PULP 007

PULP ISSUE 007

TABLE OF CONTENTS The Drive to the Black Rainbow Is Not Possible & So Sorry About the Wait by Rich Boucher Scandal in Stall #2 at DFW, Best Friend, IRL Action Hero, Picking Up the Pieces, & Doppelganger Loser by Carsten Cheung A Hunger Like No Other by Noelle Another Bad Photograph, stuck in the rut of another day, Lightbulb Burn, & crack by Marcel Feldmar i’m the best thing since sliced bread and alouette, After the Effects, backwash, i am ashamedly myself, & IS IT DARK BECAUSE IT’S DARK OR DARK BECAUSE YOU WON’T TURN ON THE LIGHTS? by A.J. Parker A Devotion to the Decor At Cracker Barrel & The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire by Joseph M. Jablonski Train Song For The Guy I Left Behind by Evelyn Jean Pine Art by Sean E. Britten Bousculade: The Big Machine by River Lazarus January of Sex by Viola Volée Invictus by Alexis Ames Fondues and Don’ts by Ryder Smith Unravelling by Keith Good Rags by A. J. Padilla Dead in the Water by Tom Koperwas Right Where It Belongs by Bri Eberhart Space Loops by Steven French Bloodsong by Ruchi Sneha

Birthmark & Vhaunting by Rodney Hatfield Neurosis, Apneic, Mother, The Gate, & Eclipse by Mahmoud Maher Eltrawy My Confession by Mark Mitchell The Four by Laura Shell A Day Off, August in Brisbane, & Her Cocoon by Andrea (Hai-Mo Hu) You Are a Terrorist by Shahbaz Khayambashi There be Monsters by Simon Collinson Night Island by LM Therrien Down into the Wasteland by Marco Etheridge Should the Stone Gods Wake by Chad Gayle Body Bags of Blood and Guts by Hank Kirton The (mostly) True Story of Isabella Labatt by John RC Potter VASECTOMAJESTIC by Jacob Schepers

Train Song For The Guy I Left Behind by Evelyn Jean Pine was previously published in Scrittura Magazine There be Monsters by Simon Collinson was previously published in Flash Fiction North.

Dead in the Water by Tom Koperwas was published in The Sirens Call Summer 2022 Issue 58. (now defunct)

CONTRIBUTOR BIOS Rich Boucher resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Rich’s poems have appeared in The Nervous Breakdown, Eighteen Seventy, Menacing Hedge, Drunk Monkeys and Cultural Weekly, among others. Rich recently served as Associate Editor for the online literary magazine BOMBFIRE. He is the author of All Of This Candy Belongs To Me, a collection of poems published

by Jules’ Poetry Playhouse Publications. Peep richboucher.bandcamp.com for more. He loves his life with his love Leann in the perpetually intriguing Southwest.

Carsten Cheung lives in Los Angeles with his family and works as an educator. He has published poetry in Stink Eye Magazine, In Parentheses Magazine, and BREATHE. When not reading or writing things, he can be found on a quest seeking out the perfect chocolate chip cookie.

Noelle is a writer who is still searching for their muse Marcel Feldmar grew up in Canada, and then left. He spent some time in an institution called The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, but ended up living in Los Angeles, where his words get caught in traffic. He has been working on some spoken word / music collaborations, which can be found under the name Blue Discordant Way on Bandcamp.

Feldmar has contributed poetry to the Curious Nothing, 7th-Circle Pyrite, and Rabbit’s Foot Magazine, and his full-length novel, Awkward on the Rocks, is coming soon from Dead Sky Publishing.

A.J. Parker grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, then spent some time on the East Coast trying to make up for all that water she lost. Her work has been published in over ten literary journals, including Feminist Food Journal and Watershed Review. She has a short story forthcoming in After Dinner Conversation.

Joseph M. Jablonski is the typewriting street poet of Winchester, Virginia. As the "Walking Mall Poet," he writes personalized poems on-the-spot for passersby on antique typewriters, and has performed at events and weddings as a live writer. In addition to recently being published

by Livina Press, he has been an artist-in-residence at the Peter Bullough Foundation and is an active Listening Poet through The Good Listening Project. He is also a contest winner and member with the Poetry Society of Virginia.

Evelyn Jean Pine is a playwright, librettist, poet and performer. A June Ann Baker Prize Winner, she has received 3 PlayGround commissions. Her play, Oakland 1982: You, Me and Rickey, about the late, great Rickey Henderson, is the first drama published in the baseball journal, The Twin Bill. Her play, Freeloader in the House of Love won the "Most Compelling Story" prize at Boulder Fringe. The Invisible Project, written with Katja Rivera, launched the Latinx Mafia's Staged Reading series. Her short opera, nada, written with Norwegian/Finnish composer, Tze Yeung Ho, premiered at Strange Trace Opera’s 2022 Stencils Festival. Her comedy, 7 Secrets of Teaching. Online, was the hit of Theatre 33's 2022 New Works Festival in Salem Oregon. Her poetry and plays has been published in Fourth Wave and other publications on Medium. She is a proud member/co-owner of the most ground-breaking social networking site on earth, the Whole Earth ‘lectronic Link, The WELL. Sean E. Britten is an author and radio journalist from Sydney, Australia. Architect of your darkest dreams, your wettest nightmares, your idlest daydreams, and those intrusive thoughts that say, 'You know that cup you're holding? You should throw that for absolutely no reason'.

His novels, including the 'Kill Switch' trilogy can be found on Amazon. Stories and more at seanebritten.com River Lazarus is a writer from Sydney, Australia. She has been writing short horror stories since the age of 8, when she first watched the film adaptation of Stephen King’s ‘Christine’ with her dad and decided to write a sequel. She enjoys exploring the intersection of gender, sexuality, culture and body-horror in her writing.

Viola Volée is the pen name Pascale Potvin, Editor-in-Chief of Wrong Publishing. Her collection DEMONDUST is forthcoming from Game Over Books, and her feature film BABY FEVER is also premiering in 2025. Thrice nominated for Best of the Net, she's also had her work put up for The Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, and Best Small Fictions, plus longlisted for the Wigleaf Top 50. Find her at pascalepotvin.com or @pastellepalaces on IG/Threads.

Alexis Ames is a speculative fiction writer with works in publications such as Pseudopod, Luna Station Quarterly, and Radon Journal. You can read more of their stories online at alexisamesbooks.com.

Ryder Smith (they/them) is an aroace writer currently studying English and Italian at the University of Pittsburgh. They primarily use their writing to promote aromantic and asexual representation and acceptance.

Keith Good is a writer and librarian living in Ohio. His delightfully weird works have appeared in Anotherrealm, Black Moon Magazine and Cosmic Horror Monthly, among others.

He lives online @keithisgood and at www.keithisgood.com

A. J. Padilla is a college librarian living and working in New York's Hudson Valley.

Thomas Koperwas is a retired teacher living in Windsor, Ontario, Canada who writes short stories of horror, crime, fantasy, and science fiction. His story Vacation won a Freedom Fiction Journal Top Crime Editor's Choice Award 2024. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming in: Anotherealm; Jakob’s Horror Box; Literally Stories; The Literary Hatchet; Literary Veganism; Bombfire; Pulp Modern Flash; Savage Planets; Dark Fire Fiction; The Sirens Call; Yellow Mama Webzine; 96th of October; Underside Stories; Danse Macabre; A Thin Slice Of Anxiety; Androids and Dragons; Chewers & Masticadores Canada; The Piker Press; Stupefying Stories Showcase; Metastellar; The Yard: Crime Blog; Blood Moon Rising Magazine; Corner Bar Magazine; Free Bundle Magazine; The Chamber Magazine; Suburban Witchcraft Magazine; Black Petals Magazine; InterNova Magazine; Freedom Fiction Journal.

Bri Eberhart is a contemporary fantasy writer located near Buffalo, New York. She is the author of Strangers in Our Heads and Strangers in Our Hearts, and her stories have also been published in the Scarlet Leaf Review, VarietyPack, Neuro Logical, and The Amazine. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram at bri_eberhart or at brieberhart.com.

Steven French is retired and retiring with various pieces appeared and appearing, most recently in BarBar, Literally Stories and Wyldblood.

Ruchi is an MA Creative Writing graduate from the University of Birmingham. Her short story ‘Lily’ was published by Mulberry Literary in their Issue VII: Bitter Lungs. She experiments with many forms of writing and loves to read widely across genres.

Rodney Hatfield has been a freelance writer for the last 20 years. I have a Facebook page for Mortimer T. Graves: Horror Short Story Time | Facebook (14k followers) to field questions for my writing and post little stories I write. Twitter/X for my poetry and nonsense. My junk drawer of writing is my Patreon page; It has poetry, dialogues, stories, articles and everything else I find cool and interesting.

Mahmoud Maher Eltrawy is a medical doctor from Egypt. Writing has always been a passion of mine, and I often write under the pseudonym Titoxz. Through my work, I aim to offer readers a deep, immersive experience, often exploring darker, more introspective themes.

Mark Mitchell graduated from Cal State Long Beach with a degree in Screenwriting and currently lives in the greater Los Angeles area, where he is a member of The Blank Page Writers Club. His short fiction has appeared in A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Hightower Magazine, and Canyon Voices Literary Magazine as well as the anthologies Nightmare Fuel: Body Horror (Cloaked Press) and Through the Briar Patch (Hollow Oak Press). Follow him on instagram @markmitchell.writer.

Laura Shell has been published in NUNUM, Maudlin House, Typishly, and many others. Her first anthology of paranormal stories, The Canine Collection, was released in 2024. She's a prolific writer and submitter of flash fiction and the Editor-in-Chief of the Flash Phantoms site. You can find more about her work at https://laurashellhorror.wordpress.com.

Andrea (Hai-Mo Hu) is a Creative Writing grad from Full Sail University. Her flash fiction “Private Funeral” was published in CafeLit Magazine, "Force to Chocolate" in The Raven Review, and "Ten Tea Bags" in CC&D Magazine. She also has a film review in CHA magazine's First Impression section. Growing up on the coast has greatly influenced her stories and has allowed her to bring elements of the ocean into her writing.

Shahbaz Khayambashi is an academic, writer, curator and failed artist. Their work has been published and shown and presented all over the world and he still gets the shivers when she sees their name in a new place.

Simon is a writer from England. He seeks solitude and shadow.

LM Therrien (she/they) loves to adventure in the dense forests of the Pacific Northwest with their family during the day and sneak off to a small desk to craft stories late at night. You can find them on BS @therrien.bsky.social Marco Etheridge is a writer of prose, an occasional playwright, and a part-time poet. He lives and writes in Vienna, Austria. His work has been featured in over one hundred reviews and journals across Canada, Australia, the UK, and the USA. His story “Power Tools” has been nominated for Best of the Web for 2023. “Power Tools” is Marco’s latest collection of short fiction. When he isn’t crafting stories, Marco is a contributing editor for a new ‘Zine called Hotch Potch. In his other life, Marco travels the world with his lovely wife Sabine. Website: https://www.marcoetheridgefiction.com/ Before he started writing full time, Chad Gayle worked as a freelance photographer, taught English at colleges in North Carolina and Texas, and served as an assistant editor at Poetry Magazine in Chicago. He lives in New York with his wife and his two children, where he dreams of finding a gluten-free bagel that tastes as good as the real thing.

Hank Kirton lives in New England and has worked in factories, warehouses and kitchens from Rhode Island to New Hampshire. He currently lives and writes in Massachusetts. His books include The Membranous Lounge and Bleak Holiday.

John RC Potter is an international educator from Canada who lives in Istanbul. He has experienced a revolution (Indonesia), air strikes (Israel), earthquakes (Turkey), boredom (UAE), and blinding snow blizzards (Canada), the last being the subject of his story, “Snowbound in the House of God” (Memoirist). His poems, stories, essays, articles, and reviews have been published in various magazines and journals. Recent publications include: Prose - “The Tickle Trunk” (Literary Yard); Poetry - “Never Again/Nie Wieder” (Sweet Tea Dichotomy Lit Mag); Review – Tezer Özlü’s Cold Nights of Childhood (New English Review). His story, “Ruth’s World” (Fiction on the Web), was nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and his poem, “Tomato Heart” (Disturb the Universe Magazine), was nominated for the Best of the Net Award. The author’s gay-themed children’s picture book, The First Adventures of Walli and Magoo, is scheduled for publication. He enjoys duties as Istanbul editor of Masticadores online magazine.

Email: johnrcpotterauthor@gmail.com OR turkyaz@hotmail.com Website: https://johnrcpotterauthor.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/JohnRCPotter Jacob Schepers is the author of the poetry collection A Bundle of Careful Compromises (Outriders Poetry Project, 2014), the chapbook Connections & Choreography (Bottlecap Press, 2024), and the micro-chap Shipwreck Abstracted (Ghost City Press, 2024). His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as antiphony, Psaltery & Lyre, Dialogist, The Greensboro Review, Harpur Palate, Heavy Feather Review and Hobart. He is an editor of ballast and teaches at the University of Notre Dame.

THE DRIVE TO THE BLACK RAINBOW IS NOT POSSIBLE RICH BOUCHER Wait for the dusk to go, then, regardless of how old you have to get, wait some more until the evening becomes the night-time. If you know what I mean, you’ll know what I mean. As soon as the voice of the engine starts to sound like a person who has certainly killed before, take all the lefts you can after you pass the house with the boulder out front that looks like a cat making the sort of face that makes one think about simpletons. For some unknown reason, consider this both a warning and a set of directions. Go left for about a half a dozen lives or minutes or so more until the town ends; you’ll know you’re where you’re supposed to be by the fact that the only thing in front of you at this point will be endless and horribly beautiful dunes of sand. You know how sometimes you see a person and they’re so beautiful that if feels like you don’t even deserve to be hearing the song you’re hearing at the time? Yeah. Like that. Now, look for the sun rising in your rearview mirror, wait for it to suddenly have an expression on its face that you never want to see again, then close your eyes. When everything comes to a complete stop, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, grab that deck of cards I gave you, wring all the diamonds out of it and funnel them, slick and crimson, into the gas tank. The engine will roar to a life without you. Get back in.

Don’t you ever be afraid again. Drive until the Sun makes a bargain with the rain; drive until not too far away a dark shape, an absurd semi-circle that you know isn’t there is there: the rainbow that glows in all the absences of color there can be, jet black to jet black again, every impossible hue of the dark, shades of ever-elusive certainty. Keep driving; floor it until you’re never there. Make sure.

SO SORRY ABOUT THE WAIT RICH BOUCHER SUICIDE We’re sorry about the wait for your meal. It’s hard to express how sorry we are about the wait. In one thousand lifetimes, we could never convey the depth of our sorrow about the wait that you have had to endure for your burger meal. We are so sorry that you had to wait for us to finish helping another customer before helping you. Please understand that while there is nothing that we can do about that, if we could, we would be very happy to take our own lives so that you can be happy and have your burger meal a little faster. It’s taking a bit longer to make your fries and so we are very, very sorry about the wait.

It’s unbelievable, how sorry we are. In fact, we wonder if we have any right to live at all; in fact, we might actually take our own lives tonight after work because of how long you have had to wait for your meal, maybe take a cyanide pastel and bite down with our teeth so that foam comes out of our mouths just like in the movies; maybe we’ll just shut the window over our neck in the drive-through so that you can see how serious we are about your satisfaction as a customer. We are so very, very sorry about the wait. We don’t know what to do. We thought there was a God. Christ on a crutch; we thought there was a whole meaning to this life, but after you mentioned how long you’ve had to wait for this burger meal with that tone in your voice, we wonder if anything makes sense at all anymore. How much does a spool of piano wire cost?

We’re just wondering. We mean, what sense is there in happiness or love or faith or devotion when you, the customer, have had to wait an additional three minutes so that your fries can be fresh for your meal.

We are so very, very sorry. Would you like to hurt us? Would you like to hit us in our faces? Would you like to penetrate us with an object? It’s incredible, how sorry we are. Fuck, we just came to the thought of that.

Maybe life’s a B grade horror movie; maybe life is just a full, empty satire about the fullness and emptiness of life - we just don’t know anymore. And the reason we don’t know anymore is because you mentioned how angry you were about having to wait a little longer for your burger meal. That tone you used. Well, we are sorry about the wait. We are also sorry for the WEIGHT. We said we were sorry. What else can we do for you? Would you like it if we died for you? In response to your frustration with the wait and the weight, we have already ordered some razor blades from Amazon, and we have a bathtub back here in which we can empty ourselves using those razors if you would like, since your burger meal took a little bit longer than you wanted to be waiting for. Please pull up to the next window. Please have your money ready.

Please, we have kids. Please, we have a family. Please don’t hurt our families.

SCANDAL IN STALL #2 AT DFW CARSTEN CHEUNG

It’s a little funny how you came into my life.

I was alone, just sitting here doing my business worried about missing boarding call when you entered, sat, and declared your presence.

And just like all those silly rom coms, I hated you at first.

Couldn’t stand you choosing to be near me.

Was disgusted by where you parked your ass and shattered my peace.

But just like those dramatic dramas, I realized the connection we share.

You see dear #3, in some ways, you connect with me more deeply than the one I’m already with.

Sure, she and I have shared a bed, exposed our souls to one another, seen each other naked and come undone.

But without even a single word between us, you and I within arm's reach, bared ourselves in ways I would never with her, vulnerable simultaneously in ways that I would never want to be with her.

It is in this moment you and I share something no two others can claim to have.

In this secret place we are kindred spirits bound by one mind and mission, unified by mutual purpose.

But just as these thoughts occur you finish, up and leave me alone, to catch your 4:30 to LAX while I head back out to her, waiting impatiently for me to catch our 3:45 to JFK,

wondering if you even knew I existed at all.

BEST FRIEND CARSTEN CHEUNG

I had no idea what Poopy McFluffin really was when you first got her.

No clue that she was some special collectors edition worth a hundred easy.

Just knew that you loved her and carried her everywhere you went.

I couldn’t stand it though.

The washing, the constant tossing her in with my dirty laundry, her pink and purple fur staining everything, like Bing Bong burst through the movie screen, crashed into our machine and threw up all over the place.

Couldn’t stand all the extra travel either.

Your whining and crying whenever you left her behind and we’d have to trek another half hour back to that damn park where we don’t even know if some other kid took her already or if someone threw her away.

If you loved her so much, maybe you’d keep a better eye.

But then one day, your aunty – the one who gifted her to you, says to me “Hey – check it out,” flipping open some catalog for some convention and there she was.

Poopy.

McFluffin.

In all her bunny glory.

With her long floppy ears, white cotton tail, smirking proud and tall.

Like a celebrity.

Worth more than her weight in gold.

So one day after I took her out of the dryer, held her limp and forever stained, still warm and smelling like softener, still worth a pretty penny even in her raggedy condition, I took her out for a drive.

And I couldn’t stand it.

Your crying and searching.

Turning our place upside down and inside out for your best friend.

Couldn’t stand it anymore how you couldn’t sleep without her, and had to crawl in with me tossing and turning so I couldn’t sleep either.

Such a pain in the ass, slipping out of bed at 3 AM writing little sticky notes signed Poopy with a paw, so you’d know it was really from her, telling you of how great she’s doing and how much fun she’s having in Bunnyville, where she’s gone to be with all the other Carters Just One Years.

And that she’ll love you forever.

She’ll never forget you, so try to be happy for her.

You see, what I couldn’t stand most was your constant bellyaching over your belly aching, “I’m hungry!”

Couldn’t stand to see you hopping off to bed empty stomach while that plushie gloated silently smiling about her bloated belly.

So tonight, as I take you out for pizza and ice cream, a special sometimes only treat, I’ll watch you smile for the first time in weeks.

Satisfied for the first time in forever.

I’ll have no appetite though, so I push my slice over to you when you’re done and ready for seconds, hoping that a little cheese, a little pepperoni, can make you forget for just a little bit longer.

IRL ACTION HERO CARSTEN CHEUNG

IRL ACTION HERO grunts and growls, slamming plates and bar onto rubber flooring, extra bounce making extra loud metallic echoes ring through empty 5AM gymnasium.

The fuck you looking at?

IRL ACTION HERO barks at the only other person there, on the elliptical, earbuds in, paying no mind.

Huffs and puffs into locker room, flexes for the mirror, chest glistening, and snaps a selfie for his snap & gram.

Putting in the work.

Get it. #Itsokaytobeweakbutnotokaytostayweak.

But on his way out and on my way in, IRL ACTION HERO crashes into me or me into him? (we were both on our phones) Causing me to drop my drink, causing HIM to rage.

WATCH WHERE YOU’RE GOING BRO IRL ACTION HERO shoves me with one arm sends me flying backwards into check-in counter.

With death in his eyes, veins bursting through every orifice, IRL ACTION HERO squats, grabs my cup, Boba milk tea dripping down his wrist, pooling with steroid tainted sweat to form Super Alpha Male droplets.

IRL ACTION HERO smiles, leaning in so close I can smell protein shake breath.

YOULIKESUCKINGBALLS!?

Flings my cup, drenching me in a shower of oolong and humiliation.

He feints I cower, he laughs -BITCH!and steps over me, knocking me with the muscles on his kneecaps.

I decide to skip gym day, head straight home, to scour website after website, SELF-OFFENSE! BULLY BEATDOWN MMA… YOUR WAY! Monthly rates, purple gis, white belts, 4 ounce gloves Dragons Tigers BEARS… I slam my computer shut, head over to the washer, stuff soggy shirt in, and slam the lid down.

Let washer’s humming, tumbling and rumbling drown out my pathetic weak ass crying.

PICKING UP THE PIECES CARSTEN CHEUNG They say, “never give up,” And “keep on fighting.”

But what if it’s better not to?

I mean, have you seen the place?

The way these “heroes” leave it after the aftermath of saving the world from whatever the hell evil came to destroy it, and ironically ended up destroying it fighting to save it?

Easy for them to say.

These so-called “chosen ones.”

They don’t know what it’s like living in the wreckage of the wasteland that was the setting for their glorious final battle, but really, you just call home.

Of course they tell us to “live on.”

Or else all their hard work and sacrifice would mean nothing.

No one left to worship them.

To build statues and monuments or make Hollywood adaptations, kids’ costumes for Halloween.

Their glory’d be tarnished and tainted.

God forbid.

But when you’re not the savior, not the one with all the powers, all the resources, all the fame and good looks and everything going for you, when you’re the little guy,

the hapless citizen or villager in need of rescue, which by the way, you didn’t even ask for in the first place, maybe, just maybe it would’ve been better to let the mad scientist win.

Let the cataclysm happen.

Let Godzilla have his way with our city.

I mean, have you see the size of his turds?

Who’d want to survive the end of the world, only to be left behind, responsible for cleaning all that shit up?

DOPPELGANGER LOSER CARSTEN CHEUNG

It sucks being the doppelganger and not the one on the cool journey.

Not the one time traveling, but being traveled to.

Not the one multiverse-hopping, but stuck in your own boring world, left to just watch and wave as yet another (future) you or alternate (better) you disappears into the portal and you’re left wondering what awesome things await you-but-not-you.

The worst thing about not being the hero though?

It’s not even the feeling of being left behind, as if you’re the minor character in the movie, just some guy for The Guy to run into on his way to save the day, and get the girl, the one you’ve been pining over since you were both little and she shared her ice cream with you when yours dropped to the ground – and you’ve been in love ever since.

But he just swoops on in from Earth 616, sweeps her off her feet, and the two fall madly in love; he promises her he’ll be back (it’s a lie – he won’t) and she promises she’ll wait.

All the while, you could

y’know, totally make your move after he leaves – I mean, he is you after all, and as it turns out, she actually does have feelings for you.

But not. You. Him. And so you don’t do anything.

Don’t say a word.

Just bide your time, while the next upgraded model you warps on in, and wins, then breaks, her heart all over again.

Nah, that isn’t even the worst part, cuz the worst thing?

Is that they can’t even spare a second, just to hang out for a bit.

They say that you spend the most time with yourself, so love yourself, give yourself grace and all that.

But it’s all BS, cuz the other you won’t even give you the time of day.

Won’t answer your burning questions about what it’s like to live the life you’ve always wanted but won’t ever get.

Technically, you got it, I mean, it is you, but, not-you.

And so you root for this other person who’s sort of you, but really, deep down, you hate that jackass, cuz they can’t be bothered to tell you what it’s

like to get with the girl of your dreams; does she bite off the heads of all the gummy bears and rearrange them, mixing and matching them like some crazed, beautiful Dr. Frankenstein; or does she get all cold and goose bumpy, and grab your jacket or your arm, using it as a blanket, but really, you’re the one made warm?

Nah. “Sorry, bro–” the other you always says, tapping his bare wrist, on some nonexistent watch, or cooler yet, tapping the futuristic, reality bending device that’s also a watch, that is on his wrist.

“Gotta go. You get it,” the yous always say, with a wink before disappearing from your life for forever, until the next jerkyou shows up in your world, saves the day, and probably saves you too, (and so you’re indebted to him).

They’re all the same.

And that’s when you realize that that’s the worst part.

They are you.

And you are them.

You’re all the same.

Which means, that you, you-you, the real,

genuine, authentically from this world, you, are a messed up, self-centered, selfish, broken asshole too.

A HUNGER LIKE NO OTHER NOELLE you loved me like a man on death row and i was your last meal orange juice drips down my neck, and you lick it away sticky and sweet now, the smell of citrus invades my senses it’s intoxicating and i remember how you once devoured me your hands, gentle at first, lit me on fire burning a path down my spine your mouth warm and wet, tearing into me flesh and bone severed searching until you found my heart bleeding and beating swallowed whole i was finally yours, body and soul

ANOTHER BAD PHOTOGRAPH MARCEL FELDMAR he had a sacred heart of Jesus tattooed on his right arm slipping out sometimes from underneath torn white shirt that read “dead inside” he sat quiet remembering images from some forgotten movie crimson handprints on whitewashed walls he sat waiting for the world to fold into itself viewing it all like some sinister pop art display shedding helpless ink through the darkness onto some unhip Kerouacian insomniac’s coffee-stained napkin blinded by café light writing on the window from hot coffee steam wash the wounds follow the scar a sudden quick conscious displacement a Nancy Drew flashback shifting concrete and he’s caught in a caffeinated nerve crash like a surreal painting sliding through the streets he trips with a little twist down some drunken alleyway in a late-night gutter frenzy looking for death like a drug addict Intense visions while flying nightmare high and he can’t remember where he was on the day anybody died he just remembers hearing about it after the bodies are long gone comic book mentality memory like mercury feeling his life change shot up with Technicolor lust wanting Selena Kyle always finding Lois Lane

STUCK IN THE RUT OF ANOTHER DAY MARCEL FELDMAR just another broken angel delirious from the fall bruised wings and painful eyes painting thick red streaks around the lips of the skull shading the eyes even darker in some cranial design and the teeth … the teeth? color them mine his smile makes me feel like I’m going to die sooner than I should now the highway eyes and tired lies slip and skid across the broken lines of my mind just a dime store angel pushing quarters at the 7-11 this night is too slow not even a week’s worth of drinks can make me feel drunk like this slow motion overdrive rainwater mesmerize and I can’t avoid the way his eyes make me feel like a car crash crimson fills the starlight view I can’t stop thinking about you But he takes my breath away

LIGHTBULB BURN MARCEL FELDMAR Psychic streetlight sends out some dim lit morse code message but I don’t get that flash I’m just walking Head down avoiding puddles Swerving Like a predestined concrete crash and this night is tied to my ankles dragging behind me like an old friend I used to know I can’t remember his name but I see his face In the clouds sometimes But not tonight Because these clouds are mine And I raise my hands to the stars Up high and shine Until the streetlights bring me down And I hit the ground running My eyes on the traffic and my shadow Wrapped around me like a wounded dog Knowing this night Isn’t going to last And then I finally understand Psychic streetlight flash

CRACK MARCEL FELDMAR I wake up after the day begins early light missing my eyes reminding me of sitting outside a motel room caught with the thrill of travel against the sky and the knowledge of an early morning drive it’s an east coast wind that pulls me closer like Florida heat and Carolina fireflies leave the rain, the slow pigeons and green head into the hills and watch the truck stops seduce the sides of the road I don’t take my sunglasses off for a week there’s a girl wearing a cross with hair in her eyes she smiles at me from room number 36 and by the time I finish my cigarette and a drink she’s gone … Greyhound quick I tie the dusk to my door while wondering about the rain humid veins and girl hair in my dreams but she’s gone before I finish my drink birds fly across my shadow but the highway stays awake

I’M THE BEST THING SINCE SLICED BREAD AND ALOUETTE A.J. PARKER lemon rind want, shove you down the disposal like all the other traces of once-edible things. sticky salty sweat, black licorice hair, nubby nose and cucumber thighs. i’d let you chop me into pieces and toss me in the sink to be another one of your wasted things. candy lips and an ice ridge spine, grapefruit tongue, spiderling eyes. i’ll be your forgotten grocery list, your growling stomach. we eat ice cream together, lick it off our lips. tangy breath and wax paper skin, you’ll watch me drink another vodka cran. i’ll beg you to take me with you to lime shavings and crunchy chips all i’ll get is liquid leftovers and soreness on the roof of my mouth. i want you to snap my heart like celery sticks, dip me in friendship and a couple drunken nights while you cook dinner with a Thomas or Henry or Bryce. he’ll fix you cold water, and you’ll tell him you love him between whipped cream kisses. i’ll do my dishes and wait for you to come back, marinate the chicken and stockpile the rice.

one day i will blend you away until there’s nothing left but pulp. for now, there is still the faint smell of fruit.

AFTER THE EFFECTS A.J. PARKER hand stretched, so dark, it’s blue. cold toes. oh, it’s you. the places where bruises should be. gas station coffee.

4 a.m. aches.

I wake up drowning. how many times over?

Styrofoam, crunch. is this what it feels like to be forgotten? shredded rubber. the fast-food lights are the only things on.

BACKWASH A.J. PARKER lie like liquid water over your lip. you swallow it so easy, sugar-coated candy. and they smell your breath and think it’s sweet, but you choke from the taste when nobody is looking. there will always be too much and not enough, it fits the spaces you want it to. who shares backwash? spit it out. who shares stomach acid? dry mouth. can you fill it with something else?

I AM ASHAMEDLY MYSELF A.J. PARKER INTERNALIZED HOMOPHOBIA if anyone asks, i didn’t have my first kiss the night before my sixteenth birthday. fifteen wasn’t my lucky number, or the color blue. there weren’t silver stars spilled all over my backyard. i didn’t wear my new leggings and a maroon quarter zip. we didn’t go to study in a coffee shop, and i didn’t know how much i wanted to kiss her. instead of driving home, she didn’t drive us to the park across from our old elementary school. my hands weren’t shaking, and her hair wasn’t a halo in the dark, all silver stars and blue eyes. i didn’t ask her if i could kiss her, stomach full of barbed wire. she didn’t say yes, because that was the kind of thing she did. i didn’t use to lie on her bed, watching her beta fish bubble around as she texted older men. she wasn’t nectar drawing honeybees, and i wasn’t just a straggler. i hadn’t waited four years to kiss her, agonizing that i wanted to kiss her.

i didn’t used to do her makeup or share her soda or catch rides in her white stick shift. i didn’t ascend, descend, when i touched her lips for the first and last time, like there was some secret locked away in her pearly whites, in my coffee breath, in her moonbeam eyes. when she dropped me off at home, i didn’t hyperventilate in the kitchen. i didn’t hang myself on all the silver stars because i kissed her. i didn’t think about how we used to laugh about boys we never liked together, how we called other girls pretty together, pretending it was jealousy. i didn’t want to bury myself in the freshly mowed lawn set up for my birthday party, glittering with stars, so many stars, the most silver stars. sixteen wasn’t going to be red and all circles, closing. because how could i? how could i kiss her? i didn’t want us in dresses together, us, sparkling together, us, keeping warm together. the stars weren’t all trampled, torn up, tossed around like litter. i didn’t speak to her until years later over breakfast-for-dinner, where i told her how sorry i was that i had always wanted to kiss her. she said it was fine, she found a boy anyway, and still, i wanted to kiss her. instead, i drove away,

and i looked up at the stars. they were all still there. that’s why, when nobody asks, i had my first kiss the night before my sixteenth birthday.

IS IT DARK BECAUSE IT’S DARK OR DARK BECAUSE YOU WON’T TURN ON THE LIGHTS? A.J. PARKER ABUSE, SH IMAGERY you can look at the clock, count the milliseconds until it doesn’t feel old. have you ever heard the word sinister? have you ever dreamt of Baltimore? did you know words can be advertisements? sometimes it’s a nudge, slow, slow, no, you heard it into existence. why won’t you let anyone touch you? what’s so wrong with you? don’t answer that. your limbs dance to that sad, sad song, and you like it. when a hand tightens around your wrist and leaves red marks, you like it. there’s no such thing as forgiveness. i forgive you if you didn’t do it. if not, i see a glass window fogged with breath, the taste of sick, and a sad face. everything i used to love only hurts now. but you know what, i made it here. clean. clean now. twist it in your fingers.

A DEVOTION TO THE DECOR AT CRACKER BARREL JOSEPH M. JABLONSKI I died to be A portrait, An advertisement.

Trinkets twinkling Above the mainstream Mantlepiece.

I am older than old, An aesthetic Thematic template Reduced - but at least Viewed.

Sediment washed up From mirrors and dressers, Hung off the antlers Of deers’ heads, “Rejuvenators” and Tinctures.

If you look close enough, You see Rome buried Under This - our share Of ancestral lantern Burning at tableside, Roadside dinners, Anniversaries and rest stops.

This is how the wagon wheel Chandelier turns.

This is me, the ghost, Rocking invisible In the chair.

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE JOSEPH M. JABLONSKI SA AND SCHOOL SHOOTINGS The Romans invented the first smartphones, Tablets of wax and stone-tapped cuneiform, Lettered numerals of wide revolution, Eagled banners a viral sensation Bundling fiber-optic fascism, Fiddles burned into entire nations of Unread oaths sworn on Terms and Conditions, The thousand commands of Diocletian Ring in our ears like Kat Callaghan, Empire on sands of appropriation Falls in pagan self-glorification.

See - the fall of Rome is now typewritten, Marble crushed by neon lupine vision, You - are boomers chain-emailed to superstition, You - are millennials with cross-less crucifixions, You - are zoomers leading Al barbarians In the gates while the rape of Lucretia is livestreamed, Your cyber auguries too bright to see School shooters feeding us to memed lions, Blood overflowing the carved characters, Meta an argument made by serpents High on standards of sensitive content.

In between the lines of biblical scrolls Was always writ the fable of our fall, Amidst the marble light of Google Search Is a truth no tax could ever besmirch: We forgot, we forgot, we forgot The gods we are not.

All wires lead to the Appian Way, But the stone-carved roads are lined with crosses Rotting where they lay.

TRAIN SONG FOR THE GUY I LEFT BEHIND EVELYN JEAN PINE I failed to be a waitress — could never learn to smile.

I hid behind the counter, drinking dank chamomile out of an old lady’s teacup, while I felt my anger rip.

That cracked little teacup saw she didn’t leave a tip.

I’ll think of this long weekend when I toss back dirty tea: I lost my job — so out of spite I took the cook’s virginity.

Shivering in the freezer, we sipped forsaken gin left by some shady customer — sweet encouragement to sin.

This trains chugs through a silent world, ice weighs down the trees with a naughty kind of gaudy that brings me to my knees.

The shrieking birds of spring have split. I sit here all alone.

Can’t even find the note you left. Can’t even find my phone.

So I tease the dark warm beer that someone left behind.

The bottle sees your crooked grin — oh, wait! — that’s in my mind.

Does the bottle take in my face too, the freckles and the scar?

Wrinkles knife my forehead as I wonder where you are.

Everything I’ve tried, I’ve failed. There’s nothing left to learn, but in my heart, I see your face. My cheeks begin to burn.

This train keeps pushing forward, my mouth can’t help but smile.

Your ripped sweatshirt’s my blanket. Maybe see ya in a while.

ART SEAN E. BRITTEN SPIDERS, BODY DYSMORPHIA, EATING DISORDERS, SELF HARM, SURGERY, BODY HORROR AND GORE

“What made you respond to the article I put out?”

“I don’t know, you said you could turn people into works of art. I wanted to be art.”

“You know art isn’t always about beauty, don’t you? Art expresses something, it makes you feel something. That something isn’t always good.”

“I know that.”

“You’re familiar with my work?”

“I am.”

Moreau leaned across his glass desk. The artist, a small but striking man, was paper pale with snow white hair and delicate hands. Surgeon’s hands. He’d practised none of his art on himself but his eyes were artificial, pitiless black orbs with orange rings for pupils. They scanned Audrey up and down, unblinking.

“This is cutting edge stuff, you know. On the cutting edge of biomechanical adaptations and grafts. I do things most people think are impossible. That some people think should stay impossible.”

“I know.”

Moreau was one of the hottest artists on the planet. Tens of thousands of people would have killed or died for a meeting with him, and yet the young woman looked like she’d rather be anywhere else. Audrey fidgeted in her chair. Floor to ceiling windows bathed the room in shifting neon from the advertising holos outside. The office offered a breathtaking view of the city’s towering skyscrapers and arcologies. Ranks of flying traffic zipped between them like insects.

Moreau leaned back and picked up his smartglass tablet, flicking through her file. “You’ve had treatment for body dysmorphia, I see that in a lot of my potential subjects. Eating disorders, drug addiction, hospitalised for a bodymod that didn’t take.”

“I was hospitalised three times when I was a teenager for not eating. Every time I looked in the mirror, all I felt was disgust. Disgusting.”

“You still feel that way?”

“Yes, no matter what I do, no matter what I try. I see my reflection and all I feel is revulsion. I don’t care what you do to me, nothing could make it worse.”

Any person looking at Audrey would have struggled to understand what disgusted her so much. Her face had clearly had work done, and had the anonymous, inoffensive beauty of most young women who had concerns about their appearance and the money to change it. Her body had been sculpted to mathematically perfect proportions and no longer showed the ravages of her teenage eating disorders. Layered over that were tattoos and piercings, and clothing that had been artfully ripped and torn. Her hair was tortured and dyed several bright colours.

“Creating art like this is a relationship, like between the sculptor and the clay. But only the clay is left so transformed that it can never be put back the way it was to begin with, you understand?”

“Sure, I guess.”

“Once we begin, there is no going back. Depending on the design, this could take years of work. And being that it is so experimental, rejection of the grafts or other changes is a real possibility. You could face death, or perhaps worse, being left unfinished.”

“I don’t care, I’ve tried everything else and I still can’t look at myself. I might as well donate myself to art.”

Audrey kept compulsively cupping her left hand against her face as she spoke. It was to avoid catching sight of her own reflection in the floor to ceiling windows beside them, Moreau realised. She was blocking out the view.

Pale scars ran up and down the inside of Audrey’s left forearm. A bodymodder could easily erase them but they’d been left, perhaps as a reminder. Moreau was more interested in the tattoo that covered the top of Audrey’s forearm. So lifelike it almost appeared three dimensional from certain angles, an ebony spider with long and spindly legs, a red hourglass on its back, in the middle of a beautifully realised web.

“You like spiders?”

Audrey looked down at the tattoo. “I think they’re beautiful.”

“Beautiful?”

“They are perfectly, what they’re meant to be.”

Moreau smiled, eyes emotionless. “I think we can work with that.” xxx Moreau’s ‘studio’ looked and felt more like a private hospital than an artist’s workspace.

Audrey moved her stuff into one of the small but luxurious apartments. Even if she decided not to go through with the procedure her room and board would be paid for. If she went through with it, she could expect to be living there and possibly not leaving for at least a year.

Audrey had been through a battery of tests, both physical and psychological. To see if she stood the best chance of surviving what Moreau had planned, and that she truly understood what would be involved in the process and result. Moreau, along with several technicians and lawyers, sat around a table across from Audrey. He passed a tablet to her and let her study the holos that sprung off its surface.

“Is this really possible? This is what you want to do with me?” Audrey said.

“It’s not possible, yet, no one has ever done a bodymod this extreme. But it will be.”

“It’s extreme, yeah.”

“If it’s too much-,” “No, no, it’s perfect.”

Moreau had already done extensive research on how the modifications would work. He had a timetable to adhere to, taking into account the long recovery periods Audrey would need between procedures. He didn’t get to work on the bioprinting until after Audrey’s final approval, however. Days later, he came to Audrey with what looked like some kind of exotic engine part made from greyish bone.

“This is what your new shoulder blade is going to look like,” Moreau said. “See the two sockets for greater range of motion, and your second set of arms.”

“Extra arms are already a pretty common mod, though? The drummer for that Nazi punk band, Shred Heil, has six. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“Those extra arms are cybernetic, all they need is a mounting and a connection to the nervous system. We’re looking at full biomechanical, which means bones, musculature, nerve pathways and so on.”

Audrey’s shoulder blades were detached, dislocated, and scooped free. New parts were fused into place alongside her spine. Even with Moreau’s top of the line facilities, Audrey spent two weeks in a cast unable to move her arms at all. Nurses and helper droids had to perform all her most basic tasks. It was an immediate wakeup call about just how involved the procedures would be. After Audrey got out of the cast, there were several more weeks of recovery and physical therapy.

Moreau then performed surgeries on both of Audrey’s arms, to lengthen them, increase their flexibility, and move muscles and tendons around in order to strengthen her elbows and wrists. Fortunately, Moreau operated on them and left them to recover one at a time so Audrey retained some independence.

Audrey’s second pair of arms, including half a dozen spares, were vatgrown rather than bioprinted. All the clones and bioprints were drawn from Audrey’s DNA, of course, to minimise the risk of rejection. The arms had already been altered during the growth process so they wouldn’t require the same surgeries as her original arms. Ribs were shifted so that the new humerus bones could knot into modified scapulas. New muscles were grafted.

“I can’t control them,” Audrey said, her new arms flopping against her sides in pathetic attempts to mimic her original arms’ movements.

“I told you that would happen. The muscles are new, you’ve never used them before.

You’re like a baby learning where their hands are for the first time.”

The process with replacing Audrey’s pelvis was similar but more dramatic. It took not one but multiple surgeries, over the course of a couple of months. Sawing her open, Moreau pulled apart and completely removed Audrey’s pelvic bone, rendering her sterile among other things with her full foreknowledge, and wrestled her legs into new sockets.

While she recovered, Audrey was restricted to a chair with four mechanical legs. It was almost a taste of what was to come. Her control over the alien second pair of arms emerging from her armpits improved every day.

When Audrey’s pelvic surgeries were complete, her legs pointed forward rather than down. Moreau performed more procedures to slim and change the flexibility of her legs.

Her feet were moulded to be more like hands, dexterous and nimble. Moreau could have removed her feet entirely and grafted on vatgrown hands, but he wanted to preserve as much of the original ‘material’ as possible. Two new legs were installed and grafted to Audrey’s hips, and she had to learn how to use them as well. When she finally left the chair, Audrey could no longer walk like a human being but had to crawl on her hands and feet.

Adjusting, her movements were clumsy and even grotesque.

“I’m not an artwork! I’m an animal!” Audrey cried in a moment of frustration. “I still can’t even look at myself, and I can’t move!”

“Creating art takes time,” Moreau said. “I told you this when we started. The worst thing we could do is end the process incomplete.”

Audrey abandoned herself to the process. Abandoned all hope, all despair, all feeling, and simply submitted. More adjustments had to be made, unplanned, to her hips, spine and shoulders. Her neck vertebrae and muscles needed to be distended and reshaped so she could easily hold her head forward as she moved on all eight limbs.

“Of course, what is a spider without a web?” Moreau showed Audrey the intriguing biomechanical design for her next surgery. “Actually, this rear section is a lot like an oversized mammary gland. See, it’s got these multiple lobules but they produce silk instead of milk, with ducts leading to this orifice at the tip. All protected by layers of muscle and fat.”

The bulbous, silk-producing gland started at the small of Audrey’s back, with nerve structures surgically spliced into her spine. Her buttocks were sliced open and the pockets of muscle and fat fused onto them. Her vagina and anus were tucked beneath the swollen gland. In a real spider, the bulbous abdomen would have stored most of its organs. Moreau didn’t go as far as shifting them for Audrey but aesthetically the lines of her body resembled a spider more and more. She’d learned to use her new arms and legs in unison, and was crawling faster and faster, but now she faced a new challenge in learning to control the gland, her spinnerette, and webbing.

Once Audrey’s body had largely recovered from its dozens of surgeries, Moreau intended

to go to work on her face. The process had already taken over a year. Audrey wasn’t Moreau’s only project. He worked on several in concert within the same facility, all of whom were known to Audrey, and an exhibition of his works was planned in just over a month. He would not rush his art, of course, but the date added a palpable tension.

“These will be your last words, if you think about it,” Moreau said, as they rolled Audrey to the surgical suite. “Once we perform this next procedure, you’ll only be able to communicate through artificial means. Anything you want on the record?”

“No, just do it.” Audrey was intimately familiar with the surgical suite by now, and instinctively avoided looking at any of the gleaming reflective surfaces.

The procedure removed Audrey’s lower jaw and her top row of teeth. It stripped away her voice box and most of her throat. Her mouth was replaced by a black, biomechanical creation of Moreau’s that resembled a spider’s mandibles. Audrey had already switched to an entirely liquid diet months ago. Her digestive system had been changed by gene-shifting injections. With new and powerful glands in her throat, she could inject an incredible acid into potential meals, dissolve their insides, and slurp up what remained with her new fangs.

