Echo

IT WAS HAPPENING again.

Connor was gripping the door frame with a tremor-stricken hand, gaping at his wife’s unmistakable hourglass form at the end of the hallway. He caught his breath and resolved to stand his ground, focusing through a thick haze of sleep and doubts of wakefulness.

Just to be sure, he looked back into the bedroom.

His body wasn’t there. But that didn’t mean he was awake. If this was a dream, it could show up later.

He shifted his eyes to look at her form again. Weight on her back foot, a delicate hand on an outthrust hip. She wore the sheer white babydoll he’d bought her for Valentine’s Day. The one with the open back and the faux sequins and pearls on lace triangular cups, glinting now like beacons. He looked at her ring finger where the diamond engagement ring also beamed, an angular carousel of lights.

“You’ve been drinking again,” she said. “I can smell it from here.”

“I…”

“How long do you think I should put up with this, Connor? You can’t even see straight, and anything we talk about, you’ll likely turn into a fight.”

“I’m sorry.”

Moonlight cascaded from their daughter’s old room, spilling into the hallway where the dark blue carpet became a sort of water tapestry, churning with lunar curiosities. As he took a step forward, the walls and ceiling shimmered with crystal webbing, the cool water of the backyard pool reflected again and again.

“How many drugs are you on now?” she said.

“Five. Prescription drugs.”

“Your body will become dependent on them, do you know that? If you miss a single dose now, you’ll shake like a junkie. What makes you think I want to be married to a junkie, Connor?”

“Ella, please…”

She turned away from him and stepped into the bathroom, closing the door behind her. He listened as she flung the medicine cabinet open and rummaged through bottles of medication, dropping them into the sink.

“Ella,” he called, and began to walk, the shifting tunnel of light and water twisting white and gold and aquamarine. “Ella,” he called again, and shoved the door open to find her facing him, holding a handful of lorazepam in one hand and an overfull glass of water in the other.

“I’ll swallow them all. Won’t take long.”

“Ella, don’t.”

He looked at her, love in his eyes, and tears. He looked at her, now too-thin in the white babydoll, locks of golden brown framing a gaunt face that somehow retained its beauty. He looked at her often playful lips, her noblewoman’s nose, and meticulous dark eyebrows. Her eyes, each a blaze of jade, the whites cherried with distress as tears flowed freely from their corners.

“How do you like it!” she cried.

“Ella, stop it.”

“How do you think it feels, watching you waste your life away, drugged to the eyeballs every day, every night? Do these drugs give you comfort, Connor? Maybe I need some comfort now!”

She threw her head back to stuff the pills into her mouth, but he lunged forward, slapping them away. The pills scattered, raining down like white M&Ms on the ceramic tiles. He moved forward finally, giving in to the pangs of his longing, and took her face delicately into his hands, imploring her. She was sobbing, thick, sweaty ringlets of hair hiding her face, the pronounced gaunt cheeks and deep dark circles like caverns under her eyes.

“Honey,” he said, rubbing his thumbs back and forth over her temples, “what are you doing here? You know it’s over.”

“Just because it’s over,” she said between sharp, desperate intakes of air, “doesn’t mean I care any less. I love you, Connor. I always will.”

She looked up at him now, blue veins pulsing like worms in her face bone white.

“And I’ll always love you, Ella. Always. But you have to go. Give this a rest or… or I’m afraid I’ll have to call someone.”

He traced the outside of her ear gently with his fingers, then stroked her hair, moving the curls away from her eyes.

“Please, Ella. Please go…”

With perfect pouting lips she pulled away and padded out of the bathroom, pausing for a moment to look at him sullenly over her shoulder. Then she continued, the water on the walls tumbling now with the ferocity of a cyclone, making her into a sea creature; a mermaid mid-metamorphose as she glided to the landing of the staircase, paused again, but didn’t look back.

When he made his way to the bedroom door and glanced across at the landing, she was gone. He went inside, closed the door, collapsed to his knees and wept and said the rosary… while draped over a sofa chair the unmistakable black cassock, rabat, and Roman Collar of a Catholic priest lay spotlighted by an illusory moon.

