I sneak back to the old mission but see no one. I press my head against the large wooden door. I can hear the deep sounds of echoing voices inside. The door is cracked and I peek inside. The way is clear, so I creep inside. The shadows are the still lords of the narthex and I am their able apprentice. I make my way through unnoticed. There are at least four men, that I can see, they're speaking in hushed tones in corrupt Latin about danger and heresy. Fortunately, they are still searching the far end of the building. I know that I can make it down to my lair without them noticing. I hope they haven't already found the books.
I make my way down and see that the library is still undisturbed. I know I can't stay here any longer. I take off my backpack and dump out my new supplies. I need to free the book. The chain looks heavy, but it is rusted and fragile. I use the end of a mag-light to break the chain. Carefully, I load the volume on the pedestal into my bag. I know that I must leave the library and never come back. I creep back out through the vault door and enter the crypt.
The echoing voices and heavy footsteps splashing on the damp stone floor of the crypt betray the unknown men. They don't know the secrets of this crypt. In the dark corners among the dead, I can still hide. I creep along trying to avoid notice. I just make it to the ladder when one of them spots me. He yells out "Ecce, suus haereticus ille elapsus!" to his compatriots. I scurry up the ladder and run at full speed to the doors of the mission.
I escape the building and rush across the open compound. I don't think I could ever run this fast before. The weight of the heavy books has disappeared and my movements seem to be those of some deadly beast. Before I know it, I'm back to my car.
I remember the pocket knife I carry with me to help prepare meals, when I do eat, or to kill a curious rat invading the library. I pull it out and thrust it into each of the tires of the invaders' SUVs. The men too have now emerged from the mission. I get in my car and pray to the dark forces spoke of in the library's books. I know the forces are watching behind the veil, crackling their broken laughs at the scene before them. I try to start my car, I feel as if my life itself is going into the car through the ignition. And then, by some miracle the car starts. I drive off with the book. In my rear view mirror, I can see a rising column of smoke where the mission was.
It is only now that I start to hear that the book is speaking to me. It is telling me to hide and take it away from the men I saw. I don't know where, or when, the book will let me stop, but I know if I ever slow down, before the book tells me to, I will meet my doom -- be it from the book, the men chasing after me, or my lords beyond.
THE END.
SACRIFICES by Robert Khan Rosenberger
The large fire crackles as it burns the dead and torpid timber setting in the middle of the fireplace. The heat makes me feel as though I’m a child wrapped in a mother’s arms, and for a short time it puts me into a state of alluring apathy. I’m forty five, but the deep lines uncovered by the burning embers reveal an age beyond contemplation.
Every inch of the sagging folds has its own set of faded lines, indentations that cut so deep into the flesh that it makes my visage look sullen and grotesque. This raw reality depresses me. It makes me feel that death is better than life sometimes, especially when my deep yearnings haven’t been satiated. My father, Jonathan Harris, felt the same at the end of his life. He was the founder and CEO of the Harris energy Corporation. I, Shawn Harris, sold it to a man named Derek DeLacey, an entrepreneur who was looking to diversify. I was never good at business. The Supply Curve and Market Equilibrium seemed to me to be incomprehensible gibberish. With the help of the employees, he managed to make it more successful than my father did. Newspapers came sniffing around. The Columbus Dispatch was first. From there, it hit all the newspapers, even before the advent of mass media, and every national publication from The New York Times to The Wall Street Journal wrote articles on its maturation.
He was a decent man, my father. He knew how to work well with the unions and keep the corporation profitable, but my mother was the head of the household, and she ruled it with preciseness and clarity. Regimenting everything, every rule, every function, every little nuance, which would’ve been fine if she wasn’t such a caustic cunt. I can’t remember when she began her dissent, as I like to call it.
When my brother and I were little, she was bearable. This was before she picked up the bottle and used it to cure whatever self-indulgent depression she had. She grew meaner and meaner, each time seemingly trying to top herself. She regarded me with a cold absence.
