Summerbaby - The World in Miniature

by Leila
http://writingvicariously.blogspot.com/

Summerbaby

I was born two seasons before him, and already I saw the river between us. Each night in my sleep, I saw the cold, harsh disparity, and his unwillingness to break from it. Perhaps this is the way. Perhaps this is fate.


I'm a summer baby. I know only laughter and endless sun. I know only the scent of lemongrass and the wavering hum of a wayward lark. Lilacs are blessed every morning, and crickets sing to the twilight's glare. The world is bright for a summer baby, and love is always near. I knew happiness this way. I knew life this way.

From the horizon, I saw the distant winter. The charcoal clouds loomed above the summer grass, and I thought that death has come. Life owes its lease to the winter storm.

That's how I knew him, my winter lover. He is afraid and gentle, but coarse and rugged. His eyes are pale, sharp, and all-seeing. He knows only of withered pine and the echoes of a wolf's ravenous howl. The moon is his friend, and he is blessed nightly by its pallid shade. His skies are wisps of faded gray, void of my iridescent summer days. I knew him as cold and perfect, unchanging in his ways.

Now there is a river between us. Each night at dawn, I beckon to him, hands outstretched against the emerald light of the vanishing stars. "Join me!" I say. "Love me!" I beg.

My poor lover, born from a tomb he knows only death. His father is a ghost, and his mother the desolate Earth of yesteryear. He could not accept my warmth or my radiant sunlight. To him, gold is harrowing, blinding. I loved him still, the unwavering maid.

"When we will be together?" I say. "There is a river between us, and I cannot wade its unforgiving torrents."

He smiles at me, his gaze a cold embrace sweeping the midnight breeze. "When snow melts, it surges through mountains and valleys. It thunders like a raging storm, digging through the soft Earth, and waking it from tempestuous slumber. This river will travel far and wide, and it won't be long before we reach the calm before the storm. When winter fades and summer calms, when autumn breaks paltry alms; and seeds have sprouted, budding forth. I shall come for you, my lady, when Spring has come."

And I waited. I waited. The snow has melted, and I drowned in its torrential tears, down the mountains to a valley of waves rushing to the crashing sea. There in the midst of a sapphire ocean, I have come to thee.

The Climber - The World in Miniature

by Meredith Towbin
meredithtowbin.com


THE CLIMBER
At twenty, Jack bought a beat-up Ford and told his mother he wanted to climb big rocks. He pushed the backseat down at night and slept with his head in the trunk and his feet by the gearshift. Five miles outside Devil’s Tower, a hitchhiker stabbed him in the gut with a jackknife. While he bled in the road he wondered why anyone would steal a beat-up Ford with an industrial-sized bag of Lucky Charms in the trunk.

Cerberurbs

by Bryan Russell

Cerberurbs


John was very brilliant and worked at a lab splicing and breeding things and he had an idea about a dog because he always loved dogs and had a Rottweiler when he was a boy. It was a big dog and he used to lie on it and feel his head rise and fall as the dog breathed, but then it chased a car and got hit and rolled over and whined in the dirt until it died.

So John had the idea to make a car-proof dog and spliced some things into a litter of puppies. He was very good–splicing was just like pushing buttons, sequencing here, sequencing there, or perhaps it was like playing the violin really slowly. He didn't tell his bosses because he'd already floated the idea and they'd told him don't be stupid.

So he had a litter of pups, but times were tough—he had a gambling debt (damn those ponies) and decided to sell the pups at a garage sale, along with his old golf clubs. Bob came and bought the biggest because it was one damn big pup, with a head like a football covered in a shag rug. But one of John's bosses happened to stop by the garage sale (he was always looking for a deal) and saw the pups and got pissed off and confiscated them, though he did buy the golf clubs for twenty-five bucks. John said that was the whole litter (because he certainly wasn't giving that hundred dollars back to Bob).

So now Bob had a giant Rottweiler pup, and it was cute and ungainly in a brutish sort of way. He fed it kibble and it grew very quickly. Within a few weeks it was eating a full bag a day and was already the size of a grown dog. Bob was sort of happy, as no one would goddamn ever mess with him while his dog was around, but it was pretty expensive, this big frigging dog.

Then the ungainly pup caught a squirrel after waiting patiently at the bottom of a tree. Bob just saw a fluffy tail sliding into the maw and down that wide gullet.

Next it was a cat. Meow.

That's one tough dog, Bob thought. He taught it to sit up and roll over and bark at his command, but after a while it simply stopped and stared at him. Bob noticed its eyes were sort of red.

