by Laird Barron
“Yeah. That’s great. I don’t get it. How?”
The Holy Star folks tried to cut in with some bullshit about recovery time but Claire sent them away. “They’re just protective,” she explained to me. “Most people don’t understand.”
“Is that why you haven’t been picking up your phone? Mom and Dad are making themselves sick worrying about you. If they knew you were running again…”
She rolled her eyes. “That’s why I’m not picking up. They don’t understand. They never have.” Then she cupped my face in her hands, and I felt like I’d just stuck my finger in a light socket. “But I know you get it. Chris, this is the closest I’ve ever come to God.”
You’d better believe my heart was pounding. I didn’t want to understand, but I was flashing back to the way my legs trembled after my first varsity-level victory, like I was both weightless and unshakable. The only time in my life I could even pretend that I had scraped a fingernail against the sublime was when I managed to overpower a competitor. When I got thrown into the pit, and emerged the survivor. When I won.
Still, I tried to resist. “Please just call Mom.”
“The Church of the Holy Star brought me this far, by the grace of St. Sasha,” she said, and I realized what it was about her that seemed so different now: her skin was barely thick enough to contain a human soul. And underneath she was all flesh, no blood. Pulseless meat on a butcher’s block. One of those preserved cadavers propped up in a science exhibit, calf muscles forever engaged, a display of the naked wonder of the human body at full gallop. “I can’t quit now. I need to repay them.” She squeezed my arm, and I winced. “I hope I see you again.”
I couldn’t have stopped that thoroughbred if I’d tried, no more than I could’ve caught a comet. Claire moved through the sea of sweat and polyester toward her fellow Churchgoers, who were preening over some prodigal preteen girl-runner – some little Claire – who’d beaten most of the adults. Stroking her hair. Pinching her chin, as if measuring… something. The prodigy turned her head toward me and smiled, with a mouthful of teeth.
~
I used to be a Marcus Hayes apologist. I used to say, we’ve got to give him time, and the pressure on him must be off the chain. I used to find excuses because I wanted to believe he was going to save us, and that when he did, it would be like I had saved us too – with my belief, if nothing else, my faith in his innate superiority and superhuman abilities. But then I realized that he was just another entitled asshole who didn’t deserve his talent, too selfish to be a hero. He’d been handed everything since he hit his first growth spurt, glided through high school and college without breaking a sweat, and now that things weren’t coming so easy, he was struggling. Because he never knew the meaning of hard work, because he didn’t understand effort. It was ironic – enraging – because everybody thought he was a god among men and he didn’t even know how much of a god-with-a-capital G he could have been if he had just tried.
~
I figured out who “St. Sasha the Star” was: Sasha Spell, a seventeen-year-old Olympic gymnast who disappeared during a famine in her home country across the sea. She used to fill stadiums, heart and soul of the people, face on every billboard. What kind of government lets a national asset like that starve, I had no idea. They dedicated the Olympic flame to her at the next Summer Games; her father, a reverend, went insane. The most famous picture of Sasha? You guessed it: arms outstretched on a balance beam, grinning ear-to-ear. Through Me All Things Are Possible. I went back to Claire’s apartment to make sure it was the same girl in the poster, and ended up sitting on the floor staring up at St. Sasha with my mouth open for three hours.
After that, I tried to put Claire and the Church out of my mind. Things were on fire at work, and I didn’t have any spare mental space for dead gymnasts or missing triathletes or whatever the hell had happened to my sister. But whereas I was usually able to tuck Claire into a bottom drawer and forget about her – because it’s not like she’d been our Claire anyway, not after her breakdown; she was just Claire’s angry, sickly, broken ghost – after I watched her win the Sioux River Run she refused to be hidden away. She snuck into my bedroom and leaned over me as I slept; she perched on my desk in her ultra-responsive running shoes and watched me type. Sometimes she had skin on. Sometimes not. But never any blood.
“Level up, Chris,” she’d whisper. “Dig deep. Power through.”
