5710 Words
Martin has his knives out. He is giving them a last look-over, wiping off any dust or water marks, checking their shine against the yellow overhead light in his kitchen. He needs them to be pristine. He is not going to be taken advantage of again. The knives are perfect and he is going to get his asking price. “One hundred, that's the price,” he says into his kitchen counter. He lets the sound bounce back to him, assesses the tone, the volume, tries again. “One hundred, that's the price. This isn't something I'm going to negotiate over. One hundred dollars or I will find someone else.” He goes over the lines again. He doesn't know about the ultimatum. He wonders if it is too intense, so direct that it sounds desperate. That is the opposite of what he wants. He walks to a small mirror on the wall in the living room. He says the lines again, watching his mouth move, watch his face change with each word. He furrows his eyebrows. No, too much, he thinks. He raises the eyebrows. It's casual, it seems unconcerned with the outcome. “One hundred dollars or I'll sell them to someone else.” He glances to his right. A few feet away from the mirror, also hanging on the wall, are two framed pictures. Two little girls smile back at him from behind the glass. “One hundred dollars,” he says. Matter of fact, to the point, clear and relaxed. He scoops up the knives and grabs his keys. Martin parks his truck along the curb on a street where the grass that used to grow along the sidewalk has died. Over the past few blocks, tidy front yards, cared for under threat of home owner association penalties and neighborhood shame, have given way to brownish green yards threatened by weeds, and now yards that can't really be called yards. They are dusty squares of jagged brown grass and dirt. The paint on the buildings has also shifted, from fresh, new bright colors to mute but even colors to what Martin sees now: chipped, faded, peeling beiges and grays on what are obviously not the nicest tenements in the city. His anger CD is playing but he isn't listening. The man said 9:00pm. He is looking at the apartments he is about to walk out to and he is glad the sky is dark. He is watching the clock glow from the dashboard. 8:59... 8:59... 8:59... He looks in the rear view mirror. He furrows his eyebrows again. Still too intense. He relaxes them. “One hundred,” he says. He pulls one of the knives from its sheath again and runs his finger over an inscription: It's about the chase – love, dad He reads the inscription, like he is reading from a gravestone. 8:59... 8:59... 9:00. He grabs the knives, takes a breath, and steps out. 1518, apartment number four. He walks up to the door. There are no kids running around the complex. There are no dogs barking, no cats lying around. The lights in number four are on, but the apartments around it are quiet and dark. He hears a baby crying. The crunch of Martin's boots on the gravel walkway are a siren. He doesn't belong here. He won't be received kindly. He knocks three times. A man's voice calls out “Just a minute,” then says something to someone else in the apartment. Boot falls boom their way toward the door. They stop. “Who is it?” a man's voice, loud and grating. He's a smoker, Martin thinks. “Uh, it's uh... Martin.” “Who?” “Martin, the uh... the knives guy.” The door opens inward, suddenly and violently. The man before him is tall, looks like he used to be bigger, much bigger, before some lifestyle choices drained a large portion of some former physical glory. But even with his pale, sunken skin and loss of body mass, he is still formidable. “Craigslist guy, huh? You got some knives for me?” Martin brings the knives up to chest level for inspection. He isn't invited in, and he's not sure he would accept if he were invited. The man snatches the belt and pulls out the first knife. “That's uh, custom leather, a custom leather sheath and belt.” “Custom belt, too, huh?” the man says, turning the knife over, feeling it in his hand. The man is impressed, trying not to show it. “Yes, sir. One of a kind,” Martin says. The man scrapes the blade along his thumb. He shaves the hair off of it, testing the sharpness the way Martin did after sharpening it for the sale. Martin notices a girl sitting on the floor in one corner of the living room. She has a baby at her side, lying on a blanket. The baby has stopped crying and is staring at a bear that the girl is dangling over the baby's head. The girl's stare is far away. Her eyes are deep set, sinking into dark circles, and yet bulging at the same time. “Why are you selling them?” the man asks. “Just cleaning out the garage. Trying to simplify my life a little bit.” The man re-sheaths the first knife. “Yeah... you need money and quick, huh? I get it.” Before Martin can argue, “Where'd you get them?” “They were a gift.” “So you don't know where they came from or who made them, none of that?” The man is probing, finding reasons to lower the price. He wants to question their authenticity and put Martin on the defensive. Martin stays calm. He practiced for this, he is ready. “I guess my question is how can I know their quality? You say they're originals and they're high quality but how can I know, you know? Why should I trust you?” Martin keeps glancing back to the girl. She absently waving the stuffed bear over the baby's face. The baby is reaching for the bear and it remains just out of reach. The mother doesn't notice because her eyes have shifted to martin. She is assessing him, staring at him. When her eyes settle on his, he can see a question there. Urgent, pleading, but hopeless. She is a prisoner here and she is afraid. “How do I know you're not trying to rip me off?” Her eyes are crying out. Help me! “Well, you can't,” Martin says, “you don't know me, I don't know you. But you can see them. You can see their quality. They are high quality knives worth way more than $100. If you're not interested that's okay, I can find someone else to buy them.” Martin takes back the knives and belt and breathes out. “Well hold on, now, hold on. I'm just asking. No need to get... sassy.” The baby starts to cry again, first in a low whimper. The man snaps his fingers and turns to the girl. “Hey, what did I say?” The girl looks down again, mumbles an apology. She lets the baby finally touch the bear. The baby is quiet again. “Alright, buddy, they look good. I'll take 'em.” “Good,” Martin says, trying to seem unaffected. He thinks about the moment his father gave him the knives. He thinks about the look on his father's face, the look of a man giving his son a real gift, a father's gift, something meaningful. Martin hadn't thought about it before, but the knives were one of the only gifts his father ever gave him, and they may have been the last gift he gave before dementia took him away. Martin blinks the thoughts away. He breathes in and out hard, setting himself against the reality that he really needs the money. They're just knives, he tells himself. The man stomps into a back room. As he passes the girl he hisses another warning to her, like correcting the perceived annoyances of a generally well-behaved puppy. There is a small coffee table near the girl. It has an ash tray. Martin notices the ash tray is full of cigarette butts, and next to it is a foggy glass pipe, most likely for meth. Signs of hard drug use three feet from the baby's head. Martin finds himself leaning slightly forward into the doorway. He wants to step inside. He wants to clean the place up, maybe clean the man up a little bit. He notices the girl looking at him again. She can see what he is thinking and her head shakes side to side ever so slightly. Thank you, but don't. The man returns with his wallet. He removes two bills and drops the wallet on the coffee table. He hands Martin the bills and Martin hands him the knives. The bills should both be fifties. They aren't, it is a fifty and a twenty. “Hey, where's the rest?” Martin asks, holding up the money. “Excuse me?” “Where is the rest, the rest of the money? This is seventy.” “Oh did I only give you seventy? Well hell, there it is right there in your hand, seventy bucks. I guess I did.” “The price is one hundred, not seventy.” “Well, I guess if I gave you seventy, then my price is seventy.” “Well, I don't care what your price is. My price is one hundred. You owe me thirty dollars.” The man steps closer to Martin. The knives and belt hang from his right hand. “Haven't you heard? The customer is always right.” The man is grinning now, showing his teeth. He prepared for this meeting, too, and he is ready. He was hoping for this. He wants a fight. He has played these games before. Many times. He is used to playing these games and he is used to winning, one way or another. Martin straightens up. “The price is one hundred.” “No one is going to take these knives for one hundred,” the man says. “I guess I'll just have to try.” “Come on, buddy, I'm offering you good money right now, cash in hand. You strike me as a guy who needs good money right now. So they way I see it, you can take them and try to sell them to someone else for $100, or you can just take my money and go now... while you still can.” Violence is pouring out of the man now. It is shining from his eyes, beaming through his toothy grin. It is hissing from every word. He wants Martin to keep arguing. He wants resistance. Now he is looking for a fight. The girl is visibly afraid now. She has seen this before many times. She has been on the losing end of this argument before. She starts to pick up the baby and stand to leave the room. The man pulls one of the knives and points it at her. “You sit your ass down!” He wants her to stay, wants her to see this. The blade points at her, lingers on her, until she is seated on the floor again. He wants her to see her man dominate... like always. She sits and picks up the baby, who has started to cry again. The man turns back to Martin. “Here, if my money is no good to you then here, take 'em back. Here, go ahead, take 'em.” He is holding the knife out, blade exposed, pointing at Martin. His words are telling Martin to take the knives back, but his tone and his eyes are saying something else. Try to take these back and I'll kill you. Martin is rubbing the two bills together in one hand. His other hand clenches into a fist and shakes under the pressure of his squeeze. Years of moving concrete and working sledgehammers and jack hammers and pulling boards and hanging sheet rock have given power to that fist. He wants to let it out. He wants to send the fist screaming through the stinking apartment air. He wants to see it snap the man's head back, separate jawbone from skull, teeth from gums, consciousness from body. There is power in that fist, world-changing power. Martin looks back to the girl. “Where you lookin, boy? I'm right here. Don't look at her, look at me.” Martin looks back at the man. He has lost his nonchalant brow and chilled out eyes. The brows furrow into dark hooks and his eyes burn. “Do you want your knives back?” Martin looks to the girl again. She is shushing the baby with her head down, but her eyes are on him. Martin doesn't want to endanger her. He doesn't want to piss this guy off. Martin knows she would pay for it later. His fist relaxes. “No, it's good,” Martin says, “your money is good. You're right, I do need the money, and seventy bucks is seventy bucks. It's a good deal.” Martin gives a toothless, tight-lipped smile. “Yeah, I thought you might say that.” “Thank you,” Martin says, sliding the money into his pocket. He puts his hand out to shake the man's hand. The man takes Martin's hand hard, squeezes it. Their fingers writhe and twist together, a coil of white knuckles and red nails, and they look into each others eyes. Martin smiles sheepishly and releases first. The man hangs on for a little longer before letting go. Martin looks to the girl and nods. “Ma'am.” Martin takes a step back and the door immediately slams in his face. He can hear the man inside yelling something at the girl. He walks to his truck, slowly. He doesn't look back, but he can't stop from hearing the sound of the baby crying. Once he is to his truck, the sound remains, and the baby's wailing seems to be getting louder. You lost again, Martin. You lost again like you always do. Martin steps up into the truck and sits. The door slams and the crying stops. All is quiet. Martin grips the steering wheel as if to let go would mean spinning out of control. He wrings the wheel out, the plastic and leather creaking under the pressure. He shuts his eyes against the thoughts in his head. Great work, Martin. Lost your job, lost your marriage, lost your daughters. Could you lose any more? He grabs the keys. They click into the ignition. He turns them enough for the CD player to come back to life. It is his anger coach, his guru, spouting nonsense. “Only when we control our anger do we control our world.” The keys won't turn any farther. Instead, the car turns off. Martin is looking at something new. It is the bracelet Hillary made for him. Two leather straps running through little beads, D-A-D-D-Y, with a heart at the end. He runs his fingers over the letters, all the way down to the heart. He pictures her sitting in school, her tiny hands carefully threading the leather through each bead, gently tying the knots at the ends. He imagines her finishing and showing her teacher, an eager smile accentuating her excited bouncing from foot to foot. He traces the letters with his eyes, says them out loud. His eyes change. Inside the apartment, the girl is still sitting with the baby in her arms. When there is a knock at the door she jumps, surprised. The baby starts to cry again. The man stomps in from a back room. “Now what? Shut that baby up before I do it myself.” The man reaches for the door knob. “What in the holy fu—” When his hand turns the knob the door explodes inward, slamming into his face and knocking him to the floor. The door crushed his nose and it spurts blood immediately, but he is still conscious. He is conscious long enough to see Martin enter, close and lock the door, and stand over him. The man sits up slowly, dazed. His words are muffled by the concussion and by the blood collecting in his mouth. “You son of a...” Martin kicks him straight in the face. The impact is horrendous, and the sound of the boot hitting the man's face is echoed as the man's head hits the floor. The thud shakes the cheap old building. The windows rattle. The man moans, softly. That is all Martin needed to do, the man is down. But Martin isn't done. As the man tries to sit up, a fist slams into his face. The man goes down. Martin punches him again. And again. Then he stomps down on the man's chest. A raspy cough sprays blood into the air and the man gasps for breath. He rolls onto his side, fetal position, instinctively trying to protect himself. It will not protect him. Martin moves to the side so he can have a clear kick into the man's stomach and chest. He kicks him. The toe of his boot goes deeper than he anticipated. The man squeals. Martin kicks him again. The squealing continues, but softer, more choked with each kick. Martin's black work boots thud into the man's chest and stomach again and again, as if he is trying to break his own leg with the effort. He kicks until the man stops moving, stops squealing. Martin steps back and stands upright, his rage chugging in growling bursts of breath. He realizes he had been screaming, roaring through the beating. He looks to the girl. She might be eighteen, barely. She is wide-eyed as she clutches her baby. She is terrified but barely moving, not making a sound. “Sorry, miss,” he says. His lungs are suddenly burning and he stumbles slightly as he snaps out of his rage. His chest is heaving with the release of fear and anger. His eyes are wide and wild. “Are you... are you okay? I'm, I'm sorry I did that. I'm sorry you... saw that. And the baby...” She doesn't respond, doesn't move. She isn't crying, just silently rocking the baby in her arms. “Do you...” Martin begins, looking back to the man on the floor. He is gurgling and choking, his face pressed into the stained linoleum. “Do you... have some place you can go tonight? Some place safe?” The man coughs a spray of blood onto the carpet nearby. He is beginning to get his breath back. Blood is oozing from his nose and mouth. His jaw looks badly broken. After a few wheezing breaths he chokes again and coughs up more blood onto the floor. Martin goes to the coffee table. He takes the man's wallet and pulls out a ten and a twenty dollar bill. He was owed thirty dollars, so he takes thirty dollars. He looks down at the man. He holds up the money. “Was it worth it?” he asks, waving the bills. The man groans and curls up tighter. “Miss, we should go,” Martin says, turning around. But when he looks back the girl is gone. The baby is lying there on the blanket, crying. There are a few noises from down the hallway, a rustling from some back room. When he looks back, the man's arms are outstretched, clawing blindly in the air above him, reaching out for help. He is trying to roll over, trying to get up. Martin walks over and kneels next to the man. “Can you look at me? Hey, asshole, can you open your eyes and look at me? Your jaw and nose are broken. You have a bunch of broken ribs and probably a concussion. Hey, hey, I still need you to listen to me. The girl and the baby are coming with me. They are going to leave you tonight and you are never going to see them again.” The man spits and wheezes. He has a rush of anger that is immediately replaced by severe pain and he settles back down against the floor. The man doesn't like to lose. He's not used to it. Martin slaps him lightly but repeatedly in the face. “Hey, hey, hey, listen, you listen to me now. They are gone, you hear me? You aren't going to look for them, they are gone. You are going to forget about them. If she tells me she saw you... if you ever even think about that little baby again, I'll find you.” Martin grabs the man by the jaw. He starts to squeeze and the man's eyes fill with tears. He can feel the jaw bone shift in his grip, can feel the looseness at the fracture. The man whimpers and sputters under the pressure. “If I see you again I won't just break your jaw...” He squeezes again, harder. Another squeal. He looks the man in the eyes. “I'll break everything.” Martin lets go. The man slumps back down on his side and sputters a few sick, panicked breaths. He is moaning now, low and quiet. He is broken. The baby is still crying. Martin walks to her and kneels down. He feels the difference of kneeling beside the man and kneeling beside the baby. He reaches out to pick her up, but there is blood on his fingers. He wipes his hands off on his pants and shirt. He lays his bruised and slightly bloody hand on her tiny belly. His hand is shaking, but he tries to soothe her, shushing gently. “It's okay. It's okay, little one. No need to be scared anymore, it's okay.” He rocks her gently back and forth on the floor. There is movement from the hallway. He looks over and the girl is standing there. Her hands are at her sides and tears are running down her cheeks. She is crying, but she still isn't making a sound. The tears just run and she looks at Martin like she is staring through him. She stares at him like she is afraid to do what she is about to do. “Do you have someone you can call?” he asks. As he finishes his question she raises one of her arms from her side. Martin sees the glint of metal before she has the gun leveled at him. Her hand is trembling but he can see into the barrel. Her sad, tired eyes are alive now. They are on fire, burning with hate. They are ready to kill. Martin's hands go up. “Whoa, whoa, wait a second...” The girl is crying and shaking with rage and trying to force her mouth to move. She wants to say something but she can't get it out. Her lips are pressed hard together. She is stuck on an “M” word. The silver gun in her hand is shaking, badly. There is no telling where a bullet would go if she fired now. “Easy... easy now, I'm sorry. I'm very sorry, miss. The baby, miss, please don't...” The girl begins a groaning mumble, “Mmm... mmm... Mmmmmm...” “Please,” Martin says. He is ready for the explosion, ready to feel the bullet tear through him. Her other hand comes up to join the first. The gun suddenly becomes steady. She finds her word: “Mmm, mm MOOVVEEEE!” Martin doesn't understand the command but he dives down over the baby to shield her. The girl steps forward and begins firing. Each gunshot makes his body jump, waiting for the impact of a bullet. He doesn't make a noise. He made a mistake but he didn't have enough time to even think about his death so he doesn't cry out. He simply covers the little one, silently, and waits to feel the bullets tear into him. Six shots ring out. Then six more clicks as the girl continues to pull the trigger. The cylinder turns. The hammer slams down again and again, the firing pin ramming into spent brass. She is standing next to Martin now, standing over him. But her eyes are looking past him to the floor beyond. The revolver clicks, the baby cries, but otherwise, the room is silent. There are no coughs coming from the man on the floor. No wheezing, no coughing, no moaning. Martin didn't see the man pull a gun from his waste band. The man was ready to shoot Martin in the back. The girl, having thought out this scenario before, finally stops pulling the trigger as she stands over the body. She lets her arm drop to her side. She looks down on him and enjoys the role reversal, if just for a moment. She breathes in, remembering the times his hands touched her, the times his fists touched her. She remembers the nights she was thrown through doorways, thrown into walls, thrown onto the bed. She remembers the alcohol on his breath. She breathes out. Prey becomes predator. Predator becomes prey. Martin looks over his shoulder at the man. She hit him at least three times: once in the arm, once in the chest, and one shot in the face. The man is frozen, the wound and his mouth gaping in a silent scream. Blood is pooling and soaking into the carpet. Martin sits up and realizes he wasn't the target. He is in shock. His mind is trying to piece together what happened. He didn't see any guns, then suddenly everyone in the room had a gun except him and the baby. The baby is still crying and he picks her up without a thought. He is numb, but begins rocking her gently against his chest. The girl scoops the baby up and disappears back down the hallway. Martin halfheartedly calls for her to stop, to wait, but she doesn't. She knows what she's doing. She knows a lot more about what she's doing than he does right now. Martin just keeps whispering “wait” to himself, over and over. “Wait... just... just wait...” Martin crawls over to the man on the floor. The hole in the man's face is enormous. Blood, bone, and brain matter are all showing. The sight and the smell, along with all of the trauma of the last few seconds, hit him at once. He gags. He crawls backward and fights back the vomit. Now what? He has no idea where to begin. He just attacked someone, thought he was going to be murdered, then saw someone else get murdered. He stands up slowly and looks around the apartment. Dead body, blood everywhere. “Wait... I don't...” His hands search his pockets for nothing. His eyes dart around the room, unsure of what they are looking for. He steps to the nearest window and looks outside. No sirens, no people walking up to look inside. Nothing. The girl returns with the baby and two bags. There are clothes leaking out of the top, chosen and thrown in very quickly. She put on a sweatshirt and sweatpants while she was back there. She is wearing slippers. “We nee... nee.. need to g-go.” She walks to the fridge and opens it. She pulls bottles of milk and grabs some string cheese. She opens the freezer and reaches deep into the back, jostling things around. Her hand returns with a brown grocery bag. “Do you have a ca-ca-caarrr... herrre?” she asks. “Yes.” She hands Martin the brown bag and points to another bag on the counter top. It is the baby bag. “We ne-neeed to go... now.” The girl steps out into the night air first. She doesn't look around. She doesn't seem nervous. She isn't scared. She is on a mission. Martin looks everywhere. He walks out as if stepping into a strange world he's never seen. He looks left and right, he looks back to the apartment building. There are windows, dozens of windows. No one is looking out. No blinds are split, no one is on their porch wondering what all the noise was about. Darkness. Silence. When he turns back around the girl is standing right there, facing him. “Ca-car?” “Yeah, sorry, right here,” he says. He points to the truck. She walks to the passenger side and waits while he fumbles with his keys. Once inside, she throws the bags on the floor and buckles in with the baby in her arms. The baby's cries have died down into soft whimpers. She pulls the baby close and sets her eyes on the road. Martin starts the engine and speeds down the street. “Feather Cr... Creek. Go n-n-north.” The three travel in silence for a long time. The baby makes an occasional sound. Martin doesn't know what to say. Finally, the girl breaks the silence. “You're bl-bleeding,” the girl says. Martin looks down. His hand is bleeding down across his knuckles. Either reopened wounds from Shawn Macky's face or new ones made with the man's teeth tonight. The girls pulls a packet of wet wipes from one of her bags. “Disin... disinfect... infectant wipes.” “Thank you.” She is so calm. Even with the stutter, her voice is somehow still even and peaceful. “Where are we going?” Martin asks. “My m-mom's house. She liv-lives in Gresh... in Gresh-ham. I'll stay-stay with her for awhi, for awhile.” Martin turns right off of Feather Creek road. “Does anyone else know where she lives? Would anyone be able to follow you there?” “No one w-w-hill know, know where I went. Not mmm... mmmany people knew I was with Nate.” “Was that Nate? Back there?” She nods, looking down at the baby. “What about the police?” “What is y-your na... name?” “Martin. My name is Martin. My friends usually call me Marty.” “Martin. It's ni-nice to mee... meet you, Martin. I'm Carrie.” She reaches out over the baby to shake Martin's hand. It is the strangest introduction of all time for both of them. “And th-this... is little miss-miss Jane. My lit... my lit, little Janey.” Martin's face changes. A shadow passes over him. The darkness of the past. Carrie notices, but doesn't ask any questions about it. “It's... it's a good name,” he says, squeezing the wheel. “She's beautiful.” They don't say another word for the twenty-minute drive into Gresham. Finally, Carrie tells Martin to slow down and turn right. After a few other quick turns, he pulls the truck into a driveway. The house is dark, not even the porch light is on. It is a well-kept, quiet house at the end of a cul de sac. Martin and Carrie exit the truck and collect Carrie's things. “I'm going to give you my phone number so you can call me if you need anything,” Martin says. Carrie digs around in the brown paper bag. Her hand returns with two rolls of cash, probably a few thousand dollars. She holds them out. When Martin realizes what they are, he puts a hand up. “Whoa, no, no, I can't take that. You take it, you will need it more than I will. Please.” The look on her face says “I just rode for almost 20 minutes in your shitty truck and there is plenty more in the bag, I'll be fine.” “You jus... just beat the sh-sh-sh-shit out of a guy, guy for thirty bu-bucks.” Martin is caught, she's got him there. “It wasn't just about the money,” he says. Carrie smiles. She takes that as a compliment. Her arm remains extended with the cash. She has no plans to let him leave without the money. Martin gives up. He loses again. He does need the money, and she seems very much to want him to have it. He reaches out. As he takes it, she leans in with the baby and hugs him. She hugs him hard and he can't help but hug back. She lets go, picks up her stuff, and makes her way to the front door. After she rings the doorbell, a light clicks on. Then another. The door opens and a woman greets her with tears and open arms. They are hugging and laughing and crying as they step into the house and close the door. Carrie never looks back. Back on the road, Martin drives in silence. No anger CD, no radio, nothing. Just the engine and the road and his whirring thoughts coming down from the crazy night. After a short ride he pulls over. He puts the truck in park and gets out. He walks a short distance from the truck and stops. He leans over and pukes. He pukes hard, violently. He pukes out the night's insanity, all over the grass and weeds, his back blinking orange with the flashing of his truck's blinker. He lets go. He lets it all go. Survival mode is over now and he can let go. There, hunched over in the darkness at the side of the road, he coughs and spits and stands up straight. It is only for a moment as he bends to puke again, almost more violently this time. He spits again. His breathing is quick but it starts to slow. He groans. It is a deep groan, primal, almost a growl, but it shifts and morphs into a cackle, into maniacal laughter. Is he smiling? Is he smiling and laughing and spitting puke out of his mouth? Has he lost it, is this the moment he cracked? No, it is joyous and rich and real. It is a laughter that has been caged, that has built up over months and years and a lifetime of repressed pain. It is pure exhilaration. He is alive, very alive, for the first time in years. Decades? Martin gets back into the truck and back onto the road. His blinker switches from left blinker to right, he merges back onto Feather Creek and drives off into the night.
