The night seemed metallic, overlaid with a silver sheen. Passing motorists appeared faceless, unfinished, refugees from mannequin nightmares. Hearing teeth grinding, Gail wondered whom they belonged to, her partner or herself.
To Bernard’s peculiar residence, an octagon house full of shuttered arch windows, they travelled, parking a few houses distant. On edge, Gail was sloppy about it, nudging a trashcan off the curb, birthing a steel clatter. Still, Bernard only glanced in their direction for a moment, and then unlocked his front entry. Minutes later came the gunshot, which summoned them inside, firearms drawn.
Aside from Bernard’s crumpled corpse, the warm-barreled Glock in his hand, and the gestural abstraction he’d painted with his own brains, lifeblood and cranium, the house was empty: unornamented, devoid of furniture. Its parquet flooring and walls echoed every footfall, made every syllable solemn, as Valetta poked Bernard with the toe of her boot and muttered, “Serves ya right, you bastard.”
After the funeral, they spoke with good ol’ Governor Ken, who fiddled with his tie, trying on a series of expressions, hoping that one conveyed sorrow. “An absolute shock,” he insisted, smiley-eyed. “He’d been so convivial at dinner. You’d never know he’d been suffering.” Beside him, Agatha bounced the governor’s eight-month-old son in her arms, cooing to avoid adult conversation.
Pulling photographs of attractive-if-you-squint missing persons from her jacket, Gail fanned them before good ol’ Governor Ken, enquiring, “Recognize any of these good people?”
“Should I?” he responded, raising an eyebrow.
“They worked at Bernard’s ‘establishments,’ and disappeared off the face of the Earth, seemingly. Did Bernard ever mention them to you, even in passing?”
Glancing to his child, his wife, then finally back to Gail, the governor replied, “Listen…in light of Bernard’s profession, I’m sure that you’d both like to believe that I’m waist-deep in sordidness. But truthfully, he and I only ever discussed sports and musical theatre.”
“Mr. Family Values,” Valetta muttered, sneering.
Infuriatingly, good ol’ Governor Ken winked at her. Without saying farewell, he escorted his wife to their limousine. “Don’t touch me!” Agatha shrieked therein, assuming that closed doors equaled soundproofing. “No, I’m not taking those goddamn pills again!”
Watching the vehicle drive off, Valetta grabbed Gail by the elbow, and leaned over as if she was about to kiss her. “Remember when I went to the bathroom earlier? Guess what else I did.” Pointing toward the limo, she answered herself with two words: “GPS tracker.”
Glancing down at her hands, Gail realizes that this time, she’s the photo shredder. Amputated features fill her grasp. Shivering, she tosses the confetti over her shoulder.
Eye-swiveling back to Valetta, she sees a third photo outthrust: an official gubernatorial portrait.
The drive spanned hours, interstates and side roads. “He must have found the tracker and tossed it,” Gail posited at one point. “Either that, or he’s dead. Why else would his limousine be parked in the middle of nowhere for two days?”
Night fell as a sodden curtain, humid-glacial. Down its ebon gullet, they travelled. Gail’s every eyeblink was weighted, her nerves firecrackers popping. Continually, she glanced at Valetta to confirm that she wasn’t alone.
When they finally reached the limousine, they found it slumbering empty with every door open. Either its battery had died or somebody had deactivated the interior lighting. Shining flashlights, they spied bloodstained seats.
A baby shrieked in the distance, agonized, as if were being pulled apart, slowly. Seeking it, they discovered the streambed, whereupon thirteen tepees loomed. The centermost tent stood taller, sharper than the dozen encircling it. Black cones against starless firmament, they were scarcely discernible. Even before the flashlight beams found them, they felt wrong.
“Is that…human?” Valetta asked. For the first time since Gail had met her, the woman’s tone carried no implied sneer.
Feeling ice fingers crawl her epidermis, burdened by the suddenly anvil-like weight of her occupied shoulder holster, Gail made no attempt to answer. A grim inevitability had seized her. Feeling half-out-of-body, as if she were being observed by thousands of night-vision goggled sadists—bleacher-seated, just out of sight—she slid foot after foot toward the nearest structure.
