Imaginarium 2013

by Sandra Kasturi

  And God, how she looks is beautiful.

  “Patty-cake,” she says, and her voice has taken on a strange duotone quality, or perhaps it’s three voices, you can’t be sure. You try to focus on the voice you remember and find you can’t. Something tickles your face as she speaks. You feel across your lips with scrabbling, panicked fingers and when you pull your hand away you see your nose has been bleeding. For how low long, you can’t say.

  She’s beckoning you to listen to that last message now. A line of drool runs down her chin, pink and sticky. Her own phone is dancing with colour, flashing images of things you’ve never seen, never imagined: dead cities; tentacled horrors of eyes and teeth; great, mindless things in the deepest parts of space devouring stars and ripping solar systems apart. Between these photos you see images from her life with you, photos of your face; pictures of the two of you, young and free and happy, cheeks touching, comfortable and familiar. In some of them she’s the blonde beauty who rescued you. In some she’s this fleshy dog-creature with overly large eyes and a smile meant for rending and tearing.

  And she’s urging you to put the phone to your ear and listen to that last message.

  You hit a button and put the phone to your ear.

  It’s ringing.

  “Hey, buddy!” Ajax says. “What the fuck is up?”

  “What?” you say. “No, nothing.” You’re confused. Is this the message you were supposed to hear? The line hisses and pops with static, and Ajax is talking but you can’t hear it. “I think Angie hurt my nose,” you say.

  It’s hard to focus when Angie’s face is moving like that. Rippling, like her flesh is a sheet covering a pit of fleshy snakes. They rope around each other, and her skin draws back from her stretching teeth.

  “. . . the fuck are you talking about?”

  You’ve made a mistake, you can see that now. You’ve made a simple, terrible mistake. You weren’t looking at the touch screen on your phone when your greasy fingers were looking for Angie’s last message, and you hit a speed dial option instead. You’re missing the point. There was some vital bit of information on that message and you’ve lost it. You’ve lost things before, but not like this.

  “Not like this,” you say to Ajax and to Angie.

  The phone is hissing at you. The blood on your hands makes it feel soft and spongy, like you’ve been holding a spider to the side of your head and trying to talk through its ass.

  Angie takes you by the hand. In a moment of total clarity you see the fields again, with those strange plant-like torsos, those flesh anemones spurting their lung-wads into the air and sucking them back in like red flags. You can almost feel the bones in your limbs cracking and the sockets popping as they reform into large bruised tentacles. You can feel your gorge rise and the heat in your midsection, burning ache for your Angel, your loins swelling with blood and tissue and bulging against the seams of your jeans. You feel beautiful. You feel powerful.

  “Come with us,” she whispers, her teeth clattering as she speaks. It sounds like she’s smashing coffee mugs together. She draws you into the dark, her large red eyes never leaving your face.

  You shuffle after her, your half-formed feet and arms making you clumsy and unbalanced. You stumble, and she picks you up. She’s as beautiful as ever, a true angel. You look up into her dog face and smile. She would never hurt you, and you trust her completely. Everything is forgiven and forgotten, but you’re not sure if it’s because of love or because the cracking and popping in your skull as your head reshapes itself is wiping out delicate memory networks. You flip a coin and decide on love.

  Later, when the screaming begins, you try to hold on to that thought.

  There’s a phone ringing, and for a long time Ajax doesn’t know where it is so it rings and rings. Finally he digs it up from under a couch cushion and sees your cracked, smiling face giving him the finger. His thumb hovers over the answer button. He feels he should answer but he doesn’t. There’s a small beep and the call goes through to voicemail.

  A lone, bloody tear tickles his cheek as he thumbs through to his voicemail options. The phone tells him he has one message from Patty-cake. It asks him if he would like to listen to the message.

  He wipes the tear with his hand, and then fingers the eye patch where his silver eye used to be.

  The phone asks again if he would like to listen to the message from Patty-cake.

  After a long time, Ajax pushes a button.

  last amphibian flees

  M.A.C. FARRANT

  CHICKENS AND US

  They sing in a foreign language like opera I’m told. A squawk is a kind of aria fugata.

