Fiction

WE ETERNAL BEINGS by Jody Sperling

Mary died earlier this week: went into the hospital for routine foot ulcer debridement—common with diabetics—developed a staph infection, went under for a lung treatment and never woke from the anesthesia. We knew Mary from back in the day. I’d moved to Omaha to live with my grandparents, found Jesus (it’s not what you think) so I sent my buddy to live with them (proselytizers got to be proselytizing). My grandparents prayed before every meal.

Mary was a banker who worked with my buddy in Omaha. Obesity led to her diabetes, which triggered her demise.

Demise. What a word. It sounds too clinical for its purpose. Demise is the word doctors use to justify premature deaths: stillborns, sudden heart attacks, “complications with x,” drug overdoses. Arise rhymes with demise, as in “Arise, Lazarus come out of the grave,” which is what Jesus said to his buddy, dead in the grave four days.

 

By the time my buddy moved to Omaha to live with my grandparents I was a recovered alcoholic, well on my way to conservative Christianity. Recovered is a loose term, given my troubles in years following, but this isn’t that story.

I’d taken work on a rat and mouse rig in the Uintah Mountains. When my buddy called I requested vacation, because he told me he’d gotten his second DUI. I came down hard on him. “You’re on an arrow’s path to hell,” I said. “You need to repent” (a fancy word for “move to Omaha”). My harsh tone surprised him. The old me had been soft: understanding and compassionate. We talked for a while and I said, “Pack your shit. You’re moving to Omaha.”

*

The demise of my water pump occurred just outside Big Springs, halfway between Denver and nowhere*. A local repair shop charged me eight hundred: five for towing and three for service. That set me back a ways, but I still can’t remember where all the rest of the money went, because I worked for years in the oil fields. Hemorrhaging cash is almost as common a disease in America as diabetes.

*Rabbit trail? Nowhere might have a secret meaning: “no-where” or “now-here.” Odd insights seem profound when you’re writing alone in a hotel room far from home.

The mechanic had my Blazer hoisted six five feet in the air. There were several five-gallon buckets nearby, all full of Unleaded 85. The smell of gas most closely resembles the flavor of MSG. The mechanic said, “It always happens this way, right after you’ve filled up.”

 

My grandparents agreed to house my buddy because (a) I talked about him often: what a dear, dear friend, what a good, good guy, what a rough, rough hand he’d been dealt, and probably (b) I angled the whole he’s-close-to-accepting-Jesus-as-his-personal-Lord-and-Savior card, but mostly because (c) I told them how he’d saved my life once (good story for another day).

 

My buddy got a job at US Bank, he called it “Us Bank,” as in “we,” and that is where he met Mary. Mary in the Bible was the sister of Lazarus. This is not significant outside of the active whirring of my brain to see the connection: a false corollary like so many others.

I had complex feelings toward Mary. On the one hand, I found her funny. She was one of those women whose egos had no bounds. She really believed the world owed her. If there was ever anything wrong at work it was someone else’s fault. If anything good happened, she had made it happen. I am drawn to people with outsized egos. But also, too, Mary had a slight odor, mildewed, washed but not dried, perhaps lusty: Does lust have an odor? If I remember correctly, she brushed her teeth with hydrogen peroxide because she’d heard on some TV doctor show that toothpaste caused brain damage.

My wife’s father recently stopped drinking sodapop because it causes brain damage. Apparently a megastudy found that those who drink twelve ounces of carbonated, sweet beverages a day experience a shrinking of the hippocampus. Don’t bother me to look this up, but I seem to recall that the hippocampus is where emotion lives.

 

Mary and my buddy and I met one day sometime after midnight at VI off L Street. We drank coffee heavy with cream and ate French Silk Pie. I think highly of France, love silk and adore pie. The three together are, today, the only trinity I care about. Between every bite of pie we drank a cup of coffee, and since we couldn’t eat another bite until our coffee was full, we’d leave our jackets on our chairs to signal we’d return and go outside into the windy cold of Nebraskan November to smoke cigarettes and shiver.