A cold voice in her head narrated: Strips in all shades of human. Eyes tendon-stitched at their confluence points, somehow crying. Teeth, toenails and fingernails embedded…everywhere, forming patterns, hard to look at. Are they moving? Tepee designs replicate imagery from visions and dreamscapes, right? Didn’t I read that, years ago? But where’s the earth and sky iconography indicative of Native American craftsmanship? What manner of beings co-opted and desecrated their tradition?
Inside…the tent’s skeleton…arterial lining. Ba-bump, ba-bump. Is that my heartbeat? Where’s that wind coming from? Is the tepee breathing?
She felt as if she should move, but it seemed she’d turned statue. Only after hearing her name called did Gail find her feet. Emerging, she saw the centermost tent spilling a misty indigo radiance from its open door and antleresque smoke flaps. Upon a pulped-muscle altar therein, a red-faced infant shrieked, kicking its little legs, waving its tiny arms. Somebody leaned over it, smiling impossibly, wider than his face: good ol’ Governor Ken.
Whatever light source glowed purple, it suddenly jumped tents. Now an elderly man—paunched and liver spotted in stained underpants—wiggled his tongue, spotlit. From a dark rightward tepee, wet-syllabled chanting entered Gail’s ears. She turned to Valetta, but the woman was gone, her flashlight abandoned. Gail prayed to a god that remained hypothetical. Again, the light jumped. A nude crone exited a leftward tent—sagging breasts, oaken-fleshed—and then retreated as if she were rewound footage.
Something inhuman called Gail’s name, then sang it with an unravelling tenor. Every tent self-illuminated, then fell dark. Numb-fingered, Gail groped for her firearm. Tripping, she shredded her knees, though the pain remained distant.
Replicated thirteenfold, the baby shrieked from every structure. Eye-swiveling from tent to tent as she stood, gracelessly mumbling, Gail felt a gnarled grip meet her shoulder.
Giggling, the old man frothed cold spittle onto her neck. Unseen hands began groping, as Gail’s flashlight died. Where are the stars? She wondered, mentally retreating.
She awoke in daylight, a wide-eyed Valetta shaking her shoulder. The woman had sprouted fresh wrinkles. She seemed hardly there. The tents were gone, as was the limo.
Silently, they drove back to the city. Filing no reports, they watched their respective careers apathetically perish, along with their marriages, soon after. Eventually, they moved in together, to wallow in shared misery.
Realizing that they no longer lusted after men, they experimented with lesbianism one hollow evening, spurred by a bottle of red and several lines of coke. Dry and ugly, it was. Neither bothered faking an orgasm, as each would have seen through it.
Reporting more stripper disappearances, newscasters seemed amused.
* * *
Years fell down the bottle, as the world greyed and withered. Good ol’ Governor Ken became grandfatherly Vice President Ken, champion for Christian values. Illegible graffiti sprang up everywhere, instantly fading.
One night, Gail pushed herself off the couch to find Valetta engaged in arts and crafts, constructing papier-mâché tepees from scissor-amputated ad features and scraps of anatomical diagrams. “I can’t get it right!” she shrieked. “Help me, Gail! I can’t stop ’til it’s perfect!”
Impossibly, in the present, Valetta holds a tiny tepee composed of three shredded photographs. Giggling, she tosses it skyward. As the tepee unravels into mist, she enquires, “Do you remember last year? Do ya, Gail?”
Mad, Valetta had been, jittering, pulling her hair out. Muttering of a thirteenth anniversary, she’d vanished for days to parts unknown.
Licking her lips, the nude Valetta whispered, “Close, but no cigar.”
“You killed me,” Valetta says, and Gail relives it.
Terrified beyond rationality by her roommate’s new hobby, hearing an infantile gurgling emanating from Valetta’s tepee, Gail let instinct take over. Retrieving a steak knife from the sink, she rushed into the madwoman’s embrace, jabbing and twisting until they both collapsed.
