DARKNESS ON THE EDGE: Tales Inspired by the Songs of Bruce Springsteen

To my wonderful wife Dee, who held my hand while I was working on a dream

Loves ya

Acknowledgements

No book is ever put together alone, and that most certainly holds most true for an anthology. So, for fear of sounding like a literary version of an Academy Award acceptance speech, it’s time for the thank y’alls:

Thanks to the contributors, for sharing my vision and delivering on your promises. One of the neatest things I noticed while putting this book together was that hardly anyone asked what the pay rate was; they wrote, submitted, got accepted, and then asked (and in some cases, not even then). As one writer said, “It didn’t occur to me to ask how much I was getting paid. I just wanted to be a part of it.” It was that kind of enthusiasm and support that kept me from feeling like I was just out there dancing in the dark.

Special thanks to Lee Thomas, who grasped early on exactly what I was trying to do. His story certainly reflects that, and his support and belief in this project never wavered; and to Mike Arnzen, whose enthusiasm for this idea nearly matched my own, and who suggested the names of and gave contact info for a few of the authors who appear in these pages. Both you guys kept my head above water when I was ready to ditch the life preserver and swallow some saltwater. You guys gave me reason to believe.

To Russ Schweizer, Lorne Dixon and Tom Piccirilli, for their longtime support and friendship. A guy couldn’t ask for better friends in this life.

To Brian Keene and Brian Hodge: my deepest gratitude and my sincerest apologies. It was never a case of your best not being good enough.

To Ellen Datlow, for letting me bounce a few ideas off of her early on (and yeah, to rant a bit), and whose advice and honesty helped tremendously as I stepped into the fire.

To Mona Okada, for always politely taking my phone calls and who always communicated with the highest display of courtesy and professionalism; who, in short, gave the legalities I needed to address a human touch.

To Bruce Springsteen, for the magic.

To Pete Crowther, for getting behind this project right from my first email and riding this thing to the end. For everyone who believes there are still gentlemen left in the world of publishing…well, he’s living proof.

To John and Bill, my blood brothers.

To my mother and my grandparents, who always encouraged this kid with his “nose in a book.” As much as for anyone, this is for you.

To my great kids, Jessica and Jason. My beautiful rewards…

Introduction

Grown’ up in the Darkness at the Edge of My Book of Dreams

What you hold in your hands is not as much a book as it is a concept, one that maybe has not been done in quite this way before.

This isn’t to suggest that music and literature have never met on the creative crossroads. There’s been music-based fiction anthologies (Jeff Gelb’s Shock Rock and Shock Rock II; It’s Only Rock and Roll: An Anthology of Rock and Roll Stories, including “Rock and Roll Heaven” by T. Coraghessan Boyle, who, incidentally, is also the author of “Greasy Lake”, a story inspired by Bruce Springsteen’s “Spirit In the Night”), songs, entire albums and even concert tour themes inspired by literature and literary figures (from artists as diverse as Springsteen, Metallica and Britney Spears), anthologies inspired by more than one musician (editor Matthew Miele’s Lit Riffs has Tom Perrotta, Jonathan Lethem, Aimee Bender and others penning tales inspired by a variety of songs, including Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May” and Paul Simon’s “Graceland”) and anthologies inspired by the work of a single artist (Stars: Stories Based on Janis Ian Songs, co-edited by Ian and Mike Resnick, featuring sf writers such as David Gerrold, Mercedes Lackey, Harry Turtledove, Orson Scott Card, Spider Robinson and others). But I don’t believe there’s ever been an anthology that’s assembled such an eclectic group of writers of several genres–horror, mystery, suspense, science fiction, fantasy–given the freedom to choose as their inspiration any song, from any album, encompassing the full body of work of a single artist with the diversity, discography and dynamic of Bruce Springsteen.

Legendary rock musician. Poet laureate of the working class. Voice of America’s conscience. Anyone with such status is sure to influence and inspire. Indeed, Sean Penn writes about Springsteen in The 2008 TIME 100:

“In the chain of our responses to the most influential art, or artists, of our day, there is a link for most of us, an image…We see one hand passing a baton into another, the influences of the influential. And in that rite of passage, Bruce Springsteen is no exception.”

Springsteen has been the subject of many nonfiction books. His lyrics can be found quoted as epigraphs in a couple of novels by Stephen King (most memorably, of course, “Jungleland” in the opening of The Stand). Elizabeth Wurtzel not only dedicates her book More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction to Springsteen, but names him as a major influence. Bobbie Ann Mason’s novel In Country not only opens with a quote from “Born in the U.S.A.”, but she’s said that the entire novel is in homage to that 1984 album. Countless singers have admitted Bruce’s influence on their work. Springsteen’s presence can even be felt outside the creative arena: John Kerry used “No Surrender” during his presidential campaign in 2004.

What exactly is it that draws so many to Springsteen’s lyrics? What is it about those words that enable so many creative minds to take away so much from them and apply their meaning to their own work? To use them to reflect their own writing? To use them, even, to rally a political quest?

The answer to that would be different, I suppose, for everyone.

For me, I think it’s the brutal honesty of Springsteen’s songs. One of Springsteen’s endearing, and enduring, qualities is his ability to tap so deeply into the human spirit, to not shy away from man’s weaknesses, his vulnerability to failure, to feel pain and inflict pain, to question himself, doubt himself, question the world around him. The world of Springsteen’s songs is our world, for the most part, wrought with the same tensions and uncertainties and fears. As American novelist and physician, Dr. Walker Percy, once said of Springsteen: “He sings of us while singing to us”.

Springsteen calls up our values, and then he strips them away, cutting down to the bone. What’s most important in your life? Your kids? Your spouse? Your home? Your job? Your freedom? It can all be gone, Springsteen tells us, in a moment. From men nostalgic about the hometowns they grew up in, to the beaten men giving the best of themselves over to the factories and highways of their work (and in many cases, the work of their fathers before them), to the men who left parts of themselves scattered on the battlefields of war or on the battlegrounds of love, to men searching for who they used to be and boys in hot rods searching for who they might become, to brave men gone cold with fear to tough men gone soft with love, we’re all afraid to lose our tenacious grip on who we are and what we are and all we hold dear.

We all have hungry hearts: the desire to love those who love us, to succeed in our careers and our relationships and our private endeavors, to live life with clear minds and unencumbered souls. For the most part, a good story, like a good song, explores the confrontations and inner turmoil that result when one or more of these things are taken away. So many of Springsteen’s characters find themselves thrust into such a situation, through the loss of one or more of the things that matter most to us: a relationship, a job, self-image, self-confidence, freedom, dignity, choice.

Loss is the common thread, in addition to the source of inspiration, that runs through the stories found in this anthology (along with love and moral redemption, it’s one of Springsteen’s most-used themes). The tales in these pages all involve loss on some level, in some form, just as you would find it in so many of Springsteen’s stories.

And that’s just what Springsteen gives us: stories. Lyrical short stories. Springsteen is not feeding us hollow prose in the form of mindless pop. He’s sitting up around the campfire and telling us stories. Life stories.

And stories beget stories. Ideas beget ideas. Creativity begets creativity.

One day some years ago, maybe stuck for inspiration or searching for a new story idea and wondering what it was that moved me, something I connected to that could spark my own creativity, I started to wonder if I could take a Bruce Springsteen song and find enough there to write a story of my own (I was then unaware of Boyle’s “Greasy Lake” or any other Springsteen-inspired writings). To allow the images and the lyrics and the themes to fit themselves into the confines of a story that would be, ultimately, uniquely my own.

Not long after this initial thought, I sat down and did just that. I felt good about it. The story did exactly what I had set out to do with it.

I was off and running.

I mentioned the idea to other writers, and piqued their interest. I started to think I might really be onto something here. Having no clue what I was doing or what I might be getting myself into, I wrote up a proposal and sent it to several publishers.

Enter Pete Crowther.

And thus, to the book you now hold. This concept made concrete.

I was fortunate enough to find enough writers who understood what I was trying to do, who were passionate Springsteen fans, who grasped the notion that his music could influence their writing. How it would all come together was something I could only, in the beginning, wonder about.

If I had any fears, they were quickly squashed as the stories began to trickle in.

The authors did exactly what I asked of them. They shared my vision and my passion. They each took a step–and in most cases, many steps–beyond the lyrics. What might the narrator of “Something In the Night” have found there in the darkness? What sins might need to be faced in “My Father’s House”? Who, or what, might really be vying for Mary’s soul out there on “Thunder Road”? What ghosts might be dredged up as you face your past walking the “Streets of Philadelphia”? What secret love might a man keep in the “Darkness on the Edge of Town”? For how long, and at what price, will a man hold onto the love he’s found in “Candy’s Room”?

The bridge between song and story does not span nearly as wide as it may seem. For practical and legal reasons, you won’t find Rosalita or Crazy Janey or Wild Billy or Joe Roberts or Bobby Jean or any of the characters in Springsteen’s repertoire, nor their stories, in these pages. What you will find is the themes in the songs, and I hope you can feel those songs in these stories. I hope they succeed in making you feel that none of these stories would have been written without the songs that came before them.

Though not a prerequisite, you might want to read the lyrics or, better yet, listen to each song represented here before reading each story. You might then easier feel Springsteen’s influence waft through the words. At worst, you’ve maybe revisited a Springsteen song you haven’t listened to in a while. Not a bad way to spend an afternoon, in any event. Reading and listening to Bruce Springsteen.

No, not a bad way to spend a few hours at all.

Editing this book made me go back over so much of Springsteen’s work, made me connect to so much of it in ways I had not done so before. It also gave me exposure to some authors with whom I was not familiar, and gave me work from other authors whom I have long admired. Thanks to all, for being in my book of dreams. Tough as the road was, it all paid off.

As fans of both Bruce Springsteen and fine fiction, I hope it does for you, too.

So…Clarence is making that sax talk. Little Stevie’s strumming that guitar. Bruce is stepping up to the mike. He’s got stories to tell. And so, too, do these authors.

Let’s rock.

–Harrison Howe

May 2008

Nothing Forgiven

by Lee Thomas

(Inspired by “Something In the Night”)

You drive south on Kingsley. At your back, the funeral of an uncle and the irritation of the family home, chatting uncomfortably with the strangers you call mom and dad and Aunt Lois. Beyond the windshield low buildings approach–shops and restaurants–all pasted against a sky of granite. Like familiar melodies, long unheard and thought forgotten, memories of youth return, rising from the houses, the road and the street signs marking familiar intersections.

So much about the city is different, but even more is the same. After thirty-three years, details you thought long eroded emerge in sharp relief, chasing you from one landmark to the next.

Long ago, you made a promise, swore you’d never return to this place. What you did here–what you allowed to happen in order to escape–was just too much to accept. You put the events down to dream, to delusion, to a mind soused with liquor. You saw things that could never be. And for many years, you blocked it out entirely. Jody. Bobby. They were hardly considered over the years. Now though, with your promise broken and the past’s topography rising, they return, joining you in the car like phantom passengers.

A pang of guilt cuts your stomach. You search the row of low buildings for a bar, hoping to numb the ache with a shot of single malt. The drive to Newark is long enough without the company of such needling companions. You certainly don’t want them sharing the flight back to Dayton, back to Susan.

Your wife is already furious with you. She resented your desertion, reminding you time and again that you couldn’t afford such a trip. The house needs a new roof; the toilet leaks, needs replacing; there is mould in the basement. Right up until you left for the airport, she reminded you how many times you claimed to hate the city of your birth. But you know her concern isn’t for you. These days, it never is.

You can’t blame her. How can you? The accident was such a terrible thing. An evening run, a reckless driver. An active, beautiful woman paralyzed, the prisoner of a wheelchair. Her emotions were bound to be as broken as her spine. And though you can help your wife adapt to the physical limitations of her new condition, you are helpless to stop her depression, her anger, her fits of destructive rage.

After three years, you are as much a captive of the accident as Susan.

You go to work, come home. You try to make her comfortable, endure her irrational outbursts, her phases of black despondence, sometimes weeks long. The settlement is spent. Your lawyer was lazy, taking an insufficient sum, and the bills keep coming. Month after month, check after check, you never seem to make a dent.

Susan was right; you can’t afford this trip, but you need it. You need to experience something beyond her disapproval and the pile of bills on the kitchen table. Yes, you hated this place. Returning was simply an excuse, a location away from the woman you love, because being with her hurts so damned bad that you thought it would kill you.

You tell yourself Susan will be okay. Her sister is taking care of her for a couple of days. They get along well. Susan is likely grateful to be rid of you, despite her protests.

Across the street, its sign glowing in the fading evening light, you see a bar. One drink, you think, just something to sand down the edges.

In the bar, you sit on a stool, watch the bartender shake a martini. You run your drink order over in your mind as if you might forget it, though it hasn’t changed in over three decades: scotch, neat.

But when the bartender, a young man with a shag of dark hair, leans on the bar and asks, “ ‘Can I getcha?” you say, “Gin and tonic.”

Jody hates the smell of whiskey.

The ache in your belly redoubles, and you squeeze your eyes closed, holding back the memory of a beautiful girl. Jody wants to be remembered, wants you to remember her, but you aren’t ready. Not yet. Not here.

You drink quickly and order another. The taste of gin is like blood on your tongue, reminding you of pain, but you drink until the second glass is empty.

Head lighter and belly heavier with gin, you walk out of the bar into the fading evening light. It will be night soon, another night on the circuit. But no, the circuit is broken. Your parents railed with age-thin voices against the new buildings–a sewage treatment facility, some other construction–that now rise on Ocean, blocking off the street that was an integral part of the loop. Some of the bars remain, certainly the boardwalk.

You wander to the corner and turn left. There is plenty of time before the flight.

As a kid, you spent weekend evenings walking up and down Ocean, taking energy and joy from the cruising youths and the pulse of rock and roll beating between the ribs of the shore side bars. When you were old enough to drive and owned a car of your own, you joined the thundering parade on The Circuit.

Round and round.

You cross Ocean Avenue, walking with uncertain steps toward the Boardwalk while trying to remember how you felt on those long ago nights. You imagine cars and chrome, conjure crowds of people, their faces blurred and dull. You struggle with the mental film, but it will not focus, and nothing else about those years emerges. Even Jody and Bobby are absent for the moment. Too much time gone. You are a father now, a grandfather. It doesn’t seem possible. Your children are older than you were the night you left this place. Your daughter’s wonderful son is nearly a year old.

For a while there, only a handful of years, you considered yourself to be on the easy side of life. Your children were educated, had families of their own, and you and Susan still had good money in the bank. The promise of retirement and comfort was already whispered in your ear. Then, Susan was run down, and then the hospital, the therapy, the wheelchair. The endless stack of bills.

Round and round.

On the boardwalk, you stop and look around to see the people, the stands displaying novelties and food, the glowing lights. You hardly remember leaving the bar. The pedestrian crowd is sparse, but you aren’t surprised. It is a weeknight, just past dinnertime.

An overweight couple in matching bright red Hawaiian shirts eats ice cream, leans on one another affectionately. Two boys count the coins in their palms in front of a booth that sells sunglasses. Groups of people in silhouette wander in the distance. Against the side of a hot dog cart, a young couple embraces, kissing each other with the desperation of juvenile passion.

Oddly, you notice little else. The odors and the sounds of this place elude you, as if you bear witness to the performance of ghosts on a make-believe set. You sniff the air, but receive no olfactory cues. You listen, knowing that there should be voices, music, electronic accolades from the arcade machines. You strain to hear something, so that you can feel a part of this place again.

Finally, a rhythmic pulse creeps into your head. It pumps and crashes and hisses. You turn away from the booths. Your steps rap on the boards in time with that distant beat. At a railing, you stop, clutch the banister. Through the darkness a filmy white line breaks on the shore. Then, you understand. The ocean is calling you, leading you back to this dreadful landmark.

And there, only twenty yards away, a familiar face waits. Your heart trips and stutters. You leave your place at the railing, cross to a steep set of wooden stairs and descend to the sand.

Jody stands on the beach, hardly changed at all. Her strawberry blond hair drapes over narrow shoulders. At her back, waves pound the shore, crashing and shushing. For a moment it feels as if nothing has changed. More than thirty years crease and fold and slip away. You smile a moment before the fear turns your blood to shattered cutting ice.

She can’t be here.

You look back at the Boardwalk, at the lights and the people meandering over the planks. Your mind grows hazy, buzzing with a distant powerful drone. You look back at Jody, standing motionless on the beach.

“Please,” you say, taking a step back.

Don’t leave. She’s why you came back.

You want to run, but something holds you on the sand, facing Jody. Your mind fills with images, one lying over the top of the other so that none are clear. A single voice, like the teller of a story or the singer of a song, accompanies the images. It is your voice, only calm. Its lulling timbre and rhythmic cadence are strange, but what it says is familiar.

You belong here. You belong to the shore, to the waves, to the muscle machines that howl in the night.

For all of your failure to conjure the past only moments before, it comes crashing back. The sand buckles. The cool darkening air shimmers.

You…

You drive north on Ocean, crawling with the highway knights sitting low on their Harleys; checking out the machine-head toughs sporting chrome and revving their Hemis to the heavens. The girls in their bellbottom jeans and broken-zippered boots giggle and wave, then cover their bright angel faces with long fingers tipped in watermelon paint. Streetlight and stars concede to the parade of headlights. Motor perfume, thick and grimy, mingles with the scents of the grilling meat from Boardwalk shacks and the spirits in throat. Clouds of salty mist hang over all. On the left, young rock-and-roll, just hitting puberty and all the more cocksure and wild for it, rages in wooden shacks where the cools gather to fill their heads, their hips and their feet with honky tonk hymns written by low class priests, singing of Gods made in their own image. To the right, past the Boardwalk, off in the darkness, the waves play out a rhythm silenced by the thunder of engine and guitar but felt in the soul and lap of every man and woman on the circuit. Sidewalks team with shag-haired boys and straight-haired girls, each of them half a beast hunting to make themselves whole before daylight. In the street, muscle machines and mom-and-pop coaches crawl along the avenue.

You make a left and then another, down Kingsley. Left again. Round and round. Always chasing the closest horizon, measuring freedom by gas gauge and the remains of a gin bottle.

Night whispers promises, drawing her children to the loop, and their orbit–circles upon circles–is gravitational, pulling the innocent in and keeping them close.

Parked in the lot, your Chevy part of the herd, you pull a bottle from under the seat. You open it, make your wish and release the juniper genie into your mouth. The gin bites. You hate its taste. But the smell of whiskey makes Jody sick, so you drink this. A small sacrifice. One of hundreds. You make another wish, take another hit.

In the arcade, amid the popping squeals of the pinball machines, lights jumping, Richie and Mike plan a drag. They call each other pussy and dork and fag until the deal is set. They wait for their girlfriends to come back from the john, still posturing like gladiators beneath a coliseum crowd. Three little girls, with barely enough rack to support their halters, cheeks slashed pink with mothers’ rouge, race by, looking terrified.

Pinballs clang and crack, trying to escape. Their reward is another paddle whack, another bumper shove or a fast descent into darkness.

You stand with a smoke in your mouth, looking hard and bored like it’s all just another moment–one of millions–that will come and go with no more meaning than the striking of a match. For some it’s a pose, a mask handed out in school for all of the shore boys to wear, but for you it’s the way of your face. You are hard. You are bored. High school is a year gone, the diploma nothing but a piece of paper shoved in a drawer under mom’s carton of Pall Malls. The nights come. Round and round. The night dies. You haul sofas for Mr. Lombardo so that the Joneses and the Smiths have comfortable places to sit before going home to your parent’s tattered Sears couch. You sit there and wait until one of the Kingsley Boys calls or Jody is finished at the bookshop.

They used to mean the world to you, closer than family. Knowing you’d be with them made you ache with a comfortable lust. Now, that longing is for something different, something distant, something beyond the promise of the night. But Jody is off work, and the night comes. Round and round.

The gladiators Richie and Mike puff out their chests in greeting to their girlfriends now back from the john. Mike drops his smoke on the cold tile floor and crushes it under a boot toe. They will race. One will lose. Neither wins because tomorrow will be the same. These carousel horses can never claim victory.

You leave the arcade and step into the street where the herd of Camaros, Firebirds and Barracudas roll. Tinny music pumps from speakers to greet the growling engines, the shouting voices and the muffled concerts of the shore-side troubadours in an orchestra of soul and steel. Jody waits for you by The Pony. You’ll meet her. She’ll talk about her day and want you to talk. But it’s all been said. Recounting your day is a familiar song, pounding at your ears. All chorus. No verse. You’ll hate her for making you sing it. Then, you’ll walk back to the lot where your car waits. In the backseat, Jody will open up to you just like she’s done every Friday for three years.

She used to be the cure for your disease. Now another symptom.

To the north, a distant and welcoming darkness and you know that if you had once, just once, gone straight instead of turning left, you would be someplace else. For the hundreds and thousands of miles driven, you wonder where you could have gone.

“Please,” you say to Night, hoping she’ll understand and grant the wish you’ve whispered so often, the one you tell your pillow with gin-foul breath.

You nearly made it out. Phil lived in Delaware. He had a spare room. Knew about a warehouse that needed hands. Jody wanted to go, wanted to see the rest of the world. But her brother plucked the dream from her. Bobby, with the shore to his back, went face down in the waves, chasing a bottle of Jim Beam with a shot of the Atlantic. Jody used you like a shrink, like a nurse and like a priest, her lips spilling guilt and agony to your shoulder. For her, leaving was forgotten. But still you could go somewhere beyond the circuit where the streets were clean and quiet and life meant a little more than horsepower and neon. Then you blew a rod, dragging for laughs with Hoyt Decola. Your freedom machine needed repair, so the money you had went up like smoke. The charred dream that remained just more litter for the boardwalk.

Along the crowded sidewalks, you march with concrete boots. People walk and stumble by. Some look at you, recognizing breed, a single face on a hundred bodies. You stop and turn to the wall, check for cold-eyed cops and pull the bottle from your pocket: another miserable shot with the promise of miracles.

Jody waits in front of The Pony. Her hair is strawberry straw hanging like curtains to hide her shoulders. She holds a cigarette to her lips, staring over the line of cars to the sky above the ocean. On her pink t-shirt, your name is written in rainbow-colored letters baked on the fabric. Hip hugger denim caresses her thighs, then erupts into bells that tent her feet. Through the wall behind her, The Jukes beat out a song that makes a man at Jody’s back bop.

She wraps her arms around your neck, kisses you. Wants to know where you’ve been. You slide an arm around her waist, tell her something came up.

Jody wants to know about your day and you shrug. Normally, you’d sing that song just to make her feel better, but tonight you can’t bring yourself to it. The night is different. Everything is the same, and you tell yourself that the difference is in your head, but you feel it. Something. It pulls at your gut.

You take her to the boardwalk instead of the car because you don’t want to feel her on you; it’s too much like a jacket, sleeves wrapped and locked around your chest. The shops with food and sunglasses, the people; a movie that never changes. So, your shoes thump a rhythm on the boards. Jody looks at you like a hero. You look at the planks like a convict. People come and go. Their voices fill your ears, and then fade.

Beneath your arm, you feel Jody pause. Looking up, you notice the empty peanut cart, the railing, the stairs. Fleshy sand fans toward the great black pond that seduced her brother. You know she doesn’t like coming here.

You know I don’t like coming here.

But there’s an answer on the sand. You can’t see it, can hardly imagine it. Still, you feel it. Its chain wraps around your heart, pulls tight.

I want to go back to the car.

Before, you would have stopped and changed direction, doing anything for Jody. She was the completion of you as a man. Your jokes were met with her laugh. Your foolishness, her scowl. Her sweet soft body refused you nothing. Once, your dreams were hers, shared and discussed late at night while sweaty stomachs cooled between you. Why did that end? When? With Bobby?

You look into her frightened eyes. Baby, it’ll be all right.

She trusts you and offers her hand so you can guide her down to the beach. Sand crumbles beneath your boots. Jody stumbles and yelps. A nervous giggle follows as you pull her tight and hold her steady. Her hair brushes your cheek. You smell the baby shampoo she uses on it. For a moment, the salt, the trash and engine fumes are gone and your head is cleansed by the scent of her and the chain tightens around your heart, pulling you toward the waves.

When you stop, it’s because your heart–its slow tic tock–needs winding. So you press your lips to Jody’s and taste the bubble gum gloss frosting them. The taste sparks no desire, no pleasure-memory. It’s just sweet and sticky.

Jody clutches at you, binding herself to your ribs. Over her head, you see the one that called you standing near the battle of wave and sand.

He is another circuit tough with faded jeans too tight and the sleeves of his t-shirt rolled. A pack of Lucky’s hides beneath the fabric at his shoulder.

This tough is different, though. His threat doesn’t grow from muscle or blade. You tell yourself that it’s the gin or the trapped beast in your head or the incest of the two breeding dementia.

You know Bobby’s face. Around this boy, a billow of smoke as black as the sky curls and dances. Looking closer, you see that he is not resurrected with skin or bone, but rather surf, beach and misty shadow, formed by the wet and the dirt and the air of this place. Night fills the cavities of his eyes and grains of wet sand lay like smooth sheets of brow and cheek. Dry sand weaves his shirt and chutes of seawater form the twin columns of his legs, the cascade an illusion of rippling pale blue cotton. His edges are rough and fray, working outward to become filaments of dark smoke, reaching to the sky. Or perhaps the reverse is true, and Night reached down to sculpt this phantom.

Bobby looks at you. Except for the whirling mist and the fall of his pant legs, he is motionless, staring. Holding Jody closer to your chest, you look on in frightened wonder. Now your heart beats faster, the way you hoped it would with her kiss.

You know what he wants. The knowledge is inside of you like the chain that brought you to this place. He wants you to turn away and leave Jody on the sand with him. The shore ghost wants to share secrets with his sister.

Turn away. Walk back to the avenue where the living go round and round.

You push Jody away, gently and with great care. Her eyes are bright and expectant as if anticipating a compliment or proposal. And you turn away to look at the boardwalk and the wall of light rising behind it from the circuit. Behind you, she speaks your name. She sounds confused and hurt, but you don’t turn back. You can never look back. With your next step, you feel her hand on your shoulder but you don’t stop walking. The hand is gone, and she speaks another name.

Bobby?

So, you walk over the sand, each step uncertain, earth crumbling underfoot. You climb the stairs toward the boardwalk, up and away from the sand. You walk along Ocean, the motorcade little more than a hum in your ears, a blur from the corner of your eye. Night suffuses the headlights, dulls the neon and blacks out the stars. The faces you’ve seen too long are now flat and featureless, masks distorted by erosion.

You’re behind the wheel of your car, driving north on Ocean but you don’t turn left. You keep going, away from the circuit to the great darkness ahead, and you don’t look back.

But now, you are back.

You let the last of the memories slip away. Jody stands closer now, though still not close.

From where you stand you see sand running in smooth sheets over her cheeks and draping long, like hair to her shoulders. The grains mound at her chest, and your name is carved in relief, just empty letters with the night showing through. Bits of captured ocean fill her expressionless eyes and weave the material of her bell-bottom pants.

She drowned the night you left. Just like her brother, Jody walked into the ocean to dream face down. Night demanded a sacrifice, payment for your release from this place, and when it appeared, wearing Bobby’s façade, you gave Jody to it and walked away.

You drove for days after that, what little cash you carried fed the gas tank, distance far more important than meat. Then came the jobs, then Susan and the children. Through it all, the numb of that night remained with you like an opiate cloud. You hid culpability behind that mist, kept Jody there for years at a time. When she was able to break through, guilt pecked at your belly, though caused no real damage.

But tonight memory burns away denial’s morphine. Looking at Jody’s image, guilt claws at your belly and sends acid tears to your eyes.

The easiest thing to do is to step forward, offer Night’s sculpture of Jody your hand and let her guide you to peace. She can take you to the water’s edge, lead you out and pull you under. A few moments of fear, perhaps panic, but then the pain and guilt will wash away on the salty tide, fear streaming from you like tears, responsibility forever behind.

The prospect of peace soothes.

Your kids are grown and don’t need you anymore. Susan will be fine, might prefer to spend the remainder of her life without you. There is insurance, and her sister or one of the kids will take her in. If they sell the house, there will be more money to get them through.

It would be so easy, you think, and a scalding desperation fills your chest. It’s what you want. What you need. Anything to escape the damned circuit of your life.

Jody reaches out a sandy palm for you. You look at her emotionless face, your chest heaving with sobs. Tears burn lines over cheek and jaw.

“I’m sorry,” you say. You are looking at the specter, but Susan fills your thoughts. You can’t be sure which woman is meant to receive the apology.

You picture Susan then, screaming at you, throwing a glass at the wall in frustration. She breaks into sobs, and clutches at her face, and you are there, arm around her holding as tightly as you can, hoping to draw the misery from her. Even now, with her thousands of miles away, you feel the emotions burn your chest. You want it to stop, for her and for yourself. You just want the pain to stop.

“I’m so sorry,” you whisper, feeling Night’s creation pulling, though you refuse to move. “I can’t make this mistake again.”

But you owe so much.

You wipe at your eyes and turn away. You walk over the sand toward the boardwalk as you did all of those years ago. Night’s grip on you tightens, tries to pull you back, but you fight with each step.

Susan is in your mind, and you are no longer swaddled by the lie that she will be okay. Every time her vehement pain ceased, she reached for you, clutched at your neck, cried apologies into your collar. She needs your warmth, your understanding and your love. If you owe any debt it is to her.

A tendril of sand whips around your face, momentarily blinding with grit. You close your eyes, feel another stinging lash crack across your brow. You keep walking.

When you reach the stairs, you turn and look back. The image of Jody remains on the beach. Around her, long cords of sand whip the air, leaving dusty clouds in their wake. You blink the grit from your eyes, let the last tears wash it away.

Maybe this escape is a reprieve, perhaps punishment. It certainly can’t be called justice, but it is right. You will follow the course of your life, carrying the miseries and the joys you are due. Jody will be with you now, no longer obscured by numbing denial. Bobby too. When you reach home, you will hold Susan in your arms. Burdens from the past will find their place among the trials of the present. And in the end, you will gratefully carry them all with nothing forgotten and nothing forgiven.

# # #

From its first haunting wails, “Something In the Night” speaks of melancholy and hopelessness. A youth’s perception of community as cage and peer expectation as duty underlies the anecdotal verses. As a result, we see how difficult it is to appreciate those things we once found comforting–home, friends and lovers–especially when we perceive ourselves as being trapped with them and by them. Life takes on an institutional redundancy (round and round), and we no longer find solace in the familiar, because we sense it is feeding on the dream of what might be. The song’s presentation, from its sorrowful melody to its lyrics of lament, gave me the sense that the narrator was looking back on these events with the bittersweet nostalgia of a survivor. It has stuck with me over the years for this reason.

Fire

Elizabeth Massie

(Inspired by “I’m On Fire”)

Mac heard the familiar rumble outside his apartment, and turned from the stove, shoved the heels of his hands against the wheels, and coasted to the window. Pushing back the thin, sun-bleached curtains, he stared down at the street three floors below where the silver Mercedes had come to a stop, the front right wheel on the curb, the engine still running and some indecipherable song pounding a bone-rattling bass through its glistening sides, making the car appear to be breathing.

A few moments later the engine was cut. The music died. Another moment and two people climbed from the front–one, the driver, was a huge, muscular man in an expensive dark suit, black tie, felt fedora tipped forward, and polished, boat-sized shoes. He walked around the front of the car with a decided swagger, kicking his feet out as if knocking back invisible dogs, until he reached the passenger who was standing on the sidewalk, arms crossed, chin tipped up in feigned confidence, light brown hair brushing her shoulders. Even at this distance, Mac could see the new wounds on her face, a prominent bruise to the right eye, a gash on her chin. The man put his arm around her shoulder and turned her toward the apartment building. The large gold ring on his finger matched the size of the bruise on her face.

As they vanished beneath the apartment’s front awning, Mac turned back toward the kitchen. The water was hissing, almost ready for the pasta. If nothing else, Mac was a whiz with foods. A former chef who had lost his job following his accident, he continued to read about cooking online and study cookbooks lent him by his crusty yet generous landlady Alva Ricardo. He ordered a wide variety of foodstuffs over the phone from the local Korean store, Greek store, Japanese store, Pakistani and Indian store. What was delivered in cardboard boxes once a week offered a unique combination of aromatic, globally integrated culinary possibilities. When Alva was free for an evening, Mac invited her to dinner. Sometimes Alva brought her daughter, Elena and six-year-old granddaughter, Bunny. They would sit around the battered yellow 1960’s-era kitchen table upon the wobbly kitchen chairs, but with the paper towels folded just so, and the candles lit and flickering, with the fragrances of the food practically pushing the lids from the pans and baking dishes, the evening became one of temporary elegance and grace. Even Elena, an overweight and naturally gruff young woman, seemed to absorb a bit of polish, and sat up straighter and spoke in a more civil tone when dining at Mac’s. One evening, she’d even risen to the occasion and complimented Mac and his cooking.

“You pretty damn good with this stuff, you know,” she said as she scooped up another serving spoon full of kha’geena and shook it off onto her plate. “You really should get a job in a restaurant. Or cook here and sell carry out. No, probably not. Got to have a license, don’t you? But I like your food, much better than what my Mama used to cook when I lived at home. That was some nasty shit. I mean stuff. Sorry.”

“You’re livin’ at home again, don’t you forget,” said Alva.

“Just temporary ‘til I find another place,” said Elena. “But anyway,” she turned back to Mac, “you got a good thing goin’ here. It’s a shame you don’t cook for hardly nobody but yourself. And you ain’t a half-bad lookin’ man, beside you not having no legs and all.”

Bunny, who’d been sitting silently, chewing on a seeded roll her grandmother had buttered for her, looked around the table at Mac’s lap and the emptiness beneath it. When they’d first met, Bunny had been clearly disturbed and confused by his physical appearance, but with time she had come around to accept that the man in the chair was a real person, that he didn’t bite or drool, and that he was nice to kids.

Mac also cooked every so often for his next-door apartment neighbor, Lisa Hoy, though he had no idea if she’d ever eaten what he’d left by her door. She never returned the dishes. Lisa was young, pretty, and shy, a waitress by trade and a drug dealer’s girlfriend by happenstance.

The two had met through the wall five months earlier, when Mac had moved to the building. He’d wanted a first floor, but Alva only had the one on the third floor available. She’d given him a cut rate on the apartment, promising that as soon as a first floor opened up, it was his. Mac had little choice but to take the offer. His sole means of income–his computer–had been stolen from his previous flat, as had his television, stereo system, and cash. Mac had fought the intruders as best he could but the boys, fourteen years of age at the oldest, had pistol whipped him out of his chair and left him dazed and bleeding on the braided rug. The landlord had been pissed and had kicked Mac out as a proven liability.

“They see you and know they got their easy mark,” he’d said, on hand on the door, the other scratching his chest beneath his t-shirt. “Fuckin’ easy pickin’. You’re out of here, this time tomorrow.”

Mac didn’t have the money to fight the eviction, so gathered up what was left, moved into a shelter for a couple weeks and then landed the vacancy in Alva’s building. He bought a used laptop with what remained on his credit card, but by the time he had his “Mac’s Cheap Yet Exotic Cooking” site up and running again (featuring the popular “Recipe a Day” and “Ask Mac” column), it had been nearly a month, and he’d lost a number of subscribers. Only a few remained.

The second evening after moving to Alva’s building, Mac had heard someone crying through the wall. He’d listened, then knocked tentatively. A soft voice had replied, “I’m okay,” though he could tell that wasn’t true by the raggedness of the sobs. He began to watch through the window and the peek hole to see who was so sad and scared, and thus came to know Lisa. Once he’d wheeled out of his apartment to her door but she refused to answer. He could tell she was watching him through her own peek hole, could hear her voice pressed up against the door. “I can’t take the chance of Darien knowing I was talking to any man but him.”

And so Mac’s life consisted of re-establishing himself on the Internet, cooking, reading, and waiting for Lisa to be alone so he could talk to her through the wall.

Lisa and Darien could be heard on the stairs now, moving up to the third floor. The man sauntered even when there was no one to see but his girlfriend, his voice affecting a deep tone that was more growl than language. They made it to the landing. Mac wheeled to his door, pushed himself up until his eye was at the peek hole, and gazed at the couple in the tainted light of the overhead bulb.

Darien was scars and sneers, unpredictable, as likely to kiss and snuggle Lisa as to punch her for saying something wrong, moving wrong, standing wrong. This afternoon, Darien was in a particularly sunny mood. He spun Lisa around, rubbed her breasts through her pink knit top, then shoved his hand down the front of her tightly fitting jeans, wiggling his hand and his hips simultaneously, leaning in to draw his tongue across the bruise beneath her eye.

“Babe,” he snarled with a savage grin, “you just wait for me, you hear? I’ll come back sometime tonight. You be waitin’ for your daddy, you be ready.”

“I will, Darien.”

“Call me Daddy, Babe. I like it you call me that.”

“Daddy.”

“You keep yourself hot and wet for me.”

“I will. Daddy.”

“You damn right you will.” Darien laughed and shoved his hand even deeper. Lisa threw back her head and squeezed her eyes shut. Then the dealer withdrew his hand and strolled down the steps. Lisa clung to the railing, her head dropped toward the floor, then moved out of Mac’s sight to her own door. Mac could hear her key in the lock, the door creaking open then slapping shut. He waited a good sixty seconds before going over to their adjoining wall and rapping lightly.

After a few moments, Lisa rapped back. Then, her muffled voice said, “Hey, there.”

“You okay?”

“Sure, Mac. How about you?”

“Okay.”

“Good.”

“You have plans for supper?”

“What?” It sounded as though she were shedding her clothes, breathing irregularly as she peeled off the tight jeans and the pink top.

“Supper? I could bring something over.”

“I’m not very hungry, Mac.”

“I’ve got freshly made pasta. Tomatoes, peppers, onions, a little garlic. It’s almost ready. I think it’s some of the best I’ve ever made.”

Another pause. “No, thanks.”

“You have to eat something.”

“I’m really tired. But thanks.”

“You can reheat it later.”

“Well.”

“All right?”

“All right.”

“I’ll bring it over, put it by your door in just a little bit, then.”

“Okay.”

Mac finished the pasta dish–lovingly sautéing the vegetables with olive oil and rosemary, then letting them cook over a low heat. When the sauce was perfect, he ladled it over the pasta in a casserole dish, securing the lid, then wheeling it out into the hall on a thick, folded towel. He knocked on Lisa’s door, his heart beginning to race.

Maybe this time she would open the door. Maybe this time, for the first time, he would be able to see her face to face.

It took a good minute before he heard her at the door. He held the towel-padded dish up toward the peek hole.

“Looks good, Mac. Thanks. Just leave it there.”

“If you open the door I can just hand it to you. I’ll be real quick, I promise.”

“No.”

“Lisa…”

“Darien could be back any time now.”

“His car is gone.”

“He’s fast, Mac. You can’t know how fast.”

The dish was growing heavy but still he held it out. “You know what I think of him. You know what I think you can do, what you should do. Yet there you are, still letting him control your life. You’re way too good for that.”

“Mac.” She sounded exasperated, defeated. And in that single utterance Mac heard, yet again, her inability to shed the man who so abused her. Then she said, “Please just leave the food or take it back with you.” He heard her withdraw from the door and back into the bowels of her apartment.

Mac put the dish on the floor. He ran his thumbs along the padding on the arms of his chair and stared at the door–the water stains, the mildew, the frayed veneer at the bottom that resembled dried fronds of an old hula skirt. Then he went back to his apartment.

In the kitchen, he dumped the remaining pasta and sauce down the disposal, and took his time grinding it into nothing.

Darien returned to Lisa’s apartment three hours later, bringing along two of his friends. The friends were stoned but Darien sounded sober. Mac had heard Darien boast to Lisa that the best dealers don’t mess with the shit they sell. They just let the morons lose their minds and their money.

Mac lay in his bed against the adjoining wall, his hands pressed to his chest, his heart thundering, afraid of what would Darien might do to Lisa, wishing he could kill the man, and wanting Lisa more than anything he’d ever wanted in his life. He listened to the feral laughter next door, the grunts, the meek, indecipherable responses from Lisa to whatever the men were saying or doing.

If he had arms of steel, Mac would slam them through the wall and catch up the criminals by surprise. He would snap them up, wring their necks, then drop them one at a time out the window to let them splatter blood and brains on the quartz-sparkling sidewalk. Warning signs for anyone else who might want to mistreat Lisa. People would step over the carcasses, afraid to move them, afraid that whoever put them there wanted them there, and who would challenge such a powerful man?

“Then she would want me, too,” he whispered to the ceiling and to a spider that hung from a fragile line. He closed his eyes, trying to think louder than the men next door. He saw in his mind Lisa coming to his apartment with the empty casserole dish. She was dressed in her tight jeans, thin t-shirt, no bra. She sat beside Mac on the bed, telling him he was right, that she was better than to let herself be treated so poorly. Telling him that she hated Darien and that she had only stayed with him because he had terrorized her into staying, that she wanted to run away with Mac and never look back.

She fell onto the bed on her side. Mac tenderly stroked her hair and kissed her tears away. Lisa moaned, rolled onto her back, and placed his hand upon one of her soft breasts. Mac felt the delicious stirring in his blood, the sudden electrical current that would not be denied, flowing outward from his soul like sun’s rays, coursing to his mind, his heart, his groin. Lisa lifted her body to kiss Mac’s lips. He reached between her legs to find the jeans gone and her dark and secret place trembling and damp.

Somewhere beyond there was a heavy sound, a thud, a groan…

Mac found his own shorts gone, his underwear as well, and he was swollen and ready. As Lisa opened her legs she whispered, “I love you, Mac. I love you so much you can never know.” He drove himself into her, into her, into her, into her. His muscles cramped deliciously with each movement. Lisa clung to his back with her fingers.

Somewhere beyond there was a muffled cry…

Lisa cried out in ecstasy. Mac’s explosion was exquisite, divine, and he threw his head back, thanking God with a loud and primal roar that made the hairs on his arms and chest stand at attention.

Somewhere beyond there was a swearing, and the words, “Fuck, you hear that?”

Mac opened his eyes. His throat was dry as gravel. He was wet below the waist. His stomach spasmed.

It was Darien next door. “You hear that?” The dealer laughed and pounded on the wall with what sounded like his foot. It made Mac’s headboard rattle. “Cripple over there’s jackin’ off! Holy shit!” There were other male voices now, joining in the laughter. Beneath it all, Lisa’s soft weeping.

Mac let his breathing slow. He swallowed against dryness, and then wiped his forehead. The laughter through the adjoining wall dropped off and the voices shifted, moving on to conversations about something that sounded more serious, something that was hard to hear. Mac wondered what they had done to Lisa to make her cry. Was she hurt or just sad?

Surely she had heard Darien making fun of Mac, banging on the wall.

He must pay.

Mac switched on his clock radio to his favorite oldies station and turned the music up.

Hot town, summer in the city…

He once again saw himself with steel arms, bashing in Darien’s brains and sweeping Lisa up and away.

He fell asleep to jovial radio co-hosts giving a weather report and talking about an upcoming festival of some sort, something to do with water, with cleaning up the river, or fishing or boating, he couldn’t quite tell because the world was falling away.

He awoke to a train of a headache so heavy, so painful, that all he could do was to crush his skull between his hands to alleviate the pressure. His pillow was soaked with sweat and dream-tears, though he could not recall the dreams with any clarity. The radio droned on, playing some nondescript classical tune defined by violins and oboes. The clock face read 6:07 a.m.

Is Darien still there with you, Lisa? Or did he go away and leave you all alone?

Mac eased off the bed onto his chair, sponge bathed in the bathroom, and put a kettle on for morning tea. While waiting for the water to hiss, he went to the adjoining wall, pressed his ear to the scabby paint, and listened. There was no snoring, suggesting that Darien and his minions had left. He looked out his living room window; the Mercedes was gone.

Turning on the computer, Mac pulled up his e-mail, discarded the spam, and then went back for his tea, black, straight, no milk or no sugar. He worked on his site for several hours until he heard gentle noises next door. He rolled to the wall, rapped.

A return rap, and “Good morning, Mac.” She sounded exhausted but not terrified. She was obviously alone.

“Hi. How was the pasta?”

“The–?” She hadn’t even tasted it. She likely had put the whole thing at the bottom of a trash bag. Mac felt a flush of heat–frustration, disappointment–at the back of his neck. “It was…very good.”

“It was?”

A hesitant, “Yes.”

“You didn’t really try it yet, did you?”

“No, Mac, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to lie. I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.”

“It’ll reheat in your microwave if you still have it. Or…you could bring it over here and I can reheat it if you want.”

“Don’t be silly.”

Mac rubbed at the fire on his neck, pushing it down, away. He took a long breath, held it, let it out. He changed the subject. “You on your way to work?”

“In just a while. I have to put on my makeup.”

Lisa served pizzas at a “child-friendly” restaurant five blocks over, where families held frantic birthday parties and children crawled through pools filled with plastic balls and played Skee-Ball and Whack-A-Mole. Lisa worked part-time, three days a week, ten-thirty in the morning until nine in the evenings. She wore the uniform of the establishment–beige polyester slacks and short-sleeved white blouse with a little plastic nametag. She usually put her hair up into a ponytail, making her look younger than her twenty-four years. The makeup was often used to hide the evidence of Darien’s mistreatments, applied heavily from what Mac could see through his peek hole and window.

Mac scrambled for something else to say, something to keep her talking. “I was looking at some of the National Parks online last night. Gorgeous places. I’d love to see the Grand Canyon, the Smoky Mountains, some of the rest. Wouldn’t you?”

“I dunno.”

“Just imagine, traveling across the country.” He tried to make his voice sound even, not overbearing. “Think of all the stuff there is to see. I’d especially like to visit all those different restaurants spread across the states, the big city eateries with the high reputations, the little diners off forgotten roads. I bet I could find a new job some place unique and exciting, start over. I’ve never had the chance to do that, to go anywhere much. How about you?”

“No,” said Lisa. “It sounds like fun.”

Mac took a deep breath. “When was the last time you had fun?”

It sounded as if she spit air. “Never.”

“You need to leave Darien.” It came out faster than he thought it would, though he wasn’t sorry he’d said it.

Silence. Then, “I can’t, Mac. He’ll kill me.”

“He’s killing you now.”

Mac sensed her shrug through the wall.

“How did it get like this? How did you let him take over your life so much?”

“I don’t want to talk about it!”

“Why? This is me, remember.”

“Fuck. Okay. I was out of a job. Darien was great. He set me up in my place, paid the rent, still pays for most of it. You think I can afford even this mouse-infested shit box for what I make at the restaurant? He’s been around a long time, more than a year, Mac, longer than I’ve known you. He’s told me over and over he’ll kill me before he lets me go.”

“You need to get away. It’s not his decision to make.”

Silence.

“Call the police. Get him arrested.”

“He’ll kill me. They’ll hold him, let him out, and he’ll kill me.”

“Get a restraining order.”

“Ha! You think that’ll stop him? He brags he’s never been held by the cops before, he’s too smart.”

Mac clenched his teeth together. It felt as though matches had been struck behind his eyes, pinpoints of red hot. “He’s not smart, he’s evil.”

Her voice dropped, becoming almost inaudible. “The only thing that will get him away from me is if he was put in prison or killed. That ain’t never going to happen.”

“Never say never, Lisa.”

A very long silence. Mac thought for a moment that she had moved away from the wall, but then he heard her shifting.

Mac put his hand on the wall, willing her to feel his love through the plaster.

“Lisa, let me help you.”

The reply was loud and abrupt. “You? You’re kidding, right? How can you help?”

Mac was taken aback. He withdrew his hand. She saw him as only the cripple next door, the young man who had nothing to offer but pasta, pie, and a friendly word through the wall.

Her voice softened as if she had read his mind. “Mac, it ain’t about you and the way you are. It’s Darien and the way he is. Nobody can help. Not you, not the police, not God, not even Superman.”

Mac had a sudden, silly, brilliant idea. His heart rose with the revelation, the clear vision of what they could do. “Hey, let’s just leave together. Right now. I don’t have money to buy that car but I can afford two bus tickets. Head out to where we’ve never been before. Leave all this mess, this pain, this fear in the dust.”

“I can’t.”

“Wait. Think. Don’t say you can’t. You can.”

“Darien knows people everywhere, he pays for information. He’d find us. He’d find the bus we take. He’ll kill us both and nobody will ever find us.”

“Lisa, please…” Can’t you tell I love you?

“No, Mac. I have to get to work. You have a good day, okay?”

And she was gone.

The day was long, the afternoon sun hanging for an inordinate amount of time atop the building across the street, sending stifling heat into Mac’s apartment. The curtain was no good at holding the heat at bay, neither was the torn plastic shade. There was no air conditioning, of course, another reason the place was so cheap. Mac worked on his site, paced, flipped through a cookbook, read the first three chapters of a novel Alva had given him a month ago, then put it aside, bored. He drank iced coffee and patted the fire away with wet washclothes.

He thought about Darien, he thought about Lisa. He imagined himself and Lisa on a bus west, her head in his lap, his chin atop her brown hair. He imagined the two of them having inexpensive roadside picnics at rustic tables where squirrels watched from treetops, the scents of honeysuckle and a near-by sun-warmed stream drifted in the air, and the world glowed like the fires of heaven.

Lisa got home a little after nine. Mac prepared to tap on the wall to say hello but heard Darien’s car pull up in front of the building, and seconds later Darien come up the stairs. Through the peek hole, Mac could see the man had a crystal vase filled with roses for Lisa, as scarlet as the blood he drew from her at his whim.

Lisa had said, The only thing that will get him away from me is if he was put in prison or killed. And that’s never going to happen.

Mac heard Darien open the door, call cheerfully for Lisa, and then everything went silent. It was silent for a long time and then music began to play, the same heavy stuff Darien listened to in his car. Mac sat on his bed, not wanting to listen beneath the music, afraid not to listen.

The beating came around midnight. Darien’s blows, Lisa’s cries. It lasted a good twenty minutes. There was a shattering on the sidewalk outside. Mac knew it was the vase of flowers, tossed out by Darien to prove some point. Then Darien left, cursing, stomping, down the stairs to his car.

The only thing…prison or killed.

Mac didn’t have the strength to kill Darien. And if he did, he wouldn’t survive prison. He’d be shanked to death, tormented, or tortured by Darien’s buddies on the inside. The only thing left was to get the man arrested and imprisoned for a long time.

The rest of the night Mac stayed awake, knocking futilely on the wall to get Lisa’s attention, listening to her sob. Mac had never heard such despair in his life, nor had ever felt it as strongly or completely himself.

Two days later, Darien drove to the apartment building with Lisa in tow. He’d picked her up from work and had a need he wanted her to fill. He brought her up the stairs, past Mac’s peek hole, and into her apartment. Darien’s mood was hard to pinpoint, he seemed distracted though not particulary angry. He didn’t stay long with Lisa, but when he came out he encountered a legless young man in a wheelchair blocking the staircase.

“What the…?” said Darien, pushing back his hat and scratching his forehead. The man’s eyes were rimmed with red, dangerous, narrowed. “Whoo hoo! Who let the cripple out?”

