Kzine Issue 15

by Graeme Hurry

  Later that evening, when she drew back the curtain to step out of the shower, Max stood there in the steam. She let out a startled cry, following it up with a little laugh. Max had the same little smile on his face.

  He drove his fist into the pit of her stomach, down low where she’d just begun to swell. The pain was bright white and amazing. It felt as if he had touched her spine. Holding her up by the shoulder, he hit her again. And once more.

  Max let her crumple to the floor and left the room.

  A series of spasms low in her belly kept her body clenched upon itself, a futile effort to protect itself and the tiny life within it. Too little, too late. There was a lot of blood.

  When she was able to get out of bed again, Max came to her in the bathroom while she brushed her teeth. He stood behind her and began to rub her shoulders. At first she couldn’t meet his gaze, but he said, “Hey. Hey baby.”

  She looked up and saw his eyes crinkled and his lips parted and smiling. Emma’s vision blurred and her lips trembled as she smiled back.

  Max brushed a wisp of hair from the side of her neck and leaned down close to her ear. He whispered, “If you ever allow yourself to become pregnant again, the next time I’ll burn it out of you with a fire poker.”

  * * *

  Just inside the door of the apartment, a red one-gallon can of gas sat on the floor, the wide mouth of a funnel hooked over the spout. Emma could smell the tang of the gas from the hallway. Next to the gas can lay a chrome Zippo lighter. Something had been engraved in the lighter, but she couldn’t make out what it was.

  The door was locked and deadbolted. At first Emma thought the can and lighter belonged to Max, that he had stopped in and left them for whatever reason while she was in her Roofie coma. She moved closer to look at them and knew that wasn’t true. The engraving on the side of the Zippo was a name: Angelina.

  * * *

  Max stayed gone longer than usual. When he returned he was a catastrophe. His eyes were pinned from the tweak. His stink—B.O. and ammonia—made her nose run from across the room. The lower half of his face streaked brown with blood. A nasty bruise covered the left side of his face.

  When he saw Emma sitting on the couch, he bared his teeth like a wolf, his lips curling up to his nose.

  “Come here, you fuck. Come here, whore.” Max’s voice scratched from meth smoke and tension. His shoulders hunched up around his ears as if he was trying to hide his head.

  Emma stood but did not go to him.

  He pointed at her, his clawed finger shaking with rage and fatigue. “You, you fucking rat.”

  Emma’s mouth felt stuffed with cotton. She worked her lips. “What—“

  Max came for her, heavy boots thumping on the thin carpet. His shoulders hunched forward, his pointing finger still pinning her in place. His other hand went to his hip pocket, for the knife Emma knew he kept there. She shrank back against the window.

  He growled as he kicked the coffee table out of his way. His knife hand seemed to move in slow motion as he thumbed the serrated blade free of its casing. The blade caught the sunlight in a quick flash. The death it suggested seemed nothing so peaceful as the one offered by a handful of sleeping pills. Emma’s body clenched and lurched to escape. Max backhanded her across the mouth. Emma pitched over onto her knees, and Max was on her. Tangling his hand in her hair, he jerked her head back at a hard angle. She gasped.

  Reaching around the front of her, making sure she could see him do it, Max put the saw-blade of the knife to her crotch. No pressure. Not yet. Just let her know it was there.

  His breath panted wet against her ear, filling her nose and mouth with his rank odor. She gagged.

  Max’s words were chopped by heavy breathing. “When I was a boy, do you know what we did to rats?”

  Emma didn’t say anything, and Max shook her by the hair, yanking her head back and forth and screaming, “Do you?”

  “No.” She sobbed, putting a hand against his wrist. “No, please.”

  “You don’t like this?” he said. “Okay.” He moved the knife away from her crotch and put it against her throat. “Maybe you like this better.” The serrated points sent cold prickles through her. He pushed and the knife dug in. “It’s what you fucking deserve.”

  Emma gritted her teeth. “Why?”

  A rough intake of breath. “Why?” He said nothing for a moment, then shrieked, “Why?”

  The knife came away from her throat and Max threw her face-first to the floor. She tried to crawl away, but there was nowhere to go. Max stood over her and kicked her in the ribs, bowling her onto her side against the wall. She curled up and buried her face in her knees.

  He squatted beside her, his elbow on his knee. He tapped the flat of the knife blade against her cheek, the tip just beneath her eye. Tap tap tap.

  “You told on me, whore. You fucking rat.” Tap tap tap. “You called Rory D and told him I had no money to pay for the drugs he fronted me, and that if he gave me the drugs that I would not sell them to give him money, that I would just use them all up.”

