August 20, 2010. Issue 20.

Borrowed

by Nathan Zackroff

I entered into the town not much later than eight or nine. The streets were empty and the town had the feel of any small Texas town. Angled cars parked on the street, jutting out, showing their taillights. The street lamps seemed outdated and rang with a buzz of electricity. Lined storefronts, windowed and clean; it smelled like rubber and oil, not foul but sweet smelling.

I parked the car in a spot in front of a burger shop. Its inhabitants were contently ingesting their food in red baskets. I smiled at the plainness.

I walked for a while with sweet remembering of my own childhood. I remembered the simplicity of wanting to feel surrounded without being confined. I walked by the small public library and the local pharmacy. A liquor store’s flashing lights invited me in but I denied its attraction. It would have been nice to fill my stomach with scotch but I was already intoxicated with the feel of the night; the lure of the path that seemed to attract me further and further forward. A darkness drawing me deeper into the night’s splendor.

A small store on the corner of the street caught my attention. Its store windows were tall and they leaned over me. The clear glass gave way to stacks and stacks of books.  You couldn’t see past them. You could only read their bindings. The familiar leather flesh of Moby Dick and Heart of Darkness laid in my eyesight.  

“What ya got?” I inquired back playfully. 

He laughed and replied. “You obviously must have missed our sign.” I smiled at this, as did he. “I got a sale on all clothing."

I looked around and spotted a sienna colored suit on the rack behind him. It was hanging like a chain from a gate. I tried it on and it fit flawlessly. 

“That suit was made for you my son.” The man spoke with distinction. I could not argue with him.  In my entire life, clothes had never fit me so well. My skinny body and narrow shoulders always felt uncomfortable in suit jackets; they fell melancholy over my frame, as if they were wet with candle wax. This suit, however, draped me like velvet (even though it was made from cheap polyester). 

“Where did it come from?”

“A man dropped it off no more than a week ago. He asked for a few dollars for it, said he needed it to pay some overdue bills. I usually do not pay for clothing but I could see that he really was stuck. He needed it more than me. It’s only money anyway.” He chuckled showing his teeth for the first time. He wore dentures that did not fit his mouth. They protruded a bit and gave him the feature of looking a bit long faced, even though his smile was somewhat charming and enchanting.

I thought of the man who sold it. Where did he come by this suit? Was it his to began with? I doubted it, this suit had years in it, borrowed many times over. 

“I promise I’ll take good care of it and when I’m done with it I’ll make sure it finds another home.”

“It’s a beautiful suit, it deserves some life. Take it dancing,” he smiled. I smiled.

“Do the shoes come with it?” I asked as I glanced toward a pair of  old worn tassel shoes.  He agreeable nodded as he grabbed them and set them on the counter. “I think I’ll wear this out if you don’t mind?”

“You got someone to impress?” He raised an eyebrow. I raised my eyebrow.

I paid at the counter. The cash register was old and when he typed in the price he did so upon large knobs. It reminded me of a large old typewriter recording all the bought and sold items of the past fifty years. This register had seen many stores purchases, had held many coins and dollar bills. It had true charm, as did the suit, and I knew that the suit would bring me luck in my adventures through the towns and cities of the world.  I wanted to do everything, see everything. Nevertheless, each town only reminded me of something before. Maybe of her. Maybe of the way she made me move and feel. 

The way she led me.  

As I left the store a bell rang overhead. I did not notice it as I walked in but as I left, the tone rang in my head. A single note that played as I wondered farther past town. A single note that I could not dance to. Tassel shoes that I could not puppeteer. A sienna colored suit with more life in it than I had ever had.  A brisk, beautiful night. A small Texas town with allure that bewildered the evening glow of New York City .

I shuffled past Main Street and found myself following a woman leaving a bar.  Her hair flowing behind her as her body pulsed forward. I followed as she walked past a small park. She playfully swung her hips as she moved through the streets. She danced her way home, not intended for my amusement but instead for the beautiful night air, or maybe for the stars above, but not for me.

Homes of all sizes and stature aligned the park. Their front windows draped with curtains of red and yellow. Their doors brown and purple. They all felt the same but each owned individual allure. I watched as she entered one, it had a large window in front with no curtains. The window exhibited the bowels of the home, their large arching ceilings and a living room showing off its’ spacious flooring. 

I watched her as she navigated her house. She would come into the large living area and put on a record. She would sway a little to the music and drink from her glass, then she would leave my sight and disappear into another room. A room I imagined filled with bottles of wine ripe for her picking.

When she reappeared, her face was canvassed with a smile. Either a drunken grin or a pure simper of joy, I could not tell, but it did not matter. Her smile was dwarfing and her happiness emanated through the window and yard that separated us. I was immediately jealous of her and of the way she moved.

My tasseled shoes began to stir and my sienna suit followed. I slowly stepped forward to her pulsing red door. I could sense that it was thick and heavy. When I knocked a low rapture of sound echoed. I could barely hear it myself. I thought of knocking harder but my nerves had tightened. What if she said no? What if my suit betrayed me? What if my tasseled shoes denied to learn how to waltz rather than just walk? Yet, her impression kept me from running, kept me from leaving.   

Again, I pounded at the door, this time more successful in creating sufficiently noticeable sound. I waited nervously but excited. I quickly rubbed the arms of my suit and pulled at the coattail to straighten my jacket. I brushed my thin hair back with my fingers. I wanted to appear at least somewhat handsome, at least not ghoulish.

She opened the door with the glass still in her hand. She stared at me. I did not speak-She did not speak. We both stood at attention waiting to hear something other than our commingled breathes. She looked at me as if she knew who I was and what I was doing there. I couldn’t keep eye contact and looked down at the doormat that read “Travis Texas Bullfrogs,” even though this wasn’t Travis.

“Hello” I whimpered pathetically, gaining enough courage to whisper.

“Can I help you?” she answered in a soft voice that felt like a blanket. 

“Can you….” I stuttered but finished weakly “help me?” she stepped back slightly. Her hand on the door ready to either shut it or lean in to hear what my intention was. She didn’t say anything and she just looked at me with brown blue eyes; a piercing beautiful stare. She took another drink from her glass and smiled pleasantly as it went down. 

“Can you teach me to dance?” I finally prayed. She laughed at the request and I almost turned away to run home like a child embarrassed and wanting only seclusion. I felt like a child. I was scared, innocent, and inexperienced. 

“What makes you think that I can teach you to dance?” she asked playfully, giving me some confidence.

“A hunch,” I whispered back.

“How do you know that my husband isn’t here right now?”

I paused for a moment, “A hunch.” To this she turned her head, and for a moment, she looked as lonely as I did. She then looked back to the hallway behind her and screamed, “I’ll be back in a second honey!” She turned to me seriously, her dwarfing smile now gone.  She raised her brow as if to say You better run along. I stood undaunted.  Undaunted but pleading my feet to not be too heavy if this turned out not to be a ruse.

She stared at me as no one has ever done before, without a movement as though she was made of wax and I was the candle that she so desperately wanted to keep away.  Her expression made me feel self-conscious and I could feel myself sinking slowly in my suit.  Her expression was so stern and apathetic.  I felt stuck in her gaze.

A sudden laugh threw her from wax to silk. She laughed feverishly and I could not help but smile and laugh myself. She opened the door wider inviting me into her home. I entered cautiously into her foyer as she closed the door behind me. She led me into the living room. She moved like chocolate and she smelled of something wonderful, something I could not place. 

I denied with a simple no thank you. She excused herself as she filed back to fill her own glass once again. I studied her living room carefully. The open floors laid with cherry wood. A fireplace framed by brick on the wall. A felted blue couch lay beneath the window. Everything was so neat and clean. 

“You a fan?” she asked as she gracefully entered.

She slid over to me and held out her left arm. I paused unsure of my next action, I was anxious and she was so beautiful. Then she smiled and her teeth drew me. I reached out and grabbed her hand. She motioned closer into me and I felt her heat against my body.  For a moment we did not move. I could feel her eyes upon me but I couldn’t look down at her. We stayed still, frozen in a pose. We stood like nervous wedding cake toppers unsure of whether to model or waltz. Completely still, me in my sienna suit and tasseled shoes and her in a perfect grey dress sewn to adorn her frame.

Her head fell to my shoulder and the air went from my lungs. We begin to shift slightly, slowly we followed the rhythm. She led me and I followed precisely. The music melted us together. My borrowed sienna suit scratching teasingly at her cheek. She was talented and she made me feel so comfortable, so free, so much like the past.

“Where did you learn to dance?” I tongued in her ear.

“My father,” she said sleepily, “and he borrowed it from my mother.”

Table of Contents

Respect

by Nathan Patton

There is a boy on a school bus, and his head is against the window. The cold of it put him to sleep, but as the bus turns and bounces, his head slams into the glass and it wakes him up. The girl next to him asks if he’s okay, but he gives no response, just murmurs like a machine.

The girl’s mind drifts into memory-dance, until she hears a thin but steady drip as it softly splatters onto the rubber below her feet. It sounds like someone opening a peppermint wrapper.

 The noise and chatter catches the boy’s attention, and he looks up, his mouth still dripping bile and spit, and his eyes meet the girl’s shallow gaze. She turns away and closes her eyes, hearing the laughter and wondering if it will ever stop, but she doesn’t move. She stays right where she is. She stays next to him until he gets off at his stop and the driver comes back to pour a special powder on what he left. She stays. Out of respect.

Table of Contents

Rug Cutter

by J. Bradley

Wait for the dirt to settle”, I tell Michael. “The best audience is the audience of one.”

Dancing on a grave requires good timing, not skill. People wear heavy shoes to muffle the honesty in their feet or salt their larynx with tears to strangle the Lloyd Dobbler in their throat from switching the boombox on, humming the prom night condom breaker.

“What dance would you recommend?”, Michael asks. He looks at my mouth like I'm wearing Twyla Tharp's blood in my teeth.

Jonah Bronton was 14 when he died. His first job as a character assassin was on my Speedo in first grade after swim class, swirling in the urinal, my tears made into a magazine of bullets. Jonah obeyed the laws of traffic at the wrong time, the hood of the car snapping the frame of his bicycle, the splintering parts grafting into the left side of his body before falling between the gums of the white crosswalk paint; it was the last time he made me cry. Two years later, my friends and I finally visited his grave. The Irish pub of revenge entered my chest and I jigged “you're fucking worm food and I'm not” on top, the headstone wishing it could nod to the beat.

“What dance would I recommend”, I swirl around, fold it in my left cheek. “Dance like you'd want someone to dance on your grave.”

Table of Contents

Dishes

by Jeffrey S. Callico

What is it you can’t handle, she says, her hands in the dishwater. I mean really, she says, how hard can it be, she says.

I sit there saying nothing.  

She says, Do you think I’m an idiot or something? Do you think I have the brain of a mole or something? Do you?

Say something, she says, don’t just sit there, she says.

I just sit there. I don’t say anything.

