InkStains January

by John Urbancik

reciprocal, but it wasn’t forthcoming. Perhaps fear was a real thing after all.

  In the middle of the stadium, on the mound, surrounded by seventy thousand cameras and flashing bulbs and microphones, he held out his arms and closed his eyes. He screamed to the masses, “I have faced your demons! I have borne your burdens! I have faltered, I have stumbled, but I have not died!”

  Perhaps fear was a real thing, but there was no need for it.

  He tried to rearrange his words again, tried to prevent the girl from going. A question. He threw out a question. Plucked it from the air. Presented it on the palm of his hand. Questions required answers.

  “Would you go out with me?”

  “On a date?” she asked, throwing the question right back at him, spiking it, going for the gold.

  There was nothing to do but answer it. As careful as he was, this was where he lost control. This was where he slipped. “Yes, on a date. Something nice and simple. I don’t have a car, I can’t take you someplace far away. And I haven’t got much money, I’m not out of High School yet. Neither are you. And I know nothing about Love. I’m still a child, but I’m willing to learn. I’m anxious to learn. I’m a good, good learner. And I do know something about Romance, because I’ve read a lot of poetry and my father taught me respect and my mother taught me gentleness. I’m strong enough and fast enough, and I am brave, and I believe a girl like you might teach me something of Love. No – not a girl like you, no one like you would do. You, and only you, and no one else at all, have stolen all the faces in my dreams and replaced them with yours.”

  Before the end, he realized he should stop. He tried to stop, but couldn’t. There was no helping it. And a crowd had gathered, albeit a small one, but word of his soliloquy would spread fast.

  She smiled at him and said, “Thank you.” Then she said, “No.” Then she walked away.

  Surrounded by the firing squad, blindfolded, offered one last cigarette, he refused. “Just shoot,” he said.

  But no one fired. The crowd broke apart. His story, distorted and twisted right from the start, began to snake its way through the school.

  When he turned, there was another girl, pretty and shy like him, but brave enough not to believe in fear. She said, “You were wrong.”

  He faltered. “How?”

  She looked away and said, “Maybe you can learn something of Love with me.”

  5 January

  Through the dark streets, avoiding streetlamps, slipping between shadows – it’s not a living thing, per se, but a thing with intention nonetheless. It cannot be caught by a passing headlight. It is not revealed in the flash of a match.

  Three boys at the corner, smoking, drinking, laughing, hiding when the cop rolls by, they don’t see it though they hear something, or at least sense it, but they’re too young or too weak to pay it much heed.

  The young mother, alone in her apartment with a glorious view of the Dumpster in the alley, glances out her window, catches something in the corner of her eye. But the baby is demanding, and demanding now, and there’s no one else to help so it’s all her and the baby and the baby’s needs, nothing else.

  The cop, circling the street with his fancy computer and radio and department-issued firearm, he sees nothing except what he expects to see.

  The taxi driver who doesn’t speak the language but knows every secret of these streets, he most certainly sees it, and maybe he recognizes it, but he says nothing to anyone. No one else here speaks Czech. And even if they did, his job is to provide an illusion of safety, not shatter that illusion.

  It’s a tough corner in a rough neighborhood on the outskirts of a rough city. Expectations are low. Hope, though it exists, is a commodity to be traded, sold, lost, or forgotten.

  Through the narrow alley, through the narrow basement window, up the narrow stairs – it glides as though on a mission. It is ancient, older than language, sometimes hungry, sometimes generous, sometimes merely bored – just as it is bored tonight.

  It shifts form, taking substance, creating an illusion of humanity, though it is easy to see through. The demanding cries of the baby attract its attention. It reaches the young mother’s door. It takes on solidity. It knocks three times, like a ghost might.

  The young mother answers, baby in hand, chain preventing the door from moving more than a few inches. Certainly, no man could just slip through. Her hair is unkempt: dark crescents droop from her eyes. “What is it?” she asks. She’s tired. She’s always tired.

