Electric Rather Issue 4: Prose

Electric Rather

Issue 04

August 2014

A Literary Magazine

Electric Rather is a fledgling literary magazine with a vibrant spirit. We publish original poetry, prose, art, and photography.

We publish new and innovative writers that challenge the boundaries of what is considered “good art.” We seek raw, intense, and emotional pieces that give us hope for the future of art and literature. We’re passionate about this magazine and want to see it continue to grow. Our goal is to provide a publishing outlet for new and unknown authors and artists. This issue is divided into two separate poetry and prose sections.

This issue features fiction by Nikki Rae, Elizabeth Theriot, Nicholas Leonetti, Kim Koering, and Kevin Reilly; a nonfiction piece by Bill Vernon; as well as artwork by Anne Bengard, Aaron Kaminsky, Sean Schemelia, and Jack Savage. Please visit electricrather.tumblr.com for more information about our wonderful contributors.

Submissions are always welcome. Please email them to electricrather@gmail.com. If you wish to contact us, you can also use this email. Visit our website at electricrather.tumblr.com or look us up on Duotrope.com. Thank you for reading!

Letter from the Editor

The stories presented in this issue are of many different genres, including fantasy, sci-fi, and nonfiction. I believe all of these authors have distinct voices that motivate the imagination and create emotional suspense.

I was impressed with how neatly our accepted artwork seemed to fit in with these stories, but this only points to how creative and well-drawn these stories really are. The authors of this issue take elements of realistic life and paint them surreally. The art in this issue similarly portrays realistic emotions like pain and fear in a cold, unique way. Most of the art in this issue was taken from canvas paintings. Texture and stroke should be evident. I love that I am able to publish such a variety of work with this magazine.

As always, I am immensely proud to be able to publish so many talented writers and artists. I am still in awe that this magazine has become as successful as it has. I hope that readers are as elated as I am to see this issue published.

-Barbi Moroz

Table of Contents Fiction Nikki Rae: “Silver and Cold” ............................................................................................... P. 2 Elizabeth Theriot: “The Birthday Candle” ....................................................................... P. 10 Nicholas Leonetti: “Scrappy’s Rocks” ............................................................................... P. 18 Sean Schemelia: Excerpts from “It’s More than Likely” ..................................................P. 28 Kim Koering: “Familiar” ................................................................................................... P. 30 Kevin Reilly: “Epicentropolis” .......................................................................................... P. 34

NonFiction Bill Vernon: “Club Swingers” .............................................................................................P. 24

Photography and Art Aaron Kaminsky ................................................................................................P. 1, 23, 33, 27 Anne Bengard: “Circus Child” .............................................................................................P. 9 Sean Schemelia ........................................................................................................P. 17, 22, 27 W. Jack Savage: “Temple in the Sky” .................................................................................P. 27

Cover design by Aaron Kaminsky.

Graphic design by Barbi Moroz.

Silver and Cold Nikki Rae

People said he came from a chemical spill.

During World War II, The Pleasant Point Nature Reserve was used to store TNT and supplies used to make explosives. The chemicals were kept in huge cylinders called igloos, which the chemicals eventually ate through, until they slowly leaked into Sandhill Pond. The water gradually turned red, like blood. The grass became brown and crunchy, and the trees dropped all of their leaves, never growing them back.

They called him a few different things: Devil with Wings, the American Chupacabra, but as more and more people came forward, one name began to stick more than the others: Bird Man. At least thirty people had come forward in the span of two weeks, starting in December of 1945, with some “sighting” or “experience” they attributed to a huge, half-man, half-bird creature. One story came from a ten-year-old kid who said a tall man came into his backyard while he was swinging, and when he stretched out his arms, there were grey feathered wings attached to them. When the boy was asked what the “tall man’s” face looked like, he said he couldn’t remember. Another story came from a seventy-five-year-old lady who was driving over Silver Bridge—the only thing connecting The Pleasant Point Nature Reserve to the rest of the town. The lady’s car stalled, seemingly out of nowhere.

But she didn’t live far from the bridge, so she decided to walk. As she reached her front yard, she heard what she described as the sound a radio gets when it can’t tune into the right frequency. Only this was incredibly high pitched, and the sound hurt her ears so much that she thought she might be sick. She ran the rest of the way into her house, locking the doors and windows, where the sound, she said, continued for only ten minutes. She told the newspapers that it felt like she had been sucked into a black hole, as if at any time the floor beneath her would open up and drag her down.

Mostly, no one really believed in the stories. The kid was young and the lady was old, so no one listened, chalking it up to vivid imaginations and dementia. The stories faded, like old bed sheets on a clothesline.

Then suddenly, in the late 90s, when no one had even talked about Bird man in fifty years, the eight foot tall bird-guy began to re-surface, not moving, but scaring the shit out of whomever he appeared to. Or the story would change, and Bird Man would chase someone’s car at night for a few miles before disappearing, or he’d look into their windows at night. Soon, people who didn’t live near the reserve had stories too. Strange lights started appearing in the woods, people began hearing knocking in the walls of their houses, like there was something trapped inside, trying to politely tell them that they wanted out.

Living in a small town is a lot like playing a giant game of telephone. The person who experiences the craziness tells someone, they tell someone else, and so on. By the time it reaches the newspaper or some other source, the story is probably nothing like it was at the beginning.

Most people in Pleasant Point are Catholic or raised to be. So when these things started occurring, the town kind of split down the middle. Half of them believed this figure was a demon, sent as a sign of the rapture. The other half thought he could be some kind of ugly angel that was here to deliver a message. No one believed what the scientists said: That it was most likely some kind of actual bird that got off of its migratory path.

Supposedly, everyone who saw him developed conjunctivitis a few days later. It was so bad that their eyes swelled shut. Other people said they lost their hearing for hours or days. Almost everyone got sunburn-like marks on their faces or any skin that was exposed at the time of the sighting. Everyone had nightmares. People became afraid of the town they had lived their whole lives in.

2

Whether all of it was made up, exaggerated, or real, I always thought it was weird that no one ever mentioned the chemical-ridden reserve. Sure, people around town theorized that the thing people were seeing was either some radioactive animal, or worse. A radioactive person. Hell, maybe everyone was breathing in fumes and that’s what caused everything. In any case, the reserve was curiously always left out of the stories and media. No surprise there. Our town was the picture of “quaint”, and the oncestorage unit for explosives took away from its charm. It was a scab no one wanted to pick.

By the time I was a teenager, The Pleasant Point Nature Reserve was a hangout for teenagers to get drunk, and the people who were too afraid to hang out there at night were just chicken. Our parents forbid us from going anywhere near the reserve. They wouldn’t say if they believed in the giant bird, only that it was a rundown place where there could be potentially harmful chemicals and someone could get hurt. So of course we wanted to go there even more. Teenagers are reckless that way, always wanting to put themselves in danger.

Daphne and I usually went on a Monday or Tuesday night, when my parents thought I was sleeping over her house for a “study-slumber-party” or whatever girls our age did.

The reserve wasn’t far from her house, so we had no problem walking to the bridge, stolen alcohol and snacks in our backpacks, of course. On Mondays, there weren’t any other kids in the reserve.

Parents in Pleasant Point didn’t let their kids out on school nights.

“You hear about the dog collar they found in Mr. Somerfield’s yard?” Daphne asked as we climbed over the fence that had a faded black and orange sign reading: Keep Out. “Yeah.” I took off my sweatshirt and tied it around my waist. It was September, but still hot at night, especially if you were sneaking around in the dark. “His dog went missing a month ago and then all of a sudden, BOOM. Baxter’s collar is on his lawn.”

“Freaky, right?”

I shrugged. “I guess.”

“Maybe Bird Man did it, Vye.” Daphne made some ominous sound effect that she must have heard in a horror movie and then laughed as we made our way toward the pond. Our flashlights shone on the water when we reached it and the rusty red didn’t hold a ripple. Not one.

This was our usual spot. Even if there were other kids in the reserve, everyone else was too scared to sit near the supposedly radio-active pond. Not us. We weren’t afraid of anything. We were stupid.

I didn’t exactly believe in Moth Man. I wanted to, of course. Daphne did. That’s why we went there almost every week, just in case the eight foot man decided to show. She had this theory that the reason he had suddenly reappeared was because the bridge was being reconstructed. The goal was to first repair the bridge, then the reserve, but construction only happened when the workers could be paid, and that wasn’t often. So far they had replaced one beam before “taking a break” for a month.

Daphne still thought the work—no matter how little—was “disturbing the restless spirit of the chemical-ridden-bird-man” or something. She always explained stuff like this as if it were fact. I envied her. Who wouldn’t want to say that something cool like that was happening in their boring town in the middle of nowhere? But I believed more in things that were real: cutting school, dating, and lying about how good I was at both of those things.

Daphne and I sat down in the grass with our flashlights between our knees, only illuminating our faces so we could see each other. She wasted no time cracking the seal on her mom’s Birthday cake flavored vodka. She took a huge gulp of it. She was gagging, but she tried to hide it from me. “You want some?” she asked. “It’s good.”

I took a sip and that was enough for me. Truth was, I didn’t really like drinking. I just liked Daphne.

“Think we’ll see any lights out here tonight?” she asked after another gag-gulp.

I shrugged. “I don’t care,” I said. “Lights are cool and all, but…” I wasn’t sure what else to say to keep the conversation going so I just said, “Whatever.”

A branch snapped behind us and made us jump.

“What the fuck?” I said as Daphne flashed her light in the direction the sound came from.

A boy around our age stepped out from behind a tree. He was wearing dirt-stained jeans, a plain T-shirt, and sunglasses. And he was smiling at us.

This was a normal thing. People hid out there and tried scaring kids like us because it was easy.

But we weren’t scared anymore, just annoyed.

“Who the hell are you?” Daphne asked, sounding almost disappointed that he wasn’t a gigantic bird.

“My name is Cold,” he said, stepping forward.

His smile stuck to his face like putty. It looked like he had never smiled before in his life. His lips were stretched so far over his teeth that I was afraid they would swallow up the rest of his skull.

“Toad?” Daphne asked.

“No, Cold.” The boy stuck his hands into his pockets, and I watched Daphne’s expression turn into a deeper disappointment as he came to stand in front of us, the rusty pond behind him. He wasn’t even tall, I could imagine her complaining later. He could have at least been tall like Bird Man. “Cold?” I asked.

He nodded vigorously, like a puppy.

“That’s a weird name,” Daphne said. I heard the liquid in the bottle slosh around as she took another gulp. It started to smell like vanilla soaked in rubbing alcohol when she spoke and it was making me nauseous. Last time I was hung-over, it smelled a lot like that. “Well, Cold,” she continued. “We kind of have plans...so, beat it.”

I nudged my tipsy friend. “Don’t be mean.”

The boy was still smiling. I’d never been afraid of a smile before that night, but his was making me shiver. “I just needed to give you a message,” he directed at me. “Then I’ll be on my way.”

Daphne rolled her eyes.

“I don’t even know you,” I said. “How could you have a message for me?”

The boy ignored my question. “Go home.”

A snort let loose deep in my nose and throat. “No, you go home.”

He didn’t answer. The man named Cold walked slowly away from the pond, looking into it briefly, before he disappeared into the trees.

Shortly after the strange boy vanished, Daphne got trashed, as she usually did when she stole alcohol from her house and had the opportunity to drink it without any chance of an adult walking in on her. She used me as a crutch to hold herself up the short walk home and once we were inside, she promptly passed out on her bed, backpack still on.

At first, I couldn’t sleep because I was thinking about the boy in the woods. I didn’t want to believe he was anything more than some weirdo trying to freak us out—they were everywhere when you went to the reserve—but I still couldn’t get his face, and the smile pasted onto it, out of my head.

And I was so itchy. First my face, then my arms and my fingers. Finally, I went into Daphne’s bathroom and flicked on the light. There was nothing there besides the faint, pink marks my fingernails made in my skin. I tossed, turned, and scratched until the next morning, periodically wondering what the boy named Cold’s message meant.

As soon as I got home the next day, I took a shower, scrubbing my face and arms over and over again until I was faintly less-itchy. Although that could have been because my skin was raw and the throbbing in it distracted me.

I took a Benadryl I found in the medicine cabinet and fell asleep. I was thankful, and always was, that my parents went to work before I had school and got home a few hours after I was back. It made skipping class a lot easier.

I’d like to say that I had some foreshadowing dream here, but that Benadryl kicked my ass. I pretty much blacked out for the next four hours, so if I had any dreams, I didn’t remember them.

4

Then the phone was ringing and my head was hurting, especially around my eyes, which took me forever to open. I picked up the phone from the coffee table, moving as little as I could for fear that the itching would return if I became too aware of my skin. “Hello?”