She doesn’t say anything for a bit then she says, taking her hands out of the soapy dishwater, she says, You’re pathetic, you know that? I mean really, you are. You’re a pathetic excuse for a—

I jump in. I say, Wait a minute, now, just wait a minute.

She flings some of the soapy dishwater at me. I feel some of the soap start to sting my right eye. She keeps flinging it then she starts laughing as she flings it but she isn’t really laughing, she just has her mouth shaped like laughter and her teeth show through her lips.

I rise up and turn the table over. I grab it by the edge and slam the other edge to the floor. My cup spills then falls, cracking the handle off, the table overturned in the middle of the kitchen. It’s somewhere close to the middle of the night.

She stops the pseudo laughter and everything falls silent.

Well now look what you’ve done, she says, those hands returning to the dishes. My eye still hurts, I say, and she just laughs again then cleans the dishes until she’s done.

Table of Contents

Smoke Rise

by Todd Cantrell

I came out to the pond in the middle of the night to catch a fish. My eyes were tired and made everything seem like the dreams that would not let me sleep. The house was dark and quiet. Tree limbs reached for each other over the water. I pulled out a catfish and it dangled on my line like a hanged man. It was missing a pectoral fin and its head was deformed on one side. It came from some place deeper than the mud bottom, through a hole that went deep to where the reject creatures lived, the failed experiments. I slid my hand up the fish’s slick body and it writhed, trying to stab me with its spiked fins. It ate everything and shit out what it didn’t need.

Southwestern Bell . The fire got too big for us but we kept feeding it. We threw in anything that burned and some things that didn’t, just to see what would happen. Tree limbs, scrap wood, leaves, corrugated metal, a stack of old National Geographics. I hacked apart an old side table that my dad had made a long time ago and no one wanted anymore. I threw that in. Later, when I went into the world alone, I wished for an artifact, a solid object that could tie me back to the blood of my name. I had nothing to hold onto, nothing to get my bearings by, just faint memories of names and hard faces from a loose pile of colorless photographs.

That night I stripped naked and walked into the pond. My feet sank ankle-deep into the soft muck. Then I sank deeper, up to my shins. I stretched my neck to keep my head above the water. I kept my legs still, but treaded with my arms to keep from going under, down into that hole. Over the tree tops, smoke rose up and touched the three-quarter moon. I could smell the still-smoldering ash and embers. I cried out for help but my voice skipped across the water and sank like a flat stone. I cried out for my mother and the man who lived with her but they could not hear me. They were locked in a room inside a house that no one could even see from the road.

Table of Contents

Two Stories

by Andrew Post

Harold

A trilling rammed itself into his dreams, a rusty brown harpoon jousted through the soft aqua membrane of his sleep. The phone was ringing incessantly, loudly. He picked it up and without opening his eyes, said, “Yes?”

“Good morning. This is your—six,” pause, “thirty—wake up call. The temperature in Minneapolis is currently—two degrees. Have a great day and thank you for staying at Radisson Inn and Suites.”

He hung up and laid there for another series of minutes, staring at the ceiling and letting his vision slowly accumulate clarity and focus. The cheap plastic vertical blinds clicked and clacked together in the soft breeze of the heating and air conditioning unit mounted to the wall beneath it. Warm air stirred the otherwise stale, vacuum-scented oxygen that occupied the hotel room with him. Silence, utter silence.

He opened his eyes, wide, toward the textured ceiling with the strand of dust or cobwebs dangling there, dancing in the heater’s soft breath. He didn’t dare move. He closed his eyes and thought about Harold.

But as soon as he whirled his legs around to the edge of the bed and stood, there it was—that terrible chomping. A pain so precise and sharp that it made his toes curl, the crown of his head go numb. The sensation wasn’t anything less than what he imagined dirty cops suffered nightly at the local jailhouse during shower time. To him, it felt like he was sitting on a combat knife, the serrated edge chewing a jagged and messy divot into his insides with each and every false movement.

He tried to remain standing to see if that would help. He clicked on the "Today Show" and paced the well-tread carpet the color of vomit. The pacing didn’t help. He stood before the TV set, with its color all fucked up and making Anne Curry look like she had the skin tone of an Oompa-Loompa or that she had been sent on an in-the-field story that was to be covered in the glowing neon green heart of Chernobyl. He imagined his asshole was being treated in much the same way, like it had taken a trip to Chernobyl or had been injected with a healthy dose of Agent Orange. His ass felt mutated, like it was developing a second head. He imagined going over to the full-length mirror and bending down before it, looking coyly through his legs at his own rear end and seeing something like that freak that came out of that guy’s stomach in *Total Recall* staring back at him, pleading to be taken out of its misery. “Please, end my suffering…” it would agonize with shaking fists. “Kill me, please!”

“Mother fucker,” he groaned, doubling forward, taking handfuls of the slippery comforter in his balled fists, gritting his teeth and clenching his eyes closed so tightly it made the colors of the insides of his lids go purple, then green. Purple, then green.

It was something that he had inherited from his father, the hemorrhoids. He wasn’t fortunate enough to have them be interior ones, which were still painful but altogether easier to treat. They were trapped inside the rectum wall and couldn’t really grow any larger than their environment allowed. They were doable, and on a few occasions, our protagonist had suffered them after double feature movie events at his favorite theater back in Phoenix and epic drives to and from his in-laws in Vegas. But once in a great while, after a lengthy flight with lots of delays and stand-stills for hours at a time on the runway, the little bastard on the outside of his asshole would crop up. He would usually discover them while innocently bathing himself in the hotel he was to spend, sometimes, up to a week in. And there it’d be, under the soft pad of his fingertip, a tiny hemisphere of flesh that was easily manipulated and painless, as if his butt was blowing a bubble. And given a few days of sitting in on long and drawn out conferences, meetings, brain storming sessions, the thing would become angry—as if it were being ignored and did not appreciate it in the least. He would sit there and listen to his peers in their expensive suits point at things projected onto the screen, all of them sitting around a bland gray conference table in the dark, maybe a bottled water slowly, silently, being crushed in his fist under the torment that the being in his trousers was causing him. Whenever one of these exterior hemorrhoids would spring forth from his rectum to delight him in a rainbow of excruciations, he would think to himself, “Harold’s back. The son of a bitch is back.”

Harold was also the name of a completely unpleasant young man who was a true pain in the ass. He was our protagonist’s manager at the little mom and pop grocery store that served as his first job and no matter what our protagonist did, Harold was there to make sure to comment upon it in the harshest of ways. “Dude, that looks like shit. Do it again.” Whether it be stack cans of refried beans into a perfect pyramid time and time again or simply voiding the parking lot of discarded cigarette butts in the early gray-skied summer mornings, Harold was there to survey his work, put his hands on his slender hips and with his blue apron flapping before him like a tribal loincloth, would say in his most just-pretend-I’m-the-alpha-male-just-for-today voice, “What the fuck is wrong with you, dude? Are you retarded or something?”

And so from that point on, all through his young twenties, his tumultuous thirties, his early forties and today, our protagonist referred to his exterior hemorrhoids as Harold. And despite having only had to endure only a small handful of them during the course of his life, each and every one was deserving of the title. It was only fitting, our protagonist thought. One pain in the ass named Harold existed in the world. Might as well be consistent and name all of the pains in all the asses Harold.

He decided to inspect himself, something he had never done before when Harold came to visit. He thought it might be a good idea to take a look at the enemy and really see what he was working with, what he was up against. He had a full twelve hours before his flight back to Phoenix and he knew that with the weather, the icy conditions of the runways and the possible onslaught of a blizzard rumored, he was going to be spending a lot more time on the plane than the ticket indicated. And so over to the mirror he went, hitching down his boxers and dropped his head down between his knees and peered into his reflection, the swashing sensation of blood running to the top of his head making his cheeks grow red. He looked at himself there, avoiding eye contact with himself, as he surveyed his nether-regions. There he was, good old Harold, developed into a tangerine-sized mass of bright red flesh laced all about with dark throbbing veins. It looked like a third testicle, clinging there, sprung out of the side of his poor, poor asshole. It was the largest one he had ever had. He blamed the coach seats on the flight in, the terrible, over-priced food he had gotten in the airport that caused him to have to heave whilst on the shitter like a one-armed sailor pulling an two-ton anchor up out of the gripping sea floor. Harold stared back at him with an eyeless snarl, comfortably throbbing there, nestled between the two pale boulders of our protagonist’s butt cheeks.

In the past, whenever Harold would pay our protagonist a visit, he would resort to the usual methods—the Preparation-H, the laxatives, the inflatable donuts that look like a lifesaving ring for a squirrel, the muscle relaxers procured over the counter in the form of Midol. And none of it was really worth the money or the suffering of having to get in and out of the car to find all of the things at various stores. In the end, it just took time and having to endure it until Harold decided to throw in the towel, disappointed he had not killed his resolute host, and retire back into the darkness of our protagonist’s bowels waving the white flag smugly over his shoulder.

But our protagonist had a flight ahead of him, a long one, from Minneapolis International Airport to Chicago O’Hare and then to Dallas Forth Worth for a two-hour layover and then finally to Phoenix . It was the best that his company could spring for. “Take one for the team, bud. Tough times and all of that have made us have to put the kibosh on the first class flights. So, eat your nuts or pretzels or tortilla chips or whatever they give to the coach peasants and "enjoy" it. The next flight out to Minneapolis will have my ass in the seat, you have my word,” his boss and surrogate father, Alan, said with flashing white dentures.

He opened his garment bag and discovered that he had brought no casual clothes besides his pajama bottoms, which were for sleeping in. He had a t-shirt, but the thing was ratty and only meant for wearing to the gym. He sniffed it; it stunk of onions. So, the only thing he had to wear on his planned trip down to the drug store was his Calvin Klein pinstriped. Fine, he thought. But I’m not wearing a tie. I’m just going to god damn Walgreens.

With each step issuing a gnashing of Harold’s pointed teeth, our protagonist made his way up and down each isle in the brightly lit convenience store that stood as the Mecca for all things pharmaceutical, impulse-worthy and holiday related. Thanksgiving was the following day and since no one decorated for that besides maybe a cartoon turkey with a pilgrim hat stitched into a banner or flag meant to be raised outside of suburban and low-income trailer park homes, the décor of isle five was nothing but Christmas. Snow globes, Snuggies in Christmas red or Christmas green, twinkle lights, light-up snowmen and paunchy leering fat men in ill-fitting red and white. Our protagonist was in no mood for canned music spewing from each device that caught his presence with an electronic eye and sprang to life in robotic dances and gyrations. He was gritting his teeth, his ass hurt, and he was looking for a remedy. God bless it, there needs to be an isle called Quick Fixes, he snarled internally.

