-
At first Mark thought the delivery driver might have a chance. Some guy had jumped into his path. To his credit, the driver powered his little e-bike right into the bastard. He had almost made it past when a second guy came out of nowhere and settled the issue with a bat.
The two muggers walked off with the bike, laughing. The first one mimicked his friend’s windup. The delivery guy’s leg twitched a few times.
During the first week of the crisis Mark joked about burning through his and Troy’s liquor cabinet while they waited for all this to blow over. Then the booze stockpiles dwindled. The places that had stayed open to deliver cocktails and tater tots faded one by one from social media. Some of the proprietors got sick—a lot, actually. Right when the hospitals were filling up. Bad timing. It got real clear, real quick that going outside was a terrible idea. Not that staying in was all that fucking great.
Troy had been unflappable until recently. Mark envied him for that. They had been in the same year at school, graduated with degrees in finance. Interned together at JP Morgan. Everybody liked Troy. He had an energy Mark would have called infectious a few months ago but that no longer felt appropriate; yet, even Troy was beginning to crack around the edges. Right now he was kneading his phone with both thumbs as if with a bit more effort he might burst through the other side.
“Damn,” he mumbled, turning the screen to Mark. “See?”
“She’s flexible.” Mark tilted his head. “Oh, wow.”
“Worst part? She only lives like two blocks away on Orchard.” Troy flopped his head back on the couch and let out an exaggerated sigh. Mark picked up Troy’s phone and took another peek, for good measure.
“Far be it for me to look past the main attraction but what’s wrong with her eyes?” They gave Mark a hell of a shock. Black from edge to edge, probably a stupid chat filter.
“Dunno, e-girl thing I guess. Contacts or something. She’s been doing cam shows for extra bucks.” He drummed his fingers on the coffee table. “She asked me to come over. Begged me.”
“You can’t go outside, man.”
“I know.” Troy made a show of snatching his phone from Mark, then tossing it back on the coffee table.
Mark knew it wouldn’t be more than a few seconds before he was at it again. This had been going on all morning. It was strange seeing Troy finally deteriorate like this, though Mark supposed if Troy was going to lose his mind over anything it would be a hot slutty e-girl that popped his last screw.
“I love ya bro, but take that edging bullshit to your bedroom. The living area is for video games and watching delivery guys get mugged. Rules.”
Troy made a show of glowering. Mark leaned against the breakfast bar unfazed. Troy took his phone back from the coffee table and went right to thumbing the screen again. He grew steadily more intense, after a bit it was like he’d forgotten Mark was even there.
“Gross. You’re legit drooling right now,” Mark said, as a thin trail of saliva crept down the corner of his friend’s mouth. “Come on.”
Troy looked back up from his phone, wild-eyed. In an unnerving deadpan he said, “I’m out of here.”
“No, wait–” but Troy was already out the door, clomping down the stairwell. Mark screamed after him, “You horny idiot!”
He almost stepped foot outside. It struck him he hadn’t even touched his own welcome mat in weeks. Being cooped up really fucks with you. He called out after Troy again, but the by now the boy was long gone.
Troy just broke quarantine for some egirl pussy, he wrote, realizing it had been ages since he’d sent something to Anna that wasn’t a dumb virus meme.
WTH?! She sent back immediately.
tbf she was . . . compelling. He mentally patted himself on the back for not saying ‘flexible’.
Ye ye, I bet she compels a few bux out of his bank account too. TF? You gonna let him back in?
Mark rubbed his forehead, then jerked his hand away and typed, I can’t believe he walked out, it was like something came over him.
Horny cabin fever.
Mark set his phone on the counter and washed his hands, going through all the motions—back, between the fingers, scrub the thumbs, and so on. He dabbed the phone down with an alcohol wipe. Pointless ritual. He hadn’t gone outside for so long that he could’ve spend the rest of the afternoon eating ribs with his fingers and be perfectly safe. God, he missed ribs. Funny how the act of washing his hands had evolved over the last few weeks. Gone from being a precaution to a meditation, something he did to soothe the panic when things got to be a bit too grim. He eyed the little green nub of soap resting by the sink. The National Guardsmen would bring another ration box soon, probably.
Later that night Mark texted Troy.
That better be good pussy because there’s no way I’m letting your plague-ass back into the apartment.
He waited for several seconds, scrolled through social media feeds. Some guy he met on a road trip through the mountain west was ranting about how the plague was a hoax. Easy to be insulated in a cowtown. People all deal with this shit in their own way, he supposed. Tried to suppose. Before he knew what he was doing he had thumbed out a pretty vicious personal attack and hit send. Score another one for social distancing. He flipped back to his messages. Still nothing from Troy.
Mark sat in the crook of the window, eyes on the corner of Grand Street. Slow night, only only one mugging. People were either wising up or all the easy marks had been picked off. He tried not to think about Troy walking into a baseball bat.
A few days passed.
Anna was sure that Troy had just shacked up. Maybe she has good drugs? She offered at one point.