There was silence on the other end.

“Hello?”

There was another long stretch of silence, and just when I was about to hang up, the person on the other line spoke. “Violet?”

“Yeah.” I was getting irritated now.

“Have you gone to the bridge yet?”

I rubbed my eyes with the back of my hand. “What?”

That was it. I didn’t hear the person on the other line hang up, but there was no other response, so I slammed the phone down myself, turned over, and went back to sleep.

“Dude, you look horrible,” Daphne said to me on Saturday. By then, I’d developed a fever and the stuff I was coughing up wasn’t exactly attractive. I had hives around my neck and down my arms, but I didn’t really pay attention to how itchy it was because I couldn’t see too much of it through my swollen eyes.

“You go to the doctor, Vye?” She plopped down on the bed next to my legs and turned on my TV to some show about rich housewives complaining about some rich housewife problems.

“Yeah,” I said, though I had to stop and blow my nose before I could continue. “They said it’s some kind of allergic reaction. I must have touched something at the reserve and rubbed my face or something.” I paused so I could cough for a little while. “My parents are pissed that I’m missing so much school, but…whatever.”

“Are you stupid?” Daphne said suddenly. “This is shit that happens to Bird Man people.”

“Come on,” I said. I wanted to roll my eyes, but it wasn’t possible. “Not now. My head hurts.”

“No. Seriously.” What I could see of her jumped up and turned off the TV. “And you said some weirdo called you and asked if you’d gone to the bridge?”

“Yeah,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean—” “We need to go to the bridge,” Daphne interrupted.

“Right,” I said. “I can barely see or walk straight, but let’s go to the bridge.”

After ten minutes of fighting an argument I knew I would lose, Daphne drove us to Silver Bridge.

We had walked across it dozens of times in order to get to the reserve, but it looked different during the day. Though it was named Silver, it was made out of wood that had turned a dark greenish color, somehow making it look wet, even though it hadn’t rained in a while.

Daphne wrapped her arm around my waist so I wouldn’t trip when we got out of the car, which she had parked in the grass near some trees. “God,” she said. “Can you like, walk? You’re kind of heavy, leaning on me and shit.”

“No,” I said, not bothering to conceal the sigh that soon followed. “I told you I was sick.”

I had to sit down so I wouldn’t fall over. I didn’t know how close to the bridge we were, but we hadn’t stepped across it, and we definitely weren’t on it. I hoped that was good enough for Daphne because I didn’t want to move anymore.

“I don’t get it,” she said, finally sitting next to me in the grass. “Why would they want us to come here?”

I snorted. “Who’s ‘they’?”

“I don’t know.” Daphne’s voice raised in defense. “Just…they.”

I sighed. “How long do we have to stay here? I want to lie down.” I closed my eyes and rested my head on her shoulder.

Daphne sighed too. “I don’t know. I guess—” She didn’t finish her sentence. “What are you doing here?”

I had to blink multiple times before I could see what she was talking about. There was the same boy with the creepy, stretched out smile on his face. He was still wearing the same sunglasses and dirty jeans. I saw him clearly, as if my vision wasn’t blocked by my puffy eyes.

“Who the hell are you?” I asked, trying desperately not to be afraid, but my voice was shaking.

I couldn’t place it, but something about this kid made the hair on my arms stand up and my stomach hurt. Or maybe that was part of the allergic reaction. Whatever, he was still creepy.

He stood in front of us, unmoving, unspeaking.

“Okay,” Daphne said in an annoyed tone. “Time to leave, Vye.” Only her voice had more of an edge of fear added to it. She stood up and grabbed my hand, but I couldn’t move.

I couldn’t look away from that kid and I couldn’t move.

“Come on, Vye.” Now Daphne sounded panicked as she tugged on my arm.

All I saw was the boy, Cold, as he walked past us and onto the bridge. He walked backwards, staring at me the entire time.

You have my eyes now. You’ll be able to see. Cold was staring right at me, through me.

I couldn’t concentrate on the words as they bounced around in my head. I wanted to ask all kinds of questions. How was this kid talking to me like that? Who he was talking about? Why was he talking to me?

But there was a high pitched screech that broke off my thoughts before I could say them out loud. It was like someone was dragging a metal chair across a metal floor, and that floor was inside of me. That floor was my head and I had to hold it so it wouldn’t explode.

That’s probably why I didn’t hear or see the bridge fall.

Daphne told me that once the noise started, I collapsed. She said it was bad for her too, but she managed to throw me into the car and drive off. She said she hadn’t seen Cold fall, although he was clearly standing on the bridge when it went down, and there was no way he would have had time to turn back. She said when she heard the crashing and banging, she pulled over, too afraid to drive any further. That’s when she saw the wood falling, piece by piece, until the entire bridge was gone. The whole time, she was searching for the six foot tall man with wings, but he never showed.

The noise stopped as soon as the bridge was gone, and my head stopped hurting soon after. She made me wait in the car, still unconscious, as she got back out, searching for the boy that was standing on the bridge only minutes before. But he wasn’t in the woods, and he wasn’t in the water.

The next day, my rash and eyes began to clear up and I wasn’t coughing anymore. The doctors said it was thanks to antibiotics, which made sense.

Daphne and I told the police about the bridge. The high pitched screech, and the missing boy.

For a week, they sent out missing persons reports, then dredged the lake. He wasn’t there or anywhere, alive or dead.

In the weeks that followed, all the people in town talked about was the bridge falling, not realizing we were the ones who saw it because that wasn’t the part of the story they wanted. They wanted danger. Tragedy. Not two stupid teenagers who only saw it happen. I couldn’t blame them.

Stories are only fun to tell when they seem less real. When they’re fiction. Daphne and I didn’t even talk about it to each other.

Also left unmentioned was the fact that from three pm, when the screeching sound began, and four pm, when the noise finally stopped, that the entire town shut down. Appliances and cars stopped working. All that the residents of Pleasant Point couldn’t think of anything else but that all-consuming sound. People curled up on the ground at work, church, or wherever else they stood.

Then their own stories formed. A school filled with kids hunched under their desks said they saw a flock of hundreds of birds fly into the windows and writhe on the ground until the sound stopped, and they simply took flight again in the opposite direction. Mr. Somerfield swore that he heard his dog, Baxter, barking in the backyard through the hour long screech, but he couldn’t move to

6

open the door. Once the sound ended, so did the barking, and Baxter was nowhere to be found.

Though he told the newspaper that the collar he found had once again disappeared. And the most talked about story came from a gas attendant who said they saw a boy matching Cold’s description as the screeching consumed the town. He said he could have sworn he saw feathers dangling from the boy’s arm as he waved, unaffected by the noise, a smile stuck to his lips.

The bridge was never rebuilt. The town said it was because of the missing boy and they didn’t want anyone else to get hurt. It only took a month for people to stop telling the stories. News and reporters disappeared. Cold was a mystery no one wanted to talk about anymore. Another scab that made others uncomfortable to watch being pulled off. And no one talked about Bird Man anymore because there was nothing to tell. Like the bridge, the sightings fell away too.

But sometimes when I go to sleep, I can hear this faint sound, like someone knocking. Not on the walls or on the doors of my house, but somewhere inside of me. Like something is asking to come in.

8

The Birthday Candle Elizabeth Theriot

The curtains were drawn and a red, diffused light wavered slow and haltingly through the room. Myra knew that she was not allowed unsupervised in her father’s library, but also knew that he wouldn’t be returning home until after supper. Her fingers grazed the book spines as she moved towards her father’s desk, and she imagined them shaking and trembling beneath her skin. Once so meticulously neat, the large mahogany desk was now piled with crumpled notes, browning documents, dusty books, and old cups of coffee. Its size at least had not changed; it was still daunting, still hunched in the corner of the room like a large, waiting beast. When Myra was younger and her father still smiled, the desk had seemed big as a house to her and she would play beneath it while he worked, making China dolls climb his legs like trees. But now this desk, this library, had grown dark as her father’s eyes. Myra pulled herself into the rolling chair, smoothing her dress over the cracked green leather.

Instead of risking discovery by upsetting the mess, she scanned her eyes over the pages, the smudged and frantic ink, the lines and circles and strange illustrations that leered and looked ready to crawl from the page. Myra hurriedly shook away this thought and finally noticed the envelope, a brighter and cleaner white than most of the paper on the desk. She gingerly slid it from under a heavy red book and breathed a sigh of relief to see it had already been opened. The envelope was heavy with thick and slightly ridged paper, her father’s name written on it in blue ink. The return address was typed. St. Augusta’s School for Girls.

Myra breathed deeply and slipped out the first page. The salutation began under a strange logo comprised of two swans with their necks intertwined over a basket of apples. Dear Mr. Bienville…we are pleased to inform you…the term beginning September 26th…Myra dropped the envelope in her lap, not in surprise but pained resignation. She made herself look at the calendar hanging on the wall. A red circle surrounded September 25th, her twelfth birthday, the day her father would be sending her away to New England. He had spoken of it months ago but Myra had held onto hope that he would forget, or change his mind, or she would be declined entry. She had imagined the place for weeks in the space between waking and sleeping, a vision clear and cold as ice: dreary grey skies and dreary grey dresses, rote recitations and sewing, playing piano hymns until her fingers ached, and plates of bland, overcooked food. As she saw these things a great empty feeling stole over her bones and her skin felt dry as infertile earth. But there was still a chance that this was just a possibility, just one option amongst many others rubbing against this reality like a hungry cat. Except now...accepted.

With trembling fingers Myra placed the envelope back under the book, wishing its weight would crush the thing into ash. She slid from the desk chair and hurried from the room, touching no books, lingering over no detail. Her footsteps smacked the marble stairs like a growing storm, and she careened blindly down them until something solid caught her around the shoulders. Zoria’s hands were old and gnarled, but firm, and Myra sighed deeply with the knowledge that escape would not yet be possible.

“Where are you going in such a hurry, child?” Zoria asked, the once thick accent somewhat smoothed and softened by decades far away from home. She had returned to the United States with Myra’s mother and father after their wedding and remained after the fatal illness, indispensable and wise. She would often say that she did not miss her home, that her old bones preferred the Southern heat. Certainly she fit right in with some of the city’s traditions, leaving small satchels in the drawers and lining the windowsills with salt. But Myra knew that at night, when the supper was finished and everything cleaned and put away, Zoria would sit by the fire and rock slowly, singing songs of home.

10

Myra pressed her fingers to her temples, hard. The aching that sometimes overtook her head was beginning to build, like an egg slowly cracking. Zoria smoothed Myra’s hair and gently removed her hands from her head, folding them between hers.

“Come. I will make you a cup of chocolate. Let us talk.”

“Papa doesn’t allow chocolate before supper,” Myra said in half-seriousness. Zoria only smiled and tapped the side of her nose.

The kitchen was already filled with spicy smoke in preparation for the evening meal. Large bronze pots bubbled and hissed while Daisy and Claudine laughed together as they chopped okra and potatoes. The gramophone in the corner played the warbling, otherworldly tones of a woman who sounded in distress, singing in a language Myra didn’t understand. One of Zoria’s choices, surely.

“Hey there, Miss Myra,” Daisy said over her shoulder. Myra smiled in response. Daisy was like a younger, prettier version of her aunt, with smooth skin and lively eyes. Though she wore her hair wrapped up in a colorful scarf, the pieces that escaped were dark, bouncing curls. Claudine was also jovial but her eyes were harder, more tired, her skin rough like old leather and hands almost as knobby as Zoria’s. It hurt Myra sometimes to see them—what Claudine once was, and what Daisy would eventually become.

“The girl has had a shock and needs some chocolate,” Zoria said, taking down tins and prepping the kettle.

“How did you know I had a shock?” Myra asked this question already anticipating the answer.

“Because I always know.”

“You have a birthday coming up, don’t you Miss Myra?” Daisy asked. Myra felt her face flush.

Claudine nudged Daisy, who smacked her lips and continued chopping the okra. Zoria set down the kettle.

“On September 25th. The equinox.”

Daisy and Claudine exchanged another look, less amused. Myra wondered if they knew about the school. Zoria beckoned her close with one crooked finger.

In a low voice she asked, “So you have seen the letter, girl?” Myra shrugged, then nodded. Zoria sighed, a slight wheeze in the sound.

“You should not be snooping in your papa’s study. People keep their secrets for a reason. As for the school…I shall see what I can do.”

Myra felt very hesitant about allowing herself to hope for a more positive outcome but forced a smile for Zoria’s sake, mostly wondering what she had meant about secrets.

“What’s going on in here?”

Myra jumped and turned from the stove.

“I am teaching the child how to make a roux,” Zoria explained, inching her large frame to the side to block the tin of chocolate powder.

Myra’s father looked at them with eyes momentarily suspicious, then cold.

