Bleed

by Lori Michelle

  Mr. Twinkles was going back to the Russian.

  “Orson!” Tara ran to the bedroom and threw the door open with a bang. “Damn it, Orson, wake up! There’s something wrong with that cat.”

  Orson sat up and peered at his wife through the gloom. She turned on the light. He saw her wound and flew out of bed. “Christ, what happened to your eye?”

  “It’s that fucking cat. It scratched my eye and . . . and now . . . it’s . . . singing.”

  Orson stared at her, his mouth hanging open, his hair sticking up.

  “Singing?”

  Tara grabbed his hand. “Come here and look at what it says on the Internet about singing cats!”

  Orson stumbled along behind her. “On the Internet. Singing. Honey, I know you don’t like cats, but you’re sounding a little crazy.”

  She stood behind him as he leaned over the desk, reading the computer screen. The cat rubbed against his leg, purring. Orson straightened and faced her. “Honey, come on. That’s just a legend. A folktale or whatever.” He reached out to hold her, but she pushed his arms away. “Look, you just need a little time to get used to each other. You’re not a cat person, but he’s a great cat. It’ll work out. I promise.”

  “I want that thing out of here, Orson.”

  He sighed, thinking of the luck the cat had brought him at the card game, thinking of the money, and the house they could soon have. “Okay, I’ll tell you what. If you still hate him tomorrow morning, I’ll take him back. How’s that? I have to work tonight and I just don’t have time for this drama.” He kissed her on the forehead and brushed a fingertip over her injured eye. “Let’s get some ice on that eye.” She followed him to the kitchen.

  Mr. Twinkles watched them go.

  ***

  Applause filled the club.

  “Thank you, thank you. You are too kind.” Orson held up his hands, palms facing the audience. “For my final trick of the evening, I shall . . . ” With a sweep of his arm, he uncovered a tall glass tank with a leather-and-chain harness hanging inside, “defy reason and cheat death!” Murmurs flowed through the crowd like blood seeping from a scrape. Orson squinted into the stage lights and searched for puzzled faces in the audience.

  He fed off their doubt.

  But doubt wasn’t what he found as his eyes were drawn to a figure at the end of the first row. A gaunt man with crazy black hair and an eyepatch wore a confident smirk as he politely applauded.

  The Russian.

  Shaken, Orson climbed into the glass tank and was secured, upside down, by two assistants. Chains were wrapped, locks snapped, and Orson’s heart raced. The audience was instructed to count backward from ten.

  He had done this trick more than a thousand times before, but the water had never looked darker or felt colder . . .

  Ten . . .

  He fumbled with the harness, looking for the safety catch. Where was it?

  Nine . . . Eight . . .

  He could always find the catch quickly, like an experienced skydiver with the pull-cord, but . . .

  Seven . . . Six . . . Five . . .

  He floundered. Felt the tank pressing in. The water crushing him . . .

  Four . . . Three . . . Two . . .

  His thumb grazed the catch, right where it was supposed to be, yet he could have sworn it hadn’t been there moments before. He grasped the hidden chain, pulled hard, came free . . .

  One . . .

  . . . and emerged to a thunderous roar of applause.

  Orson jumped out of the tank and stood at the edge of the stage.

  The crowd continued their raucous display of admiration. A few in the audience even stood. It was always like this when a performer genuinely struggled, looking as if they might not pull off the illusion. People fed off the possibility of disaster—of failure—the same way he fed off their doubt. Of course, ten seconds under water wouldn’t drown him. Shame would have been his punishment, not death.

  He scanned the crowd. The Russian man was gone.

  Orson swallowed bile and forced a smile, then fled to the small dressing room backstage and started toweling off.

  “Hey, man,” Stu Stone, another magician, said to him, “you really brought it tonight! Gotta hand it to you. Looked like you were gonna die up there!”

  “Yeah,” Paul Shannon, the opening comedian, chimed in. He turned back to Stu. “But where’s my credit?”

  “What do you mean?” Stu said.

  “I die up there for real every night.” Paul laughed. Stu smirked. Orson felt the sudden desire to kill them both as he took a deep breath and snapped on a fresh T-shirt.

