Ash Magazine Issue 2 Read online

There was a single tap at the door, followed by an extended pause. Then four quick knocks rattled in the high ceilings of the entry and main hall. They swooped past the portraits and landscapes that hung there, dusty, and hovered over the freshly scrubbed floorboards. The sound mingled with the crackling fire in the drawing room and drifted down, settling like ash into the fibers of the Persian rug at Mother's feet. The door was unlocked. It clicked open but didn't creak. Marianne was the only one who knew how to open it so it wouldn't creak.

  "Hello?" She closed the door behind her and took off her boots.

  "In here." Her mother didn't speak up. The words were faint but distinct.

  Marianne folded up her cane, set it with her boots, and walked down the hall to the drawing room. She knew all the secrets of this house. She knew the place behind the furnace where Dad used to keep an antique snuff box full of cocaine, and how the ringing pipes would harmonize with the sound of water gurgling down the drain in the kitchen sink when the temperature setting was just right. She knew the floor plan as a minefield, where, sneaking out for a glass of water or the security of her little brother’s bed after a bad dream, a misstep could send creaks and squeals exploding into the night.

  When she was nine, Marianne made Jack swear not to tell their parents that the view of the street from her bedroom window had begun to blur. Jack knew what was happening when Marianne had entered “The Awkward Phase.” The furniture began to move around, a few inches left or right, but always in Marianne’s way. Coffee mugs appeared on countertops, like the bruises on her hips and arms, only to disappear into the trash, the consequence of a careless elbow. Their mother said the clumsiness would eventually go away, and it did, but not before the truth came out: Marianne was going blind.

  It was when Marianne came out of her room wearing her blue dress before Grandpa’s funeral that their mother found out. A simple mistake - she could no longer remember which dress had lace around the collar so she chose one at random. Marianne was taken to the doctor the next day, and after a series of tests they explained that there was nothing they could do. She thought of her mother’s wails now as she walked down the hall.

  Upon entering the room, Marianne was overpowered by the smell of booze, which competed with a heavy perfume that reminded her of pears and lavender. She held out her hand and her mother gave her a curt hug before returning to her usual place, sniffling in the armchair. The furniture was in the same configuration it always had been: two leather couches at a right angle near the fire, end tables here and there, a well-stocked oak bar on the far side of the room and a large bay window. Marianne navigated the room with ease and took her seat nearest the fire, setting her clasped hands in her lap. She listened to her mother's little grunts as she yanked the armchair to face the fire. She must have been sitting, staring out at the snow before Marianne arrived, as she sometimes did when something terrible happened.

  "How was your flight?" Mother asked.

  "Oh, you know." Ice rattled in a glass.

  "Did the turbined man give you a hard time?"

  "What?"

  "The cab driver," Mother said, "he was wearing a turbine."

  "It's called a turban, Mother, and no, he wasn't giving me a hard time."

  "Oh. But you must have been sitting out there for fifteen minutes."

  "We were talking. His name's Ankur."

  "What did you talk about?" The fire popped. "Is school going well?"

  "I don't want to talk about school."

  "Well, what am I supposed to say, Marianne?"

  "I don't know. Just stop pretending to be so chipper."

  Her mother lit a cigarette and, exhaling, said, "I have been crying for the past two days, I just… A person can only do that for so long." The smoke coated her vocal chords; the words came out softer, almost wet. Marianne was quiet for a moment. She leaned back and crossed her legs. Her foot began to wiggle and the fire warmed the left side of her face and neck.

  "It's good to see you, Mary."

  "Then why'd you send me away to school?"

  Her mother finished her drink and set her glass too forcefully on the table. "Marianne, we have been through this so many times. Why do you want to talk about it now? You just said––"

  "Why'd you send me away?"

  "Exeter is one of the best high schools in the country. They can accommodate you better and their reputation will get you into an Ivy League school."

  "You just wanted––"

  "I cannot see why you are always complaining about it. There are so many girls that will never have the opportunities you do."

  Marianne stood up. "You're lying. Stop lying."

  "Don't raise your voice at me. Do you have any idea how hard it was to get you in––"

  "You just didn't want a blind girl in your perfect family." Her hands were shaking now. "Then Dad left and––"

  "Sit down!"

  Marianne sat down.

  "Now," Mother sighed, "we are not going to talk about this now." She stood up and went to the bar for another drink. The muscles in her calves quivered and she leaned heavily on the bar as she poured a brandy.

  "May I have one too?" Marianne scooted away from the fire and traced the patterns in the rug with her big toe. She thought about how Jack used to describe everything for her. He used to tell her about…

  "Brandy, alright?"

  Used to. The phrase implied a kind of potential that did lacked. As though there were a life afterward in which Jack replaced one action with another. He had. He once did. He died.

  "Do you have bourbon?" Marianne asked.

  Her mother looked over at the back of her head and raised an eyebrow, "Rocks?"

  "Neat, please."

  A smirk flickered on her face as she reached for another glass. She heaved a small sigh and her shoulders relaxed. Gazing back down at the glass, she poured a double and set it on the table next to Marianne.

  "I'm sorry. I don't know why I said that. It's just..." Marianne trailed off as she reached for her whiskey. She prepared to take a sip and felt a small thud next to her on the couch accompanied by a papery rattle. She discovered there a clean ashtray containing a small box of matches and a fresh package of cigarettes. Her mother flopped down next to her and a splash of whisky spilled out onto the back of her hand; her glass was full to the brim. She took a gulp to make it safer to hold in her lap. She felt her face cool a little now that her mother was sitting between her and the fire.

