eFiction Magazine September 2011

Editor Doug Lance Managing Editors Essie Holton, Stasey Norstrom Readers Ryan Dorill, Robert Turner, Megan Schwark, Maggie Duncan

eFiction is a monthly fiction publication. The editors only accept manuscripts online.

To review our guidelines or submit a manuscript, please visit http://eFictionMag.com/ Submissions. Correspondence may be sent to Editor@eFictionMag.com. eFiction is available for free in PDF or EPUB format. Subscriptions for the Kindle edition are $1.99 / month and individual issues are $3.99. Visit us online at www.efictionmag. com.

ISBN: 978-1-4659-3279-2 ASIN: B004UD88K2 Copyright Š 2011 eFiction Publishing

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Contents Serial Fiction The Dead Beat

E.D. Linquist

& Aron Christensen 6 The Bike Mechanic

Aaron M. Wilson 13

Blood Binds Tonya R. Moore 26 Short Stories Motivator Kristy F. Gillespie 38 Without Form or Substance Phyllis A. Duncan 54 Kimberly Ann Steven Terrill 69 Gypsies Richard Sutton 81 Blind Date Mary O’Neil

93

Divine Providence

98

Robert Turner

Poetry Youth and vitality

Lillie A. Lindsay

106

My Life Song

Lisa Vandiver 108

Memory Michael Abolafia 110 Contributors 94

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Book Reviews Helper12 Essie Holton

by Jack Blaine Break Room Anthology: Mystery and Horror Stories

by M.T. O’Neil

114

Essie Holton

118

Night Machines Essie Holton

by Kia Heavey

121

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The Dead Beat E.D. Linquist

Episode 1—The Restless and the Wicked

“I’ve got him heading up Fourth Avenue. Red convertible, top down.”

“Don’t they always? The dead always want to feel alive.”

“Do you think he can feel it at all? It’s fucking cold out tonight.”

“Come on, cut it out,” said a third voice, crackling over the handheld radio. “Trent’s on this channel. Show some respect for the dead.”

Another voice answered. “It’s fine. I’m not that sensitive, kids.

But shut the hell up. We’ve got a job to do.”

“Yes, sir,” said the first voice. “Okay, he’s just turned down Southerton.”

“Good. Hit the lights and let’s bring him in,” Trent said. “You ready, Sirus?”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s go.” ***

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Sergeant Gray was right. It was cold. Police Exorcist Arphallo Sirus flexed his fingers in his gloves. The black leather creaked quietly across his knuckles. His breath steamed and glowed ethereally in the city nightlight.

Arphallo’s partner stood beside him, still as a statue. PE Sam Trent didn’t shiver, didn’t blink. He was in his early twenties, several years younger than Arphallo. In one respect, at least… There was no cloud of breath coming from Sam’s lips and the swirling wind could not seem to stir his white-blond hair.

“Here he comes,” he said. “Can you feel it, Arph?”

“Yeah,” Arphallo answered.

He could feel it, like a raindrop trailing down his spine. The sensation was not necessarily unpleasant, but certainly unsettling.

Arphallo flexed his fingers again, nervously twisting the silvery thread between them.

The rush and rustle of traffic suddenly rose to a shriek as a cherry-red convertible screamed around the corner, scattering honking, shouting motorists before it. Two police cars chased close behind. Tires and brakes screeched. Their flashing lights and howling sirens turned the cold city street into a mad nightclub scene.

“Now.” Trent looked at him. “Now, Arph!”

Arphallo jerked his splayed fingers. The silver wire stretched between them into an elongated six-pointed star. Arphallo twisted the center of the star. Silver shined in the moonlight. The lights of

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the city dimmed and everything seemed to slow to an icy trickle.

Arphallo could count his racing heartbeats.

One. Two. Three.

The bright red car fishtailed wildly and screeched to a stop. A young, dark-skinned man with wild hair jumped out of the driver’s seat, holding his head and stumbling out of the street, towards the waiting police. Sam stepped out in front of the staggering man and flashed his polished pentagram badge.

“Kincaid Perth, you are illegally skinriding,” he announced.

“You have violated the word of Anat-Sin and the laws before the Light. Abandon this body at once and return to the Dark.”

“Fuck you, man!” the other man shouted. Kincaid shook his head, trying to clear away the shrill ringing that Arphallo knew was making his head throb. “I need this ride!”

“You want a body? Then you make the same deal as the rest of us,” Sam said coldly.

Kincaid turned to bolt the other direction, but the police cars had pulled around and blocked off his escape. Four officers crouched behind the black and white doors with hands hovering over guns, every one packed with silver and bone. Those weapons were a last resort only. They had to wait for Arphallo’s signal before they could risk the life of the human host.

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But Kincaid could feel the silver. He spat another obscenity and tried to shove past Sam. Kincaid’s body was stronger and much larger than either of the exorcists. Sam grabbed him by the shoulder and jammed a knee into the back of the man’s thigh.

“Salt him!” Sam shouted.

Arphallo dropped the silver wire and reached into his long black coat for the salt. It was fine and white as the best cocaine.

And twice as expensive, shipped in from the Red Sea and ground at noon in a mortar bowl of willow heartwood. The sealed plastic cylinder almost slipped through Arphallo’s gloved fingers, but he tightened his grip and slammed the salt canister up into a rubbergripped nebulizer.

Kincaid pitched forward, off-balance, but he pulled Sam down with him. The two dead men struggled on the asphalt. Punches flew and they rolled across the ground. Sam grabbed and Kincaid twisted, driving his knee into the cop’s chest.

“Get out of the way, Sam!” Arphallo warned.

Sam was still tangled with Kincaid and grunting with the effort of maintaining his hold on the larger man. “Just do it, Arph!

Salt him!”

“Sam—” “Do it, Arph!”

Arphallo lunged in and yanked a handful of Kincaid’s thick hair. Kincaid pulled away with a violent jerk. Sam wedged his

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forearm under the man’s chin and forced his head back. Arphallo pulled on the nebulizer’s trigger and sprayed the fine white salt full in Kincaid’s face. It stood out starkly against the body’s dark skin. Kincaid stopped struggling and splayed spread-eagle on the ground as though staked out.

Most of the salt had hit its intended target, but some had sifted through the air like fine snow. Sam’s eyes rolled wildly and he wrenched to one side. His whole body stiffened, but Arphallo had no time to worry about him right now. The exorcist pressed the palm of his glove – studded and stitched with silver runes – against Kincaid’s brow.

“Maliki n’nas,” Arphallo invoked.

Kincaid’s spine arched and he let out an ethereal scream, eerie and inhuman as wind howling through skeletal trees. Then the body went limp and flopped to the asphalt. A colorless shadow rose up from the deserted puppet. It loomed over Arphallo, eclipsing stars and city lights. And then it was gone, vanished into the Dark.

Arphallo whistled and gestured to the other cops. They rushed forward, speaking quickly into boxy black radios. They would take care of the man who had been Kincaid Perth’s unwilling puppet.

Arphallo rushed to his partner’s side.

“Sam? Hey, Sam, are you okay?”

The other man’s brown eyes were unfocused, searching wildly. He stared at Arphallo. His voice was small and frightened.

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“Exorcist Sirus, I… was…”

Arphallo leaned close, trying to catch the words, but they were lost in the sounds of the city. The other man broke off, gasping.

His eyes rolled back and then snapped shut. When they opened again, Sam stared quite calmly up at Arphallo.

“Did you get that little prick, Arph?” Sam asked.

“Yeah, Sam. I got him.”

“What about the host? Is the guy injured?”

Arphallo shrugged. He didn’t know.

Sam stood, a little wobbly at first but quickly regaining his balance. He thumped the heel of his hand against his chest. “Fit and young, just the way I like them,” Sam said. He turned to talk to the other officers. “Hey, Sergeant Gray, how’s the puppet?”

“Minor injuries, but he’s coming around. We’ll get his statement at the hospital.”

Sam jogged over to the reeling man on the ground and the cops helping him to his feet. Arphallo watched him go. Sam was a good cop, one of the best working the Dead Beat, as the others called it.

He was brave, self-sacrificing, if sometimes a little crude.

Death had that effect, sometimes.

Arphallo slipped his hands back into his pockets and followed his partner.

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The Bike Mechanic Aaron M. Wilson Part One

Dan Seward stood behind the display counter with tire levers in both hands, admiring the bent rims, broken spokes, and flat tires on the mountain bike he had up on his work stand. He yawned, thinking that it was too early to be up. His customers wouldn’t be here for several hours yet, so why did he think that opening by eight every day was a good idea? He huffed, “It just feels right to work in the morning.” His father and mother had always been out the door before six, which was something that Seward had always promised he would never submit himself to for very long. Yet, here he was, hard at work before sunrise, enjoying almost every minute.

Despite loving the work, he missed the old days and longed for the excitement that only C4-activism could elicit.

Slipping the tire levers between the rim and the tire’s sidewalls, Seward slowly bent and twisted the tires off without pinching the inner tube. Even though he liked the simplicity of a hard-tail, there were times and places for full or at least half suspension bikes.

Looking at the abuse that the mountain bike had taken, he was sure that the owner had bitten off more than the bike could chew.

Seward tried to imagine what the rider looked like: athletic but

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not fit, soft round the middle but not overweight, and likely tan but fake tanned; after the accident that did in the bike, the rider was also likely bruised, scraped, and lucky to have only bent up the bike’s rims. However, the work ticket on the bike didn’t have any clues. It was just the usual: “Scrap if repair exceeds value.” Most people didn’t try Seward’s Custom Cycle Repair & Junk Yard first.

They’d try the high end places first like Erik’s with clean, wellspaced and orderly displays, helpful sales people, and overnight service. Customers wouldn’t find such niceties at Seward’s.

At Seward’s, customers were encouraged to fix their own bikes.

Seward had started the shop to fulfill his required community service hours, doing something that he felt gave back to the community and had some sustaining potential for the future. The shop was more like a garage that was sectioned off into several fully equipped workstations. Customers could rent a station by the hour and make use of any and all of Seward’s tools. There were also buckets of parts that could be scavenged, nothing more than five or ten dollars in any of them. He’d salvaged the parts from bikes like the one he was working on now, when the owner decided that the cost of repair was just shy of something newer and shinier.

It was sad. Most people were only willing to shell out a couple hundred for a bike, which meant they were buying inferior parts.

For most people – people who didn’t off road – those bikes were adequate. However, when someone took a two-hundred dollar

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Wal-Mart special, like this one off road, even though it was from a quality name brand like Specialized, the bike usually ended up in Seward’s shop or as parts. Seward had unsuccessfully tried to explain that to a few customers by sarcastically asking if they’d feel safe taking a Yugo off road.

After more closely inspecting the bike, Seward decided to call the customer and deliver the bad news: his labor to true the rims and straighten the front and rear dropouts would likely exceed the cost of the bike. As he went to take the bike down off his work stand, the front door chimed. In rolled a Big Dummy: the very popular Surly model with an extend frame that allowed for a rider to haul a hell of a lot of stuff in two oversized panniers. Big Dummies were very popular with the outdoor types that liked to camp, eat granola, and smoke more than their fair share of weed.

Seward looked up from the bike to the owner pushing the Big Dummy in through the door. She was a beauty out of a Bike Magazine fantasy: tall, fit, tan, raven black hair cut into a bob with blue poking out from underneath around the back of her neck. Her arms were bare and covered in a chaotic rainbow of tattoos: flowering vines that laced and tangled their way around her arms. Suddenly, Seward felt like he had woken up in a Raymond Chandler noir, and he found himself thinking that she was going to be nothing but trouble.

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*** She leaned the Big Dummy against a wall, opened up one of the panniers and pulled out a multi-tool and a half-eaten sandwich.

After taking a bite of the sandwich, she rummaged through the pile of fenders.

Seward picked up a flyer, what he liked to think as the Seward Custom Repair Shop’s Menu of Services, and he made his way over.

He held out the flyer. “What can I help you with?” He would have rather given her a pick up line, but he needed money. Even in the current economy, people still tended to buy new bikes rather than used ones or parts. Plus, the rent on the building was due again in a few days.

Looking Seward in the eyes, she took the flyer. “I’ve got a long haul ahead. I was just passing by when I saw your sign. Thought I’d take a look around.” She handed the flyer back. “I think that I’d like to use your bathroom, and…” She looked over Seward’s shoulder, “I might make use of a station.”

Seward shrugged his shoulders. “Five dollars an hour. Plus parts and lube.” He walked back to the counter and picked up a key. He held it up. “Key for the bathroom. There’s a shower back there.

Feel free to use it.” He knew she’d been on the road a while by her offending odors, a mixture of damp earth, freshly cut grass, and earthworms after a thunderstorm. Normally, Seward found sweaty

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women all the more attractive, but she smelled spoiled.

“Really?” She opened the other pannier and pulled out some clothes. “You have a towel?”

Seward had stocked towels when he opened, but found that he hated laundry day more since then, so he stopped. “Sorry, no.

However, there are a couple bars of soap and some cheap shampoo.” He bunched up his face as if tasting something bitter. “If you feel so inclined, there’s a ‘Support Me’ jar back there. If you can spare anything to help keep it stocked, it’d be much appreciated.”

As she hurried by, keeping her head down, she said, “Thanks, Emmet.”

At hearing his middle name said aloud, Seward’s typical relaxed demeanor was replaced with one of panicked curiosity. Emmet, he thought. No one round here knows me as Emmet. No one beside my parole-officer, and I haven’t had to see him in a couple of years.

His thoughts kept spinning round and round until he landed on the last time he’d used his middle name. It’d been more than ten years, back when he’d been in college in Michigan. At that time, he’d thought that he’d been Dan in high school, so in college he’d wanted to see where Emmet would get him. Funny thing, Emmet didn’t get him very far. Sounded too Southern, and Northern folk equate Southern with slow and stupid.

Well, he thought, pondering wouldn’t pay the bills. He picked up the next ticket and found a real rock-jumper that needed suspen-

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sion work. He took the bike from his lined up orders and placed it on his work stand. As he lifted the bike, the suspension fork dropped to its full extension.

After securing the bike, he applied pressure to the front tire to test the suspension. The fork easily slid all the way up as if there wasn’t air in them. First things first, he thought as he collected an air pump. He opened the damping valve and attempted to repressurize the fork, but after a few pumps, he realized that the seals were blown, and he’d have to take the suspension apart and rebuild it with new seals. Lucky for the customer, Seward kept replacement seals on hand. They were hard to come by because the manufacturer would rather have the sale of a new fork for $1,600 than four-dollar replacement seals. And so would most retailers for that matter, while Seward just wanted to get people back on the road and out of their cars.

Seward put all of his focus into repairing the suspension fork, but in between steps, his mind drifted to the woman using the shop’s shower. Other than her off putting odor, she was attractive.

He couldn’t escape imagining her naked body. He bet she’d have more tattoos than those on her arms. Those thoughts led him to imaging her opening the door to the shower and inviting him to join her. However, she had known Seward’s middle name, and his acute sense of self-preservation trumped fantasy.

Before he knew it, he’d pressurized the suspension fork, taken

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the bike down off of his work stand, and parked it with the others ready for pick up. He was about to call and leave a message for the bike’s owner as the woman came out from the shower drying her hair with a t-shirt.

