POSTS

Blue Lights and Sirens

The cattle are still agitated from the blue lights and sirens, and the wind is whipping around the wee motes of hay that they’ve churned up. I’m agitated myself, but I grape up the silage to them anyways. They ignore it. 

The yard is torn up with the weight of vehicles in it today; the police, the ambulance, the fire brigade, everyone bar the Civil Defence. 

Don’t even know the lad. The officer said he’s likely not a local, blown over by whatever wind took him, and ended up in my shed. Was an awful shock. I saw the feet first, a few foot off the ground. Didn’t need to look higher to know what would be there, wrapped around the rafters, last year’s hay stacked up behind him. Was a good cut last year, the weather held all of June. 

The lad was long gone, face mottled, the darkest purple pooled just above chin. I must have looked at him for a long minute, making sure he wasn’t one of my own. The eyes can play tricks on you when you’re given a sudden shock, they say. But all our boys are red heads, like me. Only Cormac took his mother’s brown hair, and I knew it wasn’t him. Mary will worry if she’s seen the lights. 

“Is the patient alert and breathing,” the emergency operator asked on the phone. English accent, so proper I had half a mind I was in a film. 

“No,” I said, and I’ve never known a word to land heavier. I told her, best I could, what was happening, and asked her should I try and cut him down. There was an old blade down in the midden, I told her. She asked was he definitely deceased. Deceased, not dead; her words. I said aye, and laid a hand on his. It was a block of ice, hard as one too. I’ve seen enough death to recognise it, and I told the woman as much. She said not to be doing nothing, that the emergency services were on their way. 

She was right too. The police arrived first, within minutes, then the fire brigade, lastly the ambulance, though what need there was for them I don’t know. 

Had the lad down and gone within the hour, and left with only a torn-up yard and agitated cattle to prove they were even there. That he was even there. 

I go back to the house to beat the dying light. The clocks went back last week, and it’s taken the winter with it. They’re giving a bad weekend, could get down to single figures, and I need to get the cattle drenched and fluked. That had been the plan for today, but the hours are against me. I mind the year Cormac gave me a hand. He never was one for the farming, but the other boys were away off to college and I told him he was needed. Done rightly at it too, no fuss about the needles, nor the muck, nor the shite. I could be doing with him now, all the same. 

“Mary?” I call as I break the door. “Want a cuppa?” 

She doesn’t answer, but I wasn’t really asking. It’s just a given. I run the tap until it stops spitting, then fill the kettle. I’ll not tell Mary about the trouble, she doesn’t need the upset. I decide on a chocolate digestive just in case she’s sussed something’s up. 

There’s a clang from outside, and I can see the gate to the yard blowing in the breeze, where I’ve forgotten to slide the latch. I call to Mary to let her know why I’m heading back out, and the cows whine and low as I approach, thinking I’m bringing meal or bread, their ideas of a treat. Only two of them are at the silage, but they’ll all come when hunger gets at them. I slide the bolt across on the gate, and mind the time Cormac caught his finger in it. Was only a wee lad, and the squeals of him could have woken the dead. Mary wanted to bring him to A&E, but I calmed her. Was only a bang. The nail went black and eventually fell off, but no harm done. Though, it was probably why he never warmed to the farm. He’d still help out when asked, though. 

“I’m back, Mary,” I say, but she doesn’t shout back. I lift down the cups, and place a tea bag in each, then water, and milk, sugar for Mary. I take a sip at my own, and spray the room as I spit out the rank cold tea, cursing to myself for not putting the kettle on the stove. I set it down heavy and pour the abominations down the sink. 

The kitchen falls to a quiet unease as I wait for the boil, and slowly the kettle breaks it with a low hiss that rises to a squeal. I repeat the procedure; cups, teabags, milk. The steam rises this time. 

I lift Mary’s cup and head out towards the stairs. There’s a draught coming down them, cold enough to raise goosebumps. 

“Have you the window open, Mary?” I say as I climb, eyes watching the tea wash to the brim with each step. 

She’s sitting in her chair, the window open, book on her lap, her head slumped. 

“Mary,” I say loud. She starts and looks up at me as though I’ve just ruined a lovely dream. 

“What do you want?” she says. 

“I’ve tea for you,” I say. “Will you close that window, you’re letting the heat out.”

She leans over and slides the sash down. “Ah, it was awful stuffy. Thanks,” she says as she takes the cup. “What was all the commotion about?”

“Ah, nothing to worry about,” I say. 

“I thought I saw blue lights down on the farm. Is everything alright? Is it Cormac?” she asks. 

“It’s nothing, don’t be fretting. Cormac is fine,” I lie. No point upsetting her. 

“Where is Cormac, anyways?” she asks, looking at the photograph of him on her locker.

“He’s grand, he’s in his room,” I say. She’s been asking for him a lot, more recently. The doctors say it’s common for them to fixate, and it’s probably best to tell her he’s still at home. It doesn’t even feel like a lie anymore. 

“You sleeping long?” I ask as she blows over the cup and takes a sip. 

“Ah, Pat, no sugar?” she says. 

I tut and roll my eyes in a sorry sort of way, and tell her I’ll be back. I take the sugar pot with me, and a chocolate digestive. 

“Good, good,” she says. “Love a digestive. And are you alright? You look awful pale.”

I tell her I’m grand too, and I’m going to have a cup of tea and maybe get out for a walk. She tells me she’d love to join, but really wants to finish her book. I don’t tell her she’s read it before, and before, and before. I get her a blanket for her knees, to keep the chill off her and head back downstairs. 

I down my tea in one gulp, most of it, the dregs I pour down the sink, then call up to Mary that I’ll be back soon. I grab the wee head torch one of the boys got me for Christmas last year and leave. The sun’s near low, and the evening has dragged out long and watery shadows. I haven’t a need for the torch light yet, but I know I will soon enough. The breeze has kept up, and I pull my coat a little tighter as I head out down the lane towards the road. There’s a fluttering in the hedge, a bright blue, the unnatural sort. It’s a glove, probably from the paramedics, that’s flapping about in the wind, like a hurt bird trying to get itself free. Reminds me of the time with the slurry tank, there’d been plenty of discarded gloves then too. I’d gone in after the dog, poor thing had collapsed because of the fumes, and I thought I was clever enough with holding my breath. But they must have got in somehow, because I went down too, they said. It was Cormac that went in after me. Barry Brennan had been delivering his stock ram and chanced to see it all happen. Was him that phoned for the ambulance. A lot of blue lights that day too. 

