Month: November 2020

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Party of One

 

Mark could hear his phone vibrating on the wooden nightstand, a rattle he was all too familiar with. He rolled over, dismissed his alarm, and laid in the silence of his bedroom. His day began. He rolled out of his bed, slugged his feet into his slippers, and dragged himself into the bathroom in an effort that reminded him of black-and-white zombie movies. 

Mark pawed the light switch and looked into the mirror, rubbing his eyes. Internally lamenting over why he got out of bed to begin with. He brushed his teeth with the efficacy of a bear who had just come out of hibernation. Up. Down. Up. Down. This continued not until his teeth were actually clean but until Mark believed he had kept at the task long after the average person would normally stop brushing their teeth. He spat the results into the sink, took off his pajamas, and lumbered into the warmth of the shower. 

Five minutes had passed before Mark had even thought about actually washing off the residue accumulated from the day before. He spent those five minutes bemoaning the day ahead. To Mark, his work was not born of passion, but necessity. He worked as a copyeditor for a magazine; wherein, Mark would watch his life waste away as he changed “affects” to “effects,” desperately hoping to be left alone. The pessimist in him spent what seemed like years imagining the ridiculous things his boss would say to him, along with the witty responses he would never actually say to her, provided she would even establish said ridiculous situations to begin with. When he ran out of clever rebuttals, he took a tenth of the time he had already spent showering to actually clean himself, and like a soldier saying goodbye to a loved one before departing to the front lines, Mark turned off the water.

Upon departure from the shower, Mark had but one task left. He took another glance at himself, surprised by how much soap can change the appearance of a human being. After his surprise faded, he unhinged the mirror to reveal the medicine cabinet behind it. He grabbed the orange bottle, stopping immediately. He shook the bottle to a frustrating silence. He muttered all manner of obscenities under his breath before slamming the bottle onto the counter and running a hand through his still-wet hair. 

“Unbelievable,” Mark thought to himself. He had called in a refill for his Invega. Alas a late draft of an urgent project had been e-mailed to him after hours, and he had spent the evening rolling his eyes at typos, forgetting to collect his medicine. With the last dose still in him, Mark drifted into the bedroom, snatched his phone from the charging cable, and with a few taps, pulled up the messenger. 

Of his acquaintances, only three of them knew about Mark’s medicine: his mother, his doctor, and his best friend Ash. Two of them were out of the question to drive him to the pharmacy, which left Ash. Mark tapped out a message as he walked back to the bathroom to retrieve the clothing he had left himself to change into:

Hey Ash, idk if you’re working rn, but if you aren’t, could you give me a ride to the drug store? I forgot my antipsychotics lmao.

The two had known each other since elementary school. Since before Mark’s schizophrenia, or as he remembered saying to Ash after his diagnosis, “Well, actually, it’s a schizoaffective disorder, and that’s worse than schizophrenia, so I’m fucked!” He laughed along with Ash when he said that, but he knew it wasn’t true. They would still play video games and watch baseball together. 

After all, Mark was still himself, he just needed to take his pills, and the longer he went without them, the worse off Mark became. It wasn’t a matter of days, or even hours. Mark had minutes, and when those minutes wore off, it was downhill, fast. 

When Mark sent the message, his heart sunk. He felt his medicine beginning to wear off. The party had begun. 

As if Mark were pierced by the arrow of insanity, he felt his own consciousness bleed out. Like water filling a glass, the bathroom started to brim with the manifestations of his illness. It started with a tapping noise; it always did. The tapping of a nailless, handless finger on a hard surface, like concrete or steel. It tapped rhythmically, in quarter-notes, Mark had observed. He heard it slowly, by his feet. Like someone had placed themselves under the floorboards. Mark fixed his attention to the floor, and it was there the voices began calling. They were partially indistinct; Mark couldn’t actually make out anything they were saying beyond strange words and phrases. Mark’s soundscape was host to an innumerable amount of these disembodied, causeless voices. Far away, for now, but he could hear them encroaching. Mark briefly sympathized with the creature from Frankenstein, being chased by an alien mob of torches and pitchforks. The first thing he heard came from behind him, miles away. He heard a man yelling.

Hey, mister! There’s blood all over you! There’s blood in your hair!

This caused Mark to run a hand once more through his now damp hair, feeling the different clumps that had begun to dry together. He gagged at the texture. 

Ash hadn’t answered that text.

A post-it note lived on the corner of Mark’s laptop. In his handwriting, it read “You only have two hands and ten fingers.” When anyone asked about it, Mark would lie to them. He had an anecdote prepared about the dangers of stressing out over things beyond the control of an individual. It always worked. People would leave the conversation uplifted, sometimes repeating the phrase back to themselves hopefully as they sauntered back to their cubicles. 

The truth of the matter was far more unsettling. 

Mark’s hallucinations were not just auditory. They seeped through his senses, and the most common visual hallucination Mark endured was a sharp change in the appearance of his hands. Being constantly in his peripherals, Mark’s mind would wander, often interpreting something like the typing of a sentence with forty keystrokes to mean that each of Mark’s hands must contain twenty fingers. Sitting at his desk, Mark opened his laptop, logged in, turned on some music to a playlist marked “ambient jazz,” and brought up his e-mail account. In a message to his boss, Mark began typing:

Sorry to report, but there’s been an emergency in my personal life. I will not be able to. . . . 

While writing, Mark had looked down at the keyboard to find the bucket of worms his mind had presented to him: his hands overflowing with writhing fingers. As he looked at them, his stomach swirled in nausea. Combined with the intransient nonsense that had now overtaken his sense of hearing, he wondered. He wondered if this is what others saw him as. He wondered if this was his true self. 

Mark interlocked his hands behind his head, closed his eyes as tight as his face would allow, counted to ten, and recited the mantra on his post-it note. “You only have two hands and ten fingers, God damn it,” he growled. 

He unlocked his hands and brought them back around into his line of sight. They had returned to the state in which he remembered them. He smirked and finished his e-mail. 

Sorry to report, but there’s been an emergency in my personal life, I will not be able to resume working until tomorrow.

Best Regards,
Mark Duppy

Relieved of his responsibility, the only task at hand was getting to the pharmacy to retrieve his Invega. He looked at his calendar. 

“Friday, thank God. Three days to get ’em,” Mark thought to himself. Luckily for him, when he woke up on Saturday morning, his phone was blinking with a missed notification. 

Mark reached his finger-laden hands toward his phone. He repeated his mantra to no avail. 

Hey bud just woke up. Had a 12-12 shift. U good? If not lmk.

Been better. These fuckers are persistent lmao

Bet 

U home or did you go somewhere like last time?

Nah I’m home. 

Everyone else was busy 

There’s no way in hell my mom’s flying in for this shit

haha

Lmao 

Don’t leave the house no matter what anyone or anything says 

Omw

Thanks 

I s2g this isn’t a pattern or anything. 

You know. I’ve been taking them 

I just forgot.

Ik would’ve been able to tell if you stopped. Don’t mention it. 

If u feel real guilty grab some beers for the game

lmao 

For sure dude, I’ll get you back on this one. 

Don’t worry abt it

 

Ash buried his phone into the cupholder of his car, turned on the radio, and pulled out of his driveway. Mark’s apartment was just around the corner.

A coping mechanism Mark employed was to look at a compass and attempt to make out all of the real sounds coming from each direction to keep him grounded. He brought up a picture of a compass through an image search.

The north was easy, straight ahead: his laptop. The music. The song he was listening to was amidst a flute intermission, and the trills of the song spiraled through his ears like a stunt pilot looping his plane. 

The northeast, slightly to the right, the sun leaked in, dripping through the window. Mark was reminded of warmth as he heard the sounds of a fire crackling in the air. He wasn’t sure if it was the warm presence of good against evil or the fires of hell that awaited him, so he chose the more positive outlook. 

