By Ian Johnson.
I. In which Dr. Hawthorne comes to town ~
The snakeskin wagon that caused such bluster in the broadsheets from Oregon to Illinois kicked dust over the saloon steps. The menfolk—wranglers, drunks, malingerers—took to hollering, and someone rang the rusty church bell.
Jesse, the Calloway orphan, hung back, careful not to impede the homesteaders and traders and their women and children skittering through the bone-dry dirt to see Dr. Hawthorne himself lay out his wares, or more specifically, his ware: a hinged box barely big enough for a decent-sized hog.
As Jesse traipsed his two-headed donkey Buridan along to gawp, the flies and the stink of the freakish beast curled the lips and twitched the moustaches of his estranged townsfolk. The townsfolk collectively chuntered and pondered, until the prancing Hawthorne flapped out his beaver-tailed coat and jigged around the inanimate sideshow as if some holy spirit compelled him.
“This, good sirs!” He hooked a wandering eye. “This is your gen-u-ine prayers answered. Your leisure, your artifice, transmogrified!”
The ornery throng rubbed bristled chins and fluttered motheaten fans, casting shameful glances at their periphery: at the Calloway youth and the ludicrous mutant he’d failed to euthanize.
“I can duplicate anything you have, ladies and gentlemen,” Hawthorne barked, keeping to his cartwheeling. “Anything that can fit in this here box is yours twofold! Imagination, good people of Thickleweed. Imagination is your sole and bountiful master! Why, you there, that fine horse is yours?”
A scarred cowboy nodded and spat towards a bright white Arabian.
“Well, lead that beauty inside.”
The cowboy squinted. “That box won’t fit no horse.”
“Ah, but it has no bottom, and as a certificated engineer of the divine, I can sure make room with some persuasion.”
Hawthorne flipped the contraption open, and a heavenly light poured forth. He led the stunned horse by the bit, nudging and bunching and cajoling its hooves one by one into the abyss.
Thickleweed’s residents rippled. Holsters got itchy.
The box hawk-tuahed the horse back in plumes of green smoke with a foul-smelling odour to rival Buridan, then spewed out another. Whoops and gasps went up, the copy appraised by oval mouths in the fog of miracle.
The clear-eyed Calloway orphan noticed the deficiencies. Bandied legs. Missing teeth. He noticed Hawthorne too: six fingers and a left eye that never settled but only swivelled—until it settled on him.
“You, son, you wanna try?”
Jesse patted his constant companion, kneading Buridan’s mottled coat as its heads lolled east to west.
“Oh, no, not that. We don’t wanna be excerabating no defunctive produce. You got no goats, boy? Where your parents at?”
“He ain’t got no kin,” a sour voice curdled from the crowd. “No means for your doohickey, neither. Say what it cost!”
“What it cost?” the salesman echoed. “How much does your feed cost? Your pastures, your manpower? Hey, wouldn’t you like to dream a while longer? Wouldn’t you like to enjoy them pretty mountains you got? To swim and fish in that crystal creek? Ain’t you deserve no fine time, sir? Or you, sir?”
A brown cloud mushroomed as the townsfolk stampeded. There was a run on the bank, and a teller got shot, and the undertaker fed varnished coffins into the magic hole.
Hawthorne directed traffic and filled his pockets to busting, alive to Jesse’s gaze, that sixth finger tick-tick-ticking on his silver-plated belt buckle and its wonky notches.
II. In which the Calloway orphan conspires ~
You see, Jesse and his two-headed donkey were the sole survivors of a great fire that had gutted the family ranch and claimed the lives of Ma and Pa Calloway. Pa, an irredeemable tinkerer, had tried to automate the cow milking to spare Ma twenty-two minutes and forty seconds a day. His prototype, which ran off dung and rock slime, had overheated, and a plague of flames had choked the serviceable Calloways (plus saleable stock) in their dumb slumber.
Now Thickleweed dreamt.
Jesse waited them out.
He dug up Pa’s Colt and left Buridan sleeping low, one head caressing the other in the filthy straw of their ash-cold camp.
He traversed the spent town by the luminous glare of the globular moon that replicated itself in cycles of subtle loss until it hung like a bitten fingernail.
He climbed the saloon’s wooden awning and crabwalked beneath the windows until he came to Hawthorne’s master suite.
Shunting and creeping inside, Jesse made for the lonesome box on the fancy four-poster. Up close, its ornate casing was mirrored ebony, with hollow etchings of three-breasted belles and jungle vines sprouting sycamore leaves. He pointed the revolver at the cursed instrument, his cinched hands trembling as he cocked the hammer. He thought about Pa, his idle genius, those consequences, unintended. He thought about the town, the calamity he feared, that they probably deserved, and the potential orphans who didn’t.
