PseudoPod

• Author : Karl Edward Wagner
• Narrator : Anson Mount
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Marty Perrett
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“Where the Summer Ends” first appeared in the seminal anthology Dark Forces (1980), edited by Kirby McCauley. This particular anthology was an eye-opener to 12 year old co-editor of Pseudopod Shawn Garrett, and deserves a place on the bookshelf of any fan of weird fiction.

MUSIC USED – “Nobody Cares Lalala” by thr band Monplaisir. The track is made available under a CC0 1.0 Universal license (Public Domain Dedication).

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The post PseudoPod 560: Where the Summer Ends appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : T.J. Berry
• Narrator : Laura Hobbs
• Host : Tina Connolly
• Audio Producer : Marty Perrett
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PseudoPod 559: Granite Requires is a PseudoPod original.

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Granite Requires By T.J. Berry

Granite requires my baby’s eyes. Only one of them really, but that’s still one more eye than she’s gonna give. That granite already took one of mine.

I may have only one eye, but I’m a worker, not a taker. I have three jobs. First and most importantly, I’m a mama to my baby girl. She will always be priority numero uno. Secondly, I do remote transcription for a vet in Albuquerque when their regular people get behind. And third, I have a side agreement with a few of the guys in this town that keeps me in tax-free cash. God bless America.

I’m never going to be like Mama Tracey, who sits out front of Dell’s General Store holding out her mug for cash. People give it to her too, paper money like fives and tens, cause she gave both of her eyes to the granite.

They took the first in fifty-two after she was born. The other she volunteered in eighty-eight when pickings were slim in town and the rocks started to collect their due.

I could give my second eye in place of my baby and collect fives and tens too, but I bet there’s not room in front of Dell’s for both me and Mama Tracey. She’s wide in the hips and also people will think I’m a copycat and give me less. Anyways, I have my Nightlee now and lord knows you need at least one eye to take care of a baby.

I’m walking up the steps to Dell’s, which is why I’m thinking on Mama Tracey. There’s a ramp, on account of all the townies missing eyes and toes, but I like to take the stairs. Just to show I can.

Mama Tracey puts down her mug when I come around. I wonder how she always knows it’s me coming up the steps. Maybe she can hear my flip-flops making a particular sound on the wood, like that blind superhero. Or maybe she can hear the old guys stop talking so they can at stare at my boobs.

The four old men who park themselves at Dell’s are siting on either side of the entrance. They’re not panhandlers officially, but they’re always begging for your time and attention when you just want to walk on by. I don’t have to wait long for them to quit loving on the second amendment and start loving on me.

“You want an ice cream, Miss CassieLyn?” asks one of the old guys.

I adjust Nightlee onto my other hip so I can give him a full-on look that says to take your ice cream and shove it. He knows very well that I’m lachrymose intolerant and I’ll be farting like a dog if I have ice cream.

He laughs and I’m annoyed because he’s teasing me. I could shut that garbage down by telling his shriveled friends that he likes a pinkie up his ass when I blow him on Tuesday nights, but I can’t do that because public relations is a big part of my job.

“No, sweetie,” I say.

“You going shopping, honey?” asks another old guy, staring at my legs.

“I came to ask a question,” I say, stepping up onto the porch so that Nightlee’s fuzzy head doesn’t burn in the sun. “I want to know how to switch rocks.”

All three of them answer with outraged little puffing sounds through their thin lips.

“Your baby belongs to granite,” says my Tuesday night appointment, whose name is Jack. The old guy smell up here is making me want to gag–and I almost never gag. “It’s a damn shame. Her blue eyes remind me of the sea off the Amalfi coast. I was there in forty-six,” says Jack.

One of the other guys points to his foot.

“Born to marble in the lean years. Gave two toes before middle school. Navy wouldn’t take me, so I packed parachutes in El Paso.”

I move Nightlee back to my other side because damn if they aren’t revving up to recite their list of injuries, which starts with the parts they gave to the rocks as babies and ends with mole biopsies and gallbladder removals.

“That’s nothing, I had dentures before I was thirty for all the teeth they took for the breccia.” This guy clicks his false teeth up and down, showing the pink crescent of his gums and I have to bury my face in the sweet shampoo smell of Nightlee’s scalp to keep from throwing up.

Mama Tracey chimes in from her chair.

“I can’t see a thing on account of that damn granite taking both my eyes.”

They murmur their approval.

The third guy smacks his walking stick on the porch with a loud rap. He raises his eyebrows and then opens his mouth to show off a crooked stub of a tongue in his cavernous mouth. He waggles it around with a slapping sound.

“I guess Dickie wins,” says Jack.

“Dickie always wins.”

“Goddamn that limestone.”

Dickie rests his chin on the top of the walking stick with a smug smile and I guess if you’re going to have your tongue carved out before your first birthday, then at least you should be able to one-up your friends.

“Anyways,” I say, eager to get away from the self-congratulatory torture roundtable. “How do I get Nightlee another rock besides granite?”

“Well,” says Jack, “There’s an order to things, CassieLyn. You can’t just choose the rock you want. Everybody would pick shale and the other rocks would come after the rest of us.”

“I’m not asking for shale,” because that would be ridiculous. Shale requires hair and anybody with half a brain would be willing to go bald instead of blind. “But if granite can wait a few months, Kaidence is having her baby in December–”

Jack reaches behind his chair for the Calendar. I let Nightlee pull tiny fistfuls of my hair and shove them into her mouth, even though it hurts like a bitch, because it keeps her quiet and I need to focus on this negotiation.

The Calendar is one of those big jobbers that spans a decade, one year on every page. Jack’s marked the due date for each rock in tiny little block letters that they don’t teach us how to make at school any more.

“Well,” he says, tracing the months backwards to last year. “It’s been twenty-three months since granite had an eye.”

“The longest granite ever went without was twenty-six months,” says Toeless.

“Right, but Kaidence’s baby comes at twenty-seven months on the granite. Isn’t that, like, within the martian of error?” I ask.

They’re quiet for a bit, looking back and forth with little smiles. For about five seconds I think I have a real shot. Then the mute one shakes his head, quick and snappy like a drill sergeant.

“Dickie’s right,” says Jack. “We can’t chance it. The granite could come for anybody. You’d be risking everyone’s life. We can’t allow that.”

“Think of the common good, CassieLyn.”

“Take one for the team so everyone wins,” says Mama Tracey and I suddenly feel all ganged up on. “We all gave our due.”

“And then some,” says Jack, waving toward Mama Tracey, who nods even though she can’t see him wave.

They’re all fuckers. Especially that Jack, who owes me at least a little leeway, considering the places my mouth has been on him. I tilt my head like I’m concerned.

“I gotta mention, Jackie, that I noticed a bump on your prostate when my finger was up there the other night. You should probably get it checked out. For the common good.”

Jack’s mouth flaps open and his friends whoop and holler, all except the mute one who bangs his stick on the wooden porch.

As I leave the porch my heel misses the last step. I sort of slip-slide and come down hard, kneeling on the packed dirt. It’s a depth perspective problem on account of my missing eye. But Nightlee didn’t fall because I’d never let go of her no matter what.

“Don’t hurt yourself, Miss CassieLyn,” says Jack in a singsong voice that makes my arms go all goose bumpy.

I lift my middle finger over my head and hold it where Nightlee can’t see, as I don’t curse in front of my baby. I’m going to have twenty minutes free on Tuesday nights from here on out, I guess.

Schist requires an ear, so Kaidence probably won’t swap for an eye, but I’ll kick myself if I don’t ask. A missing ear is easy to work with, just grow your girl’s hair long to cover it up. And since they only slice off the outside part, not the guts inside, schist people hear just as well as anybody else. You always find a way to work around the pieces they take off you.

Kaidence’s trailer is at the back of the Shipyard, which is just a trash dump with a fancy name. As I pick my way around old tires and broken bottles, Nightlee starts making little grunty noises. I realize I should’ve brought a bottle with me.

I knock on Kaidence’s door and her boyfriend Cody answers. Now I learned at the regional high school, where we all got bussed to an hour each way, that there are two kinds of Codys in this world. One is the type with white teeth who runs track and is a mathlete or some other activity that doesn’t require stitches. That type of Cody won’t give someone like me the time of day.

Then there’s this other type of Cody, who shoots himself in the leg showing off his new rifle and decorates one entire wall of his bedroom with empty Crown Royal bottles. That Cody will be all over you, but he’s an anchor who’ll drag you down. I don’t know if there are other types of Codys in the world, but I haven’t met one yet.

Cody Tigh was the second kind of Cody.

“Is Kaidence here?” I ask, standing sideways on the stairs so that Nightlee is on the far side of me, because you never know what the second kind of Cody is liable to do. And also, Cody Tigh has a particular interest in my Nightlee.

“Maybe.” He draws the word out real long to make sure I know he’s gonna make me work for it, but I’m not playing today. I back down two stairs, making it look like I’m leaving.

“Okay. I’ll come back.”

“She’s here. I’ll let you in if I can hold the baby,” he says, smiling at me with blue-stained teeth.

Now I have a carborundum on my hands, because on one side I do not want to give my baby girl to Cody Tigh who is a liar and a cheater. And on the other side, he’s kind of Nightlee’s father so I think I am required by law to let him and her have a visitation.

After a minute, I hold Nightlee out under her armpits. Cody glances over at the window of the trailer, but the tv is up loud and Kaidence isn’t going to look up from her shows.

He takes Nightlee from me and squashes her against his chest like he’s holding a biology textbook. She meeps and squirms.

“Not so tight. Just hold her bottom half. She can sit up by herself.”

He touches Nightlee’s cheek.

“She’s pretty soft.”

“Yep.”

“And wet.”

“As always.”

A muffled voice comes from inside the trailer.

“Code, did you get my smokes?”

Cody shoves Nightlee back at me so fast that her head knocks me in the mouth and she squeals.

“Dammit Cody, be careful.”

I ruffle her fuzz and find two little imprints from my front teeth. Not bleeding, but swelling up all red.

Cody is in the house like a shot and I follow him. He rummages through a plastic grocery bag on the kitchen table and tosses a fresh pack of cigarettes to Kaidence on the couch. She looks over her shoulder and her eyes go like slits.

“CassieLyn, you have no business being in my house.”

“I came to ask you something.”

She ignores me and whacks the package on her palm for a good long time. The trailer smells like mildew and everything’s buttery yellow from the sheen of old smoke. I was here years ago, when Kaidence’s mom and dad were alive and the place was kept up. Her dad died when the gneiss was left for too long without a nose. People say that three-ton hunk of stone dropped right out of the sky onto his Cavalier.

Kaidence lights up. Smoke drifts past beams of sunlight shining through a dozen tiny holes in the living room wall. Someone’s been trigger-happy with a shotgun. I’d place my bets on Cody.

I sit on the corner of the couch, putting my knuckle in Nightlee’s mouth to keep her quiet. Kaidence leans back and rests a hand on her belly to remind me that she also has a baby from Cody Tigh.

“I talked to the Calendar boys and they said we can trade rocks, schist for granite, as long as you’re willing,” I say, trying to make it sound more official by bringing up the Calendar.

Kaidence makes a sound like the air coming out of a balloon and takes a long drag. I can see her eyes say no before her mouth says anything.

“You are stupider than they say, CassieLyn. No one would trade an ear for an eye.”

“I can pay.”

“How much?”

I have a dozen twenties saved up. Plan A is swapping rocks with Kaidence. Plan B is a bus ticket to Albuquerque.

“Two hundred.”

Kaidence puts her head back against the couch.

“Jee-zus, that’s an insult. I’m not raising up a half-blind kid for two hundred dollars. No offense.”

A roach skitters across her thigh. Her pale skin twitches, but she doesn’t swat it away. I stand up, hoping none of the bugs are on my clothes. Things that crawl on you in trailers are sometimes hard to get rid of.

I turn to see Cody Tigh behind me, holding his hunting knife.

“If you aren’t giving the baby’s eye to the granite, you have find a replacement,” he says, picking at his thumbnail with the blade, “You giving your other one?”

My stomach clenches. I fight the urge to step back. You never show a Cody you’re afraid or they’ll tail you like a coyote until you’re exhausted and weak and they take anything they want.

“Definitely,” I say, leaning so close that I can smell blue raspberry Jolly Rancher on his breath. His eyes widen. “I’m gonna use the same knife they used to carve that big-ass hole in the middle of your face.”

He puts up his hand without thinking, checking that his prosthetic nose hasn’t come loose. It’s still on tight, but I see the split-second flash of fear in his eyes. And he knows that I see.

“Get out,” he says with a hitch in his voice and I feel triumphant and awful at the very same time.

On the walk home, Nightlee is full on crying so that every damn person in town stares at me and thinks about what a terrible mother I am. I stick my knuckle in her mouth again, but when she sucks and comes up dry, she screams even louder.

As I pass Dell’s, there’s a crash that sounds like train-on-train action from the lot behind the store. The old guys hit the deck and people come trotting out of every building on Main. Nightlee is startled into silence by the kind of booming vibration that you feel in your heart.

“What the hell was that?” asks Mama Tracey, picking herself up off the ground.

I’m guessing people are just pretending they don’t know, because we’ve all heard that noise before. It’s the sound of one of the rocks smashing into a house.

I come around Dell’s and take a minute to figure out where the trailer used to be, because I can only see the basalt, standing on its small end like a skyscraper.

It’s nestled in the new guy’s place. He was passing through last year and found our little town so very welcoming that he stayed the night. We’re good at making strangers feel at home. Spend one night here and the rules say you’re in the rock rotation, just like the rest of us.

When we told him about the requirements, he laughed and refused to give a finger to the basalt. I thought maybe some of the men would hold him down and take it from him, but they said it was fine to wait. Based on the Calendar, that rock had plenty of time on it.

They even offered him a trailer for free. I think he was glad to have a place where no one questioned who he was or how he ended up here. Which is not too great a criteria for picking new neighbors.

Every day those men on the porch at Dell’s would remind him to give the basalt his finger. Tick tock… the rocks only wait so long. But that guy, he dicked around playing his guitar, fishing the stream, and drinking PBR in his yard.

When it got close to a year, they warned him that the basalt was nothing to mess around with. The longest the basalt had ever waited was fifteen months, so time was a-wasting. This week, he’d just about made up his mind to give his right pinkie–which you don’t need for strumming–when the basalt decided it had waited long enough.

That’s one thing we do know about the rocks. They don’t always come for us in a particular order, but they do love them some newcomer blood.

Around the back of Dell’s, that monstrous rock has dropped straight through the top of the trailer, blowing the walls down flat like the petals of a daisy.

It sits in what used to be the kitchen. A pair of legs splays out from underneath–like the wicked witch but with cowboy boots. We tried to tell him.

“Idiot,” says the man next to me, holding a pair of bolt cutters with nine fingers. “Shoulda just gave it.”

Even on my bad side, I feel his stare on Nightlee. If granite doesn’t get its due soon, it’ll come for her or anyone with an eye left.

“You know they’re careful about it,” says the bolt cutter man in what he thinks is a soothing voice that makes my butt tingle. “They’ll put her to sleep and like a real operation. Doctor Inez takes good care that nobody gets an infection. They’ll make the socket look real nice. Even better than when you were a kid.”

He reaches out to touch Nightlee’s head and I yank her away. He spits his chew onto what used to be the bathroom wall, kneeling down to pull off the dead man’s boots. He positions his cutters and starts crunching off toes one-by-one. No one knows for sure if recently alive parts count for anything, but we’re not going to pass up the opportunity to try.

I see my dad near the edge of the crowd. Our eyes meet for a second and I hurry away from him, but he’s faster because he’s not carrying a twenty-two pound baby.

“You give that granite your girl’s eye, understand?” he says into my ear. I smell his cologne and it smells good and terrible. I stop walking even though I don’t mean to.

“Get out of here, Ed,” I say. “You don’t have claim over me no more.”

Nightlee reaches out and grasps a strand of his greasy hair, pulling him closer to her wet face.

“Hi baby,” he says in a gentle voice that makes my breath stop moving.

I pull back, but his hair is all caught up in her fingers and we can’t go anywhere.

“Get off,” I say. “I’m not giving the granite her eye.”

I’m talking too loud and a few lookie-loos peel away from the dead man and come to watch us instead.

“I didn’t raise you a fool, CassieLyn. You give that eye or the rocks will come for her.”

“They’ll come for all of us,” says Jack, walking up behind me. “Get your girl in line, Ed.”

I untangle strands of gray-black hair out from between Nightlee’s fingers. The loops pinch tight when I pull and she howls.

People press in on all sides of me.

“Ed, we can’t have this. There’s an order to things,” says Toeless.

“If she won’t give it willingly, we’ll have to take steps. The rocks are moving a lot these days and the granite isn’t going to wait.” Jack drapes his arm around me, but turns to face my father. “You don’t want it to be like Linda, Ed.”

The way he says my mother’s name, my throat gets all tight and tingly. I clear it a few times and try to cough the hurt out.

“CassieLyn,” says Jack, reaching up to brush his thumb across my eyebrow that frames a big, smooth hole. “Just a quick nap and it’ll be over. I promise she won’t feel anything. You don’t want to end up like your mama, do you?”

He pulls a funny face and Nightlee giggles. My outsides are frozen in place, but my insides are throbbing in time to my heart. I feel like I’m thirteen again, moving to this tiny desert town with my parents. Mom has a new job as a third-grade teacher and I’m hearing some made-up story from the other kids about rocks that fall from the sky and the body parts everyone gives to keep them from killing. I’m hearing my mother’s screams as people grab her outside of school one morning. They already have a substitute teacher lined up. I’m meeting my mother at our front door the next day. She looks down at me, groggy and mute. Her hands shake so hard as she packs up that half the clothes stick out the sides of her suitcase. I’m screaming myself hoarse as my blank-faced father hands me over to the people who gather in our yard. I’m thrashing against the callused hands of four grown men pressing my arms and legs onto a metal table before the IV makes everything go white. I’m waking up under a patchwork of bandages and gauze, turning my head when my father whispers that I did a good job and I’m safe from the granite now.

