The chair instantly swallowed the shock. I shook off whosever’s hand was touching my back. Don’t touch my back, I said, haughtily. I wept. I put my hands over my face. I smelled my hands. They smelled like me. My hair fell about me. I was hungry. I blamed Margaret Huckle for not knowing about chest powers. I sent in my fault. Then, going further away, I got closer to home. I cringed.

Mom, remember when you lost account of me?

The bell jangled above our heads. They’ll be waiting for their tea, I thought. The fuckers. Mrs. Wiggins was a fucker, as was Margaret Huckle.

You’ve had your cry now, I thought. Now get the post up. I lifted my head. I could see faces. A sea of faces.

If you listen, you might hear what your words are trying to tell you, the girl whispered into the boy’s ear. The boy’s name was Myron.

The girl whispered his name: Myron. You might find a way to help your words tell you what they are trying to say, Myron.

She finished with a breath that feathered Myron’s earlobe.

Find the tree, the boy heard.

Are you next in line? he heard.

Thankfully, no one else heard what the boy heard in the instant the girl stopped whispering.

Thank you for being such a beautiful rent in the universe, the girl whispered.

The girl called Irma called for help. Help, she said.

Dear God, wrote the boy, if you listen hard enough, you might be able to hear what I am trying not to say to you. I want to tell you some things, God. I want to tell you a lot of things, actually. But the things I want to tell you are always the things I am never going to actually say to you. But you hear the real thing the words are saying. You hear the thing inside the words that the words are trying to cover. I want to tell you things about the sea in my chest (also known as chest power) and the buzz in my ears that won’t go away. But I keep saying the same thing, and that is the buzz in my ears, isn’t it, God? How does the same thing I keep saying never get said?

I walked to the river and sat down on my bum. After a time, my bum felt damp.

I wanted to do a river, Marlon told the girl in his dream. The girl in Marlon’s dream said nothing. She was a specter. But when she held Marlon’s hand, it felt real enough. The experience of wanting to do a river became carnal. It’s like the sense you have that you’re doing some exploring. You are doing an exploration of sorts. You are exploring the object of your scrutiny. The object here is your scrutiny.

The girl was buttering her hair. She was sitting at her vanity, looking in the mirror. She took into her fingers the two braids of her hair that she had woven out of cords of her hair made up of individual strands of her hair and intertwined the two braids above her head. She held them like a princess, her eyes flat as puddles, then let them down, like two snakes falling into sleep.

The result of all this, the result of the river, and of the slipping away of the river, and of the two people moving into a canyon, is that drops of water that were rain just a few days ago now suddenly meet to become a river. The drops of rain become a sinewy creature intent on intrusion. Intention is rain. Rain is the coming together, and that’s all it is. The barricades between drops of water are lost, they cease to delimit. All individual identity is lost.

Wake up, Sara Jane.

In the worst case, thought the girl, he just won’t come home. And what’s so bad about that? Do I depend on him to come home? But if he doesn’t come home tomorrow, if he doesn’t come home for a few days, who will I blame?

In the most obvious case, it becomes a case of something easier for us to arrive at mutually, Eduardo.

The girl dove into her pillow. She prayed for sky. She prayed for the sky to open above her home, for the roof to lift, for her life to spiral up into the stratosphere like some kind of sound made of a rocket.

What if you listened to words? What if words were wind and you listened, but you could not hear the wind, you could only hear the leaves in the trees, and you could only hear the plastic bags stuck in the branches of the trees, but you could not hear the wind itself?

What if you tried to hear what the wind was calling for, what the wind actually wanted?

We needed to fix a few things. We had sentences, sure. Good sentences. Really good sentences, in some cases.

But there were other things to consider.

Some of the sentences were sentences beyond anything you could ever imagine.

Sentences are really just words put together in various combinations.

I mean, if that’s how you want to look at it.

But, I’ll tell you something. Some of these sentences were pure magic. Combinations of words, yes. Okay. Sure. Maybe that’s how you want to look at it.

To tell the truth, it broke my heart when some of the guys started suggesting that there might be problems with things like semicolons and periods. I hadn’t noticed any problems myself. Like I said, it was the sentences I was looking at. I couldn’t take my eyes off the sentences.

Obviously, I wasn’t equipped to deal with it. We called in the experts. A whole slew of experts. Thirty guys. Maybe more. There was one guy who dealt only with semicolons. Needless to say, I told the guy where to stick his semicolons.

I’ll tell you something else. Maybe you think a guy like that has a life outside his work. Maybe that’s how you manage to forgive a guy like that. But that guy talked about semicolons on his breaks. He drew diagrams while the rest of us had coffee and tried to forget where we were.

Finally, one weekend, I told the guy with the semicolons I was going out of the city, would he like to come. By this time, four months into the project, all the sentences had lost their flavour for me.

I told the guy with the semicolons to bring an overnight bag to work with him on Friday and we’d head out of the city for the weekend.

I took him to a forest I knew and handed him a chainsaw. We sawed down trees all weekend. Left them where they fell.

***

Ken Sparling has written six novels. His latest is Intention, Implication, Wind from Pedlar Press. His first, Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall, published by Knopf in 1996 was recently reissued by Mud Luscious Press. He curates his own on-line library.

It seems to be a road movie. From the sixties. One of those. The open landscape splintering into shards and fragments that only further alienate the screen protagonists from the audience. Golden sunsets. Lens flare. Blood. Sand. I’m sitting in the velvet plush seats of a cavernous theater with a girl who seems intent on getting me ejected for open displays of lust. There are people smoking six rows up. The light from the projector is blue and visible. Nothing much happens in the film for a good ten minutes. Then in the heated flash of a jump cut it comes to life. The New Wave pretense drains away. The fuck of denim. Motorcycles on an American highway, the highway of serial killers, so they say. The engines sputter to life. Gasoline from one of the open overtopped motorcycle gas tanks splashes across the screen. The napkins are soaked in butter grease. The girl’s thoughts are combustible.

Three motorcycles with black-leathered and blue-denimed helmet-less characters. Two men and a woman. Roaring across the desert. The first twenty minutes are like a mash-up of outtakes from Easy Rider. The screen goes black for several seconds. When we see them next the three chopper riders are in a dingy roadside diner. Their bikes parked outside the window. The name of the diner, we see from a menu insert shot, is Contina’s. The characters talk to each over plates of pancakes and bacon and coffee in white ceramic cups. Man #1 wears a red bandana. Man #2′s hands are tattooed in red and purple geometric shapes. The Woman is the one who commands the scene through her silence. Only fragments of dialog are clear:

“. . . still following us . . .”

” . . . came in and that he took that money . . . ”

” . . . said she’s being watched all the time . . .”

“He’d destroy us if he could.”

The level of disengagement from the audience is palpable. The waitress is impossibly thin in her cornstalk yellow outfit. She clears the table. With her skeletal hand she casually drops what appears to be a folded note in the lap of the one with tattooed hands. He doesn’t acknowledge the note. He slips it into the pocket of his denim shirt without looking at it. The woman biker notices this. She murmurs something that’s not audible to us. Whatever she says infuriates the tattooed man. He slaps the table hard with his palm and leans forward as if challenging her. But then the man with the red bandana says something to calm him down (“let it go, for now . . .”) and puts his hand on his shoulder in a way that can only be described as tender.

Finally a character we hadn’t noticed before, sitting alone at a table at the far right edge of the screen, gets up to pay. He has a terrible limp. The tattooed man notices and tips his head to the others. Without speaking they get up, casually, and follow him out. The film cuts to a shot originating from across the road. The restaurant is framed in the middle of the screen like a lonely outpost. The wind has picked up and dust and tumbleweeds move across the screen in the direction of time. The man being followed limps up to a dusty yellow Datsun. He gets in and takes off in the direction of the blowing sand. The three motorcyclists talk animatedly and point in different directions. The woman tries and fails to light a cigarette in the wind. She throws the lighter to the ground. The tattooed man leans down to pick it up. The note falls out of his shirt pocket. The wind carries it away. The only sound is the sound of wind. Then they get on their bikes and head out in the same direction as the Datsun.

The next scene looks radically different from what has come before. It’s the familiar three bikers. They are in the same diner as earlier. But everything is a little larger, cleaner, brighter. They sit at the same table. Instead of leather and denim they wear uniforms of some sort. Navy blue uniforms. This time the audio is clear.

“We should say that he’s still following us,” the woman says, stirring her coffee. She pauses. “And that Mr. Cyclone or Mr. Destroyer or what ever the girl calls him came in and that he took that money.”

“How can we?” the tattooed man asks. “Steadman already suspects. The girl’s on record as saying she’s being watched all the time. In every transcript I’ve read the girl refers to Mr. Cyclone or Mr. Destroyer as ‘it.’ Not as ‘him.’ I have a feeling it’d destroy us if it could. If only to get at her.”

“I wonder if it knows we’re talking about it,” the woman says.

A red line appears in the center of the screen, from top to bottom. It’s about the width of a pencil at first. It vibrates ever so slightly as if etched on the film itself. The line slowly widens, splitting the screen in two. And if that isn’t remarkable enough, this: the characters–now divided by the red line–try to reach each other but can’t. The line is real for them. When the woman reaches across the table she jerks her hand back when it approaches the red line. She shakes her fingers to cool them. She tries again, and the same thing happens.

The red line widens. It takes up the middle third of the screen. It bubbles like lava. Shimmering waves of heat push out toward the edges of the screen. The characters–the two men on the left and the woman on the right–back away from the center. They splay their hands in front of their faces, palms out, to shield themselves from the heat. Eventually they retreat off the screen, to the left and to the right. Presumably into the implied story space of the film itself.

As the line expands it destroys everything. The screen itself is eradicated and replaced with molten red. It leaks out of the frame. It hisses when it hits the theater floor. We want to leave but it’s hard not to watch. It’s hard to think. Something else is being destroyed here. Not just theater seats and empty popcorn buckets.

Something more.

We want something more.

We want something more to be destroyed.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nicholas Rombes writes for The Rumpus, The Oxford American, and Filmmaker Magazine, where he serves as a contributing editor and writes the Blue Velvet Project. His work has appeared in The Believer, Wigleaf, Exquisite Corpse, and other places. He teaches in Detroit, Michigan, and can be found here.

The president’s coma had taken a turn for the worse: she was dead. The VP shot himself before they could do the oath. Whoever came next in line met the void, called the wars off and undid the draft. Those of us in the last week of boot woke at dawn, synchronized, to find the top brass had already split.

First thing we did was whoop it up. Then we showered and set out for the women’s barracks to get it on. The women had had the same idea. We collided over the mortar range, which was dry and pockmarked and not ideal for fucking, but in the party that ensued we all got laid except Taylor, who despite running fifteen miles a day could just not stop being fat.

Taylor’s fatness was a joke at first, when he couldn’t keep up, but soon the joke became myth. We punched him on the pretext that he couldn’t feel. A lady soldier half-wearing my camo rode me in the hot dead grass, and I saw Taylor taking shade under the only tree, massaging feet that must have hurt like hell under all that weight.

The party depressed me after two days. By then I honestly couldn’t believe I was me. I hiked to the airbase and hitched a plane to Jersey. Except it was resupply to Jersey the goddamn island. I got to London and fit a southy crew that mugged tourists in the Elephant & Castle pedways. Other gangs raped down there; we mugged. We’d rip cams and phones from helpless fingers to fence in Camden for hash. I beat up an Italian for his hat.

Hash didn’t go far. Kyle burned through it so quick that we had to keep pace to smoke our share. My name is Kyle too, so they called me Kyle The American. Didn’t like sharing my name, not with a gobshite who smelled of rotting vegetables. When the hash went, a game began: first to say “Morely’s,” the name of the foul kebab stand, had to walk down there and buy kebabs for all.

“Cah need another hit,” Aliza was explaining. “Sorely.”

“Ap!” Vernon pointed, and the rest of us shouted also, except Kyle The Englishman, who’d pushed a drunk banker in front of the Jubilee that day, fled into the two o’clock drizzle, all of it on CCTV.

“What,” Aliza said. She wrote poetry that I read when she’d gone, because I am a sensitive monster. It was okay. The whole U.K. was okay, except for a low and troubling drone in my head. Anything not loud was a whisper.

“You said … it,” I said.

“I didn’t say Morely’s!” she cried.

O, we howled. We howled more when she returned with kebabs. It plays in the mind like I was howling at this weeks later, well after the gang dissolved, when I got tackled and hooded in Paddington by two men I never saw. I thrashed and screamed it was just panhandling, but the hood was soaked in fumes and it was a purple bloom that answered.

“You’re awake,” I was told. I tasted my snot and spat. It hung inside the hood with me. The bustle of Paddington had silenced. Ears felt pressure: we were in the air.

“Son, relax. Not so bad as that. Just there’s protocol for recovering property. You ain’t the first, and it’s worse if we don’t scuttle.”

“Not your prop, Yankee cunt.”

“Oh Jesus,” the other man laughed. “You didn’t pay for that accent coach I hope.”

“Son,” said the nice one. Son. Didn’t load me up or push me out and I don’t like the ones who did. My sister was into the money machine, she was set. I had a cousin who played the pro tennis circuit. Me, I was swimming in my own skull, no idea who to blame. “Face it. The company trained you. They own what’s there, see? Invested.”

I decided I wouldn’t speak. We landed and shuttled to a camp that from smell I’d say was downwind of Philly. Looked around and if I looked as sorry as this lot I was sad: everyone had a black eye or slung arm. None could meet another’s gaze.

A drill sergeant came into the tent and told us we were deserters, degenerates and subhuman retards for supposing the military disbanded in peacetime. A deserter with some teeth knocked out said he’d been discharged for self-harm. They hauled him off and told us to wave goodbye for good.

We were too tired not to.

The weird passed again into normalcy. There were meals. The exercise was good; body was juiced at the lack of dope. I shared a triple bunk with Wilt and Johns, who were always together and much alike, so I never clicked who was who—we were pals. After we’d got some shape back they fitted us for flamethrowers. It was fun torching the straw men, but our fuelpacks weighed a motherfucking ton.

Job was to penetrate some pines and flush out the ferals who lived there. Halfway through, the officers stopped calling them “ferals” and said “mud-eaters.” The mud-eaters, inbred trash that went into the swamp a century back and walked on all fours, had killed a resource exploration crew. With rocks.

The story made us mad. Wilt or Johns said they gave us something in the food as well, a dose of giddy insomnia. Johns or Wilt disagreed with Wilt or Johns, said they put a hard drive in every head they buzzed. I had to admit, that barber had nicked me bad. An elsehood had driven me since, some cloud of simple demands.

We slogged through muck with flamethrowers and chased whatever ran. The muddies didn’t eat mud; they were covered in it, camouflaged. Wilt and Johns, walking shoulder to shoulder, had a snakepit open under their feet. By the time we got a rope down, the bodies lay together, puffed with poison.

A fox shadowed me for a whole day’s march. Except that was back in London … the animal had trotted soundlessly along a low stone wall that bordered the gardens up to Borough High, perfectly happy to stroll at my side. The sun was the sun the day we got my brother to Canada, so bright and close it went through the leaves. We flipped a coin and it rolled into a storm drain, so I told him to hop in the trunk.

It’s true I was beyond sleep, but this was a bit much.

Adults couldn’t be taken alive. The kids were claimed by a TV show. We saw a taping as reward for abundant kills and captures. Behind the waxen flesh-colored host sat a wall of acrylic glass. Behind that: adolescent savages fought spiky predators and extreme artificial weather as though their lives depended on it.

A female unit was the other half of the audience, so the hour was seized by handjobs and clit-rubbing. At one point a girl I’d yanked from a tree—receiving a kick in the larynx—ignored the fire-making tools and stood there in her frosted chamber, gazing over the moany lot.

I went around bleacher seats to the rear control room. The man and woman inside didn’t notice. They weren’t even talking about what my mud-eater was doing, down on the stage. The woman worked the panel while the man just watched.

“Thought we could offset the cost of short-life organic LEDs with energy savings,” she said. “They’re efficient but decay fucks it up.”

“You say organic?” the man wanted to know.

“Next-gen won’t rely on polyanilines in the conducting layer.”

God, I could have strangled them for saying these things, but I blacked the fuck out somehow. Rebooted while choking on an oxygen tube they were trying to shove in.

“Hello, never mind,” said one of the doctors. The tube slid out. I rasped and retched a bit and rolled over on my side. The room was silver. I glitched out again.

The world underneath me tilted. A boat. Some boys were huddled off at a porthole, discussing where the boat was pointed. South, they mainly agreed.

“Word banged round the muddies had a natural cancer defense, insurance lobby said wipe out.”

“Christ. Extinction duty.”

“How far you bolt, Saul?”

“Vancouver. It was beautiful. I did a hooker and she came in three languages. They caught me at the zoo watching penguins.”

“Look who’s up.”

“Ey,” I said. “Real penguins?”

“Real enough, buddy.”

Destination we heard topside: Nicaragua. Vessel a destroyer, the USS Spangled. Here to dismantle the Zero Cartel with local cooperation. Commanding officer touched his face, hid beyond it. He dreamt of a classical democracy that worked, that was not crippled by its weak. If he could strike us from history, fine.

First run was a classic botch. Signal flew; we opened fire on a salvage tub and killed four civilians, one pregnant. They were trying to smuggle themselves up the Mosquito Coast—we waded through their sorry possessions.

“They shouldn’t’ve,” the commander began, confused. He never told us his name or rank, paranoid even for the kind of man he was. “Insurgents.” He had us heave the bodies overboard.

“Sir?” I said. “There’s a war?”

“Agitators in the wild, that’s all.”

