Nightscript 1

by C M Muller

  He said that he saw things that were not there.

  He said the world is a terrible place.

  My face was an expression of slowly dawning terror, staring into the darkness and the artist staring back out at me.

  A Quiet Axe

  Michael Kelly

  Flat lands. Cracked. Heaving. The earth a dry grey tongue. Ghost wisps in the ancient, unsmiling sky. Something finally floating free. A dead thing.

  A shack, wind-worn and blanched, boards warped, the wind through the wood singing of madness, like the snap of old bone. Gutters droop under a weighty existence, frowning.

  Inside, a man and a woman. He was quick to violence was the man, like a sudden tornado, black and twisted. He’d beat her, and she’d fall, but she couldn’t leave. There was nowhere to go. Nothing for miles around but the arid dry land and dusty sky, both ceaseless and unending like her life.

  She would think of Becca sometimes, and she’d cry. She couldn’t keep it in, not like the man. She’d never seen him cry. He was stoic, dry-eyed, even as his fists preached to her. She wondered if he cried on the inside, if a veil of tears exploded inside his head with each fist-fall, coating his dark skull in a curtain of warm remorse or cold pity. Too much a man to show it. Even that time in the barn, when he was finished with the stray she’d been feeding, he wore a face of smooth stone, as cold and quiet as the axe in his hand. Hers’ though…hers’ was a face of sorrows, rutted like the forsaken earth.

  Him. Everything inside, bottled up. Nothing leaking out. He’d blamed her, and the land. Your fault, he’d said. Ain’t got no call for feeding strays, making them dependent. Can barely feed ourselves. Too many mouths. Face impassive, his body taut and still as a Cobra’s before a strike. The land is a dead thing. Shaking now. A dead thing.

  The woman wondered if the man ever thought about Becca. Wondered if he’d ever given her more than a passing thought, or if, in his eyes, she was just another stray. Thoughts of Becca were the only things keeping the woman tethered to this lifeless land. Like the dead, she yearned to be moor-less.

  She glanced to the floor, at the man. There was nothing inside him, really, after all. Not anymore. Just a spreading dark wetness, seeping through the floor into the parched and greedy earth.

  Outside, the weary sky frowned and the wind murmured of lunacy, like a quiet axe.

  Inside, the man gazed upward, dry-eyed and unblinking. The woman dried her hands in the folds of her dress and squinted through a dirt-smeared window at a barren world. She trembled, blinked, but didn’t weep. Not this time. She kept it inside, and it made her buoyant. After a time she went outside and floated away, a ghost of herself.

  The Death of Yatagarasu

  Bethany W. Pope

  Crow turns to face the first bluish light of dawn. His right eye stopped working some time ago; the last time he caught sight of himself (in the freshly-polished hubcap of a brand-new Mercedes) his reflection through that eye was very blurred—something milky-white was growing across the iris; an infection that he could not name. Possibly, it is a side-effect of aging. All of his nest-mates died winters ago; young enough so that their feathers were all in place, black, with a healthy green gloss. Now, the eye is totally blind.

  Crow considers himself peerless. He clacks his beak, scratches his scabrous leg.

  This morning is not particularly cool. The year is ripe and food is plentiful outside the fence. Still, his bones hurt, his joints. The last time he molted his feathers grew back patchy; his pinions swivel loose in their sockets and his pink skin shows. He rarely flies now; when he does he is clumsy. It is better to hop, much more energy efficient. Soaring is wonderful, he thinks, once you get up to where the thermals can carry you. But the climb is exhausting. His wings are too weak to bear the burden of his bulk.

  Crow’s left eye has also become unreliable. He bashes a wing on a tire as he exits the cave he found beneath the low maroon body of the latest model. It is one of thirty on the lot. He has his choice of nest-sites, even now that the trees are forbidden him.

  He has no competition.

