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THE PIPES by E.M. Stormo

Mom doesn’t let me drink from the pipes. “Don’t be a dog,” she says, but I can’t help it. All I hear is “Be a dog.” On the outskirts of the city, there’s a pipe that flows all day long. You have to squat in a ditch to drink, but it’s worth it. At night, nobody bothers you. Giant women make neon eyes from the city, but that’s it. The pipe-water tastes fresh, although Mom says, “It’s probably sewage.” I hear her calling me home from miles away. My ears itch of worms, so she must be saying my name. There are more pipes on the way, but the one near the outskirts is the best. I stop at a few of them. My name grows louder. The syllables carry on the wind like small-breasted birds. When I get home, to what city-folk call a “hole in the wall,” Mom is waiting for me, door ajar with the smell of soggy spaghetti. She is about to say my name again when she sees me. Right away she inspects around my lips, under my nose, and the back of my teeth. “Where were you today, my little dog?” She already knows. I bow my head and groan confession, “At the pipes,” but it isn’t loud enough, so I cough out the last drops of pipe-water stored in my gums and shout “At the pipes!” She hears me this time. The entire neighborhood hears, all the neighbors in their holes. I was at the city pipes and my withered lips tell the tale. My mouth doesn’t deserve her spaghetti, but she fixes me a bowl anyway. I am not invited to the table but instead eat my dinner on my mattress in the corner of our room. “I love you,” she says between slurps, “even if you drink from pipes.” Drink from pipes. Mom secretly commands me to do it. Even with withered lips, she kisses me goodnight. The smell of pipe-water doesn’t stop her from cradling me to sleep. All I can smell is soggy spaghetti. When I stir in the small hours, she attempts to feed me water from a bottle, but I spit that out on the floor.

The next day I’m back at the pipes. There is a subtle soy flavor in the water. They must have had Chinese recently. City folks are always sending out for food. If they have spaghetti, it’s from a fancy Italian restaurant miles away. The further the distance the greater they value the food. You can see them walking along the road in shoes not much different than mine. Mom could’ve made these city shoes. They walk for miles to get food. But who am I to say? I walk for miles to drink from their pipes. I don’t eat Chinese or Italian. We both wear mom-shoes, so maybe we could be friends. If they drink from pipes, we definitely could be friends. After taking my fill, I wait for them behind the road cage. Not even dogs can disguise themselves as good as this. Mom begins to call my name softly. My earworm itches. The giant women make neon eyes. My name grows louder. The position is awkward, but I don’t have to wait long. A group of city friends eventually show up. They have oily bags of some food I can’t determine by smell alone. I jump out onto the road, but I don’t mean to scare them. I am a humble animal. Bowing my head as my rear goes up. Without words, I befriend them. I turn over to reveal my belly. The purest friendship. My mouth leaks pipe-water. They toss scraps to me. It’s Italian! One of them leans down and asks, “Are you lost, buddy?” I don’t answer, but nod unconsciously. They bring me into the city. There is a color there that wasn’t visible from the outskirts, a neon waveform that surrounds every home, all neatly stacked next to each other. Our holes in the wall are random as rats in comparison. Everything in the city is fully intentional. The giant women stand among us, careful not to step on anybody’s home. A fishnet leg, the size of my mattress, is close enough to touch, but my hand goes straight through. My new friends laugh at my confusion. I don’t understand their fancy city-colors. A girl shows me how to gyrate with the waveform. I try out a gyration, but they laugh at me. One of my friends owns a real dog, a long-haired mutt. He performs a better gyration than me. He also eats Italian. He is a city dog, more so than I’ll ever be. A good dog, he shows me the ropes. He leads and I follow. We head to the pipe at the heart of the city. He demonstrates a superior method for pipe-drinking. Most of the city favors neon, its homes and women, but this pipe is golden. The water that flows is also golden. He looks at me like How does it taste? It tastes golden, buddy. Once you get a taste of the city and a feel for its waveforms, it’s impossible to leave, no matter how loud my name, how itchy my worms. I spend the whole night in the neon dirt by the golden puddle.

Mom is asleep when I get home, or pretending to be. The spaghetti was left out overnight. I wouldn’t call it Chinese or Italian. I’m not hungry either way. I drank too much. I’ll eat some in the morning for her amusement. From her bed, she moans, “Goodnight, my big city dog.” Her voice is sore from calling my name through the night. I don’t answer her because I don’t want her to smell my mouth, but she knows where I was. I am a big city dog now.

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ROUTINE by T.J. Larkey

My girlfriend works late hours, without any real breaks to eat, so it’s my duty to feed us when she gets home. I take this duty seriously. Not serious enough to learn how to cook, but serious enough. I sit in bed fully dressed, waiting. Then she calls me as soon as she’s off and tells me about her day while I drive to the nearest fast food place. It’s our routine. I like routine. It keeps me in line. 

“You’re a boy that needs to be kept in line,” she tells me.

“Yes,” I say. “I like routine.”

I get to the fast food place. I always get the same thing and the kid that works the late-night drive-thru shift knows me well. More routine. Keep things simple, and nothing will hurt you. I pull around, collect the correct change from my pocket, and wait for the car in front of me to drive away from the window. On the side of the restaurant, amongst the rocks, the cacti, there are bugs and lizards crawling around. I’ve never seen this before. I watch as a grasshopper is struck down by a lizard, mid-flight, and it scares me. This is not routine. But it’s okay. Get the food, drive home, don’t die, feed your lady, go to sleep, repeat. Okay? 

At the window, the kid asks me how it’s going.

“I just saw a lizard end a grasshopper’s life,” I say. “It was ruthless and terrifying.”

“Cool. You want sauce?”

He always asks me if I want sauce. And I always want sauce. It’s routine. It’s comfortable. If he were to not ask me if I wanted sauce, it’s likely I would spin out of control, burn it all down-- the lizards and the sauce and the routine-- all torched. 

“Hit me with some ranch, young man,” I say. “And you know I gotta have that hot sauce.”

“Ranch and hot sauce?”

“Oh yeah.”

The kid walks over to the condiments. I watch him. He’s short and a little soft around the middle and he is missing an eye. I try to picture his life outside of the fast food place. And every night it’s the same. I imagine him at home, smiling, playing video games or watching his favorite TV show. I imagine him eating his mother’s cooking, a healthy redness in his cheeks, oh so happy and loved. But then it turns into picturing how he lost his eye. I imagine him screaming in pain, near death. Then I see him in the hospital, bandaged up and trying to come to terms with the fact that this is his new reality, his new view of the world, without depth or promise or opportunity. I feel so sad, thinking about him. I want to tell him it’ll be okay and have him believe me. I want to believe me. But mostly I want to climb into the drive-thru window and hug him and take over his shift so he can go home and play video games and kiss his mother. 

“Here you go,” he says. “Sauce and napkins in are the bag.”

“Thanks man,” I say. “Have a good one.”

On the drive back, I notice the SERVICE ENGINE SOON light is on. And my gas is low. I don’t get paid for another 3 weeks. The cost of fast food is cheap, but it piles up. I need to learn to cook. I decide cooking will become my new routine. I will become the greatest chef in the world but I will only ever cook for me and my girl. I’ll buy cookbooks, new pans, a spice rack, the whole thing. My girlfriend will come home to the smells of my love and labor. Scents so good it will become erotic. That’ll be the new routine. Learn to cook so well it makes you irresistible sexually, save money in the process, fix your car, don’t die, keep it simple, repeat.

Okay.

At home, my girlfriend is in sweatpants, starving, tired, but smiling.

“I missed you,” she says. “How was your day?”

“It was good. I didn’t die. And the same cannot be said for everyone.”

“Did you see another accident today?” she asks.

I’d seen an accident the other day. It was bad. One casualty. I’d told my girlfriend all about it, then went on a rant about how my biggest fear is dying in a stupid way. Like a car accident because I was day-dreaming about becoming a master chef/sexual chemist.

“No accidents today,” I say. “Just nature’s routine.”

