A Haunting of Words

by Brian Paone et al.

  Published by Scout Media

  Copyright 2017

  ISBN: 978-0-9979485-1-6

  Cover: Sydney Blackburn

  Interior graphics: Amy Hunter

  Table of Contents

  Brian Paone — Anesthetize (or A Dream Played in Reverse on Piano Keys)

  D.W. Vogel — Rowdy

  Virginia Carraway Stark — Widower's Choice

  K.N. Johnson — The Blue Amberol Turns Again

  Travis West — If It's Not Okay, It's Not The End

  JM Ames — Only The Dead Go Free

  Mariana Llanos — The Unimportance of Being Oscar

  D.L. Smith-Lee — Knock, Knock

  Kari Holloway — Gunpowder & Wool

  Laurie Gardiner — Thief

  Dawn Taylor — Pepe

  E.C> Jarvis — Outlook Supplies

  C.H. Knyght — The Last

  William Thatch — A Wacky, Fantastical Misadventure in New Haven

  Donise Sheppard — Coal Run Road

  Ricardo Anthonio — I’m Not Sure What It Means

  F.A. Fisher — Fighting Sleep

  Susanne Kim — Objects in Motion

  Patricia Stover — Plastic Boy

  Laura Ings Self — Home

  J.M. Tuner — Joe

  Jacob Prytherch — Worm

  Lauren Nalls — The Rub

  Monica Sagle — Storm House

  Amy Hunter — Salted Ground

  Quinne Darkover — Groceries Every Day

  Sunanda J. Chatterjee — Jimmy’s Shadow

  R.J. Castiglione — The Jonathan of Bracken Manor

  B. Sharpe — Black Butterfly

  River M. Daniel — Fragments

  Nightfall

  Mark Crowley fumbled with the medication bottle’s childproof cap as another gust of wind ripped open the front of his unzipped jacket. Using the large tree branches’ shadows as cover, he tossed back his head and swallowed an uncounted number of white pills. He punched his chest once to help the tranquilizers slide down his esophagus.

  Mark found a nice-size rock—one not big enough to break her window but large enough to get her attention—and juggled it haphazardly in his hand. He aimed at Samantha’s second-story window and let the rock fly. Its trajectory was right on the money, clinking loudly against the pane. He waited a few moments to see if the sound would summon her to open the window. Seconds passed; nothing.

  He surveyed the ground for something larger. Maybe she was in her bathroom and couldn’t hear the plink. He needed something that made a thud! Hell, at this point, maybe she deserved to have her window fucking broken.

  Mark noticed a baseball half hidden underneath a bush beside the front steps. He nonchalantly strolled toward the bush, sifted the ball from the dirt, and placed it under his armpit. Illuminated by the motion-detector spotlights secured to the corner of the first-story roof, he reached into his pocket and removed a different pill bottle. He unscrewed the cap and tapped a handful of pills into his palm. He shrugged, chomped on the medication loudly until it was just dust clinging to the roof of his dry mouth, and then whipped the baseball through her window.

  Bitch, he thought.

  The front door opened, and Mark sprinted toward the tree line, using the shadows to hide from the moonlight.

  Mark could have found his special spot deep in the woods even if the moon hadn’t flooded the trees with light. Hell, he could find his way with his eyes closed. He stutter-stepped over the decrepit and rotting railroad ties and maneuvered around the overgrowth consuming the rusted double rails. He placed his hand on the caboose of a passenger train, half off the tracks and leaning like the famous Tower of Pisa. Standing on his tiptoes, he placed his other hand on the yellow-tinted window to the train car and raised the glass just enough to slip his hand through.

  His fingertips found the corner of the Ziploc bag, and he slid the stash through the slit of the windowpane. Planting his feet level on the ground, he separated the pills, through the plastic, with his thumb and index finger. Content they were all accounted for, he turned his back on the long-forgotten derailed train and stared at the back fender of his mother’s car, camouflaged under a thicket of small trees and shrubbery.

  “How many have you taken already?”

  “Fuck, man. Don’t do that,” Mark said.

