Detritus

by Kealan Patrick Burke

  Table of Contents

  Chewed Up by Jeremy C. Shipp

  Shots and Cuts by Mary Borsellino

  Ride by Brent Michael Kelley

  Mrs. Grainger's Animal Emporium by Phil Hickes

  The Tick-Tock Heart by L.S. Murphy

  Arkitektur by Michael R. Colangelo

  Candy Lady by Neil Davies

  Armoire by Louise Bohmer

  Shrieking Gauze by Edmund Colell

  The Highest and the Sweetest by S.P. Miskowski

  Heroes and Villains by Michael Montoure

  Let Them into Your Heart by Lee Widener

  In His Own Graven Image by Pete Clark

  Crawling the Insect Life by Opal Edgar

  The Room Beneath the Stairs by Kealan Patrick Burke

  About the Authors

  About the Editors

  Detritus

  Edited

  by

  Kate Jonez

  S.S. Michaels

  Omnium Gatherum

  Los Angeles CA

  Detritus

  Edited by Kate Jonez

  and S.S.Michaels

  Anthology Copyright © 2011

  Individual stories copyright by individual authors

  Cover Illustration Copyright © 2011 Kate Jonez

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author and publisher

  omniumgatherumedia.com

  This anthology is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  First Electronic Edition

  Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.

  — Walter Benjamin

  Chewed Up by Jeremy C. Shipp

  Tonight, my wife's hair smells like strawberries. I want to wrap my arm around her, but she would only squirm away, so I don't try.

  Instead, I lie there, inches from her, and a world away.

  I think about how we used to stay up all night dissecting French films and trying to figure out God, and my chest tightens. My stomach spins. And I feel little balls of anxiety moving up and down my arms.

  I say, "I love you, Aubrey."

  She's asleep, or pretending to be.

  In lonely moments like this, I can't help but think about chewed up bubble gum. I close my eyes, and I see the wads stuck underneath tables and desks and chairs, like little alien pods ready to hatch. I do what I can to clean up the parks and bus stops and train stations, but there's still a whole world of gum out there. Sometimes I fantasize about breaking into my neighbors' houses and purifying the rooms, because you know there's gum in all the nooks and crannies. The neighborhood is full of kids, and kids will put gum anywhere.

  Once, when I was young, I snuck into my sister's room, and I smashed a wad of Bazooka Joe in her hair. I don't think there was a reason why. In the morning, my sister screamed at me, my parents screamed at me, but I never admitted my guilt. Even when my sister was in the hospital, I didn't apologize for the gum. I just told her the story about how her cat Zipper lost his tooth, and then she was gone.

  "I can't sleep," I whisper. "I'm going downstairs."

  Crickets.

  In the living room, I sit on Aubrey's side of the couch.

  I caress the brown leather arm.

  Before I get the chance to turn on the TV, I detect movement out of the corner of my eye. I turn my head, and I watch as one of Aubrey's porcelain unicorns falls off the mantelpiece. My whole body tenses, because I'm sure the unicorn's going to break, and Aubrey will blame me, the way she blames me for everything lately.

  But the unicorn flaps its wings and touches down on the coffee table.

  I weep, and I'm not sure if it's because I'm frightened by the fact that I've gone insane, or just relieved.

  The unicorn sits on the obituary section of the newspaper and says, "Why do I always get the crybabies?" She sounds a little like my wife, only higher pitched. What Aubrey would sound like if she were a cartoon character.

  I rub my forehead with both hands.

  "If you're trying to massage away the madness, that's not gonna work. I'm not going anywhere until your life is a little less fucked up."

  "You're never leaving then," I say.

  "Stop being so dramatic. It's true that you're a fuck-up of epic proportions and no one can help you. But lucky for you, I'm just the no one for the job."

  The unicorn flies over and lands on my lap. She walks around in a circle, then plops over, just like Zipper used to.

  "We'll start tomorrow," she says. "Do you want to watch Conan?"

  "Alright."

  I pet the unicorn. She purrs.

  The purity of this creature rubs off on me a little, perhaps magically, and I dream of me and my sister racing to the old scarecrow and back. I don't win. I don't care. Eventually, the magic wears off, and I'm dreaming of hospitals.

  Next morning, I go the park and get to work purifying one of the picnic tables. I use my putty knife to scrape off wad after wad.

  The unicorn paces back and forth under the table. "Any idea why Aubrey's giving you the cold shoulder?"

  "No," I say, and I drop a red wad into the Ziploc bag.

  "Can you find out?"

  "She won't talk to me."

  The unicorn stops pacing and looks up at me. "Does she have a diary?"

  "That's not going to happen."

  Hours later, I'm in the bedroom, searching through Aubrey's drawers. Aubrey's home, but there's no chance she'll walk in on me. When I'm upstairs, she's downstairs, and vice versa.

  Finally, I find the diary, which turns out to be a dream journal. No wonder she always writes in the morning right after she wakes up.

  I read through the last few entries.

  "So?" the unicorn says, poking my arm with her hoof.

