by Mathew Allan Garcia

“This one’s amazing,” I said, the morning of the incident, and pulled the wooden magnet from the fridge. I turned it around in my hand.

Alistair’s basement room was in its usual state. Newspapers were piled waist high beside the refrigerator, and the basement window overlooking mom’s foxglove flower garden laid above them like a makeshift coffee table. Droppings and shredded newspaper bits were scattered on his shag carpet, evidence of uninvited guests. His old, real, coffee table leaned on the far wall by the bathroom after Fergusson, my parent’s miniature schnauzer, smelled the rat urine and decomposed food, and decided it would be a suitable spot and shit on it.

The refrigerator was the only spot that Alistair, my dad, cleaned. It’s face had never dulled, and retained its Arctic white color, barely visible now from all the magnets that littered its surface.

Alistair’s chest puffed up, and he walked around the the fridge, a smile blooming out of the corner of his lips. It was the second to last smile I would see on my dad’s lips.

“When’d you get this one?” I asked.

“The VP of accounting went to Holland for a few weeks. He gave it to me when he returned about a month ago,” Alistair said. “You’d have seen it before if you visited me more often, son.”

The magnet was a miniature wooden replica of the brothel houses in the red light district of Amsterdam, the wood carved to look like a brick, three story building. A street sign on the front marked the location as De Wallen Avenue. Two windows on each floor revealed two busty women with painted not-so-round black blotches for eyes. Rates were etched on a sign above the doorway. I held the magnet up diagonally, peering into each ladies’ room. They were backdropped by an angry red wall, and each room contained a stool and a small, purple bed.

Alistair watched me the entire time. He smiled, inhaling deeply and taking the magnet from my hand.

“Wait till you see this,” Alistair said and flipped a small unseen switch. Above the second windows, the words AMSTERDAM SEXCLUB lit up in fluorescent orange letters. The rooms were also illuminated, baking the inhabitants of De Wallen Avenue in an infernal glow. Runny streaks under the figurine’s eyes made them appear as though they were crying.

“Pretty sick,” I said.

“Sick? No, I thought it was neat,” Alistair said, a little hurt.

“That’s what I…Sorry, never mind,” I said.

Alistair placed it back on the fridge. He watched it for a second and sighed, a shadow of his former smile on his lips. He flipped the switch off and turned to look at me.

“Battery costs more than the magnet, believe it or not.”

We didn’t say much after that, and for about a minute we just stared at his fridge. I didn’t come down to his room often. The weight of our silence bore down on me.

“You should go,” I said, finally, tracing my finger on the refrigerator’s handle. “To Holland, I mean.”

It came out sounding flat, with not much hope. I still don’t even know why I said it.

“Maybe,” Alistair said, bending down and admiring his collection. I had already lost him. “Heidi gave me this double decker bus magnet from London when she went on her honeymoon. Five summers ago, I think.”

I rolled my eyes.

One from Brazil was simply two enormous ass cheeks with a small, barely visible thong tucked in between. A small goldfish magnet from Japan that was carved from stained opal. An Egyptian pyramid made from glass that had golden flakes trapped inside. A cross from Jerusalem. A bottle opener from India that had nothing to do with the country, and was probably made in a Chinese sweat shop and embossed with India’s flag. There was the Great Wall of China. Countless others.

“The intern brought the Brazil one,” Alistair added. It was a little too raunchy for him.

“Oh!” I said, remembering why I had come down to his room in the first place. “Mom asked me to bring this down to you.”

I reached into my pocket and fished out a package, wrapped in crinkled parchment paper.

“Mail from your clients, I guess. Probably another magnet. Pakistan, maybe,” I said and handed him the package.

Alistair was a financial consultant for various accounting firms. On occasion, his clients would send him magnets from their travels around the world. They would find a home, and company, on the face of his refrigerator. When out of space, the older magnets were boxed until Alistair decided to rotate them out.

“This one doesn’t have a return address,” Alistair whispered, talking to himself. He tapped his index finger on his lips.

The package didn’t have postage either.

“Let’s have a look,” Alistair said, ripping the package open and dropping its contents onto his hand.

A magnet, like I had thought. At first glance, when it plopped in Alistair’s hand, I thought it was a piece of coal, and the no return address made sense. Then the depth of the blackness struck me, and I knew it was something more. It was as black as the closet seems when cracked an inch too wide, and as vast as the space under my bed seemed when I was five-years-old. It filled me with the same dread of real danger, though I couldn’t explain why.

It was a small, oval shaped obsidian stone. Its surface appeared smooth, powdery in texture. At different angles, tiny crystals flickered out like an bouquet of flames. Alistair closed his fist around his new magnet and shut his eyes. He breathed in deep, and opened his fist. Touched it with his fingers, petting it. He couldn’t stop himself.

Despite my reservations, I plucked it from his hand. It was cold, and heavier than I would’ve thought. I placed it on the face of the fridge, shuddering.

Alistair gazed at the magnet, rubbing the palm of his hand with his fingers as though it left a pleasant residue behind.

A dimple on his face spread into a smile that took up the space from ear to ear.

The way mom recounted it when the police came, she was sitting on the couch watching Jeopardy when the TV went out. I was there by the time they showed up, sitting beside my mom and holding her hand. She was shaking, watching out the window as if expecting Alistair to walk in at any moment.

The TV popped once, as Alex Trebek revealed the double jeopardy answer.

Pop. Puh-Puh-Puh POP.

Then Alex was sucked into a void from the edges of the television into a small point in the middle of the screen. The scent of burnt elastic touched her. It smelled of burning tires and exhaust. She wrinkled her nose at it.

“Alistair!” She called.

No answer.

The rat-at-tat of the broken fan drowned out her voice. It was summer, and triple digit heat hit them like a plague of inappropriately costumed tweens in October. The fan had been running non stop for days. .

She got up and walked over to the basement door. A big woman, my mom normally avoided going down the basement steps. Her belly had become a hazard to herself, and I was always afraid she’d miss a step and land herself in the hospital from a broken neck or, worse, in the morgue.

“Alistair?” She called again.

She walked down the steps to her husband’s basement room.

The familiar odor of re-worn gym socks, decomposed TV dinners, and sweat greeted her midway down the steps like an intolerable family member.

“Alistair?” Martha said, worry entering her bloodstream and escaping through her words.

“It smelled like dying,” Mom said to the cop. Then she laughed, sounding like a sharp exhale of pent up worry and shame.

“It’s a working man’s smell. That’s all,” she added. It was one of her countless excuses for my father’s odd behavior.

Alistair realized the SEXCLUB’s lights were still on a few hours after I had left. He went over to it and watched it for a few minutes. I could imagine him hearing the hustle and bustle on the street of De Wallen Avenue, seeing the cyclists weaving in and out of traffic like a flock of doves, the passing pedestrians exclaiming and pointing at the lovely escorts, sitting at the display windows like perfectly packaged Barbie dolls.

“Psst! You!”

Alistair’s turned around towards the staircase, although the voice did not belong to Mom.

“YOU! OLD MAN!”

A small hand waved from within the Amsterdam Sexclub’s topmost window. Blotches of tar for eyes, still steaming and trailing down the figurine’s cheeks, stared out at him.

“You don’t want to come here,” the figurine said.

Alistair fumbled for words.

Another popped it’s head out of the bottom window and chimed in. “It’s full of sex. S-E-X. Twelve year old hookers with gonorrhea taking creeps older than you into their mouths like candy.”

His soccer hooligan double-decker bus’s doors swung open and a tribe of Manchester United fans marched out onto the white face of the refrigerator and looked up at Alistair. Their faces could barely be made out they were so puny.

“Don’t come here either,” they said in unison, sounding like a chant. “Full o’ us. We’ll knock your head in. Use your teeth to make bracelets to sell back to tourists like you.”

Then the whole face of the refrigerator erupted with voices with the same message.

The rowdy soccer hooligans, noticing the brothel and escorts just a few feet away from them, massed towards it and broke open the door, pulling the dolls, screaming, back into their rooms and closing their blinds.

Alistair opened his mouth to scream, but a noise that sounded like a hot tea kettle, or the way a wild rabbit screeches when it’s caught came from his throat and was drowned out by the rat-at-tat of his broken fan and mob of animated, rowdy magnets.

“And he was gone when you looked in the basement?” The police officer asked, clearly irritated at the normalcy of the situation. It wasn’t a missing persons case until more time had passed. “Could he have gone to the store? It’s only been a few hours.”

“He didn’t take the car,” Mom said, wiping her tears from the corner of her eyes, which were now puffy and red.

“I assume he can walk, can’t he?” The police scratched his head, looking stone faced at my mom as though she were crazy. I suppose in some ways she was.

Mom didn’t say anything.

“Mam,” the police said, “at this junction there’s nothing we can do. If he hasn’t returned in two days then call us. Unfortunately, these things–”

“He never leaves his room,” Mom said, barely above a whisper. She was looking down at her feet.

“What?” The officer said, with a cocked eyebrow. What a prick, I thought.

“HE NEVER LEAVES HIS ROOM!” Mom yelled, bursting out in tears from the desperation she felt. “HE HASN’T LEFT THIS HOUSE FOR OVER TWENTY YEARS!”

The officer looked first at her, then at me. Dumbfounded. He scratched something on his notepad, asked a few more questions, assured us he’d find him, and then left.

As he was walking out Mom tapped him softly on the shoulder.

“Please help him, officer.” She looked past him as she talked, “I’d hate to think what Alistair would do without me.”

There was a hole in the sound of the other magnets’s jeers and taunts.

The sounds from the magnets closest to the obsidian stone were warped, the way speakers sound right before going out. The crystals within the stone had not been this bright before, either. It carried a message also. It’s message was carried through the throngs of other magnets, and in the chaos of everyone’s separate message Alistair heard the stone’s, the way a collage of differently dressed people form a larger picture.

Step inside,

the stone told Alistair. Then, follow me.

Alistair took the stone from the refrigerator, holding it in his hand. He smiled. The stone was warm, and it felt good. It felt the way a stone feels after it’s been sitting in the sun all afternoon, and you hold it just after taking a cold dip in the pond. The rim of the refrigerator’s rubber lining glowed. Alistair gasped in surprise, and took a step backwards.

The noise from the magnets was immediate and powerful, reverberating through every inch of his body as though it were a tuning fork.

NO!

Alistair reached forward, and the voices calmed. He pulled open the door, and the light from the other side hurt his eyes. It was more than sunlight, it was something else. Something beautiful. Alistair crawled into the refrigerator on hands and knees.

And then he was gone.