And then it started eating the neighborhood dogs. The Martins' Chihuahua, of course. Then the Smith's beagle. Then Lassie (the Dubrovniks actually called the hairy thing Lassie). Sampson the golden retriever. Marko the Doberman Pinscher. Emma the Rottweiler. This made Bob nervous, and sort of happy. He thought about calling his dog Cannibal. Or maybe Cannibal Lecter.

But then the local dog owners gathered together and came with shouts and pitchforks. Well, garden rakes. The dog just stared at them, and when it growled they felt the road vibrate and they remembered their microwave dinners were probably ready now. Let the police deal with it.

The officers came, somewhat nervously, wearing padding. They were armed. They caught sight of the dog and stopped. It was a big dog. A very big dog. But the dog turned and loped off into the trees.

Maybe it's for the best, Bob thought. The officers gave him a ticket, but he said it wasn't his dog. He said he thought it was John-from-down-the-street's dog.

Except the dog came back, sometimes, at night, and looked in Bob's window at the flickering TV. It was almost as tall as Bob now.

Once, in the deep of night, when the stars were like icepicks in the black sheet of the sky, Bob thought he heard a howling, a deep and sad and terrible baying.

McAdam, who had a farm just on the edge of town, said that his cows were disappearing. The story was in the local paper, section C3. And then McAdam disappeared. The local racetrack shut down, as some of the horses had gone missing, and the rest wouldn't leave their stalls. A reporter called it "a mass onset of equine agoraphobia."

There were reports that a couple bears had come down out of the hills, rooting for garbage, haunting the McDonald's dumpster after dark. And then one day a severed bear head was found in the parking lot. It had a frightened look on its dead face.

Bob woke one night to see huge red eyes in his window, vast glassy pools lit from within and shadowed by dreams of ash and smoke. His bedroom was on the second floor. He didn't move. The eyes blinked. A nose puffed steam onto the window and bumped it open. Its breath rustled the curtains. A huge head, bulking shoulders… shoulders with strange protuberances. Like giant swellings. The furnace eyes blinked again and then the dog was gone.

Bob stopped working. He waited, each day, though nothing happened. He did not see the dog for a while. He wasn't sleeping well. There were shadows under his eyes. He went out one morning in the dimness before dawn and saw a shape. It was as big as a house. Red eyes turned and saw him. Three pairs.

The dog had three heads, each one massive and thick, like the furred head of a dinosaur, a tongue-lolling tyrannosaur. The three heads watched him for a while, and then the dog loped to the nearest house. The Martins. When Mike Martin stepped out into the morning in business casual, one of the dog's heads snapped him up and swallowed.

It was like a game. So easy. The dog was really rather quiet for something as big as a house. The shaggy heads took turns. Early-to-rise joggers. Shop owners. Civil servants. A few lawyers. A long-necked podiatrist. The heads fought over the mailman. The middle head ate John, and then it bayed, the sound haunting the air and rattling between the rows of houses.

When the neighborhood was silent (silent as a February wind after a storm), the dog knocked down a house and lay on the flattened roof. It rested its head on the ground, the lamp-like eyes watching Bob.

Bob got in his car, turned the key, and backed into the street. He started down the road. West. Go west, young man. The three heads rose up. Noses sniffed.

Bob hoped 70 miles an hour would do it, but as he hit the city limits he saw a dark form in his rearview mirror, loping along. Bob sped through the slanted light of morning toward a new town, an electric town with high picket fences, followed always by the specter of a dog.

Life's Work

by M.A. Leslie
http://maleslie1.blogspot.com/

Life's Work

The cool air flowed through the window screens and tickled his cheeks as he tapped away at the keyboard. There was stress-induced sweat building on his brow as the words finally began to flow from synapse to nerve end, and eventually onto the screen. He had finally cut through the creative snare in his brain that had plagued him.

The streets below were quiet, and, aside from the light flicker of a streetlamp, there was no movement at all. In the distance there were a few sounds of moving vehicles and distant conversation, but it didn’t matter. All senses were tuned to the white canvas filling with consonants and vowels, watching as they bled onto the page and became words, sentences, art.

Satisfied with the breakthrough, he allowed the blinders to form and the only thing that could be seen was the glare of the laptop screen. The world around him went blank and bleak as he fell into his imagination. It was genius, it was perfect, and it was what he had waited for.

Somewhere distant in his mind, he heard sounds of life and movement. There were voices around, and quiet breaks in concentration, but not enough to pull the blinders from his eyes. He sat, and still the flow of words poured like water from an open faucet, from the tips of his fingers. They continued to come and he continued to write. There was only him and his work, what he assumed was his bliss.

The world and room around him had changed, and night had become day, and then changed again. A forest was growing on his face, but he didn’t feel it or care to notice. Nothing would break his focus. There was just his work and the tapping of the keys, a pianist playing a sonnet. That is, until he was finished.

