Heathen

We all knew the storm was brewing, just below the surface, because we’d seen one before—at least, I had—that is, I knew. Remember the absurd rivalry between ninjas and pirates, maybe about four years ago, probably five? With the wildfire phenomenon of Twilight and the recent publication of Seth Graham-Smith’s Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, it was only a matter of time and meteorology before the grave-robbers would be rising up from the very crypts they’d pilfered, the artists of war stealing the very souls from their enemies’ veins. Something about the undead enchants us: is it untouchability or is it the unabashed sense of wanton destruction? The undead cannot be held responsible for their appetites, their faults. Responsibility is a construction of livelihood; they are not the latter and therefore cannot submit to the former.

Let’s get something straight: while both are considered monsters, vampires and zombies—like ninjas and pirates, and Republicans and Democrats before them—fall into a spectrum of expectations. The bourgeoisie, like my friend Søren, assistant of sorts to some entrepreneur of questionable practice, gravitate toward vampiric self-impressions. Of course, this type is drawn to the affluence of Castle Dracula and the agelessness of pale beauty rather than the villainy prowling behind their lips. But I suppose, self-awareness is difficult when no mirror will bear your reflection. On the other extreme, the zombie appeals to the bohemian hedonist, where all is forfeit to the singular allure of brains. Felix—another acquaintance of mine; someone I know from the classroom—readily admits that he’s a cannibal but won’t seek help until it becomes a real problem for him. A problem, how so? I ask, but he just growls, tired of the subject.

I never gave into the politics of the undead. Just tried to ignore them, at least, until the snowstorm, just before October ended. I’d been staying with my friend Søren as my own house was without heat, and we acted snowed in. Drifts outside grew by the minute. Søren said he was going out for something warm to drink and asked if he could bring anything back for me. I just shrugged, which seemed to put him in a mood. Søren left, and while he was gone, Felix called. Well, that’s it, he told me. I just wanted to pick her brain, you know. But then, I don’t know what happened. She’s gone now. I told him where he could find me, so we could talk it out, but when he got there, Søren was back. What’s worse was that Felix’s most recent victim was Søren’s sister. There was a vicious spat before Felix got kicked back into the drifts. Felix started banging on the door, trying to knock it in, groaning; however, Søren’s rage subsided once his adversary had been ejected. I watched in vague disbelief as snow drifted over Felix’s feet, rising to his shins and then knees, and yet Søren did not seem at all aware of his persistence or the snow’s.

Almost forgot, Søren said after some time. He handed me a lidded paper cup, and I took a sip. Whatever he had brought me was now unbearably cold. What he offered was certainty I would not have obtained on my own, certainty that there is futility in refusing to choose sides.

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- David K Wheeler‘s work has been included in literary journals such as The Penwood Review and Jeopardy Magazine, as well as in the forthcoming collection, The Pacific Northwest Reader, from HarperCollins. Meanwhile, he contributes to the Burnside Writers Collective at www.burnsidewriters.com.

Boyfriends

Samuel: Samuel was a maudlin Jewish boy who wore colorless T-shirts with old soda slogans like, “RC Cola, the mad, mad Cola”. He also wore flip-flops in the winter and pretended to be engrossed in all aspects of Marxist literature but mostly read bland, “young adult” graphic novels with feisty, female protagonists.

His “wounded” expression was tiring at best until I discovered that the source of his pain was a permanent splinter embedded into his hip one summer at sleep away camp. His mother was over-domineering and wielded large metal spatulas whenever I spent the night.

Breaking point: Listening to him pontificate on yam farming after a sojourn at an experimental Kibbutz in Nebraska.


Anil: Anil was a graphic design student I met in an elevator in the Transamerica Pyramid. I was temping for the day, which involved serving white fish and tiny, red crackers to a dozen Russian men. They were a gregarious bunch and slipped me twenties and threw worthless rubles down my blouse for fun.

Anil chatted me up, remarking on the design of the building and I rolled my eyes and stared at his at knit cap which was an intense red, it reminded me of afterbirth or red velvet cake. We made mad love on the dining table the Russians had just eaten on and when he rolled off the table, I noticed he had a piece of white fish stuck in his coarse black, back hair. I never said anything about the hair.

