Small Beer Press
www.lcrw.net

Copyright ©2007 by Authors

First published in 2007, 2007

NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet

No. 21, November 2007

Made by:

Gavin J. Grant & Kelly Link

with help from

Jedediah Berry, Micahel J. DeLuca, Annabel Link

Contents copyright (c) the authors

www.lcrw.net

Small Beer Press

150 Pleasant Street #306

Easthampton, MA 01027

www.smallbeerpress.com info@smallbeerpress.com

ISSN 1544-7782

Cover art by Tatsuro Kiuchi (mejirushi.com).

CONTENTS

The Night and Day War by Alice Sola Kim

Dear Aunt Gwenda

The Curmudgeon by Adam Ares

The Lake by Matthew Cheney

On a Dark and Featureless Plain by Stephanie Brady Tharpe

Two Variations by Jeannette Westwood

A Primer on New Wave and Speculative Fiction in Japan by Mamoru Masuda

Clay by Kirstin Allio

Two Poems by Lauren Bartel

The Postern Gate by Brian Conn

The Mysterious Mr. M by Abby Denson

The Coder by Benjamin Parzybok

Maps to God by Corie Ralston

The Blokes of Ball Point by Suzanne Baumann

Sanctuary by Carol Emshwiller

Today's Writers Today

* * * *

The Night and Day War by Alice Sola Kim

The new sickness. I stopped being able to sleep. Staying up all night wasn't as glamorous as I thought it would be. The cold reached its height and I thought it would crush me. I sat up wrapped in a down comforter and surfed the internet all night. The moonlight and the glow of the monitor were working an unknown alchemy on me. I felt that I turning into something blue and glass and ersatz.

And my parents were frightened of me. They were thinking of turning me over to the military, and the military would tell my parents that I would be cared for by scientists and possibly receive an ROTC scholarship to college, but in reality they would extract my brain juices and create a hyper-potent wakefulness serum, to be injected into top pilots and Navy SEALs and torturers who had just that much more to go before they could stop. If you don't finish torturing before going to bed for the night, doesn't that mean your work is undone come morning? The pain that must build itself on more pain. The lessening, then disappearance of hope. The blood that must not dry, the edges of skin that will not blunt and go dead. I don't know how I knew all of this; I just did. You may think I've seen too many X-Men films but I haven't. I've only seen one. What I knew was true.

I filled out the forms and asked my teachers for recommendations and sent in the application and when I got in, I told my parents I was leaving. The enrollment at Night School had always been low, and now that the Doomsday Clock was one minute to twelve, that only made it easier to gain admission.

Mom and Dad, I didn't leave because I didn't love you anymore. Mom and Dad, I was frightened of you. The things you would do to me or make other people do to me, same difference, only because you were afraid of those purple hours late at night, early in the morning-before-it-is-morning. Those hours during which I paced crazy eights into my bedroom carpet. I would never hurt you.

* * * *

Night Class. I used to have all these incredibly lame stupidass internet friends who I didn't like at all, because they could chat with me at all hours of the night. It is a special kind of loneliness being the only person awake, and this bad feeling only grew when I could feel my parents shifting in the bedroom next to me, their sleep restless and incomplete.

So even the stupidest of roflmaos and idks and g2gs felt like blessings, the uncapitalized strings of letters like ropes that kept me bound to the planet even during the worst moments, when I felt as though my worrywart brain would speed and burst out through the top of my skull.

When I enrolled at the boarding school, I chose Night Class instead of Day Class, so that I would be shielded when my loneliness was worst. Instead of being the most terrible time of all, Night would be a glamorous country, populated with vampires and the sleep disordered and the inexplicably nocturnal. No longer would I read and read and read about Mutually Assured Destruction and look out at the sodium lights that were so harsh that they felt like an eye disease, the utterly empty streets, and wonder if what was doomed to happen had—in actuality—already come to pass.

* * * *

The work-study program. My best friend here was named Bart. Bart was paranoid for a reason. I felt great pity for him, because many of the terrible things that slam people without warning happened to Bart long after he had seen them coming. Bart was a person who awoke into many of his nightmares, rather than out of them.

A few minutes after we met, Bart was telling me the story of how his family came to South Korea. “The FBI put a wiretap on our phone, and then we were deported. We had a laundromat before we were deported and then they took it away. I wonder if the FBI kept the laundromat and now the FBI are living the Korean immigrant dream instead of my family. Maybe they employ our Korean doppelgangers to pretend-staff the place. Did you ever see that episode of ‘The Simpsons’ where they get all of these actors to play the family so that Mr. Burns could trick Bart, hey that's my name, into doing something? I forget what? You know what is so fucked? That's like one of my worst nightmares. I had to watch one of my worst nightmares on ‘The Simpsons'! I never watched that show again."

Bart was on drugs. Bart was always on drugs. Ritalin, Adderall, Sudafed, Dexedrine, Provigil, Vivarin, Concerta, Excedrin, and Ambien for the holidays. Neither of us went home for Christmas break. I'd visit Bart's dorm room every once in a while, shake him until he mumbled and then I would dribble applesauce or Swanson's chicken broth into his mouth from a big squirt bottle that used to hold contact lenses solution. I don't believe that Bart remembered how he stayed alive during the winter holidays, but he was always a good friend to me after that. Ambien has close connections with amnesia, just listen to that low dull ammmm, and I wondered if that was what was necessary to be able to sleep—to forget everything every day, once a day before bed, the opposite of finding six impossible things to believe.

During the day, Bart worked as an office assistant for the school. He took classes at night. Bart was one of the lucky work-study students. Most of them had to work in the cafeteria. They were always exhausted and many of them left their hairnets on when they went to class. One of the work-study students sat behind me for English class, and when I turned to pass her an exam, I saw that the hairnet had begun to take root in her scalp, gripping her forehead delicately.

The work-study kids were so tired that they always seemed to be sleeping with their eyes open. And when they did speak—in a thick, surreal tongue—it was as though the dream they were dreaming only happened to correspond to reality.

It was rumored that they could tell the future. I believed it. Everything tells the future. You just need to know how to read it. I had heard that Night Class was thinking about offering a seminar on it—the reading and comprehension of goat entrails, tea leaves, email spam, the many dreams of the work-study students.

On the way to World History, Bart asked me to choose one of these guys for President—a guy who was a vegetarian and didn't smoke, or a guy who smoked cigars all the time and had done really badly in school. I picked.

His eyes widened. “Ha ha,” he said. “You picked Hitler as president. And you killed Churchill."

"No I didn't,” I said. “You never mentioned the Holocaust. And you didn't mention that the person I didn't pick was going to die. This is not a good game, Bart."

"Oh,” Bart said. “Yeah, I added that myself. The moral of the story is, you shouldn't trust people just because they're vegetarians. You should thank me, you learn stuff from me."

"I'm not thanking you. You made me kill Churchill,” I said, and I stepped on the back of his shoe. He tripped and we both laughed.

Bart's favorite games were either/ors, would you rathers. We started out as friends because I was already ready to choose, always ready to be wrong or not.

* * * *

Fashion. The rich kids at this school were frightening because they didn't wear preppy Lacoste or skanky Juicy Couture or the other things you might expect from rich kids at boarding school. This year they liked wearing Comme des Gar?ons, boys and girls both with red unguent smeared underneath their eyes like cannibalistic football players, their coats draped into severe black bubbles with hems that hovered above their ankles, both dense and buoyant.

If you took a walk through the school grounds, the trees were so bare and skimpy in winter that you felt as though you could see through the entire forest to the end, as though the forest was an X-Ray pinned up against a light. This was of course not true. The forest was impenetrable. But you could catch glimpses of the rich kids walking around in groups, their hands folded nun-like underneath their stark couture.

This was a school where the cheerleaders wore those gold Balenciaga robo-leggings armored with sharp-edged scales, as part of their uniforms, although that was a season or two ago. Periodically, the cheerleaders burned their out-of-style uniforms in a great bonfire, the thousands of dollars in couture flaming up into the sky at night. I asked them why they wouldn't just give the things away, instead of burning them. They said, who would wear such things? The cheerleaders said, we believe in art, not commerce. That is why we wear such things. Why would you wear them?

When I came back to my dorm room, I tried on my roommate Jillian's Ann Demeulemeester jacket, just to see what it felt like. My clothes came from the mall. My clothes signaled only pain and ill-gotten labor, with their crooked stitching and their rubbed-out look, like degenerate copies of copies, while Jillian's jacket promoted clean-burning energy, the future, high-minded values of that kind. I ran my hands over the sleeves.

Someone had planned this jacket, someone had hallucinated how this jacket would be draped over a dummy that was only an approximation of the true human form in an alien museum fifty thousand years in the future, and they had created a jacket that would stand up to such scrutiny. There was something wrong with wearing and worshipping clothes like these, but I could only think blurry thoughts. The jacket was hypnotizing me, and I began to sway from side to side, staring at myself in Jillian's full-length mirror.

But then Jillian came in all of a sudden and I just stood there, unsure of what to do. Jillian looked embarrassed too. She stared somewhere off to the side, with her teeth clenched and her face red, and she said, “Please take that off."

Jillian took the jacket from me and threw it on her desk chair.

"No offense,” she said. She took a deep breath and tried to smile at me.

* * * *

Girl talk boy talk. Jillian was a vampire, much prettier than me in a large-foreheaded, neotenic sort of way. Her eyes were somewhat too far apart. When we went swimming in the school pool and her fine hair plastered against her head, I could easily imagine her drifting off in a sac of amber amniotic fluid. Although Jillian didn't like it when I touched her clothing, she was usually nice to me.

"Go on,” she said. “Why don't you talk to him?"

I shook my head. Sam wouldn't even know what I was saying. It would be pointless.

"That's why you should do it. There's no pressure involved."

Jillian had a point there. I stood in line, waiting to feel braver. I watched the work-study kids serve watery mashed potatoes and stiff pancakes of beef and wipe off tables, the kids who had been slumped in my classes all cockeyed and weary just a few hours ago.

Sam had long eyelashes, the kind that people always seemed mad about because they should belong to girls, but that was wrong—his eyelashes contrasted deliciously with his heavy eyebrows and big nose. But it was difficult to be completely nervous about Sam. You could say anything to him and it wouldn't matter.

I stood in line and waited. When it was my turn, I leaned over the sneezeguards as far as I could and whispered to Sam. The countertop dug into my palms.

"I didn't know if you've noticed me looking at you, because people like you aren't supposed to notice people like me,” I said. “I know it's not mean or anything, I just don't register to people that way. Do I? Sam, I like you."

This wasn't a real conversation. Instead, I felt like I had just sent off an embarrassing email, one I wished I could take back. You don't usually get to talk in whole paragraphs to the boy you like.

Sam raised his head, his mouth hanging open. Metal tongs dangled from his hand, steam rising off the ends. His hairnet made him look even better. You could see more of him that way.

He said, “I walked through the door only to find that the windowpanes were alive but the people were flat stacks. Later at the supermarket the gummy bears writhed briefly in my mouth before expiring. By the time I read this, I'll have forgotten everything."

My knees buckled. Jillian nudged me with her tray, and I backed away from the counter.

"Next in line,” said Sam.

"That was good,” Jillian said to me. “You need to let the guy know how you feel, in any case. It doesn't matter if you couldn't penetrate his dreams. You tried your best."

She chattered on, unaware that I was glaring at her. My heart floated dry and light, very slowly, to the bottom of my chest cavity.

* * * *

Monstering. The Night School students began to exert major peer pressure on me, but I couldn't tell what they wanted me to do. They didn't want me to smoke pot, have sex, drive drunk, eat opium, lie to my parents, be gay, be Wiccan, be Muslim, be fundamentalist Christian with a literal interpretation of the Bible, be downloading music illegally, be having bad grades, be pierced. They wanted something else from me. The night class was populated with monsters, with vampire rich kids and work-study kids whose every exhausted word foretold the future. Then there was Bart, who was something else altogether. I think that they wanted me to be something too. I would say things like, it's really cold outside, or that the fettuccine tasted funny, and they would repeat what I had said like, “Oooooh, it's REALLY cold OUTSIDE” putting the emphasis in funny places.

There is a strange British slang term: to monster. Monstering. Monsterer? It means to hassle or harangue someone, to pester them. I knew that the Night kids didn't exactly dislike me, but they were monstering me. Of this I was certain. And there was another secret meaning to monstering that my body was beginning to discover. I had already been through puberty. This was something else.

* * * *

Our surveillance. Useless to watch the skies, to cringe underneath the imagined impact of dust and light and white heat, like a giant's palm hovering over us. We used the internet instead. The more skilled of us had feed readers and subscribed to weekly newsletters and Googled painstakingly for hours every night. We tracked the arcs of imagined missile pathways, and all of them led back to us. Back to this school, this country. I thought about living conditions. Lots of times I thought about buying jugs of water and putting one poisonous drop of bleach in them to keep the water fresh, but then I just got overwhelmed by the effort involved—riding the school shuttle to town. Spending money on water, of all the stupid things. Lugging it into my room. Everyone laughing at me, even though I'm sure they'd have no problem drinking my water when the rain turned green and sludgy.

My friend Magda was a boring person. When Magda talked, you could tell everyone was politely writhing to be somewhere else, to escape from the dreary land she constructed relentlessly bit by bit, simply by speaking. She was a boring person, but she was a freaking master of the internet. If you saw her fascinating blog, her withering comments in various forums and blogs all over the place, you would know that there was a lurking octopus underneath, huge-brained and toothy and sharp, ghostly tendrils poking out everywhere. You would know that her embodied, lived life was of little importance to her. But we watched what we said around her. If you said something stupid, thousands of people would know. The incident would be neatly re-made and re-written in that special Magda way, and you would want to die.

Magda liked me because I never seemed bored by her. I am an impassive person, even though I don't try to be.

Once Jillian said, “Let's see who can make the most wrinkles,” and we went around the dinner table trying to scrunch our faces as much as possible, creating tributaries and meeting points between every bit of skin.

"Your face doesn't wrinkle,” Bart said to me. And it didn't. I tried and tried and all I could produce were dents, places between my eyes and on my cheeks where the skin couldn't help but fold. Everyone at the table was quiet.

"You have a lot of subcutaneous fat,” said Jillian. “Not in a bad way."

That's why Magda liked me. She didn't know it, but what she actually liked was that subcutaneous fat, and how it shielded my true face like a friendly, innocent mask. Magda thought we understood each other, so she told me her secret. She leaned over and whispered to me in the library, when we were supposed to be practicing traditional research skills.

"Not everyone's going to die,” said Magda.

I laughed.

She went on. “There are bombs can smash everything. They don't distinguish between different types of things,” Magda said, running her fingers dreamily along the forever-outdated encyclopedias, flicking dust everywhere. “But there are also bombs that only destroy living things. They leave the buildings. The buildings are all the same but they're poisoned. And finally, what most people don't know about is the bombs that only destroy certain kinds of people."

"I don't believe that,” I said.

"About the buildings or the people?"

I sighed. She could be pedantic. “The people."

Magda stepped closer to me, examining my eyes and hair and skin. I smelled her rose-scented lip balm, and felt her mind send a tendril out to caress my cheek. She said, “You don't need to read up on all this bad stuff anymore. You won't get sick. You won't crumble. It won't happen to you. I promise you."

"Thanks,” I said. There was a lull. During it Magda wobbled back and forth, between touching me and standing still. I could see myself reflected in her eyes, a wavy little candle flame.

"Hey,” Magda said too loudly. I jumped. It was like a firecracker had exploded next to my ear. “You should start a blog. I would link you. I would. We're friends."

* * * *

In public. At school, we called it the hold me feeling—that apocalyptic feeling that all of us were infected by. When I was bored in class I thought about sex. It hummed inside my teeth as though wires were conducting through my gums, it poured all of the heat in my body between my legs, and my wrists ached from the rapid, indelicate transfer of blood.

The boy I liked would never make a move. He was asleep. So I knew what I had to do. I visited Sam in the cafeteria kitchen. No one else was there, but I was nervous and almost turned around and left. Sam's square hands, how they rubbed the dishes clean and squeaky, how his forearms were wet to the elbows with grey froth, those changed my mind.

I told Sam I would wash the dishes with him. When my arms were wet too, I leaned over and kissed him. He moaned and stopped rinsing the cutlery. We started kissing for real then, but I saw that he was still dreaming other dreams, as though the dreams were a nictitating membrane pulled over his eyes. I threw dishtowels, still hot and frayed from the dryer, onto a cafeteria table, and then I pulled Sam by the belt buckle on the table with me.

Sam was grabbing me, and the harder he grabbed the more his fingertips slipped. I had rubbed lotion all over my body in anticipation of this event. He licked the corner of my mouth, and for one moment, I believed that he was truly awake. Somewhere near the end I came so hard that it felt as though something in myself was throwing itself against a prison door, a thick wall. I was lucky—I don't usually come just like that, especially not with some strange boy. But I knew it would happen this time. I started at the brink. It wasn't just how it felt, fucking Sam on the cafeteria table, it was also the sliding press of his fingertips against my hips, hamstrings, glutes, the way I felt every whorl and wrinkle as Sam identified himself, and then again, again.

Afterwards, Sam smiled sort of absently, his eyes drifting off in different directions, like lily pads on a pond. He walked back to the huge industrial sink and started washing dishes again. I stood behind him for a while. I felt as though I had tricked Sam into something, and to apologize, I patted his hair and said my name into his neck. I wanted to think that he let me touch him that way, have sex with him. Perhaps my name would begin to infect his dreams. Someday, Sam might recognize me and pull me into his dream.

His dream might be a nice place to be. I might rather be there than here. But only if I got some say in what the dream was about. It was bad enough listening to people describe their dreams, imagine being trapped in someone else's dream. Anything could be done to you.

* * * *

Promises. And after that, still damp all over with fragrant lotion, like the manufactured sweat of an android, I went to wake Bart up for the thousandth time, to spoon Nutella into his mouth. Sitting up in the dark, Bart spoke to me.

"Thank you,” Bart said. “If you ever need waking up, you know who to ask. I really owe you.” His words were muffled by the thick, chocolate paste, which had climbed between his teeth like dirt in the mouth of a corpse.

He stood, zipped up his dirty hoodie, and we ran to English class.

* * * *

Day Class. My roommate Jillian hated the daytime students. I used to hang out with them all the time, I mean during the day. It was the nature of my condition, hanging out with everybody. After the Night students fell asleep, withdrawing into beds piled high with goose-down comforters, or coffins, or closets, or sleeping bags, I waited for a few hours during the dead-time when no one was awake, except for Bart, and then ate breakfast with the Day students. At first I felt grateful, but then I began to realize that I was letting them hang out with me. It was easy to feel superior to people when you had been awake for much longer than they had. I felt experienced and world-weary when they were still wiping their eyes and finger-combing their hair.

The Day Class was college admissions crazy, and they were also obsessed with the war. It was an odd and terrible combination. They spent tons of time cultivating athletic, intellectual, sassy establishmentarian personas, so that their teachers would write recommendations accordingly. They tried to start ridiculous clubs at school so they could say they did so on their applications, clubs with names that combined easy hobbies with political causes. Scrapbooking for Darfur. Adding Friends on MySpace for Friends of Falun Gong. They skimmed all of their books. They worked on their tans while they studied for the Chemistry AP exam, sprawled out on bath towels and pointedly ignoring the chemical reactions of their skin cells squirming and toasting under the sun.

But sometimes they became overwhelmed by the news reports and SAT prep, simultaneously, and the Day class would give it all up and smoke chronic in the woods by the dorms. They ate Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pies. They no longer ignored the chemical workings of their bodies, and discussed the finer points of radiation poisoning long into the morning. They felt a weird pleasure in acknowledging the loss of hope that had occurred long ago (who knew when).

The next morning, however, they would always start up again as normal. I worried for them—I felt protective of them, even though the rest of the night class never was, even though I didn't do anything to help them. I didn't know what I could do, because I no longer worried about the same things that they did. What did they need?

One day, halfway through the semester, the Day students stopped letting me hang out with them. A prickly heat climbed up into my throat as they pushed their backpacks over and said, “This seat is taken.” I caught Dean's eye and mouthed, “What happened"?

"You fucked Sam,” Dean said. “You fucked a fucking sleepwalker.” Padma, sitting next to him, started laughing.

I left the cafeteria and tried not to cry. The feeling passed. Yes, Dean, Padma, yes. I have changed. I have transformed. It was finished. We were enemies now, but what did that matter? I was on the right side—the side that threw a better party. The side that knew how to cope without embarrassing themselves. Day could go fuck itself. The sky was too bright without being vivid. The early morning was full of wimpy watercolor shades—the petal pink and gray and white sky, the yellow light filtered through the trees. I kept my eyes shaded with my hands all the way back to the Night dorm.

* * * *

The Wild Party. The playlist for the party contained, among others, songs by Gang of Four, Pere Ubu, Nena, Prince, PiL, The Postal Service, Bowie, Public Enemy, The Futureheads, Kraftwerk, The Smiths, The Talking Heads, Electric Six, Sun Ra. These bands all mention the bombs. That was the only thing we felt like dancing about. It was a wonderful party.

I liked the distraction. I knew that they wouldn't be in touch very often, but jesus christ my parents had stopped calling me after my first week here. I knew what happened. My parents had coalesced into a different kind of unit. They were a two. If they lived, they would wander a sandblasted landscape and scrounge for food together, beating the mutant lizards away with croquet mallets and tire irons. I wish I could say that I grew more okay with this, day after day, but sometimes I thought of my parents clicking together so neatly, with no room for myself, and then I felt weepy and overwhelmed, as though someone had tried to force an entire apple down my throat. Never mind that.

The party was in the Night dorm lounge, all of the sofas and coffee tables pushed to the side of the room. Someone had strung chili lights up on the walls. From Hamish's speakers, David Bowie began to moan—an aaagh that grew high and unhinged, like an adolescent dog. Hamish DJed with one finger on the space bar of his laptop.

Any day now, said Bowie. Then Bowie was overlaid with something else, a desperate, mumbly club hit from about a month ago. Both songs fought for space, for breath, while we danced.

There are always two or more conversations going on at once, but at the party, the buried conversations made themselves clearer.

"Man, remember Christmas break? I don't remember it,” said Bart. “Was I awake for any of it?"

But what he was really saying was: “It was you who kept me alive. You are a good friend. I love you? I do love you. Thank you."

"You're really clean, did you know that? You keep the room so clean. I'm such a slob. I'm such a bum,” said Jillian. She draped her arm over my shoulder. We were both drunk and it felt good for our skin to stick together.

What she was really saying was: “I'm sorry I'm mean sometimes. I'm sorry I'm selfish. But I'm fun for you, aren't I? I'm glad we're roommates. We would have never been friends otherwise."