I was of no consequence to her existence. Mark was, however, but only because he was more of a problem child. Her favorite thing to do was make Mark eat dog food from a bowl when he was upsetting her. She bought it exclusively for this purpose. She said she wasn’t raised with the privilege we had. He would only put little slivers in his mouth so he could barely taste it. This would inevitably upset our mother, destroy her sense of total control, and he would be forced to grab larger and larger chunks. The look on his face was one of disgust as every inch of his self-worth was stripped away, but even this wasn’t enough. She eventually got down on her knees and pressed his face into the food bowl, crying out the words eat it… you worthless little fuck. I must admit that I found a perverse enjoyment in this. The way she said it was funny, always with an upper inflection, always with a discordant screech at the end of every word or cadence. She seemed to be reliving some kind of trauma. Sometimes she wouldn’t let him up. It was as though he was drowning in the wet slop devouring his face.
On one occasion, she even pushed his head down so hard that his four head came up bleeding, deluded only by brownish gelatin. When he started crying, she slapped him in hysteria. Our father observed this many times on many occasions, yet he never did a thing to stop it. It always amazed me that a man so assertive in the business world could sacrifice his strength and be so pathetically passive when dealing with a woman five foot six inches tall.
His timidity at home didn’t anger me too much, but his laissez-faire attitude toward the torture of my brother angered me to the brink of insanity. This abuse continued to the point where Mark wouldn’t even speak when he got home, and whenever he had to speak his voice was low and monotone, almost nonexistent. My mother would smirk. Knowing she was the cause of this made her feel triumphant.
Then, one day, just after his thirteenth birthday, I came home from school and found him lying dead in his bed. He had overdosed on OxyContin. Mark had stolen them from his friend’s mother, a chronic pill addict. She commandeered them from a nurse friend of hers who would steal them from under various names of patients at the hospital where she worked. Mark had smuggled them from her medicine cabinet in plastic bags. No one knew why. He had taken them and committed the act without saying a word to anyone. As the cliché goes Mark was as still as the grave. I wanted to scream, I wanted to disappear, but I couldn’t manage to do either.
I didn’t even want to breathe, as though I thought I might drain what life was left in him with the very sound of my voice. I walked toward him slowly, barely moving even a couple inches. When I reached his bedside, I didn’t have the courage to touch him.
I saw his eyes, however, which were barely open and devoid of any life. I began to shake him. His head went limp on the pillow, making him look like a crude, scarecrow-like copy of my sibling. The once full bags were sitting on the dresser, nearly empty, along with the two empty beers from the refrigerator he used to wash it down. It was then that I ran out of the room and called my father. Still to this day, I don’t remember much after that. I have vague illusions in my head of the ambulance, poison control, and the funeral, but nothing else.
For the next couple of weeks my brain became an asylum that kept my feelings and thoughts locked away. I went about my daily activities as an instinctual beast whose only concern was the necessity of survival. I must admit that I liked this state of being. I felt neither extreme happiness nor extreme loneliness or anger. I just existed, my daily
thoughts only yielding to base purpose. Nevertheless, it didn’t last long and I began to feel again. It all washed over me all at once, feelings of resentment, anger, depression, and guilt.
He had stayed home the day he died, claiming he was sick, and I thought that if I had only stayed after my parents went to work, things would’ve been different.
Then I projected my hatred onto my mother, and when I did, she would beat me while my father watched, but I was fifteen, almost sixteen.
She could do me no harm that I couldn’t take, and during one of these incidences, I gripped the bottom of her face and held her against the wall, keeping my eyes locked on hers. I saw her fear for the first and only time, and I liked every moment of it.
“Stop it, now,” my father demanded without much conviction.
“Now you speak up, really,” I said.
“Shawn, stop this, please?” he said, pleading, but I refused to listen.