I’m out on the main road before I need the torch. There’s not too many cars about, rarely is, except for the likes of wakes and that.  

The local chapel appears out of the darkness, as though it had just been birthed into existence. They’ve the lights off, and the whole place looks empty, abandoned. The graveyard gate squeaks as I open it. 

I tread the well-worn path up the hill, past headstones that rise like crooked teeth from the soil. I know a lot of the names here, most of them. Good people. 

I slow up as I reach the back hedge, the top of the hill, where the land sprawls out into the darkness of the night. The local village glows in an orangey yellow fuzz. Little car beams move about on roads and seem too small to be real. In the far distance there’s the flash of blue, intermittent, stuttering, and I offer a silent prayer beside the empty chapel for whatever poor soul they’re heading to. I ask Cormac to go and watch over them. I don’t know if he can. I tell him his mammy misses him, and bless myself by his grave before I can wrack myself with guilt for lying to the dead. 

It’s pitch black as I walk back, and quiet once I leave the squeaking gate. I take my steps, one after another, and in the dark I can see the young lad’s feet, suspended, unstepping. I wonder where they’ll bury him, who’ll claim him, will the roads be packed with cars, and will hands be shaken and condolences offered that mean little to nothing. Will his father blame himself, and will his mother lose herself. I torment myself, wondering if I’d seen him before, in the shops, or at a match, or down the pub. Had I held a door for him to pass, or looked at him and thought him a wastrel. It’s getting cold and I pull my coat tighter nearing home. 

The warmth of the house is welcome as I enter, but I keep the coat on. Will have to check the cattle before bed after today’s antics. Mary is still in her chair, awake, holding tight to Cormac’s photograph. The book is on the floor, and the dust jacket is askew. 

“Where were you?” she asks. “I was wanting a cup of tea.”

I don’t tell her that the cup I made is sitting cold beside her. 

“Sorry, love, I’ll go and swing the kettle now. I was just up seeing Cormac.” I gesture to the outside, and she follows my hand to the window, then back to me. There’s a wrinkle on her forehead. 

“He’ll be foundered. Make sure he’s got his coat,” she says.

I tell her I will, and go to boil the kettle again. I’m outside before I realise, the latch of the gate open. The cattle groan in the dark and my torch light catches their eyes. They’re settled and content. I walk over to the hay shed, step inside. The wind is whistling through the gaps in the tin. A short strip of rope is snaked on top of a square bale. I can’t look up. 

I whisper his name to the darkness. 

“Cormac.”

 

Seán McNicholl is an award-winning writer and GP from Armagh. He is the winner of the Hammond House International Literary Prize, and his work has been shortlisted for the CRAFT Short Fiction Prize, and longlisted for the Bridport Prize and the Fish Prize. His stories have appeared in Epoque Press, The Storms, Gemini, Fahmidan, Frazzled Lit, The Belfast Review, and Intrepidus Ink. He is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and has been nominated for Best of the Net and Best Microfiction. Find out more at seanmcnicholl.com.

A Kind, Caring Person

Where the shotgun hit, the tree is black, like the bottom of an old oven. Jackson blinks in the mother tree’s wound, his eye framed by the clean opening. Levi vomits. To know Jackson is to know this feeling. Dehydration heavy in the face. Brain matter lost for good. With Jackson, it’s always been like this. Levi has no excuse.

Jackson holds up the baby, spit bubbling in the toothless face.

“This is Teresa’s baby,” he says.

It’s wrapped in a shirt from a theme park, a place where Levi, as a boy, had great memories. Under a roller coaster, the baby’s hand opens and closes.

He waves Jackson off, hands still gripping his knees. He thinks of Teresa, her whippet canisters, the roots of her blonde hair going black. Even if Jackson isn’t the father, he and Teresa are perfect together.

“I know whose baby that is,” he says. 

“Let’s go leave it at the fire station.”

“Bad.”

The night before, the house was full of people like them, the lost, ruined debris of the town. The place belongs to a man they don’t know. He has a hideous concave chest and works at the morgue. He doesn’t care who’s in his house, what they’re doing. He is one who glows for the anarchy of strangers.

Jackson had gotten drunk and was threatening to kill himself. Levi didn’t like the way he looked; his face red and bright, features like a smearing of paint.

“Don’t wake the neighbors?” Jackson cried. “I’ll wake the fucking neighbors.”

He went inside and brought out a shotgun. As he lined up the sight, the tree in a bullseye, his shadow was a bonfire swell against the house, a phantom son of all that came before. He fired. Bodies crushed to the narrow hall, the jaundiced bathroom. The lights snapped off and there was silence. But the man with a concave chest was laughing. Shirtless, his thumb stroked the sinkhole of bone and skin. Levi wanted to punch him. He’d never done something like that before.

Minutes later, a police car crawled over the blacktop, automatic and lifeless. Then it was gone.

When the gun fired, Levi thought Jackson had shot himself. It had been a relief.

 

Levi doesn’t believe in God. Call it rebellion, something he might outgrow. But now, he’s begging God to make this feeling stop. Make it go away and he’ll never drink again.          

Jackson reenacts how he shot the tree. He squares his aim over the bonfire pit, ashen ground where heat and colors of life had once refined the night. He yells boom. The baby laughs in a carrier.

To the small human, Jackson explains guns and photosynthesis. In the future, he says, all the trees of the Amazon will be cut down. The earth will have no more oxygen. The baby might live to see it. Jackson won’t.

He calls over. “Are you mad at me?”

“No,” Levi says.

“I love you man.”

“I know it.”

“Say it back.”

“I love you, Jackson.”

At a gas station, Levi buys egg sandwiches, paying with dimes and quarters. It’s what he has. Against the rainbow wall of cigarettes, he feels the clerk’s pity.

Walking back, shame turns to claustrophobia, then ambition—a feeling he’s never quite learned to get his fingers around. In his mind, a plan rotates. It blurs. He and Jackson can fix all the bad. Enough of this crashing they don’t ask for, their lives a lift and tumble of white lottery balls.

