prose trench

Lament of the SKULL SUZERAIN

2012-02-16T17:31:00.000-08:00

I drag my clammy hands down my face, open my eyes.

The city nightscape glows through the floor-to-ceiling window behind me. I drop my hands onto my desk, polished marble taken from the rubble of Liberty Temple after SKELETRON tore it to the ground. I put in 20 years to get this desk. My wife and I made love on this desk the night I got the promotion.

But now it’s all gone to shit. SKULL FIGHTER is coming and I can’t stop him.

I circle around the desk, tugging the cuffs on my black-and-grey seersucker jacket. I should be sprinting, but that’s fatalism for you. I leave, and in due course I’m in the security room.

--

“It’s the fucking apocalypse out there, sir,” PANOPTICON SKULL tells me, and the monitors behind him assure me he’s telling me the truth. They show us the signs of our enemy’s passing: the frayed, crackling stumps where coaxial turrets once sat, crates smashed for their contents. Bodies, piled like cordwood.

“Where is he?” I ask.

“Level seven, sir,” he says.

I suck in a breath. SKULL FIGHTER’s one floor away. I scan the security feeds with my eyes, trying to find him.

“What have we got left?” I say.

“Some of the surviving ICE SKULLS and FIRE SKULLS are holed up at the top of the funicular for a last stand.” He points, and I see he’s right. They’ve piled up office equipment like sandbags. I can see some of them praying.

“The Caliginossuary didn’t slow him down?” I say.

PANOPTICON SKULL shakes his head. “The cold didn’t slow him down once he’d gotten the Fire Crystal’s power,” he says. “FIRE BRUTE was still alive when SKULL FIGHTER pulled the crystal out of his head.” I see him swallow under his mask, see his eyes flick away for a moment.

“It wasn’t pretty, sir,” he says.

“An awful way to die,” I say. He looks surprised. Everyone knew the FIRE BRUTE and I never got along. He chafed over the cutbacks in his department, but the energy costs for his floor outstripped any other two floors put together. He could either have lava pits 24/7 or new office computers every year like the rest of us.

It didn’t matter now. He was worm food. All the work I’d done to balance the SKELETOWER’s operating expenses, none of it mattered any more.

“There he is, sir,” PANOPTICON SKULL says, pointing at a monitor to the far right.

I see him. SKULL FIGHTER walks with an unhurried swagger, fists balled at his sides, blue cape flaring in a dramatic crest behind his shoulders. He approaches a liveried JANISSARY SKULL at an oblique angle. Those balled fists swing out in wild haymakers, one, two, three. An uppercut knocks the elite defender to the ground. SKULL FIGHTER kicks him while he’s down, savage, rib-snapping stomps.

The cape fools neither of us in the security room. This is no avenging hero, it’s an unchained monster. Unchained, and unstoppable, and coming right for us.

“You can stop him, right, sir?” PANOPTICON SKULL asks.

“What?” I say. I feel light-headed.

“You can stop him? That’s why SKELETRON pays you the big bucks, right?” he says.

“No,” I say. I turn away.

“What? Where are you going?” he says.

“To the top of the funicular,” I say. “It’s our last chance.”

It’s no chance at all. I leave him.

--

We can hear the strain of the funicular’s motors and cables. I commissioned it in happier times, an industrial-size platform for the occasions in which SKELETRON wanted to ascend with the grandeur due to him by his high station.

Now it brings our deaths.

I can see two HEAVY WEAPONS SKULLS blurting bursts of high-caliber bullets down into the approaching funicular. Their shots crunch into ice shields. The bastard got the Ice Crystal too, damn him.

A few FIRE SKULLS send out blasts with their wrist-mounted flamethrowers, but they’ve got nothing yet like the range they need to reach the ice shields. And when they do get close enough, those shields will be the least of their problems.

“Semper SKELETRON,” one of the JANISSARY SKULLS hails me, snapping a salute. His discipline in the face of imminent death stings me to respond.

“Semper SKELETRON,” I say back.

“There are a dozen of us here,” the elite says. “We won’t be able to hold him for long, but we can get you the time you need. What’s the blast radius, sir?”

“Of what?” I say.

He cocks his head. I see his eyebrows knit behind his royal-purple skull mask.

“Of the Tenfold Skull-Removing Mudra,” he says.

That would be the Tenfold Skull-Removing Mudra, the second-highest expression of deadly force known to practitioners of Skulljutsu. The technique that only one in ten thousand can master and the reason I got my promotion to SKULL SUZERAIN.

The technique I can’t do.

“Just... get in close,” I say.

“It’s going to kill all of us, won’t it,” he says, a statement of fact.

Something’s going to kill all of us, anyway. I can see him now, as the funicular looms into view behind us.

“It will be quick,” I say. “SKELETRON will watch over your souls in the Negaverse.”

“I can think of no more fitting end to my service,” he says, thumping his chest with a fist. He turns, with the others, to meet his approaching fate.

They’re all quiet now, all business. The funicular reaches the top. The battle begins.

I run while they die.

--

I thought my service would vindicate the lies. The testimonials from colleagues, old frat buddies of mine. The cleverly-edited video demonstrations, camera footage panning over floppy, de-skulled heads contorted like grimacing pancakes. How insane was it to measure the worth of an administrator by combat skill? What were even the chances that I would have to fight for my life in the very heart of SKELETRON’s empire?

They were pretty good chances, as it turned out.

I’ve barely made it to my office when the door splinters behind me. SKULL FIGHTER finds me cowering behind the desk. He runs, winding up to kick the desk, the marble top, and me, through the window and down into the nightscape.

“Wait!” I cry. “Wait-”

His foot connects and the weight of the desk blasts the air from my lungs. The last thing I hear is the floor-to-ceiling window shatter.

Forgive me, SKELETRON.

For the IndieInk Writing Challenge this week, Fran challenged me with "Almost to the goal, encounter a major roadblock...." and I challenged M. Hunter with "Cyberpunk isn't dead, cyberpunk is a zombie! Take something you did in the past week and reimagine it through the dystopian gaze of William Gibson."

DM's Girlfriend

2012-02-09T17:59:00.001-08:00

“You’ve done well to get this far,” intoned Chad the Dungeon Master, “but you’ve outlived your usefulness.”

Chad’s accent, Percy decided, was the second worst part about this D&D campaign. Chad tried, bless his heart. He was way more into role-playing than roll-playing, and tried to encourage that mentality in his players. Percy could respect that.

The problem, the second-deepest pit in Hell, was Chad’s voice. He only had one stock voice, which he used for every evil character. It sounded like a French cartoon character talking in an Italo-German accent. It ate. It ate so bad. Percy knew that most people who played D&D weren’t professional actors. They were in it for the love of the game. It was okay if they didn’t have the acting range of Mel Blanc.

Except it wasn’t okay. Percy and the other players laughed about this awful, mincing voice behind Chad’s back. They told mean jokes at his expense so they wouldn’t do it to his face. Chad’s group genuinely liked him. They accepted his terrible voice acting untalent as the price of doing business, or they used to.

“All right, initiative time,” Chad said, dropping into his normal baritone. Thank fuck.

Helio rolled high. “Drawing my mace of disruption,” he said, lengthening the ‘i’ into an ‘e.’ "Dumping all my attacks on the wight, Great Cleaves on the skeletons around it when it drops."

Helio knew what he was doing. He played his berserker with the subtlety of a rocket-propelled bus, but he had a sense of where he could splash into an encounter to break it up into manageable bits for the other party members.

Ben’s rogue ran in right behind. Helio broke the line, and Ben took out the high-value targets. They were like Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, if the Mouser wore hornrim glasses and Fafhrd were an overweight Dominican. They almost didn’t need the rest of the party. Percy’s role, more often than not, was to dole out magical heavy support when Helio and Ben over-committed. They got to be the showstealers, and Percy got the comfortable, smug knowledge that his interference-running made their victories possible.

Like just now, for instance. Percy cast Lightning Bolt on one wight, using the wall behind it to bounce the arc into a second wight in the corner of the room. The second wight died outright - Percy’s dice were hot - but the first one survived to come at him. Whatever, Percy thought. He could off-tank the undead monster with Bigby’s Interposing Hand until the two-man wrecking crew chewed their way through the traitorous merchant and his reanimated bodyguard. Then they’d clean up the dregs, shake down the bodies for treasure, and hock it back in town to add to their castle fund.