“What are you gonna do about it?” I said. He swallowed deeply. I could see the lump in his throat tumbling downward into his stomach.
“Do something,” my mother cried out. “Be a fucking man. Get your son under control!” I glanced over at him. He turned away. I looked back at my mother. She was shaky and subdued, so I let go of her, knowing she would never touch me again. We didn’t talk much after that. We merely lived as strangers forced through circumstance to live in the same dwelling, then, the summer before my senior year, my mother quite her job teaching Social Studies at Waverly High School. Presumably, because she said the kids were not the way they used to be. She claimed they were lazy and disrespectful. The move seemed unlike her. It was abrupt, and her excuse seemed contrived, but my father figured that if she was that unhappy she should find something else.
At the end of the year, when my graduation came around, my father took me to a Reds game. We had fun for the first time in years and we talked all the way home, but when we opened the door, the house was empty and quiet. At first, neither of us noticed. Most of the time she was gone anyway, sometimes the entire weekend, only coming home to shower or change. We both knew she was off with other men. She even had the gull to flirt with them on the phone while he was in the room, and on one occasion, when my brother was still alive, we came home from spending the day at the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium. The house smelled of another man’s cologne, and my father found two used condoms in the bathroom trashcan. They had an argument, a loud one, and she claimed she would never do it again, which really meant never in the house –– where his dignity could openly slashed. From then on, she was gone whenever the chance presented itself. This time, however, her clothes and under garments were missing. My parents’ bedroom was bare compared to its usual description. My father sunk deep inside, cringed, and closed his eyes; as though a part of him always knew this would happen.
“I wonder where she went,” he said in a tone that was strangely disconnected from reality. “Huh, she’ll be back soon.” Days, weeks, and then a whole month past before he received a letter from her. She said she had met a man who owned a series of laundromats in Virginia Beach. His name was Donald Carter. My mother spoke as though she were writing a family member she hadn’t written in ages.
There was a childish wonderment in the tone of her cursive chicken scratches. In the last paragraph, she discussed a divorce. This changed my father forever, it seemed. My mother wrote it like a legal deposition. She didn’t mention me. Not a loss, I assure you. It would take another eight years for my father to pass away, but he was never truly alive after that day. It was also the day I said I’d never marry anyone.
I remained close with my father. We met for dinner at least twice a week, and every single time he would mention something about my mother. It was always a memory, some small but tender moment that happened between them. The memories usually came from his college days. He liked to fixate on that era. I think that was the happiest time for them. It was before they were married, before obligations, and before the birth of my brother and me. If I were younger I might’ve found this hurtful, but being in my twenties I realized that this was his way of lessening the inner yearnings for her presents. Close to the end, he told me he wanted to die. I didn’t know what to do. I just patted him on the back and pretended that I could understand what he was feeling. He passed from cardiac arrest. He always ate too much and was terribly overweight. He was sleeping comfortably in his bed when it happened, which was a succor to my sadness.
At the time, I was taking English courses at Ohio University. The one thing my mother did give to me was a love of the English language. I particularly had an affinity for horror, science fiction, and surrealism, but I read avidly of many different genres. I was a voracious reader growing up. The irony of this, of course, is that the tool I used to escape her madness was the very one she gave to me. I eventually graduated with a Master’s in education only to find out that I was to inherit a company. After selling it, I gave most of the money to my aunt, who was trying to start a school for kids with learning disabilities. I can’t claim this to be an altruistic move on my part. I had plenty of money left over to live beyond comfortably on, but it did make me feel good. After that, I hid away in a one-story house I bought in Destiny, Ohio, writing stories. My father’s house was up for sale, but the housing market was slow, so with the help of a property manager, I rented the house out to a family of four. Only one of my stories sold after three years of trying, but I kept the acceptance letter, just to keep my self-esteem from malfunctioning.