“Thanks. I really needed a shower.” She put down five bucks on the counter. “For the workspace for the next hour.” She packed her clothes back and rolled her bike over to the station furthest from the shop’s windows.

Seward watched her for a few minutes as she tinkered, tightening a few bolts and checking her tire alignment before going back to his pile of repairs. He wanted to know how she knew his middle name. He walked over to her workstation.

He wasn’t one to beat around the bush, so he asked her outright. “How do you know my middle name?”

She put her tools down slowly and turned around. Her eyes were wide.

“I mean, no one round here knows me as Emmet. I go by Dan or Seward.” He held out his hand to her and smiled. “Hi. I’m Dan Seward.”

His awkward backpedaling must have lightened the mood because she took his hand and replied, “I’m Inez.”

Seward let go of her hand. “So, Inez…” He let the question trail off as he looked at her bike. “What do you think of the Big Dummy?”

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“It’s a little heavy, but it’s the station wagon of hybrid bikes.”

Seward nodded. “I like to think of them as SUVs.” “Manlier.” She put her hands on her hips. “Either way, they get the job done.”

“Yeah. That they do.”

Inez still looked nervous, but as her shoulder’s sagged, she opened up. “You’re Daniel Emmet Seward.” She looked around as if to check for eavesdroppers. “You’re the environmentalist who took out the lumber mill a few years back near Ann Arbor.” Inez paused. “I was told you might still be sympathetic to the cause – that you might help me.” *** “I run a bicycle junk yard,” Seward crossed his arms defensively and took a step back. “Look around.” He was going to elaborate on the ecological value of recycling bicycles and getting people out of their cars, but didn’t want to get sidetracked, “So, you know who I am. I’d like to know who told you where to find me?”

Inez put the wrench in her hand down on the counter before meeting his eyes. “Al sent me.”

“The fuck he did.” Seward quickly looked around the shop. It was still empty except for the two of them. He turned and walked to the front door, flipped OPEN to CLOSED, and locked it. He

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picked up a seat post still connected to a ratty looking saddle and slowly walked back over her workstation.

Seward looked quickly to the early morning street though the display windows. The streets were will empty. He raised his improvised club. “You have until ten to give me the safe word before I feed you to my compost heap.” He looked back out at the street.

“One, two, three, four…”

Inez didn’t seem to be frightened. The only sign that seemed to indicate that she was taking Seward’s threat seriously was that she had taken two steps backward and had her back up against the worktable. “…five, six…” Seward was ready. He wasn’t going to let past mistakes ruin what he had going here. His life wasn’t perfect. He was always strapped for cash, and some weeks he had to go without a few meals, but he was his own boss. He also felt that he was doing the local community a service by giving teens a place to hang out and work on their bikes after school and on the weekends. “… seven, eight…”

Inez reached into her pocket and pulled out a small laminated card with a clenched fist in a circle, lines radiating out from the fist.

She held it up and read the word on the back, Hayduke. She held out the card for Seward to take. “Really, Edward Abbey? Seems, I don’t know, cliché.”

Seward wasn’t sure he wanted to put the seat post down. He

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looked at her bike and for a split second thought that he could get away with killing her and make a tidy profit. Instead, he shook his head and dropped seat post at his feet. “That person is long gone.

I haven’t been Emmet Seward in over fifteen years.”

Seward took the card. “Wow. Earth First.” Seward rolled up his sleeve exposing a tattoo that matched the emblem on the card.

Then he opened his hand indicating that she should look around the shop. “My activism these days is what you see here.”

Inez looked around. “I like it.”

“So,” Seward rolled his sleeve back down. “Why do you need Emmet Seward?” *** Inez retrieved a map. She spoke as she walked across the shop to the sales counter. “The University of Michigan’s chapter of The Monkey Wrench Gang is still active. We’re still under your original charter. Did you really write the charter as a freshman?” Inez opened a map of Northern Michigan and flattened it out on the glass counter top.

Seward listened. He didn’t want to believe that the student club he started his first year in college was still active. He’d read The Monkey Wrench Gang and several other of Edward Abbey’s novels in high school. Seward might not have grown up in the

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Southwest, but the encroachment of man on nature was everywhere. The characters in Abbey’s novels took action. They didn’t wait around for justice. They took revenge on the behalf of billions of voiceless species and ecosystems that were being poached, abused, and degraded. “Actually, I wrote the charter when I was fifteen.” He grinned, looking a little embarrassed.

Seward’s smile quickly tuned into a vicious snarl when he saw the markings on the map Inez had unfolded. “Tell me you didn’t.”

He pointed at a red fist drawn in Mecosta County, MI. “Don’t you listen to the news?” Inez put her hand on her hips.

“I try not to.”

“We’ll you should.” She looked around the shop. “No radio?”

“I’d be tempted to listen to Minnesota Public Radio.” He had allowed her to shift the conversation again, but he’d not give up.

“I’d be tempted to get involved. But, being involved got me nowhere and nothing.” He waved his hand around the shop. “If you really want to change the world, stop talking about it and do something local. Raise awareness in your community. Not only does this shop keep kids off the street and out of trouble, but if you check the logs,” he pointed to the wall left of the front door, “You can see the amount of carbon and CO2 we’ve prevented.”

Inez shook her head. “What happened to you? You’re soft.”

Inez started to fold up the map. “Soft like everyone else.”

“Soft?” His hands twitched and his eyes opened wide. For a

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moment, he felt young – that he had to prove himself to her. In his early days, he’d let others goad him into action, which had never ended well.

He relaxed his hands. He wouldn’t take the bait. Perhaps, he’d tell her a few stories about the old days, but he’d choose when and what stories carefully. Shifting his weight, he said, “Yeah. I guess I’m soft.” He patted his belly and smiled.

“I knew it. You’ve been lulled into believing that the small things can actually make a difference.”

“They do matter.”

“No. No, they don’t.” She waved around at the mess he called a shop. “How many of your customers ride for more than enjoyment? How many use bikes as their main mode of transportation?”

“A few.” Then he admitted, “But I haven’t converted as many as I’d hoped.”

“See.” She pointed like scolding mother. “C4 is the only answer – a wakeup call that can’t be ignored.”

“Okay. I admit I miss the thrill of more aggressive actions.”

“Like what?”

“Well, there was one time when Al and I poured sand into the gas tanks of a few loggers.” He chuckled. “The set back was so costly that the sub-development project was put on hold indefinitely. We saved a small grove of dogwood trees.”

“Wow! You must have been cute back in the day, playing at

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Lorax. Did you speak for the trees?”

Seward snorted. “So, what did the hard-boiled-eco princess do?”

“I think you know.”

“You attacked the water bottling plant in Mecosta County.”

Seward shook his head thinking that she’d likely broken in and tampered with the equipment. The damage would be a temporary setback, costing hundreds of thousands in lost hours of productivity. This was also likely his fault. He had drawn up detailed plans that outlined three options for engagement. Option 1: disrupt shipping. Option 2: disrupt pumping. Option 3. demolition.

Demolition was never a real option. He had made that clear in the charter. Options 1 and 2 would result in criminal misdemeanors, while Option 3 would almost always result in a felony conviction if caught. “Which of my plans did you carry out, option 1 or 2, or a little of both?”

Inez twisted the map in her hands. “I blew it up.”

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Blood Binds Tonya R. Moore Episode XIV Wandering Child—Part 4

Hel’s head swiveled from the abnormally tall man before her, to his turbaned companion. On a closer look, the jewel at her throat seemed to be some kind of opal. The light it emitted originated from much smaller object embedded within. It was the shape of a tesseract.

“I won’t argue with the idea that resurrection is an abominable art form,” She spoke quickly but she was still reeling. Nothing she’d just witnessed made sense. Nothing happening now made sense.

Her shaking hands curled inward, cradling her stomach. The one within was agitated. Trembling. The meaning of that sinking feeling finally registered.

“Even if something like that really happened, it is not a crime worthy of punitive action by any Power.” Her gaze flicked to the arcane markings mapping the aggressor’s flesh. No, she wasn’t mistaken about what he was. “Divine or otherwise.”

The turbaned one leaned forward eagerly. “Hmmm? You seem to think we’re here to negotiate.”

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The spear glowed again. It was advanced technology, not just some primitive weapon. Hel scowled; she was absolutely not going to bend. She couldn’t afford to.

“I will not be intimidated.” She frowned at him.

She scanned their surroundings again. She needed to leave this place. Now. Something in the air changed. She felt it first, an immense sensation that sunk deep into her bones. Acrid. Hot and heavy, salty like the sweat sliding down her back. Dragon’s breath. She turned back around, her insides a quivering mass of horror. It towered over her, blotting out the sky. Its fiery gaze was fixed downward.

She cast about wildly. Behind the ravenous thing, the delicate fruit still clinging to the tree above the domicile began to glow as if beckoning. Hope flared, irrational and irresistible. There was hardly time to think it through. If she could just make it back there—there and then somehow, back to where she was before. To what end? She really didn’t know. She didn’t know anything! The sheer depth of her ignorance was utterly staggering.

“You’ll come with us.” The one carrying the spear said. “You’ll come quietly.”

Hel whipped back around toward the foul man. “I don’t have time for this!”

That was a truer statement than she cared to admit. The small jump took more effort than she expected. She stood in the ash

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laden courtyard, and it took every ounce of energy she could summon just to stay on her feet. She looked down at her arm, vision wavering. Her hand was still wrapped in the jeweled chain Charls had given her. Maybe it still possessed the conductive qualities he’d imbued. Pain spiked into her temples. Her nostrils filled up. Blood and mucus slid down into the back of her throat.

A raucous cry filled the air. The beast was atop the roof of the old cathedral pacing and pawing the ground. It snorted, casting its head here and about. It couldn’t find her! She realized. It could scent her, but it couldn’t see her. Why was it after her in the first place? No. She shook her head. This was no time to speculate. She needed a circle, and an incantation powerful enough to get her far away from this place. Far enough to get a decent head start on these two.

She needed something sharp. She slit one wrist, walked in a slow circle. She stopped suddenly, stood there staring down and rooted to the ground. Blood. There was so much of it, so much more than she’d shed. She stepped back, surveying back to the circle.

Somehow it spanned the entire courtyard, an intricate mandala painted entirely with blood. This was magic on a whole new level, greater than the blood spell she was attempting. Cosmic magic, beyond anything she could ever execute.

“Preposterous isn’t it? That something so small can easily alter realities so profoundly—without trying, and without even

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knowing.”

There was a sound behind her. Hel whirled about again, panic rising up into her throat. As though she’d never seen her own reflection in a mirror, at first Hel didn’t recognize the person standing before her. Pale where she was dark. Dark to her light, the difference between night and day... between Garret and Kyle.

“It was the tree.” Her lunar twin offered helpfully. When all she did was stare dumbly, her Other Self pointed upward. “The flowers. You were always meant to return here. That spell was always waiting.”

“What’s going on?” Nothing made sense anymore. Maybe nothing made sense from the start. Stinging tears were streaming out.

She laughed. Crazed. “I don’t understand what’s happening at all.

Who are you?” She demanded.

“You should know something of it.” Her doppelganger smiled.

“Even if you’ve forgotten, I’ve been right here with you, all this time.”

When all Hel did was stare dumbly.

“The dragon’s potential.” The next worlds chilled her to the core. “Though, you’re only half right there.”

Don’t worry about them. They can’t see us. Can’t hear us.”

Hel was sick. Time and space just kept twisting around her. The flowers continued to rain down around her abundantly, turning to dust as they touched the ground. She could barely keep her bal-

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ance. There was something else, a sound—inchoate but insistent.

Her straining ears couldn’t quite catch it but it vibrated in the air and prickled her skin.

“You may not remember, but I know what this is.” It said.

“Things are only continuing from where they stopped, all those years ago.” *** “This spell could have lasted for maybe, anther hundreds of Deandra’s years but that boy... and that damned wizard.” Hel’s double grimaced “Couldn’t leave well enough alone, could they?

Everyone running around like idiots, thinking they each have their own battles to wage. It’s all the same you know? Not that it matters anymore. Those two out there” The wayfarer regarded her facsimile owlishly. Pretty talkative, wasn’t she? “So, your intention was to drive me into a corner for whatever reason, I can only hope to someday fathom?”

“No. The truth is more unfortunate than that.” Zehi replied.

“We’ve both been cornered. I’m only saying that since this spell has been accelerated, the life you leveraged will burn out just as rapidly. There’s an opportunity here,” the eyes flashed.” One of us gets to leave here intact.”

A life for a life, or more accurately a soul for a soul? Hel wasn’t

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September 2011

about to trust such a ridiculous claim. “If only one of us can leave here, why would I be the one who gets to choose? What kind of sense does that make?”

“It makes perfect sense. The outcome matters more to you than it does to me, doesn’t it?”

Hel’s hope to make sense of her current predicament deflated.

“I don’t understand you at all. Isn’t Zehi the successive title of the icon of the Tsavingiri? What exactly would you gain by letting me choose?”

“In the grand scheme of things, all souls are created equal. In that sense, rank and titles are meaningless. That leaves us with only one fair means of determining priority.”

Now that Hel’s terror had abated a bit, all of these things were only giving her a massive headache. She rubbed at her temples.

Where should she even begin? If she was to believe everything her spectral twin said, at some point in time, the god of the Tsavingiri had descended and had come to Hel’s aid? That was highly improbable, to say the least. Then again, that Garret could have cast a spell big enough to destroy Deandra had been unprecedented. Her memory was just too fragmented to anything other than rely what Zehi said and the things she’d seen today. If she put all of those sketchy bits together, there was nothing in the way of information that she could rely on.

“I’m really too old for this,” she muttered. She eyed Zehi ac-

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September 2011

cusingly. “This is just a wild guess but might you be trying to make amends for something in particular?”

“You insolent woman!” Zehi balked. Hel idly wondered if it was aware of how human-like its mannerisms were becoming. “If its blame you’re looking to cast, I’d say we all played some part in this mess. You, Me, the father and the child.”

Hel groaned. Now he was on the defensive? Unbelievable. This sort of thing was exactly why she abhorred dealing with deities.

They were so damned arbitrary. “Fine by me. There’s a lot of blame to go around.”

“It’s a bit of a stretch to keep calling me a god, you know.” Zehi protested. “The Tsavingiri lost their original place in the cosmos a long time ago. At best, the one called Zehi is little more than a spiritual king.”

“Say what you want but it still counts for something.” Hel muttered. There was a loud crash somewhere in the distance. The ground beneath them rumbled. “Do we really have the time to argue semantics?”

“No,” Zehi stood. “Not really. We’re out of time, actually.

“Your story’s full of holes, you now.” Hel stated flatly.

“Even so—” “Even so,” she trod right over whatever excuse her companion planned on spouting next. I’m not concerned with the price or the reason I can’t recall the exact circumstances of our contract. What

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September 2011

was it that I asked of you?”

“Help him. Don’t hurt him.” Zehi quoted baldly. “At the time, the means didn’t exist to fulfill the entirety of your request.”

“Fine,” Hel huffed. “Don’t tell me the whole truth. In any case I’ve heard enough. As far as upholding your end goes, the fact that you’ve brought me back here suggests that the means to uphold your end of our bargain presently exist.”

Zehi’s only answer was a brief nod.

