June 25, 2010

From “Cries of Ice in the Desert” by Julius C. Santos

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Local lore had it that the man buried under the blank tombstone in the oldest section of the city cemetery had wandered into the town square over a hundred years ago, clutching a nugget of gold in one hand. His skin cold to the touch, the man had muttered “ice, ice,” before succumbing to death by frostbite.

The fact that New Mexico only saw large amounts of ice on rare occasions, and that the man had supposedly died in July, precluded any serious acceptance of the story. Yet still it circulated among the bored and ne’er-do-well during the height of summer, with many wondering what riches might be found in deciphering the crazed wanderer’s calling of ice.

One man in particular had hit the town library and historical society in search of proof–Carlos’ father, during a stretch of unemployment in the late 1960’s. There had been plentiful newspaper accounts, many embellished, and a careful survey of the cemetery confirmed that someone or something was indeed buried there. But eyewitness testimony had been hard to come by, and the only clue as to the disposition of the gold supposedly clutched in the dying man’s hand come in the form of a sudden building spree around 1881.

But, for Carlos, that was more than enough.

 

June 23, 2010

From “Sale at Macy’s” by Heny Richard Thoggins

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My office hours tended to attract three kinds of students:

First was the OCD Overachiever. You know the type: straight-A’s since they’ve been getting grades, always going the extra mile to ensure the streak remains unbroken. OCD Overachievers would usually stop by to prove how Committed and Dependable they were, and to establish a rapport with me so I would be less likely to grade them harshly. If I wanted smoke blown up my ass, I’d have been at home with a pack of cigarettes and a short length of hose; nevertheless, they were something of an ego boost.

Next was the Needy Wheedler. They typically needed my signature on something or other, usually something from the athletic department or one of the variety of student offices that managed academic probation or at-risk students. Needy Wheedlers had to get my signature to play polo against State, or to avoid expulsion, or something along those lines. They’d get very nervous if I didn’t sign the forms immidiately, even more so if I began asking questions or musing about what the criteria for judgment were. As long as my John Hancock was on that all-important slip of paper at the end, they didn’t paricularly care–which could be kind of fun as I led them through roundabout conversations and red herrings to claim their prize.

Finally, and most commonly, was the Desperate Bargainer. They typically showed up after a major assignment or test, desperate to dredge up some extra credit or other way to stave off imminent failure. Often, I’d never seen them in class before the assignment was due, and then they were in my office, trying to be my best friend or telling a sob story about how success in my class was the only thing keeping their family off the street and paying for little Jimmy’s insulin.

Macy was a Desperate Bargainer, one of the most desperate I’ve ever seen. It wasn’t until later that I realized what exactly it was underlaying it all.

 

June 19, 2010

From “Ownership” by Gale S. Meyers

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Mack was the kind of person who always walked around in a cloud of cigar smoke–as if the other business he was involved in wasn’t enough, he loved to clench death-sticks between those fat lips of his and give people cancer. I sometimes wondered if he even really smoked at all, or if he just pulled out a cigar, as big around as his fingers and just as brown and weathered, to impress people. A cigar says power, money, influence. A cigar says ‘I’m the kind of guy you don’t screw with–you default on one of my loans, I break your kneecaps and shove this stogie in your crotch.’

None of that would bother me, of course, if I hadn’t been trying to kick the habit myself. Cigars and cigarettes aren’t the same, as any smoke snob will tell you, but that aroma was enough to make me reach for my empty breast pocket, where the cowboy-killers used to be. I rolled a stick of gum up and stuck it where a cig should have gone.

Mack laughed, dredging up a gallon of phlegm from deep inside his stout frame. “Ain’t you gonna light up?” he said. “Them Bubble Yum brand cigs, they sure pack a wallop.”

I laughed too–with Mack, you laughed when he did, whether what he said was funny or not.

“So, anyway, the old prick drops dead. Literally. Right there in his goddamn workshop. His kid found him there the next morning, at the bench, lookin’ like he was asleep.”

“Heart attack?” I asked, trying to sound interested, even though I didn’t know Karol Kazdemu from Joan of Arc. It’s always a tragedy when somebody dies–in the abstract. But if you don’t know ‘em, the most people can muster is a vague sorry feeling before they forget all about it. It doesn’t pay to dwell too much on death anyway.

“Stroke.” Mack gestured at Sunday’s Times, crumpled on his coffee table. “The obituary was very specific–I bet that was his doing.”

