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.

Need to Know

I’ve never been married so I had no idea what this guy was going through, but I had been in a ruinous relationship, and I knew there comes a time when ya gotta give it up.  Matt Hagerty wouldn’t, or couldn’t, and he paid an awful price.  

Matt offered a hundred bucks to find his wayward wife, Ellen.  He said she’d been brainwashed by some New Age, doomsday cult.  She’d been gone six months and he was having trouble taking care of Roy and Little Susie.  The police had been no help, and the kids wanted Mom back in the worst way.

A hundred bucks was barely a day’s pay, so I kept the poor slob hanging till he sweetened the pot.  Something about the guy seemed off, and his story was suspect, but I was in no position to turn away a paying client no matter how many red flags flew.  The rent was due, and I couldn’t afford scruples.  He finally forked over five hundred, and I promised something within a week.

Hagerty was oddly reluctant to provide much background, but I pressed, and he finally gave up info on the so-called cult and Ellen’s recent employers, plus some hometown history and her high school yearbook photo.  Not much, but enough to get me started.

First up was the Amrita Ascendant Alliance, the sinister group that had “brainwashed” Ellen Hagerty.  There have been a bunch of cults countrywide, Branch Davidians, Heaven’s Gate, and such, but there hasn’t been much activity in Pittsburgh since solicitation was banned at the airport and the Hare Krishnas faded away.  Not unless you consider Steeler Nation a cult, and I couldn’t see Ellen Hagerty as a rabid football fan.  Still, something had lured her from her allegedly happy home, so off I went.

Matt told me the cult worked out of a storefront in the Strip District, but the address he gave me was occupied by the Sunrise Yoga Studio.  The lithe young woman behind the counter had never heard of the Amrita Ascendant Alliance, and she’d never seen nor heard of Ellen Hagerty.  Puzzled, and a little pissed off, I stopped at a local library and learned that the Alliance was notorious in South Korea for a series of subway disruptions, but it had no presence in the U S of A.  None.  Hagerty had slipped me a red herring to go with the red flags.  But why?

I found a pay phone and called Hagerty’s number, but he didn’t pick up and there was no machine.  “This is why you get the money up front,” I reminded myself.  Also, why it’s best to ask the client a few questions before banking his cash.  Bottom line, I needed more on Matt Hagerty before I followed any farther down his rabbit hole, so I decided to seek the aid of my friend and neighbor, Trudy Bonner.

Trudy and I once worked for the same Spirit-Sucking Insurance Company, until the pinheads in personnel had proposed a career change.  For me.  Trudy maintained a lower profile, despite her hennaed hair and black-lacquered nails, and toiled on for the soulless giant.  Fortunately, she was not above using company resources to run credit checks and track numbers, for me, the Deacon Blues Detective Agency.

Trudy was now my downstairs neighbor in a converted townhome in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood on Pittsburgh’s south side.  The city had set up a “Cultural Trust” in ‘84 to encourage investment, and it was off to the races.  Ten years later the area was on the verge of being overrun by hipster wannabes, but for now, it was still livable.

“Frank, you know there are services that do this stuff,” Trudy complained.  I had caught her on the landing as she was heading out to a class, and she was growing weary with my mooching.

“Trude, you know I can’t afford those services, and I’m not looking for much.  No credit check or anything.  Just stuff that’s laying around in public.”  

Trudy couldn’t stand my whining, so she agreed to run some research, and then ran off to aerobics.  I climbed the flight of stairs to my apartment where I sorted through the day’s mail, and listened to a message from a parole officer named Lou Romero who was looking for my missing client and wanted a call back ASAP.

Anyone else I would have blown off, but Louisa “Lou” Romero was one spicy civil servant.  A fantasy world franchise player I’d met on a case a few months back.  I couldn’t pass up the chance to see her again, so I called her office and found her working late, as usual.  I asked her to dinner, but she claimed serious business to discuss.  She asked me to stop by her office after her last appointment which gave me just enough time to get downtown.

Louisa Romero was a poster child for the American Dream.  First in her family to attend college, she quaintly felt she should pay something forward by performing a public service.  Her office was a shoebox in the old section of the county courthouse, just right for one of those retronauts who actually believed in what they were doing.  I found her behind a big, wooden desk in a room crammed with file cabinets.  She looked up as I entered and the light from the desk lamp caught the slender gold chain around her neck.  I firmly believed that a delicate gold cross dangled in the shadows between her exquisitely rounded breasts.  I yearned for confirmation.

“Mister Rotten, take a seat,” she said with that hint of Hispania she wore like a favored piece of jewelry.  “What can you tell me about Matt Hagerty?”  Her tone suggested that my ache for confirmation would remain unsoothed, at least on this night.

“What makes you think I know anything about Matt Hagerty?”

“He’s missed his last two appointments, so I checked his apartment and found your card.”

“In that case, he’s a client of mine.”

“And just what are you doing for Mr. Hagerty?”

“I’m helping him look for something.”

“Would that ‘something’ be his ex-wife?”

“Ex?  He told me his wife had joined a cult and left him with two small kids.  I thought they were still married.”

“Did you run any kind of background check?” 

“I didn’t know he was on parole.  He paid in cash, and I didn’t ask many questions.”

“Your client just served six months for battering his wife,” she lectured sternly, reducing me to idle speculation about the end of the chain.  “His third offense,” she continued, showing no mercy.  “They are now divorced, and they have no children.”

“I haven’t found her,” I said weakly.  

“He’s gone, Frank,” she said accusingly, and I could tell she wanted him back in the worst way.  “Where did he go?”

“I don’t know.  After her, I guess,” I said, and she stared at me like I’d said something stupid, which I had.  “Hey, I’m sorry.  I’m not his keeper,” I offered lamely.  “What do you expect me to do?”