“What if I thought to hell with it and asked you to let me take it all back?” Hel stood. “I live, you die and then I remember. You make me remember everything.”

She studied her look-alike askance. She swallowed the sudden, inexplicable burning at the back of her throat away. “I already made my choice in the past,” she chided. “Haven’t I already started paying the price? Magic isn’t so arbitrary that I could simply change my mind.” She stepped in closer. “Come,” she reached out. “Keep your promise.”

Zehi regarded her outstretched hand mournfully. It seemed like there was more she might have wanted to say to Hel but there was time. The barrier around them shattered. The ground beneath them buckled. The runny red from the mandala became a light that shot up straight through them into the sky, dying the clouds a muddy color. The inchoate sound swelled and heightened in pitch until even Hel could hear them. A child’s voice whispering the same

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September 2011

desperate and heart-rending words over and over.

I wish... I wish I never did exist. *** Outside the circle, the two in pursuit were at odds. The portly Maya tore her fascinated gaze from the barrier, long enough to scowl at her partner as he shifted back to human-form and settled on the unsteady ground near her. “What was the purpose of that crude display, Klarro?”

“Intimidation,” he grunted. “It was working, wasn’t it?” He squinted in the direction of the courtyard. “What is that?”

“Suspended space-time. Unstable though.”

In the next instant the barrier was collapsing, brilliance spewing up and outward.

“Beautiful,” Maya breathed, entranced. “It’s so beautiful it burns my eyes. Oh, I see—” Her partner had already burst into action. In less than a heartbeat, he was directly behind the wayfarer. In one fluid motion, he grappled with her. Twisting one arm behind her back, he had her face planted in the charred earth. He called forth his spear. It spun as it materialized, slowed as he corrected his grip. Deadly end pointing downward, he bore down. Lightning and flames exploded outward. He leapt back, barely making it a hair’s breadth beyond

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September 2011

the reach of the furious flames. He lost his balance and toppled backward, leaning ignominiously on his backside.

“That would’ve hurt Klarro,” his target stood, turning to face him. “It would’ve hurt tremendously.”

She had his spear. How? Her irises dyed the weapon’s charged tip a cloudy crimson. She tossed it aside.

“Zehi...”

“In the flesh.” She sighed. “Why are you doing this? I distinctly recall ordering you not to come after me.”

He swatted her offered hand away. “You still believe we take orders from you?”

“Generally, that’s what servants do.” Zehi watched as he retrieved his weapon, didn’t turn to face Maya, who sidled up behind her.

“We’re your guardians,” the jeweled one said sweetly. “A guardian’s business includes discipline. Do you know what that means?

Short of killing you, we can do whatever we want. No one will complain.”

The anticipated, clever rejoinder never came.

“Humans,” Zehi murmured surveying the devastated ground all around. “I just can’t help being in awe of them.” She looked down at her hands. Spell words crawled down her arms, staining her skin. Her blood was hot under there. Boiling over excessively.

Maybe that could explain why her heart ached and it hurt so much

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September 2011

to breathe.

“Maybe a human child wasn’t the best choice for the rite of succession, after all.” She mused. “He was a gifted, intelligent being.

I wasn’t wrong about that, but the possibility that he would try to erase his own existence never even entered my mind.”

Zehi could still see them in her mind’s eye. Garret, in the circle.

Beneath the boiling clouds, an alien moon shining down. The dreadful words that feel from his lips and floated out of the circle. Words and blood. To think that was all it took. The wayfarer kneeling in the center of the circle, clutching him so tightly to her chest. Taking his wounds and his will onto her self. Her horrified sobs drowning out the wind. Those words over and over again.

Whoever you are. Whatever the cost, I am begging you! Help him. Don’t hurt him. Help him... don’t hurt him.

The chain that Charls had given Helioselene broke apart as the threads turned to cinder against her wrist. Sanguine beads scattered as they fell to the ground.

“In the end,” Zehi whispered raggedly. “I couldn’t even tell her the truth.”

“Is spending an eternity bound to that form supposed to be some manner of atonement?” the taller of the two guardians demanded. “That’s in very bad taste.”

“Shut up, Klarro,” Zehi reached up with a malicious little smile, smoldering palm pressed against his cheek. “I like this vessel and

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September 2011

I earned. I earned it righteously.”

“Stop touching me,” he grumbled. “It hurts.”

“Ah, we have a problem.” Maya suddenly announced. “Nest is running amok again. You need to do something!”

“You can’t handle one petty little mage and you think you’re fit to be my guardian?” Zehi scoffed.

“He’s captured Cassandra Baron.” Maya bit out. “He’s presently attempting to subjugate her.”

“Oh, that’s bad,” Zehi breathed, fully understanding the depth of Nest’s error. “That’s very, very bad.”

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37

September 2011

Motivator

Kristy Feltenberger Gillespie

I have a thirty year old secret. This secret consumes me even as I pass a serving bowl of cranberry sauce to my ninety-seven year old grandfather. “I don’t eat this can crap,” he says.

My mother replies, “Dad, please don’t.”

“Don’t what?” he asks.

“Don’t be difficult,” she sighs.

“I’m old so I’ve earned the right to act any damn way I please,” he says this with a wink. He’s got a point. He thoroughly enjoys teasing my mother because she always has a reaction.

“This turkey’s dry,” he says. He’s got another good point. My mother ignores him for once. I’m sure he’s also thinking that the gravy is cold and lumpy, the rolls are doughy, and the imminent pumpkin pie will be bland. My mother chooses quantity over quality like public school lunch ladies. My parents have five children; therefore, her shabby cooking is understandable.

My father pours grandpa a glass of brandy. “That’s more like it,” Grandpa takes a long swig.

Grandpa is my favorite part of family dinner. The only person who doesn’t find him amusing is my identical twin sister Annabelle.

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September 2011

Annabelle is a motivational speaker and somewhat of a celebrity. Her picture is plastered on mugs, calendars, hats, tee-shirts, and other things that people actually purchase. But it’s not only her face, it’s mine.

After eating a piece of pumpkin pie, which is made tolerable with extra whipped cream, my mother says, “Ericka, Annabelle, please clear the table. I have to take Grandpa back.” Grandpa stands next to the door clutching his walker and wearing an old fashion suit jacket and fedora. Grandpa never verbalizes when he wants to leave; he simply stands by the door like Bruno, our family bulldog, when he needs to pee.

“Bye, Grandpa,” I hug him gently.

“Goodbye, Grandfather,” Annabelle calls from the dining room.

“There’s something not right about that one,” grandpa mutters.

“Why do you say that?” I ask.

Before he can respond, my mother is ushering him out the door. “Don’t worry, Dad, I’ll get you back in time for movie night.

They’re showing It’s a Wonderful Life. Maybe they’ll serve wine and cheese.”

“They serve popcorn on movie night, Elizabeth, not wine and cheese. Anyway, that wine and cheese tasting was a joke. We had to pick between a Dixie cup of white and a Dixie cup of red. I’m near one hundred years old, for Christ’s sake, but they wouldn’t let me taste both. And they handed out un-salted crackers and square,

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September 2011

orange cheese wrapped in plastic…” His voice trails off as they slowly make their way down the driveway.

“C’mon, slacker,” Annabelle hollers from the kitchen. I gather water glasses from the table. I’m tired from the dry turkey and would prefer to join my father in the living room; especially since the Redskins are playing the Eagles.

Annabelle is shoving plates into the dishwasher while Bruno whines at the door.

“Shut up, Bruno,” she says.

My secret is that I’d like to shut Annabelle up in a hospital for awhile. I don’t want to kill her, but I do want her to feel pain. *** Twenty years ago, Annabelle heard me reciting Pocahontas’s lines for our fifth grade Thanksgiving play.

“You can’t be Pocahontas,” she said with her hands on her hips.

“Why not? I know all of the lines by heart.”

“Because you’ll freeze up like a cherry popsicle on stage. Your face always turns bright red and you stutter and,” she paused dramatically, “you have that spot on your face!”

I stuck my tongue out at her as she skipped out of our bedroom.

I touched my forehead, and although I can’t feel anything, I know my birthmark is there.

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40

September 2011

The next day she asked Mrs. Malone for a copy of Pocahontas’s lines.

She got the part. *** I reluctantly join Annabelle in the kitchen.

“I mean it, Bruno. Shut up,” she says.

“Why don’t you open the door and let him out instead of telling him to shut up?” I ask.

“I’m busy,” she replies while dumping mashed potatoes down the garbage disposal.

I open the door for Bruno and he dashes out into the achingly cold night. “I’m sure mom wants to save the left over food.” I pour carrots into a plastic container.

“Left over food is disgusting,” she says while turning on the disposal. I could shove her arm into the disposal, but that would be too disgusting.

“I bet grandpa’s dead before Christmas,” she says as nonchalantly as a weather reporter whose only news is that the day is “clear and sunny.”

“What an awful thing to say.”

“Oh, like you don’t wonder when the old miser is going to kick the bucket? I also wonder how much money he has stashed

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September 2011

under his mattress. Then again, the nursing home staff probably got to it already.”

“That’s sick,” I shudder.

“I was just kidding. Lighten up, Pollyanna,” she says while rolling her eyes.

I finger a large carving knife but think better of using it. I rinse off the knife and hand it to her with the knife pointing toward her, but she doesn’t notice. She simply plucks it from my hands and places it in the dishwasher.

“How’s life with pre-teens?” she asks, even though she knows that this is a touchy subject.

“They’ve been squirrelly lately, but that’s normal around the holidays.”

“So, when are you going to shit or get off of the pot?”

“I don’t mind my job that much,” I say.

“Liar, I know your dream is to be a writer,” she says, enunciating the word writer.

“I am a writer.”

“I mean a published author,” she smirks.

“If I had to rely on you for motivation, I’d stick my head in an oven,” I say. Actually, I’d like to shove her head in an oven.

“It’s called tough love, baby, and my clients love it. And you don’t even take advantage of the fact that my motivation is free to you.”

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42

September 2011

“Your kind of motivation has the opposite effect on me,” I say.

She laughs thinking that I’m joking. I need some fresh air. I dry my hands off with a dishtowel before heading to the back porch.

Bruno is whining to come in while I am hungering to get out. *** “What took you so long?” my father asks as my mother flings the door open bringing in a gust of harsh, cold wind.

“It’s snowing,” she says with flushed cheeks.

“How are the tires holding up?” my father asks.

“They’re just fine, honey.”

Rigging Annabelles’ car is too risky. Suppose she crashes and dies? And I don’t know the first thing about cars. Carbon monoxide poisoning perhaps? But that would kill her, and she doesn’t have a garage, so that would be tricky.

“Who’s winning?” my mother asks.

“We’re up seven,” my father grins.

“Go Skins,” my mother says with a fist pump. “Does anyone want a cup of coffee?”

The three of us give a simultaneous yes. I follow her into the kitchen. “Grandpa’s doing well, right?” I ask.

“As well as can be expected, but who knows if he’ll make it to Christmas.”

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September 2011

“I’ll make sure to visit him this week.”

“He’ll like that,” she says while dumping a heaping portion of cheap coffee grounds into the filter.

Annabelle enters the kitchen, “Please don’t add cream to my coffee, I think I may be lactose intolerant.”

“Since when?” Our mother asks.

“Since forever, I think.” I could make her sick, but with what?

Unfortunately, she isn’t allergic to anything. If only she had a peanut or shellfish allergy, especially peanuts because you can shove those suckers into anything. There is a table in the cafeteria at the junior high where I work that is specifically for kids with food allergies.

“I can’t stay too late because I have a speaking engagement in the early morning. It’s in D.C. of course. I have to go home and take a bath, choose my outfit…” I could toss a space heater into the tub, but then I’d electrocute her.

“I’m so proud of you, Annabelle. You’ve become such a success,” our mother says.

“Aren’t you proud of Ericka, too?”

“Of course I am. I’m proud of all five of my wonderful children.

It’s too bad that your brothers couldn’t make the trip.” ***

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44

September 2011

The following Tuesday, I pull into a parking space directly in front of the Belfont Nursing Home. The surrounding trees are white and withered; a precursor to the prisoners within held captive by time.

There is a stillness to Belfont, a certain stagnation similar to a fishing pond that my father used to drag us to when we were little.

I sign the guest book before turning right. Belfont has been newly renovated and resembles a hotel more than a rest stop before death. But even though the hardwood floors are shiny and the TV’s are massive and the couches actually look comfortable, there is an intrinsic stillness to Belfont that no amount of decoration or activity can shake.

Annabelle refuses to visit Grandpa because elderly people supposedly scare her. I admit, sometimes they make me uncomfortable.

They appear fragile like baby birds without a mother. However, my grandfather lives here, my only remaining grandparent, so I built a bridge and got over it. That’s what my grandma used to say.

I loudly rap on his door before opening it. Grandpa is lying in bed even though it is only a little after five o’clock.

“Hello, Grandpa. It’s Ericka.” I place a poinsettia plant and a plate of cookies on the small kitchen table.

“Why, hello,” he calls as he slowly sits up and fumbles for his walker. As he makes his way to the recliner I remove my scarf, mittens, and coat.

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September 2011

“What kind of cookies did you bring?” he asks, even though he must know.

“Your favorite, ginger and molasses. Would you like them now with some milk?”

“That sounds good.”

I pull out a carton of milk from the miniature refrigerator.

Grandpa’s apartment is actually quite nice with a little kitchen, bathroom, bedroom and living area. “Here you go,” I place the cookies and milk on a tray. “Those are nice pictures,” I say as I notice several recent photos hanging along the wall.

“Your mother put those up,” he says, his mouth is full of cookie.

As I glance at a picture of my grandmother and two of my aunts and uncle, I think that photos of ghosts are haunting the photos of the living. Three out of five of my grandfather’s children and his wife are dead. There is something inherently wrong about burying your children.

He points to a recent photo. “Your father’s gained some weight, but it can’t be because of your mother’s cooking. It’s probably due to your delicious cookies.”

“Thank-you. I guess that’s my one talent.”

“You know your grandmother was a very talented artist,” he says proudly. Three of her miniature paintings hang on the wall.

They are vibrant and shiny and alive.

“I miss her,” I say.

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September 2011

“Me, too,” Grandpa says. “Is that you or your sister in that picture?” he asks pointing to a picture of Annabelle leaning against a cherry blossom tree in Washington, D.C. “That’s Annabelle.”

“There’s something wrong with that one,” he says.

“Why do you say that?”

“Remember I’m old. I’ve met a lot of people in my time and I recognize when someone is off.”

“Grandpa, can I tell you a secret that I’ve never told anyone?”

“I’ll take it to my grave and beyond.”

I take a deep breath. “I don’t like her.”

“Who?” Grandpa’s forehead wrinkles even more.

“Annabelle. Sometimes I feel like I hate her.”

“Hate is a very strong word, Ericka. The only time I have ever truly hated anyone was during war. If you didn’t hate the enemies, then how could you find it in your heart to kill them?”

“Annabelle is the enemy, but I don’t want to kill her, just hurt her,” I say.

“Then you need to take out the enemy,” he says. He looks so tired and worn out; it is clearly time for me to go.

“I’ll let you rest,” I rise and place a kiss on his forehead.

