by Marcus Sakey
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On our wedding night, the bed rocked and shuddered halfway across the room.
When we were done, Pamela flopped on top of me, her dark hair draping my chest. I lay motionless, still inside her, feeling her every breath like it was me drawing air. Our skin pressed tight, our sweat ran together, our bodies connected, and I literally couldn't tell where I ended and she began.
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Gravel popped as my chair lurched forward. "Stop!"
The front edges of the wheels hung in open air. Vertigo squeezed my stomach. Thirty feet below, the concrete base of the bridge struts loomed. Even if I missed them, the water was deep. I couldn't keep myself afloat, not with half my body waterlogged and useless.
Behind me, I heard her sob as she bent forward, braced herself, and pushed.
The chair jumped four inches before my flailing hands found the tires. Hardened rubber burned my palms. Gravel slid over the side, hung in silence, and then clattered against the concrete below.
"Stop!" My fingers locked like steel clamps. "Jesus!" The breeze seemed to tug at my dangling feet. My arms were strong from months of maneuvering the chair, and I forced the wheels to reverse, but they skidded ineffectually in the loose ballast.
Fuck dignity. I looked backwards, staring at her upside down, trying to understand what was happening, hoping for some answer in her eyes, some hint this was a joke.
People talk about love at first sight, but what they really mean is recognition. You look in someone's eyes, could be anyone, a childhood friend or a stranger waiting for the bus, and in an instant, things are different. Like they've pulled aside a curtain and let you look deeper than flesh.
What you see depends on who—and where—you are.
When I saw what was in her eyes, I let go of the wheels.
In the sudden absence of resistance, we leapt forward, the chair cresting over the rim of the bridge and starting to fall, the river rushing upwards. Just as it went over, I thought, forgive me, baby, and then I twisted my torso as hard as I could and flopped sideways out of the wheelchair, my body slapping against the bridge edge like meat.
Pamela's momentum propelled her. She let out a startled cry and, still clutching the handles of the wheelchair, hurtled off the bridge.
I scrabbled and fell, clawing at gravel that tore up in handfuls. My dead legs swung free. As my body slipped over the side, I made a desperate grab and caught the corrugated edge with both hands. The metal bit cruelly, and my heart slammed against my ribs. I clenched my teeth and heaved, wriggling forward, rocks jamming into my ribs. When I finally felt the tug of gravity ease, I gasped for breath, muscles on fire, as I spun and wormed back to look over the edge.
She lay splayed on the concrete. Apart from the disconcerting angle of her pelvis, she looked almost relaxed, like she were lounging in the shallows to battle the heat. Her left foot and arm bobbed with the current. Something sparkled just below the waterline. Her ring. Sometimes irony is so neat you just want to shoot yourself.
Pamela's eyes were open, and locked on mine. An eternal moment passed. Then she coughed, and said, "I think I need you."
And through the blood, I finally shared the secret behind her smile.
It's a funny thing, needing someone. If it goes one way, it's a burden. If it goes both ways, it's a bond.
Our breakfast table is higher now, and there are rails fastened beside the bed. Maybe we don't laugh as much as we used to, and everything comes a little harder. After all, not all secrets are pretty. But Saturdays are still our favorite. And though there are now two wheelchairs parked beside our bed, the man and woman in it are committed—all or nothing.
There's been an interesting movement in the short fiction world of late—they're getting shorter. "Flash Fiction," as this genre is called, attempts to evoke a whole story in a minimum of words, usually 500 or so.
But in 2009, I received an email from an editor who wanted to push that further. He related an anecdote about how Hemingway had once been challenged to write a complete story in 25 words. The editor was so taken by this idea that he wanted to publish an entire book of what he called "Hint Fiction." Would I be interested in trying the Hemingway challenge?
I said I would, and following is the result.
Hemingway, by the way, whipped the pants off me—he managed to tell an absolute heartbreaker in only six words. ("For sale: baby shoes, never worn.")
The Time Before the Last
He held her crepe-paper hand and summoned an autumn day, sepia and smoke, and dancing, and music that sounded nothing like the beeping of machines.
When you're an aspiring writer, rejection is part of the business. I wrote dozens of short stories to learn the craft. They all got rejected, every one, and not just once, but from lots of places.
Then one day I got an email from a small U.K. horror journal called Thirteen. The editor loved a story I'd sent in, a sort of existential crime tale called "No One." He wanted to know if he could publish it.
My response was an enthusiastic, "Hell yes!" My wife and I took the $50 the journal paid and went out for a $100 celebratory steak dinner. It was the first moment I felt like an author.
A month later, I landed an agent, and a month after that, he sold my first novel, The Blade Itself, at auction. Since then, I've supported my family by telling stories.
But I've never forgotten the way that steak tasted.
No One
It's like the time Sara and I snuck into the nature sanctuary in Lincoln Park and went at it in the mossy twilight, both of us bare as the day we were born. There was no one around, but there could have been, see? Some evening bird watcher might have caught the motion as she threw her head back; might have raised his binoculars; might have framed them on the softness of her naked body.
That's what this is like. Exhibitionism without risk. No one will hear me.