If I don’t agree, they’ll pluck Nightlee right out of her playpen in the middle of the night.

“Okay,” I say quietly. “But I get to bring her in.” I stop talking and press my lips together so no one sees them shake.

Jack smiles.

“Good girl. We’ll do it tomorrow, as soon as the doctor gets in.”

I nod, because that’s all I can get to come out of me.

My father puts his hand on Nightlee’s head and I have to fight myself hard to let him keep it there.

“It’ll be all right, CassieLyn. You’ll see.”

His eyes are wet, but mine are dry. That’s how you can tell I’m the stronger person. He gave in to them when I was thirteen, but I won’t ever give in for my Nightlee.

The crowd breaks up and shuffles toward home for dinner and television shows and turning down sex for the tenth night in a row. But I stand behind Dell’s for a minute, listening to a nearby dog echo Nightlee’s hungry howl. Something moves behind me and again there’s Cody Tigh, leaning against a stop sign watching us, still picking his nails with that hunting knife. That boy must have the cleanest nails in Cibola County.

“You want my help, CassieLyn?” he asks. I can barely hear him over Nightlee. I turn toward home and walk as fast as I can.

“I do not.”

Cody’s footsteps fall in line behind mine.

“I know you’re going to run away. Probably got a bus ticket to Albuquerque. But I’m telling you it doesn’t work that way.”

Cody Tigh was born here and they took his nose when he was too little to make a fuss. He likes to lord his knowledge of the rocks over me and all the other newcomers.

“They’ll find you and drag you back unless the granite gets an eye,” he says, sheathing the knife.

People are looking out of their windows, watching us pass, on account of Nightlee and Cody’s big mouths. Like father, like daughter.

“Shut up,” I say, turning and walking backwards. “Everyone can hear.”

“I’m saying you need a replacement eye. So the baby doesn’t have to give up hers.” He grabs my free arm and pulls me toward him.

With both hands occupied, I’ve got nothing left to hit with, so I twist my arm around his until he has to let go.

“You get off me. Leave us alone. You can’t have my other eye.”

My heart is pounding and I can barely hear myself think above the whooshing in my ears. I watch Cody’s hands to make sure he doesn’t take out that knife again, since he seems dead set on taking my good eye tonight.

He holds his hands up like he’s surrendering.

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

“You keep following me like we have business, but we do not,” I say.

“We kinda do,” he says, looking first at Nightlee, then at me.

“You have not once taken an interest in this baby, so don’t pretend you’re suddenly going to become the Bill Cosby father of the year.”

Cody shoves his hands in his pockets so deep that the change rattles at the bottom.

“Things are different now. I mean, maybe they could be,” he says so quietly that I almost don’t hear.

I don’t know what he’s offering, but if it’s him asking to move in with me because his pregnant girlfriend is tweaking all the time and taking his cash, well he is greatly mistaken.

“I don’t believe you, Cody Tigh. People don’t change and nobody does things just to be nice.” I shoo him along. “You get going now to your Kaidence and lie in the bed you made for yourself. Me and Nightlee are not your concern.”

I spin on my heel to make a big exit and of course my flip-flop gets all twisted and comes off. I bend over to fix it and Nightlee, suddenly upside down, is stunned into quietness. I hear Cody’s voice, very soft, right before he heads back to the Shipyard.

“I’ll make you believe.”

And the hair on my arms is standing up again.

At our place, Nightlee takes her bottle cold, sucking down formula with her eyes closed and cute little groans coming out after every breath.

While she eats, I put together a go-bag for each of us. We have to get out now because that Cody Tigh will dog you until you give in. And we have an appointment in the morning that I have no intimation on keeping.

I don’t have a car, but there’s a bus stop an hour outside of town. I was hoping to leave Sunday afternoon, when everyone’s glued to their televisions watching football, but it’s cooler to walk there after dark anyways. We’ll get to Silver City by dawn and on to Albuquerque.

I pull the folded stack of twenties from inside a sock and hope it’s enough for a ticket. I don’t know how much tickets are or if there’s even room on a bus for a stroller.

I pack so many cans of formula that the stroller basket under Nightlee scuffs against the road. I’m wearing my high boots with thick socks because even though I have a blacklight for picking out scorpions, I don’t have three D batteries and Dell’s is closed.

The sun is down and the blackflies dive-bomb both of us. There’s no way to keep the mosquitoes and no-see-ums off either, but at least it’s not completely dark. The moon is mostways full, so I can see the centerline of the road.

An animal brays in the distance. It’s a thick sound, all hoarse with pain. There’s something big getting attacked out there in the desert. A group of coyotes can take down something the size of a horse when they all work together. As a group, they’re stronger than the individuals that make it up. Even weak ones missing toes or tongues are dangerous when they’re in a pack.

My skin prickles as I see two headlights shining away from me up ahead. Up at the granite that makes me nervous anyway, for obvious reasons.

The animal cries again, low and gargling, like it’s choking on something wet. I fix my eyes on a bright spot on the horizon–the gas station near the bus stop–and move as fast as I can. I put my boot down and something slithers out from under it. I shiver, but keep on walking.

We’re passing the granite and I notice that I’m holding my breath. There’s something moving on top of the huge slab. It suddenly makes sense–the sounds I’m hearing. Someone’s killing an animal up there, which is stone cold stupid because if the rocks took animal parts, I wouldn’t be trotting down this road in the dark stepping on god-knows-what right now.

The animal yells again, but it doesn’t sound like a horse. It’s moaning like a person. I wish I’d greased up the stroller wheels, because they’re squeaking like the door of a haunted house right now, calling all sorts of attention to us.

Headlights light up the granite. It’s a flat slab, tipped over on its side, like a table about chest high. Someone’s on top of it, curled up in a fetus position like they’re doing a cannonball into a stone pool.

I watch to see if they make a move towards us, trying to keep those squeaky wheels from getting snagged on tumbleweed bits.

We’re mostways past the granite when the moaning person puts out an arm and drags themself to the edge of the rock. They ease down the side feet first. As the headlights catch them around the waist, I recognize that ass. It’s Cody Tigh.

He turns frontways and his pants are spattered with a spin art of blood. He can’t seem to lift his feet properly and his boots catch in the sand. He falls to his knees, shirt all soaked. He presses a rag to his face and stares into the headlights with a blank look like his mind isn’t completely there. He leans back against the granite and stops moving. I hear his heavy breathing from thirty feet away.

Cody’s other eye is still open, but doesn’t move when I wrestle the stroller closer through the sand, not even when I nudge his leg with my toe. His hands have dropped into his lap, but the rag sticks to his raw eye socket, hanging there like a limp white flag. The moonlit outline of a tiny, bloody ball sits on top of that great big rock.

“Damn you, Cody. What the hell did you do?”

He turns toward the sound of my voice and I brace my knees a little, ready to drag that stroller back to the road if I have to run.

“You don’t have to go now, CassieLyn. You both can stay.” His words sound like they’re rasping through half a bottle of whiskey. And really, I don’t blame him for that, seeing as what he’s undertaker here tonight.

There’s a sizzling sound, like those fajita skillets they bring out at a fancy restaurant. Cody’s eye is smoking in the moonlight on top of that granite. Hand to God, it sinks right the hell into the top of the stone. Sucked into the rock like a drop of water into a dry sponge. Makes me wonder if you could wring out the rock and get all our parts back.

I take a big sigh full of cool night air and catch a little no-see-um in my throat that makes it go tight. Or something like that. I clear it away and make a speech to that boy marinating in his own blood next to the granite.

“While I am very much grateful for your generosity toward my Nightlee, we’re leaving anyways.”

“Take me with you.” The blood is drying fast. When Cody talks the smears on his cheeks flake off onto his hands like a tiny red snowfall.

“No, honey. You’re dead weight. I will take your car though. Just borrowing it until you get better, understand? You can’t drive until you figure out depth perception anyways. Trust me. When you’re all fixed up, you come find me in Albuquerque and–.”

He raises one shaking hand to interrupt me and I lean down close to his ear, smelling that penny red reek of fresh blood. He opens his mouth and I’m suddenly dreading what he has to say that’s so important he has to gouge out his eye to get my attention.

Being so close, I can see the seam between his prosthetic nose and rest of his face. I feel a pang in my belly. It’s not right when people give more than their due. Folks like that end up begging on the stoop like Mama Tracey. Thinking on that makes me put my finger across his sticky lips.

“Shh. I believe you, Cody Tigh,” I whisper. Under my finger, the corners of his mouth rise and I see his blue raspberry Jolly Rancher teeth.

Nightlee doesn’t wake up when I move her from the stroller to the back of Cody’s car. I shove the rest of our stuff in the trunk, on top of fishing gear and a couple of rifles. The keys are in the ignition and we’ve got half a tank of gas and $200 cash.

Cody holds up his hand as I put it in reverse. I don’t know if he’s saying goodbye or asking me to wait, but I keep going anyways and under the dash I give the finger to that big old rock that I never want to see again.

As we turn onto 152 North, I call Jack and tell him to go get Cody from the granite. If he stays out all night something’s liable to eat him. Save him from one coyote pack by handing him over to another. Sometimes, you just can’t win.

I’m ready for Jack to yell at me, but he’s quiet and respectful, like maybe he imagines I dug out Cody’s eye myself. Let him keep right on thinking that.

The radio is loud, playing a song about a man who lost his love then found her again. I flick it off and listen to the coyote pack get farther away instead. I’ve got a lot to think over. Apparently, there is a third kind of Cody in this world. I believe I have just met one of them.

 

 

The post PseudoPod 559: Granite Requires appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : T.R. North
• Narrator : Justine Eyre
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Marty Perrett
• Discuss on Forums

PseudoPod 558: Toward the Banner of the King is a PseudoPod original.

 

Thanks to our sponsor, ARCHIVOS – a Story Mapping and Development Tool for writers, gamers, and storytellers of all kinds!

Toward the Banner of the King by T.R. North

In times past I often dreamt I was driving a carriage through the deserted streets of an alien city.  In spite of the strangeness of the city, it seemed utterly familiar to me; in spite of the utter waste it presented, whenever I paused, passengers would appear and alight.

They were all masked, as was I.  Communication between us was unnecessary, as there was only one fit destination in the whole of the city.  They were dressed in fine clothing, but it had the air of costume, and I could find nothing of their true condition in it.

No matter how many passengers I took on, the carriage never filled.

No matter how long I drove, we never drew so close as to see the crest on the yellow banners adorning the distant towers.

I did not miss those dreams when they ceased, but sometimes during waking moments I would try to tease some meaning from them.  I spoke of them only once, to my dear sister Camilla, who scolded me for dwelling on such nonsense. “It’s a nightmare, that’s all, Cassilda.”

Her words might have been some comfort if the dreams had frightened me, but it was hardly fear they instilled.  They left me with a sense of dread, but also with a sense of great anticipation.  I would not wait trembling for the blow to fall, but wished to rush headlong to meet it.

It has always been thus with me.  Of the two of us, I inherited our mother’s leaning toward mania; my twin received as her portion our mother’s penchant for melancholy.  She named us, in one or the other of such moods, after the doomed princesses in that most scandalous of all books, The King in Yellow.  She’d never read it, she later confessed, never even laid eyes on the work.  The last qualifier I thought hard to credit, but she was insistent.

Camilla might have escaped remark upon her name had it not been paired with mine, and I believe this was the root of her resolution to shun me as much as she could bear once we grew older.

It pained me, but, I must confess, not so much as it ought.  We were very nearly identical in form and figure, the only physical difference between us being a lighter tint to her hair and eyes.  But she had a cast to her expression and features that transubstantiated her loveliness into something very nearly angelic while I remained of common clay, and seeing us together was enough to mar the effect of her grace.  Relieved of the burden of my presence, she could flit about the periphery of fashionable circles without hindrance.  Her beauty and sweet temper were all the introduction she needed, and her fairness was such that it always procured for her some admirer to nurse her through her periods of despondency.

But though she sometimes saw me as a weight about her neck, there were times when I shrank from her as a worm from sunlight.  Standing next to me might have dragged her down to the mortal realm, but standing next to her showed me up as a denizen of the depths infernal.  Every sensuous or vicious thought seemed stamped plainly on my features when compared to hers, and wholesome men shuddered to look on me as readily as the dissolute figured me for a confederate.

It might have led to some great crime or treason against nature if I’d had our mother’s temperament, but I am hardly so ambitious.  I simply reordered my heart to feel contentment in my sister’s absences and resolved to make my way in the world as best I could without compounding our mother’s infamy.

We were told that she had once been a woman of no consequence, interested only in her paints and the affections of the man who would become our father.  She had been deranged by his sudden abandonment, her fate sealed when it was discovered that she would soon be delivered of his daughters.

I have never for a moment believed that story, recited by our grandmother as a prophylactic against us taking up our mother’s habits.  Our mother had been a fury determined to smash her likeness onto the facade of history, and she had raised us until our eleventh year.  That she could ever have been other than as we knew her seemed incredible.

I had also read in her own words of how violently she had loved our father.  I discovered her diary soon after her death and secreted it among my own childish books to keep it safe from our grandmother’s purging hands.  Our father had been a man bound for the seminary, a path from which she’d tempted him only just long enough to conceive us.  She’d been grief-stricken at his absence, surely, but in equal parts she had raged at him for his desertion.

He’d begged leave from her side to attend mass one night.  She’d watched him slip into the churchyard like an apparition, then gone home again to attend to her salon and carouse with her companions until dawn.  Only as the sun rose had she noticed his failure to return.  A bribe paid to the watchman, a foul-visaged fellow who’d made her skin crawl, had bought the answer that no one had stirred through the very gate she’d seen him take with her own eyes.

She’d struck the watchman for a liar, and he had but smiled and begged her pardon and insisted that no living soul had stepped foot across the threshold between sunset and sunrise.  In the end, with no further recourse, she’d wrenched her purse out of his hands and spit in his face to pay back his bad faith.

Our father was never heard from again, as if he’d fallen into some great crack in the earth and been swallowed up entirely.  For his abandonment, he was condemned to an afterlife of haunting our mother’s paintings, cast always in the role of a tragedy or a suicide.  Her Hyacinth, her Marsyas, her Actaeon, her Seneca: all the same silent prisoner mourning in the confines of his canvas purgatory.

The last great restraint on our mother’s behavior being thus overthrown, she established in her orbit Anarchists, proponents of free love, adventurers of both sexes, and even men reported to have been German spies during the war.  Her aspirations as an artist outstripping both her natural talent and her taste for industry, she was better known as a model than a painter.  The last mercy she showed us was to pose mostly en masque when lacking any other sort of drape, for we both came to resemble her strongly in face and form as we grew to womanhood.

It was a kindness shown more to Camilla than to myself.  I took to brushes and pigments before I took to dolls and the needle.  I had little more inborn genius than our mother, but my training was far better and my application to the task far more vigorous.  I was thus able to earn my living as a painter, and, marked out as something of an oddity by my own rights, I had little concern for the memory of our mother’s behavior.  Poor Camilla’s patrons required a less tarnished reputation in their dear muse.

At times she sat for me as a model, either as a sororal favor or whenever some rich benefactor insisted on a keepsake portrait.  On those latter occasions I entered the house veiled and permitted no one but Camilla to watch me at my work, lest the sight of me blast the scales from her lover’s eyes.  If they chafed at the restrictions, it was nothing to us; Camilla refused to sit for any artist but me.  She insisted that it was because I alone could capture her proper being, and she would be immortalized by no other.

“They think there’s some magic to it,” Camilla had confided. “All this mummery about your veiling yourself and forbidding the servants entrance.  I think it’s because no one loves me as you do, and you paint a perfection which exists in your keen eye and nowhere else.”

“It exists in the mirror every time you sit before it,” I told her.  She gave herself too little credit, at times.

It was my business as a painter which first introduced me to Elliott.  It is uncommon to find a model as pliant and good-natured as he, while at the same time being handsome and clean-limbed.  He afforded me study after study of anything I could wish in terms of Olympic heroes, saints, prophets, and martyrs.  I spent the finest months of one summer molding him into Lord Byron, Gideon, Perseus, and Saint Sebastian in turn.  He was still when I wished it and talkative when I grew restless, and he proved to have an endless supply of amusing anecdotes from his time as a student in Paris.  Is it any wonder I grew fond of the man, perhaps overly so?

He was a painter, though I had not then seen his work, and I was intrigued when he asked if I might model for him.  I had already put him through his paces on canvas, wringing from him every shade of human emotion, depicting him in torment and ecstasy.  That he wished a portrait of me to grace his own studio’s wall was an overture returned.

I proposed to wear a mask for the painting, after the fashion of our mother.  It was some spirit of impishness that moved me to make the offer, or perhaps consideration for Camilla’s circumstances.  It mattered not: He rejected the notion out of hand and laughed as if at a jest.  My sweet face was the part of me he liked best, he said, and his determination on that point flattered me.

We began at once and continued as my own work permitted, though he refused to let me see the painting as it progressed.  I must admit that his apparent reserve aroused my curiosity, for I had seen his handiwork on other subjects by then.  He had cause for modesty on neither technical nor artistic grounds.  The mystery pricked at me until at last I resolved to contrive some excuse for lingering the next time he went out, and so settle my mind.

The opportunity was not long in presenting itself; some fellow-scholar from his Paris days came calling unexpectedly, and I was left to my own devices while he saw to the man as best he could.

I stole toward the easel like a thief in the night, careful lest my footfalls or even my very breath should betray my intentions.  A terrible fear gripped my heart as I approached, though I saw no reason for it in that moment, and I gently raised the curtain he’d drawn across the canvas.  The scene which met my eyes seemed far too cheerful, far too domesticated, to provoke the devastation it wrought in my breast.  I stood like Niobe, turned to stone and yet still able to weep; the woman Elliott had painted was not me but dear Camilla!