To the east, he heard galloping. Like a horse but if its hooves were wet from a run in the rain. The creature galloped from the east, to southeast, to the south, to the southwest, to the south, and finally, back to the southeast until it noticed Mark listening in. Then, it started producing a sound that Mark interpreted as someone chewing meat. The chewing panned across the back of Mark’s head in a similar motion, sweeping from his left ear to his right. Mark listened on, until the beast paused dead south. 

Slowly, it worked its way forward, with the sound of metal scraping in addition to the chewing, as if it were eating a knight in armor, dragging him along as the pair walked down a concrete road. It got closer and closer until Mark screamed, trying desperately not to listen.

Finally, to the last cardinal direction, Mark’s exercise was cut short by a knock on the door. Ash had arrived. Mark grabbed his wallet, put on his shoes, and answered the door to find Ash waiting at the bottom of the stairs.

“Jesus Christ, dude,” Ash said, looking up at Mark’s unkempt hair amongst his uncharacteristically rugged appearance. “Has this been happening all day?” He tried to look at Mark, but his eyes were affixed to something far away. 

“Yeah, like five minutes after I texted you yesterday.”

“We’re on the clock then, huh? Let’s run it,” Ash said, getting into his car. Mark climbed into the passenger’s seat, and by the time he could buckle his seatbelt, the two were on their way to the pharmacy. 

Mark hated traveling while off of his medicine. He would always overestimate the quality of his own imagination. At least in his house, Mark knew where every piece of furniture was, what sound it made, and what shadows it cast. He knew he was alone and could immediately discount any sort of outside character intruding on him. He spent time wondering whether or not anything that was going on was actually real. 

The first and most obvious scenario to him was that everything was indeed real, and he was riding with Ash to pick up his medicine. The second slightly worse scenario was that this particular hallucination started before he left the house, and Mark was sitting somewhere in his bedroom in isolation, but at least Ash could find him if he did show up. The third and worst case scenario was that this hallucination started after he left the house, in which case Mark would now be sitting somewhere outside¾God knows where¾inaccessible to anyone on the outside, for Mark would dismiss them as being a hallucination when in fact they were real, and it was he who was operating outside of reality. 

This thought scared him, and so he went about trying to prove that all was as it seemed. 

“Hey Ash?” 

“Yeah?”

“Are you real?” Ash raised an eyebrow toward Mark.

“Yeah, it’s all good,” Ash reassured him.

“Okay,” Mark began, “but, like, if you weren’t real, you’d tell me you were, right? Like, that’s what someone who isn’t real would say.”

“Well, I dunno, man. You’re in the real world.” 

“What’s something that only you would say? Like, something that I wouldn’t ever think of you saying?”  

“I need to replace my wipers. They’re squeaky,” Ash replied. 

“Really?”

“Yeah,” he said, flicking the lever beside the steering wheel. The car’s windshield wipers scraped across the glass, screeching to be repaired. 

“Huh,” Mark said, with confirmation that the two were really in Ash’s car, driving to the pharmacy. The pair traveled to the sound of the car as Mark marinated in thought, tuning out the indistinct chatter of the voices until they pulled into the parking lot. 

“You need me to go in with you?” Ash asked.

“Nah, I’m good. Thanks, though,” Mark replied, staring ahead toward the door.

“Yep,” Ash said, stepping out of the car to light a cigarette as Mark went inside. The doors slid open, and a voice annunciated through Mark’s ears and into his mind. 

We’re watching you.

Before he could even think to ask what that meant, the voice dipped back into the jungle of voices that had trailed him since this morning. He wandered to the back of the store, covertly trying to figure out if any of the other customers were indeed trying to spy on him. 

Of course, they were not. 

At the back of the store lived the register. He meandered around the area until the cashier spoke to him, as he was the only customer in sight.

“Can I help you, sir?” the young woman inquired. 

“Oh, yeah. Sorry, I’m here to pick up a bottle of Invega?” Mark said, looking down at the register.

“Sure,” the woman replied, scrolling through a spreadsheet, “Duppy?”

“That’s me.” 

“All right,” the cashier said, fishing a bag out from under her counter and placing the bottle inside of it, “That’s gonna be fifteen twenty-eight.”

“Sure thing,” Mark responded, sliding his card through the reader. The woman handed Mark his receipt, and he wandered back out of the store. He figured out if any of the customers had followed him by weaving between aisles that no reasonable person would traverse unless they were specifically following him on his way. Once he doubled back between stationery and contraceptives, Mark confirmed that he was not being spied on and left the store. Finished with his cigarette, Ash had been waiting in the car for his return. 

“Got ’em?” Ash asked.

“Yep,” Mark said, flashing the bag, “Thanks again, by the way.” 

“Really, don’t worry about it, man. It’s like, five minutes,” Ash said, pulling out of the parking lot of the pharmacy. The ride back to Mark’s house was uneventful until Ash pulled into the driveway of his apartment building. 

“If you need anything else, shoot me a text, yeah?” 

“Yeah. Thanks,” Mark said, getting out of the car. Ash rolled down his window.

“Yep, we still good for the game Sunday?” Ash asked.

“Oh yeah, for sure.” Mark nodded. He turned around to face the car, but he avoided looking at Ash once more. He figured if anyone had honestly looked into his eyes, they’d see just how deranged he was and want nothing to do with him. 

“All right, see ya then,” Ash replied, pulling away. Mark went back to his apartment, unmodified from how he had left it. That didn’t stop him from checking every facet of every room to ensure that no unwanted company had made their way into his home. When he knew he was alone, Mark retrieved his pills from the bag, ran the faucet, and, at long last, took his medicine. 

Mark turned to his laptop, resumed the ambient jazz he had been listening to, and laid in his bed. As he listened, he could feel his sanity starting to breathe once more. The voices retreated, becoming quieter and quieter, until all that was left was the music. With an outstretched hand, Mark shut his laptop, and even the music had ceased. 

He laid in the silence he took for granted mere hours ago, and he let it wash over him like the ocean.

 _______________________

Gregory Kucera is a fiction writer who graduated from Columbia College Chicago in 2020. This is his first published work. 

 

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Wore Me Out

 

Colin has his headphones in and his eyes fixed on his phone, but he still notices the instant Natalie crosses into the terminal. She shows up for their 6 a.m. flight in sweats she’s probably had since college, hair piled in a lump, more on one side of her head than the other. Yesterday’s mascara is still under her eyes. Colin asks her if Kenny gave her a ride, and Natalie says she took a cab.

He passes her his sunglasses like dawn won’t be occurring when they take off hours from now, but it’s the first time she smiles. There’s seven of them from Sales on the trip, something about making quotas or finding new lines of clients, he doesn’t know. He probably spent most of that meeting zoning out.

They’re going to Utah, like Utah is a place that people go.

He hadn’t been to bed, afraid he’d sleep through the 3:47 a.m.  alarm. He wants a Cinnabon and some vodka and whatever other bad choices the airport can provide him. He yawns, rubbing at his chin, and wishing he’d shaved.

They move through security like the living dead, like cattle, like things that stumble slack-jawed toward a destination. Except for Cynthia, who came in a full business suit, complete with stockings and a fancy brand of heels he doesn’t know the name of. She is gunning for a promotion, which is stupid since no one on this trip has the authority to make a decision about that. Natalie drags her duffel behind her like it has wheels, even though it doesn’t. He almost offers to carry it, but it’s too early and too late for him to know if TSA counts that as someone else messing with your bags.

Colin doesn’t want to go to this conference he knows nothing about, but that makes sense. Colin doesn’t want to do anything related to work. He just wants to get paid and stretch his vacation days, but here he is with his boarding pass and his photo ID, en route anyway.

He watches Natalie reach into her pockets ahead of him, pull out a coin purse with her keys attached, a pack of gum, and a crumpled Kleenex that she put back into her pocket.

The woman wearing latex gloves motions her forward, then makes her put the sunglasses in the bin with all the rest of her crap. She obliges, but Colin can tell it annoys her as well. She puts them on again immediately post-metal detector before she even picks up her clogs.

