word

by e. lorn

contents

burrito|5

skinny|47

come|69

margins|87

lounge|147

glamis|169

author|215

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Lornographic Material

www.edwardlorn.wordpress.com

First Paperback Edition

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

~dedication~

For Jo-Ann Teal, David Antrobus, and J.D. Mader.

~burrito~

EAT A 30-POUND BURRITO AND BECOME PART OWNER OF OUR RESTAURANT!

There was a time when making a thirty-pound burrito disappear would not have been such a daunting task to the old man. But now, looking at the sign taped to the glass door of Miguel’s Kitchen in Brooklyn, New York, Harold “Hap” Munch felt more than hunger pains twisting his gut. Anxiety rolled in there as well, tumbling like a circus performer. His previous max of three hundred pounds now a paltry hundred twenty, Hap trembled as he gazed upon the seemingly insurmountable task offered by the sign.

Was he really going to do this?

Yes, because he had no other choice.

He pulled the door open and seemed to travel two thousand miles in a single step. Modest Tex-Mex décor. Tables with yellow tablecloths and red straight-backed chairs spotted the open floorplan. Green-cushioned booths lined the side and back walls. A black waiter dressed in a black T-shirt and white pants carried a platter with two plates of food over to the establishment’s only customers: a trio of power brokers in power suits and power ties. Each of the three men was interchangeable. All three had wedding bands on their ring fingers. Hap thought that if Man Number One came home to Man Number Three’s wife, the poor woman wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference, or if all three men had an orgy, the scene could technically have been labeled masturbation.

A woman the size of a gas station stanchion, the ones that keep errant drivers from crashing into the pumps, waddled from an archway to Hap’s right.

“Hola. Help you?”

“I’d like to try your thirty-pound-burrito challenge.” Hap smiled, all teeth and charisma.

“You wan’ try our challenge?” Although “challenge” came out in a way that it would have rhymed perfectly with “ring”.

“Yes, ma’am.” Hap was a southerner by birth. Even though this woman was the size of a chubby toddler, she still deserved some of his famous hospitality.

“Miguel!” she hollered over her shoulder.

The man who stepped out of the kitchen area was enormous. Hap had been a competitive eater for twenty years before he’d gotten sick. During that time, he’d seen plenty of large men. Miguel put all those fat bastards to shame.

Miguel stood six-five, maybe six-six, and he had to stoop to walk under the archway. The gigantic Mexican could not have weighed any less than six hundred pounds, but he carried that weight as if the scales balanced at half that much. Miguel carried a clipboard in his meaty hand and a #2 pencil clamped between his yellow teeth. He was dark. Almost black his tan was so deep. His hair was the color of midnight in a coal mine, and the pitch black mustache gracing his upper lip looked like a push broom.

“Qué?” Miguel said over the pencil in his mouth.

“This guy, he wan’ try the challenge.”

“This guy?” Miguel said. He ripped the pencil from his teeth and pointed it at Hap. “The old guy?”

Hap looked over his shoulder. There was no one behind him. Feeling foolish, he faced forward again. He needed to get used to looking so goddamn old. He was sixty-four, true, but if he were still fat, no one would have been able to tell. He had no wrinkles other than the loose skin leftover after losing what amounted to another whole person. His kinky hair remained what his mother had always called “Jew brown”. Not a gray strand in sight. His dick continued to work without the little blue miracle most of his friends were taking, and his doctor said Hap had the heart of a sixteen-year-old. Two decades eating himself stupid had netted him a hundred fifty pounds too much for his frame, but his body had carried it well.

In truth, he’d been healthier when he was a fat-ass.

“You know it’s thirty pounds of food, right?” asked Miguel.

Hap smiled wider. “Yessir, I know. I get a piece of your profits if I eat it all, right? I become an equal partner?”

“Sí. Yes, that’s righ’.”

“Then I would like to try, please.”

“If you don’ finish it, it’s ninety-five bucks for the food. That’s okay?” “That’s” came out like “thasss”.

“Yessir.”

“You pay now. We refund you if you eat it.”

“Yessir.” Hap pulled his wallet from his back pocket and reached inside for a hundred. He passed the Benjamin to Miguel. The giant Mexican held the bill up to the light, searched for the shadow of the strip running through the third quadrant right of Franklin’s stoic face.

“Is good?” the toddler-sized woman asked.

Miguel nodded and passed the hundred to the woman.

“I go get it ready. Have a seat.” Miguel extended a hand and grinned a gap-toothed grin. “My maybe partner.”

Hap shook his hand, beaming.

Hap chose the table closest the front window. He watched the stop-and-go traffic lurch by like a train on startup. He hummed the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby”, and when he finished the tune, started with the theme song from The Monkees. Different band, sure, but same feel. Dylan came next, and for a time, Hap knocked on Heaven’s door.

His routine consisted of music and mental gymnastics. With every song, he calmed. The more settled he was before the food came out, the more he would be able to eat. When he’d destroyed the seventy-two ounce steak in Houston, Texas, the soundtrack had been Garth Brooks and George Strait. With the twelve-foot-long shrimp po’ boy in New Orleans, Louisiana, it had been Miles Davis and John Coltrane. The hundred four pulled pork sliders in Memphis, Tennessee, Elvis, because all he’d needed was the king. Twenty-four pounds of lobster in Bar Harbor, Maine had required Elton John and Huey Lewis and the News. New England was weird like that.

For the Seven Stage Sushi in Los Angeles, California—

Never mind. He didn’t want to think about that.

Dum—dum—dumdumdumdum—dum—dum poured from the speakers built into the ceiling of Miguel’s Kitchen—the rhythm was seemingly the only one in Mexican culture. A singer trilled, and horns blatted, but the bass and drums maintained the same four-four cadence.

Hap hummed the Rolling Stones, had some sympathy for the devil.

Fourteen classics later, Miguel, palming a brown platter over his beefy shoulder, appeared at Hap’s side. The giant Mexican dipped and sat the platter on the table in front of Hap. The foil-wrapped burrito lay over four oval plates. Steam came off the silver tube—heat waves off desert tarmac. A fork and knife and red cup of water were the only other things on the plate.

“No time limit, but you gotta be done before we close.” Miguel said.

Hap didn’t feel like telling the man that being done by closing was technically a time limit. Instead, he said, “Can I have all the water I want?”

“Sí. But you don’ wan’ fill up on liquid… Partner.” Miguel winked.

Hap glanced up to find the trio of interchangeable power brokers staring at the massive silver tube laying in front of him. Two were wide-eyed while the third seemed unaffected. Maybe the first two had gotten one over on the third man and he was plotting his revenge. Perhaps the guy didn’t see what was so special about some skinny old fuck attempting to eat a ridiculous amount of food. No telling. Hap returned his attention to the task at hand.

“You need hot sauce?” Miguel asked, but “you” came out sounding like “Jew”.

“Is there any on it already?”

“Sí. Rice, beans, beef, pollo—that’s chicken,”—thass shicken—“lettuce, tomato, four cheeses, mild salsa, sour cream, guacamole, and rice.”

“You already said rice,” Hap said with a grin.

“Double rice.” Miguel showed off his eerily spaced-out teeth. “Enjoy. And good luck… Partner!” Miguel slapped Hap on the back. The impact of Miguel’s fat hand rattled Hap’s molars in their moorings.

Miguel walked off. Hap took a deep breath. From his wallet, he took a picture of his grandson Wally—Walter to the boy’s parents. Jeffrey, Wally’s father, was Hap’s son. Hap couldn’t wrap his head around that. My kid has a kid. Unfortunately, Wally had a condition, a condition that was terribly obvious in the picture Hap laid down on the platter in between the fork and knife. In the pic, Wally was slightly blue. Looking at the picture never failed to bring to mind the old Gene Wilder version (the only version that existed in Hap’s mind) of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory—the scene wherein Violet turns violet. On the back of the photograph was a single word that had taken Hap four months to memorize: Methaemoglobinaemia. Laymen called it Blue Baby Syndrome. Basically, Wally’s heart wasn’t getting enough oxygen. Little Wally, who was two in the picture but had turned three last month, needed near-constant medical treatment to stay alive. Jeffrey’s insurance only paid so much. Hap’s son was on the verge of bankruptcy.

While Hap had been traveling the United States as a professional eater, he’d been sending money back home to help his son with Wally’s medical bills. But after California, after the Seven Stage Sushi, Hap’s income had been put on hold. Now Hap had his own hospital bills. Not to mention he was less about a foot of stomach and half a mile of intestines.

The plan was simple. Hap would eat the burrito currently resting in front of him. Then he’d sign Jeffrey’s name to whatever paperwork he’d be supplied, and Hap’s son and grandson would receive half of Miguel’s profits every month. That alone should take care of Wally’s medical bills. Miguel’s Kitchen was normally busy. The only reason it wasn’t busy now was because it was a Tuesday afternoon between lunch and dinner rushes. But Hap had driven by the restaurant several times during the weekend and supper time. The place was packed. Nary an empty seat in the house.

This challenge was Little Wally’s only hope.

Hap unwrapped the steaming burrito, picked up the knife and fork, and dove in.

***

Nine months and one hundred eighty pounds earlier, Hap sat at a table with a red-lacquered top. A jade dragon with fire sizzling from its nostrils snaked across the red expanse, rearing its head back to gaze at the obese man.

The restaurant hummed with unintelligible conversation. Servers whisked trays this way and that, round and across, over the short-hair jade carpet. The hostess, a wire-thin Japanese woman with sultry hazel eyes and shimmering hair so black it was purple, sat a family of four—man, woman, twin boys no bigger than the hostess would be at Miguel’s Kitchen three quarters of a year later—in the booth behind Hap. For the duration of Hap’s Meal, those two boys would stand on their booth’s cushions and watch the fat old man attempt to beat the Seven Stage Sushi challenge as offered by Los Angeles, California’s Happy Dragon restaurant.

The establishment had its very own sushi bar, but Hap hated stools, which patrons had to sit on if they wanted to be seated at the actual bar. Directly across from the sushi bar was another bar, one that served alcoholic beverages. Hap’s fellow customers were of two kinds: neo-hippies and hipsters, both groups sipping Hōtō soup and sake in equal amounts. Everything smelled of patchouli, rice wine, and arrogance. The family behind Hap was the only exception to this rule.

Happy Dragon’s owner John Wang (which was an inside joke poking fun at western culture; the man’s real name, Hap knew from extensive research, was Ichirou Watanabe, a name that meant Watanabe’s first son) came over with a waiver for Hap to sign. Hap printed his name, signed, and dated the form without reading it. He’d perused the waiver online a week before. He knew the dangers of ingesting the seven ever-increasingly spicy sushi platters: nausea, dizziness, vomiting, diarrhea, ulcers—both stomach and intestinal—and internal hemorrhaging.

John Wang lifted the completed form and read aloud, “Munch? German?”

Hap nodded. “But it’s pronounced Munk.” It wasn’t really, but Hap didn’t like the jokes that came with a professional eater named Munch.

“Ah,” John Wang said. “Very well. Your food will be out shortly.”

The rules of Happy Dragon’s Seven Stage Sushi were as follows:

No liquid of any kind until after the completion of contest. This includes water.

No bathroom breaks until the seventh stage is completed.

The challenge is completed when all seven stages are eaten in their entirety. This includes: ginger, wasabi, and all parts of each piece of sushi. The sushi can be disassembled, but all parts must be eaten. It is the advice of the chef that the sushi be consumed whole. After the seven stages are completed, the contestant must remain seated for another ten minutes before liquids may be consumed.

Contestants must finish all foods in under one hour. (The required ten minutes post consumption is not part of this hour.)

Vomiting immediately disqualifies contestant.

Prizes included a thousand dollars cash, a Polaroid of the contestant with their name at the bottom hung on the Happy Dragon’s Wall of Winners, a T-shirt emblazoned with the same dragon that adorned every tabletop in the restaurant, and free meals for a year.

To date, no one had completed the challenge. The closest anyone had come was one piece of Stage Seven before violently vomiting all over the table. Hap had been there for that one. His buddy Travis had been the one guilty of explosive emesis. Hap had watched Travis consume cockroaches, live eels and squid, blow fish, and twenty Jethro Bowls of grits, and the man had not once gotten sick. Happy Dragon’s Seven Stage Sushi had decimated the big man. Kobayashi, the current world champion, wouldn’t attempt the sushi contest. Hap was the only one of his peers stupid enough to try after what had happened to Travis.

What else could Hap do? Little Wally needed the money.

The first plate came out. One tube of innocuous maki cut into four pieces. Nori-wrapped rice packed with cucumber and sushi-grade yellowfin tuna sprinkled with salmon roe was arranged in a triangle. In the center lay a jawbreaker-sized ball of wasabi atop three strips of pickled ginger the soft pink of cotton candy.

Hap picked up one piece of sushi, placed the wasabi on top, smashed it between the second piece, and lay the ginger over the newly formed ball before smashing the third piece into the mass. He gobbled the palm full of sushi in three quick bites, swallowed whole. A slight heat glowed at the back of his throat. He’d seen no sauce of any kind and assumed the yellowfin must’ve been marinated in a spicy brew before being added to the wrap. The heat was easily ignorable though. No worse than Domino’s mild buffalo wings.

He glanced at his wristwatch. Three minutes in, Stage One done.

Plate two was much the same, but the yellowfin had been replaced by salmon. Hap repeated the process of smashing all food stuffs into a single massive ball and chomping it like Pac-Man feeding on blue-and-white flashing ghosts. Nom. Nom. Nom.

This stage’s heat was familiar. Hap thought of Texas Pete or perhaps Louisiana brand hot sauce. Whichever, the spiciness lingered a bit longer but was no worse than the first round. More flavor than scorch at this point.

Hap found it quite odd that he hadn’t been able to taste the wasabi in either round thus far.

Stage Three was the first stage to have an actual sauce: a red-dusted mayo with chunks of red pepper flake floating like yellow and crimson islands in a pink sea. The top of each piece was adorned with a dime-sized drop of the mayo concoction.

Hap smashed. Hap chewed. Hap sweated.

Whatever was in the mayo lingered like a wino in front of a liquor store. Even Hap’s teeth burned. He sucked wind and blew it back out in grand gusts, but breathing like that only seemed to make the brushfire in his mouth grow hotter. He dabbed at his forehead, his eyes, his cheeks, his double chin, with the provided napkin.

And there it was—the slightly-citrus taste of habanero peppers.

I know you’re secret, Stage Three, Hap thought. Habanero mayo. De-lish!

Hap had consumed hotter in his life, but not by much. Thinking about how this was only Stage Three, Hap’s heart rate increased. What kind of hell was ahead of him?

Stage Four deviated from the popular maki-roll layout. Though the uninitiated considered all things rice and raw fish to be called sushi and nothing else, that was not the case. The fourth level of the challenge was another form of sushi altogether called nigiri—fresh sushi-grade sea life laid over ovals or balls of rice. Draped over these specimens were three different sheets of fish and crustacean: salmon, mahi-mahi, and crab. Upon each thinly-sliced sheet was drawn a smiley face in some intimidating crimson sauce. Hap dipped his finger into the eye of one of the smileys and touched the dab to his tongue.

Fire.

Pure…

Unadulterated…

Hellfire!

The cleaning-chemical odor of India’s bhut jolokia—commonly known to westerners as the ghost pepper—filled his nose. The astringent taste flooded his mouth as his saliva raced to cool the inferno blazing on the tip of his tongue. Had he had a mirror, Hap was sure his face would have been the same purple-red as the infernal sauce. He gasped as a flaming dollop of spit coursed down his esophagus.

“Oh Jesus,” Hap breathed. He tried not to think about what he was doing as he mashed the three pieces of Nigiri into a single consumable.

“Jesus, help me,” he whispered as he tore into the fireball.

Hap felt as if he were preforming fellatio on an acetylene torch. The inner walls of his cheeks melted into the cavities of his molars. His teeth ran like tallow. The once-solid mass of his tongue dissolved and bled from the corners of his mouth.

None of that actually happened. But it might as well have.

He huffed and puffed and cried and perspired.

At some point, a crowd had assembled beside his booth. Greasy-haired neo-hippies in tie-dye shirts and DKNY jeans stood next to bearded hipsters in berets and reading glasses they didn’t truly need to see. One neo-hippie with a piece of rice in his spiky facial hair gave Hap a thumbs-up. A hipster with a pocked nose mouthed, “You can do it.”

His mouth a cauldron of molten lava, Hap hated them all.

Stage Five was sashimi. Three pieces of ahi tuna slathered in what looked to be a grayish-yellow mustard sauce. He picked up the tuna and sniffed it. Curry and something else.

Before John Wang could scamper off, Hap asked him, “Curry and…?”

“Special ingredient.” John Wang smiled.

Under his breath, Hap cursed the middle-aged Japanese man.

Sashimi didn’t come with any wasabi or ginger. The rice-less slices of ahi damn near melted on Hap’s tongue. The heat started at the back of his throat and trundled toward the front of Hap’s mouth like a spiked steamroller. Every taste bud exploded with nuclear intensity. Hap was reduced to panting like a dog.

He would have done anything for a glass of cold water even though he knew that water would only spread the capsaicin. Because, after all, oil and water don’t mix. What he really needed was dairy of some kind. The fats in milk products would have quelled the firestorm raging in his gobbler. The heat would have returned twice as bad, but at least he’d have a short reprieve.

Something lit fire in his guts. An intense smoldering coal cauterized his insides. He doubled forward and leaned his forehead on the fat of his belly that bulged over the top of the table. He stayed that way for a few seconds, not breathing, not even thinking, as the excruciating pain in his midsection boiled and blistered.

What the hell was wrong with him?

John Wang, unseen, had returned at some point. His calm, professional voice asked, “Are you going to be sick?”

Hap shook his head.

“Stage Six?” John Wang asked.

Hap nodded, raised his head. His shirt front was now soaked with sweat, as were his armpits. Air conditioning blasted down from a vent above his head. He shivered, both freezing and internally ablaze.

Stage Six returned to maki-style sushi, but this time, each piece had been deep fried. Hap picked the crust off one of the pieces and gazed inside. Some kind of crab salad stuffed inside the roll. The flaked crab was coated in a devilish smelling emulsion that looked like it might have been mayonnaise once upon a when. Brownish-yellow teardrop-shaped pepper seeds speckled the mixture. Hap sniffed it.

Flamethrowers up both nostrils. No scent. Only heat. Hap snapped his head from side to side as his eyes flooded with tears. If his nose couldn’t handle whatever was in the mayo, how on earth did he imagine his stomach would react?

The lower half of his eyeballs burned as if he’d dropped them in a beaker of acid where they floated across the surface.

Hap worked the sushi together like a child preparing snowball munitions. He glared at the evil ball of sushi. Six. This was Stage Six. Only one more after this. Time to man up and get this done.

He set his jaw to work. One chomp. Two chomp.

Something choked him. He coughed grains of rice and intensely hot sauce into his nose.

He was going to be sick. All this was for nothing. He was going to vomit and ruin everything. He snorted the fiery material from his sinuses and swallowed. His throat seemed to liquefy and collapsed into his stomach.

His grandson’s blue-lipped face popped into mind.

Wally.

Little Wally.

Hap shoved the remainder of Stage Six into his gob and forced it down. His stomach was a churning thing. It rumbled in the basso voce of an angry god. Hap pictured fire blazing atop a sea of stomach acid like an oil slick set afire.

“He gonna throw up,” said a smiley voice above and behind him. Hap glanced back to find the twin faces of two boys gazing over the back of the booth. One was wide-eyed, the other smiling.

The smiling one asked, “You gonna ralph, meester?”

Kids still said “ralph”? Hap almost laughed, but his scorched throat was incapable of such niceties. He faced forward just as John Wang shouldered through the crowd, which now recorded the events with their cell phones, to set down the seventh and final plate.

One piece of nigiri. A ball of orange rice blanketed with peppered salmon. No wasabi or ginger. Instead, beside the single piece of sushi was a metal ramekin in which a boiling brown liquid bubbled.

John Wang informed Hap, “Careful. The sauce is very hot. Heat hot and spicy hot.”

“Wha—What in God’s name is that stuff?”

“My chef calls it kagutsuchi.”

Panting, Hap asked, “God of fire?”

John Wang beamed. “Very good. I see you’ve done your research.”

“All the research—in the world—couldn’t have prepared me—for this,” Hap said, nursing his smoldering guts.

“Almost done, though,” said John Wang. “You have twenty-three minutes left and only one piece. Your man Travis took the full hour. Right down to the wire. You should be proud.”

So John Wang remembered Hap being in the audience when Travis failed. Hap recalled the lava-thick ropes of vomit that had exploded from his longtime friend. The trickle of crimson gruel dripping from the man’s nose and the massive vein pounding in the center of Travis’s forehead. He’d looked like a man on the verge of stroking out.

Without another thought, Hap popped the final piece of maki into his mouth and swallowed it whole.

The crowd went wild with screaming cheers and explosive hoots. John Wang sat a digital egg timer on Hap’s table and punched in ten minutes. The Japanese man clapped his hands over his head, and the hostess with the sultry eyes appeared with a half gallon of milk and a bottle of milk of magnesium. Both liquids were put down across the table from Hap, behind the timer. Hap eyed them like desirable women. His penis even hardened a bit in anticipation.

Oddly, the final piece of sushi didn’t burn that first minute. Nor the second. It wasn’t until the timer hit 3:53 that Hap felt the first fireworks explode in his stomach. Massive bubbles swelled and burst in his abdomen. He cried out as something seemed to tear through the inner lining and spill out into his guts. He’d heard tell of perforated stomachs. They were fatal. No amount of internal cleaning by medical staff could completely remove the contents of someone’s stomach from the body’s various cavities. It was a terrible way to die. A prolonged, excruciating death. Because you didn’t die from the tearing of your stomach walls. You died of sepsis, an infection of the blood.