Darien leaned forward in his chair, his arms folded and resting in his lap. His body burned with determination and dread, though he fought to keep his words cool, calm. “You’re not getting past me, Darien.”

“You’s a stupid fucker, man,” laughed Darien. “Get out my way before I make you get out.”

That’s what I want, Darien. Make me get out, hit me, knock me cold. Then I’ll have you arrested. I’m not afraid to call the cops on your pathetic ass. And Lisa and I will be out of here before you’re on the streets again.

“I’m not moving.”

“Hell you ain’t.” Darien stuck out his foot and shoved it against the chair, trying to kick it sideways and into the wall beside the stairs. The chair bucked up against its brakes and scooted back a foot. Mac grabbed the wheels and pulled the chair back into its original position.

“You brain damaged, that’s what you is. I said get out of my way. I don’t ask nice twice.”

“You’re not even good enough to be called an asshole, Darien,” said Mac. “You’re a shriveled up little shit-smelling nothing. You’re an asshole’s asshole. Beating up women, how brave is that?” His breathing came in shallow, irregular pulses. His heart banged at his chest, warning him to stop what he was doing.

How much will it hurt when Darien actually strikes?

Darien laughed loud and long then, hands on hips, head thrown back, his hat wobbling. He couldn’t believe what he was encountering. Mac could hear Mrs. Carter across the hall, thumping against her front door, peering out. That was good. A witness.

Then Darien’s laughter cut off, dead in his throat. He leaned over and slapped Mac soundly on his face. It stung mightily. “Move that chair.”

Mac just stared at the man, locking his jaw to keep it from trembling.

Darien lifted his boat-sized foot and drove it into Mac’s chest. Mac felt something crack in a bright explosion of pain. A rib. Breath rushed out; he gasped, nothing came in. He gasped again, again. Nothing. And then, a pain-filled rush of salt-tasting air.

Okay, he’s done it now, back up, let him by!

“You fucker,” snarled Darien. “You got what you asked for. Now move!”

Lisa, he’s going to jail, I can promise you!

Mac tried to pull his wheels to let the man get by, but the agony in his chest wouldn’t give him the strength.

“I said move!”

Mac forced himself to lean forward over the pain.

“Move!”

He grabbed the wheels, pulled, gritted his teeth yet cried out involuntarily. The chair inched back. But it wasn’t enough, it wasn’t fast enough.

“Fuckin’ move!” It was a flash then, a movement of body so rapid that it only registered in residual ghost-image after it was done. Darien hands locked together and he swung them up, around, and down, driving them against Mac’s shoulder with such force that Mac and his chair toppled over and down the steps. Mac’s hands shot out, grasping for something to stop the fall, but it was happening so fast, another rib breaking as he struck a step and flipped again, falling, falling. A shoulder cracking. His wrist. The chair bouncing over his head, reaching the second floor landing before Mac did.

Mac knew he was going to die the moment before he did. He saw how he was to land, and knew with certainty that he would never travel with Lisa to the west, never find those exclusive, exotic, and curiously old-fashioned restaurants, never get another job as a chef, never fix himself and Lisa lunch at an old picnic table off a two-lane highway where vintage metal trashcans were tethered to concrete blocks and cars hummed by, not caring who you were or where you came from. In this moment he was indescribably sad, until he saw that Alva was on the second floor, staring up at him in horror and up past him at Darien with rage.

She had seen the assault. She had watched the drug dealer slam Mac down the stairs to his death. She and Mrs. Carter could tell the police all they would need to know. Lisa wouldn’t have to do anything, just let her angry, righteous neighbor and landlady take charge. They wouldn’t be afraid to testify. Murder would put Darien behind bars for many years. If not for life, then at least long enough for Lisa to start over, to come up from the shadows in which she’d been living, to move, to grow, to find the beauty that was there that she had never truly seen before.

Or will she just go on to another like Darien? Will she even know how to save herself? Who will help her?

“Lisa!”

Mac’s head struck the floor at an angle, the weight of his body following, driving him hard against the unpolished wood, snapping his neck in a burst of golden and silver flames.

The fire went out.

# # #

I’m often compelled to write about the isolated or the alienated, the lonely or forgotten. Some of my characters are emotionally damaged while many others are just ordinary people caught up in circumstances beyond their control, leaving them on the edge of society, unwitting outcasts, struggling to get out of unbearable situations yet sometimes making things worse for the attempts. “I’m On Fire” is a short song that packs an emotional punch. The lyrics are edgy, intense, and claustrophobic, telling about secret longing and passion. The music is moody and sad. It brought to my mind someone living alone within four walls, unable to escape, wishing for something out of reach, scrambling for the key to dispel the darkness.

Atonement

Gary A. Braunbeck

(Inspired by “My Father’s House”)

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him…

–Robert Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays”

Mute, voiceless, abandoned and all but forgotten, my father’s house does not so much sit on this street as it does crouch; an abused, frightened animal fearing the strike of its keeper’s belt, the sting of a slapping hand, the rough kick of a steel-toed boot. No lights shine in any of the windows, which are broken or have been covered with boards or black paint or large sections of cardboard that now stink of dampness and rot. The paint on the front door long ago gave up fighting the good fight and now falls away, peeled by unseen hands, becoming scabs dropping from the body of a leper in the moments before death, but with no Blessed Damien of Molokai to offer up a final prayer for a serene passage from this cheerless existence into the welcoming forgiveness and saving grace of Heaven. This was once a house like any other house, on this street like any other street, in this town that most people would immediately recognize and then just as quickly forget as they drive through it on their way to someplace more vibrant, more exciting, or even just a little more interesting.

Generica, of Thee I sing.

But we can’t blame them, you and I; we can’t impugn these people who pass through without giving this place so much as a second glance. If things had worked out differently, we would have burned rubber on our way out, making damn sure the tires threw up enough smoke to hide any sight of the place should one of us cave and glance in the rear-view for a final look, a last nostalgic image of this insufficient and unremarkable white-bread Midwestern town, but that’s not the way it works around here; never was, never will be. You’re born here, you’ll die here; you’re a lifer, dig it or not.

We sometimes wonder if people still use that phrase, dig it, or if it’s also passed into the ether of the emptiness people still insist on calling history, memory, eternity, whatever, passed into that void along with groovy, outta sight, “That’s not my bag,” “Stifle it, Edith,” Watergate, Space-Food Sticks, platform shoes, Harry Chapin flying in his taxi, and the guy who played Re-Run on What’s Happening?

Wouldn’t it be nice if that drunken Welshman’s poems had been true, that death has no dominion, or that we could rage against the dying of the light? Odd. It occurs to me that if we were still alive, we’d be looking right into face of 45 about now, feeling its breath on our cheeks, its features in detail so sharp it would be depressing.

But this never does us any good, does it, thinking about such things? Especially tonight, of all nights. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten? Yes, that’s right. Thirty years ago tonight, my father buried us under the floorboards in my bedroom after he came home early from work and caught us in my bed. It was my first time, and when he saw you there, with his little girl, it was too much for him to take; not this, not this dirty, filthy thing going on under his roof, it was too much; his wife was gone, three years in her grave after twice as long fighting the cancer that should have taken her after nine months; his job was gone, the factory doors closed forever, and he was reduced to working as a janitor at the high school just to keep our heads above water because the severance pay from the plant was running out.

“At least the house is paid for,” he’d say on those nights when there was enough money to buy a twelve-pack of Blatz, sit at the kitchen table, and hope with every tip of every can that some of his shame and grief and unhappiness would be pulled out in the backwash.

You never saw it, you never had the chance, you didn’t know him as I did. I couldn’t look at his eyes and all the broken things behind them any longer; I couldn’t listen to his once booming voice that was now a disgraced whisper, the death-rattle of a life that was a life no longer, merely an existence with no purpose at its center…except for his little girl. Except for me and all the unrealized dreams he hoped I’d bring to fruition because he no longer had the faith or the strength to fight for anything. A hollow, used-up, brittle-spirited echo of the man he’d hoped to be. Even then, even before that night, he’d ceased to be my father; he became instead what was left of him. I tried to fill in the gaps with my memories of what was, what had been, but I was a teen-aged girl, one who hadn’t paid any attention to him during the six years my mother was dying, and so I made up things to fill in those holes. I pretended that he was a Great War Hero who was too modest to boast about his accomplishments on the battlefield; I dreamt that he was a spy, like Napoleon Solo on The Man from U.N.C.L.E., hiding undercover, using his factory job to establish his secret identity, his mission one so secret that he couldn’t even reveal the truth to his family; I imagined that he was writing the Great American Novel in hidden notebooks late at night, while I slept in my room with the Bobby Sherman and David Cassidy posters on the walls, their too-bright smiles hinting that some day soon my father’s novel would make him so rich and famous that the two of them would be arguing over who would take me to Homecoming, and who would take me to the prom.

But he was no war hero, no spy, no secret great notebook novelist; only a factory worker with no factory who’d exchanged a lathe machine for a mop and a bucket and pitying looks from faculty members. To the students, he was either invisible or an object to mock.

But at least we have this night, you and I, to roam a little farther beyond the boundaries of this abandoned and now-condemned property. No, I don’t remember your name. I don’t remember my name, but what does it matter now? Our names, like our flesh, were only a façade, an illusion to be embraced, a falsehood to be cherished and mistaken for purpose, for meaning. We have what remains of our bodies to remind us of that, beneath the floor, flesh long decayed and eaten away, two sets of bones with skulls frozen forever into a rictus grin as if we’re laughing at the absurdity of the world we’re no longer part of.

Let’s not stay here for now, let’s move outside, round and round this house, watching as the living ghosts of everyone who once passed through the door come and go in reverse; watch as the seasons go backwards, sunshine and autumn leaves and snow-clogged streets and sidewalks coming and going in a blink and…and let’s stop here. I want to stop here, in the backyard, just for a few moments, just to see his face as it was on that night.

Watch, see how pretty it all is. Murky light from a glowing street lamp snakes across the darkness to press against the glass. The light bleeds in, across a kitchen table, and glints off the beer can held by a man whose once-powerful body has lost its commanding posture under the weight of compiling years; he’s overweight from too many beers, over-tense from too many worries, and overworked far too long without a reprieve. Whenever this man speaks, especially when he’s at work, especially when he’s holding the mop and bucket, his eyes never have you, and even if they do, you cannot return his gaze; his eyes are every lonely journey you have ever taken, every unloved place you’ve ever visited, every sting of guilt you’ve ever felt. This man’s eyes never have you, they only brush by once, softly, like a cattail or a ghost, then fall shyly toward the ground in some inner contemplation too sad to be touched by a tender thought or the delicate brush of another’s care. To look at him closely, it’s easy to think that God has forgotten his name.

He lifts the can of beer to his mouth. It feels good going down, washing away the bad taste in his mouth that always follows him home from work. He drains the can, sighs, goes to the sink and pours himself a glass of water. He is thinking about his days as a child, about the afternoons now forgotten by everyone but him, afternoons when he’d go to the movies for a nickel and popcorn was only a penny. He thinks about how he used to take his daughter to the movies all the time when she was still a little girl and her mother, his wife, was still alive. He remembers how much fun they used to have, and he longs for the chance to do something like that again, something that will put a bright smile on his daughter’s face and make himself feel less of a failure.

He stands at the sink listening to the sounds of the house, its soft creaks and groans, still settling after all these years. He thinks about his dead wife and doesn’t know how he’ll be able to face the rest of his life without her by his side. She was a marvel to him. After all the mistakes he’s made‑and, God, he’s made a lot, no arguing that‑her respect and love for him never lessened.

He tries to not think about the things his daughter has done for him the past few months, things he didn’t ask her to do, but things she’s done nonetheless. Just to help him relax, to help him sleep.

And then he hears a sound from his daughter’s room. A squeak of bedsprings. A soft sigh. The muffled laughter of a boy.

His faces becomes a slab of granite and the broken things behind his eyes shatter into even more fragments. Unaware that he’s doing it, he reaches over and picks up the hammer he left lying on the kitchen counter last night while he tried repairing the loose cupboard door above the sink. He turns and marches toward his daughter’s bedroom, knowing what he’s going to find when he opens the door and–

‑what? All right, just this once, we won’t watch the rest. He wasn’t really there. Anyway. I’m glad we know that now. He just wanted to scare us but his frustration, his anger, his heartbrokenness took control.

Let’s pretend that we still have hands, and let’s pretend to hold them as we play “Ring Around the Rosie” once more, going back just a little more, a year, maybe less, because I’ve been saving this for you, for this anniversary, this most special anniversary. Why is it special? That’s a secret I need to keep just a little while longer. Take my hand and let’s go, round and round and round and‑

‑stop right here. Yes, this is the place, the time, exactly right.

There’s a young girl of seventeen sleeping in her bed who, for a moment, wakes in the night to hear the sound of weeping from the room across the hall. She rises and walks as softkly as she can to her door, opens it, and steps into the hall.

“….no, no, no…” chokes the voice in the other room.

“Daddy?” she says.

“….no, no, no, oh, God, honey, please…”

She knows he can’t hear her, that he’s dreaming again of the night his wife, her mother, closed her eyes for the last time, of the way he took her emaciated body in his arms and kissed her lips and stroked her hair and begged her to wake up, wakeup, please, honey, what am I supposed to do without you, wake up, please….

She takes a deep breath, this seventeen-year-old motherless girl, and slowly opens the door to this room stinking of loneliness and grief. She takes a few hesitant steps, the moonlight from the window in the hallway casting bars of suffused light across the figure of her father as if imprisoning him in the dream. She stares at him, not knowing what to do.

Then his eyes open for a moment and he sees her standing in the doorway.

“Arlene,” he says, his voice still thick with tears. “Arlene, is that you?”

“Shhh,” says the young girl, suddenly so very cold at hearing him speak her mother’s name in the night. “It’s just a bad dream, go back to sleep.”

“…I can’t sleep so hot, not without you…”

She can hear that he’s starting to drift away again, but she does not move back into the hallway; instead, she takes a few steps toward the bed where her father sleeps, tried to sleep, fails to sleep, sleeps in sadness, sleeps in nightmare, wakes in dark loneliness, drifts off in shame and regret.

For the first time, she realizes the pain he’s in, the pain he’s always been in, one way or another, this man who was no war hero, no spy, no secret notebook novelist, just a sad and decent and so very lonely man, and she feels useless, insufficient, foolish, and inept; but most of all, she feels selfish and sorry.

Her eyes focus on one bar of suffused moonlight that points like a ghostly finger from her father’s sleeping form to the closet door a few feet away, and she follows the beam, opening the door that makes no sound, and she sees it hanging from the hook on the inside of the door: her mother’s nightgown, the one she’d been wearing on the night she died.

“Oh, Daddy…” she says, her voice weak and thin.

Still, her hand reaches out to lift the gown from the hook and bring it close to her face. Her mother loved this nightgown, its softness, its warmth, the way it smelled when it came out of the dryer after a fresh washing, and this girl holds the garment up to her face and pulls in a deep breath, smelling the scent of her mother’s body and the stink of the cancer still lingering at the edges.

From the bed her father whimpers, “….no, no, no, oh, God, honey, please…”

And she knows now what she can do for him, what she has to do for him, and so she removes her nightshirt and slips on her mother’s death-gown, crosses to the bed, and slips beneath the sweat-drenched covers.

“…Arlene…?’ says her father, not opening his eyes.

“Shhh, honey, it’s me. Go back to sleep. Just a bad dream, that’s all.”

His hand, so calloused and cracked, reaches out to touch her face. She lies down on her mother’s pillow and is shocked to find that it still carries some ghost-scent of her perfume. She remembers that her parents liked to spoon, so she rolls over and soon feels her father’s body pressing against her, his legs shifting, his arm draping over her waist as he unconsciously fits himself against her. After a moment, she feels his face press against the back of her–her mother’s–gown, and he pulls in a deep breath that he seems to hold forever before releasing it.

She does not sleep much that night, but her father sleeps better than he has in years.

We can watch now, you and I, and see his face, see my father’s face when he wakes the next morning and sees her next to him. Shadows of gratitude, of shame, of self-disgust, of admiration and love flicker across his face as he stares down at her now-sleeping form. He feels her stir beneath his arm and realizes with a start that his hand is cupping one of her breasts, the way he used to cup his wife’s breast before the cancer came and sheeted everything in sweat and rot and pain.

Still, his hand lingers for a few moments as he realizes how very much like her mother’s body does his daughter’s feel. Then he feels her stir, waking, and closes his eyes, pulling his hand away at the last moment.

His daughter rolls over and sees how deeply asleep he is, and realizes that she’s now given herself a duty that can never spoken aloud, only repeatedly fulfilled. Only in this way can she comfort him, help him, thank him.

She slowly rises from the bed, crossing to the closet where he replaces her mother’s gown on its hook, then slips back into her own nightshirt and leaves, closing the door behind her.

As soon as the door closes, her father opens his eyes and stares at the empty space in the bed next to him that now hums with her absence. So much like her mother. So much like her mother. So much like her mother.

This goes on for nearly a year, her assuming the role of her dead mother in the night so her father can sleep. In a way, both know what’s going on, what they have become, the roles they are playing, but neither ever speaks of it aloud. And even though nothing physical ever occurs between them in the night as they keep the grief at bay, a part of each of them falls a little bit in love with the other. In this way they become closer than they had ever been, and though the house is never again a happy place, the shadows begin to retreat a little…until the night when her father hears the muffled laughter of a boy coming from his daughter’s bedroom and storms in with a hammer that he does not intend to use but does, nonetheless, then collapsing to the floor afterward, vomiting and shaking with the realization of what he’s done, what he’s become, and it takes only a few frenzied hours for him to mop up the blood and tissue and then tear up the floorboards and move the piles of human meat underneath, burying his daughter in her mother’s nightgown. He takes great care replacing the boards, hammering them into place, then covering them with an area rug taken from the living room before gathering a few things–some clothes, what little cash is in the house, some food–and stumbling out into the night.

Shhh, listen–do you hear it? That sound like old nails being wrenched from wood? The front door is opening, someone is coming in, someone who walks in a heavy heel-to-toe fashion as afraid the earth might open up between each step and swallow them whole.

We watch as the old, hunched, broken thing that was once my father makes his way toward my bedroom. He carries a battery-operated lantern with him, a small backpack, and so much regret that its stench reaches us even in this non-place we wander.

He sets down the lantern, then his backpack, removing a hammer from inside. The same hammer.

In the light we see how he’s changed. Well over seventy, and the years have not been kind. He looks so much like Mother did toward the end, a living skeleton covered in gray skin, slick with sickness. He moves aside what little remains of the rug and sets to work on the floorboards, which offer little resistance, and within a few minutes, he is staring down at us.

“I’m home,” he whispers.

Hello, Daddy. I’ve missed you.

He sits down, his legs dropping down beneath the hole in the floor, his feet resting between us.

“I thought about the two of you every day,” he says. “I’ve dreamed about the two of you every night…those nights that I can sleep. Ain’t too many of those, especially lately.”

It’s all right, Daddy. I understand. We understand.

He reaches into his backpack and removes something we can’t quite make out, because he’s deliberately keeping it hidden from our gazes. We’re back in what remains of our bodies now, staring up at this lost, broken, sick old man whose face is drenched in sweat, in pain, in the end of things.

“I had no right,” he says. “I had no right to love you like that, in that way. I had no right to be jealous, Melissa.”

Melissa. So that was my name. How pretty.

“I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean to do it.” And he brings the object into the light so we can see it. But we already knew, didn’t we, you and I? His old gun from the war where he never was a hero, just a simple foot soldier who helped fight the enemy and serve his country before coming home to marry a good woman and build a life for his family.

He begins to speak again: “Oh, honey, I…” But the rest of it dies in his throat, clogged by phlegm and failure and guilt.

It’s all right, Daddy. We understand. We’re not mad anymore.

But he doesn’t hear us. He clicks off the safety, jacks a round intro the chamber, and pushes the business end so deep into his mouth that for a moment we expect him to swallow the entire weapon.

He hesitates for only a moment, but that gives us enough time to move, to rise up as we are now and open our arms before he squeezes the trigger, and we are with him, and he is with us, and as the human meat explodes from the back of his head we lean forward and take him into our embrace, cold flesh and tissue meeting bone and rot, and he embraces us both, does my father, and we hold him close as his blood soaks into the tattered, rotted remains of my mother’s nightgown, and we can smell her, she is within us, around us, part of us, and in the last few moments before we pull my father down into hole with us, I find some remnant of my voice in the release of his death, and have just long enough to say, “I forgive you, daddy, And I love you.”

Then he is in the hole with us.

And in this way are our sins of omission at last atoned.

# # #

“Atonement” was originally going to be called “My Father’s House,” but the more the story unfolded, the more I realized that naming it after the song would be misleading. Like the song (which I suspect is deliberately misleading), the house in question isn’t what lies at the core of the piece; it’s what waits inside that both the song and the story are really about. And in both cases, what waits inside are memories of guilt, longing, and regret that have never been dealt with. I remember when the Nebraska album was first released, I heard an interview with Springsteen wherein he mentioned that a certain poem had “…really hit a nerve…” with him, and eventually served as the catalyst to his writing “My Father’s House.” I quoted a few lines from that magnificent and eloquent poem, “Those Winter Sundays,” at the beginning of this story, inspired by an equally magnificent and eloquent song.

Kneeling In the Darkness

Lorne Dixon

(Inspired by “Point Blank”)

The Beretta 9mm shook Teddy’s hand, either introducing itself or sealing a deal. He trembled, every muscle dancing to a primal rhythm as old as the brickwork on the abandoned south side boardwalk. Fear. It had been easier to control his anxiety out in the shadows of the streets, to concentrate on the spider web patterns in the cracked concrete sidewalk. The ghosts out on the streets would whistle and tumble past like windblown pages of newspaper, but here in the dark they crept up into his sleeves and whispered endless questions into his ears. Whatcha doin’ here, Teddy? Whatcha doing here, really?

He wanted to drop the gun, crouch low to the decaying floorboards, and sprint towards the open, rotten doorframe, out into the alley alongside Empress Street. Out where the homeless and helpless rested their heads on mattress cushions ransacked from the shuttered clinic on First and Burke. But his feet were numb, nailed to the floor by jagged, nagging little doubts. He needed to move, to shuffle in place or risk becoming a flesh statue wearing a headdress of wild black hair and perspiration.

The Seawall had burnt in the late 80’s; it was now just a cracked shell of a place, a memory with just enough wood and mortar left standing to be considered a relic. What had not blackened, shrunk, or melted in that heat remained behind to be warped by the rain that seeped in through the patchwork rooftop. Every piece of sagging, waterlogged furniture frowned in the shifting moonlight. Nothing was at peace here.

She was there, somewhere, hidden in some shameful corner.

“You brought a piece?” Van Eyssen shouted from the distorted hole that had once been a doorway. The cop sauntered in, one hand on his own weapon. In street clothes, Van Eyssen could have passed for a high school gym teacher nearing retirement. Tough but tired, just counting down the days. “I should haul your ass to the locker for bringing that thing. I’m here doing you a favor, and you bring-”

“Not for you.” Teddy pocketed the Beretta.

Van Eyssen approached the bar, slid one hand over its surface, and inspected the smear of filth on his hand. “Not for me. For who? There’s nothing left to this town. It’s just a crop of derelict buildings following the coastline. Maybe some kids selling weed to buy concert tickets. A few guys who used to be someone, but not no more, sleeping off four dollar wine on the beach head. Lotsa trash. Nothing you need a gun for.”

“It all started here. That night. This place died and it spread through this town like a cancer. It only took five years to wipe out the whole fucking town. When Nicole… Nicole and I used to come down here on Friday nights this town was alive- too alive, even. Took an hour to find a place to park.” Teddy wasn’t really talking to the cop, who only rolled his eyes, but to the Seawall itself. And maybe- maybe- to her. “It all started to die the night they shot her.”

“Kid,” Van Eyssen said as he slid a stick of gum out of its reflective sleeve, curled it, and popped it into his mouth. “It still fucks with me, what they did to your girlfriend. No one deserves that. But this wasn’t just a busy town, it always had its dangerous elements. You know that. She came in here, pretty girl, with a freakin’ ponytail no less, and met some bad men. There were always bad men around here.”

Teddy tried to ignore the anger rolling in his stomach- an old hate, a flame, maybe like the one that had burnt the Seawall but hadn’t been able to scorch it completely off the planet. “Bad men. Sometimes I talk to… people…and they tell me things. You never know how close you’re standing to a bad man.”

“What’s that mean?” Van Eyssen reached into his pants pocket, his eyes briefly clouded with distrust and guilt, maybe a glimmer of some personal history he would rather forget. “Look, its not as if I don’t have things I would rather be doing. So, goodbye memory lane. You bring the cash?”

The bills came out of Teddy’s pocket in a rubber-banded bundle. He rolled the band off like the lip of a condom and took a moment to inspect the bills. To Van Eyssen it might have appeared he was counting the money. He didn’t need to. Over the last three months he had spent just enough money to eat and get to the fish market for work. He had saved the rest. For tonight. He turned it over to the cop without a pause.

“You bring ’em?” He asked.

Van Eyssen nodded with a snicker. “You know, usually when I sell inventory out of the evidence vault, it’s a family heirloom, or a pistol from World War Two. I can understand why someone would want that kind of thing back. But this? I really can’t say I have a clue what you intend to get out of this.”

Teddy caught the small evidence bag the cop tossed him.

A small plastic evidence bag, sealed and signed.

A button of twisted metal rolled in the bag.

The carcass of a bullet.

He stared at it, trying to gauge its evil against every other object he had ever held. There was no comparison. It had cut through Nicole’s throat, cracking her jawbone, and spun upward, twisting through the soft bedding of her brain, ravaging the complex knots of memories and ambitions on its surface. Then it had shattered her skull and escaped her. It was cold in his hand, but he knew it must have burnt with an aura of ferocious, searing heat.

The second item was wrapped in brown paper and fastened with twine. Teddy took it quickly and pocketed it, barely affording it a glance. The two men didn’t even attempt eye contact during the transfer.

“Look, Teddy, I’m just a delivery boy on this one. Why you go to Patterson for this one?” Van Eyssen asked, though it sounded nothing like a question, and turned away.

“You look inside?” Teddy asked.

“Bad enough as is. We all do things we regret, sometimes. Less I know, the better.” Van Eyssen shook his head. “I don’t really give a shit you went behind my back, but Chrissake, watch what you tell that rookie, won’tcha?”

Their eyes met.

“We done here?” The cop asked, though it sounded nothing like a question.

Teddy watched him duck out of the Seawall in his peripheral vision, but couldn’t take his eyes off the bullet. Somehow he had expected it to be more substantial–heavier, grislier, uglier. But it was only a small chunk of metal, nearly weightless in his hand. Just a meaningless little thing.

A meaningless little thing that had stolen his happiness.

He pulled his eyes off the bullet. Alone, the warped walls and broken furniture appeared darker than before, as if the blacker shadows had oozed out from under their shelters and spread throughout the room. Teddy tried to recall an image of the Seawall during its life- neon lights around the bar and circling points of light from the mirror ball- but could not reconcile the place where he stood with the memory.

He watched his step–over random debris, beer cans, and a spare work hammer- as he worked his way towards the far end of the bar, towards the restrooms. He had made this journey many nights after dancing close with Nicole, her perfume and his cologne now one fragrance on both their throats. Past the splintered pedestal that had been a DJ booth the last trickle of light dissipated. There was only darkness now. He used one hand on the crumbling wall to guide him down the narrow hall. The doors were gone, clearing his path. Unlike earlier visits, he headed left, into what had been a ladies’ restroom.

A tiny finger of light wormed in through a ventilation fan, illuminating a pile of broken porcelain, a shredded bird’s nest, and a dozen or so empty beer cans. Water damage had curled the wallpaper, giving it the wrinkles and folds of a well-worn road map. He followed the line of light with his eyes and left hand to a dime-sized puncture in an exposed section of drywall. He traced its circumference with the edge of his thumb for a moment.

It was a bullet hole. Nicole’s bullet hole.

He fingered the bullet in its plastic sleeve. It had burst out of her skull at a quarter of its initial velocity, fracturing bone and spilling soft tissue. Free for just a moment, it collided with the wall and dug in. Only the very tip of its head had broken through to the crawlspace beyond. The rest of the slug cooled in the wall, waiting to be pried free by a policeman’s pliers and shuttled from one evidence bag to another.

Time and the elements had puckered up the hole, now large enough for Teddy to lean in close and peek through. He did. There was only the tiniest speck of light at first, just a glint of artificial brightness. He used his thumbnail to dig a clump of moldy drywall out of the hole, exposing a shaft of light the size of a quarter. He flicked the black mess off his thumb and leaned in, pressing his face to the wall, his eye filling the opening.

On the other side there was a woman’s restroom, identical to the one in which he stood, except not burnt or abandoned. His eyes scanned the fresh powder blue paint on the walls, highlighted by tasteful gray trim. Against the far wall a sink gleamed as white as tooth enamel. A mirror shimmered in the light, the reflection in its face as clean and unblemished as the surface of the most tranquil pond. This was the room he had found on a drunken night of mourning months ago and had dismissed as a mirage born from the hypnotic womb of whiskey and beer. Revisiting on a sober night, he had found it unchanged.

A voice whispered, just barely inside his head, Don’t. You won’t be able to go back. You can’t bring her back and this is a one-way ticket.

Teddy didn’t ignore the voice, but didn’t heed it, either. There had been plenty of voices warning him over the years since Nicole’s funeral. Some had been brief, almost cursory. You take care of yourself, okay? Others had been more involved, such as his mothers constant badgering for him to pick up the fragments of his life and find a path forward. His mother was gone now, too, taken by too many long nights working the toll booth and a three pack-a-day black stain that had spread across her lungs.

A one way ticket, Teddy. Point of no return.

He could feel the weight of the handgun in his pocket. It felt like an odd mixture of protection and baggage, an unnecessary necessity, a witch doctor’s totem in a world without superstition.

Teddy tried to ignore the familiar body on the white bathroom tile, or the pool of blood surrounding her head in a shallow halo. As much as his heart needed her, his mind would not let him pollute her memory any further. Too many nights had been sacrificed to staring at her lifeless body though the hole, each night the pool of blood seeming a little larger, a little darker.

“Do you have it?” It asked. It never took much of a form, just a dark smudge, an inky shadow against the far wall. Its voice was built from the settling of the Seawall’s foundation, the whisper of wind through the holes in its walls, the scamper of its rodents, and dozens of other sounds impossible to trace. Was it a ghost? A demon? A symptom of schizophrenia?

He no longer gave a fuck what it was.

“I have it.” Teddy’s lips quivered.

The shadow did not move, but rather shifted. Its shape was still impossible to determine, but hidden dimensions briefly became visible, like folds of lace swaying in cross winds. Perhaps it had no shape at all, no true form. “Then give it.”

He pulled back from the peephole, inserted his thumb, and used it as a tiny crowbar to tear out a chunk of drywall. He continued, involving more fingers and then whole hands as the hole widened.

He passed the paper bag through the hole.

“You need to come over.” It laughed, the sound of brittle shingles tumbling from the roof and wind sailing plastic bags across old floorboards.

Teddy hesitated for only the briefest of moments before tearing through more of the moist drywall, enlarging the hole. He pushed himself through, arms parting on the other side in a breaststroke, followed by his head, his body, his bent legs. The air inside was wickedly cool and moist, its scent dizzying. It seemed to swirl in lazy whirlwind gusts. He pushed off the floor and steadied himself on his feet. The floor felt unstable under him, a constant slight vibration tickling through his shoes like alien gravity pulling through the tiles. Passing through the wall felt like a change in altitude and atmosphere.

“You’ll get used to it. Eventually,” It said, the sound crawling from a tired throat grated raw by alcohol, cigarettes, and grief, but a human voice, no longer a collection of sounds.

The black shroud around It didn’t disappear entirely but faded, becoming nearly translucent. It was a nude man, his body pale and painfully pink, except where deep yellow scars marked his flesh like winding river tributaries. The scars met in a jagged black valley at the center of his chest.

Teddy slinked back, his courage evaporating.

“You think you’re scared?” It grinned‑leathery, elastic skin folding around its purple lips. “You don’t know anything about it. Wait until fear is all you have, all you are.”

Teddy held out the package again, his arms unsteady.

It reached out with arms as crooked as ancient tree limbs and snatched it from his hands. It clipped through the twine with one brown fingernail and then stripped off the paper bag. Its eyes softened and then closed as it pressed the child’s shoe to its face. It breathed in deeply, gathering the scent of fake leather, rubber, and a lost child.

Teddy kept his eyes on It, but bent down over Nicole and brushed a patch of dirty blonde hair out of her face, revealing a beautiful face streaked with blood. He smeared it away with the palm of his hand, leaving a pink stain.

“Thank you,” It said, shroud darkened, burying the shoe in its folds. Only its face remained, eyes opening slowly. “I’ve searched, but I couldn’t find her, or the man who took her from me… This binds us, you and I. You should call me Theodore Riddle. That’s who I was.”

Teddy’s hand stroked her face, cold and smooth, a delicate ice sculpture. “What do I do?”

Riddle’s awful face frowned in apology as he slid closer, flaps of shadowy, vaporous shroud flowing around him. “That’s not her, not your Nicole. This is where she died. That thing on the floor is just an echo of a tragedy. She’s gone somewhere else.”

“Then…what do I do?” he repeated, almost pleading.

Riddle held out one brittle hand. Teddy slid the bullet out of its evidence bag and let it fall into the outstretched fingers. Their eyes met. “You’re brave- enough, anyway. That’s good. You’ll need it to go through with this.”

Riddle’s shroud darkened and blotted out his form like an artificial storm cloud, then lightened and reconfigured into the shape of a kneeling man. His pale face hovered just over Nicole’s. He snaked one arm around her neck and lifted her off the floor. With his other hand, he brushed aside clumps of bloody hair, exposing the exit wound. The broken plates that had once been a complete skull shifted under his hands.

Hot tears seeped out of Teddy’s eyes.

Riddle pushed the slug through the wound into the soft tissue inside. His slender finger disappeared inside her head, pushing the bullet deeper.

“Do you have to‑”

He dropped her to the floor, opened her mouth, and reached inside. The bullet he extracted from between her lips was pristine, its jacket as reflective as chrome. Riddle held out the bullet, motioning for Teddy to extend his hand.

If Teddy’s hand shook before, now it rocked in seizure.

The bullet dropped into his hand. Riddle closed his hand on Teddy’s, constricting it into a painful fist. The dead man’s grip sent a powerful wave through his body, the path of the charge marked by clenched muscle and screaming clusters of nerve cells. Teddy felt his heart pound, each cycle gaining a new, painful ferocity. His body seemed to be pulled apart, tendons tearing, muscles shredding, blood vessels bursting. He felt his body on fire, freezing, and overcome by electric numbness all at once. He felt a million deaths and their singular agonies. His ears filled with shrieks and whimpers and regretful sighs.

“Listen.” Riddle said, his grip steadying Teddy’s hand. The pain intensified. His lungs filled with phantom water, threatening to burst from tension and pressure. A hundred invisible blades punctured his flesh at as many angles, bullets tore chunks of flesh out of his body, he felt himself crushed by stone, suffocated by linen, beaten until his skeleton was nothing but an assembly of shards. “Listen to her.”

Then‑

Vivid memories exploded in his mind- snapshots of smiles on board walks, kisses on benches, Nicole’s hand shaking a tiny wrapped gift, the sunrise blazing through their apartment windows. Each image flared up for only a moment before disintegrating. Then a sharp, clear image fought to the front and held on, refusing to burn out and flutter away like the others. It was Nicole, of course, wearing a simple blue sundress, the curve of her face intoxicating, her blonde hair pulled back into a pony tail. The Seawall’s dim lights bounced off her skin, giving her an angel’s subtle iridescence.

“Be back,” she mouthed, the club’s sound system burying her voice under a furious backbeat. She turned and headed for the ladies’ room. He followed, watching her hair swing like a pendulum, then glanced backward and felt a brittle crackle spiderweb through him. He saw himself standing by the bar, watching Nicole walking away.

He followed her into the restroom, stood just behind her as she inspected her makeup in the mirror above the sink. His reflection in the mirror was less than a shadow, just a slight trick of angle and light, not at all a hazy outline of a man. She was prettier than he remembered, but less beautiful than image he had built of her. He could make out the first hints of worry lines but also the brilliant smile that was carving them.

He reached out to touch her shoulder.

“No.” Riddle whispered with caution, the sound softer than the breath on his ear. He could smell its decay, like old books or sidewalk chalk. But it was not to be seen, either over his shoulder or in the mirror.

He reeled in his hand as the bathroom door opened.

A young man in a leather jacket walked in, head bobbing, eyes scanning the open stalls before reaching out- through Teddy- and sliding a hand under her hair and strumming the top vertebra of her neck. His voice juggled a Brooklyn slur and an European accent. “Pussycat.”

“You’re late.” Her voice triggered a dozen tiny memories, from bedroom moans to the sound of her singing along to Ben E. King in his car. “You’d be all over me about being late.”

“Busy night. Had to stay on duty.” His hand massaged her neck, moving in circles even as she slinked away from his touch. “I’m not so bad to you. I keep you supplied, don’t I? And I don’t ruin your little masquerade with Joe Lonely out there. He always looks so sad. Have you thought about that? About what I know about you?”

She turned quickly, pushing his hand away. “You don’t know anything about me. You just started me off when I was thirteen. I don’t even think it was about money back then. Or even sex. You did it ‘cause you could.”

He snorted. “You were never innocent, girl.”

“And whose fault was that?”

He drew a tear line down his face with one finger. “Everyone’s got heartaches disguised as life lessons, sweetheart. I spend my days picking up the pieces, seeing how you animals live. I tell a man we found his kid bludgeoned to death on a church pew and he takes a swing at me, calls me a lying cocksucker, because he won’t blame himself for letting a ten year old girl walk home from school alone.”

“So only us addicts are to blame.” Nicole sneered.

He shrugged. “I know plenty of people who listened to First Lady Nancy and said No. I never held you down and popped you with a needle, sister. You have my money?”

“I’ve got some of it.” She dropped a few bills on the sink. To Teddy’s eyes it couldn’t have been more than a few twenties. “What I have is enough. I mean, I can use a telephone, too. Have you thought about what I know about you?”

He squinted. “I ain’t sure that’s all you got?”

Teddy watched him reach into his coat pocket. He clearly heard a hand gun’s safety release. As he began to slide the gun out, his shirt opened enough for Teddy to make out the police badge on his belt.

“You don’t need to see this,” Riddle said in a sigh.

Teddy closed his eyes. They bickered. He threatened. She laughed at him, asking if he were insane or just stupid. He growled in anger. Sounds of a vicious struggle. Then a single shot, the quick fumbling with a door lock, and the skidding feet of a man running.

Teddy opened his eyes.

Nicole was slumped against the sink holding her head. She moaned, her hands trying to close the hole in her throat and push the broken hemispheres of her skull back together. Tears fell from her eyes, not in fits and starts, not like normal tears, but just two streams of liquid rolling down her face.

He leaned down by her, his own tears starting again, and put his hands on her face. Her skin was hot. She breathed deeply twice, then released her head and slumped forward. It took a full minute for Teddy to realize he had just watched his lover die.

He rolled her into his arms and held her. The warmth drained from her quickly. Her skin felt like cool wax under his fingertips. He kissed her face just below her open right eye and told her he loved her.

She jolted in his arms and pulled his ear down to her lips, so quickly and violently he thought she might bite it off. He snapped his eyes shut. But instead of teeth tearing his flesh, she growled, “His name is Kopendorski. Olen Kopendorski.”

Teddy’s eyes opened as Riddle released his hands. He glanced down at Nicole’s body, sprawled on the floor and unmoving.

“I hope you found what you were looking for.”

Teddy staggered out of the Seawall onto the uneven concrete sidewalk of Empress Street, sliding the work hammer into his belt and smoothing his shirt over it. The harsh scent of sea salt filled his nostrils; a reminder that only a patch of asphalt and a decaying fence separated him from the Atlantic Ocean, its deep blue body unchanged as the town crumbled on its shore.

A Range Rover had parked nose-to-nose with his old sedan. Van Eyssen sat in the Rover, his bucket seat reclined, the tip of a cigarette burning bright orange and illuminating the interior. Teddy stumbled over to the window and rapped.

Van Eyssen pressed a button and the window rolled down.

“Don’t you have somewhere to be?” Teddy asked.

Van Eyssen snuffed out the cigarette in a Chinese take-out container. His eyes glistened. Teddy wondered what made a veteran cop cry. “I kept thinking what it must be like to lose your girl the way you did. Or anyone, really. A wife. A daughter. You in that place with a piece, I just couldn’t shake the thought that you were gonna use it on yourself. So I came back.”

Teddy ran a hand under his nose. “Why’d you care?”

“Don’t care.” Van Eyssen folded up the carton and dropped it onto the passenger’s side floor. “But I would rather not have to explain how you got ahold of state property when we find your stinking ass in a week or so.”

Teddy nodded nervously. “You know a lotta cops?”

“Teddy‑”

He pulled the Beretta and pointed it to Van Eyssen’s face. “I just need to know where I can find someone. A cop. A cop named Olen Kopendorski.”

“Detective Kopendorski? Put that thing away, Teddy. Whatever you’re thinking, it’s dead wrong. Olen Kopendorski’s not the answer to any of your questions. He’s a Academy punk, in the family of the State Prosecutor, nephew or something. You’re pointing a fucking gun at me, kid. You’re making a mistake.”

“Olen Kopendorski killed Nicole.”

Van Eyssen snickered. “Put down‑”

“Where is he?” Teddy screamed, rattling the gun wildly against the doorframe. He punched out the glass in the driver’s side mirror with its barrel.

Van Eyssen tossed up both hands. “Okay. You want to go see Olen Kopendorski? We’ll go. It’s Thursday. He’s out bowling with his mistress. Memory Lanes, on Speedwell.”

“Move,” Teddy demanded, throwing open the door. Van Eyssen slid into the passenger seat, Teddy climbed behind the wheel. “Give me your gun.”

He did. They drove.

The lot was full, so he parked on Speedwell–one wheel perched on the sidewalk. They got out and headed into the Lanes. Teddy pocketing the Beretta but kept his hand on it.

It was a busy night, people were everywhere inside, low class socialites chatting at the bar, time clock punchers bowling in the lanes, a few kids rummaging through the ball racks. There wasn’t much else left to do in this town.

They approached a booth in the small dining area just off from the bar. Kopendorski shared a platter of buffalo wings and fries with a beach tanned, lizard-skinned, implanted blonde. He glanced up at Van Eyssen. “Hey, Mel, what you doing here? You lose track of your desk?”

“He brought me.” Van Eyssen gestured to Teddy. “He wants to talk to you.”

The blonde finished off a wing and asked, “Who’s this, Olen?”

Teddy stepped forward, shouldering Van Eyssen out of his path, and locked eyes with Kopendorski. There was something cold in Kopendorski’s stare, some little intangible thing missing. Teddy might as well have been making eye contact with a copperhead. “You killed my girl.”

The blonde let out a firecracker string of cackling laughter. Teddy’s eyes fell on seven beer mugs on the table, empty except for lipstick smears and foam. Kopendorski tossed an annoyed glance at her and then asked, “This guy a friend of yours, Van Eyssen? That would make sense You both have that lost look. You could form a club.”

“They could scrapbook,” she added, leading to another burst of laughter. A few bowlers scattered around the bar started to take notice, stopping to watch.

Teddy whipped out the Beretta and brought its weight down sideways into Kopendorski’s ear. His head hit the tabletop and the edge of the platter, scattering the wings across the table and onto the floor. The blonde scrambled out of the booth.

Kopendorski lifted himself off the table slowly. A line of blood drooled out from his split bottom lip and dripped like syrup onto a stray wing. He yelled, the sound not quite a known profanity but clear in its intent. Rage filled his eyes.

Teddy struck out with the gun again, this time jabbing its barrel into Kopendorski’s right eye. He recoiled, his head snapping back and forth, and roared. Teddy glanced over his shoulder at Van Eyssen as he took a step forward. Teddy waved the Beretta through the air. The cop froze in place and raised his hands. Van Eyssen leaned back on his heels. “Teddy…this isn’t gonna…”

Teddy reached over the table, grabbed Kopendorski by his hair, and dragged him over the tabletop. He held the gun to the cop’s throat. “You killed my girl.”

Kopendorski’s left eye widened. “I don’t know who-”

Teddy jerked him off the table. He collapsed roughly to the floor, jaw cracking against the tile floor. “Stay down low and start moving. To the john.”

Kopendorski crawled on all fours like a crippled animal, leaving the irregular blood drop behind. Teddy pushed the Beretta into the nape of his neck and pushed him along. He was well aware of dozens of sets of eyes watching him in silent disbelief. He didn’t care.

When they reached the men’s room, Teddy pulled Kopendorski to his feet and pushed him roughly through the door. He followed quickly, locking the door behind him. Kopendorski slid on the slick floor and rolled onto his stomach. Teddy pounced on him and fished out the sidearm he wore on his ankle. He tossed the Beretta into a urinal and emptied the shells out of the cop’s weapon. Kopensorski eyed the Beretta, his body tensing, readying itself to launch across the room and retrieve the gun.

“Don’t bother. It’s not loaded. I could only afford the one bullet.” Teddy brought Nicole’s bullet out of his pocket and loaded it into Kopendorski’s gun. A perfect fit.

“It was just a drug thing. Just a–” The cop pleaded.

He fired.

The pounding inside the restroom stopped.

Van Eyssen stood at the men’s room door, one hand up, keeping the other patrons back. They had all heard the gunshot, but only he recognized the report and knew it couldn’t have been the Beretta. For a moment no one in the building dared to move. In the new silence, the sound of a lane’s ball return releasing a bowler’s ball resonated against the walls. Curled up under a table, the blonde sobbed.

Van Eyssen locked his jaw and rammed his shoulder against the door. The frame broke, releasing the lock, and the door swung open. He rushed in, unarmed, hoping Teddy wouldn’t open fire or Kopendorski wouldn’t panic.

The young cop was sprawled on the floor, one eye missing where a bullet had tunneled through. His hands were still shaking, but Van Eyseen had seen enough failing bodies to recognize motor reflexes. His blood might not have stopped pumping just yet but Olen Kopendorski was a dead man.

“Ambulance!” Van Eyssen called over his shoulder, more for the report he would need to file than any chance to save the young cop.

The hole in the drywall beyond the sink pulled him over, as if it had a dark gravity. A work hammer rested in the sink, along with large chunks of the wall. The hole was large enough for a man to writhe through. Van Eyssen was larger than Teddy, but he squeezed through, tumbling to the floor on the other side.

It was dark, too dark to see. He lit his cigarette lighter.

He had expected an unfinished storage area or supply closet. The flame from his lighter reflected off stained glass, entire walls of it, scenes of Biblical challenge and redemption, marble statues of saints and angels stared at him with empty eyes.

“Teddy?” Van Eyssen shouted.

A dark shape moved into his view. “Teddy’s not here. He’s gone somewhere else. With someone he loves very much.”

Van Eyssen recoiled, pushing himself back the way he had come in, but he found the wall intact and illustrated by a vast fresco of Jesus’ sermon and the Mound.

“Do you remember this place? St. Matthew’s. It stood on Wilmcrest Boulevard before the fires brought it down. You do remember it, don’t you?” Riddle moved towards Van Eyssen, the black mist of his shroud billowing in invisible winds, dark tendrils unfurling. “You remember what you did here, don’t you?”

Van Eyssen’s lowered himself to the floor and wept. “It…It was just…a drug thing… she saw…I was so…out of my mind…Olen sold me…”

Riddle dropped the child’s shoe at his feet

# # #

The piano keys bristle through Springsteen’s “Point Blank” the way rain hits the windshield of a primer gray 1967 Camaro RS. There’s dread swimming in The Boss’ raspy voice as he whispers about the lights going out and I believe him, there’s no deceit there, only a man holding onto the fading trails of a ghost he once loved. Somewhere beyond heartbreak, riding shotgun into the twilight with a memory he can’t bury, this is Bruce at his most deliriously poetic. Is there a more human moment in the machinery of rock ‘n roll? Hell man, I hear that no one survives…

The Hungry Heart

Michael A. Arnzen

(Inspired by “Hungry Heart”)

He was breathing and yet he was choking.

The ventilator tube down Jack Jones’ throat felt thick as a garden hose, and though the drugs were staving off any pain, the sheer novelty of having his normal breathing mechanics overrun was driving him mad enough to cough and retch despite the warnings of the interns around his hospital bed. Jones gagged on the intrusive snorkel and coughed again, this time feeling a vague pressure lift from somewhere above his lungs.

Doctor Pecctori leaned over him, handling a kidney-shaped pillow: “Calm down, Mr. Jones, and let me help you.”

Jones gargled in reply.

Dr. Pecctori nestled the pillow above Jones’ chest. His voice was soft, yet coldly procedural. “Clutch on to this. You need to cough to purge the phlegm that’s collected in your lungs during the procedure, and we don’t want to strain the incision.”

Jones dimly understood what he was being told, and tried to remember that he had just had open-chest heart surgery. He hated waking up to a machine that had taken over his body, hated breathing sterile oxygen through a tube, hated being violated by this plastic rape of his lungs…but the fear of cracking his ribs open again by something as simple as coughing was enough to make him play along with whatever the doctor said. He clutched the pillow as he was told.

“Now hold it tight. I’m going to slide the tube from your throat, so you’ll feel a little tug of discomfort, but I don’t want you to cough until I give the word.”

Jones nodded quickly, grinding down on the plastic bit between his lips.

“Okay. Hold tight.” Dr. Pecctori grimaced and fished the tubing out a bit. “Now I want you to inhale as much as you can and hold your breath.” He tugged the hose gently as Jones lifted his diaphragm in a weak effort to suck in some extra oxygen. It dimly tasted of mint. “Okay… now cough.”

Jones crushed the pillow in his grip and flexed his entire body to squeeze the plastic out from his throat. The movement made him feel like a giant toothpaste dispenser being crushed in the middle, and the pain flared in his chest so sharply that he’d forgotten about the tube being tugged free from his lips altogether and gasped out in terror that his fragile ribs were unzipping at the breastbone from the pressure.

He clutched his pillow, afraid to inhale, sputum resting on his chin.

Time froze for just a second, then, as something went snap. His chest felt airy and shattered, and he was reminded of those chocolate-covered marshmallow cookies–those puffy pinwheels whose fragile chocolate shells were inevitably crackled before you ever got to take them out of the box.

His body took over and he inhaled.

His chest prickled–like a Faraday cage of electric pain–and he knew his body was self-destructing in its weak effort to recover from the surgery. His sutures were straining and slipping as his diaphragm brought in the very air his body needed; he could feel the strings loosening, the wound smacking its lips on his blood and muscle. His body was going to unravel completely and spill its guts over the edge of the hospital bed like some poorly dissected frog…and there was nothing he could do about it but clutch his fluffy pillow like a helpless child?