Upstate, a network of factories build half the RVs in the world. His cousin is a floorman there. The work has given him a lot: good money, a good trailer, a good wife from Mexico. Levi and Jackson can have this life. Like his cousin, they’ll go to the Mexican dance halls, the windows strung with paper lights of pink and blue, the scent of straw and perfume in the air. As a trumpet guides the dancing crowds, Levi will meet a girl in a ribbon skirt, and they will kiss and hook their bodies on the gravel outside.

He has to say it. They have to get out of here. If not the RV plants, then somewhere else. Anywhere. For the first time in their friendship, Levi will be direct and honest with Jackson.

They eat on the steps of the house, the baby in Jackson’s lap. Spines curving, they lick up the grease and wax paper. The meal tastes of being foraged.

Levi is quiet. Everything burns for it, but he can’t get out the words. Losing Jackson means losing a part of himself.

With its eyes, the baby tracks the falling breadcrumbs. It makes a nervous jerk, resembling something like a hooked fish.

As Jackson readies a bottle with formula, he says, “Biscuit.” The baby points at the house and he says “Mortgage.” It points at his face. He strokes his chin.

“Handsome,” he says. “I used to be handsome.”

 

Every town is the story of a family who once owned it. Theirs is no different. Long before Levi and Jackson, a rich family built a mason jar factory on the south end. For the town, it brought natural gas. For the family, it brought money.

When Levi was a boy, the family moved to California, taking their fortune with them. The factories shut down, but the town never did. If it wasn’t for those glass jars, everything and everyone he’s known would never have existed. No mason jars; no Jackson. Maybe that would be a good thing.

All that’s left of the family is the campus, one of their donations to the state. Like molars in a jaw, the structures of orange brick and white gable pack in a great stillness on the edge of the town’s river. It is a mummy of a world no longer.

Down the curving walkways of the campus, under the shade of tulip trees and oak, Levi and Jackson carry the baby. The college girls are pretty, and Levi can’t find a footing in the crowds. He worries that he looks like a drunk.

They reach a clock tower at the center of the quad. A beam of sunshine hits the limestone, striking the baby in the face. It whimpers. Jackson folds over the carrier.

“Why are we here?” Levi asks.

“To see the aunt,” Jackson says. “Teresa told me to visit her.”

He’s grinning. Levi doesn’t believe him.

On the sight lines, heavy doors of wood and brass swing open, a sound like soft thunder. These doors were closed to Levi a long time ago. He doesn’t know how it happened.

“I’m broke,” Jackson says. “More broke than I’ve ever been.”

“I know that, Jackson. I’m broke.”

“You know what’s in there? Purses.”

“Jackson.”

“Look at this cute fucking baby. It’s a gold mine.”

The quad empties and the carillon plays. A corkscrew of heat travels up Levi’s back. They stand looking at one another. Levi turns away.

“Are you my friend?”

“Jackson.”

“Say you’re my friend.”

“I’m your friend.”

“We’re going to do this.”

“This is bad.”

“This is nothing.”

Inside, the office is monochrome and has the icy air of a butcher shop. Out of the cubicles, Teresa’s aunt and her coworkers poke up their heads. They are shaped like pears.

“Jackson!” the aunt cries.

“Did someone order a baby with extra cheese?” Jackson says.

The women sway over, Velcro shoes hissing on the carpet. Their excitement over a witless baby is depressing. It occurs to Levi that maybe his life isn’t so bad.

“I’m the great aunt,” the aunt clucks above the straining, round face. “Am I the greatest?”

Cubicle by cubicle, Levi empties all the cash he can. Anything painful to lose—jewelry, credit cards—is left behind. He’s methodical and steady, and thinks he’s finally found something he’s good at.

About to undo a latch of fake gold, he feels like he’s being watched. He whirls. At a door frame, a young boy looks back.

Levi meets the boy’s gaze. He crouches. He sees himself, a face like his, sculpted by a million things unsaid. Does the boy come here after school? It must be so confusing the way mom solders down the moments of her life. Better to imagine race cars or rocket launches. When that gets boring, try to count the ceiling panels.

Levi holds out the cash. The bills fold like a wilted flower.

“I can handle this,” he says. “I’m strong enough for the both of us.”

Him and Jackson leave. Spilling back to campus, the day is white, overexposed. Yes, it’s big money, enough for a month of food and gas, the deposit for a new place to live. But Levi feels off, as if something has been cut out of him. This is the Jackson he needs to get away from.

The baby starts to hack and cry. It’s learning to not like close bodies and cold air, voices it doesn’t recognize. Jackson grunts at it like a mule. The crying stops. From the carrier, Jackson lifts the baby and goes skipping over the quad. Its laugh grows louder with each bounce in his arms.

“We’re rich you fucking nerds,” Jackson yells.

A long time ago, Levi saw a documentary about the great-grandson of the richest man who ever lived. All that inheritance, and what did he do? He went to Papua New Guinea to study the tribes, islanders who live in huts and wear face paint. On one trip, he disappeared. They say the islanders killed him and ate his body. As the credits rolled, Levi realized something. Money—no matter the sum—lowers to the imagination of the person who has it.

“Levi,” Jackson shouts over the quad. “I want to get drunk.”

 

The Blue Ox is an old factory bar. At the entrance, a 20-foot statue of Paul Bunyan is at guard. The paint is chipped, the colors petrified, an entree for dozens of winters. In his gaze, Bunyan looks not to the empty jar factory, but down the railway marking the center of town.

Levi’s grandpa had a lot of stories about the Blue Ox. When the factory was still open, a beer cost only a quarter. Station wagons and union-boss Cadillacs rumbled in the parking lot. In the basement, illegal bingo was known to end by knife fight. If a man was very drunk, his shift was over. If he was half drunk, his shift was about to begin.

It makes Levi nervous, the thought of going there. It’s a time, a place that doesn’t belong to them. But Jackson begs to go. It’s a short walk from where they are.

Inside, it’s only the real alcoholics. These men reek of a golden anniversary of cigarette smoke. In their stiff joints and dusted flannel, the pain is implicit. It’s enough to make Levi wince.

The bartender puts a hand up. No kids allowed.

“You have to let the baby in,” Jackson says. “Who do you think is buying?”

