"The Cromwells treated us like we were long-lost family members, as if nothing had happened,” Brennan had said. “You should see their house. It looks like a ski-lodge. Jason built it right in the middle of a pine tree thicket, next to a little stream where they let their horses roam freely. What a place, so full of love."
Shant remembered not thinking he knew what any such place could be like, before Miles had wheedled him off the boulevard street corner, away from the adjacent alley where Shant usually plied his meager trade, and often slept, and sometimes ate. He’d taken the walk off the over-lit big street into the strange leafy neighborhood sullenly, suspiciously, expecting the young guy in the Chicago White Sox jersey to turn on him with a blade or needle. But all he got was a big wing-backed chair that looked antique pulled up to a battered dinner table, some spicy hot goulash, and some discreet fussing from another young guy with crazy long hair. Shant had figured some three-way action was coming but didn’t care. He just kept eating, inaudibly separating himself from his surroundings, his company, and his own body to get ready, as he’d learnt to do the hard way.
"And we lived happily ever after," the White Sox guy teased.
Brennan gave Shant a large slice of strudel, which he had never had before. "We found a real nice house in Silver City, further down the road from Pinos Altos and the Gila. It was built up on a hill. You could see the whole town and all the surrounding mountains from the living room window."
"It sounds nice," Shant mumbled.
Weeks later, after Shant had grudgingly decided he wasn’t going to wake up tied to his bed, or re-hooked on some smack, or be starved into making videos until his body gave out, he let Miles give him his first bubble bath. It was the first time anyone had undressed Shant as if there were a human being under his baggy jeans and used t-shirts. It was also the first time his skin didn’t crawl when someone else touched him, Shant was certain of that.
“Brennan, Felix, and I all went to college together,” Miles told him, scrubbing away as if the gesture might erase the various now exposed signs of abuse strewn across Shant’s body. “There was a small state university there in Silver. It wasn't a very good school, but at least we were together. Felix and Brennan became close friends on their own. Brennan always thought Felix secretly wanted to have a ménage-a-twat with us. I couldn’t tell." Shant had stared at the bubbles wafting under him, the bright morning sun reflecting off the foam like diamonds. He felt as if Miles had been telling him a science fiction story.
That was before he couldn’t catch his breath. Or something was caught in his throat. Had Miles sucker-punched him? Was he slipping below the bubbles, into the steaming bath water? Shant’s body shook like a wet leaf, despite Miles’ strong grip on his forearms. Then he screamed out, once, terribly, against his will, making the awfulness trying to claw its way out of his gullet that much more wicked.
A sirocco of tears and tiny shrieks followed, until Shant was all but unconscious. He woke up later that day, neatly tucked into the small but comfortable day bed that had been his since arriving, in what was once the attic of the house and now was fashioned into four tiny bedrooms, private places, with doors that locked from the inside, not out, and shelves of books and records and the kind of hand-me-down gym shoes, t-shirts, loafers, shorts, jeans, sandals, sweatshirts, and sweaters a teenager might wear even if they weren’t penniless or plucked fresh off the street.
He found Brennan and one of the other guys planting a small palm tree next to the front porch. His doting smile all but made Shant tremble. “Hey, Saltwater, how about a hand or two here?”
*
The shabby manor became the first home Shant Nakhararian had ever known, what with being dumped on his violent immigrant peasant father by his vagabond birth mother, then fobbed off on an disinclined uncle, then cast off altogether almost the day his voice broke. At first it was just a terrifying adventure, and then it quickly became simply terrifying and downhill from there. How he made it to what he thought was possibly his seventeenth birthday, Shant didn’t know. He only began to care after Miles and Brennan made him believe they cared, too.
Shant was dumbfounded at the skill and complexity of both his guardian angels’ ability to keep secrets and lies from one another that even more bizarrely all seemed to be confided into him. Most Shant found silly, stuff not worth lying about, except for all the out of the ordinary technical classes Miles was taking instead of the literature stuff everyone thought he was studying, and Brennan’s tremors. More and more, Brennan had motor and memory problems, but somehow hid these whenever Miles was around, which, because of the university, his job there, and the long commute to and from, wasn’t very often, to everyone’s relief at the time.