Shit, right now any drugs are good drugs.
lol
BANG BANG BANG on the door.
Holy shit, brb, Mark hit send and ran to look through the peephole. Troy was on the other side, hunched over, only the top of his head visible. Mark went to open the door.
“Hey, what happened out there?” Mark called out, taking his hand away from the knob.
Troy’s fist came up and slammed into the door. The sound made Mark jump.
“Mark, you—you—have, to let me in,” Troy said. Something about his voice was weird, like he was talking through a bunch of gravel.
“Where have you been, man?” Mark’s anger rose quickly enough to push the jitters aside. “We both know I can’t let you in.”
Troy slammed his fist into the door again.
“Fuck!” Mark stumbled backward and tripped over his own feet, knocking his head into the breakfast bar. A trickle of blood snaked its way down the back of his head.
Troy yelled something unintelligible. Mark hadn’t ever heard him angry before, not like that. Fear tickled the back of Mark’s brain.
“You coming down off something?”
“Just, open, the door,” Troy said with that same lazy gravel drawl.
Mark wiped a smear of blood from the back of his head.
He got up to look out the peephole again when he caught movement on the street. Another delivery guy got shanghai’d. He went to the window to get a better look. The mugger had a knife. He stuck the delivery guy in the chest just like that, one two three. It seemed so distant, so unreal. The delivery driver fell to the ground. Then the mugger turned his head.
He stared directly up at Mark. He dragged the knife in front of his throat, pointing with the other hand. Intention clear.
“Troy, did you close the stairwell door? Troy!” Mark’s voice cracked.
The man in the mask walked toward the building. Too close of an angle for Mark to see.
“Troy!”
Mark pressed his eye to the peephole. Troy was still there. Mark wanted to open the door. He couldn’t get the social media images out of his head. The hospitals overloaded, bodies shoveled into the backs of trucks, bound for industrial incineration—what rich countries did to avoid the accusation of digging mass graves.
Echoes of footsteps in the stairwell. Getting closer. Mark ran to the door just as something heavy slammed against it. He covered his ears and whimpered his friend’s name while the dull wet thuds continued.
The sun had been set for some time when Mark uncovered his ears. He leaned back against the wall, reopening the scab from earlier. The sting and the wet of the blood on his neck were distant, like they belonged to someone else.
Mark pulled his phone from his pocket. Stupid, he thought, how we do that in times of stress. The green notification from Anna asking how he was doing paused the moment, gave a little relief, right up until he started typing and the weight of everything came tumbling back down. He’d hid like a coward while his best friend got stabbed (or worse) just three feet away.
I’m a piece of shit.
An elipsis animated underneath his message. In a fit Mark threw his phone across the room, feeling instant remorse as glass crunched against the radiator.
Scraping came from the other side of the door.
“Troy?”
Mark peeked through the peephole to see Troy staring back at him. His eyes were black from edge to edge, a blank expression on his face.
“Are you okay, man?” Mark asked. “What happened with that guy?”
Troy smirked in a way that Mark didn’t like at all. His face twisted up and to the side, the effect was even more off-putting with those gruesome contacts. When he spoke, the effect was like one of those poorly dubbed kung fu flicks from the 70s.
“Everything’s fine now, Mark. You can let me in.”
“Are you hurt?” Mark cursed himself. He needed to come right out and ask if Troy had been in contact with the plague, but he couldn’t muster the words. It felt like he was in the back seat, a spectator to his own speech. “Even if you feel okay, I can’t let you in.” Because you’re sick! I can’t let you get me sick! What he said was, “I’m concerned for you.”
Troy tilted his head to the side, but the angle was too acute. Unnatural, even. Mark’s teeth chattered against each other, either in frustration or fear.
“You’re—the—the only one who can help me.” Troy’s voice seemed to skip, synching back up with the movements of his lips, so seamless that Mark questioned whether his speech had been out of sync in the first place.
Mark began to wonder if he was the one acting strange.
“What’s wrong with your eyes?”
“Nothing, Mark. That’s just a thing I got up to.” Troy smirked. This time it was classic Troy, all arrogance and charm. “Remember the girl?”
“What happened to your eyes?” Mark demanded, growing more unsure of himself. A slick of sweat had formed on his neck. He wiped at it with his forearm. The sleeve of his sweater came away soaked.
“Let me in, I’ve got some really good news. About all this.” Troy made a motion with his arm that was hard to make out through the distortion of the peephole. Mark caught sight of a shape behind him, a man’s body slumped in the far corner of the hallway.
“What if you’ve been exposed? You don’t know if that chick was a carrier.” Mark tried to get a glimpse past Troy’s shoulder. No luck.
Troy didn’t sound bad if he was being honest with himself. In fact, Mark figured that Troy sounded better right now than he had for the last week or so before he took off.
“What have you got to lose?” Troy asked, when he knew full well that the answer was life, health.