My buddy only ever smoked socially. He could go weeks, even months, without a cigarette and not suffer. Then, in one night he’d smoke a pack—a whole pack—with no consequences. Mary and I were both card-carrying Mentholites.

 

I briefly worked myself into a two-pack-a-day habit during my stint in the oil fields. I worked with Chris the driller on a two-man, rat and mouse crew. Chris was big in the naturally-born-to-kill kind of way. He was thick everywhere. Thick legs, thick arms, thick neck, thick nose, thick tongue, he was thick, thick. Chris smoked three packs of cigarettes daily. When he wasn’t smoking he hung suspended from a tree by tenterhooks pierced through his shoulder meat. Suspensions create a religious high, they say. Look it up. People do it.

Because Chris smoked so much, I smoked a whole lot more. Odd as it may sound, if I smoked, I couldn’t smell Chris’s smoke, and I’d just get so damn tired of smelling Marb Reds all day long. Smoking was a break from smelling smoke so I smoked and smoked and smoked. That’s how it goes.

 

I didn’t actually answer when my buddy called me about Mary dying. I was checking into a hotel: I’m on the road this week in Albuquerque for work. When I dropped my bags on the hotel bed and as I was taking a dump, which is a sacred routine that helps cleanse me from the day’s troubles and reorients me to the important matters that lie ahead between end-of-work and time-for-bed, I saw he’d called. I called back and we talked work. Where I go, he goes, so we’re coworkers again which is how we met over a decade ago at a restaurant where he served and I hosted.

I’m the big cheese now, and he’s the little cheese—title-wise—but it’s not that way between us. I rely on his good reputation since he was a referral of mine. The more he succeeds the better I look: if I’ve learned one thing about Christianity, it’s all about appearances.

 

My buddy just got back from Spain, where he spent a week with his wife. They got free lodging over there through a friend of his. I’ve never traveled abroad. Not really. I spent a day in Juarez many years ago on a church mission trip. My grandparents wanted me to experience Christian Charity and since they footed the rent, what could I say? (That’s not charitable. I wanted to go but for all the wrong reasons. Remind me to tell you that one some other day.)

The kicker is, my buddy’s wife didn’t have a good time in Spain, he tells me, because she didn’t get to call the shots. He says she doesn’t do well when other people are leading and planning. Apparently his wife has a strong personality, he said. “Like you,” he said.

I don’t want to be compared to his wife. She is not on my list of favorite people. I wonder if she’ll need surgery someday. We all need surgery from time to time.

I’ve risen twice from Propofol (since they say the third time’s a charm, I won’t be going under again). The first time I was a baby in need of some kind of urethral correction. I guess I was born with six or eight holes perforating the length of my shaft. The other surgery was to repair my left ear, which heard so well it bled constantly. As a four-year-old I could hear the whispers of the dead, and it kept me awake at night. They said, “Call us out of the grave. We eternal beings. Arise, arise.”

 

 

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HAVE YOU HEARD THE GOOD NEWS? by Darren DeFrain

In spite of my better judgment, I remain on Facebook for that awkward blurring of my professional, personal, and public lives. In that domain, I recently received a friend request from an older relative. Just a glance at this request and I knew it was the same advance-fee scam I’ve encountered a hundred times over; someone had acquired my relative’s likeness, name, and a few scant details. I decided to take the opportunity to create a reply with two primary goals in mind: 1) wasting the offender’s time and 2) creating a sustained and satisfying narrative arc out of the encounter. What resulted was a mixture of fiction writing and Improv. Aside from changing the format to be more “reader friendly”—the dialogue soon involved a third character on a different platform—I made no changes whatsoever to the text.