  Mostly they’re like old men gathering at the meal replacement shelves at Safeway. That’s why Emily Dickinson crossed the road, to speak with them about death.

  Kurt Vonnegut thought the chicken’s chemical makeup was hilarious. It reacts as if it was some kind of puritanical harbinger of death, he said, and that’s why it keeps crossing the road. Kurt Vonnegut did a drawing of a chicken’s asshole which has since delighted many.

  Chickens will peck each other to death. They can’t help themselves once there’s a wound. They’re like us that way. They love the smell of blood.

  Although shaped differently the chicken’s beak works similar to a human’s mouth, ingesting one small truth at a time.

  Chicken Little Syndrome is the condition of hysteria that results in paralysis. This happens when the sky falls on a chicken, another way in which chickens are like us.

  At a chicken funeral sad music is played while a chicken relative carries the dead chicken wrapped in tinfoil towards a brightly lit fast food restaurant where a rotisserie awaits.

  A chicken brain is about the size of a man’s thumb nail. Like ours, it’s not big but sufficient for their needs.

  Unlike us, a chicken is without a love interest or a dog.

  In my day, my father said, we didn’t ask why the chicken crossed the road. Someone told us the chicken crossed the road, and that was good enough for us.

  Ernest Hemingway said the chicken crossed the road to die. In the rain, he added, and wrote several novels about this.

  I cross the road because even though I am a boiling fowl I am still able to cross the road.

  There are twenty-four billion chickens in the world and only one billion roads. What will happen next?

  I found this question in a magazine: How do you know if you’re a birder? The answer: You are a birder if you have ever faked your own death to attract vultures.

  Someone must know about Hugh and me.

  LAST AMPHIBIAN FLEES CALGARY AIRPORT

  Mother died of pneumonia one week after her spare oxygen tank was taken away during our flight to Toronto. An attendant said it didn’t have a regulator. Mother was sixty-seven years old, had emphysema and cardiopulmonary disease and had been on oxygen for ten years.

  Our boy Alvin who is huge got nasty. There’s a hole in Alvin’s nature big enough for a truck to pass through. He got convulsed by a violent aversion to the flight attendant. You just don’t just take away a person’s spare oxygen tank! They put us off the flight in Calgary.

  So we were all worked up about that. It took everything out of us and we were just about dying from hunting down hope, and trust, and gleaming promise, not to mention another oxygen tank. So there was failure.

  Then Charlie took off after the Last Amphibian which is what he calls Alvin on account of his turning from a sweet baby into a twelve-year-old canister of woe. Alvin was heading for god knows where. My step-father Jimmy went with them.

  I could not go on. I could not continue these explorations. A local man gave Mother and me cherries and a few roasted almonds while we waited for them to return which they eventually did, Alvin with two double cheeseburgers, his usual reward for compliance.

  I could not know then that I would contribute to Mother’s death. I should have known abo
ut the airline’s regulator rule but didn’t. Mother’s tank ran out and we had no spare. I was too worried about Alvin to worry about Mother. She seemed happy enough sucking on cherry pits.

  It was next day in Emergency when I got another tank. By then Mother had pneumonia.

  SMOOTH

  During the night I burst out of my fur. Before this I’d been covered head to foot in it. It came off in an explosion; chunks of brown fur lay on the sheets, the bedroom floor, the dog’s crate in the corner of the room. The force of the explosion woke me up. I was sweating but quickly realized the significance of what had occurred. Losing the fur was an enormous thrill. It was beyond a thrill; I have never known such happiness. I had to tell someone. It was three-fifteen in the morning. I woke up my husband.

  “Feel my arm!” I cried. He didn’t stir. “Wake up! Feel my arm! It’s smooth!”

  He rolled over. “What the hell?”

  “Feel my arm! Feel my skin!” I was hysterical with joy. “There’s no fur. I’m free of it at last!”

  He threw an arm my way and mumbled, “Yes, yes.”