Breaking Point: I saw him once more and we ate aloo pakoras at a kiosk in the meat district. He started in on Eames chairs and I drifted away, bored by him and all of modern design.

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St. John: St. John was an Irish boy I met one summer while quahogging knee deep in a sandy inlet. He said his name in a slippery sort of way, like” Sinjin” as if his mother were too drunk at his birth to enunciate the letters properly.  “Oh, Siiinjiiin, you will bear mee cross, ye young feller!” she sang out then vomited quickly in her whiskey soda.

He was fond of Dylan Thomas (like most good Irish boys should be) and often wore a dark, silk kerchief crisply round his throat just like Dylan but his poetry was bland and weak and stunk like the day old quahogs we often harvested. Sex with him was like the great potato famine: dry and void of any empathy.

Breaking Point: After an all night bender involving a suitcase full of clams in a dive bar called “Kelp”, I ditched him that summer and moved on to his friend, Padriac, who was glum, needy and wholly ignorant.

Andrew: Andrew was enamored by blood sausages and Angostura bitters. It was the first thing he offered me when I approached him at “The Redheaded Den” downtown. He was curled up in a red leather booth, under a red lamp; his sturdy yellow construction boots nestled under his legs like a dead golden retriever.

We got drunk on Pisco Sours and blasted “Urgent” by Foreigner on the jukebox, then dry humped each other on a bar stool during the sax solo. Eric the Red, the bartender, kicked us out after we knocked a signed photograph of Eric Stolz off the wall. Later at his house, I blew him on a plaid blanket in the garage next to an old dehumidifier. His father woke up and shined a flashlight over us and growled. I remembered his father distinctly because of his bright red hair and I thought, I should really bring that guy to the lounge.

Breaking Point: His habit of stealing my makeup to paint thin wisps of hair over his bald head.

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- Shelagh Power-Chopra is interested in the merging of fiction and fact or as a friend calls it, “speculative observation”.  Aside from writing, she dabbles in photography. Recent publications include Gargoyle Magazine and The Significant Objects Project. She maintains the blog: http://saidobject.com

- Kara Jansson Kovacev is an artist living in New York City. Her iPhone drawings have been featured in the Washington Post Digit-al Art Gallery, Beautiful Decay and the iCreated gallery, and will be included in an upcoming online exhibition in The Incliner and a book on iPhone art by David Scott Leibowitz. Her work can be seen at http://cloudbuilder.com

Esto Perpetua

A girl says, When Julian would scream until his throat bled I’d think how I knew our love would endure forever. When I’d watch him shave his chest in some motel before the show I’d feel less sure. When the band would play “Righteous Soul Slave” for second encore I’d know that they would never be famous. They were too good. The audience didn’t understand the complicated, holy thing that was happening. It—the audience—only wanted a wall of noise to throw itself against, an ocean to dive into and drown a while. Whatever. Julian’s the poet, I’m just his. Some of the weak ones fell, bleeding, got trampled or were pulled upright by some pit angel; glaze-eyed, disorientated, stalk-stumbling off. I’d stand off-stage on Julian’s side and watch the show. Except of course on the nights—these were not rare—when the stage was just a taped-off section of floor. Those nights I stood in back with Darren the manager i.e. the merch guy i.e. the bass player’s cousin, and watched the crowd heave. Each crowd was different and the same. Sweaty teenagers swipe half-drunk warmbeers from ledges, chug with pride, to puke later in the parking lot with same. Julian was the singer and lead guitar. He was pasty and gorgeous, haunted and haunting, recalcitrant nova, all the right things, blah. But our lives were perfect, weren’t they? Rattling motion and cigarette ash. Where were we, anyway? A rest stop in some desert, bald mountains like a great fence hemming us in. The van choked out blue smoke if we pushed past sixty, but we knew we had to be in the next place by this time the next day, whatever day that was, I mean was going to be. The stakes never changed, just the fill-in-the-blank after WELCOME TO SCENIC, another sign we were already in Heaven, anyway Limbo—some place where verb tense doesn’t matter. Whatever. Details were anyone else’s job. My only job was Julian. After all, where would he be without me?  Me without him? I shouted to the drummer that I was a quarter short for the snack machine. He looked past me, at the thing itself, fished one from his pocket and flipped it my way, then turned away to light his cigarette. I of course missed the catch and it landed flat in the clay, no skitter. I picked it up and saw that it was shiny, new, one of those state ones. A bird—hawk, maybe? Fuck it, it was going straight into the coin slot so I could eat. But right before I slipped it in I decided two things: first that the state on the coin was the place where we were, so Idaho. Second that the coin was a tea leaf, state motto therefore a secret message. I don’t know dick about Latin but some things are just obvious and sometimes I think that’s what God is: the obvious, resplendent and intractable and dumb. I left the other Twix in the wrapper for later, got back in the van and told Julian that in the next town he could have a groupie, if I could film it.