The man leaned back and heard a slight crack as he stretched. The room came back into focus, but it was much different than he remembered. All that remained was the bed and the dresser. The pictures on the walls were gone. Slowly he stood, unhooking the laptop and walking out to show his family the amazing work he had completed. They were gone.

The rooms of the house were as nude as birth. With a puzzled melancholy the man sat down at the kitchen table, his life’s work next to him. He had no one to share it with; all that was left sat on the screen.

With a sigh he opened the screen again to see it, but like all other things in his life, the laptop slipped. With a crash the computer bounced open against the floor. The screen was blank, except for a reflection he no longer recognized.

The Limits of Napkins

by Paul Michael Murphy
Murphblog


The Limits of Napkins

I was just about to shovel in a forkful of fettucini when the guy at the table next to us horked up his entire lung. You can’t not look when you hear something like that, so both Terri and I eased our eyes over to their table, the way you do when you don’t want to be obvious about it.
He was with a girl. She was young. I pegged her at twenty-three but my pegging’s not what it used to be. The way they go about now, she could have been seventeen or thirty. I expected her to be embarrassed. She wasn’t. “What the hell?” she said.

“I’m sick,” the guy groaned into his napkin. He wouldn’t take it away from his face and I imagined a Ghostbusters-like slime behind it. The napkins were of decent quality, but the things are meant to wipe away a bit of food from the corner of a mouth, not absorb the entire contents of some guy’s respiratory system.

Some of the stuff was leaking-- no, oozing, out. It hung there at the bottom edge of the napkin, swaying back and forth like Poe’s pendulum. “Oh, my god. You are so gross,” the girl said. I half-expected her to abandon the poor schmuck, but she didn’t. “Really?” she said. “You’re gonna do this tonight?”

“I can’t help it,” the guy said, his voice stuffy with whatever was miraculously still in his nose.

“Unbelievable. It’s always about you, isn’t it? I get a promotion and instead of just sitting there and--”

The guy pulled the napkin away from his face. It would have stopped you mid-sentence, too. Snot was covering his face, coating his lips, dribbling into the little patch of hair on his chin.

“Give him your napkin,” Terri told me.

“What?”

“Your napkin. Give it to him.”

“I’m not doing that.”

“Why not?”

“He’ll know we were watching.”

“So?”

“It’s rude.”

“So is hacking up a quart of mucus in a restaurant. Give him your napkin.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“He’s disgusting,” I whispered.

“It’s a napkin.”

“Then give him yours.”

Terri looked down at her napkin like it was a cherished family heirloom. She shook her head.

The guy cleared his throat. He coughed. I knew what was coming and couldn’t help myself. Right as the guy was about to unleash another torrent, I hopped up and thrust my napkin to his face. It was just in time.

“Thanks,” the guy said.

His date looked at me with piercing eyes. “What the hell?” she accused.

I apologized and sheepishly returned to my seat. The girl’s eyes followed me the entire way.

“My hero,” Terri said.

I grunted and looked down at my dinner. Fettucini. All that white sauce.

And as I stood to go to the bathroom the girl said, “Next time, mind your own damn business.” Then she dabbed at the corners of her mouth and carefully laid her napkin back over her thighs.

Silence

by Cyndi Pauwels
CP at Large
(Story originally published in Mock Turtle, Fall 2010)

Silence

In the beginning the silence was a welcome relief from the chaotic days and nights spent caring for an angry, ungrateful, invalid husband. He was so healthy and strong when they married. They were blissfully happy, cocooned in a world of their own. The future stretched before them, full of tantalizing possibilities, but then their brief fifteen months of idyllic existence were shattered by the war. When he was medically discharged for vague but debilitating symptoms after repeated deployments and finally returned for good to the tiny bungalow they shared, he was different, physically and emotionally. She spent his last months caring for the bitter, disillusioned man he’d become, never able to pierce the wall he built between them. He remained a sullen stranger in a familiar, yet older face.

Now he was truly gone. The last mourners, after seeking guilt-relieving assurance she would be fine, really, were gone, too. She tossed the wilting flowers, the inane cards, the uneaten casseroles. All the clothes he couldn’t – or wouldn’t – wear had already gone to Goodwill and slowly, over the last few painful weeks, every memento of their life together disappeared from the house, either by way of the trashman after a particularly trying day, or in the possession of a distraught friend or relative seeking a tangible connection to the man they once knew.

Finally she was alone, with the silence blanketing her, comforting her, shielding her from cold reality. All her dreams died with him – their unborn children, their travel plans, the meticulously designed corner bookstore they dreamed of opening. Her strength was gone too, her motivation to begin life over non-existent. The bank account was exhausted, spent on fruitless doctor visits and refused medication. The home they built and decorated together was double-mortgaged, granted on the prospect of his life insurance policy and military benefits. All she had left was the silence.