Mark wished he hadn’t thrown his phone across the room like an asshole. Anna was good with these situations. She’d know what to do.
“Okay Troy.” Mark pulled his sweater up over his mouth and nose. “I’m going to open the door. You gotta stay on the other side, okay?”
Mark pulled the door open.
Troy glowered with those horrible black eyes. Mark averted his own, only to see that the body slumped in the corner belonged to the skimasked mugger. A chill came over Mark. Hot wetness trickled down his leg. He’d pissed himself. Troy took Mark’s forearm with grip so strong he felt like a toddler. Dragged out into the hallway.
“You don’t want to end up like him, do you Mark?” Troy nodded at the slumped ex-mugger in the corner. His head had an unnatural shape that Mark realized was because it had been staved in at the temple. Bile flooded his mouth. Troy took Mark’s chin between his thumb and forefinger, turning his face around so that he was staring into those black, black eyes. “Aren’t you glad you opened the door for your old friend?”
Mark’s vision narrowed so that all he saw was the field of darkness in Troy’s eyes. His fear fell away, still real but now quite distant. He was here with his friend Troy. In the hallway of their building. Outside. The word stumbled through Mark’s consciousness until it found its place like a drunk falling into bed.
With violent effort, Mark twisted loose from Troy’s grip. He ran as hard as he could down the stairs, taking them two, three at a time. Leaping from landing to landing, until he hit the ground floor. He burst through the door onto the street and ran as hard as he could. Drenched with piss and sweat, he shivered, chilled to the bone, even as he ran. Only when he’d crossed 6th Ave did he stop looking furtively over his shoulder. Anna’s place was close.
Every movement on the street set off little explosions of fear in Mark’s head. Any shadow could hide a mugger or worse, and the street lamps cast shadows everywhere. He could barely breathe by the time he got to Anna’s building. God, he was out of shape. Mark mashed the buzzer, 5D. It rang out.
A few guys shuffled past, hoods up. They took no note of him. He must look deranged right now. Not such attractive prey.
“Come on, Anna!” he screamed impotently and hit the buzzer again, and again, and again.
“Mark?” came Anna’s voice, distorted and scratchy from the intercom.
“Bad news, something—something happened to Troy.” Mark gasped for breath, he was stuttering and could barely get words past his tongue. “You’ve got, to let, me up. Please, it’s not, safe out here.”
There was a pause that stretched out for so long that he wondered if she had hung up on him. Then the door made a faint buzz-click-whirr.
Anna was in the hallway when he came out of the elevator. Her face dropped in shock.
“Mark,” she said with a tremble in her voice, taking a step backward. “What’s wrong with your eyes?”
-
I did a Twitter thing. The story, “Online mobs, startup bullshit. A thread:”, consists of 263 tweets, or 13 daisy-chained tweet threads. Its working title was “Revolt”, stolen from the excellent Martin Gurri book The Revolt of The Public and it’s about the ways that political mobilization has changed in the 21st century, particularly post 2011; but it’s also about startup bullshit.
Start here:
Online mobs, startup bullshit. A thread:
— Eben Markov (@MarkovEben) September 17, 2019Why the weird tweet fiction thing? For one, I’ve never run across compelling Twitter fiction. I know that’s almost definitely my fault for not digging deep enough, as I’m sure there is good stuff out there. In fact if more than a dozen people read this post I’m doubly sure I will be notified of a vast trove of Twitter fiction that will put lie to everything I am about to say. However, all the attempts I’ve seen end up reading as if the author copy-pasted a short story into 280 character paragraphs, and I wanted to take advantage of the medium in a way that the other things I’ve read have not.
Tweets are (kinda) dialog. Most accounts tweet in their own voice and most message threads read like conversations. Given that, I decided to structure my composition as a screenplay rather than a typical prose story. That brought me to the second problem. What happens when there are interactions with other major characters? After stewing on it for a while I decided the most natural thing would be to structure those tweets as quote/retweets.
Too much would be overkill but by adding a few of the key supporting characters as Twitter accounts in dialog with the narrator/protagonist I feel like the reader gets just enough of the effect without it becoming tedious.
Fun! Now how the hell do I actually put 263 tweets onto Twitter? As Eben would say, Haha fuck.
The weirdest thing about the writing project I'm working on is that it requires a bit of programming to transform the story into a finished product. Completed a draft yesterday and spent this afternoon updating the script parser. Fun and weird.
