Regret To Inform

Over the past two weeks, I've gone from loving this piece to hating it and back again a number of times. It clocks in longer than the others and comes from a small idea (the coffee table scene) I had months ago but never wanted to try. It's different from my other stories in a number of ways, and I wanted to finish both as an exercise, and because I still find the core idea to be compelling. I am still foggy on my final verdict, but that likely has more to do with the time of night I find myself in. Please excuse the innumerable grammatical errors, and as always, let me know what you really think.

Enjoy.



The night before I lost her, my wife and I fought about something I cannot remember. I remember the yelling, the sweat on her brow as she spat sharp words, I remember the welling frustration inside as I tried to remain calm, until I snapped, and began to fight back, only resisting for the sake of resisting. I remember the uneasy stubborn silence as we prepared for bed, opening all the upstairs windows, pulling all but the last sheet from the bed. I remember the heat of the night, cruelly unfaltering even into the small hours. I remember wanting so badly to touch her in the dark, to begin that small reconciliation, and I remember Linda pushing me away, gently. The argument was forgotten, I have to believe, and it was only the heat that kept us apart, that pushed me away.

She was gone when I awoke, the sun already hanging, bloated in the white and opalescent sky. She had taken the car, gone to work, leaving me a small pot of oatmeal simmering on the electric stove. Next to it, on the marble countertop was a glass of orange juice and a little yellow post-it, cheery and bright, with a quick pencil sketched heart, and a single word: ‘Sorry.’ Like that, the unrest was gone, and I remembered how in love we were.

I spent the day avoiding my contracts and my studio entirely, and instead began to clean and dust the house, running a series of damp cloths over every flat surface. My allergies were already flaring as the early summer heat coaxed a thousand weeds and flowers to disgorge a miasma of pollen into the air, drifting in through every loose fitting window pane. No matter how hard the anemic air conditioner chugged, the heat never dissipated, and my sinuses flared in the thick dusty air.

The time passed quickly, and despite the discomfort and fits of sneezing, the little yellow note in my pocket had a pleasant weight, a reminder that all would be right when she returned. I took a break only to cut thin slices from a fresh cucumber, marinating them in vinegar and sugar. The first course of summer meal we would never eat.

I didn’t begin to worry until the evening, an hour after I expected her home. Dialing her mobile phone took me straight to her voicemail, and although this always planted a paranoid seed in my gut, I tried to brush it aside. But when the house was still quiet and empty as the shadows grew long, the seed cracked open and took hold with sharp and hooked roots.

The vines inside me knotted around my chest, thorns sharp and piercing as I called first her private line, her receptionist, and finally her mother and sisters, ascertaining only that she had left on time, and had made no other deviations that I could find. That had been three hours earlier.

As I watched lettuce wilt in the salad bowl her uncle gave us at our wedding, the roots of the vine turned cold, burning my insides. I dialed the police.

I reported her missing with a mechanized calm, holding my whirling terror in check as I recited our license plate, and described my wife as a series of measurable quantities: height, weight, age, hair color. When asked, I described the fight the night before, told the officer about the apology at breakfast. He made some attempt at mollifying me, encouragement rote and automated, mirroring my own artificial calm, and then asked me to call again if I hadn’t heard from her by the following day.

When I hung up, the house seemed to flex with my exhale, shuddering in time with my heart. The heat had not faded as the sun set, but instead seemed to thicken, to congeal in the air, and my breathing was suddenly labored, congested and painful. Black spots swam in the air, and my head spun.

There was nothing more I could do, and I knew that if I yielded then, allowed myself to weep and curl inward, that it would be the longest night of my life.

So I lunged into motion, swept my shrieking conscious mind away, and began again to clean. By midnight, as the sickly yellow moon crossed the sky, shimmering in the unyielding heat, I had swept, dusted and mopped every square inch of the house. Without an articulated thought, I tore to the garage, and gathered sandpaper, wood polish, and a box of tools.

Before dawn, every door swung silently on its hinges, every rough spot on the hardwood floors was smooth and glistening. In the brief hour of respite from the heat, just before the sun rose, I took to the yard. First the front and then the back, I trimmed the hedges with shears, churned the compost pile, and pruned Linda’s azalea bushes.

With the rising sun, and the return of the smothering blanket of heat, I returned inside and began to tighten each bolt on every table and chair. I could feel it inside me, the buzzing of a thousand hornets, a churning despair that always just threatened to absorb me, but the pain from chaffed and bleeding hands, toiling without stop, kept it at bay.

I was in the kitchen, electric screwdriver digging a dozen long black screws deep into the wobbling table legs as coffee brewed noisily on the black marble counter, when the doorbell rang. The tool leapt in my hand and as I clutched convulsively at the trigger. The table squealed in protest and a shivering crack ran across the table leg, parting like a fault line as the screw went wildly deep, rending the soft wood.

For a brief idiot moment, I saw my my wife on the doorstep, ringing her own doorbell. My first deliberate recollection of her face sent entwining tremors of dread and hope across my frame, the muscles of my face in spasms as it danced through a hundred half-expressions. The trance that had taken me through the night broke, and everything it had held at bay flooded back.

Somehow, my quivering legs took me to the door. Early morning light streamed in through the frosted glass of the front window, silhouetting a dark shape on the front porch. My mind was a whirlwind, no single thought gaining purchase as I emerged from my waking stupor. I turned the handle and opened the door, blinking in the sharp light and heat of the morning.

She was a police officer, badge shining brightly on the lapel of her thick jacket, patrolmen’s cap tucked under one arm, and she stared at me from behind mirrored lenses. Her short brown hair was drawn back in a bun, her face was blank and smooth, the corners of her lips turned down slightly, and she cocked her head to one side, birdlike. Her free hand slid upward and she drew the glasses from her face, revealing sad brown eyes, almost black, surrounded by the wrinkles and wear of a decade more than I had initially guessed. They were kind eyes, full of sympathy, and she held my gaze silently for a hazy moment. The last of my resolve began to crumble.

“Mr. Covington?” she asked, in a lilting drawl. I nodded, feeling my mouth go dry and my skin grow cold in defiance of the rising temperature. “Sir, I’m Officer Willette. I’m sorry to... May I come in?”

I nodded again, but before I could raise my head I felt the world beneath me slide away and I gripped the door frame with weak and blistered hands. She darted forward with gentle grace, and hooked one hand under my sweaty arm, and caught me just as I began to give in to the increasing pull of gravity.

“Easy, easy, I gotcha, I gotcha...” she repeated, a stream of reassurance, and I allowed her to prop me upright. The only other option was to fall to the floor, and I don’t believe I would have been able to rise again.

The world shrunk, a dark border creeping into my vision, and she led me on shuffling feet to the kitchen, gently placing me at the table.

“I’m gonna grab you a cup coffee sir, just sit tight.”

Breath seemed to come from far away, refusing to flood my lungs even as I tugged them open convulsively. I could hear her opening cabinets, and pouring coffee into chipped mugs. She handed it to me, placing one warm hand on my shoulder, matronly, and almost affectionate.

She sat across from me, cradling her own mug, emblazoned with the logo of Linda’s law school. She raised it, and smiled sadly at me.

“I hope you don’t mind.”

I could only stare, my hands around the hot mug. It burned me, and the crackling pain drove the darkness from my vision. Her smile faltered, and she dipped her gaze.

“Sir, you reported your wife missing last night.” It was not a question, but I dipped my head once in assent. She looked up, but not to me, instead she stared out the kitchen window at the golden sunlight streaming in from the garden. I could see her lips working, and I suddenly wanted to scream at her, to demand that she say what we both knew what was next. My throat clicked, constricting against the promise of a retching tremor. Her eyes drifted back to mine.

“Mr. Covington, your wife’s car was found on the side of the interstate this morning.” I could not have moved if I’d wanted too. She turned away from me, scowling slightly.

I realized then that I didn’t want to know, now I wanted her to stop, but she opened her mouth, to finish it, and I was still locked in place.

“Sir, I am sorry, but, your wife, she passed on.”

There. Despite knowing all along why we were here, it was now real. The heavy fog I believed I had been holding at bay did not come. Instead, I felt light, and clear headed, and infinitely tired.

I knew. I could sleep.

My eyes dipped shut and I went slack for a long time. Outside, the buzz of insects grew to a steady drone, the thick and heady thrum of infinite life in the summer morning.

I opened my eyes. She sipped at her coffee, studying me. The telling of it had freed her as well it seemed, and the frown was gone. Now she watched me with a blank placidity. But no, something else was missing. Any sympathy that had creased her brow seemed to have evaporated in the heat. She was unreadable. My eyes fell on her heavy coat, only then noticing the incongruity. The vines inside me fluttered to life.

“Was it...” My throat was all gravel, cracked and coated with dust, wood shavings and pollen. I cleared it and started again. “What happened?” I asked, not wanting to know, but not knowing what else to say. She didn’t answer at first, didn’t even move, and her blank face unsettled me further.

“We don’t know.” She said, without inflection. “Hit and run. Maybe.”

From beneath the grief and exhaustion, something else was bubbling up, a curdling feeling of wrongness. I saw that the corners of her mouth were starting to curl upwards, the thin slivers of white teeth visible between pale lips, and my fingers clutched the hot mug tighter. I struggled to make sense of this, my mind unable to process this veering deviation from the pattern.

“Was- was it quick?” I asked, and I knew at that moment, that something was very wrong.

She was smiling. Her black eyes locked on mine.

“No.” She said. Her lips shaped out the word vividly, slowly. With pleasure. Her grin crept wider, a predator’s sneer now. The blank mask of her face was lifted, erased like the dark at the dawn.

Had I not been depleted, had I not been drained, I think I would have stood and ran then, and then things would have been incalculably different. Or maybe it would have been just the same. Instead, I held her sharpening gaze and tried to still myself. Tried to focus, to collect my thoughts, to still the nauseous maelstrom inside me. She seemed to content to watch me, her smile growing even wider with pleasure at my growing discomfort. Unable to bear the silence any longer, and still unable to find a course of action, I spoke again, an idiot attempt at stalling.

“Why are you doing this? Who are you?” I asked, and my voice sounded weak and mewling in my ears. Her hyena grin convulsed once, sharply tugging and banishing the last of her soft and pretty mask.

“Not yet, Mr. Covington,” she said, languorously drawling my name. “You can call me Grace, for now.”

“You’re not a cop, are you.” It was useless thing to say. A child’s protest. She devoured my weakness with her grinning eyes.

“Got this shiny badge, don’t I?”

I was wondering, almost idly, if the real Officer Willette was as dead as my wife when everything snapped into place, the jumbled puzzle of my mind aligning with electric speed, and I sprang into motion, preparing to toss the hot coffee across the table at her, to turn and to bolt for the upstairs bedroom. I could see the black revolver in our closet, could feel its cold metal grips already in my hand, cooling and firm.

My arm lurched forward, but she was faster. One hand batted the coffee cup aside, almost dismissively, and the black gout of liquid and steam spattered to the floor. The other hand already contained her gun, and it smashed across my temple. White starlight and a screeching noise overwhelmed me, and for a moment, I was swimming in the air, drowning and unable to move, sinking.

By the time I shook my head clear, she had already slapped the handcuff on my wrist, locking the other loop to the table leg. With practiced precision, she thrust her fist into my gut, two quick jabs, driving the air out of me in a series of wheezing coughs.

I gasped, breath coming with great difficulty. She was seated again, as if nothing had ever happened, sipping on her coffee. The hyena grin had never left her face. It was quiet again in the wake of that brief flurry of violence, and she was content to bask in the silence, a cat in a sunbeam. She finished the coffee, set it aside, and laced her fingers together.