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INHERITANCE by Cavin Bryce Gonzalez

When she came hopping out of the bathroom holding an instrument that I mistook as a thermometer I was appalled that someone could be so happy about running a fever. She threw her arms around me and squeezed, squeezed like she hated me. But she didn’t hate me. She loved me. And that’s when I saw the two little lines, bright pink, glaring at me.

It’s been four months since then. We’re having a boy. Every day her womb grows, life gestates. All of our friends are so excited. “You’re glowing!” they say. Or “About time!”

Every night I watch him while she sleeps. I imagine a little me in there, stuck to a feeding tube and unaware of the great big world waiting to pounce. My wife will smile while unconscious, sometimes her hands will go instinctively to her womb and move in small, precise circles. That baby is made of exactly 50% of my chromosomes and 50% of hers. Mine are 100% fucked. When our son grows, will his resentment for life grow like an awkward peach fuzz? Will he become angry easily, contemplate killing himself before he’s even old enough to drive?

While my wife chatters about whether our child will play sports or be an artist all I can imagine is our son hiding in the bathroom, running a razor blade across his forearm and sobbing. I imagine our child taking too many pills, driving drunk into a barricade and bleeding out on the pavement; scared and alone and relieved that it’s all soon to be over. Schizophrenia, melanoma, bipolar disorder, acid reflux, overly empathetic tendencies, and a thin skin. Our child will be born broken and it’s my fault. He will try to fill his life with menial time killers; scrapbooking, soccer, friends, drugs. Whatever he may want. At the end of the day nothing will his void. Not fame, not fortune, not love. He will inherit all of my sins. He will struggle his whole life to understand why he feels this way but he won’t figure it out. Not ever.

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MICROWAVE OVEN by Estrella del Valle (translated by Toshiya Kamei)

Don't say my name, don't say my name, when you know I have died, don't say my name.

-Roque Dalton

I don't know how it happened. I only remember walking in the woods with my strawberry basket. I wanted to pick a lot of strawberries on the way because my grandmother likes homemade cakes. She used to make them before she bought her house and had to spend many hours outside. She made them with egg white foams. The secret is to beat yolks and butter well, first yolks, then butter, and whip it for a long time, pour in the mixture of flour and milk. Finally make half of the egg whites fluff up. It's easy, no? She cuts the sponge cake horizontally in thirds with a thread and on the first layer she puts walnut custard, made with real walnut, strawberry jam, made from natural strawberries, not the kind you find in a supermarket. Then she puts the last layer, which she bakes in the oven. She starts decorating it with meringue. She makes a lot of figures, roses, leaves, and faces. She can even put the birthday person's name with one hand. She's an artist. I kept walking, looking for strawberries for her cake, but I didn't find any. That's why when I saw you coming in. I thought you were a doll, dressed up like that, so elegant. You even look like Ken, Barbie's boyfriend. Then I thought you came for my grandma's cake. But I know that man sent you here. Well, tell him no. I'm tired of playing house. Like I said, I'm sick of playing husband and wife. I lost interest in cooking a long time ago, after the day when I was so hungry I went to look for strawberries for the cake and couldn't find the woods anywhere. Nobody knew where the woods were. I was tired of asking directions, so I left and walked along Broadway, from West College to Seventh Street. I kept walking with my basket until it became dark, and I didn't know how to get back home. When I realized I was lost, I thought about going back the same way, but I hadn't left breadcrumbs because with this husband we never had enough bread to put into our mouths. When we got married, my dad told him, "Take good care of my little princess." That's what my dad told him, but he didn't even listen. I walked to Seventh and arrived at St. Vincent Jewelry Center. I wanted my princess tiara to go back to my house, to my dad. I went to the tiara display counter with my empty basket. The saleswoman and other women stared at my tattered clothes and bleeding toenails. I was bleeding all over the blue carpet, my blood, which wasn't blue like the carpet, kept oozing. I don't know how it happened, the lights went out, then screams came. I don't remember anyone coming to my rescue with his sword and white horse. Only you have showed up here, with your doll-like face, your well-ironed suit, and your CD on your back that repeats the same promise you'll never keep because he doesn't want to see me. I want you to know this once and for all. I don't need him anymore because the doctor, who likes me, told me if I continue to be a good girl, as I have been, he'll buy me Barbie's microwave oven, with its flour and all the dishes for the cake.