Plain old rogue economy, working places the capital couldn’t. And the villagers were loyal. When we landed in a port, it was to explode their illegal spiny lobster fishery.

“I don’t think so,” said Saul before he swallowed the charge that splattered the deck with his self. Almost did the same but for some alien snag in my action. It was curious, now: whatever I saw or touched—ocean spray, my own hands—I sensed a simulation.
Cargo flowed out of the rain forest in canoes, shielded by triple-canopy that satellites couldn’t pierce, to open water. Mainly we floated at jungle’s edge in a skimcraft, hoping couriers were dumb enough to blunder at us. Finally some wake. We thought the fins were sharks. Dolphins, it turned out.

“Been getting aggressive,” our captain said. They began to breach as gray liquid missiles, knocking men into the water with their tails so that others could drag them down to expire beneath the waves. One landed square on the deck and flipped about, snapping her nubby white teeth.

No, this never happened. I was gone.

Wrong: I was here, reaching for a white preserver. They pulled me out of a life, they must have, though nothing about that life would assemble. I was crushed under the weight of things or falling through their total absence.

You’ll stay, a distant quarter of me said. You’ll steer out. You do not want for courage. I crawled around the kamikaze dolphin and up to the dash. I threw the accelerator, and soon we slammed into beach, where two or three of us climbed over the prow and lay breathing on the sand.

It was tropical night when one of us spoke.

“I’m for disappearing.”

Waited for my own agreement, but I was disappointed.

“Your call,” said the disappearing man. The jungle swallowed him. The stars: how I hated them. A star doesn’t have to know itself.

That far-away part of me spoke again, a subzero voice that echoed down the spine. It said I had rested enough, and to run. Back toward some rendezvous, an outpost—the loving arms of the company. But what did this voice imagine running to be? Did it really suppose I could run?

We wouldn’t ask if you couldn’t, it said.

You do magnificent work.

You are one of a kind.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Miles Klee is the author of Ivyland (OR Books 2012), a finalist in The Morning News‘ 2013 Tournament of Books that The Wall Street Journal described as “J.G. Ballard zapped with a thousand volts of electricity.” He contributes to Vanity Fair, Lapham’s Quarterly, BlackBook and The Awl.

The house. The blood. My “name” is Sheila. The sort of violence that doesn’t end but that goes on and on. Three bodies so soon to be in parts. The fact of revenge. No zombies. All the time. The dead stay dead. The living/dead is the one great “undeconstructable binary” (Aarspeth 12). The careful, months-long stalking of the people who are soon to be in parts. The assignment. The Messiah Detectives. The path through the forest. The flat windowless back of the house. The wet green grass. The nightcrawlers. The yellow porch light around front. The rusted key. The average citizens. The rusted moths. The stained fingers. The sound of sleeping. The smell of dinner rice. The ceiling fan.

I did not do these things. I did these things. I will do these things. They have taken. They have taken something away. There were wires. My name. I went to the house. The house exists in a region that must fall under discipline. I followed the map. There was a white screen door. Before that, a roadside swamp. The green green of rushes. A sense of sun. Light hurtling through space. Light from the deep past. The sort of damp map that trails off in smudges. The shredded dresses. The clean, clean cut of the sharpened knife. “The expansion of administrative competence into a region” (Aarspeth 187). The unlocked door. The thermostat turned down in the night. The sleeping bodies. The taking off of shoes so as to move quietly. The black and blue. There is movement in an upstairs bed. I am searching for what was taken. The war.

The parallel structures of fascism, the party duplicating every level of public authority. The militia flanks the army, and then supersedes the army. The party police flanks the police, and then supersedes the police. My job is to keep turmoil alive, to murder peace. The village has been too calm for too long. It is not the nation which generates the State. Rather it is the State which creates the nation, conferring volition and therefore real life on a people made aware of their moral unity. These are the words that singe the inside of my skull.

The map unfolds by flashlight. It is not a map. Rather an architectural rendering. I am in the kitchen. I orient the schema. My name. My name is. The stairwell is to the north. My knife, unsheathed. “Sheila.” They have been clear with me, about the war. The war is in danger. In danger of ending. They have spelled it out. I have read their White Papers. Their experts have been made available to me. And to the average citizens. Who have been made to understand. There is water running somewhere in the house. I hear it in the walls. The pipes. There are pipes. The hum of drones. Chicklet teeth and bones. The house is draped in stones. The mind is at war with itself. The radical imposition of “interchangeable sameness” (Aarspeth 33).

The living and the dead. Either/Or. There are no living dead. Nor dead that are not dead. The running water, hurried on by gravity. The buried stay buried, in this cold planet. I am in the assigned house. The drones have paused in skies. My name. The unsheathed knife. The war is in danger of ending. They have spelled it out. The ones I’m after are alive. This is my assignment. I did not do these things. I ascend the stairs. The family sleeps in many rooms. They must turn down the heat at night. A child coughs behind a door. Drones beget drones and there are more. There is a way that they give birth to each other in the sky.

So: the family. The house. The blood. The way that way leads on to way. A cosmic sort of hate. The child’s room. I was sent to the house. I open the child’s window to the night. This region of the village has been too calm. It’s best, I’m instructed, for the others to hear what’s about to happen. “As a rebellion against civilization . . .” (Aarspeth 696). My knife. Transforming the living into the dead.

And that way to remain, forever.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nicholas Rombes writes for The Rumpus, The Oxford American, and Filmmaker Magazine, where he serves as a contributing editor and writes the Blue Velvet Project. His work has appeared in The Believer, Wigleaf, Exquisite Corpse, and other places. He teaches in Detroit, Michigan, and can be found here.

By Barrett White.

Above your head as you read this a chalk outline of an image emits. It is of a young woman trapped inside. She is throwing a book into a cornfield and screaming. Screaming into the same plot of land where the farmer and his wife came to bury their pet chimpanzee, who ate the crucifixes from the farmhouse walls like a furious embryo, tossing itself like a wet sack on things, making meals out of its rump sounds. And the farmer and his wife wept for days until they became exhausted and hungry and thirsty and their legs gave out and they fell, cradling one another, empathy bruising their lips, and little pieces of candy corn fell from their mouths uneaten and they frothed with a madness and they died from lack of sleep right there at the foot of the chimp grave where this chalk book fell, the one you’re thinking about. The woman is screaming because the book speaks: roses and affidavits. Above her panic and your thoughts are a group of strappadoed vigilantes and priests who have been represented in several oil paintings throughout the woman’s home. They are only present in her dream memory and cannot be named. Their faces have been replaced with boxing gloves on long accordion arms, breathing in and out and slapping one another with the musical whiff of a crematorium and/or lava fields. The woman found the book on the table where her grandmother would grind the bones for baking in the mortar of the child’s head. A calendar was kept documenting the mortar’s aging, its wear, and on that basis were replacements made. For there were meals to be made, the grandmother high off nettles and rabbit fur, squatting in the corner of the cabin over a pile of eggs and biting the hen’s neck and screaming. These eloquent tones mocked by her granddaughter over the table at the book which whispered in her ear what it did to her as she slept. She slaps it from the table and it strikes the grandmother’s head. The grandmother’s head dissolves and then restructures itself as an infant’s head after the book passes through it. The book rings like a bell when it hits the ground. The woman hikes her skirt up and pissed on its pages, hoping to dampen the lies to make them soft. The grandmother’s new head caterwauls hot pokers on their wallpaper, making shear marks for fun with a fine-spoken comb. The book foams beneath the granddaughter, spits up feathers. Its voice shakes the walls of the cabin, making the pine needles scrape the window panes in pain-pleasure screeching. AND WITH YOUR EYES CLOSED it reverbuls, AND WITH YOU OPEN, CUT AND PASTE. Above the chalk outline the words float stop motion, all Méliès, with a sick moon groaning nauseous in a bind, a single exclamation, O.

Ideas don’t make up this book, pages do. The pages are stuck together with the amber grip of urine. The woman having given birth several times to the different heads the grandmother would wear, to challenge the mundanity of living in a cabin in the woods. The vinyl ghost of Ansel Adams lies deflated in the distance, big as a Macy’s day parade character, obscuring the foothills. The grandmother whines and whines through her infant mouth hole. The woman afraid that the voice of dead photographers would sing. The woman becoming a girl and the girl becoming a woman. The woman never grandmother because she could not give birth to a living child. A brisket child, sizzled in her mind ream. The face meat is something that inherits complexion. It came from inside of her raw. The grandmother would grind powder to bleach, brine blood to rouge. The grandmother’s infant head becomes a chimpanzee head and tackles her granddaughter with a playful shove. The book hovers over their struggle, muttering SO FAR AWAY YEAH YEAH YEAH. The monkey face bites and gurgles over the woman’s lumped body. Her mascara runs. ‘I want to get away,’ she says. The grandmother pinches and picks at every wenis. The book rolls out scarf-length bookmarks of tongue. One licks the oil clean off a painting of a patron saint. Behind the oil is a corral of neoplasticine grids. Inside the grids are multiple IKEAs with multiple dissolving baby heads. Like wet sand their texture fills the grids with perfectly geometrical dandruff. The baby heads have crowns of thorns that don’t dissolve. One of the thorns pricks one of the books’ tongues and the book howls with an angry threat: WHEN YOU FALL ASLEEP TONIGHT. Little dribbles of inky blood fall from the hovering tome into the pot of soup on the kettle which the grandmother makes. The soup on the kettle turns from yellow to orange to silver to purple to silver to purple to red to red to orange to black to silver to orange to purple to silver to purple to green to black to purple to orange to silver to orange to purple to silver to orange to black to black to black to orange to silver to purple. Prepared with a pageant of corn shucked from the soft parts between toddler’s tongues and palettes. Peeled from the crackling dead skin: it is true that the book’s pages are more flesh than their bodies. The book spits up balloons which cling to the thatched roof of the cabin, a birthday in the dark season of terrible two, the two of them, the girl-woman and her mother’s mother, with a kaleidoscope of heads between them, and the knowledge that plagues them with an incessant screaming. EASIER FOR YOU TO BE the book says, and its voice is interrupted by more black liquid cascading down, more oil to sour the meal.

Through the mossy gums inside her vocal hole, the grandmother tells her grandchild to burn the book. ‘Inhale its smoke to know its eternal knowledge’ she says, her head an ocelot. The book is spinning in a corner angled on its spine. It makes sounds like NASCAR binges, huge engines echoing therein. The sounds muted by the drifts of chalk detritus settling in the corner of your thought process, of the room, of the tale inside it, this book inside of you. The strappadoed priests are taken down by technicians of your dream and replaced with body-mod suspension artists with subdermal implants of stars, flowers, halos, hearts. In her chimpanzee phase the grandmother rips her heart out, eating it. The heart is made of leather. She is erased as the book calls over her vanishing corpse to the girl-woman: LOOK WHAT YOU’VE DONE NOW. LOOK AT ALL THE PAIN YOU’VE CAUSED US. The woman who is a girl now sees the smoke rising on the somber hills, parades of conflagration creeping towards the forest. Towards their cabin, towards the cornfield, their farm, their pageant. She takes a poker from beside the fireplace and catches the hovering book on it, impaling the cover with a shriek. The book flaps its pages like the wings of a wounded bird. Holding the poker in her teeth the girl thinks how she cannot escape the book, how her only option is to destroy it. This is something that is obvious. She gathers wood, the thin and brittle twigs from the nearby trees mingling in the cold. The book complains ONLY I KNOW HOW TO PROPERLY PENETRATE UR MIND. She douses the unlit pyre in gasoline. The suspension artists split little fireballs down to ignite it. A breeze rattles the bones of the cornfield as Ansel Adams’ giant deflated body shifts on the mountain side, giving the new fire breath, life. The woman drives the poker deep into the breast of the fire, sending embers dancing. The book screams and screams OOOOOOOOOOOO. The smoke of the book is a clear plastic. The girl stands beside the flames, sucking in the clear through her nostrils with a crinkle. The plastic rolls itself up in her like a mimeograph machine. Her lungs are sharp-pointed stencils that gnaw the book’s emission. The tears in it give her a new understanding of language. You and her hear the sounds of the fire trucks at the same time. Your ears perk and shrivel. She is tranced, leaning to vomit in the raked pine needles on the cold hard earth. Several police cruisers off-roading jeer, flinging dirt clods that bruise her, running over the house and razing it into a pile of sticks. Their red and blue lights cast jewels on the forest, on the hills, on the cornfields, which are wilting, crying black. The corn is blanched by a sickly rot. The fire truck tears down the forest to save it, wood splintering beneath hard rubber tires. They blast the book’s pyre with hoses from every angle, the water white with purging. They put the girl in handcuffs and lead her away. Everything floating above you is smoldering. The suspension artists are picked off by snipers and left to hang. The parade of police cars and fire trucks drive off blasting sirens into the night. For a moment, the dead forest is quiet. Out of the embers, the book crawls out. OOOOOOOOOOOO, it says. WHAT HAPPENS IF I REFUSE TO END?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Barrett White is a writer, performance and video artist. His work has appeared in Metazen, New Wave Vomit and elsewhere.

The police told me I shouldn’t have intervened. The press called me a hero. Would you do it again? they asked. Of course I would, I told them.

 To be honest, in hospital I was on a high. I’d been unemployed for months, drinking too much, heading nowhere. Now my picture was in the papers and people wanted to talk to me – I felt like someone special, someone worthwhile. 



I was alive, I’d fully recover, they’d even caught the culprit. There was nothing to worry about.

 During my stay I had a surprise visitor, Hannah. We’d split up three months before, but here she was approaching my bed.

“I thought I’d better just, you know…”



“It’s okay. Sit down, please. I’m glad you came.”



Splitting up had been all my fault. It was as if I wanted to punish myself, prove just how worthless I really was. Arguing and insulting her and smashing a wine glass against the wall. Messing it up for myself quite royally. But I could accept that now.



Holding her hand I got her to admit that she was seeing somebody else now. “It’s okay,” I told her. “Three months? Of course you are.” It was fine. I was ready to face up to anything now. Anything the world could throw at me: not a problem.

 “I’ll see you again,” I say as she leaves. And though she doesn’t quite answer that one, it doesn’t matter. We’re not enemies, why would we be? Maybe some time in the future we could even become close again.



I’m in hospital for three weeks. Then I’m released back to the flat where I live alone.

 And that’s when it hits me. When I wake up to the reality of it all. Somebody had tried to kill me. Actually fucking kill me.

 It all comes back to me. Worse, it becomes something I can’t switch off. There on the tube in my own world, then the sudden screams, sudden commotion. A man punching a woman repeatedly in the face. I rush over to help but everybody else just shrinks away. The wrestling, the struggling, then the knife.



My counsellor tells me it’s something I’ll have to work on, something that will take time. The anxiety, the depression, the jolting awake at night. But it’s not good enough.



I phone Hannah.



We plan to meet at a cafe on Upper Street. No strings, I assure her – words that strangely never leave me until I approach the place and see her sitting there outside. She looks beautiful.

 We chat, and for a while the sun cracks through the clouds. I find myself being honest. “I don’t know,” I say, some half-hour in. “I’m just finding things difficult…”

 Her phone goes then – in fact, it’s the third or fourth time – and she tells me she’s sorry but she really has to go.



”Stay – please,” I say, putting my hand on hers. But something has changed. I follow her eyes and there he is. He’s tall, dark, everything else.

 “The new model,” I say, but she pretends not to hear. “It’s okay,” I add, “go.”

 She says goodbye, kisses me on the cheek and I watch them walk away.





My attacker was twenty-two years old. From the age of fourteen he’d been gaining convictions for robbery, burglary assault … The story is old. It also makes me angry.



I go for a drink with an old friend, Dave. We talk about cricket until the drink takes hold. “What you did was heroic, Mick, you’ve got to remember that.” We went to uni together, but these days live different lives. Dave has a successful career and is married with two beautiful kids. He tells me he’s just had the youngest one christened.



“Do you believe in all that?” I say belligerently, the alcohol getting to me now.



“All what?” he says.



”Miracles, guardian angels, a higher force watching over us, guiding us …”



“Come on, Mick,” he says, putting his hand on my shoulder. “Cheer up.”



We change the subject, then soon something comes up and Dave has to go. In fact, it’s the last time I ever see him.



Meetings with other friends are just as bad. I have nothing in common with these people any more. Nothing at all.



A journalist phones about a ‘victim-meets-hero’ spread. A joint interview and photoshoot. Apparently the ‘woman I saved’ is eager to meet me. The journalist is enthusiastic and flattering and mentions money, but I tell her what I always tell journalists now. I’m not interested.



I leave a message for Hannah. I tell her I need to see her, need to speak to her. I sound desperate and instantly regret showing weakness, yet I long for her reply.



“I can’t keep on seeing you,” she says on the phone two days later. “Greg won’t allow it.”



“Greg?”



“My boyfriend, Mick. My… fiance.”



“What?”



Sometimes life has a knack of kicking you in the face, not just once but repeatedly. I already had a case of this when I was sixteen. First, in a rugby injury, I nearly lost the sight in my left eye. Then my girlfriend went off with one of my best friends. Then my mother died.



“I’m not letting you go Hannah.”



”I think we better end this conversation right now.”



I first met Hannah through a friend from work. A group of us went for a drink one evening and Hannah and I just clicked. We both had our own flats and we’d spend nights at each, and things were all quite perfect, but at the time you never realise it. Once or twice we even talked about getting married, what our kids would look like. Always with a jokey smile, but still. It could have happened.



“You need help, Michael” my sister says, visiting me.

 She’s standing there in a business suit, a leather case under her arm. Her life is so different to mine. All go, with hardly any time to think. Just how people prefer it.