Their gate is the farthest one from the two-seat bench provided for an entire airport to sit and put their shoes back on. And the whole way he wonders if their pilot’s slept at all, or if he, like Colin, just figured there probably wasn’t a point.

When they arrive at their appointed gate’s selection of uncomfortable chairs that are too small and always have parts that poke you in places that don’t need to be poked, Natalie curls up in one like a pill bug you find underneath a rock. She pulls her hood down, so all he can see is her mouth.

Colin stares at her lips from across the aisle, going fugue, until the stewardess announces forty-six minutes later that their rows can start boarding. He nudges at her calf with the toe of his still untied sneaker, and she sighs, moans, and begs him for five more minutes.

Calls him Kenny.

 

He wakes up bleary-eyed when they’re asked to return their tray tables and seats, even though he doesn’t even recall hearing they were allowed to move them in the first place. The plane descends, and he jumps slightly when they touch the ground, as though it’s unexpected.

Up a row, by the aisle, Natalie’s stretching her arms over her head, elbows pointing wide, and he can almost feel the pops of air escaping from his own joints.

Her dark hair has come loose, and she looks about nineteen in a hoodie from her alma mater. Colin watches her until the guy next to him clears his throat for a second time, obviously anxious to wrestle his carry-on from the overhead compartment.

She waits for him at the end of the tunnel and makes him promise to sit next to her in the van so she doesn’t wind up getting stuck with Cynthia.

They spend the ride whispering about how Salt Lake City is all mountains and homeless people. Her breath smells like peppermint.

 

He’s going to have to wear a name tag. Like, honestly, he’s putting on a tie so that people can ask him, “Oh, Colin with one L?” while looking right at it on his shirt pocket. It’s ridiculous.

His watch still says it’s 11:34 a.m., but he’s pretty sure he’s got time before the Meet and Greet Mixer Breakfast that’ll include all crappy pastries and weak coffee. 

They’re staying at a Marriott across from the Convention Center that seems to have accepted a challenge to use as many prints as possible in their design. The carpet doesn’t match the curtains, neither of which match either of the chairs. It’s vines and geometrics and a jumbled mess of patterns and colors. The tie he’s packed is blue and somehow clashes with everything. With one last pull still needed to achieve a crooked half Windsor, he hears a knock on the door.

Natalie’s standing there in the hallway in the black dress pants she wears almost every day and a button-down with stripes so thin they look like they were drawn on with a pencil. She looks indifferent, her face the female mirror to his. Maybe when they had started together three years ago, they were excited. To be twenty-two with that many personal days and a company phone had seemed like everything Colin couldn’t wait to get to while sitting in Corporate Finance 201 and every marketing lecture. 

It got old around the time his college girlfriend dumped him, and Natalie started dating Kenny.  He went on job interviews for better positions, but that never went anywhere. So basically, it became fully obvious that this was, in fact, his life and not just part of its ongoing trajectory.

And, yes, he recognized he should have hooked up with Natalie when he had the chance. But she’s the kind of pretty that takes a while to notice. Which he likes, he realizes, more than those girls who are conventionally good-looking but kind of shit about following up on dating apps. Her eyes are a little too big, and her upper lip can nearly disappear if she smiles wide enough, not that Colin really has to deal with that all that often in their office. She’s got great tits, even in this tragic work shirt.

He thinks rapid-fire about her in his room⎯on the bed⎯the taste of sweat on her hip, even though she hasn’t moved from leaning against the door frame.

On the nightstand, his phone buzzes, and he goes to grab it while Natalie reminds him they’re going to have to sit near the front if he doesn’t hurry up.

It’s from Casey, a text, Hope u landed ok. The office is quiet without u =). She wants them to be something serious so badly that even being the type of guy that he is won’t discourage her. It’s easy to picture her sitting at her makeshift desk near reception, their little business school intern. He and Casey aren’t really a thing, unless sleeping with her a handful of times counts as a thing. She wears dresses that are probably too short to be work appropriate, and that’s mostly why Colin’s going to respond. But Natalie calls his name, and he just slips the phone into his pocket, grabs his keycard off the dresser, and heads for the door.

 

All he wanted while they were holed up in a conference room, on chairs that were somehow worse than those at the airport, was to fall asleep, facedown, directly on top of his bed’s comforter—the only white thing in the entire room.

But after an entire day of tuning out generic PowerPoints by watching Natalie doodle in the margins of her agenda, he’s too tired to fall asleep. All Colin can think about is how someone was paid today to explain to them how to use hashtags on Twitter. Plus, the room isn’t the right temperature, and he can hear the TV from next door through the walls. He’s on his seventh wind and just waiting for it to break.

So he treats himself to a drink at the hotel bar, not bothering to change out of his t-shirt and basketball shorts. Maybe it will mellow him out, turn off his brain and shut his eyes.

One beer has turned into two and a half when he notices Natalie coming through the lobby in a yellow dress he’s never seen before. Not that it’s the kind of thing you’d wear to a soulless office to make phone calls. Her hair is in a thick braid that reminds him of loaves of bread at a bakery.

He calls out her name, too loud, so other people turn to stare at him, but she looks, and that’s all that matters. 

She comes to sit next to him in her dress the color of scrambled eggs fresh out of the pan, dandelion smudges, and soft baby chicks. Settles right on the barstool and makes him guess how many points of interest she walked past without going inside.

“I’m the worst kind of traveler,” she informs him before asking the bartender for a Jack and Diet Coke, easy on the ice. “I just want everything to be like home.”

The Sam Adams he’s had is probably why he asks her to tell him about home. What are the things that she likes about it, a question he never would have asked her in their elevator or breakroom.

Natalie plays with the straw in her drink once it’s placed in front of her, disrupting the carbonation, talking about her sister and this place she gets really good chai and one window in her apartment that she likes to look out of and feel introspective.

She makes him come up with something to follow that, and laughs when he says he likes knowing what number all of his favorite stations are on TV.

The conversation goes on as their drinks get lower and warmer in their glasses. Colin keeps bumping their knees and brushing her arm, touching her without meaning to⎯animal magnetism. Her lipstick is wearing off, so her mouth looks more like it did at 5 a.m., and that was still today. That time that seems so long ago like another person must have lived it.

Her phone chirps in her purse, and he fantasizes her turning it off, ignoring it, keeping all her attention focused on him. But she pulls it out instead and smiles. Differently than she did at the airport. Differently than she ever smiles at him.

“Kenny?” he asks, and she nods, typing out a reply.

He thinks about how he still hasn’t even told Casey he landed.

“What’s the deal with you two anyway?” even though he doesn’t want to know. Just wants to pick at his feelings like a scab.

“What’s the deal with me and my boyfriend of two years? I love him, you dummy,” she says, still clicking out a message.

Colin wonders if he’s ever been in love with anyone. How he probably should have been by now, or at least known definitively that it was happening. 

“Why didn’t he bring you to the airport this morning?” he asks, picturing Kenny with his too-curly hair still passed out in bed while she quietly carried her stuff out to a cab.

“It was so early, Colin,” and he thinks about how he would have gotten up to take Natalie to the airport like it’s something that’s actually true. He probably wouldn’t even remember that Casey had a flight if she mentioned it.

He wants to stop interrogating her, but not enough apparently. “Does he love you? You said you love him, but does he love you?”

She places her cell down on the bar and twists her body to look at him more fully, and he feels his shoulders tensing up. “I’m pretty sure he does.” She sounds so confident, even though there’s nothing confirmed by what she said. 

And then she puts her hand on his, the first time all day she’s been the one to initiate the contact, and it’s terrible in its insignificance. More terrible than the way she looked in his sunglasses, or her whispered breath against his ear, or the way right now, when he has an impulse to count the birthmarks on her collarbone. 

“Do you need to talk about something?” she asks, like she’s his mom, or a guidance counselor. “Is something going on with Casey?”

He laughs a laugh that’s more a scoff than anything else and tells her he just wants to finish his drink.