“Here’s how this works, Edward.” She began, “I tell you what to do, and you do it. No questions. The more you do, to my satisfaction, the more you get from me. You understand, sir?”

“Why should I?” I asked with great difficulty, as my lungs found traction. Her response was grotesque caricature of hurt, lower lip jutting outward momentarily before the monstrous grin returned.

“Here’s the carrot, Edward. Your wife is Linda Covington. She had a busted lawn mower in the back of the car, has a strawberry birthmark just underneath her chin, and she gets the hiccups when she cries. And she did cry.”

This struck me harder than her fists, and I gagged, a thin stream of bile and coffee leaking from my lips. Somewhere on my temple, a rivulet of blood was forming, and I felt it spill forth with the twist of my head, streaming down to patter onto the freshly cleaned linoleum.

“However, she is not dead. Yet.” She chewed this last word, loathe to let it leave her mouth.

“What do you want?” I whispered.

“I already told you,” she spat, screwing up her face for a moment before it snapped back. “Now, are you ready?” She leaned forward across the table with feline grace, leading with her sharp gloating grin.

I was ready. I had twisted my hand around to grip the chain of the handcuffs tightly. The shackle on my wrist bit into the bunched flesh, and I flicked my gaze on the other shackle, shining and silver. It was clasped loosely around the table leg, hanging beneath the yawning crack left only minutes before by the twist of a errant screw.

I swung my foot forward and then back with all the force I could muster, smashing the heel against the base of the table leg. I heard a satisfying cacophony of splintering, and felt the leg give, bending away from the table. Leading with my free hand, I drove my weight against the surface of the table above the fractured leg, and my heart sung as the heavy bulk of the table dove downward on one end, and, pivoting off the remaining legs, swung upwards towards her.

She had unslung the gun again as soon as I’d moved, but the table bucked off the ground, crashing into her elbows, and sending her body backward. She scrambled for balance, the hyena grin unchanged, but somehow infinitely more malicious in motion.

The table leg wrenched free as I slid forward off the chair. The cuff rattled down the cracked wood, the chain trailing my hand down it’s length until at last I gripped tight at the bottom. I swung the heavy leg upward, grip not quite stable, but not wanting to hesitate for another moment.

The roar of the gun flooded the kitchen, and the whine of the bullet hissed by my ear. A second later the shock of the impact shuddered up my arms. The makeshift bludgeon collided with her forearms with all the graceless power I could muster, and her arms lurched high into the air. The gun arced through the air up, and away, clattering to the floor.

The inertia of the swing threw me off balance, and she clutched her arms close to her body, and again, we locked eyes, saw our true faces. I quailed before that snarling visage, and she growled, low in her throat.

I only briefly considered advancing. Instead I hurled the table leg clumsily toward her; somehow the handcuff slid free of the knobby foot. I saw the leg collide, and she stumbled backward against a standing shelf of cereal and breads, and I turned to run.

The garage was nearly in view when the thought hit me. I didn’t have the car. I pivoted and reached out for the bannister, pulling myself up with any extra strength I could find.

I could hear her behind me, cackling and panting, more alive than I could ever have been. The terror inside me solidified, and I knew it was hopeless.

We should all be so lucky, to love what we do, and be so good at it.

I grabbed the doorframe of our bedroom and pulled as I leapt threw. I skidded across freshly vacuumed carpet, arresting my motion and reversing to throw the door shut, and fumbled for the lock. I felt her collide with the door on the other side, and it threw me backwards. She howled, a long celebratory sound that ended in high tittering. Then she kicked, one sharp shock that bent the door in its frame, splintering along the hinges.

I scrambled, slipping to one knee, into the closet, and I tugged the pistol from its shelf. It felt like I expected. Cold, black, solid. She kicked the door again, and it swung half open, the lock tearing itself free of the mooring. Her hyena laugh continued.

I clawed the tension lock from the trigger, the one Linda had made me buy the year when we first discussed the children we would never have. I pressed with all my might and it came loose. I spun, and my legs caught around each other, and I collapsed roughly to the closet floor.

She was in the room. Gun drawn, she approached me as if she had all the time in the world.

I aimed and then turned my head away and shut my eyes tight. I thought of Linda, and pulled the trigger.

For a instant, I thought of how I had always been told that a real gunshot would be quiet, not like the movies. But this wasn’t even the dull muffled firecracker sound I expected. This was a dry click, of metal on metal. I pulled again, the hammer pulling back and striking, and I pulled again.

She laughed harder, her head tilting back, a wolf baying at the moon. Then she reached me and I was frozen. I pulled the trigger one more time, wanting only to cry. She brought a booted heel down onto my left shin, and snatched the gun from my hands as a spasm of bright pain lurched up my legs.

She tossed it aside, still laughing, and brought the butt of her own gun down onto the top of my head. This time I didn’t even feel the impact.

The air was suffocating when I awoke, and for a moment I was sure she has set me ablaze. I felt liquid fire dribble down my nose and throat, and somehow I was conscious enough to clamp my eyes shut. I heard the pressurized hiss of the pepper spray, just inches from me. I vomited, convulsively, voiding only the water I’d drunk in the 12 hours.

She was laughing again, an endless gleeful shudder that took no breaks for breath. My hands lashed out towards the noise and struck the metal mesh that divides us. I kept my eyes locked shut, and as I continued to retch, and I probed my surroundings, trying hard to ignore her pleasure.

I was in the back of a police cruiser, but aside from the dangling bracelet of the cuffs on my right hand, they were free. As the bright white pain of the pepper spray began to dull, I became aware of the throbbing pain in my skull, and the caked and cracked blood that had dried in runlets down my face. I wept, and clenched my eyes tighter. When she was done reveling in the moment, she sighed, a happy content sound.

“Well sir, how can I convince you not to try all that again?” I could not see the smile on her face, but I could hear it. She sighed again. “I suppose it’s a good lesson for you. I don’t do my work without a lot of planning. I could have just took the gun, when I was in your house last week, but something in me said leave it empty, and I am just pleased as hell that I did.”

A door opened, and I could hear her sliding out. The door to my left opened, and I wailed, shuffling away from the sound of her coming, but she wrapped he fingers in my hair and tugged sharply, dragging me from the back seat. I hit the hot pavement, shoulder first, followed by my head. Behind my closed eyes, stars bloomed.

She wiped a gloved hand across my face, in a motion so deceptively warm and gentle, I was shocked into stillness. The coolness of the alcohol swab that followed was like the answering of a prayer, and she cleaned my face with something that felt like an awful twin of tenderness. I started to weep, and some traitorous and simple part of my brain wanted to reach out to hold her, and to be held, and I retched again.

Then, horribly, she did hold me, one arm sliding around my back, and pressing my head to her shoulder, and I shuddered in disgust as my body refused to fight back. The false fur collar on her thick coat caressed my skin. It didn’t last long, and soon she placed her thumbs on my cheeks and tugged my eyes open. Pepper spray residue and sunlight slammed into my eyes in a fresh wave of pain, but I was to tired, to broken to do more than flinch slightly.

We were parked in the driveway of a house, in the dark shade of a willow. She was only a few inches from me, and although my eyes refused to focus, I could see that she wore a new smile. Not the false friend, not the predator's grin. This was simple and true warmth. Her dark eyes beamed.

“Okay,” she said, “Are you ready?”

I blubbered weakly; I didn’t know what she wanted, but I was knew I would do it. Not for Linda, but for me. To make it stop. She held my head steady, thumbs still on my cheeks.

“Edward, I want to help you. I want to help you save your wife. And the hard part is over now. You tried, and I respect that, I do, but we have to do it my way now. And I need you to hear this clearly. If you try anything stupid again, I’ll just kill you. That’s not what I want, but if you can’t work with me, well... Then it wasn’t meant to be. And if I kill you, I don’t have any need for your wife. Edward, look at me.”

I snapped my eyes open again, lenses of tears blurring the world, and her soft, warm face. I looked. And she looked back. Her eyes slid sideways, and I followed them across the street, and I saw the school.

I heard the children first, the loud, carefree raucous sounds of play, the glee of a hot afternoon. The world snapped wider, away from our intimacy, and I saw the wide green fields, and the bright primary colored play structure. I saw the old brick school buildings, surrounded by a field of portable trailers, like encircled covered wagons. I saw this all, and my heart surged. She saw me start and squeezed my head in her hands, twisting me back to her.

“Edward. Listen. You are going to stand up, walk over to them, and pick one. Whichever one you think looks like the worst of them, or whichever one you can catch. Wrap your hands around his neck, and squeeze until he stops breathing. If you do this like clockwork, I’ll come stop you before you kill him, and take you again. Falter for a second, and I wait just long enough for him to die. Understand?”

I wanted to scream, to lash out, to bite down on my tongue and to choke, but before I could think the traitor in my head was nodding, and she was smiling at me, wide and proud.

“Good. The hard part is over, Edward. Go. For Linda.”

And then I was walking, on hateful idiot legs, still weeping softly. And the traitor was telling me that it wouldn’t be so bad, and that if I hurried, no one would die, no one would even get hurt, and it was all for Linda.

I wanted to believe it. So I did.

The chain link fence barely came to my waist, and I threw my legs over. The dangling handcuff on my wrist clanked loudly on the top bar. A few of the children saw me then, bloodied and vacant eyed, blinking back tears and already forming claws with my hands, and some of them screamed, but it mingled with the summer sounds. I went straight to the play structure, allowing it to eclipse me from view, at least for the moment, from the sole adult playground monitor on the far side of a blacktop kickball court.

My feet hit sand, and now they were all standing and scattering, their screams still excited and buoyant, a play mockery of fear. I was too absurd to be a threat, and it was still just a game for them. Like fish, they flooded around and away from me, darting and giggling, some of them crying. Some stood paralyzed, staring at me with gaping mouths showing irregular gaps between baby teeth. I kneeled in the sand before one tow headed boy, his lower lip quavering as he met my wild and red gaze.

I saw myself, reflected in his pale eyes. The front of my white tee shirt was spattered with forking rivers of blood. My pale and puffy face bent across the curve of his cornea, a corpse in a funhouse mirror. I began to sob as I stared at him, and he began to cry as well, too terrified to move away from me. The traitor was already screaming at me to raise my arms and curl my fingers, for Linda, for this boy, for myself, do it quick. He would go home tonight, bruised and terrified, but alive, and I would see her again. But only if I hurried.

But the traitor was weak.

And I knew, staring at this terrified child, that as broken as I was, I would never hurt him. I knew if I did, it would only be the first in an endless stream of atrocities I would commit, as she ground me down, each one worse than the last, and each one easier and easier. I knew then that I would never see Linda again.

So I gathered great handfuls of hot sand, and placed them on the boy’s shoulders. My cupped hands pressed against the cool flesh of his neck, but gently. He screwed his face tight and wailed, and I whispered soothing words, promising it would be okay, begging him to stay quiet, but he only keened louder.

Around us, the last of the children had fled, and I could see in the distance the approach of a great lumbering adult, blowing a whistle as she limped towards me, fighting against the flow of children like a spawning salmon. The she stopped short, and I knew that Grace was behind me.

Above us, a clear plastic dome protruded from the play structure, and I could see she was ten feet behind me, one hand held out to stop the advance of the yard monitor, one hand authoritatively on the butt of her gun, where my blood and matted hair were drying in clots. I held the screaming child closer, hoping she didn’t see my loose grip, and the sand ran from between my fingers. I heard her call out to the yard monitor.