The obsidian stone fell to the floor moments later, and when Martha came down to find her husband a few hours later, she kicked it under the refrigerator.

A year later I found it.

I learned of what happened to my father exactly a year after his disappearance and the day my mom decided the time to grieve had passed. I found the obsidian stone under the fridge as we were cleaning out his room. I held it for a second, remembering the foreboding I had felt when I took it in my hand, a year ago. It held none of that anymore, and the shimmer it had was gone. I placed it back on the fridge. Only the Amsterdam magnet remained of his collection. Mom had given the others away, and others still were stolen by cousins and nephews who’s kleptomaniac fingers knew no bounds. They were forgotten in a boy’s tub of toys, to be donated and then purchased with other oddities and knickknacks at a thrift store in Los Angeles.

“He’s not here anymore.” The figurine in the top window said, after telling me what had happened. “He’s in another place, but not dead. No, not dead.”

As time passed, her speech was slurred as if a serene sleepiness had overcome her. I supposed later that the power of the stone had worn off, and she was going back to wherever talking magnets came from. What I took from the ordeal was that my father, for this first time in his life, went on a vacation.

And never came back.

Comments (0)

by Robin Wyatt Dunn

Chock a block, I ride now but I know what has come for us.  Cough, man, ride it under here:  I smell a man in a wind.  The fell whirl was right in the way:  obnoxious.  Slippery and hungry.  It knows we are here but it cannot come closer.  I must dance.

Why a hat?  Only tradition?  It does keep the rain from my short beard.  What can you see, here?  Have you been to Eneffria?  Let me show you.  I live in a weir, under the Cliff of Saints, and my people are gone, gone away to the south.  If we are to live here again I must succeed.  I must succeed.  I am fortunate to have my boy with me.

“Make the fire, boy.  I must think.”  He is a good boy.  Only nine, but strong and intelligent.

It is growing dark faster, here in the month of Janus.  Guardian of gates and ways, beginnings and ends.  In Roman times his temple was closed only in times of peace.  Of course I may worship openly now.  And what does it mean for a war to end?  There is always another.

“Which way do we go now, wizard?” asks the boy.  He is not my son, but my servant, given me to educate.  I do not think he will be a wizard.  A messenger, perhaps.  Or a bailiff.

“Eat, boy.”

He eats. 

“We continue east,” I tell him.  “It will be cold.  Take my sweater from my pack.  You’ll need it.”

Chock a block, I hack and weave, I am only some small center but I am here still, I breathe, I breathe, I know what you intend, being, old being and young, I know you think to live here but you will not.

I have my limits, though I admit I do not know what they are.  Have you seen the beings come?  Or felt them, anyway?  Some dismiss it as madness but this is always the way of it:  that which is dismissed grows, grows wide and angry, like a dismissed servant, come back to reap his justice.

The being wants to live here, you see, just another interdimensional traveler.  I can smell it in the wind.  Feel it on my skin.  Taste it on my tongue.  Not evil, the term is meaningless, merely hungry and foreign, which is enough. 

I have heard of them of course.  But only in stories and in books and once, a man came from the far north, a man I knew was soon to die, and he told me that they move in ranks, three across, like columns of air, follow the chill in and you can wound it, maybe even kill it, with the right spell.  But he did not know what the right spell would be.  Fire seems wrong.  And I am not good with ice.

The boy holds tight to my waist as we ride.  I turn my head and say, “Do you feel the chill?”

The boy nods.  He is afraid.  But he is a brave boy.  It would be better to leave him, of course, and come back.  But I have run out of time.  He would not do well alone here with these approaching things.

And then I am choking.  The column of cold, running along this long and narrow valley, right through the middle of it, is trying to shift me out of its path, into an eddy where I can be its food.  I cannot breathe.

“Wizard!” shouts the boy.  He shouts into my ear but I can barely hear him. 

I open my mouth:

“Gold wind and sigh,” I say through gritted teeth.  “You come for my boy?”  And maybe the wind laughs, I do not know, but I get in a small breath. 

I turn and seize the boy and toss him, curling him as I toss, like a sack of flour, I know he will land well.  I grab the reins and turn, and leap from my horse;  the boy is screaming.  He knows I am using him as bait.

He lands in grass and rolls, and where he stops he starts to cough.  I stand with my left hand in front of me, my hand of power.

I move my left foot forward and there is a sound, like a woman, young or old, I do not know, the wind is speaking.  The she-wind says:

“I felt a breath on my back I thought it was him, are you come?  Are you come to me?  Please, lord, be come.  Bring your boy too.”

The sky is strange.  I am only a man, whatever others say.  Only one man.  Colors are moving over the mountains.

I whisper:  “Yes, she-wind, I am he, come to you.  Show yourself to me.”

And now she sounds like half a man:  “How do I know that you are he?”

And I see a twitch by the boy’s head and leap for it, clutching air in my left hand and I have it, somehow, it wants to enter my body but I will not let it, some key, some servant of this unwelcome visitor.

The wind moans.  I thrust the wind-key into my sabretache, it twisting in my hand.  And I lift up the boy and tie him to my waist on the horse.  He will be fine.

We ride, we ride deeper into the valley and it is night now, though it came too soon.  The boy is awake now but he says nothing.  And the she-wind whispers now to me constantly, telling me how she will serve me with her body, with her eyes, with her mouth, with her cunt.  I find I am grinning, a death grin, I breathe deep to smell where the coldest path is into the center of this thing.

The boy is crying, but quietly.

Chock-a-block, people of mine.  You told me I was unneeded;  I suppose I am sorry you were wrong.  We will always need magic again.  Though it changes us in ways we never wish.

I am screaming, and I drive my fist into the cold and it is outrageous, this thing is amused, and the boys eyes are on fire, blue fire, and I scream:

“Die, by wail and weal, old hunter in this night of ours.  I hunt here, not you!”

And I begin my chant, though blood oozes from my pores.

“Right and real, understeel:  by fast or feel we greet you undergoer overshaker, by hail wrack and deals old and forgotten, we have our hoar and we have our WET MAY, old May that never was!  Old May who dies!  Old May who wed Vulcan and killed him after April left!  You have none!”

More from my anger than my words it stills;  the sky changes.  Because I belong here. 

“Boy.  Do you see it leave?”

But the boy’s smile is not right and I slap him, then I shake him, hard.  Then I look in his eyes again, and his fear is back.  Fear is so healthy.

“Are you ready to leave?”

He can only nod.

At night we camp again.  It is better.

“What is a spirit, really, boy?  What is the difference between the darkness in me and the darkness that covers the sky?”

“I don’t know, Wizard.”

“What did you see, there when I killed the wind?”

“You didn’t kill it.”

“What did you see?”

“I saw you, your eyes, they were like . . . like the sky, you’re right.  Dark, and blue, and then I was asleep, but I could hear you.”

“I fear you may become a wizard like me, boy.”

“That’s what I want, Wizard.  To be a wizard, like you.”

“Why would you want that?”

“Because I love you.”

“That is not a good reason.  Eat the rest of the soup, I am not hungry.”

We return to our village and I make the signs that will bring our people back; a knock on the mountaintop, and a fire in our field.

I stand by the boy at the blaze and hold my hand on his shoulder, watching the flames.  With my other hand I toss my sabretache into the fire.

Comments (0)

by Michael Chaney

My life cracked with that electric candle. It had been raining like crazy. Judy acted funny when she said she didn’t want to walk the dog. I returned soaked with apologies freshly learned from freezing rain. But no one was home, except for an uncaring cat and an unplugged candle, toppled like a defeated king on a chessboard. I probably dropped the dog leash and I suppose Baxter whimpered by my leg. All I remember for sure is that stupid candle laying there a plastic corpse.

After Judy left, I quit my job, stopped talking to my brother, and rarely shaved. The only thing that made me feel any better was walking Baxter and watching him play.

One morning, I got up reluctantly as usual with Baxter’s nose nudging me out of bed and the cat blinking at me from the corner of the room. Baxter nudged; the cat blinked. Business as usual, but something slightly different about Baxter. Those sad eyes of his held something else I couldn’t quite place. The dog park confirmed my suspicions.

“Baxter looks sluggish to me,” said Jeffers, the dog expert.

“How can you tell,” I asked.

“It’s in his run. His nose is down. That’s the blues.”

“He’s sad?”

“How should I know,” Jeffers said. Then he looked around the field, as if anyone could have crept up to eavesdrop on what he was about to say: “Why don’t you ask him?”

“Ask who? Baxter?”

Jeffers made the kind of face you rarely see on men his age—eyes so wide they drank up the sky with a glisten to rival the river stones beneath the ice.

“Don’t you know about the Dog’s Honest Island?” he whispered.

I said I didn’t and then a white terrier appeared. It ran to sniff and play with Baxter and Jeffers’ black lab. Jeffers’ face turned to parchment as the terrier’s owner approached—white hair, deep set eyes, a death mask for a face and a prehistoric bone for a walking stick.

“Did I hear you telling about the island?” she asked.

Jeffers trembled. “His dog looked to me like—”

“That island ain’t no regular stretch of rock in the river.” When she turned to me I wish she hadn’t. “They say it juts from the other world into this one. Dog’s talk there, they say.”

“That’s absurd,” I said.

“Those what’s done it don’t think so,” she replied.

Jeffers clapped his hands to his ears agitated by some loud noise. He mumbled an excuse, collected his dog, and wandered off, his hands still clutching his head. Baxter lumbered to me, that air of melancholy still hovering about him.

“I see what Jeffers means,” said the woman. “Your dog wants to tell you something. Perhaps you should go to Dog’s Honest Island.”

All politeness gone, I laughed. She ignored me and pointed out a shallow lick of pebble about the size of a rowboat in the middle of the river.

“That’s Dog’s Honest Island. You take your animal there at night when the rains are pouring down good and you’ll see what’s so funny then, by god.”

I wanted to laugh again, but I heard her white terrier splashing in the water. It clawed itself onto the very island she was pointing to out in the river. It shook off water and puffed triumphant barks of vapor at us.

“That’s the spot,” she said. “Take him when night rains and you’ll get the truth.”

Baxter whimpered. The woman tapped her bone of stick against a rock and walked on. Her terrier plunged back into the river to follow her to wherever she was headed upstream.

I walked back to the apartment with Baxter pouting at my side. The place looked so dour from the outside. I tried to cheer things inside with music, which was a mistake. After crying my eyes out, I came back to my senses. The cat blinked at me, indifference with the slightest hint of disdain. My poor dog was curled up on the sofa. The fact that he was still hungry reassured me that he wasn’t physically ill. But something was definitely wrong with him. I leaned down to where Baxter’s head, the color of autumn leaves, lay on his forelegs, his brown eyes downcast.