Undone, I turned from the dreadful sight.  My eyes fell on the traitorous palette, left on the bench and marked with a hue far too bright for my own hair but the very likeness of Camilla’s.  A sudden fury seized me such as I had never felt before.  Even in my childish rages, even standing before the bonfire our grandmother made of our mother’s last possessions, clutching that salvaged diary and wishing blood and hellfire on her gray head, I had not been so furious with the world’s perfidy.  It was as if I stood at the center of a great maelstrom, and the only decision yet to be made was whether to let it fall upon the work or the man himself.

I drew the curtain again and arranged myself carefully so that he would have no inkling that he was discovered.  I had Eve’s example to guide me; no good came from sharing ill-gotten knowledge with faithless men.  But I could not bear to face him in that moment, and so I left the studio without notice or accounting.  I retreated to my own apartments to let the coals I’d lit in his blaze their fullest.

I resented Camilla’s loveliness.  I admit it openly.  Ever had she been the darling, the instant object on which all love fastened, while I skulked in the shadows.  The barb of seeing her reflected in my lover’s eye when he gazed upon me sank deep, deep, and pierced me to the heart.  But I’d have sooner unveiled that canvas to see a goblin squatting on the couch than my own form so transfigured.  Elliott’s brush had robbed me of all, of even the dignity of being despised for myself.  In his studio, I had become some base idol, a proxy by which he could worship his true goddess.

At last, alone in my chambers, I became mistress of myself again.  Elliott and I had spent much time in each other’s company, and he had never mentioned my dear Camilla.  She would sit for no one but me.  She would be painted by none but my hand.  It was possible that Elliott did not know her, did not love her, but had only been rebuffed by her as a pretty woman rebuffs a forward painter.  If that were the case, I could consign his canvas to the fire, break his brushes, threaten to tear out his eyes for their sin, and be satisfied.  But if he had paid court to her, had declared his love and dogged her steps and come to me after she had cast him out?  I was resolved to ruin his happiness as thoroughly as he had wrecked mine.

I did not come to him again, and I bolted my door against him.  I gave out that I was ill, afflicted with a fever, and he did not question it or try to gain admittance to see me.  Thus alibied, I slunk after him like a ghost for the next fortnight and observed him without being seen.  I could not have guessed that I was so far from his thoughts.  I stood within arm’s reach of him on several occasions, and never once did his eyes light on me.  I was farther from his notice than the sparrows quarreling over scraps of bread in the park, for at least those afforded him some amusement.

It became clear over the course of this haunting that Camilla was Elliott’s frequent companion.  They were not lovers yet, but she had not turned him away.  My heart broke at the smiles she bestowed on one so false, and after that I followed him no more.  To Camilla I said nothing.

I tried to console myself with my paints, but it was hopeless.  No matter my subject or palette, the portrait took on a jaundiced hue and a sickly shape.  Everything I put to canvas, wood, or paper seemed shot through with the brass of my hair or limned with the gold of Camilla’s.  If I made a brush of my tresses and bled the color into the paint, I could have achieved no more loathsome an effect.

With my paintings blighted and my mind thus disordered, I turned to the one remnant I had of our mother.  It was a poor substitute for a mother’s embrace, or soothing words, or a soft hand stroking the brow and calming troubled dreams.  But then our mother had not been much of a woman for those blandishments while it had still been in her power to bestow them, before death had stilled her savage heart forever.

When I had seen what our grandmother intended for our mother’s silks and paints and sketchbooks, I had slipped the diary into the paper wrap of a child’s Bible with a child’s cunning.  The one was sacrificed to save the other, and in this way the diary had escaped the flames of perdition.  Even once the book and myself were well and truly out of reach of the old woman’s matches, I had left the wrapper as a reminder of my first triumph.

I read the familiar words again, hearing our mother’s voice as I did so.  Alas, Cassilda!  Your lover was false.  Alas, Camilla!  Your lover is false.  Alas, Elliott!  Your foot shall find a stumbling block yet.  Alas, Carcosa!  Your king’s banner is his own ragged wings.

I woke before the fire with a start, unconscious of having fallen asleep.  The diary was open in my lap.  When I closed my eyes I could still see dark stars picked out against the backs of my eyelids, and suddenly I saw the instrument of my revenge, as ready to my hand as a sword.

I spent the next day scouring bookshops, beginning with the meanest and making my way to the richer establishments.  It was in a warm and seemingly wholesome place that I finally found the serpent I intended for the cradle of Elliott’s happiness.  The proprietor spoke of the perfection of art and the smoked-quartz waters of beautiful Demhe, and he placed the book in my hands with a joy that almost saw him refuse my payment.  The coins had taken on an unhealthy sheen in my eyes, though, and I pressed them on him with my gratitude.

The King in Yellow vanished into my handbag with a slither like a live thing, and at another shop I found a book as alike in size and weight as possible.  Back in my studio and bathed in the bright sun, I worked like a thing possessed to effect the terrible transformation.

The harmless pages of the treatise on natural philosophy, I prised from their cover and gave over for kindling.  The King in Yellow I handled as carefully as I might have a preparation of Paris green, refraining from touching its leaves with a bare hand or letting its words be exposed to an unshielded eye.  A judicious application of glue and thread saw the tragedy neatly camouflaged, an asp exchanging its colors for those of the garden snake.  That my sister’s smiles would break Elliott’s heart yet, I put pen to paper and scratched out an inscription urging him to read the slim volume cover to cover without pause.  As I could forge my sister’s hand but not my sister’s mark, I left the thing unsigned.

The dagger in his breast would be anonymous, a fitting blow from the woman who’d offered herself bare but for a mask when first we’d ventured into this mire.

I wrapped the book in gaudy paper and left it for him with his concierge, then returned home to wait for the seed thus planted to bear its poisoned fruit.  That night I did not sleep, instead alternately walking the floorboards as I might a promenade or attempting yet another flawed portrait.  These works were even more soiled than those which came before, but I found that whatever ochre contaminant had crept into my paints displeased me less.  The works I produced that night were hideous in the light of day, and I fled the apartment rather than keep company with them.  They had, however, so distracted me that I had almost forgotten the work of the previous few days, and I was reminded with a jolt that Elliott might even now be laboring under the effects of my vengeance.

My feet were soon on the path to his studio, though what I hoped to see I knew not.  I approached his rooms with a sense of dreadful excitement, only to find the front door ajar, standing open wide enough to provide passage for a cat.  But Elliott owned no such animal, and I had to set my shoulder to the edge to force it open farther.  I found an ottoman overturned behind it, and the rooms in a grand disarray beyond that.

It had been a man’s strength which had so ransacked the studio, but in the center of it all, unstrung and weeping, was my beloved Camilla.  My eyes started from my head at the sight of her, and I recoiled when I realized what lay open in her hands.

She rose slowly to her feet when comprehension dawned on her tear-drenched face that her accidental enemy was there before her in the flesh.  She waved the book at me, pointing savagely at the inscription.

“What wrong have I done you that you damn me so?” she cried. “What sin have I committed that this is your revenge?”

I saw then with compounded horror the book as she had seen it.  The hand which I’d known Elliott’s hope would disguise as hers could never have been any but mine in her eyes.  The lack of a signature had been no proof against her reading the inscription as a sisterly whim, to be humored as I had so often humored hers.  Never has a blow struck been so bitterly regretted!

“Not you,” I swore. “Never you!  It was meant for Elliott, and Elliott alone!”

How gladly I convicted myself of the lesser crime as a defense against the greater!  She understood, then, and sank back to the couch with a heartbroken sob.  I realized with a sudden wildness the only proper atonement.  It was impossible to purge the book’s poison from her mind, but I could still drain the cup and join her in her sorrow.  I picked up the fatal tome and turned the page, my eyes seeking now what they’d so scrupulously avoided before.

“You mustn’t!” Camilla plucked it from my hands with a shrill cry and hurled it into the fire, her beautiful features stark in her anguish.  I protested, but it was too late.  The flames consumed the wretched thing as readily as the morning sun wipes frost from the window panes, and my attempts to pluck it from the hearth served only to blister my fingers.

Camilla, satisfied that the danger had passed, returned to her seat and wept.  Even in the most profound depths of her previous bouts of despair, I had never seen her so overcome.  She cringed when I tried to console her, fleeing my touch and eventually bidding me leave.  Terrified by the thought of what she might do if left to herself, I refused the order until she threatened to call the concierge to put me out bodily.  His loyalty was such that he might have obeyed her orders, even those given in such a state.  I relented, my coward’s heart quailing at the thought of being dragged into the street like a thief taken in the act.

I paced the city, blinded by grief and tortured by remorse.  How careless I’d been in laying my snare!  I could scarcely believe my sister’s fate, or that I had been the unwitting author of it.  The sang froid with which I’d applied myself to Elliott’s destruction abandoned me.  Elliott!  What was he when weighed against Camilla?  Nothing, less than nothing!  I’d pardon ten thousand Elliotts offenses far worse if it would spare but one Camilla!

When my eyes cleared, I found that I had come to the banks of the river.  I thought of filling my pockets with stones and wading into the water, of giving myself over to the current.  It was perhaps wide and deep enough to unstain my hands, or, failing that, at least blot out my wickedness.  The water was churned and slick, though, with a yellow scum dancing on its surface and turning to foam on its shore.  Repulsed, I turned away and looked once more to Elliott’s studio.  I would not abandon Camilla just yet, it seemed, or at least not in this way.

The smoke presaged one final disaster, and I found my return barred by policemen.  Behind them a bucket brigade waged a fruitless war against the flames engulfing the building from which I had been so lately ejected.  The upper floors, which Elliott’s studio had once occupied, had already collapsed.  I searched the crowd, desperate for a glimpse of Camilla’s face.  But even as I did so, I knew beyond doubt that she would not have fled the inferno.  I continued my vigil until the building was embers and ash behind a skeletal threshold.

Dawn saw the street deserted, but for a black carriage coming slowly up the lane.  It was an undertaker’s carriage, I saw, and upon closer inspection I realized that it had no driver.  A cold calm descended over me, and I was not surprised when it came to a halt before the orphaned doorway.

I stepped forward and opened the door, waiting.  In the dim and smoke-filthed light, a spectral procession of masked dancers dressed as though for a ball drifted from the ashes and climbed into the cab.  Camilla I knew by her gait and bearing, Elliott by his artist’s hands.  The last of them came arm in arm.  Our mother’s hair spilled over the lady’s shoulders, and our father’s eyes peered from behind the gentleman’s mask.  When all the shades had found their seats, I climbed onto the driver’s bench and took the reins.  I was certain of our destination at last.

It was not long before the twin suns rose, and I bore the revelers ever closer to the castle walls.  As the light glittered on the mirror surface of Hali, the Yellow Sign stood out on the banners, and I knew that we would soon be home.

The post PseudoPod 558: Toward the Banner of the King appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Luciano Marano
• Narrator : Dave Robison
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Chelsea Davis
• Discuss on Forums

PseudoPod 557: ‘Till the Road Runs Out is a PseudoPod original.

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‘Till the Road Runs Out by Luciano Marano

The ratty doublewide burned faster than they expected, and when the whiskey-fueled flames reached the meth lab in the trailer’s back bedroom, the explosion was likewise extraordinary.

Hicks gulped the last of the Jack Daniel’s, wiped his mouth with his hand. The flames were warm against his shirtless torso, his muscles hard and lean from his most recent turn inside. He leaned back on the Mustang’s hood, feeling toasty inside and out as he was tickled by the heat of the fire and the fuzzy embrace of booze. He ran a hand over his fresh buzz cut, crossed one booted ankle over the other and casually lobbed the empty bottle into the fire.

He cast an admiring glance at Dakota. He looked hot, like something out of a vintage heavy metal video, standing near the trunk in tight jeans, black boots and a tank top. Platinum highlights streaked through his long, raven-hued hair. Dakota hugged himself and watched his childhood home burn, a cocky smirk on his glossy lips. Hicks felt something at his feet and looked down to see a fat orange cat rubbing against him. He kicked it, not hard. It hissed. He chuckled.

Dakota stepped over, slapped his shoulder and picked up the cat. “Asshole,” Dakota said, nuzzling it lovingly. “Be nice to my pussy.”

Hicks shoved off from the car and pulled Dakota close, the warm cat pressed between them. He grabbed a handful of that luscious dark hair and pulled, just hard enough, the way Dakota liked, and said, “Fuck your pussy.”

Dakota’s tongue snaked out and licked Hicks’ stubbly chin. “Promises, promises.”

“First things first,” Hicks said. They kissed, the fire roaring before them. “First we see the Duke, sell this shit.” He looked at Dakota, looked him up and down real slow, like he enjoyed every inch of the view. “Then we’ll take care of the rest.”

Hicks opened the passenger door, and Dakota slid in, petting the cat. Hicks slammed it shut and walked around, grabbing his jacket from the top of the pile of bags in the backseat through the open window. It wasn’t much to look at, but it was everything worth taking from this place — plus a shitload of crystal.

Whatever else he’d been before he became barbecue, Dakota’s father had been a hell of a cook. He’d offered up his whole stash before Hicks had introduced his face to a shotgun. A right nice gesture. Of course, they were taking the stuff anyway. And his money. And his guns. His blubbery apologies were years too late for Dakota, and Hicks had done worse things for less worthy causes. Killing that S.O.B. had been just the cherry on the sayonara sundae on their way out of this pit.

“That was so hot, babe,” Dakota said. “The way you made him cry.”

Hicks put on his coat and slipped into the driver’s seat, gunned the engine and spared one more look at the conflagration. “Didn’t I tell you I’d take care of it?” Dakota hugged the cat. “Do you love me?”

“All the way, baby,” Hicks said. “Till the road runs out.”

He threw the hotrod in gear, peeled out and made for the highway, bearing down hard, chasing — and finally gaining on — his own little bloody slice of the American dream.

The Mustang devoured road. The engine roared like a hungry beast as they sped west into the humid north Florida night. Hicks turned his head and Dakota slipped a Marlboro between his lips, holding out the flaming Zippo. He sucked deep and pressed down on the gas. Ozzy wailed from the radio. Waffles slept on the bags.

“What kind of name is Waffles for a cat?” Hicks said.

Dakota only shook his head patronizingly, as if the question were too stupid to bother with, and lit a cigarette for himself.

Hicks said, “Good thing you’re pretty.”

Dakota rolled his sparkly eyes and smiled. He could be on his way to the grocery store instead of fleeing a murder scene. Hicks liked that. He’d been concerned that Dakota was all talk in the joint, and he’d watched real close for signs of doubt back at the trailer. When Dakota kicked things off, breaking a lamp over dear old Dad’s head, Hicks had known he was for real, and he had been glad. He’d had every intention of making off with the goods either way — alone, if need be. But that’s not how he wanted it. Not anymore.

Hicks wasn’t nervous either. He felt no guilt. The speeding was more for the joy of the ride, his love of his car and the rush of newly reclaimed freedom, than fear of getting caught. The cops didn’t come out here unless they had to. No neighbors in the trailer park would have called them. They all had secrets of their own to hide. The fire department would come, but even after they found the body it would look like another meth lab accident. By the time the so-called authorities figured how Brad Chambers actually bought it, they’d be long gone.

Hicks was calm, though he wouldn’t be totally at ease until after meeting with the Duke. He didn’t like drugs and he hated drug dealers, hated their fake-ass tough guy posturing and drama. Still, there was nobody better to help them unload a stash this size. The money wouldn’t be exactly fair, but it’d be pretty close. And for now, pretty close was close enough. He pulled a pistol from between the seats, switched it to his left hand.

“What are you doing?” Dakota said.

Hicks aimed at the highway marker and pulled the trigger without slowing down. A hole exploded in the green metal sign overhead, a crater replacing the dot above the “I.”

“Show-off,” Dakota said. His flirty giggle made Hicks think about porch swings and camp fires, sunny beaches and snow on Christmas, cold beer in the morning and hot sex at night. All good things.

Hicks replaced the gun. Dakota leaned over and laid on his chest, one hand moving under his jacket, lazily stroking the smiling devil tattoo on Hicks’ stomach. The kid was asleep in seconds. He wasn’t really a kid, of course, but he seemed so young to Hicks that sometimes there wasn’t anything else to call him. Hicks snuck a peek down, feeling Dakota’s warm, rhythmic breathing on his chest, and watched his lover’s closed eyes twitch. He’d been sneaking glances at the kid for days, thinking about not thinking about him, after Dakota first arrived inside, long before they actually met.

It had been Dakota’s first time in a real jail, and it had showed. Hicks had seen the kid take a few beatings, but he hadn’t stepped in. He’d been a career con doing his own time, and he’d only wanted to be left alone. Helping people got you killed, he knew that for certain, though Hicks had still not been able to help himself from thinking about the new arrival with the pretty eyes.

Theirs was not a meet-cute by any Hollywood standard, not even by porno standards. But we don’t get to choose who we love in this world, Hicks thought, no more so than we get to choose how we meet them. He had come across two big Aryans going at the kid, and he hadn’t thought twice. Having caught them with their pants actually down, he had all the advantage he needed and more.

By the time the guards responded, Hicks had painted that cell in a fresh coat of red blood. To the hole he’d gone, but it was a small price to pay. When he came back to the block, Dakota was waiting for him. They started talking. When Dakota got out, there were letters. Letters became phone calls, visits. By the time Hicks got out, they’d had a plan. He’d made a few calls, picked up his car, and come calling on Dakota.

Happiness isn’t just for pretty people, Hicks thought. It’s not just for rich people, smart people or even just for nice people. After a lifetime of tough breaks and raw deals, bad choices and worse luck, he figured it was only fair that even a broken-down con inching ever further past forty had the right to a shot at some happiness in this fucked-up world. Everyone should get a chance, and this was his. He knew he wouldn’t get another.

But that was okay. One was all he needed.

He’d always been a good shot.

A solitary figure was stumbling down the dirt road, and Hicks could smell his happy ending begin to rot.

