The Midnight Diner
Pursuing Christ on the Fringe
Volume 3, Summer 2010
A collection of interesting and enjoyable stories that will undoubtedly expand the reader’s imaginations, and may cause insomnia due to the intense nature of some, and thus is not recommended for children or those with weak constitutions or heart problems.
The Midnight Diner
Pursuing Christ on the Fringe
Editor-In-Chief: Michelle Pendergrass
Assistant Editor: Robert S. Garbacz
Diner Editors: Matthew Quinn Martin Chris Mikesell
Web Editor: Ian Philpot
Virtual Assistant & Assistant Web Editor: Elaina Avalos
Layout Editor: Linda Gilmore
Cover and Logo Design: Virginia Hernandez
Copy Editors: Libby Cudmore Christina Roberts
Proofreader: Bonnie Ponce
ccPublishing Board of Directors: President, Michelle Pendergrass Vice President, Christopher Fisher Secretary, Kimberly Culbertson Treasurer, Angie Poole Director, Brad Fruhauff
All works Copyright 2010 by the individual author credited. Anything not credited is Copyright 2010 by ccPublishing, NFP. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or trans- mitted by any means without prior written permission of ccPublishing, NFP.
Submissions are only accepted online at http://www.themidnightdiner.com. This is the 21st century. Submissions received by mail will not be read, looked at, returned, or reviewed in any way, unless the author is Stephen King. Otherwise, get with the program.
Menu
From the Counter Michelle Pendergrass
Chef 's Choice
A Thousand Flowers Eric Ortlund
The Blood Bay Edward M. Erdelac
Clockworks of Hell Brian J. Hatcher
Grisly Eats
Monster Made Kevin Brown
Lonely Places Kevin Lucia
Flesh and Blood Greg Mitchell
Virtuoso M.L. Archer
The Cloak Douglas Kolacki
Western Flair
The Way of Cold Teeth Lon Prater
Diner Plates
Hanlon's Folly Chris Mikesell
Haunting of Mabel Jason Hubbard Derr
Hardboiled Dishes
Beneath Its Weight Michael Dean Clark
Preacher Man Lib Cudmore
Big Apple Gothic Matthew Quinn Martin
Lighter Fare
The Ocean Thief Colin McKay Miller
The Last Door Edoardo Albert
The Princess and the Vampire Jeff Chapman
Á la Carte
A Better Place Virginia Hernandez
Our Authors
From the Counter
Michelle Pendergrass, Editor-in-Chief
Three years ago, I submitted to the first edition of The Midnight Diner while grieving deeply the loss of my Uncle Ed, who took his own life on a cold night in February. Two years ago, I was asked on as editor here and soon after, sang my grandma into eternity. Last year, Coach hung up his golden spatula and placed the keys to this joint in my nervous hands and exactly one month ago, my own mother breathed her last as I sang Amazing Grace over her.
And so life has taken on a new perspective. As has death.
In life and also here in print for this third edition, my death cup runneth over. I need a change so I go back to Independence Days in Grandma’s back yard, BBQ ribs on the grill, sprinklers, sparklers and fireflies in mason jars. I go back to lilac bushes blooming, autumn leaves falling, and mom bundling me up for Chicago blizzards that dump more snow than imaginable and winds that carry it and drift it up over rooftops that I climbed and conquered. I go back to rides in Uncle Ed’s Spider convertible, Hotel California blaring, and Dairy Queen ice cream dripping down my fingers.
I go back there and get homesick.
I get homesick and remember the pain of those years, pain I won’t put to words, but the kind of pain that breaks a spirited girl’s soul.
Standing at this intersection of beautiful and ugly I make a quarter turn to face Beautiful Boulevard and make another quarter turn to stare down The Ugly Highway, then Beautiful then Ugly.
Turning circles shows me a glaring truth. Beautiful and Ugly coexist. They intersect. Overlap.
It becomes a matter of perspective.
The capacity to view things in their true relations or relative importance.
A few themes arose organically in this issue. Death. Family. Loss. Loneliness. Pain. Abuse. I can’t help but think of how God has commandeered my life during these times of overwhelming grief and pain that come with losing those that had some of the most influence on my character. And how He also took over this edition of The Midnight Diner. The Holy Ghost worked in the minds of the authors who penned these stories long before I knew my mother would fall ill. They were submitted and published at this moment in time.
Looking back to the days before we knew of mom’s brain tumor and cancer, a friend and I were at a writer’s conference. She attended a session by author Sara Miles and searched me out with a message.
"Prayer doesn’t cure disease; it heals it, and healing may not be what we think it should be."
I couldn’t have known the stories in this issue would center around death and family and pain. I certainly didn’t expect my mother to die. But, come to think of it, I didn’t expect to be editor-in-chief of this place or president of ccPublishing. I grapple with what I know, what I do not know, what I can know, and what’s beyond my comprehension. If God had stood before me and told me, "Hey listen. I’ve got this plan for you. You’re going to become this important person in this rinky-dink-but-full-of-potential company and you’re going to have to do it all while your people drop like flies…" I would have run for the hills (that He owns). A modern day Jonah, I suppose.