Yes! Indeed I was happy! Oh, I was so happy that I escaped my home and arrived at this strange place, where the dances were events where people actually did dance—you could bop around in front of someone, partner up and eel from side to side in impossible synchronicity, and then move on to the next person—and the punch was spiked with more than just alcohol and there was a little placard next to the punch listing what it had been spiked with, would anyone in normal high school have ever been so thoughtful? We had been transported to another land, really. We had left the day class far behind us and were safely ensconced in the future, where the bombs would never hurt us.

I almost forgot to mention. The Day class was having a party too, in the dorms across the courtyard. They played pretty much the same music. Ours was louder. They could never approach our levels of fun, and their numbers were few. A little less than half of the class had gone back home to their families—and for one moment I was so jealous that my scalp prickled and itched—but then it was over.

After Hamish packed up the speakers, Jillian and Bart and I left the party, our shirts sticking to our backs, as moist as fungus. Still drunk, I thought let us stay drunk. Let this last and last. But soon enough Jillian had to retire into our dorm room with the heavy velvet drapes yanked shut, Bart washed a Provigil down with some sticky Singaporean energy drink and went to the main office for work, and I was alone for the day.

* * * *

Television. We watched TV shows that were saved from earlier times of the day. All of the news was old. We laughed when we heard news flashes that were hours old, already lame and nonsensical.

We watched a TV show about a high school girl detective. We loved her. She knew how to use the internet better than any of us. Except Magda, who scoffed to herself about the Google search terms that the girl detective used.

We watched a TV show about a terrorist who had no cell, no political or national or philosophical alignments with anyone, no home. This terrorist stayed in Super 8s and La Quintas and Hiltons and wandered around various cities of the world with a wheeled suitcase containing a bomb containing in ever smaller packages within it nuclear waste, nails, glass, explosives. The same shot of a finger, wavering above a button, repeated over and over again. DO IT, we'd shout. DON'T DO IT, we'd shout.

We watched a TV show that was just us, looking back at the TV. We found this show on a channel that had been dead only a few days ago. Although Jillian and Bart searched the room and examined the TV, we couldn't figure out how the show was being made.

Sometimes, during commercials, I got up and pressed my nose to the window. If you accepted night and kept the lights off inside, you could see everything outside. But if the lights were on, it felt as though a wall had been bricked over your face. But everything outside, all of the night creatures and their huge-pupilled, staring eyes, they could see you.

There was something going on outside. I squinted. A thing, dancing and flickering and yellow, pinwheeled towards me. I jumped away from the window, throwing myself to the side. There was a splintering sound, the roar of fire.

That was what you call a Molotov cocktail. A Molotov cocktail. I stared at it, wide-eyed, trying to reconcile the glamorous name, the badassy revolution feeling, with the oily fire that was now spreading across the dorm lounge carpet.

* * * *

Day's opening strike. They had begun their attack. They opened by hacking into our school email accounts and sent emails full of dirty words to our parents and they spray-painted the front door of the Night dorms. Then they tried to set fire to us.

Jillian tore the fire extinguisher from its holder and put out the fire. Foam exploded into the air and soaked smelly chemical circles into our shirts. When we peered outside of the broken window, we saw that the gym was on fire too. Kids were running around, their bodies indistinct shades against the fire.

Jillian turned, her neck long and swivelly like a ferret's, and I glimpsed a gorgeous panic in her eyes, although the vampire part of her brain kept her calm, and mean.

"Oh my god, guys,” Jillian said, “let's go fuck their shit up!"

I wanted to kiss her, she was so lovely and scary and un-snotty right then—so different from the usual Jillian. Vampires are made to wear clothing well and to whale on people. Jillian was in her element.

We ran out and loped across the field to the gym. I felt like I was on the moon, where I would only have to push off the ground a little bit to fly in slo-mo across the sky. There were no Day students to be seen anywhere, and we stood there, confused, as the air crackled and seethed. The earth began to rumble underneath our feet, and huge doors in the ground opened outwards, toppling many of us over. Day students poured out of the bomb shelter and then we began to fight.

I tackled Dean, because he was just standing there, looking around for someone to beat up, and because he didn't want to be my friend anymore. First his back bent under my weight, then his knees gave out, like a toppling tower of Jenga blocks. I fell with him. When I rubbed his face in the dirt, Dean twisted and fought back. My lip crunched against my front tooth and it immediately went fat and numb. I was feeling like a mayhem specialist, I mean really really good, my blood wanted to pound right out of my throat. I screamed in Dean's face.

"I hate you,” I said.

"You're a monster,” said Dean. “So I don't care. It doesn't matter."

"You didn't have to treat me like that."

"You guys think we're just shit,” Dean said. “You blamed us for being scared, even though that's the only way to be. It's the only way that makes sense."

"No, that's not it. You can only see one way,” I said. “That's why you're all fucking idiots."

But my anger was leaving me. I wanted it back already. My hands began to lose the shape of fists. Dean was losing it too. He sighed and let his body relax. His head slumped backwards, and I grabbed his shirt more tightly.

Dean's eyes looked even bluer against the dirt and blood and grass smeared on his face. They stared up at the sky and I thought I could see something reflected in them, something tiny and round. I leaned in closer to see. What was it? A dot, a wavering dot. Then Dean screamed and I jerked backwards.

"The bombs,” Dean cried. “I can see them. They're up, there, there.” He started to cry, ugly sobs that pooled tears into his eyes, in flat shiny circles.

What did I see reflected in Dean's eyes? I looked up. Sirens were blaring inside our heads—our brain implants were telling us to GO INSIDE DUCK AND COVER GO INSIDE DUCK but all of us ignored them. I saw nothing. When I looked back down at Dean, he was gone. I still felt the rough material of his T-shirt in my hands, and I had to flex and open and close them to convince myself that there was nothing there.

Around me, people were rolling over or punching air or looking around. All of the Day students had disappeared. I saw Magda roll over. Her hair was thick with dirt and leaves that rained down to her shoulders when she sat up. She began to shout.

"I was right, I was right, I was right..."

Bells clanged. It meant assembly. I looked at Jillian, and she looked at me, but we didn't know what to do. So we all got up and limped over to the main auditorium. The gym fire had gone out.

* * * *

One last assembly. The auditorium blazed; they had hung giant chandeliers made of plastic costume jewelry—red and yellow and green traffic light colors. It was as though a nighttime cityscape had been tilted upside down and stuck on the ceiling. I stood in the back of the hall with Bart and Jillian. The ground was slippery with confetti.

Headmistress Furness already had her laptop ready, with her Powerpoint presentation all cued up and projected on the screen behind her. The first slide said, WE ARE ALIVE AND THEY ARE DEAD. After we seated ourselves and the teachers had finished shushing us, Furness began.

She said, “I have gone back and forth concerning the existence of ghosts. When I was a child, my aunt was killed in a car accident. She was putting on her eyeliner—a rich, cobalt blue studded with silver flecks—and we were blindsided by a drunk driver. I say drunk driver, but the driver was actually high on angel dust, a nearly fatal dose of it. But I never liked answering all those questions. So I say drunk. You don't feel any pain on PCP. I resented that, for then the whole share of the pain was allotted to my aunt. I was in the car with her. I had a concussion and they tell me that I don't actually remember this, but I remember her lifting her head shakily, chest caved in by the steering column, the eyeliner stuck into her eyeball, right in the center of her pupil, and if any of you laugh, I'll kill you myself. Children: my horror story only sounds funny because you're not used to anything like it. To this day, when I walk by the L'Oreal makeup section of the drugstore, a powerful haunted feeling passes over me. I have written to the L'Oreal company many times in order to get them to discontinue this color, but they have never written me back. I have never believed in ghosts, but I did believe in that cobalt shade of eye pencil."

She wiped her eyes. It was difficult to hear her. “But now the world will be full of ghosts. The daytime will haunt the nighttime. The changeover has already occurred.” Furness stood straight and gestured at the bad wall of the auditorium. We all swiveled to look. Something flickered across the wall, a huge moving sketch of a grimacing face.

I gasped. Then I realized it was only the work of the theater tech students, projecting the student movies from the Intermediate Film Elective class onto the back wall. While Furness gave her speech, Jillian held my hand. There was some kindness in her, whether she really was a good person deep down or she had learned it from a magazine article. What People Do For Other People When They Are Feeling Bad.

Everyone cheered. Furness talked and talked, and all the while, it never grew lighter outside.

* * * *

The true and false names of the dead. There were so many names. More than the names of my family, I thought of names of people who I never knew, would never know now. And as I gazed at the rest of the students, Furness’ speech began to penetrate my mind. I was happy to be alive. No, wait. I melted, I froze, melted and froze again back and forth. I was thrilled to be alive. I thought of all that had been lost and ruined in order to carve out this piece of the world for me. The names rushed through me, they made me breathless, not just first names and surnames, but email addresses and internet pseudonyms too, of all the people that had been lost, and I felt wrung out, like I was viewing something so large it filled my entire vision but really, I was only seeing the very tip, one tiny corner.

Here's what I wanted: I wanted to be a book. I wanted to be stuck one way or another, permanently trapped in happy or sad or something by the last page.

I left the auditorium when the party started, and sat on a stone bench by the bushes. The raccoons were in the trees again. Some of them bounced on the branches, and some of them ran around the trees looking like cats that were bent the wrong way. The trees were skinny and the raccoons looked huge next to them, if they were all things that came from different toy sets.

Bart came out and sat next to me. He looked at me sideways for a while before speaking.

"Being alive doesn't make you a monster,” said Bart. He looked doubtful. “It's a piece of luck. Just look at it that way. Don't question it."

"What kind of bargain do you think we made?” I said.

He said, “I don't know. Why do you think there had to be a bargain? There was no bargain."

"Then we're stupid,” I said. “Stupider than the stupid Day Class."

Bart chewed on the inside of his top lip defensively. “I worked hard to get here. What did you do?"

"I didn't do anything,” I said.

"So there,” said Bart. “Don't talk about us being stupid. We did the smart thing."

Music thumped the doors. If we went inside, it would pound in our chests, replacing our natural heartbeats. They were partying inside to the same old playlist, and I wondered if it would ever change for as long as I lived. You can dance like the world is ending and have a good time, but if the world has truly ended, is such a thing possible? Does it make dancing less fun? More?

I tried to breathe. “I'm calling on you now for that favor,” I said.

Bart smiled for a second, but then he scratched his forehead, thinking. He sat up and took both of my elbows into his hands, resting them on top of his palms.

"Wake up,” Bart said. “Wake wake wake wake up.” We sat there for a while, his hands on my elbows, my hands on his shoulders. Everything stayed the same.

We released each other's arms, and I slouched on the bench.

I said, “Bart, are we going to go in and dance, or are we going to sit out here for the rest of the night?"

Neither seemed good. We frowned. I started to feel desperate, because we needed to choose—didn't Bart know that I needed to choose? A decision had to be made.

But then my leg twitched, and then Bart shifted in place, and both of us began moving towards the door as slowly as we could. That seemed like a fine and tolerable solution. We would make tiny movements between partying and not-partying, and do neither forever, until all of night was used up.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Dear Aunt Gwenda

Surrealist Salmonella Edition

Dear Aunt Gwenda,

I really like a nice pair of slacks. Esp ones with peanut butter. Or jam. Or a lover named Fran. Is this normal? My parents don't seem to think so. They chained me to the wall since I started my slack obsession.

Paul Jessup

Aunt Gwenda: Dear Marcel Duchamp, your friend Salvador Dali is dead. Slacks are not for surrealists. They are for creepy businessmen.

Dear Aunt Gwenda:

Was that not a dainty dish to set before the King? John Klima

AG: The thing I never got about that rhyme is that a pie composed of four and twenty blackbirds (that's twenty-four blackbirds total, for those of us counting) is in no way dainty. That is a whole lot of gross, oozy blackbird pie. The King should really focus on avoiding salmonella. Not to mention: Ewwwwwww.

Also, this is the kind of thing my dog would eat if he was King.

Dear Aunt Gwenda,

Is it supposed to hurt when I do this? I'm asking for a friend.

Alex Wilson

AG: Everything worth doing hurts a little, right? Trust me—your friend likes the pain.

Dear Aunt Gwenda,

Is it ever, ever, EVER socially acceptable not to stifle farts while in the company of others?

I mean beside on one's deathbed and whilst giving birth.

Haddayr

AG: It's never socially acceptable, but that may just be the answer you're looking for. There is no faster way to become a social pariah and get thyself free of the surly company of idiots than to behave in such a malodorous manner.

The other exception is, of course, for the artistically inclined. If you feel called to be Le Petomane's rightful heir, wowing many and few with your flatulist antics then you must, must embrace your calling and let ‘er rip. The results still won't smell as bad as a pie made out of twenty-four dead blackbirds.

If my dog was King, he'd do it all the time.

Dear Aunt Gwenda,

What should I do with all these hot peppers? Roasting, drying, freezing, stewing, pulverizing and straight-up eating raw have all begun to seem repetitive and dull.

Michael DeLuca

AG: When a man is tired of pulverizing, he's tired of life.

Dear Aunt Gwenda,

I'm starting to worry that they're out to get me. Have you heard anything?

Jon

AG: Oh, I have. I've heard plenty. They are. They're looking at you right now, admiring your socks. They're waiting for you to collect the twenty-fourth blackbird and then it will all come to an end. And, yet, you can't stop yourself, can you? You're still out there, stalking the birds, desperate for a conclusion to the constant surveillance you know you are under, even more desperate for sweet, sweet dead-bird pie. Resistance is meaningless and overrated: They will never stop.

Dear Aunt Gwenda,

If I were out to get someone, hypothetically speaking, what sort of things would you recommend? Code names? Disguises?

Fred

AG: Code names and disguises are good. Also: nets, booby traps, a dictionary, hot peppers, a friend in a high place, more friends in low places, ninja suits, a get-away car, urinal art, dogs, poisonous plants, an invisibility cloak, raw fowl, a death ray, a tin can, a trustworthy hobo, a sparkly vampire unicorn, a suitcase full of cash, Jennifer Garner, and a nefarious database.

Dear Aunt Gwenda,

What kind of band-aids are best for bandaging caffeinated capuchin monkeys with scalding burns?

Will Alexander

AG: Well played, Fred. Now you're showing the ingenuity needed to “get someone.” The blackbird is in the tree.

[Back to Table of Contents]

The Curmudgeon by Adam Ares

The curmudgeon's face was not immediately visible as I stepped outside to embrace the still autumn air. He was clinging to the handrail, his torso upon the first two steps, his legs flailing unhappily upon muddy leaves.

"Are you dying?” I asked, when I noticed him.

"This is, uh. This is me taking a rest,” he responded, “I'm, you know. Trying to forget about mankind's imminent demise."

I whistled my exhalation. “Hoo-boy. Yeah, I know how that goes."

* * * *

We made some small talk about mankind's imminent demise. Then I started telling him about Jess, who was passed out on my futon at the time. And how my buddy Matt had been trying to hook me up with her, but how I was a little weirded out at the time and uncertain about the whole situation.

I would have offered the curmudgeon a pillow; but because he was my elder, I didn't want to imply that he wasn't able to take care of himself.

So I was kind of just talking to fill the silence. I said, “Yeah, so this girl Jess and I were debating for like an hour about game systems. I don't even know where Matt found this girl, but she at first seemed to know what she was talking about. She wouldn't cede to my point about the obviously superior not only graphics handling et cetera but the quality of the third party licensing, but all this time I'm just assuming—and here is where I err, because, as I said, it seemed she knew what she was talking about—that she's actually, you know, played the system in question? And it only occurs to me, because after all this time—an hour!—we're talking, and she says—here, I quote: ‘Well, I haven't actually played your system anyway.’ So what are you doing railing against it for half an hour? An hour. It's absolutely mind-boggling. But what Matt said is that she does this, any opportunity she has to argue with you about something, she'll do it, doesn't matter the topic. So I tell her: ‘While I appreciate your debating skills, and I thank you for the conversation, you really can't talk. You haven't played it.’ She hadn't played it! But it's cool. It was a good time, she seemed all right still. So we take off, it's me, her, and Matt in Matt's car, and we drive back here, figure we'll watch a movie or something."

Finally, the old man lifted an arm from the handrail. “Let me tell you,” he said, “I'm a hopeless, bitter old man. I would cough here just to exercise, to demonstrate more eloquently—plus elegante. Uh. Plus Elegante-ment. That I am a broken piece of. Piece of nothing. Nothing in pieces. And devastated. But people of your age have no idea. No idea. You can program your damn computers, but you can't see America. And you can't see me because I'm nothing in pieces.” A sudden sigh. “It wasn't easy, you know, getting to be a curmudgeon."

"Is that what you are? I thought it rude to ask."

"That's me. Your good old reliable local curmudgeon. Crusty and miserly, self-certain but powerless. Unhappy and stoic. All the time."

"Right on,” I said. Then, suddenly, he grabbed an empty bottle from the recycle bin, smashed it, held it to my throat, and demanded that I inject heroin as part of a cultic ritual for the Etruscan god Maris. Refusing, I shocked him with my Civilian Taser, which killed him. His body was falling on me; I pushed it onto the porch steps, dropped the taser, and did that thing that I do with my hands to express disgust at having touched something so unfortuitous as a corpse. I was solemn, because the killing even of an insane curmudgeon is not to be engaged in without the proper respects.

* * * *

"Jess,” I said, kneeling by the futon, “Wake up. I've killed a curmudgeon in self-defense."

"Mmm. Babe, I'm sleeping,” she said, “You should sleep too.” An arm waved in my general direction, as though hoping to pull me nearer to her. I knew this action to be one of clever seduction: Matt had happened to mention that she does this when she wants a guy. Which is cool. We all have our methods, you know. Even if she was exaggerating her sleepiness, I figured that she was genuinely the sort of person who would want to be woken up gradually, so I climbed onto the futon and confidently stroked her hair. Her hand clasped upon my manly bicep and squeezed it.

Then was the sex scene. After, I returned to the subject at hand: “So I still have to figure out what to do about the dead guy."

"Yeah, what's up with that? A curmudgeon attacked you?"

"Yeah. It was weird."

"Do we have to be solemn?"

"No. Not for self-defense. I was for like a second, though, just because."

"Yeah."

Then I realized: “Aw, no. Tomorrow's Sunday. And Monday's a holiday."

Jess slapped the front of her face with one hand.

* * * *

There are many reasons for my wanting to get out of this stupid town. A new reason was added to the list once I had killed a man: everything closes on Sundays and holidays, including the Funerales.

I called 911. They scolded me: “Couldn't you just go online and look up the FAQ for the local Funerales?” I would have considered this option, but Jess was still naked and I wanted to stare at her.

Apparently, I was going to have to buy some Prolonger from the Wal-Mart—with my own money!—to keep the corpse undead for a few days. If I were to leave the body as it was until Tuesday, it would begin to get maggoty and I would have to pay a significant Decomposition Fee. As Charlie Brown would say, Aaugh!

* * * *

I remember how this one time, Matt wrote an ode to Wal-Mart. It was awesome. It got published in a really reputable literary journal. It was a little bit over my head, because I haven't read as many books as he has, but I know that it included a lot of references to older works. It was in part patterned after “Ode on a Grecian Urn"—which I have, actually, read—and it was meant to say that people, we all pass through the aisles of this store with many examples of art from around the world, like from China or Bangladesh, but we just don't stop to appreciate it. Also, we can never truly understand the significance of a shirt that was made in a really different place from us. Cultural difference obscures the essence of a thing, just as thoroughly as does the passage of time. That's why everyone needs to choose from the same books and speak in the same language: otherwise, there would be a never-ending series of little wars, instead of just the big, occasional, and important wars that have been leading us toward mankind's imminent demise. When Matt explained this all to me, I told him that I already knew he was really smart, and that he should stop showing off. He explained that in heaven, after everyone's demise, we would all be smart like him. I told him that heaven sounded boring. Being a writer, he only frowned.

* * * *

Finally, Jess and I went inside and got the stuff. Working at the checkout counter was a girl who usually works in the electronics department. She asked whether I had played any good video games lately. I replied that I always played good video games, and that in fact only the best of video games were ever good enough for me. She asked whether I had delivered any good pizzas lately. I told her that I hadn't, because our pizzas are disgusting and I have never been able to fathom how anyone in the world could ever eat them. She said that she disagreed, she liked our pizzas, and that moreover she liked having cute boys in their work clothes knock at her door with a pie in one hand and a two-liter bottle of her favorite brand of cola in the other. She said that she wished she could get a pizza delivered during her break from work—which she was about to take—but that, because all the pizza places were closed at this hour of the night, she was going to have to settle for leftover vegetable-fried rice and perhaps a snack cake from the vending machine.

I was required to tell her that I loved snack cakes. Once I did, I was officially flirting with her and needed to dismiss my companion. “Okay, Jess,” I said, “Here's what's going to happen. You're going to walk back to my place with the Prolonger. I don't know how good you are at lifting corpses. You can wake up Matt if you need to. He'll help you to carry it into the dungeon. Oh, and the dungeon will be locked, but the key's hanging up in the kitchen with all the other keys. It should be marked—Dungeon Key. The same key works to get inside there and to shut the steel cage. Just set down the corpse. Use the prolonger. There are instructions in the box for how to prepare the syringe and stuff. He'll start screaming—that's how you'll know it's working. Then lock up the cage. Oh, and be sure the door is closed while you're in there, so that the soundproofing works and no one gets woken up. I'll pay you $25 for your labors, and what's the fine for heartbreak on the first night?"

"$75,” she said.

"Right. And $75. I'll just put them together in a $100 money order."

She left. I was solemn, because even on the first night, heartbreak is not be engaged in without the proper respects.

* * * *

Sitting on a bench in front of the Wal-Mart, eating snack cakes, I recounted for the cashier the night's events. She seemed interested in the story of the curmudgeon, but wasn't saying much in particular.

I again was talking to fill the silence: “I can only imagine what Matt's going to say about all of this. Writers are so weird. I guess most of them are raised by their parents, like out in the woods. That's probably it. They come to the towns and they have to get used to everything. When he hears about the curmudgeon, I can promise you, he's going to say something to make the matter seem significant. Every time somebody does something random or crazy, he gets, like, a faraway expression, and he thinks and thinks until he can somehow manage to explain it."

"I'm feeling disturbed,” the cashier, whose name I kept forgetting to ask, suddenly volunteered. “Customers have been talking a lot to me about the Family Center, as though something's going on with it. People who have relatives there have been talking to me about how they can't visit their parents anymore. They say that they're not convinced that their parents are still alive. They say that sometimes, when they go to the elevator of the place, they can hear screams from below. They say that the guards are panicking and talking on walkie-talkies and turning away everyone who wants to visit. Again and again, I hear these stories. If I were hearing so many weird stories about a human being, I would assume that they were going crazy, you know? So I get worried. I've always believed that the Family Center provides an important service—to ease the transitioning of the former Tribalists into our society. Maybe you don't know what that means. I know that most of us don't really understand what the Family Center does. It's just something that's there. But I've actually started looking into it. Books and stuff. It's kind of interesting. I'm sorry. This isn't how I talk to most of my customers. But then, I don't flirt with most of my customers. That's what bars are for. I've been wanting to flirt with you for a long time, you know. Thanks for breaking that other girl's heart. I know it can get expensive. Did you ever feel like someone was different? Not different as in crazy, but different in the sort of way that looking at them isn't like looking at other people who have the same career. This is all so difficult to say. I feel different when I see you."

