Fiction
Writers featured in this edition include Jeanne Althouse, Vrinda Baliga, Robert J. Gregg, Charles Haddox, Geoff Hyatt, Pacze Moj, Adam Moorad, Will Pewitt, Rick Spuler, Joshua JW Vick, and Catherine Zickgraf.
Jeanne Althouse lives in Palo Alto, California and writes short stories, mainly flash fiction. Her work has been published in Opium, Canary, the Stanford English Department Newsletter, and The MacGuffin. She has won theFoothill Writers’ Conference and the Lunch Hour Stories short story contests. She has a story to be published shortly in Pindeldybox.
Love Letter
My brother’s bedroom was basement dark, lit only by his aquarium light which splayed across the floor to the bed, like a line a sister should not cross. The fish were hiding behind the rocks he brought home from various trips to Boy Scout Camp in the mountains. I could hear the hum of the water filter covering the sound of my steps. Even then, at fourteen, he never threw anything away. Empty cans of fish flakes rolled around his dresser drawer as I pulled it slowly open looking for something to nail him.
He had stolen my diary again, found it in my new hiding place in the trunk, must have watched me put it there. It had that short piece about how Emma and I took the Murphy’s’ car last Saturday. Neither of us was sixteen yet, although we each had a learner’s permit. We took the car back, and nothing happened, and Emma said her parents didn’t even notice the empty container from McDonalds she left under the seat. But that was not the dangerous part. I wrote about Emma, about how I feel about her, about kissing her in the back seat. If Joe read that, he would have something serious to use against me. Especially with the parents. Who knew what he would do? Joe and I weren’t getting along well these days, not like we used to.
The paper was in the far back of the drawer, folded up small, the size of a matchbook. It had a brown stain on the surface, something spilled and wiped up, like a coke. I thought it was trash, some old homework assignment (it was on lined paper, torn on the side, as if ripped out of a notebook), and I don’t know why I opened it. I expected to see figures from algebra, or some social studies scribble with an A plus on the top, knowing my genius brother with his good grades. I leaned my butt on the bed, looked up and listened for noise of the back door opening, and, assured by the quiet of the house, I unfolded the thing. I could see he had folded it and unfolded it over and over because the creases were soft and fragile, ready to tear. I smoothed it out on the bed, centered it in the dim beam of aquarium light to read.
It was a love letter. A revealing love letter, about the time they were lying naked under a blanket at camp. I had written letters like this. I always tore them up before delivering them. But it wasn’t like anything I expected. It was a love letter from another boy, his friend Zach who had moved away.
Before I returned the letter to the back of the drawer, I stroked the worn paper with the tips of my fingers, gently, as if it were skin.
End
Vrinda Baliga lives in Hyderabad, India. Her fiction has appeared in
online literary magazines like flashquake, Rose & Thorn, Cezanne's
Carrot, EveryDay Fiction and Camroc Review Press.
Sound Bytes
The door stood firmly closed. The lock, the safety chain, the tower bolt, all securely in place.
Masterji sat alone. The news channel spewed its contents into the dark room. He watched the images and words overflow from the wooden television cabinet, spread slowly across the floor, climb the walls like tendrils.
A dead body. That was all it was. It shouldn't matter. Not to him.
He flinched when the camera zoomed in on the face. Nobody had bothered to shut the eyes. This was one carcass which would not be given the respect due to the dead. It had to be displayed like a trophy before flashing camera bulbs and grasping microphones. Too many people would not believe that this man was truly dead and gone unless they saw the body with their own eyes. The victims of his extortion rackets, his land-grabbing, the endless gang wars… - no, people needed the reassurance of this display.
Back in the studio, the anchor said, "We'll now take you over to our other reporter covering this story. Any updates, Srini? Have you managed to speak to the father?"
The father.
It didn't matter that he had disowned his son years ago. It didn't matter that he had left his home and fled to a place where nobody would know. It didn’t matter that, at the age of fifty, he had had to start life afresh, to painstakingly weave a new layer of respectability around himself. It didn’t matter that he had become the headmaster of the village school, 'Masterji' to all who knew and respected him.
He was still the father.
And they had sniffed him out, simply followed the trail of blood that led from the carcass into his own veins.
"No, Mounika, not yet. But I have with me here, one of his neighbors…"
The camera panned out to show the group of curious bystanders, then zeroed in on Ekbote, Masterji's chess partner for years.
"Uh…I didn't know him too well," Ekbote mumbled. "He kept pretty much to himself."
Didn't. Kept. They were already using the past tense for him as well.
The camera now showed Masterji's house. The gate, the fence, the tiny garden, the steps leading to the verandah.
Masterji raised himself up slowly from his chair.. He rested his palm lightly against the cold inner surface of the door even as the television screen filled with its image from the other side.
The End.
Robert J. Gregg, born in Cleveland, Ohio, Dartmouth College BA (English Major), NYU MBA, market, licensing consultant, home lighting design, distribution, author of several novels, unpublished as yet, his latest, „The Pope Takes A Sabbatical.“ Short stories have appeared in online publications, In Posse Review, Bartleby Snopes and Danse Macabre. He lives in Germany with wife and family.
Back to Basics
There was little to do but concede once she acquired a yen for masculine irresponsibility especially as regards maintenance of a household, arbitration of family grievance, and surveillance of one's mate's well-being, mine of late neglected and secondary. My wife's old unused energy fused to bridge the gap the years home had left and fueled her launch forth into independence. I was wary, cited traditional values, Darwin, defense, survival, place and vows, but my own trained nature soon recognized the inevitable in formation, and my wife was absolutely in formation, with the children behind her, time dragging and the past no more than a gold watch worth, she said. She decided to return to law school, the same from which I, then her knight in shining armor, had rescued her, to finish what she started young. The calling, only a whisper, turned into a desert storm, a Vox Clamantis, a Pied Piper dance out the front door, down the street and off into a so belligerent male world, she said, that I could do nothing but clear her books from the breakfast table for coffee together mornings before the day broke into discord, a twelve-tone regimentation that had me early racing for cover. She was serious and I was guilty because in college one of us had had to leave off studies to have our first son, and somehow she seemed then better suited. Life had been good to us; my practice prospered, and the children were grown, healthy and half out of the house. This was not the typical middle-aged energy ailing joblessness that puts women temporarily back into school to free themselves of suburban ennui. This was my wife, who without a doubt would pass soon the bar because she had determined to do so. What then, my friend? The legal world is tough and there's no place nowadays for the myriads of eager, young, self-proclaimed lawyers, mass-produced each year, but in some uncle's established practice, and in this teeming mise en scene, the uncle role was my immediate worry and the unbitten sour apple was ripening fast. I considered advising the most junior junior partner he'd be better a teacher to make room for my wife as the final stretch of bar preparation nervousness reached its zenith and I my stress limit.
She passed the bar, survived a one-year practicum at the local court of appeals, then came knocking at my door to join my staff and its new feminine matters section she was about to form, equal rights, sex harassment, and keep the male in his place sort of thing. Do unto him what he did to you. My specialty was international licensing, contracts, mergers, acquisitions, foreign claims, i.e. a field in which the basics of male and female togetherness were irrelevant, something I intended to maintain except that her arguments became ever more convincing the less she said. It was now or never.
She moved into the back office with her own second floor stairwell entrance, had the walls repainted, new carpeting laid and several modern paintings hung in various corners to neutralize the conservative atmosphere I preferred even moreso now to scare away her clients should they dare venture from her world into mine. My wife, of course, moved freely back and forth since such matters as telephones, desks, writing pads, and electricity bills were the hitherto unchallenged domain of my secretary, a staid and imposing individual, true and fast on my side of the tracks. I asked the building superintendent (a) to have the back entrance made more officelike, dark stained doorframes, wood-panelling, etc. etc. and (b) to remove please first of all the squeaking swinging door, now her entrance, heard in our offices whenever she came and went. But my wife insisted on the door as it was, since it had, so she said, a certain symbolic significance? Additionally she would have nothing to do with wood-panelling; naked walls she wanted if only to strengthen back office-front office perspectives. The people who come to her for advice, she said, would hardly be looking for the rich-in-tradition aura that mahogany and dark featureless oil paintings offer, although on the other hand, she added, their immediate vicinity might not be entirely negative. My wife had no intention of becoming a female revolutionary. She was merely a dialectical outgrowth of the old and the new, old-fashioned, reborn. And I? Who was I? What was I? A male anachronism. I inspected my ties at night secretly for Zeitgeist new world relevancy and would have gladly disposed of some if frayed or sweat smudge-stained where the knot is. None were.
Before long, the squeak of the backdoor was heard so often the rest of us found ourselves anticipating each repetition. There were more people per hour flowing through her backdoor than I did push-ups mornings now, clients, she said, seeking advice. After a week I decided either I had to know what was the attraction or I would have to oil the door. Anxieties were starting to show themselves among my partners. In the meantime my wife's original legal concept had undergone a major alteration; she had matured, she said, and as such had initiated steps to form what she called NAASRP, National Association for the Advancement of Second-Rate People, an organization for second-rate people only, complaints registered, collective burden, personal advice. For legal aid, use the backdoor. It all sounded far-fetched to me if not beyond the juristic pale; yet there was nothing I felt it wise to do. I tried to quiz my secretary who was now taking her lunches in the backroom, but she had sealed lips and afternoons a pleasantly satisfied look. Her husband acquired the very disturbing habit of calling often, which angered me more and more. I called my wife several times a day to hear how she was and to determine just in passing if my secretary were there. My mother called to say I should come out to Cape Cod with Susan, my wife, an unusual invitation. I had the walls separating our office soundproofed, but the laughter and the squeaking backdoor just seemed to ooze through, and my own door, ajar as I took to keeping it, served only to widen the smile on my secretary's face.
One evening I offered my wife my help, international experience, I said, insurance claims, contractual nuances, social mores and their various legal effects, the last a bit beyond the mark but it did sound sufficiently second-rate. She would think about it. Two days later I was called into the back office and introduced to my first client, a young lady who had lost her father to another woman and wanted to sue to get him back. I advised her to wait a moment while I hurried out of the room to my wife who was waiting in the hall grinning ear-to-ear. Remember your blond. There had been, never was, and would be no blond. I hardly ever looked twice indiscreetly at any one in all my married life. Well then, what would you tell her? Think a moment then go back to her. There was nothing to think about; I sent her home with orders to be nice, bake his favorite cake, bring his slippers and kiss him more often goodnight. Good fathers are hard to find nowadays; too many lawyers, not enough fathers, I grumbled. On leaving she signed a membership list, no fees, no dues, just membership. The backdoor squeaked pleasantly all day. That evening there was steak, home fries, salad and pumpkin pie, my favorites waiting for me.
