What's the Worth

Written Here is how it works: her brother brings them in. She pretends, at first, that she...

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 14:51:00 -0500

Here is how it works: her brother brings them in. She pretends, at first, that she doesn’t see them, that she doesn’t see anything.

She has always had that look, far away and distant and from another time. When they first started this, they paled up her skin, thinking that more ghostly would be more convincing, but, after a few dry runs, they decided that that pale was too pale, and it made the marks suspicious.

The ones who don’t believe her, who think she is a scam, but a fun and entertaining one and why not pay the five dollars?, believe that she traffics in generalities, banal statements of fame and fortune or tragedy and pain that could apply, really, to just about anyone. Or they believe that she is at the head of an entire network of scam artists, which includes that chatty woman selling beads and knick-knacks down the road, and the bodega guy who sells roasted corn, the bartender in the only bar in this six block stretch, and the kid selling Coca-Cola and ice cream bars out of a white plastic cooler, that they are all working for her, feeding her information, passing along secret signals about what couple is ripe for the picking, where they are from, who they long to hear from again, what they long for her to tell them. Some of them think that she tells them only what she thinks they want to hear, stories of success or fame or happiness or fulfillment, while others think that it’s her brother who is the scam artist and that she is simply one of his pawns, that he’s pulling all the strings and making all the predictions and suckering all the tourists.

Here is how it works: her brother brings them inside. Even before any of them—the marks, her brother—step inside, she begins to write, and she writes and she writes, and when she’s done, she steps back and waits for them to ask her what it all means. She doesn’t know what it all means, but she reads it to them anyway, everything she has written. She doesn’t know where it comes from or what it all means or whether it is true or a lie, whether it makes sense to them or not, and she doesn’t care.

All that she cares about is that she will write and write, until there is nothing left, and then she will read what she has written, and that no matter what she cannot stop.

Lyrics

Frank, His Bride

She had invited him to her place in Bushwick. He thought it was going to be just him. She invited him to see a new project she was working on. She was an artist. He was in love with her, had been for ages. We might as well get that out there right now. But there was a crowd of people in her tiny apartment and pouring out into her tiny backyard and he wasn’t tiny at all.

Some of them were people he knew but a lot of them weren’t. He had always been self-conscious around the people he didn’t know. The scars on his face and his arms, not to mention on his chest and back and legs, too, but nobody saw those. Still, considering what they could see. Well. He wasn’t blind. He had two eyes. Two different but very good eyes. He knew what he looked like. Discolored and mismatched.

He hadn’t spent all those years hidden from civilization for the fun of it.

Walking around the city or riding the subway, it was easy for people to overlook him, or look right through him without ever seeing him. But here, in such a small space? At a party? Well. You didn’t expect to find the homeless masturbating guy from the R train to show up at your friend’s apartment in Bushwick, was the thing, and when he did, you tended to notice.

Not that Frank was the homeless masturbating guy from the R train, but you get the point.

Sometimes, when he stepped into a scene like this his overwhelming urge was to point at someone obviously beautiful and yell, Hey, who invited the monster.

So far, he’d been able to tamp that impulse down.

It was a waiting game at these sorts of things. People who didn’t know him or had maybe only seen him in the neighborhood were horrified—who wouldn’t be?—and they tried to catch each others’ eyes and sooner or later they caught the eyes of someone who knew—or thought they knew—and slowly the story was passed around. Disfiguring disease. Rare form of elephantiasis. Or, whatever.

The looks of horror would melt first into shame and then pity and then brighten into a crisp kind of pride. They were enlightened and hadn’t judged and had seen right away that there must have been more to him. Why else would he have been here? And by then his situation, the sheer grotesquery of him, had become their badge, their triumph.

His only consolation was that it was all a lie.

The disease they thought he had. A lie.

He didn’t have any disease, except maybe the disease of life.

Or, rather, of dead flesh reanimated—on a cold and rainy night by a sudden flash of lightning—into some grotesque, misunderstood facsimile of life.

Whatever.

He stood in line for the keg. People in front of him, sensing his presence, shuffled out of the way, and then a beer was in his hand. He nodded, grunted. He was doing his best not to let on—to himself, anyway—just how disappointed he was that there were so many people here.

New art. My house. Nobody else will get it but u.

That was the text she’d sent him.

Nobody else but u.

Those were the words that made a thrill pass through his otherwise thrill-proof flesh.

He wanted to leave. He couldn’t leave now, though. Leaving usually caused as much a scene as arriving did, and he didn’t want all the whispering and gossip about what the hell had happened to his face, why his arms didn’t look like they matched, why the pieces of him all looked so, well, pieced together—he didn’t want any of that to take away from her thing, whatever that thing was.

Something about a bride, he overheard from two women standing to his left.

His heart sank. He’d be damned if he came out all this way, suffered through the stares and the whispers, all for this to turn out to be some strange, elaborate, artistic engagement party.

You don’t think? the other woman asked, then raised her hand, pointed to her ring finger.

No way, the first woman said. She caught Geoff—and here she made the international sign for fucking—that whore, Rachelle. Then she nodded across the yard where stood, presumably, the whore in question.

Anyway, she continued. Not her style.

So?

She shrugged. All I know is she bought, like, ten gallons of squid ink.

He moved away, tired of the conversation, of all the conversations.

The Bride. Squid ink. Who knew. He was happy enough knowing Geoff had screwed up and this wasn’t an engagement thing.

Frank finished his beer.

He looked around. He waited for it all to start. And then there was a bang, and then there was a scream, and then he turned, and there was she.

Stories by Manuel Gonzales

Photos by Emily Raw

Song by Ellia Bisker

New Year, New Scheme

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 11:01:00 -0500

The original plan for this blog was for Manuel to write a story a week for a year inspired by one of Emily’s images. We did that. Thanks for reading.

This year we’ll be posting once a month but adding song to the mix. Each entry will include in sequence:

Picture of songwriter
Story based on picture
Song based on story
Picture based on song
Story based on picture

Stay tuned!

River Walk

Fri, 28 Dec 2012 20:41:00 -0500

Even as he sat there looking at her, her arms thrown herky-jerky over her head, her legs up so high her dress slipped down her thighs, even sitting there admiring her, he knew he should have taken a picture of her, of that moment.

Then someone else showed up and she stood up and hugs were passed around and the moment was over and for the rest of the afternoon he hardly saw her.

The next day they drove down to San Antonio. She wanted to see the Alamo. He’d tried to tell her it was a joke, that there was nothing there to see, he tried to prepare her for the disappointment, but she didn’t care. She wanted to see the Alamo and then walk along the River Walk and eat over-priced, underseasoned food. Drink drinks that were too sweet. Watch the families walking along the river pushing their strollers, wrangling their kids.

After the Alamo, she bought him a tank-top. It was light blue. On the front, above a faint, light-pink image of Texas and some palm trees and the Texas flag, written in rainbow graffiti was, Texas Native, and then, in script underneath all of that, If you ain’t one, you be wishin’ you was. She made him wear it over his regular shirt for the rest of the day and at first he was self-conscious about it and then later, much later, he saw himself in the mirror and was surprised it was there, surprised that he had forgotten all about it.

Then they walked around the River Walk and he bought her some cheesecake. Later, he bought her a margarita.

The whole day, though, he kept thinking back to that moment. He kept thinking back to how he wished he’d taken that picture before everything went wrong.

It had been a perfect moment. Or even if the moment hadn’t been perfect itself, it would have looked like a perfect moment, and those, even those are hard to come by. But now it was too late and everything was going to go wrong and he would have missed it, his opportunity to document a rightness in it all.

