by Jordan Krall
The boy fired again. Calamaro felt his ear start to burn and realized that he’d been hit. His right ear lobe was bleeding onto his shoulder. It was time he had stopped caring about whether the kid got out of this alive. Maybe the Kid was better off dead.
He aimed his pistol but before he could pull the trigger, he was startled by the cries of the young Indians as they rushed past him towards the boy.
It was brutal.
Calamaro knew that the Kid had been behind the kidnappings of the Indian girls and that the girls probably died slow, painful deaths but he felt sick watching the boy get hacked to pieces. The Indians took the boy’s stash of glass eyes and smashed them against the ground, laughing as each eye exploded.
Finally he took the straps of his donkey and started pulling it out of the village. From behind him the old man approached and said, “You take this.” He held out a bladder full of liquid. “It is yours after all.”
Calamaro did not want to continue his journey with a buffalo bladder full of piss and dead crabs but he also did not want to cause any more trouble. He took it, wondering what would happen when the tribe drank the rest of the piss, what visions they would see, and what they would all mean. He never did believe in Indian witchcraft but there was something inside of him that did not want to tempt it.
Dragging his wooden donkey away from the Indian camp, Calamaro’s mind was far away from the recent events and was instead focusing on the gold that was hidden somewhere west. He heard it was in a certain area of the Nevada territory but it could be in any number of towns. There was Leonard, a mining town that was well-known for its young but experienced whores and to the south there was Starktown, a place that made its mark through the constant explosions caused by anti-government renegades who tried, unsuccessfully, to construct bombs to bring back to the Capital.
Then there was Screwhorse.
Calamaro had a feeling that he would find the gold there. He had heard rumors back east about that place. There was a brothel there that rivaled any that existed near the southern ports. There were supposedly many other pleasures and forms of entertainment that a man could not get anywhere else. But even if Screwhorse didn’t have the gold, Calamaro figured he could use that time to rest and forget about the past. Maybe he could finally relieve his mind of those memories. Maybe he could finally find peace.
The sun beat down on the man named Calamaro as he headed west, dragging his wooden donkey behind him. The leather reins dug into the scar tissue on his palms and on his wrists. Blood dripped down from his right ear lobe and fell to the ground, splattering the grass and dirt like deep red droplets of rain.
Unfruitful Works
& Other Personal Horrors
THE FATHER TRILOGY
A REPTANT HELL
I. Revulsions of the Kyphotic
Before he could speak his father’s name, Lucasse needed to down a glass of cold milk and alcohol. The combination of liquids soothed his chest, stomach, and bowels where it then exited in a very brief but loud fecal exorcism. During that process, he was able to utter the word that was the closest thing to a curse that was ever expelled from Lucasse’s lips.
“Maurent.”
There. He spoke it. He said it into the broken air. He said it into the corner of his room, the corner where the wallpaper was stripped away by the insects and where layers stains of unknown origin combined to form abstract pornography.
Lucasse waited.
He waited for no specific result, no specific end to his ongoing turmoil. Every incident in the past had been different, every result a separate personal cataclysm independent from the last yet related by a similar set-up: the milk and alcohol ritual. An outsider would not have thought each episode to be linked but Lucasse knew better. He knew the truth.
Or rather the truth he wanted to believe: that his father’s eyes would come back to look after him.
For years Lucasse had been a guest in his Aunt Eurice’s home in a town he had never heard of before coming to visit. The name of the town was generic and one Lucasse had a difficult time remembering. In fact, there were times he had suspected the town did not even exist prior to his arrival as if it had been invented simply to accommodate his needs. Lucasse usually shrugged off that arrogance until the next time he took a walk around the town and felt that same feeling of newness that was out of place in a town that looked so ancient, so colonial. Most of the buildings were supposedly built two centuries ago yet they held a fresh presence, an almost psychic weight of modernity that should have been alien to such structures.
Lucasse had once taken a walk through a small patch of woods that led to a large farm house. Nothing seemed peculiar until he walked alongside the house and felt a severe pain in his temple. At first he thought it was the sunlight piercing his eyes but realized the sun was hidden by a bulbous cloud like a child hiding from its mother. As the mystery of the pain swirled in his head, all sounds of nature ceased. It was then that Lucasse knew it was the house itself that had somehow struck him. It was the house that was telling Lucasse it was not what it seemed to be. It was not an old house despite its appearance and its half-page of faux history in the brochure available at the town hall. Through pain it was spilling its ancient secrets, a newborn revealing its true nature through anguished howling out of mouth of blood.
It was a cranky newborn made of wood and paint and its primal cries had pierced Lucasse, causing the pain in his head. After walking around to the back of the farmhouse, he decided to knock on the door to see if anyone lived there who could provide him with answers. If they couldn’t offer that, then maybe they’d give him a drink of water or perhaps, if they were liberal about such things, a small drink of alcohol. Any kind would do.
