Fantasy Scroll Magazine Issue #3

by Iulian Ionescu

  The Big Show is not happy, standing in the living room, berating everyone unfortunate to have been caught inside when he showed up. Our ratings are dropping, which means commercial revenues are down. Way down. I think they're starting to use some of the prize money for craft services. This week, especially, it seems that the show failed to generate any controversy; it had generally failed to spur anything online. Even hatred. They should tape this guy's rant. It might help perk up the numbers.

  While Bob wracks his brain, I stand on the back porch, watching the ocean. Drink a beer. The house grows uncomfortably small and quiet. When the cameras aren't here, I prefer to stay outside.

  I could have told him why his show was diving. People don't watch us because we're hip or cool or they wish they were us or had our problems. They watch to wait for one of us to lose control, for it to be THAT moment, caught live on cameras.

  The laws against use of our special talents are pretty strict. I'm sorry to say I was the reason most of them were enacted in the knee jerk legislative reaction that always seems to accompany the actions of one disturbed individual.

  That was me, just for the record. It seems that the calming influence I can project, both the light waves of cool collectiveness and the intense ice shards of frozen watchfulness—the physical manifestations they called The Peace—leave more than a small piece of themselves inside everyone they touched.

  At first it wasn't that noticeable. There were a few people who never got over their PTSD from the Strongman incident, just kind of sat back in their figurative rocking chairs and let the rest of their lives happen to them.

  Then there were a few other things that happened. Strange growths found on some of the internal organs of various suicide victims in the City. Public Health had a fine time alarming the public with fears of some new biological weapon. Nobody could put it together, though, and like all the other amorphous threats of bio-warfare that filtered out of the media, it got tucked back into some Internet graveyard, moving out of the way to make room for the latest paparazzi shot of Venus and her Beau of the Week.

  I could have noticed the change in Jack, but we weren't that close. I mean, we were, but he had come to me a cold, reserved man, the kind who finds it easy to control what few emotions he has.

  We were ideal for each other. When it got hard to be around other people, when the taste-the-rainbow waves of pain and anger threatened to become overwhelming rather than sustaining, he was there to pull me back on dry land.

  He came with me on that call. It was The Rager, our friendly, local recidivist. The first time we faced each other, he had left more than one scorch mark on a sensitive part of my anatomy. The papers loved our duels—Fire and Ice they liked to call it—and published great big color pictures of The Rager and The Peacemaker, duking it out with some iconic NYC scenery in the background.

  Unfortunately for the City, I had been growing steadily, stealthily more powerful, and he had been getting more angry and driven. Our final showdown was on its way, just like you see in the comic book mashup movies.

  It was going to be an epic battle, but then it happened outside the wrought-iron fence walls of a high-school parking lot. That day The Peace rose quickly, violently, and when the dust settled, The Rager was nothing more than crystallized flesh and bone.

  They finally figured out that Public Health crisis. The same growths found on the suicide victims matched exactly The Rager's petrified flesh. And the flesh on the six students and three teachers killed outright, standing within the shadow of the blast.

  The suicides came after. Other people—just weren't the people they had been before.

  Jack ended up in an institution, his attempt foiled by the misfire of his service revolver. From that time, harsh chemicals and fluorescent lights had kept him in the land of the living. Even if what he was doing wasn't quite that.

  It's getting dark. The tide is pulling back from the shore. Three of the last beers in the house sit on the table next to me. It's been a couple hours, but it's cold enough outside to keep them chilled. I debate going back in the house. I could spend the night out here, with the cold as my welcome companion.

  Better than the house. Jack's taken to roaming the halls the past couple of nights. I get bad insomnia. My brain can't shut down for a few hours after everyone goes to bed, too full from processing their offerings of jealousy and petty hate.

  I can't stand to see him. Not that I feel guilty. Sometimes I do. Every time I go near, he turns to look at me, as if realizing he knows me. But the memory slips away every time his brain gets close to grasping hold of recognition.

  The screen door slams behind me with more force than I intended. I pause, holding my breath, waiting to see if I woke anyone. I don't hear any sudden shuffling or movement, so I settle down and go to put the empty bottles in the sink. It's a habit that pisses off the American Venus, who thinks all beer bottles should be placed in the recycling, but it's dark and I don't want to.

  I stand at the sink, the last bottle still in my hand, looking out the window over the dark sand. The full moon casts a path across the ocean. With the breeze coming in the screen door, I can just barely still hear the waves.

  The barest hint of frost forms at my fingers, leaving faint tracks across the glass bottle. I try to hold in the dark calm, but there are no cameras here, no prying housemates. Only myself and the night and The Peace.

  "Mike?"

  The bottle slips from my hand and lands with a surprisingly dull thump in the metal sink. I turn to see Jack, standing in the shadows at the edge of the room. His eyes are more focused. His head drifts around. I realize he is looking for the all-seeing eye. There is nothing but the dark.

  He comes closer. I lean back against the sink but he stops a few feet away this time. His eyes rest somewhere below mine, still unable to make eye contact.

  "I remember you."

  Jack's voice is loud in the room. I wince and lower my voice to reply. "Do you, partner?" I didn't realize my voice would come out so brittle.

