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Pushing Daisies

 

My feet lulled to a stop as I approached the corner of Van Buren and Plymouth, my shoes scuffing against the frigid concrete. A song was playing through my headphones, but I couldn’t seem to focus on the words—instead, all I could focus on were the sirens and horns produced by the cars whizzing past me, their motion slapping my face with gusts of wind. Their movements were so fast and so violent that as my feet teetered dangerously from the sidewalk toward the pavement of the intersection, I realized how easy it would be for me to step into oncoming traffic and face what I feared most.

In a matter of seconds, all that I had come to know would cease to exist. I would cease to exist. It was as easy as one step forward, as if I were back in time taking my first steps. My death would be as fast and violent as the oncoming cars—a quick way to go, a painless way to go, if things went well. All the grief and pain bottled up inside would be gone in a minute—poof—swirling out like a genie from a bottle, disappearing as if it was nothing—as if I went through all of that for nothing.

Was it my death that I feared? As a child, death didn’t frighten me, nothing did. All I knew was cartoons and sun-kissed summers in my backyard—I had yet to be exposed to the grim reality that existed beyond my fenced yard. I was unstoppable—invincible even, braced against the weight of the world with a Barbie doll in one hand and a smile on my face. In my eyes, death and all things bad existed in a land far, far away from mine. They were purely fiction, contained in the box of my TV screen. 

It was a time when death wasn’t something I considered, let alone my own. I lived under the impression that death only happened when you were too old to go on living. Grandpas and grandmas died—and that was it. I took my great grandpa’s death like a champ because at ninety-six years old, he had lived a good life and I knew that. That was what was supposed to happen. My naivety shielded me from the certainty that would one day come crashing down on me when I least expected—the truth that death was more than just old age; it was accidents, diseases, drugs, abuse. And it could happen to me or the ones that I loved most. 

On the given times that I happened to envision death, what it could possibly look like, it appeared in the form of the Grim Reaper. He was the shape of a man, and nothing more, dressed in black with a scythe that was meant to instill fear. He was a frequent character in my childhood cartoons, a folktale that spawned after the Black Plague, yet he was death. He pursued the old, the sick, the unlucky—waiting, just waiting, for the right moment to strike, for the right soul to collect.

The thing that nobody tells you, though, is that he’s real. No, not literally, but I’ve seen him—felt his presence in the air, smelled the death that lingered after him, encountered him more times in the past few years than I ever could have imagined. He’s the cause of accidents, cancers, overdoses, and all premature deaths. He’s the root of the problem. I thought I knew the Grim Reaper, as an innocent child staring at my TV screen, but I was wrong.

I’ve lost enough people to fill my tally sheet—one turning into two turning into a strike across the entire board. I thought it was fair enough to assume we were well acquainted; I knew him as well I knew my nosey next-door neighbor. You know the one, don’t you? Buttoned up Hawaiian shirt, receding hairline, a wife who sleeps in a separate bed—we all have one. So how is it possible we couldn’t be well acquainted? 

He wormed and wiggled his way into my life, made himself a main character that was not needed. He shocked me once; he shocked me twice; I didn’t think he could do it again. I told myself that I knew it all—the ins and outs, the grief that’s acquired when you lose somebody you love, the gaping hole left behind in your soul, the numbness that spreads throughout your entire body. I told myself nothing else could surprise me.

I was wrong. Oh God, was I wrong.

I wish I could have better prepared myself. Instead, I allowed myself to continue living in ignorance. The unexpected still existed in a faraway realm, way out of my reach. The sudden deaths and diagnoses I saw across my Facebook feed would never, could never, happen to me. Until it did.

Within just a year, all I had conditioned myself to know and accept crumpled with the deaths of two people close to my heart. One unexpected, one drawn out—neither was easy. Despite all the lies that had filled my head and told me otherwise, I wouldn’t know grief—or him—until then. My mind would not be able to fully understand the concept of grief until I was forced to grieve a person still living. I wouldn’t know death until I was left with no choice but to accept that a piece of my life as I knew it was gone. Unwillingly, begrudgingly, I had to pick up the pieces and continue forward.

I underestimated him. I took the luxury of the life and family that I had for granted. My comfort bubble was popped in the blink of an eye, in the matter of a day. I did what we humans do best, what we have been doing since the beginning of time—took things for granted.

He taught me to fear death. He instilled an uneasiness within me—one that causes me to draw out phone calls in fear of the possibility of a final goodbye and stress over every cough and sneeze. I fear the unexpected, for what is waiting in the shadows for those that I love. But do I fear it for myself? Do I realize that he can get me, too? Do I care?

Suddenly, the blur of a blue CTA bus whizzed past my vision—my reflection stared back at me, eyes as empty as I felt, yet questioning, as if to ask me what I was doing. She didn’t have to, though, because she knew exactly what I was thinking, what I was doing, and she was judging me. Wake up, she said. Wake up. Wake up. Wake up. The bus was gone as fast as it had come—it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds—but my reflection’s judging eyes were enough to draw me out of the grave I had found myself buried under. It was enough to bring me back to reality—enough to inch my feet backward, back onto the safety of the sidewalk, far from the fast and violent cars and my fast and violent thoughts.

 _________________

Alison Brackett is currently residing in Montgomery, Illinois. An excerpt of her short story “Portrait of a Half-Empty Girl” was recently published in Hair Trigger, Issue 42, and in 2018, her short story titled “Sciamachy” was published in Horizons. 

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Magna Mater

God, I hate this gym, I thought to myself when I pulled up to Magna Fitness that night. The lot was empty enough that I could see the line of benches, free weights, and squat racks from my car. Think they’re so fucking special not putting the cardio equipment upfront, where literally every other gym puts it.

The only thing that got me out of the car was remembering yesterday morning. I had finally gotten in for the free training session I was promised at sign up and Amanda, the cute trainer with the legs of a stallion, had let her hand find the swell of my post-workout bicep. She looked at me with those big brown eyes and a grin that was almost feline when she told me how bad she felt that it had taken so long for us to see each other. That she usually gets the late shift, and we would probably see more of each other if I worked out later. That she would take it as a compliment if I did.

Is there anything a pretty girl can’t get you to do? I asked myself, as I traversed the dimly lit parking lot.

When I walked through the entrance, I didn’t see the usual bodybuilder-type manager behind the desk. Instead, this guy was lean, not jacked. His face was narrow, and he was so bald his head shined like it had been waxed. He also had a fang-like snaggletooth protruding from his upper right jaw.

“Welcome!” he said, perking up from behind the desk’s outdated computer.

“Hi,” I responded, pulling my membership card out as I approached.

“Someone’s got the thousand-yard stare,” he said, grabbing a towel from behind the desk. 

I glanced at the USMC tattoo filling most of his bicep. Is this guy baiting me? I asked myself.

“Nah, just leg day,” I replied, putting my card on the desk.

“Ooooh,” he said, dropping the towel on the counter. “Now that’s what I call: The Suck.”

I took the towel and slung it over my shoulder. Either he’s baiting you or that tattoo’s just for show, I thought to myself. I stared at the scanner, waiting for him to put my card under it.

“Haven’t seen you before,” he said, taking my membership card. “Just sign up?”

“About a month ago,” I replied. “I don’t usually come this late, though.”

“Oh-hoh,” he said, nodding, “That explains it. I’m the night manager. Well, know that the rule is no guests after ten.”

I almost shouted: DOES IT LOOK LIKE I HAVE A GUEST, but my better judgment won, and I just said, “Cool.”

“Now,” the manager said, leaning on the desk and putting my card to his chest, “have you thought about upgrading your membership?”

“Not really,” I replied, debating whether this asshole actually wanted me to workout.

“You know, we did just get some new cryobaths installed.”

 “Nah,” I said, “I should be fine.”

He tapped my forearm, and, for the first time, I saw how bony his hands were. He had bone running down his knuckles that was so ingrained to the skin it could have been an x-ray.

“You’re sure you don’t want to give it a whirl?” he asked. His fingertips gripped my forearm while he tapped his index finger against it like a metronome. “Just to try it?”

Why is his hand so cold?

“No,” I replied, glued to his skeletal hand, “I think I’m good.”

He sucked his teeth at me and withdrew his hand. “Well,” he said, “if you change your mind, you know where to find me. In the meantime, though . . .” he said, finally scanning my card, “enjoy a complimentary protein shake from our smoothie bar.” He pulled the coupon out from somewhere behind the desk.

“Y’know what,” he said, grabbing a pen, “I’m gonna have them make you my special mix.” He smiled as he wrote “Special Mix” on the coupon, his snaggletooth stabbing his lip as his jaw moved. “It’s sure to knock your socks off, bro.” He slid the coupon across the desk.

“Thanks,” I mumbled.

I started toward the leg press, which was past the spin studio, free weights, and just after the yoga studio; but I didn’t make it far before running into the reason I was here so late. Amanda emerged from the darkened spin studio, noticing me while she slinked toward the desk on her stallion legs. She locked eyes with me and refused to let go, even when I broke away. Something in the way she moved said it didn’t matter if I wanted to talk to her. All she had to do was flash me that feline grin, and she’d leave me frozen. 

Why does that make her so much hotter? I asked myself as she did just that, when our paths crossed at the midway point.

“Hey, you!” she said, patting me on the shoulder a bit rougher than the day before. “When are you coming to see me again?” Her voice was as smooth as raw corn liquor.

What is it about pretty women that always makes me feel so guilty?

“I don’t know,” I said, looking at the floor. “Maybe soon.”

“What’s that you got there?” she asked, pointing to the coupon I had forgotten to stuff into my pocket. “Got a free shake?”

I nodded.

“Here,” she said, taking the coupon from me, “let me make sure you get the special. . . .” She stopped when it was close enough for her big brown eyes to read. “Ohhh,” she said, “looks like you’re already taken care of.” She threw a flirty glare my way. “You know, the smoothie bar’s that way,” she said, gesturing behind me.

“I know,” I said, a bit defensively.

“Then what are you going this way for,” she said, starting to move past me. “Get it while you can, hon,” she said, smacking the back of my thigh as she went toward the desk. Her spandex hips accentuated each step as she watched me watch her walk away.

The fuck? I thought to myself, starting to blush as I felt over the spot she hit. I froze like a deer caught in those brief seconds of indecision when the headlights blare right before the impact. I was lucky enough to remember where I was and step aside before getting run over. 

Waitresses fish for bigger tips . . . trainer’s fish for clients, I thought to myself, sighing.

I retraced the way I came and went toward the smoothie bar. I had to pass the desk again to get there, which also meant avoiding Amanda’s leer. Just don’t make eye contact, I told myself, managing to block out that I was still following this chick’s orders.

The smoothie bar was tucked into the corner past the front desk and the entrance, right before the pool area and locker rooms. I gave the coupon to the barista, who informed me that the “Special Mix” was Magna’s in-house protein. He said that I must have struck a chord with someone in upper management to get a taste because “Magna Powder” hadn’t been made public yet. When the barista handed me my shake, he held onto the Styrofoam cup a few seconds after I had a grip on it. I sensed him watching me like I’d stolen something when I walked out with it, which, honestly, made me feel like I had.

I resumed my route to the leg machines, taking a sip of the shake as I walked. Not bad, I thought to myself. The protein was a little thick, which made the texture kind of powdery, but it wasn’t a bad taste.

When I passed the desk again, I distracted myself from Amanda by eyeing up the walls. Blue and red wallpaper was plastered all over the gym, but the area I read had the phrase: “SWEAT IS JUST YOUR FAT CRYING, SO DON’T BE A GIRL AND CODDLE IT!” written in big white letters. I let that phrase wash over me as I made a left at the spin studio. I was about halfway along the free weights and benches when I saw Brad doing an incline press with some 50s. 

Brad was a tall, dark-haired guy with perpetual 5 o’clock shadow. The sort of guy who refused to wear anything but designer clothing, especially when he worked out. Today, he sported a pair of cutoff Polo sweatpants and an Under Armour sleeveless. I had hoped switching to a night workout might cut Brad out of the picture, but, apparently, he’s here before sunrise and after sundown. As I passed by, I gave him my ritual nod and hoped the encounter would end there, but I also knew there was no way it would.

“Watsup, bro?” he said, without breaking form. He sat facing the mirrored wall behind the free weight rack, effortlessly raising the 50s above his head in fluid motions. His gaze never focused on his own form while he lifted but scanned the area behind him for opportunity.

“Not much,” I replied, noticing the curvy, spandex-clad blonde that happened to be reflected in Brad’s direct line of sight.

“Watch my stuff for a sec, bro?” Brad asked, dropping the dumbbells as he stood up.

Brad ran his fingers through his hair like a comb while I glanced at the open leg press sitting in front of the first line of ellipticals. “Only take a sec, bro, promise,” he said.

“All right,” I conceded, slouching as I leaned on the head of the bench.

“Thanks, bro,” he said, giving me a fist bump. Brad turned around and strutted toward the blonde squatting with the smith rack.

This is why you don’t talk to people at the gym, I thought to myself, taking a long sip of my shake. I remembered the day I broke that rule and spoke to Brad. I had been with Magna about a week and he was one of those faces I always seemed to pass, but what made him stick out was the quirky way he would wear his shorts. He always rolled the pant legs and waistband up a few inches. I thought it was kind of weird and, somehow, I worked up the nerve to ask him why. There was a hint of condescension in his voice when he answered, “So the ladies can see how big my legs are.”

Since then, I’ve been trapped. Forced to watch Brad strut over to women like this blonde, have them take their headphones out, and then do body squats right beside them to exemplify the “proper” form. This one, like most, played along for that part but sent him packing when he got to the “Maybe we should work out together so I can supervise” part of his routine. Brad strolled back over to me without a care whatsoever.

“Thanks, bro,” he said.

“No problem,” I replied.

“So, bro, I know you got a shake there, but . . .” Brad said, lifting my arm by the bicep and inspecting it, “you been getting enough of your protein?” Brad then began patting me up and down like he was a cop frisking a perp. “Bro! You haven’t, have you? I mean, just look at the state of your lats.”

Is there a reason everyone’s feeling me up today?

“What a waste, bro,” Brad said, withdrawing his hands from my body. “And what’s with the protein shake? You just about to get a pump in, aren’t you?”

“I know it’s supposed to be after, but . . .” I said, looking over my shoulder to find the distant outline of her staring at us from behind the desk, “Amanda said I should.”

“Oh,” Brad said when he and Amanda made eye contact from across the gym. She gave Brad a very girly wave, using just her fingers. “Then just . . . just forget what I said.” Brad sat back down on the bench. “She’s a professional, so she must have her reasons. Just pretend like I didn’t say anything, and go back to your workout, bro.”

“Okay,” I said, resuming my route to the leg press. God that was weird, I thought to myself as I passed by the other gym regulars: the two shirtless morons that like to watch each other flex in the yoga studio mirror, the bodybuilding dwarf with facial hair that made him look like something out of Tolkien, and the gaunt anorexic chick on the elliptical who made me sad. She was so thin I couldn’t tell where her thighs and calves met her knees, almost like her legs should have belonged to an insect. I always felt like I should report her to someone, and seeing her here this late, in the same place, made me almost do it. What ended up talking me out of it was the manager; I knew he’d never do anything as long as she paid her membership fees.

I pushed those thoughts to the back of my mind and kept walking. I told myself not to drink more than a quarter of the shake before starting my workout, but it was half-empty by the time I reached the leg press. I cursed Amanda and her stallion legs when I felt a cramp after a few reps. I tried to push through, but the heavy, lethargic pain in my ribcage was too much. I stood up and immediately wanted to fall over when the pain slipped from my ribs and started turning my stomach. The men’s locker room was on the other end of the gym, and I stumbled past the lines of machines to get there, determined not to throw up in the middle of the gym.

I entered the locker room and passed the familiar onslaught of wrinkly, gray-haired, distinguished looking old man penises. Those saggy, drooping penises were flinging about as usual. As I stumbled toward the stalls, I felt so sick that I forgot to tell myself it’s not gay that I looked because most of the penises I caught a glimpse of were seen by accident. However, when I actually got into one of the stalls, I didn’t feel like throwing up anymore. In fact, all I really felt was a little sleepy. My body started to get so heavy, and the toilet seat didn’t seem like a bad place to rest my head.

Before finally drifting off, I thought of all those flaccid old man penises and muttered: “Not . . . gay. . . .”

 

Eyes shut and body completely limp, I feel only the cold porcelain warming to my cheek. As I am picked up by wrinkly hands, my skin peels from the porcelain like an adhesive. I’d be certain I’m floating if my arms and legs weren’t being held above my sagging torso, though I still think I might be. I am moved forward, and the cheek that had been resting against the porcelain is sent into a cold sweat by the shifting air. 

“Set him over here,” a rugged female voice says.

My body is molded into a sitting position and propped against something hard. I start to feel the beat of my own heart and whatever I’m propped against seems to feel it too.

“We’ll take it from here; start preparing the ceremony with the others” she says. The weight of bare feet trotting away sounds like a quiet symphony of paws.

“You get his left, I’ll get his right,” the rugged female voice says.

My hands are moved to each side of me. I start to fall left, but I’m quickly set still.

“I feel like we could’ve given the bro a few more weeks to bulk up a bit,” Brad says, his alpha male bro-speak unmistakable. “I mean, like, what’s the point of all this risk when the gains are so small?”

My wrists touch cold metal, and warm flesh grips my forearms.

