Short Stories and Flash Fiction

We are sitting in the kitchen when I ask her if she still loves me. As she answers, she begins to remove all of the things I don’t like from a paper container of fried rice—the peas, the carrots, the chicken—until there is nothing left but browned rice and slimy onions. I feel her doing the same thing with her words—spoon feeding me answers of little substance because she thinks I like the taste of them, how easily they slip down to my stomach. She’s right. I eat it all. I’m still hungry late into the night.

It is in August when the rains fall thickly and your ghost disappears. I am seated on the porch swing, my feet dusting the floorboards, our farm fields overrun and expansive in the distance. I am work-weary, grief-stricken, manifesting moisture of any sort. Our son joins me, his hair tousled by the day, his feet a soft padding down the hallway. _I saw Peter’s ghost,_ he says, pausing to shovel blueberries into his mouth. _I saw Peter’s ghost on my bed when I woke_, and I wish I could see you like he does: _Peter’s ghost sat next to me on the bus, Peter’s ghost did a cannonball off the diving board and soaked my whole class, Peter’s ghost rubbed my back while I barfed in the bathroom._ But I don’t see you at all. _You mean Dad,_ I whisper in our son’s ear, pulling him closer, _he was your dad._ Our son cries and I rock us back and forth. The air is unmoving, stale. You used to join me here at dusk, when the falling light made it dangerous to flail blackberries along the ditches, when you couldn’t hold the steering wheel or shovel a fence post any longer. You’d rub my feet, I’d rub your hands. We’d light a fire, watch our son marvel at the magic surrounding him. Tonight, our son will wake next to me on the porch swing sobbing. He will say: _I saw Peter’s ghost at the barn, at the barn, at the barn,_ and, for the hundredth time, I will wish he hadn’t followed me there that night. That I hadn’t told you I was worried about the rains. The run-off from the river. The momentum that builds when water has nowhere to go.

“It’s cold in here,” the woman says, lighting a cigarette, blue smoke catching in the light of the laser. “It needs to be cold to work,” I say, “and there’s no smoking in here.” In the reflection of my computer screen, I notice her looking around the lab. Her left arm sticking up, the still-lit cigarette in between thin fingers, right arm around her waist supporting the left elbow. “I need to know why you’re here,” I say, punching in the code for the entanglement. “Why?” My chair squeaks unprofessionally as I spin around, “Because, what if I send you to another reality where whatever brought you here has already happened?” I wait. This was usually the time where either the reality of what they were about to do hit them or their brain began doubting what I was saying. Her body slumps a little, “My son died.” I nod and spin back around with a counter squeak from my chair. Typing in random coordinates, I let the quantum machine hum on the desk. The black box was doing its job. It would be a few minutes before she spoke again. “Is that it?” she steps over, staring the flat black box. It was unimpressive at best. I could hear it in her voice. Just a small six-inch square metal cube, humming as if thinking, which it was. “Yep.” I took in the full measure of this woman. Tall, well-dressed, nails impeccably done, hair unimaginably soft with expensive products. She had money. It wasn’t cheap to buy a new life, a new reality where the tragedy never happened. Or a new life where they were rich, or a woman, or man, or had no children, or their mothers loved them. But these days, it was mostly a dead kid. Word must be spreading. “How long?” she asks. “Couple minutes.” On the edges of the machine, I could already see the white frost. It was working hard, finding the right coordinates to send this lady back where her son was alive and well. “How does it work?’ she steps closer to the oblong ring in the center of the room. A see-through sheet of clear glass covering the opening. “I don’t know.” Twisting in surprise, her perfectly tailored eyebrows raise. “You don’t know?” “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” I smile at my joke. The temperature drops ten degrees as the glass on the portal changes. “It’s a mirror now,” the woman whispers. Letting the air out of my lungs, I say, “It’s not a…seriously, didn’t you read the contract?” Hugging herself against the cold, she stares at the woman staring back at her, “Most of it.” “It’s a reflection from a similar world as ours. She’s you, looking at you from another dimension. Okay?” Raising her hand, she waves at herself in the next world. “She’s not the one I’m going to replace, is it?” stepping closer to the aperture. “No, but that’s the closest world to ours, so it comes up first.” I kept typing, the humming box slows, and the cold stabilizes. By this time, it was nearly forty degrees in the lab. “So, I just walk through here and boom, I’m back with my son?” “More or less.” Another flash and the woman in the reflection is gone, only a copy of my lab staring back. “Hey, where did I go?” she says, upset. “Well, the other you is probably doing something else. Like at work or with your husband,” I hesitate, “Or with your kid.” The words sting. Enough for her straighten her back and almost jump through the portal. This was the moment. “There’s a little business we need to take care of,” I say casually. Shaking hands pull a silver ring from her pocket, she touches it to mine. On the outer ring, my credits jump six figures. Reaching over, I pull out a silver box and open it. Taking out the small device, I walk over and hand it to her. “Now, you do know what happens next?” “I go across, and my son’s alive.” “Jesus, did you read any of the contract?” I mutter, dropping the round object into her hand. “Oh, you mean the fine print? Yeah, I read it. I need to kill the other me, then take over her life.” I nod, “Place this within ten feet of her, and there’ll be nothing left.” Hefting the ball, the woman asks, “Then what?” “Then you live with the guilt.” A curt laugh escapes her lips, “No guilt here, buddy. Besides, it’s me, right? I can’t really feel guilty replacing myself?” I don’t answer. Instead, I say, “Safe trip.” She’s two feet from the portal. “Now?” she asks. “Anytime.” Placing the ball in her pocket, the woman steps through the glass window, disappearing from this world. “What happened?” she asks, stunned. “Jesus, did you read any of the contract?” I ask. “Yeah, but...” “You went through. I’m the other guy in the other lab.” It always took a few seconds for their brains to figure it out. Multiverses, other dimensions, portals. And I look slightly different. “You know where to go?” I ask. Her face changes; she knew where to go. It was her life, after all. “Yeah.” “Don’t get caught,” I call out as the woman leaves. “Hey.” I turn and see myself looking out of the portal. “Hey,” I say back. “Did you send anyone today?” I ask. “Yeah, he wanted to be rich. What’s with her?” I nod to the door. “Dead kid.” “Damn,” I say. “Things used to be so simple. Now there’s all this emotional baggage they bring with them. I mean killing yourself, who does that?” Staring at myself, I look well dressed, thinner, and have a wedding ring. Turning back, I mark the coordinates in the computer and smile. “It’s a lot to think about,” I tell him.

www.smokelong.com

I had the house painted yellow so she would know which one it was. She’d been getting lost more these days, and I started receiving biweekly calls from Kevin at the corner store saying “Mama’s here. Come get Mama.” When I’d pick her up, she’d be eating cheese crackers and rearranging the canned soups. “Bye bye, loverboy,” she’d say as I placed a five on the counter and herded her out the front door. I don’t know who she thought Kevin was. She never called Daddy that. “I live in the yellow house.” We repeated this every morning over coffee like a mantra. I had tried keeping her inside, but she always found a way out. Mama the escape artist. Mama the feral cat. One minute she’s there, the next someone’s ringing the doorbell asking “is this the right yellow house?” I didn’t notice that the young couple two blocks down had painted their house mustard until the cops showed up at my door. Mama was screaming in French, which was probably for the best since she was threatening to shoot them both in les couilles. People say the elderly are like toddlers, and this is true in some ways, only you can’t scoop them into your arms when they’re scared. You can’t tell them that everything is going to be okay. They won’t believe you. “I live in the flower house,” we repeated over coffee after we’d adorned the front door with flower decals made of colorful duct tape. “I thought she meant the flower shop,” said the kind stranger who mistakenly walked her to Frederick Florals. So I removed the flowers and hung glitter green curtains in the front bay windows that shone in the sun. By that time she was barely speaking English at all anymore. “Rideaux verts!” I heard her yelling from down the block. When I started painting a mural of a tiger across the entire exterior of the house, I knew this would be it. Tigre. It was almost the same in French and English and she didn’t need to say the rest. There were no other tiger houses—not that I knew of. It would be obvious where she belonged. But she was losing words faster than I could paint. I worried she’d never find her way back. Over coffee, we created a new kind of mantra. We growled and roared and hissed. We walked on all fours and slashed our claws through the air. They would know, I thought. They would bring her back to me.