  "I suppose you drink all the time out there on the East coast?"

  "Not really. They'll expel you for that. Plus, my roommate's father was an alcoholic, so it's not like we have any wild parties or anything."

  "Is she blind, too?"

  "Of course not." Marianne faced her. "I'm the only blind girl in the school."

  "Oh."

  Marianne took another gulp of the whisky and followed the burn as it burrowed its way down her throat. She flicked open her watch and checked the time. "When is the wake tomorrow?"

  "Nine-thirty. We should probably go to sleep soon."

  "Let's stay up for a while." Marianne said. "I don't want to go to bed yet."

  "Alright." Her mother lit a cigarette. She shifted her weight and sat a little closer to Marianne. The cushion dipped toward her mother's side; she must have been only two feet away. "Do you remember that hideous sweatshirt Jack wore the whole year he was in first grade? He lost it at the end of that summer before you left and cried the whole day and refused to eat anything. Remember that?"

  "The purple one with the constellations on it?"

  "That's the one. I can't believe you remember what it looked like."

  "I don't. I just remember that he scratched out the Cancer stars because he thought it was their fault Grandpa was sick." A color flickered in Marianne's mind, but she could not name it. She took another gulp.

  "Mary," her mother paused. "I can't believe he's gone." She took Marianne's hand and squeezed it. Marianne squeezed back, but retu
rned her hand to the drink in her lap.

  "How did it happen?"

  "I don't want to talk about it."

  "What do you mean, you don't want to––"

  "He fell down the stairs, alright?"

  "––talk about it? I have every right to know."

  "You couldn't tell me on the phone like everyone else?"

  "This is not about you, Marianne." Her mother got up stomped out of the room.

  "You're right," Marianne shouted, "it's you who hurts."

  "Fine." Marianne kicked her bedroom door shut behind her. She drained her glass and set it on her old dresser. Her mother's heels thumped overhead, beating out a distressed rhythm between the master bedroom and the bathroom. The water started running. Marianne shook her head and began to feel around the room. This was something she picked up when her parents started taking Jack out to the movies and leaving her home. These outings frequently included dinner, and after a few hours of memorizing the smallest details of her surroundings, Marianne welcomed the lukewarm consolation of reheated restaurant food.

  She now ran her hands along the humongous wardrobe they used to keep in the attic and the walls, now cool and smooth like an eggshell, having shed their wallpaper skins. Nightstands flanked the head of the bed and in the corner various tables and hardwood chairs sat legs up around a heap of old blankets. She smacked her chin against a wayward chair back and the musty smell that rose from the blankets, combined with the ugly sound that preceded it made her think of the chaos of a giant set of bagpipes. How soon after she left for school her room had become a guest room? How long had it been a guest room before it was used for storage? What hid in the stacked boxes that now filled the closet, and did she care? She heard a strange noise from the bathroom upstairs.

  The shower masked it at first. A light moan nestled in the static of spraying water and the rustling curtain. Then it grew louder. The hot pipes screamed like a wave washing out the echo of pleasure.

  By the time Marianne realized what it was, she had tunneled down through the layers of quilts, beneath the fine cotton sheets in her bed. There was a lump there, on the side where she always slept. She pulled the lump close and examined it, realizing instantly that it was a child's sweatshirt. The sound had changed. Her mother's moans had twisted into a low animal howl, and no matter how hard she pressed the sweatshirt to her ear, that mournful cry reverberated in her head. When she finally untangled her hair and hands from the sweatshirt, she found the house completely silent. She decided to return the sweatshirt to Jack's room.

  Marianne stood in the doorway and fingered the plastisol stars screen printed on the boy's sweatshirt. Her science teacher had told her that the whole astrology deal was a sham. It was off by a couple thousand years and the characteristics of the signs were vague anyway. How could a few specks of light, in reality orbs of exploding gas, unfathomable in magnitude, have any bearing on each other, or us? How could those stars, infinitely distant and cold, resemble an archer, a crab? It didn't look anything like a crab. She began to count.

  Three steps out into the hall, twelve to the grandfather clock that stood in the corner near the front door, a hop over a band of creaky floorboards, two steps left and then came the stairs. The third and the seventh had to be skipped completely, but the ninth stair groaned only on the right side. At the top of the stairs she was greeted by a cloud of steam, soap and cigarette smoke. She turned her ear to her mother's room and listened for any sign of life. She thought she heard breathing, not in that room, but in the hallway, maybe ten paces away.

  There had never been a reason for Marianne to believe that a spirit inhabited the house, but she found herself searching for any memory that might justify this belief. But everything was different now, wasn't it? She scrambled into her little brother's bedroom, panting.

  Her mother had cleaned the room, Marianne knew right away, because the floor was completely uncluttered. It hardly seemed like boy's room at all without the mess. It smelled strange, too. The absence of odor: sweaty socks and grass stained clothes, hoards of candy stashed on holidays and quickly forgotten–– any trace scent of these things had been eradicated by cleaning chemicals. Smoke thickened the air. Marianne made to sit down on the bed, but it too had been moved since she went away to school. He had slid it back toward the far window, and put his desk beside it. She lay down on the bed and sighed. His pillow was missing, so she rolled up the sweatshirt and put it under her head. She wondered if Jack could ever see the moon from his bed at night, and whether it was out there now. She decided it must be. She was beginning to get sleepy when, again, Marianne thought she heard breathing.

