Gutshot

by Amelia Gray

  It was a few degrees cooler inside the labyrinth, which imparted a sense of magic though in truth it was only that the low sun was shaded by the corn. The soil smelled wet and new and the path was wide and curved slightly to the right. Following its progress proved the bend continued on thirty feet before coming to a switchback. The stalks didn’t do much to block conversation on the other side of the wall, and it was possible to hear the others discussing the merits and folly of my decision.

  “You remember what he did on the hayride last year,” someone said. “Some asshole was screwing around and let his cigarette drop, started a fire in the hay right in front of a bunch of kids. Jim there took it upon himself to jump out of the truck and run for the fence. He wouldn’t come back and so we put it out and went out looking for him and when we found him, when we found—” As always the tale involved some heavy laughter at this point.

  “That’s enough,” said Dale.

  “When we found him—”

  “Oh my God,” a woman said, preemptively, though at that point the story may have easily been finished in gesture. And so the shame of the fire found purchase once again. You could live your whole life in the smallest town and still find strangers to tell a story like that.

  The trivet was a good weight, conducting my hands’ heat. It was further comforting to trace the etched shapes, settling a fingernail in the arc of a scythe or buttock, which on closer inspection could just as easily have been a winding river, so simply it was carved.

  Turning another switch, it became apparent I had lost some sense of place. The corn walls rustled. The voices faded and the only sound was the grouse pond on the far edge of Dale’s property. On I walked, holding the trivet to my chest. I wasn’t accustomed to carrying much of anything and so the disk’s weight was fatiguing indeed. I made a sincere promise to start up again with my dumbbells in the garage.

  The sun had begun to set and a cool breeze filtered through the leaves. After another switch and twenty paces, the voices returned.

  “You’ve got to hand it to him for going in there alone,” the man said, the same one who had told the terrible story. “Maybe he has that adventuring spirit after all.”

  The surprise I felt at this praise stopped me and I held my breath to listen, but there was no sound until I started up walking again.

  “He’s got balls,” said Dale, a true friend.

  “I never knew he was so brave,” a woman said. I stopped again and waited longer this time, counting out the seconds and reaching a minute, then three minutes, five, hearing only silence as if they had all of them lost interest and left. I took a step in the direction I had come but it felt like pushing against a strong wind. The trivet was exhibiting a lateral weight as if it was magnetized to the far horizon. Still I labored against it. The pressure nearly tipped me on my rear, causing me to experience a devastating picture of myself emerging from the maze soaked down the back of my jeans, clocking in for another year of ridicule. And so I turned and continued into the labyrinth, at which point the conversation began again.

  “I’m glad to know him,” I heard Connie say.

  It was a thrilling statement, but I knew better than to stop and try to hear more. The journey was providing an immediate reward, and though I was panting and making a heavy noise in my footfalls, the conversation seemed somehow amplified the closer I came to the center. Their voices provided sound’s equivalent of a compass star in the dusking sky.

  “He has a strong heart,” a man said.

  “I’m so proud of him,” said Dale.

  “Actually, I find him pretty handsome,” added Connie.

  Their voices buoyed me on, losing only slight volume when I was heading away from them, and I broke into a trot that carried me around the far side, taking the turns without pause, drawn all the while by the trivet, which seemed towed on a wire. “I wish he’d come out here so I could shake his hand,” someone said wistfully, but there was no way to stop. The switches were coming faster and the path narrowed, as if Dale hadn’t quite figured out the proportions required. Young leaves brushed my shoulders.

  I didn’t realize my exhaustion until, turning the last corner, I found the center. The moon shined a straight beam into the clearing, which was six feet wide, with a divot in the dirt the size of a man. The trivet was straining toward the ditch. It took my whole strength to hold it back and my strength was failing. But I had to keep it safe. Dale had given it to me with two hands, looking me in the eye.

