by Neil Gaiman
Bernie, like any red-blooded twenty-seven-year-old male living in a city with poor public transportation, spent his weekends drinking and driving.
It was a tragic night when Bernie was goaded into a marathon night of flip cup. Keys clutched tight, he had defied protestations, stumbling into his car.
Fifteen minutes later, winding down a one lane road, the city stretched out below with barely a guardrail in sight.
It only took a bump from behind for Bernie to lose control and careen over the hill.
In any collision, there are three stages of impact, and it is the third that causes the most damage to our fleshy-bony beings. The first is the impact of the car against another object (ground, tree, vehicle). The second is the impact of our bodies against the car (steering wheel, dashboard, windshield).
Third is the impact of our organs against our bodies. This is where our organs can be shaved, burst, split or crushed. If the hyperextension of the cervical spine as our bodies lunge up and over the dashboard doesn’t kill us, our livers, spleens, kidneys and hearts slamming against our rib cages and abdominal walls will.
And so it was with Bernie, nose broken, brain reduced to cottage cheese as it slammed against his skull. His liver sliced in half by the coronary ligament which stayed stubbornly in place, while the two lobes of the liver continued traveling forward through space and time.
The girl hadn’t known any of this before Bernie bit it. Her medical knowledge was limited to whatever ailments directly affected her family: asthma, pancreatic cancer, ovarian cysts. She took no pleasure in adding to this list, but had wanted the facts.
She liked facts, and put great store in acknowledging the world as it was, not as she wished it to be.
Mikey and this girl sat across from each other: one trying to ignore an unwanted stirring, the other wondering if she’d ever get stirred again.
Mikey couldn’t stop himself. He looked up and she kinda half-smiled at him. He felt melty from tip to toe. He hadn’t felt melty since Naomi.
Perfect lips parted, about to speak.
Mikey’s heart swelled and stretched against his ribs.
Nope. Not happening. No room in this lean mean solo machine. He was above pain, above need, did not want to want.
He slammed his laptop shut, grabbed his bag and left. He walked off tight and quick, hunched shoulders guarding his thoughts.
His next student would be a guy. A young one. A kid who hadn’t been corrupted and trained in the bad habits of adulthood. His little brother’s frat would have some poor sap with a flabby heart. Those sorority sisters were a plague on both genders. One wouldn’t be missed.
The girl watched him from under blocky black eyebrows, curls tucked behind her ear. She went back to her work, pushing Bernie to the back of her head.
She was alone. She’d been alone before. She could take it. Her heart deflated in her chest, contracting small and cool.
Death-in-Life Love Song
BY KEVIN L. DONIHE
Kevin L. Donihe is one of the leading lights of the Bizarro movement in modern lit. Which is to say, his writing tends toward the most weirdly phantasmagoric and unhinged that our literary landscape has to offer. (My favorite of his novels, Night of the Assholes, reconfigures the original Night of the Living Dead as an onslaught not of zombies, but of you-guessed-it. And if you respond in kind, you become an asshole, too. One of the aptest metaphors for inexcusable crazy that I have ever read.)
To my immense delight, he has taken that prodigious predilection for crazy and imbued it here with sweet, uncharacteristically naturalistic intent.
The result is this beautiful stunner, which could not have been written by a normal person. But it brings all his gifts to bear, in ways you will no-fucking-way see coming.
I stand in rain like needles on my skin. I remember you and me, our nakedness, and sex beneath gray and swollen clouds.
We weren’t self-conscious. Beady-eyed neighbors couldn’t see us over the protective hedge. Even if they did, we wouldn’t have cared. Let them live through us. They existed from nine-to-five and would never experience a downpour like we did.
After you left, I hated rain. Darkness coiled around me—oblivion in motion—each time a storm cloud coalesced. There was no pleasure in getting soaked alone.
But now I know his name, and I’m making an unscheduled appearance at 311 Woodcrest as soon as the storm ends and I put on clothes. Must avoid white t-shirts, and that’s too bad. I am, you know, a very casual man.
Two hours later, and you’re mine.
The apartment was easy to locate. It was just a few miles away. Amazing. You’d been so close for so long.