“What is it, buddy? What’s the matter?”

The dog exhaled. It sounded so human.

“Are you sick, Baxter?”

I caressed his legs.

“Baxter? Are you okay, good boy?”

I shook his legs.

“Baxter?”

That’s when it hit me.

“Baxter!”

My dog was not looking at me.

“Baxter? Hey, Baxter!”

Nothing worked. My dog put its brown eyes everywhere my eyes weren’t. I couldn’t believe it, but it was true. No eye contact whatsoever. I thought for a while that there was something wrong with his eyes. Then I got scared thinking it was me. I went over to where the cat was perched on the arm of the loveseat by the front window. She blinked and looked away, as usual. When I put my nose against my dog’s—cooing loving, childish things, stroking his head, scratching his chin, and saying his name in ways that ranged from sweet to stern—nothing. He would not look at me even when I tried to force him.

I became somewhat afraid of my own dog. Although he was as docile as ever, I locked myself in my bedroom that night listening to the rain on the window. Baxter spent the night on the couch. The cat stood guard, alert to nothing in particular.

The next day I took Baxter to the dogpark, where he played in the mud with the other lab, Charley, whose owner, Darlene, was pretty and easy to talk to. That is why I always found it so difficult to talk to her.

“You can tell this winter is going to be hard based on how thick the ice gets around the banks in November.” She scanned the river and was about to launch into another round of weather observations when I blurted out—

“Baxter won’t look me in the eye.”

She stood stalk still, eyes widening.

I said, “Some old woman told me about the island out there and—”

Darlene put her hands to her ears startled by some blasphemy only she could hear. Oddly, she smiled through the gesture and shouted politely, as though her voice had to carry over some interference: “You should take him there, if you want the truth.”

Then, still smiling and covering her ears so tightly her fingers were white with the pressure, she sidled off, whistling for Charley to follow. Baxter returned to my side. I looked down at him. He glanced toward the island. I began planning it. We would need a boat. It was time to call my brother.

“Where’ve you been?” My brother sounded angry. “You don’t answer the phone for weeks and now you want my canoe? You in some kind of trouble?”

I adjusted my tone to sound less desperate than I was. “No trouble. I just want to do some fishing with Baxter.”

“You drinking again?”

I breathed before answering. I had a counselor once tell me about a breathing technique that worked the last time I visited my brother with Judy, and he started asking her all the questions about where and how we met.

“I’m not drinking okay? Look, here’s the thing. I want to explore the river on the canoe with Baxter. So can I borrow the canoe or not?”

“You’re not going to the island are you?”

I thought I misheard him, so I asked him what he said and there was a long silence over the phone. I kept saying hello and repeating my brother’s name. I could hear a faint rasp on the other line, the sound shells make in your ear. Nothing and the ocean have the same voice, as it turns out, and my brother imitated them both for a while. Eventually, he said he’d see me after work the next day and hung up.

Talking over the phone was easier than seeing him. He dropped off the canoe and the pads for mounting it on my car. He made me feel like we were kids again. It was raining lightly and after he showed me how to strap it to the hood and back fender of my car, he wanted to see me do it myself. The strap kept sliding out of my hand on account of the drizzle.

Before he left he asked the inevitable questions: “You drinking again? You in some kind of trouble?” The only part about it that was remotely enjoyable was watching him try to ask about the island, crippled over, cradling his head, and skittering into his pickup.

The rain was coming down harder when I went inside to prepare. I rummaged for clothes that were waterproof. The cat was not pleased about this as she had to vacate her perch in the corner of my closet. That’s where I found the box with the old Christmas lights that Judy had brought from her old apartment. The bulbs were the exact same size as the one that was broken on the candle. I went down to test them and sure enough, the red one fit. The candle snapped to vivid life in the window.

I put on my boots and parka and tried to make Baxter look me in the eye until it was time for us to go. He had taken to closing his eyes whenever I got close. I could sense his anticipation. I swear he knew what was happening.

To get away from him and to pass the time until nightfall, I set about cleaning the apartment, something I hadn’t done for months. I straightened up the clothes in the corner, again disturbing one of the cat’s favorite nooks, and took all the empty bottles out to the bin. I made the bed and wiped away the frosted dust from the front window warmed by the red glow of the electric candle.

Finally, it was time. I loaded Baxter into the car and drove down to the dogpark beside the river, straining to see as rain flooded the windshield. I unstrapped the canoe, tucked the paddle under one arm and dragged the boat across the gravel parking lot to the river. Baxter hated the rain and barked violently at the grumbling of the boat against the rocks. He was afraid to get in the canoe at first but I lured him with a handful of cat food, which I took from the cat’s bowl before we left, knowing how much Baxter loved those forbidden treasures.

It took me some time but I paddled us to the island, whose pebbly surface shimmered beneath the bloated waves. You could hardly tell that there was an island there at all and I almost tipped the canoe trying to get out. As I steadied the boat on the rock to anchor it, Baxter barked and barked, until the barking barked into something else.

“Damn boat! Damn boat! Damn boat!”

“Baxter! You can talk.”

“Of course, I can talk,” said the dog. “And so can this boat and I don’t like it.”

I clapped my freezing hands. “It’s a miracle.”

“Maybe,” said the dog ducking his head as the rain pelted.

I looked down at my boots. The flooding made it seem that I could walk on water.

“Baxter, why haven’t you been looking me in the eye?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” said the dog.

“Why not?”

“If I answered that I would be talking about it, now wouldn’t I?”

“I suppose,” I said. “I’m only worried about you is all.”

“About me?” Baxter shook off the rain. “I’m worried about you.”

“Because of Judy?”

“She doesn’t care if we drown now. Face that. Until you do, I can’t face you.”

We stood there for a while on that tiny island being swallowed by the tempest, watching each other’s breath twisted up by rain. And then Baxter looked at me. It had been a while. I had almost forgotten how huge his eyes were, moons in tandem orbit.

I had nothing more to say. When I got the canoe ready to leave, Baxter said, “Don’t bring me here again. I don’t want to come here again.” I nodded and we started back to shore.

The way back was the worst part of it. There was a terrible shrieking sound in my ears whenever I thought about the island and the words Baxter said. The only way to stop that earth-shattering siren in my ears was to take my mind off of the island. So I thought of a song in my head and sang it while dragging the canoe back to the car in the drenching rains. Baxter barked ferociously at the canoe again. I sang so loud that it didn’t matter that the strap kept slipping. I secured the boat and sang the whole way home.

As soon as we turned the corner, I noticed how dark the apartment looked.  Smears of ink for windows. When I opened the door, the cat shot past me. I called out to her but the rain swallowed it and she was gone, long gone, into the night. By the front window, the electric candle had marks chewed into its side where it lay on the wooden floor like a hit and run accident.

Although I never got another cat, I tried having other girlfriends. It seldom worked out. Who can blame them for refusing to come between Baxter and me? The awkwardness of it all so loud it makes my ears rain just thinking about it.

Comments (0)

by Grove Koger

No doubt about it, Eric Francis was my father’s meal ticket. Oh, Dad corresponded now and then with Talbot Mundy and knew Sax Rohmer well enough to have a drink with him when they happened to be in Manhattan at the same time, but the big markets had them sewn up tight. Wonder Tales and its sister mags, on the other hand, featured writers a couple of rungs down the ladder: struggling newcomers and struggling has-beens, tomorrow’s big names (Dad liked to boast) and yesterday’s.

But Eric Francis was the magazines’ bread and butter.

Francis broke into print with “Dangerous Rendezvous,” in which a little party of Francisco de Montejo’s men happen upon a warrior queen and her retinue of slaves in the lowlands of Mexico. “Web of Fate” followed, and featured a sizeable arachnid guarding the entrance to an Olmec ruin. (You may have seen reproductions of the famously sinister illustration.) “Vanished Empire” was about a long-lost colony of Olmecs in Florida. The plots were cheesy, but the details–those huge stone heads, the temples and causeways, the oppressive jungle, the stifling humidity–well, Francis made them real. And was prolific to boot.

The response from readers was more than gratifying, and Dad was able to increase Wonder Tales’ circulation almost every issue for two years and hold it there for nearly a decade. Francis could easily have found a book publisher but instead asked Dad to act as agent and allowed him to collect fees for a series of contracts with Bobbs–Merrill. No problem!

We moved frequently in those years, and we weren’t just moving. We were moving up. Dad owned a succession of Lincolns, each a little grander than the preceding model. We summered on the Cape and even skied in Sun Valley its second season.

When archaeologists discovered the Olmec ruins of San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán in ‘38, Dad even ran a rare factual piece with photos–it was more detailed than the coverage in the New York Times–playing up what he called the “astonishing” resemblance to the descriptions in Francis’s stories. But in light of what happened next, I wonder about its impact, because it was shortly afterward that Francis retired.

That’s when Dad initiated what I think of as his “letter campaign.” He spent a full page of Wonder Tales describing how he’d collect dismayed readers’ letters and forward them to Francis in Florida. As it turned out, he filled three mail bags in no time.

I don’t dwell much on my father’s life–or my own early life, for that matter. I knew that things had changed, but I was caught up in my own affairs by then–school, baseball, then girls–and I didn’t have much time for anything or anybody else. Maybe my father’s disappearance didn’t have the impact it should have. Everyone thought that I was a heartless young man, and maybe I was.

But it’s in going through Dad’s old papers, his and those of Wonder Tales and the Edwards Literary Agency, Clive Edwards, prop., that I’ve come to realize how much I miss him. I knew my mother, for she had survived my father’s disappearance by two decades. But I had never really known my father, and I regret it.

He had set out one day on a road trip. We had just returned from the Cape–the rental had been a modest one that last summer, and I had just begun the sixth grade the week before. It was normal for my father to arrive home a little before 5:00, at which time my mother would mix martinis and sit down with him for a round of small talk. But that day he appeared unexpectedly early and was pretty excited. It seems that in going through the office mail he had found a letter from Francis’s daughter! It had been sitting in his basket for three days, and since it had no sender’s name or address, his secretary hadn’t bothered to forward it.

My father talked over the details with Mom that evening, so I picked up the gist. It seemed that Francis had died of a stroke the preceding winter, soon after giving up writing, but the daughter had found a trunk full of old manuscripts that my father might be interested in. Might be! Such a trove might revive the fortunes of Wonder Tales and the Edwards Literary Agency at one fell swoop.

If Dad could check into the Such-and-Such Tourist Court in Pensacola that Friday–“Thank God we returned when we did!” I overheard the poor man exclaim–the daughter would send a car around to pick him up. She apologized for such cumbersome arrangements, but pleaded the difficulties of dealing with probate.

