I HAVE NOT BEEN MANY PLACES, BUT WHERE I HAVE BEEN IS A SHADOW. The killings, but more importantly, their source, is close now to me still.
Perhaps the source does not matter. There are many such events; rarely are our curiosities satisfied.
{ X }
She was pounding on the door. Making a sound like rain, out of her mouth. A soothing sound from her mouth, but from her hands it was simply BANG BANG BANG.
“What is it Angel?” I asked. And I opened the door.
I opened the door, though I suppose it had already been open for some time, on what was to come; what had arrived in us.
She had not washed and was covered in some kind of liquid, I found later that it had been washing detergent. Her hair was sticky with it and she thrust her knife hand through the gap in the door before it was even properly open, grazing my stomach. I jerked back in surprise and felt the adrenaline rush into my body.
“Angel.”
I saw her then and what scared me was not her appearance but my reaction: I expected this.
Her mouth opened again and the rainwater sound came out. This part does sound crazy, though why a simple sound should be the craziest part of a story I don’t know. But that’s the sound that she made; like droplets hitting a wet sidewalk. Like someone had jammed a small stereo speaker into her throat and it was transmitting soothing nature sounds, like beach waves to help you sleep.
I hit her over the head with an empty beer bottle from my desk and it stunned her; her knife hand loosened. I did it again and she was down, and that was when I heard the others outside.
WE CROWNED THE LEVEE, crossed the railroad tracks, and descended toward the river. The air was crisp and wet. Not like the city.
“This one is old,” Lyle told me, pointing through the murk at a tree that craned over the river. “I looked it up online.”
It was 1999, the last year that it would be cool for fourteen-year-old boys to listen to boy bands. Neither Lyle nor I was cool, but we grasped for a point of reference as earnestly as anybody our age.
“And check this out,” he went on, and led us scrambling through the underbrush. There was a full moon lazing above us, so we could see beyond the tangle of branches the river shining ripples of silver. Frogs croaked, mosquitoes buzzed. It was summer and we both wore denim shorts and polo shirts.
“See?” Lyle said. He pointed again. “Just around this bend.”
I tripped over a rock but found my footing in the suction of damp earth bordering the river. The water played at my shoes. Then I saw it: A bright green moss, or something like it, hugged a branch. It seemed to pulsate, going from a dull olive color to a sharp lime that made me squint.
Lyle then said something very fast that I didn’t catch, but he sounded excited.
I asked, “What is it?”
Little wormy things were fawning from it, dancing in different directions. They stretched and retracted, though there was no breeze.
THE BAZAAR IN OLD DELHI IS BUSY AND STYLISH with barbers, psychics, jewelers, and cow dung cakes on the tar roads.
As I wind my watch to revive its heartbeat, between rows of turquoise and crimson fabric on the clothesline that belongs to a dyer, a divided sun ruffles the gaze of a woman. She is breathing beedi into the afternoon air. She has honey glazed skin and muscular thighs wrapped in a saree, restless feet and a toddler’s palm joined to hers.
The wind picks up the sound of the temple bells, a chorus and clapping hands. Several vermillion smeared foreheads appear from the saffron-colored house of deities. Time stands still on my wrist leading me to a clock repair shop, where the owner flashes his tobacco stained teeth, coughs and swipes his white sleeve on his forehead, saying, “Come after fifteen minutes.”
I turn around and the woman is still there, her child nowhere in sight. She is scratching the red layers of earth. Her toenails sparkle as her feet match the rhythm of a cotton ginner who is also looking at her with the refrain of a married man with kids. A set of beedis are tucked between her heaving breasts. The sheets of fabric sway, picking her scent like indigo infused in the white light of a thousand other smells.
The whir of bells has died and the long row of shops by the road seems as if the bazaar is stretching its arms to touch the roots of a banyan, pointing to a path. The woman avoids the ginner and looks at me, flexing her curves. The air turns giddy with playfulness and I want the time to stay dead. I want to lift her as with a pair of tongs hold a gem in light, until she dissolves into dust, swallowing a part of me that is unstoppable like the hands of a clock.
The watch repairer hollers my name and the woman turns around. A faint ticking resumes as the fabric unravels and obscures her in a sweep of colors until I only see her palms facing the sky as if releasing an hourglass – emptying and filling once again.