“Stay back ma’am, I got it.” And then quietly, she spoke to me, a mother’s disappointment thick and theatrical on her voice. “Oh, Edward, you know better than to try and fool me. He’s still sucking breath and yowling. Put your thumbs in his eyes, now, or your wife-”

I pivoted and flung the sand catching her off guard. The sand struck her eyes and she hissed ducking back and drawing the gun, but I was already rushing her, my shoulder checking her gut as I sprang forward. My bruised and protesting shins shrieked with the effort, and my head rang as I collided, but she made a noise, a surprised grunting exhalation that was as pleasing and wonderful as cool water.

I let the inertia carry us back and over, landing on top of her in the sand, my left hand flailing and grasping for the pistol, batting it out of her grasp. I raised my head and brought it down, hard, my brow colliding with the soft cartilage of her nose, feeling it give way. I soared, high on the smell of her spilling blood and her predator confusion, and I bounced on her, clumsily pummeling her with elbows and knees and fists

I lost myself there, as I had lost myself to the traitor before, and her struggling grew weaker. I leaned forward and without conscious thought, bit into the flesh of her cheek, spitting the tiny hot lump of meat out beside me. I watched it bounce, white sugar crystals of hot sand sticking to it, and I lost my focus, lost everything, and simply stared, not accepting what was happening.

She drove her elbow up sharply into my jaw, tossing me aside in a heap, and she was over me in a flash, pistol in hand. The hyena grin was wide, the lines between her white teeth picked out in blood and shadow. Her eyes burned from beneath her brows and the gaping hole in her cheek oozed. I had never seen her so luminous, so alive. I withered in her light.

“Oh, Edward,” she said, a bare whisper, sand on the wind, “You cannot conceive of what I will do to her while you watch.”

I would have died then if I could, curling, drying and desiccating in the sand, blowing away. On my knees, I looked up, and I saw him. Just a dozen yard behind us, a bald man in a police uniform, badge glinting in the sun as he leapt the fence and raced towards us, shouting into his radio. I saw her face twist, the grin melting away in a storm of true rage, and I felt real hope for the first time as I tried to process this turn of events.

He was on us then, gun raised at me, ignoring her. I could see the streaks of grey in his mustache, and I raised my hands high, the cuff dangling. I tried to speak, to tell him the whole story but I could only bleat out fragments of speech.

“Crazy. Not a cop, please god help me, she’ll kill me. She’s not a cop, please believe me.”

He held the gun trained on me, and then he looked to her; I saw the recognition on his face, and my hope broke apart like dried bones.

“Officer Willette... Grace, Jesus, are you all right?” he asked in low worried tones. She put one hand to her cheek and grimaced, and I saw her face take on that sad, sympathetic mask she had first worn for me.

“Yeah, I’ll live, thanks Tim. He got the drop on me, sonofabitch just hopped the fence and was going after the kids, gibbering like a loon. God damn lucky I happened to be passing by and heard the commotion.”

I was screaming, over and over again. No. No. They ignored me, just the shrieking madness of a broken monster on his knees. She tossed him a ring of keys, and he caught it deftly.

“Can you finish cuffing him while I wash up? I think he’s got all the piss out of him now.”

“My pleasure.” He stared at me with contempt, holstered his weapon, and started toward me. She passed behind him, holstering her own weapon.

My hand went to my pocket, scrambling for one last touch of the small scrap of yellow paper sodden with sweat and blood, the transitory heart drawn in pencil.

He was above me, his silhouette eclipsing the high noon sun, and I thought, how lovely prison would be compared to this. I thought how in a way, I was lucky. I squeezed the little yellow post-it. I felt the prick of metal piercing the paper, drawing a bead of blood; a single black screw, long, thin and solid. The last one, meant for the shattered table leg.

He leaned forward to grab my wrists, roughly, righteously, and then she moved like water behind him. Her hand grabbed his gun, brought it up to the back of his head, and fired. The thunder and fire enveloped his head, haloing him briefly. His left eye squeezed shut, rolling downward, while the right twitched spasmodically up and away, as if it could follow the path of the bullet through his skull. His forehead cracked open, blossoming in shiny white and vivid red.

Then he was falling, landing next to me, blood mixing with sand, still. She was there, above me, blotting out the sun, a creature of myth. Her smile was back. Her true smile. I curled my hand around the screw, feeling the ridges bite into my hands.

“You’ve just killed a cop, Edward. There’s no coming back from that, you know. You have to understand, you need me more than ever now. You need me. Let me help you.”

She was right, and I knew it. My future, my wife, everything was gone. But I still had this moment. I stood slowly on damaged legs, swaying, eyes dipped low, trying to get closer to her, trying to keep my welling excitement hidden. I played the hypnotized prey, the fly walking into the spider’s web. Her voice was soft, soothing, almost loving.

“We’ve changed the game. We’re off the map, and into the crooked place. But we’re together.”

I liked that. It sounded right. I was almost touching her, and she raised her arms to welcome me.

I raised my arm slowly, and then thrust the fist down, driving the screw into her neck. Felt it grate against bone. Felt it bite deep, striking true. She made a wet gurgling noise, and froze. I raised my hand and struck the screw again with the heel of my palm, and it slit open as the screw sunk deeper. I grappled for the gun, pulled it easily from her hand and shoved her forward.

She sat down, hard, in the sand, her legs stiff and straight, her back rigid and upright. She didn’t protest, simply stared up at me. Her face was a cypher, a blank slate. But she held my gaze. I thought she might go for her own gun, but instead she raised one hand to the screw, and tugged. It came out with the series of chalky clicks, and a great fount of blood followed it, pulsing onto the sand. When she looked up again, I saw something that might have been admiration on her face.

I pointed the gun at her, but I knew it was a pointless act. I could see her face paling, growing sallow. But there was so much I had to know.

“Where is she?” I said. My voice was weak and faraway. Tired.

She laughed once, one wet chuckle that formed a bubble of blood on her lips.

“C’mon, Edward. Not now. This is just us now.” She was looking at the screw now, turning it side to side in the sunlight, soaked in her blood.

“Why. Why then.” Again the single chuckle, and a little gout of blood from the seeping hole. Then she sighed, and I saw the hole was leaking in time with her heart, speeding up, growing weaker.

“This is what I do.” And she looked back at me, her hyena grin weak, but triumphant. “I make monsters.”

In the distance, their were sirens. She dropped her arms, too weak to hold them up. We were silent, and I watched the light drain from her eyes.

“Go, Edward. You might have time...”

Then she was gone, and I ran.

I still might have time.



This story is under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 license

Something New...

Hello, all.

I'll be posting one of two new stories within a week, and the second shortly after. One will be the rest of the fragment I posted in March, and the other is something slightly different than usual. It all depends on what I feel like finishing first.

It's been far too long, and I hope this latest flurry of ideas and inspiration brings about a more regular schedule of updates.

I've missed you.

Stay tuned.


UPDATE 7/14: So close... I bet on the wrong horse, so my least favorite of the two will be done first. Any moment now.

Mapping the Crooked Places

Hello again.

I wrote this in the last two days, feverishly, once the little seed of the story came to me. This is of course, unedited and rough, a first draft. But be warned, its quite long, and... odd. There is a strong influence on display, perhaps a few, and more than usual. It just happened that way, and I didn't want to hide it in this first draft. At any rate, enjoy. Feedback and criticism is always welcome and wanted.



When I was young, I drifted on the wind of my whims, allowing them to take me, rootless, like an airborne seed. I was in love, not with any of my fellow man, but with being a citizen of the places men gather. Fueled by this love, and an inexhaustible supply of money, the legacy of my parent’s deaths, I put down temporary and gossamer roots into a dozen places across the City, staying only long enough to satisfy my curious lusts before again taking to the breeze.

The City is a collection of villages, bound together like organs and cells in a body, possessed and afflicted with all the abilities and fragility of a living being. The vascular and nervous system of roads and wires brings us, each a little nerve impulse and blood cell, from organ to organ, and through the pale and textureless connective tissue between. Together the City is a whole, a single life dependent on its constituents. When I lived in the shadows of the medical college, drinking quietly and alone in bars filled with sleep deprived and wild eyed doctors-to-be, I saw the city this way, and it could have been no other.

When I set myself free from the drafty Cole Valley flat and drifted into a studio loft in the Mission, I saw that the City was a battleground: isolated camps of combatants brought together by common ideals, surrounded by the blasted, rotting demilitarized zones of cultural vacancy. Under the blazing bonfires at the heart of each district flutter the flags of identity, declaring the allegiances of its inhabitants. The enemy is raised in effigy nightly, crackling and writhing in the flames. You know who you are in those places, by your uniform and badges, by your declarations of war; and the traveller learns who he is not.

In the towers of Market Street, I saw the City was a vast and productive farm, with a single farmhouse, naturally, in the greatest and oldest place. From the upper eaves of the old house, I surveyed each unique field, growing signature and heirloom crops, to be counted, stored, and sold. When the City was a farm, there were always the fallow places between the fields, the cracked and rotting fences, the rusting abandoned machinery.

In each city, the body, the battleground, the farm, and in a dozen more, these in-between places filled me with cool loathing, a passionless hatred and fear born in my acceptance of their seeming necessity and my distaste of their lifelessness. Like bodies without souls, the interstitial boroughs, without character or a spark of life seemed on the verge of rotting away beneath my feet.

Inside the living neighborhoods, I was loathe to travel in any other way than by foot or bike, lest I wall myself away from the possible beauty; but when crossing the borderlands, I needed the barriers of taxi cabs and train cars. The empty places felt sickened, and in turn made me ill, and I passed through them only when need dictated, and my resolve was strongest.

When my map of the City and her identities grew dense, and when I imagined, foolishly, like a child, that all her secrets were known to me, my love began to sour and the fires inside me waned. I began to flirt with the idea of starting again, picking another of the world’s great cities, and being reborn, naked and fresh into a new place. These phantom dreams cloaked me, insulating promises of renewal that further removed me from the City that I had loved. In this way I lost my ties, and my connections to the good places withered.

I forgot my distaste of the hinterlands between the hearts, and wandered dumbly into their blankness, again and again, and without fear. Curious, I found little burning outposts inside these places, where people gathered together for heat, for light, for company, defiant against the bleak surroundings.

I began to believe that I perhaps I had been a fool, and a dawning epiphany bloomed: that perhaps I had ignored so much of the City, so much of what made it, what truly made it, under false pretenses. I had allowed the peculiarities of my personality to cloak these misunderstood tracts in a miasma of fear that stemmed only from myself.

With renewed desire, I began again to explore, to again be a cartographer, to map the crooked places. The undeniable ugliness and thoughtlessness of the buildings in these dark places and edifices parted slightly, and I saw beneath the veil that I myself had erected.

This is what I told myself. I even believed it, some of the time.

It was on this fevered quest that I first saw the tower.

I must have seen its skeleton from a dozen of my nests, for it had been growing slowly, the twisting branches of a great glass and stone tree, for the last half of the decade. It had in the past, filled me with the same sort of dull hatred that the borderlands had inflicted me with; it was artless and empty, a featureless glass monolith designed to house the young and wealthy, those ones who were drawn to the in-between places, for all the wrong reasons.

But when I encountered it then, during that final phase of my exploration, it tugged at me, hooked me like a doomed fish and never let go.

It stood alone, in a district that would have once curled cold tendrils of unease around my spine. The streets were empty, and clean, in a way that suggested not constant attention, but disuse, and its only neighbors were warehouses and pale shadows of failing restaurants and cafes.

Nothing about it was lovely, nothing about it was anything less than hideous, and I see that now. I might have had these thoughts, I do not remember; I only remember that I was writing a check, a deposit for one of the sterile condos above me, before I even realized that I had walked inside.