The bartender has a gunshot laugh. He tells them to sit. They drink and tear off bits of french fries. When they place them in the baby’s wet mouth, its face lights up as if it’s found the meaning of life.

Mementos from the factory days ring the wood panels of the bar. Photographs. News clippings. Deformed mason jars. On the bar top, a plastic lid covers a row of engraved silver tags. They bear the names of men, the dates they lived. Levi thinks of death.

“Best bar in the world,” Jackson shouts at the bartender.

A bell rings at the door and they turn. It’s a face they recognize.

“Fuck,” Jackson says.

Billy swings into the room, eyeing the wall of beer and liquor. Levi enjoys watching someone who doesn’t know they’re being watched. Eventually, Billy’s gaze falls on them. He swears under his breath. Maybe it’s true. Maybe it’s not. But Teresa says Billy is the baby’s father.

He rushes at Jackson and pins him to the bar. Struggling, Billy’s arm around his neck, Jackson lifts a beer to his lips. Insults break in Billy’s voice. He says something about pride and family. It sounds so funny to Levi. Around here, only idiots care about that.

He watches on. The two men sigh and twist, and after a while, Billy gives up and shoves Jackson to the bar.

Levi explains their day, that Teresa gave Jackson the baby to go and visit the aunt. Still angry, Billy winds the floor like a fighter in a ring, nose flaring, elbows loose. The baby hacks and bleats anew.

“It doesn’t like you,” Jackson says.

“Be nice,” Billy snaps.

He takes the baby, trying to cradle it. He’s no natural, not like Jackson.

“You’re a fucking bum,” Billy says. “The worst of them.”

“Thanks, Billy,” Jackson shakes his empty bottle at the barman. “I had no idea.”

Billy needles at Levi. Why is he always with Jackson? Why are they best friends? Every terrible moment—Jackson’s talk of suicide, his taking without asking—plays in Levi’s head. He’s afraid to say anything. He can’t disappoint either of them.

“I’d like to go north,” Levi says. “My cousin could get us jobs in the RV factories.”

“Sounds like the worst god damn idea I’ve ever heard,” Jackson says. “Levi just wants to marry a Mexican.”

“Those are good jobs,” Billy’s warm at the thought. “Levi will do fine. But you’d fuck it up.”

“If I’m lucky, he’ll fuck off,” Levi says. “Go give the clap to the Amish.”

“You hate me,” Jackson says.

“I should join,” Billy says. “I’m broke as hell. Not like you two of course. But still.”

“Leave. I’ll raise your kid.”

“Be nice. Last warning.”

“‘Billy? Goo-goo-ga-ga. Who the fuck is Billy?’”

“Last warning Jackson.”

Jackson gets up. He lifts his beer and wraps an arm around Billy. He coos down at the baby, calming it.

“We’re not so different, Billy,” Jackson says. “We both love Teresa. That means I love you.”

“Alright,” Billy laughs.

“Say you love me.”

“I’m not going to say it.”

Jackson screams, his voice fracturing, “I love you!”

Billy throws him off, nearly dropping the baby. There’s a long pause in the room. The baby starts to whimper. The ice machine rattles. Levi can feel it. It’s a pressing intensity. All the drunks, the bartender too, look at Jackson. How often do they see a man with a choice like that, where a moment clamors for decision? Fight or flight. Buy or sell. Win or lose.

Jackson drops to his seat.

“You look like an idiot,” he says. “It’s not even your baby.”

A bottle sails in the air, catching Jackson on the hairline. It makes a deep, hollow sound but doesn’t break. Billy places the baby on the bar top. In a smooth, geometrical motion, he draws a hook that strikes Jackson on the ear, blowing him to the ground. There’s clapping from the drunks and bartender. Jackson fingers at his left eye. Blood streams out of it, leaving his nails red. He rocks by the end of his spine, but Billy, precise and gone of anger, hacks on his cheekbone.

Billy turns up to Levi.

“Hit him,” he says. “Hit him. You never wanted to hit this guy? Him?”

Levi looks at the baby. Tiny pellets of skin run over its nose and cheeks. How unformed it is. The pink softness makes him sick, like an open wound he’s afraid to touch.

What comes next is reeling and slow. Levi crouches. Jackson doesn’t see him coming. His knuckles pass over Jackson’s face and they pass back. He does it again. A weight presses into his back. Jackson looks away, his hair tangled and damp. The wildness in him is gone.

It makes Levi furious. More violence—kicking, stomping—rise out of him. He’s blind by it, and he doesn’t stop until Jackson’s features are writhing, the ugliness set like that of a corpse.

When he’s satisfied, Levi falls to the bar, exhausted. Pain shoots through his hand. He’s never felt anything like it.

Billy has gone. The baby lays on the bar, a pool of beer soaking its diaper. It wails in the dreadful silence, a raw nerve-ending of a new life all alone.

Jackson struggles up. They look at each other. Steadying himself on the bar, Jackson spits on the floor.

“Are you happy?” he says.

“No,” Levi says.

“I have to tell you something. But promise me you won’t get mad.”

“Jackson.”

“Teresa doesn’t know I have the baby.”

“You kidnapped it?”

“You’re mad at me.”

Levi steps back. The high wall of bottles, their colors—red, white, and green—looks different. He tries to see the level of booze within each tube of glass. He thinks of all the alcohol he’s ever drunk. How many bottles could it fill? How many rooms? Jackson hasn’t done this to him. He’s done it to himself.

“Are you my friend?” Jackson calls.

Half in the door, a sunset crashes in. Levi gazes back. Against the bar, Jackson belongs to a glow of blue. He faces no direction. The baby is quiet now, rocked in the carrier by Jackson’s hand. He does it because that’s his nature. It’s the right thing to do.

From his pocket, Jackson takes out the stolen money. He puts down one more bill.

“Levi,” Jackson says. “Are you my friend?”

Outside, Levi feels drunk. The pain of the morning is gone, at least for a while. It’s the hour where gold and red, far from extinguished, menace in the sky. Above him, Bunyan rises up against the colors. The axe, the beard, the red cap. What’s one more lie parents tell their children?

He walks off into a world of pavement. Places to live, women to love, jobs to work—fantasies are both known, sewn to the lining of his heart, and void of all detail. As he goes, high fencing blocks off a white lake of concrete. The factory stares back at him. Glaciers of brick and glass, it jettisons from the earth, as if formed by plates and drift over a million years.