 

The Price (of this writing life)

You’ve been asked before. 

What are you doing?

Writing a story, you said.

And they’ve laughed.

About what?

With reluctance, you told them. You broke it down for them in layman’s terms, which made you pucker and fuss inside. It’s like nails on a chalkboard.

Huh. Well, that’s cool. You get paid for it?

You answered honestly. No, you haven’t been paid for it. And they looked at you kinda funny.

Oh. It’s good to have a hobby, though. You should stick with it.

You think they don’t understand, but be assured, they do. They see it in your eyes, your mannerisms. Your walk. The way you talk. All those big words common members of the human race haven’t heard since tenth grade English? They hear you. They watch you. They pay attention to what you’re reading, and how you take it around with you everywhere, weighing you down like a sack of dusty burdens. And it’s that thing. That something about you… is it self-pity? What do they call it now?

Emo?

You are emotional, do you know that? Dark. Brooding. It’s disturbing. Do you have any idea how disturbing it is? They know you know what those brooding artists looked like and talked like, they see you trying to pull it off, and inside, they’re laughing. They think you’re a phony; you’re full of shit; a wannabe. They know that you know that Hemingway put a shotgun to his head and pulled the trigger. They think you wish you were him. They think you’re trying to be him, without really being him; without pressing that cold double-barrel to your skull, and I’ll tell you something—

They’re right.

There is self-pity. You pity yourself because you’re empathic. You feel the pain in the world, which so often outweighs the joys that as a species you’re quite certain we’re accumulating all the necessary ingredients for a societal mushroom cloud. It is emo. You are emo. You’re dark, you’re brooding. It’s seeped in through the cracks in your limbs to your soul, weighing you down much more than just a sack of burdens. It’s a globe. You are Atlas.

You do know what those brooding artists of times past looked like. The ones with the rainclouds in their eyes. You like how they dressed. You like the sadness in their eyes because it confirms you have company in this never-ceasing circle of invisible, festering agony. You don’t try to pull it off. You do pull it off. You’re not a phony, you’re the real thing; an outcome; a result. You know they know Hemingway put a shotgun to his head, and you know they don’t know the real reason why; that when you’re an outcome, there’s a price to pay for how much you take in.

There’s a price to pay for how much you absorb.

They think you wish you were him, pressing that cold barrel to your skull. They think it’s pompous. What makes you so much better, so sensitive, so special, that you can’t handle all the bullshit, but they can? Does that make them the source of the problem? Is that what you’re trying to say, princess?

They think you think you’re better than them, you asshole writer.

And I’ll tell you something—

You’re right.

The Nursery (Pt. 1)

“You’ll never know the humility that is getting a pap smear,” she said. “Be glad about it, and stop pretending you’re an expert on female health. You’ll get jumped.”

Ben and Clarissa often happily shared the graveyard shift, but that Friday night was an exception. After the evening orderlies had filed out, they were pretty much in charge, and usually it was a good time. Sticky Chinese take-out cartons and Dr. Pepper cans scattered across the reception desk. Candy bar wrappers perched in the mess like crude origami. Clarissa’s bare legs propped up on the desk on one side, while Ben’s socked feet stunk on the other.

The intermediate children’s ward was a realm of quietude at St. Michael’s late at night, thanks in part to the shortage of beds. But it seemed that lately, babies were either born with serious ailments requiring the specialized staff of the intensive children’s ward, or popped out of the oven good and healthy, ready to go home after a day or two of pampering. In the intermediate wing that cool night in September, six newborns lay relatively quietly, cocooned in blankets with complications no more serious than the mildest forms of eczema. The job was a breath of fresh air. A change of pace from studying, or pondering their futures in medicine. Clarissa, fresh in her second year of biology at the state university, was already keen on medical school, while Ben—simple-minded, if somewhat lackadaisical—was still perfectly content with staying on course to become a nurse.

“Jumped? By who, you?”