  With the last of my power, I turned to stand between my burden and the pit. The trivet did its work from there, pushing me back and down, into the hole that seemed to have been dug to suit me, complete with a rise in the dirt for my neck and a uniform pile just below my feet. The trivet settled in the center of my sternum. It grew cold there and heavier than before, though I felt no desire to move from under its wind-removing weight. I saw now that it was a stone like any other. I found that once I stopped struggling and held very still, barely breathing against its mass, I could hear the crowd again. They were telling stories of my heroism and bravery, of underwater rescue and diplomacy—tales I couldn’t remember being a part of, though surely I was involved in some way, if so many recalled them so fondly. Eventually I did try to stand, at which point I realized the trouble.

  “Folks?” I said, quietly at first. “I think I got stuck on a root structure or something.”

  They continued their talk, even grander than before. Someone brought out a guitar and began to improvise songs which told my origin story. Born to a rancher just a little west of here / Jim raised his head and never cowered out of fear, went one line. My lungs struggled to fill against the weight of the stone.

  “Dale?” I called out, gasping. “I need help. Can you bring a crowbar?” I was being driven down into the dirt as if by a machine press. The carved glyphs bit into my chest and branded my skin. I was alone. Then I met the Minotaur.

  Device

  The young inventor created a device that could predict the future within one-tenth of a percent of accuracy.

  “Device,” he said, “tell me the winner of this Saturday’s football game with Tech.”

  “State wins,” the device said. “A man will pour beer onto his jeans.”

  “Seems likely,” he said, marking it. He thought of his girlfriend. “Tell me, will I marry Anne?”

  “No,” the device said. “Anne will move to Missouri. You will find a similarly adequate mate. The colors associated with your wedding will be sea green and ivory.”

  The young inventor had been dating Anne for ten years. He took the news with the composure of a scientist and adjusted a knob on the device.

  “Sea green and ivory,” the device repeated. It sounded flat and bored, and the scientist made a note to swap out the vocalization for something a little more upbeat, perhaps accompanied by music.

  “What will my eventual mate be like?” he asked, tweaking the machine’s color wheel.

  “Skin, hair.” The device buzzed lightly. “Fingernails.”

  “Not too much specificity there.”

  The buzzing stopped. “Grass and milk.”

  “Will she be interested in science?”

  Some process caused a turning over in the internal works of the device.

  The inventor tapped the panel. “Will we be happy?” he asked. He could hear the whirring. “Device, will we be happy?”

  The device was silent. After a while, the young inventor packed his things, collected his lunch bag from the refrigerator, and left.

  The empty room had its own energy. “Algae and bone,” said the device.

  The Swan as Metaphor for Love

  A swan’s foot, like a duck’s, is a webbed claw. In traversing swan shit and mud, these claws naturally gunk up and reek. Nobody in the history of the world, save another swan, has licked a swan’s foot while that foot was still attached to the swan. The feet resemble rabid bats in their sickly color and texture.

  Moving north on the swan’s un
dercarriage, one will find an eroded civilization of swan shit and pond scum. This is a banal phrase, “pond scum,” one that is easily ignored, but look closer. Swans eat grasses, sedges, and pondweed, each teeming with murk. They will also eat insects, snails, and a fresh shrimp if they’re near one.

  Pond scum is more of the same: swan shit, fish shit, frog shit, half a can of beer poured by some fuck teenager, plastic, photosynthetic residue, algae, permanent bubble, hexagon patch freed from its soccer ball, arthropod corpse. All attached to the swan in its idiot float through its stagnant little inland sea.

  Swans eat tadpoles. A swan will slurp up entire schools of larval amphibians, process them, and shit them out, and then sometimes it will sit in the shit or walk through it, and here we are. Anyone who claims that a swan is a majestic and noble creature has never seen a swan up close.

  Swans will attack you if you are nearing their young or their nest, if you are trying to have a conversation with their mate. They have jagged points on their beaks, which resemble teeth but more closely resemble a plumber’s saw, which plumbers call a Tiny Tim. If you try to take a swan’s picture he will strike you with his beak. Too much attention enrages a swan. The swan has a long neck and will strike at you. The swan will bite you and tear your flesh.