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B.C. by Patrick Reid

I am running as a conservative in the primaries. My name is a big one, recognizable throughout most of the world. Last month I was on a cruise with my wife and her family. There were two formal nights. My belly. My belly heaved and burst over my belt, and on sauce night, I dropped a splash onto my button down, right on the part of my belly that, when I sit down, has the same presence as a balance ball.

In college, a friend and I used the balance ball to do sit ups, 35 each, 3 times, on Fridays, back when my core was titanium.

Crumbs sneak in and around my button down, so when I stood up on those cruise dinners, I left a warm, heart-shaped, crumb-outlined impressions in the leather. I couldn't wait to get off that boat. My wife encouraged me to talk to the natives on St. Maarten, people selling coconuts on the side of the road with a lost look in their eye. The jungle was right behind the main road along the beach where, in the bright woods—it was a windy and overcast day, and the silver tropic air trembled—I saw a few natives kneeling, shirtless, in a clearing, in what looked like a prayer or some voodoo ritual. Off the ferry from the pier to the island, one who had dreadlocks down to his waist shouted at me from faraway. I turned and saw him staring at me through a crowd, pointing, a wild person with a rabid look.

I am still sensitive about taking off my shirt. In St. Maarten, I swam, even dunked my head under. I am 54, young for a politician. I was out of breath quickly.

“It's like a zoo, but all the animals got loose,” I muttered in the general direction of my wife, who floated 5 feet away.

“What's that honey?” she said pleasantly.

“It's like that Jurassic Park movie.”

My voice is often called rich, a deep, gravelly melodic baritone.

People come from all over the world to hear me speak. My expression conveys just the right amount of dry humor, but mostly a sense of severe gravity. I usually have a straight face which appears to many as a scowl but comes from lionheartedness rather than coldheartedness.

I share my rhetoric gravitas and sense of humor with my brother, a (now retired) Miami Dade police officer, who helped us get a massive discount on this cruise, and who texts me daily, finding some of the funniest race- and police-related videos on the internet. I do not know where he finds the stuff. I would go on to text him that night about my day.

Last week I visited my son at Boston College, at his dorm. He said he was completely moved in but needed a desk chair, and our neighbor had been about to throw a perfectly usable one in the dump. My son is 19 and a political science major. He is taller than his father and in better physical condition, though not in as good condition as I was at his age, a little doughy, soft at the haunches, with round, flabby love handles despite a well-toned upper body and core. At Boston College, he minors in Libertarianism, and the two of us discuss what to do about the state of Liberalism in this country. There are people at his school, he tells me, he just wants to pummel. “FAGGOTS!” He sometimes shouts, mid-sentence, even mid-word, a kind of Tourette he has developed since college, which brings his face to shuddering, reddening, then cooling, like a coal, eyes shooting off past me, just over my shoulder, then gradually holding in that phantom direction, as if some enraging and fearful vision squeezes him like a whole-body cramp, then slowly releases its grip.

Bringing the chair to his room, I walked in on him having sex. He was having sex with a girl in the doggystyle position, facing away, so I could only see his ass, her ass, and the back of their heads. I noticed his hair had been cut in an immaculate fade since the last time I saw him. I made an awkward “o” with my mouth and closed the door as quietly as possible. That night he was crying in my lap, apologizing, saying I never should have seen that. Finally I told him all young men experience this. My old man, in my Yale days, walked into my room while I had 3 girls naked at once. I felt ashamed until he told me that his old man walked in on him, his old man on him, and on and on. Of course, this was a lie to console him, and it worked.

