And oh it was hot. Hot like Old Testament Lot, all mad/sad that his wife wanted to watch her friends go to ash. But what the hell was I doing there, then? Same exact thing. Only I didn’t care which one of us got to see the other go, didn’t matter if it was Helen or me. One of us would be cinder and the other salt. Here there was no skin-of-his-teeth, “wasn’t my fault,” Sodomite. And, anyway, Helen and I were not married.

I had been dating this girl who looked like a living Modigliani. The stretched limbs and dead eyes that are – as static modernist art – the pulse of surface beauty. But find someone who looks like this for real and it is not nice to gaze upon. I didn’t even like her for “who she was,” for, whatever that might have entailed, Helen was a creature who infatuated me because of her untranslatable nature, her put-off presence, her lines and planes. After our third date I knew she felt the same way about me. And now we had been seeing each other for three months and we kept meeting up for dates – never breaking them, I mean. Helen needs glasses and never wears them, so in her eyes I come off like one of Francis Bacon’s guilty men: red and pink and then too white, when I laugh I become all mouth, bragging about gums and no good can come out of me. 

I gave up on the window, got out of the car and found my way to my seat in the third row.  Helen’s always late. There is no one else who looks like me. So, I was thinking: if she gets here then no problem. Her eyes will adjust over the seats and she’ll find me. Or she won’t show up and she’ll have beaten me at this. Our relationship was this tight Rock, Paper, Scissors-thing that became evermore steeped in the stress of how used to each other we were getting. It had always been clear in our silence how we would end. One of us would stand the other one up, and this crowning act of negligence – no matter how much we’d spoken to each other on the phone or written postcards, smiled to our families whenever we mentioned who we were seeing, what we did on our evenings out – would end it. And, like I said, we had never broken a date.  

Every Thursday night the In-Joke shows two short local films before the main feature.  As I waited for Helen I watched a carnival movie. Seventeen minutes in and it still looked like there would be no fun, not even that rank howl of the dark carnival time. Although, I did feel the pain of sweaty things: there was a jar of some amniotic-looking fluid sitting atop a rotten workbench, there was a lot of sawdust, and the score was a very drunken sounding harpsichord. 

If the flick didn’t keep flashing the words CARNIVAL, I would have forgotten what I was watching. I was thinking that this was my chance; this was the sheer space I needed to make my exit. Like: Well, I was getting sick just waiting for you to show, these student films are all so painful. Why do you get to be late? This is wrong. I’m out of here, babe. But the picture ended and I let go of my tension as the commercials came on. BUY A SODA, the words so red that you felt thirst; and a child of – I was guessing – eleven holding a chocolate bar to her lips and not smiling, really looking bored, like she didn’t need this chocolate, or like she was so used to eating chocolate that it did nothing for her. I was calm now, not wanting to ever drink a soda or eat a chocolate bar again. And now the second film. A horror movie, a black and white thing called Wrist. Aptly named and well paced. This guy gets off his convenience store job, and on his walk home nearly trips over something sticking out of the ground. He looks down and it is this finger bone. There is a thirty second camera swim around the porous object, and heaven music – synthetic organ and wash out-waves that warmed my neck, made me smile. Cut to the guy trying to dig it up. His fingers rubbing out the soft earth around the bone. We see his wrists working like he’s untying someone that needs clock-stop rescuing. There is no music when he does this, but the pant and gasp of our hero’s determination. Now the hand bones are exposed.  And again: thirty seconds of a camera inspection, that same alcohol soaked cotton balls, then rubbed along the spine-music. He keeps on digging and we go down the wrist bone. Four inches down – the work, so easy – the guy starts to pull at the ossified appendage; handshake grip like his wrists and dead wrist have always been buddies. And he yanks the arm out, too far but the bone won’t stop. How long can this go on? When the guy sees that the single bone has revealed itself to be as long as a short leg, he takes a breather. Then slowly starts the inevitable pull again.  He is cautious now, not panting. In the corner of the screen the sky is changing, the sun is coming up. The screen goes to black. The film is over. I’m glad I saw it, but wish I could forget every moment. 

And this was my cue to leave. If I wanted to be the guy who cut it close but in the end bailed, I had to get up right then before Helen showed. There are never any trailers before the main feature. And I was sitting in the dark. I could hear the breaks in the film, the switch of audio levels. The screen kept flicking bright empty projections of no show. My eyes adjusted to having to seize quick sight and I noticed that Helen was sitting to my left, a seat away from me, looking at the same white surface. She couldn’t have been there for much more than a few minutes. She looked at me then pulled up a large tub of popcorn from her lap to offer me some.  I didn’t want to eat unless the main feature was playing. But when was it going to start? This was uncomfortable. 

We had shown up. Helen and I had kept up our part of the deal, but the movie hadn’t.  And now: not even the courtesy of erratic flickering, just the integrity of projector light unfiltered by any film. The sharp planes of Helen’s face and the pale lip-skin that detailed her pout had never cooperated so tightly before. She opened her mouth to ask me something, but didn’t say a word, and after a moment let it close. 

The screen went to black, then white again. The audio was being messed with. There was a sizzle-hissing noise coming from the speakers that were lined along the theater walls. Helen put her hand in the bucket of popcorn while I, before she could pull it out, cupped my fingers over her knuckle. My palm was growing cold, sweaty; but I left it there, counting to twenty and staring at the white screen, all the while knowing that we were both looking up at that sheet of silence, of bye-bye surrender. I let go of her, then stood up, really thinking that I was going to the concession stand to get a bottled water. I mean totally believing that, so much so that I didn’t even tell Helen what I was getting up for.  

But moving out of the theater and into the lobby I just kept walking. Slow pace-like; zombie sauntering toward final rest or little boy looking for an expensive toy he was warned against losing. I walked out of the cinema and then over to my car. There was a guy standing on a ladder and changing the letters on the marquee. And there was a pink flyer under my windshield wiper. I opened the car door. Water had collected in the driver’s seat. It was not raining, but it had. While I was inside, it had rained. 

The post Rock, Paper, Cinema appeared first on The New Absurdist.

Cole left his desk and stood in the office doorway. “You doing okay, buddy?” he asked.

Imad regarded him with eyes that seemed too big for his face. “I’ve been under the weather,” he replied. “Too much reading. You know how it is.”

“I’m more of an audiobook man myself.” Cole cleared his throat. “Listen, Imad. I don’t mean to be rude, but you don’t look so great. Do you want to sit down before you head out? I’ve still got some soda from the graduation party in the minifridge. You’d be doing me a favor if you took one.”

A wan smile surfaced on Imad’s face. He took a step toward the office, but his expression twisted into a grimace as his laptop bag shifted against his side. “Thanks, but I’d better get going,” he muttered.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to call someone? Like a Lyft or something?” Cole offered, but Imad shook his head and slipped through the door to the stairs. 

Cole watched as he left. It was hard to tell in the dim light of the corridor, but he could have sworn he saw a sheen of sweat on Imad’s forehead. It was probably nothing more serious than a summer cold, but Cole wondered what Imad could have read to make his face so pale. 

As he indulged in speculation, Cole’s imagination got the better of him. Miskatonic University was famous for housing a large collection of books once deemed heretical by the large universities in Boston. Even today, books bound in human skin occupied a substantial division of the library archives. What if Imad had gotten sick from contact with one of the books in the special collections?

A story about a forbidden book would make a great podcast episode. The most downloaded episode on Cole’s feed was a story about a cursed doll he’d found on Etsy. Creepy dolls were a dime a dozen, but the pink mildew poking out of this doll’s cracked porcelain scalp was something special. The listing said the seller was local, so Cole sent her a message and requested an in-person viewing of the doll. The seller immediately replied with her address.

When Cole drove over, he found the doll perched on the edge of the rotting concrete porch of an abandoned wastewater plant. It sat in a puddle of something that wasn’t quite liquid. Cole was painfully aware that he’d walked headlong into a prank, but he didn’t touch the doll. He had no interest in mucking about with the neon fungus infesting its hair, but he was more than happy to take a photo. 

Cole invented a lurid story about the doll for his podcast. Sure enough, listeners loved it. He resented the popularity of such obvious clickbait, but it served its purpose. For a time, at least. As was so often the case with online content, interest waned quickly. He needed another hit. Cole fancied himself to be a literary horror specialist, and he used his show to discuss writers like M.R. James and Elizabeth Gaskell alongside twentieth-century film noir. An episode about a cursed book had the potential to draw an audience, and it would be a much better ambassador for the show than a fabricated story about a cursed doll.

When he introduced himself at department parties, Cole didn’t hesitate to tell new acquaintances that he hosted a podcast. He’d even printed a business card on handsome matte black cardstock with his name and website. Most people accepted the card, but very few asked him what he meant when he described his field as “dark academia.” Perhaps they assumed he was complaining about grad school. 

To be fair, Cole had tried his hand at a graduate program, but only briefly, and only at a small department at a state school in Ohio. The college’s fluorescent-lit cinderblock buildings didn’t contribute to a scholarly state of mind, and Cole dropped out after his first semester. He took the opportunity to relocate to Boston, where he found a job writing copy for the alumni magazine of a liberal arts school. 

Far from being the ancient and shadow-blighted city he’d read so much about, Boston was a textbook case of gentrification, especially the neighborhood around the university. After a year of mounting debt with nary a Gothic spire in sight, Cole found a listing for an administrative assistant at the Classics Department of Miskatonic University in Arkham. There wasn’t much charm or prestige out in the Essex County suburbs, but it was hard to deny the lure of cutting his rent in half. 

Cole was interviewed by the department chair, a harassed-looking elderly gentleman in a threadbare blazer. The chair informed Cole that there were no other applicants, and that the position was his if he wanted it. He would be working under the head administrator, a cheerful red-faced woman named Peggy who introduced herself with a wave. The chair didn’t seem overly concerned with how the department was run, and Cole suspected that Peggy had acquired the blush on her cheeks from a liquid lunch. He accepted the job on the spot.

The Classics Department was like any other office, equipped with outdated computers and furniture straight from wholesale. The industrial wall-to-wall carpeting bore the stains of years of department parties, and a neglected snake plant struggled valiantly by the lone window. Cole didn’t see much of the professors, and the grad students were an uninspiring bunch interested primarily in gossip. 

Imad was different. As far as Cole could tell, he was the only person who made use of the shared grad student office. He came in every afternoon, and he always stopped by the department office to say hello before disappearing into the small room at the end of the corridor.

Imad told Cole that he was working on his dissertation, a comparison of Near Eastern gnostic texts from the seventh and eighth centuries. He more properly belonged to the Religious Studies department, he’d explained, but it was dissolved the same semester he finished his coursework. Cole didn’t follow his breakdown of the situation, which had something to do with falling enrollments and shrinking budgets, but he understood that Imad had been taken in by the Classics Department as a courtesy. 

Cole asked about the progress of Imad’s work every afternoon, and Imad was always ready with a concise and practical explanation. It didn’t escape Cole’s notice that Imad was blessed with a mellow yet resonant voice that would sound excellent on tape.

Cole gradually developed a casual friendship with Imad over the course of the spring semester, and he came to look forward to Imad’s visits to the office. Once classes ended and the students disappeared from campus, however, Imad started to change. He lost weight, and his cheeks became so hollow that his eyes seemed to bulge from his face. The golden tan of his skin faded to a sickly olive. His beard was patchy and uneven. 