“Good. Now come here and stuff your face with me.”

I sit down next to her and we stuff our faces. It’s great. It’s routine. I feel full. I look over at my girlfriend and she appears full too. We are tired. I turn the TV on. My girlfriend needs the TV on to fall asleep so she doesn’t think about bad things that keep her awake. And I cannot sleep with the TV on because my brain latches on to everything. So I stay awake. Reading while the TV is on. I use a night light she bought me to further enhance the routine-- holding the book in one hand-- while the other hand is placed gently upon my girlfriend’s ass. Until she falls asleep. I turn the TV off. And for a few minutes I think about my day. I know a good portion of tomorrow will go the same, and it makes me feel calm. For the first time in my life, I feel calm before bed. Because of the routine. I fall asleep.

***

A few days later, at the fast food place, there is a disturbance in the routine. I order my food, but the line isn’t moving. I start to panic. I text my girlfriend. Long line. But I’m okay. I’ll be home soon. In the rearview, I see a man approach. He’s one of the employees. Belly hanging over belted khakis. 

I roll my window down.

“Hello,” he says. “Sorry about this line.”

His voice is soft. Soothing. A bit of a lisp. And his face makes me trust him.

“It’s okay,” I say. 

“The man at the window right now,” he says, looking around at the empty parking lot. “He won’t leave. I just called the cops but he still won’t leave.”

He smiles. I love him. I would do anything for him. His voice has pain in it and I want to bottle it up and take it home for him. Make the pain my own. 

“You want me to talk to him,” I say, unbuckling my seatbelt. “I come here every night so I feel kind of protective of it.”

He laughs. “No. But if you wouldn’t mind pulling out and walking inside we can get you your food in a few minutes?”

I wouldn’t mind. I would love to come inside. It’s not routine. But it’s exciting. A whole new world.

I back out of the drive thru and park near the entrance. The cars in front of me do the same. I’m first to the door and I hold it open as a group of people, all wearing clothes they wouldn’t normally wear in public, walk in one by one. The man that was in front of me is in flip-flops and tank-top, making a face that expresses how much he’d like everyone to know how annoyed/exhausted he is. And a group of three very large women follow behind, wearing sweatpants and talking about how crazy/weird this is. 

“He’s probably drunk,” one of the women says.

“Yeah, what an asshole,” another says.

I stand behind them. Thinking about other strange occurrences that have happened in this fast food place. There was the time an ambulance was called because a man had a heart-attack inside, right before the dining area was closed for the night. And there was the time a man tried to break in because they wouldn’t let him order through the drive-thru on foot. I think, how would these women react to those incidents? Then I stare coldly at them.

“We better get a free taco or something for this,” one of them says.

“Shush,” the woman who started this conversation says. “They might hear you.”

The man in flip-flop’s order is called and he walks up to the counter. He pays. I watch the man with the soft voice apologize to him and hand him his food. Then I watch as the kid with one eye scrambles around making the women in sweatpants’ food. 

“Your food will be ready soon,” the man with the beautiful voice says to the women. “And, umm, we threw in some free curly fries for you.”

The women all thank him. But it’s not good enough. Nothing in this world would be enough for the man with the beautiful voice. Nor the kid with one eye. I think about the man that started all this, and I hate him, yes, but in another way I love him for creating this beautiful scene.

“Three cheeseburgers, and three large cokes?” 

“And curly fries?” one of the women says, walking up to the counter.

“And curly fries.” 

They pay. I wait. The suspense building. When my order is called, I walk up to the counter smiling.

“Here you go,” the man says. “And I threw in an extra taco for you.”

“No,” I say. “You didn’t.”

“Yeah. For the wait and everything. We’re really sorry.”

“It’s no problem. The guy still here? Need me to talk to him?”

“Actually, I think he umm, heard me say I called the cops to those women that were behind him because he left right after.”

“Good,” I say. “Was he drunk or…?”

“Yeah. He took a really long time to order and I couldn’t understand him so he started cursing at me and umm, telling me I should go back to my own country.”

“Fuck that,” I say. “He should go home, forever and always.”

He laughs. The kid with one eye brings the food to him and gives me a thumbs up. The exchange is complete. I feel sad. But I understand.

“Well,” I say, “Hope you guys have a good rest of your night. See ya next time.”

“You too,” the man says, his voice seeping inside me. 

On the drive back home, I start thinking about my life before the routine. Through all the memories, one obvious moment sticks out. Years ago. I’d woken up in a strange place, still drunk, and decided to spend my last three dollars at a fast food place nearby, in order to sober up. I hadn’t had fast food in years. When I was drinking every day, I ate very little. Mostly eggs and nearly expired deli meat—in order to save money for booze. But that day I didn’t have a choice. I sat at a table near the empty play-area for children, eating a two-dollar cheeseburger and sipping free water from a small paper cup. After the cheeseburger was in my stomach, I just sat there, watching people eat, feeling sad and unable to move but not sure why. It seems funny now. Life before the routine. I laugh. My entire life before the routine seems absurd and distant. But I realize that very soon, I will need a new routine. I will feel that same kind of two-dollar cheeseburger sadness and a new me must emerge from that sadness. The discarding of and creation of routines will become a part of a larger routine and they will all build and be called my life. 

When I get home my girlfriend is wearing one of my t-shirts.

“How was your day?”

“Full of love.”

“Kiss me.”

“They gave me a free taco.”

We kiss. We eat. We have sex. She falls asleep. The routine is complete. And the last thing that goes through my head, before I drift off, is nothing.

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KIWI by Lee Matalone

You need to put the diaper on the other way, stupid, your brother lectures you, as if you hadn’t practically changed his diaper growing up, such a hot mess, from day one. Though you are twins, Jade wasn’t truly potty trained until years after you, pissing in his bedsheets till he was four, five years old. You two aren’t all that similar, as a matter of fact. As a baby he never cried, he didn’t speak really until he was six or seven and even then words were spare. For Mama his cough was a gift from God.

You on the other hand, you’re a talker. You’re a girl that speaks your damn mind. Like, when he’s standing there, hovering behind you at the kitchen counter, your hands smelling like shit and goddamnit will you hand me a wipe and every time he shifts his weight he makes a shhh shhh sound and it’s driving you straight insane. The pockets of his cargo shorts are filled with change. Soon he’s going to the Kroger to cash it all out and he swears there may be twenty bucks worth in there. All morning he’s flipping couch cushions and floor mats in the car and digging in all your dress pockets, you only wear dresses with pockets because we girls have to suffer different than boys and goddamnit I want pockets just like boys. Your Aunt Valentine is helping you with groceries and baby stuff, so much damn baby stuff who knew babies needed so much stuff, but she already pushes her food stamps to the limit feeding your two hungry mouths and you think come on she’s gotta party too and you are fifteen years old, old enough to get a job pushing carts in the Walmart parking lot or scrubbing dishes in the back of O’Charleys. You know you can handle this. You know sure well you are both old enough to contribute to this family and your brother he’s going to go out and get a job, he says, right after he gets that cash.

When you turn around to grab the wipe you look at Jade for a long hard minute and sometimes it really is like looking in the mirror and sometimes it is like looking at a stranger or at least like looking in one of those carnival mirrors that make your body wiggly and long, slightly off and funnier looking but it’s still you. You are twins but not the kind that look alike but you look alike enough but he, Baby Reed, he doesn’t look like either of you. He’s like he was brought in by the postman, but he wasn’t, he was made right in this house, right here by this family.

You give your brother a look that says, this is a real messy one and your brother gives you a look back that says, I wiped his ass last time, Camryn. You two communicate this way, in unspokens, much more than actual talking. Like you said you like to talk, but you don’t even have to with Jade you’re just what they call on the same wavelength, like two colors of just a slightly different shade of blue. Or green. Jade’s favorite color is green. So everything for your baby is this awful shade of lime green that looks just like...You even stole some paint from the Walmart in that awful shade of lime green and one night Jade went out and got a Hot-n-Ready and you two and Aunt Valentine put on your holiest tees and started painting Reed’s room and though you hated that color by the time it was up on the walls you said well, this actually is kind of nice it reminds me of a fresh bite of kiwi, a fruit you only had once but you now considered your favorite fruit. You tried it when another classmate with shiny white ass sneakers in the sixth grade brought it in and she told you Yeah, you bite the furry stuff and you took a bite out of that itchy scratchy layer of green hairs and even with that, even after the girls at the table started laughing at you you thought this is the best thing I’ve ever tasted and when you look at the wall you think of that fruit and you smile inside your belly and inside your heart.

