by Shock Totem
Maybe it would have been fine, had Y not decided to shave in his hour away from me. I don’t know why he did it. His face was scruffy earlier, but now it is smooth, which doesn’t matter, except that he’s nicked himself on his neck. A perfect droplet of blood formed and dried just below the shadow of his jaw.
The only option for not staring at it would be stabbing my eyes out. I consider it. I must put my mouth on that spot, I must taste and swallow him, I must have him inside me or every essential function of my biological being will forfeit the war against death and I will collapse under this mountain of desperation.
X calls after Y leaves. X is pleased I am making the effort to be friends with Y. I say nothing. X is the only person in the world who bears the weight of my secrets and I cannot give him this one to carry. It will crush him.
I pretend to be the only person this will turn to dust.
• • •
When I met X, I fell into him with ease. That rare compatibility they don’t show on the television because it’s kind of boring on screen. In person, it is a revelation. One moment, I was alone. The next, I never had to be alone again. We shelter the same demons, we believe in the same magics, we fuck in three-four time, and climax simultaneously. It is that simple.
When I met Y, I didn’t look twice at him. When I met Y a second time, I didn’t like him. It took years for us to have a conversation. I even have it written in my journal.
Of X’s friends, I find Y the most difficult.
Maybe that was it. The challenge of him. Y surprised me, continues to surprise me, when I know every surprise ending in existence. Y is never dead the whole time, or secretly multiple personality disorder, or a childhood sled. Instead, he is beautiful and masculine and angry, but then, in a shocking twist, he admits to being wrong and laughs at my jokes and is crippled with existential quandary. Y looks like the plainest, vanilla boy ever to please-and-thank-you his way through the world. But inside, Y is strange. In the biggest twist of all, inside, Y is like me.
Y has a girlfriend I never see. I hate that I am jealous of her.
Sometimes I fantasize about desecrating my body for Y. I slice off my scarred skin. I carve away from my hips and stomach and thighs until I am the right shape and size. I open up my skull and present my mind to him as an offering. I would be raw for him.
I am reduced to my physicality. I am nothing but pulsing veins and firing neurons. My body breaks under the drag of his gravity.
Y calls me, waking me up from my afternoon doze. We go walking along the old train tracks in a hot drizzle. There is so much water dispersed in the air that I am saturated with summer. Y is not in a good place today, but he won’t tell me why. I am not in a good place, either. We walk in silence.
Y is an imploding star. He sucks me in, collapses me, simplifies me until I am indistinguishable from the earth, muddy with the weather.
He touches me this time, by accident. He’s walking along the track like a balance beam and teeters, seizing my hand as if his fall might be infinite. I start like he’s made of acid. The only way I will scrape his iron grip from my mind is by amputation. Even then, my phantom limb would obsess over the sensation.
I throw up.
He watches me, too terrified to touch me again.
X calls that night. Y texted him and told him that I was sick. X is worried. X wants to come home. I try not to cry, lest I lose any more of myself to this absurdity.
X is my forever. Forever will not last much longer.
• • •
I call Y to have an awkward conversation about why we can’t be friends, but before I can say anything, he tells me he’s outside my house. He wanted to get out of his house, started to wander, and ended up here.
I hate him, briefly. But I’ve got need itching up my spine, craving burning in my belly, and fifty-billion tons of attraction shackled to my ankles. I am too thirsty for him to hate him.
When I invite him in, he stands too close, then too far, then too close, then too far. His indecision in my living room puts me on edge. I yell at him about nothing, and he yells back about even less, and it’s like the room is on fire.
I tell him I cannot endure him.
He says he cannot endure himself.
• • •
Y and I walk in the woods with inevitability cumbersome on our shoulders. He keeps offering me water from his canteen. I can’t take anything from him until I take everything.
The woods are not like the hospital. The spirits here are ancient. They don’t judge, they don’t care. They were here long before we crawled from the ocean and they will be here long after we sink back into it. Whatever I do here will be consumed by maggots and reborn into tiny, curling greenery. My sin will give the world much needed breath.
Y doesn’t speak when I come close, invading his space. He doesn’t step back when I am near enough to steal his breath. His eyes flutter shut and his breath stumbles when I strip off his cotton armor, piece by piece. That I am not demolished by lust in that moment is a miracle.
He spreads his legs as if he’s done this a thousand times before. He is hard for me, which is sort of a surprise, but he doesn’t flinch when he sees my knife, which is a definite surprise. I am so thankful for him. He kisses me, once, and I tell myself it means he is thankful for me too.
He whimpers when I cut into his femoral artery, but stays still.
His life spills forth, a shock of red, and I am quick to contain him with my mouth. He tastes of iron and earth and human. I drink him down, all the way, let his power sprawl through every pathway of my insides and purge me of the beast I have become.
When he grabs my hair I almost break suction to scream, overwhelmed with conclusion. But he holds me there, smashing my nose against the dusting of hair on crease of his thigh. It’s not long before his grip becomes weak and I can take no more. He is everywhere inside, thrashing through me, but he is barely there on the ground.