She turned off the phone and rebuffed efforts to check on her well-being until, gradually, even the best-intentioned gave up and left her alone.

The ticking clock intruded, so she unplugged it. Likewise the humming refrigerator, the noisy furnace, the clanking cistern pump. She guarded the silence jealously, even as it overpowered her.

And in the end, there was silence.

Lake Argo

by Matthew MacNish
The Quintessentially Questionable Query Experiment

Lake Argo

He watched the grey mist fall languidly off the glassflat surface of the cold, dark lake, its twisting vapors the only thing that moved in the silence. Morning stalked still and secret through the trees as dawn approached, nothing more than a subtle, desperate lightening of the far domed firmament.

Ancient. Timeless. Infinite.

The lingering dew awoke every sleeping odor held within an earthen mouth: dirt, worms, decay, fungi, wet leaves, pine, life. The world stirred.
A ripple on the water. A fluttering of leaves in the trees. The whistling warble of a nearby songbird. A gentle waft of warmer air against the skin.

He stood, stiller than a statue, his hand firm around his bow, his toes cold and stiff in the chilled leather of his boots. His breathing was slowed to a pace that rivaled hibernation, but his mind was sharp and focused. He drank the world in through his senses as he stood, and watched, and considered.

It had been a long night, spent in vigil, the threat of danger never far away. This was the frontier, and his people knew of the coming enemy. They were resigned against it.

His duty was to watch, and then to warn. Perhaps to fight one day, if, Mother of the Forest forbid, it came to that.

He shrugged, stretched his neck, and spat. His people were peaceful, but they would defend their land with determination. Damn the horde to the stony depths of the deep black wastes. They could choke, and writhe, and wither into nothing there for all the care he gave them.

Suddenly he heard a cry, a ghostly call so ethereal in the lifting fog of the charging morning that it begged the question: am I still within this life or have I crossed over into some Other World where time and matter are but rumors of their former selves.

And then he knew.

It was the lakebird of the boundary waters, heralding the breaking dawn with a call as clarion as the horn of a rider diving headlong into the great red battle at the end of history.

Yet, for him, it was but the beginning.

The Hangman Never Smiled So Sweet

by Janet Russell


The Hangman Never Smiled So Sweet

Fox approaches two birds, broken-winged.

Everybody Knew

by Bryan Russell

Everybody Knew

Emilio was nine, but he had a good arm. He could throw. Better than Chris and Juan, and he always had to throw first, otherwise nothing would happen. They never threw until he did.

They had some good stones, and when the cops' car pulled around the corner he was ready. It was unmarked, the car, and they weren’t in uniform, but everybody in the neighborhood knew they were cops.

Emilio threw, yelling as he did so, and Chris and Juan threw after him. His friends missed, but Emilio’s first stone made a metallic chunk sound against the fender, and his second throw hit the windshield, leaving a white mark in the glass.

The cops were jumping out of the car. They had beer bottles in their hands. Emilio ran. He could hear his friends behind him, their breathing, the sound of their shoes hitting the ground. Down the alley they went. The cops were shouting and chasing, all four of them. Chris ran past Emilio. He couldn’t throw worth shit, Chris, but he could always run.

Chris split left down an alley, and Emilo and Juan went straight ahead, and then right down another alley, and then left, and right.

And then they stopped. They’d come this way a thousand times, where an old chain-link gate had once stood to block the alley, but had rusted away years ago. But somebody had put up a new gate, an ugly thing made of old boards. And it was high.

Emilio jumped, tried to climb, but a big hand grabbed him and threw him on the ground. His breath left in a big whoosh. There was pain, and he tried to breathe.

“Hey, fuckers,” one of the cops said. He punched Juan, and Juan fell down.

There was blood all over Juan’s face, and Juan started to cry. Snot smeared down over his mouth.

A hand hauled Emilio up.

“You gonna cry too?”

“Fuck you, cop,” Emilio said.

The cop laughed. He had nice clothes, talked around a cigarette in his mouth. He turned and kicked Juan, who cried even harder. “Your friend’s crying.” The cop looked back at Emilio and then backhanded him across the face.

Emilio staggered, but stayed up. His face went hot. His uncle had hit him like that, once. It was like an iron had been pressed to his face. His Nan’s old steel iron, the one she used to press her Sunday dress. He never thought she was strong enough to lift it, but she always did.

He felt hot and numb, but he didn’t cry.

Emilio watched as two of the cops kicked Juan, and a third one unzipped and pissed on him. Laughter, beer bottles raised in an ironic toast.

The cop that had hit Emilio looked at him closely. He laughed, handed Emilio a half-full beer.