For several days I was away on business. Though curiosity churned most of my thoughts, there was still a certain accountability I owed my own clients. I pushed all thoughts of NAASRP out of my mind including those of the young lady I'd sent home to her father and the squeaking backdoor and the strange attraction there I couldn't understand no matter how often I pushed it out of my mind. The return to my office proved traumatic. People practically bulged out of the back office and spilled over into the adjoining rooms where I found my secretary and two partners in conference with several apparent aid seekers, all very satisfied with themselves. My secretary took time out to welcome me back, advise that all was well, nothing pending, then returned to her work in the conference room. My wife greeted me with a welcome sigh and introduced me to two new second-raters who made themselves comfortable on the leather easy chairs in my office and began to speak of the corruptibility of man in general and of their own in particular as honorable city school board officials. They would very happily join the NAASRP organization and contribute time and financial aid. Both pulled out checkbooks and wrote. Gentlemen, I said, this is not the place. They waved aside my "not the place" and copied the second-rate hyphenation from the NAASRP brochure at hand on which unmistakeably I could see upside down my address, comma, "backdoor." I thanked them for their help, mumbled congratulations on their second-rate attitude or lack not knowing exactly which way to go and accepted their checks with the beneficence expected. I gave them to my wife and received in turn a handful of NAASRP pamphlets to hand out to the crowd in the hall. I sat down next to a little old lady shouting "Hello, you there" to each new backdoor arrival in a slightly exaggerated not unpleasant southern accent. Many greeted her with the same "Hello, you there" which included me. Hello you there, I answered and offered a young man with an "A" pinned to his jacket a seat. Agnostic he said in answer to my second-rate inquisitive look and wrote out a check. The little old lady gave one of my clerks a diamond ring, which he refused to accept I noted with relief, and whispered to me, "I can't cook."
The pamphlet was short and to the point, the kind you glance at quickly, throw away, then pick up and read. Second-rate is second-rate. Is it the backdoor for you? NAASRP: National Association for the etc. etc. Is yours a complex or a status? See us. The last resort, legal recourse, but absolutely the last. By appointment only. Use the backdoor.
This was absolutely second-rate, poor in grammatics, poor in logic, poor in ethics, poor judgment, poor psychology and poorly written. If the telephone number had not been my own, I would have called to give them a damned good piece of my legal mind. I called anyway disguising my voice and requested information. On the phone my secretary asked me if I were really second-rate, otherwise why waste the time. I think I am, I emphasized, and I have your brochure here in my hand. If I were not absolutely sure, she said, I should go home and sleep on it. I was somewhat irritated, in fact, mad. I spent two nights sleeping on it without a word to my wife, perplexed as I was. I thought of the blond, the father and daughter and the two school board officials I'd spoken to. Even the little old lady entered my dreams, Hello you there. Hallelujah.
After two days I called. It was my wife. Disguised, my voice muffled, I complained of the inherent neglect in the fact that my wife earns more than I do. So what, she answered, so does Rockefeller, and hung up before I could explain what was basically wrong with the world today. Where's the pitch? I didn't understand at all.
During the following days the law firm's bank account began to take on unusual financial proportions, so much so that the bank manager advised me personally by FAX of several investment plans I should consider. Two automobile agencies called to discuss new cars they wouldn't possibly have offered without access to the latest bank secrets, rather unpleasant. I had to find out exactly what was going on before NAASRP would ruin me. I called for an appointment, John Smith, I said. But no. First I would have to submit a two-page, no more, no less, handwritten, autobiographical presentation of my second-rate problem and several possible solutions to it along with a self-addressed, stamped envelope, an SASE, prior to turning to last resorts which if legal would happily and professionally be rendered. I spent at least a week composing a two-page draft secretly so that nether my wife nor my secretary would notice, copied it clearly legibly left-handed and submitted it by mail, the return address a YMCA mailbox number. Three days later a mimeographed note about the size of a playing card arrived in my SASE, rejecting me for lack of sufficiently expressed insight. They were sorry. Who in the hell do they think they are? I sat down and poured heart and soul into two pages burning with rage, incensed and second-rate. They wouldn't dare turn me down again. My wild gushing flow became ten pages, too long, which to edit down, proved more difficult than expected. Certain historical data I left out altogether, and the deletion of repetition and some rather ineffective argumentation reduced it to five, succinct, to the point and devoid of emotional exaggeration. I reread it. I had said what I had to say, convincingly, sufficiently, with clarity and truthfulness. I stole two postage stamps from my secretary's desk, one for the self-addressed envelope and snuck out to mail my letter from the next street corner. Four days later the reply arrived at my YMCA mail drop, "Two pages, please." No more, no less, no signature, no manuscript. It had not been returned, probably not even read, simply thrown into the trash, I guessed. I had to control myself, otherwise I'd have rushed into the backroom and told my wife and secretary exactly what to do with their NAASRP. I took a long walk in Central Park and cooled down enough to realize that this wouldn't do. They were not going to get the better of me. I sat down on a park bench and began to think out a letter detailed enough to do justice to the whole matter yet within the two-page limit. I got stuck in the first paragraph. I leaned back and concentrated. This had become absolutely silly. I was a mature and successful lawyer, more than capable, in full command of several languages and trained to express myself in a perfectly understandable and normal manner. I had nothing to say which I felt like putting down on paper. In fact I discovered I was rather thankful. Several children ran by laughing. Blue sky glistened in the pond. Trees, skyscrapers and far-off sounds framed the horizon in a mingling of wondrous things. A little old lady threw breadcrumbs to ducks while the boy at her side mustered enough courage to handfeed two that waddled out of the water. A willow tree swayed lightly in the breeze. The sun was warm on my cheeks, and an inexplicable feeling of joy sprang up within me. Late that afternoon I returned to the office.
Several days afterwards during a lunch I took time to have with Susan, my wife, she reached over the table suddenly, squeezed my hand the way she used to and thanked me for the personal check I'd sent to NAASRP. What a wonderful gesture, she said. Your encouragement means so much to me.
End
Charles Haddox lives in El Paso, Texas. His work has appeared in many journals, including Commonweal, The Sand Hill Review, Concho River Review and Switchback.
A Field Trip, 1968
Two in the afternoon, and we were free. Free of the dark, narrow halls, free of the statues of saints watching us from their perches, of the terrible and arbitrary discipline of Sister Mary Pilar, the principal, who shouted at us day after day with the voice of an angry bird. She had a frightening crush on Brad Hosey, a handsome young Jesuit Scholastic who was studying for the priesthood in order to evade the draft. Frustration over her feelings for Hosey kept her in a state of constant fury.
We left the dark-brown brick school that was surrounded by dusty and funeral cypresses and made our way across the playground to the little stucco Boy Scout Hut, having been released early from classes to take part in a field trip. Once inside the Hut, the den leader, Mrs. Roberts, made us stand at attention through a prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance. Bub Hill, a full-fledged Boy Scout and Mrs. Robert’s assistant, held the flag. Bub was fat, sadistic, and smelled like aged cheese. He loved to torture us by making us do push-ups on our fingertips. As soon as Mrs. Roberts turned toward the flag and the pledge began, several of our fellow scouts gave Bub the finger. Mrs. Roberts, a thin, eternally-irritated woman whose skin was like roasted chicken, concluded our little assembly by reminding us in a threatening manner of what a privilege this field trip was. She stressed the need for us to be on our best behavior, concluding with a promise to “kick our asses” if we did anything to embarrass her. This speech drew snickers from several boys. We weren’t used to East Texas accents, and her labored drawl made everything she said sound hilarious to us. But one glance from her wide, clearly homicidal eyes was enough to silence any laughter.
The bus that was to take us on the field trip was late and Mrs. Roberts and Bub left us alone for a minute to see if they could find it. As soon as they were out of sight somebody broke into a storage closet and retrieved a collection of cardboard swords that another den had made for a skit about the Middle Ages which had been halfheartedly performed at our last pack meeting. They had also made knight’s helmets out of clean, cylindrical ten-gallon ice cream cartons, cutting out a strip over the eyes to see through. We slipped the helmets over our heads, picked up the cardboard swords, and began hitting the smaller of our fellow Cub Scouts, pretending that we were police beating “Negro rioters.” (Ironically, Joe Hill, the only Black kid in our troop, was probably the most enthusiastic member of the riot police.) It took us only a few swings to reduce the swords to shreds. We stuffed the pieces and battered helmets back in the closet as soon as we heard Mrs. Roberts calling.
We all piled onto the bus, and within a few minutes the calm and well-kept suburbs that made up our entire world were far away. We were soon surrounded by the empty stretch of desert that had been named McGregor Range, a firing and missile-testing site attached to the local army base. Our bus was waved through a checkpoint manned by an armed guard, and the road changed from pavement to gravel. I was sitting on the bus next to Fernie Martinez, the leading hellion of our troop. Even Mrs. Roberts was afraid of him. Although it was strictly forbidden to wear anything on our Cub Scout uniforms other than official pins and patches, Fernie had a huge iron-on Chicago Cubs patch on the pocket of his shirt.
We passed through a gate and entered an immense, crowded lot paved with asphalt, still surrounded on all sides by the orange sand and mesquite-topped mounds of a desert that had suffered years of abuse, first by ranchers who had overgrazed it, and then by the military who shelled and bombed it as if it were enemy territory. On one corner of the paved lot a few Quonset huts, and aluminum-and-wood bleachers, stood facing the desert. A group of cafeteria tables covered with white plastic tablecloths stood in front of the bleachers. They held shiny coffee dispensers and ten-gallon coolers full of diluted cool-aid. On the tables there were also trays of cookies: chocolate chip, sugar wafers, ginger snaps, lemon coolers and butter rounds. (I remembered what my father used to say: “The reason they always serve cookies at army functions is that’s the only way they can get people to go to them.”) Next to the last table stood a tube-shaped olive green canvas bag hung from a metal tripod. It was full of blocks of ice. At the base of the bag was a spigot that was supposed to dispense cold water as the ice melted, but the day was cool and no one could get more than a trickle out of it. Long cartons of paper cups sat in an ammunition box next to the bag.
We were directed to our places on the bleachers. I had expected a swaggering senior officer to get up and give a speech à la George C. Scott in the movie Patton. Instead, an unintelligible voice began speaking over a crackling public address system. Most of the bleachers were already filled with GIs and NCOs in fatigues, as well as a couple of majors and a colonel, also in fatigues. There was a group of German Air Force officers in blue dress uniforms.
Mrs. Roberts had informed us that we were to witness a display of artillery fire directed against a mock Vietnamese village, but the village was so far out in the desert—at least a mile away from us—that it looked like piles of straw and dirt. The artillery was placed almost as far away, and covered from behind by some sort of frame topped with camouflage netting, so we couldn’t actually see the guns that were firing, either. I assume that they were probably M102 and M109-SP Howitzers, as there were examples of both displayed on the asphalt lot.
I sat next to Fernie and enjoyed the show. The announcer on the public address system kept up a running commentary of unintelligible nonsense. The only word that I could understand was “burst,” which he calmly said before each shell was launched. The firing sounded like distant thunder, and the shells exploded in a flash and puff of smoke. The explosions were so distant that they seemed small, but each one produced a hail of black fragments that went flying in all directions along with debris from the village. Fires flared up, dark orange in color, and generated huge clouds of thick black smoke.
After a while, Fernie became bored with the show and proceeded to produce a math compass. Holding the pointed end like a knife, he shoved it into the left buttock of a scout sitting in front of us. Yelping in pain, the scout turned and hit Fernie on the thigh with his fist.
“Cut it out, culero,” he hissed at Fernie.
During a break in the action we ate cookies and drank weak, sour cool-aid.
“Goddamn army can’t afford sugar?” I heard the bus driver growl under his breath.
There was a small registration book on one of the tables. We took turns signing it, and on the “comment” line next to his name, Fernie wrote, “Pretty shitty.”