He growled then and the sensation shifted into an even higher register of pain–the kind one only feels when it has been endured for long periods of time. He swore he could now feel the scaly lining of his lungs becoming exposed to something cold and foreign through the giant laceration that was tearing up his sternum and literally unbuttoning the shirt of skin that held together his ribcage. As he clutched the pillow for his very life, its polyester fabric pressed through his ribs and rubbed against his lungs–the friction felt like sandpaper scraping a bloody slab of beef, squishy and raw.

But it wasn’t the grit of sandpaper that he felt next as even more pain lanced up into his mind and shot random sparks. No, not sandpaper. Teeth. Tiny, chewing bones, gnawing into the tissue surrounding his heart.

He screamed–and the burst felt like a Claymore mine exploded from the bed beneath him.

Dr. Pecctori pulled the pillow aside and checked his dressing as one of the nurses injected something into his IV. “Everything looks fine, Mr. Jones,” he said with a grin. “Your bypass operation was a success and you’re in excellent condition.”

Jones couldn’t believe him, but as he rested on the bed–body throbbing–pain pulsing in waves as it dulled, then blissfully evaporated–he was thankful anyway.

While he made a few notes on a chart, Pecctori mechanically went through a series of instructions in how to properly breathe and move and generally exist with this new chest wound, now that his open heart surgery was complete. He explained how he’d be monitored and cared for, how he’d have to cough often (using a pillow to “splint the incision”) in order to avoid pneumonia, how he’d have to eat carefully and urinate even more carefully. Jones–happy to have survived, happy to have new drugs coursing in his veins–couldn’t care less, as he tried to understand the new discomfort he was experiencing in his torso, tried to process why this had all happened in the first place, tried to comprehend why any god would create a body so fallible that its own circulatory system could clog up so easily on the very food it needed, like some cruddy car engine on leaded fuel.

“You’ll need to stay in the heart unit for a week or so,” Pecctori said as he clicked his pen, “but it will heal quickly if, and only if, you participate fully in your physical therapy.”

Straining the oxygen line in his nose, Jones craned his neck to look down at his chest, just to make sure it really hadn’t burst open. The gauze mummied around his torso was still a pristine white. Down between his legs he spotted the pillow he’d clutched when he coughed out his intubation.

It was a large red heart.

Gaudy as an eighth grader’s Valentine gift, the plump, heart-shaped pillow was bright maroon–dyed as red as fresh-spilled blood. And though the general form of the pillow was goofy and cute, the artwork screened on it was like something out of an anatomy book: a cross-section exposing colorful valves and ventricles and veins.

“Wha…” It was hard for Jones to speak, but he had to know.

“I’ll be back later to check on your dressing,” Pecctori said as he pivoted and walked away.

He pointed at the heart. “Wha…”

A chubby nurse smiled at him. “Hi there, Mr. Jones! I’m Nurse Hertzog. I coordinate the nurses in our special cardiac care unit here at Kingstown Memorial, and we’ll all be taking extra special care of you.” She noticed his preoccupation with the pillow and snatched it up. Then she displayed it with a smile. “This is Mr. Happy Heart!” She wobbled its left side, as if the pillow could wave hello. “He’s a special treat we give all our patients. You get to keep Mr. Happy Heart when you leave. He comes with his own ink pen, too, so your visitors can sign it, just like people do with a cast.” She looked at the toy and chuckled to herself.

He squinted at her in disbelief.

Nurse Herzog ran a long pink-painted fingernail across a purple vein on one side of the pillow’s diagram. “This is the coronary artery that Dr. Pecctori bypassed with the graft he took from your thigh. Be sure to show it to your friends and family when they come to see you.”

“Noonesskum,” Jones swallowed, feeling dizzy.

“Take it easy, Mr. Jones.”

He spoke carefully: “I said…” He swallowed, throat gritty, its passageway leading only to a dim and cold emptiness inside. “No one is…coming.”

He didn’t miss the wife and kid he’d abandoned back in Baltimore ten years ago at all. And he was certain they didn’t miss him either. They’d probably rip him apart worse than the surgeons if they found him here. He regretted being a “deadbeat dad,” but it sure beat being a dead one.

Herzog shook her head and gently pressed the heart pillow down against his chest. “Don’t worry about a thing, Mr. Jones. Now hold this tight. The surgery has made you very sensitive, but the pillow is insulated to keep you extra warm. And if you cough or sit up, you absolutely must clutch this pillow to keep those sensitive little sutures nice and snug.” She cocked her head to one side, sizing him up. “You must feel very tired right now. It’s okay, Mr. Jones. You’ve been through quite a bit and your meds are clearly kicking in. Just go ahead and take a little nap. No worries. I’ll take care of you.” Herzog cocked her head to the other side, flipping hair. “But you, Mr. Jones, need to take good care of your heart.”

He felt cold and his eyelids were getting difficult to hold up any longer. He barely noticed as Herzog mumbled something else and walked away. The cold, empty feeling in his ribcage returned and his head swam with medication as he clutched Mr. Happy Heart against his chest.

It felt warm, like a fat, muscular animal.

And it felt like it was gently purring…gently pumping.

And its surreal rhythms sent him quickly, blissfully, to sleep.

Jones opened his eyes. The sun was rising. He couldn’t actually see it, but he recognized dawn from the dim way it illuminated the pale curtains surrounding his bed area. He could hear snoring from another patient in the care unit, somewhere behind the curtain, along with the annoying bleep of someone else’s monitor. Somewhere a nurse’s spoon tinged against a porcelain cup, and he longed for a morning mug of hot, sugary coffee.

And a glazed donut. No, a dozen. Right beside a steaming pile of scrambled eggs and huge biscuits smothered with clumps of sausage and frothy gravy.

Jack Jones had survived a heart attack at a relatively young age and was definitely not looking forward to the lifestyle that would be foisted upon him for the remainder of his life. He had spent the majority of his forty-two years picking items on the menu that were explicitly not marked as “heart-healthy” choices, because he knew that “heart-healthy” was a synonym for “bland.” He despised salads and fruit juices and low fat milk. He absolutely hated oatmeal and prunes and fiber-rich breads.

And he hated the exercise that came with it. He thought that those unoriginal morons who marched up and down the park in their fancy sweat suits hefting dumbbells or jogging to the beat of their iPods deserved to be picked off by snipers or attacked by rabid wolves. He didn’t want to be another brainwashed soldier in the Nike army. When commercials said “Just Do It!” he didn’t think of athletic discipline, but sex, which was the only exercise he ever got, and rarely at that. No, he didn’t want to “just do it” and get heart healthy. He wanted to smoke cigarettes between meatball subs, watching DVDs endlessly on his entertainment center back at home, alone and uninterrupted by nagging nurses and the guilty conscience they passive-aggressively nurtured in their patients.

He tried to nod back to sleep and forget about his unfortunate future–he had enough agony to worry about for now. And he knew he should be thankful that he was alive. He’d be home soon enough. That was all that mattered: getting out of here. He could change his habits if he had to–and he knew that deep inside he was willing to do almost anything to avoid another surgical ordeal like the one he’d just experienced–but he’d “just do it” on his own terms, once he got his own life back in his own hands.

A recurring snore. A blasted monitor bleep. A terrible spoon pinging porcelain.

It was an orchestra conducted by some subsonic sadist intent on keeping him awake. He clutched the heart-shaped pillow against his chest.

It was still beating.

Jones pulled it off his chest so quickly the movement stung his sternum. He held it up by the sides, the way he’d read a newspaper, and the act hurt his ribs.

Mr. Happy Heart didn’t budge.

He noticed some writing on the side and pulled it closer to get a better look. “A happy heart is a healthy heart,” it read in thick black ink, signed by one Harriet Herzog, who had also scribbled a goofy smiley face beside her name. Another nurse–apparently a Bruce Springsteen fan–had signed “Everybody’s got a hungry heart…so feed me lots of love and healthy snacks!”

Jones angrily squeezed the messages between his fingers. He hated being treated like a baby–especially by strangers. Ever since he’d arrived at the hospital, everyone kept telling him how young he was for his condition, but he might as well have been put in the children’s ward considering how juvenile their bedside manner had become. This only served to perpetually remind him that he was far too young to die, far too young to have coronary bypass surgery, far too young to be in a cardiac ward with a bunch of geezers snoring out what little was left of their breath.

He picked up the pen and strained to write: “Health is an ideology!” on it. It sounded cryptically Marxist, like a slogan a punk rocker might have on his torn t-shirt. It was patently stupid, but he believed it, and at least it counterbalanced the smarmy Hallmark greeting card-like comments the others had stained permanently onto his pillow.

Then Mr. Happy Heart faintly beat between his fingers. Jones twitched from the surprise and nearly dropped it. But he quickly surmised that the strange sensation was probably just his own pulse, made present by gravity, the same way you feel it in your temples when you hang upside-down. Yet the quiver he’d detected beneath his fingertips seemed to flutter more rapidly than his own blood flow, so–thankful for the curtains that surrounded him–he began prodding the gory diagram on the stuffed organ with two stiff fingers, feeling more than a little idiotic as he tentatively searched for a heartbeat.

Instead, his fingertips sank into the superior Vena Cava. The large opening of the blue vein literally caved in, pliable like warm wet sand, and he could feel something gritty inside the uncanny myocardial stuffing that surrounded his fingers and quickly puffed tight like a blood pressure sleeve.

The pulse was now clearly detectable in this soft tissue which had engulfed his fingertips like a worm’s mouth. He could feel it beating as the Vena Cava gently worked on his fingers, grinding its tiny teeth into the flesh in an effort to suckle and chew.

Enthralled for only as long as it took to repulse him, Jones shook it off his hand, reminded of the bloodsucker he once tore off his thigh after he went fly fishing in the aptly-named Leech River, many years ago. He instinctively brought his stinging index finger to his mouth, sucking away the pain, tasting the sweet tang of his own blood.

On his lap, Mr. Happy Heart throbbed, wobbling on its shoulders as it pulsed. It even seemed to have darkened in color, nurtured by the nip from his hand.

And he noticed that–surprisingly–the pain had suddenly disappeared from his chest and limbs. Like magic.

In fact, his torso felt normal. His arms felt stronger.

He was able to sit up without any trouble. He removed his nose hose and inhaled hospital air, licking his lips to really taste normality again. Then he dared to pick at a corner of his dressing like a scab and peeled back a bandage to get a close look. The sutures were there, running down his sternum in a military straight line of black stippling over the blue-and-pink edges of his wound–the stitches sewn tight as a seam in a pair of jeans.

The degree of healing, so soon after open-chest surgery, seemed utterly impossible. Yet there it was. And he could feel it.

He stared down at the arrogantly cute heart that wobbled happily on his lap, dumbfounded. Soon its pulse beat a little less rapidly. And with it, the pain slowly crept back to his nerve endings. But Nurse Herzog’s smiley face grinned at him, and as he read her patronizing little message, he knew with distinct clarity what he had to do.

He acted quickly, before the weakness returned.

He got out of bed, faced in the direction that that annoying snore was coming from and lifted the bedside curtain as cautiously as a prom dress.

In the bed slept a pale woman with steely gray hair. Her bony, freckled hands were clasped together as though she had prayed herself to sleep. She’d be beautiful if it wasn’t for the fact that her nostrils flared so wide he could see the ugly crud in her nose. He wondered how it was possible for a person to sleep through such snoring.

But he hoped she’d stay that way.

Jones lifted his heart pillow and placed it over one of her hands, trying to aim the Vena Cava over her thumb. Then he softly–slowly–pressed the cushion down to assist it in feeding.

The snoring stopped.

He froze.

“What are you doing?” the old woman asked, blinking her heavy eyelids.

Jones faced her and blushed. “Umm…I live next door,” he said, nodding toward his bed. “And I thought I’d come over and introduce myself.”

The woman’s eyes were ice blue. “I was sleeping.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought I heard you call me, so I came over.” He shrugged, eager for escape. “I’ll leave you alone and let you go back…”

“You want me to sign your heart?” she asked, peering at the stuffed organ in his hands.

He looked into her cold eyes, surprised by how warm her voice had turned. She reminded him a little of his mother, the one who died herself of heart failure long ago. The one he inherited all this from.

“Well?”

“This? Oh, I just…”

She flipped a hand, “No bother. I’ve got my pen right over here.” She twisted slow as turtle, reaching toward a bedside table where a book, a pair of glasses, and a marker rested beside her own Mr. Happy Heart. Jones noticed that her pillow had so many scribbled remarks on it that he could barely make out the cardiac diagram beneath the ink. And it was larger than the one he had.

She turned back to face him, pushing the spectacles up onto the bridge of her nose. Then she smiled at him, as if seeing Jones for the first time. “Don’t be shy. It’s my pleasure to meet someone younger than the rest of us withered old fogies in here. I’m Julia Hemmings. And you are?”

“Your heart,” he stammered, sizing up her pillow on the bedside table with some jealousy and much wonder. “It doesn’t happen to…feed on you, too, does it?”

She blinked at him. “Excuse me?”

He walked over to the table and held his Mr. Happy Heart beside hers for comparison. “Yeah, just as I suspected. Yours is bigger. It’s growing.”

Her features screwed together into a tense stew of moles and old skin. “Nonsense.” She frowned. “Are you certain you should be here?”

“Yes, it is!” Jones looked at her and then looked at the heart, his jaw hanging open. Both the woman and the plush toy looked healthier and happier than they rightfully should have.

“Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” she crossed her arms.

“You don’t fool me, old lady.” Jones held up her Mr. Happy Heart and taunted: “What would you say if I took your fat little magic pillow, huh? Would you survive?” ”Nurse!”

Jones froze. “Lady, shut up.”

She rapidly clicked on the call button on her bed: “Nurr-rse!”

He lunged at her with Mr. Happy Heart, pressing the fabric pillow into her face to muffle the scream. She struggled with the pillow at first, then madly flailed at Jones himself as she fought for air. Her frail fists beat against his shoulders and tore at his chest bandages. He ignored the pain, knowing he was strong enough to endure it. Soon enough, her body slowed and her lungs stopped screaming behind the fabric and he found himself thankful for that, and thankful that there would be no more snoring anymore, either. He pressed the heart pillow against her face with renewed vigor and stared at the area where her open mouth was pulling in the fabric, creating a dark sinkhole in the middle of the heart like a crater in a volcano.

And then the sinkhole shifted like sand.

It was feeding.

He held it tight and watched the mouth on the heart pulse and suck and thicken in his grip as it swallowed the woman’s life.

But the woman beneath the pillow was not quite dead yet, growling a dark sound from somewhere deep inside. And, summoning one last desperate flail, the old woman struggled and madly beat on Jones with more energy than she had so far.

But Jones held fast as he said “Eat your heart out, bitch.” He pinned the sides of the heart around her ears as her hands clawed at his face. And he laughed aloud. He even kept laughing long after Nurse Herzog tackled him to the floor.

He was breathing and yet he was choking.

“Same routine as last time, Mr. Jones.” Dr. Pecctori readied his hands to tug the ventilator tube from his throat. “I want you to clutch the pillow and exhale.”

Although the terrible intrusion was familiar, the pain he was feeling in his chest cavity was new. Novel and terrible. He tried to squeeze the tube out on a pathway of his air, but it hurt so much to breathe that he would rather just keep the tube inside his mouth and suckle on it forever.

But Dr. Pecctori was already pulling and it felt as though his guts were tugging up through his throat along with it, as though caught on the end of a very sharp meat hook. It hurt so much he vomited air and bile and lost everything that he had inside him–his bowels and bladder, too–as his body instinctively purged all in an effort to rid itself of the foreign object.

He gasped when it was out and then inhaled as deeply and quickly as he could, like a drowning man finally coming up for air. His first deep lungful of breath carried the stench of his own bowel movement and his stomach lurched to vomit again.

“Careful, careful,” Dr. Pecctori was saying, wiping the liquid from his cheeks. “You broke several ribs when you…” he glanced over at Nurse Herzog and grimaced. “When you took your fall.”

Jones winced, sensing the damage everywhere around his torso. His chest felt like some torn food carton you’d find on the street, pecked clean by rodents and wild birds. A gutted, empty shell. He tried to focus through the pain, and searched Herzog’s fat face as it came into view. “What…happened?”

“Shhh!” she said, pressing a finger against his lips as though shushing an infant. “You mustn’t speak. It’ll only make things worse.”

Dr. Pecctori checked his bandages and nodded with approval. “On behalf of the hospital, Mr. Jones, I apologize for the…incident you experienced.”

“I didn’t mean to…”

Pecctori interrupted with a scowl. “What Nurse Herzog means to say is that she’s sorry for injuring you and that your entire treatment and hospital stay will be paid for by Kingstown Memorial. Do you understand?”

He didn’t, but he nodded.

“Your surgery, too, I’m sorry to say, did not go as well as last time. You crashed several times, and your cardiac muscles were severely damaged. You’ll have to stay here in the unit for quite a while until you get your strength back.”

Jones frowned, but nodded. He knew it was bad. He could feel it.

“Do you remember what happened?”

He did. But he wasn’t about to confess to trying to smother the old lady to death. He played amnesic and shook his head.

Herzog blushed. “When I saw you holding that pillow over Mrs. Hemmings’ face, well, I thought you were–I don’t know–smothering her. So I acted on instinct and grabbed you. I didn’t mean to hurt you like that, but my hand slid into your bandage and…well…in the fall…it just slipped right in…”

“It was an accident, I assure you,” Pecctori said, clearly worried about litigation.

Jones hadn’t remembered that last part, but the pain between his lungs confirmed what Herzog was saying. Dirty hands had been inside of him, tearing his flesh from the inside out. He felt like a torn envelope.

Herzog put a careful hand on his shoulder. “I promise that we sent you to the O.R. for immediate repair. And while you were out, Mrs. Hemmings explained it all to me. You were just showing her what you signed on her Mr. Happy Heart. She showed it to me, just as she was packing up to leave.”

The old woman should have been dead. Jones repeated what Herzog was saying, trying to puzzle it out. “To leave? What I signed?”

Herzog put the finger over his lips again to silence him, the audaciously-painted long fingernail that had clawed inside of his chest now tickling his nostril. “You know. Something about health being a belief?”

Jones made a face that said “Huh?” He meant to speak, but instead coughed.

“Belief, ideology, something. I don’t know. Whatever it was, you must have really cheered her up. She said she was a believer. She even called you her savior at one point. Can you believe how nice that woman is? Amazing, considering how she has no friends or family…”

Savior? Since Jones had fully intended to kill her and leech as much life out of her as he could, this statement made no sense to him.

Until it did.

And then he fought back the pain and picked up the heart pillow resting on his chest. He instantly recognized it as Mrs. Hemmings’. They’d somehow switched pillows. He’d gotten the plumper one, the one with all the writing all over it. She’d gotten the one he had tried to kill her with. The magical one with the creepy mouth. It had fed off her face and swallowed her breath, sure enough. But he’d smothered her with its healing magic, as well.

It fed the body it ate from.

And now Mrs. Hemmings was healthy and appreciative and gone.

Gone with his magic heart.

“Again, I’m so sorry I hurt you,” Herzog said, adjusting his nose hose. “They say the damage almost killed you. I don’t know how long you were in surgery, but it seemed like days.”

Jones teared up a little and Nurse Herzog wiped his eyes with nearby gauze. He cried himself to sleep, and then awoke later in the dark, alone, longing like a child for his lost stuffed animal. Mr. Happy Heart–Mrs. Hemmings’ impotent plush toy–did nothing to help him no matter how hard he clutched it, no matter how hard he pressed his fingers into its artificial veins. It was an empty, lifeless piece of foam and fabric.

All it was good for was reading. He read the notes scrawled all over it, the messages he’d been so jealous of. Only they weren’t get-well-wishes from friends or family. They were all notes from Mrs. Hemmings herself, all in the same distinctively cursive handwriting. Items willed and last requests. Confessions and regrets. Laments about the sheer misery of living.

One of them was for him: “Health is an ideology, but dying is forever, asshole.”

He clutched the pillow tight against his chest and coughed.

Then he rolled over on his stomach, fighting back the pain, and buried his face in the pillow, mopping his tears as he desperately tried to swallow its fabric.

# # #

I was at a restaurant. Music was playing from speakers somewhere above. I bit into a grizzly chunk of meat. And then Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart” kicked in over the loudspeakers. I chewed to the beat. And the next thing I knew, I was taking the metaphor quite literally. The idea stuck with me for a few weeks (as did some fibers that I have yet to extract from between my teeth), until a friend of mine went in for heart surgery. He shared all sorts of juicy insights with me that helped spark this strange little story (especially the heart-shaped pillow, which reminded me of Edgar Allan Poe). Al Wendland is nothing like the main character in this piece, and he’s fully recovered and heart-happy right now, but I dedicate this tale to him.

Die Angle

Lawrence C. Connolly

(Inspired by “Murder, Incorporated”)

Music reverberated from the club downstairs as Johnny watched the mice inside Nick’s terrarium. White with pink ears and tails, they might have looked cute were it not for the blood that stained their faces and paws. They were eating.

“That used to be a mouse,” Nick said, referring to a pulpy mass in the center of the terrarium. “And that one there, the little guy, he’s the one that took him down.” Nick tapped the glass beside the killer, a piebald fluff ball nibbling a string of viscera. “He attacked from behind, grabbed the big guy’s neck, held on until the others joined in.”

“A community effort?” Johnny said.

“Right. But it takes one mouse to start it. Without that one, everybody starves.”

Johnny turned away, toward a multi-paned window that overlooked the bright lights of the Ironforge Galleria, a garish structure of steel, glass, and cinderblock that occupied the former site of the town’s hot-iron mill. Twenty-five years ago, Nick had caught rats in the shadows of that mill, starving them in cages before setting them against one another. Now he raised his own victims.

“Do my mice bore you, Johnny?”

“I didn’t drive 300 miles to watch you torture mice, Nick.”

Nick cocked his head, flashing a smile that seemed not to have changed since Johnny had last seen it a quarter century ago. Age might have left its mark on Nick’s other features, but that smile remained the same, at once inscrutable and malicious. “You never know,” Nick said. “Maybe there’s more here than mice.” He turned toward a small refrigerator in the corner, knelt down, and opened the door. “You were always a watcher, Johnny. Always scoping things out, noticing details.” Nick took a Tupperware container from a bottom shelf and closed the door. “Maybe my mice can teach you something about Ironforge.” He opened the terrarium and popped the top on the Tupperware. Some of the mice looked up, whiskers twitching as Nick dropped the bodies of a dozen infant mice onto the terrarium’s sawdust floor. A moment later, there were two masses of feeding rodents: one in the center, another along the edge of the glass.

“See how it works?” Nick said. “Now no one starves.”

“You make it sound like you’re some great benefactor.”

“I am.” He replaced the terrarium’s cover. “I don’t kill animals, Johnny. I never did. I let the animals do it themselves.”

“But they wouldn’t kill if you fed them regularly.”

Nick looked amused. “What’re you doing, Johnny? Teaching me ethics? If I want that, I’ll call a priest, not a hitman.” He returned the container to the fridge. “I supposed you want to get down to business, talk about your job?”

“That would be good,” Johnny said.

Nick snapped off the light above the terrarium, leaving the mice to feed in shadows.

Johnny said, “My uncle claims you requested me specifically.”

“That I did.” Nick moved to a mahogany desk that sat beneath the posters of bands that had headlined at the club downstairs. The booking agent was a friend of Johnny’s uncle, and it was through that association that Johnny found himself back in the western Pennsylvania town of his youth, a town to which he had long sworn he would never return.

Nick said, “I thought it best to hire someone familiar, someone the victim knows.”

“Client,” Johnny said.

“What’s that?”

“I prefer to call them clients, not victims.” He sat back. “Who is it?”

Nick took a business card from his Rolodex. “You graduated together.” He passed the card to Johnny. “He’s got a contracting business, specializing in windows. His office is on Merchant Street.”

Johnny looked at the card. “Milo D’Amico.”

“Remember him?”

“High school all-star, state champion.” He put the card back on the desk. “We moved in different circles.”

“As I recall, you were always in a different circle.”

“But not you, Nick. Back then, you and Milo were thick as thieves.”

“Still are.”

“So why do you want him dead?”

“That’s complicated,” Nick said. “The details don’t concern you. What you need to know is that you’ll be calling on him tonight, at his office. You’ll tell him you’re moving back to Ironforge and you’re in the market for some quality windows. Tell him I recommended him.”

“Really?”

“Absolutely. He’s got no reason to suspect I want him dead. Not me specifically.”

“So I drop your name and he lets me in?” Johnny checked his watch. It was after 9:00. “His card says he closes at five. Are you sure he’s still there?”

“Yes. Tonight he’ll be there, in his office, drinking scotch, catching up on paperwork.”

“And why am I buying from him and not a national chain?”

“Because there aren’t any in town.”

“Got to be plenty within driving distance.”

“No,” Nick frowned. “That’s not an option. Everybody who lives here buys here. It’s part of the key to the town’s comeback, how we stayed afloat after the mill closed. On the retail level, Ironforge money stays in Ironforge.”

“And on the wholesale level?

“That’s different. Most of our businesses contract with out-of-town suppliers. I mean, what kind of club would I have if I relied on local talent? You know what I’m saying?”

Johnny sensed there was more to the story, but he pushed on. “So Milo lets me in, and that’s where you want me to do it? In his office? With his gun?”

“That’s right. It has to be his gun. Your uncle explained the setup?”

“Yeah. It’s tricky.”

“But you can do it?”

“Yeah. I think so.” He was eager to get started. “We agreed to half up front. The rest on completion.”

Nick took an envelope from the desk. “Call me as soon as you finish.” He passed the envelope to Johnny. “I need to know the moment he’s dead.”

“Then I come back here, right?” Johnny stood up. “You’ll still be here?”

“That’s right. I don’t leave this office till the job’s over.”

Johnny headed for the door, glancing one final time at the terrarium.

Shadows no longer moved within the glass. Their hunger abated, the mice had burrowed back into the sawdust to sleep amid the scattered bones.

Soft wind from the river met Johnny as he left the club, its fresh scent bringing with it another reminder of how much things had changed. Like the community, the once-polluted Ohio River had come back to life.

Johnny raised his collar and headed east toward the relative dimness of the old business district. People passed him. No one looked familiar, and no one gave him a second look until a voice called from a parking lot two blocks from the club.

“Hey!”

Johnny kept walking.

“Hey, Johnny Yakulis! Johnny Yak!”

Johnny turned to find a tall figure lumbering forward, long hair backlit by a vapor lamp.

“Son of a bitch!” the man said. “It is you. Johnny fucking Yak! I thought you were dead, man.”

Johnny studied the face, lined with the fading scars of misspent youth. “Tony?” Johnny said. “Tony Tego?”

“Fucking-A!” Tego kept his hands in his pockets. “I saw you walking by. ‘The fuck,’ I said. ‘That’s Johnny Yak!’ Where the hell you been, man?”

“New York.”

“New York? Like Buffalo, New York?”

“No, like Manhattan.”

“Yeah?” Tego nodded, looking thoughtful. “I’ve heard of it. So what the fuck? You moving back to Ironforge?”

“No. Passing through.”

“Fucking-A! I think you’ll like what you see. You might decide to stay.” Like the rest of the town, Tego had done well for himself. His sneakers were two-toned Prada, his jacket loose-fitting Versace–casual but top of the line. A slight bulge in his lapel could have been anything: wallet, wad of bills, handgun. “Tell you what, Yak. Let me give you something.” He produced a business card. “You decide to move back, you fucking call me. All right?”

The card identified Tego as Anthony Tegolezzo, owner of Riverfront Estates.

“Upscale homes,” Tego said. “Hardwood floors. Beamed ceilings. The fucking works. I’ll set you up, man.”

Tego had always been big on giving orders, and Johnny, who had spent his adolescence at the bottom of the Ironforge food chain, decided to play along. “Thanks, Tego. If I move back, you’ll be the first to know.”

“It’s a deal.” Tego extended his hand, not to shake, but to slap Johnny’s shoulder before turning away. “Catch you later, man.” He took a few steps, then looked around. “Fucking Johnny Yak!” He grinned. Then he was gone, ambling through the traffic as if the street belonged to him, reminding Johnny yet again that the visit here was strictly business. Nothing else could have brought him back to Ironforge.

Misty rain fell as he reached the old center of town: a five-point intersection lined with storefronts. A pillared façade on the corner of Merchant and Fifth still bore the stone-etched logo of the defunct Ironforge Bank. Beneath the portico, Milo’s name ran in stenciled letters across a door of triple-paned glass.

According to Nick, Milo’s bread-and-butter was selling reinforced windows and doors that protected Ironforge residents from out-of-town thieves. Ironforge might have recovered from the collapse of big steel, but surrounding towns hadn’t. And those other towns, as everyone knew, were full of crooks.

Milo’s metal detector was right where Nick had said it would be, the panels toned and textured to blend with the building’s masonry. A webcam lay to the right of the door. Below it, a plaque read: Protected by Brian Goodnight Security.

That name sparked another blast from the past. Like Johnny, Brian Goodnight had been a town misfit. The two had hung out together, parting company only when Brian’s skill at picking locks attracted the attention of Tony Tego. By the time Johnny had moved away, Brian and Tego had seemed destined for the county lockup. For Brian’s sake, Johnny was glad things had turned out for the better.

Johnny pressed the call button above Milo’s grate-covered speaker, waited a moment, then pressed it again.

Milo, when he answered, sounded pissed: “We’re closed!”

Johnny leaned toward the speaker. “Milo. Hey, man! It’s Johnny Yakulis.”

A light came on above the door. Johnny stepped back and smiled for the webcam.

“Damn!” Milo said. “Johnny Yak? You son of a bitch! The hell you doing in Ironforge?”

“Looking at property. Thinking of building a place by the river. Nick Argenti tells me you can help.”

The speaker fell silent.

“Milo? You there, man?”

Lights came up in a reception area beyond the glass. A moment later, an office door opened and Milo emerged: overweight, pale, and sporting a comb-over that started an inch above his left ear. “Damn!” Milo’s voice came muffled through the glass. “It is you, you crazy bastard!” He glanced over Johnny’s shoulder, making sure he was alone before taking a set of keys from his pocket and opening the door. “Get in here, man. Jesus! Johnny fucking Yak!”

Johnny entered.

Milo pulled the door closed, locked it, put away the keys. “Goddamn Yak!” He smelled of scotch. “Got to do business now? Can’t wait till morning?”

“I’m only in town tonight.”

“Then we’re wasting time.” Milo turned back toward the office door. “Come on. You like scotch?”

Milo’s office occupied the corner of a large space that resembled an art gallery: white walls, track lights, hanging frames. The frames held model windows, some with cutaway portions revealing layers of reinforced metal and glass. All of these hung from the wall to the right. To the left a partition of stuccoed cinderblock ran the length of the room. According to Nick, the gun was behind that wall.

A foamcore cubicle framed an office near the showroom’s entrance. Milo’s desk was inside. Atop the desk sat a widescreen monitor, cut-glass tumbler, and an open bottle of Glenlivet.

“I always drink when I work late,” Milo said. “Takes the edge off.” He took a fresh glass from a cadenza and poured a stiff one for Johnny. “You’ll need that much to catch up with me,” Milo said. Then he refilled his own glass and gestured to a seat beside the desk.

But Johnny didn’t sit. “That picture.” He waved toward a portrait behind Milo. “Who is that?”

Milo turned.

“The girl.” Johnny stepped closer, leaning across the desk. “I know her. What’s her name?”

Milo looked back around. “You got to be kidding me. Sit the fuck down, man.”

Johnny backed away. The maneuver had worked. Now it was only a matter of time.

Milo said, “I didn’t bring you into my office to look at pictures.”

Johnny took a drink of scotch, shrugged. “Sorry.” He glanced at the photo. “It’s just… I think I used to date her.”

Milo laughed. “Oh, fuck! That’s good.” He raised his scotch, downed half of it, laughed again. “Goddamn Johnny Yak!” He took another drink. “For your information, that’s my daughter.”

“No shit! But she looks just like–”

“Bonnie Lasorta,” Milo said. “She looks just like Bonnie Lasorta, who firstly you did not date, and who secondly has been my wife for twenty-four goddamn years. End of digression!” He refilled his glass. “Johnny Yak-yak-yak!” He stepped away from his desk. “Since you clearly have no attention span, let me cut to the chase.” He waved the bottle, directing Johnny back toward the showroom. “If it were business hours, I’d take you through here, show you the models. But since it’s late, we’ll start with a bang.” He walked on toward the cinderblock wall, led Johnny around the corner, and there it was: a Glock 9mm imbedded in a steel rack that in turn was welded to a shooting bench. The barrel pointed to a wall twenty feet downrange.

Johnny did his best look surprised, though indeed it was exactly as Nick had described it.

“Here’s the deal,” Milo said. “Ironforge might have rebounded, but the communities around us are still on the skids. Our success breeds contempt. That’s why we have to protect ourselves. Did Nick explain any of this to you?”

“Yeah,” Johnny said. “But he said it’s still a good place to live.”

“Can be,” Milo said. “Provided you got the right defense.” He crossed to a display case holding a line of steel-framed windows. “This is my top-of-the-line, multilayered glass and polycarb. Some people don’t think they need it, but that changes when I show them what it can do.” He reached toward the ceiling, grabbing a strap that dangled from a motorized track. The strap, when secured to the window, lifted it out of the case and down the length of the shooting area.

The setup was impressive, but Johnny saw it for what it was: an elaborate indulgence like Nick’s mice or Tego’s designer sneakers, the sort of thing that a have-not child buys when he becomes a gotta-have adult.

Lights came on at the end of the track, illuminating the window, showing off its design.

“Look at the bevel on that glass,” Milo said. “You’d probably buy that window on looks alone. But it’s more…more than just gingerbread…more than just a window.” His words came in short bursts, as if he were having trouble catching his breath. He wasn’t slurring yet, but that would come. “Now check this out.” He leaned on the shooting bench, teetering as he unlocked a drawer below the rack-mounted gun. “You need to put these on.” He handed Johnny a set of shooting muffs, and then reached back to get a set for himself.

“This is a hell of a demo, Milo.”

“Yeah. It’s theater. But that’s what sales is–the sizzle, not the steak.” Such a statement was clearly not the sort of thing that Milo would tell a prospective customer. His inhibitions were failing just as quickly as his speech and motor skills. “This is where it gets good, Johnny.” He took a loaded magazine from the drawer, slid it into the Glock, chambered the first round. “You’re about to witness…you’re going to see…I’m going to show you–” He slumped against the bench. “Jesus, Johnny.” And now, at last, he slurred the words: Sheeshus, Ssshonny. He looked at the Glenlivet bottle. “I’m fucking drunk.”

“No, Milo. Not drunk.” Johnny reached into his pocket. It was time to begin a demonstration of his own. “It’s not the drink, Milo. It’s this.” He raised his hand, revealing a plastic vial cupped in his palm. “I get it from a lab Brighton Beach. Special formula, fast-acting, tasteless.”

“The fuck you talking about?”

“It’s empty now, but it was full when I got here.” Johnny returned the vial to his pocket. “I squeezed it into your glass back in the office.”

“You…son of a…bitch.” He stepped toward Johnny, lost his balance, and went down hard, striking his head on the bench before landing unconscious at Johnny’s feet.

Now the real work began.

Milo awoke as the track moved him into position, arms suspended from nylon cuffs that Johnny had brought with him, feet dragging the tile floor that ran the length of the range.

Johnny said, “You never bothered asking what I did for a living.” He leaned toward the shooting bench and hit the button that killed power to the track. “Nick Argenti hired me.” He leaned toward the gun. “He wants you dead.”

Milo’s eyes widened. “Bastard.” He looked at Johnny, then at the barrel of the gun. “So it’s Nick, then. He’s got my name.”

Johnny touched the gun, noting how the polymer frame had been fused to the steel rack. The Glock’s other parts could be removed for cleaning, but the assembled 9mm pistol remained permanently aimed at the far wall, or at whatever target hung in front of it. Tonight, that target was Milo.

“Listen,” Milo said. “You have to go back to Nick. Tell him if he’s got my name, he has to come himself.”

Johnny sighted over the top of the gun, confirming that the aim would place a bullet to the right of Milo’s sternum. Then he asked, “What do you mean he’s got your name?”

Milo tugged against the overhead track, trying unsuccessfully to swing himself out of range. Then he straightened up and said, “Fuck you!”

“All right. If you don’t feel like talking, I’ll just finish up.”

“Jesus, Johnny!” He wasn’t slurring now. Panic had counteracted the drug. “Didn’t Nick tell you? Didn’t he explain why he wants me dead?”

“No. I don’t usually care about such things. But now I’m curious. What do you mean he’s got your name?”

Milo looked up at his bound wrists, apparently hoping to see a way of breaking free. Then he lifted his feet from the floor, putting his full weight on the track. The ceiling mounts groaned but held.

“You going to talk or struggle?” Johnny asked.

Milo looked at him again, a sheaf of comb-over sagging across his brow.

“What do you mean, Milo? What do you mean Nick’s got your name? You make it sound like some kind of lottery.”

“Yeah,” Milo sighed. “It is. A fucking lottery, and it drives our economy.” He squinted as blood dribbled along his hair, into his eyes. “We call it a triad.”

“Triad?”

“It’s composed of three names,” Milo said. “Selected at random.” He licked his lips. “The borough computer draws them, and each selected person gets an email identifying one other member of the group.”

“So Nick gets your name and hires me to kill you?”

“Yeah, but it’s not supposed to be like that! Triad assignments can’t be contracted out. Doing that goes against the spirit of the thing. Ironforge money is supposed to stay in Ironforge.”

“As I understand it, that’s only true in retail.”

“That’s altogether different, Johnny. Triad duty has nothing to do with sales.”

“Triad duty? A computer sends you a person’s name, and it’s your duty to kill him?”

“No. That’s not it. The duty is in participating, not in killing. Each person in the triad has options. He can hide out or take action.”

“Take action?”

“Yeah, like what you’re doing…only it’s not supposed to be an outsider doing it. That’s not one of the options. If Nick Argenti wants his bonus, he’s supposed to earn it.”

“Bonus? So there’s an incentive involved?”

“Hell, Johnny. There’s always incentives. That’s what commerce is all about. Without incentives–”

“But I don’t get it. Let’s back up. I’ve missed something. How does sending three people out to kill each other benefit the community?”

“It’s not three people killing each other. The triad dissolves after one member takes action. Then he calls the computer and punches in the code that sends out the all clear. It’s the fire whistle over the courthouse. Two longs and three shorts. That’s the signal.”

“And you can hear that in here?”

“Hell, Johnny. This building’s bullet proof, not sound proof.”

“All right,” Johnny said. “But how does all this benefit the community? You lost me.”

Milo stared a moment, apparently stunned that Johnny didn’t understand. “You just said it, Johnny.”

“Said what?”

“Benefits! It’s about benefits. Each resident has Ironforge listed as his primary beneficiary. The community inherits the wealth and makes it available as business loans and mortgages. See, Ironforge is more than a town. It’s a corporation. When big steel left, we replaced it with an entity of the people!”

“And everyone in town’s a member?”

“No. Not everyone. Police and doctors are exempt from duty. And so are locksmiths. And minors…we can’t include them. It’s all been totally thought through…but then you get a guy like Nick who thinks he can bend the rules. Seriously, Johnny. You have to go back, explain it to him. I’ll pay you. Name your price.”

“No price.” Johnny kept his hand on the gun. “But tell me this, what’s keeping Nick from just blowing this building up with you inside it?”

Milo looked aghast. “The hell, Johnny. This isn’t the Middle East! We’re not promoting unregulated destruction. There are guidelines. It has to be a gun…a 9mm pistol. That’s why I use a 9mm in my demos.”

“Yeah?” Johnny said. “And you do pretty well, don’t you? If a prospective resident doesn’t buy your top-of-the-line product when you tell him that the potential danger is from other communities, he sure as hell buys it when he discovers the real threat is from within.”

“It’s not that ominous, Johnny.”

“No? Or maybe you’re just so used to spinning it that you don’t realize how it comes across to an outsider.” Johnny steadied his trigger finger. “Maybe I should try thinking that way. Maybe I should say I’m not killing you. What I’m doing is saving the life of the person named in your email. Think about it. If I don’t kill you, maybe later tonight you’ll decide to kill–”

“Tego,” Milo blurted.

“Excuse me?”

Milo’s blinked. “Tego!”

“You got Tego’s name?”

But Milo wasn’t talking to Johnny. He gazed at a point beyond the shooting bench, at something over Johnny’s shoulder. “Tego!”

Johnny turned, looking back to see that there was now a third person standing in the demo area.

It was Tego: scared face, designer sneakers, Versace jacket. The slight bulge that Johnny had noticed behind the lapel was gone. The gun was out of its harness, in Tego’s hand, aimed at Johnny’s head.

“Tego!” Milo thrashed like a hooked marlin, struggling against the stays that bound him to the track. “Shoot the bastard and get me down!”

Johnny kept his hand on the rack-locked pistol, finger on the trigger, barrel fixed on Milo.

“Shoot him, Tego! Fucking shoot him before he shoots me!”

“Milo!” Tego’s voice resounded against the cinderblock. “Shut the fuck up! This is between me and Johnny Yak.”

The shooting range fell silent.

Tego turned his attention back to Johnny. “Know where I’ve been? Care to guess?”

Johnny put it together, remembering how he and Tego had been heading in opposite directions on Mill Street.

“It’s the damnedest thing,” Tego said. “I go to Nick’s office, and he’s like, ‘You don’t want me. You want Johnny Yak.’ And I’m like, ‘Johnny fucking Yak? I just saw him.’ And he’s like, “Fucking-A. I hired him. He’s my subcontractor. You have to kill him, not me.’” Tego shook his head. “You believe that shit?” He glanced at Milo. “What about you? You believe that?”

“Yeah,” Milo said. “Now shoot the bastard and get me out of here.”

Johnny kept his hand on the gun, looked Tego straight on, and said, “How’d you get in here?”

“The fuck?” He grinned. “Nick’s not the only one with ideas? I got my own subcontractor. Only difference is, I didn’t go outside for my free agent.” His grin broadened, flashing teeth that, like his face, betrayed the traumas of his hard-knock youth. “Just like the old days, eh Johnny? You remember my partner in crime?”

“Brian Goodnight?”

“Fucking-A.”

Milo said, “Damnit, Tego! We didn’t keep locksmiths out of the corporation so you could hire them freelance!”

Tego swung his gun, aiming at Milo. “And I told you to shut your hole!”

“Tego, listen,” Johnny said. “You have to go back to Nick.” He winced inside, hearing himself use the same tactic Milo had tried unsuccessfully on him. “Your option is to kill Nick, not me.”

“That’s not what Nick said.”

“Right, because he didn’t want you shooting him.”

“Think that was it? Too bad for him it didn’t work.”

“You shot him?”

“Fucking-A.”

“Then why didn’t we hear the all clear?” Johnny spoke softly, not wanting to sound confrontational. “If Nick’s dead, why–?”

“Because I didn’t phone it in. I don’t want my bonus delayed on a technicality. Way I figure it, if I kill both you and Nick before I make the call, I’m covered.”

“Do it!” Milo roared, unable to keep it in.

“No,” Johnny said. “You don’t want to shoot me.” His mind raced, sizing up the situation, determining how to use the stalemate to his advantage. “It’s one thing to kill an insider, but kill me and you’ll face an outside investigation. Something like that could blow your triad scheme wide open.” He paused, gauged Tego’s reaction, then pushed on: “Best thing to do is phone it in, take the bonus, let me walk. No one needs to know I was here.” He took his hand from the rack-mounted gun. “What do you say, Tego?” He stepped away from the shooting bench, out of the point-blank aim of Tego’s 9mm. “We got a deal?”

Tego reached for his cell phone, dialed a number, punched in a code.

Outside, the fire whistle blared, the sound coming muted through the showroom’s windowless walls.

Johnny left the range, passed Milo’s office, and stepped into the lobby. A lone figure stood outside, smoking a cigarette beyond the wall of glass and polycarbonate. It was Brian Goodnight, waiting for Tego.

Johnny looked back toward the showroom, listening to Tego and Milo struggling behind the cinderblock partition.

“The fuck!” Tego said. “He’s got you tied up good!”

“Cut it!” Milo said. “Rip the track down! Just get me the fuck out of here.”

The voices welled louder as Johnny turned, retraced his steps, and reentered the narrow space to find Tego and Milo five-feet downrange from the rack-mounted Glock.

Milo saw Johnny first. “The fuck you want now?”

Tego turned. “Aw, shit!”

Johnny opened fire.

Brian Goodnight finished his cigarette as Johnny pushed out through the unlocked door. He grinned, flashing yellow teeth. “Johnny Yak?”

“Yeah. Good to see you, Brian.” He extended his hand. Brian took it, pulling Johnny forward into a backslapping embrace.

“I hear you’re moving back, Johnny.”

“No. That was just a story. I’m out of here tonight.” He glanced at the glass storefront. “You hear those shots, Brian?”

“Yeah. I thought maybe it was Tego’s gun. He told me you were in there. Told me Nick said–”

“Listen, Brian. I got a question. You know about this triad business?”

“I’m not a member.”

“But you know about it…know how it works?

“Yeah. More or less.”

“Then maybe you can tell me what happens when all three members of a triad go down? What’s that do for the town?”

Brian shrugged. “Hell, guess that’d be some kind of windfall.”

“So it’d be like a good thing, right? Ironforge collects three times. Nobody gets too bent out of shape?”

“Yeah.” Brian nodded. “Guess so.”

Johnny reached into his pocket, took out Nick’s envelope, pulled out two fifties. “What say you lock the door, Brian? Reset the alarm. Forget you saw me.”

“No. No way.” Brian handed the money back to Johnny. “I can’t take this. I’m freelance.”

“What’re you saying, Brian?”

“I’m like you, man.” Brian took a set of keys from his belt. “I’m not supposed to be here either.” He turned and reset the locks. Before he finished, Johnny was gone.

Johnny headed back through a misty rain, noticing how the lights from the Galleria pushed against the sky like a midnight dawn, and for the moment he was back in time, looking at the hot-metal glow of the Ironforge Mill. His gait lightened. He felt young again, fifteen and believing that life as he knew it would go on forever. But then a breeze rolled in, sweet and clean from the river, and the illusion shattered.

By the time he was back in sight of the Galleria lot, he was once again feeling the weight of middle age. Another night, another job, and he wanted nothing more than to be heading east, back to the unfulfilling life that had sprung from a place that no longer existed.

# # #

I began playing music professionally ten years before I sold my first work of fiction. That was a long time ago, early seventies. I toured the festival and coffeehouse circuit with a fellow singer-songwriter and an occasional bass player, and pretty much worked my way through college traveling the northeast. It was an exciting time to be making music, and Springsteen’s influence was there from the beginning, starting with Greetings from Asbury Park in 1973. From the first listen, I felt a connection with Springsteen’s songs, the dark reflections on a changing world, a place where the old rules no longer hold true, where the kings of industry can forget the names of their workers or where murder can be considered status quo. Let us take a moment to ponder the last of these.

Recorded in 1982 and finally released over a decade later on Bruce Springsteen’s Greatest Hits, “Murder Incorporated” has always struck me as a piece of social commentary that plays like a horror vignette. It depicts a world in which murder is accepted and real work has lost its meaning. Such are the motifs that hooked me when I first heard the song, and they are the ones that came to mind when I heard that Harrison Howe was assembling a book of Springsteen-inspired stories. Inspired by the lyrics of “Murder Incorporated,” the story “Die Angle” is a cautionary tale about a changing world. Like the song, it depicts the kind of paranoia that festers in a community where violent death can come at any time, and, like many of Springsteen’s efforts, it deals with new desperations in a post-industrial age, where the children of heavy industry find themselves living by their wits in a society where the old rules no longer apply.

From the Dark Heart of a Dream

Tom Piccirilli

(Inspired by “Adam Raised a Cain”)

The father is Joe. The son is Johnny.

It’s Johnny’s tenth birthday. Joe has gotten him a bat, a mitt, and a couple of baseballs. Joe runs across the lawn and shows the kid the proper way to hit and catch and throw. How to smother a ground ball. How to scoop on the run. How to fire into home plate. How to smash to left field. How to arc one into right field just inside the foul line.

Joe, remembering his high school career, starts to sweat, and his head fills with the sound of a crowd that was only there for a little while and hasn’t been there at all for the last fifteen years.

Breathing heavily, he steps over to the deck and grabs a can of beer out of the cooler. He tells Johnny, Okay, now you try, son. He throws the kid a bouncing grounder.

Johnny dashes around on the lawn. He flails his arms when he runs. The ball jumps past him. Joe stares at the boy thinking, The fuck is he doing that with his arms for?

Joe barks, Concentrate. Do it like I did. Like I showed you.

He throws another grounder. Johnny cavorts some more while Joe knocks back another beer. The kid trips and flops onto the grass. Joe thinks, If he’s going to smother a ball like that he’s going to get his teeth knocked out. Johnny gets up and trips again.

Joe says, Tie your shoe, son.

But Johnny’s sneakers are tied. Joe looks on in dismay and thinks, Jesus Christ.

Joe tosses the ball underhand to the kid, who stands there with his mitt out, eager to join the blood-history of all the rest of mankind.

The ball lands a foot short. Johnny doesn’t move toward it.

You gotta take a step, son.

Oh.

Throw it to me. Let’s try it again.

With his tongue jutting, Johnny seems to have difficulty grabbing hold of the ball. When he finally gets it in his fist, he grunts and makes the motion of hurling it hard. The ball flips off the back of his hand and goes over his shoulder.

Okay, Joe says, take the glove off. Pick up the bat. No, over there. The bat! No, son, that’s the hose to the sprinkler. Not the hose. The bat!

Johnny finally gets the bat and stands there preparing to swing.

Joe tosses the ball again and Johnny smiles and jumps up and down in place. The ball goes over his right shoulder. Johnny doesn’t notice. He stands there still waiting. Joe watches.

The kid waits. He keeps waiting. Time doesn’t seem to affect him. His surroundings apparently have no meaning. Joe wishes he had some Vodka in the cooler.

It’s behind you, son. Pick it up and throw it back.

The kid tries and the ball flips over his shoulder again. He does it once more and the same thing happens. Finally, Johnny rolls the ball to his father. Joe picks it up and carefully underhands it. Johnny moves directly into its path. The ball beans the kid in the forehead. Johnny doesn’t seem to feel it, even though a knot is growing.

Joe stares at his boy.

The sun skewers down across the afternoon like a stone dagger knifing toward sacrifice. On the wind and in the DNA are the whispers of forefathers describing failures and hatred. The graves of ancestors rumble and crack.

Okay, you stay there, son, you stay right there.

Johnny nods, a thread of blood working down across the bridge of his nose.

Joe goes inside and finds his wife making apple turnovers in the kitchen. He grabs her firmly by the wrist and leads her to the bedroom. He’s nearly snarling. She goes, Wha’ wha’ wha’? She still has an apron on. It doesn’t matter. He drops his pants and yanks her panties aside, moves in behind her and starts screwing her ferociously. Thinking, There’s still time. There has to be time. Oh Christ, let there be enough time.

