The New Black

by Richard Thomas

  Around this time I can remember running across PANK at an AWP, probably here in Chicago. I met Roxane Gay for the first time, and once I got over how exciting the magazine was, I realized she was a gifted author as well. I was still struggling to get my work accepted, and when she took my story “Splintered,” a contemporary “choose-your-own-path” bit of neo-noir adventure, it gave me a huge dose of confidence. As I started to see her name more and more often, in other publications I was chasing, I realized that I hadn’t read a story of hers that was anything close to average or expected—she was a slugger, hitting them out of the park every single time. I was so thrilled to see her get into the Best American Short Stories 2012 anthology with her story, “North Country.” It was very difficult to select just one of her stories, but “How” filled a niche in this collection—maybe you’d call it rural noir, but whatever you label it, it’s a powerful, touching story that holds back nothing.

  As I continued to dig into neo-noir voices, mixing in the literary voices of my MFA program, I picked up new work by Craig Davidson, and realized he was slowly becoming one of my favorite authors. It started with the collection Rust and Bone, and then his novel The Fighter, followed by Sara Court. To hear that he just made the Giller long list for his novel Cataract City (which isn’t even OUT yet in the U.S.) makes me even more impatient to get my hands on it. And being allowed to include the title story “Rust and Bone” from his debut collection in this anthology is a bit of a gift as well.

  About this time I traveled to St. Louis (where I grew up) to be a part of the Noir at the Bar reading series, run by Scott Phillips and Jed Ayres. It was there that I first met Kyle Minor. I’d been aware of his writing, but hadn’t read that much of it, just one collection, In the Devil’s Territory. Later, I would run into him again at the release party for Frank Bill down in Corydon, Indiana, celebrating Crimes in Southern Indiana. After getting over the thrill of meeting Donald Ray Pollock, I reminded myself to read more of Kyle’s work. When I ran across “The Truth and All Its Ugly,” I was floored. I guess I have to admit that this may be the second story in this collection to make me cry—I’m turning into a real faucet here. As Kyle continues to gain attention, I’m again grateful to Sarabande Books for letting us include this story, as his new collection, Praying Drunk, is about to hit the streets.

  It was at another AWP, Denver 2010, where I heard Joe Meno read, following Dorothy Allison, I think, which is a nearly impossible feat. I’d actually published a story of his in a little rag I guest edited, Colored Chalk, but Joe was on fire that night, and it spurned me to pick up more of his work, such as Hairstyles of the Damned and The Boy Detective Fails. He provides some much needed humor in this collection, but underneath the jokes and uncomfortable laughter is a sadness that really got to me, in “Children Are the Only Ones Who Blush.”

  As my writing continued to expand, I started writing my first novel, and joined a group called Write Club. It’s a private community of like-minded authors who have been striving to publish and break out. It’s been thrilling to see many of our group get agents, book deals, and break into elite magazines and journals. Two authors, Nik Korpon, and Craig Wallwork, have done exactly that. Both write gritty narratives, with Nik often focusing on the Baltimore streets, and Craig on rural English country sides. But I selected stories from these two emerging authors that are closer to the fantastic and horrific, slipping in and out of realities, asking us to suspend our disbelief, and open our minds to the possibilities. Where Nik makes me fear a possible future where our dreams can be stolen, Craig scares me to death with a haunting that feels all too possible. Nik’s story “His Footsteps are Made of Soot,” and Craig’s “Dollhouse” were two voices that I knew immediately needed to be in this collection.

  Rebecca Jones-Howe is another author that has emerged from one of my writing communities—LitReactor, where I write a column, Storyville. When I compared Lindsay Hunter to Mary Gaitskill, in an article I wrote for Flavorwire, “10 Essential Neo-Noir Authors,” Rebecca’s voice is another one that came to mind, reminiscent of the heady mix of sex and violence that Gaitskill so eloquently writes. In the workshops over at LitReactor, I always enjoyed her writing. When she won the first War, a competition pitting some 60+ authors against each other in an NCAA-style series of brackets, I knew I wasn’t the only person to recognize her gifts and formidable abilities. Her story “Blue Hawaii” was my favorite of that competition.

  My book reviews continued over at The Nervous Breakdown. I ran across a little book called Zazen, one of the first Red Lemonade titles. Richard Nash has always had his thumb on the pulse of the writing community, so it was an easy sell. What Vanessa Veselka did with that narrative struck me as being very original, a literary mind dealing with heavy political issues, layers of tension stacking one upon another, a story that slowly gets under your skin. That same lyrical and haunting quality is evident in her story, “Christopher Hitchens.”

  As I started to fill up this anthology, I dug deeper for voices that I may have missed, searching for those last few authors to fill the collection. It’s difficult to put a finger on what neo-noir is, my definition differing than someone schooled in noir vs. horror vs. dark literary fiction. I’ve been a fan of Akashic Books for a long time, and as I picked up book after book, The Heroin Chronicles got my attention. Antonia Crane is another unique voice, tapping into her past experiences to write alluring, complicated, and touching stories that often show the underbelly of the various sex worker industries. But what makes her story, “Sunshine for Adrienne” so powerful is not the titillation, but the humanity, desire, hope and fear that rests behind it.