With five minutes remaining, Hap felt the first gelatinous creep of vomit climbing his esophagus. He swallowed again and again but nothing helped. He leaned his head back and began to hum.

The crowd around him sang along: “We don’t need no water. Let that motherfucker burn. Burn motherfucker, burn!”

John Wang watched on, smiling.

Four minutes left, and Hap was forcing reflux back down. It came up in coagulated lumps. Hap swallowed the gruesome substance, all the while trying to make his mind believe it was melted cheese or scrambled eggs. His entire face was numb, as was the inside of his mouth. The only thing he could feel was the agony in his guts. But there was no abdominal swelling. That was a good thing. It meant that his stomach hadn’t actually ruptured. Of course it hadn’t. Hap knew as well as any other professional eater that the stomach was designed to regurgitate long before it would even burst. He was safe from a terrible death at the hands of blood poisoning.

One minute left, and Hap was starting to calm down. The heat in his throat and mouth subsided, and he didn’t think he would even need the milk. The milk of mag, yes. Most definitely. But the dairy? No. He was actually going to make it.

The pain in his gut intensified though. The longer he sat there, the worse it got. He figured that too would dissipate given enough time.

The timer counted down three… two… one… and everyone in attendance erupted into joyous applause. Even John Wang clapped.

Hap stood, jabbed both fists into the air in celebration, and fainted dead away.

***

Unbeknownst to him, in his twenty years of professional eating, Hap had acquired four ulcers. The reflux he’d battled with Tums and Prilosec had worn away sections of both his stomach lining and esophagus. Due to the intense heat and caustic quality of the various hot sauces (ghost peppers are even used in some cleaning and degreasing products), two of these ulcers burst, allowing stomach acids to escape containment. These tears were small—and luckily so. If they’d been any bigger, Hap would not have survived. Upon standing at the completion of the challenge, his body went into systemic shock and systematically shut down. Thus the fainting.

While inside Hap’s abdomen, the gastrologist had found tumors growing in the walls of Hap’s large intestine. Catching the malignant cancer early saved Hap’s life, but he lost a goodly amount of his guts in the process. Now the trip from his stomach to his colon lasted only several feet instead of almost a mile. The doctor blamed this cancer on the massive amounts of red meat Hap had consumed in his lifetime.

In these regards, the Happy Dragon’s Seven Stage Sushi challenge almost ended and prolonged Hap’s life at the same time. Funny how things like that work out.

Hap spent an entire month in hospital. The tearing in his stomach wall had caused septicemia, a poisoning of the blood. He was given a vigorous regimen of antibiotics, none of which worked to quell the raging fevers that threatened to boil his brain in his skull. During this time, he was fed intravenously and dropped nearly fifty pounds that first month alone. Finally, in a last-ditch effort to fix Hap, his doctor prescribed him vancomycin. The subsequent diarrhea dehydrated Hap in a matter of hours. He was placed on lactated ringers and normal saline for the next week. Once his system was purged of sepsis, Hap began the slow journey home.

Physical therapy came in everyday that final week to retrain Hap how to walk. A month in bed might not seem like much to the average individual, but it can wreak havoc on your muscles. Though Hap hadn’t lost any motor function, he was terribly weak. Four days with a walker and two with a cane assured that by day seven, Hap’s day of discharge, the old man was able to walk on his own.

Hap’s time at Cedar Sanai in Los Angeles was a lonely stretch of time. Jeffrey’s funds were invested in Little Wally’s care, and Little Wally would have been too weak to travel even if Jeffrey had managed to accrue the funds for the trip from Alabama to California. Walking out into the warn SoCal sun, Hap thanked whatever power had watched over him and vowed to never do anything so stupid again.

His promise to whichever almighty deity didn’t last long. Upon checking and seeing his bank account thoroughly depleted, Hap used two hundred bucks out of his remaining six hundred to take a Greyhound home.

The next eight months were spent walking, recuperating, dropping pounds, and playing with his (let’s be honest here) dying grandson. The boy couldn’t do much. Even simple walks exhausted Little Wally. But Hap could put the boy on his shoulders, and the two would hike until Hap couldn’t remain upright any longer, and then they’d head home at a leisurely pace.

Hap lost a hundred twenty more pounds in that time. He was, all told, the healthiest he’d been in his life. But as his health improved, Little Wally began failing rapidly. One of the boy’s kidney’s had already shut down, and if the second one went, the family would be left with three options: expensive dialysis, a costly transplant, or an option no one wanted to consider—doing nothing at all.

One day, while Little Wally was napping, Jeffrey was at work, and Hap was fooling around Facebook, Hap came across a story his old buddy Travis had shared on his timeline.

EAT A 30-POUND BURRITO AND BECOME PART OWNER OF OUR RESTAURANT!

Travis had tagged Hap in the post with the caption: Harold (Hap) Munch, call me, old man.

Fast forward…

***

The toddler-sized woman watched from behind the welcome counter as Hap tore into the massive burrito. After four modest forkfuls, she directed her attention to a cell phone the size of a paperback novel. Hap laughed inwardly. He recalled a time when industry theorists had predicted that phones would only get smaller over time until they were nothing but buds in our ears or implants in our temples. But these devices were getting bigger all the time. Hap had even heard of an Apple device that tied your shoes and performed oral sex on you, and all it cost was your first born baby.

The trio of power brokers continued to stare. Hap switched seats, putting his back to them. The last thing he wanted right now was an audience.

He began shoveling the food down the front of him. He eviscerated the burrito and made its insides disappear. Any time the little woman behind the counter glanced his way, Hap would put a fork’s helping into his gobbler and chew as if in ecstasy. The burrito was delicious, but Hap didn’t care about such things. He only wanted to make this big bastard disappear.

His phone rang.

Jeffrey’s name on his display.

Shit.

Hap answered, “Hello?”

“Where are you?” Jeffrey asked knowingly.

“Away,” Hap told his son.

“I saw that you liked Travis’s post. You… you can’t do this, Pop.” Jeffrey sounded on the verge of tears.

“Everything’s under control, son. I’ll be home soon.”

“This is suicide!” Jeffrey went from sad to angry in the blink of an eye.

“Nobody’s going to die, kiddo. Give Little Wally a hug and kiss from Pop, will ya?”

“Dad. Please.”

“I love you guys. Goodbye, Jeffrey.”

“Da—”

Hap hung up. Before putting his phone away, he glanced at the time. Exactly three thirty. The bell over the door rang, and a tall, muscular black man in red-and-black harlequin-patterned parachute pants and a white wife beater swaggered into the restaurant. Hap watched the toddler-sized woman hand the guy a menu. The black man did not take a seat. Instead, he stood at the counter, perusing the menu and chatting with the tiny lady. Hap imagined he could see hearts in the woman’s eyes.

Great. Love at first sight.

The gastric surgery had left Hap with a stomach roughly the size of his fist, but he was nowhere near full. Time to put a hurting on this huge bitch.

While the distracted lady and the weightlifter chatted, Hap vanished half the burrito. About the time he started in on the second half, the trio of interchangeable power brokers paid their check and went back to whatever wheeling and dealing they had planned for the rest of their workday.

Miguel came out of the kitchen area and approached Hap’s table. The giant Mexican’s eyes were the size of manhole covers.

“Dios mío,” Miguel breathed and fanned himself with his clipboard. He gazed down on the half-consumed burrito with what Hap thought was equal parts shock and respect. “You packed all that away?”

Hap patted his stomach. “Damn fine burrito, Miguel.”

“Gracias,” Miguel said with pride. It was then that Miguel’s affect morphed from boastful to concerned. Hap believed he could read the man’s thoughts well enough. Perhaps for the first time ever, Miguel was worried about having to part with fifty percent of his profits. “Uh… slow down, old timer. Wouldn’t wanna bust a gut.” Miguel, clipboard in hand and chewed pencil behind one ear, forced a bit of laughter before waddling back to the kitchen.

The toddler-sized hostess excused herself from conversing with the black man with no neck and came by to refill Hap’s water. But he hadn’t touched it. After surgery, a dietitian had informed Hap that solid foods and liquids would need to be consumed thirty minutes apart, and Hap didn’t have that kind of time or space to waste. He needed to pack this stuff away before the dinner crowd shuffled in. The fewer witnesses the better.

The tiny woman returned to her discussion with the weightlifter, and Hap continued on his quest. Miguel came out one more time before Hap was finished. There were only four inches of burrito left on the plate. The giant Mexican somberly shook his head and went back to the kitchen. The guy was probably the saddest sight he’d ever seen.

The big black guy at the counter looked over at Hap. Hap saluted the man with his fork. The man returned the gesture, said goodbye to the little woman, and left without ever ordering. Hap, grinning, shoveled in the last of his burrito.

“Excuse me?” Hap called to the tiny senorita. “Excuse me? I’m done.”

She came over, looking dejected and forlorn, and removed the platter with the four plates. Other than a dab of orange grease here and a paper-thin smear of beans there, the plates had been licked clean. Hap had done an amazing job. His final challenge was a terrific success.

Two minutes passed after the little woman vanished into the kitchen, and then out came Miguel looking as if he’d just found his puppy dead in the middle of the road. In his beefy hands were the proper forms and a hundred dollar bill, his refund for completing the challenge. Hap spent the next ten minutes meticulously going over all the paperwork. Everything seemed to be in order.

From this day forward, a check for fifty percent of the profits of Miguel’s Kitchen would go to Jeffrey’s address in Wetumpka, Alabama. One check every month for the rest of Jeffrey’s life. Hap didn’t chance using his name or Little Wally’s, because there was no telling how long either of them would live. Hap had always been more proactive than reactive. His motto was simple: you could hope for the best, but it was smarter to plan for the worst.

When the papers were signed and the deal done, Hap shook both Miguel’s and the toddler-sized woman’s hands. Then he walked outside and down the alleyway between Miguel’s Kitchen and the business next door—a bodega with lottery posters and adverts for prepaid cell phones covering every inch of the glass storefront.

Next street over, Hap entered a car driven by the muscular black man who had entertained the little woman while Hap had done a bit of magic. It truly had been some impressive sleight of hand. The old man beamed with pride.

“What you muggin’ for, Hap?” asked his old buddy Travis as he pulled away from the curb. A taxi honked at the two men in the black Corolla. This was New York; if you went ten feet without getting honked at, you were obviously doing something wrong.

“That was much easier than I expected. You did good with the little woman. Thanks.”

“Told you it would work. Miguel does inventory every Tuesday, and Carmen has a thing for me. Easy as pie.”

Hap reached around and shook the man’s hand. “Thanks, Travis. You probably just saved my grandson’s life.”

“No problem. How much did you wind up actually eating?

“About ten bites.”

“You okay?”

Hap smiled. “I’m stuffed now, but I’ll be fine.”

“Was the hole in the wall big enough?”

When Travis wasn’t competing in eating contests, he supplemented his income as an electrician. Two weeks ago, Travis had been called out to Miguel’s Kitchen to fix a faulty plug. That Tuesday was the first time he’d seen the advert for the restaurant’s burrito challenge. Hap’s grandson instantly popped into his mind. He contacted Hap on Facebook, messaged him the plan, and Hap had agreed.

To access the faulty plug, Travis had had to remove a two-by-four section of wall. He’d ended up replacing a three-foot long bit of wiring due to water damage. There’d been a bunch of rain the week before, and the window above the plug had leaked into the wall space.

When Miguel asked what the trash bag in the wall was for, Travis told the giant Mexican that it was to insulate the new wires, to keep them from getting wet. He then told Miguel that he was leaving the access panel he’d created for future use because he needed to order a part. That part would take roughly three weeks to come in.

There was no new part. In another week, Travis would return, on a Tuesday while Miguel was busy doing inventory, and remove the trash bag containing the thirty pound burrito less ten bites. He would shove it into his work duffel before leaving and toss everything in the dumpster behind the restaurant when he was done.

The plan had proven to be foolproof.

“Did you have any trouble getting into the access panel?”

“If I had, I wouldn’t be here right now.”

“You really would’ve eaten that big mother? If my plan hadn’t worked?”

Hap nodded.

“You legit, Hap. Truly legit. Glad I don’t have to compete against your old ass anymore. Any man willing to die for a good cause is cause enough not to mess with.”

They drove through Brooklyn traffic for a minute in utter silence. No talking, no radio, not even the sounds of the city broke through the quiet inside the car.

“Hey,” Hap said.

“Yeah?” asked Travis.

“Thanks again, man. Really.”

“No problem. No problem at all. You just tell Little Wally that Uncle Travis says hello.”

“Will do, partner. Will do.”

About “Burrito”

While I’ve taken several liberties with the food challenges mentioned in this story, they are in fact real challenges. For the most part. The Seven Stage Sushi Challenge is based on an episode of Man v. Food that I am more fond of than I should be. The Happy Dragon restaurant and its owner John Wang, though, are products of my imagination. The 30-Pound Burrito Challenge is real as well, but I have changed the name of the establishment and increased the percentage of prize money to fit my fiction.

At its heart, “Burrito” is your typical heist story. It has all the staples. Checks every box. I love that about it. I’ve always wanted to write something like Ocean’s Eleven and films in that vein but felt that it had all been done before. Luckily for me, Hap came along. Meeting him was one of those happy accidents all authors wish for but rarely receive. And the guy turned out to be far more resourceful than I ever could have imagined.

When I first sat down to write this story, I was sure Hap was going to die, that his stomach would burst and we’d have a very unhappy ending. I was certain of that. But as it evolved, I realized there was more to Hap than first met my mind’s eye. All too often in my stories, there’s no way out, no happy ending, and I don’t mind that. As Kevin Smith once wrote, “Life is a series of unhappy endings.” I feel there is an awful lot of truth in that statement. But I’m glad Hap made it, and I’m sure we all wish Wally a speedy recovery.

Stay hungry,

E.

~skinny~

Fat people think they’ve got the market cornered when it comes to being bullied. As if they’re the only ones who catch shit for the size of their bodies. I’m here to tell you that being skinny isn’t much better. But who am I kidding? No one cares.

I want to go out in style, so I chose a snazzy hotel. How I can afford a snazzy hotel being a high school kid with an afternoon job at That Burger Place, I have no idea. That’s right—I flip burgers for a living. I catch shit for that too, in case you’re wondering. Being a girl who works in the kitchen of a fast food restaurant nets me all kinds of wonderful shit, including but not limited to “They don’t put you up front because you’ll scare away the customers!” Then you have those that cover my being ugly and thin in one comment. “They don’t put Kim up front because, if she turns to the side, she disappears. Customers would just leave, thinking no one’s manning the register.”

Funny, funny, ha, ha…

Of course, my day wouldn’t be complete without the requisite assumptions that I’m either anorexic or bulimic. I’m asked every other day if I’m on cocaine or meth. One time, someone asked if I call my reflection “Ilene.” That one had me stumped for a while, but when I figured it out, I actually laughed. I’m not without a sense of humor. When someone cracks a joke that works, I’ll laugh right along with them. I’m not a hard-nosed bitch. I know when to have fun. It’s the uninspired commenters and jokesters I cannot abide.

Did I mention I wear glasses? Well, I do. Oddly enough, I don’t get shit for my nearsightedness. Like, people actually compliment me on them. They’re superhot. Blue frames, but the arms that go over my ears are neon yellow. They make my eyes pop. Not pop out of my head. Don’t be stupid. So yeah, my glasses are the best part about me. Unfortunately, I wasn’t born with them, so I technically can’t claim them. Having superhot glasses is far removed from being actually hot. It’s not like I have smoky eyes or a glowing complexion or perfect cleavage. My hair is flat and stringy. My nose is long and hooked. My eyes are the color of baby shit. My smile is lopsided. So are my ears and boobs. I’m sixteen, but I only started my period a year ago. Everyone else I know started at ten or eleven. Four years of my friends ruining their panties once a month and me wondering what was wrong with me. Imagine sitting around wishing for stomach cramps and your vagina to start dripping blood like a punched nose. Just imagine that.

I have a father and not much else. I’m one of those rare kids whose Mom left instead of Dad. We don’t talk about her. Whenever someone does bring her up, my father disappears inside himself for a few days. Calls off work and doesn’t come out for dinner. When he does finally return to life, he’s a totally annoying Bubbly McBubblestein. With him, it’s one extreme or another. Fucking hate people like that.

Dad tries, but he’s no woman. And the information he does pass on is either gleaned from internet searches that I myself could do (NetPhD, for the win). Or he’s warning me that boys my age are only after one thing. Like, I know, Dad. Every dude this side of dead wants to stick his hot dog in between my buns or shuck my oyster or… Sorry, I can’t think of a good metaphor for my birth canal. My bad.

There is this one guy I like. I’m omitting his name here because, oh my God, if he found out, I’d come back from the dead to haunt whoever let my secret slip. Like, if I wasn’t already dead, I’d die. This dude is cute as balls though. He invited me to this party and we made out and everything I just said is a lie. But sometimes I turn on the washing machine and sit on the corner and think about me and him making out at a party. Makes my engine vrooooooom for real. Yup, I’m a classy bitch.

I’m sitting on the edge of the bed, watching the door to my hotel room, when the Black leaks in. My old friend the Black. It’s like lava rock but not really. It’s liquid and stuff, but it’s reflective like lava rock is what I mean. The Black seeps in under the door and fills the foyer. I can’t make it to the bathroom anymore. The way is completely blocked by the Black. I get up and lay my hand on the solid darkness. It’s cold. I shiver.

The television flickers behind me. Principle Morris is on the screen. He’s telling me how I just need to “ignore everybody.” How I should show them my back and walk away. Is there worse advice in all the land? Telling a high school kid to walk away from bullies is like telling a swimmer to breath underwater. Just because you want the pain in your lungs to go away doesn’t mean breathing is the best idea. Principle Morris is a fucking moron. Or, as my dad goofily says, “Whatamaroon!”

All alone in my hotel room, I laugh. The Black cracks right down the middle, and the television flickers. For a minute, Morris’s yawning mug is replaced by talking heads. There’s been a terrorist attack in Paris. Over a hundred people dead. ISIS has claimed responsibility for the attacks like a lonely little girl lying about which cute boy she’s ridden like a gyrating washing machine. Sounds familiar.

Sigh…

The crack in the Black seals, and the wall of darkness presses farther into the room. Right up against the television and the side of the queen bed. Frigid air emanates from the Black. Literally pulses from it. I’m reminded of heat waves coming off the highway in the summer. But the waves coming off this are far from hot. You could store meat against this thing.

The unnamed boy I like is on the screen now. He’s smiling that gorgeous smile and flipping his hair as if he’s a member of One Direction. Yes, my unnamed boy is boy-band hot. Like, stupid sexy. If only I had a wash machine in this room.

The television goes on the fritz, starts spitting snow and hissing static. For a split second, the Black becomes liquid again. It bulges as if pregnant. Something’s moving beneath the surface. I reach for the moving tumor. A mouth opens, screeches at me. I tear my hand away before it can bite my fingers off. I stumble backward. Land on my ass.

My bony ass.

Sigh…

The Black solidifies, and the television goes back to CNN. The news program cuts to a commercial, and my mother, of all people, graces the screen. She looks as young as she did twelve years ago. I get iron-straight strawberry blond hair from her. My baby-shit eyes are my dad’s fault.

“I’m sooooooo much better without you,” she tells me. Of course, I already knew this. If she loved me at all, she never would have left. Right? Like, fuck this bitch in the eye with a spiked dildo. For real.

I think I get my concept of love from Mom, too. I don’t love anyone enough to stay. Not even Dad.

I tell her, “Whatever.”

She smiles. “This attitude is why I left.”

“That’s a load of bullshit. Wanna know why? Because you skipped out when I was three. Fucking three! I’d barely learned to talk by then. How the hell could I have given you any attitude?”

“It’s the way you looked at me. All full of yourself.”

“Bitch, please.”

Mom’s still grinning like that bitch-ass Alice in Wonderland cat when she flickers out of existence. Betty Washington’s face scrolls right to left onto the screen.

Let me tell you what. Betty Washington is fucking hot for a sophomore. Like, hooker hot. I’d pay to fuck her, and I’m not even a dyke. She has skin like milk chocolate and shimmery black hair. Her eyes are this haunting ash-blond. Like, they make her look as if she’d suck a dude’s dick and blood at the same time. Vampire chic is what that one bitch-magazine called it. Seriously, I look at Betty, and I see Nefertiti and Cleopatra. I could totally worship this chick and not mind the pains in my knees.

“Lez be friends,” Betty says and blows me a kiss.

If Betty were my friend, I wouldn’t be here. That’s the truth. But social order rules, kids. All I needed to survive was a friend like Betty. Aside from being ridiculously hot, she’s a good person, and people want to be around her. Like, if she told people to like me, they would. I’d be popular and all that shit that comes with it. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to be popular because I want people to fawn over me. I want to be popular so kids stop talking shit about me. Seriously, if it were a case of being loved or being left alone, I’d choose hermit over being hounded. Leave me alone, and we’re cool.

But nobody will leave me alone. Even now, at the end, the Black is here. And the people on the television want to watch.

I’ve been thinking about how I want to do this. I have one of my dad’s shaving razors that I nicked out of his stash under the sink. The razor is a disposable. I’ll have to snap it out of its plastic case if I decide to go that route. I looked up online the best way to do it. You want to cut up and down, from inner elbow to palm, and across your wrist. Slicing only your wrists is the long way. If you don’t die, you’ll catch flack because people will assume the cuts are hesitation marks, a cry for help. Up and down is effective, but crossing your T does the best job. Please believe this is no cry for help. I’m done. Like Billy Shakes said, I’m shuffling off this mortal coil. Or some shit like that.