Although Moreau had artificial eyes himself, he’d decided against giving them to Audrey.

His were cybernetic, and all of Audrey’s adaptations were biological. Instead, he personally tattooed two black eyes onto Audrey’s cheeks and four more across her forehead.

Audrey’s mouthparts twitched but were unable to protest.

“One final touch, scleral tattooing is much safer than it used to be,” Moreau said.

Moreau hovered over Audrey’s eyes with the tattoo gun. The vibrating needle drifted slowly closer to the white of her right eyeball. Moreau did the work carefully, like putting the final brushstrokes on a masterpiece.

“The thread is spun, the web is wove. The work is done,” Moreau whispered as he pulled away. xxx Opening night of Moreau’s new exhibition was an enormous event. Tremendous holograms of abstract human and animal shapes hovered outside the gallery. Entrance was by invitation only, the crowd filled with only the cream of the art world, celebrities, and various dignitaries.

Backstage, Audrey had her own dressing room. Her new limbs worked in perfect concert as she dressed. All her clothing was custom made. There were no mirrors in the room but she didn’t struggle to get into the form-fitting suit. It covered every scar, every knot and imperfection left behind by Moreau’s process, but clung to her limbs and body like a second skin. Entirely black, except for a bright red hourglass that marked her back.

Moreau would not sink so low as to explain his own art. A team of curators toured small groups around the dimly lit exhibition hall so Moreau’s living sculptures would not be overwhelmed. A giant of a man with an impossibly hulking physique greeted groups as they entered. His musculature had been increased to such proportions that he needed a specially designed exoskeleton to make sure he didn’t tear himself apart with every movement. Moreau’s fluted girls titillated with their haunting and erotic performance, making music with their impossibly delicate frames.

“And this piece is called ‘Spider’, meant to depict a perfect predator. One who is perfectly what they are meant to be,” one of the curators recited.

A pane of glass separated the exhibition space from the tour groups. It was more to create a sense that they would otherwise be in danger than anything else. Audrey’s exhibition space was a dark square with a web of thick, milky ropes of silk hanging at the back.

From a hatch in the ceiling, Audrey descended on the web. Incredibly strong, the webbing flexed beneath her. She wasn’t totally satisfied with the web’s design but it was orders of magnitude better than her first attempts. Through the glass, she heard the first group gasp.

Even the curator looked discomforted.

All eight of Audrey’s limbs ended in handlike protrusions. They worked in perfect unison, uncannily alien. Reaching the floor, she was nimble and shockingly fast. Some of the observers couldn’t help but step back. Audrey’s spine flexed. Her silk gland jostled behind her as she raised her face. Above the nose, Audrey’s face was untouched in its unflawed beauty, apart from the tattooed eyes and black sclera. Below the nose, however, were threshing, black mandibles. Pedipalps combed her bristly chelicerae, hiding long, lurking fangs like gleaming knives. Her mouthparts opened with a low hiss.

Behind the curator, dignitaries and celebrities looked horrified. Hands were cupped over gaping mouths. A few shook their heads in helpless denial. Behind the eyes of some of the critics, headlines were already being written asking the question whether Moreau had finally gone too far. Audrey’s eyes weren’t on the aghast faces and looks of fear, however.

Her gaze settled on her reflection in the pane of glass between her and the crowd.

The reflection of what she’d become, what Moreau had turned her into. Warm and wet, a tear trickled down her cheek.

She was so beautiful.

BOUSCULADE: THE BIG MACHINE RIVER LAZARUS VIOLENCE

“Arrêtez!”

Arthur awoke with a start, grasping at his chest through the thin, tattered shirt he often wore to bed. He was gasping for breath, as though he had been underwater for longer than his lungs could handle. His chest burned, each breath feeling like sand scraping its way down his throat and into his respiratory system, starving his blood of the oxygen it so desperately needed. He was freezing cold and trembling as the chill made its way down his body. It crawled from his neck to his feet, raising goosebumps along his almost translucent skin. The sun-kissed brown that his flesh usually transitioned to in the summer months had been washed out into a pearly ivory. He hadn’t had the chance to get out in the sun this summer as his work had demanded much more from him this year than it had in previous years, and the winter freeze had set in quicker than usual.

The same dream that had haunted him since he was a boy had possessed his thoughts again last night. The visions had felt realer than ever. He was positive he was really back there, in that moment from his past that was only slightly changed with chimerical elements so characteristic to dreams, before he had awoken and realized it was simply a mirage. It was getting harder and harder to distinguish between reality and fiction, to the point that he was losing faith in his own psyche. Dreams seemed to take that quality most in childhood, Arthur had always thought. He had some memories that he was sure were real past occurrences and fond reminiscences of youth that he later found out were a complete fabrication, an invention of an overactive imagination. His dreams had transformed into something more unremarkable and drabber as he left his youth and tumbled towards adolescence.

For the last three weeks his dreams were always the same. He was once again a boy, no taller than the height of his father’s knee. He had called his father ‘Papa’ then, but the name had slowly been lost to time and age. He now preferred to simply refer to him by his legal name, Jean.

The dream always began the same way. Jean, a Wallonia native, had decided to take Arthur, his only child, to Paris for New Year’s Eve celebrations. The trip, despite being the theme of his night-time illusions, had been a real occurrence in his childhood.

When he was about five years old, his father had taken him from Brussels, leaving his mother to tend to his grandparents, and they had travelled on the train over the Belgian border and into the countryside of France. Their final stop had been Gare du Nord in Paris.

Arthur had not been aware at the time that would be the last time he would ever see her flesh with his own two eyes, rather than through the blurred, crumbling, colourless photographs his father had thrown in his trunk before they both left. That had been the last time he would speak to her and hear her voice, hoarse from years of enthusiasm towards slim, clove cigarettes. He had only ever spoken to her through rushed handwriting on letters after that. His father had pulled them both away from Belgium, deciding that he had a better chance of finding work in London, and that Arthur would have a better start at life there too, away from the mental volatility and boozing of his mother.

The dream transitioned so smoothly, as dreams often do, from him traveling on the train to him suddenly standing as part of a greater crowd on the eve of the new year in the centre of Paris. The dream mirrored his memory, as the people surrounding Le Tour Eiffel seemed to almost melt into one as they crowded around the landmark. His mind was unable to remember any particular face in the crowd and instead decided to present all of the individuals as faceless. The flesh of their face was pulled nightmarishly over their skulls; eyes, mouths and noses all absent from their visage. They appeared as spherical globes of skin, with hair sprouting from its topmost point. He could feel their heat as it floated from the mass of bodies surrounding him and his father. He was holding onto his father’s hand tight, and within its grip he could feel the calloused and rough texture of his palm against his own tender, boyish one. His father was the only person in the crowd with a real, detailed face. He could see his thick, bushy eyebrows that shot off into all directions, his eyes would lock onto his father’s hooded, light blue ones as his father smiled down at him with his thin, pink lips. Jean had always dressed up well, regardless of the occasion. That day, he had worn a button up off-white shirt, one that would be better suited to a man working in a public office or for a legal firm. He had worn black dress pants and leather shoes that had been immaculately shined that morning. He had also styled his hair, ensuring the mousy blonde locks were slicked back away from his face. He had always remembered his father smelling of an earthy, smoky cologne which intermingled with the remnants of cigar smoke that hovered around him from excessive use. He couldn’t remember how his mother smelled.

Though Arthur knew something terrible had happened that day, he could never completely recollect the event until he was back within the dream, the dream that had reoccurred every night for three weeks in a row. Once he was back in the haze of it, it became almost impossible to believe that he could forget it.

He was within the crowd and squished between his father’s thin left leg and the more muscular leg of the man standing on his other side, beside him. He felt the sway of the people in the crowd, like waves of the ocean he had only once witnessed on a family trip to the south of France. He felt his body rock back and forth as he was pushed by the movement of the man to the left of him, and the person behind him. He felt his body moving of its own accord, as though he were part of a greater being who was lurching itself this way and that, like a single cell of a person who was swinging themselves back and forth. He remembered finding it amusing at first, and still as the boy within his dream he was entertained by the motion, the feeling almost regulating his naturally overactive nature.

Then, within the dream just as he had that day, he would look up towards his father and see the stern expression on his face, the light sweat upon his brow, which was now furrowed and his lips downturned in a similar fashion. As most children did, he had attuned himself to his father’s whims and emotions and understood that his father was becoming increasingly distressed with the increased movement of the crowd and, in turn, the movement of them both. It was only when a sudden, particularly rough push from his father’s side passed through the crowd and onto him, stumbling him on his feet and almost causing him to topple over himself, that Arthur began to panic. His almost-fall had only been stopped by the large woman standing in front of him. He realized how tightly packed in the crowd now was, with barely a few inches between each individual. He imagined if he saw the crowd from above, the image would probably appear as if a large mass, a fleshy glob, had formed around the tower as though it was attempting to consume it. It reminded him of a movie his father had told him about, one Jean had seen when he visited America before Arthur was born, called ‘The Blob’. Even a simple description of the film had given him nightmares.

“Fais attention, Arthur” his father had said. Arthur could tell that his father was trying to keep his voice levelled, but Arthur caught the wobble in it during the call of his own name.

His father had gripped his smaller hand tighter then and had begun to try and manoeuvre them out of the horde. He watched his father contort himself to try and break free of the walls, made entirely of bodies, surrounding him. It was no use; his father could not squeeze nor push his way out of the barriers encasing them.

That was when Arthur felt another violent push, and before he could understand what was happening, he was toppling over himself as the weight of something much larger than him fell against his small spine and pushed him onto the woman in front of him. From the corner of his eye, he could see his father topple with him, pushing the smaller man in front of him down and landing on him. He felt a gust of wind leave his lungs and out of his mouth involuntarily as he hit the carcass underneath him. He could smell the sweat of the people surrounding him, salty and sharp. The weight upon him was overbearing, and he could feel his torso unable to expand with breath under the man who had fallen on him.

Unable to perceive much beyond his current inability to breathe, he could hear the blood curdling screams of the people all around him. He couldn’t move his head very far, but what he could see was an ocean of bodies, all collapsed on one another, arms writhing and gripping and reaching for nothing in particular. Men and women were screaming and groaning and gasping for air. He could hear his father calling his name, his breathing laboured and almost rattling. He tried to turn his head towards the sound, to try and meet the comforting gaze of his father, but he couldn’t. He was fixed into place. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t breathe.

That was when the dream ended and he woke up, often with a gasp, just as he had this morning.

Arthur could hear the horns of the cars lining the streets outside, facing the rush hour commute towards their soul-crushing office jobs in the lively city of London. He would soon be part of that unforgiving rush, a movement of bodies all in one direction - to the centre of the city, to spend the next eight hours shuffling through paper and tapping on keyboards.

Unlike the lucky men and women stuck on the roads in their cars, Arthur would be part of the congregation of the tube, the “just above the breadline” legion. London was becoming more and more expensive to live in, and he had been pushed out to the boundaries of the city and into a housing estate.

He pulled himself from his mattress and into the shower, leaving his apartment shortly after and trudging to the local tube station. Like every morning, bodies lined the underground station, men and women dressed in their suits and dress shoes. All were yawning and sighing, shifting from foot to foot as they waited for the train to arrive. Men in cheap suits checked their watches, as though watching the time would hurry it along to where they needed it to be. Arthur spotted a thin woman, dressed in a white button up blouse and grey skirt, checking her lipstick in a small portable mirror. All were trying to fill the few minutes between their arrival at the station and the arrival of the train.

Suddenly Arthur heard screaming, and the workers surrounding him began running towards the tube station exits. He could make out only some of the yells, one of which seemed to be coming from a policeman. Shouts of ‘bomb’ and ‘IRA’ stood out from the echo of screams and scattered talking that reverberated through the station. Suddenly Arthur was joining the movement of the crowd towards the narrow tube station exit, rushing towards the stairs with the rest of the group. He wasn’t sure if he had been dragged by the mob towards the exit or if he had begun running of his own accord, as though his legs had their own consciousness, but he was suddenly up against the back of a tall man trying to push his way beyond the people in front of him to get through the freedom of the soot-covered London sidewalk.

From where Arthur stood now, right against the broad back of the man standing in front of him, he was able to see just how confined the space of the exit was. It created a bottleneck in the crowd, choking the swarm between two thick brick walls. He suspected some people had fallen in the rush towards the door, as the crowd was now fixed just below the stairs.

The rest of the horde, those behind Arthur, were unaware of the blockage, pushing themselves against the people in front of them to try and break through the clog.

He began to feel that familiar sway, that sway that came to him near the end of his dream.

He was being lurched forward, against his will, by the push of the pack. The wave had started, that made one feel like they were a part of something greater than themselves and no longer an individual in a big open space. He felt like an element of the big machine. A scream from any one particular individual appeared as though it were simply the roar of another area of the hardware, a cog screeching as it grinded against another in its instinctual spin forward, the other cog naturally spinning backwards. The individual was hard at work and suffering, but the whole group moved fluidly forward and closer to respite.

Arthur was being crushed alive, again.

He began to feel his breathing become restricted as the men and women around him squished beside him further. He felt the familiar panic begin, first in his stomach - like a weightlessness there somehow combined with a deep heaviness. The feeling travelled up towards his chest, which felt tight, both with the physical restraint put upon him but also in the way his heart was thumping as though it wanted to rip itself from his body and scratch through the skin of his chest, exiting the cavity with a joyous jump into freedom. His jaw was practically pinned shut, his molars grinding against each other with each push to-andfro as the crowd clattered against him.

Despite his physical discomfort, he began to feel the rumblings of a different emotion stir within him. Whilst the fear and pain were pervasive, he began to feel a lightness to his body that could only be described as euphoria. He had heard his work colleagues discuss a new designer drug, labelled ‘ecstasy’, in the lunchroom a few times whilst he was making himself a tea. They spoke about how it felt like being a child again, like everything that once seemed like an unmendable mistake or an unrectifiable flaw in your soul melted away, and all you were left with was a feeling of pure elation rolling through your body from the crown of your head to the tips of your toes. Covered in goosebumps, pupils blown out wide and unable to feel anything but complete and utter love for yourself and others. Arthur couldn’t say for certain that he was feeling what ‘ecstasy’ felt like in this moment, but he imagined it was pretty close.

He was elated. The overwhelming body heat of the suited-up British citizens around him shifted from sweltering to snug and pleasant. The crushing feeling of bodies squeezing around him transformed from severe and cramped to the same feeling he remembered getting when his mother would hug and kiss him before dropping him off at childcare, before he was taken to London. He felt as though any worry, any depression had been washed away by the tender, overwhelming crush of the crowd upon his thin body. He felt as though he were melding into the people around him, and then around the people further beyond, as though the whole crowd were now one giant, all-loving being. Maybe this was what people spoke about when they discussed the acceptance of death. He could understand now how someone could be facing the eternal void and feel nothing but pure happiness at the thought.

As soon as that thought came, it was ripped away, as he felt the crush lessen around him.

He could hear police from behind the crowd, guiding the individuals at the end of the group back down the tube station, and towards another exit. Suddenly his chest was no longer restricted, his ribs no longer being crushed, and the feeling of being a sole entity, once again alone with himself, returned. The individuals, who were previously squashed beside him, were now a few inches away and following the rest of the herd quickly towards the other exit. Arthur followed them.

He had expected a rush of relief after the event, when he was out of the tube station and back into the hazy London air. He had chosen to walk to his office in Soho rather than to another tube station. Considering the bomb scare, it was likely his whole line would be down for at least another hour, and he could walk to work in three quarters of that time.

The rush never came however, not even a rush of fear and panic at once again experiencing what he had experienced as a boy. He had again almost been killed by an event that almost killed him two decades ago and he felt void of a reaction. The only thing he could feel was a niggling emptiness in the pit of his stomach, as though he had been anticipating something that had been quickly ripped away from him and left him unsatisfied.

There was plenty of paperwork to get through in the Department of Planning’s office once he got there, and yet the only thing Arthur could fixate on was how he had felt in that crowd. Papers were signed, and then forwarded on to the next public servant for their reading and approval. Beyond the sound of shuffling papers, keys clacking on DOS computers and the occasional cough or murmur, Arthur’s mind and body buzzed with the memory of the sensations he had felt earlier that morning, mashed and flattened against the crowd around him, a part of the big machine. He craved the rush once again, whether it was in a corporeal sense as it had occurred earlier today or within the mist of a mental illusion in the dead of night -

which he had always thought felt just as real. It wasn’t the same sensation; he had realized that today. No, the real feeling of being pressed and ground was much more visceral. It was terrifying and made him delirious but sitting in the centre of that feeling was the hum of childlike glee. Ecstasy. The supposed effects of that drug were likely the only thing that came close to how it felt.

He wanted to feel it again.

He needed to feel it again.

The rest of the workday dragged along as it often did, with much of the afternoon spent in the pantomime of the average government desk-job, performing the final act of making oneself look busy enough to not be disturbed but not so busy that the attention of anyone of importance was drawn, or worse - accidentally making oneself a person of importance.

Arthur decided to walk back home, leaving the office as soon as the shorthand of the clock on his watch hit six. He enjoyed how the streets were encased in shadow so early in the winter months, with the sun setting at four and the air crisp, polluted and harsh against his pale face. It awoke him from the evening lethargy brought on by the stale, recycled air of the office.

When he arrived home, Arthur had undressed himself of his work garments and into a cotton shirt and pyjama pants, laying down upon his hard mattress sans dinner and willing himself to sleep. He awaited, as he felt himself lulling into that familiar void between sleep and wake, the vision that always came to him once he finally became unconscious, the memories of the five-year-old boy he once was. As it always did, the dream came to him, he was once again in Paris on the eve of the new year, part of the flock who had wandered to stand before the Eiffel Tower and collectively bring in the new year. The ocean of people began to sway and shift, like waves heading towards the shore. The tightness of his chest and torso began to come upon him, as it did every night. Once again, he was falling, falling forward and encased in the bodies around him. Yet, unlike the nights before, he was left discontent. The mirage of the dream was nothing like the real thing, and he was suddenly very aware that he was only within a dream and that everything he felt was a mere hallucination - one vacant of real sensations.

Arthur awoke, but not with a start like previous mornings. His eyes fluttered open and a weight of disappointment rode the edge of his mind. He had realized, bitterly, that if he were to truly feel the big machine once again, it needed to be within the world of flesh rather than the world of thought.

New Year’s Eve in London centred around the South Bank, with many of the city’s inhabitants choosing to be overlooked by the Elizabeth Tower and Big Ben as they welcomed the new year. Arthur had never, since migrating to the city, celebrated the new year there. He had never had anyone to accompany him, with his father refusing to, following the event in Paris, and his lack of social interest resulting in him having no one he was close enough to who could join him.

His father had been the last person he considered himself somewhat close to, and he had succumbed to lung cancer a few years back.

The device had been set up without a problem a block or so away from where Arthur was now standing, amongst the crowd. They were restless but content, laughing and chattering amongst themselves as the sound of dance music, the techno that had become popular as of late, with thumping bass and harsh snare, rushed past his ears from varying directions and with varying strength. He could smell, amongst the general London smog and cigarette smoke, a waft of perfume and cologne from the necks of the people circling him. He felt a pang of envy, just at the bottom of his stomach for a moment, at the merriness surrounding him. The feeling flushed away rapidly when he remembered he would soon be a part of them, amongst them.

He raised his left wrist towards his face, angling the watch face towards himself to move the gleam of light reflecting off the fingerprint-smeared glass so he could better see the time. Twenty-one minutes past ten at night. Just one minute left. He counted the seconds in his head as he watched the thin hand make its way around the circle of his watch face.

Fifty-nine seconds….

Fifty-eight seconds….

Fifty-seven….

He began to feel his heartbeat quicken within the cavity of his chest, thumping so hard he could feel the reverberation in the skin just behind his ear, slamming against the bone of his skull. Despite the babbling of people around him, and the commotion of the crowd trying to find somewhere to place themselves, he could hear the rattle of the breath rushing out of his lungs and from his mouth, his breathing now deep and slow and contrasting the pace of his heartbeat.

Thirty-three….

Thirty-two…

Arthur’s gaze began to drag itself along the faces around him. Some women near him were laughing, one of them slapping the other lightly on the arm, aghast at the goading of the other woman. They were both wearing headbands over their bleached blonde hair which displayed, upon cheap metal springs, the numbers one nine nine eight cut out of even cheaper pieces of bright pink plastic. The numbers wobbled as the women moved their bodies around and trembled in the time between big movements. Their accents were local, but not from this part of London, more likely from south of the Thames.

A man stood to the left of him, sipping at a can of Belgian lager. He was tall, much taller than Arthur, with mousy brown hair barely visible from the buzz cut hairstyle the man had.

He was likely around Arthur’s age, and from the few times he had spoken to another man beside him, he was likely a migrant to the city just as Arthur was. The rhythmic tone of the man’s voice, intermingled with an occasional alveolar trill, suggested he was a Glasgow native and perhaps down south for the occasion. His cologne was harsh and plentiful, drifting towards Arthur and burning at the rim of his nostrils.

Soon they would all be a part of him - back in the machine. Arthur felt his stomach flutter at the thought.

He glared down towards his watch once again, feeling his eyes bulging as he opened them wider, his jaw clenching and goosebumps rising from his forearms and travelling up towards his neck and the sides of his face. The thin hand of his watch was still moving, having almost completed a full rotation around the clock face.

Five….

Four….

Arthur felt the lids of his eyes meet as they shut, a small smile pulling across his pale, sanguine face. Arthur did not again look at his watch, but he could feel within him the hand completing its rotation and just as he felt it, a blast thundered from behind him. The crowd surged forward, racing away from where the blast had roared through their ears. Arthur was practically lifted and thrown forward, slamming against the women in front of him, his eyes still shut, and the sides of his lips still fixed upwards as though they had been sewn into position. He could hear the women in front of him screaming, no words were yelled, only exclamations of discomfort as they were crushed forward again into the people in front of them. The Glaswegian man was checking on his friend just as another wave of movement struck Arthurs section of the crowd and pushed them leftwards. He felt himself meld into the Glaswegian, his body flush against him. The man hadn’t noticed it, far too focused on trying to weave his way out of the crowd.

It was impossible, the machine had been built, they were all part of it now. The thought of that made Arthur’s smile grow wider, and he thought that if someone were to look upon him now, they would see nothing less than a man in a state of mania. He giggled at the thought, the sound silenced by the mummering and yelling of the different people around him.

The euphoria began to crawl up his spine and into his brain. He felt as though his whole body was alight, like he was buzzing up and out of his body into a calmer and more dignified dimension of pure, honest love. He couldn’t breathe as he was crushed in all four directions, his torso unable to widen enough to allow in much air at all. It was heavenly. The crowd were groaning, moaning and yelling, the sound echoing through the whole mass like a low drone. There was no space between any one person now, bodies flush against each other and limbs linked together in bundles. They were all still on their feet, swaying in all directions depending on the will of the surge.

They were no longer moving of their own accord; they were at the mercy of the machine.

Arthur finally slumped, losing his footing and stumbling onto the woman in front of him.

The people behind him fell on top of him in succession, like dominos, unable to stop themselves from pressing their full weight onto the person below them.

Arthur’s final gasp of air huffed out of his lungs and through his mouth as he hit the body below him and felt the body behind him slam onto his back. He felt the thud of the next body, and the next, as they all piled up on top of him. He began to feel his consciousness be pulled into the void, dark pit of nothingness, his toothy grin still upon his face. His torso was completely unable to expand now, laying deflated within his ribs. The euphoria rolled up his chest and into his jaw, screwing it shut in pleasure. If he were able to see his eyes, he would regard his bloodshot sclera with youthful joy.

He could feel now that he was dying. Yes! He was dying! Yet, he was being reborn again into something bigger, something greater. He felt his mind slip away, leaving his singular body as he fully connected to the big machine.

JANUARY OF SEX VIOLA VOLÉE PORTRAYAL OF A CNC (CONSENSUAL NONCONSENT) EROTIC FANTASY.

Storm, sometimes things just scream to let out the weight of their patheticness. One morning I’d come down to parking lot in front of my shit apartment, except it wasn’t a parking lot for my apartment, but for customers of the Chinese place above which the four of us rested, cheaply—we couldn’t even use the parking lot that filled the entryway with the smell of trash bins—and I saw one of the reasons the bins were always open, except it had gotten trapped between the metal edge and heavy door it was usually able to heave.

I like to think of myself as an animal lover, an appreciator and certainly nonviolent, but there are always lines we seem to draw; mine, apparently, was waking at four every morning to sounds of digging through dirty spring rolls; sometimes, high-pitched fucking on the fire escape. And this story isn’t even about raccoons. I lean into this description of the shrill, pitiful whine of one I saw stuck between hunks of metal, that one of an animal knowing it no longer has any choices in the world, only because that was the inflamed feeling I had under my skin as I stood years later, knee-deep in the minus-10 snow.

“Why’d you stand out there so long?” you asked, from your side of the kitchen island, when the time was up. I was still shivering. “It’s so much warmer in here,” you said. I was shedding thick flakes onto the entrance mat. My cunt was throbbing wet.

“Because you told me to,” it was difficult to enunciate, though my dignity was quite apparently all around my boots.

“And you’d go back out again now if I asked,” you add.

You aren’t like me. You would’ve saved the raccoon, because you’re a stronger person — a calmer, and a fairer one, who won’t let himself be bothered by those of a subjacent nature. That being said, you know very well I would bend myself over into that exact trash bin, simply as a pledge of my loyalty.

Sweetly, instead, you accept the marble-coated island—because love is suffering, then it’s mostly thrusting. *

We were staying at this chalet for our first anniversary, that year, and you didn’t have t explain the reason you picked it as the vacation spot. I started packing immediately.

We’d been to another chalet together—not this one, a friend’s—as only friends ourselves.

There’d been four of us. We’d been making hot chocolate with whiskey in it, made fun of Brian for that picture of him and Alyssa over the fireplace (remember?), and he’d looked genuinely sad because she was working over the holidays so you and Dan turned on the football to distract him. You all let me take up the most space on the couch because I was by far the most sore from the skiing the day before, and the way Brian chuckled that moment made me suspect one of you had a crush on me.

Please... had I been correct?

It was fun for a little while—we were really into it—and then the TV snapped to empty.

There was no more light in the room, nor the next. Based on the way the wind thrusted against the windows filled the sudden quiet, I was afraid nothing would work the rest of the night. Know I’d been correct. It kept on getting colder.

We’d already no service all the way out here, so with wifi gone our access to the world was gone in all of the ways we could see or feel. Brian finally said there might be board games in a cupboard somewhere, and so you all went around looking for something for us to do with your little lights, but by the time everyone had had about three more beers I was on my back on the carpet with one of you forcing my leg ninety degrees upward. One of you was rutting above my head while the other pressed my arm to the floor, eventually shifting his weight to restrain m face, too. I whimpered and cried. In the dark, everything was burning.

In the dark, only they couldn’t tell I was glad. * Storm, I told you, when I was a little girl I loved to be chased through woods just like these.

Why did they cry when the sun came out?

INVICTUS ALEXIS AMES When the blond man in front of Theo at the recruiting center caught his eye and flashed him a dazzling smile, Theo’s first thought was uh-oh.

Uh-oh, this man was going to be trouble.

Uh-oh, Theo didn’t have time for distractions.

Uh-oh, he was done for.

Theo cleared his throat, pinned in place by the man’s gaze. God, he could lose himself in those storm-gray eyes. “Here for the mission?”

He regretted the words the moment they left his mouth. Here for the mission? What kind of question was that? They were both standing in the recruitment center for the first allcivilian mission to Mars. Of course that was what the man was here for.

But the man’s smile didn’t waver, and Theo was certain someone had accidentally replaced his knees with jelly. “I am. You?” “Yeah. Third round.” Somehow, he managed to keep his voice steady. He held up the stack of paperwork he’d come by to drop off, dozens of invasive questions about everything from his favorite ice cream to what had frightened him as a child. The mission leaders were nothing if not thorough.

“Third round,” the man repeated, obviously impressed. “This is only my first. They must like you.”

“I’ve no idea why they do,” Theo said in a rush. “I’ve got asthma and crap eyesight and my grades in school weren’t anything to write home about. I even almost got kicked out of college. I don’t know why they keep advancing me.”

He shut his mouth so abruptly, his jaw clicked. He had the sudden, inexplicable urge to tell this man everything, but somehow he held back a flood of words behind his teeth—how he’d had three jobs in as many years, how he couldn’t hold down a relationship past the sixmonth mark, how he’d caught sight of a billboard one day and couldn’t get the thought out of his head. Mars.

Maybe he wasn’t meant for this planet after all, and that’s why he kept getting his legs kicked out from under him. Maybe what he needed wasn’t a new start, but a new life.

But the man shrugged and said, “Academics aren’t everything. It takes all kinds of people to build a new society. Even though this mission is only a stepping stone to a future colony, they’re going to want to make sure it represents a wide breadth of humanity. If you’ve made it to round three already, there’s something about you that makes them believe you’ll be well-suited to Mars.”

Theo still wasn’t convinced that he was the kind of person the Invictus project leaders had in mind for a history-making mission, but he also wasn’t about to contradict them.

“I’m Evan, by the way.” The other man—Evan—stuck his hand out, and Theo shook it.

“Theo.”

“Theo,” Evan said, and something in Theo’s chest fluttered at the way his name sounded on the man’s lips. “What do you say to some lunch? You can tell me what I should expect in round two.”

Theo huffed a laugh. “Jumping the gun, aren’t you? You haven’t even made it through the first round yet.”

“I will, though,” Evan said, flashing that incredible smile again, and Theo believed him. He thought this man could probably do anything he put his mind to. # Lunch stretched into dinner, which stretched on into the night and the following day. Evan slid into Theo’s life with ease, as though he had always been there. He filled in all the spaces Theo had never realized were empty, made Theo’s life better by simply being a part of it.

Evan made it to the second round, as he’d predicted, and then just as easily made it to the third. After that, there was nothing to do but wait until their state had advanced everyone to the third round that it thought might make suitable candidates for the mission, and then to cull that list until only the finalists remained.

Theo hadn’t anticipated how much time he would spend waiting back when he decided to embark on the adventure of a lifetime.

But he found that he couldn’t complain, not when he had Evan to occupy him in the meantime.

“If I turned into a...platypus,” Evan said one morning, trailing warm fingertips up Theo’s spine, “would you still love me?”

Theo huffed into his pillow. “A platypus.”

“Would you?”

“Yes,” Theo said.

“What about,” Evan considered this for a moment, “an iguana?”

“Yes.” “You’d share your bed with an iguana?”

“I would if it was you.”

“You’re such a sap,” Evan said, laughing. “What if I was a spider?”

Theo shuddered. “Do you have to be?”

“Imagine a witch turned me into one. I wouldn’t have much of a say in it, would I? It’s not like the witch would ask my opinion.”

Theo sighed. “Yes. I’d still love you and let you into my bed.”

“You hate spiders.”

“But I love you.”

“I love you, too.” Evan curled closer, half draping himself over Theo’s back, and kissed the nape of his neck.

Theo turned his head on the pillow to look at him. “You’re sure you want to spend eight months trapped in a flying tin can with me, and then the rest of our lives stuck inside a bubble?”

“Yes,” Evan said without hesitation. “I can’t wait.”

Theo kissed him, long and slow. “Neither can I.” # They announced the statewide finalists at eight on a Sunday morning, much to Theo’s consternation. He tried not to be awake before ten if he could help it, but his phone rang at a minute past the hour and then Evan was shouting in his ear. It took Theo’s sleep-muddled mind a moment to catch up, and then all at once he was wide-awake.

“We made it?” he asked, dumbfounded, even as he scrambled for his laptop. “Both of us?”

“We made it!” Evan crowed. “We’re going to Mars, baby!”

“Not yet, we aren’t!” Theo yelped. “Don’t jinx it, Ev. You realize we’re still up against a couple thousand other candidates, right? Each state is advancing fifty people.”

“Yeah, but to get this far we’ve already beat out hundreds of thousands,” Evan pointed out.

“I’m coming over. We are celebrating.”

Theo tried to point out that it wasn’t even eight-thirty yet, but Evan had already hung up.

He was just stepping out of the shower when he heard his apartment door bang shut and Evan yelling for him. Theo yanked on a t-shirt and a pair of sweats, and went out to find Evan waiting for him in the kitchen.

“Drink,” he demanded, pushing a shot glass into Theo’s hand. Theo gave him an exasperated look, but it didn’t last long in the face of Evan’s brilliant smile. Evan held out his glass. “To Invictus!”

Theo clinked their glasses together, and then tossed back the shot.

Somehow, Evan persuaded him to do another, and then they drank mimosas out on Theo’s balcony, and it wasn’t yet noon when they stumbled back inside, sun-warmed and drunk.

They sprawled out on the couch, Theo half on top of Evan, and kissed lazily for a while.

Unhurried, sloppy, perfect. Evan slid a hand under Theo’s t-shirt and up his spine, tracing his fingers through beads of sweat that had gathered in the middle of Theo’s back.

“Meet my parents,” he murmured against Theo’s lips. Theo drew away.

“That is the least sexy thing you have ever said to me,” he complained, and Evan laughed.

“I mean it, though. Meet my parents.”

“Right now?”

“Well, no.” Evan twisted and flipped them, quite a feat for such a narrow couch, and stretched out on top of Theo. “Right now I’m going to ravish you. But the next time I go home, I want you to come with me.”

“Yeah, alright.” Theo tilted his face up for a kiss that Evan willingly gave. “I’d love to meet your parents.”

“And my grandparents.”

“All right.”

“And all my friends.”

“Evan?”

“Yes?” “Shut up.”

Evan leaned down to kiss him, and that was effective enough. # The elation at making it to the final round before the crew selection carried Theo through several more months of tests—psychological screenings, physical endurance tests, crash courses in engineering and physics and math and medicine. From a list of twenty-five hundred candidates, only ten would be selected for Mars. The project leaders had to ensure that they chose the best.

Theo traveled all around the state with Evan, giving speeches to halls full of bright-eyed college students or gymnasiums full of bored elementary students. They met some of the other finalists at black-tie dinners held for wealthy donors. Throughout it all, Theo couldn’t remember ever being happier. Evan was at his side, in his kitchen, in his bed, and there was nothing more Theo needed in life than that. In fact, it was dizzying how quickly their lives had become entwined. Theo met Evan’s parents, and Evan met his sister. Evan’s clothes and shoes mixed in the closet with his own; Theo left books and pajamas and a toothbrush at Evan’s place. They merged their calendars, had mail sent to each other’s apartments. To their friends, they became Evan-and-Theo, Theo-and-Evan. One was never spoken without the other.

How ironic, Theo mused, that he was finally making a life for himself on this planet even as he was doing everything in his power to leave it. # Theo woke uncharacteristically early on the morning that the crew for the mission was to be announced. He lay there as gray pre-dawn light leaked around the curtains, watching as Evan slept on, resisting the urge to reach out and trace that strong jaw, that aquiline nose.

Once again, Theo marveled that out of every man he could have had, Evan had chosen him. It didn’t seem real.

Sleep had abandoned him, so Theo tossed back the covers and got out of bed. He brewed a pot of coffee, set a mug on the counter for Evan, and then poured one for himself. He took it out onto the balcony. It was a cool morning, but brisk and refreshing, not the kind of cold that seeped into bones and weighed down the body. Already the city was waking up, and the clouds on the horizon were shot through with vibrant streaks of pink and purple.

This was his last sunrise in limbo, the last time he would exist in a state where he didn’t know if he had made the mission or not. By this time tomorrow, either his life will have changed forever, or he would be right back where he started two years ago. Both were daunting, terrifying prospects.

But he could handle any outcome, as long as Evan was by his side.

“Think you’ll miss this, on Mars?” Evan slid the door shut behind him and came to stand next to Theo. He’d pulled on one of Theo’s sweatshirts and pajama pants, and a thrill went down Theo’s spine as it always did at the sight of Evan in his clothes.

“The sun still rises on Mars.”

“Not like this.”

“No,” Theo agreed. “Not like this. No, I don’t think I’ll miss it.”

“I will,” Evan said, and Theo looked at him in surprise. He shrugged. “There are a lot of things I’ll miss about Earth. I won’t pretend otherwise. But I want to go on this mission more.”

Theo reached over and laid a hand on Evan’s where it rested on the railing. They drank their coffee, watching as the sky brightened and the city below them came to life.

Evan’s phone rang. He pulled it out of his pocket, looking uncharacteristically apprehensive, and answered the call. Theo tightened his hand on Evan’s, and Evan squeezed back, fingers bloodless.

“Yes?” he said into the phone. “Yes, ma’am. Yes, I understand. I—right. Thank you.”

Evan ended the call and clutched his phone in his fist. He stared out at the city, jaw tight.

“Ev,” Theo whispered.

“I’m on the mission,” Evan said, and the smile that broke across his face was blinding. “I’m going to Mars.”

Theo pulled him into a crushing hug, scarcely able to breathe.

And then his own phone rang.

They sprang apart. Theo fumbled for his phone and dropped it, sending it skidding across the balcony. He snatched it up right before it went over the edge.

“Hello?” he answered breathlessly.

“Good morning, Theo.” He recognized Cindra Miller’s voice from the dozens of interviews he had watched over the years. His heart felt like it was about to hammer out of his chest.

“It’s my great honor to let you know that you have been accepted on the Invictus mission.

We will—” But he never heard the rest of her words over the pounding of blood in his ears.

He had done it. Evan had done it.

They were going to Mars. # Theo had never particularly enjoyed clubs. The deafening music, the press of sweaty strangers all around him, the sticky floors, the watered-down drinks—he hated it all. But Evan’s enthusiasm was infectious, and Theo didn’t have it in him to be irritated when his partner was so happy. Besides, it was difficult to be annoyed when Evan was surrounded by beautiful strangers and still only had eyes for him.

They danced. They drank. Evan flirted with him like it was their first date, and Theo flirted right back. He didn’t know what he had done to get so lucky, but he wasn’t about to question it. Finally, finally, something in his life had gone right. He was going to grab on tight, and never let it go.

Evan shouted something in his ear. Theo could barely hear over the pounding music.

“What?’

“Marry me!” Evan bellowed.

Theo dropped his drink. The plastic cup landed on the ground, spilling its sticky contents across the floor.

“What?”

“I said—” “I heard what you said!” Theo gaped at him. “You’re asking this now? Here?”

“Would you rather I asked somewhere else?”

“Yes!” Evan laughed. Grasping Theo’s hand, he pulled him out of the club and into the cool, crisp autumn air.

“Is this better?” he teased, and this time Theo almost didn’t hear him over the sudden ringing in his ears.

“No,” Theo said, though he couldn’t keep the smile off his face. “You absolute menace, we’re drunk and at a disgusting club and it’s two in the morning—” But Evan wasn’t there. Looking down, Theo was momentarily struck speechless by the sight of Evan on one knee, ring box in his hand. “Theo, will you marry me?”

Theo gaped at him. “Wait, you were serious?” “‘Course I’m serious. I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”

“We’re going to Mars, Evan, you’re already stuck with me for the rest of your life.” But Theo was grinning so wide, his face hurt. “Yes, you idiot. Yes, I’ll marry you.”

Evan sprang to his feet and swept Theo into a hug. There was a smattering of applause from random passersby, and Theo caught sight of at least one person with their phone out.

This would be all over Twitter soon enough. He didn’t care. He felt a little like shouting from the rooftops himself.

Evan chose me. Nine billion people on the planet, and he wants me.

Theo took Evan’s face in his hands and kissed him. Their cheeks were wet and they were still drunk enough that the kiss was a little sloppy, but Theo thought it might be the best kiss he’d ever received.

“Hand,” Evan said, taking the ring out of the box with shaking fingers. Theo held out his hand, and Evan slipped the ring on. “There. Now you’re mine.”

“I always have been,” Theo choked out. “Always, Evan.” # Theo’s phone rang at dawn. He answered it on autopilot, still half-asleep, and didn’t register that it was Cindra Miller until she said, “I need you both in my office. Eight o’clock.”

She hung up. Theo ran light fingers down Evan’s side, and his fiancé—his fiancé!—jerked awake. “Wassat?”

“Miller wants to see us in two hours.”

Evan scrubbed a hand over his face. “Did she say why?”

“No.” A knot of unease coiled in Theo’s stomach. Was she having second thoughts about them? He could understand if she was reconsidering his placement on the mission—he still couldn’t believe he had been chosen in the first place—but Evan was another matter.

There was no reason to pull him off the mission. There was no one better suited to it. “We should get going, it’s at least an hour’s drive and there’s going to be traffic.”

They arrived at Miller’s office with ten minutes to spare. She greeted them warmly enough, which eased some of Theo’s worry, and then waved them both into chairs in front of her desk.

“Gentlemen, I’ll get right to the heart of the matter. We need to discuss your relationship.”

Evan’s eyebrows lifted. “Do we?”

“Yes. I’m sorry if you meant for it to be a secret, but I’m afraid we are well past that point.”

She turned her screen, showing them several tweets. It took Theo’s still-fuzzy brain a moment to realize that the grainy picture attached was Evan kneeling in the street, a ring box in his hands and a proposal on his lips.

“We never meant for it to be a secret,” Theo said. “We just didn’t think it was anyone’s business.”

“It’s the 2040s,” Evan said. “You’re not about to tell us that astronauts can’t be gay, right?

Because your mission aims to put all kinds of people on Mars, and—” “I’m not concerned with your sexuality,” she said, waving a hand. “No, the issue is that the mission leaders and I had agreed on only one rule for sending civilians to Mars. No romantic partners are allowed to go on the mission together. You stated that you met that criteria, during the screening process. Both of you attested to being single.”

“Well, two years ago, we were,” Theo said. “We didn’t lie.”

“We’ve never heard about this rule,” Evan protested. “Two years, and not once has it come up!”

“It wasn’t something we felt ever needed to be explicitly laid out, as the mission leaders weren’t going to choose anyone who had a romantic partner.” Her expression became pained.

“Obviously, we weren’t as thorough in our examination of the crew as we ought to have been. If not for social media, yours would never have come to light.”

Theo felt sick. It had been his idea to go out that night. To celebrate the start of a new life.

“Fine,” Evan said. “We’ll break up, then.”

She shook her head. “No. I’m afraid that won’t work. We want to avoid any complications that might come from two people on the mission being romantically involved. We also want to avoid any discord that might result from a couple breaking up. A romantic couple, whether they are together or broken up, can sow disharmony among the crew. That poses a danger to you all.”

“This is absurd,” Evan seethed.

“So what are you saying?” Theo asked. His stomach had tied itself into knots, and he was afraid he might be sick. “We’re being kicked off the mission?”

“I would rather that it not come to that,” she said. “It would damage crew morale if the leaders were to step in at this point and rescind our offer to one of you. And the fact is, both of you are valuable candidates. That’s why you were chosen in the first place. No, ideally, one of you would voluntarily withdraw from the mission.”

“And if we don’t, you’ll choose for us,” Evan said.

“Yes.” She gave them a pitying look. “I’m sorry, gentlemen. I wish I had better news for you.

I’ll give you the weekend to talk it over. Please send me your decision first thing on Monday morning.” # The drive home was silent. So was the walk up to Theo’s apartment.

Theo dropped onto the couch and put his head in his hands while Evan stood in the middle of the living room, looking adrift at sea.

“I don’t understand,” Theo muttered to the floor. How could they have come so close, only to have this dream snatched from them at the last moment? “They can’t do this.”

But who was going to stop them? This was Cindra Miller’s project. Her money, her rules.

And the worst part of it was, it did make sense. The crew had been chosen as much for their personalities as for their skills. They were going to be stuck in a tin can for the eight-month journey to Mars, and then stuck in a bubble for the rest of their lives. There could be no discord. It wasn’t only that it would make for an uncomfortable living situation—if the crew failed to function as a cohesive unit, it could mean their deaths.

“We have to withdraw from the mission,” Evan said. “Both of us.”

Theo lifted his head out of his hands and stared at Evan. “What?”

“Well, it wouldn’t be fair for one of us to withdraw and the other to go,” Evan said. “If we can’t figure out a loophole that lets us both stay on the mission, then we both have to withdraw.”

He was right. It was the only way their relationship would survive. It would be different if only one of them had been chosen from the beginning—they had already braced themselves for that outcome, knowing that it would mean they would be separated forever.

But since both of them had been selected for the mission, one stepping down would only breed resentment and misery.

How awful, to have come so close to this dream he could almost taste it. Theo gave a hollow laugh. He’d known, from that first moment that he laid eyes on Evan in the recruitment center all those years ago, that the man was going to be his undoing. How right he’d been. Evan was going to cost him Mars.

“Okay,” he said, meeting Evan’s red-rimmed eyes. “We withdraw from the mission.” # Theo called Miller first thing on Monday morning. Evan had gone back to his apartment on Sunday, and for once, Theo was glad of his absence. It was difficult enough to withdraw from the mission without also having to watch his partner do it. He had his own grief to deal

with at the moment; he couldn’t handle Evan’s as well.