{ X }
TARA ISABEL ZAMBRANOis an Electrical Engineer by profession. She holds an instrument rating for single engine airplanes. Her work has appeared in Prime Number magazine, Blue Bonnet Review, Jersey Devil Press and is upcoming in Redactions. She moved from India to United States two decades ago and currently lives in McKinney,TX with her husband and two kids.
Don Quixote and the Windmills – Salvador Dali, 1945
From our Spring 2015 issue, “At Ken’s Expense” is Arman Safa‘s metafictional short story-length novel about Arman writing a novel at Ken’s expense.
{ X }
{ chapter 1 }
THE FIRST SENTENCE SHOULD BE SEVEN WORDS LONG.
“Damn it,” muttered Ken to himself.
Having the last word was becoming increasingly problematic. When he wanted it, the last word evaded him. And when he sought out the perfect seven word opening sentence to his second novel, the last word confounded him still.
It was February the third, a typical and unremarkable occasion, and the eight inches of expected snow was a surprise to no one. Still, at 6pm, the bookstore was extraordinarily empty. And quiet. Just Ken’s fingers tapping on the keyboard in the back office and some aesthetically inappropriate Irish music Arman had put on behind the register.
“Damn it,” muttered Ken, audibly. Arman smiled. Though unable to see Ken, he amused himself with an image of Ken hunched over the keyboard, face aglow, pulling his hair.
“Am I cruel?” he thought. “Can boredom and the certainty of an excruciatingly slow evening turn the butter knife of my heart into a sharpened blade?”
Impressed with his pretentious eloquence and swagger of tongue, Arman decided that, if nothing else, he should be the one writing a story. And in that moment, he knew that the perfect first sentence would, in fact, be eight words long.
Distracted, and desiring a bit of amusement before committing himself to writing an entire story, Arman stepped into the back office. He saw Ken at the computer reading a news article.
“What do you want to eat tonight, Ken?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“How’s your novel coming along, Ken?” And before letting Ken respond, he added confrontationally and with more than a touch of perplexing irony, “I’m going to write one as well. In fact, I’ve already started. And I’ve even written more words than you.”
“Well,” said Ken. “I’m doing some editing. And it’s easier for you because I’m your main character.”
Arman was more than a bit perturbed by Ken’s brash display of egoism.
“I had ramen for lunch earlier,” Ken continued, “and it was awful.”
“The David Foster Wallace Empathy Contest” (contributed by Wm. Samuel Bradford for our Spring 2015 issue) is not merely a satirical homage to the work & fans of David Foster Wallace, it’s also a touching story of camaraderie and survival in a harsh, chaotic world.
{ X }
IN ITS LAST YEAR, WALLACEFEST HAD ONLY THREE ATTENDEES. The event was advertised as “an alcohol-free weekend of mutual appreciation for Wallace’s principles.” For Roland, it was a balls-to-the-wall competition.
Roland, Jon, and Bendiks sat on the pier behind the beach house rented for the occasion. They had just released the live lobsters they had purchased from a restaurant.
Roland, who had long ago realized that his looks and wit impressed no one, had latched onto Wallace fandom as his chance to be noticed. He had spent his inheritance building the no-kill dog shelter Wallace had allegedly dreamed of. He called it the David Wallace Foster House. No one would outdo him.
“So, I mean, I just felt so much gratitude. It wasn’t revealed by D or bolstered by D–it was, like, caused by D,” Roland said.
As Roland spoke, Jon spooned pureed squash into the lipless mouth of Bendiks. He had pointed Bendiks’s wheelchair to face the sunset, even though Bendiks’s eyes were rolled back in his head behind closed, twitching eyelids.
“How did you and Bendiks meet?” Roland asked.
Jon took a swig of non-alcoholic beer and wiped the rubber-capped spoon.
“So this new Latvian woman works with me in the lab. We wanted her to feel a part of the group, so we listened to Latvian folk music on internet radio while we worked. The lab started to get into it–all the zithers and stuff. It’s cool. Anyway, one day we’re listening and this news report begins, and the Latvian woman was like ‘Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ!’ and no one else speaks Latvian, and we’re all like ‘What is it, Dagnija?’ and she starts telling us about the report.
“You know bath salts, the drug? Well, it had just hit Latvia, and this kid had taken a ton of bath salts and went into a pet store and like, went nuts. He started eating puppies. I’m talking, like, eating them alive. Then he bites himself. Chunks of his arms. He bent over and bit his calves off. He bit his own lips off.”