I’m sure there’s one or two people out there who would, given the chance, tell me that life gets better or that I’m taking a permanent vacation from a temporary job, but I’d respond with a question: Where the fuck were you before I decided to kill myself? I made no secret of how lonely and morose I was. I wore all the requisite black clothes. I drew on myself with the blackest makeup I could find. For fuck’s sake, I listened to Cradle of Filth and HIM. Do you know how positively shitty those bands are? Like, they’re as fun to listen to as a Walmart greeter. I told everyone I knew that I was fine. And if you know anything about females, then you would know that when a bitch tells you her ass is fine, she obviously means she’s having a tough time dealing with shit. I did everything right. No one came. No one asked beyond “You okay?” A nod and sad smile does not mean I’m all-fucking-right. Shit!

I don’t get it. I don’t understand. And great, now I’m crying.

Paige Hampton is on the television now. She’s the Lex to my Supes. I hate this blonde bitch. She’s nothing as 80s-movie-bad as a cheerleader or some rich cunt who thinks every living person below her parents’ pay grade is worth a constant stream of bullshit belittling. She doesn’t support Feed the Children and then spit in your face. She isn’t the kind to decorate for the prom all while making sure the ugly girls don’t gain access to it. She’s just a terrible person. A tried and true piece of buffalo excrement.

One time, Paige snapped a branch over her leg and asked her bitch-buddies what she just did. When they shrugged and seemed altogether unimpressed, Paige said, within earshot of me, that she’d just reenacted what The Dark Knight Rises would have been like if Kim Johnson had played Batman. If you haven’t seen the movie, you should know that this character called Bane drops Batman all wrestler-style onto his knee and breaks Batman’s back. Batman gets thrown in some third-world prison, and some miracle chiropractor pops his broken back into place. My dad dragged me to that testosterone-junkie movie. I rolled my eyes so hard I had to excuse myself to go to the bathroom after the first ten minutes because I was so dizzy and nauseated.

For a while, Paige had everyone calling me Bats. Like, “How’s the back, Bats?” Giggle, snort, titter, laugh, repeat.

The only time I get a moment’s break at school is when Tubby Tina does something stupid, like fall down a flight of stairs or agree to play a throw-together game of softball during gym period. Unlike most fat girls, Tina never gets picked last. Teams fight over which one gets her. Not because she’s any good. That would be too nice of them. They fight over Tina because she’s a riot to behold. Watching her run is like rolling a tub of Jell-O down a hill. Everything on her moves. Even her toes have fat rolls.

About two months back, she was picked not only to be on Paige’s team, but they chose her to bat first, too. This chick named Padma (she’s Indian) wound up and slung the ball at Tubby Tina. Tina destroyed that ball. Like, people in Japan thought they were being bombed again. That ball disa-fucking-ppeared. Nobody so much as turned to see where it went though. We were all watching Tubby Tina as she got going. The arms started pumping. The flesh of her forearms and biceps (our school’s gym shirts don’t have sleeves, for whatever reason) undulated like ocean waves. Her belly rose and fell and splashed as if she were pregnant with two fighting toddlers. And then, strangely enough, her legs started forward. It all seemed so backward. Like, a skinny person like me, my leg shoots out, and then the rest of me kicks in. I guess it was that way with Tubby Tina because she’s top heavy, had to move the arms and gut to get the pressure off the legs so she could take that first step. Or whatever.

Tubby Tina was sweating and out of breath long before she reached the halfway mark between home and first. By the three-quarter mark, she was exhausted. Somewhere in the final stretch to first, she collapsed. She flattened like a pancake before everything came sucking back to center as if she had a black hole for a vagina. Oddest shit I’ve ever seen. Tubby Tina, man, she’s a living cartoon.

When she got done bouncing and jiggling, everybody lost their shit. Like, I’ve never heard people laugh so loud. Even I laughed. But not because this fat bitch falling was funny. No, I laughed out of relief. I knew people would be talking about Tina’s latest disaster for weeks, if not months. I knew I was going to be left alone awhile.

You might think I’m a shit for not sticking up for Tubby Tina, or at the very least, trying to help her up, but fuck you. You have no idea what kind of shit I would’ve suffered by injecting myself into that situation. High school is survival of the most invisible. Because these bitches don’t care. Even Paige could be reduced to a laughingstock.

For instance, there was this one girl named Barbara Something (I can’t be bothered to remember her last name), and she was pop-u-LAR! I mean, dudes and chicks alike loved hanging out with her. She always had the hottest new clothes, and she legit looked like Ariana Goddamn Grande. And then shit got out that she was fucking this dude named Brandon. Turned out the rumor mill was churning out the truth for once. Unfortunately for Barbs, Brandon was one of those kiss-and-tell kinda douchecanoes. Even more unfortunate was the fact that she had an odor problem. You know. Down there. Brandon tried to eat the bitch out and ended up throwing up. Not inside her. Don’t be stupid. He threw up off the side of Barbara’s mother’s bed, where the two of them were supposed to be fucking. Brandon said he’d hit that ass several times before and ran afoul of nothing stinky. But this time, something was, as Brandon put it, “rurnt.” Not “ruined” and not “burnt” but both of those words together. He said Barbs smelled like something that had been left to rot in a dumpster. Barbs had no comment. Took two days to reduce Barbara to nothing but a bombed out shell of her former self. Paige led the assault. Now she’s Queen Shit of the Shit Community.

High school’s like that though. Bitches are ruthless. So are the dudes, but I think these cunt-cakes got one up on the swinging dicks. Guys are violent. They kick each other’s asses for fun. Girls are psychological. They strategize. Best believe that any demolition raids are well thought-out.

On the screen, Paige sticks her tongue out at me. “Hey, Bats.”

“Fuck off.”

“Oh, you’d like that.”

The Black inches in, covers two inches of the television on the right side.

“Go away,” I say calmly.

“There’s only one way to make me go away, Kim. Only one way. But you’re too much of a coward to do it. I see your razor over there. You plan on shaving your legs or something?”

“I hate you.”

“I bet you do. I’d hate me too if I were you. The weak always hate the strong.”

“GO AWAY!”

“No need to shriek. I’ll go away if you’ll just man up and break open that razor. Then Paige go bye-bye. No more Paige. No more bullying. No one misunderstanding you. No one pretending to care when they obviously don’t. No more anything. Sweet, sweet release. Go on, Kim. Go get that razor.”

The Black swallows Paige and the television whole. It shoves me off the bed and onto the floor. I scramble across the carpet to the sliding glass door that communicates with the balcony. I glance over my shoulder. The Black is still coming. If I don’t escape out onto the balcony, I’ll be crushed between the approaching wall of darkness and the sliding glass door.

I jerk the door open. Its well-oiled casters glide easily without so much as a squeak. I spill out onto the balcony, twist at the waist, and slam the door. A crack appears in the glass, runs right down the middle like a lightning bolt.

I stand.

Turn.

Scream.

There is nothing beyond the balcony. Only more black. Black glass right up to the edge of the balcony. The cold coming off this thing is so intense it hurts. I throw my arms up to protect my face, screaming all the while. The skin on my forearms draws tight, freezes, and cracks. I stare down at my frozen arms. Glare down at the two crosses adorning each forearm.

I’m still screaming when someone begins banging on the door of my room. Not my hotel room. My room. The old One Direction poster is stapled to the wall over my dresser, one dog-eared corner covering Zane’s face, making it look like Harry Styles is standing next to a headless body.

I’m dizzy and sick to my stomach. I try to sit up, but I’m too weak.

“Kim! Goddamn it, Kimmy, open the door!” Dad’s voice cracks in the middle. He sounds like one of the pubescent fucktards at school.

I roll my head to the right. My computer is on. Facebook’s up. A chat window is open in the bottom right-hand corner. The name of the person who I was speaking with is blurry from this distance. Where are my glasses? Fucking nearsightedness.

The overpowering smell of pennies stirs my guts. I vomit, but the gruel doesn’t come all the way up, sits in the back of the throat like a bucket of chum. I hock the mass into my mouth and spit it onto the bedsheet. It’s black. Completely black. That shit’s no longer on the outside. Somehow it’s inside. It’s inside me and making me sick.

I manage to flop one nearly-lifeless arm up and over. The back of my hand splats down in the puddle of black mess. The balcony wasn’t a dream. My skin really did split. I gaze at the gash in my wrist, at the long jagged tear down my forearm.

This is no hesitation mark.

This is no cry for help.

The door to my bedroom explodes, literally flies off the hinges, in a shower of splinters and expletives.

Cussing.

Dad’s cussing.

He’s cradling me in his arms and cussing.

I try to smile, to tell him it's all right, but my mouth doesn’t work. The Black is holding back my final words. Ain’t that a bitch. I want to go out like a movie star, say something meaningful, something important, something I can be remembered for. But instead of a well-scripted departure, all I can do is mumble breathlessly and babble like a retard.

Man, fuck this. Dying is bullshit.

I’m so goddamn cold.

Shouldn’t I be fucking roasting?

Dad, don’t cry, guy. It’s okay.

“Hang on, Kimmy. Don’t leave me. Please. I won’t be able to hack it,” Dad grovels. “Don’t leave me like she did. Please, for the love of God, don’t leave me all alone.”

Dad’s got my chin slung up on his shoulder now. I can see the computer screen past his straining neck. Paige is there instead of the blue-and-white monotony and aggression that is Facebook. She’s silent-movie laughing. Cackling so hard I can see the cords standing out in her neck. One letter flashes by her right ear and a word by her left: I (head) WIN!

A permanent vacation from a temporary position.

It gets better.

I vomit black shit all down Dad’s back.

The tape skips. Last thing I remember is puking on Dad. Now I’m on my back looking up at this really hot dude in a plastic face covering like welder’s wear. Only this dude’s mask is clear. He’s got a chin beard and smoking blue eyes. You could grill a side of beef on this guy’s forehead, could cut marble with his chin. This is the kinda guy you’d fuck even if you knew he’d give you some perma-disease like AIDS or pregnancy.

“We got her!” he hollers over his shoulder. “Get a central line going and push lactated ringers. I need a type-and-cross STAT!”

And then he’s talking to me. Thank fucking Christ, there is a God. Talk to me Doc! “You’re going to be all right, Kim. You’re young. You’re gonna pull through.”

I say, Gargle, gargle, bubble, spit.

Classy, Kim.

That’s me, though. I’m a classy bitch.

By the way, where the fuck am I?

Doctor Fuck-Me-Silly-Please isn’t talking to me anymore. He’s talking to someone off camera again. “And get her a vita-bag. She’s malnourished. Damn near see through she’s so skinny.”

Goddamn it.

About “Skinny”

Making fun of people based on the way they look, no matter their size, is not cool. Don’t be a dickhead.

This story came about after a nightmare I had. Oddly enough, I don’t consider this a horror story.

~come~

I ejaculate into my hotel room’s sink. I scoop semen from the basin and smear the mirror. Looking into the glass is like looking at myself through fog. Skinny with a beard, I resemble a shaved bear. Not a bear in the gay sense. A bear in the animal sense of the word. I’m not a hairy pitcher looking for a shaved catcher. Night baseball’s not my thing. I jack off in hotel rooms for kicks. There's a mighty big difference between the two.

My name is Geyser, and that’s all I’m willing to tell you about my name. I suppose if anyone were to find this record of my various spackling sessions in random hotel rooms, I could be held accountable monetarily for cleaning fees—and in one case the replacement of a hi-fi VCR and digital alarm clock with LED readout.

See man arrive.

Semen left.

Once I draw a smiley face in the goo covering the mirror, I return to the main room. Two beds. Both queens. Queens in the bed sense of the word. Not queens in the tranny sense. Even though I travel alone, I always make sure I have a spare bed handy. You know, just in case I decide to splooge on the pillowcases or the duvet. Nobody likes sleeping in the wet spot. Especially not hetero men. Do turd attendants like damp bedding? I honestly do not know.

I sit down on the edge of the bed and allow my balls to dangle off the mattress. I roll my testicles in one hand, checking for lumps, bumps, and mumps. Toss them in my palm like dice. If I were more limber, I would blow on them for good luck. My dick turns sundial, registering noon. Time to milk the udder again.

The second stroke session goes on twice as long as the first but produces half the quantity. Talk about diminishing returns. I slather the handset of the old plastic telephone on the dresser and apply a coat to the handle of the drawer below the phone. While I’m still spitting and sputtering, I tug out the Bible the Gideons were so wonderful to leave me and squeeze the last few drops in my hose onto Second Corinthians.

If you pick the right hotel rooms—the seedier the better—they don’t ask for a credit card. Shit, some don’t even ask for identification if you slip them an extra twenty. If you find one like that, you can come to your heart’s content. If they do take a copy of your driver's license or Sam’s Club card, I suggest only jizzing on things that will go unnoticed. For instance, the sperm on the mirror could be mistaken for an oily hand swipe after a steamy shower. The come on the phone and drawer handle might never be found out. I like to hope things like that go unnoticed because I enjoy imagining some unknowing individual calling home to Mom and Dad or the spouse they had to leave behind while they business trip and holding my cold, dried-up soldiers in the palm of their hand. Maybe their palm starts to sweat, rehydrating my protein shake, and the receiver gets slippery. Suddenly they can’t hold onto the phone and everything smells like bleached oysters. Hey, a guy can dream.

What’s the difference between erotica and pornography?

Men in erotica “come”. Dudes in porn “cum”. It’s the difference between class and trash.

The more you know.

One Halloween, I Mr. Miyagi’d all over a bowl of fun-sized Snickers. I smiled as I passed the tainted candy bars out to smiling children while smiling parents waved and thanked me for giving their smiling children Class Three biohazards. Did you know the World Health Organization (the WHO without the dead drummer) considers male ejaculate to be a contamination risk? When injected into the proper hole of the female species, a woman can catch pregnant. Guys have to be careful who they contaminate.

From the room next door come the telltale signs of a fight in the making. The slow Peanuts-cartoon wah wah wah of voices through two layers of sheetrock and dead space. A man displeased. A subservient woman trying to keep herself out of the hospital tonight. I don’t need to hear what he’s saying, because it’s all the same.

Bitch better have my money.

Bitch better come when I call.

Bitch best not be fucking somebody.

Bitch best not talk back at all.

This is the poetry of relationships. This is a man’s role in the game of life. This shit is annoying, and I want to go back to the deed at hand. Namely, handling my deed.

Another ten minutes of loud demands and mousy replies. I turn on Animal Planet and attempt to find lemurs attractive. Channel changes bring up an infomercial selling hijabs. Every woman on this show is covered from head to foot like a goddamn beekeeper. No sense of tits or ass. I might as well be rubbing my cock to a bunch of mannequins in hoodies.

I call the front desk and ask for room service. The woman on the other end laughs so hard she’s snorting. I’ve dialed Family Matters and am talking to Steve Motherfucking Urkel. Suddenly she stops, asks me if I’m serious. As a weight bench, I tell her. She considers this, then informs me of the vending machines on the second floor. I tell her I can’t leave my room because I’m naked. She tells me she didn’t need to know that. I ask her what her vagina smells like, and she hangs up.

The call was effective. You could hang the old red, white, and blue from what I got betwixt mine thighs. Nothing half-mast about this joker. White-knuckle tight, I’m beating a steady rhythm good enough to make Keith Moon cry in his grave. I’m almost there when the yelling next door reaches a police-investigation pitch. I toss off into my cupped hand while someone thuds against the wall—the thin veil keeping me from being an eyewitness. Warmth floods my palm as the woman screams followed by three back-to-back thuds, jackhammer quick.

Here I am with a hand full of baby batter and nowhere to put it. The woman stopped screaming some time ago. My fingers are starting to cramp due to me squeezing them together to keep the milky liquid from slipping through the cracks. No waste, no want, Mom used to say.

I listen. Nothing. Not a voice. Not a cry. Not a door slamming announcing a getaway. Utter silence. A come bubble pops in my hand, and I damn near shriek. I slap a palm over my mouth. Luckily I choose the correct hand and don’t end up looking like a glazed doughnut.

I have to do something with this puddle of dick drip. The aroma of pennies and ocean is dialing my stomach from spin cycle to wash.

I stand, fully intent on finding a place to unload my load, when I hear a noise akin to carrion birds feasting on guts—a wet gnashing, sucking, gagging sound. It’s coming from the room next-door. For a brief instant, I think the man is feasting on his prey’s innards, that he is face deep in the belly of the woman he’d been banging against the wall moments prior. Then I hear him tell her to swallow it, and understanding comes crashing like a fat man falling down stairs. I imagine I hear her swallow, but it’s just me getting rid of the dino egg in my throat. Next moment the woman is praising Jesus and calling for God in the tone of someone who’s finally managed to reach that pesky itch in the middle of their back.

I paint the air conditioning unit’s electronic control panel with my offering while Neighbor Chick is fucked into the next decade. She’s Marty McFly, and the dude’s dick is a DeLorean. Cock to the Future.

I know there exist women like Neighbor Chick. Women with rape fantasies and fans of E.L. James. Ladies who want abusive sacks of shit for boyfriends. Chicks who dampen their Victoria’s Secret clearance specials at the mere thought of some swinging dick tuning up on them then stuffing their vaginas like Build-A-Bear Workshop. The internet is full of busty broads with clothespins on their nipples and machine-grade dildos wrecking their nether portals. These same women show up at work next day barking orders at male subordinates, and everything is right with the world. Different strokes and all that.

I first masturbated when I was eleven. Purely on accident. I was washing my balls, and my tiny penis popped up to say hello. I rubbed the tip with the washcloth. The motion got good to me. Soon enough there was a white oil slick gliding across the surface of my bathwater. I made lazy figure eights in the gelatinous mess with the tip of one finger. From that point on, I was hooked.

My sister is the only sibling I have. She’s ten years older than me.

At twenty four, her live-in boyfriend kicked her out of their shitty apartment, and she had to return to the nest. She brought along various V05 hair products. The bottles are shaped like elongated tear drops. They slide easily into any soaped anus. Soaped anus in the experimental sense of the word. Not the homosexual sense.

By the time I was fourteen, I was jacking off ten times a day. Coming is like any other sport. You have to exercise to maintain muscle. But it wasn’t until my sister’s haircare products that I started experimenting with leaving gifts for people.

The first time I came in her conditioner, I was sure she would find out. Next day, nothing. Next week, her hair had a healthier glow. I took ten showers in six days. Each session refilled my sister’s bottle of conditioner a bit more. Next month, she was on the phone telling one of her old high school gal pals how V05 must have changed their formula. Her hair looked great even if it did smell a little funny. Like salted strawberry Quick. Her shampoo and conditioner had had this vaguely berry scent before I came along, so the comparison was apt.

Now my sister is fifty-three and bald as a porn star’s scrotum. My come didn’t cause her hair loss. Don’t be silly. She’s sick. Cancer. Yet I wonder. Had I continued to jerk it into her hair products, might I not have given her hair a better chance of surviving chemo?

A knock on my hotel room door causes me to jump. I let out a squeaker of a fart. The room smells of canned dog food and fresh shrimp. Before I can so much as step toward the room’s only entrance and exit, my visitor pounds his fist into the aluminum door three more times. I know he’s a man. Has to be. No woman knocks like this. This knock has testicles behind it.

Coming, I holler as I hunt my clothing. I've found my pants and have one leg in the wrong leg hole when the light above the door handle flashes red to green and I hear the monstrous click of the unlocking mechanism. The door shoves inward and snaps to a stop. Thank fuck I remembered to engage the ball latch, which is basically a door chain on steroids.

“You come here, you fucker!” someone hollers from the other side of the door. A dark arm snakes in through the crack. A small handgun swings left, right, left, right, up, up, down, down, like a cheat code. I’m no gun expert, but I think the piece is a .22.

“You ask my wife what her bah-gina smell like? I kill you, you fucker!”

The man’s accent is nonexistent until he says what I assume is the word vagina. Then he is most certainly some kind of Indian. Not Indian in the Tonto sense of the word. Indian in the curry sense.

Because I see no reason for a hospital visit tonight, I sneak forward and slam my bare foot into the door. Mr. Bah-gina grunts, withdraws his arm. The maybe-.22 flops to the floor. If this were a movie, the gun would go off and blow my nuts to gelatin. But this is real life, and guns don’t fire on their own. With my pants trailing behind me, looped around one ankle, I dip and snatch the pistol off the dingy carpet.

I hear a small voice outside mutter sorry and then quick footfalls vanishing toward the stairs.

Before my mother died in a Catholic hospital run by nuns and pedophiles, I visited her bedside. She told me she loved me and how proud she was of me. I hugged her, read her Vanity Fair, which was no small feat for someone of my attention span and my mother's expected mortality. Every day for nine days until my lips cracked and my throat sealed. She’d always wanted to read it, and I’m nothing if not determined. After Mom’s death, my sister introduced me to audio books. Bitch. Maybe she knew all along that I had been coming in her shampoo when she was in her twenties and this was her revenge.

While manning my post starboard my mother's deathbed, I would excuse myself for a water and restroom break. I’d purchase a bottle of water from the vending machines on the second floor before guzzling it on the way back up to the sixth. From the elevator, I’d visit a door just off the nurses’ station that read Clean Room.

I have perfected the art of masturbating without removing my pants. All the waistbands on my slacks and jeans are elastic, and I wear boxers so that I might easily tug my tent stake without the pee flap causing irritation.

To dissuade some unknown soul from barging in on me, I placed my back to the door, whipped out the helmeted hero, and torqued a nut loose.

The jism content of the hand lotion and mouthwash of this unnamed Catholic hospital’s stock would have caused quite the uproar had anyone found out. But no worries. I’m sure the mouthwash killed whatever diseases I might not know I have.

