by Shane Staley
I look away without anything that resembles what once might have been emotion, another thing we are beyond. Far below an elderly sack of a still-human woman in a tattered flowered dress runs from one door to another and disappears into a building. Her fear is palpable; I can smell it even when she is gone; I can taste it, even these far stories up. I can sense everything to come with the prescience of desire and a new way of sensing: she will be snack, later, a week perhaps—it doesn’t matter when. The notion of a “week” is superfluous, ancient, meaningless; indeed, little flakes of remembered and expected time come and go, and then are gone altogether. There is just smell and a lure toward her, a future satiation, a future meal, a future communion through which we two also will be one, through which you and I, Marsha, will be One, through which we all will be. We are lured by it, by the timeless things and thing we are becoming.
You, running from door to door, looking over your shoulder. We will have you.
You, shuddering in the black shadows! You will find your head, your heart, your guts inside our great god-beaks, our great god-mouths, our great black hearts.
In the dying sun, the streets and air of the city that smell of blood and flesh, all the old and all the new, all the eaten and to be eaten, in the heat of the day and in the mid-night of times past and future, all of them, transformed and to-be-transformed, are all like us. And I turn to you, Marsha, what is left of you, still devouring that younger one. I open, open wide, and I take your own great monster head in my own mouth, and crush it. I crush it again and again, and the skull breaks, and the stony bones collapse, and I crush again and again and digest and swallow blood and flesh and digest some more. And “Wrocccckkkkk!”
This act has no more meaning than did your own, crushing the younger one, and Jed. This act and all other acts have no more meaning at all. This we are beyond.
Perhaps they’d meant to do this, the scientists who released us, the experimenters who played with natural growth and accelerated change; perhaps they’d meant the stimulation of stem-cell-like structures throughout our bodies, throughout us all, morphing into all, perhaps all along the theologians and scientists alike meant precisely this, precisely this:
I stand, we stand—the You-and-I—on inhuman legs, stand tall, big, and I roll out my feathered limbs; and the sky trembles. And I know they meant this! The dark angel, the black devouring god, the end of ages. I open my wings: past the spheres of mineral and vegetable, past the spheres of animal and man, of irrational and rational, I hold out my wings, our wings, the wings of us all to the oncoming stars. And the stars tremble.
We all stand taller, wider, to join them; we are the giant ones, the joined ones, the winged ones, the dark great devouring black angels, luring down the star stuff, and we reach up again to join it. Like twisted angels and archangels, we draw the celestial spray, take it in, circle it, devour and dance and fly with it; we circle around as one desire, around the One. We are star and earth flying, dancing, devouring all; we are a great-devouring single image of flame and light, light and dark and light-pure-light around a motionless stillness, we are a long image of all things moving ’round eternity.
That is me, us: and we open wide the gates, our great single mouth, on eternity itself, and we devour that, too.
“Wroccccckkkkk!”
JAWS OF LIFE
E. G. Smith
There was a steady, familiar whine, like the blurred wings of an insect.
Chandler’s eyes were filmed with thick amber haze. A spiderweb shimmered in dawn light, a glinting maze of concentric circles and rays. Or was it a giant, faceted compound eye? He blinked away the dense mist.
It was cracked safety glass, the break radiating out from the center of the windshield, beyond which lay an inverted landscape framed by his sedan’s body and roofed by the underside of its crumpled hood. Sprays of orange leaves and teal boughs rooted down into blue-gray sky, sending trunks stretching upward to support an immense roof of earth, thatched with dry needles, fir cones and moss. A bird swooped into view from the edge of the glass, flying with its head down and slaloming through the trunks. It alighted on a branch, wiry twig feet clutching the underside of the limb as it hung upside down and preened under a wing.
The forest was upside down. Why?
Because he was hanging in an upside down car. Why?
Because he’d tumbled down an embankment into the forest. Why?
Because he’d skidded off the highway to avoid a tree felled across the road. And?
