"What were you dreaming?"
"Horrible things," she says. "Horrible things."
The way she looks at me freezes my stomach. I want to hold her, to do something meaningful, but my hands are cold and arms feel stiff like rubber. She's a mile away on the other side of our bed. The dim dawn light paints her face blue. Her eyes are black, but glassed over with a film of tears. The ice doesn't thaw in my gut, but it does splinter. Shards drive through my heart. I ache.
"What kind of things?" I ask. My voice is small and dry.
"The trees," she says. "That park where those people died. There are children trapped in the trees."
I fell in love with Anne because she broke another girl's nose playing rugby in college. You could hear the snap on the sidelines. We'd been friends before, and Anne had invited me to watch. We made love for the first time later that night, after beers, after laughter, after I re-taped Anne's sore knuckles. I still have the team photo from that day—I was the unofficial photographer. Anne's usual smile was instead a snarling mask as she tried to make a face befitting the blood stain on her jersey.
She was a fighter. She is a fighter.
Now she fights in dreams. She fights the invisible reality that she might never have a child of her own. She fights me without fighting. She never wanted to move here, back to my hometown, back to the university town in which we'd built memories, but I convinced her. I convinced her to live here, and now she has nightmares, and no baby.
Now I imagine children born of Anne's mind trapped in trees.
"I know I'm meant to have children," Anne tells me.
I twist spaghetti noodles around my fork. "We could call the agency. The one my aunt suggested." My eyes are fixed on the pasta and the shining utensil. I don't want to meet Anne's gaze. The dead man, the 19-year-old, the nightmares, and the park… talk of life and death stirs the debate again at dinner. I close my eyes and see the tiny fingernail scratches on dead bodies.
"It's like a hole inside my body. They want to be born, Pete. They need to. They feel trapped."
I think of filling that hole with an adopted child. I think of smoothing the lines on her face and damming her tears. Maybe I'm too simple, too forward about it. Maybe Anne understands only as a woman who craves her own child understands. A baby isn't a commodity. One quick glance at her face tells me her mind is set.
Anne won't entertain the idea of adoption. She says, "They're trying to talk to me. My children. I'm going to help them, Pete. I'm going to set them free," she says. Her eyes burn like the Anne who broke another woman's nose, but something is missing. Something is wrong.
I love Anne, though, or so I tell myself.
I don't need to make love like we used to—with passion and energy and desire.
We just need to stay together.
How can I say she doesn't smile in photos anymore?
I imagine impossible connections between the children she dreams of in her nightmares and the dead bodies with tiny, pink scratches. These are 2:00 AM thoughts, impossible thoughts. But the images are there, flashing in my brain.
The discovery of a third body closes the park.
She's another college student, a girl of twenty-one with black, curly hair and no identification. She's found two weeks after the previous body. Unlike the first two, she is discovered on her side, legs bent and tucked close to her stomach in a fetal position. The scratches are there, of course, tiny surface things almost unnoticeable but undeniably there, spaced evenly, four little lines like… I glance at my hand… scratches from a baby's tiny finger nails. I have no proof, only photos and my thoughts.
And Anne. I have Anne with a vacancy in her eyes and nightmares every night.
"This is it," Jason says at the scene. "This is a pattern. This shit's going to get ugly."
"Ugly? What do you mean?" I ask.
He sighs.
"The FBI, at least. Maybe bigger. Three killings in two months, Pete." Black rings haunt his tired eyes. "We can't manage this without help. We won't be allowed to."
I'm a child again, running down the sidewalk in Vermeer Park. I want to say something to him about Anne, about my worries, but midnight thoughts and late night fears melt into child's play under even the dullest winter sun. I'm afraid of the shadows and the dark. I have no rational reason to fear, no photographic evidence save the bodies we've found and the changes in my Anne. Would anyone else see fingernail marks where the camera captures tiny scratches?
Would anyone believe me if I told them Anne is a monster?
I will take pictures of my wife every day, but there will be no more favorite photos of Anne. The thought empties my chest with a blade of ice.
When I arrive home, Anne grabs my arms, her hands tight like bands of metal. Her eyes are almost black, the pupils dilated even more and wide and wild.
"They're trapped, Pete. They're trapped and they just need help. I'm trying to help them, don't you see?"
I schedule the first psychiatric appointment that afternoon.
Anne's meds bloat her. They make her fat and uncomfortable in her skin. Her hair darkens, too, almost inexplicably. I remember it is winter and during winter Anne's hair darkens, but these memories make no sense with my present reality. Her meds make her complacent. Everything about Anne washes to grey, but the nightmares are gone.
I take the photos, one each day, a record of her life and how I love her.
I am left with photos and the reality that the deaths in the park stop when she starts taking medication, when she gives up her dream of having children. The medication robs me of the Anne who broke another woman's nose in a rugby game. It steals the dimple from her cheek and her eyes are no longer green.