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4799 words
The man's voice carried out into the wide hallway corridor. His yelping commanded four guards with body armor and automatic weapons away from their stationary posts and into the entryway. They leveled their rifles at the large, shining elevator doors as the man's sweaty fingers punched in the pass code to his secure room atop Everson Tower. Even after the steel reinforced blast doors closed and he heard the hiss and lock announcing their security, and even after the lovely British woman's voice assured him the door was secure, he fought to breathe. His wheezing worried him. Even with a double dose of his medication, it seemed worse than usual, and there would be a dozen more deep breaths before he would realize he wasn't dying and that he had fallen down onto his two-hundred-thousand dollar antique Sarouk Farahan Persian carpet. Once convinced he would live to take stock of the evening, he crawled to a row of nearly invisible cabinets lining the floor of one of the safe room's six walls. “The elevator is locked down, sir, no one up or down!” The built-in speakers crackled on the first three syllables, then evened out. The man fumbled with his phone, wiping his hands on the floor to dry them enough to provide his thumb print identification to unlock the home screen. The phone shook in his hands, but his thumb print had been accepted. After two more taps and swipes, four monitors above him on the wall illuminated. “We stay right here until your say-so,” the voice from the speakers said. Now, the man could see the security officer talking. The officer gave a thumbs up to the closed circuit camera above him, and the man gave a thumbs up to the screen. Neither man saw the other. “No one gets in, you hear me? No one comes up!” The man yelled. After another thumbs up on the monitor, the man slid down the wall and let his weight settle into the floor. He closed his eyes, started the breathing cycles his doctor advised. He envisioned his beach house in Malibu, but the image of beach combers and the ugly, cheap boats flitting across the water a few hundred yards out made him change his mind. He flew instantly to Paia, his Hawaiian paradise. He felt the warm, Maui breezes on his face. He watched his grounds keepers sweating into their beige uniforms and beige hats and imagined himself in a light, flowing silk Versace robe, red and purple, of course. A fast, aggressive breath in... He imagined the sound of the sea, waves crashing like applause, heralding him, celebrating his victories. A slow, long breath out. He tried to avoid thoughts about recent deaths in the city, tried to push out what it might feel like to take a knife to the throat, like Senator Evans had in his downtown office two days ago. He tried to dismiss the image of a bloated, drowned chief of police, killed in his own bathtub. Deep breath in... Tried not to think about taking a sniper's bullet, like Judge Kaysin. Long breath out. The election had been brutal. Between the travel and the speeches and answering the endless and insulting questions from the press, he was glad to be back home, back in New York, back in a place he controlled and understood. Sure, the news of multiple social and political leaders falling suddenly ill or disappearing or being openly murdered by a new, unnamed, brash guerrilla group had been alarming, but some rag-tag group of computer hackers and wannabe GI Joes didn't stand a chance of reaching the highest levels of power. The man reminded himself of the structural soundness of his safe room, of the security systems in place, of the armed guards here on his floor and the armed guards on nearly every floor below. There are attack helicopters flying overhead for God's sake. He took solace in state of the art technologies and tactics. He took solace in his power. Back to Hawaii. He pressed through the unwanted thoughts like tall grass, letting them sting his hands but not letting them completely block his view of the paradise beyond. His garden, his workers, a table of grilled pineapple, mango, and fresh crab legs. A saucer of melted butter. Fast breath in... His maid, scrubbing a nearby table, her skirt almost short enough for the man's liking. Long slow breath out. His mind flashed to images of Washington lobbyist Elizabeth Shurmer. She'd been wearing a skirt when she was shot twice in the head on the steps of her townhouse. He tried to pull his thoughts back to Hawaii, back to security and power and health. For a moment he was back in Hawaii and his maid's skirt was shorter and he tried to keep her face from changing to Elizabeth Shurmer's face. A breath in... The skirt got shorter. A breath out. Elizabeth Shurmer's bloodied face smiled back. “Careful, you'll use up all of our air.” The man jerked upright, ramming his head into the secret cabinet doors behind him. It wasn't the voice, it was the piercing squeal and then the crackle of the speakers that startled him. He grunted to his feet and checked the monitors. The security team was still positioned around the elevator doors down the hallway, guns still leveled. “What was that?” the man asked, palming the intercom button he'd pressed before. The figures in the hallway didn't move. There was no response. When the man pressed the button a few more times and yelled a few more questions, they still didn't move. The intercom blared again: “Do you need a towel or something? That sweat is intense.” The man wheeled around, surveying the rest of the safe room. It was nine hundred square feet, one partial wall separating a living room command room combo from the bedroom beyond. Overhead lights ran the length of the ceiling, but he hadn't turned them on yet. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he knew, he felt, before it was illuminated, that a figure was sitting in one of the leather chairs. “Don't turn on the lights,” the intercom blared again, “I like the dark.” The man immediately lunged for the light switch and clicked it on. He looked up, expectant, into darkness. The only light was now the faint glow of the security monitors. “Like I said, I like the dark.” No screech, no crackle. Now the voice was just a voice, quiet and patient with a slight accent the man couldn't place. Now it was simply another voice. Another voice inside the safe room. “Do you prefer this?” The intercom again. In the darkness, the figure brought something down from his head and placed it in his lap. Before he could speak again, the man was pounding on the intercom buttons and screaming. “Help! Help me!” he yelled, punching the buttons and pulling every switch and toggle on the control board. He fumbled across his pockets for his phone before remembering that he left it on the ground. He dove for it, snatching it up like a live grenade that needed its pin put back in. He frantically pressed his thumb against the screen. Too wet, too much sweat, and he wiped it wildly on his shirt, on the carpet, and pressed it to the screen again. He never stopped screaming for help. The figure shifted slightly in the chair. It would have been hard in the darkness to see the figure pressing his fingers into his ears amid the screaming. The man didn't see it, he was busy staring into the blank screen of his six thousand dollar smart phone. In between screams he begged the phone, pleaded with it to open and give him a lifeline to the outside world. “Oh no, is your phone not working?” the voice again, without the intercom. “Typical, right? What do you have, Sprint? T-Mobile?” The man was too busy punching buttons and screaming to respond. “Oh I know, you have some special, top-secret billionaire illuminati world domination type provider. You probably get great reception all over the world, huh? You have a data plan?” The man continued screaming: “Get away from me!” “Unlimited talk and text?” “Get away, you stay away! Help!” “Family plan?” The man dropped the phone on the counter top and activated one of the cabinets. Small lights glowed slowly from dark to dim to soft white, illuminating a weapon cache, complete with foam cut outs in the shape of a nine millimeter Glock seventeen, three Glock seventeen clips, an MP5, and a clear plastic container of bullets. The bullets remained. Every other cutout was empty. “No one can hear you screaming so could you please stop?” “Help me, help!” “Please, if you just listen...” “Help! Help!” “If you listen I think we could come to an underst—” “In here, he's in here! Help!” The man was screaming at the monitors, banging his hands against the surrounding wall panels. He wouldn't look at the figure, wouldn't even glance, the way a child ignores danger by covering ears and shutting eyes. Thoughts of Hawaiian maids and Maui and Mai Tais were retreating to the edges of the man's consciousness when the gunshot shook the room. It echoed, the tinning drum of enclosed metal and exploding gunpowder pounded on the man's ear drums before he could get his ears covered. He fell to the ground, holding his ears and moaning, as the figure finally stood. The figure walked to the monitors and took his time, smiling into each one. The security team was very determined to keep those elevator doors secure. The figure remembered a time when he looked like that: young, raw, eager. But he was never that raw. He picked up the man's phone, removing a nearly identical phone from his own pocket. He held them next to each other, smirking, humming as his thumb print activated his phone. With another few commands, the other phone lit up, as well, and in twenty-four seconds, the exchange had taken place. The figure dropped the man's phone onto the floor. “Are you ready to listen?” the figure asked. The man was still moaning, rocking back and forth and trying to find a seated position and a hand-over-ear pressure that would quiet the high pitched hum in his head. The figure dropped a folder on the floor and knelt down. “Please allow me to introduce ourselves, Mr. President.” The man's hearing started to clear. He heard the end of the sentence, heard the title he'd won in election, the title he'd carried for almost four weeks now. A strange man infiltrated his safe room in one of New York's most secure buildings and the President knew what he was about to hear. “Our name, Mr. President... is Karma. We are a powerful force for balance in the world. We wish to swing the pendulum of power back from unfeeling corporate military industrial enslavement to something a little more... equitable. More sustainable. Less... murdery. You can understand that, right?” “Please,” the President said, his eyes closed and his hands trembling in front of his face. “Mr. President, sir? Honestly, it didn't take this long acclimating the others to the conversation, and I thought the acting director of the world's largest military superpower, the leader of the free world, would have a little more sack than this. I'm surprised. I'm... disappointed. My colleagues will all be very disappointed.” The President brought his hands down from their shielding position in front of his face. He started to open his eyes, allowed himself to look into the face of his nightmares. He'd been watching for this, waiting for it to come, for almost four weeks, when he received the nomination and watched, the next day, as news came in that FBI director James Gibson had been killed. Everson Tower became a second White House, the safe room stocked with months of food and water and outfitted with the servers and software he would need to continue operations in case of emergency. The President and his inner circle had seen to the specifications personally, in preparation. He can't know why we did that, can he? As the fog of his panic lifted, he realized the room had been designed to be nearly impossible to break into, and no amount of screaming would alert the people outside. They wouldn't have even heard the gunshot. It would take a cruise missile to get anyone's attention without the intercom. “What do you want?” the President asked. The figure smiled, “I'm so glad you asked. It's really quite simple.” He dropped a folder on the floor and motioned the President to open it. He opened the folder, expecting pictures of a dead FBI director, pictures of Elizabeth Shurmer and Senator Evans and Judge Kaysin, maybe other deaths he didn't yet know about. In the last moments before seeing the first item, an image of his wife and daughters, tied up and gagged, bloody, or simply dead, flashed into the frame of possibilities. There were no pictures of dead politicians or kidnapped family members. The folder contained paper, documents, official transcripts detailing confidential CIA operations. As the President flipped through them, he started to feel like photos of bullet-induced blood spatter and exposed brain matter would have been better. “These first pages are the records of all of the CIA's drug movements through New York Harbor. We were wondering why the shipment size and frequency suddenly increased two months ago and we figured it might be related to developments we were tracking in Syria.” The President continued thumbing from page to page. He could feel the pressure rising in his chest again, could feel his inhales getting shorter. His heartbeat swished in his ears and thumped in his neck. “Oh, I love this part, page five? Probably my favorite. These are files detailing communication between CIA operatives and a Mr. Asan Al Zarkali. Did you know that? We wondered why the CIA would set up a meeting with a top member of Al-Qaeda's command, and why he would show up to such a meeting, and why the CIA wouldn't then kill him at said meeting.” The President stopped turning pages. He started shaking his head. “Oh don't stop now, you're at the best part.” He knew the story, he didn't have to read it out of the confidential documents stolen by an international hacking organization. He knew members of the CIA made contact with Zarkali to convince him to set up a small team of followers for an attack on the White House. The men would be supplied with the implements and instructions for building a small thermobaric bomb, one that could be carried in the back of a moving truck. If the truck could get close enough to the White House, the blast would level it and all surrounding buildings, killing everyone inside. Their plans included assuring that the President would be out of the White House at the time. “The White House?” the figure asked, shaking his head. “Now, we're not super keen on all of the machinations and institutions of the current government. We don't tend to get too hung up on special people or special positions or special buildings. But blowing up the White House?” The President closed the folder and let his head hang between his knees. “What do they call that? A false flag event? It doesn't matter, we intercepted this information six days ago and Zarkali and his team are no longer an issue. But that brings me to the reason for this whole night.” The figure sat down in front of the President and crossed his legs. He assumed the pose of a teacher, a wise old yogi... apart from the pistol in his right hand. “You... need to stop. You, and all of the people like you, just need to stop. America is ready to move past all of this. You ran on a platform that suggested you were a man who could move past all of this. Inciting riots, staging 'terrorist attacks,' usurping democratically elected leaders around the world, the dissemination of information and disinformation designed to keep China, Russia, and the middle east suspicious of us and of each other. Humanity is ready to move past the 'chaos for prophet' model. We don't need dark rooms full of rich old men trying to carve out their ownership of the world. It's stupid. It's unnecessary. Now, the reason I'm here with you is because your position gives you power for real change. It would only take a few men and women like you, in positions like yours, to change these flawed political structures. When you were on the campaign trail, you claimed to be ready to make real changes, to shake up the system, to fight for the people, for freedom. What was your slogan?” “You know what it was,” the President mumbled. “I do know, I remember it clearly. But I would love, just love love love, if you'd say it for me. I think it would mean more if you said it.” The Glock shifted slightly in the man's hand. The President turned over a few more pages. His mind was still cycling through options for escape, but being locked in a sound proof box, alone, with no means for communication with the outside world and no weapons to use against the man now questioning him kept his options limited: kill the armed assailant in hand to hand combat, or acquiesce. “Take your time,” the man said, “I want to really feel it. I want the version you belted out in Ohio and Michigan. I don't just want to feel it, I want to feel it in my balls!” The man stood, grabbed his crotch, and returned to the leather chair. “Come on, Mr. President, hit me!” “An America we can be...” The man stopped him, “No, no no, don't just give me the punchline, I want the last paragraph. I want the monologue, the passionate call to action. Inspire me!” The President dropped his head, dragging his chin back and forth across his chest as he started to shake his head again. “I know it's just me in here, Mr. President, but I'll help. I'm sure your chanting crowds helped at all of those campaign trail stops. You ready? Pick it up whenever you feel lead by that passionate American spirit.” The man cleared his throat. “From coast to coast, from our highest mountains to our lowest valleys...” The man leaned in, looking out of the tops of his eyes at the President's mouth. He was waiting. He knew it would come, he simply needed to wait. “… from the Pacific North West's crystal lakes to the Louisiana bayou...” The man funneled his hands around his mouth and tried to create the sounds of a wild crowd. When his hands withdrew, he rested the Glock on his knee, leveling it at the President's chest. “This is my favorite part so I'm really going to need your help here, Mr. President.” The President stopped shaking his head. The man saw it, the moment, acquiescence. “From the crystal lakes of the Pacific Northwest...” “There you go.” “To the heat and hospitality of the Louisiana bayou...” “I hear it.” “From the schoolhouse to the beach house to the penthouse to the White house...” “Preach it, brother!” “An America we can be sure of...” “Yes, lord!” “An America we can be proud of...” “Testify!” “America... leading the way!” The man stood from the leather chair with his arms raised and belted out his best “Yeehaw!” It echoed like the gunshot. “Oh man! That stuff just gets me, you know? It just gets my juices flowing! Woo! I love it, I know why you won, that stuff just works. I don't even know why, just something inside me comes alive and I want to... take over something, you know? I just want to bomb some poor brown country and take all of their natural resources. I get it, man, I get it! A lot of people in the media and on the left didn't get it, still don't get it, but I get it.” The man strode to the President's side and slapped him on the back. “Good stuff, my man. Now... quick question... where in the 'America, leading the way' slogan is the part about staging a fake terrorist attack on the White House and killing hundreds of American citizens to establish grounds for a war with Syria?” The President watched the gun appear from behind the man's leg. The black metal swung slightly in the man's grip, peering from behind him like a second interrogator. “You know what I hoped? I hoped all of your rhetoric on the campaign trail was just that, rhetoric. Words, meant to set you apart from your Democratic opponent and the previous administration. I thought, with your knowledge of social media and manipulating the mainstay press outlets, that you might be catfishing us. I hoped, somewhere deep down in my heart and soul, in my very being, that you were going to lie your way into the White House by using fear and racism and xenophobia and misogyny, only to turn around at your inauguration, accept the role of President, get sworn in, and then give your speech. In my sweetest dreams, it would have included thank yous to all of the people who voted for you. All of the misinformed, misguided, manipulated people who voted for you. I envisioned you laughing as you detailed some of the things you said to other world leaders, to your party members, to your own family and friends. I hoped you would read direct quotes you made that contradicted themselves or other statements you'd previously made. Or both! I thought you might give America a stern talking to. I thought you might lecture us on totalitarianism and the folly of dividing America and the world into an us versus them playing field where the biggest, loudest, meanest, most violent players win. I saw you waving your hands and asking how we elected a known thief, a repeated liar, a womanizer teetering on the edge of full-blown sexual predator, and then I saw you calling it all a big show. You would reveal yourself to the people for the real you, the man who truly did want to get America moving in the right direction. And, silly me, I even thought America might respond positively to such a brash and bold piece of performance art. I had such hope.” The man returned to his yogi pose in front of the President. “But then you spoke at your inauguration. And then you spoke again the next day, and the next, and we got to see your speeches and your press conferences and your emails and your Twitter page.” The man pulled another, smaller folder from his vest. “You're a performer, Mr. President. You've never been a businessman, a politician, or a leader. You're a performer, and you're performing for the wrong playwrights. We'd like to change that.” The man dropped another folder on the President's lap and the pages slid out together. The writing on these pages was different. This wasn't a collection of intelligence documents or operational transcripts. It was a script. “We'd like to try what I envisioned. We're a little late, it won't have quite as much power at this stage, but like I said, Mr. President... you're a performer. The people will need convincing. The people will want to be shocked. They will want that wow factor. They will want to tune into the rest of your TV show if you grab that microphone and you melt their faces off. Now, I know this is a lot to take in, and you're probably thinking about ways to kill me, or thinking about how I expect to get out of this safe room alive, but none of that matters. What matters is that you've been given this opportunity to make real change. You've been given a chance that no one has had since John F. Kennedy, rest his soul. You will pull back the putrid scab that is American politics. You will dig the chiggers out of America's skin and help her begin to heal. You will not arm al-Qaeda members with the means to blow up the White House and send the world, yet again, into war. We're starting a new act in the play, now. We're going to act three in this crazy show we call America.” The man rose, stepping to the control panel and raising his phone to the screens. A few seconds of key tapping satisfied him and the phone returned to his pocket. “When men approach you and threaten you or threaten your family, don't be afraid. I'm here with you in one of the safest and most secure rooms in the world and I will be gone soon and, if you'd like, you can pretend I was never here and none of this ever happened. No one else will know I was here. That is how good were are at what we do. Please know that our skills work both ways, offensively and defensively. If I tell you we will protect you and your family, they will be safe. On the other hand, if you insist on continuing to make decisions that will get more people killed and ruin more lives, I will have to come back and talk to you again. Do you want to talk to me again?” The President shook his head. “Well jeez! Tell me how you really feel!” The man checked to make sure the Glock still had a round chambered. “You've got a big speech on Tuesday, right? Sounds like a perfect day for real change. I'll know, within the first thirty seconds, your decision. We have some amazing writers on our team. I hope you will join us.” The man secured a small tactical pack and unloaded the pistol. He left the bullets on the floor and the clip and Glock on the leather chair. “One more thing, Mr. President... do you like the men out there on security?” “What?” “The men out their guarding the elevator, do you like them?” The President understood the question and nodded slowly. “They're good men,” he whispered. “Aw, see, you're already making better decisions.” The man looked at his watch. “Mr. President, it's been a pleasure. I hope you're not afraid of the dark.” Before the President could answer, the monitors clicked off and the room went black. A hiss called out from the blast doors and the President could hear them opening. He almost screamed out for help again, but stopped himself. He waited, listening, as the security team called out directives in the dark. One by one their bodies hit the hallway floor, and everything was quiet. The President got to his feet and shuffled along the wall toward the door. Before he reached it, the blast doors hissed again and began to close as the lights clicked back on. Light from the hall streamed in briefly before the doors shut, and when he looked to the monitors, all four guards were down, motionless. The man was nowhere to be seen. The intercom crackled to life: “Remember, Mr. President... an America we can be proud of. Lead the way.” The President scooped the file and the loose papers from the floor. He flipped through the first few pages of the script and drew a long, deep breath. Act one: honesty. To give this speech would mean shaking the political foundations of the entire world. It would be on every news station in operation. It would, overnight, change foreign relations, the effectiveness of representative government, the concepts of nationalism and borders, and would make him the most famous, or infamous, President, or maybe even leader, of all time. Do you want to continue the status quo, or become the most influential leader in human history? By the time the effects of the gas wore off and the guards recovered, the President had the first ten minutes of Tuesday's speech nearly memorized. 4104 Words