And there was another thing. Imad had begun to smell. The odor that lingered behind him wasn’t unpleasant, but it was odd. The smell reminded Cole of wet asphalt drying in the sun after the rain. Or like an antique doll sitting in a puddle of creosotic slime outside an abandoned water treatment plant in the twilight of rural Ohio. 

Cursed book or not, something was going on, and Cole figured that he owed it to himself to get to the bottom of whatever was troubling Imad. With almost no work over the summer and a boss who only rarely bothered to show up to the office, it’s not as if he had anything else to do. 

There weren’t many students on campus during the summer. Truth be told, there weren’t many students on campus during the school year. Cole was given to understand that Miskatonic’s enrollments had been falling with each successive semester. This didn’t surprise him. The campus was filled with stately old buildings, but none of them had been maintained for years. The gym had been built in the 1970s, and the dorms a decade earlier. It wasn’t the sort of place that attracted students. 

Regardless, Cole was required to be in the office until the end of working hours. He replied to emails in the morning and spent the afternoon in comfortable solitude searching for stories online. 

He’d recently started researching the Theosophical Society Lodge next to campus. The Lodge had supposedly held seances well into the twentieth century, but they apparently stopped on the eve of the Great War. The building now housed a library that served as a stage for public lectures on world religions, some of which had been recorded.  

Cole had just downloaded the most recent lecture when Imad walked into the office. He looked even worse than usual. His face had gone from olive to yellow, and the sheen of grease on his forehead was unmistakable.

Cole swallowed his shock as he greeted Imad. “Hey, so,” he began. “I was reading about modern Gnosticism. Not much to do here over the summer, right? And I was wondering. How would you pronounce, ah, Mandaeism?”

“Mandaeism? You pronounced it correctly. The Arabic is al-Mandāʾiyya, but Mandaeism is fine for general use. Why do you ask?”

“I was fishing for material for my podcast. I read that a lot of Iraqis moved to the suburbs of DC during the early 2000s. Apparently, one community brought lead amulets written in a form of Aramaic that no one at the Smithsonian can read.” 

“I wouldn’t say that no one can read them,” Imad replied. “Even if the ganzibria priests couldn’t transliterate the written text, they’d be able to recite the historiola.”

“The historiola? I’m sorry, I’m not familiar with that term.”

“A historiola is a short story about a ritual. The act of reading the story functions as a performance of the ritual itself, like a magic spell.”

“How does that work?” Cole asked. 

Imad shrugged. “It’s magic. Who can say how it works? Still, it’s probably for the best that no one at the Smithsonian can read the amulets. You wouldn’t want to pronounce the Aramaic with too much accuracy. If the divine creator brought this world into existence with a word, it stands to reason that another word might open the gates between worlds. That’s a metaphor for the expansiveness of spirituality, of course,” he added with a smile, “but one can never be too careful.”

“Interesting,” Cole said, and it was. The idea that the act of reading could serve as a magic ritual was intriguing. “So what are you translating this afternoon?”

“Well,” Imad started to say, but he winced as he leaned against the waist-high counter separating the office from the faculty mailboxes. It could have been a trick of the light, but something seemed to ripple under his layers of sweaters.

Imad caught the look of concern on Cole’s face. “Sorry,” he said as he turned toward the door. “I might have had too much tea with lunch. I’m going to visit the bathroom and head to my office.”

Cole nodded and returned his eyes to his computer screen, hoping that he’d staged a decent performance of polite interest. He hesitated to cross the line of professional distance with the members of his department. He couldn’t afford to move back to Boston, and he needed this job. Arkham wasn’t the most prosperous suburb, and the only other paying work he’d be likely to find here was at the fulfillment center warehouse by the highway. 

Still, he liked Imad. Professionalism be damned. 

Later that afternoon, he brewed two bags of mint tea in paper cups and carried them down the hall to the graduate student office. When Imad answered the door, Cole was struck by the wet smell that emerged from the room. It was as if something spilled on the carpet and never dried properly. 

“So I was thinking,” he said, “no one is using the department chair’s office over the summer. I was planning to air it out a bit. Care to join me?” 

The chair’s office was lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and equipped with the sort of grommeted furniture that populated movies about gentlemen explorers. It smelled like fine paper and old leather, and the sunlight that filtered through the cloudy panes of glass in the mullioned windows was bright but gentle.

 “Are you sure you don’t want to tell me what you’re working on?” Cole asked as he sat down. 

“I guess it wouldn’t hurt to talk about it,” Imad replied. He sank back in his chair as he took a long sip of tea. “At the moment I’m working on a translation of the Kitab al-Azif. This is a gnostic text that originated somewhere in the vicinity of Yemen in the early eighth century. It was believed to have potent magical properties, and it was translated into several languages over the centuries. 

“Manuscripts of the Azif managed to travel around the world, but they’re remarkably rare. When I was doing research for my MA thesis, I’d see one translation or another cited in various papers, but I could never find the original source. It turns out that the only physical copies in the United States are held by the Miskatonic library, which is why I applied to do my PhD here. 

“I thought it might be interesting to compare the versions to understand how key phrases were translated by different cultures. When I spoke to the head of Special Collections here at our library, she was happy to share a PDF of a tenth-century Arabic manuscript held by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The file isn’t the best quality, to be honest. The manuscript is a copy of a copy of a copy, and the source is badly damaged. I’m doing the best I can with what I have available. 

“I’d like to write a grant to go see the original in person, but I’m not at that stage yet. Maybe next spring? I could use a vacation.” Imad shrugged and took another sip of tea. Cole was relieved to see the color returning to his face. 

“So this Kitab al…”

“Azif. It’s a poetic word that refers to the chirping of nocturnal insects.”

“So this Kitab al-Azif, what’s it about? If that’s the right question.”

“No, that’s a great question. The book holds that there’s a deeper truth to the universe, and the author – we don’t know his true name – tells a remarkably coherent story as he explains what this supposed truth is. He claims that our universe is like the thin film on the surface of a bubble, and he believes that there are all manner of things outside the bubble we can’t see. 

“This isn’t an original idea, but what’s interesting about the Azif is that its author provides a history of our planet long before humans lived here. Most creation myths describe humans as being brought into existence shortly after the universe itself, but the Azif speaks of genesis in terms of cycles. People that weren’t human inhabited the planet before us, and people who aren’t human will live here after us.”

“That sounds kind of Buddhist,” Cole cut in.     

“Exactly! There’s a great deal of Eastern thought incorporated into these ideas. All times exist at once, simultaneously, and in different dimensions. The borders between dimensions can be weakened by magic, supposedly. By the act of reading the Azif, the creatures occupying other dimensions can be invited into our own world.” 

“I’d love to meet them,” Cole remarked. “I wonder what they look like?”

Imad stared at his tea as he shifted the paper cup between his hands. “They’re probably not what you expect. I think we’ve gotten used to the strange creatures that appear in movies. When you finally see the monster on the other side of the door, it becomes familiar, like a type of mascot. We can see horrible things online whenever we want, from deep sea fish to the microorganisms that live inside our bodies, and we’ve learned to love them. But maybe there are things out there that are so alien that we’ll never be able to process them, either intellectually or emotionally.

“Gnosticism seems so natural in the twenty-first century, doesn’t it? Of course there’s a deeper truth to the universe. All we have to do is use science to figure it out. People publish their findings, and what they learn becomes real to us in the form of technological innovation. But the modern Western world didn’t invent science. Other cultures studied the stars and the principles of chemistry and physics long before Aristotle began giving lectures at his Lyceum. So why did gnostic ideas fall out of favor? Why did people stop thinking about the universe as a malleable series of experiential planes? I wonder if perhaps someone saw the monster on the other side of the door and decided that it would be better if the truth remained hidden.”

“Wow. I wish I could have recorded that.”

  Imad looked up from his tea. “What do you mean?”

“That would have been a fantastic interview for my podcast. You have a great voice for audio.”

“Do I?” Imad laughed, but his mirth vanished as his face twisted into a grimace.

Cole frowned. “Listen, Imad. You’re really not looking so great.”

“I’m fine.” As Imad rose to his feet, Cole couldn’t help notice the awkward movement of his body. The way his sweaters bunched around his torso was decidedly odd. Something like a thick strip of cloth hung from the back of the layers of fabric. As Cole watched Imad leave the room, he could have sworn that it twitched.

Cole returned to campus later that evening. He unlocked the department office and sat at his desk without turning on the lights. He considered making a show of checking his email, but the performance would be for no one’s benefit but his own. As long as he was here, he might as well get this over with. 

Cole wanted to tell himself he was sneaking around for Imad’s own good. That was true, to a certain extent, but it wasn’t the whole truth. He’d always regretted not investigating the waterlogged doll, and he promised himself that he wouldn’t pass up an opportunity like that again. Still, as he set off down the dim corridor of faculty offices, he couldn’t help but feel guilty. The grad student office wasn’t a private space, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t violating Imad’s trust. 

There was no strange smell when he opened the office door, just the lingering aroma of bergamot tea. The two cubicles closest to the door were empty. Imad had claimed the cubicle by the window, and he’d dragged a table next to the wall behind his chair. It was covered in library books.

There was nothing unusual on Imad’s desk – a bottle of aspirin, a jumble of cheap pens, and a spare phone charger. He hadn’t pinned any photos to the corkboard cubicle divider, but a collection of thank-you cards from students was propped in a corner. Several manilla folders were stacked on top of each other in the opposite corner, each neatly labeled in Arabic.

Cole opened one of the folders. The paper inside was covered in dark smudges. This must be a copy of the manuscript scan Imad told him about. Cole didn’t know anything about Arabic, but even he could tell how bad the image quality was. It was amazing that Imad could read this at all. Interleaved between the photocopies were pages torn from a yellow legal pad. The loose papers were covered with annotations surrounding a handwritten English translation.

 Cole scanned what Imad had written, but none of it made sense to him. As far as he could tell, this particular passage had something to do with constellations. The next page was a clean photocopy of what must be a Latin translation, and the next was a translation of the Latin into severely antiquated English. Under that was a printed copy of the Wikipedia page about the sky quadrants used by medieval astronomers.

Something seized in Cole’s chest as he flipped through the pages. This was exactly the sort of academic work he once imagined himself doing. A lone scholar sitting at a quiet desk with nothing but paper and a pen as he studied ancient texts, taking careful notes while excavating the meaning of words written in centuries past. There was a certain romance to the idea, and Cole wasn’t at all surprised to find that Imad’s handwriting was as beautiful as his voice.

He picked up the legal pad sitting at the center of the desk and flipped to the last few pages. A word written in capital letters immediately caught his attention: SHOGGOTH. Under it, Imad had written: “What is formless will be given form. The shoggoth will heed the call of its creator, if called in a [dream??] voice speaking its proper name. That which hides in the deathless gap between hours can be retrieved by a shoggoth, grasped within its hands without hands.”

The next page contained a series of vectors that Imad had labeled with numbers and overlaid with pencil sketches of constellations. Cole recognized the Big Dipper of Ursa Major, as well as the three stars of Orion’s Belt, but something about the angles formed by the connected lines felt wrong. Looking at them too closely made his head hurt. 

The next page was a photocopy of an illuminated manuscript written in Latin. Cole didn’t understand Imad’s annotations, many of which were crossed out, but a square yellow sticky note appended to the bottom of the page caught his attention. Almost without being aware of it, he read the note out loud. “The hands without hands, fhtagn ph’nglui.”