I lay next to him while what remains trickles free into the damp underbrush.
Y becomes the only cold thing in this summer world.
• • •
X will be home soon. I watch the clock. Y soaked me, his stain dried all over my skin. But I am light for the first time in months. I have devoured what once consumed me. It is a terminal solution.
I won’t let X live with what I’ve done. I shed a few tears then, over everything that should have been. But if I have always been capable of this, if these past few hours are indicative of some true nature lurking inside me, then it is foolish to pretend we could have lived indefinitely without incident. There is no justice here, only victims and punishment.
My single regret is that I could not release my desire the way I now release my guilt. What an insidious, imperfect system, this being of mine. If there was any reason in this world, I would have been incapable of love. But I won’t regret loving X. It is impossible to regret loving X.
X is my forever. Forever ends today.
Victoria Jakes is a writer and artist living in New Orleans. She migrated from the bitter cold of Massachusetts last year, and has fallen in love with her new city of graveyards, humidity, and dive bars. Victoria gets paid to play with dogs and sometimes pull poop out of their mouths, but is happiest when she is creating. Comic books, stop motion animations, short films, paintings, and zombie makeup all fall under Victoria's creative pursuits, but writing is her primal calling. She is currently shopping her first novel.
Victoria lives with her man, Nick, and her miniature pit bull, Midna. You can follow Victoria on Twitter at @victoriajakes, but Midna tweets more often at @MidnaThePitPup.
AMONG THE ELEPHANTS
by Amberle L. Husbands
I’d dreamt of the Elephant Man, every night for the past week, ever since they’d given me the assignment. In my heart, I knew better than to think of Joseph Merrick as the “Elephant Man,” but asleep, in my dreams, I couldn’t help it. Monday morning came, finally, and I dressed and went to the address they’d
given me, to assume my duties as Sarah Bartell’s private nurse.
It was the personal, explicit warning that had me frightened. When he awarded me the position, Mr. Krajik had drawn me into his office and closed the door behind us. In all my trips up to the labor offices, I had never once seen that door closed.
“I’ll understand,” he began, “if you don’t feel this s a job you can do.”
At first, I was offended. I’d been training for over five years to become a nurse, and thought I’d done pretty well at it, even; head of the class, nearly always. But then Mr. Krajik continued.
“It’s mostly her face,” he explained. “The deformities in her hands, arms, chest, all of that, aren’t any worse than some of the saw mill accidents you no doubt saw in school. But her face... Don’t make the mistake that she’s blind. She isn’t. She’ll see you, if you stare at her.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” I protested, still slightly offended.
“You say that now,” Mr. Krajik answered, quirking up one eyebrow in gentle, amused sympathy. “If you want the job, it’s yours. I just want to know that you’re up to it.”
I took the assignment, glad for any work. But as the date of our meeting drew closer, the dreams began, and to my shame I found myself dreading the face of Sarah Bartell.
• • •
I found out, much later, that Sarah and I had been born during the same winter, only a month apart. Still, though, she was already an old woman by the time I made it out of school. She had grown up down south, with an adventuresome mother. Down there—though people were even less understanding—there were more wild, wide-open places to run to and escape them for a little while.
I say she was an old woman mostly because she had never been a little girl. One of the first doctors had told her mother that the girl would only live to be ten or eleven years old, at the most. Sarah heard him, and I think she must have made up her mind to become an old woman in that instant. She ceased to be young, at least.
They traveled, I’d heard, through the girl’s childhood. But then her mother had died, and Sarah closed herself up before the world could get too complete a look at her. She haunted her own world, traveling to unknowable hellish regions, I’m certain, without ever even peeking out the window. Only whispers of her, like hideous ghosts, reached us on the outside.
Sarah was twenty-nine, when I went to work for her.
• • •
Monday morning, I waited in her downstairs parlor, fingers dancing nervously at my sides as the time for me to meet my mistress came and went. I hate to admit it but must: As seven o’clock became seven-fifteen, then seven-thirty, I began hoping that she’d died in the night, relieving me of my duties before they’d begun.
Her house was bigger than I’d expected, but by no means extravagant. It had been a cook who’d brought me in and situated me in the parlor, explaining that Ms. Bartell would see me in the solarium, presently. The place was very similar to my father’s house on Elm Street. The main distinguishing features were the heavy curtains still drawn across the front windows, and even these didn’t stop the rooms from being flooded with early light.
Finally, I heard a door open and shut, and a young man came down the hall, stopping in the parlor for his hat and a briefcase.
“She won’t see me,” he said over his shoulder, as if the matter was something I’d be interested in. “One of the best geneticists on the east coast, and she won’t see me.”
I almost blurted out how fortunate he was, betraying myself and my shameful horror. But as he was slamming the front door I heard my name called, and went down the hall into the sun room, to meet the woman face-to-face.
I didn’t drop my eyes.