He looked at her sitting across from him drinking her margarita. Nothing about that looked right. Her straw, even her straw, the way it was pinched between her lips, the way she didn’t use her hands to hold it or the glass, how her hands were held somewhere under the table, in her lap or at her side, just hanging at her side. That looked awful, just awful.

He felt the urge to stand up. To stand up and walk around to her side of the table and put her hands in place, reposition her hands, place them on the table at least, but best to have one holding the glass, the other holding the straw, held four, maybe five inches from her face, her lips pouting as if she was about to take a sip or had just taken a sip. He wanted to set her right, put her back into some kind of right, good position, just to see it, another perfect moment, even though he didn’t have his camera, even though it wouldn’t matter, even though he would he would do all that work only to lose it in a second.

Story by Manuel Gonzales

Photo by Emily Raw

See Her

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 20:33:00 -0500

All the time, I would see her, like, every day, this woman, dressed all in black or sometimes, like, a gray, a dark gray. The trail—the hike and bike—ran right past my house and every morning, there she’d be. Walking. I don’t know what she was doing there. I mean, I don’t know why she was living in our little suburb. She wasn’t the only one, of course. They’d opened up a whole goddamn mosque a year before, and a couple of new Indian food places. Not that she was Indian. I know that she wasn’t Indian. You don’t have to tell me she wasn’t Indian. I don’t know what she was but I know she wasn’t any kind of Indian lady. Those ladies don’t cover up so much, even if sometimes they should cover up more of themselves than they do.

Anyway, so I’d see her all the time, and I’d think to myself, as any normal god-fearing, respectable kind of guy would, I wonder what she’s hiding under there. That’s what everybody thinks. Don’t tell me it’s not. And I’ve got a pretty wife, much like you’d expect, and I look at her when I get home and I see her in her pretty little dresses or sometimes her curvy little jeans, and I think, that’s fine, that’s good. I know what I’ve got is a good thing. But then I think, sometimes I think, I wonder what she’s hiding under there—not my wife but the other lady—and then I think, What would Jennie look like under one of those. What would I do if I came home and found Jennie under one of those things. Or if all the time except for bedtime that’s all I could see her in. I’d tell, of course I’d tell her to take it off. I mean, what the hell is she trying to pull with that shit, but also I’d wonder about her, think about her in that get up. I’d want to know, What she’s hiding under there. I’d want to know that even though I already know that. And maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. Because, that’s kind of the point, isn’t it. Not. Well, maybe it’s not the point of that big black cloak that lady wears or the mask, or, whatever, not a mask, I don’t know. What is it? A veil, I guess. I mean, that’s probably not the point of that kind of get up, but I could see my wife, like, if she didn’t think I was noticing her as much, enough, I can see her doing something like that. Maybe in the opposite direction, with some frilly little thing at night, or with something to do with her hair, making her hair purple (it happened). The point I’m making, what I’m trying to say is, I can see how this kind of thing might work. Not the purple hair, maybe. I mean. I noticed it but wasn’t happy about it. It didn’t make me wonder, What’s she hiding under there, in other words. It made me wonder other things, but not that. Anyway, we can all see how this could work, this thing, is the point I’m trying to make.

You feel sometimes like people don’t notice you, don’t see you, or they see you and think they know all there is to know about you, and that’s just the same as not seeing you at all, but then showing more of you doesn’t ever seem to work, and so what are you left? I mean. I’m just trying to get you to see it the same way I’m seeing it.

In any case, I didn’t know where you were supposed to buy this sort of stuff, the full-body wrap stuff, so I kind of put some shit together. A costume store, some drapes, some heavy black drapes. My wife’s eyeliner. It wasn’t hard. I mean. It was hard to make it look right, look even close to right, but it wasn’t hard to do. Doing it was pretty easy. Then I took a picture—one of the old cameras because of the timer and because I didn’t want Jennie to find it by accident on my phone or the digital camera. To be honest, I took a few pictures. And then I took all that shit off and threw the drapes away. I spent a hundred dollars on them and then just fucking threw them away. But now I have this. I have this thing now, and why shouldn’t I. Why shouldn’t I be able to look at this thing and wonder, What’s under all of that.

What’s he got going on under all of that.

Story by Manuel Gonzales

Photo by Emily Raw

Dirty Santa

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 15:58:00 -0500

Dirty Santa has no money is the reason why he calls me about a possible job. And look, there have been times when I have studied at the events of my life, the decisions good and bad, the whole nurture vs nature thing, in hopes of figuring out exactly how I came to run around with folk like Dirty Santa, but seeing as how I’m broke and down to my last everything, today’s not one of those days.

What job, I ask him.

I should know better by now than to trust the viability of Dirty Santa’s ideas. Once he wanted us to rob my parents, us dressed up all in black and with ski masks or Halloween masks on over our faces so they wouldn’t know it was us robbing them. I didn’t bother telling him that anything that they had that was worth stealing I’d already taken, and simply by walking through the front door and taking it.

They’ll know it’s me, I told him instead. No matter what kind of mask I’ve got over my face, they’ll know it’s me, because of the fucked up way I walk.

See, I walk on the balls my feet, some would say on the tippy toes, and no matter how much I’ve tried to fix that I can’t, so no matter what I’m wearing or how I’ve disguised myself, people always know me by the funny way I walk.

Once, in elementary school, I wore every piece of clothing I could fit over myself, and then a new heavy coat no one knew about, and then a ski mask, and then a hat over that, to pretend I was a new kid that no one knew and whose face was maybe burned by acid or something? Like kids do sometimes. But right away, see, everyone knew it was me, and I felt kind of like an idiot.

Anyway, when I thought I’d finally convinced him robbing my parents was a lame idea, he told me, Okay, okay, I get you, but here, just meet me at this address, and we’ll do this other job together. Then he handed me a slip of paper with my parents’ address on it.

I guess what I’m saying is, Dirty Santa isn’t the brightest bulb, but, since the thing I botched with the McNamara job, he’s the only bulb I know right now who’s willing to bring me in on a job.

He tells me the job and then the plan—a musician owes The Angermeier money but now it’s too late for the money and so we’ll wait for him at a bar in Brooklyn where he’s supposed to be and there beat the shit out of him and take all his stuff—which seems, for Dirty Santa, like such a straightforward and thought-out plan my Spidey-Sense should start tingling, but maybe because I’m hungry and I haven’t been sleeping too good lately, nothing tingles or whatever tingles doesn’t tingle loud enough and I miss it.

It’s a surprise, then, and not a surprise, not a surprise at all, when the address he gives me isn’t a bar, is just an empty storefront, half-burned down, and Dirty Santa’s there with another guy, some guy I don’t know, and I wonder, in the split second before it all falls to shit, I wonder if he called that guy first or second, if he laid out a plan as simple and sweet to that guy as he laid out to me, except instead of collecting from a musician, he told him, There’s a guy I have to take care of and I need a second guy with me, and if after the two of them take care of me, I wonder if Dirty Santa’s going to say, Hey, how about, now that we’ve done this, we go rob your parents?

Anyway, I start to run because I’m in no position to do anything else, and, truth be told, I’m not in much of a position to do that, either, but I start to run anyway because, fuck, what else is there for me to do?

Story by Manuel Gonzales

Photo by Emily Raw

The Princess

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 11:30:00 -0500

The king is dying.

There.

She admits it.

The king is dying and she should be there with him, attending to him somehow, or comforting the queen, who wouldn’t accept her comfort anyway, but, still. She should be at their sides instead of here in these woods looking for the old Hag. Or, not the Hag specifically, who was chased off the cliffs and fell to her death, or so it’s assumed, since nothing but her rain-soaked robes were found at the bottom of the chasm.

Not the Hag, then, but the Hag’s cottage.