SEBASTIAN AND THE TROLL A little story about how it feels I lightly edited some parts because it's translated from Swedish by a friend of Mr Backman, presumably for free, so I assumed the clunky bits were unintentional. --- Sebastian lives in a bubble of glass. This is a problem, of course. On this everybody on the outside agrees. Glass bubbles are very impractical, for example in classrooms and at birthday parties. In the beginning everybody thought the glass was the problem, but after he’d lived in there long enough it was decided instead that Sebastian was the problem. The people on the outside say you can’t establish eye contact with him, that he seems ”absent”, as if where he is somehow is worth less than where they are. ”Don’t you wanna go outside in the fresh air and play ball? Wouldn’t that be fun?” they used to ask when he was little and their voices could still be heard all the way in. He couldn’t explain then that he didn’t think having fun seemed like fun. That being happy didn’t make him happy. He can’t remember the last time anyone of them said something funny and he laughed. Maybe he never has, and in that case they’re probably right, the people who, for as long as he can remember, have been shaking their heads saying ”there’s something wrong with him” to Sebastian’s parents. He sat close to the glass back then, reading the words off their lips. They were right. A person is supposed to think that having fun is fun, otherwise something that shouldn’t be broken is broken. Something that isn’t broken in children who aren’t weird. For years various grown-ups came and went outside the bubble, some carefully tapped the glass, others banged it hard when he didn’t answer. Some asked him how he ”felt”. He wanted to tell them that it feels like feeling nothing, yet still it hurts. Some said Sebastian ”suffers from depression”, but they said it like they were the ones actually suffering. Sebastian himself said nothing, and now he can’t hear anyone at all from the outside anymore. He doesn’t know if it’s because they gave up or if the glass just got thicker. When the bubble still had tiny openings at the top they dropped down little pills, they said the pills were supposed to make the glass thinner but he thinks they might have misunderstood. He’s not sure they actually know as much about glass as they claim. The pills got stuck and blocked the last few openings. Now there’s only Sebastian in here. He can’t sleep at night. Sometimes his parents can’t either. He can see their tears run slowly down the outside of the glass then, they sound like rain over rooftops. Sebastian knows that his parents wish that something awful had happened to him. Because then there’d be a reason for him to hurt. Then he could be understood, maybe even fixed. But Sebastian’s darkness is not just a light switch that someone forgot to flip, not just a pill he doesn’t want to take. His darkness is a heaviness and a tiredness that pulls the bones of his chest inwards and downwards until he can’t breathe. And now the bubble’s gotten bigger, or maybe Sebastian has gotten smaller. Maybe that’s what anxiety does to us, shrinks us. He sometimes falls asleep in the afternoons, from exhaustion, not tiredness. Sleeps with shallow breaths and deep nightmares, just for a few minutes at a time. Until he wakes up one evening with fur in his eyes. There is a troll sitting in his bubble. Sebastian knows it’s a troll since he asks the troll: ”What are you?” And the troll replies: ”A troll.” Then you know. But Sebastian still needs to ask: ”What do you mean a troll?” The troll is busy, it’s concentrated on writing something on tiny white notes with a nice blue pen. More and more and more white notes being stacked in uneven piles everywhere, until the troll looks up at Sebastian and replies: ”Regular kind of troll”, it says, since that’s what it is. Nothing special for a troll, but special because it's a troll, of course. It's not that often you see a troll either in a bubble or anywhere else. ”What are you writing on the notes?” Sebastian asks. ”Your name," the troll answers. ”Why?” ”So that you don’t forget that you are somebody.” Sebastian doesn’t know what to reply to that. So he says: ”Nice pen.” ”It’s the most beautiful pen I know. I always carry it with me because I want them to know that I love them," the troll says. ”Who?” ”The letters.” Sebastian’s fingertips touch the glass of the bubble. ”How did you get in here?” he asks. ”I didn’t get in, I got out," the troll says and stretches sleepily. ”From what?” ”From you. Through one of the cracks.” ”I’ve cracked?” The troll rolls its eyes, disgruntledly flails its paw against the walls of the bubble, kicks a threshold, annoyed. Sebastian didn’t even know there were thresholds in here. ”You see, this here shack won’t do anymore, Sebastian. The glass has gotten too thick and everything that’s in here hurts too much. In the end, there’ll be no air left and then something has to crack. Either the bubble or you.” Sebastian’s fingers fumble over his stomach. His throat. His face. Small, tiny cracks everywhere. They don’t hurt. Sebastian thinks that maybe he’s forgotten how to do it, how to hurt in places where other people hurt, in all the normal ways. Burn-your-hand-on-a-hot-pan ways. Stub-your-toe-on-furniture ways. Now he only hurts in weird ways. Ways that don’t leave a scar. Ways that can’t be seen on an x-ray. ”How did you fit inside me?” he asks the troll. ”Oh, it wasn’t hard at all. I’ve been asleep inside your heart for a hundred thousand years. Trolls get very small when we sleep. Like balloons, balloons also become very small when they sleep.” ”And when they break," Sebastian notes. The troll nods thoughtfully, as if this is very, very true. Then asks: ”Is there breakfast?” Sebastian shakes his head. He doesn’t eat very much anymore, everyone worries about that, as if food was the problem instead of the problem being the problem. It’s easier to worry about food, of course, it’s understandable that the people on the outside stick to the kind of worrying they know best. The troll looks very disappointed. ”You get pretty hungry after a hundred thousand years. Breakfast would have been nice.” ”I’m sorry," Sebastian says. The troll nods, with his sorrow in its eyes. ”I know, Sebastian. I know how sad you are.” Sebastian reaches his hand out. The troll is soft, its fur thick. ”You’re not from my imagination. My imagination isn’t this good.” The troll takes a deep bow. ”Thank you.” ”What do you want from me?” Sebastian asks. ”What do you want for you?” the troll asks. ”I want it to stop hurting," Sebastian asks. ”What?” the troll asks. ”You should know, if you’ve been inside me. Everything. I want everything to stop hurting," Sebastian begs. The troll doesn’t lie to him then. Sebastian really likes the troll for that. ”I can’t teach you how to make it stop hurting, Sebastian.” ”Then what can you teach me?” Sebastian breathes in reply. ”How to fight.” ”Fight against what?” ”Against everybody that’s coming tonight.” ”Who?” ”Your nightmares. Your weaknesses. Your inadequacies. Your monsters.” And at night, they come. All of them. Sebastian sees them at the horizon of the bubble. They wait for just a moment, just long enough for him to be terrified. They love when he’s terrified. And then they come, everyone that hurts, every nameless terror, everything Sebastian has ever feared. Every monster from under every bed and every creature from the darkest rooms inside his head. They ride straight towards the boy and the troll now, all the anxiety that there’s space for in a child. Children always have so much more space inside them than grown-ups can take remembering. Sebastian turns to run, but he’s at the edge of a cliff, a hundred thousand feet high. The ground shakes. In a few seconds they’ll be here, all his inner demons. He feels their shadows and how cold they make everything. He’s cold on the inside now, they way you get when some of your skin is exposed to the air outside of the duvet an early morning in November, just after winter has wrestled its way into autumn but before the radiators have had time to adjust. Sebastian spins around at the edge of the cliff with his palms open, like he’s looking for heat, and suddenly he actually feels it. It’s coming from below. If he jumps now he’ll land in a bed, soft and safe and full of blankets just the right size for pulling over the head of an average sized boy. He can see it from here. The demons hiss and snarl so close to the edge that the troll has to scream for Sebastian to hear it: ”They want you to do it!” ”Do what?” Sebastian roars, leaning over the edge. He wonders whether it’s really possible for anything to be worse down there than up here. ”They want you to jump, Sebastian!” the troll screams. And Sebastian almost jumps. Because he knows how good it would have felt on the way down, and then maybe it doesn’t hurt anymore? Down there at the end of the fall, maybe it will feel like it never hurt at all? But the troll holds on to Sebastian’s hand. Its paw is also soft. It can’t be imagination, Sebastian thinks, because he doesn’t have that good of an imagination and he knows practically nothing about paws, does he? So he stays, and everything that hurts rushes straight through him, down into the abyss, laughing and howling. ”They can’t hurt you, not really, so they have to make you hurt yourself,” the troll whispers. Sebastian stands at the edge, out of breath. ”Are you sure?” he wonders. ”Are you sure there’s no breakfast?” the troll wonders. ”What do you mean?” ”I mean that sometimes you think you’re sure of something, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t be wrong. You could for example see a balloon and be sure that someone dropped it, but it might actually have run away.” Sebastian starts hurting just behind his eyes. ”So you mean that you’re… sure or not sure?” The troll scratches a few different spots of fur. ”I just mean that breakfast would have been nice.” Sebastian apologizes, the troll nods disappointedly. Everything goes quiet. Then Sebastian’s feet start moving, without him being involved. The bubble starts rocking, at first almost nothing at all but then almost immediately all at once. Sebastian closes his eyes and holds his knees with his hands, because there’s nothing else to hold on to in here. He wants to throw up, but the troll places its paw at the back of his neck and then for a long while it feels like Sebastian takes off and floats. “Watch out," the troll whispers, but Sebastian doesn’t react until the troll yells ”WATCH OUT!" All of a sudden Sebastian gets water up his nose. Then in his eyes. He flails his arms wildly, feels his clothes get wet and his shoes fill up with sharp claws, something is pulling him down into the depths as if he’s drowning. HE’S DROWNING! ”Did you push…you fricking idiot…did you push me into…into the ocean?” he screams to the troll, panicking with his nose barely over the surface now. ”No, this isn’t an… ocean, it’s…rain," the troll pants. They both gasp for air. The sky disappears behind huge waves that pound and splash them on purpose, hurt them just because they can. The troll’s fur gets dark and heavy and is sucked into the depth. Sebastian reaches his hand out and grabs its paw, an endless storm riding in over them. ”Where did the rain come from?” Sebastian yells in the troll’s ear, or at least where he thinks trolls might have ears. ”It’s tears!” the troll roars back, where it thinks Sebastian has ears. ”Whose?” ”Yours! All the ones you’ve held back inside you! I told you, I TOLD YOU!!!” ”WHAT!?” ”THAT EITHER THE BUBBLE WILL CRACK! OR YOU WILL!” Sebastian disappears under the surface, just for a few moments or maybe an entire life, before he struggles his way back up again. A flock of huge grey birds hover over them. Now and then they dive towards the water and snap at Sebastian’s shirt collar. He shields himself with his arm, their sharp beaks cut long, deep, bleeding cuts in him. ”Are they trying to…take me?” Sebastian screams with the rain and the wind raging and roaring across his cheeks. ”No, they’re trying to…scare you!" the troll cries back while one of the birds takes off with a beakful of fur. ”Why?” ”Because they want you to stop swimming.” Sebastian grips tightly onto the troll’s fur, closes his eyes even tighter, he doesn’t know who is keeping whom afloat in the end. They’re hurtled through the waters, down into the darkness, into a wall. They land in a petrifying silence, impossible to trust. But at last Sebastian opens his eyes again and realises that the two of them are lying coughing and snorting in the sand on a beach. The sun slowly dries fur and skin. ”Where are we?” Sebastian asks. ”At the bottom,” the troll whispers. ”The bottom of what?” ”The bottom of you.” Sebastian sits up. He’s got sand inside his clothes, in every place you don’t want sand to be and some places where Sebastian imagines that the sand wants to be just as little as Sebastian wants it there. It’s warm when he lifts it up in his palms, runs around his fingers until it finds its way between them. Sebastian looks at his knuckles, full of cracks that don’t hurt, and it’s not raining anymore. Maybe it never rains at the bottom, maybe the sun always rests on you here, never too much and never too little. Surrounding the beach are high, smooth cliffs, impossible to climb. This is a paradise, at the bottom of a hole. Along one of the cliff faces there is a rope, at its very end there’s a campfire burning. Sebastian carefully opens his palms towards the small, bouncing flames to feel the heat. The wind tickles his ear. ”Do it," the wind shouts. ”Do it!” Sebastian scratches his ear, looks at the troll in surprise. The troll points sadly to the fire. ”Everyone is waiting for you to do it, Sebastian.” ”What?” ”Decide that it’s easier to stay down here. And set fire to the rope.” Sebastian blinks like his eyelashes have gotten stuck to his heart and have to be ripped from it every time his eyes open. ”I can’t live on the outside of the bubble," he stammers at last. ”You can’t live in here either," the troll replies. The words shiver when the answer falls from Sebastian’s lips and the tears bring him to his knees: ”I don’t want it to hurt anymore. Does everybody else hurt like this?” ”I don’t know”, the troll admits. ”Why do I hurt when nothing has happened? I never laugh! Everybody normal laughs!” The troll’s paws rub the spot where the troll probably has temples. ”Maybe it’s your laugh that’s broken. Not you. Maybe someone broke it. One time someone broke my favourite breakfast plate. I’m still a bit upset about it, actually.” ”How do you fix a laugh?” Sebastian whispers. ”I don’t know," the troll admits. ”What if there’s something wrong with me after all?” The troll looks to be taking this under serious consideration. ”Maybe something’s wrong with the wrong?” ”Huh?” ”Maybe the balloon isn’t even a balloon. Maybe you don’t have to be happy. Maybe you just have to be.” ”Be what?” The troll writes something in the sand. Slowly and carefully, with its most beautiful letters. Then it promises: ”Just that.” The troll dries the boy’s eyes. The boy asks: ”What do we do now?” ”Sleep," the troll suggests. ”Why?” the boy asks. ”Because sometimes when you wake up there’s breakfast.” The troll puts its paw under Sebastian’s cheek. Sebastian crawls up in it and falls asleep. From tiredness, not exhaustion. The troll sleeps around him, the boy’s tears sway slowly like crystals in the fur. When they wake up the fire has gone out. Sebastian blinks at the sky. ”What are you thinking about?” the troll asks. ”I’m thinking that maybe the balloon was neither dropped nor ran away. Maybe someone just let it go," the boy whispers. ”Why would anyone let go of a balloon?” the troll asks. ”Because somebody wanted it to be happy.” The troll nods gratefully, as if this new thought is a little gift. Sebastian stretches forward carefully and touches the rope. ”What’s up there?” he asks and points to the top of the cliffs where the rope is attached. ”A life. A hundred thousand years of all the best and all the worst," the troll whispers. ”And in-between that?” The troll smiles, almost happily. ”Oh, yes! THAT! All the in-between. You get to choose that. The best and the worst in life just happens to us, but the in-between… that’s what keeps us going.” Sebastian’s breath bounces around in his throat. ”Will you come with me?” ”Yes. We’ll all come with you.” Sebastian’s face crumples up like confused laundry. ”Who’s ’we’?” ”We," the troll repeats. When Sebastian looks out over the beach he sees a hundred thousand trolls. ”Who are they?” The troll hugs Sebastian until Sebastian is only hugging air. The other trolls walk toward him and disappear, one by one, all in through the same crack. But they call out from the inside: ”We’re the voices in your head that tell you not to do it, Sebastian. When the others say ’jump’, 'stop swimming’, and ’set fire to the rope’. We’re the ones that tell you not to.” Sebastian looks at his hands. One of the cracks closes up. Then another one. He holds the invisible scars against his cheek and wonders how you live with them instead of living in them. Then he closes his eyes again, sleeps all night there in the sand. He dreams. Not that he’s running, like he usually does. Not that he’s falling or drowning. He dreams that he’s climbing now, up a rope, to the top of a cliff. When he wakes up he’s on his own next to the hole. He drops the rope and it falls to the bottom, lands with a soft thud. Far down there in the sand the boy can still read what the troll wrote when it said ”just be” and the boy said ”be what?”. It says ”Sebastian”. Just that. He sits with his feet dangling over the edge and awaits the sound of rain against the roof of the bubble. But nothing comes, and far away he sees something else, something he hasn't seen in a long time. A line in the sky, from top to bottom. Sebastian has to turn his head to the side until his neck sounds like bubble wrap before he finally realises what it is. A crack in the glass. Just the one. He can barely fit his hand through it. His mother touches his fingertips on the other side. He hears her shout his name into the bubble, and he whispers: ”You don’t have to scream, mom… I… can hear you.” ”Sebastian…” she whispers then, the way only the person who gave a child its name can whisper it. ”Yes, mom," he replies. ”What can I do for you?” she sobs. Sebastian thinks for a long time before he finally answers: ”Breakfast. I’d like…breakfast.” When his mother whispers that she loves him, snow starts falling from the sky. But when it lands inside the bubble it’s not frozen flakes, it's freshly shed fur, small bits of fluffy fuzz that settles softly on Sebastian’s skin. It’s still early, maybe he doesn’t have words for this yet, but in time he might be able to talk about it. One day when someone says something and maybe he laughs for the first time. Or when he laughs as if it were the first time, over and over again. Laughs as if someone a very, very long time ago found the laugh on the ground in a forest, broken to pieces after a storm, and brought it home and nursed it until the laugh was strong enough to be released into the wild again. And then it takes off from the rooftops, straight up towards the heavens, as if someone let go of a balloon to make it happy. Maybe, in a hundred thousand years. He blinks at the light, as the sunrise gently tugs at the clouds until the night lets go. There’s a note in his pocket. He’ll find it soon. “Don’t jump," it says, written with someone’s most beautiful letters. ”don’t jump sebastian please don’t jump because we really really want to know who you can become if you don’t.” Just that.