“Anymore and we might lose our shot,” the rugged female voice says. “Bigger they get, more difficult they are to herd.” 

Ropes tighten around my wrists, hugging them deeper into the cold metal. I catch one last phrase from Brad before passing out completely. 

“Yeah, but still,” he says, “I’m not here for novelty.”

 

I wake up to a dream. The sound of moaning, heavy breathing, and a wet snapping are first to greet me. The scent of charred meat fills my nostrils as I open my eyes. A cloud of smoke tightens around my lungs as if to say: You’re lucky you woke up at all.

I stand up on the dirty stone floor and see a cluster of robed figures crowded around each other. The smoke rises from where they’re huddled. I back away but trip; torches liven from every corner, revealing the temple walls and an empty throne beyond the huddled figures. I want to curl up and cry when I see what I tripped over. The heaving, animal ferocity of naked souls intertwining on their straw mattresses is uninterrupted by me falling over them. I count at least ten of them before tearing myself away.

I struggle to pick myself up, but the second I manage to, I’m faced with a man taking a flog to his bare skin. He’s so close I can practically taste the sweat beading down his forehead. For a moment, I’m frozen by the way his mouth twists with each rhythmic whip of the flog against his skin. It sounds like a wet snare drum.

I whip around as fast I can and see a man with an obscenely toned ass facing the corner of the temple. His elbows are bent at his side while his hands are out of sight. When his shoulders move, I hear a thin slice and a groan. He cranes his neck toward me, bites his tongue, and raises his hand above his head. He holds something that looks like a raw hot dog. When my brain connects the dots, I fall down and throw up. I lie with my stomach to the ground and hear the throaty chants begin to sound.

“MAGNA MATER.”

“MAGNA MATER.”

“MAGNA MATER.”

When I find the nerve to turn around, I see the robed figures kneeling before the bonfire. The body has the end of a stick poking out from its head and rear. The rotisserie is held over the crackling flames by two wooden pillars at each end of the fire. The outline of a scream is still melting down the face of the black and pink body as it’s turned over the flames.

That’s when I know I’m fucked.

It doesn’t help much when they start splitting the roasted body between each other like chicken breast.

I feel the heat of a world on fire as the throne behind the feast grows as tall as the ceiling. A ghostly, veiled woman appears at the throne from nowhere. She’s accompanied by two lions that rest beneath each arm of the throne. She has a motherly face, wears a mural crown, and holds a cornucopia in her lap. The flames begin to swallow me as her massive, wispy lips part. As though she is right beside me, I hear her leafy whisper in my ear when she says, “Oh, my son, you are so very fucked.”

 

When I woke up for real, I could see the fire from where I was tied up. There were profiles of naked bodies scattered about the gym, each with their arms crossed and faces shrouded by hoods. I knew I was tied to the elliptical when I heard the sound of pedals moving back and forth from behind me, the methodical repetition like a heartbeat ringing through my ears. The rest of the equipment had been pushed against the walls and the entrance.

 “So,” said a vaguely familiar voice from behind me, “finally awake, huh?”

Three people stepped out in front of me. I presumed the one in the middle had been the one to speak. The other two stood a step behind him on either side. They were all nude, except for their hoods, which made it clear that they were two men and a woman. One glance at the woman’s tan, hairless, stallion-muscled thighs, and I knew it was Amanda. For a second, I pictured her wrapping my head between her soft, naked thighs and popping my skull like a watermelon.

If I could be so lucky, I thought to myself.

The one in the center removed his hood, the rhythm of the elliptical against my back not skipping a beat. The snaggletooth told me who stood across from me.

“I know this is usually the part where I tell you what happens next,” the manager said, “but I have a feeling a little birdy came and already cued you in.” He smiled and let the tip of his tongue find the sharp end of his snaggletooth. “A little context never hurt anyone, though,” the manager said, winking. “You see, the thing that people usually get wrong about gods, is that you get what you give.”

“You want those mad gains, bro,” said the other person beside the manager (clearly Brad), “nothing’s better than some pure muscle in your system.” Brad pounded his washboard abs as he said that last phrase.

“And a little divine protection,” Amanda added, her voice sounding much gruffer than when she’d ordered him to grab the shake earlier.

“Which,” the manager resumed, “is where you come in. Not like we can get everyone to take the ‘Special Mix’.”

“Yeah, pussy,” Brad chimed in.

“Also,” the manager said, “if you’re wondering why you passed out, it’s because the ‘Special Mix’ has an obscene amount of protein in it. Enough that it starts running through your system and gives us more bang for our buck in the end.” 

The way he said it made me figure he was the one I had to thank for that detail. The three of them started walking away, but, for once, something just didn’t sit right with leaving things like this.

“Hey, Amanda?” I said, while I still could. She turned around, her big brown eyes looking down at me through her hood. “Did you know I always thought you were really pretty?”

“Of course,” she said. “That’s why you’re here.” She turned around before I could say anything else. She knew I understood.

I’m the kind of person that people eat.

The elliptical stopped moving and a woman’s gaunt face came down from behind me. I knew who it was when I saw the cheekbones, they were even bonier from upside down.

“Hi,” she said, as she licked her lips.

I swallowed hard, knowing what would happen next.

 

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Trevor Templeton is a writer who says he’s from Chicago but is actually from the northern suburbs of Chicago. He writes fiction as well as poetry, and “Magna Mater” is his first published work. He is currently based in the Chicago metropolitan area.

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10:04

 

By Cody Lee, Reviews Editor

The Upper-Middle-Class White Man has spoken, and god, I can read his prose book and book again. Let me explain that there is nothing unique about this story (a thirty-three-year-old writer slugs around N.Y.C., writing things, getting drunk, and overanalyzing his thoughts). It’s essentially a tale that the fellow walking down Michigan Avenue might explain over a glass of Glenfiddich 15. However, that’s what makes 10:04 by Ben Lerner golden, and furthermore, human; the colloquial tone intertwined with Lerner’s poetic (sometimes, perhaps, pretentious) language leads the reader into a bittersweet tunnel of intrauterine insemination, Ketamine, and New Yorker articles, all during an assumed apocalyptic countdown.

Although the novel’s only 241 pages, Lerner is able to squeeze a myriad of information into the text (e.g. his love of cooked baby octopi, the process in which instant coffee becomes packaged, the little pre-piss dip and lift that men do when pulling out their own package), but above all, Lerner discusses the omnipotent deity: The Dollar Bill. 10:04 reads as a nagging mother with nil more than money on her mind, which can be upsetting, but all Mom’s trying to do is prepare the reader for the real world. Perusing the book as a college student (in a liberal arts school, especially), one might become quite frustrated while listening to the narrator brag about his “strong six-figure” advance, but realistically, who wouldn’t boast a bit if they received two full-year salaries for one unfinished novel? As annoying as the money-talk seemed sometimes, I wanted more, more, more because not many (fiction) authors seem to supply such data. In 10:04, Lerner points out that an article in the New Yorker pays approximately $8,000. No one wants to say how much they’re paid . . . I would thoroughly enjoy sitting in a small white room, directly across from Ben Lerner while he spits out number after number in relation to the writing community. As dull as digits seem to writers, I can speak for myself—and probably a few others—when I say that, as a twenty-two-year-old African-American “kidult” with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, it’s definitely a dream of mine to live like an upper-middle-class white man, and talk about my funds (acquired via publications, stipends, etc.) for hours on end.

The story bounces back and forth in this meta I’m-writing-a-novel-that’s-super-similar-to-my-actual-life first-to-third-person mashup, which works surprisingly well in its subtlety for the first few switches, but once it grows obvious that the narrator’s basically narrating himself, the point-of-view seesaw becomes cute, but not much more.

What I find delightful about 10:04 is the narrator’s disgust of the art world in which he’s involved fused together with his obvious knowledge that he himself is indeed associated with the bourgeoisie, and not just some ghost, hovering over the masses and laughing at their idiocies (although, one could argue that the middle class does hover over the masses, but typically avoids laughing because laughing at people is uncivilized and an example of improper etiquette). This becomes apparent when the narrator’s at dinner with a few acquaintances—mostly distinguished writers or English professors—and he observes “the distinguished male author” spaz out (in Spanish) on the busboy who poured him still water instead of sparkling. Directly after, when the narrator’s water is poured, he’s unsure whether to thank the worker in English or Spanish . . . clearly, the narrator has never worked any sort of service position, because anyone who has knows that a simple “thank you” will suffice.

I can’t help but think of Lerner’s (page-and-a-half) reference to Walt Whitman: the self-proclaimed Everyman, although apparently not, since he was Walt Whitman and all . . . I wouldn’t go as far as to say that Lerner’s the neo-Whitman, but the arrogance, married with the pedestrian-esque blanket that’s thrown over the arrogance (not to mention the eroticism) definitely allows my mind to imagine a bloodline connecting the two; one drop counts, check history textbooks.

10:04 does exactly what a novel is supposed to do: it takes the reader out of their own unexceptional life, and transfers them into the shoes of someone else. However, this “someone else” happens to be just as ordinary as the reader, thus relatable, thus automatically okay. This is in regards to the content, now add money that I don’t have but would love to learn to obtain, and sprinkle in a layer of poetics (all novels aside, Ben Lerner is a poet), and out comes 10:04: an intelligent look into the brains of the bifocaled souls on train rides home, or rather, you, me, and everyone else with hopes of living as The Upper-Middle-Class White Man, the Everyman.

Similar works:

Literature: Book of Numbers by Joshua Cohen

Film: Seeking a Friend for the End of the World directed by Lorene Scafaria

Etc.: “there’s too much blood in the attic today” by happy jawbone family band

Cody Lee has no sense of humor, and hates everyone. He’s smart, too.

January 02, 2017

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The Girls of Murder City

 

Interview by Claire Doty

Chicago is not known for its gentle history—a devastating fire, corruption, and a wild gangster scene are just a few of the gritty scars imbedded in the city’s timeline. The famous musical Chicago echoes that history with a wry and comical twist. Few know, however, that its origins came from actual events that happened in Chicago. Author Doug Perry opens the curtain to the fascinating world in the 1920s in his book The Girls of Murder City (2010), which delves into the lives of women in Chicago in the bustling time of prohibition, crime, and lust. Perry creates a historical narrative that guides us through each woman’s tale, whether it be a blossoming reporter or an accused murderess. 

Perry has a great understanding of Chicago as a city in the 21st century as well as the in the early 20th. His extensive research led him to find documentation that was overlooked and considered  ordinary, but in fact added depth to the complicated history of the women who inspired Chicago. He sheds light on the roles of females and the struggles they faced in a male-dominated world, which threads into the issues women still face today. Perry sheds new light on common plot points—that some human qualities linger decades longer than humans themselves, and that those modern humans are not so different from their predecessors. In delving into the past, the present becomes sharper.

Claire Doty: What made you interested in the history of these particular women?

Douglas Perry: I saw the musical Chicago on Broadway and enjoyed it immensely. Not only was it hugely entertaining, [but] it also struck me as insightful, clever and topical. The best work Kander and Ebb ever did, in my view. The playbill mentioned in passing that Maurine Watkins, the author of the original play on which the musical was based, had been inspired by actual murder trials she covered for the Chicago Tribune in 1924. This intrigued me, and I went looking for books, articles, essays—anything that had been written about the play’s source material. But I was surprised to find there was very little information available about the events that inspired the play and musical.

CD: Where did you start your research?

DP: I started in the Chicago Public Library, where I spent days going through its newspaper archives. There were half a dozen daily newspapers in 1920s Chicago, and newspaper coverage was a lot different—and far more entertaining—than it is now. Reporters routinely impersonated police officers to get information. They broke into and ransacked the homes of murder victims in search of diaries and photographs. Crime reporters at this time could walk freely through police stations and jails at all hours. They sat in on and participated in police interrogations. They investigated crimes themselves, trying to stay a step ahead of homicide detectives. Reporters hung out at the Cook County Jail and interviewed “the girls of Murderesses’ Row” at length, over and over, without the women’s attorneys present. While it was, in some ways, a more brutal time, it was also a more naïve time. These women who were facing murder trials were often remarkably candid when talking to reporters.

The newspapers, of course, were only the beginning. I delved into government records, where I unearthed a lot of valuable information. Belva Gaertner’s divorce records, for example, proved to be a treasure trove. The documents walked me through her life almost year by year from about 1917 to about 1926. They included long interviews with Belva and her husband, and detailed reports from private investigators. One of the great things about historical research is that you don’t know what you’re going to find until you start looking. These divorce records were in Cook County’s archives, sitting untouched in a dusty box for 80 years. No one knew they were there. They hadn’t been digitized and put online, and they probably never will be. Such records aren’t about celebrities or world leaders, and they’re mostly commonplace documents, so they are a very low priority for archivists. But there are some fantastic stories there. Having gotten started, I began tracking down and reaching out to descendants and others who knew (or knew about) those involved in the events. One thing kept leading to another.

CD: What inspired you to write about Chicago’s crime history?

DP: I moved to Chicago right after college and lived there for most of the 1990s. I instantly fell in love with the city. Chicago is always changing, evolving, reaching out to the future—but its history remains front and center. You can walk through the neighborhood where Maurine Watkins lived in 1924 and still get a fair sense of what it was like then. The building where Eliot Ness and the Untouchables worked looks—on the outside—almost exactly the same today as it did 80 years ago, though it’s been converted to residences. It’s not far from Columbia College, of course. I used to live just blocks from the Biograph Theatre, where John Dillinger met his end. My favorite used bookshop—now gone, sadly—was two doors down from the theater. I learned the city during my first year in Chicago by spending my weekends riding the El, getting off at random stops and walking around. If you keep your eyes open, the city’s whole history is right there for you.

CD: What intrigues you about Chicago?

DP: It’s the all-American city, by turns beautiful and terrifying. There’s just an excitement about Chicago, and it’s something very different from what New York offers. “Stormy, husky, brawling,” as Carl Sandburg wrote. It’s the most interesting city in the country. 

CD: How would you categorize your book? 

DP: The Girls of Murder City is history, but I like to think it’s more than that. It’s about unique events that took place in 1924, but like the musical Chicago, it speaks loudly and clearly to today’s celebrity culture. It’s also. . .funny. It showcases how there’s really no such thing as normal. We all want to fit in—and we’re in a conformist era right now—but people are odd, and strange things happen. Thank God for odd people and strange happenings.

CD: In crime and gangster history, especially in Chicago, the focus is always on men. Do you think there is almost more respect for men who engaged in crime rings in the 20th century than there is for women?

DP: Chicago’s famous gangster era was a man’s world, there’s no way around it. The early twentieth century was a time of social upheaval and transformation. Women were gaining new freedoms, and this inevitably had a dark side. But of course a lot of people still had 19th-century attitudes, and so they had a very difficult time coming to terms with the very idea of women committing crimes. Violence was widely considered an unnatural act for a woman. When it happened, there had to be extenuating circumstances: the woman had been abused by a man or tricked by a man, or—ye Gods!—was in love with a man and so had lost her mind. A woman who killed surely had been overwhelmed by alcohol or feminine emotions, or both, and so she was not responsible. Cook County juries were all male, and so women—especially good-looking women—were almost always acquitted, no matter how much evidence there was.

CD: What is your opinion on the glamorization of certain crimes?

DP: I’m not in favor of glamorizing crime. While researching the book, I found Belva and Beulah to be endlessly fascinating. And my heart broke for Wanda Stopa, the pioneering “girl lawyer” who ended up killing a man. She was even bigger news than Beulah and Belva. The newspapers called the public’s appetite for her story “the Wanda sensation.” But I tended to relate to Maurine Watkins, who was appalled that women murderers were being treated like celebrities. It infuriated her that Beulah and Belva were using their gender and sex appeal to manipulate the justice system. She did everything she could to help secure convictions for them.

CD: What did you want readers to take away from your book?

DP: The march of technology increasingly makes earlier generations seem very strange and distant to us, but people haven’t changed much down through human history. Our motivations are the same generation after generation, and so there is much we can learn by studying the past, the “small” events and people as well as the big ones. And in this era of 24/7 entertainment and 400 scripted TV series, I would like readers to realize that truth really is stranger than fiction. At book events, I heard over and over from readers that they had no idea Chicago was based on real events. They would say: These beautiful, murderous, in-your-face women—how could their stories be true? But if you study history, you know the real question is—how could they not be?

 To learn more about Perry’s writing visit his website.

November 21, 2016

Tags: Douglas Perry, The Girls of Murder City, Claire Doty, Chicago History, Interview

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Behind Closed Doors

 

Chelsea and I take our spots behind the long trail of women waiting in line for the bathroom. The girl in front of us is crying, her mascara leaving black streaks down her cheeks, while her friend rubs the small of her back, telling her, “It’s okay. She’s not even as pretty as you anyways.”

I’m watching this when Chelsea reaches out a manicured finger to my head. She twirls a strand of my curly red hair around her finger, and gently pulls until the tension causes it to straighten. Then she lets go, and the corners of her lips turn up in an amused smile, as she watches it spring back into its original curl shape.

“Your hair is fun,” she says.

I give her a tight smile and we move up with the rest of the line. When we finally move up far enough to be inside the bathroom, the loud trap music blaring in the club muffles. I can’t make out what Gucci Mane is rapping about anymore, but I can still feel the bass pounding through my bones.

“I have a surprise for you,” Chelsea says. She reaches a hand down the front of her faux leather miniskirt, and I dart my eyes around to make sure no one is watching.

