by Shock Totem
Her mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. When she spoke, her voice was little more than a whisper. “That’s even worse. It’s like a tattoo done with disappearing ink.”
“But I love you.”
“Do you?”
“Of course I do. How can you even ask that?”
He reached for her; she pulled away, her eyes sad.
• • •
Alexa returned his call after several days. “Can you just leave my things by the front door? I’ll stop by and pick them up on my way home from work.”
“Please, just meet me for one coffee.”
She sighed heavily into the phone. “Jacob, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
He heard a muted voice in the background—her friend Maggie. He wasn’t surprised she’d gone to stay with her; they’d been friends since college.
“Please, Alexa. Just one coffee.”
There was a long pause and he curled his fingers around his heart.
“All right, fine. One coffee.”
When she hung up, he couldn’t help the smile that spread across his face.
• • •
Natalie used an old fashioned feather pen dipped into a pot of ink. Her letters were ornate. Delicate.
When she spoke, her words were often barely above a whisper and she had a careful measured way of walking, as if holding in some unseen hurt. He tried to convince her to talk about it, but she refused, telling him some doors were best unopened.
She slipped her hand free of his one night while they were walking beside the river. He heard a splash and waited until she emerged on the other side. She didn’t wave or even bother to look in his direction, simply shook the water from her hair and walked away.
• • •
Jacob arrived at the cafe early and took a table in the back, setting the bag of Alexa’s things on an extra chair. He’d packed everything except the scarf because he couldn’t bear to part with it yet. Maybe when the smell of her had faded from the fabric...
When Alexa arrived, she hesitated before sitting down with her hands held tightly together. Silence and the smell of coffee hung in the air between them. Alexa was the first one to speak.
“Thank you for gathering up my things.”
“You’re welcome.”
She shifted in her seat. Twisted her fingers together. And when she spoke again, her voice was small, soft. “I wish things could’ve been different. I really do.”
“But I don’t understand. You were happy, weren’t you? Didn’t I make you happy?”
“Yes, I was, but things changed after you wrote my name. You changed. Everyone gets their heart broken,” she said. “You move on, everyone does. Everyone but you. You’ve kept it all inside like a memorial, like a trophy.”
He leaned forward, over the table. “But it’s the only way I can hold onto them.”
“But that’s just it. They’re gone, they’re all gone. You don’t need to hold onto them, and while you were holding onto them, you were letting go of me.”
“No, I wasn’t. I swear I wasn’t. Please, I’ll try harder. I’ll do whatever you want me to do.”
“If you expect everyone to leave, you never let them in, and worse, you push them away until they have no choice but to leave.” Tears shimmered in her eyes as she pushed her chair back from the table and stood up with her shoulders slumped. “Every time I looked at my name, I knew you were waiting for me to say goodbye. Don’t you understand? I thought I was more than just a name, just a goodbye waiting to happen.”
Her words were tiny barbs digging into the marrow of his soul. He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know how to make it right. She wiped tears from her cheeks, shook her head, and walked away, leaving the bag behind. The strength to call her back, to follow, hid beneath his pain, so he sat in silence, fighting tears.
• • •
Jenny, his first, used fruit flavored lip gloss. She didn’t write her name; instead she pressed her lips gently against the paper, leaving an oily outline. When he closed his eyes, he could still taste the strawberries of her kiss.
They met in June at the beach—held hands, pressed footprints into the wet sand, and watched the waves rush in and out. And when the moon was full in the sky, their love rushed in and out, too.
At season’s end, he said “I love you” and she promised to keep in touch.
A promise she didn’t keep.
• • •
He took an eraser and worked slowly, carefully, so as not to tear the paper. He started with the last letter of Alexa’s name and worked his way left, pausing here and there to brush the shavings off. When he was finished, there were slight depressions in the paper and nothing more.
He tried to erase the others, but he couldn’t. It had been far too long; their names were firmly etched into the paper. He put his head in his hands and let his sorrow fall.
• • •
He picked up Alexa’s scarf and breathed in her smell. He found more strands of hair caught on the sofa cushions and in the wood slats of the kitchen chairs, an empty shampoo bottle in the bathroom trashcan, and a coffee mug she’d bought him for his birthday. Every trace of her served only as a reminder that she was gone.
He stalked through the apartment, alternating between tears and anger. The weight of the names he could not erase turned every step into a heavy thud. The memories crowded and shoved, trying to bury Alexa’s beneath theirs, but he wouldn’t let it end like this. He couldn’t.
In the drawer of his desk, he found a permanent marker with a wide felt tip. He sat down with his heart, took a deep breath, and dragged the marker across the paper, partially covering Jenny’s lip print. Pain, like a strip of skin being peeled free, bloomed in his chest and left him gasping for air.
Clenching his jaw, he returned the marker to the paper. The pain grew stronger with each new line. Even after he’d covered the entire print, a hint of sheen remained. He pressed harder, moving the marker back and forth, back and forth. Black bled through the paper, but eventually the gloss was covered.
He paused, breathing hard, then tackled the next name. The pain burned hot and bright, but he didn’t stop until the name was covered. And the next and the next. The orange crayon and Lila’s lipstick stubbornly resisted, and his fingers ached with the effort as he dug the felt tip in and scrawled over and over and over until they, too, vanished beneath a messy blob of black.
