I don’t understand why this is still a problem,” the ACS Director says, point-blank from behind the line of tiny crystal goblets filled with discreet, elegant sips of sherry. The Director’s flight, and that of every sherry-flight at the table, glistens in the muted light of the cabin. He stares on through the front windows of the yacht’s dining room into the night. The city is partially hidden on the horizon, and, up above it all, almost insignificant pin pricks of light lie scattered like fallen sequins.
I am locked up in a cell. The captors are conducting medical experiments on us. They give us metal wires to stick in our necks, which I know instinctively will erase our memories.
They crawled from shallow darkness out of a crack in the sidewalk. They each stood as tall as a man and a half. Their bodies were covered in hazelnut fur and their nose tendrils writhed like skinned octopi. There were three of them, and one of me.
I fell backward onto my ass in the street, whimpering and whining, completely expecting to have my brain eaten out backward from my skull like a stew by these terrible, loathsome, horror-inspiring… Psychic Moles from Outer Space!
When I was in the seventh grade I found a scalpel after school. I think it belonged to my mom. There was nowhere else it could have come from. And this scalpel almost glowed. The black, black, veiny marble counter it was sitting on reflected a kind of halo around the silver knife, anything but subtle.
I think maybe I want to keep them,
These weepy red constellations of chin and cheek.
But my grandfather has already retouched them out,
Airbrushed the skin flat and smooth.
He says I will want to remember my face the way it will be,
That in a year my constellations will smooth to stratus cloud,
But my older brother still gets the facewash that bleaches towels
And my mother talks about the bump she found in her ear,
Red, greasy, ugly,
Real, alive
The craters are hardly visible now. The cracked earth of the great divots is covered by a layer of plant life. The tall yellow grass waves in the breeze, a bandage across the land. Ticks jump from stalk to stalk, frolicking in the light. Below the earth, gophers scurry back and forth in their tunnels, embarking on errands and family business. In the dips and holes, ferns create a miniature canopy over a carpet of mosses, further sheltering the scarred ground from the sky above.
The field remembers when harsh shapes of steel and flame streaked the sky, the whistle of their plummeting payloads setting the grass trembling in anticipation. Boots slammed down on the ground, squelching the ferns into the mud as they attempted to run, to escape the inevitable. Shouts filled the air. And then a boom, as the world shook, and the ground was scarred.
But that is done now. The scars are covered, healing bit by bit.
Among the covered craters stands one hill. It is not a particularly large or notable hill. A piece of rusty scrap metal has recently been pulled aside from the little door that it once hid. The door is circular, made of dullish grey metal, and buried up to its center. Behind the inwards-swinging door, old, reinforced brick walls line the inside of the hill, forming a dome beneath the earth. A set of wooden cabinets are built into the wall opposite the door, their once white paint stained to a dark brownish gray. The floor is dirt, dry and hard packed. It conceals cigarette butts once ground under boots, stained paper and wrappers, a dropped pen with ink long dried.
The field remembers when this room was filled with voices of fear. A legless corpse on a stretcher, wailing as if it were still alive. A blinded man trying desperately to open the cabinets. A uniformed figure curled up by the wall, knocking her head slowly and repeatedly into the brick. Knock. Knock. Knock. A scream. Knock. The blind man dropped a glass. Crash. Knock. Knock. A distant explosion.
The sounds are gone now. While they are still remembered, their echoes have faded, even in the earth which holds them longer than most.
No plants grow under the hill, except for in the center of the room, where a single fern patch sprouts under a beam of light that shines through the top of the hill. This beam shines not through a window or from a conveniently placed spotlight, but through a hole, dug into the rain-and-time-weakened ceiling by a group of children trying to bury treasure.
The treasure lies near one of the walls, a cardboard box of stolen jawbreakers only half buried because the ground here is difficult to dig in and the children didn’t have the patience for it. How could they, after all, when they had found such a cool new hideout? The children did not find the remains in the dirt. The children did not hear the sounds that had echoed in the hill. The children saw only what was here now, and what was here now was good. Their shovel is still planted next to the treasure, and sticks of several shapes and sizes have recently made their way into the stash by the cabinets.
It was the sticks that drew the attention of the gophers. A series of tunnels stretching under the field, connecting at three places to the dome, were home to the local gopher family. A mother, father, aunt, grandmother, uncle, and various assorted gopher children all lived together in the tunnels and were rather confused by the new neighbors poking at their tunnels.