Of course, they say God is always watching, but circumstances being what they are, I'm guessing not. God wouldn't have made her go. God wouldn't have abandoned me in the shitty basement apartment I rent from Crazy Mildred, who once grabbed at me after I carried her forty-pound bag of cat food into the pantry, old-woman fingers fumbling for my jeans, forcing me to hightail it out of there and quick, locking the stairway that leads to my apartment and pretending not to hear her sobbing through the ceiling.
Mildred crying upstairs, me crying downstairs. No, there's altogether too much crying going on for me to think God is watching. I need a different sort of confession booth. So instead of a kneeling pad, I have a ladder-back chair with a broken slat. Instead of a choir, I've got Etta and Billie and Dinah keeping me company, the radio tuned to blues, the only station I get. There's still a screen separating me from my confessor, but this one shows the keystrokes as I type.
Bless me, void, for I have sinned.
I drove Sara away, and my sadness is heavy and thick, like a choking red fog. Sometimes I can almost see it, the tinges of crimson at the edge of my vision, the way they came in the fifth grade when for no reason Brian Rogers twisted the arm off my Luke Skywalker figure, leaving a naked plastic socket. Mr. Jones sent me home for a week for bloodying Brian's nose and blackening both eyes, even though it was all his fault.
But there's no red in my vision now. This confession is doing me good. I don't have anyone to tell about the way Sara broke my heart, so I'm telling no one. [email protected], get it? I'll type it all here, in this window with its hungry cursor. I'm using one of those web pages that lets you send anonymous email, and when I press submit my confession will disappear, the server trying to deliver it to an address that doesn't exist. I like to think it will keep bouncing back and forth across Chicago, across the world, an endless digital whisper telling how much I loved her.
And I did. Oh, how I did. From the first moment I saw her sitting barefoot on the field where the jocks play Frisbee, watching the sun settle behind dingy administration buildings. She wore a sundress the color of fresh cream, not like the short-shorts and belly s
hirt of most of the skanks around here wear. The light shone golden through her dark hair, and the dress stuck to the sweat in the small of her back. My stomach turned upside down and I thought to myself, oh man. So this is what it feels like.
And I went right on thinking that until a month later, when I finally got lucky and found myself in the cafeteria line behind her. I was dying for something to say, and when I noticed she had an art history textbook, I asked her if she knew what Van Gogh said when his landlady called him to dinner.
No, she said.
And I cupped my hand to my ear and said, What?
She only laughed a little, but it was only a little joke.
She told me her name, Sara Wheaton, and we chatted while a dour server slapped pale macaroni into Styrofoam bowls. When I asked if I could join her for lunch, she smiled like it was silly question, and that's how we got started.
She was the best thing that ever happened to me. Every guy in college—in the city—wanted her, wanted to be with her. But she was mine. It was the only time I'd ever had something so beautiful.
Our first time, she bled a little, but said she didn't mind. Afterwards, I lay beside her, listening to the shattering rumble of the Brown Line. The El tracks ran just above my window, and the train was loud as an earthquake, but not near loud as my heart. I lay in the shitty bed in my shitty basement apartment on a shitty block of Wilton and felt better than I ever had before. I could do anything. Just by thinking about it, I could have blown the ceiling clean off and let the sun shine in so I would never be alone in the dark again.
Why did you go, Sara? Oh, god.
It must be evening. On the radio, the blues have given way to a news anchor teasing headlines. Another Southside apartment caught fire, another body was found, another alderman lied. I don't know why they call it news.
It's true what they say about confession, though, how it eases the pain. I even feel strong enough to talk about Mark.
May roaches lay eggs in his eyes.
Mark, who lived in a Lincoln Avenue loft full of furniture his parents paid for. Mark, right wing for the soccer team. Bastard. I knew what went on in his head when they met to work on their class project.
Don't be silly, she said. Trust me. It's just homework. He's just a friend.
But I'd seen the way he looked at my girlfriend, the way he laughed at my clothes. He was just another bully, rich with things he hadn't earned. Like Brian from fifth grade. He had everything, but it wasn't enough. It's never enough for people like that. Not until they have what's yours.
May the brakes fail on the SUV his parents leased for him.
I know, I know. This is supposed to be a confession, and confessions aren't about blame. But if you'd seen the way he looked at her….
Truth, though? She wasn't innocent. Those first months our life was perfect, like a fall day when the sky is so blue it burns. But her group meetings started to stretch longer. And last week she wore a cashmere sweater and the corduroy jeans that fit too tight.
It's the end of the semester, she said. We have a lot to finish.
What about the jeans? What about the cashmere?
I thought you liked the way I dress.
I tried to explain how I did like it, but for me, not for Mark, who was just another smarmy little rich kid from Kenilworth, the same as all the other smarmy little rich kids from Kenilworth. A drone, a suckup, buying round after round at McGee's, throwing down money he hadn't had to earn. He didn't deserve to see her looking this way. That was supposed to be for me, for us, and I tried to tell her.
But it didn't come out right.
You want me to quit? You don't trust me, she said, so I should never leave your basement?
Go, I said. I don't care. Go.
She went.