  “Now feel my neck!” I urged. “There’s no fur there either!” This was so amazing!

  He pawed my neck. “Do you realize what this means?” I cried. “I am now a completely smooth woman!”

  He touched my head. “Your head is bald, Olivia,” he said. “Bald as an egg. Better check your pubes.”

  “This is just like you to spoil my happiness,” I cried. “I finally achieve something of real importance in life and you don’t even congratulate me.”

  “Congratulations,” he said. “But you’re still bald.”

  “Do you realize how long I’ve waited to lose my fur? How important it’s been to me? How hard I’ve worked? All the books I’ve read? All the visualizations I’ve done?”

  “Was that what you were doing Saturday mornings?” he said.

  “You know what I was doing Saturday mornings! I was attending my Shedding Your Fur Workshop. Susan down the road lost her fur ages ago. And Lorna, and Mary, and Lynette, none of them have fur anymore. How do you think it’s been for me, the only one of my friends still walking around fully furred? Can you even begin to imagine the pitying that’s been going on behind my back? Can you?”

  He was completely awake now, as was the dog who’d come out of her crate and was sniffing the fur on the floor. “I’ve always liked you covered in fur,” he said, raising himself on one elbow to look at me. “That’s the woman I married. I’m too old for change. Did you check your pubes?”

  “Raymond!”

  “Well, did you?” he said.

  “Here, on the most profound night of my life, when I have at last reached the furless state of being, all you can think about is my pubes?”

  “I’m going to miss your fur,” he said.

  “You’ll get used to it.”

  He got out of bed, picked up several patches of fur and together with those lying on the sheets, arranged them on his pillow. “I think I’ll go back to sleep now, Olivia,” he said, nuzzling the fur sadly.

  Too excited for sleep I lie in bed for the rest of the night thinking about tomorrow. Oh, the world was mine now!

  white teeth

  DAVID LIVINGSTONE CLINK

  She lives in a house surrounded by white teeth. The sound on the roof could be rain. A dragonfly nearing a gas station where the attendant smokes while pumping gas is an omen, an assurance that dragons will return, their scales a rattling subway train, their wings a flapping carnival tent. They will strike, as lightning once did, at the earth’s mantle, breaking it to reveal a molten core, waking bears from hibernation. No one will be able to sleep, but we’ll survive, she tells us, the skulls of newborns will still fuse, people will find themselves on volcanic land masses surrounded by unopened boxes. And the rain’s hard knuckles will beat us down. The signs are all around us.

  the sweet spot

  A.M. DELLAMONICA

  “I’m gonna visit Dad.” Matt is curled in the passenger seat of their antique minivan, scowling as offworlders tromp and slither past their front bumper. Shooting a glance at Ruthie through long, pretty eyelashes, he flips down the visor to check the mirror.

  “Dad’s dead, Matt. He can’t see your haircut.”

  “Want to come?” Falsely casual.

  “Can’t.” She throws the word through the driver’s-side door; she’s outside, waving merchandise: soda, water bottles, scented strips of leather and fur. “I have to pay off Security.”

  “You could trust Romano with that. You do it for him often enough.”

  “I could get a job in a feeler bar too,” she snaps . . . then regrets it. So much for vowing to be more patient.

  Matt gives up on finger-combing his curls. Coaxing a battery out of their aging solar charger, he checks the readout. “Did you use this?”

  Ruthie winces. “An old lady paid me forty for half a charge. Her son just died.”

  A flat glare.

  “Forty, Matt.”

  “So you get forty, I get half a visit with the old man.”

  “With an answering machine.” He can dress it up all he likes, but the battery is just juice for an interactive video of their father. “Waste of credit, waste of time.”

  “You suck, Ruth.” He edges out of the van, stomping off to the cemetery.

  Ruthie reins in an urge to beg forgiveness. It’s done; she’ll grovel later. Instead, she climbs into the van, thumbing the air conditioning and leaning into the vent.

  Since they came to Kauai, her fantasies have been about winter. Deep breath, in through the nose, out through the teeth. As cool air chills her sinuses, she imagines snow melting through her mittens.

