“Professor, how is he?”
Thurgood looked at me sadly. “I’m afraid he is gone, lad.”
“Can’t you revive him?”
“I cannot bring back the dead.”
“No. It can’t be true!” I cried out and sank to ground in anguish. “He gave his life for mine!”
“For everyone, lad.”
Utter sadness overcame me. I sat there while Thurgood created a grave by using sacred hand motions of the sort I dare not mention. The soil moved at his will. It piled up next to the solemn hole. .
“Just before Milo died,” the professor said as he worked, “he wanted me to impart a few words of wisdom: Friendship is forever.”
Thurgood’s words didn’t ease my pain. My salty tears fell hard and fast.
“You need to activate the time device, but don’t give the command to engage just yet,” he said.
I opened the case.
“Hello, Mr. Crevaliz,” it said. “What destination, please?”
Thurgood closed the lid and placed the attaché case at the bottom of the deep grave and covered it with mud. I could still hear the voice of the time device in my head. We now shared a telepathic link. Thurgood then rolled Milo’s body into the grave. We covered him with mud and dirt and I said a quick prayer to honor our fallen comrade.
“Why did you bury my attaché case with Milo?”
“He will guard the time device until you unearth it two million years from now. We knew it was vital to hide it from Zarr and any other Luxorg who wished to destroy it.”
“Who are ‘we’?” I asked.
“Myself and Mr. Moss, of course.”
“Milo—Milo was aware of all this beforehand?”
“No, no, lad.”
“What do mean?”
“Milo will develop the time device in 2029. He will travel back to 2017, when you two separated in Central Park, and inform his younger self about our plan. He will then replace his younger counterpart and give you the time device.”
“I’m very confused, Professor.”
“The fog will clear soon after we reach home.”
“Hello, Mr. Crevaliz. What destination, please?”
“Thurgood’s home,” I said. “January 8, 2017.”
“Destination confirmed,” it replied.
“Do it!”
The blue light of eternity surrounded us once again. A moment later we were back in 2017. The blizzard had vanished. The skies were clear. The Earth Mother beamed with happiness again.
The mighty globe hovered above us once more. It seemed to be alive. Its rainbow of brilliant colors was beautiful. Every mountain peak glistened with majesty. Every ocean, lake, and river exuded joy. Every speck of foliage seemed to sing.
“It’s as good as new,” a familiar voice said. The younger version of Milo smiled at me.
I looked at him with sublime joy and hugged him. His bright green hair reeked of cigarettes.
“You’re alive!”
“Of course. My older self made sure of it.”
“I thought I’d never see you again.”
“Friendship is forever,” he said, and his grin was like a beacon of light.
Paul grew up on Staten Island, New York, and currently resides in sunny Tampa, Florida, with his wife and two daughters. His work has appeared in The Dark Side of the Moon: A Song Stories Anthology, These Vampires Still Don’t Sparkle, and Happy Little Horrors: Alienated. He can be reached at facebook.com/pmdujat/
She Had a Lot
of Problems
by
Christopher Fox
The postcards from Africa were supposed to be exotic. Lions, meerkats, ostriches. Look at all the fun she was missing. Leopold made sure to deface the pictures with hurtful sentiments—laughing hyenas taking down a wildebeest, You scrawled at the top with an arrow pointing to the dying animal. Thanks for nothing, dumbass, said an aardvark.
Leopold, the geologist obsessed with sand.
Last winter, he accepted a job in Botswana and Mona was expected to tag along, no questions asked. Of course she would, right? Not much of an adventuress, she wanted to stay in Asheville where there was no sand. Africa was too hot, too dry, too strange. Leopold’s dismay was almost comical in its spluttering shock, as if he’d just realized that Mona was constructed out of tightly bound batches of stones rather than the soft, fertile loess he’d previously supposed.
An elephant with your ass here scrawled across its backside. Brown stink lines squirmed above the letters.