  My attempt to get him to whisper has no effect. He says in a normal tone: "I remember." I wait for him to continue, but he can't.

  Jack drops his gaze and looks around. Carefully, almost delicately he pulls a chair from the table and drags it to where he can see out the door into the gloom over the water. He sits there for a while. I wait for him to say something else, but that's all he's got for me.

  I move to stand behind him, my hands resting on his shoulders. It's a curiously intimate gesture for two men who have not seen each other in years, and who were never close, but it doesn't feel awkward. He reaches up to my hand, clasping it in his.

  There is a jolt as his pain washes over me. There is something dead under the pain, as if it, too, had metastasized under the touch of The Peace. The calm starts to rise in me again. My hand grows cold, and the ice grows cold and clear. I step forward to stand beside him.

  Jack looks up at me. I know he can feel The Peace like an offering in my skin. A light flashes deep behind his eyes. Just for a second, I wonder if I miscalculated, but then he is gone under the ice.

  I've tried, but I can't do it. My ability to accept that something I almost had grasped­—a chance for recognition, a chance to do the right thing in the world—had slipped irreconcilably away. I can't say when it happened, but I suspect it began when I put the Strongman down on the cold filthy marble of the Grand Central Station.

  Revelations that occur after midnight and before the sun rises are not to be trusted. We are more prone to act because we cannot see an end to the despair, to the blackness that settles down, makes itself part of something that cannot be excised without losing some important part of yourself.

  The Peace rises in me, the cold heart of its promise begging to slip from my hold. Through the velvet silence, I feel the dim threads of dream hate, anger, worry, jealousy and just the slightest amount of love, courtesy of Venus, seep through the night.

  I reach out and grasp the metal railing, the
cold leaching itself into my palms, to be met by the slow, encroaching tide of ice. Questing out, I push the shadows of silent canyons through the fragile modern spaces of the house.

  A sigh drifts up, the only sign that life still clings to its idea, if not its fleshly reality. There is a sound like coughing, and then I'm alone.

  My bag holds a few necessities, and I don't mind helping myself to the keys to one of The Big Show's shiny cars. I have a long way to go. I was never much of a hero; now I realize that was never my calling. All I can offer is a final sort of Peace.

  © 2014 by Rachel A. Brune

  * * *

  Rachel A. Brune writes short fiction, long fiction, songs, screenplays, poetry and operations orders. A former Army journalist, she lives in North Carolina with her husband, two dogs, and three cats. She blogs her adventures, writing and otherwise, at www.infamous-scribbler.com.

  My Favorite Photos of Anne

  Aaron Polson

  I am no storyteller, but I photograph my wife every day.

  One of my favorite photos of Anne shows her sitting on our bed, face stretched and beaming, with the little white pregnancy test stick in her hand. Her freckles glow in the picture. Her eyes jump at will between green and brown. Most indoor photos give them a darker tint, but not this snapshot. Her single dimple, left side, is deep and at its face-cheering best. Anne's dark curls wear sun-bleached highlights because it dates to late summer, only six months before the first death in Vermeer Park.

  I took the photo one month and six days before Anne's latest miscarriage.

  Anne and I decided we wanted to have children on a walk through Vermeer Park, and we have tried for three years. We've spoken with a fistful of doctors, burned stacks of money, and heard everything from low sperm count to "hostile vagina." We've suffered three miscarriages together and face the reality of drifting into our thirties without a child. Our friends—all married couples—have one or two of their own. The Wollcotts are having a third.

  "Number three's on the way," Jason said over the phone.

  He called me hours before we both met in the park amid the snow and trees—me to snap photos and he for his police work.

  You see, I photograph the dead too.

  She is—was—a student at the university, a girl of 19 with brown hair, blue eyes, a fake driver's license, handful of crumpled bills, birth control pills, and a can of pepper spray in her purse. Her arms are tucked under her body with the purse lumped under her abdomen. Her butt is in the air, knees bent. She looks like she could have fallen if not for her arms bending at such an unnatural angle. There are no signs of struggle, only faint scratches on her face, arms, and neck—none of which broke enough skin to draw blood. She hadn't used her pepper spray.

  She simply died three days after Christmas, and the snow fell, covering everything.

  The city had installed streetlamps earlier in the year, vintage-looking black metal poles topped with rectangular glass boxes. They look like old gaslights, the kind which filled cities in the 19th century and were hand-lit, something out of a Dickens story. The lights were installed after my childhood treks through the dark—too late to calm my fears—but they should have made a difference for a 19-year-old girl that winter.

  Should have, but she was murdered—I use "murdered" because I don't know another word—murdered and dumped, as garbage in the snow, all under the bright glow of the new lights.

  When I was younger, having children seemed far away, a decision I wouldn't need to make, but now, now with Anne's miscarriages—the last after implantation—cold reality has robbed us of the choice. It's different, choosing or being robbed of a choice.

  But Anne loves me. She says she does and smiles enough for a woman broken from the inside. She sleeps through most nights. She's tired all the time, closing her eyes as early as 8:30 on some nights. She rolls away from me and simply goes to sleep. When I touch her, spooning her close to feel her warmth, I find none. Anne is cold. Anne doesn't know how long I hold her at night, hoping for some spark. Any spark.