“Terrible tragedy,” I replied. “What’s it got to do with us?”

Mack took a fresh drag from his cigar and exhaled, filling the room anew with that sweet, dusky smell. My mouth tightened; God, I wanted a cigarette.

“For most people, yeah, stroke’s a terrible tragedy all right. But not Karol. For him, a stroke means he weaseled his way out of payin’ me back.”

 

June 13, 2010

From “Dusk Comes to Deerton” by James F. Gardiner

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The town was lit with a strange light, the sort that sometimes appears just before a sunset storm. Everything flashed an unhealthy shade of orange, nothing more so than the belfry of the old church.

Even though it’s been all but abandoned when the newer one was built, somehow the sinister twilight had buffed out the cracked and broken facade. It wasn’t a homely visage, or even an imposing one–rather, there was a deep and abiding feel of wrongness about the structure, the exact opposite of what one should feel upon beholding a small-town tabernacle.

Yet Fay had run in there, clear as day, before the light overtook the world, and the belfry had sent clouds of dust through its windows to mark her passage. Who could say what she’d do in her disturbed state?

There was only one way forward: up and after her.

 

June 11, 2010

From “The Goddess in the Woods” by Angela Balment

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“Why do you think everyone is being so cagey? They’re protecting something.”

Kevin waved his arm, but the fever-addled could manage only a feeble swat.

Fiona continued, never breaking her gaze. “This is bigger than you realize. Maybe bigger than you can realize.”

“You…you’re just a fever dream…” Kevin mumbled weakly.

“Who’s that you’re talking to?” Marcia said in the next room. “You need your rest!”

“No. This place, that’s the fever dream. The tortured hallucinations of something we can’t comprehend.” Fiona approached, hand outstretched. “Come with me.”

“No…no,” moaned Kevin. “I’m not listening anymore. Even my own subconscious won’t give me a straight answer.”

Her stare didn’t waver, but Fiona began to grow agitated. “I’m trying to save you, can’t you understand that? What does the truth matter if you can’t understand it?”

“No…”

Marcia entered the room carrying a stack of hot towels. “These’ll have you right as rain soon enough. Who were you talking to?”

“F-Fiona…”

“Well, you’re in a bad state now, but not so bad as to be talking to the dead.”

 

June 4, 2010

From “Precinct Amputation” by Altos Wexan

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“What you don’t understand, my friend, is that the veneer of civility is paper-thin. Easily torn, easily mended, easily discarded.”

Logain squirmed in his chair. “Enough with the ten-dollar words, flatfoot,” he said. “I got rights. I said I’m not tellin’ you nothin’, and you can’t keep me here ‘less I get a lawyer or you get a judge.”

“My, my, we have a constitutional scholar on our hands here, boys!” Detective Richat cried to his fellows, who responded with low chuckles. Richat removed his hat and overcoat; their brass accouterments clanked on the steel table as he laid them down.

“Yeah, not all us west side boys are complete rubes,” Logain said. “Let me go; you can be surprised later.”

One of the officers handed Richat a box from Dulley’s Floral Shoppe on State, which he cradled.

“It may be the thought that counts, but I don’t think you’re my type, detective,” Logain said, batting his lashes.

“I’m going to give you one last chance, my friend, before the veneer is discarded,” said Richat. “What did you do with Mr. Berkeley’s book?”

Logain, in response, slowly and deliberately raised his middle finger.

Richat whipped an M1913 cavalry saber out of the box and severed Logain’s outstretched finger in a single fluid stroke. A dirty rag served to muffle the prisoner’s screams.

 

May 24, 2010

From “Sunset Horizons” by Marina Paal

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“I was in a park at sunset, and…it was amazing. This pillar of clouds, towering over everything…lit in orange, purple, and red with the waxing moon above. It was like something from the cover of a fantasy novel, only I was really seeing it,” said Koay. “The clouds moved and shifted as I watched–I think they might have been thunderheads for a far-off rainstorm–so that by the time the last rays of light were fading it looked like an enormous art deco locomotive, steaming on a celestial track. I was breathless, speechless.”

“Very moving,” said Detective Haines. “But I don’t follow.”

“Do you know what? No one else noticed. They were all absorbed in their little worlds, looking down at the path or listening to their clamshells–insulated from the reality around them.”

“Now that I can believe,” said Haines.