“My daughter will never have to cook for herself. Myra, come with me.”

She guiltily followed her father from the kitchen into the den, standing by while he fixed a tumbler of brandy and ice. His white suit hung limply from once-broad shoulders, and it had been many years since his hair had been either dark or full; it receded sparsely from his forehead in swatches of black and grey. His loafers badly needed a polish and swollen bags protruded beneath his eyes like rotting fruit. It pained Myra to look at him, so she stared at her feet instead.

“I’m going on a trip, just for a few days. There are items I need to procure from some associates in London.” Myra looked up and realized that he was not seeing her either, but instead gazed at the clock on the mantle while he spoke. “I expect you’ll behave while I’m gone and work on your lessons.

You need more practice with French. Monsieur Jean will be here to tutor you three times a week now, instead of two.”

“Yes, Papa.”

“And you’re not to leave the house,” he reminded her, as he reminded her without fail before every business excursion.

“Yes Papa.”

“Good,” he said. He looked at her then, briefly, and she thought she detected a momentary suggestion of warmth in his dark eyes. She was sure they had once been a nice, comforting shade of something other than burning tar, but that seemed lifetimes ago. He looked about to say something else but turned abruptly away and headed up the stairs.

Myra once would have cried at this treatment and had, often, but it was simply a matter of course now, so many years since her mother’s death. She instead leaned against the wallpaper and stared without seeing its dark green and golden whorls, pondering her father’s words. Some associates in London. Myra knew they came from old money and wondered why her father worked in the first place; she had never been told what his economic pursuits entailed. Business is for men, he would say, not for girls, but Myra suspected her sex was only part of why she was kept from any knowledge of her father’s activities. Something had changed over the past few years and if the strange papers on her father’s desk were any indication—or the gaunt men with hard faces who arrived holding dark bundles, or the unpleasant smells that would waft through the house some nights, keeping her from sleep— something more was happening. ***

The three days her father was gone moved slow and thick like the summer heat that stubbornly refused to dissipate, even this close to autumn. Myra completed her lessons, recited French with the heavy-jowled tutor, and tried to distract herself from the dwindling calendar pages by reading, but most of her time was spent in her bedroom’s window seat. The humid air hung heavy with the smell of magnolias, cooking smoke, and garbage waiting to be collected, rotting in the heat. Myra felt despondently similar to a princess in one of her stories and wished that she could don a feathered headband and join the constant procession of bodies that moved on the sidewalk below. Maybe it was her distance, but they all seemed colorful and full of joy, while her own life felt unfairly dismal.

Myra was feeling vacant and slow, picking at some lint that had attached itself to her stockings, when the car pulled up. Her father exited the backseat carrying a heavy-looking black satchel, his face drawn and lips thinly pursed. Myra stifled the desire to run downstairs, knowing it would just irritate him, and waited in her room until dinner. But her father was not at the table. She stirred her spoon back and forth through the shrimp stew and watched Zoria tear at a piece of bread, feeling the slight throbbing in her head that threatened a migraine. Her father joined them when the melted remnants of dessert were being cleared away.

“I’ll take a plate in the drawing room,” he told Zoria in an exhausted voice. When he turned to leave the dining room, Myra followed, feeling slightly emboldened by a good supper and her father’s tired countenance, almost mild. He was sitting in his large leather chair by the empty hearth when she entered, and upon noticing her, patted his knee. On these very rare occasions when the heat was drained from his eyes, leaving only harmless ash, her father would welcome her company. Feeling both uncomfortable and pleased, Myra joined him in the chair. Her father groaned slightly.

“You’re getting too big to sit with me like this,” he said, but did not further encourage her to move, so Myra haltingly settled against his chest. He drew an arm across her and she closed her eyes, trying to pretend this was how it always was—she and her father together after dinner, he smelling like shaving soap and tobacco and asking about her day. But he didn’t ask anything, and after a few minutes Myra wondered if he’d fallen asleep.

“Papa?”

“Hmm?”

But she had nothing to ask. Eventually Zoria came in with a bowl of stew and Myra slipped from her father’s lap so he would have room to eat. After a few spoonfuls he pushed the bowl away, then noticed his daughter watching. He cleared his throat.

“Your birthday is tomorrow. Would you like anything special for dinner? Or maybe breakfast, before the train leaves in the morning?”

Myra clenched her jaw tightly against the threatening tears. A small part of her had still hoped

12

that the acceptance letter would mean nothing, disappear into the endless piles of paper on he father’s desk.

“Whatever is easiest,” she whispered. ***

Myra’s attention was split between the pile of luggage in the corridor and the pile of melting vanilla ice cream on her place. Its sloping mound-shape reminded her of Monkey Hill, which she used to visit with her family before her mother fell ill. The banana foster sauce met the melting ice-cream and mixed to create something resembling muddy flood run-off. Myra pushed the plate away and turned her attention to the dining room clock, ticking with a hollow sound. Mumbling in Romanian, Zoria picked up the plate and disappeared into the kitchen, returning momentarily with a new dish of dessert.

“Never mind waiting. Eat,” she said with irritation that Myra knew was not directed to her. To satisfy Zoria she ate about half, barely tasting it. Her mouth felt dry and deadened. The two sat together at the table in silence until the clock struck eight thirty. Zoria cleared her throat.

“Wash up, then bed. Do you need anything from me?”

Myra shook her head. Zoria brushed back her hair and kissed her. “Micuţa mea,” she whispered, then took the dishes into the kitchen. Myra climbed up the stairs with slow feet and a heavy heart, feeling that her hands had once gripped on to something tightly but were now hanging by the fingertips. She washed her face with the tepid water in her ceramic rose bowl, changed into a clean nightgown, and laid in bed until Zoria peeked in on her way to settle down for the evening. By the time Myra climbed back down onto the chilly pine floor it was almost ten. Her eyes ached so she splashed some more water on her face and waited by the window. By the time the black car pulled up in front of the house another hour had gone by; Myra was nodding off when she heard the engine. She watched her father stumble out of the car, his arms full with something in a burlap bag, and climb unsteadily onto the porch. The front door opened and shut. Myra saw the driver disappear towards his lodgings behind the house, and after a few more minutes her father reappeared in the yard, hurrying towards the sidewalk.

Without thinking Myra tore from her bedroom, flying silently down the stairs in bare feet. Her white nightgown practically glowed in the dark, so she grabbed one of Zoria’s dark shawls hanging by the door and wrapped herself in it, then slipped outside and followed her father. She was scared that he would hear her footsteps or the frightened thudding of her heart, but he was far enough away and too determined to notice. Myra struggled to keep up; at one point she had to crouch behind a parked car when a stray dog began barking, and her father stopped and looked over his shoulders. The streets they took were empty besides a few strays but Myra could hear the distant wail of a trumpet and a muffled cacophony of chattering, laughing voices. They seemed to be part of another universe; a sane place where people attended parties instead of stalking their fathers through dimly lit streets.

Finally they reached the iron gates of a cemetery. The streetlight was not lit so Myra couldn’t read the inscription, but the place felt familiar. Her father fumbled at the lock until it snapped open then, looking around him once more, hurried inside the gates. Myra ran from her hiding place behind a large tree and followed. It was like being in a completely different city, a city comprised of the dead and their white houses. She followed her father for what felt like miles, past empty eyed cherubs and brown flowers, until finally he stopped before a large sepulcher and dropped onto his knees in the grass. Myra hid behind a nearby tomb and peeked around its side. She stifled a scream with a handful of shawl when her father pulled a long bone-handled dagger from his bag and sliced his forearm.

The blood that flowed from the wound looked black. He dipped his fingers into it and began writing strange symbols on the stone door, muttering words to himself that reminded Myra of their priest; but this was no Holy Sacrament. Her father began unloading the bag and arranging a frightening collection of items before him—a skull, a chalice adorned with rubies that looked like evil eyes, piles of small bones. He lit a candle dark as the blood staining his arm and the tomb, and in the wavering flame Myra could read the name inscribed above him. She should have known, should have known, but the sight of

her mother’s name painted with blood sent a wave of hot, sickening pain through her body. Her energy disappeared and her knees dropped hard onto the steps of the sepulcher. Her father began pouring liquids from stoppered glass bottles in a small copper bowl, sprinkling herbs into the mixture. His voice that had so often lately been tired and weak was rising without a waver, each syllable dropping into Myra’s chest like the heaviest of stones.

“Sed non incorpore, en spiritum lemurs de mortuis, decretum espugnare…de angelus Katarina…

Katarina…sed non incorpore…”

Myra grasped the shawl around her in fear, waiting for the winds to rise, the tombs to break open, the dead to crawl out with rotted flesh and gaping, bloody mouths. But there was only silence, the slightest whisper of leaves. Her father nearly screamed the incantation again, then waited. She saw him rifle through some papers with shaking hands, mumbling to himself again, but this time in English.

“No…no…I did everything right…what has happened? Where are you?”

The papers tumbled to the ground, joining the leaves. Myra wondered what she should do—go to her father? Zoria? The police? The moans that now gathered in his throat sounded like the cries of a dying animal and they frightened her more than the knife and the chanting. He sobbed brokenly and beat at the tomb with his fists, which quickly began producing more blood.

“Katarina! Katarina! Why don’t you come?”

Myra broke through her paralysis, scared that her father would completely crush his knuckles against the tomb and be left with nothing but bloody stumps. Feeling that she would collapse in fear at any moment she forced herself to run to him.

“Papa! Stop! Stop this!” She clutched at his shoulders, shaking them frantically, scared that though he had never hit her in her life, the fists would turn to her next in his anguish. But finally the pounding slowed, then stopped, and he collapsed against the tomb. His sobs belonged to something broken and lost, a sound Myra would never have expected to hear from her father. He did not even cry at her mother’s funeral.

Why would you do this? Myra wanted to ask, but she knew the answer would be nothing coherent, satisfactory, or anything she would want to hear. She barely could fathom what this was, but knew it had something to do with the sallow men, the business trips, the old papers on his desk; something entirely different from the pouches Zoria left beneath their pillows, or the cards Claudine would read after Saturday mass.

Her father finally stopped sobbing, perhaps from exhaustion, and seemed to notice Myra for the first time. He clutched at her hands. She expected him to question her, but instead said, “I missed your birthday dinner.”

“Papa, it’s all right. It’s all right.”

More tears gathered in his eyes and he placed a hand on her cheek. If this gesture had been more commonplace, she would have shrunk from the smell of blood and dirt, but instead, she held his fingers to her cheek, somewhere in the darkness and fear welcoming this foreign gesture of affection.

“How can I make it up to you? Tomorrow, what shall we do? For your birthday? Twelve now, so fast, and so much like her…”

He trailed off, the tears coating his cheeks silver in the moonlight. Myra was surprised to see that her father’s eyes looked almost blue; bloodshot, frantic, and heavy with grief, but almost blue again.

“I want to see the jazz players in the square,” she said finally, resisting the urge to cry out with glee because her father had not mentioned the train, or the dreary New England school. He nodded and smiled as if it hurt to do so, then with half closed eyes, opened his arms to her. She let him hold her against his chest and wondered what they would look like to a passing officer, or a couple of teenagers sneaking around the cemetery on a dare. Like ghosts probably, maybe ghouls or vampires. Her father’s heaving chest began to settle and his breath sounded almost like a child’s falling asleep. Myra wondered what being a vampire would be like, how it would feel to live forever. Probably lonely. Even though

14

there was dirt on her nightgown and blood on her face and her heart was still pounding with residual fear, she at least, for the first time since her mother died, did not feel lonely. Myra allowed her aching head to rest against her father and watched the black candle gradually melt.

16

Scrappy’s Rocks Nicholas Leonetti

A bell rang over head as Jay opened the door and stepped inside Scrappy’s Antiques. Like all the times before, the smell of dust and mildew hit him immediately along with the comforting feeling that only air-conditioning can give you on a summer day as sweltering as this.

The old man that owned the shop sat behind the register facing the door, surrounded by the oddities collected over the years. The old man – Jay didn’t know his name – momentarily taking his eyes from the beaten up paperback he’d been reading, nodded at Jay, and Jay nodded back.

There were porcelain dolls, baseball cards, records and cassette tapes, VHS tapes and DVDs, dog-eared paperback books, train sets, vintage lunch boxes, Nintendo NES games and Super Nintendo games… a nostalgic twilight zone that took Jay, if only for a short time, away from the chaotic and hectic world that was now his newly sanctioned adult life.