There shouldn’t be anybody out here, he thought. That’s the point of the spot. The Duke didn’t hold court in Nowhere, Alabama for the scenery. It was a lonely place a million miles from anywhere a sane person would want to be. He flicked on the high beams, recognized the wounded man and realized that as bad as he thought it might be, it was actually much worse. He threw the car into park.

“Stay here,” Hicks said to Dakota as he grabbed the pistol and got out. Before him the man fell to his knees into a widening pool of blood, squinting dazedly into the car’s lights.

“Georgie?” Hicks said, kneeling to look the man over closely. “It’s Hicks. What happened? Where’s your brother? Where’s Duke?”

Slowly, Georgie turned to look at Hicks and his bruised lips spread into a lazy smile. “I got guts,” he said, voice cracking with a sudden, tittering giggle. “I got guts, Hicks. So much guts.”

He really did. They were in his hands.

Cupped near his waist, Georgie carried two handfuls of dripping intestines. A few loose ends dangled absently, having slipped through his fingers. Blood and bile oozed out of the ragged gash in his stomach beneath a silk shirt that had once been white. Dakota’s door opened, but Hicks waved him back. He grabbed Georgie’s shoulder and shook him. “Where’s Duke? Who did this to you?”

“Santa Muerte,” Georgie whispered.

As cold as it was, Hick’s heart was gripped by icy fingers of fear at the words. Saint Death. A folk-tale god, deity of the damned. The skeletal Madonna had become the patron saint of murderers, drug dealers and even more deranged members of the underworld. Hicks had seen tattoos and prayer cards in the joint. Most of it was harmless, a sort of grass-roots religion among the new outlaw class. Like all religions, though, it had fanatics, and they were maniacs.

This was as ugly as could be. Legit Death Heads were bad news: a cult of criminals who worshipped the grim reaper. If Duke and his boys had run afoul of lunatics like that, there would be nothing left of them to save — not that Hicks was interested in coming to their rescue. What he wanted was much more practical than salvation.

“Georgie,” Hicks said. “Did Duke bring the money?”

No answer. The gutted man swayed on his knees, stared into the headlights.

Hicks tried again. “Did Duke bring the money? Is it still at the spot?”

Georgie retched, the bloody vomit spilling over the mound of exposed guts he cradled in his arms.

Hicks grabbed the man’s slim ponytail, jerked his head back and pressed the pistol to Georgie’s crotch. He spoke very slowly. “Is my money still at the spot? Answer me, or I swear I’ll bury your balls with whatever’s left of your brother.”

Georgie nodded. “He brings it.”

“Tell me where.”

“You’re not serious,” Dakota said. “We can’t.”

“We can’t,” Hicks agreed, pushing the Mustang off the dirt road. “I can.”

“Bullshit.”

“We can’t make a new life with fifty grand worth of ice. We need the money.”

“I’m going, too.” Dakota reached into the backseat and grabbed the shotgun.

“No,” Hicks said. “I’m just going to have a look.”

“Then there’s no reason I can’t go.”

Georgie moaned from the passenger seat.

Hicks said, “Don’t you bleed in my car, you stupid spic.”

Dakota held the gun by the slide and cocked it with one hand. He reached for the blue duffel bag that held the others and slung it over his shoulder, then smiled and blew Hicks a kiss. “Sissy.”

“Bitch,” Hicks said.

The night wind swept through the sparse trees and silence held sway over the world. One shot, Hicks thought. Make it count. “Fine. Let’s go.”

Waffles meowed in the backseat as he watched them leave, and Hicks couldn’t help but wonder: Was the fat bastard shouting encouragement or a warning at their backs?

The bonfire in the center of the circled vehicles burned bright, fueled by the bodies of the slain cartel members and the wood and shrubbery gathered beneath them. Duke and his gang were crucified, hoisted up on makeshift timber crosses, blazing away before the writhing orgy of carnage below them, a pyromaniac’s version of Jesus.

Hicks smelled the charred flesh before he saw it. He expected the worst, and he was not disappointed. At his side, he heard Dakota gag.

On the ground, the Death Heads painted each other with the innards of another body. They were naked, emaciated and awful to see. He’d heard that the true believers often starved themselves to look more like their gruesome god. Their skeletal fingers tore slippery pieces from the gaping wound in the dead man’s belly, smearing themselves with gore. The body had no head. Hicks saw three of the psychos off to the left, kicking something around like a soccer ball — something with long dark hair.

A putrid corpse dressed in white robes sat before the fire and the burning bodies in a ratty armchair. Dead flowers, along with severed body parts, were scattered around it. Burning red candles encircled the cult’s dreadful idol as it watched over the ritual.

Hicks and Dakota sank to the ground outside the light of the fire. Hicks counted at least eight of the cultists, maybe more in the clearing. Even if there had been nine or ten enemies, he might not have hesitated to take them on alone, armed as he was — he’d beaten worse odds. But Death Heads were something else.

Hicks eyed a black Durango with tinted windows on the far side of the fire. “There it is. That’s where Georgie said it’d be.”

Dakota shook his head. “No way.”

Hicks said, “I’m getting what we came here for.”

“We don’t need it. We’ve got cash already.”

“Not enough.”

A wail rose up from the gathering by the fire as the Death Heads finally clawed the eviscerated corpse apart.

“Fuck it,” Dakota said. “We’ll figure something out. Let’s just dump the drugs and bail.”

The kid didn’t get it. He couldn’t possibly understand what it had taken Hicks a lifetime of eating shit to learn. Starting fresh, hitting the road with nothing, is only exciting when you’re young. But after starting from scratch again and again, after having nothing for so long, Hicks knew it wouldn’t work. Not in the long run, and this time was for keeps. Till the road runs out, right? This was his shot. He was going to do it right, and that included getting that money.

They’ve said that hope is free, that it didn’t cost anything to have faith. Bullshit. Hicks knew they were full of it, whoever they were, and that hope was plenty expensive. A clean start, safe home, doctors, all the operations — the life that Dakota wanted, that he deserved? Hicks tallied these mounting aspirations in his mind’s ledger. A better tomorrow cost money. There was a whole lot of hope in the gutter. Hicks had spent enough time there to know.

“Go back and start the car,” he said. “Be ready.”

Hicks grabbed the bag, got up and moved into the darkness before Dakota could say anything else. He knew that if he gave himself half a chance, he’d stay. He’d give in and they’d leave with nothing. He walked fast, making his way around the edge of the firelight and staying behind the cars when he could. Dakota’s scared, pretty eyes burned in his mind, and the shrieks of maniacs rang in his ears.

Just one more bad thing, Hicks told himself. Just be that guy one more time and you’ll have the rest of your life — your real life, it starts today — to get over it.

Better men have done worse things.

Hicks reached the Durango and opened the door without being seen. He found the suitcase in the backseat, just like Georgie’d said he would. He opened it and began stacking packs of bills into the duffel bag beside the guns. Every squeal and scream from the fire made him jump. When he was finally done, he started back.

About fifteen feet from the SUV, something struck the ground to his left. The head. A wild kick had sent the dusty severed head flying high, arcing through the air to land, bounce and roll to a stop right next to him. The cult was quiet as all eighteen of their hollow eyes turned and stared at him in unison. Hicks leveled the shotgun.

The Death Heads fanned out and began to approach. Hicks thought of ordering them back and dismissed it. Even if they understood, they would not care about his threats. They loved death. What other threat could he offer?

He tucked the shotgun under his arm, and drew two pistols from his jacket pockets. The Death Heads were closing in fast, clawing their own flesh with sharp, dirty fingernails, working themselves up into a frenzy of bloodlust.

Hicks opened fire.

The tall bald man on his far left took the first shot in the chest and went down quick. On his right, Hicks managed to hit a woman in the shoulder. She spun around and fell, but she kept crawling toward him. His second shot found her head.

Hicks kept shooting as he backed toward the Durango. The seven left were spread further out now, flanking him in the dark like Halloween decorations come to life. He kept shooting at the four he could see.

Reaching the car, Hicks dropped the bag of money and the shotgun by his feet. He rested against the vehicle and sited a man with a grizzly beard. The first shot hit his chest, the second, his neck. Hicks moved on instantly to a young girl nearing him on the right. She was close. He could smell her. The reek of shit, blood and vomit made his eyes water.

He pulled the trigger, and the gun clicked empty. He tossed it, tried the other one. Same story. He reached down and came up with the shotgun just as she lunged, emptying both barrels into her stomach and cutting her in half in mid-air. Splattered with a warm rain of blood and guts, Hicks dropped the empty shotgun and pulled another pistol from the bag. The only sound as he scanned the dark was the crackling of the fire.

Pain erupted in his shoulder, and Hicks screamed. From the roof of the Durango, a young boy wearing a necklace of bones raised a long wooden spear and plunged it down again. Hicks tried to duck, but the spear sank into his back. He stepped away and shot the boy, saw him fall silently from the roof.

Suddenly, he was knocked to the ground. The spear fell from his back, and the wind rushed from his lungs. A big man loomed over him, brandishing a machete. Hicks raised the pistol, but the lunatic brought the large blade down onto the back of his hand. Several of his fingers fell cleanly away, and Hicks saw himself drop the gun.

With a shrill cry mismatched to his size, the man raised the blade high above his head. Hicks, half-blind with pain and struggling to breathe, kicked as hard as he could up toward the man’s dangling genitals. The big man doubled over, clutching himself, as Hicks rolled out of reach.

Getting shakily to his feet, Hicks saw the other three coming closer: two women and a man with his long hair slicked back and shiny with fresh blood. Hicks reached into his boot and pulled out his hunting knife, tucking his wounded hand close to his chest.

A sound erupted from the far side of the fire, one Hicks knew well. Two bright spotlights grew large in the dark as Hicks’ car burst over the hillside, flying through the air like a V8-powered magic carpet. The Mustang came down hard and clipped the seated corpse idol. It sailed into the fire, chair and all, as the car skidded to a stop, flinging dust and gravel.

Hicks smiled as he saw Dakota at the wheel, looking mad as hell. He leapt out, blasting away with a sawed-off pump-action like he’d been born to do it. The girls scattered, and the long-haired man scurried behind a nearby pickup.

The big man with the machete, though, having recovered from the shot he’d taken to the balls, ran straight at Hicks.

Dakota, too far away to shoot without hitting Hicks, watched him and the man with the machete meet in a bone-snapping collision. The big man landed on top of Hicks, who thrust his blade desperately up, gouging into the lunatic’s left eye. Distantly, he felt the rusty blade of the machete push deep into his stomach, an enormous pressure crushing his neck.

His vision failing, Hicks tore his knife free from the big man’s eye socket and stabbed it into the side of his neck, pulling as hard as he could. The Death Head’s throat ripped apart like a soggy garbage bag, spilling blood and stringy bits of muscle and flesh down onto Hicks’ face. Still, the maniac squeezed harder at his throat and pushed the machete up deeper into Hicks’ belly. It felt like the tip was in his chest, poking a lung. Every breath was agony. The handle jutted out from the mouth of his laughing devil tattoo like a strange black tongue.

Dakota appeared above them suddenly and emptied a small .22 pistol into the big man’s back. The maniac finally slumped over and was still, and Hicks fell into blackness.

The screech of jamming gears roused Hicks. He forced his eyes open and saw the world rushing past outside the car. His hands were heavy in his lap, one wrapped in a stained sweatshirt and throbbing. A sticky, warm puddle squished beneath his ass as he tried to sit up. Pain, indescribable pain, pushed him back down.

“Hold on,” Dakota yelled, tears streaming from his eyes. His foot slammed the gas pedal to the floor. “Hold on, Hicks.”

Hicks tried to speak but found his tongue was too heavy. He blinked hard and saw the blue bag at his feet — feet he could not move — spilling over with cash. The kid would be OK. He could be anything he wanted, whoever he wanted to be. In countless mirror and window reflections over the years to come, that sly, sexy, beautiful smile would be Hicks’ memorial. On whatever face the kid chose, beneath any hair, that smile would sit resolutely below those wonderful, sparkly eyes, just for him. Not a bad legacy, Hicks thought. Better men have checked out with less.

And where was Georgie? Only Waffles stared back at him from the backseat, ambivalent, as if he were not surprised by these recent grim developments. Hicks decided he didn’t care. It was getting hard to focus. He threw up, and spit and blood spilled down over his chest. It pooled in his lap on the already sodden blanket that was wrapped tightly around him like a big plaid bandage.

“You just hold on,” Dakota said. “Just hold on! All the way, remember? Till the road runs out.”

But the road was ending. Dakota couldn’t see it yet, but Hicks could. A large black tunnel was approaching just up ahead, swallowing the horizon. They were speeding right toward it. Hicks saw the sun rising behind them in the side mirror. They were driving west. If you drive west fast enough at dawn, Hicks thought, it’s like you’re driving into the past, back into yesterday.

Hicks didn’t care for yesterday much, not any of the many yesterdays he’d known. He wished he could have been born later — ten, maybe twenty years from now. Maybe the world of tomorrow would have been his time. He’d been too early, and now it was way too late. But maybe that’s what it would take. Maybe he was the kind of guy that fueled the machines of progress. The pain flowed out of him then, sudden as a blink, and with it the regret. It was silly to regret. He’d had his shot, after all.

The world doesn’t care if you’re in love. It doesn’t care about your regrets or your promises. It doesn’t owe you anything. The world is full of monsters. They grow out of slinking under beds and crouching in closets, and they get worse. Once, a little boy named Gavin Hicks had thought you could beat those monsters if you were tough, if you made yourself scary enough, so he’d bloodied his knuckles and sharpened his tongue and cultivated a good glare and big, hate-filled muscles. He’d injected an armor of ink beneath his scar-covered flesh to hide the cracks.

It had worked, too, for a while. But he’d learned too late that grown-up monsters don’t fight like that. They’re carved of brick and steel, made of disappointment and regret, and they’re relentless. In order to take down those monsters, you have to have the right ammo and you’ve gotta be very quick. There are no second chances, none that ever really count. It’s not fair, but in the world of grown-up monsters, hate is a half measure and even love is most often a bullet of insufficient caliber. Maybe tomorrow it would be enough. Hicks had time to hope — quickly, just before the darkness got too deep — that it would.

Dakota was shouting. It sounded faint and very far away. They drove into the tunnel, and there was nothing but cool darkness and the lulling pulse of the engine.

The post PseudoPod 557: ‘Till the Road Runs Out appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : B.C. Edwards
• Narrator : Dani Daly
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Chelsea Davis
• Discuss on Forums

“Evitative” is the titular and ultimate story of The Aversive Clause, the collection of stories that also included, ‘Sweetness,’ which ran as Pseudopod episode 445.

Says Edwards: “I’ve been listening to audial fiction for longer than I’ve been listening to music. I ‘read’ Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, Treasure Island, the works of Issac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, and countless others in this form starting around four and continuing onto today. My work is always written with the intention of being read aloud. So it’s really something to have a pair of stories in your archive. Thanks for keeping both horror and the spoken word going strong at the same time.”

Shawn Garrett composed the soundbed for this episode, which he dedicates to master avant-garde musicians/field recorders Annea Lockwood & Chris Watson. A list of links to sounds used from Freesound.org are below.

SOUNDBED SOURCES 48558__crk365__birds-23dec07-spesh 278213__fundamental-harmonics__ban-doi-insects-night-time-02 320173__arnaud-coutancier__night-insects 65288__acclivity__cicadasplus

Thanks to our sponsor, ARCHIVOS – a Story Mapping and Development Tool for writers, gamers, and storytellers of all kinds!

by B.C. Edwards

Once the oceans came up and covered the streets over it was like they weren’t ever there. No streets or dead Camaros or boys that abandon you when things get flooded and break down. There were just the tall trees with the high branches and water everywhere and the smudge of mountains I can see off on the horizon if I climb all the way to the top of the tree we use for looking at things. The water filled in all the gaps and erased our telemarketing jobs and our high-heels and the clubs we wore them to. But we’re safe up here, on the little platform Jo-Jo built in the trees. He found me wandering in the muck, cold and alone and his was the first face that I’d seen in forever that didn’t look scared or desperate or tired. The first one since the water and the bombs and all who didn’t try to take one more thing from me, didn’t try to steal me away or trick me into anything. Jo-Jo just smiled and his eyes smiled too and even though he’d lost his words already I knew he meant well. And he showed me how to climb the trees and get up to his platform where there’s nothing to do but climb around, eat the berries and the appleish things that dangle off the branches like Christmas ornaments and screw all afternoon long and laze about watching the world disappear. Jo-Jo catches the birds that build their nests and try to eat our fruit, and then we eat the birds too. That’s about all we do.

That’s about all the kid in my belly will do, too. But the kid won’t know any different. It won’t think there was ever something other than the trees and the muck and the water and the men who come by every now and again in their canoes and their ugly paddles and their terrible broken whispers.

You can’t go down there; those men will eat you.

The post PseudoPod 556: Evitative appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Premee Mohamed
• Narrator : Ian Stuart
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Chelsea Davis
• Discuss on Forums

PseudoPod 555: Four Hours of a Revolution is a PseudoPod original.

Four Hours of a Revolution by Premee Mohamed

Rebels, like vampires, prowl by night, sleep by day; they are short on everything in the besieged city – bullets, socks, soap, bread – but mainly they are short of sleep, for they fight under starlight, hide under sun in secret places. And yet their enemies are most vulnerable at night when, like all good civil servants, they retire to their houses and lock their doors. Until they swap schedules neither side will eliminate the other.

So the revolution is easy enough to find as I whisper up the wall of the apartment complex, slide under the half-inch of space left by the open window. They will not open it further, even though the little boarded-up living room is intolerably hot. As it is, they sweat profusely in their sleep, even the lucky few shaded by the walls.

One has, deliberately I assume, curled up in an armchair under a poster reading ‘PUNK ISN’T DEAD BUT IT WOZ UP AWFUL LATE LAST NITE.’ On the poster, two men sleep in a train seat, cartoonishly rendered in hot primaries on a black ground. The rebel in the armchair echoes their pose, but instead of a tired friend she cradles a stolen police rifle, its distinctive silver finish oversprayed with matte black paint, the camera blocked with a glued-in coin. The police carry them proudly, counting on the reflected glare to carry their message far ahead of them; the rebels carry them only at night, counting on stealth.