As the words left his mouth, the image of the thick pale thread emerging from Imad’s sweaters jumped into Cole’s mind. He was struck by the smell of water. Roiling seas under an endless expanse of sky, stars and constellations without number, pinpricks of light fitting together into an intricate matrix of impossible geometry.

Something unpleasant rose in his throat. He barely made it to the bathroom in time.

Cole couldn’t leave the building quickly enough. He was sick again in the bushes beside the parking lot.

It was only sitting in his car, with the air conditioning blasting in his face, that his nausea dissipated. As he clutched the wheel, Cole chided himself for letting his imagination get the better of him. A cursed book was all well and good, but the notion of a cursed photocopy was absurd. He’d managed to spook himself for no reason. Whatever was going on with Imad had nothing to with star charts or Latin manuscripts. A section of the roof of Whateley Hall had collapsed during the heavy snowfall of the previous winter, and Cole wouldn’t be surprised if it had resulted in extensive water damage to the building. The insulation in the walls was more than likely riddled with mildew.  

Someone should get Imad set up in a different office. That someone, as it happened, was him. He’d bring it up tomorrow, Cole resolved as he backed out of his parking space. Still, he was troubled by the word Imad had written in rough letters at the top of his legal pad. What the hell was a shoggoth? 

Cole woke up the next morning haunted by a lingering sense of shame. What had possessed him to drive back to campus and sneak into Imad’s office? That was creepier than any cursed book could ever be. He needed to talk to Imad. Really talk to him. Maybe even ask him out to dinner.  

Cole washed his hair for the first time in a week and trimmed his beard as it dried. His apartment occupied the top floor of an old Queen Anne house, and the morning sun streamed through the tall windows under the peaked gambrel roof. Songbirds chirped in the branches of the stately ash tree growing beside the house. Cole had been toying with the possibility of moving back to Ohio, but he couldn’t deny that there was a certain charm to summer mornings in New England.

In the department office, he chatted with Peggy as he handled the visa paperwork of an incoming grad student, all the while feeling a sort of secondhand pride that someone would come all the way from abroad to study at Miskatonic. He ate lunch on the outside patio with the two elderly women who ran the office of the Modern Languages department. They showed him photos of their cats on their phones and told him stories about their grandchildren as they enjoyed the sunshine. Afterward, they brushed their teeth together in the women’s bathroom on the second floor, which they agreed was the nicest in Whateley Hall.

 Cole waited for Imad to come to the office. He waited so hard that he couldn’t read Wikipedia, not even the entry about the mysteriously nondescript warehouses used to house banks of internet servers. Everything he saw on social media annoyed him. Eventually he gave up on trying to do anything productive and opened a website that emulated screensavers from the 1990s.

After spending half an hour watching digital fish float through an overbright coral reef, Cole realized that he was being silly. It was a beautiful summer day. There was no need for him to kill time in an empty office while Imad was making himself sick looking at crusty photocopies of wizard nonsense for the sake of a dissertation that no one would ever read. 

Cole’s palms were sweaty as he knocked on the door of the grad student office. What if Imad had noticed that his research notes had been disturbed? 

“Imad?” he called out, but there was no answer. He wiped his hands on his pants before grasping the doorknob. At best, he’d have to apologize to Imad for going through his papers. At worst, he’d have to drive him to the hospital. 

There was another possibility: a void, a vacuum, a tear in the fabric of reality. A window opening onto an oceanic abyss trapped beneath sheets of ice for millennia. A silent city suspended under lightless stars. A multitude of insectile eyes focused on the present moment: a miniscule oasis in the ever-expanding desert of time and space. 

Cole opened the door. The office was empty.

The window was open, and a faint breeze carried the scent of freshly cut grass into the room. A ceramic mug of tea sat on the table next to a laptop with a burnished copper finish. 

Cole closed the door and stepped back into the corridor, where he was greeted by a strange but familiar smell. The odor wasn’t unpleasant, just unusual. It reminded him of the lake shore where his uncles had hosted cookouts when he was a kid. He’d spent most of his summers indoors, reading his way through the local library’s paltry stock of fiction. His isolation made the outings to the lake with his cousins all the sweeter. In truth, Cole loved the smell of water, and he had a good idea of where it was coming from. 

He retraced his steps down the corridor until he arrived at the bathroom by the elevators. With no hesitation whatsoever, he went inside. 

At first, Cole didn’t understand the sight that greeted him. He recognized Imad’s face, but it took a few seconds to process the rest of him. Five fleshy appendages ringed with red patches of irritated skin emerged from Imad’s naked torso. The tentacles were limp but twitched spasmodically. 

Beads of sweat pooled on Imad’s forehead as he stared at Cole in horror, his sweaters clutched in his hands. “Listen, I don’t… I mean, I can explain,” he stammered. 

“You can explain later,” Cole replied, his concern for Imad’s discomfort winning out over his shock. “Just sit tight. Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be right back.”

Cole dashed to the department office, hoping against hope that Imad didn’t flee. He grabbed a can of ginger ale from the office minifridge and rushed back to the bathroom.

He found Imad sitting on the bench by the door. His face was utterly forlorn, and his tentacles waved listlessly in Cole’s direction. 

“Buddy, you’ve got to hydrate,” Cole said, popping the tab on the can of ginger ale.  

Imad accepted the can with a curt nod and drank. When he finished, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “The words of the ritual,” he muttered. “The book was a historiola, but I got the words wrong. I couldn’t read them correctly.”

“Maybe you can get them to send you a better photocopy next time,” Cole replied. “For the time being, you need to take better care of yourself. Your, uh… Tentacles? Can I call them that? Whatever’s going on there. It looks like they’re irritated by your clothing. Peggy has a giant bottle of hand lotion on her desk. I’m sure she won’t mind if you use it.” 

“This doesn’t bother you?” Imad asked.  

“It’s not making you evil or anything, is it?”

“I don’t think so.” Imad’s shoulders sagged. “It’s just a lot to get used to. And sometimes I see things I’m not sure are actually there.”

“What type of things? Anything fun?”

Imad managed a weak grin. “Why? Do you still want to interview me for your podcast?”

“Forget the podcast. But I’d love to talk with you. I’m not busy right now. Do you want to take a walk? Maybe go out for coffee or something?”

Imad’s tentacles perked up at the question. “Are you asking me out?” 

“I… yes. I’m sorry if that’s not appropriate. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.” 

“You don’t want to make me uncomfortable.” Imad stared at Cole in disbelief before breaking into laughter. His tentacles undulated with good cheer. 

Cole returned his smile. He’d been worried that something was terribly wrong with Imad, but this wasn’t so bad, all things considered. Imad’s tentacles were kind of cute. Perhaps they would have been more horrific if they’d come directly from a cursed book, but there wasn’t much damage a grainy photocopy could do. Whatever this Kitab al-Azif was, he and Imad could handle it together, preferably after they’d gotten something to eat. And who knows, it might even make a good episode for his podcast. 

The post The Annotated Kitab al-Azif appeared first on The New Absurdist.

Before Vlad had time enough to imagine his own mirthful tableau, the receptionist  beckoned him to enter the office.  

“Ah, Prince Țepeș!” Mr. Apate smiled, shaking his hand. “It is so good to meet you,” 

“Good day Mr. Apate.”  

“Please, call me Dolus. All my friends do.”  

“Then you must call me Vlad,” the prince replied.  

Dolus motioned Vlad to sit on a leather chair in front of a mahogany desk, as he seated himself on the other side.  

“So Prince Țepeș…I mean Vlad, how can I be of service?”  

“I want to change my image. When people think of me they see a bloodthirsty monster.  It’s not helpful for my day-to-day transactions.”  

Dolus grinned.  

“You’ve come to the right place. Here at Mirage Media we specialize in…how shall I put  it? Image softening.”  

“I don’t want to seem soft,” Vlad explained. 

“Of course not!” Dolus replied. “You will still be you. Powerful in every way. Just kinder, gentler.”  

“But I fear it’s too late.”  

“Nonsense! At Mirage Media time is a malleable concept. Tell me Vlad, who has been tarnishing your reputation?”  

“Don’t you first need to know what’s being said?” Vlad asked.  

Dolus chuckled.  

“Not at all. To dismiss an accusation, you must first discredit the accuser.” 

“Sensible,” Vlad nodded in agreement. “There is a man. An Irishman by the name of  Stoker who writes monstrous things about me.”  

Dolus took notes.  

“Tell me everything you know about this Stoker.”  

“I don’t know much. We’ve never met.”  

“No?” Dolus asked. “Then how does he write about you?”  

“He reads reports about me and speaks with my Translyanian compatriots, peasants really.”  

“So his accusations are based on rumors,” Dolus noted. “Does he claim any facts?” 

“How could he? He’s never even visited my country.”  

“Fake news!” Dolus exclaimed. “It will be an easy thing to dismiss this gossip monger.” 

“But what of the reports? Can you dismiss these as well?”  

“Ah, yes,” Dolus cleared his throat. “Here we will require some details. Tell me what are the accusations against you.” 

“Well first, there’s my nickname,” Vlad suggested bashfully. “You know — Țepeș —  meaning the Impaler.”  

With his right hand, Vlad mimed holding a stick and thrusting it upward. 

Continuing to explain, he added, “I know it sounds bad but it wasn’t just me, everyone was impaling. Honestly, we were at war with the Ottomans and they did it too.” 

Dolus waved his hand in the kind of motion you might use to stop a small child’s whining.  

“Vlad there is no need for justifications. Mirage Media is a judgment free zone. Tell me about these Ottomans.”  

“Yes, they were bad ones. They came from Turkey. They attacked us!”  

Dolus’s face lit up.  

“These Ottomans, are they by chance Muslim?”  

“Yes.”  

“Terrific! That’s the angle we’ll play. You were merely defending against Al Qaeda agents. Going tit for tat or…as the case may be, spike for spike with these terrorists to defend your homeland. You’re a hero, not a monster!”  

Vlad smiled.  

“So Vlad is that all the dirt or is there anything else?” Dolus asked.  

“Well…” Vlad cast his eyes downward.  

“Tell me Vlad. We can’t have any secrets.” 

“There were some bad people in my country, a nasty lot. I found out they betrayed me, so I got a little angry. I wanted to teach them a lesson. Not slaughter them mind you, but just make sure they’d be too afraid to ever defy me again.”  

Dolus impatiently tapped his fingers on his desk.  

“And?” he coaxed.  

“Well, I kind of roasted their children and fed them to these people for supper.” 

Dolus made no sound. He propped his elbows on the desk, closed his eyes and placed both hands under his chin.  

“I didn’t kill all the children, just a few,” Vlad clarified.  

For one minute and twelve seconds Dolus remained in complete motionless silence. Then he opened his eyes.  

“How were there reports of this? Did you make any announcement?”  

“Not at all. I suppose the story was spread by servants. They really are a chatty group, my servants.”  

“So these reports were based only on what they saw?”  

“I suppose so,” Vlad replied.  

“And what they saw were a bunch of roasted babies?”  

“Not a bunch, just a few.”  

“Wonderful!” Dolus proclaimed. “They only have the proof that their eyes have shown them and that is no proof at all.”  

“But the babies looked like babies. It was cute. My cooks placed little apples in their mouths—” 

“Listen,” Dolus interrupted. “Have you tasted those “Inconceivable Burgers”? They’re amazing! No one could distinguish them from real beef. They look and taste just like a  hamburger. Now they’re making the Inconceivable Chicken. It’ll be exactly like the roast bird itself.”  