No problem! Afterward Dad thought he would continue on down to St. Petersburg to see Talbot, who was getting up in years by then, before swinging back up into the Midwest to visit a few clients. He had asked his secretary to reserve rooms for him in a couple of courts down the coast–we didn’t call them motels until after the war–as well as the one in Pensacola.

Here in the file are the carbons of her notes, yellowed and curling.

Dad left early the next morning in his two-year-old Zephyr after drinking his coffee and giving my mother a hug and me a pat on the shoulder. He would call the next night–which he did–and then again from Florida–which he didn’t. We never heard from him again.

After a week my mother phoned the court in Pensacola to learn that Dad had arrived but had never checked out. His bags were in his room, as the concerned manager had determined after missing him for several days. Would my mother please pay the bill and make arrangements for the car and the bags?

I need to explain that even now only a handful of people know that Eric Francis was a woman.

It seems that his/her first manuscript–what would become “Dangerous Rendezvous”–had come in “over the transom,” as they used to say. Return address P.O. Box such-and-such, Pensacola, Florida. Dad made it a practice to read, or at least skim, every submission. You never knew when the next Talbot Mundy might come along.

Well, the story had possibilities. That’s the word I heard my father use when he told and retold the story of his greatest discovery–“possibilities.” Too much of it read like an encyclopedia article, he said. “Interesting, but flat.” There was a story there, but it was buried. This Francis was clearly no pro, but the story had possibilities.

So he returned the manuscript–this amateur had been professional enough to supply a self-addressed stamped envelope–with a kindly worded note explaining what needed to be done. Then I suspect that he forgot about it.

After a couple of weeks, however, the manuscript came back, and it was–“perfect!” I remember my father’s excitement the evening after he received it and read it over. “I need to take out some commas,” he told my mother over the martinis, “and clear away a jungle of español. Otherwise it’s perfect!” Just as he would that afternoon years later, he fetched a cigar from his humidor and went through his fussy little routine with cutter and cedar spill. To this day I associate Francis with the pungent smell of Bolivar Habanos.

Dad must have sent an acceptance out the very next day, and must have offered pretty good terms by the standards of Wonder Tales. Avarice was forever at war with generosity in my father’s heart, but Francis was a fish he wanted to hook.

Francis wrote right back accepting his terms, and dropped the bombshell in the same letter. And here was the part of the story that Dad never told in public. She–she!–was, she explained, the sole survivor of an old Florida family and had simply been working up some of the notes that her long-dead father, an amateur archaeologist, had left her. She knew that a woman’s name on the story would interfere with its acceptance by the magazine’s male readership. She had chosen Eric C. Francis, she went on to explain, for its resemblance to a family name, and if my father felt it was acceptable, she would ask her lawyer to set up an account in that name at a Florida bank.

Dad was a little puzzled, but he agreed. After all, she was absolutely right. “Eric” would sound the right masculine tone, he said, but added that he’d like to drop the initial. So Eric Francis it was!

The carbon copy of his letter lies in front of me, yellowed and curling.

Mother, I remember now, seemed preoccupied that evening. As I learned later, she had good reason to worry whenever another woman was mentioned.

The police didn’t do much. There was no indication of foul play–they actually said that! There were no leads. People often disappeared, for one reason or another. There was, after all, another woman involved. Dad was an adult. The case would remain open . . .

The private detective Mother hired might as well have been the Invisible Man so perfectly ordinary was he. I remember a brownish hat perched above a brownish suit, but nothing in between, even after he removed the hat. He must have had a very ordinary voice, for I don’t remember the sound of it. He didn’t wear Aqua Velva, didn’t smoke, didn’t swear. He was as unlike the private eye of popular fiction as you can imagine.

What I do retain is a sense of the man’s thoroughness. He asked to see my father’s study, and spent an hour or so there carefully picking up and setting back down one pile of papers after another, one book after another. I saw him at one point sitting in my father’s leather chair, mouth slightly open, simply staring into space. He seemed neither surprised nor disappointed in anything.

His performance at the office must have been quite similar, although it took an entire morning. There, I gathered from what she told us afterward, he asked the secretary to type out copies of her notes for the courts along my father’s route, as well the last few letters from Francis. Father had apparently taken the daughter’s letter with him.

The detective–Paul Smith was his perfectly ordinary name–found more than the police did, and I think he must have felt that he was within striking distance of the truth.

For the firm’s few remaining months my father’s grief-stricken secretary kept up the files, one of which she devoted to his disappearance. It contained a few newspaper clippings, Smith’s final report, and his bill. The last was as ordinary as the man, neither large nor small.

The report was a dry affair, describing the detective’s questioning of each tourist court manager along the way and his perfunctory call on the St. Augustine police. The chief allowed that the department had never been called to the Ponce de Leon–that was the court in Pensacola–“for any reason.” The crucial part comes in Smith’s description of his stay at the Ponce:

Manager Lou DiSpazio repeated his story as reported to Pensacola Police Dept. September 21.

Smith’s “subject” was, of course, my father. And here is the photo that Smith returned, a studio portrait of a man whose round face was not quite rendered debonair by his pencil-thin mustache. (It’s my face, too, although I’ve never grown a mustache.) And no, Mother did not want to proceed, did not wish to follow the trail to Mexico. There was, after all, another woman involved.

After seven years Mother managed to get Father declared legally dead and collected on a modest insurance policy. In the meantime Hitler and Il Duce sent the world to hell and me with it. Mother shriveled into a little old woman and died, I married and divorced and married and divorced. And here I am today.

The last entry in my father’s otherwise mundane little diary ran this way:

No time to think

And perhaps they were. But that’s it–the entirety of Dad’s last entry.

Smith was right about the newspaper story, which reads:

September 18. Authorities were called to Slip 2B this morning to retrieve an ape that had escaped from its cage while being loaded aboard the “Aurora.”

In reading over what I’ve written, I realize that this has been a tale of many tales–Dad’s, Francis’s, the private eye’s, the reporter’s. And it’s thanks to yet another reporter’s tale–a recent article in our local newspaper–that a pattern has finally become clear. An intern digging through the paper’s morgue read the stories about Dad’s disappearance and tracked me down in hopes of filling out a series about unsolved crimes. So Dad–photo and all, the same one that PI Smith had taken with him–ended up being featured as a “long-lost literary figure” in a moderately accurate account of his disappearance. I dated the intern a few times and added her article to file.

But within a couple of months another story by Eric C. Francis showed up. Or rather, a familiar story in an unfamiliar guise. This one arrived at my apartment in the mail, without a return address but with a Vera Cruz postmark. A large manila envelope. It contained a Spanish-language magazine printed on the cheapest of paper, pulpier than the pulps of my father’s day. Paradoja it called itself–Paradox. The cover was garish beyond description. There were three stories–I know enough Spanish to get a sense of what they were, had the illustrations left any doubt–and a reprint–una reimpresión–of something quite a bit older. It was “Cita peligrosa”–“Dangerous Rendezvous”–by one Francesca Montejo y Coatzacoalcos.

It’s not surprising that Francis’s works would be reprinted from time to time—there had been a “rediscovery” over the past few years. What was surprising was the illustration. Here was the beautiful warrior queen surrounded by a horde of monkey-like creatures, several in an obvious state of arousal.

A card marking the page bore the inscription “Elogios del Autor”–“Compliments of the Author”–in an elegant feminine hand.

It was easy to find the right issue of Wonder Tales since I’d retrieved it a few weeks before to show the reporter. Now I reread the story, I admit for the first time in decades. Page 18, paragraph 3: “Standing before them was a bronzed, scantily clothed woman flanked by a retinue of grotesque, simian-faced attendants.” The clue had been there all along, hidden in plain view.

I’ve had time to consider any number of questions. Why did Francis start writing in the first place? Was the material really her father’s? How did she manage to get so many of the archaeological details right, details that were still awaiting discovery? Was it really her daughter my father met in Pensacola? And why did she–whoever or whatever she was–lure him there? Did she feel threatened? Challenged? And did she issue a challenge in return?

I’ve been bored for as long as I can remember. I’ve come down in the world and gone up again, and I’m still bored. I know that Dad was bored, and after all, I am my father’s son. I’m even–talk about coincidences!–the age he had reached when he disappeared. Was Francis bored too? Bored with too many years and too many memories? Did she roll the dice when she submitted “Dangerous Rendezvous”? And were Dad’s article about San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán and his letter campaign more than she bargained for? But now that I read over what I’ve written, I know the answer. She gambled. Only a gambler would have let him go that first night in Pensacola, betting that she could reel him back in.

It’s taken me a few weeks to get my affairs in order, and the clock has just struck midnight. It’s the second day of November. I’m dropping these notes in the file, the same file that our long-dead secretary opened so many years ago. Will I be adding another installment? I don’t know, but this afternoon I fly to Vera Cruz, where one way or another I’m going to finish the tale of Dad’s dangerous rendezvous.

Comments (0)

by Michael C. Keith

Eternity was in that moment.

– William Congreve

TAKE THE DREAD OUT OF DEAD! SCHEDULE YOUR PRACTICE DYING DAY NOW BY CALLING 1-800-DEAD-DAY. DON’T WAIT UNTIL IT’S TOO LATE, read the huge digital billboard along Route 95 between Boston and Providence.

That catches the eye, thought Clayton Gray with satisfaction. The twenty-nine year old Rhode Island native recorded a reminder into his 9G iPhone (“Order more signs.”) while maintaining a speed a good 20 mph above the posted limit.

His franchise of Dying Day Centers was growing rapidly. Three years ago he had come across an article in the Wall Street Journal that set him on a completely new career path. He had worked at a small law firm up to that time but had been eager to get in on something that might substantially increase his income. Now he owned four Dying Day Centers in southeastern New England and had plans to open more.

Before Clayton had finished reading the Journal article, he was convinced the concept was brilliant. It was something everyone wanted . . . needed. Who wasn’t afraid of dying? He immediately went on Dying Day Center’s website, where the home page repeated his exact sentiment and offered a solution to the universal conundrum:

Afraid of Dying? Most everyone is, but you don’t have to be.
A simple one-day Reorientation session will put you at ease as
you face life’s end. You can remove the horror of the final moments
before departing this world and entering the next . . .

The website continued to enumerate the benefits in eliminating the anxiety associated with dying, promising to make it a fear free, even pleasant, experience:

Be at peace as the end approaches. Enjoy the final moments with
your dearest thoughts instead of being gripped by terror and apprehension.
DDC guarantees a happy ending. Call now to set up your pre-Dying Day
interviews. It will change how you view your own demise . . .