A moth danced briefly along the scrunchie that was keeping her hair in a ponytail. I figured that the most polite thing to do was to stare into her eyes, trying to smile and nod.

Meanwhile, I was imagining that Jess was inside my house, carrying the curmudgeon to the dungeon with Matt's help. Soon, the corpse would be alive again, screaming at first but then mostly just gurgling stiffly. Matt would touch Jess's cute little butt through her gray sweatpants. Then, they would have their own sex scene. Tomorrow, Matt would wax poetic about how in heaven, everybody's souls would already be intermingled, and so we wouldn't be obliged to pursue penile-vaginal intercourse anymore. That idea would be small consolation. I was still going to have to be jealous whenever I saw them together.

Meanwhile, I was stuck on a bench with this creepy cashier, who was going on and on about subjects that were really not okay at all. I was really starting to worry: she was sounding more and more like a traitor.

[Back to Table of Contents]

The Lake by Matthew Cheney

They wouldn't allow us near the lake when they hauled the bodies out. We stood, huddled against each other, at the edge of the road, looking down the grey embankment at the police trucks and the rescue equipment, the boats, the divers, the men in uniform standing between us and a last view of all we had lost.

I insisted on going to the morgue and making the identification myself, though Gabe told me someone else could do it, my brother or his, someone.

—It shouldn't have to be our last memory of her, he said.

—I want to go, I said. I want to see her face.

When he said again someone else, someone else, I screamed at him, I pounded his chest with my fists, and, in the end, he agreed, and went with me, and it was done.

* * * *

For a few weeks, ours became a community of loss. Other parents, ones I'd never liked before, became my friends, their stupidities and thoughtless comments over the years swept away by what we shared in grief. We cooked for each other, we talked for long and empty hours, we exchanged memories, hoping that words might bring some life to the death we lived. Gabe and I had never been religious, but we began going to church because other parents would be there, and because any rituals were comforting.

The lake became a sacred place. Even as the water froze in winter and the shores grew thick with snow, there wasn't a day when I didn't find other parents there, standing on the bank, looking out at the calm water, our faces placid, our eyes incapable of tears. We stood like beacons or totems or guards, at dusk or dawn, morning and afternoon, not waiting so much as bearing witness to the peace that seemed so unjust.

* * * *

There was an investigation, of course. They said it was a mechanical failure, that the brakes on the schoolbus gave out as it came around the corner, the speed at which it moved was not excessive, the driver was not at fault. The lake gets deep very quickly, they said, and the water was cold, the force of the impact enough to stun, wound, even kill the passengers.

The passengers.

No fault. An accident. A very unfortunate accident. A tragedy, the newspapers said and the television reporters said and the condolence cards said, and we, too, said: a tragedy.

We were left to live inside the shadow of that tragedy, and we carried on as best we could after the funerals, after the burials, after the cards and flowers were packed away, after we got so we could walk past the closed door of her bedroom without pressing an ear to the wood to listen for what we knew was not there. It was months before Gabe or I could open that door, and when we did it was a bright day, motes of light drifting through the room, and we sat on the bed, hands together, and assured each other it was all right to cry.

* * * *

By summer, the lake had dried up. The muddy crater that remained quickly filled with sand that no amount of rain made wet.

We had lived eight months without Julia, and I went to the lake every day. I and the others who stood faithfully on the banks watched the water drift farther and farther from the shore, but noone ever ventured out to where the lake had been until the water was gone and the mud turned to dry white sand. When the sun shone down, the sand was too hot to touch, and so we waited until evening to walk, always barefooted, into the crater where the lake had been. All of the parents were there every day, kneeling down, fingers pressed into the sand, digging. Soon, there was a breeze that never died. It blew soft clouds of dust around us.

Gabe stopped going after a week.

—What do you think you're going to find there? he said.

—I don't know, I said.

He stood in front of me, blocking the door.

—Why do you want to be there, then?

—I don't know, I said. Where else should I be?

He sighed, and I knew what he thought. He had returned to work, had won every case he'd tried, tripled his income, bought us a new car and talked about moving somewhere else, a place where every inch of everything could not summon memories. He never told me to go back to work, but every day he suggested something I could do, something that would distract me: volunteering at the hospital or library, joining the board of the conservation society, learning golf.

—I already have something to do, I said.

—You spend your whole life at that goddamned lake.

—It's where I should be.

Now, standing in front of the door, he said quietly:

—Please don't go.

—I have to, I said.

* * * *

No one brought children to the lake, though of course there were brothers and sisters, cousins, friends. The survivors, the living. I rarely saw children in town, even. Once, though, I saw a boy running down the street, his face glistening with tears as he screamed for his mother. Every car stopped in the street and every person stopped moving to watch him. He ran between people and between cars, he flailed, he fell to the ground and stood and fell again. His screams grew louder, more piercing, and the crowd shivered as people took tiny steps away from him, until finally one woman, older than most of us, approached the boy and touched his head gently and smiled and embraced him, kissed him, held him until the rest of us began to move again and continued with our days.

I returned to the lake. Holes dotted the sand. A father and mother had dug so many feet into the lakebed that all I could see of them were hands rising out of the hole to drop a few more grains from their fingertips. For a moment, I thought the pair had found water, but when I looked again I saw that the sand at the side of their hole had been moistened by blood from raw hands.

My own hole remained more broad than deep.

I'd forgotten all the names of the children, and, what made me more sad, the names of the parents—my true companions, the only people who understood the language I uttered when I chose to speak, the only people who didn't look at me with sympathy or pity, because who among us had enough to spare? I remembered knowing their names, but I did not know them now. Now they were strangers again, and I feared them, feared they would find what I was looking for and would destroy it, feared they knew what I was looking for when I did not.

I watched the other people around me and hoped my hole would not engulf theirs, but I feared it would, because though I tried to force myself to move closer and closer to the center I had dug, all I could do was pull back the sand from the sides. I knew the others were watching me. More and more each day, I could feel their eyes staring, I could hear the whispers caught by the ever-present breeze.

The other people had begun to push their piles of sand into my hole to keep me away. I did not blame them. I would have done the same.

* * * *

—I'm buying a house in Colorado, Gabe said one night late in the summer. You can come with me or ... not...

My hands ached from swollen joints, broken fingernails, and cracked skin. I covered them with lotion every morning before I left and every night when I returned, but the sand was stronger, it was wiping my flesh away.

—How can you leave here? I said.

—I can't stay.

—Who do you know in Colorado? You don't know anybody. How will you get a job, how will...

—I already have an offer from a firm. It's very good money. In Boulder. Everybody I know says Boulder is a wonderful place to live, it's heaven.

I ran out of the house and drove in the old car to the lake. The sky was full of clouds, but bits of moonlight shone through and drifted over the white sand. I sat near the road, my back against the front wheel of the car, and stared down at the place where our daughter had died.

Only a few parents remained, digging, and their shadows spread across the sand like chasms. As I watched them, I realized words had formed on my lips, and the words became whispers: Eliza, Tommy, Maria, Lily, Jack, Tizzie, Eveline, George, Lucia ... I whispered them all through the night, again and again and again until the dawn, giving words to memory and to the wind.

Sometimes in the middle of the night I would go into Julia's room and turn her little radio on very low so that it whispered to me while I sat on the floor, my fingers drawing patterns across the carpet. I imagined the radio told me stories—stories dreamed up by young people who had grown old, the sentences left as remnants of a writer's youthful self, some part of that self preserved in each word, alive now in the whispers weaving their long-ago life into my own.

* * * *

Two days before Gabe was to leave, water returned to the lake. It bubbled up through the sand into puddles, filling all the holes. One of the diggers screamed, Water! and seconds later I felt cool liquid against my own hands. Murmurs and cries echoed through the breeze. The puddles spread and joined until the entire lake was one thin sheet of water, and the water rose. Not until the water had reached our knees did any of us move to the shore of the lake. The last to leave was a small woman with short red hair. She swam from the far side, and when she climbed out of the water to join us, the light blue dress she had worn every day had shed all the dust and dirt that had encrusted it, and it clung to her body like seaweed.

Within only a few hours, the lake was as deep as it had ever been.

—The water has returned, I said when I stepped into the living room where Gabe was looking at a TV show about politics.

—Shhhhh, he said. I'm watching this.

—Did you hear me? The water's returned.

—Will you shut up! I'm watching this.

I went to the kitchen and poured myself a glass of milk. I sat at the table, looking out the double windows at the back yard, where shards of starlight sprinkled over the garden I had neglected all summer.

Eventually, Gabe trudged upstairs to bed, but I waited in the kitchen with all the lights turned out until I couldn't keep my eyes open anymore. I lay my head down on the table and slept.

* * * *

A week after Gabe left, people began to say they saw faces in the water, the faces of the children. I still went to the lake each day and stayed long into the night, but though all the other parents around me knelt down on the bank and looked into the lake, I could not force myself to look. Their squeals of joy, their sudden outbursts of love and happiness, disgusted me.

I had begun to remember their names now, too, though I could not remember which names went with which children. (Were Richard and Beatrice the parents of Lucia or Tommy or Eveline? Were May and John the parents of Eliza, Jack, George?)

For the first time, children visited the lake. In the beginning, they came alone and stood far away, but soon enough a few children—siblings, I'm sure—walked down to the water, where the family knelt together and stared into the gentle ripples. Some of the children shed tears into the water, and some yelped or wailed, but most were silent.

I began to spend more time at the house, packing up Gabe's things and hauling them to the post office in town. I enjoyed filling boxes with his collection of Matchbox cars, his racks of neckties, the many books he'd bought and never read. He had taken with him only what he could fit in his car.

—What do you want me to do with the rest of your stuff? I asked.

—Doesn't matter, he said, getting into the car. He drove off without looking at me, without waving goodbye.

I could have destroyed it all, the books and neckties and Matchbox cars, the NFL mugs full of pens that didn't work, the portable television set, the camping gear we'd never used. Destroying Gabe's things didn't occur to me, though; all I could do was pack them up, put labels on the boxes, and bring the boxes into town day after day. Most of the clerks at the post office weighed my boxes and charged my credit card without comment, but one clerk, Marsha, talked to me, first about the weather and the heaviness of the boxes, then the Red Sox and the absurdities of postal bureacracy. I enjoyed seeing her, but as I brought more and more boxes to the post office, I became self-conscious, wondering what people thought of me, and I tried to go at different times each day so I might get a different clerk, but there were only three, and one day Marsha said,—Are you sending all her things away?

She covered her mouth with her hand suddenly, as if to put the words back in.

—I'm sorry, she said, her voice so soft I could barely make out the words.

—It's okay, I said. These are Gabe's things. He needs them more than me.

* * * *

As the house became barer, the bookshelves empty, Gabe's closet left with nothing but bits of lint and dust, the walls freed of all decoration, I found it easier to sleep at night and easier to breathe during the day. I called a moving company and had them take away all of the furniture except for the kitchen table.

Some days I never went to the lake at all.

Finally, the house contained nothing of Gabe's. The only room I hadn't touched was Julia's.

* * * *

When I brought the last of the boxes into town, one of the other parents, Stephen, followed me to my car.

—Haven't seen you out at the lake recently, he said.

—No, I said, I haven't been there.

—Don't you want to see the children?

—I don't think so. I don't know.

—They smile at us. We saw Tommy. Our son, Tommy. We saw him. He smiled at us. He's happy now.

—I'm glad, I said, and closed the door of the car.

Driving home, I slowed as I passed the lake. Cars clogged the sides of the street. I was sure what the parents said was true, that they saw their children's faces floating like reflections in the water and the faces were smiling, joyful. If I had thought it was some sort of mass delusion, I would have been more tempted to park my car with the others and walk down to the lake, to kneel on the shore and wait for Julia's face to slip across the water. I yearned for the comfort of fantasy, of relief from the grey life I lived, but the only fantasy that appealed to me was one I could control, one I could turn off, a world I could escape from when I wanted and return to at will.

* * * *

After two months away, Gabe called.

—I miss you, he said.

—Do you?

—Yes. Of course I do. I just ... needed some time on my own.

—And now?

Silence for a moment.

—I'm taking care of a child, he said. A friend of mine's daughter. She's eleven. Her parents are in Switzerland, skiing. They're professionals. She usually goes, but she has to be in school right now. She's always seemed fond of me, and I told them if they didn't want to have to hire somebody to take care of her, I'd be happy to. They told her to call me Uncle Gabe. Isn't that great? Uncle Gabe. They're coming back next week and...

—Did the furniture arrive? I asked.

Silence.

—Yes, he said.

—Good, I said.

—Will you come out here?

—No, I said.

—Why?

—Because I don't want to move.

—Will you?

—Will I what? I said.

—With time, will you want to move, do you think?

—I don't know. I can't predict the future.

I told him I was tired and I wanted to sleep. He thanked me for sending out the furniture, the paintings and prints, the clothes, the neckties, the Matchbox cars, the mugs and pens. He said his house was a dream, it was big and had a breathtaking view of the plains, it had walk-in closets and ceiling fans, it had a fireplace and a cathedral ceiling in the living room and skylights in the bedroom and outside a garage plenty big enough to turn into a pottery studio, which is something I'd always wanted, wasn't it, a studio right at home?

He said he would never come back east.

He didn't ask where I slept now, even though the movers had brought him our bed. Perhaps he thought it was a sign that soon I would join him and we would start our life again. Perhaps.

I climbed the stairs and walked into Julia's room. I undressed and pulled the sheets back on her bed, then lay down in it. I closed my eyes and slept more deeply than I had in years, a dreamless, restful sleep.

Night after night I slept in Julia's bed, wrapping myself tightly in the blankets, her teddy bear clenched to my chest, the radio quietly playing old folk songs that weaved their sad, hoarse tones into my dreams.

* * * *

A knock on the door one night.

I was just about to go upstairs to sleep. I stood at the door and listened to my breathing. Another knock. Another. I did not look out the peephole. I knew who was there.

Another knock.

I opened the door.

One of the children, the brother of Lily, stood on the front step. Behind him, arrayed in the flickering glow of the single orange streetlight at the end of our driveway, stood other brothers and sisters, and behind them, in the darkness, their parents.

—Will you come with us to the lake? the boy said.

I could not remember his name.

—No, I said. Please, I said. Please go away.

—The water is getting colder. The faces are fading. Soon the lake will freeze and snow will cover it.

—No, I said.

—This could be the last chance.

He took my hand in his. It was small and warm. He led me out into the cold night. The other children gathered around us, and then the other parents. We walked together down the dark street and to the lake.

—What is your name? I asked him as we approached the shore, but he did not reply.

Looking out at the dark water, I hesitated.

The brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers pushed me gently forward. I felt their hands against me, their shoulders and arms, hips, thighs. As we moved closer to the edge of the shore, I pushed against them.

—No, I said.

I staggered and nearly fell. I lunged out of the crowd and back toward the street. They stopped, but did not turn. I scampered up the embankment to the pavement, the hard surface somehow comforting.

I watched a little girl bend down and touch the skin of ice at the edge of the lake.

* * * *

Tonight, as I lie here in Julia's bed, silver flakes of snow fall through moonbeams and tap lightly against the window. The whispers on the radio had not predicted snow, but it is falling nonetheless, falling on the houses and the town, the church, the forests to the west, falling softly on the lake, where parents kneel over the water. I imagine the water unfrozen, and I imagine the snow falling on the faces in the water, and I imagine the faces open their mouths in joy and laughter so that, for a moment at least, the parents see the children catch the snow in their mouths as it softly falls. But I know the water is ice, and the snow has covered the ice, and the faces are not there, I'm sure of it. In the morning, the snow will lie in thick drifts in the yards and on the roofs of houses, on the sides of the roads and the banks of the lake. It will cover the gravestones in the cemetery where Julia and so many others were buried last year, it will hang like cotton in the trees around the cemetery and on the iron posts of the gate.

Whispers in my ears, I listen to the snow falling gently through the night air, gently falling over all the living and the dead.

[Back to Table of Contents]

On a Dark and Featureless Plain by Stephanie Brady Tharpe

It was an early summer evening and I was on the road again. I've always loved twilight, when time cannot neatly be labeled night or day, and it feels as if you could start a new life without fuss or fanfare. The windows were down and the air was warm and rich with the scent of fertilized fields. That smell always makes me feel like I'm remembering a past that's not my own. The cicadas had crawled out of the earth again that year, their alien music a white noise you noticed only in the back of your mind, punctuated occasionally by weird and eerie silences, an absence which then drew the monotonous drone back into your thoughts. Stars began to appear, an array of tumbled gods, and fireflies flickered in and out of shadow. I passed a hitchhiker by the side of the road, faceless in the gloaming, and wondered where he was going, who he was.

Farther down the road a neon sign announced Grubbs On in the deepening darkness, and the extraneous b rippled and buzzed as I rolled into the parking lot. It is not always easy to recognize the apices in our lives; at that moment my plans did not extend beyond a long stretch and a black cup of coffee, but things are rarely as we expect them to be.

Grubbs On was any diner—every diner—in America. Silver, bullet-shaped, and a little worn down—has there ever been a diner that looked brand sparkly new? One of those places we recognize without thought as a place of light against a darkening sky, where a body can call a time out and shrug off the weariness of the road for a while.

Inside the light was harsh and artificial and the air seasoned with cigarette smoke and old grease; not the best smells in the world, but comfortable and familiar. On the jukebox Elvis beseeched a little less conversation, a little more action. A young couple held the booth in the far corner. Closer to the center there was a loner, face obscured by a newspaper, hand hooked absently through the handle of a coffee mug. An old cowboy sat at the counter and I took a place for myself two or three seats to his right.

The tag on the server's blouse read Hi. I'm Dory Cone Grubbs. She would have been the prettiest thing I'd seen in an age, if her left eye hadn't been drawn tight by an evil-looking burn scar. There was no life left in that eye peering out from behind that squinched skin. I made her age to be about thirty-five, and she looked tired, but her smile was warm. She asked me, “Mister, do I know you? Haven't you been through here before?"

"It may be that I have, m'am.” I allowed as to how I'd spent some time on these roads.

The cowboy studied me carefully, and said, “I believe I know you. You're that preacher, come through here some years back. Atwood."

"I'm not carrying the word of the Lord, sir, just passing through picking up work as I go. Name's Forrest.” I didn't offer my last name, or confess that my father was once a Baptist preacher on this circuit. I didn't live in the past anymore. Hell, it kicked me out a long time ago and God and I were no longer on speaking terms.

I'd ordered a second coffee and a slice of pie when the door opened and the night offered up another traveler. He was a heavy man, and tall, wearing overalls and work boots well dusted by the road, a dark, heavy jacket and a hat low over his eyes. Unable to see his face clearly, I realized this was the hitchhiker I'd passed earlier. He picked a cicada off his collar, crunched it between thumb and forefinger, and dropped it absently on the floor.

The lights flickered once, twice, and went out. The juke popped loud as a gunshot before winding down in a slow moan to silence. The man at the table squealed and the young woman from the corner booth snorted a muffled laugh. “One of those damn bugs crawled across my hand,” said the loner. The hair on my arms rose and I felt a hot exhalation of breath on the back of my neck. I spun around, hands raised against the darkness. A bell tinkled lightly as the door opened, and for a moment a perfect silence held suspended like a drop of rain on the tip of a leaf. Then the lights came back up. There were gasps of surprise and a little chagrined laughter. There was no one behind me.

The cowboy grinned and stuck a cigarette between his lips. I watched the wheel of his lighter spin and spark, spin and spark. Spin. Spark. Dragging my attention away, I felt, I don't know, transfixed, by minute details around me: the tinkling of the loner's spoon against the rim of his coffee mug; the tiniest hint of a hole in Dory's blouse where her name tag had been pinned another night; the sweet smell of my thick and deeply clotted cherry pie; the chatter of the couple in the corner as they regained their bearings. The moment seemed heavy, and I felt a weight of anticipation I couldn't explain.

Dory topped off my coffee. I looked up at her, maybe hoping to see my unease mirrored by her own. Instead I got the jolt of my life. As Dory met my stare, her left eye gazed steadily into my own. Her right eye floated lifelessly behind taut ridges of ruined skin. My mouth worked desperately to form words.

"Forrest? You alright?"

I can imagine no response that might have served me well. I suppose I could have pointed out that something in the darkness had rearranged her face, but I suspected that she wouldn't take a shine to such talk. Perhaps she might have believed I was suffering from temporary insanity, or that I'd gotten confused, spooked myself like a small child after lights out. What I should or should not have said to Dory, however, became irrelevant when the glass on the right side of the diner cracked loudly.

"What the friggin hell!” shouted the cowboy, nearly startling me out of my seat.

There was a small shower of glass chips, and again everything seemed to both sharpen and slow; it was as if I could hear each sliver of glass land individually in its bright spray. Most of the glass remained in the window in a symmetrical webbing of cracks expanding out from the point of impact.

The young man in the booth said, “Enough of this, we're out of here.” He threw some bills on the table and headed for the door with his girlfriend in tow. The single customer also announced he would be leaving. He asked Dory to put his coffee on his tab, and wished her a good evening.

The cowboy said he'd go outside and see what had hit into the window. Dory, who was still staring at the cracked glass, turned and said, “Thanks, Shep. I'd be grateful.” I dropped some cash on the counter and offered to join him. Dory gave us both a troubled smile, and stepped from behind her counter with a broom.

Shep and I walked out of the diner in time to see two pairs of headlights pull out of the parking lot and head up the road, leaving us behind in the darkened lot. It was only then that I realized I'd not seen the hitchhiker since the lights went out. I remembered that hot breath on the back of my neck and shuddered. The night was silent.

As we trudged somewhat reluctantly around the side of the building to inspect the damage the cawing began. There was a wooded lot next door to Grubbs On, and a large tree at its forefront held one of the biggest roosts of crows I've ever seen. Our presence seemed to madden them; the black sky filled up with a riot of raucous cries and a rustling of leaves as they shook the branches. Beneath the cracked window lay the bloody body of an owl. A few crows still pecked it methodically, as if it might yet prove a threat to the roost.

"Well if this ain't some happy crappy,” Shep declared. “I hate to admit it, but all that racket is creeping me out a little bit.” I felt that the perfect silence of a moment before was creepier; it was as if the birds had not existed until we rounded the corner. But I said nothing, just nodded at the old man. He tugged his earlobe thoughtfully, pulled his nose a couple of times. Stuck his hands in his pockets and nodded back. “Guess I'd best tell Dory what happened, and get a garbage bag for this mess. I hope she has some gloves; I won't be touching it otherwise.” The old man looked at me a moment longer, nodded again, and went back around the building.

