Here is a Short Story

I wrote about phrogging.

Housewife

Every morning, he wakes, turns to her, and asks her the same question: “How did you sleep, beauty?” And always she shows him the same contented smile. The comfort of all those years spent together is apparent in the curve of those lips. No words necessary. And then he is able to face the world. That’s all he needs. “Get your rest,” he says. “I should be home around six. But I’ll be thinking about you all day.” Oh, make no mistake. Once, there were bad times, very bad times, and they used to try each other greatly. Marriage counseling didn’t work. An open relationship didn’t work. Nothing did. And then he stumbled on the solution. Now they’re just perfect together. She feels it too. Just look at that face. He can’t resist doing so, one last loving glance, as he stands dressing before the closet. Mummification makes the heart grow fonder.

I Am Brian

Sometimes the proliferating cells of my absence, the online articles about me, use the present tense, sometimes the past tense. The flicker between the present tense and the past is where I, where you, where everyone with an aching memory exists. I have a hold over certain people, almost all strangers, who come looking for me. Beloveds.

The thought of me is cast like a lure on a silken spider thread out on the water. The Olentangy River flashes in the sun, then darkens under pregnant clouds. The riverfront has changed so much since the spring I vanished. Stand on the waterfront and look out where the water was shallow that spring, only two or three feet deep, when my father and his brother waded everywhere in the flow, forded the river, hyper-vigilant for my body. My father slipped and almost drowned. He was rescued by the arms of his own brother. These moments roil in time as water roils everywhere tonight and forever.

Did you guess that when my apartment was finally broken up there would be a word carved in the wall behind my bed? How long do you pay the rent on an empty apartment when someone is gone without explanation? How long do you stand and stare and fear to touch anything? To lift a sweater and breathe in the essence of love. It was just a lonely word. A word without its sentence. I was a young man. I hid a word. Behind my bed where I slept alone, I hid a word.

You study my face. You study my face with the intensity that you study a lover’s face. You memorize the curve of my dark eyebrows. You study how my eyebrows arch, how they bend down to the inner canthus of each eye. How my smile is half-given in most photographs. You might meet me on the street, might see my face, aged ten or twenty or thirty years, on the internet. Some of you study the faces of dead young men in online repositories of images. Networks of Does. Late into the night. Looking at faces harvested years ago from woods, from water, from snow. Looking to return me where I belong. Thank you for your care.

You study how I stand. In some photos, I wear the white coat of the medical student. I assume the stance. The way you can pick out a policeman in plain clothes by the way he stands, you can see this care growing in me. Some of you notice the sign language in my hands in these photos. The hidden message: “I love you.” Some see it as a secret message to some particular someone. Others say it is to anyone in the world. You believe I planted these messages in photographs as Hansel dropped breadcrumbs in the woods. Are we not beautiful in our fairy tales and our wandering?

How we search for one another. Even when we are only images in a story.

It was April 1st, the night I disappeared. Two hours into April Fool’s Day. You watch the grainy security video tape of me in the night. Standing outside the restaurant that no longer exists. From video to video, my disappearance is grafted. The cells of my absence grafted in your body. April 1st. You make of that what you will, depending on who you are.

Some point out how much my appearance changes from photo to photo. It’s hard to connect some of the faces, the different young men, together. Some who knew me in the flesh say that I changed like the wind from season to season. Potential pro-athlete. Party boy with a D.U.I.. Straight arrow medical student who doesn’t touch drink or drugs. Budding songwriter who wants to live with his bare feet in the sand.

You listen to my last recorded words, the voice mail I left for my fiancee. All her life she will have those words. “You are amazing…” You listen for any shadings in the small handful of words that follow, searching for any hint that it is a goodbye. But the words are bright and clean. Two more nights’ sleep and we would have been sitting side by side on the plane to Miami. Through the years, as her hair silvers, as she sleeps next to another, the image will return. The two young bodies side by side on the plane. On their way to the city of bodies, of constant flux, color and danger, dance and bright reflections.

My mother’s death by debilitation was just weeks before I vanished. My father was killed by a windstorm two and a half years after I vanished. Only my brother remains to remember the most of me. The things he will tell his children. The good memories. Two boys, two bodies in the ocean together. Fighting the waves.

My father is where I am or he is not. A large branch crashed improbably down and felled him, as he stood in the backyard, like a scene out of an opera written several centuries ago. An opera you would call “overwritten” and then smile for the sake of it. Because operas have no real bloodshed. And because our weird smiles are catharsis.

First, I am in a mist. I am a mist. Amiss. Missing. Then, slowly, you start to see in me a myth. Mything.

My fiancee calls my phone every night. For many months. Each night it goes to voicemail. One night, it rings. It rings several times. She feels a sort of terror that is awe of hope coursing through her body. She shares the words of this feeling online. The cell phone pinged off a tower only fourteen miles north of where I disappeared. The service provider says it might have been a glitch. It might mean nothing. Or it might mean everything.

Someone goes back and rereads Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Wakefield.” The small, perfect story of a man who casually moves a short distance away from his home and changes his appearance, who watches the space where his life was to have been. Unable to re-enter it.

Until, many years later, a lifetime unspent, he does.

Return. He does return.

A month gone, someone breaks into my apartment. You see me going through my things in your mind’s eye. One last time. Maybe I take something that nobody notices missing. Something insignificant in the eyes of others. But everything to me.

A month gone, someone breaks into my apartment. You see my murderer going through my things in your mind’s eye. One last time, a visit where we sat together and smiled eye to eye.

The detective points out that I had the key to my apartment. If I was still alive. Why break into what was mine? But if my life was no longer my own, the only way in would be that way. To break in. I could never walk through the front door again.

Either way, the rooms were cold by then.

The place where I slept. Where I washed my face, looking at it.

Whoever came in, felt the cold.

An Ear for Crime

Hickory, dickory dock,

I selected the Hickory family. I had to choose the right one. There were several families with the surname Hickory in this city, in its suburbs. I drove and drove. So many days, so many nights. I scouted. Studied houses and yards patiently. Until I saw the ones with the clock. Right there in their backyard. I knew then. They were the ones.

The mouse ran up the clock.

It was the sundial in the backyard. The clock. I placed it against the wall which I knew had the best window for a stealth entrance. By then, I knew the Hickory family’s schedule. I knew when the kids went to bed. When the parents did. The rooms were all dark that night when I stood on the sundial and leaned against the wall, next to the pretty trellis. I used the glass cutter. I unlocked the window. I was in to do my business. I must say it all went beautifully. Not a whimper, not a pleading out of place.

The clock struck one,

They actually had a grandfather clock in there. Imagine that. I heard it strike one a.m. And people say there’s no such thing as fate. There was one Hickory left alive by then. Her eyes pleaded with me. Her mouth couldn’t. Not with that gag. I had recited the rhyme enough by then, that she must have known what was coming, what that sound from the downstairs clock meant. She must have known that it was time for me to leave. Finishing time. And so I did.

The mouse ran down!

I went out the way I came in. Down to the clock and off through the backyard, racing into the shadows of the bushes and the trees. Then through dark neighboring yards. My car was parked several streets away, where it would not arouse suspicion. I must say I was pleased with the way it all went down. It was the night of the new moon. The cool dark of that night on my skin felt so nice. Thank You, Moon. It took everything I had not to steal peeks at the videos I had recorded of the Hickorys. Such fun we all had. But I waited until I got home.

Hickory, dickory, dock.

The obituaries for the Hickory family were sanitized. The news stories splashed across the front pages, and all over the airwaves and internet, were more sensationalized. Television’s talking heads were fascinated by the murders. They loved that I had left the nursery rhyme behind. They loved that I had left a sprung mouse-trap on each of their bodies. That sort of thing plays well in the tabloids.

But not all the details were released. The police like to hold some gruesome facts back. I get it. They have to play the hand they’re dealt. They have to hold those cards close. To see who knows what. So the darling public didn’t get to learn that the dearly departed indeed showed signs that a mouse had visited. None of the news stories mentioned the gnawing.

For those following my work in the press, they’ll have other rhyme crimes to read about in the near future. Unfortunately, some will be discovered out of sequence. There’s Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary, that old battle-axe who writes those letters to the editor constantly. I finished that one months ago. But Mary has yet to return to her gardening . Come spring, when she finally gets back to tending her silver bells and cockle shells, she should find them. I mean those pretty maids all in a row.

I hope she writes a letter to the editor about that one.