pseudopod.org

The voices begin three days before someone is to die. The coffin-maker wakes up covered in sweat. He has been talking in his sleep again, his wife says, in the language of the dead. He looks at her under the waning light of the candle. Edna’s face is pallid and lined with a liquid transparency. Dark circles nestle under her eyes. He kisses her cheek and goes to work in the middle of the night. The coffin must be of mahogany, he knows that already. An important person will die, a person of wealth and power. He will figure out the rest as he goes. The coffin whispers louder and more coherently as the days pass. No, the hardwood explains, as he tries to note the measurements. Not for an adult. This will be a child’s coffin. He clenches his fists and his head stoops more than usual, but he keeps on with his work. All this time the coffin-maker is locked in his basement alone. Only once a day does his wife come downstairs to bring him bread and tea. She caresses his hair as he leans over his woodwork. She covers her mouth with a handkerchief; a stain of blood taints its whiteness. “Go rest, Edna,” he whispers. “You are sick.” The client comes on the second day, as the coffin-maker picks the coffin’s fittings. They are shaped like golden doves that fly towards the sky, albeit wounded. Seems most appropriate. She is wrapped in a red velvet shawl and smells of expensive soap. The coffin cuts in, She is the mother. She sits on the only chair he keeps in the basement. He offers her tea, but she refuses politely. When she lowers her shawl, the coffin-maker recognizes her. Mrs. Griggs, the merchant’s wife. She is upfront about it. Her son is dying, she says. It won’t be long. Surely he knows. She points at the expensive casket on his workbench. The coffin-maker’s face tightens. “Please,” she says. “My boy, my beautiful, fragile boy.” Her voice breaks, but she retains an air of pride people of her class naturally have, even when they are begging. She offers him gold. Double, no, triple what her husband will pay for the coffin. He doesn’t even have to do it himself. She has people. They will take the coffin and turn it into kindling. Then her boy can stay with her forever. He won’t face the darkness. The coffin-maker avoids the woman’s stare. “It’s against the law,” he says, trying to sound stern. He wishes it were that easy. That the woman would bow and apologize for the disturbance, then open the door and leave. But she stays there, with her red eyes, her pouch of gold. “I won’t put my boy in the ground.” The coffin-maker sighs. She is not the first to ask him this, and she won’t be the last. She doesn’t know what she is asking, though. That’s the reason there are laws about this. The dead must be allowed to rest. “Follow me, madam,” he says. The woman gives him a perplexed look but gets up and follows him upstairs. His walking is slow, burdened. Hers is light and rhythmic, more like dancing. He can hear her heels tap-taping on the stairs. He gestures towards the closed door at the back of the house. “Darling, is that you?” Edna’s voice comes from inside. The smell as they approach is putrid. The woman brings a scented handkerchief against her nose. He stops in front of the door and turns to face her. Mrs. Griggs pauses and takes a step back. “I … I don’t want to go in there,” she says with unease. He opens the door wide and lets her peer inside. Even in the half-darkness of the closed drapes and the candlelight, she can see the unnatural shape. The empty eyes. The handkerchief falls to the ground and Mrs. Griggs flinches. A muffled scream escapes her lips. “I am sorry,” the coffin-maker says, but she is already on her way out. It’s late and the coffin-maker has to finish the job. He has to varnish the casket. Tomorrow the child will die and once he is in the coffin, it will finally fall silent. But the cherry wood pile he keeps buried in the basement will never leave him alone.