 

Lucas T. Robinson is a writer and journalist. He lives in San Diego, California.

Tremors

The man Abel could have been loomed to the left of his sprawl, looking upon him as at the hour of death, hair haloed by the sun, face long and bronze with the eyes frosted over, Novembrish. “Here,” he said, and stretched a hand, a second chance, to Abel, and Abel raised both his hands to claim it, squinting in tears of exhaustion. But short of contact, Cain yowled and sprang around and stamped right on—squish squish squish—deeper in the grove, tearing leaves loose with his haste. Abel sat in fits (spoke, walked, ran, made love), as if he’d loaned his parts from different people and would account for each at day’s end. He bolted to his feet, then bowed, still wheezing, silence astir on his skin like silk, felt Cain gust through a cloud, cross the finish line, and ground his teeth against tears. It would be his last attempt to soar. He’d tried alone, in a bend where the sun winked ghostly spots on everything: arms falcon-wide, chest puffed; to spring from the brink of life and bliss into oblivion. But each time he rattled to a stop over the treetops, spiraled down green, bouncing from branch to branch, knocking fruit asunder, and banged—splat—in the mud, leaving a mask of his face in it. The first time they went at it together, Cain’s whoops and yoo-hoos burned, flickered against his twin’s heart and almost blackened it. Still, Cain always braced Abel’s limp back home, past the veined walls of red clay on either side of the deep trail, twisted roots jerking out of place and flinging rot as they passed.

Abel, twenty-eight and still unused to his parts, moving borrowed limbs and breathing on borrowed lungs, recalls the shock of falling, a long frenzy of wind, as he is laid off from his second job in six months. Eyes spaced out below the bill of his baseball cap, he shifts in the bad-news-that’s-actually-good-news chair, now slick with his sweat, across from the freshly coiffed HR Rep. He reaches in his jeans pocket. She stiffens. “Of course this is no reflection on your competence or prospects,” she says into the chill in the small office. The phone beeps again. She lowers her glasses on her nose and stares Abel down, then glances knowingly at the other faces in the room. By the door: Abel’s mute, graying manager, who’s worked thankless decades in an even smaller office on the ground floor, for clients whose demands travel miles and stick to him, whose needs flutter like bats over his desk and crowd out the light, whose orders swarm after him when he leaves the office and tussle in the back seat of his old sedan and flock in the shower with him and buzz under the covers when he sleeps, or tries to. Behind Abel: a gargoyle, armored and knee-padded, ready to rumble. “It’s my brother,” Abel says.

“And now he’s looking,” Maureen of HR announces, and sits forward, peeking herself over the edge of the desk, nearly meeting her reflection in its polished wood.

Abel huffs at the screen of his phone and then guides it, shuddering, to his right cheek. He rakes his scalp and tries to swallow but the walls of his throat stick. The line cracks open. Cain’s voice punches the speakers, jabs words at Abel’s eardrum between fast breaths. “Hey, hey, hey, listen,” Abel cups his other hand to his mouth. “Can I call you back?” A wail spangled with static loops his neck and tightens. Abel sits rigid, his eyes ping-ponging in their sockets, then holds the phone away and gags.

“What is it?” Maureen shoots up from her chair. “What is it? Undo your top button, you’re getting lightheaded.”

Abel slurs, “I would know if I was a headlight.” More white notes of panic froth out of the speakers. He takes a deep, steadying breath, holds it, and huffs it out at once. “Call you back,” he snips at the phone in his grip, and clicks it off.

“Being let go will be amazing for you, you just don’t know it yet,” Maureen says, and Abel pictures her clicking onstage, shoulders poised, facing an audience. “You will always be a part of this family, our cabin is just too small to accommodate you at the moment.”

Abel snorts. “It’s a twelve-story house. With a basement.”

Maureen darts a glance at the gargoyle. Abel stands before the dreaded shoulder tap and gives two-thirds of a wave to an imagined friend. Maureen raises the blinds as he is led away. She calls after him, “I can’t wait to see your genius solutions to the world’s problems!”

Glances splat thick as spittle on the glass walls of the corridor down which Abel trudges, face down, blinking tears, a scant folder wedged against his hip. This tunnel, worn away in its middle by the heels of numberless wage slaves, exhausted hikers on a slope with no end, a hill without a peak, so similar in its grayness to the last, and, he feared, the next one. By the time he bumbles through security and faces the other towers of plated steel and grim-blue glass in the commercial district, dusk hovers, widening from the cracks of a shattered sky. A clear moon guides his journey downtown.

Back to the swamp, Abel thinks.

>>> 

The phone buzzes long, two seconds after it boots. Abel’s fingers hurry across the bands of text. He pinches wide open the all-caps glare of Cain’s message—We’re at General Medic. She hasn’t said a word. Please call.—and squirms as if a hand has reached in his shirt and grazed his chest. He pockets the phone and continues the march into uncertainty, past blinking neon lights from see-through eateries and boutiques, the eye-watering tang from roadside grills, drifts of oboe above the chatter of a cymbal in an underwater cathedral, its pews awash with warlocks and mermaids, its altar claimed by jumpers from the white man’s boat, so the locals say; motors toward the bus station, unblinking. A swarm of faces charred by years of sun floats around his, waves of townspeople rush at him but then recede, as if sensing his ill-fortune and wary of any proximity to it. He anchors, slack all over, at a traffic light, resolve leaking from his pores, and checks his phone. i did rip her ear off.the bitch wouldn’t listen. Cain has forwarded this line from Pa, alongside a blurred image. And just like that, Abel is hung out to dry by a hook in his back, all these years later, drained from cuts in his chest, teasing slashes in his lungs and throat, while Cain flees. He gasps out of the bind, stands his full length and presses on, but the night is lead on his stride, and he bows, latches his free hand to his face and draws hard, soul-shaking breaths through the vise. Flops, finally, on the curb, the folder loose-lipped in his lap, its many tongues flickering. Clicks on the picture blurred by a downward arrow.

A pearled ear, star-dusted from the vase he flung it in, still pulsing in her palm, wisps of grey hair clinging to its curve.