— Scotty Weeks (@scottyweeks) September 3, 2019Lucky for me I’m also a software dev.
def to_beets(text) clean = text.lines.reject{|l| l =~ /^\s+$/} tokens = clean.map do |chunk| chunk.strip! if chunk =~ /^@[A-Z]+$/ {type: :at, handle: chunk} elsif chunk =~ /^[A-Z]+$/ {type: :protagonist} else raise Exception.new("Tweet too long:\n\t #{chunk}") if chunk.length > 280 {type: :text, value: chunk} end end # Could thread this fucker through the accumulator but that's # ugly. last_token = nil tokens.reduce([]) do |beets, token| if token[:type] == :text beets << last_token.merge(body: token[:value]) else last_token = token end beets end.reduce([]) do |beets, beet| if beet[:type] == :at beets.concat [beet, { type: :protagonist, body: :quote }] else beets.concat [beet] end end endThe script is just for me so I can do cute shit like naming beats “beets” and chaining a
reduceoff anend. Sue me.The first order of business was exporting the tweetplay (see what I did) to text format. Scrivener exports to Multimarkdown so that part was taken care of. Text files in hand, I wrote a quick and dirty Ruby script to parse the file into tweets. The quote tweets were a little tricky as I had to first post as the user being quoted, save the URL of the tweet, and then switch back to the protagonist account to continue the thread. Also, since nobody’s perfect, I knew I wasn’t going to only run the script once so I tracked the ids of every tweet so I could clear them all out with a single command. [for the nerds: yes, I can also pull the tweets from the api but I wanted the default to be surgical removal]
Debugging was a pain. Twitter only allows you to tweet 300 times per three hour window and that meant I would post one time, wait for 3 hours, clear the tweets and post again. Fun. Still, at least I wasn’t copy-pasting 263 tweets, then manually deleting them. I think I know why Twitter fiction is so rare.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy the story and if not maybe the story behind the story is interesting enough to make up for it. This was a fun project and like all wild-ass personal projects with no hope of being seen, the fun was the point. When I finish my rewrite of Petifleur and The Colored City I’m sure I’ll do another weird writing thing to clear the head.
-
A few months after the world ended Sam lost his cat. She was not his cat in the same way that his friends, relatives, and possessions were once his; she was his cat because they knew each other and that meant a lot when there weren’t a lot of others left to know anymore.
Sam paced the perimeter of his camp, kicking at the scrub brush. At the halfway point he leaned on the dessicated trunk of a tall spruce and gathered his strength, sucked in a lungful of air and cried out, “Eileen! Come on, kittykittykit–.”
The exertion triggered a coughing fit, bringing him to his knees while a sea of sparkles flooded his vision. It would be at least a few minutes before he’d be ready to try a stunt like that again. There was a rustle in the distance, enough to prick up his ears. She couldn’t be in any better shape than he was. CO2 levels might have been lower here than they were in the cities—the saving grace for him (and Eileen) but he still had trouble exerting himself for more than a few seconds before the headaches started.
The stack of oxygen tanks next to Sam’s tent made the camp look like a well-stocked survival redoubt. Rows and rows of scarce oxygen, the cure to what ailed him and the rest of the world—and Eileen wherever she was. He’d dutifully resisted cracking the seal on even one them. That’s how it starts, one exception begets another and before long you might as well not have had any rules to begin with. If the rest of the world could have stuck to a basic set of rules he and Eileen wouldn’t even be in this position.
Sam had one simple rule: No access to the tanks until he found a way to refill them.
Anything else would be a capitulation. An admission to the universe that he was content to idle his time away and accept his death.
A weak mew drifted through the clearing.
Sam grabbed a withered shrub and shook it with just enough force to make noise. Another, weaker mew came from off near the tanks. He pulled himself up to his feet, stars still dancing at the edges of his vision, the dull thunking in his head amplified. A few agonizing steps were all he needed to take. Then he’d be close to the tanks, closer to wherever Eileen was hiding.
“It’s okay, you idiot cat, I’m coming,” he mumbled.
When Sam first set up camp in the clearing, atmospheric oxygen levels had been high enough for him to perform basic tasks. He was puttering around securing the oxygen tanks when Eileen had come strolling through like she owned the place, field mouse in her teeth, proud and loud. He made a trill whistle and her eyes lit up with an eerie comprehension. She dropped the mouse at his feet and nudged it with her paw. Unexpected tears filled Sam’s eyes and he found himself reduced to a sobbing mess by the gesture. Eileen, being a cat, purred in response. She pushed her little body against his legs, revving her engine, nosing him. She was the only living thing he’d seen since the world fell apart, back then he’d only just escaped from the city. The odd plane still flew overhead. It was still possible to pretend the catastrophe could reverse course, but that was before the air got so thin that shouting was enough to bring him to his knees.
Sam hobbled to the stack of tanks, bracing himself against the straps that held them together. He stepped around to see Eileen laying on her side, glaring in his direction. Sam sat down next to her and ran his hand along her dirty fur.
“I could have run a line into our tent, you know?” He said, staring up at the sky. “I didn’t want to make it too easy to use all the air.”
She mewed again and Sam felt the vibrations of a weak purr as she pushed her head against his leg. Sam ran his knuckle along the bridge of her nose. He eyed the latch he would have to unclasp to free one of the tanks, then the coil of rubber hose and the clamps and the nozzle.
Sam strained to move Eileen onto his lap and succeeded in getting her most of the way there.
Together they slept.