“You’re a good girl, Ericka,” he pats my back. ***

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47

September 2011

As I drive home through the icy streets, my grandfather’s words run circles around my mind like gerbils glued to a wheel. Did he just encourage me to kill Annabelle? His own granddaughter? He was ninety-seven years old. Clearly, he wasn’t all there, was he? *** “Hello,” my sister answers the phone as if my calling was right up there with attending mass, which she loathes. Annabelle is one of those people who will call you while she is driving and then as soon as she reaches her destination, she will have to go, even if you are in mid-sentence. As if the person on the other line is an afterthought or filler that you can scrape off, like excess cream cheese on a bagel.

“Hi, what are you up to?” I ask, trying to sound casual.

“I’m heading out the door, what’s up?”

“I was wondering if you’d like to meet up for dinner one night this week.”

“What’s the occasion? It can’t be your birthday, because I’d never forget that,” she laughs.

“Maybe you can check out one of my short stories and tell me what you think.” I say the first thing that pops in my head and instantly regret it.

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September 2011

“I knew you wanted something from me. Why else would you call? The only night that I’m free is Thursday.”

“That works for me,” I say quickly.

“Where shall we meet?”

“I’ll come to your place first. Maybe you can read the story there before we go to dinner.”

“That’s fine. I have an extra bottle of Pinot Noir, which is to die for, that one of my clients brought back from Canada. We’ll have a few cocktails before dinner.”

“Does seven work?”

“Seven is perfect, see you then,” she hangs up before I have the chance to say goodbye. *** I decide on a simple gray dress with black flats. I can’t take a chance wearing heels. I surely don’t want to tumble down the steps along with her. I feel surprisingly calm as I drive to Old Town Alexandria where Annabelle owns a condo. It’s about an hour drive from Manassas where I live. I was so excited when I purchased an end unit townhouse. The only thing that Annabelle said was “Well, I’d never live here.” She then proceeded to trip up the stairs heading to the third floor, spilling an entire glass of Cabernet Franc on the freshly painted white wall. Thank God it’s a foreclosure,” she

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September 2011

laughed. I should have pushed her down the steps then. *** As I knock on her door, a pine Christmas wreath dressed in red and gold balls shakes. I feel a pang of guilt when I think about Annabelle spending the holidays recuperating in a hospital bed.

The guilt diminishes as soon as she flings the door open. She is wearing a shiny candy apple red dress; her dark hair is piled high on her head and pearls hang from her ears and neck.

“Would you like to wear something from my closet?” she asks.

“No, thanks,” I reply with a forced smile. I have to play nice with her until she is standing at the top of the stairwell. At least she is making this easy.

I join her at the bar where she pours each of us a glass of Pinot Noir. “I may as well give you the holiday bag early,” she says while handing me a large silver bag brimming with glittery tissue paper.

I gingerly pull out a 2011 calendar with Annabelle’s face plastered on the front.

“There are lots of other goodies in there, too,” she says.

“Thanks,” I say before taking a sip of wine.

“Did I mention that this wine is from Canada? A client brought back a few bottles of this from Niagara on the Lake as a thankyou. What a phenomenal gift.”

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50

September 2011

I think it tastes like dirt.

As she rambles on about how fabulous she is; I amuse myself by thinking of other ways to hurt her.

“Would you like another glass of Pinot?” she asks.

“No thanks.”

“Are you more of a wussy white wine drinker?” she laughs.

I refuse to fight with her. “Are you ready for dinner?”

“Yes, I made a reservation at a new seafood place.”

“Fabulous,” I smile. She didn’t ask about my short story which I hadn’t brought in the first place. On the slim chance that she had asked to read it, I would have lied and explained that I left it in the car.

My hands shake as I wriggle into my plaid winter pea coat. All I needed was motivation; a little trigger. I stand by the door willing myself to go through with my twisted plan.

“Stop looking so serious. God, you’re such an Eeyore.” Perhaps she was an effective motivator after all.

I stand off to the side while she locks up. I make sure to follow close behind her and before she takes that first step, I call out her name. “Annabelle.”

“What?” She turns and that’s when I shove her as hard as I can.

Her mouth forms a soundless “O” and her arms actually flail as she falls, just like a cartoon character. When I hear the thud her body makes when she hits the bottom I scream, but it’s not soundless.

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51

September 2011

*** The next few hours come and go in a blur. The police ask a plethora of questions and I do my best, but I feel numb. The fact that Annabelle had drunk several glasses of wine and was wearing stilettos added to the accidental component. *** I insist on telling Grandpa. This time, when I enter his room, he is sitting upright in the recliner and the TV is blaring, but he’s asleep. “Grandpa, wake up. It’s me, Ericka.” I shake him gently as if he is a moth with fragile, gray wings lost without light.

“What?” it takes him several moments to recognize me. “Well, this is a pleasant surprise,” he smiles.

“Grandpa,” I say as I slide into a chair next to him and grasp his hands. “I have something to tell you.”

“Who died now?”

“Annabelle fell down a flight of steps.”

“You did it,” he says flatly, as if he is a battery with limited juice. He lets go of my hands.

“Grandpa, it was an accident.”

“Blood of an enemy is never an accident,” he waves me off.

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52

September 2011

“But you said that she was an enemy.”

“If I did, it’s because I’m ninety seven years old, for Christ’s sake. I don’t know what I’m saying half the time. I was wrong; it’s you that’s off.”

“It really was an accident!”

“I won’t tell anyone,” he says and looks away.

I get up slowly and back out of the living area. *** And he never did tell. He died at the age of one hundred and was buried with my thirty year old secret when all along it should have been my secret alone. My secret to take to take to the grave.

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53

September 2011

Without Form or Substance Phyllis Anne Duncan

Elaine Prentiss was glad to be alone in the ladies room. Her inner debate had left her staring at herself in the mirror for some time.

He’s just another department head. You’ve seen his kind before, so why are you so nervous? After all, you defended your dissertation just fine, and this is only competing for a grant.

That grant money would provide the time and wherewithal to concentrate on her next book. Her dissertation had sold better than expected outside academic circles, and she needed a followup, more so professionally than personally, if she wanted to be a department head herself some day. Credibility and consistency.

Publish or perish. Such were the demands on an aspiring academic.

Elaine fussed with her hair, tucked up in a sophisticated twist, and decided the curly wisps around her face gave her a wistful look. Or was it a come-hither look? Damn, why was she cluttering her head with trivia?

She checked her make-up, saw a dozen flaws, knew she had no time to fix them, and settled for freshening her lipstick. Twisting

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54

September 2011

this way then that before the mirror, she saw her business suit lay well on her, neither hiding nor accentuating her shape. The skirt’s kick pleat was modest. Maybe too modest? Maybe the department head wouldn’t mind a little leg?

No, no, no, you don’t want this position because he likes your legs.

Well, why the hell not? They’re nice legs.

Stop it! Calm down. You can’t show him you’re nervous. If he thinks you’re nervous, he’ll think you’re desperate.

Except you are desperate because if you don’t get the grant, it’s back to shuttling among two community colleges and a second-rate university, teaching World History 101 to lecture halls loaded with bored freshmen.

Why are you making yourself a wreck? It’s not like you’re going to get the position, because getting the position would mean something in your life went according to plan, and that never happens.

The proposal had sounded too good to be true—a one-year grant for $80,000, room and board included, no teaching duties, but limited “field work”—so good to be true that, convinced there was some mistake, she hadn’t submitted the application until the day before it closed. A university didn’t dump $80,000 on you along with room and board unless it planned to wring every drop of sweat from you teaching freshmen classes or covering for the tenured profs while they did important research. She should know.

That was her life to date.

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September 2011

She wanted this grant. More importantly, she needed this grant.

For once she’d like to shop at some place other than a thrift store, and as evidenced by this morning’s drama with the tow truck, the Honda wasn’t going to take many more trips up and down the interstate to the three colleges where she eked out a living. That, and she’d caught herself contemplating scheduling an interview at the high school two blocks from her apartment.

Okay, Elaine Prentiss, you can do this. You can wear the façade that you’re professorial material for a top liberal arts university. Go for it!

Briefcase in hand, Elaine squared her shoulders, left the restroom, and finished her trip down the hall to the office of the Dean of History and Social Sciences. She checked her watch before knocking. Right on time.

The dean’s secretary was a smiling, friendly woman who inquired if she wanted tea and complimented the suit. The secretary opened a door leading to an inner office, stuck her head in, and announced, “Your one o’clock is here.” To Elaine, she said, “Go on in, dear. And welcome.” She held the door open for Elaine then closed it behind her.

Wishing now she’d accepted the tea, because a tickle was building at the back of her throat, Elaine crossed the room with her most confident stride.

This university was fairly new as halls of higher education

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went. No cramped, stuffy quarters for deans here. The office was bright and modern, lots of windows, contemporary furniture, and minimalist—more like a CEO’s haven with its hardwood floors and discrete objets d’art.

Lean, tanned, well-tailored, 50-ish, the department head was also more CEO than scholar. On the office’s bookshelves, he had prominently displayed his best sellers. He—or, more likely, his graduate assistants—had a knack for making history read like a novel, a talent which made most serious historians consider him a hack. He rose and came from behind his sleek desk and gave her a smile that bespoke expensive, laser whitening treatments.

“Dr. Prentiss? I’m so pleased to meet you. Harlan Evers.”

She shook his hand firmly enough to seem serious but without crushing knuckles. “Dr. Evers, thank you for seeing me.”

“My pleasure. Please, have a seat.”

Evers motioned to a distressed leather sofa—not from age but one of those Pottery Barn, over-priced pieces of furniture that someone had gone to great lengths to make appear as if it had years of use. Elaine sat, not so far back as to seem unduly relaxed but not on the edge either. She placed her briefcase on her lap and started to open it as Evers sat on the other end of the sofa.

“I have an extra copy of my resume for…”

Evers held up a hand. “No need, Dr. Prentiss. I’m familiar with your work.”

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She almost snorted. Her “work” consisted of trundling between those three lesser-known colleges and nothing published since her dissertation, which was why she was here in the first place.

“I was fascinated by your dissertation,” Evers continued. “Not my area of concentration, of course, but I was impressed with the scholarship and your attention to sources.” The laser smile brightened the room again. “I must say, I’ve never seen so many footnotes.”

“With prominent historians getting bad press for plagiarism, I never take chances with sourcing.”

“Good move. Actually, that’s why I selected you for this position.”

Selected for the position? Obviously, she’d misheard. “Well, I appreciate very much the opportunity to interview for it.”

“No, this isn’t an interview. The position is yours.”

“I’m sorry. What?”

“When my graduate assistant called you, he should have explained that.”

“I was just told you wanted to speak to me.”

“My apologies, Dr. Prentiss. We should have been more clear.

The position is yours. When can you start?”

“Start? Well, there’s finals at King County Community College.

Notice for my apartment. I’ll lose my security deposit if… I’m babbling. I’m sorry. This is just, I mean, I never expected… Wow.”

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Wow? You just said “Wow” to Dr. Harlan Evers?

Evers chuckled and nodded to reassure her. “We can give you time to finish up at Kay Cee Cubed. How much time will you need for that?”

“Ten days should be fine.”

“What about the other two schools?”

“Finals are done as of yesterday.”

“The usual thirty days for the apartment?”

“Yes.” “Hmm. How about if we reimburse you for the lost security deposit? I really would like to have you in place within two weeks.

There is some training involved.”

“Of course. Sure. That’s fine.” You’re still babbling, Elaine.

“The accommodations we’re offering are small but well-furnished. Of course, when you’re doing field work, you won’t be using your quarters.” His slight smile was a little mysterious.

“That shouldn’t be a problem, then. I just have my clothes, a few odds and ends, and my computer.” This cannot possibly be happening.

“We’ll furnish you a laptop for field notes.”

“Is this archaeology field work? Because, I only minored in that when I was an undergraduate.”

The full, overpowering smile appeared again. “You might say that. I’d really rather wait until you’re in place before we discuss

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the details. Oh, and there is the employment contract. I’d like for you to take that with you, look it over, and bring it back signed.

I’ll answer any questions when you return in two weeks.”

Elaine frowned with some suspicion, tried to keep it off her face, but didn’t succeed. “What happens if I don’t sign the employment contract?”

Evers’ smile was just a tad condescending this time. “I guess you go back to pushing that 1990 Honda Civic up and down that interstate three times a day.”

He had her there. “I’m sure I’ll find everything satisfactory.”

“Excellent! I really think you will be an asset to the department.”

The laser-etched smile appeared yet again, and Evers stood, shooting his sleeve and making a show of checking his watch, a Breitling. Elaine stood as well, wishing her skirt was just a little longer because her knees were quivering.

“My secretary has a copy of the employment contract for you.

We’ll see you two weeks from today.” Evers extended his hand again, and Elaine shook it.

“Thank you, Dr. Evers. I look forward to working with you.”

“Same here.”

Elaine retrieved her briefcase and headed for the door.

“Dr. Prentiss?” She turned back to Evers. “One question you should think about, as well.”

Elaine’s knees threatened to wobble now. “Y-Yes?”

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“If you could go back in time, what in history would you want to see?” Elaine’s frown deepened. “Just think about it, Dr. Prentiss.

Good day.” *** Two weeks later, Elaine Prentiss sat on Evers’ sofa again. This time she was the one distressed. Evers had coaxed her to lie down, but she sat, folded over her thighs to allow blood to return to her head.

“Just don’t ask me to explain the physics,” Evers said as he wrapped her shaking fingers around a glass of water. Prentiss straightened, using two hands to steady the glass as she brought it to her lips. Most of the water made it down her throat. The rest decorated the front of her blouse.

When words finally worked their way beyond her clenched teeth, Evers could hear the anger. “Is this some kind of joke?”

“No, Dr. Prentiss. It’s all very serious.”

“You can’t expect me to believe that, that, thing you showed me is some sort of time travel…thing.”

“Dr. Prentiss, believe me, I understand your skepticism. I was the same at my first demonstration. When you’ve calmed down, we can give you a better one.”

“No fucking way.”

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“I hate to be a stickler about this, but you signed the employment contract. You agreed to provide us with historical research services in exchange for a year’s free room and board and a stipend of $80,000.”

“I didn’t know you were nuts when I signed it.”

“I’m not crazy, Dr. Prentiss. What I showed you is a time travel machine developed by our physics department, and it works. I should know. I’ve used it quite a few times.” Prentiss shook her head so violently, Evers feared she’d get whiplash. “Dr. Prentiss, the things I’ve seen are things every historian dreams of. I stood on the deck of the U.S.S. Missouri when Japan surrendered. I watched D-Day from a German bunker.”

“Yeah, right,” she muttered.

“Imagine going back to the Moscow train station on that night in 1917 when Lenin stepped onto the platform and into history.

Imagine seeing the bravery firsthand of the Russian people at the Battle of Stalingrad. You can do all that and more, Elaine. Look, Peter the Great is one of your heroes, right?” Prentiss nodded.

“What if you could watch him at the Battle of the Neva or as he cut off a boyar’s beard? If you had the chance, wouldn’t you take it?”

“It’s impossible.”

“It’s not. I’ve done it.”

“Prove it.”

“I can’t. We can’t interact physically when we’re in the past.

