Brad Green hates skunks. This isn't a hatred similar to one high school girl hating that another high school girl's ass is closer to the Platonic form of an ass. No, this hatred isn't like that. For one thing, Brad Green isn't a high school girl, so it'd be hard to really have that sort of hatred. No, his hatred of skunks would be legendary if such hatreds were actually cataloged and revered. If a movie were ever to be made about his hatred of skunks, he thinks Nicolas Cage would portray his hatred rather well. He may occasionally blog about this at http://elevatetheordinary.blogspot.com
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Normal (March 5, 2009. Issue 1)
Her breath hissed through the orange ember of the cigarette. "Where do you want it, baby?" she asked him. "Nipple? Belly? Thigh? Cock?" She ran the hot tip of the cigarette over the hairs on his chest, watching them curl in the heat.
"Under my arm this time." He raised his right arm.
She took another drag, blew the blue smoke into his armpit. "Ok, baby, here goes." She leaned forward, her arm sprawled across his belly and jabbed the ember into his armpit. His belly bucked under her arm. His teeth clenched, sheets bunched in his fingers. Burning hair. The sizzle extinguished quickly, but there was a moment as the tip burned through the snarled hair and into the warm, moist flesh that she heard the sizzle, heard the flesh bubble and she thought how lovely, how fucking lovely is that, and took his nipple in between her teeth as he shook and writhed until the cigarette was ground into cold ash.
"God, Dolly." he said. "You are grade a prime." His breath came in shallow pants.
She didn't say thank you. He said that every week. She knew she was the best. He'd do anything she asked him to now. Anything at all for the chance to come back here each week and indulge what his wife couldn't think of. She wondered what the wife thought about the burns, the cuts, the bruises. Perhaps she never noticed. Her fingers on his paunch, she rubbed his belly like he was a puppy. She half-expected him to raise up his leg. "Anything else you want this week, hon?" she asked.
He raised up on his elbow. The bite marks on his nipple were fading back into his normal skin. These moments of deviation for him were just that -- moments. Not so for her. She knew he was going to ask. He always asked.
"The scar." he said, leaning forward. "Show it to me again. Let me kiss it."
"You always want the same thing," she complained. "It's boring. Down right normal."
"There ain't nothing normal about what we do. Just show me. I gotta get back to the shop."
She sighed, laid back on the bed and pulled up her tank top. He moved his mouth to the scar under her naval. Warm. Wet. His tongue licking. Like some stupid dog licking the ass of another. "This turns me on," he said. "Knowing that they pulled the dead baby out through here."
She pushed his head away from her.
"Hey!"
"Every week it's the same damn thing. " She pulled her shirt down and got off the bed, found her cigarettes. She rasped the lighter with her thumb. Flame seared the air. "Same thing over and over. It's all just so fucking normal." She took a draw and blew the smoke out into the room. "I really can't abide normal any longer."
The Fallen (The Old Site, A Future Issue)
I ask forgiveness each day for what was done. I raise my eyes and arms to the empty sky, hoping to hear some booming voice tell me I am absolved, that I was young, that it was Tommy Luthor's idea after all, but the sky yields no sound and all I hear is Tommy telling us how we were going to run that sandnigger family out of town.
Tommy targeted the boy. We'd seen him at school in his floppy sweater and new shoes. Tommy had studied him, his patterns, wrote it all down in a notebook, his fingers thick as our father's would be around the scratching yellow pencil. After the boy got off the school bus, shoulders scrunched up tight under his backpack, there was a half-hour before his mother arrived home. "We bust him up then." Tommy slapped his fist into his palm, loud enough that we all jumped. "Before his bitch mother comes home." We didn't know his name. In six months, they hadn't put it on their mailbox either. They knew they didn't belong.
So we waited behind prickly limbs and leaves, our legs blooming with red ache from crouching. We hunched behind hedges, lawn mowers, the warm brick corner of the house, our deadly intentions thrumming behind ordinary objects. Tommy instructed us. These were the things he'd learned from his brother before his last deployment: where to punch to knock out the breath, how to move quietly through brush, how to never relent, never give mercy. Be fierce, Tommy would say, let someone else pull you off. Tommy made us kill rabbits that summer to toughen us up because it wouldn't be long before it was our turn in the boots. We cracked the backs of rabbits over our knees, bludgeoned their heads with hammers, twisted the necks till they snapped and the fur turned loose and gentle as pudding in our palms. We'd hold up our bloody hands matted with fur and Tommy would nod, satisfied that we were growing out of our youth.
Sweat dripped down our backs outside the boy's house. My index finger shook. Tommy wanted me to draw the boy into the open. "You look like home to em," he had told me. "Darker and all. He'll be looking for someone close to his type. Not many Iraqis want to live near a military base. He'll trust you more, Gomez."
I gave the boy ten minutes before I unlimbed from the hedge and walked to the door. If everything stayed according to plan, we had about twenty minutes before his mother arrived. Twenty minutes was enough to make our point.
As my thumb hovered over the glowing orange doorbell, I wondered why I was going to do it, if I was going to do it. But I knew I would. I'd push the door bell for Tommy. I'd coax the boy out, all skinny arms, gooseflesh, and darting eyes. All of us, me, Billy Mitchell, Hugo Man, Willie Stagger -- we'd all do whatever Tommy asked because he'd protected us all through junior high, before we'd filled out our own flesh with the dark hatreds that the war brought Tommy early on. His knuckles were scarred with loyalty to us. We had no choice. This is what soldiers did, Tommy told us, his chest heaving the day they'd received the news about his brother, his mother crumpled to the floor in front of the two soldiers, their eyes professional, held in a gaze just above the anguish thudding into the bodies of the people around them, like they were giving a speech, like their duty was somehow worthwhile, their car idling on the street with the windows down. This is what they do, Tommy screamed at us with red fists and wild eyes, God damn it, they protect each other. They protect the one that has fallen from those that would cause harm. They protect the land, the brothers and sisters at home. They seek revenge for the fallen.
The bones in my fist cracked as I looked back at Tommy, remembering him opening a bright blossom of blood where Duey Porter's nose was while I sat dizzy and jumbled on the ground from Duey's fat boot. Tommy was small behind the hedge, still a boy with too much elbow, a chest packed with bone, a boy too soon a man in the areas that moved us. Tommy pumped his fist into the air, raised his middle finger at the house we were about to bring grief too. He swung a silver chain over the hedge, the links chewing into the leaves, and I turned back toward the door. I bit the inside of my lower lip on purpose. Doing this had made the rabbits easier. As my mouth filled with blood, I jabbed my thumb into the orange doorbell.