“Crystal, you’re up,” Chad said.

“Okay,” Crystal said. “Umm...” she picked up a stapled printout. It was her priest’s entire spell list.

This was it. This was the worst fucking part of the whole night, of every game night. Watching Crystal fumble through her spell list carried the existential horror of watching a frail old lady dip trembling, arthritic fingers into her purse to fish out, and carefully write, a check for her groceries.

“Okay,” she said again, pursing her lips.

Percy could see Ben clenching a handful of his pant leg under the table. Helio’s smile dropped into a bland poker mask. Percy fought the urge to snap his mechanical pencil in half. It was like clockwork. Every turn, Crystal would forget everything her character could do. She needed her spells, and basic game mechanics, explained to her every round of combat in every fucking session. They hoped Crystal would leave the game after she broke up with Chad, but that train left the station a long time ago.

So there she was, looking at her spell list, like she did every time, wasting all their time. She was a fucking succubus from hell, the Dungeon Master’s Girlfriend, and she was ruining their campaign.

“This is bullshit,” Percy blurted. Ben and Helio snapped their eyes toward him. Chad just looked startled.

“Dude,” Chad said. “Dude, chill, it’s just a game.”

“Yeah, Percy, it’s just a game,” Crystal said, tucking her blond hair around one of her glossy, black horns.

--

“So how was it?” Crystal asked Percy, on the phone, later.

“Oh my God,” Percy said, “It was 20 minutes of fun packed into four hours. It dragged so much ass.” His shoulders hunched and his feet ate up ground with swift strides. Percy lived within walking distance of Chad’s house, and a nighttime stroll helped him burn off frustration.

“Was I seriously that bad?” Crystal said, laughing.

“I don’t want to be mean, but yes. Yes you were,” Percy said. “Like okay, I get now that this wasn’t really your thing. But it bogged everything down.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry about that,” Crystal said. Percy could hear her blow out a sigh. “But Chad insisted. He took it really seriously, and I wanted to do things together with him. I’m sorry it stank up the game for you guys.”

“Okay,” Percy said, still peevish. He walked past rows of chewy-looking houses and duplexes, crowded on a hill in front of a narrow side street and rented out to college students. He stopped to stretch his back and loosen the angry knot forming between his shoulder blades.

“Why’d you break up with him, anyway?” Percy said.

“It was over a book,” Crystal said, rueful. “Like this Joseph Campbell book. The Hero With A Thousand Faces. It had a bunch of, like, Greek guys on the front cover, and that Star Wars guy.”

“Luke Skywalker,” Percy said. “Jeez, you really put in an effort, didn’t you?”

“What do you mean?” she said.

“We are so not your people,” Percy said. Crystal laughed, but it sounded melancholy to both of them. Dead air filled the line.

“Yeah,” she said, “I guess you aren’t.”

More silence.

“So he wanted me to read this book, and learn about the monomyth and all of this. And I didn’t want to, Percy! It was like a fucking homework assignment. It’s exactly what it was. He wanted me to appreciate his fucking Dungeons and Dragons game, and then he smarted off at me, like he was somehow better than me because he reads all this high-concept stuff and I don’t.” Crystal sighed again. “So then we really got into it. Then he called me, and I quote, a ‘vapid cunt.’ And that’s where I decided, enough.”

“Wow,” was all Percy could manage.

“Yeah, I know. He comes off so sweet, but he has this superiority complex all the way down to his bones. That’s when we started screaming and crying at each other. It was a mess,” she said.

Percy switched ears with his phone. “That’s rough,” he said.

“It was,” she said. He walked through another pause.

“You’re the only one who still talks to me, you know?” Crystal said. “I appreciate that.”

“Yeah,” he said, not really willing to risk saying more.

“Hey,” she said. “What’re your games like without me?”

“You really don’t want to know,” Percy said.

--

It took them a month, but Ben found out what had happened.

“Here’s our problem,” Ben said to Percy and Helio, flipping a book out of his backpack onto a table at the student center.

The Book of Extremely Vile Darkness leered up at them. Done up in the same faux-tome style as the “official” 3.5 edition product line, with a central image of winged demons locked in an act of explicit congress.

“Fucking Open Gaming License,” Helio swore.

Percy frowned. “What the hell, man? I haven’t even heard of this before now.”

“That took some doing,” Ben said. “You remember the Book of Erotic Fantasy?”

“I wish I didn’t,” Percy said.

“Right. Well, after the blow-up with that, and Wizards revoking their license, some of the creators decided to go even more extreme. They went to a vanity publisher and put out the nastiest, stereotypiest D&D supplement conceived by man,” Ben said.

Helio cracked it open. The book had no typesetting. The copy was written, in longhand, around illustrations that looked like they’d been pulled from deviantART.

“This is... mediocre,” Helio said. “Look at it.”

“The original Monster Manual had better tits in it,” Percy said, wrinkling his nose.

“Yeah, but if you sit down and read it, it’s all this labyrinthian shit about summoning things from the lower planes,” Ben said.

“So?” Percy said.

Ben took off his glasses and leveled a stare at his friends.

“So it works,” he said.

--

The three brand-new occultists stared at their handiwork in Percy’s walk-in closet. The pentagram and warding circle glistened on the bottom of an empty Little Caesar’s Hot ‘n’ Ready box.

Ironically, the pizza was Sicilian.

Finding a source of blood took the longest part of the ritual setup. They bandied around ideas like buying feeder mice and thawing them (too gross) or getting a lot of very rare steaks (too expensive), until Helio slashed his forearm with a cracked CD jewel case in a fit of frustration.

“Akkad adua, tefer beyu,” they chanted. Hesitant, not looking at each other, feeling silly.

“Akkad adua, tefer beyu. Akkad adua, tefer beyu...”

They chanted the invocation 13 times 13 times, with Percy keeping score on a steno pad. They stopped, and looked at each other. Helio’s arm was already clotting.

Percy opened his mouth to speak, then the pizza box crumpled. It sucked in on itself, as though a hand had grasped it from below and yanked, or if it were crushed by benthic pressure. The pentacle and circle remained, glistening, over a shivering black pit that had taken the pizza box’s place.

“Name yourselves,” came a voice, a harsh, septic gurgle from the pit. Percy’s first thought was that Chad would kill to have a bad-guy voice so utterly effective.

“We are seekers of truth,” Ben said, reading from the script he’d prepared. “We-”

“Are you a new or returning user?” the voice said.

“What?” Ben said.

“Have you forgotten your password? Please enter your goetic grammaton for a reminder,” it said.

“Look,” Percy said, his voice shaking. “Look, all right? This devil bitch is fucking up our campaign and we need to know what she is so we can get her gone.”

“It’s a name you want? Quid pro quo,” said the pit. “Give me yours first.”

Ben shook his head violently.

“She’s got blonde hair,” Percy pressed on, “which is the fucked up thing because Crystal’s a ginger. And black horns.”

The pit waited in silence for a long moment.

“Horns like a ram’s?” it said.

“No, they’re short and pointed, like the ends of pencils,” Percy said.

“And she gives you this look like she doesn’t know she’s getting under your skin, but she totally is, and knows it,” Helio chimed in.

“She has a tail,” Ben added.

They heard whispers from the pit. A conference, or one voice muttering to itself in many tongues. They couldn’t be sure.

“All right,” it said, at length.

“All right what?” Ben said.

“I’m giving you this one,” the pit said. “The devil Meretrice, called Leanan Sidhe, called Vepar, has your friend in her toil. The human Chad Rose did enter into a pact with Meretrice, granting her half his lifespan so that she would join him in the waking world and render to him his heart’s desire.”

Percy and Helio looked horrified at the idea of this creature cutting their friend’s life expectancy in half.

“Wait,” Ben said. “You’re volunteering this information? What’s the catch?”

“The catch is she’s a huge bitch,” the pit said. “She’s never stopped bragging about taking John Keats. She’s been coasting on cake assignments like your friend Chad, while the rest of us working stiffs have to do grunt work.”

The three young men stared at each other.

