Richmond, that’s Rob the assistant manager.
You killed Rob the assistant manager? With a vegetable peeler. That’s . . . a vegetable peeler, huh? Wow.
Well, no, you’re quite right. You didn’t kill Rob the assistant manager. You killed the alien invader who killed Rob the assistant manager. And when you killed him, of course, it immobilized his drones.
That’s one of my fellow invasion commanders you just murdered, you know. One of our people . . . Richmond, you weird little human, I could kiss you.
All right, everybody, new plan. The rest of bB Company has to be somewhere in the city. We’ll spore into Rob, as planned, except we’ll be using his body to infiltrate bB Company. I estimate we can take over their squadron by Labor Day.
We may not be able to make much headway with humans, but we can show those smug know-it-alls from the next nest. Am I right?
Exactly! Everybody give Richmond a hand.
Now who wants salad?
About the Author
SHAENON K. GARRITY is an award-winning cartoonist best known for the webcomics Narbonic and Skin Horse. Her prose fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Escape Pod, and Daily Science Fiction. She works as a manga editor for VIZ Media and teaches at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. Her writing on comics appears regularly in the Comics Journal and on Anime News Network. She lives in Berkeley with two birds, a baby, and a man.
Shaenon on Writing
The Invasion Commander’s
Motion for New Business
The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart. The core concept of this story was “Invasion of the Body Snatchers as a Bob Newhart routine.” I assume this made sense to me when I started writing, although now I can’t remember why. But Newhart’s dishcloth-dry comedy has been a great influence on me, just as it has been on countless humor writers. He’s cool because he’s not trying to be cool, and funny because he doesn’t see the joke in anything, and we all wish we had that much style.
I Married a Monster from Outer Space. There are a lot of great movies about body-snatching alien pod people, really more than there should be. From the two best versions of The Thing (Howard Hawks’s and John Carpenter’s) to the two best versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1950s’ pods in trucks and 1970s’ hobo-dog hybrids), filmmakers have tapped a rich vein of sci-fi paranoia and goopy special effects. Then there’s this little B picture from 1958, which I like for tackling, as directly as a 1950s’ movie can, the concern that alien replicants are probably terrible in bed. The aliens are on Earth to repopulate their planet, but they spend most of their time drinking and griping about having to wear human bodies and live in the suburbs. Also, excellent title.
Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars. Daniel Pinkwater is one of my lifelong-favorite writers, and I especially like the way he finds mundanity in the fantastic. In Alan Mendelsohn, two boys develop telekinetic powers and learn to transport themselves to an alternate universe—and, frankly, it’s really boring over there. Some days it doesn’t pay to leave Chicago.
The Comic Book Guide to the Mission. I admit I’m partial because I drew a map for it, but this anthology of comics about San Francisco’s Mission District is an appropriately eclectic slice of the neighborhood where The Invasion Commander’s Motion for New Business ostensibly takes place. In a story composed of a series of harried monologues, there isn’t much room for vivid descriptions of setting, but I like to think the invasion force is meeting at the It’s Tops diner on Market Street, identifiable by the “AWΣSOME HOT CAKES” sign over the door.
Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco. That place has bring-your-own-bottle bulk olive oil. This should be a thing everywhere.
ANN ARBOR VENUS WALKS INTO A BAR
* * *
KENZIE ALLEN
I’m sure there’s an appropriate cocktail
for every breakup. I’ve run out on so many
I’ve run out of business cards for the rebounds.
Anything can happen. Every drink here named
for some type of bruise, lateral or oblique,
with or without basil, and they even muddle
the cherry skins. Vulcan slides a brewski
down the lacquer, collecting icicles stiff
for my upper lip. The doorway is so narrow
you must sidle in next to me like you love
the person you’re with. What’s the catch?
There’s never enough of too much light,
never a stained-glass shade I didn’t stage
a crush on, and what are we doing here,
exactly? Let’s not pretend the setting matters
enough to write about winter. This is Pamina’s
nuclear bunker, strung up with leftover
pumpkin lights (just to spread some cheer), and
even if I’m close—my tongue an errant antenna,
groping your lobes, seeking nectar, or knives—
it’s getting cramped in here. The end times
are coming, and I’m ready. I’m ready, almost.
