The Neon God

by Ben D'Alessio

  She clicked on a masthead called The Red Fox Literary Review that seemed legit. Their About section had the typical introduction, that they’re looking for a diversity of cultures and polished writing that crosses boundaries and will inspire us. Zibby clicked the submission guidelines to send in her new short story, but immediately hit a snag.

  The Red Fox Literary Review is dedicated to promoting traditionally underrepresented groups, and therefore will only be seeking those who identify on the LGBTQI scale.

  She closed the magazine’s page and clicked on the next publication, this time going straight to the guidelines to make sure she qualified before checking out the magazine itself: The Acidity Press only publishes work by those who identify as Asian American.

  Her knee started to bop as she sucked down coffee that had gone cold and stale. She only allotted herself a ten-minute study break—more of a study breather—and wanted to get at least one submission in before diving back into Contracts. But every publication that was holding open submissions had devised some sort of barrier to keep Zibby out of the process, whether a staunch NO SIMULTANEOUS SUBMISSIONS or an ethno-geo-gender-age-content-word-count shield: Bluebird Quarterly is seeking submissions from 25-to 39-year-old female writers from Western Michigan; Elementus Literary Magazine only publishes flash fiction (under 100 words) from gay writers; The Black Box Review seeks short stories from Filipino Americans from, or with stories concerning, the greater Seattle metro area; The Illustrious Chronicles is only accepting speculative fiction short stories of 2,000 words or less from 18-to 21-year-olds who identify as Venezuelan Gender-Queer from Broward County, Florida.

  “Oh, come on! Seriously?”

  She clicked on a promising masthead, giving it one last shot: The Pelican Review is seeking submissions from female writers check of color check—Zibby felt a wave of relief pass over her—regardless of sexual orientation check—at least she could get this one out—from Southern Louisiana check of 4,000 words or less check written in French.

  She bit her lip, puncturing the urge to put her fist through the laptop screen.

  The ten-minute break had turned into a forty-five-minute submission blackout. Zibby had a Torts study group scheduled and still needed to shower—she envisioned the squiggly stench lines emanating from her armpits killing the potted plants resting on her windowsill.

  Hair still wet, she filled her backpack and hopped on her bike toward campus. She cut across South Carrollton and down Hampson Street to give a much-needed tap to the JKT plaque for finals strength. But as she approached the $950,000 house, she came to a slow, and then complete, stop. From the sidewalk, in front of the plaque, Zibby witnessed a sin take place that made her jaw drop.

  On the front porch of the house, the blonde Californian directed a duo of workers in a gringo-thick Spanish as they painted the pretty light-blue porch ceiling white.

  Her filter weakened from stress and fatigue, Zibby shouted from the street, “Ya know, there’s meaning behind that color?!”

  “Excuse me? What was that?” The woman leaned over the porch railing.

  “That isn’t just some arbitrary color you’re painting over. It’s called ‘haint blue.’ It keeps spirits away.”

  “Spirits? Oh! Like voodoo spirits and all? You must be a local. Sorry, but we don’t believe in that stuff.”

  Zibby watched as the men erased the blue paint, streak by streak, into a cream white, opening the portal for restless spirits to enter the home.

  “Do you know who John Kennedy Toole is? Have you even read A Confederacy of Dunces?”

  “Sorry, I’m not interested in the Civil War. We’re not from here. We’re from California!”

  “I know.” And Zibby sat back on her bike and sped away.

  She met with Tara, Jafaris, and Jafaris’s twin sister, Veronica, in a private study room on the third floor of the library. Jafaris stood at the whiteboard, where the tort formula P=BL was written with arrows curving and coursing out from its center, like a head football coach during a halftime game-plan revamp.

  “Hey Zibbs,” Tara said as she ran a squeaking yellow highlighter across the paper. “We’re working through one of Hastings’s old exams. Here, I made you a copy.” She slid a paper with a fact pattern that took up half the page in front of Zibby’s designated seat.