Though let’s be honest. The old Hag’s cottage, after having lived there for sixteen years, is more to her than just the old Hag’s cottage.

It’s home.

She should be with the king, she knows. Weakened and wasting away. Going mad with pain, surrounded by strangers, apothecaries, clerics, magicians, and whatever other assortment of miracle workers sent for by the queen. But she also knows, or feels, or believes she feels, that if she can just find that cottage again, then everything else in her life will be set back to rights.

That she could have spent sixteen formative years of her life living in that cottage, living in these woods, and yet be unable to find it, even after almost a year of sneaking out of the castle to go in search of it, drives her to distraction.

Still, here she is, lost in the Darkening Woods yet again.

For a long time, she tried to get the animals of the Darkening Woods to tell her something about the Hag or the about the Hag’s cottage, but they’d stopped speaking to her. Not just that, but the birds and rabbits and turtles and deer had stopped gathering at her feet, as well. Had stopped bringing her baskets full of flowers or apples, had stopped draping bedsheets over her sleeping form in the middle of the night, had begun to act like birds and rabbits and turtles and deer normally act—frightened, in other words, and distrustful, blank-eyed and without intelligence or voice—which had depressed her, made her feel she had somehow offended or betrayed them, or that they had simply abandoned her, until she realized that the talking animals must have been nothing more than a side-affect of the potion that the Hag had used to drug her and, towards the end, wipe clean her memory.

Which, coming to this realization upset her even more, made her wonder what other memories of those years with the Hag and the cottage had been nothing more than a side-affect of the potions the Hag fed her hidden inside apples and cakes and gingerbreads. It made her wonder if there had been a cottage at all.

Maybe if she sings, she thinks. She lets out a few, croaky, warbly notes. Birds and squirrels overhead scatter and fly away.

She was supposed to be happy, saved from the wicked clutches of the old Hag who had abducted her only weeks after she’d been born. Happy to learn that she was a princess, not a peasant girl living in isolation in the Darkening Woods. Happy to learn the true origin of her birthmark, be reunited with family and friends and the six spirit sisters, who were supposed to watch over and protect her, though she’s become good at slipping out from their watchful eye. And she was happy, at first. The old Hag had become overbearing lately, and unreasonable. When she was a little girl, she and the old Hag had gone deep into the Darkening Woods to pick flowers and mushrooms, to converse with the woodland creatures, to bathe in the cool waters at the base of Forever Falls. But towards the end, she’d become paranoid, asking her where she was going, bolting the doors and windows, sprinkling protective powders around the cottage. Although, in the end, it seemed less like paranoia, with all the palace guards and the six spirit sisters with their powerful spells.

Anyway, she had been happy at first. But then, after a month, after two, the castle began to feel cold and big. Her father, the king, was nice enough, but seemed distracted by kingly affairs, and now, being sick and at death’s door, the sight of him confused her. She should be sad at his imminent death, being her father and the king, but all she can muster for him is pity and an urge to avoid looking at him. It shames her to admit, but when she is at the king’s side and is being watched—she is always being watched—and she feels the weight of expectations pressing down on her, she will think of the old Hag, will bring to mind the image of her falling from the cliffs, and that’s how she will summon tears for the king.

She sighs, or maybe it’s a sob. It’s no use. She is lost, hopelessly so, has been walking in circles for an hour now. She hikes up her dress and sits on the forest floor and waits. She waits for the old Hag’s cottage to magically appear before her, or for the old Hag herself to step mysteriously out of the darkness of the Darkening Woods, or for the king to die. She waits for something to happen to her, for anything to happen at all.

Story by Manuel Gonzales

Photo by Emily Raw

Louse

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 13:39:00 -0500

I have this boot. It was given to me at a wedding. Well. Two boots. I have two boots. The pair were given to me at a wedding. It wasn’t my wedding. I’d already been through my own wedding and subsequent de-wedding. For a while, and this is a digression, I tried to convince people to call it just that, a de-wedding, as if it had been similar to a delousing. I’d been de-wed. Though, technically, the relationship—de-wed to delouse—didn’t match perfectly. I was de-wed, but if we were to try to formulate the same sentiment with the word, delouse, then it was my un-wife who was deloused. In this situation, if you can imagine it at all, I was the louse. But, see how the two don’t exactly match up? I was de-wed. She was deloused. If you can imagine it, anyway. Generally, I didn’t go into as much semantic detail when trying to convince people to agree to call it that rather than the thing they wanted to call it. There were times, too, when a person who thought they knew what I was trying to accomplish with this word, de-wed, would offer their own, de-marriage, and this would make me want to punch them in their faces, not least of all because the word made them sound like immigrants trying to say ‘the marriage’ and I found this belittling. Most often, though, I would calmly explain how the two were not only not the same thing, but were incompatible, and that their strange word, de-marriage, spoke nothing at all to the actual state of my relationship with my un-wife.

Anyway, this boot. It’s not a very interesting boot. It’s black. The soles are worn, on both of them. Both of them are equally uninteresting. Except, according to the man who gave them to me, they are interesting because they were once the boots of a famous actor. That’s what he told me, anyway, as well as the name of the actor, though I don’t remember that anymore. I’m not very good at knowing the names of famous actors or movies or singers or songs. And I think he gave them to me because he felt bad for me. I had been trying to explain to him the fact that what I’d been was un-wed. He looked at me during this explanation the way most people look at me, except that, at the end of it, he took off his boots and he handed them to me, and I thought he wanted me to hold onto them for him while he did something else, but he stood up, wearing only his socks on his feet, now, which were white, very white, and didn’t match the rest of his clothes, and he patted me on the shoulder and told me, You should have these. They once belonged to X and he gave them to a friend of mine who eventually gave them to me, and ever since, I’ve had nothing but the best of luck, and now maybe you need them, so you can have them, okay? I have other shoes in my hotel room and you should have these and maybe they’ll help you out. And then he left and then a crowd showed up at the bar and I lost sight of him, but when I knocked on his hotel room door the next morning, trying to give him the boots back, he said, Don’t be an asshole. I’m trying to do you a solid. Then he closed the door on me.

The thing was, and still is, one of the boots doesn’t fit. It’s too small. The other boot fits, if just, but the left boot is a size or maybe even two sizes too small, and while I still have them, I don’t ever wear them because I can’t get my foot all the way into the one. If I could fit my foot into that one, even if it hurt, but like really hurt, I would. I would do that, if I could, would suffer the blisters and the cramps, but I can’t even do that, so there’s not even the opportunity for them to hurt. I’d suffer through the hurt to get to the luck, is what I’m saying. But instead I have this boot I can’t wear and this wife I can’t re-wed and an entire world that doesn’t feel to me like it should be my world, and I know this is silly, know that it’s a ridiculous notion, not just that these boots were once owned by anyone in particular, and not just the idea that they have bestowed anything like luck—good or bad—on anyone who ever owned them, but the idea that my life could change, that some random act could change my life is a silly notion, but it’s one I can’t let go of, even as I bind my foot tighter and tighter, trying to make it smaller and smaller, small enough, anyway, that I can squeeze it into place.

Story by Manuel Gonzales

Photo by Emily Raw

Tree/House

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 10:32:00 -0400

It’s funny. I see this tree, like, I see it almost every night, whenever I’m standing outside your window. I see it, but I don’t.

Here’s the thing, I don’t ever really SEE it. Does that make sense?