The cops walked away. Emilio drank the beer. Something inside him went as numb as his face. It was a slower numbness, but just as deep.

Juan was crying. He was wet with piss. His lip and chin were covered in snot.

After awhile Chris came down the alley. He looked flushed, but he was breathing easily. “What happened?”

“Juan balled,” Emilio said. He turned and kicked Juan. Then he kicked him harder, and Juan’s crying grew louder. Emilio kept kicking, and Chris joined in. They kicked for awhile, until Juan stopped crying and just whimpered.

Emilio threw the beer bottle at the wall and it exploded. He’d always had a good arm. He looked back down the alley.

Someday he was gonna be a cop.

The Intruder

by Hollister Ann Grant


The Intruder

I’m invisible. Go on. Be bold or be hungry. Tech 29 slid the screen door back, slipped inside, and peered over the top of the table, but he was too short to reach the food with the incredible smell. He grabbed a shiny green cylinder and popped it open.

Some kind of fizzy liquid. Good enough.

The alien pulled off his mask and took a swig. His cluster of eyes bugged out. Amazed, he swigged the rest. Fabulous, the most delicious stuff in the universe. Seconds later, his insides erupted, gas shot out of his mouth, and he shrieked just as cheers erupted from the game.

“Keisha, the quesadillas are getting cold,” the male local called.

“Okay,” a female local called back from another room. “I just want to finish this post.”

“They’re getting cold.”

“Two seconds.”

“You’re missing the playoffs.”

“I said I’m coming.”

“Keisha, you better get off the internet.”

“I’m coming, I’m coming. Just get off my case.”

The male noticed Tech 29 and gripped the arm of the chair. His mouth fell open. More cheers and a roar from the crowd came from the game.

“There’s an alien in the dining room,” he said.

“Yeah, right.”

“There’s an alien from outer space in here and he’s trying to get the quesadillas.”

“Terrell, you’re so full of bull. You’re the king of bull.”

Still parched, stomach grumbling, Tech 29 grabbed another shiny green cylinder and a colorful bag from the table.

The male’s voice rose. “I’m telling you, there’s an alien in here. He’s three or four feet high with a big head and a bunch of eyes and he’s got a Mountain Dew. He just belched. Now he’s stealing the Doritos!”

Tech 29 couldn’t understand the local’s words, but he understood the meaning. His camouflage wasn’t working. He could sense the man’s excitement and greed. Somehow the local wanted to profit off him and one-up his wife for all time. Suddenly the local crept around the table, hunched down with his arms spread wide, and angled in front of the door.

“Hey, little alien guy,” the local said. “You hungry? You want some ice cream? I got Rocky Road. I got pistachio, too, and it’s green just like you. I got barbecue ribs and cold shrimp and potato salad and potato chips and lemon cake and cheesecake. You like those Doritos? Take some more. Take the whole bag. Why don’t you have a seat and I’ll bring you a nice big bowl of ice cream.”

The local was going to grab his arm. Tech 29 skittered into the condominium, looking for a way out, but the dark hall didn’t feel like it connected to the outdoors. The local pounded after him. When the hall ended, the alien rushed into a narrow room with smooth blue tiles and slammed the door.

A key rattled in the knob.

“Okay, so where’s this famous alien?” the female said.

The male laughed. “I locked him in the bathroom.”

Songs of Dentistry and Death

Songs of Dentistry and Death
by Bryan Russell


Mitya wanted only a quiet place in the forest to shoot himself.

His hands felt heavy, and his boots. The winter uniform. And his gun most of all. It weighed more than all the bales of hay he had once hauled, all of them together. It weighed more than all the earth he’d plowed beneath his feet.

His breath plumed in the air, and he noticed the strangeness of silence. How long? Always the noise: the people; the voices; the orders; the bullets; the awfulness of artillery shaking him like a bone doll--a filling had fallen out once, rattling right out of his head. He’d tasted it, for a moment, on his tongue.

It was just the start, he knew. Pieces of him would keep falling off.

The trees had lightened, had somehow become more airy, more open. Winter light fell through bare branches. Yet he was deep in the forest.

Yes, somewhere around here. It was quiet. The snow would come, it would cover him. He would forget, and the world would forget him.

Mitya stopped.

There was a piano.

A piano sitting on the grass. A piano, alone and waiting.

Mitya looked around. There was nothing around him. No house, no cabin, no road. No path, no mark of foot or hoof or wheel. Just a piano. Somewhat battered, tilted slightly, as the ground seemed a little uneven.

How had it come here? Who would drag a piano out here?

People, of course, were fleeing the war. Carrying bags on their backs. But none of them were carrying pianos.

Mitya stepped forward. In the silence he thought he could hear notes. Tentative, distant, the hushed tones of memory.