Some husband you’re going to make, a voice whispered at the back of his mind. Theo traced the ring on his finger absently. He might have lost Mars, but he got to keep Evan. They got to have each other. That had to count for something. Maybe this was where his life’s trajectory meant for him to land all along. Mars was never in the cards for him—Evan was.

Miller accepted his withdrawal, and asked that he keep the information to himself for the time being. She had to contact his backup to make sure they could take his place, and she didn’t want this leaking to the media before then. It wasn’t like Theo was eager to talk about this anyway, so he agreed. The new crew lineup would be announced once training officially began in three months.

When it was over, he texted Evan.

It’s done. I’m okay.

Same here, Evan typed back. I love you.

Something fluttered in his belly. He would never tire of hearing those words.

I love you, too. # Adjusting to the idea of living out the rest of his life on Earth didn’t take as long as Theo had feared. He’d made a few discreet inquiries at his old company, and they were more than willing to take him back as soon the news about his departure from the mission became public. There was a wedding to plan, too, now that they would be on Earth for it. And there were other countless things to consider as they blended their lives—merging finances, finding a place to live together, taking stock of what they owned and what they would need once they were living together. Now that they had a future together on this planet, there were other things to discuss as well that hadn’t been relevant before. Did they want to stay in this city, or move elsewhere? Did they want pets? How would they split the holidays between their families?

Evan took longer to adjust to this abrupt change in his life’s course, but Mars had been his dream for longer than it had been Theo’s. Theo gave him space to process, to grieve, and soon enough Evan was tackling this new life the way he did everything else: with vigor and

enthusiasm. He spent most of his time at Theo’s apartment now, though they continued to look for a bigger place, and started job searching in earnest. They spent their evenings researching venues and caterers and flowers and color schemes. Evan wanted an autumn wedding; Theo didn’t care, as long as he was married to Evan by the end of it.

It was a simple, mundane life. It was everything Theo had never known he’d wanted. # Theo’s legs burned as he took the stairs two at a time up to his apartment. He’d tacked on an extra half-hour and three miles to his morning run—a leisurely pace, but his body was now protesting it all the same. It was probably a good thing he wasn’t going to Mars after all, he thought ruefully. What kind of astronaut couldn’t handle a measly six-mile run?

He expected to find Evan sitting at the table, reading the physical newspaper he had bought Theo a subscription for earlier that year. But the living room and kitchen were both empty. Evan hadn’t even brewed some coffee, as he usually did by now. Was he still asleep?

But when Theo opened the bedroom door, he didn’t find Evan asleep. He found him packing a suitcase.

“Going home for a bit?” Theo kept his voice light, hoping none of his disappointment bled through. Evan liked to go back to his place sometimes, and that was fine, but Theo had hoped they would spend at least these next few days together. Take their minds off the fact that the rest of the crew was gathering for the first of many training sessions that kicked off the beginning of the mission.

“Not exactly,” Evan said. He twisted a pair of socks in his hands, uncharacteristically fidgeting. “I’m going to Houston.”

“Houston?” Theo echoed. Foreboding was a cold stone in his gut. “Why?” Evan sighed. “Because training is starting soon.”

Theo’s brain refused to comprehend the words. “I don’t understand.”

“Theo—”

“What training?” Theo demanded. It was a struggle to draw air. “What—what are you talking about?”

“The mission, Theo,” Evan said. “I never withdrew from the mission. I’m going to Mars.”

“But you said—” “I know what I said. But I couldn’t do it, Theo. I couldn’t withdraw. I’ve wanted this my whole life, and I’m so close. I’m not about to throw it away because some bureaucrat decided to change the rules at the last minute.” Evan tossed a couple more things into the suitcase, and then came over to Theo. He gripped his shoulders. “You understand, don’t you? How I couldn’t let this slip through my fingers?”

Theo shrugged him off. “You lied to me. You said you were going to withdraw from the mission, too. It was your idea. You—we’re planning a wedding.”

“But I couldn’t, Theo, alright?” Evan threw his hands up in exasperation. “Surely you—out of everyone else on this planet, surely you understand that? Mars is everything. It’s the one thing I’ve wanted since I was a kid, the one constant. I couldn’t just throw it all away—” “That’s all I am, then?” Theo demanded. “I’m someone you’re just throwing it all away with?

We had plans, Evan, a future! We were building a life together. Did that mean nothing to you?”

“It meant something,” Evan said earnestly. “Of course it did. I love you. But I want Mars more.”

“So that’s it, then? You’re leaving, just like that?”

“There’s nothing that could make me stay,” Evan said, and there was true sorrow in his voice, which made everything worse. “Not even you. I’m sorry.”

Theo’s shaking legs carried him out to the balcony. He stood at the railing, numbly taking in the bustling city below. All those people, going about their lives like his world wasn’t falling apart. How could Evan do this? How could he lie to Theo for weeks, and then, in one fell swoop, destroy everything they had been trying to build together? Was their life truly that easy to walk away from? Was Theo?

Some indeterminate amount of time later—a minute, an hour—the balcony door slid open.

Evan said, his voice careful, “I’m leaving now. I just wanted you to know.”

Theo scrubbed a hand viciously over his face and turned around. Lines of sorrow were etched into Evan’s face, and rage bubbled in his chest. Evan had no right, no right, to grieve over this when he was the one making this choice in the first place.

“How long?” he asked. “How long have you known that you were going to do this?”

“Since the day you officially withdrew,” Evan said. “I picked up the phone to call Miller, and I just...couldn’t. I couldn’t throw it all away. I have wanted this my whole life, Theo. I couldn’t bear to toss it aside.”

“And you couldn’t have told me then?”

“I wanted us to have a few good weeks before I left,” Evan said. “I wanted to give you as much time as I possibly could.”

“Oh, so it’s my fault you couldn’t tell me?”

“Theo,” Evan pleaded, “don’t do this. I love you. That wasn’t—and isn’t—a lie. You are everything to me.”

“But I’m not enough,” Theo said bitterly. The wind was starting to pick up, and he was still only wearing his running t-shirt and shorts. He crossed his arms over his chest, shivering, and not entirely from the cold. “This life, our life—it’s not enough.”

“No,” Evan agreed quietly. “It isn’t, and you’re not. I’m sorry.” # Theo hadn’t planned to watch the launch. He’d intended instead to drink himself into a stupor in bed, pull the blankets over his head, and not come out for three days. But as the minutes ticked down to the start of the nighttime launch, he found himself clutching a glass of whiskey in one hand and the remote in the other, staring at the rocket that filled the television screen.

He didn’t know what he was expecting. For Evan to declare that it was all a mistake, that he couldn’t bear the thought of spending the rest of his life without Theo? For him to make a dramatic exit out of the rocket, declaring his love for Theo and refusing to go through with

the mission? It was stupid, it was ridiculous, and Theo wanted it so badly. The worst part of it was, he’d probably take Evan back, too. God, he was pathetic.

One minute until liftoff. The camera panned over the crowd that had gathered to watch the launch in person—friends and relatives of the crew, and journalists and photographers from dozens of news outlets. The camera lingered for a moment on Evan’s parents, their eyes bright with joy even as sorrow etched itself into the lines on their faces. Theo couldn’t fathom the kind of strength it took to support your child’s dream when achieving that dream meant you would never see them again.

Thirty seconds. The news anchors stopped giving their voice-over commentary. The rocket’s powerful engines rumbled. The crowd was unnaturally silent. Theo held his breath.

Ten seconds. Theo twisted the ring on his left hand. He hadn’t taken it off since Evan had slid it onto his finger all those months ago. He couldn’t bear to.

Five seconds. The engines ignited, three massive columns of flames shooting out from the rocket. Theo felt the rumble of the engines in his chest.

And then, liftoff. The rocket left the pad with deceptive grace. Theo knew that inside the cockpit, the launch was a good deal more violent. The rocket arced through the night sky, a single, bright point of light amid the black. It hurtled through the atmosphere, climbing higher and higher, until it was no more than a speck. Within seconds, it was gone.

Theo shut off the television. He sat there, on the bed that had once been theirs, staring at his reflection in the dark screen. He could hear the cheers from neighboring apartments, everyone celebrating having witnessed this monumental piece of history, and had never felt so alone.

FONDUES AND DON’TS RYDER SMITH MURDER

I guess you could call my job cheesy, haha. Sorry, it's a bad time for jokes, I know. It’s just that I’m a little nervous. Hopefully that’s pretty natural, seeing how grave you look. No pun intended! At least not... that time– I’ll just get on with it. I’m a chef at a fondue restaurant, so I work with a lot of piping-hot, spoiled-milk-thick liquids. I guess that’s kind of what cheese already is... but it’s not just cheese! There’s also chocolate. Of course there is; you obviously already know that. That’s where they found the body, but that was only a more recent issue, though. Look, the job was perfectly normal for a good five years. I got to do something in cooking, which is all I ever really wanted out of a job, and I got paid more than most of my friends from high school, even after they all went off to “real college” or whatever. Going to culinary school was probably the best decision I ever made. Well, I wasn’t great at making specialty pasta from scratch or mastering mixology or any of the other weird stuff they wanted from me, but I know how to melt stuff and then pour it over other stuff. Plus I have really bad shaky hands, so I got great at doing the cool drizzle thing that people on the internet like so much.

It would be kind of weird to say I “discovered” the body for so many reasons, but that’s how it feels to me. I watched the entire crime happen. I was there in the alleyway when that guy in the mask dumped the body into the dumpster, all cut up into pieces. Four trash bags! Can you believe it? I know it was to make sure there was enough space for the body parts and the fondue to cover them up, but that just seems like an insult. A really childish one, too. I guess you already know the situation and where I was, knowing that I’m here. I’m sure you see cases like this one and people like me all the time. So many people die each day... and so many deaths are suspicious. Suspicious! I’m so sorry, I haven’t even gotten to the important part yet.

You probably wanna know about Levi. The killer was wearing a mask, so I couldn’t see his face, and neither could the cameras, but I’m absolutely positive it was him. Levi is a jealous, evil little man with a black heart! Sorry to get so emotional. We used to date, so he’s a bit of a touchy subject. Levi never really liked me, and I like to think I always knew it. He constantly hurled insults and demands at me, especially when we lived together. All of my friends told me I moved in with him way too fast, which was true.

But, in that situation, you just can’t tell. That was why it was a shock to both of us when I left him. He tried every manipulative trick in his playbook to make me stay, but the illusion had worn off, probably thanks to my therapist. I was done being trapped, and that infuriated Levi. Just when I had really started to love myself again, this happens. I know I’m being kind of nonchalant about this whole thing, but I’m kinda over the surprise. I know it was definitely Levi. He wanted to hurt me; that’s why he did it. You obviously know how close I was to the victim, if you know what I mean. I couldn’t see the killer’s face, but I don’t know who else it could have been.

I knew that fondue was the perfect place to hide a body. Sometimes your mind just gets away from you while you work, especially when it’s pretty repetitive. Whenever I’d go on autopilot, I’d imagine myself as a masterful detective solving a grizzly murder. In the fantasies I was always a former fondue restaurant chef, but now I work in the heart of a bustling city. The room is dark and smells a little like mildew. The force had relegated us to the basement offices. Typical. We sat hopelessly in a dingy office space covered in cork boards and red string. We had searched for a serial killer for weeks. He’d given us some cliche ultimatum: either we find the body or he’d kill again. I know it doesn’t make sense, but that’s always the type of thing they say on those daytime crime shows. Anyway, at the eleventh hour, I’d look at my team with a sudden grin on my face. I’d say something like, “Wait! There’s still one place we haven’t looked,” and then get all smug and my fellow investigators would all look up. That’s when I’d reveal to them my background in fondue. I could say how easy it would be to hide a body there, under all barely-mobile liquid. We’d go to the nearest comically-large vat of fondue. It would be molten hot, so we’d need some specialty crane to get the body out. Case closed. It was shocking to find out that other people thought about this too, of course. I couldn’t believe anyone else had seen fondue for the body-hiding potential it really had. It was honestly a little vindicating. It’s just, for my entire life I... I never assumed the body they’d find buried would end up being mine.

UNRAVELLING KEITH GOOD Darren notices lint as he scalds the last of Sophia from his skin. He plucks a tangle from his breast and watches it circle the shower drain, thinking nothing of it until much, much later.

“Oh, honey.” Michelle smiles as she reaches for her panties. “You should be proud: once in nineteen years is a hell of a batting average.”

But Darren is seething at his shriveled turtle. Out from your shell, damn you! He pulls a stray hair from the tip which unravels to a long, ginger strand. Panicked, he jokes that it looks like their tabby’s. Except Rosencrantz has been dead since before Maeve left for college, since the poor cat ate a twist tie that knotted his intestines.

Darren’s wife tucks the covers tight to her chest. “That’s not funny.”

She’s absolutely right: it’s not. ...

Darren lurches from his first board meeting and stumbles into his office, gasping. He’d convinced himself it was their Korean-made dryer leaving lint on his clothes. But on a brand-new silk shirt? He wrenches his cuff to the elbow and scrapes deep into his forearm.

Gooseflesh ripples down his scalp as a long string unravels from his skin like a scab, like the dead skin after a blister. He gulps bright-hot oxygen and digs for another.

“Siri,” he sighs, “buy some crochet hooks.” ...

More strings flutter as Sophia peels his boxers. She curls one between her fingers.

“Did some manscaping for our weekly meeting, did you?”

“I think I’m unravelling,” Darren finally admits.

She looks up, takes him in her hand.

“Give me a few minutes and you just might.”

...

“And when did these, ‘strings,’” the teletherapist takes a punctuating breath, “start unravelling from your body?”

Darren can only shake his head. His exhausted thoughts are fog drifting across a wide, dark sea.

“Okay,” the therapist clicks something on their screen, “what’s the first string you remember, then?”

Darren closes his eyes. Rose bodywash fills his nose. Steam burns his skin. “I was in Sophia’s shower.” ...

“Okay, ah okay,” the therapist leans back, “and what do you think about that?”

Michelle tries to reach across the growing chasm of their sofa. “Sweetie. I’m glad you found a hobby, but...you’re knitting a doll of yourself?” She retreats, tucks her legs under her.

“Whatever this is, Darren, you can talk to me.”

But the more Darren fumbles for explanations, the more people try to fix him. Go for a jog.

Stop drinking caffeine. Masturbate. He turns from his wife to peel a string from his lip, starts crocheting his doll’s mouth. ...

Sophia cinches the silk robe at her throat. “You want me to have a threesome with this doll?”

“Oh, no.” Darren shakes his head. “He just wants to watch.”

Later, the wooly tapping on Darren’s shoulder—Switch!—is unsurprising. He’s gone soft anyway. Alone in the darkened corner, Darren can finally see how bestial, how ugly, how utterly tiring the act looks.

Sophia moans her prayers, “god, Darren, yes,” as he picks string after string from his thigh, his wrist, his cheek.

...

“This is exactly what the partners warned you about, Darren.” The HR rep pulls her pad of triplicate forms, taupe-pink-green. “You can’t bring that Muppet into meetings.”

Darren opens his mouth but words have left him. He can only watch as the doll swipes termination papers from under HR’s pen.

“Tell the partners to piss off.” The doll rips each in half. “Tell them to count the clients that follow if I walk. Now if you’ll excuse us,” the doll throws termination confetti and strides out, “we’re going on a long overdue vacation.”

Darren can only shrug apology and follow. ...

A text pings. “Where R U? Kinda looking forward to more after last Wed.” The doll swipes Sophia’s message from Darren’s phone and blocks the number. ...

“Jesus, Darren, whatever you watched, whatever you read...wow.” Michelle’s toes curl the folds of their crumpled duvet. Dewy sweat glitters her skin. “You had me worried, you know. You felt so listless. I was starting to think…” But the intense heat of afterglow dissolves the thought.

“I know it’s been an adjustment, Em.” The doll traces the curve of Michelle’s breast with a woolen finger. “New job. Empty nest. But I’m here now.” It kisses her clavicle. “Thank you for allowing me the space,” another kiss, “to remake myself.” Its hand slides down her belly.

“Now. We’ve got a few hours before Maeve returns for break...”

Darren lets Michelle’s fluttering sighs carry him from their bedroom. At last, still and silent and alone, he finds peace.

RAGS A. J. PADILLA “Has anybody ever told you that you look like Tony Curtis?”

That was the first thing Rhonda ever said to me.

“No, you’re the first.”

“Well, you do. Maybe you should think about going into the movies.”

“Only if you promise to be my agent.”

We were standing by Rockefeller Center, both of us trying to hail a cab.

I soon discovered that Rhonda enjoyed two things above all others: sex and playing the stock market. She was very good at both.

We were together only a few months, but in that brief time I learned quite a bit from her -about the stock market, that is. Rhonda had an uncanny knack for picking stocks and selling them at exactly the right time. Teaching me to do the same thing became an obsession of hers.

“You’re a diamond in the rough, Sal,” she said to me on the day we broke up. “I could have turned you into a real prince if we’d only had enough time.”

Rhonda had found someone else, a wealthy Nordic type she met at a disco on 54th Street.

Maybe she made a prince out of the guy, maybe not, but she certainly made a stock market hotshot out of me.

I suppose you could say that Rhonda was the reason I met Gianna Lombardi. You see, the monogrammed platinum money clip I was picking up at Tiffany’s on the day I first saw her was a gift to myself on the occasion of having made my first four hundred thousand in the market.

But I’m getting way ahead of myself. So, let me begin again, this time with a bit of wisdom: a burglary perfectly planned and executed is a beautiful thing. Rags shared that notion with me more than ten years ago and I’ve never forgotten it. It says so much about him. He always took great pride in anything he did, whether it was waiting tables in a Manhattan

nightclub or relieving warehouse shelves of expensive merchandise.

He was “Rags” to all his friends, and he had a busload of them, both at the club where we worked and all over his Lower East Side neighborhood. I have no idea how he got that nickname. It never occurred to me to ask and he never volunteered the information.

“There’s a limit to everything in life, Sal,” Rags once told me. “And our little sideline ain’t no different. Stick to those limits and you’ll be fine. Step outside of them and you might get lucky once, maybe even twice, but luck always runs out. In the end, you’ll wind up doing time, and once you do time, kid, you’re on cop radar forever.”

Our “little sideline” was burglary. And the “limits” he was talking about? Well, Rags would never hit a bank, a federal rap that automatically puts the FBI on your ass. He thought all bank robbers, including Willie Sutton and John Dillinger, were lunatics. He never hit a private residence or otherwise took a dime from what he used to call “civilians.” He also never carried a gun on a job.

“Guns are strictly for chumps and amateurs,” Rags insisted. “Anybody who carries a piece on a job eventually uses it, and that kind of trouble nobody needs.”

Rags did carry a weapon of sorts, a CO2-powered pistol that fired small but potent tranquilizer darts. A single dart would send a two-hundred-pound man on an express train ride to dreamland inside of sixty seconds. The guy would be out a couple of hours and wake up with a headache, but nothing worse than that. Rags had modified the pistol himself and carried it in a leather ankle holster. He had been forced to use it only once, on a job out in Jersey the year before we teamed up.

His favorite targets were warehouses.

“You show me the average warehouse,” he liked to say, “and I’ll show you ten different ways to get around their security after it’s locked up for the night.”

He never felt guilt or remorse about any job he did, and he made it clear why.

“Nobody gets screwed when we do a job. The guy who owns the place puts in a claim with his insurance company, probably for more than he lost, and eventually gets a check to cover the whole thing. We fence the take with Brooklyn Murphy and he pays us for our trouble. Then he unloads the stuff and makes out like the crook he is. Only the insurance company pays, and who gives a shit about them? Those guys are the real thieves.”

I got my start with Rags years ago, when we were both working at a midtown Manhattan nightclub. He had been a waiter for a long time by then, and had worked at some of the fanciest places in Chicago, Vegas, Miami, and L.A. I was just out of the service, mostly bussing tables and occasionally filling in for an AWOL dishwasher. Rags and I hit it off right from the start and he saw to it that I was moved up to waiter, which was hard work but paid well enough, especially on nights when wealthy types booked the club for a big party.

I also did a little prize fighting back then, mostly prelims, to make some extra cash. Boxing was something I picked up in the navy and eventually got pretty good at. I lost only once in thirty bouts and was never off my feet.

Rags went to see one of my fights not long after we met and afterwards took me aside and told me about his sideline for the first time.

“You got a hell of a right hand, Sal, but you take too many punches. And for what? Maybe a c-note. I know a way you can make decent money and keep from getting your brains scrambled. There’s a bit of risk involved, but then you take a risk every time you step into a ring, don’t you? Interested?”

I was.

At first, all I did was drive and act as a lookout. He and his partner, a wiry little guy named Silvio, did all the work. But then Silvio got himself pinched trying to knock over a Yonkers liquor store and I was suddenly promoted.

His next job was a warehouse near Ramapo. He had studied the place for weeks and discovered that the night watchman’s quitting time was exactly forty-five minutes before the day crew showed up at seven in the morning. That’s all the time we would have to do the job and load his van with the take. Rags had planned it all beforehand, down to the minute, and it went off without a hitch.

Afterwards, I drove us out to Park Slope. That’s where his fence had set up shop. I made seven hundred that time, which was a hell of a lot more than I usually got boxing on undercards around the city.

Rags let me in on the planning for his next job a couple of months later. It was another warehouse, this one near Poughkeepsie. That’s when my education really began. I watched and listened as he went through each step with methodical care, leaving as little to chance as possible. By the time we were ready to move, Rags probably knew the place

about as well anyone who worked there. The job, a shipment of imported watches, was done quickly and smoothly, leaving no trace for even the best cop in the world to use. You would have thought a couple of ghosts had broken into the place.

Rags had kept a close eye on me the whole time and came away impressed.

“I do believe you’re a natural, Sal. You’re cool under pressure, and I think you know enough not to take stupid chances.”

From that point on, I was a full partner and received fifty percent of everything we got from Brooklyn Murphy.

We never did more than three or four jobs a year. Sometimes Rags would study a place for weeks and pass on it, deciding that it was too risky or that the probable take wouldn’t be worth the time and effort involved.

“I’ll leave that one for the bozos,” he’d say .

I worked with Rags ten years before he had his heart attack. That was six months ago, on New Year’s Day 1979, at around four in the morning. We were on our way to Brooklyn after a job in Connecticut and were hauling close to sixty thousand worth of merchandise.

There we were, cruising along listening to Elvis on the radio, when Rags began complaining about an upset stomach. And then, all of a sudden, he started pawing at his shirtfront and saying that he couldn’t breathe, that he felt like a Buick was parked on his chest. I drove as fast as I could to the nearest hospital. All the way there he kept muttering things that didn’t make much sense, except for one time when he opened his eyes wide and looked straight at me.

“One job … too … many, kid,” he said in a breathless whisper.

He sighed, closed his eyes, and seemed to go to sleep. He was dead by the time we reached the hospital.

I learned a lot about Rags in the days leading up to his funeral. He had been born John Patrick Collier in a small town in Maine and was sixty-seven years old the night he died. He was a veteran, too, with a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, and two Purple Hearts he won fighting the Nazis. All those years working with the guy, and it wasn’t until he was gone that I learned he was an honest-to-goodness war hero.

There were at least a hundred people at the service, including Moira, his lady friend, who in the absence of the wife Rags never had played the part of a grieving widow. The priest talked about his heroism in the war, about how well-liked he was by everyone at the nightclub where he worked, and about what a kind, decent, and generous person he had been. Of course, he was only repeating things others had told him. The first time the guy laid eyes on Rags was the morning he saw him inside a casket.

The mourners sat quietly and listened to the priest. I listened just like the rest of them and thought how surprised they would have been to learn about all that the fine and decent Rags had stolen in his lifetime.

I went back to work the day after the funeral, but with Rags gone it no longer seemed like the same place, and I saw no reason for continuing to work there, just as I could see no point in going back to our lucrative sideline alone. Thanks to the stock market, I had socked away enough cash to see me through a lifetime’s worth of rainy days, so I handed in my notice and never went back.

A couple of weeks later, I got a letter telling me that I had been named sole heir of John Patrick Collier’s estate and asking me to call the office of Mr. Collier’s attorney to arrange a meeting at my earliest convenience. It was hard for me to think of Rags having an “estate” of any kind. He had lived in the same two-room apartment all the time I knew him. Even stranger was the notion that Rags had actually gone out and hired a lawyer. He had no use at all for cops, priests, insurance companies, and politicians, but he hated lawyers more than the whole lot of them put together.

I went to the attorney’s office the morning after the letter arrived. He was a roly-poly guy in scuffed loafers and a navy-blue off-the-rack suit I wouldn’t have been caught dead in. He got down to business immediately. Rags had left me everything: his van, a sizable wardrobe, and every dime he’d ever managed to put away. The clothes I eventually donated to the Salvation Army. A bodega owner up the street from me bought the van.

Rags’ bank account, on the other hand, came to nearly twenty-four thousand dollars -$23,845.43 to be exact, and I wasn’t about to part with that. I signed a few official-looking papers and the lawyer handed over a check from the Chase Manhattan Bank. I shook his pudgy hand and that was that.

Twenty-three thousand is nothing to sneeze at, but Rags could have put aside much more.

The plain truth is that he had a weakness for betting on ponies that never finished in the money. He was also fond of weekends at five-star hotels in the company of some very high-priced bush. He threw away a bundle on a lot of those.

He asked me to join him once, but the idea of a woman selling herself to any guy able to meet her price creeped me out. When I tried explaining how I felt to him, Rags laughed, saying, “Kid, one way or another, a man always pays for bush.”

Rags was also a clotheshorse who thought nothing of laying out a grand or more for a tailored suit. He was especially fond of pin-striped, double-breasted numbers. There must have been twenty of those hanging in his closet. Some of the suits were decades old, but he stubbornly refused to stop wearing them. There were times when he went out on the town looking like a Gentleman’s Quarterly ad from the nineteen forties. I tried convincing him to ditch the ancient duds, but he always said no.

“A good suit never goes out of style, Sal,” was all he had to say on that subject. *** “A woman can be a dangerous thing in our business. A little pillow-talk about one of our jobs can have some very ugly results. Let’s say you argue with a woman, ditch her, and she suddenly decides to get even by going to the cops, telling them all about our after-work activities. That puts us both up shit’s creek without a paddle. You get what I’m driving at?”

That was Rags’ warning about the dangers of getting too close to a woman. I believed him and for years kept all the women I met at an emotional arm’s length.

And then I met Gianna.

She was at Tiffany’s buying cufflinks for her husband and having trouble deciding which of a half dozen sets to buy. I was there to pick up a monogrammed money clip I’d ordered a couple of weeks before. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her and she noticed me looking her way.

“Why don’t you help me select a set of cufflinks, young man?” she asked with a smile.

I walked over and she looked up at me. That was the first time I got the full treatment from her green eyes. They went through me like a stiletto.

“Stay away from the showy ones,” I said to her. “Keep it simple and you can’t go wrong.”

I pointed to a pair of links in white gold.

“Like those, for example.”

She picked them up and handed them to the salesman.

“I believe I will take these. Please put them on my account and see to it that they are delivered no later than the end of this week.”

“Of course, Mrs. Lombardi. Is there anything else we can help you with today?”

“No, thank you. Good day.”

She turned and I watched her walk away. Her figure was a study in the geometry of curves.

Her red hair cascaded past her shoulders and provided the perfect finishing touch for a woman who really ought to have been born a goddess. She stopped and looked back at me.

“Will you join me for a cup of coffee? I owe you at least that much for being so helpful.”

We stepped out into a sunny spring day. The bright light revealed a few fine lines around her eyes. She wasn’t as young as I first thought, maybe just the other side of forty, but that couldn’t have mattered less to me.

“I know a little place near here that makes good espresso,” I said.

“I make much better espresso at my studio. It’s not far.”

Her studio was a small apartment with lots of morning light and a great East River view. It had one bedroom, a tiny kitchen, and a small living room. I learned later that she and her husband lived in a high-rise duplex on Park Avenue. Her entire studio would probably have fit into its foyer.

Artist’s materials and unframed canvases were scattered around everywhere. I don’t know a thing about art, but the paintings seemed pretty good, especially the landscapes of her native Tuscany. There were also a few strange portraits with half-finished faces leaning against a wall of the living room.

Her husband worked as some sort of financial troubleshooter for a multi-national corporation based in Rome, which meant that he was away a lot of the time. I never met the guy, but he had to have been nuts. If I was married to a woman as desirable as Gianna, I’d

try to stay close to home and post armed guards if I was forced to be away.

Anyway, that day at Tiffany’s was when it all began. Her husband was on a business trip in Chicago, so we spent that afternoon, and night, together. I don’t think I slept more than a couple of hours the whole time. We made love, talked for a while, had some wine, and made love again. Early the next morning we showered and made love a third time. Later, Gianna prepared a wonderful mushroom omelet that we washed down with the best coffee I’d ever tasted.

Back at my apartment that morning, I couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened.

One minute I’m standing in Tiffany’s and a couple of hours later I’m in bed with the most beautiful woman I’d ever met. Before that afternoon, I would have sworn that sort of thing only happened in movies or in the pages of Penthouse Magazine.

I asked Gianna about her husband only once, a year after we met and six months before Rags died.

“Enzo is older than I am by twenty years. When we met, he had been married to the same woman since the age of nineteen. I was in Rome, on holiday with my cousin, and Enzo was with a woman companion who was not his wife. He is a handsome and charming man, and I was immediately attracted to him. We were together almost ten years before I committed the unpardonable sin of becoming pregnant with our daughter. You see, caro, he never wanted me to have children. I was the young prize of his middle-age and after I gave birth, I suppose I became a too much like his first wife. He suddenly lost interest in me; I mean in bed. Oh, there is still the occasional … well, you understand. Now he is rarely home and keeps at least one mistress that I know of.”

“Why don’t you leave him?”

“I want to, especially now that we have met. Perhaps when my daughter is a little older and can understand such things. Today she is in a boarding school in Switzerland and unaware that anything is wrong at home. But what about you, caro? I know absolutely nothing at all about you or your family.”

“There’s nothing to know. My first memory was of the orphanage where I was dumped at the age of three. Later, it was one foster home after another until I was old enough to go into the navy.”

“But your mamma, your papa, don’t you want to know who they are?”

“Why would I? They didn’t give a shit about me, and I decided a long time ago to return the favor.”

“My poor darling. This is too sad, too sad. Pour me some wine and come to bed. We will console each other.”

I missed everything about her when we were apart and that’s something Rags warned me about.

“A good lay is a fine thing, Sal. In fact, I recommend it. It steadies the nerves. But never let yourself get to the point where you need only one woman, or think you do.” *** The day everything fell apart began in the most ordinary way. I had brunch at a favorite restaurant before stopping by my tailor’s to be fitted for a new suit. My broker’s office wasn’t far from there, so I dropped by to see him about a couple of stocks I had my eye on. I returned to my apartment around three and heard the phone ring just as I was opening the front door. I stopped and listened. There was a pause of ten seconds after the first two rings, then it rang twice more and fell silent. That was our signal, something Gianna came up with not long after we began seeing each other. Her studio had no phone and she believed having a conversation with me on her home phone would have been reckless, so she came up with a way of letting me know her husband was away.

It was the first time she’d called in almost two weeks, and I was hungry for the sight of her, for the sound of her voice and feel of her body. Our days together had become the best part of my life. If you want to call that love, go ahead. I’m not sure I know what love is.

Rags had always dismissed the idea of love by saying, “That’s one disease I never want to catch.”

I showered, shaved, and changed into a pale blue silk shirt and gray Brioni slacks. A cab dropped me off in front of her studio and I ran up the four flights to her door. I knew something was wrong the moment I saw her. In the past, when I visited her after a long absence, Gianna had always greeted me wearing a sheer nightgown and her favorite shade of lipstick, nothing more. This time she was in a black cocktail dress and had on a string of Mikimoto pearls I’d bought for her.

We kissed and held each other.

“Let’s have coffee, caro. I’ve prepared something to go along with it.”

Gianna was a wonderful cook. I used to joke that in the time we had been together her meals had become a kind of foreplay. We’d sit for a while eating and talking softly about nothing in particular. Her expression would gradually soften and she’d sigh and say something like, “I think I will lie down for a while, caro.” I’d follow her into the bedroom, where she’d stretch and let her nightgown fall to the floor before getting into bed.

I’d had my share of women before Gianna, probably more than my share, but being with her was like nothing I had ever experienced. It wasn’t just her figure or those amazing green eyes that drew me to her. The attraction went far deeper than that; it was Gianna herself, everything that life and experience had made of her.

She broke the news to me later on, while we were still in bed.

“Caro, Enzo has been called back to Rome.”

“And?” “And, my darling, I must go with him.”

“Why? Can’t you stay here until he comes back?”

“He is not coming back. He has been reassigned to the corporate headquarters. Believe me, my love, I tried to come up with reasons for staying in New York a while longer, but I’m afraid he would not hear of it. I must leave with him. We have a week, perhaps two.”

“So, what happens now? I mean to us?”

“Why don’t you come to Rome? Take a flat there and we can be together just as before. I have a studio very much like this one on the outskirts of the city. Nothing has to change for us.”

“Rome?”

“Certainly. Why not? Don’t you care enough for me to do that?”

“Baby, I’d swallow a bag of nails for you, but … Rome? I don’t know.”

She turned away from me and sat up in bed. I feasted on the sight of her. My god, she was beautiful.

“Is there any chance he’ll change his mind, stay here?”

“He must go or leave his position with the company, and that he will never do.”

“Then I guess that’s it for us, isn’t it?”

She turned toward me with a quick, cat-like move.

“Is that all you have to say to me? Have I meant so very little to you?”

Her voice was charged with hurt and anger. Those extraordinary eyes of hers filled with tears. In all our time together, I had never seen her cry.

I knew exactly what Rags would have said to me at that instant, could almost hear him urging me on. “Get your ass out of there, Sal. A good-looking kid like you can have a dozen others just like her.”

But Rags would have been wrong. There were no others like Gianna. Still, I listened to that imagined voice and got out of bed.

She watched in silence as I dressed. When I was done, I walked over to her and touched her face.

“Baby, I don’t know what to say.”

“Say you’ll come to Rome.”

I kissed her before I left, tasting the salt in her tears. Standing out on First Avenue, I don’t think I could have felt more miserably alone if I’d suddenly been transported to the middle of the Gobi Desert.

It was more than sixty blocks to my place on Tenth Street, but I decided to walk the whole way. That turned out to be a mistake, because on my way home I passed the shop that brought me out of retirement for one last job. ***

The shoes slipped onto my feet like a second skin.

“How do they feel, sir?”

The salesman was a nervous little guy with a pencil-thin mustache and slicked back red hair.

“Good.”

“They are handmade by Italian craftsmen. Only the very finest materials are used.”

I walked around the shop. The shoes felt like twin miracles.

I sat down and the salesman gently removed the shoes. He put them back in their tissuelined box with the reverence of a priest handling the Host during Mass.

The place called itself a boutique and claimed to specialize in “fine footwear.” It was the kind of shop that didn’t have customers, only a clientele, and that never put price tags on anything.

I must have gone by that same shop a dozen times without noticing a thing, but on that afternoon I looked into the display window and spotted a pair of gray dress loafers perched atop a glass pedestal and suddenly nothing in the world seemed as important as those shoes. I had to have them.

The salesman was getting ready to put the shoes away when I asked if the shop had a bathroom.

“We have a lavatory, yes.”

His pinched face became a mask of uncertainty and suspicion.

“Too much coffee,” I explained with a wink.

“But of course, sir. You’ll find it in the back, through the stock room and to the right.”

That might have been the moment I first thought about hitting the place. Or maybe it had happened earlier, when I first walked into the shop and the little salesman gave me a snooty once over.

On my way to the john, I made careful mental notes of everything I saw, especially the security system. I also caught a glimpse of a nice-looking blonde sitting in the shop’s cramped office. She looked up, a little startled to see me, and smiled before going back to her work.

The bathroom had a window, far too small for a grown man to go through, but more than big enough for my purposes. I flushed the toilet. The sound covered the noise made when I forced the creaky window open. I looked out at the alleyway that ran behind all the shops along that street. I flushed again and forced the window shut.

I returned to the shop.

“Do these come in any other colors?”

“Mocha, gray, and the black you’ve just tried on. Of course, this style may be ordered in any color you might have in mind.”

“How much are they?”

The salesman looked up at me as if I’d insulted him. He was clearly not used to being asked about price.

“Well, sir, this slip-on is nineteen hundred and fifty dollars.”

“Does that include tax?”

“Tax, sir?”

“Yes. You know, that thing we’re all forced to pay the state?”

“Nineteen hundred and fifty dollars is the price, sir. I would assume that includes all taxes and fees.”

“I’ll take a pair in gray.”

“Certainly. I’ll be back directly, sir.”

While the salesman was in the stock room, I took another look around, zeroing in on an antiquated security setup that wouldn’t have given a rank amateur a minute’s trouble.

“Here you are, sir. Will there be anything else?”

“No, I think that’ll be it for today.”

We went to the register and I handed him twenty-one hundred dollars bills. His twitchy hands had to count them twice before getting it right. Diner’s Club cards were probably more his speed.

When I got home, I put on my running togs and laced up a pair of old Nikes. Then I went for a long run, the way I used to when I was still in training for fights. I ran faster and farther than ever before, ran until my legs felt like lead weights and my breath came in ragged gasps. Afterwards, I showered, threw myself on the bed, and fell into a dreamless sleep.

I woke at noon the next day and went out for lunch at a local greasy spoon. Back at my place, I sat at the kitchen table going through a few days’ worth of mail. Mixed in with bills and junk was a statement from my broker informing me that I was thirty-one thousand dollars wealthier than I had been the previous month. The news meant nothing to me.

Bored and restless, I went for a walk and ended up going all the way down to Battery Park.

The day had turned cloudy and a strong wind roiled the gray harbor waters. I sat watching the ferries come and go, finally boarding one and making the trip to Staten Island and back.

By the time the ferry bumped and scraped its way back into a Manhattan slip, I had made up my mind to come out of retirement for one final job: the shop that sold me the pair of nineteen-hundred-dollar shoes.

I didn’t try to fool myself into thinking that Rags would have approved of the place I’d chosen for my first solo job. He would have stared at me in disbelief and said something like, “A shoe store? Are you fucking crazy? What do you expect Brooklyn Murphy to do with a haul like that? Kid, that idea is so dumb it gives me a headache just thinking about it.”

The job presented me with a problem right away. The alleyway leading to the shoe store’s rear entrance was blocked by two six-foot-high metal doors. Scaling them wouldn’t be a problem, but I had no way of knowing what might lay behind them and that troubled me because it violated one of Rags’ sacred rules: never go into any part of a job blind.

The doors were also in plain sight of the street and anyone walking or driving by. I spent a week casing the job and never saw them open.

The doors were flanked by a Japanese restaurant and a leather goods shop. The shop closed at six, but the lights in the restaurant didn’t go out until eleven-thirty, sometimes later. Sundays were the only exception. The Japanese restaurant went dark around ten that evening, so deciding when to do the job was simple: I would have to do it as late as possible on a Sunday night.

I parked my rented Chevy on a street off of Third Avenue. It was a few hours past midnight and raining buckets, which was a real piece of luck. That late on a Sunday, heavy rain is close to a guaranty of deserted Manhattan streets.

I wrapped my burglar’s tools and a length of black electrical tape inside a tightly rolled up plastic garbage bag then tucked the bag into the waistband of my jeans and slipped into a waterproof poncho. I jogged back to the alleyway doors, paused for a moment, closed my eyes, and took a deep breath, clearing my mind of everything except the task at hand, just as Rags had taught me to do years ago.

I upended a sidewalk trash bin and dragged it to the doors. Standing on its base, I took one final look up and down the rain-soaked street before pulling myself over the doors.

I landed in a small outdoor dining area. The owners of the restaurant had decorated the space with hanging lanterns and bonsai trees in terracotta pots. A half dozen tables were crowded into the area separated from the rest of the long alleyway by another fence decorated with a mural of Mount Fuji.

I got to the shoe store’s back entrance a couple of minutes later. Wearing the same ski mask and lambskin driving gloves I’d used on dozens of jobs with Rags, I got to work, first disabling the shop’s old alarm system and then picking the backdoor lock. I bit off a piece of the black electrical tape I’d brought with me and used it to cover the surveillance camera’s lens. I couldn’t be sure the thing was recording anything, but as Rags told me over and over, “Nobody ever got nabbed because they were being too careful.”

Thick rugs silenced my footsteps as I moved past the bathroom and small office into a long, narrow stock room. I used a penlight to find what I wanted. There were fourteen pairs of dress shoes in my size. At nineteen hundred dollars each, that was more than thirty-five thousand worth of merchandise. Brooklyn Murphy might have given me a couple a grand for the lot, complaining all the while about how hard it would be to unload shoes. But I wasn’t planning to part with that particular take, even though Rags was fanatical about never keeping anything from a job.

“It’s evidence, kid. We’re in this strictly for the money. Fence the stuff, collect the cash.

That’s how it’s done. You want something for yourself, go out and buy it like everyone else.”

I went about methodically taking the shoes out of their boxes and putting them into the plastic garbage bag I’d brought with me. I returned each empty box to its place on the shelf.

It might be days, maybe weeks, before the little salesman discovered the theft. I was done in less than fifteen minutes.

And then I heard it, a muffled thumping sound from somewhere behind me. I put the garbage bag down and held my breath. I heard it again. It was coming from the rear of the shop. There were only two things back there: a bathroom and an office, and I was sure it wasn’t coming from the closet-like bathroom. I crept to the office and listened at the closed door. What I heard next sent a chill through me -- another sound, distinctly human, a woman’s voice softly moaning.

I could assume that whoever was in the office hadn’t heard me moving around in the stock room, which meant that I was free to leave as quietly as I’d entered. But what if they had heard me and already called the cops? This was Mid-town Manhattan. One call to the local precinct and within minutes a dozen squad cars would rocket into the street from every direction, sirens wailing and flashing lights painting the rainy night red and blue.

I turned the doorknob slowly, careful not to make a sound, opening the door a fraction of an inch at a time.

It took every ounce of self-control not to laugh out loud when I saw what was going on.

There was this flabby whale of a guy with his pants down around his ankles. He was far too preoccupied to have heard me moving around in the stockroom. The guy probably wouldn’t have heard a Mack truck driving through the place. You see, he and a woman were using the office’s pea- green sofa as a bed and he was in between her legs laying pipe like there was no tomorrow. The woman turned out to be the pretty blonde I’d seen the day I bought the shoes. Her eyes were lightly shut and she was moaning softly.

I shut the door as noiselessly as I’d opened it.

“Time and distance, Sal. Remember them. You ain’t got two better friends in our line of work. Work fast and get out. Then put as many miles as you can between you and the heist.”

Rags taught me that very early on, but after I closed the door I hesitated, sat there stupidly wondering about the blonde. What had driven a good-looking woman to take up with that slob? I felt sorry for her, and that was a mistake, because in that split second of weakness I let my guard down, and thoughts of Gianna suddenly flooded my consciousness. I pictured her again, as real as the last time I saw her sitting up in bed, looking impossibly beautiful. I remembered her voice, remembered the scent of her perfume, and my throat tightened with the need to hold her again.

Another sound from inside the office snapped me out of it. I was on a job and a woman, any woman, was the last thing in the world I should be thinking about.

“Women will kill your concentration, Sal. Keep your mind on your work. You’ll have lots of time for snatch afterwards.”

Rags said that to me after our very first job together, a mentor instructing his pupil on the dangers of getting too close to a woman, and yet he had lived with a string of women in the ten years before his heart attack. I asked him about that one night on our way back from Brooklyn Murphy’s.

“Not the same thing, kid. I’ve learned how to handle women. It’s a skill that comes with gray hair and arthritis. A boy your age gets excited, he starts thinking with his dick, and that’s when he loses focus, slips up, and gives cops the break they need to nail him.”

Moira, the last woman Rags had shacked up with, was a pretty fifty-something brunette with nice gray eyes and tits the size of King Kong’s balls. I think she really cared for him.

How he felt about her, or any woman, that I never could figure out, since he never spoke about any of them.

Something really weird happened just then, something I’ve thought about over and over but never been able to explain. Huddled in that narrow hallway, listening to what was happening on the other side of the office door, I suddenly felt as if I was standing outside my own skin, looking down at myself. What I saw was a pitiful thief who had walked past an office occupied by two people, two potential witnesses, like a clueless amateur. My heart began racing as an icy panic shot through me. I sprang to my feet and hurried out of there.

I ripped the strip of electrical tape from the surveillance camera lens and quickly reconnected the wires powering the alarm system. It didn’t occur to me until much later that both had probably been off all along, shut down by either the blonde or her lover.

“Weathermen make mistakes all the time and keep their jobs. But in our sideline, Sal, one mistake can get us three to five as guests of the state.”

Rags must have said that to me a dozen times.

I stood on one of the Japanese restaurant’s tables and vaulted over the big iron doors onto the sidewalk. I jogged toward Third Avenue, stopping only once -- to toss my garbage bag full of shoes into a half-filled trash bin.

On the way back to my place, I threw my ski mask, gloves, burglar’s tools, and poncho out of the car window into the rain.

I slept badly that night. I was jolted awake once, sure I’d heard Gianna’s signal, and bolted from my bed to the phone. All I got for my trouble was a dial tone.