As we traveled back to school on the bus I sat with Eduardo, a quiet boy who had few friends. I was tired of Fernie’s antics, and afraid of getting in trouble with Mrs. Roberts because of him. Eduardo sat shyly beside me, saying little. I was bored, and looked out the window, my eyes wandering over the desert landscape, a vast wasteland covered with junk abandoned by the army over the years: building materials, tires, unexploded ordinance and coils of insulated wire. I thought about Mrs. Roberts’ husband, Ron, an army captain, quiet and resigned, with a blond burr cut and sad blue eyes. I used to observe him at pack meetings, with his thirteen year-old son Dennis, and at the Saturday matinees shown on post at Theater No. 2. Dennis was a Boy Scout. He stuttered, and was as lost and lonely as his father. The only time I ever saw him enjoying himself was at those Saturday matinees with his dad, watching Godzilla destroy Tokyo, or some British actor who was portraying a flier on a mission to annihilate the Nazis.
Turning my gaze from the window, I noticed that Eddie Keene was sitting at the back of the bus. It was unusual to see Eddie alone, as he was both popular and fun. Eddie was neither smart nor kind, but he was the best soccer player in our class, and loved to fight. I noticed that Eddie was quietly weeping. Perhaps because I had enjoyed the trip so much myself, I felt a pang of compassion. Instead of drawing attention to him so that my classmates and I could make fun at his expense, I sat down next to him and asked him gently why he was crying. At first he couldn’t speak. Only sobs issued from his mouth. At last he was able to form his words.
“I know I shouldn’t be crying,” he said in a shaky voice, “but I just can’t stop thinking about all those people that they killed today.”
Geoff Hyatt attended Western Michigan University's Creative Writing Workshop and received his M.F.A. in fiction writing from Columbia College Chicago. His first novel will be published by Leucrota Press in 2010. His work has appeared in Thuglit, American Open Mic 2: The New American Voice, The Harrow, Hair Trigger, and elsewhere.
A Galaxy Safe for Love
by Geoff Hyatt
February was bad for Nate. A leaf disease assailed his houseplants. His cat died of feline leukemia. His boyfriend moved out on Valentine’s Day, a date Ian had likely chosen for its drama alone. He’d sat down on his suitcase and said, “Nathan, you’re keeping me from experiencing life,” then returned to texting on his Blackberry until a tacky Mustang picked him up. Today, while online at the office, Nate learned of a less personal (but more permanent) departure. A car had fatally struck the creator of Hammerstar, his favorite Bronze Age comic book, while Rollerblading in Anaheim. What was a man that age doing on skates? The world descended into madness.
Nate trudged across Daley Plaza. Freezing pigeons crowded the war memorial’s flame like hobos swarming a campfire. A brief coughing fit stopped him outside the Blue Line station. He squinted at the ice-crusted Picasso sculpture overseeing the square, still unable to determine whether it was supposed to be a horse or a baboon.
On Tuesdays in the summertime, the plaza hosted a farmer’s market. He’d meet Ian by the fountain and they’d walk hand-in-hand, filling a woven hemp bag with organic asparagus and oat bread. In the cold, with skyscrapers looming on all sides of the snow-swept plaza, it was hard to imagine those summer afternoons together. Nate sneezed into a tattered Kleenex. After making his way down the station’s steps and through the turnstiles, he shouldered his way into the sour-feet smell of a waiting train car.
An advertisement over its aisle struck him as a cosmic insult. A month ago, he’d been assigned to proofread its tag line: A brighter future. Guaranteed. Initially it had been written with an extra “u” in the middle of “guaranteed.” The words were printed beneath a man and woman grinning like lunatics on a topical beach. The westbound train rocked and shrieked.
An hour later, the decrepit stink-car crawled up to his stop, and he began the long trek home. A homeless man played a jumbled version of Greensleeves on his Pan flute as Nate stepped onto the street. The flautist reminded him of the mad god Azatoth, from Lovecraft’s weird tales, endlessly piping away as crazed demons danced around him.
The streets were rivers of black sludge, the sidewalks sheets of gray ice. Cars tore by, each one seeming to blast the same reggaeton beat. Trash gathered in scabs against the curb, and yellow snow encircled every signpost and hydrant. Fences like rows of upright spears surrounded the rundown walk-ups and split-levels.
A lime green Mustang was double-parked by Nate’s apartment when he got home. His stomach dropped at the sight of Ian and a thick-shouldered blond in a Diesel leather jacket leaning on the car like gangsters beneath the streetlight. Nate stomped up his front steps, pretending not to notice them.
He smiled at the package on his stoop, his latest eBay shipment of Hammerstar back issues. Near mint. Bagged and boarded. He tucked the parcel under his arm as he turned to face Ian and Blondie.
Ian’s hair was purple now, one side spiked up with the bangs swiped across his forehead. Everything he wore was black, his shoes were pointy, and silver ring bisected his lower lip. He looked like something from a terrible Japanese cartoon.
“I want to get some of my stuff,” he said, stepping onto the porch. “We called your cell phone.”
The blond, built as though he could bench press a Volkswagen, glared from the sidewalk.
“Sorry,” Nate said. “I was underground.”
* * *
Dressed in a blue bodysuit with gold epilates and gun-belt, equipped with a white helmet and jet-boots, Captain Hammerstar commands the galaxy’s fastest starship in the fight against tyranny. The character debuted in Weird Galaxy Comics, later getting his own monthly, Hammerstar, from 1972 to 1983.
Hammerstar scripts were laden with the painful conventions found in most comic books of the time. Characters talked to themselves for no reason other than to explain the story. (MY NEUTRALIZER BEAM WILL HAVE NO EFFECT ON AN ENERGY BEING!)Text described what was already clearly illustrated in the panel. (Under a picture of an exploding spaceship, a caption:THE SPACESHIP EXPLODES!) Mysterious aliens and magical artifacts routinely showed up to solve plot problems that the writers couldn’t. (TO DEFEAT NOVA-EATER, CAPTAIN HAMMERSTAR MUST FIND THE SWORD OF SATURNUS!) Captain Hammerstar himself, cleft-chinned and blond, was an amalgam of countless earlier heroes. Neither artful nor original, it became Nate’s favorite comic.
This wasn’t nostalgia; Hammerstar was cancelled when he was an infant. The series provided an escape not only from his life’s tedium, but also his era’s conventions. Hammerstar wasn’t a gory vigilante tale, or a hip self-aware “graphic novel.” No one cursed or murdered, no one was a gay shamanic raver with magic powers, or an introspective and tortured costumed hero. It was a four-color space saga. Each issue burst with excitement, having no pretensions. Simple without being dumb, perilous without being brutal, Hammerstar was a place of honor and adventure where capital letters spelled out every word, and almost every sentence ended with an exclamation point.
Even the advertisements seemed from another dimension. A mix of wild imagination and unabashed hucksterism, the kind of promises that only looked good on paper. X-ray glasses. Moon rocks. The secrets of kung fu. A miniature living kingdom of sea-monkeys. Sure, it was all a scam, but it was fun to dream about. Not like the sort of advertisements he saw all day.
Nothing sold on the pulpy pages of Hammerstar pledged security, happiness, or lifelong success. The comic’s ads instead offered mystery, mastery, and magic; they grabbed attention through sheer outlandishness. Nate wondered how many kids sent away for these things, and if the excitement of checking the mailbox every day for weeks afterward was worth the heartbreak of reality when the junk finally arrived.
* * *
Ian and Blondie stomped around the kitchen. Nate slouched in the front room’s wingback, absently digging a crumpled flyer from his pocket. Eliot from writing group had given it to him, promoting one of Chicago’s countless indie-lit events. Dusky-eyed and soft-spoken, Eliot hadn’t inflicted the writing group with any snarky-yet-wounded queer identity memoirs. After a particularly tedious session at the Caribou Coffee on Halsted, in a bar down the street, Eliot confided that he’d rather have a ballpoint stuck up his pee-hole than hear one more Thanksgiving coming out story. Club soda had nearly sprayed out Nate’s nose.
He let the flyer slip from his hand to the floor. Maybe some other time. Nate pulled issue 46, its cover depicting Captain Hammerstar decapitating a robot, from a Mylar bag.
“New comics?” Ian walked in holding the juice machine, used exactly twice over the three years they lived together, to his chest as though it were his treasured child. The thing looked like the unfortunate robot’s head.
Nate set the issue on the table beside him and said, “Depends on what you mean by ‘new.’”
“You really spend too much time on that stuff. And money. You turned thirty last summer.” Ian pushed purple bangs out of his eyes. “You should get out more.”
“I suppose I should start blowing weightlifters and smoking meth, too? I don’t knock your hobbies.”
Blondie, carrying a box of Ian’s records, shot Nate a murderous look.
“I was just saying,” Ian snapped.
* * *
The first time Nate read a Hammerstar comic, he was twenty-four, drying out in a run-down rehab center in northern Indiana. The judge recognized how the “terrible disease” of alcoholism had caused Nate to flunk out of Notre Dame, lose his job, get evicted from his apartment, and acquire his third DUI. His driver’s license was gone forever, but with a bit of work, he could preserve his freedom.
New Beginnings Treatment Center had a “library,” a walk-in supply closet housing a single bookcase stocked with rehab texts from the late seventies. Nate hadn’t been allowed to bring anything when he checked in. He was crushed to learn that only “recovery assisting” reading material was allowed in the center.
Nate pulled an orange rehab workbook from the so-called library’s bookcase, hoping to at least enjoy it as retro kitsch. The book’s illustrations depicted all the types of “regular people” who struggled with addiction, a gamut that ran from impossibly skinny young men with Luke Skywalker haircuts to grandmothers in velour pantsuits.
When he flipped to a chapter called “Owning Your Choices,” a comic book tumbled out. He tucked it under his shirt and smuggled it back to his room. This was the first time he’d ever encountered imagination as contraband—which, of course, made it infinitely more desirable.
* * *
After the Mustang tore off, Nate did an inventory of what Ian and Blondie had taken. The juicer and records. A handful of books: one of the weaker Anne Rice novels, a paperback called Philosophy for Beginners, a vegan cooking guide, and a volume entitled Secrets of Gay Wicca. Ian had also taken a crappy fantasy dagger Nate got at a flea market, one oven mitt, the soap dish, and the rubber mallet. He didn’t try to understand.
* * *
Issue 25 of Hammerstar concludes the Calagron Curse storyline, in which Hammerstar learns that by reviving the dying Princess Zorati with the Amulet of Calgaron, he has endangered an ancient race of space-mystics. The eponymous amulet was one of these mystics’ ancient artifacts, stolen from them by the evil Lord Daath and recovered by our hero (SEE ISSUE #9). By restoring the princess instead of returning it to the mystics, Hammerstar unintentionally began to drain the life-force of this sacred people. In short, the once-lost love of Hammerstar’s life becomes sustained by the slow extinction of innocent hippie-wizards.
Princess Zorati refuses to accept a life prolonged by the mystics’ deaths. In a tearful scene, she kisses Captain Hammerstar one last time before casting away the amulet and then diving (angelic in her silver go-go boots and chain-mail bikini) into the starship’s hyperspace engine.
The issue concludes with Captain Hammerstar returning the amulet to the space-mystics, saying, “MYSTICS, HEAR MY WORDS. THE ONLY THING IN THIS GALAXY MORE PRECIOUS THAN LOVE IS VIRTUE.” Then, in the last panel, Captain Hammerstar stands in silhouette before the sunset of an alien sky with the placid face of Princess Zorati superimposed over it, and he says, “IT IS VIRTUE THAT CREATES A GALAXY SAFE FOR LOVE.”
A week after finding issue 25, Nate announced his Higher Power was none other than Captain Hammerstar. Much to the surprise of his counselors, he finished up his degree, interned at a newspaper, and got a proofreading job in Chicago. Part of him believed that he would have self-destructed if not for Hammerstar’s intervention.