Sleeping Cat

The cat sprawls on a window’s blue sill. His eyes are closed. He absorbs a distant star’s fury as something intended only for him. The sun’s fury has been refined to something soothing. Merely by distance. The window’s glass holds a reflected world, but no one is watching. Brahms plays softly somewhere in the house. Another room. Distant, subdued talking. An Intermezzo.

A child rummages quietly through a small sheaf of papers. Schoolwork’s all over her bed. The girl no longer even hears Brahms, though the recording is audible anywhere in the house. It’s been played so often these past few months, that it’s like (not) hearing one’s own breathing. One intermezzo whispers into another. The girl studies a simple division problem and her answer. She feels a strange twinge when she realizes that her answer to the math problem is the same as the answer given by every child or adult on the planet. If those people give the correct answer.

For a brief moment, she feels jealous of the children who will get the math problem wrong. For a handful of heartbeats, she feels this. At least their answer will be theirs. She doesn’t follow this thought to all the places, she senses, that it wants to travel. Maybe this is because she is eight and being wrong is still fearful. She stares at the cat in her bedroom window in his full glory of sun. She enticingly whispers his name, Mooshi, just to make him lose a bit of his heaven for a moment and look back at her. His eyes open. Seeing that she wants nothing, the cat’s eyes close again.

Distant, subdued talking. Her parents go back and forth. It’s a fraught conversation. Is it too soon? Is it right? They talk about their daughter, Elise. Their only child. Brahms goes from intermezzo to intermezzo. Alicia mentions the cat. Maybe start with the cat. Explain it to her that way. Matthew is not sure. He shakes his head as he looks out the bay window into full sun. He closes his eyes against all that brightness.

The neighbor across the street, Sue, widens a slat in her window blinds and peeks out. She sees Matthew standing in the window’s full sun, blinded. She remembers the horror all those years ago. She figures she must be the only neighbor left on that street that remembers the story. Matthew and Alicia were young then. They had everything back then.

She remembers one particular day. Sue had been walking the dog she called her little “street duster,” her Shih Tzu, and they had gone past a joyous leaf fight which had erupted as Matthew was raking leaves in the front yard with his wife and daughter. His first daughter. The one who is gone. How long has it been? Seventeen years? Eighteen? Now the couple is middle aged. There is a palimpsestic sadness showing through their new layer of happiness. Even the little girl is more sober than the first one, who was so lighthearted. Strange little girls of today, she thinks.

She remembers how she would sometimes watch the other little girl walking to school under leaves turning red and yellow in autumn. Or see her skipping home on a spring day, maybe stopping on the sidewalk to find a robin’s egg that had fallen from its nest. The miracle of the unbroken. Adorable child, she thinks. There are monsters everywhere. What those parents must have gone through, she thinks and shakes her head. She refuses to imagine, she just can’t, what the girl herself faced. It’s impossible.

Now they drive her to school. She’s never seen the child walking anywhere alone.

She remembers how she would see the child’s cat still sitting in her bedroom window. That went on years after she disappeared. That cat must have lived another seven years. At least. And then one day she saw Alicia and Matthew burying something in their backyard. Something wrapped in a blue blanket. And that was the last of the child’s great love. It had been raining that dark afternoon. It had made it even more awful to see. They had never been able to bury their child.

Matthew and Alicia decide to wait. There would be days and days of growing ahead. Let’s wait until it won’t be everything, Matthew begged. Alicia thanked him for sparing them both. But should we explain about the cat? We could show her a photograph of just the cat. A photograph of the cat, all by itself? No, said Matthew. Let the cat stay the cat. So they made dinner and joked with their daughter in that goofy way she loved and smiled upon her as they dined together. Brahms went to sleep. Later, they watched some shows with her and the child made popcorn for all three of them. They shared the warm popcorn and feelings. And then they went to bed.

*

In the night, the girl is awakened by a skittering sound.

She bolts to a sitting position in her bed. In fear, she reaches out to touch her cat for comfort. The cat is already alert, staring at the window. A finger is tapping there. A woman’s manicured finger. There is a strange woman smiling into the room from the moonlight. She is tap-tap-tapping at the child’s window like that Raven in the poem by the strange looking man with the huge forehead that she only recently learned in school.

The child wonders briefly if she should scream, but the moment for that has passed. If she has not screamed by now, a scream would be an artificial thing. A scream must just happen to be a scream. Not that the child doesn’t feel terror.

She slides out of the bed in her pajamas and walks, carefully, towards the window.

The woman is smiling at her. Why does her face look so familiar?

Through the window glass she hears smudged words: “I want to come in.”

The child couldn’t open the window even if she wanted to. It’s locked. It’s too difficult to lift. And she know there is an alarm system to protect her.

The woman smiles and smiles in the moonlight. She’s not truly all that old. Certainly not as old as her parents. Her smile is full and her lips are bright red, but her smile looks painful.

“This used to be my room,” the woman laughs. “I slept in that same bed.”

The little girl’s eyes grow large. This woman is crazy.

Elise runs to her parents now, barefoot. The shrill tocsin, the screamed alarm of their names, wakes them and they come running. Her mother catches her running body. Her father checks her bedroom.

The child tells them a story that turns them to stone.

*
Elise is at school.

“It had to be a sick prank,” Matthew nearly whispers.

Alicia doesn’t respond. She is staring at a photo of her firstborn, a young girl holding a cat.

That cat walks into the kitchen from the living room just then. Not exactly that cat. But almost that cat.

“They never found her, Matthew. They found the blood. They found all the other girls. But they never found her.”

“You’re trying to tell me you actually believe it’s her. Do you realize how crazy that sounds?”

Alicia continues to stare at the image in her palm in silence for a while longer.

“Elise’s description of the woman matched, Matthew.”

“Look, we waited years. I refuse to believe…there’s just no realistic possibility…okay, even if, one in a million, it actually was her, then why the hell would she be tapping on a window instead of ringing the front door bell and walking right in? Try to explain that part to me, okay?”

Alicia didn’t reply right away. She didn’t look up from the photograph. She felt sick in her stomach, and you could hear that stomach sickness in her voice when she finally found the strength to speak.

“Maybe because she saw herself sleeping in her own bed, Matthew. Maybe because she saw herself sleeping with her cat. Maybe because she saw she had been copied, like a traced drawing or a xeroxed document, and knew that we were sleeping in the next room. Peacefully. Maybe because we gave up. We started over. Maybe because we saw her as….replaceable…”

Her words became sobs. She struggled to speak; her legs felt weak; she felt dizzy.

“Matthew, she wanted to take our little girl. She wanted to…I can’t even bear to think of what she wanted to…what she intended to…”

She choked on her own sobbing. Her husband held her. They were no longer young.

The photograph of the girl with the cat was on a counter now. All by itself.

Nothing staring at nothing. The way photographs really are.

“It’s time to pick Elise up at school. Let’s go together.”

Alicia nodded. They went out from the kitchen into the garage and got into the sedan.

As the garage door opened automatically, they stared at the rain together in silence.

*

Not that many miles away, a young woman stood in the same cold rain. She was in a city park, staring down at the dark river below a steep bank. She thought of it heading down to the bay and wondered how many lifetimes people had stared at it and known absolutely nothing.

A homeless man approached and asked her if she wanted his coat. He was older, a relic of some native tribe or other, and seemed kind.

She shook her head no.

“No man, I’m just waiting for my sister.”

“Your sister? Is she as pretty as you?”

“Oh, she’s just as pretty as me. Actually, she’s even prettier.”

“What are you two lovely ladies going to do?”

“We’re going to go on a long trip together. A spirit journey. Get to know each other and know the world. The way things are. You know what that means, right?”

She smiled down at the dark river. As if she knew it.

He looked at the dark river and tried to see what she saw.

She disturbed him. Something about the glitter of her eyes. He remembered walking down a dark road once with a shaman who was not really a shaman, but something else.

“Yeah, ” he said, and walked away.

The Peasants

The peasants drank.

The peasants drank and talked. They pantomimed. Mostly, they pantomimed the war which had consumed them. The war had been over for years. The small tavern of shadows where they congregated, a collective shambles, was like the intermediate stomach of a ruminant where things that should not have been consumed are somehow digested.

They drank beer. They drank mostly in the evening in their village which had been destroyed by the war. They drank the alcohol made from plums. They drank alcohol made from the beautiful rye grass. They drank herbed alcohol made from the fermented juice of fruits with the bodily forms of young girls and women. They drank mead. They drank to the cemetery. They drank to the brave. They drank to the worms. They drank to the fire and the fire’s children.