I wonder about the truth of what I imagine. I wonder if Anne populated the trees with her wished-for children and somehow, in some impossible way, force-fed her fighting spirit into them. I wonder if they were born in those trees, the first place Anne and I spoke of being parents together, and they struggled there half-formed. I wonder if we killed them even as they found a way to touch the world, severed their psychic umbilical cord from Anne with the razor blade of antipsychotics.
These are impossible thoughts.
I wonder about their veracity.
I wonder if it matters. Three people died and Anne will never have her child. Our child.
As a photojournalist, as someone who documents reality, none of this happened as I imagine. My wife did not conjure those things in the park. She did not murder three people with her mind, with her desire to have children. She did not create things in those trees that needed freeing, things that withered when drugs addle her brain.
I wonder if it matters.
© 2014 by Aaron Polson
* * *
Aaron Polson currently lives in Lawrence, Kansas with his wife and six children. He's now at full sitcom. To pay the bills, he counsels high school students about post-graduation plans, but he’s still not sure what he wants to be when he grows up. His short fiction has appeared in Shock Totem, Shimmer, Bourbon Penn, and under several unsavory rocks. Rumor has it he prefers ketchup with his beans.
Verisimilitude
Alan Murdock
It is here, sadly, that I will do my last writing in this world. Sad for me anyway, though probably not for anyone else who has read my work. Critics have called my ideas unreal, impractical, and half-baked. They say my characters are inconsistent, impossible to root for, and are involved in unrealistic plot turns. But this piece will be different. It will be better. It will contain what none of my writing up until now has: Realism.
Last Saturday I sat patiently at my table, located on the furthest wall from the doors, tucked into a corner in the large hall of the hotel at yet another sci-fi convention. On the table I had an assortment of my latest books (available only in paperback), and a misspelled nameplate reading Charls Branford. I added the E joking to myself it would be the most writing my autograph pen would do all day.
I usually have some passe
rs-by stop and talk, although they seem to only be those who have never read my work. People more familiar with me tend to keep walking. But those few who stop are usually good for a sale.
It was when one of these individuals stood in front of my table that this story was prompted.
He looked very tall, although my view was low from the cheap folding chair. His face was darkened beneath a ball cap, his features indistinguishable. I thought it odd that anything could be shaded under the bright fluorescent lights hanging over the hall, but then something stranger occurred.
"I'm a long time fan," he said.
I didn't think any of you existed , I thought.
"Thank you," I said.
He asked for a copy of Zombies On Planet Nine, my latest novel. He handed me twenty dollars and I asked his name so I could inscribe it. He told me, however, I couldn't spell it.
"That sounds like a name I would use for one of my characters," I told him. I have often used long unpronounceable words with too many consonants in proportion to vowels, and what this man said sounded like the correct pronunciation of one of these words.
I asked him to repeat it, thinking the echo of the hall combined with the excited mutterings of fans had distorted his voice. He did, and then, following what was surely a quizzical expression on my part, told me just my signature would suffice.
I did as requested, and handed him the book. After thanking me, he turned to walk away.
"Excuse me, um," I called after him. "Sir."
He turned, and even at this new angle his face was dim and vague. "I was wondering if there was any one thing specifically you like about my work?" It sounds egotistical, as if I were prodding for a compliment, but my critics are so busy pointing out my shortcomings that I've never received constructive feedback. If I could be made aware of even one positive attribute, it may give me something to work with in the future.
He said, "It's so real."
"But none of it's real. Not the characters, not the plot, not the setting, none of it," I said, hating myself for repeating my critics. Clearly, the continuation of our conversation was nothing more than a waste of time.
"You write reality as I see it," he said. "It's all around us. Surely you see it too."
"I only write fiction," I countered. "And not well."
"You are appreciated where I come from."
"Where is that?"
"I think you know."
He left before I could say anything further.
I abandoned my desk in a futile effort to locate him.
From then until now I have looked for him everywhere. It was only a short time ago when I sat down to my latest story that I realized where to find him—and moments ago I did. I now know his name is XTHYMOS GZRANDLP. He was in my writing all along. I'm in that world, his world, now with no plans of ever leaving. As long as I continue to write these words, I will be able to live here forever. I think this ends chapter one, but I'm in a book with an infinite number of pages.
XTHYMOS is calling me now, and so I must go deeper, deeper into the world I did not create, but merely found.
© 2014 by Alan Murdock
* * *
Alan Murdock is a writer of horror, sci-fi, and other weird fiction. He lives with his wife and daughter in New England, but is a frequent visitor to the fictional town of Haven Falls, Connecticut. When not reading or writing, he enjoys spending time with his family, watching the Red Sox, and drinking beer—usually all at once.
Orc Legal
James Beamon
I stopped counting two hundred and thirty-seven days in. That was the day the magistrate told me that I only had eight more hours of community service to earn my freedom. Magistrate also followed that up with "I'm going to see to it you never get those eight hours, filthy orc".
The jail cell was getting smaller.
