by Aimee Bender
In my mind, I saw Andre falling to his knees in worshipful adoration, and I thought about what had happened in this room after the lights went out. Once again, I was filled with that permeating sense of evil and doom.
I knew I should get out of there as quickly as possible, run out of the shack and back to my Jeep, drive back home and never even look at the woods again. But I found myself staring at the flowers still flowing from between the woman’s legs, and my mind was soothed by the emotion spreading outward from her immobile companion.
God is grateful
I thought about my empty existence, my boring job and nonexistent lovelife, all of the pointless routines that made up my usual day.
I considered several possibilities.
Then made a wish.
The feeling imparted to me now from the desiccated monkey was one of approbation, but when I looked at the mismatched faces of the couple on the bench I felt colder than I ever had in my life. The fear was back, stronger than ever, and I knew instantly and with utter certainty that I had just made a huge mistake, the biggest mistake of my life. My first impulse was to try and take it back, to drop to my knees and beg for another chance, a do-over. But I knew that was not possible.
I thought for a moment, then picked up a flower that smelled like my mother, turned away, and walked out of the chamber, out of the shack, into the darkness, tears streaming down my face.
And as I headed toward the spot where I’d parked the Jeep, I wondered what went through Andre’s mind at the second he pulled the trigger.
SURF GRIZZLIES
DAVID W. BARBEE
Tua was tending bar when the Surf Grizzlies came.
Some countries didn’t let their twelve-year-olds have jobs, much less jobs serving a cornucopia of alcoholic beverages to clueless white people. But the Dongo Isles was a tiny little nation on the Pacific Rim suckling at the teat of international tourism, so the grownups figured that if Tua had a knack for serving mojitos to the rich tourists, then they should let the boy earn a living.
His bar was a square tiki hut up on the beach. Tua served his patrons, who slouched on their stools nursing afternoon buzzes, and they all cheered and complimented his precocious bartender act. The boy only shrugged at their sly compliments.
The beach was full of umbrellas and tents and recreational junk. There were tons of people with sizzling bare skin, lounging about and building sandcastles. Swimmers floated on boogie boards and foam noodles out in the salty waves.
But then it happened.
Cresting over the horizon on a giant tidal wave came the Surf Grizzlies.
Surf Grizzlies rode the waves across every ocean of the world, an army of massive bears on surfboards. Their origin was a mystery, and no one ever knew where or when they would show up. All anyone could be sure of was that the Surf Grizzlies only took to shore when they were hungry.
Tua saw hundreds of them, roaring loudly over the sound of the crashing waves. They stood square on their boards, dark fur spiky with wetness, and roared as they closed in on the beach. Tua hurried across his tiki hut and grabbed a megaphone from under the bar.
“Surf Grizzlies!” he announced, and then ducked down under the bar. Everyone was on their own now.
The bar patrons scattered. Some down on the beach looked out and saw the giant bears riding the wave. There were screams. Panic. Those quick enough to understand what was happening began stampeding up the beach away from the water. Swimmers frantically paddled for shore, the strong ones kicking past the slow. Children were left behind.
As the wave behind them grew bigger, the bears rode their boards down the swell, closing in on the beach. A Grizzly that had to be six hundred pounds ripped ahead of the pack, zigging and zagging toward the swimmers. The beast grabbed a small child in its maw and bit into its skull, sending blood and brains exploding out. The beast whipped the corpse back and forth in its jaws and then dropped it into the rushing water as it surfed towards bigger game.
More of the bears charged in towards the beach, crushing swimmers under their thick boards and slicing bodies in half with swipes of their great claws. The bears roared again in unison and more of them spilled onto the beach as the wave crashed down.
Dozens of bears made landfall and abandoned their boards to chase down any humans straggling behind. They killed dozens of people and the tide surged red from the carnage.
Overall, most of the people escaped into the jungle or for the safety of the resort. The bears roared after them but didn’t follow. Tua looked up from his hiding place behind the bar. The bears were standing on their hind legs and sticking their surfboards into the sand. Then they turned and ambled up the beach towards him.