I turned to head for my car, and the cawing stopped abruptly. There was no sound. I mean none. Even the cicadas had stopped. There is something ominous in complete silence, something that slows time to a crawl. I could feel my pulse, steady, but pounding a little harder than usual, as if trying to fill the sudden void. A twig cracked loudly in the woods, and the sound loomed large after such a silence. Something walked among the trees.

My movements became sluggish and heavy as I turned back, as if I moved through some thick and viscous fluid. The crows sat in a perfect harmony of stillness. They stared at me and I stared back at them.

One single bird flew down and landed three or four yards in front of me. It looked at me for a moment, a long moment, and then uttered a hoarse, sharp cry before taking flight into the trees. The invitation to follow was unmistakable. The other crows remained utterly still and staring.

Now it may be that I should have returned to my car and gotten the hell out of there. Surely I should have been frightened. But I wasn't. My uneasiness was washed away by a dark and strange sense of purpose. I did not know if I would emerge again, but nonetheless I strode into the woods without hesitation. I walked for some time, accompanied only by the sound of my footsteps. I could easily have convinced myself that I had always walked here, that the life that preceded this night was a dream I'd dreamed while suspended in this eternal moment of time. I drew in deep breaths of the cool night air, that good and slightly damp forest smell, and listened to my feet strike the earth. A warm breath brushed the nape of my neck again, but I did not turn around. Instead I looked up and watched the moon dancing among the branches and leaves as I laid down my steps, one by one by one, enchanted with the night.

After some time, I stepped into a clearing, and it was cold. Cold. A frigid torrent of fright rushed through me, washing away my sense of enchantment in its icy currents. Then that breath, hot and insistent as an insatiable lover, fell yet again on my neck and I whipped around. He lunged at me, hands clutching my throat, and I in turn clutched his. We strained and grappled against each other, two behemoths locked in mortal combat. We wrestled for what seemed an eternity, each striving for purchase, for some advantage against the other. I clawed at his face, trying to jam my thumbs into his eyes. But there were no eyes. He had no face. It was a dark and featureless plain.

In the extremity of my fear I began to scream. A black veil descended upon me, the depths of my own darkness a backdrop where memories seared my inner-eye—

dust motes in the sunlight of a hot Sunday afternoon, pews packed with lady parishioners waving those cheap plastic fans that depict the face of Jesus, birds twittering in the rafters, and later, the face of my father floating above me, distorted by the surface of the river as his strong hands held me under in the name of God, the voice of my mother singing: we shall gather at the river, the beautiful, beautiful river

A sunrise many years gone. The smell of blood still in my nostrils and under my fingernails as I threw a bag into the trunk of my car. “I didn't mean to kill him, Daddy. It was an accident."

"Look in your heart,” he told me. “Find the deeper truth. You have drawn the gaze of demons."

But it wasn't true. I didn't enjoy the killing. It had been him or me. I had to do it. There was no bloodlust in my heart, and even if there were, I could outrun it. I would run and run and never look back.

There were other memories, moments of light, of swimming in the cold creek with my brothers and sisters; of helping my uncle with the livestock; and of my mother's sweet voice in the kitchen. The first time I found love in the back seat of a car on a moonlit night.

All these things and more were mine.

My opponent and I again locked hands around each other's throats. That was the first thing I knew when I returned to myself. The second was that the darkness had faded to a deep gray, and the sun would soon rise. There were now the most rudimentary elements of a human face on my demon. I knew somehow that by dawn it would wear a completely human face that would allow it to walk freely among us. It dropped its hands from my neck and spoke.

A draw, it hissed. Your soul is still up for grabs. It turned and walked away into the forest.

I felt no relief, for I knew I would see it again.

I walked back to the parking lot. I did not see the sunrise that morning after all, for it had begun to rain. When I left the woods, there were many crows, sleek and shiny black, strolling companionably in the rain, looking for treasures in the damp earth. They paid me no mind. As I came around the corner of the diner, I saw Dory closing the front door of my car. I pulled my collar tight around my bruised throat and approached her.

She appraised me steadily with her left eye. At last, she asked me, “Do you think madness is a sin, Forrest?"

Her question stunned me. I reached beneath my jacket and gingerly stroked my swollen neck. “I don't know,” I said.

"Last night I couldn't shake how familiar you looked,” she said. “I kept thinking about it when I was cleaning up that glass from the floor, and I remembered Shep saying he thought you were that preacher, Atwood, that came through here a long time ago. But I realized that couldn't be who you are. That was twenty years ago. He'd be an old man by now.” I continued to watch her but said nothing.

After a while, she said, “There was this man around here, when I was a teenager. He was married, had a lot of money. He used to get after me some. Followed me home from school in a flashy car, showed up places where I was likely to be, that sort of thing. I ignored him as best I could, but he'd come to the diner a lot so that I'd have to wait on him.

"My mamma was never quite right. She was crazy for God, was how my father always put it. She thought that women were full of sin, and that any trouble a girl got was asked for. There was a day when I was home from school not feeling well, and I'd put water on the stove to boil for tea. He showed up at my house. He came in and there was trouble. He tried to force himself on me, and I hurt him, just the way a girl knows how to if she isn't given any other choice."

She smiled ruefully. “I have to say, it was a pretty satisfying moment. Anyway, he left, but when I turned around from locking the door my mamma was there. She yelled at me and called me a whore, and lots of other names, as well. She said that I'd best keep my eyes turned away from temptation. Then she got this funny look on her face. It was like her whole face just went blank, like there was no one in there anymore. Then real softly, she says, ‘if thy right eye offend thee, oh Lord...’ and she grabbed that boiling water and threw it right in my face, right at my eye.

"I don't remember much else about that day. When my daddy got home, I was on the floor screaming and my mother was stabbing me. He killed her. Put her down with his own gun. Had to, or I would have died. But he had a real hard time accepting it. Things were about as bad as could be for a while.

"Then one year, this preacher come through here, Preacher Atwood, and he helped my daddy a lot. Made him understand that there was no malice in what he'd done, only a father making the only choice he could. Daddy was never quite the same, and neither was I, but things got better after that."

"Why are you telling me this, Dory?"

"I just thought you ought to know. I saw your car was still parked in the lot last night when I locked up, figured you were sleeping over. Folks do that sometimes before hitting the road. I was hoping you'd still be here this morning. Had a feeling you would be. Look, I don't know if he did it on purpose or not, but that preacher left something behind when he moved on from here. We hung on to it over the years, but he never passed this way again. I left it in your car. I hope that's alright."

"Thank you, Dory.” Impulsively, I took her face in my hands and kissed her cheek near the scar tissue that shrouded her lifeless eye. We just looked at each other a minute, then she smiled and left me standing there in the rain. I never saw her again, but I swear, for just a moment, I thought I saw a glimmer of light stirring in that eye, and a hint of surprise in her smile. In the passenger seat of my car sat my father's old bible. I hadn't seen it in twenty years, but there it was, his name and the births and deaths of our family recorded right there on the front page.

* * * *

And now another seventeen years have cycled by; the cicadas have returned again and I am still on the road. The darkness has followed me all these years. Sometimes it washes over me like a tidal wave, and when it recedes, my world has been altered in small ways, like signs in the wreckage that only I can see. There have been moments of grace, when someone lost has found comfort in my words, or a hurt child has been soothed by my touch, times when I have been able to fix in others what once was broken. There is life in my hands as well as death.

All these things and more are mine. At the end of each day I search the roads as night approaches, looking for that dark blank face in the twilight. We have unfinished business, he and I. And this time, I think, I am ready.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Two Variations by Jeannette Westwood

I saw you in a meadow, in the city park. You lay on your back, wind playing with your hair, and I thought you were beautiful. You were tired, discouraged—student, then barista, then sales clerk wasn't working for you. But you had always loved backgammon, so instead you dreamed of that, of ivory and spotted black-brown pieces, of turning the betting die, clinking, two, four, eight, sixteen. Grass stalks pricking between scales, I slid through the meadow to you.

The ruby above my eyes reflected pomegranate to the ground. I split my tongue for that color. Your lips hold that color, and I stare.

* * * *

There was another girl like you. There was another boy like you. You're all the same, yet different.

* * * *

Together we played backgammon. You frowned over the pieces, I flicked my tongue tasting them. Late afternoon became early evening and the sun set with orange and purple, framing tall buildings with color. I worried the night might be cool, but the sticky city summer continued and the air remained warm, remained humid. A bead of sweat trickled down your face as you glared at the board, thinking, praying?

* * * *

I wish dice loved me. They love you, they chatter so much in your cupped hands before you fling them to the board. You will win with any combination but one, and I will lose with any combination but one. I have not lost before. This is strange, and I wonder. Your face is half lit by the moon, and you bite your lip as the dice spin through the air to rattle on the board.

I taste the air, my tail tingles, my ruby throbs.

1.

You will lose, and I will almost wish you had not. You will stare at the board. Your fingers will be limp as you put away pieces, and you will stand up once you are done. I will watch you leave, considering the air and disliking the taste. Your hair will drift in the breeze but it won't be as golden as I had thought. You will hate me, and I will feel it and hate you in return.

I will be your Naga King.

You'll dream of me, biting you, killing you. You'll dream of me, biting him, killing him. Tomorrow you will find a lover, you will find Him, the one who you think is for real.

In a year from tomorrow I will slip between sheets. My ruby will glimmer once, twice, in your romantic candle light, but neither you nor your lover will see it. He will suddenly stop moving on top of you, and you'll think he's playing some sort of joke but it won't be a joke, and you'll soon realize that and scream.

I will do this again and again and eventually I'll find you weeping. You will recognize me from our game and I will tell you what I have done. You'll try to kill me, try to run from me. You'll promise me anything, everything, for tiny slivers of time.

I'll smile and flick my tongue, and you'll die with only me for company, dead before you feel my poison.

2.

You will win, and your laugh will stop my anger. You will touch my head, thank me for a wonderful game. Your fingers will be warm and they will enchant me. I will wonder if you really see me, or if you've created a fa?ade for me to wear. It's usually the latter, but you will compliment me on my beautiful tongue and scales and I will love you.

I will be your Naga King.

The ruby in my forehead will be as yours. Tomorrow you will find a lover, and he will stroke your golden hair and caress your pomegranate lips and laugh when you laugh. I will bless you both, and you will remember me and I you.

Your lover-husband will die. He will love to walk the streets at night, and though you know it's not safe, not here in the city, you'll find that you like it too. But one night you will be sick and he will go out alone. He'll be gone two hours and you'll be beginning to worry when you'll hear something stagger up the steps and collapse to the ground.

You'll drop your book and run, scramble to unlock the door and throw it open. It's him, your lover-husband, his white shirt red. When you lift his limp body he'll leave a bloody print on your porch. He'll gasp that there was shooting, that he was caught in the crossfire.

You'll drag him inside. His shirt will be soaked, and it will make a slippery mess all over you and your couch. You will stare at him for a minute, then touch him. He won't move under your fingers as you caress his face. His eyes will be open, staring just past you without blinking.

I'll find you there, weeping, and slide up your leg to your lap and gaze at your lover-husband. My ruby will pulse. You will stroke my head and my tongue will flick over your tears.

I will heal him for you. You enchanted me, with your golden hair and backgammon dreams and pomegranate lips.

I'll bow my rubied head to his throat. Your lover-husband will choke and cough up nothing, but there will be no shattered bones, no holes from back to front, no lead deep inside.

You'll kiss him and then me too, and I'll twine around your neck and face.

Your lover-husband will be weak but he'll get better, and when he's not around I'll slip out from under the floorboards and we will play backgammon again.

* * * *

I am not looking at the game but at you. The dice still dance across the board. They have not yet come to rest. You squint, hoping, praying? but squinting means nothing. I'm not sure if you know what this dice roll means. I want to tell you so that you might roll again with full knowledge, but there are no second chances, no second rolls. I wish I could stop the dice and tell you this, let you understand, but I can't and I won't.

[Back to Table of Contents]

A Primer on New Wave and Speculative Fiction in Japan by Mamoru Masuda

The following is a list of panelist biographies from a “New Wave and Speculative Fiction in Japan” panel at the 2007 World Science Fiction Convention in Yokohama, Japan, and could be considered to be a reading list for those interested the best and weirdest writing in Japan in the last thirty years or so.

Besides the writers, the panel included Grania Davis and translator Mamoru Masuda.

* * * *

Grania Davis is an author and editor of science fiction and fantasy. She was introduced to Japanese science fiction in the early 1970s by Judith Merril, who welcomed her as a co-editor for a projected anthology of JSF. During 1979-80 she was resident in Zama, Japan, where she worked with members of the Nihon SF Honyaku Benkyo Kai on a number of translations for the anthology.

Novels:

1980 The Rainbow Annals

1980 The Great Perpendicular Path

1986 Moonbird

In collaboration with her former late-husband Avram Davidson:

1988 Marco Polo and the Sleeping Beauty

1998 The Boss in the Wall: A Treatise on the House Devil

Yoshio Aramaki, born in 1933 in Hokkaido, is a novelist. His works are like surrealistic fantasies, brilliant and stylish, filled with picturesque images. He stopped writing speculative fictions and started to write virtual war chronicles in 1990s.

Collections of short novels:

1973 Shinseidai (Sanctozoic Era)

1975 Toki No Ashibune (Reed Boat of Time)

1978 Yawarakai Tokei (Soft Clock)

1980 Aru Haretahi No Uiin Wa Mori No Naka Ni Tatazumu (One Sunny Day Vienna Stands in the Forest)

Novels:

1976 Shirokihi Tabidateba Fushi (Setting Out on a White Day Leads to Immortality)

1981 Abandandero no Kaikikai (The Pleasure Machine of Abandandero)

Kouichi Yamano, born in 1939 in Osaka, is a novelist and critic. He is also known as a horse race commentator. His works are somewhat mainstream and filled with literary sensibility and culture. But now he doesn't write novels at all.

Collections of short novels:

1965 X Densha De Ikou (Take the X Train)

1971 Tori Ha Ima Doko Wo Tobuka (Where Does the Bird Fly?)

1976 Satsujinsha No Sora (The Sky of the Murderer)

1978 Za Kuraimu (The Crime)

Novel:

1981 Hana to kikai to geshutaruto (Flowers, Machines and Gestalt)

Chiaki Kawamata, born December 4, 1948 in Otaru, Hokkaido, is a Japanese science fiction writer and critic. His style is surrealistic and very sensitive, like Langdon Jones. He stopped writing SF novels in the 1990s and now he is writing mainly virtual history novels and game books.

His works:

1972 Yumeno Kotoba (c) Kotobano Yume (Words of Dreams (c) Dreams of Words)

1980 Kaseijin senshi (Prehistory of the Martian, Seiun Award winner)

1985 Genshi Gari (Hunting Phantapoetry, Nihon SF Taisho Award winner)

1978 Hanzaisha no Kagami (A Mirror of Anti-Present-men)

1986 Kasei Koukaku dan (Martian Crusted Army)

Hirotaka Tobi, born in 1960 in Shimane, is a Japanese science fiction writer. His novels are very stylish and we could see some influences of American New Wave writers. For example, the Derelict Garden is a virtual resort in a virtual space where virtual people are waiting in vain for the coming of visitors.

Short Novel:

1981 Polyphonic Illusion (Sanseido SF Short Story Contest winner)

Novels:

2002 Grand Vacance—Haien no Tenshi 1 (first of the Angels of the Derelict Garden series)

Collections of short novels:

2005 Katadorareta Chikara (Carved Power, Seiun and Nihon SF Taisho Award winner)

2006 Ragged Girl—Haien no Tenshi 2 (second of the Angels of the Derelict Garden series)

Mamoru Masuda, born in 1949 in Miyagi, is a translator.

Main translations:

1979 334 (Thomas.M. Disch)

1981 The Unlimited Dream Company (J. G. Ballard)

1988 Under Heaven's Bridge (Ian Watson & Michael Bishop)

1989 Good News from Outer Space (John Kessel)

1990 Fevre Dream (George R. R. Martin)

1991 A Talent for War (Jack McDevitt)

1994 Paradise Motel (Eric McCormack)

1995 The Gate to Women's Country (Sheri S. Tepper)

1995 Dead Girls, Dead Boys (Richard Calder)

2006 Rushing to Paradise (J. G. Ballard)

[Back to Table of Contents]

Clay by Kirstin Allio

As boys Jerome and George Mueller climbed all over the gabled roof of the row house. Arla was the girl they watched through a skylight. They wiped pigeon crap off the glass so they could see her dancing to her records, combing her grassy hair in front of her face after she washed it. She never noticed their flushed faces blocking the light. The cathedral, rising behind them, absorbed what light there was, anyway.

She flirted with Jerome, always taller, always weaving a ball around his ankles, but George would sit on the step waiting for her to come back under the hood of evening. She smelled like almond soap, covering the cigarettes, or the inside of the Chinese Fare restaurant. Standing before him on the step she blocked his view of the cathedral.

The sky over their town was locked into place by its struts and turrets and ramparts. Touring groups spilled from buses with state-of-the-art German suspension, tinted windows, engines left running. The cathedral even drew Americans, waddling through the passageways like puddleducks—the town was also the origins of Beatrix Potter.

"Muellerstein,” Arla's dad habitually teased him. Muellerberg, Muellerschmidt, Muellerheimerschmidt. That was a good one. Muellerhauserschnitzaldick!

"Get off it,” said Arla. “Georgie's English as pudding.” George hated the way his name was a nursery rhyme—the way it satisfied Arla's father. Arla's mother was ironing a shirt with piss-colored rings in the armpits. George stood braiding his hands behind his back, his balls as small as berries.

Outside, he would punch the air, one-two—like his brother Jerome did when their dad was mentioned. Arla's dad had a plushy, florid nose like a bull's eye. Weekends he played flaming darts in the clammy stairwell. “Don't take it personal, Georgie.” Personal always meant something about George's father, who had run away with a sailor.

But the first universe, the hub within concentric circles, was Arla from the row house.

"Well I suppose that means you'll never show your wotsit around, doesn't it,” she said matter-of-factly.

By the time George and Arla were seventeen Arla had already given up her dream of being a singer. She was middling on the keyboard. Her hair was short and spiky, dyed Chinese persimmon. Her scalp had a wet, raked-over look like an early spring garden. She had laddish habits like keeping her socks on in bed, drinking in the morning. But if he were to save enough, Arla would quit her job racking used records in a minute. To her, a cathedral next door, a bloody national monument, was like sharing a toothbrush with the Prime Minister. She stuck her finger down her throat, gagging. She wanted to go to London.

* * * *

One night Arla's father let himself into the cathedral yard just before midnight. The paving slabs were spongy with age—George couldn't hear his own footsteps, let alone Arla's father's. The old man tipped his bowl-shaped head back to see the black spires pressed in a putty cloudbank. George's own head spun, and coned like cotton candy. The sky roared in his ears. Likely God Himself was an island that had once been a meteor, a raised welt in the white neck of the ocean. All those stars and planets looked silvery, but you saw the close-ups, the satellite photography, and they were pumice.

Arla's dad's eyes showed up like bits of glass from a brown bottle. There was a white band across his shirt, a sporty detail that glowed like the stripe on a skunk. George's foot rested lightly upon his tools on the ground beneath him.

Well, thought George. Certainly no rendezvous. Eyes only for the cathedral. George knew it was a mainstay of the old man's imagination, the little ancestors building it. Like one of those dioramas, hundreds of bandy-legged dolls, the paddy slaves or whoever it was they made to do the heavy lifting, with blocks of tiger-striped stone lashed to their plaster-of-Paris shoulders. Give it a few sage-colored trees dipped in sugar by schoolchildren, and the museum was fit for Yanks and Krauts by the busload.

George could hear the old man saying, “You'd want to be close by the cathedral when your number's up, Georgie.” His wheezy laugh doubled as pertussis.

The shadows were thick as paint. Even if he weren't just back from the pub he wouldn't have spotted “Georgie.” He was a bulky man with shoulders like loose bricks. George watched him stumble backward, catch his foot on a protruding cobble. The night soaked up the sound of his falling.

George walked across the paving and put two fingers on the old man's pulse. The front of the trousers was dark. The neck was still humid to the touch, and boozy.

George gathered up his tools quickly. As a rule, he avoided the night watchman. If Arla's dad's idea of death was to keel over in the arms of the cathedral, well George, too, wanted something from their place of worship. He wasn't there to spy on a drunkard who pissed himself as he crumbled. To pray? He didn't need the go-ahead from any Father to love Arla. George Mueller wanted the secrets of the stone they used to build it. The night gave him cover to run his tools over the cathedral's body.

At first he had leaned against a pillar behind a group of flat-shoed tourists. The vaulted, cave-dank interior smelled like blood. He squinted at a Madonna who had the face of a twelve-year-old child. He counted the exact folds in the fall of her dress, calculated the breadth of her tranquil eyelids relative to the twin grooves between her mouth and slightly flared nostrils. He began to imagine the points of release and pressure. He studied Arla's legs with his hands; they were dry like onions, rather grainy at the knees, warm on the inside, thighs like matching narrow vases.

* * * *

Normally he would have dropped through Arla's skylight when he was finished working. George liked to imagine she was smiling in the dark, amorphous in the bed, wet tar, lava. His cold, musty clothing smelled of stone dust, and it was white on his palms like talcum. Her nose twitched when she smelled him, her teeth were sharp as shale. She wasn't morbid, thought George, just curious.

She made his stiff jeans, powder coated jumper disappear in the bed as if she ate them.

In the lovemaking George too became formless. Although as he touched her he plotted how he might carve them, entwined, in marble or granite.

* * * *

A delegation from the diocese came to see about Arla and her mother. George knew Arla's mother had made the parishioners sit for tea after they told her.

Now Arla's mum said, as if by rote, “Don't spend it all in one place, Arla.” She slid a smudgy envelope across the kitchen table. Loose change of an inheritance, but still. George hung in the doorway. But he could almost pass for handsome now that he wore a cap, grew his hair out, entertained a dark stubble.

"Hey!” Arla called him back hoarsely. He thought it was her dad for a moment. As a matter of course the dead don't talk. Arla and her mother smoked under the lamp. George saw she had on her army jacket for traveling, boots laced up to her knees like a pixie.

He hated to watch them say goodbye. “I'll just go round to my place,” he said.

"Look, George!” Arla was triumphant, waving the envelope.

George could see Arla's mother had been crying. He squinted to measure: the indents of her temples—like Arla's—deep enough to hold a swallow.

He turned so he was in the hall. A rusty, hot-water smell, scaly, papered walls. The dried herbal wreath on the facing door that had been shedding bloody thyme for as long as he could remember.

Arla came up behind him. “Where's your bundle on a stick, Georgie boy?” she echoed her father. She rested her small, carved head between his shoulders.