“What does this have to do with me?” Vlad asked.  

“We’ll just run a story that you were testing out a new vegan product. It’s 100% soy based and flavored to taste like human flesh for vegetarians who want to indulge in the cannibal experience.”  

Vlad felt giddy.  

“These ideas are fabulous…but…”  

Vlad’s expression began to sour.  

“As I tried to explain earlier, it’s too late.”  

“It’s never too late.” Dolus declared. “Mirage Media has worked throughout the ages,  supporting nobles, presidents, and celebrities of all sorts. We provide our clients with insurance  that the masses will have the correct interpretation of history.”  

“But I’m dead!” Vlad exclaimed. “I don’t exist. There is no substance to me, I’m merely an apparition.”  

Dolus Apate smiled.  

“That’s not a problem. All of our clients could say the same.” 

The post A Kinder, Gentler Impaler appeared first on The New Absurdist.

If he were to look up, he might see his own reflection in the mirrored ceiling of the elevator. An anonymous dark head, an anonymous gray suit. But Virgil is not the type of person to look up. Instead, he tilts his wrist so that the face of his watch blinks on. Six minutes early. Perfectly on schedule. 

Virgil is headed to the third floor. In fact, the elevator will only deliver him to the third floor. What actually lies on the floors above, the land of vision and dental and paid vacation time and conference calls with the CEO, he does not know. And however splendid floors four-through-seven are in reality, Virgil’s imagination is constantly concocting something much, much greater. 

The elevator doors glide open. Already the office is dotted with faces, eyes that twitch up when they hear the mechanical thunk of cogs sliding into place. Across the rat-maze sprawl of cubicles, Jude Esperanza is standing in a cluster of employees, waiting for his turn to speak. Jude, too, looks up when he hears the elevator. Jude’s eyes land on Virgil’s face, and stay there. 

Virgil imagines the office as a slaughterhouse. Meathooks swinging from heavy wrought-iron chains. Bodies pale and doughy, strung up by the ankles. Featureless masses of skin and sinew, strawberry-red muscle and cauliflower-white fat. Nail gun, bone saw, twine. Bodies heavy and ripe for the picking. 

Virgil blinks when he hears the elevator doors start to drift shut. The office is normal again, clean and white. No hooks, no white hanging bodies. He slides his foot forward into the doors’ path. For a second they just hang there, nameless hunks of machinery. Then, a groan as they slide open again. Shaking his head like he is trying to dislodge a stubborn shard of shrapnel, he shoulders his messenger bag and walks to his desk. 

Floor-to-ceiling windows colonize the west wall. Outside, the smoggy sky, easy fodder for habitual daydreamers. Past the asphalt parking lot a smudge of black against the snow, high-rises compete for dominance over the skyline. It is a bitter, brisk day. Comparatively, the inside of the office is sterile and warm, an incubator. 

The sound of a completely superfluous briefcase being slammed on a desk makes Virgil look over. Darcy, sliding her rolling chair over the linoleum, waves. 

All of the cubicles in CronosTech offices are made entirely of glass. It is supposed to symbolize something, Virgil reasons, but he can never quite figure out what. It makes him feel like an object on display. At any rate, Darcy can always see him through their shared wall, and seizes onto any moment of accidental eye contact as an invitation to chat. 

“Hey, you!” she chirps. “How’re you holding up?” Six weeks since the operation, and Darcy is still perpetually interested in Virgil’s health. 

“Fine. You?” 

“Oh, alright. My knee’s been bugging me again.” 

Virgil frowns, an appropriate facsimile of sympathy. “Sorry to hear that.” His hand twitches toward his mouse. Darcy, not finished, inches her chair towards him. “Did you hear,” her voice the stage-whisper of the unrepentant workplace gossiper, “That 

Jude got the implant?” When she says implant she points to her temple, although Virgil knows the implant is located at the back of the skull. 

“Isn’t that confidential?” Fragments of light glint off of Darcy’s round glasses. Virgil feels a headache coming on. 

Darcy ignores him. “I mean, I’m not totally certain, but it makes sense, right? I always got the impression that Jude would do anything to get a…competitive edge.” The implant, as it is colloquially known, does not yet have an official name. Still officially in testing, the offer to install it had been cordially extended to select employees at CronosTech. When one really considers it, the name feels like a misnomer. The unassuming little chip does not truly implant something new inside its host, but takes something away. The idea for the implant is this: humans, in modern day, developed countries, no longer have any need for the sensation of hunger. Certain innovators and entrepreneurs, funded and championed by CronosTech, consider hunger an evolutionary excess, as useless as the vestigial tail, and a nuisance. So, they began developing a procedure that could eliminate it. Virgil, of course, eagerly went under the knife. 

When someone is hungry, they are uncomfortable, and therefore less productive. Since the operation, Virgil’s focus has hardened, sharp as the edge of a scythe. He’s at the top of his game. He finishes work quicker. Completes extra tasks. All the while, he feels lighter, buoyant. It’s like a tiny but impossibly heavy rock in his stomach has been extracted. 

Darcy huffs at his lack of reaction to the news. “I just thought you’d like to know.” Jude is the only person on the floor who Virgil considers his direct competitor. He had been promoted to the second floor only a few weeks after Virgil, and was mere days behind in the ascent to the third. And now the (alleged) implant. Virgil has the sinister impression that the man is gaining on him. 

He realizes he’s been staring out the window. A powdery white cloud speared on the spire of a high-rise, a car backing out of a parking space. He turns back to his computer, and gets to work. 

Lunch break still hasn’t stopped feeling strange. Each day watching his coworkers take their meals from the fridge, food smells mingling together: leftover half of a burrito, BLT on sourdough, kimchi fried rice. Sitting around the break-room table, sidelong glances, everyone pretending they don’t know or haven’t guessed. Making small talk: weather, layoffs, weekend plans. The rational part of Virgil knows that he does still need to eat, despite the lack of hunger signals to his brain, but that doesn’t stop him from feeling like he’s faking it. 

Today he extracts a deli sandwich from the fridge, ham and cheese, with his name scrawled across the side of the packaging. The break room is curiously empty for the time of day. The coffeemaker burbles diligently in the corner. 

The door swings open as Virgil unwraps his sandwich, background chatter and keyboard clacks seeping in from outside. It’s Jude. 

Partially stooped and awash with the bluish light of the fridge. Jude’s long hand wrapped around a tupperware container. 

The whir of the microwave settles into the otherwise quiet room. Virgil’s sandwich tastes of nothing. Jude is staring intently at the microwave like it contains the answer to an essential question. He is an unreasonably tall man, almost Muppet-esque with his oversized, gangly limbs. The wispy ends of his hair cover the nape of his neck, where the incision scar would be. If it were true. 

The microwave beeps, and Jude sits opposite Virgil. He avoids eye contact in a way which Virgil considers a purposeful slight against him, as he pries off the lid of the tupperware. Steam rises languidly off the liquid within. Who in their right mind brings soup to work? 

“How are the reports coming?” Jude has the low sort of voice that hums in your chest. “Fine.” 

“Anya says she wants them done by Tuesday, did you get that email?” 

“They’ll be done.”

To watch Jude dip his plastic spoon into the soup, blow on it, and bring the spoon to his lips, is almost unbearable. Something about it repulses Virgil. He yearns desperately to avert his eyes. Yet, he does not, and instead watches Jude’s Adam’s apple bob as he swallows. Something passes in his expression, his mouth tightens and his nose crinkles almost imperceptibly, which Virgil recognizes. His suspicions confirmed: Jude has gotten the implant. 

The loading symbol is an ouroboros, never satisfied. Virgil clicks the mouse impatiently, although he knows that will only slow the machine down more. FUTURE IMPROVEMENTS: functional computers. 

The weekend had passed uneventfully. Virgil spent Friday night watching old sitcom reruns, went grocery shopping on Saturday (shopping expenses lowered since getting the implant; no use splurging on on pricey ingredients when it all tastes the same), and on Sunday called his mother. She chided him for not going to church, and interrogated him about his mental health. She was convinced that the implant was bad for him, and monitored carefully for adverse side effects. Throughout the weekend, the image of Jude bringing the spoon to his lips and swallowing painfully would suddenly appear, unbidden, in his mind, which he stamped down with the vehemence of a cowboy crushing a snake beneath his boot. 

The document loads at last, and Virgil is once again free to insert figures into his spreadsheet: numbers upon numbers. Dollar signs, expenditures, profits, slotted neatly into the green and red checkerboard. Everything in its rightful place. 

There is a tapping on the glass of his cubicle, like a bird pecking at a window. When he looks up, Virgil expects to see Darcy’s owl-eyes peering at him through the fishbowl of her cubicle. Instead, he is met with Jude’s cool dark stare.

“Sorry, it looked like you were in the zone there.” In the zone sounds stilted, almost ironic, coming out of Jude’s mouth. 

“Yeah, well.” Virgil rubs at a sore spot on his neck, which continually reappears despite CronosTech’s patented ergonomic chairs and keyboards. “What’s going on?” “The reports? I’m supposed to pass them onto Anya, and you said on Friday—” “Oh, right.” Virgil had finished them, in what some might consider a frenzy, after his and Jude’s lunch conversation. Then he had promptly forgotten about them. “I just need to print them out. Give me a second.” 

Virgil opens the document, and the ouroboros returns. His mouse hovers over the print button. Jude taps a bony finger against the top of the cubicle. 

Virgil presses PRINT. He rises from his chair at the same time that Jude starts to move towards the printer. 

“I got it—”, “It’s fine—” 

Their voices overlap each other. Eyes track them across the room, their buzz of adrenaline. Virgil and Jude plant themselves on either side of the printer, as it hacks and shudders like a cat coughing up a hairball. Over the plastic hull of the machine, Jude’s jaw is set and his eyes are hard stones. He looks wildly uncomfortable. Is he sweating? The printer spits out a sheet of paper, then another. Something unfamiliar churns in Virgil’s stomach as he watches Jude pull at the collar of his button-up, exposing a narrow strip of collarbone. 

Virgil imagines a butcher’s shop. Dull thud of knife hitting cutting board. Thick strong hands knuckling slabs of meat tender and pliant. Cleaver glinting, silver-toothed smile. Pool of red bleeding pink at the edges as it glugs down the drain. Raw crimson scent that settles at the back of the throat. Intoxicatingly sweet. Virgil takes a deep breath in.

The printer sighs, and the third sheet of paper is released. Virgil darts his hand out and grabs the stack. Jude tries to do the same, too late. His hand jerks out and slams against the printer with a thunk. 

“I’ll take these to Anya myself,” Virgil says coolly. 

When he returns at last to his cubicle, Darcy is, as usual, not working. “Jesus, Virgil, what was that?” 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” 

It is not until he sighs and clicks open the spreadsheet document again, the blue light washing over his face, that he realizes what the strange churning feeling had been. It was hunger.

The hold music is a rendition of one of Beethoven’s concertos, distorted and fuzzy over the phone. Virgil stands under the awning of the bus stop, watching the rain pour. A car rolls by, spraying up a sheet of water. A single bulbous drop lands on the patent leather of Virgil’s shoe. 

Beethoven comes to a stop. A laconic voice on the other end says, “How can I help you?” “Hi, yes, I’m calling to get in contact with Dr. R—?” 

“This is his office. What is this regarding?” 

