The Place Where

by Rodion Pretis

  The officer smiled - obviously pleased with himself.

  “I think the best thing is to interrogate both of you.” You cannot both be Abalens, but in case one of you does, after all ...

  The time has come. I unzipped my jacket.

  “This question can be easily clarified,” I said, unfastening the buckle of the Abalen notebook. Abalen's self-confidence went cracks along with his new image. I hesitated, enjoying the moment. This was not enough revenge for Sissy, or even for the few weeks that he wrested from my life. But that was all I could expect for myself, and I wanted it to last longer.

  I showed the computer to the officer.

  “Retinal castle,” I said.

  “If you want to see your cousin again, monsieur, you better stop.”

  It blew me up.

  “You poor wretched bastard,” I said, taking out two pieces of paper from my pocket: a list of draftees and a list of the distribution of beds. I brought them to his face. “Where did the Canadian woman go, Francois?” Look, ”I poked my finger at the leaf, as if it were the heart of Abalen. - Here she was called; now look here, - I shook a sheet of beds. “Her bunk is not here!” So what happened to her, monsieur le sergeant? Sent to Montmartre? On firing? - Hysterical notes appeared in my voice. I swallowed, crumpled the leaves in a fist and threw them in his chest.

  “No,” he said. “It's not like that at all ...”

  I did not let him finish. Jerking the computer up to my face, I poked a thumb at the power button. The computer snorted indignantly.

  - How sad! - I said. “Sergeant Abalen's computer doesn't like my eyes!” - I opened the notebook to Abalen, and he backed away. - Gentlemen? I said to the forms. Two of them grabbed Abalen by the shoulders. He tried to turn his head away, but the notebook had more mobility than his neck. A second later, he tweeted joyfully and shone like a Christmas tree.

  I threw the notebook to the ground and turned the contents of my pockets over it.

  “I suppose you'll find something to do with it here,” I said. Abalen muttered something; I did not hear what exactly. The officer slapped him in the face - either in response to his words, or simply out of principle; I didn't care about that. Then they all began to beat him.

  I pulled out the last of my sanitary napkins to wipe his blood from my hands.

  Day 63: It Will End With Tears

  - France thanks you for the services that you rendered to her, monsieur! “I understood that the blank general speaks more to the press dodgers on the other side of the mirror wall than to me, but he bowed his head, hoping that he looked rather humble and insightful. - When this villain Abalene appears in court, the whole world will see what a true face is hidden behind the mask of the Paris Commune!

  I tried to stay blasé [42]; but looking at this man, I could not help but be surprised at the arithmetic of Paris: how, for heaven's sake, you can put together people living on my street, those with whom I played baseball, and those who sold me bread with sausages and wine - and get in the amount of shit like Abalen or this idiot? What variable in this damned equation could make people stop thinking and entrust all the hard work to their emotions?

  I hoped that when I finished with Abalen, I would feel refined - but nothing of the kind happened.

  “Well, good,” I said, getting up. “I would be glad to stay and see, but now I need to go home.” I'm going to spend forty-eight hours in the shower, and then oversleep for at least a week.

  “But it seemed to me that the people from your embassy wanted to talk with you, monsieur Rosen,” the general said carefully.

  “Let them call me to work,” I said. Here I am: Mr. How-To-Make-Friends-And-Influenza-Surrounding.

  “And the photographers say they haven't finished yet ...”

  Just wonderful, I thought. “Is there anyone in this city who does not look from his bell tower?”

  Sissy didn't look from any bell tower, except for her hormones. I was able to gently place it in the back corner of my brain while I was developing my plan of salvation. But now she was violently protesting, trying to break out of my head out. When I was far from the Commune, I was no more free than if I had still remained Abalen's hand-held bloodhound: I still had to face the fact that she was gone. How do I explain this to my aunt?

  The door behind me thundered open.

  - Lee!

  I turned so fast that I lost my balance and fell. So it was, and I'm not going to change anything in my story. After a moment, she was on the carpet next to me, and hugged me, and cried; and I'm afraid I'm also somewhat husky. But I swear that the first thing that flew from my lips was: "Mother-pomata, where did you go?"

  She slapped me lightly.

  “I was worried about you too, Lee.”

  “Lord,” I said, sitting down. - I was sure that you ... - I could not say this, not now. It seemed to me that this could still happen; must be just imagination. - What happened to you? How did you manage to get out?

  “It's all Eddie,” she said.

  - Is not it. - Eddie swam into the room, graceful, despite his fullness. “She did everything herself.” I just led her back through the outposts.

  “Can you two finally stop exchanging pleasantries and tell me what happened?”

  “When the bus stopped and they separated us, I was terribly scared,” Sissy began. “They were all scared.” But then I remembered what you said: you told me that there was no need to worry. You always looked after me, Lee. She smiled, and even though her eyes were dull with fatigue, I still felt better when I saw this. “And I thought you probably know what you're talking about.” So I didn't worry. Instead, I tried to guess what you would do in my place, and I decided that you would watch and wait until you had the opportunity to do something.