  Another name that kept popping up on my radar was Richard Lange. Maybe it was Dead Boys back in 2008, or Angel Baby, that just came out, but I dug in deeper and found another voice that explored the world of neo-noir, the new black, with authority and depth. The subtle knowledge and unease that descends on the reader in “Fuzzyland,” is a hypnotic read, leaving behind sadness, frustration, and understanding.

  I wanted more weirdness, and as I looked around my office, I didn’t have to go that far to trip over the tome that is The Weird, edited by Jeff and VanderMeer. If you’ve ever read the magazine Weird Tales, you know about Ann (now at Tor). And to miss the body of work that is Jeff VanderMeer, is to ignore a powerful voice in fantasy and crime (e.g., Finch). So their names on the cover of this 1,152-page monolith meant only one thing—quality. Micaela Morrissette’s story “The Familiars” taps into every horror that a parent and child can conjure up—something under the bed, noises in the dark, abduction, possession, and the unknown.

  Which leaves Tara Laskowksi and her story “The Etiquette of Homicide.” What made this story a must-have for this collection was the unique formatting—a recipe for disaster, you could say. A strong voice in the crime and dark fiction arenas, Tara makes you pay attention, and mix up all of her ingredients to create a compelling story that builds on the classic noir staples.

  Each and every author in this collection has been an inspiration to me—as an author, a reader, and a student of the imagination. These are the stories that stay with me when I close my eyes at night and try to go to sleep. These are the voices that push me to take more risks with my own writing. These are the authors you should keep an eye on, pick up at bookstores, garage sales and libraries, making them your own personal teachers of the macabre.

  I wanted to take a moment to thank Victor David Giron, Jacob Knabb, Ben Tanzer, Alban Fischer, and everyone else at Curbside Splendor, as well as Carrie Gaffney and Nik Korpon at Dark House Press for their support—I couldn’t do this without them. I hope you enjoy this collection and come back for more. I can’t call you my Dear Constant Readers yet, as Stephen King likes to say, but I hope I can in time.

  — Richard Thomas

  October 23, 2013

  Chicago, IL

  The New Black

  X

  FATHER, SON,

  HOLY RABBIT


  STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES

  By the third day they were eating snow. Years later it would come to the boy again, rush up to him at a job interview: his father spitting out pieces of seed or pine needle into his hand. Whatever had been in the snow. The boy looked at the brown flecks in his father’s palm, then up to his father, who finally nodded, put them back in his mouth, turned his face away to swallow.

  Instead of sleeping, they thumped each other in the face to stay awake.

  The place they’d found under the tree wasn’t out of the wind, but it was dry.

  They had no idea where the camp was, or how to find the truck from there, or the highway after that. They didn’t even have a gun, just the knife the boy’s father kept strapped to his right hip.

  The first two days, the father had shrugged and told the boy not to worry, that the storm couldn’t last.

  The whole third day, he’d sat watching the snow fall like ash.

  The boy didn’t say anything, not even inside, not even a prayer. One of the times he drifted off, though, waking not to the slap of his father’s fingernail on his cheek but the sound of it, there was a picture he brought up with him from sleep. A rabbit.

  He told his father about it and his father pulled his lower lip into his mouth, smiled like the boy had just told a joke.

  That night they fell asleep.

  This time the boy woke to his father rubbing him all over, trying to make his blood flow. The boy’s father was crying, so the boy told him about the rabbit, how it wasn’t even white like it should be, but brown, lost like them.

  His father hugged his knees to his chest and bounced up and down, stared out at all the white past their tree.

  “A rabbit?” he said.

  The boy shrugged.

  Sometime later that day he woke again, wasn’t sure where he was at first. His father wasn’t there. The boy moved his mouth up and down, didn’t know what to say. Rounded off in the crust of the snow were the dragging holes his father had made, walking away. The boy put his hand in the first footstep, then the second, then stood from the tree into the real cold. He followed the tracks until they became confused. He tried to follow them back to the tree but the light was different now. Finally he started running, falling down, getting up, his chest on fire.

  His father found him sometime that night, pulled him close.

  They lowered themselves under another tree.

  “Where were you?” the boy asked.

  “That rabbit,” the father said, stroking the boy’s hair down.

  “You saw it?”

  Instead of answering, the father just stared.

  This tree they were under wasn’t as good as the last. The next morning they looked for another, and another, and stumbled onto their first one.

  “Home again home again,” the father said, guiding the boy under then gripping onto the back of his jacket, stopping him.

  There were tracks coming up out of the dirt, onto the snow. Double tracks, like the split hoof of an elk, except bigger, and not as deep.

  “Your rabbit,” the father said.

  The boy smiled.

  That night his father carved their initials into the trunk of the tree with his knife. Later he broke a dead branch off, tried sharpening it. The boy watched, fascinated, hungry.

  “Will it work?” he asked.

  His father thumped him in the face, woke him. He asked it again, with his mouth this time.

  The father shrugged. His lips were cracked, lined with blood, his beard pushing up through his skin.