At the end of isle seven, next to where the reading glasses in varying styles stood, a magical white box shone brightly to our protagonist. It was something that caught his eye almost immediately. A soothing white square standing boldly upon the edge of the shelf, and on its face read in swirling, elegant green lettering: "New Age Remedies" and beneath that, "For Hemorrhoid Relief". Our protagonist lurched with a faint hitch in his giddy-up, reaching out his hand and plucking the package from the shelf and feeling surprised at its unexpected weight. He flipped the box over and saw that the entire thing included a CD, a book, a soothing gel mask, some aromatherapy candles, bath salts. These were things my wife would undoubtedly have, our protagonist thought, figuring that if he had somehow opted out of the Minneapolis trip, that he might be able to perform his own ass-exorcising séance in the comfort of his own bathroom, with his own assembled goodies. He flipped the box back over to see the image of the nude woman, her bits submerged in a mass of bubbles, a pregnant belly rising up like the humped back of Nessie reaching up out of the water. The woman in the picture, with her soothing gel mask and the lavender-scented candle burning on the soap ledge of the tub looked comfortable and devoid of Harolds. He didn’t bother checking the price tag, instead, he took the item to the register and took out his company’s credit card.

With snow-wet shoes squeaking beneath each agonized-laden step, he approached the register and mumbled to myself, “You owe me this one, Alan. You really fucking do.” He considered his boss, in super great shape at sixty-five, snowboarding with his grandchildren down the side of Mount Everest or Fuji or wherever the daffy old tomcat went to clear his mind.

“Do you want the receipt with you or in the bag?” the smiling clerk asked pleasantly. She had the tiny slip of white paper in between finger and thumb, poised over the bag of containing the New Age Remedies combo pack. Our protagonist thought again of Alan, going over the Minnesota trip’s accounting paperwork just to see if his employee ordered porn or not, maybe put down a shiatsu happy-ending massage on the company credit card. Even though the transaction was already made, and the information was being

jettisoned back to Phoenix , to his offices, to the accounting department, our protagonist didn’t care. But he thought of that slip of paper somehow making its way into his baggage, onto the TSA bag check station and someone discovering that and flaunting it and reading it aloud for all of the other pugilistic, failed cops and the strangers around him also in line with no belts or shoes on, could all gather in one big ha-ha-ha at the guy with butthole problems.

“No receipt,” our protagonist grinned. If his boss gave him any shit, all he would have to do was remind him of the time that he walked in on him and his twenty-one-year-old secretary going at it in the custodian’s closet. How surprised they both looked. How our protagonist went back to the Christmas party and offered Alan’s wife a refill on her Pinot without her having to ask for it.

Back at the hotel, our protagonist felt a sudden surge of readiness to do whatever it took to cure himself of the jagged fire poker that was jabbing itself into him with every step, breath, thought. He disrobed and left his suit in a heap on the floor and pulled his laptop from its bag and brought it and the New Age Remedies box into the bathroom with him, closing and locking the door behind himself.

He set the laptop onto the lid of the toilet and let it warm up after its slumber within his carry-on bag. He tore open the corner of the New Age Remedies box with his teeth and with excited, trembling hands, placed the plain white disk into the drive and slammed it home. He climbed into the tub and poured the pre-measured packet of bath salts onto the tub floor and began running hot water. Easing himself into a supine position, he felt

Harold give a good tug and a twist and our protagonist winced, swore under his breath and let the music player program on his laptop automatically start playing Track One of the New Age Remedies.

“Hello,” a soothing voice said, tender and female, with the faintest, faded hint of an Irish brogue. “And welcome to New Age Remedies for hemorrhoid relief.” A twinkle of wind chimes sounded. “First, get comfortable. This process works best when in a warm bath. Take time to fill the tub first if you like. Add the soothing bath salts for a more enveloping experience. Light the lavender-scented candle if you wish. Now, let yourself ease into the water—*slowly*.”

It sounded like bad phone sex. The woman spoke at such a crawl that our protagonist, already half-submerged in the running bathwater, found himself growing bored. He had the gel mask on his face and catching himself in the mirror, he immediately thought of Robin from the old Adam West Batman series. A naked, hairy-chested, middle-aged Robin that wore his Domino mask into the bath. He closed his eyes and rested his head on the slick plastic wall of the shower, trying to push any negative thoughts from his mind. A nude Dynamic Duo in the tub together being the number one.

A soft gust of spring wind through weeping willows. “Now, close your eyes. Take a deep breath in, and release it. Deep breath in, and re-lease it…” the tinny speakers of his laptop urged. Our protagonist listened, closed his eyes and took a breath in and re-leased it. He began picturing what the mildly Irish-sounding girl who did the recording for the CD looked like.  He pictured buxom, blond wavy hair, maybe a set of tits that could grip his dick between them and—No, no. That’s not being relaxed. Deep breath in, and re-lease it.

A burbling creek, complete with crickets and bullfrogs making that plunk sound. “Picture your anus as a perfect circle. Imagine it in your mind. Picture it as a perfect blue circle, with no imperfections or abnormalities. Just a perfectly round, perfectly blue perfect circle. Imagine it contracting, narrowing, becoming half its size. Now picture it

expanding, opening up, as if the whole world could pass through there. Closed. Open. Closed…Open. Now, with your finger, gently feel the affected area. Run your finger over it gently, as you would stroke your newborn child. Do not press too hard. You do not want to hurt the baby, after all.”

He did so, running his hand under the water and making the bend around his thigh and hooking around to Harold, in his home. Immediately, as his finger made contact with the tangerine-sized knot of puffed flesh, a surprising jolt comparable to a bee sting snapped at him. His hand retreated and he could feel that his entire body had tensed up from the pain, his stomach felt cramped, his chest felt tight. The Irish woman speaking through his computer, as if she were some kind of feminine version of HAL guiding Dave through a manatee birth from the comfort of the toilet lid, issued, “Carefully feel this area. Become associated with it. It is your anus, it is part of you, become friends with it.”

Our protagonist couldn’t resist himself. “Pleased to meet you. Heard you’re a real asshole.” He laughed once and Harold did not greet this with pleasure, but another thunderbolt of nerve-deadening pain.

A waterfall, complete with the hissing of gentle mist. “Guide the affected area as you meditate. Imagine again the perfectly blue perfect circle, open—and closed. Open. And closed. Let the affected area drain, feel yourself unclenching. Feel the blood in the affected area flow out, as naturally as a river. Imagine the blue circle, open and closed. As the circle closes, breathe in. As the circle slowly opens, slowly—breathe out.”

It was quite miraculous. Under the guiding tip of his index finger, he could feel Harold shrinking. With each deep breath in and every exhale, the bastard shrunk ever so slightly. A mild jump of excitement shot through our protagonist at this moment and—*wham*—Harold shot back up to his regular size. He had gone from a tangerine down to the size of a pea—and then back again in less than a second.

With wet hands, he reached from the tub to the toilet and clicked the Back button on the laptop’s media player function keys. The stupid waterfall, with its god damn mist, started again. He allowed himself back into the fizzing water and began his breathing exercises. He guided with his finger, as if he were doing a reverse birth. He let the soothing gel mask soothe his gel or his mask or whatever it was supposed to be doing. He put both feet up on the wall of the tub as if he were in the stirrups at the gynecologist’s office. He guided with his finger, pleading in his mind for Harold to just go the fuck away. Plague me when I’m back in Phoenix , he begged. And each time, he’d shrink down to the size of a pea, a speck, just a faintly raised ridge on the right side of his anus. And then, in a flood, he’d shoot right back up to full size in all of his unholy glory when our protagonist allowed himself just one short-lived moment of victory.

Out of the tub he stood, blasted with frustration. He waddled the floor of the hotel room. He tried sitting, he tried standing. He had spent the entire morning and the beginning of the afternoon on this attempt to let himself un-*fucking*-clench and it just wasn’t working. He took the lavender-scented candle and fastball pitched it at the pillow where it made a heavy, muffled thud. He took the soothing gel mask and threw it at the window, colliding with the glass in a hearty slap, where it temporarily hung, and gave a sort thud when it hit the floor. He took the CD from his laptop and cracked it in two, tossing both reflective semicircles behind the minifridge. He looked at the digital numbers upon the alarm clock, seeing with the purest and blackest of frustration coupled with the cold thrill of anxiety that he now only had eight hours before his evening flight back to Phoenix . Most likely, with the news crawl going across the bottom of Rachel Ray displaying word of the worst blizzard in recent years on fast approach, he wouldn’t make it home until noon or later the following day. Delayed departures, bumpy turbulent flights, sleepless nights at the gate waiting for the next available take-off, listening ever intently for gate changes, delays, reschedules, reroutes. It was almost Thanksgiving and if he weren’t home for it, his wife would surely think that he was cheating on her with some floozy from Minnesota . And if he was going to have to endure all of that, it sure as hell wasn’t going to be the worst hemorrhoid of his life clinging to his asshole, causing him the most brilliant version of hell on earth he could ever imagine besides being drawn and quartered or maybe being castrated and then dunked in a vat of lemon juice. But those seemed like a day of mind bending sex compared to having Harold, hour after hour, sponge our protagonist’s insanity from his very skull.

Getting redressed in his now-wrinkled Calvin Klein pinstriped, our protagonist thought back on all of the other visitations he had been blessed with by Harold the Hemorrhoid over the years. A week after his return from Cancun for spring break back in college. Not only had he ignored the repeated warnings about drinking Mexican water, but he had Harold to keep him company all through that shit-spraying week at the dorm. And again, after a long ride to Abby’s folks’ place out in Vegas. She had opted to drive, and he rode passenger, sitting in a weird way for a majority of the trip. Once there, he realized that Harold was cropping up on him, occupying the back of his pants like an unwanted party of German soldiers with Joe Boxers playing the part of France . For an entire twelve days they were in Vegas, our protagonist caught in a perpetual state of between standing up and sitting down. He was forever fidgeting and squirming. Everything hurt. The visit sucked. He was curt and withdrawn from everyone, not even speaking the source of his agony to his wife. Afterward, when they had returned home, Abby’s mother phoned and discreetly asked if her new son-in-law had that Michael J. Fox disease.

Every time he thought of Harold the Hemorrhoid, he thought of Harold the Manager from all those days back and how much of a heinous prick that guy had been. He couldn’t help but picture that pizza-faced mouth breather’s face inside his ass, commenting on every shortcoming our protagonist had ever dared to perpetrate. He pictured Harold the Manager’s lips being two sizes too big for his face, bruised and chapped, flapping at him and telling him that he missed a spot on the front window of the store and that he needed to go out there again and do all of them, and no, he didn’t care how hot it was out there—all from inside the seat of our protagonist’s pants. “Your dick is small, I can see it from here. Maybe you should consider tugging it on once in a while, stretching it out,” Harold the Hemorrhoid suggested as our protagonist got into the rental car and took off at a breakneck speed back en route for a return trip to Walgreens. “Maybe you should consider a new line of work because that presentation you gave on the importance of work-place safety fucking sucked. Made me want to take a bath with that projector you were using, fucking frying my brains out,” Harold the Hemorrhoid remarked glibly. Our protagonist turned the zippy little rental car into the Walgreens parking lot and with a crunch of Minnesota ice beneath the tires, parked in the handicapped spot and with shirt blaring open against the frigid wind, pushed through the automatic doors and heard Christmas music. “Your wife is probably fucking someone else. God only knows how she acted at that one party you went to. She got all sloppy and was hanging on some guy she went to school with. Imagine him, beefy farmer guy, sticking the pork to your woman—and her, loving it, not feeling the least bit of shame about it. You dumb fuck,” Harold the Hemorrhoid recommended.