I am a very smart man. Always have been. In middle school in the 70s, my best friend was a retarded kid who I would beat up as often as possible. He would try to fight back, but I was too big and strong. I would push him to the grass, put his arms around his back! The fights would often be over wiffle ball games. If I won, he would throw the bat at me! So I would get the bat and chase him throughout the yard! His yard went into the woods, and I would chase him in there, beat him up until he was moaning in the dirt!

I would laugh because he mixed up b’s and d’s. I was always at the house when his parents were fighting. There were several theories that accounted for his retarded state. One, he fell out of a shopping cart three feet onto tile floor as an infant. Two, when he was three, his head was half eaten and clawed into by a Rottweiler. One time he locked me in the shed in his backyard. It was so dark. I was so angry!

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EXCERPT FROM ‘ALL PRETTY SORE’ by Alec Berry

David met me at the McDonalds and we bought McChickens before walking next door to buy 40s / Went to his apartment and drank, and then his roommate’s girlfriend came by and she told us how she slept with a dude in his 50s because it’d be something to write about / Ended up drunk late in the evening after the 40s because David kept a case of Hamm’s in the fridge, and then we called Walker, and I met Walker, and I realized Walker was weird, and we ran through the streets to my apartment and partied with the college boys I lived with / A few weeks later David said I should move into the empty sunroom where there isn’t air conditioning or furniture or a bed because I wouldn’t have to pay rent, and so I did this, and I never paid rent, and when we finally moved out months later his other roommate realized this and gave me the silent treatment and insisted I contributed little in my time at their apartment / He was sort of right / I spent a lot of alone time in their sunroom laying out on the hardwood floor, never buying a bed, usually eating those 3 for $2 chocolate chip cookies from the Holiday gas station, thinking about how I fell in love once, or what John Casey might be up to, or the old apartment on Cobun, or how I was happy to be away even though I seriously missed it all / David, Walker and I went out one night to the Otter and got real drunk and depression hit real bad, and I went outside and ripped a gutter off the apartment building on 7th street / We drove through the McDonalds drive through and I bought seven McChickens and ate them in the parking lot, and they laughed and on the way back some radio station played Nevermind, front to back / We had the windows down with the volume up in stopped traffic, and David couldn’t quit laughing / This was about as good as the time on the Fourth of July Walker and I went fishing, and then we came back to the apartment and partied with the roommates and their girlfriends and their friends, and at some point I went into the sunroom, pushed open the doors and blasted AC/DC’s “Riff Raff”, and everyone left, and I laid out on the floor / Towards the end I was eating breakfast and Cori sent me a text to say Alex Gavula died in New York City / I called his phone and an NYPD officer answered, and I broke into tears right then because it was a plain metaphor that simply said you can’t go back / I thought about the last time I spoke with him, when I asked for help covering the rent / the check never came because he wasn’t reliable / Felt bad I ever reached out for this and that I’d been angry about the let down / I think I know despite his troubles he was a good guy waiting for a chance to do good / now i feel bad it may have been another moment of mistake for him / An instance he had to say to himself, “not another one” / It would have been nice of me to say, “hey, I got it figured out. No worries.” /

The above is an excerpt from Alec's novel, ALL / PRETTY / SORE. You can check it out here.

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LIKE A FIRE DRILL by Gary Duncan

1

They found him in the stairwell, two days later. Wedged behind the door, his hand still clutching his chest. We had to evacuate the building and wait in the car park like it was a fire drill. All in our designated places, like we’d practiced. Editorial near the gates, then IT, then Sales, then Warehouse and Support. Some of the salespeople sloped off early, said they were going to the pub to sink a few for him. It’s what he would have wanted. He didn’t even drink. One of the women from IT, the one he liked but was too nervous to talk to, asked if I was going to join them. “Me neither,” she said, crying. “Poor guy, I didn’t even know him.”

