Mythic Journeys

by Paula Guran

There are looping, curving walls on either side of him. Above him, far above, the sky is dazzling, fluorescently white.

  A flash across the heavens of rose-colored clouds. They press down upon him, soft and heavy. They depart. A rain of saltwater begins, and splashes through the narrow passage he inhabits. He hears his love’s voice, whispering to him, but he can’t find her. Her voice is everywhere, shaking the walls, shaking the sky.

  “I have you,” she says. “You’re with me. Don’t worry.”

  But he can’t see her. He’s frightened.

  Something has started singing, somewhere, a horrible, beautiful, sugary roar. He’s suddenly hit by a memory of fucking his wife, on the floor surrounded by flowers that had his face. They both failed to come, bewildered by lack. It was years after the beginning, back then, but still nowhere near the end.

  “I have you,” his beloved whispers. “You’re safe with me. I know the way.” He wonders if he’s imagining her.

  The walls shake around him. He can feel her heartbeat, moving the maze, and his own heart returns to beating a counterpoint, however tiny in comparison.

  He opens his hand and finds a ball of string in it.

  The witch and the magician fumble in the car on the way to her place. Her sleeved blanket is rumpled. His top hat and tuxedo have turned to ponytail and hoodie. He may or may not be wearing a nude-colored unitard beneath his clothes. Old habits.

  “Unbelievable dick,” she says, not crying yet. “He deserves this.”

  “Believable,” he says. “Some people are idiots. She deserves this. I think maybe she never loved me.”

  He’s looking at the witch’s black curls, at the way her red lipstick is smeared out from the corner of her lip. He’s thinking about his rabbit, working its way through her digestive tract. She’s still wearing the fish-net stockings he’d thought she conjured.

  “It’s hard to make fishnets look right,” she says, turning her face toward his. Her eyelashes are wet. “They’re complicated geometry.”

  He pulls an ancient Roman coin from behind her ear, clacking awkwardly against her earrings. She looks at him, half-smiling, and then pulls a tiny white rabbit from out of his hoodie. He’s stunned.

  “It seemed wasteful to let it stay dead,” she says.

  He puts his shaking hand on her knee. She moves his hand to inside her blanket. He takes off his glasses. She takes off her bra.

  There are still people in madhouses and mazes. There are still monsters. Love is still as stupid and delirious as it ever was.

  The monster in the middle of the labyrinth opens its mouth. It starts to sing for someone to bring it what it wants, its claws trembling, its tail lashing, its eyes wide and mascaraed to look wider, its horns multiplying until the ceiling is scratched and its own face is bloody.

  The monster screams for honey, for sugar, for love, and its world comes into existence around it. Bends and twists, dead ends, whorling curves and barricades and false walls, all leading, at last, to the tiny room at the center of the maze, where the monster lives alone.

  The other thing that’s always being forgotten, the other thing that no one remembers, is that monsters have hearts, just as everyone else does.

  Here, in the middle of the maze, the monster sings for sweetness. As it does, it holds its own heart in its hands and breaks it, over and over and over.

  And over.

  “Zhuyin”

  JOHN SHIRLEY

  The only reason they went into Burned Oak, California, on that smoldering summer day was because of Logan’s thirteenth birthday. Bridey was taking Logan for a birthday hamburger and shake in town, which is what Logan asked for. Logan was excited about it, in her quiet inward way, because she and Bridey—her mother—had spent most of the summer on the farm, with only the animals and the occasional visit from the livestock veterinarian. Bridey was reluctant to come to town. She made excuses; she even went to the considerable expense of having groceries delivered.

  Bridey parked the old Toyota pickup across the highway from Meaty Mary’s Café. She turned off the engine and climbed out with a certain weariness. She was wearing her yellow sunglasses and sunhat and a yellow sundress.

  Logan got out in a hurry. She wore her San Diego Padres baseball cap, shorts, thongs, and a white blouse. The sweat started on her forehead the instant she stepped onto the baking road. Blinking in the hot sun, Logan flapped along in her thongs close behind her mother.

