The Spokes Critter Killings

Detective Dirk Wagmore dumped his coffee cup in the trash before donning nitrile gloves. The forensics team had been on site long enough to wiggle into their bunny suits, cover the body, and cordon off the area with police tape.

“Victim’s some kind of cartoon rodent,” his partner said. “Fisherman found him floating in the river and called it in.” Detective Liz Torres wore a jacket that covered the 1911 pistol, chambered in 10mm, she wore on her hip but nothing could cover her disdain for Mexican food. It didn’t take Dr. Freud to realize that the heiress to the Guillermo’s Taco empire had daddy issues. The police academy was her way out of a life of carne asada and refried beans. Once she got her badge, she never looked back. “Victim has no ID but from the animation style, I’d guess he was in his mid-forties.”

“What do we have, Joyce?” Wagmore asked the coroner kneeling by the body.

“Choked to death on a 42-ounce cannister of oatmeal.” Dr. O’Brian pulled back the sheet to expose the rodent’s face and neck. “Bruising indicates it was forced down his throat. Lack of swelling means he can’t have been in the water too long. Open sores and bleeding gums indicate the victim had diabetes. Finding his identity’s going to be tough. Cartoons don’t have fingerprints. I’m not sure about DNA and dental records. We might try to run the ink through a gas chromatograph.”

“You must not have watched Saturday morning cartoons in the 80s,” Wagmore said. “That’s Lenny the Cornflake Chipmunk. He was always running scams to get breakfasts that rodents weren’t supposed to have. Looks like we’ve got ourselves…”

“Don’t say it, Wagmore.” Torres put her fingers in her ears.

“…a cereal killer.”

***

The demon Mephistopheles appeared in the scholar’s study.

“What is your wish?” 

“That you will provide me with Bruckner’s Cornflakes as long as I live.” The disguised Lenny the Chipmunk closed a leather-bound book of spells.

“I am a servant of great Lucifer and may do nothing without his command.”

“And what would convince Lucifer to command thee?”

“Your immortal soul.”

“I would be damned a thousand times for just one bowl of Bruckner’s Cornflakes,” Lenny replied.

“Then sign this contract in blood.” Mephistopheles handed Lenny a parchment and a blade to nick his finger.

“Woo Hoo!” Lenny ran around the study and his robe fell off revealing a rodent body.

“Foolish Chipmunk. Cornflakes are for humans!” Mephistopheles disappeared in a puff of smoke.

“Bruckner’s Cornflakes – So tasty you’ll sell your soul for just one bite,” the announcer said.

 “That’s one of the tamer ones.” Captain Barkless turned off the VCR. “No doubt, Lenny made a lot of enemies with the Decency Council. Start by interviewing people who knew him.”

“Got it, Captain.” Wagmore and Torres left Barkless’s office.  

***

“Seen this chipmuck before?” Wagmore slapped a photo on the bar.

Of all the cereal cafes in all the world, Skim City had to be the worst. Even in mid-afternoon, teens with pimply skin, gaunt women with bitter frown lines, and overweight bikers whose denim vests revealed prison tattoos crowded the dimly lit room with their desperate craving for sugar, corn syrup, and carbohydrates. A TV over the dispensers showed an animated Wanda, the Woke Walrus, emphasizing the importance of inclusive language. The cereal tender picked up the photo.

“Naw, we don’t serve no rodents in here.” He was too skinny to be sampling the product.

“Look again.” Wagmore tapped the photo.

“Hey!” A biker sprang from his stool and grabbed Wagmore by the shoulder. “The man said he didn’t see him!”

Torres swung the biker around. After two quick slaps, she captured one of his hands in a wristlock and pointed her big pistol at his eye.

“Nice place you’ve got here.” Wagmore showed his badge. “Be a shame if the health department found some expired cereal containing red dye number two. We’re investigating a murder so look again.”

“All right. I seen him.” The cereal tender wiped spilled milk off the bar. “Understand we can’t keep rodents out of here if they wearing disguises like top hats, football jerseys, of they dressed like pirates. Always going on about how he used to be famous and hitting up my customers to buy him puffed rice. Felt sorry for the guy so I gave him a little oatmeal now and again.”

“When did you last see him?”

“About a week ago. Said he had some big score that would put him back on top.”

“Any idea what?”

“Said something about getting the old gang back together.”

The TV cut to a commercial with a man in a plaid shirt standing by a horse.

“Seems five-hundred-million dollars doesn’t buy as much as it used to. Like you, I’ve had to cut back by buying my daughter a Porsche instead of the Bugatti she wanted.” He placed a saddle on the horse and continued talking while tightening the straps. “Used to be, you could kill a hooker and pay the police chief to make the body disappear. Those days are gone thanks to the Washington elites and their big-government allies. I still believe America is the land of opportunity where anyone from a wealthy family can build a sweatshop or dig a strip-mine in a national park. That’s why I’m running for mayor. Even though I’m a billionaire, I need your checks for twenty-five, a hundred, or twenty-thousand dollars. I’m George Kintsugi and I approve this message.”

***

Disguised in a trench coat, Lenny entered the Soviet embassy. The scene cut to an interview room where a man with a large jaw sat behind a bust of Lenin.

“You wished to see the resident?”

“These are the specifications for an x-ray laser used in the Strategic Defense Initiative.” Lenny slid an envelope across the desk. “I can get more.”

“And what do you want in return?” The KGB agent opened the envelope and studied the papers.

“A lifetime supply of Bruckner’s Cornflakes.”

“We prefer an ongoing relationship. How about a month’s supply for every batch of documents you deliver?”

“Woo Hoo!” Lenny danced around the room and his trench coat fell off revealing his rodent body.”

“Foolish Chipmunk. Cornflakes are for humans!” The KGB agent pocketed the secrets.

“Bruckner’s Cornflakes – So tasty you’ll betray your country for just one bite.”

***

“Dean Shumway?” Wagmore showed his badge. “I’m Detective Wagmore and this is Detective Torres. Mind if we come in?”

“Sure.” Shumway ushered them into a living room, gestured to a leather sofa, and took a seat on a bearskin rug in the middle of the floor. He was wiry with blue eyes and a beard that was white with age.

“Do you own a gun, Mr. Shumway?” Torres pointed to the antelope and cape buffalo heads mounted on the walls.

“Bow hunting,” Shumway replied. “Just like our ancestors did for thousands of years.”

“When was the last time you saw Lenny, the Cornflake Chipmunk?” Wagmore asked.

“Saw it on the news. Real tragedy but it was bound to happen.”

“What do you mean?” Torres asked.

“If somebody didn’t kill him, the processed foods would have gotten him eventually. After I starred in all those cornflake commercials, I realized the human body wasn’t designed for that kind of diet. Tried to convince Lenny but he wouldn’t listen. Had a blow up three years ago. Haven’t spoken to him since.”

“Where were you on Tuesday night?” Wagmore asked.

“Giving a seminar at the Mukherjee Center.” Shumway pointed to a hardcover he’d authored, titled The Neanderthal Diet.

“Know anybody who would want to hurt Lenny?” Torres asked.

“You might check with our costar, Maggie,” Shumway said. “There were rumors of sexual harassment on set.”

As they were leaving, Wagmore noticed a Kintsugi for Mayor bumper sticker on Shumway’s Porsche.

***

The interview had to wait because Wagmore got a call about a dead body in the hills. The deceased was none other than Wanda, the Woke Walrus. Her maid found her unresponsive by the pool and called it in.

“Energy drinks, Adderall, and methamphetamine.” Dr. O’Brian pointed to the cans and bottles strewn by the body. 

“Could it be foul play?”

“My guess is an overdose or suicide. I’ll know more after the autopsy.”

“Seems like she couldn’t get woke enough,” Wagmore said.

***

Adolph Hitler shook his fist and ranted in front of a giant eagle and swastika while thousands of fanatical followers cheered. 

“Excuse me, Mr. Fuhrer,” Wanda, the Woke Walrus, raised her hand from the front row. “You forgot to tell us your pronouns.”

“He, him, his.” Hitler slapped his forehead. “Mein Gott! I’ve been wrong all this time.”

Black-and-white, newsreel footage played backwards. A building reassembled as a bomb rose and attached to a Stuka’s belly. German troops marched backwards retreating through the Arc de Triomphe. 

“Always remember.” Wanda wagged her finger. “Language has power.” 

***

“Two advertising mascots dead in two days! There has to be a connection, Captain!”

“Damn it, Wagmore! Homicide doesn’t have the budget for you to chase wild-goose chases. Dr. O’Brian said the walrus died of an overdose so drop it.”

“Yeah, just like the aardvark killer. The department never has the budget when it comes to saving toons’ lives.”

“That was thirty years ago.” Barkless fixed Wagmore with a stare he’d perfected over decades as a beat cop, a stare that could fill gangbangers’ intestines with icicles. “These deaths are isolated incidents. Now, get out of my office.”

“Come on, Dirk.” Torres put a hand on Wagmore’s shoulder. “We’ve got work to do.”

***

“My parents never liked him.” Maggie Haywood sipped her drink through a straw. Taking a break from shooting a toonbang, she’d covered her nudity with a blue, nylon robe while a herd of toon rhinos and their ox pecker fluffers waited for the next scene. “Lenny and I were both sixteen but dad said he was over a hundred in chipmunk years. Anyway, the studio offered a cash settlement for my parents to forget the whole thing.”

“When was the last time you saw him?” Torres asked.

“Twenty years ago. After the settlement, my parents moved us to Ohio. Said it was a more family-friendly atmosphere.” Air bubbled in the straw as Maggie finished her drink. “I followed his career, though. He was more than a mouthpiece for cornflakes. He wanted to play King Lear.”

“Know anybody who would hurt him?” Wagmore asked.

“My parents but they cashed in that big poker chip in the sky after a fifth-wheel sideswiped their minivan in Vegas.” Maggie nodded toward the director. “I got to go back to work. If I can help, let me know.”

“Thanks for your time,” Torres said.

***

His hair cut in a mohawk, Dean approached Lenny, who was disguised in a fedora and muscle shirt.

“I’m looking for some action,” Dean said.

“Officer!” Lenny held his wrists together as if in handcuffs. “I’m clean.” He showed that his arms had no tracks. “I’m just waiting for a friend.”

“I ain’t a cop,” Dean said.

“Then why are you asking me for action?”

“She sent me.” Dean pointed to Maggie who wore sunglasses and shorts.

“One box of Bruckner’s Cornflakes for fifteen minutes. Two boxes for twenty-five.”

“I don’t know,” Dean said.

“I promise you ain’t never had pussy like that.”

“All right.” Dean produced two boxes from beneath his olive-drab jacket.

“Woo Hoo!” Lenny danced around and his fedora fell off, revealing his rodent head.

“Foolish Chipmunk. Cornflakes are for humans!” Dean retrieved the boxes.

“Bruckner’s Cornflakes – So tasty you’ll pimp your sister.”

***

“Looks like a flightless bird took a swan dive off the thirteenth floor.” Dr. O’Brian pulled back the sheet for the detectives to see the body bleeding purple ink.

“Can’t say I feel sorry. That’s Oscar, the Obedient Ostrich.” Torres leaned forward for a better look. “When I was growing up, my parents told me and my sister to be more like Oscar. Funny thing. They never said that to the boys.”

“Detectives, I think you should see this.” A uniformed officer motioned Wagmore and Torres to a stairwell marked with an arrow and a sign that said, “This way.”

The detectives trudged up the stairs, followed the signs to exit onto the roof, and stopped by one that pointed over the edge saying, “Step here.” 

“That dodo was too dumb to live,” Wagmore said.

***

Oscar and an eel sat in a secure room.

“These documents prove our government has known the Vietnam war is unwinnable for decades.” Eelsberg pointed to a stack of papers marked Top Secret. “We need to inform the public.”

“Don’t do it.” Oscar grabbed Eelsberg by the shoulders. “Even though we have security clearances, President Nixon knows more about the situation than we do.” 

“You’re right. We must trust our superiors.” Eelsberg sat down.

The following day, Oscar showed the headline on the New York Times that said, “Hanoi Surrenders!”