They got insanely drunk and talked about the village war dead. Someone would talk about A. An old man would get drunk and would act out A.’s death for the rest of the bar. A. had not answered a certain officer of the occupying army correctly. He had stood before an officer of the army which had owned their village for the duration of the war and answered incorrectly. He had answered as if it was a performance. He figured the officer was giving a performance in that funny costume of his. A. had wanted to perform too. He had been very young, the village comedian. He had all the playfulness and natural comic instincts of a puppy. He had been promptly taken to a nearby barn and shot. The entire village had watched.

A’s pantomimer would tell the story of A. over and over, night after night, year after year. Was the story a joke? It was told in the tone one tells a joke, with broad smiles all around. The smiles of the drunks remembered the fate of A. and his comical words spoken into the face of the officer. Certainly, the shooting of A. was told as a sort of punchline. The voice telling the story got louder during this part and then everyone guffawed. “Shot dead in that barn.” “What was he, seventeen? Eighteen?” “Sixteen, I think,” an old woman chimes in. Laughter follows.

But what sort of laughter is it? Could it be compared to the laughter of schoolchildren on the playground? Or is it a rarer sort of laughter? The story would not change. Only the storyteller would change, his face becoming wizened like a dried apple, his teeth less, his teeth uglier each year. And the faces of those who listened to this story would deteriorate along with the storyteller’s face, as if in a secret sympathy.

So the bar collected drunks that would pantomime the various war dead of the village. Each dead person had a stand-in. The stories of very young children who had been murdered by the war were not told. Their stories must have gone somewhere else to be told, somewhere even darker.

The old lush who told B.’s story down the years droned on and on. She would sit in a dark corner of the bar where she could see everyone. She knew who everyone was, what everyone was. People no longer talked about who had been good in the war, who had been bad. It was the stories that needed to be pantomimed, not morality. People are story magnets. And drunks are the most magnetic old story collectors. When you’re drunk, you need a rope. And stories are like ropes you can pull yourself along. Any old story with a barb in it will do for thinking, will do the thinking for an old drunk.

The old lush would tell how B., a simple mender of shoes, had made bombs. He was attempting heroism. But he blew himself up before he had a chance to place those bombs under the occupiers’ vehicles. He blew himself up in his own barn. He blew himself up, but also a pregnant horse. That was the sockdologer for B.’s story. The drunks had even named a cocktail after B. It was called “The Pregnant Horse.”

It was drunk on the darkest nights, on the heels of the tragedies with the most teeth. Maybe it was an amulet. The younger citizens who frequented the bar, who were born after the war, had no idea what the nightmarish denizens were talking about when they toasted each other with the memory of this horse exploded in time immemorial.

And so on and so on. C.’s pantomimer recalled that young woman who had slept with the enemy for favors and was later found hanging from a large branch over the river with an ill-gotten couture bag around her neck.

D.’s story was that of an old woman who had been forced to kneel on her family’s soil with a pistol pressed to her head. She had been given the choice to spare her beloved pig or herself. She had chosen to save the pig, so the trigger was pulled. The pig was shot immediately afterwards, of course.

E. had been an educated man, the villager with the most books, who had tried to lecture the occupiers in front of his fellow villagers. He had been tied to a chair in his study and burned with his books. The drunk assigned to tell E.’s story would make the flames with his hands and his arms. He would become the flames as he laughed uproariously, a strange glitter in his eyes. The alcohol would feed the story, down at the roots, would feed all the stories.

The young people were trying to reclaim the tavern for their generation. It became easier with the years, as the bodies of those who remembered the war, its pantomimers, drifted off to the village cemetery. The stories went quiet, the stories went dark. Rain and snow fell on the cemetery. The names on the tombstones became fainter.

These young ones, who were interested in making love and making money, had no interest in these old stories. They would be polite. But they could not laugh at these stories. They would stare stony-eyed at the punchlines. You had to have been there to get it. They understood that these wizened creatures had become these stories and that this tavern was their home. They mostly tolerated them.

On the rare occasion that one of the younger drunks would go after one of the older drunks, the older drunks would form a posse and grab bottles. The young man would usually back down once he saw all the missing teeth of his adversaries and how even the old women were ready to draw blood.

The one all the old-timers wondered about was M. He had lived just outside the village. Nobody knew what happened to him or how he had behaved during the war. He just disappeared. His little house was still there but empty after the war. Nobody had even thought to check on him. Was he young? Some said yes, some no. Was he old? Some said yes, some no. Was he crazy? A monk? Did he have a family? Certainly, he did not or they would have been remembered. He must have been solitary.

But what was he? The only people who might have known were dead. If anyone had ever known. The best people could do was a story of a story of a story about M. that was usually soon discounted as hearsay.

M.’s story was the one story that changed constantly. All the other stories remained the same. M. was a community project, the one story in which the storytellers (and they all took turns telling M.’s story) could use their imaginations. They could embroider, they could reinvent. Some nights everyone was sure M. was a villain. He must have been in the enemy pay, in the enemy headquarters, “giving them information on all of us.”

Other times, he was off doing something heroic to save the village. Certainly he existed. He wasn’t fictional. Though he existed now as a series of permutating fictions. He had been real.

You could still see his house at the edge of the village, decaying. Its little roof had turned to moss long ago and had begun to cave in. All of the furniture had been taken by scavengers. Birds liked this little house now. It had become a bird hostel, a come-and-go-as-you-please aviary. The drunks were mystified. The tongues returned and returned to the missing story the way a tongue returns and returns to a missing tooth.

Maybe M. had been a saint and preached to the birds like Asisi. Maybe the birds were the souls of the dead villagers and M. had left this rainy house to them, that they might perch in its windows and watch the wild grasses and wildflowers of the summer fields nod in the wind outside their beloved village.

So the old-timers prattled on, such nonsense that rankled the ears of the young lovers and businessmen sharing the tavern with them. So long after the war, everyone still had magical hopes. And magical hopes are only chatter, the young men and women thought.

When the last old drunk found himself the only person in the bar who remembered the war, to whom could he tell his story?

He was like the last exemplar of a lumbering species now going extinct, trapped in a zoo. The others were outside his cage, looking in. Look at those strange eyes in the creature‘’s head.’“Do you think it guesses it’s the very last one?” a young woman would whisper to a young man. “And the smell!” a student would intone, elbowing his buddy and shaking his head.
In the corner, the old man faced outwards, drinking himself deeper and deeper into the only story left to him, since he could no longer speak, the conundrum that burned inside him almost as ardently as youth itself: “But what really happened to M.?”

Brainbox

The latest big threat to humankind’s existence, the johnny-come-lately of epidemics, had first entered the country’s social life in an innocent form. It all began with a popular marital aid sold in most big box stores, the DuoDex. Many considered it a novelty toy when it debuted. Early reviews were chirpily optimistic. Here was a new toy aimed at adults. Better yet, it was a bedroom toy you could actually talk about in polite company.


At the product’s first media flush of success, once it was clear the product would be huge, it became, of course, a target. Some reviewers turned cynical, just because being cynical is lucrative and eye-catching work. And then the expected negative reviews and invidious comparisons were made by would-be competitors. The device was sometimes lumped in with the Ouija board or fortunetelling apps by detractors looking to debunk for likes.


But husbands and wives, husbands and husbands, and wives and wives, or a significant number of them anyway, became closer through using the DuoDex. Sex lives improved. (The device was often nicknamed the DuoSex.) The divorce rate actually moved in the opposite direction, towards matrimonial cohesion, for the first time in several generations.


The unhappy couples who had tried this therapy and still got divorced would sometimes disparage the device. Of course, the manufacturers inserted a CYA block of legalese in the enclosed instructions indicating that the DuoDex was intended to be used “for recreational purposes only” and that under no circumstances could the manufacturer be held accountable for the fate of any relationship. In other words, your results may vary. Soon it was the number one Christmas gift for adults. For several years running.


The DuoDex consisted of two linked neural network “head sleeves” meant to be worn only when two individuals intended to sleep next to one another. Each sleeve was a bunch of plastic cords hanging, octopoid-style, from a plastic disc which sat on the top of the head. The electrodes at the end of each cord attached to various points on the human skull effortlessly, without adhesive material. Only a handful of people outside of the manufacturing company (and few within it) knew how this aspect of the device worked. Like much else relating to the DuoDex, this strange adhesiveness was a proprietary secret.


However, the DuoDex had been approved by the Department of Homeland Security for use by mentally well-adjusted adults. The FDA had once been the arbiter of what was safe for the human brain. But with the advent of new technologies capable of affecting neurochemistry and human thought, and potentially affecting national security, there had been a restructuring of such oversight within the government.