“Come to Rome, caro,” she had said, as if leaving New York were as simple as getting on a subway. I was a city kid with roots deep in Manhattan’s gritty sidewalks. Rome might as well have been Mars. But as days became weeks, and weeks became months, I felt those roots begin to weaken and finally break.

On an unusually warm December afternoon, as I was on the way to my tailor’s shop in SoHo, I passed a travel agency with color posters of Italy in its display window. Without pausing to think much about what I was doing, I went inside and arranged with an agent for a first-class plane ticket to Rome. He also reserved a suite for me at a hotel on the Via Vittorio Emanuele.

As I left the agency, I told myself that the trip was only a vacation, nothing more, but Rags’ voice broke in as I struggled to believe the lie. He’d said something to me once, something I’d nearly forgotten. It was many years ago, as we stood having a cigarette outside the nightclub where we both worked.

“Lie to your priest or your mother, lie to your wife if you’re idiot enough to have one, but never, ever lie to yourself, Sal. That makes you a loser.”

I updated my passport, left a forwarding address at the local post office, saw to it that my rent was paid up for several months, and visited my bank to arrange for funds to cover a stay in Italy.

I visited Rags the Saturday afternoon before my flight.

I put the flowers I’d brought with me by his headstone. His plot needed sprucing up and I took care of that. Even though he’d been gone nearly a year, it still felt unreal to be looking down at the white-marble stone I’d had made for him: John Patrick Collier, December 25, 1912 – January 1, 1979.

I sat by the grave, talking to him as if he could still hear me.

“I need her, Rags, and I’ll find her even if I have to pay a private dick to track her down for me.”

I laughed because I knew what he would have done if he was still around. He would have looked at me with contempt in his pale blue eyes and called me a “sucker” for turning my life upside down over a woman. I could almost hear him saying, “Don’t bother to write me, because I ain’t gonna answer. You’re too dumb to waste a stamp on.”

I imagined him walking away from me, a wiry little guy in a gray fedora and gleaming wingtips, wearing a perfectly tailored double-breasted suit, a pocketful of change jangling in his pocket with every step.

I like to think he cared enough about me to have turned around and said, in that raspy voice of his, “Take care of yourself, Sal.” But who knows? He might just have kept walking.

DEAD IN THE WATER TOM KOPERWAS RATS

Benjamin Potter, the live-in superintendent of the Nadir Building, leaned forward on the three-legged stool in the open doorway of his crude apartment and listened intently to the rusty cast-iron drains in the surrounding basement gurgling fitfully, spitting gobbets of slime and green bottomland water onto the bare cement floor.

“Patience, Furfur,” the corpulent, forty-five-year-old custodian whispered to the 18-pound American Bobtail Cat sitting next to him in a black, studded cat collar and leash. “Our latenight visitors should be arriving soon. I bet you can hear them coming, can’t you?”

As if on cue, a swarm of sewer rats emerged from the drains, their slick brown coats glistening in the glaring light of the open bulbs dangling awkwardly from the basement ceiling. Boldly ignoring Benjamin and the cat held firmly in his hands, they scurried up the narrow wooden ramp standing in the middle of the floor, greedily devouring the thin patina of strategically placed peanut crumbs. At the top of the ramp, the hungry rodents pushed through the one-way flap covering the enlarged orifice of the five-gallon transparent water jug, dropping one by one to the base of the sealed container, where a mound of delectable crushed peanuts lay.

Benjamin smiled broadly when the number of rodents trapped in the jug totaled twenty.

The city paid a rat bounty of $5.00 a head. The night’s haul would bring in $100.00; plenty of money for a case of beer and smokes and plenty of fun.

“Your turn now, Furfur,” said the custodian, eying the cat crouching at the full length of its leash, its muscles tensed like a powerful, organic spring. Furfur pulled firmly against the leash. The breakaway collar unsnapped, and he leapt high into the air. The rat pack had but a brief moment to scatter to the safety of the drains; enough time for all but one, a young, sleek pup.

“No wonder your breed is called the Golden Retriever of cats” laughed Benjamin, eying the big Bobtail trotting toward him carrying the rat’s limp body in its mouth. Once he’d dropped the bloody gift by the apartment door, they went inside.

“You’re an extremely efficient hunter,” commented Benjamin, switching the TV on in an effort to drown out the sound of heavy rain drumming against the basement windows, rain that had been falling incessantly for hours. “Your body is designed for it,” he continued, raising an index finger to emphasize the point. “But we humans must use our heads if we’re to be efficient hunters. Take my rat trap. It caught twenty rats, and I didn’t have to lift a finger.

“Okay. So they’re not dead, Furfur,” he chuckled, as the Bobtail rubbed affectionately against his leg. “But I don’t have to bite each one to kill them! No sir. In the morning, I’ll simply lower the jug into the big sump pit and let it slowly fill with water. The rats will thrash about like devils and crawl over each other, fighting to keep their heads in the remaining pocket of air as it steadily shrinks. Yet it’ll all be to no avail. They’ll soon be dead in the water.”

Benjamin dropped down onto the couch and closed his eyes. The numerous drywall and electrical chores he’d done that day for the tenants had left him exhausted. He hardly heard the T.V. announcer’s voice as he drifted off to sleep.

“Winds of 100 mph and higher have been observed. The approaching storm is expected to increase water levels along the coast by 30 feet or more...”

Benjamin woke up with a start, the unfamiliar sound of Furfur‘s yowl in his ears.

“What’s going on?” he cried.

Looking down, he discovered the answer; dirty sewer water flowing into the apartment and across the floor. Jumping off the couch, he ran to the apartment door and threw it open.

After he swatted Furfur with his hand, the cat jumped off the chair it was perched on and ran across the wet basement floor to the stairs. Grabbing a pair of shoes, Benjamin ran to the elevator, splashing in the shallow water.

Benjamin entered the elevator and started up. Suddenly, it stopped dead between the floors. A dark stream of dirty sewer water gushed into the elevator from the vents, rising quickly to his knees, then to his waist. Benjamin reached for the cellphone in his pocket to call for help, only to discover he’d left it in his apartment. The custodian thought he could hear faint voices calling from above. Maybe they would rescue him. He shouted at the top of his lungs. Then he began to scream as the fetid water rose rapidly to his shoulders. Soon, there was only a small pocket of air left in the top of the elevator. Benjamin closed his eyes, and his mind wandered back to the plight of the rats. He was in a trap similar to theirs.

The elevator was like a big jug filling with water. Soon, the last pocket of air would be gone; then he too would be dead in the water...

Benjamin opened his eyes and found himself lying on the couch, breathing heavily. The elevator. The floodwater. It had all been a dream engendered by the newscaster’s warnings of the approaching storm.

He sat bolt upright when he heard the clanging of the elevator alarm. Looking down, he saw sewer water pouring in across the floor. Jumping to his feet, he pushed open the door and sent his frantic cat out into the rapidly rising water. Grabbing his shoes and cellphone, he waded toward the stairs. He was partway up the stairwell when he paused to look back into the basement. The rising water was filled with rats swimming out of the drains. Leaping out of the water, they bounded up the stairs, running around his feet.

Turning on his heels to ascend the stairs, he lost his balance and fell.

The custodian came down hard, landing next to the water’s edge. Without interruption, the rats kept on coming, jumping onto his prostrate body, leaping from it to the stairs above.

Benjamin pushed himself up to a sitting position. Try as he might, he was unable to rise to his feet. He must have broken a bone, for the pain was excruciating. The water flowed over his legs. Desperate, he tried crawling up the steps, but he kept slipping back down into the water. Reaching into his pocket for his cellphone, he found it was gone, probably lost when he took his fall. Benjamin was sure he heard voices coming from the main floor. He shouted for help, but to no avail.

The water rose rapidly to his chest, then to his neck. Unable to move, he knew the grim truth. The rats had escaped, but he was trapped. Dead in the water.

RIGHT WHERE IT BELONGS BRI EBERHART VICE AND ADDICTION

Five painstaking, miserable minutes left until freedom.

Loosening my tie, I methodically close out each browser tab, acting like I care, but I really don’t. The desk fan continues to whirl as the lady in the cubicle eats yet another piece of candy. The crinkling wrapper is pushing me closer to the edge. Why do I have so many open tabs? I don’t care enough to see what they say, knowing they all have something to do with work.

Three minutes.

Grabbing the backpack hidden under my desk, I pull out a warm Red Bull, hesitating before opening it. Do I need this? Yes. Piling all the useless papers together, I toss them in a bin with my pens and highlighter.

I’m the master of looking busy.

One minute.

I log off thirty seconds early.

Slinging the strap over my shoulder, I tentatively stand and look both ways before stepping out into the aisle. The coast is clear; no boss in sight. Linda, the candy-eating lady from the cubicle over, begins asking me what my plans are for the night, but I’m gone before she can finish her sentence. I can’t idly chat with anyone; it’s too exhausting. The sweet smell of my energy drink wafts into the air as I carelessly make my way to the elevator, splashing it on myself and dousing my hand.

I’m in the elevator—I made it. Wiping my sticky fingers on the back of my pants, I dig for a cigarette in the side pocket, bite the filtered end, but hold off on lighting it. I’ve been busted before for not waiting until I’m outside.

The elevator doors open as “Fuck,” slips out of my mouth. My boss and two other poor saps are waiting at the garage door for me.

“There he is,” my boss chimes as if we’re good pals.

Groaning inwardly, I contemplate my options. I still probably have to be nice even though I’m off the clock, right? What would happen if I’m not? Can I walk past them, unchain my bike, and disappear forever?

I’m still standing in the elevator, cigarette dangling from my lips as he waits for a response.

Move, you fool. Reluctantly, I lower my smoke and stuff it back into my shirt pocket.

“Here I am,” I mutter, stepping out with a perfect smile painted on my face. I’m also the master of faking insincerity. “Mr. Walker, I’m shocked to see you down here.”

Mr. Walker tries too hard to be one of the guys. He does his best to fit in and be included, although he’s almost double the age of every other employee here. The glaring difference between the two of us: I don’t want inclusion. I’m a life insurance agent by day and a fucking nobody at night.

It’s great.

“Tommy,” he starts. I hate the nickname Tommy, but he doesn’t care. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve corrected him. “You’ve been here for a year now, right?”

“Mm,” I confirm while sidestepping to the glass door leading to the parking garage, planning my escape.

“I think it’s time we took you somewhere.”

I glance at the two others, Derek and Shawn. Not terrible people, but I still couldn’t care less to be in their presence. “Oh? Tonight? I actually—” “Nonsense.” Mr. Walker cuts me off. “You’re coming with us.”

I argue my case, but they ultimately shoot me down. Here’s the thing about office jobs, if you’re not willing to play the part, you may as well kiss your job goodbye. And I’ve become reasonably comfortable with receiving a weekly paycheck. Mr. Walker slaps me on the back and leaves his hand resting there as he ushers me out to the vehicles.

The four of us pile into some pickup truck. Sorry, I don’t know the name. I’m not a car guy.

As we back out, I stare longingly at my chained-up bicycle. Tension builds in my shoulders,

and I have to remind myself to unclench my jaw. I can get through the night, surely?

We ride in silence for a while before I finally ask, “Where are we going?”

Derek and Shawn smirk at each other from the front seat while Mr. Walker punches me a little too hard on the arm. “You’ll see.”

The atmosphere seems to change; I’m buzzing with some unseen energy. Mr. Walker must feel it, too, because he turns to me and announces some rules we need to go over. Great.

They’re bringing me to a strip club, a fight club, or some other equally harrowing place I don’t want to be at, especially with my boss, of all people.

Before his rules, though, the next question out of his mouth takes me off guard. He hands me a flask, and I swallow a small sip while he asks, “Do you believe in magic?”

Choking down the whiskey, I cough out a response. “Magic, sir?”

“Yes. Not like pulling a rabbit out of a hat but real magic? The impossible? The extraordinary?”

“Uhm…” I scratch my head, handing him back the flask, unsure how to reply. Do I lie?

Pretend I do to fit in? His eager smile is telling me to buy into it. But instead, I say, “Not really, no.”

“Well, Tommy, you’re in for a treat. What you see tonight... Well, we have to keep this world a secret so keep quiet.”

“World?”

“Things are different there...” He hesitates before adding, “Maybe you’ll never understand them. But why shy away from it? We must embrace it. I’ll show you.”

“I’m not sure I’m following.”

“Keep your eyes peeled. You’ll see.”

My gaze drifts out the window; there’s nothing but trees. Mr. Walker always seemed a l ittle outlandish but never insane. I clench my hands, willing myself to get through tonight without being fired.

“Well, where is it?”

“Right where it belongs.”

My heart speeds up a tad, a newly found fire vibrating inside me as I continue watching out the window, waiting for something to jump out of the woods. Within minutes, the trees clear, and we arrive at an abandoned parking lot. Off in the distance, arcade games shine, and poorly put-together rides squeak. Flashing lights bounce into the night sky, and music blares from giant speakers.

“We’re at… a carnival?” I ask, perplexed.

“Not just a carnival, but thee carnival—where anything can happen.”

I’m slow to get out of the truck as Derek and Shawn bound to the entrance like they’re eight years old again. Then, giving up on all pretenses, I pull the cigarette out of my shirt and light it, following Mr. Walker to the gates.

My head grows fuzzy the longer I stand in line. I’m growing intoxicated, although I only had that one shot of whiskey. Stubbing out the cigarette, I rub my eyes to gain focus. I don’t recall moving, but now I’m next in line. An attendee with a top hat, black eye makeup, and a shockingly red vest holds his hand out for payment.

“How much?” I ask.

“A tooth.”

Shaking my head, assuming I misheard him, I repeat my question and get the same answer.

“I’m not giving you a tooth! What the fuck?” I’m shocked, but I can’t seem to focus. Why is my head throbbing? The attendee doubles, and I squint to turn him back into one person.

Mr. Walker comes back to see what the holdup is. “I’m not giving this guy my tooth!” I exclaim, my words slurring.

Mr. Walker waves his hands in front of himself as if to clear up a misunderstanding.

“Tommy, just give him a tooth. I told you, things are different here. Pick a molar. It’s quite easy to pull out.”

Standing there in disbelief, I come to the conclusion that I must be sleeping, or in a coma, or maybe I died. This isn’t real life. A sudden power takes hold of me, and I find myself reaching in and snatching a tooth. He was right; it comes right out as if it was loose all along. I drop it into the attendee’s hand, and he thanks me for my drug addiction.

“What?” I whip my head back to respond, but the sidewalk below moves, whisking me away.

Mr. Walker is on a different trajectory, but he yells out for me to enjoy the ride. I attempt to move, but my feet cement into the sidewalk. My body feels light, filled with helium, and I’m fairly sure I’d float away if they didn’t tether me to the ground.

All around me is darkness—a circus full of nightmares. Exhibits display strange sights, and I’m slow to grasp the point. Men on unicycles circle past me, faces painted white with black circles around their eyes, masquerade outfits with long coattails dyed crimson, purple, or charcoal. Their smiles are sinister, and they’re all watching me. Women glide around with flaming hula hoops. They’re also dangling in the air, ankles attached to drapes. My brain is so foggy; I search for the correct word. Acrobats? Yeah, I think that’s it. They match the men in style, all painted to look like skeletons. Some wear flowers in their hair. They’re watching me, too. Sweat beads on my forehead, and my heart pounds steadily on.

The sidewalk slows at my first exhibit, my stomach clenching at the sight. It’s a cage filled with funhouse mirrors, all portraying different images: large, small, pulled long, or wide. A medical exam table is in the middle, with a tray of scalpels and needles surrounding it. A human is locked inside, touching their bandaged face. They wear a corset that digs into their flesh, squeezing them into an impossible size. Feet crammed into stilettos, giving them an unnecessary height advantage when they’re trapped alone in the enclosure. I want to say something to them, but I’m at a loss for words. Can they even hear me? Why are they locked up?

My heart drops as the sidewalk kicks back into motion. The longer I’m stuck in this place, the more my body seems to be rejecting it.

A man with the face of a tiger approaches me on stilts. Is that a mask? I can’t tell—it’s too lifelike. Horrified, I avoid him, but he taunts me in circles since I have nowhere to go.

“Jelly beans?” he offers.

I say, “No thanks,” as my hand reaches out and grabs the lot.

“French fries?”

No. “Yes, please.”

I continue to eat against my will as the pavement leads me past another case. A metal bar is locked firmly across the door as if someone is worried the creatures inside will escape. I hold my breath, waiting to get a full view, gasping when I see it’s all children.

At first, I struggle against my concrete bindings, desperate to help them, but then fear freezes me in place. I yell, but they can’t hear my screams either. Why are they locked in there? Where are their parents? I glance at the tiger man helplessly, but he doesn’t respond.

Wires are connecting the children to television screens. Virtual reality has taken hold; they’ll never see the light of day again.

The man on the stilts is still feeding me, and I can’t say no. My body is relaxing. Distant thoughts wonder where the other three are, but I also don’t care. I’m almost yearning for the next attraction.

The thoroughfare drags me through a jail-like building containing multiple cells. From the outside, it looks like a resort, but the inside carries an ominous feeling. Something dark and unrelenting has taken hold of these people, and there’s no letting go. Gliding past each cell, I can’t help but notice each locked-up person has a different addiction: video games, casino games, phones, tablets, and gym equipment. One cell is even full of designer shoes.

“Who are these people?” I ask.

“Lost souls.”

“How did they get here?”

“How do we all get here?”

My head swims as I try to process the information, but it’s all lost on me. “Am I like them?”

“You are them.”

Hit with sudden gut-wrenching fear, the jelly beans in my stomach twist painfully as sweat beads on the back of my neck—I’m them, and they’re me—a civilization brought to its knees by vices.

We’re crutching our way through this world, and there’s no escape.

Not unless we wake up; set ourselves free.

“They can change, can’t they? They can break free?” The tiger man’s lack of response tells me they’ve been here for years; there’s no changing now. He gazes down at me, and there’s knowing in his eyes.

Without words, he’s telling me he’ll see me soon; he sees everyone at some point.

But not me.

“I can change, I swear,” I promise.

His mouth twists, doubting me and my sticky Red Bull hands.

“We’ll see.” He stilts off.

The path spits me out beyond the gates, the energy slowly burning off. Derek, Shawn, and Mr. Walker are outside the truck, waiting for me like eager children, so happy to have shared their secret with me. It’s too late for them—glued in their ways. I wonder how long they have until they have a cage of their own.

The sun’s rising above the tree line, and all the flashing lights from before are turning off.

The dawn is now eerily silent compared to when I entered earlier. Using my tongue, I search for the missing molar, and it’s there. Was any of this real, or was it truly magic? Glancing down at my watch, I’m stunned to find I only have an hour until my shift starts.

I take in the three faces watching me, expecting me to proclaim my love for whatever this was, but there’s nothing wrong with me.

I don’t have an addiction; I’m nothing like these people.

Instead, I look at Mr. Walker and helplessly say, “I have to go now. I can’t be late for work.”

It turns out I’m the master of lying to myself, too.

SPACE LOOPS STEVEN FRENCH “Wait, so you’re telling me that there can be loops in space?!”

Derek pushed his plate away and looked over the table at Basmah, leaning back in her chair across from him.

“Yeah, come on Ms Astronavigator, tell us all about these space-loops!”

That was Tyrone, sitting next to Basmah, arms folded and smirking. Basmah sighed, flicked two fingers at him and sat forward.

“First of all,” she said, glancing at Tyrone, “it’s ‘Dr Astronavigator’ thank you very much.”

Tyrone raised his hands in surrender.

“And second,” she continued, looking now at Derek, “they’re loops in space-time, not space.”

“Oooh, ‘loops in space-time’, that explains everything,” said Tyrone, into his mug of coffee.

Basmah punched him on the thigh.

“Owww!”

“And they were predicted by Einstein.” She paused for effect, then, when Derek’s expression remained blank, she added: “One of the greatest scientists of the last two hundred years? Who came up with the Theory of General Relativity. You know, the one that provides our basic understanding of all this …” She waved her arms around to encompass the galley they were in, the ship as a whole, and the universe beyond.

“I thought,” Tyrone began, ignoring the dark look that Basmah was giving him, “that according to Einstein’s relativity theory, nothing can actually travel faster than the speed of light. So ….?!” And he in turn waved his arms around.

Basmah rolled her eyes.

“You are such an arse,” she told him.

“No, no, he’s right,” Derek interjected. “I remember reading something about that. So how can you tell me we might run into these ‘space-loops’ when the theory you’re telling us this Einstein bloke used to predict them also says we can’t be running at all?!”

He finished on a note of triumph, glancing over at Tyrone for affirmation. Tyrone, wisely, decided to closely examine the coffee stains on the table-top.

“Oh for f-…”, Basmah muttered, running her hand over her face. “Look,” she began, “we’re able to ‘run’, as you put it, because we, or rather this ship, together with all the other spacecraft traveling to and fro in this particular quadrant, are doing so using Krasnikov tubes…”

It was Tyrone’s turn to lean forward.

“Bas, mate,” he said to her, “he’s only a cook. He’s not going to know anything about Ktubes or whatever!”

“Hey!” exclaimed Derek. “I’m not a complete idiot. I do know that we’re able to reach other systems by going down these tubes that someone discovered lying about all over the place …”

“Ok, sorry,” Tyrone replied, “no offence meant.”

“But I still don’t understand where these ‘loops’ of yours come from,” Derek told Basmah.

“Ok,” she said, “in Einstein’s theory, they’re called ‘closed causal loops’. And they’re called that because not only is each event both the effect of its predecessor and the cause of its successor but in this case the string of events is joined up so it forms a closed curve in space-time.”

“And that means, if you went along one you’d end up right back where you started,” Tyrone added, looking meaningfully at Derek.

“You mean, we’d end up going back in time?” the latter asked.

“Umm, yes, sure, but …” Basmah began to say.

“But we’re not moving along a loop now, are we? I mean, we’re going down one of these whatsit tubes and they just go from one place to another, right?”

Basmah cleared her throat but before she could say anything more, Tyrone spoke up again: “The thing is, in principle, two K-tubes that happen to be close enough could spontaneously join together, kind of end-to-end, and make a loop. Out of tubes. And the thing is, a universe which had these tube-loops in it would be observationally indistinguishable from ours. Owww! Would you stop punching me in the leg?!”

“When you stop winding up the new crew members,” Basmah told him.

“You mean, there could be a bunch of these tube-loops out there and we wouldn’t necessarily know it?” Derek asked, looking around the room as if one might suddenly appear out of nowhere.

Basmah lowered her forehead to the table and muttered something under her breath.

“Bloody hell,” Derek continued. “They warned us about the effects of cosmic radiation and the possibility of … of … dark energy surges or whatever, but space-loops? What the …?!”

Basmah raised her head, glared at Tyrone, then smiled at Derek.

“Yes, in principle that’s right, they could exist and we wouldn’t know it. However …” and here she looked significantly at Tyrone again, “according to our best theories, they’re highly improbable and even if they did exist they would most likely be very small loops.”

“Wait, so you’re telling me that there can be loops in space?!”

BLOODSONG RUCHI SNEHA BLOOD, NEEDLES

Kai was tinkering with Mzia again. Altair was only aware of it because of the noises every night: the cursing, the clinks of screwdrivers against metal, the skritch-skratch of pencils dragging against paper (yes, Kai still preferred the traditional method), the crackling of the welding torch, and the sparks of wires being connected. Kai’s fixation with upgrading Mzia filled the house with activity, making it feel more crowded than it had ever felt when Altair had been living alone in it.

“Try to keep the noise down,” he told Kai as he headed for his room. Another long day at the Intelligence Corps had left him tired to his bones. Not even Xenovita would take this fatigue away.

“Yes, yes, yes.” Kai waved him away with a pale hand. Bruises covered the back of his hand, signs of last night’s transfusion. Mzia, the affable, rectangular bot with close-tosentience programming, was lying open on the table, its cogs and gears whirring lazily. A pink hologram flickered above it, displaying its own inner machinery. “I will.”

Altair closed the door and turned on his noise-cancelling earpieces. The grinding started soon after. *** Altair couldn’t wait for the damned process to be done with, until one day he returned home and found the work table empty. All the blueprints were folded up and stashed under it. Even the metal fillings had been wiped away.

“Altair, look at this.” With all the delight of an Intelligence Corp trainee showcasing a neonet grid pattern, Kai held up Mzia in the air, its display turned towards Altair. A new symbol flickered on the display: a blue digital treble clef.

“So all of this tinkering and toying was for–” “Yes!” Kai spun Mzia around and its display changed into a happy expression: two circumflexes creating eyes closed in joy. “Now it can play music!” ***

That night, Altair laid awake in bed. He was waiting for the day’s exhaustion to catch up to him and propel him into slumber, but he couldn’t keep his eyes closed. The noises that Kai made as he worked had been replaced by an emptiness that settled heavily on Altair’s chest. It was less a silence, and more a lack of … something. Something more than just noise. He got off the bed and stepped outside the room.

Kai was at the table again, slumped over the chrome surface, his head half-buried in his arms. A glistening line of drool ran down the corner of his mouth.

Mzia stood on the table beside him, its display dimmed. It played faint music, its display showing two straight lines: closed eyes.

Altair approached this scene with subdued footsteps. The music coming from Mzia crested and fell like the fickle waves of an unfettered sea: violins carrying the orchestra, gliding on the back of a harmony of woodwind instruments. Instruments Altair had only seen in historical documentaries. A memory of a time long past.

He stopped next to them, his hand raised above Kai’s shoulder. It felt like a sin, disturbing such a quiet scene, and yet …

He placed his hand on Kai’s shoulder, fingers bending around a jutting collarbone.

Kai started. His eyes flew open and he sat up, blinking. “What–” He gasped and grabbed Mzia, fiddling with it and turning the music off. “You didn’t … you didn’t hear anything, did you?” he asked.

Altair raised an eyebrow. Oh? “No,” he replied, coolly.

“Good!” Kai gathered Mzia in his arms like one would coddle a bundled baby. “Don’t look into my stuff again!”

With that, he dashed off to his room. *** Mzia – already a regular companion to Kai – became an inseparable part of him over the next few days. Kai took the rectangular bot everyplace: its faint music pumped through the

kitchen in the morning, the living room in the afternoon, and the bedroom at night. It even hummed behind the bathroom door as Kai took his long baths.

Altair understood the fascination with music. Or at least, what little of it existed now. They had outlawed musical productions decades ago. Now, only underground circuits and criminalised artists existed. New music was illegal. Old music was discouraged. It made music that much harder to obtain, and that much more enticing.

With his position in the Intelligence Corps, Altair had a few privileges that most Deltamine denizens did not. He knew the law; knew how to find a way around it. He had himself reprogrammed a music device that he kept clipped to his belt, connected to his earpieces.

He often found himself bobbing his head to music as he read, but lately, he had started to switch off his own music, hoping to catch Kai’s. Yet, whenever approached by Altair, Kai would immediately turn the music off – like he suddenly remembered that it was a secret, shameful activity. One that could get him severely penalised.

The only time Kai let Altair anywhere near himself was when they were doing Xenovita transfusions.

This too, had become an ineradicable ritual that Kai was tantalised to; the only time he would stop fussing around Mzia.

Altair – the IV needle still plugged into the back of his hand – reached for Kai’s tender fingers. Kai’s blood, chromatic, glistening, was still pumping into his veins. Swishing up his arm, circling around his heart. The transfusion was almost over. Complaisant, eyelids heavy and skin covered in a sheen of sweat, he held Kai’s hand in his own and rested his head against Kai’s shoulder. Two bodies, connected by a tube.

“Altair? I need to go.”

Altair’s eyes opened. “Now?” A tightness filled his throat; worsened, as Kai extracted his hand from his grip and stood up.

Kai pulled the needle out of his hand, nodding. “I have some tests to run on Mzia.” He ran a hand through Altair’s hair, lanky frame casting a cold shadow over him.

“Do it here,” Altair said, his voice hoarse. Scratchy. Sandpaper on wood. “I don’t mind.”

Kai blinked. “Here?” he asked, some of his usual haughtiness making its way into his words.

“You hate it when I’m noisy–” “Stay,” Altair insisted. He didn’t know where the words were coming from. They hardly felt like his own. “I insist.”

Kai, his expression perplexed but ultimately free of dissension, said, “Well, alright then.

Mzia!”

A cheery beep-boop announced itself as Mzia floated into the room, bobbing joyously. Kai set Mzia on Altair’s table and opened it.

There was something about Kai working: quiet, carmine eyes fixated on the metal gears in front of him, silver hair tied back into a ponytail, secured with black clips, a half-open mouth that made little noises of frustration. He was, at once, the quietest thing in Deltamine, a canal of serenity pooling in Altair’s bedroom, and the noisiest machine of muttered curses and clinking tools.

“Do you … do you mind if I play some music?” he asked. Altair’s eyes were already closing, Xenovita flushing through his system. Getting to his head. “No,” he murmured, one cheek buried into the soft padding of the transfusion chair. And to think he used to go over to blood banks for this, every week. He used to be part of the small percentage of people who hadn’t found partners with the Xenovita mutation in their bloodstreams. That was, of course, before Kai moved in with him.

A steady melody came forth from Mzia: flutes and reeds played in synchronous polyphony, ebbing and flowing like a gentle river, rising, falling, submerging everything in its wake. Even Altair. Caught in the amber of such a honeyed tune, he didn’t even realise when he fell asleep. *** Another ritual: Kai drew on the floor; Altair read on the couch.

This one they had been doing humdrum since Kai had moved into Altair’s. Kai liked to sketch. Deltamine had little use for artists, and Kai understood that. He never quite cared, though. His notebooks were full of ideas: fancy, ostentatious vehicles, chic, stylish androids, baroque storage boxes, convoluted grid patterns. These were whims, dreams that were always miles away from reach, leftovers of his ambitious childhood. Often, he redrew the Intelligence Corps tower. Maybe he liked to remember his days as the top Neo-net mapper

from the Netmappers faction. Maybe not. Just one of the many things Kai never talked about.

Sometimes, he drew flowers. Another rarity in Deltamine. Kai liked to reimagine the times before the Blackout had claimed Earth. The global catastrophe that made survival a priority. Everything else – music, art, architecture – became redundant. The life-altering vitality compound Xenovita was introduced. Some, like Kai, absorbed it into their DNA and began producing their own. Some, like Altair, could not.

Kai drew everyday objects too. XE-1250A bots. Self-replenishing carafes from Cafe Nitro.

Slush hookahs that only existed in the underground. Deltamine streetlights.

Sometimes, he drew his brother. From before. Not after. Never after.

He wasn’t as good at drawing people as he was at drawing objects, but he tried. Altair appreciated someone who tried.

Once he found a picture of Altair’s mother and he tried to sketch her; he imitated every ridge on her skin, every wrinkle, every smile-crinkle. He tried to replicate her wispy grey hair, her rounded chin, her tiny eyes sharp with both wisdom and affection. Some of it made it to the drawing; some was lost in translation.

The drawing now rested in Altair’s bottom drawer, wedged between the pages of a frayed book that he had read hundreds of times since he had been a child. There weren’t a lot of books left anymore. It was all digital now.

Kai caught his eye. “What?”

“Years,” answered Altair, reaching down and placing a hand on Kai’s face. He swept his mess of silver hair aside and traced his thumb near Kai’s chewed and chapped bottom lip.

Always quick to respond, Kai turned his face so Altair could brush his fingers over his cheek. “We’ve known each other for years.”

“Well, of course we have,” Kai said, but a holographic- board-blue-coloured blush was inching up his cheeks. He turned to Mzia, who was beeping happily on the floor beside him.

“May I?” “Be my guest,” Altair replied, a smile making its way onto his face.

Kai switched on the music, and Altair went back to reading. *** “Do … you mind … if … ” Altair started. He was on his back, his limbs splayed, the IV needle buried in his wrist. Kai’s Xenovita-rich blood was pumping inside him.

“Now?” “Yes.” And then fondly: “You’ll love it.”

Kai took Mzia in his hands and turned on the music. A sultry, low bass started, looped with zesty piano keys and a rhythmic beat played by a vibrating membrane. The rhythm thrummed through Kai’s blood, which flushed into Altair, making him feel heady. A little lost.

Kai laid a hand on Altair’s side, the way one would caress a lover. “I want to fill our lives with music,” he said. A fervent whisper. Words, and yet, barely uttered. “Watch.” He bobbed a finger – the same finger that had scorched circles onto Altair’s skin – in tune to the music, raising and dipping it as the melody built into a strong beat. His finger moved until it was at Altair’s hair. Then he plunged his fingers into the strands on Altair’s head.

The song ended and blended into a new one: quicker, more urgent, plucked strings, tapped keys, ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump.

Altair found Kai’s gaze. Spellbound, scarlet eyes traversed his flushed skin as Altair spasmed. Xenovita crawled through his veins – ba-bump – until it was in Altair’s chest, filling him up, slowing him down. His head swam even as his hands moved – ba- bump – and he caught Kai’s arm. His fingers trailed up Kai’s forearm – ba-bump – rubbing over the multiple puncture wounds; remnants of a time Kai no longer talked about. Ba-bump. Altair knew, of course. The blood ring, the failed transfusions, the times Kai bled himself dry to …

Altair almost brought it up too. When, if not at their most vulnerable? But Kai’s hand slipped into his own, and the thoughts floated away.

Kai’s grip was hard enough to bruise, nails digging into the skin on the back of Altair’s hands. Altair gasped for breath – ba- bump – and Kai’s fingers tightened, the nails breaking

skin. Blood painted the underside of his nails. Chromatic, dark grey, Xenovita- fuelled blood. Altair, lost, drooling – ba-bump, ba-bump – thrashed with the crescendo, the instruments – ba-bump – driving the orchestra and Altair’s consciousness over the ridge, along the bluff, down into oblivion.

“Kai,” he groaned, his face buried into Kai’s bony shoulder. “This is too much –” The track changed.

A voice started speaking. It took a second before Altair realised it was his own.

“Kai,” the voice played through Mzia, sounding annoyed. “You left your socks on the dresser again –” “Oh no.” Kai’s hand–bloodied nails and all – flew to Mzia, nearly tipping the poor thing over as he fumbled to switch it off.

Silence filled the room. The smell of Xenovita hung like mist in the air. Kai, with his flushed cheeks, was still breathing hard. The tube was still suspended between them. There were two options: acknowledge what just happened, or finish the transfusion. Only one seemed urgent to Altair at the moment.

He lifted Kai’s hand, drawing another flush of blood into his own stream.

“Altair,” he gasped. He was so blue in the face that Altair worried he might just explode.

“Kai,” said Altair, dragging out the word, knowing the transfusion was at such a late stage that neither of them could have a single coherent thought. “What was that?”

“Your voice. It-it was. Just.” Kai was a babbling, muttering, bumbling mess as their bloodstreams fused. Kai’s blood, superior to Altair’s, overpowered both of them.

“My voice?” Altair’s own voice was raw. Heavy. Full of vitality.

“Your voice – Altair!” Kai was trembling now. Altair had pressed the switch on the tube, speeding up the pump. They didn’t need the music. Kai’s blood created its own tempo, moving in perfect harmony to an unplayed beat. “Your voice makes me –” Altair jerked. Too much, he was pushing too much. He turned off the pump.

“– happy,” finished Kai, at the same time as they finished the transfusion.

Altair pulled the IV out. His head was so heavy, he could barely keep his eyes open. He had many questions to ask, but Kai placed his rough, calloused fingers on Altair’s cheek, nails bloody,knuckles white, guiding him to sleep, and Altair decided everything else in Deltamine could wait. ***

Altair waited for Kai to wake up; the latter had fallen asleep cocooned in Altair’s arms, using his chest as a pillow. Silver hair tickled his chin, but he couldn’t think of moving. Kai smelled of machine polish and sweat. Xenovita and hydraulic fuel. Sweet, still, somehow.

Altair couldn’t tear his eyes away from Kai’s arm: dotted with bumps, like a drug-addict’s.

So far from the truth. Even now, a few years into their shared housing, there was still so much about Kai to discover; to consume. Altair was housing a criminal, someone who could get him fired out of the Intelligence Corps. And how much did he really know about Kai? When Kai fluttered awake, Altair’s floaty, heady bliss had been replaced by scepticism.

“So, about Mzia.”

Upon hearing its name, Mzia beeped awake and floated over. Its eyes circumflexes again, it happily said, “Beep-boop!”

“Good morning to you too, my sunshine.” Kai sat up and Altair watched the slender back of his neck. Pale skin. Dewy. The burst of silver hair and its wispy ends falling down his shoulders. Mzia floated into Kai’s duvet-covered lap. The Beacon of Netmappers and his little sunshine.

Kai turned to face Altair. Tufts of his silver hair were sticking out, free of their black-clipped shackles.

“It’s embarrassing,” he said, slightly nasal.

“I want to hear.”

“You … you do?”

Altair nodded.

Kai hesitated a moment, then he poked Mzia and the music started again.

This time it was a slow, drawn out melody. A patchwork blanket of baritone chords. It built into a pulsing, resonant timbre. Tinny plucks replaced the heavy bass. Altair’s voice played over the music.

“Kai,” the voice said, and for a while that was all it said. Kai’s name, superposed onto a circling beat, repeated like a litany, incantated like a prayer. “Kai.” When he forgot to do the dishes. Exasperated. “Kai!” When he burnt his fingers cooking breakfast. Anxious. “Kai.” When he wouldn’t stop touching Altair’s hair while he read. Annoyed. “K-Kai!” Last night’s.

When their blood bridged the gap between them, their bodies one.

The music switched to a winding, climbing note. It rose in both fervour and volume.

“You look so pretty like this.” Uttered after Kai had spent the whole night working on a project. Eyes wide. Crazied. Face greasy. Lit up by some asinine, unrelenting passion.

Gorgeous.

“I don’t worry about the sharks. They won’t find you in my house.” Whispered. Consoling.

Gentle.

“You’re safe here.” In his arms. Reassuring. Some falsity, some verity.

“Kai. Don’t leave.” A cry. The point of completion. Eruption of both emotion and transfused Xenovita. Begging. The music dipped into a graveyard march: membranous instruments replacing the flutes and violins. Oboes and saxophones playing a dying, sputtering coda.

Fortissimo to pianissimo.

“You’re the only thing that makes this house feel alive.” A confession. Knees. Mouthful of Kaiworship. A plea. Unsaid: Stay. Stay. Stay.

The music faded into quietude. The storm vanquished, the sea returned to passive tranquillity. Crashing waves receding back to their home.

Altair’s eyes were covered by a film of moisture.

“This is what I hear,” Kai said, in a whisper. “Altair? This is your song. Say something.”

Altair snaked an arm around Kai’s slender waist and pulled him back into his choking embrace. Kai sputtered, but let himself be squeezed like a soft toy.

“You are the best thing that has ever happened to me,” Altair murmured into the dry shell of Kai’s ear. “You brighten up my days. You’re irreplaceable–” “What are you doing?” Kai’s face turned venom-blue, blood pumping into every vessel under his pale skin.

“You like hearing me talk?”

“Only because you do so little of it!”

Altair took Kai’s face in his hands and planted a kiss on the top of his head. Hair tickled his cheeks. “I’m going to tell you how special you are,” he whispered. “Every day.”

Then Kai leaned in, and there wasn’t much talking to do after that. *** Kai left for a bath, Altair’s fingerprints bruised into his skin. Altair waited for the thud of the closing door. A couple of years ago, the illegal blood ring Kai started to save his brother had collapsed. All that remained from that time were the wounds on Kai’s arm, the debt, and the nightmares he often had. The loan sharks and the DMPD had driven him out of both his job and his house, and he had landed at Altair’s doorstep. They’d never gotten along well at the Intelligence Corps, but after one look at his frazzled face, and his baleful doe eyes, Altair had opened the door wide.

“A few weeks only,” he had insisted.

Now he couldn’t picture his life without Kai. He’d keep him safe. When the sharks and the officers came knocking, he’d find a way. He couldn’t let Kai go. Not now.

He turned to Mzia. “I understand you are Kai’s companion. With what little sentience and low level intelligence you have, are you able to follow commands that don’t come from Kai?”

Mzia let out an angry beep, digital eyebrows drawing into a scowl. Then it turned neutral again. Waiting.

“Record Kai’s voice as well,” Altair said. His arms already felt empty without the silverhaired annoyance curled up in them. “All the little phrases he says – and squeaks – out.”

A concerned expression appeared over Mzia, eyebrows tilted downwards. A question.

Altair smiled. “I want to make our song.”

BIRTHMARK RODNEY HATFIELD I was hanging out at my buddy Dereck's place on one of those sweltering summer afternoons where the heat seems to seep into every inch of you. We were tossing a ball back and forth, beads of sweat running down our foreheads, when Dereck suddenly perked up.

"Dude!" he exclaimed, his eyes lighting up. "Let’s get out the lawn sprinkler slide!"

I hesitated, not sure if his mom would approve of us making a soggy mess of the yard. "Can we?" I asked cautiously, shielding my eyes from the sun.

"Of course we can!" Dereck grinned, already heading toward the garage. "It's gonna be epic."

Excitement took over, and I followed him to retrieve the slide. We dragged it out, unfurling the long, slick plastic across the grass. The hose was attached, and as soon as we turned on the water, the thing came to life. Jets of cold water sprayed in every direction, soaking us instantly and turning the backyard into a miniature water park.

"This is gonna be awesome!" Dereck shouted as he kicked off his shoes and started peeling off his socks and shirt.

"Hold on, let me catch up!" I laughed, following his lead. Soon, we were both barefoot and shirtless, diving and sliding through the refreshing water. The cool spray was like a gift from heaven on such a blistering day.

For the next hour, we played like we were little kids again, launching ourselves down the slide, splashing each other, and laughing so hard our sides hurt. The heat didn’t matter anymore. It felt like the perfect summer day.

Then, from the house, we heard Dereck’s mom call out.

“Dereck! You two need to take a break,” she said, her voice firm but kind. She stepped out onto the porch, hands on her hips. “It’s way too hot to stay in the sun with wet skin. You’re going to end up with a nasty sunburn. When you’re done and have everything rolled up, I’ll have some cold drinks waiting for you.”

Dereck groaned but nodded. “Alright, Mom! We’ll pack it up!”

The promise of cold drinks made it easier to give up the fun. We quickly rolled up the slide, wringing out the water before stowing it back in the garage. Gathering our clothes, we made our way to the shady concrete steps outside Dereck’s kitchen.

Dereck flopped down beside me, running a hand through his damp hair. “You know,” he began, “it’s actually more fun sliding with someone. We got that thing last year for a family reunion, but this is the first time I’ve actually used it.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Seriously? You’ve had this thing all year, and you didn’t tell me? We could’ve been doing this all summer!”

He chuckled, rubbing the back of his neck. “Yeah, well… better late than never, right?”

Just then, Dereck’s mom appeared with two tall cups filled to the brim with fruit punch and ice. “Here you go, boys,” she said, handing them to us with a warm smile.

“Thanks, Mrs. Wilson,” I said, taking a long sip. The cold drink was almost as refreshing as the sprinkler slide.

We sat there in the shade, enjoying the moment. After a while, Dereck glanced over at me, his brow furrowed.

“Hey,” he said, lowering his cup. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure,” I replied, curious.

“What’s that on your back?” he asked, pointing toward my shoulder.

I blinked, confused. “What do you mean?”

He leaned closer, squinting. “It looks like… a scar or something. Like a birthmark.”

I twisted, trying to look over my shoulder, but I couldn’t see anything. “I don’t have a scar,” I said, shaking my head.

“Yes, you do,” Dereck insisted. “It’s huge—about the size of a dinner plate.”

I frowned, feeling uneasy. “Where exactly?”

“It goes from your shoulder to the middle of your back,” he explained.

Still skeptical, I turned this way and that, straining to see, but it was no use. “I don’t see anything!”

“Hang on,” Dereck said, pulling out his phone. “Let me take a picture.”

A second later, he handed me the phone. “See?” My jaw dropped as I stared at the screen. There it was, a large, shiny red scar about eight inches long, oval-shaped, and stretching across my back. I couldn’t believe it.

“What the heck…” I muttered, my voice trailing off. “I don’t remember getting this. I mean, you’d think I’d remember something that big, right?”

Dereck shrugged. “Maybe you fell off your bike or something?”

I shook my head. “No. I’d definitely remember a fall like that.”

“Could it be from too much sun?” Dereck offered.

“I don’t know…” My stomach churned with unease. “I better go home and let my mom see it.

Maybe she’ll know what it is.”

I hurriedly put my socks, shoes, and shirt back on, the fun of the day now a distant memory.

Grabbing my bike, I called over my shoulder, “I’ll see you later!”

“Let me know what she says!” Dereck shouted after me.

I pedaled hard, my mind racing with questions. What was that mark? How long had it been there? Was it just some weird rash, or something more serious? I could only hope my mom had answers, and that it wasn’t something that required a trip to the doctor. I left my bike in the driveway, barely stopping to prop it up on its kickstand. My heart was still racing from the ride home, and my mind was spinning with questions. I burst into the house, calling out for my mom.

“Mom! Mom, where are you?” I shouted, my voice echoing through the hallway.

“I’m here, honey,” her calm voice came from down the hall. A moment later, she appeared in the living room, wiping her hands on a kitchen towel. Her face instantly changed to concern when she saw my flustered expression. “What’s wrong?”