He got out, but the escape pod was damaged, the airlock had a leak, and his grand plan had its flaws. He thought he could bring Ian along, too.
They had done so much for one another over the years. They’d hiked the Warren Dunes, they’d shared a bedroom, they’d helped one another get cars out of impound and make bail. Nate thought they could settle a new world together. No more small towns, no more uneasy looks over the shoulder before kissing or holding hands. They’d find a new planet to call home.
Ian became the amulet keeping the past alive; Nate became the isolated mystic whose life it drained. He knew he wasn’t Captain Hammerstar in this scenario. He never would be. Perhaps it didn’t matter, because none of it was real anymore. Maybe it never had been.
* * *
Nate paced the kitchen, a small linoleum cell, feeling caged and helpless as he listened to the cycling of the fridge and the patting of his stocking feet. When his phone rang, it seemed shatteringly loud in the emptiness. He answered.
“Nate? Hey, it’s Eliot. From writing group. I wondered if you still wanted to go to that reading tonight with me. Remember?”
He froze, looking out across his apartment. Comics spread across the table beside the tattered chair. The trashcan next to the fridge overflowed with Lean Cuisine cartons and Pepsi bottles. The empty dish for his now-deceased cat sat by the back door. A pot on the windowsill held his diseased plant.
“Yeah, I remember,” Nate said. “That benefit for the—” He faltered. “Well, I’m sure something, you know, progressive.”
“It’s for the People’s Food Co-Op, actually. I mean, I know it’s not really your thing, but—”
“No, no, I’d like to go,” he said. “Meet you there in like an hour or so?”
“Great.” Eliot’s voice smiled. “It’ll be nice to see you outside of writing group. I really was hoping you’d come.”
Thirty minutes later, Nate trudged through the snow and doubted. Nothing came as advertised, nothing guaranteed a brighter future. The X-ray glasses made you blind, the mind-control manuals gave you a headache, and Charles Atlas’s dynamic tension exercises only wore down your wrists and elbows. Eliot was too young and didn’t know him. He confused Nate’s antisocial behavior with a mysterious personality and misinterpreted his quietude for depth. Still, there was the excitement, that anticipation, like a kid waiting for a package in the mail. It was a mystery in space, a world unexplored, and maybe this one would be better than the last.
The Mad Piper in the station played a sloppy version of By Yon Bonnie Banks. Nate always liked that song. Ye’ll take the high road, and I’ll take the low road, and I’ll be in Scotland a’fore ye… The low road referred to death, to burial. Most people didn’t know that. Nate always found that lyric comforting, taking it as a promise that we’re all headed home to a place where we belong. He placed a dollar in the Mad Piper’s cup. The haggard man lowered the pipe from his lips and said, “God bless you, man.”
Nate replied, “It is virtue that creates a galaxy safe for love.”
He passed through the turnstile and headed down the steps, smiling as he plodded underground. The pipe’s notes echoed through the gloom over the rumble of an approaching train, and in Nate’s mind, he danced.
END
Pacze Moj is an immigrant. His fiction has been published in Fusion Fragment, Ruthless Peoples Magazine, and Pear Noir.
Hazelnut Street
by Pacze Moj
Once while I was walking alone on a Saturday afternoon I passed beside Hazelnut Street. The sun was thick and yellow, the breeze was warm, and the street-sign was faded green with thick white letters, so I turned in.
The way was long and lined with brick houses. Children played on the hot pavement like it was Summer. Although I'd never been before, I remembered this was where my old friends lived.
As I walked toward the distant cul-de-sac, I passed James and Mallory, Ashley and Chuck Taylor, and even grey-haired Trevor, who waved while gardening. Others continued with their lives and routines, which I saw through freshly-scrubbed bay windows and open garage doors. There was no need to stop and talk; and to closest old friends, least of all. I merely walked and watched faces gathered around dining-room tables, lit by flashing televisions, laughing, being families.
Black first spoke to me as I'd passed Mary's house, an orange bungalow atop a sun-burnt lawn. Was she happy? I answered, “Hello, Black.”
It was easier to talk to Black than to the others. I'd forgotten him. He'd aged, but my memory gave no reference. He was a new person. There was only the voice that brought me back. I smiled at him, he smiled back, and I took off my shoes, and walked onto the softness of his front lawn. When he spoke to me again, I noticed the din and excitement of the street like sudden, broken silence. Without introductions we sat down together and spoke about everything except the past.
The sun was sinking toward the horizon now, and ink was spilling into the sky, but the air hadn't yet cooled and children continued playing and making noise in the streets and around the cul-de-sac.
Entire families were home, together, in front of their houses, while I imagined the city: empty, lonely, streets and big, vacant buildings waiting for tomorrow. The lamp-lights and house--lights and porch-lights were still off when Black took his eyes off the pale blue moon and pointed them towards me.
"I have two sons."
Some time ago, I had moved from Black's lawn and sat down on the patio in front of Black's front door, reclining until my back felt the warmth of the sun-heated cement and closed my eyes. Now I opened them, turned onto my side, propped myself up on an elbow, and looked down at Black's face. He was on his back just like I had been, except down on the fluid, green grass, into which he seemed slowly to be sinking.
"I have two sons," he repeated.
His voice sounded clear, but his body was further away from mine than it was. I stared at him for so long that my vision started to burn like white flares.
The front door opened and a boy ran out. He was four-or-five years old, holding a big, pump-action water gun and smiling. He passed like a ghost, and merged with the children in the street. I reached behind me and pushed the door closed--carefully, so the lock didn't click.
Black had gone back to silence and staring at the moon, and I wondered whether he'd ever been married; and, if he had, for how long, and why it ended; and if she was still alive; and, if she was, and it had ended, whether he knew where she was, whether he was hoping she'd come back some day, simply appear at the door before lunch with two quiet knocks, or else let herself in, sit down in one of the wooden chairs in the kitchen and act as if nothing had happened, as if she'd just gone out for a walk and was back before anyone noticed she'd been gone...
Boys squirted girls with water, which trickled into rain gutters like veins across asphalt.
"I want to show you something," Black said suddenly, getting to his feet. He walked inside and was gone for a while.
The street-lights turned on.
When Black came out, his skin was paler and brighter than before, and he held a red-wooden chest in his now-shaking hands. He sat down on his front step, I moved up and sat beside him, and he passed the chest into my lap. It felt light, he wanted me to open it.
I did. It was empty.
But he kept looking at it, so I looked at it, too. We sat on the steps, looking at the empty red-wooden open chest on my lap as the noise from the street grew louder and louder:
It was like a small tackle-box, with little compartments divided by dark plastic walls. Every compartment was lined with a thin, colourful-white layer of powder-like dust.
Black put his hand behind my head and pushed me towards it.
"Can you smell it?" he asked, "It's a wonderful smell, isn't it?"
Then he took the chest from me, licked his ring finger, ran it along the wall of one of the compartments so that the dust-powder stuck to the wetness on his finger and rubbed it along the outside of his gums.
"Of course, it doesn't have a smell, even when it's full. But it's so wonderful."
I pushed myself to my feet and walked across Black's front yard, out, into the street. Without hurrying, I moved along, between kids and among half-remembered, aging faces, until I reached the cul-de-sac.
Someone was setting up a radio, someone fireworks; I recognized the auburn hair, freckled-face sipping from a glass of wine in one of the driveways: Melissa.
She recognized me, and, though we'd never been friends, greeted me with a hug. Her face was the way I'd remembered, but straighter, more taut. It was strange to see her as an adult. Perhaps I seemed strange, too. After we hugged, she offered me her glass of wine, and I took a long drink. Later, she tossed the glass aside--it shattered just as the first fire-cracker exploded above our heads--and took me by the hand, pulling me into the cul-de-sac where adults were gathering.
Together, we danced as the music played, night fell, the crowd gelled, and spinning, cracking, living, dying lights painted themselves across the sky.
"God, I can't concentrate if we're just going in circles all the time," she said, suddenly. And asked: "Do you mind if we pull out for a time, just stay still, stay away from everyone?"
I didn't answer, but she pulled me along anyway, and we ended up in the shadows between two houses, where it was cool, quiet, and the light from the fireworks didn't reach.
"What would you do?" she asked.
"What would you do if your partner left after promising you so much and giving so little, making you believe you'd be together forever but really bringing nothing and taking everything away?"
"I'm sorry," I said.
"All I have left is this car. This car, which she said was worth at least ten thousand on account of the low mileage, but which won't even start on weekdays and all the parts are turning to rust."
She started to cry. I thought she might want more wine, but she didn't; she said she still had pictures to take down, and only wanted to dance. So we danced: for an hour, maybe two, maybe more, until the crowd thinned, the music stopped, and the sky stopped being colours. We didn't say much, but she told me that after tonight the road crews were coming in and the street would be closed until the fall, maybe longer. I pressed my hand against hers, but I knew she was imagining I was somebody else.
In the morning, it was Monday. Hazelnut Street was empty. I went into the city and in to work.
Adam’s writing has recently appeared or is forthcoming in 3 A.M. Magazine, H_ngm_n, Mud Luscious, Storyglossia, andUnderground Voices. He is the author of an ebook, The Nurse and The Patient (Pangur Ban Party, 2009). He lives in Brooklyn and works in publishing. Visit him here: http://adamadamadamadamadam.blogspot.com
Excavation
I hadn’t been down there in years. Nothing had changed apart from the size of it all – shrunken and fusty, showered in sour cellar light.
That was my sister’s radio.
Those were your grandfather’s hammers.
This was where I first remembered.
I had a red dumpster on the drive that took two days to fill full with clothes, cloth, and shards of lost sawdust dusting the dank-sponge regalia of a different existence. The rest of our roach-nattered artifacts went as well until the dumpster went dent with loam and bloat.
Then I stopped to pat my back and sat, watching the century old spruce grow blue, festered and sapless, nestled with bird and insect shed. I wanted to remember it differently and tried, picturing another fir, different and dark, draped in tinsel and tiny ruby glimmers. Snow. Ice. Evergreen. My breath crystallized. My limbs numb. This is how I wanted my memory to mold it, but it wouldn’t.
That night I swept and mopped cold floor laminate. I swabbed and padded with your grandmother’s remaining rags, the ones I wore as helmets as a child and blew Marlboro smoke through as a young man. The tobacco tang was gone now, lost, replaced by stink oil and blue glue crust. From the rafters, I pulled the mattress I laid my teen cheeks, chest, and eyes, now caked in crumb and ancient dander, still pressed with the vague imprints of long gone bodies. The duster was marked with ash and dull blots of odd cobweb and cricket – things now too familiar. I hauled it to the front lawn where the neighborhood could see the sprung springs and mite-mauled fabric bake. I watched it whither in the noonday heat, earwigs escaping to the golden grass.
This was our yard.
Here I threw my first pitch.
There is where I trained to win.
This is where I learned to lose.
I went back down to rummage through a forest of worn wire, wet pipe and cardboard concealing something close to yesterday, gnarled, strewn aimlessly among seer weed and thistle.
I wasn’t searching for anything specific. I wanted rid of it all. The crumbly chalk ornaments and heirlooms, encrusted with dust and soot and shroom. Their defiant stare. That contagious fly-licked flicker. These are the things I longed to finally miss.
Only a few effects would remain:
- The last bag of cement with which we laid our foundation.
- A box of baby clothes I had worn but refused to let you wear.
- The glint from your grandfather’s revolver and tags.
- The metal shelf, bible-stained with the yellowed page of the Shriner’s Hospital.