A thing in the night makes to claim his face, thumb his lips into a soulless grin, sneak in his nostrils if he dares inhale, tickle out of his gullet a sound between a wail and laughter. He beats it off and runs apishly across traffic. The folder flutters where he once sat. He bumps into the trunk of an old Volvo and stares its driver down, stumbles just clear of the beep-beep from a sewage truck onto pavement. From the other side of the road, the moon is a yolk, washing the night a tinge of yellow that puts to shame that of the sun in autumn, though the light falls . . .  inside out? In reverse? Abel squints, the illusion stays: pale shadows slant from dark objects. Streetlamps shed scabs on silver tar. Fine coal sprinkled along a snowy dome, the stars tease the reach of slender boughs, between soot clouds. Every face X-rays out in the light, all cheekbone and teeth and void eyes—and reforms outside it.

Don’t have a college degree? someone croaks into a megaphone at the bus terminal. Stop and select the one you like.

Buy your ticket to heaven, three for the price of one, calls another. We leave next week Tuesday.

Have only girls? Drink this tea together, twice a day, for one week, to conceive a boy, yet another.

The phone pings.

Abel seeps stunted breaths around the ache in his chest.

>>> 

Done by unpractised hands in a dim ward, he thinks of this image. The cross-stitch throws off the flash of Cain’s camera. Still he sees Ma’s wince, an anguished grin rumpling her cheek. The reattached bit of ear looks cowed, like it knows it has to reach through the stitching and leech onto the nub left on Ma’s head for nutrients. I got too worried. Don’t be like me, Cain sends below this, by which he might mean I have solved yet another crisis in your absence and wonder why I ever reach out.

Abel types, Great C, and deletes it. I was all of seven the first time, he tries again, and I never called for help. I just threw myself between them and yelled for Pa to stop and yelled for Ma to hide. That’s how it was, while you spent all those days in the sun. This, too, he deletes.

The bus coasts down a stream of radiance, anchors before him. His reflection warps around dents in its side, echoes brightly in its black windows, in the doors that part with a suction sound. The sole bulb inside blinks a UFO cone on a sleeping horde. Abel trips in an aisle seat as the bus lurches on. He beats off the engulfing leather and slides to the window, presses his face on the glass, counts the human shadows on the sidewalks and in the parks, behind faint curtains and around avenues, the sturdy and the frail, towering and timorous, intent and loitering, the spry, the drink-laden, a polyphony of emptied bodies.

I’m coming over, he replies.

>>> 

That summer, the trail voiced sage and mildew in its cracks. Cain skipped farther and farther along it, at a pace that trembled droplets free and scattered feasting flies and swayed the flimsier branches, and Abel was stuck with himself—but for what beasts grazed or mated in the shadows; looking up now and again, snouts twitching, limbs working through gaps, prowling closer to his scent. Abel was in love, against his will, burdened with feelings towards a boy his age that he couldn’t shirk, but all he thought as the beasts neared him: It will return, Cain’s gift of flight, as strong as in the days before.

It never returned.

Cain sprinted, arms splayed, day in and out, and only ever landed in a ball of dirt. He crossed marshes and farms and fields and concrete, covered treeless neighborhoods, even edged towards the next town, to no avail. He cycled his limbs into a blur. Still earthbound. He started having problems at school, spitting at teachers who tried to calm him and shoving classmates, stomping objects in the old house to smithereens (table lamps, Abel’s shelf of robocops). On his tenth day confined to earth, Pa sent Ma hurtling through a swivel mirror for serving his supper late, and as Abel dutifully cleared the splatters and swept up the shards, Cain climbed a silo, the tallest one in the county, and jumped.

They got the news as Abel debated telling Pa that he was sick and wanted nothing more than to be normal, like Cain. Pa and Ma grabbed each other. The informant winced at their howling. Pa shook Abel off, then Ma, left him adrift without a raft on the news. Abel washed into a secret corner of his room and chuckled, hard: Cain could not bear to live as he did for even one week. Ha ha ha. “Oh, he’s not dead,” added the informant. His arms worked for three seconds during the fall. Panic must have overcome whatever fault or curse wasted them, Cain maintained to this day. Those arms parachuted him into a clump of sagebrush, three seconds from parched earth. Ma and Pa quilted him upstairs and begged him not to do such a crazy thing again. “Will you stop hitting her, then?” Cain stared daggers at Pa.

Pa hesitated.

“Will you? Dad . . . .”

“If she behaves—why not?”

“Okay. I’ll stop.” Cain exhaled.

“My boy,” Pa murmured over him, as greyly as if he’d passed, “you can soar without wings. Did you know that? Let me show you how.”

Wilted at the threshold, Abel turned away, his throat tight.

>>> 

Tonight, for some reason, downtown is a giant skull, broken dreams tattooed on it. Even here, the pulse of the city rises through his soles, in this outgrowth crammed with unwashed rubes and cackling prostitutes, near the end of a dizzying sequence of alleys, where Ma and Pa now live.

Mist pours from Abel’s mouth and shrouds his face as he climbs the hatch in the side of the tenement and gathers himself at the top.

“Four hundred and fifty-six,” he counts, when come through the front door with his key and down the grimy corridor, he glimpses Cain’s shadow. Rats scoot around Cain’s careful slicing of an onion and point to their mouths. Cain clucks at them, waves off their slimy hide and frenzied squeaking that dimples the pan of water and snaps against the tin roof. They flee into shadow, from the drumming in Abel’s chest. “Where’s he?”

“Ma is in her room.” Cain lays down the knife and wipes his hands on his shirt. “Pa must’ve heard you raging towards us. He’s probably in a bunker somewhere.” Cain’s teeth gleam like pigeon claws. “I’m glad you’re here.”

Abel marches on.

“Jamie’s in remission,” Cain calls after him. “The kids are doing great!”

Abel shoots him the middle finger as he shrinks down the corridor.

Ma lies frozen on her back, waiting for an unseen presence to climb her chest and grind its heel in her tired heart. The grimy mattress appears to open around her, her sad splay sunken in its foam.

Abel mouths, “Four hundred and fifty-seven.”

“Every time I swear off cooking I remember it takes you a lifetime to turn on the stove,” Ma says. “Just toss something on our plates. Thorns, live worms, flipping pebbles for all I care.” She sits up holding the candle to her false eye.

