GUD Magazine Issue 3 :: Autumn 2008

by GUD Magazine Authors

  And then she feels it; she thinks she can just detect his heartbeat. Pulling away, she strokes his fuzzy purple head. She checks for his heartbeat again. She believes he is okay, that he has been saved. But she is sorry, so sorry, as it was all her fault.

  She begs for forgiveness and cradles him in her arms. She rocks. To comfort him, to comfort herself, she rocks him in the middle of the floor. Surrounded by her pile of friends, she does not stop rocking until they are both calm. And she is sure all is forgiven.

  It is this, and only this, that she can remember.

  Clockwork Wings by Kiriko Moth

  * * * *

  * * * *

  Chica, Let Me Tell You a Story by Alex Dally MacFarlane

  I was a door, once.

  One night a year I put down my poultices and many-scented herbs, my spindle and clumps of tangled sheep-hair, I covered my suntanned, pock-marked flesh with a dress of moonlight, and I opened.

  How can I describe such a thing?

  Like unlocking an attic door fallen into long disuse, tugging it open on its rusted hinges and feeling the weight of cobwebs and shadows and gorged boxes suddenly pressed memory-thick upon the senses—but it was not quite like that. Or going to the riverside, where the cold waves, the slippery weeds and darting fish all brush against exposed skin, where the eye is treated to ripples and reflections and the ear takes in the wind's whisper, the river's murmur, the call of wild things. But again, not quite that.

  I opened, Chica.

  * * * *

  You sip your beer and I know what you think—She is mad, but harmless so far, and I have time to hear her silly tale. Well.

  * * * *

  And when I opened, through they came.

  The spirits and fey folk, all fools and kings and nightmare dead things—a picture book of terrible beauty, a bestiary of the darkly strange. I was their door, a stepping-through from one world to the next, and they crossed in their thousands. On my grassy mound I stood, open, bones and veins and muscle-strings each an archway, a gate for a chuckling shape.

  I could not stop it, nor did I ever think to.

  At first it did not occur to me that what stepped through would not be welcome. I did not think, Chica. I merely opened, as I always had.

  They found me, eventually, the people of this world. There were many quests, I later heard, with heroes and maidens and all the rest, until they reached my brick-and-mound home and began slowly to bind me.

  * * * *

  No, Chica, don't go. Is my tale so bad?

  Please.

  I was a door, once. Will you not listen to the rest?

  Ah, thank you so much. Have another beer, share my pork scratchings. I ask such a simple thing of you, this listening.

  * * * *

  They bound me with dresses.

  One of them pinned my legs while two others held an arm each, manoeuvring a white chiffon gown over my head, pushing my arms through the sleeves, letting snowy fabric whisper down to my slipper-caught feet. The veil covered my face, curtain-thick. Thus blinded, I was wed to the Saints and my Name became theirs, all theirs, and on that same day each year they forced me to honour my husbands and their host of blood-gilded Names.

  I was still a door, I still opened, but gradually my portico shrank and the traffic through me lessened.

  The spirits fought back, briefly. Growing teeth like knives and spells like poison, they tried to tear aside my captors, and naively I thought they might win. Before long, though, they were overcome.

  I played no part in the fighting. All I could do was sit on my grassy mound, bound in white, a sagging door.

  Then came the Forgetting Dress.

  Its folds and frills seemed to shimmer, to shift under my gaze, making it more beautiful than any dress I had ever seen, but the winking foolery could not conceal its true nature. From across my mound of grass, I felt it like seedlings must feel the frost—a fist, cold and strong, with the desire only to tighten around me.

  Once again my arms and legs were held, once again a dress dropped over my head and down my thin body, and I felt its vice-grip instantly. I could not fight it; I was just a door, no more cunning than anything of wood and metal.

  Years passed. My archways and gates shrank as the dress worked its magic—the dark, difficult magic of Forgetting. I felt my real Name slide away from tongues and minds like rain slides from an oiled umbrella, and as I faded from memory I grew weaker, smaller yet. This was a battle the fey folk and spirits could not muster enough numbers to fight.