“Mom, you have to see this,” I said urgently, tugging my shirt over my head. I turned my back to her, pointing to my shoulder. “I don’t know what it is. Dereck noticed it, and I’ve never seen it before.”

She took a step closer, her brows furrowing as she examined the spot. Then, to my surprise, her expression softened, and a small smile crept across her face.

“Oh,” she said, her tone light and nonchalant, “it’s just your scar.”

“My scar?” I repeated, blinking in confusion. Relief began to creep in, but I still didn’t understand. “Where did I get it?”

“You were really little then,” she began, leaning against the arm of the couch as if recalling a distant memory. “We still lived back in the old country. You got burned on your back by a campfire.”

“A campfire?” I said, my eyes widening.

She nodded calmly. “Yes. You were just a toddler, barely two years old. It happened so long ago. The scar used to cover most of your back, but as you grew, it stretched out and got smaller. It’s nothing to worry about, it’s almost as old as you are.”

“Wow,” I murmured, the tension finally leaving my shoulders. “I don’t remember that at all.”

“You wouldn’t,” she said with a gentle chuckle. “You were so young. You were so brave, even as a little boy.”

I let out a sigh of relief, sitting down on the couch. “That’s crazy. It really freaked me out when Dereck asked about it. I thought I was having some kind of reaction or that something was wrong.”

“You’re my strong son,” she said, wrapping her arms around me in a warm hug. Her familiar floral scent and comforting presence made all the fear melt away.

“Thanks, Mom,” I said, feeling a wave of gratitude.

The relief was overwhelming. Finding something like that on your body is scary, especially when you don’t know where it came from. But now it all made sense. The scar was just a reminder of something I’d gone through long before I could even remember.

As I sat there, my mom started talking about our life back in Mexico. “We lived in such a beautiful area,” she said, her voice full of nostalgia. “It was very rural, far away from big cities. I was so young then, only twenty-six. Your father worked on an oil rig, and I spent most of my time outdoors. I loved nature. Still do.”

I nodded. That love for nature had definitely passed down to me. “Is that why you became a florist?” I asked, already knowing the answer but wanting to hear her talk about it.

“Yes,” she said, her eyes lighting up. “Working with flowers keeps me close to nature. I’ve been doing it for most of your childhood. You know, you used to follow me around the garden when you were little, asking about every plant and bug you saw. That’s where you learned to love the outdoors.”

I smiled, imagining my younger self trailing after her with endless questions. “I guess I really am your kid,” I said with a grin.

She laughed softly. “There’s no doubt about that.”

Her expression turned more somber as she added, “Your dad would have loved to see how much you’ve grown, how strong and kind you’ve become. He passed away a few weeks before you were born, but I think about him every day.”

I felt a pang of sadness but also a sense of connection. Though I’d never met him, my mom made sure I knew who he was and where I came from. “You’ve done an amazing job, Mom,” I said sincerely. “I wouldn’t trade any of it.”

She smiled, her eyes glistening. “Thank you, sweetheart. Now, go get cleaned up before dinner. You’ve had enough adventures for one day.”

Since moving here, we’ve done everything we can to stay connected to nature, even though we live in town. Luckily, our house sits right where the neighborhood ends, and the forest begins. That means my backyard practically spills into the woods. It’s the perfect spot for us to escape city life. We spend as much time there as we can, whether we’re camping, grilling, or taking long walks among the trees.

One of my favorite things is when we have campfires. There’s something magical about gathering around the flames. The smoke swirls around us, curling through the air and clinging to our clothes. We don’t mind the smell, it keeps the bugs away, and for me, that lingering scent of wood smoke is one of my favorites. It reminds me of warmth, family, and simpler times.

But my absolute favorite tradition is something we call The Burning. It happens every year on October 1st, and it’s more than just a bonfire. It’s a celebration, a ritual, and a moment of transformation. My mom always says fire is more than just destruction. Fire is healing. Fire is cleansing. It consumes the old and makes way for the new.

I remember when I was really little, she would teach me about the power of fire by showing me areas in the forest that had been burned. We’d walk through charred sections of trees, and she’d point out how life was already sprouting back.

“See, mi fuerza,” she’d say, her voice full of wisdom as she held my hand. “What fire purifies always comes back stronger. There is no such thing as death. There is only transformation. It’s like being born again. Fire purges the weak and uplifts the strong.”

She had a way of making me feel like I was part of something bigger, something timeless.

Fire wasn’t just flames; it was a force of nature, a teacher, and a healer.

Every fall, we prepared for The Burning by gathering old items: books, papers, photographs—things we didn’t need any more or wanted to let go of. We’d pile them up and build a massive bonfire in the woods. As the flames devoured them, my mom would explain the importance of letting go of the past.

“This tradition has been in our family for generations,” she’d tell me. “It reminds us that strength comes from transformation. To grow, you must let go of what no longer serves you.”

For most kids, September is the month of dread. It’s the end of summer, the start of school, and a return to homework and routines. But for my family, September means something entirely different. It’s the month of The Gathering.

We spend all of September collecting forgotten, abandoned, or unwanted items for The Burning. Old toys I’ve outgrown, faded notebooks, broken tools, and scraps of memories that have lost their meaning, all of it goes into the pile. My mom says it’s a way to clean not just our physical space but our emotional and mental space too.

This year, school starts on Monday, and the first day of September is on Wednesday. That means The Gathering will begin soon. I can already feel the excitement building. There’s something so satisfying about piling everything up, knowing that in just a few weeks, we’ll watch it all disappear in flames.

For me, October 1st feels like New Year’s Day. It’s the start of something fresh and hopeful.

While the rest of the world waits for January to make resolutions, we mark our new beginnings with fire. The Burning isn’t just about letting go—it’s about embracing what’s to come.

When the fire dies down and the ashes settle, I always feel lighter. It’s like the weight of the past year has burned away, leaving me ready to face whatever comes next. I don’t just look forward to The Burning; I live for it. For my family, October 1st is our New Year’s, and the fire is our way of starting again. *** It’s two days before The Burning, and this year, Mom decided we should tackle the attic.

I’ve been working up here all week, digging through dusty boxes and hauling stuff down to the garage for the bonfire. So far, I’ve managed to move eight boxes packed with old papers, books, and random junk we no longer need. I’m almost done when I pick up the last box, but it slips from my hands and crashes to the floor. Papers scatter everywhere.

As I reach to gather everything back into the box, a piece of paper juts out, slicing the edge of my finger. “Ow!” I hiss, sucking the tiny drop of blood from the cut. I hate paper cuts.

They’re so small but sting like fire.

Grumbling, I lift the lid to stuff everything back inside when something catches my eye. A birth certificate.

At first, I think nothing of it. But then I notice the name on it, mine. I freeze, staring at the paper. The year and date are wrong. Ten years off.

“What the…?” I whisper, lowering myself to the attic floor to examine it closer. The confusion builds as I notice another birth certificate buried in the box. And another. My name is on all of them, but each has a different birth year, spaced roughly two years apart.

I shove aside the other papers and dig deeper, my heart racing. Five birth certificates. Five versions of me.

“What the hell is this?” I mutter under my breath.

The documents shake in my hands as I stuff them back into the box. My mind feels like it’s spinning, the air in the attic suddenly thick and suffocating. Gripping the box tightly, I haul it downstairs, my legs trembling with each step.

Mom’s in the kitchen, humming to herself while she spreads frosting over a cake. The sugary smell fills the air, but I barely notice. I set the box down on the counter with a heavy thud.

“What’s that, honey?” Mom asks without looking up, still focused on the cake.

I don’t answer right away. My throat feels dry. “I found it in the attic,” I finally say, my voice quiet.

She glances at the box and smiles warmly. “Did you carry that big, heavy box all by yourself? That’s my strong boy!”

“Mom…” I begin, my hands clenching at my sides. “Why do I have so many birth certificates?”

Her smile falters for a moment, then she lets out a soft laugh. “Oh, sweetheart, those aren’t all yours! Those are your brothers’.”

Her words hit me like a slap. “My brothers?” I ask, my voice was rising. “I don’t have any brothers. I’m an only child. Where are they? Why haven’t I ever met them?”

Mom tilts her head to the side, as if I’ve asked something silly. Her smile returns, but there’s something off about it, something cold. “Fire takes the unwanted and the weak,” she says softly, stirring the frosting with deliberate slowness.

I take a step back, my stomach twisting. “What… what are you talking about?”

She sets the spoon down and turns to face me fully, her eyes glinting with something that makes my skin crawl. “You, my love, were the strongest. The others… they weren’t like you.

They didn’t have your fire.”

My mouth goes dry. “Mom, what are you saying?”

Her voice is calm, almost soothing. “You had the strength to withstand the flames, the will to survive them. Not everyone can do that. Your brothers… they were fragile. The fire chose you, my dear. It left only a small scar, a mark of your resilience.”

I stumble back, my heart pounding. “Did you…?” The words catch in my throat, but I force them out. “Did you burn them?”

She steps closer, her face calm and unbothered, as though we’re discussing dinner plans.

“The flames claimed your brothers, yes,” she says matter-of-factly. “But it was for the greater good. Only the strong survive, and you, my son, were meant to thrive. The weak must be burned away, like the deadwood in the forest. It’s the natural order.”

Her words make my head spin, my stomach lurch. “You’re insane,” I whisper, my voice barely audible over the sound of my own heartbeat.

Mom smiles, tilting her head. “Oh, my love,” she says softly. “You should be proud. You are the chosen one, the strong one. The fire purged the weak so that you could grow.”

I back away, unable to process the horror of what she’s saying. My hands tremble as I glance at the box of birth certificates, then back at her.

The icing on her fingers gleams under the light as she picks up the spoon again, completely unfazed. “Now, go wash up,” she says brightly, as though nothing has happened. “Dinner will be ready soon.”

But I can’t move. I can’t breathe. All I can see are the flames she described; the flames that took my brothers. And the terrifying realization that my mother, the woman who raised me, had decided who deserved to live and who didn’t. ***

VHAUNTING RODNEY HATFIELD Sarah and Mike had always dreamt of owning an old house with character and charm.

They spent countless hours watching renovation shows, and they always imagined themselves bringing a historic home back to life. When they found the Victorian mansion on the outskirts of town, they knew it was perfect. The mansion stood proudly on a hill, its towering spires piercing the sky, and its intricate woodwork whispering tales of the past.

Despite its grandeur, the house had been vacant for years, and the price was right. They imagined restoring it to its former glory, blending their love for history with modern technology.

Sarah and Mike often talked about their dreams while watching their favorite renovation shows. They would sit on the couch, pointing at the screen, and discuss how they would tackle a project like that.

"One day, we'll find our perfect house," Mike would say, squeezing Sarah's hand.

Sarah would nod, her eyes filled with hope. "And we'll make it beautiful again. Just like they do on TV." One day, as they were scrolling through real estate listings, they came across a Victorian mansion on the outskirts of town. Sarah's heart skipped a beat. "Mike, look at this!" she exclaimed, showing him the screen. "This is it! This is our dream house!"

Mike's eyes widened as he took in the pictures. The mansion stood proudly on a hill, its towering spires piercing the sky, and its intricate woodwork whispering tales of the past.

"It's perfect," he said softly.

Despite its grandeur, the house had been vacant for years, and the price was right. They imagined restoring it to its former glory, blending their love for history with modern technology.

Standing outside the mansion for the first time, they held hands and looked up at the imposing structure. "Imagine the vlog series we can do!" Sarah exclaimed, her eyes sparkling with excitement. "Our followers will love seeing this place transform."

Mike nodded, already picturing the camera angles and time-lapse videos. "This is going to be epic," he said. "The Victorian Vlog – restoring history, one room at a time."

They spent the next few days exploring every nook and cranny of their new home. Sarah would often stop and place her hand on the intricate woodwork, feeling the stories etched into the walls.

"Think of all the people who lived here before us," she mused aloud. "Their stories, their lives..."

Mike smiled and wrapped his arm around her shoulders. "And now it's our turn to add to the history," he said. "One project at a time."

As they stood in the grand foyer, surrounded by dust and memories, they knew they were about to embark on the adventure of a lifetime.

The couple decided to document every step of their renovation journey. They set up a video channel and began filming their first video. "Welcome to our Victorian Vlog!" Sarah greeted the camera with enthusiasm. "Join us as we restore this beautiful old mansion to its former glory."

Mike took his turn to speak. "We can't wait to share the highs and lows, the triumphs and challenges with all of you. It's going to be a wild ride!"

They spent hours filming the initial walkthrough, pointing out their plans for each room.

"This will be the library," Sarah said, her voice filled with excitement. "Imagine floor-toceiling bookshelves and a cozy reading nook by the window."

Mike added, "And over here, we'll have a state-of-the-art kitchen. Modern appliances with a vintage feel."

The days turned into weeks as they started the renovation. Each day brought new surprises and challenges. "Look what I found behind this wall!" Mike exclaimed one afternoon, holding up a dusty old photograph.

Sarah gasped, "That's incredible! It's like a piece of history."

They incorporated these discoveries into their vlog, sharing the story behind each find.

Their followers grew, captivated by the blend of history and modern renovation techniques.

"You're inspiring us to take on our own projects," one viewer commented. "We can't wait to see what you do next!" *** Sarah and Mike's renovation vlog had gained a decent following, and this project would take it to the next level. They had always been drawn to old houses, not just for their aesthetic but for the stories they held within their walls. Every creak, every piece of wood, and every bit of dust seemed to whisper secrets from the past, and they were eager to uncover them.

The day they moved in, the air was filled with the scent of old wood and dust. The creak of the floorboards beneath their feet seemed to welcome them into the house's embrace. As they unpacked, they set up their cameras, ready to document every step of their journey.

"Welcome to our new home!" Sarah said into the camera, standing in the grand foyer, her voice echoing off the high ceilings. "We can't wait to show you the hidden gems of this beautiful house."

The grand foyer was a masterpiece of Victorian architecture, with a sweeping staircase, ornate moldings, and stained-glass windows casting colorful patterns on the floor. They could already see the potential, the beauty waiting to be unveiled.

"Look at these details," Mike said, running his fingers over the intricate carvings on the banister. "They don't make houses like this anymore."

Sarah nodded, her eyes wide with wonder. "It's like stepping back in time. This place has so much history."

As they continued exploring, they found themselves in the parlor, with its high ceilings and grand fireplace. The room was filled with an air of elegance and mystery, a perfect setting for their first detailed vlog entry.

Mike set up the tripod, ready to capture their first impressions. "Alright, let's get this started," Mike said, adjusting the camera. "Say something to the viewers."

Sarah took a deep breath and smiled at the camera. "This house is our biggest project yet," she said. "We're so excited to take you along on this journey with us. There's so much to discover, and we can't wait to share it all with you."

Mike hit the record button, and they both felt a thrill of excitement. This was the beginning of their dream project, and they were ready for the adventure ahead.

Their followers were already commenting on their first video, expressing excitement and curiosity. "This place looks amazing!" one viewer wrote. "Can't wait to see what you do with it."

"Thank you for all the support," Mike said, reading the comments out loud. "We can't wait to show you more."

The couple spent the next few days diving into the history of their new home. They visited the local library, poring over old newspapers and records. "Did you know this house was built in 1892?" Sarah said, showing Mike an old article she had found. "It was owned by a prominent local family."

Mike looked at the yellowed pages with interest. "That's incredible. I wonder what kind of lives they led here."

Each day brought new discoveries and challenges. They peeled back layers of wallpaper to reveal intricate designs underneath. "This pattern is so beautiful," Sarah said, tracing the delicate flowers with her fingers. "We have to preserve this."

In the evenings, they would sit by the grand fireplace, discussing their plans for the next day. "Tomorrow, we should start on the library," Mike suggested. "It's going to be a lot of work, but it'll be worth it."

Sarah agreed. "I can't wait to see it finished. It's going to be stunning."

Their journey was just beginning, and they knew it would be filled with hard work, surprises, and joy. The Victorian mansion, with its rich history and untold stories, was more than just a house. It was a living, breathing part of their dream, and they were ready to bring it back to life, one room at a time. **** It didn’t take long for strange things to start happening. In the first week, as they sat in the living room planning their renovation schedule, the lights flickered.

“Must be old wiring,” Mike said, though he made a mental note to check the electrical

system. “We should probably get an electrician in here soon.”

Sarah nodded, jotting it down in her notebook. “Yeah, we don’t want to take any chances.

This place is old, after all.”

The next morning, Sarah found the coffee maker running by itself, brewing an empty pot.

She frowned, puzzled by the sight.

“Mike, did you set a timer on this?” she called out, turning off the machine.

Mike walked in, rubbing his eyes. “Nope. Maybe it’s just a glitch.”

They laughed it off, but as the days passed, more oddities occurred. The television would turn on in the middle of the night, showing static. Their smart speakers played random snippets of old songs. Once, they heard what sounded like a piano playing softly in the distance, but when they investigated, there was no piano to be found.

“We definitely need to get this place checked out,” Mike said, though he felt a growing unease. “Maybe it’s just the house settling or something.”

Sarah, though a bit unnerved, tried to remain optimistic. “Yeah, I’m sure it’s nothing. Old houses make weird noises, right?”

One evening, as they sat in the kitchen discussing their plans for the dining room, the lights flickered again, and the temperature seemed to drop suddenly.

“Okay, that’s weird,” Sarah said, hugging herself against the chill. “Did you feel that?”

Mike nodded, looking around. “Yeah, it’s like the temperature just plummeted.”

They decided to leave cameras running overnight, hoping to catch more evidence. The footage revealed shadowy figures moving through the house, doors opening and closing on their own, and objects being moved by unseen forces. As the odd occurrences became more frequent, Sarah and Mike started to feel a presence in the house. It was subtle at first – a cold draft in a warm room, a whisper just out of earshot. But it grew harder to ignore.

One evening, as they reviewed footage from their cameras, they noticed something strange. In one of the clips, a shadowy figure appeared behind Sarah as she was talking to the camera.

“Mike, look at this,” Sarah said, her voice shaking. “What is that?”

Mike watched the clip, his face growing pale. “I don’t know,” he said. “But it’s not just a glitch.”

The realization that their home might be haunted filled them with a mix of fear and curiosity. They had always been intrigued by the paranormal but experiencing it firsthand was another matter entirely. **** Determined to understand their new home’s quirks, Sarah delved into its history. She visited the local library, a quaint building that seemed to have as much history as the mansion itself. The smell of old books and the quiet rustling of pages filled the air as Sarah approached the front desk.

"Good morning," Sarah greeted the librarian, an elderly woman named Mrs. Wilson. "I'm looking for information on the Grey mansion. Do you have any records or archives I could look at?"

Mrs. Wilson adjusted her glasses and peered at Sarah with a curious expression. "The Grey mansion, you say? That house has quite a history," she said, her voice tinged with intrigue.

"Follow me, dear."

Sarah followed Mrs. Wilson to a dusty corner of the library, where old documents and newspapers were stored. "This is where we keep our local history archives," Mrs. Wilson explained, pulling out a stack of papers. "You'll find what you're looking for here."

Sarah spent hours poring over old documents, piecing together the story of the mansion and its enigmatic owner. The more she read, the more she felt a connection to the past and to the man who had once called the mansion home.

“What did you find?” Mike asked eagerly one evening as Sarah returned home with a stack of papers and old photographs.

“Turns out, this house belonged to a man named Thomas Grey,” Sarah said, spreading the documents on the dining table. “He was a famous inventor in the late 1800s. People say he disappeared mysteriously.”

Mike raised an eyebrow. “Mysteriously?”

Sarah nodded, her face serious. “There were rumors about strange experiments and ghost sightings even back then.”

Mike picked up an old newspaper article and began to read. “Thomas Grey, the reclusive inventor, has not been seen for several weeks. Neighbors report strange noises and lights coming from the mansion, and there are whispers of ghostly apparitions. Wow, this is intense.”

Sarah nodded. “According to the documents, Thomas Grey was a brilliant but reclusive inventor. He made several groundbreaking discoveries, but his obsession with the supernatural led him down a darker path. The mansion was the site of his experiments, and locals whispered about strange lights and eerie noises emanating from the house late at night.”

Mike looked at her, his eyes wide with fascination. “So, he just vanished?”

“Yeah,” Sarah replied. “No one knows what happened to him. Some people think he went mad and disappeared into the night. Others believe he’s still here, trapped by his own experiments.”

Mike shivered. “That’s creepy. Do you think he’s the one haunting us?”

Sarah shrugged, her expression thoughtful. “It’s possible. But if he’s trying to communicate with us, maybe he needs our help.”

They spent the next few days researching Thomas Grey and his experiments. The more they learned, the more they felt connected to the house and its tragic history. They found letters, journal entries, and blueprints that revealed Grey’s descent into madness.

“Listen to this,” Sarah said, reading from a letter dated 1889. “‘My dearest friend, I fear I am on the brink of a discovery that will change the world, yet it comes at a great cost. I hear voices in the night, whispers of those who have passed. They call to me, urging me to continue my work. I must see this through, no matter the consequence.’”

Mike looked over her shoulder, his face pale. “He really believed he could communicate with the dead. This guy was serious.”

Sarah nodded, her eyes scanning the letter. “He wasn’t just an inventor; he was a man obsessed with the afterlife. His experiments consumed him.”

They discovered that Grey’s obsession with the afterlife had driven him to create a machine designed to contact the dead. He had hoped to prove that life continued beyond death, and he had dedicated his life to this pursuit.

“Look at this,” Sarah said, showing Mike a blueprint of the device. “This must be what he was working on. It’s some kind of communication device.”

Mike studied the blueprint, his expression a mix of awe and concern. “This explains everything. The hauntings, the glitches in our videos – it’s him trying to reach out.”

Sarah nodded. “We need to finish his work. Maybe then he’ll find peace.”

They decided to continue their research, hoping to uncover more clues about Grey’s experiments and the secrets of the mansion. **** The hauntings grew more intense. They would hear footsteps echoing in the hallways at night, and cold spots would appear in the warmest rooms. Their vlog footage started showing eerie distortions—ghostly images and messages that weren’t there when they filmed. One night, as they were reviewing footage in their living room, they heard a loud crash from the kitchen. Rushing in, they found all the cabinet doors wide open, dishes and utensils scattered across the floor.

“This is getting out of hand,” Mike said, his voice trembling. “It’s like the house is trying to tell us something.”

Determined to understand what was happening, they decided to leave cameras running overnight, hoping to catch more evidence. The footage revealed shadowy figures moving through the house, doors opening and closing on their own, and objects being moved by unseen forces.

As the hauntings escalated, Sarah and Mike found themselves drawn deeper into the mystery of Thomas Grey. They felt a strange connection to him, as if he were reaching out to them from beyond the grave.

One particularly chilling night, Sarah woke to the sound of whispering. She sat up in bed, straining to hear the words. It sounded like a man’s voice, soft and urgent, but she couldn’t make out what he was saying. She shook Mike awake, and they both listened, their hearts pounding.

“Do you hear that?” Sarah whispered.

Mike nodded, his face pale. “Yeah. It’s coming from downstairs.”

They crept down the stairs, following the voice to the basement door. The whispering grew louder, more distinct. It was calling them, urging them to come closer.

As they descended into the basement, they felt a chill in the air. The whispering stopped abruptly, and they were plunged into an eerie silence.

“I don’t like this,” Sarah said, her voice barely above a whisper. “We should go back upstairs.”

Mike nodded, but something compelled him to keep moving forward. “Just a little further,” he said. “I think we’re close to something.”

They reached the far end of the basement, where an old bookshelf stood against the wall.

The whispering started again, louder and more insistent. Mike inspected the bookshelf closely.

“There’s something behind this bookshelf,” Mike said, his voice shaking. “Help me move it.”

With great effort, they pushed the heavy bookshelf aside, revealing a hidden door. Their hearts raced as they opened it, revealing a small, cluttered room filled with old equipment, blueprints, and notes.

“This must be Thomas Grey’s lab,” Sarah whispered, her heart racing. “We’ve found it.” **** They spent the next few days examining the contents of Thomas Grey’s lab. The room was a treasure trove of Victorian-era inventions, notes, and blueprints. Dust and cobwebs covered every surface, adding to the eerie atmosphere. The centerpiece was a large, unfinished device that looked like a strange radio.

It seemed to be the culmination of Grey’s work.

“Look at this place,” Mike said, shining his flashlight around. “It’s like stepping into a time capsule.”

Sarah carefully picked up a stack of old papers, her eyes scanning the faded writing.

“These are his notes,” she said. “He was trying to communicate with the dead.”

Mike looked at her, his eyes wide. “You mean like a séance machine?”

“Sort of,” Sarah replied. “But more advanced. He believed he could build a device to bridge the gap between our world and the afterlife.”

As they pored over the blueprints, they realized that Grey’s obsession had driven him to create a machine that could contact the dead. He had hoped to prove that life continued beyond death, and he had dedicated his life to this pursuit.

“This explains everything,” Mike said. “The hauntings, the glitches in our videos—it’s him trying to reach out.”

Sarah nodded. “We need to finish his work.”

They decided to dedicate themselves to completing Grey’s device. They believed that if they could finish what he started, they might be able to bring him peace and end the hauntings. They spent hours in the lab, following Grey’s meticulous notes and assembling the device piece by piece. It was a daunting task, but they were determined to see it through.

One night, as they worked late into the evening, they heard the whispering again. This time, it was clearer, more insistent.

“Help me,” the voice said. “Please, help me.”

Sarah and Mike exchanged a nervous glance. “He’s trying to communicate with us,” Sarah said. “We have to keep going.”

They worked tirelessly, driven by a mix of fear and determination. The hauntings grew more intense, as if urging them on. Objects moved on their own, doors slammed shut, and ghostly apparitions appeared more frequently.

“We’re getting close,” Mike said one night, his hands shaking as he adjusted a part of the device. “I can feel it. If Grey was right, adjusting the frequency of these crystals; we can speak with the dead.”

The device slowly took shape, a complex amalgamation of wires, gears, and strange crystals. Every night, they felt the presence of Thomas Grey growing stronger. The air in the house seemed charged with anticipation, and they both felt a mixture of excitement and dread. **** The next day, Sarah was in the kitchen making lunch when she felt a sudden chill. She turned to see a shadowy figure standing in the doorway. She gasped, dropping the knife she was holding.

“Mike!” she screamed, backing away. “Mike, come here!”

Mike rushed in, his eyes widening as he saw the figure. “It’s him,” he said. “It’s Thomas Grey.”

The figure slowly faded, leaving them in stunned silence. “He’s getting stronger,” Sarah said. “We need to finish this, and soon.”

Their determination intensified. As they continued their work, they began to piece together the details of Grey’s life and his tragic fate. They learned that Grey had been a brilliant but tormented man, driven by a desire to uncover the secrets of the afterlife. His obsession had cost him his sanity, and ultimately, his life.

“Look at this,” Sarah said, holding up an old photograph. It showed Grey standing in front of the mansion, his eyes haunted and hollow. “He looks so... lost.”

Mike nodded, studying the photo. “He gave everything for this. He believed in it so deeply.”

They found letters and journal entries that revealed Grey’s descent into madness. He had become convinced that he was on the verge of a breakthrough, but his experiments had taken a toll on him. He had started to see and hear things; ghosts, apparitions, whispers in the night.

“This is heartbreaking,” Sarah said, wiping away a tear. “He was so close, but he paid such a high price.”

Mike put a comforting arm around her. “We’re going to finish this for him. We’re going to give him the peace he deserves.”

They worked day and night, their progress documented in their vlog. Their followers were captivated by the unfolding story, and the videos drew more attention than ever before.

One evening, as they reviewed footage from their overnight cameras, they saw something that made their blood run cold. A ghostly figure appeared in the hallway, pointing towards the basement door.

“Mike, look at this,” Sarah said, her voice trembling. “It’s him. It’s Thomas Grey.”

Mike watched the footage, his heart pounding. “He’s guiding us. He wants us to finish the device.”

With renewed determination, they continued their work. The device began to take shape, and they could feel the presence of Grey growing stronger. It was as if he were watching over them, urging them to complete his life’s work.

One evening, as they were nearing completion, they heard a loud banging from upstairs.

They rushed up to find the dining room in disarray – chairs overturned, the chandelier swinging wildly.

“This is insane,” Mike said, panting. “We have to finish this device. It’s our only hope.”

Sarah nodded, her face set with determination. “Let’s go. We’re almost there.”

They returned to the basement and worked late into the night. Finally, the device was complete. They stood back, exhausted but exhilarated.

“We did it,” Sarah said, tears in her eyes. “We finished it.”

Mike nodded, wiping sweat from his forehead. “Now, let’s see if it works.”

They knew they were about to face the ultimate test. The fate of Thomas Grey; and their own peace of mind hung in the balance. **** The time had finally came to test the device. The atmosphere in the house was charged with tension and anticipation. They could feel the weight of history pressing down on them, and the air was thick with the presence of the supernatural.

Sarah and Mike stood in the basement, surrounded by the relics of Thomas Grey’s experiments, the humming device at the center of the room casting an eerie glow.

"Are you ready for this?" Mike asked, his voice trembling as he adjusted the last few components of the device. His hands were shaking, but his resolve was firm.

Sarah nodded, swallowing hard. "As ready as I'll ever be. We've come too far to turn back now."

Mike took a deep breath and flipped the switch. The machine whirred to life, lights flickering wildly as it powered up. The room grew cold, and an unnatural chill crept over them. The air seemed to thrum with energy, and they could feel a presence gathering, drawn by the device.

Suddenly, a figure began to materialize before them, a translucent man in Victorian attire.

His eyes were sunken, and his face bore the marks of a tormented soul.

“Thomas Grey?” Sarah asked, her voice trembling. She took a step forward, her eyes locked on the ghostly figure.

The ghost nodded slowly, his eyes filled with a mix of gratitude and sorrow. He gestured to the device, then to himself, conveying his desire for completion and release.

“We’re here to help you,” Mike said, his voice shaking but determined. “We’ll finish your work.”

Grey's form flickered, his eyes pleading. He mouthed words they couldn't hear, but the urgency in his expression was unmistakable.

“What do you need us to do?” Sarah asked, her voice steadying as she stepped closer to the device. “We’ve followed your notes, but what’s the final step?”

The ghost pointed to a section of the device they hadn’t yet adjusted. His finger hovered over a series of intricate dials and switches, his expression growing more intense.

“Got it,” Mike said, moving to the indicated area. He adjusted the dials according to the ghost’s instructions, his hands moving quickly but precisely. “Like this?”

The ghost nodded, a faint smile flickering across his face. He raised his hand again, indicating a lever on the side of the machine.

Sarah stepped forward, her heart pounding. “This one?” she asked, her fingers brushing the cold metal of the lever.

Grey nodded, his form shimmering as if in approval.

“Okay,” she said, taking a deep breath. “Here goes nothing.”

With a final glance at Mike, who gave her a reassuring nod, Sarah pulled the lever. The machine emitted a loud hum, and the lights flickered even more violently. The temperature in the room plummeted, and they could see their breath forming clouds in the air.

The ghost of Thomas Grey began to glow brighter, his form becoming more distinct. He raised his hands, as if reaching out to touch the device, his eyes filled with a desperate hope.

“Is it working?” Mike asked, his voice barely audible over the hum of the machine.

“I think so,” Sarah replied, watching in awe as Grey’s form grew more solid. “Look at him!”

Grey’s eyes met theirs, and for a moment, it felt as if time stood still. The room was filled with a palpable sense of connection, a bridge between the living and the dead.

“Thank you,” a voice echoed through the room, barely audible but unmistakably clear. It was Grey, his voice filled with gratitude and relief.

The ghostly figure began to fade, his form dissolving into the air. The room grew warmer, and the oppressive presence that had haunted the mansion lifted. The device emitted a final, soft hum and then fell silent.

Mike and Sarah stood there, stunned and silent. They had done it. They had completed Thomas Grey’s work and given him the peace he had sought for so long.

“He’s gone,” Mike said softly, his eyes wide with wonder. “We did it.”

Sarah nodded, tears streaming down her face. “We did. He’s finally at peace.”

They turned off the device and sat down on the floor, exhausted but exhilarated. The house felt different – lighter, more welcoming. The oppressive atmosphere that had hung over it for so long was gone.

“Do you think we’ll see him again?” Sarah asked, her voice barely above a whisper.

Mike shook his head. “No. I think he’s finally moved on.”

They spent the next few hours talking about their experience, trying to process everything that had happened. The fear and tension of the past few weeks melted away, replaced by a sense of accomplishment and closure.

“We need to document all of this,” Mike said eventually, getting to his feet. “Our followers are going to be blown away.”

Sarah nodded, standing up and stretching. “Yeah, but let’s take a moment to just... appreciate this. We helped a man find peace. That’s incredible.”

They shared a quiet moment, standing in the middle of the basement that had once been the site of so much torment and obsession. Now, it was a place of resolution and tranquility.

“Let’s go upstairs,” Mike said finally, taking Sarah’s hand. “I think we’ve earned a good night’s sleep.”

As they made their way up the stairs, they felt a sense of calm settle over them. The mansion, once a place of mystery and fear, had become their home in the truest sense.

For the first time since they had moved in, they slept peacefully, undisturbed by ghosts or strange occurrences. The house was quiet, and the air was filled with a sense of serenity. **** Their vlog documented the entire journey, and it became a sensation. People were fascinated by the story of Thomas Grey and the tech-savvy couple who brought his spirit peace. Their followers were captivated by the blend of history and the supernatural, and their channel’s popularity skyrocketed.

One evening, as they sat in the living room, their phones buzzing with notifications, Mike turned to Sarah with a look of disbelief.

"Can you believe how much attention this is getting? People are loving it."

Sarah smiled, scrolling through the comments on their latest video. "It's incredible. I think people are really connecting with Thomas's story. And the way everything came together... it's like something out of a movie."

Mike laughed. "Who would have thought our little renovation project would turn into this?

We're not just restoring a house; we're telling a story."

The house, now a blend of historic charm and modern technology, became a local legend.

Tourists and paranormal enthusiasts began to visit, drawn by the story of Thomas Grey and the couple who had brought his spirit peace. Sarah and Mike started offering tours, sharing the history and the hauntings with visitors from all over.

One afternoon, as they prepared for a group tour, Sarah looked around the grand foyer, now fully restored to its former glory. The stained-glass windows sparkled in the sunlight, casting colorful patterns on the polished wood floors. "It's amazing how far we've come," she said, her voice filled with pride.

Mike nodded, adjusting a display of old photographs and artifacts they had found in the house. "Yeah, it's like a dream come true. And it's not just about the renovations. It's about preserving the history, honoring Thomas's memory."

As the first group of visitors arrived, Sarah greeted them with a warm smile. "Welcome to Grey Mansion," she said. "We're excited to share the history of this beautiful house with you."

The tour began in the grand foyer, where Sarah and Mike recounted the story of Thomas Grey and their journey to uncover his secrets. The visitors listened in awe as they described the strange occurrences, the hidden door, and the final confrontation with Grey's ghost.

One of the visitors, an elderly man with a cane, raised his hand. "Did you ever feel afraid?

Knowing there was a ghost in your house?"

Sarah glanced at Mike, who nodded for her to answer. "At first, yes," she admitted. "It was scary not knowing what was happening. But as we learned more about Thomas and his work, we realized he wasn't trying to harm us. He just needed help to finish what he started."

Mike chimed in. "And once we understood that, we felt more determined than ever to see it through. It became less about fear and more about solving a mystery."

As they moved through the house, Sarah and Mike shared more details about the restoration process, the hidden treasures they had found, and the challenges they had faced. The visitors were fascinated by the blend of old and new, the way Sarah and Mike had managed to preserve the mansion's historic charm while incorporating modern technology.

In the basement, now converted into a museum-like exhibit, they showed the visitors Thomas Grey's lab. The old equipment and blueprints were displayed alongside modern interpretive panels explaining Grey's experiments and the significance of his work.

"This is where it all happened," Sarah said, her voice echoing in the dimly lit room. "Thomas Grey dedicated his life to understanding the afterlife. And in the end, we were able to help him achieve his goal."

One of the visitors, a young woman with a notebook, asked, "Do you think Thomas is still here, watching over the house?"

Mike smiled. "We like to think so. The house feels different now – peaceful. It's like he's finally at rest."

After the tour, as the visitors departed, Sarah and Mike sat on the front porch, watching the sun set over the hill. The mansion stood proudly behind them, a testament to their hard work and dedication.

"I'm so glad we did this," Sarah said, leaning her head on Mike's shoulder. "It's more than just a house now. It's a part of us."

Mike nodded, wrapping his arm around her. "Yeah. And it's a part of Thomas too. His story will live on, thanks to us."

They continued to restore the mansion, uncovering more of its hidden secrets and sharing their discoveries with their audience. Each new find added another layer to the story, drawing more viewers to their vlog and more visitors to the house.

One evening, as they reviewed the day's footage, they noticed a faint, ghostly image in the background.

It was Thomas Grey, standing in the doorway, watching them with a look of quiet contentment.

"Look at this," Sarah whispered, pointing to the screen. "It's him."

Mike smiled, a chill running down his spine. "He's still here. Watching over us."

Their home was filled with warmth and history, both tangible and spectral. Sarah and Mike had not only found their dream home but had also forged a connection with a forgotten soul, bringing his story to light and giving him the peace he had long sought.

The mansion stood as a reminder that the past is never truly gone, and that sometimes, the most unexpected encounters can lead to the most profound discoveries. As they walked through the halls of their home, they knew that they were part of a story that would continue to captivate and inspire for generations to come.

And in the quiet moments, when the house was still and the night was dark, they could almost hear Thomas Grey whispering his thanks, his spirit at peace at last.

NEUROSIS MAHMOUD MAHER ELTRAWY He had never found solace in this world, for he knew with a gnawing certainty deep within that he was not fashioned for it. The universe, he believed, was engaged in a relentless, cruel jest at his expense. To him, life offered two paths: one right, one wrong. Whether he believed in a god was a matter cloaked in ambiguity, perhaps even to himself. His existence was a relentless march down the wrong path, every fiber of his being straining against the force that compelled him to live a life antithetical to his essence.

He often mused, "He who knows nothing of fear knows nothing of this world." And he, without a doubt, knew fear intimately. Not because he was a coward—quite the contrary.

There were moments when he seemed the bravest of men. Yet fear, in its most primal form, is the fear of death, and he was well-acquainted with it. Panic would seize him often, and he courted death innumerable times. This intimate dance with death rendered him perhaps the most fearful being in the universe, yet he knew death like an old companion. He yearned for it, sought it as one seeks liberation.

His detachment from the mundane grew so profound that he feared the loss of his sanity, feared the descent into psychosis. In time, he embraced psychosis willingly, a rebellion against the hollow veneer of human rationality he so despised. To be truly free, to be authentic in a world steeped in hypocrisy, he realized he had to surrender to madness. In his presence, one felt the unsettling possibility that it was not he who was mad, but we. He wept like a child and fought with the valor of a hero. Some saw him as a tragic figure, a squandered potential. But not I. I believed in him.

APNEIC MAHMOUD MAHER ELTRAWY I The infinite night yawned before him, an abyss that mocked the very concept of time. He yearned for sleep with a fervor bordering on the maniacal, like a wretch starving for a drop of poison to still his restless mind. But sleep remained an aloof specter, indifferent to his suffering. The drugs that once provided a semblance of peace had long since betrayed him, leaving a bitter nostalgia in their wake, a cruel reminder of when he could feign sanctuary. Now, they ensnared his mind in a suffocating fog, reducing him to a stumbling wraith, his thoughts sluggish and fragmented. Anorexia gnawed at his insides like a relentless parasite, transforming the act of eating into a grotesque ritual he abhorred. His stomach, a void echoing with emptiness, mocked his every attempt at nourishment. He had consumed every sleeping pill, every soporific, every tranquillizer, saturating his bloodstream with a toxic cocktail battling for dominance. Daylight brought no relief; tremors wracked his limbs, turning his hands into instruments of betrayal. His mouth was a parched wasteland, while cold sweat drenched his skin, a deformed reminder of his body's rebellion.

His descent into madness blurred the boundaries between the drugs' insidious machinations and the relentless onslaught of insomnia, leaving him adrift in a surreal limbo where reality and nightmare coalesced. His psyche, frayed and tattered, wandered through this spectral existence, ensnared in an ever-deepening abyss of desolation and turmoil. He could no longer discern whether his torment arose from chemical infiltrations or sleepless nights. In this shadowed purgatory, he lingered in perpetual liminality, neither fully awake nor mercifully asleep, a prisoner of his own failing mind, condemned to existential anguish.

In the suffocating darkness of his room, he wrestled with the distinction between the void and the oblivion of sleep. Both were vast expanses devoid of meaning, realms where the essence of existence seemed to evaporate. Even in the absence of sleep, his mind wandered through a tumult of thoughts, weaving a tapestry of haunting visions like a fevered nightmare. With eyes wide open, he questioned the divide between waking purgatory and elusive dreams. Was there any true difference between the torment of consciousness and the fleeting solace of unconsciousness?

II

In the desolate embrace of a corroded chamber, where shadows clung like relentless specters, an oppressive dread festered. Within this rusted womb, an unnamed horror lurked—an elusive malevolence that defied comprehension. Its mere presence tainted the very air he breathed. Insomnia ravaged his psyche, devouring the fragile remnants of his sanity. His thoughts stuttered and faltered, choked by the corrosive rust encroaching upon his mind, dragging him inexorably into an abyss of despair. The weight of existence bore down upon him, crushing his spirit under its unbearable burden. The ceiling groaned under the weight of his sorrow, struggling to endure the oppressive force. Each tick of the clock reverberated like a relentless toll, marking the passage of time as a torturous dirge. His body throbbed with weariness, every sinew and bone pulsating with despair. His heart beat within his chest like a frantic drum, echoing his turmoil. The air grew dense and stagnant, suffocating him with its oppressive weight. He felt himself slipping away, his grasp on sanity weakening. The encroaching darkness threatened to engulf him completely. Lost in this abyss of despair, he drifted like a forsaken soul, adrift in a sea of hopelessness, with no prospect of deliverance.

This nightly battle had once been kept at bay by medication, but now he faced his tormentor unshielded. His thoughts, shattered and erratic, spiraled back to his shortcomings and flaws, amplifying his self-loathing until it reverberated through his being.

The cruel symphony of his inner demons played on, each discordant note a piercing reminder of his worthlessness. Defeat crept into his consciousness long before the struggle commenced, a silent acceptance of the consuming darkness that enveloped his existence.

Even the most wretched souls found solace in sleep, but his existence remained shackled to ceaseless vigilance. What was this agony that held him captive? He envisioned hell as an intensified reflection of his current state, yet how could he fathom such a place when his own suffering eluded comprehension? He had long abandoned the quest for self-repair, surrendered the battle against this insidious demon, and relinquished hope of deciphering its nature.

Now he lay there, eyes wide and unblinking, awaiting whatever doom might befall him.

Perhaps the bugs would feast upon his flesh, or the ceiling would descend to obliterate him.

He conjured grotesque scenarios, each more macabre than the last, and resolved to remain motionless, indifferent to the horror awaiting him. He imagined his skin peeling away, revealing a writhing mass of maggots beneath; faceless wraiths materializing from the shadows to tear him apart; his bones splintering and twisting into unnatural shapes, piercing his flesh from within. These hellish visions, like nightmares painted by Francisco Goya, seemed a merciful release compared to the relentless torment of his waking hours.

Tonight, one of these grotesque fates would emerge victorious. He would lie still, a passive witness to his own demise, until sleep, the final tormentor, mercifully claimed him.

MOTHER MAHMOUD MAHER ELTRAWY She deceived us all. We once called her the Angelic Mother, with her shorn head gleaming like a beacon in our barren world. The drought stretched on endlessly, blurring the lines between years—Centuries, perhaps millennia, bled into one another. The once vibrant ochre paint that adorned our faces had faded, replaced by the dull patina of despair. We, the remnants of the Green People, were mere whispers of who we once were. Time, a concept as withered as our crops, held no meaning in this arid wasteland. Hunger gnawed at our bellies, a relentless beast whispering promises of oblivion in our ears.

Conversations, if any, were guttural groans, the symphony of a dying language. We were marionettes on the strings of starvation, our movements jerky, our eyes hollow caverns.

The elders, their skin stretched taut over brittle bones, mumbled incoherently of a time when the sky wept with life-giving rain, a paradise mocking us from the dusty recesses of memory.

The once vibrant colors of our communal life had bled away, replaced by a chilling sense of isolation. The drought had stripped bare not just the land, but the very soul of our tribe.

Gone were the days of shared meals and joyous songs. Now, every man, woman, and child was an island, a fortress of gnawing hunger. Trust became a luxury we couldn't afford.

Sharing a morsel of dried lizard meat was akin to inviting a viper into your tent.

The nights were worse. Under the cold gaze of a million indifferent stars, our minds played cruel tricks. The shimmering mirages of shimmering oases danced just beyond reach, driving us to the brink of madness. Some swore they saw plump, ripe melons growing in the cracks of the parched earth, only to collapse in despair as the cruel mirage dissolved into dust. Others saw their deceased loved ones, their spectral forms beckoning with ghostly feasts, only to vanish with a heart-wrenching sigh as we reached for them.