  "Hello?" she whispered, "Jacky?" Nothing. She could hear her own heart pounding."Mom?" She sat up. "Mom, are you here?"

  Marianne got up and put her arm out in front of her as she took small steps toward the other side of the room. She stopped. She put her arm down, and changed direction, avoiding where the desk chair might be. She would see what was in his closet, she decided.

  All his toys had been put into two large trunks, and she sat down and began to root through them, trying to find the only thing that had ever been "handed down" in the family, one of those dolls with a soft body and a hard plastic head. It was a boy, and Jack had liked it because when it was laid on its back, its eyes closed. If their mother had ever found out Jack was playing with a doll, she would have accidentally tossed it out with Dad's favorite tennis shoes, and then feigned ignorance or sympathy while helping them find the missing item. Marianne wondered where he could have hidden that thing.

  She pulled a tennis ball from the trunk and tossed it over her shoulder toward the desk. It bounced a few times, and disappeared. Marianne cocked her ear to some kind of movement. As though in response, the ball rolled back, tapping her on the base of her spine.

  She felt like she had been struck by lightning.

  Paper crinkled and a match was struck.

  Marianne huffed, stood up and turned around. She put her hands on her hips and faced the direction of the desk chair. She wanted to say something, but when she sought words, the room expanded and all air was sucked out. The floor began to vibrate and she could feel the vacuum of space simultaneously compressing her and pulling her apart. She grabbed the lid of the old chest and yanked at it with all the strength she had. Toys cascaded over her ankles and across the floor in a sharp plastic wave. The crashing seemed ceaseless, like enormous television snow. Marianne envisioned game pieces and miniature cars scattered like constellations at her feet. How could such distant points of light resemble anything like a family? And then there was only silence.

  She had to escape. She paused at the door, but the silence persisted. She made for the stairs but, having misjudged the distance, she gasped, finding herself already precariously balanced with her feet halfway off the top step. She curled her toes and flailed for the banister. In an instant, she felt diffused warmth wrap around her waist; she felt the ghost of an arm make a faint impression in the fabric there, never touching her, as if to stop her if she fell.

  Boar and Sow

  By Andrew Dimitrov

  I. Office, Exigencies

  Each keystroke’s dull thump echoes like a gong in John Henry’s head. Sweat beads on his forehead as he seeks, voraciously, to lose himself in the labyrinth of words and numbers. Ones and zeroes amalgamate into disparate symbols, animating from the fount of his desktop monitor. The phone, sleek modern juggernaut of his disgrace, sits dormant.

  With effort, he locks his gaze onto the screen. He whimsies his ghost into the lattice of data, hoping for absolution from his fear. Ones and zeroes. One: the burst of the divine, the source of life. Single celled organisms, axons, sperm, god, existence, childbirth, obelisks, mountains, galaxies, ecstasy. Zero: the absence of existence. Demons, viruses, dendrites, death, caves, black holes, existential chasms.

  If John Henry concentrates, his reality reduces to this amalgamation of ones and zeroes. As the t
ectonic plates mash, so he will spawn endless matrices with the simple duality of one and zero. Thus he does, with fervor. If he could lose himself entirely — if he could become a spirit of his industry — he would align with the machine and evaporate. The phone would never ring. He would vanish from the office, perhaps never having been there. His cubicle would become a void amid the bureaucratic frenzy. Dapper heels would thud past his workspace, and it would be nowhere. This is John Henry’s relentless fantasy.

  The phone rings.

  He had expected it. Though as inevitable as death itself, the monotone screech tears through John Henry like a disease, rendering him frail. His hallucinatory ode to his work, his feverish attempt at escape, crashes in an instant. For a moment distorted into an age, he stares at the crimson beep of the active, waiting line. A chill festers in his gut. Machinelike, he reaches for the phone. He is canine now, capable only of acknowledging the putrescent rectum thrust to his face. John Henry, the nonhuman, puts receiver to ear.

  “Yes.”

  Heather, the nubile slut receptionist: “Your wife on line one, Mr. Henry.”

  “Please tell her I am indisposed.”

  “Oh, you’ll have to do better than that, Mr. Henry. She’s already called twice today.”

  “Please… just tell her… tell her….”

  Giggling, “What, Mr. Henry?”

  A cold edict sinks through John Henry’s temperament. He will do this. As Christ — as something greater than Christ — he will carry out his assignment, though it leads only to Inferno. Fate has exercised her cruel machinations; he is the Boar. Tonight he will mount the Sow.

  “Put her on the line.”

  “Trouble in paradise, Mr. Henry?” Glee.

  “Put her on the line.” The things he could do to Heather in the dark.

  An unsettling calm before the storm; a black oasis. John Henry channels his violence, his being, into this moment. In this chrysalis, an indescribable nihilism, a blank torment, can be felt but not understood. The world stops. John Henry accepts his demise, his skin reddening as he mashes the phone to his ear. He is a vessel, concave now. Through the machinations of inexorable doom he metamorphoses: he is a slate and will bear his wife’s imprint. He will bear it.

  “Hello.”