“Katie, would you like to go to Prom with me?” That's a perfectly normal thing to say to the most beautiful girl you've ever seen, right? The Prom is in twelve days so it would be normal to walk up to her and ask. Just ask, ask her your question, Alex. It sounds good in your head so now you just need to get it out of your head. Easy. It does sound good in my head. Mostly. Its sounds as good as any thought can sound. But I know what it would sound like if I actually said it, if I actually walked up to her and looked into her face and saw her looking back into my eyes and I opened my mouth to try and form the words. The way her shoulders round, just so, the way her neck curves up to those delicate ears and her round head, that perfect kind of round, makes me want to be there, leaning in, my cheek resting against the warm strands of straight brown hair she's pulled together and draped over one shoulder, her right shoulder. I want to smell her hair and I know immediately how creepy that sounds in my mind and then I know just as immediately and even more creepily that I don't care if it's creepy. I want to walk up behind her and run my hands down her shoulders, down her arms, down to the elbows, and I want to hear her smile as she turns towards me and I want her to kiss my cheek as I lay my head on her hair and wrap my arms around her and... A voice rips me from my dreams. It is a whisper, too close, with breath very near to lunch's peanut butter and jelly sandwich with sour cream and onion potato chips. My stomach hollows out. I can't believe I didn't notice him walking the desks. It is Mr. Kenton, my English teacher. “Master Stevens, despite my suave demeanor and charitable face, I will give you a zero in participation for the day if you don't, you know... participate.” “S-s-suh-horry Mr. K-Kuh-henton.” I don't stutter his name in my thoughts. I don't usually stutter my thoughts. A doctor once told me that stress might affect my stuttering. By affect it I mean make it worse. A lot worse. I believe him. I can see myself walk up behind her and wrap my arms around her and imagine her kissing my cheek and smiling and it's all very effortless and natural and... right. It's perfect. We don't have to talk. She can talk. In most of our mental interactions, she talks. Sometimes she tells me about her day. Sometimes she tells me about her hopes for our future together. Sometimes she sings. Sometimes she whispers. She can talk or sing or whisper and I can listen. I enjoy listening. When I do imagine talking to her, even on the false set pieces and in the ridiculous scenes and scenarios I set up for us in my head, I still feel the stutter. I sense the pressure in my mouth, the heat in my head. I hear the sound – usually on the S or hard K words, sometimes on N's and M's – I hear it catch and crush my tongue into the roof of my mouth. The K sound rattles around, bouncing off of my teeth, until I have to swallow it and continue the word without the hard K. I usually replace the hard sounds with the softer, easier H sound, so Kenton becomes Kuh-henton. The stuttered K's crash outward into the air like fireworks, sudden and bright and impossible to ignore, and the soft H finishes the word like the quiet streaming of red and orange and blue flames burning back to earth. People murmur, in awe, at my voice. Maybe 'awe' is the wrong word. In my mind, we laugh, we hold hands, we kiss, and we say what we need to say without words. Here, even in the safety of my own mind, even in my idealized scenarios where I can create any interaction with her I want, I still can't talk to her. There's no way I'll be able to talk to her in real life. To express what I want to express, even if I skipped her name and, like a robot, jumped right into the question of her going to Prom with me, it would still be like walking a minefield with magnet boots. I'd stay stuck on the W in “would” for at least three beats, probably more, and then immediately get snagged by the Y in “you.” I'd finish the end of “you” at the ten to twelve second mark, and by then I'd want to skip every other unessential word in the sentence. I could skip right to “Prom.” “Would you Prom?” She would understand that, right? I think most women, if approached by a moderately attractive man and asked, “Would you Prom?” the answer would be a resounding “Yes, yes of course I would Prom,” and the two would go to the Prom and be the big hit of the Prom and they would end up married with five kids and live happily ever after. Mr. Kenton is looking at me again. My stutter is well known around school. It's been well known since first grade when it appeared in all of its social-life-ruining glory. I can still hear the laughter of the kids in my class, if I want. That isn't too hard to deal with. What I really remember is the worry in their voices, their questions to each other and to the teacher. 'Why is he like that?' 'What's wrong with him?' And my favorite, 'Ew, that's weird.' There were meetings with teachers and counselors and therapists and 'specialists.' There were many specialists. They all fed me the same lines, that lots of famous people have had stutters like mine, and that soon I'd be speaking like John F. Kennedy, or Alec Baldwin. When my parents told me who JFK and Alec Baldwin were, it made me feel even less hopeful. The kids all think I'm weird and stupid but someday I'll speak like the President? Even back then, I smelled the rising stink of adult lies. I smiled, to be polite, and I did my best with their exercises and techniques. They said they were hopeful, but that year my teachers were made aware of my condition. As were my teachers the next year, and the next. Mr. Kenton has been aware of my stutter for a long time. Generally, this makes him hesitate to call on me to answer questions or read passages from our books aloud. Now, seeing his eyes twisting toward me, seeing that I have, yet again, drifted away from his ingenious lecture, it seems like he might disavow my sanctuary and call on me to read. Even my internal pleas are stuttering. P-puh-pull-ease d-don't call on-n-n me. I shake my head slightly. His stare softens and his eyes return to the novel in his hands. “Ms. Williams, you get to close us out. The rest is all yours.” He went from nearly calling on me to calling on her? Does he know how I feel about her, is it that obvious? It probably is that obvious. She has her book laid out on her desk, and she stoops to read it. Even hunched over her book she is art. With her head tilted forward, the gentle bumps of her vertebrae catch the sunlight from the windows on the southern wall. Her shoulders slump toward her delicate hands. From the back, it looks like she might be cradling a baby bird. Then her voice. We're on the last page of The Great Gatsby. Class struggle, identity, acceptance, I get what Mr. Kenton has been saying about it and why we should find significance in some of its characters' experiences, but overall I just haven't been into it. It's a classic, apparently, but I don't feel that as my classmates read it. Not until she reads: “He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in the vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night. Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... and one fine morning – So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” That last page would have taken me months to stammer through. I would have branded an eternal hatred into my heart for Gatsby and Fitzgerald and the republic's dark fields. I would have borne the book ceaselessly into my past. But to hear her say it, to hear her voice float lines down over the class like silk threads and to scan along with every word as it leaves her lips makes the last few hundred words of the book seem like the greatest thing anyone has ever written. I want to hear her read the whole thing. I want her to narrate the entirety of my Sophomore curriculum. Science, math, history, I want her to read all of it. I don't know if my stutter makes me more susceptible to the smooth beauty of her voice, but I want her to follow me around and speak for me. To have her be my mouthpiece, I would gladly never speak again. “Thank you, Ms. Williams. So, first off, pat yourselves on the back, you did it. You read an entire F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, a classic. You can put that on your college applications. You can write it into your resumes. You can bring it up at parties and Bar Mitzvahs and job interviews. You should probably get it tattooed on your ribs in Chinese or Sanskrit. That's what the cool kids are doing these days, right? But why? The eternal question that begins all deep and meaningful understanding: why?” Mr. Kenton is moving through the desks again. Everyone watches him and pretends to be interested in what he is saying, until he looks directly at them. Then they look back to their books, intent to appear studious in their attempts to crack Fitzgerald's secret code. Eye contact is your enemy in this scenario. Eye contact is almost a guarantee of being called on for an opinion. Mike Hill is the first to slip. He doesn't look down at his book quickly enough when Mr. Kenton scans that side of the classroom. “Mr. Hill, you seem to have stayed awake for much of the reading, help us out. 'So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.' This is one of the more famous closing lines to any book from the 20th Century. How do you feel about it?” The room, everyone except Mike, shudders with the rush of not being chosen. Our relief is an affront to his sad fate, an emotional slap in Mike's face, but we don't care. Sucks to be you, brother. “Ceaselessly, that's the word that grabs me. I can see how you might read this last line and think they were inspired in some way to battle the current, to start again at a similar spot where they began once before.” Wow, Mike, you have been reading along. Or maybe Googling literary analysis of The Great Gatsby? “To battle the current is admirable and brave. To be willing to accept your past and accept being defined by it is brave, in a way. But ceaselessly, to row and row against the current and find yourself carried ceaselessly into the past, without a hope for something different? To me, that seems pretty dark.” Mr. Kenton stops to turn toward Mike. I don't think I'm the only one surprised by Mike Hill's thoughtful answer. Everyone waits to see what Mr. Kenton will say. Everyone except me. I am watching Katie Williams and wondering what she would say. “Mr. Hill, that's a bold conclusion. Are you saying this story ends with Fitzgerald suggestion that the battle for overcoming humble beginnings and climbing into the highest positions of social and economic power and influence is hopeless?” “It seems pretty hopeless,” Mike says. “What about this line, 'It eluded us then, but that's no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... and one fine morning...' that seems pretty hopeful? One fine morning we will catch that thing that is stretching out before us, we will reach out and our efforts will reward us with, something. Hope, right?” The class is waiting, but is somewhat deflated. Katie's head dropped a few inches when Mr. Kenton finished his question. I think she felt Mike had lost, that someone had finally posed a serious point with actual merit and Mr. Kenton might have to deem the idea thoughtful and worthy in some way. I think she felt like we, as a class, had won something. We, too, were stretching out our arms for some lofty prize. But she slumped at the thought of Mike being done. But Mike wasn't done. “It could be hopeful and it could be inspiring, if any of the people who were reaching out had survived the novel or succeeded in any real way. The people reaching, like Myrtle, or George, or even Gatsby himself, all failed. Gatsby died and no one went to his funeral. He reached out his arms and grabbed nothing. The truth is, not everyone who reaches their arms out or runs faster toward their goals finds that great tomorrow. Many people, maybe most people, go ceaselessly into the past, back to the same life they've always had.” “Ceaselessly, huh?” Mr. Kenton says, looking once more to the novel in his hands. “It is a strong word, Mr. Hill, a very strong word. Despite my better judgment, I am inclined to agree with you. I think Fitzgerald was so disillusioned and, probably, disgusted with the American upper class of the twenties that he saw the greed and dismissal of the lower classes as endemic. I would imagine he had little hope of it ever changing.” He did it. Mike Hill did it, he said a thing and Mr. Kenton agreed with that thing. I won't say it's unprecedented but it's pretty close to unprecedented (I wonder how long it would take me to say “unprecedented” out loud? Eight seconds?) I'm not alone in my amusement, I can hear the winds of praise stirring at the edges of the classroom and whispering their ways through the tall grasses of English Lit 201. “Your reports on this great American novel are due one week from today. At thirty percent of your grade for the class, I'd reach my arms out and run faster and paddle ceaselessly for that insightful and provocative paper. Take a note from Mr. Hill's responses and stun me with your genius.” He did it. Here, nearing the end of our Sophomore year, Mike Hill garnered the respect of the historically disrespectful Mr. Charles Kenton. He gets a few smiles and a handful of playful insults from his friends. His paper is going to be good, and I feel, somehow, that hearing him today will somehow make my paper good. Or at least better. I've been inspired by teachers before. I've been introduced to big ideas and made to feel significant and special. My fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Flowers, took me into the world of adults. I'd been sent to the Principal's office because I punched Dan Saunders in the face after he made fun of my stuttering (for the last time). When I got back to the classroom, she noticed my change in demeanor. She could tell I'd been chewed out, told that fighting and violence were never the answer and that if I ever did anything like this again, I would be expelled. She knew the drill. But as everyone was heading out the door at the end of the day, she called me back in. I figured it was so she, too, could chew me out. She put a hand on my head and looked around to make sure we were alone before saying, “You know, just because he is the Principal, doesn't mean he is right.” She didn't go into details, she didn't say anything else, she just opened a tiny window into the worldviews of different adults in leadership and let me take a quick look. Inspiring. The real kind, not the empty “you can do anything you put your mind to” kind. Mike Hill echoed this inspiration today. Tomorrow, I will leave for a boy scout weekend in the mountains. I won't see Katie until Monday, if even then. What if she isn't in school? What if someone has already asked her to the Prom by then? What if someone has already asked her to the Prom now? Katie, will you go to the Prom with me? I feel my tongue thickening as the words roll through my mind. I might be able to rush through “Katie,” the W is going to get me, but I might be able to push through it with two, maybe three extra syllables. The “you go to Prom” section is all barbed wire and bear traps. Those words are going to grab my tongue and play hot potato. But I don't care. I'm reaching my arms out farther. I'm running faster. So what if I stutter? Maybe she will think it's cute. Maybe she will sense the bravery it took for me to talk to her. Maybe she will feel sorry for me and say yes. I wouldn't even feel bad, I'll take a date to the Prom with Katie Williams however I can get it. I'm not proud. “Do it.” Another hot PB&J whisper, the sting of the sour cream and onion chips trailing behind. It was Mr. Kenton, and he smirks back at me on his way out the door. When I stand my legs aren't with me. They want to follow Mr. Kenton. Quitters. Katie, will you... Lauren and Margot are talking to Katie. I can tell Margot is about to leave, and I can only hope Lauren will be close behind her. Katie, will you go to the... “See you at three, girl,” Margot says. As she passes me, I get a smile and a quiet, “Hey, Alex.” “Hey,” I say. It's good, distraction is good. Katie, will you go to the Prom with... I have to stop because Lauren isn't leaving. I can't walk up to two girls talking and stand there like a weirdo right before I potentially stutter my way through an awkward Prom date request and receive a resounding “no” for my efforts. The only other person in the room is Mike. He is still packing up his papers and binders and books. I could walk over to him, strike up some stupid conversation about his Gatsby insights. Then I would have to talk. I have found that volume doesn't help my stuttering. Quite the opposite. Also, I might get stuck in a conversation about 20th Century literature and the role of rural industrialization on the stock market crash of 1929 and I would end up politely nodding along with his factual recitations and his own hypotheses as Katie walked out the door and out of my Prom dreams and out of my miserable stuttering stupid life. “Katie?” It's my voice. I don't know who is guiding this crazy train but it is my voice and she and Lauren are now looking at me. They way they are looking at me, I must be making a very strange face. “I'll see you at three?” Lauren asks, confused, still looking at me. Katie nods and Lauren walks past me. She doesn't give the same polite acknowledgment Margot gave me. “Hey, Alex, what's up?” I think that's what she said. I'm not hearing things anymore. I can see her mouth move, see her eyes wondering. She is waiting for me to say something and I have forgotten what it was I wanted to say. Maybe I put it out of my mind on purpose, to save myself the pain of embarrassment and rejection. It's probably best that I just walk away at this point. She doesn't deserve this. She doesn't deserve to be made to feel so awkward, to have to entertain the class charity case, that kid who the teacher never calls on because he can't talk, that kid who has never had to answer a teacher's call in class. Katie shouldn't have to be forced to either turn down a lame invitation to Prom from the charity case, or say yes out of pity and be seen at Prom with me. It's not fair. I hadn't thought it all the way through, but it's not fair. What was I thinking? I was thinking about myself. I wasn't thinking about Katie, about how sad it would be to be seen at Prom with the weird stuttering kid, Alex Stevens. I wasn't thinking about her conversations with her friends, with her parents, about showing mercy on the kid who no one wanted to hang out with. Hey, want an awesome date? Go out with the guy who takes four minutes to answer a question. Go out with the guy who takes an hour to tell a joke. There is no reason for me to be standing in front of the most beautiful girl in school a week and a half before Prom and taking up any of her time. I can't take it anymore. “Sorry,” I mumble as I turn and walk away. I pass by my desk and I hope I'll never see it again. I don't want to be sitting at that desk and looking two desks forward and one to the right at the back of Katie Williams' perfect head. When I pass the last desk and turn toward the door, I hear a voice behind me. I can't make out the words, but it is a female voice. And it is a question. “Don't you want my answer?” It is a female voice. It is Katie's voice. When I stop and turn, she is looking back at me. I expected to turn and see her staring back at me, angry, annoyed, her brow furrowed or her eyes rolling back in her head, disgusted, dismissive. She isn't angry or annoyed. She isn't disgusted. She is... confused. She is confused, but she is smiling. “Your a-a-ans-swer?” I stammer. “Ask me, again,” she says. Did I ask her? Did I say the words I've been practicing in my head for six months? I don't even remember saying anything. Is she reading my mind? She sees the question on my face. “Ask me again,” she repeats. I turn and slowly step back toward her. I look over my shoulder. We are alone. “Um,” I start, but I shut that down. You can't start with Um, it makes the stuttering worse. Um is death. Um is the devil. She stands. I start again. “K-Katie... will y-you...” She is nodding. Why is she nodding? “G-g-go to P-pr...” “Yes,” she says. She said yes, why did she say yes? “Pr-prom with m-me?” She is still nodding. “Yes,” she says again, stepping toward me. “I thought you'd never ask.” She walks past me. At the door, she stops, turning back toward me. She wants to say something but instead, smiles. She walks out. I hear another voice. It is a male voice, deep and triumphant. It is a guttural scream, maybe followed by fist pumping and leaping around the English Lit 201 classroom. The voice is stuttering the loudly yelled word “Yes” over and over again, and will continue to do so until the end of time. Upward mobility is real. Dreams are possible. Reaching out and running faster works sometimes. Most people don't know when they've said the most important sentence of their lives. I do. ` Suck it, Gatsby, I'm going to Prom with Katie Williams. 5250 Words
What you are about to read is based on actual events. All of the characters depicted in this story are real. This really happened. Really. A lot of this really happened. As you read it you will think, Yeah no, I don't think so, I don't think this really happened, and you would be wrong because you're not psychic and you didn't write it and I did and you can't prove it's not true and much of it, many of the things, these tremendous things, they were just tremendous and these were the best things and they totally happened and look at my face right now and you will know in your heart and in your feet and in your butt cheeks that this all could have probably happened if it did happen. ::ahem:: The interrogator clicks the record button on the small camera. It beeps on its tripod, the sharp red pupil of its digital eye dimming to black. “I'm sorry, are we cutting? I didn't hear cut but it looks like...” The interrogator's fist slams into the man's forehead. His head totters over the back of the steel chair. The chair's metal legs screech at their bolts against the cement floor, accenting the man's maniacal laughter. “Whoa, sorry, I'm sorry. Was it that bad? You know, you're right, if I'm being honest you're right. That was a little stiff, a little forced. Again, I'm sorry, that was the first take so maybe if we could just take it again from one.” The second punch sends the man's head back again, harder, and the base of his skull bangs into the metal. A hallow, tinny note hums in the air. “Okay okay okay, wow, easy! That was a hard one, do you all hear that, the ringing? Is that a high D? Ah, sorry, of course, more takes, more money. We're going to Clint Eastwood this thing. Cool, I'm down, I guess I just need a little more direction. What is my character feeling in this scene? What is his motivation? Fear of jail? Fear of a beating?” A broad man in a black suit rubs his knuckles, not because they hurt, but more like he is rubbing in the feeling, letting his knuckles savor it. “Got it... fear, more fear, let's go again.” “The incident,” the interrogator says. “The facts?” “Pertinent facts. Where is your wife, Mr. Sortor?” “She's crazy. Can I start with that? I guess you already know that but the lady is nuts. Are you married? Sorry, not pertinent, right? Seriously, though, are you? The anger, that rage bubbling up around your neck and jaw, would suggest that you are married. Are things not going well?” The next punch finds the man's rib cage, first left side, then right. “Sorry, sorry,” the man wheezes, still laughing. “We all have our soft spots, I get it.” Another punch, solar plexus. This one takes a few seconds... And then he's back. “That one felt extra angry. Do you work with your wife, is she nearby? That punch felt like she is on the other side of the glass? If she is watching you right now so you can't answer honestly, stare at me menacingly.” The interrogator cocks back his fist. “Oh my God she's your supervisor?” Another punch to the head. This shot draws the first blood. The man lets it drip from his mouth in gloppy strings and laughs at the shapes the blood makes on the floor. “Agent,” comes a quick chirp over the intercom. It is a woman's voice. The man laughs. “Oh no, oh no I was just kind of reading the room and shootin' from the hip but I nailed it, didn't I? I accidentally nailed it. Of course I did. That was her, wasn't it? That was your lady on the intercom, the old ball and chain. She is your boss!” The man's bloody, crazed smile causes the interrogator's hand to draw back again. The fist is about to swing when: “Ha, look, a caterpillar!” the man says, looking down at the spit-spattered blood. “Well, I see a caterpillar but that's just my perspective. What do you see, agent fluffy fists? Do you see your bread-winning super successful and I'm-the-boss-of-you wife? You should be happy, with your wife leading your family you can focus on the things in your life you care about. Like...” The detective's hand disappears into a pocket and returns with a switch blade. The man in the chair smiles into the glinting metal as it nears his face. To his left, the only door into the room opens. A figure steps in without a word and the interrogator stops. The blade slips back into place and is pocketed. A woman steps forward as the interrogator leaves. “That guy is great,” the man says, spitting another swirling nebula of blood onto the floor. “What happened tonight?” the woman asks. “I feel like if you'd let him live his passion, he'd be a much easier person to be around.” “Mr. Sortor.” “Just think, you could come home to a piping hot dinner he made from scratch. He could tell you all about his day taking hip hop lessons and crocheting Charlie Brown sweaters for his pet hamsters.” “Where is your wife, Mr. Sortor?” “I'm going to tell you about her, I am, really. There's nothing I want more, the weight of it all off my chest will be just so...” The man brings his formerly handcuffed hands up over the table and drops the lock-picked handcuffs onto the steel surface with a sort of drum roll melee. “Freeing,” he finishes. He looks to the window and smiles. The woman puts her hand up so the interrogator doesn't come back and shoot the man in the face. “He's so mad right now, whew. I hope it doesn't make things harder for you when you're alone with him tonight. The last thing I want to do is drive a massive, spiked, poisonous wedge between you two. Everyone needs their cuddle time.” The woman collects the handcuffs and slides them silently into the inside pocket of her gray blazer. She pulls out the chair on her side of the table and sits, hands folded. “Mr. Sortor, please, tell me what happened tonight.” The man sits back, snapping his fingers and humming. A smile is building on his face. He can't contain it. “Oh, alright. I'll tell you, but you have to promise to tell only the people who will be terribly upset by the story. Can you do that?” “How will I know before telling them whether or not someone will be upset?” “Terribly upset,” he offers. “Terribly upset,” she echoes. The man shifts again and slaps the table. “Well, my wife, like all wives, is crazy. Quite crazy, I would say quite crazy. And I don't mean that in a bad or a mean way. I know some wives are crazy in that bad way, that 'Do you like this dress?' and 'Why haven't you given me a baby yet?' kind of crazy. That crazy isn't much fun. I prefer the type of crazy in a woman that is like working on a rubix cube that sporadically sprays mace in your eyes or becomes ferociously hot before freezing and then exploding in your face because you 'fart dismissively.' The truth is I AM listening, most of the time. It's just hard to listen fully and follow everything she says all the time when she is saying crazier-than-the-designated-hitter-rule type nonsense for sadistic fun. But you know what? I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to be that husband who is arrested when his wife goes missing and just badmouths her to a police station full of strangers. And truthfully, when I say my wife is crazy, I mean it as a huge compliment to her, because her crazy is so unique and elegant and hilarious, it is one of the things I love most about her: 'Oh my God, smell this!! Smell it, do you smell that? It smells like radiation. Do you think the Fukushima plant leaked radiation into this imitation crab meat? Oh my God I have radiation poisoning, I know it, I do! I can feel it. I'm getting a headache, I can't breathe.' Of course you can't breathe, you're holding your breath, honey. 