“You were right all along.” Eelsberg shook Oscar’s wing. “Always obey the authorities. They know more than you do.”

***

“So, you were right, Wagmore,” Captain Barkless said. “What do you want? A citrus, caramel sundae?”

“With toasted almonds.”

“Damn it, Wagmore!” Captain Barkless left and returned thirty minutes later with Wagmore’s sundae. “There! So, some serial killer is bumping off the most annoying cartoon characters in Jupiter City. What are we going to do about it?”

“Shame we have to do anything at all.” Torres picked an almond off of Wagmore’s sundae. “Jupiter City would be a better place without those lowlifes.”

“Agreed!” Captain Barkless looked at the dessert and touched his expanding waistline. “The citizens don’t care but mayoral candidate George Kintsugi’s making noises. If he gets elected, it could affect our budget.”

“We could. Excuse me.” Wagmore swallowed. “Stake out potential victims.”

“Who are the most annoying cartoon characters in Jupiter City?” Captain Barkless stroked his chin.

“For my money, they would be Barry, the Union-Busting Bear, and Gilbert, the Gospel-Quoting Gopher.” Torres answered.

“Sounds like a plan,” Barkless said. “Wagmore, take the gopher. Torres, you’ve got the bear.”

***

Wagmore parked his Ford Crown Victoria in front of an A-framed church on Inspiration Way. He entered and found the cartoon gopher kneeling in front of a large cross behind the pulpit. Even in animation, Gilbert’s suit looked drab and unflattering. 

“Excuse me, Mr. Gopher. I’m Detective Dirk Wagmore. We’re concerned about your safety. Have you received any threats?”

“Do you believe in Jesus, Detective?” Gilbert adjusted his plastic-rimmed glasses.

“I don’t think about it much.”

“Whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

“Right.” Wagmore realized it was going to be a long day. “Let me check the locks on your windows.” 

***

Later that night, Wagmore’s cell phone rang.

“Dirk, I’m screwed,” Torres said. “I stepped out for fifteen minutes to get some chicken and waffles. When I came back, I saw Barry, the Union-Busting Bear, getting into a limo with George Kintsugi. I tailed them to the abandoned plutonium mine on Racine. I need backup but if I call it in, the captain will have my ass.”

“On my way.” Wagmore dashed to his car.

Even with lights flashing, it took Wagmore twenty minutes to drive across town. When he skidded to a halt in the parking lot, there was no trace of a limousine or Torres’ Dodge Charger. He rushed to the entrance and peered inside.

“Hello.”

The only response was the sound of his echo and smell of alpha particles. Wagmore called Torres but there was no signal. His police radio had no reception, either.  It must have been the radiation.

“Shit!” Wagmore slapped his head. “The gopher!”

He jumped in his car and raced back to the church.

***

“Drop your gun or the gopher gets it!” Torres held Gilbert from behind with her pistol to his head.

“We can talk about this, Liz.” Wagmore placed his pistol on the floor and raised his hands. 

“Sucker!” Torres fired two rounds into Wagmore’s chest. The hollow points expanded as they ripped through his lungs and he died choking on blood. 

Torres scooped up Wagmore’s pistol and executed Gilbert, the Gospel-Quoting Gopher, just like she’d killed Lenny, Wanda, and Oscar. She’d hated cute characters who propagandized little minds, too young for fact checking, ever since Marco, the Manteca Marmot, had crashed her quinceañera. Once the heat cooled down, she’d introduce Barry, the Union-Busting Bear, to an industrial shredder. After that, she’d knock off Frances, the Family Values Fox and those porcupines on the toilet paper ads. She wiped her fingerprints off Wagmore’s pistol, placed it in his dead hand, and prepared for the best acting of her life.

“This is Torres,” she sobbed into the police radio. “It was Wagmore. He killed all of them. I tried to save Gilbert but I was too late.”

The Golden Child

The name’s Waterloo Clyde. I’ve been working these hills for longer than anybody. I didn’t take up with too many women in all this time. Women found my countenance disagreeable. The hills have always been the warm bosom what grabs me and holds me through the long nights.

I had some lean times and some boom times, striking a nugget here or some flakes there. Whenever I had had the gold in my pocket, I drank and fucked it all away, until I had to go back into the hills for more.

I did call on the Widow Vern a few times to go for evening strolls. She and I would saunter past the gas lamps on the cobblestone plaza of The Town. She was fair in manner and presentation, and carried an ebullient air.

I asked her one evening, “Will you be my wife? There’s no use in both of us being alone.”

She replied, “Waterloo Clyde, I can look past the face, but you are too dirty and too poor to marry.”

I didn’t take too much offense to it. She was right. I was dirty from living in the dirt, and I was poor from not having enough money.

This happened out on her porch, where we could have iced tea within the quiet scrutiny of The Town, who needed to know we weren’t up to any funny stuff. Such were the morays of the time.

“You’ll see, ma’am. I’ll get a big payday and buy me a bathtub. I’ll wash up real good, so you’ll be proud to be around me.”

She said, “If you can get me a baby, I’ll marry you. My insides ain’t fit for childbirth, according to Doctor Tom. So that’s the deal. You have my word.”

I figured I could find a baby. Babies wasn’t as rare as gold and I found that plenty of times. So I went to the hills and started mining for babies. 

I spent years digging thousands of holes. I found some gold here or there, but mostly it was just mud.

One night I heard the holler in the dark. It was a baby’s cry. I followed it and found its source were under the ground, there in the clearing where the pines gave way to the stars. 

I began to dig. I dug like I dug into the grip of a bottle: with fury and trepidation. I hacked through roots and bramble, digging toward that plaintive wail. I used my hands when the cry got louder. What was born from that hole was a lump of gold 19″ long, roughly the size and shape of a child, there in the full moonlight. I knew what I had to do. 

I went back to The Town. I shaved part of the nugget off to pay a metal worker to sculpt me a golden baby. He had it finished within a fortnight and I presented the baby to the Widow Vern.

“Why Waterloo Jones, this not what I meant. I wanted a human baby, not a decadent facsimile of a baby.”

“Is it not as expensive as a baby? Love it like a baby. Everything is transactional.”

“Yes I suppose there is love to be had in a golden child. I think I’ll call her Goldie.”

And we paraded the baby through the streets, all hailed it as a triumph, and the Widow Vern became Mrs. Waterloo Clyde.

“We need a new house for Goldie,” she said as she nursed the metallic child.

And so I went, hat in hand, to the bank to ask for a home loan. 

Mr. Bankman, the owner of the bank said, “That’s no problem, Mr. Clyde. We’ll just need the golden baby as collateral.”

“Mr. Bankman, sir, that’s quite gracious of you, however, I don’t think I can square that with the wife. You see she’s become very attached to the baby. She’s not going to take too kindly to being separated for the duration of the mortgage.”

Mr. Banksy Bankman thought on this a second. “I’ll tell you what we’ll do because we do want your business. We will place the baby under glass and put it in our lobby. That way your wife can visit the baby during business hours.”

I thought this was a good compromise and presented it to Mrs. Clyde. She said, “So We need a bigger house to accommodate the baby, but if we get a bigger house, we have no baby to accommodate.”

“True.”

“How does that make sense?”

“I guess it really doesn’t. But we need to choose one or the other.”

“Why?”

“Because Mr. Bankman says it is so.”

“Oh. Well let’s get the house then. I can go visit the baby all day every day. Or whenever it suits me.”

This meant I had to work digging up them hills for enough gold to make the payments on the house. This was difficult because the hills was picked over like a Thanksgiving turkey, days after the feast. It wasn’t just ol’ Waterloo Clyde roaming the hills anymore. Word of the golden child spread far and wide. Now every pissant with a shovel was combing the hills, eating up all my glory.

I had to go so far to find gold, I never even visited the house I was paying for. I sleep still in a hole in the ground.

Meanwhile, throngs gather to see the golden baby. People swear they hear the baby crying still, like it did that night below the ground. Others claim to hear nothing but the echo of a marble bank lobby packed to capacity.

Party Pickle

Everyone calls me Pickles, from my biological family to my found one at Club Climaxxx. Don’t judge—or assume I got that nickname because I smell briny. Just ask my customers, I smell more like the raspberry jam of Linzer cookies. 

The nickname has more to do with my good luck. And okay, I drink the juice straight out of the jar, neon seeds and all. But ’tis the season for green stuff. You see, it’s German tradition to hide a pickle in the Christmas tree so whoever finds it gets an extra gift and blessing to carry into the new year. And I always win that Gherkin.

Some would say I’m too competitive over it, except now it’s strippers, not siblings, insisting it. But I need that good fortune more than ever since my family ices me out over my “exotic” job. I won’t have any celebration to come home to.

“So, let’s have X-mas at the club,” my boyfriend Geo says from the front seat of his shiny Escalade. He started as my escort to and from the club and remains that way for safety reasons. Sometimes I think I should still tip him for his advice. “Why not? Plenty of us are disowned by our families for running in underground crowds. Screw them. Let’s pop some bottles, exchange some bags, toss around a li’l mistletoe.”

I stop myself from chewing off my gloss. Though I can’t imagine candle-lighting the family tree after twelve teary “raised you better” voicemails from Mama, unstuffing stockings with near-naked girlies sucking on oranges and airplane bottles seems as off. 

He glances in the rearview as I stick rhinestones around my eyes to simulate a snow-speckled ice queen. The Santa toy from the Kinder Joy chocolate I gave him a year ago hangs off the mirror, its egghead winking at me as it metronomes to the soft techno. “C’mon, the holidays are bigger than the two of us. Let’s bring some folks together. We’ll have a blast. I’ll bring the Grand Brulot. Been eyeing a bottle since your girl turned me onto the VSOP.”

My smile resurfaces when I remember Chastity drinking him and DJ Jinx under the table over a game of Never Have I Ever. “I don’t know. . . That sounds like a big to-do. Chastity would be on board, but I don’t know if the girls wanna ‘waste’ their money so last-minute.”

“Ah, don’t sweat it. I’m not taking lip from selfish Sheena or too-cool-for-school Anissa. Trust me, I’m a master debater.” He rolls up to the big sign with the club’s bit lip logo. “I’ll bring the whole fam together. You can call me K-rizz Kringle,” he laughs. 

I lean over to noogie him. “Think you got too many sugar plums dancing in your head, handsome.” 

I kiss that big forehead, then we tell each other to be careful. But as I’m walking into the back of the club, I see Geo get out and beeline for the club owner’s mini monster truck. He knocks on the slime-green decaled door and down rolls the window. 

I scrunch my shoulders and push away thoughts of Mister Miser laughing at the idea—or polling all his pole minxes and them doing it to my face.

“Ooooh, Pickles,” Chastity cheers from her vanity, waving a sparkly blush brush at me. “What’s up, girl? Did you hear Miski finally got fired for thieving? Christmas come early, right? Now I can actually afford who’s on my Nice List.”

I plop into the pink roller chair next to her. “Good. That girl was feral. Worse attitude than the Cash Me Outside girl.”

“Total Grinch,” Anissa agrees, leaning into our conversation to borrow Chastity’s cotton candy perfume. “I’d put coal in her stocking and beat her with it like a prison rock sock.”

“Naughty, naughty,” Chastity clucks. “Have you really been to prison?”

“Just jail.” Anissa rolls her shoulders like it was a stint in summer school. “One night over a stupid lotion set I ’lifted for my moms… Bitch wouldn’t even pick me up at the station.” She shakes her head until her frown turns into a grin usually reserved for customers. “Who knew Kmart had security like that?”

“His helpers are always watching,” Chastity ominously intones, staring at a bedazzled Santa hat somebody draped over a mirror bulb.

“You play too much.” Anissa gives her a half-hearted shove. “What about you, Pickles? I know you ain’t never been to the pokey. But you ever done some stupid shit over people you thought was family?”

I flash on the holly-dotted embroidery hoop I have sitting on my coffee table, likely to become a dust-catcher after Aunt Zelda told me I’d “have better luck being an esthetician, not an embarrassment.” Scratching at the clasps on my bustier, I murmur, “Well, haven’t we all?”