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Like I said, don’t ask me to explain the science. The physicists tried and all it did was give me a headache. Something about ‘temporal displacement of corporeal existence’ or ‘corporeal displacement in temporal existence.’ Gobbledygook. The best analogy is it’s like we’re ghosts. The people we encounter can’t see or hear us.”

Prentiss shook her head again. “Then, we shouldn’t be able to hear or see them. Physics doesn’t work that way. Besides, all the recent research indicates that if we could time travel, it would be forward, not backward.”

Evers didn’t like showing confusion, so he covered it with a stab at humor. “Why, Dr. Prentiss, here I thought your PhD was in history, not astrophysics.”

Her expression was humorless. “I watch the Science Channel as well as the History Channel.”

“Well, as I said, I don’t understand it. All I can do is reiterate that I’ve done it.”

“What’s the point?”

“I’m sorry?”

“What’s the point of going back in history if you can’t interact?”

“Well, the pure research potential is…”

“How would you cite your sources? You can’t possibly say you observed a conversation between Roosevelt and Churchill, for example. Anything you learned wouldn’t meet academic standards.”

“As a pure research tool, it would help us resolve historical

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ambiguities.”

“Or give you ideas for more books.”

“Really, Dr. Prentiss…”

“Is it dangerous?”

“I’m still here, aren’t I?” “All that means is you don’t know yet if it’s dangerous.”

She straightened from a slouch, and Evers watched her finish pulling herself together. He really couldn’t begrudge her the nearfaint. The first glimpse of the Physics Department’s secret project had had a similar effect on him. However, her next statement shocked him.

“It’s a cheat,” she said.

“A cheat?”

“Yes, Dr. Evers. History is discovery through meticulous research, the cross-referencing of books, letters, diaries, authentication of sources. This thing, whatever it is, short-cuts that. Makes the process too easy.”

“Do you really enjoy going through moldy books in dusty collections in dark rooms of cavernous libraries? Just thinking of it makes me want to sneeze.”

“As a matter of fact, yes, I do. Even if I had a staff of researchers to do it for me, I would still like the feel of the book, the smell of the binding, seeing the faded ink on a page and imagining the hand that wrote it. When you’ve touched something a historical

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figure touched, well, there’s no substitute for that.”

“Now, you can go back and watch the hand write it.”

“But I can’t talk to the person, find out what’s going on inside his or her head.”

“You can’t do that now.”

“True, but those dusty, old books are tangible. Your gadget is a cheat.”

“It’s not exactly a gadget.”

“Like I said, what’s the point of going back in time to witness history if you can’t go that one level deeper, not to mention never being able to publish what you’ve seen? What you’re doing is like watching a stage play. It’s a cheat.”

Evers’ reaction had been so different, once he’d finally collected his wits. Prentiss had obviously recovered hers, evident when she continued, “Christ, yes, seeing Lenin step off that train to the adulation of the workers would be an incredible experience, but I can rent the DVD of ‘Nicholas and Alexandra’ and see it portrayed with amazing historical accuracy. What I’d want to do, if I were there, is walk up to him and ask him how he felt, what this meant to him as a person and Russia as a nation, why he let the Royal Family be executed. The human issues are what make history a humanity, after all.”

“You’re making it sound like it’s merely an interview opportunity for Barbara Walters or Piers Morgan.”

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“Dr. Evers, unless we have an audio or video file of an event, we can’t find the humanity behind the history, we can’t see inside the person’s head. If we could talk to—” “And what would you say, Dr. Prentiss? ‘Behold, I’m from the future and would like to chat?’ That machine is the future of historical research, and you need to get on board with this, unless you like delivering your carefully prepared lectures to sleeping frosh or worse, their tape recorders.” Evers’ patience had worn thin. “And you did sign the employment contract.”

“You said that already.”

“The university has plenty of lawyers to hold you to it. You break it and I’ll assure you won’t be able to get an adjunct position at a junior college. Teaching high school will be beyond your reach. The best you can hope for is verifying the contents of those little plaques beside artifacts in an exhibition—which somebody else with a job will have written. Or you can start training tomorrow morning for the adventure of a lifetime, have the whole past at your fingertips. No faded ink on a page. No contradictory references. No biased interpretations. Just unadulterated facts.”

They stared at each other; Evers impatient; Prentiss angry.

Evers was close to anger himself over her obstinacy. The clash of wills dragged out until Evers needed to blink, but he didn’t want to concede anything to her. She spared him and looked away first, her face now blank.

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“There’s another option,” she said. “I tell the university president what I’ve seen.”

“Oh, she knows.”

“The Board of Trustees, then.”

Evers didn’t bother to mask his smirk. “You’ll have no proof.”

Prentiss looked back at him, her raised eyebrow asking the silent question about the facility she’d just seen. “Not to worry. The physicists assure me no one poking around would find it. Look, I’m not debating this with you anymore. You signed the contract.

You’re mine for a year.”

“I know. It’s called indentured servitude. Just a step up from slavery.”

“And being indentured to three second-rate colleges to pay your rent isn’t?”

“At least it’s real.” She held up a hand when he started to protest. “No, no need to say you’re offering me a reality I couldn’t possibly find in a decade of paper cuts, and I won’t even mention the theory of parallel time lines and alternate universes because that’s just way too Star Trek.” Prentiss sighed, but when she placed her empty glass on the sofa table, Evers saw her hand was steady.

He tried not to fidget. He had a luncheon engagement in fifteen minutes with an alumna whose husband had left her a good-sized fortune, a portion of which he wanted to score for his department.

He hoped Prentiss’ hysterics were done with; otherwise, he’d begin

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to regret choosing her.

“Creation,” she said.

His thoughts on the upcoming luncheon and just how far he’d have to go to get that donation made him think he hadn’t heard her properly. “Excuse me?”

“You told me two weeks ago to think about where in history I’d like to go. So, that’s it. Creation. The Big Bang, whatever you want to call it. That way, we could help out the physics department, too.

You know, steady-state theory versus the shrinking theory versus the continually expanding theory, not to mention where all that dark matter is. Oh, and ending once and for all the insane debate over evolution versus creationism.”

“But…” “Dr. Evers, relatively recent history is all very well and good, but it only has entertainment value, as your books demonstrate.

Now, if you want to use that gadget under the football field as more than a toy, let’s get serious about it.”

Prentiss stood up, a hand smoothing her hair, confidence again emanating from her, and Evers realized he’d been bluffed better than any professional poker player.

“If we’re going to blaze new trails in historical research,” Prentiss announced, with a smile that was definitely bitchy, “why not start ‘in the beginning?’”

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September 2011

Kimberly Ann Steven Terrill

Old houses have a way of speaking their mind, especially when they are expected to keep quiet. In the dark of the kitchen, the light footfalls of the young girl stepping across to the back door sounded, to her, like dull thuds that echoed through the house.

With each step, a soft squeak of the worn, thin floorboards seemed to snake through the house to where a man laid, sleeping on the second floor, his dirty laundry strewn about the room. His systematic snoring also carried through the house but those were almost a comfort. As the girl neared the back door, her tip-toed footfalls faltered and she stumbled. The thump of her fall froze her in place, and she strained, listening for the break in soft snores that would signify the end of her story. Sweat gathered on her brow and she held her breath counting the seconds between the snores. One...

Two... Three... There had been no longer gap than three seconds between the snores up to this point. Her mind began to race; should she bolt for the door or hold her ground? Her heart began beating so loud and fast that she wasn’t sure that she would even be able to hear the snore if it— There was a cough, a hack, a loud fart, and then silence. Her

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ears searched so hard against the silence that she swore there was a dull ringing in the distance, the kind of ringing that often accompanies unaccustomed quiet—until the snores returned. She let out a whimpering breath and collapsed as controlled as she could onto the floor, tears streaming down her face, fighting back sobs. Her crying would not have interrupted a church sermon. The loudest whimper sounding more like a soft hiccup rather than a hurt girl.

She slowly gathered herself back together and crept toward the door again. The light from the moon outside was still streaming softly through the gap in the curtain. She reached to touch the door handle and the fresh purple marks on her arms caught the light.

Halting for a moment, she pulled her arm back and ran her other hand across it, wincing at the tenderness. Looking back toward the darkness, she pulled both her arms toward her chest and wrung the strap of her backpack.

Kimberly Ann fled, slipping, stumbling, and sprawling through the woods that ran dark and deep along the farmlands where she had grown up. The giant evergreens clawed at the moon, their scent of sap heavy on the air as cool winds slipped in quietly from the north. The smell of damp hay bombarded her as she made her way along the fence of her father’s property deeper into the foliage.

Raspy breaths and faltering footfalls echoed through the forest, a few flapping wings and shrill squawks parted along the wake of the noise. The eyes of the dark, the eyes she knew were there, watched

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her, weighing her down with their alien stares and questions.

‘Who?’ ‘Who?’ ‘Who are you?’

Shivering, shaking, and sightless she sped through the woods tucking her head down with the knowledge that around the cracked bark of the tree trunks waited the eyes. The eyes that wrapped around her mind with fears that sank down into her bones. Tickling her ribs and back, they teased her with the idea of claws and teeth that would sink into her flesh and separate her frail teenage skin from her fragile bones. The dark and the fear wrapped around her so tightly that she felt as though she was suffocating. Faster and faster she willed herself onward, trying to race ahead of the darkness that crept in around her.

She stumbled and nearly went to her knees as she burst out of the woods and out onto an old, dirt road. Resting her hands on her knees to catch her breath, she looked back at the forest behind her. The forest was less dense here, near the edge, and the moonlight spilled through the gaps of the branches. She wondered for a moment if she had invented all of the darkness she had just run through. She looked around at where she was, trying to find any visual clues as to how far along the road she had come. Underneath the shadows, cast by an overhanging branch, she saw a puddle of water. “When was the last time it rained?” she thought to herself.

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Thinking back, she couldn’t remember any rain since two weeks ago, and it was when she went to nudge the puddle with her foot that she realized it was actually a deep pothole. The same pothole, she realized, that her father cursed every time he hit it driving home.

“God damn hole!” he would shout, as beer spilled out from the can onto his lap. “Lousy, piece of shit road!” Kimberly Ann would try to keep as close to the passenger side door as she could when her father would go on tangents like this in case he decided to throw the beer can to the floor on her side, as he had on numerous occasions. The red and white can, even half empty, would bruise her ankles.

She shook her head as if trying to shake the feeling of the memory off. ”Just stay asleep, old man,” she thought to herself and started walking.

The brush beside the road was overgrown, and every so often a branch or a long patch of grass would caress the side of her leg, and she would jump back. The feeling was not unlike a hand reaching for her legs. Despite this, she stuck to the side of the road, not wanting to stray too far from cover, ready to jump into the brush at the first sign of headlights.

She soon regretted not bringing a watch. Not that she would really be able to read it accurately in the dark, but not knowing how long she had been walking was troubling her. Worried she might not be walking at a fast enough pace, she looked at the position

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of the moon, just a little off center in the sky, and hoped that by watching it she might be able to get some sense of how much time was passing. She trudged on stealing looks, every so often, behind her and at the moon.

The damp, musky scent of the woods wafted over her. It had looked like it was going to rain earlier in the day. She remembered hearing the howl of the wind as she was rooting through her father’s dirty pants’ pockets while he was showering. He had been drunk by then so she wasn’t worried about him finding his money gone, what little of it he had. The only things that worried her were the possibility of rain and that he may come looking for her. So far she was one for one with luck and hoped that it would hold out.

She felt herself start to grow tried and shook her head, trying to shake the drowsiness from her mind. She rubbed the back of her neck after, however, acutely aware that she had been shaking her head a lot recently. To her, it seemed as though every time she was left alone with her thoughts it was a chain of thinking that inevitably led to the idea of escape, and until yesterday, it had garnered the same response from her body: a brief, violent shake of her head and a shudder of fear. No matter how many times the ideas would crop up in her mind, escape never seemed possible, not that she wouldn’t have gotten away, but that she would never come back. “This is my whole world.” she would think, “as awful as he is to me, I don’t know what is out there in the world.” Turning the

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pages of her magazines after school, she would sometimes wonder what kinds of magical places the world would have in store for her when she finally got out of her father’s house.

One afternoon at school she got a travel magazine from the library. It focused on a few popular places such as London, Dublin, and Tokyo, but what caught her eye was the cover of the magazine. “The Grand Canyon,” she whispered while stretched out over her bed enjoying the few hours of peace before her father would be home, “now that is a beautiful place.” She marveled over the colors of the landscape, how the reds of the canyon walls spread into browns, and how the browns spread out beneath the blue sky that seemed to stretch out for miles.

She would fantasize for hours about the Canyon trying to imagine what it would be like to live on the lip of it, if it was even possible, or how different it would be to live in a place without the awful humidity that she was use to here, on her father’s farmland.

She would imagine waking up in the morning with the sun shining through her window, gently caressing her awake with its gentle warmth instead of here in the country. Here, the air would sometimes feel like a damp washrag over her whole body the moment she stepped outside. She was thinking about that beautiful sunlight now, as she walked along in the dark, hoping that it wouldn’t be long before she would get to experience that crisp sunrise. In this dark she especially longed for the light. She almost had herself

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fooled into thinking that it was raising in front of her now. The bright light in her mind almost seemed like— Headlights. The realization hit her like a train, and she dove into the bushes without thinking, her heart punching against the inside of her chest.

“Oh no, oh no, oh no” she thought frantically, “He woke up.

He found me, and he’s going to kill me!” She laid on her belly, deep in the brush, a vine of brambles cutting painfully into her ankle.

She bit her arm to keep from screaming in pain. It was a familiar motion that suddenly jarred her present situation and sent her memories back into the house she had fled from. Countless images flooded her mind, all the same, but always different, always terrifying. Spread out, biting her arm, pain in her limbs, darkness closing in on her, except for this time there was a light closing in, casting shadows of branches and vines all around her, snapping her back into reality.

The truck was driving slow, too slow, even for these old dirt roads. She knew it was him, knew that he was going to find her.

She released her arm from her mouth. She wrapped both her hands around bush, preparing to pull herself up and make a run for it if she needed to.

The truck was parallel with her now. She could barely hear the rumbling of the engine over the heartbeat in her ears. She scrunched up her face in anticipation, biting her lower lip. “This is it!” she

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thought.

The truck passed by heading down the road the way she had come. She let out a sigh of relief and pulled herself up, sitting on her haunches, still in the bush. It was then she realized that the truck couldn’t have been her father’s because it had come from in front of her. It wasn’t until the truck stopped a few more yards down the road and the driver stepped out to urinate in the woods that she realized the truck was also about twice the size of her father’s.

She didn’t wait for the man to return to his truck before she set off again, walking a little faster, favoring her now bleeding ankle.

She couldn’t help but shiver as she continued walking. Her nerves were wreaking havoc on her. Diving into the bushes had brought up images that weren’t easy to ignore. Wrapped in her own thoughts, she was startled when a bird took flight in the woods to her right. She bit her lip fast and hard to hold in a scream. As the bird flew off, the flapping beat of its wings took her back to the previous day.

The bruises on her arms had been there before, and this time the school psychologist decided enough was enough and that she needed to speak with Kimberly’s father. She had called him in during school hours to talk to him about the bruises that happened to pop up every couple of weeks on his daughter.

“She’s a klutz, he said. Kimberly had been surprised he was sober enough to come in. Even at work he was just barely able

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to keep on his feet. “Didn’t you tell them you keep catching your own feet on the stairs?”