When the bugs showed up, Mona was drunk. She staggered over to the window to gaze out at the gray clouds and feel poignant but what she saw through the panes brought relief instead. She smiled for the first time in weeks. Butterflies! Thousands upon millions of them following their invisible, willy-nilly pathways like tossed confetti. Large ones, too. They were the size of sparrows and richly mottled with orange and rusty-purple splotches. Bruised butterflies. Mona identified with them on a fundamental level. Leopold had beaten up her heart.
Life had been hard since they’d split the sheets. Mona quit going into work, lost her job. Now her only income came from placing want ads in the newspaper and selling off her furniture piece by piece. She had diseased feet. A virulent fungal infection spread under the arches and between the toes like moss. Not to mention wrecking the car, bouncing checks, gaining weight.
But suddenly, here was her consolation prize, a reason to stop sluffing around the house in tears, festooned with martyrdom and unsightly folds of blubber. She stared at the butterflies in delighted disbelief. Never had she seen so many at one time. Where had they come from? It was a once-in-a-lifetime event, magical and wondrous as if creatures from the land of faerie had emerged from beneath the depths of the hallow. Everyone liked butterflies. They signified rebirth, were metaphors for the soul.
Mona ran downstairs and all but kicked the door to get it open. Months of being cooped up with stir-crazy delusions and relentless charley horses had made her desperate, irritable. She needed a break. She needed potassium.
The fluttering of so many large wings sounded like a sustained sigh of contentment. Butterflies probably made whooshy noises all the time, only Mona had been too preoccupied living her life, dwelling on past hurts, being an ordinary person, to notice. Not in on the secret. Yet another nameless drone who didn’t bother to pay attention to the big, beautiful world. The butterflies’ destination was unimportant. Far more interesting was how they flaunted their determination to get there. Each individual flapped and flew and had a reason to exist, a motive for being here and going there. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be here. They’d be somewhere else. Or dead.
I used to be like that, Mona thought. Places to go, people to see, things to do.
Gusts of displaced air teased her greasy hair, waggling it like the snakelets on Medusa’s hideous skull. Ten revolting toes stung with a fungal itch. Dried ham glaze, eaten straight from the jar with an unwashed tablespoon, encrusted her muumuu. She hadn’t felt this alive in ages. To celebrate, she sang a ditty, danced a jig. Painful burdens lifted from her shoulders, which were dappled with moles.
Across the street, a gang of children ran around catching butterflies in old mayonnaise jars. To kill them. The brats embodied everything that was wrong with America. They oinked at Mona and made fun of her for being a frump.
“She’s got no makeup on,” said Cammy Franklin, who was only six. “She’ll never find a husband.”
Mona didn’t want a husband. Not since Leopold exited her life like a sudden soda pop belch. When had little girls become so cynical? And how galling to be judged by a child who picked her nose and gobbled up the boogers she found.
Mona kept a terra-cotta planter next to the front door. The fern in it was dead from neglect. She hurled the planter at the children. It hit the ground and exploded several feet short of the target. Exposed roots poked out of the dry soil like shriveled penises.
“Ha ha, you missed!”
The children lau
ghed even harder when Mona rushed back into the house like a lumbering rhinoceros from one of Leopold’s vindictive postcards. She slammed the door hard enough to rattle the walls and make the house say Screw you! She trundled upstairs and dove headfirst into bed.
The children were right. Mona was too fat. The bed collapsed from the strain and landed on the floor with a crash. The headboard tipped over, knocked her stupid.
Mona went on a crying jag, moistening the pillows with meepy tears. She chugged cheap vodka from the bottle on the nightstand. Then she blacked out.
Only to awaken in a puddle of vomit.
Mona groaned. Puke was caked across her lips like bad cheese. She’d hit a new low, wallowing in filth. One thing was certain. She couldn’t go on like this much longer. Friends and family members had quit feeling sorry for her months ago, because nobody likes a whiner. The day was fast approaching when she’d be too emotionally exhausted to feel sorry for herself either. Then she’d have nothing. Time to wake up and smell the coffee. If the butterflies had a reason for being alive, then by God so did Mona. She refused to be a victim for another moment.