The gophers were timid at first, and they avoided the children. The children searched for the gophers but never managed to get close. The gophers stuck to the tunnels, and the children quickly dismissed them and ceased their attempts at stick-powered exploration. As time went on, though, curiosity got the better of both sides, and they sought to make contact. A kid left some apple slices for the gophers. The grandmother gopher brought another kid a worm. And slowly, the factions began to interact and to play.
As there are no children here at the moment, there are no gophers either, except for the uncle scrabbling at the sides of the treasure. But when the children return, there will be a vast sea of curious nibbling faces to greet them.
Throughout these events, the cabinet under the hill has remained locked, both the children and the gophers failing their attempts to open it. Its stained doors remain a mystery to them.
The field remembers when this cabinet was one of instruments of life and death. A syringe rested next to a pistol. Knives and scalpels lined the shelves. Blood shone on the stainless steel and colored the glass trays that held it.
The tools are buried now. Rainwater, moving drip by drip with the force of a flood, seeped into the back of the cabinet and collapsed it. Where once the shelves were, now a new harmonious kingdom has formed. Moss makes its home, forming little cottages and towns for itself within the dirt. Earthworms stay the night at the moss towns, a pitstop on their lifelong journey. Delving down from above to explore this new land, roots take hold, providing a new stability for the earth below and the plants above. If the children and gophers were to ever open the cabinet, they would not be impressed by the new contents, but for the field there is nothing that could make it happier.
The field rests easy below the occasional chattering of the animals and plants, great and small, above and beneath.
Hell was complicated. Being entirely underground meant that there was a finite amount of space. As more and more people went to Hell, overcrowding was inevitable. The Devil's solution was straightforward: every time a new person went to Hell, it expanded. It's elegant and humans balk at the concept (always a nice bonus). Sometimes, a bored demon would torture a physicist by showing them how Hell expansion works and not allowing them to tell anyone.
Angels and mortals won't tell you this, but demons like rewarding good behavior. Torturing your fellow hellmates is fair game, but demons will find ways to make your torture crueller if you waste their eternal time. The Fallen Angel himself built a handful of infinitely-stocked cigar lounges for when the humans got breaks (breaks help prevent them from becoming numb to the torture). Smoke any of the cigars and you'll have maggot eggs lining your mouth and throat. It's pretty basic, but the real kicker came when he told the humans that he made a dozen cigars that can bring people back to life. Angels can't lie. A few hours later, some woman from Heresy was floating up all the circles on a beam of light. To this day, you can't go half an hour without seeing people hacking up maggots.
The other 11 cigars are in the Devil's desk drawer.
Torture devices like that are excellent, but developing personalized torture devices for an ever-increasing number of people is a bit of a logistical problem. For a long time, demons would just dip people into the Pit of Eternal Fire, but that meant that they pretty much had to ignore small infractions (which are their favorite to punish) and don't have any way of rewarding good behavior.
While the Devil's cigar trick was clever, his real stroke of genius was the Dynamic Evil Valuation In Length (DEVIL) system, which took human behavior and translated it into a length. That length was added or subtracted from that person's Hell expansion radius. Good behavior made your corner of Hell roomier, while bad behavior would have you screaming into your hellmate's mouth. And it was collective. Regardless of how much space they had, the humans spent their eternity wondering if they were getting screwed over by some crappy person they'd never met. Needless to say, the Greed and Wrath people hated it. Before the DEVIL system, all the demons had left the nationalism branch of Wrath to let the humans torture each other forever. The demons came back for a little bit, but only to watch what would happen as their little thunderdome started to shrink. It was bad (by which I mean good (by which I mean highly entertaining)).
That was the first sign of the problem.
Hell was getting smaller. Way smaller. No one noticed at first. Then, it seemed like a fluke — or maybe an error with either the Hell expansion or DEVIL system. Things got checked and double-checked and everything was in order. The problem was the humans.
They were up to something.
Remember how bad behavior could shrink your expansion radius? Apparently they'd coordinated to all get their radii as low as possible. They'd agreed to be bad. The Devil didn't understand why they would want to do that, but he knew one thing for certain: whenever humans got together like this, someone ended up in a lot of trouble. Maybe it would be him, maybe it would be them, maybe it would be the folks in Heaven. The Devil's weapon is temptation, and even he couldn't resist letting this play out just to see who would take the fall.