Like, it’s here, but it’s just a dumb fucking tree, right? I’m not interested in this tree when I’m standing outside your window. I’m interested in you. Why else. I mean. Why else would I be standing outside this window. It’s goddamn cold outside, right? And it’s late. I mean. Really late, and I have to work in the morning, and I have to get up early, too, to help my wife get the kids to school, and so, I mean, I’m not the kind of guy who would stand outside in the cold and the late, knowing he has to wake up in just a couple of hours, deal with kids and lunches and breakfast, all just to look at a tree. It’s a thing to stand under, usually, a thing to stand under in a way that I can look up at your window and if you were to get the feeling that I’m here looking up at you in your window, were to get this feeling so strongly that you felt the need to look out your window and down onto the street, you wouldn’t be able to see me, because I’m under this tree. I wish it were a bigger tree, of course. It’s a bit skimpy as far as trees offering cover go, but it’s the tree that’s outside your window, and I can’t blame it for that.

What I’m trying to say, I guess, is that I stand here under this tree and don’t even think about the tree. But tonight.

Because, I don’t think of it because I’m thinking of a lot of other things, right? You understand that?

But tonight, I looked up at the tree. I don’t know why. You weren’t there at the window, I guess. I got bored, maybe, staring at the empty window waiting for you to cross by it again. So I looked around. It happens some times. I’ll look at the other buildings on your street. Or I’ll watch the people waiting at the bus stop, except, this late at night, there aren’t usually that many people. Sometimes, the bus will come by and people will get off, but not very often.

Anyway.

There’s. What I’m saying is there’s not a lot to look at when you’re not crossing by your window, and so tonight, I looked up at that tree. And that tree, it was glowing. It was a red, glowing tree, and I’m sure it’s like this every night, you know. I’m sure there’s a light hitting it a weird way, and that it’s always the same light, but tonight, tonight I saw it, but really SAW it, and I just thought it was eery and beautiful and bathed in this light, I don’t know, I guess it was an orange light but the weird green color of the leaves turned that light into a haunting kind of red, but something deeper than red. Plum, I guess. I would call it plum. And this red made the leaves look almost blue, like maybe the tree was under water or we were all under water, and what I wanted to say, I guess, what I’m trying to say about this tree, this god damn tree and the light that hit it, is that it was beautiful and I wished I could tell you to come to your window right then and look down at this tree and see it, too.

Story by Manuel Gonzales

Photo by Emily Raw

The Power of the Stars!

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 20:50:00 -0400

Maybe we took things too far.

Too far? How too far?

With the powers and the sacrifice and the weight of the world and the like. Too far, all of it.

Maybe we should stop second-guessing ourselves. Maybe we should think about the fate of our world. Have we thought enough about that?

We have. We have thought a considerable amount about that, about that and more.

More? Is there more for us to think about?

Maybe we should have thought about how it would feel for the subject. Maybe we should have considered the subject’s pain.

Maybe we should stop projecting feelings of our own loss onto the subject.

Maybe we could be more sensitive not only of the subject’s loss but of our own loss, too. Maybe we should remember that we were the cause of the subject’s loss and that, furthermore, we cry ourselves to sleep every night in remembrance of our own.

We needed a warrior. Or don’t we remember? We needed a warrior and that’s what we’ve now got. A warrior.

A sad warrior.

A warrior nonetheless. A warrior for our world. Our own warrior.

It was not our right. We have made her sacrifice all for a thing she does not understand.

We have granted her the mystic power of the universe! She is transformed! She is the power of the stars transmuted into the form of her.

We don’t think she likes it very much. The power of the stars. The transmutation into the form.

We think she looks rather intimidating and powerful in her mask and with her power.

We should change her back. We should make everything right.

If we could change her back, if we could make everything right, we wouldn’t have made her this way in the first place.

No. No. We suppose we’re right. We wouldn’t have.

So. What should we do now?

We suppose we should tell her.

About the space ship? The battles to come? Her life soon to be forfeit?

Yes. All of that. We should tell her all of that.

Let’s wait. Let’s wait a moment. Let’s give her one more moment. We can give her that.

Story by Manuel Gonzales

Photo by Emily Raw

Laments

Sat, 20 Oct 2012 15:35:00 -0400

Dear Sally, Dear Selma, Dear Molly, Dear Andrea, Dear Mandi,

I miss you, I haven’t forgotten you, I still think of you, every night, I think of you often, Your eyes, Your lips, I find myself staring into space and when I come to, I lose myself in thoughts of you, I drove fifteen miles the wrong way, I left my wallet on the hood, Your smell fills this room, this whole, I found your earring in my closet, I bought a necklace because it made me think of you, There’s a cabin, a friend of mine owns it, I have something for you, a surprise, Remember the winery, Remember the paddle boats, Remember our day at the Met, Remember El Oriental, There’s something there, There’s a thing we have, We have something strong, The two of us have a connection, Our connection is special, You feel, I know you feel it, too, You must feel, I only wish we’d had more time, I only wish you’d called me back, I only wish you’d see me again, I wish I could touch you one last time, Your husband’s no good for you, Francis is a girl’s name, Your boyfriend doesn’t see you how I, It might not be an easy life, but it, Things might be difficult at first, but love, True love will make our hardships small, Love, there, I said it, I will say it again, You don’t have to love me, At first you might not love me, I know to love me the way I love you is a lot to ask, I don’t expect a miracle, I’m not hoping for, All I ask is another chance, If you give me one more chance, I can’t promise, I promise, I promise, I promise, It’s not too much to ask, I’ve seen you, I’ve looked for you, I’ve called you, But you didn’t notice me, But you must have changed your number, I’ve left you messages, You won’t return my messages, But I want you to know, You need to know, If there’s something you must know, There’s nothing I won’t do, There’s nothing at all I won’t do, Nothing in this world will keep me, I will find a way to bring you back, You will come back,

And I’ll be here.

I’ll be right here waiting for you.

Story by Manuel Gonzales

Photo by Emily Raw

Words, words, words

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 13:31:00 -0400

Sometimes we like to try to make the girl who is allergic to water cry, not because we’re cruel, necessarily, although I’m sure we’re that, too, but because we’re curious and full of disbelief, even the most allergic of us, even the girl allergic to her own goddamn hair, full of disbelief that anyone could be so allergic to something so essential and still be alive. She’s full of stony-faced resolve, though, and no matter what we try, and we have tried many, many things, she refuses to cry. Somebody suggested one night that maybe she’d had her tearducts removed against just this sort of thing, but that seems extreme, even for the likes of her.

I’m no dummy so when I first came here, I lied. I told the others I had a food allergy, nuts, strawberries, shellfish, but that’s not me at all. I’m allergic to words. It’s strange, I know, which is why I don’t ever tell anyone about it. Not even the girl who’s allergic to water, which is pretty goddamn strange if you ask me. So nobody knows. I’m on some pretty strong medication, is the thing. And nobody knows about that, either.

Sometimes someone will throw me a strawberry and I’ll forget for a moment and I’ll catch it and there will be a split second when I won’t do anything and then I’ll remember and then I’ll squeal and then throw the thing—which wasn’t a strawberry at all, in fact, or not a real one—and the rest of them will laugh. And someone will say, “Jesus, it’s just felt. Don’t be a spaz.” It’s not always just felt, though. A couple of times, just as I’m about to take a bite of my sandwich someone will knock it out of my hands right and then they’ll be scared, not a lot scared, but a little scared because they’ll have switched my ham and cheese with peanut butter, and they’ll say, “Jesus Christ, don’t you check your food before you eat it?” And I’ll stop myself before asking, “Why would I?” Because I’ll remember I’m supposed to be like them and they always check their food. Sometimes after and before each new bite, they’ll check their food.

Some days, having grown tired of trying to make the girl who is allergic to water cry, we try instead to make her sweat. We turn up the heat in the rooms. We turn on the stove burners and the oven. We grab a spray bottle of water and chase her around and around and around until we’re winded and undone, bent over panting and sweating ourselves, but even in this simple task she refuses to sweat or cry or give us any satisfaction at all.