Outside, Johnny’s thinking, I can’t wait until I get my first gun.

The true name of what lies within the fathers is Aztoreth the Unholy Scornful Wretch.

The true name of what lies within the sons is Fucking Little Pains in the Ass!

Paul tells his twenty-year-old son Freddy that he’d gotten him an interview with the firm.

Freddy asks, What firm?

My firm, son.

You work for a firm?

Yes, son. You know I do.

I didn’t know that. I thought you sold kitchen appliances.

That’s the firm I’m talking about, son.

Oh, I thought you went door to door.

Nobody sells refrigerators, dishwashers, and range ovens door to door, son.

I thought, like, you know…potato-peelers and can-openers.

We’re getting off track here, Freddy.

And spatulas and cutlery and…

Son, you’ve got to be there by nine a.m.

Nine! In the morning?

That’s implicit in my saying a.m., son. Yes, nine o’clock in the morning.

But–but–

Son, it’s time you got out into the world.

But I want to go to college! I want to make something of myself!

Son, you tried college. You went two semesters. You flunked out both times. It cost me twelve thousand dollars. You failed gym.

Yoga’s not my bag. I’ll do better this time!

Freddy, you’ve spent the last six months sitting on the couch. You watch cartoons all day long.

Anime is not cartoons, Dad!

Anime is cartoons, son.

It’s an important art form, it’s–

It’s Japanese cartoons, occasionally with some big titties and a lot of rape-fantasy but never any bush.

Jesus Christ, Dad!

You don’t help out around the house, you don’t clean your room, you got the yoga mat out in the garage, cost me $42.50, you never even rolled it up. You do nothing around here.

I mow the lawn sometimes!

You mowed the lawn once, son, and you broke the blade running over a tree stump. It cost me $62 to fix the damn mower.

But I don’t want to sell spatulas!

Freddy, you won’t be selling spatulas. You’ll be helping down at the warehouse.

Doing what?

The foreman will tell you.

Around eleven the next morning, a cop shows up at Paul’s office to give him the news.

Sir, your son’s been involved in an accident.

Paul thinks about all the things that Freddy might’ve done in the warehouse that might be described of as an “accident.”

He says, What happened?

First off, let me state, sir, that your son is awake and responsive. He’s at Southside Medical Center listed in serious but stable condition.

Jesus Christ, what the hell happened?

Well, sir, after interviewing several witnesses it seems that…ah…your son…he…ah…

Just say it.

He jumped under a forklift.

What!

Yes, sir, the foreman was showing him around the place when your boy apparently, ah, wilfully leapt under a passing forklift. His legs were crushed.

Oh my God.

It’s a miracle he wasn’t hurt worse, sir. All the witnesses assert that he’s actually quite agile.

Maybe yoga was his bag after all, Paul thinks.

He asks, What time did this occur, officer?

At approximately 9:15 a.m., sir.

Paul thinks about that for a while. Fifteen minutes. The kid was there for fifteen minutes.

He drives over to Southside Medical.

Freddy has a private room. He’s watching cartoons. Not even anime. A sponge is running around with a squid or something. Freddy’s legs are missing from the knees down. The stumps are bandaged and have tubes and drains running from them. A pretty nurse is feeding him ice cream from a small dish. She pats his mouth with a linen napkin. Freddy looks at his father and smiles, trying hard not to laugh.

At the University, in Anthropology 107 taught by Professor Irwin Fermish, we all learned the creation myth of the patriarchal Papa-O-Apollo Tribe of New Guinea, who believe that the first man, created by the gods from volcanic ash, was named Slick Sugar Brown. Slick was all about the bling, and the first thing he did the morning of his own birth was buy a 1984 lemon yellow Caddy El Dorado low rider with 24-karat gold rims. Then he tooled up 118^th Street to show it off to the bitches. But he was alone, and begged the gods to deliver him a companion. They said he would have to sacrifice his front diamond-tooth. Slick considered this for an entire day and night, and finally pulled out the tooth and watched as it grew into his son, King Blood Willie. The two of them went joyriding through the empty world, rejoicing in each others’ company and listening to old Sun Ra CDs. The first man, Slick Sugar Brown, gave praise to the heavens and offered up many invocations and libations of Miller High Life until his son stabbed him with a switchblade over twelve keys of uncut Bolivian flake.

We sat on the library steps and watched them wheel away Professor Irwin Fermish.

Pete, his father, and grandfather sit together at the local bar after they punch-out at the factory. They’ve never ventured farther than fifty miles outside of town, and that was just to see the tractor-pulls and monster trucks three summers ago.

They live next to each other in the same trailer park. Three blank mailboxes with the same name painted in white. Their trailers are the same color, though their wives have different curtains up. Their wives grow flowers in small pots they place on the three steps leading up to the trailers. When it rains, all three women bring the pots inside. When it stops, out go the pots again.

Pete, his father, and grandfather tell dirty jokes to each other. All three of them already know the jokes because all three of them know the same people who told the jokes in the first place. But they say them anyway, and they laugh at them louder than they should. They bang their mugs and hoot. Their faces go red.

They arm-wrestle each other. Pete and his dad let Grandpa win a few. It gives him courage in his declining years. He storms around the bar singing songs off the jukebox and getting into minor scuffles with the other guys from the factory. He looks for pretty girls with nice tight asses that he can pinch. There are no pretty girls with nice tight asses. There are no pretty girls. There’s only one girl, Mabel the waitress, and nobody goes anywhere near her. Dad once arm-wrestled her and she gave him a hairline fracture of the ulna and he was out of work for six weeks. They all shy the fuck away from Mabel.

Pete, his father, and grandfather stare into the mirror behind the bar. Seeing themselves, and who they were, and who’ll they’ll eventually become.

Pete’s wife is pregnant. She’s been crocheting blankets and booties. She tells him how fulfilled she is, how radiant she feels. She makes him place his ear against her belly. He hears a dull throbbing pulse within.

He too is filled with love. It swells and blooms within his heart.

He’s going to go home tonight and beat her with a pool cue.

Mark is sixty-eight. His father is ninety-three. The old man’s skin is yellow and thin as tissue paper. Pop can no longer climb out of bed, and he’s covered in sores. Mark tries to give his father sponge baths, but it’s agonizing to look into the old man’s eyes and see that there’s hardly anything left there anymore.

Once Pop was bearded and stood tall and slim and firm, and went two hundred of solid muscle. His laughter boomed around the house and around the world. He worked construction and could carry a stack of five cinder blocks with ease.

Now he’s toothless and hairless and shrunken. He weighs so little that Mark can haul him up out of the bed with one arm and hold him like a chimp while he changes the sheets.

Six months ago, when the money ran out, the nursing home kicked Pop out. Marks’ wife did her best for a while, but who the hell could blame her for leaving? She’d spent fifty-two years working in a Manhattan skyscraper. Two hour commute, including subways, there and back. She deserved to relax in her retirement, not take care of a babbling geriatric. She told Mark to give her a call after the old man died.

Pop says, Wah!

What’s that, Pop?

WAH!

Who the fuck knows what wah is. Mark spoons some strained beets into the old man’s mouth and Pop spits it back out onto Mark’s shirt.

Come on, Pop, quit that.

WAH!

He gives the old man water and Pop just lets it run over his scaly lips. Pop doesn’t want vitamins, apple juice, a fresh pillowcase, or to have his diaper changed.

WAH!

Mark sticks in the Extreme Teen Anal Gang Bang 3: Bubble Butt Orgy Spring Break video, and it seems to settle Pop a bit. The old man claps his hands and coos and jabbers. Mark reaches out and finds the lamp cord. He imagines it a noose. A garotte. He tightens the cord in his hands until his fingers turn purple. Then he loosens it and stares at the beautiful sweaty girls groaning on the screen, and wonders what their fathers think of them.

The father’s name is Edward Piccirilli. The son’s name is Thomas Edward Piccirilli.

My old man’s been dead for thirty-five years, but even his name exists within mine.

I was there but sleeping when he finally gave in, his body a mass of biopsy scabs and scars. He hit the floor in the bathroom, and my mother and older brother had to deal with it. I was upstairs. They didn’t wake me.

In the morning they shipped me to off my aunt’s. I didn’t attend the funeral. For five days they all kept it a secret. My mother thought it would be best for me. Then they stuck the truth in my ear and pulled the trigger. I was seven. I’m still reeling.

Like you, I have friends who love their fathers and friends who hate their fathers. One buddy of mine has his old man’s name tattooed on his arm. Another buddy actually got shot by his Dad. Another one used to go to hookers with his old man. Another one–well, you already know. Your buddies do the same thing.

Some of your and my friends are fathers themselves now. Their names have become Aztoreth. Their sons are all Fucking Little Pains in the Ass!

I haven’t been to the old man’s grave in twenty years. There’s a reason. I stand there before the tombstone willing myself down into the dark box to be with him. It’s not suicide. It’s not depression or rage or even pain. It’s simple curiosity. It’s the itch that can never be scratched, the mystery that goes by unsolved year after year. It’s been going on like that for nearly all my life.

Who was he? What went through his head at the end? Where did I fit? My memories are blurred and have almost vanished. I remember sitting beside him on the couch watching horror movies Saturday afternoons on Channel 9. I remember his hairy tattooed forearms. I remember his cigarette smoke. I can hear his occasional laughter at some particularly gruesome or goofy scene. A pendulum cutting a dude in half. A clawed monster on a sand dune decapitating some beach bunny.

Anyone who knows what I do, what I write, they say, There it is, that’s where it started. Sitting on the couch, watching the beach bunnies bite the big one.

Maybe they’re right.

In some ways, I have become like him by default. He swept the patio a lot. He watered the lawn. He washed the car. He was always trimming the hedges so that they were ruler straight. He was a homeowner, a man of property. Maybe a little neurotic about keeping things neat and in their proper places.

I’m the same. I’m predisposed. The neural-chemicals sluicing around in my brain keep me on the patio, sweeping, sweeping. This wrench needs to go back in the drawer. No, not that one, that one. I drive people crazy. They drive me crazy.

Sometimes, at around midnight, I’m out there with the broom, doing my thing. It relaxes me. It opens the blood channels to my birthright. My father’s ghost might be standing in the darkness, watching, evaluating, judging.

My wife shouts, What’s that sound? What are you doing?

I say, It’s nothing. Nothing.

I bond with a man thirty-five years embalmed. It does things to a person.

The father’s name is your father’s name. The son’s name is your name.

He is timber. You are stick.

He is metal. You are foil.

He is rock. You are pebble.

He is river. You are puddle.

He is gold. You are copper.

He is legend. You are dust.

He is infinite. You are finite.

You stand in the rain. He stands in the door.

You stare at each other. Your veins pump the same blood.

He is gray. You are midnight black.

He is past. You are future.

He is ache. You are muscle.

He is mortgage. You are leisure.

He is unclaimed dream and disappointment. You are aptitude and potential.

He is luxury sedan with the big cup holder for his oversized coffee which makes him shit rocks. You are 1970 retooled Dodge Charger with 472 Hemi and five speed Keisler transmission.

He is prostate the size of a grapefruit and gotta get up and take a piss twelve times during the night. You are slick all-night hard ride in the saddle.

He stands in the door. You stand in the rain.

Your veins pump the same blood. You stare at each other.

There was a reason why God told Abraham to slay his own son. It had to do with faith and adulation and trust and worship.

But Abraham figured it was just because Isaac was a mealy-mouthed spoiled little shit. He’d been wanting to finish that fucker off for years, and now he had the perfect out. How can you ever feel the least bit guilty–how could it ever be considered a sin–when God the Father is telling you to do the vicious deed?

Abraham hugged himself to sleep that night. In the morning, he was nearly giggling when he dragged his boy to the altar and raised the stone dagger high.

When the angel stayed his hand he nearly screamed.

There was a reason why God stopped Abraham from slaying his own son. With a gloriously golden voice the angel whispered the answer in Abraham’s ear, but the man couldn’t hear over the sound of his own bitter weeping.

# # #

A great deal of Springsteen’s early work is filled with gut-wrenching narratives and meditations on father-son conflicts, sins of the bloodline, and the bondage of unexpressed love. Nowhere is this heard as clearly or understood as deeply as in “Adam Raised a Cain.” The song is rife with Biblical symbolism and sung with a howling/mewling style that gives it a romanticized, almost mythological feel, which I sought to tap into and transfer to prose.

Independence Day

Sarah Langan

(Inspired by “The Rising” and “Independence Day”)

The doctor’s office is shiny and bright, but the people inside it are dirty. Trina tries not to stare. It’s depressing when these people look you in the eye. There’s a junkie two rows down who’s wearing a black garbage bag instead of clothes, and a man at the front desk with his port leaking down his back, begging for change.

Trina waits her turn with her dad, Ramesh. He won’t be seeing the doctor today. He’s never seen the doctor. He says he’s not sick, but he’s lying. He coughs all the time, and in the mornings she’s seen him spit blood and phlegm into the bathroom sink. Last month, the Committee for Ethical Media installed a television camera in their kitchen because he submitted an unapproved audio to the news opera “Environmental Health.” Instead of running it under a pseudonym like he’d wanted, the editors called the cops. Now the whole family is under house surveillance. Anybody who wants can flip to channel 9.53256 can see her lard-congealed breakfast table, and the weird foam curlers her mother keeps forgetting to take out of her hair in the morning. Her whole eighth grade class knows that Ramesh’s pet name for her is Giggles, and that they can’t afford fresh milk. Only one-day soured from the bodega on 78^th Street. It’s humiliating, and so is he.

While they wait, he puts his hand on the back of her neck and squeezes the skin surrounding her port like he’s trying to pull it out. He doesn’t understand, even though eighteen Patriot Day channels repeat it day-in and day-out: You can’t stop progress!

Trina rubs her bruised cheek and glares at Ramesh. He sighs and lets go of her port. It’s a victory, but it doesn’t make her happy; it only stirs the piss and vinegar stew in her stomach.

She’s carrying the list in the pocket of her spandex jeans. Each visit, her dad makes her write down her complaints before they leave the house, and then goes over them with her. He tells her that he wants to be sure she says the right things so she doesn’t get in trouble. But the truth is, he doesn’t give crap about her. He’s just protecting his own sorry ass.

He got drunk last night at dinner. Her mom, Drea, accidentally took too many vitamins and nodded off at the table. Trina pretended she was a duck, and let it roll off her back. Quack, fricking quack. At least dinner was ready. Peanut butter and Fluff: the ambrosia of champions. But after a few drinks, Ramesh got the look. He started talking through his teeth like a growling dog: “They’re pushing me out. Looking over my shoulders all the time. Even the janitors. Cameras everywhere. A man can’t work like that.”

He rubbed his temples while he talked like his thoughts were hurting him, and Trina tried to be sympathetic, but she’d heard this song before. Every time he got drunk, it was the same. Meanwhile, cameras were recording his every word, and where would they live if he got fired? Worse, what if that blood in the sink turned out to be cancer, and in a week or a month from now, he was dead?

In the corner, the television was set to “Entertainment This Second!” Drea pretended to be interested in what Ramesh was saying, but she was looking past him, at the show.

“Those fuckers are killing my work!” Ramesh shouted while banging his fist against the table like a gavel. Everything jumped–even his stinking vodka bottle. The salt shaker rolled into her lap. She was scared to call attention to herself by putting it back, so in her lap it stayed. Her little friend, salty. She and salty, against the world.

She hated salty, all of a sudden, because his sides were all greasy with thumbprint scum. She hated her dad, for ruining dinner. She hated their crappy apartment, and the kids at school who called her pink lung. Mostly, she hated the way Ramesh shouted, because Drea was so out of it, Drea had checked out months ago. It was Trina he was yelling at. I can’t fix your problems. I’m thirteen years old, remember? she wanted to say.

But she didn’t. It would be too hard to explain. The salt spilled like bad luck, and she let the shaker drop from her lap. It rolled under the table. “Fuck you, you fucking no good drunk,” she grumbled under her breath, only the words got away from her. They rushed from her chest, and then burst into a holler that practically echoed inside the kitchen. She spun at her mother, to make sure it wasn’t Drea who’d spoken. But Drea’s earpods were inserted. On the television, beauty queens in bathing suits wrestled in a pool of mud for the title of “hottest bitch.”

Had she really just said fuck you to her own father? She was already blushing from shame when she felt the blow. It came while her head was turned. Her dad, a dirty fighter. Another reason to hate him. At least it was his open palm and not his fist that tore across her face and knocked her out of her chair.

She lay stunned on the floor. From the table, Drea shook her head, “Don’t fight, babies. It’s beneath you,” she said, but she might have been talking to the mud-slingers.

Trina’s face broke like glass. Her lips pulled wide, ready to explode into the worst crying jag of her life, so she squeezed her fists so tight her fingernails pierced her skin, and tried to stay calm. Ramesh was kneeling next to her. His long limbs wobbled drunkenly until he gave up kneeling, and sat down. She flinched as he ran the plastic Smirnov bottle along her swelling cheek. It was so cold it got stuck and pulled her skin. “Let me see. Hold still,” he told her.

“You’re a terrorist,” she sobbed. “That’s why they want to get you fired. A dirty Indian terrorist,” she said, even though she was half Indian, too.

“Shh,” he said. “I’m sorry. That was unforgivable. I’ll never do it again.” He was still holding the bottle against her skin. He smelled like mice and formaldehyde, and though he wasn’t supposed to, he’d worn his white lab coat home from the office. It made him feel important, because he could tell people he was a doctor, too.

Trina tried to stop crying, but she couldn’t. She pushed the bottle away and hid her face between her knees. It was dark in there, and she wanted to come out and let him hold her, but she hated him so much.

“I’m so sorry,” Ramesh crooned. His long limbs didn’t quite fit under the table, so he was hunched like a man in a dollhouse. The air was warmer, because they were both breathing fast in a small space.

“I mean it, I’m reporting you,” she blubbered. He didn’t answer that. Probably too shocked. It was the meanest thing she could think to say. Then she got up and locked herself in her room. She didn’t come out until morning, when it was time to go to the doctor.

Now, a nurse holding a Styrofoam clipboard calls her name: “Trina?” She’s wearing neon orange short-shorts and a belly ring. All the smart nurses dress in tight clothes. That way they get better tips. “Trina Narayan?” she asks again.

Her dad nods at her very slowly, like he’s trying to impart one last tacit bit of advice. He thinks he’s a genius or something, but if he’d taken a real job with the Defense Department when the last war started instead of staying in the toxicology lab at New York University, they’d be rich. Instead, his funding got cut, so they had to move from their pretty house in Westchester to a two-bedroom stink-hole with wall-to-wall shag carpet in Jackson Heights, Queens. Now she goes to a school where kids ignite cherry bombs in homeroom, and her only friend is semi-retarded, which is better than the rest of the kids, who are completely retarded.

She touches her bruised cheek for courage. It still stings. “Don’t tell,” Ramesh mouths so that only she can see. He’s so scared that his eyes are bulging. A bug-eyed coward. He’s not a real man, her father.

She smiles in a way that is not meant to reassure. Her lips are closed, tight and angry, and she silently tells him her answer. The blood drains from his face as she walks away.

The examining room is empty. A bright light shines from the corner and she squints. Most people her age only require one visit, then tune-ups every ten years. You’re not allowed treatment more than once a month or you become a vegetable. Still, some people invent false identities and sneak. They wind up wandering the streets and begging for food because they can’t remember their names, or where they live.

Problem is, the treatment never works on her. Every time the doctor cuts out the bad stuff, it grows back like a tumor. Her dad tells her it’ll right itself on its own, but he doesn’t know shit. First sign the bad stuff is back, Trina doesn’t gather moss. She calls the doctor. The best part is, no matter how much paperwork Ramesh fills out to cancel her appointments, he never gets it done in time. It’s fun to watch him run around, like a wind-up toy, when she knows that no matter how hard he works, he’ll never get anywhere.

The examining room is pink and round like a womb. She’s wearing a short-sleeved jumper so she won’t have to undress. The needles are plastic, which makes them cheaper, but not as sharp. She has to shove the small one really hard to get it into a vein. Blood squirts. She puts the second needle inside the port in the back of her neck and twists its metal ring until it locks into place. Some people do it standing, but she likes to lie on the cool metal table. Makes the whole thing floaty, like a dream.

The doctor is a five-foot wide metal box in the curved corner of the room. It’s attached to the needles, and her, by worn plastic tubes that over time have turned pink from other peoples’ blood.

The doctor has a Cyclops-like eye in the center of his face. It lights up white, and then red. The needle jabs through her neck and into her skull. Her skull is especially big, so she had to get her port adjusted at a shop in the mall. The sales lady broke off a piece of her skull and replaced it with hinged plastic that she has to swipe with rubbing alcohol every night so it doesn’t get infected.

The light flicks from red to green. The machine starts to purr. She holds her breath. This is her fourth time with the doctor, and it is always this moment that feels most wrong. The needles have warmed to the temperature of her blood, but they are still foreign objects; they don’t belong inside her skin. Neither does this port that has left her gray matter vulnerable. There are people, mostly the old and young, who experience drip. Their spinal fluid leaks, and they become paralyzed. She wants to rip out the port. She wants to pull out the needles and break them. She wants her booze-hound daddy. Mostly, she wants to run.

But then the doctor doles his medicine. It travels, colder than her blood, but tingly. First her elbow, then her shoulder, her back, and finally, all the places that are just beginning to get tender. It feels like the boys she wishes would touch her. Like laughing so hard her stomach hurt back in Westchester, when life was easy and she was Giggles. Like her mother’s embrace. Like love. It feels just like love.

Begin, a recorded female voice announces over the loudspeaker. Its mechanical quality reassures her. This is too intimate for human witnesses. Too special. Oh, how she loves the doctor.

She pulls the wad of paper from her spandex jeans and starts: “I’m afraid for Lulu.” She always begins with this one, but so far every time they excise it, the worry grows back. “…In school they say that early cultures believed in this thing called a soul. It scares me. I don’t know why. Like we’ve all got these ghosts that live inside us. Like I’m haunted by my own ghost.”

Continue, the voice tells her. Its soft voice travels through the tubes so that her port vibrates.

“The actors in the movies–it doesn’t make any sense that they look so different from the people I know. They’re so pale and thin– they never have mechanical lungs… I hate the way I look. I wish I could cut myself into little pieces. I wish I was pretty…”

The tube in her arm is getting backflow. Red blood mixes with morphine, pink and pretty like all girls should be. Except she’s brown and pudgy.

“I got so mad last week I bit my hand. You can still see the teeth-marks. They’re smaller than you’d think. Looks like baby teeth, so I told everyone at school it was a neighbor’s little kid. Well, actually, nobody asked. But if they did, that’s what I’d tell them.”

She looks at her list. The rest are the items that her father invented: You don’t like sour milk; You want to devote your life to your country. You’re so excited about Patriot Day that you can’t sleep. Then he added, like it was an afterthought, but she knew it wasn’t: You want to be popular but you don’t fit in. You don’t understand that you’re special. Your worries are a gift. She’d felt her face flush when he said that, because suddenly the gig was up, and they both knew that nobody at PS 30 thought she was cool.

She decides she’ll say the honest one. Maybe it’ll stop being true, once she says it. Maybe the doctor is magic. “I’m not pop–” she starts, and then stops, because if she says the words, her father will be right. Because that smack had been so unexpected, and undeserved. Because every day for as long as she can remember, things have been worse than the day before, which is how she knows that last night wasn’t a fluke. He might be sorry for it, but next time he gets drunk, he’ll hit her again.

The morphine has wound all over her, like amniotic fluid. It feels so good, and safe. The doctor will know what to do. She crinkles the paper into a ball, and for the first time, tells the doctor what’s on her mind. “I’m so sad…. My mom doesn’t take pills because she wants to be happy. She just wants to be numb. I’d take pills if they made me numb, but they don’t.”

She sniffles, and bites her lip hard until she’s sure she won’t cry. She’d like the doctor to take everything this time. She’d like to be so empty that she doesn’t remember how to breathe.

The machine starts clicking and humming. She gets nervous. Was she wrong to say that pills don’t work?

Continue, the voice tells her.

The thing she really wants to say sits on her tongue like a sliver of reconstituted nectarine. She bites down, and lets its juice run down her chin. This is not her problem. She is not accountable. He has done this to her. Her father. The doctor, too.

“I hate my father. He drinks. He hit me last night.” She notices, dully, that her voice now echoes. I’m being recorded, she thinks, and then: Good. Now he’ll really get in trouble.

“He makes us wear air filters in our chests, even though the EPA says we don’t need them. He fills the apartment with them, too. He says he’s working on safe cigarettes at the lab, but really he’s testing metal dust on mice again. He says it’s the debris from the bombs that’s killing us. All those falling buildings. He’s going to move us to Canada because they’re granting amnesty–I heard him talking. He wants to get out before the mandatory ports go into effect.”

As she talks, the drug warms her. She’s almost sleeping. Sweet, thick dreams. She will be sick from this for days. But for now it is so good. Continue, the voice says, but she doesn’t have anything else to say.

“That’s all.”

Continue.

She tries to make something up, but her thoughts scatter. She licks them like gossamer spider’s webs, but can’t collect them into coherent strands. They bundle and knot in all the wrong ways. “I have no soul to haunt me,” she says, because it reassures her to think this.

Then the pull. This is her least, and most, favorite part. She closes her eyes, and starts floating. Warmth radiates from the port in her neck. She doesn’t feel it. There are no nerves up there. Just pulp and grey matter. Heat in tiny lasers breaks the synapses, until all those bad thoughts disappear. Memories fade, and are gone. First Lulu, then school, then the pills, then her father, then her soul. She can’t remember them anymore.

When the stream ends, she nods off. In her dream a little person lives inside of her, and that person is so angry she’s eating her own fingers until all that is left is a pair of opposable thumbs. She holds them up, bloody and ragged as the coast of a beach.

The table jiggles as it rescinds. She falls to the floor. The needle in her arm tears her skin on its way out. Blood squirts. The needle in her port, still attached, yanks her head back. “Cripes on a cross!” she mumbles, then with an eye half-open, looks at her watch: 11:15. She’s been sleeping for two hours. A personal best. She twists the tube from her port, and starts out just as the sprinklers and ammonia pour from the ceiling, to clean the room for another patient.

Except for the headache that longs for more morphine, she’s as light as air when she opens the door to the waiting room. The world is like a flat desert, and she sees nothing for miles. Wings, sparkly and slender as silk threads, are attached to her back; they’ll fly her away.

In the waiting room, her father is sitting next to the woman wearing the garbage bag. The woman is really fat, so maybe it’s a contractor bag. You could roll her, Trina thinks, and then she giggles. The doctor has made her so happy!

Her dad stands to greet her. He’s tall, dark, and skinny. Long, long ago, her mother used to call him beanpole: My funny beanpole, I could grow cumquats off your arms. My funny beanpole, bend down a few stories, and give me a kiss. Two years ago, the apartment got so hot that he filled the tub with ice water, and they all took turns snorkeling for rubber duckies in their bathing suits.

He’s frowning like he’s worried, and suddenly her stomach turns. Something is wrong. What could it be? She knows, even though she can’t remember. She did something bad.

Her temples throb. She cradles her head like she’s wounded, because she wants him to know that she’s hurting. There’s a bruise on her cheek, but she doesn’t know how she got it. “Daddy,” she says, and she doesn’t know why, but she’s crying.

It smells like metal out; another explosion in midtown. They walk with their shirtsleeves over their noses to the car. His legs scrunch in the seat, and he has to bend into the steering wheel.

She thinks maybe he’s going to hit her, which is stupid, because he’s never once hit her in her life. But he only raises his hand to make sure her sleeve stays over her nose. He holds it there, so she doesn’t have to talk for a long while. He takes care of her, which, come to think of it, he’s always done. After a long while, he takes his hand away, so she raises her own hand to keep her shirt in place. Out the window, ashes fall like rain. If you think of them as black dandelion wishes, they’re almost pretty.

She was mad at him, she realizes, so she told the doctor something very bad. Now he’s is in trouble. To keep from sobbing, she puts the heel of her hand in her mouth and bites down. “I’m sorry. I told,” she whispers through a mouthful of bone.

He closes his eyes for just a second. “Remember me,” he says.

In her mind, a bomb explodes where she sits. Its fire swallows her, and her father, and the car, and the doctor, and her apartment in Queens, and her city, and her country, and the whole world. All ashes, falling down.

He’s not yet gone, but already she remembers something as if she is reminiscing at his funeral: before the war, her dad never drank.

“Where do they go?” Trina asks her best friend Lulu the next day at lunch. They’re on line in the school cafeteria. She can’t remember what she said to the doctor, except it feels queasy, like spoilt milk. It feels gnawing, like missing fingers.

“Where does what go?” Lulu asks. She’s got a voice like Darth Vader because her mechanical lung needs a tune-up. When Trina’s feeling left out, she takes tiny breaths like hiccoughs until she feels loopy, because Lulu says that having a mechanical lung is like being high on nitrous all the time.

“Where do our thoughts go after we visit the doctor?” Trina asks. In her mind, doctors across the country collect the worries into a giant vat. They’re extracted one at a time by the people in charge, who best know what to do with them. Why should the whole world worry, when you can give the job to a select few?

“That’s stupid!” Lulu giggles. “There are no problems! That’s why we go to the doctor. To get adjusted. It’s a throwback from early evolution. Our species worries even when nothing is wrong.” It’s a line from a commercial for the doctor that Lulu’s quoting but Trina knows better than to argue, so instead she shrugs.

Lulu scoops up a ladleful of lard-fried iceberg lettuce onto her Styrofoam tray. She used to be one of the pretty girls, but over the last few years, she’s gotten fat and dim-witted. Trina caught her on the way down.

Trina bypasses the lettuce for a vitamin-fortified fluff sandwich, and they sit in the back of the cafeteria by themselves because, except for each other, they don’t have any friends.

There are about twenty television screens all set to the same program, “Brick Jensen’s Health Challenge.” They hang from hooks in the ceiling and descend to eye level at the middle of every table. Lulu is fascinated. Brick Jensen, also known as Mr. Fit, is explaining that five minutes of exercise each day is enough to keep in shape, so long as you do it correctly. You can squeeze your butt while standing, for example, and do three sets of mechanical lung lunges. For perfect arms, you hold your backpack over your head.

The show is interrupted by Mr. Mulrooney, the school principal. He’s got a tiny black mustache, so everybody calls him Hitler. The mustache is pencil thin, though. So maybe it’s Gay Hitler. Eccentric Hitler. Hitler Lite.

“Two days until Patriot Day!” he announces; a small man trapped inside twenty small screens. It’ll be July 4, 2076. The 300^th anniversary of the Great Emancipation. “Remember to wear your school colors,” Hitler Lite adds.

“If they weren’t maroon and orange, maybe,” Lulu mumbles. Her wilted lettuce looks like green poop, but she keeps eating it, like she’s punishing herself for getting ugly.

“If everybody wears maroon and orange I’ll go blind,’ Trina adds. “Seriously. It’s a health concern. I’ll get dizzy and puke and go blind, not necessarily in that order.” Lulu is wheezing, so Trina punches her backpack until the battery starts humming. She’s done this enough times that it no longer requires acknowledgment. They’re best friends, and that’s what friends are for.

“For those of you without ports, remember to bring your insurance cards.” Hitler says. “And if you’ve got private insurance…Well,” he smiles tightly, “Nobody here has private insurance.”

Patriot Day is the same day that the law goes into effect, and everybody who can’t afford a private doctor has to get a port. She used to be really happy about that. What progress: adjustments for the masses! Better yet, poppies for the masses! But that means her dad will have to get a port and she knows he doesn’t want one. Her stomach feels hollowed out again. Like somebody scooped away her insides with a metal frozen yogurt spoon. She thinks about the Cyclops eye, the list she crinkled into a ball instead of reading. And the morphine. She thinks about that, too, because she misses it already.

Hitler makes a final announcement. He’s the third principal in two years. They keep getting fired for embezzlement. The last guy partnered with Milk of Magnesia, so everybody got free laxatives after lunch. The bathrooms stank, but at least the school colors were blue. She liked that a lot better than Hitler’s pick: who wants free Tang? Everybody knows that trip to the moon was a hoax.

“Ozone levels are too high. No after school sports today,” Hitler says before signing off.

“Bees knees, shit up a tree!” Trina moans. Unless it’s video games, sports are for lesbians and stupid people. Everybody knows that. It’s the running joke on the show everybody’s watching lately: “Will Brick Jensen Get Laid?!?!” People keep remaking it with their own video cameras, and posting it on their personal television channels. It’s the joke that won’t die. It’s pulling its decaying corpse down the hall with its thumbs. Still, she loves track, and the weather’s only been nice enough once this season.

Because of her natural lungs, Trina is really good at running. She even laps the boys. It’s showing off, but she can’t help it. She loves to run. When you go fast and long enough, it’s like being high, only better. It’s like living, only good.

Most people in this neighborhood get the operation by the time they hit grade school. Stores all over the mall take out your bronchi, and replace them with plastic tubes. That way you never cough when the bombed buildings fall. But so far, Trina doesn’t need the surgery. Thanks to her dad and the time she spent in Westchester, her lungs are clean. Even if it makes you popular, fake lungs look like a bad idea. Sure, you won’t get cancer, but what happens when they rot? Still, she’s an outcast at this school. When she volunteers in class, she doesn’t pant like the rest of them if she says more than a sentence. She doesn’t need to shoot insulin in the girls’ room, either. Sometimes she brings a needle anyway, and fills it with saltwater.

“Sports are for lesbians and stupid people,” Lulu wheezes.

Trina frowns. It’s coming back to her, the stuff that got excised. She wishes it would go away. She wishes she was like everybody else, and nothing ever bothered her, but instead she’s crazy like her dad. Ignoring Lulu’s comment, she asks, “Do you think the doctor helps people? That it’s good to forget?”

Lulu shrugs. “I wouldn’t know. I don’t have any problems.” Then she adds, “I’m feeling much better than yesterday.”

Trina sighs. Lulu always says she’s feeling better, but she coughs more and more. It’s not just the battery that’s low. The tubes are clogged with pus.

The gnawing inside her hurts like a morphine headache. In her mind, a girl is chewing her hands into rags. “Maybe it’s all a lie,” Trina says. “And we can’t figure it out because the doctor makes us stupid.”

Lulu’s jaw drops. She looks around, because they both know that Trina said a very bad thing. Something so bad that if Lulu reported it, the Committee for Ethical Media would take her away to a re-education center, where the kids get stuck cleaning rubble and bodies.

They look at each other for a while, and finally Lulu smiles like a phony. “You pink lung!” she teases. Only, she’s not kidding, and for the first time in the three years that they’ve been best friends, Trina is on the outside, looking in.

The door is open to the apartment when she gets home, which is new. “Where’s dad?” she asks.

Drea is watching three different programs on the television while instant chatting with her friend next door. Trina wishes she’d inherited Drea’s white skin and blue eyes, but no dice. She’s brown like a terrorist instead.

In big letters in the corner of the screen Trina sees: “Sports are for thesbians and flaccid people!” “Brick Jenson gets me wet!” “Sour milk=de-lite-FULL.” On a side bar are all the quips she wrote, but doesn’t plan to send because, unless she dumbs it down, nobody ever knows what she’s talking about: “These ashes are our loon’s call; mad and maudlin.” “Remember, my love, it ends not with a bang, but with a whimper.” “The womb grows like a widening gyre, and even our best suckle its poison.”

Drea was a poet-in-residence at NYU when she met Ramesh at a faculty dinner. As his pick-up line, he told her that the written word was dead. Even then, he compulsively pissed people off. Trina’s the same way. She never intends to offend anybody; stuff just bursts out of her mouth. Half the time, she doesn’t even realize she’s thinking it.

But instead of getting mad, Drea agreed. “Yeah, books are dead,” she said. “So what does that make me for writing poems? Better yet, what does that make you?”

But Drea hasn’t written a poem in a decade. Now that everybody self broadcasts audio poems, she says it’s like genius and madness; there are so many voices that you can’t tell which is which anymore.

“Why was the door open? Was someone here?” Trina asks.

Outside the window, she sees a fire on 78^th Street. The Jackson Diner is burning. She smells scorched Indian food, which is a better smell than usual. On the television split screen, ten people are competing to be the best art critics. They look at photos of paintings scavenged from the Louvre, and say whether they’re any good. Then the judges tell them if they’re right, or if the paintings are crap. The second channel is that show with Rhett Butler and Scarlet O’Hara, where instead of breaking up, they get back together. The last channel is their still kitchen. Drea is watching their apartment on channel 9.53256. Suddenly all three programs are interrupted, and Trina moans. It better not be another evacuation. She only just got rid of the lice in her hair from the last time she had to stay at the 48^th Street Shelter.

The president comes on screen. He’s smiling. He’s had a lot of cosmetic surgery, so he looks just like Brick’s brother, Brett Jensen. Or maybe he is Brett Jensen. She can’t remember.

Remember me, she hears in her mind, like the president is saying it. Her head hurts bad. She misses the morphine. I worry about Lulu, she thinks, and she knows the thought is not new. The doctor’s cure never works for long.

“Good evening,” the president says, like he’s fancy. Everybody else says, “Hey, America!” Then he reminds everyone about Patriot Day. “I’ve got a special surprise,” he says, and Drea claps her hands together like it’s Ex-Mass morning. “At dusk on Patriot Day, every city in this great country will launch a FIRE WORKS SPECTACULAR!” he announces. Then he itemizes the cities: Seattle, Santa Fe, Portland, Boston, New York. He doesn’t mention Los Angeles or New Orleans, which makes her think they’re still at war for earthquake and flood supplies. She can never remember who the war is with, because it changes so often.

“Ummm,” her mother says like she’s hungry. “I love all those pretty explosions.”

“We have explosions every feckin’ day, Drea!” Trina reminds her, but it doesn’t do much good. Brett Jensen (the president?) has a dimpled smile, which for some reason makes her remember the word soul. A little girl with no hands is haunting her. She looks at her own hands now, and notices that she’s been biting them. Teeth indentations are embedded like welts along her fingers.

“Why’s the door open? Where’s dad?” she asks.

Drea sits up from the couch and looks at Trina like she doesn’t recognize her.

“Think,” Trina says. “Where was the last place you saw him?”

Drea furrows her brow. Her fingers are swollen from all the typing. She’s supposed to use voice prompt, but she prefers typing because it reminds her of writing. Old people! “I saw him on the television?” Drea asks.

Trina’s lower lip quivers. She wants to hit her mom all of a sudden, which makes her even more like her dad, maybe. “Did he go to work this morning? The door is open.”

“Oh,” Drea says, and slides back into the couch. “Somebody took him, then.”

“So where is he?”

She doesn’t answer. The president signs off, and new shows start. Their theme songs all sound the same. They plan it that way, so when you’re watching a bunch of shows at once it’s never discordant.

“I’m lonely, baby. Why don’t you come sit with me?” Drea asks, and Trina would like that. They’ll share a blanket and kiss toes like they used to. Trina will tell her mother what she did, and her mother will forgive her. Together, they’ll figure out what to do. But Trina doesn’t sit, because things have changed, and nothing’s the way it used to be.

On one of the programs, a dark-skinned girl with brown hair and deep circles under her eyes is standing in a dark, dingy room. Flickering lights cast shadows against her face. On the couch beneath the girl, a sickly thin woman lays stretched out and half-sleeping. It’s weird, because television stars are supposed to be skinny and tan, not a bunch of ugg-os. Then she figures it out. It’s her. It’s right now. This is her life. The Committee for Ethical Media has added another camera.

In her room, she switches to channels 9.53256 and 9.53257, then presses rewind. She sighs with relief. The reverse record is working. She plays the tapes backward, and sees herself wiping tears from her eyes while talking to her mother on the couch. Was she crying? She doesn’t remember that, though she notices now that her eyes are still wet.

She sees stillness. Her mother in the dark with the shades drawn, moving only to swallow vitamins and breathe. Then her dad with each arm held by an officer of the CEM, walking backward into the kitchen. They wrestle a little. Her dad is on the floor. One of the men hits him on the back of the head. But then they all get up again. They let him go, and walk backward out the apartment. The door closes, and it is dad chewing toast into existence. She wishes it had happened like that.

She uses a long metal prong to pull out the old filter. It’s black with soot. Then she replaces it with a clean one, and tries not to gag. It’s small until it fills with air. Then it expands. Her dad says it’s the ultra-fine particles you have to worry about. They get into the deep lungs, where there isn’t any hair or phlegm to carry them back out. Nobody at school uses filters. They’re expensive. Ramesh steals them from the lab. There’s about fifty hidden behind the false wall panel in her bedroom.

As she walks, she remembers. She’s not supposed to, but she can’t help it. First came the cold table, and then the blinking eye. And then the slap against her cheek, and the echo of her voice as it was recorded. She puts her hand in her mouth and bites down until she draws blood, but it doesn’t make her feel any better: her father. She told, and now he’s gone.

The main branch of the Committee for Ethical Media is at the old library near Bryant Park in Manhattan. A guard at the subway station orders her to spread her legs, because it looks like she’s hiding a bomb up there. He loses interest when she tells him she’s got antibiotic resistant syphilis. After an hour, the F train never shows, because the 59th Street Bridge is closed due to a bomb threat. She hikes it north over the Triborough, then grabs the 6 Train downtown. By the time she gets to the CEM it’s night, but the city is lit up so bright it feels like day.

She takes a number and waits. The woman sitting next to her is wearing a trash bag. This time, it’s white and lemon scented, so slightly less offensive. She falls asleep for a while. When she wakes it’s morning, and her number is three spots away. They call her name. She’s up in a flash.

“Ramesh Narayan?” she asks.

A woman punches something into a computer. “Rammy Naran? Nope. Next!”

“No, wait. You spelled it wrong. Here.” The woman enters the name again. Then she frowns. “Cremated or buried?”

Trina tries not to hear this. She tries very hard. There is something bad on her tongue. Bile, maybe. “No. He was taken in for voluntary questioning.”

“So it says.” Then she leans over the counter. She is wheezing badly, and her backpack is hissing like a bum who got stabbed. “Heart attack during interrogation,” she answers. “Cremation or burial?”

Trina’s tries to think, but the words don’t make sense. She’s not sure they’re English. Her hand is in her mouth and she’s biting hard. It tastes like salt. “I love my dad,” she mumbles. “And he loves me.”

“Which? Your insurance covers both,” the woman says. Her backpack is gasping.

Trina thinks about the cold bottle against her cheek. The bruise is still tender, and she touches it now, and pushes hard until it hurts. She’d like it to reverse heal. She’d like to wear the scar for the rest of her life. “It’s a mistake,” she says. “He was going to get us out. I made a mistake.”

The woman shakes her head. “You’re right. There was a mistake.”

Trina’s crying all of a sudden, from relief. “Yes! I knew! They only took him for questioning.” She’s holding onto the counter, because otherwise she’ll fall. “Daddy!” she shouts, “Daddy, where are you?” because maybe he’ll hear her voice in one of the interrogation rooms, and know that she came all the way from Queens to rescue him. He’ll know she’s sorry.

The woman grabs hold of Trina’s wrist like a lobster catching prey. Her grip clamps tighter when Trina tries to shake her off. “We couldn’t find next of kin. So the CEM already incinerated him. That’s the mistake. He’s still dead, kid. Now shut your mouth before the guards arrest you for making a racket.” Then she lets go, and places a bar-coded ticket on the counter. “You can pick him up at that address.”

“No,” Trina says. “That’s wrong. Ramesh Narayan. Before the war he gave lectures all over the country. He was an important man.”

“The ticket,” the woman says, only Trina sees that she’s not mad, just tired. Her lips are almost blue from lack of oxygen. “Sure, maybe it’s a mistake, but that’s where you’ll find out.”

Trina looks down at her shoes. In her mind there is a bomb at her feet. When it explodes, a hole opens in the earth, and swallows her. The girl left standing in the CEM lobby is just a shell. Made of tubes and plastic surgery. A confection of the doctor. Sweet and stupid as cotton candy.

She’s panting and wet with sweat by the time she jogs the forty blocks downtown to the East Village. She’d keep running forever, if she could, but the building’s name comes into view: City Morgue. She stands in front of it for a long while, catching her breath.

Unlike Jackson Heights, a lot of people in Manhattan don’t have mechanical lungs. Instead they’re zipped inside big plastic bubbles equipped with molecular air generators. They’re skinny and they dress in high heels, even the men. They look like a different species. As they pass the front of the building, she thinks about poking holes in their generators. The air will leak slowly, and then they’ll start coughing, just like everybody else.

Once inside the building, she exchanges her ticket for a number, and waits. After a while a guy with no teeth hands her a Styrofoam urn. She’s not sure it’s her dad, but there’s a picture burned into the side. In it, Ramesh is wearing his tan work suit. His dead eyes are closed.

She’d like to eat the urn. That way she’ll never forget. There were the animals that died in his lab. Little spotted mice with pink tongues. They couldn’t survive the debris. There are buildings that fall. The third world war in the last twenty years. There is her mother, who used to laugh. There is her best friend Lulu. They blend together. They coalesce, like mercury. Like morphine. They bathe her. She is bathed in death.

Perhaps she’ll run out of here, and never stop. There is Canada, like her dad planned. But would they really have gotten there? Or would Patriot Day have come with blood and fireworks, and then gone gently, into another day? She knows the answer, and for once it makes her think no less of him. He would have anesthetized his new port with vodka, and after a visit or two to the doctor, he’d have become just like everyone else. There was no plan for escape. There was only rage and talk. But these were better that nothing.

I won’t forget, she whispers, and she knows she should say it to the ashes, but she can’t bring herself to open the urn.

She walks the whole way, and doesn’t get home until the next morning. Her feet are bleeding. Squish-squish.

When she walks inside, Drea is on the couch. She’s been sneaking extra visits to the doctor, and Trina can tell from her dilated blue eyes that she saw him recently.

She puts the ashes on the table. The television is tuned to four channels. This time there is a view of the neighbor’s apartment. The weird guy is having sex with his daughter. Drea is sad about that, so she’s hiding her face. Trina can’t figure out if it’s really happening, or a programmed show

She turns off the television. “This is dad,” she says.

Drea is quiet. She knows she’s supposed to explain, but she doesn’t know how. She can’t help it; she laughs. This is dad, light as a feather. This is my hand, covered in open sores.

Drea examines the photo, and then opens the Styrofoam top. “If this is your father, what does that make me?” she asks.

When she wakes the next morning, she can’t help it. She forgets she was supposed to remember. She spies Drea running her fingers through the ashes, and goes on automatic pilot. She calls the doctor. He can’t squeeze her in until tonight. She uses Lulu’s name. She figures Lulu won’t care. It’s all for a good cause. Just the thought of the needle makes her skin tingle. She can’t wait for the needle.

Remember me.

Drea is playing the television so loud that it gives her a headache, so even though she’d rather stay home, she walks to school. It’s Patriot Day, so everyone is wearing maroon and orange. In her black jeans and t-shirt, Trina sticks out like a bloody thumb. There aren’t any classes, just lines of people waiting to sit on gurneys in the auditorium and get their free ports. Along the aisles, they’re handing out Tang juice and Fluff sandwiches.

In her mind she tears the ports from kids’ skulls, and watches them bleed. She tears out her own port, too. Up on the podium, the seniors are giving speeches to the underclassmen: “Before my port I wasn’t sure, but now I know I’m happy!” “The Doctor makes everything better.” “This will be the best day of your life.”

But then Hitler interrupts the testimonials for a special announcement. Something about a pep rally and bonfire tonight after the fireworks. He wants people to bring things to burn. She stops listening until she hears Lulu’s name. She’s been hiding from Lulu all day, because if she sees her, it’ll make what happened to her father real, instead of a dream. She’ll have to talk about it. She’ll have to say his name.

Hitler Lite continues. “Complications of the complication on the complication,” he says. Blah blah blah. “Let’s bow our heads for a moment, in memory of Lulu Walker.”

Her face goes red. It’s so hot she’s sweating. She doesn’t stay to hear any more. She’s out the door.

She knows she shouldn’t be here. She promised she wouldn’t come. She hates him. Then again, she’s got no place else to go. “Emergency,” she tells the nurse in pleather and vinyl. “I have to see the doctor. Lulu Walker.”

She takes a ticket. The woman sitting next to her is wearing a sheet. She’s shaking like she needs a fix real bad. Trina doesn’t look too closely, because the woman is Drea.

She closes her eyes and thinks about the trickle through her veins. She thinks about emptiness. She thinks about the filter in her lungs full of ashes. The dead are all around her. She is breathing them. And still the buildings topple while the televisions sing.

—Remember me.

—Why? It hurts too much.

“Lulu Walker?” the nurse calls, and she’s up in a flash.

Needles inserted. Blood squirted. She lays down. White eye to red to green, she begins. “I worry about the speed of things. I worry you murdered my dad. I murdered my dad. I worry he was right all along, only I hated him so much I didn’t see it. I worry this war will never end. It’s just a lie to keep us stupid.”

Her voice echoes. It’s being recorded. They’ll think its Lulu, probably.

Continue, it tells her, and she finally recognizes the voice. It’s the same lady on “Will Brick Jensen Get Laid?!?” who says that sports are for lesbians and stupid people.

The morphine tingles in her arm. She starts forgetting even though the doctor hasn’t entered her port yet. The treatment is finally working, she realizes. It’s not brain damage they’re after. Everybody remembers eventually, no matter how often they’re adjusted. The doctor isn’t the cure. It’s self-regulation. It’s forgetting with the snap of a finger, the promise of a tingle in the arm. Forgetting in the anticipation of pleasure. Forgetting because it’s easier, and you’re tired of fighting, when every day things get worse, instead of better. It’s learning to be your own doctor. That’s what Patriot Day is all about.

Continue, the woman repeats. She’s been paid for her voice, of course. An actress. They do it all the time. Trina thinks she’s going to laugh, but instead she is crying as the morphine drips. It doesn’t feel good this time; it just feels sick.

Lulu is dead. Her father is dead. Even the living are dead. The laser begins to shoot, and her father is disappearing. The machine is killing her father. Bean Pole with dark circles. They used to swing their feet on the bench in Westchester, side-by-side. The memory disappears. Burned away. She searches for it, but it’s gone. Next goes the bathtub, where he taught her to swim. Gone. She is killing her father. She is a murderer. The doctor is a murderer.

She pulls the needle like a plug. Precious morphine drips. She unlocks the port. Click. Then she’s kicking the machine. She’s beating it senseless with her bitten and scarred hands, because two days ago Ramesh was here. Two days ago, even though he knew she would betray him, he was waiting for her. He loved her. She punches and kicks, until the Cyclops eye shatters. Then she pops the needle inside its gaping wound. The morphine wets the wires, and the doctor’s lights go out.

It goes to sleep and forgets, but she does not.

She leaves fast, before they can figure out what she did. It won’t be long before they come for her. There is video. Lulu is dead. They’ll figure it out. They’ll lock her up, or worse.