  When the people of this world came finally to imprison me, I could not resist. A shadow of me floated through memory, no more than a broken remnant, my new, empty Name honoured only by children wearing gaudy imitations of those things that once stepped through me. I was fastened tight. My hinges rusted.

  Such a pathetic thing, a door that no longer opens.

  With a final dress, an overgarment of chains to adorn the Forgetting Dress and its wedding-dress petticoat, they bound me into my prison: Calendar. A prison of paper, sometimes glossy and other times matte, where my cell lies under pictures or beside them. I hang from walls in a thousand million places, as powerless as any other ornament, or sit on shelves in the gummed binding of a diary.

  I have come to know my prison well, its faces and its trickeries. How it whimsically changes its paper-shape, from thin rectangle to ink-rimmed square to no larger than a number. How writing comes and goes, staying for weeks or just a fleeting moment. When the words first stained my skin, my dress, my hair, I would be scrubbing them away from myself long after they faded from my walls—until eventually I conceded defeat and became a thing coloured by countless tattoo-phrases.

  * * * *

  You are thinking—If you are imprisoned, how can you be sitting here?

  A good question, Chica.

  * * * *

  There are still doors in this world. They are smaller, these days, to better evade a fate like mine, and they never remain in one place for long—but they do exist, in shadows and corners and quick winds.

  Sometimes they come to me. Slipping into my prison, they croon over a captured, weakened sister; they comb my writing-stained hair and then they open their little bodies for me.

  Calendar pursues me, of course, and before long cages me again. But there is time enough for me to step into the world and spread my tale. We take happiness where we can, we broken doors, and we are very patient.

  * * * *

  Ah, here he is.

  I was a door, once, and now I am held in Calendar. Chica, do not forget me.

  Seductive by Gabrielle S. Faust

  Applesauce.

  It's one of those words

  That sounds so seductive,

  So sensual,

  Like purgatory

  Or mandible.

  So long as it stays

  Devoid of meaning,

  Rolling around in your

  Mouth like wine,

  Or marbles.

  Think Fast by Michael Greenhut

  Pick an alternate timeline and you'll find my corpse. October 2, 2004: I came home from work and interrupted a burglar rummaging through my kitchen drawers; he shot me six times in the stomach. June 15, 2005: a rapist's buddy stabbed me in that alley between the fish market and the Chinese restaurant; I'd run after the rapist as he dragged off some poor college girl, but I hadn't seen the buddy in time. November 8, 2006: gunned down in three possible realities during a botched bank robbery, along with nineteen other customers.

  Each time, my life began to fade like the color from a broken dream. My eyes closed as I tasted blood and numbness bore down....

  Death waited, but my thoughts raced. That's how they escaped. That's how I survived.

  * * * *

  My sister Melanie's last words to me were, “Think fast.” It was the day I turned six. She tossed me a football, then ran across the lawn to catch up with her friends. The football smelled brand-new.

  Melanie never came home. A
week later, the police found her torn, bloodstained clothes in the river.

  Several months after that, I won the class prize for worst penmanship, since I could no longer write a single coherent word. The teacher called me slow. My mother called me beautiful. The doctor made me speak what I had tried to write, and then he called me fast. He said my thoughts raced so quickly when I picked up a pen that they became a blur and my hands couldn't catch up. As he told me this, I smelled my brand-new football, even though I'd buried it in the yard at the spot where I'd been standing that morning.

  Melanie had once called me gullible, and I'd believed her. I also believed everybody else. I concluded that I was slow, beautiful, and fast, all at the same time—a fly with a turtle's body and a king's diamond on my shell. Everybody in school smiled at me, talked to me as if their words were axes and I were stained glass.

  Once I learned how to cheat death, words became sharper than knives or bullets. Words became life.

  * * * *

  "Your wife is at my shelter for battered women,” I tell him.