No one knows the truth about Reed except you and your brother, not even Aunt Valentine. When your belly started getting bigger you told her you were simply eating a lot of sugary cereals and frozen corndogs and when you got even bigger you said it must have been immaculate convention, you mean conception and she slapped you across your face so hard you hit the carpet and got a rug burn on your cheek (Don’t exaggerate, she later said, I was just waking your ass into motherhood.). When you got back up she was sitting on the couch, one leg crossed over the other, all calm with a TV remote in her hand, and she said this baby’s gonna be the healthiest, happiest baby in all of Deridder, as if she was making a promise not to bring anymore unhappiness into this house, into this family, as if she were saying your baby would be different than the other babies in town born to girls just like you with breasts barely perky enough to salute a one-star general, the girls without fathers or mothers or neither with babies made from immaculate convention, you got one in the oven and this muffin’s gonna be a beautiful little treat. Valentine could have said a whole bunch of mean things like hey be glad your mama OD’ed when you were three but she didn’t and she didn’t quite ask where the baby came from either she just said this muffin’s gonna be a beautiful little treat and that made you feel so good for maybe the first time in your life, even better, even better than when you had that first and only bite of kiwi.

You are wiping and wiping and your baby’s bottom is so squeaky clean you could probably kiss his toosh and your teeth would get brighter, and your brother he snickers and he goes up and plants a kiss right on your baby’s ass saying he hadn’t had a dentist appointment since he was maybe six years old and hey he needed a shine. 

You love Jade with all of your heart and you know he didn’t mean anything by it he needed the loving. Like every night when it got dark and the TV in the family room went quiet he’d crawl into bed with you and hug you tight, and about half those nights he’d cry hard and soft into your hair. Those nights you’d rock him to sleep, going hey, hey hey you’re a monkee, a song you remember from somewhere in the youth that you never quite had, maybe in an aisle in the Kroger when your Mama had you two buckled up side by side in the buggie, the loudspeaker telling you you were a monkey, a fun little good time creature swinging from some tropical trees in a faraway land, or sometimes you’d sing swing low, sweet chariot, and you knew a chariot was a magical word that meant something that would take you a place other than here, and that comforted him into such a special place, a place so different than here, a place where kiwis grow on every tree and loose change flows in the rivers and beautiful babies are born with rumps as sweet and soft as muffins you went there together.

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FRANK’S BOUGAINVILLEA by J. EDWARD KRUFT

“When Joey’s husband died,” Stefania stage-whispered to their guests, “he was out of his mind. You know, they moved here to begin with partly because of Frank’s house. Really! Joey’s been…what?...well, obsessed really isn’t worded too strongly.

“You know, it’s only a half a mile from here, as a crow flies.”

The outdoor speakers crackled and Stefania shook her head. “Gerry Rafferty! It’s his newest thing. Who the fuck is a Gerry Rafferty fan? I swear to God, I shit Baker Street.”

Joey approached and Stefania placed a finger to pursed lips. 

“Is she boring you with the bougainvillea story?” he asked, while Stefania wondered, a hair’s breadth from doing so aloud, if his gut was even bigger than it was yesterday.

“Who’s up for a dip?” asked Stefania.

Dip? I didn’t make dip….” said Joey.

Dip. In. The. Pool,” clarified Stefania. “You old poop.” 

“Oh. Oh oh oh oh oh.”

“I’ll dip,” said the man who was way too old to still have a left-ear earring. 

“There are trunks in the bin over there. Or,” said Stefania, “you’re welcome to go au natural.

“Stefanie!”

SteFAnia!”

The guests laughed and Joey threw up his arms and marched off to pretend to fuss with the grill. 

“Anyway,” Stefania continued, “this space here was nothing but desert – a patch of bleck.”

“SteFAnia!” called Joey. “Do you know where the corn-on-the-cob holders are?”

“Corner cabinet!” she yelled. “When our husbands were alive, we’d visit and I’d say to him, I’d say: “Joseph Andrew, for Christ’s sake, why the fuck don’t you do something about this bleck of a spot? You have this pool, mountain views, the fire pit…all you need is an outdoor wet bar and something to color-fy this Godforsaken bit of earth.”

“I can’t find them!” bellowed Joey. 

“CORNER CABINET!”

“Oh. Oh oh oh oh oh.”

The man too old for the left-ear earring splashed into the pool – au natural – causing Stefania to wince for reasons she couldn’t list in mixed company. 

“Found them!” yelled Joey.

Stefania shook her head. “Such an ass. Anyway, it is now, if you ask me, the loveliest spot in the yard. Look at that color! It transforms the aesthetic, n’est-ce pas? And really, what is a house in this town without bougainvillea? Tell me. Tell me!” The guests smiled and a few seemed content that it was time to move on. “Oh,” warned Stefania, “that’s the end of the story, but it’s not really the story. Don’t you dare wander off, now!”

When Joey first heard the story, he was dubious. To this day, he has moments of doubt. But then he stops himself in his resentments and thinks: it’s Stefanie…SteFAnia…so yes, it is possible. 

They were drunk, of course. Dov had just died and Joey was thinking of selling the house and moving up north to be nearer his sister and nephews. 

“It really gives me an ass rash,” she’d said.

“Must we discuss your sex life again?”

“That shit-brown spot over there. Look at it. Look at it!” In Joey’s version, she went on and on and on, until he passed out on the lounge chair and awoke the next morning in his smoking jacket to find all of his mother’s good teacups on the patio table, filled with water and steeping starts of bougainvillea. 

Stephanie was smoking nearby.

“What the hell is all of this?” he’d asked. 

As Stefania tells it to their guests, including the man too old for a left-ear earring, who had cozied himself to the side of the pool, no doubt, thinks Stefania, with his nether-region positioned over one of the pool jets: “Joey was passed out, on that we agree. Third time that week I was abandoned to his drunkenness. Which, I have to say, surprised me some: used to be he could hold his liquor. But we were all younger once, right? RIGHT?”

Joey slid over from where he pretended to be fussing with the grill, something of a Cheshire grin on his unshaven face, for though he enjoyed ribbing her about it, he couldn’t help but love this story.

“Look who’s suddenly alive,” said Stefania, to which Joey put one hand to his hip, and the other reflexively gave her the finger. 

“I said to myself, I said: ‘Stefania, you’ve been griping about that little piece of shit-earth for almost a decade. So shut the fuck up and do something about it already,’ right? RIGHT? 

“And that’s when it struck me. Really, it is like lightning. Not that I’ve been hit by lightning. I was hit in the head by a golf-ball-sized piece of hail once (Joey: explains a lot) and that’s no trip to Joshua Tree. Anyway, I’m creative, I can imagine, after all. So yes, it was just like being hit by lightning. 

“Off I go, hither and thither, stumbling up Indian Canyon and around the bend at Movie Colony, up Alejo Road to the front gate. I’d been there once for a fundraiser and I knew about the bougainvillea. It was everywhere. I remember having this thought about the gardeners who might have planted it back in the 50’s, maybe under Ava’s watchful eye, RIGHT? Gus and Ritchie is what I call them, and in my mind’s eye they were business partners, but sometimes, after a day’s work in the desert sun and a few cans of Schlitz, they were also fuck buddies….”

“She climbed over the Goddamned WALL!” exclaimed Joey, unable to contain himself.

“You fucking POOP! How dare you hijack my story!”

“She climbed over the wall and stole Frank Sinatra’s bougainvillea! STOLE IT!”