This is only happening because he’s drained and a little in the bag. It has nothing to do with the way he gets up most mornings and looks at himself in the mirror to shave only to think, Who the fuck is this asshole? Which is why he comes in sometimes with a five o’clock shadow so thick, it reminds him of someone on their way to rock bottom and how that’s worse than having to look in the mirror in the first place. 

Nothing’s wrong in his life, but nothing’s all that right either.

If he didn’t run into her, he would have walked past her room at least once tonight, too nervous to knock, except still thinking everything that’s happened between them was a sign that he probably should summon the courage. He’s a coward on top of everything.

But, he offers to pay her tab, and she obliges⎯a small victory.

Colin wants to put his hand on the small of her back, imagines the sensation as warm and yellow as melting butter against his palm. Use that hand to guide someone else’s girlfriend back to his room, so she can pet his hair to wake him up the next morning. So she will perch on the edge of a tub to watch him shave and kiss him with kisses that feel like salves to anything that’s ever ailed him. Let that motion, that initiated pressure against her spine, turn him into somebody different, even if it’s just for a little while. 

There’s no Colin with one or two L’s. There’s no Colin at all.

They’re the only ones in the elevator, and she leans against one of the walls with her eyes closed, talking about how tired she is, how she just wants to take off her shoes and she can’t believe in less than a day she’ll be back on a plane, and can he believe it?

He nods like she can see him, and just lets her ramble.

At her door, she says she’ll see him tomorrow while she’s already inside, her body mostly a sliver. “Thanks for the drink.”

“No problem,” leads to him only seeing the tendons of her forearm where it’s getting ready to secure the safety latch, and so he says her name to get a few more seconds. Maybe more than that. The power of liquid confidence.

“Yeah?”

“Not going to invite me in for awhile?”

She looks exasperated, like his mom used to look when he’d remind her he needed a newspaper to do his homework with⎯which should be grosser than it is. “I’m exhausted. You’re not exhausted?”

“What’s a half-hour more going to do at this point?” He grins in the way Casey has told him can convince her to do anything, like get her off under a blanket while her roommate watched Twister with them on the other side of the living room.

Natalie opens the door wider, an invitation that he already knows he’s going to push. “You’re a bad influence, Colin. This is exactly why I have to get a snack from the vending machine every day at 3:30 p.m. now.” 

Stepping in, he notices first the clothes strewn all around, a record of everything he’s seen her wear today. It’s not hard to want to add the yellow dress to the collection. Maybe right there, beside the rumpled dress pants. She slips off her shoes with her opposite toes.

“I can’t help it that I make good suggestions.” Colin flops himself on the bed, which doesn’t smell like her. Yet. He presses his face into the comforter, imagining that almost-cookie scent of Natalie’s.

She crosses over to the bay of windows, the breeze from the air conditioner stirring the skirts of her dress slightly. She’s actually opened the curtains in her room, the city lit up warm with the temple glowing like a beacon. Somewhere beyond that, which he can’t really see, those mountains are snowcapped and intimidating. The city’s so open and so closed in, somehow at the same time.

Natalie turns to look at him, her fingers jangling the chain. “They never wash those things, you know. It’s probably covered in jizz.”

He can feel his dick jump against the mattress. “So, you won’t come sit by me?”

“Colin.”

He tries to make himself seem innocent. “What? Cause it’s a bed? You can’t just sit on a bed with me?”

“I don’t think Kenny would like it,” Natalie says, even though she’s already on her way to moving closer. “Or Casey.”

“How is this any different than when we sit in the lounge at work?”

“You know why it’s different,” and it’s thrilling that this is happening, whatever it is that’s happening right now.

“I’m going to turn on the TV, okay?” Colin stretches to grab for the remote.

Natalie says, “But you don’t even know the channels here,” which means she was really listening to him down at the bar. She gets close enough to fold the comforter back, finally sitting on the sheets at the corner of the bed.

Colin pokes his head up over the ridge she’s made to see how upright she’s holding herself. “What do you want to watch?”

“We shouldn’t be doing this.”

He asks her, “Do you want me to go?” only because he’s pretty sure she’s not going to make him leave.

“I don’t know.” He watches her, taut. “No. But put on HGTV.”

It’s basic and annoying, but she wants it, so he doesn’t even argue and just presses the channel arrow on the remote. Maybe it’ll be something they’ll recollect upon when they’re furnishing their first place together, so he allows it. The couple is trying to decide which house they’re going to buy for their growing family, and every single place looks terrible. But Natalie starts to undo her dark hair, fingers combing through it, looking somewhat wild. She leans back too, her spine relaxing, and when the next episode starts, Colin doesn’t even know where the family chose to live because he’s been so focused on her.

A realtor droning in the background, he reaches out to touch her hair, stark against the white of the bedding. It’s soft. “I wanted to kiss you at Christmas.”

“What?”

“After the holiday party. When it was snowing.” The two of them standing out in it while Kenny went to get the car. Colin had had too much to drink, and every Uber he tried to call kept dropping him, while the snowflakes were getting caught in the fancy curls Natalie had set into her hair. Cheeks pink. It almost happened.

She pulls away, the strands tugging out of his fingers. “I think you should go.”

“Come on, Natalie. I was just being honest.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she says, getting off the bed and walking away from him. Like he’s some kind of feral dog she can’t turn her back on. “This was a mistake.”

“Why, though?” He sits up. “Because you know what I know? There’s something here. And I think you know there’s something here.” Because he can’t be the only one. There’s no way, with all the glances and conversations and the fact that he is here right now in this hotel room, that she hasn’t considered this.

“I’m with Kenny.”

“Again though, Natalie, why? It doesn’t make sense to me.”

“It doesn’t have to make sense to you!” And then she’s swinging the door open, and Colin knows the moment is well and truly broken but still can’t stop himself.

Heading toward her, he desperately pleads, “Tell me you at least think about it, Nat. Come on, tell me it’s not just me,” because that’s how she makes him feel. Desperate. He needs to hear her confirm it, even though his evidence of whispers and looks feels like enough to label his hypothesis as accurate. Friends don’t glance at one another the way they glance at each other. Acquaintances don’t share secrets the same way people who’ve thought about one another naked do.

“Goodnight, Colin,” she says firmly, and it makes him sigh and head back into the hallway.

The only noise is the door mechanism locking him out. 

Part of him still wants to knock.

But he goes back to his room to stare at the ceiling and jack off to the mental image of her waking up next to him, all loose hair and parted mouth. In the hangover of it, cum drying on his fingertips and a t-shirt he’s probably going to leave behind on purpose, the guilty piece of him wonders what it’s like to be a decent person. To not hit on someone else’s girlfriend or do things like decide to finally text Casey back the very untrue: I wish you were here.

He flicks back to the list of messages, and Natalie’s is there from last night. You’re literally the only way I’m going to get through this trip. He wants to delete it. The text and her contact information and her, if he could. But he just turns off the screen with his thumb.

Colin lies in the dark and already knows he’s not going to shave tomorrow.

_____________________

Danielle Hirschhorn started writing on storybook paper in Brooklyn, New York. She is currently working as an Elementary Media Specialist while completing her thesis work at Columbia College Chicago. Hair Trigger contains her first two publications.

 

 

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A Strange Sort of Company

 

I was shocked by how much had changed. The road was the same, at least insofar as the curves and cross streets, but it had been repaved. I missed the rumble of tires on broken asphalt, the low growl of my engine choking on cheap gas. Between the new tread on the rental car and the smooth, black surface of the road, the whole thing felt like a record without the grooves; the music of it was gone.

Shopping centers had sprung up by the exits, bright and clean and empty, spilling white light into the same dark sky I’d often glimpsed through my father’s old telescope, his hand guiding mine, his voice whispering the names of constellations. 

“That’s Orion,” he’d say. “See the shield, the outline of the hunter? He boasted that he was the best in the world, so Zeus had him killed by a giant scorpion. You know how it goes.” I’d nod, even though they all looked, to me, like clusters of stars.