clarkesworldmagazine.com

The dead were arranged neatly around the dinner table; First Uncle, Second Uncle, First Aunt, her mother, her grandmother. Each Shen Pai was a monolith about thirty centimeters high, matte black plastic with the name of the deceased embossed in shiny Mandarin. Sharon wondered if the dead dreamed while they slept. It was not clear to Sharon when the traditional Lunar New Year dinner expanded to include the dead; character constructs had been wildly popular for years. Project W, the company was called. Double You. Memory plus character equals personhood, or so the tagline went. They couldn’t digitize a person, but they could, with a bank of several hundred questions and a proprietary engine that combed through a person’s entire social media footprint, produce something that was indistinguishable in casual interactions. In her earlier years, Sharon had faddishly paid for a W. It still managed her social media and scoured the online markets for bargains. It was a pity that the W represented her tastes and size from a decade prior; a specter of her youth eternally haunting Sharon. It was a short hop between having a W and leaving a W behind after the passing of the original. And so the ghosts lingered on the net. Project W then launched the Shen Pai range—spirit tablets, named after the wooden ancestral markers that used to be kept in temples. Traditions adapted and paying respects to the ancestors suddenly became much more visceral. Offering incense paled in comparison to having an eight-course meal with the departed. Sharon grimaced at the two actual empty chairs. Her brothers had skipped out on dinner again. Too busy, they said. One had to entertain his in-laws, the other was overseas for work, in a country that did not respect this most important aspect of family time. Not that he tried to take the day off, either. As the eldest, it fell to her. She sighed and booted up her rig, sucking her sensorium out of her apartment and into the space she’d curated for this year’s reunion. And then the ghosts came. --- The dining hall was a gestalt of the dream homes of all the dead. The table was the centerpiece, a massive disc of marble, pure white shot through with veins of smoky ink, its circumference hugged by a ring of pure teak, so dark as to be nearly black, supporting struts carved into the shapes of dragons holding the tabletop. The dead were no less impressive. The aunts in their elaborate baju kebaya, long-sleeved blouses of silk with finely embroidered beads, held close by ornate brooches. The uncles in their pressed shirts, short sleeved for the weather, bright red for luck. “Panjang omor omor,” they greeted her; long life. They said this without jealousy, Shen Pai ghosts knew they were dead. It was considered disrespectful to commission a Shan Pei which did not accept its own mortality. The aunties fussed over her. “So cantik,” First Aunt said, fingers brushing Sharon’s own kebaya. “Thank you, Auntie,” said Sharon, all the time with eyes on her mother. Por Por, her grandmother, smiled beatifically. Por Por was a basic model, constructed mostly of still photos and others’ memories. Character engines and animation algorithms did the heavy lifting for her Shen Pai. It was best not to stress the model out. “Aiyah, nobody special this year?” said First Uncle. Bearing the indulgent aegis of being the firstborn, he had grown up without the imposition of a filter for his words. Second Uncle elbowed him. Those were old questions, a tradition as old as reunion dinners. Sharon smiled off the question. Ws, and by extension all the Shen Pai, had a very specific built in limitation. Their characteristics were a unique seed array, the result of Project W’s proprietary technology, a vast machine learning array that ingested the hundreds of defining questions and the corpus of a person’s digital footprint. The machine digested the person and gave Project W their digital soul. Early experiments with allowing a W to grow met with disaster. the company set their AIs to adjust the seed, applying algorithmically generated character growth. The souls metastasized, fractal offshoots of illogical personality cancer. The research was abandoned; all new Ws were hardcoded. They could remember events, but they could not learn. “You are looking well, Ah Girl,” said her mother, lip pressed thin and turned up slightly at the corners. The more generous might even call it a smile. “Thanks, Ma, you too. Your sarong is beautiful this year.” It truly was, a starburst of pink and yellow flowers, the print exquisitely detailed over a pastel blue base. “Thank you, girl,” she said and then she sniffed. “Your brothers didn’t come again.” As though Sharon could force two grown men to spend a virtual evening with family. “Busy lah, Ma. Plus they also have their own dinners to go to.” Spending their evenings with the living, of course. If the eldest couldn’t corral the younger ones, then she would be locked in with the dead. That being said, she much preferred these conversations. Her brothers had their own children to worry about; children whose gravity only increased as they grew, capturing time and conversation into the orbit of school, after school enrichment, tuition to help with schoolwork, which school to apply for next, and the like. At least she knew her place in the wider family system, the trajectories familiar and well worn. Each of the elder siblings brought a dish by tradition. Por Por had entrusted each of her children with one, a form of insurance to ensure attendance at reunions, since the meal would be incomplete without one of their favorite dishes. Of course, Por Por couldn’t plan two generations down, only one of her grandchildren had any patience for Peranakan food. First Uncle inherited the Ayam Buah Keluak, stewed tender chicken in a heady sauce made from ground nuts of a mangrove plant. Second Uncle the soup, Bakwan Kepiting, clear and fragrant with equal parts crabmeat and ground pork packed into the hollowed-out carapace of small crabs. First Auntie brought the rendang, fall apart tender beef with translucent striations of tendon and fat, floating in heavily spiced curry gravy. She’d collected these recipes over the years from her aunt and uncles and they were still a hit at gatherings with her brothers and friends. Hours of work went into each dish. Peranakan food was known for its generosity of spice and time; the warm embrace of a charcoal fire under a heavy clay pot. Sharon didn’t have to cook for the ghosts. She could do better, she was a stimulus programmer—one of the few highly specialized artists that calibrated sensory feedback for virtual experiences. Or even more esoterically—getting Ws to react to virtual food. This was her annual reckoning; code was her ingredients, her spices, her technique, her craft; and her family, her judges. “The soup is very good, almost like I remember,” said Second Uncle, ladling himself another serving and then offering the ladle to Sharon’s mother, who demurred by raising her palm slightly. “Your rendang is very good, very lemak,” said First Aunt. “Aiyah, can cook like that and no family to feed.” There it was, two dishes in, like clockwork, year after year. It was a coming of age ritual at the reunion dinners when she graduated to the grown-up table. An avalanche of questions about when she’d take the next logical step to become a true adult. As though having left an empty place at the children’s table, she now had to make it her life’s mission to fill the spot. The other uncles nodded knowingly. Por Por, driven by machine reaction to social cues, agreed. Sharon looked to her own mother who refused to meet her gaze. She gave a small sigh under her breath and diffused the tension by ladling more food onto plates. First Uncle leaned back in his chair and covered his mouth to belch. “If I had known you were better than me at cooking, I would have given you the recipe long ago,” he said, and the others laughed. “You know, my Ayam Buah Keluak was famous back in the day, even used it to win my in-laws over. Maybe it can do the same for you.” Laughter again. Sharon didn’t even bother to respond. She couldn’t really hurt the feelings of a Shen Pai, and you could always give them a factory reset if they accumulated too many negative experiences. A pity that trick didn’t work on people. Her mother took a carefully assembled spoonful of the fourth dish, a piece of pork belly in a clinging brown gravy. The resolution package Sharon was using let her see the shimmer of the light on the thick layer of fat, which wobbled as the elder Mrs. Chang put it in her mouth and tasted it. Babi Pongteh had been her mother’s dish, braised pork belly with fermented soybeans. This was the recipe that Sharon never got, her mother had insisted on cooking it every year without fail, except in the one year when an aggressive form of leukemia took her down in a matter of months. Sharon had been attempting to recreate the dish ever since, scouring famous cookbooks and internet recipes alike. Every year, she tried a different iteration on the ghost of her mother, and every year her mother gave the same response. “Not bad, not quite there yet,” said her mother. It wasn’t even real pork. It wasn’t even real spices, real cooking. Sharon had coded it, told the computers how to take a recipe and convert it into 1’s and 0’s so that a rig could give a paying customer an approximation of the taste the chef was aiming for. Better, in fact, she could calibrate the minutiae of sensation, the details of mouthfeel, the touch of flavor on palette. She could make angels fucking dance on a person’s tongue but she couldn’t win her mother over. There were maybe two dozen people in the industry that could do what she did. Not the mass market stuff, approximating boba tea or the latest McDonald’s sauce. No, she was on the high end of the market. Not just the Michelin stuff. She hunted down the home chefs, the best street hawkers. And that wasn’t good enough for her family, obviously. “It will never be there for you, will it, Ma?” Sharon asked, a little sharper than she intended. The table fell quiet; first Uncle, slightly slower on the uptake, carried on talking to Second Uncle for a moment longer. First Auntie, ever the peacemaker, fought with the weapons she had, spooning out second helpings to all, including a generous dollop of the Babi Pongteh to Sharon’s mother, pork belly, dried mushroom, potato, and all. “All the family wants are good things for you, Ah Girl.” “Who defines good? You? Them?” Sharon was close to yelling now. She could tell from the coolness of the air conditioning on her cheeks that there were tears on her cheeks. The program was not set for tears, so she wouldn’t see them if she looked in a mirror, but she knew they were there, all the same. “Sharon Chang Mei En. Dinner isn’t the time for this.” Her mother had her back absolutely straight, a general on the way to battle on a warhorse. Sharon’s mother only ever used Sharon’s full name in arguments, perhaps to ensure that, even when the two of them were alone, that the scolding was meant for her and her alone. “There’s never a good time for this conversation. Never was. Never will be. Never can be. You’re dead now, remember?” There she’d let it out. That was the thing about interacting with the Shan Pei, she could get a do over, she could practice as many times as she wanted. She’d just erase this interaction from the collective memories of the Shen Pai after. If only real life had been that easy, if only she could have made the best of the time she had. The table rattled. Sharon’s mother had put both hands on the tabletop to push herself to her feet. “There are things other than work. There’s family. When did you make time for what we needed?” “That’s why you never taught me Por Por’s recipe, isn’t it? I just wasn’t good enough for you. After everything else I achieved. It still isn’t good enough. Where are your sons? Where are the cousins? It’s just me. It’s always been me. And this is all I get back.” It felt wrong coming out, this vitriol under pressure, dammed up for so long, just that small leak was causing the whole edifice to collapse. The words were the wrong shape, not the smoothly practiced retorts she’d run through her head at night when reviewing these painful conversations. In her mind, the delivery had been faultless, her adversaries were driven speechless by her wit. In this virtuality, she was gasping for breath between the real world sensation of snot running down her lip, tears down her cheeks, all at odds with what the program would display and what the ghosts would react to. Sharon saw her mother open her mouth to scream at Sharon. The machine simulated that perfectly. There’d been a wealth of video call arguments between the two. Their shared corpus, the body of their relationship, rotting and falling apart. Gobbled up by the machines and made immortal, they could argue forever in this hell of their own creation. Except the scream never came. Por Por had her own wrinkled hand on her daughter’s. Sharon’s mother was silent. That’s all she had time to notice; that emergent behavior, Por Por trying to calm her daughter. Then Sharon reset the scene and the photorealistic scene decayed into pixels, which faded into white. --- The dining table was perfectly set, the wall adorned with old family photographs, some sepia brown, some black and white. Towering Ming vases, pure white porcelain with motifs tattooed on in blue ink, flanked the mantlepiece. Dinner was set, the same dishes. Except her mother was already there. That was wrong. Sharon hadn’t booted up the Shen Pai yet, the ghosts should have been . . . asleep. Or wherever it was that they went in between sessions. The same place reflections went when people looked away from the mirror. Her mother gestured to Sharon, who followed her mother into the kitchen. Cast iron pots hung from the walls, deep woks sat over gas burners. Bundles of ginger, garlic and small shallots sat in plastic bowls. “I’m sorry about just now,” her mother said. “Por Por told me I shouldn’t have . . . not at reunion dinner.” Sharon did a double take. Her mother shouldn’t have been there. Didn’t Sharon reload the entire scenario? The Shen Pai couldn’t have any recollection of the dinner. “It’s just the same every year, it just got out of hand tonight,” said Sharon. “Same when you were all alive, same now. They’ll always want me to be something I’m not. You’ll always want me to be something else.” Her mother sighed. “We just wanted the same thing for you that our parents wanted for us. What changed?” “The world? Me?” Sharon had never had this conversation before, not like this. The two of them had circumnavigated the problem, they’d teased out its borders with half-hearted exchanges. This. This was uncharted. Her mother’s voice was soft, a tone that Sharon only half remembered from her youth. When did everything become so business-like, so perfunctory. Just like the dinners, their conversations had become ritual. “Pa and I were so proud of you. You achieved more than either of us ever had. You were enough, we just never told you.” “You never gave me Por Por’s recipe.” “You never asked. I always thought about it. But I was the oldest. I got my brothers and sister to dinner. I needed to cook that every year. Por Por gave me that recipe, that’s what made me useful.” “I guess the recipe is gone then.” Her mother gave her a look with a mischievous glint in her eye. “You know your Pongteh already tastes better than mine.” Sharon laughed, and it was good to get it out. When was the last time they’d shared a joke? Not for a long time before her mother had died, and certainly not after. “Still, just because it tastes good doesn’t mean it’s better.” Her mother smiled and pulled her to the kitchen workspace. “Ah Girl, that makes no sense at all. Come on, the trick is to start with the tombok. No food processor, you need to grind the shallots by hand.” --- Sharon dialed out of the simulation. Her cheeks were still recently wet. The Shen Pai sat on the table, she reached out to touch them. Most of them were cold, save for her mother’s, which retained some processor heat, body warm. There was a limitation to Project W’s machine magic. They could copy and extrapolate, sometimes heartily, but they could not create, not truly. Sharon ran another diagnostic on her mother’s Shen Pai just to be sure. The search parameters were familiar to Sharon, she’d run it at least half a dozen times before. There was, and never had been, any record of the recipe in her mother’s Shen Pai.

