by Luca Veste
SHADOWBOXER
By
Chris Rhatigan
Down to seven blinks per minute. Check the rear-view every thirty seconds.
Occurs to me that hopping on the interstate and driving til I couldn’t see is exactly what they expect me to do.
Been on the road fifteen hours. Drinking lukewarm Rockstar is no longer cutting it. Soon I’ll crash at some cockroach-infested motel.
Bet they’ve got that motel circled on a map in red marker. Already got a guy there ready to dispose of me.
Of course, I only sleep in fifteen-minute intervals. But those fifteen minutes, that’s where they get you.
Thirty miles of barren, muddy corn fields fly by. I take exit 289, town called Lone Field. Stop at a Casey’s, fill up the tank, slap water on my face, walk around a bit. None of it helps.
Pick up a pair of industrial orange snack cakes and pop them into my mouth. Don’t chew, just swallow. Like a duck. Shove the empty wrapper into the cute clerk’s soft hand. She rolls her eyes all the way around and rings it up.
I drive down the sad little Main Street – insurance office, bank, hairdresser that’s closed in the middle of the day. Only a pickup truck following. A quiet country road away from the interstate.
But that silence, it surrounds me. Presses down on the top of my head. Makes my ears hum and the top of my lip sweat.
I turn on the radio. Flip through the stations – God stuff, Right-wing blather, generic rock – I leave it on low. The sun is dying on the horizon like it’s giving up.
I glance at the rear-view. Double take. No mistaking it – black luxury car about a quarter mile back.
I punch the pedal a little harder.
***
I’m convinced I lost them back when I hung a sharp left down a dirt road and hooked up with State Route 56.
Haven’t seen them in eight minutes. Breathing almost back to steady. But the adrenalin wears off and exhaustion seeps in.
I’m pissing into an empty coffee cup when light catches off the rear-view. Look up midstream, urine spraying all over the center console and my jeans. I put the top back on the coffee cup and drop it in a cup holder.
Need to stay sharp – can’t do that chin-to-chest nod. Not with those two tiny pinpricks of light hovering in the distance.
Roll down the windows and put on one of the God stations full blast. Preacher talks about how he used to fill the void with alcohol. Drank bourbon every night, then every afternoon, then every morning. One day he picked up one of those Gideon Bibles and blah blah blah.
I don’t drink much, but now I want, desperately, a glass of amber-colored liquid, maybe with a few ice cubes. Want it to burn my throat, numb my soul.
Up ahead: A shape in the middle of the road. Doing at least eighty and the image assembles itself – a boy, clutching a blue blanket, darting across my lane.
I jerk the wheel left but I can’t stop.
Tires squeal like I slit their throats.
Drive right through him.
Complete stop in the middle of the highway. I’m strangling the steering wheel, eyes shut tight.
Wind whips around, rocks the car.
There was no thud. No scream. I must have missed him, but how?
I get out. Scent of manure and burned rubber slaps me. I run hard down the ditch and into the mud.
The stars and moon are bright out here. I scan for shadows against the night sky.
‘Hey!’ I yell.
Legs pumping as fast as I can. But every time I raise a foot it makes a sucking sound, and I’m twenty feet from the road.
‘Kid!’
I trip over a long piece of rusted metal. Face plant into the soybean field.
I lay there in the messy earth, each breath of cold air jagged and awful. I need to get up. But I’m blinking too much to count. Counting, it requires so much effort.
All I want is that drink, bourbon, in a glass, with ice…
I transport there so smoothly… Hotel bar of black marble, lighting at intimate, the drink a cool sting, little ring of condensation on the tiny napkin.
I pick up the napkin for closer inspection, for some reason I can’t recall what hotel I’m staying at, and I want to see the logo, but I can’t quite make it out, it’s fuzzy…
Then I see headlights.
BIO: Chris Rhatigan is the co-editor of the crime anthology Pulp Ink. He is also the mad scientist behind Death by Killing (death-by-killing.blogspot.com), a blog all about the world of short crime fiction.