Tua had heard stories of the Surf Grizzlies. They hated walking on land, and wouldn’t stay on the island long. Just long enough for a quick drink.
As they came up to the tiki hut, Tua began mixing up mai tais. The bears grunted at him and he served up their drinks in a hurry. The Surf Grizzlies drank and roared and Tua managed to keep all of them happy, even as their entire pack crowded around his bar. He mixed cosmos and kamikazes as fast as he could to prevent being eaten.
The Surf Grizzlies got royally and savagely drunk over the next hour.
Just before Tua ran out of alcohol, the Surf Grizzlies left his bar and took to their boards. They surfed away into the sunset, leaving the Dongo Isles behind. Tua didn’t know if he’d ever see a Surf Grizzly attack again. But he hoped that whatever place the bears struck next would be stocked with plenty of booze.
THE MISFIT CHILD GROWS
FAT ON DESPAIR
TOM PICCIRILLI
Fate arrives disguised as choice.
As if you could actually say, Screw this, I’m out of here, or just get down on your knees like everybody else.
But John’s got to shrug and go, “Hmmm.” He knows that even here at the end of the line, holding his pitiful check for $188.92—boss took out $40 for the broken dishes even though he was the one who slopped soapy water onto the kitchen floor—watching the teller tremble with the eleven-gauge in her face, standing behind some weight lifter with muscles coming out of his asshole and piss pooling over his shoes, and despite what he knows is going to happen after this, John realizes Mr. Teddy Bear has got to be eaten.
Teddy doesn’t like how slow the terrified twenty-year-old teller is moving and continues shrieking at her, “Move it. Hurry, goddamn you, hurry! I saw that! You put a dye pack in there? Did you?”
Of course, she hasn’t; she can’t even move or speak, hyperventilating like that. She’s too much a daughter of television and can’t do anything much besides keep her arms straight up over her head and pray to Christ in Spanish. The gray stretch marks on her underarms clearly mark how much weight she’s gained and lost after her first couple of kids, but her pouty full lips are especially sexy now, the lower one quivering with the name of Jesus.
Teddy’s rubber bear mask doesn’t fit him all that well. His beard is so thick that the mask won’t rest flush against the steep angles and planes of his contorted face. It lifts an inch or more whenever he speaks, which allows the sweat that’s been puddling in the curves and hollows of the rubber to drip out all at once. Spittle works its way out of the thin mouth slit. Ted tries to wipe his eyes clear, the back of his hand mopping the bulging forehead of the growling bear head.
Teddy’s partner, Mr. Lucifer, might hold things together for another minute or two—if only his easy, muted voice can settle the situation long enough to soothe Teddy and the frantic teller. He’s got to get the other cowering folks in the bank to follow his orders, lay down on their bellies, hit no silent alarms, and just face the walls.
“Ladies and gentleman, hush please.” The devil repeats himself twice more, and a respectful amount of Southern flavor seeps out of his hanging cadence, friendly and mannered like he might be talking to a group at a church social. His red mask has curved horns, a wide smile, and pencil-thin mustache. The voice matches it perfectly.
“Gentleman and sweet ladies, if you’ll let us get on with this, we’ll be gone in no time a’tall. This here is government money we’re taking, not yours. We’re workingmen, too. Now just lay back and relax, and we’ll all be on with our day before you know it.”
“It’s a dye pack. I saw it!” Teddy shrieks, hitting a high note that rings around the small enclosed room, picking up speed. There! There it is!”
John is the only bank patron still on his feet, but the smash-and-grab thieves haven’t noticed him standing there yet, as two old women and the weight lifter sob against the floorboards. John is a prime three hundred eighty-four pounds of graceful obesity and dire energy, almost as wide as he is tall (about five seven), dressed entirely in black: well-ironed jeans, a fine button-up, long-sleeve shirt and tie, standing so near the lacquered bank slip table in the center of the place that he appears to be a part of it. He is as immutable and immobile as obsidian.