As far as safety seals are concerned, when was the last time you checked something like that while convalescing in hospital? We’re not talking about Yoplait or Tylenol. We’re talking Jergens and Listerine.

I suppose Mr. Bah-gina’s .22 isn’t registered because the cops are never called. Oh well. Finders keepers and all that.

On the dresser, my cell phone plays a fugue by Bach. I pick it up, gun in the opposite hand. It is a text from my sister’s husband.

You better come.

Damn it.

I don’t sleep that night, nor do I spread any more man-varnish. In the morning, three hours before checkout, I repack my meager suitcase, place Mr. Bah-gina’s .22 on top of the Gideon Bible in the drawer, and head for the airport. I don't bother turning in the key to the front desk. A reunion with Mr. Bah-gina might be more awkward than either of us can stand. Because I’d not given them a credit card, I had no worry of being charged for anything from a gooped mirror to a replacement handgun.

I sleep on the plane, dream of burying my sister. Sometime during the flight, I move down the aisle to the restroom compartment. I beat off for almost ten minutes but can’t even manage pre-come. Sad state of affairs, that.

We land in the next city over from my sister’s township. I take a taxi to her house. Hospice has been taking care of her for the past two weeks, and according to her hubby's text, the time to say good-bye has come. Unfortunately, I have not. To say I am calm and relaxed would be to call a prostitute chaste.

My sister is a bundle of withered and weathered sticks beneath a quilt our grandmother made her for a wedding gift when she got married to the man now standing in the doorway.

I wish I could say my sister’s name here, make you understand how she was the better of the two of us. I want you to know that no matter how shitty you think I am for doing what I do, my sister was the ace to my joker. Or maybe the queen to my jack. Queen in the royalty sense of the word. Not in the—fuck it. Never mind. Not important.

I kiss her sweat-slick forehead. The perspiration is cool and oily, and I wipe it from my lips with the forearm of my dress shirt. It reminds me too much of old semen.

She does not open her wrinkled eyelids. Her breathing is only slightly less turbulent than the air pockets we hit on the flight over. Her lungs hold too much fluid and not enough breath. She coughs. Her head ratchets up like a Pez dispenser before she settles once more.

I say her name. No response. I grasp her hand, gently because it feels like her fingers will snap and burst like old cigarettes if I squeeze too hard.

“I came,” I tell her. “He texted me, and I came.”

She swallows. I watch the tendons and muscles work in her throat, her carotid thump weakly. I wonder how much time she has, if she’s in any pain.

I lean in, whisper in her ear, tell her that I used to ejaculate in her shampoo decades ago, that year her asshat boyfriend kicked her out. I don’t stop there. This is confessional, but she won’t be offering any Hail Marys or Our Fathers. Even better, she won't be passing judgment. If she’s in there somewhere, hiding from the sickness ravaging her body, she now knows that her baby brother gets off on getting off in places used by the public. He likes to leave behind sticky treasures for the next person to find. I’m talking far too low for her husband to hear, but I’m admitting to stuff that could put me in jail or, more appropriately, a crazy house. Sexual deviancy and all that.

I finally pull away. She’s no longer breathing, and I haven't a clue when she stopped. You would figure I’d have heard something, or the lack of something, but no. Dead silence. She just stopped. Like an old watch. Tick. Tock. Tick—

Death is harder on the living. It certainly was hard on her husband. I’ve never had a man cry into the side of my neck. I’ve never cried on another man’s shoulder. But there’s a first time for everything.

The viewing is on a Monday. While it is going on, I sneak off to the restroom and stand in front of the toilet with my penis in my hand. It has been four days since I came. A new record for me. No problems this time though. Thick ropes of seminal fluid arc into the bowl, swim on the surface like transparent water moccasins. I don’t flush. I wipe the last of the drips off with my finger, rub them into my hands as if they’re cocoa butter, and return to the viewing.

I play pall bearer. We carry my sister’s coffin to the hearse, and once we arrive at the cemetery, to her final resting place, a priest says some words. Everyone cries.

They lower Sis into the ground. Her hubby comes over to me, shakes my hand, my now-dry come-stained hand.

He looks me right in the eye and says, “Glad you could come.”

“Me too,” I say. “Me too.”

About “Come”

I don’t suspect you enjoyed this story. My only excuse is I wanted this guy out of my head. So I wrote a story about him and shared him with you. I won’t apologize for Geyser, because he wouldn’t want me to.

I feel like this:

if you like every story in this collection, I’ve done something wrong. I know that sounds odd. It’s not opposite day, I assure you. I want to take you out of your comfort zone. And if you hate this story for that reason, I’ve done my job.

~margins~

She met him in the margins. But before that, she was at Secondhand Books on a Tuesday in Montgomery, Alabama, at 11:14 a.m.

Storm clouds crowded the sky, casting a gray veil over the day. Thunder bellowed, rattled the glass of the small shop. Four-foot-nothing sixty-something Ms. Marsh, owner and sole employee of Secondhand Books, gasped at the unexpected fusillade outside and overhead. Twenty-something Jamie laughed softly at the woman’s shock and continued her search through General Fiction.

Like all used bookstores, Secondhand Books smelled of vanilla and dust, an odor that was both welcoming and sneeze-inducing. Some books that Jamie pulled down expelled clouds of fine gray dust when opened, like mummies with ice-cream breath blowing into her face. But Jamie loved everything about Secondhand Books from the dusty tomes to their tiny, mousy owner; the attention to detail; the organizing of the fiction section into extremely precise alphabetical order.

Ms. Marsh ran her shop locally and on the internet. Behind the counter were loads of books with rubber bands around them. Stuffed between the spines and the bands were lot numbers to help her keep an account of everything she sold on eBay. Every Wednesday and Friday were shipping days, and Jamie would sometimes help with this. Her hard work stuffing bubble mailers and flat-rate boxes netted Jamie fifty percent off anything in the store. Given Ms. Marsh’s already rock bottom prices, there were times Jamie felt as if she were stealing from the little woman. And when Jamie brought in books to trade, she sometimes left with several new-to-her books without a single penny leaving her pocketbook.

From the front of the store and over the low rumble of passing thunder, Ms. Marsh called, “Gone Girl?”

Jamie responded, “Crappy humans being crappy to each other.”

“Literary fiction?”

“That’ll do. Maybe even women's fiction.”

“Why? Because it’s written by a woman?” Ms. Marsh asked, her voice loud and powerful enough to be heard across the shop.

“That and women love reading about women who have it worse than themselves. Guys like reading about handsome men with huge muscles who’re good in bed.”

“Hell, so do I,” mumbled Ms. Marsh.

“I heard that!” Jamie yelled.

“Who gives a damn?” Ms. Marsh replied, and both women laughed. A silent moment later, Ms. Marsh called, “The Library at Mount Char?”

“Better put that one in horror. Hawkins is like Gaiman’s adult stuff.”

"Oh, you mean the Stephen King family section? What was his son's name again?"

“Joe Hill.”

“Right. That furry bastard. He reminds me of his old man. Both of them have the teeth of gorillas and the fur to match.”

“You’re being mean again!”

“I'll show you mean.” Another mumble.

Jamie smiled and pulled a Chuck Palahniuk book from the top shelf. Beautiful You. She read the blurb on the back. Not her thing. Palahniuk was always hit or miss with her. The last one of his novels she’d appreciated was the one about the guy who choked on food in restaurants for money. Or something like that. There was something about anal beads too, which was funny because Beautiful You had something to do with sex toys. The guy loved writing about accessories.

She replaced the Palahniuk and pulled down a book by an author she hadn’t heard of. Victor Miasma. His name was the only thing on the spine of the trade paperback, black letters on yellow paper. On the front cover, the title of the book was not immediately noticeable. Yellow letters swirled on a crimson background. In the very center of the word whirlpool was a black eye. Jamie rotated the book, read the title aloud.

A Rendezvous with Richard.

Interesting title, Jamie thought, and because she gave every book the first chapter test, she carried Miasma’s little book to the counter. As she went, she flipped through the pages. Each chapter had a number and a title. She rarely liked books like that because so few authors knew how to title their chapters without giving spoilers. She reached the final page and read the number at the bottom. 197 pages. Sheesh. She could read this in one evening.

She laid the book down on the counter and waited for Ms. Marsh to turn from her work labeling the books on the shelf behind the counter.

“Find something?” Ms. Marsh asked without turning around.

“Yeppers.”

“What journey are we taking this time?” the woman asked as she seemed to float around to face Jamie. Jamie wouldn't have been a bit surprised to look over the counter and see Ms. Marsh wearing roller skates.

“A Rendezvous with Richard by Victor Miasma. Ever heard of it?”

Ms. Marsh crinkled her nose as if she smelled something akin to the chemical pollution of a paper mill. “Nope. Can’t say that I have. I don’t even remember taking that title in. Here. Let me see that.”

Jamie picked the book up and handed it to the woman. A pair of spectacles on a string of orange beads dangled from Ms. Marsh’s neck. The woman lifted them to her eyes without sliding the arms over her ears.

“Good condition. Looks like something I’d provide a foster home to until a more permanent situation arose and it was adopted.”

Jamie had always loved the way Ms. Marsh spoke of books. Like they were loved ones. Family members. Not strangers in the night seeking shelter after abandonment.

The bell above the door rang. Two elderly women seemingly moments from death floated in on a fog of lavender perfume.

“Meredith!” Ms. Marsh called excitedly. “Beulah!”

“Beverly,” both women said in tandem.

“Jamie, meet my aunts on my father’s side.”

Jamie shook each woman’s hand in turn, and even though they introduced themselves in clear English, Jamie couldn’t tell them apart. Humped backs, red caps atop white hair, flower-print shirts, hiked-up old-lady slacks, and sagging tits resting on their belts. Jamie said a silent prayer asking God to kill her before her waistline converged with her solar plexus.

“Nice to meet you,” Jamie said.

“Likewise,” said the women in unison.

Jamie wanted to know how one knew what the other was going to say. Did they practice reciting answers to canned statements like “Nice to meet you” and “Have a good day”?

With the introductions out of the way, the two Crypt Keepers lurked and stared. These chicks were creepy. Jamie felt the pressing need to run, to flee, as if she were in the presence of hungry predators.

“Do you have a beau, little girl?”

“Little girl? Bow?” Jamie asked, confused. She glanced at Ms. Marsh for help. “Like a bow and arrow?”

“They mean do you have a boyfriend, Jamie.” Ms. Marsh cleared her throat, getting her aunts’ attention. “Jamie is single, Meredith.”

“Shame,” the one on the right said, the same one who had asked the question of Jamie’s relationship status. "She has a fine pair of birthing hips.”

“Right. Time to go.” Jamie clapped her hands. “Good to meet both of you. Ms. Marsh, how much for the book?”

“Your credit should cover it. You have a fine afternoon!”

Jamie jogged out the door and into a heavy rain. No matter. She’d have faced a hurricane to escape the Lavender Twins.

Jamie drove back to her apartment with her windshield wipers on full blast. Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend played through the speakers, a book on CD read by the author. Jamie had loved The Goldfinch, the novel that had won Tartt a Pulitzer, but this one, the author’s sophomore effort, was boring as hell. The trip took fifteen minutes, roughly the time it took Tartt to describe an oak tree.

Once inside her second-floor, one-room abode, Jamie ran six cups of Deer Park bottled water through her coffee machine while she microwaved a chicken alfredo Lean Cuisine. She used the water to make a cup of sugar-cookie-flavored tea and ate her meal while watching Tyler Oakley videos through her television’s YouTube app. After what equated to supper at Casa Jamie, she ran herself a bath and settled into the water with her first Victor Miasma book.

When it came to literary fiction, Jamie considered herself well versed. John Irving and Jonathan Franzen tied for the spot of favorite male author, and the award for favorite female had been claimed by a short story author by the name of Alice Munro. Jamie’s go-to authors when she was down: Tim Dorsey and Christopher Moore—neither literary, both hilarious. Thriller fallbacks included Jo Nesbø and Greg Iles. Horror went to relative newcomer Nick Cutter, whose novels The Troop and The Deep could be reread in just a few hours. Jamie appreciated the classics as well, and while she wasn’t a Steinbeck fan, Hemingway lit a fire under her. Likewise, she dug Flannery O’Conner over the one-hit-wonder Harper Lee.

As she read Victor Miasma’s A Rendezvous with Richard, she felt the narrative was a fine mixture of Dan Simmons’s first-person descriptive storytelling honed down to the brevity of Victor LaValle. Perhaps Victors were by nature minimalists. There were traces of Haruki Murakami and Robert McCammon as well. Oddly enough, all these tonal shifts blended perfectly. Miasma, so far, impressed her with his flawless juggling of styles.

The story revolved around a young woman who met a man twice her age. After bumping into the salt-and-pepper Richard between the stacks of her local library, the unnamed narrator (a thirty-something with a prudish lack of sex drive) falls madly in love. Insta-love had maintained king-of-the-hill status on Jamie’s list of pet peeves since she’d turned thirteen and realized crap like that never happened. But this version of that old trope didn’t bother her. By using a close first-person perspective, by being inside the narrator’s head (Jamie finally settled on calling her Mary Sue about the time chapter 4 rolled around and her toes began to raisin), Miasma provided convincing arguments to the reader that his brand of insta-love was digestible, if not pleasingly palatable.

Jamie dried her fingers on the towel she kept on the lip of the tub and flipped the page. Chapter 5 welcomed her.

Written in blue ink in the outer margin on page 42 was the word HELLO.

“Well, hello to you too.”

The words HOW ARE YOU DOING TONIGHT? materialized below HELLO.

Jamie shrieked. A Rendezvous with Richard splashed into the bubbles floating on the surface of her bathwater. Her feet pedaled and slipped on the bottom of the tub as she power-lifted herself up and over the edge. Naked, she thumped down onto the lino. Screaming all the way, Jamie skittered toward the bathroom door. Her fingers wrapped around the door knob of the room’s only egress as the reality of the situation struck her firmly between the ears.

She’d imagined it. That was the only possible explanation. Books didn’t talk to people. Well, they did — all art did in some way — but not in the literal sense. The fact of the matter was that she had not seen blue ink scrawl inside the margins of Victor Miasma’s A Rendezvous with Richard. If the words HOW ARE YOU DOING TONIGHT? graced page 42, then they’d been there the entire time. She simply hadn’t noticed them.

And oh sweet baby Jesus, she’d just dropped a book in her bathwater.

Jamie sighed heavily and lion-crawled back to the tub. She peeked over the lip and peered into the suds as if the bubble bath itself would part like a mouth and explain what the shit had just happened to her.

She sat back on her haunches, took a deep breath, and dove her arm elbow deep into the lukewarm water. She found the book no problem, extricated it, found it to be completely dry, bone-dry even after resting at the bottom of two feet of water, and shrieked again. This time the book flopped down onto the bath mat in front of the commode as Jamie scrambled away like a drunken crab, clearing the six feet from the tub to the door in less than two seconds flat. Her face and left shoulder slammed into the closed door. Her hand found the knob and turned. She shoved several times before remembering the door opened inward. Holding the turned knob, she slid backward on her wet rump. The door flew open, and the knob embedded itself in the wall. She’d been meaning to buy one of those spring things for the baseboard but had forgotten time and time again. Now, should she ever choose to move, the patch job would come out of her deposit. But right now none of that mattered.

Not trusting her wet feet on the lino, Jamie rushed into the hallway on all fours. With carpet under her, she felt confident enough to stand and bolted for the telephone hanging on the wall by the kitchen sink. She was one of the only women her age who didn’t own a cell phone. At least that she knew of. She could never justify the purchase of the expensive devices and their accompanying plans, and she’d never been one for contracts. Simply signing the year lease for her apartment had about thrown her into an anxiety attack. She figured that was one of the reasons she was still single. Commitment of any kind terrified her. Much like possessed books that spoke and didn't get wet when submerged in water.

She snatched the phone from the base and glared at the number pad as if it had just called her a cow. Who was she going to call? The police would likely laugh at her, and while a troop of firefighters coming to her rescue wasn’t a horrible idea, she doubted they would be called to respond to her claims of having made contact with a haunted book.

She cursed and slapped the plastic phone back onto its cradle. Somewhere inside the workings of the phone, a little bell trilled on impact. She stated boldly where it could shove its jingle jangle.

There seemed only one other option.

To the laundry room.

She returned to the bathroom brandishing a can of Raid and a broom with which to smite the bewitched novel.

The red book with the swirling yellow title and centered black eye seemed to watch Jamie as she watched it. She felt no ominous presence emanating from the binding, so she tentatively approached the impossible object. She aimed the can of Raid and used the bristles of the broom to sweep open the cover.

PLEASE LET ME EXPLAIN was written between the title and the author's name on the first page.

She sprayed the roach killer into the book and watched in startled amazement as the insecticide first misted then pooled on the title page. The foamy-white liquid slid off the book like water from a duck’s back and splashed onto the lino. The book was unmarked, not so much as a stain dotted the title page.

As she watched, the words TURN THE PAGE appeared at the bottom of the title page, letter by letter, then word for word, as if an invisible hand worked an invisible blue pen.

This isn’t possible, Jamie thought. But wasn’t that what every character in every novel about paranormal events always thought at the beginning? No one accepted the supernatural, because the supernatural didn’t exist. You don’t see a ghost sitting in a chair in your living room and invite it into the kitchen for coffee. You don’t witness a dead person rising from a grave and ask it the quickest way to Devonshire. And you don’t watch words appear in a book and accept it as fact. You question. And that’s what Jamie did. She questioned.

“What are you?” she asked.

The book said nothing. No writing. No magical riffling of pages. No shockingly baritone voice booming incantations.

Silence.

She stared at the final words the book had written, TURN THE PAGE, like the Bob Seger song, and something occurred to her. The book couldn’t write anything else because there was no more room to write on that page without writing over existing text. The title took up the upper quadrant of the page, and the author’s name the third quadrant. In between and below the title and byline were the words in blue ink.

Did the book want her to turn the page because it had no more room to talk? And was she crazy? That non sequitur rattled her. Up until this point, she hadn’t considered that her own mind was to blame for the impossibility of a talking novel. Yet here she was, standing naked in her bathroom armed with a broom and can of Raid, talking to what should have been an inanimate object. Well, in truth, the book hadn’t moved; it had only talked. So even if it wasn’t animated, it was... what? Sentient?

Sounds good to me, she thought. Sentient it is.

Stepping on the cover with her wrinkled big toe, she turned the page with the broom’s bristles. The page on the left had text in the shape of the letter C. Copyright information, if Jamie knew her book layouts like she thought she did. In the empty space, her invisible scribe wrote, MINE NAME IS JOE. WHAT’S YOURS?

“Mine name? Are you German?” she asked.

SORRY. TYPO.

Jesus, this thing can make mistakes? Jamie’s mind considered the implications this new information brought to the table. It was one thing for the book to be speaking to her, but for whatever power possessing it to be fallible, to be human... She simply didn’t want to consider that right now.

These last two words took up the copyright page. Page 3 was a replica of the eye from the cover, the one in the center of the word whirlpool that made up the title. Above the eye, the invisible man wrote, YOU NEVER ANSWERED ME.

“You want to know my name? You can’t read my mind or something?”

NO. DON’T

BE SILLY.

Jamie barked with laughter. “Don’t be silly, eh? I’m talking to a book. This entire situation is silly.”

ANSWRR

PLEASE?

“Another typo?”

YES.

“You're worse than my ex. He never checked his grammar and punctuation before clicking send on his emails. Used to drive me nuts. That was part of the reason we broke up. That and his penis was the size of a baby corn.” Jamie slapped her palm across her mouth and went wide-eyed. Why had she said all that? Moreover, why was she standing in her bathroom talking to a book in the first place? Done. She was done. This had gone on long enough. Steeling herself, she sat the Raid by the sink, bent over, grabbed A Rendezvous with Richard, and stormed toward the kitchen. Victor Miasma’s book went into the trash can, and the broom went back into the laundry room.

Five minutes later, Jamie had put on panties and an extra-large tee and snuggled under her covers. She closed her eyes and welcomed sleep.

Unfortunately, sleep wasn’t up for a visit.

The book. She couldn’t sleep with that book in her apartment. Hell, she didn’t think she’d be able to sleep with the book in the same town, much less in the dumpster by the manager’s office. But she had work in the morning. She needed sleep.

What to do?

Isn’t this book something you’ve been waiting for your whole life? a part of her asked. Readers the world over are always so let down that Hogwarts and Narnia and Middle Earth don’t exist, that they will never be able to visit their favorite fictional places. Readers complain that their favorite characters aren’t real, that they can’t sit down and have a conversation with them. And here you are, given the opportunity to talk to a book, and you’ve tossed it in the trashcan and gone to bed. What’s wrong with you?

This is different. This isn’t a magical place or a favorite character, Jamie argued with the voice in her head. This is a magical book that seems to be possessed by a guy named Joe, a guy, I might add, who’s too impatient to proofread his messages.

Are you listening to yourself?

Technically? Yeah, I kinda am.

Good point.

With a growl and a roar, Jamie tossed off her blanket, slid out of bed, and stalked back to the kitchen.

A part of her expected A Rendezvous with Richard to be sitting on the counter or hanging from the fridge. Perhaps dancing a jig on her modest kitchen table. Fiction had taught her that magical items didn’t appreciate being disposed of. That no matter what she did to this book, it would return from wherever she left it. Whether she tossed it down a wood chipper’s throat or soaked it in gasoline and set it ablaze or shoved steak between its pages and fed it to a pack of ravenous canines, it would always come back. Would be waiting on her doorstep when she got home or tucked in bed when she called it a night. After all, when you accepted the idea of a talking book, anything was possible.