It was my father’s funeral that had brought me here. I’d known he was dying, but still—you’re never really prepared for the way that phone call hits you. I got off the freeway and made my way along the backroads.

Some of it looked exactly as I remembered. There I was, fishing in the creek behind our synagogue with Andy, leaning against the dusty walls of the movie theatre in line for Fatal Attraction, waking up in my jeans on Jordan’s living room couch, the TV still playing. 

Three identical blue houses still stood along the left side of The Arlington, waiting to be watched from the window of a bus on the way to school. 98.7 still blasted the Christian Rock my sister and I listened to when we wanted to torture our mother. I looked for the Rose Garden just off of Grant Street, but it was gone.

It’s funny how we expect our old corners of the world to be put on hold as we work and shop and buy houses and generally make a mess of things. I found myself fuming at the new and better supermarkets, the repaved roads. People passed laws conserving all sorts of swamps and valleys they deemed sufficiently heavy with history; had no one thought to protect mine?

 

The funeral was nice, I guess. Forty or so people packed themselves into the small synagogue at the top of Spruce Road. I’d spent much of my young life there, and still, I always denied that its teachings would come to inform my worldview. I spoke, briefly, to say that I was grateful for the support, and that I missed my father, and that I loved him.  

After the reception, I swam through the throng of guests, trying to avoid eye contact. The script was always the same. 

Thank you. I’m doing all right. Yes, he was. It is hard, but I’ll be okay. Yes, thank you.

A woman tapped me on the shoulder. “Joel, it’s good to see you. I’m so sorry. How are you holding up?”

“Thank you, it’s good to see you, too. I’m doing all right,” I said. I studied her face. She was entirely unfamiliar to me.

“Your dad was always so kind, I mean, just the sweetest man, really,” she said.

“Yes, he was.”

“And you’re sure you’re all right?”

“Yeah, I’ll be okay,” I said. She paused for a moment, looking at me. She seemed to be waiting for something. Then she smiled. It was a sad little smile, the kind you might give an old man when he complained that the nurse was stealing from him. I brushed away the thought.

“Well, it was great seeing you, and again, I’m just so sorry,” she said finally.

“Yes, you as well, thank you.”

I watched her fade back into the reception before it hit me. The lines by the corner of her eyes, the music of her voice . . . this woman had once been Jenny. Jenny, whose hands had pulled me over the sagging, chain-link fence of the local pool at two o’clock in the morning. Jenny, whose mother made the best lasagna imaginable, whose sense of fashion was so bad you couldn’t help but admire her bravery, and whose lips I had once kissed on a blue sofa by the window of my best friend’s living room.

I wanted to run after her, to tell her I remembered, to ask her how she was. Instead, I slowly made my way across the room, saying yes, and thank you, and he really was, until the courtesies faded into one another, and the people became a mess of moving mouths and reaching hands, and I found myself back in the rental car. 

 

The house was what I’d really been dreading. I hadn’t been back since my wedding, when the yard was full of balloons, and my mother painted the steps like a rainbow. It seemed a shame to give up the memory in favor of sorting through boxes.

I opened the door quickly and stepped inside. It was cleaner than I’d expected, and a little contrived. It looked as though I might have found it tucked between the pages of a realtor’s pamphlet, but I supposed that once he was on his own, my father had finally taken the opportunity to remove the ragged couch and bright posters that had defined so much of my childhood.

I made my way into the study. Even now, entering the space felt mischievous. I waited for my mother to poke her head through the doorway. What are you doing, Jo? You know Dad doesn’t like you to be in here without him.

Most of the stuff was garbage: tax returns and junk mail and textbooks I couldn’t imagine anyone ever wanting to read. I decided to keep my old report cards, but found little else of value.

The rest of the house was mostly bare. I salvaged a few mugs I thought I remembered, and a pillow I’d embroidered for Mother’s Day a million years ago, and continued to look around for something I could hold on to. Where were the photos, the journals, the old calendars? Everything was too new, too unfamiliar. Someone had painted over the initials we’d scratched into the wall beside the fridge. Our old TV had been tossed aside in favor of a flat screen.

I headed back into the study to grab the report cards and noticed a letter on the side of my father’s desk. Finally, I thought, here was something of his I could hold on to. I turned it over. It took me all of two seconds to realize the return address was mine; I had sent him the letter only weeks ago.

And yet, I couldn’t bring myself to put it down. I imagined my dad holding the paper between his fingers, reaching for his glasses. I imagined him doing his best to decipher my handwriting, thinking about what to say, setting the envelope on the corner of his desk. Maybe he was hoping to write back in the morning when the light was better. Maybe he went to the couch to watch the news and forgot all about it.        

I read my own words until my hands started to shake and my eyes felt hot and the letters blurred together, and I sank to the floor, sobbing.

I cried for a while, thinking about his ridiculous status updates on Facebook, the way he always asked about the kids before he asked about me, the way he let them dye what was left of his hair over our summer break, the last time I’d seen him. I thought about his old tweed flat cap, a relic of the time he’d spent in the Lower East Side as a child, the long breaths he took between sentences, the way his hand felt on my shoulder. I thought about the first time he’d held onto me not as a gesture of warmth but to steady himself as we walked down a flight of concrete stairs, how scared it had made me for reasons I couldn’t quite put into words.

What did it matter if the town was no longer small and ragged, if my old friends had changed? He had changed too, long before the pills and nurses. It had been a long time since I’d spent a night chatting with him under the stars. For years, our conversations took place over the phone, our topics ranged from preschool to doctor’s appointments to politics. 

It occurred to me that the man my high school classmates remembered had died long ago, little by little, and each time I’d had a chance to mourn alongside him. I’d cringed as he pulled out the holiday card from the year he forced us into matching sweaters, listened to him sigh as I attempted to spread my full-size sheets across a twin-size bed in an empty dorm room. 

Those losses were gradual, and shared. Most of them had long since been forgotten. I was longing for the man I’d written two weeks ago, the man who was old, and contemplative, and grouchy sometimes. It’s one thing to miss someone you remember. It is quite another to feel that they should still be with you.

I packed the report cards and mugs into a small cardboard box, grabbed the pillow, and headed back to the car.

The road was still too smooth. The sky was still washed out. It didn’t bother me. I knew what I was looking for. I knew it would still be there.

It was a warm day, and the beach was lined with tents and towels. The lake was dotted with the bright colors of children’s swimsuits and life jackets. I took off my shoes, enjoying the warmth of the sand on the bottoms of my feet. There it was, perfectly preserved, a bright splash of color between the aging planks of the closest picnic table. My kids had insisted on pink, spreading the dye across his head, staining his hair. I closed my eyes. That was how I wanted to remember him: sitting in the sun, pink hair dye streaking down his back, watching me, and the kids, and the waves. 

Running my hands over the cracked wood, I felt, for the first time, a closeness that was almost unbearable. I wanted desperately to see him sitting next me, to feel his calloused hand on my shoulder, to hear the rough edges of his voice over the wind. I opened my eyes.

I was alone, of course, and lonely, but it was a loneliness that felt for all the world like a strange sort of company. 

___________________

Asher Witkin is a singer-songwriter from Berkeley, California. While these are his first published pieces of writing, you can find his music wherever you listen to songs; or check out his website at asherwitkin.com.  

 

 

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The Graceless Haze

 

When I was young, I used to want to rip my heart out. Whenever Mother would get angry with me, she would say that I had a “graceless heart”¾a rather morbid insult for a young child. On the days she yelled at me, I used to cry so hard I forgot how to breathe and imagined that I could rip my heart out and grow a new one¾a kinder, redder, more graceful one.

My life on the farm was dull. The same soft creaking of the old house and the same old breeze that blew by was familiar in the worst way¾any twinge of nostalgia was riddled with disdain. The skies surrounding the farm were always the same shade of hazy blue. They never shone that brilliant, ocean-like shade of blue¾there was never any depth. It was always covered by a layer of haze as if I were seeing through the lens of an old film camera. I didn’t know any differently at the time, but I somehow felt the brilliance underneath like it was an invisible force whispering my name and promising me “more, more, more.”

