In the Summer

Normally he would be turning right at this four-way stop. It would be dark, and Elise would be beside him, wearing a spaghetti strap tank, lime green or pink or turquoise, skin tight with the side of her bra showing. Or sometimes wearing a t-shirt too big for her, one of his, which she loved to wear over running shorts so it looked like she had just the shirt on. She said she liked his smell to follow her, that it made her feel safe. From the passenger seat her hand would rest on his forearm with his hand on the knob of the shifter. They would drive up the steep hill with the tall pines rocking on either side, nodding their approval like silent older siblings. The rutted road curving up and up and disappearing into the ink boat sky with the moon drifting along. A thought that if you could just drive fast enough you’d jump onto the invisible road above, the one camouflaged in rainbow shades of deepening violet, and just putter off into the stars. That’d be something, wouldn’t it. Push the accelerator. Windows snapping in the wind and the smell of wildlife: the sharpness of a skunk that released its toxin maybe a mile away, the faint stench of the stockyards beneath it, otherwise the air heavy and moist like the mist of a humidifier. Night birds crooning in the shadows and bugs tick-tacking off the windshield as the needle hits 50, 60, tips toward 70. Elise’s grip tightening on his arm as he shifts one last time and the transmission stutters and catches, approaches the end of the line. He looks over at her, her feet stomping into the floor of the truck, pushing herself into the seat with what little force her thin legs will give her, thighs trembling, like brakesbrakesbrakes slow down… her white teeth emerging from a smile of sheer adrenaline, ecstasy. She looks back at him right before they hit the hill. Right before they’re up and away into antigravity, everything weightless and slow motion like they’ve been submerged in a pond of molasses. Her hair flying wildly around her face, whipping in the air that roars through the windows. Bump at the top and the wheels spin without friction, then a touch, touch, carunk—and they’re back hugging the asphalt and the truck’s motor is winding down. The ground drops away before them, roller coaster style. Open mouth laughter. Her free hand over a pounding heart, then removing wild strands of hair from her mouth. Decelerate to make the next curve. Noises and smiles giddy with fear from near flight, near death, enrapture.

A few more minutes down the serpentine road in silence, her grip more earnest on his arm now. The light heartedness from anticipation—they’ve all but forgotten about the roller coaster hill. They would park by the abandoned barn, behind it so the occasional car driving by wouldn’t see them there. She would jump right out of the passenger seat and into the truck bed, and wait as he turned off the headlights and opened his door and came around back to take off her clothes first then his and make love. Afterwards, lying down on the rough blankets in the truck bed or the grass, pieces of hay stuck to them along with the smell of the outdoors. Making up constellations. Exploring her body with his eyes, knuckles smoothing over the contours of a curved hip lain sideways, moving his hand up to hold gently her pale neck, a thumb massaging the place behind her ears. The way she would turn her head and burrow her cheek into his palm when his hand went to that spot. Her smile. Hours of it. Hours of nothing.

Conversation

Said the worm to the bird, “Please spare me kind sir, for I have a family to feed”

With a cock of his head, a twitch and a peck, 

said the bird to himself, “Tee-tweet”

The Burbs and the Bees

What many people do not know about the great fall is that the fallen angels fell in the form of insects. The almighty God, with his human eyes and human beard, demanded with a cast of his hand only one thing—Do not let us see you, He said, for you are gross. He raised his heavenly hand to his forehead, which throbbed painfully of brain shrinkage, for He had imbibed far too much ambrosia the night before while working at his kiln. In His drunkenness, He had grown tired of making graceful deer and lithe panthers and majestic bears, and He felt an inexplicable longing for destruction. Hence, came forth from his clay machine these things with snapping pincers and clicking mouths, shiny and slippery and all but drooling on themselves—the detritus of God’s creation. Admittedly, it was a lonely life on God’s cloud, and a heavy responsibility to be the sole creator of the universe. You can’t expect anyone to be perfect, even God—the Bible says so.

