Shock Totem 6: Curious Tales of the Macabre and Twisted

by Shock Totem

  The lighting was track lighting and he was forever adjusting it slightly downward. Up a little here, down a little there but mostly down. By ten or so it was nearly impossible to read the menu. The consensus among us was that that was the idea. He wasn’t making the place any more romantic. He was making it cavernous. You couldn’t read, you couldn’t order. Time to go home.

  Joe, Michael, Robert, Amy and I were all a little drunk so we didn’t mind the gloom. Gert was already so far gone she could barely talk and when she did talk you had no reason to listen to her. Behind the bar Stella kept pouring. The music was so familiar we could probably have sung along without knowing a single word of Greek.

  Night at the Santorini.

  The conversation had descended into rarely known facts. Or maybe barely known facts was more appropriate because you could bet that some of this was bullshit. Sure, an ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain and butterflies taste with their feet. But is it really impossible to sneeze with your eyes open?

  I needed proof on that one. Unfortunately none of us had allergies.

  “Okay, did you know that ‘stewardesses’ is the longest word you can type using only your left hand and ‘lollipop’ the longest using your right?”

  Michael was a writer so we had to believe him there.

  “And that the average person’s left hand does most of the typing?”

  “Nah, why would that be?” said Joe.

  Joe worked with computers all day, setting up online systems for hotels and motels, so he’d logged in plenty of time at the keyboard himself.

  “Dunno. Just is.”

  “Even if you’re right-handed?”

  “Yep.”

  “Doesn’t make sense.”

  “Palindromes,” said Robert. He sipped his beer. It was probably his seventh.

  “What?”

  “Palindromes. Racecar. Kayak. Level.”

  “What the hell’s he talking about?” said Amy.

  Robert tended to be strange and mysterious now and then so you never knew.

  “They’re the same whether you write them right to left, or left to right,” said Michael. “That’s what he means.”

  “Thassright,” said Robert. “Palindromes.”

  “What’s that got to do with your left hand doing most of the typing?” said Joe.

  “Absolutely nothing.”

  “‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,’ uses every letter in the alphabet,” said Amy. “We learned that back in typing class. And you know what else? There’s no Betty Rubble in Flintstones Chewable Vitamins.”

  “Jesus wept,” said Joe.

  He looked at me. “I need a smoke,” he said. “You ready?”

  “I’m gonna wait a while. Finish my scotch. It’s fuckin’ cold out there.”

  “I know it’s fuckin’ cold out there.” He was already putting on his coat.

  “Fuckin’ cold out there,” said Gert.

  We ignored her.

  “Amy?” said Joe.

  “I’ll wait.”

  “Michael?”

  “Same here.”

  “Fuckin’ Bloomberg,” said Joe.

  “You got that right,” I said.

  “Fuckin’ Bloomberg!” said Gert.

  It was practically a mantra by now. Fuckin’ Bloomberg. Since the smoking ban in New York City bars, we citizens who favored our tar and nicotine had to step outside evenings for a smoke and now the weather had turned cold on us. Bloomberg was going to freeze our little subculture to death if he had his way.

  Even those of us regulars who didn’t smoke hated the sonofabitch if only for interrupting our conversation.

  I watched him drift out the door. Behind him a couple from the tables was leaving too. The tables were empty now in fact except for one other couple by the far right window. The only patrons of Santorini were the two of them, us down at the far end of the bar, two young Spanish guys at the front end hitting on a lovely young brunette who seemed to like their attention and a pair of yuppie types—a man and a woman, probably in their mid-thirties—talking earnestly about something or other in between. I saw Joe’s match flare and die behind the plate-glass.

  “Babies are born without kneecaps,” said Robert.

  “Really?”

  “Really. You don’t develop them until you’re about two or something.”

  “So if you want to get in trouble with the mob,” I said, “the thing to do is to do it early.”

  “Exactly.”

  “No word in the English language rhymes with ‘month’,” said Michael.

  “Dunth,” lisped Robert.

  “Or ‘orange’.”