“Do you have any idea how hard John Edwards was? Like... any idea? Not difficult-hard. Being around the man, around the politics. It was utter shit. Every time someone called him a ‘kingmaker’ it was like knives. And our guy didn’t even come close,” the pit said.

“Who...” Percy started.

“Mike Gravel,” the pit snapped. “I don’t want to talk about it. Anyway, you’ll be doing me a major personal solid by tripping up Meretrice.”

“But how do we do it?” Ben said.

“You don’t,” the voice said. “Chad has to. He’s still in his 90-day trial period, so he can revoke the contract without penalty. Make him see what he’s dealing with. It shouldn’t be hard.”

“Aren’t you shooting yourselves in the feet with a trial period?” Helio said.

“First, it’s courtesy. We’re not ogres,” the voice said. “Second, I don’t come up there and tell you how to play a stupid game for children, so don’t tell me how to do my job. Third, fuck you.”

The pit closed in on itself. The air pressure in the walk-in closet shifted violently, blowing out the blood pentacle into a fine spray all over the three young men and much of Percy’s wardrobe.

--

“Crystal, you’re up,” Chad said, the soul of patience.

“Actually, umm, I’m going to go to the bathroom. I won’t be long, guys,” Crystal said, eyes too-wide and earnest. She stood from her folding chair and went for the stairs. Helio pulled from his backpack a prayer candle printed with the image of St. Jude. He threw it, like a football, into the small of Crystal’s back. She fell over, ass over teakettle.

“Avaunt, demon!” Ben cried out.

“Guys, what the fuck?” Chad said. “Leave Crystal alone!”

“That fucking isn’t Crystal, Chad,” Percy said. “Look at her!”

Crystal stood up facing them, rubbing the small of her back. She wrinkled her nose at Percy.

“Look who decided to grow a spine,” she said.

“I’m calling game,” Chad said. “We need to deal with this. You guys have been passive aggressive with my girlfriend for weeks now, and I’m getting sick of it. What is the deal here?”

“The deal is she has horns, Chad!” Ben said, stabbing a finger at Crystal. Her hair, dishevelled from her fall, tangled around her horns. She folded her arms.

“She has horns and a tail. And Crystal’s not blonde! That’s not even slightly Crystal, Chad! She’s not even trying!” Ben said.

Chad moved over to Crystal in a show of solidarity. She let him put his hands on her shoulders. Her tail coiled, like a constrictor, around one of his legs.

“People don’t have horns, Chad,” Helio said. “You summoned a demon to stand in for your ex. That is literally what you did.”

“She’s not my ex,” Chad said. “We fight, but everyone fights.”

“You know what else everyone does? Not have fucking horns,” Percy said, pointing at them.

“I think you three need to leave,” Crystal said, snaring Chad’s waist with one arm.

“This isn’t your house, you evil bitch!” Percy said.

Chad scowled. “She’s right. Get out. Get your shit and get out. I’m done with this game.”

Helio surged forward, knocking over his chair, the card table, and thirty dice. Character sheets and Sour Patch Kids flew like rice at a wedding. The physical outburst startled them all, startled them long enough for Helio to grab Chad’s wrists and force his hands to cup Crystal’s horns.

“Horns!” he yelled.

“She likes cosplay,” Chad stammered.

“Horns!” they chorused. Crystal pushed Helio and Chad away, baring her teeth, bright and pointed.

“Her name is Meretrice. You summoned her,” Ben said. “She’s life-draining you to stay here and fuck with our game. She’s making us all miserable.”

Chad stared at Metetrice, who made even less effort than usual to hide her bestial aspect.

“I know,” he said, finally. She looked thunderstruck.

“But I need her. I don’t have anyone else. I fucked up with Crystal, real bad. She was perfect. I need this,” Chad said.

Meretrice floated back to his side, eyes bright and triumphant.

“You need this,” she said in his ear.

“I need you,” he said, crumpling in on himself.

“Good boy,” she purred. “Mine.”

Percy felt sick to his stomach.

“But they’re right,” Chad said.

“Hmm?” Meretrice nuzzled Chad’s throat.

“You’re really... bad at D&D,” Chad said.

She looked up from savoring him. “You wanted Crystal,” she said. “I will be anything you need. I’m everything you need.”

“Okay, well... well, what I need right now is a girlfriend who isn’t shitting up my campaign,” Chad said.

Meretrice opened her mouth. Said nothing, closed it with a click. Chad’s three friends stood silent, utterly out of their league.

“I’m going to be lucky to live past 40 because of our contract,” Chad said. “I... I appreciate what you’re doing, but the least you can do is learn how to play.”

“It’s boring,” Meretrice whined.

“Learn to play or I revoke the contract,” Chad said.

--

“Meretrice? You’re up.”

“Flame strike on the vampire,” the demon said. “Helio can hang on another round without heals.”

It took Helio the longest to adjust to the situation with Chad’s girlfriend. His lapsed Catholic upbringing couldn’t reconcile playing D&D with an actual demon, who he was allowing to suck away at his friend’s life force. Ben seemed more fascinated by her, and after a frosty couple of weeks, started to engage her in conversations about the underworld.

Percy felt strange, because he had started dating Crystal. The real Crystal. Also, he thought it was fucked up that Meretrice played the party’s priest.

For the IndieInk Writing Challenge this week, Carrie challenged me with "write a story where a false memory features prominently" and I challenged Satu Gustafson with "Write about an outsider looking in. It can be depressing shoegazer fiction or an upbeat fish out of water story. Whatever!"

Purge

2012-01-26T16:09:00.000-08:00

Freshman year: I’ve scrawled a saw-toothed gargoyle on my day planner with a 0.7mm mechanical pencil. It takes up all of the space alloted for Thursday, where I was supposed to mark down my homework. My gargoyle spreads big bat wings and flexes the pectorals and abs a boy learns how to draw after years of reading shitty Rob Liefeld comics.

The homeroom teacher, a hatchet-faced Bride of Santorum, goes from desk to desk, checking our planners to make sure we’re using them. Acceptable use wins us approval stamps, which we can trade in for precisely jack shit. Who knows what failure will bring? Probably death. I realize a little too late that a leering, demonic bodybuilder probably won’t win this lady’s love. She’s two desks away, and I have to improve. I draw a word bubble.

“Don’t do drugs,” the gargoyle now says, when she comes by to stamp me.

Art class. This teacher stands six and a half feet tall, nearly bald, Dad-glasses on an oblong head. I think I’ll like him better than my junior high art teacher, a woman who dressed like Phoebe from Friends and smelled like marijuana at all times. We’re at our seats, starting to shade cubes with pieces of charcoal. I really don’t know how this is going to help me draw buff gargoyles.

“You’re in my seat, faggot,” says an upperclassman, a piece of work named Andy. I ignore him because it isn’t the fourth fucking grade. I put more shading on my cube.

Andy yanks the chair out from under me and dumps me on my ass. A few people titter. The big, tall art teacher barks out some kind of warning and then looks back at whatever’s on his own desk. Nothing ever comes of the incident.

--

Sophomore year: The gargoyles hide in the margins of my day planner now. They’re small, stick figures with round heads and jaggy little wings. They’re something to doodle when I’m bored. No more big shelves of pecs and abs at three-quarter profile for this guy. I put most of my juice into my art projects. My favorite was a she-angel, drawn in sequential panels. Left to right, she shed her pinions for bat wings, halo for horns, and some kind of muumuu for slut gear.

It’s not been a great year. After a solid week of torment on the bus ride home, I bloodied a kid’s nose and ate a few days of suspension. I’d taken to carrying sharp rocks in my pockets on the way home, just in case: slumped, wearing the clothes my family picked out for me, backpack drooping and full of horseshit like quadratic equations and sentence diagrams.

Art class. We’re cutting out stencils with X-Acto knives. My hand slips and I gouge the soft skin behind the base of my thumb nail. Dark blood wells out and I yell. This is great comedy for the class. Everyone laughs. I grab the kid next to me by the throat and shake until I’m pulled away. Another few days of suspension.