Awakening, Gail realized that Valetta and her tepee were absent, though bloodstains remained. Into the bottle, she retreated.
If the stars would only come back, everything would be fine, Gail thinks, in the present. Her car’s battery dies, along with its headlights. Nearby, an infant shrieks eternally.
“Gail,” Valetta says in parting. Widening impossibly, her eyes and mouth gush indigo luminescence. From ten digits, her hands spill matching radiance.
Arcing, the lights reach thirteen locations, trailed by Valetta’s branching flesh. Exiting the pretense of corporality, the ex-detective twists—turning inside out, reconfiguring.
Becoming myriad eyes, teeth, nails, bones and flesh strips united by sinew and braided hair, Valetta’s shade evolves into the abstract: thirteen tepees spilling indigo light. Each respires, and has a deafening heartbeat.
Unhesitant, Gail strides toward the centermost.
7
MEDITATIONS by McKenzie Cassidy
{Note: The following excerpt is from a composition journal found at the 3000 block of Orange Lane. The house, belonging to Mr. and Mrs. Ted Carmichael, was searched by police in connection to multiple homicides at East Smithville High School. Their son, Matthew Carmichael, who later died of the fatal injuries sustained from a gunshot wound, was named the primary suspect in the investigation based on footage downloaded from the school’s closed circuit television system. Upon searching the private residence of Matthew Carmichael, with his family’s consent, police found ammunition matching the calibre used in the shooting and a composition journal from which this text was taken. This is an abridged version of that text.}
* * *
I can’t wait to see the looks on the faces. Looks of horror, like the ones I got for years, but it’s my turn now. They don’t expect it, the Day of Reprisal, the role of it, their final judgment, but why would they? People are going to ask about it one day – ask about me – why and how I did it. So, here, I put my thoughts down on paper. I’m an extraordinary thinker. I can’t even share all of my thoughts. The average human can’t even understand me. They’ll think I’m sick or evil, but don’t we all suffer through life? That’s what the Day of Reprisal is all about; a return to the void, the darkness, a loosening of the slack, a reclaiming of our essence that every “she” has taken away: our beings, our cocks, our lives. Society finds ways to harness us and it’s time to break free, no hiding behind phony structures and deceptive adornments any longer.
I am reborn. This is the new me. Nothing will bring me back. I’d rather die before I let that happen, and I probably will by the end of it all. Andrea is first, no doubt, and the flaps of each girl taken, sliced cleanly from their filthy bodies. Cherokee warriors took scalps to mark victories over their foes and trophies of retribution, and that spirit will return again. She’s long, bleached, and styled straight. I want it. I want to smell it. She’ll beg me to stop and I’ll remind her how she started it all. I told her that; but she spread that putrid twat anyway. She didn’t listen and now I’ll fuck her with a knife until she screams and understands. When judgment is upon her, upon them all, the strict sacrificial order will be followed: Natalie, second, and then Sarah, Julia, Melanie, and Brandi. Maybe they’ll all understand how they led this to happen. How they hurt me first.
Sometimes I put the cold barrel across my cheek. I imagine a smooth bullet burrowing into flimsy skulls and grinding flesh like a steel hook through beef. They strut around, unconcerned, happy, dirty little assholes in the air like bitches in heat, fucked by degenerates spawned of society. They’re so carefree; it makes me want to puke. I’m too smart for that. I know better. If they had figured me out than I wouldn’t have to kill them all. They degrade their bodies and my treatment is a reflection of how they treat themselves. It’s truly a gift for them. I get so excited that sometimes I picture jerking off – dick taut with thick blue veins pulsating in my palms – holding a gun to their heads, they watch me do it, screaming in their funny fucking faces. I get the joke now.