She thinks about Canada. It would make her father proud. But she doesn’t have the paperwork to leave the state. She could take a train to Westchester, but she’s broke. Besides, they’ll run her name through the CEM Database. An idea occurs to her, and she likes it. She could walk. She’s good at that. She’ll insert a double filter and cross the Triborough at night when they won’t see her walking the old pedestrian path. She’ll sleep during the day, and walk as long as it takes. She’ll visit those places she’s heard about, where there is grass and dirt. Where there are animals, and birdsongs, and she doesn’t need a filter.

But do places like that exist anymore?

She goes home first. The apartment door is wide open, and her father’s ashes are scattered on the coffee table. The television is loud. She packs a bag full of filters and vitamin-enriched fluff. Wears it on her shoulders like a mechanical lung. “Mom?” she calls.

Drea is lying on the bed. The bottle of vitamins is empty. Trina’s first thought is a bad one. But then Drea opens her eyes. “Sweetie,” she moans. “I got lost and had to find a nice policeman to take me home. They put this on my arm, so it doesn’t happen again.” Drea lifts her wrist, where a barcode has been branded into her skin. “You’d think they’d just write the address. But nobody likes words anymore, do they?”

Trina sits down on the bed. Her mom doesn’t move. Her head is upside-down, which makes her look alien. “I’m in trouble,” she says.

Drea blinks. Her fingernails are dirty. Or maybe ashy.

The camera’s light is green, just like the doctor’s, and she thinks about smashing it. She’d like to say: I’m leaving. Come with me, mom! But this is being recorded, so instead she stands. “I’ll remember both of you,” she says.

Drea smiles. “How nice.”

She’s walking backward out the door, like this is a movie in rewind. They haven’t really lived in this hole for three years. Her mother isn’t really a junkie. She didn’t really rat her father out to the CEM, and get him killed. She isn’t really leaving all that she’s ever known.

“Bye, mom,” she croaks as she crosses the threshold. Then she’s running down the steps.

The streets are red, and the sky is ashes. Inside her, a girl is chewing the scenery. She’s ripping down all the old pictures, and making everything blank. A girl is yelling and shouting and crying. And breathing. And running. And thinking. And remembering. This girl is her.

Feet pounding, she doesn’t stop until she’s out of breath. When she looks up, a crowd of people has amassed under the Triborough Bridge in Astoria Park. Have they come to arrest her so soon? No, she remembers. It’s Patriot Day.

All along the street and sidewalk are floodlights, gurneys, and the sound of drills. The streets look wet, and at first she thinks it’s water, but no, it’s blood. People stand in lines one-hundred bodies deep, waiting for the messy operation. Scalp wounds bleed. Her sneakers are red.

When the sky explodes, she thinks at first that it’s another bomb. But then there are colors: red, white, and blue. Heads bobble in unison, thousands, and peer into the light. She notices now the men with guns. They’re here to make sure that everybody, even the people who try to back out, get their ports.

She pushes through the crowd and gets onto the bridge. The road is so thick with people that she can hardly move. Still, she pushes. There are others, she notices, who do not look at the bright lights in the sky. They navigate the crowd, and try to make their faces blank, but they can’t. They’re terrified, just like her. One in a hundred. Maybe one in a thousand, but still she spots them. Still, they exist.

Have there always been others, only she’s never noticed them before? Or is it that she’s never been one of them before? She knows the secret now and it has nothing to do with the doctor. The way to remember is to stop forcing yourself to forget.

The people like her make their way across the bridge while the other stand still, and block the way. Some are alone, others in small groups of three or four. Heads bent, chests pounding, they steer through the immobile throng. She thinks they’re all headed for the same place. Canada or free Vermont. A few are wearing neck kerchiefs, and she realizes it’s because they have no ports.

Remember, her father told her. And she will do more than that.

She doesn’t know it’s happening until her breath comes ragged. She’s running along the bridge in blood stained shoes. She’s not sure, but it seems like she’s the first. Others follow. Soon, half the bridge is shaking, pounding. There aren’t many of them, but they’re determined. They are running. It feels so good, the air slapping her face. She was born for this, to run. She will keep running, until she is far away. Until she can watch the fireworks of Patriot Day from some place free.

# # #

I listened to Springsteen music for about two months straight in preparation for writing Independence Day, and was most strongly drawn to “The Rising”. The world has changed in bleak, unexpected ways since 2001, when Springsteen wrote that optimistic song to heal my grieving country. Sifting through the debris of all those dashed possibilities of that terrible time is where I found my story. There’s a nice duality in Springsteen. He’s nostalgic for an America that never existed, but if we try hard enough, well, maybe we can create it. There’s always hope for a better tomorrow. He’s both an optimist and a pessimist, and I love that about him, because it makes the things he loves all the more bittersweet, and real. As I wrote, I began to realize that the dystopia I’d created in my story mirrored the themes from a lot of Springsteen’s darker songs, particularly “Born to Run,” “Dead Man Walking,” “Born in the USA,” and “Independence Day.” All these things share dreams, and possibilities, gone sour. But even looking them squarely in the face, especially looking them squarely in the face, there is still hope.

Ain’t No Angel Gonna Greet Me

Guy Adams

(Inspired by “Maria’s Bed”)

A life can be lived in miles of blacktop as surely as it can in years. Each revolution of the tires: a heartbeat. Every bit of wear on the brake pads: a wrinkle on the face, a hair from the head.

My work takes me all over this sprawling country; road trips broken by nights between motel sheets thick with the ghosts of fucking and tears. Roadside breakfasts fuel the miles with grease and insincere smiles, drive-time radio watches over me, steel guitars and desperate gospel.

Today though I’m in familiar territory–within shooting range at least - and when I’m done I can get home to Maria. You have no idea how much that means to me.

I met Claudio in a bar so down-scale they let the rats pay for lap dances. The girls moved their doped asses regardless of rhythm, scuttling towards proffered notes with the grace and passion of spastic crabs.

“You like her?” Claudio asked, as a cadaver with faintly blue skin thrust her groin at my eyes with desperate enthusiasm. I was sure I could have checked out the state of her womb, if I could just squint past the sequins.

“No, not particularly.”

Claudio shrugged. He took another mouthful of his cheap bourbon and hissed the stale, sweat-laced air between his yellow teeth. He looked right at home.

“I like ‘em thin. That ‘waif’ look thing, y’know? I don’t know what it is, some protective thing maybe…”

I didn’t choose to question Claudio’s belief that protection was synonymous with fucking, it was not a subject I wanted to get into.

“Takes all sorts I guess.”

Claudio nodded at this, as if I had offered one of the most wonderful pieces of wisdom he had ever heard. He lifted a brown paper parcel onto the table between us and nudged it towards me with his finger. “Everything you need’s there.”

“Cool.” I picked the parcel up and rested it against my stool.

He pulled a twenty-dollar note from his pocket and poked it into the dancer like she was his own gynaecological piggy bank. The look of gratitude on her face broke my heart.

I pulled over by the side of the road and stepped out into dust and a heat that was falling as the sun worked its way behind the pink mountains. You could see for miles in both directions on the highway and there was no sign of life in either one of them. I moved round to the trunk, popped the catch, and pulled out the package Claudio had given me. I tore the paper away and unfolded the clothes inside: a dark, Italian-cut suit and a light cotton shirt. The shirt had a small hole in the front where a bullet had entered and the cotton surrounding it was dark brown with the stain of old blood. Inside that bundle was another drawstring bag containing a wallet, boots, socks, a pair of Cuban cigars–the dead man’s favourite I was assured–a pair of cufflinks in the shape of dice and a silver ring fashioned into a grinning skull. He had been a classy guy.

I fetched a couple of bottles of water from the back seat, placing them on the roof of the car where the setting sun could bounce and reflect inside the plastic as I stripped. I kept my eye on the road as I flung my clothes onto the back seat even though I knew there was no chance of being seen. A man just gets a little shy when his balls are in the wind. I had a handful of complimentary bars of soap in the glove box, treasures from dozens of hotel rooms. I grabbed one, ribbon-wrapped and smelling of roses.

Checking the road again, I squatted a few feet from the car and dumped the remains of a burger in the dust. It looked just as good now as it had when I’d first eaten it. I hate eating that greasy shit, it’s bad for the heart, but time had been short and options few. I wiped using pocket Kleenex and kicked loose soil over my turd.

Working up a lather from the first bottle of water, I scrubbed rose-scented foam all over my body. The sun dried it on my skin almost as soon as I smeared it, like scaly lizard skin ready to be shed. I splashed more of the sun-warmed water over me, rubbing my skin raw until I was happy I had washed away the sweat and dust of the day. I pulled the bloodied shirt over damp skin and buttoned-up the cardboard-stiff front of it, then tugged on the large suit pants and forced the belt a notch tighter than the previous owner had used in order to keep them up. Sitting on the back seat I scrubbed at each foot in turn before pulling on the dead man’s socks and boots; a size or so too big, but nothing I couldn’t walk in. Finally I popped his snake-eyes cufflinks in place, pulled on the jacket and slipped the tasteless skull ring over my wedding finger where it hung loose.

I closed the trunk lid and got back behind the wheel. I would take the last step of the journey in my dead-man’s clothes.

I began to sweat a little against the heavy fabric of the suit. This was good, this was cross contamination and it brought the fibres alive. I smelt the ghosts of a hundred dead cigars clinging to the wool of the lapels. The material held onto the heady vapours of drinks too: scotch and gin, tequila sunrises and beer. I could smell the dead man’s sweat, pumped out as he ran from his killer. His bladder and bowels had emptied, that final ablution before God. The suit remembered that and wafted the smell of animal shame to me as I drove deeper into the desert.

I felt my way along the empty road. When the sun fell low enough to be useless I turned on the lights. After an hour or so I saw the neon of a gas station in the distance. I pulled in to top-up, the tank was healthy but I saw no point in risking it. I buttoned the large suit jacket to cover the stain of the old bullet wound.

An old guy who looked as dry and wind-beaten as the desert rock around him shuffled towards the car. “Evenin’,” he mumbled, soft as the breeze. “Much as she can take?”

“Yeah,” I replied. “You got a phone?”

He jerked a thumb towards the lit shack behind him. “Inside there. Washroom too if you need it.” Guess he was catching a whiff of dead man’s shit. I reached for a handful of change from the well between the seats–I always keep a stash for payphones, preferring them to carrying a cell, those things could kill you I hear, fry your brain right out your skull‑ and watched the old guy through the rear window as I slipped my wallet from my discarded jeans. His hand was a mess of arthritis, fingers twisted and bent in towards the palm. He scooped the gas nozzle from the pump with practiced experience, resting the metal pipe across his wrist as he used his rigid fingers to unscrew the gas cap. He guided the nozzle in with a sigh and pushed the trigger with the back of his hand. The gas flowed with a clunk and I headed towards the payphone.

Maria never answers the phone, but I often leave her messages “cause she picks those up right enough. “Be with you in a few hours, honey,” I said after listening to my own voice played back. “Can’t wait.” I imagined her sitting by the phone listening, and felt an almost overwhelming surge of emotion. Lovers always tell one another that they’re impatient for each other’s company and I was touched, not for the first time, at the sincerity with which I meant it. “I should be able to hang “round for a few days too. I’ve got nothing on for the rest of the week. Maybe we could just stock up, draw the curtains, lock the doors and forget about the outside world for a bit, huh?” In my head Maria nodded at that, wishful thinking. “Okay, well, I’d best get moving, the sooner I get the job done the sooner I’ll be with you. Love you, honey.” I blew a kiss into the receiver and replaced it in the cradle. Outside the old man was hanging up the gas nozzle and walking back towards me.

“You got any matches?” I asked as he shuffled behind his counter.

‘sure thing.” He flicked a box in my direction with his hook of a hand.

Back out to the car and on into darkness.

I had no real idea how far I needed to drive, my instincts don’t work like that. It’s more of a subconscious thing. I sort of ‘tune in” to the clothes and the memories they hold, point the car and let go. I let the rest of my mind wander. It’s a fragile thing this talent of mine, if I focus on it, observe it, then it just doesn’t kick in. Let it get on with its job and things play out just fine.

I had taken to thinking of the future a lot lately, most particularly how I could give up my current line of work for something lighter on travelling. I didn’t want to be satisfied with a few days with Maria, I wanted to pitch up and stay there. Still, I wasn’t naïve enough to think Claudio would be happy - the problem with possessing skills that are rare is that they will always be in demand–there was no way he would let me retire, he’d see me dead first. I can’t say I liked the idea of living on the run. There had been enough of looking over my shoulder during the first few months of my relationship with Maria. Living in fear isn’t living at all. A man needs to be able to relax when he can.

After a couple more hours of driving I felt a twist in my gut. I was close. I slowed up, feeling my way along the road for another mile or two before pulling over.

I got out and gathered the stuff I needed from the trunk: flashlight and spade. I threw the cigars, matches and water in the drawstring bag and slung that over my shoulder. I walked away from the road and followed the small cone of light and the instinct in my belly. The sky was clear, moon and stars blocked only by the mountains to my right. The old blood on the shirt made my skin itch, and the heat of the day had been replaced with a chill that made me move quicker to keep warm. I was glad of the dead man’s boots, as oversized as they were: a pair of Italian loafers would have proved useless over distance.

After twenty minutes or so, my stomach was churning and the soles of my feet tingling as they moved through the cold sand. I slowed down and began to quarter the ground, feeling my way to the precise spot. I stood still and closed my eyes. I was there.

I stepped back a couple of paces, putting the small bag down and resting my flashlight on it so it shone on the ground. Then I began to dig.

The digging kept the freezing air at bay as I thrust the spade deep and flung the soft earth into a pile to my left. After a few minutes the spade connected with something solid, a shin bone perhaps, and I worked more carefully, pulling the earth away and giving the buried body a little room. I dropped into the hole and scooped with my hands, holding the penlight between my teeth to guide me. His skull was ragged, decorated with frills of dry skin, his teeth holding that permanent amusement of the dead.

I cleared the corpse carefully, removing as much dirt as I could without damaging the fragile meat and bones which were all that was left of him. When done, I climbed out and took a seat on the pile of earth from the hole. I reached for the little bag and pulled out one of the cigars. I held it between my teeth while striking a match. I quit smoking a few years back, so I was cautious not to have a coughing fit by inhaling the thick Cuban smoke into my lungs. I just drew and puffed blue clouds into the night air, aiming for the corpse in front of me.

There’s no spells, no magic words or potions, the smell of something familiar and my presence is all it takes. The dead just respond to me.

The corpse coughed–that’s the closest word for it–a dry rasp as the beef jerky tongue rolled in the dust of its cavity and the hollow bellows of dried lungs tried to puff enough air for speech. It was hopeless of course, the body was far beyond the ability for such things, but spirits remember flesh and the way to work it. The spirit doesn’t need the body to speak–not to me anyway–but it thinks it does.

“Water,” I said, getting up to lean over the grave and pour a little water over those happy teeth and down along the ragged track where his throat used to be. The lungs flapped as he gasped for a breath and I saw long-boned fingers clench in the dirt.

I sat back down and continued to puff cigar smoke. Every now and then a clap of dried meat or a click of old bone came from the hole and eventually his fingers appeared at the edge of the grave as he pulled himself up into the moonlight.

“Smoke…” he whispered, with his remembered voice.

I reached into the bag and took out the other cigar. “Got one here for you if you want to come up here and smoke it.” I held the cigar up like a dog treat. The corrupt meat and dirt mix of his eye socket stared longingly at it and he twisted and turned in the grave, trying to force his leg muscles to play the game.

“Here.” I stuck out my hand to help. He stared at me, not moving. “What have you got to lose?” I said. “What can I do to you that hasn’t already been done?” I waved my extended hand. “Come on, take hold. Let’s get you out of there.”

Slowly his fingers wrapped around mine in a brittle grip and I pulled gently, lifting the light body into the air. I grabbed for his other hand as his loose hips shook, flinging legs to-and-fro trying to find a foot hold. I made a grab under his arms, careful to avoid poking a finger into any open cavities (corpses hate that, you ever want to really freak one out then shove your thumb in its rib cage and poke towards where its heart used to be), then swung him over next to me on the earth. “There you go.” I lit his cigar off mine and held it out. “Knock yourself out. Who gives a shit about cancer now, eh?”

He took it and held it towards his mouth. The lower jaw shook a little then opened, a flurry of dust pouring from the joints. He clenched the cigar between his teeth and stayed like that for awhile. It takes time for the spirit to get a handle on the flesh again, not helped by the rough state the body has inevitably descended into. I’ve dealt with both extremes: recently dead with all of its extra mobility and even, on one particularly unpleasant job, a loose collection of bones with no more chance of physical cohesion than sentient grit. This guy wasn’t doing so bad. “Want some more water?” I asked, offering the bottle. The corpse nodded, took it and moved the cigar to a safe distance before splashing great mouthfuls into his open jaw where the liquid ran and trickled down through his body, pouring over the ribs and onto his dry thighbones like a decorative fountain. The water makes no physical difference but it’s a great psychological help; you’d be amazed how much more sprightly the old bones can get once they’ve watered themselves a little.

“Hurts”, he whispered, which was a phantom memory. This guy had no nerve endings to feel “sore” with.

“It passes,” I replied. “Just take it easy for a bit. Drink some water, smoke your cigar. Let the body figure it out.”

“How?” he asked, as they always did.

“Long story. Still, it might take your mind off things for awhile. A few years back I was working in Bennetti’s, that pizza place off West Lake Mead, you know it?” He shook his head. “You didn’t miss anything. It was a shit job but it kept me in rent and calzone.

“Anyway, we had a few customers who kept the place going, ‘family guys’, y’know?” I looked sideways at him, “Guys like yourself, frankly. Nobody big, the kitchen wasn’t good enough for that, but Johnny Franks used to eat there a fair bit. And Spizzo Monteleone, you know: psycho midget worked for the Detroit guys back in the day, before he got old and his eyesight went. Joey Briscoe, too, though the management had some cause to regret that, the way things worked out. Joey had pissed off Claudio Fornale (guess you can imagine that, seeing how you ended up), ‘cause he’d been making eyes at his daughter–you know how he was with her.”

Claudio’s obsession was well known, nobody looked at his “little girl” but him. There was a lot of talk when she turned up dead, though not talk loud enough for him to hear. The general belief–and I knew it to be true–was that he’d killed her himself, lovesick and unable to bear the thought of her being with anyone else. Claudio was one sick fuck.

“So, anyway, Claudio decides to nip things in the bud before they can even get started and he drops by with a loaded gun and an inclination to put Joey face-down in his soup. This he does, though not before Joey loosely fires a round or two off himself, one of which finds me,” I tapped the centre of my chest, “right here.”

I took the water bottle off him–brushing at the neck as I took it, so as to look natural and not hurt his feelings–took a swig and another puff of my cigar. This reminded him of his own–which was the idea–and he lifted it to his mouth and went through the motions of smoking it.

“So,” I continued, “there I am, flat on my back, bloodstain spreading across my cheap waiter’s shirt. I look up at Claudio and the freakiest thing starts happening, there’s light everywhere. I mean this guy is pumping it out, it’s hanging around his shoulders, pouring off him like that glowing goo in those lava lamps everyone had in the sixties. I assume it’s some weird shit that goes through a man’s head as he’s dying. Then this stuff actually takes shape. It’s not just light anymore, it’s a goddam face hanging over Claudio’s shoulder and looking right at me. Pretty weird. Then it says something and, by the look on Claudio’s face I obviously repeated it because he freaks out. I said: “Carly always was a messy little shit, never could keep things under control.” I had no idea what it meant of course, not then, but Claudio’s looking like he doesn’t know whether to shoot or cry over me. Next thing I know, he’s picking me up and carrying me out of there. I clocked out almost straight away, and next thing I know I’m lying in bed–not my own, the sheets were far too white and clean for that–and it feels like someone’s making a hole in my chest with a hand-drill.”

My cigar was close to done and I curled it between my fingers, looking at the orange glow at its tip, staring at the way the ash crumbled and formed, like layers of rock.

“Claudio’s freaking out because I referred to him by the name his old dead dad used: ‘Carly’–kind of a girly name ain’t it? Don’t think there was much love between ‘em–and he wants to know why. He’s had me patched-up and shoved in his spare room until he knows what’s going on. Of course, when I tell him what I saw, just like I told you, he’s none too happy. He drags me downstairs into the cellar and I’m eye-to-eye with this poor bastard tied to a chair in the middle of the room. Someone–who am I kidding, Claudio–has worked him over for an hour or two, there’s ragged holes where some of his teeth should have been, one eye’s gone and his nose is splayed out like the end of an exploded firecracker. This guy’s as dead as you get. But guess what happened?”

“He came back to life.”

I nodded. “Thrashing in his chair like he was plugged into the wall socket. Claudio’s first thought was that he’d made a mistake and that the guy hadn’t been dead. A pair of bullets to the skull didn’t stop him though, which meant that Claudio–and I–had to rethink our understanding of the universe.”

My cigar was deader than the guy sitting next to me so I threw it into the darkness, watching the amber glow roll through the air like an over-fed firefly.

“Turns out it takes a bit more effort to reanimate anyone more than an hour or so old but I can do it, however long they’ve been buried. Claudio knows better than to ignore an interesting asset, which means I now work for him, travelling up and down the country talking to people in shallow, unmarked graves. “

“What for?”

I looked at the corpse, still holding onto his cigar and his newly found sentience. “All sorts. Think about it… I can find out pretty much anything, talk to anybody… the graveyards of America are full of knowledge. You guys beat Wikipedia, tell you that much.”

He nodded. “What do you want from me?”

“Well, that’s rather mundane I’m afraid. When you lifted all that money from Claudio’s clubs, he figured you for a man who found himself in the right place at the right time: an opportunist, a man who got lucky,” I gave him an awkward shrug, “up until you got caught, anyway. Thing is, he’s had time to think and he’s convinced you had a little insider help. Normally of course, there’s nothing he could do about it, but that’s where I come in. I need names.”

The corpse looked at me–at least as much as he could with those mucky pits for eyes–and I got the impression those grinning teeth were grinning a little wider. “Why should I tell you a damn thing?”

“Because he knows where your daughter, her husband and both your grandchildren live. Sorry, I know it’s a cliché but I’m just the messenger here.”

“Without you, my family and I wouldn’t be in this situation. You’re more than a messenger, you weird fuck.”

I sighed, “I think you’ll find that it was you robbing Claudio that caused the problem, pal, let’s be straight about this. You rob a psycho like Claudio and there are going to be repercussions. You knew that, but you did it nonetheless. I am a repercussion; deal with it. Now…give me names.”

Perhaps it was the wind, perhaps it was a sigh of despair from lungs no longer capable, I couldn’t tell. “Frankie Benneletto tipped me and helped with security. That’s it.”

I nodded and got to my feet, “There, wasn’t so difficult, was it?”

“What now?”

“Now you get back in that hole of yours and I fill it in.”

“Like this?” He creaked to his unsteady feet. “I’m not going back in there now! I’m alive, for fuck’s sake!”

I’d done this often enough to know they always kick up a fuss at the end. Can’t say I blame ’em either but what am I supposed to do? Leave them walking around?

I reached for the handle of the spade which was sticking up in the earth like a cheap grave-marker and spun it around to scythe at his tatty neck with the blade. There was a dry ripping noise, like when you step on a rotting log in the forest, and his head tumbled from his shoulders and rolled in the sand, lit cigar still clenched between its teeth. The body flayed around but I brought the spade down a few more times before it had a chance to realise it didn’t need the head to operate. Ten seconds is all it took to leave a pile of ragged bones that looked like kindling.

“You fuck!” his head shouted at me. “You vicious fuck!”

“Yeah,” I sighed, kicking the bones back into the hole. “Sorry about that. Pretty callous, I know, but from experience you guys get pretty violent when it comes down to it and I’ve learned to play it safe.”

“I can’t move!”

“Of course you can’t,” I said, walking over to where the head was staring at the stars, smashed stogie between its teeth. “Jesus, I can see why Claudio figured you must have had a little help. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, huh?” I considered lifting the skull by the split cigar but decided not to risk it, bastard would be of a mind to nip my fingers if it occurred to him. I gave it a gentle kick towards the hole instead.

“Fucker!”

“Oh shush now, it doesn’t hurt. You’re spirit: this is just rotting waste. Learn to let go, fly free…go into the light my friend!” I gave him another kick. “It doesn’t matter what happens to these old bones. I dragged you back into them, now all you have to do is get out again.” The skull had fallen short of the grave but one more tap saw it roll in. I looked over the edge. The skull was facing up at me as I grabbed a shovel-full of dirt.

“I…I don’t know how,” he said, anger replaced with fear. “How do you let go?”

“Fucked if I know, sorry.” I dropped the dirt onto the skull, eager to get this over and done with.

“How do you live with yourself, you bastard?” he said as I filled in the hole, his voice quieter with each new shovel of earth.

“The love of a good woman, my friend. It’s the only thing that gets me up in the morning.”

With the hole filled I jogged back to the car, shedding that baggy suit like the damn thing was on fire. Buck-naked, I sat propped against the rear wheel for a minute, taking mouthfuls of water from the last bottle I had stashed in the back. I spat the water several times, cleaning my mouth and then found I was crying. This wasn’t unusual, whatever brave face I might wear while working. I sobbed, wiping the tears from my cheeks and snot from my nose until I was all done and the cold was biting my flesh. I dressed, got back behind the wheel, and drove towards the city.

I pulled in at the gas station again, the old guy raising his eyebrows at me.

“We don’t do loyalty cards, I’m afraid.” He smiled and chuckled at the C.S.I. re-run he was watching on a small portable. I smiled, grabbed a cold Coke and called Claudio from the payphone.

“Frank Benneletto,” I said into his answering machine, knowing that the guy would be getting a visit from Claudio and his boys before I was an hour down the road.

I drank my Coke parked out front of the gas station. I had a thought running around in my head. Could be that there was a way of dealing with Claudio that hadn’t occurred to me. Claudio was a lunatic and Maria and I would always be in danger from him the way things stood now. Not that he knew about Maria of course, but Claudio had a way of finding things out.

Claudio couldn’t be trusted. He had got where he was through a love of violence and a lack of morality. People like that don’t make reliable employers. In the old days, when his father had run things, there had been a sense of fair play to business that was sorely lacking now. Claudio’s old man had been dangerous if crossed, but he knew how to look after his people, an attitude that was beyond Claudio. Which was probably why he’d killed the old man in the first place. There’s nothing like a little patricide to get you promoted, after all.

I needed a way out: something to get Claudio off my back once and for all.

It was only a couple of hours to the house I shared with Maria, a little place just outside Bunkerville. By the time I pulled up it was morning, with dawn only a few hours from the horizon. I got out of the car, stretched my aching back and jogged onto the front porch, the key in the front door without breaking step.

“Maria, honey?” I called as I stepped inside and closed the door behind me. It was late but I knew she’d be waiting, Maria didn’t keep time like normal folk.

She was sat in the front room, wrapped in a thick blanket and staring into the flames of a confident fire. She got chills most nights.

I walked behind her and kissed the top of her head. “Hey darling, how’ve you been?” Her hair was thick with mud, which made me sad. I picked at the soil a little, trying to tease out her curls. “You been in the back yard again, honey? I wish you wouldn’t do that.”

“I miss the earth,” she whispered.

“I know you do, hon, but people might see you someday.” This was unlikely; the closest neighbours were a couple of miles up the road. To be honest, I just hated to think of her burrowing out there. “Listen, I’ve thought of a way I could pack all this in, we could head north–Canada even–start a new life. Can’t think why it didn’t occur to me before.”

“I don’t want to move.” Her voice was huskier than normal. I’d been away too long.

“Sure you do, honey, you know as well as I do that if your daddy ever finds out about us it’ll be all over. I can’t keep working for him like this, he’ll find out someday.”

“I miss daddy.”

That hurt. “Don’t say that baby, if it wasn’t for him you wouldn’t be…” Shit, I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. “Well, the way you are. I need somebody to deal with him so we’re free to do what we want.”

I turned her seat around, shifting her eyes from the fire to mine. ‘There’s one person we both know that could sort him out.” I bit my lower lip, saddened at the state of her face. She’d got dirt mixed in with her foundation, a great lump of it clogged into the bullet-hole just beneath her right eye. I licked my thumb and rubbed at the dark stain. I kissed her dry lips and looked for a sign of love in those distant eyes. “Where’s your granddaddy buried, baby? Can you remember?”

# # #

Springsteen is as evocative in what he doesn’t say as what he does. We don’t know what the unfortunate protagonist of ‘Atlantic City’ is going to do when he finishes singing his song - and we don’t need to - but we know it won’t end well. Will the bitter narrator of ‘State Trooper’ keep his gun in his pocket or will more blood be spilt before his journey’s done? Some times it’s in those blanks that the real story lies, the real kicker… When it comes to ‘Maria’s Bed’ from the Devils and Dust album, there is something dark hiding beyond the bottomless adoration of the singer’s love for Maria. We’ve met this man–he with his suit and skull ring—before, on The Rising album where he promised he’d meet us ‘Further On (Up the Road)’. But what does he do that makes him yearn so hard for the relief of Maria’s love? Why does he wear that suit? What darkness does he find out there in the desert? I had this idea I might know…

When choosing a title I cheated and lifted it from another song entirely (“The Streets of Philadelphia”). In this context the absence of angels upon someone’s death felt so appropriate (both to the unfortunates the protagonist meets and ultimately himself) that I couldn’t resist using it.

With These Hands

Kurt Dinan

(Inspired by “Factory” and “Two Faces”)

“The acts of desperate men sadden all of Heaven and shock all of Hell.”

–Unknown

I’m sitting at the bar in Sullivan’s, watching the Red Sox, doing my best to ignore the guys who want to drag me off the stool and beat me bloody. No one would stop them if they did. They could rally together as union men and leave me for dead right here on the barroom floor. Part of me hopes they do.

A lifer pushes in beside me, stale beer hot on his breath. He’s one of the guys who’d spent countless nights killing off cans in the kitchen with Senior, the lot of them getting rowdier as the hours dragged on.

“Some of us are wondering about Friday, Joe. The way you left the meeting has a few of the guys thinking you’re going in tomorrow. That’s not the case, is it?”

I look past him to the door, hoping Holly will enter.

“Is it the time and half if you show? Or is it that wife of yours works upstairs? You afraid they’ll can her?”

–First you’ll lose the car, son. Then the house. Then Holly.

“Look, Joe, I’ve known your family a long time. We’ve all got to stick together. It’s going to be tough on everyone, but if we give in, they win.”

I turn away in my seat.

“Nothing to say?” He leans in close, wraps a rough hand around my wrist. “You’re nothing but a goddamn disgrace to your father.”

I grip the glass. He’s about to hit me, maybe spit in my face, spark the blaze they want to happen. Instead, he walks away, throwing a lazy elbow into my back as he passes.

The guys at the table behind me laugh. A few seconds later, a bottle cap bounces off the back of my neck, pinging onto the floor. I let it go. Earlier, I’d walked out in the middle of a rank and file meeting after they announced the strike, walked out of the hall with the eyes of every desperate man on me. What did I expect?

I head back to the phone, hidden away in a corner by the bathrooms. I fish two quarters from my jeans pocket and call home. The phone rings and rings, but I know Holly’s not going to answer any more than she’s going to show up here.

Like most couples here in town, the two of us collapsed into each other out of a desperate loneliness one night at the quarry. She was twenty, older than me by two years, working at the diner out on 35. That night she wore a pair of cut-off jeans and a Tom Petty shirt she still wears some weekend mornings. Even now when she pulls her hair back like she did then and gives that crooked smile, I’m over the moon.

One night, lying together in the back of Senior’s Mercury, naïve and drunk on Pabst, I told her, “When I get out of here, I’m never coming back. I’m not getting chained to the factory like my father.”

“You say that like every other guy out here, Joe. But for some reason, I think I believe you.”

The windows were fogged over, our skin slick with sweat. I said, “It’s like I can see exactly where I want to go-”

“‑but you don’t know how to get there?”

I think we both knew then.

She traced the tips of her fingers down my arm and said, “Maybe it’s that you have to go with someone. Maybe that’s how you get out for good.”

“That’s probably right.”

I didn’t know then that no matter what unspoken promises I made under the stars, the factory had its own plans.

I hang up the phone, drop the quarters back into my pocket and return to my stool. Of course she’s not going to answer. The way she looked up at me from the bedroom floor, as if I was a stranger. It wasn’t anger or even disgust in her face, but pity, as if what I’d done had been a long time coming–nothing but a sad, lonely expectation.

–The first time’s the hardest, son. Seeing her cower there. Like everything else, you get used to it.

I twist my wedding ring and fight the nausea. My hands are as scarred and rough as a barnacle. The hands of my father.

Sully starts my way, wiping the bar down with a dirty white rag. The old man’s thin arms dangle from the sleeves of his white t-shirt. He does a double take when he looks at me.

“Sometimes I still look up and think you’re him. I don’t know how many times he sat in that very seat.”

I hand him my empty glass. “Get me another, would you?”

“You’re not the most popular guy tonight, Joe. You sure you want to stick around?”

“I’ll be okay.”

“As long as you know what you’re doing,” Sully says, pulling another Guinness. “You must’ve gotten your father’s stubbornness along with his looks.”

–And my name.

“I suppose you’re right.”

–And my blood.

“Just be careful, Joe,” Sully says, walking away.

–And my hands.

I shrug and watch the Sox turn a double play to end the eighth. The screen goes black for a second, and in the reflection my father stares back at me.

“I’m not you.”

–Don’t think your wife would agree.

I shut my eyes and press my thumbs into the lids until fireworks explode. When the colors fade, there’s Holly again, on the floor, looking at my father’s hands tight at my sides.Bile churns up my throat until I think I might throw up.

Another bottle cap hits my back. I turn and see some of the guys from shipping grinning at me.

“We’re not bothering you, are we, Joe?” Vance asks, head cocked.

My hands ache.

“Let’s talk about it outside.” Something my father might say. Most likely did say, many times. Some of the scars of his knuckles born not from work but from hitting the faces of men he might have considered friends.

Others follow us out behind Sully’s. A bare bulb over the backdoor casts the Dumpster and lot in a yellow glow. In the distance the factory stands watch over the town.

Vance has a good six inches on me, his arms steeled from years loading and unloading boxes.I clench my hands into fists. As he stalks forward, the calls of murder from the other men fade. I only hear Holly’s vacant words as she glared at me from the floor seconds before I left the house.

“Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

He throws a blurry, arcing fist. I drop my arms and allow the blow to smash into the side of my head, rocketing me to the pavement. In seconds he is pounding my face and breaking my ribs. And I just lay there in the Dumpster run-off picturing Holly’s face, fighting to keep my hands down, hoping this man will beat the shame and the poison and my father right out of me.

All of the row houses on the street are dark by the time I make it home. I stumble to the front door and find it unlocked, the way I left it five hours ago. I lose my grasp on the screen door and it crashes shut behind me. For a moment, the house is still. Holly may not even be here.

One night when I was still in high school, Senior wandered in drunk. I’d fallen asleep on the couch watching TV. When the front door slammed with enough force to shake the house, Mom, half-conscious from sleep, hurried to see what had happened. Senior hit Mom so hard I swear the windows rattled. She hurdled across the room into the wall, crumpled to the floor like dirty laundry.

Senior looked first at her, then at me. His eyes were glassy. “Get to bed. You’ve got school in the morning.”

After he disappeared into their bedroom, I reached for Mom’s hand. She jerked it away. Her voice was barely a whisper. “You heard your father.”

She died a year later. The official cause was breast cancer, but I knew better. Like an uprooted tree, she had simply turned brittle living under Joe Senior’s roof, his words and hands sapping her will to live.

–She understood the life she signed up for. They all do.

“No one deserves that,” I say in the darkness.

–Holly’ll learn soon enough.

The small table beside the mail slot is covered with bills that have begun to pile up like autumn leaves. Not ready to face Holly yet, I stagger to the recliner, the same chair my father sat in night after night. My breathing is heavy, my entire body throbs. As my eyes adjust, the darkness in the room fades.

Little here is mine. The sofa, the coffee table, the pictures on the walls. Holly has tried to make it our home, but even she can’t remove the ghosts.

“You make sure to take care of that house,” Senior’d slurred in the hospital after his stroke on the factory floor. “And that car. Watch after it too.”

I fought back tears I still don’t understand. “Don’t worry, everything’s in good hands.”

“Not so sure about that,” Senior rasped. “Those hands…you’re no kind of man.”

When he died three weeks later, I inherited his house, his car, and his bills. Then, like every other son in town eventually does, I took my father’s place on the line, my hands continuing his work as if they’d never taken a break.

–And now you understand, don’t you?

The bedroom door is closed at the end of the hall. I keep the hallway light off anyway. The curtains are drawn and the room is dark, but I can hear the fixed rhythm of Holly’s breathing.

In the bathroom I see myself for the first time since Sully’s. My face is swollen, my left eye shut tight. Flaked, dried blood crusts my bottom lip. The purple beginnings of bruises line my ribs.

There’s a knock on the door and Holly enters. She stands there as the fog of sleep clears. Then, “Oh Jesus, Joe.”

I can’t keep her eye. “That bad?”

She takes my hand and sits me on the edge of the tub. There are no hard looks or questions, just Holly kneeling beside me, cleaning gravel out of my cuts and taping my ribs. She even cares for the scrapes across my knuckles. The whole time I wonder if Mom did the same for Senior.

After the raw flesh is tended to, Holly lays her head on my leg. She says, “Tell me what you said when you proposed.”

“All of it?”

“You know what part.”

I take a short breath. “I said I wanted to be the kind of husband my father never was.”

“That’s right. And you are. You’re a good man, Joe, and you’ve got a good heart.”

She looks up, but I still can’t keep her eye.

“But this town is poison. It flows through every man here. All of you spend your lives trying to catch up in a race everyone else in the world started well before you.”

I grip the side of the tub, my knuckles aching.

“The women here live by different rules. We either get lucky and get out, or we marry and take our chances. I think I did pretty good for myself.”

–Your mother was happy once too. Remember that.

“Joe, look at me.”

I swallow my shame and look down at her. Her face shows a fierce tenderness.

“I can live with your flaws because I love you and because I understand this town. We’ve always said it’s the two of us against all comers. That one day we’d get out of here. I don’t care if you join the others tomorrow or if you go in with me. Either way, we’ll get by. But if you ever touch me like that again, Joe, I’ll leave you. I swear to God.”

Part of me wants to let everything out. To explain what is happening, to explain every fear and worry and failure. But not in this house. Not in his house. Not after what happened earlier.

In bed, Holly puts a light hand on my hip, her breathing slowing, then steadying, until she is asleep. No easy prayers or sleep comes. It’s just me and him.

–Admit it.

I’m looking right at the spot where Holly landed.

–You’ll feel better. Does everything lead to this?

–Just say it.

“The release felt good.”

–Goddamn right it did.

Then, as if she has heard my confession, has heard my betrayal, Holly rolls away, hand drifting off my side, leaving me awake and alone in the dark.

The factory whistle summons me from bed. Maybe it is from habit or a simple matter of survival, but I don’t second guess my decision as I dress. I lie and tell myself life is about sacrifice, that today is just like every other day. And every other day that will follow.

The house is cold. I check to see and yes, the gas company has made good on its promise. It’s a juggling act, paying bills only before service is cut, learning which utilities will let us go the longest without payment. This one has slipped past.

Holly enters the kitchen, dressed for work. She stops, looks me up and down.

“What are you wearing?”

I check myself. I’ve dressed in my father’s old work clothes.

She touches a bruise on my face.

“Let’s just make it through the day.”

We drive empty streets toward the factory, the car following a well-traveled path. Shortly before the driveway, they wait, corralled behind barricades with angry signs and anxious faces while police, batons in hand, keep the entrance clear. Towering overhead, the factory stands its ground, gunmetal-gray smoke rising from its chimneys and the ever-present wail of industrial saws filling the air.

Holly crouches near the floorboards while I speed past the strikers and through the gate. Men who threw bottle caps at my back last night now hurl insults and curses as I go by. Inside, I’m barbed wire tightening around a fence post.

“It’s going to be okay,” Holly says. “Those men, they understand‑”

“Don’t.”

Holly shuts up.

We park in the worker’s lot behind the building. There are more cars and trucks than I expect, but the lot is less than half full.

–Cowards, like you.

We’re met inside by Lucas Bixby in his short-sleeved white button-up and blue tie. Bixby’s been the HR guy here for as long as anyone can remember. A company man. He writes our names on his clipboard.

“We appreciate your loyalty.”

He’s enjoying this. The man had the same smirk on his face as the day he pulled me off the line and into his office, announcing the arbitrator’s ruling that the company had no liability in Senior’s stroke. Standing in front of Bixby’s desk like a beggar, I heard nothing past, “If he’d actually been hurt on the job, the factory would have to-”, before his words faded out. At nineteen, all I could think of was how I wanted to break his goddamn nose. Now, all these years later, I’m thinking the same thing. My fingers even twitch, eager to curl into a fist. Funny how nothing changes.

Except, for a tired instant, Bixby’s face does. It changes. His smile fades and deeper back in his eyes I can see it–he’s trapped like the rest of us, doing nothing but the factory’s bidding. He has no more choice in the matter than I do at this point.

Holly gives my arm a squeeze before heading up to the air conditioned offices overlooking the production floor. “I’ll see you at lunch, okay?”

The production area sounds with the high-pitched wail of industrial saws, sanders, and nail guns. A thick, dusty heat hangs in the air. The furniture being crafted by hand, high-end pieces whose production has kept the town alive for over ninety years, covers tables and fills work areas, awaiting finishing touches before heading to shipping. To an outsider, it would appear business as usual. But the air is mournful, less than half the men as usual at their worktables. Those who are here look as if he’s second-guessing not just this one but every life decision. No one looks another in the eye.

My mouth is all sawdust. The armoire I work on is fashioned with Senior’s care flowing through me. How many of these pieces did he craft in his day? How many will I build before the factory takes me as well?

–You feel it now more than ever, don’t you?

My hands instinctively curl into fists.

–That’s it.

My breath comes in short bursts.

–Let it out.

The sounds of the saws and power tools fade. I see the men outside standing their ground. I see the postman delivering more bills. I hear the collection agency dialing the house. I look at my hands. They wear my father’s wedding band. Now I’m fifty-two, with a hangdog wife and a son who has no appreciation for my daily sacrifice. At night I sit in my kitchen with men from the line and when they leave, my wife is on the receiving end of a lifetime of desperation. A lifetime of failure.

I look up at the management offices and see it clearly now. Holly is standing in the window. She is thirty years older, looking down on me as she will for the rest of our lives. Her face is bruised, one eye swollen, cheap makeup not hiding the worst I’ve done to her. She might leave at first, run to her mother’s afterward, but she would come back.

–They always come back.

How it begins doesn’t matter. Holly will say something. Anything. Senior has taught me well. I’ll drop her to the floor with a cement fist to the stomach. And when she crawls to her feet I’ll smash her face. My knuckles will tear through her nose and mouth and

–It’ll feel so good.

I’ll shake her hard, driving her back and forth

–Get it all out.

and pounding her body until the wire slackens, leaving me exhausted and weeping and complete.

–You are your father’s son.

The factory noise floods back again. My hands ache. I stand motionless in front of the worktable. I have never been so tired. Holly appears in one of the windows overhead, waving down, her smile sad but defiant.

I take a two by four from a nearby pile and walk to an open table saw. With a push of a button, the blade screams to life, its teeth disappearing into a blur. I slip my wedding ring into a pocket, leaving my hands naked and hungry. I guide the board toward the spinning blade.

“Do you remember what you said when you proposed?”

Metal teeth rip through wood, chewing angrily, spitting dust and splinters.

“Nothing but a goddamn disgrace.”

The wind from the blade pushes against my fingers, stirring the hairs along the backs of my hands.

“If he’d actually been hurt on the job‑”

I curl my fingers toward my palms, making fists.

“We’re one and the same.”

Seconds before I slip my wrists under the blade, leaving both hands nothing but dead flesh leaking blood and poison, I know I will lose consciousness. I know I won’t hear the panicked shouts, the throwing of the emergency shutdown, and the striker’s chorus of cheers as the factory machines go still. And I know I won’t hear Holly beside me, screaming my name. Nor will I hear my father’s voice finally falling silent.

But I hope it happens.

It has to happen.

# # #

When my first marriage fell apart, I listened to the Tunnel of Love album more than was probably healthy. I found a strange sort of comfort in Springsteen’s songs about the relationships between men and women, and how we often fall short of the unspoken promises we make. The character in “Two Faces” is failing, but forever trying, to overcome his weaknesses as a man and a spouse. I could relate to that. But in thinking about the defiance he shows at the end of the song, I wondered just how he’d respond if the screws were turned even tighter. Would he stand as straight if, say, he was also living the life described in Darkness on the Edge of Town’s “Factory”? That question led to this story.

Wings for Wheels

John Palisano

(Inspired by “Thunder Road”)

The Hot Rod Angels called for Mary…

Their blackened Camaro idled out on Thunder Road, several paces from Mary’s front porch. She slipped off her headphones, took the needle off the record player, and inched open her bedroom curtain without taking her eyes off the three Angels emerging from the burned car. Tommy and two pale-skinned boys. The paint on the car’s hood had splintered into raised brittle bubbles, some of which had split open to reveal the grey steel underneath. Even the white walls on the tires were charred. Mary couldn’t imagine how the car could be in such poor condition and still be running.

The familiar sound of Roy Orbison’s “Only The Lonely” echoed from the Camaro. Just after their last dance as a couple at the Senior Prom, she had told Tommy that song was her favorite; she imagined that was why he’d chosen to play it now.

On the first step of the walkway, Tommy stood between the two boys. When he turned to one of them, Mary glimpsed a hole in his leather jacket. The gouge stretched from his left shoulder blade down to the middle of his back. From his right shoulder, she saw a second hole where a frayed black wing fanned out.

Tommy twisted round, looked up, and locked eyes with her as she felt her throat go dry. Was she seeing a trick of the moonlight? His eyes had changed into glossy black crystal balls. She saw herself reflected in them, only she’d aged, thinned, and looked ill. Wisps of blood curled down the insides of Tommy’s eyes. He blinked and instantly they transformed back to their familiar steely, cold gray.

Mary squeezed her eyes shut and hoped what she’d seen was just because it was late, and she was tired. Moisture from the rain played tricks, was all. She wanted the Angels to get away from her house. Their skin was gray, too, just like Tommy’s eyes. Every gesture seemed pained. They’re like ghosts. Tommy stared at her from beyond his empty eyes. Her house was small; the second story was no more than twenty feet from the walkway where they stood. It seemed she could reach down and take his hand, if she chose to.

The Angel next to Tommy stepped back to the Camaro. Tommy put his hand up. “Not yet.” Then he pointed at Mary. “You lied to me.” He spread his fingers and put his hand out to her. “I forgive you. Come outside.”

Mary recalled what she’d told him: that she’d always love him, and that they’d always have something special between them. Well, it hadn’t really been a lie, had it? She still felt good about what they’d shared, and he still mattered to her. And it wasn’t as though she had her choice of the boys in town. Regardless, Mary wanted to find out what lay beyond the borders of their sleepy oceanside town after she graduated. Although she really had no idea what she eventually wanted to do with her life, she was sure it would happen somewhere other than The Shore.

Tommy blinked, and his eyes turned back into shiny dark mirrors. “We have Redemption.” Mary again saw herself reflected in Tommy’s eyes. This time she was hung up on a cross, nails through her wrists, a crown of thorns, her face framed with dark, drying blood. She pictured everyone in town gathered and watching her as if she were on stage. And she was beautiful to them. She saw a black crow on a barren tree above. It eyed her like a merciless devil come to collect her soul.

For a moment, rushing out her front door and going for a ride with the Angels seemed like a great idea. They’d found a way to be known–to be something other than what people in their town ended up being. Then her eyes strayed to the dying bouquet of roses that Tommy had given to her on graduation night, curled blackening petals lying strewn across the top of her dresser. “It’s a fine area to live in,” Tommy’d said that night, talking about how they could build a life there. “I’m going to work at the Belco Steel Mill this summer, and maybe I can hang on after that…” But he chose his friends over her. She’d told him she didn’t want him racing, that he might eventually get hurt. He hadn’t listened.

Mary scooped the drooping roses out of the vase, opened the window, and threw them down onto the sidewalk.

Tommy glared up at her, then he and the Hot Rod Angels climbed back in their Camaro. She watched them screech away from her house, heading out to Highway 9. But she knew they’d be back tomorrow, calling for her, just as they did each night.

Mary quickly hopped back in bed and pulled the quilt up to her neck.

All summer she’d prayed for someone to save her from Tommy, and from the promise she’d made. It didn’t matter to him that he’d sold his soul to run with the Hot Rod Angels: Mary was his.

Everything changed the night Mary first laid eyes on The Kid. Johnny. Each night since she’d met him, she’d marked a cross on the back of her bedroom door. She’d made seventy-five of them since May. Some of the drawings were simple, while others were elaborately decorated. It depended on her mood. Still others were circled; those were for the nights she’d seen his band.

I wish he’d come out tonight, Mary thought while curled up on her bed. For the first time in her life she felt old. Her mind raced with what she’d just seen. Tommy. The Hot Rod Angels.

It took her a while, but she eventually slept.

She awoke to the sound of an idling engine; her veins felt filled with ice. They’d come back for her. Tommy’s chant rang in her head.

We have Redemption.

At the bottom of the stairs, Mary looked out her open front door. She was scared, imagining the worst. She stared out at the car parked in front of her house. It took her a few seconds to recognize The Kid’s ’57 hardtop convertible Chevy. His car was the only one she knew that had orange flames painted on the hood. Mary’s entire body went cold.

She spotted him behind the wheel, leaning down in his seat enough to have seen her come down the stairs through the open passenger door. How could he have known? He must have heard her praying for him to come.

Mary’s white cotton dress fanned out as she hurried across the porch and she clutched at the bottom hem to keep it from rising up. She made it down the three small steps that led off the porch and headed for The Kid’s car, stepping over the scattered roses she’d thrown at Tommy.

“Get in,” he said, his voice distinct, smooth, and clear. Mary felt electricity race through her and pool in her fingertips. It seemed impossible that Johnny had found her now, of all nights, of all moments, after a summer of being endlessly bothered by Tommy and the Angels. In the backseat, she saw his blonde Fender Telecaster. Mary had seen him play it dozens of times during his shows.

Mary stopped before getting in, leaning down to see him. “What brings you to my neck of the woods?”

Johnny smiled. “You,” he said. “We can make the last ride around the Circuit before the sun comes up if we leave now.” The arms of his black leather jacket creaked as he stretched over towards her.

Mary climbed in. “This is gorgeous.” The dashboard glistened; every detail was perfect. The interior smelled of vanilla and the earthiness of his leather jacket.

The Chevy’s door was heavier than she thought as she pulled it closed. The sound reminded Mary of the steel mills, The Kid’s drummer and a prison door all rolled into one. She turned to Johnny.