Figurines placed in various positions inside a glass-case – Darth Vador, Mr. Spock, Wolverine – wore small price tags wrapped around their necks like slack nooses. Jay looked at these, seeing some that he may or may not have owned as a child, smirked and walked on. Further back, a short staircase led up to another room where larger, more precarious items – Big Kids’ Toys a sign scrawled in half-assed cursive read – were showcased: a crossbow hanging from a nail in the wall, and BB guns of various sizes in a glass case much larger than the one holding the figurines sitting below it. There was a defunct counterfeiting machine from the 1930s in one corner and an old-time shoe-shining kit below it. Various other items scattered the room, but none of it interested Jay very much.

Through another door that led to another room, the local finds area, one could come across any number of strange and weird items that Scrappy’s claimed to have found in the surrounding Pine Barrens. Carefully preserved animal bones, some with an excess number of heads, arms and legs posed on shelves, along with exceptionally odd-looking plants and rocks and other things of dubious nature.

Showcased in the center of all this was a small chestnut table, lacquered and shined, with a sign scotch-taped to it. The sign read in that same deplorable cursive AUTHENTIC SPACE ROCKS FOUND IN YOUR OWN BACKYARD. Jay approached the table and saw fragments of what looked like alabaster marble, some bigger than others. He picked one up. The feeling was not what he expected it to be.

He expected a hard, cold sensation, but he found a soft and warm one. He squeezed the fragment in his hand, expecting it to give, but was surprised to see that it was very much solid.

It was the strangest thing he had ever felt before.

The price for the space rocks was $10.00 for one and two for $15.00. Jay picked two of the largest ones he could find, deciding that he would give one to Amanda, and took them to the counter to pay. *** “Weird,” Amanda said, wrapping her fingers around Jay’s gift. “It’s so warm.”

“Yeah,” Jay said, holding his own. “I found them over at Scrappy’s. The old man is claiming they’re from outer space or something. Not sure about that. He said he found them just this morning.

They’re pretty cool, anyway, right?”

“Yeah,” Amanda said, opening and closing her fist. “You sure they’re safe?”

“Why not?”

“Well, you don’t think they, like, maybe harmful to people or anything do you?”

Jay laughed. “No! Not at all. I’ve never heard of a rock being harmful.”

18

“What do you know about rocks?”

“Not much,” Jay said. “I’m sure they’re fine, though. You don’t have to keep it if you don’t want it. I just figured you’d like it.”

Amanda shook her head. “No, I love it. I’m sorry. That was rude of me.”

Jay smiled and kissed her. ***

That night, while Jay and Amanda slept, the rocks began to glow in the moonlight. ***

The next morning, Jay woke up with a headache. He went to the bathroom to find a pain reliever. Amanda still slept soundly. He made coffee and breakfast and then took a shower. It was 7:00am.

Jay was straightening his tie when Amanda started to stir.

She placed her hand over her head and rose from the bed. “Oh,” she said, “I have a headache.”

“I did too,” Jay said, tucking in his shirt. “Too much wine last night.”

“I didn’t drink any wine.”

“I did. I drank enough for both of us. I took some Advil. It helped. Take some. There’s some coffee, too. I feel fine now.”

“I’m tired,” she said, falling dramatically back into bed and stretching like a cat.

Jay smiled. “Then go back to sleep, mama.” He went over to her and sat beside her warm body.

He kissed her forehead and walked his fingers down to her protruding, hard belly and rubbed it.

“I guess I could.”

“Then you should.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll see you later.”

Jay kissed her again and left for work. ***

Around noon, while Jay was in the lunchroom eating a slice of pizza, his headache came back.

It was worse this time: a hot, searing pain that pulsed behind his eyes. He flinched at the suddenness of the onset and rubbed at his forehead.

“You all right?” Pat, his co-worker said, picking at a piece of pepperoni.

“Headache,” Jay said. “Hang over, I guess. Jesus, I thought it went away.”

“Came back for one last bite, huh?”

“I guess.”

Jay rose from the table. “I’m gonna go wet my face.”

The bathroom was empty. Jay ran the water, felt it with the tips of his fingers, and then splashed it in his face. He looked at himself in the mirror and saw the first strands of blood crawling out of his nose.

“What the–” He wiped at his face, and almost immediately, two more thin strands of blood ran out of his nostrils. Jay pulled a handful of paper towels from the dispenser and put them to his face.

The whiteness of the towels quickly went red. He took the mass away from his face and saw that now his nose was literally pumping out blood, as if someone turned on a faucet in his head. Crimson lines of gore ran from either side of his chin in a quick staccato that eventually led to a consistent flow. The water running turned pink as it hit the sink and washed Jay’s blood down the drain.

More blood came rapidly, and Jay started to panic. He yanked another wad of paper towels and put it to his nose. He slowly walked away from the sink, starting to feel lightheaded and made his way to the door. There was so much blood coming out of his nose that a puddle of it formed under his feet, and he slipped in it, landing hard on the tile floor. With the paper towels still clenched at his face, Jay managed in a muffled yell, “HELP!”

And then he blacked out. ***

He woke up in a hospital bed a few hours later.

It took him a few minutes to realize where he was and why he was there. A blood bag with a long IV running into his arm read “O+” on its white label. He was wearing a blue hospital gown, and his bare feet protruded from a thin, white sheet at the end of the bed.

The television was on.

It was the five o’clock news.

Five o’clock? Jay thought. I’ve been here for almost five hours? Amanda has to be worried sick!

His attention was caught by the warbling television screen in front of him. Scrappy’s took up the whole picture. At the bottom a caption read: Breaking News: Local antique shop is currently in quarantine. Death toll at 3.

Jay could feel his forehead begin to perspire. Cold sweat formed underneath both of his arms, and his eyes felt heavy. “Amanda,” he said, over and over again.

Ripping the IV from his arm, Jay slowly got out of bed. The minute he stood up, he had to sit back down again. His head was swimming, still dully aching from the hours before. His clothes sat in a neatly folded pile on a chair at the other side of the room. He glanced at the hallway to make sure no one was around before he changed into his clothes. A doctor walked past, his head in a folder, but that was all.

Jay quickly got changed and left the hospital.

Realizing that his car would still be at the office, Jay hopped into one of the idling cabs outside of the hospital and gave the driver his address.

It took about fifteen minutes to get home. When the cab rolled into Jay’s driveway, the sun had already gone down. Amanda’s car was in the driveway, but the house was completely dark.

He paid the driver and made his way as quickly as he could to the front door. His hands shook as he placed the house key into the lock and turned it.

“Amanda!” he yelled, walking into the house, not even bothering to close the front door.

He turned on the hallway light and felt the absolute silence of the house closing in on him.

There was something wrong, terribly wrong, and he was horrified at what would be beyond the bedroom door when he opened it.

He was at the door now. His hand was around the knob, squeezing it tightly, hot and damp with sweat. The frame of the door was glowing blue from whatever lay behind it. In a hoarse whisper he said her name, hoping to God that she would answer back.

No answer.

He turned the knob, and the door creaked open, and the glow grew brighter. His head hurt, and he could feel the first trickle of blood start to leave his nostrils.

Jay took a deep breath and went inside the bedroom.

20

22

Club Swingers Bill Vernon

I parked my bike and entered the Harmon Golf Course Clubhouse where, supposedly, the town’s big shots hung out. The lure of their money took me to the counter and I met someone who I guessed was a college man working there for the summer.

I said, “Hello. I’d like to be a caddie.”

He looked me up and down. “You live around here?”

“Over on South West Street.”

“Caddied before?”

I shook my head. “Never golfed either, but I’m a fast learner. I can do it.”

“You got half an hour to kill?”

I nodded. Why was he asking that?

He left the counter and led me back to the door. “I need a break. Come on. I’ll play the last four holes and teach you how to caddie as we go.”

He handed me a bag of clubs, closed and locked the door, and led me around the clubhouse.

“Basically, your job is to stay out of the way, find the golfer’s ball, which means keeping an eye on it, present him the bag so he can select a club, and be quiet. The golfer should neither see nor hear his caddie until he needs him.”

The job was in fact a snap. Thirty-five minutes later, the man wrote my name down, said he was the manager, and told me to be there early Saturday, Sunday, and holiday mornings. That’s when they were busy.

“Act like the other caddies and you’ll be fine.”

I arrived the next Saturday morning at 7:00, my idea of early, but already people were milling around on the putting green and the first tee. Farther off on two of the fairways I could see, golfers were playing. I hurried to the caddies’ dock, set up my bike on its kick stand, and walked toward three boys sitting on a bench. “Hi. When’s this place open anyway?”

“Soon as you can see,” the nearest kid said.

The boy beside him said, “You a caddie?” He was out of uniform, but I recognized him as Tom Preston. His baseball team had played mine last week.

I nodded. “It’s my first day.”

Just then, a man yelled for Tom and the silent kid. They both left, and the remaining boy said, “They’re regulars for those two golfers.”

“You have to know a golfer to caddie?”

“Not really. You’ll probably get asked.” The kid walked over to drink at the fountain, and while there, a man came by and took him.

Two golfers at the putting green were looking my way, but neither approached. I waited restlessly. A few minutes passed and two caddies showed up in the caddies’ area after finishing hole nine, but instead of sitting on a bench, they stood between me and the clubhouse. Immediately, the two golfers I’d noticed hired them. Ahead of me. The men called them by first names so maybe they were regulars too. Still, I checked the ninth green. There were four golfers on it and two caddies. Would those two come over and get hired ahead of me as well? I was resentful just thinking of it.

“Hey, if you’re a caddie, I need one. Come on.”

A man leaving the clubhouse wanted me. I gratefully shouldered his bag of clubs, and on the first hole discovered that he was perfect: a short, straight hitter, so no problem finding his ball. The two men with him, additionally, carried their own bags so I didn’t have to carry two bags on this, my first

24

go-around. My threesome finished the first nine and without a break, played the nine holes a second time. The man paid and thanked me. My performance had apparently been okay, good enough by my standards.

Fingering the four dollar bills in my pocket, congratulating myself, I headed for my bike and stepped on something. I looked down. An inflated bicycle tire. Beyond it was another in the grass. Beyond that were handlebars, a seat, pedals, a kick stand, a frame and chrome bumpers. God, it was my week-old Schwinn Phantom lying in pieces. I was paying its $82.65 cost myself at $5 per week, but now it looked ruined.

Then laughter. Five caddies were on the benches watching me, Lebanon public school students.

The truth was obvious. I attended an out-of-town Catholic school and so I was an outsider to them.

Tom, the baseball player, the one caddie I knew, was among them so I approached him. He turned away, drank at the fountain, then faced me. I asked him who’d taken my bike apart, and his answer was to spit a mouthful of water in my face. That was such a terrible insult, I leaped on him in a frenzy and wrestled him to the ground.

Several hands dragged me off and broke us apart. I yelled, “Who did it? Which one of you?”

The biggest one, James Douglas, said, “It was me. What’re you going to do about it?”

I attacked without even considering that he was heavy and muscular, a football star, two years older than me. He slapped my hands aside, grabbed my wrists, spun me around and threw me aside like a sack. I ran at him again, but it was like wrestling a building. I couldn’t even get my arms completely around his waist. My hands unclenched, my arms dropped, and I stepped away. Fighting him and all five of them was impossible. Amid hoots and guffaws, I rinsed off at the fountain, ignored the caddies, and inspected what was left of my bike.

“Put it back together, you little baby,” James Douglas said. “It’s all there.”

And they left, their fun over.

What a mess. Should I call Mom to come with the car? She was busy, but I couldn’t leave my bike lying here.

“Hey, what’s up?” The manager who’d hired me was on the nearby putting green.

I pointed. “The caddies tore my bike apart. It’s brand new.”

Twirling his putter in one hand like a baton, he came over, and the rest of my tale poured out.

“James Douglas said he did it.” I took a deep breath. “I guess I’ll pay Cutler’s Bike Shop to put it back together. Douglas said all the parts are there.”

The man said, “You can do it yourself. Wait here a minute.”

He went into the clubhouse, returned with a metal tool kit that looked like a tackle box, and basically reassembled the bike himself. I handed him things and held the bike steady while he worked.

When finished, he set the bike upright on its kick stand.

“See if it’s okay.”

I pedaled around in a circle. “Everything works fine.” I was elated.

The man stood with the tool kit in his hand.

“Jimmy was just having fun.”

“Yeah?”

“He didn’t hurt you and he could have, right?”

I shrugged.

“I’m Richard Douglas.” He smiled. “Jim and I are cousins.”

“Oh.” I thanked him again and pedaled off.

For a few laughs, the caddies had put me in my place. I was still angry, but the manager’s kindness made me feel better. About halfway home, still mulling over the experience, I realized, though, that the manager hadn’t apologized. In fact he’d sort of excused his cousin. He also hadn’t promised to do anything to stop the caddies from acting that way again. I was nobody to him. My career as a caddie ended my first day.

26

Excerpts from

It’s More than Likely Sean Schemelia

I am asking too much. Sleep now, mére.