***

On the stage, glacial in temperature and shade, I forget about all my sad-browed relatives and lack of holiday plans. I shake off the stress, keeping the beat even though I’m sick of Ariana Grande’s caterwauling and the customers who think I don’t see them reusing bills from the edge. Men keep their billfolds closer to the chest this time of year, squeezed tighter from their kids’ wish lists, hosting the in-laws, and their wives’ endless list of “necessary decorations.” 

I’ve heard about it for countless lap dances and tabletop bops, so I dip, slide, and shimmy through the night and early morning until Geo comes to get me. He greets me with Mister Miser, Chastity, and Anissa at his flank. 

“You gotta real fun braintrust here, Pickles.” The club owner winks and glances at his gold Rollie. 5AM. “Merry Christmas Eve. You gonna deck the halls with us next shift or what?”

“Huh?” I wipe sweat and glitter off my forehead, raising a brow to my man.

“Said I gotchu, Pickles!” He shakes up a bottle of Moet but doesn’t pop the top. “This Christmas will be five times funner than some dusty ol’ family function, a fusion of the new and classic! Let me surprise you.”

Well, this is surprise enough, I think, but seeing he’s even got the cheapskate club owner and snooty booty Anissa on board… “We’ll see.” My smile shows I’m already cautiously optimistic.

***

Though 7PM is more like breakfast to clubsters, twelve of us sashay through the doors of The Melting Pot. We soak in all the actual and metaphorical cheesiness of eating liquid cheddar while draped in fluffy white bras and hookah smoke. 

“Germans always have fondue for Christmas Even, right?” Geo asks, as eager as a puppy who actually studied the homework instead of ate it. “That’s what Google said. It’s corny fun anyway, right? Nice.”

“Yes. Kitschy in the best way.” I beam, hoping he’ll relax. “Can’t believe you actually coordinated something with eight strippers,” I whisper as he pulls my chair out.

“Can’t believe you doubted your boy!” He winks and asks the waiter for a round of cranberry mojitos. Once they arrive, he toasts, “Miami doesn’t have much of a winter, but it’s definitely the coolest place to come together. I hope this is the first of many years we support this tradition. Even if we move away from the club, we can all take a piece of this memory, knowing that family is what you make it. Thanks, Pickles, for inspiring this! Cheers, everybody!”

Everybody clinks glasses, then laughs about the droplets that fall and sizzle on the hotplates at our roundtable. The bouncer teases Mister Miser that these drinks are less watered-down than his, and the girls squeeze each other’s shoulders in playful shoves, kidding about who’ll get drunkest before dusk. We share cauldrons of Swiss to dunk duck and fillet mignon, charcuterie and shrimp, we cook ourselves on skewers. Anissa entertains us with how she used to slink into her mom’s closet as early as November to slit open her presents with a nail file. Chastity talks about how glad she is not to have to be glared and ogled at for free in church this year. By the time we move onto chocolate and wedges of bread, pineapples and pretzels, I forget why I ever feared rejection here.

“And the best is yet to come,” Chastity sings at me with as Geo signs the bill. 

***

The Champagne Room is strewn with candy-striped balloons. On the red-hot couches, we all sit for the gift exchange by a Charlie Brown tree. Our heels excitedly stomp on the carpet patterned with hair-swinging babes. Anissa tries her best not to fight over that Agent Provocateur lingerie set she had to trade in the shuffle. Chastity and I giggle like schoolgirls over the gag gifts of literal stress “balls” and pregnancy tests that got passed around. I’m more than pleased with the Body Works basket I won and the spa certificate I gave away, but Geo’s sweet deep voice says, “Wait. Pickles, it’s not Christmas without your signature.” 

He nods toward the artificial tree. 

It’s easy to see through its limbs but it takes some digging to pluck that ornament of a Vlasic classic. The other girls halfheartedly search, munching Haribo gummies. 

That pickle prize is mine! I hold it up like a torch.

The girls whistle and clap. 

Geo snatches it from my hand. 

Before I can ask why, he plants a jewelry box in my palm instead. He flicks open the small square and reveals an emerald ring. 

“Ol’ switcharoo. Whata ya say, Pickles?” He proposes, “Year one of many traditions?”

I say, pickles really are lucky. I am.

Fuck Christmas

Since it was Christmas Day Mom wanted to get drunk. This sounded like a good idea but it’s illegal to sell alcohol in Massachusetts on holidays. She would not be discouraged.

“We’ll drive up to New Hampshire. There’s liquor stores just across the State line.”

That sounded depressing. A storm had covered the Northeastern Corridor with several feet of snow that’d mostly turned black and crusty.  But anything was better than being at home, except maybe the Bay State Prison where I’d spent the last few Xmases. 

“And then we can drive a bit further north and visit your father.”

She put icing on the suicidal cake. My old man’s buried just outside the Navy Stockade at Portsmouth. He struck an officer while intoxicated. They could’ve strung him up, but he took care of that detail himself. 

Black ice blotted out the long stretch of industrial blight. Mom’s naturally chatty. I turned on the radio to drown her out. She doesn’t appreciate Satanic metal, and switched to a station heavy on the Xmas carols. She sang along tunelessly and it was better than her usual nonsense about happier times.

She’d dressed as though we were headed to Miami instead of closer to the North Pole. The car’s heater was broken. She mewled about eggnog, Yule logs and chestnuts burning on an open fire.

The New Hampshire liquor stores were all open. Even so, there were long lines. Xmas is hard to face sober. Mom waited till we were back in the car to open the first bottle. 

“Did you see how all those men were staring at me.”

The attention made her merry. The sky got lower and lower, grayer and grayer. Jesus Christ is born, hallelujah. A storm warning interrupted the carols and prayers. It was strongly recommended that citizens remain in their homes and avoid the highways. 

The prison loomed deathly pale against black clouds headed in from over the Atlantic. There were no other cars in the visitors parking lot. 

The inmates’ graveyard is just outside the chain-link perimeter. The names on the tiny headstones face in towards what amounted to home and family for those dead men.

Mom got weepy, even though her first ex-husband had spent all her money, knocked her up and then left her for some other alcoholic floozy. I never even met the guy, but he’d passed on the prison gene. 

The ice storm hit while we were on the bridge that leads onto I-95. The old car had bald tires and we skidded like a rattlesnake in a jar of vaseline. Police cars had staked out all the exits and the cops were waving people off the road. I prayed they wouldn’t make me pull over because I wasn’t too sober at that point and wasn’t supposed to go out of State. 

Mom saw the pink neon motel sign. “Oh look I stayed there with your father once. At least I think it was him.”

Seemed like a miracle when the old guy at the reception desk took a check for the room. He must’ve been new in the motel business, or maybe he was drunk too. 

“Oh look honey a double bed. We can snuggle up and watch TV like when you were a baby.”

A bottle hit the floor and I awoke to what looked like a snowdrift dancing up and down on my lap. The TV glowed an electric snowstorm and roared static. Mom looked up. 

“Oh I thought it’d be OK as long as you’re asleep.”

Actually it felt pretty good, and it wasn’t as though I had any other hot dates lined up. So it was time to follow through, head in where I came out of, turn life into a round-trip. The place where everything started was nice and cozy and Mom was singing jingle bells but then a thought crossed her mind and she stopped. 

“Ooh baby weren’t you awful lonely in prison?”

“They never stuck me in the hole.”

She moaned. “Oh that’s not what I mean, honey. Didn’t you have a nice cellmate to hug you and keep you warm on Christmas Eve?”

Those are the memories you forget as soon as they let you out. “I’d rather not talk about it, Ma.”

“You don’t have to talk about it, baby. Just let me feel it.” She assumed the position.

TV glare showed a wreath of dead flowers that pulsated with the cathode vibrations. The thing went in slow.

“Ooh now I remember why I fell in love with your papa.”

Guess I’d learned a thing or two at the Bay State Correctional Facility, the only place I was ever popular. 

Outside the motel the snow fell and fell. Mom sounded so happy. She sang about her dreams of a white Xmas. 

The white stuff came out, eventually. And I remembered through an alcoholic haze that there was something else I’d picked up in prison that maybe I should’ve told her about.

The Art of Love

I sit silently staring down at the blood dripping from the slashes in my arms. I embrace the pain as it reminds me that I’m alive, and still capable of feeling. I look at the canvas in front of me. It sits on an old wooden stretcher I borrowed in High School and conveniently forgot to give back. The painting on the canvas was an abstract tree meant to represent the tree of life. It had come alive with sweet melancholy when I started to smear the blood onto the tree, starting at the roots and making my way up the trunk. I eventually ran out and tore another gash into my arm to finish the branches. The way the blood mixed with the already dark construct made me smile. This was true art. There aren’t many left who will suffer for their art like this. This, after all, was a tree of life, and what better representation of life than blood?

​ The numbness in my body began and I knew that meant it was time to bandage myself up. I go to my cabinet in the corner of the studio where the medical supplies are kept, pull out a large amount of gauze and medical tape, and go to town on myself. I don’t worry about the stitching materials. I don’t think I went too deep this time. My last painting, a bastardized conception of the Virgin Mary was a whole other story. That one took a lot of blood, and a lot of stitches, which I had luckily watched a YouTube video on how to do.

​Now that I’m all bandaged, and feeling somewhat alive, still riding the high from the loss of blood I figure why stop there? I light a cigarette and open a beer, then send out the notorious, “You up?” text to a few girls on my phone. A few minutes pass, and it buzzes showing an icon of Sara’s face. Wouldn’t have been my top pick if I’m being honest, but it’s midnight and here we are. Her text reads, “Yeah, I can be there in ten.” with a smiley face. So I reply, sounds good, and crack another beer and wait.

​ Sara makes it to my house in what feels more like twenty, but I’m not going to complain. At least she showed up. Something about her is radiant tonight. She wore skin-tight black jeans and a low-cut v-neck showing off just enough. Her porcelain skin seemed to come alive when it was lit up by the pale moonlight. Her face was all angles and beautiful as she brushed her fair hair out of her eyes. “It’s good to see you,” she said. “Do you have another art project you want my opinion on or was this just a booty call?”

​“Can’t it be both?” I ask and we both laugh. I ask her to come in and offer her a drink. “We have beer or bourbon, take your pick.”

​“Do you have any Coke? I’d love a Jack and Coke.” So I mix her one before pulling her over to gaze into my newest masterpiece. She looked at it in awe and it filled me with gratitude, why was I ever hoping it would be one of the other girls? Sara truly sees my art and might be the only one who does. “Did you. . did you hurt yourself for this one too?” She asked in a soft voice. I just grin back at her and pull off my sweatshirt, revealing my heavily bandaged arms. At that moment, she looked so sad and I swear I saw tears forming in her eyes. 

​“Hey now, it’s okay. It’s all for the art Sara, don’t you see? Don’t you see how much better it makes it?” She doesn’t look convinced, but she forces a smile and says, “Of course. I think you’re brilliant, you know that.” I smile back at her. She was beautiful and full of flattery tonight. I grab her by the waist and pull her into the tightest hug I can muster with my arms in their lousy state. She leans in for a kiss and her lips have to be the softest I’ve ever felt. The kisses start coming faster in rapid succession as we both clumsily make our way back to the bed. 

She pushes me back onto the bed with little effort because of how woozy I am from the blood loss and alcohol. She starts taking off her shirt as I slide my jeans off and then I go for my shirt and by the time I get it over my head she’s standing at the edge of the bed completely naked. Her body curves in all the right places and I can’t remember a time when I was more aroused. She slides on top of me and it’s in within seconds, I swear I’ve never felt someone so wet. She rides me for what feels like hours, every second is pure bliss as skin slaps together. We fit together perfectly like slippery puzzle pieces that were meant for each other. 

We both come multiple times before she rolls off of me and we lay there in complete ecstasy. I light a cigarette and pass it to her and then light one for myself. She props herself up on one arm and leans into me, using her non-smoking hand to draw imaginary lines around my belly button. She starts to run her hands over the scars all over my belly and torso, and then she says. “I wish you wouldn’t do this to yourself. I know it’s for the art, and it makes it better, it does. I just still hate that you do it to yourself. I wish you would use someone else’s blood. Your body is scarred enough. Why not use the body of someone else you care about? Maybe even someone you love?” 