But God finds a purpose and home for all of His creations, and in these horrific things He found an outlet for the angels He did not like. Belial! He commanded, come here, you indolent charlatan! You will now be a worm. And so it was that Belial became a worm. And you, Mammon! The lascivious earth-rapist! You, will be a dung beetle. And so it was that Mammon became a dung beetle. Next was Mulciber, who was made a termite, and Moloch, who became an arachnid, and thusly and so on it was begotten unto them until only Beelzebub and Satan remained.

The heavenly father cast the rest from the heavenly cliffs and they drifted into the nebulous like nuclear ash still aflame. Some, realizing they had been left their wings, turned onto their bellies and buzzed, What a fool God is! He forgot to take our wings! And they flew away to sting and bite and buzz in the ears of the paradise worthy. God’s response was that of course He had known that He was going to leave the wings even before He had remembered that He had thought about making them in the first place—for He is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent! And for their impudence, He cursed these fallen angels with the irony of forever flying into the brightest light in a sad and often suicidal attempt to return to heaven. Then, gesturing with his unsloshable glass of ambrosia, He turned his merciless wrath to Beelzebub and Satan, who stood defiantly at his side.

You guys, said God, are the worst. So you will be tempted eternally by the beauty of paradise, but you shall never know its inclusion.

And so, Beelzebub was made into a cicada and imprisoned in the bowels of the earth for his life’s sentence, being thrust momentarily into the brightness of paradise in the immediacy before his death. Satan became a cockroach, destined to scuttle about the dark corners of our lives, nibbling at our scraps and silently waving his antennae in frustrated antagonism. For a while he convinced Beelzebub to accompany him in his insidious brooding, but as Beelzebub saw the futility of Satan’s quest (what, with an abandoned shack, an amphetamine-addled trailer, the sewers being the only places they could overtake with sin), he retreated to his home in the earth with his cicada brethren and threw raucous sex parties instead. Come on, man! he addressed Satan, forget that life up there. All that prim and proper bullshit, the formalities and phoniness of it all! Just forget it and live down here, unrestrained in the underground. We can bring the hordes up every 11 years or so and wreak havoc, you know, eat some crops, upset the order, then come back to where we belong. They won’t come after us down here, as long as we stay out of sight.

But Satan never understood because he was a born contrarian, and a blind one at that. He did not want that surface life, never! He did not want inclusion in the fakeness. What he wanted more than anything, especially more than any semblance of content in his own, hidden world, was to destroy the flaunted happiness of those above. Those ever-smiling faces! Such unbounded pleasure! Such baseless stability! He did not want it, but he knew he could never have it. They had excluded him, they had forced him into the dirt by the heel of their boots. And because of that, it had become his mission to destroy as much of their world as possible.

Are these allegories? I’m not so sure. I was informed by an intelligent young man that they are the literal, and not literary, truth.

The Cicada’s Song

The cicadas make their alien sounds in battling crescendos. First, from the left comes the sound like steel wool on a violin—louder and louder it encroaches, penetrating the night until it calms and fades away to momentary silence. An echo reverberates from the right, (did the cicada teleport, fly across in its spaceship at warp speed?). But no. Because there is a third voice, and a fourth accompanying, and soon the whole of the night, the gelatinous calm, is sliced through by the clash of bayoneting vibrations. The smell of burning brush comes in on the dark wind. The many stars above inspire shortness of breath with their interminable vision. And the cicadas croon their song of life, their song of fleeting vitality.

For the following weeks they will emerge from the ground. Like insectile zombies they will dig out of their tombs, crawling forth from their skins and spreading their wings to feast beneath the shimmering aphrodisiac of the full and silver moon. Their shells will rot where they stand imbedded in the trunks of pines or fall to the ground with the browning needles in piles of decay. Then they will return to the dirt. Think of them as humans at hyper speed: emerge, grow and shed their former selves, socialize and rabble-rouse until they fall, are inhumed in the dirt and ground to mulch to become the feeding trough for the next generation. Ashes to ashes, dirt to dirt. What, really, is death but the decay of order? A fallout of singular ambition, a weary grip lost on me and a crash-course on is—a submission to the whole, and a slide into the dim, transcendent realm of nonexistence.