The voices are back like back from some secret business. I thought I knew once, but I never knew where it’s at. Lady origami, she unfolds herself disgustedly. Must muster again my eyes. I know they once were mine, at least. I’ve been seemingly long told otherwise. Riptide torrent and the jackals won’t fucking nip it. The time, the time has passed to count blessings.

Sera toned rustic city hall all malenky piss poor. A place dyed itself chrome all at once. That’s when the important questions get asked. (Exothermic demise, desirous head. Dining in plastic places and burning incense into the moon for comfort.) Who touched that knob? Why do some people dislike themselves, serve others? Where’s that fucked up Bang I ordered hours ago. Somebody will never know.

It was like watching a man deeply fry an egg. She cried into a well into nightfall at him. Filled it. What a sick fuck of a planet I lie my head! Tumultuos syrup was then exercising his right to embolism. Atrophic trophy, the last man standing. Signed “Love, Old Scratch” with an older still insignia.

There was a hint in the sad toolshed. We toasted our spines and told ghost stories about it on endless, distant first like Henry Miller hit David Sedaris in the tit. Sun was settling I should be so lucky. The stone chief decides to rest his bones, bested again. Protesting tome (over the intercom), - don’t Touch me!

Well I’ll be a bastard’s father! It speaks! The tome preaches on mumbling humble martyrdom at what they Do to a body in a bad way.

What I want to know who taught the book to read? Same broad what bit red delicious into one hundred million fractal shards. Bzzt - fifth world to fifth world; come in, fifth world - bzzt.

The mob ignites in hungry conquest. There were no survivors. They didn’t know who was who halfway through. It’s said justice is blind. I can’t help but wonder what happened to the last one.

Did he find him a reflective body of water or was there cues taken amiss?

Incognito dream man lands him a gig castrating caviar. Good for him. Canned laughter canned everything. Somewhere in London, eight years ago goddamnit. We was one ten at rest. Some the lads reach four. I clutched my heart with both hands on a sheetless bed and tried to make the shadows go home, all private Vector3 spawn; Where’s the water I once wanted to wear has too gone away? It’s important you know why I put my foot down. I’ve been lying my whole life.

28

Familiar Kim Koering

Drops of blood catch in its whiskers, and it licks them up. Bits of flesh and fur catch between its teeth. It scrapes flecks of organ meat from its palate with a sandpaper tongue. At its paws, only tiny bones – so thin it snaps them beneath its pads with a little pressure, just to hear the small sounds of destruction – and the corrugated tail remains. It never eats the tail. With all its sections and bare, pale flesh, it looks like a worm. Worms remind the cat of death, so it buries the tail with the bones beneath the soil.

It thinks a lot about death lately. Mostly when a witch dies, her familiar leaves with her. It thinks of the mummified mice found in Egyptian tombs, presents for the feline gods as they pass over into the next realm. The cat cannot understand why an offering of death ought to comfort the dead. It raises a paw to its mouth and cleans away the traces of its kill from its claws.

Perhaps it is a loyalty thing, the cat thinks as it moves among the shadows of the graves. The familiar accompanies its mistress into the beyond, ready to search out the mysteries of the next life together. Whatever they say about curiosity and cats, it has no interest in the next life.

It is fascinated by the dead, though. As its paws move over the dirt of the churchyard, it can sense what is beneath. Each tombstone names each bone pile as if naming a thing can keep it from turning back to dust. It is no different than the photographs the cat has seen hanging on the walls of the houses in the village down the hill. They try to freeze time, keep it from becoming past. They hang pictures on the walls as if a house was made of memory instead of wood and plaster.

The ground by the graves is slightly warmer than the cold earth all around, imbued with the essence of what is as the soil is rejuvenated by what was. In the moonlight, in the shadows of the oak trees, the churchyard looks bare. In a few weeks the air will become warm, the sun will have regained its vitality, bright shades of green grass will blanket the sloping lawn. Bees will dip their feet into golden baths of pollen. The churchyard will be reformed. Something of the life and nowness of the place will speak to the hearts of man. Lovers will walk hand in hand through the gardens, forgetting the graves, as children pedal down the paths, their training wheels scratching cryptic signs into the earth. They cannot understand how life obscures the essence of this place. If the cat were religious, he might think it sacrilege.

The manor house where the cat lived with its mistress was made of stronger stuff: stone and magic. Spirits walked among the halls and through the walls. The grounds, full of tangled vines with thorn teeth to keep the neighborhood children out, were always imbued with fog, the ambiance of ghosts. Here there was no death and life, only a perpetual now. Stardust settled over everything, the byproduct of endless years of alchemical experiments. Instead of mice, the cat sniffed out bits of magic its mistress had not yet swept up.

There was a certain Chancellor whose spirit haunted the witch’s house when she was still alive.

He was rather ego-centric and full of wisdom the living were simply too busy to heed, as he often lamented to the cat. But the cat enjoyed long discussions of philosophy and found the dead were often better company in this regard because they had time and little else to fill it with. Death, the Chancellor told the cat, is not an ending but a realization of one’s own timelessness. Timelessness, the cat responded, is immortality and immortality is a life too full to admit death’s intrusion.

As it bats a tuft of grass with its paw, the cat wonders whether it seeks out graveyards for their presence, for the comfort of the familiar.

30

The cat claws its way up into a tree, dislodging flecks of bark like dead skin cells. There is comfort here, too, in the arms of the dead. The branches reach toward the sky, as if supplicating the moon or whatever mysterious power will bring it back to life when the penance of winter is over. A crow sits in the branches above. The cat casts its eyes up at the bird. With its belly warm and full of blood, the cat does not think of another killing, another death, though it has killed crows before. And once, a raven.

Instead, it admires the way the moonlight shines on the bird’s glossy feathers, the somber doppelganger of a phoenix the cat once knew.

The witch fell in love with a wizard who kept a phoenix. Or rather, as the wizard explained, the phoenix kept him. It was their mutual respect for immortality which bound the two. The wizard had spent centuries of his youth searching for the right logarithms, the precise ingredients, to create an elixir of life. He was so passionate about the endless cycle of death and rebirth that the witch eventually ended their relationship. The cat was sorry to leave the wizard’s castle, the kind of stone mammoth only found nowadays in fairytales and in children’s imaginations. It was sorry, too, to leave the phoenix with whom it had developed a sort of friendship after the disastrous attempt to make the phoenix its dinner.

The cat had assumed it would taste like the scraps of roasted chicken villagers sometimes tossed to it, thinking it a stray. It tasted instead of ash and coal and had scorched the cat’s throat and stomach so much that its mistress was distraught she could not save its life. When it awoke from its enchanted sleep, the cat was one life older and, it assumed, much wiser. Uncertain afterimages swam around in the cat’s head after this loss of life. These dreams of the dead, where nothing happened because it had all happened already, disturbed it. It sought the phoenix’s expertise.

When the relationship ended and the witch found a nice, haunted manor of her own, she would stroke the cat and coo in its ear about the foolishness, the vanity, of immortality.

“Where’s the urgency in a life that lasts forever?” she would ask as if she expected the cat to answer. It would purr and think of the phoenix and the limitless potential of those who conquered death.

When the raven first tapped at the window of the witch’s bedchamber, a chill rose up the cat’s spine. The fur on its back stood straight up and it bared its teeth at the evil bird. Unfazed, the raven stayed until the first light of dawn broke over the dark trees of the forest. The cat’s mistress awoke, as vitally magic as ever, and the cat forgot about the omen until the raven returned that night. Slowly, as if it carried death instead of just announcing it, the witch began to languish in the raven’s presence. The bird took up the post, day and night, tapping on the latticed window when the cat’s mistress was asleep.

If she ever noticed the raven, the witch never mentioned it. She awoke each morning, a little sicker than the day before. Her pale skin lost its shimmer of stardust and turned the color of ash. Her knuckles became knobby so it was hard for her to unscrew the caps on her bottle of powered rhino hide, her vial of newt bile.

The cat tried to scare the raven off. It pounced from the gables one morning early in the raven’s tenure as its mistress bustled around her cauldron and sniffed incessantly. As if the bird were made of smoke, the cat fell through and splattered itself on the flagstones three stories below.

The cat lost another life when it snuck up behind the bird on its branch outside the bedchamber. The bird’s eyes were fixed on the kitchen window where the witch was bent nearly double, coughing up phlegm and worse things into an empty cauldron. Black bits of soured magic dribbled from her lower lip. (The cat does not like to think about it. Even now the memory stabs at its heart and it feels anew its hatred for the raven. The crow takes flight, angling over the tiny church, frightened perhaps by some sense of the cat’s murderous musings.) The cat swiped at the bird’s neck. It was a powerful stroke which should have severed the artery, but the cat might as well have struck air. The bird spun its head around to look at the cat with one fathomless, black eye. It was like looking into an abyss, into the unknown. Then the bird struck out with its wings. Startled, the cat lost its balance and tumbled through the branches. It was spared the hard contact of the flagstones and was eviscerated on a thorn bush.

It sought advice from the spirits of the manor.

“Don’t you know what a raven is?” asked the Chancellor one night in the study. In life he had been a distinguished intellectual. The cat always found him in the study, staring at the bookshelves with the corners of his mouth drawn down into a bullfrog’s gloomy expression, wondering just how he might take up a book so he could feed his starving mind. The cat thought his question was rather stupid.

“It’s a bird,” it said.

The Chancellor looked away from the dusty shelves and turned his frown on the cat. “It is not a bird of flesh and bone,” he intoned. “It is made of darkness and cold.”

The cat’s moonlit eyes stared at the pearlescent figure, waiting for an explanation.

The Chancellor sighed and rolled his eyes. “Scare it off with fire.”

By way of thanks the cat pawed a book off one of the lower shelves. It crashed to the study floor and fell open. His translucent eyes popping open like a man about to have a heart attack, the Chancellor crouched on the floor before the tome. It was a book on ornithology.

A couple of weeks after the raven appeared, the witch was too weak to make it to the kitchen.

The brew in her cauldron sat unattended and began to spoil. Whatever failed magic she had been working on was left to the greedy hands of the spirits. They fought over the cauldron’s contents and the rows of potions lining the shelves in the dungeon. As its mistress lay dying, the magic which held the house together, which shielded the grounds from the elements, began to crack and crumble as if it had simply been a figment of her powerful imagination.

Stashed away in a mouse hole was a cache of magic the cat had collected over the years. It wasn’t sure if its mistress would be upset to find all the shavings and leftovers of her magic hoarded away. It was enough, the cat believed, to start a fire which would never burn out. Guided by its inexpert knowledge of magical law, by the time the cat had prodded the specks of stardust into flame, it was too late.

The raven’s curse stuck and the witch died.

Jumping down from the tree, the cat lands impossibly light on its feet. The moon is sinking behind the church steeple. The first few rays of dawn will soon come over the hill. The cat stretches – not because it is stiff; it never gets stiff anymore. There is no satisfaction in stretching muscles which are already loose, so it trots toward the church where the mice emerge from the cellar, noses aquiver to sniff out danger. They never sense the cat.

The bird took fright at the flames. With its concentration broken, the magic which made it intangible dispersed. Though the cat knew its mistress was a lost cause, it pounced once more at the raven. This time, it sunk its teeth into the feathered belly and pulled its entrails out as the bird’s scaly feet kicked and clawed at the cat’s muzzle. The blue and green flames can still be seen from time to time in the dark forest. Scientists try to explain it as phosphorous escaping from the rock or earth.

As it nestles into the grass beside the church, the cat wonders what the Chancellor knew of the curse. It cannot believe that a man of such intellect would not have guessed the result of the cat’s task.

When its bloodlust was sated, the cat fell into torpor. It sat curled by its mistress’s cold body through the night hoping its own vitality could somehow undue this final spell, the one where life is turned to death with the speed of a magician’s fingers. When the body began to decay, the cat moved into the parlor where the witch had once stroked its fur as she comforted herself over the loss of her love.

In the weeks and months which followed, the cat discovered the raven who supplied its mistress with death had given it eternal life. The thought thrilled the cat. Its heart was full of the joy it had known in the company of the phoenix, its sleep no longer troubled by the dreams of the dead. The cat conquered the raven, conquered death, took hold of immortality.

32

There was a time, when they were young and in love, when they lived in a castle overlooking a grand meadow, when the sun was always strong in the day and the stars always glorious at night, when the cat had liked to find a sunny patch of grass to stretch out on. The rays would warm its fur and chase away the haunted dreams. The cycle of day and night and day again cheered its heart. Every day was a new beginning, a new opportunity to recreate the self.

