Issue 3

He pronounced his name, ‘Gee’, like the French name, Guy. That’s what he said when I hired him as a dishwasher. But, he left the plates greasy. And, he kept breaking the glasses as they slipped through his hands. I was ready to fire him, but Gee begged me to let him cook. So, I relented. And, our food acquired an unimaginable richness. Word of mouth spread. Curious, I spied Gee at work in the kitchen. There I discovered his secret as Gee dipped his jaundiced hands into a steaming pot, and his ‘butterfingers’ melted away before my eyes.

To stay safe and free is a constant battle. Wherever I land, wherever I hide, human hands plunge into reeds, rushes, and bushes - thorns or not. To smear pond weed and carrion blood on my golden feathers is of little use - the slightest glint during daylight hours and the hunt starts all over again. Once, I wished treasure-hunting would fall out of fashion, but I fear it never will.

Now, I pray for meteor showers to flood the world with precious metals, to render my plumage as worthless as chocolate coins. Only then may I live in peace and obscurity.

Legacy Bookshop was kaput. For 42 years Sarah maternally operated this quaint literary haven. She saw her baby flourish, albeit modestly. Putting all your eggs in one basket might pay dividends, it seemed. But rapacity had at last intruded upon Sarah's Eden. Her landlord bluntly informed her that he could get $700,000 extra for the space. And he would. MBA vs. MFA once more. Instead of sitting shiva, Sarah performed final inventory. Melancholy ruled until she recorded the sale of Intriguing Young Poets of 1976. Inside this archaic anthology resides "Idyllic Winter" by one Sarah Thomsen. Her legacy shall continue.

The media liked to call it ‘the Boomerang Probe’, whenever they could be nudged into reporting on its progress. More prosaically, the team of scientists and engineers behind its development had named it the Non-Euclidean Curvature Remote Observatory. It was a marvel of twenty-first century technology, designed to cruise through deep space at near light-speed on a long interstellar loop. The aim was to settle the debate over the origin of dark energy once and for all. Everyone expected it to come back laden with novel and exciting scientific discoveries. No-one anticipated that it would return carrying an unwelcome passenger.

Black was slimming; red-and-white stripes, not so much. I guess black would make me look like the Grim Reaper. Not a good look for a hospital volunteer.

“You’re early,” Hunter, the pharmacy supervisor, said, his bearded lips shiny from a half-eaten Wendy’s burger open-faced on the counter.

“Here.” He handed me a package that looked like a bunch of little gray submarines from Battleship. “Separate those, please.”

“Like this?” I tore one off and asked, “Hey, how do people swallow these?”

“Um…what?”

“Are these like horse pills?”

“Uh, no, they’re suppositories.”

I waited.

He blinked. “They go through Door #2.”

On the fifth anniversary of his father’s heroic death in a far-off jungle, a nine-year-old boy pleads and screams as he’s dragged into a tool shed by his drunken stepfather.

On the twenty-fifth anniversary, the boy, reeking of cheap whisky and cigarettes, staggers into his daughter’s bedroom while the young girl cowers against the wall.

On the fifty-eighth anniversary, that girl collapses into her lightless closet, and as her fury-laced glares and impaling shouts become anguished sobs, her teenage daughter sits alone in the bathroom and once again glides the thin, comforting edge of a razor blade across her thigh.

After graduation, I had to buy everything for my first apartment: bed, sheets, plates, desk, and bookcase. Most of my new possessions were from yard sales. At one sale I found a pair of Star Trek mugs emblazoned with the IDIC on one side and “Live Long and Prosper” on the other.

Feeling whimsical, I bought them—although I had no one to drink with. The mugs sat lonely on my shelf a long time.

One morning, I saw her: purple-haired, blue-eyed, and wearing a t-shirt adorned with the Enterprise. I said hi. I think those mugs will get used

Mum pointed at the grass, still lush-green despite the summer.

“Tread softly,” she said. “The dead soldiers lie just under the surface.”

She loved highlighting hidden dangers.

Everything came with a warning, another test for Charlie. Easy on your feet. Mind your position.

“Trust your instincts,” said Dad. “We’re with you.”

Mum and Dad. Here to help.

The wind hushed in Charlie’s ear. Faint voices, still breath in them after so many years.

“Go on.”

Charlie dropped the ball and raised himself onto his toes. He breezed across the grass, gaining speed, flanked by his two defenders.