  I am thirty-two, but I haven't forgotten Melanie's face. The punk standing before me in his doorway looks about nineteen. He wears a hoodie, a lip ring, and a mohawk that's almost grown over. I've decided that Melanie's killer looked like this guy. He's out of place in this suburban New York community. Somewhere, a trailer park and six feet of dirt are competing for his occupancy.

  "Who the fuck are you?” He fidgets with something in the pocket of his hoodie. The slime in his voice makes me feel the dirt under my nails. “Are you lookin’ for money or something?"

  "David Spar,” I say. “Asshole Accounts Payable. Founder, President, Treasurer."

  He pulls out a handgun.

  * * * *

  There are only two ways to kill me. One is to take me by surprise with a bullet through the back of my head. The other is to talk me into committing suicide.

  Twice, I've gone out to play the suicide game. Each time, I stumbled across a football at a crucial moment. In the parking lot of the old shopping center where the toy store used to be, I sat and remembered the days when Melanie had taken me there. I wondered if sweet memory had gone sour. As I thought about this, both times, a football rolled in from nowhere. Different balls with different logos on the pigskin. They looked old and smelled new.

  Now, whenever my employees at the women's shelter think I'm suicidal, they invite me to a football game.

  * * * *

  "That's it. Give me the gun,” I tell the punk. “Handle first, please."

  He'sGonnaShoot. MoveLeft. My thoughts, but I don't control them. At least, not from this point in time.

  "I said, handle first."

  MoveLeft. GrabTheGunAndTwist. HisGripIsSlippery.

  He grunts as I disarm him. “Fuckin'.... “he mutters as I break his index finger.

  I see blood on the floor. It's brown. Is it mine? An echo from a discarded future?

  * * * *

  I believed in time travel the way most children believe in Santa Claus. My parents pretended to believe with me. When I asked to try it, my mother ruffled my hair and my father said, “Not today, David.” Melanie said she'd take me once she could afford a flying car.

  Then, on my seventh birthday—a year after Melanie's death—I met the old man in the park who drank from a bag. That morning, I had excused myself from class and climbed out of the bathroom window. I ran to the park where Melanie used to jog every day. She had always taken bread crumbs for the pigeons, so I took the crust off my cheese sandwich and crumbled it up. I threw bits of it in the grass and ran in the same little circle for thirty minutes, pretending I could jog like Melanie.

  The old man reclined on a bench, sipping from a bottle in a brown paper bag. His head tilted upside-down as he stared at me.

  "You're not very fast,” I think I remember him saying, though he may not have actually spoken.

  "I can think fast,” I answered. “I think so fast I can hardly move."

  "You think that fast, you can think into the past,” he said. At least, he said something that sounded like that. He looked like he wanted to eat me.

  I ran back to school, all the while imagining he was two steps behind me, chasing me on all fours and drooling.

  Think fast, think into the past. I let those words marinate for years. My speed of thought, I pondered, must be faster than the speed of light. I should be able to send my thoughts back through time, to an earlier self. To ex-David, my thoughts would sound like a little Jiminy Cricket or feel like a gut instinct. The more aware my ex-Davids became of this ability, this hindsight, the more they would listen.

  * * * *

  "Your wife is a pretty woman,” I tell him as he clutches his finger and winces. “I want her to forget you. Maybe I should buy her a gift, but I'm never good with gifts and the whole gift-card thing is getting old. I could use trial and error, but it would be simpler to ask you. What kind of things does she like?"

  "What the fuck are you saying?” He can't seem to speak more than seven words at once. The word “fuck” comprises over fifteen percent of his conversation.

  "I said I want to buy your wife a gift. Yes, I know, it's hardly professional, but this is hardly a profession."

  "Go fuck yourself, you fuck.” Twenty-one percent.

  * * * *

  At thirteen, I used hindsight for the first time. Richard Dunn, who played lacrosse with the high schoolers and once made a retarded boy smoke pot, beat me until my bones felt like broken glass. He'd caught Patricia Anderson kissing me in the school cafeteria.