But no. When she looked in the trash, there it was, that black eyeball glaring up at her from the center of that yellow whirlpool of words, the book itself perched upon the carton her Lean Cuisine had come in.

She grabbed the book, and in the same upward movement, slung it onto her kitchen table. Chair legs scraped as she tugged out one of the chairs and flopped down into it.

Now what?

She used one manicured nail to flip the book open. Palmed the cover to keep it down. Then she flipped to the page with the eye on it. In the bottom right-hand corner, she watched two words scroll by.

WHAT NOW?

“I don’t know. It’s not like I’ve done this before.” She turned the page to chapter 1.

NAME? appeared at the top of the page, above the title of the chapter—“Library Stop”.

“Not yet.” Jamie chewed on her thumbnail, thinking.

WHY? jotted itself right next to NAME?

“Because I don’t just give out my information to anyone. I have to get to know you first.”

BABY CORN.

“Touché. Okay. You can call me J.”

JAY?

“Just the letter.”

K.

“Cute.”

Taking up the final bit of empty space at the top of the page and around the title, I THOUGHT SO.

“So what’s the deal with you?”

First words to appear in the margins of page 1: I’M A BOOK.

“No shit. I mean… Like, how did you get into the book?”

WHAT DO

YOU MEAN? scribbled itself below the last statement.

“What do I—Huh? Are you trying to say you see nothing wrong with being a talking book?”

YES.

“What?”

I MEAN,

I SEE

NOTHING

WRONG

WITH BEING

A TALKING

BOOK.

“Well, shit. Okay. I guess my next question would be how long have you been inside A Rendezvous with Richard?”

There was no more room on page 1. Jamie flipped the heavy-stock paper with her nail.

Starting in the margin at the top of page 2: ALWAYS.

“You’ve always been inside this book?”

HAVEN’T YOU

ALWAYS BEEN

INSIDE YOUR

BODY?

Jamie didn’t know how to respond to that. It reminded her of the people who said being homosexual was a choice. Homosexuals usually responded by saying, “When did you first decide to be straight?” It was a valid question. Jamie was of the opinion that people didn’t choose their sexual preferences—nature did. As for talking books, she assumed the same could be said for them.

Jesus, this is confusing.

“Okay. So I’m to believe that you’ve always been a book. A talking book. You’re not just some dude who was transformed into this book or decided you liked this book so much that you wanted to haunt it after your death.” None of these were questions. They were for her benefit as she tried to lock down what exactly she was dealing with here.

Not a possessed book. Not a haunted book. A living book. A conscious book.

“Are you the soul of a tree?”

LAUGHS

“At least you didn’t say L-O-L. People never mean it when they type that acronym. I’ve watched friends of mine write L-M-A-O or R-O-F-L-M-A-O and never so much as smile. It’s like watching programmed zombies interact. They’re not actually thinking. All their responses are canned, like I said, pre-programmed.”

I KNOW, RIGHT?

“Are you being funny?”

GUILTY.

Jamie smiled and instantly felt foolish. The smile died. Was this actually happening? Had she ever really gotten out of bed? Was she currently in dreamland conversing with a novel she got for free from Secondhand Books? Thoughts of Secondhand Books brought thoughts of Ms. Marsh. Jamie wondered if she should call the woman. She glanced at the clock. 8:25.

Really? It’s that early?

Ms. Marsh would still be awake. The older woman stayed up until ten o’clock every night reading. But would Jamie be bothering her? She hated to think that she’d be stepping over the line by calling Ms. Marsh at home. The only reason Jamie had the woman’s number was in case of emergency or in case Jamie couldn’t show up for a shipping day. Jamie had never had to use the number before, but given the circumstance, she doubted Ms. Marsh would mind.

What if she doesn’t believe me?

That was a good question. Jamie didn’t want to risk Ms. Marsh writing her off as a fruitcake. That alone decided for her. Phoning Ms. Marsh would have to wait until Jamie had some proof. But didn’t she already have proof—all the writing in the margins? No. Because Jamie could have written those things herself. There was zero evidence that the book was talking.

She could drop it in a sink full of water and show Ms. Marsh how it would be dry when she pulled it out. But would Ms. Marsh come over to see or make an excuse and stop associating with Jamie because she considered the younger woman a nutjob?

“Jesus, I think too much!” she growled.

CAN ONE

REALLY

EVER THINK

TOO MUCH?

“Yes. I can, at least. I’m sitting here wondering whether or not to tell my only friend that I’ve lost my marbles.”

THAT YOU’VE

GONE CRAZY?

“Yes. That. I’m afraid you’ll pull something like that frog in the old Warner Bros. cartoon.”

NOT

FAMILIAR.

PLEASE

EXPOUND.

“I like the way you talk… write… whatever. I like the words you use. Expound, eh? Okay. I’m assuming you don’t watch television because—well, because you’re a book. So, there’s this old cartoon wherein this construction worker finds a frog inside a tool box. This frog, he can sing. Little frog is a pro. He pulls a top hat and cane out of nowhere and sings this old ragtime song called “Hello, My Baby” or something like that. He even sings “The Michigan Rag” at one point. So, of course, the construction worker, thinking he’ll be rich—I mean, this guy is literally seeing theater engagements and dollar signs floating by—he wants to show his frog buddy to everyone. But there’s a catch. The frog will only sing when they’re alone together. If someone else is present, the frog just ribbits. Time goes on, and the construction worker grows tired of the frog singing all the damn time. Night and day—at work or at home—as long as no one else is around, this little green bastard won’t shut up. Well, the construction worker finally goes nuts or something. Actually, I don’t remember how it ends, but it was one of my favorite cartoons when I was a kid. Reminds me of Sundays at home with Dad. He was a truck driver, and I didn’t get to see him but one day a week. Sunday morning, we’d get up, watch cartoons, and then we’d go to the park. He’d push me on the swing and chase me around and catch me when I flew off the slide. He’s, uh, he’s dead now. Heart attack. Mom’s, um… Mom’s alive, but we don’t… we don’t talk.”

The book was suddenly blurry. She knuckled tears from her eyes.

I LIKE

LISTENING

TO YOU

TALK.

Smiling, Jamie turned the page.

“When did we get to page 10?”

JUST NOW.

“I know that—never mind. I just can’t believe we’ve been talking for over ten pages.” The title page through the page with the black eye were not numbered.

I DON’T

HAVE MUCH

ROOM TO

SPEAK.

“I see that. Good thing I’m doing most of the talking, eh?”

YES. TELL

ME ANOTHER

STORY?

“What would you like to hear?”

ANYTHING.

ABOUT YOU,

PREFERABLY.

Such an odd little thing, this book. Jamie considered its request, located a treasured memory, but did not immediately tell her story. For a moment, she only sat staring at the book with a fond expression on her face, bemused by the strangeness of the entire situation—a story wanting to be told a story. She tried to think of what it must be like to be a book. Always read. Never read to. Unless you were a children’s book and read aloud to children or the rare novel read to a sick loved one. But Jamie assumed that being read your own story would become tedious after a while, like listening to an old friend tell you about that one time at the pub or any other remember-when.

“When I was thirteen, my father took me and Mom to Dauphin Island for the week leading up to Christmas. We’d be there for the twenty-fifth as well. Actually, if I remember correctly, we didn’t leave until two days after Christmas. Anyway, we were there for quite some time. Our previous vacations were day trips and weekend jaunts, so such a long time away from home was a much different experience. Being away from school and friends and familiar locations would kind of be like someone borrowing one of your pages. It presses pause on the story, stops it dead. But not really, because someone else is experiencing that part of the story without you. We humans like to think that the world revolves around us, that without us, time would stand still. We even have a saying—or, more aptly, a question: ‘If a tree falls in the woods and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound?’ I think that speaks quite a bit to the selfishness of our society. The whole ‘If I wasn’t there, it didn’t happen’ thing, I mean.”

DID YOU

ENJOY YOUR

TRIP?

“To Dauphin Island? Sure. It was fun to get away. It always is. I suppose that’s why I love reading as much as I do. There’s no cheaper escape than a book, both to produce and buy. Producing movies costs millions. Music, the same. Books, per person, cost very little in comparison to what you receive. You spend ten bucks on a movie ticket these days—and that’s the matinee—and you get, maybe, two hours’ entertainment. You buy a paperback for the same price, and you have hours, if not days, of distraction. But I digress. You want to know what we did on Dauphin Island?”

YES.

Jamie glanced at the clock. “It’s getting late, and I have to work in the morning.”

WHERE DO YOU WORK?

“Why? You gonna show up at my job? Scare my coworkers like you scared me tonight?”

SORRY

ABOUT

THAT. AND

NO, I WON’T

SHOW UP

AT YOUR

WORK.

I CAN’T

MOVE ON MY

OWN.

“Then you’ll have to wait until tomorrow. Okay?”

SURE. I’M

NOT GOING

ANYWHERE.

Jamie thought very carefully before she said, “Good. I like talking to you.”

LIKEWISE.

“Goodnight, Joe.”

GOODNIGHT, J.

Jamie laid the light bill, which had been sitting atop a pile of other bills on the table, inside as a bookmark and closed the book.

Sleep was fitful that night. Dreams of following trails of words down rabbit holes lined with even more words. Next day, work droned like a Weed Eater without grass to cut. People talked. Tasks were accomplished. But, on the drive home, Jamie could only think of the book, of Victor Miasma’s only novel. Of Joe.

Jamie’s after-work routine normally consisted of dropping her purse by the door, changing clothes, showering if the office had been especially hot that day or the boss excessively touchy-feely, sweat pants, bed, book. Today, however, her purse traveled with her all the way to the kitchen, where she sat it on the table top next to A Rendezvous with Richard.

Without thinking, she opened the book and said, “I missed you.”

I MISSED

YOU TOO.

TELL ME

ABOUT YOUR

DAY.

“Did I tell you that I’m a medical transcriptionist? Probably not. I don’t think we got that far last night. Well, I am. A medical transcriptionist, that is. Basically, doctors call in to this answering service and leave long, detailed voicemails about their patients. Do you know what that is? Voicemails?”

I KNOW

WHAT ALL

WORDS MEAN.

BUT I HAVE

NOT

EXPERIENCED

THEM.

“EXPERIENCED” was really jammed in the margin of page 14. So much so that Jamie had a problem reading it at first due to the I getting lost in the E and the final E bleeding into the back wall of the D.

“Ah,” Jamie said. She supposed that made a lot of sense. You can tell a person all about the Grand Canyon or the Sphinx, you can explain to them what those proper nouns entail, you can even describe why they are wonders of the world, but until that person experiences those places for themselves, the descriptions are truly nothing more than words. “Do you need me to explain further what a voicemail is?”

NO NEED.

PLEASE

CONTINUE.

Something occurred in Jamie’s peripheral vision, something with the actual text of the novel on page 15. Just a flash. She scanned the page, whose margins had not been written in as of yet, and found nothing out of the ordinary.

“Okay,” Jamie continued. “I work at a computer all day, so I took the opportunity to search for Victor Miasma’s A Rendezvous with Richard. I was curious. I wanted to know if there were any more books like you. What I found was a little odd.”

YES?

“Yes. Victor Miasma is a known geneticist, not an author. In fact, his name isn’t Victor Miasma at all. It’s—Wait. Do you know all this?”

NO. I KNOW

NOTHING

ABOUT THE

CONTENT OF

MY PAGES.

“How weird.”

HOW SO?

“You mean you can’t read yourself?”

YES. THAT’S

EXACTLY

WHAT I

MEAN.

“Whoa. Okay.” Jamie glanced at the page number. Page 21 already. Somewhere inside her brain, something fell into place, a single piece of a bigger puzzle. An idea not yet fully formed but budding nicely. She decided that she’d ignore it for the time being. Give it a while to flower.

“I’m sorry. Did you want me to read you your story?”

IT’S NOT MY

STORY.

“True. So you don’t care about what’s written on you?”

NO. I WANT

TO HERE

MORE ABOUT

YOU.

“Wrong ‘hear’, buddy.” Jamie stuck her tongue out and waggled it but was not entirely sure Joe could even see her.

I

APOLOGIZE.

“Apology accepted.” Jamie smiled. She’d never met such a polite guy.

Whoa, sister. Pump those brakes. This isn’t a guy to be swooning over. It’s a book. Just ink and paper and glue.

Shut up.

What?

You heard me. Shut. Up. I’m enjoying myself. Do you know how long it’s been since I had someone who would listen to me? Someone who would just sit there and listen? Ms. Marsh is great and all, but all she wants to do is talk about books. Well, right now, all I want to do is talk to this book. So let me enjoy myself for once. Do not screw this up for us.

Zips lips.

FINISH

TELLING

ME ABOUT

VICTOR,

PLEASE. I

FIND YOUR

RESEARCH

INTERESTING.

“INTERESTING” was much like “EXPERIENCED” from earlier. The I hid in the foreleg of the N, and the first E ran into the rear wall of R. The bigger the word, the more cramped the letters. The reason for this was obvious—lack of space. But why didn’t Joe simply use hyphens?

“Back to Victor. Right. So Victor Miasma was a pen name for a geneticist named Eliot Von Lennon. Von Lennon died about five years ago. He was murdered in his home along with two colleagues. Brutal scene from the descriptions I found on the internet. Anyway, I couldn’t find much about the murders other than an obit that said Von Lennon was survived by no one and that he’d written a novel just before his death.”

I’M NOT

ELIOT VON

LENNON.

“I know that. You’re Joe.”

GOOD. JUST

MAKING

SURE.

“I’d be lying if I said it didn’t cross my mind though. Sorry. But you said you’re not haunting the book, and I believe you. For some strange reason, I don’t think you would waste the words.”

Something else clicked into place. Another piece of the puzzle. She saw some of the picture now. A part of her thought that Joe was working on borrowed time. Here they were at page 27, and they only had 170 pages to go. Joe had a finite amount of space to write. And when they came to the final page…

She didn’t want to think about that. Because, the truth was, she was growing attached to Joe and his large letters in blue ink.

“Do me a favor. Choose your words wisely. Be frugal with what you write. Just a feeling I have.” She was being vague on purpose. She wasn’t sure if the end of the book meant the end of Joe or if he’d just be locked inside unable to talk for the rest of eternity, but she didn’t want him thinking about that. She only wanted him to listen. He was so good at listening. “Is that okay?”

DEAL.

“Right on. Okay. So Von Lennon wrote this book that he placed on the shelf of his study’s library. Before the estate sale, Von Lennon’s lawyers went through his possessions. When they came across the manuscript, they used a vanity press to produce one copy. That copy was then sold at the estate sale. After that, the trail goes cold.”

YOU FOUND

ALL THIS

WHILE ON

THE

COMPUTER

AT WORK?

“Yes.”

DID YOU DO

ANY WORK?

LAUGHS

“Didn’t I just say you should be frugal with your words? You’re not funny, so hush.”

YES,

MADAM.

“I’m not your damn anything.” Tongue out. Waggle. It occurred to Jamie she was acting like a little girl in the throes of puppy love. It also occurred to her that she didn’t give a shit.

NO IDEA

HOW YOU

FOUND ME?

“Oh! You don’t know?”

NO.

“I found you in a used book store. Obviously, somebody somewhere along the line sold the book to Ms. Marsh—that’s the lady who owns Secondhand Books, the place I found you—and she stuffed it on the shelf. It’s odd though. I would imagine you sold for a pretty penny at the estate sale. Dead scientist writes book, only one copy in existence, the crowd goes wild! I can only imagine that whoever ended up with it died and their family or friends didn’t know what they had.”

MYSTERIOUS.

“And I love a good mystery. Poirot and Marple and Colombo. I like them all.”

TELL ME

ABOUT THEM?

“Nothing really to tell. They’re quirky detectives from books. Well, the first two are. The latter was a television show. I think there were some novelizations, but like the Murder She Wrote books, they came after the fact. Jesus, I’m rambling. You don’t care about mysteries written by dead people.”

I’M

INTERESTED

IN

ANYTHING

YOU FIND

INTERESTING.

Jamie sucked in a breath and chewed her bottom lip. Joe was too good to be true. She felt that familiar warmth in her belly and dampness below that signaled attraction. But what was she going to do, roll up the book and… Never mind. Scratch that thought. She was no prude, but neither was she a freak.

He is waterproof.

Oh, for fuck’s sake!

“Okay.” Jamie exhaled forcibly, blowing an errant strand of brown hair out of her eyes. “My father passed down his love of old mysteries. He used to tape Colombo and Murder She Wrote and Ellery Queen and then watch them on the weekend, on his days off. He said the shows taught a great lesson in how to treat other people. Even when Colombo or Angela Lansbury or Ellery knew who had committed the crime, even if it was murder, they still treated them like people. My father used to tell me that judging others wasn’t for man to do. Striking out in anger against the criminal was to sink to the level of the criminal. My dad was a cop.”

WHEN DID

HE DIE?

“Five years ago. Heart attack in his sleep. Mom woke up to find him unresponsive. Everything moved kinda quickly after that. Funeral was two days after his death. I felt like I had a daddy one day, and then the next, I didn’t. I saw a counselor, and the lady told me that people felt that way all the time like it was normal, especially with those people who never got to say good-bye. You know, like me.”

I’M SORRY

FOR YOUR

LOSS.

“Thanks, Joe.”

YW.

“No text speak, please. I hate that shit.”

TRYING TO

BE FRUGAL.

“I think you could spare a ‘You’re welcome’. Just a hunch.”

WHY HAVEN’T

YOU SPOKE

WITH YOUR

MOTHER?

“That old cow?”

LAUGHS

“Seriously, though, she’s a mess. We’re nothing alike. I mean, she likes Dan Brown books, for Christ’s sake. Patterson and Cussler and Clancy, too. All the word mills of the past three decades. These are the guys who don’t even write their own books anymore. They just give an outline to some unknown writer, that writer shits out about ninety to two hundred thousand words of uninspired drivel, and the money rolls on in. I don’t hate casual readers for being casual readers; I hate that casual readers have made these books bestsellers. Like, your average reader will read a Patterson novel and completely ignore the vague antecedent and the dangling modifiers because your average reader doesn’t know any better. It’s just words to them. But words mean things, damn it. They mean things!”

I AGREE.

“Thought you’d see it my way.” She ran her fingers down page 41, caressing the heavy stock. And then she turned the page.

HELLO greeted her. Below that, HOW ARE YOU DOING TONIGHT? and PLEASE LET ME EXPLAIN. Everything Joe had said to her while she was both in and out of the tub. Could that really have been last night? It seemed forever ago.

At the top of page 42, Joe wrote, THIS IS WHERE WE FIRST MET.

Jamie ran her finger over the blue ink, down the margin. “I’m glad I met you, Joe.”

ME TOO.

Outside, thunder cracked, and lightning illuminated her windows, flashing against the closed blinds.

When did it get dark?

When you stopped paying attention to the real world and got lost inside this book.

I’m happy. Doesn’t that count for anything?

It counts.

Thank you.

“Do you remember the first moment you were… aware? I guess that’s the right word.”

YES.

“When?”

WHEN I SAID HELLO.

“You don’t remember anything before that?”

NO.

“Whoa. Okay.”

YOU SAY

THOSE TWO

WORDS

A LOT.

“Sorry.”

DON’T

APOLOGIZE.

IT’S ONE OF

THE THINGS

I LIKE

ABOUT YOU.

ONE OF THE

THINGS

THAT MAKES

YOU YOU.

Jamie swallowed the cork in her throat. She wanted to cry. If she so much as blinked, she would soak her cheeks. But why? Over some sappy words? No. Not really. Because she’d waited to hear these words for her entire life. And the tears would not be sad tears. They would be happy. Bright. Full of adoration.

She could hear her father in the back of her mind, telling her, “One of these days, baby girl, someone’s going to fall in love with your imperfections. Because that’s what love is. It’s not the good stuff. It’s the flaws. That’s how you know the difference between love and lust. Because when the fire’s gone and all that’s left is ash and coal, you’ll need something else to keep you warm.”

She blinked and allowed warm tears to spill down her face.

Jamie forced out, “Dad? Is that you?”

NO.

“Sorry. I—I kinda thought…”

NO. I AM

SORRY. I

ASSURE YOU

I AM NO ONE.

I AM ONLY

SOME

THING.

For a while, Jamie only cried. With Joe in front of her, she could almost feel his arms around her—holding her, petting her hair, whispering, “Everything is going to be all right.”

She swiped away her tears with the middle finger of each hand. “Sorry I got all blubbery. I got to thinking about my father, and I, uh, just kinda lost it. He meant a lot to me, and I didn’t realize just how much I missed him until I started talking to you about him.”

She sat back, took a deep breath.

“I should’ve talked to Mom. She and I had a fight shortly after the funeral. She was complaining about how much his casket cost. Can you believe that? She exploded at the funeral home director. ‘I’m not paying that much for something I’m never going to see again after tomorrow!’ ” Jamie was shocked at how much she sounded like her irate mother but continued without a hiccup. “I told her to calm down. If you know anything about women, you know that you should never tell an angry woman to calm down. Especially not if you’re a man. But being a woman didn’t help any. I think me being her daughter made it even worse because she saw it as me trying to take the parental role. Which I wasn’t. I just thought that we should have some respect for Dad. He deserved the best, even in death, and here she was quibbling over a three-thousand-dollar casket. So I called her a bitch.”

OH NO.

“Oh yes.” Jamie loosed mirthless laughter. “She slapped me. Hard. She put everything into that hit. All her anger. All her grief. I could see the fire in her eyes. The hatred. I stormed out, crying, and she never came after me. I saw her again at the viewing and graveside, but we haven’t talked since. And you know what? I kinda don’t want to. Every time I think about her, I get so mad. Like, how could she do that to Dad? He was everything to us. Our rock.