”She has to sweat,” someone will say.

”Why don’t we just fucking spray her with the water,” someone else will ask.

”It’s not the same thing,” we’ll say, almost in unison, and it’s not. The rest of them, the things they’re allergic to come from the outside world. Nuts, dust, mites, grass, tree pollen, dog or cat dander, cockroaches, berries, stone fruits, eggs. The girl who is allergic to water, what she’s allergic to makes up, like, three-quarters of her body. Three-quarters of the inside of her are dangerous to one hundred percent of the outside of her. Spraying her with water just isn’t the same thing and no one understands this better than the girl who is allergic to her own goddamn hair, but even she doesn’t really get it, because when her allergies kick in, her body doesn’t attack her—doesn’t close her throat or break her skin out in a rash or swell up her eyes and lips—but attacks the hair itself, so the worst that happens to her is that she grows some hair, her body kills it, she goes bald, and then the whole thing starts over again, and so really the only person who really understands the girl who is allergic to water is me, and sometimes I’m tempted to tell her this. As I chase her through the house with the spray bottle, I will whisper, I’m just like you, just before shooting a mist of water at the back of her head to make her run faster, but really, that’s not true, either.

Thinking about water doesn’t make her skin crawl, doesn’t make her lips go numb, her eyes go all blurry. Thinking about water doesn’t make her nose start to bleed.

Before I came here and before they figured out my meds, I had trained myself to think about chains of random letters—aofiwfjdieongk and so on—all day nothing but these letters instead of actual words. If I saw a chair, I didn’t think ‘chair’. I thought, ‘wifjei’. I didn’t think door, or cat, or blue sky, or window, or glass of milk. I crossed my eyes just enough so that when I saw a stop sign or an exit sign or a billboard, I only saw colors and lines, but no words. But now I don’t have to do any of that. The medicines do it all for me, or they did. Last night, I stopped taking them, and since this morning, words are becoming clearer to me again. I can feel my ears turning red, can feel my chest tightening up. I’m waiting for one of the others to ask me, Did you eat something, like a strawberry or something? But I don’t care. I’m taking them all in, as many of them as I can. I’m eating them up, because I don’t fucking care. Right now, all I care about is this: before my fingers swell up into sausages, I will take the bucket under the kitchen sink and fill it to the top with water and find the girl allergic to her own tears and pour that shit right over her head.

Story by Manuel Gonzales

Photo by Emily Raw

Trifle

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 12:06:08 -0400

It was the last meal she would make, for him or anyone else. This Susan decided as she watched her husband’s girlfriend, Tracy, spoon mashed potatoes onto her plate. Susan had always been praised for her potatoes—What fluffiness! What taste!—but on Tracy’s plate, they looked lumpy and gray. She noticed the grease stain in the shape of Florida a breaded chicken breast left behind on a paper towel. She noticed the wateriness in her collard greens. Dinner was a wreck and she didn’t want to be a wreck, not anymore. Maybe her whole life would have turned out differently if she’d never started cooking in the first place.

She and her husband had been separated for six months. When he called about coming over for dinner, Susan had thought it was to talk about their prospects, but it turned out that he had just wanted Tracy to meet the kids.

“Go play in the park,” Susan had shouted at the kids when she saw Tracy standing on her doorstep, smiling a loopy smile. She wore a denim skirt and a tube top. She was a bottle blond, her teeth a little crooked. Susan had used a tone of voice that made the kids—two boys, twins, but not the kind that looked alike—run out of the house, the back door clattering behind them.

“So where are the kids?” Tracy asked now, a dark clump of collards dripping on her fork.

“There are no kids,” Susan said. “You came all the way out here for nothing.”

“Do you have anything to put in this iced tea?” her husband asked.

“I stopped keeping liquor in the house,” Susan said.

“That’s a drag,” said Tracy.

Susan glanced down at her hand and was embarrassed to realize that she was wearing her wedding ring. She still wore the simple gold band around the house, when she thought there was no one who would notice.

“Well, don’t you listen to her. There absolutely are kids,” her husband said. “Two boys. They came out of her at the same time.”

“Don’t be gross,” Tracy said, wrinkling her freckled nose.

“They just turned ten last week,” her husband added, even though he hadn’t bothered to come to the party.

“We had a magician at the birthday party,” Susan said. “We had pony rides and acrobats who juggled and a sheet cake the size of this table.”

“There she goes, telling tall tales again,” her husband said, knowing she couldn’t afford any of the things she had described, not even the sheet cake.

Susan’s plate was still empty. She sipped her ice tea and imagined her boys climbing trees in the park. Climb higher, climb higher, she always shouted when she was out there with them, because she wished someone had told her to keep reaching, to not rest on life’s lower branches. She never noticed that sometimes they had already gone as high as they could and her words made them feel afraid.

“When are the kids coming back?” her husband asked. “Tracy took a night off work to come over tonight.”

“I work at a bowling alley,” Tracy said. “But one day I’d like to get a college education.”

“One thing at a time,” her husband said.

Susan went into the kitchen and brought out dessert, a trifle she had made using three different types of Jell-O pudding, chilled in a big glass bowl. It was her husband’s favorite. She had made it on anniversaries and birthdays and when he was sick and when they were happy.

“Does this remind you of anything?” she said, serving him a delicate bowlful. Tracy reached for the serving spoon, but Susan smacked her hand away like she was a child, which, to Susan, she was. Tracy couldn’t understand what it meant to be married, to believe in another person so completely. Susan wanted her husband to look carefully at the trifle, at the layers, and remember the things he had always loved about her. For a moment, she thought she heard the voices of her children outside, the sound of them coming home.

“It reminds me of hard times,” he said, picking up a spoon.

Story by Laura van den Berg

Photo by Traci Matlock

Loved Ones Lost

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 16:51:00 -0400

Her husband told people that his parents both died when he was young. This was a lie. His parents were not yet dead, and neither was his brother, who he sometimes claimed died in the same accident that killed his parents.

She thought this an odd quirk, but he was a good husband in so many other ways—handsome, intelligent,kind, good at fixing things and baking cakes—that she didn’t think very much of it.

She had always thought he’d had a peculiar sense of humor, which she often told herself was what had first attracted her to him.

That was, until he began telling people his wife had died, which he did once in front of her.

They were going to have a drink at a hotel bar. Her husband had a fondness for hotel bars. She had just said something that had made her husband laugh, laugh loudly, which made her laugh, and they were laughing together as he ordered them both drinks at the bar.

A tired, middle-aged man wearing a business suit and sitting two or three stools down turned at the sound of their laughter and smiled at them.

“Vacation?” he asked.

“Yup,” her husband said, which was not an unusual sort of lie for him to tell. He liked to humor people’s notions about him. Once, while at a parent-association picnic for the school near their house, one of the fathers came up to her husband and asked, “What about you, what kind of work do you do?” And then, before her husband could respond, the man said, “No, wait, let me guess. Technology? Computers? That sort of thing?” And her husband, who knew next to nothing about technology or computers, said, “You got me. You got me pegged.” Then he spent five minutes, ten minutes talking about computers in a way that even she knew sounded horribly made-up and not at all how people who knew anything about computers talked about computers. Her husband wouldn’t stop talking, though, and the man who had come up to them tried to inch himself away, smiled uneasily at first and then became stony-faced and then, when her husband stopped talking finally and gave a half-smile, the man shook her husband’s hand and said to both of them, “Well, nice to meet you, anyway,” and then walked away.

She had mostly hoped, going to the picnic, that no one would ask them which screaming, antic child was theirs, since they didn’t have any children and were only at the picnic for, well, she didn’t know why they’d gone, actually.

