Dan wasn’t always an asshole to her. He used to read her dumb jokes off a dumb cartoon calendar that they both laughed at. He always asked her about her weekend. Then, eventually, he asked her about next weekend and suggested they do drinks, and when she asked if he meant friend drinks, his body language shifted and his goofy smile turned into an injured scowl. He said, in a clipped voice, that he hadn’t realized she had a boyfriend because her Facebook profile said she was single.
Now he gets up and goes to the window and presses the button that makes the shutter slide down, eating the sunlight.
Anger bubbles up in her gut. She wants to scream at him that she wakes up in the dark and goes home in the dark and the least he can do is let her have the one tiny beam of sun that helps her pretend she’s warm.
Instead, she focuses on her own glare-free monitor. The Kingston branch is still trying to use the old location system; she has to make them stop. The 172-page manual is lurking behind her browser as a PDF.
“You don’t mind, right?” Dan says. He’s staring, almost as if he knows she is researching rat poison on Wikipedia in a small, separate window.
“Nope,” she says, not meeting his eyes.
Before lunch, Claire stops in and asks if she read the email about the manual, about how they would like the revisions by the end of the week, as if the conversation in the bathroom was completely excised from her brain. Dominique assures her that she has read the email and has downloaded the PDF and will get to work on that as soon as the Kingston branch stops messaging her for help.
For lunch, Dominique takes the Tupperware out of her bag and pops it open, looks at the lentil salad inside and feels vaguely ill. She shovels a few cold bites into her mouth before she has to run to the bathroom. Her stomach is roiling. She gets on her knees, bows her head over the toilet bowl. The tile under her left kneecap is sticky with stray droplets of someone’s piss. She inhales the antiseptic smell of the toilet cleaner hooked to the edge of the bowl and wonders how close it is, chemically, to rat poison.
After lunch, her supervisor stops in and asks, in a paternal voice, if she’s doing okay. He heard she was a little under the weather. He puts his big hand on her shoulder, and she can feel all five of his paternal fingers through the thin fabric of her shirt. They feel like paws. She gives him the smile she didn’t give the Metro lady and says she is feeling just fine, thank you for asking, and Dan glares.
She thinks about shiny black haunches and naked whipping tails. Beady eyes, gnawing teeth. She thinks she can’t keep doing this, but she has thought that for years.
The sun is gone when she leaves the office. The dark always makes her jumpy; she hurries from one orange pool of streetlamp to the next, watching the shadows. She sees animal movement in a garbage bin and her stomach heaves. Not rats, though—squirrels, the black kind that made a nest under the hood of her neighbor’s car and chewed through the soy-based plastic parts of the engine.
The bus ride is an eternity. Her guts are a pressure cooker now, a building mudslide. Her head is spinning with all the things she could have said today, all the things she should have done. She is hollow and horribly full at the same time. She dreads arriving home. Her thumb picks out her mother’s number on her phone by muscle memory, but she doesn’t want to call her. Her mother already knows about the rat problem. Reminding her about it would just be selfish.
When the bus lets her out, she runs. She cuts across the first two lanes, waits in the middle for a truck to slam past, then books it the rest of the way. Her breath plumes out behind her in the cold. She dashes past the corner streetlamp, slip-sliding on the ice, and for a second her stretched black shadow is composed of a hundred smaller ones.
She grips the railing and leaps up the stairs to her front door; the metal is so cold it burns her bare hand. She forgot her mitts on the bus. It gives her a dim twinge of regret, because she dimly remembers someone knitted them for her, but that twinge is nothing compared to the sensation writhing all through her body. Her hand shakes and jabs left then right of the keyhole, adding new scratches to the scratched metal.
Saturn is on the couch. He watches impassively as she swings the door shut behind her and staggers into the hall. He has seen this before.
Dominique hurtles down the stairs into the basement. Her body is a hundred smaller ones swarming under insufficient skin. She collapses off the last step and the first rat erupts from her stomach, reopening the tiny scabbed welt she has inspected so often in the mirror, the one she cannot let anyone else see. Its fur is glossy black and slick with her fluids. It chitters and squeaks.
Another follows, and another and another, pouring out of her in a wave. She can’t tell if they are keen and vicious and beautiful, or if they are filthy, hideous. But she knows they are hers. She knows she has to kill them. The rats keep spilling out, scrabbling tiny paws against her stomach lining, tickling her abdominal muscle with their flicking tails. They’re ravenous how she’s ravenous, and they dive onto the traps.
A symphony of tiny cracks as metal beats bone, dying squeals. The rats climb over each other, sniffing for the bait. Sometimes she wishes they would turn the other way and eat her instead, but they never do. She curls up on the floor and waits for it to end. The wound in her belly slowly stitches itself shut. The trapped rats whose spines did not snap clean make small pitiful sounds. From somewhere up above her, Saturn gives a cautious meow.
When she can stand, she stands. She fingers the holes shredded through her shirt. Touches, just with the lightest brush of her fingertips, the welt on her stomach. Her breathing finally subsides. She feels better. She feels calm. It isn’t really so bad.