-
The realization hit Damon so hard he totally lost track of the story his mother was reading him.
“He’s a sorcerer, huh?” Damon asked, sitting upright in the bed.
“A what? Oh no, nothing at all like–.”
“You just said it. He levitated on water.”
“He walked on water.” His mother’s tone shifted downward, patience thinning.
Damon knew better than to get into an argument during Bible time. He nodded and assured her that he understood and topped it off with a good hug. The storm cloud cleared from his mother’s eyes and she went on to read the rest of the verse, which contained even more magic, which he heroically resisted pointing out.
They said a short prayer and his mother finished tucking him in. The lights went out, the door shut, but Damon’s eyes remained wide open, locked on the ceiling. This was huge. Why hadn’t he been able to connect the dots before? Magic was actually real. Hoo boy, if he could learn to levitate he’d be the most popular kid at school.
That night Damon Jones decided that he would become a wizard, just like Jesus.
The next morning Damon grabbed his mother’s wide mouthed planter bucket from the garage and hauled it into the back yard. The pipes rattled when he turned on the hose. No movement at his parents’ window, the coast was still clear.
Now for the hard part. Damon rolled his pant legs up and placed one foot on top of the water, just enough to get his sole wet. He put on his best concentration face and leaned in. His foot sunk, splashing water all over his jeans and making it look like he’d peed himself.
What would Jesus do?
He’d try again, that’s what he’d do.
Damon stepped out of the bucket, topped it up, and this time he put a very small bit of his weight on the foot. He sunk again, but only a little, maybe an eighth of an inch before he started to feel some resistance.
“Damon, what the heck are you doing down there?” His mother was staring down from her bedroom window.
Damon’s concentration broke and his foot sank down in the tub, splashing water everywhere. His mother shook her head and turned, saying something to his dad.
“You better clean that mess out of the driveway before breakfast,” she said, then shut the window.
Fine by him, that meant he had at least another hour of practice. He went to it.
Water levitation turned out to be pretty easy once he got the hang of it. He learned other tricks too, like the time his parents took him to Sorrento’s and he kept breaking up the breadsticks but they never ran out. When his parents didn’t notice he considered calling attention to his new skills but remembered his mother’s reaction to the sorcerer comment and decided to keep his mouth shut.
In fact, he hadn’t told anybody yet. He wanted to at first but water levitation and bread multiplication, neat as they were, didn’t have much pizazz. He needed a good trick, something with a bang. Something that would put Jesus to shame.
Finally, one Sunday when summer was almost at an end the Jones family pulled into the church parking lot. Damon strained against his seatbelt in anticipation. It was finally time. He had been working on his magic all summer. Man, his parents were gonna be blown away.
The pastor was greeting parishioners one by one at the church door. “Mr. and Mrs. Jones, oh and Damon.” He leaned down. “How are you this fine Sunday?”
“Pastor? Can I show you something?”
“Damon, the pastor is busy. Whatever it is can wait until after the service,” his mother said, putting her hand on his shoulder.
“It’s okay, Mrs. Jones. What is it you’d like to show me Damon?”
Damon took a deep breath.
“Step back, everybody.”
The adults smiled at each other and made a show of spreading out so that he had room to move.
Damon closed his eyes and concentrated. The air filled with the hum of electricity. Adult whispers hissed all around him. Damon scrunched his face up as hard as he could, mustering all his will—until his feet left the ground.
The whispers turned to shouts and gasps.
Damon wasn’t done. He spread his hands, pulling electricity from the air all around him, sending it back and forth in wide arcs around his floating body. The crowd below had gone silent, staring up at him in awe. Then, gently, he let go of the electricity and floated back down to the ground.
“Pretty cool, huh?”
The pastor ran up to him with wide, terrified eyes.
“You must go! It’s not at all safe for you here. Mrs. Jones, how could you let him–?”
“We didn’t know.” His mother’s voice trembled in a way that made Damon’s heart sink. Why was everybody so upset?
“Oh, no,” the pastor said, barely moving his lips. His eyes were locked on the church steeple. “It’s too late.”
The air crackled with electricity again, but this time Damon had nothing to do with it. A flash of light erupted at the peak of the church spire and when it cleared a robed man floated in the air, arms down, palms outward. He drifted toward where Damon stood, touching down on the pavement a few yards away.
“Who challenges Jesus?” The man’s voice boomed, “Ready yourself.”
Damon wriggled his fingers, causing sparks to dance across his knuckles. He spent the whole darned summer learning this stuff, he wasn’t gonna be bullied now.
“Ready as I’ll ever be, Jesus.”
The little church was left in splintered ruin. The parking lot’s remaining cars were now a frozen tidal wave of melted and cooled scrap, trickling toxic electric-fire fumes into the air.
The duel had lasted five days.
At its end, man and boy stood facing one another in quiet stalemate, clothes long since burnt away, the ground scorched black all around them.
Jesus extended a scarred palm to Damon, who took it grudgingly.