“By Mrs. Schwimmer and her feminist death squad. I swear, if you go a day without bringing up periods, pregnancy, menopause, mammograms, or pap smears in her class in a joking way, I’ll buy you an iPad. Are you not aware of the way she looks at you when you’re in the middle of one of your tirades?”

Ben laughed, chomped down on a Twizzler. “How does she look at me?”

“Like she wants to jump you.”

“My bones?”

“Har. Can you be serious for ten seconds? You’re so gonna fail at being a nurse.”

“I’m wounded. You know I’m very capable of being serious when it’s warranted. Pap smears are a necessary part of a woman’s life. You either get it done once a year or you run a higher risk of developing cervical cancer later on. It’s a fact. You either prop those legs up on the stirrups like a good lil girl or you don’t.”

Clarissa dropped her chopsticks and slice of chicken in the carton she held, swept a lock of glossy black hair behind her ear, and shot him a wicked glare. “I rest my case, Benjamin.”

“What?”

“Compassion. You should try it sometime.”

“Wait, am I supposed to feel sorry for you because you’re a woman?”

She shoved the carton into a corner of the desk, swung her legs around, and stood. “I’m going to the bathroom.”

“To change the pad?” he called out. “Don’t be long! Margaret’s going on break in five minutes! It’s your turn to spot her!”

He boosted up in his chair to find Margaret—the resident midwife—in the nursery proper, rocking one of the wailing new arrivals in her arms with an expert jitter. Jiggling the babes, he called it, and now he muttered it to himself like a mantra over a new mouthful of steamed rice: Jiggling the babes, jiggling the babes, it’s the good lady Margeret jiggling the babes.

A light flickered over the reception area.

Ben stuffed a slice of beef into his mouth and chewed like a cocky young man; like a guy from a time when bad boys were greaseballs with cigarette packs rolled up in their shirt sleeves and switchblades were taboo. He thought about Clarissa’s legs, hoping she’d prop them up on the desk again, but when she returned, barely disiturbing the air around her when she sat, he noted with dismay that she’d changed out of her white nurse’s uniform with the skirt, opting instead for the same boring old navy blue scrubs he was wearing.

“Did you really mean it?”

“What,” she grumbled, and picked up her chopsticks, daintily plucking a wedge of green pepper from the vegetable carton.

“That you’d buy me an iPad.”

“I was trying to prove a point.”

“Which was?”

“That you revealing a compassionate side would be so revelatory and amazing and miraculous that it might warrant purchasing an overpriced window pane.”

There was a pause, and then they looked at each other and laughed—Ben with his usual jarring turkey chortle, Clarissa doing her best to hold in sheer relief at some semblance of a reconnection with the boy she secretly considered a soulmate and possible future husband. She broke his glassy, laugh-drunk stare, swiping another chunk of green pepper from the veggie carton with the chopsticks, slipping it into her mouth with a princess stealthiness only a woman overconscious of her image could achieve.

“You still mad at me?”

“No comment.”

“C’mon, how could you be mad at this face?” He flashed her a bright grin, which she studied for a moment in mid-chew.

“You’ve got crow’s feet.”

“What?”

She looked away and resumed chewing, nonchalantly wiggling her chopsticks in the air as if to circle the wrinkles for him to see. “At the corners of your eyes. You know…crow’s feet. I hadn’t noticed them before. Maybe they’re new.”

“I do not have—“

“Crap, I gotta go relieve Margaret. See you in a bit.”

Ben watched her jog away from the reception, blending into the darkness cast over the rest of the ward. In the soundproof glass-enclosed nursery, she quickly apologized to Margaret and took over as midwife, cradling a bawling, newly-arrived pink bundle of misery.

Another light flickered over the reception area. Ben watched it pulse continuously, a veritable strobelight for a good thirty seconds before settling into its unreasonably bright, migraine-inducing glare once again.

Chordata, Carnivora, Caniformia (Pt. 2)

PATRICK SHERMAN SAT SLOUCHED, watching John Wellington pace around the small room in his grey Armani suit to the tune of Johnnie Ray’s Cry.