And I’d whisper, hands over my eyes: “Shut up, shut up, shut up.”
The more I thought about her, the sicker I felt. Numbers and dates slipped through my fingers. I was losing sleep, losing time. I missed two meetings, fell asleep in another. At one point I caught myself standing in front of the water cooler with my thumb on the handle, water overflowing onto my hand. Wasn’t too long after that – though I don’t remember exactly when – that my boss called me into his office and asked what the hell was wrong with me. He was one of those CrossFit freaks, and started yelling at me over his half-eaten salad, pointing the fork at me every other sentence.
A lot of words were being thrown my way, like “unacceptable” and “irresponsible,” but I couldn’t keep my eyes off the television in the corner, flanked by motivational posters of men rowing toward waterfalls, climbing cliffs, running up hills. Determination. Commitment. Endurance. ESPN was reporting that Marcus Hayes, the Prince that was Promised, hadn’t shown up to practice that day – lazy shithead, I was thinking.
“Chris.” That I heard. “Level. Up.”
But I didn’t know how. When I tried to dig deep for some reservoir of energy, some crawlspace of strength, I found my body hollow. Cleaned out. Decimated. I had hit the wall that I was sure I’d always be able to barrel through, and I slinked out of his office with my head down. Because once you can’t level up – once you fail yourself – once you let your weakness win – what good are you? What worth do you have?
As you can imagine, I wasn’t in the best of moods getting on the highway that night. It was raining, and I was starving. Some fucker cut me off and I chased him because the sea of angry bile churning inside me didn’t know what else to do – missed my exit, followed the guy into a gas station parking lot and then just sat there, shaking, because as soon as the fucker got out of his car I knew he would have killed me and an animal side of my brain that I had never wanted to acknowledge – a meek prey animal – paralyzed me.
I had nowhere to go but home. My shitty, empty apartment; my shitty, empty body. And then, as if she’d been waiting for me to sink to my lowest, Claire finally texted me back: Watch it. I thought at first it was a warning, but when I picked up the mail, a flash drive was perched on top of Sports Illustrated – a little silver flash drive with a white star on it. In that moment, you have to understand, that star looked like a lighthouse in a storm to me.
On the flash drive was a janky video, maybe a decade old. And on the video was a man: some Norman Rockwell type with cracked-out eyes and a bad suit, sitting behind a desk with a bronze statuette of a human figure in a back-breaking curve, arms holding up an orb that was the world. “Hello,” he said to the camera, to me, “I’m Dr. Richard Kettle, Professor of Religious Studies at Rosewood College. If you’re watching this, congratulations. You’ve taken the first step toward overcoming your human limitations and realizing your full potential. As you begin your journey toward greatness, I’d like to tell you the story of Saint Sasha the Star.”
Apparently, Sasha Spell didn’t starve to death. Apparently, she sacrificed her body to feed her father’s flock. And because she was touched – because the astral divine had blazed into her body when she was still in the womb, a random turn of fortune that could neither be predicted nor earned – her flesh kept them all alive. Not just alive: thriving.
“Saint Sasha, in her infinite grace, understood the gift that she had been given,” said Dr. Kettle. “She knew that her ultimate act of glory – beyond any medal or trophy – would be sharing her bounty with those who had always believed in her, the
reby refracting that holy white light into a thousand magnificent colors.”
There was an uncomfortably long pause as the camera crept toward Dr. Kettle’s unblinking eyes as if trying to find a spark, and then an abrupt blackness. I felt numb, but also weightless – no more knot in my stomach, no more grip on my shoulders – not because the pain was gone, but because my whole body seemed to be. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a light: Claire had texted me again. Did you watch it? I could barely feel my fingers as I replied: Yes.