“Where are you both from?” the man at the bar asked.

Her husband smiled and said, “Well, I’m from Charlotte, and she.” He paused and looked at her and for a moment it wasn’t like he was playing a game anymore, in which he was making up a story about themselves, but like she was not who she was but was someone else, a woman her husband had just met, here at this bar. “You’re from Kansas City, right?”

And the man at the bar said, “My bad, I thought you were together, here for an anniversary or something.”

Which was when her husband’s face fell, sharply and so convincingly that she worried something horrible had really happened to him. “No,” he said. “My wife.” He took a deep breath. “Sorry. Unfortunately, my wife died about four months ago.”

The man at the bar looked stricken and then looked at her, his eyebrows raised, and then her husband turned to her, too, and said, “I’m sorry. I. I should have told you, but we were having, I was having such a nice time, and it had been so long.”

“I’m sorry,” the man at the bar said. “I didn’t mean,” but her husband interrupted him with a smile full of warmth and wholly foreign to her and said, “No, friend. It’s fine. Everything’s fine.” Then he looked at her again and took one of her hands and said, “I’ve had a really nice time talking with you, and you made me laugh in a way I haven’t laughed since she first became ill, and I can’t thank you enough for that, really, I can’t.” He smiled and, despite herself, she smiled back. “But I think I should go back to my room for now. Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow, before you leave?” Then he lifted her hand and kissed the top of it and then he nodded at the man at the bar and then he walked out of the bar and to the elevators and he was gone.

She and the man at the bar watched him leave, and maybe she was waiting for him to stop and turn around and say, Just kidding, guys, except of course he couldn’t rightly do that, could he? And so she said, “Excuse me, but, but I have to,” and the man at the bar nodded and gave her a consolatory smile, and she followed after her husband.

She wasn’t mad, yet, or frightened, or hurt. Well. She was hurt, but mostly she was confused and not a little concerned, and she didn’t know how she should react, what she might say to him when she found him standing just out of sight, which was what she expected to happen, but she turned the corner, and he wasn’t there, and she went to the parking garage, and he wasn’t there, either, and she called his cell phone, but he didn’t answer, and she went to the front desk of the hotel but didn’t know exactly what to ask them, and when she mentioned her husband’s name, they’d never heard it before, and when she finally got home (a cab, since she couldn’t find the car, didn’t have the keys), that’s where she found him, asleep, not on his side of their bed, but over all of it, as if it were his alone.

Story by Manuel Gonzales

Drawing by Emily Raw

Manatee

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 21:26:00 -0400

We were by the sharks. No. Wait. Not the sharks. I mean. Yes. We were by the sharks, at one point, early in the morning, it’s what he wanted us to go see first, the sharks, but this happened after the sharks. We were by the manatees, I think, or, no. I get them confused with, what’s the one that looks like a manatee? It’s been a long day. I mean. You know, right. You know this. It’s been a really long day. I don’t know if the aquarium even has manatees. Porpoise. We were by the porpoise tank. I don’t know, is it even called a tank? And then she took Sammy to the bathroom because it was her turn because, you know, we trade off. That’s what we do. That’s, like, whenever we talk about how glad we are we only had the one, we only had Sammy, we talk about how it’s nice because we can trade off. You know. If we had two, we’d each have to, well, we wouldn’t be able to. Trade. So I took him to the bathroom right after we ate lunch and then she took him to the bathroom when we were by the manatees. I mean. Whatever. The porpoise. And? I waited. And? And nothing. I waited and they didn’t come back. For about twenty minutes, at first, because, you know. I didn’t want to leave. I mean. I wanted to leave. I had this idea that I should go looking for them, you know, and it’s like you’re driving and you think maybe you missed your exit, and you want to turn around, but you’re not sure. You’re not sure that you missed your exit, and you think, maybe this next exit will be it, or over this hill will be it. So you don’t turn around because what if you turn around right before you hit your exit? And so what if I went looking for my wife and kid and the next second they show back up and I’m not there? That’s going on for twenty minutes and after that, I lose track of time. I mean, I stop looking at my phone. All I’m doing is looking at my phone, right, looking at the time on my phone, and it makes me a little crazy, so I stop. I make myself stop. I, what is it, I exist in the moment because I think that if I stop obsessing over where they are, they’ll just, well, be there. I watch the porpoise and the people watching the porpoise and I lose myself in it, in the porpoise, in watching it slip by the glass. It’s not the prettiest thing. I know people are supposed to think these things are sleek and graceful, but the head, the snubbed head, it looks like its brain is too big for its head, like it’s a mad scientist, maybe, and not at all attractive, and so I can’t stop watching this thing circle around the tank, showing everyone its pale, soft, white belly, and there’s this kid, maybe two or three years older than Sammy, but not as nice as Sammy. I mean. He’s pounding his fist against the glass, which everyone knows you’re not supposed to do, and he’s just pounding and pounding and pounding, until finally, the porpoise swims right up, just, out of nowhere, swims right up to the glass, its mouth wide open, like it was going to eat the kid’s head, like, if the glass weren’t there, it would have chomped right down on that kid’s face, and it scares the shit out of that kid, makes him squeal and flinch, and I don’t know what it was about that moment, about what happened then, but something about it made me think that I wasn’t ever going to see them again, that I wouldn’t see my wife or Sammy ever again, and I looked at my phone, I looked to see just how long it had been, thinking that maybe I’d sat there watching and waiting for another ten minutes or fifteen minutes, but no. It’d been two hours. They’d been gone for over two hours, and that was five hours ago, and I’ve been all over, and then I came here, came here to you.

Story by Manuel Gonzales

Photo by Emily Raw

That Moment He Forgot

Fri, 14 Sep 2012 10:20:00 -0400

At one point in his life, he forgot what it was he liked, but, you know, really liked, and what it was he liked but liked only because he wouldn’t have normally liked it, but doesn’t know when that moment happened, when it passed, and now, now he is stuck, and he’s not sure, he’s not at all sure, what is him and what isn’t him, what isn’t him at all.

Story by Manuel Gonzales

Photo by Emily Raw

The Dead Have Hair, Too

Fri, 07 Sep 2012 11:47:49 -0400

She expected the hair to be coarse. She’s not sure why, but that’s what she expected, coarse and brittle and strange to touch. It wasn’t.

There was a smell.

She expected there to be a smell and there was. It reminded her of seventh grade biology, the fetal pig project. She didn’t do so well with the fetal pig. Or biology class. Or school, to be honest with you.

The smell bothered her less than she thought it would. All the colors and perms had burned away the parts of her sensitive to those kinds of smells and this one wasn’t far off. The smell bothered her less and the hair wasn’t coarse, so there was that.

And it wasn’t anyone she knew.

There was that, too.

A woman, hysterical and angry and red-faced, had stormed into the salon, a worried faced man trailing meekly behind her. He was a medium-sized man with a cowboy hat held in his hands in front of him at his waist. The woman wasn’t crying, but maybe she had a face that looked as if it had been crying for long enough that there wasn’t any crying left. Then she started hollering, her voice hoarse from all the hollering she’d already done, and so maybe she didn’t look that way because of all the crying but looked that way because that was the way you looked after a lot of hollering.

It was hard to understand her, her voice was so brittle. She stormed from one station to the next, yelling and hollering, but it was the man—her brother, it turned out—who said, We need someone who can fix hair who could come with us, maybe, across the street. Then he cleared his throat and said, Across the street over to the Wimberly House.

She had just finished a blowout and it would be another hour before her next appointment showed up—a color—and all the other girls were in the middle of an appointment or waiting for an appointment to show up any minute now or pretending to be waiting. She didn’t want to, necessarily, but she felt bad for the woman who wasn’t hollering anymore but was huffing now, huffing into her chest, and she didn’t want to see what might happen next if no one offered to help.