  The razor-wire fence keeps out the cats and the guard dogs are well-fed; they do not bother him. The night watchman, a fat, lank-haired man who was probably born the same year Crow hatched, has never noticed him. The last time Crow saw him, the man was sitting on the front bumper of a lapis-blue model, sinking the chassis beneath the weight of his flabby blue-clad behind. He was chewing a Snickers bar and staring vacantly into the jaundiced light of a sodium arc lamp. Crow thinks, secretly, that the guard isn’t very bright—not that this stops him from feasting on the fat man’s leftovers.

  Crow has been living in this vast expanse of rubber and metal since before the first frost. When the snow fell he was sheltered by cars. The lot was regularly shoveled. Life here is easy. There aren’t any predators. In the daytime men and women wander around in suits, staring at clipboards, small glowing oblongs, and gabbling in their strange liquid tongue at the occasional customer, but if he remains silent, if he resists the urge to call, they rarely bother him. Food is not abundant, limited to fast-food scraps and the occasional lost insect, but he never has to fight for it. Every share is his.

  He survived the winter.

  If he had remained in the park, he would not have done so. He has become too slow. A cat would catch and make a meal of him. One of those roving bands of adolescent male rooks would find him and finish what the last group started; it took months for his wing to heal from that last attack. They came on him in a group, their black eyes hungry, their voices raw. He still bears a long and ragged scar (it stands naked and pink, a lightning-line running down from his left shoulder) left over from his last encounter with the barely-fledged juveniles who would have torn the flesh from his bones.

  Remembering the pain, he thinks, I would have been gamey, but protein is protein. In his heart, Crow does not blame them. He would have done the same, when he was young.

  As it was, he kicked, he fought, he pecked and scratched as hard as he could. Crow barely escaped them and his recovery was slow. He couldn’t do so now.

  Yes, he is safe here. Comfortable. He doesn’t know why it isn’t enough.

  Each night, he huddles down, fluffing his remaining feathers to trap his fleeting warmth. He closes his eyes (the quick and the dead) and up he goes into a sunset the same wonderful color as a mouse’s insides. He soars on thermals that flow like a blood-river, carrying his strong body across a landscape the shade of a ripening bruise. Flight is a dream the dawn shatters, and each dawn here is cold and gray. He is so tired of having a full belly and an empty heart.

  Crow wants out.

  He drags himself through rows of vehicles (stiff as rigor mortis) to the dumpster behind the low-slung boxy main building. This is where the deals are made, where papers are signed, handshakes exchanged, and meals eaten. The dumpster is full and a white box (insides coated with something sweet and lurid orange) has spilled onto the ground. He allows himself a happy grunt. He will not have to climb the metal box to plunder the top of the pile. He can conserve his energy for something greater.

  Crow eats.

  He scrapes citrus-tinted syrup (vaguely flavored with meat, slightly tainted with paper) into his obsidian bill. If he strains with his good eye he can see the contrast he makes with the colors and he is flushed with pleasure at the sight of it. His razor-sharp beak is his one undulled, unfaded feature. This syrup makes him feel young. It’s the high-sugar content. It’s the resemblance to dried blood.

  Fed, his body tricked to youth for a few minutes and the sun rising brighter every minute, he hops as fast as he can to the fence that divides the car lot from a small city park. The fence is ten feet tall and topped with loops of slicing wire. The park itself is overgrown and filth-littered. He can smell cat from here. The shrubs are poisoned with the urine of dogs. He can smell mice. There are nettles underneath all of the bushes and not a leaf of soothing burdock to be seen; it is all so vibrantly alive. He knows that it w
ill kill him.

  Crow doesn’t care.

  Crow hooks his beak into the lower corner of a chain-link diamond; he uses the strength of his last tool to haul his ragged body up. Weakly, he grips the links on either side of his head with his feet. He rests a moment, then reaches up to grasp another diamond. The climb is slow, and painful. The sun is quite high when he reaches the top.

  There is a gap between the top of the fence and the loops of brownish razor-wire that threaten to shave off his plumage at the cuticle. Ducking, he wedges himself beneath the blades. His back hurts, but he won’t have to endure it for long. He takes in this view, the patchy, yellowed grass, the weeds, the garbage. It is the last and richest visage of his life. Crow stretches out his neck and delivers three caws. They are as loud, as ugly and joyful as any lovestruck crow-song.