His arms hang loosely at his sides, his massive hands open for when he has to hug the dead to him.
Teddy Bear isn’t having any of it though, still screaming and finally realizing the teller’s already out of her head, her voice rising and begging the Mother of God to save her. Those heaving, swaying breasts are doing things to Teddy, who prods one tit with the barrel of the shotgun. Without benefit of a bra, it jiggles for a while before finally settling.
Mr. Lucifer is about to say something else, but it’s already too late, all the choices have been made. There’s only one way out now as Teddy pokes the girl’s other breast and she lets loose with a screech. The slobber pumps freely from his mouth slit, as he gives a braying laugh and pulls the trigger.
No one ever gets used to the hypnotic sight of flesh and fluid applied to an area where it shouldn’t be. Everybody in the bank lifts his head and watches as her lower jaw alters into cherry gel rushing across her chest and the cash drawer in one violent splash. The corpse wheels completely around on its toes, revolving one and a half times in a pirouette, before taking a final awkward step and pitching forward.
Most of her teeth are somehow intact, though, and a handful of them do a slow slide across the floor until they stop just outside the growing circle of the weight lifter’s piss. John can’t help himself as her ghost floats past him, still praying as her breasts finish bouncing, adrift and being reeled towards an aurora of seething golden light that hovers and opens just over her body’s left shoulder.
His enormous hand flashes out and he eats her.
The bank manager has seen this sort of thing before, and he enjoys murder. He’s done in one ex-wife already and is getting ready to do in another. He hides his smile well, but not in so dark or carefully guarded a space that John can’t see it.
The weight lifter is sort of thrashing around on the ground, his muscles so taut that it looks as if he might snap in seven places before this is all over. A security guard stands there with his gun in its holster and his hands straight out in front of him, wrists twirling, ass angled to one side like he’s at a disco doing the bump and having a pretty good time. A few people continue to moan and murmur, so far down on the floor that they’re licking it.
The dead teller is already inside John, and he can feel her settling into Gethsemane Hills, her arms still over her head and standing beside Manfred Filkes, the mailman who’d died from an aneurysm walking up John’s driveway six years ago. Filkes is digging the look of the frightened teller, who sways on her feet as she touches down in the middle of Juniper Boulevard. Filkes had been a pedophile, his mail cart full of illegal photos and magazines that would have sent him away for twenty-five years if only his brain hadn’t burst. His madness is palpable and unshifting, the primeval energy of hate and lust rising from him like heat from a brick oven.
Filkes goes after her, even though she’s well out of his preferred age range. He manages to get one of his pale hands on her throat before John can get the thin John, the true John, down among the ghosts to slap the shit out of Filkes all the way across the cypress-lined street. Filkes can’t get rid of his mind full of baby rot even now, and cowers and sobs as he goes ass backwards over a plastic flamingo planted on a well-groomed lawn.
The dead teller, whose name is Juanita Perez, is too shocked to cry anymore, staring through her fingers at the true John, muttering passages out of the Bible, but getting a lot of the words wrong. Almost everybody does. He whispers and tries to comfort her, saying, “It will be all right, Juanita. Be calm. I won’t let anybody hurt you here.”
This place is no different from anywhere else in the world, the John inside himself tries to explain, and he’s right. When Juanita can finally move again, holding a palm to her bruised breast and glancing over at Filkes sitting on the curb, who’s bleeding heavily from his broken nose, she discovers large signs looming above her in the starlight.
This is the town of Gethsemane Hills, population now 1,604, including thin John, who comes and goes, but is always on hand to keep things from spiraling too far out of control. About six square blocks of suburbia, where people occasionally still say hello to you on the street.
There are no hills, but the name is the only one this hometown could have. There is power in names. It is a perpetual twilight of coiling shadows, violet-drenched dusk, and a blood-soaked sun, always with a gleeful moon glowing. Streetlights take the form of the gaslit globes of nineteenth-century London. There is no smog, but there’s a smoggy feel. The yards are flawlessly landscaped, flower beds weeded and fertilized, gardens tilled, rooftops all recently reshingled, the dogs well fed. John takes great pride in the place and does all the work himself.