Three knocks on the door brought nothing but a wind chime’s weak song. Lucasse opened the screen door and stepped into the porch. It smelt of moss and blown-out candles. Magazines were strewn across the floor. All of the titles had been cleanly cut off with a razor. Lucasse crouched down to pick one of them up but found it stuck to the floor by a yellowish gummy substance.
He wiped his fingers on his shirt and stood up.
The door to the house opened on its own, revealing a tenebrous chamber that was nothing like the inside of any house Lucasse had ever known. It was more like what he imagined a stomach of a whale would look like: humid, dank, and dark with swollen shadows.
“Hello?” he said to the blackness.
No voice answered. There was only the chimes again, brief and weak but sinister in a way only soft sounds could be, like the footsteps of a home invader or the sharpening of a butcher’s blade.
“Anyone here?” he said. “I was just wondering if I could have a drink. I’ve been walking for a long time.”
No answer.
But the shadows at the heart of the room started to spread, making everything darker. Lucasse didn’t think that was possible: shadow within shadow within shadow within an even darker shadow.
Then he found himself lying on the couch with an icepack on his forehead.
“Where am I?”
A voice from behind him said, “You’re home.”
It was his Aunt Eurice. This was her house.
The shadows above him swayed with the sound of chimes.
“I’ll show you to your room,” Aunt Eurice said.
That is when Lucasse fell asleep.
II. Once When the Sky was Outnumbered
There was only one park in town and Roux spent most of his time there. Though some citizens enjoyed taking walks, flying kites, or playing with their children, Roux could usually be found in the park reading a book on one of the wooden benches.
Before leaving his house to go to the park, Roux would run his hands along his many shelves and take a book at random. He needed it to be random. In fact, every night he rearranged the books on the shelves while blindfolded. Making decisions was difficult for Roux and so he decided to let chance dictate what it was that he read.
Book reading was not the only thing chance d
ictated. Roux’s meals were chosen at random from random menus from various eateries that delivered to his home. Roux did not want to have the responsibility associated with such decisions. If a decision was poor, he’d rather be angry at the silent, allusive god called Chance than at himself.
One this particular morning he was sitting on a bench reading a book on the history of industrial parks. He hadn’t even remembered purchasing the book yet he must have since it had been sitting on his shelf. He had never received a book as a gift even when he had family who would be so inclined to present him with such an item. Roux concluded he must have bought it during one of his rare book-buying binges. Still, he was surprised he hadn’t remembered choosing such a title. Oh well, he thought, it was surely just as good as the rest of them.
It wasn’t a particularly sunny day nor could it really be considered cloudy. It was, Roux thought, somewhere in between the two. The air was neither warm nor cool. It was if the air came from a yet undiscovered season. No wind blew through the park; it was a morning of stillness and Roux was terrified.
He looked down at his book. The words on the page were jumbled. They were begging for wind, begging for something to move it away from Roux’s hands which were too smooth, too unused. The letters, which were previously all English, had somehow been transformed into insidious shapes and sigils foreign to any alphabet Roux had ever seen.
Roux knew the book wanted to disown him. It had altered itself (or had let itself become altered by some outside force invisible to Roux) just to distance itself from him. The book had become an outsider in his hands.
Or, Roux contemplated, it had made him an outsider.
There were other people in the park and Roux knew they were trying to hide their suspicious looks.
He also knew one of those people was going to kill him.
How he knew this, he didn’t know. It was a question Roux could not or would not answer. If the explanation was there inside his mind it was hidden under some unconscious blanket of fear and self-illusion. It was a truth worth hiding from his awareness. It was not a truth that was going to manifest itself like some quant introspective epiphany. Roux simply knew that someone in the vicinity of the bench was going to extinguish his life right there in the park.
But he also knew he could not leave the park.
Leaving would upset things, upset the order that had been predestined by whatever powers moved destinies around like shells in a confidence game. Roux’s fate was sealed in a windless park with a book no longer readable while he was surrounded by people who looked upon him like a pariah. Perhaps they were right in their judgment. Perhaps he was something to be shunned, feared, and slaughtered. Perhaps he was, as he knew some people referred to him as, the “freak on the bench.”
Roux had never considered himself a friendly person or even minimally a social one. His interactions were always brief and without ceremony. He could not remember the last time he had sincerely wished someone a “good morning” yet he could remember dozens of times within the last month in which others had wished him that very thing. His lack of social skills had long ago ceased to bring guilt but he sometimes regretted not being successful in trying to avoid those interactions so that he would not have to meditate on his obscene lack of conformity.
And perhaps now the chickens were coming home to roost, as they say. He was finally going to reap the rewards of his lifestyle or lack thereof: his complete and utter aversion to being bothered.
Roux’s eyes perused each potential assassin in the park. There were two sets of grandparents with their boisterous spawn-of-their-spawn. Could it be them? That would be a nice trick, sending out the least intimidating murderer. Oh, but that would be too obvious, wouldn’t it? No, it was unlikely to be the grandparents. They were too old; you couldn’t count on them to move quickly enough.