  Swans mate for life, which is maybe ten or fifteen years. Someone found a swan once that was twenty-four years old and probably it was mating for life, which everyone made a big deal out of even though the swan was not even old enough to rent a car. The swan wasn’t yet acquainted with life enough to silently hyperventilate in its bed. The swan didn’t have a bed. The swan was too stupid to have a bed and if it did it would fill the bed with swan shit.

  That’s all for today about swans.

  Year of the Snake

  They didn’t think it would last all year. Ten months at the most. When the snake appeared as a broad green sunrise on the horizon it was January, an inhospitable month for snakes. But this was no ordinary snake. It crested the far range and barreled down the main road, flattening trees like wet reeds in its path. It towered over the farm mercantile and humbled the line of threshing machines. The townspeople ran from the square, but the snake settled and didn’t move to coil around anyone, not even the smaller pets. It wedged silent between the south awning of the schoolhouse and the north entrance of the bank.

  The snake stayed put for a few days before anyone approached. Naturally the first to gather the courage was Martha Swale, the town scientist. She walked to the outskirts of town and into an apple orchard, where the snake was resting its head on the limb of a sturdy Braeburn, its tongue snapping bark off the trees as it tasted the air. Swale propped up a ladder and climbed, pad and pen in hand, to take measurements of its venom ducts. The snake allowed Swale to span its eye sockets with her tape, heaving what the onlooking farmers described as a resigned sigh. Indeed, she found, the creature had the same proportions of a standard snake, only larger by an exponential degree.

  Back in the town square, a team of engineers examined the damage done. The snake was so wide that the front façades of some of the buildings were thoroughly crushed. The creature had become load bearing where it was wedged under the schoolhouse’s roof and against the bank’s pillars, preventing their collapse. As long as the snake didn’t move, the structural damage was not the type that threatened either building’s integrity. One engineer patted the reptilian flank and remarked that the poor girl was stuck. Nobody questioned his determination of sex, as the engineers were perceived as simultaneously knowing everything and nothing at all.

  Time passed, and the people grew bold. No apparent clues arose in the mystery of how the snake had come to be, or where, or why; as generations before had found, there was little utility to questioning the unknown. Children made one flank into a climbing wall by leaning boards against its body. Down the way, they used their bikes to section off a court for their handball games. The mothers stood by nervously, but when no harm came to their babies, they went on with their daily work.

  Even Swale found herself more interested in the physical presence of the animal than in its origin. As with any bridgeless river, it was difficult to traverse the snake, and so the town was split in two. People started referring to landmarks and locations in terms of the new barrier; the school, church, and nicer homes were in North Snake, while the bank, movie theater, and poorer homes fell within South Snake. Children in South Snake couldn’t get to school anymore, and instead played handball games all afternoon. The children formed rowdy gangs and roamed the area, knocking down mailboxes. In North Snake, people started spending more and more time in the church, until a group of a dozen or so individuals held a constant vigil there, praying all day and night at turns for the health of the snake and for the death of the snake.

  A devastating insomnia settled over both sides. The snake’s presence had thrown off the whole town’s biological rhythm. People stayed up late, watching from their porches. They took shifts and acclimated to fewer hours of sleep. Nobody wanted to turn away in the event that it might continue its silent progress, or—God forbid—eat a child, though the snake hadn’t budged in months and one had to travel into the orchard to even see its fangs. Still, nobody wanted to wake and find they had missed any major event, and so they slept less and less. Soon enough, everyone could stay awake for weeks at a time. Schoolteachers rubbed their eyes as the children before them multiplied and vanished, turned sepia-toned, and spoke in tongues. Butchers forgot to log deliveries and had to throw out pounds of spoiled meat.