  “Hey,” Stu said, “we’re going out for a few drinks. Wanna come?”

  “Thanks,” Orson said, “but not tonight.”

  “What’s wrong?” asked Paul.

  “Nothing . . . ” Orson started.

  “Lady troubles. I’d know that look anywhere,” said Stu.

  Paul scratched his chin and squinted. “Come to think of it, when are we gonna meet that lady love of yours? Tara, right? You talk about her all the time, but—”

  “Not now,” Orson snapped. He’d worked with these guys for a few months. Normally liked them. Sure, Paul’s observational humor was mostly lifted from Seinfeld, and Stu hardly knew his way around simple coin tricks, but they were good guys. Best to just walk away rather than unload. “Later,” he said, already rushing for the exit.

  He pushed the door open and stepped outside, stopping just short of running nose-first into the Russian man and the gray furry bundle he held in front of his chest.

  Mr. Twinkles.

  ***

  The Russian slid into the passenger seat of Orson’s old Corolla and pulled the door shut. Mr. Twinkles purred on his lap. Orson gripped the steering wheel and wished he were somewhere else. A cell phone was thrust into his ribs.

  “Someone wants talk to you,” the Russian said in his thick accent.

  Orson looked at the man’s seamed face, then took the phone. Its video screen showed his worst nightmare.

  Tara sat bound and gagged, staring wide-eyed into a camera somewhere, struggling and crying.

  The Russian laughed in Orson’s ear. His breath smelled like death.

  With a horrible ripping sound, a disembodied hand snatched the strip of duct tape from Tara’s mouth, leaving a red welt across her face. She inhaled sharply and screamed.

  “Orson!” Tara pleaded. “Help me! I don’t know what’s happening. What’s going on, Orson? Help—”

  The Russian hit the disconnect button.

  “You son of a bitch!” Orson cocked a fist and threatened to hit the Russian. “How?”

  The Russian smiled at the windshield. “You know, I was once like you. Young, married.” The Russian looked at Orson. “Cheater.” Orson let his fist fall into his lap.

  “I’ll do anything to save her, give you everything I have. Just don’t—”

  The Russian laughed. “It was at big card game, out in country, like one last night, da? Must have been, oh, twenty years ago. I was big deal. Winning every game, lots of money, moved to America. Even bought nice big house for my wife.” The Russian gave a snort and scratched the cat’s ears. “Then, one night, too careless. I win too much. Man saw me pull ace from my sock. They let me play whole night, let me think I was going to win biggest money ever. Then, after game, bam! They knock me down in alley, kicking, hitting. Man who saw me cheat had knife and he did this to me.” The Russian lifted his eye-patch and showed Orson his empty socket, dark red and puckered with scar tissue. “Beat me so bad, I nearly die. I wake up when something tickling my face, licking hole where eye was. You know what woke me? Do you?”

  Orson couldn’t think about that. He wanted to know where his wife was, who was hurting her. It wounded him now, to think how much he had neglected her. How much he loved her. This was all for her. It was all—

  “That tickling on my face,” the Russian continued, “that licking my wound, was cat. Mr. Twinkles, da?” The Rus
sian laughed. “I lost one eye, but I gained two new eyes that night. Cat is always on lookout for me. Helps me spot cheaters who try to take my money so I can correct them, like I was corrected.”

  “Sir,” Orson said, “you have to believe me. I didn’t cheat last night. The cat sat on my lap the whole time. He . . . he brought me luck.”

  “Cat sat on your lap and watched you cheat me blind. And through his eyes, I saw . . . I saw everything.”

  “You’re crazy . . . that doesn’t make any sense. That cat . . . he . . . he reminds me of a cat I had when I was a kid. That’s why he brought me luck.”

  “Really?” said the Russian. “And what was old cat’s name?”

  Orson couldn’t remember. He grasped for the memory. Felt it fall away.

  “There was no cat,” the Russian said. “Think hard, Great Orson. There never was cat in your childhood. There is no cat in your adulthood. Cat will never bring you luck. Cat may bring you justice, may bring you balance, but never bring luck.”

  “Tara,” Orson wheezed.

