by ed. Pela Via
Liquid
But it was too late to wash it all away.
Sixteen years later, when the child they would never have is sucking down liquid, tripping her way into bliss, she awoke at a reunion with her husband and the story everyone was dying to tell.
How he had lived through a kid, a divorce, an institution with white walls and locked doors that called him its own. A deluge had come from God and he never found that olive branch or the return of his sweet white dove.
She could never be a sweet white dove.
How he swerved into the ER lane, ran to the waiting room and tried to untangle the wire and ball sculptures that kept the kids distracted while the hospital sterilized everything left unsaid. There would be no note except the article in the morning paper and the remaining silence was a hammer that began to smash her life away.
How he held the security guards with the .45 he stole long ago from his dad, backed his way into the small chapel, a few pews and a giant cross and a little piano in the corner. He sat, smiled, cracked his knuckles and soothed the opening chords of the next nine minutes of her November Rain.
And how he doesn’t have to sing because by the time he reaches the second verse there are people at the doors singing for him, nurses and patients and a janitor tilting his life on a broom, knowing it’s his wedding and funeral wrapped into one. He shakes more sound out of the piano than the chapel can hold, his color coming back, his arms tightening up, pounding away at the silence with his own little hammers to show her what beauty might mean and how to get there.
And then we’re at the 7-Eleven, and the cops are at the door, pushing the rest of us aside, working their way into the pews and up the aisle. It’s too late. He’s started his crescendo. And we all begin to sing. You’re not the only one, you’re not the only one. And he raises his hands like Christ on the cross, sprints up the aisle and into the hall with the .45 in hand, tossing the unsuspecting deputy through the gift shop’s still glass door.
And I know my part because no one ever notices. I reach into the toppled gift shop rack and grab the magazines, rolling them under my shirt, already outside before someone doesn’t see he never stole the bullets.
I take the crucible and begin to run, leaving our kingdom behind, take it the rest of the way to the tunnel beneath the road, the one that digs down deep where God can never find us. I hurry inside, descending, descending, and knowing right or wrong this is the only way I can hear it if I ever tell it all myself.
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Crazy Love
by Cameron Pierce
So you meet a stranger on the bus. The two of you speed headfirst into small talk about diminishing salmon populations, and that settles it. You will have a casual fuck. Two hours later, you float on the pillows that appear when the storms of good sex have ceased thundering. You’re both vigorous cuddlers, so it’s hard to tell in the half-light where your flesh ends and the stranger’s flesh begins. You fall asleep, very much in love.
The stranger shakes you into wakefulness around seven in the morning and says, “You knocked me up.” You insist upon the eternal virtues of prophylactics and tell the stranger to go back to sleep. The stranger gets out of bed and paces from one end of your room to the other. This irritates you. You have always hated pacers and morning people. It seems you have fucked the wrong kind of stranger again.
Five minutes later, the stranger yelps and gives birth to a child. Faithful to its strange origins, the child is a weird-looking thing. It could pass for one of those plush, cutesy-eyed hearts that pop up in grocery stores and boutique shops when February rolls around. You find it hard to imagine that your genes played any role in its creation.
“It sure is a weird-looking thing,” you say.
“I think it is beautiful,” the stranger says, and that settles it. You make coffee and eggs and the three of you take the bus down to the courthouse. You get married. With a child thrown into the equation, you see no option but marriage. Still, you’re uncertain whether you really love this spouse-stranger. After all, the spouse-stranger is a pacer and a morning person. You return home from a honeymoon of takeout Chinese and an Italian horror film that the spouse-stranger claims to have seen precisely thirty-six times. “Once for every child born,” the spouse-stranger says.
You think this is a lot of children for one person to have, but decide it is better to leave your separate pasts unspoken. You find yourself warming up to the fuzzy infant dozing between the two of you on the sofa. Family life might be okay after all.
A month of swell fucking and many diaper changes goes by. Then one morning at the crack of dawn, the spouse-stranger asks for a divorce. You pull the covers to your chin and say, “I thought we were happy.”