“Of course,” she added, already over Joey’s rudeness, “Frank hadn’t actually owned the house in 50 years, but still.”

“But still!” echoed Joey, looking at her with a fondness that was reserved for the few.

“But still,” she said, returning the look. 

“Yeah,” he said.

“Fuck you. You old POOP, you.”

And at that, Baker Street began to play.

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MISAPPREHENSION DUET by Graham Robert Scott

Even by nine a.m., the heat’s settled in like a blanket, calories by the zillions, welling out from laboring bodies and machines under the desert sun, trapped under layers of atmosphere and cloud and smog. Damp handkerchief in one clenched fist, Dale Brenner mops brow and crown. He aims his lips at the reporter—Gina? Tina?—and bellows against a cacophony of straddle carriers and trucks, of containers crashing into place: This freight’s all dead tires. Once it makes port, it’s on its way to ’Nam. A sideloader grinds by. As G(T)ina checks her phone, its driver gives Dale the bird. It’s a great deal. We don’t want this shit in our landfills, but Asia can’t get enough of it. G(T)ina interrupts, asks how many he employs. Our op? Forty-two, full-time. See, tires are mostly oil, yeah? So they burn ’em for fuel. Power cement factories with them— Annual revenue? Oh. Look, I’d rather not disclose that. I’m sure you understand. But, see, it turns out tires have some great byproducts, too, once you've pyrolized them. Crumb rubber and shredded rubber as construction additives. Carbon black— G(T)ina glances at her phone, again, and blood pressure swells as Dale squeezes his handkerchief behind his back. Hot date? Gonna write any of this down? She frowns up at him from behind wisps of gusted hair. A scribble goes into the notebook. Unclear whether it’s shorthand or doodle. Sweat builds on his face; in his pits; between folds of belly; in the crack of his ass. Far side of the yard, a truck engine roars to life. Dale leans forward, raising his voice to match, trying to smile at the same time, and looks as a result like he’s trying to eat her. It’s a win-win, see? Rare success story for recycling. Both entrepreneurs and environmentalists happy. Scribble. Gonna take pictures?  With frown and furrow, she shakes her head. Dale pulls his collar away from his neck to unstick it, let it breathe. Back in his office, a sheaf of legal paperwork rustles under the AC; he envies the document its location, loathes its existence. Now, China’s cracked down on imported used tires, which, I won’t kid, cuts off a big market. But Asia’s bigger than the Middle Kingdom, and we’re making new deals every day in other parts of that world. Exciting, yeah?  She performs an oh-look-at-the-time, tucks notebook away, extends a hand. Wait, is that it? So few questions. In particular, none about his recent EPA suit, which at first he took as a positive, a sign she’s not one of those reporters. But she hasn’t asked much else. It’s just, I thought this would be a nice story for your readers. And, he doesn’t say (because it’s understood, isn’t it?), also for his vendors and investors, show he’s back in the game, shit squared away, so they don't fucking bolt. But G(T)ina gives him that puzzled look again. Dale feels words tripping out of his mouth faster than he can edit them, as his face looms closer to hers. I mean, is this going to be a nice profile? Not a hit piece? ’Cuz I thought maybe this would be forward-looking, optimistic. We got a bright future here. Now I’m worried you only called because you wanted to write shit about that settlement deal. Regina—he remembers her name now, out of nowhere—retrieves her notebook. Her hand is smooth, without callous; her face, without wrinkle. Only now it dawns on Dale, maybe he’s misread how much she prepped for this visit.

Settlement? she asks, and clicks her pen.

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FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY by Julie Watson

Two weeks after Jane and Richard sent their only son Bobby to college, Richard lost his job. He’s been talking in his sleep non-stop ever since, nearly six months now. Jane is exhausted. She knows any sane woman would have exiled her husband to the guest room by now, or marched him into the office of a reputable sleep specialist. But for Jane, Richard’s new habit is revelatory. Since he started talking in the night, Jane has learned more about her husband than she did in the entire twenty-two years prior. 

Richard’s job search is going poorly. In order for him to sleep at all he first sought the escalating assistance of bourbon. Every clank of ice in the glass was another reminder of the bleakness of their situation. Richard’s drunken sleep was deep at first, his midnight ramblings nonsensical and humorous.

“We’re not getting a fourth cat,” he said one night with a firmness Jane found hysterical. Thanks to Richard’s severe allergies and disdain for pets in general (filthy and expensive, he said) they would never get a first. On another night, he sighed in a way that made Jane picture the disappointment on his face, so clear she was certain he was awake. Yet, when she moved to comfort him, he rolled over and said simply, “I know, but he’s a dumbass.” On still another night, she woke to Richard shouting, “the scrotum!” with William Wallace-style conviction. Jane was forced to bury her face in her pillow that night, biting down hard on the cool cotton sheets to keep from howling out loud.

With each passing week, the balance in their savings account dips lower, along with the number of Richard’s boxer shorts Jane runs through the wash on Wednesdays. When the bourbon stops working, Richard switches to a rainbow of over-the-counter pills and supplements loaded with scientifically-proven ingredients. With these, he begins to open up.

“I don’t want to fail,” Richard says.

“Fail how?” Jane asks, rising to her elbows.

Richard nestles his head into the pillow. “I’m barely a dad. I’m a half-assed husband.” The words appear in a voice that isn’t Richard’s, too supple and watery to belong to her precise, authoritative husband. “All I had was that fucking job.”

In the morning Jane tucks away his confessions like the expensive chocolates she hides in her sewing table drawer. The only sound at breakfast is the clicking of keys on Richard’s laptop, his angry, intermittent sighs. Jane buys more sleep supplements and another bottle of bourbon. 

“She never loved me the way I love her.” 

Jane has taken to coming to bed late, counting the cars that pass on the street until Richard begins to speak. Carefully, noiselessly, she leans in to hear.

“I’m just security for her, and now…” Richard trails off, smacking his dry mouth.

“Now what?” Jane says.

“Exactly.”

In his sleep Richard is someone else, by day he is exactly who he’s always been—making lists, creating budgets, complaining that Jane has purchased the wrong brand of mustard. 

“Expecting an interview any day,” he says, his voice hard with determination. “I might need you to take in my suits.” 

Jane listens to the old Richard and squints, trying to square the sound with man she sees in front of her, pale and shrinking under his bathrobe like a week-old balloon. She takes in his suits and buys the right mustard and waits for the new Richard to meet her in the night.

“What have I done?” 

Her husband’s words are crumpled like the balled newsprint he tosses into the fireplace. Jane can tell he’s crying. The same way she did when his mother passed away, or when he got that gash in his hand while cleaning the gutters, Jane touches his shoulder.

“Shhh,” she whispers, “It’s going to be okay.” 

Richard startles at the contact, his body flopping about like a fish on the edge of suffocation. Jane rolls away from his unpredictable limbs. When he sits up in bed a moment later she can see the whites of his eyes, still glossy and round with fear.

“Must’ve had a bad dream,” he says, commanding as the dark gray shadows around them.

#

Richard puts his bathrobe in the wash and tosses his sleeping pills in the trash. He rescues his running shoes from the garage and wipes them clean at the kitchen sink.

“Pity party’s over,” he announces. 

Jane cannot pry her eyes from the wastebasket. She sees only Richard’s rainbow pills, resting on a bed of discarded mostaccioli.

“I’m done with the drugs, done with the booze,” he tells her. “Getting back into running will help me start sleeping again.”

Running does help Richard. In no time at all his mood improves, his thighs harden and compact. At night he is silent.

“Feeling really good about my prospects with Whitman Courier,” Richard says over dinner one night. “Good feeling about this one.”

Jane is listening, but only halfway. She misses the night Richard and sees more than enough of the old one, his former arrogance wrung out and replaced with a fresh version in a sleek new athletic container.

While Richard is out running, Jane visits her doctor. 