“A draw then?”
“Sure, Jesus. We can call it a draw.”
That year Damon was the most popular kid in school. Jesus’s reputation, however, never fully recovered.
-
The hard crack of a breakshot echoed over a crowd of murmuring fishermen all belly-pressed to the bar. The men were flannel clad, their fingers stained with engine dirt and yellowed with nicotine. Interesting swears bounced between the brags and complaints like the balls scattering on the felt a few yards away.
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-
The line of pilgrims stretched all the way down the mountain. They came to pay respects to the monks who dedicated their lives to the faith.
“They come up here to curry favor with the universe,” Bodhi grumbled.
“No different than us,” Naga said in that infuriating somnambulant tone of his. “We’re used to it, that’s all.” He smiled with pursed lips, slowly extending his smirk so that the corners of his mouth reached almost to his ears.
“Don’t do that in front of the faithful, they’ll tell the others they saw a demon.”
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-
The road was like he remembered. Red dirt fenceposted by oaks and green shrubs. He leaned forward in his seat at every bend in case it was the one. The church was familiar. He passed a wrought iron archway and slammed the brakes, reversed, and turned toward his uncle Warner’s farm.
“Well I’ll be,” Warner called out from the porch. “Tommy come here so I can get a look at you.”
They shook hands. There had never been a time when his uncle’s handshakes hadn’t made him feel miniscule.
“Opal, Tommy’s here! She’ll be out in a minute. Was the trip down alright?” His uncle smiled with that broad grin of his.
“Had a blowout near Albuquerque but triple A took care of it,” Tommy said, retrieving his battered hand.
“Stayin’ a while?”
Tommy looked down at his uncle Warner’s feet, both of which were sunk deep in the red soil. Safe here. A place that had always been waiting for him to return.
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-
The register dinged. A dozen eggs, jug of milk, some apples came down the conveyor belt. Robbie hustled, flipping the milk jug over, gently setting it into the open bag in front of him. Eggs to the side. Apple bag given a quick twist to secure its contents. His hands moved on their own, they knew the job better than he did.
Robert. Rob. A few times Bob. His name tag said Robert. Nobody had ever asked him but he preferred Robbie. That’s what he’d have someone call him if they ever asked but no one ever did, until Benjamin.
Circumstances were different with Benjamin. His hands were tied behind his back, for one. And he’d been in the basement for more than six hours by the time it happened. Six hours is a short shift at the grocery store. It’s a bus ride to Des Moines or a movie marathon. Six hours is barely any time at all in the grand scheme of things. Robbie’s basement was not the grand scheme of things.
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-
A gust of wind howled through the stairwell. Bill paused, shut the door, and savored a few seconds of warmth before pushing forward again. Outside on the street it was even worse. The wind greedily leeched the heat from Bill’s body as soon as he left the vestibule.
“That’s it Harry, I’m moving to California. Last straw.” Bill dusted his jacket like he was beating the cold away.
Harry waved him off. “Yeah, yeah. You’d be pining for New York before your luggage came off the carousel.”
Several triads of software developers were huddled around the office in standup meetings. The sales team were all headsetted up, making their first calls for the day.
“Maybe I’ll get a place in Venice. On the beach.”
Harry wasn’t even looking at him anymore.
“Serious. I have a cousin in–.”
“Go get a bowl of hot noodles or something. You’re hangry and cold and your beach fantasies bore me.”
Bill’s stomach rumbled on queue.
“It’s too early for soup. . . .” he trailed off. Harry’d stopped paying attention completely. He was battering the keyboard, staring through the screen. Bill zipped his jacket back up and turned toward the door.
From behind him Harry called out, “Go to Lam Zhou. Get the dragon soup.” The clatter of Harry’s keyboard continued uninterrupted.
The noodle shop was the size of a California walk-in closet, a New York studio apartment, or a wide parking spot. The place had too many tables to fit its space but too few to seat the crowd.
Bill shouldered up to the counter and ordered a bowl of dragon soup. Twenty bucks! Nothing on the menu was more than six. Hell, you’d get eighteen dumplings for six bucks. The beef noodle soup was four dollars. This shit better be made with real dragons.
A surly man with clown baldness clattered the bowl on the counter. Bill dug a twenty from his wallet and jabbed it at the guy hoping for at the very least an apologetic shrug. Clown Bald whisked the banknote from the counter and disappeared into the back after a pile of noodle dough.
The soup was dark and had bits of leaf floating between thick white noodles. The smell was between peppercorn and smoke. Bill’s stomach growled. He stuck a spoon in and went to work.
The broth hit his mouth like liquid fire. Hot not heat-hot and not even spicy hot just somehow hot. Bill’s first instinct was to spit the mouthful back into the bowl but to his surprise he swallowed it down. The fire burned all the way to his belly but he had no time to even consider the carnage in his guts because he’d already filled his mouth with another spoon of soup. Smoke like a tea plantation fire; heat like jealousy. The edges of Bill’s vision blurred leaving only the rapidly disappearing bowl of soup. He shoveled, unable to stop.