  She mimes packing a snowball, rolling it across an unbroken plain of white. She barely has the bottom ring of a snow fort built when someone raps on the window.

  It’s Sam, a.k.a. Security, leering down her shirt through the tinted glass.

  Ruthie shuts off the air conditioning, grabs the weekly payoff, and slides out into the balmy fist of the Hawaiian afternoon.

  Sam is a spotty-faced redhead whose scarred right eye socket bulges with a cut-rate offworld prosthetic. Blue gel shot through with veins pulses at her, fronted by a lens that has the fluted edges of a poker chip.

  “Morning, Ruth.” Onion breath ruffles her hair.

  “Hi.” She holds out the weekly bribe.

  He pockets it without counting. “We gotta talk. Inside?”

  She shakes her head. “Graveyard. I’ll have Romano watch the van.”

  “Please. You think I want a piece of your skinny ass?”

  She shrugs. Not all the women on Vender’s Row pay their bribes in cash. Besides, she doesn’t want that onion smell in the car. “Gotta stretch my legs.”

  He’s not thrilled, she can tell, but he follows her through the converted golf course to the high point of the cliff.

  It’s a scenic viewpoint, postcard perfect: ocean glittering silver-blue under swirled, fragile clouds. An anti-aircraft platform, purple-black in colour and shaped like a rosebud, drifts lazily among the cirrus wisps, guarding the Kauai channel and the offworlders’ undersea military base there.

  A hundred feet down, the aliens are splashing around the beach at the foot of the cliff, exuberant as children. They are kids, pretty much—barely grown, they were yanked from the seas of their homeworld to help the Democratic Army in its war against the Fiends.

  “I never see anyone but you up here,” Sam says. “Gawking at squid makes it hard to forget the war.”

  Ruthie leans on a sand-coloured boulder. Below, the offworlder soldiers wrestle, dunking each other, spitting water and tootling, churning up the Pacific as they tangle themselves into knots and then slip free. “Is that possible, forgetting the war?”

  “Who the fuck knows. Hey, want an apple?”

  “In exchange for what?”
r />   “My treat.” He holds out the gleaming red fruit and Ruthie can’t help but snatch it. It’s tart enough to make her pucker, and she nearly moans at the first bite.

  “So . . .” Sam glances around. “Army’s decided to put in another databank for the graveyard.”

  Ruthie catches a dribble of apple juice on her chin, licking it off her thumb. “More storage . . . the Democratic Army expects more casualties?”

  “Lot more. Fiends have been cleaning their clocks.”

  “What’s that to do with me and Matt?”

  “They’re not digging up the green for no mausoleum.”

  “They’re putting it in the parking lot?” The fruit in her mouth becomes rubber; she fights to swallow. “How big?”

  “Arches, plaques, statues, flowers—the whole nine.”

  “The entire parking lot?”

  “Half,” he says. “I’m giving twenty vendors their walking papers.”

  Yet another crypt. She can already see it, a square, depressing monument to the endless grind of this war. The Fiends—Friends of Liberation, they call themselves—have been making headway in their drive to secure the whole planet.

  “Kabuva’s gonna have to send even more of them,” she says, indicating the squid on the beach.

  “Yeah. That’ll happen,” Sam grunts.

  “We’re never gonna beat them at this rate.”

  “It’s cute, Ruthie, your belief in the great Demo cause. But I ain’t here to debate strategy.”

  “You’re right. Matt and I can pay more, if you give us a chance. There’ll be fewer vendors, less competition, more mourners. Can we stay?”

  “Well . . .” Sam drawls, fake eye pulsing, snaggled teeth peeping out from under the skirt of his loose upper lip. “That depends.”

  The graveyard greens are lined with mosaic paths made of slate tiles. Each tile is inscribed with the name and signature of a Demo soldier, along with their mourning catalogue code. Twining over the immaculate fairways, the paths lead to curls of hedge and stone walled alcoves, nooks constructed to offer privacy to visitors.