My mother, Isadora, did everything in her power to make sure that I never craved anything other than that hazy blue that seemed to engulf everything around it. I almost never left the cottage that my great-grandfather had built. He’d left the house and the land surrounding it to my mother when he died. I was only a baby.

To my granddaughter, Isadora, he wrote in his will. It was scrawled in his perfect script that stayed immaculate until the day he died. I leave my house and my farm, so she may never want for anything.

My great-grandfather was an adamant farmer. I always remember seeing a photo of him on the wall in the kitchen where he was sitting on a tractor with a smile. He once owned one of the biggest farms in the state, using his acres of land to raise cattle and grow corn. Under my mother’s watch, the farm had dwindled to a mere half-acre of land, a garden, and the big red barn. I was in charge of caring for the animals in the barn (there was a goat, a pig, a cow, and a bunch of chickens), which I hated to no end. My mother refused to enter into the barn for some reason. Gathering eggs into a wicker basket before the sun comes up was certainly not my idea of fun, to my mother’s surprise. She did everything in her power to keep me from wanting more, which is why I was bound to the tiny oasis she’d created¾isolated from the world and its excess.

“Wanting more leads to sin, Florence,” she’d said one day when she was chastising me for asking to eat something else for breakfast. I was tired of the same old scrambled eggs and plain toast. I was thirteen at the time¾of course it was getting old. “Being unthankful is a sin.” Her voice was starting to get louder and louder, the way a train does when it gets closer to you. “Don’t have a graceless heart!”

But no matter how much she yelled at me or punished me, I was still that graceless girl with a graceless heart who didn’t want to eat those freshly scrambled eggs or sit underneath the hazy blue sky. I always found something to long for.

 

Every morning began the same clichéd way¾with the crow of the rooster. That meant I had about an hour before my mom was expecting a basket full of fresh eggs for breakfast. The sun would have just cracked the horizon, slowly turning from a soft pink to the blue I hated so much. The haze, the goddamn haze. It was relentless, or in my mother’s words, graceless. I always tried to get out of bed quietly, as to not disturb my cat who slept at the end of my bed.

I knew something was wrong when the rooster did not crow at daybreak. Rather, I awoke to the sudden jolt and shock of cold air caused by my mother ripping the quilt off of my body. I instinctively tried to yank the covering back, which certainly did not help my case against my already enraged mother. My eyes were still heavy with restless sleep.

“Florence!” she bellowed, eyebrows deeply lowered.

She looked distressed and sounded even more so. Her voice cracked when she uttered my name, and for a moment, I felt sorry for her. Sorry that despite her best efforts, I wasn’t happy. But that moment of tenderness was as fleeting as the spring, and the ever-present gnawing of disdain and resentment came to the forefront of my mind.

“The rooster didn’t crow,” I muttered, tugging at the sleeve of my gingham nightgown. No matter how angry I got, my default seemed to be timidity. I suppose that’s how my mother taught me.

“Get up, now!” she pursed her already thin lips, so they almost disappeared for a moment. “You have twenty minutes. Then, we will discuss repercussions.” She stomped out of my bedroom like a toddler throwing a tantrum. My cat was staring at me with his round blue eyes, confused by the racket. I pet the top of his head making him purr softly.

“Here’s to another day in the oasis,” I whispered. The words tasted bitter at the back of my throat.

 

I trudged my way out to the barn, tripping a few times over the hem of my nightgown. I hadn’t even bothered to change. It was later in the day, so the sky was already that shade of blue. The sun was warm, but the air was cold; almost unseasonably cold for the early fall. Nevertheless, I walked to the barn with my wicker basket in hand.

When I opened the doors to the barn, a rush of cold air hit me. The temperature was about twenty degrees colder than it was outside. I shivered but proceeded. I knew my mother would be expecting me in the next ten minutes. I started with the cow, pouring some feed into her trough.  I had to milk her later since I was under a time constraint. I fed the goat and the pig the same thing and even stopped for a moment to pet them. The air got colder and colder the deeper into the barn I got, and by the time I reached the chicken coops, my entire body was covered in goosebumps. I scanned the area, searching for the rooster that had caused so much trouble. I didn’t see anything except the strange way all the chickens were huddled to one side, clucking wildly. My hand began to tremble, and I clutched the basket so hard I could feel the pattern of the weaving pressing into my hand. I knew it would leave red indents for a few minutes after I loosened my grip. Something wasn’t the same, and I would know, all I knew was the same. The closer and closer I got, the more evident it became that something¾god, I couldn’t put my finger on it¾was very, very wrong. Still I proceeded, stepping over the bales of hay that kept the chickens in that area, to collect the eggs.

One egg in the basket. A gust of wind blew cold air into my eyes. It made them tear up.

Two eggs in the basket. I heard breathing. I looked at the huddle of chickens. I knew that there was no way that an animal would breathe like that.

Three eggs in the basket. I heard chewing—really loud, ill-mannered chewing.

The fourth egg almost made its way to the basket, but before it could find its home among the others, I saw a figure hunched in the corner shoveling something into its mouth.

I dropped the egg and felt the yolk splatter on my ankle. The figure was human-like; I could see the outline of every vertebrae of the spine on its back. I tried not to make any sudden movements, but my breathing was uncontrollable.

The figure whipped its head around, throwing the long mess of tangled black hair in a rainbow motion. It looked up at me with murky eyes that showed signs of them once being blue. Its skin was so pale that it was almost purple; you could see its blood rushing through its body. The head was huge in comparison to the thin, willowy body that it was attached to. Its neck did not seem suited to uphold so much weight. Everything about its body read like a disproportionate drawing done by a child. The arms were just slightly too long, and the legs were a little too short. I stepped back, unable to break eye contact. The figure rose slowly to its feet as if not to startle me.

“You needn’t be afraid,” the monster said. The voice was a woman’s voice with an endless whisper. “My name is Delilah.” Her teeth were sharpened to a point¾every one of them. There was blood on them still, and I could smell the metallic scent wafting out of her open mouth. “I’m returning from a long journey. I must retain my strength before going home.” She circled me. Although she was walking on two legs, something about her gait made it seem like she was floating—flying. Her white dress was ripped and dirty at the ends, but clean on top.

“I can’t help you.” I turned to try to run away, but Delilah swiftly moved in front of me.

“Graceless girl!” she yelled in her whispery voice. She trailed my neck with a long fingernail. “I could slice you open right now.” She pressed her nail just hard enough to draw blood and let it drip onto her nail. She raised the drop to her lips and licked it off. “And my, my, wouldn’t you be delicious?” She cackled at the fear she saw in my eyes. She lowered her hand onto my shoulder. It was even colder than the temperature inside. I tilted my head down to hide my nose from the smell of blood and rotten flesh that continued to flow out of her mouth. Delilah grasped my face in both of her hands and brought it closer to meet hers. Our noses were touching. That scent was all I could smell. “You must help me. And I will make the world shine for you.”

“Wh¾wha¾ what do you need?” I barely squeezed those few words out. Delilah released my face and stepped back.

“Aha, I knew you would find your heart.” She made a noise that sounded like it was supposed to be a laugh but was more like an exasperated wheeze. “I need to feast. For five days. Every day, I need something fresh,” she grinned, exposing her pointy teeth, “to devour.”

She moved her skeletal hands rather theatrically.

I was momentarily mesmerized by the way her fingernails moved in a delayed wave as she gestured. The trickling of the blood from the cut on my chest snapped me out of it. I wiped it with the sleeve of my flannel, watching the deep red disappear among the pattern of the shirt.

“Well, we have a garden. I can bring you something from there.”

Deliah wheezed again. “No, child.” She moved close again. “I need a life!” All of her words were beginning to drag out more. “And I need blood!” She was so close to my ear that her breath made the side of my face burn. “There is always more.”