  Swale, who lived in a small apartment in South Snake, observed the darkening circles under the eyes of her neighbors. She suffered a very bad haircut from a woman who paused during the experience to lean against the wall and weep. Watching the woman slide down the wall, Swale realized there was a need. Though she was born and raised to research and she made quite a good scientist, she also aspired to invent and produce a product. Her mother had inspired this dream when she made the very good point that since Swale was unemployed with neither prospects nor money, she would soon have to move back in with her parents—and she didn’t want that, did she? She did not. And so, one afternoon, she brought her kit to the snake.

  Children played handball around her as she worked. First, she took a rubbing of the scales and examined their feathery tips on a page of contact paper. She pressed a sponge into its side to see if a liquid might emerge, and then swabbed the area with a moistened cotton ball. Neither technique successfully disclosed any material, and she tapped the snake’s side with her fingertips, considering it. She went to her kit and returned with a fine razor.

  Working slowly, she shaved off the tip of a single scale. The reptilian wall shifted with discomfort while she made her incision but calmed once she applied pressure. She examined the sample—a silvery aqueous thing—and used an even finer razor to cut a slight piece, as thin as an eyelash. A gentle titration of the slice in a saline solution caused the material to change slightly, producing a blue glow that matched her calculations. She added another shaved piece to find the solution glowed even brighter, a pinpoint of light in the waning day. The vial’s contents produced a gas, popping out the cork. It glowed with an organic heat. She detected the slight odor of cloves. This was precisely what she had anticipated. Like any good inventor, Swale tried the potion on herself, downing it in one go. It tasted like a rubber ball. She held two fingers to her lips, burped, and slipped to the ground, unconscious.

  She woke surrounded by curious townspeople, the night sky at their backs. Her head had been propped up awkwardly against the snake. She rubbed her neck and patted the ground for her pocketwatch. Six hours had passed. And there it was: a sleeping potion to rival any drug, easily administered and instantly effective. And what was truly interesting, she saw once she stood to examine it, was that the snake’s scale had completed its regeneration process. It was impossible to find the spot where she had taken her sample.

  The potion worked so efficiently that each individu
al required only one glowing drop. Folks quickly learned that they should be in bed at the time of dosage, as its immediate effect had them wreaking accidental havoc, smashing into stacks of books and pulling down tablecloths. One woman woke to find herself wrapped up in a load of wet laundry she had tried to hang before the drug kicked in. A man banged his forehead on the side of his drafting desk on the way down and gave his wife quite the scare.

  People put in bulk orders. A half-drop formulation worked with children and a double drop treated the obese. The streets cleared out at night. Someone tossed a small package of the drug over to North Snake with usage instructions. Eight hours later, a baseball wrapped in cash came back with a note reading MORE OF IT.

  A new empire rested in Swale’s hands. She hired a pair of assistants, taking only a pin drop of her own treatment and waking a few hours later to get back to work. She shaved thicker pieces from the snake. Her young assistants mixed the solution and marked their observations. Swale stood at the sentient wall with her hands on her hips, regarding her vast potential fortune. For all she knew, the snake didn’t mind the knife. The faster they cut, the faster the scales regenerated.

  There, in the heat of production, wary Swale heeded the kind of impulse she typically wouldn’t follow. It was a caprice inspired by growing demand, distinguished only by its thrilling mixture of success and greed. In that wild moment, she pushed one of the assistants aside and plunged her surgical steel deep into the snake’s flesh. The blade sunk as if being pulled by a new gravity and then was sucked from her grasp. She found herself elbow-deep in the snake before she thought to draw back.

  A cracked line of light crowded from the wound, and with it a suffusion of warmth. Swale stared as the snakeskin parted and smoked, peeling back to reveal that the flesh inside formed a cavern. She saw a lantern swinging gently from the knobby spine ceiling. A man sat at a table, regarding her, as calm as the moon. The man turned Swale’s surgical steel in his hand. He resembled a laborer of some type, perhaps a farmer. His long trousers were dark and he was barefoot. An old cap drooped around his eyes, which squinted at the intrusion.