- The gurgle from the cupboards that won’t close, burping lime sweat and spore.
- A hollow rattle from the basket of toys untouched for many years.
- The pin-dimpled box fan blades clicking with flood rust rash.
- The mildew glaze inside balmy bottles of spoiled liquor.
- The echo of dilute gloss on black and white photographs: A lake. A long, dead dog. Armenia.
That night I could hardly think of what had been. Spine sore, I stretched on the pine swiped floor still somehow stuck with gray scalp scab and frittered wasp wing. The work had given me pangs of old growth. The want of benignity. Something innocuous to grip and sooth my insides, but clumped like mud on my ribs.
Most like us were raised in homes constructed by the same migrant touch. Ours. Callused with truth. Our gems were bricks and mortar. A long, hard day for nickels and dimes. Tomatoes grown in plastic nomad pots. Those were years void of want.
I could feel heat worm inside me, now. An opening slit of space I knew nothing of how to spackle. I held a hope my mind would somehow patch the gap – without knowing, even – and help me form a new meaning from the world to make making sense simple, again, for a second, a minute, what lifetime left.
I kept delving, brushing, bathing the basement with my hard hand lather until the room was empty. Blood bare and crypt calm. Air without an atom of static. Tone cold, boney. Still, I felt the place yeasting in regions I could not see or decipher.
This is where we huddled hidden from tornados.
There is where the stairs still groan with smolder.
Here is where we spent our years.
Imagine fake-wood walls, prickled and chipped, bejeweled with the black tacks of defrayed portraits and confiscated relics.
Picture framed faces. Families. Frayed newspaper extracts and maps. Our records once enshrined.
On the way out through the living room, I found the rug discolored and bathed in shadow. A dim silhouette shaded up the whittled wall to the ceiling where the vines had hung themselves towards the taint on the brittle window glass. And then my eyes sharpened, lids honed and strung with the stink of carpet covered concrete, once coated by mine and my father’s split-knuckles – cracked for a floor we poured from homespun plaster. I left kissing the tattered floorboards goodbye with my fallow, gum-worn soles.
This is where I learned to walk.
There is where I first fell.
Here is where I stepped last.
I stirred towards the car, slowly, measuring time between moments, and watched the mailbox, wide-eyed, still believing it will stay there forever in the reflection of every future rearview. Behind me pulling off, the house – a sick shingled buffalo – quavered, choking on dark muffles of prune-colored powder through the chimney we had once laid, puffing our old ash and sand from the antique flue as it eroded inch by inch towards the center of the earth.
Soot smudged, I left the dumpster jam-packed and bursting, splotched in ruptured paint peel and dried crimson slicker. The blotched and swollen cistern sat as a casket on the washed-out drive, waiting for time to finally ebb out of reach. I would see never any of it again, the debris. The honey-covered grit and gristle. Its musty pinecone odor. The teething touch of what came and went before.
I teach English composition at the University of Arizona, where I am also working towards my M.F.A. My stories have been published in several journals including Pindeldyboz, Avery, The Claremont Review, and Word Riot.
If You Were
I became infatuated with Lacie Bauer as soon as I found out she had genital herpes. It wasn’t commiseration and it wasn’t any sort of sympathy; my feeling for her was more than simply pity. Infatuation seems an apt word. Also, the attraction wasn’t sexual. Don’t get me wrong, I understand what the disease is; I would like to think I’m fairly aware of the strange level of allure I felt toward Lacie. After I found out, I of course researched genital herpes to no end to know the general effects, the risks of infection, the tendencies of outbreaks. I needed to know the details of one’s danger to oneself.
Lacie’s plight was not the cause of poor luck or of being lied to. Lacie’s issue was simply the result of incorrigible sensical slippage. She was dumb: she had dated Rob O’Connor—a boy whose STD had been quite publicly outed when other members of the football team noticed something in the locker room. Gossip spread. We had sympathy for him. To find out that Lacie Bauer had contracted the disease from him after knowing of his condition did not draw compassion; it only drew shaking heads and rolling eyes. After all, what sympathy can you have for someone who does something that ignorant?
I did not have sympathy. I was obsessed.
* * *
The first time I looked into Lacie’s room, the tree branches in her backyard were slippery. She only shut the blinds on the right side of her bay window which looks out over a small but well-gardened backyard. Through the left side of the window, I could see several other things contributing to my infatuation for her: she turned on the television with her left hand though she was right-handed; she used only two fingers to type on her laptop though at school I had seen her type with all ten in a computer science class; she often crossed and recrossed her legs in varying ways, as if she knew she was being studied and wanted to look most presentable.
The reason I know I’m not crazy is that I’m aware this is very unusual behavior. I’ve read books and seen films about people who do such things as this—stalk—yes, I can say the word. In these fictional tales, the characters always seem to think what they are doing is not morally wrong or that it is normal or that it is only a justification of their obsession with said person. Really, all their stalking ever turns out to be is a conviction of their own obvious delusion. I will not sit here and try to excuse you from the honesty that I was carefully stalking a girl. I have no good reason. I won’t bore you by trying to justify it. That would not be very interesting.
* * *
On Saturday mornings her family goes to the farmer’s market, and because she began losing interest in her social circles—or perhaps because they had lost interest in her—Lacie started accompanying her parents. When they go, they leave the door unlocked.
Her diary said that she hated being alone through this. It said that the worst part was having to think she would have to meet someone new and discuss the issue from the start. There would be no joy in the first dates—only the anxiety of having to unveil such personal information to someone she barely knew. It was a paradox (she used the word correctly; she really was a very astute young girl), and she wrote that she could not afford to not have that talk early in a relationship, but that having the talk would keep any development in said courtship from occurring.
This is where I got the courage to do what I did.
I thought putting a note in a girl’s locker was a little cliché. Anybody can do that. In fact, quite a few people do it even when they have only lukewarm feelings for a person. After the third period gym class it is unlocked and unoccupied. And so instead of a hallway locker I put my letter into her locker in the girl’s changing room. It said, “You are loved. And if you are interested in knowing by whom, then wear your hair parted on the right side tomorrow.”
Lacie always parted her hair on the left—and always with either a black or red fine-tooth comb before blow-drying and straightening it for roughly twelve minutes. And because I knew that, I thought this was a simple request.
The next day her hair was parted on the left. I won’t try and pretend I wasn’t hurt. I also can’t say that I was surprised. You see, my mind was functioning perfectly all the time.
However, one day later, Lacie’s hair was parted to the right. I don’t care why she parted her hair that way, just that she did it.
The next note I put in her gym locker said I was someone she saw every day but never spoke to. I gave small details about myself: that I had three grey hairs on the back left portion of my hair, that I was four inches shorter than my father, that I had exactly ten freckles on my right arm as opposed to only two on my left. And the final clue I gave was that I could not keep from looking at her.
To see her look toward me in our common classes was an excitement I have never known. To be able to ignore her glances or to meet her eyes—and look at her as if she were the strange one—carried a weighty power I indulged in. But upon seeing that mousey retreat into herself I felt more pleasure than guilt in seeing her isolation increase.
Next, I sent a series of notes all requesting she meet at certain locales. The first of which asked for her simply to stand in front of her house at eight o’clock at night. I felt eight was a reasonable time between dinner (usually conducted in the Bauer residence at six-thirty and concluded by seven-thirty) and when her parents went to sleep (ten o’clock at the latest if they were not making love which, I noticed from the tree in their backyard, occurred sporadically less than once a week).
She came out until eight thirty-two—standing with perfect posture the entire time. The desperation resonated on her cheeks gorgeously as I watched with binoculars from behind bushes down the street. I never showed.
The next note I left was placed into her hallway locker, not her gym locker. It stated that I was sorry that I had been unable to arrive as I meant to. I told her how pitifully upset at myself I was, of how I would never again leave her wanting me without being there for her.
The note begged for her to meet me in the parking lot of our school the next day at midnight. If she could get out of the house it would truly be a sign of commitment.
She showed. I hid.
Perhaps if she had remained confident and dignified through the process—held her head high in school and kept her chin up, as they say—then she would have maintained a veneer which wouldn’t have allowed honesty. But she walked with her condemned gait nonetheless, scooting down the hallways with a very purposeless walk, and you could read pain in her chapped lips when she slept, in the way she put on the same dull pink nail polish, or the way she applied the ointment to treat her mistake of sleeping with Rob O’Connor, in the way she knelt into tears in the middle of rearranging the posters on the wall, and in the way her handwriting became more stilted, more rigid in the dates after she found out. In her diary she still dotted her Is and Js with hearts, which I saw as the saddest thing of all.
* * *
My next note held no apology, but requested that she meet me in a park which was roughly an eighteen minute walk from her house (when taking into account the fact that her steps tended to be short, and her walk was unrushed, that she is five feet and four inches tall and that she weighed one hundred and seventeen pounds according to her last physical checkup, a copy of which was stashed in her desk in what might have been an attempt to keep the news of her disease from her parents).
She not only came but was nine minutes early. I watched her stand there with her loneliness and desperation, checking her watch just seven times in slightly over an hour (sixty-eight minutes)—averaging, respectively, a mere .206 looks per minute. She stood for the bulk of the time, sitting once, but only briefly and drawing a few designs in gravel by the swing-set. Her posture was no longer perfect.
From afar I looked at her features, not admiring them so much as taking them into consideration: her light hands in front of her holding her small purse, her twice pierced ears, her running nose causing her to sniffle every so often, a lower lip redder than the upper, a stance that made her shoulders uneven. I suppose she was pretty but that’s not why I was there. It made me think, If you were anyone less damaged I’d have no interest in you.
I would like to say I regret putting her through more emotional pain—rejection and desertion—but the only thing I regretted was that I could not see exactly what shapes she had drawn in the gravel and whether or not she had written both our names. Perhaps she had written them with a heart over i. Of course she did not know mine, making such a hope impossible. But hopes are rarely based on facts.
I left one more note the next day. There was no apology. It stated only, “Do it again.”
Spuler’s poems have appeared in the following anthologies, journals, and poetry magazines: The Album of International Poetry, American Poetry Anthology, Descant, Fragments, The Rose's Hope, Voices International, Alura, Ublue, and are forthcoming in New Mirage Quarterly and Miranda. He is currently working an a collection of short stories and poetry (Memorabilia and Other Assorted Forgettables). For nearly 20 years he has served as Senior Lecturer in German at Rice University in Houston, TX. He enjoys music and reading.
Eighteen Inches of Personal Space
Our world population is ballooning, our cities are sprawling and congested cities, we have a voracious appetite for anything non-human, and we have become acutely aware of just how much each individual needs his or her personal space. We know about the need each person experiences, but what we don’t know is just how much space is required to meet those needs. I’ve given this matter some thought, during times when I’ve been utterly alone, with not a soul around me for miles, as well as during times when I was nearly reduced to applesauce by the sheer mass of the masses, massing about like strangers in a strange place, taking here and taking there, yielding nothing, least of all space, and I think the answer: eighteen inches. This isn’t earth-shattering news. It’s a scientifically … as hard as I try, I can’t bring myself to say “proven,” so let’s go with postulated instead, “fact.” I didn’t cook it up in my own little mind, which doesn’t measure even eighteen inches, although that fact has been neither scientifically proven nor postulated.