  I looked at Sissy more closely. What I saw in her eyes was not just fatigue; there was something else - something like calm and understanding. This was no longer the girl with whom we parted at Dialton. Of course, when a person is abducted, this can produce a similar change with him.

  “And now I stand and watch what happens, and what happens is that everyone is so scared that they just stand still, talk all sorts of nonsense and cry on each other's shoulder,” she continued. “They must have been doing this all the time, only before I had not noticed, until I calmed down and forced myself to look.” We all just stood and cried like children. And our guards must have understood this, too, because when I looked at them, I saw that they really did not pay attention to us. They all watched the boys being driven.

  That's right, I remembered, that we made the main noise - at least some of us. Some of us were still trying to come up with a way to somehow get ourselves out of this binding.

  - So in fact, everything was very simple. - Sissy smiled innocently, and at that moment she again became my cousin girl. - I just started to step over and step back, trying not to move the body very much. And then, when I was behind the crowd, I just kind of slipped out of it. It was dark and no one noticed. But you know, Lee, I don't think they were really that cool. We ourselves decided this because we were too scared. As soon as I started trying to think like you, getting out was easy. - She furiously squeezed me in her arms. “I saw you trying to distract their attention from me, Lee.” “She was crying again.” “What you did for me - I could not have done the same for you ...”

  She buried her face in my shoulder and began to sob, and I felt like a stupid idiot on this side of the boardroom. With all my brains, I myself earned a good eight weeks of slavery, and she had enough reason to just go and leave - and she still merit it?

  “And this is where Eddie saved me.”

  “I followed the bus,” Eddie said, shrugging his shoulders. “Maybe it's not the smartest thing in the universe, but still ... I had to figure out what was up there, and I didn't. I felt responsible for all this, understand?

  I understood.

  - When I saw that they were unloading and distributing you, I realized that nothing shines here for me, and I was alread
y going back to the outpost when I came across your Sissy. He continued. “And I'll be damned if she didn't want to drag me back to try to help you escape!” It took me ten minutes to convince her that they would simply kill us.

  “You should always trust Fat Eddie,” I said. “He always knows three ways to get around any existing corner.” The fact that you listened to him then undoubtedly saved your life. “At that moment, I decided that I would never tell Sissy the full story of my service to the Commune - even if this Sissy, smiling at me now, was not the girl who came here to see the sights in the great Before.

  “You know, she could have gone home,” said Fatty Eddie. “Her mother wanted such a damn thing, be sure!” But instead, for the last two months, she and I have only been doing that we were whining and shaking shit out of everyone, trying to find you. And finally found!

  - And finally, I want to shower! - I said. - And change into clean.

  “And I want to go back to Dialton and finish off what I haven't finished,” Sissy said.

  I stared at her.

  “You're kidding, are you?”

  “Oh, if you want, you can take a shower and change clothes first.” - She got up from the floor, then took my hands and pulled me, putting on my feet. - Come on, Lee! Glorious times are coming in Paris!

  In Paris - where snipers hide behind high windows, and unwashed thugs stupidly stare at the castrated video lottery terminals. In Paris, where on the pavement in front of a rusting Citroen, I once decided to die. An agonizing pain, surging through, swept through me - and out.

  I was dead, dead many times over the past eight weeks - and at the same time, by some miracle, I was alive. I was alive! In Merry Paris, where the celebrated Dialton was still standing, where the bartender could mix me Manhattan, where my cousin Sissy could dance, and I could look at her approvingly from the side table, at the same time thinking about my work problems and exchanging ironic looks with Fat Eddie.

  I held out her hand, and Sissy took me under the elbow. Fat Man Eddie moved ahead, paving our way through the crowd, along the epoxy-tiled boulevard, towards the Dialton.