“What are you doing?” I hiss, taking a step forward to block her from people’s view.

She digs around for another moment before pulling out a tiny plastic bag with two little pink pills inside of it that match the color of her lips. Her face lights up as she holds it in front of her stomach for me to see.

“Where did you just pull that out of?” I ask her.

“My panty pocket,” she replies matter-of-factly. “That’s what they’re there for.”

I know exactly which pocket she’s talking about. I highly doubt that the small extra flap of cotton sewn into the crotch of most panties was designed as a pocket for girls to place drugs in order to sneak into clubs. I have to admit that it’s a pretty great idea to use it as one.

“What is it?” I ask.

“Ecstasy,” she replies.

I don’t want to admit it to her, but I’ve never tried ecstasy before. In fact, I’ve never tried any drug other than weed before, and I’m not sure that I want to tonight. I’m already feeling pretty tipsy. I don’t want to push myself over the edge.

“I can’t,” I tell her.

“Why not?” she asks. We take a few baby steps forward.

“I have work tomorrow.” This isn’t a lie. I do have work. Not until three in the afternoon, but she doesn’t need to know that.

“So?” A toilet flushes, and the girl who’d been crying walks out. She gasps at herself in the mirror, and quickly dabs under her eyes with a piece of paper towel that she rips from the dispenser.

Chelsea goes into the now-empty stall and when another toilet flushes, I go into that one, hoping that Chelsea will just drop this whole ecstasy thing. When I come out, Chelsea is standing at one of the sinks washing her hands, her eyes meeting mine in the reflection of the mirror. I go up to the sink next to her, taking in my own reflection.

My cheeks are a flushed, bright pink, and there are a few tiny flecks of black under my eyes where my mascara has begun to flake, but my mauve lipstick hasn’t smudged, and what little cleavage I have looks great in my dress. I usually don’t wear dresses like this one—sequined, short, deep-V neckline—but when Ian told me that we were going to a club, I knew I had to find something other than the white cotton sundress I’d worn for my high school graduation.

I bought this one on sale at Charlotte Russe earlier tonight. My very first club dress. As I sat on the train going into the city, I noticed a few men checking me out and a few women shooting me angry glares. I pressed my lips together, pretending not to notice, but inside, my heart was pounding.

“It’s only one pill,” Chelsea continues to my dismay. “You’ll be fine to go to work tomorrow.”

I sigh, tossing the idea around in my head. “What about the guys?” I ask. I’d come here with Ian after all, and had just met Chelsea and her boyfriend Marco for the first time tonight. It didn’t feel right doing drugs with one of Ian’s friends behind his back like this.

“What about them?” she chuckles, turning off the sink and shaking water off of her hands. “My weed guy gifted me these for free last weekend, and I figured tonight would be the perfect time to do them.”

“Wouldn’t you rather do them with Marco, though?” I ask her, following her out of the bathroom and back into the club.

“Marco’s always getting fucked up without me,” she shouts over her shoulder at me. “I want you to have it.”

I follow her up to the bar where she orders two double Jameson’s and ginger ales, passing them both back to me. She takes the little baggy out of her clutch, opens it underneath the bar, and drops two pills onto the palm of her hand, letting the baggie fall to the slightly sticky floor when she’s done.

“Here,” she says, holding her hand out to me. I stare at the pink, button-like pills that seem to glow in the dim, shadowy nightclub. “Come on. It’ll be fun. I promise.”

Sighing, I hand her drink back to her and take a pill. She grins widely at me, and we both toss the ecstasy back with a sip of what’s mostly Jameson, before I give myself enough time to think up another excuse not to.

“Okay, now let’s go find the guys,” she says. She grabs my clammy hand and leads me into the sea of sweating, gyrating bodies.

 

I don’t remember leaving the club, but we’re outside now on a street I don’t recognize. A breeze whips through my hair and I shiver, but I don’t feel cold. I should feel cold, shouldn’t I? Instead, I feel warm and fuzzy like freshly spun cotton candy.

I hear a click and follow the sound to see Marco with a Camel Crush hanging out of his chapped lips, one hand forming a roof over the top of it, the other wrapped around a lighter. He attempts to light it, but the wind keeps blowing it out.

“Fuck,” he murmurs around the cigarette.

“How do you feel?” Chelsea is standing in front of me now, her lips the color of bubblegum, pupils the size of saucers, and pores large and visible under the harsh white streetlight.

“Good,” I say. And I do feel good.

She grins a toothy grin and says, “Give me your arm.”

I hold my arm out to her and she gently runs the tips of her coffin-shaped nails up and down my skin, causing it to prickle with goosebumps. I feel myself smile and realize how badly my jaw aches.

“Hey, give me a cigarette.” Chelsea has moved away from me now, toward Marco. Where’s Ian?

A shudder of panic runs down my spine, and I look left and then right, but only see a cluster of people smoking and a girl in a hot pink dress drunkenly shouting into her cell phone. Did we leave him at the club? My heart rate quickens for a moment, but then I see him emerging from the nearby alley, pulling the zipper of his jeans up as he approaches us. His t-shirt rides up a little bit, revealing a tan strip of stomach. Both he and Marco are wearing t-shirts and dark jeans with jackets (Marco’s leather, Ian’s a bomber). They have a way of making t-shirts and jeans look polished, expensive.

“You ready to go?” I turn my head toward the sound of Chelsea’s throaty voice. “The Uber is two minutes away,” she says.

Chelsea wraps a thin arm around me, passing me her half-smoked cigarette, and Ian walks over to where Marco stands, the cigarette in his mouth finally lit. I don’t normally smoke, but I take a puff, coughing as it burns the back of my throat. I pass it back to her and she takes a long drag before stomping it out with the toe of one of her black strappy pumps.

A shiny black Nissan Altima pulls up and we all pile inside; Marco sits up front and I sit in the back, smushed between Chelsea and Ian. The smell of whatever woody cologne our driver drenched himself in is overpowering inside the tight confinement of the car, and I reach over Chelsea to roll down the window.

“Hey, you can’t smoke that in here,” the Uber driver says to Marco in a thick Indian accent.

I realize that Marco still has a cigarette between his lips, smoked down to just a nub now. Chelsea laughs through her nose next to me. “My bad,” Marco says, rolling down the window and tossing it out.

I watch the Uber driver roll his eyes in the rearview mirror. “You’re going to Justine Street?” he asks.

“Yeah,” Marco replies.

We pull into the street and begin driving, the wind tousling my hair through the open window. Marco starts fiddling with the radio, asks the Uber driver if he has an aux cord (he doesn’t), and turns the volume up to twenty when he finds 107.5 playing a rap song that I vaguely remember hearing earlier in the club. I can tell the Uber driver hates passengers like Marco by how tightly his hands are gripping the steering wheel and how erect his posture is.

“Where are we going?” I whisper to Ian.

“A friend’s house,” Chelsea answers for him. “My weed guy.” She winks at me, as if this is code for something that only her and I know about, and I wonder if Ian and Marco know that she and I are on ecstasy. I can’t remember telling them we were.

I remember finishing that drink she and I got from the bar. I remember finding Ian and Marco deep inside the crowd, where I couldn’t tell whether it was my sweat, someone else’s, or a mixture of the two, dampening my dress so that it stuck to my back. I remember dancing. A lot. So much that the muscles in my thighs ached. I remember Marco and Chelsea whispering to each other. Maybe she told him about the ecstasy then? I remember Ian and Marco leaving to go grab more drinks, Chelsea grinding her body against mine while they were gone. How her body seemed to send mine some kind of electric charge as it rubbed up against me. Then that’s it. It’s as if we time-traveled from the club to the street, and into an Uber.

“Are we picking up weed or something?” I ask.

The Uber driver glares at me through the rearview mirror, and I remember that he’s within earshot of me.

“Something like that,” Chelsea replies. I glance over at Ian, who’s staring out the window, and I wonder why he’s being so quiet today.

He and I met through Tinder, something none of my friends back home in Glen Ellyn know I’m on. People tend to be very judgmental where I’m from. If my friends knew I’d met a guy on Tinder and then hopped on a Metra train out to the city to see him a few days later, they’d think I was insane. I’d be lying if I said that it wasn’t exciting though, having this secret life that no one but I knew about. Where I’m from, everyone is content with being content. Their idea of fun is going to a movie or to the mall. It gets pretty old after a while. I wanted to meet new people. I didn’t expect to meet someone so soon.

The first time Ian and I met, he took me out to lunch and we walked around Lincoln Park Zoo. While we were waiting for the Uber that he called to take me back to Ogilvie Station, he leaned over and kissed me. His stubble was prickly against my chin and his lips tasted like nicotine. I’d never kissed a guy who smoked cigarettes before, but I didn’t mind the taste. I kind of liked it, actually. He had been so sweet and funny and talkative that day, but now he won’t even look at me. Did I do something wrong? Had I done something embarrassing in the stretch of time that’s somehow escaped my memory?

I try to shake off this thought, deciding that he’s probably just tired, and stare out the window. As we continue to drive, the tall buildings and overflowing bars turn into three-story apartments and tiny corner stores with metal bars on the windows. An uneasy feeling settles in the pit of my stomach.

“Where does your weed guy live?” I murmur to Chelsea.

“Don’t worry. We’re almost there,” she replies.

When the Uber comes to a stop, it’s in front of a white two-story house with chipped paint and a miniscule concrete porch. It sits on a patch of dead grass, enclosed inside a metal gate. All the curtains are drawn, and the porch light is off.

“Thanks,” Marco says to the driver as he gets out of the car. Ian and Chelsea open their doors to get out too, but I remain frozen in my seat, staring out Ian’s open car door at the house.

Chelsea walks around to Ian’s side and bends down to peek in at me. “Come on,” she says.

I glance back at the Uber driver, who is watching me through the rearview mirror, his thick black eyebrows knitted together. I feel a sudden overwhelming urge to ask him to take me away from here. Away from this house, this neighborhood, this city.

I think about my room back home in Glen Ellyn. About the pink and white bedding I’ve had since I was sixteen and the big window looking out into the front yard. I think about my mom and dad. They’re probably sitting on the couch right now—my mom with her legs tucked underneath her and the quilted blanket she loves draped over her, and my dad in his favorite Blackhawks sweatshirt with his arm resting on the back of the couch. Neither are worried about me because they think I’m spending the night at Kaitlin’s house, only ten minutes away, just right down Roosevelt Road.

“Leah,” Chelsea says, sounding slightly irritated now.

I tentatively slide across the smooth leather seat and step out into the night, which feels much colder now. Chelsea shuts the door behind me, and I watch the taillights of the Nissan get smaller and smaller as it speeds off down the street, eventually making a right, and disappearing around the corner.

Ian and Marco are already waiting on the tiny slab of concrete porch, and as Chelsea and I ascend the three brittle stairs that lead up to it, the front door opens. A tall, wide Hispanic man fills the door frame, yellow light pouring out of the spaces his body does not take up.

His murky brown eyes land on me and the corner of his mouth curls up ever so slightly. He greets Ian and Marco, and they both slide past him into the house. When Chelsea approaches him, he wraps her up in a hug, and I watch his large, tan hand travel down to her ass. My breath quickens.

“And who might you be?” he says to me, his voice deep and gravelly. He looks me up and down, and I suddenly wish that my dress was a few inches longer, the neckline a few inches higher.

“That’s Leah,” Chelsea introduces me. “Leah, this is Damian.”

He holds a meaty hand out to me, the same hand that was just on Chelsea’s ass. I reach out my own trembling hand and shake it, his palm warm and calloused.

“Come on in,” he says to us. I trail behind Chelsea into the front hallway, pressing the door shut behind me. His house smells like weed and disinfectant, skunky and astringent.

We walk past the kitchen where a woman not much older than me sits, rolling joints. She looks up at me as we pass, her cold, empty eyes meeting mine for only a moment before returning to the pile of weed in front of her.

When we walk into the living room, Marco and Ian are already sitting down, Ian on the faded tan couch and Marco on one of the two metal folding chairs adjacent to it. Damian sits down on the other one, and Chelsea and I sink down into the worn couch, with me winding up between her and Ian again.

The only other furniture in the room is the knotted wood coffee table (scattered with two full ash trays, random blunts and nugs of weed, a small scale, even smaller baggies, and a remote) and the TV, which sits on a fold-out table parallel to the couch. I feel very out of place here in my black sequined mini dress and three-inch red heels.

“So,” Damian begins, his voice booming throughout the small rectangular room. “Anybody need a drink?”

“I thought you’d never ask,” Chelsea replies. She rises from her spot on the couch and looks down at me. “Come on,” she says. “Let’s go help him grab the drinks.”

I glance at Ian who is sunken back into the couch, too busy picking at his cuticles to notice that I’m looking at him. Tentatively, I rise from my seat and Chelsea takes my hand in hers. She follows Damian into the kitchen, pulling me along behind her, but I don’t think it takes three people to go grab some drinks.

My hand is slick with sweat when Chelsea finally releases it. The woman at the table glances up at us, her face remaining expressionless. Damian places his hand on the back of her chair, leaning down to murmur something into her ear in Spanish. She looks back up at Chelsea and I, then gets up and walks out of the room.

“Come on, ladies,” Damian says to us. We follow him over to the refrigerator. “So how did you like those pills?” he asks as he opens the door to the fridge. White light pours over his tan face. I notice a bright pink scar that snakes around his left eye, beginning above his eyebrow and ending at the top of his cheek.

“They were great as always,” Chelsea purrs. “Leah, what did you think?”

My heart rate quickens at the sound of my name. Damian pulls out a six-pack of A Little Sumpin’ Sumpin’, and he and Chelsea both look at me, waiting for my answer. “They were great,” I parrot Chelsea, my voice shaky as it leaves my mouth.

“I have more of them upstairs in my room,” he says. “You want another one?”

He and Chelsea look to me again as if they’re counting on me to give them the correct answer. Instead, I stand there, mouth slightly ajar, wondering if Ian and Marco are wondering why it’s taking us so long.

“She wants another one,” Chelsea answers for me, her bubblegum lips coiling up into an impish smile. She takes my hand again and as Damian begins leading us out of the kitchen, beer still in hand, I feel the pad of her thumb gently begin to stroke the top of mine.

Ian and Marco don’t even glance up at us when we pass by the living room. A thick cloud of smoke hangs around Marco’s head, and he reaches through it to pass Ian a bowl, as we continue past them to the stairs.

The stairway leading to the second level of Damian’s house is dim and narrow. Each stair creaks under our weight and the closer we get to the top of them, the more I want to turn around and run out of here. My gut is playing tug-of-war with itself inside my stomach and a cold sweat has broken out on the back of my neck. All of the doors upstairs are closed, but Damian opens up the second one to the right, and we file inside. He closes it behind us.

Inside Damian’s room is a mattress with disheveled blankets and sheets, a nightstand, and a dresser with a TV that sits on top of it. The only source of light in the room comes from a small lamp that sits on top of his nightstand, casting a dim, yellow glow over everything. I notice a rosary with turquoise beads sitting on the nightstand too. The silver cross hanging from it gleams under the light from the lamp. The miniature Jesus hanging on it unnerves me.

Damian plops down on the mattress, placing the six-pack on the carpet at his feet, and opens the drawer to his nightstand. Chelsea sits down beside him. I stand over them, feeling awkward and slightly nauseous.

“Sit down,” Chelsea tells me, tugging on my hand.

I sink into the bed next to her. Damian pulls out a Ziploc baggy full of those pink little pills, which have a slightly orange hue to them under the yellow light of the lamp, and hands one to me and one to Chelsea. Next, he pulls out two beers and opens them each before passing them down to Chelsea and me.

As I pop the pill in my mouth, I notice that Damian doesn’t take one. But he grins at me as I swallow mine down, and I think I can feel that little pink pill land in the pit of my stomach, which groans. I realize that I haven’t eaten anything since lunch. My mom would have a fit if she knew that. She was always so persistent on making sure that everyone had enough to eat.

I wonder what she and my dad had for dinner tonight. It’s Friday so they probably had Lou Malnati’s. Every Friday since I can remember, we would order a deep-dish cheese pizza from Lou Malnati’s for dinner. When I was little, I’d always go with my dad to pick it up, and when we rode home, I’d place the pizza box on my lap, holding it steady so that the cheese wouldn’t slide around when my dad turned a corner. I hope the cheese didn’t slide now that I wasn’t there to hold it.

“God, these heels are killing me,” Chelsea says. She kicks them off, then looks to me. “You should take yours off, too. I’m sure your feet are sore from dancing all night.”

They are sore, but I don’t want to take my shoes off here. If I take them off, that means we’re staying awhile, and I don’t want to stay awhile.

“Shouldn’t we head back downstairs?” I say instead. “Won’t the guys be wondering where we are?”

Chelsea rolls her eyes dramatically and leans back on her elbows, removing the barrier between Damian and I. “Didn’t I tell you earlier not to worry about the guys?” She reaches a bare foot over and kicks the shoe off my right foot for me.

I glance at Damian, who sips a beer, his dark eyes peering over the top of it at me. I feel Chelsea kick my other shoe off, and I think I should make up an excuse to leave soon. Say I have to get some rest before work in the morning or something. Then I can call an Uber and go home. I could be back in my room watching Netflix in less than an hour. I should tell them I have to leave. I should get up and go back downstairs, but my limbs feel heavy, too heavy to move, so I remain frozen on Damian’s bed, my spine stiff and straight.