  “Okay, wait…” Jafaris paused, looking over his creation like a genius janitor solving linear algebra matrices, “if the tiger caused Alice to swerve her car into the telephone pole and…and…the telephone pole crash caused Bernie to have a heart attack…” He connected a black arrow from a bubble containing the word “Zoo” to a bubble with “City.”

  “Well, the zoo is not strictly liable for the tiger’s escape,” Veronica cut him off. “They are only liable if they are deemed negligent. It’s an exception to the general rule.”

  “Oh man, lemme read this,” said Zibby.

  “It’s a beast,” Tara said, this time running across two consecutive lines with a pink highlighter.

  “Natalie, my mentor, told me that last year his entire exam was just one big, two-page hypo that covered everything for the semester,” said Veronica.

  “Did Ben have Hastings?” Tara asked.

  “Who’s Ben?” asked Veronica.

  “My mentor.”

  “Oh, he’s more than that,” Tara said.

  “Ohhh, scandalous.” Veronica smiled.

  “Can we focus on this, please?” Jafaris asked from the whiteboard. “Will the city be liable for damages to the passengers on the streetcar?”

  “Wasn’t the conductor drunk? Wait, does that matter?”

  “The driver definitely has a duty of care to the passengers,” Zibby started. “But…the tiger…wait…yeah, tiger, was an unforeseeable, intervening circumstance.”

  “Is it superseding, though?” Jafaris questioned.

  “Wait, is Ben the three-L with the book?” asked Veronica.

  “Yup.”

  “He’s cute,” Veronica said, sitting back in her chair.

  “Gross,” said Jafaris, not looking away from the whiteboard.

  “Have you read it yet?” asked Tara.

  “No, I’m like, not sure if I’m supposed to.”

  “Why not?” asked Veronica.

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’d be like, patronizing or something?”

  “Or you might not like it?” Veronica said.

  “Doesn’t your store sell it?” asked Tara.

  “But if the conductor wasn’t drunk, his reflexes would have been better and he would’ve hit the brakes earlier. However, the tiger cutting across the avenue was the proximate cause of the passengers’ injuries…right?”

  They finally focused, and the four of them worked through three old exams in the windowless study room chamber, losing track of the time, enveloped in the world of negligence and reasonable and prudent people.

  “Do you think we could bring a claim against LaSalle for intentional infliction of emotional distress?” asked Tara.

  “If anyone has a claim, it’s Jafaris,” said Veronica. “You didn’t bite your nails before the semester.”

  “I don’t even know I’m doing it sometimes.”

  “What’s her deal, anyway? I mean, she’s got beacoup bucks. It’s not like she needs to work. She must just get off on torturing one-Ls,” Veronica posited.

  “Not the only way she gets off with ’em,” said Tara, squeaking a green highlighter through the dense text of her casebook, before Zibby could add that LaSalle didn’t even take a salary. “Whadya mean?” asked Jafaris.

  “You haven’t heard?” Tara scanned the room, relishing in the fact that she possessed such a juicy morsel of gossip. “She’s slept with at least three students.”

  “No way!” said Jafaris.

  “Stop,” said Zibby. “Not a chance that’s true.”

  “I’m not making this shit up! And get this: all three have ended up at ‘Big Law’ firms. You know how many students Loyola sends to Big Law out
of a class? Like, very few. One even got an associate’s with Slater, Brewer, and Burcham, ya know, that monster firm up in New York, and he wasn’t even on law review.”

  “So what are you saying? She hooks up her hookups?” Jafaris smirked at his deftness. “Yeah, basically.”

  “Interesting…”

  “Don’t be gross,” said Veronica.

  “Heuh cooch give dat resume a lil lagniappe,” Zibby said in an exaggerated accent.

  Their laughter broke through the confines of the study room and caused students to pop up from their cubicles like meerkats in the dirt.

  “Shit. Shit. Shit,” Tara started.

  “What?” asked Zibby.

  “Shit. We got so in the weeds with Torts I lost track of time.” She dropped her casebook, laptop, and disheveled papers into her backpack. “I’m gonna be late for work. Shit.”

  “You have to work during finals?” asked Veronica.