yalereview.org

It was in August that he had found the sparrowhawk on the mountain road, crouched in the dust with one small falcon wing fanned and limp, eyeing him without malice or fear—something hard there, implacable and ungiving. It followed his movements as he approached and then turned its head when he reached out his hand to it, picked it up, feeling it warm and palpitant in the palm of his hand, not watching him, not moving, but only looking out over the valley calmly with its cold-glinting accipitrine eyes, its hackles riffling in the wind. He carried it home and put it in a box in the loft and fed it meat and grasshoppers for three days and then it died. Saturday he went into town with Mr. Eller, holding the bag in one hand and sitting up high in the cab of the old truck watching the fields go by and then houses and more of them and finally stores and filling stations, the river-bridge, and beyond that the shape of the city against the hot morning sky. How you gettin back? Mr. Eller asked. I’ll get back, he said. I got some things to do. He was standing on the running-board, one foot in the street at the corner of Gay and Main. Here, Mr. Eller said, leaning across the seat, holding his hand down. What? Here. I got money, he said. It’s okay. Go on, damn it, the man said. He was shaking the quarter at him. Behind them a horn sounded. Okay, he said. He took the quarter. Thanks, I’ll see ye. He slammed the door and the truck pulled away, Mr. Eller lifting his hand once in parting; he waved at the back of his head in the rear glass, crossed the street and went up the walk to the courthouse, up the marble stairs and inside. There was a woman at a small desk just inside the door fanning herself with a sheaf of forms. He stood for a few minutes looking around the hall and reading the signs over the doors and finally she asked him what it was that he needed. He held the bag up. Hawk bounty, he said. Oh, she said. I think you go in yander. Where’s that? Over there—she pointed to a hallway. Much obliged, he said. There was a long counter and behind it were other women at desks. He stood there for a while and then one of them got up and came over to him and said, Yes? He hefted the ratty little bag to the counter. From the sweat-crinkled neck exuded an odor rich and putrid even above the stale musty smell of the old building. The woman eyed the package with suspicion, then alarm, as the seeping gases reached her nostrils. Delicately with two fingers she touched the pinked mouthing of the bag, withdrew. He upended it and slid the malodorous contents out on the polished wood in a billowing well of feathers. She stepped back and looked at it. Then she said, not suspiciously or even inquiringly, but only by way of establishing her capacity as official: Is it a chickenhawk? Yesm, he said. It’s a youngern. I see. She turned sharply and disappeared on a click of heels behind a tier of green filing cabinets. In a few minutes she was back with a little pad of printed forms, stopping further down the counter and writing now with a pen from a gathering of inkstands there. He waited. When she had finished she tore the form from the pad and came back and handed it to him. Sign where the X’s are, she told him. Then take it to the cashier’s office. Down the hall—she pointed. He signed the two lines with the pen, handed it back and started away when she called him back. I wonder if you would mind, she said, wrinkling her nose and poking a squeamish finger at the little bird, mind putting it back in the bag for me. He did. Holding the slip of paper delicately in one hand and waving the ink to dry he went to collect his bounty. He left through the open door with the wind hollowing through into the hall and skirmishing with the papers on the bulletin board, warm wind of the summer forenoon fused with a scent of buckeyes, swirling chains of soot about on the stone steps. He held the dollar in his hand, folded neatly twice. When he got outside he took it and folded it again, making a square of it, and thrust it down between the copper rivets into the watchpocket of his overall pants. He patted it flat and went down the walk past the grimy trees, the monuments, the poised and interminably peering statue, and out to the street. A band was playing, wavering on the heat of the city strains of old hymns martial and distantly strident. Rows of cars were herded in shimmering somnolence beneath a vapor of exhaust fumes and at the intersection stood a policeman at parade rest. He crossed the street and the music came suddenly louder as if a door had opened somewhere. When he got to the corner he could see them coming, eight and ten abreast, a solemn phalanx of worn maroon, the drill-cloth seedy and polished even at that distance, and their instruments glinting dully in the sun. In a little knot to the fore marched the leader, tall-hatted and batoned, and the four guidons bracing up their masts, the colors furling listlessly. A pair of tubas in the mass behind them bobbed and rode like balloons, leaped ludicrously above the marchers’ heads and belched their frog-notes in off-counterpoint to the gasping rattle of the other instruments. Behind the marchers came a slowly wending caravan of buses through the windows of which flocks of pennants waved and fluttered. He watched, gathered up and pressed in the crowd, the people sweating in their thin summer clothes, a maze of shapes and colors similar only in the dark patches under their armpits, straining their necks, toe-standing, holding up children. The marchers passed them under the canopy of heat, sweaty and desperate-looking. He saw the near tuba player redfaced and wild as if perhaps he were obliged to puff at his instrument to keep it from deflating and drooping down over the heads of his fellows. They passed in an enormous shudder of sound and the buses came, laborious in low gear, churning out balls of hazy blue smoke, their windows alive with streamers, pennants, placards, small faces. Long paper banners ran the length of the buses proclaiming for Christ in tall red letters, and for sobriety, offering to vote against the devil when and wherever he ran for office. One by one they passed and again the multicolored flags in small children’s hands waving at the spectators who in turn mopped listlessly at their necks and faces with handkerchiefs. A blue and yellow card legended: Don’t Make My Daddy a Drunkard fell to the street like a stricken bird, leaving an empty hand clutching at the window. The next bus splintered and ground the flagstem and printed tiretreads over the sign. Then the music stopped abruptly and there was only the uneasy shifting of the crowd, the slow drone of the buses. The pennants and signs came gradually to rest, to a collective embarrassment as if someone had died and they went on that way until the last bus was by, the little faces looking out solemn as refugees, onto the bridge and so out of the city. The crowds ebbed into the streets and thinned and the traffic began, the cars moving and the streetcars clicking past. He was still standing on the sidewalk and now he saw the city, steamed and weaving in heat, and rising above the new facings of glass and tile the bare outlandish buildings, towering columns of brick adorned with fantastic motley; arches, lintels, fluted and arabesque, flowered columns and crowstepped gables, baywindows over corbels carved in shapes of feet, heads of nameless animals, Pompeian figures… here and there, gargoyled and crocketed, wreathed dates commemorating the perpetration of the structure. Rows of pigeons dozed on the high ledges and the heat rose in visible waves up from the paving. He patted the folded dollar again and started up Gay Street. When he got to the Strand he stopped and studied the pictures advertising the Saturday serial and fingered the quarter. Then he turned left and went up to Market Square. On the corner a man was screaming incoherently and brandishing a tattered BibIe. Next him stood an old woman strapped into an accordion, mute and patient as a draft horse. He crossed the street behind the half-circle of spectators. The man stopped screaming and the accordion began and they sang, the two voices hoarse and high-pitched rising in a sad quaver to the calliope-like creaking of the instrument. He went up the far side of the square under the shadow of the market house past brown country faces peering from among their carts and trucks, perched on crates, old women with faces like dried fruit set deep in their hooded bonnets, shaggy, striated and hooktoothed as coconut carvings, shabby backlanders trafficking in the wares of the earth, higgling their goods from a long row of ancient vehicles backed obliquely against the curb and freighted with fruits and vegetables, eggs and berries, honey in jars and boxes of nuts, bundles of roots and herbs from sassafras to boneset, a bordello of potted plants and flowers. By shoe windows where shoddy footgear rose in dusty tiers and clothing stores in whose vestibules iron racks stood packed with used coats, past bins of socks and stockings, a meat market where hams and ribcages dangled like gibbeted miscreants and in the glass cases square porcelain trays piled with meat white-spotted and trichinella-ridden, chunks of liver the color of clay tottering up from moats of watery blood, a tray of brains, unidentifiable gobbets of flesh scattered here and there. Among overalled men and blind men and amputees on roller carts or crutches, flour and feed bags piled on the walk and pencil pedlars holding out their tireless arms, past stalls and cribs and holes-in-the-wall vending tobacco in cut or plug, leaf or bag, and snuff, sweet or scotch, in little tins, pipes and lighters and an esotery of small items down to pornographic picture books. Past cafés reeking with burned coffee, an effluvium of frying meat, an indistinguishable medley of smells. Under the Crystal’s marquee of lightbulbs a group of country men stood gazing hard past the box office where a tired-looking woman sat beneath a sign: Adults 25—Children 11—watching the film through a missing panel of curtain. Sounds of hooves and gunfire issued onto the street. He couldn’t see past or over them and went on by, up the square, until he stood before a window garnished with shapes of wood and metal among which he recognized only a few common handtools. He held his hand up to one eye to break the glare of light on the glass and he could see them in the dim interior, hanging from their nail on the wall. He checked the dollar and went in. The boy touched the oiled smoothness of it, pan, trigger, jaws, spring. His footfalls were muffled on the dark oiled floors, bearing him into an atmosphere heavy with smells of leather and iron, machine-oil, seed, beneath strange objects hung from hooks in the ceiling, past barrels of nails, to the counter. They were hanging down by their chains and looking fierce and ancient among the trace chains and harness, bucksaws and axehelves. A clerk passed behind the counter and waited on a man idly turning a brass doorknob in his hand. Together they disappeared into the gloom, ducking under a fringe of dangling strap leather, to the rear of the store. A few minutes later a grayhaired man came up the aisle and leaned on the counter looking down at him. Can I hep ye, son? he said. How much are they? He motioned vaguely past the man as if there were but one item of merchandise displayed there. The traps… your traps there. The man turned. Traps? Steel traps. Yessir. Well, he said, let’s see… what size? Them. He pointed. Number ones. The man studied the dull metal shapes as if aware for the first time of their existence, seemingly puzzled not over their price but as to how they came to be there in the first place. Then he said, Yes. And lifted one down and set it on the counter before the boy at a quarter-angle, straightening the chain, as one might show a watch or a piece of jewelry. The boy touched the oiled smoothness of it, pan, trigger, jaws, spring. How much? he asked again. Thirty cents. Thirty cents, the boy repeated. Lessen you buy by the dozen. They’re three dollars the dozen. The boy turned that over in his mind. Thet would make em twenty-five then, wouldn’t it? Well, the man said, twelve and three… four for a dollar… is right, twenty-five cents is right. Well, he said, I aim to get a dozen but I cain’t get all of em together at the same time. So I wonder if I couldn’t get four of em today and then get the rest latter on…? The man looked at him for a minute and then he smiled. Why I reckon you could, he said. Course you’d have to sign a pledge for the whole dozen so as for me to let you have the four at the dozen price. The boy nodded. He reached up and unhooked three more traps and put them on the counter, their chains rattling angrily, reached under the cash register and came up with a book of old order forms. He wrote in it for a while and then tore off two copies and handed one to the boy. Sign that, he said. He was holding out the pen. The boy took it and started to write. Better read it first, the man cautioned. He read it, ciphering out the tall thin handwritings I, the undersigned, do hereby agree to purchase 8 (eight) Victor no. 1 traps from the Farm & Home Supply Store prior to Jan. 1, 1941. Price to be @ 25 cents ea. Signed ...................... signed his name to the bottom and handed back the pen. The man took the signed paper and handed him the other one, the carbon. Thisn’s your copy, he told him. The boy took it and folded it, then took the dollar from his watchpocket and smoothed it on the counter. The man took the dollar and rang it up in the register. Wait till I get you a poke, he said. He pulled a sheet of brown paper from a roll and wrapped the traps in it and tied them with string. The boy took the package, hefting the weight of it in his hands. I’ll be back to get the othern’s afore long, he told the man. Then he was gone, out into the blinding sunshine among the high-shouldered crowds, sped and well-wished by an old man’s smile.