2

I mean how terrible is that, someone dying, actually dying, and no one even noticing. The poor man, I just feel so awful for him, for his friends and family. I can’t stop thinking about him, lying there in the dark on his own, behind that fire door. I didn’t even know him, not really, but I wish I’d said something to him, just hello, you know. Made the effort to say just one thing to him. One of the guys from Editorial, he was crying and I was crying, and we just stood there crying together, not knowing what else to do. They said we could have a few days off, to grieve, but I don’t want to stay at home on my own, not now. But I don’t want to go back to work either.

3

They said the fat bastard had been there for a couple of days, but you ask me, it was probably more like a week. One of the security guards, one of the lads who found him, said it had to be a week, the state of him. You know what he said? He said the guy’d shat himself. Said the place stunk to high heaven. Flies and everything. We didn’t know that at the time of course. We didn’t know much at the start because they dragged us outside straight away, into the bloody car park, in the rain. Not really rain, more like a heavy drizzle, that thick drizzle that clings to your clothes, you know, so me and a few of the other sales guys we thought fuck that for a game of soldiers, let’s nip over the Red Lion for a pint. Make the most of it, make an afternoon of it. I didn’t know the guy from Adam, to be honest, but I’m sure he wouldn’t have minded.

4

I didn’t think anything of it. You don’t, do you? Just a niggle in the chest, more towards the shoulder really. A twinge. I thought I’d maybe pulled something when I was loading those boxes onto the trolley. Printer paper, boxes and boxes of the stuff. Thought I’d be clever and do it three at a time, even though we’re not supposed to do that, what with health and safety and everything. But it was just a twinge, nothing to worry about. I’d forgotten all about it, then it happened again when I was going up the stairs. This was different. Scary. Like someone had reached into my chest and ripped it apart with their bare hands. Christ, the pain. I was near the fire door, at the top of the stairs, and I thought I’d be fine if I just sat down there for a while. So that’s what I did.

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SPORES by Łukasz Drobnik

The superhero needs to save the city, but there’s a drunk man in her kitchen. He’s eating a banana. The way he snaps off the stem and peels the whole thing in one brutal movement is all too familiar. She closes her eyes, just for a bit, and thinks of the cool forest air, her cheek against the damp moss, his coarse hands under her blouse. When she lifts her eyelids, the peel is already lying on the stained blue tablecloth, as lifeless as roadkill.

Outside, the supermarket is being attacked by red-furred flying monkeys. They grab trolleys from the car park and toss them at frightened customers, rows and rows of teeth inside their black hole mouths rotating as they do so.

She should be there, protecting the little girl from abduction, the middle-aged man from being torn apart, but she knows he wouldn’t let her. The monkeys can see her from afar with their laser eyes, their shark-like teeth glistening in the dark. When he tries to pull her closer, bits of banana flesh still on his fingers, she instinctively recoils.

Later they watch a medical drama, pretending nothing has happened. He sits in the centre, in front of his grimy laptop, drinking another beer straight from the can, while she peeks at the screen from behind the yucca plants — a mini-jungle in this otherwise barren room. She keeps track of his beers. One more and he’ll get sentimental. He’s just two or three away from waking the Beast inside him.

He drove her to the woods to take her mind off that boy. They walked over a floating mat covering a lake. Holding hands, they joked you’d think it would feel more like a waterbed, but that one was pretty solid. The layers of moss under their feet were the colour of surgical drapes.

They heard a sound as if of a bursting beach ball. Then another. And a few more. Through numerous punctures in the mat, with a horrendous, multiplied hiss, came fumes of red granular matter. She started running, as fast as she could, among the newly erupting jets. When she turned around, he was still in the same spot: waving at her, consumed by the clouds, completely oblivious to the hundreds of spores entering his mouth and nose and ears.

A rain of starving hearts from the sky. Clouds of capillaries forming into force fields. Cardiomyocyte bombs. None of her many superpowers could save him.