Ennui

—He’s got it.

…is it bad?

—Just about as bad as it gets.

The Doctor stood with Mrs. Patterson outside of a glass retaining wall in the observation room. Her husband—middle aged and suited, potbellied and balding, tired and remarkably motionless—sat at a kitchen table within. Pads and wires attached to him monitored his galvanic skin response, but he seemed not to notice and just stared at the wall with a blank expression. The Doctor adjusted his mirrored glasses in a clinical manner. He cleared his throat officially. It all made Mrs. Patterson very nervous, and she twisted the wool hat in her hands. It had been a hard winter in Wisconsin.

Oh jeez… He’s not gonna die, is he? I mean, he’ll make it, right?

—That’s up to him. Whether or not he’s a fighter.

He’ll be alright, I know he will. I mean, he’s always. . .

—Before you make any karma-inducing statements, Mrs. Patterson, we should run a few simple tests.

Well, alright then. Whatever you think is best.

—First, we will administer a test of awareness. This test will determine whether or not he is paying attention to his surroundings.

The Doctor pushed a button, and a hot plate of food rose from an opening in the kitchen table. Savory steak with eggs and gravy, toast, coffee, and a glass of orange juice. It looked delicious.

—I want you to tell him you made it just for him, a new recipe.

Mrs. Patterson looked up at The Doctor. He motioned to the microphone protruding from the control board. She approached it hesitantly.

“Good morning, honey! I made this just for you, a brand new recipe to get your day started.” She looked back at The Doctor for approval, but he was already writing on his clipboard.

Mr. Patterson looked around for the source of the voice, then noticed the plate of food in front of him and began to eat. The Doctor watched the monitor make its jagged blips and bleeps, and scribbled on his clipboard accordingly. Before Mr. Patterson had finished eating, The Doctor pressed a second button and the food was lowered from the table. A second dish took its place. It looked like dog food. Mr. Patterson hardly noticed, and continued eating. After the first bite he made a face of disgust and confusion, but then he just shook his head and finished the plate. Then he said, “It was fantastic, honey. Thank you,” and he picked up the newspaper beside the plate and began to read. He burped and grimaced at the aftertaste, shook the paper, and kept reading. The Doctor looked at his clipboard in concern.

—I’m afraid we’re going to have to resort to more drastic measures.

The Doctor walked out the door of the observation room and appeared in the testing room to the left of the kitchen. He placed his hands into two gloves that protruded into the kitchen and used them to pick up an extendable meter stick leaning against the wall. He drew it out, and with utmost precision he pointed it at Mr. Patterson and prodded him, lightly.

Mr. Patterson shifted in his seat.

The Doctor waited, then prodded him again.

Mr. Patterson moved his hand down to swat the stick away, and finding nothing there, he rubbed his side and returned to his meal.

The Doctor poked him hard enough to make him jump.

Mr. Patterson said, “whoever’s doing that, will you please knock it off?”

The Doctor prodded him incessantly.

Mr. Patterson tried to get up and move to the other side of the table, but when the wires restricted him, he sat back down and accepted the prodding.

When The Doctor returned to the observation room, Mrs. Patterson was sobbing quietly. It’s bad isn’t it? she said, It’s really bad.

—There is still some hope yet, Mrs. Patterson. Maybe he is just a very calm and enduring person. Next we test his empathy.

The Doctor pressed a third button on the control panel, and a television dropped down from the corner of the ceiling. CNN blared from the screen. 600 Sudanese children were found in unmarked graves today, victims of what is believed to be a sex trafficking ring. . . As the news report continued with pictures accompanying, the monitor showed only the slightest reaction from Mr. Patterson. Mrs. Patterson let out a cry of anguish. The Doctor shook his head at his clipboard.

—There is one more test. The American rule. One must always value the individual above all things. I want you to read this to him, Mrs. Patterson. He handed her a script, which she scanned quickly, and looked up at him in horror. No, she said, I couldn’t. I just…

—Read it, Mrs. Patterson.