Now the warmth brings unbearable pain to the cat’s flesh, the light burns it eyes. Perhaps there is some truth to its mistress’s words about urgency of life, but the cat is still puzzling it out. To its right is a flicker of movement. Silent as smoke, the cat stalks the mouse in the last minutes of the night.

34

Epicentropolis Kevin Reilly

April 4, 2034 Highlands Quarter, Epicentropolis, NJ, USA

Felix Etcher had made up his mind. He was going to get out of this place. He was lying face down in his bed; the lights were out in his room. He couldn’t even guess what time it was. He had been in this exact position for hours, weighing out his options. First off, everyone he cared about lived in this city. His sister Penny was here, the only family he had left. Obviously, it wasn’t as if he could come back to visit if he actually decided to leave. Once somebody left Epicentropolis, they were never allowed to return, in order to keep the purity of the experiment intact. When Felix’s mother officially registered him to become part of the emerging city, he had to swear that he would never attempt to contact anyone from outside the dome at any time. This was inconvenient, but it was the one rule that everyone needed to abide by in order for their basic needs to be financed by the local government. The carefree system within Epicentropolis was only possible when it was fully contained. Even now, Felix could understand that.

He rolled over and stared at the ceiling. He thought he heard birds chirping outside, then remembered that was impossible. The songbird track wasn’t played over the city loudspeaker until quarter to six each morning, and by then his curtains would be glowing with the first hints of morning light. This was all part of the problem. Epicentropolis was a study in predictability. Without the risks of normal life, everything took on a stale, artificial air. He could map out tomorrow as easily as yesterday.

Perhaps leaving would be for the best. Penny was an adult now; she could look after herself.

Felix groaned and checked his watch. Three thirty eight. It was always this time of night that found him at his most introspective. When you’re the last conscious person on your entire block, the world seems to pause for a moment, and allow you to collect yourself; nothing is happening around you, so you aren’t missing anything. There are no distractions left. If you’re still in your right mind, an unlimited amount of progress can be made in just a few short hours. Doubtless whoever came up with the idea for this godforsaken city thought of it in the dead of night, when anything was possible. ***

Across town in the Metropolitan Quarter, Penny Etcher walked aimlessly along the infinite sidewalk, her hands in her pockets. She was lost in thought, and far away from home. She had been sauntering forward for more than an hour already, and had taken Kramer Ave all the way to 54th Street, where she hung a left. She would take Clinton Boulevard all the way back to the Suburban Quarter, and after a quick five blocks on 4th Street she would be home. It was a four mile walk, the exact path she took whenever she had some serious thinking to do, which was pretty often these days.

The route never varied. As spontaneous as the young girl seemed, those who knew her well could see that every aspect of her life had a hidden routine. She was chaos, controlled.

Penny sighed. Her brother was unhappy with Epicentropolis. That much was clear to nearly everyone that met him. He had never loved it here, but lately it was starting to get worse. He barely did anything but talk about how terrible the city was. So, Penny thought, what should I do? Tell him to leave? That I would be all right without him? It wouldn’t be true. She was eighteen now, sure-footed and resourceful, but she was still a child in many ways. She needed Felix more than anyone else in the world.

36

Penny took a left turn down Clinton Boulevard. Although it was a major road that cut through the entire city, the street was desolate at nearly four in the morning. Automated buses—the only vehicles in Epicentropolis—perpetually lurched along the roadway, empty. Nothing else Penny could see was even moving. This was her favorite time to wander around. She was completely alone in a city of ten million people. Solitude made it easier for her to concentrate. She had to find a way to make Felix feel important while keeping him close to her. There must be something here he could take charge of, she thought as she kicked a holographic can down the street. Epicentropolis was spotless—the janitorial robots worked night and day to clean up litter—but studies showed that kicking trash down the street was beneficial to the thought process, so artificial cans were placed along the curb every few blocks, balancing precariously, just begging for a swift punt. Penny smiled in spite of herself. How could he not love this?

As Penny walked past an alley in the center of the block, a pair of strong male hands emerged from the darkness and grabbed her by the shoulders. She was yanked backwards into the alley so fast she heard her neck crack from whiplash. Penny began to scream, but one of the hands covered her open mouth. She bit down, hard.

“OW!” The hand let go.

She could see blood already surfacing on the fingers as they quickly withdrew. Now it was her turn. She spun around in her best self-defense form—just like Felix had taught her—and swung at the attacker’s face. Penny was a skinny little thing, but she had a wicked right hook.

“SHIT! PENNY, STOP!” The attacker stepped forward into the streetlight, clutching his wounded eye with his good hand. This obscured his face, but his voice was unmistakably familiar.

“…Stephen?” The adrenaline-blurred world was collapsing around her. “Stephen, what the hell are you doing?!”

“Jesus, Pen, your teeth are sharp.” *** March 27, 2034 Highlands Quarter, Epicentropolis, NJ, USA

Felix Etcher and Stephen Slowe were killing time on the roof of Stephen’s apartment building. Felix sat with his legs dangling over the edge, fifty feet above a spotless alley. He looked up at the quickly moving clouds through the gigantic glass dome and shivered, an old reflex he couldn’t seem to eliminate. It was the middle of spring. It would still be chilly, back home in the mountains, even at noon. Not here. Epicentropolis had citywide climate control. Outdoors—so to speak—was always a comfortable seventy-eight degrees with low humidity, regardless of the time of day or season. Felix hadn’t worn a jacket in years. His sister Penny, who was born in the city, had never even owned one.

Eighteen years ago, their pregnant mother had entered the gates with a ten-year-old Felix. Their father opted to move to Pennsylvania when the experiment started. At the time, Felix was angry with him, but when Millie Etcher died during childbirth, he understood why his dad stayed behind. Felix sniffed, and shifted his weight. Well, he thought, when you let anyone who walks into a hospital deliver babies, that’s what happens.

Stephen paced around a small pipe jutting up from the center of the building, smoking. Stephen was smoking, of course, not the pipe. Felix detested the habit. In an effort to curb his friend’s constant pestering, Stephen had taken to always moving while smoking. He argued that with the exercise, he was practically breaking even, health-wise. At the end of each week, he left two packs and fourteen miles behind him. At least half of this walking took place in a tight circle around this pipe.

Felix leaned on his elbows and tilted his head back, watching an upside-down Stephen pace.

This made him feel slightly motion sick, but he supposed that was better than feeling nothing. “Do you remember the river?”

Stephen glanced over at Felix, then resumed his course. “Sure. I think about it all the time.

There was nothing like it, watching millions of gallons of water move south every second. I always used to wonder where it all came from.”

“You think it’s still there?” Felix asked. “I hardly think that place still exists, after all this time.”

Stephen chuckled. “Of course it’s still there, man. Town’s long gone, but rivers don’t give a shit if there are people around to watch them. They don’t need upkeep. They keep right on moving. That river is better off without us.”

Stephen tripped over himself, his tennis shoes squeaking under foot. He looked down. As a result of his constant shuffle, there was a slight ovular depression in the cement, crosshatched by scuff marks, as if someone had spent an afternoon half-heartedly power washing the roof, opting instead to make a weird pattern for the next handyman to find. Similar markings could be found on the porch in Penny’s tiny backyard in the Suburban Quarter, but hers were more erratic, forming a rough figure eight around a couple old lawn chairs. Her marks were evidence of compulsion, not routine.

Felix sighed. “You’re probably right, but I don’t think I’m better off without the river.”

“No,” Stephen said, “I wouldn’t think so. We could take a bus to the Shore Points Quarter if you want. Check out Leisure Ave, have a look at some fountains—”

Felix rolled his eyes. “I’m so sick of those fountains, Steve. More proof of our battle with nature, that’s all they are. Another example of man taking something pure and just…ruining it. Making it more complicated than it has to be. And they have the nerve to put them in there, and say ‘Look, water!

Epicentropolis is like the real world, but better! Forget about the past, let’s move forward!’ Into what?

This place is like living on a carousel. It’s nice for a little while, but eventually you have to either get off or throw up.”

Stephen flicked his cigarette butt off the roof, down into the alley. He squinted and watched a janitorial robot roll swiftly over and sweep it up.

The robot looked up. “Thanks!”

Stephen resisted the urge to spit onto the defenseless machine’s head. Instead, he gave it a curt nod, and walked back over to Felix. He stood next to his friend on the edge of the roof with his hands on his knees, panting slightly. “Well, you can hop off whenever you want. The carousel, I mean, not the—”

Felix glowered. “You say that like it’s crazy to even consider it. We don’t need this place to survive. We didn’t before and we don’t now.”

“Maybe not, but surviving is a lot easier here, don’t you think?” Stephen scratched at his chin.

“Food, water, shelter, all paid for by the government. And they ask us for nothing in return but to hang out in here and let the rest of Jersey grow back for a couple generations. Plus there’s pretty much no crime, no struggle—”

Felix grimaced. “Save it, I’ve heard it one too many times.” He hopped up onto his feet with a start. “No, you know what? That’s the problem right there. Struggle! Life is about struggle, more than anything else. Right now, we don’t have any. We’re complacent, we’re stupid. When nothing goes wrong, there’s no reason to think, or to affect change. There’s no drive to improve the world we live in. Everyone shrugs, says ‘Close enough.’ I swear, this is the first time in human history that we are at risk of losing our sentience. We’re like farm animals now.”

“Maybe,” Stephen grinned, “but on a nice, organic farm. We’re given enough space—”

“Just enough to keep from suffocating one another.”

“The weather is perfect.”

Felix scoffed. “I haven’t felt snow in a decade.”

Stephen raised his eyebrows. “Aha! I’ve caught you! It still snows every year out there.”

“Oh please,” Felix said, rolling his eyes, “the entire dome being covered and blocking out all natural light while I bump into shit wearing a t-shirt and shorts hardly counts as snow.”

38

“Fair enough,” Stephen said. “Well, at least we don’t have to work.”

“We’re parasites. We don’t produce anything. Don’t you see that?” Felix’s right eye began to twitch so slightly that it was barely noticeable.

Stephen’s eyes lit up. He had seen that twitch many times. It was the sign that he should stop antagonizing Felix immediately. Still, he thought, what are best friends for? “What do you mean, nothing? We have all these great conversations, that has to be worth something.”

Felix shot Stephen a blank stare, punctuated with the slowest, most sarcastic blink he could manage. “That’s just not enough, and you know it. If all I get out of life is sitting up here arguing with you, I might as well just take a quick jog off the side of this roof.”

“You know, Felix, you’re right. You’re absolutely right, as always.” Stephen sighed, and looked up at the clouds. “But it doesn’t matter. Things are just…better here. They are. There’s almost no disease, zero starvation. Our survival is all but guaranteed.” He patted Felix on the back. “Granted, you make a lot of good points. This is a bland life at times, a little too easy. I’m not disputing that. I’m just saying, my folks sit around their apartment all day, happy. My old man used to lie on the kitchen floor just to get his spine in line. Every night, for two hours. He didn’t own one shirt without splinters and dust all down the back. He doesn’t have to do any of that shit anymore.”

Felix nodded. “I know, I know. And they deserve it. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. I just…

I don’t think I can live like this anymore. I need a change. Some conflict, some excitement. I can feel myself starting to shut down, and I really don’t like it.” *** March 29, 2034 Suburban Quarter, Epicentropolis, NJ, USA

Penny Etcher sat on the floor of her little duplex, cross-legged. She lived a mile away from her brother, on the edge of the Suburban Quarter, in a neighborhood populated by young people that were born in Epicentropolis. Since all the housing in the city was equally nice for different reasons, people moved around as they pleased, and tended to flock to those that they saw as peers. This far into the experiment, the city was separated by hobbies and interests more than ethnicity or social status, which suited Penny just fine.

Penny sat so still it hurt. She was a kinetic being to the core, a chronic leg-wobbler, and a caffeine junkie. She was always moving, treating every moment with complete enthusiasm and determination. This was her greatest asset, but often her lack of control and poise manifested itself in inconvenient ways, hindering her. So she spent an hour each day doing as little as she possibly could. Some people saw meditation as a relaxing. Penny saw it as penance, a daily sacrifice to keep her capricious nature in check.

There was a knock at the door. Penny flinched and opened her eyes, then shot up onto her feet.

“Thank God!” Penny ran over to the door and flung it open to reveal Stephen Slowe balancing on one foot on her front porch, with his arms stretched toward the sky. Penny smiled.

“Meditating, were we?” Stephen brushed past Penny into her living room. “Wouldn’t dream of interrupting.”

“Nonsense,” said Penny, “I was just about to scream anyway.” Penny gestured to the couch and walked over into her kitchen. “What can I do for you, Master Slowe? Drink?”

“Sure. Cola, if you have it.” Stephen took two running steps and dove onto Penny’s couch, landing face down with such force that it slid along the wood floor. “By next year,” Stephen said, his voice muffled deep in the cushions, “this couch will be against that wall.”