Shostakovich, he thought. Yes. Not one of his great Soviet propaganda pieces. Some minor thing. A personal little piece. Small and forgotten. He didn’t know the name. Just this little snatch of melody, of hushed notes.

His fingers touched the keys. The sound stepped out, clean and good, reverberating off the cold trees. The notes drifted through the forest. He played the Shostakovich, the little bit he remembered. He wasn’t very good; he never had been, really, and he was rusty now, yet the music came out right, or at least it sounded good to his ear. A little plunky, but the notes danced for a moment, before drifting out amongst the trees.

There was another sound, then. The heavy thrumming of artillery, the deep vibration rolling through the earth.

Just drums, he thought. His notes still hung in the air, a fading counterpoint. The earth rumbled. Just drums. Mitya pulled his gun around and marched back into the trees, ignoring the pain in his teeth.

Yellow Bus

by Bryan Russell

Yellow Bus

Sara checked her hat and her mittens. The other kids were already heading out the door, except Michael. Sara stomped her feet, her snowpants making her legs feel like heavy balloons.

“Yellow Bus?” Michael said.

“Yes, it’s time for Yellow Bus,” Sara told her classmate.

Michael’s smudged face turned down to his coat. He tried to do up his zipper, but his fingers did not seem to recognize the task. Ms. McCarthy started to walk over, but Sara was already pulling her mittens off with her teeth. They dangled there, red and woolen, as Sara grasped Michael’s zipper and did it up.

“Yellow Bus?” Michael said.

“Come on,” Sara said, pulling her mittens back on. She walked out into the hallway and Michael followed. “Quick, quick,” she said, “we don’t want to miss it.”

Sara pushed out the heavy door to the parking lot, and as it swung back it banged Michael. He was always slow to push through, but sometimes Sara forgot.

“Sorry,” Sara said.

“Yellow Bus!”

Michael pointed. There were a row of yellow buses, but Michael was only pointing at one of them. It was a third the size of the others, and idled at the end of the row. There were lots of yellow buses, but only one Yellow Bus.

Jasmine sauntered over. She was an older girl.

“Yellow Bus!” Jasmine said, miming Michael’s faint lisp.

“I take Yellow Bus,” Michael said.

“You take the Dumb Bus,” Jasmine said. “It’s little cuz your brain is little.”

Michael put his head down.

Sara pulled him. “You gotta get on your bus, Michael. Come on. You gotta get on Yellow Bus.”

Jasmine sauntered after. “Dumb bus, dumb bus, dumb bus.” She wore low-slung jeans. She had older sisters. Everyone said Jasmine was cool. Sometimes she smoked.

“Come on, Michael,” Sara said, trying to push him up the steps onto the bus. His face had scrunched in on itself. His eyes were wet.

“Dumb bus, dumb bu-u-u-us.” Jasmine was singing now, pretending she had a microphone.

The Yellow Bus turned its lamplight face and looked at Jasmine. It growled its engine and then jerked forward, its grill opening and yellow teeth clomping on the girl, swallowing her head. Another bite and most of her torso was lost inside. There was a crunching sound. Only the legs, the low-slung jeans, stuck out.

Sara watched the legs wiggle a moment, one shoe falling off, and then Yellow Bus tossed its head back and the legs slid inside. Crunch crunch. The wipers flashed across, once, twice, and then again. A puff of smoke belched out the tailpipe. Yellow Bus was chewing, though its bright gaze had already turned back to the road, to the larger buses ahead.

Sara pushed Michael onto Yellow Bus. He was calm now. The doors swung shut behind him.

“Everyone ready? Sara?” Ms. McCarthy called.

There was a sneaker on the ground. Turned on its side. Sara kicked it under Yellow Bus.

“I’m ready,” Sara said.

Invisible Skins

by Bryan Russell


Invisible Skins

The chameleon crept along the line of people. Its green skin filled with shadow blooms like thunderclouds, the color washing through until the chameleon was invisible against the smooth grey carpet.

Small feet, fingers sharp with little claws, crept down the aisle. The chameleon was like a small blur of cloud against a vast iron sky. The black shoes of mourners, the long black-panted legs—they were like trees growing in reverse, growing out of the dark sky and sprouting up toward the distant earth, eyes and coiffed roots searching, searching, always searching.

The chameleon’s tongue touched the air, which tasted of sadness and grief and chemotherapy. The lizard moved forward. A long tail trailed behind, an arrow pointing to safety, to some small crack sheltered from the moist breaths of mourners.

A coffin. Little claws grasping the wood. Up, up, up, like the tree legs. A man lay within. The chameleon stared at the figure with dry little eyes. It was, everyone said, Edgar Martinez, but his skin was not the lustrous skin she knew, smelling of Old Spice and home—it was grey as the carpet, and hinted of some bitter detergent.