Seven and a half hours to be at the airport. Snow falling from the sky, not in drifting, softly tumbling baby chick feathers snowflakes, but actual gathered clumps of snow, falling out of the sky like a roll of attic insulation had been struck by a surface-to-air missile a few hundred feet off the ground. Clumps of it, literal clumps of it. And our protagonist could see it as he stood in line with his gathered things, his shirt hanging open, the smell of lavender and bath salts clinging to his still-moist skin. The intruder in his pants roaring, “Where do you see yourself in five years, shit-dick? Do you see yourself being promoted, maybe getting that HD TV you’ve had your eye on, maybe finally getting up the nerve to ask your wife to swallow, maybe sometime in there get that addition put on the house. Maybe sometime in the next five years you’ll get the nerve to ask your fucking son about his limp wrist feminine take-it-up-the-butt ways that he doesn’t want to share with you. You’re useless. I fucking hate you and I hope and pray on bleeding fucking knees to the darkest of gods that you fucking die.”

“Back again?” the cashier smiled. Our protagonist said nothing. Upon the counter, he laid down a double armful of items. Among them: hydrogen peroxide, latex gloves, cotton balls, two rolls of paper towels, one roll of medical tape, a roll of gauze, a six pack of white boxer shorts, and an Exact-O knife.

“No receipt.”

Something soothed her, something about the whole scene. The air conditioner spraying flecks of super chilled droplets, like it was blowing a raspberry at the whole, dark place. She sat on the couch, wedged neatly into one corner. She felt like she was fortified, sitting there, on her birthday no less, smelling blood. Locked in and determined to get an indelible drunk burrowed so deep into her mind that it would take her a week to feel normal again. It would be one great night, followed by a half week of misery—so the night had better had good plans for her. She sat there, watching daytime TV, listening to the air conditioner spit, waiting for him to come home. She wanted him to get his dues, to get what was coming to him, so she could move on with her life, to bigger and better things. She was young still, only turning twenty-five that fateful morning, and she wanted to get started, get him out of the way and just fucking get started.

She was dejected, rejected, used up and unwanted. Everything that would make any other woman crumble, crack and fall apart. But not Ashleigh, no—not Ashleigh. She was determined to make lemonade out of lemons, coleslaw out of cabbage, water out of wine. Something like that. Either way, she had a picnic planned and she was sure as hell going to be  RSVP “fuck yes.” So she wasn’t good with metaphors. She shrugged to herself, eyes at half-mast, chuckling all alone at her own inner monologue. Where would she be in six months? Hell, where would she be in just one month? Three weeks? Two weeks? A handful of days? Tobey had dropped her of all the things she knew, given a firm boot-to-buttocks kick out the front door, so to speak. Truth was, he had the maid pack her things, what things she had brought to his place, a blanket for when they watched TV together, her balance ball, some candles, her cell phone charger. She found all of these things packed up in a nice little box, set by the front door, with a note attached to the handle of the umbrella that stuck highest from the box among her things.

Ashleigh,

Don’t take this as personal, but it’s over. And it has been for quite a while. I love you all the same, but I just can’t manage you and my career at the same time. The firm is taking off and I want to make partner by the end of the quarter. I hope you understand. I mean, we were only seeing one another for eight months—so it’s not like we were married. You were always a tough cookie, you’ll probably read this,  shrug, walk out the door and land a new guy by the end of the week. Listen, I like you and I want us to remain firm friends. And if you ever need any legal advice or if you need me to get you out of a speeding ticket (which I’m sure you’ll end up getting in that new car of yours) be sure to keep my number. If you have any questions or concerns regarding this break-up, be sure to call me afteroffice hours.

Yours,

Tobey F. Wellington III

She could hardly believe it. She read the note three times just to look for any hint of a joke between the lines, any iota of an inkling of a fraction of a hint that he was just joking. But that’s the way he was, straight to the jugular, here’s how it is, take it or leave it, call me if you have the audacity and you want to hear me repeat the note, orally, for you. If the maid had been around, she certainly would’ve asked her if she was in on it or if there was some kind of hint that she could give her. But she wasn’t, Lauren the Maid had left hours ago. And there she was, in his apartment, with her box of shit sitting next to the front door like it was a reminder to take out the recycling. That narcissistic motherfucker, Ashleigh thought, still in her pajamas and her stomach rumbling with the ache for breakfast. She decided to take some time to make up her mind about what she should do next, preparing the espresso and toast, mulling it all over. She supposed that he was right, that they hadn’t really been so close in the last few months of their relationship. Things had gotten cold with them fast, scarily so. When they first met, it was sex every night, even sometimes during the middle of the day when they could find a parking garage that didn’t have security cameras. And just like that, one night, he rolled over and said he wasn’t feeling up to it, that he had a lot on his mind and that he wasn’t feeling particularly well. “Big meeting tomorrow, kid,” he said. “Plus, I think I had some bad sushi today,” he moaned, grabbing his muscle-quilted stomach for effect. Her knew her well enough to bring up the subject of bodily dysfunction to scare her from pursuing the topic of sex any further. She had confided in him that her biggest fear in the world was getting vomited on and he often used this to his advantage, whether employing some torturous gag or, now, as a scapegoat to get out of sex. I should’ve known, Ashleigh thought, chewing her toast slathered with fat-free margarine and sipping her scalding espresso carefully.

“Motherfucker,” she grunted to herself, shaking her head, desperately wishing she hadn’t quit smoking for him because in that very moment, perched atop a kitchen stool, staring at his perfect collection of kitchen knives from IKEA, she could’ve really used a cigarette. She got dressed in the clothes she had been wearing the night before, skinny jeans, a pair of ballet flats and a frilly blouse that showed off her massive rack that, yes, Tobey had funded. She looked at herself in the mirror, her clothes wrinkled and her hair flat on one side and her makeup smeared. She shrugged, pacing back into the kitchen when the buzzer rang on the wall. She had existed in the orbit of Tobey for so long that answering his buzzer was second nature and while her mind was busy charting the descent and inevitable flaming wreckage that their relationship had taken, she pressed the button and answered the intercom with an absent, “Huh?” before she realized what she had done.

“Hey, Lauren, can you let me up?” the very-feminine voice asked on the other end, the sound of the midmorning traffic screeching, honking, chattering behind her. Ashleigh stared at the slats of the intercom, the speaker beneath, concealed by its mesh netting of fabric. The news it had just delivered, the voice it just emitted—was not Tobey’s secretary, was not Tobey’s mother, was not Tobey’s sister, was definitely not Tobey’s deceased grandmother. Who the fuck could this be?

Ashleigh pressed the intercom button and said in the sugary-sweet tone that Lauren the maid had always spoken in, a Long Island accent topped with a heavy dollop of motherly sweetness. “Oh, hello dear, come right on up.” She released the button and said, to herself, “Wait—what the fuck am I doing?”

Ashleigh panicked, dancing in place and waving her hands around, looking for a good lampshade to stick on her head to pretend to be a lamp, a harness to latch around her middle to rappel down the side of the building, a jetpack to strap to her back and launch herself back to Midtown where she belonged. Anything as a means to escape. She ran back to the bedroom, nearly breaking her ankle with the quick corners she had to make in the mazelike modern-architecture layout of Tobey’s ultra chic apartment. She was gathering her things, shoving her brush and phone and contact lens case into her bag, trying to make a hasty escape. But then she stopped. She just froze, her hand still clutching the blue and white contact lens case in one hand, her electric toothbrush in the other. Who was this woman that was steadily on her way up to the thirty-third floor to see Tobey, about something, on the same day that Ashleigh was being booted?

She turned and paced back into the kitchen at a regular pace, navigating the twists and turns of the hallway expertly, with grace and a slow I-don’t-rush-for-anyone-with-less-money-than-me walk. She went to the kitchen counter and landed her gaze upon Tobey’s new IKEA knives. One butcher knife, a pair of kitchen shears, a standard kitchen knife, a pairing knife, a boning knife and six cruelly-edged steak knives. She slid one from the block and listened to the blade sing as she did, a sharp shhhing, slowly drawing it from its matte black holder. She held the knife in one hand, with a loose grip, feeling the weight of the butcher knife. It’s big square blade, the hole in the one corner for hanging it up, the blade unmarred by the fact that Tobey never cooked, Lauren did, and she took care of her employer’s stuff. Kept the knives sharp and without dings and didn’t use them to cut open packages or CD cases like Tobey did. Who was this bitch, Ashleigh thought to herself, recalling the movie Psycho and scads of others horror movies that featured a knife as a means of dispatch. She considered going down to Tobey’s closet and getting the hockey mask from his gym bag and donning it, surprising the hell out of this bitch. Maybe she’d even screamed when she jumped out from behind the shower curtain, just to make this girl piss herself even more. And there was no doubt that this was not a woman, standing in the elevator in her DKNY shoes, her Coach bag, her Dolce sunglasses, her god damn fucking manicured nails and her expertly applied makeup by a team of cosmetologists that just waited for her every morning in her bathroom. All of which, Ashleigh was sure, was courtesy of Tobey. He was the kind of smooth fuck that loved to groom a girl into a woman, build them into the perfect Barbie bimbo that would eventually quit her job, become his personal plaything and mid-day fuck buddy, just to have them lose their luster and interestingness, for him to dump them aside. She had seen the woman before her go, some redhead named Chloe. Tall, busy Chloe, tromping down the front steps of Tobey’s building, looking quite rejected, carrying a box of her stuff like she had just received her walking papers from a really great job that meant she was going to have to go live with her parents in god-forsaken New Jersey. Ashleigh was never quite sure, but she had her suspicions, that Chloe, as her name tag read, had been the same Chloe that Tobey had proposed to. Well, before she “became a crazy bitch,” according to Tobey. And by becoming a crazy bitch, Ashleigh supposed, must mean that she gained a little extra weight from all the sitting-around-waiting-to-be-fucked that Tobey assigned her life to be after taking her under his wing. Maybe she told the same story about her sister’s best friend too many times. Maybe she even forgot to shave her legs once or maybe she had a zit on her butt, just once. Whatever it was, she had gone—just like Ashleigh was being nonchalantly hinted to do.