Hunger, the great leveler, stripped away all pretense of civility. The bonds of family, once sacrosanct, frayed and snapped. The cries of children, once a source of joy, became a maddening symphony of need, a constant reminder of our dwindling resources. Desperate whispers of a forgotten prophecy surfaced – whispers of a red moon and a sacrifice to appease "the Thing." We, who once scoffed at the superstitions of neighboring tribes, now clung to this sliver of hope like a drowning man to a piece of driftwood.

Enter the Angelic Mother. She arrived like a wraith, shrouded in black leather that seemed to drink in the ever-present sunlight.

Her shaved head, once a beacon of fertility, now gleamed like a skull polished by the desert winds. Her eyes, cold and calculating, held no warmth, no empathy. Her smile, a chilling crescent moon, sent shivers down our spines. Despite the gnawing suspicion that curdled in our bellies, her pronouncements held a strange power.

The queen, a woman with eyes as hollow as our bellies, became a mere pawn in the Mother's game. We were desperate, so desperate that reason itself became a luxury we couldn't afford. The Mother's demands – the desecration of our most sacred traditions, the sacrifice of our ancestors – were met with a mute acquiescence. Hope, a flickering candle in the wind, fueled our compliance.

As the crimson moon, a bleeding wound in the inky sky, painted the parched earth red, a flicker of something akin to hope stirred within us. Gathered on the shore, the once vibrant pulse of the ocean stilled, replaced by a slick, crimson calm that mirrored the blood sacrifice staining the Mother's hands. Her chant, a guttural invocation in a language older than time, echoed across the desolate landscape. It wasn't a prayer. It was a pact, a bargain struck with a power as ancient as the stars.

The ocean churned, waves of blood crashing against the shore. From the depths emerged a monstrosity that defied comprehension. Six spindly legs, each thicker than the mightiest baobab tree of our forgotten past, propelled a gelatinous mass that pulsed with an unholy luminescence. Its eyeless head, a grotesque parody of a starfish, writhed with impossible angles, revealing rows of razor-sharp teeth that gnashed at the air. An inhuman stench, a cloying amalgam of decay and sulfur, assaulted our senses, threatening to melt our very flesh. The Mother, her laughter a chorus of rasping echoes that seemed to emanate from every crevice of the world, threw herself willingly into the creature's maw. Panic, primal and raw, seized us. We scattered like frightened insects, but escape was futile. The entity devoured everything in its path, leaving behind only the chilling emptiness of a world devoid of hope.

I never believed in gods. Even now, staring into the abyss that swallowed my tribe, I don't.

This… thing… was no deity. Perhaps a devil, a manifestation of our collective despair given form. A single tear, a glistening ember in this wasteland, rolls down my cheek. Does it even matter if I believe anymore? The Green People are gone, their vibrant colors replaced by the crimson stain of a hungry god, or perhaps, a reflection of our own corrupted souls.

The vast, indifferent sky stretches above, a canvas of countless, mocking stars. In this cosmic dance of oblivion, where meaning crumbles to dust and civilizations rise and fall like fleeting breaths, what is the purpose of a single life, a single tribe?

Lost and alone, I stand on the precipice of oblivion, a solitary echo in the face of an uncaring universe.

But a chilling memory surfaces, a testament to the true horror of our demise. In the throes of starvation, driven to the brink by the Angelic Mother's maddening pronouncements, the whispers of cannibalism began. At first, it was the weak, the elderly, those who succumbed to hunger's cruel embrace. But the hunger, once awakened, became a ravenous beast with an insatiable appetite. Suspicion turned into accusations, accusations into violence.

Families fractured, bonds severed. Brother turned on brother, sister on sister, all for a single, meager scrap of flesh. The stench of roasting human flesh, a macabre incense to a pitiless sky, became a constant companion.

The nights were the worst. The gnawing hunger, fueled by the taste of forbidden flesh, twisted our dreams into grotesque parodies. We feasted on spectral versions of our loved ones, only to awaken to the emptiness of our bellies and the chilling reality. The line between sanity and madness blurred, leaving a chilling emptiness in its wake.

The Angelic Mother, that harbinger of doom, watched with a detached amusement. Her eyes, devoid of any human emotion, gleamed with a cruel satisfaction. Was she a prophet, or a puppet master, a willing servant of the entity that rose from the crimson sea? The answer, like the meaning of our suffering, remains shrouded in the dust of this desolate world. Now, I am the last. A lone survivor in a graveyard of forgotten dreams. The entity, satiated for now, has retreated to the depths, leaving behind a chilling silence. Do I yearn for death? Perhaps. But a flicker of defiance, a vestige of the Green People's spirit, still burns within me. I will not surrender to despair. I will live, if only to bear witness to the desolation, a living testament to our folly and the cruel indifference of the universe. There may be no redemption, no solace in the afterlife. But I will cling to this life, this solitary existence, a final act of rebellion against the oblivion that awaits.

ECLIPSE MAHMOUD MAHER ELTRAWY He struck an unholy covenant with darkness, the haunting ambience of sound, and the frigid embrace of coldness. A pact forged with the world, beneath a sky ablaze with the tortured souls of the damned, reflected in a lake awash with stagnant red blood. He stumbled upon the undesired, forsaking the sought. A pact with the devil, solacing in inferno, where his dormant soul decayed into oblivion. All that lingers—cursed flesh and bones—waiting, endlessly waiting for the impending end.

A whispered invitation in his most tormenting moments, 'Come closer, fear not’ Feeble attempts at compliance met with disastrous failures. Dwelling in an eternal nightmare, he succumbs to the inescapable demise, shrouded in the grotesque specter of fear. he accepts the certainty of dying in fear. In the relentless wait for the well-deserved, hideous punishment, anticipating God's wrath. At fleeting moments, his dormant soul pleaded for release, yet redemption proved to be a twisted illusion, slipping through his wicked fingers.

He grasps the immutable truth —nothing changes, nothing will change. Craving the termination of unending torment, he hungers for the finality. His existence a manifestation of fear, and he knows for a fact that even the wise and the saints meet their demise in fear.

Fear, the undeniable truth, the enigmatic companion, the twisted friend, and the relentless motive. The notion of 'conquer your fear' seems, in his desperate reality, as the cruelest joke uttered by humanity.

THE GATE MAHMOUD MAHER ELTRAWY In the desolate expanse of the dreamscape, where the shifting sands whispered secrets of forgotten epochs, I stumbled, a lone wanderer adrift in the void. Amidst the barren terrain, an apparition materialized, an ancient sage cloaked in robes as white as the bones of the earth, his beard a cascade of untold wisdom.

Though my desperate pleas for guidance reverberated through the void, the sage remained aloof, his gaze fixed upon a distant horizon where shadows danced with the specters of lost dreams. Ignoring the howling winds that tore at my soul, I trailed his phantom form as it glided effortlessly towards a palace of unimaginable splendor.

Its gilded walls, adorned with grotesque carvings of forgotten gods and fallen empires, shimmered like a mirage in the sun's merciless gaze. As the sage vanished into its hallowed halls, leaving me to confront the imposing facade alone, I felt the weight of impending doom settle upon my shoulders like a shroud of lead.

With trembling hands, I reached out to grasp the ornate door handle, its surface cool to the touch despite the blistering heat that surrounded me. To my astonishment, the doors swung open of their own accord, revealing a labyrinth of enigmatic beauty and unsettling dread that stretched out before me like a yawning abyss.

Undeterred by the palpable sense of unease that permeated the air, I ventured deeper into the bowels of the palace, my footsteps echoing through the desolate corridors like the tolling of funeral bells. Shadows danced and whispered secrets of forgotten sins as I navigated the twisting passages, my heart pounding in rhythm with the drumbeat of impending doom.

Suddenly, I stumbled upon a solitary chamber, its entrance obscured by the veil of darkness that hung like a pall over the dreamscape. With each step closer, the air grew thick with the suffocating weight of fear and dread, clawing at my throat and twisting my stomach into knots of apprehension.

In a moment of reckless abandon, I stepped forward, unaware of the abyss that lay hidden beneath the surface of the chamber's murky depths. With a cry of terror, I plummeted into the void, my descent into oblivion a testament to the fragility of mortal existence.

As I fell, the fear and dread that had once gripped me tightened their icy grip, suffusing every fiber of my being with a paralyzing sense of despair. The darkness swallowed me whole, engulfing me in its cold embrace as I tumbled ever deeper into the abyss.

I plummeted, a soul untethered, consumed by the chilling embrace of the hidden lake's depths. Dread and terror intertwined, weaving a suffocating shroud around me as I sank deeper into the murky oblivion.

Surrendering to the siren call of death, I embraced the icy tendrils of the abyss, yearning to dissolve into the void and escape the relentless grip of fear and loss. Yet, in the darkness, a strange tranquility washed over me, the sensation of drowning a paradoxical caress, promising liberation from the burdens of mortal existence.

Despite my fervent desire for oblivion, my corporeal form rebelled against the abyss and my body betrayed me, propelling me upwards towards the realm of the living. Gasping for breath, I emerged from the depths, reborn in the crucible of my own despair, a phoenix rising from the ashes of longing and despair.

Guided by an unseen hand, I stumbled upon a secluded chamber where I cast aside my earthly trappings and donned the white garb of the ancient sage. The razor's blade whispered against my scalp, shedding a lifetime's worth of illusion with each stroke.

In the reflection of the mirror, I beheld a stranger, his visage drenched in the remnants of the hidden lake's embrace. His countenance, once etched with the burdens of mortal toil, now shimmered with the purity of innocence, a transient soul stripped bare by the baptism of water and fire.

His eyes, twin beacons of divine wisdom, blazed with an otherworldly light, piercing through the veil of illusion to reveal the boundless expanse of cosmic truth.

MY CONFESSION MARK MITCHELL I’m not proud of what I did. And honestly, I don’t know how anyone could be. Ask me however if you think I was wrong to do it and I might just give you a different answer.

Consider this my confession.

It all started when my siblings and I got together for our monthly dinner with dad. My older brother by four years had made the three hour journey from upstate to be there. Eric could usually be relied on to make some sort of excuse as to why he wouldn’t be able to come this month, whether work or illness being the culprit. He surprised us all this time by being the first to arrive. Naturally we all thought it would have been my sister Joanna - Jo for short since she acted as our father’s caretaker.

Jo had assumed our mother’s role after she passed away nearly a decade ago, to make sure dad took care of himself. Exercised regularly. Ate less fried foods. Went to his doctor appointments. Jo did all this despite having a family of five keeping her more than adequately busy.

I was the last to arrive, though I lived nearest to our father’s apartment. This was a deliberate decision on my part, not because I didn’t like spending time with my father, but because we didn’t have a whole lot in common with one another. Once we had dispensed with the work gossip, my love life, and how painful this year’s Bengals team was, a decidedly awkward silence would suffocate the room. I needed my other siblings there to act as a buffer.

We had just sat down to dinner - a meal Jo would try to pass off as one of her favorite recipes, but since it became my chore to throw away the garbage, I had the insider information of where she had ordered from that month.

Being the patriarch my father naturally sat at the head of the table. He eased into the well worn cushion that supposedly helped his lower back pain and set about to cast his ruefully judgemental eye upon his three offspring.

My father rattled a tumbler glass of scotch, taking generous sips from it at appointed intervals in the conversation. After every prolonged gulp, he’d smack his lips with satisfaction. Possibly one of the only pleasures he had left in life.

“How’s the business coming along?” my father asked Eric after a smack of the lips.

Eric looked up from his plate of Mediterranean cuisine - one of the healthiest diets for my father’s high blood pressure and rheumatism - to look from my father, to me and back again.

“Great,” Eric said. He patted a splotch of olive oil from the corner of his mouth. “We’re looking to bounce back with a strong third quarter. Making up for that fiasco back in midApril.”

“That’s my boy,” my father said. He rattled his glass at me. “You know, you could learn a lot from your brother. Instead of wasting your time in that dead-end job of yours.” He harrumphed into his glass.

“I like what I do,” I said, rather meekly I’ll admit, and spooned some couscous into my mouth.

As if on cue, my sister the savior swept in from the kitchen and snatched the glass from my father’s hand.

“Hey,” he said in protest.

“You know you shouldn’t be drinking alcohol,” Jo said. She set down a tall glass of dark crimson liquid. “Drink this instead.”

“What the hell’s this crap?” my father snapped.

“Beetroot,” she said. “It’s good for your heart. Speaking of which, have you taken your pill yet?” She fought to get our father to look at her.

“No,” he said into his shoulder.

“Where are they? You know what your doctor told you about keeping up with your regiment.”

“They’re in my desk in the study,” he said.

“Chris, would you mind?”

I looked up from tearing a round of pita bread.

“Why me?” I asked.

“Because you’re closest to the study,” Jo said.

“Why can’t you do it?” I said. “You’re already standing–” “Help your sister,” my father said. When he thought Jo wasn’t looking, he tried to take another sip from his glass of scotch. My sister was prepared for such an attempt and moved the glass from his reach.

“All I’m asking for is a little help,” Jo said. “He’s your father too, so why don’t–” “Fine!” I pushed back from the table. “I’m going, alright? Geez!”

The light switch in the study didn’t work and I almost tripped stumbling over to the desk lamp with the lime green shade. The light was dismal, but enough for me to search by.

I opened the top drawer to find a miscellaneous assortment of pens, envelopes, paper clips, and rubber bands. Not what I was looking for. The bottle of medication was in the bottom drawer, as if he had hidden it away where the bottle would hopefully be forgotten about.

I had to move a tape player out of the way to get to the pills. The tape player was a relic of a bygone age in electronics. My father had taken it with him on sales trips before he retired. I figured he must have played the sounds of the rainforest or something to help him sleep in those ratty motels he’d stayed in. Out of curiosity, I hit play. At first I couldn’t hear anything.

Then I turned up the volume.

Consider this my first mistake.

On the tape a woman moaned with ecstasy. Her voice was raspy and sensual. As if Kathleen Turner moonlighted as a 1-900 call girl. The voice instantly brought a tingling to my nether regions. It was beyond hot. Sexy and dangerous. I couldn’t stop listening.

That voice had a magnetic quality that made you want to listen to more. A siren’s song of desire and passion. I thumbed the volume to make it louder when the door opened behind me.

“What are you doing in here?”

I fumbled the tape off and turned to find Eric standing in the doorway. I didn’t dare ask what he might have heard.

“Jo sent me to see if you got lost,” he said. “What’s taking so long?”

I stashed the tape player back in the drawer and slammed it shut.

“They were in the very bottom drawer,” I said, holding up the orange canister of pills for him to see. Anything to draw his eyeline away from the incriminating bulge in my pants.

“Whatever,” Eric said, turning away. “Jo wants to serve dessert now.”

Throughout the rest of the meal I couldn’t concentrate on anything but that sultry, orgasmic voice that had nestled into the crevices of my brain and lodged itself there for the foreseeable future.

Whether my siblings asked me anything, or whether I had a response in return, is unknown to me. That voice. That damn voice rang in my ears. Over and over. The huffing. The prolonged yeses. Just the thought of that voice brought moisture to my brow and I had to readjust my posture to accommodate the enlargement in my pants.

I had to hear that voice again.

When I had mastered my own thoughts - for the time being at least - and allowed myself to subside to normal flaccidity, I excused myself to use the bathroom. No one heard what I had said, they were all too busy fighting over who would do the dishes.

After turning on the bathroom light and shutting the door to mimic the room was occupied, I tip-toed down the hall into the study and secreted myself inside.

The tape recorder was right where I’d left it. As if that should have been a surprise, but it came as a relief to me. The tape inside had a homemade label on it. In my father’s definite scrawl it read: Business Seminar ‘87.

My father had been a traveling salesman, or at least that’s what he told us. What type of business seminar had been captured on tape was beyond me to know, nor did I care at the moment. I had limited time before potentially getting caught again.

This time without a valid excuse.

Thinking quickly on my feet, I rewound the tape to the beginning and hit play. With my phone, I recorded the voice onto my device. Now I would have my own facsimile of that tantalizing moan to listen to at my leisure.

Consider this my point of no return.

With my spy work concluded and the room set to normalcy, I finished out my visit in perfect splendor, aching to get home to replay the recording to my heart’s desire. # As the days went on I had to come to terms that I had a problem. I couldn’t stop listening to that recording. For hours I would stand at the window looking out at the city with my headphones on, playing the track over and over till my mouth hung open and drool accumulated at my naked feet.

Who was she? Where had my father met her - or if he hadn’t met her, then where had the tape come from?

The more the questions were raised in my mind, the more I didn’t care. That voice. That’s all that mattered. I’d been hooked and wanted to spend all my time listening to that breathy moaning.

Consider this my darkest secret.

Since the recording had been transferred to my device, that voice came with me everywhere I went. To the gym. To work.

I would sit at my desk, mindlessly typing away and glad my finger didn’t get stuck on the “O” key anytime the voice climaxed.

My coworker Stanley stopped by my cubicle to tell me our supervisor wanted to see us in the conference room right away. It pained me to tear myself away from that voice for even one minute.

In my haste to accompany Stanley, the side effects of the recording failed to cross my mind.

As I stood up my turgid member rattled my keyboard, flipping it over in an acrobatic somersault.

“That excited about the meeting, huh?” Stanley joked.

I told him I’d be right there. Before going into the meeting, I ducked into the bathroom to take care of some more pressing matters that needed to come first.

Consider this my new work ethic. # That voice was set to ruin me. I had to get my addiction under control. At this point it had been three weeks since I’d discovered that provocative tape in my father’s study and I’d grown to find it had invaded every aspect of my life.

To obtain a restful night of sleep, I had to play the track on repeat until I drifted off into a repose of lustful dreams and vivid sensations. Every other day became laundry day to wash my sheets after another night of wet dreams. Who knew at my age I could have so many nocturnal emissions. It was as if I'd gone through a second burst of puberty. Because of this, I also carried a gallon of water at all times to replenish my fluids and prepare for later that night.

My girlfriend even saw a sudden change in my prowess.

One heavy-laden night of drinking found us in the throes of passion. For the first time in my life though, I found I couldn’t perform. I could tell my girlfriend was starting to lose interest when all the usual tricks failed to get a rise out of me. It was time for drastic measures.

Though I’d promised myself never to use this power irresponsibly, I placed one earbud in and played the track on my phone. In an instant I responded to the occasion.

With the carnal act committed, my girlfriend rolled off of me, our sweat-soaked skin peeling off one another. She sucked for air and her body trembled. When she was able to hold enough breath to speak again, she said: “My god, what has gotten into you? It’s never been like that before. Now I know what that lion feels like on Animal Planet.”

I turned my head to the nightstand and smiled at my phone, knowing it had been a team effort.

Consider this my surefire fetish. # We held three encore performances that night before we called it quits. Our private areas had been pounded to the point of bruising. A welcomed kind of hurt.

My phone alerted me to an impending software update. Without thinking, I accepted the terms and placed it on a charger, then rolled over to get some much needed sleep.

I had no way of knowing the extent this addiction had grown until that next morning. My girlfriend turned over and gave me a devilish smile.

“I’ve been waiting hours for you to wake up.” She bit her lower lip and reached under the sheets to grab hold of me. “How’s about a little pre-breakfast action?”

I was game, but knew I’d need a little assistance to get the juices flowing in that early morning light. As my girlfriend went to splash some water on the entry zone, or whatever she had to do in the bathroom to get ready for our excursion, I took my phone off the charger and navigated to my recordings.

Consider this my worst fear.

The audio file was gone.

Somehow it had been erased in the update. That was the only explanation I could conceive of in my sheer panic. I looked everywhere for it. In my files. Under ringtones. Even in the trash. Nothing.

My moaning motivator had disappeared overnight.

I sat bolt upright in bed and threw the covers off me right as my girlfriend sauntered out of the bathroom top to bottom naked and ready to be satisfied.

“What’s wrong?” she said upon seeing my troubled face.

“I’m sorry,” I said, jumping into my jeans without the prerequisite underwear. “I have to go. I can’t explain at the moment.”

I made it to the door before returning to give her a peck on the cheek. She would be pissed at my sudden departure, but some things needed to be risked. Without that woman’s voice, I doubted if I could ever get an erection again. # If there was a brightside to my agony, it was only a few more days until my siblings and I would get together for another check-in dinner with dad. All I needed to do was make it through the next seventy-two hours. Surely I could do that. Afterall I was an adult. On paper at least.

Then came the withdrawals.

I couldn’t sleep. Had no appetite. I called out of work the rest of the week claiming to have contracted a highly contagious cold. If anyone saw me, they would never think twice that I had been lying. My appearance deteriorated rapidly.

I stopped showering and took to cowering in the dark corner. Porn wouldn’t do the trick.

Nor lotions or lubes. Even time-tested old school methods like magazines had no effect.

Dire straits indeed.

My phone rang through the silence of my desolation. Most likely my girlfriend calling to find out where I’ve been. Another angry voicemail for me to listen to later, but it wouldn’t be the intense ejaculations I needed to hear at the moment.

Sitting on my haunches, I rocked back and forth and listened to the seconds tick away from the clock on the wall. A persistent chill took over my body and I clawed at my arms with the jagged fingernails I had begun to nervously chomp on.

Saturday couldn’t come soon enough. # A miracle occurred in my dismal apartment. Somehow I had made it. Saturday. In a little over seven hours my siblings would arrive at my father’s apartment. This time, however, I wouldn’t be the last one.

I forced myself into some cleaner clothes and even brushed my teeth, though that was the extent of my grooming for the day. I could no longer take it. I needed relief.

Consider this my admission of a problem.

When my father opened the front door and saw me standing there, I had expected some sort of surprise. Maybe even a touch of wonder. Instead he merely said: “Jesus. You look like shit.”

“Hi, Dad,” I said.

He stepped aside and allowed me to enter. My heart raced. My salvation was only twenty feet away in the study down the hall.

“I was about to have a beer,” my dad said. “Care to join me?”

“Umm…please.”

He gave me a once over, silently judging my disheveled hair and blood shot eyes. Mercifully he didn’t ask about my condition. Instead he shuffled to the kitchen where the fridge door opened and then closed three seconds later.

Dad handed me a cold bottle and then slumped into his chair. He found football on TV and slurped from his own bottle.

I stood in the entryway, unsure of how to proceed with my plan. Though every fiber in my body wanted desperately to rush into the study and fill my ears with those soulful sounds, I had to be careful. Dad couldn’t find out why I’d arrived so early.

I forced myself instead to sit on the couch. I guzzled my bottle of beer in hopes it would make me have to micturate. The last few days of dehydration sought to foil those plans.

My leg jittered as I tried to concentrate on the game. My father looked over several times, but didn’t say a word other than to ask if I would like another.

“Please.” I handed him my empty and while he was in the kitchen, I added, “I’m gonna hit the head.”

He grumbled some sort of reply, but by then I was already halfway down the hall. I entered the study and closed the door behind me. It took wills of iron not to slam it. I leaned back against the closed door and for the first time in days I let out the breath I’d been holding in.

I slid the bottom drawer of the desk open. The tape player was right on top. The light from the desk lamp whinked across the plastic window where you could see the spools of tape inside. I imagined the tape player was happy to see me too.

I cradled the tape player in my hands and gave it a caress. The smooth plastic was cold against my pursed lips. The click of the play button made my heart skip a beat.

The first few soundwaves reverberated down my ear canals and stirred my lustful hunger for relief. My pants grew tight in an instant. As if I had been trained like one of Pavlov’s dongs.

The moaning washed over me in a tide of sensations. Blood throbbed in my veins. My eyes fluttered shut and I bit my lower lip. Before I realized it, my hand had unzipped my pants and held my engorged member. I stroked and stroked, building speed until I was ready to release. Three days of buildup ready to spring forth in a matter of seconds.

And that’s when my father caught me.

Right as I was nearing completion our eyes met. Him standing in the doorway. Me bent over his desk with my erection in hand. He looked from me to the tape player and back. His mouth stammered before anything intelligible came out.

“Not that tape!” he said. “No, you mustn't. That’s a recording of…”

He grasped at his chest and dropped to his knees. He made a gurgling sound in his throat and outside of a few expletives, he spoke no more. His body fell forward and made a thud against the floor.

I knew I should run to him and offer whatever help I could, but I was so close to the end.

Can you blame me for finishing before calling for help?

Consider this my rock bottom. #

The funeral was held a week later on a pleasant fall day. Crisp but not cold. Sunny but not bright. A fine day to say goodbye.

Family and friends gathered around the freshly dug grave to pay their respects. Jo, dressed in all black, sobbed and wept the loudest of those in attendance. She more than made up for the tears I was unable to produce. Too much weighed on my mind. I had killed my father. One simply doesn’t get over that in a week’s time.

After we had thrown our handfuls of dirt on the casket, and my father was lowered into his grave where he would deteriorate next to my mother forever, we went back to my father’s former apartment to reminisce around a platter of finger foods and refreshments.

I avoided my sister at all costs. She was still bawling at the drop of a hat and from her rueful stares she directed at me, I had the feeling she blamed everything on me. Warranted or not, it still stung a little that she thought so little of me.

Eric stood in the corner of the room alone. I grabbed two beers from the tub of ice water and joined him. He took a beer from me with a slight inclination of the head. We clinked bottle necks and took a sip together.

“Crazy how fast life can change, huh?” Eric cast his eyes to the carpet and shook his head.

“Jo always told dad to take care of himself. Guess she was right in the end.”

He took a longer pull from his bottle. I followed with one from mine. He then turned to me and asked: “Did he say anything…I mean, you were with him when he died right?”

I nodded.

“What were his last words?”

I took another sip of my beer to stall for time. I had to think of something.

“He said he was proud of us,” I lied. “Even me, can you believe it?” I forced a laugh.

My brother hurrumped with a slight lift of the shoulder.

“You tell Jo that?”

“Not yet,” I said.

“What was he doing in the study, anyway? He knew we were about to come over for dinner.”

“He was showing me his tape player he used to take with him on business trips. He said he wanted me to have it.” I shrugged and tried to play it cool. Eric furrowed his brow.

“That’s strange,” he said. “Why would he pick then to tell you that?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Though he did say it was important that I had it when he was gone.”

“Whatever.” Eric gulped the rest of his beer. “Just make sure you throw away the tape inside.”

I almost choked on my beer.

“Why?” I said, wiping foam from my chin.

“You don’t know?”

I shook my head.

“That tape he always kept in there,” Eric said, “was a gift from mom. Something she made for him so that he wouldn’t get lonely and cheat on her while on the road.”

Consider this my utter disbelief.

“How do you know that?” I asked, mortified.

“Dad got drunk one day and mentioned it to me when we were watching baseball together.

I don’t know what made him think of it.” Eric stepped away and turned around. He held up the empty bottle on one of his fingers. “You want another?”

I nodded without hearing his words. My mother’s climatic moaning echoed in my ears. The rest of the sound from the reception died away leaving me with only those oh’s and ah’s my mother recorded decades ago. I suddenly felt sick, and worse, slightly aroused.

A coldness came over me and I had to sit down. The room was spinning.

Nausea rose up inside. It felt like all eyes had fallen on me.

Someone reached out and grasped me by the shoulder, inquiring if I was alright. I pushed the hand away without seeing who it belonged to.

Gaining my feet, I muscled my way to the study and closed the door behind me. This time I remembered to lock the door. I pulled the tape player from the bottom drawer and clutched it against my breast. I slid down against the far wall and pushed play.

There in the dark, a single tear fell down my cheek as I listened to the only thing that had brought me joy in recent weeks. One tear became two. Two became four. And before I knew it, I was sobbing alone for my wretched soul. There was no going back from where I had come.

Consider this my damnation.

THE FOUR LAURA SHELL Their names were Nash, Bishop, McManus, and Hooper. A woman and three men. Nash brandished her two .45s. Bishop had two .50 Desert Eagles. McManus hated guns, so he'd brought his two Damascus kukri blades the size of small children. Hooper had a .223 long rifle with a scope. These four weren't fucking around. They had a mission, a destiny to fulfill.

They'd all had the same vision—to meet at this particular spot, on this particular day and time, to battle this particular foe. Why the four of them? They had no idea. They had plenty of questions but no answers. So they resigned themselves to do what their visions had foretold.

The brown creature stood four stories, had six legs, skin like a snake's, and a ginormous round mouth with rows of shark-like teeth. And it smelled. If anything, that was the main reason to kill it. Sure, it destroyed buildings and cars and anything in its wake, including living beings, but it was the smell...Jesus fucking Christ. It was a combination of decaying flesh and a burning dumpster full of dirty diapers.

The creature roared as it appeared between two office buildings, crushing parked cars along the way and sending white spittle into the air, which landed ten feet in front of the four with a splat. The four winced due to its odiferous offense, then looked at each other and steeled themselves.

"Fuck this mother fucking thing," Hooper exclaimed.

"Yeah," the rest of them yelled.

Those with guns blasted the smelly bastard, causing it to roar louder as their bullets pierced its scaly flesh. Then McManus charged at it with his blades. ### The four sat on a curb, exhausted. They were covered with the creature's bodily fluids, be its spittle or its green blood or its green internal juices, or its green shit and piss, or a mixture of some or all of that. And now, the smell was worse. It surrounded the decimated corpse of the creature and everything around it for blocks, maybe miles.

People who were in the city at the time of the battle came out from their hiding places and inspected the scene—the dead creature and the four who had made it dead and the mess of body liquids and body parts and internal organs in the streets. All of them covered their noses and mouths. Some of them barfed; the smell was that bad.

A hissing sound emitted from the creature's direction. The middle of its skull parted. A tiny humanoid being crawled out in a puff of green smoke and coughed. It was about three feet tall and covered with bright red hair. It stumbled toward the four, holding something in its hands—a rough-cut diamond the size of a pie. It handed it to Nash.

In a raspy voice, it said, "You win." It limped away.

Nash scowled at the stone, then tossed it to the ground. She stood and yelled. "Fuck that mess. How do we get rid of this smell?"

The tiny thing turned slowly, then laughed like a hyena. "You don't."

A DAY OFF ANDREA My hands smelled like period blood. The brown and red were long gone, but the smell stained with stubbornness. I frowned, but I wanted to learn how to like it.

Looking down at the screen of my cell phone, another graceful young woman talking about her positive mindset when her period arrived. She embraced the pain and mess with gentle words. Her skin glowed in the photo and her style of clothes matched the designed bookshelf and coffee table next to her.

It had been an hour. A weight accumulated at the crouch of my pants. I dragged myself toward the toilet, and the moment I stood up, a blob of warmth slid out of my vagina.

I tore off that bloody pad and rolled it into a spring roll. A smell stung my nostrils. It was the five previous rolls in the trash can. They were cooked by Taiwanese summer. Rotting of sour, bitter, and iron, the smell leaked out even the dried blood was concealed by the pink packaging. I refused to deal with it this instant and wasted the trash bag. I sprayed the pile with some air freshener.

Loving oneself seemed lovely. The women promoting self-love on social media all appeared glowing, confident, and comfortable. I wanted that, too. Yet, book after book about feminism and biology, loving oneself grew tiresome.

Waves of blood in me pulled me to a desire to go to the beach. I longed to listen to the tides of nature and felt the wind smooth out my troubles.

No other cars in the parking lot; no one else on the beach. Everything was so quiet, only wave after wave patting on the sand. I found myself a piece of beach where there were not that much crumbs of trash. I took off all my clothes, including my pad, and laid down.

The sun was up, but the sand was cool and soft. The taste and smell of the ocean melt in the air and consumed by me. I sipped with greed, and they washed away my anger for the inconvenience and pain of my period. Drip after drip of blood slid out my vagina and was absorbed by the sand under my butt. The wind caressed my swollen breasts.

I fell asleep under the song of the ocean. When I woke up, the sun squeezed out sweat from every inch of my skin. Perhaps it was time to go home.

I stood up to feel a lighter version of myself. The tension and agony in my uterus were gone.

I stared at the dark spot where my period blood was freed for a second before I buried it with sand around it.

I walked into the water and washed off the sand stuck on my skin. I did not know whether through this journey I had learned to love myself. At least, for now, I did not feel like hating my period. The blood was fused with seawater. It smelled better.

AUGUST IN BRISBANE ANDREA I guessed Brisbane’s weather and my temper had a lot in common. It occurred to me while I escaped the burn and suffocation from hanging laundry under the sun. One day, the sun boiled every surface it could reach, and the oxygen seemed to evaporate with the dewiness and coolness of everything. On the next day, the chill and humidity in the air could wipe out your motivation to get out of bed.

North Taiwan, where I came from, had the biggest swings between seasons and weather.

Due to high humidity, the sensation of cold was colder, and hot was hotter. Yet, even so, when we put away our summer or winter clothes, we put them away with seriousness. A tiny farewell, until the season arrives next time should we see each other again. Not for Brisbane, no, the weather here teased and taunted us. We walked out of our long sleeves but could not store them away in peace at the same time.

“What should we do, then?” He stood at the opposite side of the room.

“How should I know? They’re your friends.” I cast the irresponsible and emotional statement in the air. Regret jumped and covered every inch of me as soon as I said that, but pride turned my head away and refused to take that back.

It was August. It was not even spring. The sun roasted on like it was its time of the year to push its talents to the limits. The heat choked our throats and pressed our lungs. There were no air conditioners in the house, which was a cultural shock for us subtropical people.

The only blessing was that we did not get sweaty under this temperature like back in Taiwan. Still, the heat drained all of our outdoor plans for the weekend and indoor desires such as watching a movie.

“C’mon, don’t be like that.” He sighed.

The sigh enraged me. “Like what? A crazy bitch? Is that the word?”

“I didn’t say that.” His jaw muscle tightened.

I wished he would just come forward and hug me.

“You don’t want to talk to them yourself; you don’t want me to talk to them. I don’t understand. You keep pouring your negative emotions on me.”

The bubbling escalation of heat vanished on the next day. Grayness took over the sky and aided in the sun’s rapid mood swings. Gusts of wind began the day and messed with our minds, blowing away our senses. Humidity crept in from every crack in the wooden walls and every inch of the filthy carpet. Right after I hung the laundry outside because of the humidity, rain poured with no mercy. An old townhouse in Brisbane was not up against Zeus’ tantrum. Water leaked in through the walls and splashed in from the windows. One window screen surrendered and gave up its position with a loud crash. Breathing the humid carpet air, I was on the verge of using my inhaler every single minute.

“Who am I supposed to talk to about this?” I breathed hard to try to squeeze out one drop of tear.

“I didn’t force you to come.” The victim card did not work. “I am your person to talk to. But it’s getting overwhelming.”

The extra folds on his eyelids and the rashes on the back of his hands stormed into my vision the moment I was about to unleash the rage for his “I didn’t force you to come.” I curled into a ball on the chair. The thought of being a burden to him shadowed my mind and left me no space to be aggressive and unreasonable anymore.

Perhaps I did not like the idea that he had allies other than me. I could also envy the straightforwardness of their friendship which I never experienced with my own friends.

However, the idea of talking to them face-to-face about how they should take out the trash once in a while or clean up their mess accelerated my heartbeats and turned my stomach upside-down.

The rain rotted the fallen leaves on the grass and the quiet dead bodies of mice or lizards.

The stench of death stung my nose and head. Death was close enough to put everything out of importance. The chill in the air cooled my stacking rage on sunny days. I was not a child anymore. I should deal with the emotions and consequences of my decisions. No one could fix it for me just like hyenas did no such thing as looking after lions’ cubs. Neither was I a goddess sitting on clouds.

Seeing me frozen on the spot, he approached me and knelt so I did not need to look up to meet his eyes. It was one step forward in this argument.

“Am I a burden to you?” I uncurled. “That’s what they said. I heard.”

“No, you’re not. They’re stupid people, k?” He stroke my arms.

“They’re your friends and they’re stupid?” I let a chuckle leak out.

I could smell it in the air when it was a beautiful day. Sunshine brightened the land and cleared the sky. We glistened under the light but experienced no pain. The air was fresh.

The breeze joined the party. The smell of rot and heavy humidity retreated with the gray clouds. Every touch was so dry and cool that my fingertips danced with joy.

“We’ll figure this out together.” He smiled and kissed my cheek.

“I’m sorry.” I hugged him. “I’ll think it through. Whether I talk to them myself or live with my decision and don’t mind it so much.”

August in Brisbane was both hot and cold; both dry and humid. Crows howled outside, waking us up. Brisbane’s weather and my temper had a lot in common. Rage burned the crisp edges of plants. Insecurity flooded the splits and gaps of the house. A few deep breaths and count-down later, it would ease into a beautiful day.

HER COCOON ANDREA The gray sky blocked every possible chance sunshine had. With a lack of illumination, the edges of the ocean and the cement cliff melted together into one grayness. The wind pushed and pushed until all plants tilted toward the ocean. Three teenagers appeared to be three specks of sand dust on the cliff.

"Let's go already," said one teenager with braided black hair. Her eyes were as still as a pond on a windless day.

The thin and pale limbs of three teenagers wiggled in front of the flying security cameras around the cliff. Two of them giggled, sprinted, and jumped off the cliff: two splashes and two clouds of white foam on the surface of the ocean. The one with braided black hair stared at the blurry boundary between the cliff and the ocean. She hummed "Dreaming of Home and Mother," took a deep breath, held it, and leaped into the sea. # The cold body of the teenager with braided black hair was dropped on the porch of residence 145 by a flying ambulance. The red cross shone on its round and polished white body. The black dot on its top turned blue after dropping the body, and it flew away. A huge robotic claw opened the door, picked up the teenage body, and delivered her to a coffin-like machine in a bedroom. The sketches on the wall showed a girl jumping off dangerous spots. The machine started vibrating and buzzing. Layers and layers of spider-silk-like threads covered her body, and soon, there was a cocoon.

A loud beep got out of the machine.

"Kyrie, is that you? Time for dinner," a woman called from downstairs.

The cocoon shook and cracked. "Comin', Mom," Kyrie's voice struggled out of it.

She kicked the bottom of the cocoon open. The cocoon was then split in half. She wiggled her way out of it and rubbed off the goo and threads left on her skin. She was as good as new. # A chart filled with numbers was projected in front of a wide window. The window contained nothing but a sheet of grayness.

"I can't believe they're bugging me about the numbers of ambulance usage again." A middle-aged man sitting in a fine leather chair stared at the chart with a deep frown.

He turned to a hologram on his right. Moving images of Kyrie and her friends waving at the security cameras and jumping off the cliff repeated. "It's them again?"

"Yes, Mayor Jaron," the voice of the office AI system replied.

"They're misusing their cocoons." Jaron stood up from his seat. He looked beyond the grayness in the window. "There are so many things they could do instead of wasting their lives and time."

The small town beneath the mayor's office was as gloomy as the dark ocean next to it. Houses from the last era lay around lifeless and broken with plants tangling and taking their places. Empty and rusted battle vehicles were paused forever on the bigger roads. Residences now were silver balls with numbers on them. They scattered around as if they knew nothing about each other or were not in the same town.

"Mayor Jaron, but cocoons are for reviving. They are operating them correctly," said the office AI system.

Jaron turned back to the hologram, "Sure, but this action shows that they are not appreciating and respecting lives. And they bring all the nagging from up there." # A storm came the next day. The wind and rain tore leaves off the plants and dragged waste out from corners of the town where they were hiding. Everybody stayed in their residences.

Kyrie tapped her left temple, "You guys there?"

Hearing responses from the other end, she smiled. "It's the perfect day to do it again. I’ll see you guys at the cliff."

Jaron got a notice almost at the same time. The town's security cameras brought him the footage of three teenagers sneaking out of their residences. He grabbed his storm outfit and left the office.

The rage of the ocean jumped and devoured the edge of the cement cliff wave after wave. In the mist of gray, the red lights on security cameras were bright like stars.

It took Jaron a few seconds to see the three teenagers in a blur of ocean water and mist. "Hey! What do you think you're doing?"

His voice was loud and clear through the sound systems in their storm outfits. They jumped a little and turned to stare at him.

"None of your business, Mr. Mayor." Kyrie took a step forward at the mayor.

"It is my business because you're wasting ambulance resources and misusing your cocoons."

One of her friends nudged Kyrie, “Please, Kyrie, no bad blood with the mayor.”

She shrugged them off, "It's our civil right to use our cocoons however we want."

"Why are you doing this?" Jaron struggled to move a bit closer toward the teenagers. The wind was slowing him down in every possible direction.

Kyrie stepped back next to her friends, "It's how we feel alive."

"There are plenty of other ways to feel alive or find your purpose, whatever."

"Well, this is the way we choose."

The three teenagers used their heels to feel the edge of the cliff.

"Stop," Jaron made a gesture, saying that he would not get any closer to them.

"Why do you care?" Kyrie asked, tilting her head.

"I don't. I just can't put up with this nonsense. Misusing technology and disrespecting life."

"I don't care, either." Kyrie held her friends' hands. "Shouldn't you go blame the one who invented the cocoon?"

While Jaron chewed on the sentence and was shocked at Kyrie's arrogant attitude, the three teenagers fell into the ocean on their backs. # The mayor's office was as gray as the days before and during a storm. Now that the storm had passed, the blue sky framed in the window was a ridiculous contrast with the rest of the room.

Kyrie sneered and scuffed her way to the worn sofa.

"So, this is the new you," Jaron started.

What do you want?" The glow on her skin was hard to overlook.

"Like I said, you should stop abusing your power of reviving." He stood in front of her and looked down at her.

"It's how things work now. Why are my actions accused of being abusing power?" She made herself comfortable on the sofa and put her feet on the small, wobbly tea table.

"What is it that you despise life?" He backed away from her, step by step.

"I don't. This is how I feel alive, like I said," she rolled her eyes. "Feeling the thrill and last breath. If that makes more sense to you old people."

"Nothing better to do?" He moved closer to the hologram panel.

“Oh, screw you. I really don't care if you couldn't understand." She rose from the sofa.

"Maybe you should," he paused like a cat. "If you ever want to 'feel the thrill' again once in a while."

She froze as his words gently landed on her shoulders. "What are you talking about?"

"Here's the thing about being a mayor," he glided his fingers on the panel. "Mayors have control over you town people. Some buttons to job distribution, some to entertainment distribution, and some to your cocoons."

There was a chill coming down her spine, but she bit her lip to maintain her usual breathing.

"Cocoons were invented because the human population was on the verge of being wiped out and for some endangered species, of course." He leaned on the panel more. “Not for some stupid kids to kill time. These things take resources, too.”

“Don’t try to educate me now. You adults should’ve done that a long time ago.” She pinched the outer sides of her thighs.

"You don’t listen, do you?” He sighed. “What's it gonna be?" His index finger hovered over a green button with the number "145-3" on it.

She could no longer hide her trembling voice and a faint scream. "What do you think you're doing? This is threatening."

He shrugged, "I didn’t want to come to this step. It makes my record appear bad, a little. But you kids just have to push it."

"I'm not giving in. This is not some ancient, brutal time like 2023. You can't do this." Her voice turned hoarse.

The blue veins on his temples tangled with his rage. “Do you think the government cares about your stupid rights? They built these buttons for us.”

"You have no right to interfere."

"You really are a kid."

A roar and a shriek echoed in the mayor’s office one after another. # A loud beep set its presence in the house.

The cocoon shook and cracked. Kyrie kicked the bottom of the cocoon open. The cocoon was then split in half. She wiggled her way out of it and rubbed off the goo and threads left on her skin.

The old-time weapon from her grandparents lying near the cocoon machine nearly tripped her.

She was as good as new.

YOU ARE A TERRORIST SHAHBAZ KHAYAMBASHI POLITICAL VIOLENCE

You sit at your computer. A link to a news article catches your eye. Click. A bomb has fallen on a distant land. There is a video. Children are screaming, looking for their parents, looking for their limbs, looking for help. A woman lies on the ground, bleeding from the head. She is surrounded by rubble. You scroll down to the comments. People are justifying what has happened. These people shouldn’t have supported their government. If they had not voted, this wouldn’t be happening. On another page, you see comments insisting that voting is crucial to avoid this sort of thing happening at home. The contradiction is painful.

You make a comment. These people must be free. People don’t like it. You get voted down, below the threshold. You are called a terrorist. &&& You walk to work. You have a pin on your lapel, a flag. It demands peace, freedom. You walk past people as they give you dirty looks. Some of these people look on approvingly, but you never quite notice the approval in the sea of disgust, do you? You walk past posters demanding the bloodshed to continue. “We gotta stop this from ever happening again,” they say, oblivious as to why it is that this keeps happening. You walk past a sneering face, an old man set in his ways. You make eye contact. The face gets closer, the eyes pierce, the mouth moves, sound emits. Don’t you know you’re wearing a symbol of aggression? This person only learned what this symbol was a few days ago, but now he feels passionate about it. You are called a terrorist. &&& You walk down the street. You are among a field of bodies, people on either side of you, all marching in the same direction. You chant for peace. You chant for freedom. There is a microcosm of your city’s citizens here. Children, the elderly, people of all races and genders, walking together. Many cheer you on. Those who know what is happening, at least. They raise their fists in the air, they join you, they chant along. A man walks into street in front of you, holding the flag of the oppressor. The chants turn to jeers, deafening disapproval. You yell at him because that is all you know how to do. Suddenly, the police swarm the man, not to remove him but to protect him from you and your kind.