--

Junior year: No gargoyles now, just crude stick figures or jagged lightning bolts and arabesques. I’ve lost the ability to plot out anything more sophisticated. Usually they crouch or hide in the paper corners, shooting blasts from their claw-hands. I put the most effort into a tableau of me punching another kid in the stomach. He’s a noisome, unloved little fucker with bad rosacea and the kind of gurgly, slurpy voice that would have St. Francis of Assisi reaching for a gun. When the kid opens his mouth, it smacks and sticks like someone peeling open a grilled cheese sandwich.

In the drawing, a geyser of slime shoots from his mouth as I punch him. I’m doing the kid a favor.

Art class. Andy died this year. It was a sudden onset of who fucking cares. I guess I should have been sad, or sad for his little sister, who got a free pity pass from all her teachers. I barely noticed him. There were so many dogs barking now, silencing one had no effect.

My grades drop. I failed art class in junior high, but that was because I blew off every other project to make an elaborate mirror etching for my then-girlfriend. I’ve got no girlfriend now, I’ve just stopped caring about most of the assignments. The second to last thing into which I put actual effort was a painting, arcylics on thick paper. The school janitors threw it away.

The last piece of work was a clay sculpture. Clay was new, a venture into the third dimension. I made a human figure. He was stocky, faceless, no joints on his limbs. It liked working the clay, though, getting my fingers into something real.

“This will shatter in the kiln,” the art teacher said, when I finished.

“What?”

“There’s nowhere for the air to go when you fire it,” he said, taking the figure from me. “It needs a hole to vent air.”

With two fingers, he dug an enormous hole between the model’s legs. The art teacher handed it back to me. My clay man now sported an outsized vulva. But at least now it wouldn’t blow apart in the kiln. I set the figure down.

My shove sent him sprawling over the chair behind him and onto the ground. My classmates let out a surprised blurt and began to jeer. He pushed himself off the floor and I was there, kicking him in the side.

My art teacher shoved me back. Every swallowed retort and bitter piece of staircase wit I’d ever squirreled away tried to come out of my mouth at once. They jumbled into a feral scream and my brain caught on fire.

I dived on the man, drove him back into the ground. The first headbutt jarred the thick glasses from his face. The second and third broke his nose. I jabbed my forearm into his throat and his shouts turned into coughing gasps. His teeth gave way under my fists. I smacked his head against the tile floor, over and over. He was a six and a half foot tall Kitty Genovese and none of the students pulled me off of him. I sobbed and screamed, clawed his shirt until the buttons popped and exposed his flabby, hairy chest. His arms windmilled, trying to pull me off.

I hit him again in the throat. He’s not moving so much, now. I stand up, give him one last kick, and howl like an animal at my terrified classmates. I stalk out of the class and down the hall to the school entrance. I walk at an even pace, spattered with blood, teeth bared. My mind is so quiet. Three blocks down the road, the police finally get me. I see an ambulance speed by.

--

I’m in something called a “Learning Academy.” Adults, security guards and instructors we’re supposed to address as “chiefs,” shuttle us from our cells to our classes. We do math. We watch videos where out-of-touch oldsters dressed like the BK Kids Club teach us how to be decent human beings. There’s a lot of exercise and unvarnished physical labor. The idea, I think, is to make us too tired to be sociopaths.

It’s nighttime, and it is at least dark enough to ignore the co-axial camera in my room. The girl in the next cell over has a crush on the desk attendant, a college kid with tribal tattoos and heavy-gauge piercings. She whispers the most obscene things to him for hours. I’m embarrassed for the poor guy.

It’s all right, though. There’s enough light from the buzzing street lamp outside to make it through my barred window and onto the bed. I’ve got a tear-away notebook and a felt tip pen. It’s quiet in here. It’s all right.

I soak the pages with my art.

For the IndieInk Writing Challenge this week, Michael Webb challenged me with ""I just feel it as it goes. I do whatever I feel is right for me at the time." -Johnny Cash" and I challenged SAM with "A character can't get a joke or some gut bustingly funny image out of their head. But they're at a funeral, or working at a suicide hotline, or some other place where it would be bad form to break down into gales of laughter. What now?"

Crap Poem

2012-01-19T11:03:00.000-08:00

fuck your middle class, contemptible ass reachin for brass rings
grabbin pointless things, suburbanous bling
you’ll do anything to dull the sting of self-awarenuv
I mean -ness, go ahead and confess, you’re nothing but a Big Lots Crassus
sittin high on a pile of denarii until a Parthian guy lets some sky in your asses
you didn’t grok my sasses? take some classes, hell, get a study guide
won’t see no history on your fucking DVD of the blind side
can’t abide these facts with which I pepper you, the only way out now is shameful sepperku
there’s no meter to these verses, but you know the worst is yet to come
this writing’s fucking dumb, a rumbling ramble through syntactic bramble
I’m no poetic Fred Astaire, I’m running out of care, pitstained shirt and white stockings
I’m writer’s blocking, wanna quit this shockingly bad harangue
50 words to go, let’s google “what rhymes with boomerang”

For the IndieInk Writing Challenge this week, The Lime challenged me with "Write a post between 100 and 200 words long that includes the words 'pepper,' 'boomerang,' 'stockings' and 'bling.'" and I challenged MaryBethC with "Write about a good old-fashioned training montage. What's the character striving for and what's keeping them going?".

Horsewise

2012-01-04T19:36:00.000-08:00

Charlie knew the jig was up when his exercise partner stopped talking.

Katie didn’t chatter so much as she felt duty-bound to fill conversational silence. She helped ease the tedium of their 20-minute interval runs at the rec center’s elevated track. Below them, basketball players squeaked their shoes on the courts and shrieked curses at each other. To the side, separated by a glass wall, there worked a yoga class.

They’d finished their run and stepped out of the lanes for cool-down stretching. Charlie, a foot taller than his partner, looked over Katie’s head at the yoga practitioners. He never saw any fat people doing yoga. Maybe they weren’t allowed. Charlie got ready to crack a joke at the expense of the imaginary, excluded fat yogis when he saw his dream girl.

His eyes traced the curve of her downward dog pose to her feet. Her feet! They were perfect. The rest of the world receded from them. This chick had feet like the kind of woman who made hobbits look at World War I through birdbaths on the forest floor. She-

Katie stopped talking. He looked away from the dream girl into Katie’s eyes. Katie reminded Charlie of Violet Beauregard. It was the pageboy cut and round face. She blushed hard, and it made her look even more Violet-ey.

“Hhhhholy shit, Charlie.” Her eyebrows vanished into her bangs.

“What?” Charlie said.

“You happy to see me today?” she said.

Charlie looked down. His grey workout sweat pants did nothing to hide his raging boner.

“Ohgod,” he said. Charlie dropped into the defensive half-squat that every male of the species learns in middle school when their bodies begin to betray them. He looked badly constipated, but at least it baffled the outline of his traitor dick.

“When I tell you I’m fighting with my boyfriend, that doesn’t give you license to... show off your business.” She poked his stomach pooge with a finger. Charlie wanted to drop about 20 pounds, which was entirely the point of their trips to the student rec center.

Katie bulldozed over his mortified silence. “Seriously, it doesn’t mean my relationship’s falling apart every time I vent about Jason. You boys always get this look like, ‘oho, now’s my chance,’ any time-”

“Not you, her,” Charlie said.

“Who?”

“I’m not going to point,” he said, aggrieved. “The one in like... the tight blue thing.”

Katie looked. “Seriously, Charlie? There’s nothing to her. She’s built like Gumby with mosquito bites on the chest.”

“Look at her feet,” Charlie said, unable to keep the awe from his voice. He lifted his eyebrows. They looked like they were drawn onto his face with black permanent marker.

“Her what? What’s so special about her feet?” Katie said.

“Oh God, Katie, they’re perfect. I want to just... fucking put them on a bun and eat them.” Charlie said.

Now Katie’s eyebrows came back to earth and scrunched together.

“Charlie Levert, do you have a foot fetish?” she said.

“No!” Charlie half-turned his pelvis away from Katie and the yoga class behind her.

“You do. You totally do,” Katie said.

Charlie pressed his mouth into a thin line. He looked away. Downstairs, a basketball caromed off the backboard. One of the players let out a blistering curse.

“What, do you want to suck on my toes, Chaaaarlie?” Katie said, laughing. Charlie’s ears turned red and his shoulders pushed together in a way that told her that Charlie did, he absolutely did want to suck her toes. He wanted to suck all the toes.