anotherchicagomagazine.net

Late September, my first year teaching, Father Paul pulled two of my fourth graders by their necks out of the boys’ bathroom. His face was sagging and furious. The students were Xavier and Johnny, a pair known for boyish mischief. Breaking into snack machines, bothering the girls, cheating. Xavier on his own wasn’t a problem, but other teachers warned me about Johnny. The first day of class an overgrown boy walked into class with his shirt opened down to his chest revealing a fist-sized golden cross, and I thought to myself: this must be Johnny. Father Paul held the boys up like junky potato sacks. Their feet skimmed the ground. Johnny’s shirt was buttoned back up, but his chain spilled out. This always happened. I never told Johnny to close his shirt during homeroom, but by lunchtime his shirt was buttoned up by Sister Therese. I never really pushed anything onto the students other than the lesson. Part of my method was to see what the kids would do if not told to do anything. Sister Therese’s method was to slap students with a ruler. “Father Paul,” I said, “what did they do?” “What did they do?” he replied in disbelief, shaking the boys with each word. “What did they do? Well, Ms. Fontenot, why don’t you go look for yourself?” Father Paul obnoxiously checked my school ID to say my name; this was only the third time we’d spoken to each other. He finished his last question by shoving the boys in the direction of the bathroom, the way my father used to shove my dog’s snout in his shit when he had an accident in the living room. Sharpied penises and money signs coated the faded blue walls of the boys’ bathroom. At first I thought it excessive that Father Paul should get so worked up over kids practicing premature graffiti, but then I saw a juice box straw and three and a half poorly cut lines of orange dust behind the faucet. I pressed the button on the hand dryer and sent the dust flying. Outside the bathroom, kids skipped down the halls and teachers chattered as normal, the way thunder delays after lightning strikes. No one else seemed to know about the incident besides Mr. Todd, the janitor, who was putting up an “Out of Order” sign on the bathroom door. He looked at me and giggled. Nausea spread from my stomach to the back of my throat. In my disoriented state, I stumbled into the girls’ bathroom. Krystal, Maria, and Claudia were using the stalls as an indoor playground. Claudia, the skinny double-jointed girl, climbing like a spider between the stall and the wall; Krystal, hanging upside down from the stall frame; Maria, holding the top of the second stall’s frame and swinging her body to reach the sink. I’d never gone into the student bathrooms before; it felt intrusive that I could see over the stall wall just by standing straight. The girls were all laughing, laughing the pressurized laughs that you have to wheeze to get out. Krystal in particular, whose braids swept the floor, was struggling not to choke on her laughs. When they saw me walk in, their laughter tumbled out of their throats louder. “Girls, please come down. I don’t want you to fall and hurt yourselves.” I had no intention of punishing, nor any backbone. ✷ Guilt consumes me when I remember my earliest months teaching at St. Anthony the Great. I was right out of college. I felt too young. The excessive discipline practiced in the school by the faculty members brought my devotion into question. The nuns were strict, I anticipated that. My horrible grandfather used to say Southern crosses looked different. But even the other lay teachers beat the boys, cut the girls’ hair off, held bad children in solitary confinement for whole days. My determined style for my first year was primarily to learn from the children—understand their motivations and displeasures—and allow my method of teaching to flow from there. My last job at the Walmart on Tchoupitoulas Street, the graveyard shift after my college classes, we weren’t allowed to stop a customer from stealing. It was in the handbook: no intervention. We’d become a liability too quickly. The children would snub their little noses at a teacher behind their back, in front of me. And I would just freeze there, an empty-eyed fossil of a thing. Johnny’s innocent schemes amused me. His methods were far more advanced than his schoolmates, a constant world-building going on behind his eyes. The time he collapsed the roof of the boys’ locker room. He stored bagged chips there, accessed by pushing a loose tile. He charged the other boys two quarters for the snacks after PE class. I assumed it was his mother who tucked away such furtive capitalist ambition in him. Though one day Johnny slipped while grabbing the tile, and the entire roof collapsed over his head. The school already was crumbling on its own—rotted floors caving in, cafeteria tables collapsing. Things constantly broke and nobody was at fault. But of course Johnny’s accident signaled the end of the world. His mother was billed $1500 for damages, but she never replied to Father Paul’s letter. Before the bathroom incident, I believed Johnny was a genius. His perverse devilry, to my mind, was due to his accelerated learning capacity, like Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I considered teaching Shakespeare’s play, so Johnny could find a character to relate to. Many of my teaching decisions were molded by my desire to satisfy him. I’ve since heard that first-year teachers often do this—imprint. I tried instead Of Mice and Men but, failing to move the students past the third chapter, switched to The Outsiders. I don’t think the children understood the dead mouse. ✷ The Friday after Johnny was caught cutting up his Adderall, the AC unit in the teachers’ lounge broke. The September heat was merciless. I and the other teachers not assigned to recess duty instead ate our lunch in Mrs. McGhee’s classroom. Her classroom theme was elephants, and as a result the artwork and decorations were much more dull than the teachers who had selected cheetahs or parrots or butterflies as their theme. I sat in the back corner, near a student’s large drawing of an elephant with outrageously pink ears. It was the most colorful fragment of the room. I was quietly grateful for the room change; in the teachers’ lounge there was only the large center table and some loveseats lining the walls. I usually found myself sitting awkwardly between teacher friend groups or else politely laughing on cue when the conversation was large enough for the entire room. Mrs. McGhee’s room, at least, was awkward for everyone. I fit into a desk uncomfortably and constantly changed which leg I crossed over the other, but the teachers too big for the desks sat on top of them, and the teachers too large to sit on the desks leaned against the wall holding their microwave meals in their hands. The chatter didn’t take long. “I’m not even surprised,” Mr. Emory announced to the room, jabbing his plastic fork into the air. “Xavier, maybe. But of course he follows in Johnny’s footsteps. Even if Johnny was to jump off a bridge, Xavier would make the second splash.” “I blame these kids getting over-diagnosed. I don’t even think Johnny has ADHD. And even so, drugs are the last thing he needs,” Mrs. Roberts said with a raised eyebrow. “Who knows what drugs he’s surrounded by at home,” Mrs. Mayer said sharply. Something about her voice made me want to burst out of my seat and scream. I often heard those three bad-mouth so-called welfare mothers, imagining living rooms they’d never been in. And yet, every Sunday Mrs. Mayer walked down the church aisles with a wicker basket and suggested donations. The disparity in her behavior confused and annoyed me. I clawed at the cage of my own self-imposed silence. After a quiet moment, Mrs. Hightower spoke up, “It’s no good to threaten him with expulsion. If he were to transfer to one of the charter schools—” “We need to do what’s right for the whole of the student body. For the school community,” Sister Therese jabbed in. “And Johnny is a bad influence on whoever finds themselves around him. Johnny is a snake of a boy.” “On top of that,” Mr. Emory said, standing up from his position on top of a desk, “what does that communicate about our school if we don’t enforce the toughest repercussions?” After recess, Johnny walked in fifteen minutes late to the afternoon lesson. The other students quieted, waiting for me to punish, but I let him take his seat and continued on about Divine Revelation. God reveals himself to us through the sacred scripture. Sister Therese’s words echoed in my mind: a snake of a boy. I remembered, then, a story I had read once about a delinquent boy who wore a crucifix and scared the teachers. Stories follow me everywhere. I find cracks in the world that I wouldn’t have fallen into without them. For instance, the revelation that Johnny was not a delinquent. I tried not to look at Johnny, instead keeping my eyes on the thick beige brick walls that seemed, in that moment, carceral. But when I made contact with his bored eyes, a scratchy announcement sounded on the intercom. Classes cut short twenty minutes. Mandatory mass to follow. Apologies, teachers, for any inconveniences. The students silently shouted yes and fist-bumped each other under their desks. I watched Johnny doodle in his notebook until I was distracted by a silver shiver reflecting off his black hair. At Mass, the afternoon light streaming in from the stained glass windows caused the pulsing veins of Father Paul’s neck to look like red snakes crawling under his skin. He stood at the podium, fingers gripping the oak, spitting words at the students. I’m not sure, even, if it was truly a Mass. Right when the classes filed into the pews, he broke into his hoarse song. He called the students cursed dogs. His voice bellowed, echoing and folding over itself in the empty space left open by the silent choir. My back was glued to the pew, and I could hardly blink. The church seemed sharp, weak, like shattered glass. Father Paul locked eyes with me, and I saw the way he looked at Johnny earlier. If looks could strangle. “The Apostle Paul at the church of Corinth said: For I am the least worthy of the apostles, I who am not fit or deserving to be called an apostle, because I once wronged and pursued and molested the church of God, oppressing it with cruelty and with violence.” Father Paul caught his breath and smoothed his hair. He paced behind the podium, like a frustrated husband. “You are who you are only by the grace of God. By the grace of God.” Claudia quivered next to me, and I took hold of her hand. Behind me, two eighth grade girls with big hoops in their ears sat at the edge of their seats and smacked their gum and tapped their nails on the pew near the base of my neck. I knew they were scared. Grace, the unmerited favor of God. Mrs. Roberts had to take a second-grade girl to the quiet room; Father Paul had screamed her into a newborn panic attack. I made the sign of the cross. When I was a girl, I was in the habit of throwing tantrums. Wailing, vowel-laden, tear-drenched tantrums. Even up until I was the age of the tough-skinned girls behind me, though by that time the outbursts were less tantrums than ungoverned paroxysms. Another mother may have considered it a mental illness, or even an annoyance, but my mother considered it a calling. She was determined not to repress my feelings but instead to find a physical language I could whittle my explosive feelings down to. My mother was a very large lady, much taller than my father. She would arrive at my side and whisper, “Undo the room, Olivia. It’s going to be okay.” The idea of the exercise was for me to scan the objects of the room and reconfigure them to their original state. The pews we stood over, restored to their towering oak woodland. Father Paul’s wool robe, knotted on the skin of a sheep. The candle, a scaly honeycomb. Johnny, across the pews from me, rocked from one foot to the other. If you could pack everything your body had been before it had become you into this church room, it wouldn’t fit. Catholics can be very averse to decentering the present moment, the present body. I don’t fall into those young pits of passion anymore, nor do I try to figure out what they were. If nothing else, I consider them my first lesson in mysteries and an early understanding that not everything is in our control. Father Paul pounded his fist on the podium, and the children kept their eyes on him, whether they were really looking or not. ✷ The boys’ punishment had been to spend lunch and recess with a teacher for the rest of the semester. I volunteered. After eating, they were to pull out their homework and work in silence. Xavier always split his bologna sandwich with Johnny, who never brought lunch except one Friday when he had a hot dog sliced open with Kraft cheese melted down the middle. The boys devoured it; I nearly vomited. During those lunches, I played old movies on the projector. Casablanca, Vertigo. I taught them how to play solitaire, and we sat at the three desks in the front of the room, playing our cards, our faces glowing with the shifting black-and-white shades of the movie screen. Johnny stayed at St. Anthony the Great two more months until his mother pulled him out. The day before Thanksgiving holiday—the last time I saw Johnny—he told me Father Paul was stuffing their mailbox with complaints and reminders and bills, and she was sick of the bullshit. With no more Johnny, the administration allowed Xavier freedom from our teacher lunches, though I’d just see him pacing the blacktop and every once and a while stooping down to tie his shoes. My job felt aimless once Johnny was gone. I had relegated the other children to the background, and so I felt very invisible most days. I flung my lessons out my mouth and watched them fizzle in the ears of the schoolkids. Sometimes I didn’t remember the sentence I said before and would keep talking to make sure no one was listening. I went to confession at my church across town and prayed with my priest to fix my poor performance as a teacher. I could see his creased forehead behind the black lace screen dividing our faces inside the confessional. I always found it strange that we sat during the sacrament, hidden from each other, only to stand at the end to give each other a hug. It felt like a lazy formality, conceived when private manners became trendy. He said I acted as if Johnny was a child of mine, dead too early, and asked if I was on birth control. In college, I took an introductory class on literary theory. The professor coughed a lot and taught sitting down, which I liked. He said words like ideology and machismo and phenomenological. Words absent in my life until then, and I loved it; look at me now. Not to say I was good at it. I thought every paradox was an imitation of the Holy Trinity, but sometimes it is just not. That was the best thing I learned in college, that not everyone thinks like you do. That felt like grace. Though I eventually specialized in Southern Lit where the Holy Trinity did hide, more often than not. One of those theory classes, the professor lectured on schisms in Marxism. He told us to pretend we were standing on a cliff and that there was a rope dangling over the edge. One Marxist says if you think about the sturdiness of the rope a lot and trust the evidence that it would hold you, then you believe in the rope. The other Marxist disagrees and says that thinking about the rope and trusting the evidence for its strength isn’t enough to believe in the rope. The only way to prove that you believe in the rope is to grab onto it and step off the cliff. The professor kicked his socked feet out onto his desk and said the rope represented ideology—though it looked more like prayer to me. Regardless, I was thinking about the rope and my prayers when I drove to Father Paul’s house one night after my confession. Everyone from the school’s church knew where he lived—a block away from the campus in a brick rancher. He often invited the parishioners to walk with him to his home for donuts after mass. He came to the door drunk, with a goblet in his hand. “Ms. Fontenot! A pleasure! Come in. Come in.” “Olivia,” I said, somewhat caught off guard. I was hoping to seem menacing and terrible, a chasm of surprise, for having just appeared at his house. But he, sauntering around his living room in a red velvet robe, was not awe-struck in the least. “Would you like a drink? I’m having Russian Standard. I have, also, Stoli if that is something that you fancy.” “I don’t drink.” “Oh, that’s fine. I have plenty of friends that don’t drink.” He rubbed the bald spot on the crown of his head. I took a seat on the plastic-covered armchair, and he sat on the coffee table. “I came here to talk about Johnny.” “The rat doesn’t even go to our school anymore, Olivia. What’s the matter?” “I don’t like the way you treated him. He was neglected, and he is going to turn his back on the faith now.” “He’ll come back to it years down the line. Be it because he raises a son of his own or because he ends up in prison and finds light there, I don’t know. He’ll come around to it though.” “Prison! Father Paul, how dare you. He is a boy.” “You act like you know everything, Fontenot. Sit down. Cops have brought that boy to my door thrice now. First time, he threw a brick through his little crush Charlotte’s window. Second time, I stopped asking. His mother doesn’t deal with him. Cops bring him to her, and she shuts the door in their face. Says, That’s not my son. I promise. The officers tell me these things.” He sipped from his goblet. “God knows he’ll end up somewhere.” Why am I here? I asked myself. That feeling of grabbing onto a rope you trust. For me, that is prayer. Swinging in the air, without thinking that you might fall down. For Johnny, well, if there was a rope it silently unraveled in his hands. “All the kids at the school and in the congregation are sons and daughters to me. The doors to my home are always open to him,” Father Paul said. “School! Where will he go to school! Where will he learn!” I was standing again, taut and energized. Furious that he wanted to relegate all my blame to Johnny’s mother, a woman I didn’t even know. My angry eyes drifted to all the breakables in his living room. The vodka bottle. The glass cross. The brass urn, which wasn’t necessarily breakable, but would make a scene if I threw it. “Maybe you should drink.” “Father Paul!” “Oh, shut up. I make that joke to the Sisters all the time.” I picked up his goblet. It reminded me of the jeweled Fabergé eggs I saw once in a history museum. I listened to the headset’s audio guide explain through the static that the imperial eggs were given by the Russian tsars to their wives for Easter. The first egg of this tradition opened to reveal a golden yolk, which opened to a miniature hen, which opened to a diamond and ruby replica of the imperial crown. Russian nesting style. The hen and the crown are allegedly lost, though I am certain someone during some hidden history found them. “Olivia, why are you religious?” Father Paul asked me. I considered telling him that I wasn’t, and rousing him to fire me, just to screw him. I considered, also, seeing what his drunkenness had to say about the rope or that lost Fabergé hen or Lenny’s dead mouse, but instead I just said, “It is everything that I know.”