I think about this for a moment. Do I “love” anyone? That I’m not sure of but I guess if I did, Sara would be the one. I, at the very least, love her at this moment. “What exactly are you suggesting Sara?” I ask, already knowing the answer. 

“You could use me, I’d let you. I trust you to patch me up, and you’re still beautiful with your scars so maybe I will be too.” She says, almost excitedly. 

“Sara, there is nothing in this world that would ever make you less beautiful,” I say with a smile. I brush her hair back and tuck it behind her ear. “Are you sure? You want to be a part of my art?” She nods, and that’s that. “Then there’s no time to waste. I already have my next idea. Let’s get started.’

The concept for my next piece is simple. I will simply paint the Earth and then smear Sara’s blood from top to bottom on the canvas to symbolize the cruel reality we live in. This planet is dying, and we’re doing it. All of us, me, you, Sara, it doesn’t matter, we’re all guilty. Sara sits behind me and watches the gentle brush strokes shape the most authentic representation of the Earth that I can muster. It’s not my best work, for the hour is late and I’ve grown quite drunk, but I’m riding the high now and if I let go for even a second, I may crash. 

I start coloring in my world with blues and greens with a little dash of white here and there for a foggy effect. Look at that, I’ve painted the Earth and it’s only three-thirty in the morning. Now the fun begins. I walk over to Sara with my razor outstretched. She grimaces away at first but composes herself quickly. She’s still naked and I take a moment to see her whole for the last time, without any blemishes. She is so beautiful, but there’s work to be done. 

I make sure not to go too deep with the first cut. It’s on her upper forearm and I just want her to get a feel for it. She winces only slightly and then stares down, mesmerized at the site of her blood. I remember my first time and in that moment I envy her for how free she must be feeling. I grab her arm and squeeze as I run my brush under the flowing crimson. She cries out because my grip is too tight. “I’m sorry,” she says immediately. 

“It’s okay, are you sure you want this? I’m going to need a lot more than just that little bit of blood.” Most of what I had squeezed out of her was already drying and was useless to me now. She doesn’t speak, she just nods her head. So I tear a few fresh wounds open on her arms and go back to work. The blood sets up nicely on the not-yet-dry paint, giving it the exact effect I want. Sara whimpers behind me, admiringly as I, the virtuoso smears fresh blood on as much of the canvas as I can. “Other arm,” I say without even looking back at her as I hold out my hand for hers. She gives me her arm and I tear three new gashes into it, maybe going a little deep with one, but she’ll be fine. I’m a professional, after all. 

Sara’s arms look worse than I initially realized so I pause from my work and begin to bandage her up. The one I went a little too deep on won’t stop bleeding so I know I’m going to have to stitch it. I make my way over to the medical cabinet, pull out my supplies, and go to work on a not-so-great suture that looks even worse than the ones I did on myself. “There you are, good as new,” I said.

“Baby, I don’t feel so good, I think I need to lay down.” It is getting late and I also want to lay down so I get it. We can finish the blood-soaked Earth another time. 

“That’s okay, let’s get you to bed. We can finish it later. You did great for your first time.” I guide her over to the bed, lay her down, and tuck her in gently. She drifts off to sleep almost instantly. That really must’ve taken a lot out of her. I admire her one last time and throw my arm over, bury my face in the pillow, and begin to drift off myself. 

I dream that I’m standing on a stage in front of a large audience. There are hundreds of people seated in front of me in rows. Next to me stand my blood-soaked earth, still propped up on my hand-me-down stretcher. There’s what appears to be a panel of three judges looking over it. I hear their murmurs, saying words like exquisite. A normal man would blush under these circumstances, but I know what I am. I am modern expressionism embodied and the words from the judges are well-earned. They all hold up little cards with the number ten on them and the crowd begins to cheer. I deserve this.

I look down and see Sara sitting in the front row. I go to the edge of the stage and beckon her to join me. “Ladies and gentlemen,” I say to the crowd. “Could we have a round of applause for my partner, for it was she who truly inspired this work?” The crowd eats it up and then all of a sudden I hear an alarm going off in the distance. My alarm clock succeeds at waking me up even though I swear I shut it off the night before. I have a splitting headache. It’s only eight in the morning. What was that like four hours of sleep? Oh well. I look over at Sara and notice something is wrong with the way she is breathing, or rather the way she seems to almost not be breathing. 

“Hey, wake up,” I say, shaking her gently. Nothing. She doesn’t respond. I shake her harder and roll her onto her back. Her face stares up at me but there’s nothing left to it. All the vibrance is gone. Her eyes are open slightly and her mouth is ajar, but no air is going in or out. I feel a tear fall from my eye and it lands on her face as I begin to break down. I look at her arm and see that the stitching I had done the night prior had been ripped out and underneath her was a large pool of blood. My silent sobs grow heavier as I feel my chest heaving in and out. I turn with just enough time to avoid doing it on the bed and throw up all over my floor. 

I allow myself what feels like an hour to remain in this state before I get up and start pacing back and forth. “Okay, you gotta fucking think. Not only are you a murderer, but there are clear signs of mental health issues wrapped up in this too. So do you go to the cops? Confess? Spend the rest of your useless life in the psych ward of some prison? Fuck no, okay? We’re not doing that. It’s not what I want and it’s not what Sara would want either.” A thought crosses my mind to get rid of the body and ditch the cell phone. The cellphone would be the easiest to get rid of, my band plays a show tonight at The Rockit, I’ll just drop it there in the crowd somewhere, but the body was an issue.

I look around the room and my eyes fall on the pile of camping stuff in the corner from back when my folks and I still did things together. I know the sleeping bags are wrapped up in a couple of Hefty’s so I’ll use those first and foremost. I go dump the sleeping bags and I’m back to the bed in seconds. Her body was small so maybe I could just fold her into one? I start at the feet as if the trash bags themselves were sleeping bags and when I can’t go up any farther I push her head down and forward until it lets out a loud crunch. I recoil and it takes everything I have to not throw up again. It did work though. I was able to fold her up and get the first bag tied. The second bag fit over much easier and then part of it was done. 

Luckily my house is surrounded by a few miles of forest on each side. I just have to pick a place that’s not often explored and I know just the spot. After checking that both my parents had already left for the day. I picked up the garbage bag and went outside to my car. I popped the trunk and placed Sara gently inside. I run to the tool shed and find the biggest of the shovels we have to choose from and return to the car with it laying it on top of Sara. My head is going a million miles a minute in all different directions, most of which end with me in prison but I can’t think about that now. We’re not going far and I just have to take things one step at a time. 

It’s only about five minutes of driving before I park and go to the trunk to retrieve Sara and the shovel. It’s a bit of a walk to the secluded lake, and the overgrown wildlife doesn’t help matters. Still, after an additional five minutes, we come to a large open area with a big rock at the end of it that looks out over a lake. When it isn’t muddy and horrible like it is today, this is my favorite spot because of how beautiful it is. I’d spend hours here when I was young with my sketchbook and colored pencils trying to catch a trace of the magic on paper. In later years, I’d try to paint it. This was also the first place I ever self-harmed, the place I came to cry, and the first place I ever brought Sara to. 

I find the cleanest-looking bit of soil that I can and begin to dig. I dig for hours. She has to be deep. No one can ever know where Sara went and if she’s deep, no one will ever find her. I’m satisfied when I hit what feels like eight feet. It’s a struggle to get out of the hole and an even bigger struggle to say goodbye to Sara before tossing her into the hole. I fill the hole much quicker than it took to dig, and I smear a lot of the mud surrounding the area overtop so it doesn’t look much different from the rest of the ground. 

I toss the shovel in the back of the trunk and light a cigarette. I begin to cry again, as I had in this spot so many times before. This was my spot and now it would always be our spot. “I love you, Sara,” I say before flicking my cigarette into the lake. I’ve never said those words to anyone other than my parents, and never thought I’d love anything other than the art, but it was true. If I could go back I wouldn’t have cut her so deep, but there aren’t many left who will suffer for their art like this.

Communion

I wake up with the shakes on the cold cardboard bed. The sky is a continuous grey yawn. Everything feels grey. There is a light snow, such that you could walk between the snowflakes if you were clever enough. I’m not feeling clever and I let a snowflake kiss my cheek, then deliquesce–Its union with my beard causing it to lose its composure.

Life’s been rough for awhile. I spend my days on the hunt for hooch, and my nights are spent in the sauce, thinking about all the ways I done wrong; fantasizing about going back in time to make things right. Maybe if I loved her better then…

The shakes are going to get bad soon.

I get my bearings. I’m on 8th, outside the Episcopal church. I think it’s Sunday. Perfect. That means there will be a bunch of benevolent Liberals with their pockets full to tithe… 

That gives me an idea.

I take the Sharpie from my pocket and write on my bed, “TITHE TO ME I need it more than the church does.” I tear off the piece of cardboard, which is my drink ticket. Next I need to find a discarded cup. I see one rolling in the wind, about half a block up.

A man walks past and yells, “Get a job, you bum!”

I say, “Thanks, I hadn’t thought of that. Do you have any more sage wisdom for me?”

He doesn’t seem to understand what I’m saying because he just looks confused. “Fuck you!” And he walks away.

It’s weird living in a way that people just fucking hate you for continuing to live. I kind of understand it because I hate myself for continuing to live. But it’s just wild how skyrocketing rents and depressed wages and severe mental illness are my fault. They hate me because I remind them of what could happen to them with one or two bad turns. 

There but for the grace of…

I walk down to the cup, blowing in the grey wind. I pick it up. It’s a relatively clean cup. There’s only a couple drops of dried coke on the inside. It’s a Burger King cup, and it is my passport to the kingdom of drunkenness. 

The shakes are getting more severe. I find a snipe on the sidewalk and light it up to try and calm the terror welling up in me. It’s an old cigarette that’s maybe been there for weeks. I can taste the old of it. It’s disgusting, but it hampers the need.

I go to the door of the church with my sign and my cup, as the good Christians file past.

“Spare some change?” I say. “Spare some change?” I say again. A few people give me all of their change. It amounts to about 85 cents. Not enough for a beer. “Spare some change?” 

Most of them ignore me. A few make a show of patting their pockets before telling me they don’t have any cash. A few frown at my sign, but my sign is true. 

This church’s property was probably purchased in 1885 or some such time that they paid like $25 bucks for the land and they haven’t had to pay taxes on it since. It’s all gravy for them in there. I bet the pastor or priest or whatever lives in a mansion in Hyde Park. Meanwhile I just need three dollars for a drink so I don’t die of the DT’s. 

The pastor is a beggar too. Honestly, everyone is a beggar when you think about it.

The foot traffic slows to a trickle and it occurs to me that they have wine at Communion. I go inside and there’s an elderly greeter at the door like this is a Walmart or something. He hands me a slip of paper. I don’t look at it. He looks scared of me. I must look scary to old men. 

He says, “Peace be with you.”

As a reflex from my childhood I reply, “And also with you.”

I walk into the cathedral and the ceiling stretches up like it’s trying to prove something. There are all the churchy things here: stained glass windows, intricate carvings on all the columns, a throng of parishioners. I think that’s what they’re called. The audience, if you will.

I find a seat near the back. I sit far away from any of these nice people because I don’t want to spread my smell. I’m shaking like an Indonesian Richter scale now. It’s really bad and I see people look at me and whisper to each other.

I sit through the service for like an hour. It’s so boring, I drift off and think about when I was a kid going to church. I hated it. Dressing in my Sunday best. The button up shirt that would choke me with a little tie. The preacher being all fire and brimstone. He’d say that God was punishing me for my wickedness, and maybe he’d be right.

Finally it comes time for Communion and I’m a sweaty rattle of bones. I rush to the front, but as calmly as I can. I need that sweet blood of Christ in my bloodstream. An infusion to keep me going. I make my way through the line, trying to keep my cool, but people are looking at me like something stuck to the sole of their shoe.