As you see yourself being separated by a barrier of flesh and cloth, a barrier of save and project, a barrier that disgusts you because of what it stands for, you hear one of them murmur something. You are called a terrorist. &&& You walk out of the subway. It is past midnight, the last train. You walk to the headquarters of the local weapon manufacturers. A real mom and pop operation, bringing carnage and death to the places you only see online. It used to be that you would see them on TV, but the TV is more interested in the damage to the oppressors these days. This is not where they make the weapons, but it is where they congregate, just like dozens are congregating now, clad in black, holding spray paint, bricks and Molotov cocktails, a veritable anarchic brunch. You reach into your pocket and pull out a can. You walk up to the front door of the building and spray the word murderers in red spray paint on the door. This leads the charge as damage is brought to the building. You hear the police and run. The next day, you see your artwork on the front page of the daily news. You are called a terrorist. &&& You walk towards the legislative building. The bombing has accelerated. The number of dead and injured has multiplied. You have seen more dead children than you can count.

Your government has done nothing about it. In fact, they continue sending them weapons.

Everyone does. The weapons manufacturers that you attacked earlier have announced record profits. Your local government has announced support for the oppressors. You have lost your job because of your pin. You are nervous, but you do not let it show on your face. You reach the door. You do not go in. Not part of the plan. You wait. Shortly thereafter, the big man in charge exits the building, flanked by security. The big man who could have done something but did not. Instead, he just went on TV, day after day, insisting that his heart breaks for the children, his face empathetic as if built in a factory, his eyes cold, unblinking, lifeless, all before he sends another thirty billion to the oppressors. You walk to him. Quickness is essential, but you do not want to draw attention to yourself. They called you a terrorist when you commented online. They called you a terrorist when you wore a pin. They called you a terrorist when you protested. They left you no other choice, no other way to be heard. You reach into your waistband and pull out your newly acquired pistol. You never had a use for one before. You believed in peace, but where did that get you? You squeeze the trigger once, twice, three times. You hear shots firing off around you.

Everything goes blurry. You are not sure if you shot anyone, but you hope you did. You fall.

You know, no matter what happens here, one thing is true. Tomorrow, on the news, you will be called a terrorist

THERE BE MONSTERS SIMON COLLINSON There might be monsters lurking in this old house. Lately so much confusion and disorder has crept into this creaking place. Turning everything upside down and making the familiar foreign. It’s like I’m stumbling through an alien forest in fading light.

The willowy walls whisper wicked conspiracies. Pipes hiss their petrifying prophecies.

The halls echo with strange sounds and eerie wailings. Clearly, Something not of this world walks these floors.

I can hear their ghostly movements late at night and see their wraith-like forms flit fleetingly around me. I reach out, but they flee and fade away from me. They’re always just out of reach.

By dawn’s early touch they have scattered and slithered away. They might be vampires, for all life has been drained from me. Clearly I’m not the man I used to be. They grow stronger as I grow weaker.

The Sun has set upon the man leaving an empty shell. The hero so soon becomes buffoon.

I feel a coldness and sadness that wasn’t there before.

There might be monsters hiding in this house. From nearby shadows, I’ve heard it spoken in hushed tones by hidden voices.

Last night I shone a bright light upon these strange ones. They flinched and backed away. I saw a marvellous sight of people with beautiful complexions.

Then I caught sight of my visage in the mirror. The shock was intense. I had not seen my reflection in many years.

What a sight I saw! What a vision to behold!

What was this disgusting thing facing me? I was aghast at this ghastly ugliness set before me. I dared not recognise what was reflected.

A hideous sight leeringly looked back at me. I stared incredulously upon a shrunken, stooped and twisted form.

The thing had a pallid complexion. It had a face criss crossed by crevices, with red teeth and sunken yellowed eyes. The fiend had a hair of horns. The stranger that faced me was a grotesque mockery of a man I used to know. More beast than man.

The sight was repellent to every sense, an outrage to humanity But then, recognition reached out. Then the shuddering shock as hellish reflection and self merged. I was sent reeling.

What had I become?

There are monsters in this house. I know it to be true.

For the thing that makes people afraid and flee, it’s me. In this old house, I’m the monster!

NIGHT ISLAND LM THERRIEN SELF-HARM, VIOLENCE, & DEATH

I sprinted barefoot and empty-handed past the neighboring farms that looked so gentle by moonlight. All those false warnings of dark magic in the night flared up in my chest. My father’s wicked bedtime stories were nothing like the danger that was strongest during the day, when kisses were traded in secret, only to have that affection soured into jealousy. I ran from the praise and proposals, seeing them as harness straps, cinching tighter each day. No to my father’s blessings. No to all the men. I would rather chase cricket songs down the dirt road and the follow the whispered freedoms on the night breeze. Ida and Agathe and Meredith and Tulla, all names calling from another realm, driving me forward.

Hours of running brought me to a river that had an island in the center. There was a bonfire on its shore and the sweet voices of high-spirited women, like me. The firelight that danced before my eyes spurred me on and I clambered onto a fallen log that was barely tethered to the bank by a single root. I pushed off, trusting the buoyancy of what was to come.

I held on and moved with the current until my log steered me close enough to let go, and I emerged soaking and stumbling. Four women stared at me—their hair and spirits were loosened by the firelight. I exhaled for the first time in my life.

“I’m Freya.” I said unbridled and then recited their names, like flowers in a daisy chain. “You are Ida, and Agathe, and Meredith, and Tulla.”

“And now there is Freya! Join us! There are fine foods for roasting,” they cheered, and I did.

There were apples, beans, and berries. Such colors were not seen so early into spring. I took my place by the fire and let go thoughts of seasonality. We were the lucky ones.

“It would be a shame to leave even a single apricot,” I said as I bit around the stone.

Tulla’s voice was the very spark of life, and when she called me kin my heart skipped a beat.

A song came to us from the trees. We all heard it and soon it was what we all sang.

Meredith had the strongest voice. Her words felt like secrets, and I followed along in harmony. If I sang off key, Tulla squeezed my hand to calm my nerves.

Between the frenzied heat and the full moon, I felt a change in our circle. Our bond with each other tightened and the fire roared higher than ever before. These were my kin now and a new resolve fired inside me to never let go. I focused on their voices; I lived for their next breath. There was no worry of spreading flames, because when you feel this alive danger can’t touch you. Still, we stepped back from the surge in energy. Once our hands broke connection it was a race. We fled into the trees.

All our lives we had been storing away our spirit, a little every day. Our personalities were a small riot against the farmer’s pruning shears. We accumulated strength from tedious lives and from the fire; we brought the wild with us now to the center of the island. With wind on my face, I called out like a bird; I was a summer swift taking flight.

And then I felt the power under my feet and stopped. The center of the island was for sacred, secret things. When I opened my eyes, my vision blurred around the edges in a desperate hope. The others were close by. Tulla chanted. It began soft like a breeze and made me shiver under damp clothes.

The other women danced, shuddering out of their physical form. Their movements were like the wind, nothing I could hold onto. Sweat cooled my skin but it was the need to follow that consumed me. Even when Tulla locked eyes with me, I was unable to move or hear her song any longer. It was on the lips of everyone else, this moment of awakening. They each turned away from me and vanished.

My arms were open as I cried for Night Island to bless me with the same destination, to let my heartache spill out of my veins and saturate the earth. To let me follow my kin, but there was a warning on the wind. The space between the trees wasn’t for me. The louder I shouted the more alone I felt. I was my own shape in the night, a comfort to no one. # When the sun rose the next morning, I was on the edge of the island without recollection of how I had returned. I only cried a little, surrounded by the remnants of the feast, before pulling myself up and running through the forest in a directionless fury. I would prove my worth because this love was winding. It wrapped me up in purpose. I made promises, shouting them at the island, “I only think of you.”

I would find Tulla again.

Except that I couldn’t. I lived outside of Night Island.

The island was entirely free to explore by day but as soon as dusk came, I woke up at bonfire edge facing villager’s bank the next morning. The others were withheld from me a twilight distance.

I ran and ran. Every day, I ran. But going from dawn to dusk without the evening break blurred place and time. Everywhere I went felt almost the same as earlier.

Flashes of my mother came to me, how she would comb my hair in slow strokes and whisper about strength in filling small spaces. She had been talking about sitting calm on the stool but it seemed possible she was also talking of this island. Night Island needed to be calmed. So, I set aside my envy and slowed down, curving myself into all the secret places I could find. The trees with separating trunks were rough against my skin, but I shared space with each one until the spiders mistook me as something to spin webbing to. I climbed the boulders above a wolf den and stretched out, letting the patches of shade tan leaf patterns on my forearms. I plunged into the ground and curled my fingers around the raspberry roots, holding anything that felt like interlacing fingers.

The hours spent creeping along the forest floor heightened me in other ways. I could sense better. Each morning, I studied the surroundings, trying to sort out if a new sprig of lavender shooting up through my fingers was a sign. A tiptoeing trail of moss led to the center island. The moss-prints thickened into a path as the days seeped by. Sometimes Meredith called to me through a falcon’s overheard cry.

Then there were the snippets of lucid dreams that came to me unexpectedly during daily tasks. Tulla and Ida’s intertwining voices sang erotic delights to me, pressing the scent of cool, damp skin against my cheek. These were one-sided dreams where the kisses and caresses remained gentle. My sleeping eyes hid all my daytime passion. I woke up with fervent words on my tongue, ready to stoke the love between us, but the things I said were only heard by the rising sun. The only pledge I could give was my on-going presence.

Days drifted; wildflowers unfurled. Flowers tangled together and I tried to absorb their beauty as my own sun-kissed lesson.

Much of the barely eaten food scattered on the ground from the feast had already seeded itself. I savored walking barefoot around the corn and potato sprouts. Maybe I could add to the garden, growing a gift of my own. I imagined the sweetness of the blackberries staining lips with my unspoken words. Ida, Agathe, Meredith, and Tulla most of all, could finally taste me. I collected all the dried berries I could find along the ground. My hands planted them with tenderness.

# The afternoons were the quietest and I’d become accustomed to watching the farmers across the river. Two men flattened their fields, brothers both in conventional appearance and their spades turning the soil. I could see their small village attitudes from here, heads down and toiling without a sense of fun. If only they’d look up and notice the shade trees that I escape to. Instead, they stripped and threshed until only dirt was left. I laughed at all the energy it took to coerce the land.

When their seedlings grew to plants the birds took notice and crossed the river into their fields.

On the hottest days the men whistled toward the island. Something deep down assured me they could not have this section of the river. This place was not for them. I trusted that feeling even when a pair of wolves dashed into the water, swimming to the other side. They emerged soaked and skinny and ate dripping meat from one of the brother’s luring hands. I didn’t want to see such simple-mindedness, to think of how easy trust could sour into betrayal. # The end of summer had no rules. The days stacked together while the plants dried up as much as my dreams. The sun became even hotter, and it was hard to remember much of anything. The farmers on the other side had arms full of wheat and carts filled with colorful vegetables while my garden grew at a slow, spindly pace. The more the stalks reached upward to the hot summer sky, the more I could feel myself drying out.

Even the plants along the water’s edge shrank back, tired of the growing season, ready for that partial death called winter. Only the blackberry plant had thrived, and I searched the vines for fruit. There was none. It had not yielded a single berry, instead it grew and grew without ever having to restrict itself. The small garden was taken over and the vines went high and low, climbing the nearest trees and swallowing the riverbank. It should be the way of my heart too. Instead, I was listless and in need of grounding.

The river rocks were smooth and cold, so I let my feet soak for a while. Under the flowing current I found a perfect rock. It was flat enough to break in half, revealing the edge that had been inside all along.

I went back to my garden and stood within the barren blackberry bush.

It was so hardy, making leaves or roots as it chose, it made no difference to that plant. It was the sort of tenacity I could draw on. I made sure to surround myself firmly in the vines and cut in several places on my heel and ankle in hopes to draw them in, under my skin. I needed the same eagerness.

On the third day of standing, I inspected my feet. There was a small line of healing crust over the cuts. The vines that had wrapped around me were smooth, never forming the barbed ends that I hoped to unify with. I pulled and yanked, hoping to rip them out of the ground, hoping to feel some defense scratch across my palms, but all the new growth was the same harmless texture.

“Let me be part of you!” I shouted into the island, “I am a carefree lover!”

I retreated to the riverbank, breathing with my whole body. Was there any part of me that was wanted here?

But there was wanting. I could sense it; I could taste it in the air. Desire came from the other side of the river, the brothers and the wolves paced back and forth. The hot days seemed to be even hotter on their flat, dry land. It wasn’t enough for them to cool their necks; I could see on their faces how they listened to the shallow water and yearned to tame all this wild. I had no use for them, nor pity. They had tilled, racked, and scraped all summer until their field resembled a scab.

I would not look at them any longer. “I am not like the villagers and farmers. See me. I am waiting.” More promises shouted into the island until my throat was raw. # I was bitten.

Sharp teeth let go of my leg almost immediately and I jumped up, ready to bite back. The wolves had returned, loyal to their impulses. I tried to chase them, angry at their lack of loyalty to the island, except they were meant for running and I couldn’t keep up. Catching my breath, I realized how dark it was. So much time was spent in the sun I had forgotten how the night must always take something for itself, like my sight or my heart. Cool air clung to my skin. I slowed my breathing, enjoying the subdued scent of grass and dust. The wolf bite had forced me out of Night Island’s trance—a gift. I would not squander this chance.

I needed light. Under all the vines, somewhere, there had been a fire that first night. I dug down, scouring the area. Finally, I felt an ax and its companion flint.

The spark took immediately. It grew like nothing else had on this bank during the past months. The blazing dance of fuel and combustion was beautiful. It didn’t matter that it would be the end of the garden. I deserved to make something that thrived, and the answer was buried under my effort all this time. I loved it. Instantly my determination was reignited.

I could join them; this firelight would reveal all that had been hidden from me.

Voices across the river shouted and pointed. I wasn’t the only one who watched the fire spread down the shoreline. The farmers’ worry grew with the flames. The fire was a threat.

It didn’t matter that it wasn’t their threat, the men would come. Whatever unspoken barrier had been set by the river was gone now. They ran across the shallow current, filling their buckets as they went.

I stood my ground wondering if I was part of their saving; if I had been noticed in all my days of watching and protecting, but they only saw the flames. When most of the fire was extinguished, they spread out eager to reap the imagined fertile ground before them.

The light I needed had been reduced to coal. I wouldn’t be able to find my way now. Both men were already chopping and shouting from different places on the island. Their voices carried farther than the birdsongs. There would be little chance of me following Tulla’s singing over their noise.

I gathered the vines that had been too robust to burn right away and set them on the smoldering garden to make a new bed. The green plants hid the coals underneath and made it easy to lay myself down and close my eyes. My clothes burned and coiled into ash, carried away by the smoky wind. Only my feet felt the pain. It had always been where the connection to the island was strongest. Heat breaks down decay. All that giving, and guarding, and reverence for the Night Island burned away, breaking my tethers while I rested.

When I woke up the light was so low on the horizon it could have been dawn or dusk.

I stood on charred feet, knowing I could take my time. Everyone would see me now. They would feel my heat. I fired downward and spread out like a tendril, reaching from one plant to the next. I used their tangled roots to travel, spreading the destruction underground. I reached as far as I wanted, burning into the heart of trees. The forest sounds were replaced with hissing.

I am catching. Flames were pushed through the grasses that then wedged into the wolves’ paws. The men were nearby too, so loud and trampling. Once my heat joined together on the other side of the island it was easy to surround them. I pushed the brothers toward the middle like a searing embrace. The blanket of slow-moving smoke quieted their efforts and soon they were unconscious on the forest floor.

One of the men was flat on his back. I touched his peaceful face. His beard sizzled under my hand, and I thought back to the dry, scrapped farmland he left. How unfortunate that he should have come all this way across the river. Better to have stayed where one is safe and wanted at night. Night Island has no patience for acquisitiveness; I should know, I’ve tried almost everything. Smoke began to rise out of his open mouth, burning from the inside out. I left the farmer’s side, telling myself it was the only way.

The sky darkened further. It was dusk after all and time to find the secrets places now that I had my own inner light. The delicate moss path leading to the center burned out under my feet. I imagined Tulla falling into my vines so that we could make a new, searing song. She and the others were about to come out of hiding. I’ll go to them and prove myself to Night Island or burn it to cinders trying.

DOWN INTO THE WASTELAND MARCO ETHERIDGE A blaze-white sun bleaches all color from the sky and bakes an already blighted landscape. Heat waves shimmer in the parched air above a rutted track. The track rises to a vanishing point at the crest of a scrubby hill, and over that crest appears the figure of a man.

Nearer at hand, the track forks, forcing a wanderer to choose. A smaller path leads left off the first, winding across a desert valley to vanish in the mesquite.

A skeletal tree guards this lonely parting of shit road and worse path. Perched in on a bare branch, two ravens mark the approaching man. They croak to one another. Their harsh words grate the silent air.

“Feast your black eyes on this sorry bastard, Harry.”

“Aye, Larry, I see him. Not looking too spry, is he?”

“I believe this is the one foretold by old Clara. She’s got the sight, you know.”

“Ha! Got the sight if you’ve a kangaroo rat handy.”

“Go easy, Harry. Dead rat or no, Clara aims in truth’s general direction. Yesterday, she told me about a strange human who rescued a child from an abandoned mineshaft.”

“Shows sense. Lots of good eating there, I reckon.”

“No, you’re missing the point, ya greedy bastard. A human child wandered into a mine, see?

Got lost, he did. The man searched to the bottom of that mine and fetched the bairn out.

Did it to save the thing’s life, not to eat it.”

“Foolish, if you ask me. Any critter stupid enough to get lost in a mine deserves eating.”

“Normally, I’d be agreeing. But this fella, he’s a queer one to hear Clara tell it. Tries to do good. Like I always say, humans is hard to figure.”

“A fella trying to do good? In the wasteland? Good for our entertainment, maybe.”

“Well then, let the saga begin, Harry. The Boyo is about to make his entrance.”

The man trudges the desolate track, close enough now to hear the croaking ravens. The sun beats down. Dust puffs from beneath his boots. He stops at the fork. Looks up at the black birds. The ravens meet him stare for stare. He opens his mouth to speak, then thinks better of it. No good comes of talking to birds.

He lowers his eyes, lifts a battered hat from his head, and pulls a bandana from a pocket.

As he mops his brow, a heated argument rages in his skull.

What I wish, more than anything, is that you’d learn to leave well enough alone. How was I to know?

Don’t give me that shit. You damn sure know what happens when you stick your big nose where it don’t belong. Worse yet, you know and ignore the knowledge. That’s the definition of ignorance, or your name isn’t Bill Taylor.

All right, I admit it might have been a mistake, but the phone was ringing.

A pay phone and none of your business. A phone booth on a civilized street, I might add. A paved street with cafés and honky-tonks. Right now, we could be in a dark bar downing cold beer. Instead, you have to answer that damn phone, and then—Poof!—here we are. Good going, pal.

Yeah, so I fucked up. Done is done. Meanwhile, which way do we go?

Screwed either way if you ask me. I vote we turn left. I’m already sick of this road. How could it get worse?

Bill Taylor fits the hat back on his head and pulls the brim low over his eyes. He stuffs the sodden bandana into his pocket, then stares up the sorry excuse for a road. The crooked path doesn’t look any better. With nothing else to look at, he glances up at the ravens. No help there. He shrugs at the damn birds and begins tramping up the path. He’s not yet ten paces away when the ravens resume their croaking.

“Can’t say he made the wise choice, Larry.”

“Wouldn’t argue with you, Harry. But then, what do you expect from a fella who believes in a functioning phone booth in this day and age?” *** The trail weaves past mesquite, cholla, and prickly pear. Bill Taylor keeps a sharp eye on the thorny tangle. Who knows what might be lurking. And nowhere to run except up or down the damn path. Anyone venturing off the rocky will end up a pincushion in three steps. He’s already regretting his choice.

The sun has reached its zenith and bears down with a palpable weight. Bill pauses to mop the sweat from his eyes. In the heat-baked stillness, he senses something on the very edge of hearing, the whisper of a dull roar somewhere ahead. He feels it, too, through the soles of his boots, as if a monstrous serpent writhes beneath the earth.

A clear warning for anyone with a lick of sense. This is where a smart man would turn back. And yet the warning stirs a familiar chord in Bill Taylor’s cloudy memories. A wave of déjà vu goads him like a cattle prod. He pockets the bandana and steps forward.

A half-hour further on, and the whisper is now a sullen roar. Cresting a small hillock, Bill Taylor confronts a huge gash in the earth. A narrow canyon splits here from there. The trail winds one last furlong, then vanishes at the brink of the chasm. And at the very edge of the abyss stands a decrepit plank hut.

Bill Taylor tramps down the last of the trail. The voices in his head drown out the crunching of his boots.

We don’t have to do this, pal. Really, we don’t. Let’s go back and talk to the damn birds. At least they weren’t trying to kill us.

You know we can’t do that.

Right, sorry, I know we can’t. Dammit. Can’t blame a fella for wishing.

Guess not. But wish in one hand and…

Spare me the clichés, will ya?

Sorry. Hey, does this place look familiar to you?

Yeah, it looks like the road to hell.

That’s good, then. At least we’re not lost.

There’s an old geezer sitting outside the shack. Looks to be at least a hundred. The fella spits a squirt of tobacco juice and smiles. What teeth he has are stained brown.

“Howdy, young sir. Pleased I am to see yourself again.”

“Sorry, Old-timer, do I know you?”

The centenarian squeezes out a wheezing laugh, then spits another stream of brown goo.

“Always the joker, sir. Does an old body good to laugh, so I thanks you. I’m Old Charlie, as you well know. Now then, I suppose you’ll be after your pouch as always. If you’d be so kind as to empty your pockets, we can proceed.”

“My pockets?”

Now, sir, we haven’t got all day. Time’s a’wasting. You know the rules better than anyone.”

The geezer straightens his frail body and raises his bony hands.

“Ahem. The sojourner, stripped of every possession, receives his favors.”

He smiles at Bill Taylor and winks.

“Loosely translated, you fork over all you’ve got, and I gives you the goods.”

The old fella points to a tin bucket at his feet.

Bill Taylor shrugs and begins to empty his pockets. A pocketknife clangs into the bucket. A soiled rabbit’s foot strung on a tarnished chain. One pencil stub. A lottery ticket. Three peanuts still in their shells.

He pats his trousers and dusty vest. No wallet, no keys, no phone. Then he remembers the bandana and pulls it free. The old man wrinkles his nose at the rag.

“Better keep that, sir.”

Old Charlie reaches a hand behind his back and mumbles a few words under his breath. A pause of a heartbeat, then a soft twang, like a guitar string snapping.

The old man swings his arm into view, a brown grin plastered over his face. A leather pouch rests in his outstretched palm.

“Ta-daaaah!”

Bill Taylor blinks in surprise.

“Sorry, sir. Not strictly necessary, the theatrics, but I gets lonely out here. Go on, take it.”

The pouch is light, a few small articles at best, and certainly no gold coins.

“And no peeking, sir. The rules again, meaning no offense. But keep it close to hand.”

Bill Taylor clutches the pouch and looks to the yawning chasm only a few steps away.

Words echo in his skull.

Descent, darkness, death.

Behind him, Charlie slaps his palms together. Bill Taylor jumps at the sound.

“Sorry, sir, almost forgot the clue. Getting old, I am. Forgive me. Now then, listen careful.”

Again, the arms raised to the heavens.

“To the sunlight go when you face the foe.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“They never tell me, but I’m sure you know best. That’s it, then. Time to be on your way, sir.”

Bill Taylor stares at the old man, then the pouch. He shakes his head and begins walking toward the brink. He hears another sharp twang, which reminds him of his manners. He turns to thank the geezer, but the shack has vanished, and Old Charlie with it.

Bill Taylor rubs his eyes and tries again. Not a trace.

I’m getting near my limit for weird.

Much later, he will remember this thought and wince.

The trail zigzags down the sheer canyon wall in a series of dizzying switchbacks. No handrail or safety rope. One false step, a single slip, and it’s five hundred feet to the roiling river.

Bill Taylor takes it slow.

He’s only halfway down when the creatures attack. They swoop out of nowhere, dozens of them. The things look like orange squirrels with bat wings, if squirrels were three feet long and armed with vicious fangs and cutlass talons.

The squirrel-bats swoop past from above and below. They scream a chatter-squeak that pierces Bill Taylor’s skull. The bastards are all around him now, trying to drive him over the edge and into thin air. He’s got no weapon, not even a stick. Then he remembers Old Charlie’s clue.

To the sunlight go when you face the foe.

A bright patch of sun just below where the trail switches back. He lunges for the light, almost going over the edge at the turn. The horrible critters pull back, circling just beyond the edge of shadow.

Ha! They can’t take the light.

Yeah, but it won’t last. Look up.

Indeed, the sun is slipping toward the lip of the canyon far above. Soon, the entire wall will be in shadow.

Think, man! You’ve got to fight them off now. The pouch, what’s in the pouch?

Bill Taylor claws open the leather bag while the squirrel-bats circle and squeal. If he was expecting a secret weapon, his hopes are dashed. The pouch contains an old key stung on a bit of yarn, a dog whistle, a tiny spray can of WD40, and a shard of broken mirror.

He sags against the canyon wall, fingers clutching the mirror. This is it, the end of the road.

No magic sword when you need one. What a shitty way to go, eaten by a bunch of mutant squirrels.

No, no way. You gotta do yourself.

Looks over the edge, tries to make himself take the leap, but he’s always hated heights. He can’t do it. Then he feels the sharp edge of the mirror beneath his fingertip. He raises the mirror, hesitates.

Well, shit, get it over with. Artery on the left side, or right?

The mirror pivots in his hand, catching the brilliant sun. A beam of reflected sunlight slices into the shadows. The beam catches a squirrel-bat dead on, and the creature explodes into flame, spiraling out of the air like a stricken fighter plane.

Bill Taylor stares at the smoking death spiral, then at the mirror in his hand. He throws back his head and shouts into the canyon.

“Thank you, Old Charlie!”

Before the echoes die away, Bill Taylor goes on the attack. He holds the mirror to the sun, swiveling to catch the full strength of the day star. The reflected beam cuts into the squealing squirrels-bats. One touch is all it takes.

The battle is over in less than a minute. A dozen flaming creatures corkscrew to the dark river. The rest flee, squealing and chattering. The last cry dies away, and Bill Taylor is alone, still alive, still clinging to the narrow ledge.

He does not waste time gloating. Slipping the mirror in the pouch, he ties the thongs to his belt and resumes the descent.

Counting the switchbacks, four, five, six. Now he sees the river foaming over huge boulders. And yes, there, a bridge, or at least the remnants of a bridge. He pushes down the rail as fast as he dares, dreading the return of the flying monsters.

Then he’s at the end of the trail and staring at what’s left of a suspension bridge. Many planks are missing, and the rest are suspect. His brain screams no even as he hears the chatter-squeals above his head. The squirrels-bats are back, dive-bombing from above.

Maybe it’s the mad dash that saves him or blind luck. Planks snap beneath his boots as he leaps from one to the next. Broken fragments fall to the torrent and are swept away.

Somehow, he is almost across.

The squirrels-bats are on him now, swooping in for the kill. The bridge ends at a narrow rock ledge. A cave or tunnel opens in the sheer wall. The last plank crumbles beneath his feet. He catches a cable with one hand, swings himself forward, and lands on the solid ledge. Without a thought, he rolls forward, finds his feet, and lunges into the protective darkness.

The tunnel, for that’s what it proves to be, runs straight and true into living rock. Bill Taylor moves as fast as he can, one hand tracing the rock wall, feeling his way with his boots. He prays to any god within earshot to please, please, keep the squirrel-bats away. He hears their angry screeching, but it fades, as does the last light.

Another minute, and the darkness is complete. Still, better alive in the dark than dead in the light. No choice but to keep going. As if he ever had a choice in any of this.

Ten minutes pass, or maybe an hour. No way to tell. His heart pounds out of his chest, and he’s sure it will burst. He sees a glow ahead. He’s running now, heedless of consequence, a desperate man seeking the light, whatever it brings.

Then he’s out of the tunnel, gasping for breath and squinting in the sunlight. A cliff at his back, rising a thousand feet and more. And before him, a long sloping valley. At the foot of the valley, he sees a town, or at least what’s left of a town. Nothing moves, no smoke, no cars, nothing.

The sky is devoid of flying monsters. Bill Taylor spreads his arms wide and addresses the sky.

“Whoever you are, thank you.”

It’s a long mile and more to the edge of the town. Bill Taylor walks the downhill slope as fast as his legs will carry him. The sun is dipping behind the cliff. No way he wants to spend the night in the open. A deserted town is better than nothing.

He’s close enough now to see the buildings. Some are tumbled down. Others lean precariously, waiting for gravity to finish them off. There’s a sign beside the way, weatherbeaten and casting a shadow.

Welcome to Dogville Bill Taylor throws an anxious glance at the town but sees no canines. His hands yearn to hold a weapon, any kind of weapon. He pushes desire away and wills his feet to move.

Another hundred yards to the edge of town. On his left is a cracked asphalt parking lot and a cinder block building. A sign teeters above the roof.

Dogville Storage Ur Secret is Safe with Us Something clicks in Bill Taylor’s brain, and he laughs out loud. The laughter dies away like it’s been smothered.

I’d say this is the place, pal. You know how the bastards love a secret.

Nice of them to leave a clue.

That depends on what it is we’re supposed to find.

Standing here ain’t getting it done.

Great, now you’re quoting Dad. Let’s move.

He walks past the low-slung office and finds three long buildings separated by weedy driveways. Roll-up steel doors every ten feet, diminishing down the long lines. He counts one side. Fifteen doors each, three buildings, front and back. Ninety doors in all.

Okay, we’re screwed.

Like we got somewhere else to go. Let’s have a look.

Are you’re going to try the key in every lock?

Shit, I forgot about the key.

Fat lot of good it’s going to do us.

Shut up.

Bill Taylor and his jumbled thoughts hurry down the line of doors. Graffiti on most of the doors, the usual collection of huge phalluses and crude curses. One tag foretells a doom.

Don’t let the dark and dogs fall on your ass Door and more doors, but nothing sparks a memory. Around the corner and up the next row. Wait, there!

In the middle of the line, one steel door is adorned with three images. A trio of snarling dogs, red-eyed and slobbering. The graffiti stands apart from all the other crap. Whoever tagged this door was an artist.

Bill Taylor steps forward and reaches for his belt. Wait! Did that dog move? He jumps clear, heart pounding. But no, only a trick of the light. Cursing himself for a coward, he crouches on the asphalt and empties the pouch. Whistle, WD40, and the key. No sign of the mirror.

He must have dropped it running for the bridge.

He grabs the key and fumbles with the door. The lock is covered by a tab of steel, and the damn thing is rusted in place. He twists the tab, pushes it, taps it, but it won’t budge.

Shit.

Back to his stash. He grabs the pocket-sized WD40, shakes it, and gives the rusty tab a spray. The WD soaks in. He sprays it again and again. From the top, from underneath.

Taps it with the can. Nothing. Then he kicks the door in frustration. The tab swings free.

Hey, think for a minute, will ya?

What?

The pouch, man! Everything is important. Don’t leave it lying there.

Forcing himself to focus, he crouches and scoops the whistle into the pouch. When he looks for the spray can, it’s gone. All that’s left is the key in his hand and the whistle.

Shaking his head, he closed the pouch and ties it to his belt. Then he turns to the door and fits the key in the lock.

The roll-up door screeches in protest, but it clanks open. Light filters down from a filthy skylight. Dust motes float in the air. Bill Taylor hesitates, then steps inside.

The interior resembles a low-budget shrine. Shelving units line all three walls. The shelves support a cast of action figures, some still in the original boxes. Everyone is there: heroes, monsters, bad guys, dating all the way back to the first GI Joe. Every figure is propped up or posed standing. Each dead face is turned to face the door.

A hundred pairs of painted plastic eyes stare at Bill Taylor. He stares back.

Dolls. Just a bunch of dolls. Somebody’s idea of a head game. Whatever.

This time, there is only one voice in his head.

Aside from the shelves, there is nothing in the unit except a cheap folding conference table centered directly under the skylight. Not another stick of furniture in the place. No piled-up boxes, no rolls of carpet.

A black case rests atop the table. Military-grade, heavy latches, the size of a carry-on bag.

And not a speck of dust on its surface. Bill Taylor steps forward.

The case is not the only item on the table. He sees a glass bowl filled with fun-sized candy bars. The thought of food sears through his brain. He is suddenly ravenous. When did he eat last? He reaches for the bowl, then jerks his hand away.

Eat nothing from this world. Drink not a drop, lest you be bound here forever.

Bill Taylor feels his memory and mind come together, merging like a genetic imprint.

The warning is real. You know that. This wasteland is governed by strict rules. There are traps for the unwary. Don’t be fooled.

He ignores the lure of the candy and turns his attention to the case. Hands forward, fingers braced against the top, thumbs under the two latches. One heartbeat, two, breathing out, exhaling thoughts of explosions and poisonous vipers. Then, he thumbs the latches and lifts the lid.

The case does not explode. There is no warning siren or flashing red light. Instead, Bill Taylor sees dozens of glass ampules, each nestled into protective black foam.

He pushes an index finger under the foam and lifts. Another layer of ampules below the first and another below that.

He eases the foam back into place, closes the lid, and snaps the latches.

An image leaps into his brain, and he recognizes the truth of the vision.

A poor village. Children, many sick children. A plague. A vaccine. Someone had to go on a journey. Return to save the children.

He grabs the case by the handle, hefts it, and turns away. It’s time to move, but he hesitates.

Then he sees a hockey stick leaning against the wall just inside the door. An old-style wooden stick. The tape on the blade not even scuffed. The stick has never seen the ice.

Two steps, and the stick is in his hand, feeling exactly right. But the case is awkward.

Hockey requires both hands. He needs a piece of rope, a belt, anything. There, a pull rope dangling from the roll-up door.

He drags the table under the door and climbs up, wishing he hadn’t surrendered his knife.

Luckily, the knot is badly tied. The rope comes loose. He runs a loop through the handle, ties a bowline, and slings the case over his back. Grabs the hockey stick with both hands.

That’s right, because this isn’t over yet. They’re not going to just let you walk out of here. You remember now, don’t you.

Bill Taylor hooks the hockey stick over the door handle and pulls it low enough to grab.

Closes the door and locks it. The trio of snarling dogs reappears inches from his face. He raises his hand to ward the monsters off, realizes the hand is empty. The key has vanished.

A premonition. The mirror, the spray can, and the key. All gone. He leans the hockey stick against his chest and reaches for the pouch. The whistle is still there. He fits it between his teeth, stuffs the pouch into a pocket, and grabs the stick.

Bill Taylor knows there’s no going back the way he came. The tunnel will have collapsed, or the bridge washed away, or the squirrel-bats will get him. He’s walking fast now, out past the office and turning left onto the road.

Dogville passes by on either side, and there’s not much of it. He’s halfway down the deserted main street, and already he can see the far edge of town. A couple hundred years at most.

A single heartbeat later, Bill Taylor knows he’s not alone.

The dogs appear out of nowhere, dozens of them. The canines are in front and behind, on both sides, red-eyed and growling.

No time for fear. No time for anything. Bill Taylor moves forward at a trot, leading with the hockey stick, ready to slapshot the first mutt that tries anything. A stocky bulldog blocks his path.

Tough shit for you, Fido. Your pals might get me, but I’m taking you with me.

Cocks the hockey stick waist-high, ready to swing. The whistle clenched between his teeth.

Exhales hard before stepping into the shot. And then Mister Bulldog sits on its haunches, its ears upright and twitching.

Bill Taylor checks his swing just in time. Grabs the whistle with one hand, blows into it like he’s trying to bring down the walls of Jericho. Dares to take his eyes off the bulldog and look around. All the dogs are sitting now. Some are wagging their damn tails.

Blowing the whistle with every ragged breath, Bill Taylor begins to walk. He forces his feet to maintain a steady pace, fighting down the urge to sprint. He’s practically hyperventilating into the stupid whistle, but he keeps at it. And as he walks, the dogs fall in behind him like a bizarre canine parade.

Then he’s at the far edge of town. Just when he’s sure the platoon of mutts intends to follow him home, the dogs stop. He half-turns, sees a pack of mongrels sitting in a row, every eye on him. He nods to the pack, turns away, and keeps walking. The dogs remain in Dogville.

Where the whistle disappears to, he does not know.

The road runs on in a long curve to the left. Bill Taylor is alone. Nothing moves in the wasteland. He is glad for the solitude. The sun is sliding down toward the horizon in front of him. The light is blinding.

After a long mile, maybe two, Bill Taylor sees something shimmering in the glare. An archway or pillars, and the road curving to meet whatever it is.

Another hundred yards, and he realizes what it is he sees. A bridge, and beneath it, the gaping shadow of a canyon. He clutches the rocky stick at the ready, eyes peeled for squirrel- bats.

He halts at the brink of the bridge. The structure rides on two curved arches that span the canyon. The deck is covered with steel grating.

One deep breath, and then he steps onto the grating. Far beneath his feet, the river churns and roils. He feels vertigo washing over him and looks to the far end. Just keep walking.

Halfway across, he dares a look upriver. A black gash in the earth, darkest shadows, no sign of the first suspension bridge or the flying critters. Then he’s walking as fast as he can.

When he finally hears the crunch of gravel beneath his boots, it’s music to his ears. *** A westering sun throws long shadows over the wasteland. A rutted track runs through mesquite and clumps of thorny cholla. And coming closer along the track strides the figure of a man.

Nearer at hand, a smaller path joins the first. A dead cottonwood guards the junction.

Perched in the gray branches, a pair of ravens mark the approaching man. Their croaking sounds like dark laughter.

“Well, lookee here, Harry. That fella is back and coming from down below. As I recall, you said he made a bad choice. What do you say now?”

“Damn me. Guess I’ll have to eat crow if I can kill one of the bastards.”

“Haw-haw-haw. Look at the Boyo. You weren’t far wrong, Harry. He’s been through the wringer and no mistake.”

The man stops beneath the tree and stares up at the ravens.

“Good evening to you, my feathered friends.”

Larry nudges Harry with a black wing.

“Hey there, Boyo. You’ve done well to make it back.”

The man nods, holds up a stick.

“Think you could keep an eye on this for me?”

Harry pokes a sharp beak into Larry.

“Be happy to.”

The man steps forward, digs the blade into the ground, and leans the hockey stick against the tree trunk. He steps back onto the track and adjusts the case hanging over his shoulder.

Then he looks up.

“Sun’s getting low. I better get moving. Maybe I’ll see you two again. Who knows?”

The ravens croak and bob.

The man looks up the rutted track and begins walking. The ravens watch him go. The figure of the man shrinks, fades to a silhouette, and then vanishes over the crest of a scrubby hill.

Harry the raven preens his ebony feathers. Larry eyes the setting sun, then turns to his companion.

“Think we’ll see that Boyo again?”

Harry croaks out a harsh laugh.

“Count on it, Larry.”

SHOULD THE STONE GODS WAKE CHAD GAYLE Sarabeth picked herself up off the ground and slapped her hat on her sweaty head. It wasn’t the first time she’d been thrown and it probably wouldn’t be the last, but hot damn how she wanted to grab the rattlesnake that had spooked her horse with her bare hand and smack it against a rock.

Her horse stood far enough off to look fuzzy in her nearsighted eyes. Careful not to spook him a second time, she approached the gelding carefully, with her arms extended; the horse flicked his ears forward when she grabbed the reins with her gloved hands. As Sarabeth got back in the saddle, the horse scooped up a mouthful of grass and they were on their way.

She checked the ridge behind her before she went up and over a stony hill, following that tremulous whistle that had been with her since she’d left Lewistown. It was a pitch higher than a train whistle but not as shrill, a bit like the groan of an old church organ, and it made her feel cold in spite of the warmth the sun cast on her shoulders. In her dreams, those nightmares that had plagued her since she’d started to bleed, the whistling sound was the warning knell that preceded the arrival of the Stone Gods.

It was the herald of the end of the world. *** At the same time she started to have those dreams, Sarabeth realized that she had a power that no one else seemed to possess. She could calm a creature, man or beast, by tapping gently against its forehead with the tip of her finger; with the full spread of her palm laid against a neck or a wrist, she could put the same creature to sleep. It was a mystery how she’d come to be blessed—or cursed—with this Gift; she only knew that it set her apart from her friends and her family and forced her to keep her distance from anyone who came near her, lest she be labeled a witch.

It was also the reason she left home. She wandered for a spell from town to town, serving as a maid or a laundress until she confided in a gypsy with glittering green eyes who told her of a way to put her Gift to good use. This was in Lewiston, where, with the gypsy’s help,

Sarabeth set herself up as a fortune teller, plying her new trade in a ten by twelve room above the town’s largest saloon. For two bits, she sought the future in a crystal ball she’d purchased through a mail order catalog while she deftly glanced the outstretched hands of her customers with her bare fingers to put them to sleep. Then she would pilfer their pockets and purses for tokens that would tell her something about the lives they lived.

When she returned what she’d taken, she rang a bell hidden under the table to help her patrons unslump themselves and offered them bits of optimistic bunk tied to people they knew or recent purchases they’d made. They stumbled out of her apartment afterward as contented as if they’d just woken from a pleasant dream, which they mostly had.

It was a decent living and she was fairly happy with it until she told the fortune of a man who thought he knew what she should be doing with her future. Sarabeth wanted nothing to do with the lout but he wouldn’t leave her alone, and one afternoon he grew so bold that he bolted into the bathroom as Sarabeth was getting ready to slide into a tub full of hot water. With an ugly leer pasted on his unshaven face, he grabbed her shoulders and tried to pull her to him; Sarabeth wrapped her hands around his wrists, squeezing them tight, and his eyelids came crashing down.

The two of them switched places as he let Sarabeth go. Throwing on her robe, she heard the bastard drop in the tub with a splash but had no way of knowing that he would drown himself. She didn’t even realize he was dead until she went back an hour later for the rest of her things, and that’s when she was accosted by the maid who’d pinned the man’s demise on the fortune-teller who did “the devil’s work.”

The rumors that had started to stick to Sarabeth by then—that she was a pickpocket and a ne’er-do-well—found purchase in the maid’s testimony to the sheriff, who immediately swore out a warrant for Sarabeth’s arrest. The owner of the saloon helped her clear out, and Sarabeth traded her dresses and her crystal ball for a pair of trousers, chaps, and boots at the general store. She bought the gelding with the money she had left and hightailed it out of town.

She had no notion of where she was headed; the whistling sound was her only guide. She knew it from her dreams, those nightmares that she watered down with whiskey before she went to sleep. There the whistling whine signaled the parting of the Cleft at the foot of a mountain she’d never visited and the stirring of those monsters she called the Stone Gods.

That’s what they reminded her of as they climbed up out of the earth to trample trees and houses and railway trestles with giant strides, those behemoths that blotted out the sun, that brought death and destruction and a thousand years of darkness to the country she called home.

She dreamed about the Stone Gods night after night, but she’d never heard that whistling sound outside of those dreams until the morning after her would-be suitor got himself waterlogged.

And she understood, when she left Lewistown, where that whistling sound would lead her: to the Cleft she’d dreamed about, that opening at the foot of the mountain with the twin peaks. To the place where the Stone Gods, which were as real to her as the air that she breathed and the sunlight she felt on her face, would have to be put back to sleep. *** After she crossed a wide swath of prairie crisscrossed with brackish creeks, Sarabeth pushed her steed up the steep slope of the tallest hill she could find and dismounted. She’d been sitting in the saddle for so long that her legs were just plain numb, so she massaged her thighs while she sat splayed out over a skull cap of granite tucked in under the shade of some pines. Then she cupped her hands over her eyes and squinted, focusing on the washed out tree trunks and boulders far on the other side of the field she’d come across.

She sat there staring until she saw the three men on horseback she’d spied the day before.

She knew they were the same men because of the horses they were riding—a black, a roan with white legs, and a dun. She figured it was the sheriff and a couple of deputies, which meant that she’d been right not to light a fire the night before.

Scurrying away from the granite cap, she led her horse down a narrow ledge and got back in the saddle when she was on level ground. From there she followed the easiest available path she could find at a trot, preferring patches of bare earth to thick grass so she had some assurance her horse wouldn’t get spooked by another snake or some other ornery critter. When bars of copper and gold bricked up the sky, she eased her mount into a walk, and the calls of whippoorwills backended the whistle that kept her moving.

She let the horse have its head as dusk deepened, trusting its eyesight over her own. At the mouth of a forest as dark as a coal sack, she dismounted again and led the horse through the woods in spite of her fear of being mauled by a cougar or a black bear. Although she carried a rusted Colt 45 on her hip, she wouldn’t have been able to hit a thing even if her eyes had worked the way they were supposed to, so she paused periodically to listen to the frogs and the birds, knowing that if they suddenly grew quiet, she ought to climb a tree. She walked for so long that she was sure she must be walking in circles but came at last to the edge of the woods, where she took the saddle off the horse, wiped down its sweat lathered coat, and poured water in her hat for the horse to drink.

Too tired to eat, she made a pillow of her pack at the base of an oak and went right to sleep.

Her dreams that night were unlike any of the dreams she’d had before. Over and over again, she dreamed that she stood before the steaming Cleft while the Stone Gods spoke to her in a language she couldn’t understand. They were asking her to do something for them, but she didn’t know what it was.