Unfortunately, the man was stubborn, though it took him a while to notice me. I was quiet, and a glass box had commandeered his attention. He didn’t lift his eyes from the screen until I was ready to strike.
My first blow only stunned him. Though his mouth opened and closed like a goldfish, he said nothing before my hammer fell again. A red flap opened on his scalp, but still he staggered, blubbering and drooling on himself like the world’s biggest baby.
So I hit him a third time, a fourth, then a fifth. The experience was becoming absurd. Finally, gravity did its belated work and carried him to the floor.
Bent over the man, I noted his upturned, glassy eyes. Perhaps I’d gone too far. Taking hold of his wrist, I detected a pulse. My fingers lingered over it for longer than necessary. Human existence seemed fragile when the highways to the heart were buried in fleshy graves.
I withdrew my fingers. (You know I go off on mental tangents. You said that little facet of me charmed you the most. Standing in the apartment of the man I had just beaten senseless, however, afforded me little time for contemplation.) I struggled a bit to pick him up. Out of the apartment, I helped him to my car as I would a drunken friend. He was well acquainted with the bottle. Though I just met him tonight, I know all about the guy.
You might say I’ve read up on the subject.
Now, he lies strapped to two card tables pushed together. I never fancied myself a surgeon, but I’ve done enough research to know cutting through the chest is going to be a bitch.
Wish me luck.
The ribcage is like living marble. Every stroke brings me closer to my destination, so I keep sawing, despite the strain.
Hours pass. I want to abandon caution and plow through the body, but I stay my hand. His life force is your life force, and I can’t risk losing you again.
The ribcage wobbles. Grasping a segment of it with pliers, I twist back and forth until it breaks. Light illuminates the breach and reflects off of you, Judith, resting inside.
My hands play over you. I feel your death-in-life love song resonate through organic strings. You don’t need a mouth to sing. I realize this now.
You lurch beneath my touch. Perhaps I should be gentler. Forgive me.
But also try to understand. After the accident, the mortician used his best tools to construct a smile for you, but putty only goes so far. In your casket, I saw the ghosts of slits and gouges on your sewn-together face.
Smiles, you see, come from the heart, and darkness alone lies in empty cavities. Your seat of love was placed in a cooler and turned into a rush-delivery package. It was shipped off to an undeserving recipient.
And what was left for me? Just the memory of a few hours spent with a shell in a gilded box.
But you’re back, Judith. Nothing else matters. Blow the rest to hell. And guess what…
Tomorrow’s forecast calls for rain.
Ralph and Jerry
BY LESLIANNE WILDER
One of the greatest crimes modern society commits on a daily basis is the dumping of our mentally ill back onto the streets with no provisions. From a fiscal standpoint, it’s utterly sound. But once you get past the bloodless number-crunching, it’s the cultural equivalent of running raw sewage through our psychological thoroughfares, and into our tap water. Drink up!
Leslianne Wilder is a str
eet-level medic, who has seen too much and more. She is also one of my favorite new writers, sharing her unstinting eye and formidable style with immense compassion.
I consider this story a public service. It drops my jaw, and breaks my heart.
The alleyway is painted with cats, red on red, with patches of the fur curling brown at the edges and intestines looped like streamers at a prom. I remember prom, and wearing my uncle’s blue tux with a paper flower boutineer down low to cover the stains, and all the time I sat with a plate in my lap not eating just watching Jennifer Rheeland with her pink skirt spinning, spinning, spinning, up till you could almost see where her legs stopped being legs and started being…
Ralphie sits next to me and chews on some bits of the cats. Ralphie’s my best friend. Today he’s a dog. A skinny dog that’s going bald on the shoulders, and looks like he tried to lick a comb over. Wet fur clumps into dark brown lines like spider legs, and from the top he looks like two tax accountants standing back to back.
“Shit,” I say to Ralphie. My stomach rolls. I feel terrible. “Shit, shit, shit. What if these were somebody’s pets?”
Ralphie gnaws. Little bones snap between his teeth. He chews around the claws. “They weren’t anybody’s pets, Jerry.”
“What if there’s some little old lady? Like, with a shawl and little knitted coats for her cookie jars, and these were her cats, and somewhere she’s waiting for them to come home?” I look around and wipe my face. My hand is sticky and I regret getting it near my eyes. “But they’re not coming home.”