It got to the point Shant had to help Brennan dress, and eat. Only after they’d visited the nearby clinic for the umpteenth time did the male nurse take Shant aside and explain Brennan’s dire condition: the multiple concussions he had gotten in the attack many years prior were lingering with a vengeance. The specialist Brennan finally got in to see confirmed there were severe internal bleeding issues in his brain that only a chancy surgery could fix, as if they had the money for it in the first place.
Shant hadn’t been to church, any church, in his life, but went to a beautiful tiny Catholic place not too far from the house, steeled only by one of Miles’ modest secrets only recently divulged: though not religious in the sense Shant understood that to be, Miles admitted he believed in the intercession of saints. Something else Miles talked about that Shant had trouble figuring out. But, in that church, Shant tried to talk to a saint, any of them, maybe all of them, not knowing exactly how many of them there were or were not, or which one he should try and call on. He did light a candle and felt good about being able to put a few dollars in the collection box. He was weirded out by the holy water, but crossed his wet fingertips nevertheless, just in case, just to make sure.
He found he couldn’t wait to tell Miles about what he’d done, but suddenly felt trapped by the inevitable ‘Why?’ that would follow. He would keep Brennan’s secret. That was more important than anything he felt.
Worse than living with his birth father, worse than being forsaken by him, even worse than the final heave-ho, Shant watched the ambulance take Brennan away from behind the unlit shrubs of a neighboring home. The other guys watched helplessly from the porch. Miles wasn’t home yet.
The cerebral hemorrhaging killed Brennan before Shant had got to the hospital. But he was there to greet Miles, who just seemed to turn into a waxwork figure while Shant wept uncontrollably.
They took part of his remains to an obscure beach hours north of Los Angeles. The smell of the ocean, the feel of its spray, the warmth of the sun and its brightness on the water, the sound and power of the waves became deafening as they deposited the heavy grained ashes into the surf. Shant pictured Miles and Brennan swimming naked on this very seashore (which they had, once, with their friend Felix, until they all realized how cold the Pacific usually was and ran right back out, Brennan said laughingly, satisfied in being able to say they’d skinny-dipped in the ocean together). Barefoot and shivering, shoulder to shoulder, Miles and Shant began the long walk back toward the small cluster of buildings that made up the remote but alluringly picturesque State Beach's meager facilities, then drove back to the city in worn-out silence.
When Shant woke up in Miles & Brennan’s outsized bed the next morning, Miles had gone. His Dear Shant note read like a cold set of instructions, what to do, who to call, who to trust, where to send one last part of Brennan, when Felix would pick up the rest. Shant did as he was told, and then ran the house for the other few guys all the while, as if he’d been doing it all along.
Shant found the manuscript, along with Miles’ dog-earned and nearly unbound Complete Shakespeare after all the stomach-churning rigmarole was at last behind him. Inside was the personal note from Miles that Shant had longed for.
On pure animal instinct Shant had learnt out on the street
how to hide and safeguard the little boy cowering deep inside him. And, if not cleverly but at least instinctively, Shant had quickly recognized Miles had been doing the same thing. Playing hide-and-seek, even recoiling, not from an unkind world or rotten people but from something deep inside, something Miles himself didn’t know from any of the saints, but something he undeniably felt, germinating within.
Shant slid on one of Brennan’s jock straps - he’d stopped wearing underwear after a trick had once tried to strangle him with his - his first new pair of jeans Miles had bought him for no good reason, and one of Miles’ red White Sox jerseys before heading downstairs to deal with whatever was causing a lot of racket. It was nothing, just squabbling over one of Miles’ many thousand books.