He’d seen this all before, heard it all before. You bring them what they want, on time, tied up all pretty with a little bow and a smile and it don’t seem to matter a damn. Pat had brought the goods, but Wellington was about to ask for even more. They so often ask for more.

He’d done everything right. Moved past the alarm and the dogs and the camera, slipped into the meticulous glittering Georgian estate and skulked about for the better part of an hour while the wife n kids n the mayor had still been awake. He’d waited in the music room, sitting right there on the piano bench dressed in his black sweats and hood with ski mask. He’d sat there, one with the darkness, still as Death in the cold moonlight filtering weakly through the floor-length windows and dark chocolate drapes behind him. All five members of the Staub family had to move through the music room repeatedly in the hours before bedtime, seeing about laundry, seeing about ironing, making lunch, gassing up the three vehicles. There was much traffic, but Pat didn’t move a muscle nor produce a solitary bead of sweat. His body understood such commands.

He just waited.

And when the time was right, when the lights had gone out and mommy and daddy said g’night to the kiddies, kissed em n locked their doors one by one, he padded—catlike—up to the circle of bedrooms, which, at its highest point, wrapped around an impressive chandelier he was sure could feed a couple thousand starving homeless children on the streets of Texas. The Cinderella thing dripping with crystals overlooked a marble staircase he couldn’t hope to guess the value of.

He shook his head.

He crouched by the edge of the staircase and he shook his head and waited.

One hour later, he was inside the master bedroom, standing over the Mister and Missus, both of them deep in slumber, the Missus with her arm draped over her man’s chest. He ignored them for a while, pulling on a second pair of gloves—the ones with the brass domes—flexed them a bit to work them into his grip, and removed the Glock .33 from the holster under his arm and pointed it at the Mister. He was about eight feet away. Wouldn’t be much of a mess if it came to that. Clean entries. Clean exit wounds.

The Missus rolled over. Reached for something on her night table—a cell phone, shit—and checked her text messages discreetly over the edge of the bed. She keyed in the necessary commands to begin her response, and when she was done, she felt something very hard and very cold pressed into the top of her head.

“Don’t move,” Sherman said. “Don’t talk. And don’t you start whimpering. This is gonna go down clean and painless, so do exactly as I say, hear? I’m thinkin you prefer clean and painless.”

He saw her nod in the moonlight.

“Atta girl. Now, with the hand furthest from me, reach over and nudge your husband’s shoulder. Softly.”

She did as he asked.

“Again. Do it again.”

Chordata, Carnivora, Caniformia

At a certain age, a man makes diamonds out of three things: family, faith, and pride. If any of these things are compromised, he changes.

Men’re bears. Don’t matter how tall he is or how wide he is; don’t matter how much he can bench. He could have washboard abs or a Santa belly—a man is a bear. Comfortable and assured in his element, he’s loving and protective and will most assuredly leave you the hell alone if he’s happy (which, mind you, don’t take much). But you interfere with a bear’s life, simple as it is, and suddenly he’s reared back and larger than life, all teeth and claws and hair standing on end and you better run, because once he’s taken one of those marching steps in your direction, you’re as good as in medias res—in the midst of things, if you know what I’m sayin.

Look, I ain’t justifying my actions. I ain’t even sayin it was the right thing to do. But my three corners was threatened, and if I didn’t do somethin, I’d have nowhere to go when all was said and done. So I reacted. And please do admit the obvious, that overreaction is a classification based entirely on opinion. A lot of men’ve said I did what any of them would’ve done. Some even said I was nice about it. I don’t regret what I did that evening, so don’t  you ask me to fake it. Don’t you ask me to be someone I ain’t. Don’t ask me to plead.

Yessir?

Do I fear for my life?

Let me ask you somethin—what do you think a bear would say?

Yeah? You sure you wanna hear it again? Fine with me, if you can stomach it. You seemed sorta pale the first time I told you how it went down, and I wasn’t even halfway through. Took your restroom break and never came back. You want the abridged version, sheriff?

