Nightscript 1

by C M Muller

  The towering figure was adorned with an abundance of feathers stuck to its naked, muscular frame with blood. Barbwire was threaded into the flesh along the sides of its torso and the insides of its arms, indicative of an attempt to make wings; feathers were stuck there as well. Dried, crusted blood coagulated at the intersection of flesh and metal. Fresh blood dripped moistly from its exaggerated leer, accentuating its cockeyed gaze. The leer was set back behind a metal and mesh makeshift beak.

  Sam gasped, breath released, surrender at hand. Her legs gave out as she stumbled backwards, landing hard on the wooden chair at the head of the table.

  Magdalene started to whimper as a passage from one of her favorite books, Alberto Savinio’s Lives of the Gods, flashed within the dimming light of her thoughts: “Don’t judge me by what you see now; I don’t take care of myself, my sufferings have sharpened my beak, and I do nothing but laugh.” She pulled her legs even closer, a taut, trembling ball, and tried to make herself smaller. Tried to disappear.

  “Coo, coo,” it said, a throaty, ugly sound—wrong as Magdalene had suggested; as she had known—as it stepped into the room….

  A Knife in My Drawer

  Zdravka Evtimova

  I was afraid.

  Sometimes the sea was quiet and the sun was in the sky all the time, or so I thought. I was tempted to run to the shore and get a swim, but I suspected a storm would break the minute I’d touch the water. That was my imagination of course. I could hear the wind roar and howl and the waves hurled masses of cold rage against the other side of the page. I wrote a short story on the page, but on its other side the ocean growled. The paper was the wall that separated me from the endless freezing water. At times, I asked myself what would happen if I bored a hole in the page, I had even bought a penknife which I kept on my desk. I often forgot what I was writing as I sat there lost, motionless, listening.

  “What are you doing?” Len, my husband, asked and I thought I saw fright in his eyes. I didn’t tell him about the crags, the surf, the waves hitting against the rocks. I didn’t tell him I heard screams of dying birds but he sensed something had gone wrong with me.

  “You are unhappy your stories don’t sell,” he muttered. “Don’t be. Stories are nothing. Come here.”

  When I was with him I couldn’t hear the ocean. I was afraid I would miss the rare sunny hours when the waves slept and barely touched the paper on the other side. Those were the prettiest days in my life. I glued my ear to the paper and listened. At first it was only the sigh of rippling water, then sands whispered and the shore was so near I could feel its pebbles on the tips of my fingers.

  “You don’t speak to our son,” Len said. “He needs you. You don’t smile at him. You don’t notice me.”

  We had a small house on the shore of the Black Sea. It was Len who bought it. I had never liked the sea. It raged and thundered in winter, in summer tourists infested the shore and the beach was full of them. I turned my back to the waves. Sometimes I swam at night when the beach was a sigh in the air. Then the surf and the night blended and the shore touched the page with the ocean I had left on my desk.

  “Maybe I am in love with another woman,” Len, my husband, said.

  What a funny man he is, I thought. You are free to be in love with anyone you want. You are free but I am not, Len. I want to go behind the page.

  “Mother, why don’t you write on your computer?” my son asked. “You write nothing on that piece of paper. You are constantly staring at it. There’s nothing behind it, Mother.”

  But I heard slight barely audible tapping on the other side of the page. At first I thought it was a pebble that had hit the paper. Then fear seized me. I thought the sharp edges would cut a hole and my page would be torn into pieces. I panicked: what if the water burst into the house. My son was in his room. My son!

  “Do you want me to take you to the other side?” I asked the boy. “There are sunny days there, and the waves are quiet like the pictures on the walls in your room. The water is warm.”

  “I like the Black Sea more than your page,” my son said. “Your page is a lie. You care about an empty piece of paper.”

  The tapping sound on my page got stronger. I could swear somebody was typing on the other side. The surf was writing a short story for its shore.

  The noise stopped abruptly and then the sunniest day behind the page began. I could swear there were seagulls flitting over the surface of the water, the sun shone, and infinity loved me. I reached for the penknife that lay on my desk. I wanted to get there, behind the page.