“And you’ll be dead.” Penny placed two sodas on coasters on her chestnut coffee table and kicked the couch back into place. “This space has been arranged, quite meticulously I might add, to streamline the creative process and inhibit procrastination.”

“So I’ve heard.” Stephen took a deep swig of his soda and punctuated it with a crisp audible exhale. “How exactly does the position of the couch effect the…qi? Flow? What do you hippies call it?”

“Don’t patronize me, it’s irritating. And there isn’t really much canon for what we hippies call things.” Penny squinted at Stephen and plopped back onto the floor, Indian-style. “Besides, I don’t bug you about your weird pacing, or the frankly shocking amount of stuffed animals that reside in your home.”

“My mother gave me those and you know it,” Stephen said with an indignant huff.

“Exactly. So you have your baggage and I have mine. Now then, out with it.” Penny cocked her head from side to side in a futile attempt to crack her neck, a sure sign that she was paying attention.

“You must have had a reason for dropping by.”

“All right then,” Stephen said, “you caught me.” Stephen took another swig of soda, sliding his thumb down the side of the can until he felt the cool liquid inside, keeping track of the level, an old habit he picked up from his father. “It’s Felix. I’m…a little worried about him. He seems a bit detached lately.”

“Sounds about right,” Penny said, drumming her fingers on the floor. “He never was one for grand displays of emotion. I remember—”

Stephen brushed her anecdote aside with a decisive wave of his hand. “No, I’ve known him for a long time, practically his entire life, and this is different. It’s this place, I don’t think he wants to try to make it work anymore. I think he wants out of the bubble, for real.”

Penny choked on her soda, her eyes widened. “Are you sure? Did he say that to you?” She started to jostle a leg, making her look like she was meditating on top of a washing machine. She couldn’t keep still when she was nervous, something that Stephen could understand well.

“No, no, not exactly. But that’s what he’s thinking, I’m sure of it.” Stephen picked at the dirt underneath his fingernails. “We have to do something, quick. Find him some way to see that he makes a difference here. Or else we’re never going to see him again.”

Penny sighed. “I mean, he’s always had the idea in the back of his mind, I think. But if you’re sure that he’s serious, then I’ll do anything. We have to keep him around here.”

Stephen nodded. “I’m with you there. I just don’t really know how to go about it. He’s so pessimistic it’d be hard to get him to try something new.”

“Yeah,” Penny chuckled, “I’m pretty sure that’s not an option. Hmm…What if…what if instead of something positive, we do something negative?”

Stephen furrowed his eyebrows. “I’m not sure if I know what you mean.”

“Like…what if we create a situation where he’s the only one that can fix it? Show him that without him, we wouldn’t have someone to help us when stuff goes wrong.”

Stephen jumped to his feet. “That’s great, Pen! Yeah, something bad…I hadn’t thought of that.

It might just work. I knew you were the right one to ask. Do me a favor, and think about what we could do.” He began to walk toward the door. “Listen, I’ve gotta run, I’m late for dinner. Just thought I would pop my head in on the way home. I’ll mull it over too, and we’ll meet back up in a couple of days, all right? Whatever it is, we have to do it quick.”

Penny nodded. “I’ll give it some thought. See you later, Stephen. Say hi to the folks.”

“Will do.” Stephen waved goodbye and closed the front door gently behind him.

Penny straightened her back and took a deep breath. She closed her eyes, trying to clear her mind. “Something bad…something bad has to happen.” ***

40

April 4, 2034 Highlands Quarter, Epicentropolis, NJ, USA

Felix sat on a polished silver bench in Backstreet Park, three blocks away from his apartment.

He had given up on sleep for the night. It was just after dawn, the sun was beginning to rise overhead.

Sunrises were still nice here, but the light refracted through the dome was somehow…off. It was colder, a little farther away, like always looking at the sky through a window. Felix shivered and rubbed his hands together. He had come to this bench for the same reason he went anywhere, to watch the people.

Felix was so tired that there was an audible whir within his skull. Still, the sleeplessness was starting to numb over, the sight of the sun gave him some encouragement. He stood up and walked over to the amenities area of the park. Several stands with little vending machines and robotic baristas surrounded a fountain shaped like five young men dancing in unison. Water shot out of the microphones they each held at jaunty angles.

Felix shook his head. He grabbed a fresh coffee from the robot barista, then turned around and blew steam from the piping hot cup.

“What, no thank you?” quipped the machine.

Felix glared over his shoulder. “They made you things way too realistic.” He shuffled back to his bench and sat down. The early risers were just starting to surface and scavenge for food. Felix sipped his coffee. It was perfect, as always.

Epicentropolis was built from scratch, in what was once a rural area of Southwestern New Jersey. Everything that used to exist within the current city limits—a couple unexceptional towns, a little wooded area, some strip malls—had been completely bought off and leveled, and the entire project was executed according to an incredibly detailed master plan. The idea was to move the entire populace of New Jersey to a single city, so that the barren, depleted natural environment could slowly revive itself. Since the experiment effectively shifted all state and federal funding directly to Epicentropolis, an inconceivable amount of money was available to those with innovative city planning ideas. In the end, almost all menial, uninteresting jobs that people used to do to survive had become automated. Technologically, this was possible years earlier, but companies did not want to have to deal with the expense, which was astronomical compared to conventional human labor, not to mention the inevitable backlash from a newly unemployed workforce that could not survive without meager compensation for unskilled labor. The shift to automation needed to be seamless and all encompassing if it was ever going to work. Epicentropolis was the perfect opportunity. As a reward for sacrificing their previous lives and joining the experiment, new residents of Epicentropolis were told that their living expenses would be fully subsidized. Everything within the city was complementary. Employment opportunities were all but nonexistent, and the few essential services were performed on a volunteer basis by whoever was interested. No one had to work to survive. As a result, everyone in the city had way, way too much time on their hands.

This is what Felix found so interesting. Instead of watching boring Americans doing the only thing they were familiar with—working themselves to death—he could now observe an entire population of people forced to do whatever they want. Some took full advantage of the freedom. Others didn’t have the first idea of what to do with themselves. Felix was definitely in the latter group. He glanced at the bench beneath him. Even two decades into the experiment, it was painfully, unnaturally new, so bright and scratch-free that it gave off a migraine-inducing glare. The same could be said about most of Epicentropolis, Felix thought. It seemed more like a really elaborate movie set than a city.

As a child, he had visited New York and Philadelphia, the cities of the past. These were dingy, old places, with history, and palpable scars. These cities made Felix feel insignificant. It was impossible to look at them without realizing that they had existed long before everyone he had ever met was alive.

Sure, they weren’t in perfect condition, but entire lives had taken place within their boundaries. They had character. Epicentropolis had no character. One day it might, but for now, it was much too pristine.

The city was domed in and exactly the size it needed to be for all of the citizens to be comfortable, with plenty of room for population expansion. Everything was just a little too neat to be believable. Except the people, Felix thought. He smiled. When you drop ten million humans into a perfect little dollhouse, they’re afraid to touch the furniture. It was fascinating.

Today was a morning like any other. Felix peered into the steady stream of people in business attire, hurrying this way and that. Eighty percent of them were going to breakfast, he thought, but they all seemed late. They bumped into one another, jaywalked across intersections between automated buses, and checked their watches compulsively. The morning commute to nowhere, he thought. These early risers had the most difficult time transitioning into their new lives of leisure. Something about it made him feel better, like he wasn’t the only one who was unhappy with the way things were. These people, they were embarrassed to have nothing to do. They wanted to pretend that they still had jobs and commitments to blame for their lack of ambition and free time. They were lost in the maze of the permanent vacation. Felix felt that he could relate to them better than a lot of his peers, who didn’t really see the problem with doing absolutely nothing all the time. He liked this time of day best because he almost never saw anyone he knew. Scarcely any young person woke before noon.

Felix never had the opportunity to become an overworked young professional, but he thought he would have fit in great. He needed structure, somewhere to be, some infinitesimal task to accomplish in order to help a bigger picture. There wasn’t any of that here, and they called it progress. Felix called it the self-destruction of society. He sighed. I might just go back to bed, he thought, as he took another sip of his coffee.

“Felix!”

Felix glanced toward the source of the voice, just in time to see Stephen run across the intersection, narrowly avoiding being struck by a bus. He was a mess. He was covered in dirt, and his left eye was swollen almost completely shut. His hands were coated in dried blood. Felix jumped up, dropping his coffee on the ground in front of him. The crowd parted to allow Stephen a path toward his friend.

Nobody acknowledged his presence, or even the act of avoiding him. They brushed past in a practiced apathy that was once reserved for dodging the more aggressive homeless of the old cities. Stephen came to a stop next to Felix and collapsed onto the bench.

“Stephen! What the hell happened, man? Are you okay?” Felix was frozen in place, hovering, not sure what to do next.

“Yeah, I’m fine, don’t worry about me.” Stephen was breathing in deep, heaving gulps.

“It’s just…oh man. It’s Penny. He…he took her.”

Felix felt his heart stop for a moment. His mind raced for a logical explanation. It didn’t find one. Penny. He fell back onto the bench in a slump, partially on top of Stephen’s legs. The two stayed sprawled out for a full minute in silence. Middle-aged men and women passed by a few feet away, ignoring them. Finally, Felix found the energy to speak. “Who? What? What are you talking about? Shit, Penny! What happened? Is she okay?”

Stephen propped himself up to a normal seated position. He was still panting. “She’s okay, I think. I hope. I was…I went over to her place late last night. I couldn’t sleep and I figured she’d be up. I kept knocking at her door and no one answered. Something didn’t feel right, in my gut, you know, so I hopped in through the window. I checked everywhere, but no one was there.”

Felix felt nauseous. “So then what? Why are you all beat up? Maybe she was on her walk—”

“Exactly, that’s exactly what I thought.” Stephen had caught his breath. “So I thought I’d try to find her. Normally I would have just come back later, but like I said something wasn’t right. So I started along the path backwards, hoping I’d catch her on her way home—”

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“And? Come on, out with it! What happened?”

Stephen held up a bloody hand. “Hold on, I’m getting there. I jogged as far as Clinton and 53rd without any sign of her. I was starting to think I was crazy, that she must be off doing something else. I was about to turn around and go home, when I heard someone yelling down the next alley. It was Penny, I was sure of it. I sprinted down there, just in time to see some gigantic dude carrying her off down the street. She was kicking and biting and screaming, but he was just too much for her. I shouted ‘Hey, put her down!’ but he just walked around the corner. I ran after them, but as I turned the corner, the guy clocked me.” Stephen pointed at his swollen eye. “I was knocked out cold. When I woke up, they were gone, and this was right next to me.” Stephen pulled out the boot he had tucked into his waistline.

It was a small black women’s boot, with the toe worn almost completely down from too much shuffling.

Penny’s. “I got up and ran here to find you. I don’t know what to do, man!”

Felix stared, more past Stephen than at him. He felt like he was going to explode, but he didn’t have time. His sister was in trouble, he had to focus. He stood up and began to walk toward the Metropolitan Quarter. “Come on.”

Stephen jumped up and followed on Felix’s heels. “Where are we going?”

Felix kept right on walking. “Show me. Show me where it happened. We’re going to find her.” ***

Felix and Stephen took the bus to the Metropolitan Quarter and hopped off at the corner of Clinton Ave and 50th Street. Only a few blocks remained between them and the last place Penny was seen. A smattering of people walked along the sidewalk; it was only seven thirty in the morning. Felix pushed forward at a blistering pace, clutching his sister’s boot, jogging more than walking. Stephen trailed behind him, gasping.

Stephen unsuccessfully tried to grab his friend’s shoulder to slow him down. “Hey…Felix…can you…go a bit…”

Felix turned on his heels and ran in place, glaring. “It’s only been three blocks, suck it up.

Penny’s missing, man! You gotta quit smoking, it’s really getting pathetic.”

“I know…but…running won’t…make her…any less…” Stephen was exaggerating, a little. He needed as much time as he could to figure this thing out.

“You think I don’t know that? I just—”

“Stop! We’re here!” Stephen doubled over, sucking air. He nodded his head in the direction of the nearby alley.

Felix dug his heels into the sidewalk and skidded to a stop. He looked all around the entrance to the alley, but didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. There was one of those idiotic holographic cans a few feet away, but you could find those anywhere. He wondered if Penny had been kicking it. She loved those things; she could hardly pass one without sending it flying. Maybe that’s what distracted her.

Stephen was watching his friend poke around, still pretending to catch his breath. This is a good plan, he thought, it makes sense. Now it was show time. “Okay, I’m good. It all went down in here.” He walked into the entrance of the alley.

Felix followed, his eyes fixed on the ground, scanning. “There!”