Clayton had excitedly clicked the “Business Opportunities” link and soon found himself contacting the franchise office’s 800 number. Two months later, he opened his first location in Warwick, Rhode Island, and three months after that a second in Barrington. The next two followed quickly. The money started pouring in and plans were in hand to expand into surrounding states.

It’s like the movie Soylent Green, recalled Clayton after he had made first contact with the company. Loving science fiction, it had been one of his favorite films, and the scene in which Edward G. Robinson lays atop his deathbed as his most desired experience is fulfilled, had always stuck with him. What a way to go. Dying while your best thoughts are played out. He had been excited to think that soon he would be a part of a business that offered such a humane service.

The road was nearly empty at 3 AM Sunday morning as he returned from his Casual Connect date. It had turned into much more than a cappuccino at the mutually agreed upon bistro on Charles Street. A night of unharnessed lust left him exhausted but content. He pulled off the highway to find a Dunkin’ Donuts for a large blast of caffeine. It didn’t take long to find one. They seemed to have stores at one-mile intervals. Clayton hoped his Dying Day offices would one day be as ubiquitous. He chuckled at the realization that both businesses shared the same initials.

“No one can be finer, ‘cause my Dinah is a minor, Deedee Dinah,” sang Clayton as he arrived at the drive-up window and placed his order. As he sipped his hot coffee back on the highway, he belted out a variation of the tune. “Nothing could be finer than to be in her vagina in the morning.” How good can life get? he wondered as the Providence skyline came into view. Home for a quick shower and then on to the Warwick center. It was Clayton’s practice to participate in as many reorientation sessions at his various facilities as possible, although he had very capable staff members at each location. It was something of which he took great pride and pleasure in being a part. Relieving clients of their greatest fear made Clayton feel like he was making a great contribution to the human race.

“Can there be any greater profession?” chirped Clayton pulling into his driveway. “No, absolutely not!”

An hour later he reached his headquarters at the Warwick location of Dying Day Centers and was greeted by Carla Harcourt, the receptionist and his personal assistant. She informed him that his first REO (the abbreviation had been inspired by Carla’s favorite rock group—REO Speedwagon) was waiting for him in the Pre-REO suite. After dropping some things off in his office, he greeted the elderly client, who had invested the required $2500 for the procedure.

“Mr. Jenkins. You’ve had your DD interviews and now are ready for your Reorientation. Is that correct?” asked Clayton, warmly.

“Oh, yes. I’m more than ready.”

The two Dying Day interviews involved a lengthy series of questions to determine a client’s greatest fears and joys––in the first instance, something to be avoided, and in the second, something to be fully realized. After compiling a comprehensive profile of the individual, the Center would prepare a digitized virtual experience of what was most precious to the client. During the actual REO session the client would be placed in a sensory deprivation chamber where he or she would remain until acclimated to the absence of stimuli. The DDC termed it Death Simulation. It was intended to create the impression that one was removed from the living world. The oxygen in the chamber would be decreased in prescribed increments to simulate the collapse of the body’s ability to breathe and replenish itself. The client’s heartbeat would be monitored to insure there would be no actual cessation of life. At the peak of the client’s anxiety, the specially created video containing the client’s notion of profound happiness would be rolled. Oxygen would then be fully restored as the client was immersed in his beatific vision. When the client reached what was termed a Bliss Line––as reflected by a very relaxed pulse rate––the video would slowly fade away. A soft, reassuring voice would then repeat––in mantra like fashion––“There was never anything to fear.” REO seldom ran over an hour.

When the chamber door was opened, the client was often found weeping with joy and appreciation. Repeat sessions were available to those who desired them, but for most a single REO was enough to sustain an individual through the balance of his or her life. The service had not been in existence long enough to see if this would actually be the case, but so far only one client had requested a second REO. In the end, he cancelled the session without giving a reason.

Following the day’s first REO session, Clayton had lunch and met with a new client, who looked very familiar to him. Halfway into the first interview, Clayton realized who it was. When he was eight-years old, his third grade teacher, Mr. Houser, had fondled him on two occasions in the cloakroom. Clayton had been too confused and frightened to tell his parents, and then he was saved from further molestations when his parents had switched him to the local Catholic school. Now he sat face-to-face with the pedophile and his heart began to race. He abruptly ended the first meeting, saying that he didn’t feel well. It was either that, or go postal on the man, figured Clayton.

Carla scheduled the client’s second meeting for the next day, while Clayton sat in his office contemplating the encounter. He had always thought about the two shameful incidents with Mr. Houser, but never took any action on the matter, even though he figured his former teacher was still in the area. The more he thought about the childhood incident, the more he wanted to retaliate. Then it came to him. He would give Mr. Houser an REO session he would never forget.

When his long ago teacher appeared for his second meeting, Clayton gathered all the information he felt he would need to execute his revenge.

“So, Mr. Houser, what are the things you fear most in life?” inquired Clayton.

After a long pause, the teacher answered. “Spiders and snakes really freak me out. Even the tiny harmless ones make me feel like fainting.”

Well, we share that in common, thought Clayton.

“What else, Mr. Houser. Try to be specific.”

“Well, let me think. I really don’t fear much. Maybe getting caught . . . ah, for something I really didn’t do.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, you know. Being accused of something bad and being put in jail.”

“What might that something bad be, Mr. Houser?”

The gray haired man shifted in his seat, and then waved Clayton off. “Nothing . . . really. Who knows? Can we get on to the next question, please?”

“What other things frighten you?”

“Like I said, I really don’t get scared by much . . . except by spiders and snake,” said Houser, appearing agitated.

“Okay, let’s shift gears to something much more positive. What gives you the most joy in your life?”

“Children. I used to teach grade school. Retired now.”

“Children? How did they give you joy?”

“They’re so sweet and innocent . . . really beautiful. Just looking at them would raise my spirits. I adored them.”

“All right then, what else contributes most to your happiness?” Mr. Houser?

“Fifi.”

“Fifi?”

“My Shih Tzu. She’s the real love of my life. I’ve never been married, so my pets mean everything to me. I’ve had four dogs and loved each one dearly.”

“Anything else makes you real happy?”

After several seconds of contemplation, Mr. Houser replied. “Can’t really think of anything else. I mean, that gives me as much pleasure as children and Fifi.”

Following several more routine questions, Clayton said he would schedule Mr. Houser’s REO at 8 PM the next day.

“Oh, you do the sessions in the evening?”

“Only occasionally,” replied Clayton. “But our schedule is so full at the moment, we’re forced to do so.”

“Wonderful. I’ll be here then.”

When Clara asked about scheduling Mr. Houser for his REO, Clayton said the man had decided against having one. Despite what he had told his former teacher, REOs were never scheduled after 5 PM. However, for this customer, Clayton was more than happy to make an exception, and he needed to be alone to initiate his plan.

When the center closed for the day, Clayton went to work in the digital mixing suite. His goal was to prepare a video hologram for Mr. Houser‘s REO session that would be like none he’d ever made before. If Clayton’s plan succeeded, it would increase Mr. Houser’s fear of dying tenfold––and Clayton’s satisfaction at least as much. He worked long into the night gathering images that would horrify Mr. Houser while in the sensory deprivation chamber. They included the most ferocious pictures of spiders and snakes he could find, including several action images of large snakes devouring small dogs. He had even come across a gruesome video of an Anaconda gulping down a Shih Tzu.

After a couple hours of sleep in his office, Clayton continued to refine his hologram for the man who had marred his childhood. Fortunately, his day’s schedule was open, except for one client interview, so he had more than enough time to prepare the special REO. By late afternoon, Clayton had completed a video that he felt would haunt his third grade teacher to his grave.

At the designated hour, Mr. Houser appeared at the Dying Day Center for his REO session.

“So this will really make a difference in my life? I’ve always had nightmares about dying, and if I don’t any longer, it’s going to be wonderful,” said Houser.

“Yes, it will certainly change how you see your death. I can assure you of that,” said Clayton, leading his client to the REO chamber.

Mr. Houser entered the small cubicle with noticeable hesitancy.

“I’m not fond of small spaces.”

“Nothing to worry about. I’ll be monitoring you just outside.”

After Mr. Houser took up his position on the padded catafalque, Clayton attached a series of wires to his temples and chest and then departed the chamber.

“Just relax, Mr. Houser. This will be an unforgettable experience for you. You’ll never think of death in the same way.”

Clayton took up his position at the REO control panel and viewed Mr. Houser through a window and also on monitors connected to an infrared camera in the chamber.

“Happy dying, you fucking pervert,” muttered Clayton, leaning back in his chair.

He allowed for a longer than usual period of “void” time to have it’s affect and then activated the hologram. By that point he had reduced the oxygen level in the chamber by thirty percent causing Mr. Houser to gasp for air. Within moments his erstwhile nemesis, was screaming at the horrific images that enveloped him. Clayton averted his eyes from the scene. It had been all he could take to assemble the footage of snakes and spiders, and he could no longer tolerate the sight of them. He thought it ironic that he and his molester shared the same unique aversions.

Sounds of horror and desperation poured from the REO production room speakers for the next hour. By the time Clayton finally entered the chamber, Mr. Houser had fallen silent.

“Mr. Houser. Your session is over. You have been reoriented.”

When Clayton reached his subject, he believed he had fainted from the horrific sights he’d been subjected to. Maybe he’s dead, thought Clayton in a sudden panic. But then Mr. Houser spoke.

“That was good . . . really good. It has changed my thinking about death just as you promised.”

Clayton was perplexed by Mr. Houser’s response.

“Good?”

“Yes, just what I needed. Now let’s give you something you need.”

His former teacher stood and looked at him across the short expanse of darkness. His eyes cast an eerie glow, causing Clayton to take a step backward. In that instant, Houser lunged at him striking Clayton’s forehead against the wall. The force of it made Clayton fall onto the cushioned recliner. As he did so, he felt the hands of his attacker groping his genitals. Before he could react, he received another powerful blow to this head, which rendered him unconscious. As he sunk into a nightmare state, he heard a hideous, otherworldly cackle.

“It’s time for your Dying Day session, my little third grader,” growled Mr. Houser, leaving the chamber and locking its door.

Before he fled the control room, he pressed the activate switch on the equipment console and saw the chamber come alive with the grisly images that had been assembled for his exclusive benefit.

When Carla returned to work after the long weekend, she discovered her boss’s self-mutilated cold body lying in the REO chamber. On the video monitors was a grainy photograph of Clayton as a happy eight year-old.