  “I have to go,” Len, my husband, said.

  “Go,” I told him. “You are a free man.”

  “You used to be so jealous,” he breathed. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “It’s what she sees behind the paper,” my son said. “The page’s changed her.”

  They’d been gone for a month, my son and my husband, or so I thought. I had not written any stories. I described the sounds the water was making. They were magnificent and powerful. The page was the only barrier that cut me off from my dreams. Maybe Len and my son were at home all the time. Yes, somebody cooked food for me, and I didn’t care what had happened to the woman Len was in love with. The tapping sounds on the other side of the paper continued. The ocean was friendly and I thought of the writer on the other side of the page. He was not as tall and handsome as my husband. I believed his face was brown with the sun, and he was tired because he had been writing on the water months on end, and there was no one to read his fairy tales. I felt sorry for him and I tapped the page with a sharp pencil. He answered me. He tapped the paper so carefully, so timidly I could have cried.

  “There is no ocean behind the paper and there is no one typing there,” my husband who was in love with another woman said. “I want you to be happy the way you were before you found the notebook with a single page in it.”

  He didn’t know these were the loveliest hours redolent of salty water, soothing with the shrieks of seagulls. Was the ocean a string of days I had missed, days that had gone leaving no memory, no trace? Who had settled on the other side of the paper? I lived with my stories in the smallest room, in the unreality of water, on the shore of an angry black sea. I had a husband who was in love with another woman and a son who needed my attention all the time. They were not a part of my happy days. Maybe the shore on the other side of the page was the place where death waited for me, tapping ever so gently on the thin white sheet, letting me know it was much more real than my uneventful life, and the short story I’d printed on the paper was a door to oceans I had never seen. Was it my hope to go there that made a difference? The man, the one who was not very tall and handsome, lived in the story.

  He had a long purple scar on his cheek. I like your blue T-shirt, he had said to me. I’ll come and find you no matter what. And I’ll bring you a blue tulip. There are no blue tulips, the woman who lived in my short story had said. I was that woman. I lived in the words and the paper pulled me out of the stormy waters. I’ll bring you a blue tulip, the man repeated and the story ended abruptly. Maybe the biting winds behind the page were my panic I’d never see the tulip. My hopes surged, gleamed then were gone, and I knew they would not come back. My husband’s shadow was my home, my room was made of fears, and the waves behind the page hated the night.

  “I’ve torn the page from your notebook,” my husband said. “I burned it.”

  I froze in my tracks. I had no notebook and no ocean. No soothing smell of salt and infinity. I looked at my desk horrified.

  “Our son needs you. I need you,” my husband said. “I want you to be healthy. There was nothing behind that page. Nothing.”

  In the evening, I cooked potato soup for them. In the morning, I took my son to the zoo. I hadn’t taken him anywhere for months. We ate ice-cream and sandwiches, he told me tales. I listened, I listened hard. The waves were gone. There was no ocean and no seagulls. My son babbled on. My husband brought me flowers and suggested the three
of us go to France, to the castles on the Loire, and the French Riviera. I wanted to stay home. I bought a new notebook, and then another one. None of their pages separated me from an ocean of fears and hopes, from squalls and tales of screaming waves. I locked myself in the room and listened. I glued blank pages on the wall and nothing happened. Death and fears had left me, hopes had left me too.

  My husband brought me flowers almost every day; my son was happy and cheerful. We invited friends and threw parties. You are beautiful, Anna. You are more beautiful than before. I am so happy you are back, my husband said. He didn’t know I kept a sheet of crumpled paper glued to my skin. I prayed to bring the ocean back to me. But the salty wind was gone.

  I took a job in the local library. I cooked delicious meals for my family, I took long walks with friends, and I wrote short stories and fairy tales.

  “We can go to see the castles on the Loire, what do you think?” my husband said.

  I thought I wanted to go.

  “I’m glad the yellow rings under your eyes are gone. I’m glad you smile again.”