  “Hi, honey.” The Sow’s voice is purposefully, detestably saccharine. John Henry hallucinates a brief musical accompaniment to her voice: a grotesque declension of discordant violins, an orchestra of the undead. His face pales.

  “Late night?”

  “You… betcha.”

  “Well. Don’t work too hard.”

  “Sure. I’ll be coming.”

  “You’ll need to save some of that famous Henry energy.”

  Click.

  The sow’s lips dripped murder. He could see her — hear her — glistening on a bevy of plush beige, a symphony of crevices. A gelatinous empire of folds in which to drown in mammon. His doom. Inevitability.

  There is a fight. He must protest. He will not be enveloped. There is an escape. There is a God. John Henry scatters the mechanistic aura of trifles that lie on his desk: papers, notes, clips, reminders, nothing. A flurry of nothings. He curses, grunts, tears at the chains of mediocrity pinning him to his station.

  Yet he relents as quickly as his rage swelled. Memos, clips, and falderal fall gently about his head and upon his desk. His exertions, his pains — meaningless. There is no meaning save that most feral union which will take place this night under the hiss of blankets, a crime so vile no man dares comprehend.

  You’ll need to save some of that famous Henry energy.

  Laughable, John Henry whispers to himself. Laughable “Henry energy,” the sow’s christening of his awkward thrusts on their hair-raising honeymoon. It is called love. Lovemaking. A grin formulates as he absconds the cubicle. For once, it is not forced, though his visage is an aberration, a supposed human face. His legs, steel poles, clippety-clop to the men’s room. The chirrup of fluorescent lights bathes John Henry with realization. This is reality. The grin melts.

  He is forty-one years old. He is not in shape. He is not beautiful. He has been balding since his college years. Sweat blooms in his underarms. He is a flesh artifact serving a triumvirate of purposes, equally weighted: a manipulator and prognosticator of numbers and symbols for a colorless, pedestrian organization. This is his calling. This gives him meaning in a society of like flesh-machines. This is his job.

  A sentient being, capable of ecstasies and torments, yet unable to objectively relegate or classify them. He exists in a shell of black unknowing. This is his person.

  A deliverer of coding material in the most base process, at once man’s greatest aspiration and undying shame. A husband to the Sow, a sallow genetic banshee shrieking for fulfillment, a concavity which must be filled once a year, on this, the darkest of days. This is his hell.

  John Henry watches the water’s crystalline flow into the polished matte of the drain. The tiny droplets coalesce into a miniature torrent, whisked to sudden darkness past the grill. Sudden, sweet, amniotic black. Forever. A liquid stream in which to sleep, to die. Perhaps to revivify as another tiny droplet, expunged from the gaseous heavens to fetter the horizon in amorphous, lubricious wet?

  The bathroom door crashes open, tearing John Henry from his futile whimsy. In stumbles Andy, a loathsome obelisk of a man — if it can be called a man. A grinning, intrinsically doglike dilapidated shell in a corduroy suit that clashes hideously with his face’s wan palette. A bloodless grin of primordial origin. Gently wallowing slabs of base white normality attempting to veil the freak show of animalism within.

  “Working hard or hardly working, Johnny old boy?”

  “Working… Andy.” John Henry grimaces, fractures his face into a thousand globules so that Andy might see in the mirror a visage so hateful, so full of pestilence, that he will depart. John Henry would laugh as the colossus lumbers away in ague disgrace, but instead his horror multiplies: a hand, corpulent and jaundiced, slithers from the bog of Andy’s person and alights on his shoulder.

  “Rough day there, buddy?”

  Ice cracks in John Henry’s veins. A gentle minuet, then a stream, then a gush, and finally a torrent of dark, feculent rage bursts from his core. It ricochets through his nerves, paralyzing him. Andy’s hand is childishly, morbidly flocculent; a plush glacier. It gently smoothes the flannel wasteland of John Henry’s shoulder.

  Millennia pass. Hot blood gorges the capillaries in John Henry’s maw at his rage, his shame, his inability to strike at the child-leviathan behind him — or at himself. An inferno of malice roils in John Henry’s core, hisses through his pores. This crevice of Building Six, Municipal Office Park B assumes a celestial chill, yet the glacier does not retreat. John Henry blinks back tears, so repellent is the absurdity of his nightmare, so putrid the mephitis of his thoughts.

  Eons pass. Andy’s canine intellect may perceive a certain vacuity, an emotive dissonance in response to his mediocre attempt at bailing the sinking ship of John Henry’s psyche. Much more likely, the simpleton detects only the deranged twitch of John Henry’s tendons. His snout reels at the foul pheromone of John Henry’s enmity. He instinctively senses danger. Miraculously, the meaty paw retracts. The behemoth retreats. A murmur of banal consolation — “Keep on truckin’, buddy” — and a maladroit apology bumble from some estuary within the gelatinous slab of face. He averts penitently and, with remarkable celerity for a body so encumbered by gross, disproportionate anatomy, wheels about. The disgraceful pageant of co-workerly commiseration is broken. The steely pall of normalcy resumes when the behemoth shambles from the bathroom, tiles squeaking beneath the cheap loafers upon which his gaze is deservedly fixed. The door hisses and clicks shut.