He sat down on the large wrap-around front porch, right where he had slept the first few days at the house, unwilling and downright afraid to go in, huddled in a thick woolen blanket Brennan treated like a magic carpet. The immediate block was always quiet, but the nearby rest of the city was remarkably still. He could even make out a few far-flung stars beyond the orange streetlight vapors.
Shant was certain Miles wasn’t going off to kill himself, even to be with Brennan in the next place. Shant smiled, still a slightly unnatural reflex for him. Miles might go off and kill somebody else, him and that little Beretta of his (which, to Shant’s delight, Miles had once ground into the cheekbone of a rat-like Korean pimp who tried to stop him from taking a boy Shant knew out of his grips).
No. Shant let out a long, audible breath. Miles may have disappeared, but he wasn’t gone. Like he’d read (and re-read almost every night thereafter) in the manuscript, Shant didn’t know if what he felt, could still feel, was love, but he knew he wanted it to be. Not just to prove he actually could love someone or something other than simple survival, but to try and catch up to where Brennan and Miles had been, so inexplicably early, so breathtakingly much, so wonderfully shared with the most desperate and truly alone.
Shant knew the Alone Miles had written about, he knew it agonizingly well. But for the first time in as far as he could remember, perhaps most queerly - or least so - in light of Miles’ vanishing, Shant Nakhararian did not feel alone. That wall had fallen. His love for both Brennan and Miles filled him that hushed night. It stayed with him at the slightly less scruffy manor long after, like a lowered rifle that turned out to be empty in the first place.
“Please, Saint Christopher, watch over Miles. Saint Joseph, help me show his love to the guys here now, to anyone else that might come...”
A small dog scurried out of the darkness right up to the porch, his wide black eyes boring into Shant’s. For weeks, Shant has seen the dog darting in and out of the yards all along the block, but had no idea who if anyone it belonged to. It was a he, and had no collar or tags and looked hungry, coat akimbo, and smelt a bit. Wow, Shant thought, just like I’m sure I had.
“Come on, you.” The dog followed Shant into the house. “Thanks, Saint Francis,” Shant murmured. The dog’s dark eyes floated around him, not quite sure if the warm house was a trap or Heaven. Shant laughed to himself and said aloud, “I know how you feel, little guy.”
* * * F i n * * *
Author Bio
Adam Henry Carrière is an online habitué specializing in letters, publishing design, and instruction. A former NPR broadcaster, he holds a BA in Film & Video from Columbia College and an MA in Professional Writing from the University of Southern California. He has taught writing at both his alma mater and for the United States Navy across the Pacific. Born on the South Side of Chicago, Adam now resides in Las Vegas, where he has won the Nevada Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry. He styles as Verleger / Herausgeber of Nevada’s first online literary magazine, Danse Macabre. He is widely published across the web as well as the author of novels Miles (2012) and Hi's Cool (2013) and the poetry collection Zigeunertänze (2009, 2012). A second poetry collection, The Symphony Shostakovitch Never Wrote, is forthcoming from Bench Press (NZ).
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Catalogue
Zigeunertänze
poetry
Adam Henry Carrière
A Gypsy’s dance and his music are elaborate and fantastical, understood somehow in all the lands he travels. Like Carrière’s collection of poems, ZIGEUNERTÄNZE, the Gypsy bewitches with his sparkling, lively strangeness. And like the Roma, the ostinato of this book is romantic love, sometimes embodied, other times imagined and wished for. Stylistically tense as a well-strung bow, and agile with a turn of phrase, ZIGEUNERTÄNZE runs the scale of human emotions from a place of unspeakable longing that begs articulation.
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Richard, Zombie King
fiction
Robert C.J. Graves
Richard Diemar is under a love spell cast by a beautiful witch who tricks him into murdering his father and brothers. After she refuses to marry him, he flees to a settlement of polygamists, steals the patriarch’s youngest wife, and takes her to New Orleans where a voodoo mambo turns them into zombies. Richard escapes living-death when a snake god shows him how to travel through inner-dimensions found in shadows. He reunites with the witch, whose spell still holds him, when he finds her reincarnated as a giant serpent, and together they set out to build a zombie kingdom. Packed with love, betrayal, dark history, and heady revenge, RICHARD, ZOMBIE KING is full of what readers crave: myth, murder, mayhem, magic, the dead, and, of course, the undead. Laissez les terreurs commencer!