The device did not function when worn by waking brains. Attempting to neuro-link during waking hours could result in tremendous migraine-like headaches lasting for days. The device had not been approved for use by children. Of course, kids would get into their parents’ privacy drawers and dabble. That misuse alone had sparked a firestorm of talk show arguments between the proponents of civil liberties and the proponents of governmental parenting.


The device worked by setting up a neural circuit between two brains. The device was most active during R.E.M. dream states. The most the manufacturer, Elkcogito, would say about how the device worked its magic was that the DuoDex could siphon fear from one human brain and then circulate this fear through the linked brain, which largely dissipated it. Joy, the company explained, could also be redistributed, shared. If one partner or spouse was unhappy, the happier partner could share his or her happiness effortlessly. Some psychologists decried this process as a “cheat,” but then some psychologists were losing a lot of money. Empty chairs sat in offices where marriage counseling and relationship counseling had been a booming business, a fatted cash cow.


The speculation was that Duodex worked by controlling the neurochemistry of the brain by triggering neurotransmitters. Clearly EEG, brainwave-reading functionality was also present in the device. But this is stating the obvious. It was the particulars of the design that resisted analysis, that was the uncrackable code. There were endless websites and videos purporting to show how the device actually worked. But the nanotechnology of the DuoDex was of a new order. Few individuals or even firms had the technology needed to really break down the design. Patent wars loomed on the horizon for the manufacturer. Several Japanese companies had alleged blatant theft. That much had already leaked into the news cycles.


People shared their DuoDex experiences with friends, family, clergy, talk shows, everywhere people normally talked about relationships. But there was a mystification factor in this talk. People couldn’t articulate how they felt changed by using the device. They could only say that things were better, that they got along better with their spouses or partners. It used to take a second honeymoon to Acapulco or Paris to achieve the magic the Duodex could work, inexpensively, in usually under a month. And it could be repeated endlessly, without additional expense, unlike a third or fourth honeymoon. Couples would talk about feeling happier, more hopeful, less full of fear. Younger, recharged, erotically nimble again. So much energy, positive and negative, lurked in dreams. That much was clear. And it could be harnessed and redistributed. Hurrah for the tech gods.


And then the nightmares started.


Hackers began toying with the device, reverse-engineering it and changing its capabilities. Junkies were soon carrying these retooled Dexes around from motel to motel. They were getting high off captive brains. Seriously damaged people were being found tied down to motel beds all across the world. These victims were sometimes unfixable. These individuals were referred to as iced or icees. Their brains were now dangerous places. They were invariably violent to themselves or others. Complete sedation followed by institutionalization was the only option. Sometimes they recovered. Sometimes. The divorce rate had gone down, true, but now the homicide rate went through the roof. The DuoDex was recalled. The lawsuits began.


But it’s not so easy to recall a technology that has become a pandemic. In fact, it’s nearly impossible. It’s like closing Pandora’s box after the dragons have flown.


Sykes was a detective in the era of the Dexes. He rolled with the punches but he found himself single after enough of those punches. Even his kids rarely wanted to powwow with dad. Maybe it was the long silences. Sykes had started living deep in his head. He was nearly always turning the gruesome facts of some Dex case over and over in his head like so many worry stones.


You can only be called out to so many crime scenes in the middle of the night before even a DuoDex won’t fix your marriage. And, apparently, Sykes’ brain was now too dark from his work. The first time they tried it, his wife refused to neuro-link with him ever again after a month. She said his brain gave hers the heebie-jeebies. Big fat surprise, he thought. She was happily remarried to a bearded guy who taught high school French and looked like a model who was aging very well.


Sykes was used by now to being called out at 3 a.m. to stand on a windy highway bridge where one of the iced had plummeted into the dark bay below. Sometimes he would look down into that black water and think of the sleepless sharks under that choppy surface as his brothers. Weren’t they “on-call” all the time too? Sykes figured it was his spirit-animal.


It took years of the job to make Sykes into Sykes. But the undoing of Sykes didn’t take long. It took less than a week.


Sykes had been allowed to sleep all night for once. The call came in as he was driving to the office. He was told to divert to the Sunrise Motel down along the bay. He pulled into the lot when the sky was all pink and coral and yellow behind the cheap motel. What a great day to wake up dead in a motel, te detective thought. It was a dive. Tourists were warned to stay away. The reviews of the motel online frequently alluded to bloodstains, strange smells, and more than one mentioned finding a body. Sykes had read these before. One pithy review said it best: “Dex Trap, Death Trap!!!”


It was a girl. Lying in the motel room. It just had to be a young girl, didn’t it? He had a daughter about that age. She had, like slightly more than half of the iced do, killed herself. Someone had tied her to the motel bed, drained all the positive feelings from her brain, and left her there, a screaming wilderness of psychic pain. A fried egg. She had broken out of the restraints, smashed the large mirror over the bedraggled bureau, and gone to town on herself with the shards.


The girl had been pronounced dead on the scene. But just as Sykes was commenting on how the bureau appeared to have been attacked by a posse of beavers, the body on the bed began moving its limbs in the most unearthly fashion.


“Coroner’s flubbed it again!” Sykes shouted as he and several officers who had been milling about the room threw themselves on the body, which had begun to thrash.


She was awake now and fully iced. Her pitiful screams began. Like one of the worst scenes in The Exorcist.


“Brainbox!” Sykes bellowed towards the open door of the motel room.


A few officers came running in, one of them holding what looked like a crash test dummy’s head with wires dangling from it. Sykes and several other young men and one middle-aged woman held the girl down and talked to her as Officer Lopez deftly connected the wires from the brainbox to the girl’s skull. Sykes himself threw the switch on the brainbox and the flat pseudo-eyes on the device glowed red. The brainbox was draining the woman’s fear. Within minutes, she began to thrash much less and the E.M.T.s on the scene began tending her wounds. She had, miraculously, missed the major arteries. The blood around the motel room was mostly body and hand transfer.


The young woman left by ambulance. In time, everyone left. Off to other nightmare calls before most citizens had finished their breakfast. Sykes was the last one left on the scene. He was guarding the scene until the techs arrived. The girl would survive. Today was a “win.” Quotes necessary. Where was the bastard who did this to her?


After speaking the evidentiary notes he needed for his report into his phone, and while he was waiting for the evidence techs to arrive, Sykes noted that the disconnected brainbox had been left on the carpet next to the bed. He used one gloved hand to pick it up by the handle and carried it to his car, where he deposited it in a sterile bag. All it takes is a moment’s inattention, and that thing could be boosted and end up on the black market. There’s no telling what sort of misuse the evil bastards could find for that.


There was no doubt the brainboxes could be reverse-engineered to kill. But mostly they were used to achieve unprecedented highs. Sometimes this produced happiness zombies who would walk obliviously into busy traffic. Sometimes the hapzombs would step off the upper floors of parking garages, sure they could walk on air. Or at least that’s what people speculated they were thinking, who knows. They’d often be found, the corpses, with big smiles on their faces. They were called leerers too. For this reason.


Sykes would never have guessed that this day was the day of his undoing. Because, so far, it had been business as usual. As bloody as it was.


Sykes was returning to the precinct when he got the inkling that he had left his stove top on after making eggs just before leaving for work. Why didn’t he have a remote system control for this appliance? He chastised himself. He had failed to log the stove on when he had set up his apartment network. So he decided he would make a quick stop back at his apartment.


He decided to err on the side of caution and carried the brainbox up the small flight of stairs to his front door. There really wasn’t a mess in the bag. There was only a smudge of blood on the head. If the brainbox was stolen out of his vehicle, the repercussions would be enormous, there would be hell and then some to pay.


The oven had been off, after all.


Sykes was preparing to leave his apartment, he was almost out the door, when he got the call that flattened him. His wife’s voice, softer than he had heard it in years. The tears in her voice. Their son had been found dead two hours earlier. It was an icing incident. Sykes talked less than five minutes with her. She worried when he wanted to hang up. She knew he was alone. He told her it would be alright.


He called the office and told them he would not be in. He shot his notes from the Sunrise Motel over to his colleague. He looked up the number of the coroner who would have jurisdiction. He imagined his voice coming out of a speaker in the same building where his son’s body must be lying on a cold gurney. He called, talked to several of the administrative staff who put him on hold several times, and then eventually he spoke with the coroner, who was kind but reminded Sykes of her professional obligations.