Winged scapula, temperate skin, shallow dish of a pelvis.

* * * *

All three—Jerome, George, and Aggie—had bushy chocolate hair like their father. Their eyes were dark and alarmingly quiet, a metallic sheen to their pupils. Still, their mother told them, perhaps it would've been worse in another town, without the C of E breathing down your back. After all, it was a warm breath, wasn't it, when they took up a collection for the heat the winter your daddy. Some people thought if you kowtowed to the towers you might allow yourself an extra pint or one more fuck before you were off the mistress altogether. God knows she'd been such a mistress, their mother blurted.

But even in kitchens with the windows steamed over, bedrooms with hissing radiators drowning out all sounds of love, there was a pious restraint of the heart, men wore cardigans over their pajamas. A pinchy little chest since his infant days, lungs like dried plums, George's mother teased him. Sneaking about with chisels and hammers. What for, George-love?

* * * *

"I'm set to lose all of you, then,” his mother said flatly when George told her he was going to London. She had to look at Jerome when she said it. Jerome leered at his little brother.

It wasn't worth the trouble, what his mum thought, or Jerome. Sex was still fresh as the taste of parsley. George squeezed his eyes shut involuntarily when he thought of it.

Arla's skin was the frozen, mottled texture of rose quartz. Sparse lashes that didn't do enough to keep the dust out so that her eyes were always aflame like a stonecutter's or a drunk's.

When they moved apart there was a sucking sound that shocked him.

His love, not just his stinging groin or his pounding heart, but a bigger body, was like an overshoe. Was that the soul? Like a stupid Wellie? Well, he was up to his bloody neck in the water. He would drown for her. Her likeness in stone would rise up like a meteor island.

* * * *

They were spirited away in the back of the van of a pop group from Scotland. The drummer fancied Arla. She stretched out on a packing blanket and pulled George down beside her. “Not with that drummer fellow watching,” he pleaded.

George carried the tools in an old doctor's bag stiff as a whalebone corset. Each was oiled and wrapped in flannel: the fine bright chisels, some with nibs no bigger than a fountain pen, the surprisingly heavy oak mallet. They had pushed the rest into duffel bags as lumpy and long as corpses.

When he woke an hour later, she was leaning through the portal to talk to the musicians. “I'll do hair to get started,” she was saying, and it seemed to him, too casually. “My mum's line of work. It runs in the family, you know? I'm too old to be singing in the street."

The musicians laughed with her. Ar-la made a smashing chorus; the drummer had a falsetto like a wire.

She was kneeling on the floor of the van. George had seen La Danaide, photographs; he considered Rodin sentimental. Arla's back was all sharp tines rather than lush marble. She had hips like a boy rock star. Once he had examined her vertebra after they made love. He felt each headless knob between his thumb and forefinger. “Is this massage?” inquired Arla, her cheek flat on the pillow.

He drew back instantly. She didn't think he wanted to do it again, did she? He could sense her spine's skeleton.

"You've chosen a legendary profession, man,” the drummer was saying.

George tried to laugh along. A profession? Well he couldn't very well call himself Mr. Rodin. A talent, it was absurd. People would laugh at him, that simple. He refused to dissect himself—thin arms with black hair like iron filings—

But Arla he could see in segments.

* * * *

The flat in London was one big charmless room with finger marks on the walls so definitive you could make out the singular diagrams. The space had been used previously for photo shoots of the rather low-end variety. The iron bed was bolted to the floor in the middle and there were rays of duct tape, chalked x's from its epicenter. George began to understand there would be naked women on pedestals, platforms, whatever the studio provided, daily.

The blanket humped its way to the floor in the dead of night where it picked up the hairs of some rodent shed by Arla's second-hand fur coat. The toilet was behind a curtain. He had never once called out for paper but Arla was shameless. There was a cold fireplace into which they blew their smoke. The city grime irritated Arla's cloud-colored eyes so that they ran continuously. A new girlfriend told her to put tea on them. Well, all friends would be new here, wouldn't they.

George saved money by making porridge on a gas ring instead of buying a roll in the street. It was fashionable to eat your roll as you ran for the train, but George would have felt foolish anyway. You couldn't very well treat the city to your breakfast crumbs if you had a parochial slope to your shoulders.

Arla draped herself with a cherry blossom kimono. Her hands stuck out of the loose sleeves like skinned rabbits. He thought he'd seen the granny—were you actually supposed to draw the arse like the flap of a cat door?—who modeled in his life drawing class wrap up in just such a kimono.

Once she fell asleep with a fringe of false eyelashes pasted to her lids that made her face look primitive, like a death mask.

* * * *

The bath was on the hall, shared with the other non-earning artists. Arla made it a habit to track down the corridor in nothing but a towel. Cold water dripped from the ends of her hair and her breasts beneath the skinny towel were gooseplumped.

In their childhood homes you stayed in the bath with the door shut as long as you could manage. You ran to the kitchen and put your back against the oven until your mum had to take the roast out.

Once, George hit her. With an open hand, for coming from the bath wet, for disregarding the morality of their shared childhood.

It wasn't from the hit, of course, but blood and water began down the warm inside of her leg, as if the warmth of her leg was melting what was inside her. She dabbed at it. The towel looked as coarse as sandpaper. The blood disappeared and more came.

He knew he should have knelt down and gathered what was dripping from her body in his cupped hands. Put his tongue to her heart to taste its salty juice. Just taste. A prickling of lace came out on her cheek. Abruptly, he went out. Even in London he sought the underwater, interior murk of churches.

* * * *

In his sculpture studios naked young women rotated like halal meat on a skewer, fan heaters trained on their marbled flesh. Their backs turned pink, their nipples taut, as if he were a great lover. He built all these girls out of clay. Arla slipped in near the end of class and watched him work.

Afterwards she said—defiantly, it seemed to him, “You're no pin-up either."

It seemed incredible to him that this was all she could say about his body. He had made her body with his hands. He had built her on a chair-sized armature. Her skeleton, then laid the muscles on, the fat, the derma layers of clay.

In the town where they grew up the shadows of the cathedral were high contrast, dark blocks and striations like a topical layer of geography over the houses, streets, peg-like citizens.

Where was that, then, that you grew up together? said the people in London.

Arla and George looked at each other and neither gave their town a name. When they reached the flat Arla went straight for a glass of something. “Our last bit of solidarity,” she said with her back to him.

What did she mean? he protested. “You're the one wanted to run away with the drummer—” he began. London! He hated it, the way there were a thousand blokes in second hand herringbone, jackets ironically too small or too large for their barrels. London was a hall of mirrors, a thousand George Muellers in secondhand jackets. Daylight plugged up with buildings that lay their stilted shadows across his pathway.

* * * *

He had a tin ear for music—the goats’ bells that woke him up every morning here in the Loire were no better than the metallic cacophony of London. George was thirty-five yesterday.

He shaved in the kitchen, the loo was in the yard under a mossy roof. He had a plastic-framed mirror of the sort people put in bird cages. The pallor of a jaundiced newborn. His sister Aggie had underweight twins who were, well, the rather nasty color of cheese rind.

The old farmer who sold him the house had told George his grandparents were married in the kitchen. Yes, even with a church across the street; the dam at the mill above them had burst and graves were washed out in the flooding waters. Tough old flowers, bones, sure, even the recent body of a child, had piled up against the great flank of the church the night before his grandparents’ wedding.

A butcher block table a meter thick was left in the same kitchen. George loaded his clay upon it, nubile bricks, always cool, but heavy.

He'd been in France three years now. His loss of love was a silver-gray expanse, flat as an abandoned football field. The day George Mueller bought the house—a hovel that looked more like a toothy stone wall than a farmhouse—there was also a wedding. The bells were incessant, hard and strong. It rained all day. George sat in his car and watched the procession. The French girl was wasp-waisted, with high hair, the groom had a crimson comb like a rooster. George had slammed his car door and stood in the rain with his coat over his head as if no one could see him.

His house was made of the same fifteenth century stone as the church. He had felt relieved to hand over his small, scrimped fortune. It would have made twelve thousand pounds—the old farmer gave no sign of thanks though, and George's French sounded like a dog with a smoker's cough. There were crude outbuildings that could one day be converted to studios. Even a kiln, although he didn't have the temperament for pots, was not a craftsman, drank his tea in a glass, had eyes and hands only for the nude—classical, female.

He was working on a study of Arla. He had been, in fact, three years on the body. His only friends here, a couple of Americans who had remodeled the rectory, suggested she might be a many-armed Shiva. He said, “Wasn't Shiva a male deity?” And the Americans were charmed by what they thought was his understated, particularly British humor. His Arla had no head, he told them.

He tinkered with her—she was a life-sized doll, and perhaps he was just a toymaker, Gepetto. All he needed was to attach strings and wooden hubs for joints and he'd have Arlita. Arlotchka, why not.

The hands were well done, like gulls, muscular, long-fingered, harsh and elemental. He held them in his own. There was almost no temperature to the clay. He might have been dancing with a salt bay, becalmed, and he was a terrifically bad dancer. That her feet were bare seemed frivolous, sophomorically romantic. But more laughable was a bare-breasted goddess wearing trainers. He knew he should stop trying to force her. He broke off work more and more frequently lately.

* * * *

The Americans spotted him and waved merrily with their safari hats. He hoped his squint would pass for a smile. Besides his humor he knew they thought he was small and dark, the stuff of fairy tales.

"Bonjour!” they called in unison. Sometimes it seemed they were reading their lines straight from a lesser Hemingway.

"Apricot season, Monsieur Mueller!"

He couldn't stand Hemingway, blunt and literal. To be a Brit in the French countryside was a natural expatriatism. But to be American in the crossroads town of Les Cerquous Sous Les Moulins, the Sarcophaguses, to purchase the rectory, plunk ice cubes into everything, was the type of behavior that would cause World War III. They wore loose linen that flapped about their vitamin-long limbs, treated his scurvy back to daunting slaps, an unwelcome, physical familiarity. He could feel the reverberation through to the burr of his sternum.

But he crossed the street in spite of himself, followed the bulk of Jim and Susanna into the whitewashed kitchen.

Susanna rubbed her elbows into the counter. “What about our niece in Boston?” She was all relish, matter-of-fact intimacy.

He had never meant to tell them anything, but they were such fine drinkers, and now he was their case and they were in apparent possession of a pipeline of American nieces, each awaiting his charms by electronic mail.

George gave in, expelling the appropriate stage groan.

* * * *

He hadn't even had a telephone until yesterday. He'd taken to writing letters. The warp of distance—three days? A week to England?—satisfied him. Not that he wrote to Arla. No address—easy. When he moved to the Loire he'd finally given up the room in London he'd let since he and Arla shared it. The next lessee had it as a “studio” for quadruple the price. He hadn't a clue whose mailbox she would have subsequently co-opted. He couldn't see her in her own place.

She would have been thirty-five a month before he was. He had imagined her conning some fellow into driving her out of London on her birthday. The way they used to get home together; then Arla would instruct her mother to meet them en route in the ancient Vauxhall. George could see Arla's mother braced up against the wheel, wearing her enormous, tinted driving glasses. I'm coming home for my birthday, Mum! And she wouldn't allow her mother to cook, would take her out instead to XO's Fare of China. So-what-do-you-hear-of-George-Mueller-Mum? They'd go to the pub after for spiked coffees.

To sculpt her was like building a house. He was an old-fashioned immigrant in the land of art, a pioneer who struck out for Canada or some God awful outback, one funeral suit and a pickaxe. He was the crag-faced sod, aged thrice as fast since he'd last seen her, who called for his wife by letter, by ship, when the log cabin stood in the clearing with all the chinks filled with louse-y blankets. A widow from the settlement—would she have been pretty, such a mistress? George couldn't decide, and his heart wasn't in it—had, in exchange for some petting, hung curtains.

Good God. George had remained utterly faithful.

* * * *

He took the handset from the cradle. He had never noticed it was, in fact, ear-shaped; half-moon shaped, gentle as a spoon, wasn't it. He lifted it above his head, absurdly, as if he meant to smash it like a rock-n-roller his guitar. When he put it down he pounded out the long string of numbers gracelessly.

Her voice came tumbling out all around him. As if he found himself suddenly in the heart of a jungle, overdone foliage sucking up all the oxygen. She was well! She was brilliant! How the bloody hell had he got her mobile, anyway? She seemed so close he lurched backward, pulling the phone off its little stand with a great clatter.

* * * *

When she rung off he went to the huge soapstone basin where he soaked his clay tools and stuck his head in the running water. He turned his mouth to it and drank feverishly.

He went out. He had laid flagstones like a jigsaw puzzle. The little trolls at the local quarry laughed behind your back when you hauled the junked shards off across your own axles.

* * * *

"August,” he'd said into his new telephone. “Let's start out with August."

"You've turned yourself into a Frenchman, then,” she said almost unguardedly.

"Well it's not terribly romantic,” he said darkly. “A pile of stone and some sunflowers. A place to stay in at weekends."

"Hey. You sound good.” There was a firm, maternal condescension in her tone, as if she willed his well-being.

* * * *

Perhaps some other girl would step off the train—someone she'd sent—he imagined a flippy skirt, high calf muscles. The last time he saw Arla she'd been wearing a jet-black wig. A glossy pageboy, a gray flannel suit, eating something crumbly out of a sack. They were on a street corner in South Kensington. He had caught her pretending she didn't see him.

"In a hurry?” he said.

"George Mueller! Small town!"

"Well then, Cleopatra."

"Just borrowing the hair.” She had reached up to touch it like you'd touch the feathers of an exotic bird—ostensibly tame but with opaque eyes, ebony.

* * * *

By evening of her arrival date she hadn't phoned.

He didn't bother driving to the train station several towns away. Once you'd staked your place on the platform, nodded to another loner in an anorak, it was unthinkable to go home empty handed. He made tea and told himself he could wait another hundred years to call her. He paced the lower floor of his low house. His jeans were stiff with clay but he wouldn't change and jinx it. There were gray-white body parts everywhere and the pale silt of clay on the floor that captured his footprints. He tried to see it through her eyes, his humble abode. There in the corner of the living room—although the demarcation of rooms was in the floor plan only, George had no furniture—were her faun legs.

* * * *

There was Susanna, the American, all turbo and shimmer. She poked her lower lip out. “Come drown your sorrows. We've got cases and cases from the pig farm.” They called the cellar in the rectory the torture chamber and kept their local, bargain wine there.

"I must've mixed up the days,” George mumbled. He followed the giantess across the street for the second time in a day. The church was rosy in the light. There really was a sunflower field a half a kilometer down the dirt road, George reminded himself.

A woman was already seated in the half dark at the Americans’ big table. A fleet of tiny votive candles bobbed in a trough of water. Arla's white face was sketched with shadows like the fibers of asbestos. George had never noticed the crossbeams of the rectory ceiling before. She was actually eating an apricot.

"Christ, Arla."

"They knew all about me,” she said lightly.

She must be teasing, he thought. She was teasing, to catch him off guard—what did she mean by it? He remembered, long ago—before London—she had implored him for a likeness, a bust, she laughed at the word. He had thought, as if it were a parlor trick, a five minute portrait in the street, one of those pedestrian bridges in Paris, the Seine an instant background brushstroke.

Maybe he had tried to tell her he wasn't a human Polaroid, not even a quick study. He didn't remember. “Just give it a go,” she shrugged, or pressed—he had felt he wasn't savvy enough to know how much it meant to her. “I just want to see what you see, George."

* * * *

Now she said, “It was my idea,” as if to comfort him. “You're allowed confidantes, you know?"

His face was hot. “What an assumption,” he said stiffly.

In his darkest hours he had not even conjured a reunion like this. Moving toward her was like finding himself naked in a dream. Trying to find a telephone booth or a cigarette kiosk against a jeering, tidal crowd.

She was wearing a straight black skirt of a rather unflattering length. It seemed to cut her in half. His eye longed to smooth her out. “Anyway, George,” she was saying, as if they'd left of yesterday, “I've brought work—"

Just for a moment he allowed himself to see her in full color. Instead of in clay, symbol.

* * * *

The Americans, like blustery fairy godparents, shunted them off without even pretending to offer supper.

They crossed the street, George leading slightly and Arla slanting behind him. In the last of the daylight he could see the stickiness and shine of the thick polyester material. She made a point to grimace at the church.

"So it feels just like home, eh George?” she said, as if for her it was a completely bizarre predilection.

It was absurd, playing they didn't know each other.

He wanted to say, suddenly, as it came to him, he had stalked the cathedral yard under cover of darkness the same way he had dreamed of her, was finally permitted to drop through a hole in the roof, the skylight of her bedroom, a pinkish moon crushed between clouds above them.

He started to reach for her but she ducked theatrically as if she were shrugging the weight of the church's dense shadow.

* * * *

She had a laptop on which she could rearrange pop songs for a company that processed and sold “atmospherics.” It seemed you didn't even need a keyboard. After supper she put her headphones on again for her abdominal regimen. George could hear the bass, a remix of a Peter Gabriel song, then Frank Black of the Pixies. Living alone, he had quit listening to music.

She called the abdominals her futile flying. He noticed her long stomach muscles were distended from overuse. She didn't mind if he watched, but then it was like brother and sister, wasn't it. A relationship of proximity; toneless, shared origin.

She had a retro style that revered a garish, generic sense of childhood. If anything she'd lost weight. Someone else's childhood, thought George. Two braids, a shrill schoolgirl's blouse too tight across the shoulders. Maybe it was ironic in London. Sex was ironic in London, he thought. Here his stone house was pitch black at night, a dark that blotted out conversation. He opened the sheets and she came to him. He didn't need to know if her eyes were closed or open.

* * * *

On Sunday they drove four hours to the beach. Arla left her headphones in their room—she called it her room, as if she were checked into a quaint little auberge with an empty bureau. She stuck an unmarked cassette in the car's creaky player. Her new boyfriend was a musician.

George carried their rolled-up towels through the dunes. He had heard about this beach from a bunch of backpacking Australians, not just topless but girls playing volleyball nude, a rainbow of pubic nests, labia hanging between their legs like earlobes.

"Christ,” she said behind him. “I don't see you in a hurry to strip, George Mueller."

He didn't know what to say. It hadn't occurred to him, that he would remove his clothing.

Everyone wants to see you, Arla, the leverage of tendons behind your knee like the hinges on a jewelry box, even the gizzard skin of your elbow.

She ignored his silence. “You're positive you don't want me to take any photos of your statues back to London?"

The businesswoman.

* * * *

He didn't dare say it. Perhaps it was a flabby accord, the couple who eat together once a week after they're divorced just to feel the fight gone out. They choose a cheap place exactly half way between their new, separate flats, order the curry.

"They're hardly statues, are they,” he said.

He lived in a stone house in a stone village and he couldn't afford to work in stone. Not unless it was a commission; “Well how do you get a commission when you're hiding out in bloody France?” Arla seemed genuinely frustrated. He had never worked in wood, or papier-m?ch?, or how did they put it? Mixed Media.

* * * *

She wouldn't take off her bathing suit. “Come on,” she said. “I'm not twenty."

A girl with a white-blond bush flounced by. He found he couldn't raise his eyes to her face. Neither to Arla's face nor to the face of the naked stranger.

He squinted across the green water, Arla beside him in her sarong and one piece. He was a doggy paddler. His patchy English back turned red against the brisk sea surface. Arla would only dip her hands, rinse her sweaty forearms.

She rolled onto her belly and took his hand. “White hands, George,” she said. “Clay hands.” He felt himself shrink in her grasp. Was this the time to say it? When he couldn't have made love even if he wanted to?

But he had promised himself he wouldn't talk. Just to have her out here was enough. Not about the past or the future. Not their respective mums, who they'd left in sooty rooms with tax payers’ rights to be buried at the base of the cathedral like tulips. A day at the beach! Afterwards they'd sample the white wines of Saumur, oysters, drive home drunk. Listen to her cassette tape.

* * * *

He had put in an appearance a year ago at the birth of Aggie's double progeny. One of England's greatest gothic cathedrals. He stole up to the roof like a schoolboy. The footholds came to him like a mother language. It would have been fine if he'd brought something to drink but they were all drinking from oversized plastic cups, his family, there was no flask he could slip in his pocket. He clamored across the slate to Arla's skylight anyway. The girlish room was kept up, perigee of the mother's orbit. The same yellow coverlet made of something slick and shiny and purchased at the local bazaar, three china dolls propped on the pillow.

As a boy, he had never noticed the way the sky seemed even further away when you were up here. Now he thought it retreated from the cathedral spires.

* * * *

"Don't mistake geography for love,” she'd said into the wind on London Bridge the last time she left him. “Like a stupid pop song, Christ, being from the same place."

He had said, “I didn't need it spelled out for me."

* * * *

Now Arla slept with earplugs. “Since I don't pass out pissed anymore.” Otherwise the night sounds impressed her dreams, she told him.

"It's quiet enough here, though,” said George. He watched her forage for her eye cup and the same old squirt bottle of saline solution.

He was stuck in the doorway. She looked at him almost accusingly, her pale eyes bloodshot.

God, he thought, there's a reason women put on weight after thirty. Her breasts were flaps of flannel. He wanted to feed her something with a fat cream sauce, he wanted to hold her.

She pushed her earplugs along the table with a finger made of horn. “So do you want me to sit for you or am I to be the headless woman?"

Ah, she had switched tacks. “She's called Our Lady of Lost Love,” he corrected.

"Not, Arla,” she said. She was a rare woman, comfortable saying her own name aloud. She said it beautifully, followed the syllables over a waterfall. She pulled on a tight camisole.

"I touched a nerve dropping in,” she said.

"Hardly. Remember I called you."

"Well if you want me to sit for you—” She was all bluff and business again, offering her favor.

"Don't trouble,” George muttered. Her vanity was insatiable.

She pressed the earplugs in and mouthed goodnight.

George got up, passed across the stone floors barefoot. The house was a park where they could take their separate evening strolls among the statues.

* * * *

When he woke the earplugs were lying on the crate that served as a bedside table. Little bites of foam that had spent the night inside her. They were the slightest bit discolored in the opal morning light. She was at the desk he had rigged for her on the other side of the bedroom, her back to him, spread eagled, the chair too low for her.

"This is a first,” he said, pulling the sheet over his bare torso like covering one of his own busts. “You awake before me."

She was reading the time table. He was aware that it had been a week. Not all of August. Only one week. She said, “I've got to get back tomorrow."

* * * *

A boy on a slate roof: There was a small hollow in the sky like a tide pool. Untouched by any orbit, not even the chimney sweep, fog from dreams, a boy hidden there. He wanted to see her as he remembered the moon from that roof—unclothed, rose quartz, held up against a great body of water, sky, ink, crushed velvet.

We are from a town so small you can count the chimneys, they would say to the people in London. They met music people at the parties she was invited to. There were a few painters he met at the studio where he rented a nude model for five pounds an hour.