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Spaced
poetry from South Asia
Sheikha A.
SPACED speaks to a time that hasn’t yet forgotten, or forgiven. Each poem is an echo, a voice leveled in tonality, like a sounder that is used to measure the depth of water but in the process causes reverberating ripples all around its space. Author Sheikha A. navigates the philosophies of love and spirituality in search of the aura beating within both. Can adoration be alchemized into new forms of divinity, into images that transcend demarcations into lucidity? SPACED eschews reasoning for feeling, exploring avenues of balance within imagery and patience through the beauty of the precisely-selected word. There is no stillness of heart in this extensive and empathetic collection.
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The Olive Stain and other Stories
fiction & photography
Kristin Fouquet
THE OLIVE STAIN and Other Stories is an illustrated chapbook of fiction from celebrated New Orleans photographer Kristin Fouquet. Each tale is not only a narrative snapshot in the finest traditions of short fiction but features a bespoke visual rendering in monochrome. These distinctive portraitures of the Gothic, the idiosyncratic, and the macabre will transport you to a captivating literary landscape set amid haunting visual panoramas only a denizen of New Orleans could create.
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Ono
poetry from New Zealand
Mercedes Webb-Pullman
ONO is the latest collection from acclaimed New Zealand poet Mercedes Webb-Pullman (LOOKING FOR KEROUAC, AFTER THE DANSE). Devotees of Mercedes’ kaleidoscopic oeuvre will greet this new gathering as an event; lovers of world poetry new to her work will delight in the layers of concentric etymology and passion that infuse Mercedes’ prose. In ONO, indigenous Maori speech is illuminated through the subconscious of the observer, the meditations of the traveller, and the sensuality of the wanderer. Count ONO as a radiant addition to any poetry lover’s bookshelf.
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Death Road
fiction
Robert J. Gregg
DEATH ROAD is both a thriller and a shocker for young and old. Depicted are the political scene on the U.S. side of the Mexican border and the lethal rivalry between the Latinos and the ‘Whites,’ the dirty tricks, the rumors, the fights, rapes, killings, and evilest of all, the indifference. DEATH ROAD is also a story of unusual friendship and love in which
right and wrong interweave, oppose, fight, die - and keep the reader arrested if not shocked. Though so many may perish on so painful and apparently senseless a road, “Life burned on unconsumed.”
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The Middle-Relief Man
fiction
Loretta Carrière
A young Afghan mujahideen arrives in France with a cache of Stinger missiles for sale. A cell of National Security Agency operatives in Paris is being systematically murdered. An American Serb obsessed with becoming a player in the Yugoslav civil war enters the fray, on a collision course with the untested emergency replacement sent to retrieve the secret US position in France. Treachery, cold war enmities, mesmeric nationalism, deeply-held faiths, and the ultimate weapon of sex all intertwine in THE MIDDLE-RELIEF MAN to create a mosaic of old school espionage stripped naked before the advent of history and the eternal rules of the game.
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mango-red leaves
poetry
Fragano Ledgister
MANGO-RED LEAVES is a fulsome collection of poems almost all in formal modes – ballades, sonnets, Chaucerian roundels, villanelles, chants royal – that are marked by reflection, introspection, and occasionally moments of humour, anger, and wit. It is driven by memory and history, the author Fragano Ledgister’s own and the shared histories of the communities to which he belongs and in which he has lived. Through it all, Ledgister seeks to maintain a consistent voice, one that questions rather than hectors, that is amused and not weary. Poetry is not journalism, to be sure, but it can document stories in the same manner. These are Ledgister’s little stories. They are there to fill the interstices of larger narratives, to refresh the places that prose cannot - or will not - reach.
Miles Page 24