I stared.
But I made sure to smile as I did it, the brightest, bravest smile I could possibly manage. And slowly my terror subsided, creeping away little by little with each stolen glance. She did appear blind; only the slightest flickering of wet blackness from two pits, hidden deep within the folds of her face, proved otherwise. Her neck curled away from where it should have connected, thin and bent, and her voice crept out of it tangled and snarled. Her face was mostly immobile. I don’t know whether it was physically so or if she had simply trained it not to betray her. But in that first moment, when I didn’t drop my eyes, I did see one thing, one emotion. I think, to this day, that it was a flash of fear.
• • •
I began to see deformity, whenever I closed my eyes. The nightmares didn’t go away, though I eventually stopped blaming her for them. In the instant between first sleep and oblivion—long before proper dreams stirred themselves—I would suddenly see horribly mutilated faces, staring back at me from a void. I would see twisted, torn bodies, or parts of them, or starving, mangled animals eating one another. They were just imagines, just visual flashes filling the open gaps of my mind, but each scene gripped me with such intense terror that I would often jump awake stifling a scream, when I’d just nodded off the instant before.
The fear in these images—and I must confess, I believed I was glimpsing Hell, at the time—was unlike anything I’d ever experienced...
But almost immediately upon waking, they would leave me filled with a heavy sadness instead of the fear. I couldn’t bear to think of a world where such pain and miserableness existed...and couldn’t bear to accept that my own mind would invent such atrocities.
Was that really the stuff that filled my head, I wondered; was this really the stuff I was made of? Was pain the language that I thought in?
• • •
“There’s no such thing as Hell,” Sarah croaked one day, straining to be nearer to my ear as I held her medication up to those hard, twisted lips. “We’ve already come through that part...and this world is the reward for whether we performed nobly there...or not.”
“How does a person perform nobly in Hell?” I asked her.
“You plant flowers,” she hissed. “You feed the birds, while they’re burning.”
I dared not ask how she believed either one of us had performed, to be awarded our present lives. After all, she’d been given almost two decades of borrowed time, while I was still seeing Hades inside my eyelids.
• • •
“Do you know what’s funny?” she asked another time, after I’d been working in her house for nearly a month.
I waited, leaning close to hear Ms. Bartell’s strangled voice, balancing the plastic cup with that day’s first round of liquid-mercy on my knee. I knew she lived in horrifying pain, but she was never in a hurry to take her medicine. I could not imagine what this woman could possibly find funny about the world we lived in.
“I’ve heard all the jokes, or imagined what they must be,” she continued. “You know what? My mother really did work with elephants... For a zoo, back down south. And they loved her... She took me to meet them, once, after hours. When I was just a girl...I was afraid they’d trample me, think me monstrous...but she said that, to them, I smelled enough like her that they’d love me on sight. And they did! They never batted an eye, they just loved me as my mother’s daughter... I wish now I’d spent more time there, with them.”
I didn’t work for her long, but I was there the morning that she sat back in the sun room and stopped breathing. She’d been planning a trip to Africa—one we both knew would never come to exist in reality. That was okay; the plans were enough. She wanted to stand in an old place, she told me, one that still remembered what the world was like before people walked across it...
Sometimes I wish I’d spent more time among the elephants, too.
Amberle L. Husbands is a writer currently living in middle Georgia. Her short stories have appeared in the Alchemy Press Book of Pulp Heroes, as well as on the websites Underground Voices, Fear and Trembling, and The Cynic Online. Her first novel, See Eads City, was released in October of 2011.
A TALE OF TRUE HORROR
THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE PARKING LOT
by Kurt Newton
The fo
ur young men standing in the parking lot didn’t look cold. In fact, none of the four wore winter coats even though it was eleven o’clock at night and below freezing outside.
The four stood in a clot in front of a parked car. At the center stood a young man with blond hair. His eyes were closed, his head tilted up toward the night sky. The other three surrounded him, one on each side and one standing in front. The one on the left had his hands placed firmly on the blond man’s shoulder and forehead. The one on the right had his hands holding the back of the blond man’s neck and cupping his chin. The third, who crouched slightly in front, his head turned toward the pavement, had both hands placed against the blond man’s chest. He appeared to be feeling for a heartbeat.
My first thought was the blond man had been skateboarding in the parking lot and had fallen. I don’t know why I thought this because the men, though young, were too old and too well-dressed to be skaters. Besides, the small parking lot was gated and private. Only guests of the house were allowed inside.
I kept expecting the blond man to open his eyes, but then I realized all four of the men had their eyes shut. Their lips were also moving, subtly, repetitively. It was then that it occurred to me that the four were in the midst of some kind of prayer. So I turned away.
Maybe they were friends or relatives praying for someone inside the House. After all, the house I was staying in was the Ronald McDonald House in New Haven, Connecticut. No, I wasn’t there to get a bite to eat. I was there because my newly born granddaughter was at the hospital nearby, close to death.