”I’m already getting help,” I say, opening a can of Stella.



“From where? The inside of that fucking can? You’re an alcoholic.”



”Oh shut up.”



”I’m going to make a phone call,” she says, pulling out her mobile. “I know someone. Counselling isn’t enough.”



Hannah and Greg like to go for walks together. They like to stroll through London Fields, near Hannah’s place, or Highbury Fields, near Greg’s and sit picnicking on the grass. On a Sunday afternoon they go for drinks at the same pubs Hannah and I used to visit, or amble through the market or along the canal. Greg has a thing about public affection. Holding her face in his hands and kissing her on the lips. I see it when he greets her, when he says goodbye. Is he doing this for me? Does he know I’m there?



“Okay,” Dr Cohen says. “Let’s take it right back to your childhood.”



I was eleven years old. The new boy in our class was quiet at first, but not for long. Hey, jug ears! he’d say, giving me a whack to the side of my head, showing off to the girls. He was bigger than I was, more confident, and I felt there was little I could do. But things got worse and one day I had enough. We fought to the sound of fight, fight, fight and I reasoned that even if I didn’t win, at least he’d be walking away with bruises. But I did win. And when he finally stopped struggling on the ground beneath me, his nose a bloody mess, I took things further. I grabbed a piece of a brick and smashed it over his head.



I don’t remember much after that. Only that there was a massive furore. Parents brought up to the school. Suspension. A social worker brought in to speak to me. The boy had to go to hospital and everyone was shocked. I remember my father having a close talk with me, worried if like the headmaster had implied, I was some kind of disturbed child. But things carried on as normal, the whole thing soon forgotten. The boy was gone, his parents sent him to a different school. I was never bullied again.



“Let’s talk about your mother.”



”I don’t want to talk about that.”





I still phone Hannah, but she never answers. One time I phone while watching her. She and Greg are out carrying groceries back to her flat. She looks at her phone then almost jumps up and down in exasperation. But Greg does something else. He laughs.



I rarely used to read the news, but now it’s something I do regularly. Scouring the local papers online trying to shock myself. In Willesden a man slashes three strangers across the face in an hour-long rampage. In Acton a man is hurled screaming from the twenty-first floor. In Manor Park a girl is gang-raped and set alight. In Croydon a violent hooded mugger who has already killed one and brain-damaged another is still on the loose. ‘Hammer Attacker Strikes Again’ the headline says.



I dream I push my attacker in front of a train. He falls beneath the wheels, his body dragged up the tracks, out of sight. Then I turn and there he is next to me, smiling, knife in hand. One night I dream I attack him with a hammer, the blows raining down, over and over, even with his body broken and lifeless beneath me and my face covered in blood. Some nights I mix my medication, work through a whole bottle of vodka trying to drown out my thoughts.



After my mother died was the only time I ever cut myself. I suppose I just needed to let out the pain. I suppose it even helped. My mother was addicted to tranquillisers. She overdosed. My father always maintained it was an accident, and for years I even tried to believe it. Of course it wasn’t an accident.



“Hi Greg.”



He’s just stepped out of his car and is staring at me on the pavement. The street is dimly-lit and he’s baffled. He takes a step closer to discern the face under the hood. “Are you …?”



“Laughing now are you?” I say, coming towards him with a hammer.



He grabs my arm and we tumble against his car. I drop the hammer as we wrestle across the pavement, tumbling to the ground. Getting a clean punch in, I free myself, grab the fallen tool and run.



Later that night I’m arrested. I’m interviewed at Stoke Newington police station.



“It never happened,” I say. “He’s making it all up.”



I tell them Hannah still sees me on the side and Greg’s obviously jealous. He’s just trying to get me into trouble. It sounds plausible. I get the feeling they might even believe me.



Towards the end they try to keep a straight face as they say, “He said you were wearing some kind of paint on your face. He said you looked black.”



”Well, in that case maybe you should question the guy’s sanity.”



Finally they shake their heads. I’m bailed and they even admit it will probably never make it to court.

 Sure enough, within weeks, the whole thing is dropped.





”You fucking bastard,” Greg says, coming out of his flat and seeing me leaning arms-folded by his car.



I stand there staring at him, enjoying his surprise and fear. He starts fumbling with his phone to try and film me, but by then I’m simply a man in a hood walking away.



I start sending Greg messages. One says he better start checking under his car.



Again I’m taken in for questioning. The police tell me issuing a threat to life is a serious offence that can carry up to a life sentence.



“And what’s that these days?” I say. “Two years?”



I’m released without charge.



The next day the story appears in the Evening Standard. ‘Tube Hero Held in Harassment and Assault Probe.’ It’s hilarious. It’s full of such bullshit it actually cheers me up.



Finally, a few days later, my phone rings. It’s Hannah.



We meet at a coffee shop in Angel. She tells me she shouldn’t really be doing this.



”That’s okay. I know you’re probably recording this or you’ve got somebody watching from outside, but honestly, I don’t mind.”



She looks at me. “I can’t believe you just said that.”



“Said what? It’s true.”



She stares down into her coffee. A minute passes before she says anything more.

 “Greg’s a liar.”



I look at her.



“He was cheating on me,” she says. “I checked his phone… A bitch from work.”



I watch her eyes fill with tears.

“I don’t know what to believe any more. To be honest I don’t even want to talk about it … but if you are harassing him, I just want you to leave him alone.”



I smile and place my hand on hers. For the next twenty minutes we say little, perhaps nothing at all. But for the first time in months I feel happy and warm.



“I better go,” she finally says, gathering her things, her face red and wet.



”I’ll call you,” I say.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Keenaghan lives in London. His short stories lay scattered across the web.

When the alien overlords came, they did not arrive in giant spaceships intent on destroying the earth, nor were they hulking metal invaders or slathering, poly-mouthed monstrosities. They were small, delicate creatures – helpless-looking really – but they made it clear they were here to rule. Mankind had had its day – they were our replacements.

I was in the woods, camping alone, when it started. I’d told Carol I needed some time to think about where our relationship was going, but I’d spent most of the time sitting under the canvas porch drinking whiskey macs with my cagoule hood tight around my head. I hadn’t looked in a mirror in over a week.

I was packing up when I got the call from Bodge.

“Don’t go home,” he said. “Meet me in the bunker.”

“Carol’s expecting me,” I said.

“They’re here man,” he whispered. “Did you not see the meteor shower?”

He told me they’d come down a few days ago, with shooting stars that seemed innocuous at first – but then people started acting weird. The prime minister was on the news telling everyone everything was fine, but people were acting like zombies – without the cannibalism.

“You can tell the ones who’ve been got to by the way they look,” Bodge said. “They’ll be totally exhausted, they’ll be unable to say almost anything interesting, they’ll be dressed badly like they don’t care anymore, If you speak to one, they’ll tell you they’re happy but they’ll look suicidal.”

“What do you mean? I said. “What’s wrong with them?”

“They’ve been got. They’re hosts now. I’ve seen them man – their little big heads and their vacant little eyes. They’re space parasites, like face-huggers but on the chest – chest-huggers. They like women more than men. They’re everywhere. The government’s been taken over. Carol’s been got too – I saw her yesterday and she was looking for you. Don’t go home, man. I’ve seen them take two people at a time.”

Of course, home is exactly where I did go, figuring Bodge had been smoking something again.

Everything seemed normal on my street – a little quiet, but not the apocalypse. I pulled the car into the driveway and got out. The lights were on in the living room, the electric aura seeping around the edges of the curtains. I closed the car door quietly, leaving my kit in the boot. I wasn’t sure how happy Carol would be to see me. I’d left pretty suddenly. Somehow, she heard me coming. I had my key poised for the lock when the door swung open.

“It’s you,” she said.

“It’s me,” I replied.

“You look awful…and you stink too.”

“I’ve been camping.”

“I know where you’ve been,” she said. “Are you finished with it?”

“With what?”

“Living like a hobo.”

“I’d like a shower.”

She stepped away from the door. “You’d best come in.”

“A shower, a shit and a shave, that’s what I need,” I said – but she didn’t laugh. I started to notice how tired she looked, how drawn and taut her skin was. She was dressed in this old, black flannel dressing gown with bits of dried porridge stuck to the side.

“Have you lost weight?” I said.

“Jim, we need to talk.”

And that was when I saw it. The right-hand side of her dressing gown slipped down a little and I caught a glimpse of its pink, bulbous head leering at me from the shadows, its tiny arms clinging tight to her side, its little lips wet from feeding on her. Its mouth dropped open and it began to scream – alerting its kind to the presence of the uninfected. I looked up at Carol and saw her beautiful brown eyes were now the colour of dusty earth. She was a goner – what Bodge would later call a ‘half wife’ – a slave to the creatures. I backed out, stumbling along the driveway to my car. I headed straight to Bodge’s basement.

“What kept you?” he said, when I came clattering down the stairs.

“I went to Carol’s,” I said. “I have to save her.”

Bodge cracked open a can of lager and handed it to me, frothy beer-juice running over my hands.

“There’s nothing you can do,” he said. “She’s lost to us now.”

“So what do we do?” I said.

“We resist,” he replied. Then he picked up a replica gun attached his games console and pulled a silent trigger.

We soon found out we weren’t alone. There were others holding out – the resistance – but there was no official opposition. The government, the army, everyone who counted, they were rolling over and pretending like nothing was happening. We came to understand they were all under the control of our extra-terrestrial replacements. Beneath their suits, their jackets, their blouses – was one of those little critters sucking them dry, controlling their every thought and move so that their lives were no longer their own. The world was run being run by the critters – to what end, we did not know.

It came down to basements full of desperate, unshaven men – creased shirts, holey jeans, beer-slicked moustaches and long hours target practice on games consoles (live ammo was in short supply). Generally, the women fell like we knew they would – the fairer sex was the weaker sex – and few lasted beyond the first months of the occupation. They were never strong enough to resist the replacements’ powers for long and they joined the ranks of the thralls. All it took was one look from the aliens, and the women were swooning. They couldn’t see them for what they were. The mind control was too powerful. And slowly, our merry band began to disappear.

At one time there were eight of us in the bunker: Bodge and me – of course – and then Ray, Jason, Matt, Elvis, Ginge, Big John and Alan. We kept each other in good spirits while the world went to hell outside, falling under the replacements’ spell – society ordering itself only around their needs. But they began to peel off. Jason told us he needed to go back to his old place to get some things, but he just never came back. A few weeks later, we saw him walking in endless circles around the park with his old girlfriend – and we knew she’d been got. He gave Bodge and I a look as if he didn’t recognise us, and we saw the shifting bulge of the replacement beneath his girl’s jacket. He’d been mind-washed. Most replacements took more than one host – and once they’d latched onto a woman they usually sought a man next, their oily suckers poking out from their corpulent little organ sacs in search of a Y chromosome. They got Matt after that, then Ray. They left for supplies and we never saw them again. Sometimes I think they wanted to be got, that they couldn’t handle the resistance life anymore. They gave themselves up.

Things were looking grim. There were just five of us left and Big John and Ginge were getting serious cabin fever. Then, one day, Bodge made a discovery.

We’d known for a while that alcohol repelled the creatures – but only to an extent. Get too close and they’d still make you theirs, maybe just out of spite – especially if they already had a woman. They were dangerous, these possessed women – the half-wives. They moved quickly and they didn’t let up. So you had to be careful, drink just enough to keep you safe, not too much to make bad judgements. The tipsy survived but the drop-down drunk got beholden. Bodge had been working on a formula for a while – a kind of repellent spray – something to keep us safe in the outside world. He came racing down the basement stairs one morning to say he’d done it – he’d had his eureka moment. He’d spent the whole night in the company of thralls, half-wives, the beholden – and nothing. He’d watched as the pulsating little creatures – latched onto all that surrounded him – turned and shrieked at his presence, driving their host humans away and leaving a kind of cordon sanitaire surrounding him. Bodge called it a ‘circle of life’. With his repellent on, not even crazed half-wives would come within ten feet of him.

“Six parts lager, two parts gin, one part whiskey, half a curry, and thirty cigarettes,” he said.

“Is it a cure?” I asked.

He narrowed his eyes at me. ”Don’t you see?” he said. If we manufacture this on a global scale all men in the world will be safe.”

“Will it work on women?”

“The women are all gone, man.”

He put his hand on my shoulder and signalled to Alan. Alan nodded at Big John and Big John reached into the fridge and pulled out a beer. Bodge caught it with his other hand and lifted the ring pull up with just one finger.

“Only the strong survive,” he said.

But I was gone that very same evening, as soon as the ‘resistance’ had passed out in front of Modern Warfare 3. I took Bodge’s formula, spraying some on myself and keeping more in an atomiser, and headed to Carol’s. I’d been thinking about her for months, wanting so badly to see her again, though I hadn’t told anyone. That was quitter talk. That was the kind of talk that got Jason, Matt and Ray suckered. The lights were on when I pulled up, just like before. It was amazing to see how similar the world looked despite the change in ownership – how everything seemed to run as normal. I knew that was one of their tricks, but still.

I rang the bell, atomiser at the ready, hoping that Bodge’s formula really worked, praying it was strong enough to drive the monstrous little creature out of Carol.

She opened the door. She was in the same dressing gown, just with different stains. I’d heard Ginge say the half-wives had a peculiar odour, and he was right. There was a stench like runny faeces, like someone with a bowel problem. I began to worry Bodge’s repellent would not be strong enough, but I’d already said hello, already looked in Carol’s eyes. The replacement was not in view, but Carol had frozen me to the spot.

“Come to rescue me?” She said.

I nodded, and she backed into the house. I stepped inside. Beyond the smell, it was nice in there, like I remembered it – warm, bright and comforting. The aliens obviously liked to live well.

“Carol,” I said, and I had the atomiser at the ready. I saw the folds of her dressing gown begin to fall back as the hiding thing prepared to reveal itself.

“What is it you’re so afraid of?” she said, seeing my wide eyes.

“You’re not you,” I said. “You’re not who you are.”

She seemed to glide closer to me, like she was hovering – there was no sound. I was shaking, one hand on the atomiser and one hand held out to ward her off. I could sense my moment, but I could also feel it slipping away. My vision blurred, pulsed, narrowed to just a tiny pinhole focus on Carol and her auburn hair and her large, freckled nose and the gap between the sides of her dressing gown, the creamy white skin of her neck guiding my eyes down and then, before I could stop her, she was inches from me. My hands were slick with sweat. I lost my grip on the atomiser.

“Carol,” I said. “I won’t give you my life. I won’t give up, not even for you.”

“Shhhh,” she whispered, and she took hold of my free hand and guided it slowly, purposefully, between the folds of her dressing gown and onto her chest.

“Now there,” she said. “How frightening is that?”

And that’s when I felt its strange, alien heart beating. And I was lost to the world of men.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rhys Timson lives in North London and has previously been published by Aesthetica, Opium and Literary Brushstrokes. Last year, he won a fellowship to attend the Summer Literary Seminars in Vilnius.

CLOUDY SAKE

It’s really annoying how much time you’re spending writing this novel, don’t you have any self-control, any sense, your working gig is in the afternoon so you are in the habit of writing all morning, and this is one such morning when Kimiko sends you a freak text message, Meet takoyaki today lunch? Kimiko, it’s freakish because most Japanese do not spontaneously meet for lunch, not because of some inherent trait, but because most people plan weeks even months in advance, something stirs in the basest part of you, and you write back with excited fingertips, I love takoyaki. What train station?

You go back to writing your “novel” while waiting for her response:

On this brisk autumn day, he arranged the mannequins so that Olivia and Persephone were on the couch in front of the tea table, and Gerda was in the recliner, palm extended to make a point. He pressed play on the tape recorder, and Gerda spoke first in British upper crust falsetto: I do not believe there is inherent racism in modern Japanese society, but rather a persistent prejudice which has its roots in Japanese imperialism itself. What, objected Olivia, Japanese imperialism? Ha! responded Gerda. My dear, dear Olivia. Have you not heard of the islands of Okinawa?

Your phone buzzes, and you break off, thankfully, from the pretentious tripe, and read, Higashi Machi station. Meet 12 clock? Are you ok? Yes, I’m ok, you write, Are you ok? to which she responds, Ok Ok, do you ask too many questions? to be safe, this time you are twenty minutes early arriving at the station, you take the escalator to street level and watch the ubiquitous compact Nissan taxis mingle in with city busses along the main thoroughfare, there seem to be no used cars in Nagasaki, you haven’t seen even a door scratched in the entire city, not that you walk around looking at car doors, but most of them seem to undergo the kind of waxing one associates with a Rolls Royce, what is this mysterious, prosperous, ordered land of no litter and cosmetically perfect automobiles? you ask yourself, and then your phone buzzes again, this time it’s Azuka, she’s writing to you from work, Pick me up some bananas on the way home, says the text message, there’s something insidious about the tone, something unspoken, you’re reminded of the last fortune cookie you read, develop your intuition, that was the fortune cookie, only now do you understand the significance of that masterful ribbon of wisdom, she knows, there’s something in the tone of her text, she knows, she knows you’re meeting another girl, probably even knows her name, abandon ship, abandon ship, you sink into a despair, knowing she will be waiting for you at the point of rendezvous, you call Kimiko to cancel the meeting, something came up, you’ll see her another time, you’re lying, there will be no other time, you’re a coward, you’ve backed down, you’ll never text another girl again, it’s all over, it’s all over now, it’s done.