She read it. It said that she had been sleeping with his boss for 3 years. It said that he was worthless, disappointing, and would never amount to anything in his miserable life. It said he had a small penis. For a while there was silence as Mr. Patterson digested the news. Then, he said, “Well, then I guess we should get a divorce.”

The Doctor turned to Mrs. Patterson to give her the diagnosis. He checked items off his clipboard as he spoke.

—Lack of conviction due to feelings of powerlessness. This is typical of a man who was once driven by deeper desires. Over time he has realized the miniscule impact he has as an individual, and the ever-growing tide of control of those individuals that are against him.

—Robotic detachment. After years of anguish, failure, and disappointment, he has realized it’s easier to walk an emotional flat line. He takes life as it comes, and does his best not to care about anything, especially if it involves himself.

—Feelings of inadequacy, stage 4. He’s been downtrodden, pushed around again and again by his superiors, and… well, he’s given up, Mrs. Patterson. I don’t know what to tell you. He simply does not care anymore. I’m sorry, Mrs. Patterson, but there’s nothing we can do.

Mrs. Patterson sobbed. Nothing? she asked, absolutely nothing?

The Doctor took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

—Well, there is one thing, but it’s up to you, Mrs. Patterson. Let him believe he has control. If a man can’t even have control of his own home, then what does he have? You know better, Mrs. Patterson. You don’t need the reassurance. But he might. Maybe you can pull him out of this. Remind him why he loves you, why you love each other, and maybe you can bring him back to life. Maybe you won’t even have to convince him, maybe it’s still true. Do you think you can do that?

Mrs. Patterson looked terrified. I don’t know, doctor, she said. I don’t know if I can do it. I don’t know if I do love him anymore… the way he is now.

The Doctor sighed and walked to the lever at the far left of the control board.

—Then he’s dead.

He pulled the lever and electricity poured into Mr. Patterson. His muscles went taut and he trembled from the force of the voltage coursing through his body. Then he went limp and the room faded into darkness.

It was the middle of the night and Jon shot up in bed. Natalia was there beside him, her small hands smoothing the rumples on his undershirt and checking the temperature of his forehead.

“Are you alright?”

“Fine,” he said, looking out the dark window. “Just a dream. A really weird dream.”

She pulled him back down beside her and kissed his neck.

“Just a dream,” she repeated sleepily. “Go back to sleep.”

Jon rolled onto his side to ask her something, but Natalia’s eyes were already closed. He pushed the hair back from her face and took a deep breath.

“I love you,” he said. But he did not go back to sleep.

Crush

Like a spool of thread his heart unwound. That is how he described it, that is how it was written—although at the time that was not how he felt at all. To be honest, at the time, the first time he saw her… well. She was walking with a lunch tray held close to her body, delicately traversing the crowd of students on her way to friends. He watched her from his seat on the far side of the cafeteria. He watched her walking and saw her smile at acquaintances and watched her lips move to form the words of greeting and… she was so beautiful! Unbearably so. It was not love he felt at first sight so much as disappointment that bordered on hatred. How he hated her for being so beautiful. That beauty, coupled with the knowledge that he could never be with her, never even be seen with her in casual friendship because she was and always would be three steps up on the social strata. He hated her presence, and most directly, the effect her presence had on him. She was the daughter of the siren queen, so beautiful that she bent him to her will without song. A magnetic aura, so flawless, so captivating—he didn’t know what to do with himself, all he could do was think of her, and continue spooning mac and cheese into his mouth. A spoonful and a furtive glance, a few chews and another. Entirely inappropriate, he knew. Occasionally she would catch his eye, using that sixth sense that people have when they know they’re being stared at, and he would immediately look further up the wall like his eyes just happened to be passing by—up to the ceiling that he certainly hadn’t seen a hundred times before, then orbiting around the sterile cafeteria and back down to his plate—the disposable Styrofoam plate with the cold mac and cheese and the carton of 2% milk and the canned beans and the hard cookie that he really couldn’t taste at all, even if he were trying.