  He smiles unnaturally and says, “I can help.” His voice, if nothing else, betrays him. He’s no man, he’s not human, and his definition of words aren’t necessarily in line with words’ actual definitions. When he says he can help, he means he can ease the young mother’s burden by removing it. Then she could sleep again, and maybe buy new clothes, maybe go back to school and get a decent job and escape this rough neighborhood.

  His intentions are transparent.

  “I don’t need your help,” she says, and she tries to shut the door both politely and firmly.

  The crack allowed by the chain is not too thin. He slips through it before she can close the door. He reaches for the baby with one hand, her cheek with the other.

  The young mother screams.

  In a neighborhood like this, screams are not uncommon, but there are many different types. In all the world, in all of history, there have been but a dozen screams of such deep desperation, such a magnitude of vibrant panic, they stopped a thing that might be called a god. While this scream, this mother’s cry of naked fear and defiance and fury, was near to that dozen in its tenor, it failed to stop a thing that might be called a god.

  It was hungry now.

  The scream echoed through the apartment building, which was as good as empty. It leaked into the alley and spilled onto the street corner. The bottle of beer in one of the boy’s hands shattered.

  They responded immediately. They followed the source of the scream into an apartment where the front door should’ve denied them access. Up to the third floor, to the door of the young mother, ajar but still chained. The baby, in the arms of a thing that looked like a man but might be called a god, wailed like any baby forcibly separated from its mother.

  She lay on the floor, unconscious perhaps, or maybe dead, with a trickle of blood above her eye.

  The boys knew the mother. The boys knew the baby. The boys did not know the thing holding it. They broke through the door easily. The fault was not in the chain but in the rotted wood. They confronted the baby snatcher. They encircled it. They were confident, because they were youthful and strong and had numbers on their side.

  They were foolish.

  The first, the thing that might be a god tossed out the window. Glass shattered, but the rusted fire escape held.

  The second, the thing that might be a god threw against the living room wall, which had always been thin, into the vacant adjacent apartment. There was nothing but floor and freshly torn drywall to break his fall.

  The third, the thing that might be a god carried out the front door. It held the boy with one hand and used him as a battering ram, smashing him first against the broken door and then the wall in the hall. Then it dumped him down the stairs. Several bones cracked along the way.

  The young mother opened her eyes. She climbed shakily to her feet. She chased the thing carrying her baby down the stairs and out onto the street.

  There, the cop waited with his gun drawn. “Enough,” he said, calling upon all his authority and courage and bravado. He’d secretly hoped for a moment in which he might play hero. His department-issued firearm felt warm and anxious in his hand. The baby cried.

  The thing that looked like a man and might have been a god cocked his head and blinked his eye and, without moving, snatched the gun from the cop’s hands, twisted the metal, and dropped it to the street. He said, “You might hurt the baby.”

  The cop drew a second, non-standard firearm, which he probably should not have carried, and fired one perfec
tly placed shot between the eyes. The baby, still crying, was never in danger.

  Neither was the thing that might’ve been a god. He absorbed the bullet, crushed the second gun and, with it, the bones in the cop’s hands.

  Then he walked away, into the street, and into the path of an available taxi. The driver didn’t need language to know not to touch the brakes.

  The crash did more damage to the taxi than the thing that looked like a man, but every bit of momentum in the whole of the universe has consequences. The thing that might’ve been a god dropped the baby.

  This time, the young mother’s scream was more desperate, more anguished, than any scream in the history of screaming. The boys, also emerging from the apartment, added their horrified gasps. The cop shouted the most heinous series of expletives imaginable. The taxi driver cursed once in his native tongue. It was the most appropriate word he had.

  The dropped baby did not land on the steaming hood of the taxi or the dark asphalt street or the cracked sidewalk. The baby did not fall into the gutter. The thing that look like a man and might have been a god moved with a god’s speed and a god’s gentleness, to catch the baby as quickly as he had dropped it.

  For a moment, all was still. This rough corner in a rough neighborhood on the outskirts of a rough city fell preternaturally silent.

  The thing that might’ve been a god kissed the baby’s forehead, a blessing of a sort, and returned the baby to the young