Trader Joseph’s

Tommie Unsell

On his hourly shelf inspection, Trader Joseph’s employee Michael Abrams found something odd. After searching 27 cans of Joe’s Os for parasites, disease, or anything else that could result in a class-action lawsuit, his 28th can yielded mold. Red, mushy mold. He rushed back to his superior, Jesamine Lucina Rosalyn Smythe. “Madame Smythe, you have to see this! It is really important!!” he said in his submissive retail worker voice.

“What is it, peasant?”

“I found mold on the pasta, it was disgusting and made me feel abstract emotions.”

Without further hesitation, Jesamine gestured to her attendant, who proceeded to pull out a pistol and put Abrams down. His lifeless, unfulfilled body dropped to the floor, oozing several fluids of varying density. “We shall observe this mold.” The two went off. After the 3 minute walk, they arrived at the canned goods section. The attendant retrieved her looking glass and observed the can of mold. “Miss, he was wrong. The ‘mold’ he spoke of was just the pasta sauce that it came with.”

“Oh.”

The next day at 8 o’ clock, the Trader Joseph’s opened again. The aisle home to dry beans, wet beans, and canned goods was sparkling more than usual, and nothing was out of the ordinary. There were 108 cans of Joe’s Os on the shelves, (which were also TJ’s brand), warmed gently by the patented Cherenkov light fixtures. Behind the scenes, the break room was a sight to behold, with the employees exiting their daily prayer. As always, Jesamine had led the prayer with the ferocity of a rabbit in heat: always multiplying and the subject of many similes. Michael’s corpse was propped up near the corpse pile, adjacent to the “01 days since last employee mishap” sign. He was a man taken before his time, a man whose pockets were never lined. Nobody cared about him, least of all his fellow employees. They were too concerned with the men who complained about how hot the freezers were or how cold the coffee bath was. The real enemy of Jesamine, and by extension Trader Joseph’s, was human stupidity. The customers don’t know that freezers work by pumping out heat, or that hot coffee led to the downfall of McDonald’s. Even Michael Abrams didn’t know what spaghetti sauce was. Nevertheless, his fellow employees abided by the company motto, “Quid futuis, cur apud me es? Exi nunc,” and avoided the same mistakes as their counterpart.

At 1 o’clock, there were 97 cans of Joe’s O on the shelves. The food court was packed from the lunch rush, with thousands of people of all shapes and sizes lining up for their meals. Ever since Trader Joseph’s was given government funding, it had become an oasis of commerce that outshined even the famed “In-N-Out Burger” of the American Southwest. Everyone in a five mile radius was hoping to get the famous BLTJ (bacon, lettuce, tomato, and Jerusalem artichoke) with a side of unleavened bread. This Trader Joseph’s in particular had become famous for a combination of Barq’s root beer and coffee creamer, a concoction known as Coffee Beer by the locals. At 1:30, the bell rang and all the diners stood up to sing the pledge of allegiance. Singing it in schools had fallen out of favor after the war, but Jesamine found it to improve morale. After all, the people making food for the troops should be filled with the spirit of free America!

At 3 o‘clock, the personal shoppers in service of the irradiated and bedridden 1% were interrupted by a mild to moderate ruckus in the southeast section: vegetarian and gluten-free options. Jesamine was taking her afternoon nap of approximately 47.5 winks, but her attendant was wide awake, fully prepared to cause grievous bodily harm to anyone that interrupted her liege. She heard the noise, however, and decided it could perhaps be important. She crept into Jesamine’s room using the password, RudyXD69. Even though she made frequent visits in the night, the room never ceased to amaze her. The wallpaper was complex without being tacky, and it paired excellently with the decorations. There was a colonial era theme, with several paintings of former US presidents like Abraham Lincoln and

Rutherford Birchard Hayes (her personal favorite). Jesamine herself slept on a bed of peacock feathers, with the bedspread patterned to look like the redesigned American flag. She was stirring in her sleep, although it could have been from the dreams rather than the explosion.

“Miss, wake up. I think there was an incident.” Jesamine slowly rose up, bending only at the waist, in the fashion of a vampire. She appeared as if she was never asleep in the first place.

“Ah, the horse must have gotten in. Or was that a dream I had… it gets hard to tell these days.” The attendant just stood there with a dearth of bewilderment; she had become used to these kinds of conversations. She resolved to just walk out of the room, expecting Jesamine to follow her. She did.