“What’s wrong with you?” Chelsea asks, moving her hand, cool and damp from holding the beer, so that it rests on top of mine. “You were having fun earlier, weren’t you?”

That was back when we were at the club, I want to say. Before we came here.

“Yeah,” I say instead.

“Well relax, and let’s keep having fun then,” she replies, her lips curling up into a jack-o-lantern-like grin.

“Yeah,” Damian chimes in. “You want some music? I can put on music.”

He rises from the bed and walks over to a closet. I glance to my left as if I may find a way out of this over there, but all I see is a framed photo of a baby with pink pudgy cheeks and a blue knit cap on his round head, sitting on the dresser. I wonder if this is Damian’s child. It must be. Why else would he have his picture out on display in his bedroom? Is that woman from downstairs the mother?

Damian walks over to the dresser and places a portable speaker on top of it.

“I just don’t get why we’re listening to music up here while Ian and Marco are sitting downstairs,” I say.

Chelsea sits back up, her face cast over as she glares at me. “Here.” She picks up my beer, which I’d set down on the carpet, and shoves it at me. “Drink this and we’ll get the music going and we’ll all have fun, okay?”

I stare at the bottle, watching a single drop of condensation roll down the side of it like a tear rolling down a cheek. I let out a deep sigh and take it from her, swallowing down a long sip.

She smiles and says, “Good girl,” as glitchy electronic music begins playing from the speaker. Then she stands up, holding out a hand to me. “Dance with me.”

I stare at her hand for a moment before I hesitantly take it, her thin fingers interlacing with mine, and let her pull me up off of the bed. I take another long swig of my beer before setting it down on Damian’s nightstand.

Chelsea twirls me around like they do on that show my mom loves, Dancing with the Stars, and I feel like this ecstasy pill is hitting me quicker than the last one did.

Electricity runs up through my fingertips, spreading throughout the rest of my body. Damian turns the volume on the speaker up and Chelsea’s blonde hair whips around as she dances, moving her hips and head in sync with the music. I get that feathery feeling just underneath my skin and when Chelsea pulls me toward her. I let her. When her bubblegum lips meet mine, I don’t pull away, even when her cold, wet tongue slips between my lips and into my mouth.

I’ve never kissed a girl before. It’s different than kissing a guy. Softer. Sweeter. Gentler.

I feel her hand tangle up in my hair, her fingers gently beginning to knead the back of my head.

When we fall onto the bed, I notice that the hem of my dress has hiked up to the top of my thigh. I reach a hand down to fix it, but Chelsea reaches a hand down to stop me. Then I feel that same hand begin to travel slowly up my thigh and under my dress, and when it reaches inside my panties, I let my arm fall limp at my side, my back tensing up in pleasure.

I don’t know how much time passes by. An hour? Twenty minutes? Five? It all becomes fuzzy once the ecstasy peaks. But at some point, once both of our clothes have been shed (I hardly remember taking mine off), I catch a glimpse of Damian out of the corner of my eye and my stomach lurches. I forgot he was even in the room, but there he stands, off to the side of the bed, lips sneered and shoulders squared, holding his phone out, recording us.

I immediately jerk upright, my head swimming as I do so.

“What’s the matter?” Chelsea asks me. I stare, wide-eyed at Damian, and he looks back at me, something smug and sinister flickering in his eyes. He doesn’t put the phone down.

I tear my eyes away from him and hold my arm up across my bare chest, feeling trembly and disoriented as I turn my head left and right, searching for my dress. Chelsea glances back at him, but doesn’t seem even vaguely phased.

“Sweetie, relax,” she tells me, placing a cold hand on my shoulder. “Nobody you know is gonna see this.”

I stare into her calm, dilated eyes. “What the fuck are you talking about?” I remark, jerking my shoulder so that her hand falls off of it. The ecstasy is taking a turn now, and I feel as though I might throw up. I squeeze my eyes shut, taking in deep, measured breaths through my nose, and letting them out slowly through my mouth.

Chelsea sighs as if me not being okay with all of this is inconvenient for her. “Damian’s family back in Colombia sells them for us, so no one in this continent will ever see them. You’d be surprised how much people will pay for some real-life amateur American porn.”

Porn. The word is so alien to me. I’ve never even watched porn before. An acidic taste creeps up the back of my throat.

I stare at her, waiting for her to tell me that she’s just kidding, that of course this hadn’t been the plan the entire night. I remember Ian and Marco downstairs. Were they in on this? I wait for her to tell me they weren’t in on this, that at least Ian wasn’t. But she just stares right back at me impatiently with pursed lips.

“I need to leave,” I say, sliding past her and finding my dress crumpled up on the floor next to the bed.

Chelsea sits there, looking irritated. “Why? We were having fun. Just forget he’s even there.”

I step into my dress, knowing in that instant that I will never wear it again, and as I inch it up over my body, I notice that Damian is still recording. Why the fuck is he still recording?

“Leah, come on,” Chelsea says from the bed.

My throat burns with unshed tears, and I reach around my back to zip my dress up, but my hands are shaking and I’m only able to get it up halfway, so I just leave it, grab my shoes, and walk out of the room.

I float down the stairs, the sitcom audience laughter from the living room TV growing louder as I near the bottom. When I stop in the doorway to the living room, Ian and Marco both look at me. I wait for them to gasp, to ask me what happened, but they just sit there smoking their cigarettes, looking stoned and bored.

My legs are like Jell-O as I walk over to the couch to grab my purse, keeping my head cast down, refusing to look at Ian or Marco as tears well behind my eyes and humiliation burns my cheeks. I just want to get out of here, away from these people. I just want to go home.

Where my mom has probably fallen asleep on the couch during whatever movie my parents were watching. Where my dad has probably woken her up ever so gently and followed her upstairs to bed, leaving the light above the sink in the kitchen on for me in case I change my mind about staying at Kaitlyn’s, and so I wouldn’t come inside to a pitch dark house.

Home feels different now. Maybe home isn’t where I want to go after all.

“I wouldn’t go out there alone if I were you,” Ian says as I turn to leave. “Just sit down and relax. I’ll call you an Uber.”

I’m really fucking sick of people telling me to relax, but I sit down anyway, leaving a large space between Ian and I.

I squeeze my eyes shut, flashbacks of Chelsea and Damian playing behind my eyelids. Her lips, bubblegum pink, coming toward mine. Her hands, cold and soft as they traveled expertly up and down my body. And then Damian. Sneering. Foreboding. Recording. People are going to see that. People are going to see me. I repeat it over and over again in my head, trying to make it feel real. I know Chelsea said no one on this continent would ever see it, but how could I trust her after everything she’s done? What if she was lying? What if someone I know sees? What if my dad sees?

When I open my eyes, they’re blurry with tears.

This is all Ian’s fault. He was the one who messaged me, who took me out and made me laugh. Who brought me here. Or maybe it’s my fault for being stupid enough to trust some guy I met on Tinder. Is this my fault?

I think about that day at Lincoln Park Zoo and how I stumbled over what to say because I was so nervous around Ian. I think about the second time we hung out, eating pizza and watching movies in his studio apartment. I let his hand travel up underneath my shirt while we made out on his futon. I decided then and there that the next time we hung out, I wouldn’t stop him if he tried to have sex with me. What an idiot I was. I should have known that Ian didn’t actually like me. Ian, with his cool friends and cool city apartment and cool apathetic demeanor, would never be into me, sweet little Leah from Glen Ellyn. I should’ve known to take his attraction to me with a grain of salt.

Six minutes later, my Uber arrives. Neither Chelsea nor Damian come downstairs in those six minutes. Neither Ian nor Marco say a word. They just sit there, smoking and watching TV, as if all of this is perfectly normal to them. And maybe it is. The thought makes me queasy, and I’m grateful when Ian finally utters the words, “He’s here.”

When I get into the Uber, I realize it’s the same driver who dropped us off here. He looks at me in the rearview mirror, sitting there with my dress half unzipped and my shoes on my lap and tears staining my cheeks.

“Going back to Glen Ellyn?” he asks.

“Yeah,” I croak, and he peels off down the street.

_______________________
Alexis Bowe graduated from Columbia College Chicago with a double major in creative writing and graphic design in the fall of 2018. Since graduating, she has done some freelance writing, as well as continued to work on her novel-in-progress. She is an emerging writer, and her work can be found in Hair Trigger 2.0 and Hypertext Magazine. 

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Beautiful Savages

 

Mama used to brush my hair at night before bedtime. We’d sit on the porch together, feeling the cool sensation of silk throw rugs beneath our bare thighs. Mama would be behind me¾so close I could smell the fragrance of her violet perfume. Sometimes, she’d lean forward so her pretty, heart-shaped face would rest on my shoulder. The point of her chin would dug lightly into my skin, but I hadn’t mind.

I loved my special time with Mama.

When we were alone together, she’d really talk to me, the same way she did with one of her friends or my aunties. She made me feel special like I wasn’t a baby. I was a woman.

Tonight, we observed our old ritual.

“Never follow a man,” she whispered into my ear as she brushed the tangles from my hair. “Men are foolish¾much like that boy from down the street that you like to play with. You’re not foolish, Fumi. Don’t behave foolishly.”

“Men are foolish,” I repeated. I wanted her to know I was listening.

“Don’t become like me, my darling.”

She’d often say this, though I wasn’t sure I really understood what she meant, at least not when I was younger. She was the purest form and embodiment of what a woman was, and what a woman should be. Why would I not want to be a goddess like her in my own right when I was older? 

“I will be whatever you want me to be,” I said as I traced my fingertips over the goosebumps forming on my forearm, staring out into the darkness ahead. The black outline of pine trees blanketed our house, the familiarity giving me a sense of comfort.

That night, I had the dream.

I was down by the beach, surrounded by women, the smell of incense strong in the air: wood and green tea¾no hint of sweetness.

The women all had thick, black hair, milk-colored skin, cold, black eyes, and blood red lips. Masks made out of broken skulls adorned half of their faces, from forehead to nose. They didn’t speak. Instead, they waved their hands through the air, slashing at nothing with long, yellow nails. Their smiles were the worst thing I’d ever seen¾hideous. Their teeth were plastic zippers, sealed shut and glowing.

One of them, smaller than the others, became curious of me. Over her naked body, she wore a silky robe of yellow and blue that trailed behind her. She approached me, and when we were face-to-face, she lifted her hand and unzipped the toggle at the end of her mouth with one of her long fingernails.

She licked my cheek, her tongue cold and smooth against my skin. I stepped back to look at her. I had the strangest sense of familiarity and a desperate urge to look away from the gruesome sight. She licked me again, and I shuddered. Her tongue was a bright green with two small, black eyes, and a long, forked, pink tongue of its own. Her tongue was a snake.

I told Mama about the dream in the morning before breakfast.

She sniffed and waved her hand over a cloud of steam that erupted after she lifted the lid off a pot of rice.

She whispered, biting into her lips, “Nure-onna, the snake woman.”

I thought of the old folktale. An amphibious beast with the body of a snake and the face of an angelic woman. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes as I shook my head.

“No, Mama. The serpent was inside her, not a part of her body.”

I watched as Mama flew through the kitchen in her pale robe. Her waist-length hair flicked so quick it became a blur, smacking against her back.

“It’s bewitchment,” she said as I followed her to the table.

Mama artfully placed down the china bowls along with a steaming plate of rice, a pot of soup, and some fish she’d bought early that morning down at the market.

“I just worry about you, my Fumi. You know your grandma’s mania started with dreams.”

“I know,” I replied, sinking into one of the cushions on the floor as Mama raced back into the kitchen.

I felt my appetite drain away, leaving a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach. Bad dreams. Mama said the dreams had caused grandma to bolt out of bed before sunrise. She’d glide through the house, looking blood-drained and chalk white as though she’d seen an apparition, whispering to herself, speaking of spirits and a dark presence. Mama said her passing was a blessing; it gave her peace.

I could feel Mama’s eyes on me. She was thinking about her, too. Her lower lip quivered slightly as it sometimes did when she was about to cry.     

“Eat up,” she said. “Let’s not worry our minds about such things right now.” She sat down, brushing out the wrinkles from her robe before she grabbed one of the bowls.

We ate in silence. Morning came and went quickly. I did my chores, sweeping and tidying around the house before I took Tom, our dog, for a walk. We headed east past the forest. Tom nipped at my heels and barked at our neighbor, Kyoshi, when he came down the pathway.

“Good afternoon, Fumi,” he said. “It’s lovely today, isn’t it?”

I fought a grin as I stared at his forever shaggy, black hair. I’d met Kyoshi when I was five and he was six. We’d bonded quickly over a love of digging up earthworms in the garden, building them magical castles made out of newspapers and plastic scraps. Mama didn’t approve.

“Yes, it is,” I replied, watching as pink spots appeared on his cheeks.

“How is your mother?” He asked.

As he knelt down to pet Tom, I noticed that Kyoshi’s shoulders were beginning to broaden out, and the pudgy mound of baby fat around his belly was gone. It was strange¾as a child he’d been much rounder and was often teased for being overweight. Suddenly, it was like staring at a stranger. I hadn’t noticed us changing as the years went by, but now I felt all too aware. I stared down at Tom.

“She’s doing really well, Kyoshi.”

“That’s good. So, the doctor’s treatments are helping then?”

I opened my mouth.

“Kyoshi!” A voice rang out from behind the trees.

“Coming!” He replied, jumping up and brushing the blades of grass from his knees. I felt an urge to ask him to stay but couldn’t get the words to come out.

“I must go,” he said to me, before turning toward the trees. He seemed to disappear so quickly it was as if he’d never been there at all. 

“Bye, Kyoshi,” I whispered to the rustling branches. I wouldn’t tell Mama about our quick run-in. The older Kyoshi got, the more she seemed to disapprove of him hanging around.

Tom barked.

We headed back home for lunch. Mama and I ate rice balls stuffed with umeboshi and eggs on the porch.              

“I have spoken with your Auntie Tearu about your dream.”

I looked up at her, my mouth still full with a bite of pickled plum. It tingled on my lips.

“Why, Mama?”

Her brows raised as she gave me a look. Her fingernails tapped on her collarbone briefly.

“I’m only doing what I must.”

Despite my opposition, I remained quiet.

“This is for the best, Fumi,” she said.

Off in the trees somewhere came a high-pitched shriek. It startled me, but Mama ignored it.

“I fear that something is coming for you, my darling. Something coarse and wicked.”

“Nothing is coming for me, Mama.”

She stared out into the sea of trees, but didn’t respond.

                                                                       

That night I could not sleep.

My mind wandered as I thought of conversations with my mother. Our special time on the porch where we’d share stories. Sometimes, when Mama was feeling up to it, she’d talk about her family, telling stories about growing up with my grandma and grandpa. Sometimes I’d imagine what they were like based off Mama’s stories since they had passed before I was born.

                                                                       

“Your grandpa was a handsome man,” Mama told me one night as she tucked me in for bed, “Many women thought so, but he chose your grandma.” Mama paused briefly to shoo away a bug on the window sill before returning to the bed. “Handsome, but very serious, he didn’t have time for anything he considered frivolous. There were only a handful of times during which we spoke alone together. It was very different with grandma.”

I remembered staring up at her intently as I asked her what she meant.

“We’d have adventures,” Mama said as her eyes twinkled with happy memories. “We’d dress up in our best outfits, our hair done up, and storm through the gardens to dig for buried treasure, drape sheets over low tree branches and pretend we lived in castles far away.” Mama wrapped her arm around me as she pulled me in close to her warm body. “But Papa would yell at her when we tracked in mud, and when he found the sheets torn and dirty with bugs and leaves,” her voice grew softer. “It broke her spirit.”

“Don’t be sad, Mama,” I said as I wrapped my arm around her waist. “We can still have adventures.”

“At least your grandma had someone,” Mama said as if I hadn’t spoken. “At least she wasn’t all alone.”

“You’re not alone Mama,” I said. “You’ll always have me. Forever.”

She stared down at me and smiled.

“Forever,” she echoed, as she ran her fingers through my hair. “Forever and always.”

                                                                       

Hours passed before I fell asleep.

In my dreams, my mind took me back to the world of those beautiful savages. They watched me, their cruel-looking eyes seemed to dance beneath the strange skeleton masks they wore. They howled like Titans when I begged them to take me back through the smoke swirls to the mental sanctuary of my home and the loving arms of Mama.

I tried to wake up, but they held down my slight form, their talon-like nails digging into my shoulders. Their rancid breath was warm on my cheeks. They laughed high-pitched howls as they sniffed my dark hair, breathing in my soap scented, limp locks. Their teeth gnawed at my small, pouty lips, and when they drew my blood, relishing the salty taste with cries of joy, I screamed. I saw the outline of the city in the distance against a starless sky filled with dragons that looked as flimsy as tissue paper. Their wings fluttered in the cool breeze.

I watched silently.

Then, it began to rain. It streamed down, the water black and corrosive as battery acid. The dragon’s wings of red and gold melted into nothing. The women holding me down threw back their heads and wailed. The rain burned away their hair, their skeleton masks. Their skin, which had once seemed so beautifully creamy and soft, was now eaten away, chunk by chunk. Left behind were hideous faces, skulls with small chunks of muscle hanging limply off bone.

In the morning, Mama asked me to go to temple with her to pray.

“It will help, my darling. Tearu recommended it.”