  “Sorry, thought you knew I was here,” Dawson replied.

  “I never know when you’re here.”

  Dawson laughed. “I’m always here. You should know that better than anyone.”

  Mark sat down next to his best friend. “These are the only things that help me through the day.”

  “How many prescriptions do you actually have?”

  “Legally?” Mark asked, reaching into his coat pocket for the two bottles.

  “Whichever.”

  “These two”—he handed Dawson the bottles—“and these are the ones I bought from Neil at the mall.”

  Mark handed over the Ziploc bag, a smorgasbord of different-colored pills of various sizes.

  Dawson looked at the labels on the two bottles. “Mogadon?”

  “Yeah, it’s a tranquilizer. And this one is my antidepressants.”

  Dawson returned the two bottles and the baggie to Mark. “Are they helping?”

  “Well, they curb the desires and urges. I also pretty much stopped caring about anything. So, yeah, I’d say they’re doing their job just fine.”

  Mark opened the bag, pinched three different pills—none of them similar—and sent them down the hatch.

  “Did you go to school today?”

  Mark shook his head. “Nah, I don’t concentrate when I’m there. I can’t seem to focus. Plus next week is prom and then graduation. What’s the point?” He unscrewed the bottle of Mogadon tranquilizers and flicked one into his mouth.

  “Dude, fucking slow down. You’re gonna kill yourself the way you’re eating those like candy. I’m the one who wanted to die, remember?”

  “You’re a little neater and more concise with stuff like that than I am. Plus I can just blame the genes. As the son of two pill-heads, there was never any real hope for me anyway. I inherited their problems,” Mark replied. “Oh, I went to Samantha’s tonight. Broke her fucking bedroom window with a baseball.”

  “Jesus, you have zero regard for that restraining order, don’t you?”

  “It’s just a stupid piece of paper.”

  Dawson stood up. “A piece of paper that will get you arrested if you go within one hundred yards of her house or work.”

  “I don’t think it says anything about staying away from Baldock & Ashford.”

  “Go get it. I’m sure the order includes her work. Doesn’t matter if she only works there on weekends. I can’t imagine her parents not including it, after what you did.”

  Mark rose to his feet and headed toward his mother’s car tucked in the woods. “Doesn’t matter anyway. I won’t lie. The sex was kind of fun, but really it was just one more way to kill the boredom. And, if she made me fucking listen to Radiohead one more time, I was gonna hurt someone.”

  “Sometimes I don’t get you, man. I mean, you’re my best friend, but you certainly go out of your way to be disliked.”

  Mark reached the passenger side door and yanked on the handle to get it open. The doorjamb was crusted with dried mud and sticks. He opened the glovebox and removed the folded yellow paper. When he slammed the door, startled birds took flight across the large lake in front of the abandoned car.

  Mark scanned the glasslike water and tried to focus on the shoreline across the lake. A tightening in his stomach took him by surprise. He wasn’t ready to become sentimental or nostalgic of times past. Not now. Not ever again. He forced himself to look away from the cleari
ng across the water, grabbed a large stone, and tossed it into the lake, shattering the calmness of its serenity.

  Need to lay off the tranquilizers and load up on those antidepressants instead, he thought as he shook the memories and emotional response from his brain.

  “Let me see,” Dawson said.

  Mark handed him the paper, and Dawson unfolded it. Scanning with the tip of his finger, Dawson’s lips fluttered slightly as he silently speed-read the provisions of the restraining order.

  “See, right here. It states you are prohibited from going within one hundred feet of her house or her place of employment.”

  “No worries. I’ll just stay away from Baldock & Ashford whenever I hang at the mall. I hate that store anyway.”

  “Now there’s the right attitude. Don’t be accountable or sorry for what you did. Just find a way to cut it out of your life altogether. You’re a piece of work sometimes. Do your parents even know about this?”

  “Give me that,” Mark said and snatched the restraining order from Dawson’s hand. “And I didn’t tell my parents. They don’t care about anything anyway.”

  He crumpled it and hurled the balled-up paper, like an outfielder, through the trees.