She gathered her things, maybe a little slowly, hoping not that someone else would speak up and do this instead of her but that someone might tell her what to do, what she might have to do differently, but no one did.

There was no give. Or maybe give isn’t what there wasn’t any of. The head moved when she pulled on the hair because there wasn’t anyone inside it to hold it in place or tip it down or move it to the side, and so she had to do those things instead. She didn’t like that. That was the thing she didn’t like the most. It was like the heads she’d worked with in school, which she had never liked, either. What she had always liked most about cutting hair was the people inside the heads, who moved or didn’t move, who closed their eyes or talked about every little thing that came to mind, who she could gently push into place, who were warm and who flinched at her scissors or the clippers if they veered too close to an ear, whose soft breaths she could hear as she snipped and clipped and layered and combed.

The woman wanted the impossible—a high, round permanent—and the funeral home had failed to give it to her, and really, all she could do was give the woman and her meek-looking brother something in between. When she was done, the woman said, It’ll have to do, and then walked back out, and the brother smiled and placed his medium-sized hand on her shoulder and said, Thanks. She looks beautiful.

Then she went back to the salon to wait for her color. The brother had slipped her a hundred dollar bill, which she almost didn’t take, but then she did, and when she came back to the salon, they asked her if they’d tipped her and how much and she told them and Sheila said, Shit, my blow dry stood me up. I should’ve done it, instead.

Her boyfriend thought the whole thing was funny and weird and just spoke to the idea he talked about a lot and that he seemed to think made him special or especially smart, which was that the thing wrong with this country was that everyone was obsessed about how they looked. She’s dead, he said. Who the hell cares what she looks like?

Then she told him about the hundred dollars and suggested they go out for dinner and over dinner, he said, Hell, maybe you should do this all the time. She was going to tell him that there were people who already did this full time and tell him about all the things she didn’t like about it, but she didn’t. Then he said, You could have a whole salon, call it, The Dead Have Hair, Too, but, you know, with a big pair of scissors as the 2.

That doesn’t even make sense, she said.

Or, he said, ignoring her, or maybe, Hair Today for the Gone Tomorrow.

And then she told him to shut up, and for whatever reason, he did.

Story by Manuel Gonzales

Photo by Emily Raw

Tandem

Fri, 31 Aug 2012 09:58:00 -0400

Choose carefully, she whispered.

What a curious thing to say. Nevertheless, Matthias stilled the trajectory of his arm. Reflexive obedience. His other hand (off-screen) damply gripped the homemade knife.

Had they been inside, the Mexican votive candle on the nightstand would have made a cave drawing of the hand he’d extended. The Big Bad Wolf, mouth slightly ajar, scarier as shadow. Tear you to fucking pieces, he’d have warned the boy, secretly delighting the way his bedtime stories sent the kid burrowing deeper into his downy nest.

But the kid had been years ago. And they’d shifted the party outside, to the garden. Goddamnit, it was a beautiful day! The communion with nature had been Matthias’ suggestion. Truth be told, he was improvising.

What do you mean? Matthias asked. The sleeve of his robe, in the harsh afternoon sun, throbbed whitely.

Have you ever seen one of those secret agent pictures where the secret agent has to defuse the bomb? she said. Like that. Don’t cut the wrong color wire, is all I am saying.

Matthias stared at the plant. How did you like that? He’d been just about ready to grab one of the leafiest green leaves, probably a trace instinct left over from some herbavoric genetic ancestor. Now he second-guessed.

You trying to get into my head, he said.

He could feel her shrugging somewhere behind him. The wooden grip of the stiletto, mummy-wrapped with a gauzy stretch tape, had a layered elasticity that Matthias found pleasant to squeeze.

Ingrate, he said. Try to pick you something nice. Still, neither hand moved.

Shoot the messenger, she said.

What, you gonna run, now? After all we been true?

Too late for funny accents.

Fine. I propose one final game. Then we can sleep.

One possibility (substance abuse), implied by the talk of daytime sleep. Had they been up for days? But that robe pointed to another scenario (cult religion, paranoia, isolation curdling into madness); unless it’s a simple bathrobe, in which case we circle back to the drugs. Or he’s an escaped mental patient, and the child and the father have already been butchered. (He’s only wearing the father’s bathrobe while his street clothes receive a thorough laundering in the basement.)

She might be a prisoner. Or she might be in on it.

None of this speculation matters, in the end, because we’ve skipped right to the final scene. What came before is impossible to know, and so irrelevant to our purposes.

Matthias hesitated, his fingers poised before one of the slender beanlike stalks. She’d definitely gotten into his head.

What kind of bomb? he said.

Big one, she told him. End of the world. Our world, at least.

A sweat raced along the inside track of his robed arm, cooling and tickling in tandem. In the sunlight, his own skin had assumed a grotesque, overripe fecundity even greater than the garden’s.

I’m doing it.

Do it, she said.

Are you ready?

Choose wisely.

Stop saying that.

I’m just trying to help.

You’re trying to get in my head.

Do it.

Okay. I’m gonna do it.

It’s crazy how every decision.

Stop.

One wrong move. The slightest.

No more.

Something so insignificant.

Stop.

Forever. No turning back. We just accept this notion of time, irreversibility, water tumbling down the hill, never back up. We accept this horror.

Not all of us.

That’s what I’m saying. Grown-ups do. You have to choose, sometime. So choose your fucking petal.

He might be the victim. Hadn’t considered that one, had you?

Choose wisely.

He took a breath and, with a final and firm decisiveness, pinched the tiniest white petal between his thumb and index finger, snapping it free of the stalk.

The explosion was instantaneous. They were both consumed by a terrible fire.

Story by Mark Binelli

Photo by Lukasz Wierzbowski

All We Are Left

Fri, 24 Aug 2012 15:21:00 -0400

Part III: The Boy

There’s one like him in every story, this boy.

Tortured. Deeply, madly, insanely in love. The unrequited kind of love, of course.

By all means, an ALL CAPS kind of love.

A poet’s soul. A martyr’s heart. Eyes of a sociopath, but tender, too, sometimes.

Maybe he’s a butcher. Maybe he simply likes to wear a blood-red apron over his wastrel form. For this story, for his part in this story, it matters little. For this story, for his part in this story, who he is or where he is from or anything about him less than the most immediate thing about him, which is what brought him here, matters little.

Matters, maybe, not at all.

His part in this story arrives thusly: the door creaks open and then is shoved into the wall, the door knob chipping into the wood panelling, as he barrels his way inside.

Do not be mistaken. He is not here for the girl, or the ghost.

He cannot see or sense the ghost, for that matter.

Let’s say he is ill-equipped to see or sense the ghost, sense the palpable coldness of her coalescence as he pushes through her.

Or blind. Let’s say he is blind, has been blinded by love, by this unrequited love, by this ALL CAPS love, and that perhaps in other, more favorable to him circumstances, he might have understood just how difficult it has been for the ghost, willing itself into this physical if nimbic shape, might have sensed and felt kinship with this ghost, a kinship which would have manifested itself in fear and dread and unbidden thoughts of death and mortality, which is the kind of kinship one imagines ghosts profit from most, but love has blinded him and thus blinded, he scatters the ghost back into its non-elemental realm without once pausing.

Just as, thus blinded, he mistakes the girl muttering to herself at the dresser for another girl, the ALL CAPS kind of girl, and grabs her viciously, but tenderly, from behind, clamps his hand over her mouth, holds in his other hand a fist of her hair, whispers into her ear violent, loving, unyielding truths, or maybe he simply hisses. He cannot always remember when he speaks words and when he simply hisses.