  To this day, I suspect she planned it. I couldn't tell if she was crying or laughing as Richard broke my face in six different ways. She begged him to stop, called him an asshole. After he gave me that final kick in the ribs, she told him, “I didn't know you were that strong."

  "Shut up,” Richard answered. “When we get to my place, you're next. I'll teach you to screw around like that."

  "Oh, stop it,” she said. Through my swelling, half-shut eyelids, I watched Patricia wrap her arms around him. “I knew you still loved me."

  I thought back to the David of five minutes earlier as I moaned on the floor. TurnAround, I commanded. I sent my thoughts back to the end of that kiss. TurnAround TurnAround TurnAround. He'sGonnaSneakUpBehindYou.

  Suddenly, the beating dissolved into a daydream as I stood outside the school, contemplating ghost pains from an attack that had almost happened.

  Later, older and somewhat wiser, free of the social anxieties that had been my burden, I thought back to the beginning of Patricia's kiss. I gave ex-David a new instruction. UseYourTongue.

  * * * *

  "Where's her stuff?” I hold the punk down by his greasy hair. My other hand reaches instinctively for a handkerchief.

  He goes for my legs. I grab the back corner of his head and shove him to the ground, then pin him with my knee.

  "Fuck you,” he repeats.

  Through the window in the front door, I see a police car with lights flashing. Either I made too much noise or they were already after this guy.

  * * * *

  Whenever I've tried sending back a thought-command to keep Melanie from leaving home that day, a brown turtle has invaded my thinkspace and stopped me in my tracks. My thinkspace becomes solid, as if I've fallen into a dream without growing sleepy. With a twist of its head, the turtle beckons me across a green field with red and white flowers and a trail of brown stains. The turtle's invitation drives me to flee, and, when I do, Melanie retreats to the back of my mind.

  * * * *

  I turned on the TV one Sunday morning while my parents were sleeping. I expected cartoons, but I found a preacher instead. He talked as if he were about to sing. He spoke about the pleasures of Heaven that awaited us, and I believed him. I wanted to pack my Optimus Prime action figure and go.

  But when I shoved my tongue down Patricia's throat, I decided Heaven could wait a little while. Dating had been too much of a puzzle until that boost
in confidence. After that day, I learned how to walk with my shoulders back and smile at a girl until she melted.

  * * * *

  "I'm going to bring you back,” I told Melanie one night, watching the sky and tracing my own constellations. Rabbits, lynxes, shooting stars frozen in time. “I just don't know when. I don't know what'll happen."

  I toyed with a thought-command, holding Melanie's last morning in my memory. The brown turtle interrupted, watching me with red-diamond eyes. Come with me, it cried in its non-voice. Come with me and turn me red.

  I knew the turtle had to remain brown. Only my blood would turn it red.

  * * * *

  The police are here. They handcuff me, but I am water.

  "David Spar, you have the right to remain silent,” yada yada. They have a warrant on me for five murders, but they got lucky and caught me red-handed here.

  The burglar in my home, who ate his gun with the wrong fingerprints. The rapist and his friend, who I turned against their own knives. The two bank robbers I shot the day before the heist. This punk on the floor with the broken neck makes six.

  They don't know about number seven. Number seven happened first.

  * * * *

  "Richard,” I called.

  Eight hours after the beating that had no longer occurred, I stood outside the open door of his parents’ garage, watching him lift his father's weights. An old maroon Volkswagen was parked beside him.

  "Richard,” I repeated. On the fringe of puberty, I sounded like a bullfrog.

  He dropped the weights on his lap. “Jesus Christ! What the—"

  "Did you hit Patricia?” I walked into the garage and leaned against the Volkswagen. I hoped she was okay, but I wanted him to say yes.

  "You're fuckin’ dead, you little faggot.” He charged at me and swung his fist.

  I ducked. His fist crashed through the car's window. He screamed and I pushed him to the ground. I kicked him in the stomach. This was probably the kind of hooligan who killed Melanie, I thought. I pulled my leg back to kick him again, this time in the face.