In that same nameless fog of desire, I knew one thing. I wanted to be on the upper floors. I must have told the small and corpulent manager this, for he cracked his wide and sharp grin, baring twin rows of perfectly straight teeth, and assigned me a unit on the top floor.

I rode the elevator in breathless anticipation, and went straight to the room.

My belongings and possessions were brought to me later, for once I entered the tower, I only left it once more, and that time for good, nearly five months after. When I left, I was free of the fog, free of the pretension of finding the soul of the soulless places, free of my love of cities. I was scoured clean of everything, left raw and naked, every sensation amplified and painful. I left with only my terror and my life, although how much of that I retained is in question.

***

The first apartment was spacious and empty, smelling still of construction and dust, antiseptic and clean. One wall in each room made only of glass and offering a sprawling view of the bay and the sharp and crumbling docks, the last few vestiges of proper industry in the City borders.

I understood at once it was not the view my sudden, hot desire for elevation demanded. It was something else. Within moments of occupation, I also understood this: the top floor was too high. What I was drawn to was now beneath me.

I left the room at once, and began to descend the staircase, the metal steps still covered in powdered drywall, feeling the invisible draw in my lungs, in the beating of my heart, and in the cords of my muscles. It only took a few floors before the attraction was now level with me and I entered a hallway identical to the one above.

My fingers drifted up, without thought, as so many of my actions would become, to the eastern wall. As I slowly paced the hallway, I could feel the pull down the length of my arm. Like a dowsing rod, I dragged the tips across the rough texture of the wall, the hissing friction against them and my soft footsteps on the carpet the only sounds. The air was redolent of paint and carpet glue, but beneath it all, dancing in the air like a cracking whip, was a thin thread of something sickly sweet, a night blooming flower, or something just on the border of rot. It was intoxicating.

I reached a door halfway down the hall, and my legs froze. I did not come to a natural stop; the muscles literally locked in place, and I was rooted to the expensive and untrodden carpet. On the other side, just past my raw fingertips, beyond the heavy wooden door, lay whatever was calling me. I felt an intense and delicious anticipation, a nearly fulfilled desire stronger than any before.

I was not unfamiliar with nameless wanting, with not yet having reason or language to describe and justify what my mind yearned for; but this was not only my consciousness that ached, but the very structure of my body. I placed both hands on the door, fingers splayed wide in a lover’s caress, and held my body to the cool painted wood of the door.

I had to enter the room. I needed to be inside.

I looked up to the numbers, 2319, picked out in delicate and filagreed golden numerals, and committed it to memory, repeating them breathlessly over and over again to myself, knowing, with a sharp pang, that I would need to leave here before I could return to be fulfilled. I would offer any price, and pay any cost, but I would cross the threshold.

I found it difficult to pull myself away, and thought I might stay fixed to that spot, almost, but not yet touching my prize, forever. Then, through the warped glass bead of the peephole, light suddenly flared and I was shook from my trance.

It took me a moment to restrain the whirlwind of my thoughts, and process the small and simple chain of logic. While I had been pressed to the door, sighing with unfamiliar intimacy, the occupant of 2319, the interloper, had been on the other side, staring out.

What flared in me was not the polite embarrassment that good breeding and decency demanded, but something more akin to jealousy. But there was more, a violence I felt in my forearms, and clenched fists. Something bestial, and cruel.

Reason broke through the surface of the raging sea inside, and I relaxed, secure in the knowledge that I had the means to take what I wanted in the proper way, with no need for bloodshed. I grinned into the looking glass, my eyes slitted with devious and cold assurance. I was not accustomed to being disappointed.

The manager furrowed his brows when I returned, so soon, holding out my checkbook. I could see now how truly he was a creature of the dead zones, perfectly bland and polished in form, with dull eyes, and empty of dreams. The inhabitants of the frontiers are not always living mirrors of their environs, but some are born to them. Others gut themselves, until they truly do belong. I did not know what sort of man this was, but he would be forever in thrall.

The room was indeed taken, it was the first chosen, by the very first occupant. The manager tried to joke with me, clumsily, not seeing the clarity of my need. Now that I knew what I needed, desire had cut through the fog, and I was scalpel sharp. Or so I believed.

I offered to buy out the occupant. I offered to buy the whole building. In the end, the best I could do was place my name, first, on a waiting list. In the meantime, I moved my deposit to a new room, 2219, where I could wait just below, and bide my time until the occupant could be persuaded.

I never unpacked, even though I had the contents of my previous Outer Richmond flat shipped to me at great expense. I lived out of boxes, on minimal furniture, and subsisted entirely on delivered food. 2219 was close enough to the wet, living, thrumming prize above me to act as a temporary salve, and for a while, I thought it might be enough. Simply being there filled me with a contentedness I had never known.

My previous life, the wandering cartography of the invisible borders was forgotten. I sometimes lay on the floor, eyes drifting between the floor-to-ceiling windows, and then to the waving texture of the ceilings. The city beyond was meaningless to me now. I could still see the neighborhoods, the districts I had loved; I could see the grey stripes of nothingness that bound them to each other, the no man’s lands that once filled me with a unease.

It meant nothing to me now. But I still was grateful for it. Where I had once misunderstood the city, I now saw it’s true meaning. Every part of it, unknown and known, existed across these centuries for one purpose: to birth the tower. To create the room above me to safely house the thing, whatever it was, that sang to me.

I could smell it, in my waiting chamber; the strong floral scent permeated the walls, and stuck to my skin, cloying, and thick. I could almost hear the harmonic vibrations, through the walls, and down the wires. It was all that I had ever wanted, even before I knew it had existed. My whole life had been leading up to this place and this time, and I hovered on the precipice, almost terrified to go any closer, for fear of losing it all.

Soon, proximity was not enough. I found myself standing on a wooden chair, sometimes for days on end, trying to be closer to It. I would stretch my arms high, and press my palms to the ceiling, feeling the siren song running down through carpals and radius and ulna and humerus and spreading into my lungs and heart.

But soon, even that was not enough, and I coiled my desire and need into a sharpened point, and brought it to bear against the occupant, the silent intruder of my dreams above me.

***

I began with noise, unpacking my stereo and pointing the speakers upward, blasting random and sharp intervals of atonal nonsense. The tower was still sparsely populated, in truth nearly empty, and I knew that I had the floor to myself, and but a single neighbor above. This was yet another sign I disregarded utterly, one in an endless parade that would have driven me far from the place, had I still retained any of my sanity at this time.

But instead I squatted, in an abominable, heartless husk of a home, in a neighborhood that should have set my teeth on edge, in a place that should have been anathema to me, behaving like wild and exiled fool, a quisling to all that I loved about the places of men.

When the occupant made no complaints, I raised the frequency, the volume, until finally I could no longer stand my own tortures. I turned to pounding on the roof with a broom, slamming the ceiling until chips of paint and plaster fell down into my eyes. I admit that in this fevered state, I thought more than once of simply tunneling upwards, and emerging from the hole, to choke the occupant and take my prize.

I got a response, finally. He would simply tap his heels, lightly, in echo and reply to my thundering, a retort I found mocking and intolerable.

I tried horrid smells, boiling foul and mouldering scraps of food with the door and windows open, and pouring them on the threshold of 2319 in the small hours of the morning. I made complaints against him, claiming he was responsible for the noises and the smells, but the Manager, dead-eyed as he was, believed none of it, and threatened to expel me.

I began to slide notes beneath his door, angry volatile screeds, threats, grotesque descriptions of the violence I would visit on him if he did not vacate the place. They became pleading, mewling cries, offers of wealth, lies and thin tales designed to stoke his sympathy for my needs.

By the end, he would thrust the notes back out as soon as I slid them in. He was always in, always at home, and I understood this. He, like I, and so few others, understood, felt the draw of the place, of whatever was inside. In my most magnanimous and clear headed days, I knew that he and I were kindred, and he had merely had the luck of being first.

I was beginning to break, to grow thin, physically and mentally, brittle and dry. I was on the verge of giving up, not my desire for the special place above me, but of the very act of breathing, a final childish tantrum. Although I was closer than I dared dream, the distance felt magnified, and I knew if I ever left, it would haunt me, like a bullet lodged in flesh, working its way to my heart, for the rest of my days.

I hadn’t eaten in days when he came to me one night, knocking softly on the door. I had smelled the sweet death-smell growing stronger as he came down the hallway, and when he knocked I had a sickening moment where I believed that the occupant himself was the thing that called to me. But when the rapping knuckles on the door repeated, I felt, with relief, that the drawing power was still above me.

The door was open, and I bade him enter, too weak to stand from the filthy sodden chair, and too singleminded to ever lock the door.

He was truly, a citizen of the borderlands. He was plain and well groomed, dressed in expensive and pressed clothes that he wore comfortably, like a second skin. Some may have called him handsome, but it was a flavorless sort of pleasantry, symmetrical, synthetic. Only the heavy perfume of our mutual passion above clung to him, and called him out as someone like me.

He chuckled dryly at my wasting body, the piles of fetid filth and refuse that drew his gaze. But after every glance, I saw his black eyes snap upwards, towards the roof.

“I understand,” he said at last, his eyes still fixed skyward. “I really do.”

I began to cry, creaking sobs that shook my frame painfully. If he noticed, he pretended not to, whether in grace or embarrassment, I do not know.

“Soon,” he said. The word hung in the air, and coated me like a salve, a healing balm, heavy with promise. “I’m almost done with It. It’s almost done with me. You understand. It was here before us, before the City, before anyone. And It will be here long after us.”

I knelt on the floor, sliding from the chair to stand before the teacher, the one who had been in It’s presence, and would soon stand aside to let me near. He shook his head violently, and I saw his face crease. It was a face unaccustomed to sharp emotions, looking oddly fetal and new, as something strong and sharp gripped him. He took a step back, his eyes returning skyward.

“That is, if It’s not lying. It lies when It tells the truth. It waited so long for this place to be built. Patient.”

Again he shuddered, and I saw the suit was soaked with sweat, far filthier than I had originally though. Not creased, but wrinkled. I had somehow mistaken his tousled appearance for cleanliness, his chaos for order, but it was clear to be now. Beneath the night perfume of our mutual addiction, there was something else, something acrid and wrong. Fear, panic, hysteria. His still and calm was gone now, and I saw it had been a temporary posture, one he had once wielded masterfully, but could no longer hold for more than a minute.

“I’m sorry. I’ve decided, I think. It’s good to be out. Thank you.” He smiled broadly, and I saw the rot in his teeth, as I tried to puzzle the meaning in his words. “I needed to clear my head... I think...”

The words trailed off, and he turned, rocking on his heels, and was through the door and gone before I could speak. I heard the pounding of his feet down the hall, heard him trying to hold a steady pace, before breaking into a run.

Moments later I heard the door above me open and slam shut. I heard him stop, his feet planted to the ground directly above me, at the heart of the luring thing. A creaking, like something being dragged. There was a great surge of motion, announced in vibrations through the walls

An explosion of treble, a splintering symphony of glass. Outside my window, a sparkling cloud of glinting light, and an overstuffed leather chair hung briefly illuminated in the night, an absurd tableau of shattered glass and furniture. Seconds later, it was gone

I heard, in the following silence, the heavy tread of his feet. Away from the window, towards the door. Stop. A pacing circle. Stop. A sudden run, a blazing trail towards the window, towards the open night.

I raised my aching frame, pressed against the glass, the breath stopped in my lungs, and I saw him go.

One leg out, a runner jumping hurdles. Wild hair whipping in the breeze. Arms wide to the night sky. Free.