In some ways, “A Lesser Cement” (Anna Lea Jancewicz‘s flash fiction from our Spring 2015 issue) is a love story like countless others. But in other ways, it’s a unique love story– particularly in the way that it’s about a girl who marries a hammer.
{ X }
THERE WAS A GIRL WHO MARRIED A HAMMER. At first, it seemed like a pretty great idea. He was the strong and silent type. She found him on Craigslist, and he only cost her five bucks. She knew he was used, but she had a checkered past herself, one she didn’t want to talk about, so that part was okay. Their first date was awesome. She made a huge pot of matzo ball soup and they lay on her couch, binge-watching Firefly in its entirety. He didn’t complain when she ate all the matzo balls, and she never had to pause the show for him to take pee breaks or get beers. When he fell asleep on the couch, she covered him with a freshly laundered dish towel, tucking it under his sloping claw. He looked serene in the blue television glow. She was sure they’d be very happy together.
She liked his soft rubber grip, the way it fit perfectly in her hand, as if they were made for each other. Things could get a little rough in the bedroom, but it wasn’t so bad. He cracked one of her molars, but she liked that she could sit at her desk at her job during the day tonguing the sharp edge of the broken tooth and thinking about him. It felt like a barnacle. She was glad he never discarded used cotton swabs on the bathroom floor or insisted on listening to NPR when he rode in her car, because she liked to rock out. She was glad he didn’t make fun of her when she didn’t know how to fix something on her computer and it took her a long time to do it. She liked that he had no misguided opinions about female underarm hair equating to lax hygiene. He didn’t snore. He didn’t smugly correct the way she mispronounced certain words that she’d only ever read but never heard aloud.
Illustration for Rudyard Kipling’s “With the Night Mail” – F.X. Leyendecker, 1905
Should you care for another taste of our Spring 2015 issue before it flies on March 20, here’s “The Rud Yard,”Vajra Chandrasekera‘s hilariously terrifying take on the future of the surveillance state.
{ X }
HE SAYS HE’S ALLERGIC TO EVERYTHING, only as if he’d like to be bitten by a radioactive spider and wake up the next morning without any allergies and with 20/20 vision and surprise abs. What he has instead is a pain in his belly from, he claims, the constant stress of the surveillance state. He refuses to let me use his name, so let’s call him M.
I get M’s shirt off and discover a belly like that of a woman just barely pregnant. I place my hands on it reverently and make a face like the baby just kicked.
“You have a radiant glow,” I tell him. Then I have to explain that this glow has nothing to do with the radioactive spider, and we get sidetracked into an argument about the Radium Age of science fiction a hundred years ago. Specifically, about Kipling’s Aerial Board of Control stories, which he thinks should definitely count and I don’t, mostly because I haven’t read these stories. M says they’re about airships that rule the world or something like that.
“Oh, like drones!”
M says no. Not like drones. He says one time when he was twelve the President came to his school for prize day.
“What does this have to do with Kipling?” I say, “Or for that matter, the surveillance state?” and he says shush, wait for it.
So the President came to his school for prize day and the entire auditorium was full of important people and parents –these were non-overlapping groups, with the important people in the front and the parents in the back– and there was no room for the kids, so they set up some plastic chairs outside the auditorium, under a tin roof still glowing cherry red from the afternoon sun.
Sweltering under it and choking slowly to death on their ties, the boys –it was a boys-only school, he says, all rum and sodomy and the lash– practiced their bad seventh-grade French, which consisted entirely of all the French swear words they had learned to that point, and the useful phrase je ne sais pas.
“The two most important stages of language acquisition,” I say.
Yeah, M says, the parts of speech that are always permitted: swearing and denial.
The reason M refuses to let me use his real name is, of course, the surveillance state. It’s not that he thinks they don’t already know it, as M always says, but it makes him uncomfortable to hear it said at all any more.
THE SLOW, WET, GAPING PULSE of Chew Stum Valley morning. I place the cup of crap hotel coffee, cold, on the front porch and lift the crime scene tape, blue and white on this side of the ocean. The door is unlocked behind it.
The hallway is boring; the siderooms are boring. They look kitted out by some mid-century landlady, keen on boiled breakfasts and bachelor boys, all of life justified by air raids. This, despite the fact that Thorne lived alone and unaided for the past several decades. I skip rooms, ignoring the outdated TV, the slack bookshelves with Protestant classics bound in imitation leather, dull watercolors of sheep and boulders and sheep. True Arcadia kitsch.