He chased after her, his eyes full of rage, each of his steps sending a ripple through the mossy mat. She reached the shore and ran into the trees, but now the whole forest was under the Beast’s spell: every root and stem and insect at its ruthless command. It must have summoned some brambles that trapped her legs like barbed wire. She only remembers falling through the cool air, her cheek smacking against the damp moss, his coarse hands lifting her from the ground.

The Beast’s lifecycle is a complicated one. First there are the spores. Once they find themselves inside a human host, they form a mycelium of sorts, which plants its roots deep in the brain and spinal cord, taking control of every neuron. It can last anywhere from days to years before it tells its host to hide in a cellar or dead tree trunk, crawl into a ball and disappear in an opalescent cocoon. From the cocoon sprout the deadly vines, which slither through the sewage system and underground car parks, feeding on rats and stray cats, leaving behind leather-like fruits packed with monkey embryos. The fruits pop after several months to release swarms of murderous winged primates. After they’ve had enough human flesh, the monkeys dive into lakes or ponds or rivers, where they turn into bloated, spore-producing, living furry bags.

The boy’s heart looked like a frightened animal. She’d done it dozens of times before. Her movements were slow, steady and precise. She never expected the bursting artery, the bloody deluge, the flatline.

He keeps the Beast’s spores in prescription vials, but she won’t be fooled. She has mastered the art of hiding them under her tongue. Before they have any chance to sprout, she walks to the kitchen, past the inebriated man, and hides them deep inside the banana peel, which she throws into the bin. On her way back, she glances at the gaping hole where the supermarket used to be. The monkeys feast on bones.

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CONNECTICUT VAMPIRE by Adrian Belmes

This is what we burn. The dead. Our ghosts. And illness, like a brand, held long above the fire. Our misunderstandings do become our monsters we admire, for fear is nothing if not love of sorts, obsession. The village men below this home implore upon my grief and seek solution, save their wives, forgetting mine, your sister, and my dying son. You are not a killer, my unrested child, but these men do not know you as I did: a daughter and a weeping lung upon a bed that lies an empty tomb. What sins do we exhume for peace of strangers. Buried deep into the snow, your ruddy face is like you never died. This is the myth, so the liver they must take and wound you. Your brother takes into his mouth your heart, the viscid flakes, the frozen liquid in half-rot, abrasive on his tongue, and summons in his gut a nausea, an ancient violation. Old kings ate their fathers to sustain their lion hearts, but God does not abide by these pursuits. Not years before, these fathers burned such sins upon a witch-like pyre where now these desecrations are communion, Christ-like healers, tonic-waters. Your consumption kills. The men of the village sleep calm inside their homes that night and in two months when little Eddie dies, I bury, and they hold their wives in satisfaction of a prophecy foretold, an obsession that they laid to rest. But science will not know this for another many years. In five, you’re born again and offer up to man a devil we don’t know that you had written. Long buried in the heartless mire, your cold blood does sail a thousand tales. Our misunderstandings do become our monsters we admire.

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WHITE GRAVY by Marcus Pactor

Mother said the old man had never been touched. I didn’t know what she meant by “touched,” but I had heard enough. That afternoon, I leaned over the fence and grated cheese into the old man’s backyard. His cat licked every cheddar shred from the weeds. Its intestines must have gotten clogged, but it lived.

The cat disappeared after city workers buried the old man. Months later, a storm buried the eastern seaboard in golden, blanket-sized leaves. Far south of there, we savored the peripheral breeze. Mother had taught me to savor, whenever possible, the small pleasures which occasionally attended the global decline.

Sarah and her parents replaced the old man’s junk with theirs. I remember none of her words. I remember not even the quality of her voice. I do remember that she stood even less than I for boredom.

She egged the children’s hospital. She set a controlled fire of neighborhood breakfast waste—egg cartons, milk jugs, and pancake mix boxes—in her backyard. She killed two pigeons with a slingshot. At her direction, I nailed them to the fire station door.