About the Author
KENZIE ALLEN is a Zell Fellow in poetry at the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program (MFA 2014), and a descendant of the Oneida Tribe of Indians of Wisconsin. She is at work on her first manuscript of poetry, a chapbook of Texas poems, and a memoir about blood quantum. Her poems have previously appeared in Sonora Review, the Iowa Review, and Word Riot. Kenzie is also a classically trained lyric soprano, a digital illustrator and UI/UX maven, and a devotee of the desert.
Keith Carter © 2014
THE CUTOFF MAN
* * *
CHAD BENSON
Engelmann was the catcher, the smartest in the league, but the information-storing quadrants of his brain were so differently shaped from those of his teammates that his knowledge remained off-limits. He calculated statistics for each facet of the game that defied transcription, obscure enough to baffle a competent Newtonian, much less some utility infielder who’d dropped out of the ninth grade. Even if Engelmann had possessed the ability to communicate in more than grunts (which, believe me, he did not), it would have been impossible for anyone else to grasp firsthand the data that made him so valuable.
Fortunately, Engelmann’s own private mastery turned out to be more than sufficient. He informed each of the ten thousand tiny decisions required of a catcher during a ball game with reams of information from his deepest synaptic catacombs. The advantage he gave his pitchers over opposing hitters, the knack for calling a changeup or a slow curve when the batter was thinking fastball all the way, was uncanny. It drove Engelmann’s backup, Howard Beechy, to envious grumbling, and it astounded the team’s manager, Happy Truman, who’d once fancied himself to be the league’s premier reservoir of baseball esoterica.
It flat-out spooked the team’s twin aces, Marty and Lenny Penobscot, and the Penobscots were not easily spooked. They were tall and broad men, well proportioned, boarding school–educated. They did Ouija and Pilates and cavorted with scarved women in political exile from Sudan and Cuba. They had witnessed, at the age of nine in a Chicago nightclub, the mob-related stabbings of their mother and father.
The Penobscots had also been born just barely Siamese, joined by a tiny isthmus of arm skin that required a quick postpartum snip. No more than a solitary drop of rich red blood had been shed that morning, but the wounds never fully healed. Each brother retained a nubby tab of scar tissue that jutted forth from his pitching elbow.
Early in their careers, a frustrated opposing manager who’d suffered mimeographed defeats to the hard-throwing left- and right-handed brothers had petitioned the league, insisting that the garbanzo-sized peduncles on the Penobscots’ throwing arms created just enough distraction to tangle up his batters. He declared this to be an unfair practice and argued that for the sport to remain credible, the commissioner had no choice but to order those nubs removed in what he could only imagine would be a supersimple procedure, requiring dummy-proof amoun
ts of anesthesia.
The commissioner, however, dismissed the motion, citing various civil rights and disability acts, leaning unnecessarily on an interstate commerce clause, and suggesting through wryly tilted bifocals that the manager might be suffering from a scathing -itis of the sour-grape varietal. Perhaps, said the commissioner, this manager’s stingy team owner ought to pony up for some talented young prospects instead of trotting out a squad of rickety veterans who’d faded into ghosts of themselves (which every insider and sportswriter agreed this particular team had a tendency to do). The rest of the league sort of laughed it off, embarrassed, secretly grateful that someone else had at least given it a shot.
Incidentally, you shouldn’t expect this to be the kind of story where Marty and Lenny find out who killed their parents. They never did. That’s how it happens sometimes.
The issue of the nubs didn’t come up again until the incident I want to tell you about, which is something that occurred ten seasons later, when for a few glorious weeks the Penobscots and their teammates achieved a level of baseball perfection only visited upon this earth maybe a handful of times per century. It sent fans and players alike scrambling for Bibles and crystals and Las Vegas bookies to try to make sense of it. Those few weeks were the best I’ve ever known. They altered the course of my life forever, though now it all feels like something that happened to a different person entirely.