  “Porridge,” said Robert.

  “Doesn’t count,” I said. “No ng sound.”

  “Or ‘silver’.”

  “Hi-yo to that!”

  “Or ‘purple’.”

  “Splurpable. Like Amy.”

  “You really are a dunth,” said Amy.

  We listened to the music for a while.

  The door opened and it wasn’t Joe but some other guy, heavy-set, in a woolen coat much too thin for the weather. He sat down between us and the yuppies. He looked half-frozen and rubbed his bare hands together vigorously, smiled and ordered a Heineken. Stella set the bottle down in front of him along with a frozen mug the guy obviously didn’t much need. He poured anyway, took a sip and set it down. Then he fished in his pocket and came out with a pack of Winstons and a clear plastic lighter. He lit up.

  “Check this out,” I said.

  And then it was eyes left for all of us.

  It took the yuppies a couple of puffs to get a whiff of it. Concerned glances were exchanged. Looks of disgust. It was the woman—not the guy she was with—who finally stepped up to the plate.

  “Excuse me? Sir? You can’t smoke in here,” she said. “It’s against the law.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Sir?”

  The Spanish guys had noticed too. “She’s right, man,” said the taller of the two. “I could care less, you know? But you get busted, man. You get fined. All that bullshit.”

  “Please put that out,” she said. “It’s against the law.”

  “You already said that.” He took another drag. Slowly.

  Adoni stepped in from the kitchen. Like most Greeks he was a smoker too but he had no choice. He was the manager. He did his job.

  “I’m sorry, but you will have to put that out, my friend,” he said. “It’s the law.”

  “Okay,” said the guy.

  He dropped the butt and stepped on it.

  Good choice, I thought. Adoni didn’t have a mean bone in his body but he’d been Greek Army in Afghanistan. He was big. He had a grip that could bruise mahogany and though he didn’t use it often you wouldn’t want to cross him.

  “You are from out of town?” he said.

  “Nope. Lower East Side. Just wanted to see what you folks’d do.” He drank his beer and smiled. “I’m with C.L.A.S.H. We’re doing this all over town.”

  “Clash?”

  “Citizens Lobbying Against Smoking Harassment.”

  “Ah yes, I see. You lobby for smoking. I wish you a very good night, sir. But on this?—you must wait. Enjoy yourself.”

  “Thank you.”

  “C.L.A.S.H., huh?” I said. “I’ve heard of it.”

  “Lawsuits,” said Robert. “That’s the ticket.”

  “We’re filing them. Plus a little guerrilla theatre now and then, if you know what I mean.”

  He winked at us and smiled.

  “We wish you all the luck in the world, sir.”

  Robert raised his glass to the guy. We all did—with the exception of Gert, who was wearing a puzzled expression. As though we’d all turned to Steuben glass figures suddenly and she couldn’t for the life of her understand how or why.

  Joe came back in and the yuppie made a face as he passed her. I guess she noticed he’d been smoking. “....bet his mouth smells like an ashtray...” I he
ard her mutter. I guess I was the only one who did. It got a smile out of her partner.

  But she was beginning to piss me off.

  “I’m Jerzy,” I said and offered my hand to the C.L.A.S.H. guy. “This is Joe, Robert, Amy and Michael.”

  I didn’t bother with Gert. Gert was puzzled.

  “I’m Art,” he said. We shook hands all around.

  I saw that the table was paying Rita. She moved off to get them change. The Spanish guys had already settled up with Stella and they were smiling, herding the pretty young brunette out the door. I judged her slightly sloshed. One of them just might get lucky tonight if they didn’t both blow it with too much eager competition.

  I ordered another scotch. So did Joe and Michael. Amy finished her red wine and ordered another. Robert was still sipping his beer. He licked the foam off his mustache. The C.L.A.S.H. guy, Art, asked for another Heineken. The couple beside us ordered too—theirs was the house white. Of course it was.

  Stella poured, quickly and efficiently. You had to love the woman.