“Now, son, if it’s about that donkey, you gotta know it’s an abomination… an affrontage to nature’s true order.”
The boy whipped the gun’s iron sights at the corner, where Hawthorne sat cross-legged in the twilight murk.
Hawthorne smiled. “And what would that achieve? Am I the Dr. Hawthorne himself? I forget. But an apprentice… a franchise… someone to carry the torch, to lure the sceptical younglings, now there’s an idea, I declare, bucked from the thinking part of my own skull’s interiors. What more proof do you need? Step on in, son. No more wavering.”
Jesse regressed, a compliant child in need of instruction. He wiped his wet cheeks, setting down the Colt, prising the box wide and plunging his ragged boots into its depths.
Within, a glowing tunnel.
A blip.
Another version of himself—unburdened by the custodianship of anomalies, and yellowness, and the self-destructing legacies of dead inventors—gripped his wrist and floated skyward.
A fresh coupling emerged. Jesse might have chosen to see the devil, but instead he saw family, resurrected: a one-headed companion, at least, with a backbone and an entrepreneurial glint.
“Hell, yes!” The box’s guardian stomped upright, his brimming eyes shining like a kindly demon at the weird twins. “A chance to recalibrate, repurposeify, from Oregon to—”
Jesse’s doppelgänger took up the gun, steadily levelling and blamming a smoking hole through Hawthorne’s ripe forehead.
“Fetch dat der double donkey fur dat doohickey, double,” the box-born slurred at his inferior self with a fat forked tongue, flicking the sidearm towards the stars, the trail, and all creation’s rolling grift beyond.
III. In which a new place meets a new Hawthorne ~
Now, Hopetown was altogether different from Thickleweed, on account of the town’s industrious Mayor Chambers, Esquire. Chambers had personally seen to it that the railroad was rerouted via Hopetown. Chambers had led a posse to massacre the train-robbing Black Hand Gang on Overlook Ridge. Chambers had secured that gang’s grieving widows some horizontal work in their legalised brothel—a profitable living.
The mayor hectored a defensive line of cowed gentlefolk with hats in laps at their burgeoning utopia’s meeting hall. “I want that magic box all for Hopetown, y’hear?! In this land, we insist on preserving the weakling and the moron, and even allow them to propagate! This doohickey is our chance to only duplicate the great and the good, for the prosperity of a generation, sirs! No more blow-ins. No more mongrels. Let’s give this Hawthorne a big Hopetown welcome! Go set him up a tab with the Black Hand whores…”
Meanwhile, Calloway & Calloway bickered. Jesse Deux—the dupe—slept for fourteen hours in every twenty-four throughout those weeks in the back of Hawthorne’s stolen wagon. He took the doohickey for a pillow and woke only to rile his driver and eat rotten carrion, maggots and all. Original Jesse sat at the reins, cajoling his deformed donkey with a “Good boy, Buridan,” and an “Almost there,” despite the slow going under the sun’s fiery scowl.
“Whip dat donkey,” the phlegm-soaked voice tasked from the rear.
“Hey, you be quiet! I-I-I’m in charge. For this to work, on m-my terms, you’re the silent partner, r-r-remember? No talkin’!”
“Yuk yuk yuk.” Jesse Deux rolled over.
Calloway & Calloway rumbled towards Hopetown on their thirteenth morning, under the bunting-strewn gateway, into Mayor Chambers’ outstretched arms and prodigious gut. Chambers smoothed his purple velvet waistcoat, prepared to perform to the shit-eating grins of his assembled populous: “Dr. Hawthorne, the pleasure—” But faltered. “The pleasure… say, ain’t you a little junior to… and what type of donkey is…” But recovered himself. “The pleasure, regardless, remains all mine, to receive you in this humble oasis of humanity and conviviality!” Then he bowed his peeling dome slightly and waited for a reciprocal greeting.
“Erm…” Jesse hopped down, shuffling in the dirt. “W-would you be interested in—”
“Interested?!” Chambers blazed both bloodshot barrels. “Young sir, we are more than interested. We have a proposition: exclusivity on your doohickey! For you, in return, a king’s ransom! A palace, with wine and cooze enough to drown in! How’s that sound?”
“Erm…”
“Good! Good! All we require is a show of faith. I have a stable of stallions—the fastest, strongest studs in the whole state. If you double them, I promise you the world. Is the whole world enough for you, Hawthorne?”
The wagon chugged on its clunky spoked wheels. Jesse Deux wriggled free. The crowd recoiled. He held a shushing finger to his swollen lips, dried gore flecking his muzzle.
“A… a twin?” Chambers gasped. “Oh, a twin! From the box! The box, ladies and gentlemen, come on, give it up!”