  “Important name,” the Russian said, “but not pretty like Russian name.”

  The cell phone rang. The Russian jabbed a button and handed it to Orson.

  On the screen, Tara’s hair was yanked back by a man wearing all black. Her throat was exposed. She tried to scream, but the duct tape was back on her mouth. The cartilage in her neck worked as though she were gulping water on a hot day. A knife flashed across her tender flesh and opened a fount of blood.

  Orson screamed, his throat and eyes burning, his heart running a race it couldn’t win.

  The Russian opened the car door and started to get out.

  “Tell me this is all a trick,” Orson cried. “Tell me—”

  “No trick,” said the Russian, holding Mr. Twinkles closer as he stepped from the car.

  On the cell phone screen, the man in black showed Orson the money he’d stashed away for the down payment. For Tara’s dream. A dream he could have fulfilled months earlier, though he hadn’t told her. He wanted to do better than the bungalow. Surprise her.

  The Russian bent down and thrust his head back into the car.

  Orson lowered the phone, expecting a bullet to enter his brain at any moment. When it didn’t come, he asked, “Aren’t you going to kill me, too?”

  The Russian laughed. “I like how you Americans play your games. Your ‘No Limit.’”

  Orson turned his head to face the man and his cat, and . . .

  No, it can’t be!

  . . . the cat was laughing, too.

  “Kill me,” Orson pleaded. “Just kill me.”

  “Mr. Twinkles and I,” said the man, “we adopt your ‘No Limit.’”

  Mr. Twinkles’ eyes went wide. Streetlight starbursts glimmering in silver orbs. Hypnotic.

  “Just kill me,” Orson repeated weakly.

  “He already has,” said Mr. Twinkles in a soft, faraway purr. “He already has.”

  THE UNSTOPPABLE ANNIHILATION

  Jeffrey C. Jacobs

  Jeffrey C. “Time Horse” Jacobs is a failed Physicist and Computer Programmer who drives an electric car around the Mid-Atlantic. He assists two local writing groups, a Doctor Who club, participates in EV events and created and produces Project Kronosphere. He lost his grandmother to cancer and assists his local Cancer Society.

  I remember the stars. Sirius, Arcturus, Aldebaran, Fomalhaut, hundreds of points of light in the sky, like gems inset in a black-velvet sea. Even as a child, my grand-pappy had told me of hundreds more from when he’d been just as young as I, myself, had been back then.

  Presently, the only points of light in the night were the lonely planets, gracefully orbiting, retrograding, waxing and waning. And now I, as old as my grand-pappy had been, feared even those glimmering specks would blow away like their pinpricked neighbors.

  A chill took me, standing in my daughter’s back garden this mid-summer’s eve. The Moon wouldn’t rise until three in the morning, and a solitary tree stood watch by my side. Beneath the nearly empty sky, her house shone the only substantial light inside the fence. Subsequently, a diminutive, ghostly silhouette eclipsed even that. Moments later, I was finally warmed by Lothar, who rushed over to hug my leg.

  “What’cha doing, grandpa Tom?” Lothar looked up at me with eyes wide like only a child’s could be.

  I ruffled my grandchild’s hair as he clung to me. “Lothar, my boy! Do you know why your mamma gave you that name?”

  “The healer.” Lothar answered with such adorable pride as he hugged me tighter.

  “That’s right. Lothar was the name of one of Wōden’s sons.”

  “Like Thor?” Lothar’s grin was beaming.

  “Yes, like Thor, but Lothar didn’t carry a hammer, he was a healer. His saga tells of a great plague falling upon the mortal world, giving boils and lesions to the people.” I deepened my voice as I continued. “So Wōden sent Lothar to cure the sick. Lothar traveled from town to town, where his touch was able to heal the sores and shrink the cancers. And everyone Lothar cured gained Lothar’s power to heal so that soon, so the story goes, everyone had the ability.”

  “When I grow up, I wanna be a healer, like Lothar.” Lothar shook my leg with excitement.

  “You can be anything you want Lothar, as long as there’s still a world for us to live in.” I cast my gaze skyward, lost in my memories. “When I was a child, there were uncountable pinpricks of light in the sky.”