Comments (0)

by Michael Griffin 

Some wives fear losing their husband to an office affair, some to a heart attack. Each morning Sveta watches her husband leave for work and thinks maybe today’s the day he annihilates the universe.

While Dmitriy’s at his lab on campus, Sveta stays home on Uni Row, spinning old records, or working number puzzles with a purple pen that smells like grape.

She thinks Dmitriy’s glad she quit teaching. Their accomplishment gap bothers him. Her lofty IQ and advanced degrees aren’t enough to keep her in the same ballpark as Dmitriy’s towering level of genius. It’s not her fault. Nobody understands Dmitriy’s work but Dmitriy.

Still, Sveta hides Physics books and reads them sometimes.

More often she plays Liszt concertos and worries about how it will feel, that first moment when reality dissolves.

She communicates with Dmitriy all day through matching neural node implants, exchanging messages via a mind interface. Sometimes they send text, other times Eyeshot^TM images or Auralclips^TM soundbits. Sveta’s impatient when too much time passes between messages. Her mind strays to horrid visions of unraveling. It’s hard to imagine never seeing him again, not even in dreams, because her mind will be nothing but quanta scattered through spacetime at the speed of light.

Today Dmitriy’s first message describes the usual mundane observations. The lab, coffee. Tidbits, but no meaningful details.  Project security restricts Dmitriy from sending an Eyeshot^TM from the lab, so Sveta has never seen it. She reads the text over and over, pacing in front of the living room’s picture window. Finally with a mental gesture she files it away.

She switches to a digital slideshow and flips through an album of their young-couple-in-love years. Honeymooning in Prague. Holding hands on Ytvar bridge. The party for Dmitriy’s Dirac Prize. The post-lecture party at Eötvös.

Sumac the cat makes room for Sveta on the window seat and together they watch the rain. She ponders the way the drops are impeded by the leaves of the tree, make their way down and fall with a pattern, like complex music. She’s sure Dmitriy would understand. He could probably explain it in math.

After disabling the neural interface, careful to avoid distracted driving, she leaves the house to send copies of Dmitriy’s book to friends in Ukraine and Hungary. The friends probably won’t read it, might not even try. In fact Sveta hopes they won’t. It would make her feel better.

The moment she’s back in the driveway she reactivates the interface. She’s sure a new message will be waiting.

Subject: I miss my beautiful Sveta!

Dmitriy complains about Carlo, and though he refers to Carlo as his “colleague,” Sveta translates this as “helper.” He speaks of needing to restrain Carlo’s Mediterranean passion. He means this as a joke, a Ukrainian describing another culture as too passionate. Carlo keeps pushing Dmitriy to pursue some new angle in the experiment.

This presumption makes Sveta angry.

Re-reading the text she feels tension in her shoulders. Her teeth grind, and sweat trickles from her armpit down her side.

Sveta shuts down the interface and heads upstairs. Spinning on the stationary bike helps.

She pushes beyond fatigue. The tension falls away.

Dmitriy comes home early.

Sveta asks if he wants wine.

He talks absently, not really explaining, something about nonlocal measurement. “I hate complaining to you about work.” Then he goes on rapidly about control routines, incremental improvement, N-band something-or-other.

What really bothers him is how Carlo keeps pushing to sidetrack.

Sveta bites the inside of her lip. “It’s your experiment, not Carlo’s.” She wants to hide her rising anger.

Dmitriy leans back against the kitchen counter. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t give you my stress.”

If only he knew.

“Most of the department can’t stretch far enough to understand this. Even those strong enough in QM theory to understand a little, they say it’s more metaphysics than real science.”

This makes Sveta burn. She smiles. “That only proves how advanced your work is. They lash out at what’s beyond them. Even Carlo just wants to ride coattails of your reputation.”

Dmitriy looks at her appreciatively.

“What’s Carlo doing right now?” she asks.

“When I left, he was trying to convince Amanda of his angle on this. He was talking so fast, sketching out his ideas on a whiteboard.”

“Amanda Beart?” She stood back. “Right now Carlo’s in your lab, convincing the Dean of the department to change your experiment?”

“He suggests a human element, intention in place of randomness.”

“Go back there.” Sveta asserts herself so rarely, they’re both surprised. “Do what you must.” She picks up his jacket from the back of the chair and hands it to him.

Dmitriy hesitates.

“Go!” She prefers Dmitriy think her overprotective, even prideful of his status, to revealing her fear. “Call if it goes very late.”

 Too distracted to work puzzles, she paces the hallway, but this doesn’t dispel her tension so she goes outside to soak in the hot tub.

After a while her muscles go loose. Her mind feels off-center.

An Eyeshot^TM-Auralclip^TM bundle arrives. The Eyeshot^TM means he’s not at the lab. Maybe on his way home?

Playback.

Her thoughts jump, an unnerving shift. Not just perception, but physical disorientation. Like flipping through a tricky, twisting dive.

Dmitriy’s vision. Some kind of argument, or scuffle. A man lunges, steps back. It’s Carlo. Dmitriy crashes to the floor.

The place looks like the way Dmitriy described the lab.

Carlo’s breathing hard. “It was so… exhilarating!”

A blond woman beside Carlo holds out her arms, regaining balance. Amanda Beart? She staggers, hyperventilating, wide-eyed like someone just off a rollercoaster.

Carlo looks down to Dmitriy. “Did you feel it the same?”

“I told you not to open that up, Carlo!” Dmitriy’s voice, trembling. Pleading. “Once it’s let loose it won’t be contained.”

“Look at this,” Amanda says.

Something covers Dmitriy’s eyes. The clip darkens, but not before  Dmitriy says, “Carlo, stop!”

Message end. The world skews around her, like a sudden reversal of gravity, then rights again. A fault in the neural node? Sveta hopes that’s all. Her heart pounds, fearing something worse. Even now, seeing things with her own eyes, something feels terribly broken.

A plain text message arrives: Did you see/feel that?

She hurries a reply: I’m OK but everything’s crazy, spinning.

Sveta anticipates his next message, but what comes instead tackles her like a concussion. A scattered mess of sounds and images.

Dmitriy’s voice: “… no control apparatus!”

Static.

“– machine parameters — human interface –”

Skip skip skip.

“– just a test — wanted to show Amanda!” Carlo, pleading.

“We have to stop, Carlo, now!”

Sveta feels a twitch in Dmitriy’s consciousness in real time. Not their usual connection, not discrete messages back and forth, but a yank on an invisible line. The deep whoomp of a great engine knocked out of alignment.

All visuals twist, the world’s film projector flipped sideways.

Dmitriy is here in the hot, bubbling water. A moment later they’re both back in the lab. Sveta’s not just seeing it in Eyeshot^TM this time. She’s actually there.

“I shut it down,” Carlo cries. “It’s not my fault!”

Sveta shouts to Dmitriy, who seems not to hear.

Dmitriy says to Carlo, “Your intention was enough.” His voice pulses, his very body vibrating heavily. “These physical conduits are just lines of thought now.”

Another skip. White walls flash, then fade away. Silence, other than Sveta’s breathing. She looks down, suspended over a great expanse. A wisp of cloud drifts below. Below that the ocean, quietly seething, perceptibly curved.

Hundreds of feet up? Thousands?

She flashes between locations, passively, without intention. Something clicks and she transports by merely wishing.

Something’s wrong.

Sveta’s only wants to go home, wait for Dmitriy, but every change she imagines rattles into conflict with outside intentions. She tries to send herself nearer him, and he tries to move her away. To safety.

World-conceptions jostle, a conflict like disorganized argument.

Dmitriy merges with her for an instant, then he’s far away.

Deep space. Brittle, Arctic cold. Intangibility. Dark water.

She’s alone again.

Carlo solidifies the mind-machine interface by mere thought, imagines others breaching the quantum order, and this initiates a struggle for dominance. Equilibrium is too complex for a single mind, yet a multiplicity of intentions fall quickly out of sync.

Dmitriy tries to take over what Carlo set loose.

Outside, brisk wind pulls her hair, bites her face.

Sveta’s aware of Dmitriy’s struggle and he becomes aware of her. He shares control. There is no time to plan.

Sveta flashes upon a conception of God. She has never believed, so why this idea, now? The question feels absurd.

She recalls a dinner party overseas, years ago. Dmitriy holding court, his brash drunken promise. A box once opened, can’t be shut.

“One day I’ll prove God to be Man’s invention.”

The lab again. The walls waver, disintegrate. Sveta sees this through Dmitriy’s eyes, then through her own eyes, from another angle.

Sveta is with Dmitriy, home.

A strange quality of light outside the window, a wavering glow on the horizon from the west, toward campus, warns her of what’s coming.

Now she’s angry. She wants more time.

The living room, stairs, the bed. Dmitriy joins her, warmth upon warmth. They stay close, press together into one. Sveta knows he wants to explain but there’s no time.

Somehow she always knew.

They hold each other hard. Her arms tremble. His grip bites Sveta’s shoulders. She feels his resolve, equal to hers.

Never let go.

They’re both completely sure of this intention when everything, everywhere comes loose.

Comments (3)

by Sayuri Yamada

‘Well, you’ve done a sloppy job. Unless you do something, you’ll fail this module.’

‘But, teacher, I’ve spent so much time on this. Please, please be kind to me.’

‘All the students have spent their time on this project. It’s not only you. Look at this. The temperature is rising unnaturally. The air is dirty. Many species are disappearing. It’s a shambles.’

‘But, it’s got good quality. The sky is blue. The clouds are white. From a distance, it’s a nice blue and white. Only one species has gone wrong. Only one.’

‘That only one is the predominant one that is destroying everything. You’ve got to erase it.’

‘Do I have to? I love those small creatures. They started as the obedient ones. They are still good in a way. They are . . .’

‘You’ve got to erase it, start again, and put the process in the rationale. That’s the only way you can rescue your messy project.’

‘Do I have to? I’ll be sad to destroy them. Do I really have to?’

‘Yes, you do. Also, you have to do it artistically. You can let me know how you’ll do it beforehand if you don’t want it to fail again. I’m being very kind to you, just because your last project was unique and very good. I don’t think you can get a first again this time, but you could get a lower second if you do a good job now.’

‘I understand. I’ll book a tutorial again when I’ve got an idea how to destroy them. Bye.’

‘Here is what I was thinking about. I’ve got two ideas. One is wars. Even now, some of them are killing each other, so, I thought, if I make them do it more, they’d kill themselves at the end. I’d just push some ringleaders a bit, then they’d start all over the place. I mean all over the place, not just a part of it like the last two times. How’s that?’