- Justin Taylor is the author of the story collection Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever, which is just out from Harper Perennial. He is also a contributor to HTMLGiant. His personal website is http://www.justindtaylor.net/

Everything Rumbles When the Thunder Falls Too Near

carwash

It was just something that he had always kind of wanted to do. By no means was it the only thing that he could think about, nor did his life bare scars of regret in its absence. It came into his head, this thing that he wanted to do, every so often between more pressing thoughts, and he would half-smile and imagine how neat it might be if one day without warning this thing were to actually happen. There was a girl in his life, and he waited to ask her until they had been together for a while, until she really knew what sort of person he was and that this small thing that he had always kind of wanted to do was just a peripheral quirk, some odd take-it-or-leave-it itch that was maybe oddly endearing or even a little bit sexy. He wasn’t crazy or perverted or a freak. She would need to understand that first. So he waited, weeks and then months, before he ever brought it up.

“Let’s make love in the carwash,” he finally said one day while they were sitting on the roof watching the sun dip over the top of another roof.

She turned her head slowly and snorted.

“In the carwash?”

“Yes. I think we should make love in the carwash maybe.”

He reclined on his elbow, the words hanging there. She wrapped her arms around her knees.

“Like on the ground, in the spot where the cars go, where all the dirt from the cars is washed off?”

“No silly, in a car in the carwash. You know, either yours or mine, while it’s being washed we can stay in the car. We can stay there and make love in the carwash.”

She laughed a single laugh in that high-pitched way that means a million things and you have to choose just one. Then she turned back toward where the sun had set over shingles. Silence followed until the sky was purple and the chill drove them inside. When conversation resumed, the topic was dinner. He suggested Thai and put the carwash thing out of his mind.

This was not a disappointing outcome. It had never been his expectation that she would agree right away. That might have seemed slutty after all, which was really not what this was about. He thought of toes in the water and reminded himself of the importance of perspective. This first attempt had landed somewhere between acceptance and rejection. It was not a yes, but it was not a no either. Silence was a promising response.

They dated for a little while longer with things being quite pleasant. Each found the other to be entertaining, and there were some sweet times when they just wanted to sleep all day in the same bed with their legs touching. After an extended period of things being pleasant and the two really getting along, they decided to get engaged. She was very happy, and so he asked her again soon after.

“Let’s just make love in the carwash,” he said.

She kissed him, which he thought was a yes, but then she never brought it up again, and it sort of went away. They got married in a garden that you could rent for weddings. He was happy to say things like, I’ll have to run that by the Mrs., and she felt better after they fought and made up when she could call him my darling husband. They lived in a little house with a lamp post in the yard and felt very much like real people living real lives. Sometimes they laughed just because being that way made them both feel like laughing. It was nice, but then there was this question that surfaced from time to time – not often, just every once in a while – when they had finished raking leaves or when she found out she might be pregnant:

“Why don’t you and I take the car down the street to the carwash and, you know.”