She didn’t want to give him the details of his son’s death. He pushed. She pushed, gently, back. She begged him to surround himself with family or friends. She really had to go. He thanked her and hung up.


Sykes called the police department with jurisdiction next. The detective he ended up speaking with hadn’t even seen the paperwork yet. He didn’t want to be a hard ass, since he felt he was talking with a brother of sorts, but again there was nothing to share. Not yet. And again, professionalism dictated discretion. He knew Sykes knew that. But he reminded him. He, too, urged Sykes to seek out someone he could talk with.


Sykes did what he would never ordinarily do. He drank the rest of the day and popped a handful of pills. OTC, yeah, but still crazy stupid, he knew. He lay in bed and looked at photos of Rowan on his phone. All ages of Rowan.


It was so much worse because they hadn’t spoken in over a year. He replayed that conversation and reminded himself that his kid didn’t hate him. He never hated his dad. He just couldn’t have any good conversations with his father. And now Sykes went into the dark sting of realizing that it was his fault. He was the one who could have changed that. But he had always figured there would be time. Why wouldn’t there be? And then he remembered what he did for a living, what he saw every day, and he felt stupid. He was the stupidest P.O.S. on the planet.


Q: How drunk does a detective have to be to illegally neuro-link with one of the department’s brainboxes?


A: Very fucking drunk, indeed.


He set the crash test dummy head on the pillow next to him, where nobody ever slept. Maybe a head with an interesting face would rest there for a few hours and show him its ecstasy, eyes rolling back into the head, now and again, for which he was always hugely grateful.


But nobody slept there all night. Ever.


Not since the divorce.


Sykes put the head sleeve on, he flipped the switch on the brainbox, and the red featureless eyes lit up. The whiskey and pills synergistically did their work, and Sykes was gone in minutes.


He was dreaming. He was with his son at the beach, lifting him over higher and higher waves. His boy was eight. His wife sat on a towel on the sand, her lovely legs shining. It was all good. It was alright. It was all good.


And then he heard a woman’s voice calling him. Terrified voice. Behind him. Even as Sykes held his son up above the roaring waves of the surf, he felt the boy turn into white static, dissolve. He was holding nothing. Empty air. He turned back to the beach and all the bodies were dissolving, like a filmstrip image melting on a superheated projector.


He sat on dream sand and listened as the woman told him how she was trapped. Inside the brainbox. She whimpered her story. Sykes sat on the sand in a dark night now. Each fist held a fistful of sand. Tightly. The voice told him she had made mistakes. She had run away from home, she had fallen in with icers. She had been used as a dupe to lure young men into motels where their thoughts had been drained into bootleg brainboxes. Now she found herself in the worst sort of hell. She existed. But only in the brainbox.


“This is just a nightmare,” Sykes intoned. He was clearly having a bad trip. Even in his dream, he was partially awake. Sykes was a lucid dreamer.


But she gave him her name. She begged him to look it up. She begged him to release him, to destroy the brainbox. If there was no way to come back. Sykes woke up yanking the wires from his skull.


He had no idea how long he had been out. But night was in the window.


He went online and researched the name she had given him, Samantha Radic. There were several newspapers in New Jersey which had covered the Dex bust. It was reported that Radic had been discovered dead in a Motel 6 in Atlantic City. Several icers had been taken into custody.


Her name also came up in an article in a fringe, underground newspaper that alleged that Samantha Radic was one of a number of “allegedly dead” individuals who had been reported as having contacted living people while they were hooked up to resuscitation brainboxes. Sometimes the brainboxes were circulated around between police departments, after receiving the regular servicing, for example.


There was an editorial in this largely anti-government online rag stating that there was evidence “out there” indicating that living human brains were actually encased in the brainboxes. Or else, they were AI simulations of actual human brains. The editorialist hedged his bet.


This bothered Sykes tremendously.


Everyone knew that the brainboxes were impervious to x-rays and impossible to open. If you tampered too much with them, they were designed to undergo a sort of meltdown which destroyed the contents. Intense heat was generated within. Sykes had seen underground types with terrible burns on their hands from monkeying around with a brainbox that had hotboxed on them. Word on the street was that hackers had recruited specialists who could crack the code and open the things.


Sykes called his ex after scanning several messages that had come in while he slept, and they wept into the abyss of the past in a longer conversation this time. Funeral details were already set. Sykes told her he would fly out the day before. He begged her to have his daughter call him as soon as possible. She promised. They hung up.


Sykes was showering and crying into the noise of the shower. He cried so long his throat began to hurt.


While he was toweling off, he smelled something burning.


He jogged down the padded carpet to his bedroom and saw his bed was scorched. A smoldering glow in the darkness came from his quilt. The brainbox, which he had placed back in its plastic bag, had superheated and burned through it plastic, producing the acrid smell which had brought him running. He was able to extinguish the burgeoning quilt fire with just his wet towel. He carried the entire quilt, rolled-up, into the bathroom, and threw it into the shower which he turned on full. He didn’t need his fire extinguisher, after all.


He had rolled the brainbox onto the sheets below the quilt where it was busy starting a new scorch. He knew he had to roll the still superheated brainbox onto something that wasn’t flammable. He grabbed a pan from his kitchen and used the wet towel to push it onto that, down on the floor next to the bed.


Sykes knew this wasn’t a coincidence.


Someone knew he had made certain queries. They had to know.


They had remotely triggered the brainbox to self-destruct.


He wondered darkly about the fate of Samantha Radic.


Her true fate. Not the one the newspapers had assigned her.


He intended to find out.

Opercula

The teachers made a strong effort to create a respectful silence around me. They knew my classmates would talk. Would whisper. These teachers, the braver ones anyway, gave little speeches occasionally. They talked about “delayed development” and “transgenic differences.” How not everyone’s body will bloom at the same pace. They would talk about famous late-bloomers. Great, inspirational success stories. Sometimes though, they confessed, and they would always admit this last part almost under their breath, a strong voice collapsing into a whisper, a person just doesn’t bloom at all.

They were trying to ward off meanness. I get it. But meanness (and trust me, I’ve encountered it) happens outside of the gaze and earshot of teachers. Publicly, everyone at school’s a perfect angel, nodding along with the sermon. The worst offenders usually applaud the preacher.

I used to sit in class and daydream. Instead of focusing on what numerical identity the mysterious Secret Agent x had decided to assume today in algebra class, I would steal peeks at my blossoming classmates. I would notice Oleanna’s branches, the recent growth spurts on both sides of her body. They were long and luxurious, to her knees. Once again, she would be in season. She would bring forth the loveliest fruit. Just look at our yearbook if you don’t believe me.

She was probably the most fertile girl in our school. And I always ended up sitting near her. She wasn’t mean at all. Not publicly anyway. But still. Some days I hated her. Those were usually the days when I would catch a peripheral glimpse of her picking one of her juicy dark berries and tossing it back through her perfectly glossed lips. She knew how many guys and girls were transfixed in those moments when she would taste herself and then smile her mysterious Mona Lisa smile. Other days, I didn’t hate her at all. I admitted the truth to myself. I just wanted what she had.

Of course, my parents had taken me to the usual specialists. My siblings, my younger brother, my older sister, were both branched, and my older sister had never had any problem bear fruit. I was happy for them. My older sister wasn’t nasty about it at all. She’s even tried to help me, massaging my opercula. And my mother gave me the usual liquid supplements which are supposed to help the growth-challenged. We tried everything on the market.

The specialist doctors did all the usual scans. They said everything was in the right place. They did some exploratory visualization with fiber optics and newer technologies and then even gave me a dose of nano-bots to assist in my germination. They didn’t help at all. They told my parents it could come right at any time. Nobody knew why I hadn’t even been able to bring forth one branch from a single one of the many gill-like openings on either side of my body. I was a barren waste. My mother and father both promised they would never put me through the agony of transplantation. You could always tell when someone had transplants. There were horrible stories about what happened when the body rejected the branches. Sometimes they grew in the wrong direction, into the body instead of the world. Rumors abounded that those branches came from cadavers. Those were the fruits of the dead. Yuck. In the end, the medical consensus, the recommended course of action? Home schooling. Hide her.

I began to stay in the house all the time. I joined some support groups but this was on my phone, not in real life. I became close with some of those kids and even a few of the adults. Half would preach that were would be a cure soon. And about half would say we’re okay just the way we are. A few were just as silent as me. Being fertile isn’t everything, they would say. Food can be grown anywhere. We don’t even need the transgenic fruit to survive. For the vast majority of human history, people were not half-trees. Great minds and spirits of the past did not produce fruit. Well, not literally. Not on a single day of their lives.