  Crow swallows. Coughs.

  Crow spreads his wings.

  Crow soars.

  The Cooing

  John Claude Smith

  “Creepy, eh?” Magdalene heard a slight clinking sound, not unlike glasses of champagne kissing on New Year’s Eve, as the warm wind delicately rattled the jagged shards of glass jutting out of the broken window pane in the abandoned house her girlfriend, Samantha, and she were exploring. Despite the heat, she wrapped her arms around herself a little tighter.

  Middle of the summer, it was so far from New Year’s Eve. Out here, it seemed so far away from everything.

  “Beautiful,” Sam said, clicking off picture after picture, enamored by their inspiring find: a splintered door frame; a toppled, torn sofa; a gaping hole in the hallway wall; and other signifiers of disrepair and forgotten dreams. On and on, she was in her preferred version of Heaven.

  Empty Houses was her new project. This abandoned farmhouse with its ravaged soul on full display, a dozen miles down the road from an equally depressing and discarded town, fascinated her deeply. She lived for desolation in all its spirit-draining glory.

  Magdalene went along for the ride, her fascination geared toward Sam. The things one did for love.

  Three other cars were parked along the dirt road across from the house. The desert stretched out beyond the vehicles, a pale sheen burning off the surface as the sun swelled with an intensity they had rarely ever experienced. The temperature settled between a hungry, flesh-singeing crematorium, and Hell. When walking past the other cars, Magdalene ran a slim finger across two of them, the dust thick and sticking, despite the hot breeze. It seemed to her the breeze did not blow any of it away, instead pressing it into the painted skin. The third car seemed more recent, but signs of any of the inhabitants were nowhere to be seen. They were probably already inside. Fellow explorers, lost in the wooden carcass.

  “Oh,” she said, startled by a cooing sound from somewhere outside. She’d spotted a few hawks lazily gliding across the fading blue into bone white sky on their way here, but this sound could not be one of theirs. A pigeon? A turtledove? She had no idea, but did not expect either of those birds were indigenous to the southwest. But what did she know?

  All she knew for sure was the silence in places like this made her ears ache. The cooing of a pigeon or some similarly inclined to sing bird shattered the silence in an unpleasant way.

  “Just a pigeon, honey. No reason to get all jumpy.”

  She wondered if it really was a pigeon, if pigeons haunted dreary places like this. Perhaps it was a Raven, Poe’s Raven, come to wish her a miserable day.

  Sam strolled into another room, sandals clapping at her progress, getting lost in her art, her obsessive ways. Magdalene followed dutifully behind, a stray puppy in need of attention.

  Again, the cooing rattled her spine. Something was amiss about it that made her dig her fingernails into her palms.

  “Sounds hoarse,” she said, more to break her escalating anxiety than in expecting a response, verbally dusting the bird away.

  “A horse? What are you talking about? It’s obviously a bird.”

  “No.” She sighed under her breath.

  Sam canted her head toward Magdalene, catching the sigh in her ears and registering Magdalene’s annoyance, along with her always brittle mood.

  “The cooing sound, it’s hoarse. Rough. Very un-bird-like.”

  “Dry up here. Perhaps the bird’s sick or thirsty. Why don’t you head out to the car and give it some of your water?”

  Magdalene sensed the exasperated tone propping up Sam’s words, ignored them, and entered the room behind her—a kitchen. Sam was smitten by dishes left dirty for eternity in a cluttered sink. The whirr and click of Sam’s camera was almost soothing, when the cooing ratcheted up a notch. Insistent and, like her, in need of attention.

  Sam ignored her, knowing any further conversation would only lead to the petty arguments that littered their relationship. Now was not the time for one. Never was the time for one...