Eighteen inches might not seem like much to you (although it does to my mind), but if you consider it closely, you’ll realize that it’s six inches more than foot. It’s not the whole nine yards, but then we’re talking feet here and yards don’t matter, because eighteen inches provides enough space for both of your feet. Sure, it’s less than two feet, but we already have two feet. Why ask for something we already have? It can’t be a meter because, aside from a bunch of scientists (and they don’t really count), we don’t use, let alone understand, the metric system. So eighteen inches it is. It may not be a prime number, but it is divisible by both three and by six, and when you add all that up, well, that’s good enough for me.
I mentioned that a personal space of eighteen inches was a scientifically … postulated fact. Let’s look at what Dr. Conrad, at the University of Massachusetts Boston, has to say about it.
Social psychologists and cultural anthropologists are interested in how people from different cultures use space. People in the U.S. from a European background tend to stand about 18 inches from someone they are talking with. Eighteen inches is a comfortable "personal space" when talking with an acquaintance in a friendly, informal conversation. For people from other backgrounds and cultures, "personal space," or the "polite" and comfortable distance for a conversation, may be much less or much greater. There are misunderstandings and potential problems between people from different cultures when individuals don't know about cultural differences in personal space. Then, differences in personal space may be misinterpreted as expressions of motivation or personality. Someone from a different culture may stand close and be seen as "coming on" or threatening ("in our face"), when they are simply standing at what is for them a comfortable distance for a conversation. Similarly, someone from a culture with large personal spaces may be thought of as snobbish or uninvolved when they are standing at what is for them a comfortable, friendly distance. (Psychology 101 Research Module, Spring 2003)
This makes perfectly good sense to me, especially since he endorses my idea about the eighteen inches. But, as we all know, scientists tend to disagree, or, if not disagree, then at least nitpick. Take for example this extrapolation of the notion of personal space:
C. How communicators use space, known as proxemics, plays an important role in communication.
1. Personal space, or the distance between communicators, is comprised of actual and perceived distances.
2. Communication takes place in four zones.
a. The intimate zone, ranging from skin contact to eighteen inches.
b. The personal zone, ranging from eighteen inches to four feet.
c. The social zone, ranging from four to twelve feet.
d. The public zone, ranging from twelve feet and beyond.
[…]
4. Each individual is surrounded by a “personal bubble” that marks his or her personal space. The bubble expands and contracts depending on the situation and the people involved in the message exchange. (Josephine Benavidez Aragon, M.A., Honorary Lecturer, Department of Communication, COMM 201, Lectures, Chapter 5: Verbal and Nonverbal Skills)
I think it warrants taking a look at the zones and bubbles. Zone A: “The intimate zone, ranging from skin contact to eighteen inches.” This makes good sense. You can’t be intimate, I meanreally intimate, without some kind of skin contact, rubbing and gyrating and … well, I won’t get into that here. Zone B: “The personal zone, ranging from eighteen inches to four feet.” Who are you trying to kid? How often do you hold conversations with people while assuring that there are four feet separating the two of you? I have to disagree with Zone B, or call it the impersonal zone. That would be more accurate. Zone C: “The social zone, ranging from four to twelve feet.” Again—are you kidding? When was the last time you attended a social gathering and exchanged pleasantries at a distance of twelve feet? Some party. Might as well go to the hog-calling contest. Zone C is also a misnomer. Instead of the social zone, we will refer to it henceforth as the asocial zone. Zone D: “The public zone, ranging from twelve feet and beyond.” I have no argument with this. You want to keep your distance from the public. It’s easier to project your voice and avoid thrown objects. None of these accounts include a zone we all know, a zone where we can’t fathom what kind of message exchange, if any, is taking place. This zone is full of weird people. If you find yourself there, then you must be weird too. We know this as The Twilight Zone.
And the bubbles mentioned above? “Each individual is surrounded by a ‘personal bubble’ that marks his or her personal space.” I don’t think a bubble is a good analogy. It reminds me of the phrase “burst your bubble,” and I don’t think that’s the kind of association they want to have working here. “The bubble expands and contracts depending on the situation and the people involved in the message exchange.” Okay, but … what about when people want to enter that “intimate zone?” What do you do with your bubble then? You don’t want to burst it, as least not prematurely, and if you make (skin) contact, well, I’m afraid your bubble is history.
Once we know how much space we require, we need to figure out how to get it. You could stop using deodorant for the sake of assuring your personal space. It’s crude, but effective. Eating abnormal amounts of garlic has a similar effect. Women could take up square dancing. You could wear a large flared dresses and sweep across the dance floor comfortable in the knowledge that no one will violate your personal space or your flared dress—which, by the looks of them, provide more than eighteen inches of security. Gentlemen could do as the ladies do, but I don’t think the local square dance club would allow guys to sweep around a dance floor, or anywhere else for that matter, in large flared dresses. A pity, really—the dresses sounded like such fun.
If you who make frequent trips to your local arts and crafts store, next time by some simple tubing and articles resembling the spokes of a bicycle wheel, only made out of wood. (The pain will be less that way.) How many spokes depends on the dimensions of the person, but each spoke would need to be eighteen inches in length. Buy a belt, or sacrifice one you already own, and perforate it at appropriate intervals all the way around, assuring that each perforation accommodates one of the (wooden) eighteen-inch spokes. This may sound like one of those items that come cheap, with a warning that “some assembly may be required,” but trust me on this. Assembly completed, you strap it on. Voilà! You now have eighteen inches of space at through all 360 degrees. You’ll feel the pressure against the tubing, telling you its time to back off and seek safety. Don’t worry about the fact that you will look ridiculous. It’s also possible that dogs will mistake you for a fire hydrant, but you will at least have your eighteen inches.
There is another possibility that doesn’t require any physical objects, no contortions of the body, no forsaking of deodorant. You can mentally project your personal space. You might picture your space as a cocoon, the boundaries of which lie eighteen inches from your body and represent a border that outsiders are not be permitted to cross. If they did, there’d be no metamorphosis. Or you could picture your space as a radiating shield, glowing and pulsating with life, a luminescent extension of your self that defies any attempt to penetrate its armor. Or you could think like squirrels and picture you space as a nut that sustains you throughout the harsh winter months, not to mention the less harsh spring months, the intolerably harsh summer months, and those months so quickly associated with death but more commonly referred to as fall. You would be the proverbial hard nut to crack, and you’d be safe from anyone’s intrusion—with the exception of squirrels. Don’t be alarmed. As the saying goes, squirrels are people too. Being people, they deserve their own personal space. But unlike people, who simply go nuts or are already nuts, squirrels actually enjoy eating the things.
The truly resourceful person can come up with a number of ways to assure a personal space of eighteen inches, but if none of these suggestions work, then you can always resort to what can only be described as a desperate but effective method, a simple and yet uncompromising phrase, an expression of substantial force and clout. You simply open your mouth and repeat after me: “GET BACK, MOTHERFUCKER!!”
Joshua Vick is a student within CMU’s Graduate Fiction Program. He is in his last semester and looking forward to defending his thesis soon. He also teaches at Climax-Scotts High School in Climax, Michigan (Kalamazoo County). He loves his fiancée Michelle and son Brayden Riley very very much.
Straightjacket Life/Love
1
When you’re finished reading this, I will have completely lost my mind.
Gone. Zapped. Depleted. Entry Deleted.
Sanity nothing more than random impulses scattered amongst millions of other uncontrolled random impulses.
You won’t understand, but that’s okay. I won’t pretend to understand either. I know some simple rules, and I will try to help you sift through them. You decide what’s next.
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2
The last thing I want to see is her face.
I always secretly hoped it would offset the condition. Tranquilize that thing inside me so intent on obeying the rules. Perhaps a bit of normalcy would cancel the craziness.
Or maybe I figured it would just speed up the process. Some say love is a misunderstood form of lunacy, you know.
We’re actually quite the odd couple. She the conservative. Me “the radical”.
I want to speak and be heard. I want to sing. I want to shout at the top of my lungs. I want to curse and scream obscenities. I want to relish in the intrinsic beauty of obscene language.
I want to shout the word “Fuck” at the top of my lungs just for the sake of it. In fact, I want to string along sentences of complete gibberish where the only objective is to see how many different ways I can fuckin’ say fuck.
People used to believe vulgarity was a sign of stupidity. In my time, it’s intoxicating.
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3
Despite how it may initially appear, it’s quite simple. From birth, we are given nine hundred ninety nine thousand, nine hundred ninety nine spoken words. Or, simply put, one word shy of a million.
Any person brave enough to speak that millionth word will completely, absolutely, and quite precisely, lose their mind.
Zap. Zilch. Zero. Gone Daddy Gone.
Afterwards, they’re taken to a remote island where they are forgotten.
Of course, that’s how the story goes.
Let’s just say few truly want to know.
We learned to not question. You will, too.
*************************************************************************************
4
She used to tease me with a word on occasion. I’d never know when it would happen. Sometimes randomly. Other times planned to the minute.
Many times I’d blow a hundred of my own just to hear her speak one more. Each word, one way or another, driving me closer and closer to insanity.
Seven Hundred Thousand, three hundred eighty one.
Eighty.
Seventy Nine.
Seventy Eight.
Seventy Seven.
Still I begged, “Speak to me. Speak. Say a word. Any word. Speak. Please. Just speak.”
Words ticking by like seconds on a time bomb.
She’d cover her hand over my mouth’ her eyes pleading, “No more, no more.”
Once she caved and shouted “Please stop!” Frightened by the sound of her own voice, she slapped me across the mouth and ran out of the room, slamming the bathroom door and sobbing to herself on the floor.
I was oblivious. I let the words resonate. Let them saturate me, engulf me.
There has never been a sexual urge as satisfactory as the sound of her voice.
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5
Don’t get me wrong. That one millionth word comes around for more people than one would think. Some people just can’t contain the voice inside themselves. They’d rather go completely daft then not speak.
Everyone else simply finds ways around it.
Of course, we don’t have music, movies, and theater anymore, not like we used to that is. And very rarely is anything new produced. We’re left with the creative inspirations of yesterday. Reruns over and over and over again.
Silent films have resurfaced. New music is processed and robotic. Recorded words from our past recycled and reused overtop new beats and sounds.
Of course, there are some who still produce new and unique music. In fact, the most famous musicians are the ones who string together a complete album of sung words. Of course, in most cases, these artists are never heard from again once their albums are released.
They waste all their words on their music, leaving behind only echoes of themselves. Aural reminders of formerly sane minds. Echoes from the ghosts of music’s past.
*************************************************************************************
6
She wants to grow old together. To conserve our words as well as our bodies. To spend our final years in rocking chairs speaking up to three or sometimes four words a day.
She wants to survive. She wants to adapt.
I just want to live my life.
Two hundred fifty seven.
That’s all I have left.
If Amelia knew, she’d plead with me to ration them. Find a way to make it work.
But I’m not built that way.
I was meant to sing. To be heard.
I’m pretty sure I don’t have much of a singing voice. I also don’t have anything very important to say. But that’s never been the point.
*************************************************************************************
7
To me the risk always seemed far too great. I always feared I would die in a car accident, long before my time.
There I’d be trapped inside while rescue workers frantically rush to aide me. All the while I’m completely incapacitated, hemorrhaging, and yet still shouting the lyrics of my favorite songs. Screaming them.
In the distant background, I hear police officers pushing back onlookers as a recorded message sounds in the background instructing, “Remain calm and allow rescue workers to conduct their tasks.” The sounds of scuffling feet, blaring sirens, medical equipment being unloaded and operated, cars stopping and starting cannot possibly block out the sound of my screaming, maniacal voice.
“JOSIES ON A VACATION FAR AWAY, COME AROUND AND TALK IT OVER!”