“Why’d you come get me, Kid?” she asked. “How’d you know I wanted to go out with you?” At that moment, Mary wanted to tell him all about Tommy and the Hot Rod Angels, about their burned-out car and the blank looks in their eyes. But she thought better of it, not wanting to ruin the moment, afraid he’d think she was crazy.

Johnny tapped the side of his head. “Your light was on and I was just passing by. Figured I’d take a chance.”

“But don’t you already have Maria? She’s the most popular girl in town.” Mary looked at her feet. “I don’t even come close to looking like her. No one even looks at me when she’s around.”

He shook his head. “But there’s something special about you. I just couldn’t talk to her, you know?” He leaned over. “I have something I want to ask you.”

The streetlights of the boardwalk glowed just over the horizon. Mary wanted nothing more than to float out past the dashboard, over the hood, and disappear inside their warm, fuzzy colors. The radio played The Ronettes “Be My Baby”. Ronnie Spector’s otherworldly wails at the end always sent shivers down Mary’s spine. There was something magical in the hollow, shambling drums that made her feel comforted and sad, like the sun peeking out during a rainstorm.

Familiar icons of her life rolled past: Max’s Hot Dog stand, Arnie’s Arcade, Peter’s mini-golf course, the Wonder Bar. She saw a few kids walk between the clubs and the food joints, but no one looked up to see her ride by in The Kid’s Chevy the way she hoped they would.

When Johnny spoke, she jumped a little. “Penny for your thoughts?”

“Oh, it’s nothing,” she said. “I was just looking at the lights and the arcades and the rides and thinking about how much time I’ve spent down here over the years.”

The Kid steered them onto Ocean Avenue, which was four lanes wide. At the corner of First Avenue, they passed the Empress Hotel near the Golddigger.

“Funny, isn’t it?” the Kid said. “We spent so much time here waiting to leave, and then, when someone gets a chance, they get nostalgic. Well, that ain’t me. I’m not going to be one of those losers. I met this guy last night at The Upstage. He’s got tons of connections. Liked what I was playing. Told me I should come down to a party tonight on Tenth Avenue.”

Mary looked out at the bars. She could hear the live rock n’ soul bands reverberating from inside. “Lots of people like your music. I mean even Terry at the Upstage loves you.”

“This is different.” The Kid reached into his inside pocket and took out his wallet, handed it to her. It felt thick and heavy. “Look inside.” As they talked, they rode Ocean all the way down before they headed west to Kingsley. They passed the Stone Pony and the Palace and finally back to Ocean.

Mary didn’t open the wallet, simply held it for an entire lap around The Circuit, saying nothing. Her mind raced–was The Kid going to sell his soul like the Angels? He couldn’t. He was different. She was different. She took in a breath–the air smelled charged.

The Kid broke the silence. “Aren’t you curious to see what I’m talking about?”

When she opened the wallet, Mary saw the largest wad of cash she’d ever seen. The blood in her veins seemed to freeze; she felt sick to her stomach. “What is this?”

The Kid smirked. “Five grand.” They pulled up to Ocean Avenue. “That’s just a promise from him that he was serious.”

“A promise?”

“He told me to write four or five songs and have them ready to play for the Big Guys tonight. He said that no matter how it turned out, I could keep the money as an advance.” He pointed his thumb at the Telecaster in the back seat. “That’s why Sandy’s with me.”

“It seems weird that some record bigwig would just give you money like this.”

He shook his head. “You never know when your break’s going to come. You just need to jump in and be ready.”

“It seems dangerous.” His wallet suddenly felt tainted and poisoned. He was busy turning the wheel, or she would have handed it right back. “Are you sure you’re not doing anything else for him? This isn’t a trick of some kind?”

The Kid shook his head. “I trust him. Look behind the money.”

Mary found a white business card with a big red logo on the front. “CBS Records? John Hammond?” She turned it over and read the address scrawled on the back. “One-Nine-Seven-Five Tenth Avenue. Third floor. Eight O’clock.”

“He’s a scout,” The Kid said. “Do you want to come out with me tonight and be my good luck charm? Find out if it’s for real or not? Escape this place once and for all?”

“I don’t know…” Mary started hesitantly.

“Listen.”

The dials behind the steering wheel became brighter. Mary stared at them for a second before she noticed the light was coming from The Kid’s fingertips. They glowed a bright orange, as if little ovens were heating up inside.

He flared the fingers up on his right hand, but kept the butt of his palm on the wheel. “Want to hear that guitar really talk?”

Little sparks shot from his fingertips. They multiplied until they looked like five small volcanoes, then fires rose, stretching along the top of the Chevy’s ceiling, rolling back and down onto the Telecaster.

The Chevy filled with his music. She recognized some of the chord progressions from his show, although the sound was different than anything she’d ever heard. Each string lighted up, vibrated, and sounded. There were notes, followed by chords, and finally, songs.

The interior of the car brightened and the windows fogged. The lamps and neon signs of the boardwalk melted and bloomed. Roadside stands blended in psychedelic ooze. The amusement park, the people walking alongside the boardwalk–they all appeared to melt into a pool of yellow and white light. Mary felt a strong summer sun on her forehead and smelled the salt from the ocean. The car seat no longer felt like leather. She didn’t know how, or why, but she swore she was sitting on the beach on a hot July day instead of riding in The Kid’s car on a chilly night.

Then she realized his music was making her feel this way. His songs changed the world around them. She closed her eyes and the music grew louder; Mary felt it in every pore. She saw him in front of a sea of people, playing, singing, dancing. She saw him turn to her and smile, as if she were standing just off stage. In the crowd she saw people staring at her, and she felt as though she was trespassing. The music and the noise from the crowd blended together until it was one large rumble. Everything turned dark and Mary felt like she was spinning head over heels. She reached back to steady herself and touched the car seat.

As she opened her eyes the boardwalk scenery had returned to normal. They’d nearly pulled up to Kingsley and were about to enter The Circuit.

Mary turned to the Kid. “How…how did you do that?”

“A magician never reveals his tricks.” They’d nearly pulled up to Kingsley and were about to enter The Circuit again. “So?” he asked. “You think people will dig my new song? Think it might get me a deal?” Before Mary could answer, a deafening mechanical roar came from behind them, followed by a high-pitched wail. Mary turned to see a blackened Camaro race toward them. The Hot Rod Angels swerved, their tires screeching, horn blaring.

The Kid looked away from the rearview mirror and stared straight ahead. “They heard the music,” he said, almost to himself. “Or saw the light show.” He pulled onto Kingsley, shaking his head just a bit. He looked back up into the rearview, and then quickly away. “They’ll want it now that they’ve heard it.”

“Why won’t he just leave me alone?” Mary clutched the side bar on the door and looked over at The Kid. Her throat tightened.

The Angels pulled up alongside the Chevy on Mary’s side as “Be My Baby” blasted. They’d heard that, too. She saw Tommy behind the wheel. He turned to look at her, ghosts in his stare. Mary wanted to duck down, but was so scared she couldn’t move. When the Camaro passed them, she again spotted that black wing curling out of Tommy’s back like a vampire’s beckoning finger. The Camaro’s engine revved and Mary swore her ears were going to ring for a week.

“What are they, Johnny?”

The Kid didn’t turn to her but kept his eyes forward, on the Camaro. “Sometimes Devils have wings,” he said. “But us Angels have wheels, baby.” It sounded ludicrous, but it didn’t seem as though he were joking. Rolling down his window, The Kid put his left hand out and pointed it upwards. Mary heard an incredibly loud wailing noise from the Telecaster, as though it might have been plugged into a wall of Marshall amps a half-mile long. The music lit the air around them with fire.

For a brief second, both the Chevy and the Camaro burned in a violent inferno. Mary threw up her arms to shield her eyes. After a moment, she lowered them and watched as the Camaro raced past. Its tires spat feather-shaped flames. Several panels and doors were missing: burned away, she imagined. Mary wrinkled her nose as the smell of burned rubber, metal, and skin engulfed the Chevy in a plume of sweet-smelling exhaust.

Finally, the Camaro degenerated into countless black embers. The asphalt sucked them in as the street caught fire near the Camaro’s final resting place. The Kid rolled right through it.

“Don’t be afraid,” he said. “They can’t hurt you now so long as you’re with me.” When she turned, Mary found The Kid staring right back. His sunglasses were off. Colorful organic shapes flickered where his pupils should have been. The shapes turned into a cheering crowd. “What’s it gonna be?”

Mary shook her head. “It’s your dream,” she said. “You need make it come true.” She knew his life of magic and midnight drives along the boardwalk wasn’t hers to share. She’d had the night, and it was beyond her wildest imagination, but she was not meant to be part of his future. The Kid was different than Mary. He needed the attention from playing for people. Mary knew she’d never be comfortable tagging along. In the end, she wanted a better life–freedom instead of fame. With Tommy gone, The Kid had given her back her independence.

The Kid slid his shades back on. “I might not be able to come back after tonight,” he said. “This might be the last chance you have to see me. Come with me.”

Mary smiled with her lips closed. She looked right into The Kid’s eyes and knew that, soon enough, he’d be gone, and she would not be with him. In some ways, she felt he’d already left without her.

She stood on her porch and watched The Kid pull away. He put his hand out the window and waved. She waved back, but The Kid kept his hand fanned out and pointed at the sky. His fingers glowed a deep orange, five strands of fire burning upwards into the night in a flurry of drifting sparks.

She heard the tremolo and reverb-soaked twang of his guitar, once more the single notes building into scales, chords, songs. His music was so loud it echoed off the inside of her porch. It sounded even better than it had inside the car. Comforting warmth filled her as though she had a hole in the top of her head and he’d poured the sound inside her entire body.

Thunder Road glowed, everything lit with the unreal bloom flowing out from his hands.

Then the Chevy rolled away, slowly, until it picked up speed. Mary watched the light fade away as the taillights became smaller. The Kid raced into the night, to Highway 9, to Tenth Avenue and beyond, for once and most likely forever, away from Thunder Road.

Mary stood a bit longer before she turned and went inside, shutting the door against the night and all the possibilities it had once held, gone now. And she thought that if by some miracle Tommy and the Angels were to show up tonight, maybe she would take that ride with them.

Just maybe.

# # #

I’ll never forget the first time I heard “Thunder Road”. I stumbled across a showing of the late 70s concert film No Nukes. There was this thin fellow with a Telecaster blowing into a harmonica on the storied Madison Square Garden stage. He’s talk-singing these poetic words. My imagination soars. Who is Mary? Who are Hot Rod Angels? Why are they haunting Thunder Road on a summer night, calling for her? The next day I spent my allowance on Born to Run. I scoured the record for clues. Riding the backstreets as the streets catch fire? How cool. This was someone who seemed to know exactly what I was going through. Every time I hear “Thunder Road” fade in it’s made me brave and scared, young and old, but never alone.

Across the Border

Peter Abrahams

(Inspired by “Across the Border”)

Mikhail Barkov had three surprises for his wife. The first came the night before they left their dirty town forever. “I’m going to St. Stephen’s,” he said.

“But why?” said Luba, throwing a few shabby things into her shabby suitcase. He’d never been inside St. Stephen’s as far as she knew, never mentioned it. “It won’t be open at this hour.”

“How can a church be closed?” Mikhail put on his worn army jacket, stripped of insignia, and opened the door of their flat, letting in the greasy smells. “That’s like saying God is not available.” He left.

Not long after, Luba felt an urge to visit the church herself. She didn’t know why; she wasn’t a believer or anything like that. Perhaps it was just for a look at the medieval icon of the saint, hanging behind the altar. She remembered it well from her childhood. He had sad brown eyes, and held a rock, symbol of his martyrdom, in his bony hands. Nothing else about the town was worth remembering. Luba finished packing and went to bed.

She awoke during the night to find that she and her husband were having sex, and that it was almost over. These were not surprises. After, Mikhail was in a good mood.

“Did you go to the church?”

“Didn’t I say I would?”

“Was it open?”

“You’re checking up on me?”

“No.” She’d learned not to do that. “I just don’t understand why.”

“For the benefit of my eternal soul.” He saw an expression on her face that made him laugh.

“What’s funny?”

“I’m happy, that’s all. This is so exciting.”

“What is?”

“Dimwitted tonight, aren’t you? I’m talking about everything. Our new lives. For example, Luba, I have been thinking about cars.”

“Cars?”

He switched to English. “Do you know what is ‘sports utility vehicle?’”

“Get some sleep,” she said in Russian.

“You’re right.” He was quiet for a moment. Then: “I had an idea today.”

“We need sleep.”

“You repeat yourself.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Are you listening?”

“Yes.”

He watched her to make sure she was. The greenish light from the railroad yard shone through the broken slats of the blinds, falling on the prominent bones of his face but leaving his eyes in shadow. “What if people believed we were brother and sister?” The second surprise.

“What people?”

“The people in our future. All the ones we’re going to meet.”

“But why?”

“A simple question of flexibility.”

“Flexibility?”

“The key to successful strategy.”

It must have been something he’d learned in the army. “I don’t understand.”

“You don’t understand brother and sister? A tool, Luba, for exploring the possibilities. Just until we’re settled.”

“Settled?”

“In California, of course.” That was the dream. He pronounced it to rhyme with Plisetskaya.

Days later–Luba thought five, but it might have been six–they were riding in the back of a van through mountain forests. The paperback book she’d found under the seat, Dark Is The Color of Dreams, with its cover picture of a woman on a balcony and a bare-chested man looming behind her, lay open on Luba’s lap, but she was watching the scenery. The leaves were changing; here and there above the fiery colors rose huge green conifers of a type she’d never seen. She felt like an explorer in a land where gods still lived. It was so beautiful she tapped Mikhail on the knee. He opened his eyes, looked out and said in Russian, “Don’t call me Mikhail anymore. Or Misha.” The third surprise.

“No?” said Luba.

“Name me Mickey,” he said in English. “Mickey Buck.”

Duggy–she assumed that was the spelling–glanced at Mikhail in the rearview mirror.

“They don’t say ‘name me,’” Luba said. “They say ‘call me.’”

“I thought that was phone.”

“It’s phone, too.”

“Good. So easy then. And Luba?”

“Yes?”

“Be speaking English from this moment onward.”

“You bet.”

“‘You bet?’ This is correct?”

“Perfectly correct.” Luba knew it was: she’d taken it directly from the first chapter of Dark Is The Color Of Dreams.

Duggy’s eyes shifted again to the rearview mirror. This time they were on her. Mikhail caught him at it.

“Watch road, please, Mister Duggy.”

Duggy seemed about to say something, but did not. They still owed him the second half of the payment. His gaze returned to the road.

Mikhail was looking out too. “My God, Luba,” he said. “How smooth is the paving.”

Duggy drove them across a foaming stream, then up and up on switchbacks until Luba had to yawn to clear her ears. She caught a last glimpse of a distant fiord and the blue Pacific beyond before they started down the other side.

“Don’t get many Russians,” Duggy said. “Chinese to beat the band, but not many Russians.”

“Is interesting,” said Mikhail. “How much are you making the cost for them?”

“Same as you, Mickey Buck. One size fits all.”

There was no conversation after that. They crossed more streams, climbed more mountains. Luba read Dark Is The Color Of Dreams.

Light faded until it was too hard to read. Luba closed the book, studied the cover. The man on the balcony must be Pierre. He was dark, muscular, dangerous. Jack was the right choice; would Lucasta see that? Luba herself had never come across a Jack.

The van topped a rise and came to a stop. Beyond, the road sloped down through an orchard, then curved sharply to the left and disappeared behind a line of trees. On the near end of the curve stood a white building, on the far end a gray one. The white building flew the maple leaf flag, the gray the stars and stripes.

“Nighthawk,” said Duggy.

“The meaning of which?” said Mikhail.

“U.S. border.”

Mikhail frowned. “But this is a border post, yes?”

“Right.”

“But we do not want border post, Mister Duggy. We–”

“Don’t get your shorts in a knot. It shuts down at five. You just wait here until it’s real dark, five thirty or so. Headlights’ll flash on the other side, past those trees. That’ll be my buddy. You just walk over, staying in the shadows, real quiet, and hop in. You’ll be in Wenatchee for supper.”

“Wenatchee–this is in California?”

“Just about.”

“But this was not the agreement,” Luba said.

“So call your lawyer.” Duggy shook his head. “You people kill me.”

Luba’s gaze followed the road, down through the orchard, past the white building, to the gray. “What’s wrong with staying here?” she said.

“Here?” said Mikhail.

“She means Canada,” said Duggy.

Luba nodded. “We are already inside.”

Duggy snorted. “BFD. Anyone can get in here. Country’s like a goddamn sieve.”

“Sieve?” Mikhail looked at Luba, but she didn’t know the word either.

“Like a ten-dollar whore,” Duggy explained. “Everybody gets in.”

A disgusting image, Luba thought, and ill-fitting. “It is beautiful.”

“But not California,” Mikhail said.

“You put your finger on it, Mickey,” Duggy said. “There’s some that says there’s no difference, Canada and the States. But take it from a guy paying alimony on both sides–there’s a difference, all right.”

“What is difference?”

“It’s simple, Mickey. Do you want to kiss or do you want to fuck?”

“Fuck, for sure,” said Mikhail.

“Then let’s get this show on the road.”

“So you will drive us across, as in the agreement?” said Mikhail.

“For Christ sake, no. I’m saying fork over.”

Mikhail turned to Luba. “He wants the money,” she told him.

“Ta-da,” said Duggy; a trumpet blare that made her flinch. “Five C’s.” He held out his hand. “U.S.”

Mikhail reached into his pocket, passed some bills to Duggy. Duggy counted them.

“Hey, dipshit–there’s only four here.”

“Please, Mister Duggy, we have give you already five now,” Mikhail said. “Making nines hundred in sum.” English wasn’t as suited for cringing in as Russian, Luba thought. Or perhaps it was just that they’d had so much practice.

Duggy got out of the van, jerked open the side door, leaned in. He was a big man, almost as tall as Mikhail, and heavier. “You tryin’ to jew me, pal?”

“Jew?” Mikhail was shocked. “You think we are Jews?”

“Fuck,” said Duggy. He looked to Luba for help. Then he had an idea; she could see it in his eyes, like some sea creature rising to the surface. “Tell you what, my friend,” he said to Mikhail. “Maybe we can make a deal.”

“What kind of deal?”

“I’ll forget about the last hundred,” Duggy replied, “if you take off for a little stroll.”

“Stroll?”

“And give me fifteen minutes or so back here with your little sis.”

“Little sis?”

“Who’s going to be a big success in the new world. She’s a babe, your sister.”

Mikhail made a bull-like sound and a bull-like move, charging past Luba, rocking the van, blocking her view. By the time she got to the door and could see what was happening in the twilight outside, Duggy was on the ground, bleeding from his nose, and Mikhail was standing over him.

“You shit,” said Mikhail. “You large shit.”

Luba saw Duggy’s hand sliding toward his belt. “Misha!”

Mikhail’s foot kicked out. Something silver spun away and landed out of sight. Then Mikhail used his foot on Duggy once or twice, but not as hard as she’d sometimes seen. He snatched a bank note from his pocket, spat on it, crumpled it, threw it in Duggy’s face. “Here is your precious C-note, Mister Duggy. Now be gone.”

Luba got out of the van, taking the paperback and their two suitcases. Dabbing his nose with his sleeve, Duggy limped over to the van and sped off. When the gravel settled it was quiet; quiet and cold, much colder than she had expected.

Mikhail, on hands and knees, searched the bushes for the weapon. He came back laughing.

“What’s funny?”

“The bank note development.”

“Speak Russian, for God’s sake. You’re a buffoon in English.”

Mikhail came toward her, put his arm around her neck, squeezed, too hard. “Maybe you change your mind when you learn that it was a one-dollar note. Ha? Now what is your thinking?”

“I don’t know what to think.”

“Is OK. I do the thinking.” He leaned down, kissed her, stuck his tongue in her mouth, dug around. She pushed him away.

“This is not like a brother,” she said.

He laughed. “You are the funny one.”

They sat on the suitcases, waiting for the flash of headlights. “The beaches, Luba. How you will love the beaches. Even the names I love. Malibu, Redondo–” He stopped abruptly. “What was that?”

“What?”

“I was believing I saw the flashing of the lights.”

They stared at America, not far away.

“I don’t see anything,” Luba said.

Some time later, two figures emerged from the border post buildings, met on the road, closed the gate between the two countries. One spoke. The other shrugged his shoulders. They returned to their posts. Night fell. Lights came on in the second stories. A cold wind rose. Luba smelled woodsmoke.

“We will do well in America, Luba. Big successes.”

“I’m cold.”

“Cold? You are from Siberia. This is not the cold.”

Five thirty passed. The lights went out in the border posts. Stars drifted across the sky.

“Guess what I am thinking, Luba.”

“I have no idea.”

“Big Macs.”

“What is that?”

“Big Macs. You do not know Big Macs? At McDonalds, for the sake of God. Certainly there will be McDonalds in this Wenatchee. We will have Big Macs for our first supper.”

But it was past suppertime, and, after awhile, long past.

“What is this BFD, Luba?”

“I don’t know.”

“And shorts getting in a knot?”

She couldn’t explain that either.

It got quieter and colder. Luba closed her eyes, was drifting off, when he said, “Luba, you hear?”

She opened her eyes. “Hear what?”

“That sound. The heart of America, beating closely by.”

Luba listened, heard nothing.

“My heart too is beating.” He took her hand, placed it on his chest. She felt the pounding inside, and wanted to go home.

Sometime later, Mikhail fell asleep and Luba found, by accident, the icon of St. Stephen tucked at the bottom of his suitcase. Home? No longer an option.

# # #

Borders: if they didn’t exist, writers would have had to invent them, the associated images, metaphors and connotations being just too irresistible. The lyrics of the Springsteen song “Across the Border” are hopeful, but I think I hear dark undercurrents in the accordion solo. Those are the currents I followed.

The Room

Jeffrey Thomas

(Inspired by “Candy’s Room”)

There are two posters on my livingroom wall. They might seem a little juvenile, clashing with the rest of my Beaumonde Street luxury apartment, but I told the decorator to just frame them nice and never mind the wrinkly-nosed comments. The posters are photos of the music stars Del Kahn and Frankie Dystopia, the acid-tongued Frankie being a longstanding critical darling and Del, of course, being the working class hero of the whole damn Earth Colonies, both of them noted as powerful songwriters. I’d always liked Kahn, but it wasn’t until I met Candida that I really came to appreciate both men’s music.

Nowadays a lot of people call me Wild Bill. The story behind that is, four triggers of a rival syndy once tried to gun down Neptune Teeb at a birthday party for the daughter of one of his captains. The way they tell it, one of Teeb’s rising young slicks, known for his quickness–yours truly–brought down two of those stupid mad-dogs himself with his .55 Scythe. Now, of course I can’t confirm that tale. It’s enough that I’m going to tell you what I’m going to tell you. And that’s something that happened twenty years ago, when I was a kid of twenty-four. Well, that’s when it began, anyway.

Back in those days I was known as Quick Billy. That was because people would tell you things like, “Billy can get that for you right away,” and, “Nobody can get such-and-such for you faster than Billy.” I’d also like to think it was a nod to my smarts, because there are definitely dumber people in my profession (like triggers who crash a party full of syndy boys carrying friends under their tailor-made suits).

I started out as a gang punk, and who didn’t when you lived in a neighborhood like Forma Street? But my quickness of thought and action soon got me noticed and adopted into the Teeb family. To this day Neptune Teeb, despite numerous attempts to take him down, remains the strongest syndy boss in the city of Punktown; on the whole of the planet Oasis, for that matter. To be number one, of course Teeb has to have his hand in all the usual iniquities–drugs, girls, gambling–but he has a certain flair for the black market. And naturally, the black market consists most importantly of guns, but Teeb also has a whole stable of people talented in biotech and other such scientific wizardry. That’s how they attract their higher-end clientele. If you can afford it, they can get you an android made that looks like your favorite VT star. If you die, they can clone you in one of their secret clinics, where your cells have been kept in storage in the event of just such a calamity, and load it up with a recording of your memory, all this despite cloning of private citizens being illegal.

I knew a lot of people, I had real street rapport, and so Candida got my name from some friend of a friend at school. School was none other than Paxton Polytech (Paxton being Punktown’s real name, but only the rich folks who send their kids to Paxton Polytech call it that). Candida Jaxxon. I tried calling her Jax but she didn’t go for that. She didn’t go for calling me Quick Billy, either. For her, I was always William; she said it with a teasing smile, and it’s my favorite of the various names I’ve worn over the decades.

For me, she became Candy.

I was given directions to her apartment building, a very nondescript little box hiding behind the frilly named Colonial Estates. She was on the top floor, six, and I rode the lift to a gloomy long tunnel of a hallway with a third of its strip lights out and another third fluttering. I counted off the numbers on the metal doors with their blistered beige paint, until I came to the one I’d been given: 30, the last door on the right side of the hallway.

I rang the buzzer, and in moments the vid screen set into the door flickered to life and a woman’s face appeared before me. I knew she could see me, too. “Yes?” she asked, sounding wary.

“Quick Billy.”

I heard the bolts snap back on the other side of the metal door, and when it was hauled open I saw the woman wasn’t at my eye level as she had seemed on the security monitor. She was short but nicely proportioned, with long legs in tight jeans, and her shapeless Paxton Polytech sweatshirt couldn’t entirely hide the shapes within; mm-hm, two soft kids snuggled all warm under a cozy blanket. Her skin was a creamy chocolate, her lips extra full, her shoulder-length hair tied back behind her head. The way she tipped her head up to look at me, and the way her lips pouted, it was like she was thrusting them out at me just to see what I’d do. I found I couldn’t stop watching her mouth.

She smiled, a little shy maybe, maybe a little afraid. Not that I was so scary looking–yeah, I had on my leather jacket but I thought my black beret made me look, you know, poetic, and I still had a baby face back then–but she knew I was a runner for a syndy, and I imagine she’d never had dealings with a creature such as me before. She said in a soft voice, “I hear you can get me some special items I need for a project I’m working on.”

“What kind of project, if I might ask?”

“I’m working on my thesis, and it involves some practical applications to support and demonstrate my research.”

“Ahh, right. Anyway, do you have a list or something of what you’re looking for?”

“Yeah, I’ve printed some things off the net to show you, and I have a couple magazines, too. Come in, please.” She stepped aside to let me into her little flat. It was dingy, a bit cluttered but clean enough. Right away I noticed the work station she’d made out of her livingroom. Against one wall was her desk, covered in expensive computer equipment, a large central screen surrounded by a number of smaller monitors and some virtual screens projected into the air, to boot. Thick black cables snaked down the side of the desk into a power unit she’d adapted to the wall outlet. Did her landlord know about that? I bet utilities weren’t included in her rent.

Turning, I nodded at two posters on another of the room’s walls. “Del Kahn. I like him. Who’s the other guy?”

Candy looked up from where she was digging out that stuff to show me. “Frankie Dystopia. Amazing lyricist. You don’t know him?”

“Maybe if I heard him he’d be familiar.”

“Wait a second.” She moved to her music system, punched a few keys, and started up one of Dystopia’s first recordings, as I later learned. She flashed a smile at me, bright white against her dark skin, and motioned for me to sit on the sofa. She plunked down easily beside me–I guess she was losing the wariness–and spread her materials across our legs. “This is the thing I need the most. Not exactly something I can order out of a catalog.”

“That where you got your other stuff?” I nodded at her busy technical set-up.

“Some of it. Other stuff is borrowed from school.”

I didn’t know if “borrow” meant borrow or “borrow” as in borrow for good, but anyway, I tapped a picture in the magazine she’d opened on my thigh. “And what is this thing, exactly?”

“An antimatter-catalyzed fusion generator.”

I looked up at her slowly. I guess my eyes said more than any words I was trying to come up with.

That bright smile of hers, bigger this time. “Well, they told me you were good.”

“Hey,” I said, regaining my balance, “I’m Quick Billy.”

Those cuddly twins were bigger than I’d first judged them, God bless them, with black nipples like licorice gumdrops. Her skin was smooth, so smooth, and when we were slick with sweat it was like melting chocolate and I wanted to taste every inch of it. She would clench me tight with her legs like she was afraid I’d float away if she didn’t hold me down, hold me inside her, and she looked up into my face one time with a kind of urgent desperation that clenched my heart tighter than her legs, and cooed, “William, you make me crazy.”

“You can’t pin that on me,” I told her.

“Don’t leave me,” she said. “Don’t ever leave me.”

Told you I was quick. But I wish I could say that I was smarter than I’d always thought I was. She tried to explain her research project to me as I brought her what she needed over the next few months. Tried explaining quantum teleportation, molecular displacement, suchlike stuff, but it all sounded like magic to me. In fact, the hardest things I tracked down for her–and I can’t tell you how I did it–were a couple of books that sounded pretty magical to me, especially given how old they were. One was called The Atlas of Chaos, by a Choom named Wadoor, and the other was The Veins of the Old Ones by a Tikkihotto guy named Skretuu. These two books were the only things she didn’t try to discuss with me; in fact, she seemed kind of evasive about them. One time I got a little extra curious, but she cured that quick by dragging me back to her bed.

Since her actual bed was heaped in clothing and piles of books, for us bed meant the fold-out sofa, which we’d open for the night as I spent less and less time at my own place. We’d lie there in the weird emerald green glow coming through the cooling vents of the generator I’d managed to get for her. I’d sold it to her cheaply enough, considering, but I’m not saying it was cheap–not that I spent a cent on it myself, ahem. It was a used super-duper-whatever generator, and one night steam started hissing out of it, giving us both a moment of panic, but she got the thing under control again.

Across the livingroom from Candy’s work station were sliding glass doors that opened out onto a stingy little strip of metal trying to pass for a balcony. We’d often open the doors up and lean over the railing, me in my boxers and she in just my shirt, watching neighborhood kids play in the alley. They were one of Punktown’s races that I didn’t know the name for, with skinny white bodies and six long legs, looking like cadavers with an extra set of limbs sewn on. They actually scampered up and down the alley walls like spiders, tossing back and forth four balls–one red, one yellow, one black and one white–like expert jugglers, though I never did figure out the rhyme or reason of their game. Still, it was fun enough cheering them on. One afternoon, squeezing my hand as we watched, Candy pecked me on the cheek out of the blue and whispered, “I love you.”

I was stupid. Always the cynic, but probably it was more to do with insecurity. I snickered and said, “Aw, come on, baby–you’re just slumming while you’re away from Mom and Dad. After you win all these prizes for your project and sell the rights to some mega-corp, you think you’re gonna settle down with a runner for a crime family?”

She let go of my hand and edged away from me. I could tell I’d really hurt her. “Why don’t you give me a little credit, huh? How about a little faith in me?”

I squirmed inside my skin, muttered a little and rubbed her back. Gradually she warmed to me again, but I never did apologize enough for what I said.

Three days later, while I was out looking up some new item for her (I’d stopped taking money for them a long time ago), I tried again and again to reach her on my palm comp but couldn’t get through. So I drove to her flat instead.

Emergency vehicles surrounded the building, even in the alley where the spider children played. For a minute, I couldn’t find the strength to step out of my car, or even shut its engine off. I just gaped up at Colonial Estates, at its top right corner where Candy’s apartment had once been. Now, that corner of the building was–gone. There was no fire, no billowing black smoke. No debris in the street below. Later, when I managed to pull aside forcers, fire fighters, EMTs to question them, each told me basically the same thing, which wasn’t much. It was like that corner of the building had been vaporized, without so much as a cinder block falling to the sidewalk.

And the apartment’s tenant? Well, they said, unless it turned out that she’d run off to the market or something, then it looked like she’d been vaporized, too.

Three months after the accident…and I still hadn’t slept with another woman. That wasn’t like me at all. I learned something about myself the hard way. I was capable of a love much stronger, truer, and more lasting than I ever would have believed of myself. Candy had said, “Don’t ever leave me.” Well, she had left me–but my love hadn’t vanished along with her.

Three months after the accident…and one night a glow behind my eyelids awakened me in my own little Punktown flat. I opened my eyes to a vivid green glow that filled my room, and with a start I was throwing myself out of bed, almost tangling my leg in the sheets and pitching to the floor, but I managed to stay upright and even whip out my pistol from under my pillow.

Floating in the center of my bedroom was an open doorway. A room lay beyond that threshold, two-dimensional like a room reflected in a mirror, and the green illumination spilled out from in there. Though the metal door with the blistered beige paint and the number 30 was itself missing, I recognized the room I found myself staring into. But I didn’t even need to recognize it, because standing just beyond the doorway that hovered a few inches off my ratty carpet was Candy, gaping back at me, looking just as rattled as I must have looked.

I was reminded of the first time we met, standing on opposite sides of this same portal, and peering at each other through the security monitors.

“Oh my God, my God, Candy…” I babbled, over and over. I was unaware that I was still pointing my gun at this vision, this mirage or hallucination, and I found I couldn’t approach it. In fact, I’d backed up until my legs touched my mattress.

“William!” she called across my bedroom to me. Her voice sounded weirdly muffled and far away, almost like it was underwater. Her eyes were wide. She was bundled inside a blanket like a shawl, and I thought I saw her breath wisp out when she spoke. “William!”

“Oh my God, Candy.” I wanted to ask her if she was dead. If she was a ghost. But I knew it was something even more horrible than that. Across the room behind her I saw the balcony windows, their drawn curtains washed in the emerald light from the generator I’d found for her. It hadn’t exploded and vaporized her livingroom, after all.

“I created a displacement bubble, William,” she said. “I wasn’t trying to teleport myself, I only wanted to extend a bubble, to test the field. But I got shifted out of our plane.”

“Shifted where?” At last, my feet made their own decision to shuffle me closer to the doorway into her room-within-my-room.

“I don’t know where I am, but I’m cold.” She drew the blanket around herself more tightly. “So cold…”

“Are you okay? Are you hurt?” I asked, stepping closer. I ran my free hand through my hair, maybe just to hold my head together. “My God, Candy, it’s been three months!”

“Three months?” Her face twisted. She looked around herself, apparently checking out the time as displayed inside her room. “It’s only been a few hours!”

“A few hours?” My mind knotted up with more questions. “How did you get here? How’d you find your way to me?”

“I knew where you live.”

“I know that, but how?”

“I don’t know. I was thinking about you, and…”

“Oh man,” I cut her off, “why did I ever get that generator thing for you? I knew it was old. Why did I get you all that stuff?”

She gave me the faintest, weariest of smiles, a ghost of the smiles I knew. “If you hadn’t got it for me, we never would have met in the first place.”

“No, baby, this is all my fault,” I groaned. I was very close to the doorway now, and while she talked I reached out my hand tentatively to reach through it.

“Don’t!” she screamed. And then, from under her blanket, a limb emerged. Her right arm was the same beautiful dark color I remembered it to be, but the end of it was a smooth, tapered stump ending at the wrist. “Please,” she moaned, shaking her head, “don’t touch it, William.”

A mist started clouding the doorway, like fog breathed on a mirror glass. It softened the green light, but more than that, it made Candy’s voice more muffled. In moments, I could see her moving her lips but I couldn’t hear a word.

“Candy!” I shouted. Despite her warning, I felt my body coil as if I might try jumping through the rift before it could close.

But then the doorway and its eerie glow–and the woman framed within it–vanished altogether, as if it had all been a waking dream, now dispersed. The only evidence I had that it had occurred was the tears that brimmed in my eyes.

At twenty-nine I guess you could say I was officially no longer a street punk. Teeb himself had taken notice of my work. Now I had runners working under me to buffer me from the actual street action.

In the months following Candy’s visit that night, I had contacted her parents and tried to get them to believe what had happened. In short, they thought I was cruel, and sick, for suggesting such a wild story about their deceased daughter. Even wilder was the suggestion that Candy would have been involved with me at all. Her mother even went so far as to sneer and say something to the effect that Candy’s boyfriends had always been from good, wealthy families, and that was the kind of man she would have ended up marrying–not a scruffy beret-wearing alley rat like myself.

I managed to track down one professor at Paxton Polytech who was willing to listen. I told him just enough about the equipment I’d gotten for her to make him believe me. He instructed that if Candy should visit me again, I best have a camera ready to record the encounter, and he gave me a list of questions to ask her, urging me to call him immediately in such an event.

Together, we visited Colonial Estates, but already the missing section of the building had been repaired. Still, we got the landlord to let us check out the restored apartment, which wasn’t yet tenanted. He had always been decent to Candy and me, and as we strolled around the apartment with him he made a wincing expression and said, “I hate to tell you this, but the workers found something strange one day when they came in. Right there in the middle of the livingroom floor was…well, it was a human hand.”

I stopped in my tracks, my mouth hanging open, before I managed to get out, “A hand?” something off somebody dead a long time. We figured it might be something left over from the explosion–but then, why didn’t anyone find it before, and why lying there in the middle of a brand new floor? So I decided it must be a prank. But when we turned it over to the forcers, well,” and now he touched my arm sympathetically, “it was Candida’s DNA. Sorry to be the one to tell you.”

“How long after the explosion was this?”

“Ah, about three months.”

I nodded. That would have corresponded with Candy’s experience of time; for her, just a matter of hours would have passed. Hours into her ordeal, she had tried reaching through the portal. Through a twisted maze of space and time, that part of her at least had found its way back to her point of origin. But bones, the man had said…just bones.

Well, after that I waited. Every night for months I lay awake, waiting. But weeks passed. Months. And five years, before Candy appeared to me again.

I still had the list of questions somewhere, and the professor’s number, too, but when I lifted my head to see that doorway floating at the foot of my bed, all I could do was jump to the floor and stand riveted.

Five years is a long time. I had a wife now, and she sat up in bed groggily, too. When I heard her mumbling in confusion, I whipped around impatiently and convinced her it was only another one of her drug-induced delusions. I dragged her slack body out of bed, shoved her into the bathroom and told her to take a shower to rinse out her brain. I heard her slump down onto the closed toilet seat as I shut the door, and then I turned to see Candy there, gazing across the room at me yearningly. She was still wrapped in her blanket. She looked like she hadn’t aged a day. But when I came close to the invisible barrier between us, I could tell she saw how five years had changed me.

I babbled. I told her about her parents, her professor, asked her how she had found me this time when she had never been to this apartment before, but she barely seemed to hear me. She was too agitated, kept looking over her shoulder at the drawn curtains of the glass balcony doors. I could barely hear her trembling voice as she whispered, “Why did I use those books, William? Why did I have you get me those stupid books?”

“Candy, what is it? Why…”

Her eyes were wild, almost crazed, as she looked back at me again and hissed, “They keep scratching at the windows, William! They want to get in! They know I’m in here!”

“Who? Who are they? People?”

“Not people–just arms. I see their shadows out there, through the curtains. Long, long arms like tree branches.” She fought back a sob. “Like tentacles, William…”

The fog was beginning to obscure the doorway already. “God, no!” I choked. “Candy…wait…”

I darted across the room, found my handgun, turned back to the doorway and tossed the pistol toward it. I wanted her to have at least some means of defending herself from whatever was out there in the limbo she was trapped in. But of course, the gun vanished in a blink, never reaching her. I imagined it thumping onto the livingroom floor of apartment 30 of the Colonial Estates, much to the bewilderment of its current tenants.

The mist was swallowing her. Again, I couldn’t hear her, and so I wasn’t sure if she heard me–even though I yelled with all my might–when I called, “Candy, I love you! I love you, Candy!”

And then she was gone.

My wife staggered back into the room, dripping on the carpet, and grumbled, “Who were you talking to on the phone? Who is this you love, Bill?”

“Shut up,” I said without looking around at her.

I divorced my wife a short time later.

After I, ah, allegedly dropped two of those kamikaze triggers with my .55 at the birthday party, Teeb had made me one of his captains, but it wasn’t just about gratitude. I was good, better all the time, because my work was all that mattered to me. So at the age of thirty-four, Wild Bill was a name known to every hood and law forcer in Punktown.

I lived alone, and so this time I was the only one to see when the doorway reappeared. I’d been awake watching VT, because I was still inclined to sleep during the day. I stood up out of my chair, and she was there, poised at the threshold. The panic in her eyes made me step close, but I knew better than to pull my Scythe out of its holster–even when I saw what was happening behind her.

There was no sound at all. At least that much was a blessing.

The glass of the sliding balcony doors was shattered, and shadows were writhing outside the torn curtains, a seething mass of shadows. Then, a forked black arm slipped through and thrashed around blindly, trying to catch hold of Candy, but so far she was beyond its reach.

She looked into my eyes, seemingly only a few feet from me. I saw her open her mouth to scream, and though I couldn’t hear her, I knew she was calling my name.

And then she jumped through the doorway, as if to throw herself into my arms.

“Candy, no, no!” I cried.

She winked out of existence, but the room remained. Another arm, then another, snaked into the room, like rubbery tree branches. The whipping limbs smashed furniture, and one of them clawed down the poster of Frankie Dystopia. There was a blast of green light that made me bury my face in my shoulder, and an afterimage was burnt on my eyes for minutes afterwards. Either intentionally or accidentally, one of the arms had done something to make the generator blow.

When my vision cleared, the hovering doorway had disappeared.

I’m forty-four now, and plenty of people speculate that Neptune Teeb will pass his crown to his right-hand man, Wild Bill, should he retire before some enemy guns him down.

I still live alone, in my luxury Beaumonde Street apartment, except for the soldiers and servants who live in the two adjacent apartments. I still sit up watching VT at night. Or else I listen to music, usually from the extensive works of Del Kahn and Frankie Dystopia. When they sing of love found and lost, of devotion and desperation, it’s the closest I have to Candy whispering to me as we lay together on her fold-out sofa.

Ten years earlier I’d put out my ears, expecting to hear that a woman’s skeleton–missing one hand–had been discovered on the floor of apartment 30 in the Colonial Estates. But it never happened.

I know it’s a slim hope to hang onto…that she’d made some adjustments to her computers, and opened up another path for herself. That she was lost for a time in that twisty maze, but would eventually make her way out the other end of it. It was a slim hope, that a young girl like her would appear before this aging hood someday, with the same avowals of everlasting love on her tongue.

But maybe not so slim. “Don’t ever leave me,” Candy had said.

So I never have. And never will.

# # #

“The Room” finds its inspiration in the song “Candy’s Room,” off Darkness on the Edge of Town. What I wanted to get across was this song’s approach to love: urgent and immediate, but mixed with promises that it’s something that will endure forever. The lines about that love revealing secret worlds — however dangerous they might prove to be, this being a horror story — are what ultimately cemented it as my choice. A note: I was happy to sneak in Del Kahn, the protagonist of my “Punktown” novel EVERYBODY SCREAM! for whom Bruce Springsteen was partly the inspiration. Frankie Dystopia, on the other hand, is based on Elvis Costello, and he’ll have to wait for his own anthology.

Fog Boy

T.M. Wright

(Inspired by “My Father’s House”)

I dimly remember an unpleasant and painful surprise.

The dog is sleeping, the dog is cold, shivering, the dog whimpers while he sleeps. I feel great sympathy for him, but he won’t accept a blanket, and my carefully enunciated explanations about why he’s cold, as I am, are simply gibberish to him, of course.

And so we both shiver, the dog and I. He sleeps and I do not. He dreams whatever dreams come to dogs and I have waking dreams of what might have been.

He appeared from the high grass and, I imagined, from the deep woods at the horizon. He’s tall, lanky, thick-furred, looks as if he’s got some Siberian husky in him, some Great Dane, too. He’s very much like a dog I had when I was younger and had begun to grow…

He was much in need of food when he appeared here, and very friendly, as well, though in a hungry-and-therefore-calculating way. I decided during his first half hour in this house that I would give him a name, but that has yet to happen and it has been many, many half hours, I believe, since he came to me…

He’s eaten daily, and so have I.

But he lies shivering and asleep, now, and I haven’t slept in perhaps as long as he’s been with me, in this tall and sturdy house my father built.

Memory often deceives us. Sometimes I think its very purpose is to deceive us.

I dimly remember a great and painful surprise–glass breaking, the mixed-pitch screams of adults (Father? Mother?), a wet tongue on my knee, my thigh, my chin.

The nameless dog has passed on easily in his sleep, after his whimpering had long-since stopped, as I expected he would, and I’ve taken him into the tall grass, as far as I dared go, and have lain him on the hard earth, said good-bye to him, touched his muzzle lovingly, and come back to this house in which I have existed for a very long time.

My Dictionary and The Great Books help me grow. Father said once, “Consult your Dictionary, Son, and The Great Books, too, and, at last, and no matter what, you will never stop growing.”

“No matter what?” I said.

And he said, “Yes. No matter what.”

My dishes were in need of washing and so I washed them. Hot, flowing water on my hands felt like a blessing and I was thankful for it (though who or what provides the hot water is a great mystery to me in this house of great mysteries).

I took a long time washing my dishes–more than a few plates and glasses and bowls, some stainless steel pots and pans, and several black iron skillets of different sizes. I washed them all very, very thoroughly, as I once was taught (“Pay close attention to each chore and to every experience that comes your way,” Father said, “and you will always have memories far beyond your few years.”) then I dried them just as thoroughly and put them where they needed to be, in various cupboards and cubby holes and, the skillets, on the wall between the refrigerator and the white porcelain sink.

“There’s a good boy,” I heard: it was the voice of memory. (How imperfect memory is–like pouring alphabet soup through sand and into a bowl.)

I miss the nameless dog. I knew I would. I had made a connection with him, and he with me: I talked to him, of course, got stares of vague comprehension and a few wags of his tail, which gladdened me. And then he went into sleep and, at last, into his final moments, just as the afternoon became night.

I had convinced myself that my father built a house of clichés‑love, most importantly, and regret, passion, remorse‑but how can this be true? How can a house, after all‑composed only of walls and ceilings, floors, windows, doors and porches, full basements or rec rooms or concrete slabs‑be built of clichés?

I don’t remember Father well. At most, I remember that he lived and that he may have died. I remember little else. I don’t remember well his size (only that he was large) or his hair color or his predilections

Do you know that there is nothing “complete” about memory? If it were complete, it would amount to much more than mere snippets out of time.

I have conjured up the dog and he sleeps, now, in the kitchen, in a wing-back chair I’ve never used because it once was Father’s. His breathing is slow and deep and he does not shiver as he used to: I have given him a name–Butcher. I’ll probably change it, though it’s a name (or an occupation) I feel I remember, from some past which eludes me.

I live fearfully within myself.

It’s possible that I, also, am the house my father built.

Today, during the late afternoon, and under a dazzling sun that cast no warmth, I visited the place where I laid the dog to rest. I paid my respects to him–whatever respects were due–and then I looked beyond the tall grasses, into the deep woods, and I supposed, briefly, there was some danger, there, so I came back at a run to this house where my father and my mother and I spent our best and most agreeable years..

At night I do not see the deep woods. I see only the leading edge of the tall grass in the poor light that escapes the house. The grass is dull brown in that light. In the sunlight that casts no warmth, it is bright green.

During the evening, I have terse and always one-sided conversations with Mother, when she appears. She does not move with much speed, though she moves with profound, almost forbidding silence, and when I see her, it is, at best, only for a moment, only long enough that I can quickly ask a question of her, or make a brief comment–”Mother, are you well?” for instance, or “Perhaps we could talk when you have time..” This can continue for many hours on some evenings: she appears in a doorway, or down a hallway, or in one of the bedrooms or bathrooms, and I blurt a question or observation and she turns her head or her entire body in my direction, though her gaze never settles on me, and then she moves with profound and forbidding silence to some other place in the house, where I might encounter her a half hour or an hour later, and the process repeats itself.

When I sift through the residue that is my storehouse of memories, I find:

“Remember always that your manner of speaking and writing reflects the person you truly are,” Father said. In my memory, he pauses for effect, then adds, “So, know this, even when the world has passed you by, you will be judged for who you truly are.”

And he has said, too, “So go forward in your existence, even when you believe it is beyond you.”

I eat my meals, which I make myself, at all hours of the day and night. Sometimes I eat very hungrily–I push the food into my mouth and swallow almost at once. This gives me a good feeling. I’ve taken to eating this way more and more, though it leaves me breathless and, oddly, as famished as if I hadn’t eaten in a thousand half hours

I watch myself eat this way sometimes. I take whatever I’m eating to a mirror in an upstairs bathroom and I stare at myself while I push the food hard into my mouth, barely chew, and then swallow–Adam’s apple, such as it is, bobbing. I’m always surprised by the person I see in the mirror, surprised by his way of eating, his way of being, the all-but savage expression he wears. I think that children only are capable of such unashamedly naked expression.

And sometimes, not often, Mother is there, behind me, in the doorway that’s reflected in the mirror. I see her left eye and forehead, the graceful upsweep of her long red hair.

Butcher does not eat what I eat. He sleeps much of the time–more than most dogs. And I believe he dreams of food and warmth and companionship, which are the concerns of all living creatures.

Sometimes, while he sleeps, he does not breathe.

I do not see Father here. I see only his very large feet, which possess exquisite arches, and toes almost as long as fingers. He keeps his toenails well manicured because he’s a fastidious man–as fastidious as a cat.

The music here is almost nonexistent, and so it insinuates itself on me constantly because I can’t get hold of it, define it, identify it, or characterize it. At times, I think I know it. At times I think I can even sing or hum along to it, but those moments pass quickly, the music fades to near-silence, again, and I’m left mystified.

Somewhere in this house my father built there must be a radio or a record player. I would be so happy if the music I’m hearing were identifiable and knowable.

But I have only my Dictionary and The Great Books, which have kept me whole, and, no matter what, have allowed me to grow.

In odd but very real ways, I believe that I am the house that Father built.

Butcher woke minutes ago, got out of his chair and left the room slowly, casting backward glances at me as he moved; in retrospect, those glances were as blank as eggs, like the glances of a reptile or toad.

Do not love me! those glances said.

In sunlight, the tall grasses that crowd the house are green, and the deep woods beyond are a very deep green. Who do I see there? I wonder, in those deep green woods? But how could I see anything; it is a wall of green, those woods, a place where no sunlight insinuates, a place as inviting as disease. It hasn’t always been that way, I realize now. And the tall green grasses weren’t always as tall as they are today.

At some point, I know, there was more.

I remember a huge and painful surprise. I remember glass breaking, the mingled and discordant screams of adults (Father and Mother), a wet tongue here, and here, and here.

Father used to sing to me. Mother, too, though not at the same time as Father. They did much together, and some of what they did was very noisy indeed, but they never sang together because their voices were discordant in harmony. That’s a memory which I find oddly pleasing.. Father used to sing to me while I slept, or when he thought I was sleeping: he came to my door in his knee-length dark red robe and knocked very softly (as if aware that my sleep was fragile), and then, getting no response, opened the door halfway and sang in a soft tenor voice: I don’t remember what he sang, but I do remember that I always saw only half of him, from his waist to the floor, because of the angle of the light.

There is no sign of the unnamed dog.

It occurs to me, very disconcertingly, that I’m not at all sure if this is a large house or small, that I could easily be visiting rooms again and again and merely convincing myself–for whatever reason–that I’m encountering previously un-visited rooms.

When I go out, beyond the brief lawn, to the tall grasses, and look back, I see a narrow house, and I remember that Father built just such a house–narrow, with tall windows in abundance, and a dark roof bearing a very steep pitch. It’s not a beautiful house; it’s a narrow box with tall and narrow windows.