Soon enough, none of the demons had to work anymore. Not like there was anything they could do within the compressed throngs of people. Pushing and kicking and gasping sweaty air, the crowds were squeezed tighter. Words were lost amongst the noise. The air between bodies disappeared. The edges of people pressed against one another, becoming wrinkles in a single, screaming disc. People cannot die again in Hell. Instead they compress beyond mortal limits, bodies stretching vertically, blood swelling into any limbs lifted above the sinful masses.
And then
THWUP
Like a great cavernous cannon, the only part of Hell left was a shrinking tunnel pointed straight towards the entrance. The humans, the demons, the cigar lounges, everything jettisoned out into the mortal world and scattered across the lands. By the time the Devil had dusted himself off, the High Seraph was already waiting, shading itself with its six feathered wings.
"What the Heaven is this?" the angel asked.
"I... um... uh... Hell peace?"
"Hell peace?"
"Hell peace. It's like world peace, but... in Hell."
The High Seraph glanced around. "Doesn't look very 'in Hell' to me."
"Well, it was in Hell. Initially. My point is they all put aside their differences. They worked together! No one on Earth can do that!"
"That's great, and I'll appreciate that later. Right now, I have to kill all these people again and you have to make sure that they can't get out of Hell again."
The Devil stopped to do some mental math. "I like the idea, but I think most of the people aren't going back to Hell."
The High Seraph narrowed its eyes.
"I mean, think about it: everyone's back to life, so they get a second chance at judgment. And Hell peace. Hell. Peace. Most sins are small potatoes compared to that. Plus, you can fight with your spouse every day and still get purgatory. I'd be surprised if a lot of people did go back."
They both said nothing for quite a while. The High Seraph's wings twitched.
The Devil traced a glowing red circle with his heel. "So... I think I'm going to head out. I've got a lot of cleaning up to do. Back home, I mean. I'll be sure to take the demons with me. And the cigar lounges. But, um... good luck with everything! It was nice seeing you again. It's certainly... been a while."
The High Seraph said nothing.
It was a good day to be the Devil.
A slimy web, compacted
in a little stick of flesh
eager, springing out
childhood school
laughter and then crying
on the streets and the apartments
connecting, reaching out
until, stretched across the universe
knotted with the rest
the sun of life sinks into dark velvet
and it falls limp.
What is the shape of it all?
The web of webs,
a net? or a twine ball?
A blight ever spreading its rash
across the skin of the cosmos?
or perhaps a hothouse garden
the tentacle curling in on itself
like the frond of a fern?
All I know is
across the vast expanse
by fortune or luck
our webs have become entangled
+ I am a dangerous trend
A sign of adolescent miscalculation
Or else, a dark clawed thing
+ I am a shadow on the wall–
They have never seen my face
(I don't think they want to)
+ I am a talking point
An illustrative picture
A "what's wrong with"
+ I am a mistake is what they say
They are telling each other that I am a mistake
+ I am silent in their stories
When they talk to you about me, notice this– In their stories, I never open my mouth
+ I have learned to be sweet + good at this dance.
They would love me if they met me,
Smile at my elegant mask
+ call me the wrong thing when I turned my back–
But I am a dangerous trend
+ I am a shadow on the wall
+ I am still going to be here in the morning
“Taking photographs has set up a chronic voyeuristic relation to the world which levels the meaning of all events…The omnipresence of cameras persuasively suggests that time consists of interesting events, events worth photographing.”
—Susan Sontag, In Plato’s Cave
silently it slithers
serpentine
—satanic
leaves
alliteratively a-rustle
it carves a wake- (funerary?)
hence-lifetime
of snapped twigs
& naturally
dreams
a faint gleam
lunar
(thus portentous)
light on its flesh
or through it:
translucent
its latest meals laid bare
it swallows
moon
leaves
trail
translucency
verily, it is an ouroboros:
sisyphean self-digestion:
an act of mythic
collaboration
it shits
them all out
corroded
in consumptive vitriol
essences extracted
for your viewing pleasure
Jenkins had always said that baloney wasn’t a good foundation for a railway system. The sausages couldn’t stand up to the pressure of the tracks, it didn’t burn hot enough to be good fuel, and obviously they couldn’t serve that kind of thing to the passengers. Vince ignored him, and signed the deal anyway, confirming the transfer of five hundred tons of baloney into the Jiang-Costa Rail Company’s storehouses, and the transfer of five million dollars out of their coffers.