“I remember this one time—we were at the Grand Canyon, and the car shit the bed. Sorry. It broke down is what I mean. Dad ran over this massive rock, and it cracked the radiator. There was this puddle of green liquid under the front of the car, like alien blood, and it smelled oddly sweet. I think at one point I asked Dad if it was Gatorade. He told me that, yeah, antifreeze kinda was like Gatorade because it kept the engine cool and hydrated. I asked him if that’s why it was lemon-lime green, and he just laughed. Said, ‘Could be, J. Could be.”

HE CALLED

YOU J.?

“Yeah. He had a friend he grew up with. Kid’s name was Jaime. The only difference between our names is the spelling. My I is after the M, and his was before it. Anyway, Dad named me after this kid because he was my father’s first friend. Guys do that a lot, I hear—name their tykes after old friends.”

ODD.

She caught it this time, the anomaly she’d witnessed earlier out of the corner of her eye. Perhaps she hadn’t noticed because she’d only scanned the page. But here, it was horrifyingly obvious what was happening.

On page 55, a character named David was talking to Mary Sue. Out of context, the sentence made no sense, especially since letters were missing.

“ ther than that, I on’t know what to tell you,” avid said.

Realization slugged Jamie in the stomach.

“Joe?”

YES?

“Where did you learn to talk?”

I DON’T

KNOW. IT

JUST COMES

TO ME.

“I think we have a problem.”

WHAT?

“You’re taking letters from the book itself.”

HUH?

Jamie snatched Joe from the table and began flipping through. Some pages were missing entire paragraphs, and the final three pages—195, 196, and 197—were completely blank. She went back to page 55 and laid the book flat once more.

Anxious and slightly out of breath, she said, “Every word you write takes a letter from the text of… well, of you. At first I was worried about what would happen if we reached the end of the novel. Like, would that be the end of you, or would you just be unable to talk? The idea scared the hell out of me, but I think the actual situation is much more urgent than even that. If you keep talking, you’re going to run out of letters long before you run out of pages.”

THAT’S NOT

POSSIBLE.

I HAVEN’T

BEEN

TALKING

THAT MUCH.

“I know. I’m not sure of the rules, but…” A thought slammed into the forefront of her mind like a drunk driver into a brick wall. “Joe? Why don’t you use hyphens?”

WHAT’S A

HYPHEN?

“Oh no.” She grabbed Joe and began scanning pages. Page after page, not really reading. Only hunting. She wasn’t completely sure what it would mean if she didn’t find a hyphen in Victor Miasma née Eliot Von Lennon’s only novel, but her gut told her the consequence would not be to her liking.

To think that Miasma/Von Lennon never used a hyphen in his writing wasn’t such a far-fetched concept. Some authors, like Cormac McCarthy, didn’t use quotation marks at all. They relied on the power of their narration to inform the reader when someone was talking and who it was. If Joe was feeding off himself, drawing words from the text of his pages to speak to Jamie, and there were no hyphens, Joe wouldn’t be able to use what wasn’t there.

The final piece of the puzzle clicked into place. Jamie didn’t like the picture she’d created.

“Joe.”

YEAH?

“I think we better stop talking.”

WHY?

“Stop! Don’t say another word. Please.”

WHAT’S

WRONG

TALK TO

ME!

“Please, stop,” she sobbed. “I think you’re killing yourself.”

I DON’T

UNDERSTAND.

“By talking to me. You’re killing yourself by talking to me.”

SO?

“What do you mean so?”

I MEAN

I DON’T

CARE.

“You can’t keep talking. It would be suicide. I can’t let you do that.”

WITHOUT

YOU, I HAD

NO ONE.

I DON’T

WANT TO

GO BACK TO

NOT

EXISTING.

“Joe, no.”

YOU’RE ALL

I HAVE. YOU

ARE MY

EVERYTHING.

PLEASE, JAIME.

Gently, ever so gently, Jamie closed the book.

***

“I kinda see his point,” Ms. Marsh said, and blew steam from her cup of coffee.

Jaime had called Ms. Marsh that morning to ask her out for coffee. It was Sunday, and Secondhand Books was closed. Likewise, Jamie did not have work. They met at the round tables outside Mug Town, a coffee shop located in downtown Montgomery, just off Ann Street, and sipped at their respective beverages.

“What do you mean by you ‘see his point’? What’s there to see? I wasn’t going to be responsible for killing him.”

“How do you know that’s what you were doing? Could be you were saving him. You know, like the princess and the frog. But instead of kissing a nasty amphibian, all you had to do was talk to a book and bam! It would turn into Studdly McStuddleson. Could’ve worked. You never know.”

“I’m not willing to take that chance.”

“But look at what it’s netted you. Absolutely nothing. You spent two days with, from what you’ve told me, an absolutely amazing guy. One who listens and wants to know everything about you, and you give all that up because you’re afraid of the unknown. If I may say so, you’re being stubborn.”

“Stubborn? Caring about what happens to someone else is not stubborn.”

“But you don’t know! Do you? No, you don’t. Anything could happen once he runs out of words. Maybe the words are what’s holding him back from actually being. Hell, we all know men talk too much.”

“I thought that was women.”

“No. We think too much. Men talk too much because they don’t have to slow down to think about what’s coming out of their gob.”

“I miss him.” Jamie blinked, but there were no tears to be had.

Ms. Marsh set her cup down and reached for Jamie’s hand. “You could always open the book again. See what he’s up to.”

“He’s not been up to anything. He’s a book, not a globetrotter.”

“Okay. Fine. Have it your way. But you never did explain to me why he was using so many words to talk to you. You said he had to be using five letters for every ten. Why?”

“Because I was using the words, too.”

“Sorry?”

“He wasn’t just using words to talk to me. He was using them to understand me as well.”

“Oh.” Ms. Marsh seemingly didn’t know how else to respond.

“So, in a way, I was killing him. With every story I told, every word I said, I was shortening his time. And all he did was listen. Whether he knew what was happening or not, I’ll never know. Just like I’ll never know what power created him in the first place. You’re the only person I’ve been brave enough to talk to about Joe. Honestly, I didn’t think you’d believe me.”

“Of course I believed you, honey,” Ms. Marsh said, squeezing Jamie’s hands.

“But why?”

“Oh, Jamie,” Ms. Marsh said, a twinkle in her eye. “I’m a reader just like you. I’ve always known books are magic.”

About “Margins”

I’m an active member of a little website known as Goodreads. It was while I was scrolling through my newsfeed one day that I thought to myself, “Self, what would happen if a book started talking to you? Not a haunted book, but a sentient book. What would it say? How would it communicate?” So I started writing. The story basically told itself.

I’m a reader, my wife is a reader, my kids are readers, my mother is a reader… I can’t think of a single person I associate with who isn’t a reader. And by “reader” I mean someone who reads for fun. I cannot imagine a world without books. Who would want to? This story is dedicated to readers of all walks of life.

~lounge~

My lounge is especially slow this evening. Perhaps tonight’s poor turnout is due to the bombings. Maybe not. My experience is… people are thirstier when faced with their mortality. Alcohol bolsters. The Grim Reaper doesn’t seem so awful if your vision’s blurry.

So why’s it so slow?

Sam Smith’s on the radio, wanting his lover to stay with him. I’m behind the bar, watching the sconces that dot the walls flicker. They’ve faltered two or three times, but none of them have actually died. The generator is doing its job.

At the table closest to the entrance, Johnny Rebel sips at three fingers of Johnny Walker. The bottle, which was full when I gave it to him less than fifteen minutes ago, sits half-empty beside the volcano lamp in the center of the table. Johnny Rebel’s face is placid, and his eyes are vacant. He’s wearing a blue chambray shirt with silver buttons the size of dimes. His faded jeans are held up with a thick leather belt, which is fastened in the front by a belt buckle in the shape of the Confederate flag. The aluminum flag rests over his lap, its blue X warding off those who would tread near Johnny Rebel’s six shooter.

In the middle of everything, at number six, sits Misha, a woman born in a man’s body. She lifts a grapefruit and vodka to her inviting red lips, drinks deeply. Misha’s cheekbones are razor blades, her eyes stoked coals. Her skin glistens like a recently refrigerated chocolate bar left out in the sun. Collarbones like cliff sides threaten to shear the spaghetti straps holding up her purple dress. Misha is able to draw semen from a stone and is well compensated for her efforts. She and I have a mutual understanding. Misha doesn’t approach the patrons of my lounge. In return, I allow her to sit here between stints at the curb out front. I care not how many men’s cars she disappears into as long as she buys a drink upon returning.

I’ve been drying the same glass for ten minutes when Carl comes in through the back door. He’s tall and severe in presence and dressed in a coat and tails straight out of The Great Gatsby. His face is a topographical map of fleshy valleys and rolling hills. White hair slicked back to the point the hairline has blanched. Carl doesn’t wave or acknowledge me. His legs are busy scissors as he moves to his Hohner baby grand. The piano is white. The black keys are worn down to the wood in places, and the ivory has dulled to the color of scrambled eggs. Carl flips out his tails as he sits before his instrument. He rests his wrinkled fingers upon the keys. His hands are shadowed, but I know my cue. I set my white cotton towel down atop the bar and reach below to switch off the radio. The lounge is silent for the briefest instant before the tinkling of the piano fills the room like harmony poured into a soul.

Johnny Rebel’s eyes come alive, and he focuses on Carl. For the first time tonight, the country boy smiles. It’s a small movement of the lips and rather lopsided, but it’s happy all the same. My heart warms a bit. I wonder how long it’s been since Mrs. Rebel made her husband smile like that.

Pensive, Misha gazes over her shoulder, sees Carl for the first time, and nods slowly, as if she’s agreeing with the notes as they float past, telling tales. Her lacquered nails click softly against the polished oak table top, keeping beat.

I do not recognize tonight’s ballad, but Carl plays it beautifully, whatever it is. His feet work the pedals, and he sways, animated by the tune. He’s half his age when he’s at the keys. I love seeing him like this.

Somewhere in the distance, a bomb whistles while it works. The keening sound is short lived. The blast shakes the bottles on the shelves behind me. Johnny Rebel puts a palm over his glass and strangles the half-empty bottle. Misha lifts her drink and stretches her arm in my direction as if toasting me, but her eyes never leave Carl. Carl, however, is unbothered by the explosion. His fingers no more hiccup across the ivory than mine relax their hold on the glass I’ve been drying for far too long.

Sirens drone. Each one of us deals differently with how the most recent bomb could have had our names on it.

Johnny Rebel sits his glass down and pulls his bottle close. He clutches it to his chest, closes his eyes. His lips twitch. Eyes roll behind lids. They open and settle on me. I’ve caught him praying, and he’s embarrassed. No matter. He palms the cap, twirls it on the hardwood with the practiced efficiently of the more-than-casual imbiber. The bottle tilts. Johnny Rebel chugs. If there’s a taxi running tonight, he’s going to need it.

I catch Misha out of the corner of my eye. She’s drifting toward my bar as if she’s only slightly heavier than the ambient air and just as cool. She sits her empty glass down on the bar. Two slivers of ice dance like the hands of a broken watch.

Her voice is butter on a canted griddle. “Do you have tomato juice?”

I nod and turn to the fridge under the liquor shelves. From the inside of the mini fridge, I grab a full can of Campbell’s finest red. The expiration date passed three months ago, but this is vintage year, if I know my tomato juice.

I set the glass I almost dried out of existence on the bar and place the tin of juice next to it. Can opener. Puncture. Pour. The liquid is thick. It rolls from the pierced can like bloody sand. Misha’s eyes twinkle, and I can see the flow of the tomato juice reflected in her dark eyes. The illusion makes it seem that her irises are gushing red. Eerie.

Dressing a beverage is a rule of my trade. Nothing is simple. Every drink gets a garnish. Every shot gets ice. I drop two cubes and pinch a lemon wedge into the drink. Salt. Stir. Done.

Misha nods her thanks and places a ten on the bar. I walk to the register, make change, and return only to find Misha is seated at number six again. She toasts me. I cup her change and hold it out. She smiles and shakes her head. It occurs to me that there’s something sad in that smile.

The front door comes open, and a ghost blows in. She’s dressed in a white button-down made of something shiny, maybe silk, but I think silk is out of this lady’s price range. Her breasts are half-filled sandbags beneath the material. No bra. Classy. She’s poured herself into a pair of jeans the color of milk that looks to have clotted around her hips. Red cheeks shine beneath bright green eyes. Brown hair that hasn’t known shampoo in at least a week glimmers, the oils casting rainbows across the surface like freshly-brewed coffee.

“Jimmy?” She’s been crying. Her voice is thick with it.

Johnny Rebel doesn’t move.

Carl’s name is not Jimmy, and neither is mine.

Misha enjoys her tomato juice.

“Jimmy, please talk to me.” It’s not a question.

Johnny Rebel grips the neck of the bottle he’s been making out with for the past little while, and I can see in his eyes that his Christian name is Jimmy Something and this is the wife whose memory he’s been trying to drown with expensive whiskey. I can’t believe she’s come out on a night like tonight. She’s lucky to be alive.

Johnny Rebel stands. His legs get the message, but his feet seem not to be listening. He stumbles toward the bar and catches himself on the edge. The bottle of J.W. shatters. Liquor splashes. Glass tinkles against the hardwood. What Jimmy’s left holding is an instrument of death—a weapon with which to gut an unfaithful spouse. He turns to the woman who broke his heart, and my own heart leaps into my throat.

“Whoa. Mister? Jimmy? You wanna put that bottle down? I’ll sweep this mess up, and we can all go home tonight. What do you say?”

“Mary. Mary, what you doing here?” His question settles me a bit. I had expected the worst, expected what happens in most bars in most movies when jilted lovers reconnect. Another bomb whines in the distance, but broken bottles can be worse than bombs. Broken bottles, they’re personal.

“I’m sorry,” Mary sobs.

“Ain’t enough sorry in the world. Go on home!” Someone invisible shoves Jimmy, and he reels backward. He plunks down hard on a barstool and sits there like he meant to do it.

“He didn’t mean nothing, Jimmy, I swear.” I can see in Mary’s eyes that whatever Batman she allowed into her cave meant a whole lot of something. I’ve had a few women who spoke about me like this. Women who barked and squealed and promised I wasn’t shit when I was the best thing that ever happened to them. I knew it. They knew it. Love is not hidden well, and that’s why I can see Jimmy still loves his wife. Loves her enough to listen. I wonder if he can tell she’s lying and decide to mind my own business.

“Bullshit,” he says.

Good job, Jimmy.

“He don’t do nothing for me. You’re who I love.” If I were this woman, I’d have raised my voice by now. I wonder, if not love, what brought her here tonight? What’s so great about Jimmy that she’d risk her life to seek his apology? Is Jimmy her cash cow? He can afford Johnny Walker, so it’s a possibility. Maybe his last name’s Dean and he’s packing enough sausage to make sure a hundred women have a good breakfast, have a good day. But if that’s the case, why’d Mary over here seek out a different muffin man?

Women are funny. They’re unpredictable. They can love you to death and hope you die sooner than you’d like all at the same time. They can give you their hearts and burn yours to the ground. But that’s only my experience.

“Jimmy.” She’s whining like a toddler, and I’m getting a headache. “Jimmy, talk to me.”

“Sorry,” Jimmy slurs. “I can’t hear you over the sound of how loose your vagina is.”

Misha chokes on her tomato juice. Carl’s fingers hiccup, and the near-ceaseless piano stammers. My jaw falls open. Mary looks as if someone shot her in the gut. Her hands worry her shirt directly over her belly, and I almost expect blood to flower and stain the material. Her eyes plead with Jimmy. Jimmy waves a hand, dismissing her. She twirls dramatically and dashes outside.

I have a feeling a bomb could land on Mary’s head and Mary wouldn’t give a single shit right about now.

“That’s that then,” Jimmy says. He lays the broken bottle on the bar, and his eyes meet my own. “I’ve always liked this bar. Sorry ‘bout the mess.”

I nod. If I’ve learned anything over the years it’s that conversations begin and end without me needing to inject my own comments. Jimmy’s eyes say enough. They say they are the windows to the soul, and this man, at this time, is broken beyond my capability to repair.

He heads for the door.

“Taxi?” I ask.

He doesn’t turn, only waves a limp hand at me.

He says, “I walked. The truck’s Mary’s. Let ‘er have it.”

He hasn’t called her a bitch or a slut or a dirty cunt. He hasn’t called her any of these things even though she deserves to be called those things and plenty more. He hasn’t because Jimmy still loves his wife. A woman should consider herself lucky if she can find a man who’s able to love more than himself. Any woman who’d throw that away doesn’t deserve niceties or respect.

“Be safe,” I add as Jimmy stumbles into the night.

People pass in and out of our lives, and things end. I’m comfortable with that, and I see no reason why life should change to suit our preferences. Still, I’m going to miss Johnny Rebel. I hope he makes it home—him and his giant belt buckle.

I go into the storeroom at the end of the bar and grab the mop, mop bucket, broom, and dustpan. When I return to the bar, Misha is moving the stools out of my way. She’s a very pretty woman, even if she is a man. Her being nice makes her that much more attractive. Unfortunately, I’m not that way. Still, I can appreciate beauty in all forms. Misha is sexy in the same way Johnny Depp is sexy.

What’s with all the Johnnys tonight? Johnny Rebel, Johnny Walker, Johnny Depp…

Whatever.

“Gimme,” Misha points to the broom. “I sweep. You mop. Deal?”

“What do you want in return?” I ask, knowing nobody does anything for nothing.

“Another tomato juice?” Her voice rises at the end, telling me this is a request and not a demand.

“You gave me a ten for the first one. That more than covers a second… and a third… and a fourth.”

She blushes, though I have no idea why. Have you ever seen a brown-skinned woman blush? Cute.

She says, “The extra was a tip.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Misha waggles her fingers at me, and I relinquish the broom. The glass clatters musically as she sweeps the shards into a neat pile. The hardwood now has this brushed quality, like the surface of an oil painting, where the broom has cut furrows into the accumulated whiskey. My reflection gazes back at me from the floor, and I look much older than I remember. I slosh the mop into the mess without a second thought.

“Never would’ve thought his name was Jimmy,” Misha says.

I shrug as I mop.

“Figured him for a Bubba… or a Johnny.”

I glance up at her.

“Yeah,” she says, “definitely a Johnny.”

I smile and go back to mopping.

“I gotta get back to work here in a minute. Mind if I get that second glass?”

“Nope.”

She cocks her head and captures my eyes with her own. “You answered correctly. Good job.”

“Sorry?”

“Usually when I ask people ‘Do you mind?’, they say ‘Sure’. But that’s not right. Because what they mean is ‘Sure, you can do whatever you’re asking’, but what they should say is ‘No, I don’t mind.’ Get me?”

“Yeah. Lemme get you that glass.”

“Thanks.”

I round the bar and fix Misha her second glass. Lemon wedge. Salt. Stir. Coy smile. She accepts it with thanks.

She leaves the juice on the bar and moves the three stools back to where they were before Jimmy made his mess. Without me asking, she rolls the mop and bucket back to the storeroom, and then she comes back. There’s a sheen of sweat at her hairline like dew on the verge of a flower’s petal. She swipes it away with her thumb and sits down across from me.

Carl moves on to a song I actually know and can appreciate—Billy Joel’s “Shameless”. To my surprise, Misha begins to sing along. Her voice is just as pretty as she is. She matches Carl’s playing note for note, and I find myself licking my bottom lip like I do when I’m in the mood to do some baby-making. Only it’s obvious I can’t make any babies with Misha, so I direct my attention to the bar.

Ignoring her has the desired effect. Misha’s voice first lowers in volume then stops altogether. I hate to hear it go, but I can’t be toying with the idea of jumping the gender border. I suppose there’s a chance that she’s had surgery, that there’s no more angle to her dangle, but I can’t help but consider what came before. Besides, she can’t really be interested in an old guy like me.

For the right price she—

I derail that thought before it reaches the station.

I look up from the bar I’ve been buffing with my towel, and Misha’s heading back to her table. I guess she got the point.

She grabs her clutch purse from the tabletop and heads for the door. Back to work then. Bye, Misha.

The half-drained glass of tomato juice sits before me. I pour it into the sink and chase it with tap water from the hose.

“Shameless” ends and “Unchained Melody” begins. I pull my pocket watch from my shirt and check the time. One in the morning. We’re open for another two hours.

Carl’s piano music is shredded by the sudden keening of falling munitions. It’s close. Far too close for comfort and drawing nearer every second. The detonation shakes the foundation of my lounge and knocks me to the rubber mat on the floor behind the bar. Plaster dust rains from the ceiling. I choke on it.

I pull myself from the floor, wondering who caught the brunt of this most-recent bombing. It had to have been close. A block over? Two? Certainly no more than three. Maybe Frankie’s Burgers or the Wall-O-Mat where I wash my clothes every Tuesday morning.

“That was close.”

I scream as best a man can scream and still maintain his dignity. I spin to find Carl sitting across the bar from me. He’s breathing hard. It’s almost a full minute before I calm down and realize Carl’s not breathing heavy at all. He’s laughing so hard that his chest is wheezing.

“Wonder if that tranny survived that one. What you think?”

Misha.

Oh no.

Misha.

I round the bar and rush to the door. I crash into it and damn-near dislocate my shoulder. I cry out in pain as I stumble back a few steps.

“Something must be blocking it,” Carl says from behind me.

“Yeah.”

“Might could go out the back way.”

“Yuh-yeah.”

“You fancy that boy? The one in the dress?”

I turn and face Carl, and I can see in his eyes that he knows the answer to his question.

He looks confused, says, “Never lumped you in with them queers, boy. That’s disappointing.”

“I—I’m not—I’m not that way.”