I once asked Engelmann what he thought about those skin bits on Marty’s and Lenny’s arms. He just rocked his torso and stared at a spot four inches below and to the left of my face, because that’s what Engelmann did. Engelmann didn’t talk to nobody. On occasion, if it was an especially splendid baseball day and something rare or beautiful occurred on the field, he might engage in a few seconds of strong and meaningful eye contact with his catcher’s mitt. If you asked him to dinner or nudged him and whistled after a hip-tossing blonde, he was 100 percent brick wall.
But I can guarantee you (and this is one of those stories where you should assume that what I tell you is true) that when the ruling about the Penobscots’ nubs came down from the commissioner, Engelmann was a very happy man. He kept buckets of stats in his head about those little skin blobs, and he knew exactly how to make good use of them. Depending on the angle of the sun, the barometer, the whiff of lunch on a batter’s breath, Engelmann (I’m certain) could determine the miniscule degree to which those Penobscot skin tags would obscure the trajectory of a tailing fastball, making it harder to hit than even a devastating slider in the dirt (that slider being an obvious Penobscot strength that a lesser catcher would have defaulted to in the same situation).
The rest of the pitching staff (up until that unprecedented run I’m going to recount) was awful, but Engelmann’s shrewdness boosted them past their limited talents, and this alone kept the Barons competitive. The Birmingham Barons. Though not the Birmingham you’re probably thinking of. We had a dead-armed lefty junkballer named Muddy Alvarado and two guys in their midforties who’d had the famous Tommy John elbow surgery so many times we just called them Tommy and John. If anyone in the lineup could have hit their weight, the Barons might have been something to see. As it stood, each season was a battle to finish in second place rather than third, every game a stinge-fest for the one or two runs that got scored. Unless it was a bad day. If Tommy or John or Muddy couldn’t find a rhythm or lost control of their off-speed pitches, then you were looking at a 12–0 shellacking. Sometimes, not even Engelmann could rescue those guys.
Midway through the season that I’m talking about, a decade into the Penobscots’ careers, when they’d already reserved their spots in the Hall of Fame but hadn’t yet begun to physically decline, an event transpired that changed everything. It caused the whole ball club, for the first time in ages, to beat back superstition and wander into the forbidden territory of hope, to stray from the comforts of mediocrity and consider graspable (in a knock-on-wood sort of way) the possibility of winning a championship.
What happened that day was this: Pudge Morrison—aging veteran left fielder who’d failed to imagine his way into life after baseball and returned for too many twilight seasons, diluting and ruining what could have been a respectable set of career statistics—struck out to end the game. Again. All season long he’d been struggling worse than ever, and on this day he’d failed to drive home a rare Baron base runner who’d been hit by a pitch, stolen second base, and advanced to third on a dribbly ground ball. Pudge had never been a great hitter, even in his prime, but now in middle age he’d turned to unadulterated dogshit. His contribution to the Barons consisted merely of adequate defense in left field. Even his locker room presence, once garrulous and fun-loving, had deteriorated into a sullen and contagious funk.
Pudge’s wife and three daughters lived way out in San Diego. He was getting old and lonely climbing the dugout stairs with aching knees, sleeping in a rented downtown efficiency, trying to save money for a retirement that scared him even worse than striking out every night. It was all these years on the road that constituted his real life: drinking on trains, kicking up dust, girls in hotels. Not some suburban idyll in Southern California with a too-smart trophy wife who’d already lost her glint. The game might be getting harder to enjoy, but at least he was still suiting up every night.
So after ending the game with a strikeout for the who-knows-how-many-th time (Engelmann probably knew, actually), Pudge Morrison accepted truly sincere condolences (not the masked, passive-aggressive kind) from Buck Hodge, Richard Ratigan, and Sean O’Malley. These three, along with Hitsui Takahashi—the six-foot-eight Japanese import who played first base—made up the Barons’ infield, a close-knit group of chatterboxes who popped gum and exchanged knock-knock jokes while fielding the between-inning grounders that Takahashi delivered with robotic grace. When Pudge Morrison struck out to end a game, they legitimately felt bad for him.