  “I got one for you,” said Joe. “Thought of it outside. Did you know that Al Capone’s business card said he was a used furniture dealer?”

  “I did not,” said Robert.

  “Did you know that our eyes stay exactly the same size from birth,” said Amy, “but our noses and ears never stop growing?”

  “I did not,” said Robert.

  Maybe that was why Gert was looking at us so strangely. Maybe she was watching our ears grow.

  “Did you know that Adoni has just locked the front door?” said Michael.

  It was true. The couple from the table had just stepped out the door and Adoni’d locked it behind them. He was walking toward us, smiling, digging in his shirt pocket.

  “If you got them, light them,” he said.

  He put a cigarette in his mouth, walked by us and disappeared in back.

  I lit up. Michael and Amy lit up. Art lit up. Joe lit up even though he’d only just had one. Robert didn’t smoke. Gert fumbled around in her pocketbook for a while and then even she managed it.

  The couple beside us looked aghast—like they’d maybe seen a ghost. The ghost of barrooms past.

  “I don’t believe this,” said the guy.

  “You realize this is against the law?” said the woman.

  There it was—the law again. The woman was obsessed.

  “A man’s bar is his castle,” said Robert.

  “This is a public space,” the man said. “There are staff here. Waitresses, cooks busboys. Not to mention how rude this is to us.”

  “He’s gonna mention second-hand smoke any minute,” said Joe to me sotto voce.

  “Second-hand smoke has been proven to...”

  “I told ya,” said Joe.

  “Second-hand smoke!” said Gert. “That’s right.” There was lipstick on her Virginia Slim.

  “We have every right to demand you put them out right away,” said the woman.

  “That’s right,” said Art. “You do.”

  “Then in that case we ask that you please put them out right away.”

  “Sorry, but no,” Michael said.

  Adoni walked in. You could hear his pockets jingling. There was a Marlboro fired up in the corner of his mouth.

  “There is a problem?” he said.

  “We’ve asked these people to put their cigarettes out and I’ll ask you to do the same. This is outrageous! Does your owner know about this?”

  “The owner is Greek,” he shrugged. “A smoker, sorry to say.”

  “We have just ordered drinks. We have every right to be able to drink our drinks in peace without having to deal with smoke being blown in our faces.”

  “Face away from the smoke, then. That is the solution.”

  “Don’t you get it?” said the man. “We could have you closed down for this!”

  “I don’t think so. For first offense, they fine you.”

  “Fined, then.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He took the handcuffs out of his pocket, snapped one on the guy’s right wrist and the other to the shiny brass barrail. The guy barely knew what hit him. His lady friend slid off the barstool purse in hand with the clear intent of heading for the door away from all these lunatics but Amy was there in front of her and so was I and Adoni made short work of cuffing her to the rail too. He seated them both back down.

  We knew the drill pretty well by then so Amy went through the woman’s purse for her wallet while I dug his out of his inside jacket pocket. I handed it to Michael, more for show of solidarity than anything else. He read off the driver’s license.

  “James Wade Holt,” he said. “Hey, you’re a neighbor! 175 West 69th Street.”

  Amy was reading the woman’s. She shook her head.

  “They don’t live together,” she said. “This one’s 33 West 48th Street—Hell’s Kitchen. Joanna Bowen.”

  “Why do we have a tendency not to give women middle names in this country?” said Robert. “I’ve always wondered about that. This one’s James Wade Holt and this one’s just plain Joanna. Doesn’t seem fair.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Joe said.

  “What...what are you doing? What are you going to do to us?” said James Wade Holt.

  The woman said nothing, only looked around anxiously from face to face.

  “Did you know a dragonfly has a life span of only twenty-four hours?” said Michael.

  “I did not,” said Robert.

  “Stella? Give me a check pad, please,” said Adoni.

  She handed him the pad. We handed him the wallets. He took a pen out of his shirt pocket and opened them and started writing. The place was totally silent. Somebody—probably Stella—had turned off the bouzouki music. When he was finished he closed the wallets up again and put them on the bar.