Maybe I should have been more understanding, but I kept picturing golden-haired Mark, the way he threw his arms in the air when he scored, flashed his idiotic white teeth. How he'd have the same greedy look while he unbuttoned her corduroys. I lay in bed with the curtain closed and the radio on, Etta and Billie and Dinah, and when she didn't call the next day, or the next, I told myself it didn't matter. Lots of fish, and all that. Fell asleep and dreamed red fish in red seas.
Yesterday there was a knock on my door. I was expecting no one, so I figured it was Crazy Mildred, and was feeling so lousy I had my mind half made up to let her grope me with her filthy old fingers.
Rain poured from skies swirling like the end of the world. Sara stood at the top of the steps, framed by the tracks and drooping power wires. She wore ratty jeans and a soaked DePaul sweatshirt, and her eyes were circled in black. I've got something to tell you, she said, and crossed her arms over her belly.
And I knew.
The nerve of the bitch. How could she? How could she sleep with Mark, and then come to me crying, dressed like all the other tramps, and think I'd forgive her? She'd tarnished everything. Red haze filled my world.
She started to lie, to say she hadn't been with him, that it was something else, but I couldn't let her talk. I opened my mouth and freed all the words no one can know I keep inside. I can't even remember what I said, but I know it was red poison. It must have been, because she left, crying and begging at first, then her eyes wide and lips silent as she went away.
After Brian tore the arm off my action figure, I threw it away. It was spoiled.
Now I'm alone in the dark basement that she made brighter, listening to the rattle and clank of the washer, typing with dirty fingers. The radio man is still talking. He's jumped from the apartment fire to the next horror, a body found in the bird sanctuary in Lincoln Park. A woman. Unidentified. Pregnant.
Sara's skin was pale and soft, her freckles constellations in the skies of my world.
The red is creeping back into my vision as the announcer keeps talking, leaving behind the girl in the college sweatshirt and torn jeans, staring open-eyed in the rain. It's time for me to do the same. To press send and lay down to remember Sara the way I first saw her, swept up by the sun, sundress sticking to her pale, perfect skin. My Sara.
Click.
From 1997 to 2001, I ran a web and graphic design shop. I started it with a partner, and over those years we grew to fourteen people. We had a loft office with a climbing wall and beer in the fridge and an open-door policy for dogs. It was a wonderful time, made possible by the sheer amount of money out there trying to cash in on dotcom magic.
Though my shop wasn't a dotcom, we neighbored on the world. There was so much I saw in it that amused me, so much that was obviously completely impractical and yet landing millions in funding, so many excesses and so much silliness. The whole thing struck me as a demented theme park designed by brilliant morons.
This story, which is completely different than anything else I've published, is my attempt to capture that weird time.
Insert tongue firmly in cheek before reading.
Cobalt
I'll feel better once the monkeys arrive.
The habitat went in this morning. Two pleasant Asian gentlemen hung from the rafters installing a primate paradise. There are thick braided ropes dyed green to resemble vines. There are beams lathed like tree trunks. There's even a little monkey boudoir made of hypoallergenic netting.
There are, as of yet, no monkeys.
While I reviewed the invoice for netting and fake foliage and green rope, the younger of the Monkey Environment Specialists asked me where the animals would, you know, relieve themselves.
This is the kind of question that earns an accusatory stare when raised to Jerry. A stare that tells you he is a visionary, that it's his job to handle the view from 30,000 feet, and that while he'd thought you were riding shotgun in the purring airplane of his vision, your focus on such pissant details as the scatological needs of monkeys suggests he may have been wrong.
I told the Environment Specialist it was under control. As Jerry's right hand, I have a staff, and where the monkeys relieve themselves is an item I intend to delegate
.
Also, I intend not to linger too long or often in the lobby.
Chastened, the men packed and left me alone in the drafty warehouse to imagine the world that will be born here: a visionary place, well-decorated, in which everyone can enjoy an unprecedented range of custom entertainment with the click of a mouse, all for a reasonable monthly fee automatically debited from any major credit card. From the womb of the new world I used my PDA to check my stock options, which were up up up. Buoyed by my burgeoning net worth, I put the monkeys out of mind and settled in to await the Pod Installation Specialists.
It was after midnight when I returned home to be greeted by banging noises. Nora was violently reorganizing our bedroom closet. Black clothes—Prada tops, Gucci bottoms, Versace dresses—covered the bed, which she used as a way station between the closet and a large suitcase.
"Hello, my love!" I said brightly, ducking the Cliniqué makeup kit she threw at my head. "What seems to be the problem? Is there an issue that we can, working together as a team, synergistically if you will, address?"
"Do you have to talk like that?" She continued shoving clothing into her suitcase, which seemed a rather amazing piece of luggage to hold so much designer apparel. I noted the brand.
"What way is that, my little partner, CEO of my heart?"
"Like you're at a self-help meeting at the Ramada. While licking Jerry's bunghole."
Unfair. My beloved was clearly displacing her own anger. However, she was also shutting her over-stuffed bag, climbing on top of it, and, sweating slightly on her shapely upper lip, wrenching the zipper closed. Without a glance in my direction she trundled toward the door.