Soon after the school year commenced, her cobra died in its sleep, and a custodian touched her in a bathroom stall. The internet led us to his ranch house. We found his pick-up unlocked, and so, when night fell, we popped the hood and flooded the engine with his garden hose. She touched me against the truck’s cab till the streetlights burnt out, one after the next. We set the cobra’s body and a warning note on the driver’s seat. The custodian never returned to work.

Sarah touched me through many school days: while the last frogs watched from the aquarium; while the theatre curtain brushed our calves; while, on the other side of the closet door, the assistant principal drew spirals on his desk calendar. Elsewhere, too, she tied me to any post at hand. I felt neither aches nor blues.

Our fun must have gone on longer than a school year. Her parents must have died one day or another. Mother, too. Everyone must have died. The bodies had nothing to do with us, I thought, till the power grid collapsed for good, and she used a steak knife to draw people on the wall. I led her outside to survey the neighborhood. Paved roads, ranch houses, chimneys, even trees now belonged to us.

“We’ve inherited so much,” I said.

By then, we could set a fire as well as any Eagle Scout or caveman, so we only needed ingredients to survive. We found most of our neighbors’ houses barren, but three spinsters in a cul-de-sac had, in their living room, a hoard of thirty-pound bags of food powder. They had almost certainly stolen them from our school’s inventory. The bags read “Cheese Pizza,” “Beef Tips,” “Egg Noodles,” and “Mashed Potatoes.” According to the instructions, we could reconstitute the powder into lunch by stirring it into a pot of boiling water.

A large part of me wanted to eat a pound of beef tips right then. A small part was distracted by the sight, on the coffee table, of twenty-four Roach Motels opened up and eaten clean. The spinsters’ bodies lay twisted on the carpet.

I touched Sarah’s elbow.

“I’m here,” I said.

We buried the spinsters in the backyard.

Months later, the old man’s cat returned. Sarah and I were naked and weak as ice cream when it crawled from under the fence and nuzzled against my thigh. It smelled like chicken juice left for a week in the sun. We would never taste fried chicken or ice cream again. I strangled the cat. Sarah drew a mean line in the dirt.

That evening, winter came hard, full of snow, and taught us what our last teacher had meant by the word “homogenizing.” Roads, houses, cats, old men, frogs, fallen street signs, caved-in roofs, shanks of glass, planks of fence, parked cars, garbage cans, garden hoses, broken zippers, dead tree trunks, and shed pine needles all went white.

When the sky let up, I skinned and boiled the cat, buried it in salt, and served it by candlelight. She refused her share.

“I can’t eat alone,” I said.

She shrugged.

I began to eat.

Snowfall resumed.

I did not remember then what I remember now: Mother telling me that, at some point, a woman will expect you to lift her heart. She will dramatize her appeal by, perhaps, leaving the dinner table, lying in the spinsters’ backyard, and letting the snow pile upon her.

The day couldn’t end, though, till I finished choking down the cat, so I did. I’ve choked down plenty of cats since then. Every so often, I wonder why they’ve survived better than dogs.

I still do, on occasion, catch myself believing in reasons or presidents or calming, pink streaks on the late afternoon horizon. But if any of those things had ever been truly true, don’t you think that old man’s cat on that frozen day would have tasted memorably worse than any cat I’ve chewed on since?

You’d be somewhat right if you did. It certainly tasted worse than most roasted cats I’ve experienced. A roasted cat has a smoky flavor and charred surface that, when cooked best, can briefly fool you into thinking you’ve lucked into an oddly shaped hot dog.

You’d be entirely wrong, though, if we restricted the question to boiled cats. Every one of them I’ve sampled, from first to last, without exception, has tasted like rancid, rubberized white gravy. With the right mindset, though, you can grow used to any meat on hand.

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