There is, among baseball players, if nothing else, tremendous empathy. It’s due to the sharing of so much common failure. Even the most legendary hitters get on base less than half the time, and the best teams win maybe two of every three games. It seemed to Pudge that Takahashi, too, was genuine with his encouragement, but this was harder to figure. Takahashi spoke through a translator, who also happened to be a willowy six-foot redheaded blast furnace, distracting enough when she wasn’t even talking, much less reproducing a subtle Japanese undertone or an unspoken Japanese sentiment. (Her name was Delilah. In addition to being willowy, she was also a Rhodes Scholar and spoke some Mandarin to go along with the Japanese. I mean, she was really something.)
And so after the strikeout, after the hangdog toss of the helmet and the ripping of Velcro batting-glove straps and the sulk off the field down the corridor to his clubhouse locker with the padded folding chair, after the stripping down to jockstrap and socks and dangling golden crucifix, Pudge Morrison looked up from the scarred relief map of his knees and saw one thing he expected to see and one thing he did not.
The thing he expected to see was three female reporters shoving microphones in his face, asking how it felt to end yet another game on a humiliating note when his teammates so often rose to the challenge and at times performed almost brilliantly. To this, he was accustomed. Years earlier, when women had gained access to the locker room through freedom-of-equal-employment stuff, guys had responded by getting naked more than usual and clandestinely chubbing themselves up, at first in flagrant protest and then from insecurity’s onset. A few major stars in the league actually eschewed the warm glow of media attention due to concerns about their endowments while lengthier journeymen and career benchwarmers chatted freely from wide stances about games they hadn’t even played in. Pudge fell somewhere in between, though at this stage in his career he no longer cared much about who sized up his duffel bag. His desire to avoid the reporters was rooted in a different embarrassment, the one where he clearly didn’t deserve to be in the starting lineup.
Owing to some fealty that persisted solely in the most sentiment
al and gentlemanly of American sports, Happy Truman kept Pudge out there in left field night after night, batting at the bottom of the order, ostensibly for defense. But defense didn’t win ball games. The truth was, Pudge and Happy went back a long way together, all the way to the Texas League, and that meant something in baseball. Even more than winning, in some cases, especially if the chances of your team winning weren’t great to begin with. Happy was the grumpiest son of a barn cat you ever met, but don’t go thinking this is some kind of Dickens tale. Happy was just a nickname. Grumpy guys get called Happy all the time in baseball.
And so Pudge Morrison expected to see those reporters with their microphones asking questions and checking out his junk. As luck would have it, his was hanging pretty loose and attractive that evening, and though he officially didn’t care, it would be foolish to pretend this didn’t hearten him a bit.
But the thing Pudge did not expect to see, the thing that kicked off this entire mystical turnaround the Barons were about to experience, was a pale little girl, about ten years old, in a stiff red dress pulled tight at the waist by a shiny black belt. That dress looked like a red bow tie turned on its side. She wore a single braided ebony pigtail that extended straight out from the left side of her head like an Allen wrench. It didn’t appear that the second pigtail had come undone out of sloppiness or neglect. In fact, it was pretty clear there had never been a second pigtail. The girl looked perfectly nourished and cared-for.
Pudge Morrison was the first to see her, but he was not the first to speak. From the far side of the locker room, someone angrily called out to ask who’d brought the little girl, who’d brought their kid in the clubhouse for godsakes? The initial assumption was that she must belong to one of the female reporters, but all the reporters shook their heads and made faces that said, “Don’t look at me, I don’t even want one.” Next, all the infielders and outfielders and starters and relievers turned to each other with raised eyebrows, wondering who’d let their admittedly adorable daughter into the clubhouse. It was bad enough that they had to commingle with lady reporters appraising their roots on top of their performances, but a line had to be drawn at little kids, who probably weren’t yet covered by fair-employment equal-access legislation and surely deserved a few more years’ protection from life’s male grotesqueries.
Day One, Year One: Best New Stories and Poems, 2014 Page 22