It kept coming up, here and there, after a good movie, before a dentist appointment. The subject usually changed quickly or just melted away into chuckles and kissing. Their lives progressed in standard ways. Insurance was purchased. Important decisions were made, but then there it was again, this question at random moments, after a long night when the baby didn’t sleep or the time the cable company accidentally gave them some premium channels that they didn’t watch that often but it was nice to have for free anyway.

“No, I don’t think so.”

She started answering him outright instead of dodging, which made him feel uneasy, like maybe this was really something that was not going to happen for a very long time.

“I don’t think that’s such a great idea, husband.”

She still smiled when she said it though, a sliver of chance, a fading possible maybe perhaps.

He changed his approach several times, which was really just a matter of semantics. Why don’t we do it in the carwash? Let’s get something going, carwash style. I’m up for some carwash intimacy, how about you? She continued to deny him in as many different ways as he knew how to ask. It slowly became clear after many varied attempts, when their lives were getting very busy with things that had to be done and her patience was beginning to crumble, that there was a distinct possibility that this thing that he had always kind of wanted to do might never happen even once in his entire life.

A thinly-veiled desperation became audible.

“I’m feeling the carwash, and it’s now or never.”

His asking became a wedge. She would leave the room and then he would be there alone with his thought for too long.

He asked less frequently, but still it came up, and when it did she acted like he asked all the time. So he asked even less, almost never, and only when she was in a really good mood and the kids had been well-behaved and the laundry basket was empty. She stopped cushioning her reply and just started saying no. It was an angry no at first, but then over a period of weeks and months, the no grew softer. Exasperation became resignation, and the sound of her refusals slowly waned and wilted into silent contemplation. Finally one day, after he had swept the porch and located the toenail clippers that had been missing for weeks, he asked one last time.

“Carwash?”

“Fine,” she said.

The nearest carwash was a brown brick building with three slots in it for cars to drive through. There was no one that worked there, only a machine that counted coins and asked credit or debit? It wasn’t used very often except on days when the oil change place gave out coupons for free car washes with any premium oil change. It was crowded when that happened, so they called to make sure this wasn’t one of those days,

It was empty on the Sunday that they went, just brown bricks and pools of soapy water. He put in six crisp bills and pressed the Superwash button. A green light beckoned Enter, and he angled the car onto the track. The red light said Stop, and he shifted into park, checked the mirrors, released the seatbelt. She took off her shoes and crawled across him, placing her knees carefully on either side of his thighs, wrapping her arms around his neck, leaning her head against his so their eyes made blurry versions of each other in the idling hum. The car began to move, and everything became very dark.

There were sounds all around in every direction, and they could hear the driving blast of the water jets running cold fierce torrents across every inch of outside. The windows buzzed and glazed over, blunting hard edges, carving whistling rivers into glass. The car began to shake, and suddenly the whole wet world was pressed flat by spinning churning things with tongues and tails that make rubbery sounds in the dark. And there was gravity confused and visions of drowning and the pulling of shy things away from comfortable places, and for the two of them inside together there was nothing to do but be present and feel for the lean rift of each aching second that passed without promise of another to follow. The muffled roar expanded and absorbed every tin rattle until there existed only one broad sonic thrust. It raged on for longer than they imagined that it possibly could, too long, and for a moment they felt that they might be trapped in a systematic malfunction that would slowly erode their car, their clothes, their bodies into nothing with graceless automaticity. It grew louder still, the sound of everything at once, booming, savage, unhinged, vibration until they couldn’t hear anything else, and they couldn’t see through the glass, and they felt very small and far too brittle to be saved from angry sopping metal set spinning in the black.

But it was warm inside, and they were safe because it was both of them in there and not just one or the other. The sounds melted back into slender wet breaths and then there was just dripping and movement toward a lighter place where the sun fell on the pavement and the water rushed off into sewers they could not see.

“That was pretty okay” she said.

“Yes, it was.”

“It reminded me of something else.”

“Watching a storm.”

“At night through a window in bed.”

“And everything rumbles when the thunder falls too near.”


- James Bartels is a writer of fiction. His work has been published in Flatmancrooked and Takahe Magazine. Additionally, he has been been nominated for The Pushcart Prize and recognized as a finalist in the Glimmer Train Award for New Writers.