The girl knocked on the door, two little taps. Two little weak taps. Thump…thump. It made Ashleigh’s blood boil, just hearing how lazy this girl was, that she couldn’t even give the door a good thumping when she wanted to be heard. She was robably the type that sat around all afternoon, doing nothing, perhaps going to the gym to keep her figure, perhaps meeting friends to buy things with her father’s credit card, making appearances at movie premieres and basically be a social leech that Tobey, for a period, was more than happy to provide the vein for.

She withdrew the knife, confirming to herself that yes, this girl was going to die. She was going to die, and whenever Tobey came back home for his prescheduled fuck-buddy session, he too, was going to die. But Ashleigh never considered herself a killer, nor did she think that she was ever going to kill anyone. She had grown up a city girl by regular parents that owned a tailor shop in Queens . Just a regular life, school, summer vacations, boys and concerts, college and beer, job in Manhattan, lunch breaks and coffee with friends, cigarettes and drinks at the club, sex with men, lunch with men, dinner with men, living together with men, breakups with men and then sex with another man, etc. The regular life, Christmas at home, Halloween in the Bronx with her friend Julie, every year pretty much the same until she hit twenty-five, and she knew that then, she’d have to settle down, land a guy while she was still pretty and still owned decent legs. She had a career, she had gone to college, she had lived a life. Now, it was time to settle down, find a guy. Find a "good" guy. Get married, have babies, follow the pattern that life has decreed for generations and generations before her. So what if it wasn’t original, she’d make up for all of that with a memoir she planned on starting to write when she hit fifty. "Ashleigh Hatcher: The Makings of Regularity."

But here it was, her life was about to take a drastic, hard left turn. She was about to murder someone. She was about to end someone’s life. Someone’s grand daughter that enjoyed her month-long stays in the summer. Someone’s daughter, who they saw go off to the big bad NYC to chase a fashion photographer dream. Someone’s friend, who they had grown up alongside since kindergarten, who they shared deepest, darkest secrets with, sat up late at night and stared at the popcorn ceiling with tired eyes, whispering to not wake the parents, and shared dreams of what it would be like, to one day, be an adult. Here she was, tapping again. Thump…thump. Followed by, “Come on, Lauren, it’s really cold out here in the hall. Let me in.” Here she was, existing, plodding along, making plans, breathing and living and just generally "being". And then here was Ashleigh, knife in hand, approaching the door, considering the fact that she was about to mess all of that up for this girl. All future lunch dates, cancelled. The tickets she had for the Beyonce show this weekend? Might as well sell them on eBay now. The overloaded credit cards? Have daddy pay for that. The hair appointment at the first of every month? Might as well pencil her out, she’s not going to make it. There they were, two trains set loose on their tracks on opposite ends of the universe, chugging along, day and night, the scenery changing every second, moving and moving and moving—to this one moment, standing there, seeing on either horizons, as the bodies moved, toward one another, blind to the fact that it would be today, that day, right then, within seconds—the big moment, the freeze-frame millisecond that would change everything. The tracks would be changed, forever altered, shot off into different directions. Of course, for one, the tracks would end right then and there. But for Ashleigh’s track, well, who knows where it went. But she hoped that it would aim her directly at Tobey, so that another fateful millisecond could occur. Yes, she decided, hand on knob, knife in hand, that Tobey would also meet his fateful millisecond. She had set her track, she was loading the coal, blowing the horn, the imminent moment approaches.

Ashleigh pulled the door open and the girl stood close to six feet tall. Brown hair, curly, hanging about her olive skinned face, her perfect almond eyes, her puckered lips, her begging mouth, her perfect dimpled chin, the slide and elegant flow of her neck that led the eyes down, down, down, into the cavernous space between her giant breasts. Her clothes, perfect, fashionable to the second, the accessories tasteful and reserved and just as up to the minute in-fashion. She was the idyllic Italian beauty, the knock out that Ashleigh had strived to be, but as Tobey had obviously decided, she had failed.

"Who the fuck are you?” the girl snapped, closing her phone with a pop. Ashleigh could muster nothing else but a lunge forward, sliding the knife with ease into the girl’s front, high on her stomach. She felt the blade hit bone, resist temporarily, and then push through, slipping between ribs. The girl made a terrible gasp, tried to scream, but her face twisted into pain. Ashleigh had hit a lung, and the girl was in too much pain to take another breath. She pulled the girl into the apartment and slammed the door behind her, keeping the blade buried inside of her. They turned together and Ashleigh lowered the girl to the floor. In the process, the girl’s purse overturned and its contents spilled onto the floor with a crash. Ashleigh noted, digging the blade deeper, that the girl used the same hand lotion as her. The same lipstick, even the same brand of birth control. Here was Ashleigh Hatcher, in the future, sculpted and perfect and made smooth, streamline and immaculate. She was stabbing her future self, drawing the blade out, letting the girl take a breath, and then bringing it back down, this time in her throat, that tiny little pit between the collar bones. The girl’s breath stopped, her face spreading out into a look of terror, her mouth open but no sound escaping. Again, Ashleigh brought the blade out and brought it down as fast and as hard as she could—as if she were trying to push not only the knife, but her entire hand and arm through  the girl. It was harder than they made it look in the movies, to puncture not only clothes but the surprising resilience of skin. Each time the knife punched through the girl’s perfectly smooth olive skin, it made a distinct pop when it broke through.

Ashleigh was content with twenty-five stabs, one for each year of her miserable life. She took a step back, seeing that she had gotten a good deal of blood on herself, on her own jeans, on her ballet flats, on her forearms and chest. The room began to fill the smell of the girl’s insides, a coppery, bitter smell. The girl didn’t last long though, she laid there on the foyer and squirmed on the floor, apparently in too much pain to really fidget about too much. A puddle began to spread out beneath her, nearly getting to the carpet. Instinctively, Ashleigh threw down a handful of towels at the edge of the tiled area that represented the foyer, to prevent the eggshell carpet from getting stained. She had killed someone, sure, but it didn’t mean she had to be a monster. And just as she had tossed the paper towels down, sure enough, the girl stopped moving. Her eyes stayed open, staring up, up, up, at the ceiling, at Jesus, at Buddha, at whoever it was that had come down to claim her, to rescue her from her wreckage that her track had brought her to. Her millisecond was over, the moment passed, and her track was altered, moving upward now, or down—depending on how she lived her life, Ashleigh supposed—to whatever fate waited beyond.

After inspecting the girl’s body for any clue as to why she was there, she discovered an orange post-it indicating that she had an appointment, at Tobey’s address, on the thirtieth of October. Ashleigh checked the calendar, seeing that it was the twenty-ninth, leaving a big bloody fingerprint on the day. She looked back at the body, seeing that fate would have it that the girl, whose driver’s license indicated her name to be Tiffany Piazza, would be a disorganized little tart unable to remember the date, and therefore, fuck up her own life someday. Ashleigh chuckled, seeing the cruel irony in the girl’s demise. She felt no guilt for it despite discovering this, there was no doubt that Tobey had been fucking this girl for months, just to see how good of a replacement she’d be, before dumping Ashleigh.

The phone trilled at close to six that afternoon, by that time Ashleigh had showered and changed into some of the clothes she found in her box by the front door. The body remained there on the floor, and she watched the motionless Tiffany as the phone rang and rang. “Are you going to get that, bitch, or should I?” Ashleigh mused with the corpse, unwilling to get up from her comfortable position upon the couch. The answering machine finally picked up, spewing the caller’s voice into the room.

“Hey, babe, just me. I’m sorry,” he laughed, “Just wanted to let you know—"

Ashleigh interrupted the message, shouting, “You hear that over there? He’s calling you babe, must mean that he really, really likes you!”

“---I’m sorry I’m not there yet, I hope that little prank I pulled on you didn’t get you too upset---” Ashleigh froze, sat up straight so fast that she thought she might fall off the couch. Her hands were claws on the arms of the sofa, her feet planted on the floor, her ears listening so hard that it hurt. “---But I would think that the little bit at the end there about only calling when it wasn’t business hours should’ve been a dead giveaway. Anyway, I love you and happy birthday. To make up for the little scare, I hired Tiffany to come by for an hour session with you tomorrow. Enjoy the night, open that bottle of merlot we were saving—I’ll be home soon. Love you, kid. Kisses. Buh-bye now.”

Ashleigh couldn’t believe it. She kept trying to speak, but only little noises, little chirps, would emerge. She slowly turned and looked at Tobey’s dead masseuse laying on her back, legs cocked out to the sides, twenty-five puncture wounds scattered around on her torso. Acupuncture, Ashleigh thought fleetingly, despite knowing that she had just killed someone. Killed someone. Fucking killed someone. She got to her bare feet and padded across the carpet to the barrier of paper towels blocking the pool of impending stain-maker on the foyer’s tiled floor. She knelt down before Tiffany’s giant ball of curly hair.

She couldn’t speak, but the best she could muster was, “Are you okay?” to which Tiffany did not respond. Again, she asked, and again. Each time, her voice breaking even more. She felt the beginning of it, the crumbling, the cracking. What would break any other woman would certainly not break her. But she felt it, the hairline fracture running down the middle of her cemented determination to teach her boyfriend a lesson. And another, and another. Splintering, breaking, shattering. And just like the arch removed of its keystone, the entire mess came down at once. She rolled into a ball next to Tiffany, pleading for her to take one breath, to bat an eye, to say something, say anything. “Just fucking breathe!” Ashleigh yelled into the woman’s olive skinned and motionless face. But she had laid there for four hours, she was gone, she was dead. But that didn’t spot Ashleigh from remembering her training as a life guard all those years ago, to tip the head back, pinch the nose and breath into the lungs. Ashleigh performed CRP as best as she could remember, folding her hands and pushing one, two, three on Tiffany’s bloody chest. Again, Ashleigh attempted to blow air into Tiffany’s lungs. And blow hard she did, with every stale breath, she blew. Just as she was going to do, later that night, after she had Tobey on the floor just like she had Tiffany. She was going to buy a birthday cake for herself. And just blow.

Table of Contents

Wayfinder - Home of the Lýkos

by Suany Cañarte

A lonely howl escaped from the tip of his long muzzle and drifted into the air. He watched as it danced up through the trees and spread out across the sky, a longing feeling pierced his heart. His large pointed ears swished back and forth following the sounds. The trees rustled, in the air the scent of fear, rivalry and tension wafted across his nostrils. The whole forest rang with his abandoned song, and as was expected, no one sang back. He waited a few moments longer before deciding to call out again. Nobody had ever responded to his cries, but he always felt the need to call the others that he knew weren’t there. His second howl resounded a little longer and for a moment he was deceived by a distant echo. The sound was not repeated and he gave up on it for that evening.

He hunched his back over, reached down and wrapped his fingers around the branch below his feet. His golden eyes narrowed and fixed themselves on the ground that was far below him. He considered for a moment what he should do. His body decided before his mind and he careened off of the branch to the ground below, snagging some branches on the way down, and landing in a thorny bush which had not been in his line of trajectory. His fur bristled as the thorns tore into his back leg and side. Panicked, he danced from side to side, not stopping to think about the best course of action. His run became more rampant as he slammed the side of his body into a tree, losing his balance and teetering into a small stream. The sudden feel of cool, running water both calmed the frustration as well as the pain and he sat for a few moments taking in the small, but significant, relief.