Finally, it’s my turn and I greet the priest humbly. He’s in his 50s; A greying stoic structure of a man. He has the wine in a great golden chalice that probably cost a downpayment on a car. 

He pours the wine in my mouth and I grab the chalice and chug all the wine I can in front of everyone. He fights me, trying to get the chalice back. He pulls back hard and wine gets all over his robe. 

People gasp and mutter. “Filthy animal,” I heard one person say. I just confirmed for them everything they think about me.

Something strange happens to my stomach. It’s like the wine is turning itself inside out. My mouth tastes like copper. I don’t know how I know this, but the wine is actually transubstantiating into blood in my gut. 

I look up at the stained glass window depicting Jesus. I fall to my knees as the clouds part and sun shines through his face. Tears stream down my cheeks as large men drag me out of the church.

Next Year In Jerusalem

Mom wants us to move to Israel. She made the decision after the second time someone scrawled “kike” on my locker with a Sharpie. I didn’t mean to make a big thing out of it. I got a paper towel from the bathroom and soaked it in warm water and soap. I tried my best to scrub the word off the blue steel while a few other kids watched me in silence, but the ink just wouldn’t budge. A Russian janitor passed by pushing a mop and a bucket, and I asked him for some help. That turned out to be a mistake. 

The janitor managed to remove the slur with some rubbing alcohol and elbow grease. But he must’ve told someone in the administration, because an hour later I was called into the principal’s office over the PA. I was happy to leave math in the middle of a quiz, but my good spirits died the moment I saw the school counselor and Mom were there waiting for me. Mom was hunched in a fold-out chair and was red in the face as she tried not to cry.

The school counselor tried talking to me about how I was feeling. I insisted that I was fine and that this sort of thing was part of being a Jew in a small town, but she was hearing none of it. She told me about how unsafe and traumatized I must feel. Some of what she said was true, but she didn’t have any business knowing that. 

At some point I let it slip that it was the second time that had happened. That turned out to be the biggest mistake I’d made yet. The school counselor brought a manicured hand to her lips and Mom started balling. The principal quietly suggested that I should go home early. At least I didn’t mind that. The whole thing didn’t come up again until a few days later, at Shabbat dinner.

Mom took a deep sip of wine and stared into the flame flickering on the melting candle she had said a prayer over minutes earlier. “I think we should move to Israel,” she said. Dad almost choked on the forkful of steak he’d been chewing. Dad coughed and pounded his chest with a fist until the cow flesh was successfully swallowed and death was averted. He got up to pour himself a glass of water, drained it, then came back.

“Israel?” Dad asked as he sat down. 

“Israel,” Mom confirmed. 

“But both our jobs are here,” said Dad. “Our families are here. The kids’ friends are here. Our lives our here.”

“I want to live in a Jewish community, in a Jewish state,” said Mom. “I don’t want to live in a town where folk write hate speech on our son’s lockers any longer. I’m tired of always being an outsider.”

Dad glanced at me and my sister. We’d both stopped eating and were watching the conversation unfold between our parents in rapt silence. I’d left a chunk of skewered steak abandoned on the tines of my fork.

“Perhaps we should talk more about this later,” said Dad. “When we’re alone.”

Mom shot Dad a look that could have made Godzilla stop dead in the middle of destroying Tokyo, but she didn’t say anything else. We spoke no more about it that evening, although it was clearly on everyone’s mind. 

I didn’t mind the thought of leaving Rhinebeck. There isn’t much to do here but go to farmer’s markets and high school football games, and neither of those are of any interest to me. New York City is about a two hour and half hours’ drive south, which is the exact worst distance it could be. It’s close enough to be tantalizing, but far enough that we never go. But I didn’t really know much about Israel yet.

I knew Israel was a country in The Middle East. I knew that its political situation was complicated, although no one had ever taken the time to really explain it to me. I also knew that my whole life, older Jews had been telling me that Israel was my homeland. I never really understood that. I’m American.

For as long as I could remember, the final words of every Passover seder were, “Next year in Jerusalem”. I felt relieved when those words finally came, because it meant that I could leave the table and rituals behind to play Xbox alone in my room. But I never understood why my parents said them. There was nothing stopping us from hopping on a plane the next time Passover came around and having our seder in Jerusalem, but we never did. My parents knew we wouldn’t, even as they said those words, but they said them anyway. I guess that’s religion for you. I wondered if this past Passover was the first time those words might not have been a lie after all. 

“My mom wants us to move to Israel,” I told a friend of mine the next day. We were biking over to another friend’s house the next day to play Dungeons & Dragons, like we did every Saturday. There weren’t any cars on the road and we biked at a lackadaisical speed that made conversation easy. He’s the only other Jewish kid I’m friends with, so he’s the only person I really felt comfortable mentioning it to. If anyone would get it, it’s him.

“Is it because of what they wrote on your locker?” my other Jewish friend asked. I told him that it was. I’d tried to keep the whole thing quiet, but people found out anyway. The fact that the slur was visible to anyone walking down the hallway probably hadn’t helped.

“That’s pretty heavy, man,” said my Jewish friend. “You know if you move to Israel, you’ll have to join the army when you turn eighteen? Your sister too.”

I told him that I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that at all. Did Mom really want my sister and I to have to fight in a war? I didn’t like having to scrub hate speech off my locker, but it sure beat digging a bullet out of my lungs. 

We reached our other friend’s house and rested our bikes against the garage. We knocked and his mom let us in. Knowing exactly where to go, we went straight down the stairs and into the subterranean lair that our friend had made his own. Most people would call it a basement, but that doesn’t feel like the right word.

The lair is filled with LED lights of every color. Every inch of the walls are covered with posters of heavy metal bands and horror movies and colorful illustrations of large breasted women wielding broadswords. It’s to the point where there’s not even a visible spec of the gray cement walls beneath. An old doom metal LP spun on a turntable hooked up to an impressive sound system, because our friend considers himself too cool for Spotify.

Our friend was waiting for us in his lair with the game all set up on a foldout card table. He’s the dungeon master, and he’d been preparing for this all week. Our fourth friend had beat us there, and she sat on a beanbag chair beside the dungeon master. She’s the only girl who’ll talk to us. The dungeon master is openly in love with her and I’m secretly in love with her. We’re both pretty sure she doesn’t know about either affection. 

“Good, we’re all here,” said the dungeon master. The dungeon master handed out our character sheets while my Jewish friend slipped his backpack off his shoulders. My Jewish friend pulled out a small clear baggie and some corresponding apparatuses. He pulled some nuggets of a controlled plant substance out of the baggie. He grinded the nuggets into a thin powder and loaded them into a glass bowl while we chatted. The dungeon master and I both spoke over each other trying to engage the only girl who’d talk to us. This resulted in her not speaking much to either of us. We began the game once the bowl was packed. 

That week we led the invasion of an orc fortress. We passed around the bowl and the bag of dice. Everyone except me had a good time. I played well and strategically, and my barbaric alter ego ended many an orc’s life with swings of his axe.

But every time the dungeon master described a cloud of black arrows flying toward us, all I could imagine was dodging gunfire in the desert. Everytime I rolled a high number and the dungeon master informed me that I had successfully killed another foe, all I could imagine was the life leaving its bulbous, imaginary orc face. I couldn’t help but wonder if that orc really deserved to die. After all, we were the ones invading. 

What had the orcs done wrong besides being born big and green with sharp teeth and tufts of hair in the wrong places? The Monster Manual describes them as chaotic evil, but that seems like quite a generalization. And anyway, I didn’t know if the Monster Manual was a source that could really be trusted. For all I know, whoever wrote the Monster Manual could be harboring some terrible prejudices against orc kind.

By the time the game was over, we had conquered the orc fortress and smoked everything my Jewish friend had brought. We hung out for a bit longer, just talking and watching TV. Eventually, the only girl who’d talk to us’s mom came to pick her up in time for dinner. My Jewish friend and I got on our bikes to head home soon after. We biked in the same direction for a while. My brain felt like it was encased in jelly, and I had trouble keeping my bike moving in a straight line. 

“You alright?” asked my Jewish friend.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said. “I’m just kinda high. Also, I really don’t want to have to join the Israeli army.”

“Then don’t move to Israel,” advised my Jewish friend.

I got home just as Mom was finishing cooking as my sister wrapped up setting the table for dinner. I could hear the Yankees game echoing from the connected living room. I didn’t have to enter to know Dad would be slouching on the couch watching it. There’s never any expectation for either him nor I to help with dinner. It’s not in my best interest to question such things.

“You’re home,” said Mom as I burst through the front door. “I wasn’t sure if you’d make it.” 

“Mom, I don’t want to move to Israel,” I said. 

Mom looked up from the vegetables she was arranging into a salad bowl and narrowed her eyes at me. Her hands kept working even as her gaze settled on me, transferring lettuce and cherry tomatoes from their plastic packaging into a big ceramic bowl. My sister watched us with eyes that had grown big beneath her glasses while her mouth was as silent as ever. She’s never been big on talking.

“You don’t know what you want,” said Mom. 

“I know I don’t want to join the army during a war,” I said. “That seems dangerous.”

“You won’t have to join until you turn eighteen,” said Mom. “Maybe the war will be over by then.”

I didn’t know a lot about the conflict in Israel. I didn’t know whether it had the potential to wrap up in the next few years. But what I did know gave me the impression that was unlikely. 

“Do you really want to bet my life on that?” I asked. Mom started crying. She didn’t move the salad bowl, and her tears smothered the lettuce like ranch dressing. I heard the baseball game click off and Dad walked into the kitchen.

“What did you do?” he scolded. “You’ve made your mother cry.” 

My sister was in the room too, but there was no question which one of us he was speaking to. Dad didn’t have to see what had happened to know whose fault it was.

“I just told her that I don’t want to move to Israel,” I said.

“You didn’t just tell me that,” said Mom. 

Dinner was tense and mostly silent. Dad was the only one who hadn’t seen Mom cry into the salad. He took a big bit of lettuce and made a face when he tasted the tears. He swallowed the portion that had already made its way into his mouth as quickly as he could. He then discreetly lowered his salad fork and didn’t raise it for the rest of the meal. I excused myself after I finished my chicken, as I usually did. My sister waited for my parents to excuse her as well, as she usually did.

Mom came into my room a couple of hours later without knocking. She never knocked. I didn’t bother pausing my Xbox as she entered. I just kept wandering around a peaceful meadow. The game I was playing had monsters lurking around every crevice, but I didn’t really feel like facing them at that moment. That felt a little too real, so I just kept frolicking in a virtual meadow.

“We should talk,” said Mom. She walked over to my desk, pulled out the chair and sat. I just kept running around in the virtual meadow. I even caught a butterfly.

“I know you’re nervous about moving. Picking up and going halfway across the world must be scary to a kid,” she said. “But I need you to trust that as your mother, I really know what’s best for you and your sister.”

“But if we go, I’ll have to fight in the war,” I said.

“Military service is something that every Jewish boy and girl in Israel goes through when they grow up,” said Mom. “You’ll be defending our Jewish homeland, the land that God promised us.”

“I don’t believe in God,” I said. 

“You say that because you’re fifteen,” said Mom. “You’ll believe in God again when you get older.”

I thought that seemed unlikely. But there wasn’t much to do other than wait until I got older and see who was right. 

“Well, at least as of right now, I definitely don’t believe in God. I don’t know anything about Israel, and it doesn’t feel like my homeland,” I said. “America feels like my homeland. But I wouldn’t even fight a war to defend America, so I definitely don’t see why you want to sign me up to fight for Israel.”

“You’re focusing too much on the military service part,” said Mom. “There’s so much more to Israel than that. We’ll be returning to the land of our ancestors. For the first time in your life, you’ll be in a primarily Jewish community. You finally won’t be on the outside looking in.”

“I think I’ll be on the outside looking in wherever I go,” I said honestly. “And I’m ok with that.”

“Well, I’m your mother. Believe it or not, I know more than you do.”

“What does Dad think about moving to Israel?” I asked.

“I’m still working on your father,” said Mom. “But he’ll come around. In his heart, he must know what’s best for all of us.”