AZUKA

You conclude the 1st grade class with a singalong, Hello Happy Day, How Are You, you’re anxious to rip down a whiskey, in the lobby you notice there is the glass display of miniature workers pouring concrete into barrels, you pick one up to see if there is a whistle hole in its behind, there isn’t, the Assistant Principal sees you with your lips on the bronze buttocks, the janitor and Principal follow you outside to see you off, once you leave the school you tilt your golden flask at the back of the bus, the flask engraved with the initials J.T., your great grandfather who lost everything in the stock market crash of 1928, you’re texting Azuka with dinner plans, you have no heart, of course she’s already had a few beers when she calls you, you set the flask on the seat, she wants you to pick up cabbage, pork, enoki mushrooms and kimchee to make a spicy nabe tonight, you agree, Wakatta, Azu-chan, wakatta, you tell her you’ll do it and hang up the phone, you get off the bus on the ultra-wide street, all the major streets are wide in Nagasaki, a long stretch of textured yellow strips on every sidewalk, there to guide the blind, a sad reminder that even the blind have a better chance if they’re Japanese, you step into the grocery store, the beer fridge sports eight different labels with the same tasteless beer inside, you pick four tallboys to get you through dinner, intuiting some cultural blow-up and misunderstanding is about to happen with Azuka, you get stares in the checkout line, stares from the crone with the pocked face, stares from the young couple wearing berets, the clerk, though, is unable to look at you, you swipe your card, you say nothing and leave, loitering for a moment you enjoy scandalizing the façade of the grocery outside and crack open a beer, you lift the beer to your lips and take one step onto the street as a motorcycle rips through your best shirt, a black button down with thin gold stripes, the handlebars of the bike twist you onto the unforgiving ground of the sidewalk.

GAUZE

Now a small crowd is standing above you, Is he okay? they ask each other, I don’t know, what should we do, he can’t speak Japanese, nobody bothers to actually ask you, they notice bits of blood on your foreign face, they‘re making phone calls, you brush the pendants of dirt off your pants, your sleeves are torn and the top button is missing, the groceries miraculously have landed unaffected, propped against the wall of “Californya Café” (a misspelled sulking ground behind the station), you prop yourself up and start walking, unacceptable by Japanese standards, you should reassure those around you, instead you say nothing, you’re feeling particularly misanthropic and your arm feels like one giant bee-sting, you leave them in a group discussing what to do, they could do it for hours, the motorcycle rider pedals next to you, apologizing, bowing, pedaling, begging you to stop, apologizing, bowing deeply, pleading, pedaling, bowing three times fast, sincerely apologizing, really apologizing, he’s incredibly sorry, bowing again, you’re not saying anything, your elbow is whistling bloodover your pants, you don’t care, you just want the day to be done and to nuzzle into the confusing set of cultural signifiers awaiting you at Azuka’s, she is frighteningly devoted to you, a commitment you never thought possible, it’s what drives you away, you knock and she’s there, jumping at the door, almost wagging her tail, clasping her hands, it’s surreal, is she faking it, you wonder, you callous soul-wrecker, you don’t deserve her, why would you question such a thing, of course she’s sincere, it’s you who are not sincere, she sees you’ve been hurt, the jumping stops, the argument grows even uglier when she wraps purple gauze around your arm, the gauze has Disney characters printed on it, you blame each other for what the city does to you, she kicks the bathroom door leaving a slipper print on the new white paint, you will break her heart for sure this time.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Moscovich writes flash fiction and performs his texts both live and on the radio, fragmenting, ricocheting, and refurnishing language until it meets its own devolution. He lives in New York City.

My temporary apartment. The sand. The blue water. Agadir.

Bugged and over-bugged so many times that I can practically hear myself through Schneid’s ears. Best not to talk. Best not to think. Retrieve the loaded handgun stashed between the mattresses. Go to the cafe on the corner where the Marxist students used to congregate, before I wrote poems that identified them by name, that gave them over to their tortured futures. Their dialectical futures. Their electroshock futures. In the hot sun at Aitswal Beach there are three men waiting for me, each one dedicated to murder in his own way.

A warpath of words, my poems. Poems giving shape and substance to ideas that out-revolutionize the revolution itself. The bartender’s face is scarred. Africa is no longer the same. The signals are weaker. The patient is dying. I remove the folder and place it in front of me. The bar door is propped open with a broken cinder block and there is a warm breeze coming in and I use my glass of illegal beer to hold the papers still. A young woman with pink palms appears and takes a place at the bar next to me. The African sandflies described in the Bulletin of Entomological Research in 1938 have returned.

The enjambment of just one line could make the difference between a prolonged death and a short one. The television above the bar seems to switch channels on its own. The bartender is cutting lemons right before our eyes. The code Schneid gave me implicates him. I don’t know if Schneid knows this. That he has asked me to break a code that, once broken and revealed, condemns him to death. The bartender removes the quartered lemons and wipes the counter. There is a phone ringing from the black depths of the back of the bar. I have never shaken fully the soft sand from this part of the Sahara. It falls from my hair like thunder. The West hears it now, too late.

The insurgents or whatever they are called at any given time have developed a code that the weaker among us believe unbreakable. It travels across the lines in the old analog way and to decipher it means re-harvesting equipment discarded long ago as useless. According to Schneid I am the poet of the counter-revolution. I have been sent to Chad, to Garoua. My memory sloshes from one side of my head to the other. From Garoua I am driven through impossible sand north to Mokolo. Then further north, for weeks, deeper into shallow blinding light. There is dissent in the caravan. There is a fight over the safest route. A sparkplug is stolen during the night and we languish for days.

Schneid is the theorist of our movement. He is interested in typology and time. When new thought blossoms he exterminates the thinkers. He sends us all across north Africa to do this. There are other units, in other continents. He speaks of Black Easter and cosmic dread and speculative annihilation. He sends us white papers on the psychological archaeology of repulsion. His favorite weapon is a flare gun, used up close and in the face. There is no other way to say this.

I arrive, at last, back at the café. I can hear the ocean waves in the distance. There is an American show from the 1990s on the television, Wild Palms. For the usual reasons we pretend not to watch it. The three men from Aitswal are there, too, sitting in the back in plastic chairs. They are wearing loose white shirts. One of them is smoking. These are likely the new men that Schneid has sent. They are semioticians, and I am just a poet. I can see their axes beneath the table. Now the one who exterminated the Marxists must be exterminated himself. I understand this.

Somewhere in Europe Schneid practices with his flare gun on one of the students I’ve named in my poems. Right before my eyes, the bartender makes an alien symbol with his hands and one of the men from back comes over and sits beside me. There is sand blowing in through the open door and collecting in the corners of the café. Wild Palms still plays on the television. Two men walk across the screen in the bright sun beside a blue pool. One of them wears a white track suit. A voice off screen—a woman’s voice—says, “Love among consenting holograms?” What will become of the North African Unit without me, without my words?

And then the other two men from the back approach me, one of them holding an axe. And what happens next, there is no poetry to convey the tenderness by which they seize me, laying their hands upon me, the animal they have been given to destroy.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nicholas Rombes writes for The Rumpus, The Oxford American, and Filmmaker Magazine, where he serves as a contributing editor and writes the Blue Velvet Project. His work has appeared in The Believer, Wigleaf, Exquisite Corpse, and other places. He teaches in Detroit, Michigan, and can be found here.

The park was empty from the rain and the evening. It would stay empty, except for the people I was meeting. The dope felt light in my pocket. I kept shaking it and asking myself if I’d believe it was an ounce, more a Milky Way than a Mars Bar. Waiting in a kids play park, ready to sell drugs, made me feel like a wanker, like I was in one of those awareness videos we used to make fun of at school.

I was meeting was a stoner called Burrito who was one of the many students returning home to the town during the summer. When he arrived Burrito had a girl with him called Kate. I didn’t know her. Kate was pretty, in that hippy sort of way. Her hair was braided with purple string, I’m not sure what it was supposed to do but it was hard to focus on anything else about her.

I had seventy pounds worth of dope on me but I was selling it to them for a hundred: it was amazing the expansion a block of dope underwent in half an hour in a hot oven. Burrito took the dope and shook it lightly in his hand, feeling the weight. He showed it to Kate who shrugged then nodded eagerly as if she didn’t care as long as she got a smoke soon. Burrito took five twenties out of his pocket and handed them to me. His dope shaking ritual revealed as the show it was.

“Split or choose?” he said turning to Kate.

“Choose,” she said.

Burrito split the dope into two equal sized blocks and Kate pocketed one, that she tucked into a gap in her twenty deck of Marlborogh Lights. Burrito slipped his half into his pocket.

“Do you fancy a smoke?” Kate asked me.

​“We buy it from him and smoke it with him too?” Burrito muttered.

​“Naw, you’re alright,” I said to Kate.

​“Naw, go on, stay,” she insisted, pulling me by the arm.

We walked along a path that took us out into the country, stopping at a little wood that blocked out the wind and rain. It was only half seven but already starting to get dark. Fallen leaves provided a nice cushion for us to sit on.

Burrito let rip with an egg and mustard special, and looked around him like a dog that had pissed on the floor and didn’t understand why he was being put outside. This was the reason for his nickname; someone said he smelt like he’d been eating beany burritos. Burrito thought it was because he looked like Gram Parsons from The Flying Burrito Brothers; their only similarity was Burrito’s hair, which he had cut purposely, after getting the nickname, to copy Parsons’ shaggy longish look.

Kate sparked up the first spliff and Burrito the second. Burrito attempted to start a philosophical conversation that he’d no doubt pre-rehearsed in his head. He’d done this before, another time he’d a girl with him, and he knew that I didn’t know the names for any of the philosophers or their arguments or the movements they belonged to or how they tied together.

“What do you think death is like?” he asked looking directly at me.

I didn’t reply. Though part of me felt I should; it might stop him telling one of his stories. Burrito’s stories went like this: ‘I was at the park. It was a sunny day. I had a bag of weed.’ And there it would end. All Burrito’s stories ended with him having a bag of weed. There would be occasional variances on this theme: sometimes Burrito would roll a big joint but usually he just had a bag of weed. Maybe it was the same bag of weed every time, maybe that was why it was worth talking about, or so I’d thought, but now I dealt to him I realised this wasn’t the case, though the amount he smoked suggested why he thought these stories were worth telling.

“Do you know what happens when you die?” he asked.

I ignored him. I’d stopped looking at him, there was no reason to think his question was specifically for me. One of Burrito’s signature farts drifted up into my nostrils. Kate passed me the spliff.

“Do you think death is like going to sleep?” Burrito asked. There was something in his tone, like he was daring me to say yes. Kate stared at the ground, like she didn’t want to meet anyone’s eye, like she was embarrassed for him. She took out her dope and began rolling another spliff.

“I dunno,” I shrugged.

“I think Death is when there are an infinite number of yourself repeating the same action at the same time.”

Burrito was looking round, mainly at Kate, waiting for some sort of praise for his intelligence. She was trying hard not to look up, and stared at the spliff she was making with such intensity that if we’d just got up and left she wouldn’t have noticed. When she refused to acknowledge him Burrito gave me a look like I wasn’t intelligent enough to understand what he was saying. Kate must have felt his eyes leave her because she glanced up and shook her head at him when his back was turned.

Listening to Burrito make an arse out of himself was one thing but I had a home with munchies and music and big cups of sugary tea that were more appealing than competing against this prick for a girl who was looking more uncomfortable by the minute.

“Do you study philosophy?” I asked him.

“No I study Law,” he said and then paused for our awed silences. I seized the opportunity to turn the conversation to Kate.

“Are you a student too?” I asked her.

“Just finished my degree,” she said. “2:1.”

“What are you going to do now?”

“Pay off some debts,” she laughed, holding up her hands like claws “eighty words a minute.”

“You see most people think death is like a big sleep…” Burrito began, interrupting us.

My flat became more appealing with every rambling phrase that poured out of Burrito’s mouth. Every joint we smoked made listening to him more of a chore. The sky was growing that dark evening colour that gives everything a bluish look. The birds were twittering away in the trees and beside me Burrito was twittering away about philosophy, spoiling it all.

“I’m going to head,” I said standing up, passing the joint to Kate. “Have a good night.”

“If you’re going into the city centre we’ll come too,” she said.

“Yeah, let’s go,” Burrito offered, a little late.

Burrito tried to instigate philosophical debate the whole way back into town, but we weren’t interested. Kate was telling funny stories about people she’d gone to college with. One guy used to be a catalogue model and when he met his girlfriend’s mum for the first time the mum said he looked ‘really handsome, like someone you would see in Kays catalogue’, then he got paranoid that her mum might have seen him in a pair of y-fronts and dumped her.

It was interesting that Burrito wasn’t in any of her stories, or didn’t seem to have any stories of his own. He slowed down, dragging behind us most of the way.

​Kate ignored him. She seemed really indifferent to him; I started to wonder how long he’d known her, or if he knew her that well at all.

“This is me here,” I said when we reached the edge of the pedestrian zone in the city centre; I wasn’t letting them see where I lived.

“See you,” Burrito said sulkily as he tried to lead Kate on.

Kate asked me for my number. Hopefully she would be without Burrito the next time we met.

She looked really pleased when I gave it to her and gave me one of those lingering looks before turning off and walking down the road with Burrito. He said something to her that I couldn’t hear; they burst out laughing and she pushed him. Then he looked back at me, laughing still. It struck me how friendly they looked together, and I wondered that he never spotted all the head shaking she did when he couldn’t see.

And as I stood there stoned, in the empty city centre, watching the two of them walk away with little more than fifty pounds worth of dope left between them: the fact that I had double that amount of their money in my pocket was little consolation.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gerard McKeown is a writer living in London, originally from Ireland. He studied English at Queens University Belfast and Cumbria Institute of the Arts. In 2007 he was a runner up in the BBC Radio 4 UK Poetry Slam and in 2010 was featured as part of The Irish Pages: Up and Coming Writers showcase.

He wasn’t sure how long he had been in the tower. He recalled that his wife had probably left the TV on at home, that the buzzing of the atonal message system was probably now drawing the neighbours’ attention or at least some good Samaritan or passerby. He noticed that the people below, outside the window, far from looking like ants, actually looked almost too-exactly like humans. The humans developers would draw in the windows of unsold high rises that you pass by on the freeway, the outlines seeming to be a composite of various bodies and shapes, a one-size-fits-all sort of thing. In fact, from far above, he couldn’t help but attach stories to their movements. He flashed on a dinner party — maybe this was in a dream — where he had apparently said something terrible but couldn’t remember what, and everyone at the table had immediately gotten up and moved away from him. He imagined the small figures moving away in a similar fashion. It was infuriating. He put the stock of the rifle on the polished stucco, something passing through it. Something bad now good. He felt better.

He didn’t have a radio. Even if he could actually think of a good reason to have one, he had never really considered himself a “radio man.” The idea of sitting there in the dark listening to another man’s voice seemed foolish. At least have a damn image in front of you. You couldn’t even imagine how the man’s face was moving when he said certain things. This was also a pet peeve of his, when you couldn’t detect the tone or intent behind someone’s words. It was like they were trying to trick you. Like when his wife sent him a text message and it said something like “sounds fine” and he couldn’t tell if it was said in a snotty, typical bitchy way, or a normal, calm way like “yea, sure, alright.” It infuriated him. This also happened in person occasionally as well. When at work, after “accidentally” (as he said in his “official” report) dropping a short stack of 2x4s on Mike Richardson, the motherfucker who had said something about his “mommy” packing him a lunch that Laurie had made the night before because it looked so put together and was in a brown paper bag as opposed to a tin box, he was told he would have to go to a dumbass head shrinker if he wanted to keep his job. When he went he always used to just make up words coming out of this old, goat-like Jew’s mouth as he was talking. He was normally just saying things like the old crusty sicko he was, asking him about his mother or some bullshit, what his hatred of lotion might mean (he once said his wife sometimes felt “slimy”), so instead he just sat there imagining things for the doctor to be saying like “I know I only got this job so I could have people look at me and pretend I’m important and it’s only because my mom never let me wipe my bottom wah wah I’m old and put a few framed pieces of paper on the wall behind me so people can think I’m hot shit even though if you looked close enough it’s just from some online bullshit or whatever and wah wah listen to me, tell me your problems I know I’ll understand I’m sure, wah.” After they couldn’t get him to talk for about five sessions they just gave up on it and the old guy signed the fucking form anyways. Amateurs.

Life was precious, was what he had heard at the sermon last Sunday. He didn’t normally go, the pews made his ass hurt, but Laurie had asked and he knew he’d be dealing with her little twisted curled up mouth sitting in disappointment for a few weeks if he didn’t, so he did. Place was near empty, the ceilings so huge and tall that when there were only about ten or fifteen people there it looked abandoned. But the guy was saying, the preacher that is, the guy up there in the starched linens, that life is precious, that life is precious wherever you can find it. Even a leaf, a plant, a rock, a convict on death row, they were all precious. Yeah and he thought that was a load of horseshit until a few nights later, when he was driving home from the bar and had had, yea, maybe a few too many or just something too strong because the barman was always fucking with him and giving him scotch when he asked for whiskey and shit like that, and realised as he was driving that he was sort of nodding off, suddenly waking up and seeing that he was about to run over a hiker who had tried to cross the road too close in front of the car and he swerved, sort of blacking out until he got back on the road, not thinking about it and not wanting to go back, thinking maybe there was a girlfriend or daughter or something as well and he better not check the bumper. It scared him and he only drank about three or four beers before driving home after that. Precious he didn’t know but an inconvenience he didn’t particularly want to deal with certainly.