“It’s just been difficult,” she tells the doctor, “What with Bobby off to college and Richard’s job search taking longer than we thought—”

Jane has looked in the mirror. She’s seen the dark rings of sleeplessness under her own eyes, her cheeks hollow with worry. She stays awake all night, but hears nothing more than Richard’s shallow breathing, the rhythmic hum of their four-bedroom, three bath suburban dream.

“And are we having trouble sleeping?” the doctor asks his clipboard.

“I’m afraid so,” Jane says. 

#

Jane starts slowly at first, unsure. Crushing the pills proves difficult, until she finds the mortar and pestle she ordered when she had designs on making aioli. Her first attempts are tentative—granules of powder sprinkled onto a chicken breast, a bit more stirred into the pudding she serves Richard for dessert. Perky with anticipation, Jane waits while he drifts into a still and wordless sleep. Richard sleeps so hard he is unaware he’s clutching Jane’s breast.

Slowly, Jane increases his dosage, searching for recipes to mask the taste. She changes the bed sheets twice a week, invests in heavier curtains. She fills their room with essential oils known to induce deep and uninterrupted sleep (or your money back). At last, Richard speaks.

“She’s taken good care of herself, but you want to know the truth…most wives get fat.”

Jane decides to research just how much is safe. She is no longer sure how many pills she is giving him, or how much it will take to bring the other Richard back. On a whim, she adds some to his early-morning protein shake. According to her findings, a nice, even release should yield positive results.

Richard returns early from his run, waving his phone in the air. 

“Just got a call from Chuck at Whitman,” he says, breathless and grinning. “They want to see me today. Right now.”

Jane opens her mouth to speak, but Richard is a blur. He grips her by the shoulders, kisses her firmly on the forehead, and makes his way to the shower. A short time later he is at the door in his perfectly-fitting suit.

Richard doesn’t get the job, at least not that day. The car accident leaves him indisposed.

“I explained the whole thing to Chuck,” he says in the emergency room. “They want to see me as soon as I’m feeling up to it.”  

Jane fusses with his blankets and cords, tells him their first priority is getting him well.

“I still just—I don’t know what happened,” Richard says, pulling at his temples, shaking away the cobwebs. Jane places a hand on his shoulder and strokes his hair until he falls asleep. 

The doctor tells Jane how lucky Richard is, if accidents can be lucky. Nothing more than a sprained wrist and some abrasions, he says, and Jane feels some relief.

“He’ll be a little stiff, so I’m sending him home with some heavier pain relievers today. Should have him back to his old self in no time.” 

Jane shakes the doctor’s hand and finds her forgotten smile.  

“I should mention,” the doctor tells her before he leaves. “You’ll want to be careful. Those pain pills will make him a little sleepy.”  

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PRAYERS FOR PIGEONS by Chris Wilkensen

On a bright summer morning, Edith craved something different to do. In the 1960s, without school, TV or a radio, she went outside and peered at the pigeon coop, maybe the only clear possessions of value that her father owned. She decided to say hi to them, the closest things she had to pets. 

Pigeons weren’t cuddly or pretty. But they were company for Edith, creatures that wouldn’t take out their frustrations on her and she enjoyed feeding them. Watching animals eat was almost like going to the movies. Edith picked up the cup inside the 50-pound bag of bird seed, making sure it filled to the top. “Breakfast time.” She opened the gate. One pigeon squeezed through the slightly open door because Edith wasn’t fast enough to feed them.

“You’re going to get me in big trouble, little bird,” she called out after it. While she had her back turned, another pigeon pushed out and flew into the sky.

“Not you too! Please come back, you have to come back! Father will notice that two of you are missing! Please.” She closed and locked the gate so no more could escape, vowing this was her first and last time feeding the pigeons. 

The more she yelled for their return, the more out of sight they flew. They had disappeared, just as she had sometimes thought about running away from her father. She scurried back to the house to make sure that no one saw.

Like most of the summer, Edith was alone during the daytime hours. Her father was at the store cutting up meat. Her stepmother worked a full, floating schedule between bakery clerk and office building cleaner. Thank God she wasn’t home because Edith’s stepmom might have told on her immediately. 

Edith wished she had a brother or sister around, never more so than today. They could have talked about what to do, how to split the blame, how to calm down her dad, something, anything. Edith locked up the house and walked to her friend Clare’s for advice. She knocked on her door, but her mother answered. 

“Hi there, Edith. I’m afraid Clare can’t play today because she’s at Vacation Bible School. You could’ve gone with her if you were Lutheran like us.” She smiled and shut the door in Edith’s face. 

But that gave Edith an idea, one she thought would actually help. She would go to her Catholic church and pray for the return of those two fly-away pigeons. Her father, who didn’t seem to like anything, didn’t seem to mind going to Saint Joseph. There, she saw him do things he never did anywhere else: kneel, cry, and, occasionally, smile.

So Edith entered the Catholic church, found a pew, and sat. She said in her heart the words to the Our Father, Hail Mary, and Glory Be hundreds of times during those hours. She also prayed directly for those pigeons, that they were safe, but most importantly, that they would return. Or that her father wouldn’t know they were gone. Everything would be OK then.

The sky dimmed to dusk. Edith’s tummy rumbled louder and louder, but she had no appetite. “It’s late now. You have to go, my child.” A nun said from behind, walking toward the front of the church.

When Edith felt the summer breeze, she got goosebumps. She knocked on Clare’s front door again because she had to be home from Vacation Bible School by now. Clare’s mother answered. “Do you have any idea what time it is, Edith? For heaven’s sake, go home!” The door closed in her face again.

Half a block allowed meant time for one more “Our Father.” Edith hoped they returned. When she arrived at the pigeon coop, she counted the pigeons. The numbers added up, including the two that left. They must have returned. A miracle! She skipped to the house, opened the doorknob that led to the kitchen. 

“There she is!” her stepmother called out. “Enough worry for one day. I found two pigeons waiting outside the coop when I got home. I put them back in and didn’t tell your father. Would you know anything about this?”

Before Edith could answer, her father came in the kitchen. “We were worried about you, that something happened to you. Gone all day.” 

Edith’s prayers, that either the pigeons would return or that no one would find out that the pigeons fled, must have worked. She was so happy she started to cry. 

“You have no idea how much you worried me by staying out all day and into the night. You’re my daughter, and I thought something happened to you. Don’t ever do this again.” Her father removed his belt, rolled it up ,belted her on the back. He started to count out loud while Edith prayed in silence. 

God, please let him get tired soon, Edith prayed on the inside, cried on the outside. It’s past my bedtime and he should be in bed. 

“Don’t be too hard on her. This is the first time she’s been out after supper. I’ll be in bed.” Edith’s stepmom walked out of the room. 

After her father counted to five, he put his belt back onto his pants. “Now go to sleep, Edith. I love you.” He turned off the kitchen lights. 

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THE FIRST ONE by Michael Wade

I got the digging part off the Internet. You can use spray or bait, but I don’t use poison on my land if I can help it. I read how in Texas they just dig 'em and fling 'em. You want a big sharp shovel. You go out a morning with no wind, before it gets hot and they get too active, and you slide the shovel right up under the hill. 

Then you fling the whole thing downwind, hard as you can. Let it fly apart. See, when they get separated from the queens, they just run around like fools til they die. And that takes care of that hill. 

Anyhow. I don’t want you to say nothing to nobody about the rest of this, T-Dot. All right?

This morning I’m down at the dam end of the pond and there’s the biggest nest I’ve seen. The hill was two foot high or more, three foot around. It’d take three or four shovels full to get it and after the first one I knew they’d be riled. I’d need to move quick.

I slide that shovel under and lift.

There was a face under that nest. Bone-white. Wide as the shovel. Great big black eyes and a narrow chin and nothing but a line for a mouth. And then something like a claw, like a crab or lobster but big, comes up below the chin and rubs over that face, like it’s trying to cover itself with dirt again. That claw kept rubbing like that, feeble-like. Them eyes looking right at me. 

It won’t no Halloween mask. It won’t no skull. It won’t nothing human or made by no human. It won’t like nothing I ever seen or you ever seen, neither. Clean and alive. No ants on it.