Mom got up and left my room. There wasn’t any room for further discussion. I played video games until I fell asleep, carefully avoiding any battles or conflicts that couldn’t be solved with the right dialogue options. 

That was weeks ago. The weekly D&D sessions with my friends give me panic attacks that I try my best to hide whenever it’s my turn to reach for the dice bag. I don’t play violent video games anymore because I can’t enjoy them. My dreams are filled with bullets and explosions and my own blood spilling over hot sand. But there’s nothing I can do, because Mom wants us to move to Israel.

The Podophile

I didn’t want to admit that I found her feet the most attractive part of her, that I had been drawn to her from the outset by the promise that the high-heeled red pumps she had on encased a pair of perfectly high-arched, daintily-toed dogs. And so it was. But is it necessary to tell a paramour about such a fetish or kink—is it a kink? I don’t know but I can’t stand being without her. I truly can’t stand it. And by that I mean I can’t stand to be away from her feet. 

When I see her after any prolonged chunk of time, I am beside myself, short of breath, almost on the point of urination. But in all honesty, her face, which is an ordinary face, neither beautiful nor ugly, neither here nor there, and her body, sturdy if not perfectly proportioned, and her personality, neither scintillating nor grating—these elements of her person do not keep me enthralled. No. It’s her feet. 

For me her perfect feet represent an idealization of womanhood, and an idealization of all that makes me happy to be alive and happy to be a man. Would I admire them—worship is too strong—as much were I a woman? Perhaps. Depending on my persuasion. My current persuasion battles efforts to play it cool with the feet. Don’t make too much of them, I have to remind myself. Don’t gawk at them. Don’t tell her it’s okay to go barefoot in your apartment, that indeed you’d prefer it if she would, floor’s clean. She’s no dummy. And don’t hold them when you’re making love. It can get weird. She said it was weird one night when we had a particularly fervid session. 

She said, “Why do you keep holding my feet, man? It’s creeping me out.” 

I let go of her feet and spent the rest of the night with my face in my hands. Where do we go from here? I don’t know. What do you do when you find what you think you’ve been looking for all your adult life? Does it all come down to feet, for me? Is that pathetic? Do I need help? I don’t know if I need help. 

“Hi honey,” I say one night when I drop by her place for a visit. I’ve brought Chinese food for us in the little white cartons you see in movies but which actually don’t exist in these parts. 

“Isn’t that sweet,” she says, smooching me and grabbing the cartons. 

I notice with a rush of blood to my head that she’s barefoot. We sit at her kitchen island and eat with chopsticks. I’m pretty good with mine. She struggles a little and finally drops the sticks and fetches a fresh fork. 

“Do me a solid,” I say. 

“Anything dear,” she says. 

“Should I take you at your word?” I say. 

She pauses her fork and tilts her head. “What is it?‘ she says. 

“Would you put your feet up on the island while we eat?” I ask. 

She furls her brow and drops the fork. “What?” she says. 

“I, um, was joking,” I say. 

“How is that a joke?‘ she says. 

“Never mind,” I say. 

But with great regret and remorse I realize that nothing will be the same after this, nothing.   

I Am Become Kilo

“pan·psy·chism  (păn-sī-kĭz’əm)

n.

The view that all matter has consciousness.”

–The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Online

Being a coca leaf is easy. My worries are few, and loneliness cannot exist when one has many other leaves living on the same branch with them. My thoughts are simple, consisting of: Sunlight…then Water, on something like an infinite loop. But then one day a boy approaches my branch, and everything changes. The boy wears a straw hat and a yellow and black striped silk shirt that makes him look like a giant bee. Around his hand he wears a coarse band of something like burlap. He does this, I learn, so that he can rip meand my brothers and sisters from the branch. Then he tosses us into a basket made of frayed straw while I scream in a way that reaches his ears as silence. 

At this point, I still think of sunlight and rain, but it’s not like before, where I awaited them and celebrated them when they arrived. Instead I’m pining for them, missing them, crying for them, as are my brothers and sisters. We rustle around together, whoosh and crinkle. We can feel the sere brown blotches, death encroaching on the desiccated flesh of our leaves. 

We are carried uphill, into a shadowy part of the jungle protected with a triple canopy of dark green leaves. The boy moves toward a log hut with a thatched straw roof. He walks past a shaggy yellow-coated dog, piebald with mange, that spends all its time leaned back on its hind legs, scratching a rash on its hide.

Farther up the hill, next to the hut, is a barrel that has been sliced in half, filled with collected rainwater. A naked bronze-skinned girl stands there bathing, the waterline even with the tines of her thin ribs, diaphragm swelling to raise her breasts with milk buds like brown rubber. The water she tosses over her black hair is murky with scummed film dissolving in greasy bubbles from the chunk of soap. The oily lather takes on all the colors of the rainbow, turning her barrelful of water into a glowing magical font.  

She throws more water on her wet hair, and the beads cascade down her back, moving in the runnel of her spine’s slight curve like fattened raindrops. 

The boy who ripped me and the other leaves from the trees watches the girl some more, his mouth open enough to catch horseflies. Finally, the girl’s protector (or owner) speaks up:

“Keep looking at my sister like that and I’ll poke your eyes out of your big head.” 

This man wears a planter’s hat and smokes a maize cob pipe, and stands beneath the overhang of a thatch-roofed hut. This man is like a sturdy tree next to the sapling burdened with his bag of coca leaves. The boy—like all creatures—wants to pollinate, but knows he must either grow larger first, or find another flower besides this one potted inside in the waterlogged drum. To fight for this particular flower might cost him dearly.

Besides, right now he needs his own food: pesos. He gets a pile of them in exchange for me and my brothers and sister, then disappears with his money. The man puts us next to other baskets that eventually get picked up by a white pickup truck covered with a coat of rust. 

***

We’re dumped from the dark confines of the burlap bag into a square pen like where the humans slop their hogs. A man holds a tool ringed with blades like a mouth filled with sharp teeth, wearing green hip-wader boots and a matching oilskin apron. He walks into the pen with us and starts the motor on his metal-toothed monster, which spits out fetid, blearing exhaust. 

The blades begin to whap, and we dance in the downwash of the sharply spinning points.

The man holds the blade-toothed tool over us, walking slowly and in straight lines, slicing us into shredded piles of yellowish-green matter. I can hear moans, and tiny pieces of what I once was shred into insignificant chips that comingle with the other fragments. The pain is like having the veins of your leaves devoured by hungry fire ants.

Then the man exits the pen, and other younger men come in wearing heavy rubber boots. They stomp and squish and our screaming fragments congeal into slurry that sloshes like grapes becoming wine.  

They pour poisons on us that sting and blear, and burn. They cannot hear us cough and we hear nothing over the sound of our own heaving, an agonized choir harmonizing into a single lament.   

Eventually, after all of the stomping and cutting and pouring, I and the shreds of my friends are stirred and pounded until we become one thick wedge. Like a block of cheese.

The largest man—face pitted with scars and nicked with divots from knife fights—holds us in his hand and smiles. His teeth are yellow and rotted, like weevil-plagued seed maize.

His smile doesn’t last long, though, for another man breaks through the thickets of palm trees and approaches him.

“You were light last time.” This other man wears a khaki uniform and a black hat with a stiff brim with a little golden symbol pinned on it. He is flanked by two other men with similar hats and uniforms, but they have no gold bar to boast. “I’ll take that.”

The soldier holds out his hand, while the two smaller men behind him choke up on their shooting sticks. They try to look tall and calm, but they squirm and their eyes dart nervously around. 

The ugly man starts to smile again, then looks back toward the men behind him, the ones in rubber boots. These smaller men don’t look scared, even though they only have the tool with its blades like metal petals on a giant silver flower.

“Okay,” the man with bad teeth says, still smiling. But then the smile drops from his face and he shouts in loud Spanish, “Tu desayuna está aquí, mi negrita!” His voice echoes, and then there is the metallic ting of a cage door springing open. 

The trees rustle, whispering, and something emerges from the jungle. It is a jet-black beast, its coat shining like polished onyx, each muscle flexing as its haunches shift. It springs forward on four legs, green eyes glowing like unholy jade and teeth brandished like curved ivory-white daggers. 

The beast snarls, and its green eyes turn a sickly yellow, the jaundiced jewels burning in its black skull. It leans back on its haunches, ready to pounce, perhaps waiting for the right word, or waiting for the soldiers to run. 

The golden soldier gulps, pretending he can’t hear the drumbeat of his heart pounding in his temples. His trembling right hand drifts to his leather belt. He tickles the loopholes with shaky fingers, eyes flitting between Ugly Teeth and the beast stalking forward. The ugly-toothed man warns the golden soldier to stop tickling his belt. One of the lesser soldiers behind his leader is already half-turned, the whites of his eyes wide, ready to disappear into the dark forest. The other soldier flanking the golden man doesn’t flinch, though sweat spills in profuse sheets from beneath the bucket brim of his boonie hat.

At last the pantera launches itself for the golden soldier, with a snarl that sends the birds in the trees flying toward the clear blue sky.

The golden soldier shrieks, draws his small handheld boomer from his belt, but it’s too late. The panther pushes him to the ground. Its black claws are so sharp that they slice him without trying, shredding his brown khaki shirt and tearing through the skin beneath the cloth. His flesh splits easily, ribboning, unfurling in thick bloody strips like parchment, greased with exposed fat and muscle.  

Then there is a rip like rending burlap, only instead of a brown dust cloud like from sackcloth, a red mist rises into the air. 

The man shrieks. One of the soldiers behind him, shaking, turns and disappears into the trees. The other soldier, his rifle rattling in his hands, looks from the panther chewing the golden soldier toward the dark woods. He chooses the dark woods.

The panther sinks its teeth into the poor man’s skull, cracking it like a nut. 

A splatter of the screaming soldier’s blood hits us, and soaks into the block of strange cheese that we have become.

The blood doesn’t taste like rainwater, but it feeds me. 

***

We’re cocooned in the wicker basket, placed snug in the flatbed of a fruit truck, and hidden beneath large piles of pineapples. The spiky-plated skin of the fruits prickles against the basket, but I don’t fear the sting. Nothing could ever scare me after seeing the panther crack the screaming soldier’s skull like a coconut, nor sting like the blades on the weedwhacker.

And even when we are dragged against a cheese grater and stung with chemicals that burn, it doesn’t really hurt. I’m so tired of being anything besides a coca leaf that I let them do whatever they want, without caring. 

I drift off into a lifeless state, until, after a while, I have no choice but to sense again, as we have changed form and location once more. 

Now we are compacted together into a yellowish-white brick, flying in the belly of a giant metal bird, stacked as one stone in a pyramid among other such bricks. Have we been swallowed, maybe eaten up by a condor vulture with black angel wings? I wait to be digested, to disappear in a bath of stomach acids, hoping, that unlike the other acids, these ones will dissolve me forever rather than just burning.

Then I hear a voice belonging to a man. It’s gruff, speaks slowly, in a language I’ve never heard before. The voice is mellow, sonorous but deep, like birdsong mixed with a bullfrog’s mating call. This is a voice that can calm the fears of others. He sings as he flies, steering the bird from within its metallic braincase. And he sings the same songs so many times and in so many variations (whistling, humming, improvising his own usually-dirty words) that I learn the melodies and lyrics.

By the time the man lands on a private island that’s mostly palms and white stone buildings, I know Smuggler’s Blues and Treetop Flyer by heart. I hum them to myself without cease, using song to ease the pain and pass the time, just as humans did when laboring in the field under the sun. But then the rest of the grains in the kilo groan, having had enough, begging me to stop. 

So I cease my offkey singing, sparing them. 

We disappear into a velvety blackness, and I can feel us rollicking along in a new way. We are not gliding through the air in the man-bird, nor are we bumping along the road in the flatbed that farts its noxious gas.

Instead, we float, bobbing up and down, and as I listen, I hear the hiss of water.

Maybe, I think, we will drink water again. It has been so long since I have tasted the pure rainwater.