Therefore, what I don’t know is probably good for me. And Him, I imagine.
But that doesn’t mean the struggling stops. It also doesn’t stop the healing from occurring. What matters is the perspective with which things are viewed. Certainly, most of us don’t expect tragedy. We don’t anticipate our step-mother’s abuse when Dad is out on the road as in Monster Made. We don’t set out to overwork ourselves, which in turn, sets a series of events into motion that we can’t undo like Jon in Flesh and Blood. As children, we don’t think we’re going to watch our mothers die. Ever. Whether peacefully as I did or tragically as Jonas from The Blood Bay witnessed.
Because we live, we struggle. Just as Jacob wrestled with God, we grapple with Him and His ways. Sometimes we walk away limping with dislocated hips, other times, like the bleeding woman of the New Testament, just touching the hem of His garment heals us.
This healing that does not always look like we think it should is never more obvious than the story of Christ and his encounter with the Beautiful Ugly—the Cross. Our healing comes through his pain, suffering, and from His Father’s abandonment, if for only that one moment in time. Imagine what it must have felt like to do everything asked of you—sinless and blameless—
to have your Father turn His back on you while you’re being beaten and tortured and killed.
Through this horrible death came a healing, though, that could not be accomplished otherwise.
What is presented to you between the covers is what I believe represents a much different perspective of fiction written by Christians. It exemplifies those of us who are Pursuing Christ
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on the Fringe.
Chef 's Choice
A Thousand Flowers
Eric Ortlund
"My wife and I were driving through North Dakota once. This might be North Dakota now, for all I know. The ‘great trek,’ she called it. We were driving through a field much like this, all our camping stuff in the back. I made tapes of our favorite CDs, and we’d try to listen to the faded recording with the windows down and the wind roaring in our ears."
The fields opened up on either side of the car. The sky above mirrored them, blue slate without boundary. My right calf began to ache as I held my foot on the accelerator.
"We had stopped in some dirty little town that was trying to pretend it wasn’t," he said, "or...or the people had forgotten it was dirty just because they had nothing to compare it to. It seemed like dirt was everywhere—on the long windows of the car dealerships, on the windows of the restaurants, the cars. We got gas and I got coffee. The station was so strange to me: the people had put a lot of work into it, setting out all kinds of condiments and everything else. Even had the worst-made horror movies for sale that I’d ever seen—no money put into them."
He paused.
"Aren’t you going to ask me what kind of horror movies? If there were zombies?" His voice had something in it that suggested he was rolling his eyes—and that he wasn’t really tired or disgusted. Just mimicking my anticipated reaction in its absence. "Well, there were."
"So we got back out on the road with the worst coffee I’d ever tasted. I don’t know how you could come up with coffee that bad even if you tried. Eventually I chucked it out the window, though I’d always be nervous I’d get a ticket for littering. The wind just about took my arm off."
I could see out of the corner of my eye that he was looking out on the endless horizon.
"Anyway, I think it was just after that that she saw the flowers. A whole field of them—sun- flowers. Black and bright yellow. And they were all facing the same direction, looking right toward the sun.
"She pointed it out to me and said it was kind of scary.
"She was right." Something came into his voice that almost made me look at him. "There was something brightly frightening about it, as if some aggressive conformity had all of them in sway. The field of them was endless.
"This was before we’d had kids. We’d been married about a year."
I waited for more, but he said nothing, turning to look out the window. My eyebrows bunched together as my aching calf finally pushed down on the accelerator.
The engine roared as we sped along. And it came to me that I had, without realizing it, associated them with starfish. That is what the waving tentacles around their faces looked like: starfish arms. And yet, there was a kind of terrible beauty in them—flowers opening before the sun.
~
After almost, almost telling me what had happened, he proceeded to spend the rest of the day being a complete idiot. I was almost certain I knew, but he needed to say it himself.
It was our fifth stop of the day. You could never tell where the gas would still work and where the pumps would be dry, so you had to keep looking. He found a bottle of spray paint and put smiley-faces on store windows. After that, he would knock on each unshattered store window and ask in a British accent, "Excuse me, sirs, but may we enter and commit robbery?" He would repeat it as he sauntered around, feet crackling on glass, hand waving to knock potato chips and soft drinks off the shelves. It was bad enough seeing the superficial brightness of plastic wrappers and pop machines reduced to silence in the darkness and grime that had settled on every store, but seeing him stomping groceries somehow made it worse. I had lost count of how many stops we had made when he switched to a southern accent, and I finally gave him a look that shut him up good. He turned and went outside. I heard him kicking around while I rummaged through the convenience store, still looking for things we could really use, like barbed wire or ammunition that hadn’t been wetted or flashlights with fresh batteries. I was crouched over, looking under the counter, when I heard him start to urinate against the wall.