  “And, for the record, your band sucks,” Mark added.

  “You only heard that one song.”

  “Well, you guys sound like a crappy version of Pearl Jam.”

  “Hey, don’t knock Pearl Jam,” Dawson defended.

  “I’m not knocking Pearl Jam. I fucking love Pearl Jam. I’m knocking your shitty band’s attempt at being Pearl Jam. And what’s with all the black clothes? Jesus, could you guys be more cliché? Fucking goth-looking band sounding like early nineties grunge. And you tell me that I’m the one who’s confused?”

  “Are you done?”

  After a moment of silence, Mark answered. “Yes.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But your music’s still crap.”

  “For fuck’s sake, man. Why do I even still hang out with you?”

  Mark snickered. “Because you have to.”

  “I made a decision. It wasn’t an easy one, but I made one.”

  “You mean the curse. The curse of ‘there must be more,’” Mark said and peered over Dawson’s shoulder, making sure Dawson knew where he was looking.

  Dawson turned and looked at the silhouette of his own hanging body, swinging in the breeze from a thick branch, still undiscovered by any of the search parties.

  “Yes, the thought—not curse—of there being more than this shitty life,” Dawson answered.

  “Have you tried to leave Jupiter Island?”

  “Not yet. Something about going too far away from my body until they find it bothers me. Jupiter Island was always the happiest place of my childhood. My family would camp in these woods, and we’d fish in the lake. I’d have laser tag tournaments with the other kids who were also camping. I learned to swim in that lake as a kid.” Dawson looked across the water just beyond the top of Mrs. Crowley’s car. “I’ll stay here until someone cuts me down.”

  “I’ll cut you down.”

  “I already told you, Mark. I want them to find me. I want them to be so sorry for the way they treated me. I want them to find their dead son, decomposing on the rope. I want to drive the message home. That will be their penance.”

  Mark snickered. “And you think I’m fucked in the head?”

  “I never said that. Are the pills helping at all?”

  “I’m not really sure. I keep having these thoughts. I own all this stuff, material shit, but so what?”

  “Hey man, in the end you can’t take it with you. I’m a case in point.” Dawson waved his hand down the front of his body like he was Vanna White on Wheel of Fortune. “But you need to get your shit together. I made one decision that changed everything, and I can’t take it back. Not that I want to right now, but, if I ever did, it’s a no-go. I think I damned my soul, if you believe in that kind of thing.”

  “Are you trying to save my soul? Okay, so tell me. What happens now? I want to hear it with conviction.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “I could be on a plane, and someone could have a bomb in their suitcase. And boom! The plane rips apart, and my body disintegrates across the sky and through the clouds, and my ashes fall over some park in Wales.”

  “Why are you going to Wales?”

  “I hate you sometimes, you know. I mean, what happens now? What is the difference between what you did to yourself and some horrific natural disaster? Does it affect what happens to us afterward?”

  “Are you talking about whether it’s the difference between being a ghost trapped here, like me, or being whisked away into the heavens? Dude, I don’t fucking know. I haven’t left Jupiter Island since I cannonballed off that branch last month.”

  Mark shook a few more unmarked pills from the Ziploc into his mouth, like they were a handful of sunflower seeds. “What good are you then?”

  “You know what? You just keep popping those pills. Let me know how that works out for ya.”

  Dawson slowly faded until Mark stood next to the train tracks alone; the rope holding Dawson’s body creaked as it swung in the distance.

  Mark walked toward his mother’s car and leaned backward on the hood. He inserted his earbuds and closed his eyes as he pressed Play on the iPod in his pocket, inhaling the welcoming smells of Jupiter Island’s lake. A rush of happy memories swarmed his head, then were stifled by the medications—doing their job by regulating both happy and sad into a flat emotionless line.

  Keeping his eyes shut, he dreamed of an escape. Arriving somewhere but not here. Maybe fleeing on the derailed train behind him. Maybe the train tracks could be his proverbial yellow brick road. There must be something better than this.