And he was eating a triple-decker burger and didn’t look up from the wrapper in time. He’d been running late for his next sales meeting at a hardware chain’s main office, eating on the go.
The driver’s window was gone, and through its aperture a breeze wafted the electric reek of scorched metal, raising Chandler’s hackles. Several tangerine-colored maple leaves blew in with the stench, scuttling under his head.
By reflex, Chandler grabbed for the key and turned the ignition off, silencing the steady, familiar whine that meant a door was open. Was a door open? He couldn’t see.
He tried to move, but was leashed by a taut seat belt dimpling his belly fat. He pushed the button on the belt’s latch and jerked down an inch or two, his entire body shuddering from the ensuing pain. Beyond the cracked steering column, from which hung the powdery, withered skin of a deflated airbag, his thighs disappeared into shadows and warped plastic.
Chandler gripped the steering wheel and struggled to wrench his legs free. Steel fangs pierced his kneecaps, driving up the center of each femur and along his spine, convulsing his entire body. The agony brought a rush of nausea, and certainty that both limbs were severed to the bone. How was he still alive?
The mist returned, streaming into the car and swathing Chandler’s head. The shattered glass went out of focus, becoming a field of pulsing stars.
* * *
The acrid smell of fast food grease burned his nostrils.
Chandler awoke with a gasp, his knuckles dragging across the felt headliner.
A squirrel screeched and barked somewhere outside the window.
Chandler took inventory. The pale strip of skin on his finger meant that his 18 carat wedding ring was gone. Had he been wearing his silk tie? A series of red stains, either ketchup or blood or both, painted the leather upholstery. His wallet was gone from his back pocket and his front pockets were both inside-out, protruding from his hips like white horns. Where was his cell phone?
He craned his stiff neck to search the car’s interior, which was shrouded in talc from the airbag. The glove box gaped open and empty. A hamburger patty floated sideways, glued to the intact passenger’s window by condiments whose orange trails smeared down the glass. Everything that had been on the floorboards and forgotten under the seats had amassed on the headliner: his daughter’s purple giraffe, berets, corroded pennies, and a mélange of ice cubes, mixed nuts, candies, mints, cereal shapes and mummified French fries, which he collected and scooped into a pile for rationing. And there were dozens of light bulbs. Chandler’s samples box had been on the back seat, and now every model, size, shape, wattage and tint of bulb he carried were strewn above his head, most of them intact. He ate two ice cubes and the hook of a candy cane, furry with lint.
He mouthed his sales pitch: They look just like a normal bulb on the outside, and work with clip-on shades and vanity fixtures. But inside, they’ve taken a leap from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first, replacing flimsy filament with sci-fi-high-tech LED. Any conventional bulb, any brightness or shape, can be precisely replicated and vastly improved with diode technology. The improvements? Would you believe twenty-five times the service life for one-quarter the energy-usage? Your customers...
A high-pitched scream of terror, or glee, or both, erupted somewhere outside.
Chandler spun around, battling the agony in his knees to see out each window. “Hello?” he called, “I’m in here. I’m injured.”
A pair of spindly legs flitted through
a clump of ferns and disappeared behind a trunk ripe with swollen, tumorous burls.
Chandler shouted at the deformed tree, “Please, I need help. My legs are stuck. I’m trapped.”
A faint reverberation of “I’m trapped” returned from the forest, followed by a melodic but dissonant giggle.
Fern swords wobbled beneath a sparkling, sunlit cloud of gnats. “Are your parents nearby?” he called. “Can you bring your parents here?”
Then something was inside the car with him. It thumped the headliner, rolling the bulbs.
Chandler twisted his stinging neck, but could see only an empty sliver of the back seat.
A delicate hand darted over the passenger’s headrest and snatched the purple giraffe, withdrawing out of sight to jingle its bell. Another hand, more robust and with thick, grimy nails, peeled the stuck patty from the side window. “Mine!” screeched a voice so close and shrill that Chandler’s right ear squeezed shut. The seat pounded his back and something soft and wet grazed his bald spot.