True, there was that recent argument that Jesus had been the way we are now. “I am the vine and you are the branches.” And other quotes like that. “Eat of my body and drink of my blood.” I think it’s funny that today Jesus is always portrayed in visual art as a total fruiter, and yet when you look at the art of the distant past, he was just like any other human.

There are still countries, I would tell myself, that have resisted the transgenic revolution. These were usually smaller countries, many of them dominated by some of the newer religions that were catching on. I can’t tell you how many times in my fantasies I saw myself moving to one of those countries, perhaps finding my great love there looked exactly like me. I knew that when I was older I could always fall back on visiting one of those dating sites exclusively for the non-germinating. But I didn’t look forward to the experience. I tried to imagine myself falling in love with someone just like me. It made me feel so weird. It made me want to just float out of my body.

Actually, if I emigrated to one of those non-transgenic countries, my foreign love wouldn’t even have opercula. He would be a “skinflint,” to use the horrible term the fruiting use to insult the fruitless. Would I be as accepted as I am? Would my love want me to undergo painful surgeries to remove my opercula, so my body would look like the cultural norm? Wouldn’t my lover want my body to look like a body he grew up fantasizing about?

Things all sped up when my sister had gone from being engaged to actively planning her wedding. I can still see my mother and her sitting before that glowing screen, oohing and aahing at the various wedding dresses with their golden and silver body trellises. There were nectar supplements to assure a bride had a bountiful harvest on her body for her wedding night. Some brides-to-be grew their branches very long in the back in preparation for the big day, so they could be woven into the train of the wedding dress. The groom would then harvest these on the honeymoon. Some guys got so hot for that ritual. They would trade stories. I hated overhearing those conversations.

I remember the day I left. I had been watching a scene in a movie in which a very beautiful young man was sunning himself on a dock. He was about my age. He was famous. He was absorbing the light he needed to complete his natural fruition. His branches were strong and wiry, like a second musculature outside his already chiseled body. He had gone through his latest seasonal flowering and now he was bearing fruit. Some sort of miniature pear-hybrid all over him. I had to turn it off. Because I imagined the look he would give me after seeing my body. And then how quickly his gaze would avert itself, knowing where not to look ever again.

I went into the river on a summer night. It was warm water, or warm enough anyway, and I had no fear of drowning. Like virtually all non-germinaters, my malfunctioning opercula hid functional gills. True, these were vestigial, but I could submerge for extended periods. This is why people like me had even been banned from the Olympics. Our unfair advantage.

I had swim googles on. And a strong waterproof flashlight I had only recently purchased. I wondered what my family would make of that, when they saw the last purchase I had made. I hoped they would not follow me, not create embarrassing MISSING notices. I wasn’t missing. I was gone.

I swam towards the Deadlands. The area of no video cameras, the area we are forbidden to inhabit. The area which the last great war had destroyed. It had once been a metropolis swarming with life. It was a long journey, but I made it. I didn’t really care what happened to me then, the night I swam away, but that has changed now.

I had to leave the river and walk the last fifty miles or so. Down the dead highways. I thought they were pretty. The desolation. The wildflowers everywhere taking back the roads. The animals come to look at you. They’re no longer afraid.

I don’t want to go back. This is home now. My problem now seems small in comparison to those faced by the war survivors here and those crazy enough to come live here. I’m able to help people here. People with greater challenges than me. Skinflints abound, but so do variant transgenic beings of all stripes. We have a loose form of government that’s almost no government at all. We are blocked from receiving news from the outside world. Our technology only operates within the Deadlands. The outside world doesn’t want us to know anything.

I hope my sister had a beautiful wedding. I hope she has a lovely marriage. I hope her children bear fruit and their children bear fruit. “Long vines to you!” as the wedding toast goes.

One night the jamming of signals they do out there must have gone down. Because an iffy signal bled over onto my screen and we were suddenly watching their t.v. for a short while. Instead of our home grown programs. It was a beauty pageant. A glittery affair. Vines everywhere. Some of my friends were over, and their children, and we all gathered around to watch the girls strut and flounce to show off their fruits.

Many of those in the room had never even seen fruiting bodies. There were squeals of laughter and disgust from the kids. Parents chided them. These older ones looked at my opercula in the flickering light from the screen and deeper lines formed in the brows of some of my friends. “You okay?” they asked, as true friends do.

“Of course I’m okay, stupid!”

We all laughed.

Later that night, after they had all left, I went into my bedroom at the rear of my house, and sat on the edge of my bed facing a pier mirror. That mirror which had just always been here in this house that we found, that was ours for the taking. That mirror which had probably belonged to someone who died a hundred years ago. I like that mirror.

I no longer wear the clothing they wear in the outside world, with openings for branches. I wear whole garments now. But I was naked.

I held a pair of pruning shears in my right hand, and as I looked in the mirror, I clipped each branch that had begun to grow from each operculum.

I felt good doing it. And then my lover came into the room. He was monstrous. He was beautiful. He was the sun in the night.

“Do my back, darling…please?”

He smiled as he took the shears tenderly from my hand.

Gift

Jason.

It would be so easy to say it’s all Jason’s fault. After all, he was the one who retrieved the package from our mail box. While Sarah and I were still at work, he opened it and read the instructions and blindly did what they told him to do. But it’s what any kid would do. We remind ourselves of that. When we get to really arguing. When we get ugly with each other. Hundreds of times we’ve reminded ourselves.

And I’ve looked at that set of instructions hundreds of times. It’s a single sheet of paper that arrived folded in the package. It looks like any other goofy set of instructions telling kids what to do with a toy. Large, hand-drawn comic book style instructions with black and white drawings show you how to put the contained “seeds” in a filled bathtub. Kids can’t wait to see the seeds “COME ALIVE.” They can’t wait to see the “MAGIC SWIMMERS!!!” promised. The words under the drawings are in several languages, so kids around the world can understand no matter where they live. No matter which country.

I’ve never seen the seeds. I have to imagine them. I have to go by what Jason tells Sarah and me, when we ask him to repeat the story. He hates telling it now. He’s almost a year older.

He’s started talking about leaving. At his ridiculous age. Where would he go? How would he live? He carries a heavy load of guilt, we know. We keep telling him that it’s not his fault when he talks about leaving. Or when he hints at doing something worse. I take him by the shoulders and tell him. “It’s not your fault.” But, really, a tiny voice deep down inside me screams that it is his fault. It totally is, kid. You did this to us.

Jason says when he placed the seeds in the warm bath water we were at work. It was late afternoon. He had just gotten home from school. They were in the mailbox inside the envelope addressed to him. It was a label sticker, not handwriting. Later, we noticed his name was actually spelled wrong. His birthday had been less than a month before, so he figured it was just one of his uncles who had sent them. Perhaps the young uncle who travels a lot with his army job and is always late with birthday presents, when he remembers them at all.

Or it was just some sort of free promotional gift for something he had filled out somewhere. Some contest or other. He didn’t give it a lot of thought, he admitted. He just wanted to see what would happen.

It was slow at first, Jason said. Nothing seemed to be happening with the seeds. They just sank to the bottom of the warm tub and rested there on the bathmat doing nothing whatsoever. “What a rip!” Jason thought. He went downstairs to watch t.v., made a t.v. dinner, texted a bit with his friends. Then he ran back upstairs to the bathroom and looked.

And they were swimming around in there. Little black aquatic creatures. One for each seed. Five of them. Not like fish. Too many tiny little limbs attached, he said. And the shapes of their heads were different. It wasn’t all that exciting. He ran down to the basement to see if we still had the aquarium. He wasn’t sure if we had donated it to Goodwill after the last of the goldfish deaths.

When he got back upstairs, and he assured us it couldn’t have been more than five or ten minutes later, there were no longer five of the things in the water. Now there were at least a hundred of the small black creatures swimming in the tub. And he saw the drain cover had been removed. Partially. The tub was slowly draining. He watched as the black creatures swam with everything they had in them for the drain. And down they went. It wasn’t a random sort of swimming. It was directed. It was intelligent. And they were gone in seconds. He watched them go.

He watched them go.

He said he had no idea how that happened. The drain cover being partially open. Sarah slapped him once. Hard. She slapped him hard across the face when he said that part, when he repeated the story. When he said that he didn’t know how the drain cover was open. I don’t think she knew why she slapped him. We all knew by then that he hadn’t done it. They had. I think she slapped him because he had mentioned the moment when things truly became irrevocable.