  John Henry exhales. The universe’s cosmological clockwork briefly aligns to a state of mercy. Evanescence.In mediocrity, there is a certain peace. Yes. John Henry presses his palms to his face, and all is aglow. The men’s room effervesces, undulates, and
effervesces. It synchronizes with the beat of John Henry’s heart, the tick of his watch, the drip of the faucet, the steady uncoiling of his fibroid nerves.

  The dull croon of fluorescence at last illumes not perdition but a mathematically congruous vestibule where John Henry is comfortably alone. No demons tear at the foundation. A gentle swell overtakes his nervous system. At first he protests; his protestations are liquid soothed. John Henry is dulcified. He starts to think of cream, pinwheels: pleasant things, infantile things. He dares not suppress the simper that wells from his throat, leaks from his lips. A sweet absurdity. He smiles, gibbers to himself, to nobody.

  In the aether of his mind’s seraphic ocean, John Henry can meditate, cerebrate. He has time. It is meaningless, but it is time. A blinking delirium enters John Henry’s peripheral vision. Egrets eclipse the mordant sun in timid flickers. Oscillating penumbrae dance in swoops and folds, yet always return, tethered to the smooth plank of oak upon which slumbers our John Henry. The susurrations of the endless, torpid ocean rock and cradle him. Sound and sky converge into a scintillating nocturne.

  A slow enervation overcomes John Henry. He embraces it, glistening, smiling. The soft lamentations of the egrets are eclipsed by the sound of John Henry’s hand slipping viscously along the plank. He slips into the sweet delirium of the majestic abyss. The fractured umbrella of the outer world falls away, gracefully.

  The tide rips him away in its perfect pendulous regularity. The evaporating panorama of ebullient Solaris herding the egrets, the plank, the waves, are replaced by velveteen gloom. John Henry is perfectly naked, alone yet surrounded by a chorus of spectral familiars. They tenderly perforate the cast of his skin, glittering through his veins, filling him once more. John Henry is a bubble in this ocean; he bursts.

  I want you to save some of that famous Henry energy.

  Doom. John Henry’s beauteous empyrean rapture miscarries. He finds the amniotic ocean a mockery. His glittering familiars shatter into infinitesimal shrapnel, piercing his veins, their cruelty exacting. The felicitous velvet black inverts itself. The Sow must be pleased. The Sow demands genetic coding material. The egrets, in a reverse cavalcade of shimmering white noise, become vultures.

  Egrets become vultures.

  John Henry hits himself, abusing his person in front of the mirror. With the elongated talon of his one hand which he has allowed to pullulate for just this purpose, he serrates the skin of his other palm. It is futile, of course. His pain fails to assuage his grief, or to depreciate his acute receptivity for elective morbidity. He is appalled at his own philosophic fragility, daunted by his own frailty. Tendrils of red spread across his face.

  John Henry awakens. He is not the diviner, nor the architect of this delirious circumstance. He is a cog. He is not nothing, no matter how hard his febrile neurons scurry to compute nothing. He is something. There is something. Machines must execute their functions before joining their discarded brethren in the scrap yard. Stars must explode, subtracting themselves. Concavities must be filled.

  It is simple math: he must fill the Sow with seed. Females of certain arachnid genera devour the male, post-coitus. In other species, more execrably evolved, the logical male will circumnavigate the abdomen of the massive female after insemination and dutifully insert his head into her mouth, condemning himself before the chopping block so that she may more easily devour. It is fitting; she must feed the children that will soon rent the walls of their egg sac, clamoring for blood.

  Divested of emotion, this mathematical fugue takes on a perverse beauty. John Henry accepts this. No need for histrionics. No breakdown. John Henry wraps his fires, his emotions, his ecstasies, and his torments into parcels and tosses them into the chasm of his subconscious. He is blank. He will deliver these base materials. Slowly, without thought, he soaps his self-imposed stigmata, watching his sanguinary particles sluice into the drain. No turning back.

  John Henry snaps his head upwards and straightens himself. The figure in the mirror is macerated, undone. Taking a comb from his pocket, he rakes it through his pate’s remaining wisps of cilium. He rotates the faucet’s handle until its dripping ceases. His muscles tense. He can feel the handle dissociate, almost, with the stem. The revenant in the mirror blurs. John Henry’s faculty swarms with crimson; he is at the breaking point. Yet he relents, releasing the handle. He looks at his mirrored visage and counts, slowly, to fifty, and the blurring lessens. John Henry is human enough to take tentative steps towards the bathroom door.

  For only a moment, he hesitates, one foot on cold symmetrical tile, the other sinking into sodden gray carpeting. The office. Adrift, he is finally able to mobilize. He resumes the role of prognosticator/manipulator without thought. The bathroom door shuts behind him, and he is struck by the mechanistic halo of the office, the universe of physical information which composes the illusion of sanity and meaning.

  Sunlight — streamed across ninety three million miles of black nothing from a great nuclear orb, fragmented by ozone, rivened by chlorophyll of the oak sheltering Building Six, dithered by glass — ignites dust particles, confuses with fluorescence, and finally illumes the cubical labyrinth of which John Henry is an inextricable part. He perambulates the office, slowly. He pays careful attention to the grey-white ornamentation, the incessant keyboard taps mingling with subdued laughter, the light pabulum which makes bureaucracy tolerable.

  These banalities distract from the crude reality: a cabal of advanced primates related not by blood but by the shared symbolic idolatry of finance, of power. They cower in workspaces in communion with electricity, compiling maps of an immaterial landscape that exists only in dreams mediated by television and computers and words. Their personhood is reduced in order to transcend the indefinable, ineffable plane of success — tranquility. The images refract back to them.