  “Yeah, my boss is being a total dick. I’m gonna have off the nights before an exam, but most nights I have to work.”

  “That sucks, T,” Zibby said. “Bring your outline and just leave it behind the bar.”

  “Yeah, until some Tulane couillon spills his drink all over it. I’ll talk to y’all later.”

  “We still meeting tomorrow for Crim?” asked Jafaris as she headed toward the door.

  “The three of us are. You should just ask her on a date.”

  “I would, but I can’t perform scared, and that woman shakes me to my core.”

  Dio

  The God of the Vine swatted away the priest’s shaking hand for the hundredth time since daybreak.

  “I know what…Will you stop that? I know what I’m doing,” Dio said to Silenus.

  “Know bgurp what you are doing? Did you know what you were doing when those hysterical girls in Salem bgurp were slinging accusations about witchcraft? They blamed that poor Barbadian woman…bgurp…and those girls barely sniffed your wine! The way they drink in New Orleans, this entire city will be razed worse than Carthage!”

  The previously possessed girl, the honey-yellow having returned to her cheeks and the blue to her eyes, wrapped herself around Dio’s leg as the god packed his last four bottles of wine into her backpack—the first six he had shoved into a duffel the priest had provided.

  “Oh, yes, fine, ignore me, but have I ever steered you wrong?” Silenus drank from his last allotted bottle. “I even warned you not to fall in love with that bgurp Phoenician.”

  “Do not speak of him!”

  “Yes, go ahead, let that wrath exude from you…I don’t know what it is about you Olympians, but none of you could ever pass up forming a good cult.”

  Dio shook the girl off his leg and slung the backpack over his shoulder, leaving the abandoned amusement park, the priest and schoolgirl following, without parting words to his longtime mentor and friend.

  “Au revoir, Dionysus!” Silenus called as he lifted his bottle into the air, barely three fingers of wine remaining at the bottom. “By the way, the wine is still fabulous, my son!”

  Dio came to the threshold of the highway as a light drizzle began to fall from the sky. The Cajun priest muttering to himself and the girl brushing dirt from her uniform skirt stood beside him. It was still early and only a car passed here and there as Dio contemplated his next move.

  He appreciated his new following, as it had been some time since he formed a proper cult, but the priest’s incessant blathering had started to irritate him—the god took off the backpack and pulled out a bottle, drinking half the wine before taking a step toward the heart of the city.

  “Lord, make a’me da instrument of dy peace,” the priest looked to the sky. “Where der be hatred, let me sow love…”

  “Are you sure there isn’t some way I can repay you for bringing me back?” asked the schoolgirl.

  “Tell me,” Dio began, “what did you see?”

  “Well, I was above my own body, lying there on the cart. My…soul, I guess, began to recede…and…I watched as you ran your hands over my eyes. Then I shot back into myself, into my body, as fast as a missile, and I woke up.”

  “…where der be doubt, faith…”

  “Did it take the pain away?”

  “Pain? I’m…I’m not sure. I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “…where der be despair, hope…”

  “But what did you feel?”

  “It’s hard to explain. I’m sorry, it happened so fast and it was so unfamiliar.”

  “…where der be darkness, light…”

  Dio took a swig of wine and snapped around, frightening the schoolgirl and the priest. “There will be no more praying,” he said. “A new age blossoms in this city and I require complete devotion. I am your god now.”

  He swung the backpack onto his shoulder and started down the road, into New Orleans proper, the girl and the priest following close behind.

  DECEMBER

  Zibby

  Zibby had to fight the urge to say “when the fuck would this ever happen?” while she read through the Torts hypothetical in her first law school exam. As practiced, the entire exam consisted of one fact pattern, wherein every conceivable intentional tort and negligent act (or omission) took place like a Murphy’s Law domino effect.

  Her knees bounced up and down like pistons and her earplugs kept the amplified holdings and rationale from spilling out of her brain.

  If the zookeeper just tried opening the door, it wouldn’t be false imprisonment, and that lion would’ve never gotten out, and then I wouldn’t be here taking this fucking test!