“Look, I’m sorry, big guy.” She patted one of his arms, having the good grace to look ashamed. “You gonna ask her out?”

Charlie’s caterpillar eyebrows tried to fuse with each other. “God no!” he said.

Katie laughed again. “No. You’re gonna ask her out,” she said. “We just... let’s just, you know. Kind of calm down the situation in your pants.”

“Oh God, Katie, it’s not prehensile. I can’t make my dong do stuff on command,” Charlie said.

“Maybe let’s hang your coat on it,” Katie said. Charlie made a strangled noise of disbelief, but at least the shame was drawing the bloodflow away from his sweat pants.

“I don’t even know her name,” Charlie said.

“What’s that, Charlie? You’ve just developed an interest in yoga? That’s great! I’m so glad for you,” Katie said, shoving him thataway. They caught up while Dream Girl and the others greeted the sun.

Up close, Dream Girl had the ethereal, brainwashy look that yoga practitioners get after lots of practice. Her long face and scrunchied-back blonde hair would have looked horsey on anyone who didn’t take such good care of herself, Charlie thought. But she was lean and graceful.

(Like a horse)

“Shut up,” Charlie muttered to himself.

“Can I help you?” Dream Girl said.

“Yeah, uh. I’m interested in trying out yoga. Apparently.”

Katie snapped a savage kick into the back of Charlie’s leg. He wrenched his pained grimace into what he hoped was an inviting smile.

“Sure,” Dream Girl said, stepping away from the others. “The easiest thing to do is start with a couple rest poses. They don’t look as exciting, but you can feel them work when you sink in.”

“This one is Child’s Pose,” she said, kneeling and then draping her upper body forward onto the ground. “Just give it a shot, and I’ll correct you as you go.”

Charlie looked back at Katie, who watched with folded arms and a Satanic grin, then did his best.

“That’s a good start,” Dream Girl said. She stood up. “You’re tight around the neck and upper back, though.”

“Here,” she said, pressing the ball of her foot between Charlie’s shoulders, forcing him to flatten just a little. She frowned.

“You’re shaking a lot,” Dream Girl said. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” he said, voice warbling, face down. His ears were still bright red. “Do you want to go out?”

“Sure,” Dream Girl said in a no-big-deal voice. Charlie could hear her smile.

“I’m going to put you through the yoga wringer first, though,” she said.

“That’s fair,” Charlie said. He could hear Katie laugh.

“You’re arching back up again,” Dream Girl said. “Let me just...”

Charlie felt her foot and splayed toes on his back again. He wriggled.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” she said.

“I’m great,” Charlie said, glad that Child’s Pose kept his crotch aimed at the floor and out of sight.

For the IndieInk Writing Challenge this week, Aimee challenged me with "If passion were a palpable thing, what would it feel like?" and I challenged Tara Roberts with "It's time to feed the wolf at the door. Maybe it's a pile of bills or some unpleasant, forestalled obligation. Maybe it's an actual hungry wolf!"

My Hero

2011-12-22T16:57:00.000-08:00

Sir Lawrence Teilhard found his captor lying face down on her bed.

The Necromancer-Technician Aconite’s purple satin sheets spilled between bed posts onto the floor. The lady herself was in dishabille, her arms stretched forward as though diving. They were, in fact, stuck in a robe she had put on halfway before giving up. Her feet hung over the foot of the bed. Aconite wore one black stocking and, praise be, her panties.

Teilhard cleared his throat, brushing his mustache with a knuckle.

“Your breakfast is getting cold,” he said.

“Not hungry,” she said into her mattress.

Teilhard set down the polished tray he had been carrying. The toast, loaded with basil and tomato, had gone soggy.

“You haven’t eaten in a day,” Teilhard said. “Your master is concerned.”

Aconite made a noise like “mumph.” The captive paladin pursed his lips. A month ago, Necromancer-Technician Aconite would have taunted him. The Deathless Lord was his master too, now, she would say, thrusting a servant’s broom into his hands and and twirling away with a nasty smile.

“Aren’t you cold?” he said. Aconite growled at him and made little fists with her toes. It was a fair question, he thought. Aconite laired in one of the turrets of the Deathless Lord’s keep. The slate blocks and mortar did nothing to keep out the winter chill. The lich’s living minions took great pains to show the environment did not affect them.

To Teilhard, the keep was a purgatorial shit hole, but he also pretended it didn’t bother him. It was clear, though, that something bothered his captor.

“Something’s bothering you,” he said, stepping forward.

“My dog died,” Aconite said, her voice muffled and warbly.

“When did this happen?” he said. When she didn’t respond, he silently converted the words in the Hymn to Torm into their numerological values, then added them. He was trying to find out if the sum was a prime number when she answered.

“Two yurr mumph,” she said.

“What?” he said.

“My dog died two years ago,” Aconite said.

“Ah,” Teilhard said, scratching his beard. “A long time to mourn a pet. Or is this the anniversary?”

“No,” she said.

“Your master will punish you for dereliction of duty if you remain here,” he said. “Technicians Hemlock and Hellebore have already had to take up your slack in the resurrection pits.”

“What do you care?” she said, rolling over and sitting up. Aconite scowled, beautiful and fey even now. Her fey beauty was blunted somewhat by the robe still draped over her head and tangling her arms, but it was true that Teilhard got a commanding view of her belly.

“If you wanted to split hairs, I care because of the battery of heavy enchantments you’ve used to enforce my servitude.” Teilhard approached to pull down her robe, but she wriggled with such menace that he backed down.

“Fat lot of good it’s done,” she said, pitching back to lie down again.

“I’ve carried out the duties you’ve seen fit to assign me,” Teilhard said.

“But you hate me,” she said. “You absolutely hate me.”

“I don’t hate you,” he said.

“We’re sworn enemies,” she said. “You’d kill me if you had the chance.”

“I did not hate you, even before you enchanted me. I oppose you, that is different,” Teilhard said. “And chances to kill you have been few, ever since you saw fit to beat my holy sword into a plowshare.”

“Why don’t you love me?” she wailed. “I’ve bound you so tight you shouldn’t even know what year it is.”

Teilhard blinked. “This is courtship?”

“No, idiot!” Rage gave Aconite just enough energy to pull her head through her rumpled necromancer’s robe. Her hair, which she styled into glossy, coiled ringlets on better days, frizzed like a red dandelion. She had not removed the black paint from her lips from the night before, and now it streaked down her chin.

“I’m trying to break you,” she said. “You’re supposed to fall for me, and I’m supposed to lead you from your faith into darkness everlasting.”

“It’s not working,” Teilhard said, raising his eyebrows.

“It’s not working!” Aconite agreed. “Why isn’t it working!”

The paladin’s beard hid most of his blush. “I don’t fancy women,” he said.

“WHAT.”

“I don’t... it’s really not your business,” Teilhard said.

“You’re gay? You’re a gay paladin,” she said, digging her nails into her cheeks and forehead. “How does that even work?”

He huffed. “Fairly well, in truth, until you ruined my weapon.”

Aconite barked out a bitter laugh. “I ensorcel the only gay paladin in the entire church of Torm,” she said.

“Actually-”

“No, shut up,” she said. “Just shut up and throw me out the window.”

Teilhard felt the shearing force of Aconite’s command against the terms of the spell under which he labored.

“This isn’t in character for you,” he said.

“It’s the winter,” she said. “I hate winter. I hate stupid paladins who don’t have the good sense to swear their souls to darkness when they’re properly beaten. And how do you know what is and isn’t in character for me? I’ve had you in my toil for like a month.”

“I feel like fits of despair would... compromise your ability to serve your master,” Teilhard said.

“I don’t handle failure well. And it’s the winter. And I thought about my dog the other day. And I don’t want the others to see me, or they’ll start making fun of me. I see the way they look at me. They probably tell jokes about me. They know I’m worthless,” she said, rolling over onto her belly once more.

“You’re not worthless,” Teilhard said, giving her back a cautious pat. “You’re very effective at what you choose to do. You can do anything you set your mind to,” he said.

“Except make you fall,” she sulked.

“Except that,” he agreed.

“I should just kill you. A zombie would do what I say. I could kill you so easy,” Aconite said into her pillow.