  Mark hadn’t realized how long he had been draped over the hood of his mother’s car until the last track on Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced? gave way to The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Mark opened his eyes, disregarded the fantasy of ever escaping the industrial cityscape of Golders Green or the throes of the pills, and headed home.

  Mark awoke to the sound of a chromatic scale played on the piano outside his bedroom door. His shutters were closed, and his curtains were drawn; just a peek of sunlight pierced through the haze of his room. He rubbed the sleepies from the corners of his eyes and heard it again. The banging of the notes sounded like untrained fingers randomly running down the keys.

  He crawled from bed and found his way, using the small bit of morning sunlight and the flicker of his television to guide his path. He opened his bedroom door and grunted when he saw the family cat, prancing back and forth over the piano keys.

  “Bonnie, you shithead, you woke me up. Get in here.”

  He stepped aside while the cat jumped off the piano and scurried into his darkened room. He stopped in front of his television as some actress screamed. Stupid horror movies. He grabbed his earbuds from the floor and looked at his iPod’s display screen. Radiohead’s The Bends had been set on Repeat at some point during the night, replaying in a vicious cycle on his floor.

  Mark clicked the input button on the television remote and switched the movie to his Xbox. He coughed, shook a few tranquilizers into his mouth, and searched for the controller somewhere within his unmade bed. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror and didn’t recognize the guy there. He glanced at the bottle of Mogadon and then back to his reflection. He stood and approached the mirror slowly. He opened his mouth wide and scraped his fingernails along his stretched cheeks. He half expected to claw his skin from his bones, like the idiot had done after seeing a maggot-filled steak on a kitchen counter in the movie Mark had just switched off.

  Mark flicked his cheek hard, just to make sure he could feel pain. He looked at the pill bottles on his nightstand and shook the cobwebs from his brain. Bonnie curled herself into a fuzzy ball on his pillow and purred. Mark nodded, content this was reality and that the pills hadn’
t tie-dyed the fabric of life just yet.

  He sat on the floor, his back pressed against the foot of his bedframe, and loaded Halo. As his finger flicked the switch, slaying the Covenant, Bonnie relocated from his pillow to his lap. He patted her absentmindedly as he continued to battle with the alien enemy on-screen.

  Just as he gritted his teeth and pivoted his torso downward and to the right—as if body language ever helped anyone move their game character faster—his mother burst into the room without knocking. Bonnie whimpered and scooted underneath the bed. Mark didn’t even look up from the game.

  “Where’s my car?”

  Mark’s trigger finger worked overtime as he proceeded though the level. His left eye twitched, concentrating on the impending enemy assault.

  “Mark. Did you hear me? Turn that shit off. Where’s my car?”

  Mark raised his left hand in a not now signal.

  “Don’t you ignore me, young man,” she said and stepped farther into the room. “Where … is … my … car?”

  Mark shrugged and glanced at the Ziploc bag of treats. Those were what he wanted right now. Not the shitty prescription tranquilizers and antidepressants. The Matrix-looking shit that rendered his body void of a person.

  Mrs. Crowley noticed her son’s distraction and stormed across the room. She snatched the plastic bag and sighed. “Turn the game off.”

  Mark stoically continued to blast the threat on the screen.

  “Mark, please,” she pleaded and stared at him and stared at him and stared at him and stared at him and stared at him … while he shot and killed, shot and killed, shot and killed, shot and killed, shot and killed; … and she stared at him and stared at him and stared—

  “All right. Christ! I can’t take the staring or your silent sympathy,” he blurted out.

  “How do you feel?”

  “I hate that question,” he answered, returning to shooting and killing.

  “How’s it going in school?”

  “Mom, school is a fucking joke. You know I can’t concentrate.”

  Mrs. Crowley sighed. “Do you wanna talk about it?”

  Mark dropped the controller and glared at her. “You are such a bitch! Your mouth should be boarded up. You talk all day long, and you don’t say anything relevant to anything. Even when you try to act smart with your drinking floozies, your points are all based on misinformation. And Dad should get a fucking medal for trying to talk to me. That man just won’t let up!”