  Logan noticed a pretty blond teenage girl sitting on the shaded stoop of the hardware store next to Mary’s. The girl was frowning at her smart phone. Her rather strident makeup had been selected to match her very short blue and red flower-print dress. She glanced up, and her smirking inspection made Logan feel she should have worn sneakers and a nicer blouse, maybe even a dress. She only had one dress that still fit her, and she’d only worn it one time since school.

  Bridey and Logan got across the highway just ahead of an enormous double-trailer truck carrying boron from the mine; the semi rumbled by, not fast but so weightily Logan felt the wooden walkway shiver under her at the café’s door. Burned Oak tried to keep an old-fashioned veneer, with false front buildings and wooden walkways. The little town, sparsely edging the Southeastern California highway, was aware that it was rustic and, perhaps, tourists could be encouraged to regard it as quaint.

  To the left of the café’s front door a noisy air conditioner drooled rusty water. To the right, a big Sunshine Orange Soda thermometer was screwed to the wood.

  Logan followed her mom into Mary’s. The café was almost cold after a ride in a truck with a broken AC. It was Sunday afternoon and there were a good many people—miners and shopkeepers and their wives—all looking at Bridey and Logan as if remembering they were from around here but not sure exactly who they were. Her mother was a modishly attractive brunette with short hair and large dark eyes, and she was a magnet for curious looks.

  Logan and her mother sat at the counter because Bridey believed Logan liked to watch the shakes being made, an impression outdated by ten years.

  A Mexican cook looked at them from behind his service window. He pointed to Logan’s baseball cap. “Hey, the Padres! I used to go see the Padres play, back in San Diego! Nice ballpark there.”

  Logan smiled and gave him a thumbs up. “Padres!”

  She and Dad had gone six times to see the team at Petco Park. He loved baseball more than he’d loved the Padres. Maybe still loved it, if he was alive. There were no more tickets to major league games after they moved out here to be near the Sierra Butte Army base. Just the two of them, then, her and Dad at the farm—which wasn’t really a working farm, though there was a milk cow, a bull, and some horses who were supposed to breed colts. Logan had been there most of a school year, Dad working on his classified project at the base. She didn’t mind making her own dinner, or the interminable bus ride to the middle school in Quarryville, miles and miles with a bunch of kids who never talked to her. True, there was that girl Brinda, with the big wine-mark on her face, and that spotty-faced boy, Erwin, who liked to tell her, breathlessly and cluelessly, about how he was breeding some kind of Japanese cattle for the FFA. Nice kid, anyway.

  But then, Dad . . .

  Don’t think about Dad today, she told herself. Birthday stuff. Seeing town with Mom. Think about that.

  Meaty Mary’s waitress was an elderly white lady with bright red lipstick and vividly dyed orange hair caught up in an old fashioned waitress’s cap. She had arching, drawn-on eyebrows. “How you doing, honey?” she said, setting her little notebook on the counter. She smiled at Logan. There was some lipstick on her dentures. Lana was embroidered on her blouse.

  “Okay.” Logan hoped that Bridey wouldn’t mention the birthday.

  The waitress looked at Bridey. “Ma’am? Getcha something?”

  Bridey ordered for both of them and Lana wrote it down. Then she looked Logan and Bridey over, and screwed her mouth up like an early television comedy actress, her head cocked. “You’d be
. . . Bridey? Married to Harve Kelly?”

  “I would be her, yes,” said Bridey dryly, taking off her sunglasses. “Except that Harve has passed on.”

  “He’s missing in action,” Logan corrected, voice low but firm. “Overseas. In Tunisia.”

  “The Army says . . .” Bridey let it trail off, and shrugged. “He’s missing in action.”

  “Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry, sweetie!” Lana said, her cartoon eyebrows knitting. “He’s . . . I thought he was stationed over here on some research thing? They put him into combat overseas?”

  Bridey adjusted her silverware. “Field testing something over there—I don’t know what exactly.” Her voice was almost inaudible.

  Lana patted Bridey’s hand. “I’ll get your burgers and fries . . . and I won’t forget those shakes. One vanilla, one strawberry.”

  They ate and drank in silence, Logan stealing a glance now and then at Bridey.