ROLL ME AWAY
By
Patti Abbott
At least once a day, and certainly in bed at night, Barry Johnson reviewed the details of his final race. He knew this was a bad idea—more than one shrink had told him to recite poetry or the Ten Commandments instead—but it had become unavoidable. Like saying the rosary was for a devout Catholic.
His bike had been only seven months old but well conditioned from many weekend treks. He knew the bike. A dark-red Monster, it handled all terrains. He’d saved for the bike since high school—every dime he could lay his hands on for six years.
It was his second bike but a lot more powerful than the first, a used Honda he bought from the mechanic at the corner gas station—a junkyard purchase—but what else could he expect at that price? And not being a gear head, he had to rely on the guy’s skills and say so. A sprocket here, a crank shaft there, a cam chain shiny new, then finally something resembling a bike appeared.
He’d never taken to the ersatz Honda—always seemed like the piece of junk it was. Even the paint job was second- rate.
The Ducati was awesome—he liked that it wasn’t a rice burner—and the chicks flocked to him when he parked it outside a bar or at a track. Stroking the bike like it was a big red dick, asking him for rides. He took it out whenever he could find the time since its purchase, raced it twice before the Enduros up near the Dunes. After six months of a Kenpo karate class, he felt physically prepared. Calm and in command. Had a few rallies under his belt, but this would be his first time-card test.
The bike had been tuned at the dealer the day before. It wasn’t necessary, but that was the way he felt about it. He also took special care since he was a novice compared to the grayheads who’d been racing for decades. Fat men, whose asses bulged over their aftermarket gel seats, looked his bike over and shook their heads.
He’d only taken up motocross two years earlier—but always was a demon for speed. First skateboards as a kid, then stock cars, but only briefly. Cages made him itchy, trapped. That turned out to be the final irony, didn’t it? Back then, a time that seemed very long ago now, it was as if the car drove him—he never really felt one with it. So he moved on to the bikes. Liked leaning into a turn, feeling each shift in his stomach, vibrations in his calves. And the road beneath him, that was part of it too.
He did a shit job that paid okay because work didn’t matter. He came alive on the bike—loved riding fast. Taking off into the unknown—depopulated neighborhoods in Detroit that were as quiet as cemeteries, dirt roads in the midlands, or sandy trails far up north.
Racing required a series of rapid decisions, and he was good at making them. Had the instinct somehow. Loved the sound of motors, the smell of the oil, gas, grass, dirt, hearing the din, and finally, the roar of the crowd. It was his sport.
Until it wasn’t.
It’d been completely random—what happened that day—which made it both harder and easier to take, depending on his level of despair. Someone’s broken headlight scattered glass on the track-nobody even knew the fuckin’ thing was broken—and his front tire caught a piece, actually several pieces, someone told him later. He’d tried to lay it down when he saw how things were, tried to bring the bike under control, but the tire shredded after a few rotations and he smashed into a wall. First the bike hit the concrete with such force it vibrated uncontrollably, and then his body smacked the wall too, catapulting above the bike—as high as ten feet. A few more feet and he might
have cleared the wall entirely, landing lightly on the other side. The arbitrariness of it all—that was the hardest thing to stop dwelling on later.
‘Don’t move,’ someone kept telling him. No fuckin’ chance of that. If he had a body after that, he didn’t know it. Seemed to be floating above it all—above the track and himself—and wondering why there was no pain. But they, whoever they were, repeated the words ‘don’t move’ for hours it seemed, and he obeyed. Obeyed without trying to because he couldn’t have moved if it meant his life. Not even his head or arms at first.
Helicopters, ambulances, wheelchairs—these were his new vehicles. Hospitals, rehab centers, and finally home. His parents’ house, which had been redesigned in his absence, was now a place for his chair and medical equipment. He took over their room, their life.
Home. Four walls almost all the time now—true confinement—the ultimate cage. He knew other guys had vans fitted—custom deals—but to go where? Shopping at the mall, out to Applebees, a movie, maybe take in a race or two. No. None of it.
This is what he dreamed of every night. That he climbed on the Monster, drove miles up north with his old girlfriend, Michelle, flew into the ozone or whatever lay beyond the cliffs. He could live with that. Or rather die with it. Soaring and free, his choice.