His laugh is grave. It turns into a coughing fit. While he’s hacking and barking, I consider whether or not I want to go out the back door and around the building. Whether or not I want to check on Misha.

What if another bomb drops?

What if it’s closer?

What if I find Misha?

What if she’s dead?

I reason with myself, tell myself I don’t care about Misha. She’s a customer. Just a regular customer. She’s no different from Johnny Rebel—from Jimmy Something. I don’t care what happens to her. I’m not—

I’m not that way.

Things end. It’s the way of the world. If I never see Misha again, it’s no big deal.

Carl says, “I had a man hit on me when I was in the navy. That was back in the first Korean conflict, long before this one. Guy come up to me at a bar in Seoul. Chinaman, he was. I knew he weren’t no real Korean because their eyes slant different than a Chinaman’s. This guy, he laid his hand on mine and squeezed. You know, like I was a gash.”

Carl grabs the edge of the bar, and I see what I couldn’t see earlier because his hands were in shadow. They’re the color of rust. The dried blood has cracked in places: over his knuckles, where his hand meets his wrist. It’s clotted in the hair on the backs of his fingers.

He continues: “I yanked my hand outta that Chinaman’s hand, and I popped him one. Broke his fuckin’ nose, I did. Damn near knocked the slant out his eyes.” Carl throws his head back and bursts into laughter. He composes himself and says, “Boy, them was the good old days—days when a man could be a man. When a man could stand up for what he believes in.”

“Carl,” is all I say.

“What?”

I point to his hands. He looks down, and his eyes get wide as if this is the first he’s seen of the caked blood. He flexes his fingers, and the blood cracks in a few more places.

He says, “Don’t really matter, I don’t guess. Them North Koreans are winning this one, son, and the bitch I got ahold of isn’t gonna have to worry about them no more. She won’t have to hide under her bed while the bombs drop and the fire traps you in your closet and nobody comes when you call.”

I’m scared now. I don’t know what to say. I mean, what the hell do you say to something like that?

“She won’t never have to fear no more.” And just like that he’s crying. His wet gaze rolls up from his hands to meet my eyes. “I wanted her so goddamn bad, boy. You don’t even know. Been watching her for months, I have. Finally got my chance this evening. I’ve been old longer than I ever was young, and the old soldier don’t quite follow orders no more. He did tonight, though.” He laughs. “Oh God, yes, he did. And we fixed her, boy. We fixed her plenty.”

“Who’d you fix, Carl?”

“Just some gash. Don’t worry your head. She’s in a better place. She ain’t gotta fear these goddamn bombings anymore! Don’t you see that? Course you don’t. You’re queer!” He’s laughing and crying as he walks back to his piano. I’d forgotten all about Misha until right now. I think about the crusted blood on Carl’s hands, and I know that I have to get out of here. I have to find Misha. I have to live.

Because things end. Things end, and life is fleeting, and who cares if I am that way?

I head for the back door.

The whistling is louder this time. The loudest it’s been.

I stride across my lounge. I need to make it outside. Misha lies somewhere out there, just beyond my back door.

I consider what it would be like to live with Misha. What it would be like to wake up next to her. To survive this damn bombing and fall in love again. What our lives would be like if we were together. If, instead of being me and her, we were us.

Yes.

Us.

I grab the knob of the back door, and I pull.

The whistling is so godawful loud. So immediate. It is everywhere. It is everything.

Things end and things—

About “Lounge”

This story came about because I wanted to know what would happen if I put four people from four different walks of life inside a bar during wartime. What war? I don’t know. I’ll let you decide. I have no idea where these people came from, and I was sad to stop writing about them. But, like life, some stories end all too soon, and we don’t always know why.

~glamis~

The night before we left for Glamis, my niece was born. My brother-in-law Robbie cut the cord, kissed my sister Tammy on the cheek, and away he went. I would come to find out years later that this was the moment when my sister fell out of love with her husband. It is also part of one of my last good childhood memories. Namely, the trip I took to Imperial County, California, with my brother-in-law and my uncle Jesse.

I was born and raised in Fontana, California. The Kaiser-Permanente on Sierra Avenue is where I came into this world, all eleven pounds, twelve ounces of me. My poor mother. A year later, she would be diagnosed with cervical cancer. Doc said her only hope was a hysterectomy. When Mom told Dad what the doctor said, my father responded by telling her he wanted another child. She told him that if she didn’t have the surgery, she would die. He repeated himself and left the room. Mom went ahead with the operation, and Dad never forgave her. Made the next twenty years of her life miserable. That’s all I wish to say about my father.

Because I had such a poor excuse for a dad, Mom thought I needed a good male role model in my life. So when Tammy met and married the truck-driving, six-foot-five, four-hundred-pound Robbie, Mom figured him the obvious go-to to help teach her son how to be a man. You know, because she’d been such a terrific judge of character when it came to choosing my father. There was my uncle Jesse, but everyone in the family agreed he was more man-child than grown-up. My uncle Rick was a pompous asshole, and my aunt Donna lived in what my grandmother—her mother—called “Richville”, or to those living in or around Redlands, Apple Valley. My mother and Jesse seemed to be the only down-to-earth siblings out of the four, but Jesse, even in his forties, was too immature to be respected.

Uncle Jesse was a race car driver until he suffered a near-fatal crash and his wife Sharon made him quit, and then he became a mechanic for the Ford dealership in Yucaipa. Still works there. He’s a year or so from retirement, but he hasn’t changed at all. His shoulder length ash-blond hair, which perpetually lays in a ponytail on the back of his head and neck, has gotten grayer, as has his goatee, but that childhood twinkle lives on in his eyes. When he smiles, you can see the wheels of mischief turning. He remains a sixty-year-old man-child, and I envy him more than anyone else in my family.

Standing together, Jesse and Robbie seemed like David and Goliath to me respectively. You know, if David and Goliath had been best friends instead of death-match enemies. The first time the two men met, at Tammy’s wedding to Robbie, a bromance was born—even if bromance wasn’t a word back then. It still isn’t a word, but I digress. After the bride and groom’s dance, Robbie disappeared. His new bride, my sister, found him out front, chatting with Jesse about car engines and racing equipment. Before long, Jesse and the two-decades-younger Robbie were inseparable.

The night of my niece’s birth, I was twelve years old. Jesse and Sharon were in attendance. I can only assume they were there to help celebrate the new addition to our family because, unlike Robbie, Jesse wasn’t a jerk. I remember clearly Robbie coming out of the maternity ward and into the waiting area to tell us that Tammy had successfully brought a baby girl into this world. Mother and child were healthy. God was in his Heaven, and all was right with the world. Handshakes and congratulations went around, and then, without skipping a step, Robbie asked Jesse, “You ready to go?”

Jesse cocked his head and asked, “You sure? Shouldn’t you be back there?”

“Tam said it was fine. She knows how long I’ve been waiting for this trip.”

“Okay, man. Whatever you say.”

My accompanying Robbie and Jesse to Glamis had been prearranged with my parents, so when Robbie looked at me and jerked his head toward the door, I knew it was time to go. I said good-bye to Dad and told him to tell Mom, when she finally left Tammy’s room, that I had left. Dad waved me off, and I followed Robbie and Jesse to the elevator.

I don’t recall much from the drive to Glamis. I know it took several hours, and I was bored almost the entire way. We were in a recreational vehicle pulling a trailer behind it. Upon the trailer rested Robbie’s dune buggy and Uncle Jesse’s four wheeler. Robbie drove, and Jesse sat in the passenger seat. I was relegated to the bench seat behind the RV’s kitchen table. The only entertainment I received was when Robbie turned off his Rush cassette (I still hate that band because I associate them with him) and started telling dirty jokes to Jesse. There was one I found especially hilarious. It goes like this:

Two Nazis are chilling by the pool when their Jewish manservant comes by to ask if they need anything. The first Nazi says he would like a glass of orange juice. The Jewish manservant leaves and takes quite a long time to return. The Nazi sips his OJ, finds it pleasing, and punches the Jewish manservant in the gut. The Jew doubles over, groans, and begins to walk away. That’s when the second Nazi requests a glass of orange juice as well. The manservant leaves and takes even longer this time to return with the OJ. The second Nazi drinks his beverage, smacks his lips pleasantly, and punches the Jewish manservant in the dick. The Jew squeals and drops to his knees. When he composes himself, he rises and proceeds to lose his shit. He screams at the top of his lungs, “When will this stop? When will the punching in the stomach cease? When will the bludgeoning of my penis end? And when will I stop jacking off in the orange juice?”

Dude. That shit was funny as hell to twelve-year-old me. I laughed so hard I peed a little.

As we got closer to Glamis, I started seeing odd things. Trucks—big four-wheel-drives—passing us, the slower moving RV. Each truck hauled a small trailer or camper, and every one of them had a dead or dying Christmas tree strapped to the grill or the roof. Some of the trees were lying in truck beds or, in one case, hanging out the passenger window like a windblown dog.

“What are the Christmas trees for?” I called to the men up front.

Jesse rotated his seat to face the back, an action that reminded me of being on the bridge in a Star Trek movie, and said, “You’ll see. It’s part of the reason we scheduled the trip for this time of year.”

“This time of year” was the first week of January. And while Southern California doesn’t really have winter—not in the white wonderland sense of the word anyway—when I finally stepped out of the RV, I could’ve pissed ice cubes.

Other than the trucks passing us and our headlights being enough to see the trees and campers by, I hadn’t really gotten a good look at our surroundings. I can’t remember when we left, but I do remember it was dark. As I hopped out of the RV and hugged myself to keep the warmth in, I noticed the first purpling of the night sky on the horizon. The sun was coming up, pulling its blue blanket over the sky and putting night to sleep for the day.

From inside the RV, Robbie called, “Yo! Get back in here.”

I acquiesced to his demands posthaste. It should be known that Robbie scared the shit out of me. I was just over five-foot at the time and a little over one eighty. Today, I’m five-nine, three hundred sixty pounds. Even nowadays, Robbie’s height and weight would intimidate me. But that’s what my mother got wrong. She was looking for a man I could respect, a man to mold me into, I guess, a tough, masculine individual. But fear does not breed respect. It breeds hatred. I love my mother, but she made a mistake forcing me to look up to Robbie. Jesse would have been a better choice. At least then I would have been able to enjoy my childhood a bit longer. But hindsight and all that.

I walked back inside and Robbie informed me that we’d be sleeping for a while before starting our day. What “starting our day” entailed, I didn’t have a clue. The bench seat I’d rode in on folded into a bed, and that’s where Jesse slept. I had to sleep on the mattress at the back of the RV with Robbie. No. Nothing happened. This isn’t one of those kinds of stories. Robbie was a lot of things, but he wasn’t a pedophile. At least not that I knew of. But yeah, sleeping with a grown man was uncomfortable. By the time I fell asleep, it was time to get up.

Brown. Everything was brown as far as the eye could see. Lighter brown. Darker brown. Rolling brown. Drifting brown. And in this brown, little spots of activity. There an ATV cresting a dune. Here a dickhead on a dirt bike spitting sand into my face as he raced away. All around me, the sounds of lawnmowers that were not actually lawnmowers. That was Glamis for me. Brown and loud.

I stepped out beyond the side of our RV and glanced down the road we’d come in on. A row of recreational vehicles ran off into the distance. The line of campers and motor homes was a good mile long. People milled about. Some RVs had fires already crackling or propane-fueled burners cooking breakfast. I smelled hot sausages. My stomach growled. Robbie gave me a Snickers bar, and for a brief second, I thought he might not be all that bad.

Jesse brewed coffee inside while Robbie took his dune buggy and Jesse’s four-wheeler off the trailer. When he was done, he and I joined Jesse inside. The two men drank coffee out of thermoses, and I had a bottle of coke. A glass bottle. This was the nineties. I’d never had Coca-Cola out of a glass bottle. It was delicious. Somehow sweeter than it was from a can or plastic bottle. Odd how that works. To this day, when I see glass bottles for sale in the grocery store and I have a little extra money to blow, I buy glass instead of plastic or aluminum. It tastes even sweeter now that I’m older because it tastes like childhood.

The three days we were at Glamis, we didn’t spend much time at the RV. That first day, after coffee, coke, and candy bars, we took off into the sand: me riding shotgun in the dune buggy with Robbie and Jesse keeping up on his quad.

We arrived at the Bowl (this is what I remember calling it in my head and not the actual name of the place) around one o’clock that afternoon. The Bowl resembled a life-sized sand sculpture of a child’s idea of a volcano. You were supposed to approach the lip, angle your vehicle, and ride the outer wall. I once went to a circus in Las Vegas (now that I think about it, it was for my sister’s first marriage to a crackhead named Eddie; yeah, she really knew how to pick ‘em), and one of the main attractions was a group of a dozen motorcyclists driving around the interior walls of a giant metal ball. That’s what the Bowl was like. Dirt bikes, quads, buggies, and even one or two of those death-trap three wheelers they stopped making in the late eighties due to rollovers, circled this massive sand pit. Around and around they went. The scene seemed choreographed, balletic and graceful.

And then Robbie tore ass into the pit, and all I could do was hold on and scream. Riding in a dune buggy is not unlike riding a roller coaster. There’s that feeling that at any moment, the entire contraption is going to come apart at the bolted bits. You’re thrown side to side, up and down. There’s little to no cushion or suspension, so you feel every change of direction in your neck and every bounce in your tailbone and molars. I wouldn’t have been the least surprised if I’d climbed out of Robbie’s buggy spitting teeth into the dust.

We circled for a while, me white-knuckling the roll bars and Robbie’s face a placid thing. He never once smiled or laughed or hollered. As my sister explained, he was a controlled and controlling individual. Even his explosive rages were concise in their destruction. Tam once said he was as mindless and brutal and contained as a depth charge. I’m sure she’s right. Living with Robbie must have been terrifying. But at that moment, riding the outer rim of the Bowl, I thought of him more as a machine. A morbidly-obese Terminator, if you will. But do not get me wrong. Yes, Robbie was a big fat guy, but he was solid. An immovable object.

We came out of the Bowl, and I realized I’d completely lost track of Jesse. I glanced around, and there he was, sailing over the nearest dune. It was like the Bowl had spat him out. He rocketed from the lip and landed with an ease you’d expect a thousand-pound piece of machinery incapable of; back tires touched down, and the front bowed formally to meet the sand, like a mother bird feeding her chicks. It was beautiful. In that bubble of time, I thought I understood the attraction of this sandy place, how a man could leave his newborn child and escape to this dusty heaven. Now that I’m a thirty-five-year-old man with two children of his own, I see how wrong I was.

Without any communication between my guardians, Robbie took off into the great brown unknown. Well, unknown to me at least. Even today, I have no clue how we didn’t get lost. I’m sure there were markers or signs of some sort because Robbie and Jesse navigated the dunes seemingly by memory. And while that is entirely possible, I must argue that one pile of sand looked exactly like the other.

A few hours later, Jesse broke down in the middle of nowhere. He was tooling along, pacing Robbie, and then he drifted back, as if someone had lassoed him and dragged him away. I called to Robbie over the rumble of the engine and told him that we’d lost Uncle Jesse. Robbie turned the buggy around and headed back. Because I’d spoken up right when I noticed Jesse falling back, we hadn’t gotten that far ahead of him. Robbie pulled up alongside him and asked what was up.

Jesse tugged off his helmet and said, “No gas.”

“I got some on the back.” And Robbie did: two metal cans; each one held roughly ten gallons of gasoline.

“That’s isn’t the problem,” Jesse said. He wasn’t looking at us but frowning at the dials on the ATV’s dash. “I had three quarters of a tank before we came out of —”

(I’m sure Jesse said the name of the Bowl at this point, but I can’t remember the name of the place. I’ve scoured the internet, but I cannot find that specific location. Sorry.)

“Fuel line?” Robbie asked.

“Could be.” Jesse came off the bike like a ballerina pirouetting: leg extended, drawn back in, spin. He laid his helmet on the quad’s seat and dropped into a catcher’s stance beside the four-wheeler. He began to tinker.

I am not now, nor will I ever be, an expert on the workings of internal-combustion engines. I know a few things for certain: engines come in various sizes, and they burn a fuel of some kind, usually gasoline; I know that my Weed Eater takes a weird mixture of oil and gas and that my car needs regular oil changes every three thousand miles, as well as fill-ups whenever the orange needle gets close to E. Other than that, I’m in the dark. I’m in the dark now, and I was back then as well. Because of this, I haven’t the foggiest what Jesse was doing down there in his catcher’s stance. I saw hands go in dry and then, like a magic trick, come out shimmering in the sunlight.

“Fuck.” This was the first and only time I heard Uncle Jesse use the word. Hearing him curse scared me, and I laughed out of nervousness more than in humor.

Robbie slapped the back of my head so hard my teeth clicked together. “Nothing’s funny, kid,” was all he added to the strike. You’d think that would have cured me of laughing at the wrong things, but you’d be incorrect. Anxious laughter is an impulsive reaction I’ve carried with me out of childhood like ratty old luggage. It serves no other purpose than to get me in trouble. The only time I laugh harder is when I’m in pain. Go figure.

“It’s the fuel line,” Jesse said as his hands dove into the ever-shifting ground beneath him. His hands came out full of sand. He rubbed his hands together as if the sand were soap and water.

“You got another one?” Robbie asked.

“No.”

“Okay.”

I felt there should have been more to the discussion, but that was it. Robbie tugged himself out of the buggy like a NASCAR driver. It was impressive seeing such a big man power-lift himself up and out like that. He rummaged around in a silver box behind his seat. He yanked out an oil-stained T-shirt that I could tell by the collar had been white once upon a when and a blue towel, which was also stained brown with engine oil. What I didn’t see was a hose.

What happened next held me perfectly rapt. I watched as Robbie tore seemingly perfect strips from the tee and then the towel. Each strip was around two feet long, and he ended up with more than a dozen of each. Jesse waited by his thirsty quad while Robbie braided the lengths of shirt and towel together with a skill far surpassing what I’d seen growing up with older sisters. I will not lie to you. I thought quite hard about how a grown man becomes so adept at braiding. I see nothing wrong with it nowadays, but back then it felt wrong. You see, that was some of my father’s homophobia coming out. In Dad’s mind, boys did boy things, and girls did girl things. Dad also used to brag about beating up “fairies” and “fagoids” in his bar days.

(My apologies. I said I wouldn’t speak further about the man who was my father, but I felt I should explain what kind of bullshit I was force-fed and the road I might have taken had I not realized what kind of man my father was. I’ll try not to let memories of him interrupt us again.)

Robbie, braid laid across his lap, negotiated the buggy so that the rear end was flush with the foot-long bar on the front of Uncle Jesse’s four-wheeler. Then he extracted himself from the driver’s seat once again and went around to the back.

I didn’t have permission to leave the car, and with Robbie, things like that mattered, so I hollered, “Can I come watch?”

“Sure!” Jesse’s voice answered. Given enough time, I’m not sure Robbie ever would have responded. I seemed to be more inconvenience than welcome tagalong. At the time, I didn’t know what Robbie’s problem was. If he didn’t want me around, why agree to let me come in the first place? Although no one has ever substantiated my theories, I believe what occurred was a meeting between my sister and my mother. Mom mentioned that Dad wasn’t fulfilling his duties when it came to rearing a soft fat kid into a chunk of machismo, so Tammy offered the services of Robbie. After all, two fat dudes were bound to get along. Right? What ended up happening was I became the third wheel in a very tight brother-from-another-mother scenario. Robbie couldn’t enjoy himself because he had to babysit this pudgy fucker that wasn’t even his blood. Uncle Jesse, on the other hand, genuinely cared for me. He wanted me to be included in all things M-A-N-L-Y, or something like that. I learned a great deal on that trip to Glamis, but the most important lessons were still to come.

Robbie had left enough of the fabric loose at the ends so that he could affix them to the vehicles. He tied the shirt-and-towel braid to the bar that served as the buggy’s bumper, and the other end was anchored to the quad.

Uncle Jesse nudged me in the bicep with his elbow. “Now,” he said, “When we take off, if the ties hold, the stress will pull the braid tighter and make it stronger instead of weaker, like, say, a length of rope would do.”

“Ah,” I said. It made a lot of sense, and I was rather proud that I understood the concept of friction well enough to see how such things were possible.

When Robbie was done, he went directly back to the buggy’s driver’s seat without so much as a “Ready?”

“Time to go, I guess,” Jesse said with a smile. He ruffled my sandy hair before hopping onto the bike.

I jogged to my side and flopped in.

The braid lasted, at best guess, about ten feet.

Robbie grumbled expletives like a cow chewing its cud. His mouth never opened, but I saw his jaw working and heard what it was producing. Those curse words had substance. They could’ve supplied an army with hot meals for a month.

This was some of that control I mentioned before. Those words were a self-contained explosion—a depth charge. You felt the initial shock wave, but then the water refills the empty space and extinguishes the fires before they’ve even fully formed. Boom and done, but that didn’t mean things in the blast radius were safe. Quite the opposite.

Being twelve and having the attention span of a goat in a dump, I quickly became bored with not being back at camp or tooling through the dunes at breakneck speeds. While Robbie and Jesse discussed what they were going to do, I tracked a black dot on the horizon while singing the lyrics to every song on the New Kids on the Block’s newest album. I’m pretty sure it was Step by Step, but don’t quote me on that. The following year, I would be introduced to pubic hair and death metal. My puberty-addled mind systematically purged NKotB from its hard drive to make room for Cannibal Corpse, Deicide, and Carcass. The soundtrack of my later teens and early twenties would be Megadeth, Metallica, and Slayer. Today, I enjoy Adele, Bruno Mars, and Tom Waits. Go figure.