“What?”

Felix indicated a pair of thin parallel scuff marks. They were identical to the marks that covered Penny’s back porch. “That was her, I’d know those scuff marks anywhere. You were right.” His heart began to beat faster. He didn’t know what to do. Still, he had to press forward. He had to figure this out, for Penny.

Stephen kept walking down the alley. The scuffmarks continued for a few feet, then stopped abruptly. “Okay, so she must have been dragged to right here, then…something happened. I couldn’t see all this earlier, it was still too dark.”

Felix bent over the spot where the scuffmarks stopped. He saw a few small circular stains, so deeply red that they looked black from farther away. “Blood. She must have hit him, or bit him, or something.”

Stephen held his throbbing hand behind his back. “Well, I don’t want to be…morbid or anything, but couldn’t it be…hers?”

Felix was looking at the scuffmarks a little closer to the alley’s entrance. He was screaming on the inside, but he had to keep it together. He shook his head. “Nah, if it was hers, it would have started up there, I think. Like if he bopped her over the head on the street back there. No, he must have just grabbed her and dragged her.”

Stephen nodded. “Yeah, okay, that makes sense. This musta all happened before I showed up.”

Felix was looking at the walls of the buildings on either side of the alley. His head was on a swivel. “Hmm. Right, so this guy must have grabbed her, put his hand over her mouth—”

Stephen took a step back and began inspecting the area beyond the end of the scuffmarks. It was seventy-eight degrees as always, but he was sweating heavily. “Why do you say that?”

“Otherwise,” Felix said, “you would have heard Penny yelling from farther away, don’t you think? Big alley like this, that late at night? The sound would have carried for at least a full block. Didn’t you say you were right around the corner before you heard anything?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Stephen nodded his head vigorously. “Right, that makes sense. You’re good at this, dude. Seriously.”

Felix walked past Stephen, toward the end of the alley. “So let’s see…we’re looking for an injured guy, one big enough to drag Penny without much resistance, but still small enough for her to put up a fight against, at least for a moment. Look at these little lines here…” Felix pantomimed the motions, first standing at the end of the dragging marks, then taking a step back and sliding his foot back and forth along a faint arcing scuff mark. He stopped for a moment, lost in thought. “Okay, okay, so Penny was dragged until the end of these lines, a hand over her mouth. Then, she must have bit his fingers or wrist, something like that. Which accounts for the blood.”

“Right.” Stephen shoved his hands into his pockets. “But what do you mean, she put up a fight?

When I got in here I saw her getting carried like a sack of flour. The guy looked massive.”

“Maybe,” Felix said, “but hear me out. She bit his hand, right? He’s caught off guard. He stops dragging, maybe grabs his hand, definitely loosens his grip at least. But then look. Penny swings around…” Felix spun quickly, his outside foot following the arcing lines. “Then, she must have hit him, probably right in the face.”

“Yeah, okay, but the dude’s a brick wall. He shakes it right off and just picks her up like nothing, and walks down that way. She starts screaming around then, and I come around the corner just in time to see them leave.”

Felix scratched his chin. He walked the rest of the way down the alley. Something was off.

“Yeah…yeah that must have been it, because nothing else looks disturbed after that…picked her right up over his head. Hmmm. Where’d you get hit again?”

Stephen nodded toward the very end of the alley. “Right there at the corner. He was waiting for me. The boot was right there in the middle when I came to.”

Felix walked over to the alley’s exit. “So this guy was so big that he ran around the corner, held my full grown thrashing sister under one arm, waited a few seconds, then knocked you out in one punch with his free hand?”

“Yeah, pretty much.” Stephen began to rock on his heels.

Felix shook his head. “That’s the craziest thing I ever heard…So we need to find the most gigantic guy in the Metropolitan Quarter, with a black left eye, and messed up…say, Stephen?”

44

“…Yeah?”

“How’d your fingers get so bloody?” Felix pointed down at the dried blood caked on Stephen’s wrists, visible even with his hands in his pockets.

Stephen froze. He had to think quickly. “These? They, ah, I was holding my nose with them when I woke back up. The punch busted it up a little, had a nosebleed for a bit, you know.”

Felix blinked. “Your nose looks okay to me, man.”

“Yeah, I know, I think it was a weird, glancing sorta thing. My eye took most of it.”

Felix looked at Stephen, then at the floor of the alley, then back at Stephen. “But…there isn’t any blood on the ground here.”

Stephen laughed uneasily. “Well, I did a great job containing it, as you can see.” He held up his bloodstained hands, with his palms facing him.

Felix shrugged. “Guess so. Well, that’s a pretty decent description to work with. I’m gonna canvas the neighborhood. Why don’t you go home and get cleaned up, you’re in no shape to talk to strangers.”

Stephen nodded. “Sounds good. I’ll head over to Penny’s when I’m straightened out. Meet me there, maybe we’ll find some clues. Hey, Felix?”

“Yeah?”

“She’s gonna be fine, I’m sure of it.”

Felix smiled weakly. “I hope so, man. She’s all I’ve got.” ***

A half hour later, Stephen shut the door to his Highlands Quarter apartment, careful not to slam it. He had gotten so much grief for slamming doors as a kid that it even irritated him when other people let doors slam. Stephen kicked his shoes off, next to the twin of Penny’s boot that Felix had taken as evidence. He shuffled over toward the bathroom, rubbing his wounded eye. Penny was sitting on his couch, reading and jostling her leg. She snapped the book shut.

“How’d it go?” Penny looked worried. “I don’t think this was such a great plan.”

“Relax,” Stephen said with a smile, “It went fine. He bought it, and he was doing some seriously awesome detective work.”

“Really?” Penny smiled. “I always thought he’d be a good detective.”

“He was unbelievable. A natural. He really almost caught us, just based on the evidence. It’s a good thing I was there.”

“Awesome. What next?”

Stephen walked into the bathroom. “A shower. I’m covered in blood, thanks to you. Then, the next installment of our dastardly plan. I told Felix to meet me at your house.” He shut the door, and the water began running.

Penny lay down on the couch with a thud. She was worried about Felix. Suddenly, this whole thing didn’t seem like a great idea. She went along with it because she had almost knocked Stephen out, but if he had told her about the plan beforehand, instead of springing the kidnapping idea on her by actually kidnapping her, she would have never agreed. When she said something negative should happen, she was thinking more along the lines of pretending to have the flu. Penny sighed. Stephen never was one to do things halfway. Oh well, she thought, maybe it could work.

There was a knock at the door. Penny ran over. She always loved visitors. She swung the door open to reveal Felix, standing there with his arms folded.

“Penny!” He wrapped his sister in a huge bear hug. “Thank God, I thought I lost you!”

Penny smiled and hugged her brother back. “I know, I’m so, so sorry. It was Stephen’s idea—”

“Oh, I bet it was.” Felix looked around the apartment. “Where is he? I’m gonna give him another black eye to match the first one.”

Penny laughed. “I think he has it coming. He’s in the shower though, leave him his dignity.

How’d you find out?”

Felix shook his head. “Stephen’s a terrible liar, it was obvious once I got to that alley. I just had to be sure, I had to make sure you were okay.”

“Awww, thanks big brother.” Penny went back to the couch and sat down. “Still, I want you to know that I was going to find you and tell you the first chance I got.”

“I know you were, kid.” Felix sat down next to his sister. “One thing, though. Why? Why the hell did you two fake a kidnapping?”

“Well, we both thought you were depressed and wanted to leave the city, so Stephen said, ‘Let’s do something to make him feel good and important.’ And I thought that something negative would make you want to leave less, but then last night—”

Felix held up a hand. “Okay, I get it.”

Penny cocked her head to the side. “So…you aren’t mad at me?”

Felix shook his head. “No, not at you. I’m absolutely furious with Stephen, but you just got caught up in a stupid plan. I know you meant well.”

Penny smiled. “Thanks…and you aren’t going to leave?”

Felix sighed. “Oh, I’m definitely going to leave. Now more than ever. It just isn’t your fault.”

Penny’s jaw dropped. “But…but…I need you…”

Felix tussled his little sister’s hair. “No, you don’t. You’re an adult now. You have this place more figured out than anyone I know. Plus, you almost hospitalized a grown man last night. Remember that.

Now, I’m going home to pack before Stephen gets out of the shower. He means well, but I think I might kill him if I see him right now. You two come over my place tomorrow to say goodbye, okay?”

Penny nodded, but her bottom lip was starting to quiver. “Are you sure this is what you want?”

Felix smiled. “I’m positive.” *** April 5, 2034 Highlands Quarter, Epicentropolis, NJ, USA ` Felix, Penny, and Stephen stood outside what used to be Felix’s apartment building. Felix looked up at the cloudless sky. It was a beautiful day. He was ready to say goodbye. All of his possessions were packed into a backpack and two suitcases. He stacked them up in a little pile between himself and the two most important people in his life. This was going to be it, he thought, the last time he ever saw them.

“So, again, I’m really sorry about kidnapping your sister, man.” Stephen scratched at his chin.

“Any chance that you’ll reconsider this?”

“Nope. And I forgive you.” Felix smiled at his best friend. “I get what you were trying to do, it was just a terrible, terrible plan.”

“Yeah…I see that now.” Stephen looked down at his feet. “But…you were great at being a detective, didn’t that make you feel a little better about this place?”

“Nope, it made me think my sister might be dead. But it showed me that you two would be all right without me. I was going to do this one way or another, and I think it was sweet of you guys to try to change my mind.” Felix smiled. “I’ll never forget this place.”

Stephen and Felix hugged. “Well, maybe things will change and one day we’ll see each other again.” Stephen was trying his best not to get too emotional.

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“Maybe,” Felix said, “but I wouldn’t count on it. Take care of Penny for me, okay?”

“Absolutely.”

Penny was sobbing. “Fe….lix…I’ll…miss…you…”

Felix frowned. “I wish it didn’t have to be this way, Penny. I’m gonna miss you so much. You’ve grown up into an amazing human being. Just keep your wits about you, and don’t listen to a word Stephen says.”

Penny latched onto her brother. “Okay…I…won’t…”

Felix picked up his luggage with a wry smile. “Well, this is it, guys. I love you both and I always will. Goodbye.”

“Bye, buddy.”

“Bye, Felix.”

Felix turned around and began to walk toward the main entrance to Epicentropolis. This part of his life was over. The future held something truly unpredictable. *** April 5, 2034 New Jersey, USA

Felix walked out the front gate of Epicentropolis for the first time in almost two decades. The wind felt strange and foreign against his skin. He took a deep breath of the fresh air, and bent down to feel the soil beneath him. Everything was so new, authentic, and wonderful. He was sure that this was the right move. Felix picked his suitcases back up and began walking through the trees in the direction of the Delaware River. It was a ten mile walk, and then he had to find a way across. There were no guarantees, but if he could manage that, he would be in Pennsylvania, back in the real world. Last he heard, his father was somewhere in Philadelphia. Maybe he could find him, if he was lucky. Felix smiled to himself. Life was getting harder already.

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About the Contributors • Nikki Rae: “Silver and Cold”

- Tuckerton, NJ • Elizabeth Theriot: “The Birthday Candle”

- New Orleans, LA • Nicholas Leonetti: “Scrappy’s Rocks”

- Galloway, NJ • Kim Koering: “Familiar”

- Vineland, NJ • Kevin Reilly: “Epicentropolis”

- Milford, NJ • Bill Vernon: “Club Swingers”

- Dayton, OH • Aaron Kaminsky: Untitled Pieces

- Philadelphia, PA • Sean Schemelia: Untitled Pieces

- Philadelphia, PA • Anne Bengard: “Circus Child”

- London, UK • W. Jack Savage: “Temple in the Sky”

- Monrovia, CA

About the Editor

Barbi Moroz was the recipient of the 2014 James Baldwin Fiction Award, as well as both the 2013 Joseph Courter Fiction Award and the 2013 Stephen Dunn Poetry Award, which are first place literary awards at The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey.

Her poetry has been published in the online magazines Untitled Publications, Misfits’ Miscellany and Leaves of Ink. Her poetry has also been published in the print magazines Creepy Gnome Magazine and Stockpot, Stockton’s literary magazine, and Bank Heavy Press.

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Special Thanks

Electric Rather would like to thank the talented writers and artists that contributed to this issue. We are very proud of the diversity of this issue and are honored to publish it. We received more than seventy submissions of fiction, poetry, and art. Sifting through these submissions was a labor of love and we can’t wait to start the process all over again. We would like to thank everyone that submitted to our magazine and our wonderful readers.

Submissions are always welcome!

We would like to cite two sources that created some of the textures and patterns used in this issue: cgtextures.com and subtlepatterns.com.

For more information about our contributors, please visit our website: electricrather.tumblr.com.