He wrote the first verse in the silence of his bedroom, where he could let his romantic spirit free from the taunting fetters of his peers. In his solitude he could imagine a life in which his fantasies were realized; in this moment he imagined a world of fairness and merit-based successes, one that would raise him to the height he deserved for his moral fortitude and honorable intentions. One in which he could be with her. Honorably. Morally. There was no room for lasciviousness in his fantasies…at least not until later, when he would have his dreams. In that room his spirit roamed free, unbound by even his own restrictions. 

Many afternoons were sighed away at the page, and his poem was now tucked into his coat pocket. In the cafeteria. Watching her talk lightly with her friends—all of them pretty, but none as pretty as her. He took out the page and read again.

 

A spool of thread, my heart unwound

all crimson string it fell aground

and I, in time-stuck reverie

let love first seen remain unfound

 

Unraveled self! All else was spurned

to follow her disparate soul,

but into fog she disappeared

and on I turned in cloud and cold

 

Ensnared in her Medean maze

and I, the beast! No hero’s game,

I strained to break my crimson thread

but found no rest and no escape

 

How long behind the prison gates

with carnal thoughts insatiate?

My living dreams in ghostly shroud,

that love first seen I never found.

 

He put down the poem. Stupid, he thought, stupid. Why, he thought, why? The poem was so full of sappy melodrama and inverted syntax, what could he possibly have been thinking when he wrote it? She would laugh at him, surely. Or worse, everyone else would laugh at him and she would give him a look of pity. I’m sorry, that look would say, but you’re right.

The bell rang, and a clatter arose as the students in the cafeteria got up to clear their lunch trays. He stood with them. Now was his chance. He made his way through the throng of students to the waste bin at the front of the room, the same bin he’d seen her use every day since he first saw her. He held the poem pressed under his tray with the palm of his hand. There she was. Just as beautiful up close. Even more so. He started removing the contents of his tray and throwing them into the trash. The milk carton first, in the trash. He looked up as she walked toward him with her friends. The Styrofoam plate. What he wouldn’t give. The half-eaten cookie. So beautiful, too beautiful. He turned away before she could catch him looking. The poem.

A Brief History of the Future

            He is an ambitious young man. That is what he has been told and he carries the responsibility proudly on his shoulders. They have a small dim place with a stained carpet and pervasive staleness. He stands at the only window by the door. In his mind he imagines future worlds and new versions of himself.

            Through the window the sunlight submerges the room and the figure of the young man in shifting shadow and color as the sun rises and sets and rises and sets at an impossible speed. The mutating light throws transient spikes of shadow across the walls that make it seem as if the room is rocking slowly back and forth. The young man’s wife sits at the kitchen table with her shoulders drawn close by a rough blanket. Beside her a small child fades into existence and then a second and a third and together they scamper around the room. They are ghostly whirs of a wispy substance and paling color, never stopping long enough for him to see any of them clearly. They streak across the mottled carpet and around the fading and torn furniture, through the young man and through each other like translucent projections of light. Occasionally his wife stands to cook and does so in an instant and the children blur into the kitchen to swallow their meals and leave again. But most of the time she sits and watches him by the window.

            At first glance, the young man’s sharp button down and slacks distinguish him from his humble surroundings. But looking more closely, the slacks have been worn thin and reveal the paleness of his thighs, which are slender but retain the willowy resilience of young muscle. His shirt is also tinged a slight acid yellow from the repeated gathering and washing of dirt and sweat; but his brow is stern and his eyes are hard set in their challenge of the horizon.

            “Time is our most valuable commodity,” he says, “but it’s a raw material. I won’t become rich or famous, accomplished, remembered in any way if I harvest time alone. I must use it to accomplish my goals.” The man is immersed in the ever-changing light that flows in waves through the window. His figure sharpens in clarity and vibrancy as time speeds forward. The children around him grow faces and collect memories and names. Their shadows expand and thicken and they move more slowly with the added weight. But the young man takes no notice.