The journey was quick, as the only aisle separating them was filled with pallets upon pallets of mayonnaise. The scene they came across was quite demented, dubious, and/or droll. A large man wearing jodhpurs and a pleather jacket lay tied up with expired red vines. Around him were two employees and three customers. The customers were clearly spooked, but Jesamine’s loyal workers were trained to handle anything from an intelligent hamster to an unintelligent hamster. Jesamine was not new to intruders; just last week a swarm of shrimp found its way into the fountain. It took hours to stop them from leaping out and attacking customers’ eyes. Jesamine was wondering not how, but why such a man would come here. She said, “I wonder not how, but why you would come here.” He stayed as quiet as a corpse. She leaned in closer to deliver her monologue. “Any one of my enemies could have sent you, as I have made many in my life. What sets me apart from every other manager is that I have passion in what I do. I have faith in myself. Even though my employees range from idiotic to barbaric, I have faith in them. You have nothing in your life. Even as you sit here in my store, tied up with edible BDSM gear, you are not the cornered predator. You do not have nothing left to lose. You never had anything in the first place.” As she backed away, her staff knew what to do. They picked him up and carried him away, and by tomorrow he’d be on the corpse pile. On the walk back, Jesamine’s attendant spoke up.

“Miss, that man back there, I think he was dead before we got there. He wasn’t breathing or struggling when they took him.”

Knowingly, Jesamine responded, “Of course he was, dear.”

“But I thought-”

“Don’t think. Thinkers don’t last very long.”

Jester’s Macabre

Adam Curtis

The Jester waited patiently, flipping a freshly sharpened, pearl-hilted dagger idly in his gloved hands, catching the razor-sharp steel as it flew towards his flesh. Ever since he was a boy forced into an ill-fitting motley, he’s become familiar with this type of feeling, the taunt of steel so close to his flesh. The fear of slipping, of the wealth-ridden blade falling just a hair too close to his wrists, was all too similar to working in the center of power for thousands. For nearly as long as Jester had known, their laughs rang hollow in his ears.

But the Jester knew his job, and completed it with the practiced grace of a master of his craft. He was allowed to be at the center of one of the most powerful kingdoms the world had ever seen, walking the same walls and under the same bricks that sheltered powerful nobles for centuries.

I am powerful. The Jester lied to himself, his face contorting into the ghost of a snarl. I am seated at the table of gods.

But that wasn’t the truth, and deep down, he knew that. Just hours ago, The King made that fact very clear. The Jester paused and closed his eyes.

Bells jingled playfully from his hat as The Jester pushed the heavy, gold-inlaid, oaken door open, revealing an old, frail man hunched over a table, bathed in candlelight. As The Jester walked in slowly, the man made no sign of noticing his entrance. “Your Majesty?” The Jester called out into the darkness. “You called for me?”

“Come over here.” His gruff voice ordered. The Jester obeyed immediately with practiced loyalty. “Tell me: how long have you served me?”

“I have always served the crown to the best of my ability,” The lie came easy, like a leaf drifting peacefully down a river. “Though I have served eighteen years in this position, your majesty.”

“Hmm.” The King grunted, looking up into The Jester’s eyes. For a split second, The Jester’s smile faltered, noticing The King’s suspicious glare, like a thousand daggers piercing his back. “Then tell me, boy, why would a man like you need to leave the castle tonight?”

The Jester’s throat screwed itself shut, choking away any words that could’ve escaped his traitorous lips. He swallowed nervously. “What do you mean?”

“Don’t play coy with me,” The King snarled, sitting up in his chair. “The woman you’ve been seeing. Do you have the slightest idea who she is?”

The knives in his back drew closer, their sharp tips brushing against his spine. “I—,”

“I know your plan. You wanted to sneak her into the castle tonight. You were planning on letting this girl, a common peasant, walk in the halls of kings,” The king explains. “Am I correct?”

The Jester, fearing the blades at his back, bowed his head. “Y-Yes, your majesty.”

“You should consider yourself lucky,” The old man sighed, and held his head in his hands. “Treason is a serious crime. If my guards didn’t catch her first, you’d be facing the same punishment.”

“Treason?” The Jester croaked in silent realization. The question tumbled out of his mouth before he could stop it. “What happened to Anne?”

The King’s face drew itself into a cruel, grim line. The Jester knew his answer before the old man’s condemnation exited his cold, cracked lips.

The Jester opened his eyes, stopping the knife in an instant. Carefully, he lifted the knife closer to his face, and gazed into his reflection, trapped within the blade. On the other side of the steel mirror, a man stared back at him, his face contorted into a frown, with dark, strained lines drawn across his face, hidden behind a layer of white make-up. The face looked almost exactly as The Jester remembered it. He could imagine a kind, playful smile curling at the corners of the image’s mouth, and the twinkle of harmless mischief in its eyes.