“I am happy,” the spouse-stranger says, “and I feel like I’m in Hell.”
“How can you feel both things at once? What makes you think that?” you ask.
“Oh, a lot of things,” says the spouse-stranger, packing a suitcase that belongs to you full of clothes that are yours. The spouse-stranger slams the front door three times on the way out.
You prepare to face the trials of single parenting, but first you sleep until noon. With the spouse-stranger gone, you can finally return to your normal habits. When you wake up, the empty bed saddens you. Prickles of loneliness scratch at your insides and turn your thoughts into some kind of lousy meat. Everything you think seems out of place in your head, dragging you to a new all-time low every minute.
You walk into the kitchen and spot a note on the counter. Your heart beats with the gusto of a Bach symphony. You clear your throat and restrain the great hopes the sight of this ketchup-stained note has bestowed upon you. You hold it between your fingers like a scroll from the heavens and read:
The baby died. I put it in the trash. Remember to pull the can to the curb tomorrow. I’m sorry I don’t love you anymore. Don’t feel bad about it. This is just what I do.
You pace from one end of the kitchen to the other. You hate yourself during every minute of it, but you’re compelled to pace. You’re a mad pacer. You were born to pace. The sun shines and you pace. The sun hangs itself on the blue horizon and you pace. The blue horizon fizzles into black emptiness and you pace. Black emptiness and you pace. Black emptiness. Pace.
Morning comes and you pass out on the floor. You dream that you die and meet the spouse-stranger on a bus taking you to Hell. The spouse-stranger shows you a ticket stamped PURGATORY in gold embossment. The bus drives off a cliff and you wake up. You realize what you must do.
You leave your house and stand at the bus stop. The bus pulls up five minutes later. Strangers occupy half the seats. The other seats remain unfilled. You sit beside a stranger near the back of the bus. The two of you speed headfirst into small talk about the poisoned cat food epidemic in China, and that settles it.
You go to the stranger’s house because your own house is behind you now. You feel the stranger’s stop approach like a historical compendium of all the strangers who have ever slept together.
But when you get to the stranger’s house, you find that it is haunted. You stand outside and squint your eyes at the house’s twisting spires, as if to gauge its spook count and decide whether the risk is worth the fuck. “I grew up in a few haunted houses,” you say.
“It isn’t that haunted,” the stranger says.
Puffy white ghosts peer out from all the windows. The house is definitely that haunted. “Maybe it isn’t,” you say, and walk inside.
The stranger guides you upstairs to a room where a stained mattress lies in a corner. “I can’t have sheets in the house because the ghosts poop on them,” the stranger says.
“That would be a lot of dirty laundry,” you say.
You and the stranger undress and lie on your backs. Then you turn and kiss the stranger and you fold over each other. The sex isn’t that great because ghosts howl and fly through the walls. Lovemaking strikes you as a funny thing to do in a haunted house and you l
augh. The stranger takes sex very seriously and does not laugh. This also makes it less great. The stranger sighs a ghostly wail and orgasms. You haven’t come yet, but the stranger says, “I guess that’s the end of our sleeping together.”
“I guess that’s it,” you say. You dress in silence, recalling all the reasons you vowed never to live in a haunted house again. A ghost follows you down the stairs on your way out. You wonder if the stranger ever gets lonely and tries to sleep with the ghosts.
You stand at the bus stop and figure you’ll have to try again some other day. The bus arrives a few minutes later and you step on. You spot the spouse-stranger you’re still legally married to. The spouse-stranger sits beside another stranger who once meant something to you. You can think of nothing that made this stranger different from all the other strangers you have slept with. That stranger was not special, you think. Anyway, it took place in some half-remembered time.
It no longer matters that you engaged in brief encounters with either of these strangers. You still love them, but in the way people love the memory of a carnival funhouse. A gust of longing rises up in you because to hell with it. These encounters do matter. They must add up to something more meaningful than any of the strangers who make them happen. To think otherwise would be sticking a foot in the mouth of your own aimlessness.