We saved the envelope they came in, but the return address was fake. When I searched online, I saw how many other people had received the package too. Many of them had different fake return addresses, but no small number had our same fake address on their package too. The address in Idaho. It said it was a “toy company.” The government had begun collecting the packages. By then, we realized the government was also rounding up those people who had received one of the packages and that those people were not returning to their lives. Not even their children were returning to their lives.

So we chose to be one of the families who remained silent. We chose to proceed with our lives.

I remember when we first noticed it in our drinking glasses. It would form a black gelatinous mass on one side of a clear glass. Perfectly circular. Smaller than your pinkie fingerprint. You could turn the glass away from you and the mass would swim across and paste itself against the side of the drinking glass nearest your face. Even with a magnifying glass, you couldn’t see any distinguishing features, any sense of a tiny animal or animals in the mass. You would see see nothing in the filtered water container in the fridge. It looked like crystal-clear water. And when you filled the drinking glass and sat down to watch your favorite television show, it would be there within minutes. On the side of the glass.

Well, of course you didn’t drink it, you’ll say to yourself.

But if you didn’t drink it, the pain would start up inside. Inside your guts. Sometimes in your head. In your brain. It felt like knives twisting or sometimes like hot coals placed inside one of your organs. Other forms of pain were something new on earth. Like nothing anyone on earth had described in any medical textbook. I know because I would type words in the search bar. The only matches were people describing similar pain that started only with this year. It was dangerous to confess such things on blogs or websites. The government was tracking us all down by then. I stopped typing things in search bars.

So we did as our bodies told us.

Soon, we learned the pain would stop if we walked outside the house.

If we walked a certain direction, the pain increased. If we walked the other direction, it relented or completely disappeared. You’re getting warm. Warmer. Warmer. Very hot. No, you’re cold. Go back the other way! You’re feezing! You know this game. Cold hurt like hell.

So now we leave the house when we’re told. All three of us, Sarah and Jason and I.

Remarkably, we are still able to keep our jobs and Jason goes to school every day. Except for the days when the pain tells him to stay home “sick” and then go out. While we are at work, he goes on what we now know are missions. We go out in the evenings. Sometimes in the middle of the night, Sarah just leaves. I say nothing when she slips out of our bed and begins dressing. She says nothing on the nights that I get into my clothes at two or three in the morning and leave as fast as I can, to stop the gnawing pain.

We don’t talk with each other about the places we go on these “guided journeys,” or the things we must do. The things the pain makes us do. Because on the few occasions we have tried to pool our information, the volume on the pain was turned up to its highest level. We are still allowed to have normal conversations, to pretend that life continues as normal. But it’s a hollow thing, an exercise in calming our own nerves at the dinner table. It helps to pass the time.

I think we’ve all thought of suicide by now. Probably we’ve all thought of familicide too.

You probably would too. In our shoes.

There’s always the government. We could go to them. But the pain would be excruciating. And nobody has seen any of those people return. The word on the street and online is that those people were probably all seen as collateral damage. They’re just gone. It makes sense.

I don’t want to tell you all the things I’ve done. I don’t want you to hate me any more than you already do right now, as one of the uninfected reading my words.

I don’t want to tell you how I’ve had to open my mouth and disgorge a dark, gelatinous fluid into the food of my coworkers kept in the little mini-fridge we share in our university office bay.

Only the oldest colleagues in my office still leave their food out of their sight. That generation doesn’t seem to get what’s happening. The younger coworkers are well aware. I’ve seen some of them eyeing me. They talk to me differently now. A few of them do, anyway.

I’ve started to get the pain around them. They know, you see. They know which ones know. Just as they know if I try to talk to anyone.

I know what I’ll have to do in a matter of a very short time. The pain increases and the thought forms in my head. When they approach and speak with me. The ones who have guessed I’m on the new “down low.” They might have already spoken with the government. It might be too late.

I know what I have to do.

Unless my young colleagues are better organized than I am. Part of me, and it’s a large part, hopes they are. Hopes they win. I’m tired.

But for now I must go and have another ordinary afternoon, stand before my host of angels, my paying students, and explain William Burroughs (how ironic, right?) to the innocents in a way that the words will walk carefully on society’s eggshells, and yet still perhaps give them a hint of a warning that the safety they are feeling is a safety within a placid dream that someone other than themselves is dreaming.

People Talking in Their Sleep

"The diamonds and emeralds, the rubies! That little dog is not your dog, that dog was always mine, he loved me more and you hated me for it!" an eighty-five-year-old man in pineapple-pattern pajama bottoms growls and punches his pillow, which this moment is a brother who has been dead since 1969.

"I'm the Queen of Snow Peas!" a four-year-old girl exults, so proud to be handed the crystal scepter and see those countless green minions, who stretch to the horizon now, jumping up and down and cheering her, just before she rolls out of the top bunk and crashes to the floor, waking up crying and screaming for her parents, from the pain, but mostly from the sudden revocation of royalty.

"I always will, Essie, I always did love you…your brother is a liar and I killed him cuz he poisoned you against me….put 'em in a garbage pile….like a carrot!"mutters  someone in New Jersey who thrashes under a blanket, as a dark nurse stands in the dark doorway, half watching a CSI rerun on a television in a room across the hall.

A woman who has become her long-dead Yorkshire terrier in a series of dreams chases the sled on which she (as a six-year-old girl) flies so joyfully down a snowy hill in a cemetery near her former home, long-razed, where a strip mall now stands, barking merrily all the way down.

"Yes, I used the toothpaste to masturbate," an astronaut-in-training reverted to his eleven-year-old self abjectly confesses to his father, who is a mouse twice his size, standing before him, next to his mother, who is now younger than he ever remembered her, platinum blonde and dangerously alluring in a way that he knows only from photographs in a family album that was rarely brought out.

An eleven-year-old girl who has recently studied the history of American slavery is shouting out numbers, bidding at a slave auction on all her classmates, white children who have become African-Americans, but still look exactly like themselves, had they been born black, in another century, and not ten or eleven years ago in a Connecticut city with the highest per capita income in the state.

"Be quiet, I am punishing you," a thirteen-year-old boy tells his little sister's favorite stuffed animal, a pink rabbit, in a dream, but the lagomorph fights back, and soon he is on his back and the pleasure is everywhere until he is woken by something like a bee sting and the thrashing of his necklace, its crucifix, so tired he had been last night that he had forgotten to remove it, and now his fingers discover (his eyes with the girlish lashes are still closed) it is wet with something he is sure must be blood and probably the blood of weeping Jesus his grandmother in the mental hospital warned him about.

A homeless man wrapped in several blankets on a park bench that overlooks a river whose hard surface deer now cross, going from blue forested island to blue forested island, freezes to death in the night, but not before reciting The Gettysburg Address to perfection in the presence of his parents, who keep nodding approvingly and smiling, though he murdered them seventeen years before for drug money.

I Wrote This Short Piece of Fiction (I Swear) While I Was Asleep

I was really typing while asleep. I remember thinking when I woke up that it would probably have all sorts of trippy leaps that made no sense. But it seemed to read okay. It's louche prose, sure. But I wanted louche.

I think it might qualify as "exciting porn" in Japan. Not sure.

Warm

Jim was hunting with his two older brothers on what the locals called Jawdrop Mountain. Though he was only sixteen, he had convinced his brothers to let him go it alone, at least for a few hours at a stretch. The guys had gotten a late start that day, so it was around one o’clock when the three brothers set out hunting in different directions. This was to have been a separation of two hours before a final rendezvous at a marker tree on the path which the three young men had used to ascend the mountain. And then the brothers would head back down, deer or no deer.

It was a severely overcast day in midwinter. Several inches of snow lay on the ground from recent storms. No significant snowfall had been predicted for that day. But the weatherman had been wrong and a surprise storm brewed up on the mountain. It began as a squall, near white-out conditions. Jim panicked and stumbled around until he realized he could walk right off a precipice. This thought scared him so badly he froze in place under a sheltering stand of trees until the squall degenerated into a normal snowfall.

Then the boy realized he was lost. He had sprinted and walked much further than he had realized in his panic.

He looked at his cell phone, but without hope. He knew there would be no reception. Ridiculous even to look. He cursed himself for having wandered so far in his initial panic. He had lost all his “mental markers” in the landscape. He was calling out to his brothers, to anyone really, at the top of his voice. But no one replied. And the terrain already looked totally unfamiliar. All the trees looked the same in any direction. The snow continued to fall.