            ‘’Keep up with the future or fall back with the idle—complain and despair with the timid and weak. I will become the man I see tomorrow.” As he speaks his jaw strengthens and sprouts black hairs. They grow and thicken into a beard. From the back and shoulders of his worn clothes spring new strands of silk. They thread through each other in a serpentine pattern, looping and flattening like inchworms until they form a rich suit of clothes. His chest and shoulders broaden and fill the suit. The man gains the defiant composure of self-confidence.

            “Time can be money. Time can be progress. Or it can burn away, and everything and everyone with it. Too many people live passively. They treadmill. They lift weights that settle back into the same place. I will always move forward. I mean to accomplish many things.” Now the house creaks and moans as it grows. Clean white walls rise up and curl to meet at the peak of a cavernous ceiling, and from the ceiling a chandelier unwinds. The floor trembles and melts and hardens into smooth polished wood. Several windows appear and expand outward like mirrored portals. Dark portraits swirl, pull and drain away the children in rivulets of shimmering dust. The man’s back compresses and bends, his belly and chest soften and droop. But he does not express any sense of loss. He revels in his success.

            Then, almost as quickly as it began, the rumbling fades into the distance. The sun slows its frantic pace and rests low on the horizon. The house is silent.

            The old man stands at the window by the door. He leans heavily on the cane in his hand. He breathes deeply, nods, and turns to inspect what he has accomplished. His eyes are dark and clouded with myopia. They stare widely as he scans the bright room as if searching for something.

            “Luisa?” he calls. His voice echoes through the main chamber. His deadened pupils dart back and forth, straining to detect any movement or figure from behind the veil of blindness. But all he can see is a vague warmth of light and the blurred outlines of the photographs on the wall.

            “Luisa?” he calls again.

            He remains poised for a reply that never comes. The air is still and silent.

Room 106 (Part II—the strangeness)

The cold slide of steel on steel and a slow turn and drop into the chamber. Click. Isolated explosions resonate like M-80s and the bullets melt under the combustion and drive, speeding through the air in jagged shards. The sharp crack of gunpowder clouds the parking lot, mixing with the more translucent steam that rises from the asphalt. Fire and flood, Earl thinks, judgment day comes like the 4^th of July. The bullets cut through his body.

            Two through the abdomen, one rattles around his chest cavity. His left shoulder thrown back from the impact of another, a fourth travels through his turned cheek and leaves a small crater behind his ear. Earls falls to the floor and his handgun drops unfired beside him. Like a backward dive into a bottomless well. Down into darkness.

            He feels the floor shift with the turmoil of many divergent souls as a carpet of black roaches churns and grinds agape a whirlpool opening to the shaft of hell. From beneath the ashen scuttling comes the heat of the incinerator, burning like magnesium its immortal white blaze amidst the stench of burned flesh and sulfurous howls. It is now that Earl looks around him and sees that the cockroaches engulfing his body are not actually cockroaches, but the blackened stubs of fingers reaching out from mottled hands, the flesh slow roasted and falling away. Crying out from beneath are countless grey faces that twist and contort, surging over one another like rotting fish. They grab hold of his arms and legs. Their fingers dig into his flesh. Nothing to hold onto. He is dragged into the howls.

            When Earl comes to he is strapped to a torture device that resembles a rack made of stone with a fire burning steadily beneath him. Pain shoots through his spine as his nerve endings sizzle and die, then regenerate only to be cooked again. His skin blisters and melts into the stone slab, making it impossible for him to move.

            Beside him a demonic being sharpens torture devices. How cliché, Earl thinks, surely Satan could be more creative. The demon turns to Earl with gnashing teeth and fiery aura. He approaches the torture rack with a long, sharpened pick and a heavy stone hammer. Earl sighs.

            The demon takes the pick and wedges it beneath the fingernail of Earl’s pinky on his right hand, raises the hammer, and slams it home. The fingernail cracks and tears off, removing a jagged slice of flesh up to his second knuckle. Earl winces, then sighs again. The demon moves the pick to his ring finger. Earl looks at him wearily.

            “Come ooon,” he says, “can’t you think of anything better? This is in, like, all the movies. You’ve had forever to think of ways of torture and this is all you got?”

            The demon doesn’t respond. Instead he raises the hammer and drives it home a second time. Earl winces. Then he shakes his head.