It is this girl, Whittaker, in the armchair, in this war, that I am here to claim. In due time, as is her right and my duty. For I am Death.

War, we joke, is very good for business. It is a joke because we must deal with both sides, or all three sides, or at least on one memorable occasion, all six – no alliances were made between the infuriated families, as it so happened, and the souls of all those disparate enemies were still swiping at one another as we bore them off.

There is another joke, which I first heard a thousand years ago.

The lathered courier arrives at the palace all aflutter, and drops to a knee to deliver his desperate message: Highness, highness, the peasants are revolting!

O yes, says the king, lifting a scented handkerchief to his nose, I know; but were you not tasked with bringing me news?

Whittaker is young, and I think a typical rebel, or anyway typical of the revolutions I have seen – when the war descended like a guillotine blade separating the body of the populace from its head, she was already on the blade, all unaware. I have known of her since the moment I arrived in this doomed city. Orphaned young, a child of the streets, swindling, stealing, cajoling, cozening, switching loyalties as easily as she swapped her nail polish, prepared for whatever would find her food and shelter for even so long as a single day. Now, she has found – though she does not know it – the people at whose sides she will die.

I float past the others, asleep in heaps on the floor, ringed in sweat on the rugs like the chalk outlines they used to put around the dead. As is customary in situations like this, one person is snoring so loudly he could be confused for a diesel generator; and as is also customary, they have all been so tired for weeks that no one wakes to roll him over. I take up a position behind the girl’s armchair, not to leave her till I have completed my duty. I suppose, given the amount of artillery in this room, it will be a gunshot wound, perhaps even friendly fire. I know they have already said they would die for each other. Hollow laughter. They would die also because of each other, and many have.

This revolution began with, of all the supposedly innocent things, a curfew. Those in charge insisted that it was meant to be temporary, but when it became permanent, the first grumbles began low and slow, rising as arrests began to be made for breaking curfew, and then the inevitable consequences of jailing too many in too small places, and the dawning realization, by a bewildered populace, that the jolly, maroon-uniformed neighbourhood policeman they’d seen all their lives, stopping to compliment their herb gardens or return their lost cat, was the enemy. And one day a few months ago, a half-brick came whistling from the fourth floor of an apartment building not far from here, and the policeman it struck died at once. In my arms he opened his eyes in shock, uttering, as we flew away, only two words: “That hurt!”

The open window slammed shut, but not fast enough; the policeman’s partner raced into the building, and shots were fired, and the protests the next day became a mob. No more mobs now; most people have fled into the countryside, starving on weeds and stolen sheep. The remainder are unable or unwilling to leave, cruelly abandoned by their families with a note and a few spare oxygen tanks, or – like this little troupe – determined to stay and fight.

The first thing they did when they arrived at this hideout was sweep it for microphones, cameras, watchbugs, boobytraps, anything the enemy might have installed. The second was to loot it to the bones, of course; there are twelve of them, they’re hungry, they’ve been hungry for months, you can’t shoot if you don’t eat. Exclamations of pleasure as they distributed clothing from dressers and closets, a dozen shameless apostles stripping in front of one another, fresh white underpants and socks, trousers and skirts pinned in place around waists that were, by now, mostly pelvic bone. And from the back of the closet Whittaker pulled a tremendous ancient thing, perhaps a costume, a glittery red ballgown. They all marveled at it for a moment; then she pounced, and butchered it with her pocketknife, and spent an hour sewing the crimson silk into a flag that could be folded small and placed in a pocket.

I hope she gets a chance to wave this flag before she dies. Though of course, we are not supposed to hope anything.

But I am a very old Death.

Now, the building trembles as the army’s great, multi-legged tanks patrol the street below. I suppose they think they are tiptoeing. In their sleep, the rebels stir, but some sixth sense will wake them if there is true danger. Anyone without that sixth sense has left the city one way or another. Indeed, that is the revolution’s saving grace – there are so many empty apartments and houses, so many abandoned offices and stripped businesses, that the police cannot find them each night. Only the dark spirits of their nightmares, and, of course, me. They’ve lost seven people in four months. Not, if I may so compliment them, having seen a war or two in my time, a bad mortality rate. But I think they would not appreciate my compliments.

I do think they would appreciate knowing that there is a government man hidden in this group, waiting to connect with their larger organization to spring his lethal trap. But there is no way to warn them.

The tanks creak and whine, fade into silence at the park at the end of the street, the noise eaten by the trees. And Whittaker wakens, beads of sweat trickling down her face, and turns to look at me. I freeze.

This has happened before; there are so many sensitives now. She cannot truly see me, only a whirl of indistinct impressions. I know if she fears the gun, I will appear as the darkness of a barrel; if she fears the sea, I will be the cry of gulls and the black in which the abyssal fish swim; if fire, no more than a strange brightness.

The man in the blue shirt, with the cityscape printed on it, I want to tell her while she stares. Over there, asleep underneath the desk – do you mark him? Kill him. Or your revolution will fail.

After a moment, she closes her eyes again and settles back on the velvet chair, and sleeps while the tanks rumblingly return for a second pass.

Just before nightfall, when the sun’s reflection still protects them, they eat again – cans of ravioli and beef stew, cold pea soup and artichoke hearts – and whisper about the night’s plans. Their lowered voices are meaningless; the spy can wear no recorder their detection gear would have spared, not even the lapel-pins the army uses, but he has a memory, and he has a mind, and he has been waiting for this. “Tonight, we must meet with the greater cell,” their leader says. All nod. “Eleven. I know the place. We must go together.”

Three hours from now. Till then, they will proceed as normal: “We must kill the army bastards, kill the police. And we must slow them if we cannot kill them – disable or destroy their damned tanks and the stilted fortresses and even the spotlights and the ‘thopters.” They nod. A drone the size of a pigeon glides silently past their window, unseen by everyone except Whittaker. She does not speak up. It did not detect them, or it would have turned to stare in the window.

She does not like this new leader, Falkenberg; she thinks he does not know enough of the streets they defend. To the others she only concedes that Falk has a tidy mind, since he was once a professor; the others like that, feel safe in the structure he builds for them with his plans.

The dusk fades as they talk. In the cooling room they mop sweat, clean their guns again, stuff pockets with facecloths or handkerchiefs to dry their fingers before they shoot. Two of them count and recount the ammunition. So many incendiary grenades, so many batteries for the shoulder laser, so many of this type of round, so many of that. They all carry knives too, and are experts at foraging for found weapons – a fencepost, a chunk of concrete, anything flammable.

Will they say a prayer before they leave the sanctuary tonight? No, it seems not. I follow as they leave, silently, in groups of two, down the building’s remaining usable staircase. Their boots are so worn-down they are as silent as woollen socks. Not like the army, not like the police, who herald their arrival with the faraway metallic ringing of reinforced nanoceramic soles, the stuff of bulletproof vests. The rebels are very good at face and leg shots now. It is a dance, the government and the rebels – one moves a foot forward, the other back; they touch hands, bow, turn, follow the steps. One cannot move without the other.

Despite the long hunt, and the privations and anxiety of war, Whittaker is pretty still, and recognisably the girl she was when that brick came sailing from the upper window – vain, fey, impulsive, as confident in her ability to cajole a snack from a cop as to somersault from the top of a church. With her clippers long gone, her precisely maintained lifelong flattop has become a soft, ragged black cloud, somewhat longer at the sides from constantly being crushed beneath a hat. The others nod to her beauty as an acknowledgement only, not a salute; it will not save her, it will not save them, but they must nod to it, sacrosanct and chaste for now, while she is so young as to be off-limits. This does not seem to deter the government man, who trots next to her as they move into the streets.

“I’m Christopher,” he whispers. “I’ve been meaning to ask. What’s your first name?”

She gives him a look. “Miz.”

As they trickle into the street I see what lies in their path first, a knot of perfect night not dissimilar to their own – the soldiers in black stealth gear, the lights of their tanks and cannons covered with electrical tape. Falk pauses at the head of the rebel column, and glances back, his eyeglasses catching the only light in the alleyway. There will be a firefight. I head to the roof and seat myself on a gargoyle to watch; perhaps I will be needed in a minute, perhaps not.

The first hit goes to a rebel, their sniper. She was not aiming at the troops; a moment after the riflecrack, the support strut under the main cannon gives way. Curses and cries of dismay drift down the street like smoke. The rebels show their teeth in the darkness, not quite smiling. It was worth giving away their position to decommission the big gun, which could have brought the entire building down.

Now, at Falk and the sniper’s hissed direction, they emplace themselves, lay guns and lasers along forearms, squint, shoot. Soldiers fall and writhe like shadows printed across the street, their protective armour crushing organs. I scan the skies for their Deaths, see nothing. Oh well.

The brawny old man with them for the last month, has fallen; Whittaker slides his grenade belt from beneath the body and joins the sniper on the rooftop. The other shooters are spread out amongst the buildings, flitting catlike between floors and doorways. I feel Whittaker’s warm breath on my neck, fast, excited. She has never used a grenade before, only watched the others throw them.

Now, she stands, winds up, hurls two into the massed darkness below, her long teenager’s arm unfolding like the killing claw of a praying mantis. The first grenade is shot out of the air; the second bounces off a boot and rolls, detonating underneath a parked car. She curses, but the grenade has not failed; it has transformed the car into a secondary grenade. Shrapnel rises almost to our eye level, seven storeys up, and falls in a twinkling rain. Only now do I see Deaths, nearly invisible against the dark sky, like curlicues of smoke as they pass the few streetlights that remain. We nod to each other professionally as the soldiers’ souls are gathered into arms as soft and nebulous as feather coverlets.

The soldiers gather their wits, return fire, bullets and lasers pocking the building’s facade. Fragments of gargoyles plummet; the soldiers dodge bulging stone eyes, razor-edged horns. One of the rebels drops, the cigar-chewing man who never gave a real name. A contingent of soldiers is dispatched to capture him, but they are mowed down by rebel backup , invisibly perched atop a wrought-iron fence with a semi-automatic pulse rifle. The red light illuminates pools of blood as dark as ink.

Whittaker nods to the sniper and they flow down the stairs to rejoin Falk and the others. “We’re behind schedule,” someone says. “We need to cross half the city.”

“We’ll make it,” Falk says.

No one seems to see Christopher emerge from his foxhole, pale face smeared with someone else’s blood, perhaps even one of their own, his thin lips overpainted with it into a friendly red smile.

They skip across the city like a thrown stone, keeping to the shadows, leaping to rooftops and over fences as needed to avoid patrols. It is not, as their previous leader stressed, that they wish to overthrow and take over the government; it is that a reasonable government must be installed, and until this occurs, the war continues. A long and unfunny joke, a joke of months’ duration, with so few people left in the city to be governed. Should the army and police throw down their guns, and the dictator in her crystal castle relinquish all power, the new government’s subjects will consist almost entirely of revolutionaries.

“I need to talk to you,” Whittaker whispers to Falk as they run.

“At the meeting,” he says.

“Before that.”

“There’s no time.”

Ah, ah. So she does know. She must know. How interesting. Christopher is running at her side, a wheezy lope, flakes of dried blood fluttering from his face; she effortlessly speeds up to lose him.

Their meeting is, of all places, in the old city hall, abandoned forty years ago when the new building went up downtown. This one is too close to the river and is no fit seat for government – crusted with moss and ringed with black mould, usually half-submerged, stinking of mildew, disdained even by the city’s big silver rats, who hate to be flooded out. Only cockroaches survive here, and they flee the rebels’ lights as the troupe creeps through the outflow’s brick tunnel, dry in the summer heat. I take the point position, watching for movement behind us – nothing but the things with antennae, who defiantly watch me back. Christopher has fallen behind in the tunnel, is surreptitiously writing on his phone, the light of its screen hidden inside his blue shirt so that he seems to walk in a bubble of ocean.

The leader of the main cell and the others wait in the upstairs hall, former home of visiting dignitaries, weddings, awards ceremonies, former home of the ignorant and rich. Whittaker’s cell is late. They cross the rich, crumbling carpet and find seats on the piled desks that ring the room. In the centre is a heap of debris – cinderblocks, tarps, discarded timber, broken furniture – surmounted with an elaborately carved door, saved from the warping mould on the first floor. The ancient chandelier above this rubbish throne awakens, feebler than the moonlight entering through the perforated glass dome. The hall slowly becomes a place of golden and flickering shadows.

A small man – this must be the one who leads the leaders – climbs the heap and balances on the door, cradling a painted police rifle in his arms. He is brown and freckled, beard still dark, hair the kind of mixed salt-and-pepper that nearly looks blue. “We have sentries at all the cardinal points, at every entrance below and above ground,” he says, his tone casual, as if he is informing meeting attendees where the washrooms are. “Your cell leaders have been briefed on escape routes should we be discovered. The – ”

“Falk,” the girl is whispering again; I drift closer to listen, unable to stop myself. “We’ve got a rat.”

“Who?”

“I…I can’t tell you. He’s here.”

“What?”

“I said he’s here.” She cannot lower her voice any more; at this volume, no one could hear her except for me. Falk isn’t paying attention anyway; the little man on the door is still speaking.

“Call him out,” she urges, and it seems that she has his attention now; Christopher, a few seats down, is staring fixedly at the heap of rubble, sweat trickling down his face, rehydrating the blood that drips onto his shirt.

“I asked for proof,” Falk whispers. “You said you didn’t have any. You didn’t say ‘I’ll tell you later.’ You said ‘I just know.'”

“I know what I said. And I know I’m right.”

“Well you can’t just say things like that,” he says. “That’s what the government was saying when this all started, you know. ‘I don’t know how they’re bad, I just know.’ And then the raids, the guns. So think about that before you start throwing things around that you can’t back up.”

Their whispers are attracting attention, though Christopher still stares straight ahead. Falk shrugs apologetically to the others, and turns his back on Whittaker to listen to the leader, who is now discussing how best to smuggle recruits from the surrounding countryside into the city.

Outside city hall, soldiers assemble in silence, readying gas nozzles on light metal tubes, loading guns with bullets of lead and rubber, patting their vest for grenades. Helmeted and shielded in glossy black, they resemble unfamiliar insects, perhaps the ants that mass together to kill larger prey. It is eleven forty-five. Whittaker does not have long.

The first gas nozzle pierces the window that lines the east wall, and clogs at once. But a thin spurt of gas gets through, and then it is pandemonium as the rebels realize they are surrounded, a few of the leaders gathering their people for escape, a few for a fight.

Whittaker shoulders her rifle and looks at the few of her own that remain, armed with grenades and pistols and lasers and even, for some reason, a hatchet, looted from the lower level. Their heads swivel as one at the musical tinkle of breaking glass: Christopher smashing windows to give the incoming soldiers access. “Here, over here!” he shouts. “That one, there – with the beard – he’s their leader! Take him alive!”

Before anyone can draw a bead on the spy he’s surrounded in a gleaming shell of shields and upraised batons, nets and muzzles. His smug, shiny face disappears behind this wall as the invasion begins to destroy the actual room, the soft wooden floors giving way under tons of boots and equipment, disintegrating ceiling plaster knocking drones from the air. Rebels tread these tiny spies underfoot, revelling in each expensive crunch. As the walls are shredded by laser fire, roaches skitter for cover, find none, race each other in a panic down the stairs like a shining, gold-brown river.

The soldiers have come en masse, but they cannot fight in this space; it is chaos, and they are untrained for chaos. Their Deaths are legion compared to those who come for the rebels, who have entrenched themselves behind discarded furniture, popping up to shoot or toss grenades that ignite the tear gas nozzles and burn it off in clouds of harmless blue flame. A rebel has gotten at least one incendiary out a broken window; below, screams rise like the flames from the gas canisters. Disorganization frightens these soldiers more than their enemy.

Whittaker is out of rounds. Instead of spending precious seconds reloading she snatches a  hatchet from someone’s back, chops at a soldier’s unprotected arm – not quite through – and seizes his silver rifle. She is not a crack shot but she is a good one, and black-clad bodies spill bonelessly to the floor. Falk finds her and they fight back to back for a few minutes, grimly ignoring each other, the ‘You were right’ and ‘I know I was right’ unspoken for now, and if they are to have this conversation they will have to hurry, as she only has three minutes left. There are many soldiers in the room now, a scrambling wasps’ nest of armour and upraised weapons, black and amber. They trip over their fallen, misfire, hit one another, disappear through holes in the floor. Their numbers are shrinking.

Moving as gracefully and casually as if bullets did not envelop her, Whittaker removes the folded flag from her pocket and shakes it once to unfold it, the dead woman’s silk ballooning out with a crack. The pocket she sewed into the edge slides, as she must have designed it, over her pilfered rifle. And she is climbing the hill of rubble one-handed, lifting the gun from the dust and blood, and waving it over her head, a slow billow of crimson that stops everyone in their tracks, and a final tracer screams from the darkness and ignites the silk and still she waves, the blaze will extinguish itself in a moment, still she waves.

If only the dress had been white, I think. This is no flag of surrender. It is the opposite, if such a thing exists. A flag of victory. Her teeth and eyes are lit in gold, gaze meeting mine.

And it is at this specter of victory that Christopher aims, the click of his scope loud in a momentary silence, and I cannot stand it any longer, I will not, and with the tip of my wing I nudge loose another chunk of masonry – yes, that would have fallen anyway, I tell myself, and that is what I will tell the Council when they ask – that lands near him with an explosive dusty thud. He yelps, instinctively drawing his gun arm over his head.

It is his last mistake. Whittaker sees him, camouflaged there in the grime, smoothly lowers the rifle, as if the burning silk did not pass an inch from her face, and fires.

His face vanishes in a puff of blood, and I catch his soul a moment later, my claws clacking against his Death’s. Our eyes meet in a moment of embarrassed suspicion. I must brazen this out.