  She doesn't know how much I think about the dead girl in Vermeer Park. She doesn't know how it feels to take photographs no one should ever see.

  A boy from Anne's school finds the second body in early February.

  He was an older man, a member of the local Rotary club and a retired banker. He is found much like the first: hunched over with his arms awkwardly tucked under his body and butt in the air. There are scratches, too, just like the girl, tiny marks on his face and exposed hands and forearms. These scratches, like the girl's, are on the surface only, little pink lines.

  I take photos. I do the work the police ask. I snap shots of the walk, the trees, and the late-winter shadows for the paper. We won't print the body, just sterile images of the area where the body was found with police tape circling a group of officers in winter coats. This is how we publish deaths in the paper or post them to our website—photos of the area but never the crime, the setting but never the story.

  Two deaths within two months, both bodies found in the same park, just to the east of the sidewalk… these details must mean something.

  "Not good," Jason says to me as we stand under the arching trees in the park. "Not good at all."

  The camera dangles from my neck, heavy and solid like a stone-tied leash. I rub numb fingers together for warmth and say, "Any leads? Any clues to what's going on?"

  Jason's smile is half-formed. "You know I can't tell you anything, Pete. You know I can't show you too much."

  It's a game we play. He always shares too much, but I play along. "A college co-ed and then this old guy… not much link there except for the location and manner of death."

  Jason coughs. His eyes shift toward me.

  "Something about the manner of death?" I ask. "What about the girl?"

  Jason glances over his shoulder. A shudder shakes his body. Something has him spooked, at least a little, conjuring memories of our childhood fears. I know images and faces and every expression Jason makes. "You know this is hush-hush, right?"

  "Scout's honor," I say. I was never a Boy Scout. "What's wrong?"

  "We couldn't reveal too much, you know, confidentiality and it's not all that newsworthy." His gloved hands press together. "She just died."

  "I took pictures, Jay. I know she was dead." My voice lowers, knowing it needs to hide. "What do you mean, by 'just died'?"

  "Like a heart attack, but she was nineteen. Fit. The docs couldn't really explain it. It's like her heart just quit. Like her body just gave up."

  "Drugs?" I ask, knowing the answer.

  Jason wags his head. "No. No booze, no narcs, nothing. Nothing we know of anyway. Nothing we can trace."

  I touch my cheek with cold fingertips. "The scratches?"

  "Big mystery. They're spaced just about right but not fingernail marks. At least that's what the coroner said on the girl. But this guy… shit. I don't know." He clears his throat and nods toward the body. "They couldn't be nail marks. They're tiny." He coughs. "Look. We didn't have this conversation."

  "Hush, hush," I say, and the shiver finds me. The words "tiny nail marks" spark in my brain.

  "Right. Hush, hush." His eyes drift skyward toward the branches overhead, and I follow suit. A moment passes between us, a moment of frozen air and long-ago thoughts. "The trees are still creepy. Unnatural. Remember that game we used to play?"

  "We'd count," I say. "We'd count and see how fast we could run through the park."

  "But never off the sidewalk." Jason scratches his lean chin. "If we did, they'd get you." He shivers. I'm sure it's the cold. Jason is a practical man, a man of law and logic.

  "Child's play," I say. "Used to scare the crap out of me, imagining something hiding in these trees."

  As a boy, I feared the park. Maybe it was the meandering sidewalk and trees-tall, groping trees and the lack of anything else between the community building in the north to 12th street two blocks to the south. The paved path curved slightly, a concrete ribb
on looping past century old oaks trimmed high above the ground. No small bushes or other trees were allowed to grow near the path. Darkness owned the park at night.

  Jason pulls his collar close to his neck. "I don't like this, Pete. I don't like things being broken like this. Two dead in the same place within two months. This town isn't big enough for shit like this."

  We turn and walk toward the lot, following the same path we ran as children. Silence hangs between us and grows to an awkward, ungainly thing. I want to ask what happens when we find a third body. I can't.

  "How's Anne?"

  "Anne?"

  "Yeah. It's been a while since we've seen you guys. Everything all right?"

  "Nightmares," I say. "She's having nightmares."

  Jason coughs. "Since when?"

  "Around Christmas."

  Another photo is ten years old, another bed shot—her with disheveled hair, "crazy hair" like she called it. Her smile is there, though, and while not as big as the pregnancy test photo, her dimple and wrinkled nose tell the story. She'd just woken. She was happy. She was in love with me, and the world held wonder. I imagine her dreams that night were big and beautiful.

  Her dreams are haunted now.

  Now she knows only nightmares.

  Dr. Redding claims her fertility cocktail—Follistim and Lupron and God knows what else—shouldn't have any effect on Anne's dreams. The nightmares haven't listened to Dr. Redding. Coincidence, although not causation, always makes a strong case. Anne's nightmares are real, visceral things. She thrashes her arms and speaks gibberish. She often wakes with glassy, trance-like eyes, sometimes in her sleep, leaving the bedroom for the long hallway and stairs.