In nineteen ninety eight, I tried finding a job at Piketon Junior high school, but they could only hire me part-time, which was fine because it enabled me to continue my writing. I also found myself having slight panic attacks when I stood in front of them, but I managed to get through it without much stumbling. It wasn’t debilitating. At least I was functioning, and once I got to know them, it progressively became easier.
Then The Lee House reopened as a restaurant. Before then it had been somewhat of a treasure in the small city of Destiny. Hewitt Lee founded it in 1867 as a hotel and hang out for former northern Civil War soldiers looking for a hangout. He also founded the town, claiming it a place of renewal and divine destiny. That’s how the town received its name. Later on, the hotel gained a strong reputation for its friendly staff and top-notch service, and by the 19th century, fueled by newfound economic optimism, people came from everywhere just to stay the night. The sturdiness of its reputation allowed it to survive the First World War, the Great Depression, and World War II. Different owners came and went, but the name stayed the same. Roger Idleman was the man who had recently bought it and turned it into a restaurant, and Damon Bailey was brought in as the manager. Eventually, I began frequenting this restaurant at least three times a week to eat or drink. It really hadn’t changed much from the few times I had been there with my father. It was located about fifteen minutes south of where I lived. The hotel rooms downstairs had been walled over with wood paneling that had peculiar designs etched in expertly. While the upstairs, however, had been converted into a series of VIP rooms. Damon would be walking around and greeting anybody, whether he knew them or not.
He had the uncanny ability of impressing anyone, and he had one of those faces one always believed but didn’t know why. He was a tall black man, fit, and always well dressed.
Sometimes he would work the bar just to show off his chops as a bartender, but he was so charming that his bragging never came off as crass. Then, one night, he came over as I was having a drink at the end of the bar. I was jotting on a small sketchpad because I was having a dry spell when it came to my stories.
“Whatcha writing?” he said.
“I’m keeping track of every moment of my life,” I said jokingly.
“Sounds a bit narcissistic,” he replied.
“Well, so is walkin’ around braggin’ about yourself.”
“Oh, excuse me, I show my work. I have no need of bragging.” This comment made me smirk.
“I write
short stories, so I’ve started carrying a notebook around, just in case I get any ideas.”
“So are you gettin’ one now… in my bar?”
“Perhaps, what’s it to you?”
“Am I gonna get any fucking paycheck or royalties for being the inspiration?” I laughed at this.
“Sure,” I replied. This conversation began a friendship, and it didn’t occur to me until later, but I realized that I never had someone that I could call a friend. I had a bunch of acquaintances that I used to smoke pot with in junior high and high school, and others that I could go drinking with in college, but I had never had anyone that I could talk to about anything that didn’t involve something superficial.
I had always been alone with my thoughts, unable to express them, although I wasn’t lonely. I had just grown accustomed to this. It was what I had always known. We started going to local concerts every weekend, most of the bands played blues or various classic rock covers.
Damon particularly liked the blues, especially if they did any Muddy Waters covers. His favorites were You Can’t Lose What You Never Had and Manish Boy. Four weeks later, he introduced me to his younger sister, Kya. She was a hairdresser working at a local shop in town, and she hoped to own her own one day. At first, I had a hard time talking to her, but her insistence at getting to know me pushed me out of my shell.
We began going out, just she and I, as friends. We usually went to different restaurants and eateries around town. She had a different upbringing then I did. Her family was very working class compared to mine, but she spoke lovingly of her parents, who now lived in Florida. On the fourth night out, she kissed me, and I lit up for the first time.
I felt the kiss deeply, to the point where I was almost in ecstasy. She invited me in, shut the door to her apartment, and slowly removed her clothes, looking vulnerable and open as she did. When she began to remove her panties and jeans, I saw the sharp curves that had been hiding the whole time I had known her. She stood up in front of me, allowing me to see the tiny curls of dark hair layered over her pubis. As I looked upward, the hair thinned out, becoming less coarse, until my eyes reached her stomach, which was lined with darkened stretch marks that didn’t seem to compromise her at all.
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