Abel reaches for his voice, the only thing that will ever differentiate him from Cain in low light. “How’s the ear, Ma?”

Ma gapes as if she’s seen a mermaid. She flops again on her pillow, reaches the candle back on her drawer. “It’s His Remote Highness.” She arches a bald brow at him. “You still work in an office? It’s unnatural to work in an office, unless you live by nature. But you don’t have a single leaf on your street,” she says. “Don’t you feel depleted? How do you recharge?”

“You’re coming with me,” Abel says.                      

“It’s our fault, your ending up in one of those glass tombs.” For the defeated way she admits this, eyes welling, Abel may as well be hunched behind bars, awaiting execution. “Abel, you have no idea how terminal is the bond between aging spouses. If your father upped one morning for hell I would chase after him, crying. This is our home   . . . such as it is.” She slackens into a nightly erasure like sleep.

One year after the fall, seething ambition drove Cain to the city, on a scholarship, and Abel had his chance to be normal. At first, when he did swing by the house, Cain was amused by the impersonation: Abel’s twinning his every move, down to the way he breathed, so that Cain often felt he was in a mirror, staring out at his owner, watching him slide through a series of poses and turn around and leave. Abel nicking his cadences, the gravel in his voice, the splay of his feet, his air of thorny innocence, his stammer. His sole disguise Cain’s helmet haircut, Abel stumbled into strange parties and stranger bedrooms, accepted favours and socked away gifts from friends and orbiters of Cain’s. For Cain, Abel justified the deceit to himself, at first. Except he never told Cain any of it, the things he’d done in his name, the best man speech he gave while locked in Cain’s slick-as-a-seal tuxedo, still woozy with altitude from the window seat Cain’s friend paid for. That he resumed at a college in Iowa as Cain. That when Cain opted to attend Marymount Seminary on Staten Island, Abel wheeled his things into the dorm and by his third day there had convinced Pedro, the roommate, a scrawny Jesuit from Uruguay, to mount him. So complete was Abel’s performance that Pedro snuggled up against Cain on his first night there and stroked his penis and breathed in his ear, “I missed you.”

Abel dropped the act for how sharply it reminded him of the growing emptiness that was his life. Also, he’d proposed to Jamie while doped to the gills and sweating ethanol, as they traced stars on the roof of Cain’s truck, and she’d said yes, yes, midway through his laugh, and even disguised as Cain he dreaded commitment. Then there was Cain’s slow exile from all he knew, his moping at this loss, which might have been tolerable if Abel had a life worth trading, one that Cain could inhabit.

No one had warned Abel of the bruising and mental rifts that attend pretense, of the body’s need to break down and reform in order to sustain any performance; of cracks in heart and soul for the weight of mimicry. Changes Abel still could not pinpoint, except that each time he’d stepped down from being Cain, he’d had to rehearse himself, relearn control of his thoughts, his mind, his body.

>>> 

Although Cain quit trying to fly after the fall, his arms surprised him now and then. Once, strolling to church with his brother, he rolled them to avoid slipping in a puddle and buzzed into the air, as briefly and tipsily as a dragonfly. When Jamie’s poodle sniffed its way out of the porch and down the driveway to a rushing car, he cut the mower and swooped low across the lawn and snatched it up. Once, the twins spread their arms to a wind like they could ever be kids again, and Cain was kited several feet back, over a neighbor’s roof.

Ma perks up as he ladles dinner. Her breath flutters the candle stood in its wax on the scarred wood, shifts the shadows of their heads on the walls, the ceiling lashed with damp.

Abel stirs the slop on his plate, his eyes space into thought. He refocuses and points his fork at Cain. “I was fired today because of you.”

Ma blinks. “Oh, that’s wonderful! Thank him for the favour. Now, go live in nature.”

Abel laughs, brokenly. “What I mean is, I would have kept my job if I did it as you, enjoyed life a lot better, if I lived it as you.”

Cain recovers from his look of shock, quavers, “Not this again.”

Cain never lost his affection for the woods, for wildlife, and these days he “brings about conditions needed for vegetal strains to mutate” in a shed named for him at the state conservatory.

Ma clunks her cutlery down. “Can you not?”

“But it’s true!” Abel cries. “I stood no chance at being normal, except when I was him.”

“That’s not true, you never even tried,” Cain says.

“You still gay?” Ma quips. “Ain’t nothing normal about that.”

“You could’ve just been yourself,” Cain insists.

“How?” Abel holds his breath for the answer.

“It’s not too late,” Cain adds.

Abel chuckles, long, squinting in tears. “Fuck me. You still water plants at the conservatory?”

“He was promoted today,” Ma says; “to the board.”

Cain chides her with a look.

Ma resumes eating, each scrape of her fork across ceramic a fine, pimply trail down Abel’s spine.

>>> 

The cavalry of time has drawn its reins for Cain to cross, yet tramples Abel, stamping ravines in his face and the gloss from his hair. This wreck awaits Cain on the stoop after dinner, drawing on a cigar and spouting smoke hoops, thin lids squeezed shut over a memory. But Cain does not come. “Tell me how you got over it,” Abel whispers, at the space Cain should have occupied by now. “How you can love Pa after everything. Why I can’t forget. Why I’m  . . . well  . . . ” He stands, adjusts his pants. “Good night, Ma.”

As he recedes from the borough, skirts brick walls brailed with bullets, boarded up windows, weary strays and drifts of trash, he debates tousling his hair into a pale imitation of Cain’s and asking the night, “How do I look?” He demurs, zips up his coat and trudges on.

 

T.N. Peter has explored moral conflict, climate change, world politics, and the legacies of colonialism from a position of otherness, online and in print.

His Fingers Dripped Like Wax

Part One: A Dichotomy of Sun and Sea Reflected In the Needle’s Eye

The world spun and he spun plummeting down like like like himself hot wax melting over him like a coffin solidifying as he hits the water Lot’s wife brackish in his mouth saline in his veins and while the fall itself was an eternity the moment when the surface tension broke and he left the sky and entered the vinegar-dark sea is the one that drew tears from his eyes. Crushed down everything’s imploding while sterile-white feathers float to the surface in a funeral procession. By the time he hits the bottom silt exploding in constellations Cancer Libra Orion he is a casualty of war but he was drowned long before now and the silence is so overwhelming it ruptures eardrums.