I don’t know. What I do know is that whole time I stood there, holding the shovel and froze cold like it was January, looking at that face and that claw rubbing over it, not one single fire ant touched me. You know I shoulda been covered up. They shoulda eat me alive. Why didn’t they? What was wrong with them?

It won’t no white rock. It won’t no damn grub worms or no mole that was moving in that ground.

It’s ten o’clock in the morning, T-Dot. And you know I ain’t touched a drop in thirty years.

What’d I do? Well I laid the shovelful gentle right back over it and I got in the truck and come here.

I’m going to let it be, that’s what. I reckon it ain’t hurtin’ nothing. Though part of me thinks I should’ve hit that face with the shovel hard as I could.

Something stopped me. Scared as I was I halfway felt sorry for it, the way it tried to cover itself again with that big claw. But them eyes. They won’t like no animal, or no human. Looking right at me. I got to thinking what if I miss with the shovel. Or what if that head is hard as it looks, like bone, what then? 

I don’t know if I done right. That thing controlled them ants, somehow. They didn’t touch me. Maybe it controlled me, too. That’s what I thought, right before I covered it up, just like it wanted me to do.

I couldn’t think of nobody to tell but you. I just felt like I ought to let somebody know. Just a feeling. In case…forget it, T-Dot. 

Forget it. Forget I said anything. Now I think about it, it prob’ly was a rock, crawlin’ with ants, the sun throwin’ funny shadows. That’s prob’ly all it was.

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MARTELLO TOWER / NATIONAL MUSEUM by Nate Kouri

Sweet memories: Ciara the star turnBroadcaster Dr Ciara Kelly—an ambassador for Dementia: Understand Together—pays a stylish visit to the 'Memories Are Made of This' show garden at Bord Bia's Bloom Festival, which opens today at 9am for four days at the Phoenix Park, Dublin.

Book with 'satanic pledge' was found in room of Boy B, Ana trial told

The copybook contained a drawing entitled "satanic pledge", a list of names, including Boy A and Boy B's names, and a list of rules. The rules included "no talking about Jesus or God, only Satan," the court heard. Boy B's father also said his son doesn't respect him and didn't want to "share his truths" with him. Boy B told Gardí he called it a "Satanist cult" because he didn't want people to join who he didn't want to join. It was really a homework club, he said. The accused, who were 13 at the time, have pleaded not guilty to murdering 14-year-old Ana Kriegel in a derelict farmhouse. Boy A has also denied a charge of aggravated sexual assault. The trial continues.

—The front page of the Irish Independent on Thursday, May  30, 2019

This is Iowa: Kids keep baseball game going as tornado touches down within sight near Montezuma.

Des Moines Register headline, the same day

How children watch scenes in the fire: flames rolling over, wheeling back into waves red and red and roped by black, flamefoam rising, spinning out into circled eyes (squeezing eyelids, batting out) spreading between, sticking under (the midnight curtain drawn).

Watching through the grass on my stomach, leaves like cornstalks tall above the children who look flat like shadows in front of the flames—skipping, linking hands, like silhouetted paper dolls spinning in a Zoetrope—I hear the squat multitude chanting and I am touched but not moved by a vision of where I used to live. Seeing again a fading footpath through the rice fields where a military marching band set down their trumpets, the sun slowly kneading its thumbs into the hot brass like clay: handleside by morning, spoutside by night. Leaving home, I passed the band sleeping, surprised (the band and I) their chests falling and falling mechanically like four lazy whiskey stills (or don’t they move?), at least like ferris wheels and I didn’t think about violence for more than a minute, the way I would have as a child when I could still feel the force of gravity dragging me by my center down until I was temptation touched so I would not move hidden in the rice field. A farm has become a place to hide to. How many rows of crops could they check? Not here where city girls pull out roots, giving his limbs more leverage, their fourdoors half-tilted in the plow’s path off to the side of the road. Or here where Boy A and Boy B are in the soybeans making marks on the stalks with their teeth like rabbits, doing things to each other so…completely unavailable to the adult imagination, things they’d never really believe, couldn’t even read if they were written down and printed prominently in the newspaper. And soon the boys will forget each other too, the uncontrollable sounds once forced from their red faces erased, yes, entirely.

Or here, the paddy rice where during the night lightning repeatedly struck the band’s bass drum, the bolts turning green as they touched down on copper screws, blowing out the drumhead hides with such bassy force that it drowned out the sounding thunder, bursting the snoring heads resting on each side, chunks of their skulls sent into the distant cornfields as their bodies were flung, limbs limply collapsing, into the bog of the rice paddy with a thick splash, water landing on the hood of a truck parked in the ditch of a nearby country road as mud swirled around what was left of them tighter with a boagrip tighter through the age of image and tighter past the century of hands, the four bodies hugged motherly close by fertile Iowa mud in the dark, drowned farmland that a thousand years later, drained and dried into a hill, would unveil them in a cauldron on a crannog, its alloy engraved with intricate animal designs, their right hands raised in blessing, left hands gripped to croziers or tillage spades, and their so-called discovery by a group of Newsweek reporters stranded by a broken-down fourdoor en route to a routine smalltown caucus report would lead to the corpses’ Caesarean removal from nature’s tomb and entrance into the whim of human designs, passed between towns in territorial diocese disputes and finally sealed—the mud vacuumed out of them, their prehistorical dandruff dusted off, leaving only muscly potatoskin shells with a few fully formed organs or limbs jutting out—by an art dealer in a plexiglass human-sized jewelry case with cute poems and crude drawings of the bodies from first and second-graders pasted under the museum display, passed idly by students pointing at a portrait of W.B. and yelping yeet yeet!

Or that’s what I would have seen at eight when I looked for drama between the flames when I knew all the chants and before I despised the rain.

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PURSUED BY FURIES: THE LURE OF THE UNCANNY IN FICTION AND FILM by Kevin P. Keating

Madeline and Sophie Ryan are identical twins. They are eight years old. They exude a rugged masculinity and are built like their merchant marine father — thick, solid, broad shouldered, with eyes so dark and glassy they seem to be made from perfectly polished pieces of obsidian. Mass murderers of spiders, flies, moths, and the exceptionally brilliant brush-footed butterflies that sail above the surface of the family swimming pool, the girls constantly hunt for easy prey. They’re also accomplished mimics who delight in doing impersonations of adults, aping their vocabulary with unnerving precision in a single singsong voice and then squealing with malicious, porcine laughter whenever their latest victim shoots them a weary and wounded look. They can be cruel to younger children but reserve the brunt of their wickedness for their long-suffering mother, relishing their roles as jailers and persecuting her in ways that only the most heartless of wardens can. Clever, calculating, supremely subversive, they understand intuitively that parenthood is a kind of indefinite prison sentence, one in which beleaguered moms and dads spend most of their days sequestered from other adults. To neighbors the girls look like a pair of wretched, half-starved urchins out of a folktale, feral creatures that search the nighttime streets for rancid scraps of food before seeking shelter in abandoned barns. They commit acts of petty vandalism. They may possess preternatural powers. They are darkly comic flourishes, or so I once believed, from my novel The Captive Condition (Pantheon 2015).

As I put the finishing touches on the book, I received feedback from several readers who said Madeline and Sophie reminded them of the eerie twin girls in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining. I was a bit mystified, perhaps even disappointed, by this comparison. I truly believed, at least to a certain extent, that the girls in The Captive Condition served as comic relief. Curious, I viewed the movie again for the first time in several years and became so intrigued not only by the iconic imagery of the hand-holding twins in their periwinkle puff sleeves and ruffle skirts but by Kubrick’s masterful storytelling technique that I decided to teach it in two of my college courses, Introduction to Folklore and Introduction to Mythology.

While performing the obligatory professorial research on the film, I learned that Kubrick, justifiably famous for his attention to detail, conducted his own survey of the horror genre and fell under the spell of “The Uncanny,” an essay by Sigmund Freud. The uncanny, claimed that cigar-chomping, glossarial jigsaw-solver of the human psyche, was the only feeling that was more powerfully experienced in art than in life. “If the horror genre required any justification,” Kubrick remarked, “this concept alone would serve as its credentials” (Kubrick: The Definitive Edition, Michel Ciment, Faber & Faber, 1999). 