  John Henry convolutes his lips into a grin and gives Andy an eagerly reciprocated thumbs-up. John Henry’s nightmare is absorbed by his fixation on process, reduced to a thin strand of wire taut in the back of his brain. He resumes a businesslike veneer at his desk. Balance at last.

  It is now five twenty. John Henry sits as the apotheosis of neutral solemnity, of bureaucratic indifference. Start menu. Time card. Papers back in folders. As if blind, he elongates his limbs, distends his cirri upon the desk, recollecting and reassembling the minutiae of clerical dross which mottle his workspace, his miniature, meaningless outburst a distant memory now. His movements so cursory that they are involuntary, John Henry does not command his own body but merely watches. It is soothing. Click, click go the mouse-parts, scurrying into their holes. The wire in his head remains taut. It is now five twenty five.

  John Henry jerks, elongates his form in a dance: the closing ritual. Jacket on. Start menu. Shut down. Computer off. When he passes the reception desk, he will be assuaged. Another button on the coat. Another ant upon the mound. The wire is in the back of his head.

  A stream of flannel, corduroy, and beige flows to the elevator. Heather chats nimbly with an intern, lifts her leg to gesticulate. The baboons moan with subdued ardor. Undeterred by their eroticism, John Henry passes wordlessly.

  “Oh, Mr. Henry?”

  “Heather? What.” The elevator door begins to close. John Henry does not hold it.

  “Happy Valentine’s Day.”

  Within the shrinking aperture, Heather’s smile widens, producing the fangs of the arachnid mother in John Henry’s whimsy. Her laughter becomes vicious, slurping at his wan visage. He knows she sees his sudden loss of constitution, his horror. He knows she knows he knows; it gives the slut caustic buoyancy as she touches the intern. Her cruelty becomes lust. The wire snaps. The door closes.

  Revolution

  By Elizabeth Sparenberg

  I stepped into the bitter sunlight of a new morning, myself bitter from waking.  My miscarried dreams still clung to me.  I dragged myself and them across my building's parking lot until the damp and bitter sunlight corroded the film of fantasy on wh
ich they fed, and they dropped off me like old moths, and I was alone in the brass reality of morning. 

  My car looked dirtier than it had last night.  It was covered with an unfamiliar film.  I remembered, suddenly, with the jarring force of nostalgia, that the wind last night had been so strong it had entered my dreams and tossed me from year to year of my life, so that instead of the usual linear nonsense, I dreamt a howling puzzle of memories.  The dirt on my car then must have blown there from the construction site down the street. 

  I got into the car, turned it on.  It also found this commute too early, but with heaving sighs and grunts, it conceded to back out of the parking lot and amble onto the road.  We passed the culprit construction site, the thrift store, the pet shop with the doleful, short-lived exotics, then met the curve onto the freeway, where we joined other sleepy cars and bitter workers herded by traffic signs to the metropolis ahead.  I imagined, with the guiltless certainty that others imagined with me, breaking suddenly and screeching horizontal across two lanes, causing a massive, bloody pileup, and stopping so many days abruptly in their tracks.  I buzzed with the thrill of the idea, but there was always the fear of the questions that would certainly be asked of me if I survived.  I reached my exit and left the traffic behind me unmarred.

  Then I could see the Serenity Inn, my daily destination, where I earned my rent by catering to preoccupied guests who would not offer any serenity to the inn, but expected the other guests to do so.

  Having connected parking lot to parking lot, I left my car, a smutty smirk between the expensive, freshly washed rentals the guests brought in.  The sunlight was voluptuous now, and almost incarnate in its intensity.  It swarmed the concrete of the parking lot and encrusted the northeastern half of the building.  I swallowed the sunshine in the manner of the shadows, whom fatten with the day and become lean when the sun wanes.  I gulped it in until I nearly drowned in the heavy, unrelenting luminance.  Only then, when I had to escape or be transformed into a brittle shadow-thing, could I bring myself into the inn and position myself behind the front desk. 

  Across the lobby, I saw the breakfasting business men, and tourists, disillusioned with travel, who would soon become an onslaught of guests checking out and disputing bills. 

  My first interaction of the day was with a man, mid-50s, who had a bristled face and scorched voice.  He slapped his blue plastic room key on the desk.  "I'm in room 303."  Though he worded a statement, he voiced a command. 

  I cocked my head slightly, hoped I was smiling, and asked, "How may I help you?"

  "I'm in room 303."  I typed his room number into the database to pull up his information.  There was a note.  I clicked it open.  It was a frown-face.

  "Mr.Warrell?"

  "That's me."

  "How may I help you?"

  "You haven't heard about my problem?"

  "No, I'm sorry."He banged his fist on the counter.  The couple checking out with my co-worker turned their hungry faces to us and inhaled the drama, eyes gleaming.

  "I reserved a smoking room!" Mr.Warrell shouted.  "I reserved a smoking room, but I did not receive a smoking room.  I need a smoking room.  I am staying here for a week and I need to smoke in my bed."

  "I apologize, Mr. Warrell."  I had stopped masking my apathy months ago, after realizing that sincerity was too strikingly alien in the commerce of this inn.  He flicked his hand at me.

  "Find me a smoking room."