“Yes!” Koay continued. She’d grown flushed while speaking. “It made me realize that we’ve stopped seeing things, stopped noticing–if I hadn’t been there, looking up when I was supposed to be looking down, that glorious display might have gone unseen!”

“Meaning what, exactly?” Haines wasn’t quite sure what Koay was getting at, but the light in her eyes gave him pause.

“I guess that’s when I decided that I need to make people wake up. To make them notice.”

“At any cost?” Haines said warily.

“Maybe so…maybe so.”

 

May 14, 2010

From “Between the Covers” by Harris Raymond

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Lewis jerked back like a puppet on a string. “No! Please! I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

“Start singing. What do you know about the book?” I’d known from the first that he had a little bit of a songbird in him, but hadn’t been expecting Handel’s Messiah.

“He came by here the other day, looking to pawn it. Said it’d be worth a lot of scratch to the right buyer.” Lewis stared straight ahead as he talked, like a deer in the headlights of a ’32 Cadillac. The truth always was a little blinding for his type, though the fact that he was staring down the headlight of my .32 Winchester probably helped.

“And what’d you say?” I asked, though I already knew the answer. A rube like him was happy enough to buy a heater fresh from intensive recruitment for the local undertaking parlors, but didn’t have any use for a book aside from a doorstop. Lewis would’ve torn up a Gutenberg Bible to pack the pages around a 4-cylinder that leaked more than his roof.

“I told him to hit the bricks,” Lewis said. “No money in books.” Clearly, he’d never seen the hollowed-out Tolstoy in my office full of liquor futures.

“Where was he going after you told him to get on the trolley?”

“No idea.” Lewis glanced nervously at the shooting iron in my mitt like it was going to jump on the counter and do a dance. “A…are you a detective?”

I put my hat back on and pulled my collar up. “I’m a librarian,” I said. “And Mr. Salvatori’s book is very overdue.”

 

May 12, 2010

From “Into the Glen” by Zoe Gulliver

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I kept walking. Somehow, being lost among short grasses bending in the afternoon sun and trees undulating in a light breeze was less stressful than it ought to have been. Though wild, the foliage nevertheless had a faint air of maintenance about it, almost like the median strip on a highway.

After twenty minutes, I saw the girl again, sitting on another rock. Given her disinclination to move before, I was surprised to see that she’d somehow gotten ahead of me.

“How did you get here before me?” I demanded.

Still keeping that absurd, almost meditative pose, the girl opened one eye and once again regarded me. “I have not moved from this spot,” she said.

“Then how did you get ahead of me?” I demanded. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Things often don’t,” she replied, closing the eye. “But I’m not surprised to see you again.”

“You don’t exactly seem to be anything to see me again,” I said. “Care to be a little less cryptic for those of us not into transcendental meditation on random rocks?”

She sighed. “The glen won’t let you leave.”

 

May 3, 2010

From “Deep Midnight” by John Sullivan

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In a dark and windswept place, the Lady and the Fighter met. A cool wind was blowing, making the Lady’s silvery cloak and the Fighter’s long black coat as things alive, writhing and twisting.

“What about…him?” the Fighter said. “If he returns, he’ll crush us. I can’t win against him–none of us can.”

‘”He is lost,” crowed the Lady, each word accentuated by a cloud of mist from her lips. “Swallowed by the darkness he created. There’s no more than an echo left, a pathetic little thing.”

“Let me kill him,” the Fighter said. “I’ll make it slow, so when I finally crush his skull, he’ll know…”

“No. You will leave the echo He is already broken. The echo is powerless to act, and is no threat to us. But, more than that, I want him to see our triumph. He sought to destroy us–now he will see us triumphant and simply fade away.” The Lady laughed, silver bells smothered in indigo velvet.

“I still think we’re making a mistake,” said the Fighter.

“Of course. Attacking, grappling, feeling the sour breath of your adversary in your face: that’s you. Far better to act with a subtler touch.” the Lady said. She made a sweeping gesture and rose off the ground, riding the wind like a gossamer thread. “Great things have been set in motion; go and do your part.” She wafted upward, and vanished among the clouds.

“And you do yours,” the Fighter muttered. The ground at his feet became tacky and malleable, and he sank into it. The precipice where the conspirators had met was left barren, as it had always been.

A small figure appeared at the edge, emerging from nothingness as a fuzzy outline before congealing into the form of a small child with dark hair. He stood for a moment, sadly regarding the desolate scene, and then vanished, fading away like a dream upon awakening.

 

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