  Rarely, at night I heard the waves beat against sharp stones. I heard screams of seagulls, I saw the page again and I wrote on it. The endless water glowed, I wanted to swim to the shore, and I sensed the wind slept in the waves. Very rarely, I heard the tapping sounds and deep in my memories the short story gleamed, pale and silvery, like a shadow of a kite, like a song I had forgotten long ago but it was in the air I breathed.

  I was a happy woman again. I had my job and my family. The ocean had vanished and the wind had died. I was free.

  On the day before we started for the ancient castles on the Loire, my son and my husband went to buy a new suitcase. I was in the kitchen cooking lunch when the front door bell rang.

  “Coming,” I called out thinking it was my husband with the new suitcase.

  Out of breath, I ran to see it.

  A man, not very tall, not very handsome, stood in the door. A long scarlet scar ran down his cheek. I looked at it. I looked at it and could not breathe.

  “This is for you,” the man said.

  He gave me a flower, a tulip.

  It was blue. Impossibly blue.

  On Balance

  Jason A. Wyckoff

  Peak season ends with Labor Day, but thriftier tourists continue to rent the beach houses through September. Hurricane season is in full swing by October, and if it is difficult to find lodging then, it is only because some houses are shut for the season and some others are occupied by their actual owners, anxious to enjoy the last of the warm weather as the winds allow.

  I preferred this time of year to take my vacation. I did not fish or frolic in the surf, and swam but rarely. I was contented to stroll aimlessly, my slacks rolled to my knees. When I became tired, or found a particularly quiet or attractive spot, I sat in the sand and watched the surf.

  On one such occasion, I noticed a man with a metal detector sweeping along the base of the dunes a hundred feet from my repose. Dispel any romantic notions you have of his endeavor—such beach-combers have little expectation of discovering sunken doubloons swept ashore; they troll for lost tourist jewelry. This character struck me as a semi-ambulatory melted waxwork: from his drooping head down through the slack of his faded clothes. As I watched him shake his tool roughly and then flip the bottom plate to his face with some unknowable inquiry, I felt instinctively his last day on earth would involve the routine cleaning of a firearm. Several times the man stopped to pick something up. Loose change was pocketed; rejected objects were tossed carelessly into the rushes. Just as I lost interest and looked away I heard a particularly loud squeal emanate from his machine. I watched as he set the metal detector aside and used both hands to dig into the sand. He straightened, holding some object I could not see. He peered closely at it and turned it over several times. Then he looked off towards the surf as though weighing a decision of some import. He repeated the process twice more. I was surprised to see him shrug and toss the thing aside indifferently before resuming his hunt.

  I attempted to return to my thoughtless ocean vigil, but I found myself distracted. I couldn’t help but wonder what sort of thing would cause the treasure-seeker to act in that exact way—what was it that could elicit such intense but ultimately ephemeral interest? I could not guess. And I saw no reason to guess, as it couldn’t possibly impact me whatever the thing was. Yet my curiosity remained unabated. I waited while he moved further along the beach. When I thought he was far enough away that he would not notice, I went and retrieved the object. It was a small, metal cup, dented in places, most especially on the base opposite the handle. I judged it to be made of tin, but dark, wet sand clung doggedly all over, despite my secondary efforts to wipe it clean, which made it difficult to get a sense of feel. Some luster showed in the polish beneath the earthy patina, and I was surprised the treasure-seeker hadn’t added the cup to his haul for further investigation. I noticed some sort of engraving on the cup and rubbed the area vigorously with a thumb. Stippled gothic lettering emerged: Donna Louise.

  Of course, the name was not known to me. I examined the base to see if there was a maker’s mark, but the sand smeared black and would not fall away. Perhaps two minutes passed before I realized I was duplicating the scavenger’s actions exactly—turning the cup over in my hands repeatedly, furrowing my brow in concentration as I peered at it. I even looked away to the horizon as he had, as though it might hold some clue. I realized I was considering the obvious move, which was to rinse the thing in the surf. My deliberation as to whether or not the action was warranted took longer than its accomplishment would have, but I felt frozen, as though the choice would be impossible if I didn’t first appreciate the significance of the decision. I am not easily embarrassed, but I suddenly felt foolish when I noticed a boy of about ten watching me. I looked at the cup again but could see no reason it should hold my attention—and that was irksome, for there was no reason it shouldn’t, for if I chose to be interested by it, then why shouldn’t I act as I pleased? There was a grip of mystery upon me that made me hold the cup longer than I might if I didn’t care about it, but also anchored me from taking it with me for a laugh, as though the short time invested was sufficient that it could no longer be treated as a lark. Finally, I was exasperated by the very weight of the decision. If I should have been embarrassed about anything, it was my exit: I hurled the thing to the ground and stomped away.