“This is mine,” she whispers, stroking the soul’s forehead; he looks up, sees her, screams. I ignore him.

“Madame, he is mine,” I say. “The Council must have made a mistake. It has happened before. There are many of us tonight, as you can see.”

“Yes,” she says uncertainly. “All these lives on a razor’s edge, I suppose. Could be some…confusion, sir.”

I do not break my gaze, and finally she shrugs, floats off, her wings wafting a scent of rot and blackcurrant. In my arms the spy’s soul is heavy, the leaden weight of guilt, so that he does not even thrash or seek to escape my embrace as I rise with him into the coolness of the night.

Below, Whittaker’s face is upturned for a moment only. Then she frees her rifle from the smouldering remains of the flag and walks off into the darkness.

 

The post PseudoPod 555: Four Hours of a Revolution appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Ville Meriläinen
• Narrator : Riku Kanninen
• Host : Tad Callin
• Audio Producer : Chelsea Davis
• Discuss on Forums

PseudoPod 554: A Doll Full of Nails is a PseudoPod original.

A Doll Full of Nails By Ville Meriläinen

1.

 

“Once upon a time,” the doll began, “there lived a god who feared the dark.

“He cast a shadow over his creations and heard them whisper his doom when he turned away. He feared them so much he stole fire from the other gods and gave it to the tiny creatures, hoping it would take away the dark in their hearts. Instead, they set the god on fire, and that is how the sun was born.”

“Fascinating,” grumbled the doll maker, setting a glass eye into the socket of his latest masterpiece. This one, he hoped, would be as mute as most, unlike the one sitting on his shelf. “And patently untrue. Be quiet, now, or you’re getting another nail.”

The doll sat quiet for a time. It watched the doll maker work—or so it felt—until he was finished and set the new doll upright. This one had bright blue eyes, flaxen hair and a skirt the miller’s wife had made for their daughter’s sixth birthday. On her seventh she disappeared, never to be found, and in place of a gravestone they wanted a doll so lifelike it would be as though she had never left.

The doll maker watched his creation with welling sickness before sealing it in a box. This was good use of his skills, for he had long studied the art of imitating life. If it gave people comfort to have dolls reminding them of their children, how could he say no? Doing so would have made him a hypocrite, after he had given his wife the creature now sitting with its legs dangling off the shelf.

Even so, he dreaded another one of his works would grow a tongue of flesh he did not place, and then do nothing with it but lie.

“Once upon a time,” the doll shaped like his son began, “there lived a warlock who studied children. He lured them into his gingerbread house and broke them into little pieces so he could see how they were made. When he pieced them back together, he never learned how to give them back the spark of life, and that is how dolls came to be.”

“That’s enough,” said the doll maker. He reached for the box of nails on his desk and took one out, lifted down the doll with a little boy’s smile and the fine clothes his wife had made. He pulled its mouth all the way open and yanked out its tongue, drove a nail through and spun it. When the tongue would twist no further, he set the nail sideways and closed the mouth around it. “I’m going to bed now. If you speak during the night, I will throw you away.”

Guilt pricked him even as he said that, and he knew the threat was empty. The doll maker toyed with the thought of leaving the doll downstairs in his workshop, but when he stood, he cradled it in his arms and brought it into his bedroom, where he set it by the foot of his bed before lying down.

2.

 

Once upon a time, the doll maker dreamed, there lived a little boy who walked in the woods.

He was small and the woods were great, and so every time he went, he got scared and cried for his father.

Every time, his father came, and the weeping boy said a monster had touched his hand.

His father told him there was no such thing as monsters and that he should not come here if he was afraid.

But the boy loved the woods, and so he went, every day, and so he cried, every day.

Until one day, his father was sick of the boy’s lies and did not help him.

The crying went on for a time, but then it stopped,

so suddenly the father’s heart stopped with it.

His heartbeat returned, but the boy never did,

and that is why—

 

3.

 

The doll maker awoke with a start.

Pale sunlight filtered in through the curtains, making dust dance. He shoved aside the blanket, found his face streaming with sweat. “Did you speak just then?” he demanded, leaning shaking hands on shaking knees. “Well, did you?”

The doll said nothing, even though the doll maker knew it had removed and swallowed the nail.

“One of these days,” said the doll maker and lifted the replica of his son, “I will cut out that tongue if you don’t keep your mouth shut.” The doll smiled vacuously at the threat, one more nail rattling in its belly as he carried it downstairs.

The miller came by that afternoon. He opened the box and gave a wet groan at the mimicry of his daughter, pressing a fist to his mouth. “You know,” he said, when strength found its way back to his voice, “I thought this would be a horrid idea, but she—it—looks so like her it might just be what we need.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” said the doll maker, though it sounded false even to him.

“Tell me, did your talent help you and your wife after your son drowned?”

The doll maker winced. “I don’t much care for what came of it, though the doll was dear to her.”

“Hum. Perhaps you’ll craft one to look like her, if you’ll come to find the house lonely.”

“I sincerely doubt that.”

Now the miller winced. “Forgive me—I shouldn’t say things like that. It’s the sorrow speaking, and I forget not everyone is as dreary as me.”

When the miller left the house on a hill, reached the path and turned towards the town, the doll maker fetched a flower from the kitchen. He went down after the miller, but instead of heading to town, turned towards an orchard at the base of the hill. He removed his hat and held it against his tightening chest as he approached the gravestone surrounded by apple trees.

“Hello, darling,” he said, kneeling to set the flower on the mound. “It’s one of these mornings. You started a trend. I should be grateful, but my purse isn’t the sole thing that’s heavy.” He dusted the stone and sighed. “I know I promised, but I can’t stand the doll any longer. Would I be remiss to throw it out?”

He listened to the wind brushing trees, to the lap of waves on the lakeshore. His wife hadn’t spoken aloud in a long time, but in the wind was a memory of her singing. She’d known a different one for every task: One for planting roses, one for digging weeds; one for gathering apples, one for the honeybees. Now the hives were empty, the patch overrun with daffodils, and around the doll maker were rotten apples he hadn’t bothered to collect.

And so, even though his wife could not speak, he was reminded of all the other promises he’d failed to keep. The doll maker returned to the house and set to working on the order of the mayor, who had finally given up on finding his nephew after weeks of searching.

4.

 

The doll maker woke up on the sofa, eyes bleary and head aching. He had only meant to rest for a minute, but night had crept in during his nap. The doll sat in the armchair beside him, head lolled to the side. As soon as he sat up, rubbing his temples, it spoke.

“Once upon a time,” the doll began, “there was a corpse who wanted to be a boy again. When it told lies, its arms grew, until it could reach up from the bottom of the lake where it had sunk.”

The doll maker froze, slowly facing the glass stare.

“Every day, a living boy came to the lake, and the corpse whispered it was safe to swim.”

“Be quiet,” the doll maker rasped.

“But when the corpse reached from the depths for the boy’s hand, he was repulsed and cried for his father.”

“Be quiet!” the doll maker snapped, grabbed the doll and threw it at the wall. It fell askew, was silent a moment, then rolled over to face its maker.

“One day,” the doll went on, as the maker ran for the box of nails in his workshop, “his father didn’t come, no matter how much the boy cried. ‘There’s nothing to fear,’ the corpse said, over and over. Every time it did, its arms reached a little further, until its fingers locked with the boy’s.”

The doll maker rushed back, a nail in his hand. He found the doll sitting upright. Before he reached it, it said, “And that is how I came to be.”

He pulled out the doll’s tongue, drove the nail through it and spun until it would turn no further. Even then, he twisted with all his strength in an attempt to pry the tongue loose. When he found the effort fruitless, he set the nail sideways and closed the mouth around it. Then he carried the doll to his workshop.

He set it on its back on the table, took out another nail and his hammer. He placed the nail against the doll’s chin and struck.

The nail scraped along the face without so much as a groove. He tried to bind it with strings, but they slid away as though the doll was oiled. He tried screws, but they dug in no better than the nails. Finally, he smashed its head with the hammer. Even the glass eyes survived the blow without the slightest cracks.

“I’m throwing you away,” he swore. “And I’m never making another doll. Is that what you want? Then be quiet and there will never be more.”

The doll smiled vacuously at the threat.

The doll maker made to lift the miscreation, but when his hand touched its back, he was overwhelmed with a terrible sense of loss. He jumped back as though scorched, steeled his mind and tried again.

Though guilt no longer kept him from discarding it, he was physically unable to lift the doll, even though he had just carried it in. He had accepted the doll’s behaviour as a sign of his own insanity, but now questioned how far even madness could reach.

He staggered away until he bumped against his chair and collapsed into it. Silence fell heavy on the room, as though a noise that belonged there was absent. He wondered if the doll was trying to speak, tongue slowly unfurling until it would swallow the nail.

“I’m throwing you away,” he repeated, with effortful defiance, and was surprised by how quiet the words were. “First thing tomorrow. The mayor gets his doll, but others will have to resort to markers, or find some other way to grieve.”

The doll said nothing. The way it stared at the ceiling now seemed petulant, purposeful ignorance of its creator. The doll maker groaned at the notion. It had no capability for petulance, no matter how near to being alive it seemed. I am a madman, he reminded himself. If I invited someone to lift it, they would do so without trouble. In fact, that is what I’ll do. If I cannot do it myself after a good night’s rest, I will ask the mayor’s servant to dispose of it for me when he comes for the order.

With these thoughts came release that allowed the doll maker to gain his feet. He was calm again, though the doll was still heavy. “Fine, then,” he said, with a wave of his hand. “If I can’t lift you, I can’t bring you upstairs. You can wait here until I get rid of you, for all I care.”

When the third step up creaked under his weight, the clink of a nail against a pile of others petrified the doll maker’s legs.

“Once upon a time,” came the voice of the doll, muffled by distance and a closed door, “there lived a woman with a bright red cloak. It was a gift from an admirer, and she accepted it gratefully.”

“Be quiet,” the doll maker uttered, punching his leg to force feeling back into it.

“The woman was comely but the man was not, and so he knew he needed to find a more substantial way to charm her than the beauty of his face. The man wove her the cloak, and she came to love it more than anything.”

“You wicked liar!” the doll maker screamed. “Be quiet! Do not speak of her!”

“But the cloak was so fine the woman became curious of her lover’s talent, and followed him one night when he left his loom. She saw him skinning animals alive, hands red with the same hue as adorned her shoulders, saw him studying them and piecing them together for the most wondrous of cloaks.

“The woman kept the secret of her lover and stayed with him for the fear of what he might do if she told someone. What if they did not believe her? She would be wholly at his mercy.

“Then, tragedy struck them. Wracked with grief and horrid suspicion, the woman asked her lover to make her another cloak, even finer than the first. He obliged. The new cloak resembled something precious so much it fooled the woman into thinking her husband had taken her treasure and ripped it apart to replicate it, even though it was his first innocent work in years, a testament to the heights his talent had reached.

“The woman could not bear the secret any longer, and that is why no one sings in the house on a hill anymore.”

Regaining control of his legs, the doll maker charged into his workshop. He threw open the door, bellowing with rage, and grabbed the hammer on the desk. The doll sat upright, eyes set forward, and the maker brought his hammer down. He swung in a frenzy and the hammer finally bit, sinking into the doll’s body, caving in its head, sending the eyes rolling along the table until they, too, were smashed. Nails spilled from its eviscerated belly. The doll maker bashed and swung and maimed, until nothing was left of the idol shaped after his son but pieces of painted wood and fabric and a tongue that had never had a right to speak.

He gathered the pieces in a sack and picked up the tongue. He expected it to writhe in his grip, but it was as lifeless as the manmade body it had been a part of. He burned the remains of the doll in a small pyre on the shore and cast the tongue into the lake. Ripples of schooling fish appeared where it sank.

When the pyre died out and the ripples vanished, the doll maker returned inside, fell into his bed, and wept.

5.

 

Once upon a time, there lived a doll maker who sought to excel in his craft.

He studied his art until he was considered a master, but even masters yearn to improve their skill.

What did artists do when they wanted to get better? Looked at the work of others, dissected them, deconstructed them.

The doll maker went further. He looked at those his own work imitated, dissected them, deconstructed them,

until he was peerless.

Everyone said his dolls were lifelike, but that was untrue; they were deathlike,

for the doll maker studied the fragility of life to mimic it in static form.

How many necks had his fingers crushed?

How many eyes had he plucked?

Not even the doll maker knew anymore.

All he cared about was his art,

and that is why the fish in the lake have grown fat.

 

6.

 

The doll maker snapped awake to the pounding of his heart.

The voice of the doll echoed in his thoughts, refusing to recede before waking as dreams were meant to. He pressed his face into his hands and gave a great shudder.

The doll maker rose to open the window. The breeze was too cold for comfort, but he braved it to suck in fresh air. He looked up to the moon for solace from the dark. Even as he did, it clouded over.

“Once upon a time,” came a voice, hoarse and thin, “there never-lived a doll.”

The doll maker spun with fright, but could not locate the sound in the gloom. He scrambled for the door to find it locked from the outside, and gave a startled cry when the window slammed shut.

“All it wanted was to tell stories, so that its maker would think of what he had done, and confess his sins.”

“YOU ARE NOT REAL!” the doll maker screamed. “YOU’RE A FIGMENT OF MY MADNESS!”

“But all he did was call the doll a liar and put nails through its tongue.”

Warmth coursed down his leg when the doll maker slumped against the door. The clouds dispersed, letting moonlight pour in.

The doll sat by the foot of his bed, grinning with a mouth full of nails.

“Until one day,” the doll croaked. Its arms were covered in blue, rotted flesh, face around the glass beads bloated, cheeks fish-nibbled open so he could see the contraption of nails within. “The doll was tired of having nails thrust through its tongue and decided to put one through its maker’s throat.”

Beside his ear, the doll maker heard a whisper: And that is why the doll maker never woke up.

 

The post PseudoPod 554: A Doll Full of Nails appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Benjanun Sriduangkaew
• Narrator : Jen Zink
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Marty Perrett
• Discuss on Forums

“Fade to Gold” was first published in End of the Road, edited by Jonathan Oliver (Solaris Books, 2013).

by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

They say the afterlife is a wheel and that is true, but I am between and so for me the way is a line. It unspools interminably into a horizon that shows the soft gold of dawn, always just a little out of reach.

Before the war this was only packed earth and grass and dirt to me; before the war I trod this path from home to capital thinking of the sweetness of rare fruits. Now that my back is to Ayutthaya the ground is sometimes baked salt where nothing grows and sometimes wet mud bubbling with the voices of the dead. Inside my arteries there is blood which throbs and pumps, and my belly growls at emptiness as might a bad-tempered dog. But it is difficult to be sure, after so much soldiering, that one is still alive. It is difficult to be certain this is not all a fever dream. 

The post PseudoPod 553: Fade to Gold appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Gus Moreno
• Narrator : Maui Threv
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Marty Perrett
• Discuss on Forums

PseudoPod 552: The All or Nothing Days is a PseudoPod original.

The All or Nothing Days By Gus Moreno

Sometimes Ya-Ya would lie on the ground and look up at the sky, and in between sips from her mason jar she would point to clouds and call them out. That one looked like a shark, that one looked like a gun, that one looked like Donkey Kong. And I would always ruin it with my questions. What’s a shark? What’s a gun? What’s a Donkey Kong?

She would roll over and that meant she was over it. She grew impatient with me and with herself, with slipping and mentioning something that was before my time, and having to explain it to me, something that was so simple and obvious to her that she was reduced to stuttering because she couldn’t figure out how to explain what a computer was without me asking what plastic was, what an internet was. She’d rather talk about other stuff, like pyramids. She didn’t mind explaining to me their shape and precision, how no one knew how they were made. I imagined a mountain with flat sides, with the point of a knife at the top, when both of us laid in the red dirt after the sun fell and the stars covered the sky. She said pyramids generated their own energy. You could run a whole city off their magnetic power. They were beacons to lifeforms on other planets. They were built by a kind of human that was different than us. But the planet froze over and killed off this special strain, and the humans we descended from were the cowardly, spindly ones that knew how to hide and steal and survive.

Each time she finished a mason jar, she put it back in a cardboard box she kept next to the house. When the box was full of empty jars, she drove to get some more. No matter how tall I got, it was still too dangerous for me to go with her. She never said dangerous from what. All I knew was that a long time ago the world ate itself. We were all that was left. Us and the animals. She made trips to the nearest deserted town for supplies, and I sat in the doorway of our home, waiting for her rusted Bronco to pop up on the horizon. My job was to empty the trunk so she could crawl into bed and collapse on top of the covers. Or she would drink a whole mason jar and fall asleep wherever she was. That was another job of mine, to drag her into the shade, ever since she passed out in the sun and her face cracked and blistered. I could probably carry her inside now, if we were back in the canyon, maybe not like a man carrying his wife through the threshold, but at least hook my arms under her pits and lift, instead of pulling her in, feet first, and listening to her head bounce off the steps.

Ya-Ya spent most of her time sleeping.

After she ate, she slept. After a cigarette, she slept. After hunts, she slept. She took a big bowl of beans once she got up. She would make a big pot of it that would last for days, and when she started moaning awake I would pull out the floorboards and reach for the clay pot in the hole we dug to keep it cool. Anything you didn’t eat within a day in the canyon would spoil or harden if you didn’t it hide it where the sun couldn’t get to it. It was mostly ever beans and rice, sometimes tuna if Ya-Ya found tins on her trips. Sometimes she would go out at night and kill a boar. By morning she would have it shaved and buried a good distance from our home. She would bury it except for the portion of the boar she wanted me to cut out to make for dinner, and I would stagger out of bed with the knife and a hand over my erection because she would flick it if she saw it, and I would flay the skin first before cutting out the meat. It was a special occasion to have meat in our meals. We ate as much of the boar as we could before the sun got to it beneath the layer of dirt, or before a coyote or bobcat dug it out and dragged it away, nothing but lines in the sand and a small formation of bones farther out still. Wherever the boar was dragged, I was no longer allowed to go near it. I only had to ask why once for her to scrape her nails across my face. Questions bothered her. Especially the same question asked again. This was why I never asked about what happened to the world, why we lived in the deserted canyon instead of moving, why we never saw anyone else besides Frank.