“Go on now, you buzzards!” a froggy boy’s voice snarled with authority. “Go on, I said.”
The din subsided. Chandler took a deep breath and composed himself as best he could. Here was someone he could talk to, someone who could get help.
A pair of moccasins, crudely homemade from yellowy-beige leather, splayed on the ground outside the driver’s window. Tan, stringy fingers held a loop of string braided from sinew, knotted at one end to a scrap of wire curled into a crude hook. “You a bull cow?” spoken in the same boy’s rasp.
“What?” Chandler stretched his neck and caught a glimpse of a lean jaw masticating, a mottled cheek bulging.
“It’s simple enough.” The boy spat dark cud at the leaf litter. “Are you a bull cow or not?”
“I don’t know…what you mean,” Chandler dithered. Scruffy children scurried beyond the cracked windshield. His custom-tailored sport coat, which had been on the back seat, was now a dress-up overcoat, its hem trailing through deadwood and sprays of miniature lilies. His tie was a ribbon, fluttering at the end of a wiry arm.
The boy tilted his head down into the window frame, a pair of large, green eyes peering over freckled cheeks, and clucked his tongue.
“Young man.” Chandler paused between each phrase, searching the boy’s face for traces of comprehension. “I’m hurt. Hurt bad. My legs are stuck, crushed. I need an ambulance, a hospital. Can you bring a grownup here?”
The boy’s ruddy brows creased. “He is stuck good, ain’t he, like a hare in a trap.” The green eyes turned to the windshield. “Did you know cows could talk like that, Nettie?”
A face was pressed flat against the outside of the fractured screen, the nose pugged and broad, the cheeks flat and pale. “It’s fat,” slurred squashed lips as they wiped spit across the glass.
“Could be it’s not a cow at all.” The boy shrugged at Chandler. “It looks somethin’ like a man.”
“It’s fat.” The girl pulled away from the windshield, her face morphing from bloated to svelte beneath a tangle of mousy hair. She crouched beside the boy, pulling up a wheat-colored shift to expose scabby knob knees. A gold ring hung crooked from her left thumb.
“Yes, I’m fat,” Chandler whimpered, “but...”
“Could be a fat man. I never saw a man that fat.” The boy considered Chandler with less skepticism and asked, “What did you say you was?”
Chandler snapped, “I’m hurt,” then took a deep breath and fought to sound calm, “I need a grownup to come here.”
“A grownup what?” Nettie grinned, exposing yellow, crooked teeth. She made the same odd, melodic giggle.
“He means somebody old, mouse brain,” the boy sneered, “like Sir.”
The girl stuck out a plump tongue and curled it toward her nose.
The boy cocked his head at the man, dubious. “You sure you want Sir to come here? I don’t know ’bout that.”
“Yes, please get him.” The horizon beyond the broken glass began to tilt up and down. Chandler feared he was going to pass out again.
“I can fetch him,” the girl leapt to her feet.
“No!” the boy croaked, “You don’t tell Sir about nothin’, you hear me. Not a squeak.”
The amplitude of the car’s pitching increased, thumping Chandler’s chest against the wheel. Metallic groans and screeches obscured the children’s conversation.
The girl pouted, “Why not, Fisher?”
“’Cause I’m the grown up here and I said.” The boy looked the man down and up, his dour expression softening into something resembling pity. He scrambled to his grimy feet, brushing needles from cut off jeans that were more patch than denim. “We’d best go. You two, get on off a’ there and get home now.” With a creak and an end of the tilting, two sets of legs leapt down from above, pouncing on the forest floor. “Nettie, give him back that ring, we ain’t keepin’ nothin’” The girl clung to the gold band, but finally surrendered it to Fisher’s outstretched hand, which then tossed it beside the man’s head.
Chandler lunged through the side window, grabbing at receding ankles. “Please, please bring help. I need help.”
The children ebbed into the forest, chopping at sprays of bramble and rose with lengths of dead wood.
* * *
Chandler awoke swatting at a tickle of whiskers in his right ear, but found himself alone.