“First eat your toast,” Teilhard said.

For the IndieInk WritingChallenge this week, Kurt challenged me with "'Sorrow is like the ocean and sometimes I wish my heart would stop.' - Will Christopher Baer, 'Kiss Me, Judas.'" and I challengedKat with "A character is locked in a bathroom at the worst possible time."

Horst Case Scenario

2011-10-20T11:39:00.000-07:00

Brian had become a brony, and it was worse than his friends could have imagined.

They’d been fooled by Megan, they all had. She seemed harmless enough, a collegiate Mrs. Potato Head stuffed rudely into a frayed Megatokyo shirt. Brian’s friends knew things would change after high school. People experimented, tried new things, sometimes drifted apart. Brian was 18 now, old enough to try animes responsibly.

But Megan, that horrid, lumpen siren, had drawn Brian in past the point of responsibility. The animes became the scummy lenses through which he viewed reality. Brian’s friends started worrying when they caught him taking a bento box to the dining hall, when he started peppering his conversations with words like “oro” and “naw-nee?”

They were worried, but when they found out he was a brony, they were terrified.

A grown man watching a television show about talking girl ponies. It was more than anyone could bear.

“Maybe... he’ll grow out of it,” said Erica, Brian’s junior high sweetheart. Erica was an all-American girl, third-generation Pakistani and the product of a hideous, crushing divorce that molded her into a compulsive cutter and collector of porcelain owls.

“Yeah, maybe,” said Jaydyn, Brian’s best friend and success story. Every one of his personal milestones, clear back to his conception and birth, had taken place in a yellow, single-wide trailer. His work ethic was so poor that, at 16, he found himself fired from a hunting and fishing store because he skipped work to go hunting and fishing. But he turned it around, flexing a formidable talent for math to claw his way to a cumulative C average.

Erica and Jaydyn sat together in the Grothmann Hall dining facility, looking for the lost member of their triumvirate. Jaydyn poked at his lunch, green peas in pudding.

“Remember that year when he was all into Power Rangers? Where he couldn’t, like, stop talking about the redemptive arc of Bulk and Skull?” he said, trying to sound encouraging.

“Don’t remind me,” Erica said. “He wanted me to wear a Rita Repulsa costume for Halloween. With the...” she gestured. “The traffic cone tits and everything.”

“No shit?” Jaydyn barked out a laugh. He always wondered why Lord Zedd was so sad that year. “Is that why you broke it off with him?”

“Well. Well yes,” she said. “I mean-” she made a frustrated noise. “He’s a great kid. Somewhere in there, he’s a great guy. But he just has this... addictive personality. He finds something and it buries his entire self-identity.”

Jaydyn offered a solemn nod. “I tried my best, man. I tried to get him on drugs. You know? Wean him onto something a little bit better for him, but it didn’t take.” He shook his head, smiling. “Though I did get him to drop acid once.”

“No shit?” Erica said.

“He said he was watching Toy Story, and the bit at the end where they’re trying to get on board the moving truck? He thought the toys were yelling at him to come aboard. He kept trying to crawl into the television,” Jaydyn said.

Erica laughed, and Jaydyn had the good grace to blush. “Look, you didn’t hear that from me though. Seriously though... maybe he’s just gonna be like this for a little while,” he said. “It isn’t affecting his grades, so... who’s it hurting?”

The two of them fell silent. They saw Brian enter the dining hall, surrounded by Megan and the rest of her boy-harem. They watched them claim a table, pull out bento boxes in unison, and mash their grinning faces into them, hands free. When they came up for air, their faces were sticky with honeyed oats.

They were eating oats.

“Oh, hell no,” Erica said.

--

The battle for Brian’s soul turned into a holding action, and then into ugly trench warfare. On one side, the forces of normalcy and a reasonable body mass index. On the other... the bronies, implacable and awful.

With increasing desperation, Jaydyn tried to engage his friend with ultimate frisbee, then Modern Warfare, and even Dungeons and Dragons. Once, Erica flashed him. They won no decisive victories, but they could at least arrest Brian’s slide into vice. Or so they thought.

Brian was an only child and a momma’s boy. He called home every Thursday, at least before Megan got her grody claws into him. Brian’s parents expressed concern to Erica and Jaydyn, in a roundabout way, through texts and Facebook messages. Parent Weekend was coming up, and Brian’s friends needed more time. They had to convince Brian’s folks that he was all right, and that they didn’t need to see him until Thanksgiving break.

The brony podcasts were going to make that hard. To their mounting horror, Brian’s friends discovered he had been uploading videos to Youtube, 10-minute-long screeds of earnest discussion about something called a “Pinkie Pie.” If Brian’s folks caught wind of this, nothing would be off the table. They could pull him out of school, have him committed. Maybe even killed.

The Wednesday night before Parent Weekend, Brian and Erica hit on a solution. Strung out on energy smoothees and subsidized pizza-by-the-slice from the student union, Erica remembered reading about ELIZA, the grandmother of modern chat bots, a program created in 1964 to mimic a psychologist’s reflective listening technique. Maybe they could use a chat bot like ELIZA to simulate Brian, or at least a normal enough Brian to buffalo his mom and dad.

An hour of trawling Google for freeware programs turned up some disappointing dead ends. They didn’t have the knowhow to make a speech-to-text converter play ball with a chat bot equipped with text-to-speech. And besides, Microsoft Sam’s bland, blatting voice was nowhere near Brian’s excitable tenor.

In the end, Erica called on her brother Ravinder to fill in the technical gaps. Ravi was hesitant to get on board, but his sister cemented his commitment when she threatened to tell his father about the quarter sleeve tribal tattoo he had picked up over the fall. All they needed was Brian’s voice... and the podcasts proved to be grist for that loathesome mill.

The three students broke into Brian’s room that night, installed the necessary programs on his computer, and sectioned apart 40 minutes worth of Brian’s podcasts to build the chat bot’s vocabulary. Brian himself did not come back to discover their work; he was over in Megan’s room, sinking deeper into unspeakble brony iniquity.

Thursday came. Jaydyn, Erica and her brother still had uncontested control of Brian’s room.

The phone rang. Erica held the receiver, Jaydyn crammed a computer speaker and a stand mic against the phone, and Ravi manned the keyboard.

Click.

“Good evening, internet-”

“Brian!” It was his mother. “How’s my favorite son?”

“I’m. Doing. -have a great show for you tonight-”

Erica bit her lip, looked over at Ravi. Her brother shrugged, clattering at the keyboard.

“Your father and I have been talking about Parent Weekend,” Brian’s mother said. “We could catch the game on Saturday and take you out to eat, our treat.”

“I’m really looking forward to the new season of- Power. of friendship.”

“Yeah, I think the new coach is going to take us all the way to the... what?”

“I’m really looking forward to the n-”

Ravi hammered the keys.

“-Pinkie Pie.”

“Are you all right, Bri?” his mother sounded worried. Jaydyn could feel a drop of sweat crawl down his armpit.

“Pinkie Pie is the greatest.”

“Is... Pinkie Pie a girl?”

“I love Pinkie Pie. I wish I could put m-”

“Why didn’t you tell us you have a new girlfriend! Oh, I hope things aren’t awkward with you and Erica.”

“She is- Friendship conquers all-”

Brian’s mother blew out a sigh of relief. “Oh, thank goodness. I didn’t want there to be any bad blood there. Do you want us to hold off on coming down? We don’t want to embarrass you in front of... uh, Pinkie Pie?”

“Pinkie Pie is the greatest.”

“Well, all right... so how is school going?”

The door clicked open. Brian walked inside, wearing a shirt with Pony Princess Celestia cast in the style of Shepard Fairey’s Obama campaign poster. Jaydyn made a throat-cutting motion to Ravi, who pushed more buttons.

“Signing off until next week, see you in Equestria, fellow bronies-”

Erica jammed the phone back on the receiver. Brian stared at them, agog.

“What in the actual hell are you three doing in my room, on my computer?” he demanded.

There was a moment of awful silence. Ravi and Jaydyn looked at Erica.

“Quick, run!” she told them. They scrabbled to their feet and bum rushed the door.

“What-” Brian started.

Panicking, Erica lifted her shirt to flash him.

“Kapow!” she yelled.