“He implanted the CronosTech, uh, thing in me, and it’s malfunctioning.” “Are you experiencing any of the following symptoms: swelling, fever, dizziness, fatigue, memory loss, hearing loss,” The voice rattles off. 

“Well, it’s just that I’m hungry again. But it’s not a normal hunger, it’s stronger, it feels… weird. Bad.” Virgil takes a gulping breath. “I’m not myself. I’m thinking strange things.” “So.” The word is heavy, drawn-out. A shuffling of paper, a sigh. “Dr. R—’s earliest appointment slot is in February. We can have you come in then, if it works for you?”

Virgil leans his head against the cold metal of the pole, feeling slightly faint. “Hello?” comes the voice. “Are you still there?” 

“Yes,” Virgil says. “February works fine.” 

The receptionist confirms the details of the appointment, and Virgil resuscitates frozen fingers to add the date to his phone calendar. He is shoving his hands in the pockets of his coat when someone ducks under the awning beside him. 

Jude nods in greeting. Virgil forces his face into a smile. 

“I’ve never seen you take the bus,” Jude says. 

“I normally Uber.” Finances have been tight. 

Jude nods thoughtfully, like Virgil has just provided some keen insight. 

Virgil looks back at the ground. The gutter is congested with slush, gray-brown and sluggish. The churning in his stomach is back. 

“Do you ever feel,” Jude says into the thick silence, “Like you’re being compartmentalized?” 

“What? No.” 

He glances over his shoulder. “In there, I mean. At work.” 

Virgil shrugs. 

“I just…” His eyes are darting around, like he’s hunting for some secret camera or enemy agent. He looks into the headlights of oncoming traffic, pigeons resting on a telephone wire, the shuttered windows of the building across the road, but never at Virgil’s face. “I’ve been feeling claustrophobic, lately. Yesterday I nearly hyperventilated in the elevator. The third floor is so small all of the sudden. It’s like I’m a figure in a spreadsheet, and I’m stuck in my stupid rectangle. And I can’t move, even if I wanted to, until they decide it’s time to slot me into the next compartment. And maybe the next compartment will be a little bigger, but maybe it’ll be just the same as it’s always been.” 

Virgil doesn’t know what to say. He thinks he should defend CronosTech, something about the ingenuity of the company, the beauty and symmetry of it. If Jude doesn’t like being a tiny cog in an immaculate machine, that’s his problem. But the words aren’t coming, they’re stuck somewhere in his small intestine, forming a hard knot. 

“I don’t know,” Jude says. “I just feel like there’s something missing. A hole. Something like that.” 

A distant rumble. The screech of heavy, unoiled machinery. The bus is here. Jude steps towards the bus as the doors swing open. He looks back expectantly. “I’m taking the next one. This one doesn’t go to my place.” Virgil lies. The thought of 

close, humid quarters, of beads of moisture trickling down the windows, of heat and fabric and skin, of Jude’s bobbing Adam’s apple, makes him feel sick. 

The rain does not let up until the next day. Puddles in the office parking lot shimmer iridescent like the hard shells of beetles. The sun pokes reticently out from behind a fat gray cloud. Darcy is humming an infuriatingly cheery tune, breathy and soft. Virgil supposes she’s cheerful because it’s almost 5pm, when they can all pack up and go home. But Virgil will be staying late tonight. 

Anya had pulled him aside to point out a miscalculation in his most recent report. Virgil could only stand there like a chastised child, heat creeping into his face. It is unreasonably time-consuming, to fix all the incorrect dates and numbers that had spawned from the initial miscalculation. His eyes are heavy marbles in his cottony skull. Perhaps, on a brighter day, an automated solution to this problem might have found its way onto the FUTURE IMPROVEMENTS list. 

Jude is pretending their rainy conversation never happened, that he never admitted his secret seditious thoughts. He is smiling widely at everyone, baring his big chemically whitened teeth. 

All the while, the pit in Virgil’s stomach expands and expands. He had eaten his deli sandwich today, for the first time in weeks, ravenously. This did nothing to quench the hunger. It boils and palpitates within him until he is certain it will spill out in a great wave, flooding the office with a tide of want. 

Darcy says goodbye as soon as the clock strikes five, power-walking to the door with the tenacity of someone with a hot date. Virgil lacks the energy even to roll his eyes. By the time he inserts the last corrected figure onto the document, the sky outside is the color of wet charcoal. The date of his appointment with Dr. R— could not seem farther away. The printer whirrs and spits. Infernal machine, always complaining. The office is nearly deserted; the motion operated lights over every cubicle but his own have long shut off. His own, and one other, on the other side of the room. Through layer after layer of distorted glass, he can just barely make out the figure sitting behind the desk. 

Virgil takes the papers from the printer, warm like a hand, and tries to ignore the pounding that now thrums in his skull. He is ready to double over from the hunger. He lays the corrected reports down on Anya’s desk, hoping that the speedy correction might win back her favor. 

When he looks up, Jude is there. He’s breathing heavily; Virgil can almost imagine he feels the breath on his own cheek, goosebumping his skin.

The look on Virgil’s face might have registered as surprise in Jude’s mind, because he says, “Sorry to startle you.” 

When Virgil doesn’t reply, he adds, “Burning the midnight oil, you know.” “Me…too.” Virgil manages. 

“But I’m done now.” 

“Me too.” 

Virgil drags his eyes up from the floor, up Jude’s improbably tall frame. For the first time he looks, really looks, into Jude’s eyes. Inkwell black. In those eyes Virgil sees reflected the same hunger that dwells rabid and desperate in his own stomach. The wave inside him crests, foams over. 

Virgil stares. Jude stares back. 

Then, two snarling beasts, they are upon each other. A passerby glancing idly at the scene might have seen a pair of lovers, but lovers do not generally tear each other’s throats. Virgil’s teeth sink into Jude’s neck. Jude drags his nails down Virgil’s back. Blood, hot and sweet, rushes into Virgil’s mouth. The taste of iron and sweat. Jude clutches Virgil’s head, knots his bloody fingers into his hair. His face pressed to Jude’s neck, Virgil swallows to keep from choking. Jude clamps his teeth into Virgil’s shoulder, tearing away a soft chunk of flesh. 

The two dedicated CronosTech employees, locked in their embrace, crash into the nearest cubicle, which shatters into a kaleidoscope of broken glass. There is no time for efficiency, shrewdness, precision. Their work is simple. Simple as the food chain. Simple as carnivorousness. 

It is as if Virgil has been eating gravel all his life, and now he finally has tasted food. Hearty, lush, instinctual. Meanwhile, Jude writhes against him. His teeth ribbon Virgil’s flesh.

Virgil’s shoulder burns, ache laces through him, but the taste is so magnificent he does not care. He will gladly take hunger if it means such bliss.

The post Saturn Devouring His Son appeared first on The New Absurdist.

The post Analog appeared first on The New Absurdist.

“Do you like it?” she asks, her torso draped over the jewelry counter from the strain of reaching over to place the ring on my finger. The counters are designed to mitigate physical interaction between the cashiers and customers, but her determination to outfit me in her homemade bling took precedence over the layout of the register counter.

“I do,” I reply. She points a finger adorned with a blue acrylic gem at the tray of green-stoned
jewelry.

“Let me see those.” Her eyes peer up at me from underneath the bang that runs across the front
of her harsh black bob.

She’s imposing, despite her petite stature at four-foot-nine. She doesn’t even need to bend down to see what’s in the jewelry case. She’s a televangelist on a Korean-language prayer hour broadcast on local cable in a less-than primetime slot. She comes in once a week to pass out her handwritten business cards and paw through the secondhand jewelry. She is a blinged-out Virgin Mary, a neon fresco cast in flesh, a disciple of Tammy Faye.

The televangelist holds up a necklace with a large gem in an opaque lime neon color: a faceted octahedron dangling from a chain coated in green residue formed from the neck sweat of its previous owner. It likely belonged to a small time drag queen who pivoted careers to a desk job when their dreams of stardom didn’t find them before they were booted from their parents’ health insurance.

Her vanity—her total disregard for anything that won’t sparkle on camera—is refreshing. That’s
the televangelist in her.

She sets aside the pendant and nods to me, the signal to set it aside for purchase. She picks up a necklace made of green plastic beads. Costume jewelry is difficult to sell; the consumer mindset it appeals to is one of theatricality, of the self-conscious performance of glamor. The wearers of kitsch like this, tacky even by the standards of their years of manufacture, take pleasure in the effacement of modern tastes. In their shared simulacrum of wealth, they create the images of the culture of unapologetic plastic overflow they grew up in: the intentional kitsch of Dynasty, the series. An untrained eye would discount it as camp. The costume-jewelry buyers’s covetousness is paradoxical: the sheen of something like costume jewelry implies the kind of richness that is frowned upon in the Bible: “Proverbs 25:16: If you have found honey, eat only enough for you, lest you have your fill of it and vomit it.” But the actual value is little more than the materials it’s made of; they buy to invent the glamorous image that they feel represents them. Overconsumption, the performance of it, is a vice that they can only afford at a secondhand store.

The televangelist settles on the neon green necklace and a pair of earrings with resin stones dyed off-aquamarine. Four dollars. She walks out after promising to return next week. The bejeweled gift was accompanied by her business card. It’s a small piece of green cardstock with her name and channel number printed on the front and the words “Read Romans 5” printed on the back, followed by the word “sin” in parentheses.

I read the passage a few hours later in the breakroom. It serves as a short introduction to finding salvation from humanity’s inherent sin, with familiar characters like Adam and Jesus Christ, even to someone not raised in the church—any church—like myself. “We know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope,” declares the passage. This is the gospel that her rings symbolize: if trash can be made into something beautiful, so can the wearer.

That’s the ethos of this charity shop, named after Mount Sinai in the Old Testament, which serves a hospital on the West Side of Chicago bearing the same name. The store has resold the donated items of Chicagoans since it opened in the 1980s. The televangelist is one of the neighborhood oddities who traffic through the charity shop: day roamers like trust fund babies, night janitors, social security pensioners, and anyone else without a place in the normal working hours of the workday. These people are older in age. The youngest of the charity shop evangelists, as I have taken to calling them, are sixty.

Most of them have accrued the physical afflictions that come with age: liver spots, wrinkles, pallor, cataracts, varicose veins, and other signs of the body’s denigration. Many of them show signs of more extreme maladies. In the case of the lifelong smokers, they have blackened gums and missing teeth—much too expensive to replace at the same rate as they fall out (they just keep them out and stick to soft foods). Some have tumors hanging from the side of their larynx. Benign, suspended in a brief moment of inactivity like the life of the body it’s grown from. For now, we are together. And then one day we won’t be.

The unstoppable march of modernity has left these folks in an alien culture, a space-age landscape run on technology too sleek to have been created by human hands. While the world around them strives towards the future they, the oldest, have been left behind by digital payments and Instagram stories. They have been left behind by trend cycles in a culture of constant novelty. So as an expression of their style, for their unbridled confidence in old age, as a protest
against the sidewalk treaders who would rather ignore them, they dress boldly.

The women favor loudly patterned blouses adorned with shiny brooches. Sometimes they wear animal prints: leopard and zebra like the wealthy of yesteryear. Their furs aren’t real. The prints that adorn these archetypal church ladies, signal a love for the personal expression of glamor; a word that has come to mean very little when used to describe clothing made to order en masse from thin pleather, polyester, and wall insulation. The men dress in business casual, accessorize with feathers, rings, and uniquely-rimmed eyeglasses. If they require an aid for their mobility, they will often opt for a wooden walking stick, updated dressings of a Biblical prophet costume. Style is a lost art in the age of convenience, wherein an outfit can be made to order and shippedfrom overseas in minutes. But in a place like a charity shop, the customer must hunt for their purchases. The sensibility persists in those that the age of convenience is not convenient for.