“They didn’t have ID,” Ralphie points out. His breath smells like shit, and death, and cigarettes. “No tags. No wallets. Nobody wants them. If there’s an old lady I bet she turns off the lights when they come around, and pretends she isn’t home.”
“Poor cats,” I say. I forget my hand is wet and I run it through my hair. “That lady’s a bitch, to treat them like that.” I want to smash her cookie jars, leave them a spiky ruin of porcealin and little knitted coats.
Ralphie licks my smeared face. “This isn’t really about the cats, is it, Jerry?”
I want to hug him and cry, but when I reach for him he growls.
Ralphie has boundary issues. He doesn’t like to be touched. “It’s just about the cats,” I say, but I know he doesn’t believe me. He finishes cleaning my face, like I’m somebody else and he’s somebody else’s mother with a little pink rag and spit. I stand up, I fold my knife up and put it in my pocket, and I go out into the street. I like Houston. It’s like it’s always summer here, at the beach, and you sweat but it never goes away, and soon all your skin and all your clothes taste like the ocean and the trash on the beach. People try to lie to you sometimes, try to fool you. They put on coats and Christmas lights, and they tell you it’s winter, but I know better. I don’t believe their lies. I walk by the refineries with all their little lights and I feel like Godzilla, like all the pipes are skyscrapers and I could grow big enough that I could stomp through it all, break it to the ground. Like a lizard they woke up from the bottom of somewhere dark and frozen with atomic bombs, and lipstick, and fast food clown statues, and kiddy porn, and Haloperidol and Thorzine. I stand by the fence with all the warning signs of lightning striking fat black stickmen. I open my mouth big. I practice breathing radiation fire. I spit on my beard but I don’t care. There’s a bus stop behind me and the shadows from the cars’ lights bend and shift like stampeding crowds of Tokyo people, trying to get away. I feel high and nauseous, like God. The drains smoke in the wet heat of the night. It’s warm here. It’s not like Columbus.
There’s a bus stop behind me and the bus stops when it comes by. The driver’s an old guy and the way he looks at me makes me want to hide. “You getting on, or what?” he says, and I want to tell him no, but then I see Ralphie inside the bus. He’s a black lady now, with shiny pink and white beads at the end of his hair. So I get on the bus and I take out my paper cup and unfold it so I can reach the quarters. It’s my good cup, my lucky cup. It’s my ID. It has all my money in it, and the number on the inside wall, written in blue pen. I sit down next to Ralphie and keep my hands in my pockets. There’s three other nurses with Ralphie, and they all look pinched and raw, like they have wounds around their eyes and their face is trying to grow a scar over them. Something smooth and hairless that they can’t feel the world through.
They all have ID.
I can’t read it anymore. My eyes are bad and the fuzzy letters crawl around, but I know it’s their pictures and their names and it means somebody wants them. There’s rules in the world and jobs, and the nurses follow them every day. They’re part of it all, plastic gears like the inside of toys that fit into other gears, that touch everything so they move the world and the world moves them. Someone’s waiting. Someone somewhere looks at their ID and welcomes them back. Someone misses them when they disappear.
Ralphie’s fat now. I like it. My mom is fat, big, and soft, and a little wet. I remember, I remember holding on to her when I was small and scared, and sinking in to the smell of her, her big arms and breasts all around me, like I was inside of her and nothing could ever hurt me again. She hates being fat though. She cried, and she cut herself, and she put up all the pictures of her when she was skinny, when she made the videos and showed up in the magazines, in just high white socks and a hat, and her legs like cold metal poles, and her smiles where you could never see her teeth, and her breasts and and and…
Ralphie gives me a “fuck off and die” look, and I huddle next to him, but I know he won’t hug me. He doesn’t want me to touch him. It’s sad, sometimes, and I wish I had a friend like they do on the TV, where they hug each other around the shoulders, and have beer, and sometimes they fall asleep on the couch next to each other. Ralphie’s a good friend, really. He never disappears, he never leaves me alone, he never gets arrested, or overdoses, or freezes to death, or dies in the bathroom of the shelter because somebody stabbed him over a smuggled sandwich. But sometimes, I just wish- I mean, I know it’s stupid, but I think of the way Mom used to hug me, after dinner, when she was in a good mood, and I sank into her like she was a marshmallow or a waterbed, and listened to the little growls and chirps her belly made. I wish Ralphie would let me touch him. Wishing makes me lonely and nervous, and I put my hand in my pocket and flick the knife open and closed. Open and closed. Open and closed. The handle is sticky with cat.