Toward the end of his brief essay, Freud posits that we experience the sensation of the uncanny whenever a storyteller denies us access to our reality-testing faculties. By this he means that most reasonable people, when faced with a spooky situation and tempted by their “primitive impulses” to attribute perfectly natural phenomenon to some supernatural power, can always rely on their critical thinking faculties to quell any lingering doubts and reveal the mundane truth. For example, we may be lying alone in bed on a stormy night and hear a door creaking open ever so slowly. Our “primitive minds” warn us that a ghost is approaching and yearns to slip under the sheets with us and whisper a bloodcurdling lullaby in our ears. But because we are rational beings who have easy access to those creature comforts provided by modern civilization, we can flip a light switch and quickly confirm that a cold draft has blown open the door and that the rusty hinges need oiling.

As Freud writes, “For the whole matter is one of testing reality, pure and simple, a question of the material reality of the phenomena.” The difficulty only arises when a storyteller keeps us in the proverbial dark for a prolonged period of time and doesn’t allow the trembling protagonist, and therefore the audience or reader, access to a conveniently located light switch. In order to create and sustain a sensation of the uncanny, the storyteller must keep us guessing about the true nature of the fictitious world he has created. Freud writes, “For the realm of phantasy depends for its very existence on the fact that its content is not submitted to the reality-testing faculty.” And according to Freud the critic, as opposed to Freud the psychoanalyst, readers and audiences may retain a feeling of dissatisfaction, “a kind of grudge against the attempted deceit,” if they see through the ruse and react to it as they would react to real experiences. In this case, the intellect serves as a metaphorical light switch and exposes the storyteller as an incompetent trickster.

In Freud’s view the stories most capable of creating a sense of the uncanny are those in which the storyteller “deceives us into thinking that he is giving us the sober truth, and then after all oversteps the bounds of possibility” by bringing about events that can never happen. In the completely fabricated and precisely structured worlds of “once upon a time” and “long ago and far away,” we accept the impossible as being perfectly ordinary. No one ever questions the validity of the tale of an innocent maiden who suddenly awakes from a poisoned-induced sleep and then runs off with a handsome and well-intentioned prince. 

Similarly, in a body of literature that makes use of what Freud calls “poetic reality,” we may experience a sensation of gloominess, but because the nature of this world is still imaginary, though less imaginary than the faraway kingdoms in fairy tales, we do not experience the uncanny. Freud points to the tormented souls in both Dante’s Inferno and Homer’s The Odyssey, particularly the episode in which Odysseus makes the treacherous descent into the underworld to consult with the spirits of the dead, including the grief-stricken spirit of his own mother. In both of these epic poems, the moods are somber, the settings somewhat disquieting, but we cannot say they are uncanny.

For Freud the situation is dramatically altered when the storyteller “pretends to move into the world of common reality” [italics mine]. I believe this phrase, indeed this single word, is fundamental to our understanding of the uncanny. Through the slow and careful accumulation of minute details, the storyteller pretends to create a simulacrum of the world as we know and typically experience it, but from the very start he or she has something else in mind entirely. For example, at the beginning of The Shining, Stanley Kubrick gives his audience, and the doomed Torrence family—parents Jack and Wendy and their six-year old son Danny—a pleasant tour of the Overlook Hotel during a sunny afternoon in early autumn, making everything appear perfectly ordinary and familiar. Only after the hotel closes for the season and Kubrick turns his attention to the secret inner lives of his characters do uncanny feelings germinate. 

One of the earliest and most memorable harbingers of the uncanny comes shortly after the Torrence family is left to care for the now vacant hotel during the long, brutal winter. Jack’s son Danny, while riding his Big Wheel through the labyrinthine hallways of the Overlook Hotel, sees the figures of the twin girls and listens to their unnerving refrain: “Come and play with us, Danny. Come and play with us. Forever—and ever—and ever.” It’s interesting to note that Kubrick’s twins, though peripheral to the plot of The Shining, continue to occupy a central place in the minds of most viewers, maybe because Danny cannot possibly explain the presence of these unfortunate girls who have been badly butchered by their demented father, the previous caretaker Delbert Grady. The indelible image of these girls, purportedly based on a photograph by Diane Arbus (though Kubrick adamantly denied this), serves as a warning to Danny about the very real dangers he will soon face. 

Bruno Bettelheim, in his book The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, argues that these fantastic stories can serve a trouble child and help him overcome life’s travails. “Psychoanalysis,” writes Bettelheim, “was created to enable man to accept the problematic nature of life without being defeated by it, or giving into escapism. Freud’s prescription is that only by struggling courageously against what seems like overwhelming odds can man succeed in wringing meaning out of his existence. This is exactly the message that fairy tales get across to the child in manifold form: that a struggle against severe difficulties in life is unavoidable.” The trick, of course, is to “master all obstacles and emerge victorious.” A resourceful child, Danny Torrence memorably manages to elude the same grisly fate as the Grady girls by entering into a hedge maze while his deranged, dipsomaniacal father pursues him with an ax. 

Throughout the film Kubrick uses mirror images as the primary means of unmasking, rather than concealing, repressed aspects of Jack Torrence’s persona. To establish this idea, Kubrick stages a scene early in the film. While eating breakfast in bed in front of a mirror, Jack reveals to his wife that he feels oddly at home at the Overlook. “It was as though I had been here before,” he tells her. “I mean, we all have moments of déjà vu, but this was ridiculous. It was almost as though I knew what was going to be around every corner.” 

Soon he begins to see ghosts in the hotel, and in every scene in which he confronts one of these spectral figures — the bartender in the gold ballroom, the deceptively beautiful woman in the green bathroom, the racist caretaker in the red bathroom — Jack is standing in front of a mirror. To fully grasp the significance of these ghosts, and all of the subsequent horrors the Torrance family must face, one must understand certain hidden realities. “The uncanny,” Freud states, “is something that is secretly familiar but has undergone repression and then returned from it.” It’s easy to see that the ghosts in the film are manifestations of past traumas, which are secretly familiar but which Kubrick renders as "uncanny figures" after they have "returned from repression.” For example, Jack Torrence's repressed alcoholism becomes the bartender, an uncanny figure who shouldn't exist but who manifests a "secretly familiar" repression. Similarly, Jack’s uninhibited lust manifests itself as the naked woman in the bathtub of Room 237.

Unable to face the terrible truth of his moral weaknesses, Jack begins to identify with these apparitions until he is in doubt about his own identity. Freud writes, “The subject identifies himself with someone else, so that he is in doubt as to which self is his, or substitutes the extraneous self for his own.” In other words, there is a doubling, dividing and interchanging of the self, and thus we have characters who are to be considered identical because they may look or behave alike. There is also the constant recurrence of the same thing — the repetition of the same features, character-traits, vicissitudes, and — most importantly for The Shining — the same crimes. Freud explains, “These themes are all concerned with the phenomenon of the double, which appears in every shape and in every degree of development.” 

By referring to Freud's work, Kubrick seems to be making a larger metaphorical point: that the spectral images he presents to viewers are not supernatural or mysterious in origin, but rather, completely familiar. Freud cautions us that humanity’s horrors aren't something to be explained away with mysticism, ghosts, or magic, but to be fought off with logic and intelligence; nevertheless, we interpret the disturbing images in The Shining as bizarre, horrific and odd simply because Kubrick denies his characters — and therefore his audience — access to reality. His characters, because they are unable, or perhaps unwilling, to confront the troubling nature of their past experiences, fall victim to their own unconscious minds, which transform these buried memories into a series of warped and nightmarish images.