  "Let me see what I can do."  I scanned the database.  The management, attempting to conform to the new national green trend, had eradicated most of the rooms designated for smoking, and only five remained.  None were available.  "I'm sorry, sir," I said in the vacant, placating tone necessary in customer service.   "We don't have any smoking rooms available during your stay."

  "I reserved…"

  "I'm going to go ahead and upgrade you to a balcony suite.  You are welcome to smoke on the balcony."

  "I don't need no, damn balcony suite!  I need to smoke in my bed!"

  "I'm sorry, sir."

  "This is your fault.  I reserved a smoking room."  He yanked a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and slipped one into his mouth, gripping it between his teeth as he spat, “This place is a shit hole." 

  He sulked to the automated front door.  It slid open.  Before stomping outside, he lit the cigarette, turned, and swung his head as he exhaled so the smoke swept across the lobby.  I watched the trails of smoke curl around the browning fruit left over for late risers, then dissipate into the shafts of sunlight weaving through the tree branches outside the lobby windows.  I was working a ten hour shift.

  After breakfast, I watched the front desk manager, a stocky man with sharp features and deceptively benign eyes, strut across the lobby.  The previous year, he had been bestowed with the responsibility of choosing the new lobby design from a set of corporate templates.  He decided on an earthy green and brown color scheme, with curve-backed wooden chairs in the dining area, and, to his delight, pink lights, which offered a diffused, sleepy quality. 

  He allowed the large lobby windows to remain uncovered during breakfast; he believed the morning light was invigorating, but after 10:30, when the graying breakfast buffet was carted off to be re-heated and eaten by the housekeeping staff, and the tree branches outside were skipping with contented birds, he pulled closed the thick lobby curtains to block out the increasing daze of sunlight. 

  Throughout the day, satiated guests tumbled in from the dizzy outdoors and, sighing out their happy exhaustion, settled gratefully into my boss' constructed ambiance.  For them, it was a relief from the duties of enjoying their vacations.  For me, the unchanging, calm lighting blurred the hours so that my shift became long and timeless.  If I did not arrive early to work to stand outside and gorge myself on morning, I would succumb to a delirious waking slumber.  As it was, by the end of my shift, my temples burned, my visual track slurred, and my thoughts crawled.  I did not even have the energy to change out of my uniform.  I simply clocked out and walked outside.

  The day was already slipping away.  Long shadows, like fingers, clutched the light.  I felt the coolness of a day in decline.  The sunlight had ripened while I was inside, and now, thick and sweet and lazy, it was giving in to evening.  I ducked into my car.  It was hot, but I left the windows up so I could experience, vicariously, the moods of light my parked car had collected.  I backed it out of the spot, and steered us back down the route we had taken that morning.  Watching the same cars as the previous evening drive past the same streets populated by the same pedestrians, all of us united by our private routines, I realized it had become superfluous to observe my surroundings.  I turned onto the freeway, knowing the green Honda would merge before me; I would pause for the silver Toyota truck, then merge and glide home.

  The impact left me no room for breath or thought.  I was solely feeling: The weight of my own car crumpling onto me, the lightness of spinning out of control, the aggressive burn in my left side, the painful itching on my neck, the jolt of a second impact.  After my car crashed to stillness on the guard rail, my instincts rushed back.  I dragged air into my mouth, but it squeezed through my lungs and there was not enough.  I began drifting.  My left arm was searing; heavy, immobile.  My right arm tingled with an uncontrollable levity.  But there was someone else. Between a medley of neon splotches, I saw hands unclipping my seatbelt and maneuvering my body out of the crushed vehicle. It hurt. Maybe I screamed.

  There was a period of chaos when my eyes tried to manipulate the light into comprehensive images. Then clarity. The pain and commotion became background as my focus shifted away from the influx of light. To my horror, I saw what I had unconsciously been avoiding seeing my entire life. The vision weighted me with an awesome, hollow gravity. Between the pictures built of light, pinpoints of darkness shaped a different image. A giant form towered over me. Like a sheet of night sky, it flickered with the little specks of light left over from
life. The longer I looked, the dimmer became those familiar lights, until I saw the complete image this darkness was presenting.

  The form was almost human, but sexless and larger than any man or any monument of man. It had no face, but when I looked where it should have had eyes, I felt a vacuum expand from my chest. Before I lost myself completely, I looked away from the empty face to marvel at its enormous antlers. They twisted and undulated like silent, dark flames, and reached forth a distance I imagined surpassed the sky. Hopping along them, gripping and uncurling their claws as they skittered on the great horns, were several vultures. They snapped their beaks greedily, staring down at me. I squirmed under their gaze. I sensed that they were waiting for me to die. These, however, were not the flesh-vultures to whom the Tibetans submit their beloved corpses.  They were not interested in the haggard, blood filled mass of my body. They were waiting to make piecemeal the ineffable substance between my flesh, for love of which my earthbound heartbeat and my brain tirelessly transmitted its impulses. The vultures' desire was stronger than my damaged, feeble organs; my mind began to wind down, and my own darkness began to unstitch from my frame.

  One of the vultures jumped off the antler to come closer to me. I looked directly into its eyes. They were absolute darkness, unable to even reflect my decades of days. In those true black eyes, I saw an exhilarating freedom. If I gave myself to the vultures, never again would I be bound to sunlight, never again would I ache at the perimeter of an idyllic day.  I would be void.  The other vultures jumped from their perches.  Their beaks clapped with such force that I felt myself quake further and further from life.  They surrounded me.