  Lothar loosened his grip, I glanced down to see a quizzical look in his eyes.

  I sighed. They just didn’t understand.

  “Mom! Grandpa’s telling us one of his fantasies again!” Lothar was halfway to the back door before I could comfort him. My poor grandson, my poor family. So strange they’d accept an old Norse legend but not the facts right in front of them.

  I supposed it was for the best they didn’t know the danger. The lies from the government which kept society together were no doubt preferable to the total social collapse and chaos were the average person to know the truth. The only folks they didn’t control were the Anarchists, but then no one controlled the lawless.

  I shook my head, freeing my few wisps of remaining hair to flutter in the breeze. So very few recalled the majesty of the heavens. Sure, my kids remember when even Alpha Centauri winked out about four years ago. But for the hundreds, perhaps thousands still living from my youth, the stars were fast becoming a memory of a dying generation.

  My daughter’s cat, Alex, came out to rub against my leg. I picked him up to pet him. He seemed to be my only friend standing there in the yard; did he even know what was happening?

  It was as if no one wanted to believe there was anything else beyond the Earth, the Sun and the various planets, asteroids and comets of the solar system. The historians even described whole galaxies, each containing one hundred billion stars of their own. And yet, today, no one even believed that a single star existed beyond our very own Sun.

  The Annihilation had come slowly at first. We’d sent probes long ago to try and intercept it, yet nothing had survived. Still we’d tried to understand and arrest the onslaught.

  ‘Starve the beast,’ they’d said when I was merely a boy. A great project to prevent the Annihilation from absorbing anything more. To stop it from feeding. To cut off its supply of nutrients. It hadn’t been easy to shut down the stars immediately around the Annihilation; we’d done our best. Still it had come, infecting even the lifeless husks of once vibrant, stellar plasmas. The government, as duplicitous as ever, had hidden the entire mission from the public, Earth’s greatest heroes, forever unknown.

  “Dad, come on! We’re going to take you home,” my daughter called from the house.

  “Shauna, please don’t take me back to the home! It’s so depressing. I want, need, to be near family when the Annihilation finally takes us.” I released Alex.

  “Dad, stop being so melodramatic. You know we’ve got work and school tomorrow. Get in the car.”

 
Head low, Lothar came out to comfort me once more. I followed as my grandson took me by the hand and led me to Shauna’s black, Suburban SUV. It was dusk and soon the Annihilation would be in full view. Blacker than the blackest black you’d ever seen. I knew they were in a rush to get me back to the nursing home and to return their house before the dark, empty night overtook them. No one stayed out after dark; the Anarchists made sure of that. But that’s not the true horror. What would happen when the Annihilation finally took all of us?

  It was a short drive to the home. As we approached the city, the raucous partying without abandon was deafening even through the cars windows. The lights from the metropolis created a bright halo to the otherwise darkened western sky. The Anarchists were out in force.

  Shauna looked agitated. “Don’t they have jobs? I swear, the constant partying as if the world was going to end tomorrow; it’s just ridiculous.”

  Even in my youth there had always been folks with a carefree attitude. You could’ve found a guy with a “The Annihilation is Nigh” placard on every street corner. Yet recently these shenanigans seemed to be more the norm than an aberration and they had evolved into true Anarchists. At least they knew our time was almost up.

  Shauna pulled into the nursing home a few minutes later. My kin hugged me tight then left me at the door, all except Shauna. She held me in her arms one last time and then looked deeply into my eyes.

  “Dad, please stop telling these nonsense stories about the stars. The stars disappearing is a natural process. It’s all over the news. Nothing to worry about. We’ll be fine, you’ll see. Even the President says so. After all, it’s been years since we had any stars and life goes on. Please stop with your Anarchist tales.” Her eyes pleaded with me to relent.

  “I’m sorry Shauna, my dear. You go home and rest up. I’ll be here tomorrow when you get home from work and I’m always just a phone call away.” I couldn’t hurt my only child; her ignorance would be her bliss. I released my daughter and retired to my room alone. I just hoped the Annihilation would allow me to keep my word to her just one more night.