Most are religious. Not as religious as the televangelist, but religious enough to make an occasional reference to God at the checkout counter: “God bless your customer service!” Every day they come, willing to trade their allotted spending cash from their Social Security for tchotchkes, jewelry, clothing, even electronics past their obsolescence in this economy of reduced capacity. Here, we all gather under the denomination of trade. The gospel of the manufacture of goods is recited: “Hardwood furniture really isn’t what it used to be,” and “It’s so hard to find clothing without any plastic in it nowadays.” Their belief in an unchanging higher power is hand-in-hand with the persistence of objects that have resisted obsolescence. True believers may find evidence of a higher power in the endurance of the trappings of a world that once welcomed them; a person may find evidence of God in a bakelite Mah-jong set.

The whole thing occupies a rented warehouse with enough donated furniture to give extreme home makeovers to the entire population of a small township. Once through the front doors, customers walk down the center aisle through the heaping piles of vintage furniture in the front to the cash register planted in the middle of the sales floor: the functional altar helmed by someone like me who has been in the store long enough to know them by name. Behind the checkout counter is everything else: the clothing racks, the shelves of books, the piled home goods. They stay, sometimes for hours, in the makeshift pews assembled from secondhand dining sets and office chairs (and at one time, an actual pew donated by a now-defunct Baptist Church in West Chicago). They’ve been coming for years, some since the store opened, during the daylight hours when the rest of the city is working or in school.

Items are donated to the charity shop for lack of need, lack of love, lack of life. The largest donations are from deaths. Sometimes the death is inferred, like in a shipment that contained a marked up copy of the book “Live Free of Cancer” and the remnants of a last meal putrefied on the surface of an unwashed dinner plate. Other times it’s more obvious, such as when the previous owner’s belongings are shipped alongside the person’s ashes in an urn. The disembodied connection between donor and customer is like the relationship between saint and reveler. The continued subsistence of the store and those that depend on it comes from gifts of these deities of outgrown paraphernalia; and thus we are rewarded with shipments from the Patron Saints of Neiman Marcus Cashmere and Nabokov literature.

A young woman bought a night light in the shape of the Virgin Mary for three dollars. It was an opaque piece of plastic molded in the shape of the Madonna holding a baby, from the crook of her swaddling arms up to a halo around her head. A lightbulb was placed inside her cranium via an opening in the back and when the figure was plugged into an electric socket, a glow emitted from her halo, casting light onto the open wall beyond her. It had likely been donated by another Christian who had found enough comfort in the Lord’s protection that they no longer needed the light while they slept.

Religious objects are bought quickly. These are things like wall crucifixes, Jewish prayer books, even a tee shirt from the extreme end of the evangelical spectrum that said “Vaccinated in the Blood of Christ” (which, unless owned ironically, likely arrived as part of a death shipment). As it functions in America, religion is an institution that the masses participate in by buying the pieces of their own shrines at home: small fetishes made from the reappropriated artworks of the Romantic Period, endowed with no ephemeral divinity other than the shared belief held by buyers—the essence of the American free market.

The American spirit of self-determination claims that the spirit of God can reside within everyone, but is best shown outwardly by purchasing. Most of the modern empires of faith have had less to do with the holiness of their geographic location and more to do with the naivete of the surrounding people who live there. Many have crumbled beneath the weight of the crimes perpetrated by the con artist behind the gilded desk at its megachurch headquarters: the Falwells, the Bakkers, the Shamblins. And evangelical sites that aren’t taken down through the conventional method of prosecution for white-collar crimes often dissolve after an FBI raid and a classification of their beliefs as a cult.

That was the version of religion that I saw growing up: a cult of hypocrisy that used the image of an omniscient creator to hide behind their bigotry about the things that they did not understand. And as I got older and grew into myself as a queer man, my disdain for their way of thinking only festered. I was raised in an atheist household. I had no conception of a higher power at a young age except for my parents, who I knew were responsible for bringing me into the world. I was a product of love—not divine love but mortal infatuation un-entwined with any sense of cosmic destiny. I was a product of hormones and a honeymoon in Eastern Europe. There was comfort in the simplicity of my birth—I navigated the world without residual guilt of the suffering of any saints at the behest of my inherent sin. I felt nothing at the sight of the crown of thorns, at the figure of Jesus emaciated on the little cross jewelry that my classmates wore. But when I felt lonely I had nothing to turn to for comfort.

Belief in a higher power was an immaterial concept, a shared falsehood I couldn’t comprehend during my developmental years. Because the way that evangelical religion functions in America rests on tiny acts of divine intervention. These were any happenings before the eyes of the congregation that gently stretched the laws of physics: bursting stage lights, speaking in tongues, the face of Jesus inscribed in toast. The faith I was an outside observer to was merely an audience captivated by sleight of hand magic. No matter how hard I squinted, the browning on my toast remained absent of even minor gods.

Without experiencing the devotion that is built out of religious rituals, there was little for an outside observer like myself to find appealing. Every interaction I had with prayer, every time my skin prickled at the utterance of the word “God” was colored by the fact that I thought I was too smart to fall into the mindset of religiosity. But could I be blamed? There is little appeal in modern Christianity: the brash, bulldog ideology that was created from the attempt to merge the New Testament with American mass culture. I had, and have no interest in erudition from Mark Wahlberg or the crucifixion pageant performed by Marvel superheroes.

The current world shaped by the Industrial Revolution has begun to rapidly depreciate as it reaches the limits of what can be gutted. Paradoxically, the Bible preaches against loving the world in place of the higher power that created it: “John 2:15: Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” Yet there is an innate desire of the world’s inhabitants to find meaning, even pleasure in the state it has been left
in, in lieu of reverence to a higher power. The garbage is already here. It can be enjoyed at least.

In the case of entirely secondhand decadence sold at a charity shop like this one, the items have already been consumed and discarded. With a new owner, the synthetic undergoes a resurrection, which offers a different way to interpret the definition of “decadent.” For a culture like America’s, one that shrugs off the principles upon which it was founded in favor of perennial modernity, lots of waste is left behind. So when confronted with photographs of landscapes decimated by chemical runoff and sea life asphyxiated on shoelace aglets, a rational person would feel compelled to clear out their Amazon cart and rescue some pre-loved items from their destiny as trash, to thrift. Overconsumption isn’t the problem, it’s hyper-metabolization, the secular shame of fetishized novelty.

Despite its service, desire for new things has reached such a fever pitch that the store has begun to fall into obsolescence. Most of the clothing that has been donated displays the tags of already-defunct fast fashion retailers, made from more plastic than actual cloth. The housewares have more frequently come from the shelves of Walmart and Home Goods which the original buyer tired of after a few uses. Though they’re returning to the economy, these things weren’t meant to last very long anyways. The line between donations and tax-deductible waste disposal has begun to blur.

The cash register receipts must be wound by hand now that the gears of the machine no longer turn. The clothing racks sway with every shove of the hangers, thrown off balance from the weight of the load they bear. And when a counter drawer collapsed beneath the weight of miscellany, doomed to otherwise be forgotten among safety pins and sticky notes, a small piece of paper inscribed with the Virgin Mary was revealed, shoved between the cabinet wall and the drawer slide. It was a flier given by a Catholic Church with the Memorare prayer: “Remember, O most compassionate Virgin Mary,” it read, “that never was it known that anyone who fled your protection, implored your assistance, or sought your intercession, was left unaided.”

The store’s inventory grants customers intercession, a deliverance from the weight of a necessity that can only be alleviated with a purchase. “Things tend to find people here,” is what my boss told me when I started, “so don’t worry about trying to push people to buy things. If they want something, they’ll buy it.” But in order to complete the transaction, to receive the offering made, they must actually buy it at the cash register, the altar equipped with altar people like myself to aid them. And while I do not believe in divine providence, I believe in the power of a salient community united in the religious-adjacent belief that if they revere the charity shop, it will return blessings unto them. I am a part of an intangible network that is much larger than myself. I receive from them for my servitude to their holy site, most often loose cigarettes, even though I tell them I don’t smoke: “Let this humble gift bring you a little bit closer to Heaven in exchange for your kindness.”

The televangelist comes back one evening, within the hour of the store’s closure.

“I’ll be quick,” she says. “I want to see that.” Her bejeweled finger hovers over a necklace of warm-toned glass beads like a string of hard candies.

“That’s pretty,” I say.

“I know,” she replies. “I’ve got good taste. You see what I buy.”

“Are you going to make it into rings?”

“Yes.”

“Can you save one for me?”

“Maybe. There are some people at a jewelry store over there—” she gestures eastward, “that want to buy some.” She winks at me and leaves. She will be back for more supplies soon, just like the rest of the sidewalk roamers that find themselves drawn back to the store each day. 

They, the practitioners of the secondhand gospel, will tread the sidewalk every week until their hip, or heart gives out. And when it does, their estate will send a truckload of their leftover belongings to the shop, which I will sell to another wanderer, just like them.

The post Charity Shop Evangelists appeared first on The New Absurdist.

Welcome to the Clementine Barish Memory Clinic! We specialize in memory recall, modification,  and erasure. In order to ensure we are able to meet your memory needs, please fill out the  following form and a memory specialist will reach out to you in order to schedule a consultation. 

Please be advised that memory erasure is permanent, and cannot be undone. While there will  be several check-ins with your specialist before your final procedure, please be sure to read up  on our memory modification procedure, which may be a better fit.

Name: Alex Goodwin 

Date of Birth: 9/16/1982 

Email: Nonsenseaddress @ hootmail . net 

Are you a new or existing patient? NEW

Have you had memory recall work done before? NO 

Have you had memory modification work done before? NO 

Have you had memory erasure work done before? NO

Please list all of your viable payment options, as highlighted in our Payment Guideline:

– Bank account  

– Family inheritance (future acquisition date unknown) 

– 2017 Toyota Corolla 

– The ability to taste cilantro as something other than soap 

– The ability to see the color orange 

– All of fifth grade 

– All of sixth grade 

– All of seventh grade 

– All of freshman year of college 

– The muscle memory associated with painting 

– Enjoyment of the taste of chocolate  

– 45 decibels of hearing 

– A kidney

Please explain which memory/memories you would like erased. Please start with the least  emotionally-resonant memory first. More deep-rooted memories can be difficult to cleanly  extract, though our technicians will do their best to remove as many as possible. 

Reminder: These should be memories that you want COMPLETELY ERASED.

– That episode from that stupid kid’s sitcom when the star gets fed zucchini and blows up  like a balloon, itching and choking the entire time. (Can you get rid of all memories of  shows with this plot line? Are they all connected or do I need to list them all out?) 

– The screaming fit I threw at that coffee shop when the barista poured dairy into a cup  that clearly said “almond milk” and then the person who ordered it was like “It’s not a big  deal” and the barista got mad at me for telling him how he might have really hurt  someone. Killed someone. 

– Crying in the grocery store when the manager had to walk me to the back cause I was  freaking out the customers.  

– Crying in the middle of my board meeting when Janine was presenting on the Q3 profits.  The looks of pity were like knives in my back, brutal betrayals of the carefully built  separation of the world and work.  

