Praying Mantis Lindsay Roberts

The Southpaw Man Jay Melzer 1st Place in Prose, Student Contest ___________________________________________

She had begun seeing the graffiti about four months ago, appearing in hazard orange spray paint first on the alley wall of the deli six blocks from her office building, then on a park bench near her usual bus stop in Flamingo Rock. The coded blacklist in the lonely hearts ad she was used to; she checked them regularly out of habit, the way someone might read the classifieds with only a vague sense of what they’re looking for, but rarely made an effort to look for the people they described, largely uninterested in her civic duty toward her fellow freaks. But when the Uncanny Union stooped to such obvious warnings, you took notice, because it meant that more subtle methods hadn’t worked to eliminate the problem — it meant that the person they were after wasn’t just an inconvenience, but a danger.

She knew about the Southpaw Man, of course — what cryptid in the Badlands didn’t? He was the latest fashionable urban legend, something thrilling and frightening to gossip about at Paradisco on Saturday evenings: a figure taken straight out of Dracula, an Abraham Van Helsing for the modern age, and he allegedy did his hunting with horrifying efficiency. They said he could smell the glam on you, would know you for what you were at a glance — that he was a glammer himself, and it hid him until it was too late. She knew there had been too many disappearances lately, too many to blame them all on Weird Flight from the metastasizing suburbs, but she had never credited the rumors. It was too fanciful, too storybook; the Southpaw Man was no more real than the Jersey Devil, which had after all been nothing but a stray thrall of the Roadkill God, an atavistic goat that had wandered into the Pine Barrens out of the Vagary. It had mauled no more than a handful of hikers before expiring in its own tumorous juices, and she’d assumed this one-hand jack was a low-grade Agonist at most, someone Angelo’s boys would have under control in a month.

But she was standing a block from her new bus stop now, looking at the back wall of the video rental store across the street, reading the warning there — no whimsical murals with an inconspicuous signature, just tangerine text that shouted at the eyes. They were dead serious. The Union Committee not only believed the Southpaw Man was real, that he was a threat — they believed that he had been in no fewer than three of the places she went regularly. It wasn’t just unsettling — she had bypassed unsettled days ago. It was actually frightening.

It had been a long time since she’d genuinely been afraid of something. The hunger stole compassion first, because a predator wouldn’t survive if it could empathize with the animals it was supposed to hunt, but over time all of the other emotions seemed to go too — it was like progressively going colorblind, and after awhile you almost forgot what things like yellow and orange had looked like, until they returned without warning and scorched your eyes. She was afraid, but she also needed to work if she didn’t want to depend entirely on the good graces of Angelo de los Angeles and his cronies — and the mistake that would undo her, on this gorgeous summer afternoon, was the simple, universal assumption that nothing truly bad can happen in the middle of the day.

She sat at the bus stop, back stiff, smoothing her dark brown hair with a slender, olive hand. Her nerves were rattled, yes, but she felt fine — the overblown incompetent she did secretarial work for was so prodigiously fat that she could afford to parasitize him twice a week, and she had left him in his office in a daze, totally unaware that it wasn’t his cock she had sucked. She’d started to notice small sores at the corners of his mouth, and wondered how much longer it would be before she needed a new job. She wondered if he’d given what he’d caught to his wife — if the woman could even bear to be touched by him at all. She wouldn’t have blamed her if she couldn’t.

Fifty years ago, she might have felt some stirring of horror at her own train of thought, at how casual and flippant it was — she could even remember a time when she had felt horror over it, long ago — but she had, as they said, lived since then. Why should she care if her fat, lecherous boss caught rabies or hepatitis? Why should she care if his wife, or even his wife’s mistress caught it? What should she care if the whole of the Electric Coast caught it? If she had learned anything about people since they had invaded the Flipside, it was that there were always more of them, much the same as they last had been, and that only the calamity of all calamities would ever succeed in wiping them out entirely. It was none of her business.

She wrinkled her nose at a sudden waft of unpleasant odor — the tang of whiskey, overlaying a smell that reminded her vaguely of a rotten onion. Her back stiffened a little further when a tall, lanky man dropped down on the far end of the bench from her: he was obviously homeless, bundled in a ratty coat and jeans faded to the color of dishwater, leather shoes whose expensive brand she could only excuse by their battered condition — he had pulled them from a