For the Indie Ink Writing Challenge this week, andrea challenged me with "A character is talking to an automated message system but somehow the conversation makes sense so the character doesn't realize it," and I challenged Debra Elliott with "a daring plan to save the print news industry."

The Doctor, The Tailor, The Clown and The Sailor

2011-10-13T16:10:00.000-07:00

The shadow came for the fat man around three in the morning.

Kevin Vogt knew it was coming, but the knowing didn’t help. He sucked in great gulps of air, his sweat soaking into the memory foam mattress. The dread came slow, crawling up like pipe organ music in minor key. He felt pressure, like hands or snakes.

He saw the shadow.

It swam in the corner of his eye. Vogt could never look directly at it, but he felt its gaze on him. It loomed beside the bed, the moonlight showing the hard edges of a mouth full of flat, grinding peg-teeth. The mouth opened, and Vogt whimpered.

The shadow’s mouth widened beyond the limits of reason and the borders of its face. It leaned over, planting an arm on the bed by his love handle. Vogt’s whimper rose to an ochone wail. He waited for the words, and they came, low and awful -

- Vogt was on his feet, every muscle racehorse-taut. He slapped at the touch-activated lamp one time too many, flicking the light through its brightness presets and then back off. Another slap, back on again, and he was alone in his bedroom. He felt tears and snot on his face. He felt a fist tighten around his heart.

“Not again,” he said, pulling a bottle of nitroglycerin tablets from his nightstand. He choked one down and scrambled for his Blackberry. There it was, in the concave outline of his body pressed into the foam mattress. He’d fallen asleep on it. He jabbed four buttons on his phone and waited. The fist around his heart squeezed, dug in its nails.

“911, where is your emergency?” said the phone, a woman’s voice with a Midwestern drawl.

“77 Monument Drive in Jefferson,” Vogt said. “I’m having chest pains, and Ive taken one nitro already-”

“The village or Jefferson Town?” the dispatcher said.

“The village!” Vogt said.

“Do you have any trouble breathing?” she said.

“Some,” he said. “I’ve got a positive history,” he added. At age 41 and clocking in at 380 pounds, this wasn’t Vogt’s first time to the heart attack rodeo.

“Is this Kevin Vogt?” she said. He answered.

“All right, Mr. Vogt, stay calm, we’re going to send you help,” she said.

“Thank you,” Vogt said, and hung up.

Last time, the Jefferson Rescue Squad’s ambulance took five minutes to get to his house, and that was in the heart of Wisconsin winter. Vogt took the time to wrestle on a pair of pants, not looking back at the wide crater his fat ass had dug into the memory foam after only a few hours. He wasn’t going to get any more sleep tonight, he knew.

“Fuck it all,” he rasped, “I’m going to miss the board meeting.” He could already hear the sirens.

--

Several days and a trip to the hospital later, Vogt sat on an exam table, mostly naked. The disposable paper crinkled underneath him. He was glad he couldn’t see his reflection right now.

“Christ, Kevin, you look like a melted candle,” his doctor said. “This is your second cardiac event. What’s going to wake you up?”

Dr. Michael Kinderknecht lifted his chin, one of his many little special ways to get people to rise to his bait. He had about 10 years on Vogt and looked like he’d spent each of them inside a kiln. Bald, dried out and brusque, Kinderknecht kept his clientele because it was too expensive to drive 40 miles south to Milwaukee for a friendlier GP.

Vogt stayed quiet, not that it helped him. “You’re here because of choices you made, Kevin. There’s no genetic predisposition here, no blaming your upbringing. You’re old enough to know what you’re doing to yourself, and you keep doing it. For God’s sake, why?”

Kinderknecht paused again. “I didn’t vote for you, you know.”

Vogt snorted. “As long as I’ve known you, I’ve never heard of you saying a kind word about anyone, Mike. Why start now?”

Kinderknecht smiled, pulling one cheek tight to show an uneven slash of bleached teeth. “Show me someone worth endorsing. This whole area’s full of contemptible people, Kevin. ugly people and their cornfed children in ugly little condos.”

“You’re happy enough taking their money,” Vogt said.

“Someone has to,” the doctor said. “They’ve got more of it than they have sense.” Kinderknecht turned around to scribble in Vogt’s patient file. “Listen, I’m going to refer you to a physical therapist in Menomonee Falls. I’ve seen her trim down land whales bigger than you. She’ll get the job done if you work with her. It’ll be unpleasant, but so’s dying before your boy goes to college. Can you make it down there in your oh-so-busy schedule?”

Vogt didn’t answer. Kinderknecht turned around. The doctor’s nasty smile fell away when he saw his patient was white from fear.

“It’s just exercise, Kevin,” Kinderknecht said, too surprised to throw much venom into the barb.

“No, it... I don’t know. I had a bad dream, right before the heart attack. I thought I saw someone by my bed. I had to turn on my light,” Vogt said.

“That’s very interesting. Anything else to it?” Kinderknecht said.

“It was like I was awake. But everything felt so strange. It was the worst feeling. I just... I had to get the light on. Once I did, my chest started hurting,” Vogt said.

The doctor frowned. “That sounds a lot like night terrors. Not good, Kevin. I sent you to a sleep specialist for your apnea this spring. Were you at least wearing your CPAP mask?”

Vogt shook his head. “That’s for old people, Mike. I just need to lose this weight, and I’ll be fine.”

Kinderknecht tutted and slashed more scribbles into Vogt’s file. “I’m going to insist. I’m sending you back to the specialist. If your sleep’s so bad that it’s triggering night terrors, and those night terrors are triggering cardiac events... you do the math, Kevin.”

--

Vogt never imagined he’d enjoy walking to work. It was midsummer, the cruelest time of the year to be a fat man, but it was also six in the morning - well before doorknobs and blacktop radiated searing heat and the air got too hot and thick to breathe. The flat land, just south of Wisconsin’s moraines, made for easy walking, and it only took fifteen minutes to get from home to Captain Kevin’s Boating Essentials.

He served on the Jefferson Village Board. The public voted for him but he hated it when they looked at him. He hated his shuffling, penguin walk. He hated the strained, wet noise of his breathing, even at rest. He hadn’t seen his own penis in at least two decades.

But this early, no one else was up to see, except early-bird health nuts out for the morning jog. They smiled and waved to him with the enthusiasm people usually reserve for babies who clear developmental hurdles.

They were about the only people happy to see him. The village board had voted to gouge holes in a 30-foot-high berm that ran the length of Highway H. The property owner, James Kelly, put it up for privacy and to flex the muscles of his landscaping business. The residents at Cantobre Court, a condo development across the street, hated it because the berm deflected rainwater over to their side of the road, where it flooded their basements during the wet season.

Vogt wanted to hold off, for a host of reasons but mainly because he wasn’t sure about the legality of the village digging around on private property. He could have deadlocked the vote, but he had spent that evening in the hospital, wired to a heart monitor and an O₂ tank.

So now Kelly was furious. The Cantobre Court developers were furious at the drubbing they’d taken from the newspaper. The residents were furious that it took two years for them to get resolution.

Whatever, Vogt thought. The village would probably eat a lawsuit, but the sun kept rising in the morning and the condo’s sump pumps would stop begging for mercy. The developers were stupid for digging basements into marsh land, anyway.

The walking gave Vogt time to order his thoughts, to stop getting lost “in the thick of thin things,” as he’d read once in a Stephen Covey book. If given the choice, he’d vastly prefer to take his little yacht out onto Lake Michigan, but the morning walks were giving him a reason to appreciate the terrestrial outdoors, too. His sleep had even improved. He’d had no waking nightmares since his trip to the emergency room.

He rounded the corner of Monument Drive onto the sidewalk of Main Street. Vogt smiled. He could get used to this.

Then he saw the cat, lying on its side at the base of the street sign. It was a red ruin, skinned and nearly bloodless, already glutted with flies and ants. Its exposed teeth grinned up at Scott. Crawling things swarmed its eyes.

--

Animal cruelty is a felony in Wisconsin, but it took weeks for police to catch Kelly. Regional news seized right away on the string of gruesome discoveries, but the people of Jefferson didn’t much care about stray cats. When pets started to die, the villagers took notice. When the village mayor found his Labrador’s flayed corpse, he drove to the police chief’s home and shrieked at the man for two hours. The investigation picked up after that.