  "She dreams a lot about a baby boy. He drowns in a bathtub and falls off a skyscraper and gets pulled apart by dogs. Aubrey always tries to save him, but she can't."

  "Well, you're a pathetic crybaby, so the baby obviously represents you."

  "Funny."

  "I'm not kidding. My guess is that Aubrey needs you to grow up and be a man."

  "I work hard. I respect her. What more does she want from me?"

  Minutes later, I'm watching ESPN in the living room, and I hear Aubrey moving around upstairs.

  The unicorn stomps on the remote control and turns up the volume. "If she can't hear you, then what's the point?"

  After the game's over, I say, "I'm off to the gym!"

  Me and the unicorn get in the Prius. "Do you think I should get a Hummer or a truck or something?"

  "Couldn't hurt."

  "Do you really think this is what she wants?"

  The unicorn shrugs, as well as a unicorn can shrug.

  I start the car.

  Weeks later, and we're back in the park, purifying a wrought iron bench.

  "Any progress?" the porcelain beast says.

  "She still won't talk to me," I say.

  "Shit."

  "Any other bright ideas?"

  "Just one. But it's a bit fucked up."

  She tells me
her plan, and she's right. It is fucked up.

  "You in?" the unicorn says, and holds out her hoof.

  I touch the hoof with my finger. "Fine."

  On the way out of the park, we pass by a garbage can.

  The flying horse points a hoof at my Ziploc bag full of gum. "Aren't you going to throw that away?"

  "I need them for my collection," I say.

  "You're shitting me. Right?"

  I shake my head. I can't remember when I started my collection, and to be honest, I don't know where in the house I keep all the gum. But it's as important to me as the unicorns are to Aubrey.

  Later, I'm lying beside Aubrey, inches from her, and a world away. Tonight, her hair smells like cherries.

  Before I can fall asleep, I detect movement out of the corner of my eye. I turn my head, and I watch as a dark mass flies around the room.

  "You're dead, Aubrey!" the creature says. "Dead!"

  My wife screams.

  The creature flies straight at her face, but I grab the monster just in time and I toss it out the window. The unicorn winks at me before flying off into the night.

  After I secure the lock, Aubrey hugs me from behind.

  "Thank you," she says, and she leads me to the bed. She smiles at me the way she used to. She pulls off her Pink Floyd t-shirt.

  So Aubrey doesn't want a man, after all. She wants a hero.

  I kiss my wife's forehead, her neck, her stomach, and every kiss tastes different. Cherry, cinnamon, spearmint.

  The unicorn crashes through the window and says, "You should have saved her."

  "I did," I say.

  "Help me, Marcus!" my wife says, and I make a strange yelping sound, because her whole body is covered with gum. What Aubrey would look like if she were a cartoon character.

  I yank off the wads and try to purify her, but I'm way too late to help her. Underneath the gum is a bulging eye, an open mouth, blistering flesh.

  The unicorn eats a piece of gum off her cheek.

  I remember the hospital. I remember shaving Aubrey's head. I remember her telling me about the baby in her dreams who she believed represented her own mortality. I remember her decision to die at home.

  I wanted to save her, but I wasn't strong enough.

  I let the disease kill my wife.

  There's no one here to punish me for my weakness. But lucky for me, the unicorn is just the no one for the job. She gallops toward my eye, and in no time at all, I'm dreaming of hospitals.

  Shots and Cuts by Mary Borsellino

  There's almost nothing on this planet that can shove me out of my comfort zone. That was true when I was a snot-nosed kid, and after fifteen years in the homicide unit, it's even truer.

  Serves me well on the job, but there's a downside.

  Take last Christmas, for example. Sitting around the table after we'd picked the turkey down to scraps on a ribcage, everyone mellow and chatty, and I realise that the only topics I know anything about are tales of the bleakest places in the human soul. I start telling this one story, about the Maniacs, because that's the one I've been reading up on for a local case. Murder's like any other human interest: if you want to be an expert, you have to stay ahead of the trends.

  So I mention something about the case, because I think it's quirky enough to pique at least a little interest, and my sister gives me this look that shut me right the hell up. My sister's as normal and suburban as they come — the opposite of me — and so I've started using her as my yardstick of what it's not okay to talk about at the family Christmas. Turns out the answer is pretty much 'everything I know about.'

  Her kids want to hear more, of course. She's got twins, fraternal but both boys, nearly fifteen. Too smart to give much of a shit about school, too dumb to know what to do with themselves otherwise. Old enough to get away with hearing about gory shit and young enough that they can't really comprehend the full meaning of said shit. But maybe I'm not giving them enough credit there; kids grow up early, these days.

  Have you been to a concert lately? Doesn't matter the band. Rock, pop, metal — same's true for them all. Next time you're at a show, look away from the stage and around at the crowd.

  Little camera screens everywhere, right? Mostly cellphones, some regular cameras. But all of them digital and all of them set to video mode.