But that wasn’t going to happen so he sat out on the porch or in the backyard whenever the weather was fine. His parents’ house—he’d never lived on his own and wouldn’t now—was consumed by his predicament. Whispery conferences over whether he could be left alone for a weekend trip to Traverse City, whether Mom or Dad would drive him for the rehab, whether there was enough money left to buy a new TV now that he watched it all the time, how to get Michelle to visit more often. Ever.
People going down the street—giving him that look. Folks looking at him like they were glad—whatever it was that put him in that chair—hadn’t happened to them.
Once a kid going down the street had asked, ‘What happened to you, Mister?’ ‘Afghanistan,’ he hollered back, then wondered where it even was.
Lived inside his head more and more. Shrink told him to take up some hobby, something to take him outside himself.
‘There’s a million things you can do,’ guy told him, handing him a video about wheelchair basketball. Maybe he’d try that, he told the shrink. He was good to go from the chest up. Maybe he’d be okay at it when those months of training in karate kicked in. But he never played the movie once, didn’t even take off the cellophane.
He never felt the bite of the mosquito, but his thigh swelled up. His parents, then his doctor, then the ER staff, looked at it. Doctors said the insect might have bitten him ten times, maybe more. Never felt a bite, an itch. Never felt anything. Fuck.
It took him a few weeks to die though, and it was still the crash he visited in his head. Dying seemed related to that—not to some dumb-ass bug. In his head, he was back on his bike, Michelle holding on tight, sailing into the ether off the sandstone cliff at Picture Rocks. Wind in his face felt so good, her breath on his neck even better. He would soar above all of it.
BIO: Patti Abbott is the author of the ebook MONKEY JUSTICE and co-editor of DISCOUNT NOIR. Upcoming stories will appear in BEAT TO A PULP: ROUND TWO, PULP MODERN, Beat to a Pulp (the zine), YELLOW MAMA, and Ed Gorman's Best Stories of 2011. She lives and works in Detroit.
I WANNA BE SEDATED
By
Chad Rohrbacher
At the exact moment of my death, I saw my boy, Neil. He was outside. I never realized just how small he was until I really looked at him in the yard. He waddled like a fat beaver then dove onto the plastic swing set seat, his arms out like he was some kind of bird. He hooted, floated back and forth, then slid off and did it all over again. That kid. That damn beautiful kid. I wish I watched him more like this, free, just experiencing the world. I love these years in the loop. He’d be the one saving turtles, protecting bugs. He’d be the one snuggling his momma’s lap and hugging her like I never did.
Rita had this goofy grin on her face when she gazed upon Neil swinging. Why shouldn’t she? She ate those moments up, savored them. She was a stunning woman. Long rose red hair, small lines in the corners of hers eyes like trails from stars. And her legs. Those legs could’ve made the Pope weep. I always stand next to her and try to grab her hand, point at our son, smile with her, instead, I’m silenced with loneliness and dread.
People are idiots. When they say, ‘I saw my whole life flash before my eyes’, they don’t have a fucking clue. I’ll tell you what it was; it was a blasting forward, a Marty Mcfly rocket jet, a gel-fueled lightning strike into the future. And then it stopped. And then it starts at my death, again, over and over and over.
It’s interesting to observe your own funeral. Aunt Trudy lined everybody up in front of the casket to take pictures. Said it was for her scrapbook. My pop just stared in the casket a long time. He was a whisper of a man. Hair silver. Grey eyes. I suppose I wouldn’t know what to say either. Over time, I wanted to stand before them, apologize, fall to my knees and beg for forgiveness, weep and holler and flay myself with a whip. I wanted Trudy with her larval-like face to raise that point and shoot and capture me in supplication.
Rita sat in the metal chair and cried the whole time and that made my boy cry. She refused to say anything about me. She was wailing and snotting and Neil gripped her tight and wouldn’t let go. It was too late, but I swear I could feel their bodies as I wrapped my ethereal form around them and cried. I bawl every time now. Father Schmidt said some nice words about redemption and afterlife, but the somber tones bumped up against the dock of morality. They really weren’t going anywhere.