The lizard stood, staring, the color of mahogany now, swirls like fingerprints across her skin, like grains of wood, the DNA of change. Edgar Martinez did not stare back. His eyes were closed. It wasn’t him. He was too still. He had the stillness of the chameleon’s baby brother when she watched him, sleeping, unmoving, that moment of stillness before the baby finally breathed, that moment of stillness when she started to worry, to wonder if something was wrong, why wasn’t he breathing, until he breathed, sucking in a breath that made his little chest rise and fall. Except Edgar Martinez did not breathe, his chest did not rise, he was caught in that endless moment of worry and waiting, a premonition of wrongness.

Other people wanted to see this statue of Edgar Martinez. They waited in line. Solemn faces. They could not see the chameleon. She was invisible.

If they could, they would talk to her, these people. Talk to her, pat her head, and look awkwardly away. Their words would remind her that her name was Erica Martinez, but she didn’t want to remember that, her name was dangerous, her name connected her in some way she didn’t understand to the solemn people. They would hand her Kleenex. She would take the Kleenex and sit, tearing it into small strips, and then smaller strips, and then little pieces. They would drift slowly downward like flakes of snow. Little windswept drifts would gather at her feet.

But Erica Martinez was an invisible chameleon and didn’t like the snow. Hers was a secret life of nooks and crannies, of hot sun and cool shadow. There was no snow, just desert winds that peeled off tears and husks of dry skin.

In the Land of Dead Letters

by Bryan Russell


In the Land of Dead Letters

Eduardo had taught at the University, American History, specializing in domestic policy, but his drinking and the affair with the student (well, two of them, really, but no one knew about one of them, except, of course, himself and the lovely Lila) became big problems, and he didn’t have tenure, and wasn’t ever gonna get it, either, as he’d stopped publishing, no one wanted his articles, least of all himself. He tried giving a few away, once, but students didn’t even want them for term papers.

He got a job at the post office. Probably better than he deserved, and he liked it more than he expected. He didn’t have to publish, and his wayward postulations on history faded from his head–they weren’t really his, anyway. And he liked the mail, liked all the envelopes with addresses, the endless strangeness of handwritten names and numbers.

It was orderly, the post office. Everything carefully coded. Zip codes and postal codes, letters spiraling out into the world, destinations alive in ink. Zip zip. Zing zing. Off they went into the world. This number meant there. That number meant here. Everything was official. The government sent tax notices out in flights of a million, flocks whistling out to towns and cities and along muddy rural roads.

Yet some letters went nowhere. Typos, spelling mistakes, forgotten stamps. Broken-winged, they couldn’t fly. Sloughed off by the flock and falling to earth. Piles in the dead letter office.

Yet each one held a voice. Eduardo looked through them. He fingered them, read them, listened to them. Something old burned inside him–a sense of history. Not a history of the books, of the scholars and academics, pontificating to students, but a history of small slippages, of checks gone astray, of letters lost, of reunions forgotten and old lovers missed. A history of silent voices. Of silenced voices.

Eduardo gathered them. One night, after work, he started binding them together. One sheet, then another. Insurance forms, legal papers, ungainly poems, love letters stilted by desperation. He bound them together until he had a history of the blank spaces between worlds, of the empty moments between people. A history of missed conversations.

The book was vast and huge and ungainly, and he had trouble carrying it to his car. He took it home, driving faster than normal. He lugged it inside.

Lila’s voice, on the answering machine, told him to stop calling. It was over. Perhaps she was seeing the Professor of Foreign Policy now. Hot stuff, foreign policy. The War on Terror, history as foresight.

Eduardo looked at the dead letters of his book. He hauled it out to the backyard. The grass was weedy. It was a rental and he didn’t feel much like cutting it. He put the book on the ground. He lit a cigarette and stood smoking, watching the book. After awhile he leaned over and pressed the cigarette on the top page. It smouldered. A little flame licked out.

Eduardo stepped back. The flame grew. Orange ate into the papers, into the dead letters, swallowing them one by one, like old leaves. Sometimes he thought he heard voices–singing, wailing, whispering. But they all vanished in the end.

The voices of time could not resist the wide nothingness of the future, the great wall of history already written, already growing into the present. Bricks piled up, the past hidden from view.

There was a burnt patch in the scraggly ground, ash sifting among the weeds. It was against his tenant’s agreement, he was sure. But it wasn’t much of a rental anyway.