But he didn’t see a playful smile on the image’s lips. He didn’t see mischief in the image’s eyes.

He saw murder.

The Jester was patient, though. He could wait like a coiled snake playing the part of a rabbit. He had faced a thousand injustices in his time. He could wait, living on the fact that this one he’d faced would be the last The King would ever commit again.

“You killed her,” The Jester said.

“I did no such thing,” The King said firmly. “I punished a criminal for a serious crime. A crime you nearly committed yourself.”

“You killed her,” The Jester repeated, quieter, and to himself more than his love’s murderer. “She was innocent, and you killed her.”

“I am growing tired of this folly,” The King snarled, standing from his seat. “You think that the peasant was innocent? Are you willing to take her place? Even so, nothing will reattach her head to her shoulders. Accept it. There’s nothing you can do.”

But The King was wrong. There was something he could do.

“I am powerful.” The Jester whispered, barely louder than a strained snarl. “I am stronger than you could ever imagine.”

The Jester wasn’t powerful in the normal sense of the word. But that didn’t matter. He had his knife, and he had his knowledge.

The Jester smiled softly, and closed his eyes. Oh, the things he knew. He could topple empires with that kind of information.

In fact, he might as well indulge in a little chaos himself. The Jester thought of himself as a fair man. He did his part as any other subjects did. He danced. He sang. He told jokes. He smiled and bowed as they laughed, the bells in his hat chiming playfully.

Every man has their limits, though, and his were crossed a long time ago. Now, it was his turn to return the favor.

He smiled softly at the mirror version of himself, in a way that didn’t quite reach his eyes, as he heard The King’s meeting come to an end. Gently, he tucked the blade into his waistband, and pranced up to the great hall’s oaken door.

The Jester was used to being on the sidelines, but it was time for him to enter center stage. Today, he would make his last performance:

“The Jester’s Macabre.”

Tethered to the Night

Ava Lowell

As she stepped out onto the balcony, the glow of the warm summer sun cooked her skin and her hair gleamed. There were dark splotches in front of her eyes, or maybe behind them. The birds were talking and the dog walkers mindlessly scrolling through their phones. The parents struggled to get their kids in the car, and teenagers chattered on their way to school. She felt as if a chill was washing over her. As the traffic whizzed by, each driver and each passenger couldn’t predict what was about to happen. She was bathed in the night, even as the sun burnt through her flesh. But she blinked, and the heat wasn’t so painful anymore.

They didn’t need to predict anymore.

Shaking off the strange coat of black that she had been drowning in, she stepped back inside. Found the two things by her bedside that would’ve alarmed most people and stashed them away. You aren’t allowed to know where, because then maybe she could be stopped, but we have to let things play out the way they’re supposed to. She proceeded to go through the motions of a regular life. The man still in her shower, who was he again? Brush the black dust away — right, her “husband.” She had vowed to be with him through anything, but she didn’t know if that was a promise she could continue to halfheartedly fulfill anymore. What would happen if he had pretended to really notice her the way she had to pretend to love him, would he have found out? Probably not.

He barely even tried to look at her how a normal husband would, like she thought he did in the beginning. She could still remember the moments when she thought she loved him. She could still remember feeling her heartbeat out of excitement, not fear. She knew now, though, what it felt like to know he was watching her not out of love but objectification. Examining her, observing her. Uninvited eyes in uninvited places. He bored holes into her skin with those eyes.

Anyone that knew them probably thought it couldn’t be a healthier, more loving relationship, their constant smiles, his arm wrapped around her anytime anyone saw them, whispering who knows what into her ear, sharing a kiss every time someone glanced at them sideways, in retaliation for their doubt. But every time they smiled, her jaw ached. Every time his arm touched her, she had to force herself not to pull away, her own arms protectively crossed over her chest and her hands in fists, scars on her palms. She knew, every time, what he was whispering in her ear even before he’d brushed her hair away from it, to touch his lips gently to her skin before the pain spilled out through one breath and pierced her eardrum.

As she made the bed, her movements jerky and her mind afloat, the water shut off into sudden silence and she hurled back to consciousness. The bed was poorly made, and somehow her side seemed to crease and her pillow to sink every time she fixed it. But his, not a single fold, almost as if it were brand new, no destruction from a body collapsing it ever so slightly each night.