She found the body fragments when she cleaned the attic. All dried and shriveled up in a wooden box—teeth, hair, nails, umbilical cord. Five sets of each in envelopes, named and dated. She wished it was a memory box, but it wasn’t. She did not have any children.

“Jake! Jake!” She came to wake her husband, who sprawled out on the couch. The place he spent most days now.

“Where’re these from?” She asked.

His dull eyes landed on the box. Unfit. Alcoholic. Abusive. Psych facility. He chugged the rest of the beer. Burped.

“Don’t recall. Where’s my breakfast?”

In this story I let the actress play her part. She is telling a true story. She has her audience crying. But the flowers in her hat are wilted and turning brown and one of her stockings has dropped. She rises expectantly to take her bows, quite startled to see the auditorium has emptied.

There is a second part to this tale. The actress has left town. All of her thespian talents having been disbursed, she now practices ventriloquism in another state to feed her narcissism. She manipulates her puppets with purple strings behind black velvet curtains coated with marshmallows.

Jason had convinced himself he was dating a real girl, until she asked him for a ride to the android factory where she could score an upgrade. She told him she was considerably behind, due to her dataport having a loose wangle. He thought at first she was pranking him, but she pulled back her hair and showed him the dataport. Then she confessed that her nightly hour of meditation was actually a recharging. So, he drove her to the factory and waited in the lobby while she was upgrading. There he met a nice brunette. She seemed real enough.

I sat sobbing on the cold tile floor at my in-laws’ house. Exhausted, I had mistaken familiarity for safety.

“You’re just too emotional. She’ll hate you for it one day,” they said.

My tears kept moving, but I didn’t.

The baby cradled tightly in my arms cooed.

A long life awaited her. So that was our last visit.

Eight years later, my daughter told me she was studying five-lined skinks. “They freeze around predators. And if that doesn’t work, they run away, but they have to leave a piece of themselves behind, like a tail. Can you even imagine that?”

She wakes up early to say goodbye; he’s already gone. She runs to the door, catches a glimpse of his car as he drives away. Her mind takes a picture, processes it, then hangs it in her heart, just a blurry image of him driving out of the frame.

She stands by the door a minute watching a flock of birds that just closed up their summer home take off for somewhere warmer. Maybe they’ll come back. Maybe they won’t. She stares until they disappear into the sun.

She really didn’t want to say goodbye, anyway.

I’d forgotten the airport routine, and the turmoil wasn’t helping at all.

“Do both these bags belong to you?” the agent asked again.

I looked back down the line, but I couldn’t see her.

“Uh, this chick asked me to carry that one for her—the big one.”

“A woman? Can you describe her?”

“Uh, young? Black hair? Said her name was Pandora.”

Frowning seriously now, the agent reached for his phone.

“Sorry,” I apologized. “Sorry!” I looked back again, but the chick just wasn’t there. “Look,” I said, appealing to the agent, “look—why don’t we just open it?”

A package arrived.

“It’s heavy,” my wife exclaimed.

“14 pounds,” I said. It was from Boise, which I hadn’t considered since I’d fired Boise-based Sid long ago.

“A bomb?” my wife asked.

“I wouldn’t think so.” Inside was a decorative vase with a heavily taped lid. After some struggles, the lid burst free. Chalky ash spilled onto our floor.

“There’s a note,” my wife said, brushing ash from her shoes.

I read the note aloud. “Ashes for an ashhole. In life, you were my problem. In death, I’m yours.

“It’s Sid,” I said.

Marjorie grabbed the last jar of Rao’s marinara sauce.

Alexander’s fingers closed around hers, his nails digging deep. Their eyes met across the shopping cart, decades of rivalry crackling between them.

Sauce was required for his binding ritual and her summoning circle.

Neither yielded.

The cataclysmic confrontation—inevitable.

Alexander began his incantation, dark syllables spilling from his lips. Marjorie countered with her own spell, weaving shadows between the aisles. Their magic collided in a violent eruption of energy.

Shoppers fled as reality splintered.

Both wielders lay among scattered groceries, powers spent.

Only the jar of marinara sauce remained.

We stay off the roads and keep to the woods, cutting the brush with machetes.

Old Wilfred falls and dies on the summit. Now we move by dead reckoning, heading the direction he pointed before he died.

Only Wilfred’s friend Ruth keeps us moving along.

We've had a run of bad luck, she says, but every streak has to end.

Later we realize she planned to lie down in the meadow and refuse to go on. She waves us off, her face cleaved by a beatific smile, her hands full of wildflowers, the joy in her eyes impossible to deny.