Your stop is coming up and you want a stranger to talk with, but all of them converse with other strangers. Your thoughts no longer slosh around like bad meat, but you are hungry and a hamburger sounds delightful. Half a mile from your stop, you stand and tiptoe to the front of the bus. You tap the driver on the shoulder. You think that even if she’s a pterodactyl and missing a front tooth, her blue uniform compliments her yellow eyes. You can tell this dinosaur has style and taste.
You ask if she’s heard of an all-night diner that recently opened.
“No,” she says, bubblegum smacking between her elongated jaws.
Before you can tell her about the diner and ask her on a date, the pterodactyl misses a turnoff because you’re distracting her. The bus zooms straight ahead, right off a cliff. As the bus plummets into a canyon, everybody screams, including your ex-lovers.
The bus driver climbs out of her seat and takes you in her arms. She opens the door and leaps out of the bus. Her wings unfold like a lovely umbrella and you sail toward the sun. Deep down in the canyon, the bus explodes. Those strangers are dead now. It’s just you and the pterodactyl. Maybe, if she doesn’t have a nest full of babies somewhere, and she doesn’t feed you to them, the two of you will hit it off.
——————————
Chance the Dick
by Paul G Tremblay
now: the client
I say, “My fingers were stolen and replaced with someone else’s fingers.” I hold my left hand out to him as if he could take it, twist it, flip it all around up and down, inspect it like it was a jewel or a fossil or a photo of a crime scene.
I tell him that I woke up leaning against a toilet and my left arm in a bathtub full of ice. It wasn’t my bathtub or my apartment. Only one light bulb in the vanity worked. There was blood on the aqua-green tile and all over my white blouse. I didn’t remember anything.
He says, “Are you married?” He’s wearing a pinstriped suit, like everybody else. His face is hard and rough and back lit in the neon spilling through his office window. I’m supposed to think about having sex with him, but he makes me feel tired instead.
I was woozy when I left the bathroom. Everything had a haze, a fuzz, the edges not sharp, not defined. My hand throbbed and burned, but I could move it and kept it huddled against my chest. I bumped into things in the apartment, overturned and broken furniture biting my ankles and knees. No one was there. I left and couldn’t find a number on the front door. There should’ve been a number there, like 213, or maybe something with a 7.
I say, “I’m not married. See, no ring.”
He says, “May I?” He lifts up the bandage on my index finger and does find a ring of angry red stitches. His touch is smoother than I imagined. He says, “Sloppy job.” He’s not surprised. He’s seen it all.
then: the writer
It can’t be now: the writer because I’ll have written this before you read it. A minor detail.
I worry about the woman with the stolen fingers. Unless I go back into her past, I worry she’ll always be stuck in the present tense, almost like she has no future.
I’ll give the private dick a snappy last name. Something with two syllables. Or Frisk or Frist, or Chance. Chance’s first name doesn’t matter, no one uses it. His office is dark, like his city. I think all cities are dark places.
All the characters will say cool things and be smart and sexy and weird. I will like all the characters, and I will hate them. How else will they be real to me? I think Chandler hated Marlowe.
then: the client
I ran out of the numberless apartment building and into a laundromat. I had someone else’s fingers, a blood-soaked blouse, and no quarters. The fingers worked, at least, but the hair on the knuckles was black and wiry. The place was empty and the lights had a green tint, like the bulbs were covered in pool table felt. Wait, the place wasn’t empty. There was a slim man in a pinstriped suit and wearing sunglasses filling one of the machines. I watched him throw in mini-skirts, a curly blond wig, and three brown fedoras.
I wanted to do something sexy or deviant. I said, “Do you mind if I throw in my blouse?” and unbuttoned my shirt. My bra wasn’t very sexy or deviant, but it was supportive and would have to do.
Sometimes you had to improvise.
The man threw his sunglasses in the washing machine. His eyes were green, like pool table felt again. He was young and he had a scared look about him that I find most intelligent young people have. He said, “Go ahead.”