And like the glass, and the chair before, he was gone. No sound announced the impact. He simply vanished.

The blooming corpse flower smell surged, hotter and brighter than ever, and if I could have scaled the air itself to ascend into the room above me, I would have ground my fingers to the bone. Instead, I broke, each joint separating, each muscle going slack, and I dropped heavily to the floor, unconscious before I hit the ground.

***

I woke, only moments later, the sound of far away sirens trilling in the air, coming steadily closer. My body tapped into its final reserves, flooding my limbs with carefully hoarded fire, and I surged to my feet.

I didn’t have much time, the police, the manager, they would be to his room any moment. I took the stairs two at a time, and flew down the hallway.

The door was unlocked, the shining numerals 2319 glinted in the halogen glow. I put my hand on the doorknob, and sighed in glorious expectation as I pushed the door open.

The room was a twin of mine. The occupant, my predecessor, had lived like I had below, out of boxes, with minimal furniture. Waste and rumpled piles of clothes were strewn across the room. The great ragged hole in the glass sucked at the air, the sounds of traffic and the world below came to me for the first time in months. The curtains fluttered, whipping like flags of surrender.

The call was stronger than ever before, from just inside, and I closed the door behind me, my eyes vacant and searching.

It was here. The siren, the flower, the lure. At first, I could see nothing, but presently as I walked on uncertain clubbed feet, I began, finally, to perceive it.

It was invisible at first, and then it resolved from nothingness as I stepped sideways, like an impossibly thin sheaf of paper seen first from the edge.
It was a seam in the world, a tearing, a hot, and colorless rend across space. Impossibly thin, and still gaping wide, It flared, colorless and bright, in recognition of my awareness, and the cloying smell flooded my nostrils, and entwined itself around my ribs. The call was so strong, and my ecstasy was complete and total.

It seemed to curl and whip, but it never moved. Alien colors and smells and air flooded from It, and somewhere, deep in the core of my body, It spoke to me. The wordless beckon of the past months resolved, like a picture suddenly snapping into focus, and It was speaking to me at last

I was walking towards It, my hands outstretched. I was crying, openly weeping with joy and the heat of the thing seemed to awaken every nerve ending in my body. It was making me whole, healing me, comforting me, and I knew I would never want for anything, never fear. I would be loved for all time.

And It was asking so precious little in return.

I might have stepped into Its arms forever, might have been lost to its promises, if something had not awoken in me then. Perhaps it was my true self, lost to the vile chasm’s draw so long ago, emerging. Perhaps it was the unthinking panicking animal we all hold chained in our psyche, the runner, the fighter. Perhaps it was the electrical echo of the occupant, his last act of defiance still rustling in the breeze with the shredded curtains.

I do not know. Whatever it was it seized control at that moment.

I saw Its lies. I saw It, imprisoned in the sky, calling out, filthy, reeking promises to those below, those attuned to its foul wavelength. I saw delicate filaments of influence, coiling like burning plasma, down to the City below, infecting and cancerous, I saw them wrapping around the lights of men, choking, and crushing. Hateful.

I saw that It was the borderlands. It was the name to my nameless fear of the dark places. It was, and It will always be. And It would use me, break me, bend me. It already had. When I was done, no more use to It, I would be cast aside, and It would call, again.

I tugged for control of my body, traitorously still approaching this fragment of profane divinity. I pulled, hard, and when my vessel cracked free of Its grip, I slid back into my skin, and allowed the animal instincts to guide my escape.

I stopped only long enough to kick, twice, at dials of the expensive gas stove with one bare foot. The hissing rotten egg smell of gas began to twirl with the smell of It. An hour later, I would wonder at the blood pooling in my shoe with every footstep as I fled the tower, and raced to the border of the City, but not now.

I entered my flat, below. I do not remember descending the stairs, but I was there, grabbing a single still packed duffel bag and my long abandoned shoes.

It called to me from above, furious and reproachful, promising and threatening all at once. I could not shut It out, but I held tight to the image of the occupant, soaring gracefully through the air, arms failing at the task of being wings, forever hanging in the night sky.

I would leave the tower in my own way, I thought to myself, and this simple promise kept my body my own.

I lit own gas stove before I went, and curling a strip of a discarded pizza box, made a small torch, which I held to the ragged ceiling. One of the tiny frayed holes, the legacy of my vandal idiocy, began to smolder.

I do not remember choosing to do this, or deciding to kick the stove above me. I simply did, because it was, unlike everything else in the tower, unlike everything else I had done for a half of a year, right. Right, in some profound and elemental way.

When I left, It no longer was promising anything but everlasting suffering and pain. Yet I still wanted to go to It. It still held me tight. At the staircase, I very nearly went up, feeling some awful analog of gravity tugging at skyward. It would have been so easy to simply go to It then, to turn myself over to Its magnificent will, but again, I hung frozen in the air with my predecessor in my mind, saw his final relief and escape, and demanded my body to descend.

The police were talking to the manager, out on the sidewalk, calmly jotting notes as he wrung his perfectly groomed hands. He saw me coming, saw me wild eyed and unkempt, and his eyes narrowed into slits. I could hear what he thought. He thought I had come, now, to claim my spot on the waiting list, to take ownership of the room. He thought I was a grotesque fool, and a murderer.

He opened his mouth to speak, and from above there came a great and terrible roar, and a cacophony of cracking glass. A tongue of fire licked the sky from the gaping hole in tower’s side. Glass began to rain, and burning scraps of paper and clothing danced in the air. When all eyes were upward, voices raised in confusion and distress, I turned my feet, and slipped away, into the night.

***

They want me back, in the City, to answer questions, of this I am sure. I know that any day they will come with a warrant, and drag me from my home, to answer for what happened in the Tower.

And I know, of course, that I failed to kill It, I could never have even truly harmed It. At best, I kept others from it, for a short period, kept perhaps a single mad and passionate fool from falling into its slick and sweet honey trap. This, and my own temporary safety are enough, more than enough.

I also know, that even if they never find this cabin, never track down the clever twisting trail of money that allowed me to flee the City, the country, and all of my fellow men, even if I live to see a natural death, that I am not truly free.

It has marked me. Forever. That salivating, sweet smell is forever in my nostrils. It never stops speaking, and I will always see It, in every crumbling barn, in every rusting skeleton of every abandoned car. I saw Its writhing tendrils, growing and thickening across the City as I fled, saw them twine across every small border town, saw them in every dying community I’ve passed through.

It is not quite here, yet, in the thick woods, in my isolation. But It will come.

Every city is like a body. Every community of men is possessed and afflicted with all the abilities and fragility of a living being.

It is a cancer, a corrupting and spreading growth. It isolates, It squeezes, It chokes. It infects, and even if a lone cell should escape, it will bring the infection with it on its foolish flight.

It is inside me. And someday, It will have me back.

I can only hope, in the end, that I will fight. That I will not go willingly. But I know that when It calls me home, at last, I will go without question. I will return to a City that has become one immense dead place, one massive, heartless hinterland.

I will answer for my small, meaningless act of rebellion.

But not today.

Today, at the very least, I remain free.

Today is enough.




This story is under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 license

Metapost 3: An Explanation, An Excerpt

Greetings.

A few of you have inquired as to my whereabouts, and I apologize for the long silence, but I’ve been working on a pair of longer stories. One (tentatively titled... ‘One’) will be ready for you to see shortly, the other will be a long term investment. I hesitate to say ‘novel’ at this point, but it’s certainly stretching on that direction; the working title is Echoes, that’s a good enough moniker for the moment.

I’ve also spent some time editing and submitting several stories for publication in various markets, but my knowledge of the genre fiction markets is severely lacking. If any of you fine folk have any suggestions, I would be more than grateful.

Furthermore, in editing, I have found that the combined feedback from you all has been invaluable in the refining and polishing process, and for that, I am grateful beyond measure.

Thank you for reading, thank you for criticizing, and thank you for keeping me honest.

The first draft of One will be up within a few weeks, and I may share a chapter or two of Echoes as it progresses. My hope is to return to writing shorter pieces more often, but the next couple of months are proving to be complicated to say the least. But for the present, here’s a very brief segment of 'One', a little tinder to keep the fire burning.

('One' is, at the moment, an informal bridge between 'Zero' and 'Before'. I've tried not to call attention to it, but I've always believed that many of my stories have had tenuous links, or could be said to occur in the same world or worlds. There is a loose mythology to some of them, simple and nascent at the moment, but the connections have always existed in my head... I'm not sure if that brings something more to the table, or whether it's simply a lazy writing trick, so I've been hesitant to make it any more of it than necessary, preferring to let ambiguity, and not affectation, be the connecting tissue.)



One (An Excerpt)

In the night, with only dim starlight holding back the true dark, I am alone. The day’s business is done, the traps checked and reset, water collected from the evaporation pits, the perimeter alarms set. My body uncoils, the thick ropes of aching muscles unspooling as I lay in the filthy sleeping bag. The once springy down filling is clotted with a foul smelling damp, bunching into greasy clumps and knots. By next winter I will need to strip the filling, and find something to replace it, but it will not pack down as light. By next winter, I might be able to venture back into a city, and find a sporting good store. By next winter, this might be all over, or I may be dead.

I drift away, the pinpricked night differing very little from the haze of sleep. When I awake and shake the gossamer film from my consciousness, I become aware of the passage of time. The spine of silken light behind the stars, the heart of the galaxy that I have become re-accustomed with in the past month, has twisted across a quarter the sky. Small coiling tendrils of fog are coursing up the sides of the mountain, like the rising of some vaporous ocean. And behind the wet and living thrum of the brush, behind the shudder and shiver of the breeze, I hear the clank of glass and tin cans.

The alarms.



These stories are under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 license

The Gift

A little scrap of a first draft.
I'm focusing on a longer project at the moment, but I'll post a new short at least once a month.


Underneath the old stone bridge, in the early summer heat, I first met my friend. I’d come to this spot beneath the bridge for as long as I could remember, following the small creek in the our backyard down through the farmer’s fields, and behind the roaring freeway. Beneath the bridge the dirt was still cool, even in the hottest noonday sun. I’d come to the bridge to think, to play, to cry, and to dig my pale chubby fingers into the blessed cool soil, digging deep depressions in the damp earth.

The creek trickled by, but my father had told me never to go in the water; it had a thin scum on the top that reflected the light in an odd, shimmering way, like the shell of a beetle. I’d disobeyed him once when I was younger and the rash that boiled up on my legs had scabbed and bled for a week. Now, I was content to sit among the pale and drying reeds and hold tight to that primal cold in that place where the sun couldn’t reach.

On the day he was first there, the cottonwood trees were shedding their seeds, bright white silken clouds that drifted in the air like snow that somehow defied the sun. The air was thick with heat and exhaust from the freeway, buzzing over the rise like an angry hive. He was stretched out on the other side of the creek, his body half covered by the shadow of the old stone bridge. At first, I saw only a pile of ragged clothes, capped with a wide-brimmed and frayed hat, but then I saw the long, bony fingers steepled across his chest, and his calloused and blackened feet.

Tied to his big toe with a perfect bow was a thin line of fishing wire, and I saw the toe twitching slightly, tugging on the line. The hat covered his face, but beneath it, I caught the quick dance of a frayed stick or root, grasped between his teeth; it slid back and forth under the shadow of the brim. I watched him for an hour, nothing moving but his toe, the stick, and the slow rise and fall of his chest.

I didn’t move, or make a sound that I was aware of, but soon, the stick stopped its rhythmic journey, and slowly tilted upward, tucking under the brim of the hat. I saw the outline of his pale lips and teeth, as they dug in and pushed the stick upwards, lifting the filthy hat like upwards like a cellar door.