'Blurry vision, I have blurry vision, is that a sign of radiation poisoning?' I don't know, sweetie. It's been so long since the government used my radiation-sniffing abilities to diagnose imitation crab meat viability. I felt like the worst superhero of all time. Imitation crab meat radiation smelling guy, to the rescue. The past few weeks started to feel like every classic hero movie. I was being asked to come back from retirement for one more job, to put my skills to use one more time.” “We need you, Sortor, now more than ever!” “I don't know, Captain, I'm not that guy anymore. My nose isn't what it used to be, I don't know if I still have what it takes.” “Dammit, Sortor, you were the best. Even on your worst day you could smell three microns of cocaine in a strippers ass crack from two rooms away!” “I can't go back to that life!” “Wow, you are gone. The man I knew would never have backed down from an assignment. The man I knew wasn't a quitter.” “I'm not that guy anymore.” “You're not a MAN anymore.” “DAMN YOU, ROGER, YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT IT'S LIKE!!” The woman puts a hand up. “Mr. Sortor, please. This isn't your Netflix comedy special.” The man's smile fades. He lets his head drop forward, lets a pout pull at the corners of his quivering mouth. “You asked me about my wife and I'm telling you.” “Something tells me between 95% and 100% of what you just said was a lie.” “Well, if you don't want to hear the rest of my amazing story, that's fine. No, no, don't tell me to finish my story. You're fussy fists' boss, not mine!” The woman sighs, settling back into the chair. “Of course. Please continue.” “Well, I'll just close the story out with a 'don't worry.' In the end, I find a reason to re-enter the life I left behind and I sacrifice myself valiantly, heroically to save all mankind from radiation poisoning and death and destruction. It's kind of a big deal, is all I'm saying. So anyway, my wife can smell radiation, apparently, and she asks for my help in deciding whether something is deadly or toxic or actively giving her cancer at that very moment. I used to be very understanding. I used to try and help quell her fears and reassure her that the donut she was eating would definitely not send her into cardiac arrest. But now, I'm not as helpful. After years of my reassurances being ignored, I found it harder and harder to give them out. If she was just going to waste my empathy and sympathy, I was going to save them for people who valued them... and maybe be a little less helpful to her. 'Oh, wow... yeah I think you're right, it does kind of smell like radiation, hon. Matter of fact, it smells like it's already affecting you. You didn't already eat any of this crab meat, did you? I think I can smell your hair dying. I can smell you prematurely aging. I think I can smell your ovaries drying up like apricots in the vicious central California sun.' You know, the usual husband and wife banter.” “Oh my God,” the woman says. “I know, right? Women, what are you gonna do?” the man asks with a shrug. “She glares at me to show her disdain, but that just fuels me. It sustains me, num num num. Sometimes, I'll top the sundae off. Something like, 'Wait, there's something else... it smells like your friends all secretly hate you and love to trash you behind your back. It smells like they are being catty about you RIGHT NOW, and loving every minute of it. It smells like you are going to grow old before your time and die alone, surrounded by a crowd of your most painful regrets.” “Okay,” the woman says, “so we've established that your wife probably hates you.” “Strangely enough, these most recent exchanges caused her to ask my opinion of smells and such less and less. Who cares, it's adorable and hilarious, great fun for me.” “Adorable and hilarious, yes, thank you. What a beautiful back story, very moving and informative. You have such a knack for storytelling.” The woman is mumbling with disdain. “You know what I want?” “What you really really want?” the man asks. “I'll tell you what I want.” “What you really really...” “Stop it.” “Sorry.” “I wanna... I wanna...” “Now you're doing it!” the man yells. “I wanna know why your house exploded tonight, why we picked debris out of the neighbors' yards four hundred feet away, and why you don't have a mark on you? I wanna know that and I wanna know where your wife is?” “You know, agent boss lady, it was amazing getting to know my wife before we got married because she did things and thought thoughts that I had never heard other human beings admit to doing or thinking. Up to the age of about seven, she thought that if she had her mouth closed that any noise she made, only she could hear. She thought it stayed in her head, her own little secret conversations. She thought only she would be able to hear it, and it gave her comfort and satisfaction to chirp and bellow to herself in class. It worked, too, for a long time. Too long. It worked for a long time because she was so weird and crazy that no one dared question why she was making those noises.” Hey, that crazy Kristina girl is making those whale and chimp noises again and I can't concentrate. Tell her to stop. You tell her to stop. I'm not going to tell her she is closer to you, you tell her. Holy Jesus she is looking this way. “She would stare at them like a lion guarding a kill, eyes wide and wild, teeth clenched under grinning lips, her frantic pencil scribbling little drawings of flowers and vampire bats. I always pictured her crouched over her school room creations, speaking madness she thought only she could hear, like Gollum from Lord of the Rings: Precious... our silent mouth chirps is precious. We can hears its but they cants hears it. No one can hears its but us, precious, NO ONES!!” “So I don't know how many years she got to babble crazy talk to herself but eventually a teacher told her she was audible and disturbing to the other students, and possibly autistic, and she took it pretty well. She didn't speak publicly for 8 months and frequently peed her pants in class. Problem solved, done and done.” The woman leans back in the chair and folds her arms. She knows she has to listen, and she knows the man is going to continue spouting nonsense and it seems like he could do so for the rest of the night. “I should say that she is also very normal in a lot of ways. I shouldn't sit here and ramble on like she shows nothing but lunatic behavior all day every day. Examples, examples... well, she tells me I have to wash my dishes before I put them in the dishwasher. I was skeptical about this the first time she said it, but turns out it's true. You are supposed to wash your dishes off before you put them in the machine called a dishwasher. Isn't that fun? What else? Oh, she wants me to bathe and practice at least semi-decent hygiene on a semi-regular basis. I'm not a huge fan of general daily hygiene, but that seems like a pretty normal request. She says things like, 'I can smell my brain,' which is normal, right? Oh, and she reserves the right to believe that I could, at any point, become possessed by a demon, and she has lovingly assured me that if this happens, she will promptly shoot me in the head or stab me about the face and neck until I am dead.” The woman sits up suddenly, slamming her feet into the floor. The handcuffs jingle in her pocket and she folds her hands and tries to play off her reaction. “Normal stuff, you know? Things women need to feel safe and to feel loved, so I grant her these simple things.” “So much of what you've said is silly, but that last one felt so specific. If that is true, why would she have the worry that you might become a demon and...” “Possessed.” “Possessed?” “Yes, become possessed, the process of shifting control of the human mortal to the eternal, formerly divine high being, now derogatorily referred to as 'demon,' is possession. Possessed.” “Possessed, okay. Why would she be worried about you becoming possessed by a demon?” “Great question, boss lady, best question of the night. Four months ago, about a year into our marriage, we were lying in bed. The lights were off and I was nodding off to sleep. It had been a hard day, I was sore, mentally done, so I was happy to be in bed and winding down. She was lying there, next to me, quiet and peaceful and, I think, totally asleep. There's nothing quite so soothing as finally settling into bed next to your partner after a long, tough day, right? So my thoughts were quieting down, I settled into a steady breathing pattern, relaxed, let my eyelids close...” The man slowly presses his palms together and lays his face against them, closing his eyes. He smiles as he simulates peaceful sleep and light snoring. The woman squawks when he suddenly slams his hands down on the interrogation table. “Screaming! Suddenly the bed was filled with her wild screaming and kicking as she thrashed back and forth under the covers. Her fists slammed into my arms. She was kicking at my legs, the covers were whipping up around us, and I felt her toenails dig into my tender calf flesh and tear out a bunch of my ample leg hair. My heart exploded up to 200 beats per minute, eyes shot open, I was ready to defend her against whatever ninja or alien or infamous puddin' pop comedian was attacking her.” “I WILL DEFEND YOU, MY LADY!!!” She stopped. She just lay there panting out exclamations of relief. “Holy crap, what? What's wrong, are you okay?” “At that point I was coming back to a normal level of consciousness and starting to make guesses about what could possibly have elicited her response. First thought, someone was in the house, that she was screaming because we were about to be robbed, murdered, or zombies were going to chew our faces off. But I quickly realized the house was silent, there was no one else in the room, and she didn't try to get up and run anywhere, so that wasn't it. Next thought, anyone? What could have woken the sleeping beauty into such violence? Spider. Must have been a spider, or what she thought was a spider, crawling over her feet or something. And yeah, that is one of the most horrifying possibilities in the universe. What's that, there is an 8-legged arachnid crustacean creature with 8 eyes and toxic venom and huge fangs that drinks liquefied bug guts and it carries it's babies on its back and can jump like a hundred times its own body length and produces one of the pound for pound strongest filaments in the world from its BUTTHOLE!!! THAT THING, just crawling around my bare legs a mere inches from my genitalia? Yes, by all means, you scream and I'll scream, too. Let me scream like a tiny newborn and be freaked out of my mind. I'd kick and punch whoever was next to me if it meant I wouldn't have to get bitten by a spider. I'd elbow my wife in the throat to get out of a spider bite. I'll head butt a baby, I don't care, that baby will recover, it would be a light head butt, I have control. But if a spider crawled up my inner thigh and jabbed its two slimy, venom-dripping, bug-blood soaked fangs into my pale flesh, I would never be the same. I would never sleep peacefully again, I'd be ruined as a human being. Every time my back hit another bed I would feel hairy exoskeleton legs tap-dancing around my crotch, scrawling little Xs to mark the spots it would want to BITE ME AGAIN!!! I would never stop feeling the tooth pinch, never stop seeing those eight crazy eyes looking at me when I closed my eyes, so yes, if she did indeed feel a spider crawling on her leg or something, thrash away. I fully support your decision. Mash that little bastard up into bed lint. Crush his essence, smash his very memory from earth, TEAR HIM FROM THE BOOK OF LIFE!!!” The woman scratches at her neck. She can feel the spider legs tickling. “So I was like, 'What happened, is something in the bed?' I wanted to know. For her, sure, to protect her I guess. But I needed to know for me, too. She was hyperventilating, sweating, pawing blindly into the darkness and looking to take hold of something solid to assure herself of her safety. 'Oh my gosh... oh... man... I thought... I thought your foot was a hoof.' I blinked two or three times before responding with, 'Um, what?' I thought maybe I was still groggy from the sudden pull from near-sleep, and from the mental and emotional trauma of my wife screaming me back to reality. It sounded like she said she thought my foot was a hoof. So I asked her to clarify. She said, 'I thought your foot was a hoof. It felt like a hoof.' Hmm... okay, first off, rude! Very rude, I loofah these bad boys at least three times a week. They are soft and supple and shiny and beautiful, so how dare you gently rub up against them and think they might be hooves. Second, you thought my foot was a hoof? Tokay, I guess that is scary, I guess, because it is more common than you might think, that your husband will turn into a goat at night when you fall asleep. Most of the time we turn into goats, sometimes llamas or alpacas, sometimes we turn into common sheep. Horses, zebras, deer, bison, water buffalo, pigs, depending on how we're feeling, but usually we turn into goats. Anyway, besides the point, whatever... a hoof, animorphing into some other being? Yeah, that would be scary. But in that vulnerable moment, I made a mistake. I started laughing. Hysterically. At the time it was so mind-blowingly funny to hear my wife tell me she thought my foot was a hoof and be completely, sincerely honest about it. It was adorable, like when a child comes to you, teary eyed, and tells you they saw a monster in their closet. Something very sad about it, and this other part, a darker part, that is eyes-tearingly, gut-shreddingly hilarious. As you might guess, she didn't share my feelings that it was hilarious.” “Shut up, it was scary. I thought you were turning into a demon.” “Boom. Forget goats or pigs or horsies, my wife thought I was becoming a horned, hoofed, hairy, fanged, drooling, winged, fire-breathing fallen, a spawn of Satan, an enemy of God. Spiders? HA, I laugh at spiders, I'm a demon sent from hell to my wife's bed to gently rub my hairy hoofed leg against hers. No towers of screaming fire, no smoke or violent speaking in tongues of strange hellish language that when played backwards are the lyrics to the songs of Matchbox 20. Just a gentle leg to rub, that is what a demon would do, though, right? I guess some demons might come in with locust swarms and flames and Hootie and the Blowfish playing. But I guess demons are different, at least as different from each other as humans are from each other, right? Some might melt your skin with mouth lava. Other might sink their fangs into your throat and swallow your head and carry the rest of your lifeless body out to the nether realm. Maybe others are just a little bit weird and creepy, not too over the top. Subtle. Maybe some demons just like creepy whispers, strange noises, hoof to leg contact in bed. Seems possible.” The woman stands, dropping the handcuffs back onto the table. She walks to the door, opening it, and looks back. “Mr. Sortor, I'm going to leave now, as I am done having my time wasted. If you feel like actually saying something important, kindly let your guard know and he will arrange another meeting for us.” “Wait, you don't want to hear the ending?” The woman shakes her head and goes to leave. “But it's the best part,” the man whines. “The best part of your ridiculous stories, Mr. Sortor, is when they're done. And guess what... they're done. Enjoy your stay. Maybe after spending the weekend in a cage, you will feel like telling a story that is a little more helpful.” The woman leaves, closing the door on the man's pleas for her to stay. The interrogator is standing in the dark waiting for her. “He's fun,” the interrogator says without smiling. “He's insane,” the woman replies. “This guy has worked for the city, for the mayor's office, he was on the Governor's staff for two years and he is completely out of his mind.” “Positions of power always draw the finest people.” “His wife was killed tonight in an explosion at their home and all he can do is joke about it? If she survived the initial explosion then she most likely burned to death, and look...” Through the viewing window they watch the man pose his fingers on the table like they are legs. The hands walk toward each other and stop to bow before dancing across the shining metal. He is humming. It is quiet but the woman recognizes the tune. “Once upon a dream,” she whispers. “What?” “The song... he's humming the song from Sleeping Beauty, Once Upon a Dream.” Her faraway look brings the interrogator to his feet. He grabs her shoulder. “Hey, you okay?” he asks. “What?” she says, still looking through the window. She forces a smile. “Sarah,” he says, shaking her slightly. This time she doesn't respond. She doesn't look at him, she is watching something else. When the interrogator looks through the window, the man is waltzing his hands across the table and humming. Words begin to emerge from the intercom, quietly at first, louder every few seconds. “I... know... you...” Sarah joins in, “I walked with you once... upon... a dream.” Soon she and the man are singing the song in sync. “Sarah, what the hell is going on? Stop it!” “I... know... you...” “Stop!” “That look in your eyes... is so... familiar a gleam...” The interrogator stands in front of her and stares directly into her eyes. His hands go to her shoulders to move her out of the room. Pulling at her shoulders is like trying to move a tree at its base. She doesn't budge. He raises his sleeve cuff to his mouth. “Interrogation room three, I need backup immediately, over!” The voice on the other side comes back, but before it can complete a response, the interrogator's earpiece sends a piercing beep into the center of his mind. The noise destroys all thought except remove the earpiece. He yanks it, tossing it across the room, and the skull-splitting noise stops. But there is another noise below it, rising. “And I know... it's true... that visions are seldom all they seem...” The interrogator goes for his gun. He takes a step toward the door but stops. Sarah pulls him back to the viewing window and slaps the gun from his hand. She grabs the back of his head and holds his face to the viewing window. She has impossible strength, and she holds him in place while still singing along. “But if I... know you... I know what you'll do...” “Sarah! What are you doing, stop! Don't do this. Stop!” She slams his face against the glass. “You'll love me at once...” He winces against the pressure. “The way you did once...” When he opens his eyes, the man at the table is still seated, his hands folded on the table in front of him. He is smiling. The interrogator can see the man's lips moving in sync with Sarah's last line. “Upon... a... dream.” A darkness begins at the floor of the room and spreads up the walls. The man's pants shift beneath the table, and at first the interrogator can't tell what is going on, not until the man stands and rips the table from its bolts in the floor and tosses it into a nearby wall. “This isn't happening,” the interrogator hisses into the glass. “This can't be happening!” The man stretches out his arms. His shirt begins to tear at the seams as his flesh churns and expands beneath it. The interrogator can't fully process what he is seeing but two large dark masses appear behind the man. They open up and stretch out toward the wall and ceiling, shuddering slightly. If his mind were working, he might think he saw the man getting taller, and wider. He might even say the massive dark appendages were wings. “Please, Sarah... please!” Her grip on his head and neck don't change. He tries to close his eyes but they are being held open by a force he can't see. They are being held open so they can see everything. The man doubles over and his head begins to change shape. Two sharp edges appear from the top of his head and sprout up and back. Thin spikes stretch up into the darkening air from the man's back. His hands are thickening, his fingers lengthening, and sharp nails are extending from his finger tips. A cough rocks his body and smoke chugs from his now snarling and fanged mouth. Another cough doubles the smoke, then sends fiery embers sparkling to the ground. After the creature is still for a moment, it looks up at the viewing window. Its eyes are glowing red. Its teeth are clenched and small streams of smoke escape between them. When it stands up to full height, its horns stab into the interrogation room's ceiling, ripping the plaster apart. “A cage?” Sarah's voice, but not her. She is whispering into the interrogator's ear now. “Oh, detective Carter, this isn't a cage.” The beast swings a massive, horned tail against the viewing window glass. It explodes inward, the shards hailing down on Sarah and detective Carter. The beast leaps in front of them, roaring hot saliva into their faces, singeing their skin and hair with lashing flames. “Not a cage, detective... this is a buffet!” 5372 words
PG-13 Four days ago, I gave my name and credit card number to anonymous online merchants who promised discretion in the packaging of their product and discretion in the company name that might show up on a credit card statement. Now, I'm worried about this purchase showing up on a credit card statement no one else will ever read. If I had a wife, or a girlfriend, or if my two female roommates were even remotely nosey, I might have reason to worry. There is no way anyone else knows or cares about this purchase, and yet I can imagine the feeling of coming home from yoga, or from my creative writing class, or my job at Starbucks, and knowing, before the handle on the front door turns, before the door opens, before my girlfriend/wife/roommates' tilted shoulders and tilted eyebrows and tilted questions roll over me, of the shame I would feel. I can simulate the dread. I can feel a trap door open and my balls drop out. Even now, sitting on my bed with the package on my lap, my blood pressure is rising, and I don't even have a girlfriend. I do have two female roommates. But their problem with this purchase would be that I didn't make it sooner and I didn't include them in the shopping process. “You bought what? How can you even live with yourself?” “You aren't a stable person and we think you should move out.” They would never actually say those things. One of them teaches first grade and the other runs a construction company, but... “It's a ridiculous outfit, but your ass is going to look good, though, ugh. I will give you that.” They might say that. It's stupid, even my anxiety and harsh self judgment sneak in a little positive spin. You're a monster but your butt will look good? I think the devil on my shoulder is critical, and a joy thief, and a liar, and rude to strangers, but he does have a thing for fashion. While he is shrieking in my ear about how bad my screenplay is and how fat I'm getting and how only a terrible person would get karaoke-bar-level drunk at their father's funeral, I'll hear a faint whisper about the shoes I bought. I guess even terrible people like to look good. It's a shy compliment in a land of extroverted cruelty, and I'll take it. Every time, I'll take it. My therapist says it's a temporary fix for a deeper issue. Did you say fix? I open a pair of scissors and slide one of the blades across the box's side creases. Then I carve down the main middle crease, leaving the last few millimeters of tape intact so I can pull it apart with my hands and hear and feel the satisfying pop. The company lived up to their advertisement, it is discreet. Most people don't know that you can buy a police officer uniform online for $24.99 and have it arrive in a box from Walmart. Granted, the cuffs are plastic and the shirt and pants have velcro that allows for easy speed-removal. Like, if you need to rip them off in one uber masculine, hyper-sexualized movement. They should be able to survive multiple rippings and re-rippings, if the wearer survives their first bachelorette party. The badge says “Officer Frisk,” which I chose over “Lt. Dangle” and “Officer Ken I Seymour.” Now, turning the badge so the light hits it just so, I feel I made the right choice. You're the worst. The shirt is adequate. The badge works. In the box, the pants seemed awful but now, looking in the mirror, I feel like I make them work. I'm not sure they'd be worthy of the village people, but I'm not far off. I have a shiny pair of shoes ready. I'm not sure which of my fake mustaches I'll wear, or if I'll even wear one at all. You're pitiful. No, I can't. I can't wear a mustache, or these pants, or this shirt or this badge. I can't do any of it. I hear you, devil, I hear you and you're right. This is stupid. I AM pitiful. No normal, decent person would buy these things, and no normal, decent person would ever wear them in public. Of course not. Or in private. I like how you said you were done with this life. No, no, I never said I was done. Yes, I know what I said. I said some things. I never told myself I was done with this life. I said, in a dark moment of nauseous ennui and staring into a muddy puddle of regret, I might have said I didn't want to do this anymore. But everyone says that sometimes, about everything: jobs; family; relationships; life. No, this isn't rock bottom, it's just a silly outfit. I know the handcuffs are plastic, it's the softer side of fantasy. It's so cliché. Hey, you wear a cape and carry a trident, so maybe be careful with the accessory critiques. So you are going to do the show tonight? I don't have to make a hard decision yet, relax. I can just cancel and they could get Bruce, or Gary. Bruce and Gary are great and I'm not feeling one hundred percent anyway, so... yeah, that squat workout wrecked my glutes and then we did stairs and my hips are fired up and I spent too much time out in the sun without my coconut water and Carol wants me on register for seven hours tomorrow so I'm leaning toward no. I haven't prepped my set, I don't even know where my iPod is. It's been at least a week since I twerked at all, so I don't know. I shouldn't do it, I'll say that. I should pass it off to Gary, but let me just... let me just look at this stuff. I just want to look. I know, I should just tape the box back up and burn it in the kitchen sink. I should melt it in acid in the bathtub or throw it into a volcano, but... Wait, is that...? Oh sweet meatballs I forgot. This is the main reason I ordered this particular outfit in the first place. I can't believe I forgot, in four days, about the shining police officer hat. It's a peaked cap with a golden medallion and I know I shouldn't be this excited again about something I was this excited about four days ago, but I am. I mean, I'm sure it won't fit because standard hats, especially those most likely manufactured somewhere in Asia, never fit me. I have a big round head. I should be proud of my big round head but I'm not. Alec Baldwin seems proud of his massive head, shouldn't I try to be more like Alec Baldwin? Is Alec Baldwin proud of his bald spots? They're not bald spots, you ass! Sure, my hair is thinning a little, is that so terrible? Mom and dad's sides both had baldness, it's not my fault! And furthermore, I feel like still having this much hair past thirty is pretty good. I'm good, I'm all good. So you're back, then? No, I didn't say that. I'm curious, can't I be curious? I'm just going to try it on. There's no harm in trying it on. It is here, right here in my hands, after all. Someone slaved over this outfit for hours. Yeah, a child slave. So what? So what if a child made this in a factory? I didn't make him make it. In fact, I think to not buy the child's