When the ungodly monstrosity known as JCR 53, quickly dubbed “The Meat Train,” was put on the tracks, Jenkins still maintained that this was a terrible idea. Passengers lined up on the platform as usual, checking watches, balancing screaming babies and dragging around luggage. The Chicago to New York train was late, as each of the watch-checkers noted with judgement. They turned as one to check the station clock, winding their watches in unison. The clock confirmed their suspicions of tardiness.
The finely tuned ears of the baby-balancers, conditioned to note even the beginnings of a scream or tummy rumble from a mile away, heard a sound from around the bend. Something was moving down the tracks, but it did not seem to make the familiar sound of metal on metal that a train would normally produce as it braked before a station. It was a similarly familiar sound, though not one that they had ever expected to hear here. It was the sound of meat grilling.
When it came around the corner, most of the passengers did not see it immediately. Conditioned train riders, they faced directly towards the tracks as they waited for the train to pull up in front of them. The children had yet to adopt this tradition, so they were the first to witness it, though what exactly they witnessed was a bit difficult for them to understand. A tube of baloney, severed into connected parts like a chain of sausages, was mounted on a set of hardened sausage skin wheels. To the sides of the wheels, flaps of meat had been lowered against the wheels and the tracks as brakes. The sound of the flaps grilling from the friction grew louder as the Meat Train approached, as did the smell. At the front of the train, steam puffed from the top of the sausage engine. The first car appeared to be half gone, the upper half of the sausage simply missing. This open view revealed the inside to be mostly hollow, a thick wall of meat surrounding an open interior. Clambering around on top of the car, a group of workers dug into the remaining meat with shovels, scooping it up and carrying it into the engine car in chunks.
The train pulled up to the platform with a long, drawn-out squelch. The sizzling of the brake pads maintained a steady timbre as ropes of intestine pulled them upwards and off the wheels. The meaty car doors opened. Vince stepped out of the engine car, holding a bullhorn to his mouth. He was a small wiry man with short thick black hair sticking straight up. A limp mustache was plastered across his upper lip and his eyes shone brightly in a mildly unsettling manner. He wore a three-piece suit with long coattails.
“Greetings, passengers!” Vince’s voice reverberated down the platform. The passengers in question paid him no mind, transfixed by the food fiend before them.
“Please refrain from sitting in the forward car, as it is currently being harvested for fuel,” Vince continued. “Those of you going to Indianapolis, if you could sit in the second car so that we can begin burning it once you get off that would be wonderful. Those of you going to Columbus, third car, Pittsburgh, fourth. You can figure it out.”
The passengers didn’t move.
“Let’s move people, come on, we’ve got a schedule to keep.”
The gawking passengers were shoved out of the way by the luggage-draggers, eager to acquire spacious seats for their precious belongings. The others followed soon after, logic and gag reflex overcome by the commuter instinct to get on first.
As the passengers boarded, Jenkins leaned out of the engine car, sweat soaking through the bandana he had tied around his face. Jenkins was a tall heavyset man. He wore a brown cap over his curly black hair. A pair of work pants held up with suspenders and an oil-stained white shirt with the sleeves rolled up almost to the shoulders completed his outfit. His eyebrows were a bit high, giving him a constant look of worry or surprise.
“Vnse, ve bn lking at duh ful lies—” Jenkins mumbled.
“Jenkins,” Vince said, “I told you, I can’t hear anything you say through that thing. Get over it and take it off already."
Jenkins groaned and pulled down the bandana. He gagged as the smell of the train hit his nostrils again.
“Vince, I’ve been looking at the fuel supplies,” he said. “If my math is right, we’re going to run out of train before we hit Philly, much less New York.”
Vince raised an eyebrow. “That’s not what you said this morning.”
“I know what I said this morning, but while I may be a ferroequinologist, I am by no means a carnologist. I didn’t expect the meat to burn well, but the efficiency is below my lowest estimates.”
“Can we sell the meat we’ve already burned along the way for extra funds?”