Rapturous applause echoed off the elegant rows of shacks and shops, painted in peppermint stripes. Chambers cinched both Jesses in a fleshy embrace, whispering his edicts. “You come to the bank with me, Hawthorne number one. Hawthorne number two, you take your show up to my ranch and give me a herd of prize stallions. Go on, now. Don’t dally.”
IV. In which pacts are struck ~
“You don’t say much for a salesman, do you boy?”
Jesse, the original Jesse, sat opposite Mayor Chambers at a rich oak desk, stacks of notes piled high in front of them. The last genuine Calloway-turned-Hawthorne impersonator hugged his armpits, imagining his demon twin casing a handsome home unattended with those ugly appetites.
“Quiet dignity,” Chambers sighed. “I respect that. I respect the holy hell out of that. Alright, Hawthorne, I’m gonna give you ten thousand dollars to unburden yourself of that box and be on your way, you damn crocodile.”
Jesse’s thigh jittered, his foot tapping nervously.
Chambers wiped a handkerchief on his sweaty brow. “Okay, okay, okay. You drive a hard bargain. I’ll give you twenty thousand dollars right now, not a penny more, and I don’t wanna ever ever EVER hear your name again! Do we have a deal, you cougar, you cottonmouth, you grizzly bear?”
“Erm…” Jesse unfolded.
“Thatta boy!” Chambers shook him by the arm, rattling his teeth. “Come on, let’s see how that dupe of yours is getting on at my place.”
Jesse rode on the back of the mayor’s golden steed. Chambers rang a bell as they trotted through the square, signalling for the townsfolk to follow, which they did in their dutiful droves, twinkling and beaming and streaming like a liquid gold rush.
The procession reached the stables to find the great wooden doors shut, the snakeskin wagon empty and untethered. All was quiet as Sunday bed springs.
“If those cowboys are playing grab-ass again…” Chambers squirmed in his saddle. “Perez! Hernandez! Attend to me!”
A cold dread trickled down from Jesse’s scalp to his nape. He slid to the ground, his fingers laced in prayer, at the feet of the mayor and the subordinates who flanked him. “Erm, Mr Chambers, sir, if y-you’ll excuse me a s-second, sir…”
“Sure. You’re the showman, I get it. Prepare your stage.”
Jesse pried open a gap in the door, squeezing inside.
He was met by a shimmering mass of horse corpses.
Jesse Deux wrestled with stallion carcasses, stomping them into the open box, which spat out hooved cadaver after hooved cadaver in a sulphurous emerald mist. Each one was less perfect than the one before: each one more dead.
Two limp Mexicans, propped against haybales with holes in their foreheads, bore witness.
Buridan lay still, finally out of his misery, riddled with bullets.
Jesse, authentic and pure, clawed at his eyes, biting his thumbs. “W-w-w-what the… what the f-fuh… w-w-what in God’s…”
“Dey got in da way! And dat double donkey got got. And dose ponies wouldn’t come a-willin’. Better like dis. What dis pay?”
The unlatched doohickey coughed and cooked under the strain, or else its infernal work was all done, melting as it did into concave slop.
Jesse sank to his knees. The expectant audience outside peeled back the curtain of the stable doors. The onlookers’ faces twisted in horror. Their screams scraped marrow. Their rifles levelled and cocked.
V. In which the Calloways go a-hangin’ ~
Calloway & Calloway stood side by side at the creaking gallows. The Hopetown mob, the bloodthirsty kind, wailed and whooped and demanded a reckoning. Jesse, the mother-born, quaked under his hood, his crotch leaking as the noose got tight, which Mayor Chambers personally saw to. Jesse, the box-born, yawned. He writhed and groped and took his maker’s bound hands in his, squeezing them tight with a “Der, der, my brudder. My pa. Der, der.”
The floor gaped—thin air. A tandem snap. Four flailing boots. Then nothing but a pleated twisting in the cool noon breeze.
At nightfall, the crowds dispersed.
Jesse Deux waited them out.
You see, his spine was fused different, his windpipe set back, so all that rope gave him was time to dangle. He wriggled free and scuttled towards the horizon, where it was said he persisted for seventy years, making a tree hollow his home, and taking up taxidermy, exhuming and stuffing the original Jesse for his sap mantle, and marrying a swamp hag, but never procreating under the cautionary stare of his ornamental creator.
At least, so it goes.
Small mercies from the stayed hand of made monsters, I suppose.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ian Johnson (he/him) is an emerging writer from North East England. His words appear in Trash Cat Lit, Product, Apricot Press, Underbelly, Pistol Jim, Literary Garage, and Free Flash Fiction. He is a 2026 ‘Best of the Net’ nominee.