Rita, you know, she just slipped into darkness. It ate her up. One night she lay in the tub, hair wet, eyes wet, tears mixing with bath water, and I don’t know why but I imagined that’s how holy water is truly made, a simple innocence offered up, desperation, a plea for deliverance. She fingered this razor blade, turning and turning it in front of her face. She hiccupped more tears. I scream at her. With each loop I try to grab her attention, tell her she can make it, to think of Neil. I do this every time even though I know the outcome. I can’t help myself. I loved her. Love her.
When Neil wandered in, she didn’t see him at first. He was still so small then. And he was quiet, observing her like a porch dog might regard Mormons riding up the drive on their bikes ready to sell Jesus. It was like somebody snapped Rita with a wet towel when she saw him. Rita’s arms flailed up sending water and soap bubbles all over. Her chest heaved. Neil giggled. He had white bubbles in his hair. They slid down his face leaving slug-like trails. Rita smiled and dabbed more suds on his nose. I wish I could share a simple smile, a touch of finger to face.
The darkness didn’t leave her, but she found relief in bottles of Amytal, and Nembutal. Over time she spent her days on the couch and nights chasing away days at the pub on the corner. Her hair got brittle. New and old face lines scarred her. She took up smoking and her teeth yellowed. I notice more each loop. She brings scumbags home and shoves Neil in his room. I tell her she’s too good for them. I tell the guys to leave. Spit obscenities. Scream that I’ll kill them. She’s my wife, for heaven’s sake. Then I go and sit with my son and we listen to the noise in silence. Water drips from our eyes.
Neil was a quiet kid as he got older. He went to school, played some, rode his BMX, watched his mother. He took everything in; I mean, nothing escaped that boy. As he got older, he thinned out, let his hair grow long, bought a leather jacket. He smoked dope. Whenever people asked him about me, I’d tell him to ignore them. He never heard me. He’d throw wild punches, got the shit beat out of him quite a few times on my behalf. Black eyes, swollen lips. I think someone broke a few of his ribs once but he didn’t go to the doctor. Rita was too stoned to take him. You know how hard it is to see your kid like that, all curled up with pain and rage?
He met this girl at an Evolutionary Tail concert. This girl was dancing with her eyes closed while
Neil stood stock still in the middle of the dance floor gazing at the stage lights. She bumped, he smiled, and they were in the bar’s utility closet an hour later.
When Neil went to tell Rita that this girl carried his child, my grandbaby, Rita was already dead in a pile of frothy vomit. Some loops, I hunch over her body trying to clean her up; other loops I stand next to Neil. Apologize. Tell him to focus on his coming child.
My grandson is charmed with blue eyes, dimples, a smile that’s smooth as a Miles Davis’ tune. They named him Mack, a good strong name. Man, I loved that kid even though I never met him. He had a good life. Has a real good life. It’s all the same anymore. All I know is it was something I never gave my own son. Of course, he never knew me, never had to deal with the questions. When I see Neil fumbling with his kid, I try and show him how to hold his arms, but he’s awkward, uncomfortable. The part that is most heart wrenching is when he follows in his mother’s footsteps. At that point in the loop I have to turn away, shield my eyes. If I could throw up, I would.
As I move forward, I feel every single damn emotion of my family, then I get this weird sensation, like a buzzing, like standing on a foot massager, but it ripples through my guts and makes me dizzy. I dry heave, then I feel my body on fire. Torched. My body is lit up, all my nerve endings screaming, even the insides of my skin, I swear I sense every organ, the stomach, liver, small intestines, every single one simmering and turning to ash, then I rise, a phoenix, back to the moment of my death: I’m standing there, her silky hair in one hand, my smooth cheek against hers, the warmth of her body radiating into mine, the heartbeat, the rhythm of it like music making my soul dance, the cold hard truth in my other hand, the strength of it, then the warm, viscous fluid running down my body, soaking my clothes, the ability to breathe again, and then the pop, a few more, and pain, my knee, my stomach, my chest, and then I’m falling, falling to the warehouse floor, falling into the dirt and dust, catching glimpses of the broken window as I twist midair, the rusting metal girders, the hole in the ceiling, and I’m falling on her, sharing blood with her, and it’s like this relief.