Getting out of bed was a struggle—she had the twirlies—but down in the basement it was cool and damp. Musty dimness soothed her bloodshot eyes. The shotgun and ammo were stored in an old wheelie cooler. Mona was going to shoot the children. Not kill them, just hurt them real bad.
Step one: Wreck up the place; use eyeliner to write spooky poems on the wall; take a dump on the rug; scratch her face with toothpicks.
Step two: Mow the kids down.
Step three (for when the police arrived): Sway to a mysterious, inner groove and keen like the madwoman she was, completely out of it, an emotional catastrophe. Everyone knew she had inner demons and battled depression. A battle she had sadly lost. Not guilty by reason of insanity.
Postscript: As the children recovered from their injuries, grew up, got married and raised families of their own, taunt them with anonymous poison pen letters. Her life hadn’t panned out. Why should theirs?
She clambered back upstairs and peeked out the window sniper—
style.
Too late. The children were already dead. Four ravaged skeletons sprawled across the sidewalk like the remains of a fried-chicken dinner. Butterflies feasted upon the scraps. Their pulsing wings bulged with fresh infusions of protein.
Mona screamed and dropped the gun. It shot a hole in the wall.
Dammit!
Not only were the butterflies going around eating people, but Mona had lost her chance to revenge herself upon the children. It was so unfair. Nothing ever worked out for her. Now what was she going to do?
Calling the police was a bust because the phone lines were down. Her cell phone was useless—disconnected due to nonpayment of funds. Television and going online weren’t options either, because she no longer owned any electronics. Sold them for a song. And the car sat in a weed-choked lot next to Billy’s Garage, waiting for her to scrape together enough money to have it fixed.
Radio was her only link to the outside world. The one frequency still broadcasting was the college station where the deejay went by the name Dick Whiplash. He raved about dead coeds, dead professors, general pandemonium, nothing Mona hadn’t figured out already. In between hysterical outbursts, he lectured about how vinyl records sounded better than any form of digital media, and played punk rock and harsh industrial bands. Mona hated the music, but what could she do about it? She had to stay tuned in case Dick had something important to say, what to do, where to go. Why didn’t he put on a few decent tunes by someone like Hank Williams or Patsy Cline? Poor Patsy! She’d flown into a mountain. Mona could relate, only instead of getting it all over in one fell swoop, her plane crashed in stages, losing a wing here and a landing gear there, and then the cabin depressurized. At least Patsy got to be famous and sing beautiful songs before she cashed out.
Every few minutes, Mona peeked out the window and watched the flood of killer butterflies flow down the street. She wondered if any animals in Botswana were running amok. It was a real gas to think of Leopold being terrorized by swarms of furious termites or being gored by a water buffalo. Tee hee, ha ha.
Dick was playing a song by some freaks named the Snot Hurlers when he suddenly cut in screaming, “They’re getting inside! We’re all gonna die! Black Flag rules!”
After that, dead airwaves.
Mona wigged out. If the butterflies could breach a radio station with soundproof walls, what was going to prevent them from invading a forty-year-old tract home? It used to be kind of nice but was now more than a little run down. Just because she had nothing to live for didn’t mean she wanted to die.
She raided her hope chest. Although in my case it’s more of a no-hope chest. Mona gagged on tears. Why did she get such a perverse thrill from hurting her own feelings? Proof she was messed up.
She forced linens with a high thread count down the bathtub drain. She crawled underneath the sinks to cram hand towels into the U-bend and then wrenched the pipes back together. Her bad knees cracked with every move, making her wince in agony. She shut the drapes and tacked antique tablecloths across the windows. At least they hid the dead flies in the sills. She sealed the mail slot with duct tape and stuffed Beanie Babies into the cracks under the doors. At no time did she utilize any of the linens she used on a regular basis. They were filthy dirty and she worried that this might attract the butterflies. By the time she finished, she was drenched with sweat. Her muumuu clung to her like cellophane. The swish it made when she moved sounded like butterfly wings, so she took it off. Also, there was barf on it.