‘It’s risky. Don’t you understand those creatures possess nuclear arms? What if they used them all over everywhere and destroyed the whole planet? You won’t be able to start again on the same one. What’s the second one?’

‘Well, I don’t know if you’d like the second one. It’s not natural. It’s that I’d erase things in red, one by one, like red cars, red bridges, red shirts, red buildings, and red blood at the end. They’ll all die for sure then. Oh, I’m still sad just to think about it. I couldn’t sleep last night.’

‘I’m sorry you have to erase your creation, but that’s what you’ve got to do. Your second idea is good. Just do it slowly. Take your time. Enjoy it if you can.’

‘Hiya. Yeah, I’ve done that. No, I’m not sad anymore. When my teacher told me to erase my creatures, it was a shock. I wanted to cry, “What’s wrong with them? They’re fine beings.” But I’m happy now. Well, because the process was so exciting. I should’ve done it earlier. But if earlier, there wouldn’t have been that many, so it wouldn’t have been as exciting, then. I’ll put everything in the rationale tonight. Do you want to know how I’ve done it? Have you got time now?’

‘I’ve got only three millennia. Is it enough?’

‘I think so. If not, we’ll meet again later.

‘First, I erased a red suspension bridge in a city on the left-hand side of the most powerful country. The bridge was famous all over the world. It was a symbol of the city. Hundreds of cars cross it everyday. Before doing it, I looked at the little creatures in those cars, with their tiny fingers clutching the steering wheels, with their small eyes looking ahead through the windshields. I almost decided not to erase them. To hell with the module. They all had families and friends. They sometimes behaved badly, but they were basically good. So I almost left them as they were. Then I thought if I fail this, I might fail to get a scholarship. I can’t afford to pay the tuition fees. So, I sighed, shut my eyes, and said, “Let there not be the red bridge.” I opened my eyes. Cars were in the water, sinking. Some creatures managed to get out of them. They were screaming and drowning with their front paws frantically bashing the cold water. The creatures on the ground were watching them with their eyes and mouths wide open. Some were crying as if they themselves were dying. It was awful. I wanted to wind time backwards. But the scholarship. I stopped myself and looked at them dying in the water. I don’t know how many died. I should’ve counted them for my rationale, but I was too sad.’

‘Oh, you poor thing. You shouldn’t have attached to your creation so much. When I had to do it to mine, I just did it without blinking an eye.’  

‘I know. But it was too late. I loved them. I didn’t really want to kill them.’

 ‘Why? They were ugly when you showed them before. They hated each other. They hurt each other. They killed other species. They were simply a mistake.’

‘I know. They weren’t nice. I didn’t mean to make them that bad. Something must’ve happened to them while I wasn’t  looking. But I don’t know why I loved them so much. Anyway, I went for a walk after that. I needed a rest.

‘When I was back, I erased red fruit. I know erasing fruit wouldn’t kill the creatures, but I couldn’t do any damage to them then. Do you know they’d named each fruit like apples, strawberries, raspberries, cherries, tomatoes. It was cute. You know, they didn’t have to give each fruit a name, but they did as if they were their pets. Some of them were just eating them. Some were picking them from trees. Some were carrying them in their cars.

  ‘I said, “Let there not be red fruit.” I didn’t have to shut my eyes then. An apple disappeared from a small female hand and she was surprised, with her big eyes watching where the apple used to be. It was funny and cute. A sliced tomato vanished from a dish cooked by a popular cook in a live TV show. He ran around in a panic and the audience booed. Strawberry pickers lost their picked fruit and got angry. The overseers lost theirs and got angry. They started fighting each other with red faces and loud voices. It was like watching a comedy. How I laughed then. But, I don’t know if I should put it in my rationale. What do you think?’

‘It’s not a good one, but you shouldn’t skip anything. Your teacher’ll find out sooner of later. You should be honest. A guy I knew omitted one thing and got erased right away.’

     ‘Oh, yeah? My teacher wouldn’t do such a thing to his students.’

‘You never know. What do you know about him? I wouldn’t take a chance.’

‘Oh. . . . OK. I think, I understand. So I’ll put it in the rationale as well. But the next one was not bad.

‘It was red vehicles I deleted. Most of them had four wheels with often only one creature inside, sometimes two or more. After “Let there not be red vehicles”, all the creatures inside got hurled onto the tarred ground. That destroyed their body parts, and then, most of them got run over by different-colour vehicles moving right behind them. The most efficient places were on long meandering tarred places where only vehicles existed. All of them moved fast, so all the creatures got killed. Their innards spread in red liquid on the tarred surface.’

‘That’s red. Did you erase it later?’

 ‘Yeah, red liquid from their bodies. They all had it inside. I’ll tell you about it later.

‘I was sad about them. One moment, they were manoeuvring their vehicles happily, thinking about their future and the next moment they were just smashed body parts. They were so vulnerable. They didn’t have hard skins like other smaller creatures with six limbs. I shut my eyes and stayed still for a moment. Do you know something? When I opened my eyes again, their crushed bodies looked repugnant. I couldn’t believe they had such ugly things inside. I know I created them, but I didn’t construct the details. I just made them exist.’

‘That was your mistake. Do you want to know how I did mine? I painstakingly built everything, bit by bit, molecule by molecule. So I knew everything about everything: what they were doing, what they were going to do, how they were going to do it.’

‘Oh, I should’ve done like you did. But why are you using the past tense. Don’t you like them anymore?’

‘I neither liked them nor disliked them. I didn’t have special feelings about them. They were just my creation. When I go bored, I erased them all with one swipe of my arm. They were just one of my seventy-nine creations. That was all.’    

‘I envy you. You’re so cool. There might be something wrong with me. Do you think I should go to the infirmary?’

‘Don’t go there unless it’s urgent. You’d be entirely remade. This guy went there with just a slight headache and came out a totally different guy. Don’t go there. You’ll do a better job next time. Back to your story.’

‘OK. Where was I? Oh, yeah. Some survived, especially in big cities where all the vehicles were moving slowly. But many died.

I almost forgot. The red vehicles in the air vanished as well. There weren’t totally red ones, only partly red ones. But the red parts disappeared, the entire vehicles dropped to the ground and all creatures died, some of them died even before hitting the ground. They were so weak. The good thing was that they didn’t have time to scream much. So it looked not too bad.’

‘Good. You were being more mature. What was the next?’

‘The next one was red fire. I said, “Let there not. . .’

‘Oh, skip your mantra.’

‘Sorry. I thought I should tell you everything. Anyway, they used to use red fire a lot in cold seasons. But recently they used other sources to get warmer. So I wondered if it would work. But it did. Red lava vanished as well. So the whole planet got cold. And they didn’t have red fire to warm them. Many died, especially old ones and small ones. I didn’t feel sad so much. I felt sad that I didn’t feel sad. You know what I mean?’

‘I think so. You’re getting better, anyway.’

‘Thank you. The next and the last one was red blood. Most of creatures died at once. It was spectacular as if they all timed it. The surface of the planet was covered with limp bodies everywhere. It was something.’

‘You said most of them. So it wasn’t all of them?’

‘Yeah, some creatures with blue blood in the sea survived. I hope they’ll evolve and make a better world.’

‘Well done. You’ve matured quite a lot during the process. Your teacher’ll be pleased about your rationale and you.’

‘You think so? Well, I’ve got to go. I’ll write the rationale now. See you.’

‘I thought I made it clear that you were to erase only those bad creatures, not most of others.’

‘Oh. . . .’

‘I’m afraid you’ve failed this module.’

Comments (0)

by Osmond Arnesto

The wall stands, as it always has. That is what it was made for, after all. But one summer afternoon – August 19, 2011 to be exact, sometime after the European Union issued an embargo on Syrian crude oil but well before the Chicago Cubs fired Jim Hendry, who had worked for them for twenty-five years – the wall decided to drop the ‘it’ and become a ‘he.’ It – excuse me, he – felt like it was just time. He blinked for the first time, causing a dull picture of a Mason jar to shake from its perch and drop to the ground. “Sometimes it is a good thing when the airport loses your baggage.” It is something he heard once, during a time when students sat at the tables.

He remembered a certain young woman’s attention directed out the window, oblivious to the discussion going on inside. Some of the students would have called her pretty plain. Others would have said she possessed a subtle beauty, and he knew of one student in particular that looked at her like she was Elizabeth Taylor herself. But what he knew for sure was that if he had to return to the existence of a forgettable piece of architecture, he could stand another few decades if she was in the room. So he left the Mason jar on the floor and went out to look for her.

A person can tell a lot about the infrastructure of a building if it is still standing after one of its walls forces itself out of its frame. Not to say that there wasn’t a lot of confusion and abject terror, of course. The janitor on the third floor huddled under a doorway after the building started to shake, praying to a God he hadn’t prayed to since childhood. Daly Benson and Vahini Ganapathy, grad students whose idea of a cheap thrill was getting to know each other Biblically in an empty office on the second floor, more or less didn’t notice. Helena Moretti, who was just breast-feeding her child on the other side of the country, was just looking outside of her apartment musing on how peaceful Central Park was in the evening.

Regardless, the act was as easy as getting out of bed. He stretched, and the roof caved in. He stepped over the rubble and was disappointed to find that he could not fit through the door, which was swinging wildly off of its hinges. More baggage. He tore off the excess – confetti strips of drywall and puffs of calcium drifting into the air like balloons – until a lean figure remained. He admired his new look in the remains of the window. He decided to take the stairs down. He did not want to pop his elevator cherry just yet – that will be with someone special. Besides, it had been a very long time since he got exercise and today seemed like a good day to start.

The first things he learned as he took timid steps out of the building was that the wind was cold when you were naked and fire engine sirens were loud when you were not prepared to hear them. He decided to seek shelter in a building to the west with large glass windows. It represented a new haven. A new beginning. The wall hummed a tune and in doing so found out that he could. He would not enter this new building as a piece of construction supporting the ceiling. He would not enter it and be forgotten. He would enter it as an individual with purpose. He would be noticed. Remembered. Celebrated, even. This, truly, was an important step in figuring out who he was and why he existed. According to his students: “Oprah calls it empowerment.”

Also, the young woman might be in there so all the more reason to go.

Upon entering, he found the place to be full of people already. It was some kind of food court. Linoleum floors, neon signs. And the people. They were all talking, and chewing, sometimes gesticulating, and the amount of energy inspired him. Friends. The word tasted nothing like gypsum board and white paint. He relished it, and sighed for the first time in his existence.

He would start off slow. Test the waters. Take baby steps. He approached an older woman whose black hair was pulled tight into a bun. The sheen coming off her head was pointed towards the book in her hands. “First impressions are often the truest.” His students had never steered him wrong so far, and he remembered a rather bold yet honest introduction he had heard from a young man who often spoke out in class.