  Something tickled my skin.  Pricks of light broke through the darkness.  At that sight, I felt the exhausting longing to live and see and feel the warm, persistent sun; to breathe.  The light conglomerated into an image of a face.  It took me a moment to recognize the man looking at me, and then to realize that his tears were falling on my cheek.  It was Derek, the man I lived with.  The man I told I loved.  He was smiling and crying and looking down at my injured body.  Half of his face was harsh with stubble.  Although I had little control of my muscles, I smiled inwardly.

  When he had gotten the news about the accident, he had been shaving.  He always shaved his face just before I came home so that the bristles wouldn’t bother me when he kissed me hello.  He had been thinking of my lips, and that kiss, when the phone rang and unexpectedly halted his evening custom. 

  Suddenly, I was angry.  So angry that my heart jumped, causing Derek, startled, to look at the heart monitor that had just changed tempo.  Who was he to be my last image?  Each night, his face ended my day.  Each morning, before I even saw my home, it was him I looked upon, that face that now hovered over me.  His features were too familiar, that line of stubble that halved his face too easily explained; part of the unremarkable clockwork of my existence.  Anyone, anything else to be my last experience of light, but not Derek!  Not commonplace, inescapable Derek!  I wanted to reach out my hand to push his face away, or to turn my head so I could see, instead, the hospital room with its foreign furnishings and strange devices whose uses I could end my life guessing.  But I couldn’t.  Whether by permanent damage, or by constraint, I was paralyzed. Derek was fixed in my visual plane.  I glared at him with a silent, unforgiving intensity, until the darkness began again to push out the light

  My breathing shallowed; the darkness became complete.  In the abysmal vulture eyes, I saw the same ultimate relief, but my anger persisted, roaring and binding me to my painfully crippled body.  The vultures skipped along the expansive antlers, darkened eyes tracking my struggle, still hoping, but no longer certain, that they would feast on me that night.

  Imaginary

  By Erin Kassidy

  Just fuck it.

  Spend however many years coddling the bitch, and for what? To have her turn around and tell me that I'm not wanted anymore? To be sent out into the cold like some homeless freak? Best years of her life I gave her, and this is the return I get for it?

  I drag on the cigarette, retrieved from the ground where someone had snuffed it out before its time. It still has the taste of the other person's lips on it, the telltale taste of alcohol. Beer and ciggs. Only thing left for them is a gun, and we're in ATF territory.

  The rain's coming down. It's been raining since she left me. Since she kicked me out, cast me down. It always rains in this city, dripping off the skyscrapers, wind channeled between them until they're little more than the howling gusts of Hell itself; hot and humid as the fetid breath of some forgotten horror, and in the play of the eddies among the trash left on the streets, I can almost see her still, on her hands and knees, digging through the dirt, tending her garden, the whirl of papers about reminding me of the fluttering of her skirts in a sharp breeze.

  Growling under my breath, I stalk down the street. Nobody sees me; or at least, they pretend they don't, carefully averting their gaze to not look at me. What must they see, if they do? The hairy look of a man who hasn't had a decent night's sleep in forever? The fire of rejection burning brightly in my eyes, warning those who happen to meet my gaze of atrocities which have not yet been committed, giving them no recourse but to scurry away for safety? I don't know. I can't look in the mirror; I can't stand to meet my own gaze, can't stand to see whatever it was that caused her to reject me in the first place

  .

  Dropping onto a bench, I rest my head in my hands. It won't be long now until I'm turned away, the authorities come to ensure that the likes of me don't foul the look of their lovely city - though the words burn in my mind, as little remains around but bits of refuse tumbling like ash through the sky. My thoughts turn back, as they have, as they always do, to that last conversation.

  She was packing. Her image would be forever in my mind; the long raven hair, the fair skin, her eyes, which could never decide if they were going to be blue or green, and everyone had a different opinion of her who saw her. She saw herself differently still, though she'd never submit to telling me what she thought. Even packing, she could evoke memories of the years we'd spent together, of her laughter, of her sadness and joy.

  “Look, I need...” she'd said, searching for the words to somehow make it easier on herself, on me. “I need space. I'm going off to school, see? And you can't come along.” She placed her clothes, folded so perfectly, into the suitcase, the only imperfection I could find caused only by the stress of this conversation. Always too perfect by half, I held her. “You can't come where I'm going,” she repeated, as if convincing herself.

  “I've always been here for you,” I told her, stepping forward to embrace her in my arms, to hold her tight. The arms she'd retreated to in safety for so many years, when her father had come home drunk, or her mother was too absent to care, lost in her own world of medication and insanity.

  “I'll always be with you, no matter what.”

  Her tears came as she gave up her fight, or so it seemed, her arms wrapping around me, her small frame almost trying to crush the life out of me, hanging on to what had previously been the only sane, stable source in a life so very short. For a long time she cried, and I held her, keeping the terrors of change at bay, but she knew and I knew that this was the end. That she mourned not for what she'd tried to do, but for what she must do.

  “I'm so sorry,” she'd said to me, sliding out of my embrace afterwards. Cleaning her face before finally zipping up her suitcase to leave, she gave me one last, sorrowful look. “I love you, Richard, with all my heart... but you're not real.”