– Crying at my older sister’s birthday party when I found an epipen in her kitchen drawer. I  tried so hard not to ruin her big day, but even just sitting up in her room to calm down, I  know I had made it all about me again.  

– Not picking up the phone because I was “busy” when really, I was just mad we had a  fight and I wasn’t ready to get into it. He’d be back from lunch with Paul soon enough,  we’d duke it out later. Later. There was always going to be a later.  

– Walking into the hospital room and seeing him under that sheet. They said someone  used the epipen wrong, they said they didn’t get there in time. The EMTs did everything  they could, tried to keep the airway open, said I shouldn’t look under the sheet. The  words “horror show” were used more than once. When I held his cold hand, his fingers  were so swollen.  

– Driving down to the restaurant to scream at the manager about not labeling their  desserts properly. Who expects apple pie to have peanuts? Why wouldn’t you label  that? He says he’s sorry. He says the company is sorry. He says everything he’s  supposed to say. But unless he can bring back the dead, his apologies weren’t worth jackshit.  

– Looking under the sheet. 

– Calling his mom. All of it. Every single moment of it. 

– When I let him walk out the door without giving him a kiss goodbye. 

– Looking at him after the funeral parlor had cleaned him up, in that shitty suit from the  back of the closet. All stuffed and puffed up, skin still too tight everywhere. He wasn’t  him anymore. He wasn’t my husband. Lyle was gone.  

Memory erasure is often a complicated procedure, due to the way memories are often  entangled in one another, and some memories may be erased in the process. While we cannot guarantee the preservation of all associated memories, please list all potentially associated  memories you would like us to try and preserve.

– Our first date, which was at that restaurant. It was a different menu back then, and  obviously if I had known this was going to be the place that killed him, I would have  suggested we eat somewhere else, anywhere else.  

– Lyle’s whole department coming to clean the house and help get relatives to and from  the services. Preparing food and fielding questions. Even Caleb, that massive prick, was  helpful, bringing enough cases of wine to supply a vineyard.  

– Holding his mother’s hand at the funeral. Glenda and I never saw eye-to-eye, but in that  moment, she seemed to finally get that I really loved him. I just really need this one.

– Dr. Ramirez sitting with me next to Lyle’s bedside, rubbing my back while I cried, telling  me everything I was going to need and then writing it all down and giving me her number  in case I needed anything. She shared in my anger and ire in ways I hadn’t known I  needed at the time. I have drawn on her words a hundred times now. 

– The most important of those words: “Nothing will ever be enough, but hatred is as good  a place as any to start.” 

– The fight. I was a giant ass, acting like he was definitely coming back. I want to  remember it so I always know that my words to someone could be the last. And even  though he was mad, it was the last time he said I love you to me. That’s mine, that gets  to be mine forever. 

– Lyle. He has to stay, whole and complete. Whatever happens, you can’t let me forget the  way he breathlessly ate food or wheezed when he laughed or the feel of his cold hands  after working outside or the scrunch of his nose when he got mad or how he never, ever  separated his whites no matter how often I told him or the way he used to kick the tires  of his car every time everytime he got frustrated. Even the bad parts of Lyle have to stay.  All of him. The whole of him who walked out that door and who could come back, always  just on the other side. 

Is there anything your memory specialist should know before your consultation?

I was told I needed to wait twelve months from the last memory I want erased, and I figure by  the time the procedure is scheduled, it will be about the right time. I can’t sleep, I can’t bring  myself to eat. I can see the image of him in that awful coffin burned into my eyelids. Please, I  am begging you, I can’t live like this anymore. My last memory of him cannot be him lying in the  tacky oak box in a suit a size too small for him. If the payment isn’t enough, please let me know  and I can figure out something else. I can get loans, I can clean the clinic, whatever you need,  whatever it takes.

Your memory specialist will reach out within 1 to 2 business days in order to set up a  consultation. If you have any questions in the meantime, don’t hesitate to email us or call  our office. 

Thank you for choosing the Clementine Barish Memory Clinic!

Memory management you’ll never forget!

The post We Can Forget It For You appeared first on The New Absurdist.

The day was too early and too gray to wake. I peeled the scab of the comforter away from  the raw yawning of my bare legs and grabbed the bundle of clothes that would dress me in all  shades of seriousness for work. I combed my morning straight through with the prongs of usual  routine: shower, breakfast, cup of tea. Keys that clack together as they lock the door and a car  that takes two hruffing times to start. The commute takes an hour without comment, with no  apology for the length of road or the time not given back. 

It’s odd to watch the warming start: sunrise cracks the blank-egg sky like a thumb yolking out color, and then the gray clouds trundle back in and smother it. Patchy weather. A  fidgeting indecision in the rain that would and wouldn’t fall for want of sunlight after all. But the rain came anyway. I watched the distortions of thick and heavy drops plop and bulge along the  windshield. I turned the windshield nob and watched the wiper slay the brief full-thoughts of  droplets, wet, depressing down the pane. 

The road turned, gradual, a long unwinding, and the marshy swamplands fogged the left  side of my car with low, disgruntled trees and furrowed brush. I side-eyed the landscape. There  was no one on the road so I risked distraction. The causeway I was driving on stretched over  miles of tangled wetland, and I watched the gray things blur. It felt barren, mottled. For all the  life that sprouts from such wet earth, it all looked dead. Gnarled, fetal things curling under the  thumbnail of the world. Pressed into bogs of time. Twisted, shriveled things, and the howls of  shorebirds swooping by, snapping up shimmering pulses from the mucked up womb. Womb,  tomb—what was the use? You could try and try, but what wouldn’t still goes on and simply  would not work—wouldn’t for a long time. Life doesn’t beget life alone. It begets sore tries and  failure to thrive. 

My eyes detoured back to the road ahead. A few gulls were swaying in the wind,  dropping crabs that shrapneled in collision with the shoulder of the road. I wanted to get away  from those pops of life vanishing into fragmented parts. My fingers tightened around the steering  wheel as I tapped the accelerator, but a gull cut in front of my windshield, and I swerved as  another bird dropped its half-devoured meal onto the hood of my car. There were two thumps  and a slap. The slap happened first. The thumps knocked me cold. One was my headlight and  fender plummeting into the wet bog and running solidly into an idle, slanting tree. The second  was my forehead into the steering wheel. The gray behind my eyelids prickled, and I sank into a bodily sleep.

Numb, I came to. A partial fish face looked at me through the windshield. Its body had rolled up  the car as the vehicle force-braked against the tree. The mackerel sheen of the head and his  ribbed tailbone had slapped down from the sky and settled like a sweeping bruise on the skin of  my car. I felt the water of the marsh already wrapped like socks around my bloated ankles, the  water pulling itself up my pant leg hand over cold hand, and I knew I was too dizzy to seriously  move. I rested my cheek on the steering wheel and probed my forehead with my fingers feeling  for the goop of blood that was drying like oil paint to the canvas of my bleach-blind headache. I  watched the fish as my eyes dipped in and out of focus. Watched the gills flap in the wind and  the bottom lip blubber as if about to talk. The one eye, smooshed against the glass, did a curious  thing and blinked—one time, two, three. 

“My god, lady, you’re bleeding.” 

I snorted, pathetically, my weight thrown forward onto the steering wheel, my feet  stirring up tidal waves in the water that was slowly filling the car from some unseen rent in the  framework. I shifted my legs and spoke from the side of my mouth as my cheek slumped on the  bar of the steering wheel. “You should see yourself. Not too shabby, I think. The blood that is.  Me.” 

“Do you ever ask how we get like this?” The fish twisted eagerly. 

“Get like what?” I asked. 

“Falling out of the air when you least expect it. Dislodged-like. Certainly didn’t plan it.  After all, I’m a sea thing. I glub about in water. You think you could trust that staying the same, but now here.” The fish’s eye swirled, rotating in its head, as it took in the interior of my car— ripped ceiling cloth, junk tossed onto the back seat, water rising. 

“At least it’s raining.” I grumbled. 

“That’s like air bubbles in the sea—useless if you’re drowning.” 

“Do you drown in air?” 

“It’s a sort of choking—this sort of falling down into unfamiliar territory. Purged from  whatever body steadies you.” 

“Expels you,” I mumbled into my arm. 

“Hmmm?” 

I dismissed him with a slight shake of my head. “There’s water in here. You know, for  drowning or, uh, not choking.” My brain hummed. I slowly dragged my feet and felt the water  slosh around my ankles, quickly regenerating, gushing into the brief emptiness left by my legs— like tides grasping around the legs of a pier. Toppling. Humming—my brain. “I hope it doesn’t  sink any further. The car, that is. I don’t feel I can get up just yet.” 

“Yeah, don’t tell me.” The fish flashed its skeletal tail in the air behind him. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply. Pain blushed out of my forehead. I felt woozy and  tried to grip the steering wheel with my hands, but my fingers were too sore, dented with impact. The fish head called to me. “So why do you think it happens? This falling?” “What falling? I didn’t fall. Nothing fell.” My eyes flared open angrily then immediately  cringed as my head throbbed with the sudden movement. The fish blinked. “Sure you’ve fallen. You were happy and smiling and gurgling, and then a few feet into  the air of your life and whatever was buoyancy dropped you. Or maybe that’s just me or anyway… And now, you’re here poking at your rib-bones, finger painting with your blood, and  you’re wondering why? Surely the world isn’t all that different. So, something fell inside.” “Something fell inside.” 

“Quite.” The fish’s mouth gaped open and closed. 

“I feel so alone.” 

The fish’s eye twitched. “Is that what fell?” 

“No. I don’t know.” 

“Do you want a family?” 

My chest clenched, and I shrugged sharply. My whole body ached in extension of the car  wreck. “That’s not something you plan on your own. You can’t just will it into being. No.” “It isn’t?” 

“No. It’s not like you point into the crowd and say, Yup, that’s the person I want to fuck a  family out of. It comes from mutual choice and ability. Ability to… and someone who wants to  stick around. Someone who sticks, you know? Not someone so easily shaken out.” 

“Oh. Well—I guess it’s different for a fish. I had a family of a sort. A big family— huge—little swimmers. Hard to be lonely when there’s ten more just like you bumping around in  your swim. And I guess—” 

A gull flapped down on the car and stripped a ribbon of flesh from the gray-scaled fish. I  raised my hand and slapped the windshield which scared the buzzard off. My arm fell limply  back to my lap. “You were saying?” 

“Lonely: I guess I’m used to more company. So I would ask if you’ve got company?” “Oh, no. Not anymore.” 

“Well, what about a hobby?”

“I’m infertile.” 

“Infertile in dreams, you mean?” 

My palm cradled my abdomen, and I rubbed my head gently along the top of the steering  wheel. “I guess you can say that.” 

“Do you feel stalled?” 

“No, no—life doesn’t feel like that,” I pushed myself away from the steering wheel and  leaned back in my seat, lopsided with headache, eyeing the fish. “It doesn’t feel idle or stalling.  It feels like a current, and it’s rushing in a deaf static all around me, and I am bound by a—by a  fishing line, if you will, to a sunk fishing rod wedged in unbudgable rocks at the bottom of all  

that rushing, and I’m flapping around but not swimming. There’s no living. No dreaming. No  company. No one. Nothing—do you understand? It’s just me at the bottom. Nothing sticks. It’s  just me.” 