Jefferson’s police department canvassed the village while deputies checked the outlying areas. But they didn’t catch Kelly in time to save Bill Van Der Meer’s life. Police found him done to death like the strays, flayed and drained. Twenty-two years old, Van Der Meer was the son of Walton Van Der Meer, who sat on the village board.

Bill Van Der Meer had lived in Cantobre Court.

The police obtained a warrant for Kelly’s arrest immediately after forensics investigators found his fingerprints in the gore. Fifteen minutes later, they surrounded Kelly’s property, tracked him to his storage shed, tasered him and drove him off to the regional jail. They found traces of Van Der Meer’s blood gummed in tanner’s tools and a sewing machine in his basement.

They couldn’t find the skins.

--

Vogt got a call a few days after the arrest. It wasn’t his weekend to spend with his boy, so he spent it resting his bulk in a recliner and watching recorded episodes of “Deadliest Catch.” Vogt wiped popcorn butter off his hands and picked up the phone.

“Hello?” he said.

“Kevin, I think you should head out of Jefferson for a while.” It was Kinderknecht. The phone lent the doctor’s already-flinty voice a jagged edge.

“The.... what happened to Walt’s boy,” Vogt said. “We’re all stunned, but I’ve still got to do my job.”

“Listen, Kevin, I, uh.” Vogt heard the doctor make an inarticulate noise. The dried out old bastard sounded shaken, and that made Vogt sit up as much as his gut would allow.

“You remember back in June when you had your heart attack and the night terrors? Listen. Uh. There were other people in the village who’d had night terrors, too. It’s been an ongoing thing,” Kinderknecht said. “It started about two years ago, and I’d been getting more and more cases. But your attack was the last one. If my patients have been having night terrors since, they haven’t been telling me.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” Vogt said.

“Patient confidentiality, dummkopf,” Kinderknecht said.

“You don’t have any problem breaking that confidentiality now,” Vogt said.

The doctor huffed over the phone. “Just take the warning, Kevin. Get out of Jefferson. I’m taking an extended vacation. Something’s not right.”

“You think? Did the murder give it away, or the mutilated animals?” Vogt said.

“I had the dream too,” Kinderknecht blurted. “Just last night.”

There was no sound but Vogt’s breathing and the drone of the television.

“What did you say?” he said.

“I had all the classic symptoms, Kevin. My wife said I was wide awake and gasping. I didn’t recognize her. And there was the... it looked like a shadow man.”

Vogt went quiet. The doctor’s voice rasped out of the phone like a necromancer’s spell. “I don’t remember much but its mouth. It was red all around like Ronald McDonald, but its teeth were huge. Like cow teeth. And it said to me...”

Michael Kinderknecht said the words. Vogt hung up and threw the phone across the living room with a shriek.

--

The fat man got one more call at midnight.

“You’ve got no clue what you’ve set in motion, you stupid, fat fuck,” said the voice on the other end.

Vogt cringed in his bed. It was James Kelly, the murderer. The last he’d heard Kelly, the man was an old buffoon, airy and incapable to come to a point. Now his voice dripped with acid and fear.

“The Cantobre development disturbed its barrow. The swamp water kept its belly full in the summer, and the cold keeps it frozen in the winter. The berm was the only thing I could do, until you idiots tore it apart,” Kelly said.

“Where do you get off calling me, Jim? You’re sick in the head!” Vogt said. He heaved his way to a sitting position, grunting over the phone.

“I get my phone call. I saved it just for you. If you had just delayed the vote, I wouldn’t have had to kill Walt’s boy. It would still be asleep,” Kelly said.

“What would still be asleep?” Vogt said.

“The cannibal corpse. The wendigo!” Kelly screamed the last word and Vogt’s blood turned to ice water. “The skins kept it happy for a little while and Bill’s blood even put it to sleep for a while, but now-”

Vogt heard the sound of a struggle, a prison guard wrestling with Kelly, who wailed something the phone didn’t catch. The line clicked dead.

--

Vogt tugged on a Badgers jacket, puffing for breath. He had stuffed his CPAP device under one arm. He didn’t know where he was going, but his animal hindbrain screamed at him to get out of the house. He paced around the living room in the dark, cursing to himself, looking for the car keys. He saw them glint in moonlight. He’d knocked them onto the floor.

The fat man bent down onto his hands and knees, feeling his pre-arthritic joints pop and grind in protest. With a grunt, he seized the keys. He braced his hands on the table to pull himself back up.

The wendigo was there.

The darkness mercifully obscured the details of its ragged cloak. It was chalk-pale, wizened. Red gore surrounded its mouth like circus paint. It opened its mouth. The teeth were worse in person. Vogt’s heart lurched as he heard the words, the words

CAN YOU MAKE IT TO THE LIGHT BEFORE I EAT YOU?

For the Indie Ink Writing Challenge this week, Dili challenged me with "The doctor, the tailor, the clown and the sailor..." and I challenged Debra Elliott with "The Great McGuffin has been destroyed and with it, the Dark Lord's power has been vanquished forever. Now what happens?"

2011-09-28T15:22:00.001-07:00

Six Christmases ago, for a newspaper story, I sat in on the last sermon of the world’s saddest church.

Picture a little white church at the bottom of a hill, right next to the train tracks. It had a gravel parking area and a tidy graveyard, though who knows how tidy those graves are now. A century ago, the local mining camp built it. Then the mine died. Then all the big donors died.

Then the church died.

I went there a few times when I was little. I remember Halloween parties, grape juice and building the Tower of Babel out of popsicle sticks, which I guess showed us how God punished popsicles for their hubris by making them different flavors. I remember one guy who went there, who was either a gangly teen or a young adult at the time. He was autistic and his breath smelled like shit. The actual smell of turds would waft out of his mouth.

Then I turned into a gangly teen myself and stopped going. And so did everyone else. When I came back for this story, I saw a plaque on the wall that boasted a record attendance of 119 or so. I did a head count in the sanctuary. On Christmas 2005, I think 19 people showed up for the last sermon.

It really should be a bittersweet memory, because I talked to some cheery old ladies who were proud of what they’d done in and for the little church, and were proud to carry those memories to new congregations. The thing that sticks out in my mind most is this, I don’t know, sketch for the kids, in the middle of the last sermon.

One of the congregation, this woman in her 60s wearing a petunia-colored sweat suit, came up and started talking about what was important about Christmas. (spoiler: not the presents.) Only she was talking about gold and jewels for some reason. She had this forced levity you only hear from estranged family members and divorcees, where if you put on a happy face then everything is okay.

It was the most horrible fucking thing. This woman couldn’t relate to the kids in front of her, these sullen hunter’s kids with buzzcuts who may have been named Hunter for all I know. It was like watching a mother try to play board games with her disinterested, cynical step-children. It was like the Chris Benoit tribute episode of Monday Night RAW where this gimmick wrestler who pretended to be a retard with a fucking toy horse or something flopped around while everyone else was too busy being devastated and heartbroken over Benoit’s double-murder-suicide.

This lady was trying to reach out the only way she knew how. I don’t know if she was aware of the generational disconnect or the way her upbeat tone jangled against a background of stifled sobs and burning tears. It goes without saying, that Christmas sucked.

Sometimes (constantly) I feel like I’m stepping into this lady’s shoes. I used to be a print news journalist. Recently a human resources lady shot me down from a job I know I can do because I have no “social media” experience. My body of work means jack shit because it’s not in the form of 140-character hiccups buttressing a bit.ly link. I’m old enough that I can’t go back to college without crippling myself with debt for the rest of my life.

I’ve looked at how to master this social media horseshit and the best advice boils down to either “be famous” or “have a famous website.” Or if you’re MinecraftChick, post 60 videos of yourself playing a video game badly with a picture-in-picture frame of yourself maundering on about narcissistic drivel. Oh yes, I jelly. She has fifteen thousand followers on Twitter.

So I feel like the clock is ticking and I’m too stupid to open the few remaining doors available to me. I’m going to go through the motions but I think I’ll spare you the chirping, forced levity. I’ll put on a happy face when and if I’m happy. Don’t hold your fucking breath on that count.