“I did, Daddy” “Then what’s the problem here, folks? I can’t help it if my kid don’t know her left foot from her right. If sixteen years of trial and error hasn’t done it, what’s left?” He let out a chuckle, which sounded genuine enough.

The psychologist apologized to him, told him that it was the school’s duty to check up on these things and that as long as the bruises didn’t crop up again before the end of the school year they would have nothing to bother him about.

He smiled and told her it was alright and asked if it was okay for him to take his daughter home with him since it was near the end of the day.

In the truck, as soon as they pulled away from the school, her father produced a six pack from under his seat. “God damned school doesn’t know shit.” He growled, and then downed his first beer. “How dare they call me in from work to talk to me about those damn bruises. Don’t they have nothin’ better to do?” They rode in silence as he continued to drink the six pack. By the time they reached their driveway it was gone.

She had never seen her father this angry before, not to the point where he was quiet. He was always shouting when he drank, cursing everyone he could think of, crushing the cans angrily in

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his hands. Silence, though, silence was a new terror. He climbed the steps of the front porch first and when she went to follow, he held up his hand and bade her to stay. She sat nervously down on the steps, wondering if he was going to force her to sleep outside, as he had on an occasion when she had accidentally woken him from a drunken nap.

He returned after a few minutes with a shotgun in his hands.

His face was taut with anger, a vein in his forehead stood out dramatically, and she didn’t know how to react. As he got to the end of the steps he threw a box of shells into her hands and pulled her up by her shirt as she fumbled to grasp the unopened box. He held onto her arm like a vice as he pulled her through the yard down to the small pond near the edge of his property. It was at the pond’s border that he stopped and motioned for her to open the shell box and hand him two. She did this without question, though growing more confused, until her father cocked the gun and raised it level to a spot near the left side of the pond.

There was a small family of ducks that had lived at the pond and had been one of her chief forms of entertainment after school since her father did not allow her to watch television. She would grab a few pieces of bread from the kitchen and run down to the pond before her father got home and would feed them, a mother and four younger ducklings.

“Daddy!” She started, but her father whipped the gun around

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at her face and pressed the cold metal against her forehead. She understood. He turned back around and fired, tearing two of the ducklings apart, and startling the others who tried to fly to safety, their wings beating the air frantically. There was a second shot and then silence.

Later that night, her father came to her in the darkness, like he would from time to time since their mother had left when she was thirteen. The shadow would enter the doorway of the room, taking the shape of a man and then she would smell the booze wafting off of him as he stumbled into the room. She used to fight, scream, and bite, but these things only prolonged the process and got her more pain and bruises than it was worth. As his hot hands brushed her form, seeking out the edges of her shirt, her panties, she would lay there, limply, trying to be somewhere else. As the fabric was pulled down her legs she would try to imagine the Grand Canyon, or even Tokyo, and as the weight of her father pressed down on her, she would bite into her arm to stop the endless screams that tried to escape from her mouth. Sometimes it would last for what seemed like an eternity, but sometimes, like that night, it seemed to pass by in moments, hot tears running down her face, he would shamble from the room. It was that night, after seeing what her father could do, that she decided enough was enough.

“The world might kill me,” she told herself, “but so could he.”

She reached the road just as dawn was starting to break, its

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pale light spreading over the landscape, showing the forest floor clearly for the first time, making her movement easier. She stood, looking out over the road, wondering what time it was. Making her way cautiously around the edge of the woods, not wanting to stray too far from the cover, she started searching.

Her exhaustion vanished at the sight of the building. The Greyhound Buses were sitting idly in its parking lot, just a few people waiting around for a ride to unknown destinations. She felt her heart soar. A few quick steps brought her to the middle of the road, right above the double yellow lines. Standing there, she found herself unable to move forward. She looked back toward the forest, then in front of her where the bus stop was, small puffs of exhaust floating into the morning sky from the idling bus. She wrapped her arms around herself and stared off toward the woods. “What am I doing?�

Tears running down her face, she turned back toward the bus and hurried to catch her ride.

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September 2011

Gypsies

Richard Sutton

Paul sat at the end of his bed, limp hair hanging into his eyes.

The bedding was already stripped off and packed away, so the lumpy mattress tick gave the almost-empty room a somber tone.

He held the plastic airplane carefully in his right hand and tried to maneuver the cardboard box around beneath it, on the floor, to hold it complete, wings and all. It wasn’t going so well, and it was making him angry.

He’d worked for hours finishing the bomber several months before and knew every rivet and mold seam intimately. He’d been especially careful not to get any glue on any of the outside surfaces that showed. He was proud of how it turned out. The clear bubble windshield glinted in the room’s meager light. He turned it over carefully and spun one of its landing gear tires around a few times, and then, with eyes beginning to tear again, he held it with both hands at the wing tips and suddenly crushed it into a mass of gray plastic shard. The pieces fell slowly from his hands into the box below.

He heard his mother’s voice down in the kitchen singing the corny “road song” he so thoroughly hated. There were clicks and

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clangs as she packed up the last of the kitchen pots and pans. He glanced around his room. The four walls were now bare. Only small tags where the tape holding the posters had lifted the paint left evidence of Paul’s short occupation. The ones he thought were worth saving were rolled up and standing in the corner near the door. The rest had been crumpled up and tossed. There would be a lot of garbage at the curb this time.

Paul brushed his hair from his eyes and recalled the piles of curbside garbage holding their ground each time the car pulled away. He’d climb up into the dusty hammock of the Packard’s rear window boot and watch each garbage pile grow smaller and smaller until they disappeared entirely in the distance or at a turn. That’s the way it always went. Smaller and smaller, and then not at all.

“Paul,” his mother called from the stairwell, “how’s your packing going?”

“Fine, Mom” he called back.

“Good, because Daddy will be home from work in an hour.”

He heard her footsteps trail off, hollowly echoing against the bare wood floors.

The last of his small, private things—the treasures he kept in little boxes and jars—were rounded up from the top of the closet shelf and the big, wide dresser. He pushed the pile of broken plastic in the box aside and carefully fit each of the items into the corners. Then, from the floor nearby, scooped up armloads of his underwear and T-shirts and dumped them into the open box. That

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was the last of it.

Paul carried the box over to the door where it joined the four others already waiting there. His name was marked in large, squarish letters on each one. One last look around, and he walked out of what had been his bedroom and into the hall to the star landing and stood peering down the stairs to the floor below.

He wiped his red eyes with his fists. I’m no cry-baby, he repeated to himself a few times before slowly descending the stairs.

With a small show of defiance, he put both hands into his pockets, almost daring his feet to slip off the bare stair treads.

“Then they’d be sorry,” he muttered under his breath. Step by step, he left his last life upstairs. As the first floor landing got closer, he felt his eyes tearing up again.

“No you don’t, cry-baby,” he muttered aloud as his feet stood firm on the landing. From the kitchen, he heard his mother singing “…we’re on our way to somewhere, the three of us and YOU!” The brainless song continued. The lyrics were a well-worn family tradition. It was from one of the awful Bing Crosby/Bob Hope “Road shows”. Whenever one was on the TV, Paul had to sit through it. This stupid song had been sung so many times it had a life of its own inside his head. He started to mouth the rest of the song, without thinking, and began walking toward the kitchen door.

“Cuanta la gusta, la gusta, la gusta…” rang in his ears as his mother’s voice carried throughout the house.

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September 2011

“Paul,” asked his mother, hearing him shuffle into the room, “are you finished?”

He nodded. She was kneeling upon the torn linoleum, running masking tape over the top of the box she had just finished packing. There were six other brown, cardboard boxes stacked up against the back door, each with a white cross pattern of tape.

He recognized the pattern. It was the same one every time. Some of the boxes had several layers of tape crosses from previous uses.

She got to her feet and carried the box to join the others, then turned, looked into his eyes for a time, and asked him, “How’re you feeling honey?”

He turned away from her so she could not see his red eyes and answered, “Fine, Mom.” She asked again, “You sure, honey?”

“Sure, Mom,” he answered, flatly. His eyes followed the curl of the linoleum along the wall until it met up with the boxes and added, “We’re Gypsies, aren’t we Mom?” He knew she wanted to hear him say it.

“That’s right, son” she replied brightly, “Gypsies. Made for the road and adventure!”

She walked over and embraced him from behind in a big hug.

Same words, same hug. He knew it was his job now to keep quiet until Dad’s homecoming. He’d probably have to repeat the performance again. Meanwhile, he had to find something to do to keep

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busy, or his head would explode.

“Mom, should I put the boxes on the front porch?” He asked her, looking up. She was gazing out the window, a blank expression on her face.

“Sure, Paul. Daddy will appreciate the help,” she replied without looking away from the window. She then released him and began gathering up dishtowels and the remaining few items on the counters. A single empty box gaped from the table.

Paul turned and picked up the first kitchen box. It was heavy and he had to struggle a bit to get both hands on its corners securely, but he held it to his chest and marched out of the kitchen and out to the front door. With a little balancing effort, he managed to push the latch and the front door swung in. He sidestepped around it and carried the box across the warped porch floorboards to join the other stacked up boxes. Waiting.

His nose picked up the reek of the paper mill, and it made him shudder. “P.U.” he said aloud, and a small spark of happiness leapt up from his chest. By tomorrow morning, he remembered, he’d never have to smell that giant fart again.

It amused him how, over the course of the seven months they’d lived in the house above the mill, his mother never seemed to notice the smell. The first few times he’d made a comment, she’d change the subject. He got the idea he shouldn’t say anything, so he didn’t.

But it was strong enough to peel paint. His few chums at school

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used to compare stories of how they’d hold their noses until the bus came every morning, but even leaving the neighborhood was little relief. The sulfurous stink penetrated even the school walls when the wind turned.

He knew he should be glad to leave. It was a shitty, stinky town and a shitty, stinky house.

Above him, he heard a sharp squawk and saw the old gray and blue jay sitting just above the height of the porch roof on a branch of the big spruce. A flash of bright blue against the blue-gray of the tree and murky gray of the overcast sky. The jay was the single, bright spot in an otherwise drab, gray neighborhood. The bird’s raucous voice had cheered him every morning since they’d moved in. Paul knew he’d miss him.

“Hey, bird,” he called out, “will you miss me?”

He got no answer, but he really didn’t expect one anyway. He went back into the house and, one-by-one, carried each remaining box out and set it into place on the porch until the wide porch was so filled up, no windows could be seen and the door alone stood witness to the possibility of passage. Paul thought it looked like some kind of fortification, a military battery, or, a prison. Yes, that was it: it looked like a prison wall.

He walked to the road’s edge and, without thinking, opened the mailbox door, letting it fall and hang there. Stupid box looks like a big, ugly mouth, he thought. He wished he had a baseball

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bat in his hands; he’d flatten the stupid, gaping thing. He returned to the porch and sat down at the end facing the garage. His legs dangled over the edge and he kicked them back and forth as he remembered the school year in this stinky, shitty town.

Bobby Mason had been the only one who’d stuck by him when that nasty little girl threw the trash can lid at him and sliced his knee open on its sheet metal edge. He hadn’t cried. They both looked into the deep wound where the crème colored bone glinted out from the bloody ravine. It was really gory. Kind of cool. Bobby helped him wrap his T-Shirt around it, and he hobbled back to Bobby’s house. Bobby’s Mom called his Mom and she came to get him. It meant stitches.

Except for that day, and the day he caught the fly ball after school, the rest was a muddy blur. He’d played “The New Kid” same as ever, and after the initial curiosity waned, Paul was pretty much left alone by his classmates. His teachers gave him good marks, but always added “…works below his potential, not a team player…” or some such bullshit. Bullshit. He’d be a great team player if he ever felt like he was on a team of more than one.

He’d said goodbye to Bobby and the few others that he hung out with the day before. Everybody shook hands and he told them he’d write. He knew he wouldn’t. None of his teachers made any fuss about it, and that was just fine. He already couldn’t remember their faces clearly.

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September 2011

He stopped kicking his legs and looked up the street for any sign of his father and the U-Haul truck they’d be driving south in.

He already missed the Packard. Daddy had sold it to an ugly, sour old guy at the end of the block. In a week or so, after the truck had been unloaded, Daddy would buy a new car. Probably smaller than the big, black Packard. He saw their neighbor, Mr. Engle, coming home in his wood-paneled Ford station wagon. Now, that was a cool car, thought Paul. You could even sleep in the back, like in a tent. Mr. Engle tooted his horn at Paul as he made the turn into his driveway. It sounded like goodbye.

No sign of his father, so Paul stood up and walked back into the front door as his mother went into her version of another “road song”. He flung himself down on the ratty old couch and waited.

As the minutes passed, he felt his eyes tearing again and made his hands curl into tight fists until it hurt enough to stop the tears. At least it wasn’t raining.

It rained almost every day they had lived there. Between the stink, the rain, and the grim looks on most everybody’s faces it wasn’t much fun, but he found himself suddenly smiling. He was remembering the cockamamie story his father had laid out the year before explaining the upcoming move. It was so complicated and silly that even Mom lost track and asked him to tell it all again. Finally, Daddy threw up his hands and said, “We’ve gotta go. There’s a better place ahead…just over the hill.” Paul had liked

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the sound of that: just over the hill.

He’d thought at the time that it meant they’d be only moving a short distance away. By the time they were unloading under the big Spruce, they’d crossed over three state lines and put more than 1,000 miles under the wheels of their old car, a big, black Packard.

When the car finally stopped in front of the two-story clapboard house with the peeling paint, Paul wondered what his father could have meant. A better place it wasn’t.

Paul was alerted by the squeaking of heavy springs and the squeal of brakes as his father backed the truck into the driveway over the pothole near the street. He got up from the couch and peered out from the now open door to watch the truck slowly backing closer. Right up to the porch.

Paul’s father got out of the driver’s side of the cab, and a big, ruddy faced fellow with a flattened cap climbed out of the passenger side. Paul grinned at his father, who threw up the truck’s big roll gate with a crash and brought out four heavy, wide boards, which were used to bridge the gap between the truck’s bed and the front porch. The other man helped secure them by hammering a nail in each one and into the porch floor.

“Paul,” said Daddy, ”meet Mr. Jenkins, from work. He’s going to help us load the truck up!”

Mr. Jenkins slowly stuck out his big hand, and Paul shook it.

Mr. Jenkins smiled and then turned back to Paul’s father asking him, “What’s first, Tom?”

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By this time, Paul’s mother had come to the door and nodded to Mr. Jenkins with a smile. The two men began deliberating the sequence of loading the furniture, and Paul stepped back along the porch to get a better view. He heard the jay squawk out a couple of times and Paul looked up to the Spruce just in time to see the bird fly off behind the house and out of sight.

After a couple of hours, the sun was starting to slide down behind the heavy curtain of smoke the mill sent up daily. Paul’s father strode into the now empty kitchen and called the pizza joint down the road to deliver a big pizza pie. “Be sure to put extra peppers and cheese on it,” he added as he closed out the order and got the price.