I treat the home like a canal, cut through it straight. Out the bookdoor, down the pseudo-quaint little cobble-stone steps and through the dead, knee-high garden (how is it that I’m sweating?), straight to the door of the old small chapel, which sits at the edge of the property. No caution tape here which, if I pause and force myself to smirk, I can see the irony of. This is where Thorne really lived. This is where the Glassblower, whoever he was, was born.
I open the door.
Earlier, Nailsea
Hanging in the air of the small club is a special kind of exhaustion. Post-synth drainage and slow throb the color of headaches. The patient mold of the interior of an orgasm on the screen behind the stage. Two white-suited henchmen disassemble the two hundred-odd pounds of equipment, exchanging quiet, sick little stories. A squat and beautiful young woman with deliberate scaration decorating her shoulders picks crushed plastic cups and discarded drug delivery systems off the floor. Edward sits on the small, high stool propping open the emergency exit, smoking Silk Cut. A heavy, though not fat man, he has shed his own straightjacket and now wears a gray hunter’s flannel above leather pants. His beard is russet and dirty snow, but he does not sit like a mage, more like a Catholic schoolboy, tilted as if to avoid notice and suggest other perpetrators. He exhales a plume of gray, which then leaks out the door where hot scummy rain pounds the twist of a convoluted alleyway. The resultant battering on concrete is almost a nothing sound. It is distinct, but as if you are always hearing it and have only just caught on.
“Where do you live?”
“Me?” I adjust the glowing iPhone on my right thigh, the digital read of the recording time running what seems impossibly fast.
“You.”
His voice isn’t the soft, unstrained tone it is on the more lunar tracks, nor does it approach his dead bandmate’s abrasive, churning yowl, once over-described very well in the NME as the final screams of a fetus about to be eaten by its twin. It is moderate, a cast-off discursive tone, flowing and clipped simultaneously. I don’t know enough about England to place it, if its origin is in fact geographic.
“I live a bunch of places.”
Edward tightens his posture, legs crossed, knees snug together. Back straight, barely inches away from touching that metal door. He watches as I light my own cigarette, eyes following my movements. I find myself secreting from some kind of self-conscious gland.
“Berlin. Sometimes. I lived in New York longer than anywhere else. My parents live in Roanoke. Thought you’d like that,” I say, even though he’s given no sign he recognizes the name. “CROATOAN and all that. It’s a one-story beach house. They have most of my library, but it’s wilting. Salt air.” I drink some of the Powers he prefers. His is still untouched. “I have an ex in Austin.”
“But you never lived there.”
“No, not really.”
“We lived,” he inclines his chin out the door into the alley, as if Silence was out there, spectral and soaked, leaking fetid ectoplasm from his wounds. “In the same place for nearly 19 years. A few miles west of here, actually.” He accentuates the directionality with the inverse of a hiss, taps ash onto the floor with absent deliberation. “But you knew that.”
“Yes.”
“You work with Hélène?”
“Sometimes.”
“I like her.”
“She speaks of you highly. We got extremely drunk once, and she said how much she enjoyed visiting your… chalet.”
His laughter is an immediate, reserved thing, not trailing off but ending with extreme deliberation. “Is that the word she used?”
“Yes, not without some irony.”
“She wanted to talk about sex, so we talked about sex, though I don’t think she got quite what she wanted. But you don’t want to talk about sex.”
“No. I don’t think so at least.”
“You don’t want to talk about music either. You want to talk about James.”
“Never made a secret of it. It was in the email.”
“I never read the email.”
“It was in the subject line of the email.”
He smiles once, the muscles’ contraction and relaxation forming feral movements. He is still heavily avuncular, without the attendant smarm.
“You don’t want to talk about it. Fine. Let’s talk about The Quartered Man’s commitment to spontaneity.”
“There was no commitment to anything.” And then, before I could figure out exactly what the fuck to say to that: “At times, we could have been spontaneous.”
“‘Could have been?’”
“We were capable of it.”
“Your choice of recording spaces seemed to have been fluid.”
“Choice?” Someone else’s laugh runs wild in the alley. “I cannot remember, dear boy, the number of places we recorded. I believe I slept, shat, ate, and fucked in all of them though. If that helps you.” His cigarette has not gone out yet. I find this difficult to believe. Perhaps I simply did not notice him light a new one. Shafts of remembered cinema history: Cigarettes, despite their prevalence, were always a bitch for editors to keep track of. Whether they were lit, how far they had burned down. It makes me light another of my own, for continuity.