She wondered about her family. Even though she loved them, they were probably dead. Dad, probably from running outside with a handgun, blasting butterflies from the sky. Mom likely from codependency, following fast behind him with rollers in her hair, wagging a finger at him, nag, nag, nag. And Rhett, the lazy mooch, thirty-two and still living at home rent-free. Mom cooked his meals, did his laundry and cleaned his room while Dad paid the bill whenever the Firebird broke down. True, Rhett did have a job, tending bar at Smiley’s, but that was so he could pick up cheap floozies with names like Starla and Dee Dee. Nothing the spoiled, golden wonder boy ever did was wrong. But Mona was labeled the difficult one. The problem child.
A door slammed. Mona peeked out the window and saw her elderly neighbors making a break for it, John and Gwen Mortensen. Unlike with the children, Mona didn’t want anything bad to happen to them. Gwen had knitted snoods out of brown yarn for Mona, nice ones that caught flyaways on days when she didn’t feel like doing her hair, and John always had a kind word, was confident that it would be easy for someone as “smart and lovely” as Mona to find another man. Out of gratitude, Mona baked batches of fresh snickerdoodles for them. There was no way to tell if they ate any or not. They were wonderful people.
John bolted for the car while Gwen fumbled with the house keys, wanting to lock the door so no burglars could get in while they were away. Both flitzed pepper spray at the butterflies. They doused their bodies as if applying perfume. While not stopping the attack, it did keep the butterflies away for short stretches of time. Individuals taking a heavy dose dropped to the earth and flopped around.
The Mortensens would take her with them, Mona was sure of it. They were her friends, perhaps the only two left who felt bad about how things had worked out for her and weren’t of the opinion that she was somehow to blame. Mona doubted that she could make it to the car without being savaged but she had to try. If only she weren’t in such bad shape. There was no point in blaming Leopold, depression, or a glandular problem. She was fat because she had chosen to gorge with wild abandon. No one forced her to overeat.
Mona flung the door open and ran. Being a large woman, she couldn’t go very fast. More of a lumbering canter. Stained bra, ripped panties, unshaven legs and armpits, hair on her head a positive fright—she looked like the Yeti.
“Wait for me! I’m coming with you!” There was no s
hame in admitting that she needed help and couldn’t survive on her own. Not today. Maybe tomorrow when everything returned to normal. Then she would be okay. She would get her life together and emerge triumphant. Leopold could go shit in a hat.
Butterflies honed in on her with the narrow-minded deliberation of raptor birds. Mona noticed with disgusted dismay how they had changed, as if their grisly diet of human flesh and offal triggered some kind of rapid evolutionary jump. On the wings, the dark, violet hues throbbed against the duller orange sections, refusing to touch as if miscegenation was repellent to both. Their mouths lacked a proboscis. Specialized palps curved into wicked, mandible-like pincers gouged chunks out of Mona’s flab. She swatted at them furiously, squealing in pain.
Their bodies were segmented into a bulbous sequence of rounded sectors reminiscent of the head, abdomen, and thorax of typical insects, but not quite the same—they appeared to be more closely related to annelids or slugs, an unholy hybrid. Surviving them was going to be quite a challenge. But wasn’t everything about life a challenge? When Mona thought about it, today was no different than any other day. It’s just that the danger was more apparent than normal. Hopefully, this realization hadn’t come too late. All she wanted out of life was to be happy.
There was a sudden stabbing and burning at her belly. Mona looked down. The butterflies were carving into her abdomen in an organized group! She crushed two handfuls of them against her rolls of fat, their greenish-yellow blood squishing between her thick fingers. Their blood smelled sweet and feculent like honeysuckle on top of feces. She licked her thumb, and shuddered. The goo tasted like three-month-old rotten chicken and was horribly bitter. Eating them would not be a survival strategy.
John must not have seen Mona or known she was on the way. He gunned the motor to encourage Gwen to hurry up, stop dawdling, but in his alarm he must have placed the gearshift in reverse. The car peeled out and ran Gwen down. Mona cringed. It sounded like a card table collapsing at a bridge party. Now John was parked on top of her. The old fool. There was no reason for an elderly man with ague and cataracts to still be driving.
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