precious labor is exploitative in its own way. What, should we throw away all products made by children so the children worked for nothing? Or, should we honor their sacrifice by rocking these pleated pants and this navy blue button up and badge and tip this peaked cap to a room full of cackling bridesmaids? You're a hero. So you're back in, then? These pants are tight. Why did you tell me I could get a MEDIUM Dairy Queen blizzard? You know what ice cream does to my hips! Aren't you going to be ripping those pants off, anyway? It fits. It fits! The hat fits my beautiful and perfect head. I told you it would fit. Whatever you say, officer. I do look the part. Why didn't I become a cop? Probably something to do with the two DUIs before you turned 18. Look at me, I should've been. How about your germaphobia? Eh, sani wipes. This isn't even my best mirror and look at me. Who wouldn't want to get a ticket from me? I look like someone who could slap the cuffs on you, take you downtown, and throw you in the slammer. I look like someone you better listen to, or else. Don't taze me, bro. Gary, you're going to have to sit this one out. You're back? I'm back! What am I doing? I told myself I'd never do this again. They told me I was great but it doesn't matter if I don't feel great. They told me I was the best but I don't feel like the best. I still feel the rough edges in my chest where the last bachelorette party scooped out hunks of my soul. All those sweaty wads of one and five dollar bills. All that pawing and shrieking, and... objectifying. I am a human being! And yet here I am again, having texted the maid of honor twenty minutes ago to tell her I was on my way, then two minutes ago that I was here, and now I'm standing in front of the large double doors of a two-story colonial in Pasadena and listening to the wall-buffered rumblings of Katy Perry. You like Katy Perry. That's not the point. I can feel the plastic handcuffs digging into my left butt cheek. It's been almost three weeks since I wore a thong and my ass doesn't remember how to handle it. It's itching in protest. I can hear the women singing along with the music and squealing with delight and they are definitely drinking and definitely not preparing their physical boundaries or washing their hands regularly and if they swarm me in the state I'm in, I might just lose it. This is a mistake, this is a huge mistake, I should leave. It's still not too late to leave, right? I could still call Gary and... I got you. What have you done? “Girls, was that the doorbell?” That's her, that's the voice from the phone. That's the woman who set this all up. I could still run to my car and drive away and never look back. I could be in Mexico in a few hours. You should run. You're not ready for this. My legs won't respond. My feet weigh a thousand pounds. The door opens. “Oh no, what seems to be the problem, officer?” Easy, killer. Before I can run, the shift begins. It's been so long since I worked a party like this that I'm not prepared for the fever to take hold of me. A smirk fights its way up. I can't stop it. The woman looks me up and down and her eyes go wide and she has to cover her face to conceal a crazed shriek. My hands cross over my chest. I raise an eyebrow to tell her she needs to control herself. My eyebrow lays down the law. She abides. The training is trying to take over. One step over the threshold and I'm back in the familiar rhythm, the swagger, the sass. I want to let them look at me, let them take me in. There's a lot to take in. Wide, round shoulders, a swimmer's back, long lean calves, abs for days, and a couple of honeydews in the back. It's a sight to behold, take it in, ladies. Then I notice the dining room. On the floor in the corner, there are two baby bounce chairs, chunks of mouth-moistened Cheerios and Goldfish crackers dotting the plastic rims. As I look around the room, I can tell that whoever lives in the house has a number of kids, and she isn't the only one. The way the women are sitting, leaning on the arms of the couches and chairs, the way they try to stifle their whispers and their giggles, the way they are downing the margaritas and wine, all has the feel of a room full of women who are still coming down from the high of simply not having their kids following them around and screaming at them for a few rare and precious minutes. Their mom masks are cracking. The essence of wild womanhood is starting to seep out. I've been here before, in this wind tunnel of margaritas and Rhianna medleys and crumbling female inhibitions. I've patrolled these streets. I know the laws around these parts, letter and word. These women are ready for an escape, ready for release. These are dangerous women. You know what you're doing. Why did I wear this belt and these leather holsters? Why did I fill these holsters with plastic pistols? What have I done? “Oh no, the cops are here!” one of the women yells before putting her hands over her mouth. The bride-to-be rolls her eyes and smiles. She finally sees what's happening and her hands go over her face. The cackling squeals of the others surround her. They're like Hyenas circling a kill. I want to let go. I want to forget about the cracker crumbs and smeared drool and snot and the galactic laser light show that I'd see if I hit this place with a black light. I want to ignore the sticky tile in the entryway, and the gritty crunch of the dirty carpet under my feet right now. I might find serenity if I thought there might be one spot, just one little spot, that I could touch that wasn't crawling with child-borne diseases. So you shower afterwards, big deal. I need to find a point of reference so I don't continue to look around the room. Too late, I see a toy box, and in her rush to prepare her house for guests, Carrie didn't put all of the toys back inside the box. She stacked some toys on top, and a few trucks and blocks are on the floor next to it. I can see the crusted applesauce. I can see fingerprints made with now dried and sticky jam. Focus on the job. I slip Carrie my iPod. She's been told what to do. “Cut that music off! Cut it off!” Again, Carrie abides, Rhianna is silenced. The other women turn and their dancing and giggling slows to a nervous stop. They see Carrie at the stereo system. They hear the sudden silence. But they don't see Carrie plug in my iPod. “I need your full and undivided attention, ladies! Now, my name is officer Frisk and I'm responding to a noise complaint. From the looks of it, I'm in the right place.” The wall at the base of the staircase has a crosshatching of jagged crayon scribbles, drawn by small, frantic hands. Hanging from the banister is a dog leash, a poo bag tied around the end. They have a dog, too? “Now, by law, I'm supposed to make you aware of the noise complaint and give you a warning.” I feel like I'm going to get dog hair in my mouth. My hands float, on their own, to the heels of my pistols. At least I know those are clean. “I usually give my verbal warning and go about my business. But now, standing here, looking around the room at all of you... ladies... I'm worried. I'm worried that maybe you don't like to follow the rules.” The women giggle as they pull the bride from her place on the couch and stand her up in front of the large leather recliner in the middle of the room. God only knows what levels of food and filth are living under its cushions. “Now, I'm going to ask this once and only once. If you lie, I'll know. Who... is in charge... around here?” Arms and hands and pointed fingers guide me to the bride. They point to her big white crown and her long lacy veil. When she bends over and buries her face in her hands, the women pull her back to upright and begin moving the other chairs to the edges of the room. Then they move away as I approach. One woman – the biggest, seemingly drunkest woman – gives the bride a slap on the ass before stepping away. When I stand before the bride she tries to step back, catching a foot on the recliner behind her. She falls into it, and is suddenly sitting and looking up at me. She is trapped. There is nowhere to go. Time to go to work. Oh God, is that baby powder? “Is that true, little miss? Are you the boss around here?” Before she can answer, Carrie comes in hard with, “Yeah, she's the boss. What's it to ya?” “What's your name, boss lady?” I lean down a little and turn my right ear toward her. “Rachel,” she whispers, the name catching in her throat. I lean a little more. “I'm sorry, you're going to have to speak up.” “Rachel,” she says, a little louder. “And Rachel, are you in charge of these... outlaws?” The girls all nod and affirm. “Well, boss lady, I deliver my warning to you: lower the noise, or be prepared to face stiff consequences.” The girls hoot and howl at that. One utters a sassy “uh oh” while two others clink their margarita glasses together and down the drinks. The arms of the recliner are worse than I thought. The leather is smooth up to a point. As I lean in, my thumb hits a sticky section. I pull it away but it's too late, some mystery residue is now on my thumb. I need to scrub it under hot water. I need to soak it in Purell. I stand and step back. “I don't want to have to come back here. It's just a warning... this time. This time, you lucked out. You got good cop.” I straighten my shirt and secure my hat. I turn and head toward the door. Under one of the chairs, a baby spoon sits on the carpet. Crumbs and dirt are stuck to it. Curly hairs are sprouting upward from the handle. Don't you dare throw up. As I reach for the door knob, I consider ignoring the plan and just leaving. But Carrie's voice catches me. “Hey!” she yells. I turn and look back toward them all. “What if we want... a bad cop?” The stereo silence ends. Her high end speakers fill the room with a roaring guitar. The show starts with “Bad to the bone.” The women erupt. As I make my way back into the living room, they take places on the chairs and couches, turning them to face the bride. I am a Manchurian candidate. When the song begins, what I want no longer matters. I can't resist the call. As George Thorogood and the Destroyers fill the house with grinding guitar riffs and his tales of pleasing women, I carry on his tradition. I take off my badge and flip it over my shoulder. I pull the pistols. They spin in my hands, first upward, then downward. Then one upward and the other downward before I toss them in the air and switch hands. I spin them again, faster now, and when I've heard a few oohs from the ladies, I holster one and I blast off the six caps from the other. I try to shoot to the beat. The women gasp. The pops are louder than they expected, but they soon screech their delight. I don't pull the second pistol. Instead, I pull the bride to her feet and turn. I bring her up behind me, put her hands on my hips, running them up and down my thighs to the rhythm of the song. But I'm still wearing my pleated pants and my striped shirt and my peaked cap. I'll keep the hat on. I bring the bride's hands around my chest to the buttons on the shirt. I use her fingers to undo the top button, then the next one, and after those two, I don't need to help her with the others. She sees what we're doing. As the last button pops free, I take her wrist so I can spin her twice around and lay her out over my left arm. I dip her backward and she bends and squeals. I offer my right cuff for her to unbutton. When she does, I pull her up and spin her twice around and into my other arm. She undoes the button in that cuff, as well. I pull her back to standing and turn. My arms go out and I throw my head back and wait for her. She immediately knows what to do. She pulls at the collar and slides the shirt open, out across my back and down over my shoulders. Every inch she pulls the shirt, every new inch of tanned skin, every new ripple of muscle, brings the hooting and howling of the other women up another notch. When she gets the shirt past my biceps, the big drunk lady cheers. I can smell the tequila pouring from her breath, and after her cheer, she surprises herself with a wet belch. I command my nose not to take it in. I will it. I beg God and Zeus and Krishna and the universe to spare me the smell. I rip the tearaway pants off in one triumphant arm swing and hip thrust. All that remains are my shoes, the belt and holsters, and my shining golden thong. And my hat, of course. Normally, I would put it on the bride-to-be. It tends to make the women feel less weird, somehow, if they are wearing it while I dance for them. There is no logical reason for why this would be true. It just is. But, I want to be able to wear it again so I don't want to put it on her head. She probably lets her friends' babies play with her hair. I bet she feeds them and burps them on her shoulder and they spray-belch a fine mist of milk and stomach acid onto her braided ponytails. Do it, put it on her head. If I put it on her head, I will never get rid of the image of wearing a baby vomit hat. It will feel like long, stringy trails of barf are oozing their way down the sides and back of my neck. Stringy barf hair, I don't want stringy barf hair. You won't get stringy barf hair. The women cheer louder when I pull the too large hat down over her hair. It slides to the side, just so, in a way that some might classify as cute. But there is a price for the hat. As she grabs the edges to adjust it, her wrists get close enough together that I can handcuff her. I can still phone this in. I have a simpler act, shorter, easier for me and easier for her. Three more songs, a brief full frontal, and I'd be out. It wouldn't be my best but they wouldn't know that. My mediocre is still pretty damn good. Ugh, is that a grape-scented Yankee Candle? I could run most of my normal moves. This carpet, while stained and sticky, feels good enough for a back flip. A back handspring might be better. I don't know if my hips can handle a drop into the splits today. Maybe after I get going. The bride isn't a big girl, but she isn't small, either. Could I pull off a Magic Mike? You have to do the Magic Mike. Either a Dirty Dancing or a Magic Mike. The other women are starting to drop dollar bills into the bride's lap. When she doesn't work fast enough stuffing them into the band of my thong, they jump in to help. The first two hands are polite enough, maybe a little grabby. So many different types of hand lotions. There's no way they all washed their hands before doing this. Through the second song, the bride is starting to loosen up and enjoy herself. She even gets tired of placing individual bills, and she shoves a wad of ones straight down the front of my goldies. When I bring her hands to my chest, they don't smell weird. Maybe this will be fine. She isn't drunk and she seems clean enough, as long as none of the other women... Another set of hands hits my shoulders, then another on the other side. It's one of the margarita chuggers on my right and... Heads up. It's the big girl on my left. As I turn to look at her, I hear her giggle way too close to my ear. I feel a puff of hot drunk breath just before a wet sponge hits my cheek. Is she licking me? She is licking you. She grabs my head and pulls me in, spreading a wide, slow, wet path of saliva from my chin up to my ear. Her tongue rolls up over my earlobe, then dives down deep. It squishes around for way too long and creates a suction. When she rips her head back with a satisfied cackle, my ear pops and it starts to ring. The air on the saliva sends icicles into my bone marrow and my butt cheeks slam shut. Rachel loves it. I can't hear it, but I can see that she is scream-laughing. I wait for Carrie to jump in as the voice of reason and escort little miss licky lick to a safer distance, but when she lets go of my head, another set of hands grab it from the other side and another tongue explores my face. This one, too, settles in my ear, and this tongue didn't feel like the last tongue spent enough time rooting around. A similar suction is created and when the tongue slops out and I turn to look for Carrie, I see that it is her holding my head. It was her tongue in my ear. You're losing control. I lost control. I'm trying to ignore the saliva-induced deafness, trying to ignore the layers of saliva now drying all over the sides of my face, when a hand hits my right butt cheek. I'm rotating my hips clockwise in front of Rachel, and when I swing my hips out to the left, the left cheek gets slapped, and when I come around to the right, the right cheek gets slapped. I go around two more times but the slaps are getting harder and harder. When I stop gyrating, the slaps stop. Then there is a hand on my crotch. One of the women has reached up, from behind me, between my legs and is mashing my junk around in a circle. Oh no. Oh no. They're out of control, what do I do? It's escalating so quickly. I can't take much more of this. Time to Magic Mike this bitch. I ignore the slaps and grabs. I lean forward and squat down so I can slide my hands down under and around Rachel's thighs. I need to reach deep enough to clasp my hands around the back of her waste. This puts my face right between her legs. Luckily, curiosity puts the other women back in spectator mode. They want to see exactly what I'm going to do here. My hands dig across the recliner seat and squeeze their way toward each other. I can feel my fingertips touch. I squat lower. The women scream louder. I throw Rachel's feet over my shoulders. The women lose their minds. My fingers are almost interlocked. I can feel the drunk one getting impatient. I know it before she gets to me. She wants to cram my face into Rachel's crotch. I can feel her approaching footsteps. If she rams my face into Rachel's crotch it's over. I will lose it. The actual police will have to be called. Almost there. There is a rise in the women's shrieks. The drunk one is moving in. Almost... there... Do it. My back ripples and my quads engage. Once my hands clasp together, I pull Rachel closer to me and hoist her up over my head. I am her chair, her royal throne, and she is now riding my well developed shoulders and biceps around Carrie's living room like a queen while her loyal subjects cheer for her from below. In that moment, my ears clear and we lock eyes. She is cry-laughing. It is ugly and beautiful. She is nearly crushing my head with her panicked leg squeeze and her monkey-like grip. She tensed so hard when I picked her up that she broke my handcuffs. I can feel the other women cheering, and secretly wishing they were Rachel. I can feel the waves of envy. We ride the waves together and I start to spin her. Song three comes on, “It's raining men,” and we twist and twirl around the living room, above the crazed women below us, above the crumbs and the stains and the mind-blowingly immense civilizations of bacteria living all around us. I tell her to put her hands on my shoulders. The fear only flashes across her face for an instant and then she complies. She presses down into my shoulders and I press her hips up over my head. A Magic Mike into a Dirty Dancing. I don't question it, I don't even think about it, I just do it. It just happens. Rachel's hands are on my shoulders and my hands are on her hips and her legs extend high into the air and we are eye to eye and spinning and for a single, shining moment, we both know who we are. We are loved and understood. Then her foot hits the ceiling fan. An hour later, I am told bits of what followed our glorious moment. The fan changed the momentum of our spin and Rachel's hands slipped from my shoulders. She twisted in my arms and came down, face first, into my nose. It is broken, they tell me. The way it feels, like a cantaloupe hanging from my face, I believe them. After smashing our faces together, the spin speed sent me sprawling back across the cookie table and into the dining room's china cabinet. Rachel kept spinning as she fell, straight down, like I'd executed some secret wrestling move. I was nearly naked and oiled up and there was music blaring and there were people cheering for us, so it may have looked, to an outsider, like a devastating WWE finishing move. But neither of us won. I was knocked unconscious by a falling cabinet and Rachel's face hit the floor and her feet hit a nearby coffee table, shattering the glass top. I remember why I stopped stripping. Carrie brings me a brown paper grocery bag. It has a sexy cop outfit, broken plastic handcuffs, and a peaked officer cap. Some of Rachel's blood is still on the brim. Carrie didn't notice and I don't tell her. She also hands me an envelope and smiles. It is full of cash. A lot of cash. She says it was one of the best nights of her life. I tell her I'm glad she enjoyed the show. I tell her it was not one of the best nights of my life. She asks me if I'm free August 17th. Can you recover from a broken nose in four weeks? You bet your pretty little pistols I can. 3360 Words
PG-13 Mercy is death in the arena. A warrior must accept the weapons drawn against him. He must honor such an action with the drawing of his own weapons. He must look his opponent in the eyes, let his opponent look back, and let the best of himself rise to meet the challenges of battle. A warrior mustn't show mercy. Mercy is death in the arena. The Colosseum is hot today. No clouds offer cover from the buzzing sun. The horses are not braying or bucking in their stables. Though I am a mere ten paces from the lion cages, I hear only an occasional low bellow. Even though the crowds' cheering sends rumbles throughout the corridors, the lions don't pace. The horses don't neigh. The other men sweat silently into their leather thigh guards and armored breast plates and try to breathe their fear away into the dusty air. I pull my swords from their sheaths. When I lay the blades against my thighs, they are still cool. I do not sweat into the pads under my armor because I am not wearing any armor. I do not have a helmet to cover my head so the beads of sweat bubble up and run, unchecked, down my head and neck, down the ridges of my back and the rolling flesh of my chest and stomach. They roll over the scars from the slavers' whips, the scars from the African who ran his sword across my shoulder and face. They roll over the scars from the horseback archer's arrows, arrows he loosed before I brought him down with my spear. My flesh is a map of the roiling will of the gods. My flesh is a map of violence. It has always found me. From childhood, violence found me, only ever leaving for a short while, always returning again. It orbits me. My pull is too great. The constellations on my skin, wounds from sword and ax and arrow and spear, raised and discolored, circle my body. It is the night sky of my life, swirling in a dying universe. As the sweat runs its course, tickling its way across skin and scar, down into my leather belt and the sand-colored cloth around my loins, I feel their weight. Each scar reminds me of those who gave them. Each scar echoes the cries of the dead. To break my skin is to meet the boatman, to sway and bob across the river styx. The weight of this is getting harder to hold. I never cared for armor. I never liked the feel of it. Mostly, I never cared for carrying the extra weight. The weight of my life was always enough. On the farm where I lived before the soldiers came for me, my master tasked me with carrying tools for the soil workers. They tilled the ground for seed, sometimes by hand, sometimes with a plow and a horse, and I carried the leather strapping, the picks and posts for rock moving, and any smaller items my five-year-old arms could carry. I didn't share a common tongue with the slavers, or the master, but they usually gave me food at the end of the day. Sometimes they gave me more food than I'd ever had in my own house. And they gave me my strength. The things I carried got bigger, the amount of things more numerous. I moved from carrying leather tow straps to using them. Now, as I run my fingers along the straps of my belt and sword sheaths, I can hear the hiss of leather grinding across the calloused years. I remember the first time the leather pulled the skin from my hands into raised, shining blisters. My palms are thicker now, from plowing and moving rocks, and from wielding sword and spear. The splinters that once plunged into the skin and meat of my scrawny hands would shattered against the weathered skin now. It would take work to drive even a sharpened nail through them. The other men are murmuring again. Another cart is making its way toward us from the arena. Will it be dead Romans, or Greeks? Maybe one of the Egyptian chariot drivers? The cart rounds the end of the corridor. Workers are wheeling a horse out from the arena. It is on its side, motionless other than the heaving of its final breaths, and it stays still and silent even when a man tears four arrows and a spear from its flesh. One of the men across from me vomits between his feet. The men beside him try to ignore it, try to hold in their own vomit. One of the men laughs and slaps his back. As the horse passes me, its eyes are closing. The black eyes shine like ponds in a desert. They seem to stare up clearly for a moment, seem to find me, but then the heaving of the chest stops and the horse is gone. In my ninth year, the master's most trusted slave, Arlos, showed me how to drive a plow horse, how to guide it to keep the furrows straight, how to use the horse and plow to remove big rocks from the field without help. I plowed the smallest tracts. I was given the smallest horse. The other plow horses were stronger, faster, and easier to steer. The other slaves, when finished with their work, would hand off their horses to the stable maids and return to some other duty. Arlos made me do all of my own stable work. I didn't speak his language, and he didn't speak mine, but without a word, he showed me how to strip and clean all of the equipment. I washed the sweat and dirt from the saddle blankets, from the saddles, the bridle. I cleaned and dried the collar and the bit. He showed me how to mount them on my horse to avoid blisters and sores. He showed me how to hang them so they would dry properly and be ready for the next day. There are few things in my life I have enjoyed more than standing silently beside Arlos and seeing all of our tools and gear hanging, clean, in their proper places. Arlos taught me about the horses. He showed me when to call out to them, when to use the whips, and when to be silent. He showed me how they liked to walk for awhile after hard work. They liked to calm down, walk free of plow or bit or rider, before returning to the stables. He showed me how to clean them, how to check for cuts or large bruises, and how to wash and rub them down. He placed my hands on the horse's hamstrings, squeezing my fingers and using my hands to massage the muscles. At first, massaging a horse seemed weird. It scared me. The second time I ever touched my horse's leg, Arlos pointed to the horse and then grabbed his own leg, massaging it the way he wanted me to massage the horse. The moment my fingertips touched the horse, the horse grunted and tried to kick me. Arlos laughed. After I picked myself up off the ground and realized I wasn't dead, I laughed, too. Once the horse got used to me, I could tell he liked the washing and massages. His movements slowed. His breathing changed. Arlos placed my hand on the horse's chest. He brought my attention to the heartbeat. He made a sound with each beat, baboom, baboom, and made me aware of how the heartbeat would slow, how the horse would become calm. I would nod and smile. He would nod