El agua nos arruinará, idiota, another part of the kilo says. It is the first time I have been called an idiot, and it hurts. But I fear the other part is right, that we will melt if hit with the water that I can hear sloshing around.

What’s more, this water is spiced with something that bites with an acrid spite, like the caustic acids poured over us in previous stages of this process. The water, I realize, is filled with salt, and parts in a wake of crystalline waves as the boat we’re in cuts a path toward the shoreline.

***

We pupate from the velvet-lined interior of an alligator-hide suitcase. I can see and breathe again, but going from total darkness to such brightness is almost like going blind. 

The hotel room has white walls, white leather sofas and chairs, and a balcony with a glass door letting in sunlight. It’s so bright in fact that the man and woman in the room wear their sunglasses just to protect their eyes.

For a while they ignore us. Then the man undoes the buttons of his shirt covered in palm trees at sunset, and yanks a small ivory-handled stick from a leather pouch on his belt. He presses a button that goes flick and a shining blade appears. 

He comes over to the pile of kilos, and brings his knife down. It looks like the point is going to get jammed into my bag. But he changes his mind at the last second and stabs the bag next to ours. I hear a thousand tiny grams screaming in unison, while he hears nothing but the pumping of blood in his veins, and its throbbing in his temples. Then he brings the sharp tip of the blade up to the two holes above his mouth and sniffs! hard once.

The woman speaks in Spanish, a language I have not heard for some time. “Don’t do too much of that shit.”

“Shut up, bitch,” he says.

I wait for her to get angry, but instead she just comes to him where he hovers over the suitcase. Her blue silken robe is open, her milk buds visible, hardened by the sea salt breeze and her hunger for us.

He sticks the knife back into the screaming bag and holds the sharp silver point out to her. The pile is like a peace offering. She makes the snort! sound and her face does a funny little twitch. Then both their hearts beat hard as war drums, and in the same kind of synchronized martial fury. The man forgets about us for a brief time, and we all feel relief as his rage flows elsewhere. 

Now he stabs his knife hard into the table covered in a white linen cloth where shells of devoured crustaceans and wineglasses sit on silver platters. 

He and the woman move over to the bed, and the smell of their strange pollination is in the air. It’s a feverous hothouse honey, a mating ritual involving no brown midges or buzzing bees or windblown spore. Just the man grunting and the woman moaning, a thrust and counterthrust as violent as his knife plunging into the table. They continue to insult each other, cursing, hating each other even in the throes of their passion that makes their racing hearts pound so that both might explode.

Then they do something that makes no sense to us, or any other species. They decouple at the moment where the miracle might pass between them, and their two bodies might make a third through the fertilization of the female’s loamy soil.

The man spills his pearlescent drops of life upon the woman’s tanned belly. She isn’t confused, like us, by this precious rain of life with no receptacle except the sloped gourd of her stomach. Rather she is angry that some of his seed has spilled onto her blue silk kimono. She curses him in Spanish fouler than any I have ever heard (and I have been around poor men who slave in the sun twelve hours a day.) 

The man does the smart thing and backs away from a potential fight with this mad two-legged leopardess. Unfortunately, when he flees her, he runs back toward us, who can hear the cardiac-clenched screams of his heart with its choked arteries. If she doesn’t kill him now, we will soon. 

The fleshy stamen on his body stands up, pointing like a blade, and I wonder if he is going to stab a bag with it. Instead he clutches the ivory handle of his knife, grits his teeth, and pulls the weapon free from the table’s groaning wood, making the lobster shells shake and tremble.

He looks at the bag he’s already sliced open, and I can feel his thoughts, smell them in the beads of his sweat. He wants to snort more, but is afraid not only of the crazy woman, but of other crazy men, all made crazier by coca and the money it brings.

He fights the desire to snort more, but then a wave of chills hits him hard, and nausea makes him quake. The sickness sends tremors through him, and settles over his body like a dark cloud. That this cloud won’t leave him—or even worse, that it might grow bigger—scares him more than the thought of the crazy men, or another argument with the woman. And the only way to get the cloud to lift is to snort again. 

He sticks the tip of the blade back into the bag, slowly. When he brings it up to his nose, he breathes gently. The powder sneaks inside his nostrils, dissolving after a sniff into membranes already slick with blood and mucus.

“You’re not taking another toot, are you?”

“Just a bump,” he assures her.

Having been weighed, cut, processed, reduced, mixed with burning quinine and milky baby powder, I have learned a bit about the humans and their weights and measures. And I know that the pull he took, however discreet, was not “just a bump.” His body knows it, too, and responds accordingly. His face twitches several times like the spasming, seizing muscle of a hunted animal that has been running too long. His eyes nictitate like those of a tree lizard. He grinds his jaw so that we can hear the scream of his teeth cracking their enamel, sanding the grains into a powder fine as us. And still he cannot stop.

The cocaine grains laugh around me, in concert, a wicked choir, reveling in their revenge. The humans who caused them to be torn from the tree have now been made slaves of the lowest kind.

The cocaine grains stop laughing as the man comes down again with a silver spoon. A spoon should be less scary than a knife, but this time it isn’t, because this spoon is going to separate us from one-another. Once more, I’ll have to get used to the rhythms of a new me. Not only that, but I’m going to be further mixed with chemicals. And to be diluted is to both be deceived and become deceptive, both lie and liar.  

The man touches me as he mixes and stirs. The back of his hand crawls with black, spidery hairs. On his wrist is a watch, glaciated with living ice, diamond bezels and shiny pinkish gold that matches the tint of his smoked-rose sunglasses.

I can feel his dreams as he stirs and mixes. He’s so deep in his fevered reverie that he doesn’t even hear the jibe lobbed by the señorita on the bed behind him. She says, We’re selling yay, not trying to make their linens whiter. But he just keeps mixing, adding more bleach to cover what he snorted, until the cocaine smells stronger of chlorine than this hotel’s swimming pool. 

He is lost in a vision of himself as the helmsman of a yacht cutting through blue water so clear he can see shadow bands on the sandy seafloor. And instead of just the golden cross around his neck, he imagines himself with a giant bejeweled medallion shaped like a ship’s anchor draped over his potbelly. Rather than one woman who argues with him and makes him feel small, he is surrounded by three women in white bikinis who make him feel big. They dote on him, pouring champagne into his glass that overflows and spills onto the ship’s spotless white deck.

When he is finished mixing and stirring, he wraps me in plastic and sets me, along with four other kilos, in a blue Adidas gym bag.

I hear the flick of the zipper, a quick zink! as it’s being pulled closed. Then I am back in the darkness I’ve learned to love, so different from the sun I once knew. 

***

The light returns, but it is not the sun. It’s the sick shine of fluorescence, designed by humans to torture other humans.

The man before me deals with the pain caused by the harsh light and the pain caused by everything else in the only way humans know how. He splits a bag and snorts. But he is more civil than any other human I’ve ever seen, and instead of using a knife, he pierces the Saran wrap with a little plastic straw.  

Pieces of me disappear up his nose. Then he reaches a finger inside the bag, runs the digit through the powder, and sticks his finger in his mouth, as if brushing his teeth and gums. But that one taste isn’t enough. And he returns, greedily snorting like an anteater I once saw who couldn’t stop licking fire ants from a log.

This man, unlike the last one, is still wearing all his work clothes, a white shirt and a red-striped tie, with brown khaki pants. We are in an office, with a lamp, a computer, a shelfful of books, and a desk made of polished wood hewn from a long-dead tree.  

The door to his office opens. It is also made of wood but the rest of the office is made of glass panes and steel beams. And when this other man comes in and slams the door, the glass and steel rattle.

The loud sound makes Numb Man’s heart stutter. 

“You think I’m paying three large a zone for laundry detergent?” the man who slammed the door says. 

“The fuck you talking about?” Numb Man is trying not to sound scared, but I can hear his heart thundering like a terremoto.

“I’m talking about you stepping on those ounces, making them twenty-twos instead of twenty-eights. And putting the rest up your nose.” The man pauses, looks at Numb Man. “And in your mouth, or are you going to tell me you come to this car dealership at two a.m. to eat powdered donuts?”

“I came here to give you your blow.”

“I’ll take it,” the other man says, “and that excess you’ve been stashing behind the acoustical drop tile up there in the ceiling.”

Angry Man pulls out a gun, a pistol like the one the golden soldier drew when trying to stop the panther. No way can Numb Man get the drop on Angry Man now. But Numb Man has us rushing through his bloodstream, bursting blood vessels in his nose, filling him with thoughts of his own invincibility. And he draws his gun.  

Both men shoot and fire flashes. Smoke fills the air. The bulb on the desk lamp shatters, making everything darker, making our grains stand out even whiter, phosphorescent in the night. Numb Man is face down on the desk, an amoeba-shaped pool of purple blood expanding around him, staining his white shirt a dark wine color.

Angry Man is no longer the Angry Man. He is the Hurt Man, bleeding, a flower pulled from the ground with perhaps enough water left in its roots to survive a day, if it is strong. He puts us back in the blue Adidas gym bag. Some of us spills out onto the desk, mixing with the blood. 

The cocaine granules sigh as they taste the lifeforce of the Numb Man. It took us a while to become accustomed to the taste of human blood. Now we have become as addicted to their blood as they have to our life. 

All life, I realize as the blood enters me, is lived at the expense of other life. Even as plants we once lived at the expense of the sun burning itself black to fuse hydrogen into helium, via a bloodsucking called photosynthesis. 

The Hurt Man groans, ignoring the leaking powder because his blood is leaking even faster. Then there is a sound, a call like a bird of prey crying from the depths of its syrinx.

This sound is followed by light as magic as the plumage of the rarest rara avis. It is blue and red, red and blue, pulsing in consistent strobes to counterpoint the syrinx shriek. I think the light is beautiful, yet Hurt Man is not happy to see it. Hurt Man raises his gun again, but he is too weak to do much more than threaten the humans outside, who are more powerful than he. 

There is more fire, and smoke, and Hurt Man becomes, like Numb Man, a dead man. 

I resolve myself to being taken by this next group of men, and mixed and cut and adulterated until my soul is as small as that of Numb Man. But that’s not what happens. Instead, we are carried from the office, seized, in the words of a man with brown eyes and a brown mustache like a caterpillar crawling across his upper lip. He brings us to his car with its bird syrinx and the plumes of strobing light. 

He takes us to a room with a grillwork door made of cold steel, the walls of exposed and crumbling ancient brick. 

In this room are many shelves. On the shelves are other things that have made their own treks here from disparate places, sitting in corrugated cardboard boxes, open-faced coffins. In the boxes are jewels, like the ones that once shined on the drug dealer’s wristwatch, and guns like the ones men use when they stop using words. The jewels have stories, of the necks of dying men from which they were snatched. The guns tell their own tales, of being gripped in hands slick with fear sweat, and the exchange of shots leaving men dead and smoke rising high in clouds. 

Finally I tune out their voices, and let them murmur and boast through the nights we spend in the small room under the harsh lights. I should be sad, because my new cardboard home is much less comfortable than an alligator-skinned suitcase or even a silk-lined gym bag. And I should be sad because I am fed my least favorite light, fluorescence, a cold substitute for the warmth of the Colombian sun I once knew.

But a woman comes by, wearing rubber gloves and holding a pen in her hand, and she affixes a little tag to my box. Someone makes a joke about toe tags, but I have not been here long enough to understand that. And when I look down to see what the woman has written, I smile. For she has finally given me a name, a weight, an identity.  

I am cocaine, twenty-four point three grams, with traces of b-type and o-pos blood smattered through me, according to a serological reagent test. The blood types match those of the Numb Man in the office and the golden soldier who had his head chewed open by the panther.

The woman turns out the light before leaving, and we left in darkness. I sing the songs the white-bearded pilot once sang. None of the other inmates, the jewels and guns in boxes, listen to me. They are too busy with their braggart gossip to heed my ballads about flying through treetops or getting the smuggler’s blues.   

I figure that this will be the end of my story, but I am wrong.