Finished, he dropped the pen and sat with his shoulders hunched. His breath rasped in and out of his lungs, an ancient locomotive straining to make it uphill.
When he finally lifted his heart, the paper tore, bits stuck to the top of the desk, and the ragged edges crumpled and fell off. He was left with a misshapen scrap filled with holes, but there was a bare spot in the center, a spot with the impression of Alexa’s name.
The hurt in his chest subsided; the ache in his hands did the same. He held the ugly, battered thing that had been his heart in the palm of his hand, marveling at the change in its weight.
Now Alexa would know how much she’d meant to him. How much he wanted, needed, her in his life and how wrong he’d been about needing the others, and when she saw what he’d done for her, he knew she’d give him another chance. She had to.
Writing as Damien Walters Grintalis, Damien’s short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Interzone, Fireside, Daily Science Fiction, and others, and her debut novel, Ink, was released in December 2012 by Samhain Horror. As Damien Angelica Walters, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Apex, Shimmer, Strange Horizons, Daily Science Fiction, Nightmare, Drabblecast, Pseudopod, and the anthologies Glitter & Mayhem and What Fates Impose. A collection of her short fiction will be released in spring 2014 from Apex Publications.
HOLIDAY RECOLLECTION
EVERYTHING’S JUST METHADONE AND I LIKE IT
by Violet LeVoit
He was twenty-two, a skinny buck-thirty on storky five-eleven legs. Fat guys hate thin guys
because thin guys are all cock. It’s true. High cheekbones, green eyes, fangy grin. Hairless as a leather couch. I was thirty-six, a separated single mom. He cut through the haze of my domesticated malaise. He was the vampire ectomorph anarchist of my dreams, Johnny Rotten on a road bike. Fucking him made me see stars.
We’re not together anymore.
There’s not many twenty-first century ways for women to be ruined. Virginity only matters for royal brides, stretch marks are MILFed away, divorcees retire poolside with zinfandel, and rape victims bravely go public. There’s no sinkhole, no shattered feminine Siberia where a careless slattern like you clutches her lace handkerchief and ponders her grim future as a Fallen Women. You curdle milk now, witch. The plague hand creeping under your corset, your cunt in its cold palm. I loved him so hard and so fierce my body made milk for him.
“You should go on dates,” well-meaning people tell me. “Not some dumb kid this time. Someone mature. You know, there’s a lot of divorced men who’d be happy to have dinner with someone as pretty and intelligent as you.” I smile at them, politely. Colette said, “If I can’t have too many truffles, I don’t want any truffles.” Everything’s just methadone once you’ve had a wish made flesh.
Now I’m ruined.
He ruined me.
I’m fallen like Lucifer.
I go on dates. I have sex. But I know where I’m broken. I like it. The maimed fetishists in J.G. Ballard’s Crash loved the snap of bone, the dizzy smell of spilling gasoline. I know how they feel. Seeing his name again, remembering the phantom sinew of his body against me, poking the abscess where our future used to be is like running from the wreckage. The doom of that statement thrills me. It might be better than being in love.
I clutch my handkerchief. I spill milk. I shiver, right in the pussy.
HOLIDAY RECOLLECTION
THE SICKEST LOVE IS DENIAL
by Richard Thomas
In some ways, isn’t love a sickness? It washes over you like a virus, making you sweat, as you lie awake at night—it alters your senses, makes your heart rattle the inside of your ribcage like two birds fighting for the last worm, it makes you dizzy, and sends you out into the night, stumbling around, lost.
She was just a girl, somebody bent over a pool table, always grinning, that hint of cleavage, that Cheshire grin when her boyfriend left the room, dark doe eyes and long lush hair. If she cheated on him with me, then what could I expect but despair?
In the beginning it was long nights under the covers, every slick bit of flesh covered with my hands, my tongue, the world slipping away as we became the only souls left on the planet—floating on clouds, above it all. It was the only thing that mattered.
Eventually we moved in together, passionate and young, willing to live in the moment, to hide from the jealousies, the state of possession. Why not bring home a willing third wheel? How could it go wrong? Music and cold beer, then teeth on necks, long fingernails dragging trenches in my back, this is what all men wanted, more of it all, gasping and moaning, until the sun limped into the sky.
But then she started working late, coming home smelling of other women, strange perfumes, other men, their musk, and it turned my innards to knots. The long slow drag of a razor blade on my wrist as I waited for her to appear, waited for just enough strength to push a little harder, and then she was at my side, taking it away, kissing my bloody skin, licking, crying—never again, always mine, it would be okay.
And I believed her.
And then I stepped out myself.
Lost in the chaos, suddenly I was attractive, the lost bride on the last night of her freedom, the adventurous foreign exchange student, whatever my excuses, they were just that.
She would make me undress, this girl I loved, and sniff me from head to toe, asking me where I’d been, what was this bruise, this indentation? Are these teeth marks, is this lipstick? Give me your hand, your fingers—let me put them in my mouth.