  Since the day Bridey had shown up at the farm, Logan had never, ever called Bridey “Mom” or “Mother.” An ambitious lawyer for a while, Bridey had broken up with Dad when Logan was small. Apart from Christmas presents shipped from an internet site, she had been out of Logan’s life for years until Dad went missing. Just didn’t come home one day. She called the base, they said they’d look into it—and after three days alone at the farm, Bridey showed up with some papers from the Army and told her that Dad was overseas and hadn’t come back from a mission and, “As your mother, it’s my responsibility to take care of you, so . . . here I am.”

  To be fair, she’d only said it that cold way because Logan had been crying and yelling at her and saying she wanted to talk to her dad on the phone and she didn’t believe he would leave without telling her he was going, she could take care of herself and she didn’t even want Bridey to take care of her.

  But Bridey had stayed, and Dad hadn’t come home.

  Two months of Bridey working from the farm, using the internet, some sort of legal consultant now, with Logan keeping to herself and Bridey sporadically dating a middle-aged Army captain from the base, a guy named Miles Winn. And sometimes a young sergeant named Chris something.

  Then the word had come that Dad was listed officially MIA in some unspecified North African military disaster, possibly an encounter with an Islamic State spin-off.

  Bridey wasn’t dating Miles now—coming home one night she muttered something, about a fight with him. “He was hounding me. Hassling me about dating Chris.” That was all she’d say. But a button was torn from her blouse, a small hole ripped where it had been.

  Bridey preferred Chris anyway—only, Chris hadn’t been around in weeks. Which was maybe part of why Bridey was so pensive and silent lately.

  Finishing her shake, Logan mentally rehearsed the speech for the ride home. I can live with Aunt Tracy in Riverside, we talked online and she said I could stay with her. I don’t want to stay here and you won’t have to take care of me and I’ll give the Army my contact information for when they find Dad.

  Maybe she was tired of trying to “do the right thing.” Maybe she’d let her leave.

  The sun was still blazing when they returned across the highway to the truck. They climbed in, sweating in the even hotter pick up. Bridey frowned over her purse as she looked for the keys.

  “Can we go to the library, on the way?” Logan asked.

  “The library? I doubt it’s open.” Bridey put the key in the starter and turned it. The key made a doleful clicking sound.

  “I doubt it’s not open, Bridey. It’s air conditioned. I want to see if they got the book I ordered.”

  Bridey’s frown deepened as she tried the key again. The engine wasn’t turning over. Click, click, click. “You have a book to return, before you can check anything out.”

  “I have the book here, it’s under the seat.”

  “Logan, hush—the car won’t start. I need to figure this out . . .”

  She tried again. Nothing but clicking.

  “Take the key out and put it in again,” Logan suggested.

  “It’s not like rebooting a computer.” But she did try it. The starter still just clicked. “We have half a tank of gas, so it’s not that. Shit.”

  They tried for a few minutes more, and then heat drove them out of the truck. They went back into the café, where Bridey, scowling now, called the tow truck at Milburn’s Car Repairs.

  It was after five before Bridey let her walk down to the library. She got there just as Erwin was coming out, a few hefty books unsteadily tucked under his skinny arm. “Oh, hi Logan.” At school he’d been fairly cheerful, now he had the expression of someone in a hospital waiting room expecting bad news.

  “Hi. Are they closed?”

  He nodded. “Closing right now.” He looked glumly at the ground.

  “Are you . . .” Logan broke off. She didn’t know him well enough to ask him why he was so upset. She nodded toward his books. “Are you reading about, um, animal husbandry?”

  “No. About predators.” He looked out toward the hills overlooking the town. “California predators. Migration of cougars and like that. My cattle . . .” His mouth buckled and he looked close to crying.

  “Something attacked those cows . . . the cattle you were raising?”

  He gave a single quick nod. “Yeah. Something killed them all.”

  “All of them?”

  “Didn’t even leave much behind. Tore them up, ate ’em. Could be coyotes, even wolves—but no tracks.” He took a deep breath. “I got to catch the last bus home.”

  “Sure. I’m walking up to the garage.” Logan dropped her book in the “Return” slot. “If you’re going that way.”