back. He showed me other signs of health or illness, in the eyes and nose, in the mouth, in the horse's piss and dung. He taught me to watch these things, to notice how taking care of things made them work better. He showed me how taking care of something else could make me feel better. I did notice. The horse always worked better the next day when I took care of him the night before. He kicked less, bit less, stopped less. Seeing him work better made me work better. It made me feel better. I didn't notice at the time, but I think Arlos made me do my own stable work to keep me out of the harder work in the field. I think he knew the cool and quiet of the stables would be good for me. It kept me away from some of the other, rougher men. I think he knew caring for a horse would be good for me, too. But I didn't always do a good job. Sometimes I grew tired midday. Sometimes the work and the heat and the hunger were too much. Sometimes the memory of my family was too much. Some days, tired and angry, I would take the horse straight to the stables without a relaxing walk. I would rush through the cleaning processes and rush through the brushing and massage. The next day's work was never the same. One day, after a rushed night of halfhearted duties, we struggled at the plow. The horse didn't want to pull. He wanted even less to be whipped, and after three hard whips he planted his front feet and let his back feet strike out at me. His hooves caught the side post for the plow and snapped the wooden supports in two places. One of the jagged edges swung up and dug into my forearm, leaving a gash and a handful of splinters I would have to cut and pick out one by one. It took almost an hour for the workers to calm him down and return him to the stables, and more than an hour for the men to repair the broken plow base. They hissed at me and, I assume, swore in their native tongues, and I caught glances from most of them I will never forget. Arlos laid a hand on my shoulder and spoke words I couldn't understand. Even without knowing what he was saying, I felt comforted. The next day, we returned to the field and set to work again. But again, the horse didn't want to work. He didn't kick the plow this time, but he raised up and stomped the ground before him. He reared up and stomped, again and again, and refused to move forward. When one of the larger men came over to whip the horse, the horse took the whipping without a sound. He would not move. The next day, he did the same. The last day, he did the same. It was then Arlos taught me about the way of things. If a horse works, he is serving a purpose. If something has purpose, it has value. If a work horse won't work, his purpose diminishes. His value is limited to other things. One thing a good horse can be used for is breeding. My horse did not have such value. He was the smallest, weakest horse in the stable. He was not a quick learner or a compliant worker. This limited his value as a breeder. A work horse could be sold off. But no one would want to buy a scrawny, stubborn horse who didn't like to work, and the master wasn't one to lie about a horse's worth. The amount he could get for the horse wouldn't be worth as much as the last option. Food. Horses could be food. A horse who isn't a worker or a breeder can feed the people who are working. Arlos expressed this to me without words, that this was the way of things. On the fourth day, two slaves came for the horse. They unhooked him from the plow and walked him on a light lead to the black house. The black house was a separate building, away from the barn and stables, where the hunters brought their deer and where the animal workers brought their pigs and birds. Again, after some time apart, death had circled back to me. Now, under the Colosseum, the horse on the cart will be sold for its meat. It served its purpose, and now will serve a final purpose. I return my swords to their sheaths. Two swords are the only weapons I will bring into the arena. I once wore heavy armor. I once used a spear, long sword, daggers, and mace. These things fell away slowly, piece by piece, with each battle I won. The people remembered me after my third fight. By then, I'd left the spear and mace behind, settling for my swords and daggers. After my third fight – after carving out the throat of an Egyptian – I cut the leather over my shoulders and let the massive back and breastplates of armor fall from my torso to the bloodied sand. Each time I discarded a new item, the roars from the crowd grew. They grew in volume and in admiration. They grew in fearful anticipation. Once the armor hit the sand, an archer on horseback was released into the arena. I retained my thigh armor, which is where the first arrow struck. The armor slowed the arrow down but didn't stop it, and the sharpened point tore into my leg. On the archer's second pass, his arrow sang past my neck, ripping through the air near my ear. My long sword deflected the third arrow. As he rode toward me for his fourth pass, I took the long sword in both hands. I didn't wait for him to come to me. I charged out into the horse's path and the archer was too busy lining up his shot to steer the beast in a new direction. The arrow ripped through the ribs on the right side of my chest, sending white hot pain down into my pelvis and into the center of my spine. I stumbled, but regained my balance as the horse was about to past. The arrow wound screamed as I reared back and prepared the sword for flight. As it left my hands, I knew it would find its mark. The blade rolled end over end before crashing into the archer's helmet. The impact echoed in the arena and pulled gasps from the crowd. The archer toppled from his horse and fell headlong to the ground. The clatter of his armor covered the sound of his neck snapping, and the crowd gasped collectively again. I retrieved the long sword and the crowd murmured. I walked to the downed archer and the crowd sizzled with anticipation. I removed my helmet and threw it to the ground. The crowd was ready. When I raised the long sword above the archer's quivering body, the crowd was ready. When I brought it down into his chest, the arena erupted. I wouldn't wear a helmet again. I left the long sword buried in his chest and took the gladius from his belt. His short sword and my own would be my weapons. A blade in each hand and nothing more. I cut the thigh pads from my legs and laid them out on his chest. I could feel the blood running down my side from the arrow wound. I knew, under the chanting and roars of the Colosseum, that to leave myself unprotected would almost certainly mean death in the next battle. The people knew it, too. I could hear, in the center of their blood-crazed revelry, a disbelieving admiration. I could hear their pity and their pleasure. They were awed by my boldness. They hungered for my death knowing they would be saddened when it came. I could hear in their chants the desire for me to win and the knowing that I would lose. I'd felt the same feelings. When the Roman soldiers came and burned the farm and killed most of the workers, those they didn't kill were pitted against each other in fights to the death. The soldiers placed bets. When I, the smallest male left alive, threw my sword into the face of my larger, stronger opponent, and stabbed into his unconscious body until two soldiers finally pulled my off of him, they saw in me what the Colosseum sees in me. They saw a wild animal. They saw insane desperation against impossible odds. In each fight I became bolder, more reckless. I felt, at the same time, the desire to live and the desire to die. I threw myself at my opponents and tried, ferociously, to kill them all, but something deeper hoped in throwing myself wildly and recklessly forward that I would meet a quicker and more painless death for myself. No matter how near I sat to the executioner, his blade ignored me. No matter how loudly I cried for death to finally embrace me, his arms remained ever folded, his back turned. The chants are rising in the Colosseum. Dust is rattling from the walls and ceiling of our holding room beneath the stadium. The people are stomping their feet. Their voices are a twisting, thunderous chaos. It sounds like the ravenous howling of beasts from the underworld. It is a noise that must anger the gods. From the crazed screams, a word is emerging. Two lines of soldiers approach me. Most warriors are marched out at spear point. Others are dragged, screaming, and thrown to the dusty ground in the center of the arena. For me, the soldiers line up along each wall and turn their backs. I take a position in their midst and we march to the entrance gate. The people seated on the far side of the Colosseum see us first. Their cries rise up and spread, left and right, until the noise has rolled like a wave around the entire stadium and back again. The ungodly sounds we heard beneath pale before the sounds that are now shaking all of Rome. “Arlos! Arlos! Arlos!” The slavers took my name. I do not now even remember what it ever was. They called me something in their native tongue that I will never know. The soldiers called me “puer ferox.” I have come to discover this means “wild boy.” This is what they called me but it is not my name. When they came for me on the farm and thrust their spears into the only person I ever loved, I took his name. I swing these swords for him. My hands do his work, my feet run for him. The only pleasure I feel in my life now is in this last moment before battle, as the soldiers turn and march back beneath the seats. My single, beautiful moment among all of the dark terror comes once a week when they shout his name to the heavens. “Arlos immortales! Arlos immortales!” Arlos, the immortal. I carry these swords for him. I carry these scars for him. I carry on his glorious name, and to hear it shouted by the farmers, the merchants, by sentries and Senators and slaves, and to see and hear it shouted, maybe loudest of all, by the Emperor himself, is the closest I will come to finding favor with the gods. The men they have pitted me against today are slaves like me. They are men who were taken from their homes and forced to do things they never wished to do. No matter. If I must slay them to hear the name of my true father shouted before the gods, I will slay them. If the Emperor offers other men, I will slay them, too. His name will be shouted in this arena. His name will flow out along the endless roads of Rome until the empire's end. And if I have to kill every slave in every kindgom in all the world to continue the echo of his name throughout the entire Earth and all of history, I will. I'll kill them. The men cry out, their weapons drawn. They run toward me on dead men's legs. Arlos, the immortal. I'll kill them all. 2513 Words
The boy watched his mother sleep. The sky was black, its stars hidden behind the rolling mists pouring into the valley from the eastern peaks, rolling down and away from the faint beginnings of morning light. The boy watched his mother breathe, as he did every morning, watched the flowing mass of wool blankets rise and fall like waves around her. He watched the whispers of light touch the edges of her, glowing and flickering at the outline of her legs, the rise at her hips, down to her waist and up to her shoulders. He liked the way her red hair glowed in the last faint firelight of their hut's one candle just before it burned out. Soon, Rezden would be at the door and the boy would be up and out, into the woods, until the sun reached its peak. Soon, the boy would be nocking arrows and arcing them into straw targets, then into the herds of wild boars in the lowlands, or into the scattering V's of the migrating geese making a quick stop in the lake before continuing South for winter. For now, he would watch his mother sleep while he chewed on the wild corn husks he smuggled into his hut after last night's training. He found them growing in the forest of dead trees. Most of the corn had been eaten by the boars, but inside one of the hollowed out trunks, two stalks had managed to find enough sustenance to produce four small ears of corn, each. The boy knew he wasn't to eat unless instructed to eat by Rezden. He knew if he were caught with the corn, the penalty would appear in long, swollen stripes on his shoulders and the backs of his legs. It would also show in the deepening valleys of skin between his ribs, as he would be denied food for two days. Mother stirred, turning suddenly onto her back and sucking in a terrified gasp. Her arms thrashed around her head and she cursed harsh whispers in a language the boy had never heard. Her convulsions caused the candle to wobble and hiss into its wax pool. The boy sat up, about to call out to her, when she stopped. Her arms stayed outstretched, as if caressing some unseen face. Her harsh whispers softened and her arms slowly lowered back to their resting place on her chest. The trembling flame bounced new light across her form, and now, lying on her back with her hands and arms at peace, the boy could see the firelight glistening in the tears on either side of her face. It wasn't the first time. Her early morning terrors had happened yesterday, and the day before that. The boy considered the last time he watched her sleep peacefully through an entire morning. The candle hissed a final time, burned to completion. The hut went dark. He couldn't remember the last time. The soft crunch of purposefully quiet footsteps brought the boy to his feet. Rezden. The corn husks were stashed under his head rest and he was already wearing his shoes. He grabbed his bow and quiver from their post and strapped his knife belt around his waste. He knew now which board to stand on for complete silence. He knew how to pull the handle on the hut's door so that it could be opened without the squeak of metal on metal, and he knew just how hard to lift the door while opening it to avoid any creaking where the wood and the hinges met. He slipped through silently and closed the door again with a faint click. Rezden stood before him, the mass of a tree trunk in his dark brown cloak. The boy could only see his outline, a black emptiness, like a hole in the world. Rezden was alone this morning. The boy was first. Rezden turned without a word and the boy followed. They made their ways silently along the worn paths of dirt between huts. The boy watched Rezden's feet, as he always did, and couldn't understand how that much mass and weight, and those giant feet, made so little noise in the dirt, across rocks or bark or grass. Or anywhere. The boy would hold his breath and soften his own steps and still could barely hear any sound from Rezden's footfalls. Unless Rezden wanted to be loud. Five huts marked the trail. Each hut produced another child, another boy and two girls, and the group made their way to the fifth hut. Rezden approached first. Once he was still, the four fanned out in a perfectly even line behind him, equal distance apart and by descending height order, and waited in silence. Rezden was silent, as well. The four waited to see if they'd been quick and quiet enough in forming their line. They would know if they'd made too much noise, or if their line wasn't straight, or if they'd been too slow, if Rezden's head turned back toward them ever so slightly. He wouldn't turn to look at them. He wouldn't say anything. He would turn his head and tilt his chin downward and the children would bite their lips and work to hold their breath and calm their accelerating heart beats. Move silently, show the simple discipline of straight lines, pay attention. Each child would lurch forward in their minds to what might be their penalty later in the morning for a misstep. Each child tended to anticipate the penalty they'd hated the most in the past. One child tensed as she thought she saw Rezden beginning to turn his head. Her mind flashed to the water dragon game. That game entailed crawling down on hands and feet from the top of golden hill to the lake, filling their mouths with water, then keeping the water in their mouths on the crawl back to the top. The crawl down took a quarter of an hour. The crawl back up with a mouth full of water took longer. The children knew they would all need a complete mouthful to finish the task. To swallow any, or choke along the way, would mean failure. Once at the top of the hill, the dragons were instructed to breathe their fiery dragon breath over the entire surface area of one of the large, flat rocks on the ground. “Engulf the stone in your fire,” Rezden would yell. The rock would need to be soaked, from top to bottom, on every side, all the way around. If it wasn't, they would be told to try again, back down the mountain on all fours for a mouthful of water, and back up again. The worst day had seen the group down and up the hill four times before succeeding. They pulled splinters and small bits of rock from their palms and fingers for weeks. The boy saw them all holding handstands for minutes at a time. They would be instructed to hold their handstands while Rezden brought a thumb-thick switch down on the bottoms of their bare feet. If they cried out or fell to the ground, they would be instructed to crawl to the lake below where they would do handstands with their heads under the water. The boy had taken enough water up his nose the last time they endured this torture to pass out. Rezden dragged him out of the water and left him there to choke and cough the water up, or die. The boy had choked up the water and, once mostly conscious, was dragged back into the water to continue. Each child knew to be ready before first light. Each child knew to listen for Rezden's silent approach. Now, standing before the final hut, the four children wonder what is keeping the fifth, Porano, from appearing, and they wonder what penalty they will have to endure because of his disobedience. Rezden is motionless. The children think, multiple times, that they see him start to move. They think they see the subtle twitch of a hand, the shifting of a foot, but he stands and watches and waits. His back is to them so they can't see his face, but they all have an idea of the look that is on it. Porano has never been late before. He has never failed to appear, never made a mistake that cost the group in lost luxuries or endurance of pain. He has never felt the full force of Rezden's instructions in discipline. He has never needed it. Rezden finally moves. He turns to his right and continues walking up the path, now away from the huts and toward the rising glow over the eastern summits. The children follow, each waiting for what they feel is the right time to steal a glimpse back toward Porano's hut. They each glance in turn when they feel Rezden isn't looking. The hut remains silent and still as they crest the hill and turn left toward the thickening of the forest. As the huts disappear from view, the boy wonders if he will ever see Porano again. Rezden stops and his hand shoots up over his head. The children stop. Rezden extends his little finger and thumb out from the fist he made and all four children nock an arrow and prepare to draw. His eyes are tracking the upper tree line, above the line of sharpened log fencing that stabs into the air above the village at twenty-five feet. His eyes are tracking back and forth, following some dark and shifting shape, some wraith, just beyond the wall. Then he drops his head. The darkness and mist are limiting sight. He is listening. His head twitches to the right slightly, then suddenly left. The children strain to listen, too, and after holding their breath through ten accelerating heart beats, a distant branch cracks high up in one of the trees. Rezden kneels and turns his face to the sound. His arms reach out and he points in the direction he wants the children to go. They move, fanning out into a curved line and converging in the direction to which Rezden is pointing. Once the children are on the move, tracking the source of the noise, Rezden lets his hands drop to his sides. He sits down, dropping his head and closing his eyes to listen. The boy lets out a short whistle. The line spreads out. They run in aggressive bursts, stop and listen, then sprint again. They are nearing the barrier wall when another branch cracks under the weight of some unseen creature. They stop, bows ready and arrows aimed upward. This time, the crack of the branch is followed by another sound. It is high pitched, rough, gravely. They can see the branches trembling in one tree, then a moment later in another tree, closer now. The hoarse screeching is getting louder. The screeches are now punctuated by clicking sounds, like stones being smacked together. The girl on the left side of the line, Arva, knows the sound better than most. Her eyes narrow to see it and she is too busy staring for the right sign of movement in the branches to notice her ready arrowhead trembling. She knows these beasts. She knows their powerful wings and their clawed feet and hands and the jagged teeth twisting through their long, narrow snouts. She's seen them up close. She's felt the rush of air blown about by their wings, she's heard their claws scrape wood and stone. And flesh. She's smelled the stinging rot of their breath after one of their croaking screams. She's seen what they can do to a child. “Karpie!” goes the cry. Before the cry is finished, the Karpie's wings close just before its feet and arms hit the earth. It takes a moment to steady itself after the impact. Then it rears up and screeches again, scraping large furrows into the pine needles and dirt and sweeping chunks of dirt and rock into the air in violent flurries. As the children fan out, the Karpie looks to each one. It chooses the nearest child. They always go for the nearest target. One of the boys, Gome, is the nearest target. The Karpie doesn't wait to posture or try to intimidate anymore. It pulls at the ground, at a full run in seconds, and leaps at him. Gome knows the Karpie will leap and he is ready. He looses his arrow before sprawling onto his back. He flattens his body and falls on the ground in time to see the Karpie's front claws tear through the air above his face. The Karpie sails harmlessly over him and crashes to the ground on the other side. It slides into a tree and stumbles. But it isn't deterred. It turns back, its eyes even more wild with its violent hunger rage. But Gome's arrow found its mark. As the Karpie tenses for another attack, it can feel the strength leaving its limbs. It is receiving the message that it is wounded, that something is wrong. Instead of leaping again, the Karpie looks to the other children and hisses its poisoned venom to the ground in thin, sticky streaks. Another arrow whistles through the morning air and slips through the Karpie's neck, lodging in the tree beside it. The furry body shudders and a thick line of blood arcs from the neck wound onto the dust and stone at the winged creature's feet. As the Karpie stumbles backward it fights to muster another scream. The noise begins in its throat, rises into its mouth, then stops. A bow twang sends an arrow into the Karpie's face, the broad head striking just below the Karpie's left eye. The arrow tip destroys the Karpie's skull and lodges in its brain. The impact locks the beast's legs into a toe-curled death spasm they will never escape. With its legs locked, the Karpie falls face first into the dirt. Three convulsions shake strange chirps from the body and then it is still. The third arrow arrived from a strange angle. All of the children notice and they turn to see its origin. From the dark mist, Porano shoulders his bow and puts the arrow he'd had ready back in his quiver. The children watch him walk to the Karpie, slam his ax into its skull three times, and dig out his arrow. He looks down the shaft to see if the arrow has been warped or damaged. He wipes it off using the Karpie's fur and lets it join the others in his quiver. The other four children watch this process, and then look to Rezden. Porano didn't appear from his hut when he was supposed to, and yet now here he is. Rezden is still kneeling where he spotted the Karpie. The children know there must be some penalty for Porano's tardiness. They know they will suffer in some way, even though he was here to claim the kill. Rezden rises. “To the portal,” he says. 2278 Words