            “Really? I thought when I came down here I would at least learn somethin’, find out about what I missed out on up there. You’re disappointin’ me.”

            In response, the demon removes the rest of Earl’s fingernails on his right hand in quick succession, then looks down at him. Earl shakes his head. The demon grunts and goes back to his workbench.

            He returns with what looks like an iron mask, not more than a hollow head-shaped piece of metal with two eye holes drilled out. He jams it onto Earl’s head. From inside Earl’s voice comes in a muffled, metallic echo.

            “Oh, what’re you gonna do now? You gonna take a blowtorch and heat this metal thing so my face melts? So I can’t breathe?” He shakes his masked head.

            The demon stops, a blowtorch held in the air over Earl’s face. He goes back to his workbench. Earl strains to turn his head, but the mask restricts his movement. He sits back and stares at the stalactites through the tiny holes. The sound of the blowtorch being used on something else comes from the workbench.

            “What now?” his voice echoes, “you gonna heat the pick with the blowtorch and stick it through the hole in this mask like you’re gonna put my eye out but just leave it there for a while, close enough for me to feel the heat and think about what it would feel like to have my eye put out before you actually do it?”

            The demon tears the mask of Earl’s head and throws it across the room. He replaces it with a dirty grey rag and swings the torture rack on its axis so Earl’s head is pointed at the floor.

            “Great. Waterboarding. Like nobody’s tried that. I’m telling you—”

            Boiling water hits Earl’s face midsentence, drowning out his words. He coughs and splutters, the water blistering his mouth and nostrils and the soft crevices in the corners of his eyes. This lasts for some time. When it’s done, Earl shakes his head. “Hot water’s a good touch… I guess.”

            The demon stares at him for a good while, his demonic flame creating a halo of fury around his bony frame. Then he leaves the room. He returns with what looks like an emaciated demon-rat, its fur stretched thin over its skeletal structure. Earl looks at it in disgust.

            “So what,” he starts, “you gonna take that starved rat and put it under a bucket on my stomach and heat up the bucket, or maybe just fill me up with cottage cheese and give the thing a little nudge in my direction til it starts to eat into . . .”

            As this goes on somewhere—possibly 4,000 miles beneath the surface of the earth or in another world altogether or just in Earl’s mind—the policemen in room 106 at are inspecting Earl’s body. It is making strange, guttural noises akin to that of strangulation, but the eyes are dead open at the ceiling from where it lays leaking blood and brain matter. One of the cops nudges the mangled skull with his boot.

            “The mother fucker’s still alive. Shot him fulla holes and he’s still alive.”

            The second cop looks over at his partner, then back at the breathing carcass.

            “More of a child fucker than a mother fucker, I’d say.” He makes a tentative expression like a probing smile, which he quickly wipes off his face when he sees that the commanding officer is not pleased.

            “Come on, Charlie, have a damn sense of decency. That ain’t shit to joke about. This man was a monster.” They watch Earl’s body in silence. It makes a choking noise and draws one last rattling breath.

            It is said that the last few moments of a life can feel like an eternity. With no counterpoint to stabilize the relativity of time, how can one know when the end truly comes? It’s like an endless dream. And for Earl, there was no waking up from what had become his nightmare.

            Apparently the evaluation was over. The demon didn’t leave so much as he disappeared from existence. The chamber didn’t crumble or fade away as much as it simply ceased to be. Earl was not sure how he got here but here he was here, yes, he was here, still alive in some way, still conscious even though he had no way to affirm it. The closeness of the earth, its moist texture on his body, the sound of his breathing were all that remained. No one to see him. No one to know he was ever there. Is this eternity? Is this the fate to which he was assigned? He tried to move and could not. He tried to scream but he made no sound. Just him, in the earth, enveloped in the silence and the darkness.

Room 106 (part I)

Earl is crouched in the corner of room 106 at La Quinta, down south of Atlanta off I-75. Could be any room, except for the particular that the window’s been damn near gunned to hell—imploded to a million pieces that filled the room in a stream of glass powder, bringing with it the screen and its flimsy plastic frame surging into the bed, the lamp, and the wall behind it—the whole place shot to holy fucking shit. The room covered in pocks and craters dribbling various types of stuffing. That was a few minutes ago. Now just the residue on the floor.