emergeliteraryjournal.com

I. Breakfast: button mushroom toast with lion’s mane coffee The mushrooms swimming in my bloodstream detect the cancer cells attacking my body and—full of precision, finesse—swallow them whole. You are safe, they tell me. The mushrooms used to live in my stomach, tucked between glistening pink walls. They used to travel down my digestive tract, tingling, tickling. Now they are in every meal, my skin growing a layer of fuzzy-soft hair like their round caps, their velvety stalks. My system works on fungal fuel, my veins colored the white of mycelium. Esophagus lined with a soothing patina of spores. Thank you for saving me, I tell the mushrooms, taking a break from morning toast and coffee to touch my breasts before the bathroom mirror. To knead the dimpled flesh this way and that, looking for discoloration, lumps. II. Lunch: cream of wild mushroom soup, topped with pan-seared portobello “You know not all mushrooms can prevent cancer, right? Even if we assume any food can, in fact, prevent a disease we still know nearly nothing about.” “You’re mansplaining again,” I tell my brother from another mother during our monthly lunch meeting, avoiding his stare. I don’t think he is, but I need to divert, deflect attention from myself. The mushrooms move within my belly, my bones. I can feel them whispering, mushy tendrils urging me to tread carefully, to not let him reveal to me information that might stress me. Stress isn’t good for the body after all. “If anything, I’m doctor-splaining,” my brother from another mother says, absently fixing the collar of his white coat. We don’t meet each other as much as we used to since the hospital hired him, my teaching job fired me. I twirl my spoon in my soup bowl. The mushrooms inside are eager to join the horde of me, strengthen their fungal ranks, their phalanges fighting against cells autophagus, hereditary. Mutant and degenerate, like people on the news call people like me. I stare at an agaricus slice, floating slimy and unappetizing for once, almost like a fishtail in the lukewarm broth. “So what kind of mushrooms?” I ask, unable to control my known compulsions. My brother from another mother talks about the fungi used in traditional herbal medicine. No peer-reviewed studies, he cautions. No corroborated evidence. The mushrooms inside me revolt, roaring about how I need them, searing my veins with their moldy rage. My mouth fills with soil-filthy water. He stops mid-lecture about the chemicals of store-bought varieties. Eyes softening, hand reaching out. The eyes we share, the hands we do not. “Hey,” my brother from another mother says. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be there for you at her one-year memorial. I know my relationship with her wasn’t the best toward the end, but I could have—” “Shut up,” I say. Hands clasped over my ears to block out the information that might stress me. The mushrooms are silent as a death shroud, a grave. III. Dinner: chestnut mushrooms in white sauce over baker’s yeast dough Over a solitary dinner, I schedule three new oncologist appointments. They have to be in a different city. Every doctor and medical technician in the area has stopped being understanding after I showed up at their office several days in a row, demanding they test me for new growth, fruiting cells and bodies. The mushrooms are a shield, but even the strongest defense formations have their blind spots. I stare at my dinner plate and remember my mother teaching me how to make mushroom pie with cheese and phyllo while my brother—her stepson—visited his other mother. Her fork punching holes in the pie ‘til it resembled a hand perforated by nurse-needles. She insisted I wear a scarf around my hair when I was in her kitchen. She didn’t have to. Her head was shiny as a white mushroom cap wiped gently with a wet towel, stripped of its fur. I no longer cover my head when I cook, wanting the reminder when I find hair in the food that I still have mine. I choke the hair down, hoping to grow another layer of insulation inside my gut. Why did you fail her? I ask the mushrooms. She put her faith in you. Don’t you know how precious that is? How dare you squander it? The mushrooms don’t answer. When my pulse pumps in my ears, it’s only my red blood, free of snake oil, mushroom serum.

CW: cannibalism, horror. Obviously. *** Salutations, friend! Apologies for waiting on your doorstep, but you weren’t in when I first called, and I wanted to catch you when you got home. If I could have but a moment of your time to—pardon, come again? Oh no! No, good God, I’m not a Mormon, nor a car salesman. Nothing like that. This is about a purchase you tried to make on the twenty-eighth of June, this year, from Neil’s Delicatessen on Cumberly Row— Ah, that’s got your attention. Now sir, don’t panic, don’t get so pale. I’m not with the police. Take a breath and put on a smile, there’s a gentleman. You’ve forgotten to unlock your door, by the way. Better turn that key and we can take this conversation inside, don’t you think? What a lovely house you have, sir. Flawless Georgian fireplace, and enough paintings for a museum. Beautiful, tasteful. I’m particularly fond of this living room wallpaper. Adore these hand-painted cranes, a stunning colour. Is this a Graham & Brown design, by any chance? Ah, Milton & King. Of course. Must admit, I do approve of that choice. And these sofas—earn a fair bit, do you, sir? Quite right, none of my business indeed. I hold my hands up to being a nosy fella. But no need for insults, sir. I’m not here to blackmail you, if that’s what you fear. I suppose I’d best address the matter at hand, before you up and have a heart attack. Now then. On the twenty-eighth of June, you made enquiries of the good Neil Gazers, Esq., owner of Neil’s Delicatessen on Cumberly Row, about the prospect of acquiring exotic meat. Is that, or is that not, accurate and correct? Struck dumb, eh? Never mind, sir, never mind; your face tells it all. And we heard it from Neil himself—he’s one of us—that you’d been round. Which is why I’m here. I suppose you must have heard the rumors, the little whispers in those elite clubs you’re so fond of, about Neil’s Delicatessen. For a man like yourself, wealthy and widely travelled, purveyor of exquisite dining and unusual culinary experiences, it’s only natural to feel that guilty curiosity, that questing after the ultimate experience . . . human flesh. Especially in this day and age, when other kinds of meat are so increasingly rare. Trust me, sir, I know all about it. You’re a man after my own heart. In fact, you might say there are a few other men who share your interests, your craving for the exotic. Enough of us that we have formed a little subscription-based club. One which I am here, today, to formally invite you to. If you’ll permit me sir, I’d like to offer you this information leaflet, it’s quick enough to read. *** THE COLD SHOULDER CLUB “Did you hear about the cannibal who was late for dinner? He got the cold shoulder!” WHO WE ARE * An anonymous group of individuals, singularly united by our quest to push the boundaries of culinary arts, even in these lean and difficult times. * Membership by invitation only. Invitations given out based on group consensus. * All club activities require utmost secrecy and discretion. HOW THIS WORKS * All members must contribute an initial joining fee of £3,000, and a further subscription of £500, payable each month. * Every month, you will be sent a deluxe recipe box straight to your door, containing recipe suggestions, choice cuts of exotic meat, and carefully curated ingredients. Home-cooked delights in the privacy of your own kitchen means discretion is guaranteed. * If you are still a member in six months’ time, you’ll be invited to a highly discreet dinner party, location TBC one day prior. * Attendance is encouraged but not mandatory. This will be a truly gourmet experience! * Menu selection will be sent out via text, also one day prior. * £5,000 for the dinner party will be payable on the door, cash only * Bon appétit, monsieur! NOTA BENE The CSC cannot be held responsible for any legal difficulties that its members incur as a result of careless activities. We ask that you exercise discretion and intelligence, and any member seen to be behaving in a risky or problematic manner will be expelled. *** A joke, sir? I should think not, this is serious business. You did not seem to find it so funny a topic when standing in Neil’s Delicatessen, hat crushed in your hand and sweating out every word. Why should it be funny now? Perhaps you think the worldwide food shortage a joke, too. I assure you it is not, having once had agricultural shares myself. The Livestock Pandemic grows worse every day, and that’s not even counting the aggressive grain-hoarding going on by certain organisations. You may not be aware, since such things are beneath men like us, but a majority of the population has been unable to afford meat for almost four years. Yes, sir, that’s right, it has been that long. Four whole years! Bread and vegetables are quickly going the same way, and unless some of those embargos lift in short order, it’ll be nothing but nutrition gruel for the masses. I dare speculate that in a year or two, even we shall be raising our eyebrows at the cost of beef. Of course, the funny thing—and this is a joke, of sorts—is that human life remains as cheap and accessible as ever. Your average human has as little worth as a cow, while being in better nick than those poor, diseased animals. Ironic, since they are little better than cattle themselves, most of them; stupid, greedy, always reaching for handouts. And at least cattle have a purpose, to feed their keepers, whereas such folk give nothing back to society. I see by the glint in your eye that you agree. I suppose you must, or you’d never have sought out Neil’s Delicatessen in the first place. Life goes on, eh? Those who can afford dining experiences must continue to have them. Those who cannot are a part of the problem. Social waste, you might say. Tell you what, sir. I’ll leave you with this complimentary Welcome Box, which includes recipes and a sample of our finest kidneys. Flavour like you’ve never had—you’ll be licking the pan! Say again? Oh, no worries. You don’t have to stress about any of that, sir. We might dine on the poor, but we don’t dine poorly, if you take my meaning. Only non-smoking, non-drinking, vegetarian specimens, for utmost flavour and toxin-free flesh. Anyhow, the time is getting along, and I’m sure we’re both busy men. How about I leave this Welcome Box right here on your couch, along with the leaflet, and you can have a think about whether the Cold Shoulder Club is right for you. No need to make any commitment! At this stage, it’s all free of cost. I’ll give you my number and you can let me know if you want anything set up. No, no, don’t rise. I shall see myself out. Bon appétit, monsieur! *** Welcome Box: Sample Recipe Baker Beans on Toast This delightful dish blends two classics—baked beans on toast, and cooked kidney on toast—to bring you kidney (beans) on toast. Combine staple cupboard goods, quality human flesh, and rationing ingredients you can legally obtain yourself to create this authentic, filling, and delicious meal! Bakers are a tasty, nutrient-rich member of the commoner class, who often enjoy good diets and are typically found in hygienic environments, making them a quality meal. *** 6 baker kidneys, about 375g/13oz, skinned 50g/2oz of hutter (human butter) 2 tbsp sifted roach flour Salt and pepper, to season 1 lab-grown onion, thinly sliced 1 tbsp synthesised tomato powder 1 tbsp Apocalypse Mustard™ 300 ml sterilised water Slices of bee bread More hutter, for spreading A handful of wild parsley, thyme, and rosemary (optional, dependent on local growing restrictions) See overleaf for cooking method. Welcome, sir! Terrifically pleased to see you, I must say. The location can be quite difficult to access, but I promise it will be well worth your trip. We do have such a wonderful treat for you tonight. Speaking of, have you enjoyed your exotic food boxes, these past six months? We are always open to feedback, improving the service as we go. Heh, that’s what we like to hear, sir! No complaints indeed. I think other customers would agree with you, if I might say so without sounding braggartly. We’re nearing fifty subscribers, between you and me. Which is not a bad number at all for a niche little start-up. What’s that? Ah, now sir, I can’t tell you where we source our meat from. Top secret information, that is. Rest assured that our quality never suffers, and there’s no shortage of supply. Do step this way, sir, and watch your noggin. The ceiling beams are a little low, I’m afraid. Just down this hallway. Shall I take your coat? Ah—here we are. You’ll be dining as our only client tonight; we consider it too risky for subscription members to meet in the flesh. Hope that does not disappoint too much, sir. If it’s any consolation, you will not be alone. Unless you desire to dine in private, which is of course your privilege. But in case you care for company, I thought I would introduce you these lovely folks here, who help run the Cold Shoulder Club. This man to your right, giving you the shy wave, is Neil himself, owner of the fantabulous Neil’s Delicatessen. He sources ingredients for the boxes, does the packing and postage, and keeps the show running. In fact, these exotic subscription boxes were Neil’s idea entirely! Ah, he’s bashful now, don’t mind his blushes. Neil took his inspiration from the glorious past, you see. Back in the day, when food was a trifle more plentiful, regular folk could get all sorts of subscription services to their door. Exotic veg, fruit, regular meat, coffee, beer, on and on. I suppose we shan’t soon see days like that again. But on with the introductions. This gentleman to your left is Todd. Not his Christian name, just a bit of an in-joke, there; he’s our butcher, you see. Oh, is sir unfamiliar with Sweeney Todd, the fictional character? Well, never mind, it’s a rather old-school story. I daresay they don’t teach it much in schools anymore. Might give folks ideas. Penny, at the far end of the table, is our resident chef and recipe genius. Brilliant woman, endlessly creative, got a good mind for puns. We do love a recipe pun in this club. She’s careful with pennies, too, like her namesake, and looks after our accounts. And then there’s me, but naturally you already know me, here to bring in fresh customers and be a face for the friendly folk in this room. Do take a seat, we’ll be serving soon. The finest haggis, neeps, and tatties you’ll ever have eaten, if I can make so bold a claim. And while you’re waiting, might I recommend a glass of Spätburgunder with your meal? Genuine stuff, bottled thirty years ago before the grapes all died. Or possibly a dram of Lagavulin whisky? Even older and rarer, that one! Quite agree sir, it simply has to be the wine. I shall go an open a bottle at once. Bon appétit, monsieur! *** Human Haggis This quintessential Scottish classic has been missing from menus for almost twenty years, following the large-scale sheep culls in the early days of the Livestock Pandemic. For a while, various eateries served a lacklustre vegetarian alternative, until skyrocketing prices of grain, including oats, put paid to the recipe entirely. Fortunately, here in the Cold Shoulder Club, we have been developing and adapting a version of this underrated dish to showcase the unique and complex flavours of human flesh. Try hu-mutton, and you’ll never go back to regular mutton ever again! (Not that you have a choice, since the lambs are all silent.) The trick with human meat, as always, is to select a specimen free from toxic lifestyle choices. This is particularly relevant given that haggis involves eating offal. Almost every human these days is vegetarian through necessity, but unfortunately, smoking and drinking rates have quintupled in recent decades. If you cannot find a single human individual who is teetotal, non-smoking, and gets regular cardio exercise, you may have to source your ingredients from multiple specimens. *** 1 human stomach (young) 1 human liver (teetotal) 1 human heart (runner) ½ lb human kidneys ¼ lb hutter 3 lab-grown onions, peeled 1 tsp synthesised coriander powder ½ tsp synthesised mace 1 tbsp Apocalypse Mustard™ 1 lb cloned oatmeal Salt & pepper Assorted herb collection (provided) See overleaf for cooking method. *** Going somewhere, were you? No need for haste, sir, do sit down. Yes, I know your meal is finished, but our business with you is not yet complete. I’m afraid I have been a little conservative with the truth. My deepest apologies. This club is not quite what you think it is. Earlier this evening, you asked me where we source the meat for our subscription boxes. The answer is quite simple, sir: we source them from our clients. Neil finds new clients through his delicatessen and word-of-mouth rumors, we get them hooked on our delicious subscription service, and after six months we invite them a private meal where we humanely end their life, and send them out in little packages to other subscribers. Such a quaint look of confusion! Such an endearing stutter! Sir has a flair for the dramatic, I do think. Let me spell it out unequivocally. You are here to be butchered, you scum, parasite, money pig, bank grubber, greedy bastard landlord, and useless pen pusher. For the first time in your worthless life, you’ll serve a higher purpose. Is that clear enough? Shall I go on? I think I shall. Having feasted for six months upon other rich bastards, it’s your turn to fill the pot. So we will cut your throat and hang you by the ankles till the blood runs out, then parcel up your body into chunks and send you out to other monsters on our little list. Your fellow subscribers will then receive you in their monthly box, with recipes to fillet your flesh into juicy steaks and crisp your skin until it’s golden and crunchy. They’ll stew you in your own juices and wring your intestines into sausages; they’ll turn your fat into a delicious spread for toast as they boil your bones for a luscious stock. Not a pound of you shall go to waste. Even the eyes shall have a use—delicious when pickled, I’m told, and medicinal to boot. Eventually, they too shall come to us, and share your death. This is what we do, sir, and the entire reason the club was formed. We catch reprehensible pigs like yourself and take you one by one by one to slaughter. We cook and feed the rich to the rich. Oh, spare me your screeching moralisations! Yes, it’s a scam, but so what? The money we charge is nothing to your kind, mere pocket change, but it’s everything to us. It will pay for vegetables and honest foods to feed my children. My children, sir, who will grow up in a world that you ruined, unable to eat properly ever again because bastards like yourself have hoarded all the meat and embargoed all the grain and raised all the prices. All while squatting on your piles of money like dragons. We may be peasants in comparison, but enough peasants can slay a dragon. Really, sir, do stop running about and screaming. High cortisol levels will tinge the taste of your flesh. That door is locked; you won’t get through it. Those windows are reinforced, so don’t damage your hands trying to beat against them, there’s a fellow. One of my subscribers is fond of barbequed fingers, but only if they’re not bashed and bruised. Besides, any minute now and the sedatives in that wine should kick in. These are your last moments, sir, and I suggest you spend them with dignity. It’s a better death than we ever gave cows, and it’s certainly no worse than whatever death you’d have given to your hypothetical victim. For God’s sakes, stop the sniveling. No, you cannot have any bloody mercy! Wouldn’t you have killed and eaten one of us? Haven’t you eaten your fellow gentlemen, six boxes’ worth? Wasn’t this in your original purpose in going to Neil’s Delicatessen, in paying the joining fee, in coming here tonight? Can you tell me you’re a good person, sir, or that this is any worse than the fate you’d have given to another human being? Where was your mercy, then? Yes, that’s more like it. Kneel gently, as if in church, and let the wall support your weight. Rest your eyes, lean your head upon your chest. It’s nearly over, and you won’t feel a thing. That much I can promise. We are not total monsters, after all. Bon appétit, monsieur. *** Recipe 3: A Rich (Bastard) Stew Method: First, catch yourself a rich bastard. Invite him to an elitist club where he is told that his “need” for meat will now be filled by consuming impoverished citizens, and once you have his trust and have taken several months’ worth of his money, butcher his corpse to feed the other bastards. Let them eat themselves to death. *** 50g/2oz of hutter 4 oz human bacon strips 1 human leg, skinned and boned, cut into 1½” pieces 4 cups human bone broth (made from the leg you’ve deboned) 1/2 Tbsp sea salt for the meat, plus 1 tsp for stew 1 tsp black pepper for the meat, plus ½ tsp for stew ¼ cup all-purpose flour or gluten-free flour* 1 large lab-grown onion, diced 4 Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-Garlic cloves, minced 1½ lbs Pseudo Potatoes, halved or quartered into small pieces 4 Reconstituted Carrots, peeled and cut into thick pieces 1 lb farmed mushrooms, thickly sliced 1½ cups of Penfolds Grange wine (provided) 1 tbsp tomato paste See overleaf for cooking method.