Part Two: He Burns Like the Sun and Nostradamus Watches

His name is Julius or that is what they call his skin the one that has grown too tight and is dried and crinkled at the seams pale as Barium they say he is wasting away like the waning moon but they’re wrong and soon he will burst free and his real name will Echo like Narcissus. Today the news came to him through a telephone not the kind with a rotary and a rosary but the kind that steals one’s voice and plays it backwards to dial tone gods who will divine fortunes in radio static. Hello they said is this Mr. Flint and he said yes and they said you might want to sit down and he didn’t and then they told him that his house burned down and he said I don’t have a house I live in an apartment and they said not that one the one you lived in as a boy and he doesn’t remember what they said after that because a ringing noise not unlike starsong played in his head and the next thing he remembers he’s in his apartment boxed in bricked in oh Fortunato why are you so cruel? He is drawn to the flames not like a moth but like a witch approaching the stake but it doesn’t really matter since everyone goes up in flames ashes ashes we all

Part Three: Maps of Human Hair Speak Memory at Roadside Stations

He can fly at Mach Nine but there’s the inevitable fall even though he has no pride so he takes his car and the motor roars like a blinded Cyclops but Nobody is there to complain so he sets off. He’ll drive until time’s arrow lands and then he’ll be there and then what? He has technically owned the house while the Sun circled Earth several times but he’s never been there. His parents owned it once and he won’t think of that anymore not go past that exit he’s missed his exit.

Part Four: Kronos Consumes the Communion

He’s parked at a rest stop though he can’t rest and in constant motion like a hummingbird’s death throes he takes his food to a table by the window and eats Prometheus’ liver on a sesame seed bun puts extra ketchup packets into his pocket leaves again.

Part Five: The Echo of the Scream of the Ghost of the Crooked Little House That Jack Built

His car feels like Charon’s ferry bearing him to an afterlife composed of blood-and-Betadine scented childhood and crematory ash. The firebird will not be born here again its golden heart will lie among the embers until the four winds whip it all away. He walks in the ruins rubbing ash between his hands like chalk and the ghost of the house rises up around him its foundation supporting empty air its gable roof injecting the sky with virulent diseases. There are people staring like a chorus and he averts his eyes looks at the ground and there among the ruins he finds it in all its rusted glory among the brick fragments and broken microscope slides he finds it it’s still sharp it’s his father’s scalpel.

Part Six: The Splitting of Osiris

His youth flooded back to him as Deucalion’s box was opened. His Father built the labyrinth and his Mother was the Minotaur and Julius was left to wander corridors of anguish sometimes made of rusting industrial steel sometimes of damp stone sometimes of splintered wood sometimes of polished marble and while there were sometimes flickering fluorescent lights or dripping candles it was always dark dark dark and went on forever and they never did numb the pain. It started when he was attacked by a dog one with burrs in its fur and saliva on its face mauled until Julius was little more than a hot lump of flesh but he healed in a day holey wholly holy and that was nothing because then the torture began.

Part Seven: The Hypocritic Oath

They cut him open like a chrysalis until the butterfly paste oozed out and half-formed wings fell to the dirty tile floor. Banishing death with dissection breastbone to groin solar plexus under the ribs flaying for a Nobel cause for what’s one child in the path for eternal life? Julius retreated like low tide deeper and deeper into the labyrinth until he reached its lower strata where haruspice ran their fingers over his wounds and whispered in his ear his fortune he could not hear them over his mother and father seeking truth in the telomeres. Every day for he doesn’t know how many years before he took off his shirt one day at school because they were forcing him to go swimming even though he hated the water and his teacher gasped at the scar there for he could heal but he could not heal that and so they took him away but the sun had already set and the stigmata would not fade.

Part Eight: The Man Who Stared at the Sun Until Ra Replied

He stood in the ashy ruins of the labyrinth and stared up at the sun his pupils black holes sucking in its light. He was lost in the labyrinth which had never left him it lurked in the cracks in the wall in the white between letters in the coffee grounds at the bottom of his chipped cup. In his weakness it crawled upon him a millipede of impossible angles and infinite curves and it sucked him in and his feet bled and his waxen wings could gain no purchase on the sepulchral air and the ghosts of two minotaurs roamed here with horns like scalpels and if they found him he would be lost forever pickled in formaldehyde and left on a shelf gathering dust like stars. It was here he met himself so long ago it was here he donned his wings but he escaped only once and from that came fractal falls each one incomplete and branching vanes on a feather and he fell until he cried out for the labyrinth screamed for it prayed for it found himself back in it and realized the mistake he’d made. After that the labyrinth clipped his wings. He is losing himself again. He wails and people turn to look at him at the man in the middle of a burnt-down house and he turns to the sun and the sun reaches out rays to him as to a long-lost child and he stretches to reach it but a cloud passes over its face like the moon’s ghost jealous of the one that lets her glow. The labyrinth has sunk its teeth into his calf like a rabid dog on a playground he cannot break free he flounders in the wake of a ship that set sail without him he cannot he cannot he takes the scalpel clutched in his hand and drives it through his left eye.

Part Nine: In Waxen Hemispheres the Corpus Callosum Waits

People are screaming and it pierces him like a scalpel but there’s already a scalpel and it’s in him and in his blindness he sees the minotaur in broken robin’s egg scrubs holding the other end. Julius pushes the scalpel deeper and suddenly he tastes rosewater and the sea. He will not fly too high this time he knows that’s a lie for he must embrace the sun and be burned to nothingness like he never existed.

Part Ten: Postlude

Oh hubris an immortal cell line leads to living hell hello can you hear us Mr. Flint? He sits up smiles beatifically sunshine in his words: I didn’t fall.

 

Anna Rose Greenberg is a Virginia-based writer of weird fiction. Her work has appeared in Strukturriss, a journal of experimental fiction; Schlock! Webzine, a horror periodical; and her story in the horror publication Carnage House was later anthologized in The Best of Carnage House Year Two. She specializes in future worlds not quite our own, and nightmare landscapes populated by strange inhabitants of uncanny towns. When not writing, Anna Rose reads tarot, and has previously deejayed radio shows on German and Eastern European rock, metal, and industrial music. She lives with her two guinea pigs, Gingerbread and Razzle-Dazzle.