Jenkins shook his head. “It’s burnt to a crisp by the time we’ve used it. You asked me to design an engine, not an oven. What would you use the money for anyway?”
“To buy more meat,” Vince said.
“I don’t think that more meat is the solution to our problem. Besides, we wouldn’t even be able to get our hands on it. Meat and supplies are hard to find this far west. I still don’t even know how you managed to get this much meat in the first place, much less why you’re wasting it on something like this.”
Vince looked off towards the horizon. “Jenkins, I have a dream.”
Jenkins ducked back into the engine cab.
“My dream may seem odd to some,” Vince continued, paying no mind to his lack of audience. “But if I wish to cross this country in a large baloney-based horror, a horrible melding of flesh and machine based on an ill-advised purchase I may or may not have made while I was drunk, is that not the most perfect example of the American dream?”
“Hey meathead,” Jenkins called from the engine car. “Get in here, the engine’s heating up and we need to get moving.”
Vince entered the car and the train began moving once again, pulling out from the station as it truly began its journey.
Caleb looked like a ghost, in the light of a computer screen. The click of the computer keys demanded silence, so though a fan spun gently above, its crisp black blades pointlessly recirculating torrid air, it didn’t make a sound. The room was choked in darkness, the edges between objects made meaningless without light. Reaching out, the thin plastic of a water bottle was not as sturdy as the glass cup he’d expected, and it was wrung and crunched in his grasp.
He reached for a notebook, filigree lines and schematics printed on the surface like cracks in clay, but his hand was shaky and instead, he found himself bumping over a sample bottle. It clinked heavily against the table, the viscous liquid inside muting the sound, then spilled out slowly, running like syrup over the papers.
Quietly: “Shit.”
Caleb’s eyes didn’t move from his screen, his face expressionless. He knew he was hungry in the same way he knew that those ruined papers represented months of work, his best idea yet: as a dull contemplation, quickly ignored in favor of more important ideas.
The bolt in the apartment door slid open, cheap tin painted up as silver. Light from a flickering bulb in the hallway threw shadows under piles of clothes, sickly on the crisp linoleum floor, and reflected off the metal seams of towering filters that lay rejected against the sleek black countertop.
Silhouetted in the light, she muttered, “I don’t know why you need samples of this stuff. We have a sink.”
She turned the knob for emphasis, black water running like blood against the basin. He cleared a space on his desk and looked up from the screen. Awkward silence stretched out, only seconds, but in the dim light and the early morning it felt vast.
“Alright, Dad, love you too.” She shrugged as she switched off the faucet.
In the street below, a bottle smashed against a wailing car alarm, and muted by distance someone screamed. They wailed not in defiance or terror, but in pain. Caleb knew that scream — everyone knew that scream. When the water itself is polluted, laced with sickness, and people you know die like flies on the surface of a summer lake, you get used to those cries. He didn’t know what the other sounds were. He didn’t want to know.
It was funny, he mused, the scream jolting him out of his work. No one died of dehydration. Even the most committed, even those who knew that to drink was to die, gave in eventually.
“We’re running out, aren’t we?”
“We have a day. Maybe two.”
Caleb turned back to his work. Water dripped at a snail's pace out of the latest filter. It was a little clearer, wasn’t it? It was harder to work with shaky hands, bleary eyes, and a mouth like parchment, like sand. Neither of them bothered admitting their thirst, but it hung in the air like a stormcloud. Finally, breaking like a dam, desperation rose to the surface.
“I’m going out. There’s gotta be someth—” she started.
“No.” His eyes darted up. He spoke too quickly. “I’m almost done.” She sat down and he seized his moment, rising shakily to slide the tin bolt against further conversation. The outside world was dangerous — the desperate would drink anything, and they were both too thirsty to risk the temptation. And he was so close. He barely thought as he discarded the key down the kitchen sink. It hit the side with a bright clink.
He narrowed his eyes, filtering out thirst, hunger, and numbness from hours of work. His thoughts were muddled, Caleb thought. He needed clarity.
The blackened water that was spilled across the inventor’s desk and splashed over the sink basin had dried, now. The filter was painfully slow. But after this test, he would know that he had succeeded.
The newspapers said you’ll know the end is coming when you stop feeling pain — and slowly dehydration numbed his sore muscles, the ringing in his ears, even his sandpaper tongue. Still, he made the final adjustments on a filter that he no longer had time to test.