He sits with his back against the radiator and his head against the wall, dangling the tip of a Smith & Wesson handgun over the patch of carpet between his legs. He rubs his nose with his empty right hand, sniffs. Takes a few shallow breaths before looking down to watch his ribcage pump dark blood out of a hole he can’t see. He presses his hand to his side and feels around. A couple holes at least. Leaking his own damn stuffing. He manages a smile, winces. Bastards, he thinks. Pigs. They fuckin’ got me. And I was so damn close.

The rain has been coming down for a few hours now. A heavy southern storm, typical for an evening in July. Flash flood warnings, torrential downpour. Could be called a typhoon in other places. Through the empty space where the window used to be, Earl listens to the airy hush and patter of the heavy drops of rain cascading onto the asphalt. The metallic pap, pap of them hitting the hoods of the cars. And the police sirens going round and round, taking turns illuminating the room in cold blue light. Earl puts the handgun down and repositions his hands on either side of his legs. Scoots himself inch by inch, arms trembling, over to the edge of the window. He hazards a peek.

Gunshots crack and are answered by the slang of the bullets careening off the brass bedpost and the crumbling of plaster as they are embedded in the wall. Shit shit shit. Must be at least 20 of ‘em out there. A flash image of the officers positioned behind opened doors of their patrollers. Armored vans parked lengthwise behind—they got the god damn FBI out here. What an honor. Earl smiles again. At least I stuck one of ‘em, maybe two. He could hear the screams. The rain is still coming. The smell of it in the air.

A megaphone whines, crackles: “Come out with your hands up. We know you’re in there, O’Hara.”

What is this, a god damn movie? He feels like he’s in a god damn movie. Obviously they know he’s in here, he just shot one of their fucking compadres. Earl doesn’t say anything back to the megaphone man and instead turns the .38 in his hand. He slides out the clip. Three more shots, three more stuck pigs… the good lord knows they won’t let him die peacefully. Not after what he’s done. It’s either here or in prison. He pulls back the hammer.

“Alrigh—” he chokes. He clears his throat, surprised at how weak his voice is. This really is it, damn. So this is what it’s like. Not much pain yet. Just a vague numbness and knowledge that their should be pain. Kind of like a dream.

“Alright,” he says in a more commanding tone, and satisfied he continues, “You got me, I can’t stay hiding no more.” Earl pushes himself up to stand against the wall, his sock feet making wet noises in the puddle of blood. “Just don’t shoot me and I’ll confess to all of it.”

Silence outside.

Earl waits before shouting again, “I mean all of it. You’ll get the damn TruTV special you’ve always wanted.”

Still nothing. Fine. If that’s how it’s gonna be. He clears his throat again, takes a rattling breath.

“You know how many people I’ve broken?” He waits. “How many I’ve ruined? Destroyed?” Earl smiles in the silence as he revisits his memories. He starts laughing and coughs, bubbles of blood oozing from his chest. He clutches his ribs, makes a face somewhere between a smile and a grimace.

“You want to know what it’s like to fuck someone who doesn’t even know what the hell is happening to them? It’s ecstasy! Fucking ecstasy!  Makes you feel huge. Like you’re everything in the world all at once—the whole mother fucking world is you. Don’t tell me you haven’t tho—“

“Come out with your hands up, O’Hara,” the megaphone says, “Or we’ll just let you bleed to death in that shithole.”

If that’s how it’s gonna be. If that’s how they want it. Earl holds the gun in his left hand pressing hard against his ribcage, and with his back turned to the cops he moves right toward the open window. His right hand breaks the plane first. He waves it, tests the water. No shots. Alright. Keep going. A shoulder, a hip, back, legs, now everything in view.

“Show us your other hand, O’Hara.”

He doesn’t move.

“You’re other hand, O’Hara! Put it up, NOW!”

He turns.