He and Jerome claimed the three chimneys on their row house roof. There was a year—he was ten and Jerome twelve, he thought—they dropped love notes down her chimney. Wafers of paper came back up with the peaty smoke, flags on fire, wishes granted or consumed. They watched the notes turn to grey ash against the cathedral.

* * * *

On the last night he left her sleeping in his bed and went downstairs. Bare feet on stone. She had taken out her braids before bed. Her hair was crimped and shiny.

Strangely, he felt like working. His hands were moist in anticipation of the clay. He unwrapped the remains of a torso-sized chunk, massaged its chapped skin with water, cut off a piece with a length of wire, and re-wrapped it.

He began to pull a forehead from a brow with his two thumbs. He made rhythmic circles at the temples. His hands moved for an hour, until he had a face. It was a blank, classical, female mask. With his wire he sliced away what would have been the back of the head. It was about Arla's size, he figured. He soaked his hands in a bowl in the big soapstone sink and then wiped them on a crusty towel designated for clay. He washed them under the running water. He picked up the mask. The clay was soft and malleable. He went upstairs quietly, even though Arla slept with earplugs. In the wet early light, her face was already clay colored.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Two Poems by Lauren Bartel

Zerry

She always wears her hair in two long braids, they fall straight down her back and her part is straight.

She wears a leather coat, plucks nervously at her sleeves.

She is not pretty.

Swinging, her braids caught my notice this morning.

She was walking in front of me.

For one absurd moment, I wanted there to be a lover.

One to rise every morning and draw a line down the back of her head, part her hair with his fingers, taking longer than it would take so he could sit behind her while she patted on makeup or yawned or held a mug of tea.

This girl who was not pretty and never spoke with firmness or to any of us.

She turned and I saw she was not smiling, going a different way than me, hadn't noticed that I was behind and wishing for her.

She always wears two straight braids and they do not twist when the wind picks up.

Milk Glass Moon

The moon is a porcelain dish, a delicate, shallow bowl that cups the sky, the hand of a kitschy china shepherdess, pale sleeve outlined against pale fingers with chipping gold line.

White against a black that is not quite black, but the color that black appears in old children's books.

Goodnight moon in a blue-gray sky.

And the moon has spilled light,

Halloween yellow, and it becomes a halo.

I have seen things all day;

a shadow without a shadow-thrower slid along the sad contours of my small kitchen while I watered the plants after dark.

A young boy turned his head back and forth in a carriage that an old man pushed toward me until I saw it was only sand for the sidewalk ice.

Blue lights like summer lightning, or a camera flashing, or a metallic bead appear straight in front of me all the time.

I had a dream about a ghost touching a man and he grinned all cocky and squinting and I was afraid, walking alone in the dark to work this morning.

I looked for the tracks in the snow before I crossed to unlock the door but he had hidden his well, riding on the backs of ghosts.

When the sun rose, it stayed hidden, the world remained blue, no yellow or red, only ultramarine, black and white.

The snow and the clouds were the same, luminous cobalt until the magical, effusive light of dawn had faded.

I got home disoriented, stood on the porch staring at the moon and waiting to see something else.

A boy in the saucer rolling over in his sleep, a crack of lightning or falling power lines, heavy with snow, my own bedroom lights on and someone moving inside the room, sighing, typing, putting on her nightgown, lighting candles.

There is only me and I am off balance but I don't want to take my hands out of my pockets to catch myself.

Little milk glass fingered moon.

[Back to Table of Contents]

The Postern Gate by Brian Conn

It is Christmas eve. Rain rushes black down black walls. There is something in particular about all of this; it is something I have had in my mind for a long time. There are women and men moving about inside this place, mounting stairs and unlacing boots. There is one monk struggling down the forest path. The trees grow tall and spare as though straining against something.

I have heard of monks who say the world is their home, but this monk is not at home in this forest. A spiteful wind flings rain under his hood, and in the bluster of the boughs overhead there is a threat. His face is round, pumpkinlike; his nose is squashed; his hands are wide and flat, like pancakes. Do not mistake his simple expression for enlightenment: it is merely distraction. He is imagining that he is somewhere else.

On the steep slope above a dell, the trail has washed out. A muddy ledge remains, not wider than the span of a hand. The monk reaches for an overhanging branch to steady himself, and the branch dumps an icy stream of rainwater into his palm; his sleeve falls away, his palm overflows, and water races the length of a broad pink scar that runs from his wrist to his elbow.

Let him wait for his balance. It is good that we have him with us tonight. The castle of the local warlord is a secretive place, poor for a castle (no moat, no ditch, no rocky crag; it looms abruptly from the forest, governing only an empty glade) but shut up tight against the rain, stones sharp in the dark, doors massy behind iron bands. It is good that we have with us someone accustomed to unwelcome.

His intention is to dance lightly across the ledge, one two three steps, then steady himself at the next branch. At one his feet slip away from him as though the mud were goose-grease. Two finds him sliding down the washout, twisting to keep his lantern dry, and three leaves him hip-deep in a bank of sodden leaves. The rain redoubles. The monk feels something cold creep between his toes. He has not hurt himself, and the lantern is still alight, but he does not bear this indignity with monkish stoicism: as he stands, sloughing off the mire as best he can, there is a tightness in his face. He moves to rejoin the path where it reaches the bottom of the dell. Covered in leaves and mud, the materials of the forest, does he now feel more at home? He begins to shamble.

What is he doing here? The look on his face says it is something he has done too often. I think he sometimes forgets whether he is coming or going, in the way that a swimmer, sucked down by the current, may forget which way is the light and which the brine.

Half a mile on the straight road will bring him to the castle. He knows the bolts are thrown and the guardhouse silent; he knows the great gates will not open to anyone tonight. He knows there is a postern.

Behind the postern, half a mile through twisting corridors and narrow stairwells, a bundle wrapped in white stirs uneasily in the white arms of a maid. Its whimpers vanish against the rain. Should it wail, they will hear it in another room, and wonder from which stairwell the sound comes.

The maid is proud of her errand. What is in her mind as she makes her way through the empty corridors? Vertigo, perhaps: it is rare that she comes into the world above. Defiance, a bit. She is no longer under the protection of her mistress below, but in the domain of the Lady of the castle (who need scarcely concern us: thin hair and bleached eyes, a blotchy complexion, she tries nevertheless to toy with men). The maid must keep strong lest she fall prey to the careless whims of the Lady's subjects.

She rounds the corner and climbs three stairs. She listens for the sound of footsteps. This way is the mouse-hole where the mouse startled her last time; but she is not one of the fainting women who live aboveground. She pictures herself a courtesan in a green dress: dainty feet and fine powders, a head filled with straw. One who loves knowledge, one who is not afraid—that one must have her roots in the earth. And here is the turning where in the summer the light is like a cathedral and one looks up. What a din at the room with the square door! She hesitates in the gloom. The door is closed. There is a draught, but here there is always a draught. The walls are scarcely solid around that room. The boys boast falsely that they have been there; the women fear it.

An apathy spreads from here on certain nights; you may find you don't mind the peculiar smell that fills the halls, as of a roast beginning to burn; later you may wonder why you're still sitting when you should have gone to bed long ago. If you do sleep, your dreams will be boring in the way that a labyrinth is boring; but likely you will find sleep difficult.

The maid carries a wax candle, simple and clean, of her mistress's manufacture. To the one who slips from the square door and follows her, its light is a yellow nimbus around her silhouette. She is not hard to follow, and in this quiet part of the castle, away from the others, he can come as close as he likes. The rooms here are empty; the other men have remained behind the door.

How did the monk know to be here tonight? I recall the message came unexpectedly from a boy; or rather, from a man, a stranger, an ordinary man in trousers on his way to work. He has delivered the message and now he bolts across the square. But what are we doing in this seaside town? Things are losing their coherence: I was afraid for a moment that the message had come through a network of tubes underground.

The note itself is concrete enough: black ink on a white feather of a slip of paper, weightless and translucent. The script is ornate:

"Another one for the brothers. The men do keep them coming. They will be at it again six days from now; if you can come then, the girl will meet you as usual. This one is deformed in the hindquarters, but not poisonous."

Behind the square door, an atmosphere of genial bonhomie prevails. Well-dressed men exchange cordial words over snifters. There are not many of them, though the room is large. (The men are going to expand; to run against each other would be unpleasant.) Look at their hands—no, blink for a moment; after the dark outside and a single candle in the passage, the light here may be too rich. The long chains from which the chandeliers hang have been mirror-plated by some exotic artifice. Mirrors trim the room below as well, in the baseboards and the chair rails, whipping on the light of the candles at every corner. The inside of this room is the inside of a firecracker. The silver is polished to a shine and the linen is white as snow.

Look at their hands. What is it about them? Does the skin change color slightly at the wrist? Are they too small for the arms? It may be only that they are entirely without hair: there in the alcove the servant with his tiny razor is putting the finishing touches on the back of the last skeletal finger. But there is something else as well, something metallic about the flesh. The men have eaten little.

Stand here in the center of the room and face the square door. The key-plate, too, is mirrored. Watch the funhouse reflections of the men as they rise from their chairs. They are not wearing shoes. Now look up, up to the faraway ceiling, and there to the left, off in the shadows behind that beam. At first, seeing with the corner of your eye, you may have mistaken it for an elaborate molding; in fact there is a small door in the ceiling, unmirrored: a simple plank with a hook latch and a leather strap to open it by. A postern.

The servants are driven from the room and the square door is sealed. In the floor is a spiral portal some dozen feet in diameter. It gleams like black marble but is tacky to the touch. The men follow a simple choreography that extinguishes all the lights but one, which the mirrors of the room hold in a fulgent haze that leaves the portal below in gloom. Although it opens, there is no sound of opening. The men's breath and the murmur of their movement dwindle to faraway sounds, like sounds heard through a seashell; the air dims, then clears. The men are expanding, not like balloons but like cats: the hair of their heads stands on end, and the invisible parts of them which ordinarily lie neatly against their bodies inflate and stand erect in a halo extending some distance from their skin. There is a smell in the air, the smell of plenty, as of meat roasting over an open fire.

I remember this castle a friendlier and more expansive place. There were tournaments here, bright pennants: the blue fleurs de lis, the green boar, the golden horn of a bull; underneath them animals roasted on spits, the juice sizzled on the coals and filled the air with smoke; men played artfully on stringed instruments, gruffly with women, violently with each other; there were goldfish in the moat. The scene is familiar to all of us. I remember an elaborate barbican and a bit of high ground beneath that made the place heroic. Now there are only the wall and the gate.

The weight of solitude in certain wings of the castle is pronounced tonight, more so for one accustomed to full rooms and loud men filling them, one wandering now on a strange whim through unfamiliar halls. He is a broad fellow with rubbery skin, pink ears, and great freckled forearms, a clean and honest beast, trusting of his brothers, lonely in this place; no one can blame him for following this woman in white. But ought he to have followed her to the loneliest part of the castle?

In the rain and the dark the castle is a still place, a place where time flows more like a scent than a sentence. But there are things happening here. There are things happening everywhere. This honest fellow thinks of the forest as a still place, yet the monk forges a new path amid the silent trunks of trees while leaves riot overhead. This honest fellow sees a stillness in the maid. There is movement everywhere.

Her breath becomes faster, although she is not afraid. A year ago she might have panicked, might have tried to run. But she is a woman, and burdened; and there is the infant to think of. At the next corner a window opens on the west courtyard far below; in front of it, a wooden bench—light enough, maybe, if her footwork is quick. She runs, not to escape, but to compel him to run after her. She hears the slap of his bare feet against the stone. She takes the corner as fast as she dares, cursing as her sandals threaten to slip on the tile; at the last second her foot shoots out, catches the leg of the bench and flings it behind her, and she throws her shoulder forward to shield the infant as she slams into the wall. The silence of the hallway explodes in the clatter of the bench, the man's cry, the crunch and tinkle of the window. She steals a glance over her shoulder. He has not fallen through, but caught the stone frame with one hand. He begins to pull himself back.

The lead of the window lattice gleams in the torchlight. She punctures him under the ribs, just as she ought. Once is enough: he slumps again into the glass, which crumbles under his weight; in the courtyard the shards and the rain shine in the sudden moon, and he floats out after, like a dreamer who believes in the lights, and follows them down to earth.

I find I am comfortable here. Maybe I know the brutal ingrown ways of this place better than the easy gaiety of former times. I find now that I have no memory of the great gates opening, not ever.

The people here enjoy a reputation as breeders (dogs, horses, more), and, necessarily, as veterinarians. They go forth with chests of mysterious unguents, salves, and powders; also smoldering embers. Do not examine their baggage too closely.

Their horses, though highly prized, demand diligence from the farrier: the iron shoe begins to sink into the hoof, or the hoof to grow out and envelop the shoe, so that the demarcation between shoe and hoof fades day by day. When the old emperor fell behind the enemy line, his horse stayed near though the battle raged hotly all around. The tide turned and the men rushed to his side, and found the horse nuzzling the great wound in his belly: not, as they first thought, in grief at the loss of its master, but in quest of the sweet imperial gizzard. The animal, its muzzle full of blood, was put to death. The new emperor has not the love of riding that his father did; but the services and the animals of this castle still command a certain price.

Our maid knows that even the crash of shattering glass will not draw the guards for some time. Her mistress only sends her out when the slowness is on the castle; tonight the only guards are the young, the infirm, and the unfavored. It may be that no one will come until morning. The infant squirms in her arms. Has it scratched her? She is nearly at the postern. She recalls the great fires deep in the castle's belly, in the rooms of her mistress; she recalls their orange light on the wood. She recalls waking to a light from beneath her mistress's door and the smell of warm linen. She has learned to keep secrets from herself. She fixes her thoughts on the fire, on the room below ground and her mistress's voice, and leaves her arms to hold the infant on their own. Has it bitten her? It writhes and rustles against her breast just as though it were something else.

The room below ground is high, as high as the tower above. The fires are high and they shine on the blonde wood up to the black beams of the ceiling. Servants feed the fires from without; only the maid is permitted here. In the corner, steps rise from the tiled floor to a dais. There, behind screens, lies the maid's straw pallet, and beyond that the door of thick polished planks lashed with sinew. It is from the door that the voice comes, like the voice of a woman. The maid has never opened the door, nor knocked, nor does she bring food. She does not know whether the voice is always there but sometimes silent, or whether it goes away. The fires never burn low. Wood rumbles down the chutes like an earthquake and its noise mingles with the far-off voices of men, the servants. Their voices are not frightened, but they are not bold. In the clay basin beside the mistress's door, objects appear. They appear while the maid sleeps, while she attends the mistress's business above. Infants appear. The maid keeps the room clean. She fetches the things the mistress needs: rusted iron (horse shoes, slop pails), human teeth (children, brawlers), linens stiff and stained, filth from the feet of unconscious men. Four stairways lead from below ground up to the castle, all of them beginning and ending in doors bound in red copper and locked with locks of red copper to which the maid has never seen any keys but those on her own ring. It is her duty to shine the copper. It is her duty never to remove her shoes. From the clay basin, things disappear.

Does it bother her not to see the sun? She lies at night with the lamp dark and lets the orange eye of the fire watch her through cracks in the screen, and she imagines that its roar is lust. Under the mistress's door, an arm's reach from the edge of her pallet, there is darkness. She has never been lonely. Above her pallet are paper, inks, chalks, and charcoal, and next to them, bound in twine, a stack of drawings: men mainly, and mainly dull men. Men with flat chins and dirty feet. Gray men. They may have one or two talents. They do not ride well. When she cannot sleep she lights the lamp and draws, comfortable between the fire and the black strip under the door, unmindful of time. I do not think we can follow her there.

The infant has not bitten her; the rough patches on its skin have only rubbed her ragged inside her wrists. None of the infants she has brought here has harmed her.

The postern opens onto the storm where the monk waits, and has been waiting. The rain has plastered his robe to his watermelon belly. How many posterns in the castle tonight? He takes the bundle and peers under the blanket and grimaces. Below the child's waist the smooth pink skin is a segmented carapace like lava rock; violin-bow legs squirm mechanically and two pupilless eyes stare into something not present. The monk glances up at the maid. Has he seen her before? He nods politely and takes the bundle away.

The child herself will not remember this moment. If she comes back to this castle, she will not recognize it and she will not recognize the maid. She will recognize the forest, but she will not remember why. After the rain stops at dawn, she and the monk will sleep a few hours, huddled on the drier ground on the lee side of a basalt boulder like a whale's tail. All day they will climb the mountain and arrive at the monastery in the early evening. But the child will remember the road in the deep part of her as though it never ended.

The day on the mountain is sunny and warm. It is dusty here, and high enough that the vegetation is meager: scrub and thorns and small, twisted trees with sticky sap and savory leaves. Above us a crag of rock throws cold shade on the huts that hug the slope. Below us spreads the valley, the old aqueduct and the ruined road, the distant speck of blue smoke from the fires of the village. Two spots of brown stand out against the yellow of the path, nearby under the first switchback: two monks gone to gather leaves to flavor the stew. It is from that direction that our monk and the child will come.

The place to wait for them is in the kitchen. In the afternoon it is alive with chopping and boiling: eight cooking monks at three long work-tables and a stream of others bringing lemons, apricots, olives, and dates from the gardens. They will have their meal before the sun fades and our monk will arrive afterwards. He will not come to the kitchen at once: he will arrive and they will welcome him, he will eat something alone in the refectory, and they will bathe and feed the child. But afterwards he will bring her here to the kitchen. Then the scent of the fire will be dying and the smell will be of clean stone, the dusty wood of the building, the iron of the great black pots. Knives hang beside the tables, their wooden handles stained gray with the sweat of monks’ palms. He will carry her into every corner. The sun has nearly set and the kitchen is full of shadows. It is warmer here where the ovens are still cooling, and the warmth pacifies her.

He will bring her into the courtyard and they will mingle with the other children. There is the one he pulled from the fire, the one whose neck and chin, pink where the flame held his head in its burning palm, will match forever the pink scar on the monk's arm. This child has a short tail; that one carries a batt of wool awkwardly under his arm, his hand pale and fleshy and shaped like the claw of a crab. Coming from the nursery are the three blind children. One way or another they have all found a home here.

Behind the square door, the black portal opens smoothly. A wind roars up from beneath; the men jump northwestward and cling to the ceiling on all fours. Hairless hands sparkle and the men emit a faint glow. A hook clinks free of an eye, a simple plank door swings open. The floor is empty. The room is empty.

Finally the guards come, listlessly, to the corpse under the high window. Soon the warlord and his men will come too, descending gently on invisible stairs or rising up from the stones, and then the guards will finally begin to speak, though in dialects not their own. The corpse will be laid out before dawn. They will sacrifice wine and meat and women. The sun will rise on a funeral feast.

The warlord is reminded for a moment of a day when he was young, a day he courted the woman who would become his wife. It was a tournament day: the banners, the roasting joint, the jugglers. Always before, as a boy, he had hated the tournament, the smell of dung, the flies and the sweat, the shouts of the men. But on that day these things belonged to him. The orders were his to give; that day, by the arcane algebra of power, was the end of his servitude. What caused him to choose her out of the throng? He knew her well enough; they were of similar age, from noble families. She was without beauty, charm, or wealth, and he was without nostalgia for a childhood spent together. But that day, when he had come out of his dead father's chamber and into the air, when the people came to him and touched him and murmured inconspicuous words—that day she too came to him, she too opened her mouth; but she could not speak. He chose her then, believing that she, out of all of them, knew and best feared the distance he had come.

What is this distance? The distance to the monastery is many miles, but the monk, arriving footsore with the last rays of the sun, will soon forget them. The distance to below ground is twenty-six stairs of mossy stone; though forbidden to others they are light to the maid. The distance from servitude to power is short, even too short: one season and an old man's fever. The distance from one end of servitude to the other—as I say, I have had this scene in my mind for many years, I do not remember how many. The duration of one night's carnival rites; the space between the cooling oven and the dusk blue rectangle of the door; the length of a contemptuous gray brow sketched in charcoal—who can contemplate these distances?

[Back to Table of Contents]

The Mysterious Mr. M by Abby Denson

* * * *

* * * *

[Back to Table of Contents]

The Coder by Benjamin Parzybok

I had to climb a ladder up to the roof and every time I joked to myself about how I was climbing the corporate ladder. Here I am, climbing the corporate ladder, I'd joke. Really getting high in the world now. I'd have the corporate cafeteria lunch on a tray, or perhaps two, one for each of us, trying to balance it as I climbed. This was all the Coder ate—one corporate cafeteria meal per day, tasting slightly of aluminum. Though I often thought that before the Coder went crazy he'd only eaten a single daily meal at the corporate cafeteria anyway. Crazy. Is that what he went?

I sat and ate my own lunch and watched him work from a giant air duct on the roof. We were four stories above ground. He let me do this, watch. Or he did not notice. I'm not sure which. He wouldn't eat his lunch until he finished working, be it ten minutes later or the next night. He was in his usual position, cross-legged on the tar roof, bent deeply over a stack of papers, pencil in hand. He was thin, so thin that I worried that he wasn't getting enough food. It was my job to worry about these things. He had sharp cheekbones and clumps of straw and gray hair that blew in the wind, whether there was wind or not. He was wearing his glasses now, comically stereotypical glasses, the thickest, coke-bottle glasses you could imagine. His face was taut with weather burn, and with his clumps of gray hair it was impossible to determine his age. When he worked he rocked ever so slightly in rhythm with the pencil. Occasionally he leaned up from the work, often with eyes closed, and waved his pencil and arm in the air, as if he were a conductor, keeping time. Sometimes I mimicked the motions, trying to feel what he felt.

When he was finished he'd hand me the code. Perhaps there'd be eye contact.

Or he'd leave it there and I'd go harvest it.

* * * *

The wise man lives atop the mountain, this is where wisdom is dispensed. But how does the bugger eat? Who carts food up there, who brings him books, makes sure he's comfortable, totes his teachings hither and thither? That fellow, the one that does all the work and gets none of the glory, the wise man's lackey, that was my job.

I worked for Nebbets, Inc. A little company of about three hundred deluded individuals each with a nice little title that attempted to describe what it was they never got around to doing. We were a software company. We made a couple of different types of software, but our most important one, our bread and butter, was a piece of software called Rail Logics (TM). In essence, it let freight train controllers know when to send a train here and when to send one there without getting all those trains in a terrible muddle somewhere. What would happen to our nation if all the freight trains carrying everybody's cars and grains and nails and beauty supplies were suddenly in North Dakota? We'd shut down, of course. That'd be it for this country, kapputenzig, broken down.

Obviously, we thought we were rather important. But then, if we hadn't done it, somebody else would have. And indeed, somebody else was. A company with the rather intimidating name, LogisticMagic, Inc. was a newcomer on the scene that had recently gotten several freight companies to switch over. This made the Nebbets, Inc. management rather nervous.

Every company in some way is like a family. It has its collective personality, its little quirks, its history and grievances and grudges. It also has its secrets. Nebbets, Inc. had a big secret.