The baby's breath is sweet. It has the smell the woman has come to love, the sweet remnants of breast milk suckled twenty minutes ago. Now the baby has had a second burp and is content. The woman knows part of what she loves is the sweet smell, and part of what she loves is the sweet silence of a baby finally pacified. The sweet silence. But the woman also loves the warm round mass squirming gently on her chest. The baby's breaths, the slight rise and fall, the occasional hiccup or twitch each remind the woman of the cold outside, the cold beyond the insulated windows and the steaming cups of coffee on the tables around her. She looks out and watches a man cower against the rain and wind. She watches him shrug his collar up higher on his neck. He shudders. When he gets to his parked car, he gets in, slams the door, and tries to shake off the rain and cold. The brake lights shine a blurry red in the fog of the coffee shop window, and the woman imagines the man's relief at being in out of the rain and feeling the car heater chase the chills into the dark corners of the car's cab. The car pulls away. The baby kicks in his sling. The woman knows the cold. She learned of it in second grade when her drunken step-father forced her out into the November air at Thanksgiving. He said she'd been bad again, said she was always being bad. “You're gonna learn, though,” he'd said, nearly crushing her tiny hands as he slammed the door, “you're gonna learn, one way or another.” She didn't dare bang her freezing fists on the door and yell to be let back in. She didn't dare call for her mother, who watched silently from a living room chair. She knew her mother wouldn't voice opposition. She knew her mother would say nothing. No sense in both of them being locked out in the cold. She didn't dare involve the neighbors, or child services, or the police. She didn't dare. She walked to the side of the house. She would have to wait for a few minutes. She would have to hold out. She crouched, tucking into a ball so she could blow her hot breath into the junction of pajama pants where her knees came together. There, the heat would help warm her legs, at least for a few seconds, before succumbing to the surrounding air, now near freezing. She would wait there, crouching, shivering, below the dryer vent. She knew if she waited there, her mother would pretend to put a load of clothes in the dryer. Her mother would make a good show of it, letting the buttons and zippers clink and clang against the hollow aluminum. Mother would dampen them, first, in case he checked the clothes. He never checked. He was too drunk to care. Two minutes of sitting on frozen ground surrounded by frozen air listening to her father yell at the TV and her mother pretend to be transferring wet clothes from the washer to the dryer. Two minutes to sit and huddle and absorb her own breath. Two minutes cast out into the wild. Two minutes in a cold, lonely hell. Two minutes until she would be bathed in billowing air and the sweet smell of fabric softener. There, she would wait until her father passed out and her mother felt safe to let her back in. Two minutes was a long time. The cold clawed at her feet and fingers, tried to burrow its way into her back, up the back of her neck, through her tangled hair and clenched teeth and tightly shut eyes. The claws went deep. The cold found its holes, found a way in every time. She wondered if she would be able to last through the cold every time. She wondered if her mother would turn on the dryer, wondered if she would take too long or forget, or even choose not to turn the dryer on. What if tonight was the night her mother was tired of dealing with all the trouble-making? What if tonight was the night she was tired of her daughter causing more problems than she was worth? Every time, at least for a few seconds, she wondered if this would be the time her mother would give up and let her die alone out in the cold. But every time, moments after these thoughts, the wall would rumble to life and the vent at her back would begin pouring hot air out over her huddled body and into the cold night. That first burst of warm air was renewing. That first burst of warm air was a rebirth. She wouldn't feel that resurrecting warmth again until the first time she felt her son's tiny body pressed against her chest. Now, watching the world outside darken under the cold rain, she shivers. She shivers, knowing she will never be made to feel that kind of cold again. “Small hot chocolate for Reese!” Reese braces the sleeping baby boy as she rises from the chair and steps gently toward the counter. She takes the hot chocolate and smiles. She returns to the chair, squatting slowly so the boy doesn't wake up. As she settles into the soft leather and the chair hisses, the baby twitches again. His arm jerks outward and grabs wildly at the air. Reese settles into the chair and holds her breath, slowly wrapping her palm and fingers around the baby's back. She shushes quietly. After straining for a few seconds, the boy's arm relaxes and falls back down onto Reese's chest. His tiny fingers scratch lightly at the skin over her collar bone. She can feel him slipping back into sleep as the rhythm of his scratching slows. Before he stops, his fingers find the scar. Above her collar bone, just to the right of her throat, his fingers find a scar, thin and a few inches long. He flicks at one of the scar's raised edges, follows the edge down to its end, then back up again. His tiny fingernails are sharp and without looking Reese feels the redness he is creating. She doesn't mind it. His scratching may inflame the skin a little. It may draw more attention to the area. Someone, like the older woman in line at the bank a few days ago, might ask about it. Maybe someone here in the coffee shop will notice and wonder. As Reese looks around, she realizes she wouldn't mind if any of these people asked about it. She could just lie. She's lied about the scar many times. To the woman at the bank, she said it was from a car accident. People rarely followed up after disclosure of a major car accident. To the man on the bus, she said it was from surgery. A vague reference to surgery, she noticed, tended to shut people up, too. To the woman renting her the apartment where she was staying, she said it was to remove cancer. A single mom with an infant and cancer? That got her rent lowered. To the man who sold her his car, she said it was from a childhood bike accident. She told him it's why she needed the car, she couldn't bring herself to ride a bike again after that. He, too, lowered the price. The scar, the fear, the tone of her voice, it all garnered the right kind of attention. The kind of attention that brings sympathy, and the kind of sympathy that brings favors. Before that, she told a man she worked for that the scar was from a bully at school. She told a teacher once that it was a birth mark, that she'd always had it and would always have it. That would mean, in a way, that she got it from her father, so in a way, that version wasn't a lie. She told people she loved it. She told others she hated it. She told people it meant a lot to her, that she enjoyed the imperfection, that it made her feel special, that it made her feel strong. She told people it was the mark of a warrior, of a survivor. She told men she needed to manipulate that her boyfriend did it, or that her ex-boyfriend did it. Or that her father did it. She let them get angry about that, let them assure her they weren't those kinds of guys, they would never do something like that. They told her they would look after her, that they would protect her. They promised her they would never let that happen again. She told people what they needed to hear, what they wanted to hear. She told people exactly the ways they could help her while feeling like they were in control, like they were helping themselves. She told them what they needed to hear to give her the money that fed her and the baby for the past six months. She told them what they needed to hear to buy the car she drove here, to buy the hot chocolate in her hand, to buy the handbag over her shoulder with the .357 Magnum and the box of spilled shells. She told them what they needed to hear to get her these things without a path to trace. The baby's hand slides away from the scar and back against his chest as he sleeps. The scar sings and throbs from the abuse of his fingernails. She feels it must be shining and red, that everyone in the coffee shop must see it and wonder. She pulls her shirt up a few inches. She tries to cover it but the shirt won't stay. It doesn't matter, she decides. Let them see. Let them stare at it and see. She thinks of a new story to tell the next person who asks her about it. She thinks about the girl who handed her the hot chocolate and what she would say if the girl asked. Dog attack? Gun shot wound? Maybe I'll tell the next person who asks the truth. She smiles considering this. What would little miss braided blonde hair behind the counter do if she asked about the scar and wasn't ready for the answer? What would she say? What expressions would ripple across that peaceful face? I can see you looking at my scar. It's okay, I get it all the time, and it's fine. You're wondering how I got it, right, what happened? Well, I did it myself. She'd never told anyone she did it herself. She'd never told anyone she pulled a steak knife from a kitchen drawer and slid it, twice, slowly into the muscles of her neck. She'd never told anyone about one of the coldest November nights and the icy chill in her bones and the look on her mother's face when she opened a side door to let her daughter back into the house after her step-father passed out. She'd only considered cutting his throat once she was at the hospital. Thinking about it now, she thinks she made the right choice. Cutting her own neck and hearing about the police kicking down the door and throwing her step-father to the ground and hand-cuffing him and taking him to jail made her smile then and makes her smile now. Seeing him prodded into a courtroom in chains made her smile then and makes her smile now. Hearing the judge give her decision, twelve years for first degree assault of a minor, made her smile then and she smiles now. But this smile fades. She heard he got out early on good behavior. Only a few months after she watched cancer take her mother, she heard he was out. She heard he'd been living in an Oregon town and working at a place called Castle Lumber. Even through the mist of rain and through the foggy glass of the coffee shop's front window, she can see the letters of the business sign directly across the street. Castle Lumber. She scratches at the scar on her neck. She feels the heat from the other scars on her body. She made the one on her neck, but she didn't make the others. Tonight, in the rotting apartment he lives in, her step-father will remember. Tonight, when he pulls in at 5:15, when his keys scrape the lock and when the deadbolt clunks free and he walks in and sees her, he will remember. Tonight, he will remember all of the scars. Another figure appears, bracing against the grating rain. She knows the hunched back, the staggered walk, the way about him. He gets into a truck and the break lights shine to life and he sits and lets the engine warm and the heater do its work. She can see him cupping his hands, blowing into them, then rubbing them together. She can see him cold and shivering and struggling to shake off the chill. She smiles and finishes the hot chocolate. The baby coughs. She puts her hand on his back, shushing quietly, and holds him close to her as she stands. She lets the truck back out of its parking space and pull away before she leaves the coffee shop and heads to her own car. The air in the car is cold but she doesn't notice. She catches up to him at a red light. He turns. She follows. “You're gonna learn, though,” she says. “One way or another.” 3592 words
PG-13 Looking down, I can see the path of my drops of sweat. They fall from my chin and nose all the way to the floor. They fall to the dark rubber mats in wet splashes as tiny chalk plumes spread out in rolling white dust storms. The grooved edges of slightly rusted barbell metal cuts into my hands as I tighten my grip. I see chalky sweat, I see shining silver knurling, and I can hear my heart beating in my ears now. That is all I can hear, raspy breath and heartbeat, and a somewhat vocal part of me begging to slow down, begging for a few deep breaths, begging for lighter weights. My mind begs in vain. My grip tightens and the muscles in my back ripple into rigid formation. The erector spinae are reinforcing the vertebrae protecting my spinal cord, and are allowing me to brace the support muscles of the ribs, the rectus abdominus, psoas, the latisimus dorsae, my diaphragm, all keeping things stable down into my pelvis. It creates a solidly anchored foundation for my glutes and hamstrings. 135 pounds, power cleaned at this speed and intensity, is no joke. My hammies need all the support they can get to provide me with violent hip extension. The barbell leaves the floor. As the extension continues, slow smooth strength makes way for speed strength as the bar travels above my knees and toward my hips. My shoulders fight to stay back and down. They fight to stay stable, to support the weight while the bigger muscles do the lifting. Once the bar gets to my hips, the violent extension really kicks in and I jump through my legs as hard as I can. I don't think it, but enough training has taught me to keep my arms straight during this process, even when they really want to help lift the bar by curling upwards. Despite the desire to help, they comply, and remain straight. They are unbreakable, sinewy straps. Shrug! I shrug and pull with the bigger muscles of my upper back. The transition sends pulling power from my feet into my hammies and glutes, into my lower, mid, and now upper back. Once my hip extension is maxed out and I can shrug no more, I re-bend my knees so I can drop slightly and get my chest under the now fast-rising bar. It will not be fast-rising for long. Get under the bar, Jason! I do, and the bar lands high, near my collar bones, cradled by my shoulders, chest, and finger tips. This is the rack position, my second favorite position in all of weightlifting. To power clean heavy weights and hit the timing so precisely that the bar floats in its weightless transition between rising and falling and settles, almost gently, into the rack position feels like Jedi force magic. It's the feeling of perfect contact on a fastball at the plate that sends the ball over the left field fence. It feels, not effortless, but graceful, like we were designed to do it that way. It feels right. But it's one repetition out of the seventy or eighty I will complete in this workout, so I keep my admiration to a minimum. “Let's go, buttercups!” My voice, but not me. It's not Jason's voice, it's Gray's. Gray is my other name. It's what is yelled at practice. It's what coaches have yelled at me since I was a child. Gray is what the Freshman call me unless they like running what we call greyhounds. But nobody likes those. Greyhounds are a delightful conditioning drill that requires running on all fours around the bases, usually in groups of four or five guys, where winning means you get to stop, and losing means you get to go another lap, and another if you lose again, and so on until everyone is out. It's not a lot of fun to be that last guy huffing and puffing all alone through the last lap of dirt, wheezing harshly as teammates gleefully hop in front of you like Bugs Bunny. Gray, team leader, catcher, and captain of the baseball team. Pick up the bar, Gray! Pick it up, now! “Get back on the bar, guys! Three second rests and go again... GO!!” As team captain I also program and coordinate many of the workouts for the team in the off season. Two years ago I stumbled upon a new training methodology called Crossfit. I tried it myself for a few weeks and got hooked, as thousands of people did before me, but I was the first to bring it to my school and to the team. The coaches were thrilled within a couple weeks, our team's progress left no room for discussion about the program's efficacy. We immediately started implementing the training to compliment our baseball-specific work. One of the best things about the Crossfit model was its competition applications. The workouts were done either for time, or for maximum reps, or maximum weight. The ability to compete with each other in different aspects of fitness, and compete in a new aspect every day, was perfect. We needed to all be challenged in different areas of fitness, and we all needed to be immunized to the stresses of competition. Crossfit was perfect for all of that, and more. The reason it took me awhile to bring the training to the attention of the coaches was I wanted to be sure it was effective, that is would be right for the team. And I wanted a head start. Back then I wasn't team captain yet, and if I was going to cement that position, bringing a new highly effective training method into the Juniper High School baseball program would be the best way to establish myself as a good leader. If I could bring it in after having trained with it, honed it, and becoming relatively good at it, that would be a bonus. Getting a couple month head start made it all very easy. After only a few weeks of watching videos on technique, practicing those techniques, and hitting a few dozen workouts, I was leaps and bounds ahead of where I'd started. I made a few strength gains in the big lifts by focusing on certain breathing and positional cues. I felt quicker, lighter, and stronger. It was magical. I knew I'd found something new, something important that would raise the level of the entire team and place me at the head of the pack, and in the coaches' good graces. Once I felt decently established in the movements and methods, I brought it in. The coaches heard my pitch and let me try some things. In the beginning it was no contest. I, a lowly freshman, was teaching strength and conditioning techniques to seniors and then dominating them in the workouts. Some of the bigger guys had me in the raw strength events, but I dominated in speed, endurance, agility, and all of the high skill moves. But no matter who you were athletically, you got smashed. The weaknesses came out in a big way. It kicked everyone's ass. Nine months later, Sophomore year, I was team captain, the first Sophomore ever to hold the position. It was beautiful. “Come on ladies, four minutes left, seventh inning stretch! This is the time to push!” I say it as my own heart feels like it wants to explode. The workout this morning is a 12 minute AMRAP using pull ups, power cleans, and burpees. It's easy, seven pull ups, seven power cleans with 135 pounds, and seven burpees, and don't stop for 12 minutes. Most rounds wins. What is a burpee? A burpee is a delightful creature comprised of a jump to the ground, a push up, a jump back to the feet, and a jump and clap in the air. They sound easy, and doing one is easy. Five are easy. Ten in a row are pretty easy. But the way they can make everything else in a workout suck is not easy. Burpees jack up your heart rate, make your arms heavy, and make your legs feel like you are borrowing them from Danny Devito. They make everything worse. Much much worse. “Let's go, Josh!” Joshua Crowley. Josh. He's a guy who should have been named Brock. He is a monster, he just doesn't know it yet. He runs the 40 in something like 4.3 or 4.4, squats around 400, dead lifts over 400, and can still run a sub six minute mile. This strength and athleticism, coupled with his throwing arm and his presence at the plate make him a baseball superstar. He could be leading the team, even leading the league, in home runs and RBIs, not to mention leading our team as its captain. He is stronger than I am, faster than I am, and a better baseball player than I am. He could be running things and on his way to whatever college team he chose if he wasn't being torn down psychologically on a regular basis by his team captain. A few months ago, he sprained his right knee sliding into second. It wasn't a bad sprain, but it was definitely a setback. I advised him to play it safe with his knee. I told him he shouldn't come back too soon or too strong, that to play it safe now would help ensure a better future after high school. In some ways, that is true. In many ways, I told him the same things the trainers and his doctor told him. I just kept telling him these types of things long after they would have given him the green light to return to his normal full throttle. He is the best athlete on the team, probably in the state, and he could crush me in most workouts if he didn't allow me to constantly undermine his confidence and destroy him psychologically. I blame him for allowing someone like me to get in his head and continue to make him think his sprained knee would still be unstable six months later. The coaches are trying to get him to let the monster out and get back to full tilt training. They are probably confused as to why he isn't, why he is still being tentative. It's almost like someone close to him, like his teammates, or his team captain, are telling him things that would lead him to believe he should be constantly wary and never commit fully to a workout. It's almost like someone is keeping his injury on his mind so much that Josh is actually starting to limp on that knee after tough training sessions. Why would a fellow teammate do such a thing? I actually feel like I'm helping him, like this experience will make him stronger in the long run. When he realizes the pain and the doubt and the distrust of his knee were all in his head, he will realize the importance of staying mentally tough and being positive. But for now, there will be one star on the team. One star is plenty. I positioned myself near Josh today so I could watch his progress and stay close to him throughout the workout. I don't want him to get ahead of me, but I want to stay close enough that he feels like he is hanging tough and has a chance to beat me. He doesn't. I created this workout and anything that has pull ups in it is going to favor me. Throw burpees and relatively light weight power cleans into the mix and I'm unstoppable. With this time domain and movement scheme, I am in control. My barbell is behind Josh. He can hear me picking up the weight and dropping it. He can hear me doing burpees. He can see me peripherally when I transition to the pull ups. Being behind him allows me to watch him working and get a feel for his speed, count his reps if I need to, and be ready when he turns to get a look at me and my progress. Every time he glances back, I make sure to look fresh and strong, to smile at him, and to use the opportunity to call out to the rest of the team. “Three minutes, pick it up!” Some people have a hard time hiding the fact that they are out of breath. I never had that problem. My heart rate could be jacked up near two-hundred beats per minute and my lungs could be on fire, and I could still yell a command without sounding out of breath. When I do this over ten minutes into a nasty workout, and Josh sees and hears me do this, it crushes him. It is beyond demoralizing. I'm sure that he is hurting in ways that most people will never understand, both physically and mentally, because the last thing you want to feel when you are exhausted and fighting for breath is hopeless. When he sees me, still seemingly strong, still able to bark commands to the group and still ahead of him in the workout, he breaks. It happens at least once a week. I'd like it to happen at least once a week. If he gets broken every couple of workouts, he stays hungry and that fire to push forward and improve and beat me burns hotter. That is where I need him, burning to improve. I need that fire to drive him into peak condition for the start of the season. At that point, he can take out all of his pent up frustration towards me out on the rest of our league. God help those poor bastards. Josh is our starting pitcher. He doesn't have the classical long, lean body of a pitcher, but he manages to overcome his relative stumpiness with ferocious power. He pitches the way I imagine Mike Tyson would pitch. Top form Mike Tyson, late 80's Mike Tyson. He pitches to kill you, to blow a baseball-sized hole through your bat if you dare to swing at his pitches. When he is really fired up, he grunts as the ball leaves his hand. Well, something between a grunt, growl, and a death snarl. It's almost religious, like he is speaking a lost, forbidden god language. It is truly unsettling, for those people who don't know him, and maybe more so for the people who do know him. It is the same sound he would make if he were digging a battle ax into your skull on some ancient blood-soaked battlefield. He is a valuable weapon. Especially when he is fired up. “Two minutes!” Doing this many power cleans and pull ups together is destroying my hands. The central section of a barbell is crosshatched knurled metal, made rough to help you maintain your grip. Grooved metal is great for gripping as its tiny, hard edges tear into your flesh. In round eight I started to feel the dull, pulling pain of a blister on my right palm. Once the skin starts to pull free from the flesh below, there is no stopping it. No amount of chalk can paste the layers back together. You just have to grit your teeth and pray for the end to arrive before you leave too much of your palm on the bars. My prayers held up for three more rounds. Once back on the pull up bar in round eleven I knew. Each pull up tore a new couple of millimeters of skin free from the flesh below. One... two... three... “Last minute, guys, everything you got!” Four... five... “Don't hold back, don't hold back!” Six... I know that if I can finish this last rep, the clock will run out before I get back to the pull up bar. Hold on hand skin, just hold on a little longer... Nope. As I pull for number seven I feel the rip. It's a pretty bad one. Sometimes when you tear your hands, you know it isn't too bad. This pain is different. I think when a certain amount of skin is ripped your brain suddenly alerts you, very urgently, to a serious problem on your palms. Your brain wants you to know you messed up, you messed up in a big way. Sometimes the tear is small, not too deep, no big deal. Those rips are a nuisance. I immediately knew this rip was a bit more than a nuisance. “Forty-five seconds!” Even as I'm calling out the forty-five second warning, what I'm yelling in my head is shit. Shit, I have to get on the bar now and pull 135 pounds seven more times with a ripped palm. Shit, then I have to do more burpees. Shit, then I'll have get back on the bar and sprint like hell to cushion my lead over Josh. Shit, then I'll have to patch up my hand and try to heal it quickly for the workouts over the rest of the week. Shit. Shit, shit, shit. I wanted to do some batting practice this week, I guess I could tape my hands up. As long as I don't go too hard or for too long, that would work. Shit. Shit. Most people don't realize how much a palm rip can affect your daily life because most people never tear the skin off of their palms. If they did, they would realize it makes showering, washing your hands, writing, typing, opening things, and picking things up, a lot harder. Everything is a little more painful. You remember it when you grip a steering wheel, and when you hoist your twenty-five-pound school backpack. You remember when you shake someone's hand. Everything you do reminds you of the tear and restarts the quiet throbbing of your body trying to patch it up. For athletes, ripping hands is infuriating. For me, it is harder to catch and throw a ball, harder to swing a bat, harder to slide into base, harder to do everything required for playing baseball. I should have taped my hands better before the workout started. “3... 2... 1... Time! Time's up, guys, good job!” Along with my grip, my shoulders are toast and my legs are a bit wobbly. I stumble to the white board on the wall and grab one of the blue dry erase pens. We use blue for all of the times but the three fastest. The three fastest times or best scores get written on the board in red. “Alright guys, whatcha got?” One at a time they begin shouting out last names and scores; Porter, 9 rounds plus 12 reps; Jackson, 10 rounds even; Harrison, 9 rounds plus 19 reps. I try to hide my shaking hand. The tear is throbbing now, red hot pulsing nastiness, and it is making it hard to control the marker. Booker, 10 rounds plus 14 reps. “Nice work, Booker!” Chris Booker is a quiet killer, one of the hard-working silent badasses that every guy wants on his team. He lets a tiny smile flash across his face at my adoration, and just as quickly extinguishes it. Felton, 8 rounds plus 18 reps; Barlow, 11 rounds plus 5 reps. “Yeah Barlow, think that's going to be top three. Getting in the red today, rock on!” The last few scores come in. They are good scores, solid 9 and 10 rounders. Then I get to Josh. He hit the second best score, and improved from a month ago by more than a full round. He should be stoked. He is not stoked. Crowley, 12 rounds plus 3 reps. Gray, 12 rounds plus 14 reps. Josh gets a few high fives, consoling high fives. The team is full of respect for the guy, he is a monster, but they feel sorry for him being so good and having to chase me. They congratulate him on his performance and praise his effort, but their words are tinted with pity. Their “good job, man,” sounds to me more like “it's okay, man, you'll never beat him no matter how hard you work.” Time to rally support. “Bring it in guys. Really quick, batting practice on Friday, if your hands are up to it after today. And by the way, put those raggedy hands up if you beat your score from last month.” Hands go up. All of them. “That's what I thought. Now, put your hands up if you didn't. Any pansy ass slackers in here?” No hands go up. The guys look around and see that they have, all of them, improved over the month. They are all stronger, faster, tougher. In Crossfit terms, they are fitter. They are more ready to deal with whatever their sport, or life, throws at them. Realizing this for themselves gives them a sense of accomplishment and pride. Seeing that every single guy improved shows them something I need them to see. “You see that, guys? Any doubt that what we're doing is working?” No doubt, they shake their heads and smile as they realize their leader knows what he is doing and will lead them on to victory and glory if they listen to him and do what he says. They have experienced improvement under my training. They have been reminded that they can, and should, trust me. “See you monsters on Friday.” “Philip?”