A buzzing was coming up. There hadn’t been a buzzing like this, he thought, his neck feeling cool against the marble, really just cool, since the hot Texas nights when he was a kid, the chirpings sounding like buzzsaws, like a wall of plastic shuffling at high speed. This one was longer and loping though, coming in and out weeeeo ooohhhh weeoohhh, and he thought, well, oh well, there’s some music now so that’s alright, that’s just fine. He was tired now and he realised the handful of whatever he had stolen off his wife’s nightstand was probably making him drowsy, that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to take it without knowing. He realised that if he held his breath for a few moments there was something like going underwater, or the game you played as teenagers where you held your breath and banged your head against a wall until it didn’t hurt, it just sort of felt like someone was dunking you. He was getting cold. He put his hand to his shoulder, as if an invisible bullet were pulling in cold there. He dug around in his pocket and closed his fingers around a collection of similarly cold metal. In a moment of dumb joy he threw them out the window behind, just for laughs you know, thinking about maybe the other hikers and joggers below and students and stuff y’know being all “scared” or whatever then the metal rains down like confetti making a happy noise on the car hoods and they’d all relax a little. He’d never get his pension now, he thought, the noise weeeoohhhh coming up again, it was all going to the fucking feds damn, never even get to sleep in that boat house he wanted.

It’s a funny thing being about to be caught, he thought. Because right now, right here, right at this exact moment, he was free. Totally free. He could do whatever he wanted. Blow his brains out if he wanted to. That’s another thing, the fucking feds and Jews and everyone just wanted you to act exactly as they wanted and if you didn’t you were fucked. A man couldn’t even blow his own brains out in this country without it being a crime. Your ass was owned from the second they put your name on the damn birth certificate. Well at least there was a bit of freedom in the last days if only you could make it so you were living in the last days. Well, oh well, hehe, he thought, sometimes you have to speed it up, the good lord does fall asleep occasionally and you got to Wake. His. Ass. Up. Otherwise things might never change. He thought about Martin Luther King and him coming out on that balcony in that scummy hotel in Tennessee and not knowing what’s coming, not seeing the guy in the bomber jacket ducking through the weeds, just coming out for a newspaper or something. What was the headline on that? Prolly someone selling a lamp, an old pair of jeans, or something, and they didn’t know their jeans would get so famous when they were on the newspaper old MLK got shot with. But that’s just the thing, you don’t know you’re about to be made a big fuckin deal of, the headlines kinda only temporary or changeable like that, and he thought, if he just played his cards right, he’d maybe get fucked not in the huge historical way but just the regular way one could only hope for.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Casey Henry is currently a PhD candidate in English at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He has had plays performed in New York City, and written for periodicals like The Huffington Post and LA Weekly.

On the grass with our heads together under a Port Jackson fig tree that is trying to fill the sky. I slip the camera out of my pocket and take a photograph of the moment.

Embarrassed smiles as naked we straighten the crumpled bed sheet. She leaves the room for the bathroom and while she is gone I feel around for the camera and take a photo of the bare bed. She comes back in after the flash has lit the dark and frowns and I say sorry and shrug and put the camera away but want to take a photo of this moment too.

It is early morning when the call comes. I hang up. At first I do not remember but I remember and take a photo of me having hung up. I get dressed and tell her I will come back soon and call her if it is not soon.

Sunlight makes the bright room glow almost neon.

I pull stray hair that isn’t mine or that of anybody I know off my clothes. Freed from heads and caught on the wind only to stick to me. I shake out my scarf and pick off a single short hair dark like mine dark like the hair on my head and on my body.

I can only think of a chest open with ribs splintered.

Body. I give thought to this simple word body. Think what it means and think about my body in this hard plastic chair and his body and the bodies around his body trying to fix the body that he has partly left lungs open to the world.

The surgeon holds it in her hand. Holds this piece in her hand still warm and carved off bloody chest open and puts it on a steel tray that reflects the light as white as hell.

Brain asleep chest open kept alive by the wires and the secret thoughts of machines. Chest open to the air and rib bones splintered under the electric saw. Lung piece carved off like leg ham. Skin sluiced and pegged back to show inside. A finger quivers then knee caps twitch and a part of him that is being carried away for biopsy. Chest open with a radio on. Her favourite channel because the hum helps the surgeon think as she operates. Music and ads about sales and talkback help when there is a chest open before her like a meal. Alien light from somewhere else lighting the chest cavity. Assistants breathing into their masks staunch bleeding and monitor the body with a chest open and time on watches while their coats become dappled with blood from the body of the man. Their telling of weekend stories among the electronic beep of life and radio music because it is a job for them while this body is open.

Flecks of sweat glitter on my fingertips. There is pressure on my bladder and my feet are cold. An eyelash caught on the left breast of my shirt. I brush it off and want a god that blows a distant wind to whisper a prayer to. I want a small god like a kitchen corner Hindu deity to reject and be mad at if I must be mad. I hope I do not need to be mad. Damp under the underarms. Heart alive in my chest circulating blood. The sound of wind at the window.

Chest open. Oxygen is fed into the working lung while this man this unconscious body of a man remains in deepest sleep.

I feel the rush of impulse. I dry my hands on my jeans and tug my thoughts back from the room and slip the camera out of its cover and take a photo of this moment. I think of taking a photo of the moment in which I take a photo of the moment. I scroll through the other photos I have taken to take my mind off what I am thinking and think about taking a photo of me scrolling through the moments I have taken photos of.

A nurse calls my name and I follow her to an office where she stands beside a cluttered desk and tells me news that is not good and asks me if I have other family I need to tell and if she can help do that. I nod and say that will be nice and I slip the camera out of its case.

I walk by the highway past car lots with flags fluttering and words in fluoro paint painted across the windshields of the cars to my home a long way from here but I am walking.

We crowd around the coffee table. I am watched from eye corners while they pour drinks and spill alcohol wetting the tablecloth. I smell sweet dope and one of my friends smokes with another friend on the balcony. They talk for my benefit and I join in where I can. They are here for me and I want to tell them it is not needed and to go away home. One of them proposes a toast and I put my hand over my eyes while we touch glasses. I take a photograph of us friends here in the starkness of my living room. After glasses have been emptied I say to them I am leaving for a while going away and they go quiet and I take a photo of the glasses and bottles of grog on the table.

Late night a friend pulls me out of the flat and down the stairs and we talk under a street light. I have my hands in my pockets and he talks in my face. I nod but have left the camera upstairs so I tell my friend to wait and that I will come back but he says forget it.

When the others have left we sit in silence while the television plays. Finally she says she may not be here when I come back if I do this and we both let this breathe for a moment. I ask her what she wants me to do then. Hurt she says she thought I was different to this. I sniff and clear my nose and touch the area of my chest where I imagine my lungs to be. Then I take the camera out of its pouch and take a photo of this.

She says to me what the fuck are you doing put it away so I get up and pull the suitcase off the top of the cupboard and open it up on the floor. Halfway through packing I take a photo.

In the morning I lean my backpack against my suitcase in the hallway. She calls me a coward she says this is a cowardly act. She watches as I take a photo of me being cowardly. She says I think I am justified now in taking these bullshit little pictures. I say yes probably now I suppose.

I sit at a sooty table on the roof of a Saigon hotel with sweat rolling down my calves. The only other people up here are a smiling Chinese couple in blazers and matching sunglasses and a bartender polishing glasses. I sip at a perspiring gin and tonic with a wedge of lime that the bartender squeezed over then dropped into the drink. While I cannot see them I can hear the swarms of scooters twenty floors down. The sounds of their horns rise up like the wailing of damned. Somewhere up here is a pool. I am aware of the splash of a stroke a kick or the crackle of water hitting pavement as a swimmer climbs out to dry off. The wind whips in every direction and most of the other buildings are squat and out of sight so it seems like I am on the rooftop of a skyscraper in hell.

What Saigon calls to mind I have not found here. Saigon Saigon. Ho Chi Minh they call it now as if it were the man with the beard of wisps. Maybe that is why I have not found smoky bars with lanterns or Vietnamese women in traditional dress and make up maybe that is somewhere else. Maybe it is Hollywood. The sky is a pure grey wall of dull aluminium light that does not look like ever parting for the sun that I can barely open my eyes against. I make a mental note to buy sunglasses off a walking street vendor. I breathe hot air deep into my chest. Neon lights burning through the dark and paper parasols. I tinkle the ice now small slivers the shape of tiny canoes in my drink. Singapore Slings I think and think that maybe I am confusing Saigon with Singapore. If so I have been wrong this entire time but I am here. I wonder why the fuck I have come and remember to take a photo I take a photo.

The Chinese couple sit only a few tables away. If I spoke they would hear.

A blast of air blows across the hotel rooftop and rattles the umbrellas and attempts to uproot the decorative plants. I finish my drink and take a photograph and turn back to the bartender in black tie and vest to indicate that I want another. I imagine him cupping the lime and squeezing the juice into my drink before placing it in with something like love.

Smiling young women at reception tell me every morning what I should do with my day like we are old friends and they know me and I nod and say that what they have said sounds like a good idea.

I know now I like to be driven past things to get a glimpse between palm trees. Peering out of a taxi window feels more right than being in somewhere significant and led around by a guide who is unaffected by the heat and more right than knowing it in this way. A glimpse that impresses a single frame of it into my memory even before I can get my camera ready.

The Chinese woman has put her sunglasses on her head and is touching up her lipstick. I see her eye looking at me in her mirror. I squeeze the camera out of its case but before I can take a photograph the bartender arrives and replaces my empty glass with a full one.

I tell him to charge it to my room squinting into the horizon. The bartender presents a receipt for me to sign. I tell him up here it feels like I am drinking gin and tonics on Mars and look towards him but not at him and when he has no reaction I wonder if this was not a polite joke. He leaves me to the locust buzz of bikes in the wind the horns like safari birds while sweat runs down to the small of my back.

The Chinese couple stand up out of their chairs and walk past me to leave leaving me alone here. They pass and for a moment my throat feels like it has been stopped up clogged with something and a tear comes from my eye running down to my mouth salty on my lips and tongue. I take up the gin and tonic and lob it soft at the sky but firm and the gin and tonic and ice and lime wedge form a momentary arc. The glass disappears noiselessly over the edge of the building with a glint of grey light as it is sucked into the vacuum below and the gin and tonic and ice slap the tiles and the ice breaks and the lime tumbles and would be the only evidence that this has even happened and that I was ever here if I did not take a photo.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tristan Foster is a writer from Sydney, Australia.

This week just felt like last week, or was it the week before, he couldn’t remember, didn’t know. All he knew was that things weren’t good, that was what he knew for sure. He knew it with studious accuracy. It’s all the same for him now, everything is all the same. It is like an invisible sadistic giant has its thumb pressed hard against his skull, paralysing all attempted movements. He works on the waterfront at Woolloomooloo. He is security on the gate at the naval base. His job is quite simple. He authorises everybody entering or exiting the site, and does hourly foot patrols of the perimeter. He mostly works inside a box that is around the size of a toilet cubicle. It has a large window looking at the entry gate, also a closed circuit television monitoring eight different areas of the base, and a control that he is occasionally required to use, to open a boom gate for vehicles to enter the site. He always works the midnight shift, five in the afternoon until five in the morning. He rotates with another guard, Dave. Dave does the day shift. It is the sort of job that could drive a person insane, from solitude alone.

Harry’s Café De Wheels, a popular eatery for tourists and late night partygoers, is down the road. It is just a caravan, really. There are pictures hanging of celebrities eating one of their famous hot dogs or pies. Friday and Saturday nights are good. There are always lots of people around until the early hours of the morning, which is a bit better than the usual desolate Woolloomooloo streets, and eerie late night echoes of the Sydney Harbour. He has been working at the naval base for nearly two years now. It doesn’t pay so well, but that doesn’t matter too much to him, he has never really cared for money. He would spend what he made each week and that was how he liked it.

He lives alone in a sparsely furnished ninth floor art deco apartment on Victoria Street, close to his work. He has lived alone for a while now, but has been married once. It lasted nearly six years. One day his wife didn’t come home. He received the separation papers in the mail shortly after. He doesn’t look so good at the moment, looks completely worn out. His skin is pale and he’s really jumpy. Whenever an unexpected sound is made, his whole body tenses and goes into a momentary panic. Things really aren’t going so great for him.

The past few weeks when he has been walking home from work, he’s noticed a cat resting in some bushes next to the large sandstone stairway that leads up to his street. It was always alone. It seemed as if it was waiting for him there every morning. He wondered what it was doing, why it was living by those old dirty convict built stairs. There was two bowls in the small space where it laid, one with milk, the cat food. Around its neck was a relatively new looking bright red collar and it appeared healthy and well groomed.

One morning he noticed the cat was a girl, as she attempted to climb a tree. She was something quite remarkable, he thought. He decided to give her a name, Ludmilla, like the beautiful woman from the Gorky novel. That was the prettiest name he could think of, and Ludmilla was pretty. She was beautiful. He looked forward to seeing her after work. He no longer just admired her, he now sat with her. She would curl up on his knee and he stroked her. He felt good.

Three weeks later, Ludmilla no longer had a collar. She didn’t have any food or milk either. He would take her home with him. He picked her up and carried her to his apartment, when there he gave her milk. He turned on the television and sat watching the morning news, Ludmilla laid on his right leg. He felt good. He had Ludmilla, beautiful Ludmilla. Things were going well.

The days passed, turned into months, eventually seasons. One day her fur didn’t look quite as shiny. Not only her coat, but her movements as well, they had become lethargic and uninspired. He couldn’t understand it, he took her to a vet. “How long have you had Ludmilla?” “Just over a year.” “This cat is no kitten, its just ageing.” “Isn’t there something else wrong with her? How could she be changing so much? She looks like she is dying.” “That’s because she is. She’s getting older. She still has a few more years to go though.”

He started to feel bad around her. What is the use of having her around at all? I just give, all I do is give, she can’t even give me herself anymore. Only a reminder of what she once was, he just couldn’t take this betrayal. Her dependence on him had become so appalling that some days he would purposely not feed her. Her eyes were greyer than ever, her coat dull, bones protruded harshly against the fur. She was terrified all the time, had become a nervous wreck.

He took her back to where he found her, dropped her, then walked on to work. He noticed that she was following him. He just ignored her. Pathetic thing, he thought. It continued over the next few weeks, she’d be waiting for him, and would follow him to work. She’d then wait for him across the road from the naval base, and follow him home.

One afternoon, she wasn’t waiting outside his building. This was good, finally free of that cat, he thought. He took a few steps and noticed her sleeping by mailboxes. She didn’t smell so good. He stood looking at that withered dead body a moment. Probably for the best, she had nothing more to offer, he thought. He lifted her and there were thousands of insects attached to the other side of her body, eating away at her, he tried to shake them off. He carried her back inside his building, dumped her in the garbage bin, then continued on his way.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brenton Booth is a 33 year old writer of poetry and prose. He resides in Sydney, Australia. He has work in Underground Voices, Gutter Eloquence, Camel Saloon, Mad Swirl, and Shot Glass Poetry Journal. He is currently working on a novel, Deep Down with the Beasts, Birds, & Nocturnal Crawlers.

In the crystalline quiet where no one watches an iceberg calved with the shrieks and growls of any birth. A part of her shivered then rumbled then slipped, splashed into the ocean to announce an arrival with ripples of frigid blue waves.

From the raw edge of ice that remained a cylindrical tin of preserved meat emerged, a tooth cutting out from a gum or left behind by a bite taken badly. A blue stamp on one end had been smudged by time and the elements but the metal itself was unpunctured; the canister still held its shape since being dropped by some expedition long gone. It pulled free with a scraping exhale audible only to a lone skua resting at the peak of the berg — it’s body a graphite smudge like something almost but not quite erased — but the bird didn’t react as the weight of what had been exposed of the can towed free what was still in the ice. That second splash was nearly lost in the still-flowing wake from the heavier fall of the calf now floating nearby. The can dunked under quickly and bobbed as if it, too, might float, a third iceberg in miniature, then it sank — more slowly this time — to the seabed where it came to rest.

The gray and the quiet resealed the rent. Fish fed in bubbling shoals from the stirred swirls where calf and can met water while two icebergs, one large and one small, glided apart, pushed by the force of their own separation, broken but still somehow whole. Oceans away, days afterward, weeks, water lapped the smallest bit higher on some far off beach and none of the tan, dangling toes come to eke out the last scraps of summer were the wiser when a chill of northern water washed across southern skin. In the north those icebergs glistened with meltwater runnels and the slimmest suggestions of cracks that would, someday, become fissures then splits as those frozen wedges of time sweated through seasons they weren’t meant to see at temperatures they’d never known. The can rusted below in the dark and the cold until one day it burst in a thick cloud of old meat, a strange feast for scrabbling creatures who feed from the bottom and were only too glad to take it all in while what remained of the metal rusted into no more than specks in the sand and then into nothing at all.

Mornings with the light at its best and evenings when it would do, she rolled back and forth on the horizon. The swivel of the telescope her husband left for her entertainment creaked in its housing and stuck when it turned. From its southwestern extreme the brass shaft took a nudge, a firm bump of her palm, to set the device back into motion northwest. She never strayed from that range, never turned the lens skyward to take in the stars or look back toward Europe or closer at hand across the blank slate of Greenland, that near-continent whose raw edge she occupied in her waiting.

The Esquimaux boy and girl brought her breakfast with tea brewed from leaves long gone stale but so far from the shops and the mongers she had been left with no other choice. And her husband, she knew, endured worse, was by then rationing the last dregs of weak coffee among tired men if luck had stayed on their side; if not they were scraping up lichen and stewing old leather for broth.

Or, dare she dream, were already on their way south, toward her coast, toward those compounding lenses arranged one after another with her own eye at the far end of the world’s gaze.