  Magdalene shuffled her feet, hands buried in her denim pockets, watching Sam in her khaki shorts as she worked, wishing she had worn something that let her skin breathe and wanting away from this sad place. Why Sam found places like this interesting made no sense to her. Magdalene found darkness and melancholy in words appealing, her gothic heart smitten by those who wielded words in such a way, almost romantic. But not in real life, where such designs left her uneasy. Where’s the beauty here, despite Sam’s statement earlier that it was beautiful? Somebody, a family, had dreamed here, grew up here. Perhaps died here. Left it as barren as her heart often felt when she watched how Sam fully immersed herself in the foreboding vacancy of places like this. But places like this, where the dead landscape outside—cactus flourished, but the land was brown and riddled with weeds—drew Sam’s focus in a way Magdalene never felt she would, simply made her unhappy. Even jealous.

  A stunted scream cut through the cooing, as well as Sam’s concentration.

  “The hell was that?”

  “A reason to leave,” Magdalene said, pulling on Sam’s arm as goosebumps frolicked along hers. Sam gently, firmly peeled herself from Magdalene’s grasp, ears perked up as a cat’s and said, “So abrupt. Probably one of the people from the cars out front just stubbed a toe. Or found a nest of spiders.” She laughed, but there was no humor in it. She yelled out, “Hey, you all right?” to the silence, where it hung unattended for a smattering of seconds before the cooing recommenced.

  “There. See. It didn’t even scare off the bird, why should it scare us off?” She smiled at Magdalene, but, again, there was no joy in it. A false face for a false statement.

  Magdalene knew Sam was feigning courage as she often did, all the damn time. But not now, please. Don’t put up this act, let’s just go.

  “The cooing is closer.”

  “So what?”

  “Sounds harsh. Sounds wrong. And it’s getting closer.” Magdalene felt herself grow dizzy. From the heat or from this place, she wasn’t sure. She placed her hand on the kitchen table for balance, then immediately reclaimed it, wiping sticky fingers on her jeans. Sticky from what, she did not know. Dried jam? Spilled wine?

  “Give me a break, dear. It’s a goddamn bird. That’s all. Don’t make it something more than it is.” Sam’s momentary disquiet and faux courage was shoved aside by her irritation in her dear love, Magdalene’s, fragile manner. Her always fragile manner.

  “It’s in the house,” Magdalene said, backing away from Sam, her breath constricting in her chest. Tighter, tighter...

  “What is your problem?” Sam put her free hand to her hip after brushing one of the many loose strands of auburn hair out of her face, miffed to the teeth at Magdalene’s overdramatic ways, not that she should be. The girl lived in a state of perpetual worry.

  “It’s behind that door,” Magdalene said, pointing to the door at the far end of the kitchen. To another room, perhaps a basement; the bird; the cooing.

  “It’s a fucking pigeon, Maggie. Just a bird. God, I hate how you’re always such a scaredy-cat.”

  The cooing echoed loud off the humid confines of the k
itchen. Sam had to admit it was rather discomfiting, but battened down the hatches of her fear and said, “Look. I’m going to open that door and kick the little bastard to Timbuktu. Then I’m going to finish exploring this place while you step outside and do whatever the fuck you need to do to simmer yourself down. Head to the car and read some Keats or Shelley like you always do. Bury yourself in the past.”

  “No, baby,” she said, hurt by the intent of Sam’s words, yet more disturbed by the scene playing out to grim completion. “Let’s go...”

  Magdalene’s face was contorted into a mask of dread so complete Sam almost pulled up the camera and took a photo of it.

  Magdalene knew when Sam got set in her ways, there was no turning back. She bumped into the wall, not even registering she had been backing out of the room, her instincts set on escape. The entrance was to her left, but she chose to scrunch down against the wall and let this all play out. Let Sam be right again as she kicked the bird to Timbuktu. Nonetheless, she hugged her knees to her damp, Bauhaus’ Bela Lugosi’s Dead t-shirt, her sweat-soaked breasts.

  The cooing was like a suffocating blanket, but Sam ignored her own instincts, instead set on a course for making her point and moving forward.

  “Scaredy-cat,” she said, a snort of exasperation as she twisted the much colder than she would have expected knob to the door, paint peeling to the damaged wood below—almost as if fingernails had clawed at it, she thought—and swung it open.

  “Here birdy-birdy,” she said, before the birdy-birdy’s wings were clipped by confusion.