And there is Sheila. Not as beautiful, perhaps, as Mother, but less forbidding, far less forbidding–one could say not forbidding at all, one could say, in fact, inviting, very inviting, very comforting, very present, her sweet odor and overwhelming generosity:

Do you feel her touch, as I do?

At some point, the sleep I do not have and the dreams I do not dream will end.

In this house my father built, I believe everything I need to believe.

It is such a fertile source of the detritus left behind by having lived.

I think it is home to a cliché. I think it is home to several.

(I know that if I speak and write to myself in riddles I will always be diverted, entertained and comfortable.)

The large and unnamed dog is with Mother. She has him on a leash. He looks as if he’s quite used to it, as if he has been on it for many years. Perhaps, he was always hers, though I think I would have remembered him. But I think, also, and with disquietude, that I could have forgotten him as easily as I’ve forgotten my second Christmas, my fourth birthday, the names of various beloved teachers, my father’s occupation.

I see Mother and the unnamed dog for very brief moments, a second, two seconds, three. And I see them at whatever distances the interior of this narrow house will allow–across a long and poorly lighted room, at the far end of a hallway, or above, on a landing, or near the top of the stairs, as they ascend into the copious darkness that exists there.

Death is a cliché, heaven, also, and hell, pain, love and heartache, too.

Clichés follow us everywhere because they’re part of us from our first breath and, I believe, well beyond our last.

Father told me that. He told me much, though I remember little.

It’s possible, I realize now, that I live fearfully here, within the house my father built, within myself, as he intended.

Went to the mailbox this afternoon, found many letters, some junk mail, a package tied with twine, some flyers from the grocery store not far off–it’s called The Big Top–and notices from the postman that I have even more mail awaiting me at the post office itself, mail too large to fit in the rural mailbox.

It exists, the mailbox, down a long, narrow, unpaved driveway, muddy today following a heavy rain overnight.

I took my mail, which the postman was kind enough to put in a large blue bag, into the house, laid it on the table, poured over it for many minutes–there were letters from relatives (a sister, two brothers), letters from a friend named Salt (his actual name, which he loves–”I love my name,” he says. “Who else is named ‘Salt’?” he says), a brown paper package tied in twine from a woman named Cautious, which seemed to be her only name–”Cautious.” Odd, yes.

My kitchen, and my kitchen table–where I laid out the mail from the blue bag, has three entrances–one from outside, one from the living room, and one from a hallway which leads to the stairs that lead to the upper floors. These entryways, except the exit to the out-of-doors, are always dark, no matter the light, and so it was a grim surprise to see Father in one and a woman I assumed to be Mother in the other, watching as I poured over my mail. It was, of course, my peripheral vision that showed them to me; and I knew only too well that, were I actually to lift my head from my mail in order to see them clearly, they would be instantly transported to somewhere beyond my sight.

The woman named Cautious sent me a book in manuscript. One hundred and twelve pages, all typed on what appears to be an old manual typewriter. Such a beautiful thing, that manuscript–I know it’s a beautiful thing because it exists, exists, on my kitchen table.

Sheila has visited. Our conversation was brief

She said, while standing in the doorway that leads from the kitchen to the out-of-doors, “You live in a house you have made into something unknowable and…and anarchic!” She briefly looked very pleased with herself, as if she had just made a delightful discovery..

“I don’t believe that’s true,” I said.

“It is, this house,” she said, “very like your very mind.” She looked momentarily confused, then added, “Even my very way of speaking is very like your way of speaking. Shit!” She looked briefly pleased again, then went on, “There is no reason for that. Who is this person in your doorway who has so focused your attention? Has she grown in the same way you have grown? Has she, at least, somehow survived beyond puberty?”

I said nothing.

She glanced around the kitchen, right, left, then said, “You are a flummoxed person. You have always been a flummoxed person, except when you were in pre-school.. I don’t know why that would be, though it surely is. You were in pre-school, and then, all at once, in the blink of an eye–so to speak–you became a flummoxed person. But hear this: if you invite me to your house again, I shall surely not come. I shall, instead, wait just beyond your reach in the impenetrable spaces you have created.” And, with that, she stepped backward, closed the door, and let what passes for night, in this place, swallow her up.

Sitting in the front room, reading a book of brief and unpleasant stories, I saw a face, then two, at various of the tall narrow windows. I saw them unclearly, as if through haze, and they were made all-the-more nebulous by a misty rain that had begun to fall not long before I sat down.

One of the faces, my imperfect memory tells me now, was Father’s, strong, even bear-like, and: the other was the face of a woman I can not name.

The brief and unpleasant stories are contained in an anthology I received long ago from a dear friend, whose name I do not recall; the book is entitled THE FIRST EIGHTH AND FINAL SEVEN-EIGHTHS OF BEING, which, yes, is a strange title for a book of brief and unpleasant stories:

Here’s one of those stories, in its entirety: It’s titled, “Where He Went”:

He got into a car and was driven, by someone he knew well, away from the curb, onto the street, where the car made an oblique turn. He did not look back or say good-bye or wave, that anyone could see or hear. And everyone looked at the car until it was well-past seeing, and many who were looking sighed, and some who were looking wept, and some shrugged their shoulders or raised an eyebrow or looked into the eyes of another for a very brief moment.

And someone said, “How very much like him when we knew him, oh for so abysmally short a time,” and there were murmurs of assent here and there, and nods of heads, and someone else said, “The father is man to the child, after all,” then the street became terribly empty and, soon thereafter, the storefronts and the lights in the schoolyard, from whence he had been taken, grew dark.

The unnamed dog has returned and so I have named him Return.

He lies quietly, now, curled in his wing-back chair in the kitchen.

He is very bear-like, which is not as I remember him.

Here’s another story from the anthology of brief and unpleasant stories:

INSIDE A BUBBLE MADE OF CHEESE

He existed inside a bubble made of cheese and didn’t know it. He could not see beyond the bubble and no one could see into it: though everyone, including he, tried, they saw only cheese.

He had no idea what lay beyond the cheesy bubble because he did not realize he was in it, and so he went about his business as if he weren’t in a bubble at all. He made love to himself often (a wonderful process he had only recently discovered). He pushed food into his face and chewed a time or two, and that was that. He ogled imaginary women, heard music he could not identify and, therefore, refused to hear, even though the music was completely identifiable to anyone who didn’t exist inside a bubble made of cheese. He put on his long coat, often, and went out into the primary mist and became disoriented, which pleased him because it was better to be disoriented than simply lost: being disoriented had a hard and delicious edge to it, which he savored.

When he slept, he did not dream, and when he dreamed, he did not sleep.

If he were to become aware that he existed inside a bubble made of cheese he would attempt to eat his way out of it, but that would be impossible because the bubble wasn’t made of real cheese, it was made of a wholly unnatural cheese substitute that was indigestible and odor-free.

He was antiseptic and almost new inside his bubble made of indigestible cheese.

Something is being built on my lawn, near the tall grass, but not in the tall grass: it is clearly something metallic, tubular, and shiny, and it comes and goes, comes and goes, as if hands and arms have nothing to do with it, as if memory alone has everything to do with it.

Did you ever stop and consider that there’s nothing “complete” about memory? Where does memory come from, after all? It comes from the past, from moments that will never be relived, and these moments, and how we store them, are also at the whim of our hugely imperfect brains: we store so much in memory, but what does the brain do with that stuff afterwards?

I remember someone asked me that question, once, and I wasn’t certain what he was talking about. I am certain, now, though: it was Father who asked it, and, as I think about it–the question–I can see his bare feet and his all-but-hairless calves, and the lower edge of his deep red robe, all lit by bright, artificial light.

It is a child’s playground being built on my lawn, near the tall grass. I see strong arms working at it.

Return is with Mother, who’s in the doorway which leads to the living room. She is garishly lit. Her pretty face is stark and un-pretty in the ugly light that reveals her to me. I remember her as being otherwise. I remember her as pretty and soft, but there she is. Otherwise.

It’s all I can do to look away.

“Mother!” I say.

She says, “You are developing well, my son, despite the complications.”

I find that I have no telephone. This is someone’s oversight.

One more selection from the book of brief and unpleasant stories:

HE KNOWS HOW TO CHA CHA CHA

He was bought some penny loafers and was taught how to cha cha cha, which made him smile, and made others–those who were watching him–smile, as well, though not for the same reason he smiled, which he didn’t understand, being incredibly young

And, after that, when he was told that others were smiling at him for reasons different from the reasons he was smiling, he vowed to grow and mature “no matter what,” because, he explained, “Otherwise you are always at the whim of another’s amusement,” though he didn’t say those words exactly (how could he? he was so incredibly young)–he merely felt the sentiment and ideas that the words expressed.

And so, eventually–not long afterward, months, actually–his ideas were made real, his transformation began.

And he hardly knew it.

Sheila called.

“Hello,” she said, “this is Sheila. Do you want to talk?”

I said, “Yes, I want to talk. Let’s talk.”

“About what?” she said.

I chuckled. “Well, for starters, we could talk about your reason for calling me.”

“Huh?” she said. “My reason for calling you? How could I do that?”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“The last I heard,” she said, “you didn’t have a telephone.”

“But…” I began, and she hung up.

When I stand near the tall grasses, near the child’s playground, which is quite clearly in the process of being built, I see the house as tall and narrow, just as Father built it, just as he and Mother and I lived in it, just as they made love in it and raised me in it (a truncated process).. But it is a house that changes. I know this because I’m intuitive. I have always been intuitive. I’ve even known about great and unpleasant changes in my very existence soon before those changes took place.

I knew, for instance, of the imminent passing of my only dog, whose name was Griz, because I saw Death in his eyes, as if, for a brief moment, he had gone blind.

The Dictionary and The Great Books have sustained me in this existence. How can one grow–as one is supposed to, no matter what–without The Dictionary and The Great Books?

I would list for you The Great Books that line my library shelves, but they are too numerous and my time here, at the house my father built, is unknown..

I will tell you this, however, Father and Mother, both ( at different times of the day, of course, though usually at night), often read to me from the Great Books, and when they read a word to me with which I was unfamiliar (“Father, what does ‘corporeal’ mean?”) they referred me to The Dictionary. After several years of such tutelage–beginning, as I recall, even before I could walk–I was thought of by many as quite gifted, even as a child prodigy. But it wasn’t my doing, at all; it was their doing. Father. And Mother. They taught me to learn and grow and mature, no matter what, using The Dictionary and The Great Books.

And I believe with great conviction, now, that it is why they’re here, in this house of great mysteries. To continue their tutelage.

I all-but remember a huge and unpleasant surprise. “All-but remember” because I know only that there was a huge and unpleasant surprise, though I don’t recall the nature of it. I remember only that I was standing at a mirror. Perhaps it was a bathroom mirror. And I was brushing my teeth, looking into my mouth and thinking that teeth were interesting, and gums, as well, and the uvula (whose definition I had looked up in The Dictionary).. And then the great and unpleasant surprise happened. I know only this, now–that there was massive, and thankfully short-lived, pain in it. As if something vital to my existence were coming apart.

And I remember Father looking on wonderingly.

Return has come back, reeking of Mother and her specific mixture of odors–Chanel , fresh ironing, the sweat of Father.

“Mother, what does ‘orgasm,’ mean?” I said once, long ago, I believe–long, long ago.

“Look it up,” she said. “Consult The Dictionary. It will help you grow, no matter what. It will make you a better boy, no matter what. It will keep you from stagnating, no matter what.”

“ ‘Stagnating’?”

“Look it up. Consult The Great Books,” she said. “Become immortal.”

Sheila called me on my telephone. “I’m in the playground,” she said.

I looked out a kitchen window, at the playground. “But you’re not there,” I said, because I could see clearly that the playground was empty.

“Yes, I am!” she insisted. “I am!”

“You sound petulant, Sheila,” I said.

“Huh?” she said, then added,, at a whine, “You and your big, stupid words.”

“Why are you making fun of my words?” I said. “They help me grow.”

“Flummoxed person!” she screamed into the phone. “Flummoxed stupid person!”

“I’m not stupid!” I screamed back.

“You are, you are!” she screamed.

“Petulant child!” I screamed.

Another selection from the anthology of brief and unpleasant stories:

FOG BOY

I call him “Fog Boy.” He dislikes it, but so what? He’s “Fog Boy,” constantly in a fog, constantly bumping into things, and there’s nothing he can do about it.

One of the things he constantly bumping into, and, really, the only thing, is unfortunate recollections. They’re unfortunate because he’s got them all wrong, and he’s got them all wrong because his memory has become a great puddle of toxic soup. It used to be vegetable alphabet soup, maybe. He’d like that. Make words out of it, make words and sentences and ideas out of it. He’d like that. But it’s just a toxic puddle soup, now. Muddies his existence, what there is of it.

But, see now, he drinks that toxic soup and it comes back up and…there it is, a memory made of toxic soup. And, fuck if he doesn’t drink it again! In one fell swoop, it’s gone, and, almost instantly (Ha! Instant Toxic Puddle Soup!) it comes back up, even more toxic than before, and, hell–can you believe it?–he laps the goddamned stuff up a third time.

Christ, whose child is this–what a poor, suffering creature! I know him only too well.

I know him so well that I can feel the cold underside of his gray flesh.

And I can taste the toxic soup he inhales.

# # #

What is “My Father’s House”? After a fashion, I’ve tried to answer that question in a number of stories and novels because, in essence, the real question is, “What did my father build? And what is it made of?” Difficult, intimidating, almost frightening questions. Then other questions arise, such as: Am I the house my father built? Is the person I present to the world really the person who lives within, or is it someone quite different from what the world sees? And was my father in many ways responsible for it? “The father is man to the child,” “Fog Boy” says. And how can it be otherwise? We look to the man—his structure, the face he presents to the world—throughout our lives for clues and cues about how to structure our own lives, when, in reality, the boy is not the man, the man is the boy, the boy and man are one, the boy and the man live in different houses, and sometimes the boy—perhaps even after death takes him—struggles, often in van, to find the structure for which the father is responsible, the structures that matter most, the structures made of love and compassion and strength.

Darkness on the Edge of Town

James A. Moore

(Inspired by “Darkness on the Edge of Town”)

I saw Tony Chambers when he came into the bar and knew he was trouble. Nothing knew there, Tony had almost always been the sort to think with his fists and talk with the sole of his steel-toed boots. He was white trash, and not all the money in the world would ever change that.

Tony’d grown up in Reeve’s Mills, same as me and damned near everyone else around us. It wasn’t a great town, but it had its good points. Strictly a blue-collar place where most of the men fixed their own cars and walked around with a pack of cigarettes rolled into the sleeve of their t-shirts like it was a badge of honor. The way their dads had done before them. That much hadn’t changed, even after the laws about smoking in public switched to a “just say no” mentality.

The difference was that Tony always had a chip on his shoulder about it, like he was supposed to be better than what his life had given him, and it offended the hell out of him. He had a brand new car until he couldn’t make the payments anymore, and then he bought a piece of shit from one of his neighbors and worked on it until it ran smoothly. He had a fine new house up in the Heights, but that went away too when he couldn’t make the payments. That was pretty much the story of Tony’s life and it was a story he hated with a passion.

There was only one thing that made the whole mess tolerable for him, and not too surprisingly it was a girl. Her name was Theresa. Theresa went to school with me and Tony and all of the other losers who never made it out of the Mill. She was German-Italian, with porcelain skin and auburn hair, hazel eyes and a body that was about as perfect as it could get. She was also, to be kind, as high maintenance as most of the muscle cars in the area.

Two years he’d been with Theresa, and he’d never been happier. She was Tony’s as long as the money was good. And that was the problem. I don’t know exactly what sort of sales Tony was in, but he was good at what he did and for a long time he made cash and a lot of it. At some point, though, either the sales were dwindling, or he got stupid with investments and gambling, or maybe even both.

Have you ever watched a happy man grow desperate? It’s not pretty but it is fascinating. The easygoing smile that had found a home on Tony was still there, but it grew strained, and his face changed into hard plains and sharp angles around his perfect teeth. All the looks a man could want–I’d seen plenty of women casting eyes in his direction over the years, believe me, and more than one man glare at him jealously, too–and they changed when the good times rolled away. He was still handsome, but that desperation, it was like a cloud of stench around him; everyone noticed it and no one wanted any part of it.

More importantly, Theresa wanted no part of it. She’d dumped him almost six months earlier and everything about him from that moment grew more and more bitter. His money was gone, his house was a thing of the past and even his car was looking like it needed some tender loving care. When I say everything changed, I mean everything.

Tony’d been calm and happy for so long that seeing his angry side come back out was a shock for a lot of people. Not for me, because I’d known Tony a long time and I’d known before he clued in that Theresa was going to shoot him down. You work as a bartender long enough, you get an eye for that sort of thing. You own the bar, you learn who’s going to be trouble and who isn’t the same as kids learn to walk.

Tony came through the door that night, and I knew he’d be trouble. It was just that simple. Maybe not right then, but sometime soon. So I kept an eye on him.

Anyway, back to Theresa. She knew what she wanted out of life and nothing in Reeve’s Mills was on her list of must-have items. She was staying around the area for the same reason most of us were; there was just nowhere else to go. I had the bar, and it made money. Theresa had whoever could afford to keep her in the ways to which she wanted to grow accustomed, if you get my point. Once that someone could no longer keep her happy, she moved on. I don’t mean for that to sound like it’s a bad thing, it’s just the way things happened.

Turns out that after six months without her in his life, Tony finally realized that maybe Theresa’d left him for greener pastures. Not the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree, but even Tony caught on after a while.

It was two weeks ago when he came into the bar and I got that bad vibe off him. I don’t mean the sort that means maybe he might be too drunk to drive, I mean the sort of feeling in my pit that told me Tony was capable of rough violence and worse.

See, I hadn’t gotten that feeling off him in years; ever since he’d hooked up with Theresa, really. It got easy to forget how much trouble he could be. In his time I’d either seen Tony maul or heard about him wrecking twenty men. Sounds like a legend, right? The sort of shit gunslingers talked about or something, but there it is.

He’d been a violent little fuck back when we were all in grade school. He hadn’t gotten better with age. The only reason Tony hadn’t gotten himself locked up a long time ago was because you didn’t call the cops when somebody kicked your ass in the Mills. You took your beating and you manned up. Long as guns and weapons didn’t show themselves, it was all just part of the town. Well, knives had shown up a few times with Tony, only they’d always shown up in the hands of the people he wound up beating half to death. I’m not saying he was indestructible or any of that nonsense, I’m saying Tony could handle himself in a fight, even if it was one where he was outnumbered or where somebody tried to use a blade to make a point. He might have gotten injured a few times, but he was normally the one standing when it was said and done.

Theresa hated fighting. That was the first thing Tony gave up to be with her. I think it was probably the one that hurt him the most, because for Tony fighting wasn’t a matter of anger, it was a matter of simply being the best at something. After he accepted that it was Theresa or the fights, Tony changed. He focused himself, you know? He got his head on right and started working for goals, started making sure that he could keep the prize he’d captured. It took months, of course, but I watched every slow change that Tony went through for Theresa. Half the time I shook my head in wonder and the other half I wanted to laugh out loud at the whole damned thing, but I watched it.

That night, he came in looking for Theresa, or looking to find out who she was with, or maybe both. Who can say for sure? All I knew, and yeah, I’m beating a dead horse here, is that he was there for trouble.

Tony sat down in the same spot he’d been sitting every time he came into my place. The actual bar is set up like an island in the very center of the room, and he always sat in the corner of that island that was the farthest away from the front door. The mirrors on the walls gave him good vantage points to both sides and he had the best view of everything going on around him.

Tony liked to know where everyone was. He liked to have his back covered. I think maybe that came from being in so many fights. That, or maybe he just didn’t like being surprised.

Watching him was like watching a storm building on the horizon. He sat in the usual place and he nodded when he came in, and then he ordered one Bud Light and started nursing it.

Wednesday nights aren’t exactly booming, so I had the time to watch him and wonder if he was going to get into a mood in the bar. Unlike a lot of the people he’d fought with in the past, I had the cops on speed dial and I wasn’t the least bit worried about him going to jail.

Instead of swinging, he finally looked my way and spoke the first words he’d said to me in weeks that didn’t involve ordering a drink. “Mike, I don’t think I can stand it much longer.”

I knew exactly what he was talking about. Hell, I think everyone in the bar knew. Like I said, he’d been a wreck ever since Theresa dumped him.

“Tony, my man, you gotta move on. It’s done. She left you a long time ago and whining ain’t gonna change that.”

Maybe I should have tried being more understanding. Tony looked at me hard for a few seconds and then nodded his head. But even as he was agreeing with me, I could see his face working, trying to find just the right expression of calm to make everything better. Listen, if it were possible to just look calm and have everything go right, we’d probably be better as a society.

Some college kids came in. It happens now and then, kids from Princeton travel a little out of their way and decide to slum it in the Mills. There weren’t enough of them to make me rich, but there were enough to keep me busy. Maybe there was a game going on, maybe they were just trying to unwind from a week of finals, who can say? All I know for sure is they were in a good mood and they were spending money.

I guess something about that just pissed Tony off.

He sat still for a while, still nursing that same beer, but he got real quiet. The only part of him that seemed to move was his eyes as they darted around the room and locked on one kid and then the next, taking measure and contemplating what he was going to do. Me? I was too busy pouring beers and cleaning up messes to notice when the storm broke.

Maybe somebody bumped into Tony. Maybe somebody just got rude. Maybe Tony just decided it was time to be himself again. Whatever the case, I heard a scream and by the time I’d turned around, one of the college kids was on the ground, bleeding from his mouth and his nose.

Tony didn’t stop to think about what he was doing, he just aimed at the next kid and took a swing. I don’t think anyone was prepared for it. I was still reeling, looking from Tony to the kid he’d knocked senseless and back again and probably looking as shocked as everyone else. The next one he hit was just starting to put the pieces together when Tony punched him in the stomach and then drove an elbow into the back of his head.

He beat the crap out of four kids total before I reached the phone and called the police. I’m a regular sport. I yelled out for him that the cops were on the way. He got away, and I got to deal with the aftermath of his mess. Not that I minded too much. It comes with the territory. Still, things like that were enough to make me consider hiring a bouncer.

Thing about small towns is, everything that happens is everyone’s business. The next day I had Theresa giving me the third degree about the fight and asking for details. I told her what I knew and despite the temptation, I actually told her the truth instead of exaggerating. She looked kind of torn up about it, but not badly enough that she was going to run after Tony and take him back to make it all better. I think part of her wanted to, I really do, but it had been half a year and sometimes there’s no going back. She’d moved on and probably couldn’t understand why he hadn’t. She was that kind of girl. The past was the past and nothing was going to change that.

Half an hour after she left, Tony came in and sat down in his usual spot. I looked at him for about four minutes before I shook my head and got him a Bud Light.

“I’m sorry about last night, Mike.”

“Fuck you. You owe me money.”

He nodded and pulled two twenties from his wallet. He’d cost me more than that in business, but I let it slide.

“What the hell were you thinking, Tony?”

“I just lost it, man. They were all so happy and I didn’t want to hear them anymore.”

“There ends up being a next time, I’ll tell the cops exactly who started swinging. I know where you live.”

Tony nodded his head and then shook it. “It won’t happen again. I got it all figured out now.”

“Yeah?” I waited for him to enlighten me, but he didn’t volunteer anything. Ten minutes later he left, dropping a five dollar tip on the bar next to his empty mug.

That was the last time Tony ever came into my place. Two days later I heard that Theresa had disappeared. When her mother called the cops to report her missing, they broke into her apartment and found signs of a struggle. I didn’t have to guess what had happened, or who had happened. I knew. So did everyone else, I suspect. The police were looking for Tony everywhere and that included my bar.

I told them about Tony, of course. They already knew, but I told them anyway. Thinking about it got me nervous, too. See, I didn’t know Tony as well as I’d thought I had. I would have maybe expected him to start a fight at the bar, but only after he’d been drinking a while, not when he was nursing his first beer along. And if anyone had told me he’d be responsible for Theresa disappearing, I’d have laughed in their faces, right up until the time it happened.

Life goes on. I hate that saying, mostly because it’s true. I spent a lot of time worrying about Theresa and wondering what the hell was going through Tony’s head, but that didn’t stop me from getting my ass out of bed and taking care of business every day. See, the problem with being all grown up is the bills still need to be paid, no matter what sort of disaster comes along to sidetrack you.

I had a bar to run and I ran it. I didn’t like it. I would have preferred running around like a fool and chasing down Tony. He had most likely hurt Theresa, and that thought haunted me all the time. I’ve never been the sort who can sit and do nothing. I’m also smart enough to know that nothing was all I could do about whatever had happened to Tony and Theresa, so I did the only something I know and I went to work every day, even when I wanted to scream.

Why did it bother me so much? Because I was a little in love with Theresa. I had been since long before she broke off with Tony to be with me. We’d been smart about it and kept it discreet, but there it was. It tore me up not knowing where she was, whether or not she was alive, if she was in pain or happy. It tore me up even worse to think about Tony’s hands on her, or his fists, or his teeth.

Tony could be an animal.

Four nights ago the cops found Tony. He was sitting under the bridge over Abrams Street, rocking back and forth and crying to himself.

That bridge runs a high speed line from New York to Philadelphia, and stands thirty feet above the city limit sign for Reeve’s Mills. On one side of it, you have the worst of the tenements in the area. On the other side, you have the spillover from the local junkyard. That’s all there is to see around there.

Joe Piermont, one of the gang I knew back in school, was the cop who found him first. He came into the bar and told me everything when his shift was over, and I listened to every word he uttered and kept my best poker face going all the way through it.

Tony was crying himself into a stupor, and he was naked and covered in blood. Nine, maybe ten days after him and Theresa both disappeared, he shows up at the bridge in a state like that, and Theresa still hasn’t been found. There were no wounds on Tony’s body. Do the math.

Tony got escorted to the 5^th Precinct building. He hasn’t made bail yet. I don’t think he will. According to Joe, Tony didn’t actually try to run, but it’s on the police reports from all three of the cops who took him in that he did his best to escape. They tried to take him peacefully, far as the paperwork is concerned, but he resisted himself into seventeen stitches and a chipped tooth or two. Tony, the meanest bastard I’ve ever known in a fight, apparently didn’t even try to defend himself when they beat the shit out of him. See, all three of the guys knew Theresa, too. The Mills is a small town. Everyone knows everyone.

I had to check out the tracks myself. I know the bridge where they found Tony. When we were teenagers, it was a good place to make out on a summer day and not worry too much about being caught. Back when we were kids, all of us used to hang out there and see if we could find anything interesting along the rails, or just climb under the bridge itself and hide in the deep shadows while we played at being pirates or cowboys or gangsters and cops. Sometimes we found a coin or two, and sometimes we just went down there to get away from our parents and to throw rocks at the cars that passed too close on Abrams Street. Mostly we missed. We weren’t really trying to hit anyone anyway. We were kids, and we all grew up afraid of pissing off our parents and getting punished. I think sometimes that’s all that stops adults from breaking the law, you know? Fear of parental punishment. Forget prison and forget lawsuits; deep inside, it’s the dread of having your dad take off his belt and snap the leather against itself in preparation for blistering your ass, or the sure knowledge that your mom can see what you’re doing even if she’s out of sight, and her hand can hit just as hard as your dad’s belt. That’s what makes us behave.

I think somewhere along the way, Tony got over that fear.

I went down to the bridge after I closed the bar that night. The weather was cold and crisp and so much like autumn that I knew the summer was as good as dead. I shivered a bit as I walked along the embankment next to the road and tried to imagine exactly what Joe and the others had seen.

I don’t know how long I stood there, but it was a while. Long enough to smoke a couple of Camels and think about Tony and Theresa and the way my life had changed since high school and the so-called glory days of my youth.

I was just firing up my third smoke when I caught a hint of familiar perfume and heard Theresa’s voice calling out.

“Please, Tony! Please don’t do this!” Her voice broke into sobs, and for several seconds all I could hear was the sound of her trying to catch a decent breath. Then I heard her scream cut into the night and break into fragments. The chill I had going got a lot worse right around then, and stayed with me for a long, long time.

I looked everywhere, but there was nothing to see, nothing but the shadows under the bridge, and the memories of what had been in the past, both from my childhood and from the last few months.

I knew then that Theresa was dead, knew it in my heart and soul as the old song says, but I refused to accept it. I crawled up under the bridge and I got on my hands and knees and tried so hard to find her as I moved under there. I sifted dirt and debris and garbage through my fingers until they were numb and bleeding.

If Theresa had ever been there, she left no trace of herself behind. I guess maybe it was a couple of hours before I gave up the hunt.

I came back the next day, when the sun was up, and there was nothing at all, no sounds or scents to tell me she was close.

Then I came back again that night, and I slid up under the trestles and listened as hard as I could. I listened until I heard her again, begging Tony for her life, crying and then dying. I moved around in that darkness desperately, trying so hard to find her, find a hint of where she was, where she might have been, and just as I was about to give up completely, I felt her.

Cold hands caressed my sweating chest and icy lips pressed themselves against my throat. That perfume of hers haunted me again and Theresa’s voice whispered in my ear, soft, but loud enough to hear over the trucks rumbling down on the road below. She said, “I miss you, Mike. I want you.” And then the words were gone, the touch disappeared and I was alone.

Last night, I was there again after I closed the bar. It was almost dawn before I heard her begging to be spared and night was dying when I heard her call my name and felt her frigid breath across the back of my neck.

Weird the things you’ll do for love, isn’t it? Tony changed his whole world for Theresa and when she left him, he changed it back to what it used to be and went even further. Me? I kept secrets and I reveled in them. I have a diamond ring sitting in the bureau of my bedroom, bought and paid for. Yet I doubt she’d be calling to me late at night if she were still alive. I don’t think Theresa ever really loved me or Tony. Sometimes, when I’m feeling extra cynical, I wonder if she was even capable of love.

But these days, I’m good enough for her. These days I’m the only person who knows where she is, and I guess that makes me good enough.

I work my job and I do my time in the bar. And when I close up for the night, I don’t usually go straight home. I go out to the trestles and I settle in for a while. I smoke a few cigarettes, and I wait and I hope.

See, I’d rather have Theresa than any other woman I’ve met in my life. I’d rather be with her, no matter what strange requirements she asks of me, than be without her. I think Tony is the same way. I think in the long run he couldn’t live with knowing that she didn’t want the same thing back. Or maybe he just couldn’t let her live.

They haven’t found her body. I don’t know if they ever will, but I know she’s dead just the same. I knew it the second she called out to me in the darkness at the edge of town, and every time I’ve gone back there has just clarified it for me.

Some people are afraid of the dark, but I’m not one of them. For me the darkness holds promises and I’m going to listen as carefully as I can to see if those promises can be fulfilled.

Anyone needs to find me, it’s not that hard to do. You just have to know where to look when the lights go out at my bar.

# # #

The thing about most of Springsteen’s earlier works is that they’re evocative. I don’t think there are too many of his songs that didn’t come properly steeped in desperation and misery. A lot of his earlier works, and especially “Darkness on the Edge of Town”, are about that desperation and seem to me to have an element of the ghost story to them. For that reason, I decided I wanted to write just that, a ghost story. I wanted to keep that edge of desperation, that hunger, in the story, but I took a few strides away from the very heart of the song to do it. There are haves and have-nots in the tale, and to a certain extent I think the simple truth about the girl referred to is there, just, maybe a little more romanticized. I might have completely missed what Bruce Springsteen was trying for in the song, but I think I got somewhere in the right neighborhood at least.

Lightning Can’t Catch Me

Gerard Houarner

(Inspired by “State Trooper”)

There’s a beat in the car, steady and true. One part’s my heart, another’s my breathing. There’s the rubber on the road, popping over seams. A knock in the engine, a rumble in the exhaust from where a bullet went in, both joining in the rhythm just enough to keep you guessing. And there’s the thunder.

The wind is the song riding that beat, cold and barren, keening at the crack of an opening in the side window and the holes in the windshield. So much air blowing in, but for all the shrieking, there’s still a part of the song that’s quiet, gentle, steady, like a lullaby carrying me to my sleep in a car that’s my casket, plate numbers for a tombstone.

There’s her voice in the wind, too. Laughing. Crying out, like when we took each other in the back seat. Whispering, into whatever shred of a soul she thought she’d found in me, and into the certainty of her beer. Shouting at the future. Weeping over the past.

That’s the song of what we were together. I can hear it even now, though she’s gone. Damn song sends chills up my spine, makes her old scratches on my back burn all over again.

Now I know. I need my own song. Nobody ever sang one for me. Never thought to make one up for myself. Or anyone else. Didn’t know you needed one to keep you company when the hellhounds are on your trail.

All I got of my own is that wind coming in the car. It’s a lonely, cold, old blow, even with that touch of her voice in it. Especially with that touch. And the thunder. I guess that thunder’s all the song I’ll ever have.

Me and the Devil go back a ways. Took one for him in school, when a bunch of us were busted for breaking some kid’s head in the yard. Even then, we were all itching to go fast, go hard, and never look back. He got away. Never could have become an angel if he’d been cuffed then. Never would have fallen so far, either. Sometimes favors don’t work out.

The time in Juvenile didn’t do me no harm. Taught me a lot. Learned more about devils than I’d ever dreamed there was to know. More than enough to live with them, but not enough to dance.

The Devil’s friends were always mine. But never the Devil. Because you never dance with the Devil. I always knew that. Learned the lesson young. Lived by the simple rule. Until she came along.

She was one of his friends.

She was special. She’s the one he kept in the house with him. She was the next worse thing to the Devil.

I hear the thunder, but lightning can’t catch me. I’m too fast.

Speed makes everyone buddies. Love it or hate it, everyone’s screaming. Some with joy, others from madness. Go fast, go far, let go, go away. Don’t come back. Never, ever look back. Give it all up. Everyone scream.

Some need what others fear.

That’s why she came to me. I was looking for anyone who’d ride with me, for that little while it takes to forget, for as long as it took to go fast. But she was looking for someone who’d scare her, who’d rip her out of everything holding her back, make her leave everyone she knew, cut her loose from everyone and everything tying her down. Someone who’d make her feel alive by showing her how close to death she was. Someone who’d make her forget about belonging to the Devil.

I knew who she was. Who she was with. It wasn’t the first of his women I’d been with, but that never bothered him before. The Devil’s funny that way. Takes what he wants. More than his share. I never was with anyone he hadn’t already had, or took away from me. But the Devil don’t hold on to much. That’s what makes him the Devil.

I’ve done runs for his friends. Gotten drunk with his boys. Took another hit for one of his buddies. I’m not a snitch. I never said what I knew. The Devil never even said thank you, which suited me fine. He understood, I didn’t want to dance with him.

She looked good when I rode up on her, walking slow and swaying, one foot right in front of the other on the tightrope of her life, hair picking up with the breeze, dark eyes looking down to places where maybe she’d been, where she might be heading. She walked like she didn’t have anyplace to go, like she’d come from someplace far away, long ago, maybe even stepped out of the Devil’s dreams. I’d seen her around, but when I saw her in the sun and the heat looking so cool and far away, I had to slam my foot on the brake. When she saw me and stopped, I was blind to the line between what she was and who she was with.

And she was willing. Never thought she was better than me. Knew exactly what she needed. I told her I had a case of the Promised Land in the cooler in the back seat. She gave me a smile that sank its teeth in my heart. She climbed in like we’d grown up together, and we rode for a good long while drinking from the death brew you can’t piss out.

I loved her, fast and hard. We screamed, with love and madness. We went far and deep into each other. I think even the Devil heard us, that first night.

Didn’t think I’d stay. Thought I’d keep moving, right past her and back on through the Devil’s friends, round and around everyone, like always. Just like they expected me to. Just like the Devil wanted.

Some fear what others need, and I found what I’d feared in her–someone I needed. I never came back from her. Never looked back, or ahead. I gave it all up. For her.

I hear the thunder, but lightning can’t catch me.

I got to keep moving. The radio’s saying there’s a hellhound on my trail.

God’s always been on my side, but it’s the Devil who’s got my attention. He was another kind of angel, once. Proud son from a house high up on a hill. Looking down on everything like he’d made it all. But he didn’t stay up in that house. He liked to play our games, run through our backs alleys and lonely midnight streets. He liked the empty places, as if they held something that tempted him

Some need what others fear.

He came down to us, but we never got invited up to him. Not that we didn’t pay his place visits. Looked in through bright lit windows at all the furniture and paintings and books, enough to fill a block of houses down below. Watched his old man and him have dinner, the breeze that was snapping his Dad’s flag not the same one making the Devil’s fly. Listened in on the silence between them. Never found a thing up there to gossip about.

He had a future, rarer than gold in these parts. He could go places and do what we’d never dream could be done. But instead he came down to us.

We didn’t change him. He changed us. Made us worse than what we already were. But that’s the Devil’s job, isn’t it?

His father left him behind, after the trouble in school. Like he knew what really happened. Maybe they were too much alike. Maybe if his mother had still been around, he’d have gone with her. But she wasn’t. And the house on the hill went to someone else, and the silence between the Devil and his maker went far and long into the night, and he came down to us to stay. A cousin took him in. Wanted to finish school where he grew up, was the story. Didn’t want to leave his friends. He’d catch up to his father later, after college, when he was a man and ready to take on the family business.

Instead, he fell. Became the Devil, with his broken heart and sickly soul leaking out of him like the guts of a cracked egg.

It was a slow thing. Not something anybody noticed. He always seemed like an angel in church, on the school football team, in the county judge’s office working his internship in the back room. Who pays attention to shadows, even one that won’t go away under the noon day sun?

He never went away to college. Put roots down, instead, using what money was his from his mother’s will when he came of age. Danced with this one and that one, filling up the town’s empty corners with what he was. He didn’t get everybody. God looks out for those who let Him. But the Devil got enough. And the best part is, for a lot of folks, he’s still an angel. He fell so quiet, they still don’t know who they’re dancing with.

Once you dance with the Devil, you can’t stop. He won’t let go. He comes after you to finish what was started. Until one of you drops. And the Devil don’t get tired easy.

I knew I was in trouble when I ached at the sight of them together. I should have run away. Never looked back. But who can do that? Maybe if I’d had my own song…. Instead, I told her, we’ve got to get away.

All she ever heard was the Devil saying: You’re going to stay until one of us is dead. So that’s how we played it.

But the Devil is a hard one to kill. God couldn’t do it. What made us think we could?

We were going fast. So fast. We didn’t see what was coming. Couldn’t see clear, at all. Too much darkness in our hearts, in the world.

She called him to her, her Devil to the rescue. Never let him think I was hiding nearby. I thought it was him I saw. But it was her I shot.

I hear the thunder.

The Devil lies. He’s fast. It was dark. My hand was shaking. You can’t try shooting the Devil without knowing your hands are going to shake.

Maybe I was fixing to set myself free, all along.

What I’d meant to do didn’t matter, anymore.

You always hurt the one you love, the Devil said.

I wasn’t sure if he meant it was him I’d hurt, or her. And if it was him, was it because I’d tried to kill him, or taken away something that belonged to him, the thing he’d come to need?

The Devil looked over at me and said in a gentle sing-song, “So long.” And when he’d stopped laughing, he kept on in a nursery tune, “It’s been good to know you.”

We’d never been friends. Until then. He looked at me like I’d done him the biggest favor I ever could, greater and deeper than letting him keep his kiddie angel wings, or saving his little demon friends. I’d saved the Devil from what he loved. Set him free.

Wasn’t born in a manger, and Mother Mary never held me, but it seems like I’m always dying for other people’s sins.

Wish I’d had a father like his. Wish my Mom had been stronger. But I am what they made me, what I was born to be. Right now, more than ever.

I can almost see him in the rear view mirror, driving that cruiser. Badge shining. Strobe flashing, lighthouse high beams strong and steady, showing the way back through the Nebraska night to the safety of the Devil’s shore, trying to lead me back from the rocks I’m dead set to crash on. No one else on the road. Even the big rigs are missing. Where did everyone go? Across the Missouri, over the pine ridge. Fell off the horizon, running away from the Devil. Fast. Faster than me.

The night’s all around, near and forever, just like my future. A big, black cloud’s closing in. Choking me with the dust of all I could have been, never will be. Too close, everything’s too close. Her blood. The Devil’s smile.

I got a clear conscience. I got the road, and those radio relay towers leading me to where she went. Nothing but talk jumping the air between them. The action’s on this road, riding these wheels. Fast. So fast.

Did he let her wander, or make her? Did he let me take her, or know I would? Did he want us to just go, fast into the wilderness, or did he count on us fearing the Devil enough to go after him first?

Even if I’d asked, how could I trust the answers?

He waved me on. Smiling. And I smiled back, because we both knew I was dancing with the Devil, and the Devil never let his partners go.

I hear the thunder, but lightning can’t catch me. I’m too fast.

Devil is a tricky word. It’s just another kind of angel. Look close enough, and one can be living next door, passing by, taking your money, saving your life. Good, or bad, you just never know. They’re crawling all over life. Hell, maybe I was an angel once. Or a devil.

Is that the Devil catching up? Or am I catching up to myself?

Is that a wolf howling? Or is it just me, screaming?

Is that the wind singing through the window about everything that was, or is it her, with a song of what’s to come?

I got nothing ahead of me on this long, godforsaken road, except more darkness. And behind me? Just the Devil, his red lights flashing. I got an ice pick on the floor, to break his frozen heart if I get the chance. But I’m not stopping for him. That’s never been a reason for me to stop.

That song of mine is getting louder.

Lightning just can’t catch me.

But the thunder won’t stop coming.

I hear the thunder, I hear the thunder…

…I hear the thunder–

# # #

What I always heard in Bruce Springsteen’s music was the cry of desperation. When I was hanging out in funky East Village bars in the early 80’s, his rough voice would rock out of the juke boxes and remind me that darkness had me surrounded, inside and out, and no matter how young and full of hope I might be, I should pay attention and not get lost in dreaming because the world wasn’t going to be kind and news was not always going to be good. Hungry heart, indeed. When Nebraska came out, I wore the groove down (can you imagine, listening to albums on a record player?) on “State Troope”r, and the initial inspiration for this piece came from that song. The ghostly voice over the relentless rhythm still cuts through me. And as stupid as it may sound, I really do feel every story’s a prayer, and this could be my last one. But in thinking about the how and why of someone hoping Mister State Trooper won’t stop him, my mind drifted to the album’s title song, and the truth that has always stayed with me of the world’s meanness. Doomed love, along with the eternal themes of sin, love, hope, redemption helped fill out the noir plot, while “My Father’s House” and” Mansion on the Hill” fleshed out some of the character background. Throw in a little Woodie Guthrie from the Dust Bowl days, lean a little on Jerry Garcia, fill the air with gritty, blues-based rock and roll, and simmer over seething desperation, and pretty soon you have a story. Maybe not one you’d take comfort from. But then, you don’t necessarily go to the Nebraska album for comfort……

In Winter

Nancy Kilpatrick

(Inspired by “Streets of Philadelphia”)

There are those who insist that autumn, when life fades, is monster time. But for you, the monsters have always appeared in winter, when the world is petrified, and the dead seem alive.

You remember the winters most. At no other time could you feel the cut of the invisible wire, the balance between life and death, madness and sanity. This world and the other. But time has vaporized almost everything about Philadelphia. Everything but the monsters.

Winter souvenirs lodge in your brain like frozen food abandoned in the freezer. You haul it out, covered as it is by a deadly frost, and you know that if you try to eat this food you will perish and yet you can’t bear to toss anything. You long to taste it, if only to play Russian roulette with existence one more time.

Decades ago, didn’t Kensington look the same? As you drive your vintage car through the working-class neighborhood where you were born, at first you can see only the past. Ghosts float through time from another era, dressed in clothing out of sync with today’s fashions, and their ethereal forms overlap the impoverished in rags who dwell here now. But quickly these specters fade as memory is overwhelmed by what has become of this place. You are shocked with an electrical charge of nostalgia thwarted. Is this ectoplasm at its best or worst? You only know that what you see now is a fragment of what it once was, and you are left burning and empty inside and, at the same time, prepared to explode.

First stop, the house on Coral Street, a lovely name that you have carried with you all your life, despite the tragedies here, the deaths, the pain and anguish, the betrayals. You lived right across from the Harbison Dairy which takes up an entire inner-city block, and you drive around the immense structure twice. The dairy is no more, the building now used for some sort of business with huge tractor-trailers going in and out. The giant milk bottle atop the structure that you looked for from the El, that warned you that you were almost home, is now completely rusted, nearly unrecognizable. Corrupted the way life becomes, it reflects how things evolve, or de-evolve. Entropy, staring you down.

You find the street by driving every which way, knowing it’s on one side of the El, but confused. These narrow streets built for horse and carriage with their narrow houses can’t be where you’re from! Finally, though, you stumble upon the address, the one you’ve remembered all along, and the three story red brick row house where you spent the first eight years of your life. Where your mother was taken away screaming. Your grandmother suffered cancer and died. Your great grandmother, broken and confused, proved that life does not end well.

Other images flood you: your best friend Peggy, face and arms bruised by a demon mother with a vicious temper; the cute neighborhood midget girl, bitten by an enormous feral dog, her skin a mass of scars that would never truly heal. Is that how everyone from here ends up, you wonder? Scarred? If not on the outside, on the inside?

All the philosophizing, as you gaze at this non-descript structure, is forgotten as the reality before you comes into painful focus. On one side is a boarded up house. On the other a house with the door wide open, loud TV and radio and screaming pulsing out staccato, like the beat of an impending myocardial infarction. The next is a hollow structure, charred, black soot framing empty windows and a doorway without a door, the smoke residue leaving erratic wispy patterns like dark phantoms. Then the corner which is an empty lot, where the store used to be that sold sour pickles from a barrel and candy dots on strips of paper that resembled the LSD you later ate to try to make sense of existence.

It is winter here now, a thin layer of snow on the ground, and you remember other winters, snow piled up to the top of the white marble steps your grandmother scrubbed each Saturday of every season with a stiff brush and Babo cleanser. One Christmas you received a Raleigh two-wheeler and sitting astride it, you went down those snowy steps upright on the bike, hurting yourself between your legs, bearing the pain silently and telling no one because everyone was too busy with their own pain. Today, the marble is grey, long unwashed, and even the snow cannot make the steps white again.

The address plate is the same, blue glass with white numbering. Art deco design. You want this antique plate so much…

A woman answers your knock readily, as if she was standing on the other side, waiting. Waiting for you. She does not appear to be afraid of the decay and fire that seem to be what the street is about. You tell her you lived here once. Could you see the inside? You do not expect she will let you enter, but she does, and you follow her into a long narrow room, dimly-lit, with a staircase to the right. “There used to be a wall here,” you explain. “The stairs were in the hall.”

“My father took the wall down,” she tells you, adding that they have lived here for thirty years now. They own the house.

“We only rented,” you say, feeling poor, although you now own a house in a good area of another city worth a thousand times more than this one.

If you had a second alone, memories might surface. As it is, you are shocked by the smallness of the interior. It must have been even narrower with the wall but as a child this house felt palatial to you, with no place to hide.

You follow her to the kitchen and see a modern washer and dryer, stove, sink. “We had a back porch here,” you say, pointing to the shed, “and inside an enamel sink. My grandmother washed me in it when I was a baby.” The woman looks at you strangely, as if you could not possibly remember this. “I saw a photo,” you explain, but she does not appear convinced.

The woman lets you into the yard. Here, as a child, you planted a small garden, and kept your little dog Penny. How could that have happened in such a tiny space the size of a burial plot?

Back inside, the woman says she lives with her mother, the elderly woman sitting in the rocker in the corner nodding, who is hard of hearing, and a younger woman you hadn’t noticed in this barely-lit room, standing forlornly by the window clasping her hands together, grinning, who seems either slow-witted or depressed. The relationship to the younger woman is not made clear, but the three generations look alike. “We live alone now, the three of us,” the woman tells you, as if betraying a secret. Three women alone in such a neighborhood as this; it gives you pause.

You wonder if they have plans to sell the house. You realize that, given the area, and the desolation at the corner under the El which used to be a vibrant avenue of shops now long boarded up, they probably couldn’t sell this place if they wanted to. Likely they plan on dying here. For a moment you entertain the insane idea of making an offer. Hoping to bring the ghosts out of the closet?

You mention that your grandmother slept in the back on the second floor. What you don’t say is that it is the room where one night lying in her bed alone because your own bed had frightening creatures residing beneath it, you remember seeing three witches with pointy hats and equally pointy noses fly through the black night on their brooms outside the window. As they breezed by, each turned to peer at you through the glass, and grinned. Terrified, you felt paralyzed and could only pull the covers to your chin. You wanted to cry out for help but something made you turn towards the doorway. Standing there, your mother, grandmother, great grandmother. Silent angled faces, pointy noses, grinning…

Your great grandmother had the entire third floor to herself, you tell this stranger. Your mother, when she was there, the front room second floor. Your room was in the middle. On your wall above the closet door hung a photograph of a reclining baby with rosy cheeks, and eyes the color of your own. The glass pressed real hair, blonde like yours, to the picture, and a coral-colored piece of quilted satin representing a blanket. Even as a child, the image struck you as curious, everything but the baby three dimensional. If you only had this vintage picture now you know it would be worth a fortune–you’ve seen only two on eBay, both selling for a bundle.

But your mind’s eye travels down to the closet and the sense of foreboding is resurrected that you always felt because of what lay behind that door. You could only bring yourself to open it once. In fear and trepidation, you crept silently across the bedroom and reached out for the knob, slowly turned it, pulled the door outward, towards you. Inside the closet stood your mother, rigid, as if she were dead, or a statue of a living person, grinning…

The woman does not invite you upstairs, and you are disappointed but cannot push it. You thank her for letting you see the place again, for letting you take the snapshots, mainly of the yard so she wouldn’t feel intimidated. You decide not to offer to buy the address plaque which she confirms has been there since her late father bought the house. The same plaque you have seen in old family photos.

You leave Kensington and head over to Allegheny Avenue and up to 7^th, to your second house, the one you lived in for two years. This is an area that once supported factories, like the Hardwick and McGee Carpet Factory where your grandfather worked on a weaving machine that caught his little finger and bent it into a permanent crook. But there are no operating factories now.

You can’t quite remember the address, but you know the street. At the corner is the Allegheny Tavern where your grandfather drank himself to cirrhosis of the liver. The tavern is still there, with a different name. You must circle the block and come at the street through an alley near the dead end.

More little houses. How can they be so small in reality and so large in your memory?

You know the house was in the middle of the street, north side, and it’s pretty much either this one or that, because of the way the front door opens. The entire street is so run down it feels as if the tilting homes will surely collapse onto one another like dominos. Maybe a giant hole will open at the corner and suck in first the tavern, then the rest, down into hell. You think that if the earth swallowed up this cursed street, it would be a blessing, but this is not the first time you fan the flames of that desire.

You leave the car and walk along the deserted pavement on the North side of 7th, stopping to stare at the two houses, looking back and forth, trying to figure out which one you lived in. It feels as though the elements are paused between weather conditions. It could rain, it could snow, a hurricane might blow through. Anything could happen on this street, and did.