Just as it was getting dark, the boy saw a form in the woods which gave him hope. There was a cabin in its own little clearing deep in these woods of the tallest trees. He raced to it, realizing it was his salvation.

As soon as he arrived at the front door and knocked, he knew it was empty. It just felt that way. He looked in the windows, which were actually very dusty, and knew then that the cabin had probably been empty for a long time. He did a cursory inspection walking around the small structure, and saw it was intact. This was a secure place to hole up until help arrived. Though he had his rifle, he did not want to be out in the night. He realized it was hypothermia he should fear, but a primal part of him feared the other things too.

He couldn’t believe his luck in finding an unlocked window in the rear of the cabin and squeezed his svelte body through. He actually ended up falling to the floor and that was the scariest moment, when he felt most vulnerable. Lying there on the floor in the dark cabin. He froze and waited for whatever horror lay hidden in the cabin to fall upon him. He breathed a sigh of relief, right there on the floor, when he realized it was silent throughout the rooms. He could actually hear the sound of the snow falling outside through the still open window. But he wouldn’t close his exit behind him. Not before he really saw the whole cabin and knew he was safe.

“Hello?” he called out. “If you can hear me, I’m not an intruder. I’m a hunter. I’ve gotten separated from my brothers and I’m lost. Don’t be afraid.”

No fearing soul answered him or came forward to greet him.

Jim ran to the front door and undid the locks. He threw open the door and this let in a little more light. It was the wan light of snowfall which was cast into the living room of the cabin. Jim discovered that there were two other bedrooms and a small bathroom. These bedrooms were the scariest rooms to enter, since they were the darkest rooms, windowless. His eyes adjusted, but he could not be sure that he was seeing everything in those rooms. He saw enough to realize no one could be in those rooms. Not unless they were hiding under one of the beds. This was just a little too much of a risk to check right now. He could smell the dust in the cabin. Jim took it on faith that he was the only occupant of the cabin. It had surely been empty a few years, at least.

He ran out the front door and couldn’t believe his luck in finding a woodpile under an old, wind-torn blue tarp. He loaded up the fireplace and had never been so happy to be a smoker in his life. His Bic served him nicely. He prayed the chimney wasn’t blocked or sooted up beyond use. But the fire roared up and he slammed the front door shut and locked it again.

He felt terribly guilty when he thought that his brothers might be risking their own lives looking for him. He worried about them. But he figured they would descend the mountain and return with a search party. They sure would be pissed though. What more could he do but sit and wait until the morning. At dawn, he would try to find his way back to the path and maybe even be able to meet any searchers on their way up the mountain.

He decided to keep the window by which he had entered cracked open just a little bit, in case he could hear his brothers’ voices. He wondered if he should listen for search helicopters flying overhead. Or was that unrealistic? If only he could tell everybody he was alright, sitting now in front of a toasty fire as the sun died off the mountain.

Jim made a bed on the floor in front of the crackling fire. He had taken the pillows and blankets off the rather ramshackle couch that occupied the center of the room. In no time, the exhausted boy had fallen deeply asleep, grateful for the fire and the roof over his head.

When he was suddenly awakened, he had no idea at first where he was, what time of day or night it was, or what the sound that had awakened him had actually been. He thought it had been a knocking. A hard, insistent, series of fast knocks. Had he been dreaming?

Then he remembered his circumstances and he called out his brothers’s names, each one in turn. Had they miraculously found him? He sprang up and ran to the front door. But something in him told him not to open it. Not just yet.

“Hello? Who’s there?” he asked hopefully.

No answer. Only the sound of the wind. The storm had grown emboldened after night fell. He could hear its shrieking on the other side of the door.

“Okay, no one then,” Jim laughed to himself. “Of course, it’s no one. I was dreaming.”

Jim turned to return to his bed. This was just as more knocks sounded on the door: three times more. But this time, they were loud beyond belief. They sounded like the worst type of threat. It couldn’t have been a fist that had done that. It had to be some sort of board or log or….

Jim looked at the open window at the rear of the dwelling. It was still cracked open a few inches. The boy ran to it and slammed it shut. He was grateful there was a swivel lock on the sash. He shot it clockwise tight. He let the thick curtains close on the window, hiding it. But he knew that was only a thin pane of glass separating him from whoever or whatever was out there in the night. And there were two other windows in the cabin.

Panicked, he searched for a weapon. He was so grateful to realize the fireplace’s poker was there. He approached the front door again, weapon in hand, and listened.

His mind began to play tricks on him. What if that was one of his brothers, half-frozen to death, on the other side of that door, unable to speak, trying to let Jim know that he was a human icicle. It seemed improbable. But it was not impossible. He had to know.

Jim counted to three, but silently, in his mind. And then he threw open the door.

No one.

Only the snow innocently falling.

But looking down, Jim saw there was a line of tracks in the snow leading to the front door! Bipedal tracks. The snow had gotten rather deep and the wind was blowing, so there was no way to tell what sort of boots or shoes the visitor was wearing. Yet the weirdest thing was that these tracks stopped right there at the door. Jim looked left, right. No one. The snow was its own light source, so it was easy to see into the night. But there was no one, nothing there to be seen.

“Where in the hell did you go?” Jim whispered under his breath.

And that’s when he heard the sounds above him. Someone was walking on the goddamn roof!

This freaked the boy out. His thoughts ran madly. How did the visitor climb up there. Was it his brother, after all, hallucinating while freezing to death?

Jim couldn’t take the wondering anymore and stepped through the open door, ran out into the deepening snow. He looked up onto the roof, but there was no one. There was a tall pine tree, however, that grew close by the roof. It dangled branches down over it. He saw little miniature avalanches of glittery snow come sparkling down from the tall tree’s branches. Because something was stirring in those branches. He couldn’t see it in the darkness of the tree, but he could see it was climbing. Then the tree grew still.

“Who in the hell are you?” Jim screamed up at the tree.

He waited in a terror he felt was skinning his heart.

Now there was only the sound of the snow, the gusts of the wind picking up and then dying off.

Just as he was ready to run back into the house, feeling all his danger sensors shrilling alarms, he heard a voice come from the darkness of the tree.

“Waaaarm,” the voice hissed out at him. The boy was shocked at how well this loud whisper (for it was a sort of creepy whisper) carried.

“You want to get warm?” Jim asked.

“Waaaarm…..” the voice sighed again ten seconds later.

Before Jim could respond, a black form flew out of the tree, and it was larger than any man, whatever it was, and came sailing down right over Jim’s head, and something touched him there, on the top of his head, as the boy screamed.

But the thing had sailed past and up into another tall tree behind Jim.

So Jim bolted inside the cabin and locked the door in triplicate.

Mere seconds later another knock came on the door. This one sounded much more polite. It sounded almost like a human knocking. Almost. But it was a dragging sort of knock.

“What are you?” Jim couldn’t stop himself asking.

“Waaaarm?” the voice hissed beseechingly.

“What do you want?”

“Waaaarm!”

“You want to be warm?” Jim asked, shaking now.

“Waaaarm meeeeal,” the voice whispered loudly.

“Listen. To. Me. Now. I have a poker and I’m going to beat your brains in if you don’t go away. I’m going to beat your brains in, and then I’m going to eat you. I don’t care what you are. I’m going to skin you and eat you and cook you in this fire. Then tomorrow I’ll shit you out and flush you down a toilet. So consider that before you ask for anything again.”

There came the sound of claws scratching on the other side of the door. This was a very angry sound.

Then Jim was sure he heard wings flapping, flapping away.

He returned to his makeshift bed and he stared at all parts of the cabin over and over, all night long. He paid particular attention to the windows.

Morning came. Morning finally came after that endless night of snow and winds and the unspeakable. Jim looked out the dusty windows. He saw a beautiful sunny morning.

He stared out several of the windows for another hour and then he finally decided it was time to head back out and find the path home.

He held the poker tight in his fist and his breath tight in his chest as he opened the front door.

Four raw scratch marks had gouged the wood. There was a claw stuck in the fourth raking. It was no claw or talon that Jim could recognize. It looked like the sort of claw you saw on dinosaurs in the museum reproductions of those creatures.

Three hours later, Jim heard a member of the search party calling his name. He was reunited with his brothers an hour after that.

He couldn’t say why he never showed the claw to anyone, not even his brothers. Maybe the shame of having gotten lost, of causing so much worry for everyone, was enough embarrassment to shoulder. The story he had to tell would have made it even worse.

But he kept the claw in a drawer in his bedroom for many years, right next to a pistol that he always kept with him anytime he found himself having to enter the woods, whether it was hunting season or not.