Bill pushed the empty bowl back. He leapt up and ran into the street before he’d got his coat zipped up. The cool air floated past leaving him unmolested.
“The fuck, Harry. Twenty bucks.”
“Chill. You want a coffee?” Harry bee lined for the break room. “One sugar, right?” He was around the corner before Bill could answer.
Bill dug through his emails; dutifully replying, forwarding, carbon copying. The warm rumble in his stomach wasn’t going away. He put his hand to his belly but jerked it away quick. Hot. Like stovetop hot.
“Goddamnit!” He yelped in surprise.
Harry set a cup of coffee on Bill’s desk. Bill was about to give Harry a good earbashing over the soup and the hot belly and whatever the fuck was happening to his body but his stomach had declared emergency. He ran to the bathroom not knowing which direction the soup would take on its way out, only that an exit was inevitable.
The mouth.
Bill locked the door behind him and fell to his knees in front of the toilet. His body convulsed and the ball of heat and smoke worked its way up his esophagus with agonizing slowness. He opened his mouth and a sharp teakettle hiss escaped followed by billowing smoke and what felt like an owl’s pellet full of feathers and bones wriggled from his throat, blocking his air. Bill panicked, grasping the side of the toilet, frozen in fear.
A convulsion racked Bill’s chest.
The blockage cleared. Air rushed into his lungs.
A snake, about a foot long, sat coiled on the toilet seat. Bill backpedaled and fumbled at the door handle which he’d locked a few seconds before. The snake shifted revealing several sets of small legs and its head was not the head of a snake at all but more like a crocodile’s with tiny little deer antlers on top.
Then it spoke.
“Hurry! Hide me in your shirt and let’s get out of here, I’ll explain on the way.” The snake thing sprung from the toilet seat to land on Bill’s arm, its six legs gripped his sleeve like monkey hands. The thing reared its head and looked directly into Bill’s eyes. “Come on, there’s not a lot of time!”
The eye contact shocked Bill into averting his gaze. He met eyes with his own reflection in the bathroom mirror and stood stunned at the image. The snake with feet and antlers glared impatiently. Confusion fucked up Bill’s fear instinct. He mumbled, “Climb in, I guess?”
The thing wriggled into his shirt. Bill braced himself for sharp claws and gross reptile skin but there was only the hint of a warm breeze under his shirt. He patted himself down, double checked the mirror, wondered if he’d imagined the whole thing, ignored the implications if he did, and left the bathroom.
“Let’s ditch,” the voice whispered from under his clothes. “Get your stuff, we’ve gotta blow this popsicle stand, man.”
Bill snatched his coat.
“Early lunch?” Harry asked, eyes on screen. Bill could have sworn there was a smirk relaxing at the edge of Harry’s mouth.
The sun was out which made things bright but in no way warm. A cluster of cars sped down East Broadway kicking up a frigid breeze in their wake.
“What do you want?” Bill hissed through chattering teeth.
“Same thing as you new buddy.” The voice was familiar, friendly. Like a college roommate or that one dude who played acoustic guitar and always had great weed. “I want to go to California.”
“What in the hell are you?” Bill jogged toward the subway entrance.
“Dragon.”
Bill paused hoping the word would find another to connect with in his head. After a few moments, “A dragon who—correct me if I’m wrong—came from soup and wants to go to California?”
“I’ve been working on a screenplay but never mind that, like we both want the same thing right? We can help each other out.”
A train pulled into the station.
“Wow,” the dragon said, “that’s loud. Why don’t they fix the brakes on these things?”
Bill pressed into the car, it was shoulder to shoulder.
“Psst,” the dragon whispered. “Can we get off at the next stop? It’s way too crowded in here, I’m gonna suffocate.”
They came up the stairs at Delancey to find the wind had not slowed or warmed in the last twenty minutes. Maybe it was residual warmth from the subway but the wind didn’t penetrate his jacket. The apartment was only ten or twelve blocks away. Maybe he’d just walk.
“So uh, dragon, how are you going to help me get to California then?”
“I’ve got a name.”
Touchy little prick.
They walked to Chrystie and cut down through the park.
“Steven. That’s my name. I figured you would ask but since you didn’t: Steven.” The dragon gasped in shock, “That’s garbage, piled up on the sidewalk? Ungh, I hate this city. How can you live here? Those trains? The crowds?”
“What’s this about helping me get to California?”
“Helping you? Whoa you got that wrong. No man you buy the ticket and we fly out and I work some dragon shit when we get there. I’m like genetically super charged good luck. So if you want we can go to Vegas for a sick party weekend and make a bajillion bucks on the craps tables. Promise, it’s like money in the bank. If you’re into it we can get hookers and shit too but for reals, you gotta buy those tickets before we can do this thing.”