“Are you lost?”

You turn and an older Latino man, shorter than you, with graying hair and a kind, wrinkled face, looks concerned. You did not hear him approach and wonder at such stealth that matches the quiet. You remember this street as nothing but violent noise.

“No. I’m just looking at the houses there. I used to live in one. I think that one.” You point and turn back to him.

Suddenly, from behind, you hear noise, like glass breaking.

The door opens and a large powerful-looking Latino man, the sides of his head shaved, stands in the doorway, fists on hips, glaring. Abruptly, he storms off the porch in just a t-shirt and jeans, no coat, leaps down the steps and crosses the street towards the two of you, his face pinched with anger. Your guard goes up. Anger belongs to the house he came out of and now you are sure it is the one you lived in. As he approaches, you glance behind him at the front door, which seems much the same but for the absence of the beautiful beveled-glass panes. An instant memory flashes:

Christmas Day. Your Pop Pop, as you called your grandfather, was visiting with his schizophrenic adult son from his first marriage. Pop Pop had tied one on. Again. Your insane half-uncle was on holiday leave from the army, and your ten year old self was not happy about either of these men being there. Your great grandmother had retreated upstairs and left you alone “To visit” with the two of them sitting in the living room, Pop Pop on the red sofa, his crazy offspring in the matching overstuffed armchair. Pensive, you stood in the doorway, on guard.

Pop Pop was in a jovial, holiday mood, talking to his son, who was, as always, talking to himself. You felt dread building in the air as if a fireball would burst into the room at any moment. But it was winter, cold outside, and the door and windows were closed against intrusion. No fireball could find its way into such a contained hot-spot. At least not until you challenged the fates for the very first time.

You were only a child, you thought. Why must you hang around, monitoring, making sure your grandfather did not change? All your life, even before your grandmother kicked him out, before she died, he changed under the influence of booze. He was always changing, more so in this strange house…

Feeling rebellious, you stepped out of the living room and into the hallway, turned in defiance and moved towards the kitchen. A few minutes of escape, that’s all you wanted…

Had you lost time? Could so much have happened in a split second?

Yelling. Screaming. Blood as arms and a head crashed through the beautiful crystal in the door, shattering it forever. Your grandfather, who you longed to believe was just a human being, became once more an animal before your eyes…

The older man is speaking Spanish, calming the younger glassy-eyed one who is rapid-fire talking, trying to assure him you are not with the government but that you once lived in his house. Suddenly the suspicion and rage on the younger man’s face shifts to a strange form of happiness, giddiness almost. He clasps your hand and shakes it fast and hard, as if you are a long, lost relative.

“He wants to know when you lived here,” the older man says.

“When I was a child,” you say to the man who now lives in your house. “Bambino,” you add, your hand hovering about three and a half feet from the ground.

The Spanish-speaking man is so happy to meet you, and won’t stop talking, even though the older man translates but a fraction of what is said. You have the feeling he believes you might hold the key to what the house is about. But you know nothing more than he does, only that the house itself might be possessed. Maybe a changeling dwells here, infecting everyone, but you do not feel you can voice such a concept.

Soon, you tell them you have other places to visit, other memories to pursue, and they release you into your future. You leave them remnants of your past to add to their own stories, on the street where time shifts, it seems. Where one might, at any moment, become someone or something else.

Your last stop takes you into North Philly, into more dangerous territory. Here, you lived with your aunt, an alcoholic, recently divorced, and despondent to the point of suicide, forcing you to keep watch over her.

You scan the faces of the people as you drive by, going about their lives of noisy and quiet desperation. Most are black, some Latino, the odd washed-out white face, ninety-nine percent are men. All look distressed and forlorn. This is drug land. No one gets out alive.

The ones who notice you driving your classic vehicle along their streets follow you with bloodshot eyes. You are not certain if this is a threat in the making or idle curiosity. You check that all of the doors are locked on your feeble car.

The house you search for you lived in for three years, as you turned into a teenager, until the afternoon you came home from school and found your mother’s sister hanging by a rope from her bedroom light fixture. You had seen dead bodies before, but in coffins, waxed, and made up, fancy-dressed for the viewing. Never a fresh corpse.

Her face: bloated and red, eyes bulging, tongue lolling between dark lips, bloody from her biting them in her final moments. Her body: limp as a worn-out rag. For long seconds you could not move but stared, fascinated, horrified, awed. You expected her to turn her head towards you and speak, and you were not surprised when she did and said, “Winter.”

You took the word as a warning, perhaps of the time of your own demise? Or did you imagine it all? Because a heartbeat later you blinked and clearly there had been no movement, her head had not turned, nothing had changed. You became aware of the ticking clock, reinforcing time. Moving ahead. Always. Except in memory, where it stands still.

You recall trying to work up some emotion but all inside felt pulverized, unable to reconstitute. Finally, you forced yourself downstairs and outside, without a coat, and crossed the icy street to knock on your friend Pansy Beckton’s door where you told her mother, “My aunt has expired.” Pansy’s mother pulled you to her chest, cradling you, and you wondered about this, how you should respond, how to manufacture an appropriate feeling like grief, but you could not feel a thing, and they thought you were in shock. Maybe you were, and still are.

You drive along Sartain Street, vaguely remembering that the address is in the 2000 block. But the street seems wrong. Shorter, only two blocks long, and the numbers high. Frustrated, you circle the block again and again–so many one-way streets! Why is there a park you do not recall at one end? And Lehigh Avenue around the corner at the other? None of this looks familiar.

Despite the late afternoon chill, there are men loitering on Sartain Street, in small groups, and alone, as if the setting sun brings them out like cockroaches in the dark. You drive by slowly and peer at a house where a man is about to enter. A light snow is falling and flakes cling to his hair and shoulders. He turns to stare back at you, his brown skin pale, his eyes lusterless hollows, expressionless, his movements zombie-like. He shows no recognition that another of his species is nearby. What is it he sees when he looks at you?

As you reach the end of the street, outside the storefront that reminds you of the one that used to house the holy-roller church, you pass again the group of five bundled against the cold, huddling close together over an oil drum with a fire burning, warming their wan faces and hands, each of them looking at you. As you stare back you realize there is only one man and the other four are women. You wonder if any of them are wondering what you are doing here. Or if they are wondering anything. Every face is haunted, lines etched deep into the flesh, eyes reflecting the burning hunger of addiction.

Suddenly you realize you will never find the house. The city must have torn it down along with several blocks of what was once the whole of Sartain Street. The street where you saw death up close and personal is no more. Your home is gone, like the dead are gone. And you feel the loss deeply.

You hurry away from this area and drive up Allegheny Avenue as far as you can go to Laurel Hill Cemetery where all the monsters are buried. It is late now, twilight, but the grounds are still open, the sign says for one more hour. You have been here so often, when you were growing up and since you have reached adulthood that you could find the plot in your sleep, and have in dreams and nightmares.

There are no stones, no vases, no flowers, just a small marker in the ground, commemorating the existence of beings that were. You brush snow off the brass plaque but it is coming down so heavily now that you must work fast to keep up with it. Suddenly you see clearly the ‘W’ that starts your family name, surrounded by death lilies etched in one corner, and a cross in another. Your fingernails dig around the plaque, first making a small rectangular groove, then deeper, more frantic, sweat forming on your brow despite the cold. Can you open a hole, a doorway to the world below?

The plot is nearly full. Only one empty grave remains. Room has been left for the last surviving family member, the last monster. You. The ghoul that lives off the dead.

You pause in digging, your hands cold and dirt-caked. You have always believed that even monsters deserve eternal rest. One day a huge gouge in the earth will expose this empty womb from where you came. Where it is quiet. Calm. Perpetual.

You sit back on your heels and turn your head up to face the full moon that peeks through a break in the cloud cover. That day will come, you assure yourself, when the time is right. And that will be, of course, in winter.

# # #

Let me start out by saying that I have not seen the film Philadelphia in which Springsteen’s song “Streets of Philadelphia” was used, but I have a general idea of what the movie is about. It is definitely the song itself that hit home with me; I was born in that city, and the fragile feelings of hope and despair that come through in the music and the lyrics, the grimness, the utter grief and sense of timelessness and the blurring of time, all of that had a profound effect on me when I heard the song for the first time because it resonated. My story “In Winter” reflects the emotions evoked within me by this unique and powerful song. In writing about Philadelphia, I had to draw from my life, of course, and the working-class neighborhoods where I was born and raised, the streets I knew well. Some images in this story are based on my experience, directly or loosely. Others are entirely fabricated, fictional tropes used to form the time-honored ‘beginning, middle and end’ (thank you Mr. Poe, who, by the way, also lived in Philadelphia, within walking distance of my old ‘hood!). I imagine that’s what a lot of back-in-the-day is for most of us, especially writers, a strange brew of what happened, what we imagined happened, (and what we wish had happened). But perhaps essentially what we gained and lost along the way. Springsteen captures a rich mosaic of thought and feeling and memory of the past beautifully in “Streets of Philadelphia”. I can only thank him profusely for igniting the creative force in me that led to this story. Please, Mr. Springsteen, accept this story as my accolade.

Armageddon, Now Available in High Definition

Nate Southard

(Inspired by “57 Channels (And Nothin’ On)”)

Static.

Test pattern.

Static.

Picture.

The sudden appearance of an actual program on the sixty-five inch plasma monster made Tabby Henson blink. She stared at the screen with wide eyes, trying to make some sense out of it. She saw a news desk—a graphic told her she was watching CNN—with a dead body laid out across it. The body used to be a man; now it was a mess. Its chest and stomach had been torn open, pale flaps of skin pulled back and left to hang. She noticed a few white ribs, broken and jagged, pointing at what the studio lights. The man’s face was peaceful underneath a splattered mask of blood. A fly settled on the tip of his nose and then took off again in stunning detail.

It dawned on Tabby that she’d already seen this one.

“Huh.” She leaned forward and sucked up another line of coke from the mirror in front of her. Five lines left on the glass, then another twelve on the marble coffee table. What would she do when it was all gone? Maybe call Big Davey. He always had a score ready to sell. Not that Tabby ever paid for her drugs. Big Davey was a starfucker of the highest and strangest order. As long as he got to suck her toes for a few minutes, he’d happily leave some coke behind. And heroin cost only a few slaps across her bare bottom. Not a bad deal, considering today’s prices.

She watched the corpse for a few more seconds, but it didn’t do anything interesting, so she started flipping channels again.

Test pattern.

Static.

A graphic said there were technical difficulties, and regular programming would return soon. Sure. Tabby had given up on that around noon. It was four o’clock now, and the stations were dropping like flies.

She flipped a few more channels with little result. Comedy Central was still showing South Park reruns, but Kenny’s death wasn’t nearly as funny with everybody in the real world getting torn apart like old newspaper.

She sighed. Since when did the real world mean shit to her? Maybe this little global crisis was forcing her to grow up the slightest bit. Yeah, sure. What a bunch of crap.

A few more taps on the clicker took her past Fox News, where some old guy was saying the sudden homicidal rage that had taken over the world was either an Islamic or liberal plot, probably both. What was a liberal, anyway? Tabby didn’t have the slightest clue, other than she knew that George Clooney was one. She wondered if Clooney was still alive and if she’d ever get to sleep with him.

She kept shuffling the channels and finally landed on MTV. Through some incredible miracle, they were still on the air. That guy she’d made out with at the Kelly Clarkson concert was talking about relief efforts and sticking together as a society so humanity could overcome this terrible crisis. He looked like shit, and Tabby guessed he wasn’t about to cut to the latest Jimmy Eat World video anytime soon. The TRL studios had been filled with sheet-covered gurneys instead of screaming teenagers, and every now and then she saw the twirling tips of flames at the bottom of the studios’ large windows. Pretty cool, if a little sad.

“In case you’re just joining us,” the guy said (what was his name?), “we’ve received word that Eminem has been dragged from his home and murdered by a group of ravagers.”

Ravagers. The word sounded familiar. Had one of the news people called the crazies that? Tabby shook her head and snorted another line. She rubbed her sinuses with the fingers of her left hand as she fumbled with her right, reaching for the margarita she’d poured earlier. She found the glass, pressed its rim to her lips, and knocked it back. The slivered remains of long-melted ice cubes struck her lips, and she grimaced at the watery taste. Time to pour another.

No, that was bullshit. She was a role model. She had to get out there and help. She was powerful and capable, the daughter of a billionaire. She’d done walk-ons for at least three different network shows. That counted for something.

She grabbed her phone and dialed her publicist. Dianne would know what to do, how she could help. Dianne knew all sorts of crap. Hell, the woman could probably have her on MTV within an hour, helping to put the world back together.

She smiled. Helping made her feel good.

She punched the speed-dial for Dianne. She listened as the phone rang half a dozen times, then Dianne’s too cheery voice chirped on the other end.

“Dianne. Not available. Leave a message.”

The phone beeped, and Tabby tried to think of something to say.

“Um, it’s me. I want to help, so you need to get me on MTV as soon as possible. Seriously, I think I can stop this if I just get in front of a camera. Cool? Cool.”

She tossed the phone onto the couch, not bothering to hang up. It would disconnect sooner or later, and then Dianne could get through to her. She’d learned long ago you don’t wait on your publicist. That’s not the way it works.

Another dozen clicks on the remote didn’t turn up much. ABC was still running reality shows, but the reality looked even more boring than usual. Five college kids racing for a million dollars didn’t pack a lot of punch once you realized they were probably all dead. That wasn’t fair, though. Maybe one or two of them had gone mad, taken over by whatever the hell it was that had put the world on its ass.

Tabby clicked the channel again, ready to give up, and she almost jumped as she saw the front of her house on the high def screen. At first she thought it might be the powder she’d inhaled, but no. That was her mansion, owned until two months ago by her daddy. There were the marble pillars, and the huge bay windows that opened up onto the balcony. Hell, the balcony was only two doors away from her present location.

Why was her house on TV? Not that she was about to complain. Bad publicity wasn’t the sort of thing she believed in, so why would she care what brought the cameras to her front door?

The push of a button raised the volume on the surround sound. A voice was talking over the images of her home. It sounded pretty cute. Were those people she saw outside?

“Now outside Tabitha Henson’s home, rumored to be one of the most secure strongholds in Beverly Hills. No sign of the heiress, but reports put her inside and alive.”

Reports? Who the hell was reporting on her? She hadn’t talked to anybody since this whole thing started. Well, a few minutes with Lindsay, but that chick had been bombed out of her mind, so who really gave a damn?

“…dozens of refugees outside, hoping to get in before ravagers find them. Security has held off the throng so far, but it may only be a matter of time.”

Her security was still at the house? Great! Maybe she could send Rob out to score off of Big Davey later. Surely the dealer would accept an IOU under special circumstances.

Why hadn’t she known about the people outside, though? Wasn’t her help supposed to keep her in the know about this sort of thing?

She searched the sound system’s remote until she found the mute button. She punched it and the television went silent. She heard the crowd at once, a murmuring noise from far off that sounded more than a little angry. Why would people be mad at her? She hadn’t done anything wrong.

“Well,” she said before destroying two more lines, “I’ll just have to go see.”

It took more effort than she was prepared for to push herself up from the leather couch. She shrugged. Just about everything was harder than she figured. No big deal.

Her skin crackled with energy as she walked across the floor on bare feet. Davey really had given her some good stuff. Maybe she’d let him do a little more to her next time. Or maybe she’d pay him. Either way, she should make it worth his while.

The sound of angry voices grew louder as she stepped into the next room and approached the bay windows. A single set of French doors opened onto the balcony, and she pushed them open and stepped out with the grace of a swan.

The crowd went suddenly quiet, then burst into roars of envy and desperation. Tabby looked down on them with compassionate eyes, gesturing with open palms. They were pointing and yelling. More than a couple snapped pictures as fast as they could. Good to know the paparazzi hadn’t lost their touch just because of something like the end of the world.

She held out her hands in a calming gesture. The crowd booed her‑they really were anything but nice‑and she made the gesture again. Slowly, they quieted.

She had to say something. She could see the news cameras at the edge of her drive, and she knew whatever she told the crowd would be important, one of those moments of history that lived on forever. She could prove to the world that she was somebody other than a shallow little princess. She was a role model, and she would show the entire world just how helpful and caring she could be just by saving it.

She took a deep breath, then spoke.

“Just be cool to each other.”

The crowd of regular people stared at her, and their eyes made her uncomfortable. They weren’t getting it.

“Look. Don’t be dicks, okay?”

A murmur rippled through the people, and soon the angry sounds returned. They weren’t as loud as before, but she could tell she was in danger of losing them.

“I’m serious, guys! It’s not cool!”

The rock came out of nowhere. It cracked across the side of her head, bursting stars across her vision and sending sharp jolts of pain through her skull. She reeled, but managed to grab the balcony’s rail with both hands so she could right herself. Once her balance returned, she pressed the heel of one hand to the side of her head and then held it out. She saw blood.

“Assholes!” she yelled. She pushed herself through the French doors and stomped back into the house. The hostile shouts that followed her were louder than before. Well, fuck them. If they weren’t going to appreciate her, then who gave a shit? Maybe Dianne had called. She’d be on MTV in a few hours, helping, and then the normal people outside would really have a reason to be pissed.

She found her way back to the couch and plopped herself down. Two more lines, one for each nostril, and she raised her eyes to the TV.

And screamed.

She saw a picture of herself on the sixty-five inch screen. That was her on the balcony‑couldn’t possibly be anybody else‑only she was naked. Those were her expensive breasts just hanging out for the goddamn world to see. And why was her nose bleeding? She wiped at it with one hand and saw more blood. This didn’t come from the wound in the side of her head. Jesus, she was falling apart.

“Bullshit,” she said, and she believed both syllables.

She looked down at herself, and sure enough she was sitting there in her birthday suit. How had she lost her clothes? How fucking embarrassing. Dianne was going to ask for a bonus, no doubt. Well, she’d better earn it. The bitch hadn’t even called back yet, so good luck.

She reached for the remote and hit the mute button again. The sound system roared to life, drowning out the ungrateful bastards in her driveway.

“The fucking nerve of that bitch,” the reporter was saying. The guy was looking over his shoulder at her house. He turned back to the camera, and his face was creased all to hell and back with anger. He really wasn’t that cute at all. “Thinks she’s so goddamn superior!”

In the background, a group of people was beating on something. She couldn’t tell, but it looked like Rick. That couldn’t be good.

She felt dizzy. It wasn’t just the coke.

The reporter let out a whoop of excitement as the crowd pushed forward. “We’re in! Fucking move, guys!”

She heard a booming noise from somewhere downstairs. What was going on?

On the TV, she watched as a shaky camera raced toward her front door. People were shouting and cheering, and they didn’t all sound like they were on the television. A rumble like thunder spread through the mansion.

One more line. That would clear her head. She snorted it up and let out a moan.

Now the image on the screen was from inside her house, racing up the steps. She saw pissed off faces and heard the word “whore” at least once. They couldn’t be talking about her.

Something pounded on the doors that led to the room. She wished she had time to put something decent on.

“Fucking get her!” somebody on the television said.

The doors burst inward. Tabby stood up to face her public.

“Hey, you guys want to party?” she asked.

…Behind her, the screen went blank.

# # #

I first saw the video for “57 Channels (And Nothin’ On)” on MTV. It was about two o’clock on a Sunday morning, and I’d been watching that channel for close to twelve hours. I was a teenager, and I’d fallen for the former music network’s marketing hook, line, and sinker. I even watched MTV Sports. Yes, it was that dire. Years later, when I was on my own and couldn’t afford cable, I still loved that song. As the reality series grabbed hold of American television like a monster and the brain-dead heiress became the new celebrity, I finally realized what Bruce had been trying to say. It took a few years, but the message finally reached my 57 channels-addled brain. This is my stab at the same culture.

Devil’s Arcade

Mark Charan Newton

(Inspired by “Devil’s Arcade”)

Something in the night air, but what?

It sounds like someone is screaming, distant and remote, a fractured voice on the wind. Outside the window: empty streets have a harsh tone under the sodium street lights. He’s not in the bed. Where is he?

There’s a hope the clear skies would hold some kind of meaning. She stood barefoot on the front lawn, the feel of dew on her skin. A hangover from childhood, it always gave her a fresh shiver. She was staring down the roads at her new neighborhood. The street had a sense of arrival, not departure, a suburb on the end of a town that automatically made you think: home. You could smell baking from a nearby window, hear mothers’ voices calling. Kids rode their bikes without caution, full of carefree laughter and wide eyes. Boys strolled, trying to look hard at the girls walking by in their summer dresses. It was a scene best viewed on a sepia-toned film. The sun took a slow arc, stretching these new days endlessly. If Theresa could, she would have stood on that lawn forever, just basking in those small moments that are taken for granted. She’d finally been offered that chance to build a real life, a chance she thought would never come.

Not while Daniel had been away.

There’d been far too many nights by the phone, waiting by lamp-light, or in the dull glow of a computer screen, for anything to tell her he was still alive, to hear his voice, to read his words. Anything to connect with him over the distances, anything that would offer something nearing a sense of calm.

She would never get a good night’s rest, instead taking a surface sleep, a state where you were expecting any minute to get that call to tell you that every night from then on would be spent alone. She would stare at her cell phone in paranoia when it made a noise. It didn’t help watching the documentaries that explained how bad things were out there, about what was happening to soldiers in a country she’d hardly heard about. What business did she have with Iraq?

When Daniel had arrived home it took her days until she felt it was for real. He was driven up one lunchtime, the whole family in the front yard, and there was a cheer from them all; a hero’s welcome. He glanced at them, standing proud in his uniform, with his usual shy smile, the one she’d fallen for back in high school, one that right then suggested unease with all the fuss.

Their gazes connected. She had no idea how to describe the moment. She remembered only the beat of her heart.

They’d held a party that day, back in their small house on the edge of Atlantic City. A spring barbeque. Family and friends. Uncle David and Aunt Mary up from Charlotte. Her parents, flown up from Tampa.

“It’s all right,” Daniel said when they had a chance to speak properly, and Theresa did nothing but hold him, almost pulled him into her, forgetting the fact that others were watching. Daniel was home, in one piece. In her arms. Every bit the noble hero. Later they had slow-danced in the garden under the light from the house. Men drank cold beer in the warm evening, discussing tactics and speaking of the past. Women made a fuss of Theresa and spoke of the future.

An endless night:

They took long walks across the sea front, stopping to lie on the beach, to listen to the repetition of the waves, watching the curve of lights along the coast. Face to face: smells of cheap perfume and gin, just like it used to be. Vaguely she remembered old cars and parking lots, pulling up outside houses after midnight, eager kisses and everything seeming so dramatic.

A drizzle bled out of the dark skies, but she wanted to stay there, her arms around him. She stared into those hazel eyes, unable to take her hands from his shaven head. She lay on top of him, feeling the beat of his heart. He rubbed the bones of her wrist between his finger and thumb.

“Promise me you’ll never go anywhere again without me,” she said, her blonde hair streaking across his face, a bass thunder of the sea surrounding them.

“Hey, I’m not leaving this state without you. Don’t worry about a thing.” His hand traced the lines and creases of her skin, a slow exploration, maybe even a rediscovery.

She said, “Good. Not the state. You said that. You promise?”

“Yeah. I’ve been discharged. That’s it. That’s it for me.”

“You said. Not the state.” Then she began to kiss him. The act was slower than she remembered, a little more appreciation in every brush of skin, as if she sought out wounds on his face and neck to seal them with her lips.

Where he was broken, she would fix him.

They decided it would be good to begin again in a new town, where there would be none of the bad memories of her fears and worries around Atlantic City, the places she walked when she hadn’t heard from him, the coffee shops where friends would offer her support, the bars where she had burst into tears.

Though the city had been ample distraction with its night life, it was a transient place, where you could never settle fully, where there was little indicating stability, something she craved so much. When she and Daniel were younger, it was an ideal city to be near. Now, she felt as if such things weren’t important anymore. Neon lights, brash music, money changing hands quick as Vegas: it was of little appeal when you spent every night wondering if your lover was dead.

Daniel’s family had some savings, enough that meant they could try a new place, and have a few weeks without worrying about work.

They went inland, to a quiet house on a quiet street, in a town that was built without considering automobiles, their narrow streets, people walking everywhere, architecture that was decades old in places. There was a simple naïve charm in their new world.

“Pass the orange juice.”

“You never drank orange juice before.”

“Yes I did. I always have.”

“No you haven’t. You never like it because of the gunk at the bottom.”

“Maybe I don’t like the gunk. But I like the juice.”

“You don’t like the juice.”

Pleasures now in these simple things. Of making him eggs for breakfast, sunlight slashed across the table. Daniel skimming through car magazines. Music on an old radio.

He said, “Anyway. Figured I might find some work today. I saw some jobs going at the warehouse on Smith.”

“The Westerman’s warehouse? You want coffee?”

“Yeah, some jobs going there. Lifting mainly. Operating a little machinery. Coffee, thanks. I need to start doing something. Feel as though I’m just getting fat.” He indicated his stomach.

“You’re far from that. Why don’t you make the most of your free time? Relax.”

He shook his head. “Need to keep busy.”

The radio music faded to news. She didn’t like to listen to what was said so much as the stock phrases repeated again and again, more of a mantra really, and it was an old habit of hers to treat it in this way. You could gain more comfort from not listening to what was really happening in the world.

For a couple months there were no problems. With Daniel’s presence in bed she would fall into the deepest of sleeps. It suggested to her that part of her had been missing before, when he was away.

When she woke early for work she’d watch him sleep, grateful for the fact he was there at all. A breathing body beside her. In that dirty light of dawn she would run her hand across his torso, along his ridges, imagining what had caused some of the scratches, the things that happen in service for your country.

It was a strange hour to be awake. There was an unnatural stillness about the house. Noises seemed to lose all context. Strange, how your house could become an uncomfortable place to be in. She would shiver then, hairs erect on her neck.

More recently she noticed that, even though the nights were balmy, he’d begun to sweat more than was normal, beads of the stuff, forming lines and webs across his skin. Names materialized at his lips, Jim, Charlie, men he’d mentioned in his letters and emails, men he fought alongside, men that may or may not have died. She couldn’t remember. Then came stranger words, mere murmuring of orders, something that sounded faintly exotic, a place-name, a map reference perhaps. His words were almost occult. As if he was possessed, some malevolent spirit penetrating his body. The curtains flapped like banners in the wind. She concealed a towel under the bed so she could wipe away the sweat. More than once she swore that some kind of sand was coming off on the towel, as if he was bleeding the desert that he’d been fighting in.

“Morning, angel,” he said, his eyes red and sleepy, the same every morning.

“How you feeling?” she said.

“What d’you mean?”

“You didn’t sleep well.”

“I slept fine.”

“No. You were talking in your sleep. You said some names.”

“Names?”

“Names. Jim. Charlie.”

He said nothing to that.

Theresa said, “Were they friends of yours? You never mentioned them.”

A pause. “Yeah. They were.” He lay on his back, wiped his eyes, stared at the ceiling. In the distance you could hear the slow churn of the road as another day began.

She heard about the body on the news, a man the same age as Daniel, twenty-seven, found strangled in a ditch on the outskirts of town, near the motel and the giant Exxon sign. His body had been there for days. Theresa felt her heart stop when she saw the photograph on screen. He looked identical to Daniel, same hair, same physique, same smile.

She checked the bedroom to make sure he was fine, and he was there, his eyes open, staring at the ceiling.

“You okay?” she said.

“Yeah.”

The distance that was growing disturbed her. What had she expected? That things would return to normal immediately?

She asked him about the war sometimes. Those moments where he’d leave a sentence open. When he appeared as if he wanted to talk. And he would recall the occasional prank the guys played on each other, and there’d be the jokes some of them shared, things to escape the reality.

Daniel finds himself on a grassland a mile from the edge of the town, the dark of the night surrounding him. A chill wind comes, sounds like a cry for help. How has he gotten here? A car drives by, headlights pointing away, and it serves only to heighten his sense of loneliness.

Before his eyes, the grass fades, turns to the gentle swirls of dust. Of desert. His heart misses a beat. He shades his eyes from the grains, turns his back on the wind. Where the hell is he? The lights of the town are in the distance, every second another step away from him, glimmering like fading muzzle flash.

A gunshot. Has he imagined it? There it is again, penetrating the wind, the staccato noise he’s so familiar with. You can just about make out figures, almost black on black. Camouflage? They shuffle towards him, stepping out of a night as dark as a grave. He stumbles back. Some have no arms. One is shambling forward on crude crutches. They are figures of bone, more or less, their skin having peeled away as if in an explosion, shattered ribcages extending outwards. They take irregular footsteps through the sand. One carries a machete, pointing it towards Daniel. You can see their eyes all right, white orbs glaring like headlights from a truck, shining at Daniel, and a thousand memories flood back then, all the moments he’s seen in combat, the ghosts of the men he’s killed, the whites of their eyes, the screams caught in their throats, and every one of those men and these men ask the same question of him:

Was it worth it, soldier?

Driving on the edge of town. Day time. Theresa behind the wheel, whilst Daniel stared out across the landscape. The wind pushed through the grassland like a unit of ghost soldiers heading towards the forest. Clouds bruised the horizon as they banked the distant hills. Thin white trails of a jet plane in the sky. He imagined that it could descend to drop a death cargo any minute. A hundred men shattered and burned.

He sensed something then, an unnatural texture to the air. What, he didn’t know exactly. “Stop the car.”

“What?”

“We need to pull over.”

“Why?”

“Please. Just pull over.”

Out the car, stepping onto the grass. Theresa shouted something from behind, but her words came through muffled, static on a fading frequency. For some time he stood there, gazing at nothing, trying to tune into whatever it was that he sensed in the car. A couple of birds flew past him, bobolinks, which brought him to reality again. They carved arcs in the sky before disappearing into the distance.

He brushed down his jeans, and when he moved to do the same on his t-shirt he noticed there were jagged streaks of sand across the material. He lifted up his t-shirt to examine it, and it was real, dirty particles in the fabric of his clothing. What the fuck was that? His mind was playing tricks on him again. There was no desert here. He flicked away the grains, then stepped back towards the road.

That was when he saw it, down to the right, a body nestled awkwardly in the ditch. Daniel scrambled down. It was young man his own age, the man’s face smashed blue, his body stiff.

Daniel ran back to the car.

“You got your cell phone?”

“No, why?”

“There’s a body, back there. A young man. Dead.” Daniel indicated towards the ditch, examined Theresa’s face for her horror. ‘It’s all right. You’re safe with me,’ he said, not sure if the fact had settled in her mind. And he meant that, felt a sudden urge to keep her safe, and emotions came back to him, weak and unfamiliar, but if felt good. Felt good to feel anything really. He jogged out to the edge of the road and started to wave down traffic as car horns signaled their annoyance.

Eventually a black SUV slowed, and pulled over behind their car. Daniel ran around to the window. A woman inside, thirties, clearly panicked at this stranger on the road.

He said, “There’s a body here. You got a cell phone? Call 9-1-1. Get the police. It’s down by the ditch.” He indicated the grass verge.

She glanced up and down his body, her gaze full of assessment, not trusting him, a man who had fought in her country’s name, but she nodded, reached for her phone, never opening the window. There was fear in her eyes.

Cars burned up the road at high speed.

They went hand in hand to the doctor’s office. Theresa had to wait outside a special room with blue walls while tests were taken on Daniel. Dr. Lang, a half-Chinese half-Australian man with a constant smile, was as efficient and polite as those senior military officials he’d met maybe twice. He spoke of war vets committing suicide, and did Daniel have thoughts of the same? A firm no.

“Good, good.”

“No, I’m trying to rebuild things as best we can,” Daniel said, and he looked across at Theresa. Smiled. “She’s helping. Family’s keeping me sane.”

His hearing wasn’t quite the same apparently. Why was this?

Dr. Lang: notes on a clipboard, forms, paperwork. Several more steps removed from the real world.

“The explosion came from a rocket launcher,” Daniel said. “East side of Baghdad. A while ago now, when we went in. Blast shook us to the floor. It’s been a little problematic. I mentioned it in a couple of job interviews, and they sent me away. Can’t have any problems with hearing around machinery. It’s not easy getting work now. I mean, would that put me in line for benefits maybe?”

“We’ll need to put an investigation for evidence of that one I’m afraid,” Dr. Lang said. “I’m doubtful you’ll be able to get benefits immediately. These things take time. More and more vets are making claims, you see. The war has long effects.”

Like you would know, Daniel thought, what the fuck the effects are. With your paper and pen. In the safety of this office.

This was the way the conversation went. Avenues of enquiries that had little use on practical life. Vague attempts to sift through the nightmares of the last few years. Without any obvious physical wounds, all limbs intact, he wasn’t a priority.

“And what about your dreams?” Dr. Lang said. “How have you been sleeping?”

Daniel had his head down for some time, as if it was heavy with the weight of his experiences. “I see things, sometimes. It’s so real. I see all sorts. Burning men. I see flames beneath their skulls, you know, fire in their eyes and all that. They’ve got guns sometimes. They speak my name. Man, it’s hard to describe. I’m not frightened by them or anything. Doesn’t take a doctor to tell me why I’m dreaming of that shit.”

“No,” Dr. Lang said, giving that efficient smile of his, a little uncompassionate. Daniel thought he’d make a good commanding officer.

“Well anyhow. That’s what I think of when I close my eyes. So yeah, it makes me not wanna sleep at times. While Theresa’s out for the count I’ll stick on some films. Tune out until I’m so tired I have to sleep. You not got any pills for that?”

On the news again, a second man. The one Daniel had found. Theresa didn’t know what to think. It could so easily have been Daniel to have been killed. In America, her country. Not some far off land. He could die anywhere. Did it matter where you died or what for?

Would she ever stop worrying about him?

“It’s okay,” Theresa said.

“It’s not.”

“It’s not important.”

“It is to me. Can’t fucking make love to my girl anymore.”

“You can. You’re just stressed. It can happen to anyone. We’ll try again, some other time, when we’ve not drunk.”

“It’s not the drink.”

“I know.”

“Fuck do you know?”

Then a hand on her shoulder.

“Shit, I’m sorry, Theresa.”

In the desert again, on the edge of town. Maybe. You can’t be certain of these things.

There’s a smell in the air, something burning.

A gun in his hands now, M4 Carbine.

Overhead, a helicopter tears through the skies, ripping up dust.

A bass shudder shakes the earth.

And here he is, back in Atlantic City. No. Somewhere like it, an avenue of amusements, neon lights beating through the rising desert sands, clown faces lurching from shuttered windows, the voices of laughter, and Daniel keeps on walking, he has no choice, has to carry on, follow orders.

Gun fire tears apart the ground in rapid beats.

Daniel aims into the dark windows at what had gone. Turns towards a head that is lowered too quickly. Something in the distance now, out of range. He shoots towards the black horizon. Shrieks from somewhere: a scream maybe, a descending bomb.

Is it worth it, soldier?

Next thing he knows is those figures are here again, the ones from his past, shambling towards him with automatic weapons, but they’re impotent machines now, hanging down by their sides, and there are flames in their eyes. They are soldiers, sent to attack him in this arcade. Fairground music in the background. It’s all like some drug-induced hallucination.

He has his orders.

He can feel his heart beating.

Daniel screams as vehicles speed up the street, away from him, his own gun vanished. He’s only got his bare hands now, man to man, the worst kind of combat where you see the enemy’s face, where you can see his reactions. Sweat bled down his cheeks. He ran forwards, took down the first, knocked the machete and gun away, punched again and again into a face that just absorbed the impact, mutilated by the force, caving in like putty. Still they came, surrounded him, and‑

‑she called his name but he didn’t look back. He was too far away. Theresa screamed. Police sirens faded into range like banshees in the night, heading towards this parking lot. In the skies a helicopter approached, lights beaming down. Noises became intense. If Daniel couldn’t hear her now he never would. She got out of the car‑

‑hold the man by the throat, push him to the ground. It’s either him or Daniel. Those eyes stare back, burning through Daniel’s mind, those memories coming back, the ghosts of his past.

He stared at the body on the ground searching for an explanation for why the man was dead.

Theresa was there, holding Daniel, pulling his head to her chest in repeated sobs, and the sand and blood was mixed on his shirt again. He looked at the body beneath him, the limbs bent awkwardly, the face caved in. He wondered how it had happened? Was he responsible?

Daniel noticed his fists were sore, bloodied. He lost his breath then, his lungs struggling to take in air.

There were tears on his face, not sweat.

“It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.” Theresa’s words provided some comfort, a vague connection between the worlds in his mind, although she wouldn’t look him in the eye. She kept her head turned to one side. He could feel the beat of her heart, and the fires in his head began to burn slowly away. Men were shouting, police, pointing guns from a distance, barking orders and commands, the flash of red and blue lighting up the sky above the parking lot where a chopper was hovering, beating air down in pulses across the grass, into the bleak night.

# # #

The song “Devil’s Arcade” is one of Springsteen’s most obvious anti-war songs, yet as always there is subtlety to his words. He highlights the personal wounds that a war inflicts, and on the Magic album there was much to be said about the damage war does to an individual. It was this concept that I really wanted to work with, about the costs of war on people, about what it can do to relationships. How it changes human minds—fragile things at the best of times. And war is full of horrors, so I felt that ought to somehow be reflected. The song itself has little narrative to build on, unlike many of Springsteen’s other songs, so it was open for a number of possibilities. Since it’s one of the last tracks on the album, it also seemed to be a coda to the anti-war message throughout. I thought the spirit of some of those earlier tracks should be contained in this story, to reflect this.

(“HIDDEN TRACK”)

Wreckage

Harrison Howe

(Inspired by “Wreck On The Highway”)

The headlights skim off the wet road, slick and oily, glaring back at you. Traffic reports whisper from the radio: roads are closed, accidents have claimed fenders and lives. You are not shocked when you round a curve and come upon the car crumpled against a tree. Strips of bark scattered across the asphalt. The beam of one headlight skidding off into the woods, glittering off silver raindrops.

You drift onto the shoulder. You have been going slowly enough that it doesn’t take much to stop. The rain twists through the twin flashing beacons of your hazard lights, chills the back of your neck as you bend your head to peer inside. The dome light is on and the bodies are cast in a weak gray glow, bright spots in a set of death-stares. The rain hisses like pissed-off rattlesnakes on exposed engine parts.

The dead stare at you from the twisted ruins.

I remember the rain, and the drinks sloshing around in my brain, and my hands so tight on the steering wheel. Maybe I told her to shut the fuck up. “Just shut the fuck up, Meg.” Like I always did after a few. The drinks making me angry and the argument making me angrier, pressing on the accelerator, taking the curves too fast. “Just shut the fuck up, Meg,” and it was probably over nothing. Nothing.

I don’t even remember her last words. I just remember thinking the world was made of glass and metal, and that the world had just exploded; the blood in my eyes as I stared at her staring lifelessly at me.

Memories press against you, wafting their feral breaths in your face. They twine around your brain, almost cutting off oxygen, leaving you limp and light-headed. You cannot stand under the weight of them; you drift down to your knees, then sit on the side of the road.

Hot metal hisses; the dead stare.

I remember…

You are crying as you return to your car, fishtailing in the mud back onto the road and speeding for home; the tears fall into your lap with almost audible slapping sounds, your heart a thousand broken splinters shredding your chest cavity, slicing through your throat, your gasping lungs.

You pull into your driveway, take the porch steps in a single leap that makes the knee that got wrecked in the accident scream in protest, the knee you can’t lean on when you bend to plant flowers at the grave, burst through the door calling her name, up the stairs to the bedroom, the unmade bed, where

I slip in beside her and slide my arms around her, tell her again how sorry I am, I’m so so sorry, and I press my lips into her damp hair and feel the slivers of glass in there, pricking at my lips, and I hold her tight, her slight broken body so tight against me.

# # #

This is the one, you could say, that started it all.

Back in 2004, I was interested in submitting to a flash-fiction anthology and I needed a story. I was in the habit then of looking for inspiration in songs and song titles. I looked through my stacks of CDs, playing some at random. One of them was Bruce Springsteen’s The River. I started to think about the narrator of “Wreck on the Highway”, how the sight of the injured man on the side of the road makes him realize how quickly we can lose those we love, how it makes him hold his own wife or girlfriend a little tighter, and I thought, What if it was too late? What if he had already lost her before he saw that accident? and bam, I had my little ghost story.

I found inspiration in more of Bruce’s songs over the next year or so, and then I began to find other writers who could also tap into that great body of work.

And thus, an anthology was born.

BIOS

Peter Abrahams is the author of seventeen crime novels including Delusion, End of Story, Oblivion and the Edgar Award-nominated Lights Out. In addition, he’s written the Echo Falls mystery series for young adults, the first of which, Down the Rabbit Hole, was also nominated for an Edgar Award and won the Agatha. His most recent YA novel is Reality Check. He lives on Cape Cod.

Guy Adams collects careers like baseball cards. In his time he has tried his hand at Museum Curator, Tour Guide, Historical Researcher, and Newsagent His main occupations, however, have always been acting and writing. In the former he has mugged people in UK soap opera, Emmerdale, perved around in his y-fronts simulating sex with a woman dressed as a horse (Jean Genet’s The Balcony) and earned something of a reputation by impersonating real people (Hemingway, George Bernard Shaw and Hitler, to name but a few). He also toured as one half of the wittily titled “Adams & Jarrett” on the comedy circuit and is the youngest professional actor to portray Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. He is the author of three books about the television series Life On Mars. If nothing else, these have kept him in gin. He also wrote the surprisingly nasty children’s novel The Boy From Ondassa which offers much for the Giant Squid fan and is currently reworking his novella series ‘Deadbeat’ as full length novels for a UK publisher who really should have more sense.

Michael A. Arnzen has won multiple Bram Stoker awards for his offbeat horror stories and poems. His latest book is Proverbs for Monsters (Dark Regions Press, 2007), a collection of his best short stories over the past two decades. A disc of spoken word performances set to his music, Audiovile, was also recently released from Raw Dog Screaming Press, and is now available to download from iTunes. Arnzen presently teaches horror writing at Seton Hill University near Pittsburgh, PA. Visit his website at www.gorelets.com.

Gary A. Braunbeck is the author of such novels as Mr. Hands and Coffin County, as well as numerous acclaimed short-story collections, including Destinations Unknown and The Collected Cedar Hill Stories series from Earthling Publications. His work has won the International Horror Guild Award, three Shocklines “Shocker” Awards, and five Bram Stoker Awards. He lives in Columbus, Ohio, with his wife, author Lucy Snyder. Learn more at his website: www.garybraunbeck.com..

Lawrence C. Connolly’s fiction has appeared in many of the major science fiction, fantasy, and horror magazines, among them Amazing Stories, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Cemetery Dance Magazine, and Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone Magazine.. His work can also be found in a number of best-of collections, among them Year’s Best Horror, Best of Borderlands, and Best of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction from Audible.com. His novel Veins, a supernatural thriller set in and around an abandoned Pennsylvania surface mine, was published by Fantasist Enterprises in 2008.

Kurt Dinan’s stories have appeared in Chizine (where he won 2007’s short story contest) and the Horror Library Volume III.. He is a high school English teacher in Cincinnati with a wife and son who love him regardless of his Springsteen addiction.

Lorne Dixon lives and writes somewhere off an Exit of Route 78 in residential New Jersey. He grew up on a diet of yellow-spined paperbacks, black and white monster movies, and the thunder lizard backbeat of rock n’ roll. His short fiction can be found in Book Of Dark Wisdom, +The Horror Library+ Volume Two (Cutting Block Press), Dark Distortions Volume One (Scotopia Press), Traps (DarkHart Press), Potter’s Field 3 (Sam’s Dot Publishing), and elsewhere. His novella Snarl and novel The Lifeless were published by Coscom Entertainment in 2009.

Gerard Houarner, a New Yorker married at a New Orleans Voodoo Temple, works by day at a psychiatric institution and writes, mostly at night, about the dark. He’s had several novels and a couple of hundred stories published. For the latest work in print, visit www.gerardhouarner.com..

Harrison Howe came wailing into the world over forty years ago, and hopes to be much quieter when he leaves it. He has sold over 80 short stories and poems to various print and online publications. A dark poetry collection, The Voice of His Brother’s Blood: Crying, was published in 2006. He is also the editor of Dark Notes From NJ: Dark Tales Inspired by the Songs of NJ Musicians, published by the Garden State Horror Writers in 2005. He lives with his wife, two children and Bruce Springsteen albums in North Carolina.

Award-winning author Nancy Kilpatrick has published 17 novels, close to 200 short stories and has edited 8 anthologies. She writes mainly horror, dark fantasy, mysteries and erotica. Recent stories appear in these anthologies: Blood Lite; The Living Dead; Bits of the Dead; Zombies: The Walking Dead. Currently she is writing two new novels. Check out the latest at: www.nancykilpatrick.com

Sarah Langan has an MFA from Columbia University, and is persuing a Master’s in Environmental Toxicology at NYU. Her first novel, The Keeper (HarperCollins, 2006), was a New York Times’ Editor’s Pick. Her second novel, The Missing (Virus in the UK, HarperCollins, 2007), won the Stoker Award for best novel, received a Starred Publisher’s Weekly reveiw, and made several other best-of-the-year lists. Her third novel Audrey’s Door is slated for publication in early 2009, and she has published several short stories. She lives in Brooklyn with her fiancee and pet rabbit.

Elizabeth Massie is a Bram Stoker Award- and Scribe Award-winning author of horror novels, short horror fiction, media tie-ins, mainstream fiction, young adult historical novels, comics, radio plays, poetry, and nonfiction articles on the craft of writing. As she says, “Why not? It’s all fun!” Massie has been published by some of the best houses in the business, including Simon & Schuster, Berkley, Pocket, Tor/Forge, and more. Her first novel, Sineater, received the Bram Stoker Award from the Horror Writers Association. Her Bram Stoker Award-winning novella, “Stephen,” was selected for inclusion in The Century’s Best Horror Fiction. In 2008 and 2009, Massie wrote the novelizations of the second and third season of Showtime’s original television show, The Tudors. Her newest works include Afraid (an e-book collection from Crossroad Press) and Homegrown (a mainstream e-book novel from Crossroad Press, soon to be available in print), and Sundown (a soon-to-be-available collection from Necon E-Books.) Massie lives in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia with illustrator Cortney Skinner.

James A. Moore is the author of over twenty novels, including the critically acclaimed Fireworks, Under The Overtree, Blood Red, the Serenity Falls trilogy (featuring his recurring anti-hero, Jonathan Crowley) and his most recent novels Deeper and the forthcoming Cherry Hill… He has twice been nominated for the Bram Stoker Award and spent three years as an officer in the Horror Writers Association, first as Secretary and later as Vice President. He cut his teeth in the industry writing for Marvel Comics and authoring over twenty role-playing supplements for White Wolf Games, including Berlin by Night, Land of 1,000,000 Dreams and The Get of Fenris tribe book for Vampire: The Masquerade and Werewolf: The Apocalypse, among others. He also penned the White Wolf novels Vampire: House of Secrets and Werewolf: Hellstorm. Moore’s first short story collection, Slices, sold out before ever seeing print. He is currently working on three new novels, Smile No More, a story of Rufo the Clown, his first apocalyptic novel, Dark Gods, and Fear of the Dark. He recently completed his latest Jonathan Crowley novel, Cherry Hill. He’s lived all over the country and currently resides in the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia, with his wife, Bonnie, and their menagerie, which includes one dog, four cats, eight ducks, many fish, and a parrot named Dos. Please drop by his website www.jimshorror.com or leave him a note at bulletin board at www.horrorworld.org..

Mark Charan Newton is the author of The Reef (Pendragon Press) and the forthcoming epic fantasy, Nights of Villjamur from Pan Macmillan / Tor UK. He lives and works in Nottingham, England, from where he hassles his dad for Springsteen tickets each tour. His website is www.markcnewton.com..

John Palisano’s writing includes appearances in Beast Within, Latent Image, and Horror Book of Lists. If the night’s just right, and the boardwalk’s getting just sleepy enough, John’s been known to strap on his old Telecaster and coax forth a few magic colors.

Tom Piccirilli is the author of twenty novels including Shadow Season, The Coldest Mile, The Midnight Road, The Cold Spot, The Dead Letters and A Choir of Ill Children. He’s a four-time Bram Stoker Award winner and has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award, the International Thriller Writers Award, and Le Grand Prix de L’Imaginaire. Learn more at his website www.tompiccirilli.com..

Nate Southard is the author of three graphic novels, including Drive and A Trip to Rundberg.. His short stories have appeared in several genre magazines. He lives in Austin, Texas with his girlfriend and numerous pets. He loves food, drink, comic books, and muttering under his breath. Look him up at www.natesouthard.com..

Jeffrey Thomas is the author of such novels as Blue War, Deadstock, Everybody Scream! and Health Agent, and the short story collections Punktown, Thirteen Specimens, Doomsdays and Voices From Hades, among others. His blog and message board can be accessed through his web site, www.jeffreyethomas.com..

Lee Thomas is the author of the books Stained, Parish Damned, Damage, and The Dust of Wonderland. In addition to numerous magazines, his short fiction has appeared in the anthologies A Walk on the Darkside, The Book of Final Flesh, and Inferno, among others. He has won the Bram Stoker Award and been named a Lambda Literary Award Finalist. Writing as Thomas Pendleton, he is the co-author (with Stefan Petrucha) of Wicked Dead (HarperTeen), a series of edgy horror novels for young adult readers. His novels, Mason, Blood Runs Cold, and The Demon Need are also forthcoming from HarperTeen. Look for him on the web at www.leethomasauthor.com.

T.M. Wright is in his 48th year as a writer (in training). Author of twenty-six novels (published in various languages) and three novellas, a dozen and a half short stories (he finds the novel easier to write), and lots of poetry, Wright is convinced that the all-but-eternal quest for exactly the right word or phrase can hobble any writer. A grandfather, and artist (he’s done the artwork for five of his own books), Wright loves pugs, Maine coon cats, and vegetarian cuisine. According to Ramsey Campbell, TM Wright is a “one-man definition of the term ‘quiet horror’.” Some of his novels, Strange Seed (1978), for instance, A Manhattan Ghost Story (1984, in development at Touchstone Studios) and Cold House (2003) have become classics of horror and dark fantasy. His most recent books are Blue Canoe (2008), a novel from PS Publishing, and Bone Soup (2008), a collection of short fiction, a novel, poetry and art, from Cemetery Dance Publications.

DARKNESS ON THE EDGE

Tales Inspired by the Songs of Bruce Springsteen

Introduction

The right of the individual contributors to be identified as Authors of this Work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Originally published in printed book form by PS Publishing Ltd. in April 2010. This electronic version published in May 2011 by PS by arrangement with the author. All rights reserved by the author.

FIRST EBOOK EDITION

ISBN 978-1-848631-70-0

This book is a work of fiction. names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

PS Publishing Ltd

Grosvenor House

1 New Road

Hornsea / HU18 1PG

East Yorkshire / England

editor@pspublishing.co.uk

www.pspublishing.co.uk

Contents