~
Since he transferred back home, every article about Marcus Hayes uses the word “community” about twenty times. Have you noticed? Gives back to the community. Welcomed by the community. Boost for the community. And there’ll be a picture of him at a pediatric cancer ward or shaking hands with disabled veterans or showing star-struck kids how to shoot a free throw. As if he’s doing us a favor by slumming it in our shithole city when he could be living the good life in Miami, L.A. Except we made him here, in this shithole city. He went to our schools, walked our streets, drank our heavy metal water, inhaled our smoke. He’s ours. And if he really wanted to “give back,” if he really wanted to repay us, then the least he could do is give us a taste of what it feels like to win. I want you all to remember that, when you write your eulogies. Remember that none of these trophy-hogging superstars would have their big glass houses if it weren’t for all of us. Remember that we made them. Remember that they’re ours.
~
This time, the door with the white star was open, because this time, I was ready. Claire stood in the aisle, her bulging muscles glowing by candlelight and the unearthly gleam of the Holy Star, and took my hand. Her little hand had grown so calloused while I wasn’t looking, strong enough to break mine. “I’m so glad you came,” she said. “I knew you understood.”
We walked past two dozen pews filled to capacity with true believers. The prodigal girl-runner from the Sioux River Run was there. So was the old woman who’d greeted me at the door and told me I wasn’t ready; this time, she was nodding. I looked around for Lee Sheridan, but Claire gently whispered that having reached his full potential at the World Championships last year, Lee had already given his body to the congregation. “I ate first,” she said sheepishly.
At the front of the church was a man in a tweed jacket who I recognized as Dr. Kettle, looking not one day older than he had on that video. In front of him knelt a wriggling, handcuffed body with a sack over its head. Claire urged me on alone with a few claps and a pump of her fist, like I was seventeen again and headed down to the mat.
Looming above everything was a gorgeous twelve-foot statue of St. Sasha the Star. A hole had been carved where her heart would be, and a prism placed there – a ray of white light shot in from the back of the church, and her heart splintered this light into a brilliant rainbow of color that teemed out over the pews. She was beaming up at a ceiling that was painted a thick, palpable black to represent the unknowable universe. Not the universe they show you in a planetarium, full of tiny needle-prick stars arranged into animal shapes. That’s an illusion. It’s got nothing to do with what lurks out there, bestowing gifts, stretching possibility, sounding drums. Death is a drummer, they say, but what hides in that darkness is beyond life or death.
I knew who was being offered even before Dr. Kettle took the sack off. I recognized the ripple in his calves, the ridges in his biceps, his Galatians 6:14 tattoo. Through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. I had prayed for those muscles to contract correctly during a lay-up, to extend at just the right angle to make the basket. Prayed for that high-octane body to hit the peak performance levels it was made for. Sometimes I don’t know if he realized how perfect he was. Innocence, I suppose.
Marcus Hayes was sobbing, which shows how little he understood the gift he’d been given. He looked older up close. I could see acne scars and bags under his eyes and shaving nicks. For the first time he stared at me and warbled, “Why are you doing this? Why do you hate me?” As if we didn’t all love him so much that it made us shake to watch him, as if our hunger wasn’t the ultimate expression of our love! And then: “I got money. I can give you money.” And he said other things, too, but it all dissolved into static.
Dr. Kettle held out a boning knife. “I’ve heard a lot about you from Claire,” he said, and I remembered her screaming my name at a high school wrestling meet – louder than our parents, louder than my friends, because Claire understood what being a champion meant. “She’d really like you to be here to witness her ascension, when her time comes.”
You know what they say: some are born great, some achieve greatness, some have greatness thrust upon them. And some of us – the believers, the doers, the never-say-diers – seize greatness by the throat and wrestle it into submission.
I didn’t use the knife to take Marcus’ life. I didn’t have to. I put him in a chokehold, one we learned how to do in high school even though it was illegal to use in a match. For one sublime moment, it was just me and him, locked in struggle, and when I pressed my skin against his I could feel the fever-burn of the Holy Star, the blessing of infinite possibility, passing from him to me. And then Marcus went limp and fell forward nearly onto Dr. Kettle, who offered me the knife again. That time, I took it and sliced a three-inch chunk of flesh off his calf.