My auntie was just as eccentric as my mother.

I sighed. “Alright, Mama.”

After breakfast, we headed west through the forest toward the temple. It must have rained the night before. The air was crisp and fresh. Dewdrops trailed off oversized ferns and the earth was moist. The hem of my dress became mud-soaked.

I trailed behind Mama, watching my feet as they sank into the ground with each step. When I looked up, she was gone.

“Mama?” I called out, scanning the trees.

The forest was quiet. I could not hear her footsteps, see her tracks, or hear her voice calling me.

“Mama!” I said louder.

The forest was still, save for the chirping of birds and the humming of crickets.

I raced the last mile to the temple.

“Mama!” I cried. My voice bounced off the trees, echoing back to me.

I could see the temple up ahead. Rainwater dripped off the top of the sloped roof, collecting into a large puddle near the base.

I raced up the pathway and through the gate, almost falling on a slippery stone on the path. When I got to the steps, I slowed down.

The door felt slightly sticky in my hands as I slid it open. I moved quickly, but quietly, through the rooms, searching.

“Mama!” I hissed. “Where are you?”

At the end of the main hallway, I slid open another door leading to a small room, perfumed with jasmine incense. Colorfully decorated banners hung from the walls, and a small, wooden table held a bowl of pears and figs.

“Mama?” I whispered to a figure crouched down on a mat.

She lifted her head. “Darling!”

“Mama, why didn’t you wait for me?”

She grinned. “You’re here now, dear. That’s all that matters. Come,” she waved me over, “sit with me.”

I was so confused. My head felt strangely heavy and cloudy. How could she have gotten here so fast?

“Fumi?”

I began to chew on my nails, a nasty habit, one Mama had always tried to discourage with little success.

“Fumi!”

My left hand dropped from my mouth and I moved to join her.

After we’d finished praying, Mama and I walked silently down the paths outside. The gardens were beautiful, artfully arranged with sculptures, rockeries, and ornamental decor. Beneath a red maple tree, a small, bronze Buddha smiled at us cheerfully, his large belly exposed from his clothes. As Mama and I walked past the statue, a man in brown robes brushed past.

He nodded to us.

“Good afternoon,” I said.

“Lovely day,” said Mama.

He grinned at me, revealing a few missing teeth.

“Enjoying your visit?” he asked before continuing further down toward the low shrubbery.

“The new additions to the pathway are nice,” I said.

“I noticed you removed the fox statue that used to be by the gate,” Mama said. “I found that very disappointing.”

For some reason, the man ignored Mama, and instead turned to me, his eyes crinkled as the sun poked out from behind the clouds and beamed down on us.

“Best be off,” he said. “Must fish out the maple leaves that have fallen in the pond.”

We stayed a little while longer before heading home.

When we returned, I told Mama that I had a headache. She made me a wrap dipped in essential oils and placed it on my forehead while I rested on some cushions. The soothing smell of lavender and wild mint made me feel relaxed and sleepy.

I must have drifted off. When I woke up, it was nighttime.

“Mama?” I called out to the dark room. “Mama, where are you?” I waited to hear, right here, darling! It never came.

Our house seemed so cold. As my eyes adjusted to the light, I realized something wrong.

The room was torn to bits. The curtains were shredded, hanging limply from their poles, the tables overturned. The air smelled like rotten eggs, moldy carpet, and feces.

“Mama!” I cried.

There was no response.

I leaped up.

“Where are you?” I screamed.

I ran to the kitchen and fell onto my stomach. The floor was slippery, the wood looked rotten and eaten away.

I burst into tears.

“Help!” I croaked out.

“Woof!”

Tom ran up to me and licked my cheek. I stared at him.

“Tom, what’s happened to you?” His fur hung over his eyes, was matted on one side, and he smelled awful. “Oh Tom!” I cried, brushing back the fur from his head. “What’s happening?”

Together, we moved through the house. I found that the windows were smashed, the food was rotting, and the porch¾our beloved porch¾was broken. There was a crack right down the middle like a giant fist had slammed down through the woodwork.

Tom ran up to the hole, looked down, and howled.

I pulled him away and went back inside to the cupboard. The broom in the closet was coated in a layer of dust. I wiped it off on my dress, went down the hall, and began to sweep away a broken vase.

I spent the night cleaning. I sobbed occasionally. Eventually, I fell asleep on the floor. When I woke up, the house remained in the same state of disarray, now with sunlight streaming in through the broken windows.

There was no breakfast.

I spent the morning in the forest, calling out Mama’s name. I didn’t find her, but noticed that the forest also seemed to be in a worse state than I remembered. Trees were split and on their sides, flowerbeds trampled, and the stones that lined the pathways were gone.

Instead of eating lunch, I hiked back out to the temple. Perhaps she was there, I could only hope. That was all I had left now. This time I ran up to the gate and raced up the stairs.

“Mama!” I screamed, running through the rooms, startling several people mid-prayer.

After I’d checked every room, I ran out to the gardens.

I called out for her, smashing the wildflowers with my boots and knocking over small sculptures. I ignored the damage. I had only one goal, one focus.

“Mama!” I screamed.

The man from the other day, the one in the brown robes, looked up at me from his spot underneath a willow tree and smiled.

“Hello! Lovely day isn’t it?”

I ignored him, scanning the grounds.

“Are you alright?” he called out.

I turned to him. “No.”

“May I help?” he asked.

A thought came to me. “Have you seen my mother?”

His brow furrowed. “Your mother?”

“Yes. The woman I was here with the other day. You saw us. Remember?”

His face paled. “I remember you. But not your mother. You were alone.”

I glared at him. “No. She spoke to you. You said it was a lovely afternoon.”

His faced wrinkled as he shook his head. “I spoke to you, and you were alone.”

I clench my teeth. My fingers curled into fists, fingernails biting into my palms. “I wasn’t!” I sank to the ground. “I wasn’t.”

“Why don’t you go back inside?” the man asked, moving in closer. “Perhaps someone inside can help you¾”

“No!” I shrieked, pounding into the dirt with my fists. “No! You’re lying about yesterday, about Mama!” I began to cry. “Stop lying!”

 The man looked alarmed.

“Is everything all right out there?” a man called out from the porch.

“Help me!” I cried. “Please, he’s lying to me!” I said, pointing up to the man in the brown robes.

The man on the porch raced down to us. “Fumi, is that you?” the man asked.

I stared at his face. It was Akio. Mama knew him better than I did. He sold us our furniture.

“Fumi, what’s wrong?”

“I can’t find her!” I cried. I hit the dirt again with my fist. “She’s gone!”

He crouched down. “Who?”

“Mama! She’s gone!”

He frowned, “Fumi, what do you mean?”

“I can’t find her! My house . . . our house is torn apart! And she’s¾

“What’s she talking about?” questioned the man in the brown robes.

Akio turned to look at him. “She’s . . . she thinks . . . her mother’s here.”

“No! She’s gone! She’s gone!”

“Yes, she is, Fumi,” he said gently, putting a hand my shoulder.

Your mother, your family, passed on.” Akio said.

I let out a wail, smacking away his hand, “No!”

“Fumi, I know the accident was very hard on you.”

“No!” I cried. “Kyoshi, he asked the other day about Mama¾”

“Sho’s son?”

I stare at him, pleading.

“Oh child,” he said quietly. “The typhoon got them too.”

“No!” I tore at the ends of my hair.

He stared down at me, expressionless. “Yes, child,” he said. Akio turned toward the man in the brown robes before telling him, “I hadn’t realized how bad it’s gotten. She’s not a child and, even though she’s been alone, I’d thought things were improving.”

I stared up at the clouds.

“But, what about the dreams?”

“Dreams?”

“They’re coming for me!”

He sighed. “Who?”

“Demons,” I whispered. “The snake woman.”

“No,” he said softly.

I closed my eyes. I couldn’t take seeing the pity etched into his face.

“Yes!”

He was wrong, he had to be.

“Please, Fumi,” he said, Akio stood up and offered me his hand. “Stop this madness.”

I stared up at him, “You’re wrong, they’re coming for me.”

He glanced over at the other man and gestured for him to come closer. “I know, child. I know.”

                                                                       

They led me back into the temple as the people gathered around outside staring openly, but I didn’t care. They led me down the halls, all the way back to a small room, and motioned for me to rest on a green couch. The man in brown robes offered me a patchwork quilt that was ragged at one end.

I wrapped myself up and sank back into the cushions.

“Try to rest,” said Akio.

I wanted to reply, but my body wouldn’t stop shaking. I didn’t understand any of it.

When the two men walked away, I closed my eyes. They were wrong. Mama always said men were great deceivers. That was it, they were lying! But¾I started to remember.

It’d been six months. Six months since the storms had struck, destroying the house, and taking away my mama. Instead of staying home to care for her, I’d gone outside to hike through the forest. I’d told Mama I was going to run errands, a pointless excuse to get out of the house¾and Kyoshi! I’d run into him on my way back.

Maybe, if I hadn’t stopped¾but I’d wanted to stop, I’d wanted to see him. Maybe if I hadn’t, Mama would still be with me.

The tears returned.

Mama had struggled so much by the end, just like she said grandma had. It came on sudden. Just like the dreams had taken her, they’d begun to take Mama, too.

I’d spent countless nights waking up in darkness, the sky still pitch-black outside. I’d rub the sleep from my eyes and force myself out of bed. I would hear her whispering, talking about monsters, demon women that were coming for her. When she’d let me, I’d guide her back to bed, but sometimes she’d become hysterical and begin screaming.

I’m so sorry, Mama, it was an accident. Nothing more.

We’d known the storm was coming, I’d tried my best to board up the house, Mama had even seemed lucid that day.

“I’ll see you soon, darling,” she’d called out to me as I walked out of the house without looking back.

The rain was already heavy by the time I’d gotten back, and the winds were too strong. I should have stopped her from running outside. I shouldn’t have argued, or yelled, as she ran further away. I didn’t mean it, Mama¾the things I said.                    

I choked on my breath. The tears wouldn’t stop.

“Mama! Mama!”

“Mama,” I whispered. “I want to see you, I miss you¾so much.”

I grabbed the cushion and buried my face into it.

“I’m right here, darling!”

I looked up, but the room remained empty.

Wiping away tears, I dabbed at the wet spots on the cushion before I rested it behind my head. I was tired now, so tired that I felt as if I could sleep for the next hundred years. I shut my eyes and waited.

I dreamed, and in my dreams came the women, with their snake mouths, masks, and talon-like nails. As I stared at the crowd, the small creature wearing the yellow and blue robe stepped forward and removed her mask.

“Hello, darling,” she said.

I felt tears run down my cheeks. Even with a forked tongue, and bone jutting out from her skull, I still recognized my mama.

The women smiled at me and this time when they smiled, I was not afraid. My mama beckoned me, and without fear, I stepped forward.

The women came, circling me like prey. Their tongues slid out, ready to devour. They hissed, and their nails scraped my cheeks.

I knew what they wanted.

They wrapped themselves around me. Their skin sticking to mine felt ice-cold. They wanted me to let them in. They wanted to be inside of me¾mind, body, and spirit belonging to these dark monstrous creatures. So, I let them take me.

“I love you, Mama,” I whispered to the nothingness before the world around me went black.

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Twenty-Six

Disney World is the happiest place on earth. This is a known fact, verified, proven. Those who disagree have simply never been, have never smelled the piped-in-cinnamon sugar scent of Main Street, USA, or tasted the cool creaminess of a Dole whip; haven’t heard the screams from Splash Mountain as they wait in line, eagerly, for their turn down the slippery slope; and haven’t seen the spires of Cinderella’s castle as they walk through the gates. Epcot is my personal happy place. The second park to be built at the Orlando sight, Epcot was completed after Walt himself had already passed away. The park is very different from his original vision of an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow and, in fact, has the distinct feel of being two different parks smashed together—because it is. Epcot came about when two imagineers with two different ideas and two different models tried pushing the models together.

If Magic Kingdom is one hub surrounded by the spokes of a wheel, and Hollywood Studios is an ambling boulevard, and Animal Kingdom is a rough, sloping mountain pass, then Epcot is all circles and spheres, puzzle pieces stuck together to form a whole. The two halves curve like slices from two different melons. One half is Future World, with rides about conservation and communication and technology. The other half is The World Showcase, part international bizarre, part World’s Fair. Each melon half sits around a man-made lake (large, but not so large that you can’t see the opposite bank at all times). And, of course, it is topped by the iconic “golf ball,” a 180-foot-tall geodesic sphere that contains Spaceship Earth, easily the most fun you’ll ever have while learning about world history. Usually less crowded than the more popular Magic Kingdom, the sight of the huge gray sphere of Epcot rising up above the trees has the uncanny ability to drive away every trouble out of my mind. Except, this time, it is not quite working.

It is Sunday June 10th, 2018, fifteen days before my twenty-sixth birthday, and “I Won’t Say I’m in Love” from Hercules is blaring through the speakers as I navigate my best friend’s car into the spot indicated by the enthusiastically waving parking lot employee in the orange-striped shirt. After I put the car in park and turn off the engine, I take a deep breath, my hands flexing on the steering wheel.

“Are you okay?” Liz asks, her hand on the door handle and one foot already out of the car. I smile at her, and it only feels 40% forced.

“Yeah. Let’s go.”

Our first stop is the trunk of the car for supplies. I have a tiny backpack full of snacks, as well as two bottles of sunscreen, and a plastic canteen full of gin and Sprite (honestly, more gin than Sprite). Liz and I both slather on the sunscreen because it is a beautiful, cloudless June morning and already ninety degrees. It is 9:00 a.m. so I don’t take a swig from the flask, but the thought is tempting, and I can’t help but wonder if that is one of the signs that I am turning into an alcoholic. Both of my parents were alcoholics, and drug addicts. They met at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, what a wonder the marriage didn’t last. I cram the flask into my tiny backpack and as I lead to way to the line for the tram to the park entrance, my smile becomes less forced. Liz and I take selfies on the tram, our hair tossed about in the slipstream of the 40 m.p.h. vehicle. I try not to think about the phone call.  

In the morning, before Liz and I got on the road, my father called me; an odd occurrence, since he usually just messaged me on Facebook, if he contacted me at all. It was 6:30 a.m. I had just woken up an hour before, suffocating beneath Liz’s purple polyester bedspread. I hadn’t really been sleeping—who can ever sleep the night before a Disney trip? When my alarm went off I bounded out of Liz’s bed to start getting dressed. Liz simply buried her head further into her mountain of pillows, cursing me and my need to get on the road at the earliest possible moment. I let her sleep until 6:00 a.m., my excitement making me generous, and when she did finally stumble out of bed, it was with a chorus of muttered complaints that bounced off of me as though the sparkly makeup I was meticulously applying in the mirror was actually a magic shield.

By 6:30 a.m., we were both dressed, Liz’s car was packed, and we were about to hit the road. The call, like a lot of things my father has done, threw everything off.

“Hey, kid,” he greeted me when I picked up. “Do you know if grandma is home?”

I wondered how much my father knew about his own mother if he was wondering about her whereabouts at 6:30 a.m. on a Sunday morning. My grandma and I are both night owls. Before I moved to Chicago, when I was performing regularly with a Rocky Horror Picture Show cast in Tampa, I would usually get home around three or four in the morning and she would still be awake, playing matching games on her cellphone and watching HGTV.

“She should be,” I replied. “Why, what’s up?”

Liz was hovering in the doorway, watching me with tired eyes that made me feel just a little bit guilty for making her get up so early. On the phone, my father paused, and a spike of anxiety joined the guilt.

“I’m in the hospital,” he said. “I think it was a heart attack.”

 

Our main goal on this fine Sunday morning is to visit the World Showcase Promenade, a 1.2 mile stretch hosting pavilions from eleven different countries: Mexico, Norway, Germany, Italy, Franc, England, Canada, China, Morocco, Japan, and, of course, America. And I don’t mean shabbily erected tents with tables crammed beneath. This is Disney World, land of details and immersive storytelling. Each country has a slice of the mile-long path, and each slice is dominated by a piece of intricately detailed architecture. Mexico has a step pyramid, Morocco has an open-air market, China has a circular theater. England is laid out like a city road and is teeming with shops, including a Twinning’s tea shop with more tea and biscuits than you could consume in a year.

The World Showcase is my favorite part of Epcot. Each pavilion is unique, with snacks and shopping themed specifically for that country. Walking into each pavilion does not feel like walking into the countries themselves, I imagine. It is a manufactured version of the best parts of the countries represented, but when I’m waiting in line for sushi in Japan and can hear the drum ceremony outside, or when I’m browsing through trinkets in the market at the heart of Morocco and all around me is the smell of incense and roasting meat, I feel more connected to the world at large. It is a manufactured connection, but it still means everything to me. As a kid, it was the closest I ever came to being a glamorous world traveler. It doesn’t open until 11:00 a.m., so we decide to stop for coffee first. I lead the way. I’ve got a reputation for being Disney-wise, my head loaded with tips and tricks for surviving the sunbaked, ornery, Mickey-ear-wearing throngs. I know where the good bathrooms are (the one next to Journey into Imagination is secluded and rarely used). I know how to sneak in booze (in a plastic water or soda bottle, never glass; they confiscate glass), and that you no longer have to sneak in food.