Being a software company, one would have expected us to have a number of programmers around eating pizza and staying up late in front of their computers studying the bits and bytes that make up their world. But we didn't. We had one programmer. Oh sure, we had a couple of guys who could write a line or two of code and who could troubleshoot and compile and do all that other fancy stuff one does with code, and they went on masquerading as our software engineering department, their desks proudly displaying titles written on little brown placards like “Chief Software Engineer” and “Database Developer” and so on, but we only had one real programmer.

My friend Cherie in Human Resources looked up his name for me. He was hired under the name Jeff Thrams, though I doubted there were more than two or three people in the whole company who knew the name. He'd gotten a B.S. degree in Computer Science from some Texan university.

Only a B.S. in Computer Science? I had a B.S. in Computer Science ... how could so little education turn into this? My computer science degree had been a joke. At one time, perhaps, I had painstakingly hacked out an application. Now I was a Product Manager. Brian Gorman, Product Manager. I had my little cubicle, my computer and the phone that nobody ever called me on. I ate lunch in the company lunch room, skeptically watched the company stock ticker electronically displayed on every wall, and each night I went home to a small, quiet apartment with its views. When I went back to work, I had the Coder. He was my job.

There weren't many people in the company that knew of his existence. And those that did, by some quiet, collective agreement, never mentioned him. But they were all sure of one thing: the Coder was a genius unlike any other. They thought he was a god of programming. And I was his interface, his lifeline, his contact to the outside world. I was the messenger.

I'll tell what I know, that which was told to me in conspiratorial whispers by the company chairman. The Coder had been hired a long time ago. He had been fresh out of college, a young kid, and proved his facility for programming quickly by fixing several longstanding bugs in the company's fledgling program. He also made enemies by either directly insulting the intelligence of the other programmers, or implicitly doing so by retooling their code. He hated noise, talked only when forced by circumstance, and when he wanted something his way, he forced the matter with his coding prowess. In his first three months he wrote several viruses that he unleashed on the company, one that silenced all of the phones, and another—though this is pure speculation since the company experienced several electricity blackouts during his first three months—that cut the power to the building. He was known to be volatile and erratic, given to long periods of silence. But at the same time he made himself irreplaceable, he was the brain behind the product.

Around his third month at the company, and after he'd taken on the majority of the development for the company's product, he began to work in seclusion, to avoid human contact. He spent his days barricading himself in an office or supply closet. He wrote all of his code on paper during the day and then transcribed it to computer by night. And then he disappeared.

At first no one noticed his absence. They weren't used to seeing him. On the third day during routine maintenance the building's janitor found the Coder up on the roof of the building. He was half-crazed and dehydrated and threatened to throw the janitor off. The janitor sought out the company's chairman, the same who relayed this story to me, who went to speak to the Coder. Reportedly, the Coder had run out of paper and had scuffed thousands of lines of code into the hardened tar roof with a stone: genius code, invaluable code. He refused to leave the roof. From now on, he said, he would work from there. After hours of bargaining, a deal was reached. A pact, an arrangement. The Coder stayed on the roof, where rough accommodations were made for him. A sort of lean-to hut was built against the top of the elevator shaft enclosure. Stacks of paper were brought up, #2 pencils, and regular meals. And the secret was suppressed. Inside the company they worked to erase his presence.

In my first week of work this same Chairman handed me a tray of food and asked me to bring it to the roof.

* * * *

Up on the roof I sometimes had to look for the Coder. He'd be hunched in a corner or hidden behind an air conditioner box. Sometimes it was raining and he'd be splayed out on his back, with his mouth open wide and full of rainwater, his code crumpled up in his fist and turning to a sodden mess. I would panic, thinking him dead, and shake him, but he'd always jolt awake and snarl at me. It'd take us days sometimes to translate all of his smeared pencil marks into workable code. The code was in his brain, the paper he'd written it on inconsequential, only, perhaps, a courtesy to us.

I could never call for him, or speak. He'd become irate at the noise. But I feel certain that he was aware of my presence. Did he picture me as the zookeeper or the slave? His robot or his disciple? I was the only human he saw, now, at least at close range. From where he was he could watch—and often I would watch with him—the employees file out of the building at end of day. When I watched him work sometimes for hours, I knew some part of him was aware—at least he was aware before he started and after he finished. But in between, when he went to that deep logic core of himself, the part that streamed electrons, ones and zeros, on and off switches that moved a thousand spidery webs of trains and trucks through the country—there, I'm not sure that he was aware of anything.

* * * *

When I brought Daniel, our “Chief Software Engineer,” the day's code, he and I would peruse it together in wonderment. Daniel, with his Ph.Ds in computer science, was little more than a secretary at Nebbets, Inc. He was a good man, studious, humble even in his own brilliance, eager to see what would come next from above, like code handed down from heaven. He'd never met the Coder, of course. I'd hover over his shoulder as Daniel opened up the code for the existing program and typed in the new work. We'd sit and try to determine what had been done, Daniel making educated guesses, me just guessing.

"He has this all in memory,” Daniel said. “He has no line numbers to work with, nothing to know where to put the new work. The bastard, lucky bastard. If only he had a conscience he could work miracles."

As always, I felt proud to hear this. I tried not to take the compliments personally—I couldn't pass them on to the Coder, and so these praises stayed bottled up in me. “Yeah,” I said, “I wonder how we could derail him.” Daniel laughed. I wished the code were mine.

"He doesn't even use a computer, never debugs; the whole code is an ecosystem in balance in him,” Daniel said. Among the company, of those who knew of him, there were several factions: those who were superstitious, those who hated him, and those who were his fans. Daniel and I were fans. “And the code is hardly intelligible—look at this, this function has nothing to do with any of the code around it. Is it called somewhere else? Is it in preparation for code to come? Strange loops and detours that don't make sense, but that work anyway."

The day after I met with Daniel, my computer informed me via our wired company calendar that I had a meeting with Nebbets management to discuss the product. This meant we were going to have our biweekly discussion about the Coder. This meant that I would field hopeful, anxiety-ridden questions about the future of the company based on what little I knew of the Coder, who refused to see any of them. The alert box gave me the three choices: SNOOZE (procrastinate, put off, delay), DISCARD (how secure was my job?), OPEN (only when desperate). I chose SNOOZE. Bob leaned over my cube. This was Bob's job, as far as I knew. To lean over my cube.

"Hey, are you busy?” Bob said.

"Uhhhhh ... not really."

"Cool, cool, I've got something to send you.” A split second later I had email in my inbox. It was an attachment. From Bob. Though Bob's cube is right across from mine, to get into my cube, Bob had to walk twelve cubes down to the end of the aisle, turn into my aisle, and walk twelve cubes back up. Bob raced out of his cube and I knew he was on his way over so that we could both take joy in his attachment. I dutifully opened it up and previewed it so that I might express the requisite amount of glee when he got here. He got to my cube out of breath. I waited for the panting to ease until he said, “Play it, play it!"

It was a video clip of a man hitting a bump too fast on his bike on a bridge, bouncing up, tumbling comically over the railing of the bridge, and down into the water.

"Yes, yes! Play it again!” Bob was dying or laughing or both, crowding up my cube. I played it again. “Dude! Dude! Dude! That's fucking hilarious!"

"Bob, swearing?” came a voice, but it sounded more like Bahhhhhhhhb, swearing? That was Ellen who got annoyed with Bob's swearing. She sat kitty-corner to my cube and next to Bob. About all I ever heard her say was, Bahhhhhhhb, swearing?

"Sorry, man, sorry. Dude, play it one more time. Can you believe that shit?"

I wondered why it didn't play on his own computer.

SNOOZE, DISCARD, OPEN, my computer beamed, and I realized I was saved. “Oh man, Bob, I've got a meeting,” I said, hitting OPEN finally on the alert box for his benefit.

"Oh, OK, management, huh, cool. Come see me when you get back. I've got a book for you."

* * * *

It was ten people and me. It was always an odd, uncomfortable meeting—how unique was it in corporate America? I didn't know. Ten upper management, wealthy, fancy-titled, male and female executives, and me. All of them with their eyes trained on me, the messenger, who delivered the company's future.

"Well,” the chairman started. “How does he look?"

"Oh, you know, about the same,” I said. “Daniel says the code is impressive, as always."

"Ah,” he said. “Good."

There was an uncomfortable silence. The purpose of these meetings was to reassure the management that everything was status quo. They all fretted, what if he just stopped working one day? What if he were struck by lightning? They'd installed an extensive lightning-rod system on the roof already.

"We're counting on that next upgrade, you know,” said another. She pointed at a chart on the wall that looked like the profile of a mountain. A steep slope on the left side, and a slope that eased down on the right.

"Ah, mm-hmm,” I said.

"Any ideas what features he may have planned for the next version?” This was asked every meeting. Everybody knew the answer, but it was a question that had to be asked.

"Uhh ... boy, no I really don't. He doesn't ... really talk about those things.” This was what I always answered. It was like a class play we put on every other week, but the audience had left long ago.

"LogisticMagic's new beta has response tracking by region,” another noted while studying the underside of his tie.

Several of the executives nodded thoughtfully. It was hard to tell if any of them knew what that was.

"We could give him a raise,” said my direct boss, Kim. This was brought up roughly every tenth meeting. And often the Coder did get raises, money that was deposited electronically in a bank account that I had set up for him. Money that accumulated. The Coder did not entertain the concept of money.

"Yesssss,” said the chairman, “he should get a raise. It's about time. Especially with a new release coming on. Perhaps ... a little motivation?"

"Twenty percent?” someone suggested.

"I think ten percent should be ample,” said the Chairman, tapping his pen on the great table with slow beats.

"Yes,” said a senior member, “but remember our revenue flow."

"Ah,” said the chairman.

"Yes,” agreed another.

"Perhaps a five percent raise now, and a five percent raise after the release."

"Then it's agreed."

"Yes. Sal, would you take care of that?"

There was a minute or two of silence while they looked at notes or shuffled papers.

"What about a doctor's checkup?” someone volunteered.

"Oh, I don't think he'd ever consent to such a thing. But I could try to ask,” I said.

"We could tranquilize him,” said the senior member. “Put something in his food, and then have a doctor come up there real quick."

I saw horror on the faces of the few who had actually met the Coder.

"Now, now, this is no Wild Kingdom,” the chairman said.

"If he found out...” I said and gestured ambiguously. In my position, I found I was most effective if I implied everything. “And then even if he didn't find out, tranquilizers,” I said, “and the brain...” I trailed off. They trusted me completely. I was the voice.

Everyone nodded.

"We want to make quite sure that he's, ah, comfortable,” said my boss Kim.

"At least in his, err, situation,” the chairman said.

"Has he got everything that he needs?"

"I think so,” I said. “He hasn't expressed needing anything."

"Sometimes humans have needs,” said Kim.

Several others nodded in agreement.

Kim spoke carefully, “Do you think he'd like a ... companion? Even if one just visited?"

"A companion?” I said.

"Yes, a companion,” she said. Everyone waited for me to understand, and when I did, I blushed, which in turn caused several other members to blush. I understood that they'd talked about this and Kim had been nominated to ask.

"No no, no.” I laughed, and others laughed with me, relieved the question had passed. “I mean, I don't think so. He might, I don't know, but I don't think he'd even notice if she went up there.” I shrugged, hopelessly, what did I know what the Coder wanted. A companion? The man didn't even really speak English, much less, I thought, realize he had “human needs.” A woman, a man, a dog, a hamster? All of these made sound, took up space. But what an offer, he's a rock star, I thought for probably the hundredth time that year.

"Oh! He did mention a telescope once,” I said. This was for me.

"Excellent!” said the chairman, “excellent.” He pounded his fist once on the table. “I like telescopes myself! I know a perfect model, I'll order one immediately.” Everyone was quite pleased and I felt pleased, too, for thinking of it, for giving them a toe-hold.

After the meeting Kim pulled me aside. “Brian, how's he doing, I mean really, how's he really doing? You don't think he's lonely?"

"No, I don't think so. He seems ... he's absorbed, taken up with his work. People distract him,” I said. I protected him from them. The Coder was mine. “He's not a normal human. The only time he ever gets close to me is when he attacks me."

"Oh, I know, I know, you're such a good sport about that. Thank you for doing that. I hope he doesn't attack you because he feels frustrated on the job,” she said, suddenly alarmed. “Is he still interested in the work?"

Everything was money. Money was everything. There must be new features to spur upgrades to spur profit. How much would they be able to charge? There is no such thing as a finished application, in an executive's mind, because upgrades mean money. In a coder's mind, a perfect piece of software can exist.

For the rest of the day, Bob leaned over my cube.

* * * *

The Coder sat cross-legged on the tar roof, bent over a stack of paper, furious with his pencil. He gestured for me to wait. And I waited. I waited for five hours. From past experience I knew not to make too much noise, or to fidget, at least within his peripheral vision. Most of this time I sat cross-legged on the tar ten feet away and imagined myself writing the code. The symbols I'd all seen before. Variables, if then statements, loops, database calls. Endless semicolons, parentheses, curly brackets. I took out the pencil I'd begun to carry and gripped it like he gripped his. The knuckles white. The point perpendicular to the paper. I filled my head with what I imagined to be his code. I had done this many times before. It became dark and the Coder continued to work. Could he see? An hour after darkness he set down his pencil. Straightened the pages and then, without even glancing in my direction, got up and walked over to the small hut we'd built him, the one I'd never seen the inside of, and entered. I got up stiffly and stared out at the city lights, wondering what code had just been written. It would be written as the Coder always wrote code. Fast. Confidently. Maniacally. Bug free. At the top of the first page would be a sequence that was underlined. This was code that was already written, already in our program, it was an indicator to us where we should start placing the new code, as he never wrote consecutively. The Coder had the entire program burned into his brain, over a million lines. Supplanting, I supposed, social skills, verbal skills, desire, loneliness. The Coder was the code. He was not just close to the machine, he was the machine—no, he was more than the machine. I agreed with the board; he was divine, he was a god of code, and I wanted to be him more than anything.

* * * *

The next morning I did what I always did when new code came in. I stared at it. I tried to memorize it. Before I passed it on to Daniel, I wanted every part of that code inside of me. But I was not built that way. It did not easily pour into my brain.

There were times that we didn't understand the Coder's work, what to do with it. He gave us pages of scrawlings with no starting point, no reference point for where to add it into the old code. And so we ran it separately, as its own application. Sometimes the code snippets seemed to have done something. Other times, we weren't sure. Some quit immediately after running and refused to run again. Was he experimenting? Building something else? Changing our systems? Once, Daniel and I entered in a batch of new code and when we compiled and ran it, every single screen in the company turned to static, the entire company caught in the stare of monochrome pixels. Just as quickly as the static came, it was gone. Later our network administrator came and let us know that there were strange events in the transfer logs. Transfers had been made. Data had escaped.

* * * *

Bob, who I'd stupidly told about the specifics of my job over one bored lunch, wanted to know what the Coder was really like. “Is he like Marlon Brando at the end of Apocalypse Now? Is he like that guy from Silence of the Lambs? Or is he more of a mad scientist type, like maybe Jeff Goldblum in The Fly?"

About once a week Bob managed to talk me into eating lunch with him.

I tried to think of the appropriate movie role. The Coder is a machine, I thought to myself, he's a rockstar and a machine. Is he like Conrad's adventurer, in Heart of Darkness? Maybe, but there, even, the man has a cognizance of going too far, of going anywhere. He believed he had fallen into evil. What about the Coder? Was he harming anything? Was he soul-less or did his soul vibrate with the universe's logic?

Perhaps he was a mad scientist. But I felt even with mad scientists there was some sort of aggressive drive, a terrible ambition.

"Did you ever see A Man Facing Southeast?” I said. “The Argentinean film?"

"Yeah yeah yeah, the guy was a hologram, right, a hologram of himself as an alien, and he went around playing music and people believed he could heal them."

"Yessss,” I said, though I hadn't remembered that. “Maybe he's sort of like that, except antisocial."

Bob nodded thoughtfully and then changed the subject, pulling out a book he'd brought for me.

"You've just got to read this book, this is the best book, I know you'll so dig this book. Runway Star Eternal Mar,” he said, pointing to the title. “The plot, dude, it's the most twisted sickest cool thing, it'll blow you away."

I stared at the cover as Bob explained the plot. On the cover was an android shaped like a woman on a model's runway. The covers all looked identical to me. There was a girl and a guy. Of course there was a girl and guy—Bob was lonely as hell. Bob was the guy. He thought he was the hero. Oh, and of course, the buzzwords. Girls and buzzwords: NeuroBeamer, Electron Hornet Burst, Psychic Network Hat.

I could go on and on about Bob, but I couldn't blame him, really. Everybody wants to be the hero. Even the messenger.

* * * *

Some days my job took thirty minutes. All I had to do was bring a cafeteria lunch to the Coder. Some days I spent twelve hours on the roof, watching the Coder, waiting for him to finish. Imitating, imagining, trying to become one with the code. On Fridays I brought up extra food for the Coder for the weekend. The rest of the time I surfed the web, I stared into where the walls joined in my cubicle, that crevasse there, occupying so much of my attention. I anticipated Bob's face over the top of the cubicle. I ate, walked circles around the office, wrote email to friends. Or I rotted. Tried to keep my jaw from going slack, my eyes from glazing like an icy windowpane. But at least I had work, a center of focus. I don't know how the others managed to keep themselves busy, or sane.

Sometimes the Coder lay in wait for me, and when I exited the portal he'd tackle me, throwing punches at my face and gut. Fighting back was out of the question. If anything happened to the Coder the company would die. And besides, who hits the master, unless a mutiny is planned? Being larger than him, I was usually able to keep the damage to a minimum. He had hardly any muscle mass to speak of—but it was the only physical contact I ever got from him. It was an intimacy, almost. Like a father who hits his son, says “this hurts me more than it hurts you.” That's how I imagined it.

When I brought up the telescope, the Coder looked up with the blankest, most uncomprehending look. It was a look I was used to—he was lost somewhere in thought. Not working, but not not-working. Perhaps his mind was timing trains, following rivers of cargo across the country. Perhaps his mind was caught in an endless loop.

function time(){

$self = true;

while ($self = true)

{

echo “inhale";

if ($watcher != null && $watcher.isAlive)

{ if (!$awake)

{

eval(if($self—$awake))

{break;}

}

else {

process(data($data = “self"));

while ($self = data)

{

count++;

}

}

}

echo “exhale";

time();

}

}

end;

Sometimes I had to resist the impulse to bow to him.

I set up the telescope. When I wasn't looking through the telescope, I watched him. That day I felt his eyes following me. Evaluating. At last he came over to where I was with the telescope, watching our company's employees escape into the night, and he stood for the longest time. Finally he gestured that he would like to use the telescope, and for about an hour I stood next to him as he trained it on the city, on the sky, on the ground. I couldn't tell if he was searching or observing, and I spent the hour resisting putting my hand on his shoulder. I spent the hour not choking him, not throwing him off the roof. I spent the hour not asking him every question I could ever imagine. When he was through he went straight to his lean-to.

The next day Bob leaned over my cube. He said, “This day is shit, just shit, everything I do is shit, even parking this morning, shit."

This was Bob's warm-up to a half hour rant. In a moment Ellen would say Baahhhhhhb, swearing? And then they would go at it just like the day before, and the day before, just like everyday. I decided to reroute, jump tracks. Send the freight train express.

"Bob,” I said, perhaps a little too loudly, catching Ellen mid-complaint. I held up my hand. “Can you tell me later? I'm sorry, I'm just too crammed."

"Right right, dude, sorry. No problem, no problem at all, man. I'll tell you at lunch."

I went back to staring into the crevasse where the walls of my cube met and thought about telescopes and code and when loops were broken.

* * * *

I visited the Coder, climbed my corporate ladder into the open air with his lunch. And he was waiting for me. Standing next to the portal that leads to the roof. He looked me in the eye and broke one of his erratic vows of silence. “Brian,” he said. And hearing him speak my name gave me a jolt. I had wondered if he knew it. “This is it,” he said.

"It?” I said, my voice cracking.

He nodded and handed me a light stack of paper, eight pages in all, scrawled in his usual pencil. He nodded at me again, with much gravity, and said, “It's finished.” Then he turned back toward his hut. I watched him until he was out of view. I hesitate to say this for fear of it sounding strange, but there was a glow about him. There was something. Something different. I guess.

The dreaded words: It's finished. The words that end a software company.

The code didn't have a starting point. It was not of the existing program. I gave it to Daniel who compiled it and ran it and informed me it didn't do anything. It quit the second it began. We shrugged our shoulders.

* * * *

The next day I was the first person to the office and on a whim I headed up to the roof to check in with the Coder, but—there is no other way to say this—he was gone. I looked for him everywhere, but there is nowhere to get lost on the roof of our building. The doorway above the ladder was locked. There was no way down through the building. I looked over the sides of our building but there was no sign of anything. It was a four-story drop, but without any obvious handholds down.

I felt heartbroken, I guess. But also like a ship whose anchor is severed in a windstorm. No longer straining, no longer held back.

I stayed a long time. Fearing at any moment he might return, I looked through his hut, observed the cleanliness. The precision of everything, the logic of the layout. Could a room contain ultimate logic? I lay on his cot. I toyed with his pencils. There was a dresser that we'd put in the room for him but it was empty, and a wood desk with a ream of paper stacked neatly atop. A sink, a toilet, and a shower stall were in a tiny adjoining bathroom. A razor, a toothbrush, toothpaste—all items I recognized because I had brought them to him. On the back of the toilet, the Coder's glasses sat folded.

I studied the land through the telescope. Was I looking for him? No. Yes. After being on the roof of a building for years you don't just leave for the morning. You don't wander around the company grounds. What happens to you? I have no idea. Maybe he evaporated. Somehow that seemed possible. Maybe the janitor had smuggled him out. Maybe a helicopter landed, a UFO, maybe LogisticMagic got him. Maybe he ascended. But how could I not look?

It was 4 PM and I realized I had not been down to my cubicle. I had not officially shown up for work. Perhaps I was considered missing, too. Let them wonder, I thought. I was not eager to tell them the Coder was gone.

I stayed into darkness. Nervously, expecting him to appear at any time. In his bed, I slept. And I cried. Where is the cocoon that transforms? What special ingredient did I lack?

Another day passed.