The last furniture remaining was the well-used, folding card table and four metal, folding chairs. Mom was sweeping out the corners and Dad carried down the last upstairs box as Paul set up the table. Paul arranged the chairs around the table and Mom brought over an old Chianti bottle with the Raffia wrap around the bottom. She’d been burning candles in it until the colored wax drips formed a rainbow over the bottle’s sides and into two hard, little pools where it had run down to some table, somewhere. She placed this in the middle of the card table and lit the candle stuck in its neck next to a quart of Olympia Beer Dad had brought home with him. Three empty glasses came next, and finally, as the pizza guy climbed up around the truck and onto the porch, another glass

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with milk in it was set in place for Paul.

Paul waited until the steaming pizza was opened up on the table and his father called them all to eat. Mr. Jenkins found his chair across from Mom, and soon everyone was filling their stomachs.

Daddy and his co-worker spoke of the job and a few odd-balls working in the plant.

“I sure won’t miss him,” Daddy blurted out with a laugh after Mr. Jenkins mentioned the foreman. Paul had heard some stories.

Not all of them around the table, and most of them with words he wasn’t supposed to even know.

Paul drained his milk and put his empty glass down on the table. He didn’t expect his father to notice, but he did. Daddy said to Mom, “Honey, bring us another empty glass for Paul. He looks thirsty.”

She raised one eyebrow, as she did almost every day, and gave Daddy a look, but he said, “Paul’s old enough for a little beer. It won’t hurt him.” He winked broadly at Paul who began to beam.

The last slice of pizza went to Mr. Jenkins as Paul gulped the last of his half-glass of suds. With a satisfied expression on his face, he let out a big, uncontrolled burp, which made Mom give Daddy a stern look, but made Mr. Jenkins laugh out loud. Dad, and even Mom, joined in, and Paul blushed bright red. After a little more grown-up talk, Mr. Jenkins excused himself, giving his friend a powerful goodbye handshake.

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“Best of luck to you, Tom,” he said, “and your family. You’ll be in a better place than the rest of us.” Paul thought, Just over the hill. Mr. Jenkins walked over to Paul and gave him a pat on the head, then left. So here it was: there’d be a new house in a new town and a new-old car, in a couple of days.

An hour later, after Daddy had pulled the truck’s roll-gate down and thrown the big lever lock, they piled into the cab. Mom had opened up a small space under the couch, between two chairs where Paul could sit on the floor of the truck, on a couch cushion, behind the bench seat in the cab. Dad brought up his tool box and pushed it into another space behind the cab seat and climbed in.

With a grin, Paul’s father proclaimed, “Gypsies…we’re OFF!” The truck grudgingly went into gear and lurched past the pile of garbage and away from the stinky house in the shitty town.

After the sun was down and the highway lights were glaring off the windshield, Paul’s father remembered something and called back, “Paul, are you still awake?”

“Sure, Dad,” came the reply from behind the seat.

“Did you get your model bomber to fit in one of the boxes?”

Daddy asked.

“Sure Dad,” said Paul, “it fit right in.”

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92

September 2011

Blind Date Mary O’Neil

They were both extremely nervous, as they took seats at a table in the corner of the bar. Though they had been communicating over the internet for several weeks, meeting in person brought with it the possibility of a rejection that would hurt one’s ego. There were certain advantages to electronic relationships, in that regard, but they could only go so far, and they had clearly reached the point where they both wanted to meet.

Adrian had been the first to suggest it, with fingers stuttering on the keyboard as the words were typed. Francis, too, had felt the the need, yet had, at first, hesitated to accept the invitation. The online relationship they had both enjoyed, would abruptly end if either of them was disappointed in this meeting. They both knew it, and they were both ready to risk it.

Adrian had felt meeting in a local bar would be the least stressful for them both. Though it was not a question of trust, the first meeting should be in a open place anyway. Having liquor available would both relax the setting, but also allow each to see if the other might have a tendency to over indulge. Both of them were self declared social drinkers only, and neither of them was interested

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in someone who had an alcoholic addition.

They had already discovered during their online chats, that they both liked the same drink, which the barmaid quickly went off to obtain for them.

“I don’t think we ever discussed past, serious relationships, did we?” Francis commented nervously. “Have you ever been married?”

“Once,” Adrian responded. “A mistake, which I realized within the first six months. Annulled, but that was some time ago.”

Francis laughed nervously. “I suppose, in this day and age, I should ask if your ex was male or female?”

Adrian laughed, too, at that. “Times are different now, aren’t they? What about you? Any past marriages for you?”

“No, but I did have a five year relationship once. Ended badly.”

The barmaid returned then, with their drinks. They both reached for their glasses with a bit of relief, Adrian also taking a sample from the small bowl of bar nuts that she had set down for them as well.

“I was afraid to try the dating thing again,” Francis admitted.

“People seem so phony sometimes. I don’t get that feeling from you, though.”

“Nor I from you,” Adrian admitted. “But I have to say, usually the people I’ve met online tend to completely misrepresent themselves. You know, height, weight, looks. You are exactly the way you described yourself.”

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Francis laughed nervously. “You didn’t exaggerate either. I had no trouble picking you out when I got here.”

Much of their ensuing conversation covered information they both already knew from their online chats, but hearing the same answers in person just seemed to solidify they relationship. There was no nervous eye blinking, no trembling of hands. By the time the barmaid had brought their second drinks, they had each memorized not only the other’s eye color, but also every visible facial feature.

If fate played a part in one’s life, then these were two people who had been destined to meet from birth, for they were so perfect for each other.

“Your voice is so intoxicating,” Francis commented. “Just as I would have imagined it to be.”

“I feel the same,” Adrian answered. “And I expect we’ll be spending a lot of time on the phone now.”

“Better in person.” They both smiled at that. The second drinks weren’t fully finished, when Francis suggested they walk over to the nearby movie theater. There was a new movie out that they had previously discussed online, that they both had wanted to see.

As they left the bar, hand in hand, they barely noticed the scraggly young man who brushed past them. Barely out of his teens, two days of stubble on his young face, he was more intent on keeping a tight grip on the gun in his pocket, than noticing the exiting couple.

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September 2011

He went straight to the bar, the now visible gun aimed directly at the seasoned bartender.

“Cash. NOW,” he commanded, giving the gun a thrust with his hand for emphasis.

It was not the first time the bar had been robbed, but that didn’t make the bartender any less nervous. He took two handfuls of cash from the drawer, setting them before the robber. The young man scooped up the money, and ran out the door.

It didn’t take the police very long to get there, as they had been in the area already. None of the bar’s patrons had noticed the robber, and there was no video surveillance inside the bar.

“There was a couple, just leaving,” the bartender remembered, when the officer was taking his statement. “They would have gotten a good, solid look at the guy.”

“Regulars? Know their names?”

“No, first time I’ve ever seen either of them. I could tell you what they drank, though,” the bartender said with a smile. “And they sure seemed to be enjoying each other’s company.”

“Well, give me a good description. We can try and keep an eye for them, maybe get statements from them, if we see them. How were they dressed?”

The bartender described their clothes to the best of his ability.

“Which outfit was the man wearing?”

The bartender stared blankly at the officer.

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“Man and woman, this couple, right?” the officer asked, his pencil poised expectantly above his notepad.

“Uh, I’m not actually sure,” the bartender stammered.

“Two guys? Two gals? What?”

“I’m sorry, Officer,” the bartender admitted. “I really don’t know.”

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97

September 2011

Divine Providence Robert Turner

Before midnight on the first of March, 1535, a storm raged along the river Mincio and across the Mantuan lakes. It moved down the river away from Vittorio as he knelt in the road above the city cradling the warm corpse of his only daughter. He looked about him at the trees felled by the wind and raised his fist against the heavens. “Why not take me?” he thundered. “You have taken all that I hold dear. Why do you destroy all of this, but not your accursed jester?”

He lifted Gilda’s body, still partially encased in the coarse cloth of the assassin’s sack, whispering as he staggered up the hill to the wagon, “Don’t worry, my daughter, I will get you to Bruno’s monastery in time for a Christian burial.”

He stopped the wagon at the barn where he had left what remained of their earthly possessions. He had planned to load them into the wagon and set out from there to his rendezvous with his daughter in Verona. He lifted Gilda from the wagon and laid her body on the oaken table. The guttering candle distorted the crimped silhouette of his torso cast on the wall of the barn. He continued muttering to her while he moved his belongings away from the

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prying eyes of other travelers, under the sacks of grain he would carry in the back of the wagon. Looking at her pale features, he thought of the martyred alabaster saints amongst the angels in the great hall of the Duke of Mantua’s palace. “At least now you are free of your obsession with that monster,” he said as he gently placed her in the wagon.

He worked quickly. He knew he must get the wagon loaded and out of Mantua before sunrise if he were to have any chance of traversing the thirty-seven miles to Cremona within the next two days. Then, he could ask Bruno to have her buried in the hallowed ground of his monastery so that she would take her rightful place beside her mother in the heavenly orders. Vittorio wondered if this might ease his burden; however, lost in his righteous indignation, he did not care. He had hired the assassin to kill the Duke, not his daughter. The indifference, or malevolence, of Bruno’s God had worked against him once again, as it had when his wife had died leaving him to raise Gilda. He was accursed, but there would be a place for Gilda in Bruno’s heaven. He left the trunk containing most of her clothes on the table for the farmer and his family.

He walked beside the wagon most of the day so as to not overtax the draft horse which had been obtained from the farmer in exchange for most of Vittorio’s savings. He paused frequently to rest and water the animal. By the afternoon, as they approached the northern fork of the old Roman Via Postumia near the hamlet of

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Calvatone, he felt hoof-beats reverberating behind him. He turned the wagon onto the northern fork of the road just in time to evade the party of five cavaliers, adorned in the gold and black silks of the house of Gonzaga. He gave thanks that they paid no attention to the wagon or its driver. “Evil spawn,” he growled at the backs of the carousing noblemen as they thundered off toward the western boundary of their duchy. “It’s fortunate you did not recognize from behind the crooked form of the fool you call Rigoletto or he would never get his precious charge to Bruno in time.”

He led the horse a short way into a field of rye grass. Here they could tarry until evening when they could take to the road again without fear of meeting any of the Duke’s cavaliers. He rested his aching back against the trunk of an elm tree not far from the fields where, in the time they called the year of the four emperors, the noble Romans had fought their battles. Nowadays, he thought, each petty tyrant thinks he is an emperor as powerful as his forbears. What chaotic times, he mused, as he began to relax for the first time in many hours.

That evening, he set out again toward the west. Traveling steadily through the moonlit night, he was able to reach the Humiliati monastery in Cremona early the next morning. He left the wagon in the square and asked the initiate at the gate to summon Brother Bruno Savolino.

“Our brother is at morning prayer,” said the novice, whose

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gray habit blended with the ashen stone of the gate’s supporting pillars. “Who shall I say is asking for him?”

“Tell him it is his servant from the kitchens of Mantua with the supplies he has ordered,” said Vittorio. “I will await his reply in the piazza.”

“I will give him your message at the completion of the service,” said the initiate, blending again into the shadows along the entranceway.

Vittorio shivered despite the warm sun falling upon him but not on the wagon which he had left under a maple tree at the other side of the quadrangle. He knew his friend would, as always, respond to his message as soon as he could. They had grown up together in Mantua, Vittorio a kitchen worker and Bruno a stable hand who became a scholar and later a monk. Vittorio was two years older than his friend, and although bent at birth, he was well-muscled from his labors in the kitchen. He had protected his bookish friend from the taunts of the other household workers; and later when Vittorio’s wife died, Bruno had helped secure a place for Gilda at the nearby Humiliati convent. As she had grown older she had worked with him in his herb garden and helped him with caring for the sick among his brothers.

“You look as though you have been dragged through purgatory by the fiends of hell,” said his friend as he limped across the square. “What has happened? How is my goddaughter?”

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“Her soul has left her and should soon be with the angels,” said Vittorio. He choked on his suppressed sobs and in that moment could only embrace his friend. Bruno’s slender body trembled as he too struggled to regain his composure. “H-h-her e-e-earthly remains are w-w-with me awaiting a Christian burial,” Vittorio continued, “if that could be arranged.”

“Of course,” said Bruno, quickly reestablishing his priestly equanimity in response to his friend’s need. Vittorio felt the steady pressure of his friend’s hand on his shoulder and felt the compassion in his voice as he said, “You must tell me all that has transpired, but first, you must guide your wagon through our gate and take a few moments to calm and refresh yourself.”

Bruno, the second son of the master of horses for the Duke of Mantua, seemed to have inherited a special talent for handling frenzied animals or humans. He had exercised this frequently over the years since Vittorio, the illegitimate child of a court governess and a blacksmith, frequently succumbed to his depressive rages.

Vittorio’s mother had taught him to read, and he had developed a thirst for knowledge. A thirst that was thwarted at an early age when his parents’ death forced him to earn his keep toiling in the Duke’s kitchens. Bruno, though working in the stables, had studied at the court school of Isabella d’Este from which he borrowed books for his friend. Vittorio had fashioned candles from bits of tallow from the kitchen and read the books late into the

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night worsening his congenital thoracic deformity but assuaging, somewhat, his unhappiness as he escaped into their pages.

They left the wagon by the infirmary, and Bruno brought him a flagon of wine and some bread and cheese which they ate in the garden while Vittorio told him of the ravishing of Gilda by the Duke, his own attempt at retaliation, and the resulting sacrifice by his daughter to save her defiler. His friend’s eyes filled with tears overflowing onto his beard and spotting his white scapular. Vittorio did not conceal his part in the tragedy, nor his lack of remorse for seeking his just revenge. Bruno did not address this but said he was sure Gilda had remained a child of God and, therefore, he would arrange for a quiet burial in land the abbot had set aside for his use. He gave the distraught father a sleeping draught, took him to the guest quarters, and told him to rest until that evening while the sisters prepared Gilda’s body for burial.

That night, after Compline, Bruno read an abbreviated service for burial of the dead, and he and Vittorio buried Gilda near the garden at the rear of the monastery. They lingered awhile before returning to their quarters. Vittorio listened to the night creatures scurrying among the vegetables and breathed the aroma from the flowers lining the beds. The night wind cooled his skin, and he watched it clear the clouds from in front of the full moon. He felt his friend stir beside him and heard him cough in that nervous way he had before saying things he wished it were not necessary

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to articulate.

“There is the matter of your mortal sin in hiring Sparafucile to assassinate the Duke,” he said. “My God, my friend, despite his depravity, he was your employer and is the leader of his people.

I cannot understand how you could allow yourself to contribute in this way to the murder of another human being—especially of your duke.”

“Nor can I,” said Vittorio, thinking that this was the only answer that his friend could accept and getting up to take his leave.

As he was telling his friend that he would leave the next morning to travel to the south and west where perhaps he could find some solace in different surroundings, he crushed a dark green dung beetle under his boot.

“Our order has communities in many cities,” said his friend, placing his arm over his shoulder. “I will give you letters of introduction to use on your travels. Perhaps the brothers in our other houses will find better ways than I to help you find the means to your salvation.”

“You have been more than kind,” said Vittorio, looking down and thinking that he had about as much chance for salvation as the unfortunate dung beetle. He watched the disruption in the soft dirt next to his boot as the insect, which had been partially protected by its sclerotic exoskeleton, limped away toward the relative safety of the garden.

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“I will do my best to become worthy of your friendship,” he said.

“May God go with you,” said Bruno.