Dominique pulls a garbage bag from the box under the stairs and starts cleaning up, tossing the broken bodies and their traps inside. She wants to get to sleep a little earlier tonight. Tomorrow is another full day.
Permian Basin Blues
by Lucy A. Snyder
The sky’s the color of my old blue jeans,
and the land is pulled tight by drought.
All the fields are perfectly smooth,
planed and drawn and quartered
by old farmers and good ol’ boys
in their diesel-smoking tractors,
and everything is boxed off
into barbed-wire squares.
* * *
They say the air is clean and pure,
but there’s an overwhelming smell
coming from every corner of the town:
it reeks of sheep piss and cheap booze,
smoldering hostility and burning books,
dirty laundry and minimum-wage sweat.
People say they can’t smell it at all,
but I can’t take a single rotten breath.
* * *
My neighbors’ bodies are neat and clean,
but their brains are caked with the dust
of generations of low hopes and ignorant fear;
their lives were fossilized well before birth.
The tight minds of the old men who run
this town are walled in Biblical rock;
their thoughts are locked against the chaotic
joys of the weird, the wild and the young.
* * *
This place is little more than a roadcut,
and the stratification is plain to see.
Little white people live in big white houses
that stretch out like blank limestone slabs
bleaching on the sunny southern side of town.
But on the north side, peeling clapboard shacks
that contain the unfortunate children of Spain
sit like worn and crumbling sandstone fragments.
* * *
And here I sit, trapped between the strata,
a misplaced bit of flint or gneiss or granite,
an arrowhead from some alien tribe lodged
mysteriously amid these prehistoric layers
that bear down with unrelenting pressure
> until keen edges are ground into gray sand.
* * *
So I’ll drive out to some big, flat ranch,
strip down to the pink to let my skin breathe,
and I’ll dance for pleasure, I’ll dance for rain,
I will dance for lightning, I will dance for pain,
I’ll scream out at the emptiness until my lungs bleed
and try for the volume that will make the fossils stir
deep in the sterile ground and rise to the surface,
hard skeletal denizens of a long-dried ocean swimming
through layers of rock, wreaking a tectonic tsunami
that will shock the city from its flatland coma.
* * *
And if the rancher drives out, armed
with a shotgun and a look of confusion,
then I will just smile at him and say
that I’m just trying to make some waves.
* * *
Originally published Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Issue #7, October 2000. Reprinted in Sparks and Shadows in 2007.
Rage Against the Venting Machine
by Russell Nichols
They stand in line, outside in the dark, halos over their heads spinning black.
“Would you hurry the hell up?”
“Some of us got places to be.”
“You bet’ not be in there jacking off, swear to God.”
Inside the 64th Avenue venting machine, I don’t pay the users outside any mind. Truth is, they need me and they know it. If it wasn’t for me, there would be no moderator for Area D. If it wasn’t for me, they’d all be miserable, walking around mad at the damn world all the damn time. Loose cannons. Like the people living beyond city limits.
Like Sammy.
When I exit the booth with my bulky FlyBack toolcase, I blink a few times, adjusting to the darkness of the street, still without power. Usually takes me a good twenty minutes to do a full sweep, but this time I finish the booth scan in under fifteen.
“All clear,” I announce.
“All clear my ass,” one user says. “How come we still getting these blackouts?”
“I know, right?” another chimes in. “I been venting every day two years straight!”
“Out of my hands,” I tell them. “But the company’s working on it, so bear with us.”
I count about thirty users, deep scowls chiseled onto dark faces, captured by the holographic glow of mood halos. The first one, a frail church mother with a crooked jet-black wig and a green halo, limps forward. I hold out a free hand to help her inside.
She shoos me away. “I don’t need no help, Goldilocks,” she says, referring to my halo, spinning gold. Then steps into the booth and slides the soundproof door shut.
I walk across the street to my auto: a midnight-blue Ford Thunderbird, my dream car. Soon as I open the door, Sammy leans forward, frowning, his face covered in week-old scars. “You just gon’ let them niggas talk to you like that?”
I wave my hand, dismissive, climbing in. “It’s not personal.”
“Shit, you a better man than me,” he says. “That was me, we’d be having ourselves a conversation of the nonverbal variety.”
“Aren’t you all about Black empowerment these days?”
“Black, blue, whatever,” he says, “you not finna disrespect me.”
In my periphery, I see his left leg with the magnetic knee brace bouncing. That’s how you got fucked up in the first place, part of me wants to say. But I let it go. No point in arguing. My baby brother has his perspective and, misguided as it may be, I have to respect it.
“So we done now, right?” he says, rubbing his palms together. “How about we hit up the Coliseum? There’s a VR match happening tonight. C’mon, Negro, let’s get into some acción.”
“Auto: 73rd and Bancroft,” I command, and the car starts up, glides off. “Two more VMs to check, then I gotta pick up more water bottles for the house,” I tell Sammy.