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Five miles from town, just me, my rifle, the deer blind, the white field getting deeper the more powder falls. Here’s me in a pile of myself, one foot corked at a ninety-degree angle, still caught in the bottom rung of the slick ladder. There’s the vast pale dark held up by the skinny pines reaching into the nowhere. All the whistling, all the roar, my rifle already buried in the fresh white, my face windburnt, hands like lifeless fans of coral under my gloves. Get one free, pull the heel of the glove by my teeth. Search for my phone, bite tongue, taste iron, stay angry, don’t let the dark in the corners of my vision spread. Phone’s dead, of course. What was it Dad always said? *You can borrow time, but only from yourself*. My backpack gathers snow a body’s length out of reach. Inside there’s handwarmers, a roadflare, bullets, a first aid kit, Dad’s flask. The first step of this delicate procedure must be agony: lifting my twisted ankle from the rung. How can something numb hurt so much? Frozen crust of flesh around a core of molten pain. How can a leg be so heavy? I recall when I was nine, the first time I found Dad ragdolled on the floor of the garage with one of his weird books splayed on his stomach, and I tried to turn him over, tried to lift that continent of surly fat and muscle and beard. *Life doesn’t like being played with*, is what he said when woke up. Dad could fix everything. Car radios, bicycle chains, eyeglasses, shoes, everything. Just not himself. At twelve years old he told me from his hospital bed, *Everyone has their time*, and then he breathed into his silver flask and slipped it to me quick, before the nurses could see. The snow and my own weight fight me for every inch on the way to the backpack. My thumb sticks to the zipper, and the zipper takes its tithe of skin when I rip it free. Funniest thing when I find Dad’s old flask under the granola bars. It’s warm. Shouldn’t steel be cold? Shouldn’t it stick to my hand like the zipper? I’ve never drunk what’s inside, never even twisted the cap. Just kept it with me, hid first in my box of secret treasures, and then kept in my first car’s glovebox, and then dropped in my hunting bag for whatever piece of luck he wanted me to have. Dad was a Kentucky bourbon man, but now when I unscrew the cap—stubbled with just a salting of rust—the smell that oozes out surely isn’t bourbon. And what leaks into the snow isn’t the sweet amber of corn mash. Darkness fattens around the corners of my eyes. How do such skinny pines hold up so much sky? I remember to open my eyes. The world has turned, or rather I have, sat up now, my back to a tree. Fireglow kisses the feeling back into my face. Resin hisses and branches whine as they bend and snap. There’s a man across from me. Big as I am, just my same age or thereabouts. Even looks like me, except his beard is wilder. He tends the small fire with a pine branch. It’s when he smiles, and mirth etches little white crinkles around the rims of his eyes that I know. What are you doing here? He smiles wider; shows a wall of nicotine yellow. I’d ask you the same, kiddo. Seems pretty stupid to come out alone in this weather. Who do you think you are—my Dad? We both laugh; me weakly, he with vigor and so much fire in his belly that a dead man shouldn’t have. You built this fire? And splinted your leg. You should be able to walk on it, just favor the right. How are you here? It’s like I always said, you can borrow time, but only from yourself. Dad reaches across the fire and hands me the flask. He shakes it so I hear there’s still a little something left in there. Some of his life, reserved for a time of need. Son, there are always ways around these things, if you know what you’re doing, and you’re willing to give something up. I think about how Mom raged after he said no to chemo, and suddenly my hand finds feeling enough to make a fist. You left us. You let the cancer take you away from us. He doesn’t reply straight away, like there’s years of silence needs sifting through. I gave up a little time, he says. Gave up a little of what I had left so I could be there when you got grown and needed me. Listen. I can keep this fire going till morning, but when dawn comes, you’re on your own. There’s the Fish and Wildlife office a mile from here, due west. You know your directions, don’t you? I taught you that, at least. I blink to keep the dark away. I’d shout at him if I could. Outside the fire’s reach is nothing but a ravenous dark. Above my head is all black except for a few cold stars. I see me mirrored on his eyes. There’s me, grown man but still a boy so much smaller than this man my same height. I won’t make it that far, Dad. Hush, boy. You’ll feel stronger in the morning. What if I don’t? You’ll have to. Now rest up. I’ll keep this fire tended; I’ll keep the dark off you till sunup. I rest my head against the tree and let my eyes flutter shut while the hissing resin sings from the wood. Against the weight of my lids I peek open a last time, expecting it to be nothing but dark, but the fire’s still there, and so is he.