The fish blinked its eye. The skeletal tail tapped uncomfortably against the glass. “No.  No, see, I don’t understand. I think that’s very rare to find a fish tied up like that… I think  sometimes the current rushes, and there’s greater joy in spreading your fins and following.  Sometimes you look back along your spine,” the fish demonstrated by curling his head back to  look at his tail, “and what you find is that what you thought was a line was only a stroke of  sunlight that confused the water. Do you understand? That it’s just confusion? Madness to flap  around like that? Not a real line. Not a real trap. There is no bottom for a fish, only rising up. A  sinking skyward when we’re done. You see?” 

“No. No, I don’t see. I’m not a fish.” I pinched my eyes shut. 

“May I tell you a story?”

I stayed quiet. Still. Listening for the nothing moving inside of me. My hand smoothed  over my abdomen. 

“About a fisherman,” the fish continued, “who once stopped by the wave I was riding  on.” 

The fish waited a moment and then went on, “His name was Gabe. He came across me  one night when I was testing the shallows, and he told me about him and his wife. Kept me in a  bucket on his little skiff and told me he’d let me go if I only listened. So, naturally, I did. 

“He wanted to tell me about his wife, he said. How it had been a year since her death,  you see? And she was right pretty and wore her life as well as she could. Gabe wiped his nose on  the back of his hand and continued, Well, it was a night like tonight. A night like tonight, and I’ll  never forget. Never forget how she changed the tides for me. For both of us, really. See: when we  were younger, her and I, we tried to conceive. Wanted a big family. All the company our little  home could keep. He said to me, he says, They were unable to hold anything. Nights, his wife,  Martha, would take to her bed and just lay there, despondent, cribbing herself under the covers.  No more nights siting up by the fireplace, no more talking over cups of joe, nothing. She would  just go to her room with the lights off and just curl into the dark like the echo of the sea curls into  the coil of a shell. Just wouldn’t move. 

“So I started taking myself out at nights. Would row out here on the water and just watch  the stars twisting about like little minnows or some sort in the reflection of the water as it furled  off the boat. Would row real slow so as not to disturb them, but a few always spun out. 

“And one night, long after we’d given up and age was starting to fray and loosen the  waistbands of our knuckles from holding on so tight, and the skin around our eyes finally  stopped shrugging from looking so hard for the damn thing, dear Martha, my shell of a wife, 

uncoiled from her grief and, instead of remaining under the blankets, followed me outside. She  followed him right outside, he told me. Gabe said, He had already settled himself into his little  boat, was about to release the rope from the dock and shove off, and Martha done called out his  name. ‘Gabe, stop!’ He stopped. And helped her climb in and spread the blanket he kept under  his bench across their knees—a shared square of warmth—little frail and worn-down thing. And  when they were skimming along the shoreline, the man rowing and the wife dipping her fingers  in, she shivered and made a grasp for Gabe’s hand, ‘Wait, wait,’ she said. He stopped rowing  and just watched her face watching the wake. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘All these stars.’ She peered into  the water. ‘Yes,’ he said, just watching her watch the water. Didn’t look at the stars. Seen them  all before. ‘Yes,’ he continued, ‘yes, they’re quiet.’ Martha looked up at him, ‘Grief can be like  that. Quiet.’ She smiled. ‘Gabe, I can imagine each shard of star in this vast fluid dark is one of  ours. One of our tries, and maybe grief is quiet like that. And it distills all our failures and all  our tries in vastness. In waves that make them shine for the mere trying. The attempt. What we’ve  survived hasn’t been small after all.’ Not for one moment did my eyes leave her face, Mr. Fish,  and I told her, I said, ‘That’s a right pretty way of looking at them.’ Martha settled closer—her  knee touching my knee, and that dear love said, ‘I would like some tea or some coffee. Something  warm to drink. Can we go home now?’ The fisherman smiled. He told me, he knew when he was  welcome and her affair with loneliness was over. And they went back to that home of no holding  and warmed themselves to living. 

“He let me go after that. Said he wanted to be on his way, and I’d be wanting to be on  mine too. And told me to say hello to all our fallen stars—not one too many, not one too few.”  The fish fell silent and blinked at me.

“I need to go.” I swiped the wetness from my cheek and thumbed the seatbelt buckle off  of me. The lock released and unwound the restraint from my body. And I sighed with the  soreness of my being thrown about. “I can’t do this. God—so alone.” I squeezed my eyes closed  and hugged my chest. Folding in. 

“No, you’re not.” 

I opened my eyes and looked at the fish who was shifting side to side trying to get a  better look at me, and repeated, “You’re not.” 

“I’m talking to a fish.” 

“No, I mean—I saw something on the way down that you may have missed as you were  careening into that tree.” 

“What’s that?” 

“You’ll see.” 

“Mmm.” I slumped forward slightly, testing my legs by lifting them one after the other.  “I need to leave. I can’t stay here.” 

“I wish I could walk from where I land. At least you have that going for you.” The fish  nodded at me slowly. “But even in this moment it is not that bad because I’ve made a friend in  falling.” 

I shook my head and shouldered open the door. More water rushed in as the car tipped to  it. I stepped out and was up to my thighs in marsh. Looking around, I saw other cars crashed into  trees, into bog, into brush—in various stages of sinking—doors ajar where others had fallen into  the same helpless ditch. Swamped. Flooded. Cars gutted of people—real people. Others who had opened the doors of their crash and walked off. Walked from where they landed.

I nodded, feeling the warmth from my head spread down to the extremities of my body,  and turned back to my mangled companion. “So, falling is the least lonely thing about living?” The fish slapped its bony tail on the glass. “So falling is the answer, it would seem.”

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The emergence of The Wasp was also unnatural because of how visitation was handled in our home. How, I wondered, are you here, tapping at our windowed walls? How did you find the side road behind the clusters of bushes that leads to the front gates, the presence of which is only revealed to guests in a message from my mother? How did you find the little panel on the left pillar of the gateway, press the voice memo button, and receive my mother’s approval to allow you in? And how did you know I would be here, in the grand living room, seated at the piano but never once playing it, weightlessly sliding a hand across the keys at most, because my mother gave up on me a long time ago, no longer watching me with a smile as I play out a phrase, then stop, then lean closer to the repertoire book on the ledge, then play it out again, a terrible and artless thing, but still she believed, still she goaded me on with that voice of soft leaves?

The Wasp did not say anything in response. It maintained its rhythmic patter on the window. Boxed by the windless dark, by sleeping pine trees, The Wasp seemed nothing but an astray beam of yellow light, reflecting on the window from a source high above, something not really there. The taps were precise: it slammed its body against the glass with consistent ferocity and tempo. It was unearthing something within me. Soon I was playing a languid etude dug from the sealed fissures of my memory, amateurishly woven together, all the while guided by the metronome of The Wasp.

I was sweating by the time I finished. I turned and The Wasp was no longer there. The wind inhaled slowly and the trees shivered in apprehension. The living room with its sofa that could stage six people, ten if they were drunk enough to get close, was so very empty. The tapping came about again: The Wasp was now assaulting the front door. Through the glass panels sandwiching the entrance I could view it more carefully. It was the largest insect I had ever seen. Its wings shuddered the surrounding air; its abdomen, possessing the heft of a filled grocery bag, swayed jeeredly from its thorax like the entrancing swing of a grandfather clock’s pendulum; the blade of a sharpened pencil extended from its backside. It studied me with a million black beads.

You can’t come in, I said. I made sure to open my throat and propel my words with my stomach. I’m sorry. It’s too late. And my mother doesn’t like bugs. Mom doesn’t like anyone visiting, really.
The Wasp stopped tapping. Its antennae looped and unlooped as though crossing its arms. Do you treat all your guests like this? it seemed to say. Gales with great arms dragged helpless sheets of leaves across the path that connected the door to the front gates. The moon winked behind layers of clouds. The Wasp lingered for another moment, tapped one more time against the door, and shot skyward.

I stepped back from the door. Our home was situated close to a commercial flight path; as The Wasp undertook this maneuver, I could discern no difference between the whisk of its wings and a turbine’s low roar. I returned to the piano, hoping that The Wasp would too return to the windowed wall where I had first noticed it. I twisted myself into the corner of the room; I ran up the stairs to the first landing; I adopted any position in which I might attain a wide and unburdened view to escape The Wasp as soon as it reentered my vision. Nevertheless the buzz was everywhere. For all I knew, it may have tunneled its way into the walls.

In a fit of childlike panic I ran back to the door, for the camera system was controlled there, a large high-definition screen that amassed all the gazes of all the cameras around the home, and so I thought, delusionally, that in reaching this screen—meaning traversing once again the living room where I would be vulnerable—I would be able to scroll through all the cameras and pinpoint The Wasp, and so delusional I was that I did not consider what would happen afterwards. I arrived at the screen; I whipped my finger against the controls, sifting through the camera footage as a madman scribbles paranoias on a page; I saw no Wasp through any of their eyes; the plot of the house was silent and dark; The Wasp was behind me.

It was crawling on its legs. It studied me like a dog.

Hi, I said.

The Wasp’s head swivelled to the left. It waved an antenna.

You’re not supposed to be here, I said.

The Wasp held out one of its front legs. I took it and shook it politely. I thoroughly enjoyed the kindness of The Wasp—that despite my running and hindering, it surrendered to common courtesy.

How are you? I said. I pushed myself onto my toes. Pretty cool, huh? It’s pretty big. Bigger than your nest, I bet. Or wherever you live.

The Wasp shook its head.

Well then. I can’t imagine why you’d want to come here.

The Wasp was now crawling towards the piano. It floated up onto the lid and examined the tuning pins. Satisfied, it receded to the couch.

Do you want me to play?

The Wasp nodded.

Once more I found my way to the piano bench. The line of keys was a stretch of wrathful river; I felt if I were to place my hand on the keys, I would be swept away. The Wasp recognized my hesitation. On the sofa it began a gentle flutter of its wings, a sound like soft leaves padding a path. The blood under my skin stopped rolling.

That’s a nice sound, I said. Thank you. But I’m really not sure what to play. I haven’t played in a long time, see. My mother doesn’t want me doing so.

The Wasp again swiveled its head. The clusters of black beads swelled and corrugated.

Well. I did play just now, didn’t I? You’re right. But I’m not sure if I can do it again.

The Wasp wandered up to the piano lid. It navigated a leg into the innards of strings and hammers. Slowly, without any concern for rhythm or dynamic, it plucked out the first few notes of the etude I had played. It opened its mandibles as though saying, You can’t play much worse than that.

I had made up my mind: I would play. I realized that, seated here by the piano every night, dreaming, looking for something in the soundless instrument, I had been waiting for The Wasp all along. The wrathful river died down. I settled my hands on the keys.

A boom came from upstairs, the sound of a door flinging open. It was the first time I saw The Wasp recoil in fright. The stairway rattled with my mother’s footsteps. She was singing an old 70’s tune to dreadful results—her tongue didn’t seem to work properly. The Wasp flung itself off the couch, scrambled through an air vent, and disappeared. I could hear its wings as it was eaten by the night.

My mother paused on the final step. She sniffed. Her hair looked as though it had been tumbled in a washing machine. Her left arm was kept snug to her bathrobe; her right brandished a wine bottle.
Was there anyone here? she said. Coarse sand and creaking floorboards. I shook my head. Mmm, she grunted, and began downstairs.

So concluded my first bout with The Wasp. I hoped for its return. My mother was probably going down to drink wine and cry.

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