She had not spoken more than instructions in days: how to cook, how to clean, how to arrange her chair for the optimal frozen view of the sea from the windows of that lightly adapted — insulated, though you’d never know it, for God — fishing shack. She read but her books and her papers were old, threadbare as the castaway trousers she wore for warmth after the way her skirts lifted the hems of her husband’s left behind parka to let in the cold during her first misguided days on that shore: if the women in the south knew what was out there, how cold it can be in the world, they would all wear trousers themselves; they would strangle the dressmakers with whalebone and hoops, even the most highborn and coldblooded ladies. And she could not help but wish to be reading instead her husband’s own journal, the log of his excursion across the ice to the Pole.

She had not spoken more than instructions to her makeshift Esquimaux household, her wish their command, but the rejection of her desire to join the expedition still stung: she was not man enough as a woman, her husband would not hear of it, would not take the request to his backers — he’d be laughed from the Society, he’d said to her face after he’d finished laughing in it himself. There was no room for women apart from those natives so often mistaken for men on the vast empty span of the ice. No room for her stories in the serious white pages of the Society and its magazine, no room for the presence of a feminine touch, a weak female body, to diminish the pleasure of mounting the Pole. It means less, her husband admitted, if you can do it, too.

So she waited, marking the edge of the already-conquered, the no longer a feat. She watched the boy and the girl and their brown-skinned parents struggle with the mechanisms of her modern kitchen transported north, her parlor assembled as if she were in Philadelphia or Boston or Cleveland and the wives of other men might come calling at any moment expecting fresh tea. They knew how the gas cooker worked, her wild housemates. She’d seen them use it with the same confidence they brought to her phonograph, laughing and dancing and singing along in empty sounds she mused, despite herself, might in fact be purer music.

They knew but forgot or refused to employ it and served her raw fish tasting still of the sea and the ice and of the dark distance between the empty space of the Pole and her husband with a flag poised to fill it and the long shaft of his telescope left to her on that coast where foreign air trapped long ago between lenses held the world closer but still out of touch. She sent that fish back to the kitchen, asked them to scorch it until it tasted of dry land at least, and as she awaited a second try at civilization she turned the telescope southward until as always it stuck.

That man with a camera, as strange as the last group of southerners to pass over the ice — the ridiculous trinkets they offered for sealskins and furs, baubles and gewgaws that wouldn’t get a man through a cool day in summer never mind cold winter depths. They thrust their shiny toys with wide-eyes, worked up as children finding their first clutch of edible eggs, as eager for a pat on the head.

Look what we have! Look how shiny, how new!

And that one, the camera-man, interrupting each act of the day with the stab of his lens, the rattling whir of his machine on its three wooden legs — a mechanical creature that couldn’t walk let alone run, as impotent on the ice as its owner if Allakariallak and his family lost interest in humoring him. If hospitality wasn’t their way.

Now, here, in that trading post where Allakariallak had exchanged skins for tools many times — for his rifle, for bullets, for steel fishing hooks, a scarf for his wife so brightly colored it seared their eyes and had to be trailed from their sledge frame to wash out in the sun — here the camera-man mimed ridiculous things. Play with the phonograph, he suggested with wild gestures from behind the lens; crank its arm and marvel at its weak southern music. He urged Allakariallak to gawk pop-eyed as those earlier white men had done, to gawk with the void gaze of a seal fallen under the club. Then he took up a phonograph record behind the camera and pretended to bite it, to make a meal of its wax, of the sad songs contained in its grooves. He bounced from one foot to the other like a monkey Allakariallak had seen once in a book in that same trading post and despite himself the northerner couldn’t keep from laughing inside his furs, he couldn’t help taking up a phonograph disk of his own and testing it with his teeth to mock the man-child’s routine. Around the room and just outside the camera’s view, Allakariallak’s family laughed as he popped out his eyes, played up the ruse of encountering music for the very first time, and asked without asking, “Who are these strange men from the south? Will they never grow into their bodies?”

The camera-man laughed along, set down his own disk and cranked grinding gears inside the machine until its brittle film ran through and pulled free. While the man rushed to prepare a new reel Allakariallak stood, inspected the shelves of the trading post’s wares: the matches in boxes, the hats knitted with stripes, the rifles and whip-thin fishing rods. Amongst them all in a jumble of harpoon heads too old and worn out to be sharpened again he found a strip of sun-washed walrus bone on a strap of the same animal’s hide, two oblong eye-shades bearing bleached umber marks he had not seen in years.

Those shades were his father’s once, out on the ice, where Allakariallak had learned to hunt and to fish, to make a block home and a family. They were his father’s when his father was lost with one of his uncles in a year so far back Allakariallak hardly remembered it now, but he remembered those markings, those shades, and as one white man laughed by the cashbox and another laughed wrestling the mechanical beast with its insistent, intrusive glass eye, Allakariallak was no longer laughing. He saw his father’s body out on the ice and saw pale fingers picking him free of his eye-shades and furs, releasing the last wisp of warmth from his long-frozen flesh. He saw southern fingers leaving his father’s whole story behind, trampling it with their own tales and bringing back no more than they could salvage for coins to be carried away. He saw his own uncles a season ago in the same trading post, speaking into the horn of another man’s phonograph, telling his family’s stories in exchange for the convenience of foreign objects and he wondered — too little, too late — where those stories were taken and swallowed by what hungry ears.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steve Himmer is the author of the novel The Bee-Loud Glade and the ebook short The Second Most Dangerous Job In America. He teaches at Emerson College, and edits Necessary Fiction.

Visions of roast chicken and lamb chops and T-bone steaks and lobster bisque and sticks of saffron crumbling into curry mixture, wrapping round the vegetables, gold-dusting the meat.

He blinks them away, scrunches his eyes like the fists of a fighter. Knocks them out, one by one, those daydreams of slaking the onsetting starvation.

He doesn’t need any distractions. Doesn’t want any.

His mind doesn’t, anyway.

That great bone-caged glob of grey matter, that summer house for his soul.

But his gut – his tummy, his stomach, his belly, his food-processing plant – it rumbles. Noise of, at first, the needle rip-tiding across paper churning out from a seismographic machine. Pictures of scientists gathered round studying it. White-coated figures – strange and sexless wedding cake dolls – holding a coven meeting whilst they check on the charts.

Another distraction. Another in-mind movie competing for attention with the thing that’s heart of focus for him now. He shoos it away. Holds finger to lips and attempts to becalm it to gag it to make it sod off.

It doesn’t.

They don’t, those white-coated fuckers. They stand there, not hearing nor heeding his outcries for silence, faces growing instead in consternation at the ink-marks that spool out on the seismograph page. Over their shoulders he peers, and can see same thing they do. The epicentre is far nearer than any of them dared think.

The noise – the rumble, grumble, sonic jumble – it levitates, it rises, but sinks deeper at the selfsame time. The needle-scratch is barely audible beneath it.

Still swinging his fists at all thoughts of mealtime, he has only his feet left free to try and trample this scientific worry with now.

He does not need these distractions.

He does not want these distractions.

He has only one thing that he wants on his mind.

Because of that one thing, he hasn’t eaten for days.

Hasn’t drunk much either.

Has barely slept.

If he sleeps, he reasons, he’ll miss his dreams. He’ll wake up without knowing quite what they were.

If he sleeps, he’ll waste the time he needs to spend wanting this one special thing.

If he eats, he will get sidetracked by flavour. By cacophony of tastes all consumed in combination, by bliss of full plate, and then of empty plate and full belly.

But that belly, being empty, is, paradoxically, the thing that is currently pissing him off. It attempts once again to invade his headspace with an image-crammed menu. Spreads a chequered tablecloth out and lays down its favourite heures d’oeuvres, sets down platters of crispy duck, of roast pork belly with fat rich and salt-glistening.

It turns the volume of its rumble up higher. Deeper.

The scientists, faces gone ghost-white as their coats, scream out, then scatter and scarper. The nuts and bolts of the seismograph shake loose and rattle out of their appointed sockets, end up break-dancing – freestyle, manic – upon the slowly cracking laboratory floor.

His eyes clamped so tightly shut right now that this earthquake’s beastly dub-step locates and pressure-points his temples. Heaves and swells against the borders of his brain.

He struggles now to call up the object, the subject of his wanting.

He wants her in his head, and her alone.

No, he wants her in his company.

His presence.

Her, present.

Here.

No, not here.

He wants her in a desert island setting. On an atoll, somewhere. Just the pair of them, in utter and majestic separation from the world. Toes trailing slick and gentle patterns in the unanticipated clarity, in the ice-floe blue, the mineral green of the lagoon. Fish that trace spirograph circles around their ankles, fins tickling at their flesh. Rare species – colours thieved from undiscovered rainbows – to which he won’t give much attention, because he’ll save the bulk of that for her.

He wants that. Urgently.

But the quaking, jungle-drumming rumble of his belly doesn’t falter, doesn’t stop. The laboratory has crumbled to the ground now, is lost entirely in the grave-space of its foundations, and, around that ruin, he watches as other buildings in the city begin to wave and bend and tumble. Roads collapse. Bridges buckle. Restaurants explode.

Again, the menu that his stomach dreams of barges rough into his focus. The grumble of his gut has grown to such a vicious clearness that it almost seems to form the names of the dishes it desires to devour.

Steak tartare.

Monkfish.

Oysters.

Crème Brûlée.

He doesn’t want to be distracted.

His stomach doesn’t care.

Spaghetti alla carbonara.

Paella.

Burritos.

Risotto.

Butternut Squash soup (with crusty bread).

The rumble, the pulse, the voice of this other want, of this un-needed other hunger, it moves beyond the city. Moves over to the sea.

He doesn’t want to be distracted, but he cannot fail to watch. The ocean jumps at first with just a little ripple, but this small splash curls upwards soon and swiftly forms itself into harbinging beginnings of a tidal wave.

Struggling now to bring her face to mind, between the recipes his gut reels forth, and the torpedo-inbound rush and threat of the tsunami.

All he wants is the freedom and the time and the space to want this one thing. Is to be left alone to want it, to enjoy it, simply, without intrusion.

He doesn’t need all this distraction.

On their atoll, on their sandcastle in the centre of the seven seas, they both look up in unison.

The wall of water sweeping closer. The great blue broom of being a part of this life, come to shift this idyll underneath a rug, come to make sure that he forgets, and remembers it was never real.

Grumble, growing ever closer to language, is carried both beneath the wave and within the chariot of foam that crests its peak.

It doesn’t matter if he does not want to be distracted.

The slamming hulk of navy blue is nearly on them now.

A few specks of water falling, redolent of nothing more than lightest rain. A quick shower.

His eyes screw down tighter.

In his soul’s summer house, the lights are all switched off.

Blackness.

Blankness.

He is not sure what to think.

He is not sure if he can think anything at all.

Then, a voice.

Still enough of a trace of gruffness, of grumble, to it for him to discern its origin, its source.

Hey you, up there!

‘Yes,’ he replies, tentatively.

Why the hell am I this hungry?

He shrugs. Then, recalling the darkness, speaks: ‘I don’t know.’

It is a weak answer. He shuffles his feet, uncomfortable. As if by way of reprimand, he stubs his toe on the edge of some unseen and unknown object.

You must know. You are the controlling force. I look to you for everything.

‘You do?’

This could, of course, be the tiredness talking, but he is genuinely perplexed.

Not out of choice, perhaps. But out of necessity, yes.

‘I don’t know what to tell you. Are you looking for an apology?’

Again, he is aware this response is shonky, not what’s being searched for, but he keeps himself still. Tries not to wince or whinge or gripe about his hurting toe.

It is not my place to ask for an apology. I simply want a reason, an answer to this question: Why am I so hungry?

He stands there, silent, thinking it over.

He folds his arms, cautiously.

He thinks.

He strokes his chin, carefully.

He thinks.

For the first time in days he is without distraction, but he cannot come up with an answer.

He is sure, however, that replying back ‘I don’t know’ will just not do at all.

He repeats the question aloud to himself, to see if that will stimulate the problem-solving portion of his brain.

‘Why am I so hungry?’

Quiet, for a beat, and then his belly speaks.

You’re hungry too? I thought that was my cross alone to bear.

‘No. I am hungry too.’

He finds a little relief in admitting that aloud.

And yet, you carry on dismissing all entreaties I make to you for food. Why do this, if we are both of us hungry?

It is a fair question, he knows, but he feels his stomach simply will not understand if he attempts to explain.

Explain what? his tummy says.

Taken aback, he stays speechless for a moment. Then opens mouth and talks into the lightless space.

‘There are different types of hunger.’

Pensive, his belly prompts him: Go on.

‘You want food. A basic, essential form of sustenance. You can dress it up however you like, and label it with fancy French names, but still all you really need to cure your hunger is to eat.’

Agreed. But is that not also the case for you?

‘It is.’

He pauses, considering how best to word it.

‘But there is another hunger in me, which feels so much more pressing, so much more important, and yet which cannot be so quickly or so simply satisfied. It is the kind of hunger that a man may spend his entire youth – sometimes longer – cultivating, refining, harbouring – and then, when it is at its fullest, it is the kind of hunger which overpowers all others, which ignores the rest in its own quest to be sated. It finds the one thing it wants most – does not often need the manifold options of a menu – and demands that its owner pursues that one thing above and before all other things. You talk about a reason, and this is all I can say. My hunger is my reason, however stripped of reason that hunger may in itself appear, and to compromise it with other appetites seems like nothing but unnecessary delay, a waste of my all-too-finite time.’

Again, silence in the summer house.

Again, he doesn’t move, still digging his bruised toe into the comfort of the carpet.

The voice of his gut interrupts his musing.

I understand, I think.

He rocks back a little upon hearing this. He had not expected that to be the case.

Yes, I understand this idea of hunger you cling to. This need to chase one thing above all others. It is strange, for sure. It is strange, and, as you say, not properly within reason. Selfish, even. And stupid. And blinkered, certainly. Yet, the fidelity of your pursuit is touching. The single-mindedness of purpose that you have, as you say, cultivated, is even kind of noble. Albeit in a quaintly ridiculous way. But, yes, I do understand.

He stands there, breath coming out through a widening smile.

Headache easing.

Fighter’s fists of eyes steadily unclenching.

Lightness returning to the house that he rents beside the now-calm mass of the sea.

Having said all that, I think you should at least eat a sandwich. After all, I’m still fuckin’ starving down here.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dan Micklethwaite has a postgraduate qualification in English literature and currently resides in Yorkshire, UK. When he isn’t writing, he’s usually telling himself that he should be. His stories have been published in Ink Sweat and Tears, BULL: Men’s Fiction, Birdville, with another forthcoming in NFTU. A further selection of poetry and prose is available on his blog: http://smalltimebooks.blogspot.co.uk/

It’s true that I worked for them during the second purge. It’s not my intention to excuse what I’ve done, though God knows my crimes, if crimes is even the proper word, are far less grievous than those committed by others, the ones now called patriots. As for those maimed by our activities, they will have to speak, if they are still capable of speaking, for themselves. I’m responsible for my actions, and my actions alone. I’ve been promised immunity. But from what? And by whom? I don’t even know who my captors are, only that they have instructed me to commit to writing a true and faithful account of my role in the second purge.

*

I suppose I should start with the Aarspeth case. Upon first glance, the file seemed typical, Aarspeth having taken certain actions which, in the eyes of the Messiah Detectives, deemed him suspect and unreliable. I was to follow him, trace his communications, and take all due and proper precautionary action should I deem him about to divulge information that would force the agency to reveal, in the process of recovering that information, its existence. For it was true that at this point the agency was still a shadow operation, whose power derived not from visible action but rather from, as they claimed in white paper after white paper, strategic abstinence.

Like I said, there was, upon first reading, nothing atypical about the Aarspeth file. As customary, it was delivered beneath my door during the night. As usual, stamped in blue ink with a time code indicating precisely when it should be opened. A little heftier than previous envelopes, perhaps, which only whetted my curiosity, even as I felt a noose tightening around my neck, invisible, its rope threading out through my window, down the street, into the sewers, and up again though the vents into the offices of the Messiah Detective Agency where, tied to a heavy iron handle emerging from the floor (much like I imagine an old train switch lever might look) it awaits the yank that will snap my neck.

But all this is speculation. About the rope, the noose. The facts are much less melodramatic. I opened the file at the time indicated by the time code, and began to read. As usual, I jotted down the major points on my notepad and mapped out, roughly, my plan of action. The file was sparsely written, in the minimalist corporate style fashionable during that time. I put the file back in the envelope, poured myself a drink, flipped through the sports pages of the local newspaper, and went to bed. It was only later, sometime deep into the night after being awoken by a sharp noise that seemed to come from within the apartment itself, that I realized what it was that bothered me about the file.

*

The second purge, unlike the first, was less joyous. The public hangings and beheadings were glorious the first time through, accompanied as they were with the high rhetoric and the music. They were spectacles that meant something, confirming a certain iron-fisted tendency of thought that had crept into the minds of even the most liberatory of our thinkers. And yet, clearly, the first purge had not done its duty. Five years of gagging violence had still not rooted out the primal attachment to wrong ideas. The second purge would need to purge the purgers, and that’s where it began. All the architects and heroes of the initial purge—Maria, Sergio, Tomás, Annabel, Toni, and the others—were of course disposed of first, their bruised faces the last image-memory any of us have of them. I remember (and even disclosing this is a risk, but I am already doomed) walking along the riverbank with Sergio several days before he disappeared, sharing a cigarette, when, in passing, he mentioned a name to me, which I at first thought (mistakenly) to the be the title of a book: Aarspeth. I remember that the cherry trees were in bloom, so it must have been spring, even though we tightened our collars against a cold wind.