He is unhurried. Now that he has her in his arms, so to speak, now that they are together again, in a manner, he no longer has to rush. His shoulders relax. He had been carrying so much tension in his shoulders. It feels good that they have relaxed. He uncups her mouth and lets loose her hair and holds her by her shoulders and turns her to face him, so they can talk like people should talk, face-to-face, not through a computer or a phone, not through text messages or Facebook status updates.

Maybe he should have hugged her, he will think. Maybe he should have held her tight and pinned her arms, he will think. Maybe if he had done that, she would not have grabbed the small but solid table lamp, would not have busted it sharply into his eye, would not have pushed past him and out of the hotel room.

But she does and she runs, leaving behind the leather satchel of money, which he does not see because he can’t see anything because now he is blinded not just by love, but by blood as well, by the blood pooling into his eye.

But let’s say that mostly he cannot see because he is still blinded by love, and when we are blinded by love, all we are left are our actions, the movements of our hands, the inexorable push forward of our limbs, the desire to grab and hold, and so, though some part of him knows, deep inside knows that she is not the girl he loves, and knows even more deeply that the girl he loves will never love him back, he flings himself across the room and through the door, chasing after her because, in the end, there’s nothing left for him to do.

Story by Manuel Gonzales

Photo by Emily Raw

All We Are Left

Sat, 18 Aug 2012 00:36:00 -0400

Part II: The Girl

The door creaked open but the girl didn’t turn. She could sense the something there but she knew that if she turned to face whatever something waited behind that creaking door that she would come to regret it and she already regretted so many things.

The money for one.

The money she stole, she should say. That should be clarified. Not just any money. Money she took.

Just over three hundred thousand dollars. She regretted that, or, rather: she should have taken more.

She regretted not having taken more.

Timothy. Him, or rather fucking him.

That. She regretted that, too.

Not that he wasn’t cute. Dumb, maybe, but easy to look at. And not a bad fuck. But he’d done it all—knocked on her door at two in the morning smelling of whisky and with a bottle to share hidden behind his back, and flowers, too, also hidden behind his back in his other hand, so that she didn’t know how he’d managed to knock in the first place, and for a moment imagined him knocking his wide forehead against the door, which seemed ridiculous and just like him, but flowers, in any case, which he whipped around in some kind of tired but still charming old-fashioned romance kind of way, held out to her a bunch of irises clearly stolen from her next door neighbor’s flower bed (clumps of dirt and roots still hanging from the bottoms of the stems), which made her laugh, even though she didn’t want to laugh, especially not the barking seal laugh she laid on him, but she hated the old lady who lived next door to her, and dearly loved that he’d uprooted her irises—just to get back at her sister, and she regretted that, putting herself in the middle of that.

Of course, she left right after, what with the leather satchel of money under the bed, so she wasn’t in the middle of all of that for very long. But still. Her sister could be a vindictive bitch.

Not to mention the years behind her, the regrets and false-starts and dead-ends and also-rans and wastes-of-time behind her.

And now this.

This out-of-the-way, middle-of-nowhere creep-fest of a hotel with its weird old-man at the front desk, and its faintly glowing, barely-lit neon VACANCY sign flashing, and its doors creaking spookily open. She wouldn’t have been surprised to see two twin girls wheeling down the hallways on their BigWheels, or to find peep holes in the walls and the old man jacking himself off to the sight of her standing at the dresser deliberately not turning around to see what had made the door creak open.

It wasn’t as if she didn’t know what was in store for her.

It wasn’t as if she didn’t read books or watch movies.

It wasn’t as if she didn’t know her role in all of this. Just as she knew that everything bad that was going to happen to her moving forward she could trace back to this one bad decision, this one poorly chosen hotel, its ghosts, its serial killers, its bulldozed Indian burial grounds.

But she wasn’t going to give in. She wasn’t going to give it—whatever it was—the satisfaction. She was going to stand at this dresser and think about her money and think about how strange hotel-room dressers are and how strange the people are who unpack their clothes and place them neatly folded inside these drawers in the first place and she was going to think about how tired she was and how long of a drive she still had in front of her, but no matter what, she wasn’t going to turn around.

No matter who or what came through that door that just creaked open, she wasn’t going to turn around.

No matter what.

Story by Manuel Gonzales

Photo by Emily Raw

All We Are Left

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 13:14:00 -0400

Part I: The Ghost

The door swung open, or maybe swung isn’t what it did, maybe what it did is closer to creaked. The door creaked open. Swung implies, doesn’t it, a fluidity, a forcefulness, confidence. People who are sure of themselves swing doors open, don’t they. People who are sure of themselves or who are running away from something that is sure of itself. Confidence, in any case, plays a big role, don’t you think, in whether a door swings or creaks.

And in this moment, there seems to be little confidence at play.

The ghost, for one, the ghost isn’t confident in itself, and neither is the woman, who is standing at the dresser, her back turned to the door until it creaked open, neither is she confident in herself.

What makes for the ghost’s lack in confidence we cannot know because we are living and it is not. We can personify, perhaps. We can say that the ghost is having a crisis of faith, maybe. We can go on to say that perhaps the ghost is reconsidering the act of being a ghost, is reconsidering the rigmarole of making itself visible and known and a nearly physical presence. We can assume that this is not easy, is not an easy thing to do, to coalesce the spirit vapors of a dead soul into the realm of visible spectra or physical action. Maybe that is a safe assumption to make, but it is still only that: an assumption.

All we are left are assumptions.

But let’s assume the ghost would like to do something else, and maybe that something else is nothing at all. Let’s consider for a moment that the ghost would rather leave itself in a vaporous and dissipated form whenever a strange, fresh, living creature enters this old, long-abandoned house on the outskirts of town. Perhaps existing as an invisible vapor seeping out to every corner of the house is to a ghost what sitting on the couch watching Everybody Loves Raymond is to you and me, and that maybe making itself visible, manipulating the physical properties of a door knob, of the hard, splintered wood of the door, are the equivalent of cleaning all those dishes, picking up the pizza boxes, the dirty boxer shorts strewn across the bedroom, making the bed, preparing the house for visitors.

Or maybe it’s worse than that, even.

Maybe there is exertion, maybe true exertion is required to make whole and visible and almost solid a thing that would rather not be. Maybe it is akin to having the smallest, most individual particles of yourself, the vaporized bits and ephemera of your diffuse existence, squeezed together, piped through a piping bag into the former shape of your living self.

Or maybe it is not like that at all.

But for what, you might say. But to what ends, you might wonder, and perhaps the ghost wonders the same.

Perhaps the ghost asks itself, What sort of joy is derived from these actions, from this long-standing and difficult work?

Asks itself, What kind of satisfaction is obtained?

Perhaps, some long time ago, there was satisfaction to be achieved in the haunting. The heat of fear, perhaps, the taste of sadness, the sense of regret, the living, breathing, emotionality of a victim of a haunt, maybe these filled the ghost up at one time, maybe these were once satisfying in their way, did once create a heat and a glow inside the ghost, a lingering, tactile memory of those things no longer on offer for the ghost, but now? Now, not so much.

Hence, or so we might assume, the hesitation, the creak rather than the swing. We can picture the ghost, its corporeal form, pale and gray, withered, hinged together through an unwanted mystical force and a will that no longer seems particularly willful, pausing as it reaches for the door, rethinking its current path, and maybe the door is an accident, the ghost having decided, No, no more, not this, not for an eternity, this, but brushing against the door by accident, creaking it open, when normally a swing would have been preferred.

Or maybe none of this, maybe none of this at all. Maybe the door creaked because there is something innately creepier about creaking than swinging.

Story by Manuel Gonzales

Photo by Emily Raw