  “Where do you think it is right now?” he said to the boy.

  “The—the rabbit?”

  The father nodded.

  The boy closed his eyes, turned his head, then opened his eyes again, used them to point the way he was facing. The father used his sharp stick as a cane, stood with it, and walked in that direction, folded himself into the blowing snow.

  The boy knew this was going to work.

  In the hours his father was gone, he studied their names in the tree. While the boy had been asleep, his father had carved the boy’s mother’s name into the bark as well. The boy ran the pads of his fingers over the grooves, brought the taste to his tongue.

  The next thing he knew was ice. It was falling down on him in crumbly sheets.

  His father had returned, had collapsed into the side of the tree.

  The boy rolled him in, rubbed his back and face and neck, and then saw what his father was balled around, what he’d been protecting for miles, maybe: the rabbit. It was brown at the tips of its coat, the rest white.

  With his knife, the father opened the rabbit in a line down the stomach, poured the meat out. It steamed.

  Over it, the father looked at the son, nodded.

  They scooped every bit of red out that the rabbit had, swallowed it in chunks because if they chewed they tasted what they were doing. All that was left was the skin. The father scraped it with the blade of his knife, gave those scrapings to the boy.

  “Glad your mom’s not here to see this,” he said.

  The boy smiled, wiped his mouth.

  Later, he threw up in his sleep, then looked at it soaking into the loose dirt, then turned to his see if his father had seen what he’d done, how he’d betrayed him. His father was sleeping. The boy lay back down, forced the rabbit back into his mouth then angled his arm over his lips, so he wouldn’t lose his food again.

  The next day, no helicopters came for them, no men on horseback, following dogs, no skiers poling their way home. For a few hours around what should have been lunch, the sun shone down, but all that did was make their dry spot under the tree wet. Then the wind started again.

  “Where’s that stick?” the boy asked.

  The father narrowed his eyes as if he hadn’t thought of that. “Your rabbit,” he said after a few minutes.

  The boy nodded, said, almost to himself, “It’ll come back.”

  When he looked around to his father, his father was already looking at him. Studying him.

  The rabbit’s skin was out in the snow, just past the tree. Buried hours ago.

  The father nodded like this could maybe be true. That the rabbit would come back. Because they needed it to.

  The next day he went out again, with a new stick, and came back with his lips blue, one of his legs frozen wet from stepping through some ice into a creek. No rabbit. What he said about the creek was that it was a good sign. You could usually follow water one way or another, to people.

  The boy didn’t ask which way.

  “His name is Slaney,” he said.

  “The rabbit?”

  The boy nodded. Slaney. Things that had names were real.

  That night they slept, then woke somehow at the same time, the boy under his father’s heavy, jacketed arm. They were both looking the same direction, their faces even with the crust of snow past their tree. Twenty feet out, its nose tasting the air, was Slaney.

  The boy felt his father’s breath deepen.

  “Don’t . . . don’t . . . “ his father said, low, then exploded over the boy, crashed off into the day without his stick.

  He came back an hour later with nothing slung over his shoulder, nothing balled against his stomach. No blood on his hands.

  This time the son prayed, inside. He promised not to throw any of the meat up again. With the tip of his knife, his father carved a cartoon rabbit into the trunk of their tree. It looked like a frog with horse ears.

  “Slaney,” the boy said.

  The father carved that in a line under the rabbit’s feet, then circled the boy’s mother’s name over and over, until the boy thought that piece of the bark was going to come off like a plaque.

  The next time the boy woke, he was already sitting up.

  “What?” the father said.

  The boy nodded the direction he was facing.

&n
bsp; The father watched the boy’s eyes, then nodded, got his stick.

  This time he didn’t come back for nearly a day. The boy, afraid, climbed up into the tree, then higher, as high as he could, until the wind could reach him.

  His father reached up with his stick, tapped him awake.

  Like a football in the crook of his arm was the rabbit. It was bloody and wonderful, already cut open.

  “You ate the guts,” the boy said, his mouth full.

  His father reached into the rabbit, came out with a long sliver of meat. The muscle that runs along the spine, maybe.

  The boy ate and ate and when he was done, he placed the rabbit skin in the same spot he’d placed the last one. The coat was just the same—white underneath, brown at the tips.

  “It’ll come back,” he told his father.

  His father rubbed the side of his face. His hand was crusted with blood.

  The next day there were no walkie-talkies crackling through the woods, no four-wheelers or snowmobiles churning through the snow. And the rabbit skin was gone.

  “Hungry?” the boy’s father said, smiling, leaning on his stick just to stand, and the boy smiled with him.

  Four hours later, his father came back with the rabbit again. He was wet to the hips this time.

  “The creek?” the boy said.

  “It’s a good sign,” the father said back.

  Again, the father had fingered the guts into his mouth on the way back, left most of the stringy meat for the boy.

  “Slaney,” the father said, watching the boy eat.

  The boy closed his eyes to swallow.

  Because of his frozen pants—the creek—the father had to sit with his legs straight out. “A good sign,” the boy said after the father was asleep.