Meanwhile rumors floated into my shrinking cell, talk of evil overlords growing powerful in different corners of the Seven Realms. Any one of those overlords would need orcs like me, making up their faceless hordes in black armor, ever-ready to do his/her evil bidding while raking in pillage and employment benefits like decent co-pays for dental and a viable retirement plan.
It was a great time to be a henchman, and here I was serving time. The new fish in the cell next to me wouldn't stop crying. And the warden was pissing in my water ration with religious tradition.
Speaking of, it was lunchtime in the dungeon. The other dungeon dwellers, humans naturally, complained about the food like they complained about everything else down here. I was still trying to figure out how anybody had the stones to complain about a consistent meal of bread and gruel. Seriously? This was a banquet ball compared to Lord Dreadbane's death marches… back when he was on the scene we basically had to eat any orc that fell to exhaustion.
Old Lord Dreadbane… man, did he have a great incentives program.
I could hear the warden making his rounds with the food cart, with the squee squee of the wheels and the clang of tin bowls that he tossed at despondent prisoners. When he got to me, my water was surprisingly clear.
"What? None of your homemade lemonade?"
"I ain't forgot about you, sweetness. My proprietary blend's in there alright… I'm just giving most of it to crybaby next to you. Maybe it'll dry his throat out enough for him to shut up."
"Good plan. What's his deal anyway?"
"One of them weird races. Centaur, brought in for lewd conduct."
Warden glared down at the next cell. "Enough already, princess pony!" he shouted as he squeaked his wheels down to where the centaur was.
Sooner or later (you never knew which one was which down here), the centaur's crying downgraded to sniffling. That was about the time the elf came to visit him.
I saw the elf scowling into the centaur's cell, looking all dapper and tall and blonde.
"You're a disgusting sack of filth. I'm going to see to it that you never leave this cell unless it's as glue, dog food, and transplant organs. You make me sick. I'll see you in an hour."
The elf left and I called out to the centaur. "Man, the District Attorney really has it in for you."
"District Attorney? No, that was my court-appointed lawyer. And here I was thinking he wouldn't care about my case since I wasn't paying him anything."
"Sorry dude."
"Sorry for what? This is great! He's an elf. And his designer look lets me know he's a professional. I'm sure he won't let personal feelings get in the way of doing his job."
"Why in blue-green blazes are you so sure of that?"
"Duh… he's an elf."
Again with the myth of elvish nobility. Every race looked up to those lanky bastards just cause they were elves. Most orcs knew their secret; they used most of their fairy magic shrinking their guts or making their faces beautifully aquiline or keeping their hair from having split ends. That's cause if they just let themselves go natural most of them would end up looking like orcs, and then where would they be? In dark armor marching for dark lords to make ends meet, no doubt.
Screw this centaur. It would be just desserts to see him hang from his stupid notion of bright and right elvish goodness. I turned to do some pushups and an idea hit me.
Public defense counted as community service.
If the centaur requested it, no way the magistrate could say no.
"Hey centaur, what's your name?"
"Moxie."
"Nice to meet you, Moxie. I'm Anglewood. Listen, I think you deserve more for your defense. Someone who's not only a true professional, but someone who is passionate about your case and will work tirelessly for at least eight hours to see you free."
"Sounds nice. But no one will defend me because I can't pay."
"I'll defend you."
"You? What do you know about the legal system?"
"I'm an evil henchman for hire. I've been in and out of jail since I was a kid. What don't I know about the legal system?"
It took about three hours to make all the necessary
arrangements and prepare the defense. That meant five hours away from freedom.
Moxie took the time to relay the particulars of his case to me from his cell. Like I cared. I took a nap.
The courtroom was full of angry townsfolk. I was glad they had to leave their torches and pitchforks outside.
The District Attorney was the same elf that was acting as Moxie's public defendant a few hours ago. Guess he got a taste of half-horse meat and refused to let go. The jury box was full of the same lanky elves.
Everyone was looking at me like I was on trial, including my client.
"Dear Judge?" the centaur asked. "Can I change my mind about my lawyer?"
I pulled his human head down to my level. "What are you doing?"
"I thought you were a human. If I knew you were an orc I would have said no in the first place."
My other hand pointed to the jurors. "Your racism isn't exactly warming any hearts over there in the jury box and I'd be kicking your horse's ass right now if I hadn't sworn an oath to defend it."
Moxie slapped my hand away from his head. "You ever been horse stomped and elbow dropped all at once? Cause I'm telling you, there's a first time for everything."
"Enough," the judge interrupted. "Pervert centaurs don't get much leeway round here. You made your bed, now lie in it, or sleep on it standing up, or do whatever it is your kind does when its bedtime."
That's how the trial of the decade for this small township started.
The elf called his first witness. While they talked yada yada, I was getting an earful of Moxie's disappointment. "I could have had a professional looking lawyer like that. No, I got roped into having an orc who wears dirty tattered rags for a business suit."
"Dude, I live in a dungeon, not a palace parapet. Get over it."
Fantasy Scroll Magazine Issue #3 Page 4