  Emma began to shake her head but Max wrapped his free hand around her throat, his bony fingers a warning as he tap tap tapped the knife against her cheek. “And so he comes into the room where I am fucking one of his girls, and, because I am a friend, instead of killing me, he beats me.” The tapping stopped and the blade rested on her cheek, the tip pressed against her lower eyelid. “He beats me as if I am his dog.”

  “I never—“

  The knife tip pressed harder, stung her eyelid.

  “Shut up.”

  He took the knife away and closed it, released her throat and let his hands dangle between his knees. A breath Emma did not realize she had been holding came out in a raspy whine.

  “I am no dog, Emmalene, Emmaline, Emmaliar. I am a man.” He traced a finger from her shoulder down her ribs, over her hip. He cupped her ass in his palm. “Do you think I am a dog, my love?”

  “No.”

  “After he beats me, Rory tells me I have three days to pay my bill. My ‘invoice,’ he calls it. And that is why I will not cut pieces from you as we did to the rats when I was a boy. Because, in three days I must have this money, and you are going to get this money for me.” He bent down and kissed her cheek. “You, my pet, are going to fuck a lot of people to make this money for me. Okay?”

  Emma found herself nodding, crying and nodding and hugging her knees. “Okay. Okay, okay.”

  * * *

  The really bad parts of the DTs were fading. The shakes, the cramps, they’d settled down enough that she could shave her legs without causing herself too much damage. But her head thumped like a rotting tooth. She squinched her eyes shut against the glare of the bathroom vanity lights and slid lower in the water so that only her face broke the surface.

  Water sloshed over the edge of the tub as she hauled herself up. She grabbed a wadded towel off the floor and dried her hands before picking up her phone. She thumbed open the call history and looked at the last four days’ activity. Two calls received from the strange number, one outgoing to it. No calls to Rory D.

  She got out of the tub and put on her robe. No call to wear much else tonight. As she reached into the medicine cabinet for her toothbrush her eyes rested briefly on the orange bottle of Halcion tablets. Instead, she grabbed a couple Valium and a Xanax bar and dry swallowed them. Best to put as much distance between herself and reality as possible in preparation for the kind of festivities Max had planned.

  * * *

  Her johns passed over her, one after another, specters that labored and sweated, but that had no meaning or weight. Their grunts and moans seemed to echo from within a tin house and they each were different faces on the same man, different skins for the same need. Emma, not fully within her own body, floating sometimes beside the bed and sometimes over it, saw that none of these men had faces. When they called her a whore and spat on her it didn’t matter; they weren’t abusing her as she floated near them; they weren’t
real.

  She loved them all.

  Afterward, Emma went to the living room and lay on the couch for a while. Her body below the navel throbbed and ached. Her feet were asleep. Her eyes drifted half closed and she felt heavy. She could just stay here for a while, and sleep with her legs dangling over the arm of the sofa, her ass bare. She didn’t care.

  But she had to have a shower first. Had to. She forced herself to stand.

  On her way into the bathroom, she glanced into the room she shared with Max. His back was to her and he muttered to himself as he struggled to fumble pills out of the bag of Roofies.

  Later, she sat in the living room, her wet head reclined against the wall. Max’s snores carried through the bedroom door.

  Metallica roared from her phone on the seat beside her. “Master of Puppets.” She didn’t have to look at the number, but she did. Stared at it until long after the call should have gone to voicemail, until the song was almost over. The phone felt warm in her hand.

  She answered and held the phone to her ear, but didn’t say anything.

  “Hello,” said a voice, and it wasn’t the man this time. A woman. The voice was familiar but Emma couldn’t place it. “Hello?” the woman said again.

  “Who is this?” Emma said.

  A quick intake of breath on the other end. “Oh my God, oh baby, it’s you. You picked up. I’ve been calling every few minutes, I was so worried! Why didn’t you pick up?”

  “Mom? Is that you?”

  “Yes, it’s me baby, and I’m so happy to hear your voice. It’s been too long since I heard your voice.” A hitch in the breathing on the other end of the line. A muffled sob.

  Emma’s eyes stung. “I… you can’t call me.”

  Her mother’s voice sharpened. “Hush with that. Certainly I can call you. I’ve stayed out long enough, and now you’re in trouble and I’m going to call you and come help you.”

  “How are you calling me?” A knot twisted in her stomach. “Why are you calling from this number?”

  “When you were a little girl you never were afraid of anything, do you remember that?”

  “I don’t—“

  “Your daddy, sometimes he’d say, ‘Someday that little Angelina’s going to set the world on fire.’ He was so proud of you.”

  Emma’s belly went all hollow and weightless. “I’m not Angelina.” Her tongue scraped against the roof of her mouth, thick and awkward.

  “I’m coming to get you, dear, and we’re going to get you out of that awful place.”

  Emma’s voice was a raspy whisper. “But you’re dead.”

  Her mother went silent but for unsteady breathing.

  Emma said, “Don’t go.”