“Aarspeth, yes,” I said to Sergio, “but it is you for whom I fear. What about you?”

“Oh, there’s no hope for me!” he said, brightly as if saying it might protect him, putting his hand upon my shoulder as he always did to indicate that our conversation had reached a point beyond which it could go no further. I suppose that’s why we had remained friends for so long: we knew when to draw the line, and when not to cross the line, while others drew lines only to cross them.

I was the one to cut down Sergio’s body, days later, hanging from a cord not much thicker than a shoelace, from a lamppost at the edge of the city park. His trousers were bunched down around his ankles, his hands tied behind with his own bandanna behind his back. There were scuff marks on the rusted lamppost pole where his heels had kicked. Tomás and I carried his body to Maria’s apartment (that smelled of lemons) nearby, and then onto the hospital in the backseat of her car, the air conditioning on full force, him laying there like the flesh that he was.

In the hospital lobby, which stank of formaldehyde and burnt rubber, two men dressed as orderlies grabbed Maria and quickly taped-over her mouth and dragged her away down a fluorescent hallway. Tomás and I fled through the smeared glass doors back out into the parking lot, but as we ran (past the very car that held Sergio’s body) they overtook Tomás, as well, and would have taken me but for his fighting, which delayed them until I disappeared into the darkness, the night offering its own strange sort of bindings, the harsh hospital lights receding in the distance, the cool blank fields smelling of night dirt.

The next night Toni doesn’t answer his phone at first, and then later he does, except it’s not him, and I wonder if it’s true like the rumors suggest that a call can be traced so quickly through the heavy wire lines.

Which is to come back to what gave me pause about the Aarpseth file: it was, as I noted right away, a little heftier than the others, something I first attributed to the stock of the paper, which felt slightly heavier in my hands.

In other words, a forgery.

*

As the principal architect of the second purge, Aarspeth was a despised (if largely unseen except for the fact of his name) man, widely known to be the author of the so-called “Gutter Articles,” slang for not only where the executions took place, but how. Despite the blood that flowed and splashed in the streets as a result of these orders, Aarspeth, it was suggested, was really more of an idea man than a man of action. He was not associated with the original junta, but was recruited later from university, where prior to the purges his published critiques of how power is rooted primarily in language and subtle but persistent linguistic “codes” earned him wide acclaim among the very intelligentsia his policies would eventually exterminate.

“What does it mean for one to be a prophet of his own fate?” Aarspeth had asked in one of his rare post-Gutter public appearances, as if seeking the answer for himself. “With modernity, we enter the age of the production of ourselves as the Other, do we not? All the endless commentaries about the rights of the Self are thus mere folly.” This brief clip (he seemed to be speaking at a soccer stadium at night, harshly lit, his glasses speckled with rain, the sound of explosions or thunder cracking through his words) circulated briefly, and then disappeared, and returned as an extended version that was so over-copied and degraded that Aarspeth’s face (if it even was Aarspeth at this point) appeared as a Cubist, pixilated thing. And then, enigmatically: “As for hate speech, all speech is hate,” or something like that, as an explosion so powerful it rocks the camera and interrupts his last few words before the screen goes static and then black.

And so yes: it’s true that beginning sometime during the second purge there was no “good” side anymore, nor “bad” side. All sides were equally bad, with the difference being that the more powerful side exacted a more crippling, terrible form of badness upon the less powerful. As I’ve said, at that point the Messiah Detectives were just becoming what came to be known as the Messiah Detectives; two words that did not yet carry the weight or burden of history. They had no context. It was just another shadowy name, mistaken by the resistance as opposed to the junta and mistaken by the junta as opposed to the resistance.

In truth, my fate was sealed as soon as I opened the envelope, and saw his name. Whether or not the papers were forged was, I came to realize in the following weeks, immaterial.

*

The envelope contained an invitation to a small, private party where Aarspeth would be in attendance. Taped to the card was a simple silver ring that I was to wear on my right hand, with instructions to present the invitation card to the doorman with my ringed hand, making sure that my left hand remain gloved and to my side. The ring, apparently, would allow my entry without being searched. I was to seek out Aarspeth quickly, shoot him dead, allow myself to be swarmed and captured, confess that I, acting as the long arm of the Messiah Detectives, had murdered Aarspeth for no other reason than to demonstrate that it could be done, and await my rescue by another person, whom the instructions referred to as an “inside” man.

The plan went . . . according to plan, as they say. I was ushered into an elegant home, down a long narrow hallway that spilled open to a large ballroom lit by chandeliers that cast everything in a gold hue. On the walls hung enormous red paintings that looked to have been made out of splashed blood. Women in dresses and men in tuxedos drank champagne and marveled at what appeared to be a mummy in a glass box near the middle of the room. One entire wall, floor to ceiling, appeared to be an aquarium, but it turned out to contain no fish but rather a wooden chair with leather straps placed on a short ledge near the top of the tank, just above the water line.

In the glass, I saw a reflection of Aarspeth behind me, wearing a red vest as I had been told he would. He too was looking at the tank, at the chair. Without hesitation—before he could speak to me—I took out my gun, turned to him, and shot him twice in the neck. He stepped back, fixed his fox eyes on me, both hands at his own throat, and collapsed in a sputter and gurgle of blood and bone. Within seconds the pistol had been knocked from my hand, skittering like a spin-the-bottle across the wood floor and coming to rest beneath a chair. I was seized by two men, then three, one of whom (wearing black gloves that smelled strongly of chemicals) pulled out a handful my hair. Another put his palm on my face and pushed my head back with violence. They wrestled me to a small paneled door that I hadn’t noticed before, punched me through it, and then really began to lay into me until I was on my back on the floor. One of them took me by the ankles and dragged me further down the hall and through another doorway into a small room lit by candles.

“The chair,” the one with the gloves said to another.

“The chair,” the other replied.

*

My accounting of the Aarspeth imbroglio now catches up to the present time. I remain in the room with candles, writing this on my knees, the open notebook before me on the floor. For some reason, I feel that I should use my remaining words not to speculate about the meaning of the chair, or my fate in it above the blue aquarium, if that is indeed what awaits me, but rather on Aarspeth himself, whose life I took. My mind goes back to that degraded video tape of Aarspeth speaking at the stadium laying out in modernist abstractions his structuralist vision for the total control of our society, and the hints that he gave regarding the coming “third purge” which would be so annihilating that it would usher in a new Enlightenment.

I struggle to recall the frames in question from that short video and what I remember most—as Aarspeth spoke with surprising force in the heavy rain—was the bright lights, lights that reminded me of a soccer stadium at night. But even at the time of original broadcast I felt there was something about those lights, something terribly familiar. Now, in the clarity of forced isolation, I understand that the lights had been added in later, post-filming, and that Aarspeth had delivered his speech in the rain in complete and utter darkness, as if the absence of light itself prefigured the barren hopelessness of our land. I imagined the rain itself coming down so heavily as to choke Aarspeth’s words in his throat, and that his colleagues at the university whom he had betrayed, whose carpeted living rooms he had sat in before it all went bad, trading flirting jokes with the flirting daughters who, were they fortunate, had not been raped before being flayed and murdered in the abandoned gymnasium, and how even then, before the purges, he understood this about himself: that he was the sort of man to betray those closest to him for the chance to be a part of history.

If Aarspeth had indeed given his speech in the dark (the bright lights added later, perhaps to give the moment the thrust and force of an epochal “event”) then how had his face been illuminated, post-production? It seems to me now, as I realize that the Messiah Detectives have betrayed me and that there will be no inside man to rescue me, that somehow everything hinges on this question. For if those who made the videotape were truly able to manufacture light—enough wattage to illuminate the black-hole darkness of Aarspeth—then what else might they be capable of making, both of this world and not-of this world?

*          *          *

Hours have passed. One of the men who dragged me here—the one who pulled my hair—enters the room and sits in the empty chair across the table. His left eye droops. His hands are large. He seems all undercurrent, and no current. There’s a pull of gravity around him and I’m sure that were he to remain seated for hours eventually the objects in the room would all end up closer to him.

Perhaps he is, after all, a fellow Messiah Detective, the so-called inside man. He seems to be waiting for me to speak first, but what to say? These thoughts only last a moment, and are quickly replaced with more disturbing ones.

For I come to suspect—and then at last to understand with certainty—that the man across from me is, in fact, the one whom I was sent to kill. Writing this, as I am, in his very presence, I can hardly bring myself to print his name. There he sits, his hands now clasped together resting on the table as if to signal that he is about to make or has already made a decision.

Aarspeth.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nicholas Rombes writes for The Rumpus, The Oxford American, and Filmmaker Magazine, where he serves as a contributing editor and writes the Blue Velvet Project. His work has appeared in The Believer, Wigleaf, Exquisite Corpse, and other places. He teaches in Detroit, Michigan, and can be found here.

In the belly of the city’s slum, on Christopher Street outside the Conservatoire’s window, Mark Crawford stood listening as the girl played piano. One hand held a paper bag while the other toyed idly with his ivory glasses. It may have appeared to others that the music had simply stopped the man in his tracks, had arrested his momentum homeward and halted his thoughts, but in truth Mark’s tracks had since waking led him only here, where every week at such a time the Chestertons’ eldest daughter practiced her scales. Why else would he be found in the belly of the slum? The window was half-closed, half-revealing a room dappled in sunlight, and was as he had anticipated it to be, stood, then recently risen, to measure the day’s coming pleasures against a newly crisp sky, eyed between the thick folds of his bedroom curtains. Coupled with Miranda’s youthful playing, the light recalled to Mark his own childhood, one of leaves held vein to glass in early summer, of stems transversally cut and diagrammed, of the scent of chlorophyll, wild flowers, pencil lead. Across the street, a young man stood listening. His eyes were closed and it seemed as if he too had been arrested, as if the music had seized and gently placed this thin body where it now inclined. Despite the untrained tapping of his fingers, he remained entirely still, offering the illusion that it was the wall moving and not the unclean hand.

Mark, who was half-talented at most things, also played, doing so with the same moderate success with which he had once danced under a once-renowned but now forgotten director; to wit, with frequent scandal and mild acclaim. For if he hadn’t the patience to master any single artform, Mark thrived in the presence of beautiful genius. It was with obvious delight, therefore, that he had gained the company of the Chestertons, who had themselves experienced a veritable explosion in popularity not long after (and perhaps due to) Mark’s appearance. It appeared for a while as though today’s luxurious youth – the last barricade before the gates of Olympus, it seemed – would succumb to their version of Rachmaninov’s Marguerites. Of course, the fretful glamour of pop music and celebrity weeklies soon eclipsed their chart debut, their breakfast show appearance, having quivered but lightly under their nimble fingers. It all happened in a single year, it was all indistinguishable: the Chestertons secured an all-but-pantheonic career and, in large due to the appeasement afforded by said near-miss to Mr. Crawford’s swollen and tender ego, the couple cemented a friendship with Mark.

As the girl finished today’s scales, Mark ruffled through the sashay (a Chesterton affectation) and removed the single remaining cherry before shaking the bag free and kicking it lightly aside. Tonguing the pip, he inspected his porte monnaie and noted with regret that hunger would triumph over his disdain for the area’s eateries.

“Beckett was my big dog,” dit l’Idiot, sans même se présenter, “I loved that shit in University.”

Philippe avait complètement oublié le livre qui dépassait de sa poche, dont l’idiot s’empara et regarda fixement.

“Ok,” lui dit Philippe, pensant simplement, “ai-je bien fermé la porte?”

“Oh yeah,” continua l’Idiot après un instant, caressant le livre, “I wrote an essay on it. You read that book he wrote on Proust?”

Philippe hocha la tête.

“What you getting?”

“Pardon?”

“What are you drinking? Coffee?”

Philippe hocha la tête à nouveau.

“Two ristrettos please, my petal, my blossom.” Philippe ne savait pas si l’Idiot avait rajouté cette plaisanterie malencontreusement proustiennne à l’intention de la serveuse ou bien pour lui-même. Quoi qu’il en soit, Philippe faisait mine de farfouiller dans ses poches, à la recherche de la monnaie qu’il n’avait pas. L’Idiot l’en empêcha en payant pour eux deux. Philippe, sans se rendre compte, dit “Thanks, man,” mais ça sonnait faux: il avait parlé trop rapidement, d’un ton trop bas et avec un accent bien étrange.

Ce fut à ce moment-là que l’Idiot remarqua enfin le manque d’intérêt de Philippe lui portait, mais au lieu de tourner les talons avec son café ou même de dire courtoisement “au revoir” et de s’en aller, l’Idiot recommença à parler à Philippe avec encore plus de verve. Il lui semblait que le désir de l’Idiot, de communiquer, d’être
amical, lui permetterai d’echaper à tout possible malentendu entre eux. Philippe décida de rester immobile, sans rien dire, sans rien faire, tel un sosie muet de lui-même. Après un silence gené, l’Idiot lui rendit son livre en disant: “Well, listen man, enjoy your reading. No worries about the coffee: my treat.”

L’Idiot lui tendit la main, mais remarquant que celles de Philippe furent déjà pleines (un ristretto, un livre), il lui frappa légèrement l’epaule du poing et repartit vers sa table.

Philippe but son café d’un trait. “Ça va remettre mon corps en route,” pensa-t-il, “dans toute les senses du terme”” ce qui se manifesta tout d’abord par un movement vers la porte, vers le conservatoire, puis vers un restaurant. Il ne remarqua qu’au moment de partir la maitresse de l’Idiot, qui l’attendait à une table du fond. Elle arbora un sourire, digne de la dernière starlette de l’âge du jazz. “Que veut-il dire?” se demanda Philippe.

L’Idiot, en passant entre eux, éclipsa brièvement la Starlette et remarqua son sourire à son tour. Il se retourna langoureusement vers Philippe et ébaucha lui aussi un sourire pâle et désesperé en comparaison. Il dit, d’une voix faible, “yeah man.” Ils se fixèrent du regard et Philippe hocha la tête pour la dernière fois.

“Yeah man,” repondit-il à l’Idiot, jetant maintenant un regard sur la Starlette, “on est d’accord.”

Mais l’Idiot ne comprit rien.

They embraced just the once, behind the tennis club facilities. For Mark, it was a drab and lifeless affair which had, however, unfolded with vicious necessity; it was all, for him, inevitable, but really this was a truth ineluctable only by design, delicately engineered over the backgammon table, in so many bons mots.

“Your mother has quite the touch,” Mark would say to the Chestertons’ eldest, who would often attend the board games. Holding young Miranda’s delicate wrist and fixing Margaret’s gaze, he smiled and rollicked laughingly. Indeed, it was in the drawing room, in plain sight of Charles Chesterton himself, that Mark engendered this clandestine tête-à-tête. But what passed as playful flirtations, those Margaret seemed rather to endure than enjoy, stirred in Charles such pride-tempered jealousy as renews the desire for one’s spouse. He now saw his wife afresh through Mark’s horn-rimmed eyes, a gift for which he was willing to forgive the man’s crass assaults. Had this not continued for weeks, over the kitchen counter, in messages sent and gifts slyly exchanged, it may have come to little. Charles’s naiveté was not wholly unproductive, after all: together, the couple had never played as well.

The restaurant – Mark scoffed at the word’s misappropriation – was half-clean and suitably half-illuminated; both dirt and darkness had been chased behind the deadreed plants and bamboo fittings. Chairman Mao – whose delightfully well-positioned image framed the room’s clock – “as if he owned time or, worse, was time,” thought Philip – looked down upon the few remaining patrons. The painted hand of a zealot marked the seconds ticking left to right to left, holding a single copy of the Chairman’s Little Red Book. The young man abandoned what could but have been a watery soup and sidled, wriggling towards the lavatory – the frankly disgraceful state of which Mark wished away in favour of Miranda’s fingers playing music – “Miranda’s fingers,” Philip thought to distract himself from the inevitable flowing forth – and if he’d noticed the bespectacled gentleman’s entrance he did so withoutany sign of recognition. Upon the young man’s table sat a book that Mark strained himself to see. Endgame, it said. He made a memorandum to read Endgame, surmising that the raggedy fellow needed a decent conversation as much as he needed a good meal.

As the clock’s Little Red Book beat towards four p.m., Philip installed himself in the toilet. These were places – “the point between the seen and the unseen,” Philip thought – upon which the young man judged a restaurant. This particular toilet was so small as to preclude standing for effluence and when seated the young man’s knees grazed the wall; with his left hand he could touch the toilet door and with his right the restaurant’s quick release fire exit. Arms braced, he was approaching the point of evacuation when the alarm sounded – a silent fusing of wires, a catching upon the dried leaves which Mark didn’t see for snivelling at the menu, which he continued to do until, inevitably, the smoke forced itself upon his faculties. When it occurred to Mark, as it did quite rapidly, that the main entrance was blocked by fire, he dashed towards the commode’s fire exit with a heightened sense of self-preservation natural only to the truly arrogant.

The fire gained upon Philip in the following sequence: audition (alarm), olfaction (smoke); tactitian (pressure on lungs; pressure against door; water under door; water in shoes); but none of this could change his coffee-induced bowel movements. A freeflowing following quite unexpectedly, if sensibly, from the initial effluence. He could not be restrained, this was a force of nature not to be interrupted.

“We’re going to die in here, you idiot! Open the door,” the bespectacled man shouted, “if you don’t open the door, I’m bloody well breaking it down. I don’t care what you’re getting up to.” The banging on the door increased as Philip rushed to finish, seizing at the thread of waxy roll (sudden memory of tracing paper). Seeing from without, one might have noticed the young man’s hand moving along his arse crack with the regularity of the clock’s Little Red Book, then double-time, whipped on by the thrashing of the hands upon the door. But as the Book’s movement ceded to flames, as the hand stopped wiping, so too the beating beneath the young man’s left paw; Philip paused with his trousers half raised.