Ralphie glares at me. “This is a public bus, you sicko.”
I look down at my lap and it takes me a minute, but I realize what he means. I take my hands out and hold them up to show. “I don’t do that!” I say. “You know I don’t do that!” I did once, when I was a kid, and there were pictures all over the house and mom saw me and she told me every true horrible thing she could think of to punish me. I’m sick. I’m messed up. I’m disgusting. I ruined her life. She wished I’d never been born.
I don’t do it. I get sick like coming down even thinking of it. Ralphie knows that. He knows it’s just a knife, and he knows I don’t do anything sick with it. I don’t know why he’s being like that. He stands up and he walks away. He isn’t looking at me, but I hear him say, “Where’s your ID, Jerry?”
I take the cup out of the pocket that doesn’t have the knife in it, and I hunch over it like it’s coffee on a freezing night. It’s my lucky cup. It’s where I keep the number. It’s my ID. Ralphie knows that.
“That ain’t ID, Jerry,” he says as he gets off, looking back over his shoulder at me in disgust.
I don’t want to be on the bus anymore. I get off at the next stop, because I want to be anywhere else, even somewhere in the hot, salty night with all the gutters smoking like there are cities under the street burning to ash, everyone dying, screaming, melting, because someone fell asleep with a cigarette in their mouth. The bus drives off and it’s lit up inside the way windows into people’s houses are. The nurses laugh under the blue-tinged light while they turn into little specks inside a tiny TV on wheels that I used to be
inside of, too. I point my knife at it, like a remote, to turn it off. But I don’t have batteries.
I think I’m at a mall. And I think, maybe, maybe, maybe there’s a pay phone. All the pay phones are gone nowadays. They’re like all the Indians, all the Cadillacs, all the happy families, all the shirts that change color when you put your hand on them, all the blue toilets and bathrooms with tiles that spell something out if you look long enough. If you’re clever. Somebody caught on, and now all those messages are gone, and that makes me mad, because the bathrooms never spelled out anything bad. Why does the world always have to take everything away?
I walk through the parking lot and I pretend the white stripes are the bones of old whales and it’s the bottom of the ocean. I walk the ribs. I pretend I killed the whole parking lot. Jerry: whale slayer. It feels good to be someone who can kill monsters, who can be mighty, who can make the world what it is supposed to be.
I don’t see any pay phones. There’s shops with mannequin corpses all in red, in tiny skirts and high socks. I don’t like to look at them.
“Hey buddy,” says a voice behind me. “Let’s see some ID.”
I turn and it’s Ralphie, only now Ralphie is a big white cop whose cheeks and nose are red with tiny holes in them. He sounds so mean and angry. What did I do? He’s supposed to be my friend. Didn’t he lick my face when I needed it?
I hold out my lucky cup with the number, and he knocks it out of my hand. “I don’t want your fucking change,” he says. The money goes everywhere but I dive for the cup. The cup has the number. I hold it close, and I look up, and I see the Ralphie look around for cameras, and I know he’s going to hurt me. He’s got the look on his face. They took away the tiles in his bathroom too, and he knows he can’t kill monsters, and he works and works but he can’t pay for anything, and people yell at him that he’s a freak and a sicko, and they hurt him and hurt him, and he can’t fix anything, and I can see it in his face. He’s going to hurt me because I don’t have ID, I don’t have a place, I don’t have anybody who waits up for me, I don’t have anybody who will wonder if I never come back. And he’s going to hurt me because hurting something is the only way to feel for just a few minutes like he isn’t tiny and helpless. I get that. I curl up into a ball because I know what’s coming. His boot comes down again and again. My mouth tastes like puke and the inside of cats. It hurts every time I breathe. By the time he’s done I can’t bend two fingers on my left hand anymore.