Between us and the coffee shop are the Legacy Gardens, the first true challenge of Epcot navigation. It is a place where you can pay to have a loved one’s face engraved on a little piece of metal and displayed for all eternity on a shining marble slab. It’s an odd feature for a theme park, but Epcot has always been a little odd; a science and world cultures themed family vacation destination? Whacky, but I love it dearly. Sitting flush up against the park entrance, the Legacy Gardens is the spot everyone stops to take a photo, regroup their scattered party, or to ask questions to the overworked employees. It is a great photo spot: a dozen hulking, brown-marble slabs slanting a path toward Spaceship Earth, colorful hedge sculptures of Mickey and Minnie Mouse towering over all. Nothing at Disney is half-assed, not even the landscaping. There is an added challenge, one that I am fully responsible for. Before entering the park, I had stopped at one of the ticket booths and asked for a Happy Birthday button, because I wanted as much festiveness crammed into this day as possible. The woman behind the glass wrote my name on the button in looping script and handed it through with a smile. Walking in, every employee who saw my button wished me a happy birthday, as did several guests, an unspoken Disney tradition. I’ve wished complete strangers Happy Birthday, or Happy Anniversary, or Happy First Trip to Disney World countless times. Despite these challenges, I am able to safely navigate us to the Starbucks without losing Liz in the crowd.

Despite my best efforts, I am thinking about my dad at the Starbucks just past Spaceship Earth. It is fairly new, installed a few years ago, and it is one of the changes to the park that has not upset me. I was not a big coffee drinker until after my dad moved home from Canada. He had been gone for ten years and came back my junior year of high school. He missed a decade’s worth of birthdays, my first broken bone, and my sister’s high school graduation. The day he came back, Casie and I picked him up from the airport. I had swine flu and puked twice on the way there. We sat outside the luggage pickup at Tampa International Airport, so he could smoke. He told us that leaving was a mistake and asked us to make a spot for him in our lives now that he was home, begged us for forgiveness while crying freely. I noticed that we had the same eyes, that his turned green when he cried just like mine did. I told him that he came back, that that was all that mattered, and at the time, that had been true. I didn’t realize then what kind of a man my father was. I saw him cry. After sixteen years of fear and abuse at my mother’s hands—of jumping every time the garage door opened, a coffee mug shattered or a door slammed, or watching my words in case I said the wrong thing—having a parent that cried and asked for forgiveness for their wrongdoings was like a revelation: everything would be okay now that he was back.

We used to get coffee and talk. He always wanted to talk. He fooled me, at first, into thinking he wanted to talk with me—about my life and my goals and my dreams. Then I realized he only wanted to talk at me, about how sorry he was for leaving us, sorry because he knew how violent and unstable my mother was, and he left us there anyway. He talked about all the things he was doing to fix it, how he couldn’t change what he had done, but how he was really going to be there for us now. They were words that sounded pretty, but it did not take me long to figure out that he simply wanted praise for trying, that it was all just empty promises.

 

We have two hours to kill before the World Showcase opens, so we ride Spaceship Earth twice, waiting in line beneath the giant ball and sighing with relief every time a gust of wind blows over us. As we are waiting, I get a text from my grandma saying that she had arrived at the hospital an hour ago, and that they are running the usual gamut of tests on my father. I text her back, asking her to keep the details coming. Inside the ride, crammed into the little blue cars, we practically melt in the cool darkness as Dame Judy Dench’s voice guides us through the history of communication on this, our Spaceship Earth. The smell of the artificial fire burning in Rome is one of my top five favorite scents of all time. The last time I rode Spaceship Earth with my father, pre-Canada, we were hopped up on sugary sodas and laughing at everything. My sister and I shared a car while my father rode in the one behind us, cracking as many terrible jokes as he could cram into the fifteen-minute ride (something about our family resemblance to the wooly mammoth near the beginning, something else about Suleiman’s onion hat further in that I didn’t get). We were the most obnoxious family on the ride that day, but I didn’t care; I was too busy trying to breathe through my giggles.

Mentally, I have divided my father’s heart attacks into two categories: pre-Canada and post-Canada. It’s an even split. He had four, either before moving to, or while in Canada. Those are the ones I have been told about, but do not know the details of. I do not know exactly when they happened, I do not know their severity. I can guess at the various causes (cocaine before he got clean, horrible diet, too much caffeine, no exercise after he got clean, and a history of heart disease from his father’s side of the family). He has had four since he moved back to Florida in 2008: one major one and three minor ones, and I visited him in the hospital every time, except for this one. Heart attack number eight, and I’m strolling through the crowds of a theme park, sipping iced coffee, while my family scrambles to make sure my father is okay.

His first heart attack since coming home, the major one, was in 2014. I was working two jobs at the time, taking a break from school after nearly flunking out due to a bad battle with depression. My grandma called me while I was at work and explained that he was in the hospital. I left work in tears, got in my car, and cried the entire way there. I knew at the time that it wasn’t the first one, but I didn’t remember the others. For the first time, it had felt as though his heart attack was happening to me.

At the hospital, I found my grandma sitting in one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs in the waiting room, a Styrofoam cup of black decaf coffee in one hand, and I was struck by how small she looked, how exhausted. At the time, she was seventy-one. Always spry, always sharp, but in that hospital waiting room she looked every one of those years. When she saw me, she stood to hug me tight. She was not crying even though her son was in the hospital, and it occurred to me then that she had watched her husband die of a heart attack at fifty-four. This was my father’s fifth one, and he had just turned fifty. He had been clean before my sister was born, had quit the cocaine and alcohol, but still ate greasy food, shot-gunned Trenta iced coffees, and smoked like he had stock in Marlboro.

“Don’t be scared by how he looks when we go in,” she had warned me as we stood outside the door to his room. “There will be a lot of tubes and monitors making noise, but he’s okay for now.”

Okay for now is how I’ve thought of my father ever since.

 

After Spaceship Earth we hit up Journey into Imagination, and by the time we get out, the World Showcase is open, and the real party can begin. I’ve come to Epcot for my last three consecutive birthdays with the intention of Drinking Around the World. It’s difficult to find any facts about when or how the grand tradition of Drinking Around the World began. If I had to hazard a guess, I would say it started when Epcot decided to serve alcohol. Magic Kingdom is a booze-free park, meant to be family friendly in every sense of the word. Epcot has a broader scope. The goal, as dictated in numerous articles and YouTube videos, is to buy and consume one drink from each of the eleven country pavilions. This is difficult because eleven drinks is pure madness, and the cost of each drink is high both emotionally and financially. I already know we won’t succeed, but that isn’t the real point.

Our first step is La Cava de Tequila in Mexico. It is cool and dark inside, so naturally it is crowded as people try to escape the sun for a few minutes. The margaritas are potent, the perfect beginning, but as the salt grinds between my teeth I realize I am still thinking about my father. This frustrates me. I am at Disney World with my best friend, I am wearing a sparkly plastic tiara and a button that says Happy Birthday, but I can’t stop thinking about my father, trussed up in a hospital bed because at fifty-four, he never bothered to learn how to take care of himself. I’m thinking about my grandma, sitting in yet another hospital waiting room, a cup of black decaf coffee in one hand and looking more irritated than worried. I’m thinking of my sister, who loves my father as much as she hates him, and who drove him to the hospital during the heart attack before this one, barely over a year ago.

I find myself wondering how different my life would be if my grandfather hadn’t died when I was too young to remember his face outside of photographs. I always think of my grandfather at Disney. My grandma likes to tell me that he always cried during the fireworks at Magic Kingdom whenever she catches me doing the exact same thing. My grandfather was tough, a hard worker, but infinitely loving. He liked to fix things with his own two hands, even though he was not very good at it. My favorite story about him is one that gets told at nearly every family dinner. One pleasantly sunny afternoon, my grandfather had been making a few minor repairs to the pontoon boat he and my grandma owned. Somehow, he got distracted and managed to screw his hand to the boat with an electric screwdriver. According to my family, this was “classic Wayne” behavior. He was accident-prone, determined, and a big softie.

If my grandfather was still alive, I wonder what he would have taught me: how to fix things without screwing myself to them, how to shoot a gun, how to drive stick, how to stand up for myself, how to respect others, or how to fish. My father doesn’t have his father’s gift for repair. He tried to take me fishing, but grew frustrated when I could not get the hang of it. Same with trying to teach me to drive stick. He was not in my life enough to teach me anything, really. My grandfather died of a heart attack. He had a history of heart disease, southern-born love of greasy foods, and my father is a fine example of history repeating itself, and it’s the ones not stuck in a hospital bed who have to watch it happen. Helpless, furious.

 

We pass through Norway without buying a drink, but a man in full Viking dress spots my tiara and bows to me. We watch part of a contortionist act outside China, fanning ourselves and shading our eyes with our hands. We make it through half of the canteen of gin while we munch on dumplings at the picnic tables and stumble through the shop behind the dumpling stand, buzzed and giggling, and holding carvings of dragons and tea cups aloft for each other’s giddy perusal.

We are drinking wine in Italy when I realize I am angry. The wine is making my cheeks warm, and whatever Liz was saying is drowned out by a raucous surge of laughter from the table two over from ours. I sink back in my chair and I am angry at my father for having a heart attack. Over winter break, I had to pick him up to bring him to grandma’s house for a family dinner because his car had broken down again. He made me stop at a corner store so he could pick up cigarettes. He had stopped smoking after the heart attack of 2014 but had, apparently, started again a few months previous, despite having had two more minor heart attacks since then. I was furious as he lit up the cigarette in my car, filling the confined interior with acrid smoke. He mocked me for listening to The Smiths, saying that Morrissey was a douchebag. I said Morrissey was a douchebag that made great music, and he came back with some asinine comment about how the art shouldn’t excuse the artist. I bit back a retort about how tearful apologies shouldn’t excuse crappy parenting, and turned the music up instead, not saying another word to him for the rest of the drive as Morrissey belted out something about too much caffeine into the awkward silence.

 

As I tip my head back and drain my glass, I realize I am not mad at him on my behalf, but on my grandmother’s, who buried her husband after his third heart attack and now watches her son go in and out of the hospital for the same reason, never knowing which will be the time he doesn’t come out, wondering if she will have to bury him, too. I am mad at him on my sister Casie’s behalf, who feels cheated, abandoned, who still craves approval from both of our shitty parents and hates herself for it.

Liz keeps shooting me furtive looks. I feel guilty that I ruined this trip for her as much as for myself. I know she doesn’t care, but I do, so I hand her the canteen, urging her to drink more. Eat, drink, be merry. That was why we were there.

In Japan, I order a Tokyo sunset, my favorite drink in all of Epcot. Coconut rum, peach schnapps, banana liquor, and pineapple juice, garnished with an orange slice, and decorated with a paper umbrella. It is the most delicious thing I have ever tasted. I’m sipping it slowly, savoring, as I browse through the gift shop. I used to have a little tradition every time I came to Epcot. I would buy myself a pair of chopsticks. The shop has an entire wall of them. They come in every conceivable color. I already have so many pairs—bamboo ones with purple owls, black ones with ninjas, red ones with a beautiful painting of a geisha—and I hardly use them, but seeing them in my silverware drawer is a small happiness. I haven’t bought a new pair in a while, and I’m contemplating a cherry blossom painted pair when my grandma calls me.

“Hey, sweetie.” It’s how she always greets me. I haven’t spoken to her all day, and the relief I feel at hearing her voice leaves me dizzy. Although maybe that’s the Tokyo Sunset.

“Hey Gram. How’s the patient?”

“He’s doing okay. They put a stent in his heart and he’s resting now.”

I sit down abruptly on the shelf below a display of anime t-shirts.

“Wow, already?” I reply. “So he’s okay?”

“Yes,” she replies. She sounds so tired.

“Are you okay?”

She sighs. “You know, I’m not sure. I’m glad he’s okay, but. . . .”

There is a long pause. My eyes are stinging, and I can see Liz in the periphery, sticking close, but trying to give me and my grandma what little privacy a crowded shop in a theme park can afford.

“I know,” I say, because I do. We’ve done this dance too many times; we’re both sick of it, and I know my sister is, too, and I know that none of that will change my father’s behavior.

“Number eight,” she says. “Jeez.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, like it’s my fault.

“Don’t be, he’s the one who should apologize to you. What a dumbass.”

I laugh out loud at that, startling some of the tourists trying to look at the t-shirts I’m sitting in front of. I refuse to move out of drunken stubbornness.

“How’s Disney?”

“It’s great!” I exclaim. I feel lighter, now, some combination of the alcohol and hearing my grandma’s voice. “I’ve had five drinks.”

She’s laughing with me now. It’s a bright sound.

“Good, keep drinking, try to relax. He’s going to be okay.”

I say goodbye to her and down the rest of my Tokyo Sunset.

 

I’ve been told that my grandfather loved It’s a Small World, unironically and with great enthusiasm, a fan of the message in the song that plays during the ride, even if he wasn’t a fan of the creepy dolls that crowd every surface of it. I relish hearing this because I have always loved It’s a Small World unironically and with great enthusiasm, a fan of the message if not the dolls. My grandfather is a mythic figure to me, a hero and a gentleman, and a loving husband and a good father, a figure worthy of story time over every family dinner. I still wonder what would have happened if he hadn’t died when I was so young, if he had been around after my father moved to Canada. I wonder if, after learning what my mother was doing to me and my sister, he would have gotten us out much sooner than we got ourselves out. I’ll never know, but he was a better father than my own turned out to be, and I have absolutely no idea what that says about the fairness of the universe, so I order champagne in France.

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Fighting the Tide

 

Of course, Jed Jeffanie didn’t believe the whale was real at first. It felt more like a mirage, a false shape that had slipped into his world to challenge his bearing. Just a moment earlier, he’d been in the Darkness, in himself, in that internal void where crude shadows repeated his past around him. He’d been drinking coffee from an incomplete mug at Mac’s diner, then sitting with Jen Schumann in the rubble of a house in the woods, bricks and trees around him blinking in and out of existence, her fingers and legs forming and fading, only her face remaining constant. Then he was there, all of a sudden, walking along the shore of an empty beach, the weight returned to his legs, lungs expanding, a newspaper in his hand. He was confused, and for some time doubted the transition. It seemed that everything around him–shifting water, gusts of wind, smooth sand, oddly cold morning air–all of it could have followed him out of the Darkness. And it was then that he came upon the whale.

Instinctively he tested whether his present reality was solid. He looked back the way he’d come to find his bare foot prints still in the sand, a fence in the distance. He looked the way he was heading and found another fence a hundred yards off. Toward the city was yet another fence and a slow trickle of cars streaming past on the other side, maybe occupied, maybe not. No people were visible anywhere, and he felt like he was locked in a cage at the end of the world.

He checked his newspaper. It was the local chronicle–one of the expensive paper editions. The date was legible and unwavering: a Sunday morning in June. If it was today’s paper, then the city’s churches were in session, which could explain part of the beach’s emptiness. The fences around him maybe explained the rest. But that didn’t tell him how he’d gotten within those fences or how a creature that had been thought extinct had wound up on the beach before him. It all made him feel ill-prepared.

Jed approached the whale slowly, as he might have approached a stranger in the woods, afraid both that it would disappear and that it might remain. Only when he was next to it, with his hands wet upon its blubber and the smell of brine and death in his nostrils, was he convinced of its existence. He felt the flesh on its back, the surprising resistance of the fat beneath the skin. He saw how it shone in the white morning light like a Mustang after a coat of wax, how it started so wide–wider than he was tall–then tapered down to the width of a utility pole before fanning out again. He wondered if it were afraid, if it felt panic, and thought that it might, but wondered if that was only because he wanted to matter to it.

Then the whale inhaled, a great heave and a sick sputter, and Jed jumped back. He thought of Mac coughing his smoker’s cough. He thought of that wheezing laugh and pig-pink face. And for a moment he believed that everything around him would dissolve, that soon he would slide back onto his stool at the diner to pick up the thread of some old conversation about draining the Great Lakes, fixing up water-transport trucks, saving a bit of money. But the world remained, and when he looked at the newspaper again the text neither shifted nor dissolved. 

Still, there was no one around at all.

He looked for reassurance in the front page, studied it more closely now. The top half held a familiar picture of the Bernhard boy, a headline reading “Two Weeks Missing, Family Turns to God.” The letters beneath told the same story they’d told the last time he’d read them. But when was that? Jed could still remember pieces of it. The family was prosperous, the boy chipped and tracked–but the mother said he’d just disappeared from his room in the night as though ‘the Lord himself had taken him up.’ The article spent some time exploring that possibility before chalking the inexplicability of the situation up to the mystery of God’s creation, supporting this claim with stories of a woman in Kansas who’d pulled a full-grown cow from a sinkhole, two teenage girls in Oregon who’d flipped an overturned grain trailer off their dad. Jed didn’t see how the stories related, but he was glad to read them.

He lifted his eyes to the whale and the beach. The water rolled back and forth, just twenty yards away, the plastic bags offshore rising and falling on the surface, lifting to the white clouds in the white sky, sinking to converge with the other bags. 

When he turned from the water he saw a young woman standing on the sidewalk, on the other side of the fence separating the sand from Seashore Drive, looking at Jed and the whale. She reached for her hand screen.

Jed called out to her, his voice hoarse and wavering. “You–you think we should do something about this?” he said.

The woman looked down to her screen and started typing without acknowledging Jed. 

Maybe she wasn’t even there. 

Jed checked the newspaper, looked back up to the woman still typing, and figured maybe she was getting help. That was what he wanted to believe, at least.