The moon rose high over the trees before he decided to pull himself out of the water and consider any plans for the evening. The journey to the other side of the forest had begun two days prior, but he was already feeling the fatigue of unaccustomed exercise take over his muscles. He shook off the water that he now realized was not just cold, but almost icy. His body quivered and he wondered if he should turn back to his comfortable home. There was a cave back there, a cave that had once belonged to a large brown bear. It was waiting for him so invitingly. It was windy and dark but it kept out the rain and harsh sunlight. In the winter a blanket of snow would cover the entrance and insulate the inside. It was perfect, and warm. He began to forget why he would leave a home that he fought so hard to obtain. The entire trek seemed ridiculous and unnecessary. If gone too long another bear would come and try to claim his home. Bears were large, strong, and angry. He was not quite as intimidating, but when it came to brute force, he knew bears came up a bit short. The two had fought for close to an hour before the bear finally conceded and limped off into the woods, looking for a new home in which to tend his wounds.

Remembering the fight, his muscles tensed. The bear had put up quite a struggle, but he had been the victor. The cave was his. The forest was his. If ever there were someone watching over this world, he would surely be seen as a king. He was powerful, he was feared, but in the end he was alone. He only hunted when hungry, which was rare unless he exerted his body extraneously. This led him to spend a lot of time thinking. He knew his brother creatures did not have this pleasure. They were far too concerned about being eaten or what to eat. But he did not have these worries. Nothing would dare hunt him, and food came easily. Carnivorous by nature, he frequently indulged his personally developed sweet tooth by eating fruits and berries when they were abundant. His hunger was so often under control that many animals lived by his cave without fear. Any trepidation towards him would only be equivalent to that of any other predator; therefore he posed no larger threat. Yet, they did try to stay out of his way when he strolled through the trees without a purpose. He was known to be clumsy due to his insistence on walking on his hind legs and many animals were wise to avoid the thrashing of the large, often injured beast. For the most part, though, he enjoyed strolling through the woods.

Often, after the cold season passed and the warmth began to touch the world again, he would find himself entranced by how alive the forest became. Fawns, cubs, fledglings, and a number of other baby animals filled the forest that he often claimed as his own. This was always an exciting time of year for him. The little ones were not aware that they should fear him and he would often engage in play with the small speckled deer or the frail and tiny badger cubs. But it would never be long before the parents would teach their children about the dangers of predators, and he would lose his playmates to the laws of nature. This year, the warm times did not fill him with joy, instead they emptied him. He tried to remember his youth, but he had no memory of the time. He wondered if he was different than his cousins. He seemed to be the only one of his kind. The others did not have his face, or mimic his body. He would call sometimes, as he had been doing since he was a cub. No one ever returned his calls, but still he felt the urge to call out.

It was because of this that he had decided to travel to the other side of the forest; Well, because of the new barrenness and a new scent. It had first wafted in on a hot evening, late in the warm season. A cold front had traveled over from the east and collided with the hot muggy weather of this time of year. The two struggled and disputed over dominance of the mild tempered forest grounds and in the process brought its inhabitants an earth trembling squall. He had never taken notice to the severity of storms; after acquiring the cave he would cage himself in through many storms without having to pay much heed. In the worst weather he would allow some smaller rodents to take refuge close to the entrance, so long as they did not get in his way. To him this seemed like just another destructive tempest. But the wind carried with it something new this time, something exciting. The scent burned within his nostrils, to the very back of his head. It was so fresh, so thrilling, and yet there was a faint familiarity in it. It lingered within him, torturing his mind. He breathed in and out as if it were a rapid pulse, hoping that the more breaths he took, the more he could convince his mind that it knew this smell. And there, that very day, he decided that he would follow it, that he would find the source, and that he would quell the apprehension building up inside of him.

He grew weary of sitting in the shallow pool and lifted his body out into the oncoming wind. His fur was tangled and sopped from his encounter with the stream. A foul stench filled the air around him, one that he usually took no notice of. It was a common smell of his fur when it was wet. There was a bustling riverside near his cave and he would often spend his mornings splashing around in the cool running water. It was one of the many simple pleasures that he enjoyed in his life. The smell was bothering him at this particular moment though. It was making it much more difficult to follow the other scent. He shook off as much of the water as possible before deciding that until he was dry, he would have to delay his journey a little longer. He did not want to lose track of the scent, and the stench of his fur was making it much too difficult to keep track of. He now missed the warmth and seclusion of his cavern. It shielded him from the cold and harsh winds.

He began to shiver before long. The searing cold crept deeper into his bones. The muscles that constricted, unflinching, under his protective skin and fur was so taught that he feared they would snap off. He had no love for the cold. It was not an unusual cold for this time of year, but it was colder than he liked it to be. Winters were dreadful for him, and in these conditions he would be huddled up in a corner of his cave, nibbling on some berries or watching the mice gather nuts and other foods that would last them the harsh winters. He never threatened the mice, they did not bother him. He often presented them with his leftovers and they took them graciously. The mice seemed to be the least afraid of him. They knew that such an enormous and ravenous creature would not waste his energy hunting tiny mice that would barely fill a corner of his large belly. He missed them. Their squeaks filled the cavern, along with the nervous skittering made by their miniscule feet. How annoying, it seemed, that his mind would be filled with a longing for the companionship given by vermin.

It wasn’t long before his eyelids drooped halfway over his eyes. Exhaustion was setting in and it seemed that he would never truly get back to his purpose. No, there were too many inconveniences; it was too difficult and fruitless. He would sleep now and in the morning he would return home. He curled up into a ball, draping his tail over his face and keeping in the heat made by his body. No sooner had he closed his eyes than they were open once more. The sun was just beginning to travel through the sky and the warmth left over from the hot seasons was filling the forest again, he stretched his arms out, scraping the dry earth below him. His muscles still felt stiff but he was cherishing the sun’s rays. The air wafted into his lungs and he was wrapped up in the scent again. It seemed that the wave of hot air had intensified the smell; his mind forgot all about the resolutions of the evening before. The smell was just too powerful, too inviting.

The forest seemed to take this wave with stride. The animals were so alive, a fact that shocked him. They seemed so dreadfully oblivious. The storm had left everything so disheveled, but now they were all working towards preparations for the cold season. He could tell that the wind had not quite settled, as if she were catching her breath. He had not noticed but yellow and red tinged leaves were scattered amongst the brush and only the tall proud pines were left untouched by the crimson and golden hues. He continued onward, watching a plethora of squirrels and chipmunks scurry around his feet. Most scurried past him, but some bumped into his clawed paws, looking up at him with intense fear. He grinned down but they skittered off as soon as they recovered their courage. The last of the bunch, a feeble tawny-colored creature with broad black stripes painted like lightning on its back, hissed at him. It amused the large predator as the tiny creature snarled and nipped at the thick, gray and rough padding that covered his paws. The amusement overtook him and he picked up the creature, who tried – far too late – to evade the grubby fingers and scamper off. He looked at the minute thing, and then shoved his nose into its little chest taking a big whiff. He yelped, and let out a large sneeze. The rodent took this chance to escape from his clutches. He shook his head and frowned inwardly. He hadn’t expected the little beast to smell so… ticklish. The mice by his cavern had a much more pleasant odor.

He continued past the copious amounts of scattered vermin. Their number increased as he pressed on, until the ground below was blanketed with them. His amusement soon turned to annoyance as the little wave of fur and squeaking overcame the entire atmosphere of the forest ground. He had never seen so many rats, mice and chipmunks in one place, they all just ran past him. Some were covered in a light scent of brimstone. Hunched over, nails burrowing deep into the hard earth, he continued his trek through the underbrush. For days it seemed that he was following a continuously dyeing trail. The scent was becoming second nature, becoming more ingrained in everything around him- the trees, the hedges, even the occasional stream of water. The entire forest seemed to reek with it, making it difficult to follow a straight path to its origin. The weariness that this new development had brought upon him, along with the unprecedented early onset of the cold season, slowed his progress some. He often spent hours sitting, placid, in the underbrush and watching nothing in particular as the sun set and rose again above him. He had never gone this far in the forest, and a small corner of his brain irked at the thought that he might never be able to find his home again. He often awoke convinced that he would return, but the fact that he had already come so far and a calling that he did not understand always persuaded him to press on.

An unexpected weariness, a longing for the familiar had come over his furred body. The muscles were tender, the eyes were forlorn. This was no longer a simple journey, a passage; time had taken its toll and the sun had set far too many times. His chest, young, vibrant and full of life grew tight and hollow. There was little end in sight, little beginning to look back on. There was no past, no future, simply the cold horrid present. He knew now what it felt like for the beasts, the mice and deer and other animals he often observed. Instinct, nothing else. That was all they had, they knew to eat, to sleep and to move. Keep moving. That was all they could do, and this was exactly that. A moment of instinct turned a lifetime. Instinct that seized and conquered rationality and thought processes that had taken centuries to manifest. He had abandoned his life for a horrible wanderlust devoid of comfort and routine. His bones began to feel the ache of realization, of cruel memory, and he let his body fall below him in a heap. A new scent. A new scent. A new scent.  

A jade vine curled around his fingers. The unusual behavior distracted him from the fatigue as he followed the source with his empty golden eyes. His fur prickled and he pressed his ears hard down against his head. He knew fear would be logical, that he should be afraid and ready to attack, but his body felt at ease. A thick willow tree curved up above and over him. The trunk captured shades of emerald, ruby, amethyst, like a conflagration of jewels in the sunlight, yet it had no color of its own. A face pointed down at him from the extending limbs. It was unlike any face he had ever seen, it had no muzzle or cavities for breathing, simply a set of long slender sea-foam eyes holding him with intense love and a horizontal parting, a crack, which curled up at the ends. The branches draped around the tree whipping gently in the wind. The wind. It was not the angry, disconcerted wind that had been raping the skies, but a gentle and soothing wind he had not seen since before the horrid tempest. It greeted him with playful grace as it danced around the beautiful tree and swung the branches over his face, embracing him with them. A faint whisper filled his body, a tugging. He could hear her, the tree, as she whispered to him without words or language; without sound. He curled up at her feet, the eyes still fixed on him. The jade vines curled over his body, warming his icy bones. Euphoria and release filled him as he drifted to sleep.

The dawn had rolled in a thick fog that swept over the forest embracing it with ambiguity. He gazed at the willow tree, now dark and dead of the night’s splendor. The bark had grayed; the eyes were no longer there. The wind had quelled her dancing and now stood still, swirling the fog with her fingers in random places. He pressed his hardened face against the colorless bark. Vines sat dead on the ground, the same pallid color of the patches of grass that chose to brave the colder season. There was no warmth, no vibrance, no jewels or fond embraces. All that was left was a cold dead forest, waiting patiently to be given life again. His aches had filtered out of him and he felt neither fatigued nor hungry. The specter had granted him new life, one that she denied the rest of the forest. He would have to continue now. The dragging feeling was overwhelming. He needed to follow this scent. He needed to follow. To move.