“Hey baby,” he said as he laid a hand on her shoulder. “Are you an angel? Because I have an erection.”

The second thing he learned was that a slap to the face could hurt in many more ways than a punch to the gut ever can. He retreated to an empty table next to the window panes. He wondered if there was anything that could ever cause a window pain. Perhaps the window was in lust with a co-worker. It had spent time at the office Christmas party talking to and drinking with this co-worker, and when it asked if the two of them could get to know each other better away from the party, the co-worker – breath smelling like five parts vodka, two parts coffee liqueur, and three parts fresh cream – laughed and called it unfuckable, sending it into a shame nose-dive that crashed into an inability to form any kind of meaningful connection with any other person up until it was fired in disgrace for propositioning a co-worker and it would spend the quiet nights after that renting shitty romantic comedies and freeze-framing the sex scenes in a desperate effort to rub one out before crying itself silently to sleep with only its pillow beside to make believe that there was someone out there who loved it and trusted it enough to share nights with it.

The wall wondered whether this was pity or sympathy in his gut. Never one to let fellow furniture wallow in its own self-inflicted misery, he had a silent conversation with it.

“,” he grumbled.

“,”, the window warned.

“,” he argued.

“,” the window replied.

“,” he demanded.

“,” the window assured him.

“,” he conceded.

He had to admit that the window raised a good point. He stayed there long after the people filed out of the doors, and he stayed there long after he had licked down the free ice cream cone he was offered by an elderly fast food employee around 4:23 in the morning. She had patted him on the back and told him, “This one’s on the house, sweetheart.”

The wall stepped outside at 6:04 am, eleven minutes before the sun was due to rise that morning. Iran will sentence two hikers from the United States to eight years in prison, and a suicide bomber will kill forty worshippers in a mosque in Pakistan. But at the same time, two lovers will wake up and find out that she is with child and he has a tendency to take the Lord’s name in vain when he receives surprising news. They will decide to keep it – the he or she that it may be – despite their rocky financial situation. They will have dinner together that night for the first time since October 7, 2010 and remember why they started sleeping with each other in the first place. The child will be known as Evelyn, after a woman who will have trouble deciding whether to kiss her daughter or strangle her future son-in-law after receiving the news.

“You’re going to have a good day,” that young woman would say as she looked outside the window, well before class would start and the rest of her peers would trickle into the room. So the wall looked to the sky. It was a clear blue mirror – cracked only by the points of stars and the pink of a newborn dawn. He felt something catch in his throat, and his view blurred. This was her gift to him. He wiped the tears falling from his face. He reached up to grab the day, but found that his reach wasn’t long enough. So he stripped off the rest of him, insulation and wiring and all. He looked back to the windows and could not find a body there to admire, but saw that he had everything he needed.

He lifted himself off the ground, and kept going.

The buildings fell away. So did the trees and the window pains, and soon after that whole cities and countries. It was night-time in China, and the lights from the buildings in Shenzhen blinked in farewell. He felt that he might be going too fast, but that implied that there was something he was leaving behind. There wasn’t. There won’t be. In nine months’ time, Mars will be leaving the house of Aries to enter Taurus. Evelyn will be a stillbirth. The DOW Jones will close, down 0.13% from the previous day. The wall fell into the curtain of clouds and rose from the ozone layer. He sped away from the planet, as it grew smaller and smaller, until it was a pale speck of dust in the corner of his vision. Past the many moons of Jupiter, the great dark eye of Neptune, and the now-defunct Pluto. Past the countless white dwarfs and the red supergiants, noting how many of them were half of the way to super-nova. Past the swirls of the Milky Way Galaxy. Past 40 Eridani.

Until he was surrounded by warm nothingness. And he was left with the steady thrums of distant drum beats and the rush of the wind. And he felt what was left of him curl up into a ball. And he waited for the light.

Comments (2)

by Harry F. Kane

I had the street pretty much to myself. Of course, there were many other figments of my imaginations bustling to and fro, but they don’t really count. I’ve always had an overactive capacity to produce these ghost that populate the streets, but even when I consciously realized what was going on, they remained there. They didn’t go away.

Among all these automata I could see very few people whom I hadn’t made up. Little Chen, a stiff-built little devil, could be seen lurking in his pile of cupboard boxes and newspapers, as I passed his corner of the derelict building. Chen has a paranoia about closed spaces, so even in the winter he burrows into piles of insulating garbage like a lame-legged beetle into old leaves, but would never spend a night in a room with four walls. Poor Chen, something must have happened to him as a kid or something.

Now me, I’m quite adapted. Closed spaces don’t freak me out, open spaces don’t freak me out, and the ghostly apparition that fill the streets don’t freak me out either. They did in the past, to be honest, but after I figured out how to deal with this situation, things mellowed out.

I stopped at the intersection and waited for the cars to stop as well. They could fool anyone of a more naive turn of mind that they had drivers and passengers, and there was a time when I had been fooled as well. Back then, I had even been deceived that I live in a house with a real wife, and work in an office with real coworkers. How these illusions cling.

The cars stopped. I walked over the zebra crossing, evading skillfully the clumsy mannequins that stumbled erratically into all directions. I reached the supermarket and went to the back, where it’s cozier. This is where old Conny lives.

She’s a splendid old hag and has been around simply forever. When you talk to her, you get the impressions that she remembers gas streetlamps, horse-drawn carriages, and telegrams sent and received by chaps with sideburns and top hats. Smart women know how to seem wise beyond their age.   

Last night we had quietly made love in her niche behind the huge rusting rubbish containers, her newspapers rustling under my knees.

It’s a great place to have, actually, there’s always more the enough food thrown out from the supermarket every day, and Conny seems to project a sort of respect. No one has ever tried to take over her place.

She still had some of her hair left, and her tongue still had strength in it. I confess that I was quite thrilled when she had patted my thigh with her gnarled hand and called me a ‘pretty boy’. Finally, some real human contact.

Today I was bringing a gift to my new lover. She may be living in the perfect place to have fresh good food daily, but I had found something which she would certainly appreciate.

A gorgeous porcelain cat. It was half the size of my fist, and its left ear was gone, as was half of its tail. But I was sure Conny would go crazy over it, girls are suckers for such things.

I reached her place behind the rubbish containers. She lay there, below her old threadbare blanket, her funny fur hat covering her face. A lock of her hair lay right on her nose, which would’ve tickled the hell out of me, but not her, no, she’s of the old, stiff upper lip school.

I coughed politely as I approached. Past experience pointed conclusively against the wisdom of waking her abruptly, gentle touches and soft kisses included. Most likely she would explode into wakefulness screaming and waving her old kitchen knife.

Normally she can detect my polite cough at fifteen paces. But this time she simply didn’t stir.

“Conny,” I leaned over her now, “wake up, sweetheart, look what I’ve brought you!”

She continued with her non-stirring. Strange. I crouched by her and examined her face critically.

Was she even breathing?

I blew gently at her wrinkled face, making the lock of hair tremble over her nose. No reaction. I touched her cheek. It was very, very cold.

For a moment I was disoriented. My hands grabbed my elbows as I rocked on my feet, still crouching. Was she dead? Did this mean I would be overwhelmed by emotional pain in mere moments? This was terrible possibility. I had to act swiftly. I had to restart my drive right here, right now.

I stood up. Hands tense, breath bated, I took my tin foil hat off. Things came sharply into focus. All the foggy phantasms snapped into three dimensional existence, insistently leaning towards me, pressing at me with their demands for attention.

No matter how many times I do this, I never get used to it. The back of my T-shirt became wet instantly. My chin trembled.

I counted to twenty, said a quick prayer to the Lord, and put my hat back on.

Everything was back to normal, as it had always been. And now as I looked at Conny’s body, I realized that I had been mistaken after all. She was not dead. How could she be? She had never been alive.

She was one of the ghost-people, not one of the real ones. I had been mistaken, that’s all. No reason to grieve. No reason to panic. No reason to shed tears and to feel the stomach knot.
Relief, grateful relief flooded my body. I looked around myself with renewed confidence. Humanoid shadows flickered in the corners of my eyes; the noon sun warmed the back of my head. With surprised joy I realized that now would be an ideal time to go and find old Daren for a game of chess.

My shadow was thick on the pockmarked asphalt, it oozed and jerked with gusto, reacting to my every movement… When all was said and done, what mattered most is that at least I was still real, real and not feeling any pain at all.

As a gesture perhaps to my own naivete, as a nod to my tendency to confuse facts with fiction, I left the porcelain cat in the lap of the ghost that had been called Conny.

Then I left.

Comments (0)

by James Valvis

I gotta be cool cause if I don’t be I don’t matter at all.

Like check this shit out. Funk4Lyf come to school today with he hands glued to he azz. Calls it Glued Glutes. Says he got this new glue ain’t even in the stores yet. Says it just be sold online and coupla places he know.

In homeroom he can’t even sit down cause he hands and arms be all twisted. He ain’t even got no fingers for holding no pen or books. Teacher know better than to give him shit, yo. Last biotch did that to one of us got her kneecaps made into hood ornaments. Funk4Lyf just stand in the back of the class, looking like King Dog of the 6th Grade.

I sit in the back anyway. I say, “Yo Funk, you stupid. Now you can’t do nothing. Not even hold you stuff while you piss. I can see you azz too. You mama cut the bottom out of you jeans?”

“Right, yo,” he say. “And no homework neither. And no shit my mom wanna make me do. I got an out for it all, yo. Dumbazzes like you sitting there, doing that math shit, find out what x be and shit like that, and I be back here all chill.”

“That glue wear off?”

“Nah. This like outta space glue, like seals skin together and shit. You gotta get an operation and even then you lose hands. I ain’t into no press-on tattoos. This be the real ordeal.”

“How much it be?”

“Congress money, yo.”

Later all the girls be talking his shit up. Funk4Lyf ain’t never had so much action. Even the full-dev girls in the 8th grade be on his junk. Heading to lunch, I see him with this one fully-developed, the hottest, and they be all walking down the hall, hand in hand. Only she got to be putting her hand over his hand that glued on he azz. She be feeding him a sandwich in the cafeteria too.

Looking at him there, listening to him slag on kids gotta be doing homework and wiping they own azzes and shit, I know I gotta get a tub of that outta space glue. Somehow. Someway. I gotta have my hands glued up straight. Even if I gotta shoot some dumbazz for it.

Cause you know by next month won’t be but one azz in school not having Glued Glutes.

And he ain’t gonna be me.

Comments (0)