My number drops faster and faster, pushing violently towards the end. Vainly, I scream the words, trying to turn the tables. Trying to destroy my mind before my wounds destroy me.
“I DON’T WANT TO LOSE YOUR LOVE TONIGHT!”
I sing at the very pinnacle of lung capacity. Women cry into the shoulders of random strangers. Paramedics scribble out frantic notes pleading me to remain quiet. Please remain calm.
As I lay dying, I sing with a purpose, desperately trying to compensate for a life’s worth of unsung words.
My greatest fear is that I will waste a single word.
Her greatest fear is losing her mind.
This difference is the single reason we could never work.
*************************************************************************************
8
Obviously, books are back on the rise. In fact, they’ve nearly become currency. In a world as populated as ours, communication is still critical. The mediums have simply transitioned.
We’ve learned to budget what we say. That is, most have.
The key is speaking with economy. Words have evolved so that common phrases have been spliced together. Some English speakers, for example, have spliced the common phrase “Hello how are you” to the word “Lohowru”.
I never understood the point, however. Maybe it gave people some sort of self fabricated comfort. It never made a bit of difference though. The entity keeping track of our total word count never concerns itself with syllables or sounds. Somehow it simply always knows the exact words we intend to say. As if it’s watching us project our mental image of that word on some screen we’re imperceptible to.
You might be asking how it does this. You might want to know how it knows exactly how many words we intend to say.
But you might as well ask me the meaning of life. Or perhaps ask me what God looks like. Ask whether or not if he/she even exists. Sure, people have their theories. Others have tried to find the answer. Of course, we all have our own guesses. The fact remains that no one understands it. And, like I said, I don’t expect you to either.
*************************************************************************************
9
For the longest time, I had made up my mind to do whatever it took to be with her. If it meant I’d never say another damned word for the rest of my life, I was resolved to do it.
I even did pretty well for awhile.
But then one day I was driving along in my car and Huey Lewis and the News came on the radio.
The Heart of Rock ‘n Roll.
Huey Lewis --- that tempting son of a bitch.
Satan of the Rock Universe.
Like the song says, “It's still that some old rock and roll music that really really drives 'em wild.”
I couldn’t help it. First a tapping foot. Then a slight rap with my fist on the wheel.
Then suddenly, like a geyser, “THEY SAY THE HEART OF ROCK ‘N’ ROLL IS STILL BEATIN’, AND FROM WHAT I SEE I BELIEVE ‘EM…”
I couldn’t resist. I sang every single glorious word. Each and every cursed one. Each sound annunciated with precision. Each syllable sang to perfection. Challenging that thing inside me. Taunting it.
See what I can do. Can you hear me?
One moment I was shimmying my shoulders in tempo with the beat of the song, screaming it out as if declaring my freedom for the very first time. The next I was at a red light blasting my imaginary saxophone through a blissful solo.
Drivers in adjacent cars stared in disbelief. Unsure if I was still “with it” or not.
I mocked them with my words, “Now the old boy may be barely breathing, but the heart of rock and roll is still beating…”
I drove straight home and pulled out all my old albums and, for a full hour and a half, sang furiously. Sang until I was exhausted. Sang until I was dripping with sweat. Sang so loud I strained my voice (oh the sensation!).
I sang each of my favorite songs. The ones I’d been longing to sing my entire life.
“Dance Hall Days” by Wang Chung
One Hundred Ninety One Words.
“Who Can It Be Now” by Men at Work
Two Hundred Eight Words.
“Wild Boys” by Duran Duran
Two Hundred Twenty Two Words.
My number was a hungry shark, feeding off each sung word. Fattening itself with every sung lyric, every shouted verse.
“Don’t you remember! We built this city on Roll ‘n’ Roll!”
Eleven words.
“Toora Loora Toora Loo-Rye Aye, and we can sing just like our fathers!”
Fourteen words.
“Hands, touching hands, reaching out, touching me, touching you, Oh, Sweet Caroline!”
Twelve words.
“Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto.”
Four words.
Five thousand words in a single night.
I was hooked. Beyond the point of no return. An addict of my own voice.
Amelia, of course, was clueless.
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10
Why one million, you ask?
The best theory I’ve heard is that our brains were designed to contain only so much information. After awhile, we simply evolved. In order to process lifestyles flooded with more and more information, our brains simply budgeted our ability to speak. And now, after one million words, the brain simply goes into shutdown.
But why one million?
I respond, why not?
One million is as random as any other number. It could have easily been two hundred thousand, three hundred seventy nine.
Or six hundred billion, two hundred thirty nine million, three hundred and eleven.
Our brains, efficient as they are, can only process nine hundred ninety nine thousand, nine hundred ninety nine spoken words, or one shy of a million.
You may wonder why it’s the same for every living human being. But you might as well ask why humans only have twenty three pairs of chromosomes. Or why DNA coding is composed of a double helix rather than a triple helix.
The fact remains that since the very first incident, a human being has never spoken a word over one million without completely losing their mind.
You might ask what determines whether a person has lost their mind. My response is: you know.
You just know.
What makes everything even creepier is our number. We know exactly how many words we have spoken and how many words we have left. It sits there in the back of our mind. It’s a part of our consciousness. The number is always there. As we speak, the running total begins to decrease, edging its way closer and closer towards one million.
*************************************************************************************
11
She pulls her car into the driveway. Gives herself a look in the mirror. Steps out and shuts the door.
As she walks up the path towards the house, she is still wondering why I’ve asked her to meet me tonight. She has no idea I’ve been so wasteful.
She raps softly on the door. I pull it open, and she smiles
“Hi,” I say, welcoming her in.
She rolls her eyes and shakes her head as she walks past me and into the house.
Two hundred fifty six words.
She walks into the kitchen and sits down at the table as is our custom. She reaches across the table, grabs an ink pen that is resting nearby, and scribbles out carelessly on a pad of paper, “What’s going on?”
Obviously, I know this moment has to be handled with both delicacy and efficiency. So I move over towards her and pull a chair up close.
Grabbing her hands, I take a breath and say, “The first thing I want you to know is that I love you very much.”
The words roll off my tongue like life spontaneously combusting into reality.
Two Hundred Forty One Words.
Instantly, she slaps both hands across my mouth. Shaking her head violently, she removes one hand and pulls over the pad of paper. Quickly, she removes her other hand from my mouth and wildly scribbles again onto the notepad, “What the hell are you doing?”
I’ve been planning this moment out for some time and know exactly which words to say, when, and how many. I’ve also known all along that I would have to do some explaining on the notepad.
Taking the pen, I write calmly beneath her handwriting, “You knew this moment would eventually come.”
Her eyes instantly fill with tears. She steals the pen back and writes, “Why? Why are you doing this? How could you? Why? Why? Why?”
The words grow intensely in size and shade as she emphatically digs the pen into the notepad, tearing into subsequent pages, imprinted forever.
The words angle down the page like a staircase and trail off into the margins like echoes from invisible mouths.
She hands the pen and paper back to me, demanding my prompt response.
Still calm and collected, I flip the pad over to the next page and respond, “I’m not built to be silent. You know that.”
She rips the pen back out of my hand and responds, “Yes you are. We all are. You’re no different than any one else.”
Temporarily, I abandon my plans.
“Amelia,” I say aloud, speaking just above a whisper, “Yes, I am.”
Frantically, she drops the pen and paper to the floor and slaps her hands back across my mouth. Tears are now streaming down her cheeks. Her breathing is heavy and weighted.
“No,” she pleads out loud. “Don’t.”
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12
You may think a million words is actually a lot. But you’ve never watched your words tally up in the back of your mind as you speak. You’ve never had to stop speaking for fear of losing your mind. The honest truth is a million words really aren’t that much.
There was a study in the beginning that tried to ascertain how many words the average person spoke per minute during the average day. Taking into consideration the dynamics and types of conversation, pauses, slang terms, colloquialisms, dialect, and many, many other factors, researchers discovered that, before the one million word limit was imposed, the average person spoke one hundred twenty five words per minute.
Or, in other words, one million two hundred sixty thousand words per week.
Simply put, our brains had budgeted less than a week’s worth of words for us in a single lifetime.
In the beginning, it became immediately obvious that our lives would change forever.
How did it start?
It started with a word. A single word tallied up inside our minds. A word that rolled over into fifty words. Then two hundred. Then three thousand. Then nine hundred ninety nine thousand nine hundred ninety nine. And then nothing.
Then millions of people gone absolutely crazy.
The government declared martial law. Crazies running blind in the streets were exterminated like cockroaches. After control had been resumed, after millions of bodies had been burned and disposed of, people stopped speaking.
Numbers stayed locked firmly in place.
A man walking his dog in the park. The number seven hundred eighty five thousand, two hundred thirty one glaring menacingly at him from inside.
A bus driver locked in at nine hundred ninety nine thousand, seven hundred eighty three.
A policewoman stuck at exactly nine hundred fifty thousand.
We learned quickly to live without words.
We learned to cherish them. To relish them.
In addition to love making, couples would celebrate anniversaries with five hundred word conversations, each basking in the temporary bliss of the other’s voice.
Sign language became the universal “spoken” language, practiced and taught in secondary schools all across the world.
It became customary to see couples walking down the street exchanging notes on a pad of paper. Quickly, we became adept at writing short quick notes. Legible handwriting returned. In fact, it’s now considered rude to have poor writing. Doctors no longer have the worst handwriting. Now they are educated to be the best and most take pride in careful, legible, and detailed writing.
World leaders conducted ten word speeches. Many times they’d have an aide or other top official speak on their behalf. Or they’d handwrite their speeches right before the eyes of viewers. The television screen would split, showing the world leader handwriting his or speech. The other screen would display the words as they were being written down. Certain words would be spoken for emphasis, but only rarely.
Suicides rose drastically. However, rather than leave notes, suicides often recorded themselves.
Some people saved their words until old age, and then, ranting and shouting at the top of their lungs, they burst like volcanoes, trying to make up for decades of silence in the final moments.
Others who waited it out would simply begin rationing words at late ages, evolving what many already referred to as the golden ages. Retirement became a starting point rather than a climax.
You may question: wouldn’t mankind completely lose its ability to speak? We thought that might happen, too. But, for some reason, it didn’t. In fact, we became better speakers, each person a master of their language. Each person able to speak with articulation and exactness; able to form new words from older ones and paraphrase large thoughts into small spurts of powerful sentences. We simply evolved into something different.
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13
I always wondered what it would be like. You know, to lose my mind.
Most of us had very little experience with it. We knew the history, and we knew that it still happened. But seldom did we experience it firsthand. It’s not like each occurrence was publicized in the newspapers. Instead, the stories normally reached us through the grapevine, although it was never clear whether the story was truth or simply urban legend.
As for myself, I had seen it happen only once.
Before me and hundreds of other people, a man lost his mind in the subway.
It wasn’t immediately apparent what had happened. I didn’t take notice until the surrounding crowds began to scatter.
When the area cleared, I was one of a few remaining bystanders who decided to stick around. We hovered amidst the scene like paparazzi, curious to see what happened next, but still conscious of the invisible line that existed between us and him.
He was an older man, probably in his late 50’s or early 60’s.
My first impression was how well groomed he appeared. He wore an expensive, dark-blue jacket with a matching shirt, tie, and pants. His cuffs were donned with gold links and on his wrist rested a shiny platinum watch. He was clean shaven and well kempt. Clearly, he was a professional in a line of work that required a tidy appearance.