He peered out, straight at me, and blinked in the sunlight; the rest of his body lay perfectly still. He was gaunt, and sunken cheeked; his skin was weathered and tanned like leather. As his bright sunken eyes met mine, his mouth split into a wide grin, showing a row of perfect and polished white teeth clamped around the twig.

It was infectious, and I found my own face stretching into a smile. I could have stayed there, smiling with him until the day went dark. I felt content. When he relaxed his mouth and allowed the hat to drop back over his face, it was so slow that I hardly noticed the movement until the shining coals of his eyes vanished beneath the brim.

As soon as the hat obscured his bristled chin, it began to rise again, revealing cheeks puffed out like a trumpet player and eyes crossed tight together. I laughed out loud, feeling a warm wellspring of happiness inside me. The hat dropped and rose again, this time, his face was puckered, like he’d eaten a lemon. I laughed harder.

After a parade of distorted faces that left my lungs sore from laughing, he leaned forward and rose to a crouch. He removed his hat, running his hands through a thick mop of unkempt black hair. He smiled again at me, chewing on the twig, and began to twirl his feet around each other in a little waltz, coiling the fishing line around his toes.

The hook slid out of the water, dragging with it a little sparkling tangle of gold that caught the sun and ignited. Once he’d drawn the hook up to his feet, he reached down and clasped his hand over it like it was a bug. His face took on an exaggerated impression of fear, as he pretended that it was leaping in his hands, trying to escape as he struggled against it. I couldn’t help myself and I burst out laughing, and my friend flashed his wide smile. He mimed throwing underhand until I understood and held out my hands, cupped and expectant.

The little tangle of gold chain sailed in an arc across the glistening filthy water, and landed perfectly in my hands with a sound like shifting sand. It was a beautiful necklace, with a tiny golden gross encrusted with sparkling green stones. I looked up, and my friend winked, the skin around his eyes crinkling and pulling, and he raised one thing bony finger to his puckered lips. I understood, and looked back to the beautiful little gift.

When I looked up again, he was gone.

I didn’t know the girl who was missing, but she was my age, and I must have seen at at school. It made me angry to see people who didn’t know her crying and carrying on like they were the best of friends. I tried not to scowl at the little bawling clusters of kids in the hallways, and fingered the little gold chain in my pocket. I was dreaming of summer break, a scant two weeks away, and thinking about my friend when I fell, my fat clumsy feet wrapping around each other, pitching my body forward in a wave of inertia. I threw my hands out, but only succeeded in throwing the little gold charm and bending my fingers back against the hard marble floor.

It didn’t take long for the little crowds of mourners to break their stage-play of grief to laugh at me, sprawled on the floor with watering eyes. All except one dark haired girl with puffy wet eyes. She was staring at the necklace on the floor, with a look that I didn’t understand, blank, yawning and broken. Then she looked at me and screamed.

I understood then, but even as the principal and later the policemen questioned me, I played dumb. I told him I’d found the necklace outside of school that morning, repeating the story with clever little details I made sure to keep consistent. My friend had given me a gift, and I owed it to him to keep the secret. I’m not like the pretenders in the hall. I don’t care about some missing girl I never knew about, and who would have never cared for me. I care about my friends.

It was months before I saw him again, in the beginning of autumn; he was perched on top of the old stone bridge, his filthy feet swaying like an excited child. I hadn’t been let outside for the whole summer; trapped in the dry air conditioned dark of the house as my father drank and my mother cried at each new disappearance.

Most of the missing meant nothing to me, but those few whose names I recognized made me smile in secret. They were the worst, the ones that beat me, taunted me, and called me names. The ones that laughed. And I knew that I would be safe.

It made such perfect sense, that I wanted to share it with my parents, to assure them that it was only the bad people. That it was all okay. But I saw in my mother’s blasted eyes the same lying phony grief from my school. I saw her taking someone else pain and using it to plug the holes in her own emptiness, and it made me sick. When I finally felt like I was going to burst, so angry at them all for not recognizing the gift, I snuck out into the evening cool, leaving my snoring father and hollow mother and racing along the creek.

Somehow, I knew he would be there, but my heart still leapt to see him. His clothes were the same, if only more tattered and dirty, and he appeared to have the same wet and shredded stick tucked between his thin lips. He smiled wide at me, and I sat beneath the bridge in contented quiet, just relishing the company of someone who simply understood and asked no more.

In wordless conversation, he showed me how he could crack the knuckles of his toes, just by shifting them quickly, playing a crackling little rhythm of pops and ticks as his feet shuddered and wiggled. I laughed as he juggled a pair of apples and a large dusty stone, taking a bite out of each apple as it passed his mouth, and miming a painful bite from the rock. The sun set and the stars pierced the sky; he was showing me how he could fold those long fingers into the shape of a flying bird, when I heard shouts, crying my name far in the distance.

My friend turned to me with a little wink and then dropped from the bridge, landing almost silently in the dirt beside me. He crouched, his shining smile and papery skin just a few feet from me, and I smelled a sweet, warm smell like cloves and cinnamon. His hand darted out towards my ear like a striking rattlesnake, and his face was a clown’s mask of surprise and shock. He twisted his hand with a flourish to reveal a key ring, packed with bouquet of dozens of keys, brass, silver, chrome, shining in the waning sunlight. The key ring fell into my outstretched hands, and as I turned it over again, I thought how lucky I was to have a true friend at last.

Then, he was gone, and my father’s hands were on my shoulders, shaking me and yelling. A group of half a dozen men, my fathers friends and important men in town, clustered around him, gripping lanterns and rifles, huddling close together, their wide faces reflecting fear and moonlight as their eyes darted at each noise.

I wanted to laugh at them, feeling that warmth in my chest as I saw what it looked like when bad people were afraid, at last. So much is changing for the better, and I have my friend to thank for it. The key-ring was heavy in my pocket, hidden from them and my father’s drunken anger. I clasped it tight, so it was perfectly silent, a reassuring weight in my stubby fingers.

Later in the night, as my father and his cowering posse combed the countryside for what I knew they would never find, my mother covered me in crocodile tears and breathless constrictor hugs. It was only the little weight of the gift in my pocket that kept me from being sick with contempt.

When the winter came, the roads were blocked and no one could have left town if they’d wanted to. The food grew scarce and soon there weren’t enough of my father’s friends to patrol the town, and the vanishings and disappearances spiked. I confess that I was surprised at how truly rotten the town must have been, but I trusted my friend. He knows what is right.

The keyring has kept me alive. While my mother and father doled out the last portions of dried rice and beans, I passed unseen through the silent white town to find a treasure trove of locked larders and pantries. My friend is wise, as well as benevolent. I considered sharing this gift with my parents, but if they were meant to be chosen, my friend would have let me know. So I stayed warm and fed, and my parents grow thin and drawn.

One morning I awoke to the pure silence of winter, the snow robbing the world of all sound. The usual movements and shuffle of my parents were gone, and even the creaking bones of our old house were silent. There was a sudden swell of happiness in me, like a youthful Christmas morning, before I was told it was all a lie.

I danced through the empty house, no longer trying not to smile. No longer holding back my joy, because I knew: the gift was complete now. I pulled on my snow-boots and jacket and burst out into the silent world, purged of evil, emptied of predators, cleansed of all that was wrong.

My friend was at the bridge, sitting cross legged in the cobblestone road. He was covered in snow, it hid his entire hat under a broad cone of white, and it crested up against his sides like frozen waves. His broad shining smile rivaled my own, and his skin was flushed with warmth. When I approached him, he stood, slow and elegant, like a tree growing in front of my eyes, and I noticed for the first time how very tall my friend was. When he’d risen to his full height, he stretched, in exaggerated pantomime complete with a yawn that stretched the corners of his wide mouth. Then he leaned forward and pressed something into my hands, something cold and hard, and his long fingers wrapped around my little hands like a spider. I clenched it tight, not wanting to take my eyes off him, knowing that his work was done, and this meeting would be bittersweet and final.

He smiled warmly at me, winked one last time, and hoisted a filthy burlap sack to his shoulder. A few feet down the road, he turned and tipped his hat to me, sending a little flurry of snow down that obscured his face, and then he was gone, swallowed up into the swirling whiteness.

I opened my hands slowly, watching the bluish fingers curl away from the last gift, and my heart’s warmth flooded through my body, and hot little tears formed at the corners of my eye. My parents wedding bands, tarnished and simple, lay in my hand; the rings were somehow, impossibly, linked and intertwined.

I stood in the unbroken quiet and perfect drifts of snow, and looked out at the world. The silence, the freedom. The perfect and beautiful loneliness. This was the true gift. This was my friend’s work. And he asked nothing in return. All I can do, is to someday, try and return the favor.




Here's a little sketch I did of the Vagabond.



This story and picture are under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 license

Metapost 2: A Change of Format, Ephemera and Apocrypha

Greetings, everyone.

First, the news. I've decided, in the new year, to make a slight change to my writing habits. I'll be spending my writing time editing my previous shorts and beginning to plot out a few long-form tales. As such, I'll be posting a new short exercise/story just once a month, on or before the last Sunday of each month. I hope you'll all keep checking back in, and I will probably post fragments or chapters of some of the longer works without warning.

Thank you again for reading these exercises, and for passing it on to your friends (or enemies). A special thanks to those who've been commenting and giving me feedback, especially the negative feedback. You continue to keep me honest.

To keep the tap on, I'm sharing with you two oddities that I wrote before I began the weekly story project.

First, is a rewritten and rephrased version of the very first horror story I wrote, "The Hole in the Wall." While I like certain elements of it, including a just slightly tweaked climax that adds some extra menace to the proceedings, much of it, including an mid-story verb tense change, falls flat. I wrote this right after I finished "Up", very early in my evolution, and it shows. I haven't touched it since I began writing in earnest.

But, I thought it might prove of interest.

Secondly, is a mere fragment, the beginning of something longer that I may or may not revisit. It began as an idea for a screenplay that I began to write out in prose, but I've not gone back to the idea. I haven't looked at it since I wrote it around the same time as the second draft of "The Hole in the Wall", and again, I can't think of a better place to air it out.

Enjoy.


The Hole in the Wall (Revised)

It’s been 12 days since I saw the apartment last, but there are echoes of it in everywhere, here in my temporary home. Light streaming through window will remind me of the bright, spacious living room. The squeak of the floorboards recalls the creaking first step in the hallway. The smell of cracked drywall sets my teeth on edge.

I’ve severed all ties with the apartment; all my possessions are in storage or stacked in sagging boxes here in Leif’s squalid garage. I went through the vague motions of filing the police report, and leaving an explanatory message on my landlady’s machine. I’ve done all the right and proper things, so there seems little left to do but share the why, before I move out of the City, and every city, for good.

Last September, my fiancé and I moved into the apartment; the top floor of a stately little four unit building in the Benton Park neighborhood of St. Louis. We were still living out mostly out of boxes six weeks later when the county hospital called us in the middle of the night. Her grandfather, a seemingly invincible ox of a man, who had raised her since her parents passed during her sixth grade year, had collapsed in grocery store line, a blood clot lodged in his tree trunk neck.

She had no choice, yet resentment welled in me when she took our car back to Twin Oaks to care for him, to watch and bathe him as his frozen left side slowly thawed and his mighty body withered. We talked of hiring a full time nurse… but it was the sort of idle way a barren couple might discuss children. She went to watch him die. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t lie awake at night, still on the right side of our half empty bed, praying wordlessly for death to hasten.