  I looked back just before I was to turn up the path over the dune. I saw the boy absorbed in examination, holding the cup near his guileless face.

  I vacationed along that same stretch of beach the following October, but derived no pleasure from my time there. I returned to work wearier than I left. The next three years I vacationed elsewhere, but found no satisfactory replacement.

  The fifth year after I found the cup I decided to stay home. There was no benefit in the idea other than curtailing my disappointment in another destination. I had a mortgage on a condominium in a suburb long past its ‘trendy’ days, and though I had an impressive collection of silent film memorabilia (most of it in storage), I had no creative hobbies—so there were no projects for me to ‘finally have time for’, either having to do with my property or any languishing avocation. I had no particular notion how I would occupy my time, and might have elected not to take my vacation at all if I hadn’t been instructed otherwise.

  Not that I would miss work. I had been bored at my job for some time by then—possibly from my first day. Oddly, the one aspect of weekdays I did not mind was my commute. The train ride between a place that was barely home and a job I didn’t care for took about fifty minutes each way. You might expect such long, frequent forays into this transit limbo would exacerbate my general malaise, but I was never anxious on the rails. My line was crowded only close to the city, and that fraction went quickly. I read sometimes, or I noted the incremental change in the scenery through the seasons, or I smiled an umpteenth time at the strange stylistic transitions betwee
n songs listened to on a playlist arranged alphabetically by title.

  As the train neared my stop to ‘officially’ commence my vacation from the rigmarole, I reached underneath my seat to retrieve my satchel. When I pulled it out, I felt some loose object drag along beside it, and I heard a dull plink of metal against the wall of the car. I thought something might have spilled from my bag, though I couldn’t imagine what it might be. I bent forward and reached beneath my seat, but my hand found nothing. As the car was nearly empty and no one seemed to be watching, I slid to my knees and leaned my head to the floor.

  Though the telltale inscription was pointed away from me, I had no doubt it would be there. I had inspected the cup for only a few minutes on a beach hundreds of miles away five years before, but the contours of the thing, even beneath the now-absent grit, were as familiar to me as the day I’d thrown it to the sand. There was a sudden sharpness to the moment, an acute dread and a falling away simultaneous with an odd exultation and a release of gravity, a sensory experience equivalent to the old ‘rack-focus’ camera trick common to suspense movies.

  Surprising myself, I snatched it up immediately as though there was the danger someone else might do so before me. I was roused from my shock at its presence by the realization that the train had stopped. I barely made it out before the doors closed.

  My mind raced, trying to define the implications of this thing in my hands finding me again so many years later. No, of course, I found it, I corrected myself. It was no use staring at the thing in the station. I needed private reflection to make sense of it. I looked around as though someone might be watching—who, or why, I had no idea. I squeezed the tiny thing between my forearms and my stomach like a running back with a football and kept it there the entire walk to my condo.

  When I had the cup ‘safely’ home, I inspected it. It was, as I mentioned, clean of its former residue. What I had mistaken for tin was revealed as silver—‘Sterling’ was stamped on the bottom with the maker’s mark ‘WEB’. Gold wash inside the cup gleamed attractively. A quick internet search identified the manufacturer as the Web Silver Company of Philadelphia, in operation from 1950. The silver ‘baby cup’ was a novelty common to the era; Web Silver Co. sold especially at Wannamaker’s department store. In its less-than-perfect state, I would be lucky to get thirty-five dollars for it. (Admittedly a small sum, but I confess to a moment’s pleasure thinking on the beach-comber’s oversight.) A search on the incomplete name was predictably futile.