She woke with the sun on her face. The air was thick with gnats and flies; it had to be close to noon. Trying not to panic, she saddled her horse, pulled a couple of hard biscuits from her pack before she stowed it, and checked her canteens to see how much water she had left. With a sinking feeling, she realized that the canteens were almost dry. She suddenly felt foolish; she’d crossed a clear running creek the day before, around midday. She should’ve filled them up then.

Following the whistle that still raised the hairs on the back of her neck, she rode down into the next valley, a broad divot skinned with red dirt and rocks of all sizes. Buzzards circled overhead while the rot of a bloated but unseen carcass fouled the air; flat fields speckled with sagebrush and islands of pine stretched out from the valley on the other side. She thought she could see mountains in the distance, behind a line of far off hills, but there wasn’t any sign of water anywhere, and when she did see a wrinkle ahead of her, it was the wrinkle of a road, not a stream.

A lonesome house stood beside the road, a white timber A-frame attached to a hog pen and a tilled square of acreage lined with rows of bent corn. When she got closer to the house, she could see a bricked in well on its far side.

She dismounted as quietly as she could. Stealing up to the well, she smacked her lips, overwhelmed by her thirst as she grabbed the handle of the bucket with stiff fingers. She couldn’t help smiling when she lowered it and felt the cool, moist air rise up out of the well; then she pulled the rope attached to the bucket hand over hand, leveraging the weight of the water she’d gathered against an iron stile tucked in a lip of brick.

A screen door slammed on the other side of the house. Sarabeth froze; a coffee colored woman in a faded calico dress was running toward her with a shotgun in her hands.

Although the shotgun was pointed at the ground, the woman seemed perfectly capable of aiming it at Sarabeth and blasting her with both barrels.

“Not nice to take what ain’t yours without asking,” the woman said. “Good way to get yourself killed.”

Balancing the bucket on the edge of the well, Sarabeth put her hands up and tried to look as harmless as she felt. “Sorry. I was just so thirsty, I couldn’t think straight.”

The woman tipped her head back and set her feet. “That gun you’re carrying—is it loaded?”

“It is, but it can’t shoot for shit,” Sarabeth said.

A hint of a grin raised the corner of the woman’s mouth, but her eyes remained cool, as if she was determined not to be fooled or taken advantage of. “Where you from?” she asked.

“Lewistown.”

“You in trouble?”

Sarabeth blanched. “What would make you think that?”

“You’ve got that look about you, like you’re in trouble. Where you headed?”

Sarabeth hesitated. “I don’t know, exactly. I know what I’m looking for but not where to find it.”

Cocking an eyebrow, the woman turned her head to spit a dollop of brown tobacco juice on the hard ground. “But you do know that someone’s looking for you,” she said.

Sarabeth’s throat closed up. When she opened her mouth to speak, she croaked; her voice was suddenly as hoarse as a winter wind. “Listen,” she wheezed, “I didn’t mean to bother you none—” “No bother,” the woman replied. “Now that I’ve had a good look at you, I can see you don’t mean no harm.” She gestured at the well with the barrel of her gun. “Go on, have a drink.

Looks like you need it.”

Without waiting to be told twice, Sarabeth brought the bucket up to her lips and drank.

Water dribbled down her chin and onto the collar of her shirt, and a cool stream of it ran right through her chest to pool in her mostly empty stomach. It was cool, clean, and delicious.

“What’s your name, thirsty little white woman?”

“Sarabeth.”

The black woman nodded. “I’m Nedra.”

“Nice to meet you, Nedra.”

Nedra set the butt of the gun on the ground. “Same,” she replied.

“Would you mind if I filled my canteens? I can pay you for your trouble.”

“Fill them up,” Nedra said. “And keep your money; I don’t want it.”

Sarabeth unbuckled her canteens from the bundle on her horse and dunked them in the bucket. “You live out here by yourself?” she asked.

Nedra shook her head. “Got two kids, neither of which is old enough to sort eggs.”

Sarabeth poured what was left in the bucket into her hat and held the hat out for her horse.

“Where’s your man?”

“He ran off a while back.”

Now it was Sarabeth’s turn to shake her head. “Just the sort of thing a man would do.”

“Well, it was probably for the best. He wasn’t quite right in the head.”

“What was wrong with him?”

Nedra turned to spit again. “Don’t know, exactly, but we get the shakes out here, which scared the Dickens out of him. He used to complain after every little tremor about this sound he said he could hear, said he couldn’t get it out of his head.”

“Did he describe it to you, this sound?” Sarabeth asked.

Nedra pursed her lips and whistled up and down. “Kind of like that is how he described it.”

Sarabeth let go of the bucket; it dropped down the well and splashed in the water below.

“You all right?” Nedra asked. “You look like you just seen a ghost.”

Sarabeth wiped her lips with the back of her gloved hand. “I’m okay. I was just thinking about how hard it must be to work this place by yourself.”

“With two kids to boot. It ain’t no picnic.”

Still shaking, Sarabeth stowed her canteens and patted some dust from the horse’s rump.

Nedra shifted her stance, easing toward Sarabeth.

“I could use some help with the hogs,” Nedra said. “If you wanted to stick around, that is.

Got an extra room you could sleep in.”

Sarabeth blushed. “I appreciate the offer, but—” “You’ve got to find what you’re looking for. And deal with what comes after.”

“Yep,” Sarabeth replied, practicing her smile.

Nedra smiled back at her, showing off her tobacco stained teeth. “Well, you come back this way, Sarabeth, don’t go skulking around the side of my house; you come up and knock on my front door next time. We’ll sit down and have something to eat, maybe even get to know each other.”

“I’d like that,” Sarabeth said. “Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Sarabeth got back in the saddle, tipped her wet hat to Nedra as she swung the horse around, and set off at a trot. “Good luck!” Nedra shouted after her as she rode away. *** The mountains looked like enormous teeth scraping against the sky. They’d grown larger throughout the day, but their faces remained blurry and blobbish in Sarabeth’s eyes. And yet she knew that the Cleft lay directly ahead; she knew this because she could just make out, with a careful squint, the mountain that was topped with two peaks.

In her dreams, the Cleft was lodged at the base of just such a mountain.

The whistling in her ears was so loud now that she couldn’t hear anything else. It was grating, like the constant screech of a whetstone against a giant blade, and there were moments when she thought about turning away from it, when she considered running up on the sheriff and his deputies with her gun drawn, even though she knew that she would wind up dead if she did so. She resisted that temptation by burying her gloved hand in the horse’s black mane and dwelling on the importance of her Gift. It had to happen this way, she told herself. It’s the one thing I was put on this Earth to do.

But as the mountains filled up more and more of the sky, she could no longer ignore how weary and worn down she was. She felt like the head of a nail that’s been hammered down to a flattened nub, and it was a struggle to keep her feet in the stirrups while the tapped out gelding lumbered along, moving up and down and side to side while the sun sank low, casting a shadow that was a mile long over the mountains. At the top of a treeless ridge cut with slabs of pink rock, she paused to look at the hills that rolled away from her and spotted the three horses and the men riding them. She tried to dart forward, goading the gelding with her heels to get it to go faster down the ridge’s gentle slope. It tossed its head and neighed; it was weary as well, and it wouldn’t budge from a walk.

She guessed that this probably didn’t matter as much now. She’d reached the base of the mountain she was looking for, and she could see the Cleft, a tall fissure hollowed out from the ancient rock. The area around the Cleft was clear of vegetation and trees, and she could see the heat rising from it that created eddies and whorls in the cool evening air. The whistling sound was no longer a whistle; it was a deep throated thrumming, the vibration of a locomotive as it chugs along freshly laid tracks, pounding against her ears.

She dismounted and tried to lead the gelding into the clearing, but the horse refused to go any further, so she took off her glove and touched the tip of its nose with her finger to calm it down. Then she was able to get it closer to the Cleft, close enough to give her a chance to escape quickly if she had to.

Looping the horse’s reins over a boulder, she looked back at the undulating slope she’d just descended. She couldn’t see the sheriff and his men yet, but she knew they were on the other side of the hill. She tried to imagine the looks on their faces when they reached the Cleft and saw where her trail ended, and then she remembered the dreams she’d had the night before, and her mood brightened.

She had an idea.

Touching the horse’s forehead with two fingers, she coaxed it into sleeping lightly on its feet, and then she unbuttoned her shirt and took off her boots. Approaching the fissure in the rocks, she braced herself against the swelling column of heated air that emerged from the Cleft and tucked her shirt under her arm. With her hands free, she gripped the ankles of her boots, got down on her knees, and made boot prints in the dirt, stamping the heels as she slammed the boots down on the ground, one after the other, while she moved backwards, in retreat from the Cleft. Every so often, she stopped to swish away the impressions her knees made in the loose dirt with the shirt, and in a short time she’d created a trail that led from her upright but dozing horse right into the mouth of the cave that housed the Stone Gods.

When she had the boots back on her feet, she walked backwards up the rocky face of the mountain to reach a ledge above and to the left of the Cleft that would provide her with a place to hide. Along the way, she used the shirt to erase any evidence of the path she’d taken, and then she put the shirt back on, buttoned it up, and waited for the sheriff and his men to arrive.

She didn’t have long to wait. The three horses—the black, the roan with white legs, and the dun—came lumbering toward the Cleft as soon as she’d fully flattened herself against the ledge, and when the horses decided that they wouldn’t go any further, the sheriff and his men were forced to walk the rest of the way.

The sheriff was the oldest of the three. He had a handlebar mustache and had his silver badge pinned to his shirt. His companions were bearded and had gaunt, sunburned faces.

Sarabeth ducked even further out of sight as they neared the gelding, which still stood idle where she’d left it.

Then they discovered the tracks she’d made that led to the fissure in the rocks, and they started arguing about what to do next. The deputies were fairly adamant about holding their ground and waiting for Sarabeth to come out on her own, but the sheriff wasn’t that patient. He wanted to be on his way back to Lewistown, and he told his men that he would withhold their pay if they didn’t go in after Sarabeth to bring her out. They agreed, reluctantly, to look for her in the Cleft only if the sheriff would come with them, and so, after some further grumbling, the three of them stole into the fissure with their guns drawn.

Waiting with bated breath on the ledge, Sarabeth flinched when she heard the gunshots and a long, loud scream. Then the rumble filling her ears reached down into her gut to become a sullen roar, and she squeezed her eyes shut tight and told herself that the Stone Gods would be satisfied, for now, with the sacrifice she’d offered to them, even though she

wasn’t sure if there was any truth in this. When the roar suddenly subsided, there was quiet all around; even the whistling sound was gone.

She opened her eyes. She could hear birdsong and the sound of a ground squirrel scampering across the rocks, and the earth beneath her was still; the sky was a dark, deep blue streaked with bright pink clouds. Climbing down from the ledge, Sarabeth led her horse over to the three horses that were without mounts. After she’d freed them from their bridles, saddles, and saddle pads, she shooed them off, and then she walked her own horse up the opposite slope. She didn’t need to look back at the Cleft to know that the Stone Gods had gone back to sleep.

This meant that she would finally have some peace. When she crossed over the next ridge, she was going to find a good place to camp, a clearing out under the stars, and then she would build a big fire for herself and try to settle her stomach with a meal. She knew that she would worry a bit about how much time would pass before the Stone Gods started to stir again, but when she grew drowsy, she could look forward to dreaming of something else—of the little house beside the road she’d crossed, for instance. The little white house with its pig pen and its field of corn and its bricked in well.

Yes, she told herself, she would dream of that house tonight, and tomorrow, she would return to it and knock politely on Nedra’s front door. And if Nedra was still willing, that was where she was going to stay. She would be close enough to the mountains to use her Gift if she had to, to make sure that the Stone Gods would not wake, but she wouldn’t be alone.

If Nedra would have her, she would never be alone again.

BODY BAGS OF BLOOD AND GUTS HANK KIRTON VIOLENCE, SEX, DRUGS, BAD THEATER

“The show was allegedly entitled, BODY BAGS OF BLOOD AND GUTS which tells you what kind of sick people we’re dealing with here.”

—Lieutenant Roscoe Booker Gass, Deputy Director of Field Operations, Arkansas State Police.

And the guy just flopped down and died. Well, he didn’t just die. More things happened to him. He enjoyed (if you can call it that) about six minutes of peaceful repose before the gibbering naked hunchbacks burst from the wings and fell upon him all greasy and scary.

They pinched his nipples with chicken-skin fingers and made smiles on his body with razor blades and the guy bled real good, melting out a glossy pool of red lifestuff all over the factory-fresh carpeting.

Gallery owner Mrs. Helen Groveniette was pissed. She still owed on that goddamn fucking carpet (the Chartreuse Starburst pattern was wrenchingly expensive).

“Layaway dry-fucked me right up the ass!” she reportedly quipped.

It wasn’t until his bowels collapsed that the audience knew the truth.

He was a famous chef. He swept the floor. He gathered dust. He said hello. He asked questions. He had questions asked of him. He pushed a broom. His favorite dish was liver & onions. He liked it because it made him gag.

He made his life difficult and unpleasant in strategic ways. His live (and last) performance was no exception. There was something coiled inside him. Like a twisted Slinky at the bottom of a toybox.

His name was Tommy Knox. He insisted the name wasn’t a blatant pseudonym but after his sticky naked corpse was peeled open and then stitched back up and processed and described in tediously-detailed paperwork, it was reported in the Texarkana Gazette that he was born Eustice Wembley Herk and he’d studied culinary arts in France, Egypt and Soylent, Louisiana.

The people who knew him were mildly astonished. They had no idea he was a welltraveled raconteur. He always seemed so stupid. A rube. Like, strictly Hicksville, y’dig?

Tommy had lost his parents to a traffic accident when he was 18. He grieved. Silently, privately. Like a monk. He walked in the woods. He looked at scenery. He slapped at mosquitoes. He brought binoculars. He felt the Ozark Mountains like a smothered orgasm.

His folks left him a small pile of money.

He ran a barbecue shack for three years called Dead Meat. It received a decent review in one of the local rags (***1/2). Governor Bill Clinton ate there once during his campaign for president. It was a contrived photo op. They captured the moment Clinton shook Tommy’s hand, Tommy grinning like he’d just sucked in a blast of nitrous oxide (something he reportedly liked to do).

Business dried up after hitting that pinnacle of visibility and he closed the Dead Meat’s doors on August 1st, 1993.

Following the demise of his enterprise, Tommy skedaddled to Los Angeles and fell into the pornographic video industry. He performed under the name Tommy Knoxxx. He was a very handsome fellow back then and quite the ladies’ man, they say.

He grew a droopy mustache to accompany him on his new career path.

He met with producers. He hung around the Sunset Strip. He met with directors. He memorized lines. He worked hard to maintain erections. He couldn’t believe what he did for a living. He dabbled in cocaine.

He took long walks along the Hollywood Walk of Fame, musing.

It was said that he was better at dialogue delivery than delivering the goods sexually, which was unusual for male adult actors at the time. They called him, “Tommy Knoxxx the flaccid fox, who can’t stand up like other cocks.”

But not to his face, obviously. That pithy little poem came from a Hustler magazine article.

Viagra could’ve rescued his career but it didn’t exist yet. Not to the general public anyway.

It was only doled-out (under the table) to politicians and corporate CEOs back then. Of course, Tommy’s old pal Clinton had easy access to it.

Anyway, Tommy packed up his sorry ass and ran back to Arkansas with his tail between his legs.

The entire extent of his videography list as follows: Lawrence of Your Labia (1993) Henry: Portrait of a Venereal Driller (1994) Four Weddings and a Gangbang (1994) Yo, a Ho! and a Bottle of Cum (1994) Fuck Scum Pig Cunt Vol. 12 (1994) Once back home he secured a stop-gap job as a sous chef at a restaurant that had fucking peacocks walking around outside. It was called The Crumpled Blue for some stupid reason. It was sort of an upper-crusty type joint and Tommy’s sterling credentials made him a shoe-in for a key position. Some of his co-workers called him “Chef” out of genuine respect.

He helped create the dinner specials. He designed new plate presentations. He demonstrated his sauce-plating techniques, creating intricate, calligraphic swoops, lines, dots and swirls along the edge of the plate. He was a master and impressed his new coworkers with his skills. If his manager, Chef Martin Bolster felt threatened or envious, he gave no sign. They seemed to get along.

According to reports.

It was at The Crumpled Blue that he met his future girlfriend and partner-in-crime, Wanda.

Wanda Sonnet. Better known in dark art circles as Debbie D. Defoliant. Good ol’ Triple-D. She was a waitress at the restaurant and he was immediately attracted to her glass eye. It didn’t move, giving her an off-kilter stare. He liked that. Also, her real eye was brown and her false eye was blue, further enhancing her uncanny appeal.

It was love at first sight.

Tommy once said, “She really peels my carapace,” and nobody knew what the fuck he was talking about.

Wanda the waitress was one person. Debbie D. Defoliant was a whole different animal.

Some have concluded that she had multiple personality disorder, like in that old movie, The Three Faces of Eve (1957) with Joanne Woodward playing three people trapped in one body.

She won an Oscar for that fucking role.

Others were convinced that the whole Wanda/Debbie dichotomy was all an act. Debbie craved attention. She carried herself like a spectacle. Like one of those fucking peacocks outside.

Tommy didn’t care either way. He loved them both.

Wanda claimed her enucleation was caused by a bicycle accident when she was twelve.

One of the handlebar ends was missing its grip and the hollow, exposed metal punctured her eye when she landed in a tangle at the bottom of a sudden drop.

Debbie Defoliant on the other hand said she’d purposely gouged out her right eye with a lead pencil while tripping on black acid. When she was twelve.

Take your pick.

The staff at The Crumpled Blue started to notice the increasingly tactile interactions between Wanda and Tommy. They couldn’t keep their hands off each other.

They took their breaks at the same time (2:00 pm) so they could make out or even fully fuck behind the walk-in freezer. You could hear them, apparently.

According to reports.

Debbie D. Defoliant was a performance artist when she wasn’t running between tables at The Crumpled Blue. She built her reputation at a clandestine club in Little Rock called The Open Sewer, which was located in the basement of a travel agency, Alluring Journeys. The manager of The Open Sewer was the (22-year-old) son of the woman who owned Alluring Journeys. His first name was Sorell and everyone called him, “Sore” for short. Most people agree the appellation suited his personality.

Debbie came out naked in her first show, Slick Pussy. There were a variety of items arranged on a stainless steel medical stand-tray. You can guess the rest of her act. She performed it on a yoga mat, spouting abstract poetry punctuated with orgasmic gasps.

She earned eager applause from the audience of eight.

After word got around, her next performance, Now on Sale sold out (all 25 seats) and the police stood vigil at the back of the room, waiting for obscenity.

Debbie spent thirty fucking minutes sitting in a paint tray of Smucker’s grape jelly and powdering her ass with confectioner’s sugar, all while singing a lullaby in a baby voice.

No arrests were made. Bad taste wasn’t a crime.

And Debbie D. Defoliant became an underground celebrity.

Of sorts. She still had to wait tables at the restaurant. Most of her newfound fans couldn’t afford a fucking appetizer at The Crumpled Blue. Her two lives remained safely divided.

Until poor Tommy Knox entered her life. He became acquainted with both sides of Wanda/Debbie.

And his life would never be the same.

They arranged to share the same day off and spent their leisure time bonding in unsavory ways: drinking vodka straight from the bottle, fucking, and smoking crystal methamphetamine. Debbie claimed the drug “inspired” her, giving her the “exciting” ideas she would incorporate into her performances. She eventually moved into Tommy’s apartment to get away from her nosy, judgemental roommates.

It was the official launch of their downward spiral.

When Tommy finally admitted to her that he’d worked as a porn actor in L.A. she was overjoyed. An eyewitness reported that Debbie “squealed with delight” at the revelation.

Although the identity of this witness remains unconfirmed, some believe it was 18-year-old Horace McPloog, a busboy at The Crumpled Blue who often sold the couple drugs.

McPloog would later play one of the “hunchbacks” in the couple’s notorious final performance.

Tommy’s porn resume inspired Debbie to write him into the act. Tommy told her he missed performing and would be happy to oblige. It sounded like a pretty fucking cool idea, he said. Reportedly.

They visited three fucking video stores to rent his movies so Debbie could learn what he was capable of as an erect thespian

(he had not revealed to her his frequent bouts of erectile stagefright).

None of the stores carried his movies. Debbie had to make do with Tommy’s vague descriptions of the sexual events depicted. Her maniacal imagination did the rest.

She came up with a one-act play called, Everything’s a Toilet When You Have No Point.

Tommy helped with the set and stage blocking since he had an eye for design. He built and painted the backing flat. He chose the costumes.

He also wrote a song for the play, Give Me a Home Where the Urinals Roam but Debbie nixed it, saying, “Musicals are out of fashion nowadays.”

According to reports.

One witness declared, “Tommy’s song was just Home on the Range with the word `urinal’ instead of `buffalo.’ He was a fucking joke.”

The opening (and subsequent closing) of Everything’s a Toilet When You Have No Point occurred over one weekend in September, 1996 with a single performance each night (Fri & Sat). The play ran around forty-five minutes. Tommy wore only a loincloth made of (supposedly) feces-smeared toilet paper.

As the play progressed, his sweat and movements disintegrated his “costume” and he finished the play naked. Debbie wore a pink ballerina outfit with holes cut out for her breasts to poke through. Unfortunately, the play was not recorded. The duo never wrote anything down. It is a drama lost to time. One audience member described the play thus: “I thought it was kind of stupid. They just talked about toilets the whole time. They had a toilet bowl on stage and they peed in it. They also did this jerky, spastic dance to the sound of a flushing toilet. I guess they were trying to be animated turds or something. I don’t know.

After one of them danced, the other would say, 'You look flushed!’ It was fucking stupid.”

According to reports, this eyewitness was Debbie’s ex-roommate, Trixie Hardesty (23).

An opposing opinion was elicited from a local musician who went by the stage name Bea Nice: “I thought it was great! It really made you think. About plumbing. About how our lives are all going down the drain. Y’know, existentially speaking and shit like that....”

Tommy and Debbie discussed plans for a national tour that never materialized.

The closing performance was fatefully attended by Mrs. Helen Groveniette, the (57-yearold) owner of an art gallery called, The Black Plague. She was impressed with the toilet humor in the play.

She’d recently held a successful exhibition of the macabre charcoal drawings of Noah Nimitz, the Arkansas serial killer and cannibal who was convicted of thirteen heinous murders between 1978 and 1984. He took up charcoal sketching to pass the time on death row.

The art exhibition attracted a lot of controversy, which sparked a lot of publicity, which sold a lot of tickets. All thirteen drawings by the notorious cannibal and necrophile were sold.

Mrs. Groveniette was looking for something that would invite further controversy. She believed that Debbie and Tommy could be her next ticket to infamy.

She contacted the couple with an offer: perform a new play at her gallery and make it as disturbing as fuck. Something powerful. Daring. She wanted to make the six o’clock news.

She encouraged them to provoke local law enforcement and instigate a raid. With arrests.

“Just make sure that if you decide to take a shit on the floor, you put down some plastic first.

I just had the floors redone,” she told them.

According to reports.

Mrs. Groveniette offered to pay them $500 for a one-hour performance. Debbie eagerly accepted. “We won’t let you down.” she reportedly promised her.

Now they just needed to come up with an idea.

At this point in their drug addictions, Debbie and Tommy’s world had started to capsize.

They both leaned heavily toward the tipping point.

Wanda was the first to lose her job at The Crumpled Blue after a spectacular selfimmolation.

She reported to work so tweaked-out on meth that she forgot how the timeclock worked and had to coax Bill the bartender to punch in for her. Twenty minutes into her shift she

dropped a large tray of beverages. She stood over the crashed ruin of spilled drinks and shattered glass, laughing at her own slapstick.

The entire dining area froze—some diners pausing mid-mastication, others with partially lifted forks—as if time itself had halted with the crash. Her maniacal laughter was “terrifying” according to one customer.

Then Debbie started to dance. Wanda had left the premises. For good.

Debbie moved through the tables doing an awkward, clumsy belly dance, humming along with her movements. Several witnesses were later contacted and asked if they could identify the tune she hummed. None of them had any fucking clue.

The bartender, William Whiffle, tried without success to calm Debbie and get her to sit down as the diners gaped at the spectacle. He had already called the police. Debbi danced until they got there. By that time, embarrassed patrons had begun to file out.

When the officers arrived, Debbie began to scream about “fascism” and “brown work shoes” for some reason. The bartender described the screams as either “blood-curdling” or “bone-chilling.” Reports varied.

Debbie was taken into custody and charged with creating a disturbance. She also underwent a raft of psychological tests.

Meanwhile, Tommy returned to work (he’d been taking his lunch break at Wendy’s) to find The Crumpled Blue in a state of chaos and disarray.

His boss, Executive Chef Martin Bolster delivered the shocking news: Wanda had flipped out and caused havoc and had been arrested.

Tommy was floored, according to reports. He requested (and received) the rest of the day off and high-tailed it to the police station to rescue the love of his life.

He was met with a waiting room.

Night had fallen by the time he was able to post bond and get Debbie out of the holding cell.

They returned home where Tommy informed her that her job at the restaurant was no more. She dismissed this development as no big deal since now she could devote her full

time and energy to her ART. It was a blessing in disguise. She was free. And ALL artists needed to be free. To create. To break barriers. To forge their own lives heedless of the consequences. Did van Gogh have a day job?

Tommy wasn’t sure who that was but he was so moved by her impassioned speech that he never returned to his job at The Crumpled Blue either.

The now untethered couple began to work on their next big performance.

Debbie had taken a recent interest in true crime and wanted to use her newly- acquired knowledge of murder and bloodshed in the new play. Tommy suggested the title Cannibal Menu which would incorporate his culinary expertise. He reportedly said, “We could come up with dinner specials like, buttocks au gratin, and French-fried testicles.”

Debbie vetoed Tommy’s ideas as too “whimsical.” She wanted something hard and gritty.

Like a forensic photograph of a crime scene. Something with “blood and guts and body bags.”

And then it dawned on her. A title was born. They smoked some meth to celebrate and set about writing the play.

Debbie paced the apartment while Tommy took dictation. His pen had trouble keeping up with her rapid-fire ideas and it took them another two days just to decipher his frenzied scribbles. Two more days later they had completed the writing of what would become a nationally-known (for all the wrong reasons) theatrical drama, Body Bags of Blood and Guts.

The only other participant with access to the written script was busboy Horace McPloog who stated for the record, “I only pretended to read it. I really don’t know what all was in it.”

Art gallery owner Mrs. Helen Groveniette had built a makeshift “stage” in her display room, complete with working curtains (of the shower variety) and a row of footlights (owl-shaped children’s nightlights).

Interpretations of the play varied wildly—from the first-person spectators to the play analysts who only had second-hand accounts to work from—but most agreed that the play seemed to be about consumerism. The written play (and Tommy’s frantic original notes) were reportedly destroyed prior to the performance.

Mrs. Groveniette would regret not putting down plastic. She would also regret not allowing the performance to be recorded.

The details of the performance emerged sporadically after the fact. Some accounts of the play contradicted each other. Other reports were affirmed or disputed, depending on the eyewitness. Some recountings seemed to be embellished by the spectators, others only vaguely alluded to. Specifics proved elusive.

The following descriptions of Body Bags of Blood and Guts were confirmed by a small majority of the direct witnesses who came forward following the event and offered their (at times biased) testimony: It began with a long monologue from Debbie about the price of ham, in which she compared The Holocaust to a container of cloves. She performed wearing only a wooden barrel, which she called, “the uniform of the poor.” Tommy remained offstage, groaning in mock pain everytime she said the word “glaze.”

After the monologue, Debbie left the stage. She returned with Tommy, having changed into white tights, white dinner gloves and a plastic tiara. She was topless, with Band-Aids covering her nipples. Tommy wore a dinner jacket and no pants. He reportedly had a large price tag tied to his genitals: 25¢.

They then performed an acapella version of Home on the Range with the words “bar code” substituted for “buffalo.”

Apparently musicals were no longer passe’.

One audience member, local zine critic Michael Dwork, described the play as, “Fucking baffling. Nobody was sure if it was supposed to be funny or not so nobody laughed. But if it was supposed to be serious it was fucking embarrassing, man. I don’t know. Maybe avantgarde theater just isn’t my bag. ” Trixie Hardesty, who also attended the show, opined, “The real crime wasn’t Tommy’s death. It was that stupid fucking script they wrote.”

Tommy and Debbie left the stage again. They returned nude for the infamous “price gouging” portion of the play. The final act. The fucking denouement, if you will.

Debbie called Tommy a “capitalist pig” and tapped his head with a large ostrich feather.

Tommy dropped in a flawless pratfall (his autopsy revealed a linear skull fracture, indicating he may have been unconscious during this pivotal scene in the play).

Tommy lay flat on the floor, face up, while Debbie poured a bucket of honey over him. She then sprinkled cloves over him while chanting, “Sticker shock! Sticker shock! etc....”

Debbie then ran offstage. She would not return. The audience (and Mrs. Groveniette) were unaware that after her exit she hastily dressed and fled the scene.

Tommy remained onstage, perfectly still, for three to six minutes (accounts vary) while the audience grew restless.

Then three more actors rushed the stage. They were naked, wearing papier mache “humps” and grunting. Their bodies were coated in lard, their fingers gloved with raw chicken skin. Each held a double-edge razor blade and they crouched over Tommy, slashing into his honeyed flesh.

The three hunchbacks were played by Horace “The Horse” McPloog (18), Dabney Gloss (25) and Barney Testaverde (49). All three men were well known in certain drug circles around Little Rock and frequently associated with Tommy and Debbie. They were all taken into police custody following the play. All three pleaded fucking insanity.

When the blood began to flow and seep into the carpet, the audience applauded, believing they were witnessing convincing special effects. One spectator was quoted as saying, “We just thought, Cool! The show’s finally getting good! It was kinda boring up to that point....”

The three actors took a bow and exited the stage.

It took the audience members approximately thirteen minutes to grow impatient enough to be concerned.

Uncertain how to proceed, Mrs. Groveniette closed the shower curtains and checked Tommy for a pulse, finding none. She alerted KATV 7 News and then summoned emergency services.

Blood tests confirmed high levels of pentobarbital in Tommy’s system. His cause of death was determined to be respiratory arrest, leading authorities to conclude that his death was an intentional suicide, assisted and orchestrated by Wanda “Debbie D. Defoliant” Sonnet

as the finale of her final performance.

One of the assistant medical examiners was reprimanded for referring to Wanda Sonnet as a “cooze” to a local reporter.

Michael Dwork, editor of Bug-Zapper Magazine stated, “As lame as the play was, it got kind of epic at the end there. I hate to admit it. And in one night, that crazy meth-headed bitch became legendary. Tommy stayed a loser, unfortunately, as crass as that sounds....”

“The police questioned me,” Trixie Hardesty revealed. “Like I know where she went. How the fuck should I know? We hated each other’s guts. She’s not gonna call me or tell me anything. Oh hi Trixie! I’m in fucking Venezuala! Not gonna happen. Out of sight out of fucking mind, that’s my policy. Screw her. I don’t even give a care anymore.”

The search for Wanda Sonnet continues. She seems to have evaporated from the surface of the earth. Investigators speculate that the name Wanda Sonnet may have been an alias as they could find no records of her existence.

Debbie D. Defoliant’s whereabouts also remain unknown.

According to sources.

THE (MOSTLY) TRUE STORY OF ISABELLA LABATT JOHN RC POTTER It was one of those chilly and snowy evenings in southwestern Ontario that seemed to be worse back in the mid-70s when this story takes place. My younger sister Barb and I were pleased to have the old family farmhouse to ourselves that evening because our parents had gone to visit relatives. We had earlier invited a few of our favourite cousins to come to visit us that evening, with the expectation that we would end up going into town and driving from the north end to the south repeatedly, which was one of the popular things for teenagers to do back then. My maternal cousins, Pat and Marilyn, were my age and in the same grade at high school.

We sat around the kitchen table, no doubt drinking and smoking. The wind was howling outside, and icy particles of snow struck the windows with startling force. It was clear that a snowstorm was brewing, and perhaps not the best kind of weather to go out for a joy ride. I thought I heard the door to the back kitchen open; it seemed strange that anyone would be coming to our house unannounced on such a wintry evening. There was a light tap on the door, and then it opened suddenly and banged against the kitchen counter. Everyone in the room stared in amazement. A young woman was in the doorway and leaning against the doorjamb in apparent exhaustion, her breathing audible in ragged gasps. Although she had heavy makeup on her face, it accented and enhanced her theatrical appearance. We were startled yet fascinated by this unexpected apparition: the young woman was wearing a luxurious-looking fur coat, with a colourful silk scarf carelessly wound around her neck, whilst a jaunty winter bonnet sat on her head; a few golden tresses fell across her face. The snow on this young stranger’s clothing was already beginning to melt in a pool at her feet, which were clad in expensive-looking winter boots. A beaded bag was slung over one shoulder. Before anyone could move or say anything, the young woman seemed about to collapse just before she uttered words that chilled us to the bone: “For God’s sake, help me!” …………………………………………………………..

Marilyn jumped up from her kitchen chair and caught the young woman before she swooned, gently guiding her to the boot bench beside the kitchen door; she also had the

presence of mind to pour water from the kitchen tap into a glass and hand it to the unexpected guest. I closed the kitchen door to prevent the frigid winter air of the unheated back kitchen from entering. We started to pelt questions at the young woman, but Marilyn sternly told us to give our gasping guest a chance to get her breath. She sat beside the young woman on the bench and put a protective arm around her fur-clad shoulder.

Looking at everyone and then back at the stranger, Marilyn asked calmly, “Are you ready to tell us what happened and how you ended up here?”

The young woman shook her head, affirming her readiness to talk. She took a dainty sip of water, then said, “My car went off the road, and I wandered in the snowstorm until I saw the porch light outside.”

Our first concern was that the young woman was injured, but she said that was not the case. She was only shaken up and, of course, chilled to the bone. The young woman told us that she was from London, a city that was a one-hour drive away.

“Why were you up here?” Marilyn asked. “Where were you going?”

When the young woman told us the names of the couple she was going to visit further up the concession, we looked around in surprise. The man she named was one of the richest farmers in the community. Everyone said he was a millionaire, but you would never have known it because he was always clad in his trademark barn overalls.

My curiosity got the better of me, and I blurted out, “Who are you?”

The young woman paused. She seemed to be trying to remember. Did she have amnesia, I wondered? Finally, she said in a quiet voice, “My name is Isabella Labatt.” You could have heard a pin drop in our kitchen at that moment. My sister, Barb, asked the question that was on the minds of all assembled there. “Are you from the Labatt family in London that owns the beer company?” If so, her famous family would have been one of the wealthiest in the city.

Seeming to be embarrassed by her response, the young woman’s cheeks reddened slightly, and she said, “Yes.” Then, as if it explained everything, she continued, “But I don’t drink beer.” I shook my head, thinking the young woman was a bit of an odd duck.

Marilyn asked the young woman if she wanted to go to the hospital. The response was no.

She then asked if she wanted us to take her to find her car. The response was yes.

The million-dollar question. I asked, “What kind of car do you drive?”

Almost apologetically, the young woman responded, “A Bentley.” It occurred to me that a tractor or tow truck would be required if any car—especially a Bentley—went off the road into a snowbank. I told the group as much. “Let’s find the car first and find out the extent of the problem,” one of the others stated.

One of my cousins was driving the family car, a spacious sedan that we referred to as more boat than car in size. We managed to get ourselves into the sedan, with Isabella in the front seat in the middle. Before backing out of the laneway onto the snow-laden gravel backroad, Marilyn asked, “From which direction did you come?” I piped up from the back seat that it had to be from the north of our farm because the couple’s farm, where the young woman went to visit, was further up the concession. Although there was quite a bit of snow on the road, the snowfall was fortunately not blizzard-like.

As we drove up the backroad to the train tracks, Pat asked, “Does anything look familiar?”

Isabella shook her head from side to side. Several heads looked from left to right, searching for signs of a car in the ditch. Within a few minutes we came to the highway that led to Clinton to the east. We had not yet found the young woman’s car.

“Did you go off the road further up the concession, past the highway?” someone asked.

Her voice trembling, Isabella said, “Yes. (pause) No. (pause) Perhaps.” I suspected that everyone in the car was wondering if the young woman had amnesia or a head injury or had just plain lost the plot!

We crossed the highway and drove up the concession line, known as Horseshoe Road, because it traveled in an arc to the north, then to the west, and finally back out to the highway. By now, we were almost to the property owned by the wealthy farmer. Barb burst out with a question that was on everyone’s mind, “How could it be so far away from our home? Isabella, when you were walking from your car, why didn’t you stop for help from one of the farms closer to where you ran off the road?”

The young woman cried, “I don’t know!” and then covered her face with her hands, slightly sobbing.

Marilyn made a sensible decision: “We haven’t seen your car, and the property you were visiting is next. We’ll take you there.”

All of a sudden, Isabella shrieked, “No! Not to them!” Grasping Marilyn by the shoulder, the young woman pleaded, “Please take me back to your home.” Marilyn explained it was my home, not hers, but why did she want to return there and not get help from her friends, the wealthy farm couple that she had visited that evening? Acquiescing to this strange and distraught young woman, the car was turned around and headed back down the road.

Suddenly, the young woman exclaimed, “I have something to tell all of you.” She paused dramatically. “Please, don’t be angry with me, but…” There was dead silence in the car as we all waited expectantly for the young woman to continue.

“My name is not Isabella Labatt!” …………………………………………………………..

After her surprising statement, the young woman informed us she would give further details but would only do that back at the house. The assembled cast of characters in the spacious sedan remained silent on the short return journey to the farmhouse. Everyone was wondering about the young woman’s identity and the reason for her surprise appearance that evening. If her name was not Isabella Labatt, who was she? Did she actually have a car stuck in a snowbank? Had she really gone to visit the local millionaire farmer and his wife further up the concession? Was she dangerous? What was in that beaded bag of hers – a knife or pistol? As we disembarked from my cousin’s automotive yacht, everyone quietly walked through the snowy yard to the back kitchen door. I purposely walked behind the young woman, either to make sure she did not make a great escape or to ensure she did not knife me in the back.

As my cousins and I took off our boots and coats in the back kitchen, the young woman responded negatively when asked if she would like to take off her fur coat. We walked into the kitchen and sat down around the big table in the middle of the room. I glanced at my cousins. Marilyn looked a bit miffed as she waited for the denouement. Pat had a skeptical look on her face. At that moment, as everyone stared at the young woman, a common thought seemed to come to all assembled: in the harsh lighting from the overhead kitchen lamp, the stranger in our midst did not seem 20-ish but, rather, more like a young teenager.

Marilyn took the bull by the horns. “Okay, if your name is not Isabella Labatt, who are you?”

The young woman grinned impishly as she looked at everyone assembled around the table. Finally, her sparkling blue eyes rested upon my sister, Barb, and me. “Should we tell them?” she asked us. At that point, all eyes were on me and my sister. I stood up, paused dramatically, and said, “This is Barb’s friend, Rosemary, who lives in the west. She’s here on

a visit.” Barb explained, while the proverbial penny dropped, “You may recall that she and her family used to live not far from here, on the highway, before they moved away.” There was a great deal of whooping and hollering from our cousins and no doubt a few welldeserved curses on our heads! Barb, Rosemary, and I had successfully pulled the wool over their eyes with our little charade. There was no car stuck in a ditch. The luxurious-looking pelt of skins worn by the ‘actress’ was as fake as the character wearing it. There had been no visit to the wealthy farmer up the concession. It was all part of a hastily devised plot.

What seemed most extraordinary was that the idea had come to us only a short time before my cousins had arrived. It was not the first time that I would direct and stage such an impromptu play, and certainly not the last! As Shakespeare’s timeless words tell us, all the world’s a stage, and for a brief moment in time, that stage was in southwestern Ontario, with the setting a farmhouse in the countryside in the middle of winter, when an actress playing the role of a character hastily named Isabella Labatt, stumbled through a doorway and into the collective memories of our youth.

VASECTOMAJESTIC JACOB SCHEPERS MEDICAL RECOVERY; REFERENCES TO GENITALIA, MASTURBATION, BODILY FLUIDS

// Sacre bleu! Balls and bruises!

How graphic do you want me to be? Ought I share the outline of the Rorschach hematoma flanking either side where the incisions show?

What revelations might awake in the shaking of these Magic 8 Balls?

That this comparison roughly fits without too much hyperbole the fact of their current hue, size, and fluid density is entirely too much. How else to put it? My Pinocchio testes have grown into real boys but only when their strings were cut so they can no longer make boys. How about that?

Hell, they even look as if they took a donkey kick straight to ‘em. So what gives?

The pure-potential mostly-ghostly unrealized not-children survive but in the valley of their making carved into isolation like little towns beside fjords or the Finger Lakes. Adieu!

Adieu! I leave them behind for the time being. I am, after all, still at it, my mending, the cold compresses on rotation of rechilling and application, shoving a fresh one down my gym shorts but not under the suggested compression so as to avoid direct contact of skin to cold.

Have had closer contact than that, mind you, years ago: With aching neck, I brought a soft Freez Pak to bed one night only to dream of eating something—Slushie?

Cotton Candy? Enticing no matter which way I fathomed it. Awoke with a start and a burn on my tongue. Had somehow bitten through the bag, torn it open to begin ingesting the gel, to taste the honey, hot coal to my mouth like a prophet from an angel telling me to Take, eat, make this a poem because the memory will fade, will fail you, and I guess you just had to be there but this past foretells my future ruin. Everything is connected, I promise, even the poison. Please stay with me.

It will all make sense in the end. Mostly. Please.

Don’t leave. Not yet.

// Let me get out ahead of this and say I’d be downright flattered if anyone considered an undertaking such as this venture in oversharing to be, wait for it, ballsy.

It’s high time too to make mention of dividing each of these entries with two strokes (any more than that and, hold for applause, I’d be playing with myself).

Two strokes it is then. A hop, a skip, a jump to the next and on.

Exceptional Courage!

Excelsior Travesty!

// In the thick of my homework, self-aggrandizement to the very ends, self-gratification to the point of release. If I were more fantastical, this’d be the point in our journey where I solicit aid from supernatural help. I imagine myself submerged in spunk, surrounded by muck critters— spermatozoa their genus, a host of homunculi and their animalcule accompaniment welcoming me like Lilliputians: That is, by tying me down to restrict me but here for my own good.

Perhaps they’d sit by my bedside cheering me on to completion in this feral—say it with me now— phantasmaorgasmia.

// To tap into our emergent national pastime I’m reading drivel online from folks decrying anyone who “butchers and mutilates” their God-given bodies. I want so badly to gather their thoughts on this procedure called “vasectomy” but I call “majestic.”

I want to see them wriggle over the hot coals of the raging IVF debate and watch them cast their lots and behold what they do with their proverbial cakes or the bone on the ground— or the reflection in the water— with one already in the mouth, loaded in that chamber. I challenge their conceptual categories.

I want to protect trans kids.

I want porous borders, fuzzy boundaries, liminal spaces, in-betweens. Do I fall

outside the definitions of “man,” of “male,” of “masculine”? Where does my virility end and my life begin? Two little snips— one on each side—and I can no longer father, no longer sire, no longer impregnate, no longer fertilize, but yet I still father and still parent and still my soul that any such quandary is ever insurmountable.

I mount, I surmount, veni, vidi, vici.

Veni, veni, veni, deadass.

// Real talk, true shit: most folks back home would likely clock me a cuck and pagan for the way I’m talking now if they hadn’t already.

Straight beta “no homo” screaming top down to second coming. Nevertheless I’m reading up on semen and the algorithm now seems to believe I have an insatiable need for the stuff, this good shit, this need for seed, goddammit, and my Apple News sends push notifications on high alert for any mention thereof and so too every ad in the age of our Lord, in these days of hawk tuah, hawks its wares for penile fortitude through some brand named hims or another sex shop pawning off a pornoadjacent Clone-

a-Willy dildo deal for membersonly folks fawning over miracle cures for the Dead Bedrooms subreddit which is the deadass saddest corner of the interwebz yet rife with edgelord incels chiming in with evil evil yikeson-bikes catchalls sans captchas to avoid provoking the robot detectors and thereby evade any deus ex machina out there and sidestep some cyber-addled divine anger, this wrath we court called mênis for Achilles’ anger: But, really, as I turn heel, my eyes have seen the one I can’t stop wanting. Snip, snip, and I embody the blind Tiresias endowed those seven years in utter and splendid fluidity. I set my sights on the penitence vaccine and the job is done. Well done, my light was on just to keep you off my mind. There was a nice moment with a cadence you could stomach if willing to read through the grime

and sift through the smut.

If only such moments came without such rancid, trying language. I’m a poet of ugliness, so invested am I in the mess of words spinning out with the world hamstrung as it is because ugliness is good and proper and right and true and apt. Forget the urn’s lesson: Ugliness is truth, truth ugly.

What’s good for the goose is gravy for the gander: What’s best is when something cuts through because cream rises to the top.

What I can skim is nectar, ambrosia, derived from the golden yellow of honey locusts at harvest which makes music plucked on Apollo’s strings like a Creamsicle pizzicato.