The man rose from the waiting room chair and placed the People magazine back on the small side table in precisely the spot where he'd found it. He arched his back and winced as he stood. Though he was only fifty-four years old, his glasses, graying hair, and posture suggested he was much older. The creases and wrinkles, the fatigue around his eyes, suggested a man nearing the end of his life rather than navigating the middle. “It's Phil,” he said, finally able to stand up straight. “Oh, I'm so sorry,” the young woman said. “Yeah, they said they were sorry last time, too. They said they would change it in the system.” “Oh, I'm very sorry we didn't get it updated for you.” “People say a lot of things.” “Well, I'm Angie, Phil, and I'm going to have them change your information in the system right now. How does that sound?” She didn't wait for his answer. Angie turned to the woman behind the reception desk and asked her to update Mr. Carson's file. Angie told her he goes by Phil, and asked her to change his records to reflect this. The woman replied that she could. “Sure thing,” she said. “Awesome, thank you, Kelly. There, Mr. Carson, from now on, in this office, you will be known by and referred to as 'Phil.' Problem solved.” “I prefer Mr. Carson,” he said. Angie inhaled and froze. Kelly turned in her chair. Working in a dental office meant she interacted with a lot of very stressed out, and often angry, people. Anxiety, the physical pain of dental problems and dental solutions, and the often high costs associated with them, brought out some of the more undesirable human behaviors. She'd been sworn at, shoved, had pens, pencils, and toothbrushes thrown at her, and a great grandmother had once dragged a shaky, wrinkled old hand into the bottom of a purse and thrown what she had retrieved at Kelly's head. Her computer, phone, and desk had been pelted by butterscotch hard candies, pen caps, an old lipstick case, a collection of rolled up threads and lint balls, and seventy-six cents in change. There were two quarters, a dime, two nickels and six pennies. One of the pennies hit Kelly in the neck, and as the caretaker was escorting the old woman away from the desk and toward the front door, the old woman yelled that she wanted her money back. Kelly understood that she didn't work in an amusement park. She understood people were coming to see her because something bad had happened or was going to happen and it was most likely going to cost a lot of money. But Mr. Carson's attitude was special, even for a dentist's office. They hadn't started care of any kind, and already this was his attitude? She wanted to say something. At 2:00, in the middle of an already long and stressful day, she was ready to say something. But the man was saved by a call on the office phone. Kelly turned back toward her work station and answered it. “Well,” Angie said, reapplying her courteous smile, “Mr. Carson if you would follow me, we can begin.” Angie lead him down the short hallway toward one of the five dental stations. She stopped and again cranked up the smile that was expected of her before turning back to face him. She stretched out her arm. “We'll be right in here.” Before he could slip by the divider wall into his section, a mother and a little girl appeared from the section before his. They were suddenly in the hallway, together, blocking it, still speaking with the dentist, Dr. Fensworth. Mr. Carson stopped suddenly. His eyes widened, as if he'd been lost in thought and was genuinely alarmed by the sudden appearance of the mother and daughter. “Thank you, Dr. Fensworth, thank you so much. Ella, can you say 'thank you' to Dr. Fensworth?” The little girl would have if she'd not seen Mr. Carson, his eyes wide with fright, staring down at her. She grabbed her mother's leg and pulled herself in, burying most of her face in her mother's upper thigh and hip. She pressed her face entirely into the faded blue denim of her mother's jeans. The mother turned, feeling the sudden fear in her daughter's grip. “Ella, what are you... oh, I'm so sorry, we're in your way. Come on, Ella, let's move over and let the nice man pass.” Mr. Carson's face changed. His eyes narrowed and his awkward attempt at keeping good posture seemed to relax. He smiled, and Angie watched the seemingly seventy-year-old man morph into what looked more like a man in his fifties. Mr. Carson pressed his back against the wall, sucking in his gut and spreading his arms out to each side to make himself as narrow as possible. “Not to worry, madam, by all means... ladies first.” As he said this, he let his left hand swing in a low arc from the right side of his body to the left, beckoning them to pass down the narrow hallway before him. “I'll try to make myself very small, but I'm not sure how long I can hold it.” He sucked in his gut again, taking a long, loud breath. He held it, letting his cheeks and his eyes puff out. He held the pose until he noticed the little girl craning her head around the side of her mother's thigh to see what he was doing. When he knew the little girl was looking at his face, he turned slightly toward her, his cheeks huge and red, his hands pressing harder and harder into the wall behind him. “Hurry,” he said, catching the little girl's eye, “I can't hold it much longer.” The girl smiled and stepped slightly away from her mother's leg. She let a few giggles bounce out as her mother struggled with whether to sneak by him or back away and let him pass, first. “Please... hurry!” he said, his cheeks and forehead now nearing tomato level red. “Oh, okay,” the mother said, taking the little girl's hand. “Thank you, sorry.” As they passed Mr. Carson, she added, “Please excuse us.” “No problem,” he chirped, quickly shutting his mouth and puffing out his cheeks again. The little girl was transfixed. Her mother tried to rush her along, but she stared back at the strange man making strange sounds and strange faces and wanted to see what he might do next. For now, he was still pressing himself into the wall and staring, eyes wide and wild, straight ahead. As the girl and her mother reached the end of the hallway and were about to disappear from his view, Mr. Carson blew his full lungs' worth of air out and dropped slightly, his hands pressing into his knees to hold him up. He huffed and puffed, waving weakly for the little girl to continue on, not to worry about him. The little girl giggled again, waved, then disappeared into the lobby. When Mr. Carson turned around again, Angie was smiling. “That was very cute, Mr. Carson.” He blew a puff of air from his nose and winced again as he straightened up. The smile faded from his mouth, replaced by his previous flared nostril scowl. The shine in his eyes dimmed again, pulling him back into his late fifties, then early sixties. But he kept his rosy cheeks, and with the scowl and dark, squinted eyes to go with them, he eclipsed his previous look and soared, as Angie saw it, into a crotchety mid-seventies. “Through here?” he croaked, pointing to the reclined chair behind Angie. She nodded, and Mr. Carson stepped by her, his shoulder bumping into hers. “Have a seat on the chair, here. The first thing we'll do is take some new images of your teeth. Have you been having any trouble, any pain or sensitivity you'd like the doctor to know about?” “I'll let the doctor know about it myself.” Angie secured Mr. Carson's bib and raised the chair to keep him more upright. She pulled the first set of bite wings from their drawer and glanced at his chart. Most of his molars had crowns now. He'd had over a dozen cavities filled and refilled, even between some of his lower and upper incisors. It had been almost a year since he was last in. Angie knew he would be having some issues. His gruffness might be because of the throbbing pain of some infected root. It might be time to have one or more of the crowns replaced, and possibly consider root canals. It would have been hard to see it, even sitting in the chair next to her and looking into her face at that exact moment. A joy was bubbling up, dancing, from inside, but on the outside, Angie's lips sharpened at their corners ever so slightly, a barely perceptible smile. Without looking at the date of his last appointment, she knew: October 17th, 2015. He'd come in at 2:00pm that day. He'd come in at 2:00pm today, too. The appointment before that had been a 2:00pm appointment, as well. This showed a rhythm of some sort, at least in appointment scheduling. Maybe he was free on Tuesdays at 2:00pm, so consistent appointments were a matter of necessity. Maybe scheduling early afternoon appointments allowed him to leave work early and have a good excuse to not come back in for the rest of the day. Maybe he liked to use the excuse to steal a few extra hours of evening freedom. Or maybe this habit was simply one of his many habits. Are you a creature of habit, Mr. Carson? “I'm going to place the bite wings now. Can I have you open your mouth a little?” Mr. Carson opened his mouth with a grunt. Angie laid the heavy lead vest across his chest and secured the straps. “Not quite that wide. A little less. There, good, go ahead and bite down for me.” Angie swiveled the imaging machine, a plastic box with a long, silver tube at one end. Every time she maneuvered the machine into position, it felt like a canon. It pivoted on its metal arm, like a turret, and she aimed the canon down range – toward Mr. Carson's face. Angie stepped behind the protective wall at the back of the station. “Just hold still for a moment, and...” A click and a beep sounded. Angie returned to his side, sliding the canon around the front of Mr. Carson's head, imagining laser beams and machine gun fire and tiny rockets blasting into his face, taking off his nose, blowing off his ears, all ordinance hitting their mark and leaving nothing but a smoldering bare skull hanging limply from its neck. “Now the other side.” She repeated her steps, placing the wings, positioning the canon, and stepping back behind the wall. Another click and a beep. “And done!” she exclaimed, separating the velcro straps and removing the lead vest. “Has anything else changed since you were in last?” Angie asked. She knew what his response would be, so she kept the question vague enough to draw him into the trap. If he simply offered the information she asked for, she would note it in his chart and move on. But she knew he wouldn't do that. She assumed he would, once again, let her know he would only be speaking to the doctor. “Just send the doctor in,” he said, adjusting the bib on his chest. Oh Mr. Carson, we're going to have fun today. “Well Mr. Carson, Dr. Fensworth is very busy in the afternoon, and he is very particular about our jobs as his assistants. He would prefer to discuss your medical changes and needs, and he would prefer that we get any accessory information for your file updated. You can understand that, right?” Mr. Carson's face changed. Now, to defy her would mean defying the doctor's wishes. He grumbled a quick acquiescence, “Yes, I suppose that makes sense.” “Plus, I can't leave yet, because I'm doing your cleaning.” He sighed as she started lowering his chair to horizontal. “It looks like it's been a little while since we've seen you, but today we're not doing anything out of the ordinary. The last time you were in, you would've received the same treatments. I'm going to use an ultrasonic water tool to clean any plaque off of your teeth. Some people feel some sensitivity when having this done, so you can let me know if it is too much for you, or if you need a break, okay?” The chair clicked into place. Mr. Carson was staring up into the overhead lamp. He flinched when she placed the protective sunglasses over his eyes and one of the earpieces scraped along the hair and scalp just over his left ear. “Sorry, just your protective shades. We want you to look cool while you're getting your teeth cleaned.” “It's fine,” he said, squirming to find a comfortable position. Angie donned her face mask and eye shield. She clicked on the overhead lamp. “That was pretty cute what you did with that little girl in the hallway.” Even through the shades, Angie could see Mr. Carson's eyes change. They widened with recognition, like he was seeing an old friend again for the first time in a long time. As soon as the look washed over his face, he changed it. He blinked hard three times and made a noise like it was nothing, no big deal, like he didn't even really know what Angie was talking about. A creature of habit. “Do you have kids?” she asked. “No, no kids.” “Do you work with kids?” Another flash in the eyes, quickly extinguished. “I'm a teacher,” he said. “Aw, that's nice. And you teach kids that age?” Mr. Carson nodded. “You know,” Angie said, beginning the cleaning, “since you walked in, I've had this weird feeling that I know you from somewhere. You look so familiar. Do you teach here in town?” She didn't expect a verbal reply, not with the water tool and suction device in his mouth. Mr. Carson nodded. “Do you teach at Booker Elementary?” He nodded again, flinching slightly as Angie sprayed an obviously sensitive area. She didn't stop. “Oh, okay, maybe that's where I know you from. I went to Booker. That seems like a lifetime ago. I don't remember a lot from those days, but I do remember stealing peaches from the peach tree at the back fence. Have you seen that peach tree, the one beyond the baseball field? I think the Heathers family lived there. We used to eat the peaches and then plant the pits. They never sprouted, not one, but every time we ate a peach we planted the pit and would run out the next day fully expecting to see the tiny tendrils reaching up from the dirt. We probably planted hundreds in the ground out there.” Another flinch, this time with an added groan after. “Oh, sorry. A little sensitive there, huh?” Mr. Carson let out a harsh breath and nodded, enunciating his complaint as best he could with all of the equipment in his mouth. “Hey, look at me. There's nothing to be scared of, okay? It's perfectly natural. Don't worry, I'll go slow. It won't even hurt.” Mr. Carson flinched again, without Angie having done anything. She saw his eyes widen but put the water tool back in his mouth. “Can you open a little wider for me?” She pulled his jaw open wider and held it there. She could feel him squirming under the pressure, feel him realizing the danger he might be in. He wanted to sit up, he wanted out of the chair, he wanted out of the office. He wanted to leave and drive to his house and pack the things he needed and go, tonight, and never come back. Like a dog ready to run, Angie could feel him quivering. Like a dog ready to run, Angie held him down by the neck. She leaned over so she could be millimeters from his ear as she whispered: “You leave now, all that kiddie porn on the laptop under your bed goes straight to Agent James Kotaki at the FBI.” A rush of breath left his nose. Her grip on his jaw tightened. “Now, I can feel your fear. I can feel you thinking about jumping out of this chair and running from this office and trying to escape all that you've done.” Mr. Carson felt a single point of contact on his neck. Something pushed against the skin over his carotid artery. Something small and hard was holding there, his heartbeat thumping against it. Above him, in the reflection from the overhead lamp, he could see it. Angie was holding the silver hook of her explorer tool against his throat. “Not only will that kiddie porn go to the FBI, but if you try to get up, if you cry out, if you so much as squirm in a manner that isn't to my liking, I will plunge this probe into your neck and tear your fucking throat out. Now, please nod if you understand me.” Kelly called out from the hallway. She popped her head into Angie's section. “Hi, sorry to interrupt, but you don't have to do the 2:30, Ellie's got it.” “Thanks, Kelly,” Angie said, smiling. She could feel Mr. Carson straining to choose: stay still so this woman doesn't kill you, or make your move now, jump to your feet and scream for help? She could feel his twisting in the chair, his hands squeezing the armrests a little harder. Like a quail lying low in a hide, he was trying to stay still. He was holding his breath. He was trying to think, trying to control his pulsing nerves. With the fox this close, he wasn't sure whether to stay still or fly. He made his decision. He took a breath and relaxed his hands. Once Kelly was on her way back to the front desk, Angie smiled down on him. “Good work, you didn't even try to run or scream or anything.” She patted his head. Sweat was beginning to soak his gray hair. “Now, again, please nod if you understand my rules.” Mr. Carson nodded. “You know, I thought we would get a little further in this conversation before you started catching on. Bravo, sir, bravo to you for paying attention. I'm kind of surprised you remember the little phrase you used to say before all of our recess and after school... meetings. But now I realize I wasn't the only student you said those kinds of things to, right? It probably hasn't been that long since you last said it.” “Please, I...” He managed two words before the hook dug a little deeper into his neck. He winced away from it now, feeling that Angie was applying enough pressure to break the skin. He felt the prick, felt the heat around the area, and felt the hook slide around in the blood it had drawn. “Mr. Carson, you promised. Remember, T is for truthfulness. Isn't that what you told us?” He nodded his head against her grip. “Please try to be a better listener. If we don't listen, we don't learn, right?” He closed his eyes against the words. She was pelting him with the little maxims from his classroom. They were words from another time, another place. They were words from another him. He wasn't Mr. Carson, second grade teacher, right now. He put it on every morning when he entered his classroom, and he took it off every evening when he left. He didn't want to have to hear about the classroom now, without his mask on. He didn't want to have to pretend. He'd said those words hundreds, maybe thousands of times in his years as a teacher, every one of them a lie. To have them rain down on him here, without his mask, naked and exposed, was too much. He gripped the arms of the chair and tried to be as still as he could. He wondered how she could know all of these things? How she could know about the laptop? How she could remember what he said before he... He closed his eyes against the images, tried to close his ears and shield his mind from them. But the insides of his eyelids became mirrors. The harder he shut them, the more clearly he saw who he was without the mask. “Now, you're probably wondering a lot of things right now, huh? Well, I have you here for the next twenty-five minutes or so, before people will start wondering what is going on, so we have plenty of time to answer all of those scary questions zipping around inside that stupid head of yours. First things first, as you're probably trying to deny, this is real. This is really happening right now. I need you to keep reminding yourself of that, and I will try to help remind you, too.” The ultrasonic tool was back in his mouth and spraying away. Angie went from tooth to tooth, ignoring his spasms, ignoring his winces and shudders of pain. Whenever his eyes closed against the pain, Angie would stay there for a bit, and whisper for him to try to keep his eyes open. As she reached one tooth in particular, Mr. Carson groaned and one of his legs kicked up and off of his chair, then rebounded with a thud, squeaking the chair and its metal base. She stopped, and a second later he again felt the gentle prick of the sharp hook at his neck. Her voice didn't change. “When I was a little girl, I remember doing exactly what you're doing now. I remember watching the other kids file out of the classroom toward the playground, toward recess. Toward freedom. I watched them go and I wanted to scream: scream what you were doing, scream for them to stay, for them to help me. I remember standing at your desk trying to understand what was happening.” She went back to work in his mouth and he groaned again. A single tear formed in the corner of his right eye, and when he shut his eyes against the pain, it rolled its way across his cheek and into his ear. Angie wondered if, at this point, he was flinching away from the pain of her work or the pain of her words. “After, I remember trying to ignore it, trying to pretend it hadn't happened. But I watched you smile at me, watched you welcome the other kids back into the classroom the way you always did, watched you walk to the black board and continue on like everything was normal. I saw you look at other girls in the class and then look at me and I knew. I was different. It did happen. I couldn't keep trying to tell myself it didn't.” The water tool stopped and Angie suctioned out the excess water and saliva build up. “You know, Mr. Carson, it looks like we have some excessive plaque build up here. Not to worry.” The metal hook dug its trail, along the gum line between tooth and tongue. She made long, slow strokes, and continued even when the blood started flowing. “You doing okay with the pain, Mr. Carson? I'm giving you the special treatment, so don't tell anyone, okay? It's our little secret? You don't want me to get in trouble, do you?” His feet kicked and scraped along the base of the chair, and more tears streamed down the sides of his face. “I've been wondering something. For years after I was in your class, I had nightmares. I woke up screaming, I wet the bed, and it didn't really change in third grade. Or fourth grade. Or fifth. I did get better at convincing mom and dad that nothing was wrong. I used towels to control the pee. I washed my own sheets. And now, even now, there are nights when I sleep soundly through the night and don't piss myself. But those nights are pretty rare, and so I ask you: how have you been sleeping? From what I've seen, you don't sleep very soundly, either. You tend to sleep best between two and four in the morning, but even that is rarely sound sleep. I can't tell if you're dreaming, or what you're thinking as you toss and turn, but it doesn't seem like good, quality, rejuvenating sleep, you know? So I'll ask again: have you been sleeping alright?” Mr. Carson was panting now, driven nearly to hysteria by the pain and the shock of what was happening to him. He was losing it, and he was going to cry out for help. Angie felt it coming on, but before he could yell for help, she lifted the sharp metal hook into the roof of his mouth. She stared down at him, down into his red, wet eyes, until his panting stopped. “Me either. Man, the weeks and months and years get lo-lo-lo-long when you don't sleep well, right? It can feel too long, like if you can't sleep and you can't get away from the pain for even a second you should probably kill yourself. That's what I thought, at first. If there is no escape from the pain and the only thing that might help is sleep but you can't sleep, well, then... what do you do? For me, I tried to help myself sleep. I tried sleeping pills. I stole them from my mom. When they didn't work I tried booze. Then I tried them together. That worked a little bit for a little while, but pills and booze bring with them their own problems, don't they? When their benefits started waning I tried something a little... stronger. I got over my fear of needles really quickly and found that heroin can be a very sympathetic friend. H and I shared many sad, lonely stories and consoled each other, night after night, for almost a year. But again, like booze and pills, heroin started to turn on me, too. But in our last days together, in those last few bouts of vengeful give and take, heroin showed me something about myself. When the last syringe emptied its venom into the vein on the top of my foot, a voice appeared. It rose up from beneath the angry shouts and the wailing self hatred. It rose up from beneath the voice begging me to kill myself. The small voice grew louder, still barely audible amid the sounds of whiskey glugging down my throat and pill bottles popping open and rubber bands tightening while veins were being slapped to attention. A small voice, screaming in the depths, screaming from a dusty box I'd bolted and chained and buried.” Angie stopped scraping and for a few seconds, Mr. Carson had some peace. She wanted him to breathe for a moment, to feel a small rush of adrenaline and brief endorphin relief. She offered a momentary stop to the pain. Then she pulled one of her sleeves up nearly to the elbow and held it out for him to see. His eyes followed the path of gray scars, back and forth, crossing and crossing again along every inch of skin on the underside of her forearm. The jagged patchwork had been woven from the palm of her hand up to her elbow and, it seemed, beyond. She bent down to whisper again. “There are more, Mr. Carson. A lot more.” She pulled the sleeve down and pried his jaw open again. Back to work. “I'd been trying to convince myself that it didn't happen, that you didn't do those things to me. That voice had been screaming so loud for so long I'd forgotten the other voice existed. It came back to me like a stranger. A strength, a force, a determination I'd forgotten I owned. When I couldn't convince myself it hadn't happened, I tried to convince myself that I'd wanted it, that I'd enjoyed it. That's when I cut myself. The pain became my new friend. The pain helped me sleep. At least for a little while. But it was only more noise trying to drown out the other voice, and I just couldn't drown it out forever.” Angie pulled his head to the right. She slapped his cheeks twice, hard. “You still with me, teach? Any of this make sense, any of this resonating with you? I feel like maybe part of why you do what you do is because you don't understand what it's like to be helpless like that. You don't know what it's like to be at someone's mercy. Not anymore, though, right? Now you know,” she laughed, “now you know, big time. So tell me, how does it feel? Do you like it?” He shook his head. He was starting to sob. “Are you crying, Mr. Carson? That's surprising, because I seem to remember you telling me something when I cried at your desk. When your hand went under my dress the first time, I think I cried. You said something. Do you remember?” Another sob, harder now, wracked his body. It was loud enough that Angie slammed her palm down over his mouth and pressed him deep into the cushioned chair. “You said, 'Oh don't cry, little angel. Little angels don't cry.' Angela, your little angel, right?” Angie held the hook over Mr. Carson's face. She brought it down slowly, made sure he was watching it glint in the lamp light, just before it touched his cheek. She ran the long rounded edge of the hook across the corner of one of his eyes, wiping the tears down toward his ear. She let the metal trace the tears' path three times before moving to the other side. On the other side, she turned the hook so the sharp tip pierced one of the tears as it left his eye. She dragged the point along his cheek, tracking a series of diminishing spirals down to his jawline and all the way to the tip of his chin. “Don't cry, little angel,” she whispered, “angels don't cry.” She'd dragged the hook hard enough to create a series of red spirals in his skin. She followed them back up to their origin and held the point of the hook directly over his pupil. “Don't cry, little angel.” Mr. Carson closed his eyes. He blurted out a plea for her to stop without trying, without thinking, and started to sob again. He closed his eyes and she let the hook's tip touch his eyelid and rest there. “I need you to know something,” she whispered, “something you taught me. I need you to hear it and really think about it and never forget. I need it to go deep into your mind, into your bones, into your soul. Are you ready? I need you to know that life... isn't fair. Did you hear me, Mr. Carson? Life isn't fair. And that's okay, as long as we're honest about it. It is what you taught me. It is what that little voice in my head wanted to tell me. Through the noise of me telling myself I deserved what happened to me, through the noise of pretending I wanted it, that I asked for it, the little voice pushed through all of that to tell me that life... isn't... fair.” Angie got down low again, right next to Mr. Carson's ear, and held his head with both hands. She got down to his ear so he could feel her breath, so he could smell her, so he could remember this moment forever. “Life isn't fair, Mr. Carson. You're going to know that, soon. You're going to know it truly, deeply, for the first time, and it is going to change who you are. My advice to you is... let it. Let it change you.” Her hands left his head. “Let it change you.” Mr. Carson bit his lip against the rising flood of mental debris. His fingers dug deeper into the chair's armrests and his legs trembled. The rush of emotion overtook him and a groan started deep in his belly and squeezed its way, like bile, up into his mouth. He vomited it into the air above him, then into the entire office. Before he knew what he was doing, he was up from the chair spitting blood onto the floor and wiping his mouth madly and screaming. He was punching out in all directions. He tripped on the instrument table and matched the noise of crashing tools with even louder screams. He formed no phrases, no words, only grinding, ghoulish vowels in random sequences at random pitches and tones. When Kelly met him in the hallway, he pawed wildly at her face like she were a monster ready to devour him. When Dr. Fensworth seized him by the arms, Mr. Carson swung an elbow back into the doctor's face. The doctor went down, his nose bloody, and Mr. Carson pushed past Kelly and made his way to the front door. As he pushed out into the sunshine, more hands seized him. This time, there would be no elbows thrown, no pushing aside, and he would be taken into custody by special agent James Kotaki of the FBI, who'd received detailed information about a Mr. Philip Carson's possession and distribution of child pornography, as well as information about his position and influence as a teacher at Booker Elementary School over the last twenty-nine years. The information provided would be enough for the Federal prosecutor to force Mr. Carson's attorney to seek a plea deal of five years in prison followed by probation, mental health treatment, and placement on the national sex offender registry. The prosecutor denied this plea and on May 1st, 2017, Philip Carson was convicted of twelve counts of possession and distribution of child pornography and sentenced to sixty-five years in federal prison. He received many letters once in prison, but he only ever read one. The rest, he crushed angrily in his hands and threw away without opening. But the first one, return-addressed from his mother's house, was short: Dear Mr. Carson, Perhaps now you can understand what we all felt in your classroom. Perhaps now, trembling under the violence of the men around you, you can understand the helplessness and fear. Don't push it away, that small voice rising inside you. Let it in. Listen to that voice and let it change you, Mr. Carson. Let it change you. And then kill yourself. Love, the little angel |
AuthorI want to write just a little more every day Archives
December 2017
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