Before now, he must have been a lawyer or a salesman because his entire ensemble begged to be heard. You can imagine, of course, how the value of appearance had risen. In the land of the silent, appearance reigned supreme.
Of course, the world inverted upon itself the moment he spoke his last word. Whatever had been appealing about him immediately became obsolete as well. He was a leper to society now.
I didn’t hear his last word of sanity. After the fact, a rumor bounced around from person to person, supposedly originating from those closest to him when it started.
I only heard him after the crowds had cleared and he began to shout:
“I don’t need this coat and I don’t need this damned shirt. Or this tie,” he said. “I don’t need any of it. Can you hear me? I don’t need any of it at all.”
As he spoke, he frantically tore off his clothing like a superhero stripping out of disguise. Except, in this instance, he was stepping out of sanity instead.
Now in his underwear, he began to close in on the crowd of onlookers. “After all this time! All this time! And now just look! Just look!”
The crowd, myself included, repelled his presence as if our proximity to him was enough to make us spontaneously burst into madness as well.
I moved naturally with the crowd; as if on autopilot. My focus, however, was elsewhere, silently counting each and every word.
Thus far, he had said 44.
I couldn’t help but envy him.
“Son of a bitch almighty. Just look! And after all this time? All this time!”
15 more. I thought. God, look at him go.
I didn’t try to make sense of what he was saying. I just didn’t want him to stop. Nobody wanted him to. For the moment, he spoke for us all.
He dropped to his knees and began sobbing into his chest. All the while he continued to repeat, “After all this time... After all this time…”
Then they came for him. Men in dark suits emerged from seemingly nowhere and descended down upon him.
Oddly enough, he didn’t fight them. He just kneeled there on the concrete, sobbing.
Methodically, they wrapped him up in white and carried him away. The ones that stayed behind began to break up the crowd, gesturing with batons that flashed white and red lights.
A recording began to play: “Please return to your previous endeavors,” it instructed. “This is an unfortunate but necessary measure.”
Since that time, I found myself whispering his last words every night before I lied down to sleep:
“Tabula Rasa…”
On many nights thereafter, I dreamed of the man on some distant tropical island, singing quietly to himself as he strolled casually down the shoreline.
His footprints in the sand were open invitations I was never able to accept.
*************************************************************************************
14
Amelia’s pleas have little effect on me.
In fact, the sound of her voice only fuels my ambition to be on with it. To challenge the status quo once and for all.
It’s there, staring directly at me.
Two hundred thirty seven.
The number sits there in the back of my mind, taunting me, trying to intimidate me.
In the meantime, Amelia continues to beg me to reconsider.
“Don’t be so selfish,” she wrote. “There are people that need you. I need you. Don’t do this.”
I reach over, grab the pad of paper, and fling it across the room into a trash can.
“I can’t possibly make you happy this way. It’s for the best.”
Two hundred twenty five.
She hides her face into her hands and begins to sob hysterically. Her back heaves and arches with frustration.
Some part of me wants to stop right here, take her in my arms, and do exactly as she asks. It’s not like I am completely void of emotion. However, equally so, I have thought this over for a long time and know it is my only path.
Is it really selfish for one to pursue their destiny?
I know I can never be happy living this way. The number’s constant presence is too much to ignore. I have to take it on. I can avoid it no longer.
I leave her for a moment to retrieve my guitar.
When I return, she is pacing the room. She has the pad of paper in one hand and the pen in the other. The sheet we have been writing on has been replaced by a new one, but she hasn’t written anything just yet.
When she hears me re-enter, she turns to face me.
“I refuse to be a part of this. I don’t care what you have planned. I am going to leave. Then you’ll have to do this all by yourself.”
Her words stop me in my tracks. I never expected her to say so much.
I want to reason with her. Scratch that. I want to argue with her for the rest of the night. Scream at her at the top of my lungs only to have her scream back just as loud.
Not that I am angry with her. Not at all.
At this point, an argument would be the most vigorous and exhilarating experience of my life. The ultimate erotic experience.
You can’t possibly imagine how frustrating it is to argue with someone on a pad of paper or on a chat messenger or typing back and forth on cell phones. You just want to scream at the top of your lungs: “God damn you! You couldn’t possibly be more wrong!” The frustration eats at you to the point of hopelessness.
I don’t respond to her even though most every part of me desperately wants to. I just can’t; my words are limited enough already, and I am not about to deviate from my plan.
Instead, I beckon for the pad and paper.
“Oh ,now you’re silent. I don’t know who is going to lose it first!” She says, tossing the pad and paper back across the room to me.
I can’t help but smile. In fact, I have never wanted to touch her so badly in my life. No other person has or could ever be as sexy as she is right now, standing there glaring at me through red eyes overtop swollen, mascara stained cheeks.
“I’m sure this is real great for you isn’t it?” she speaks again. “You know I haven’t said this much at one time in my entire life. Thanks a lot.”
I shake my head in bewilderment; still smiling. What is she doing?
In response, I write, “Save your words. It’s time.”
I pass the pad of paper back over to her. She scans it over quickly, and then sits back down in her seat.
For a moment, she opens and closes her mouth several times, never uttering a single word. Eventually, she sighs and simply says, “Okay.”
*************************************************************************************
15
The word “okay” is a green light and from that moment I am instantly focused.
To start, I take the time to tune the guitar precisely. I could’ve done it last night, but I want the moment to be perfect. I don’t want to start only to stop and then start again.
Once I am certain that everything is in order, I begin to strum the first few chords of the song.
Amelia’s eyes fill with tears once again. Time slows. I see the liquid gather, see the sapphire in her retina slowly intensify in radiance, see her tears build in miniscule pools on her eyelashes, then overflow and trickle gently down her face.
The chords are playing themselves by now. For the moment, I feel alone with her for the first time; as if my number has simply ceased to exist.
Then I begin to sing, “When I’m feeling blue, all I have to do is take a look at you, then I’m not so blue…”
At that precise moment, the number returns in full radiating force. It drops tumultuously down, as if racing furiously to stay ahead of me.
My words are balls of snow gathering at the top of a mountain, gradually building in both magnitude and ferocity.
Two hundred five…
As for sanity, I feel fine. In fact, I have never felt saner in my life. The number no longer seems as menacing as before, and I begin to think I am in no danger of losing my mind at all. As if everything has been a figment of our imagination all along.
Encouraged, I continue.
“When you’re close to me, I can hear your heart beat, I can hear you breathing in my ear. Wouldn’t you agree baby you and me, got a groovy kind of love.”
One hundred seventy four…
“Any time you want to, you can turn me on to anything you want to, anything at all…”
One hundred fifty five…
“When I kiss your lips, ooh I start to shiver, can’t control the quivering inside…”
One hundred forty…
She moves close to me and places her hand on my leg. She isn’t crying any more, yet I find myself vainly trying to gauge her reaction. Her face is a blank slate. Either she is resigned to accept the decision I have made or she is simply too numb to express herself.
Even so, I still feel liberated. Admittedly, a bit guilty, too. But only because I wish I could share this moment with her. I wish she could experience the freedom I feel.
Sadly, time passes quicker than I want it to, and, soon enough, I’m reprising the chorus. My word count nearing the point of no return.
Twenty Seven…
I notice myself starting to feel strange and can’t place exactly what it is. The chords are no longer playing themselves. In fact, I find myself concentrating to simply position my fingers in the correct spots. I even begin to fumble the lyrics a bit; suddenly, they no longer seem familiar to me.
The effect is clearly noticeable when the rhythm slips out of sync. Amelia’s eyes begin to open wide, and she covers her mouth.
“No,” she whispers, barely audible. “Stop.”
At this point, I can’t. I have to know.
“Wouldn’t you agree baby…you and me….we’ve got a groovy love…a groovy kind of love…”
Ten…
*************************************************************************************
16
I stare hard into Amelia’s face as the guitar falls from my lap onto the floor. She startles when it gently collides into the linoleum.
“Stop…”she repeats. “Stop...”
I can’t. Momentum had carried me this far. I have to know.
Concentrating, I grab her by the hand. Then, careful to annunciate each and every one of my last words, I say:
“Would’nt
you
agree?
We’ve
got
a
groovy
kind
of
love…”
A rush crashes over me like a tidal wave wiping out a small city, and, suddenly, I realize that’s it gone.
Like an amputee suddenly acknowledging the loss of a limb they had lived with their entire life, I am completely aware that my number has vanished forever.
“It’s gone!” I exclaim, rising violently to my feet. “My God! It’s gone!”
Without reason, I reach back and shout as loudly and jubilantly as I am physically capable, “It’s gone!”
For the moment, I am lost within my own world. I beat it. I took it head on and beat it. And after all this time not knowing, I finally found the courage to say the words and learn the truth.
In some other place, I say out loud, “After all this time…god damn, what do you know?”
Then, for some reason I cannot explain, I pick up the chair I had been sitting in and fling it violently across the house and through the living room window.
As the glass crashes to the ground, I return to reality just in time to see Amelia run out of the house, screaming at the top of her lungs.
“Amelia, wait,” I shout after her. I give chase into the front yard where a small crowd has started to gather. “Amelia, it’s gone. Don’t you understand? After all this time…it’s gone.”
But she’s not listening to me anymore. Instead, she buries her head into her neighbor’s chest. In the meantime, some men from the crowd move in on me, apparently with the intent to subdue me.
“What the hell is going on!” I shout as the men approach. “Can’t you hear me? It’s gone! Amelia, god damn it! It’s gone! Amelia, listen to me please…”
She still isn’t listening. She falls to her knees, covers her ears, and screams a piercing shriek of anguish.
“Get your damn hands off of me,” I shout as the men take hold of me. “Are you deaf? I said it’s gone! Don’t you understand? I’m not insane! I’m not insane. Amelia! Amelia please!”
The men continue to restrain me. They aren’t rough, only firm. Not a single one speaks a word. In fact, they don’t even look me in the face.
Then suddenly another sound interrupts my pleas. A recording begins to play in the background:
“Please return to your previous endeavors. This is an unfortunate but necessary measure.”
Panic sets in. “Jesus Christ, no! I’m not insane! I’m not insane!”
Then, before I can say another word, a sheet of white envelopes me and reality slowly….
Catherine Zickgraf graduated from the University of Miami in 1998 with a degree in English Literature. She currently lives in Augusta, Georgia with her husband and two little boys--all of whom are creative writers.
I Wanted to Punch You for Telling
I couldn’t though, knowing you’d crack my temple in return with your fist of tucked tight-bitten nails. Instead, I wrote you a letter on my Strawberry Shortcake stationary: why our two am trips to the creek were our secret, sacred projects engineered in our fantasies to belong to us alone. It was our hideout we cleared into the arch of hard branches. Our stoop of cracked glass we set into the creek coast to slow our pursuers—our port to sail away from. Remember? I insisted our fort be kept quiet, ready when you needed to flee your drunkard or I, my pastor—fathers whose boats we’d avoided rocking. Their unbalanced bows sent us overboard anyway until we begged our betrayers to drag us back in.
Never ask a child to keep secrets, your Momma agreed with my Momma while they nursed our sisters at the kitchen table. You and I argued over how hot the griddle should be to cook forty-five silver dollar pancakes for our nine siblings. And then you told the Moms we were middle-of-the-night worker ants, preparing our haven for the day we’d run. In their horror, they forbade us from returning to our construction site in the woods. But they couldn’t promise to protect us instead. For this women togetherness, this swooping children under their wings, this mid-day kitchen gathering, men at work, were their own haven from their husbands’ fragile, angry triggers.