  On the other end, a baby began to wail. It was a weak sound, thin and hungry.

  The line clicked dead.

  * * *

  Emma liked looking at him like this. Peaceful. In repose he became the Max that could have been. If she closed one eye, he was a poet. If she closed the other, he was a father. If she closed both eyes, he was gone.

  She screwed off the lid of the gas can.

  * * *

  Greasy smoke roiled as she closed the door to the bedroom. She realized, looking down at herself, that she had left all her clothes to the inferno in the bedroom. This bathrobe was all that remained.

  It didn’t really matter.

  He stood waiting for her at the front door.

  He wore a dark suit and had no eyebrows.

  He said, “Everyone is waiting for you,” and held out his hand to her.

  Emma, standing just out of his reach, took a step back. “I don’t want to die,” she said as heat rose like a pressure against her back.

  The thickening smoke made his grin a bit fuzzy, but his chuckle and his words were clear. “No? I thought that’s what you wanted.”

  She shook her head, coughing a little.

  “Well. That is fortuitous. Because it’s not time for that. There’s more waiting for you. But not here. Come.”

  Maybe it was the heat or the choking smoke that pushed her forward again. She went to him and took his hand. They stood until the flames just touched them, and then went out the door.

  Contributor Notes

  Francis Bass is an undergraduate student at the University of Iowa, though he is a native of Tallahassee, Florida. His work has appeared in Dramatics magazine and the Thespian Playworks 2014 anthology. You can find him online at francisbass.wordpress.com.

  Richard Mark Glover has published short stories with Oyster Boy Review, Bookend Review (Best of 2014), Crack the Spine, Buffalo Almanac, and won the 2004 Eugene Walters Short Story Award, for “Chef Menteur.” His journalism has appeared in San Antonio Express News, West Hawaii Today, and the Big Bend Sentinel where he won the 2010 Texas Press Association Best Feature Award, medium size weekly, for “Just Another Night in Marfa.” A collection of short stories, “Luck and Other Truths” will be published this summer by Pure Slush, Australia.

  Graeme Hurry edited Kimota magazine in the 90s and a horror anthology called Northern Chills in 1994. Now he has branched out by editing this kindle only magazine, Kzine. He has a story in Terror Tales of The Scottish Highlands anthology and an honourable mention in Year’s Best Horror 2001 for a story he collaborated on with Willie Meikle called The Blue Hag.

  Jon Arthur Kitson has most recently had stories published in Fiction Vortex, Toasted Cake Podcast, and World Weaver Press’ Fae Anthology.

  Brian M. Milton is a member of the Glasgow Science Fiction Writers Circle and the idea for this story came when he entirely mis-read another story at one of their crit sessions. He has been previously published in anthologies such as Caledonia Dreamin’, Oomph: A little super goes a long way and The Speculative Book. Brian can be found on the Twitter’s @munchkinstein

  Joshua D. Moyes has previously been published in Abomination Magazine, Allegory, and Plots With Guns.

  Lynn Rushlau graduated from the University of Texas with a degree in Anthropology and minor in Sociology—which seem like awesome planning for a life creating cultures and societies, but she’ll admit to not have been thinking that far in advance. She lives in Addison, Texas with two attention-needy cats, and can be found on twitter at lrushlau. Her short fiction has most recently appeared in Sorcerous Signals, The Colored Lens, & Swords and Sorcery Magazine.

  Larisa Walk a native Russian, lives in California with her husband and two formerly homeless cats. She often draws inspiration for her paranormal/historical fiction from her shabby life in the former Soviet Union. Her short fiction appeared in several anthologies and magazines. She has published a historic fantasy novel, A Handful of Earth, and a modern paranormal novel, A Witch Without Magic, which are available from Amazon.

  Dave Windett is professional comics artist and illustrator. He has worked for numerous publishers in Britain, Europe and America - among them Cappelen Damm, DC Thomson, Fleetway, Future, Marvel UK, Panini and PSS (a division of Penguin USA. Korky the Cat, Count Duckula, Lazarus Lemming, Inspector Gadget, Ace Ventura, Tails the Fox, The Loony and Tiny Toons are just a handful of the very many original and licensed characters he has drawn. With Writer John Gatehouse he self publishes some work under the Little Lemming Books imprint the latest of which is The Kaci Bell Mysteries. He recently completed work on Monster Hunters Unlimited a four book series for PSS. Samples of His work can be seen at - www.davewindett.com

  Kathleen Wolak is a writer and blogger from Hamden CT. Her short fiction has appeared in Danse Macabre, Sanitarium Magazine, Massacre Magazine, and Hello Horror. Her first novel, The Tasteless was released in 2014 by America Star Books. She is a regular guest on The Easy Chair Podcast with Laura Hurwitz.

 

 

 
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