She had hoped to leave before he was out, but now there was no avoiding him. Every drop of water that he slipped over with his towel slowly plinked to the floor, one by one as he emerged, and with each one, her shoulders rose ever so slightly, her chest tightening, and her feet, unnoticeably, even to her, turning towards the door.

He was talking to her, something about visiting his mom, but his words were jumbled in her mind, so she inserted thoughts into the conversation that she knew weren’t her own.

Walking to the bathroom, she avoided each droplet of water that he had let fall to the floor. She couldn’t move her eyes above the sink, instead rummaging through a drawer for a brush. She found it, picked it up, and heard something drop, hitting the tile with a crack that echoed through the apartment.

A moment later she realized it was the brush, and using the hand that wasn’t still on her shoulder, he bent down slowly, picked it up, and silently started dragging it through her hair, humming a song she knew all the words to, softly, into her ear. Raising her eyes to the mirror, she only stared at him, fighting back the urge to get away.

She knew what would happen if she insisted on doing it herself. Just like when they were fifteen, when she wouldn’t respond to him the way he hoped for. Since then, she had silently obeyed.

When he was finished, she dutifully let him kiss her on the cheek, slipped on her shoes, and left, her wallet and phone clutched in her hand, her fingers white around them.

When she arrived back at the building that night, it loomed over her, its shadow dancing, taunting her, even in the dark. This place was supposed to feel like her home, but she hesitated behind the door before turning away. She stood there for several minutes, then sat down on the jagged pavement and tucked her head into her hands. She was constantly battling her mind, but tonight it was different. The sky was a blanket, suffocating her, each star a hole in the fabric she couldn’t quite reach. She pictured the two things that could hand her an escape, but she’d never be able to bring herself to do it. Her mind always followed her back to the constant warning. I’ll kill myself if I lose you. In other relationships, couples said that to be sweet — “I’d die without you!” When he said that, she could see the black that sat before his eyes, threatening to break free and engulf them both. She couldn’t bear to be his reason for leaving. No matter how miniscule she felt around him, how meaningless, how much of a toy, she couldn’t let herself carry that, even if she were to go along with him.

Hearing the click of the lock behind her, she bolted upright, jumping to her feet, with her quivering fingers in her pockets, her fist wrapped around her keys. The door creaked open, sliding heavily along the floor to reveal his face, eyebrows furrowed. He asked her what she was doing, the slight lift in his voice that she knew too well. She told him she couldn’t get the door open and that she didn’t know if he was home yet too, so she decided to wait outside for him. Stepping inside, she tensed up as her side brushed against him inside the doorway. She walked up the endless stairs, aware that he was watching her, but in anger or longing, she didn’t know. She couldn’t tell the difference anymore. They reached the top, and he gently placed his hand on the small of her back, shifting her out of the way to unlock the door.

Following her in, he started to do something, but she didn’t know what. She couldn’t focus on him, her eyes blurring if she stepped towards him, or glanced in his direction.

Instead, she started boiling a pot of water, sprinkling in salt, remembering her mom’s voice when she was in high school, gently reminding her when she managed to forget every time. Her mom’s voice echoed in her head now, and she knew she would have told her to leave. More saltwater dripped into the pot. She hurriedly brushed at her face, not wanting him to see.

Leaving it to boil, she went to her bedside, grabbed a book that if you asked for the title, she wouldn’t have been able to tell you, and stepped out onto the balcony. No warm sun cooked her skin. No people were lingering outside, talking away. The cars going by were slowed, the traffic, she was sure, making every person inside their car angry, wishing they could be home. She wondered what it’d be like to be in one of those cars.

Tonight, there was nothing to stop her desires. She knew they were selfish, but after so many years, she wished, more than anything, to live in a place that didn’t make her feel heavy the moment she stepped in the door. She wanted to be able to see her mom, to talk to her friends. She knew she couldn’t reach the pinpricks of light poked through the blanket of black. Stepping closer to the ledge, she leaned over, resting her arms on the cool, black, railing.

A moment later, he called her name, and she turned around, bracing herself to walk back inside. She barely noticed her book tumble over the ledge. He appeared in the doorway to tell her the water was boiling, and she responded, meaningless words floating out of her mouth.

With his hand rested on her shoulder, he guided her back inside, past their bedroom where her secrets lay hidden away, in the place you’ll never find, past their bathroom where she wasn’t allowed to get ready in the morning by herself, past the front door where she wished she could turn to, into the kitchen where the pot was bubbling, saltwater spilling over the sides into the flames. She longed to be back on the balcony, following the book.