“Is there?” My gaze was still down, but Delilah raised my chin with the knuckle of her boney pointer finger.

“Un-bow your head, child.” She paused for a moment and took a breath. “I promise you,” she smiled. I wondered how her pointy teeth didn’t cut her lips. My mother used to tell me that one day I would cut mine on my sharp tongue. “There is more.”

I nodded and told her I would return the next day to give her something new to eat. I picked up a few eggs and put them in the basket as Delilah returned to the carcass.

For a moment, I looked forward to the next day. The hazy blue skies did not seem to haunt me.

 

Back at the house, my mother was stewing at the kitchen table. She cooked the eggs spitefully. I don’t know if it was the scent of the eggs or the thought that in only a few days things would go back to the way they always were that made my empty stomach lurch.

“Shall we pray?” my mother asked, already with her hands clasped together and elbows resting on either side of her plate. The steam from the eggs was fogging up her glasses. “Bow your head.” I dropped my neck but kept my eyes open. “Dear Lord,” she sighed. “Blessed be this meal that we are about to partake in. And let Florence remember what your word says¾‘God opposes the proud but shows favor to the humble.’ Forgive her. Amen.” She opened her eyes while her head was still bowed as if to avoid making any eye contact with me.

She chewed every bite of her breakfast slowly while staring at my plate. I stared back at her. I didn’t touch my breakfast, and she said nothing.

 

The first morning I woke up to silence was intoxicating. There was no rooster ringing in my ear singing the tune of rural prison bells. I pulled myself out of bed before the sun even dared to interrupt the stars. My cat, resting along my feet, looked up drowsily at me, his eyes shining through the darkness.

“Another day in the oasis,” I whispered in his direction as I pulled on one of my many long floral dresses that my mother had sewn by hand. I was doing everything as quietly as possible as not to wake my mother in the room across the hall. The thing is, whenever you’re trying to be quiet, everything seems ten times louder. The click of my boots against the hardwood floors sounded like an entire army and the creak of the front door felt like it echoed forever, but when I got outside, everything went silent. Not the sad kind of silence that made you feel alone, but rather the kind that meant you could fill it with whatever you wanted.

            

Delilah was waiting anxiously in the corner where I had found her. I caught a glimpse of the pile of dry bones next to her before she rushed to greet me.

“What shall I eat today?” She swirled around me once, rubbing her hands together ravenously.

I looked around the barn. It was just about feeding time and all the animals were already awake. Some of them wouldn’t be fed but become food for Delilah.

“You can eat the pig.”

Before I could even finish my sentence, Delilah had already made her way over to him. I looked away just before she impaled him, but not in time to cover my ears from the squeals.

 

The third day went the same.

I climbed out of bed before daybreak and headed to the barn to tend to Delilah. On that day, I let her eat the cow. My mother asked me why I didn’t bring any milk for the day.

“I’m tired of milk, Mother,” I said as I sat down to do my schoolwork. “Can’t you go into town so we can have juice or something?”

She did that thing where she tilts her head down and looks at me over her glasses instead of through them.

“Florence,” she sighed. “I pray that you talk to God and cleanse your heart of this ungrateful spirit of yours. I really do.”

I said nothing after that. And she did not speak to me for the rest of the day.

 

On the fourth day, Delilah finished off our animals when she ate the goat. It made me quite sad. He was a beautiful thing, with his black coat and perfectly spiraled horns, but he looked at me with a resolution that was almost comforting. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say he knew what was coming.

“My child,” Delilah began with a mouth full of goat flesh. I had become less squeamish about watching her eat. “What shall I eat tomorrow? On the final day.”

I looked around. I hadn’t thought of that. The barn was nothing but hay and bones at this point. Panic rose in my chest almost instantaneously.

“I¾I¾” I stuttered, trying to catch my breath that had suddenly run away from me. “I have no idea.” My voice trailed off. “There is nothing else.”

“You’re wrong, child.” She raised her head from the carcass only momentarily. “There is always more. You just have to search for it.”

 

I was distracted all day¾the only thing I could think about was Delilah. Every time I remembered that I needed to feed her on the last day, my heart started to race. Things came to a head when I was sitting at the table doing schoolwork my mother had given me for the day.

“Mother,” I began, glancing up from my schoolwork. I had been staring at the same unsolved math problem for the past ten minutes. “There is something I need to speak with you about.”

Whenever I spoke to her, my voice took on a very formal cadence. It wasn’t a conscious choice. I suppose my subconscious just knew that to ensure survival, I had to protect my mother’s idea of me.

My mother looked up from whatever she was crocheting.

“What is it, Florence?” She sighed with an already disappointed tone. She was getting tired of me, I could tell.

“There is something strange going on in the barn,” I was trying to make it seem as minuscule as possible. “Something very, very strange.”

She looked at me, her beady eyes cutting deep even beneath her thick wire glasses.

“And there is nothing more,” I got choked up on my own words. I could feel the tears welling up. “There is nothing more I can do about it.”

I don’t know what I expected from her, honestly. I knew it would not be sympathy or care or anything of that sort. Perhaps more of this shameful indifference she had recently adopted. Anything, but nothing prepared me for rage. She paused.

“Florence, you are testing my patience!” She slammed her crochet needles on the table so hard it made me jump. “Your thanklessness sickens me! You may not say it with your mouth, but you say it with your actions.”

“Mother, there’s something in that barn!” I yelled.  I’d given up on trying to hold back my tears. They tasted bitter. “And I can’t make it go away!”

“Don’t you raise your voice at me!”

“Mom, please, listen!”

“I will not entertain your NONSENSE!”

I gulped.

“I did not raise you to be this way!”

“Mom, I’m sorry.” I was really crying then. My voice was cracking at every inflection. “I really am. I’m sorry that I can’t ever seem to obey the right way, and that I always seem to want more.”

She crossed her arms over her chest.

“I’m sorry! Please, forgive me! But I need you to listen to me!”

I was groveling at this point. There is truly nothing more shameful than having to beg.

“You make it difficult for me to be graceful,” she stood up and abruptly pushed her chair in. “And for that, I do not forgive you.”

She left me at the table, alone. Crying so hard I had to gasp for air.

 

The fifth morning of waking up without the crow of the rooster was not really waking up¾I hadn’t slept at all. The feeling of silence wasn’t as intoxicating anymore¾it was frightening. I stayed up all night trying to think of something for Delilah’s final day. I had considered going out and killing a squirrel. Or just begging her to eat something from the garden. But I wasn’t up to begging anymore.

I must have gotten too lost in my thoughts. The thing that snapped me out of my panic-induced haze was the sound of my mother opening her bedroom door and trudging her way to the bathroom. I whipped my head around toward the window. Sure enough, there were the early signs of daybreak. My heart instantly started to race. I wasn’t sure whether I was going to cry, vomit, or have a heart attack.

I jumped out of bed and began pacing around my room.

“There is nothing more, there is nothing more,” I repeated over and over again in my head. Or at least I thought it was in my head, but apparently, I was saying it out loud because my mother burst through my door. 

“Florence, what in the world are you doing?”

My cat finally awoke from his sleep when she spoke.

I was so panicked¾nothing she said really registered in my brain¾I was just fixated on my cat. His orange fur and blue eyes and the way he still looked a little drowsy and a little confused. My heart sank to my feet when my brain registered my thoughts.

“Florence! Answer me!” my mother yelled. She was no longer hiding her rage.

I ignored her and made my way to the edge of my bed where my cat was. I snatched him into my arms and brushed past my mother toward the door.

“Florence!” she called after me.

Her voice trailed behind me as I broke into a stumbly run, seemingly unable to move my eyes anywhere but forward. I was headed to the barn barefoot against the cold grass.

 

I burst through the doors of the barn just as the sun was beginning to come up. I didn’t even realize how much I was freezing.

“Did you find anything?” Delilah approached so frantically; she was almost running on all fours.