Indistinct, silent people sit on their stoops and front porches, watching Juanita closely. A few insubstantial shapes rise and begin to make clumsy eager gestures, stopping and starting and abruptly stopping again. These are the ambiguous movements of the uncertain, who see no reason to act but are propelled by memories of action. There is some laughter though, as well as angry men’s giggling, and a few whispered entreaties.
A hand flashes out, silhouetted in the always failing sunlight—the fingers are crooked, the hand little more than a claw, damaged by arthritis, tension, or heaving doubt. Juanita whirls, gazing around at the rows of dimly lit duplicate houses, each of the similar staggering shadows weaving a bit, forward and back. They are waving to her, and then they recede. Doors are closed quietly—locks are thrown, televisions squawk, and children are tapping at upstairs windows, begging to be let out.
Mr. Lucifer scans the bank one more time, finally noticing John standing there in the middle of the room. He shakes his head because he can’t figure out how the hell he’d missed the fat guy in the first place. The devil points his nickel-plated .38 and says, “Excuse me, sir.”
“Be quiet,” John tells him, “or I will eat you.”
“Pardon me?”
“Shh.”
“Hey, now, we’ll have none of that. You might have some trouble doing squat thrusts, but even a fella your size ought to be able to get down on the ground when he’s told.”
Teddy Bear doesn’t look up. He’s intent on getting the other cashiers to empty the banded stacks of cash into his oversized rucksack. Juanita’s corpse propels them on so that everybody is really moving now, shoveling money like crazy. Rolls of change fall and break open, so Ted stomps on rolling coins and picks them up. John sees everything that needs to occur actually happening in about eight seconds. If he had a stopwatch he would click it . . . now. The arching, wavering lines of chance and force of will solidifying into a pattern he can put to use.
He takes a step sideways as thin John, the true John weaves and thinks of ushering the lovely Juanita to bed. His heart is hammering and the flush of ticklish heat is flooding his groin. His breathing begins to speed up and a light sheen of cold sweat forms on his upper lip.
Her house is already picked out at the end of the block: a one-story cottage with a bouquet of freshly plucked forget-me-nots already in a vase on the dining room table. P
hotos of her kids are framed on the mantel, and their crayon drawings are held in place by magnets and exhibited on the refrigerator door. He’s filled a bookshelf with some of the greatest volumes of poetry and classic literature. He’ll teach her metaphor and symbolism and the definition of subtle underpinning. A single white rose lies across the pillow of her queen-sized bed. The vanity is laden with lace undergarments, stockings, and garter belts. There are condoms in the nightstand drawer, along with several brands of spermicide and tubes of lubrication. He likes the way her rack bobbles.
Juggling some change, Mr. Teddy Bear steps over Juanita’s lower jaw, still expecting to find dye packs everywhere. His eyes are flitting like mad, his eyelashes swiping against the rubber loudly. He spots Lucifer’s .38 and follows where it’s pointing until he spots John calmly standing before them. Somehow the bear mask manages to contort. “Get on your knees!”
“I don’t do that,” John tells him.
A large splash of sweat falls out from the mask and threads through Teddy Bear’s beard. “You don’t . . . ?”
“No. Never. Not for anyone.”
“You grotesque fat piece of shit freak!”
John is lissome and quick without ever showing his speed, even while he’s in motion. It’s funny and impressive to see him bringing it on. He reaches into his gully-deep pocket and draws out his nail clipper, carefully stepping around the weight lifter’s yellow zone of urine. Ted has been holding the shotgun crooked in his arm for so long that as he turns, he wavers and spins two or three inches too far the other way, and John is already reaching.
The devil politely says, “Hey, now . . .”
The timing is impeccable, as if John had seen this happen many times before, perhaps in a recurring dream. Ted has to correct himself and bring the shotgun back again, as if to take John in his tremendous stomach.