Mighty Unclean

by Cody Goodfellow

  It took a small eternity for him to stop shuddering, and by the time he was able to move again, he realized that the door was still standing open. He pulled his head forward and reached out for the door, gripping the inside handle, and he started to close it, he knew this without looking because he could feel the force he was putting into it, but then he made a big mistake: he looked out.

  And what he saw was nothing. Nothingness. Only a wide, deep, endless blackness with no varying degrees, not like a normal night possessed, some shadows darker than others, giving it discernable boundaries, recognizable limits, something he could distinguish as being part of the world he knew. No, not this. This was the end of everything, where it all came crashing down, where it all scrambled into an instantaneous decay pattern and reduced everything to a harmless spray of subparticles that were scattered about only to be absorbed by whatever had existed here before the universe had been born.

  He knew all of this with that odd certainty that every human being experiences at least once in their lifetime, an unbreakable conviction that they and they alone have just realized something that they can never hope to express to others with a tool so pitiful as mere language.

  He looked out the windshield and saw the snow-covered highway before him; he looked to his right and saw the abandoned SUV still idling in the emergency lane, its wipers still singing their song of thunka-thunka-thunk!, the exhaust from its pipes swirling into the winter air, creating small misty whirlpools that seemed to be trying to resolve themselves into definite shapes.

  Matt closed the door, lowered his head, and silently uttered a prayer for safety and deliverance to a God he’d never really believed in nor disbelieved was there to hear such pathetic requests, but pray he did.

  And then he did something that he suspected wasn’t a very good idea, but he had to know, had to be sure. He pressed the button on the door handle and began lowering his window.

  It took only a few seconds for the window to drop halfway down, and that was all Matt needed: through the lower half of the window he could see the highway on which his car was for the moment stopped; but above, in that space where the rest of the window had been, he saw only the blackness of space illimitable, pressing toward him, a few tendrils whispering against the door, curling upward like the darkest smoke, and beginning to spill into the car.

  He raised the window a few moments before the first tendril of nothingness could make it inside. From the floor, the voice from the cell phone was still repeating, “…never to stop. The best way to get there is never to stop. The best way…”

  The headlights he’d seen earlier were no closer now than they had been before. Matt wondered if the vehicle was moving at all, or if it was only occupying the same space, over and endlessly, while the road below it moved, giving the driver the sense that he was in control.

  He looked at the SUV once more as he put the car in gear, and then remembered—

  — jesusgodhowcouldyouforget?—

  —how he and Lauren had looked at an SUV just like this one during the third month of her pregnancy, how she’d convinced him that, with a new baby and all the tons of new-baby-caring-for paraphernalia they’d have to haul around every day, they were going to need a vehicle like this. There was going to be a lot of stuff, you know. And if the weather was bad and they needed to take the baby to the hospital, didn’t they want a vehicle they knew they could depend on to get them there? And think of all the groceries they’d have to buy every week. Don’t you think this would be just so perfect?

  He drove away, mind and body numbed beyond anything he’d ever experienced. He kept driving until he saw the EXIT sign up ahead, then the exit, and he took it, and no sooner had he gotten back onto the road than a Merge Right sign appeared, then another abandoned vehicle in the emergency lane, taillights flickering, a Ford Escort this time, just like the one he’d been driving when he and Lauren had first been dating, and he kept driving, kept following the directions every time a Merge Right sign told him to do so, kept passing other vehicles abandoned in the emergency lane; Merge Right – the Honda he’d driven during his last year of high school; Merge Right – the Toyota that Lauren’s parents had given her for her college graduation; Merge Right–and the rusty, damn-near dilapidated Chevy station wagon he and Lauren had once taken for a test drive from a used car lot, just for shits and giggles, and in which, on a crisp autumn afternoon, he had proposed to her, and she had said yes.

  Merge Right. Decay patterns. Particles scattering.

  He stared at the snow that came spraying forward from the darkness to throw itself on his windshield only to be scattered by the wipers, and he thought about decay, and loneliness, and grief, and responsibility.

  He slowed the car and looked into the rear-view mirror, watching as the exhaust danced into the night, combined with the swirling snow, and danced a ballet of form, becoming the faces of every person he’d ever hurt, ever disappointed, ever let down, lied to, betrayed, mocked, ignored, or – worst of all – forgotten about. They danced around his car with a cold grace, and continued to dance around as he inched forward, never touching any of them, until, at last, he came to a stop and put the car in Park.