“I couldn’t find anything. There is nothing more!” my voice was shaky. A few tears fell down my cheeks as I clutched my beloved cat to me. “This is all I have left.”

My cat looked curiously in Delilah’s direction. He was just as mesmerized by her fluid motions as I had been on the first day. She moved her hands slowly to watch the cat’s eyes follow her to the left, to the right, and then back again. Suddenly, she closed her hand and lifted her gaze simultaneously. She was glancing, no, glaring, right over my shoulder.

She smiled as she brought her focus back to me.

“Don’t cry, child.” she cooed, wiping my tears with the rough pads of her fingers. Her long fingernails scraped my cheeks.  “There is always more.”

I shook my head and brought my gaze to the ground. “There’s nothing. I’m sorry.”

She placed the back of her hand under my chin and raised my head.

“Florence, my child,” Delilah breathed. “There is always more.” She looked at me with knowingness in her eyes, as if she was trying to send her thoughts rushing through my brain. “There is always more.”

She motioned behind me with one of her skeletal hands. 

There was my mother standing in front of the open doors. The way the early morning light was hitting her, she looked like a shadowy figure. I could only see her silhouette, yet I could imagine her facial expression: a distant stare with flickers of fear. She didn’t dare to move from her place, not to leave or to escape from Delilah’s beckoning. This was the one and only time I witnessed her speechless.

Delilah placed a hand on my bare shoulder.  It wasn’t as cold as it was the first day¾there was a humanlike warmth that permeated my arm. When my own eyes sparkled with understanding, Delilah brushed past me without hesitation.

More, more, MORE, I thought. It wasn’t a quiet thought this time, instead my mind screamed every syllable.

Delilah floated over to where my mother was and circled her once. The hem of her tattered dress followed a few seconds behind. I wish I could have seen my mother’s face. Would I have detested the fear in her eyes or savored it? I suppose I’m lucky that I didn’t see her face; that I didn’t have to learn of my own cruelty on that day.

Delilah sliced her chest open with a single swift motion. I could hear a slight sputter, but I was surprised not to hear the gush of blood and a loud cry.

I didn’t know that death was so silent.

I saw Delilah’s hand disappear, stretching the cut down my mother’s chest into a chasm. She grasped my mother’s still-beating heart out of its rightful place, the arteries rebounding and spraying drops of blood on my face. I didn’t bother to wipe them away. My mother’s heart beat three more times before it went still.

Th-thump. More.

Th-thump. More.

Th-thump. More.

Stillness. Everything.

A sick smile broke across my face as I relished in the feeling of that soft haze fading from the sky. I knew the brilliance would be revealed to me in only moments more.

________________________

Deanna Whitlow is a fiction undergraduate at Columbia College Chicago. She was a staff writer of the digital publication Affinity Magazine; and she founded SameFaces Collective, an online literary and art magazine where she is both editor and a regular contributor. 

 

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Evan Dahm tackles the political dynamics of a fantasy world in Vatt

 

Interview by Lily Reeves

Evan Dahm is a prolific comics creator from North Carolina. He has been self-publishing fantasy comics online since 2006, and his work is commonly known as a game-changer in webcomics, bringing complex worlds, themes, and art to the medium. Since then, many of his comics have been physically published. His currently running, award-winning webcomic, Vattu, has two physically published volumes, and the third was successfully Kickstarted in November.

As a comic artist myself, Dahm’s comics have been hugely inspirational to me. I first started reading his comic Rice Boy in middle school, shortly after it ended. At the time, his work mystified and fascinated me. Having since become an adult, I can say that’s still the case, but I can also appreciate the masterful story-telling, and relevant sociopolitical themes. Vattu, in particular, is a gut-wrenching story about the machinations of the powerful, and about the little people dealing with the fallout.

 

How did you get started in comics? What got you interested?

 I’ve been drawing forever, and drawing comics for a long, long time, but I only started to take them seriously as a medium to work in when I started Rice Boy in 2006. It’s a medium for visual narrative that one person can create entirely by themself in whatever idiosyncratic way they like—that is the main thing that still draws me to it.

How would you describe Vattu to someone who’s never heard of it?

I still have trouble with this. It is an expansive, meandering fantasy-adventure comic, a kind of biography, and an exploration of the capital of a preindustrial empire and the social dynamics and revolutionary energies within it. It’s about political power and the development of identity within and against it. It’s set in a world full of weird creatures.

What are your biggest influences for Vattu, or for your comic work in general?

I don’t know what to point to exactly. An interest in actual history and what the experience of first-contact culture shock must feel like was a motivating thing for Vattu. Invented-setting genre fiction with a social and political focus has been hugely important to me: Ursula K. Le Guin, Angélica Gorodischer, China Miéville….

The world of Vattu is colorful and complicated, and entirely imagined. How do you approach world-building? What do you prioritize in order to make it feel real, without getting bogged down in all the details?

I am very interested in the experience of reading and believing a fictional setting –in how “immersion” works in fantastic stories. I really try to prioritize the mechanics of exposition in any sort of invented-setting story; I think how the setting is conveyed through the story is as important as the material of the setting that the writer develops external to the story. In the material of the setting itself, I start with broad atmospheric and thematic ideas and build in detail to support that. Starting from a premise that detail is quality, and that a fictional world has to be as richly and arbitrarily detailed as the real one can be destructive to the goals of a narrative, I think!

Vattu contains a lot of symbolism and specific cultural practices, such as the Fluters’ name marks, and the Tarrus cult. Is any of it based on real world cultures? Any particular stories behind any of these ideas?

I don’t think any of it is specifically based on real cultural practices! The Fluter marks in particular started for the sake of visual interest, and keeping the characters distinct, but as the comic went on I got really focused on the idea of identity and selfrepresentation, and it became valuable as a way of talking about that. A lot of the cultural detail is stuff I’ve built in to support the thematic content of the story. That’s a little backwards maybe!

Much of your work is centered on nonhuman characters with features very different from our own. In a visual medium it can be difficult to portray the alien as relatable. What’s your interest in these kinds of characters? Do you have any special methods for making them relatable to your readers?

 I’ve been doing comics mostly about nonhuman creatures for a long time, and I’m stuck on it now! It feels kind of like a waste to make stories in a totally visual medium and not take advantage of it in that particular way—I want to invent as much as possible of the visual context, and use comics to present it fairly literalistically or without much overt “style.” I guess it is difficult sometimes to communicate with non-human characters, but I think all readers are generally eager to meet you halfway, and to anthropomorphize whatever is presented. I don’t have any special methods other than to try to take body language seriously!

How do you plan out your comics’ plots? Do you have an entire script that you follow, or a loose guideline? Over the years, have you changed the course of Vattu’s story?

 I’ve approached plotting in very different ways for everything I’ve done! Vattu started with a big broad outline, and it’s tightened up and shifted in the details as I’ve moved through it. The main structure hasn’t changed fundamentally, but the comic has started to mean different things to me than it did eight years ago, so I think it’s different now than I would have thought back then. I am writing and rewriting pretty frequently.

Historically, comic books have been widely dismissed as cheap, disposable entertainment. However, they’ve been gaining traction as a vehicle for more serious and more personal stories over the past few decades, especially in independent publishing and web comics. What do you think this medium brings to the table that distinguishes itself from others?

 I think the facts that comics are a visual medium that can be made by an individual or small team and distributed very cheaply or for free open a lot of space for idiosyncratic work. It feels like a pop cultural frontier sometimes because it’s so low-risk. This makes me want independent comics and my own comics to be weirder and more personal and more critical.

Any advice you would give to someone trying to write their first long-form comic?

Keep all your art at 600 dpi. You can plan too much; be aware that any long-term project that you move through from front to back might be more like exploring a space you’re building than it will be like executing a plan you’ve made beforehand. The most valuable thing starting out is making your work visible and easy to find!

Vattu © Evan Dahm

http://www.rice-boy.com/vattu/

Tags: Evan Dahm, Vattu, Rice Boy, interview, comic, webcomic, graphic novel, fantasy, world-building