And then I was up and sprinting out of the store because he was yelling that they were coming, that those things were coming. I rounded the corner, skidding on the dust and tiny rocks that made up the store’s parking lot, to see nothing else but his dunce’s grin as he zipped up. He walked past me, toward the jeep.
I stared at the ground for a while, biting the inside of my cheek. Then I followed him.
He was the only other person I had seen for months. It would do neither of us any good if I left him.
~
Sleep was weighing my eyelids when I heard him speak again. I had driven all day (I did not trust him to drive), but something in his voice made my eyes flick open. We looked up at a gigantic splatter of stars, pinpricks in a dark fabric worn and faded with time. Although we kept our guns loaded next to us while we slept, we had stopped sleeping in turns long ago; none of them traveled fast, and we hadn’t seen any this far north for a long time.
"How do you think it happened? How do you think it came about?" I waited a long time before answering.
"I don’t know," I said, and my voice was as close to friendship as it ever came with him. "Maybe a meteor hit with something on it that infected us. Probably some government experiment gone wrong. Red alarms going off in bases deep under Nevada and white lab coats running around. You’ve see movies like that. One or a couple of people got infected, and it spread."
More silence. In my weariness, I felt entombed between hard earth and dark empty sky, but did not find it unpleasant.
"Why are there two kinds of them?"
Another pause. He deserved an answer, but I had nothing to give him.
At the farthest angle of my vision, I could see the muscles of his neck bunch and start to shake, fists clenched on top of his sleeping bag. He eyes flared and lips pressed together, as if some beast inside him was straining within his throat.
~
What I did not know then was that there were actually three kinds.
~
A few nights later we were intercepted.
I stared, ignoring the breeze which passed over the shriveled worms of our sleeping bags and whispered through the anemone-plumed grass. The thing’s head looked like a cheap sun-shaped mask: star-fish arms all coming out in a circle. The appendages waved, but not in the breeze. The thing reminded me of a bent tree, holding crystal moonlight in sad hands.
The arms were red, not yellow. (I could see that even in the darkness.) But there was some- thing of the sun in them all the same.
It hissed at me. I could not see its mouth, but knew it was there, holding three or four tongues.
"Mouth" was not the proper word, for they enjoyed none of the things which humans can do with theirs: talking, drinking, kissing. But it is the only word I had for the hole with teeth on the lower half of their face, a gap that might have spoken, if there had been a soul and a heart within. Long veinless red arms suddenly snapped straight against its sides; the arms on his head uncurled to full circumference. It hissed again. Whether it was talking to me, I did not know, for it looked to the side. They walk paths no human can see.
I kept my rifle trained on it. My companion was lying down behind me, a ridiculous grin on his face. He was awake—he must have awoken at the sound of my panicked rising—but was pretending to sleep. I felt the muscles above my eyes bend as my teeth pressed against each other. Part of me wanted to turn the gun on him, to see if that would get him to stop pretending. He was like a kid who would rather wet the bed than get up in the middle of the night and go to the bathroom. But I did not dare swerve my gun from the flower (no, starfish—not flower) whose path we had crossed.
I had shot one once, when it had kept moving towards me; I had so little ammo that I never shot unless I had to, but that time I had had no choice. Half of its face exploded, starfish arms flying away and then dropping, with gentle but audible thuds, to the ground. Red fluid spurte
d from the coral of the cartilage making up its face, droplets propelled outwards and splattering the ground. (It still makes my hands weak to remember what happened next: the tiny droplets of what passed for blood in the creature slowed and stopped in midair, as if shot in slow-motion and finally brought to a still frame. Then the adjacent tentacles that remained began to caress the air, reclaiming the droplets that had been lost and absorbing them.) I shot the monster in the face again; I heard it fall over as I ran.
Not wanting to see that again but not wanting to give any ground, I re-trained my gun right at the center of this dark sun and put a little more pressure on the trigger, but what happened next...I turned it over and over in my mind the next day, the repetition making me more sure instead of (as often happens) less confident in my ability to remember accurately: the thing flinched and turned away just before my finger began to pull on the trigger. Bullets still devastate their bodies. They know this, and I certainly knew it at that moment, standing before this intruder to our camp under the full moon. I am sure it flinched and turned and sprinted away in the great, precise leaps which their kind makes, face still flared open, because I threatened him with my gun—but it began to move before I re-aimed. They walk different paths than ours, are caught on different currents.
His stench had hardly begun to fade when I slammed the butt of my rifle against the sleeper’s face. He lay there, gasping, not screaming as I realized I expected him to, for I had swung in an long arc, and far too fast. His cheek was almost certainly shattered.
Eyes wide, gasping, panting, he dug bunched hands into the earth and clawed up dirt that looked black in the moonlight.
Without saying anything, offering myself a thousand excuses—I was trying to toughen him up so he could survive, trying to keep him alive—I sat down next to him to wait for dawn.
~
He was humming when the sunlight finally came. He would not look me in the eye, and he kept humming. His face was a mess.
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