  “I knew after about fifteen minutes,” he said to Lauren, looking at her, there, scattered particles trapped in her jar. “I knew what you were going to do, and I did nothing to stop it. I couldn’t move, baby. I was too scared. I couldn’t imagine how I was going to handle it, having to deal with the baby and taking care of you, trying to nurse you back to health, spending the rest of my life worrying that you were going to try it again the minute you were out of my sight, never knowing if you’d ever get over it, the two of us always looking at each other and seeing only the third person in our family who wasn’t there.”

  He turned to face her. “Do you understand?”

  I know, honey. I just needed to hear you say it.

  “And I still feel like you abandoned me, and sometimes…ohgod, baby… sometimes I really, really hate you for it.”

  Now it’s part of the world, that thought of yours. You have spoken it aloud. You have given it form.

  “So what am I supposed to do now? How am I supposed to keep my promise to you?”

  Leave me here.

  “I can’t…can’t do that.”

  “It’s okay, Daddy,” said the voice from the cell phone, once again that of the child, of Cynthia, his little girl who almost was.

  Matt leaned over and unstrapped the urn, bringing it to his chest and cradling it with all the tenderness he could muster.

  Just open the door and step outside, honey. The ground will be there this time.

  “I don’t want to leave you.”

  You’re not. You’re just scattering some useless particles, that’s all.

  Matt unbuckled his seat belt and opened the door. True to Lauren’s word, the ground was still there. He climbed out into the icy night and stood upon the churning snow that wound around his ankles, holding him in place as the others, the figures of mist and snow and exhaust, continued dancing around his car. He spotted the faces of his own parents among them and whispered, “You two would’ve made terrific grandparents.”

  He removed the lid from the urn and tossed it into the car, and then, slowly, with great deliberation, raised the urn over his head, turned into the wind, and emptied its contents into the winter night. He did not notice that a good portion of the ashes had fallen into a small pile near his feet.

  He climbed back into the car, replaced the urn’s lid, strapped it into place once again, and began driving away, closing the door only after the car started moving; he wanted one last breath of the night wind; perhaps some of her still lingered near and he could breathe her in, have her with him forever and always, a part of him, absorbed into his tissue, never to be taken away again.

  “Matt?” came her voice from the cell phone.

  He leaned over and picked it up. “Yeah, baby?”

  “Where are you going?”

&n
bsp; “Home, I guess. If I can find the way.”

  “Honey?”

  “Yeah…?”

  “You have to forgive yourself first.”

  “For not saving you?”

  “For all of it. For everything. You’ll never find your way home if you don’t.”

  He stared out into the snow and darkness, and thought of all the sins, mortal and those of omission, that he had ever committed, all the people he’d hurt, turned away from, alienated, or ridiculed. He realized, with a smile, that he’d been a pretty selfish man for most of his life, and not a particularly good man, either. All the goodness, it seemed, he’d been saving for Lauren, and for their child, and what good was it now?

  “I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon, baby.”

  “Then it’s going to be a long drive back.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Remember, Daddy,” said Cynthia. “The best way to get home is to keep driving and never to stop. Never to stop. Never…”

  And as Matt’s car was swallowed by the snow and darkness, a wind came up from the south, softly, with almost no sound, and took hold of the remaining ashes, swirling them around in a final dance before scattering them, one by one, into the night air where they drifted for only a moment before surrendering to the inevitable decay pattern and vanishing into nothingness, leaving only the drifting snow, the sighing of the wind, and the figures of the mist dancers; but soon they, too, began to break apart and scatter, until, at last, there was no sign any of them had ever been there or that any of it had even happened.

  But had someone else been there, had they listened carefully, they might have heard the faint, distant echo of a child’s voice, urging Daddy never to stop, never to stop, never to stop…

  As It Is In Your Head

  By Gary A. Braunbeck

  “O! Keep me from their worse than killing lust

  And tumble me into some loathsome pit,

  Where never man’s eye may behold my body.”

  – Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, II:3

  ike most men whose Quixotic notions of true love crumble into the easy and cynical promiscuity of the failed romantic, Craig Larousse was in no way prepared for the astonishing beaux yeux of his fantasy lover when she at last revealed herself; but then, she could have been anything other than the sad creature named Shelly who was next to him in bed and he would have been pleased.