According to Freud it’s all a matter of intellectual uncertainty. Are we supposed to be looking at the products of a madman's imagination, “behind which we, with the superiority of rational minds, are able to detect the sober truth?” This is a distinct possibility, and yet our critical thinking faculties are incapable of explaining away our sensation of the uncanny. Storytellers like Kubrick know this perfectly well and attempt to manipulate our emotions by exploiting our uncertainty. We cannot be entirely sure whether the ghosts in the Overlook Hotel are products of Jack’s imagination or real apparitions. Our rational minds are searching for an explanation, but uncanniness is derived from the storyteller’s ability to make us doubt any rational explanations we might devise. The most successful stories deliver a raw, emotional experience, and in order to accomplish this goal, Kubrick used every tool at his disposal. 

“Primitive man,” Freud argues, “ascribes meaning to numbers, objects or events which are repeated.” He theorized that we equate things like repetition and patterns with “destiny” and “mysticism,” and Kubrick bathes his film in a semiotic language of repetition, hidden numbers, symbols and patterns, knowing that these images will likely lead to uncanny feelings when discovered. The audience is left confused and enticed by these mysteries and then attempts to bring them to light by creating meaning. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the imagery of “the double.”

But why is such a technique so universal to storytelling? One possibility, according to Freud, is that doubling is “a preservation against extinction.” He hypothesizes that the desire to transcend death led people in ancient civilizations to develop the art of making images of the dead in lasting materials, for example an Egyptian sarcophagus, so they could live forever and ever. Such ideas, however, have sprung from the primary narcissism which dominates the mind of the child and of primitive man. For modern people, the “double” reverses its aspect; from having been an assurance of immortality, it has now become an uncanny harbinger of death.

This ultimately futile desire to make, or perhaps remake, the image of the dead in lasting materials is presented quite explicitly, and with tragic consequences, in the final shot of The Shining where doubling is used to extraordinary and almost vertiginous effect. As the film draws to an end, Jack Torrence undergoes a startling transformation of character until he seems to be composed of several different personalities and finally becomes a permanent part of the “haunted” hotel, memorialized in the unnerving 1921 photograph. The film’s self-referential ending highlights the ambiguity, or rather, deliberately confuses the distinction between reality and imagination. An uncanny effect can often be seen when reality (a caretaker in the present day) interacts with our imagination (the caretaker’s likeness in an old photograph). Freud says this is precisely the moment when our “infantile and neurotic elements” start believing in magical practices. We focus on mental realities and ignore the material reality. 

Despite The Shining’s bleak ending, Kubrick does allow Danny Torrence to escape from the hedge maze and reunite with his mother. As Bruno Bettelheim writes, “It is not that the evildoer is punished at the story’s end which makes immersing oneself in fairy stories an experience in moral education. In fairy tales, as in life, punishment or fear of it is only a limited deterrent to crime. The conviction that crime does not pay is a much more effective deterrent and that is why the bad person always loses out.” Bettelheim continues, “Morality is not the issue in these tales, but rather, assurance that one can succeed. Whether one meets life with a belief in the possibility of mastering its difficulties or with the expectation of defeat is also a very important existential problem.” 

Many commentators have noted that the true hero, when faced with an existential crisis, can only escape a terrible fate by coming to the realization that “the self” is an illusion created for the benefit of other people. We all craft stories about ourselves, stories that are partially true and partially false. In time they become semblances of an identity, but it is crucial that we recognize these stories as the different masks we wear in order to present—or to disguise—our true selves. The problem is just this: many of us are unable to identify with any degree of certainty a single persona that seems entirely authentic. Who are we when in the presence of our friends? Who are we with our parents? Our children? Our employers and colleagues? Who are we when we are alone? The more we think about this, the more likely we will find that there is no “I” at the center of our consciousness. The ego is a culturally conditioned fiction and in storytelling is often associated with the monster—a deceptive, selfish and self-seeking creature that spreads fear and destruction. 

One solution to this conundrum is to become egoless or selfless or, as Odysseus becomes in the episode with the Cyclops, to become Nobody. To be Nobody is not to enter some fantastic condition of egolessness. Rather, it is simply one’s willingness and ability, when the time comes, to drop the self, to let Somebody go and surrender to circumstances. As a reprieve from the cultural demands of egoism, it is important that we slip into a condition of anonymity from time to time. We always worry about what other people expect and want from us. Dropping the illusion of the ego can help us overcome these everyday concerns. Accepting that we are “nobody” can be a difficult and even frightening realization, but relying on pride and ego more often than not leads, at the very least, to profound disappointment. 

In The Shining Jack Torrence is an ineffectual husband, father, writer, caretaker, and former school teacher. Perhaps by becoming Nobody he can escape from these culturally conditioned and predictable roles. The problem, of course, is that Jack is deceiving himself more than anyone else in his life. Consumed by different aspects of his own repressed and twisted ego, he rapidly descends into madness, and this, I think, is the final point that needs to be made about the film.

Just as he uses ghosts to reveal disturbing aspects of Jack’s personality, Kubrick uses Jack to reveal something rather disquieting about human nature in general—namely, that the ego can be characterized by one basic rule: it always wants something. Thus, for the person driven by ego, life is characterized by chronic desire and chronic frustration. We are frustrated because so often in life we don’t get what we so desperately want. Jack wants to become a successful writer. He wants to have a drink and even says, “I’d give my fucking soul for a glass of beer.” He aches to posses the beautiful women in the bathtub. He wants to escape from his wife and child. Since these paths are not open to him, he naturally begins to repress his desires until they gradually transform into terrifying phantasms.  

Looking back on my own work, I can now see how Madeline and Sophie Ryan serve a similar function in The Captive Condition. The adult characters in my novel, fearful of serious introspection and therefore lacking in any kind of meaningful self-awareness, have a tendency to perceive the twins as devious little fiends and, later, as a couple of cajoling ghosts, mainly because the girls have an uncanny talent for revealing the moral shortcomings and the secret, forbidden desires of adults. At certain moments in our lives, our emotions can become asphyxiating clouds of uncertainty, and in a passage near the end of the book, I briefly make use of mirror imagery to acknowledge that, for many of us, determining the difference between what is real and what is imaginary can be difficult:

Some people, when they pass away, leave behind fond memories and wonderful legacies of love, but many more leave long trails of misery and despair, and when the bereaved claim to sense a presence floating along dark hallways or glimpse hooded figures rising up in shattered mirrors or witness fantastic apparitions advancing and receding above bogs and fens and festering swimming pools, they likely are perceiving the enduring gravamen of the dearly departed, a disappointment so profound that it somehow transcends death. So who could say for sure if the spectral figures that…floated above the streets of town were in fact ghosts or illusions conjured up by the drunk and disorderly revelers making their way home on New Year’s Eve. Madeline and Sophie wondered the same thing themselves: was this how ghosts were supposed to feel?

There can be no definitive answer to a question of this kind. We are now in the realm of the fantastic. The passage is meant to reveal more about the reader than the characters enacting the drama, but of course the whole art of the drama is to put into words and images those experiences people know are secretly true but haven’t yet noticed or are themselves unable to express. In this sense storytelling becomes a kind of meditation on the self. As Bruno Bettelheim puts it, “Stories also warn that those who are too timorous and narrow-minded to risk themselves in finding themselves must settle down to a humdrum existence—if an even worse fate does not befall them.” 

Only those who rid themselves of superstitious beliefs can see through the uncanny. Such individuals can shrug off deceptive sights, signs and repetitions, and perceive the underlying truth. In contrast, those who cling to the ways of our primitive forefathers are doomed to believe in the supernatural. Freud states that our ancestors’ fondness for mythology and fables is largely what causes our belief in ghosts, apparitions, and monsters. Thus, our current irrational beliefs are largely due to the irrationalities of our ancestors. They’ve been passed down from one generation to the next, much as generational violence has been passed down in Kubrick’s film. Jack Torrence, who clings to the ways of his predecessor Delbert Grady, reenacts the same heinous crimes simply because he conjures up ghosts of the past, which he uses to affirm his own existence. Freud cautions, “Unless a man is utterly hardened against the lure of superstition, he will be tempted to ascribe a secret meaning to these phenomena.”

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