He sighed, tossed the newspaper aside, swung his arms, dug footholds with his heel into sand still firm from the tide, then put his hands to the whale again. For a moment he paused, looked at the liver spots on his skin, the veins below his knuckles, the narrowness of his wrists, and he wondered what he was doing. What had the doctors told him about stress? Wouldn’t it aggravate his condition? 

But he had to try. 

He crouched low and pressed his right shoulder into the blubber behind the blowhole. Then he pushed. Hard. He threw all his weight into the animal, his breath held, his ears ready to pop, and for a moment, with blood drumming in his head and the strain arcing from his arms to his feet, he thought he felt the whale shift ever so slightly, maybe an inch up, maybe an inch forward.

He stopped and stumbled back, panting. The ocean’s edge continued lapping the shore, carrying on its perpetual push and pull, push and pull, farther away now than when he’d found the whale. He was sure of it. And the whale, of course, was right where it had been.

But Jed wondered if that was the only possibility. After all, there was the woman in Kansas and the girls in Oregon. With or without God, such stories seemed to hint at a clause in the contract of reality that allowed for impossible acts in extraordinary circumstances. The problem, he figured, the cause of his continued averageness, was in his motivation. Great things were the result of great inspiration, great emotion, but when was the last time he’d been moved by anything? 

Jen Schumann. That day in the woods thirty years ago. Right before she left. And every day since had been shorter than the last, and each one had left him slightly more disoriented, slightly more apathetic. Even now, with the most incredible thing he’d ever seen lying before him, the only feeling he could summon was dread.

“What were you doing?” he asked the whale. “You think you’d just hop ashore and roll on back when you were ready?” He looked at the empty beach to his left and right again, then rested his forearms on the whale’s back. He hung his head. “I don’t think that’s how it works.”

He stood upright again, feeling light-headed still, turned around so that he faced the street, leaned back against the whale, and slid down until he was sitting in the sand. The whale exhaled, and Jed heard in it a familiar disappointment. 

“Hold on, buddy. Just…I just gotta think for a second.” 

He looked at the woman, his sole spectator, smiling into her palm screen. She actually looked a bit like Jen did back then. Brown hair. Short like that. And he wondered where Jen was right at that moment, how old her kids were now. And he hoped that whoever this woman was texting would get there soon.

His attention drifted from her to the flashing exterior screens of the Irish-pub-tapas-joint at the corner of Main Street. Similar screens were flashing all throughout town–they lined the tiers of boutiques and doctor’s offices and sensory-relief studios, the four or five stories of apartments on top of those. Wires connecting them all crisscrossed over the streets and alleys, dividing up concrete and steel, fragmenting a sky bleached white by poison.

Jed knew that Mac had been right to leave. Jen too. The town was coughing up blood. The whole state was. All the shops leap-frogging over each other, all the buildings tottering ever higher–the flood had pressed everything together and made it all sick. 

But still, Jed reminded himself, home was home. 

The woman on the sidewalk had stopped texting. She was staring at Jed now, and when Jed met her gaze he waved. The woman didn’t wave back. She definitely could see him, but she didn’t wave. Jed squinted, shaded his eyes, looked at her more carefully. There was an emptiness in her expression, a hunger. Jed had seen that look all his life. And he was sure then that she wasn’t calling for help. At least not for the whale. 

He wished more than anything that someone was there with him. Someone he trusted. He patted the pockets of his jeans: no wallet, no keys, no screen. And even if he could find a screen nearby, who would he call? It didn’t matter. Jed couldn’t leave. The vultures had caught the scent, and Jed knew he had to watch over the whale, to scare those scavengers away, until help found its way to him.

He sighed, closed his eyes, and imagined again that he were a different sort of man. He pictured himself marching toward the road (his hair thicker, his arms bigger) and flagging down a whole parade of cars. He imagined a crowd emerging, tramping down the beach, and together rolling the giant back into the water, heaving on the count of three, shouting, laughing, patting each other on the back. He saw them fight the swells and win, and while the whale swam back to wherever it belonged they waved. And the whale waved back the only way it could, by slapping the water’s surface with its tail. And Mac was there. And Jen looking just the way she did senior year. And she remembered everything she’d loved about Jed, why she wanted to be with him, why all the years since high school had been a mistake. And at their wedding everyone would be there, even the whale in a giant aquarium. And Mac. And little Lonnie Bernhard, wearing that faded red sweatshirt from the paper. 

The world went quiet then. The laughter of the crowd, the music of the reception, all of it faded as the shapes of Mac and Lonnie and the whale slipped away. When Jed opened his eyes again, he found something familiar yet old: cinderblocks stacked into low, unfinished walls with vines climbing through them, dead leaves carpeting the ground below. Jen–younger, really a girl still–sat beside him on the bricks. She tapped two cigarettes out of her pack, lit both, and handed one to Jed. A tear hung from her chin. Jed wanted his hand to reach out and brush it away, but it wouldn’t move. The trees around him were shifting, the cigarette no longer in his hand. And he understood that he had no control over this scene, that he was a spectator in the Darkness, playing along with the shapes while they practiced forming all the mistakes he’d ever made.

“Don’t cry, Jen” his voice said. “I’ll be right here.”

She shook her head. “That’s the problem, Jed. You’ll be right here. You think this is the center of the universe and everything that leaves will be pulled back to you some day. But it won’t. This place is nowhere and I don’t want to come back.” She looked at him with red eyes, lines of freckles on her cheeks darkened by tears. “Come with me. Please. What can I say?”    

“Stop,” he said. “You know I can’t.”

“You just won’t.”

“You’ll be going to classes and meeting all these interesting people. I’ll just be dead weight.”

“Life is what you make it, Jed.”

“How do I make my life what you want it to be?” 

“Try.”

“I mean, what would I even do?”

“Work. Maybe apply for classes next spring. What are you gonna do here?”

“I’ve got a job. I’ve got friends. This is home.”

“I thought I was your home.” Those were his words coming out of her mouth and again he felt trapped–in the moment, in the conversation, in the decision he was doomed to repeat forever. 

All he could do was shake his head. And as he did, as though the world around him were drawn on an Etch-A-Sketch, Jennifer Schumann dissolved, the cinderblocks of the house they sat upon scattered, and the trees shook and shed until they were darker, colder, dryer. What was left was a different forest, a different time. But Jed still felt trapped. 

A thick fog wove between the brush and rendered what trees remained permanent in shades of blue. Behind one waited something he didn’t want to see again. But no matter how much he willed it, he couldn’t run. Instead, of its own accord, his body crouched and his eyes closed. And yet, as though his eyelids were wet wax paper, he could still see. So when the figure finally emerged, tall, stooped, and shrouded in shadow, Jed Jeffanie couldn’t help but watch. It walked toward him with its neck bent forward and the red hood covering its head, the trees around it fading as it grew larger. And when it was upon him, when it loomed over him, Jed looked up. He found no eyes, no nose, just an infinite bright white where the face should have been.

Jed sat up straight, gasping. The world was white again, the sound of wind and waves in his ears. The whale was moving behind him, shaking, and for a moment he believed that it too was waking, that soon it would lift itself off the sand and crawl back into the waves. Then he heard the sound of the water, felt the coldness biting his feet, saw the white sky above, and remembered where he was. On and on and on it went.

Still the whale was shaking.

He pushed himself to his feet, turned, and found half a dozen people standing at the whale’s stomach: three men, three women. The man standing directly across from him had his head lowered, and a frayed baseball cap covered his face. He was evidently struggling with something.

“Mac?” Jed said, but his voice was barely a whisper. He cleared his throat. “Are you here to help?” he asked.

The man lifted his head and Jed didn’t recognize the face narrowing its eyes back at him. The cheeks were hollow, the eyes dull. Jed glanced at the others and saw that they too were marked by emaciation–it looked like none of them had eaten a solid meal in weeks. 

“When was the last time you seen a drone?” the man demanded.

“What?” Jed asked. The question was so far from what he’d expected that it made him feel as though he’d woken up into the wrong world. All the moments leading up to this began loosening and falling away. He tried to grab them, but caught only pieces: the trash on the water, the diner, the wedding. “I don’t know,” he said, and felt the tears in his eyes.

“Who owns this beach?” the man asked.

Jed shook his head.

A woman closer to the tail said, “I’m telling you he doesn’t know anything.” Jed followed the voice and found the woman who’d been watching him through the fence. “He’s just some bum. Fell asleep on the damn thing.”

Jed shook his head but knew it was true. Then he realized what that meant–what the presence of the woman meant, too: he’d messed it up the way he messed up everything. “No,” he said. “No.”

The waves rolled in and out, in and out. The wind lifted the spray off the break, over the whale, onto Jed’s face. He put a hand on the whale’s skin and began stumbling toward its head, the word “no” escaping from his lips in a whisper with every step.

The people on the other side had their heads down and their shoulders moving, sweat pouring off their chins, and still Jed hoped that they were helping, that they were tying a tow strap to the whale maybe, maybe working some sort of track under it that would roll it to the ocean. But when he rounded the whale’s head he saw irregular squares of flesh missing from its stomach. Each person had a knife deep in the blubber, stacks of fat and meat piled on a tarp at their feet.

Jed lurched forward and grabbed the nearest man by the shoulder and wrenched him away from the whale. The man staggered back a step, then sprang forward and shoved Jed. Jed’s ankle rolled and he fell. When he looked back up, the man had retrieved his knife from the whale and was pointing it at Jed. The man didn’t say a word. For a long moment they stayed like that, then the man turned and plunged his knife back into the whale. 

Jed scrambled to his feet and ran back around to the whale’s blowhole. He watched it a moment, willing the hole to open and sputter out breath. There was nothing. He pressed against the whale again, put his ear to the flesh behind the eye, and listened. The only heartbeat he could find was his own in his ear. Beneath that, beneath the waves laughing cruelly now, only the inner stillness of a stone remained, the silence of an empty house. But maybe he just couldn’t hear–maybe the whale’s body was too dense. Maybe it wasn’t too late.

Hands on the flesh. Lower. He crouched, thinking–believing–that there was still a chance. There had to be. All he had to do was lift. Just lift. 

The blood in his body rushed to the surface until it felt like his skin wouldn’t be able to hold it in any longer. He lifted with his legs, and his arms, and his back, sure that every muscle he had was tearing, every tendon and ligament snapping like a stretched rubber band slit with a knife. His vision faded to white, beautiful and endless, and from somewhere in the distance he heard a scream like a cow being torn apart by wolves. 

And then his body relaxed. 

No. Not relaxed. But it understood something. He understood something: that his pain wasn’t true, that his life didn’t need some extraordinary love for it to be remarkable, that to make his world what he wanted it to be he simply had to reach into the Darkness and pull out the shapes that were right. He just had to look past the averageness of the world, let the life to which he clung drop away. Because he’d held on so tight for so long. But he didn’t need to. He’d never needed to. And when he let go, finally, the weight of his limbs was gone. There was no coldness in his feet. There was no torment in his muscles or mind. Effort was no longer necessary.

In one easy motion he straightened his legs and spine. The whale rose with him–only its tail remained in the sand–and even when its body was over his head, it felt no heavier than a pillow. 

The vultures on the other side of the whale backed away. Some of them fell. Some of them still held their knives, but their grips were looser now, unsteady. The woman who’d been watching Jed from the street fumbled for her screen. Jed considered them all for a moment, then brushed them away from his mind like so many flies and focused on his destination.

His first step was unsure, weakened by the memory of life before. But his second had confidence. There was no reason for it not to be confident. Movement was simple. Success was inevitable. One foot in front of the other. That’s all it took.

He looked to the water: the back and forth was more jarring now, the give and take more exacting. Waves crashed into the shore and dragged back foam. Spitting and roaring, spitting and roaring. The sound called to him the entire way. It filled his head while the water filled his shoes and rose to his knees, while the sun broke through the clouds and lit the sea around him. 

Raymond Virginiais a writer and editor based in the Chicago area. He’s currently working on expanding the world of Fighting the Tide into a novel.

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Dreamland

 

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Danielle Carr is a photographer and creative director attending Columbia College Chicago, set to graduate in Spring 2019. In this series, she took inspiration from her struggles with isolation and loneliness and channeled those mental states into photographs. Her intent is to show the headspace of the subject through color and movement.

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To the Coast

 

Casey’s skated the tunnels before, but not all the way through. Her brother said they run from Angel Park to Suncoast casino, though neither he nor Casey have tracked how far the tunnels run; phone signal becomes spotty ten minutes inside. The first time Casey went alone, she’d turned back. She told Valencia and Roi about it during algebra the next day, waving her hands and scratching her wide, round nose. She said, “If you want to torture someone, put them on acid, then dump them here.” Naturally, Valencia and Roi exchanged stares, their teacher’s lesson on polynomials long forgotten.

All it took was one week, Casey’s Jeep, and ski masks to heighten the drama. They were in. They had a mission. Casey got lights they could wear on their heads; it was real; it was happening, and Valencia was combing through her wavy, frizzy hair at 4:03 p.m. on Tuesday, waiting for Casey to roll up to her house.

 

Casey’s ginger ringlets are windblown when she arrives, drawing Valencia from her house with a text proclaiming, we out herefollowed by several emojis. Valencia hops in the passenger seat—her usual spot—and they collect Roi from the neighborhood down the street. He crawls into the backseat, lays skateboard at his feet, and proudly unfurls his ski mask, which had been folded like a beanie.

“Take that off,” Casey insists. “I’m not getting pulled over on the expressway because you look like a wannabe robber.” 

Roi rolls his eyes. “Killjoy,” he mutters, removing the mask and itching his head.

Casey sneers at him in the rearview mirror and turns up the volume on a playlist named “Skate or Die or Maybe Both.”

Angel Park is north—past the Strip—and Roi takes the chance to Snapchat the rows of Vegas hotels as they drive past, pulling down his ski mask and sticking his tongue out at the camera.

After the Strip, it becomes infinite expressways and traffic. It’s 4:51 p.m. when they get off at exit 37—Durango—and get a new view. Past the right side of the street, short grass goes for miles. It’s getting that sickly-yellow color, slowly, because it’s October and this much grass was probably never meant to be in the desert. But Valencia’s heard that it sometimes snows up here—not snow-snows, but desert snows: little snowflakes that disappear upon contact and never stick. 

Casey swerves the Jeep into a parking spot near past the grass and everyone piles out. She locks the car as Valencia and Roi throw down their boards, heading for the red, metal bridge that connects the two halves of the park. The shadows outgrow the skinny trees that cast them. Valencia is still grateful for the snippets of shade they offer but the clock is ticking. 

Like all good hideaways, the tunnel is in plain sight. Roi gets over the bridge first, stopping at a steep, rocky hill. “I’m guessing it’s this one?” He yells, peering down into the arroyo. Valencia joins him. Below, two tunnels stand without a soul in sight. Their mouths stretch roughly ten feet high, a cut of sunlight on one’s tongue as golden hour peaks.

“Yeah,” Casey answers, skating to a stop. “We want the one on the right.” She points and moves Roi aside, beginning to climb down the rocks, legs steady as she tries to dodge around the creosote bushes. Valencia loves the bushes because they have white, pea-size puffballs all over and smell like rain. Roi likes them, too, but not now as he makes his way through a bush and comes out covered in fuzz.

There’s graffiti all over the tunnel walls, though Valencia can hardly read the bubble-font as it tapers into black. She’ll have Casey—who’s donned a white ski mask—decode what it says.

The goal is Suncoast by sundown. Or, maybe, shortly after; the mission’s end-time is flexible. Valencia’s not sure how far it is to the gaudy, glowing casino, but it’s probably under two-and-a-half miles. And honestly, she likes it like that—not knowing—and so do her friends. She doesn’t need to see under their masks to know they’re revved up, high off this new, little thrill they can juice from Vegas. There’s a lot they miss out on in Vegas as minors; this is theirs; no one can stop them.

Minors or not, Casey’s swiped a variety of beers and hard seltzer from her brother’s stash, and Valencia selects a can of lime Bud Light from Casey’s worn-out backpack. She passes a requested can of PBR to Roi. Casey raises another PBR, and they toast to victory, to quiet chaos—to not going stir crazy at home. 

The cans glint in the sun and Valencia scans the houses in the background, letting her beer can fuzz out of focus. The homes perched around the arroyo look nineties-made, copy-and-paste stucco with ruddy shingles. They feel like spectators, and Valencia wonders if she’s the only one who feels watched. But this might as well be suburbia—there are no bars on windows—and everyone is probably watching Netflix or at work. They’ve got the arroyo to themselves. 

“Are you ready?” Casey asks. She crushes the beer, tosses the can into the rocks, and yanks down her ski mask: a pristine, white mask she took from her brother’s dresser. He’d worn it in a music video, once, having filmed it along Fremont Street; Valencia recognizes the little dollar sign embroidered under the left eye—a truly American beauty mark. 

“Are we ready?” Roi repeats, popping up his skateboard with the toe of his dirty, doodled-on sneakers. “If we don’t do it now, it’ll be too cold next month. There’ll probably be homeless people sleeping there or something.” He lets his board down onto all four wheels, steps on it, and nods toward the tunnel. He hooks his middle and index fingers around the rim of his “beanie” and pulls down. The cuff unfolds to a multicolor, camouflage mask that makes his coal eyes pierce. They’re just a shade darker than Valencia’s. Roi’s pupils blend with his irises, a sharp contrast to his honey-glow skin. A strand of black hair peeks out from one of the mask’s eyeholes. He’s got bags under his eyes, but it’s the most awake Valencia has seen him all week.