Despite her absence (a sensation not of pain but of emptiness, a tangible hole) I grew to enjoy in some small way, the luxury of a solitary existence. The apartment stirred feelings of contentment in me from the moment I saw it. It was adulthood, and reward for responsibility made solid and earthly. Newly remodeled, energy efficient, double paned windows on every wall casting beams of sunlight onto the cool and well worn wooden floors. It was the embodiment of our transition from sunburned country children into modern city and cubicle dwellers, rapidly paling beneath the fluorescents.

It was never perfect, but at first, the idiosyncrasies and nodes of strangeness in the apartment felt like pleasant affectations, Persian rug flaws of architecture and design that only increased our affection for the place. The bottom floor was all garages, laundry machines, and strangely irregular spaces with unfinished walls, filled with construction supplies gathering dust. The two upper floors each contain two mirrored units, one facing the street, and the other facing a sad little stone and weed garden that I preferred to ignore.

To my mild disappointment, the worst of the flaws were the walls, thin in a manner I would not have believed possible. The first night of unpacking I heard with sharp clarity the conversation of my downstairs neighbors, a heated discussion about a pair of off-season artichokes spoiling in the fridge. Over the next few weeks, we became intimately accustomed to their schedules; their alarm clocks, their love of forensic cop dramas, their histrionic arguing. I knew when they showered, I knew when they fucked. To be sure, they knew the same about us. I learned their names when we moved in and promptly forgot; the more we knew about each other from voyeuristic proximity, the less we actually wanted to deal with each other.

Two months ago, they moved out without giving a word or reason. One morning I awoke to the sound of dragging furniture, and watched with bemusement from my father’s worn recliner as they loaded a rented moving van. The next morning, the apartment door was open, revealing a swept clean doppelganger of my own living space.

Within a week the other tenant on the lower floor vacated, the door now permanently open on another blank canvas of a home. I can’t even recall his face, an anonymous gray visage that simply stopped appearing in the hallways. The other top unit, opposite my own, had been vacant since I moved in; this left me alone in the building, king of a tiny rented castle.

The youngest of five children, I knew how to appreciate solitude. I relished in the carefree freedom of heavy footfalls late at night, the loud retort of video game gunfire and explosions, the echoing moans of pornography, and the long weekend mornings spent entirely naked and stoned. I occasionally would wander into the empty other units, drifting through the uninhabited, sterile cleanliness with a mild shapeless guilt intertwined with curiosity.

It was a few weeks later that it started. The first of the strange signifiers of something wrong; signposts in a language that I am only now fluent in.

In the small hours of one Thursday morning I began to hear sounds again from downstairs. Delicate and tiny at first, but sustained and insistent. I strained in the dark to hear it, but it was slippery and would not stay in my grasp. When I could isolate it from the wind, I heard something between a hushed conversation with only one voice, or a small motor spinning in the dark, it was a babbling and inconsistent drone. It set my heart pumping as I lay perfectly still, mesmerized by the sounds. I desperately wanted to identify it, but it remained inscrutable.

I collected shifting rationalizations for it as I vainly attempted to sleep that night. A refrigerator motor going south, a failing heating or cooling duct, air in the water pipes. Hours later, I was able to drift to sleep, and despite the return of the noise each following night, I began to accept it. Even when the drone was augmented with a steady, delicate tapping noise, I had learned to live with it, to allow it to become part of the background white noise of urban life.

The sound of creaking boards began to permeate my space, not beneath my own feet but floating up from all around me. It was a warm spring, and I simply associated the sound with the dry expansion of the warming timbers. Although the sounds of a building stretching and contracting have always unsettled me, I never once doubted that these sounds could be anything but benign.

The vague stirrings of unease became solid the night I discovered the great peculiarity of the closet.

I am crouching over the sink, brushing my teeth with a fraying brush when from behind me comes a sudden, dry thud. I freeze in position, the brush protruding from my pursed lips, desperately waiting for some further sign of an intruder, or an explanation to the sound, but it is dead silent. Even the regular drone from downstairs has stopped. I walk the house with silent steps, turning every light on in turn and searching each room, but I am alone.

I check the hall closet last.

The closet lies directly behind the bathroom, exactly where I heard the sound. I open it up, flicking the light on and feverishly hoping to see a rational excuse, one of the last unpacked boxes toppled on the floor. But the closet is immaculate and the sound still hangs unexplained in the air.

Unwilling to accept the sound without explanation, I reach out and tap on the wall between closet and bathroom. The sound is oddly hollow. It slowly dawns on me that the closet is… more narrow than it should be in relation to the bathroom. The certainty grows as I pace out the distance using my bare feet, and then with the tape measure from the tool kit my fiancé’s grandfather gave us. Sure enough, there are 40 extra inches between the bathroom wall and the closet.

My capacity for rationalization is slightly strained. Surely there’s extra insulation to keep the bathroom warmer, or maybe all walls are thicker than I imagine. I’ve never built a house; I have no frame of reference for judging. I imagine a hammer left inside the wall by a careless contractor finally slipping after months of teetering. Once the adrenalin flood dissipates, I am able to forget the incident and drift quickly to sleep, relishing the absence of the babbling sounds from beneath.

The drone returns the next night.

The next few weeks pass in a haze of my rising discomfort in the apartment, until that warm Friday night. It’s two in the morning, and I am returning home late from a perfunctory office trip to the bar, not nearly as drunk as I would like. I am thinking with a grimace of self loathing about the clean laundry I’ve left to wrinkle in the dryer the night before, and I almost miss noticing that the door to the flat beneath mine is shut. I’ve become used to seeing the empty mirror image every day. Maybe the landlady finally started showing the units, I think,

Rationalize, rationalize, rationalize.

Down the stairs on the small shared back balcony, I carry an oversized duffle bag to the laundry room, sleep weighing down my ankles and eyelids. I stuff cold, wrinkled shirts into the bag, missing the usual warmth of the process; my mind drifts away to the thought of clean sheets and a morning without an alarm clock.

There are two things you should know about me at this point: I turn every light off when I leave a room. No matter what. My dad used to beat the shit out of me when the power bill spiked higher than he felt it should. Due to the same Pavlovian conditioning, I lock every door as I pass through it. I’ve even locked the back door on the way down the steps.

As I start back up the steps, the nylon cord of the duffel cutting into my shoulder; I happen to glance up at my bedroom window.

The light is on.

And there's a silhouette against the closed blinds.

I feel a warm trickle on my thigh, as the hair on the back of my neck snaps to fucking attention.

And then the light goes out.

It happens in less than a second. Thirty seconds later I’m still frozen in place, trying to parse impossible data and decide whether I’ve actually seen what I know I’ve seen. Rationalization finally fails me and I softly retrace my steps down the stairs and out through the garage, fighting the animal urge in my thighs and heart and feet to run at full speed away from the apartment.

Across the street, I stand beneath in the streetlight shadow of a dying elm, and call first the police and then a cab. After five minutes of silence, moments after I begin to chastise myself for overreacting, the venetian blinds on the living room window part slightly, and I feel the electric tingle of connecting with invisible eyes. And then it is gone.

The cab comes 20 minutes later, and the police never show up. I stay at a hotel the next night and on Sunday morning; my co-worker Leif accompanies me back to the apartment, to see how much has been stolen.

It’s all there. My laptop is still charging next to the bed, the brand new flatscreen TV stands monolith like and untouched in the living room. My stomach is twisted into knots. With Leif, a few other friends, and a pickup truck I move everything out the next day.

When we are almost finished I invite them to help themselves to the last beers in the fridge, and they squat in the empty living room, allowing sweat to evaporate off dripping brows. Emboldened by daylight and company I slip downstairs to examine the downstairs apartment, hoping to make a little sense of the unconnected puzzle pieces I have.

I go straight to the hall closet.

It has the same abnormally thick wall.

Only in this wall, someone has hammered a large, jagged hole, exposing the tiny crawl space between.

And in the dusty cavity, flat against the wall, is a cheap hardware store ladder; running up through the darkness, to the space behind the walls, in my apartment. As I stand, staring in dawning horror at the brushed aluminum and orange paint of the ladder, it moves. It bounces once against the wall and goes still. Dust drifts down in the motionless air.

Then, it creaks, slightly, shifting under invisible weight.

I can’t breathe. My lungs are clawing for oxygen and the edge of my vision goes dark, but I can’t breathe. My limbs feel cold and dead.

The next thing I know, I am outside beneath the elm tree again. I am calling Leif on his mobile phone and asking him to meet me downstairs with the last load of boxes. I don’t mention the hole, or the ladder. I just want to be away from there.

I don’t know how he got into my apartment from that space. I don’t want to know. All I care about is never seeing that building again. I mailed the keys to my landlord, and told her to keep the deposit; filled out an obligatory report with a terminally disinterested cop.

I’m burning through my last vacation days, and ignoring the insistent texts and emails from my boss. I can’t bring myself to go back to work. My chest constricts slightly, thinking about the dense hive of the downtown office building, people surrounding me at all times.

Leif has been letting me sleep on his sagging couch in his filthy one bedroom house, but I can tell I am wearing my welcome thin, and I am leaving in the morning. It’s just as well, I haven’t slept well since I abandoned the apartment; I lie awake, acutely aware of his presence in the next room, hearing him snoring, hearing the sheets shifting every time he moves. It’s time to leave.

Two days ago, my fiancé’s grandfather got a hold of his shotgun, put it in his mouth, and pulled the trigger with his toe. Brave old bastard. I’ll be moving with her into his weathered farmhouse, with acres of barren and rocky fields surrounding it. It’s quiet out there.

It sounds like heaven.

I haven't told her yet, and I don’t think I will. I told her simply that I quit my job and moved out. She's devastated, wounded, and it would be cruel to add to it now. I may have to tell her someday if it ever comes up, because I don't want to live in the city anymore. I don’t ever want to hear people moving beneath my feet, or on the other side of a wall.

Never again.



Starfall (A Fragment)

The night the satellites fall, I am sprawled on the lawn of the home where I grew up, drinking my father’s oldest bottle of scotch. The air in the valley suburbs is crystal clear and my eyes water as I trace the shapes of familiar constellations I haven’t seen in years of city life. Orion, Cassiopeia, Ursa Minor, the Pleiades. I fill my head with their mythic names, displacing the lingering tangle of wills, advanced health care directives and death certificates.

The scotch is as smoky and warm as the night is clear and cold, and it infuriates me to see that my father has never opened it, never even tasted it. The dog eared book on his nightstand will never be finished; a stack of rented films will never be seen. My throat burns now as it tightens and my eyes sting; I suck in a cool draft of night air.

The first streak of light cuts through the haze of my regret and clears my mind. The next comes only moments later and I grinned in childlike delight as the frequency increased, the sky now crisscrossed with luminous arcs, enthralling and captivating me.

A few minutes later the first dull thumps roll across the valley floor. Deep tremors, rolling through the earth as much as in the air, pass beneath my feet, rattling the windows and shuddering in my lungs. The falling stars continue to streak, each one now punctuated with an impact.

Disoriented panic and bile rise in my gorge as I stand on uncertain legs, and scan the horizon. The first of the fires are burning now, and columns of smoke are lit by the bright tangles of their tendrils. I watch as little blossoms of fire bloom and grow into thick vines of fire and smoke.

I stare for long moments in disbelief at the flaming sentinels that flare on the horizon, when gradually I become aware of a new noise; a deep bass hum, a melodic drone counter point to the rhythmic explosions.

At first it is warbling at the edge of my hearing insistently, but it changes, quickly. It seems to solidify in my ears like a tentacle, a hard and solid instrument of sound and I feel a sharp bite of pain throughout my head, as it wriggles deep into my skull. It shuts out the fire and concussions and cold grass on my bare feet, and my world withdraws into one bright, hot spasm.