  Logic—ironically—was sometimes an ethereal concept during a law school exam.

  She took a deep breath and composed herself. The fact pattern looked eerily similar to an old exam from 2006 they had used to practice. Unwilling to fall into the trap of assumption, Zibby read through the facts for a second time, outlining her rules in the margins and laying out a few points for her arguments, which made completing the exam fluid and machinelike.

  She turned in the exam with twelve minutes left. Ambivalent to her success, Zibby had peaked and troughed throughout the test—at times she felt as if she could teach Torts I herself and should pursue a professorship upon graduation, while at others she questioned her intelligence and whether she belonged in law school at all.

  With her brains now oozing out of her ears, Zibby left the exam room and went outside, where over-caffeinated 1Ls were engaged in the exact conduct they were advised not to engage in—discussing their answers.

  Zibby walked to her bike, head down so as not to make eye contact with anyone and make the same mistake. Ben had texted her to come over after her exam to unwind with some wine. Lol. Jk. But seriously. And Zibby was going to take him up on the offer.

  She rode past the Toole house—the haint-blue porch ceiling now completely lily-white—without stopping, and she turned up Adams Street to Ben’s ground-floor apartment.

  Kennedy watched from the window, perched on the air conditioner, as she walked her bike to the door and chained it to the black fence.

  “Hey!” Ben said, toothy and enthusiastic. “You survived your first law school exam!”

  “Barely.” Zibby dropped her backpack and jacket with the Creole Bitch patch on the couch and bent down to pet Kennedy.

  “I bet you did great. Here, let’s celebrate.” He turned the corner and walked into the bedroom, which led to the kitchen. “I got some bubbly!” he called. “And don’t worry, it’s extra cheap!”

  “Oh, good!” Zibby laughed while Kennedy paced across her shins.

  Ben returned with a King’s Natural tin bucket filled with ice and two wine glasses.

  “You snag that from Vito’s?”

  “Ha! Guilty. But with all the money I blow at that bar, I deserve a souvenir. Just don’t look in the cabinet…”

  “Don’t worry, your kleptomaniacal secret is safe with me.”

  He pulled the California bubbly out from the ice—Soma was writte
n in red Sharpie across the white label.

  “Brave New World reference?”

  “Huh? Oh, yeah. I started doing that a while ago. Soma of my life.”

  He poured out the wine, the effervescent white bubbles foaming to the top of the glasses.

  “Oh! I know you’ve been crazy busy with studying, but you manage to submit that story to any publications yet?”

  “Ugh, not really. Like, a few, but everything is so damn niche.”

  “Ha! Please, I’m a straight, white male. I feel like I can’t even read some lit mags.”

  Zibby wasn’t sure how to take that. She had detested any and all forms of complaining from men from such a demographic, and even had to consciously stop herself from rolling her eyes at the statement, but she had also seen how exclusive literary publications had become and that such exclusivity did not rest on the merits of the writing itself—Law School Zibby had betrayed Liberal Arts Zibby in one semester.

  “I mean, I get it,” he said, taking a step back. “There definitely needs to be a spotlight on diverse voices, but publications shouldn’t only accept ‘traditionally marginalized voices,’ even if those pieces get a plus factor. Oh, right, you’ll learn about that next year in Con Law, when you go over affirmative action. Ivon divides the class…”

  “Ivon?”

  “I mean, Professor LaSalle divides the class in half and…”

  Zibby watched Ben’s face redden as he continued with his anecdote about the tension in the class when they discussed Gratz v. Bollinger, the controversial affirmative action in admissions case at the University of Michigan.

  “Yeah, so unlike one-L Crim class, she is a lot more relaxed in Con Law. More so guides the class than structures it.”

  “You have a crush on her or somethin’?”

  He coughed on the bubbly. “Whu…what?!”

  “Hey, I get it. She’s got the whole pantsuit and heels look goin’ on.”

  “Please.”

  “I wish I could command a room like her,” she said.

  “So, what plans you got goin’ on for after finals? What’s your light at the end of the tunnel?”