The Falcon - The World in Miniature

by Marlene McKay
www.marlenenashmckay.com

The Falcon

The tiny field mouse sensed, rather accurately, that his days were numbered long before his dark, beady eyes found the Peregrine Falcon. He scurried through the long grass, desperate to get away, his only thought: survival. There was nowhere for him to hide from the rapidly approaching raptor and the attack, as it would, killed the small, defenseless rodent instantly.

The powerful, slate grey bird that hunted for the sport of it only, never because it was hungry, threw the mouse aside unceremoniously before flying off to a nearby outpost overhanging the ocean. It surveyed the surrounding through with shiny black eyes, drinking in every detail, until quite sure that there was nothing out of the ordinary in the immediate vicinity.

The Falcon spread its wings seemingly in preparation to take flight again. But the wings continued to rise upwards and outwards, from where they phased into the muscular arms of a man; the rest of the body followed as he regained human form at a remarkable speed. From a leather pouch around his neck, the olive skinned man removed a loin cloth which he carefully tied around his waist. He inhaled deeply, relishing the cold salty ocean air that stung his now expanded lungs. Power, he thought, as he rested his eyes on the waves crashing tumultuously against the cliffs below, can be found in so many different things. Soon this will all be mine; this and every other thing on earth; this and every other thing in the heavens above it.

‘I will overthrow the Master. It is only a matter of time until I regain my name and then,’ he snapped his fingers, ‘power will be mine once again.’

Almost two miles away, from a vantage point high up, the Eagle cocked his head to the side as he drunk in every word and listened to every thought of the Falcon’s. His father had warned him many years ago, that the time would come when the Falcon would remember who he had once been. This will happen, he had said, when knowledge was no longer sacred and man finds it difficult to continue believing in those things he cannot see. The Eagle had sensed for almost one hundred years now, since the outbreak of the First World War to be exact, that the time was nearing although the chain of events did not cease to amaze him. How yet another angel fell for lies and deceit was beyond him. But that was all in the past now. What mattered from here onwards was that the girl had to be protected at all costs, for the name that the Falcon desired was locked within her and would be immediately revealed in the event that her soul was corrupted beyond any saving grace. It was now the only obstacle that remained between the Falcon and the portae inferi, the gates of hell, and the only thing he required in order to release every single twisted, degraded, maimed, cruel and perverted soul contained within. And where would they go once set free? To earth, naturally.

The Marriage of Summer and Winter - The World in Miniature

by Bryan Russell


The Marriage of Summer and Winter

They met in the spring, of course, with blossoms on the trees. January Heights with her hair down, so fey and beautiful, lingering and dancing and singing pale songs in the hollows of the woods. So odd, so different, Nathaniel August thought, so unlike the sun-licked girls of summer.

They were married with garland wreaths around their necks, and January became wide with child, and yet diffident and shy, the wreath withering to a noose. She kept creeping away, hiding in small caverns carved into the trunks of trees. Nathaniel August grew angry as the weeks passed, for he could not find her, hidden away as she was in the womb of an old oak tree, and his mood soured with the growing cold and the coming of winter. He blinked his eyes – the sunlight, reflecting off the new snow, seemed alien and strange.

Nathaniel came suddenly upon January in the woods, dancing, white fingers twining in the air, bare feet spinning through dusts of snow. Nathaniel pointed his gun and shot January, and she fell, her white hair whistling sadly like the wind.

The child, peering from the hollow of a tree, turned and fled, running swiftly into autumn, trailing red leaves like sparks and singing of the end of things.

Where had summer gone? Nathaniel August had slept through it, ignoring the blue skies, the yellow sun, the white clouds. He woke and returned to the clearing to find January. She lay on a bed of leaves, a hole through her, pale and cold and perfect. A layer of clear ice crept over her, lit with winter light.

The wind came from the north, and Nathaniel August sat, waiting, and his skin turned to snow, and his breath flashed to frost in the air, whispering only slowly to the ground – a blanket for his January. Nathaniel’s eyes were dark as coal, and when he opened his mouth to sing a lament his lungs froze, melancholy breath entombed.

The winter was long, the snows cold. But all things pass, and spring crept up, and blossoms came again to the trees, peeking through white shrouds.

Nathaniel’s tongue grew into a flower, a dark stem reaching out, white petals blooming. The petals fell, drifting down to cover January. Warm petals, touched with the heat of memory, melting slowly through the skin of ice. January breathed, pale limbs stretching.

She stood. The sun turned Nathaniel’s shroud of snow to water, and January drank and was refreshed. Beneath the snow was sun-touched skin, warm and brown and tasting slightly of strawberries when she kissed it.

Nathaniel’s breath flowed out, the melancholy air whisked away by the warm breeze, and they looked on each other and smiled. Nathaniel August told her it was fine, so fine, she could sleep through the summer. He would find her again in the autumn, and they would dance in the trees with their spark-haired child and sing of the seasons.