It was a moonlit night, for although the moon was out of view somewhere above the car, its pewter-blue light glazed the trees and stones. The rasping of crickets echoed the rattling of Chandler’s teeth.
Shivering within the icy car, he wondered how long could he hang like an aging side of beef. How long before Claire got worried enough to call his office, or the hotel, or the police? And when they looked, why would they look for him here? He could have driven off the road anywhere along a hundred mile stretch of forest. How long could his body hold out? Would mouse-brain bring Sir? He needed to do something or he was going to rot like a prisoner on a gibbet.
The horn, and the lights. Idiot. Why hadn’t he tried them?
He felt along cold, textured plastic for the ignition and turned the key.
The headlight knob was gone. He pulled back on its stump and the high-beams flashed on, bleaching nearby tree bark white; but the light soon dimmed to yellow, then murky orange as the car’s battery lost its battle with the night. He pushed the lever back and waited for the glowing trails in his eyes to fade.
Chandler pressed the center of the steering wheel hard, shoving his back against the seat. The horn started at half-strength and soon faded and pitched down to an unrecognizable, warbling flat note, lost among the crickets. He let go and swung in ever shorter arcs until he came to rest.
* * *
Loud shots roused Chandler. Each report was followed by a pause, then another pop, like aimed gunfire.
The sun was hidden above the vehicle, its harsh white glare saturating the forest. Fisher, dressed in a ratty camouflage T-shirt and the same frayed cut offs, was ten yards away throwing something at a tree. Pop. He held several white balls in the crook of his left arm. His lean fingers grabbed one and hurled it against craggy bark. Pop.
“My samples!” Chandler shrieked, immediately regretting his panic.
The boy dropped the remaining bulbs to the ground, stared at the car, and backed away through billowing fronds.
“Wait. Please don’t go.” Chandler waved his arm out the window. “Fisher, come back.”
The boy scratched his upturned bowl of copper hair and picked his way over broken glass to the car.
“Thank you for coming back, Fisher. Did you bring help? Is someone with you?”
“No.” Fisher’s face passed out of view above the window.
“Can you bring someone here today? A grownup?”
A leather-clad toe poked through fir needles, exhuming a corpse-gray toadstool.
Chandler smeared sweat from his brow. It was either very hot in the car or he was running a fever. “
You understand that I need help. I’m depending on you to be a hero.”
“Yeah.” A reluctant mumble, almost lost among forest chatter.
“There must be a phone you could use to call for an ambulance, or someone else you could bring here; a grownup, or another child.”
“Ain’t got no phone.” Fisher broke off the mushroom’s cap and pulverized its stalk. “I told the other kids to keep away from here and not to tell no one.”
“Why?” Chandler blinked salty drips from his eyes.
“Because I said so.” The boy’s voice cracked with frustration. “Because it ain’t none of their business what happens here.”
“Fisher, you know I’ll die if I stay here much longer.” Chandler was pretty sure this was true.
“Ain’t none of my business, neither.” The boy kicked the pale remnants of fungus away, scattering them.
“But you came back.”
“I can go wherever I want.”
Chandler ransacked his febrile mind for a way to keep the boy there and the hope of rescue alive. Sales. If he could sell crappy light bulbs, he could sell anything. It was just a matter of finding the right pitch, of capturing the customer’s interest. He chose each word with the brisk precision of salesman of the year, two years running. “When the police and the ambulance come to get me, do you know what they’ll bring?”
“What?”
“The Jaws of Life.” Chandler said the name in capital letters.
Fisher turned and squatted in front of the driver’s window, his green eyes wide. “What’s that?”
“Giant metal jaws with sharp, curved teeth that can bite right through cars and get people out.” Chandler fashioned his arms into hydraulic pistons, his fingers into a fierce mouth. “They can cut this car up like a can opener on a tin of beans. And the jaws of life are loud. They roar the whole time. If you get help for me, you could watch the firemen use them. You couldn’t afford to miss that.”