It would only get worse. Pictures were taken, lines of powder, tabs of liquid gold, needles and days that never happened, and the freedom turned to violence to bloodstained sheets, and a stomach covered in bite marks that would take a week to heal.
There was a pregnancy.
Was.
Too damaged, no longer able to sustain eye contact, no longer able to keep the lies buried, this love turned sour, became our undoing, required us to flee, to run in different directions, as fast and as long as we could.
It couldn’t have ended any other way.
THE MAN OF HER DREAMS
by Tim Waggoner
Kristen was sipping a Singapore sling and trying to come up with an excuse that would enable her to leave as gracefully as possible when Barry walked into the bar. Oddly, she wasn’t surprised, though she supposed she should have been. After all, until that moment Barry had existed solely in her dreams. But it seemed the most natural thing in the world for him to be here, weaving through the crowd, pushing past the drunken revelers from her office who had turned out to celebrate Lauren Foresca’s promotion to regional sales manager, his gaze trained unwaveringly on her the entire way.
He stopped when he reached her table, nodded to the empty seat next to her. “May I?” His voice was the same mellow tenor that had spoken countless devotions to her while she slept.
She knew there was no possible way this could be happening, that seven years as a sales rep for a textbook publishing company had finally taken their toll and her mind had snapped. Still, she smiled, gestured with her drink toward the chair. “Please.”
He sat, moving with the fluid grace of a jungle cat. His eyes were the same deep blue as those of the Barry who inhabited her dreams, his hair the same blonde, so bright it nearly sparkled even in the bar’s dim lighting. Mustache neatly trimmed, no sign of beard stubble even though it was 6:45. His facial features were at once both rugged and sensitive, so much so that he could have been a cover model for the romance novels Kristen devoured so eagerly. He wore a light gray shirt, dark gray khaki pants and freshly shined shoes.
“I bet you didn’t expect to see me tonight.” He smiled, displaying straight, even teeth so white they nearly gleamed. “Before you went to sleep, that is.”
Before Kristen could reply, Lauren came walking unsteadily toward them, rum and Coke sloshing over the side of her glass. “You’ve been awfully antisocial tonight, Kristen. One might get the impression that you aren’t exactly thrilled by my promotion.”
Kristen hated Lauren. Hated her grating, brittle personality, her love of office politics—the dirtier, the better—the way she looked like she was in her mid-twenties even though she was pushing forty, hated the low-cut mini-dresses she favored. Right then she especially hated the way Lauren didn’t take her eyes off Barry as she spoke, the way she leaned forward to display her cleavage.
“Sorry,” Kristen said, doing her best to keep the venom out of her voice. “I’m not much of a party person, I guess.” Especially when the party’s for you, she thought.
“That’s all right. You can make up for it by introducing me to your handsome friend here.” Lauren flashed Barry a smile which said I’m extremely available.
“I’m Barry.” He reached across the table and enfolded Kristen’s hand in a grip of velvet-wrapped steel. “Kristen’s fiancé.”
Lauren looked as if she had just swallowed a very large and juicy bug. “Really?” She turned to Kristen, her voice suddenly cooler by several degrees. “This is the first I’ve heard about it.”
“I proposed to her last night,” Barry said, smiling. “In bed.”
Lauren looked as if she might bring the bug back up. “How very nice for you both.” She gave Barry an appraising look, and Kristen knew what she was thinking: How did a loser like you end up with a hunk like him? “I suppose congratulations are in order.”
“Thank you,” Barry said. “Now why don’t you go away and leave us alone?”
Lauren gaped. She was not used to being spoken to like that, especially by men. They
usually fell all over themselves trying to please her in hopes of getting a close-up view of that cleavage. Kristen bit her lip to suppress a giggle.
Lauren scowled. “Now listen here Mr. Fiancé, I don’t care who you are or what sort of brain damage you’ve incurred that’s so obviously impaired your romantic judgment. But if you think for one minute—”
Barry stood and grabbed Lauren by the shoulders. He squeezed and she grimaced. She dropped her drink. It fell to the floor and shattered in a shower of glass and caramel-colored liquid.
The bar grew quiet; everyone turned to watch.
“Perhaps you didn’t understand. I asked you to leave us alone.” Barry’s voice rumbled with barely restrained anger. “And I don’t appreciate anyone making disparaging comments about my Kristen. Especially not a syphilitic tramp like you.” Barry released her, walked over to Kristen and held out his hand. “Shall we?”
Kristen knew she would undoubtedly pay for this later at the office, but right now, she was delighted. Grinning, she took Barry’s hand. “Let’s.”
He helped her up and together they left the bar, all eyes upon them, people whispering as they passed. It was an exit right out of a girl’s dreams.
• • •
Kristen woke to yummy smells drifting in from the kitchen. She stretched and yawned, exhausted but contented. No, not merely contented—elated.
Last night had been beyond beyond. After escorting her from the bar, Barry led them to Kristen’s car and, at his direction, she drove them all over town on a night of unequaled romantic perfection.
First, Barry had her drive downtown, where they waded barefoot in a fountain. Kristen had always wanted to do that; it looked like so much fun when people did it on TV or in the movies. But she’d always been too afraid of being caught.