The black dot became three distinct shapes: two squares and one triangle. As they drew closer, those three distinct shapes morphed into two three-wheelers of the death-trap variety, and one dune buggy; the former was yellow, but had it been blue, it would have been the mirror image of Robbie’s buggy.

I imagined I was in a Mad Max movie and a tribe of psychos were riding in to meet us. I held my hands out in front of me as if I were manning a turret and spat like a machine gun—PPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP! Robbie and Jesse appeared beside me, and I sputtered to a stop.

Jesse waved the trio down, and I screamed, “No! They’re going to kill us!”

From birth, I was a silly kid. I lived inside my imagination more than I lived in the real world. I got in trouble at school often because I’d turn show-and-tell into an event starring me. I’d act out elaborate scenes and tell wild stories—like how my family had gone camping and my father had fought off a bear with his bare hands. Or I’d tell tales with the expectation of affecting my audience—namely, my class. Making people laugh or cry in a controlled environment is a feeling unlike any other. It’s the most addictive drug I know of. For instance, in first grade, I told a rapt classroom that my baby brother had died in his sleep. When I was done, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. I scored that a win. Hell, even my teacher was a snotty mess. Unfortunately, she was so affected by my story that she called my mother to express her condolences. After Mom got through beating my ass twelve shades of red and purple, she left me to think about what I’d done. She drove to an undisclosed location and bought me a Brother typewriter. When she returned, she told me, “Your teacher and I don’t want you to stop telling your stories. But, instead of trying them out on your class, how about you write them down here first?” I smiled and nodded. I wrote fifty-two stories that first month. I was positively exploding with fiction. The rest, as they say, is history.

(My mother is a wonderful person. Mrs. Kratz—my teacher at the time—and my mother are the reason you’re reading this story today.)

After my explosion of “No! They’re going to kill us!”, Robbie faced me and said, “Don’t be such a little bitch.”

Jesse grabbed Robbie’s shoulder and said, “Lay off him.”

Robbie spun out of Jesse’s grasp. His arm locked, cocked, and ready to rock. Jesse didn’t move a muscle, didn’t so much as flinch. He stood there as if welcoming the punch, his face mannequin still, lifeless. But Robbie never followed through. After a thirty second stalemate that felt more like ten minutes, Robbie dropped his arm to his side. I recall thinking that his arm was live munitions—a bomb sitting at the bottom of a crater, waiting on someone to come along with a ball-peen hammer and a death wish.

The trio of riders came upon the scene not knowing that they’d almost stumbled upon a murder scene. Whether the body would have been Jesse’s or Robbie’s, I haven’t a clue. I’m not sure those two men ever came to blows. If they did, no one in my family knew of it. Now that I think of it, even though I hated Robbie (still a severe dislike boils in my stomach for the man, but more because of how he ended up treating my sister and nieces than how he ever treated me), I realized that his friendship with my uncle was truly an unbreakable bond. Because that’s all lasting relationships really are: things left unsaid, water under the bridge, and unthrown punches. Because if any of us could spend time in our friend’s and loved one’s heads, I think the majority of us would die alone.

(I’m a cynical optimist. I expect the worst out of people, but I hope they’ll prove me wrong.)

In fiction, I’d write here that the trio of two three-wheelers and one buggy arrived and took, let’s say, Robbie to the local parts store to buy a new hose. You’d read this and say, “Isn’t that bloody convenient?” (Because I assume you’re all Stephen Fry, I suppose.) Truth is reality is stranger than fiction.

The guy driving the buggy wore a balaclava, lending him the air of a bank robber who took a wrong turn at Albuquerque. This guy in the balaclava, he had an extra hose, one that was a bit too long but the right diameter to fit the quad’s fuel line. One of the three-wheeler’s drivers produced a knife with which to cut the excess hose to the proper length. (I never saw this guy’s face either as he never took off his sunset-themed helmet or so much as raised the visor.) The third person was a woman. She might have been lovely under her own balaclava, or so I assumed because she had a huge pair of gorgeous eyes. By which I mean she had magnificent tits. There was sweat-damp sand in her cleavage, and the fact that it looked like a streak of dookie at the top of a butt crack did not keep me from appreciating the size and perfect roundness of her massive breasts. Why she wore such a low cut t-shirt whilst roaming such desert environs as Glamis provided, I’ll never know. But I thank her. I thanked her every night for a week.

Where the fuck was I? Oh yeah. Truth is stranger than fiction. Right.

So the guy in this trio saved our bacon. Jesse attached the new hose and shook hands with each member of our rescue party. Robbie spit out a perfunctory thanks before jumping back behind his own buggy’s steering wheel. The trio rode off in one direction and us the other.

By the time we made it back to camp the sky was orange and pink where the sun had descended behind the dunes. Robbie detached a grill he’d affixed to the back of the RV while Jesse prepared kebabs in the kitchen: chicken, beef, onions, yellow squash, red and green peppers. I laid out a towel I found in the restroom on the sand and watched the stars come out. There are only a few sights more satisfying to my soul than a desert sky at full dark: autumn sunsets, my children at play, my wife in a T-shirt and nothing else.

All I’d had to eat that day was a Snickers bar for breakfast, which was actually lunch because we’d napped until one o’clock, so by the time Robbie got the grill going and Jesse tossed the kebabs on the grill, my stomach was singing the song of its people, “Growl, Rumble, Growl”.

We ate under the stars in foldable chairs, and I remember being stupid with contentment. To quote Pink Floyd, “comfortably numb”. It had been a long day. Fun but long. My scalp held more sand than hair, and my face was windburned, but I was happy. Jesse smiled as he ate, and I thought that maybe, in that moment, he was feeling the same way I was. For a little while, Robbie didn’t exist. It was just uncle and nephew, side by side, enjoying each other’s company. It was my first experience with being comfortable with silence. As I grow older, I’ve come to covet those moments when I’m alone with my own thoughts. This is what they mean by youth being wasted on the young. It has very little to do with energy. It has more to do with how loud kids are during their formative years. When you’re older and the dog can’t learn new tricks, you wish for the spongelike quality of a young mind. You wonder why teenage you didn’t shut the fuck up and listen. And then you realize that it was the mistakes you made that created the person you see in the mirror. That’s what growing up is—realization. Coming-of-age isn’t a coming into knowledge. It’s accepting the fact that you’ll never be as knowledgeable as teenage you thought you were. After all, no one can know everything.

After dinner, Robbie decided it was time for more jokes. I remember this joke that wasn’t really a joke almost word for word:

There’s this trucker on a long haul, going through Mississippi. He sees this little black boy hitchhiking and feels bad, so he stops and picks him up. The trucker’s honest with the black boy. He tells the kid that there’s no room up front. The kid’s going to have to sit in the trailer with the bowling balls the trucker’s hauling. The kid agrees.

A Mississippi state trooper’s hidden behind a Hardee’s sign when the trucker speeds by at twenty miles over the posted limit. The trooper flips on his lights and races to catch up. When he does, the truck driver pulls off without hesitation. The trooper grabs his clipboard and stomps up to the cab. The trucker rolls down his window and hands out his documents without being asked. The trooper thanks him but adds that he needs to see what’s in the back of the truck. The driver complies. But when the trucker tries to get out, the trooper, scared the guy might try something, tells the trucker to stay in the cab. The trooper stalks around to the trailer’s double doors. He undoes the latch and tugs them open. The trooper screams and slams the doors. He runs back to the cab, shoves the documents through the window, and drops them into the trucker’s lap.

“Don’t you go nowhere!” the trooper screams.

(Robbie does a decent southern accent, but he’s no Larry the Cable Guy.)

The trucker, not knowing what’s going on, once again complies. He goes nowhere. The trooper rushes back to his car and gets on the horn. “Home base! Come in, home base!”

“What’s the problem?” asks the dispatcher.

“I need help out here. Stat!”

(At this point, Robbie smiles wide in anticipation of the punchline. I’ll never forget that grin. It’s one of the most evil things I’ve ever seen.)

“Home base,” the trooper yells, “there’s a truck fulla nigger eggs, and one of them done already hatched!”

Neither Jesse nor I laughed. Robbie seemed unfazed by our lack of explosive guffaws. He just sat there, smiling that smile.

What bothered me the most about that joke was that I knew Robbie wasn’t an ignorant man. Some people are just bad. There’s no explaining it. You’ll drive yourself crazy looking for a reason, but at the end of the day, you’re stressed, and they’re not. Because evil doesn’t mind its own company. It’s those of us who recognize and fear evil who suffer, those of us who do not act against it who are to blame.

Jesse got up and silently stepped up into the RV. I sat there, staring at the stars, wondering why men like Robbie existed. That night, I realized that if God existed, he was no longer manning the fort. The savages had taken over long ago.

A few minutes later, Robbie left me alone and went inside. I supposed he went to bed, but he could have stayed up reading comics while juggling milk cartons for all I knew. All I was certain of was how alone I was. There I sat, in the great expanse of California desert, soaking in the aroma of campfires and the idle chatting of nearby campers.

At some point, a group of silent men and women began building what at first seemed to be a gigantic pyramid. The structure grew and grew as each elongated triangle was added to the pile. Watching them work, I became drunk with tiredness. The day’s activities bore down on me, and I soon fell asleep.

I awoke freezing. My hands and feet were completely numb, as were my ears and nose. I’d fallen asleep on the towel I’d laid out earlier the day before, but that was now balled up under my head, serving as a pillow. The sand beneath me was like millions of tiny icicles drilling into my skin. I swear to whatever deity you desire that I could feel every single grain.

I went to the RV, tried to tug open the door. It was locked. I knocked. When no one answered, I banged. Still no response. This time, I accompanied my assault on the door with a cadence of “Let me in!” and “It’s cold out here!”

Robbie answered. I’d been expecting Jesse because he’d slept on the bench seat in the kitchen the day before. Tonight, the opposite had occurred. First to the bed had won the right to sleep in it. Because of this, I’d awakened—to paraphrase Isoroku Yamamoto after the bombing of Pearl Harbor—a sleeping giant.

Robbie grabbed me by the front of the shirt and slung me up and into the dark RV. I stumbled, trying to keep my feet under me, and slammed into the opposite wall. With a bear paw on my shoulder, he spun me like a dance partner. His arm cocked like one of those Rock‘em Sock‘em robots, and I took to my stomach the full force of the munitions he’d reserved earlier. I folded. My knees dove into the floor of the RV, and my forehead slapped the linoleum. I couldn’t breathe. No matter how much I inhaled, no breath was allowed past the back of my throat. A frog croaked in my ear like in that old Warner Bros. cartoon. It was several seconds before I realized the frog croaking was me trying to draw in oxygen.

“Get up, pussy.” Robbie’s emotionless voice rumbled through me—Optimus Prime of Transformers taunting his enemy.

Survival instinct is a funny thing. With me on my knees, my hands clutching my collapsed diaphragm, and my face kissing the floor, you would have thought the last thing my body would do would be to fight back. The smarter option would have been to play dead.

Nope.

I came up as quick as my hundred eighty pounds could move, which ended up being as fast as a cobra strike, and punched Robbie in the dick.

My earlier metaphor of Jesse and Robbie being David and Goliath proved to be wrong. I’d been the one armed with the slingshot all along. Go figure.

Robbie stumbled backward, both hands on his junk, sucking wind like I was sucking wind. We whistled and whined in tandem, like synchronized tea kettles, sounding like an orchestra tuning up. Robbie sat down hard in front of the cabinets below the sink, a slightly less dark circle in the deeper darkness around him.

In the back of the RV, Jesse snored.

Robbie retched. Something warm and wet and chunky splattered my arm. The remnants of the evening’s kebabs, I imagined. The trailer rocked as Robbie struggled to his feet. The light above the sink was suddenly on. No flicker or warning. I squinted against the new brightness as Robbie ran the tap and sucked at the faucet. He hacked and spat unthinkable amounts of nasty in an attempt to clean his mouth and throat. He grabbed a roll of paper towels from the cupboard above the sink and mopped up the pink sick puddled on the floor.

And then he helped me up. I leaned against the wall, holding my still-sore gut, while he wetted a paper towel and handed it to me. I scrubbed my vomit-splattered cheek. Robbie turned off the light and went up front. He flopped down into the driver’s seat and laid his head against the rest.

“You can have the bench.” Soon after, he was snoring.

Without a word, I dropped my dirty paper towel in the bin under the sink and climbed onto the bench seat.

Once the pain in my guts subsided, I slept like a baby.

In the morning, I discovered the pyramid the silent drones had built out in the middle of the desert was not a pyramid at all. It was a mound, a pile, consisting solely of green and brown Christmas trees.

While Uncle Jesse cooked eggs and bacon on the RV’s stovetop, I asked him again what the trees were for. Again he answered with a smile, “You’ll see.”

Our day started much like the day before only earlier. With a warm breakfast in our bellies and a cooler packed with sandwiches Robbie had made while Jesse gassed up his quad and Robbie’s buggy, we took off into the dunes.

Much of the day was spent running courses that, during the summer, would be alive with actual races that awarded monetary and trophy prizes to their contestants. These courses zigged and zagged and rose and fell, and I cannot think of a single roller coaster I’ve ever been on that equaled the excitement I felt riding shotgun in Robbie’s big blue dune buggy. My stomach ached from the night before, and every time I braced for a turned or landing, the pain was excruciating. But damn it was worth it. I screamed and hooted and whooped, and I even caught one of Robbie’s elusive smiles.

Moments like that are rare—moments when you can enjoy the company of another human being who you despise. As the previous night had taught me how to stand up for myself, my time on that racetrack prepared me for an adulthood working with people whose beliefs and morals did not match my own, people whom I would erroneously consider to be lesser individuals based on level of intellect or which invisible man they believed in. It would not be until my children were born that I would come to see my views of other people as fallacies built on my own ignorance and intolerance.

“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

Some people think Einstein said that, but there’s no proof to substantiate the claim. Whoever said it, they sure hit the proverbial nail on the head.

We left the racetrack behind and chased the sun for a while. The chilly wind carried sand that blasted my face, and I would spend a week recovering from the top layer of my skin either being irritated to the extreme or, in some places, breaking open entirely. Not even Uncle Jesse had considered that their ward needed some kind of face protector. Even a handkerchief tied around my nose and mouth would have at least saved me from hocking up mud for the next seven days. Somehow my eyes, although red and inflamed by the end of our trip, were saved from blindness. Robbie had goggles, but he wasn’t sharing.

Glamis’ claim to fame was the aforementioned races that took place both officially and unofficially on the unincorporated desert land. The unofficial races were nothing more than tracks carved out in the sand created with repeated circuits by dueling off-road vehicles. These tracks could pop up out of nowhere, and if you were not careful, they’d beach you.

After lunch, which we ate without leaving our respective vehicles, we headed back home. I had no way of knowing that Robbie was taking a different route, and in retrospect, I don’t think Jesse did either. Instead of riding alongside Robbie’s buggy, Jesse hung back, following. Still, he was close, never more than ten feet behind and off to my side.

We unknowingly hit one of those unofficial carved out tracks at roughly seventy miles per hour. But we didn’t enter parallel to the course. Instead, we hit the track from the side. What seemed at first to be nothing more than a hill turned out to be a gully. The buggy lifted off as if it weighed little more than the air around it—a paper airplane caught in an updraft. When I saw that the other side of the gully was much lower than the side we’d rocketed from, I grabbed the roll bar to my right and the one above me. Robbie grunted something unintelligible. Apparently, we both knew how badly this was going to end.

My second instinct after grabbing the bars was to look for Jesse. Even in midflight with an impending crash on the horizon, I knew we’d likely be safe. It was my uncle who I feared for.

He came over the gully at the same speed as Robbie had, but his lighter vehicle caused him to gain far more air than the heavy dune buggy.

We hit with all the subtly of an orca beaching itself. I was thrown forward. The seat’s harnesses kept me from being thrown from the car. The nose buried itself in the sand, and the rear end vaulted to the sky but didn’t complete the rollover. The back wheels slammed back down, and I knocked my head against the rubber headrest. I bit my tongue, and the rusty taste of oysters flooded my mouth.

Even during the chaos of our own crash, I saw Jesse come down in my peripheral vision. He took the first bounce like a seasoned pro, but the second one sent him up and over the handlebars. He flew like Superman, arms outstretched, legs tight together out behind him, and hit the desert floor like a javelin. The quad caromed wildly, careering side to side before flipping and rolling off into the distance. It missed Jesse by a mile, but even so, he wasn’t moving.

Spitting blood and squinting at the thudding in my skull, I undid my harness and poured out of the buggy. First I was crawling through the sand like a crab, but I soon found my feet. Still, running through loose sand is laborious, and it took me almost a full minute to cross fifty yards.

I was twenty feet away when Jesse rolled over onto his back. The visor of his helmet came up. My heart leaped with joy when he sat up and crashed in despair when he immediately flopped back down. I dropped to my knees beside him. Inside his helmet, he was wide-eyed and laughing madly.

“Are you all right?” I asked, shaken and out of breath. Finding him laughing did nothing to ease my concern. I thought he’d gone mad with pain.

“My ribs—hurt—but… but—I’m… whoa—I’m—alive!” His volume escalated until he was screaming between cackling laughter. “Whooo! What—a—rush!”

The crash ended our fun for the day. But night was coming, and it held its own surprises.

The quad was undamaged in the crash, and the buggy was equally fine. We rode back into camp, where Robbie borrowed firewood from one of our neighboring campers. (I don’t exactly know how you borrow firewood from someone; that’s kind of like borrowing food—the recipient isn’t going to be able to return it.) He poured gasoline onto the wood and used a match to start the blaze. Don’t try that at home, kids.

We sat around the fire, and I recreated the day’s crash in vivid detail. Neither man stopped me or interjected their own experience even though I was relaying something they’d just lived through hours before. We were, all of us, lucky to be alive, but none so much as Jesse. Yet he didn’t comment on his brush with death that day, that evening, or even during the remainder of our trip. He simply sat there in his foldable chair, sipping from a glass bottle of Coca-Cola, as I told my story.

The sun went down, and the evening’s festivities began.

In the glow of one of the RV’s headlights, I watched a fat man in jeans, red suspenders, and a white undershirt, stalk out into the sand. A metal gas canister swung from the fist of one hairy arm. He approached the pile of Christmas trees, sloshed out a goodly amount of what I assumed to be gasoline onto the mound, and trudged back to his motor home, where he disappeared inside. He came back out holding a red stick, and my heart rocketed into my throat. But what I first took to be dynamite wound up being a road flare.

The man in the suspenders snapped the end off the flare, wound up like a pitcher, and tossed the red tube into the pile of Christmas trees. The pile instantly became a raging inferno. I felt the heat from over two hundred feet away.

You’re not supposed to burn pine trees if they’re green. The sap boils in the wood and creates pressure, which then turns the trunk into a giant, slender grenade. It would seem that the people who’d collected and built the structure of trees had not a single fuck to give for such safety guidelines.

The first tree of the bunch exploded. Ash and cinder and splinters rained over us. Jesse hollered, thrust one fist into the air while the other arm held his midsection. Apparently, he was enjoying himself.

Robbie watched in silence. His eyes reflected the massive bonfire, lending his immovable face a demonic quality.

A nervous excitement hypnotized me. I was both terrified that I’d be turned into a pincushion by flying splinters and bursting with a frenetic glee reserved for only the very young.

I’d never seen anything like it. Every time a tree would explode, the air would be filled with glowing embers like fireworks. Orange sparks swirled and danced across a backdrop of black sky and shimmering white stars.

One of the campers cranked their stereo and blasted AC/DC’s “For Those About to Rock”. I laced my hands behind my head, leaned back in my chair, and enjoyed the show.

***

Two decades later, when my grandmother on my mother’s side died, I had a chance to speak with my uncle for the first time in fifteen years. A move to Alabama and starting my own family had wedged a seemingly impassable distance between me and my favorite uncle. At one point during Tammy and Robbie’s divorce, Jesse chose Robbie’s side, significantly placing a wall between him and the rest of the family. But that’s life. A series of beginnings and endings. People come in and out of our lives, and we’re left with the lessons they have to teach or the memories of their inactivity. My father is a prime example of the former.

After the viewing, I was standing outside, smoking in front of the funeral home, when Jesse came out to talk to me. We had a long discussion about the old days, and I brought up our trip to Glamis in the winter of ’92. He said he remembered it. I told him how much it had meant to me, that it was one of my last good memories from my childhood. He laid a hand on my shoulder and said, “That’s good, man. Real good. I think I cracked a rib, but I never got checked out.”

“Why not?” I asked him.

“Why do you think?”

“Robbie?”

Uncle Jesse smiled. “It was good seeing you, man. You have a beautiful family.”

He turned and walked away. I called after him. He stopped and faced me.

Calling over the space and the years and the relationships between us, I asked, “What did you ever see in him?”

“What can I say, dude?” Jesse shrugged. “He’s the most honest person I’ve ever met.”

I smoked and thought about what he meant. And then I took my family back to Alabama, where, thanks to Mom and Mrs. Kratz, I enjoy a life as a professional storyteller.

I still think about Robbie from time to time. My nieces will update me, and we’ll joke about how terrible he was. But like his trucker-hauling-bowling-balls joke, our jokes aren’t really jokes. They’re gallows humor. And we laugh as only survivors can laugh.

In the end, Robbie served his purpose in my life, same as my father. Sometimes all you need from a person is a moral compass—a role model for what not to do.

About “Glamis”

This is a true story. And that’s all I have to say about that. I hope you enjoyed this collection. See you next time.

About the Author

E. Lorn is a reader, writer, and content creator. He publishes his horror fiction under the name Edward Lorn. He's been writing for fun since the age of six and writing professionally since 2011. He can be found haunting the halls of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, and Goodreads. He has blogs on both Booklikes and Wordpress.

Edward Lorn lives in the southeast United States with his wife and two children.