And another day passed and I was crazy with worry. I was no longer me without him, without his defining me. He was the programmer, the coder, the engineer. His absence was an infinite loop of misunderstanding.

import java.sql.;

import java.util.;

public class InfiniteLoop implements Bean

{

public void set(String args[]) throws Exception

{

ResultSet resultSet = null;

try

{

int count = 0;

statement.execute();

resultSet = (ResultSet)statement.getObject(1);

while (resultSet.next() && count—20)

{

out.print (resultSet.getString("ELEMENT"));

// count = count + 1;

}

}

catch (Exception e)

{

out.print e.toString();

}

}

}

Sunrise. I shaved my head, what of it I could with my pocketknife. It was a botchy job but there was no mirror for me to care appropriately. I donned the Coder's clothes, checking the pockets, measuring the feel of the threads, pleased to find they fit, if a bit tight. The coke-bottle glasses—which I could barely see through—felt comfortable nonetheless. I sat at his desk. I think I knew what I was doing. I sat at the desk and waited, and another day evaporated. In the telescope I spotted people leaving the building, entering the building, leaving again. You could see a lot, into a nearby apartment building, another corporate office building down the street. I shifted the view from cubicle to cubicle to cubicle. I tried not to think about my growing hunger. There was a naked man stretching at his window in one apartment, an old lady cooking in another. I kept time with my pencil on the desk.

I took up anxiously looking at the portal to the below, knowing at any moment someone would appear. I pulled a sheet from the ream of paper and sketched the telescope. Next to it I sketched a dog. When I was finished, I turned it over and began to write code. I opened my brain and let revelation come.

I was at the desk sometime later—how many hours?—when I heard the portal clang open. I had been writing. I don't remember it, but the evidence was there. Curly brackets, parentheses, semicolons.

Bob surfaced from the portal. Of all the blundering idiots, I thought, they chose Bob! Could not a more worthy messenger be found? I watched Bob from the corner of my eye through the hut's window as he timidly approached, scuffing his shoes along the roof. He carried a tray of food, for which I was grateful—had the Coder ever been grateful for the food I brought, had he even noticed?

Bob entered the open door of the hut, and put the food down on the edge of my desk.

"Hi,” he said, with fear and perhaps reverence in his voice, his eyes lowered, “I'm Bob. We're ... uh ... not sure where Brian is.” He paused and I nodded once. I tapped the papers in my right hand against the desk and stared at the food. I realized I was tapping out the beat to a song but I couldn't quite place the words. I considered humming a few bars, but then remembered Bob and handed him the code. There it went, more paper, I knew where that paper went. Loops that looped into loops, I thought. There were peas and potatoes. I knew exactly what they would taste like. Peas and potatoes and fried chicken that tasted of aluminum. I picked up the fork and rubbed my thumb across the tines. I spread the napkin across my knees.

"Thank you. Thank you,” said Bob. He tripped over the door's threshold, regained his footing, and left.

I ate everything and then went to lie on the roof, face up, staring into the sky. The taste of mashed potatoes in my mouth. Coder, I said, to myself, to the Coder, in deference, in awe. Coder.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Maps to God by Corie Ralston

Here's the thing about my mother: she's been fading out for years. These days I can't understand her unless the electromagnetic fields line up just so.

Just yesterday evening at dinner she tuned in and out as I twisted the fork in my hand: “—Dr. Franklin—staff is excellent—not enough—"

I finally got the angle just right: “Herb, I bought the medication."

Fortunately, my dad is on my frequency, so I don't need utensils to hear him. “We already discussed this, Joan,” he said.

* * * *

Tum-ticka tum. I ain't no holla-back girl. That's the other thing about my frequency—it's tuned to pick up secret signals from a Gnostic sect hidden deep in the Sahara. Or possibly Nevada. They send me messages coded in pop songs.

My mother's mouth opened and closed but the electromagnetic wind must have shifted because I could no longer hear her. My father shook his head at what she said. The setting sun angled through the kitchen window and bloodied the white tablecloth between my parents. I heard the clank of silverware and the ever-present hum of background radiation like a perpetual motion refrigerator.

I shifted so that the sprig of dogwood blossom in the table vase blocked my view of my mother and applied my fork to dinner. I segregated the little rosemary spears from the potatoes. It was a long job, but necessary; my mother might have applied truth serum to the tips of the spears. She was always trying to trip me up, get me to tell her my plans.

"No,” my father said. “Remember what happened last time?"

I always loved the one-sided conversation. It was a puzzle.

"Come on, Joan. Leave her alone."

I looked up. My mother had obviously just addressed me; her face was expectant.

"She wants to know what you're working on now,” my father said.

"It's proprietary,” I said. Tum-ticka-tum.

I didn't expect my mother to understand. Even though I'm still a teenager she knows I could be the next Einstein, and it scares her. Some people are afraid of genius.

I've been ostracized by the scientific community for years. The National Academy of Sciences has never answered any of my letters. They just don't understand the importance of my work. They don't understand that I could have made teleportation work if I just had the right tools. At least the Gnostics believe in me.

This time I'm working on something big. I mean really big. It's a map to God, and it will change everything.

* * * *

After dinner my father helped me in the lab.

"Wire cutters!” I sang.

"Wire cutters.” My father passed me the red-handled ones.

My music swelled. Ticka-ticka-tum-TICKA. We are THE CHAMPIONS. It's so sad that he can't hear it. My father believes in me even though he doesn't understand the physics behind my work.

"Tape!"

"We're out."

"Jesus Christ!” I couldn't help myself. “We're so close!"

"How does this machine work?” he asked.

"It's difficult to pinpoint,” I answered.

A map to God is a paradox: every step of the journey is a piece of understanding, which leads you further from God. Every step closer is also a step further away.

My dad looked up from the machine. My mother stood in the doorway to my laboratory, hands on her hips, frowning.

I didn't used to have a lab in the basement.

Last year when I was sixteen my mother tried to help with my invisibility machine even though she didn't have the scientific background and I didn't need her help. That day she sat down next to me while I was working on the control box, picked up a capacitor, and put it in completely the wrong place.

I took her capacitor out.

How was that helping, I ask you. It wasn't.

She said something.

She reached in to the control box and took one of mine out. That was really not helping. I slapped her hand away.

She stood up and the control box overturned. And it had been almost done! I pounded the capacitors on the floor. Anger in my fists, anger in my fingers.

My mother's mouth moved and her face turned red. She stood up and tripped over the power supply cables which scavenged left-over kinetic energy from my sneakers.

I felt the vibration of her voice in my teeth, even though I couldn't hear her.

Later that day my dad helped me cart all my lab equipment downstairs. He said I had to work in the basement from then on.

We set up my equipment in the east side of the basement. On the other side was the washing machine, and in the middle was a piece of orange carpet and a couch.

My dad stood up, knees creaking. “Good luck with your machine."

I continued on with the wires. Red to black. Black to red. Tum-ticka-tum. I could do this without duct tape.

* * * *

When I went upstairs to get some water my mother trapped me in a transition point. That's the thing about doorways, certain pathways, anything that helps you move from one place to another. Most people move through easily, don't even notice them. I get stuck in them, and my mother takes advantage of that.

She stepped in front of me as I was trying to get from the living room into the kitchen. I tried to move but I was held tight by the transition force, a giant hand on my shoulder.

She held up an orange bottle with typed words on the side. What poison had she concocted for me now?

She twisted open the lid. Small white pills spilled into her hand.

She smiled and held out her hand.

They were such tiny pills. How could she think that anything so small could affect me in any way? It struck me as funny, and I began to laugh.

My mother shoveled the pills back into the bottle, her lips pressed tight. Several dropped onto the floor, rolled this way and that. One rolled through the doorway and ended my paralysis. I followed the pill through the doorway.

Dum. Dum. Dum. Another one bites the dust.

My father sat in the living room reading a paper. My mother must have said something to him because he said, without looking up. “I won't make her take anything she doesn't want to."

My mother bent to gather up the pills, hands shaking. One had escaped. It lay in the crack between where the kitchen tiles ended and the living room carpet began. It was stuck in a transition. I knew what that was like. I felt a sudden kinship with the little pill.

I put my foot over it, pressed it further into the crack to keep it safe from my mother's enormous groping hands.

"Do not be afraid, little one,” I whispered. I hummed softly to it. Hum. Hum. Hum.

My mother walked away. Her back was very straight.

I would come back later and rescue the pill. I had a moment of inspiration: the pill was vitally important for my machine.

* * * *

When I was young I could still hear my mother pretty well. One day when I was nine she lured me to the front of the house with the promise of a trip to the science museum.

She stood by the front door in a suit. Green light from the stained-glass inset spilled around her like a sick halo.

"Are you finally ready?” she said.

She had only worn that suit once before to uncle Mark's wedding. She would never wear it to the museum.

I would have run except that she had already trapped me in the transition point of the hallway. I sat down on the floor. I held my backpack over my head. I thought maybe all the metal in there would shield me.

"Herb!"

My dad came back in, carrying the car keys. He didn't look at me.

"We're already late,” my mother said.

He tried to lift me up by my arms. The backpack fell open, and all my lab supplies skittered here and there: antennae, transducer coils, power supplies.

"Jesus Christ,” my mother said. “What is all that junk?"

My dad squatted next to me and helped me gather the equipment.

"Dr. Franklin won't wait forever,” my mother said. “Just leave it."

"No!” I said.

"I don't know what good Dr. Franklin is going to do anyway,” my father said.

I hugged the transceivers to my chest.

"Forget it,” my mother said. “Just forget it.” She slammed the front door on her way out.

That's when I knew she would never understand me.

* * * *

Midnight. Alone in the basement. It was my habit to work late into the night, long after my parents had gone to sleep. That's when I did my best thinking, when the signals from the Gnostics got through loud and clear. Love is a battlefield.

I kept thinking of that little pill upstairs, trapped in the gritty boundary between tile and carpet. Carpet fuzz to the west, unyielding tile to the east.

I crept upstairs and with a plastic knife, freed the renegade pill from its prison. The basement door frame gave us a bit of a problem, but eventually the pill and I slid through sideways, my back scraping against the door jamb, and we made it back to my machine.

The machine was almost ready.

The metal had to be carefully arranged so that the magnetic field lines of the earth (albeit small) would coincide with the induced field lines of the metal. The current I got from a dead light bulb. Transitions are fuzzy; there is a little bit of death in life, and a bit of life in death.

A special aluminum-tipped wedge served as a conduit, coaxing out the last bit of power from the bulb. Four spherical transceivers, a prism to cut and spread the energy of photons, a fine mesh to capture and distil the mystery that is God.

Here's the key to the machine: God is in the transitions. God is the moment just passed. The instant you think you've put your finger on it, it has slipped into the past. God is the moment about to come. It is always just out of reach.

I only had to capture a moment, hold it still for an instant.

I washed the courageous pill with the light from the prism. I placed it first in the tray of the machine so that it would soak up the precisely aligned magnetic fields, and then into my mouth, where in four hours it would bring me face to face with God.

* * * *

I woke in the morning on the little strip of carpet next to the basement couch. Light shone through the dusty half-windows which looked out past the garbage cans onto the front lawn.

My machine stood on an upside-down plastic folding chair. Twine wound through the legs, creating a see-through basket. Aluminum foil balls adorned the feet. A prism hung from a key chain attached to a dead light bulb.

I stood and pushed the prism. As it swung, the colors of the rainbow washed over the litter on the floor: red sheaths of plastic from stripped wires, bolts and nuts and nails and screws. My equipment. My laboratory. My sad machine.

"No,” I said. It no longer looked like a machine, like a key to anything.

And the Gnostics—they had deserted me. I could hear morning jays calling to each other. I could hear a bus grinding the pavement outside, but I could not hear my music. My head was empty as a carved-out pumpkin.

I ran to the stairs, up the stairs, to the doorway, through the doorway. I was strangely unhindered by transitions. Failure, failure. My machine had not worked.

I went to the front door and opened it. Outside, dandelions sagged over the front stoop, dew clinging to their leaves. There was a bus stop directly in front of our walk. I remembered waiting there sometimes, holding my mother's hand. I remembered riding the bus downtown with her to the science museum, an hour away. I remembered my mother's bright blue cardigan and her singing softly to me in time with our steps up the wide cool steps of the museum, and the giant concrete lion out front.

"You're up early."

I turned. My mother stood behind me in a ratty bathrobe. Her hair was not in place.

"Are you going out,” she said in a flat tone, not really a question. She moved away, as if she did not expect a reply. My mother was a stooped and graying woman. The years were written in liver spots on her arms, in the way her mouth turned down, afraid to smile. When had my mother become an old woman?

I blinked, swiveled my head this way and that, trying to find my frequency. Where had my music gone?

"Something's wrong with my head,” I said.

My mother stopped. She turned and stared at me.

I knew in that instant that I would never forget the way my mother looked that morning. Her slumped shoulders, her lined face, time pivoting around us like a top dancing on its point, slowing, taunting, primed to topple.

And then, strangely, my mother began to cry.

Nothing. Only a whisper, but it was there. The Gnostics! They were coming through. I tested the doorway, felt a hint of resistance. Relief flooded through me. Tik-tik. The faintest brush of beat, like a grasshopper's legs preparing for the night.

"Have you talked to your father this morning?” my mother said. The last few words were so soft I could barely hear them. And then she said, “I thought—missed—but look."

"I'm going back downstairs,” I said.

My mother wiped her eyes. She might have said something else.

Nothing's gonna change my world. I hurried through the hallway arch and through the basement door before the transition force could lay its clammy hands on me.

Ticka-ticka-tik. By the time I reached my machine, the music gurgled through my veins once more.

I surveyed the machine. The prism was at the wrong angle. The magnetic fields did not align.

The Gnostics have taught me that inside each person is the spark of the divine, and that it is just as real as the soup of the physical universe in which we swim, live and die.

But I think they are wrong. The divine spark is not inside or outside, but somewhere in between. God is not the attainment of knowledge, but the attempt at apprehension. God is in the cracks; God is everything we can't quite reach, everything we can't control. In the border between sanity and insanity. In every imagined story ending.

I began to think: Maybe it was impossible to capture a transition, but every time we go through one a piece of God sticks to us like lint on a sweater.

There are many maps to God.

This is one of them.

[Back to Table of Contents]

The Blokes of Ball Point by Suzanne Baumann

* * * *

* * * *

* * * *

* * * *

* * * *

* * * *

* * * *

* * * *

* * * *

* * * *

* * * *

* * * *

[Back to Table of Contents]

Sanctuary by Carol Emshwiller

Just like Russian thistle and starlings, they took over. And, like those, they paid no attention to us, just took over every empty plot of land or empty building ... parks ... forests....

Just as with Russian thistle and starlings, we hardly noticed them at first. They do jump fast. You always think: Did I really see that or not? That long legged thing? Was it really there?

I suppose they thought they were so fast, and us so slow, we wouldn't notice them at all—ever—or if we did we wouldn't care. They must have thought, that, after all, they would only live in spaces where we weren't, but there got to be a lot of them and we did start noticing.

* * * *

We don't know how they got here, but however it was, for sure they knew our habits. There are some broken clumps of metal at the tops of many of our lesser mountains so they knew us well enough to know the tallest mountains would be crowded with climbers, and they knew that hardly anybody wanted to climb the lesser ones.

We figure they must have got in trouble back wherever they come from and looked for sanctuary here.

They're fast and they can jump four or five times their height. Also they can lift many times their body weight. They must have counted on all those things to keep them safe and they must have thought, since they weren't doing any harm, and were staying out of our way, and were careful not to take anything we might be using, and didn't live in places we might want to live in ... they must have thought: Why would we care whether they were here or not?

They don't mind being all packed in together. I saw that when I found a bunch of them in my old unused cistern that I'd had before the city water came out this far.

The day my life changed for the better, I had taken my pipe and my six pack and a portable fan (global warming is even worse than last year) out to the front porch rocking chair. No sooner had I sat down than here was one of them (holding still for once), perched on the porch railing gesticulating and making whistling sounds.

I'd never had such a good look at one till then. They're always leaping out of sight before you hardly grasp that they're there, but this one sat on the railing chirping at me. If I thought real hard I could almost think I heard real words.

I'd read about them, and I thought I'd maybe seen some jump a couple of times. There were pictures in the paper, but mostly of them leaping away. This was my first good look. Their eyes are larger than is comfortable to look at—like small dogs'. Their thighs seem malformed, too. Overdeveloped. I guess they have to be to leap around so far and fast. Their ears are too big, too. Funny how, even with all these exaggerations, they look so much like us.

I knew I couldn't catch it just like that, leaping out at it. I'd have to trick it. It was male. (Their idea of clothes is ludicrous. Wispy bits of scarf-things that don't hide anything important.)

(On females those thick thighs makes them all the more sexy, even though their breasts are small. None of that is of any use to me though.)

He chirped at me and waved his hand as if trying to make me understand something, but I didn't want to.

I nodded and smiled and waved my hand in a similar way. He smiled and nodded back. (Their smiles are just like ours.) I motioned for him to follow me inside and led him to the far side of the living room. He followed. Gullible. On the way I picked one of my wife's African violets and held it out to him. Had he a buttonhole that would have been about the right size for it. Just when he reached to take it, I tipped the wastebasket upside down on him.

I once caught a squirrel that way.

Once you've got it, the trick is to slide something under the waste basket without lifting it up. I used a cookie sheet. I had my wife start boiling water—that was before we found out they taste a lot better fried. When the water was ready, I lifted the whole shebang and dropped the contents of the wastebasket in.

The next day I found dozens of the creatures in my old cistern. It was leaking. The whole bottom was covered with about a foot of water. Maybe that's what that male wanted to tell me. The creatures were hanging from the walls as best they could. They didn't try to leap away. They looked as if they thought I'd help them and I did.

The water was full of all sorts of debris: pieces of cloth, doll-sized pots and pans, doll-sized hats.... Most likely stolen from us and our kids. Or maybe taken from our dumps.

I was one of the first in this area to realize their potential. Actually lots of potentials because after that I started selling see-through mesh wastebaskets as the best kind for trapping them. They're too smart for have-a-heart traps. Best to lure them into your house with flowers or some such. With my cistern, I let them out one by one straight into a cage. They've already had babies. I haven't tried any of the little ones. I don't know if they'd be economical anyway, being so small.

(Isn't it lucky they came along just when global warming got really bad and most types of cows and sheep weren't doing so well?)

I fixed the leak and lowered an old table in for them in case it happened again. I could see on their faces they were grateful. I smiled back at them and waved and then I nailed down the lid.

We found out they taste better when, like snails, they're purged, so I feed them mostly on cornmeal. Besides, it's cheap.

They don't scream when plopped into the grease. I think their voices, especially at a time like that, may be at higher frequencies than we can hear.

Their legs are a little too big to be called frog's legs, but I market them as that. You'd have to be pretty stupid not to know what they really are, though some people don't seem to, or don't want to admit they know.

No matter how much they wave, gesticulate, shake their heads no, try to escape ... even so, by now lots of us are in this business.

How smart can they be with heads the size of tangerines?

Only thing that matches them in sweetness and tenderness is rocky mountain oysters.

The Chinese prefer the eyes and they like finger bone soup. The French like the sweetbreads and brains.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Today's Writers Today

Kirstin Allio's novel Garner (Coffee House Press) was a finalist for the LA Times Book Award for First Fiction. She has recently been selected one of “5 Under 35” writers to watch (and hopefully read) by the National Book Foundation. She lives in Providence, RI with her husband and sons.

Adam Ares enjoys staring at blank word processor documents, reading books in languages that he doesn't really understand, and Galaga. Perhaps, in the future, he will put adamares.com to some better use than he does now. Trained in yoga, baking and phlebotomy, Lauren Bartel lives in Minneapolis where she is currently involved with the newborn book publishing efforts of Whistling Shade Press, contributing to various food-related publications, and planting tomatoes.

Suzanne Baumann has been making minicomics for over a dozen years and plans to make many more. She feels most at ease in places where there are lots of pens and scraps of paper lying around.

Gwenda Bond is writing young adult novels while keeping her pets in line and her books close by.

Matthew Cheney has published fiction and nonfiction in Rabid Transit, Locus, Pindeldyboz, Strange Horizons, Failbetter.com, Rain Taxi, English Journal, and other venues of questionable taste. He is the series editor for Best American Fantasy. He teaches high school in New Jersey.

Brian Conn grew up in a forest where it often rained on Christmas Eve. His work has also appeared in GUD and Sybil's Garage. He is an MFA student at Brown and a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. He lives in Providence, and the only thing that can make him laugh these days is Beckett.

Abby Denson is the creator of Tough Love: High School Confidential, Dolltopia, and Night Club. She has scripted Powerpuff Girls Comics, Simpsons Comics, and comics for Nickelodeon Magazine. She rocks out with her bands Abbymatic and The Saturday Night Things. She loves New York, container gardening, and her cat, Slinky.

Carol Emshwiller's most recent books are a novel, The Secret City, a young adult novel, Mr. Boots, and a collection, I Live with You. Small Beer published her novel The Mount and her collection, Report to the Men's Club as well as reprinting her first novel, Carmen Dog.Recent awards include a couple of Nebulas for short stories, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement. She lives in New York City.

Alice Sola Kim lives in San Francisco and works at a strange startup. Most recently, her job has involved gossiping about Nicole Richie eating a Kit Kat bar. Her work has appeared in Rabid Transit: Long Voyages, Great Lies, and is forthcoming in Strange Horizons.

Benjamin Parzybok is the publisher of Gumball Poetry, a literary journal published into gumball machines. He founded the Black Magic Insurance Agency which runs a city-wide mystery/treasure hunt called Operation Peachblow. He lives in Portland, OR, with the writer Laura Moulton and their son. He has two novels ready to go: Couch, in which three social misfits carry a couch from Oregon to South America and A Body of Water where a 20-something isn't sure whether to help his brother commit euthanasia.

Corie Ralston is a scientist by profession, although sometimes she wonders what on earth possessed her to go to graduate school. She writes in the spare nanoseconds of her life, in all the transitions, wishing always that there was more time. She has been published in Strange Horizons and a variety of other venues. She is absolutely determined to finish her novel. And she does not need utensils to hear her mother.

Stephanie Brady Tharpe is a lifelong resident of Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. She spends her time writing, raising her fifteen-year-old daughter, and teaching English and Creatiove Writing at Skyline High School. Her poetry appears in multiple volumes of The Poet's Domain. This is her first fiction publication.

The Best of LCRW is doing fine, thanks for asking. How are you? Did Aunt Gwenda's answer help?

Jeannette Westwood still lives in California. Her newest hobby is stenciling and painting T-shirts.

Visit www.lcrw.net for information on additional titles by this and other authors.

Table of Contents

The Night and Day War by Alice Sola Kim

Dear Aunt Gwenda

The Curmudgeon by Adam Ares

The Lake by Matthew Cheney

On a Dark and Featureless Plain by Stephanie Brady Tharpe

Two Variations by Jeannette Westwood

A Primer on New Wave and Speculative Fiction in Japan by Mamoru Masuda

Clay by Kirstin Allio

Two Poems by Lauren Bartel

The Postern Gate by Brian Conn

The Mysterious Mr. M by Abby Denson

The Coder by Benjamin Parzybok

Maps to God by Corie Ralston

The Blokes of Ball Point by Suzanne Baumann

Sanctuary by Carol Emshwiller

Today's Writers Today

[Back to Table of Contents]