  “First of all,” he said. “You will not report this. You see, I have your names and addresses. I will make copies for all my friends here so that they will have them too. You do not have their names or addresses, however. So if anything should happen to me or to the restaurant Santorini they will know where to find you. In a moment I will release you and you will finish your glasses of wine and you will each have another, on me, on the house. We will smoke because that is what smokers do and you will not complain. You will be our guests.”

  “A crocodile,” said Robert, “cannot stick out its tongue.”

  “What if we simply want to leave?” said just plain Joanna. “I mean, what if James and I...”

  “You will not leave until we say so. We have done this many times, you see. Do not think you are the first to act as you have acted and be inconvenienced for it. If you had simply said nothing and walked away thinking live and let live, then fine. But you did not. You will not be harmed but you will endure what we have had to endure and feel like a second-class citizen in your own City. It may make you angry. It makes us angry. But that is life, no? And when you leave here you can forget all about this. A goldfish, after all, has a memory span of approximately three seconds.”

  He unlocked the cuffs.

  “Enjoy yourselves,” he said. “I will go and xerox the copies.”

  “You guys are amazing,” said Art. He laughed. “I’m putting this little tactic up on the website.”

  “No names, no places,” I said.

  “Goes without saying.”

  “Not a single study, by the way, has validated the claim that second-hand smoke can be dangerous to humans,” said Robert. “What is certain is that your clothes are going to stink a little. Mine always do. But hell, what are friends for?”

  The couple said nothing. They sipped their drinks. I saw that the woman’s hands were still shaking. I didn’t mind.

  “Did you know that cats have over a hundred vocal sounds, and dogs only around ten?” he said.

  “Ten!” said Gert. “Ten dogs!”

  Our personal captivity wore on.

  Jack Ketchum is the author of over twenty books,
novels, novellas, and story collections, five of which novels have been filmed to date—The Lost, The Girl Next Door, Red, Offspring and The Woman, the latter written with director Lucky McKee, with whom he also wrote the screenplay. He is the winner of four Bram Stoker Awards™ and was elected Grand Master at the 2011 World Horror Convention. His latest book is I’m Not Sam, also written with Lucky McKee. He lives in New York City.

  2012 SHOCK TOTEM FLASH FICTION CONTEST WINNER

  MAGNOLIA’S PRAYER

  by John Guzman

  Without a sound, Magnolia hurried downstairs and slid into her seat at the table. She grasped her sister Lillian’s tiny hand and squeezed, pretending not to see her tears. Father had returned and they were gathered like they did every night before supper. They watched him, stern and expressionless, sorting loose pages of different colors and sizes. He was a postman but Mother called him a shepherd. Magnolia was anxious but didn’t show it, just like Father.

  He began to hand leaves of paper to her mother and her brother, seated at his sides, and they passed them along, keeping one for themselves. In a moment, all of them were squinting in the candlelight and reading the words before them. Some were printed, some handwritten; notices of debts unpaid, images of sin from plain brown envelopes, a woman’s hastened note to a secret lover (those were Magnolia’s favorites).

  “Let us pray,” her father said, and they closed their eyes.

  “From us to thee, sinful men, for your salvation we forfeit our own, as did our fathers and their fathers. Amen.”

  “Amen,” Magnolia repeated.

  Father tore his letter into strips. He looked like a sage in the gloom, with his shaved hair and wire glasses. The writing on his arms writhed as he continued. He immersed a piece of the letter in his wine, folded it several times and placed it into his mouth. He chewed with clenched jaw, looked around the table, and swallowed. Her brothers followed, copying every motion. Magnolia was too young for the wine but she tore her letter into smaller pieces and swallowed each one with a practiced smile even though it scratched and burned.

  Lillian was crying again. Magnolia grasped her arm and smiled and pleaded with her eyes that her sister might be calm. Her mother looked at both of them, shaking her head with careful turns, a hint of fear in her eyes. She looked back at Father with a smile that bore the timeless weight of love and loss and punishment.