Out of the corner of his eye, Caleb saw his daughter stand. She approached the sink. Dehydration slowed his reaction, his eyelids trying to wet his eyes and follow her movement. He reached out, fingers closing around the cold metal. Standing up cost too much time, and too much energy. The room extended, the seams between the tiles faded in the darkness. Each step thundered in his ears, gripped in his hand a holy grail, he tried shouting from dry lungs that he had finished, that the filter was done, that they could save themselves from the cloying sickness flooding the world below, but instead all he could do was rasp, unsure if he had really spoken or just dreamt speech.
Blackness closed around the corners of his vision. He stood too soon, but with each footfall hitting like raindrops, he reached the sink; lunged over empty bottles, clothes, dishes, domestic refuse, blood pounding in his ears. The sharp pain was iron in his veins, blunted only by dehydration. He could feel his stomach flip and surge with bile. Sunlight broke over the rooftops, through the blinds.
His filter clamped onto the pipes beneath the sink, Caleb took a step back, panting, The filter — his greatest invention — gleamed in the dawn. Beneath the apartment, the plumbing groaned and shrieked, pressure building up, but the filter held fast.
They had no more tears left to cry, but if they could, they would both be weeping. The inventor's daughter laughed as she reveled in the simple pleasure of tap water! She reached out to fill a cup.
The faucet sputtered and shook. No water came up. The inventor let himself smile for the first time in days. The key to their door was discarded, the door locked, and all the water filtered out of the pipes.
He would not die a putrid death, infected, poisoned. He could not hear his daughter screaming at him, trying to tear his magnum opus off the pipes. Warm sunlight heated the room, and the fan did nothing but recirculate hot, dry air.
if we can be described
as a network of nodes
inked pairwise
and graphed in black
then I fear,
that when the threads are tied
and factors drawn
I will be left without
hanging
factors clustered
loops of friends made
the ocean web coalesced
in knots of knowing
of smaller circles
bound together
without
me
I
alone.
What if,
I am but a loose tie,
to call when I am needed,
an inoffensive hand
in exchange for a kind word,
a convenience
but not a dear friend
What if,
It wouldn’t mean much to you
that was the problem, in fact
if when you all were listing
each person you adore
and I was there
I was right there
you didn’t see me
you didn’t know me
until I had to ask
to say “Hey”
“don’t forget me”
I fear I am a whisper in the whirlwind
and that I have to yell to be seen
and how?
if I am seen at all
who am I
what am I
Am I—to you?
am I?
Good bye rayon, yeggs, coach-lamps, milkmen, icemen, horse-cars, moontowers, light-buttons, plug hats, lamplighters, laundry vans, carriage-blocks, argand lamps, fly netting, Hearth Spaniels, Holland shades, mint juleps, castor oil, Latrobe stoves, Dundrearies, haircloth chairs, electroliers, Isinglass, Vitrolite, Bombazine, Mattei cure, uncut books, carpet rakes, Teletype, parquet floors, cycloramas, Bayard Taylor, square pianos, carpet-beaters, Pullman Porters, Gladstone collars, Alger novels, smoking jackets, pulling doorbells, phosphate soda, knicker-bockers, lina-crusta, army bugles, police whistles, magic lanterns, chromo-lithos, boxcar handbrakes, 'Guffey readers, Brussels carpets, Rogers sculptures, Tableaux Vivant!
Just kidding, I'm taking you all with me forever.
she pours excess life
into its limp rubber body
breath, not helium;
she has not learned ambition
so she cannot ward against it
she transmutes air to waxen wings
— how grounded, to make a toy
of her spent vitality
it shudders with each breath
terrified of vacuous substance
of implanted purpose
she is only finished
when its skin strains to burst
a puff or a poke away
from violent oblivion
she ties it shut, admitting
no further contribution
the balloon is grateful,
after a bit of play;
it would collect dust
without her
better to be made
waste than not at all
it delights at every smack:
the pure joy of physics,
the relief of masochism
the balloon cannot distinguish
abandonment and negligence
a matter of words
the result is the same:
she throws it to the wind
up and away it goes,
safe from her,
and lonely
will it deflate
before it pops
will it be too high up
for her to notice
or to care