“Do you know much about the Vietnamese culture?”
“I read a bit, knowing I’d be talking to you.”
“Co bac?”
I shake my head, sip my whiskey. His is almost gone. Another continuity problem.
“It’s not a test. Ong bac are spirits of the ancestor. Co bac are spirits of strangers. But neither is given preferential treatment. They are obvious, in a way nothing is obvious to the Occidental mind, which needs proof.” He says the word as if shitting with his mouth. “They are equal. Even if the particular co bac was, in life, an aggressor. Such as an American service-man. Each is acknowledged and granted a social existence.” His spent cigarette arcs into the alley; it is struck down by droplets. “That is why I am going to Vietnam.” Soft, dignified smile. “They will know how to look after my spirit.”
“We always recognize the evil we make,” says the narrator of “The Love Spell,” Tom Stephan‘s chilling yet heartfelt tale from our Winter 2015 issue.
{ X }
I TOOK IN THE CABIN. Sundown streamed through small, sturdy windows, caressing dust motes crazed in the agitated air. Warped pine floor, black as the stove that pierced the roof like an ancient pylon. Refrigerator, stovetop, sink, all lined up in martial order against the wall. In the opposite corner squatted a comfortably broken-in bed with brass head and footboard, perfect in patina, covered in a bright, threadbare quilt. To the right, a claw-foot bathtub old as the Wild West, visible plumbing jerry-rigged together with plastic pipes and curtain rods, suspended by chains and ropes.
“This is my cabin,” he said proudly, holding me tightly from behind. “Turn of the century. Some of the wood is a hundred years old. See that beam above the bed? A hundred years!”
I breathed in the smell of the potbellied stove, wet wool, undertones of pine and unwashed clothes.
“I’ll start the pipes for the water. You have to drain them in the winter or they’ll freeze,” he said, running for the door like a teenage boy, pausing only to grab a wrench. “If you need to use the bathroom, let me know and I’ll stand outside.”
When he came back I took his hands and pulled him in for a long kiss. When he leaned back for air I said, “This is perfect.”
His face lit up like Christmas. “It is?” I nodded, smiled, and kissed him again.
{ X }
We spent four days in that cabin. In the mornings I woke up early, pulled the scorching feather quilt off my legs and stepped lightly onto the frozen floor. Dressing hastily, I would re-light the stove, grab my coat and go out to walk the ridge.
He had neighbors on the hill. The Chicken Man was out every morning with his pail and his flock. His wife was fat and he was lean, both with smiling, achingly sweet faces like dried apples. I would wave and march up the hill to the cemetery, the bench in the middle and the gorge beyond. I would bunch my fists in my pockets and watch the sunrise pull color into the gray fields of snow. It felt like freedom.
About an hour later, I would see him poke his head up the hill. “What are you doing here?” he’d call in mock surprise. “Hanging out with dead people?”
MY MOTHER GREW UP ON THE MYTH OF FARMS. “We’re from good, peasant stock,” my grandmother told her when she was young. The legend of the strong salt-of-the-earth, a fabrication of too many times reading the Bible. Even so, she was raised in a suburb, surrounded by the soft baaing of cars and the gentle crowing of car horns. Her family killed and ate the fresh meat of the long city blocks, grew up with the metallic sheen of industry dripping down from their dreadlocked hair, the hippy unwashed stink of progress and renewal.
That left my brother and me stranded between words and reality. When my mom got married, she had earth-stars in her eyes. She turned her sights to the mountains, to the rabid screech of raccoons fighting over garbage. She packed up the family and we drove out along a narrow dirt road that wound around redwood tree trunks so large that it took half a day to come out the other side.
I didn’t care about distance, especially when the bluebirds sang maniacally in the trees. The only birds I knew were pigeons, safely coated with gasoline dust, hopping around on twisted club feet. These shrieking birds flashing about with their iridescent flags of wings were too much of an alien takeover of the planet of my life, insidious as little green men with ray guns. I foretold Hitchcock and shut myself up in the princess’s tower.
My brother knocked on the door, took me by the hand and led me outside. He picked up a caterpillar and gave it to me–it turned into a monarch butterfly and sipped gently at my skin with its proboscis. “You see, Angie,” he said.
FLAPPERHOUSE 