I found him swimming in the watering hole behind our home. Ya-Ya said a long time ago settlers had dug a trench and filled it with water so cattle could drink as they grazed. She noticed me already cowering.

“Cows,” she clarified.

“Then why say cattle?” She swiped at my face and I ducked under her arm, a little surprised at my own reflex, though I didn’t see her knee cocked back until it landed between my legs. She said rain and erosion had deepened the trench until a lip of earth climbed into the sky and shaded the stagnant pool. The animals that drank from the hole had died a long time ago. The men who dug the hole were dead too. The salt in the water, mixed with soil, would dry my skin and leave white streaks across my face, but I didn’t care. It was the only fun to have out there.

Around that time a heat wave was rolling through the canyon, and after a week of no rain and cracks splintering the ground, the water level in the hole dropped and revealed the top of a person’s head. I put my clothes back on and ran back to Ya-Ya. She kicked an empty mason jar aside and followed me. We both stood on the edge of the slope, looking down at the water and the crown of wet black hair floating on the surface. She rubbed her chin for a while and finally said that was Frank. When I asked who Frank was, she raked her nails across my face. The watering hole was off limits now. It belonged to Frank.

Sometimes she passed out in a way that I could pull out her pack of cigarettes, steal one, and slide the pack back in without her waking. I would light it and sit on the slope, looking down at Frank, who never got out of the water. Who could hold his breath longer than I ever could. Unless he was walking around at night when I was sleeping. He became more than a man in my imagination. I imagined that below the surface of the inky water, there were gills opening and closing behind his ears. I imagined Frank’s mouth too big for his face, spherical and ribbed. I pictured Frank looking up at me through the ink, thinking I couldn’t see him. He morphed into another chore. Cut the meat. Hide the beans. Drag Ya-Ya out of the sun. Empty the trunk. Watch Frank.

When the cars appeared, I almost didn’t know what I was looking at. There were four black boxes on the horizon, same as Ya-Ya on her way back from scouring for supplies, except Ya-Ya was sprawled inside the house, and I was chopping down a rocking chair she had crammed into the Bronco for firewood. It was dusk and the sky was orange. Their cars appeared on the thin black line and descended down the sand slopes that created long tails of clouds, dipping out of sight and then reappearing on the crest of another dune. The axe fell out of my hand. Ya-Ya picked it up and told me to run inside and hide.

The cars peeled to a stop, forming a half circle around Ya-Ya. She dropped the axe and put her hands in the air. The doors swung open and men sprung out with black objects in their hands pointed at her. They were all screaming and the collective noise sounded like the coyotes at night when they killed their prey on our porch. I pulled a small corner of the curtains back to watch. One of them swung Ya-Ya’s arms behind her back and cuffed her. The back of his jacket had the symbols F, B, and I. He untied the twine that kept her hair in a knot, letting the long gray strands fall all the way down her back.

If I bothered her in some way, or did something that annoyed her, she always threatened to call the police. It looked like she finally made good on that promise. Not ever seeing the police before, I pictured them as towering creatures in blue uniforms–she always talked about their uniforms–with coyote or bobcat faces, who lived inside the mountains on the horizon, listening in silence to rainwater drip until someone called about a bad boy who was misbehaving.

Ya-Ya turned to the window and screamed, “Run!”

I ran out and circled around the house, police and the FBI chasing after me. I ran towards the red ball of the dying sun, and the agents ran with their flashlights fixed on my shoulders, stretching my shadow for miles ahead of me. I ran to the watering hole and jumped in, holding my breath for as long as I could to make them think I was gone. When I finally came back up for air, they were waiting, pointing their guns down at me and yelling, “Put your hands up!” When I raised my arms and tiptoed out, their guns still pointed at the water. They wanted Frank to come out too. The ongoing drought had dropped the water even lower, so besides the crown of Frank’s head, you saw the protruding ridge of his brow, his eyebrows gone, that curved inward to eye sockets you still couldn’t see under the water. A breeze swept through the canyon and I began to shake. An agent pushed Ya-Ya towards the edge of the slope to make her see. He pushed down on her cuffs and she fell to her knees. He kept screaming, over and over, “Who is he?” And looking at me as the cop yanked on her cuffs and she gritted her teeth, the canyon echoed her voice, “He is Little Horn. He is Son of Perdition. He is returned. Hail Satan!”

My first car ride ever was my last time in Conquered Canyon. They drove me to a hospital where I waited in a room with a wool blanket wrapped around my shoulders. Wavy salt lines covered my arms and chest. They would say later, the actual police who accompanied the F, B, and I men, when they would come to the foster homes and check in on me, that I had looked like one of the stray dogs they sometimes picked up on the highways, so tense and bug-eyed from living so close to the edge that they didn’t know whether I’d bite or piss as soon as they touched me. Then with the other fosters looking through curtains, they’d ask if I was hungry, or if I needed clothes, or if anyone was messing with me. Telling on the others would only get me into more trouble. The cops would leave but I would still have to go back inside and sleep in a bunk with older boys who were familiar with the concept of penetration, in all the ways you could think. The best thing the cops could ever do would be to leave me alone, which they never did.

In the exam room I met a doctor followed closely by a social worker. The social worker asked for my name, and I said, What’s a name? What’s a birthday? What’s a dad?

The doctor put things in my ears and put things in my mouth. The FBI agents came in next with a dark haired man in a long trench coat. He sat on a stool so I could look down on him. He handed me a lollipop and then pulled it out of my mouth when I didn’t take the wrapper off. He asked how long I’d known Ya-Ya. All my life. He asked if anyone else ever visited us out in the desert. Just Frank. He asked who Frank was. I didn’t know. He asked, after looking back at the social worker and the social worker giving him the go-ahead, if I had ever seen Ya-Ya digging, or burying anything around our home. He meant the boars. What boars? I told him about Ya-Ya’s night hunts, how it was my job to cut out the portions she prepared so we could cook them with our meals. The social worker started reaching for the walls to keep herself from falling. The doctor gasped but then heard the clawing noises behind her and went to catch the social worker. The detective was covering his mouth with his hand.

I’d been cutting out human flesh and dropping it in the clay pot, watching it boil and watching the rendered fat bubble and skin the surface.

My first time watching a television was my last time seeing Ya-Ya, as she was being led into a building where cameras flashed in front of her face. The bottom part of the screen read: SERIAL KILLER APPREHENDED.

She used to frequent rest stops along the highway and pick up men who had lost their nerve for gay sex in the restroom, maybe seeing her as a chance to prove their straightness. Because of my age, the news never mentioned my name. The doctor swabbed my mouth to test my DNA against Ya-Ya’s. Other detectives were scouring through old missing child reports and comparing them to Ya-Ya’s known movements.

There were foster kids who felt the need to beat on me once they found out who I was, and there were foster kids who would offer me drugs or sex to make sure I didn’t hurt them. It didn’t matter where they moved me, somehow the kids found out. They could lead me down a line of questions a normal person could answer about themselves, but I would come up empty because my backstory was blank.

The last home, Mr. and Mrs. Jackson, they gave me a room upstairs, and while LeTroy was in the shower I would climb into his top bunk and look out the window, and look at Conquered Canyon in the east. Sometimes that was how the other kids found out, by me calling it Conquered Canyon instead of Concord Canyon, and them knowing that’s how Lady Luck called the canyon in the news sites. Everyone knew the details, knew what the cops found, knew she was found with a kid. So they would have me saying Conquered Canyon to start with, and then they would notice how I held a spoon, and how I sometimes played with the light switches, how everyone sat in front of the television and I sat and watched the microwave, how I pretended to be asleep no matter how much the Jacksons pulled on me to get to bed, until they gave up and let me sleep on the floor. It didn’t take long for the boys to corner me somewhere in the house, when the Jacksons were upstairs or in the basement, one of the girls conveniently turning her radio really really loud. Maybe because their whole life adults were always trying to squeeze details out of them, these boys never had the patience for questioning. They would just come out with it. You that kid? Ayo is that you? And then they’d ask if I thought I could take them. Was I really about that life? Man I wish you would try some shit like that on me. I cut your dick off.

What ended up getting me booted from the Jackson home wasn’t the other boys, but me. One morning the couple woke up to the sound of digging, and pulled their curtains back to find a crater in the middle of their backyard. A pyramid of dirt towered next to the hole. The head of a shovel peeking out and flinging deep brown earth against the pyramid.

The social worker called my police dads. They arrived at the house and crawled into the cave. I’d taken a milk crate and playing cards into the cave with me at that point. They were laying on their stomachs, unconcerned with getting mud on their uniforms. From the cave entrance, they assured me this was just a phase. They had been to Iraq and Afghanistan and said they knew men after the war who were like this, who dug holes, who could only sleep sitting upright and against something, who sat in their bedrooms holding a lighter, gliding their palm over the flame, doing these things, these rituals, as a way of transitioning back into the everyday world. All I needed was time, they said.

Before that familiar white van could pull up in the morning and take me to another home, I ran away. I waited for Letroy and Miguel to sneak into Mary’s room like they always did, and I climbed out the window, landing softly on the dirt pyramid. There was a train crossing near our house, and I walked along the tracks until one of the freighters slowed enough that I could grab a rung.

I measured time by how long it took for late night shows to stop making fun of Ya-Ya. How long it took her photos to fade from the front stories on websites. Until Lady Luck was the setup to a punchline no one could remember.

Scrap yards do not ask for ID when you bring them materials. They don’t require a mailing address, social security number. When they became familiar enough with me and noticed the lack of tracks on my forearms, they offered me a job working the yard. Whether those DNA swabs came back positive or not, only the Jacksons know. The state executed Ya-Ya and it snowed. The gauntness in my cheeks, a product of desert winds and the salt in the watering hole, made my face look older than I was. I sat in a bar and watched on television as people danced outside Ya-Ya’s prison when the state executed her.

Ya-Ya used to mention a dog named Guber, and sometimes she saw him in the clouds rolling over us, halfway through another jar. The local free paper did a piece on a shelter filling up with dogs no one wanted. They had been pets to owners who died suddenly in the house, and by the time officers came around to do a courtesy check, the dogs had eaten portions of their owner’s face, or nibbled a couple digits off their hands. These dogs were rehabilitated and ready for new homes, but people were still too afraid. They’d held fundraisers and promotions with radio stations, but no one ever adopted one of these dogs. The shelter attendants were only too eager to help me through the application process. They Xeroxed the work ID and a US resident card I’d found in a van in the junkyard. A kennel assistant led me down rows of metal cages filled with dogs wagging their tails and pacing nervously at my arrival. I stopped and crouched down to pet a small white poodle through the stainless steel bars. His name was Luke, and his beady eyes looked like pieces of coal buried under bunches of white wool.

I don’t have any friends. I don’t know how to read. Luke sleeps with me on a mattress at night, and I listen to the city scream. You can’t see the stars here. Sometimes I forget to pay my bills.

On our morning walk Luke and me watched a truck T-bone a minivan in a high traffic intersection. The minivan wrapped itself around a light post while the truck flipped on its side and jumped the curb, striking a few pedestrians. Luke flinched at the impact and tried to run away, but the leash snapped his collar and within a few seconds he calmed down. So many bits of glass lay strewn on the asphalt. There were people wailing and propping themselves up, men frantically screaming for someone to call an ambulance. Pools of blood were beginning to spill beneath car doors, and not more than a leap away from us, laid what looked like a child’s hand, snapped clean from the wrist. Luke spotted it lying in the street too, and I could feel his demeanor change, a tension building in the leash. He stepped in place nervously and began to whine, looking up at me and looking back at the hand. I know, boy. I could feel it too. I could feel the pull. Our rehabilitation being tested. We were supposed to be good. There was paperwork that said so. I could feel the enzymes in my mouth. The copper scent was in the air, and Luke was crying, and Ya-Ya’s voice was echoing in the canyon. Hail Satan. To what end?

The post PseudoPod 552: The All or Nothing Days appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Seras Nikita
• Narrator : Dagny Paul
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Marty Perrett
• Discuss on Forums

PseudoPod 551: Alison is a PseudoPod original.

Alison by Seras Nikita

Alison will live her whole life in Folkston Georgia, forty miles from Waycross and as close to the Okefenokee as you can get before the ground starts filling your footprints with scab-colored water.  She will wake each morning to the thickness of the swamp sucked up into the air around her. She will eat dinners of fried fish, and balls of corn fried with onions.  Twice she will be hospitalized with blinding migraine headaches that are actually overdoses of aerosol insect repellent, ferried to her bloodstream via a bad habit of biting her nails and chewing the torn skin beneath them.

Alison Crenshaw will live to be nineteen years old.  She will die without losing her virginity, or understanding that she is schizophrenic. Up until the very end, Alison will never consider that anyone else’s mind might not be exactly like hers.

Alison’s first ‘episode’, as her mother came to call them, occurred in late March, when the pines of Folkston were heavy with white, football-sized cocoons of brown moth larvae.   Alison had been five years old, breaking apart acorns on the screened-in porch of her babysitter’s house when she smelled a smell that reminded her of the white collar her mother’s cat wore to keep fleas away.  Then she looked to the sky and saw that the caterpillars were finally alive in there, squirming in and out of view, obscured by the gauzy white stuff they’d spun.  Looking at those caterpillars Alison suddenly felt something in her chest  -something bright and hot stirring around.  She stood, disoriented, and something bolted through her, knocking her to her knees, a feeling of rage like nothing she had ever felt.  A feeling of disgust, and terrible urgency, that made her feel like a balloon had grown in her throat and the only way to make it stop stretching her was to scream out and make it pop.  Then she felt something else, some heavy and alien emotion that most people would describe as homesickness.  For the first time she was feeling things in her chest instead of just thinking them in her head, and she hated the feeling.   The thought that the cocoon was like her, that this feeling that had suddenly come over her was only one of hundreds more, teeming and squirming beneath her surface, and the cocoon was only a thick husk- person she had grown around herself.  And then, plain as her mother’s voice, Alison heard something tell her, “Let them out.”

And she had crawled up into the tree, breathing hard through her mouth like a dog, and tore down three of the cocoons and broke them open and sat on the porch with them, pulling out the unborn, still-soft caterpillars and crushing them one by one between her small thumb and forefinger, making little brown and yellow piles with their corpses, and when she was finished she took them inside and put them on the floor in the kitchen before lapsing into such a fit of screaming that her body began to seize and the babysitter had rushed her to the hospital where she’d been sedated with benzodiazepines. Ann Crenshaw, skeptical of the bland diagnosis that her daughter had suffered an anxiety attack, fleetingly wondered if her Alison might be possessed, but the next day the girl was back to her old self and seemed to have un-remembered anything disturbing about her behavior the previous day.

Alison was a fast learner.  As young as kindergarten, she came to realize that adults seemed repulsed by her.  Alison found herself denied things that other children received – juice boxes and pillow cots and extra minutes of bathroom time.  Eyes narrowed when they fell upon her; hands and bosoms were used for stern purposes rather than comforting ones.

“An unwavering child disturbs grown people.”  This was Alison’s first lesson in adaptation.  It was her first lesson in hiding the broken cogs inside her.

She began to observe carefully the reactions of other children around her.  She learned that a loud voice and a pointed finger meant she should sob.  Drawn syllables in voices that spiked high at the end meant she should clap delightedly.  When three or more classmates tittered their voices in laughter, so did she.  In some sense, Alison has spent every waking moment since developing and revising this mimicry.  In her most private thoughts, she believes that her intelligence enables her to function without a soul.

Today is Wednesday.

Alison is propped on a stack of hospital pillows with one leg fastened into a steel and Velcro matrix of cruel-looking traction apparatus.  The splinters of bone formerly protruding through the flesh of her calf have been prodded back into place and fixed with screws and plates.  Rods are attached to the screws, and the other ends of the rods fit through the bolts of a rigid hammock suspended over her hospital bed.   Around the rods, her flesh is punched into seams with hard, tight staples.  When the swelling goes down and the stitches heal, the doctors will apply a soft cast that they’ll replace every twenty days or after each surgery, whichever comes first.  But right now Alison’s right leg is as bad as it will ever be; shaped like knobs of Chinese ginger and covered in big green bruises full of clotted blood.  In the next bed over, John is being prepped for transfer to the burn ward.

She knows its John because she can see one of his eyebrows through a break in the carapace of stained bandages enveloping his body.  Flanking the eyebrow are twin divots where the EMTs have removed the piece of jewelry, shaped like a bent barbell, that he usually wears there.

If not for this, the body in the bed might be anyone.  It might be any twenty-two year old young man with second-degree deep partial thickness burns covering 45 percent of his body and a morphine drip keeping him just stoned enough to quit screaming about it.

Today is Wednesday.

Alison’s childhood passed with only one more ‘episode’, a terrible day in her eleventh year that began as a wonderful day at the water park.

In her yellow swimsuit, Alison was waiting in line for the bathroom when she saw a woman pass by her holding a little boy by the hand.  The woman was wearing a floppy hat, and using the hand that wasn’t occupied by the boy to eat an ice-cream bar, the kind with the waxy chocolate on the outside.  And she was crying.  Sobbing, really.  Sobbing and pulling on the boy and still eating the ice-cream, which was falling apart in the midday heat and dripping a trail of white stuff and waxy brown shards behind her.