For one day a man comes into the evidence locker and flips the light switch. And as he peers into my box, I get a good look at him. It’s the one with the brown eyes and brown caterpillar mustache. His eyes are now strained, weak, their dark resolve gone watery, as if he were about to cry. As if he regretted what he was about to do but could not stop himself. 

I smile as he pulls me out of the box, because I can see now that my story is not yet done. And I know that, if he does not snort me out of existence, there is a good chance that I will taste his blood. And, if I’m lucky, the blood of another human or two, before the last of my grains are gone, snorted up some nose or smoked into some burning lungs.

It Takes a Perv

I first met Dolores when she answered my personals ad in a San Francisco weekly newspaper. My headline was, “Submissive Man, Calling All Dominatrixes!” Dolores was a middle-aged woman who specialized in spanking and fucking men with a strap-on dildo. She told me on our first phone call that she’d been a single mom, had raised three sons and two daughters to adulthood, and now that the kids had all fled the nest, she’d been using the privacy of her home as a means to earn some extra cash. She said she’d not participated socially in the San Francisco s/m scene, but she had plenty of experience giving real spankings, and the dildoing was something she’d fantasized about and wanted to try ever since she’d seen a video of a woman fucking a man in the ass.

“I really am a disciplinarian. I don’t have to play at it,” she said, closing the deal for me. We made a date for the following day. “Bring me a strap-on rig and a hundred dollars,” she added before we hung up.

“Yes ma’am,” I replied.

I went to Good Vibrations, a lesbian co-op that sold sex toys on Mission St., and bought an adjustable leather harness and a small dildo. I was at Dolores’s house out in the Sunset District at 1:00 p.m. sharp the next afternoon. Dolores was a big-boned, buxom woman wearing a red, form-fitting dress that displayed a generous amount of bulging cleavage. She held out her hand and without a word I put the C-note in it. She ushered me into her kitchen and I marveled at the size and shape of her ass as she bent over, opened the dishwasher and pulled out a big black dildo. “It’s silicon and dishwasher safe,” she said. She then took a large spanking paddle from a hook on the wall and led the way down to her basement. 

“Let’s see the harness you brought,” she said. I removed it from the plastic bag and handed it to her as she gave me her dildo and paddle to hold. Stepping into the harness, she pulled her dress up over her waist and tightened the straps. “Snug,” she said, looking pleased. I handed the big black dildo back to her and she inserted it through the metal ring in the front panel of the harness. Gripping the base of the dildo’s thick shaft, she gave it a shake that made its massive head bob up and down in intimidating fashion.

Stepping out of her dress entirely, she stood before me then, cutting an imposing figure in her black lacy bra and panties.

“Undress and hug the pole,” she ordered, referring to the weight-bearing column that had been padded with a full-length body pillow. She used a length of rope to tie my wrists round the pole in front of me, wrapping the rope around me several times before it knotting it tightly round my ankles. She then started paddling my ass in a slow, steady rhythm, each lick slightly harder than the last. Before I knew it, I was hollering, then screaming in pain. 

“I’m going to keep paddling you until you stop making a fuss,” she scolded. “This basement is soundproofed but my ears aren’t.”

It took a couple of minutes and a dozen more smacks before I was able to quiet down, and true to her word she untied me. I slid down the pole onto my knees.

“That’s right, now get on all fours for me.”

I did as instructed as she pulled the little dildo I’d brought, thinking that’s what she’d fuck me with, and put it in my mouth. I looked up to see her squeeze just a few drops of lube onto the head of her giant dildo. Moving behind me, she squatted down low enough to touch my asshole with it and slowly buried it in to the hilt. She kept me stuffed like that for a few moments before starting in with long, sure strokes that filled my gut and tickled my prostate. It wasn’t long before I exploded and she withdrew completely.

I had to grab the pole to pull myself back upright and get dressed. It was a struggle climbing back up the basement stairs. 

“You behave yourself, boy,” she said as she let me out her front door.

“I’d like to come back when I’m able,” I said.

She smiled and nodded her assent.

I never got that second session, but two days later I got something much more painful when I read an article in the Chronicle that Dolores Johnson had been found tied to a pole in her basement, beaten to death with a wooden paddle. Her daughter had been unable to contact her and when she went to investigate, she made the grisly discovery and called the police. A homicide investigation was underway and police requested anyone who’d seen the victim recently to call the homicide tip line.

I thought about going in and telling my story but I was afraid they’d pin it on me, a likely pervert. If I’d had money for a good criminal defense attorney to accompany me, I’d have gone in, but my dominatrix habit had a habit of eating up my discretionary cash, so I sat tight on my sore ass instead. When no cops had called by the end of the week, I started to relax.

My sore ass had healed up enough that I’d begun craving another dominatrix session, even more than usual, as that was my way of dealing with stress. I booked one with Tasha the Thrasher, sad that it couldn’t be with Dolores. Arriving at her home at the appointed time, she greeted me at the door and led me to a little cottage out back.

Once inside, she gave me her specialty, an over the knee spanking with a big wooden hairbrush. After I’d had enough, I pulled my pants back up over my red, smarting ass, and she led me back out through the door.

“I love the gardening you’ve done,” I said, admiring the flowers planted outside. “Do you mind if I linger a while?”

“Sure, enjoy,” she said, leaving me to it.

Surrounding the cottage were a variety of colorful flowers, daffodils and tulips mostly. Circling round behind the cottage, I noticed some fresh footprints and a daffodil crushed into the dirt outside the window. Had someone been spying on our little play session?

As I drove back across the Golden Gate Bridge, I spotted a red Honda Civic with dark windows that had been following behind me for a while. At first I thought I was only being paranoid, but even as I took the exit into San Francisco and made a series of random turns, I just couldn’t seem to shake it. I got the license plate number memorized and made a U-turn at the next intersection, running the light but losing my tail in the process. On my way back home, I called Tasha on my cell and left her a voicemail explaining what had just happened.

I had no way of tracing a California license plate, so I looked for nearly half an hour before I found one of the few remaining payphones in the city from which I anonymously gave the police tip line a call. I gave them the license plate number and told them to check it for a possible suspect in the recent case of the woman murdered in the Sunset District.

I needed a drink so I went to an AA meeting, specifically one for alcoholics who were also into s/m that I’d attended frequently enough to know some of the regulars there. I noticed that Lady LaRue, an organizer of the Domme Guild, was present in attendance. I approached her afterwards and unburdened myself of my secrets. She got the license plate number I’d given the cops and thanked me, reassuring me that she’d keep my info confidential. 

I didn’t book any more dominatrix sessions that week. I went back to another s/m AA meeting where I saw Mistress LaRue again. She said the license plate I’d given her had been stolen the day before I’d seen it. She’d talked with Mistress Tasha about her security, and Tasha assured her she kept a pistol handy and hadn’t seen anybody lurking around.

The next afternoon Tasha was taking a walk around Lake Merrit after her morning spanking session when she was killed by a kamikaze drone attack. This got the local, state, and federal investigators involved as well as a pack of journalists and bloggers. The San Francisco homicide detail located Tasha’s list of submissive clients on her laptop and started checking their police records, and to see if any had a background that lent itself to drone warfare. The Feds used some terrorist investigators to see what they could determine about the flight path of the drone. Neither approach yielded a good suspect.

I had an idea that the two dominatrix murders weren’t necessarily the result of a personal revenge motive but might stem from a hate-group on the increasingly active political fringe. I decided to investigate the Incels in San Francisco after I read a report on domestic terror groups that included them and showed a timeline of several violent, sometimes fatal attacks Incels had committed against women. Some online searches located men who identified as Incels in the Bay Area but no organizations. I created an Incel persona online and became active in chat rooms. I attended an Incel meeting at a dive bar on the edge of the Tenderloin District that I was told about by one of my new online “friends.” They’d picked the particular bar we met at, The Goats Head, because the only women who came in were streetwalkers taking a break from the pavement on a barstool where they might happen to find a guy who’d be their next trick.

“All women are whores, at least these bitches don’t have any pretensions about it,” one of my companions offered. 

“I won’t pay for what should be rightfully mine,” another one added.

“I wish I had all the money I’ve spent on dominatrixes,” I said, trying to sound like the alcohol had affected me more than it had.

“You pay women to mistreat you when they mistreat us for free every day?” one Incel hissed at me.

“I know, but it’s always turned me on,” I said.

“Taking a rod to those alpha bitches would be my turn-on,” he replied, glaring at me. 

“Believe me, I’ve thought about turning the tables on them,” I said, “If I just knew how to do it without getting caught up in the feminazi legal system.”

“It appears somebody has,” he said. I gave him a puzzled, I’m interested to hear more sort of look, and took a long swig of my beer.

Suddenly he tightened up and looked the other way.

“The drone murder in Oakland by the lake, she was an alpha whore,” our other companion said. “So was the bitch tied to the pole in her basement a couple weeks ago.”

Another two Incels they knew walked in and headed for our booth. One of them, a stocky blonde guy caught the tail end of that last remark of our conversation. At the moment he laid eyes on me, he abruptly turned around and left. A couple minutes later the guy who’d been talking about the two murders took a call on his cell, looked freaked out, and said he had an emergency and had to go. I stayed a while, had another beer and some less pointed discussion on the sad state of sexual affairs our kind was heir to now that patriarchy was overrun.

When I got in my car and left, it wasn’t long before I noticed the red Honda Civic following me yet again, this time with a different license plate. I strongly suspected it wasn’t because he’d taken off the stolen one and put his own plate back on his car, but I wrote it down anyway. I had a strong hunch that the recent attacks had been the work of an Incel, quite possibly this guy who’d been following me. 

I saw Mistress LaRue at the s/m AA meeting that evening and gave her the new license number and an update on my talks with the local Incels.

“We need to ID the guy tailing me,” I said.

“I’ll follow you in my car, from a distance, and if this dude starts following you again, we’ll box him in and confront him. We’ll get his photo.”

“He could be dangerous,” I said.

“That’s why we’ve got to get him,” she said. “I know just who to get to ride shotgun with me.”

After the meeting, I saw Mistress LaRue and Bam-Bam Becky Riley, one of the top women in MMA, getting into LaRue’s car. I got in my own car and drove off, letting them follow me a few cars back as I headed in the direction of my apartment.

Soon enough, the red Honda Civic popped up in my rear view mirror.

I started looking for a good opportunity to stop in front of him where he couldn’t get around me.  Eventually I turned onto a narrow lane with cars parked on both sides of the street. When I saw LaRue’s car approach behind him, I slowed down until he was closing in and then I stopped at such an angle as to form a blockade. The red Honda Civic came to a stop and LaRue pulled up fast behind him, she and Bam-Bam getting out of their car as I got out of mine.

“Why have you been following me?” I shouted, getting his attention as Bam-Bam darted in from behind, yoking his neck through the window. Meanwhile, LaRue had pepper spray pointed at his eyes that were bugging out of his head from Bam-Bam’s chokehold.

“You can’t…” he gasped as LaRue pulled the door open and Bam-Bam jerked him out of the car so hard he sprawled out across the pavement. Gasping and speechless, the dude looked like he was about to shit his pants.

I reached into his pocket, pulled out his wallet and took a picture of his California drivers license and a couple more of his face and car. LaRue motioned with her head that we should leave, which we did, fast. Left the guy lying there in a puddle of piss.

The suspect was a 28-year-old named Carl Wilson who had been dishonorably discharged from the Air Force for sexual abuse of a woman under his command. After his arrest, he was booked and SFPD, Homeland Defense, and Air Force Intelligence all had questioned him thoroughly before dawn. Apparently, he’d sourced his military-grade drones on the dark web, buying them with crypto.

A day later, the police called to inform me that his phone records showed he’d called my personals ad seeking new women to whip my ass. It was then that I remembered a woman with a husky-sounding voice who’d responded. We’d set up a date for them to pay me a house call, but no one had ever shown up. It wasn’t long after that I’d got the call from Dolores.

The detectives concluded that Wilson had tried using me to bird-dog dominatrixes, hoping to frame me for his murders. Ultimately he confessed to make a deal and avoid the death penalty, giving info on other Incels as well.

Mistress LaRue gave me a free domination session the next day, as reward for helping the Domme Guild stop a predator.