You’d think I’d be shaking, pissing myself – but I wasn’t. I was completely calm, calmer than I’d been in years, as if some enormous force that I guess you’d call God was holding me safe in its cloud of arms. That was how I knew I’d made the right decision. You have to obey your gut, when you’re in pursuit of excellence. That’s what mediocre people don’t understand. You have to answer your hunger. Holding back from the bounty is an affront to the divine.
When I put that raw star-kissed flesh on my tongue, I shut my eyes and saw Claire. She was bathed in a white coffin of light, floating in darkness, holding a platter of meat carved from her own body. It was only a matter of time – years, months, weeks, who knows when you’re going to hit the wall – before it was Claire kneeling before St. Sasha the Star, freely giving of herself. Bloodless and heartless and triumphant.
Dr. Kettle was starting to chant, and I could hear my sister behind me, and the parishioners behind her: “Through him, all things are possible. All hail the Holy Star.”
I imagined how proud I was going to be, and swallowed greatness whole.
SCRAPS
by Max Booth III
The diner door chimes and by the time I turn around, coffee pot in hand, the boy’s already standing next to the PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED sign. All thoughts of taking my 2:30AM lunchbreak and smoking a cigarette in the alley while scrolling through my dead wife’s Facebook account vanish. My brain freezes at the sight of him. For a second, I swear to god I’m staring at my son, but that’s impossible. Muddy hair hangs past his shoulders, his body skeleton-thin, his skin pale, his eyes dark. He’s young—ten, eleven max. A rank odor rises. A garbage smell. A death smell. The boy had dragged the stench in from outside.
I set the coffee pot—freshly brewed—down on an empty table waiting to be busted and rush over to the checkout counter, slowing as I get closer, afraid of spooking him away.
“Holy shit, are you okay, kid?”
The boy wears a plain T-shirt that had probably once been white but is now mostly black and jeans with more holes than a drive-by victim. He’s barefoot, and judging from the dirt and blood smeared across his toes, he hasn’t owned shoes for quite some time now. A thin jagged cut runs across his face, from the right side of his forehead down to the left of his jaw, skipping over his blackened eye, sloping over his crooked nose, and digging through his lips.
He licks those lips now. “Hungry.”
I gently touch his shoulder and lead him across the diner. “Of course, come sit down, I’ll bring you something. Are you okay?”
“Hungry.”
Once he’s seated in an empty booth, I race into the kitchen in se
arch of something to bring him. On the counter next to the sink in queue to be tossed in the trash is a plate of fries and a half-eaten burger. I fill up a clean glass with tap water and bring that and the plate back out into the dining area. The boy’s head rests against the Formica tabletop and for one terrifying moment I’m convinced it’s too late and he’s already dead. Died of hunger, died of the smell attached to his presence, died of whatever caused him to be here, right now, at 2:30 in the morning, who the hell knows. I stand above him and clear my throat and wait. The boy stirs and raises his head. When he sees the food in my hand, his dark eyes widen.
But they do not brighten.
I place the plate and glass on the table and the boy dives into it, ravenous. I watch him feast, unsure of what to do with my hands, eventually settling on folding them behind my back. “So, uh, what’s going on with you? Should I...call the police? Do you need an ambulance? Are you hurt?”
The boy shakes his head as he chews. “No police. No ambulance.”
“Are you alone? Where are your parents?”
“No parents.”
“Okay, uh…” I scratch my head, wishing like hell I knew what to do. “Maybe you have some kind of other family I can call. Someone who could come get you?”
“No family.” The boy shakes his head again then swallows what was in his mouth and meets my concerned eyes. “Call no one.”
I lean forward, afraid to disturb the boy’s eating. “Can I get you anything else, at least?” The question comes out in the form of a timid whisper.
The boy nods enthusiastically, crumbs falling from his dirty mouth, and points at the plate. “More.”