At first he had no problem navigating, having become so used to following the scent without aid, but as he traveled deeper into the fog a faint smell of cinder caught his attention. The forest would sometimes acquire this smell after a substantial thunderstorm- some tree off in the distance might catch flame when the heavens decided to part and remind the earth that the sky was an element to be feared. This wasn’t an unfamiliar smell; in fact, it seemed almost pleasant to encounter something he found so connected to his home. As he stumbled through the mist in his preferred but awkward two legged stance, the odor began to grow exponentially. He fixed his eyes on passing trees and noticed the charred trunks. There was a general absence of undergrowth in the area as well. A foul stench that had never touched his muzzle before wafted in and his ears flattened on his head. He dropped down on all fours, preparing to hurdle away if he had to.

A large moss-covered boulder was planted amongst all the blackened trees. It stretched far above his head and seemed to taper off into the mist. He hesitated at first, but the logic of being above this mist in the situation at hand won over his innate trepidation towards the large stone. He let his ears lift, pointing them forward, back and to the sides. The only sound he could make out was a gentle rumbling, the bustling of a nearby river, as the sound was far too substantial to belong to a bear or any other large woodland beast. With quiet agility, he fastened his clawed fingers into a protruding groove in the stone and heaved his body up. He reached the top, with many stops, but nothing seemed to have stirred as he climbed. Above the mist he stood on what seemed like a mossy ridge growing above the forest alongside the trees. The ground here had a leathery feel to it and it rumbled slightly below his claws. He walked forward, swaying his head and eyes, hoping to catch any peculiar movements. The horrible stench grew unbearable. He swayed, dizzy from the putrid toxicity of the air.

His eyes were not the first to catch the movement as the ground below him shifted and he broke forward into a dash. His head collided with what he thought was a tree. A moment’s confusion was torn by an ear piercing roar that echoed the forest walls and seemed to reverberate below him. A large green scaled head was perched atop the tree that was attached to what he had taken to be land. He stood on the back of a large reptilian creature, colored a vivid green. He watched as the scales below his feet took on a deep violet then brown. These were the colors of the poisonous lizards that lived in the trees. They were shy little scaled reptilians whose toxins could kill a full-grown buck. This reptilian was much larger and probably carried much more poison.

Panic struck as the creature became aware of her unwelcome rider. He dug his claws deep into the neck of the large reptilian, fearful that she would knock him off in her wild thrashing. She screeched and lashed as a translucent ichor escaped from within her body drenching the foliage below. Trees were trampled and torn down by the violent whipping of her tail and head. His fingers burned and hissed in the fluid, a thin line of steam spreading out. He was thrown off of her back and into a thicket of thorn bushes. He clambered to his feet, searching the sky for a view of his former mount, rolling away as a large scaly tail soared down onto where he stood. Then, there was stillness- unimaginable stillness. His lungs tightened with air and he felt the earth below him shake. He backed away from the large reptilian as she filled her lungs with air. Spines that protruded from her head, back and legs turned a deeper shade of purple. And then, a flash of gold and heat covered the forest. He had begun running before the flames had left the mouth of the hell-beast but the light was so bright that he was blinded for a moment. Much of the sprint was spent crashing into trees and breaking through shrubbery. He ran and ran until his legs gave way at the bank of a river, miles apart from the incident. He tumbled, rolled and crumbled at the edge of the bank. The water licked his fingers with a gentle murmur.

His fur was becoming more and more matted as the thick red blood caked black against his skin. The dark crust clumped hair together and it tore without relent at his new wounds. The heavy odor of brimstone and ash burned the inside of his nostrils. His breathing had become so labored that his lungs seemed to burn with the cinders. In the distance he could still hear the reptilian wailing and tearing the forest apart. His body lay crumpled, the flesh repairing itself without tiring as wounds were torn back open by the occasional spasm of his muscles. Time passed and at some point, when the forest was blanketed with a dim purple light, he heard the reptilian settle down and disappear into the forest in a direction opposite his own.

A pang of realization ebbed into him as he lay there. Not only had he lost the scent, as well as the ability to find it again, but he had also been thrown completely off trail. He had run so violently through the trees, turning in random places and weaving through the undergrowth, that he could not even imagine finding his way back by sight alone. A wave of new pain crashed into him, his body contorted, filling his healing wounds with dirt and fallen leaves. He wailed and whimpered, rolling into the earth. Anger replaced the mourning and he found the strength to rise. He stumbled up onto his hind legs, stumbling into the water’s edge. Looking off past the river to the opposing bank he could not truly appreciate how far the water spread and began to trudge through the muddy cache into the moving rapids. The sound flooded his ears, pulsing deep against his throbbing temples. The water beat against his legs, pulling at him, wanting to take him.

Without any explanation other than habit he lifted his muzzle high in the air and let out a loud, clear howl. It rang through the forest in its usual way, resilient and empty. It echoed and returned to his erect ears. The sound made his body cringe into the water, another howl bubbled deep and he let it crack and slide through the folds of his mouth. Then, the mounting exhaustion crashed upon his body and he collapsed. The water forced itself over his body, washing away the residue acquired in his previous encounters. He could hear the water rushing around him, his muscles relaxed and let the river cleanse him. He forced his eyes open, his head just above the rush and fixed upon figures moving in the distance. Far off, beyond the opposite bank deep in the trees, he watched. A soothing tranquility filled him then drifted away while voices, as melodious and longing as his own, finally called back.

Table of Contents

Suicide Talk

by James Valvis

--I’m going to kill myself.

--Okay.

--I really mean it this time.

--Okay.

--What are you saying?

--So far I’ve just said ‘okay.’

--But there seems to be some meaning in your okays .

--There isn’t.

--None at all?

--None at all.

--Aren’t you going to try to stop me?

--No.  Why should I?

--I don’t know.  Seems like the nice thing to do.

--Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t.

--What are you saying?

--Well, you’d think it’s the nice thing to do and everyone says it is, but what happens if tomorrow, after I stop you from killing yourself, you are kidnapped by a serial killer and he locks you in his basement and slowly skins you alive?

--You’re making me want to kill myself even more.

--Of course, what happens if tomorrow you win ten million dollars and meet the woman of your dreams who just happens to have a spare ticket for an around-the-world cruise?

--That’s not likely to happen.

--Neither is the serial killer.

--True.  I guess that’s true.

--Something in the middle will happen instead.  Something not too bad nor too great.

--Probably.

--I’d bet my life on it.

--Very funny.

--Of course, when emotions are involved it hardly matters what happens.

--What do you mean?

--Well, it’s like this.  Say on the best day of your life you stub your toe.  What happens?  Ah, you jump around a bit and curse and then go on feeling blissful because your met t some girl or published a book or won a football trophy or whatever.  But if it happens on the worst day of your life, you might see it as the straw that broke the camels back.  You might use it as an excuse for murdering your wife or quitting the football team.

--So what you’re saying is it doesn’t matter what happens to us, just how we feel about it?

--Not exactly.

--Then what are you saying?

--I’m saying try not to stub your toe.

--Hmm.

--Hmm, exactly.

--How did we start talking about this stuff anyway?

--Don’t know.  You wanted to do something.

--Yeah, what was that?

--Dunno.  Can’t remember.

--Well, I’m tired.  I’m going to bed.

--Okay.

Table of Contents

A Common Seduction

by Thomas Kearnes

He said he loved me when he never did. That’s all you need to know about Ryan Hammonds. That’s why I’m seated around a high-top table at one of those restaurants with posters of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean on the walls, seated across from Ryan’s boyfriend, Kenny. He slurps from his glass of whiskey and soda with a straw, making a rude noise as he hits the bottom. I ask him if he wants another. This will be his fifth, sixth drink. I’ve lost count. But I’ve been saving my money for this night, planning every detail since I scored Kenny’s number from one of my fuck buddies.

Of course, I haven’t told Kenny who I really am. I told him my real name, but not that I used to be Ryan’s boyfriend. When I told Kenny my name on the phone, arranging this date, telling him we had mutual friends and I was new in town, just looking for someone to hang with, no big deal, just a couple of drinks, he didn’t seem to recognize it. This stung me, I must admit, that Ryan no longer mentions me, all our months together completely forgotten. I wasn’t even a stopover on his usual list of all the asshole boyfriends from his past. And that’s the thing with Ryan: all his ex-boyfriends are assholes or creeps or shitheads. The world is against him, he told me, and probably told Kenny, too.

The loser gladly takes his next drink from the waitress and finishes half of it in one gulp. I’m still on my third one, must stay sharp, can’t let anything slip that might clue in Kenny to who I really am. Underneath the table, I feel his foot rub against my leg, and I know it won’t be long now before he asks me where I live, and I’ll say close by, just up the road, in fact only about two miles away from where Ryan Hammonds lives now, another welcome piece of intelligence my fuck buddy nailed for me.

I tell the dumb kid he’s beautiful, that his eyes knock me out, I’ve never seen that shade of green, would he be willing to pose for me sometime, nothing big, no nudity of course. I tell him I’m a photographer, that most of my work consists of bourgeois families with smart-ass kids and bored husbands, but on the side, I like to photograph men. Aren’t men beautiful creatures? I ask him. He smiles and nods his head. I wonder if he even understands what I’m saying.

This is my plan: seduce this moron Kenny, take a picture of him nude in my bed with my cell phone camera and send the image to Ryan, fuck you written in all caps. I’ve waited countless months for this night. Of course, Ryan hasn’t been with Kenny that whole time. There have been other boyfriends, flings. But when my fuck buddy described Kenny as an easy mark, willing to bend over for anybody who bought him drinks and treated him decent, the scheme presented itself like a pair of spread legs. Who couldn’t see the beauty of it, a revenge so pure it bleeds white?

He tells me we better not let Ryan know what he’s doing. He wouldn’t understand, Kenny says. No, I tell him, we won’t say a word. I ask him some benign questions about Ryan. I thirst for knowledge about the man who broke my heart: where he’s working, what he does on the weekends, did his father ever survive that bout of prostate cancer? But here’s the funny thing: I don’t even listen to Kenny’s answers. I’m lost in a reverie about my last night with Ryan, holding him against me in my cramped apartment, the blinds missing a few of their slats, allowing the moonlight to slip through. I see my ex-lover’s body tremble, feel him in my arms, me having no idea that it would be the last time, that he never loved me, not even in that moment.

Kenny pushes his empty glass toward me, says he’s had enough. Light-headed, he says. I caress his arm and he blushes. Do you want me to stop? I ask. He shakes his head.