And you’re sure bout that…

Alright, then here it is.

If you say so.

Like A Mouth

Parting flesh delicately

with precise consideration—

“Ah.”

Acid bubbles explode in your arm,

and the bloody little mouth

blubbers stupidly.

Panic Scan

Scarred bloodshot,

eyes in a panic-scan for pity,

find nothing but a stone black fist;

mass and velocity propelled

by carelessness and cyanide.

Look At You

Looking at me,

In your bleached white kite like a parasol spun,

A top spun by everyone.

Look at you, lying smile.

Poison dart teeth spread gutrot through kisses; I’ll find myself writhing under the sheets come nightfall with only my curses

to console me.

Look at you,

With your high-pitched false-meek squeak, slipping mask and cherry cheeks;

my guardian angel is loathe to ignore your disregard of my fragility,

but I

don’t say

a word.

Q&A, July (NEW TUNDRA) by Tanya

(Conducted on MSN Messenger)

TANYA: So you had a bit of a surprise for me today.

JEFF: I did?

TANYA: Oui. You said you’ve been working on some YA material. Mr. Graphic Disturbing Horror writing stuff for kids?

JEFF: Oh noes! The horror!

TANYA: Indeed. Tell us about this YA project.

JEFF: It’s called New Tundra and it has a simple premise. Our planet is attacked, completely out of the blue. There is no fight. No one knows who our attackers are. All we—the survivors—know from satellite reports is that the source of the blast completed a full orbital path around the Earth in a mere thirty seconds, just before a solitary blast rippled across the surface of the planet, destroying 99% of all life. To say we’re on the verge of extinction is an understatement. Less than 1% of the surviving Earth species are human, and even after the blast, we’re not safe. Ghost wolves roam what’s left of our planet in search of survivors to consume them.

TANYA: Why is it called New Tundra?

JEFF: Because though civilization has been reduced to ash, the goal is to make the best of the situation—no matter how grim—and start fresh.

TANYA: But the characters, they can’t start fresh because they’re being hunted.

JEFF: That’s right. They’re constantly pursued, adding to the tension coursing through the book.

TANYA: Talk about the characters.

JEFF: Seven children. I introduce them in brief passages. The Bullied Boy, The Girl Who Saw And Felt, The Dreaming Boy, The Girl Who Took The Wind, and The Girl Who Escaped.

TANYA: Why the brief passages, and what’s with the titles for names?

JEFF: To train myself as its written to eliminate useless prose. It’s intentionally very minimalist; a reflection of the world the children inhabit. And the titles are just that—titles. The children do have names, but the titles refer to what they’ve been through, and how that makes them unique. What makes them unique, in turn, is what makes them useful to the group and its survival. They come together like cogs in a machine.

TANYA: Talk about one of the characters. Give us a peek at just one.

JEFF: Huxley, The Bullied Boy, was the overweight kid no one paid any attention to in grade school except when they needed someone to be the butt-end of a cruel joke. After the attack and subsequent culling of humanity, he becomes the first line of defense for his new family, and not just because of his size, but also due to his ability to shut down one of the three pain receptors in his body at any given time. It’s a metaphor to discuss the effects of abuse and the abilities cross over into the fantastical, but I like to keep these elements muted. Keeping it all grounded in realism is what I do best.

TANYA: That sounds freaking awesome. Can’t wait to read it!

New Tundra: The Girl Who Escaped

TERRORS IN THE DARK. Even after the nightmare is over, true evil leaves ashen memories behind—a residue—and screaming won’t shatter its molecules.

She wakes in a veil of sweat-drenched black ringlets, petals of smudged mascara spotlighting white-blue windows to a wounded soul. Howls sift through the night sky. Her heart skips a beat, stealing breath. It was no dream. It was a vision.

The proof of darkness prevailed is all around; a world devoid of light laid out before her.

No salvation, she says, reaching for the backpack and the machete.

Sometimes you’ve gotta make your own.