“And with you,” said Vittorio, wondering again, if Bruno’s God existed and whether He cared what happened to the feces eating scarabs of the world.

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Youth and Vitality Lillie A. Lindsay

Next month, I say goodbye to the twins, I first met the girls at age 12, At the time, they were in training, They were a pair.

The girls and I had so much fun together, We went through so many milestones together, During the most important times of my life, My girls were there.

A spray of cologne, They did not come out that often, When they were there, You couldn’t help but notice.

My girls and I had future plans, Together we would satisfy a nation, A nation that thirsted for youth and vitality, My girls delivered.

We had so much fun together, Throughout all this time, There was never jealousy,

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All for one and one for all.

We were a pair!

Until…

Until one day I looked deep into the mirror, Twin one was looking down on the floor, Twin two just kept looking around the room,….

Paranoia was in her eye.

Twin two said, “You should get rid of Twin one, Twin one is the problem, I have done nothing less than bring you great joy.”

Twin one woke up, “What is she trying to say about me, She whispered….

You know she’s got problems too.”

What is wrong with this picture, So I took a picture that went deeper than deep, The kind of depth which swings like a magnet from pole to pole, MRI! So… next month I say goodbye to the twins, You see they were a pair, All for one, and one for all, Youth and vitality will again be restored.

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My Life Song Lisa Vandiver

The Sky is blue The grass is green and I lie on my back in between dreaming of tomorrow thinking of yesterdays gone by I do have regrets yet I still have dreams for bright tomorrows absence of sorrows So what is a life without regrets It has a hand in creating who you are And what is a life without dreams for dreams is what motivates us to move, to dance, and to plan I will not be one to sit on the sideline as life goes along I want to write my lifesong

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And when I am at life’s end I hope that others will say of me I lived life as it was meant to be free

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Memory

Michael Abolafia The forest was a sun-kissed altar, a mossy censer in a glassless cathedral with a vaulted malachite ceiling.

The girl, a rain-tinted olive grove.

The leaves, they were ever-falling like great myths and parchment dreams, and they were from sixteen forty six.

The triptych that half-dissolved into and out of her heady head, a foreign arabesque.

The sunlight filtered through the trees enshrouding her an elfin whisper through the forest of a million fabled beasts.

And in her green book, the lass scribbled,

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like a ghost: the melody of memory, the Eleusinian Mysteries, the pattern of the intricately-traced leaves that float serenely; like scents of jasmine, myrrh, and sink, at once, becoming things that were.

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Contributors Phyllis Anne Duncan is a retired public servant with more than thirty years of credited and uncredited non-fiction work in the area of aviation safety and security. Her work has appeared in FAA Aviation News Magazine (now FAA Safety Briefing), Professional Pilot, and Aviation for Women, and in internal Federal Aviation Administration and Department of Transportation publications. She was the editor of FAA Aviation News for eleven years after working as a reporter there for seven. As a result of an honorable mention in a short story contest a decade ago, she received from the contest sponsor a publishing contract from iUniverse and published a collection of short stories, Rarely Well-Behaved. End Times, which is Book One of a trilogy on modern domestic terrorism entitled, A Perfect Hatred, was a semi-finalist in the James River Writers Best Unpublished Novel Contest in 2011. Her current non-fiction includes articles and blog posts for Transition Voice (an e-magazine on peak oil and transition in a post-fossil fuel world), Lindsay’s List (conservation tips for women), and her own current events blog, Unexpected Paths. She has studied writing under Sean Ennis at the Gotham Writers Workshop and Clifford Garstang at Writers.com/Writers on the Net. Kristy Feltenberger Gillespie graduated from the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown with a Bachelor’s of Science degree in Psychology and a minor in English Literature. She graduated from Marymount University in Arlington, VA with a Master’s in School Counseling. She is employed as a full time middle school counselor and works part time at a winery in Northern VA. Her short stories are published in Backroads Literary Magazine and The Meadowland Review. The next issue of SubtleTea will feature one of her poems.

Steven Terrill is a 21 year old man child, living in Waynesburg PA with his Steffani and the Rigby. After failed attempts at making millions quick, he works as a Pizza Cook and studies both Psychology and Creative Writing at Waynesburg University.His mother is also a Ghost Buster.

Richard Sutton was born of the Golden Gate bridge on a windy day in 1952. He’s learned, like the boy in his story, that getting used to wearing

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lots of different hats makes it easier to cope. From ex-commune hippie to adman in New York to small business owner and Indian Trader, to novelist... it’s been a long, strange trip. He hopes his stories entertain and maybe even raise a smile or two.

Mary O’neil is an Idahoan since 1993, but raised in Huntington Beach, CA. Many things to many people, but always true to herself. She is a proud parent, recent grandparent, army veteran, indie author, and eternal optimist. http://mtoneil2011.blogspot.com/ Robert Turner MD’s work has appeared in a variety of medical publications. His short fiction has been published in: “eFiction”, “Dead Mule”, “CC&D”, “The Copperfield Review” and “Muscadine Lines”. He lives with his wife in West Palm Beach, Florida, where he is at work on “Rigoletto’s Renaissance”, his first novel.

Lisa Vandiver is an author of fiction. She writes short stories and poems as well as novels. She has two novels at Smashwords and other sites. She has been writing professionally for five years, but has enjoyed writing her whole life.

Michael J. Abolafia has been scribbling strange sonnets and inscriptions since ‘nam, (or the age of six.) Now sixteen, he studies Folklore as a full time student at Miskatonic U, nursing a love of the weird, wintry and wraithlike.

A resident of New Jersey, he has known his share of that which is maddeningly misshapen and monstrous; he currently spends his recreation rendering parchment (or the world wide web) his conduit for the long lost (love) craft of grotesque storytelling. His work has been published in the Edison Literary Review, the Our Town Newspaper, and a flash-fiction story of his is forthcoming from Eschatology, the journal of apocalyptic flash-fiction.

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Book Reviews Helper12 by Jack Blaine Reviewed by Essie Holton When an author asks me to review his or her book, generally I get a description of the story. By the time I sit down to read the book, I usually have no idea what the premise is, unless the title gives it away. Sometimes this adds a little more excitement to my story reading and sometimes this confuses me. In the case of Helper12, I was confused. I thought I was fairly certain what this book was about, and in part I was, but there was a bigger picture that changed the genre of the book in my eyes.

Helper12 is set in a world where only the rich have control of their own lives. All others are tracked as infants into the jobs that they will do for the rest of their lives. The Helpers, as they are called, have no names, only numbers. They have no families, only the Breeder who gives birth to them, the Baby Helpers who care for them, and the Trainers who teach them. Helpers aren’t allowed to ever start families of their own and aren’t allowed to live outside of the complexes where their every move is digitally monitored.

In the beginning of the book, a baby helper, Helper12, is intro-

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duced. She cares for the babies from the time they are born until they are tracked at 6 months old. It is a sad description of how babies are cared for. No one loves them except for the baby helpers, and after they leave for tracking, the baby helpers never see them again. There are some babies who don’t make it that far. Some are deemed as unuseful to society and are euthanized.

Helper12 is getting ready for the end of her shift at the hospital when the director comes into the ward with a woman and her son.

Helper12 is amazed and horrified all at once. She has never seen a family unit before. The woman hasn’t been sanitized and wants to hold a baby. One baby in particular, baby Jobee, as Helper12 calls him. The director allows this, and Helper12 is left helpless.

Through their conversation, Helper12 discovers that this woman’s intention is to buy the baby boy whom she is holding. To her horror, Helper12 finds herself being sold to this woman and her husband as a nanny. She has no choice but to go.

Helper12 is distraught and doesn’t trust Mr. and Mrs. Sloan or their older son Thomas. She sees no way out. After arriving, she tries to get to know the other Helper in the house but is met with distrust and aggression at every turn.

Finally, the Sloans go away on a three week anniversary vacation, and Helper12 feels like she can breathe. Complications arise when Thomas returns home and demands that she and the baby spend time with him so that he can get to know his little brother.

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Helper12 doesn’t know what to do about this situation, and when she leaves the house with Thomas the first time, she is certain that nothing good can come of the outing.

I was not expecting what I got when I sat down with Helper12.

Although surprised, I was not disappointed. In my eyes, a good story is a good story, and Jack Blaine gave us just that.

I felt like I got to know the characters in the short time that I was “with” them. I found myself cheering for them and thinking about them even when I wasn’t sitting down reading the book.

Long after the story concluded, I thought about the characters and what they would be doing after the story’s end.

The book’s ending was somewhat unexpected. I could see where it was going, but as it got there, I was surprised by a few of the details. I love being surprised by endings. There is nothing worse than an overly predictable ending to a story.

Sometimes, endings are rushed, thrown together to close a story, and incomplete in their urgency. Helper12 was none of these things. It was a continuation of the story that led to an ending that finished the story. It wasn’t a separate piece the author attached because it was time to end the story. A good ending is seemly hard to come by. Blaine worked hard to give us that ending.

There are few discrepancies in the novel that were a minor irritation during reading, but if you could get past them, then the book worked well enough. In one instance, Baby Helpers are said

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to care for babies until they are tracked at six months old. Later in the story, Helper12 explains that she is only trained to take care of an infant to age 4 months. I didn’t get the feeling that she was being deceptive to simply get out of the house to gather more information, and the author didn’t suggest as much. It appears to simply be an oversight by the author.

The author also left a minor plotline completely open and feeling a little empty. Helper12 broke the rules. She loved to draw.

She would save paper from work and bring it home to draw on.

She even had to go through illegal channels to obtain pencils to draw with. When Helper12 goes to live with the Sloans, she brings her last 3 drawings with her. Thomas later discovers her passion and Helper12 is terrified that he will turn her in. I wanted to see some real danger come from this plot line, but it didn’t develop into anything sinister. Of course, I didn’t want Thomas to betray Helper12, but the author went to great lengths to describe the severity of continuing with this activity, yet, the reader never got to feel the terror that Helper12 felt.

Overall, a good read, especially for those of you who like alternate realities but not fantasy. This one won’t disappoint.

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Break Room Anthology: Mystery and Horror Stories by M.T. O’Neil Reviewed by Essie Holton I’ve discovered a sure-fire way to get a book bumped to the top of my to-be-read list. Send me a hard copy of the book. Oh, and it helps if it is written well, otherwise, I may put it down and forget about it for a while. At any rate, I love getting books in the mail, so much cooler than getting a file emailed to me. When I open the packages, my two year old likes to look at them, flip through the pages, and then “keep them safe” for me.

I got Break Room Anthology: Mystery and Horror Stories and began reading right away. I finished it in only a few days. I’m not sure that I would classify these stories as horror, but my definition of horror may be too narrow. They are more like stories with horrible endings. I don’t mean that the author did a bad job with the ending, in fact, I love the way the endings were never overly explained. They didn’t seem to be under explained either, which in my opinion, is a difficult task. The actions of the characters, or the circumstances of the endings, were just crazy. I was actually horrified at what some of these characters did and got away with.

Stories with a twist ending.

My biggest complaint with the book was the author’s use of commas. Commas aren’t needed before every use of a conjunction.

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Overused commas, fortunately, don’t typically kill a book for me.

(Underused commas, however, can kill a book because they can make sentences unreadable.)

The first story in the book is written from the point of view of a child. Probably an elementary school aged child. Poor, too. The author does an excellent job capturing the voice of an underprivileged child in about second or third grade. Having worked with kids in this age group, and socioeconomic status, it was frightening.

I could picture some of my former students concocting a plan similar to this child’s, even if they would never follow through with it.

The author does a good job throughout the twenty five stories with the characters’ voices. I never went from one story to another confused; it was so clear that someone else was doing the telling.

Each character had his or her own personality, his or her own voice. (Another author who did this well was Monique Mensah in Who is He to You.) My personal favorite story was about a grieving husband who is a suspect in his wife’s death. It is clear to the police that she had been poisoned with cyanide, but no one seems to know where it came from. By the end of the story, the husband is cleared, the death ruled an accident, but the reader is fully aware of who the killer is. I can generally guess where an author is going with their mystery ending before the grande finale, but this one got me. I had no idea, and that pleased me.

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Look for Break Room Anthology: Mystery and Horror Stories and M.T. O’Neil’s next short story collection which is coming out soon. I know I’ll be asking her for a free, review copy.

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Night Machines by Kia Heavey Reviewed by Essie Holton Night Machines is another great indie novel. I received this book in the mail, and it came with a few other goodies which I got fairly excited about. First thing I noticed was an Anadreme pill bottle with little blue pills in it. Of course, they were blue sugar candies, but I will admit, I was caught off guard. There was also a CD and a Night Machines bookmark. Excellent attention grabber.

The best way to grab my attention, however, is to write a good book that is well edited and proofed. Kia Heavey managed to get my attention on all fronts.

Night Machines tells a story about Maggie, a wife and mother of two small children. Her husband Rowan is a police detective who works long hours and, in the beginning of the book, becomes emotionally distant with the onset of a new, horrific case that he is working. His emotional distance increases until he is rarely home, and when he is home, he is also physically distant from his family.

Maggie begins a new job at the start of the book. When she goes to interview at a large pharmaceutical company, she feels completely out of place. Upon meeting the founder and president, she is surprised to learn that she has a connection with him that she barely remembers.

As time goes on, Maggie’s relationship with her husband con-

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tinues to deteriorate. While sleeping and dreaming vividly, Maggie conjures up a romantic scene with a man from the office. Upon awakening, Maggie decides that a little fantasy romance can’t hurt anyone or anything. Especially since no one needs to know the details of Maggie’s dreams…or do they?

As her fantasy world grows larger, Maggie’s life begins to spin completely out of control and she doesn’t see a way to stop it.

Night Machines had me hooked. I didn’t want to stop reading at night, and on more than one occasion I stayed up much too late reading only to pick it up again in the morning. When I came to the last 40 pages, I locked myself in my bedroom leaving my husband and children to fend for themselves for a while so I could read the conclusion.

The characters were all likeable and real. I was hard-pressed to dislike even the distant husband because the author showed inside his head, the reasons he was distant, and his true feelings toward his family. Maggie was the most likeable character in the book.

She always wanted to do what was best for her family, especially her children. She took her wedding vows very seriously; she just needed a little romantic outlet, and she chose to do so completely in her head. The man whom Maggie becomes secretly involved with is also likeable, and despite my better judgment, I found myself cheering him on throughout most of the book. Of course, the author doesn’t always show his true colors.

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The plot was well laid out and detailed. There were parts that I thought had been left to chance, such as some of the husband’s police work, but in the end, the author was able to logically and thoroughly explain how each piece of the puzzle fit into her story.

The only hazy point in the plot that I can come up with was how Maggie’s future, secret-romantic interest was able to know that she was going to apply to work for the pharmaceutical company.

Unless he put his plan into action after seeing that she had applied.

If so, that was some amazing planning and follow-through in a short amount of time.

Without giving away the ending, I wished that it had happened a bit more dramatic. The selflessness that was seen was very uncharacteristic. It did provide the story with a neat, clean, completely final ending, but neat and clean isn’t always the best way to end a story. The finality of the ending could have been achieved a number of ways that aligned better with the character’s nature—selfish and crazy.

Kia Heavey didn’t disappoint. Excellent story, well written, and more than decently proofread. She will certainly be on my list of authors to look for in the future.

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