The media, the cowards, the liars, the sluts, the sell-outs, they’ll ask how I did it? I’ll share that now because I’m confident it won’t fall into the wrong hands. Everything is ready. The fire alarm is too obvious and that trick’s been done too many times. Doors will open like the great sword of the Archangel Gabriel cutting through limitations until my Day of Reprisal is complete. Once they lay out their defences, I’ll follow my own grid to find every last one of them. Police response is too long and I’ll have plenty of time. Clips hold 15 rounds, enough for six of the degraded and a few extra if I miss one or one bullet doesn’t do the job, or if I need to hold off the police. I’ll take fire from them, but it doesn’t concern me because I have destiny and spirit on my side. They’re incompetent and caught off surprise and can’t understand the significance of the Day of Reprisal. It’s my advantage. By the time I see them, it will have been done, and a success, and it won’t matter if I’m dead.
This town and all of the fucked up degenerates living here will be talking about this day for generations. I know that now. The printed books that the children read, under The Great Day of Reprisal, will demonstrate how I transformed into the liberator. Choices matter and they made theirs and I made mine. They don’t understand: I decide how good or bad it will be, not them. They made their beds, night after night after night with dirty dicks, and now it’s time to lie in it. I will show them what choices they make. Many will ask if I felt sorry for what I did. No. Absolutely not. I’m doing a service to mankind and the universe, why should I feel sorry about that?
Think of me as you wish. All great men are misunderstood, until one day the populace recognizes their contributions to the world. I’m dead now. I’m proud to say that I died for a noble cause. I couldn’t live a minute longer in this world, if that meant keeping my eyes shut or adopting the life of society’s degraded. I’m not like them. I will now take my rightful place among great warriors and I ask the others out there, the silent like me, to rise up and show the new universe in all of its glory, before it’s too late.
8
GRIEVING IN REVERSE by Drew Chial
ACCEPTANCE
* * *
Wind rattled the trees, clogging the gutters entire branches at a time. Rain spilled down the roof. The mansion’s features were blurred beneath a cascade. All I could see were pillars and lights.
Behind the waterfall, the chrome plated doors looked like an art deco rendition of the Empire State Building. There were porcelain knockers on each of them. The one on the left was shaped like a comedy mask with a ring in its smile. The one on the right was shaped like a tragedy mask with a ring in its frown. I picked tragedy, or maybe the atmosphere picked for me.
A well-dressed man opened the door with hair like eagle feathers and a smile that buried his eyes in crow’s feet.
He offered a manicured hand. “Mr. Advena? I’m Edgar Staples, assistant to Mr. Freeman.”
Edgar regarded my yellow trench coat. “Please tell me there’s a zoot suit under that.”
“There’s a zoot suit under this.” I unbuttoned my coat to reveal a dress shirt, thin black tie, and pleated pants.
Edgar shook his head. “That’s no zoot suit.
”
I pointed to the ceiling. “You said ‘tell’ not ‘show.’”
He smirked. “I take it you were a screenwriter in a past life?”
I nodded. “And you?”
Edgar took my coat without answering.
I stepped out of the rain and onto a red carpet. The entryway was framed in footlights that lead to a box office window with an empty marquee.
Pulling a curtain back, Edgar led me through a leather door where I discovered, not the entrance hall of a grand manor, but the lobby of a movie theater. The bar was made up like a concession stand. There was a big neon sign where the Let’s All go to the Lobby singers were joined by a smiling beer mug and martini shaker.
“Right this way.” Edgar directed me to a flight of stairs with a golden railing up the middle.
“Aren’t you going to ask me to shut off my cellphone first?”
Edgar gripped the railing. “Right after I show you the fire exits.”
* * *
DEPRESSION
* * *
Ramsey Freeman was a short stout man, bald with a tuft of bangs, like Friar Tuck. He wasn’t much to look at but he was a giant in the film community. His eyes were on the notecards on that famous corkboard, where he conceived The Straw Husband, Mutiny on the River Styx, and We the Damned.
The screenwriting professor at Columbia told us that Freeman plotted every scene on a notecard. The board fit seventy, no more no less. If Freeman had extra scenes it would force him to decide what to cut. Except today those cards spilled onto the wall. Was this his Gone with the Wind?
Walk Hand IN Hand Into Extinction : Stories Inspired By True Detective Page 6