Then it is gone, and the noise evaporates into a gentle electric sigh that seems to crackle and dissipate from the very air. In its passing, the streetlights flicker and go silently dead. The house behind me is dark. A thousand ambient hums from radios, televisions, refrigerators, and light bulbs dissipate in that moment. Without the sudden silence in the gentle sea of background noise, the steady impacts around grow louder. The fires burn brighter in the sudden blackness.

My face is wet; I raise my hand to my nose and it comes away sticky and warm. The heat in my blood from the scotch and sorrow are flooding out now, displaced by cold panic and fright. My mobile phone has leapt into my hand, promising some sort of clarity, a tenuous connection to the news, an emergency broadcast, or another person; some way for me to dissect and categorize what is happening, but it is leaden and dead.

Already the smoke is blotting the sky. I see the constellations that moments ago provided me with a sense of cool order and stability. They are vanishing behind the red veil of burning farmlands and particulate clouds. This is the last time I will see them. This is the last time I will see the sky. I know this now with sinking dread.

My mind is spinning in rusty circles, and I can formulate no plan, can articulate no goal, and can not identify even a direction to run in. I am lost and alone in a rain of falling stars.

These stories are under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 license

No Man's Land

Had quite a bit of trouble with this, despite a lot of extra time budgeted for writing,
Procrastinated, and couldn't seem to to get terribly excited about it.
Which is a shame, because I think that disinterest shows, even thought I like the idea.
Playlist of some period (and not so period) music.


Unteroffizier Erich Lang awakes long after the dawn to the distant sound of artillery. The gunmetal sky ripples with threatening black clouds, and the dusty smell of rain hangs in the chill air. He is slumped back against the earthen wall, his left arm crooked and folded behind him. It comes awake in a flare of pinpricks and fire, and he winces as he works it free and shakes. His slender frame is wrapped in his thick woolen coat, sodden and heavy with mud, and he feels cold water seeping in through his threadbare trousers. Besides the upturned helmet lying in the mud a few yards away, he is alone in narrow trench.

He pulls his long legs toward his body and stands, feeling the cold air glide through the shifting folds of his clothes. The coat tugs at him as he stands, weighted down with filth. There is water in his boots, running down his legs as he stands to soak through the layered socks that protected the last bit warmth and dryness. He scowls at the mud and the sky, and they are unmoved.

He winces against the sudden pain in his head and chest as he tries to sort out the jumble of memories and awakening thoughts. He wonders idly what day it is, but he cannot recall the chaplain’s last sermon, the only landmark he has to mark the progress of the days. He tries to remember the night before, or at least some small hint of how he’d ended here, soaking up rainwater in the trench. The preceding days are a monotone fog, a jumble of images and impressions of mud soaked boredom and terror.

“Thought you might be dead, ” comes a voice from his left. He turns to see a figure, leaning on the wooden post at the crook in the trench. His face is obscured by a gloved hand gripping a smoldering cigarette. Erich blinks and strains to focus on the man, but his blood is now surging in anticipation of tobacco.

He takes a few awkward steps, and he can see now, the crooked chin and bulbous nose of Karl Strauss. Aromatic smoke seeps from between his yellowed teeth, and Erich wordlessly extends his hands. Karl drops the small leather pouch into them. When Erich has rolled, lit and inhaled his first cigarette, he clears his throat and spits on the hard packed earth.

“Why did you let me sleep out here? I could have froze,” he rasps. His throat is raw and catches when he speaks. Karl chuckles, a deep rumble from his barrel chest, and flicks his cigarette against the wall. It collides noiselessly with a support beam and blossoms into a hundred momentary sparks.

“I let you do what you like, Lang.” He grins at Erich and claps him sharply on the back. Erich momentarily considers anger, but cannot find the heart for it.

The low tremor of a distant explosion ripples through the dirt, and Erich stiffens.

“Big guns. Far away,” Karl says, and Erich begins to relax.

“Us or them?”

Karl shrugs and his eyes bulge slightly. For the thousandth time, Erich can see how perfectly Karl was suited to his life before the war. He pictures Karl on the stage, greasepaint glinting in the lights, playing the clown, the fool, for the cream of Bavaria. A natural.

Out here, in the blindspot of God, Karl is a natural of another sort. Erich has been with him in the beginning, since Belgium. Erich can recall the clown’s visage, somehow pleasant and comical still, in the firelight of Andenne, as they burnt the village and, fearing guerilla fighters, shot all the men.

Karl and Erich walk the trench, taking the traverse back through the lines. A few men huddle for warmth in small groups, smoking, or warming their hands on tin mugs of coffee. There is a lethargic stillness to the men, and they keep their eyes fixed on the ground or skyward, but avoid eye contact. Erich is grateful for the quiet passage.

The first guard post is empty, and the mounted machine gun and mortar are untended. Erich looks to Karl, but he seems unconcerned. Karl has kept a small rank superiority to Erich for the past three years, and Erich has come to depend on relinquishing all judgement and worry to the older man. It has allowed to live this long, unquestioning.

Only the Chaplain sits at the mess hall benches, solemnly dipping a crumbling dry biscuit into his coffee. Karl and Erich join him, following his lead to soften the rocky bread. The Chaplain, Sebastian Raus looks up at them with watery brown eyes through his scratched and chipped spectacles, and nods, almost imperceptibly, before returning to the patient vivisection of his meal.

Erich thinks to ask him what day it is, but can’t imagine knowing would be worth the effort, and moves to lay his jacket on a small stove. Anemic smoke drifts from it, and it seems no warmer than the surroundings. They sit in silence, draining the last of the coffee and rolling cigarettes from Karl’s seemingly endless pouch.

“I just realized,” starts Sebastian, his voice tenuous from disuse. “I haven’t seen an officer in at least a day.”

“This is a good thing, most likely,” Karl huffs with his crooked grin.

“What if... What if the line is breached, and we’re cut off, with no one to tell us?” The Chaplain does not appear worried, merely curious. For a moment, Erich considers the logic in this conclusion, and cold panic begins to coalesce in him.

“Stick to the sermons, father,” Karl snorts his derision.

But the idea gnaws at Erich through the day. He passes scattered and listless men, all strangers to him, but no officers. It occurs that he cannot recall the last briefing they had. At an empty guide post, he raises his head tentatively above the outside wall, and gazes across the front, toward the French line.

As it has a thousand times before, the stark unearthliness of no man’s land catches his breath and turns his heart to ice. Jagged cinders in the shape of trees jut defiantly from the craters and hillocks of carrion soaked mud. Erich can see blue hands clutching at the sky, the ragged shreds of boys from across the Empire.

The land is dead, Erich knows this in some deep and primal way; he’s seen burned farms, and razed towns, but out here, it’s different somehow. There’s a palpable emptiness, a hollow that absorbs all sound, and cuts away at those that persist in living here. Erich can feel it, reaching out to him from the monochrome charnel fields. A shiver twists around his spine.

“I know it doesn’t look like it, but, He is here.” Sebastian’s voice is quiet and hollow. Erich turns to regard the Chaplain briefly, before returning his gaze back to the void.

“I admire your faith, Sebastian,” Erich leaves the next part unsaid. Sebastian has been insistent and dedicated, but they’ve had this conversation many times. Erich knows they are going through the motions to satisfy Sebastian’s guilt, but today, he’s too tired to humor him. Erich hasn’t believed since Andenne. Sebastian’s smile is weary, and he looks grateful for Erich’s non-participation.

“You’ll see,” he says, at last.

They stand in silence, as a thin and fetid miasma of fog drifts over the dead land and spills like molasses into the trench. Erich is looking at the fog thicken and blot out the unburied dead, when he turns to see Sebastian is gone, the fog and the dead land stealing even the sound of his footsteps.

The sky darkens and Erich gives up any hope of being dry or warm today. A concertina picks out a lively tune in the distance, but the fog muffles the sounds and robs the life from the notes. Erich tries to follow the wilting music, taking traverses and glancing down each line, but it always stays in the distance, circling around him in the encroaching gloom. At last, it dies away, mid stanza with a mournful trill, and Erich is alone in the deepening gloom

He fights down panic as he backtracks towards the front line. The dark and the mist have muffled the world, the only sound is the scratching shuffle of his wet wool coat and the tread of his boots. The trench is empty, and he is alone. Above him the sky is a bruise, purple and darkening. He struggles to recall which direction the makeshift barracks are in, but this only makes him realize that he’s not quite sure where he is at this moment.

The fear has him now, a cold blue corpse’s hand clutching at his lungs. He struggles to catch his breath and the filthy damp in his clothes presses inward, smothering his skin and extinguishing the heat like a flame.

The world pitches a little, shudders, and he’s suddenly aware of sitting, Karl above him and sliding a lit cigarette between his fingers. Erich catches a hold of his drumbeat heart and focuses on the warmth of the smoke. Karl is playing the father, his best paternal mask on his face.

“I worry about you, Erich,” Karl says at last.

“What’s going on?” Erich demands. Karl smiles, sadly, and helps Erich to his feet.

“Does it matter?” Karl offers at last, turning away. “Get some sleep, boy.”

He hums tunelessly, and soon the fog swallows his music and the burning ember of his cigarette, and Erich is alone, again. For the first time he can remember, Karl’s assurance has not thawed the frost in him. His heart begins to surge again, terror winding around his ventricles and constricting. He loses his breath and begins to pant, dropping his helmet and running his fingers through his filthy hair. The sky seems to contract around him, and the trench stretches away infinitely. Erich is gripped by fear, and he slumps against the earthen barricade.

There is a low thud, followed by an angry hissing, and a bright column of red fire arcs into the sky, igniting the black fog. The world is suddenly bright and painted crimson. He stumbles to the edge of the trench, and looks over the edge, hoping pitifully not to see what he knows is there.

The nightmare landscape of filth and gore is cast into sharp and dancing relief by the burning flare, and the graveyard is picked out in sharp contrast. The dead trees loom menacingly like prison bars around the dead. The fog hovers like a noxious living thing, it’s tendrils caressing the defiled earth.

In the hellish stillness, he sees them, surging from the fog. Hundreds, thousands of the enemy, breaking across the pitted ground like a wave. Bayonets on rifle barrels shudder across the surface like quills, and they are pressed together so close that Erich can not pick one from the next.

He grasps at his back for his rifle, and realizes with a sickening lurch that his doesn’t have it, hasn’t had it all day. His sidearm holster is empty, the leather damp and torn.

They are closer now, and the world is silent. Erich can see their hollow, empty eye sockets. He can see their hanging, shattered jaws and torn leathery skin. He can see the French soldiers in ragged uniforms, and the torn and burnt shapes of civilians. He can see his friends, his comrades. They all bear down on him beneath the waning flare light in utter and unbroken quiet.

They crash over the edge of the trench, and Erich feels a bayonet slide into his lungs, hears the rifles fire, and smells the burning wool and meat from his ragged wounds. He is crushed backwards, his arm folding beneath him as he tumbles to the floor.

The rotting thing above him stands, panting. Erich looks up to it, but instead of worm choked cavities, he sees... watery blue eyes in a filthy, young face. He sees fear that matches his own. He sees a child. He sees. He begins to understand.

The fog, at last, obscures his sight.

***

Erich awakes long after the dawn to the distant sound of artillery. The gunmetal sky ripples with threatening black clouds. He is slumped back against the earthen wall, his arm crooked and folded behind him. It comes awake in a flare of pinpricks and fire. Besides the upturned helmet lying in the mud a few yards away, he is alone.




This story is under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 license