But could it be the grandchildren?
There were five of them. It was difficult to tell their ages but Roux thought two looked under three years old while the other three looked to be between ten and twelve, a suitable age to contemplate killing someone like Roux. Yes, it could very well be one, or more, of the children.
He wondered how he would react if it was indeed one of them. Would he embrace death at the hands of a child? After all, who better to exact judgment upon him then a person who is innocent and full of hope and potential? They would simply be making room in the world by snuffing him out. Would they actually comprehend their actions? Would they think it was all a game and that Roux’s death was simply the end of the round? Would they expect him to get up after they had plunged a knife (or pulled a gun’s trigger) and caused his extinction? Roux wondered all of this and found himself even more frightened than before. Youth had never seemed so horrible.
He looked back down at his book.
He was on a new chapter but could not read it due to the previous transformation. To compensate, he imagined it was a chapter about the distribution of goods and how that affected building types in industrial parks. Some of the foreign words were fading on the page while others were blinking to an unknown rhythm. Perhaps they were signaling the return of the wind which would come by and rescue the tome from Roux’s hands.
He wished that was not the case. Despite the danger he knew he was in and the obscurity of the words, he still wanted to read, still wanted to finish the book he had chosen at random on the shelves he had set up randomly the night before. If he was to die before reading the book, he would feel incomplete. Death itself would feel incomplete.
Death would feel unfair.
Roux figured if he was patient and accommodating despite his terror, then maybe things would work out in a complete way.
There was a sound behind him, something that resembled the rustling of leaves. Had the wind returned? Roux looked over his shoulder quickly as if the sound had startled him even though it had not. A part of him wanted to startle the wind so he may have the upper hand in the proceedings.
But it was not leaves being scattered by the wind. It was a young mother with her child. The child, a young girl of about five years old, was taking small toys out of a plastic bag. That it is the sound Roux had heard: small hands grabbing for toys in a plastic bag.
It reminded him of his last surgery. The doctors had searched through his body looking for something, anything, to justify his excruciating pain and their extravagant fees. According to them, they found nothing. That didn’t prevent them from billing Roux in the amount of four-thousand dollars and eighty-three cents which was approximately four-thousand more dollars than Roux really had to spend.
The young girl with the plastic bag stopped rummaging around. She stared at Roux and brought her hand up. Her palm opened, revealing the toy she had chosen. It was a mechanical duck.
“Quack quack,” the girl said. “Quack quack.”
Roux was petrified. His body tensed and he was back in surgery, unable to move. Someone was going to try to heal him: the little girl or the doctor or both. He didn’t know nor did he care to think about it.
“Just do it already,” Roux said, directing the words to the girl and to the doctor if he was somehow listening in the windless air.
“Quack,” the girl said.
“That’s what I thought.” Roux let his book slide out of his fingers and fall to the concrete.
III. Adactylous Arms of the House
Franco was sick of selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door but was far too unmotivated to look for another job. Besides, he needed the exercise. His midsection had grown into a spare tire and his thighs were starting to rub together when he walked. Luckily his face hadn’t gained any weight but still, he really did need the exercise.
He had been in town for two days but hadn’t sold a single subscription. That wasn’t totally unexpected. A lot of these medium-sized towns were hard to crack but there was a good chance he’d stumble on a whole neighborhood that would make the trip worthwhile. Housewives who were interested in the latest tabloids or a generic sports
magazine for their already-preoccupied husbands. Young women interested in the newest fashion despite having an income insufficient enough to keep up with it. They were all potential customers.
The house Franco stood in front of now looked at least a hundred years old, a true treasure of the Victorian age. He figured he’d like to live in a similar house if he ever made enough money. He knew it was not a realistic goal but it was still something that crept in the back of his mind from time to time. Until then he would have to be satisfied with living in a one-room apartment over a garage of a farmhouse.
Franco knocked because he hated ringing the doorbell. It was so impersonal, so abrupt. A knock was flesh-on-wood and was friendlier. He found it was very successful in warming up to potential customers.
The only answer to his knock was an unidentifiable noise. Franco knocked again.
He heard the clip-clopping of high heels across a wood floor.
The door opened with a groan and a woman in her forties answered. Her hair was severe: deep black with all straight strands and sharp angles. “Yes?”
“Hello, mam. My name is Franco and I’m selling magazine subscriptions…”
“I’ll stop you right there.” The woman opened the door wide, revealing her enormous breasts that tested the fabric of her blouse to its limits. “First mistake you made was calling me ‘mam’. No woman, no matter what her age, likes to be called mam.”
“I, uh…”
“Call a woman ‘miss’ or use their name if you know it.”
Franco blushed. He’d met some assertive customers in his line of work but none who were forceful about something so insignificant. His face was on fire, his heart pounding his confidence into pulp. “I’m sorry,” he said, turning around to walk away because he knew he would not be able to go through with the sales pitch without sounding completely embarrassed.