  He tried not to laugh as he watched her slip off the bed and glide across the room with something she must have thought to be daintiness. She lit a candle, then turned to face him, untying the belt of her terrycloth robe and smiling as her costume slipped from her bony shoulders and tumbled to the floor. She brushed a thin strand of wiry hair from her eyes and began to caress the tip of a pinkie with her tongue, keeping her small ingenuous gaze on his face.

  “This do anything for you?”

  “Definitely.” It was a lie. With her bony shoulders, shapeless hips, and sagging thighs, she was by far one of the most dismal specimens of femininity he’d been with in quite some time: gray stretch marks over her midsection betrayed the weight she’d gained and then lost; freckles from her childhood had darkened into unsightly splotches; and her chest was sprinkled with disgusting brown moles that formed grotesque patterns.

  In the glow of a candle stands the shattered Venus, thought Craig, his mind wandering to the test he would be giving his Mythology class Monday morning.

  “I want to do something…different,” said Shelly in a throaty whisper.

  “I’m game.” He couldn’t have cared less.

  She took a small plastic bottle from her bureau and squirted a small amount of greasy liquid into the palm of her left hand, then slowly doused her skin with the lilac-scented oil as if she were polishing a mirror in hopes that it would show her the reflection she wanted to see. She stumbled over to the bed and began massaging the oil over Craig’s body, all the time nibbling and licking his neck.

  “Is now okay?” she asked.

  “Absolutely.”

  She smiled through slightly discolored teeth and went down on him in a fumbling burst of passion, biting him only once – which was already an improvement over the last time.

  As Shelly labored away at his cock, Craig thought about the test: The Lesser Myths Of Greek and Roman Mythology. Right. What the fuck did any of his students know, or for that matter, care? Not one of them took these myths to heart, not one of them spent their nights fantasizing of a goddess like Venus, one who could make the sex as good in the flesh as it was in your head. Did any of them ever stop to wonder why, as you grew older, the act of physical love became less of a mystery and more of a means to an end? That had, in less abstract terms, been Craig’s ex-wife’s biggest complaint toward the end of their marriage: Why can’t you be more passionate with me? Half the time I feel like I’m just a third hand to help you jack off. He would never have admitted it to her, but she had a point, and at times like this he couldn’t help but wonder if—

  —“Damn,” said Shelly, pulling up her head and shaking some hair from her face, “gimme a break, huh? If I try any harder I’m gonna swallow my teeth.”

  He said nothing.

  She crawled up beside him, her fingers tracing circles on his well-defined but hairless chest. Craig cursed himself for not having a go at the blonde who’d been tending the bar; he’d talked with her enough to start the moves, and God knows she’d hinted that she’d be receptive, she would have undoubtedly been better in bed, so what the hell was he doing here?

  He stared at the candleglow that bounced and shimmered across the ceiling, forming shapes; images of youth, a first kiss, first sex, the faces of all the early girls…he longed to touch them again, re-shape them, fuse them together like a lump of clay and sculpt them into one perfect lover. He watched as their faces dissolved and reappeared, each time with more clarity and substance, coming closer until they split apart like magnified atoms and spun away in a cataclysm of yellowish light, leaving behind only the eyes.

  The eyes.

  Stationary and unblinking, the candleglow formed two eyes that looked down on him with frightening desire. He held his breath, his heart triphammering against his chest as the glow spread farther, outlining the ghost of a face that smiled at him with a thousand secret flames of ineffable pleasure.

  There was a sudden movement below his waist and Shelly stopped massaging his cock and pulled her hand away.

  He tore his gaze from the face for only a moment, but when he looked back, it was gone.

  “Is there some problem?” snapped Shelly.

  He wasn’t sure if there was petulance in her voice or not and right now he didn’t care; that face was gone because of her. Something in him had awakened during those few brief moments of communion and he wanted it back. More than anything, he wanted it back.

  He touched Shelly’s hair; it felt like an old Brillo pad. He forced a smile onto his face to make her feel special. Girls like her needed to feel special even though they weren’t and never would be. At one point in his life he would have been angered at the idea of a man pulling on a woman what he was about to pull on Shelly, but that point had been left in the dust long ago; now he’d become an expert. And prided himself on this maneuver.

  “There’s no problem, baby.”

  Shelly pulled away. “Don’t lie to me.” She lifted the sheet to cover her tiny breasts. “You were fine earlier, the first time, and now you turn into cotton candy. I don’t mean to sound bitchy but…well…it tends to make a woman feel…I dunno…ugly and undesirable.”