Alison looked at the woman, bewildered. At the way the woman’s mouth twisted as she tried to cry and eat, unable to stop doing either, and the broken cogs in Alison’s head mashed their cracked teeth together, trying to turn.   Feelings boiled up in Alison for the second time in her life, alien and crooked, a furious feeling like she was being tricked.  And there again was the phantom smell, sweet and wicked.  She had pulled off her bathing suit right there in the line and attacked the woman, knocking her to the ground and forcing broken pieces of the wooden ice-cream stick over her lips and down her throat while the boy looked on, screaming in a shrill child’s voice.  Then desperation overtook her, an urgent need to be somewhere still and quiet and un-peopled.  She ran until she could crawl, and wedged her small naked body between the toilet and wall of a bathroom stall like an animal seeking the tight comfort of its burrow, where she fought herself bloody to avoid being touched and tried to exorcise the deluge of feelings with screaming sobs so intense they bordered on hysteria.

This time Alison’s mother Ann did not take her daughter to the hospital.  She told nobody about the episode who had not already witnessed her daughter dragged naked and bloody from the water park men’s room.  As for the woman with the ice cream, the splintered wood tore two holes the size of raisins in her esophagus but she declined to press charges after Alison carefully printed some paragraphs of apology into a greeting card shaped like a flower flanking a pair of sleeping kittens.  Having come out of her bad moment, Alison hung her head and bit her lip because she knew those were the fitting motions for shame.  But inside, she felt nothing.

The final episode, the last of her life, began around 8:30 on a Monday night..  Alison was alone in her room when she saw a flash of lime-colored light at the periphery of her vision and then smelled something floral.   She sniffed around the room and checked all the electrical sockets, which seemed fine, and by the time she finished doing that the smell had gone.

On Tuesday night John and Alison went to the theater together, an event Alison logged as their third official date.  After the movie John convinced her to stop off at a restaurant bar at the urging of John’s idiot roommate Cleveland Harold whom everyone called Cleaver, and who immediately set to work goading John into matching him with neat shots of Jameson whiskey.

The first several shots of liquor soothed the boys’ anxieties about the ramifications of taking more shots, and before long they were clumsy and wild.  A discussion about a mutually despised ex-girlfriend of Cleaver’s somehow became a lusty celebration of Mexican food, but not the Mexican food you get here, that’s just shit, but REAL Mexican food like they ate that night in Tijuana at the place with the chickens and the fence.  Alison waved away a third cocktail.  She observed how the bartender’s eyebrows behaved and passed judgment on people based on their posture.  Alison watched a cluster of women exclaim over some photo on a cell phone, noticing that the more attractive the woman, the more at-ease her arms seemed to be.  Alison relaxed her shoulders.

Presently Cleaver went outside to smoke, and when he did John pushed his face close to Alison’s and lapsed into a glassy-eyed insist-a-thon, telling her she looked beautiful tonight, cooing over her hair and hands and, in a burst of devil-may-care optimism, her breasts.  She considered the pros and cons of sleeping with him and decided against.  She pushed him away and he was too drunk to be offended; she told him to keep his hands to himself, and he laughed.  He poked a cigarette between his lips and tried to light it from the wrong end, and Alison didn’t help him because she had ceased to feel any responsibility over his feelings.

Alison, soberest by far, was ferrying the three of them home in John’s blue 1993 Tacoma when the smell came to her again, a thousand times more strongly, and for the first time she was able to associate it with something she’d smelled before.  A high, blunt stench like plumbing fluid and gardenia that brought back memories of a sweet-smelling poison her father would pipe through the sprinkler-hose to rid their front lawn of mole crickets and fire ants; black plastic boxes of poison plugged into the necks of sprinkler heads like latched ticks.

Alison turned to John, half-lidded, propped between herself and Cleaver.

“Smell that? Hey.” She elbowed him in the lap. “Hey.  Smell that?”

“Dinn smell nnythun,” replied John thickly, head bobbling on his neck in agreement with the bouncing of the pickup.  Cleaver had got the window seat so he could ash his Marlboro Mild into the rushing night air.  This afforded John the middle seat and more chances to insinuate his hand into the crease between Alison’s thighs.

“Mmmm.” John smiled, eyes fixed on some imaginary drama playing out in soft focus a few inches from his nose. “Mmmm.”

“Stop.”

“Whuss goan make me, hmmm?”

The sloppy opera of his fingers reached an apex as he thrust his thick fingers into the groove of her jeans, forcefully and without finesses, as one might wrench a bent spoon from a jammed garbage disposal.  His other hand slipped between her Wranglers and the small of her back, past the seam of her panties, until she could feel his dry unwelcomeness finding entry into her anus.

Cleaver heaved in the window seat and dropped his cigarette onto the floormat, where it sizzled briefly before being extinguished by vomit.

“Mmm, you goan say youaint that KINDA girl? Well yuh’re goan be tonight. I’mma make a silverdollar outta a dime with yuh’re assshole tonight.”

“STOP IT.” Alison grabbed John’s hand, but before she could throw it back at him the metallic-poison smell intensified suddenly, filling the small space of the truck’s cab, overwhelming her.  If the smell in her dorm room had been a whiff of mole-cricket poison dissolved in sprinkler-water, this was the feeling of drowning in the stuff, of being scalded to death in a poison-flooded burrow.  Alison’s eyes bulged and she sucked in air.  She hacked with all the force of her lungs and let go of the wheel, just for the smallest of seconds, as she pushed all the air out of her in a violent, choking wheeze.

And then a child with no eyes stepped directly into the wash of her headlights.  Light flooded into empty sockets, apricot-sized cavities grown over with flesh, perfectly smooth, as if eyes had ever meant to be there at all.

Behind the wheel of the Tacoma, time slowed down.  Alison felt her palms close around the emergency brake.  The child’s face whipped in the direction of impact.

The eyeless child shrieked and the sound pieced the night, pricking through Alison’s scalp like a blackberry bramble, the insane death cry of the eyeless child with crumbling teeth who had arrived to rearrange the furniture in her brain.   Her face purpled with the force of her coughing, her heart thumped in her throat.

For the barest instant before impact, Alison saw that the thing no longer looked like a child, but like an old, old thing.  A thing with knotty sockets of stretched skin that locked onto Alison and saw inside her and filled her chest with a swollen ache that felt like terrible homesickness, or the feeling of sudden descent when a roller coaster drops from its highest peak.

Then the thing was a child again.  An awful, awful sound rose from it, a gibbering shriek that went up and up until it split the air like a mordant trainwhistle.  It was the scream of a banshee, and Alison thought,

This thing is an evil thing, and it knows my name.

The sound of impact was a fleshy clunk, an Easter ham dropped in the sink to defrost.  Alison screamed.  Her eyes rolled in her head and she swerved into a ditch, where the truck flipped twice before crunching into a thick-trunked oak tree. Boughs of moss dangled like ripped snakeskins in the smoke above the wreckage.

Cleaver made an ‘UHHN!” sound as his skull was crushed between the half-down window and an L-shaped piece of automobile jutting improbably from the passenger’s side doorjamb.  John’s head flapped into the dashboard as if his neck were made of strung taffy, and Alison could not tell if blood or urine was coming out of him but one or the other was puddling warmly around her armpit and collarbone, mashed as she was into the roof of the cab, which was now the floor of the cab.  The keys rattled in the ignition. Leaves and tendrils of detritus swirled around the truck’s carcass as it lay crumpled at the foot of the tree, presenting its greasy black belly to the sky, and the tinkle of the shamrock-shaped jingle bell dangling from John’s rearview mirror slowed, slowed – stopped.  Then everything was still.  The wrecked truck had become part of the nighttime countryside, and so too the three soft, broken bodies inside it.

In Alison’s final memory of the crash, she opened her eyes and everything was quiet except for a gentle, metered dripping and the sound of soft swamp air rustling through the big tree above.  She saw the world upside-down through the splintered frame of the driver’s side window.  A tremendous weight compressed her diaphragm, and her face felt numb and sticky.  She tried to lift her head but found it pinned by something; a strange warm thing that was both hard and soft.  She put her hand up and groped, and her fingers identified the shape of an ear connected to a patch of sweaty, bloody buzzcut.

It was John’s head, pinning her head.  John’s body, pinning her body.   She wet her lips and tried to make words, but all that came out of her mouth was a throaty sputtering sound.   A flash of lime-colored light, the smell of cricket poison.  And then something moved near the corner of her eye.  At the edge of her vision, something was creeping out from behind the window’s skewed frame.  Something silvery and slow-moving.  She blinked and it was closer, blinked again and it was inches from her face.  A child’s head of hair.  Soft cornsilk hair.  Alison screamed.

Her mouth, when she opened it, filled with blood from her nose and made her choke.  Still she could not stop from screaming as the eyeless child craned its head into the wreckage, leaning in from behind the truck’s twisted window frame like a grinning moon, and then unhinged itself to crawl into the wreckage of Alison’s mind, which had likewise become unhinged.

It knows my name.

Today is Wednesday. 

Cleaver died on impact.  Alison knows that now because the doctors have told her, except they’d called him Albert Cleveland Harold-Strunk and for a moment she didn’t know who they were talking about.  She also knows that her airbag likely saved her life, even if her face is a swollen purplish mess and her upper lip feels as large as a split kielbasa.  And she knows that she passed out before the truck caught fire.  She knows these things now.

But even conscious, they tell her, she wouldn’t have been able to free herself because of how her right leg was bent up into the center console and jammed in place with a length of her own broken tibia.  But even spared THAT, they continue, the nurses and doctors, she would still have been pinned beneath John’s limp weight, which fell draped across her body like a sweaty human duvet.  Two-hundred-and-ten-pounds of him.

A two-hundred-and-ten-pound fire blanket.

As it turns out, the number of minutes necessary for gasoline combustion flames to consume a body the size of John’s is marginally greater than the number of minutes required for a stocky ex-marine named Dave and his brother-in-law Matthew to come upon the scene of a very bad car accident and pull the inhabitants to sanctuary.

Not enough time to consume the body, but more than enough time make it mauve-colored and weeping and covered with fluid-filled blisters the size of fried eggs.  The fire melted the rubber of John’s his Nikes into the soles of his feet, sparing the fair-haired maiden beneath him.

Today is Wednesday.

This visit that the nurses are granting Alison is an excursion from Intensive Recovery Room 914, to which her relocation from the operating room is recent enough that she’s still stupid with anesthesia.  The nurses keep reminding Alison that such a visit is VERY much against hospital rules, as if they’ve been weakened by her mewling and unending petitions.

From how the nurses are behaving, Alison understands that she is expected to thank John.  She is expected to DEMAND to thank him, for shielding her from the flames and sparing her flesh by sacrifice of his poor, selfless body.  She thinks maybe she is expected to weep over him, or to burst out with some display of gratitude or bewilderment or even explode into sudden internal wrath at the injustice of it all.

That the nurses are affording her this indulgence now, in the freshest aftermath of their shared hell, is a fact Alison takes to imply that John is extremely unlikely to survive.   The thought does make her feel something in her chest, but it might be a broken rib.

Although Alison is 100% certain that John’s act of self-sacrifice was more a testament to his blood alcohol level than his belief in martyrdom, Alison’s logarithmic judgment tells her to play along.  She calls up just enough tears to brighten her eyes.  She whispers some nonsense words and reaches through the bedrail, but isn’t permitted to touch him because the risk of infection is terribly high when you’re missing most of your skin.   Alison sits with him doing these things until John’s breath quickens beneath the bandages and he begins to whimper, at which point the nurses separate the two beds in order to calm John with another jolt of morphine.  As a pair of candy stripers wheel Alison back to Intensive Recovery Room 914, a nurse follows behind, fiddling with the IV bag and encouraging her to consider the compound fracture of her right leg a lucky break.  Alison manages a weak chuckle, but only in her mind.

In the burn ward, nobody appreciates a pun.

Today is Wednesday.

There is an article in the paper about the accident.   A nurse brings Alison a copy and holds it up so she can see the headline through her crusty, slit-swollen eyes. There is a black-and-white picture of Cleaver.  It’s a yearbook photo, five years younger, and his hair is shaped into crunchy comma-shaped spikes that have been bleached at the tips.  The spot reads “STUDENTS IN DEADLY COLLISION”, and smaller letters underneath,  “22-YEAR-OLD HERO SHIELDS GIRL FROM FLAMES; CONDITION REMAINS CRITICAL”.  In a color photo Dave the stocky marine is standing next to the charbroiled Tacoma, its black-burnt remains crusty with leftover oxygen-eating foam.   Dave is smiling, one boot planted on the burnt Tacoma.  He looks like a hunter standing over his kill.  He’s smiling and Alison can see wet spade-shaped teeth that make her think of cantaloupe seeds.

In Alison’s dreamscape, the measure of instants that make up ‘minutes’ and ‘hours’ has no foreseeable significance.  For a long while, she has tethered herself to reality with a long, thin string.  Now her mind is wandering.   She dreams of the child, its moon-shaped face, and an eyeless horror that comes toward her out of the dark, smiling, plucking apart knots with long, thin fingers.

The eyeless thing never leaves her.  Sometimes it sits on her lap, playing with her hair and sucking on the external fixation pins that jut from puffy openings in her calf.  But most often, the thing has taken to tucking itself into a corner of the ceiling, like a blind house spider.  It grins and whispers things as she swallows her antibiotics and scrapes up green spoonfuls of Cisco Gelatin Desert and lets the beeping of the various monitors lull her into blissful morphine dozes.  The things says things that don’t make sense to Alison, but making sense of things isn’t on her priority list right now, and she doesn’t think about it much.

“They must understand that you’ve purchased this township, fair and square,” is one thing that it whispers.  It also says things like,  “Jemima used to love corn on the cob,” and, “To incapacitate a witch you must impale it by the cunt,” even though Alison has never known any witches or anyone named Jemima except the black lady with the bouffant on the squeezable bottle of pancake syrup.

Sometimes the eyeless thing sings soft, sweet songs about animals going to heaven.  And sometimes it talks about John.

“When the burns dry up, he’ll come for you,” it whispers.  The face of the thing still looks like a child but the body is bloated and scaly, and the arms and legs have begun to look like the legs of a spider or a wasp.

“He’ll crawl in here when you’re sleeping, and he’ll steal your skin.  He’ll drag the rest of you to Hell with him.”

After the hero story runs in the paper, the nurses start reading Alison letters from well-wishers and congratulateurs that are arriving for John.   There are Hallmark cards with sappy religious poems, often passed around offices and classrooms, signed with a chaos of different names and inks.  Arts-and-crafts sympathies from Girl Scouts and relatives and second-grade Sunday-school classes.

Alison’s mother arrives at some point while Alison is dozing, and when she wakes up she’s there at the side of the bed.  She presses her lips together a lot, and her eyes never stop being pink and glassy with tears. When she speaks she can’t keep her voice from cracking.  She keeps wanting to hold Alison’s hand.

By the fifth day Alison does not want to hold anyone’s hand.  She just wants to sleep.  The doctors have removed her from the morphine drip and now sleep is the only release from the deep, rotten ache biting into her bones.

But she can’t sleep.  Not really.  She can only get as far as dozing, and then she gets stuck, in-between dreaming and waking.  But there isn’t much pain in the in-between, so Alison doesn’t mind staying there.  She learns the sound of her own heartbeat and likes the way the sheets ruffle the hairs on her arms.  She listens to the cogs turning insider her.  She fades into a painless place that only looks like her hospital room.

The eyeless thing sits on her pillow and picks at her hair and strokes her eyebrows, gently.  It makes a singing sound in its throat like a wet nurse humming a baby to sleep.

Some days pass.

Alison feels well enough to watch television and eat one of the hamburgers her mother brings, but the meat tastes spongy and strange and she spits it out.  She asks the right questions and smiles at the right times and at night she has terrible sweating nightmares in which she knows she needs to find her way to the burn ward, but her leg is bolted to the traction beam with screws bored into her bones.

Alison wakes from these dreams panicky and physiologically agitated, and it takes time for her to relax into sleep again.  She is not alone. Her eyeless visitor watches from its hidey-hole in the corner of the ceiling, telling her things – things about centipedes and the A-Bomb and things about John.  Eventually Alison notices that the thing doesn’t speak words any longer – only sounds.  Laughing and squishing sounds.  In the dimmest corner of Intensive Care Room  914, Alison can see the thing grinning and pulsing.  She can see that it’s begun to spin a cocoon around itself.

It is her birthday.  Nurses and her mother and several members of her mother’s church are gathered around her bed, but she cannot tell their faces apart and she cannot hear the singing because the noises from the thing cocooned in the corner have grown deafening. She sees a foil balloon with a honeybee, and a cake with blue icing, and on top of the cake there are candles whose tips are alight with the most beautiful, sensuous, godly fire.  Alison looks into the fire and two things happen at once: She is gripped by the most powerful orgasm of her life, and the thing in the corner screams a single word so loudly that she will be effectively deafened forever. The word is BURN.

The nurses are reluctant to allow Alison another visit to John’s room, as his morning debridement has been a difficult one and the pain is overcoming him to the point where drugs merely bring the unholy pain ripping through his skinless nerves from a scream to a conversational tone. An “indoor voice”, as Alison’s aunts and teachers would say. But in the end they agree to wheel her briefly to John’s bedside, persuaded perhaps by her meaningless tears and perhaps by a sense of emotion, a thing that Alison is no longer capable of comprehending.  The matches the nurses used to light her birthday candles are pushed into the rim of her cast, the strike-strip irritating the splotchy skin that has grown prickly with newborn hairs.

The child-thing sits at the foot of her hospital bed, smiling at her with its mouth full of teeth. Hundreds of teeth. Its bones, and its face, have gone.

The oxygen tank ignites immediately, showering John with sparks the color of fireflies in the moonlight, and then redder, richer flames as the bandages and ointments catch fire.  Alison cannot hear screaming.  She cannot hear the crack of bone as her leg breaks apart for the second time, as she drags herself into John’s bed and covers his raw body with her own.  She smells cricken poison.  She feels flames splash across her body, and at first they feel cold, icy cold like falling onto your palms while ice-skating.

She would like to die before the hurting begins.  She asks the child beside her if it can help her with this, and the child says yes, and then a wash of darkness spreads before her eyes, edging out the light of the world like softly melting snow.

Alison has lived to be nineteen years old. Up until the very end, Alison never considers that anyone else’s mind might not be exactly like hers.

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