“Have I killed them,” he thought, “have I fucking killed them?”

The door crashed in with the combined force of three men’s gasping dash; the momentum carrying Mark and Philip (three-quarter-panted) through the escape door and out into the open air.

Margaret stood against the tree, smoking, turning it over. She had suffered the injustice of being willingly seduced. She had been seduced, willingly. Suffered. And, what’s more, having so casually cast aside their moment together, he now stood talking with Charles on the lawn. They both seemed despicably happy. Of course, she was under no illusions about the man’s intentions, towards herself or her daughter, she had understood this much after his little comment about the drain. And clearly Charles relished the competition, but she couldn’t resent him for this since all he had to do was cast his eyes about the club, with everyone watching everyone watch their wives’ white skirts. Not even the relish of indecent fondling escaped the purview of the man’s ego, by which she meant man’s ego. Never before had she raised the gumption to do it – not with the young ball boys, yacht-tanned and gym-preened, nor her colleagues, nor even the aged and sutured money spilling across the dining hall floor each night – and look how it had turned out.

“The man’s a bloody waste,” she told her daughter, “don’t trust him. You can’t even cop a feel without it being turned into some little game.”

“Don’t you love father?” her daughter had asked.

“Don’t be silly Miranda, of course I do,” and she meant it.

Philip sat at his desk, almost able to read. His kneecaps rubbed against the wall, as though the thin layers of wool and skin between the two were simply not present. At such times, when he could feel his bones, really sense their presence and weight grinding together, he knew the game was up, that he’d never get to work. “Never,” he said aloud.

Philip stood and paced across the small, cube-like room. He turned to the small window and watched his ants come and go along the sill, through the small crack, upand down the wall, from and into their obscurity. His ants, by which he assumed all ants, had a certain relentless gusto; watching them didn’t so much calm his nerves per se, but had become enough of a habit to distract him. The gap beneath the metal window frame was slight; at any one time only a single ant could pass, and even then bearing but a minimal amount of foliage or household waste. Each insect transported a mere fraction of its potential load simply because the conditions (the movement of the building over time) determined it to be so. Each day, Philip thought about widening the crack, about smashing the window entirely.

After some time he took an old coat from the hook and left, locking and checking the door twice, lest uncertainty dog-ear his entire afternoon. In the cement hallway he resolved to take coffee, a decision that for Philip’s minimal budget precluded dining, and in the cement stairway he resolved to catch the girl’s piano practice. Though he somewhat distained extravagances of vocabulary, Philip felt her to be ‘exquisite’. This word didn’t need articulating. It was a fundamental belief, like the sum of shapes which form letters, or sounds words. It occurred against his wishes; it existed prior to cognition and couldn’t care less for coffee or food.

In his pocket was a book, something he’d once taken out and had until now forgotten. Endgame: a book he recalled disliking.

It was one of the few places beyond the mole-like scrutiny of the club’s elders and she had been there quite by accident.

“What was it?” she gasped upon seeing him. “To fetch that darn second set lob, I suppose.” One could smell the bin-chute, the shower’s drainage. He stepped closer, offering a cigarette which she took and had no time to light before he kissed her. She placed her hands around his waist. He did not.

“The skirts are so short these days,” the older ladies would exclaim with each passing season, hands riding up fattened cheeks to adjust a curled hair. After the first moment passed, however, and Margaret stood panting a little, as she looked into Mark’s calm face, she understood how it was for him; she grasped perfectly the man’s desire to own her for nothing other than the owning. He cast his eyes to the drain and said only,”They should keep a lid on that.” She slapped him.

They found themselves in a jungle. Not as in the business-jargon ‘out there,’ not as in a bucolic, ex-urban stroll, but as in a place where the green swilled with violet, where bloated flora grew from the feet of trees colossally thick and tall. The heat was sickly, almost saccharine on the tongue and throat. Both men thought of jungles they had merely heard of, of pre-history. It was just the two of them, enclosed in a mass of foliage. After taking a moment to stand and open his disbelieving eyes, Mark shouteda short, sharp “hello”, billowing in the nigh-on infinite sameness. The birds shivered around them – there were birds, at least – and the insects gathered in agitation. Given the improbability of their presence here, of having tumbled from a restaurant’s smouldering frame and shabby escape door into this place, even the most unpleasant of familiarities was a deep comfort to them: a welcome hum of mosquitoes.

Dashing about, Mark made to shout again, “Don’t,” Philip muttered. Mark paused for a moment, as if to comply. Suddenly, he turned away and shouted a wordless cry, around which the humming silence settled immediately. It was as if the jungle held the yelp in a pocket almost palpable, holding it up to a dim and foreign light for the two of them to inspect.

“It’s so dark,” Philip said, examining his body. Mark had lost his glasses and begun thrashing about as if this were an imposition he simply would not endure. His voice steadily elevated in volume:

“I say, I mean, what the…” he had begun to shout, only to be caught pre-expletive by a single brute noise that exploded and whose deafening coda shook free the birds and the tenures of their hope. It was on the edge of the intelligible, like the wrenching of an arm from a socket, sucking forth the lungs’ wet air, enveloping everything. The larger of the two began to weep, the smaller just stared. The noise blasted again, pronouncing a meaning so implicit as to set the men running like piglets in a cage. Its aid: “You do not belong.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in Leeds, England, Terry Andrew Craven is a bookseller and writer in Paris, France.

After Miles Davis’s Spanish Key
 
This happened yesterday. Or maybe a long time ago. No, it’s happening right now. The sky is the colour of blister water, and the abandoned refinery is burning in the distance. This spit of land is spit into the warm waters of the green sea is shining in the beach roil like camel’s hair and here we stand at the edge of all things. Puerto Lempira. This has happened before. It’s happening right now.
 
Somewhere along the way trust was broken, bargain became knife fight, mistakes laced in like homemade stitches. You glance at the others, the guy they call Celestino Pedrazo, though that may not be his real name, and Two-fisted Joe and his wife Marie Les-Yeux-Sont-Belles, who’s cursing him under her breath. The skiff’s cutting away into open water. And though you’re absolutely certain that Little Emerald is at the helm, wearing his ruby ring, you understand that betrayal means nothing. The story is so old and has fixed its plumb weights on us, pulling us forever out of reach of the words to tell it.
 
A sound comes our way, and we look back at the refinery. Maybe one of the fuel tanks has gone up. A boiling plume of black smoke gyres back on itself. Pedrazo says: They cleared out all the salvageable fuel years ago. And Two-fisted Joe suddenly sits down. He’s overweight, and the heat even in the morning is hard on him. You look away from the refinery, but all you can see is the sea, and this little curved thread of sand, the harmony you once dreamed of broken, and the sea birds cascading down the beach.
 
And this is the truth: you saw the world’s light through the sparkling tendrils of a spider’s web, the web ingenious and always you the spider, maker, knower, but then knowing turned into fathoming: it was we the spider, the universal spider, always weaving over or into your nets, and Lao Tze born under the plum tree saw this and welcomed this, just as you were crushed under its plum blossom weight. But you were not drunk, you were rational — you made the words drunk, broken heaps of nothing that shone like oil in water. You know how deep this is: Pedrazo has no idea. And then Pedrazo says, the soldiers will come first to the refinery, and then they will see us. Two-fisted Joe’s wife begins crying, and we apologise to her.
 
And then you think you’ll write a poem to the soldiers, but you remember that you gave up poetry even before you gave up childhood, and besides the only poem a soldier knows is the poem of a bed offering sleep. And then you think, what is all this for anyway, the incandescence and phosphor light within, the unquenchable macabre inventory of entangling urgency, and you remember a woman dancing last night on the Rio Coco, drinking from the can and spitting every third gulp into the fire, like an offering to the god, the flames flaring up, her eyes nearly insensate with the pure joy of being alive. A sweet recovered entelechy ran like lightning through your nerve core. Those dream hoops dangled like the earrings of bazaar girls as they wash the dirty minds of the world in the ancient Biblical river.
 
And yet you know too that the soldiers will bring their brass cartridges with them to litter the beach, and this you understand because you have drilled deep into the trenches of time and all the mad ignored suffering it encloses, deep as the trenches in this becalmed sea where the dying drift and fall of bones goes on for eons through clear water. And Pedrazo says listen. And you listen with your diamond ears and in the distance you hear the sound of the coastal trawler carrying the soldiers.
 
Everything becomes electric then, pulled together in tight bands so that really there is only one sound, and it goes to the deep of your own thoracic cavity, as though the what-you-were is fractured into the graceful movement of time itself within you, subtle and textured, not your story, but your story’s time key and signature and tonal shifts, this the only true knowing, and you here especially, and the others on the beach, the quarter tones in blue.
 
And then you sit on the beach, just like crazy Two-fisted Joe and his wife, who are leaning into each other like broken statues, and you see how you too could become a sand monument, and now whole new registers are coming your way, caught in the wave purls, the holy noise of your childhood with its bebop and jaunty clatter of glasses at the cafeteria where you washed dishes and also that diving bell-shaped echo chamber inside you when the poet kissed your mouth, while your heart ran in spondees and amphibrachs, and finally afterwards the broken rhythms that are beaten on an empty cooking oil can.
 
And so now you are hearing only pure and original sounds, disconnected from source, raw, un-tempered, tuned in paradise — waves thus holding within them refractions or cascading scales that implicate your brother’s voice when you were kids playing on dirt piles on construction sites, or the men’s voices in the café your dad took you to, early mornings, while it was still dark, and the waitresses looked beautiful and sleepy, and even the righteous bass clarinet of your dad’s actual voice, ordering pancakes, and you sure at that age that there was some final mystery in this.
 
Of course you were wrong. And you glance once again toward the refinery, and the smoke still billowing. The skiff’s long gone, Little Emerald long gone, and only the long green-blue of the water remains, the sun glaring as though in competition. And you suddenly feel compassion for all of them, for Little Emerald, for the soldiers coming toward us, still invisible but for the deep low chug at the edge of perception. Because you see finally how trapped we are in the story — or you, really, more than trapped, because you, not anyone else — and how to get this across — you alone, and we as you are, simple as the sky of white embers bending to touch the phosphor green and pale flotsam of the sea, the you-story, the us-story and what you might imagine ourselves to be, or even the possibilities of freedom (and recall how you wrote in your schoolbook: we is the other before I are the ones), absorbed into this endlessly repeated narration, with its endlessly repeatable integers, no less the cartridge cases that will soon litter the beach than the soldiers, no less Pedrazo and Two-fisted Joe and Marie Les-Yeux-Sont-Belles than the luff of small waves, and all of this, the shining web you invented but were instead caught in and then required endlessly to invent anew and then be caught in anew, and no chance of words bringing you to a we-beyond-the-us, and so here you are on this spit of sand, the sun with you, and everything ending in silence. Ha, ha. It all seems funny at the same time sad. Even your refusal to speak does nothing against the endless weight of this version, which drags you down into bone water, and endless trench fall to unfathomed hollow plummet base-note and cave-dark water. And not even possessing the grace of adequately offering its own ending.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Peter Vilbig is a writer in Brooklyn, New York. He has lived in and travelled extensively in the United States, and as a reporter covered politics, crime, and culture in Central America, Miami, and Washington, D.C. His short fiction has appeared in the Baltimore Review, Drunken Boat, Fleeting, the Horizon Review, The Ledge Poetry and Fiction Magazine, The Linnet’s Wings, the Review, and Tin House, among other publications. In addition to writing, he teaches in his home borough.

​She tried to only once, after I landed on my foot the wrong way and turned my ankle too badly to go on. The director sat me down and spun her into the arms of some young man, who pulled her across the floor, one two three four two two three four one two one two three four. I could see her falter from the side of the stage. Her lips were moving, counting, but her timing was off. The boy, fluid, dragged her alongside as best he could, but you could tell there was no chemistry. It was like their bodies spoke different languages. When the number was over, she ran off the stage in tears, pushing past her dance partner and the director for the back door. I hobbled after her held her while she shook with rage and tears. Never again, she told me. Not alone like that.  

When we were young and dancing, no one questioned that we were inseparable. Between the travelling and the shows and the polite meet and greets with whoever would have us, there wasn’t much time for anyone else. It was a whirlwind, and when we’d finally unwound ourselves from it, there weren’t too many people left to talk to. I suppose it doesn’t much matter now.

She’s been rushing ahead of me again lately. The stairs are taller, the distances between things longer than they used to be. When she coughs, I can hear lungs up against her bones. I’m not so much better. My skin is like paper, thin and easily torn. I’ve been losing track of time, hours passing like days. But I don’t feel as fragile as she looks.

I had to help her into bed. Her breath was ragged, weak. I took her hand and I counted one two three one two three slower than I used to, just loud enough for both of us to hear, and waited for her to catch up. She fell asleep that way, hand in mine, shallow breaths coming softly from beneath the blankets. I’ll wait, keeping time, one two three one two three one two three one two three one two three over again until we’re finished.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR 
Jaime Fountaine was raised by “wolves.” Her work has appeared in PANK, Bluestem, and Pear Noir!.  

Some parties are forgettable, Alyssa says, how many parties have we had this week. She turns on the bathroom faucet but does not wash her hands or look down, staring at herself casually in the mirror, listening to the water. Her big lips crack as they smile. If you’ve been through hell, keep going, she says. Alyssa feels the edge of the sharp blade of her pocket knife with her thumb, and winces just before it breaks the skin, before she hears a knock on the door. She walks outside still holding the knife. She walks a straight line in one direction, because direction is consoling, softening her focus, rubbing the bridge of her nose with her other hand before descending downstairs. The person in the front of the line, waiting for the bathroom, a girl wearing a bikini, says, Winston Churchill. The girl in a bikini says, That girl walking away holding the knife is quoting Winston Churchill.
 
Everyone is staring at Alyssa as she is walking to the kitchen, almost tripping and falling, still visible to everyone upstairs. Alyssa says, I keep going. Her face looks peaceful but distracted, nonchalantly untethered and unblinking, no rush or rise. Almost immediately, she throws the pocket knife in the sink, and grabs another drink from the mini bar. Oscillating fans blow in her face and hair, cool her skin. Dipping her hands into the ice cooler, she takes a shot of whiskey before grabbing a beer. Usually drinking too much makes her stomach ache, but right now she is making an exception: she has seen some unbelievable things, sucking the blood from the small cut from her thumb.
 
Chloe is rubbing an ice cube against Alyssa’s neck, suddenly appearing from behind her in the kitchen. Alyssa barely trembles. Chloe says, The people upstairs are all chanting Winston Churchill, I don’t know why. Alyssa and Chloe exchange silent, shocked glances at each other for fun, something they do sometimes in spite of each other, for force of habit. Sitting together on the last step of the soft carpeted stairwell, they share the beer in tiny gulps, in shocked glances. They ask each other at the exact same time, both smiling, Guess what.
 
Alyssa says, I am not going to kill myself anymore.
 
Chloe says, I think I am falling for Jesse. It’s weird good, bad news.
 

Jesse
 
Q.
 
I can be someone who, all the time, ignores omens. I have seen things I would not know how to explain in the least bit. A girl offers her bare stomach for the lines of cocaine and pulls up her shirt. She swallows vodka like water and unhooks her bra. I watch a reflection of the ceiling fan on the glass coffee table before she lays down. Another girl leans down and kisses her bellybutton, before taking a line. Feeling strangely calm, I don’t join the cheering that happens around us, or the tensed hurried way everyone is scooting closer. The girl laying down says, Everything in moderation. Although this is my house, this is my party – we are all sitting together in my guest room with candles on the carpet – I don’t know anyone intimately in the circle. Everyone here is a stranger.
 
Someone jumps from upstairs, a girl in a small bikini, right into the hardwood floors. She falls so hard she dislocates her shoulder, gasping as though she is surprised and out of breath. Getting up, she pops her shoulder right back into place and waves to Alyssa. The girl says, Winston Churchill.
 
Once I tried to kill myself in front of my webcam to preserve the moment; I broadcasted trying to hang myself live on the Internet. The feed went viral in less than an hour, in about a dozen countries, in four different time zones. When I was still breathing through my nostrils, more and more people logged on and watched me swinging. I woke up dehydrated and Internet famous, and then police arrived at my door in the morning, paramedics paces behind them. I remember saying, I lived, as an answer to every question that came to me. I wanted to announce tonight that I am willing to try again, but I haven’t found the right moment to speak. I have been lingering and locked in for the past few hours, unsure of myself.
 
Chloe walks over to the ice cooler and grabs another drink, before smiling brushing past me. I try and mimic her face, and our two smiles grow larger when there is eye contact. I wonder how far our party can be heard and turn to look out the porch. I can see dozens of open lit windows and imagine the lives of the people I manage to see, framed inside their houses in the neighborhood.
 
She says, I’ve seen your video. She says, I’ve sought you out. I am falling in love with the Internet.
 
She looks at me in a way that causes me to blink first, before Alyssa comes to join us from the kitchen, wrapping her arms around me. Alyssa says, There was a girl that dislocated her shoulder. I look at Chloe before answering, I think I saw everything from here. Both girls are biting their lips and I am wearing down. Chloe mumbles, Maybe we should kick everyone out and just be here by ourselves, just us three. It is as though I had forgotten how to nod when I finally do, when Alyssa squeezes tighter, when Chloe keep looking at me, the entire house still vibrating with music and strangers, and I keep nodding.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Chiem (b.1987) is the author of You Private Person (Scrambler Books 2012). His work has recently appeared in elimae, Pop Serial, and Artifice Magazine