  Forget any rumours of debauchery and drug use going on backstage; the real danger to the souls of rock and rollers comes from that old chestnut about cameras stealing your spirit when they capture an image. Those poor musicians have been fractured into a thousand thousand YouTube uploads.

  The weird part is that most of the kids with the cameras, they aren't watching the stage. Their eyes are on their screens like they're already preparing the memory rather than living the moment. Like my sister's kids, who can't keep their phones out of their hands at the Christmas dinner table or through a movie screening. Always only halfway paying attention to the real world.

  Growing up in the age of the Internet has made this younger generation into expert curators of their own lives. They all know how to angle a snapshot to make their faces thinner, how to phrase an update so their day sounds exciting and glamorous. Life stops happening and becomes how they shape the memory of it. Zoom in, jump cut, adjust the audio levels.

  So what, right? If kids would rather collect a life than live it then that's their business, isn't it? Okay, sure. But remember this: a generation's monsters reflect the generation. Charles Manson turned free love into free hate. Ted Bundy keeping severed heads in his house like acquisition would lead automatically to fulfillment. Kids in black trench coats thinned locker-room herds.

  If the world fears its monsters, what frightens twice as hard is the spectre of a teenage villain. Teenagers, even the non-monstrous variety, do not play by grown-up rules. They care too much about some things and not enough about others. Their emotions simmer constantly, just a degree or two short of boiling over. Even at their most placid, teenagers are scary. My sister's kids are still years away from learning the art of moderation, of subtlety. Everything happens to them with the volume turned up to eleven.

  One last thing before I start the story of the Maniacs, something you already know if you've ever watched a crime drama on TV or read a paperback thriller you bought at the airport. One last piece to put on the board before we start the game. It's this: serial killers take trophies from their kills. A lock of hair, a drop of blood, a watchband, a shoe. Something they can keep like a holy relic of their crime. Through this trophy, the killer is able to relive the murder. Sights and sounds and memories, all locked up in one little object, tidy as a YouTube link.

  I'm sure you've started to see what sort of situation all these facts could lead to, if properly combined.

  In June and July of 2007, twenty-one extremely brutal murders took place in the Ukraine, in a town called Dnipropetrovsk. I'm talking some Jack the Ripper shit here, and even worse than that. Faces bludgeoned with hammers until nothing resembling a face remained. Eyes gouged out of still-living victims. A pregnant woman sliced open to cut out the fetus. Children, the elderly, the drunk and homeless. Multiple bodies turned up every day. Some had their jewellery or phones stolen, though most of them weren't even robbed.

  One time, near to the start of the reign of terror — what else is there to call it, honestly — two 14-year-olds were the victims, attacked in broad daylight. One of the kids died, but the other managed to get away. The police denied him access to counsel and then beat him in an effort to make him confess to killing his friend.

  Shit like that gets me really steamed. It's shitty police work, and never does anything but work in a defendant's favour when you get to trial — and that's assuming that you've got the right guy to begin with, which in this case they didn't.

  Sure, sure, there's reasons like personal liberties and freedom and all that. Violating the rights of another human being is never a good idea. But even purely from a pursuit-of-justice standpoint, it's a shitty methodology to
employ. Anything that's gonna muddy the waters dividing the good guys (cops) from the bad guys (mass-murdering scumbag freaks) is poor procedure, in my opinion.

  Twenty-one is almost too many people to comprehend as entire individuals, alive or dead. Think of all that you are, all that you hope to be, all that you remember and love and hate. It's unfathomably large. Double that. Then add another. You're still only up to three people. To get to twenty-one, you have to multiply those three infinities by seven. Then take that sublimely huge mass of consciousness, and snuff it out. Use a piece of steel construction pipe, and strike over and over until there's nothing left but red pulp on the ice of a sidewalk.

  Authorities recorded a total of twenty-nine attacks. Somewhat miraculously, eight people survived their attempted murders.

  But all this is nothing more or less than the usual bloodshed of human history, is it? After all, the recent history of the Ukraine alone has also given us Andrei Chikatilo, who mutilated and murdered more than fifty children and women. Or if you want to get even more specific and stay in Dnipropetrovsk, there's the police investigator Serhiy Tkach, who confessed to murdering more than a hundred children and women.

  Don't think that the Russians have something bad in the water, either. Albert Fish was born and raised in America, and in addition to counting his total victims at over a hundred, he liked to boast that he'd raped and eaten a child in every state of the USA.

  To put it bluntly, humanity produces some seriously fucked pieces of shit on a regular basis. So why am I talking about one grubby little string of not quite two dozen kills? Well, the age of the killers, for starters. All this horror and gore was generated by two teenage boys, Viktor Sayenko and Igor Suprunyuck. Nineteen-year-old kids.

  They grew up together, their friendship forged by the bullying they both endured and a shared fear of heights. When they were twelve years old, the boys decided to conquer that fear in the same kind of reckless bullshit way that kids try to do all kinds of dumb stuff. They climbed over the railing on the balcony of a 14th-floor apartment and hung on, bare against the wind and gravity.