The wind blew hard but the cold (again) didn’t penetrate Bill’s jacket. He stepped aside as a delivery guy on an electric bike cut across his path. Barely any breeze at all.
“So we hit your place and get some tickets and then pack your shit and get a cab to the airport. Clean break. This is your chance.”
“You’re warm, you know that? I’m warm right now and you’re under my jacket so that must be you?”
“Yeah, I’m a d-r-a-g-o-n.”
A fishmonger dumped a bucket of ice onto the sidewalk. Two Chinese aunties shouldered past Bill to get a look at an open box of long jawed silver fish. The rank smell of cut durian assaulted his nostrils but instead of triggering the usual annoyance it filled him with a sense of home.
“Buddy, er, Steven? You want to stay tucked in my jacket for a bit?”
Harry peeked over his monitor. “How was the soup?”
Bill shrugged.
“Still moving to California?”
“Nah, you were right about that. Something tells me I’d really hate California. Thanks for the advice by the way. The soup warmed me right up.”
“I know, man.” Kevin’s typing stopped, leaving an eerie silence between them. “I was in the same headspace last week man and Ben in marketing told me about the Lam Zhou thing. Dragon soup.”
“Cure for the winter blahs.”
“You got that right, man.”
A muffled grunt came from under Bill’s shirt. He reached inside and pulled Steven’s head out to check that his airways weren’t blocked and readjusted the tiny ball gag to keep his grumbling quiet. Perfect. He stuffed the silenced dragon back into his shirt.
Harry made a knowing look.
Bill grinned, slipped his headphones on and started work on his emails. He had almost a whole day’s worth to catch up on.
-
The woman is a spindly monster. She has that ruddy overdosed on the tropics look white people get after a few months in the country. A Thai in his thirties is walking up the beach with these glow lamp things attached to each other on a string. The monster woman lurches forward and snatches them from his hand.
The guy is thin. The hunger in his eyes maybe is from speed. He’s been carrying those fucking lamps up and down the beach all night. He tells the woman that they cost 50 baht.
She’s screaming at him, holding the lamps away in her other hand like a schoolyard bully. He steps back to the edge of the light and lowers himself onto his haunches, waiting.
She spins the lamps in wide arcs that are somehow out of time with the music. Her husband slouches further down in his beach chair. The lazy grin on his face might obscure a grimace. She stumbles. Everybody’s hoping she falls into the fire but no luck. Her foot slams into a big bottle of beer which makes a satisfying thunk. She hops around on one foot for a little while. The Thai man wipes sand from his face and moves his crouch a little further back.
A tourist kid is now waving 100 baht in the Thai man’s face. He’s screaming over the music and making an exaggerated marijuana pantomime with his other hand. A couple minutes later there’s a handoff.
The kid settles a few meters away. He passes the joint around to his friends. A new guy shows up and the kid points him to the Thai man. He’s doing that pantomime again.
“Bon,” the Thai man says when the guy introduces himself. The single syllable of his name is short and ends with a swallowed n. The kid chortles, repeats it back, this time making a swirling motion with his lighter hand. “Like Bong! This guy’s name is B-O-N-G!” He gives a thumbs up. His friends cheer.
The lady has dropped the lamps. Bon skirts the shadows, moving toward his property. The woman is standing upright, slumped forward like a sleeping horse. He’s close. One of the lamps flickers when he touches the string. The woman lurches to attention. Now she’s screaming at the top of her lungs, spittle is hitting Bon on the cheek. She swings the lamps above her head like a gladiator. Thock. One of the glowing bulbs bounces off Bon’s head. He smiles with his mouth only. Backs away.
The lady moves, swinging the lamps close to her husband but he passed out a while ago. The balls of light whoosh past his open mouth in long arcs. The lady laughs in these intensifying fits. She loses her balance, falls in a heap. There’s a muffled pop. She landed on one of the glow bulbs.
Her face freezes in confusion. Time comes to a halt. The confusion turns to horror. Her face is twisted but no noise has yet escaped. The potheads nearly beat her to the punch, erupting into a chorus of guffaws right as she starts screaming. Now everybody’s looking. The guys that have been hanging out on that big driftwood log are staring in silence. They had happy shakes earlier and are trying to figure out if this is all a dream.
The husband is awake now. He’s at his wife’s side. Three of the beach boys from behind the bar are approaching. Everybody around the woman is moving in little jerks. Too much speed. You can almost hear their teeth grinding.
And she’s up.
A wide streak of blood and sand runs down her leg from just under the ass. She’s blubbering, gingerly brushing against the cut, trying to get a better look without falling over. The beach boys are helping her to the parking lot.
Bon stretches like a cat. He takes a few glances across the crowd. They’re busy retelling the scene, sculpting the memory. One of the lamps is still on. He winds the string, pulls out a new bulb and goes to work. When he’s done he kicks sand over the broken glass before giving the repaired globes a little test drive. The stoners applaud.
A few minutes later he walks up the beach to see if anybody else wants to dance with the glowing lights.
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