He had quarters and bleach. I leaned against the washing machine and let myself shake for a bit. He watched but it didn’t make me feel sexy. Then we sat across from empty driers that he turned on, and he’d somehow rigged the machines to work with the doors open. The fried air poured over my skin. He sat on his hands even though I know he wanted to put them on me. My hand felt big and dumb. I tried telling him about my hand and how I didn’t remember anything. I don’t think he heard me because he didn’t speak. When the washing machine was done, my once-white blouse came out the same color as pool table felt, and it came out dry and without the bloodstains.
The man didn’t take anything else out of the washing machine. He lifted my hand, was real gentle with it as if people had always been gentle with me and said, “Find Chance,” and left.
then: the writer
Near where I live there’s a busy intersection that has a name. It has a laundromat, too, but with white lights. This past spring there was a man in a pinstriped suit, but this man was older, close-to-retirement age, and he stood on one corner, on the mini-manicured lawn that was owned by Mobil. Behind the man was mulch and shrubbery trimmed into letters that spelled ‘Mobil.’ I only knew that advertising shrub was behind him because it was always there. The man blocked the shrub from doing its duty with his very own advertisement. He leaned on a large piece of plywood with thick, desperate black letters that read: “40 years of insurance/mgmt experience looking for a job. Hard working. Call 781-_ _ _- _ _ _ _ .” He was grey and bald at the same time. He wore big glasses that were not in style and were never in style. He was there every morning for two weeks, then he was gone.
now: Chance the dick
She smells like a dryer. She has black hair but wears it like it’s blond. Her green blouse stops a few buttons shy of being shy. I can’t see her legs over my desktop but I hear them cross and uncross. A cricket chirping. Knives sharpening. I’m a dead man, aren’t I?
She says, “I’m not married. See, no ring.”
That’s funny. Almost as funny the throbbing pain in my left hand. Wait, that’s really not funny at all. It’s the opposite of funny, though I get the subtle-as-a-sledge-hamm
er feeling that someone is still laughing.
I say, “May I?” I lift the bandage of her index finger and find a ring of angry red stitches. The skin is raw and swollen and the finger is bloated, throwing an antibody tantrum. The finger doesn’t want to be there. It’s a shame really. Those fingers of mine never hurt anybody that didn’t deserve it.
I say, “Sloppy job.”
She says, “You know who did this?”
“Maybe. But I know whose fingers you have.”
“Who?”
“Mine.”
I put my feet on my desk and feel sad. The world is running out of mysteries.
then: the writer
I was mad at the pinstriped-suit-guy. He shouldn’t be there. Why didn’t he just have a resume made and posted on-line? Why didn’t he hire a headhunter or employment counselor or something? He had to know standing on the corner with a sign was fruitless. Was he taunting me/us with his management-level unemployment, trying to spoil the ritualized commute and coffee? I don’t drink coffee. After anger, came superiority. I would never be like him. So passive. So not-in-control. After superiority came pity and a panoply of demise scenarios. Divorced, kicked out of the house, really was a swell guy just a relic of business-days long past, let go by a mega-corporation after a lifetime of service, just like my dad. Maybe I’d help him, make a resume for him, set up practice interviews, introduce him to people, maybe I’d save him, but then I’d convince myself that it wouldn’t work that he’d be needy and clingy and that he wouldn’t get a job that way and that he’d have to save himself, it was the only way. After pity, came . . . I don’t what. I just wanted to forget. Forget that I was like him, only I might know the current rules better than he does. Or maybe I didn’t. Maybe he knew more. Maybe he knew that none of us were in control and that things happen to us and we can’t stop it. We didn’t live, we reacted. And that’s why I’ve inserted myself into this story because I want some control and that’s why I love and hate my characters and that’s why Chandler hated Marlowe because Marlowe was always in control even when he wasn’t, because Marlowe was action and not reaction, because Marlowe wasn’t real like Chandler.