  Jeffrey ford

  Mysterious Horror Arabesques No. 8

  An inky night of a burial alive, thirsty for impurities, smeared with blood-stained zombies, which was cried out by a vampire bat in a flask in the hands of Dr. Imperius Govnokus, a maniac in a lab coat and a former Nobel laureate, who enclosed his once beloved wife in an ice-cold freezer invented and flew off his rocking chair, tormented by surrogate lust for the immaculate hips of Wendy Vazhenki, the ringleader and captain of the fun club, whose mental development coefficient iswhen he was not more than forty, an appetizing cutie in the thundered Thunderbird convertible on the side of the road, opposite a dilapidated mansion, which long ago, in antiquities teeming with monsters, even before the invention of radio and Prohibition, became the final place, culminating in the mutual gasp of battle between Kotolitsy Ugly and Crouching Brainworm, thereby inhumanly eating a corpus callosum [43] with almost no remorse and even less mercy, like an ordinary person with a transplanted lamprey soul, giving out an arc e the electrical leap at the request of the tamed thunderstorm energy - and also too much radiation, too much bitch radiation!- because of what the ants spontaneously mutated into geniuses and did not want anything else but to crawl into the ears of sleeping children and delve into their brains, feeding their aching, pin-pained fantasies and at the same time kindling in them dreams of a figure shrouded in shadows, prowling along the alleys with a dangerous razor, which once was the beard of poor Lazarus, a figure that fell, but did not move away, although with bones protruding in some places from under the skin, digging soft ground with yellow nails of half-decomposed hands, there, in the cemetery, in aspiration butHe was born again in order to fall back on the ancient mysteries of Hermes Trismegistus, an Egyptian adept who has all the answers to all questions, for example: how does the city seller of sparkling water Jed Bliner, the big-eyed handsome boyfriend Wendy, intend to save her screaming working flesh from the grip of Govnokus, before than he will begin to experiment with her body, making it sour-green and wrinkled by implanting his own lust under her sacred, still undefiled dome of the Lord, using a special recipe consisting from the saliva of a demon, the gaze of an alien and the sweat of a human monkey, thanks to which she will love him exactly as he loves her: just like the Demon of latent science and everything that is unknown, pagan, Nazi and anti-Christian assures that loves himself in the name of the intended plan and the growth of flesh.

  Alice moser

  Seven days of itching

  Paula has had an itchy back for several days. The itch was strange - strong, stubborn, completely unlike anything in her memory. He was almost on the verge of pain - such as happens with a burn on his back. Yes, that's what it looked like: a burn. But when she raised her hand behind her back, with difficulty reaching out to the very edge of this place with her fingertips, each time it seemed to her that there was nothing special.

  Most of the time she did not think about itching at all, but sometimes he suddenly invaded her mind. For the first time, she felt it in the middle of a school meeting, just as this old bitch from the teacher's association said that she was adding six more items to the agenda. She began to fidget in her chair, but when at last it seemed to her that she was able to get this place with the edge of her back, she suddenly realized that several people were looking at her point blank. I had to leave this venture.

  The next morning, she tried to make out this place in the mirror, but no matter how she wriggled, there was nothing to see except perfectly clean skin. Under the shower, she tried to scrape there with a hard washcloth, but the washcloth seemed to cling to something. In any case, this did not help, so she just put her back under hot water and again forgot about itching.

  And now, lying in bed in the gray light of the morning, feeling the touch of Janet's warm chest on her back and her warm breath on her neck, Paula again found that she was itching. It was wonderful - Janet could scratch her back! She reached out and gently squeezed Janet's hip.

  - Janet!

  - hmm? She muttered. Paula shook her hip slightly.

  “Janet,” she said a little louder, “could you scratch my back?” There is something itching and itching for several days, but I can't get it.

  Janet kissed Paul on the back and lazily raised herself, propping her head with her fist.

  - Of course, dumpling. Where?

  Paula put her hand behind her and showed the place.

  - Somewhere here. Try to scratch, and I'll tell you when you get where you need to.

  Janet began to gently scratch her, and Paula directed her.

  - No, a little to the left. No - to my left. Like this. Almost got it. A little higher ... Even higher ... Yet ... yes, yes! Is there anything there?

  Janet hesitated and scratched again.

  “No, nothing special.”

  - Squeeze stronger.

  Janet scratched.

  - Some kind of strange touch.

  - What does “strange” mean?

  “Well, some ... elastic, or something.” As if it can be washed a little inside ...

  Janet stopped scratching and poked an itchy spot with her finger. The skin was slightly exposed, almost like rubber. Suddenly Janet cried out quietly.

  “What is it, Jen?”

  “I don't know, Paul.” So strange - I seemed to feel as if ... as if the tip of my finger ... was pulling in there.

  Paula felt Janet poke her finger again, and then she heard a strangled sound, as if Janet was trying to swallow and inhale at the same time.

  “Paula,” Janet's voice was unusually high. Paula was lying on her side with her eyes closed, but she did not doze.

  - Yes?

  “Paula ...” There was a strange pause. Paula suddenly heard that Janet was panting oddly. She turned her head with a laugh to look over her friend's shoulder.

  - Janet? What happened?

  Janet leaned over her; Paula
heard her rapid breathing.

  “What happened, Jen?” What's the matter baby

  Janet breathed in, hoarsely, forcefully drawing air into herself.

  “I don't know what is going on,” she said, and her voice sounded insane, “all this is too strange ...” She inhaled again, deeply, with difficulty. - Paula ... You know, once, when I was probably in the fifth grade, I glued my eyes.

  Paula frowned. What is she talking about?

  - I glued the upper and lower eyelids together with epoxy resin, by chance; I was making an airplane model ...

  Paula waited for Janet to continue.