What I don’t tell him is, we won’t be getting into any “acción,” not tonight, not tomorrow, not as long as he’s in my care. The only thing he needs to be getting into is a venting machine. Sammy sucks his teeth, reclines, flicking through half-naked 3D women on his palmtab. I’m only trying to protect him, from the world, from himself. Brother’s keeper and what have you.
Sammy gazes out the window, into the unending abyss of the streets. “Thought you said the VMs were supposed to be generating power or something.”
“They will. Eventually,” I tell him. “FlyBack is still in the testing phase with this pilot. It’s a public-private thing, so you know how those go.”
“Could take decades is what you saying.”
No use explaining. I know Sammy. He’ll tune out soon as he hears the words “electromagnetic induction.” He’ll doze off if I go on about how a transducer in the VMs will, ultimately, convert vibrations from angry voices into electrical energy that powers the grid. That kind of high-tech rollout takes time. But my baby brother couldn’t care less about the process. All he cares about are outcomes.
“Nothing happens overnight,” I tell him.
I keep my eyes forward, pretending not to see Sammy shaking his head with a smirk. Yeah, I know what he’s thinking. He’s thinking I’m crazy to be living here still, working in this city, working in these—what he would call squalid—conditions. That I’m getting “pimped by the White Man” and “screwed by The System.” That’s what he’s thinking.
But he couldn’t be more wrong.
“The tech’s not ready yet, but the VMs still make you feel a hundred-times better.”
“I don’t know,” he says. “If you go in the booth mad, come out feeling good, it seems like people would just find the smallest, most insignificant shit to get mad about, just to vent.”
“Long as they keep it to themselves, what’s the harm?”
“But it’s so isolated.” He moves his hands like he’s trying to hug the air. “Where’s the togetherness? The unity? There’s power in numbers.”
“Crime’s down twenty percent.”
He shrugs. “If you say so.” And reactivates his palmtab.
The venting machine on 73rd Avenue is one of the busiest in my area. Right across from the town center, foot traffic stays heavy. People using it as a de-stressor before or after shopping. I’m explaining this to Sammy as the auto glides to a stop, and the car announces that we’ve reached our destination.
But all my baby brother cares about is the fact: “Nothing’s changed at all.”
We grew up four blocks down. Used to do our weekly shopping here. And he’s right. It looks pretty much the same as it did back then. Except for this venting machine.
“Come with me,” I tell him, stepping out.
He scrunches up his face like I’m telling a bad joke. “Yeeeah. Nah, I’m good, man.”
“What if I said that? What if when you hit me up, talking about, ‘Big Bro, I got jumped at the club and I’m at the hospital, but I’m flying home in the morning, could you pick me up?’ What if I said, ‘Nah, I’m good, man.’”
I didn’t want to go there, with the guilt trip. But whether he knows it or not, Sammy needs help and, lucky him, I’m the VM man with the VIP pass. Sammy huffs and steps out.
The users we pass on the way over, they smile and salute with gold halos.
“Evening, Mr. Moderator,” they say over the rattling of rusty shopping carts.
And I’ll admit: It feels good to be getting this respect, especially in front of Sammy. Even though the others, the users still in line, halos spinning black and blue, don’t look too happy to see me coming.
“Maintenance check,” I announce, holding up my FlyBack moderator’s badge.
A collective groan erupts from the queue. Some leave the line, as usual, more inclined to brave the horde of shoppers or go home than wait twenty minutes.
“Ayo, bruh-bruh,” says a sweaty, heavyset man at the front of the line with a red halo. “Lemme just
do mine’s right quick. I got kids, they at the crib waiting on me to fix dinner—”
“No can do, chief,” I tell him. “If I make an exception for you—”
“Listen, I-I-I-I won’t even take the full two minutes.”
“I understand that, but—”
“You want my people to go hungry?!” he says, his halo blackening.
This happens every day, more or less. Somebody’s always looking for special treatment and has a whole story about why he or she deserves it. One user told me it was a court order, that the judge said she had to use a VM right then and there, or she’d get locked up. Another told me his mama was on her deathbed and prayed he’d get his “knucklehead into a VM machine” and it had to be before 7:00 p.m., or she’d croak.
“Sorry, chief,” I tell him.
The man sucks his teeth, slumps away and grumbles: “Bitch-ass nigga.”
And this sets Sammy off. “Watch your fucking mouth,” he says.
With my free hand, I hold Sammy back. “Don’t.”
Across the unlit street, users who stepped out of line turn around. The crowd gathers like storm clouds, and the night air takes on that electric charge it does before a fight breaks out.
The big man smirks. “I’ll knock your lights out, scarface, don’t try me.”
“Do something then, with your Kool-Aid Man-looking ass.”
I step between them. “No, stop, stop, alright—” I usher the man to the VM. “—go ahead. Do your thing, just … just get in.”
“That’s what I thought,” he says, stepping into the booth. He shuts the soundproof door.
I take a deep breath, my own halo spinning yellow, now, as folks go about their business. I look at Sammy, holding my hands out like: What the hell were you thinking? He just shakes his head, goes back to the auto.
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