  Erwin walked with her up to Milburn’s Car Repair, both of them silent, squinting against the maliciously angled sunlight. Her thongs seemed extra noisy on the sucking soft asphalt. When they got there he turned, smiled shyly at her—a touch of gratitude in that smile—and walked on.

  Logan went into the cluttered, oil-redolent garage office. Bridey was standing by the window, chewing her lower lip and looking anxiously out at the empty street.

  “Library was closed,” Logan said. “I dropped off the book.”

  Bridey gave the faintest of nods.

  Logan sat in an old wooden chair—and almost at the same instant, Miles came in. Miles Winn. He was loosening his tie, carrying his Army captain’s jacket over the other arm.

  Bridey turned him a cold, heavy look. “Just to make the day complete.”

  Miles was a round-faced man, a little plump, with sweat on his wide forehead. He took off his cap, wiped his face with a sleeve and said, “Wow. Still hot. I saw your truck in the garage there . . .”

  “Yep, there it is,” Bridey said, voice tinder dry.

  Miles nodded pointlessly. “I talked to Milburn. He doesn’t think you’ll get it fixed today. You need a ride?”

  “I don’t, no,” Bridey said, her voice clipped. She looked out the window again.

  He turned his hat in his hand. Logan was surprised at the way he was looking at Bridey—sucking air through clenched teeth and staring at her without blinking. Then he turned briskly away and walked out without a word.

  “Damn,” Logan said. “What happened with you guys?”

  “He’s been harassing me, is all. I’m going to report him to his commander. Don’t worry about it.”

  “But—”

  Milburn came in, then, wiping grease from his hands with a red rag, his incomplete smile stretching his thin red face. “Well, we got to order a part. New distributor. Don’t have it for that model.”

  “How soon?” Bridey asked, getting wearily up from the plastic chair.

  “Maybe tomorrow afternoon. If they have it in Quarryville.”

  “I can give you a ride after work,” he went on. “But that’ll be after seven-thirty, or so.”

  It was eight-thirty before they were bouncing and swaying along the curving country road, all three of them in the tow truck’s big front seat. Milburn was s
till wearing his coveralls; his blackened fingers left marks on the steering wheel. Logan was glad she was sitting by the window. She didn’t feel comfortable around Milburn.

  She looked out across at an uncultivated field thick with a tall yellow-flowered weeds. The sun was barely down; the western horizon was still a brooding scarlet.

  They were still half an hour from the farm when Milburn said, “You know, that distributor—looked like someone cut those wires.”

  Bridey stared at Milburn. “Cut the wires? Why didn’t you tell us this back at the garage, that someone cut the wires? I’d have called the sheriff!”

  “Because—” He licked his lips. “Captain Winn told me not to say anything. Said he’d take care of it. He thought it was somebody pranking you. He wanted to handle it.”

  Logan gaped at him. “Miles told you not to tell us?”

  “He—Miles is not a guy you cross. People in town, we learn that.” He shook his head.

  Bridey swore under her breath. Then she asked, “Christ, Milburn—couldn’t you have just . . . I don’t know . . . spliced the wires or something?”

  He grimaced—he had a scowl as big as his grin. “No ma’am, you wouldn’ta been sure to get all the way home, with spliced wires. Now, what I’m thinking—”

  “There’s something in the road!” Bridey said suddenly, pointing.

  Logan clutched at the dashboard as Milburn hit the brakes. They swerved to a stop about fifty feet from a big tree-trunk lying across the highway. In the headlights it looked glossy black. Maybe the bark had been removed, Logan thought.

  Both ends of the trunk stretching across the road were hidden in shadow under the fringing oaks.

  “Oh god, a fallen tree!” Bridey said. “That figures. That just fits right goddamn in with this whole damn day. Can you drive around it?”

  “Well now, I don’t know, with that woods there. Maybe I could tow it out the way. Gotta have a look.” He switched off the engine, pocketed the keys, and climbed out of the truck.

  Logan watched Milburn walk into the overlapping circles of headlight glow. He stopped and stared, looking right and left along the tree trunk.