I have lots of portraits hanging on my walls, I tell him. All beautiful men. Would you like to see them? Kenny nods. Let’s go to my car so I can kiss you, I say. We leave the restaurant. Emerging into the cold night air, I gaze up at all the stars, the first-quarter moon, and I’m thinking, Yes, Ryan, this is all for you. You fucking bastard, all for you. Kenny takes my hand and pulls me into the parking lot. Ryan, I say, aren’t you eager? My name isn’t Ryan, he says, looking hurt. But I just keep smiling and say, No, of course it isn’t.

Table of Contents

Trifecta

by Jeremy Grace

The trifecta. We saw it in our grasps, and we went for it without a second thought. As far as high school memories go it was up there. Up there with the time Steven Kettle flooded the school quad, or the time Steven Kettle stole the sophomores’ homecoming float. Those were great pranks, I mean Steven Kettle is now in juvie, but the pranks were brilliant nonetheless. The prank I want to tell may not be as impressive as flooding a quad, but it is interesting. One night, four guys—Jason Montgomery, Alex Jones, Phillip Sanchez, and myself—went to teepee three cars belonging to some of the most despicable girls we’d ever met. Now we used to be pretty good friends with these girls at one point, we all played in the school band, Friday nights we’d all go to the movies, and in fact, Alex even dated one of the girls—Amy. Actually, now that I think of it Amy also dated Jason at one point…and Phillip at the same time. Well…I guess you could say Amy was somewhat of a slut. Anyways, the point is at one time we were all very close, but by a year later none of us hung out. The girls quit band all together, started drinking, going out every night, and every week us boys would hear the latest rumor. How Terri started smoking pot, how Amy passed out at this house or that one. Or how Tara, drunker than ever, told Brad Williams that she wanted him to be her first, so he took her to the upstairs bathroom, in God only knows what house, laid her down in the bathtub and popped her cherry right then and there. He said it was “more efficient” that way. He said he “didn’t want to create a mess.” So there everything went. Right down the drain. We were all disgusted when we heard that one; I mean these girls used to be our friends. And the worst part? They didn’t care at all; they stopped talking to us like we were the ones doing things our parents would never approve of. They did whatever they wanted. So that’s why we decided to pull the trifecta, tag all their cars all in one night, show them how we felt, we planned it for a week, and then finally Thanksgiving weekend us boys hit the road with an arsenal of toilet paper, saran wrap, and my personal favorite—window chalk.

The evening started around ten-thirty after we got all the necessary supplies from our homes, plus some extra stuff from the 7-11. The clerk we bought the window chalk from knew exactly what we were planning. I could tell by the way she was staring at us. She had a look that said ‘Alright boys, I don’t want to end up on the evening news for selling this to you.’ I knew that’s what she was thinking because she said a second later, “Alright boys, I don’t want to end up on the evening news for selling this to you.” Jason tried to come up with a cover for us and told her, “Oh, no…you’re fine, we’re actually using this chalk to write on some friends’ car. We have a big soccer game coming up.”

“Oh you play soccer? For the high school?” The clerk asked.

“Yup, we’re all big soccer fans. Can’t get enough of it.”

“I thought the soccer season is in the spring?”

“Uh…it is.” It was such a rookie vandalism error it would have made you cringe. In fact, it still makes me cringe. Fortunately I came to the rescue.

“Yeah, but we play with a club team during our off season. You know, to stay in shape,” I said to save the situation. Jason was later chewed out thoroughly by all of us for that mistake.

Now those of you who have never partaken in vandalism probably wouldn’t understand, but there is a wonderful surge of energy that you receive whenever you about to do something you know is illegal. Call it adrenaline, anticipation, suspense, whatever you want, just know its pure magic. Anyways, you can imagine the buzz kill we all felt then when we didn’t see Terri’s station wagon outside her house. Sure enough, Amy and Tara’s cars were missing as well.

“What the fuck? Where the hell are they?” Phillip asked in anger.

“They’re probably at Justin Inge’s party,” said Jason with what seemed to be the answer.

“What? A party without out us?”

“Why? Since when have you been getting invites to places Phil?”

“I was obviously being sarcastic Jason, jeez.”

So we did what any other group of teenage boys on a Saturday night would not do—we waited. Waited quite a while for those cars actually. To kill time we drove to the AMPM for some twinkies, then Jason was craving McDonalds so we stopped there, then Dairy Queen for some sundaes. We were on our way to KFC at Phillip’s request when we decided Terri had to be home by now, and we were correct. Parked right outside the house was her car, all ready for the taking.

We started towards it with a slow walk, checking any houses with lights still on—an important step to remember, always look out for any moms up with newborn babies—they’ll be the first to make a call to the police, I know because that’s how Jason got caught once tagging Noel Gomez’s car. I think it’s the protective mother instinct. Of course, four guys dressed in black from head to toe at one thirty in the morning will make anyone suspicious. It’s always important to start out walking towards the car so that nothing looks suspicious, then once you’re about a hundred feet away from the vehicle you can start to turn that walk into a light jog. As you really start to get closer though, make sure you crouch so that you can’t be seen as huddling over the car. (That’s never a good look for a vandal to be caught in.) Once the perimeter had been checked, everything started like clockwork. Alex slid under the car, and Jason started feeding the saran wrap to him so that the two of them made circles covering all four doors. Phillip worked with the toilet paper, doing his usual zig zag pattern over the hood, while I started with the window chalk.

“Remember,” Phillip whispered, “Wipe off the windows before you start, otherwise if there’s dew the chalk could run and get on the paint. And then that shit’s permanent. We don’t want to leave anything permanent.”

“Yeah, yeah I know,” I whispered.

Now for my window chalk designs I like to keep it simple and just blot out the entire window. You can try to write something if you want, but make sure it’s something that won’t give away your identity. If you’re looking to make something obscene I would suggest drawing a large penis on the windshield. The penis is a vandalism art that has never gone out of style. You don’t believe me? Go to any men’s public restroom and you’ll get what I’m saying. The last step is even more simple—run. You’ve done your job; now get the hell out of there. Which is exactly what we did.

Next up was Amy. Her car was right in front, but we still played it safe, Amy has a huge window in front of her house that pretty much lets her see the entire street. We were about thirty yards away when we heard a big “creek.” Amy also has a large wooden double door and thank God for it, because we hightailed it back to our car as soon as it opened.

“Shit.”

“Well what do we do now?”

“Call it off?”

“No, no…we’ll just have to wait. She’s probably just getting something from the car.”

But a minute later we could see she wasn’t getting anything from the car, instead she was driving right past without even noticing us.

“What should we do,” said Alex at the wheel.

“Follow her!”

“Follow Her? I can’t—”

“She’s getting away.”

“Oh God,” and with a gulp Alex started the car and we had become engaged in our very first car chase. I will admit looking back on it now we probably got a little carried away. I mean, tagging a car is one thing, following a car is a little more oh…I’ll say stalkerish. But that’s exactly what we did that night at 2:27 in the morning. I must say Alex was a saint considering all the yells of “Go,” “Don’t get too close,” and “You’re losing her” we threw at him. Finally we agreed on staying about two cars behind, an estimate determined by watching a lifetime of James Bond car chases.

“Where is she going? Safeway?” Asked Alex.

“Yeah, Alex, pull in the parking lot,” Jason said.

“What does she need at 2:30?”

“Tampons?”

“No, no, I think that guy….you know…Charlie or something works here.”

“Who the hell is Charlie?”

“I think he’s her most recent dude.”

“How do you know about this?”

“Come on. It’s Amy. Even when you don’t want to hear about her, you hear about her.”

“That’s it,” Phillip announced all of a sudden, “I’m going in.”

“Going in, what the hell are you going in for?” Jason responded, completely confused.

“Phillip! Get back in the car,” Alex demanded, “What are you doing?”

“What do we do?”

“Forget this, Phillip’s gone awol, I’m getting us out of here, it’s too risky.”

So we drove to the bank parking lot two blocks away. I wasn’t really surprised with Phillip jumping out, he’s the first to get carried away with any activity. When we first told him about this plan, he bought a ski mask for the occasion.

“What should we do now?”

“Damn….I knew Phillip would do something stupid.”

“Hey wait! He’s trying to call me.”

“Put him on speakerphone Jason.”

“Phillip?”

“The bear has left the cave,” Phillip whispered.

“Phillip, what the hell are you talking about? You don’t even—”

“Shhh—keep it down, speak softly like I’m doing. I’m crowded behind the watermelon stand, and the bear is at checkout line number three talking to some guy.”

“Why are you using code…and why did you make Amy a bear?”

“Oh! I think she’s spotted me. Abort! Abort!”

“Phillip? Phillip?”

“Alex, you better drive over there because I’m picturing a very scared and confused Phillip running out of Safeway right now.”

Jason’s prediction was exactly right, Phillip dove head first into the back seat of the car and we drove off as fast as we could out of the parking lot.

“Did she see you?” Alex questioned Phillip.

“I don’t know. I got real close to her though. Practically right next to her.”

“Why in God—”

“Look, there she is,” interrupted Jason.

The truth was she hadn’t noticed Phillip in the slightest, and just like that she was back in her car and our chase was back on. After a while we couldn’t help but grin, you see we started to know where Amy’s car was headed. The one place that guaranteed we would be able to end this night sooner than we had expected—Tara’s house.

“This is brilliant,” Phillip let out, “Amy must be spending the night at Tara’s house. It’s like they want us to get their cars. We must be the luckiest sons of bitches ever. They didn’t notice us at all tonight. Two in one.”

So we went through the routine—saran wrap, toilet paper, and window chalk on Tara’s car. We were onto Amy’s when I started thinking about what Alex said. I thought how amazing it was Amy never saw us at her house, or following her on the road, she didn’t even notice Phillip right next to her. “What luck,” I said. And then I paused from writing on the window. I started thinking how hard we worked, how hard it was planning this whole operation. I went over how Amy didn’t notice us at her house, or when she drove past…or even when we were following her.

“Phillip,” I whispered, “hey Phil.”

“What?”

“How close did you say you got to Amy?”

“I already told you dude. I was pretty much right next her.”

“And she didn’t notice you?”

“Not at all.”

“What…luck,” I said again. I turned back to chalking the window, and then something unplanned happened. Somehow my hand got into my pocket and somehow I took my keys and “screeeeech.” Somehow I keyed Amy’s car. A light went on in Tara’s house, and the guys gave a quick “what the fuck look” as we all booked it to the car. As soon as we were inside the car I was bombarded with “what were you thinking” and “what the hell man,” but I didn’t care. I told them that, after a minute of hearing their screams I shouted, “Shut up, shut up. They didn’t see the car and they didn’t see us so we’re good okay! Nothing’s going to happen, it didn’t make a difference. So shut the hell up.” And I was right, it didn’t matter. Amy didn’t know who did it, she got a new coat of paint and everything stayed the same. Sometimes I still think of that night, before I go to sleep. I think about seeing that light turn on and feeling like the rules didn’t apply.

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