“Speak for yourself,” Valencia says, a hand fluttering to her chest as if in a pledge. “Iwas born ready.” She takes to her board, feeling the way the pavement—smooth aside from the tiny pebbles littering it—dips toward the tunnels. They call, and answering is only polite.

Casey smiles, rummaging through her backpack while jogging aside Valencia. “Val-gal,” she says, withdrawing a light with various straps attached to it. “Catch.” She tosses the light, and Valencia barely catches it without falling off her skateboard. She gives Casey a quizzical look.

“It’s a headlamp. I’m assuming I don’t gotta tell you where to put it.” Casey explains, tossing another light to Roi before grabbing her own. Roi fumbles for a moment, fixing his headlamp after putting it on upside down.

“Alright, people, let’s go!” Casey claps, then pumps her skateboard up into her hand, jogging again. She slides the board out of her hand, its velocity matching her stride as she hops on. Casey kicks, spraying up a few pebbles as she blows past Valencia. She carves around a large rock, leaning with her heels off the board. Valencia watches her disappear into the cement maw of the tunnel; an angel descending: white mask, white hoodie, copper skin. Casey’s voice drifts, “Catch up, bitches!” She laughs and it resounds.

Roi glances at Valencia. He shrugs, clicking his headlamp on and as he takes off. Cans of spray paint clatter around in his backpack as he chases Casey, moving in a clean line, unlike Casey’s smooth carve.

The sky is hot, hot, orange—golden hour near-death—when Valencia pulls down her mask. Camouflage, like Roi’s, but with what’s considered “girl” colors—whatever that means. According to marketers, it means pink, purple, aqua, and green, topped with knit cat ears, and double the price of Roi’s mask.

Her hair’s fried from the last time she dyed it violet, but it’s long enough that it doesn’t fully fit in the mask, so Val flips to the side. It falls past the alien on her t-shirt and half-covers her black jean-jacket. The late-October wind gives her a goodbye kiss as she kicks off—she will not be left behind.

The tunnel takes her, the slope of water-worn cement guiding her into the void. The sound of skateboard wheels clicking on the ground and Casey’s laugh make Val’s heart giddy. She can see Roi and Casey up ahead, the lights on their foreheads flickering over the walls as they half-heartedly race, eager to get in deep.

Perhaps, Valencia considers, they want to see each other crack. Not out of malice, but out of curiosity. Elementary schoolers are like that on the playground, want to be entertained with the girl who can walk in a handstand, want to see a boy drink the mystery sludge they concocted during lunch. Who dares, who dares?

The Bud Light is warm in her belly, and she can feel it slosh when they all lean into a turn. All around is art. Maybe the art teacher at school would disagree, but there’s care in some graffiti. The lines are too opaque, too clean on the mural of a cartoony robber making off with a bag of money. On the right, some sexy legs in heels are painted with pale pink, sticking out of the letter H. Valencia still can’t read what it says, but she’s going too fast to care, anyway. There’s graffiti with less patience, drippy lines scribing out swear words and dicks. Classic.

“See any blank spots?” Casey calls. She hardly has to raise her voice; there’s no wind aside from their self-made breeze, and the tunnels carry her voice back to Roi and Val. Roi’s light scans from left to right, and he replies, “Negatory, captain. But there’s some random crap we can paint over.”

Valencia can tell Casey’s shaking her head. Her lamp moves back and forth in quick, short strokes, swiping the ground with light. “Nuh-uh, we’re claiming our own spot.” Casey claps, and it smacks around the tunnel. “Forward!”

 

They go for a while and the graffiti begins to dwindle. There’s the unspoken rule: keep up with Casey. But Valencia likes her spot in the back. She can take it all in, has a few more seconds to react, and knows if the path in front of her is clear. No one’s flown off their board yet—miraculous, given the number of broken bottles and rocks scattered around the tunnel. The ground is uneven at times, and sour water pools in the dips and cracks. Without checking her phone, Valencia guesses ten minutes have passed. They’ve got a rhythm down. Casey steers them straight, Roi looks to the right, Valencia checks the left. There are holes in the wall that connect to the tunnel next door. Sometimes, Valencia catches the glare of something there, but so far only metal rungs leading to pipes.

When they pass an array of neon green scribbles, Casey yells for a halt, proclaiming, “This is it.” 

It’s not blank, but there’s room to breathe. The cement is mostly clean, spare a few random phrases or messy doodles. A neat, crisp image of an eye bores into Valencia as she joins Roi, whose lamp spotlights its pupil.

“What color do you want?” Roi asks, unmoving. “I’ve got blue, black, gold, and pink. Just grab it, the caps should match unless I mixed them up while high or something.” He continues to stare, taking his headlamp in hand as he squints at the eye, leaning in. Valencia watches him as she picks the gold can from his bag. 

Roi removes his mask. “I’m gonna draw a pyramid around this guy,” he pats the eye’s sharp pupil.

Valencia scoffs, and Casey nudges her arm with a grin, taking the blue and black from Roi’s bag, sliding it off his arms partway. “Thank ya, thank ya,” Casey sings in a playful voice. “And for Roi-boy.” She hands the pink can over his shoulder, and Roi lets his empty backpack slip to the ground.

Casey maxes out the volume on her phone, and hits shuffle. Right away, Val knows the song: “Don’t Fear the Reaper” by Blue Öyster Cult.

“Ooh, throwback. Okay, okay,” Roi says, shaking the can of spray paint, “I see you, Miss Love.” He shimmies a bit as he rattles the can, treating it as a strange maraca.

Casey cringes, uncapping her spray paint with a pop. She lets the cap clatter to the floor. “Don’t. People call my mom that. Please, Roi.”

He begins, exaggerating his enunciation as he sizes up the eye, “Miss—”

“I’ll spray your eye out,” Casey threatens, and though she sprays the tunnel wall with her can of black, gold comes out. She quirks an eyebrow and shakes her head. Her light flashes over the shimmering streak. “Well, that’s not right.” She tilts her chin up, and for a moment, her headlamp blinds Valencia. “Val. Trade me.”

They swap cans. Roi sprays a streak as soft singing and cowbell fill the tunnel.

Valencia, as she begins to work on her gold U.F.O, hears Roi sigh. She turns, noting the blue, not pink, on his wall. His shoulders slump, then go still: “A trade for your can of ‘blue’, Miss Love. . . .”

 

Roi doesn’t get sprayed in the eye and Valencia is slightly disappointed about it. Casey only wrecks his pyramid, striking its eye with an X while Roi gives over-dramatic screams, “No, no, my baby! You’re killing him!”

Valencia wishes she had phone signal to Snapchat it. But some things are best left in the moment. Valencia finishes her aliens with pink. Casey’s painted a large storm cloud in black, with the rain in typical blue. She poses under, arms crossed and straight-faced as she has Ro crouch down to snap pictures of her. Valencia kneels below her U.F.O., raising her arms and pretending to scream. Roi declines all photos with his dead “baby.” They wrap up, pack the paint cans into Roi’s bag—caps matched right—and Casey claps, rallying the trio. 

“C’mon,” Casey waves, hand flashing before her headlamp, “I wanna see if Suncoast’s movie theater does $5 Tuesdays.” They shove out. The tunnel is freezing. They’ve been in the black for about thirty-ish minutes, and Valencia is fighting off shivers. She wonders if it’s dark outside yet.

They skate in their usual formation and Valencia watches Casey give a long, smooth turn as the tunnel goes left. Casey’s close to the walls and sticks out a hand like she wants to run it along the concrete. Roi kicks after her, and Valencia hears him swear as he gives a sharp twist.

He huffs, “Fuck rocks.”

Casey laughs, apologizing for not warning him. “Didn’t see it,” she reasons, slowing so she’s beside Roi. “Figured if there’s nothing on the walls, there’s not much on the ground, either.”

Roi mumbles, and Valencia’s sure he’s making a face under his ski mask.

Casey tilts her head down, trying to look Roi dead-on and watch the path. She’s doing that thing where her eyes go dark, a trick of light and shadow. Valencia’s not sure how well it functions with the ski mask and headlamp.

“Race you!” Casey shouts, and then she’s already shooting away, jeans tight around her calf as her leg propels her forward.

Roi swears again and yells out for Casey to wait. Without turning around, he adds, “What about Val?”

Yeah, what about Val?Valencia thinks, hurrying after their ruckus. She can hear Casey teasing, Roi spitting out half-baked comebacks. Their skateboards click over the pavement, steady but quick, like a rollercoaster pulse. Val can manage—she always does—slow or not. She can feel her ski mask sticking to her cheeks, courtesy of sweat as she pursues her friends. She spots Roi up ahead, Casey a flash ahead of him as she gives a sudden lean to the right, vanishing. A sharp curve. Roi puts his weight on the tail of his skateboard, popping it up as he pivots out of sight.

Valencia bends her knees, adjusting her footing so her heels are almost off the board, then—air. She doesn’t shout, doesn’t swear. Her gut drops as her body pitches forward, faster than her arms can react, and for a moment, she flies. She hits the ground face-first—nose-first—with ears ringing. It’s like the nightmares where there’s an alarm sounding in the distance and she can’t wake up. 

She can’t hear. Roi, Casey—they’re gone. Valencia, sits up, deciding her body’s lack of pain is a result of adrenaline high. She should hurt. She should be crying. Perhaps falling on her face kept the wind from getting knocked out of her. She tries to catalog the injuries she’s likely sustained: broken nose, bruised knees, and maybe a twisted ankle. And like that, the pain appears. Brilliant.

It takes a moment to realize the blackness in her vision isn’t from the fall; her headlamp is shattered on the ground. She doesn’t bother to salvage the straps, opting to pick herself up and try to find her board. The ankle she’s certainly twisted gives her a limp, so she crouches down and stretches her arms, searching for her skateboard. Her groping hands find it a yard or so back, propelled by her sudden ejection. She lays it across her lap. Casey will come back for her. Roi had to have heard her fall.

But you didn’t scream, says her brain, so maybe you’re on your own. Can you even walk? As brains do, it offers up the handy thought: what if you die here?

Valencia knows it’s silly, that it’s the reptile-brain response to injury and being left behind by the pack. But it’s a tunnel. She’s halfway there. Dead or not, they’d probably find her on the way back. She waits to hear her name reverberate. She imagines Roi turning around, adjusting the eyeholes of his mask and asking, “Where’s Val?”

She withdraws her phone and checks the battery. Because she’s here, and because Apple is evil and likes to make phone life drain faster and faster as they age, she’s stuck at 2%. It’ll stay at 2% for a good while, she knows, but the camera and flashlight refuse to turn on due to “conserving battery.” Dark it is.

Walking is the only option—limping, if she’s being honest. The direction is up to her. She considers Suncoast, glittering and golden with an American flag flapping over it’s burning, white-light name. She could scare her friends really good, she thinks, if she goes back and waits for them at the Jeep. She could text them to head back. That way she won’t have to make two trips—to the Coast and back—either.

But they got masks and Roi packed a victory joint. Valencia knows there’s only one choice. She grunts as she gets up, tucks her board under her arm, and continues.

 

Casey’s brother once said, that when you die, you go to Hell with whatever you’ve got on your person. It can be clothes, keys, or a hogee sandwich. If you get stabbed, the bloodstains go, too. Valencia wonders how his theory works. Does she keep her skateboard? Do her injuries heal even if the bloodstains stay?

Focusing on her possible Hell-equipment keeps her busy. The blackness forces her to hone in on the drippy, ploppy, sound of rain drainage, and the strange, muffled groans from what seems like a road overhead. There are cars above and they don’t know she exists. She thinks it’s kinda like being a spy, but then she walks into a puddle and decides that if this is spy-work, being a spy must suck. The puddle is deep enough to soak the canvas of her sneakers, and Valencia groans, waiting for her socks to dampen, wiggling her toes in a futile attempt to avoid the sour water. Her injured ankle feels fine, strangely—shouldn’t there be pain? Of course, as she thinks it, her ankle throbs in response as if waking up. She debates trying to skate despite it, but peroneal tendonitis isn’t worth it.

Despite the creeping cold and wet socks, Valencia feels comfortable. She doesn’t question it further; grateful she can focus on avoiding a potential encounter with one of the meth-heads who are rumored to squat in tunnels during colder months. On the way to Angel Park, Roi’d asked if anyone ever found homeless people in the tunnel. He explained that shanty towns in Chicago were common beneath underpasses.  Casey answered no; however, there had been a news story about someone being set on fire in a tunnel. She gave no further context.

Death by fire or freezing, Valencia’s not sure what she prefers. Living is a better option. She limps her way through the tunnel, the grip tape on her skateboard rubbing her side and upper thigh, sanding her jeans. She’s got her free hand feeling along the wall, making sure she doesn’t bump into anything. Suncoast can’t be much further. She’ll find it. She has to. There’s only one exit. There’ll be the light, and she’ll have made it.

When she was a kid, she locked herself in her bedroom and shut off all the lights as “emergency training.” The world could end and take the power out with it. She wanted to be ready. Everyone always imagines themselves alive during the apocalypse, for some reason, and Valencia thinks it’s because people are narcissists or maybe it’s some ancient survival instinct that saved early humans from doom. Foresight: what if I lived? You have to be prepared.

Survival is sexy. That’s what biology teaches. Those who survive get to go on, and so do their genes, but all Valencia wants right now is to survive the tunnel, change out of her jeans, and curl up in bed. Her dad will give her shit about her ankle. Casey will, too, but she’ll probably buy her ice-cream from Suncoast. Roi will shrug or clap her on the back, and try to doodle on her ankle brace, should she choose to wear one. Maybe he’ll give the eye-pyramid another go.

She is not sure how long it takes, but after a straight stretch of tunnel, there’s light. It’s the kind of light you only get in Vegas, the kind of fake gold that bounces off bodies of casinos plated with shimmer, like dragon scales reflecting fire. Suncoast is there. It’s night, crickets chirping because they have yet to freeze to the ground. They’ll freeze soon enough, perfectly preserved because it’s rarely cold enough for things to ice-over for more than a couple hours. Valencia imagines them frozen to the bumpy, stone wall of the high school quad, their bodies so light a sneeze could send them flying. She smiles; come November, she’ll arrive at school early to meet Casey before homeroom; Valencia makes note to put some of the crickets in her pocket to throw at Casey as a joke––revenge for the mocking she’ll receive for her ankle injury. Foresight. 

When she sees the light, she runs. Her ankle doesn’t hurt, not right now, but she’s not thinking about why or how it should be twisted and making her wince. Her eyes adjust to the white, blinking title of Suncoastthat’s bordered by a burst of red light. It’s small and distant, at the top of the building, but what’s not small are her friends, sitting on their skateboards smoking a joint, gazing up at the casino.

A plan pops into her mind: sneak up, scream, snatch the weed, and say, “Surprise, bitches.” Valencia slinks, her steps intentional and soft as she suppresses a grin. She pushes closer, and she can smell the sweat coming off of Roi—she knows it’s him because it smells like Old Spice—and Casey smells like the five-dollar vanilla perfume from Bath and Body Works. Valencia pauses as Casey passes the joint to Roi, and, inclining her head toward him, she freezes. Valencia knows she’s been caught. 

 “Val’s been gone a while,” Casey says. “I think we should go back.” 

Roi takes the joint, and Valencia deflates, wondering if Casey needs glasses. “Val’s probably just lagging. It’s not like she could get lost.” Roi shrugs. “But we should make sure a meth-head didn’t get her.” He gets up, his skateboard rolling a bit as his weight no longer pins it to the ground of the arroyo. He stretches his arms, leaning side to side as he cracks his neck, and turns around. His ski mask hides whatever concerns are on his face, but his eyes look to Casey with a strange nervousness. He gets on his board and skates past Valencia. “You don’t think a meth-head got her right?”

Casey’s face is bare, but she pulls her mask from the kangaroo pocket of her hoodie, yanking it over her ginger curls. “Val-gal? Not a chance. She’d beat someone’s ass with her board.” Casey gestures for the joint. “Put that out. Leave some for Val. She’ll be mad if we smoke it without her.” 

Roi nods, wetting his fingers with spit as he pinches out the cherry. “Fair. I thought she’d be here by now.”

The light from Suncoast paints their backs as they begin to skate toward the tunnel. Valencia, her body suddenly weightless, walks after them, waving. She insists they’re great actors, haha, very funny. They’d once played a similar joke on a teacher during April Fool’s day, getting the class to pretend the teacher wasn’t there for the first ten minutes of class. 

Roi asks again, “You sure a meth-head didn’t get her? Maybe we should’ve taken your brother’s bat before we left.”

“Nuh-uh,” Casey shakes her head, “I’ve gone through the tunnels alone, I don’t think they hang here.” She and Roi skate beside each other, growing more distant as they return to the tunnel. “And even if they did, Val’d give ‘em hell. She’s a survivor. Maybe she just fucked up a knee. Maybe she hit her head.”

Casey waves Roi off, carving a smooth turn into the mouth of the tunnel, leaving Valencia alone in the light.

---

Gabriela Everett is a creative writing undergraduate at Columbia College Chicago and presently lives in the South Loop. Everett’s previous publications include prose and poetry in Santa Fe University of Art and Design’s lit mag, Glyph, and Columbia’s Hair Trigger 2.0.