“Find him and bring him in.  By the end of the day tomorrow.  If not, a warrant will be issued for his arrest.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” I said, and she returned to her work.  “I guess this means we’re not going to dinner”, I concluded as I rose to go.

“Good night, Frank,” she said flatly without looking up.

Damn, she was hot!  But even by my low standards, that had not gone well.  Not only was my client a lying sack of shit, he was also a wife beater and fugitive from justice.  It was embarrassing how little I knew about the guy.  I should have just cut him loose, but I was low on liquidity and in no position to issue any refunds.  So, snoop on, Rotten.

  Early next morning I set out for the Hagertys’ hometown of Bridgeton, WV.  Not exactly “holler” country, but close enough to hear the banjo twang.  I stopped at the town police station and asked to speak with the chief, one Tobias Millard Coleman.  I didn’t expect much, showing up unannounced, but before you could say, “Welcome to Mayberry”, I was sitting across from the big man himself.

“What brings you to Bridgeton, Mister Rotten?” asked the uniformed chief who looked every bit the stereotypical smalltown sheriff – buzz cut, paunch, and squinty, suspicious eyes. Fortunately, he proved to be level-headed and slow to judge.  And helpful.

I explained I was trying to track down a former resident by the name of Matt Hagerty and told him I was working with the Allegheny County parole office, which wasn’t that much of a stretch.  I offered my license and one of Lou Romero’s cards that I had lifted from her desk.

He gave my license a close look and handed it back, then set Lou’s card on his desk and slowly opened up about my wayward client.

“You say he violated his parole?” asked the chief, and I nodded.  “What was he in for?” 

“Simple assault.  He did six months for beating his wife, Ellen.”

“Not too surprising.  I knew Matt Hagerty to be a coward and a bully.  Ellen was a sweet kid, friend of my daughter’s.  I was sad to see her get mixed up with him.”

“What kind of trouble was he into here?

“He raised some hell in high school, knocking over mailboxes, fighting at football games, that sort of thing.  Nothing too serious.  But after he graduated, I strongly suspected he was dealing drugs.  Meth is a real problem in these parts, and it was working its way into town.  I thought I had him dead to rights a few years back, but he wriggled off the hook.  He and Ellen left town shortly thereafter.”

“You think he might head back here now that he’s wanted in Pittsburgh?”

“Not likely.  He burned a lot of bridges.  This is a small town and people talk.  If he was in the area, I expect I’d hear about it.”

I thanked the chief for his help, and he promised to call Lou if he heard anything.

“I’d watch yourself, young man,” the chief advised as I made my way to the door.  “He can be unpleasant if he doesn’t get what he wants.”

Apparently, Hagerty had not left his heart in Bridgeton, and my road trip was looking like a dead end, but I reminded myself I had been hired to find Ellen Hagerty, not Matt.  And I remembered that Ellen had worked waiting tables, so I took a short walk down Main Street to the Hometown Diner where I settled on a stool and ordered a late breakfast.

I was expecting a high degree of small-town suspicion, but the young waitress was surprisingly friendly and readily recognized Ellen’s yearbook photo.  She’d actually been in the same class and was happy to fill me in.

Matt and Ellen had been high school sweethearts and married right after graduation.  Matt got a job in the auto parts store and Ellen worked right there in the diner.  Ellen thought about taking some classes at the local community college, but never got around to it.  Neither had family left in town, so it was no surprise when they picked up and left themselves.

“Off to the big city to make their fortune, or some such,” said the waitress as she warmed my coffee.

“I heard Matt was a bit of a troublemaker.”

“You must have been talking to my father, the police chief,” she said, and I smiled.  “He had it in his head that Matt was dealing drugs.  He may have been using on occasion, but I never knew him to be a big dealer.”

“How did he and Ellen get along?”

“Okay, I guess.  Matt was a hard sketch.  Bit of a control freak, but Ellen didn’t complain much.  At least not to me.  And I haven’t heard from her since they left.”

The lunch crowd was starting to pick up and the waitress was busy, so I just finished my omelet, left a generous tip, and headed home.

As I drove, I reviewed what I had so far, which wasn’t much.  Matt Hagerty was looking like an edgy asshole who kept his wife on a short leash.  Ellen might have had some ideas of her own but seemed to be following Matt’s lead.  Things hadn’t gone well for either one.  

I was beat by the time I got back and hoping to put the Hagertys out of my head for a while, but I didn’t make it far. 

“Yo, Rotten!  Get your ass in here,” Trudy Bonner called through her opened door as I reached the second-floor landing.

“Hey, Trude.  What’s up?” I asked expecting the worst.

“Do you have any idea what a total sleazeball you have for a client?”

“I do now.”

“He did time for assault, Frank!  The man beat his wife.  Don’t you ever check up on these guys?”

“He paid in cash and the rent was due.”

“This is not good, Frank.  The guy’s a total loser.  I don’t want to be helping out with shit like this.”

“I hear you,” I said sheepishly, and it was, in fact, beginning to sink in.  “How about Ellen?  You come up with anything on her?”

Trudy flashed me some serious stink eye, but as mad as she was, she had a story to tell, and she couldn’t hold back.

“I turned up some police reports, and a newspaper article.  Apparently, she developed a bit of a drug problem.  Arrested for possession.  Meth, I think.  Anyway, given her history of being abused, they put her in a treatment program instead of sending her to jail.  But get this, the newspaper article mentioned that the Libby Arnold Society was a “presence in the courtroom”.  Apparently, they’d heard about her situation and were providing “support”.  Pretty cool, huh?”

“What kind of support?”

“The paper didn’t say, but I imagine it was the usual stuff.”

The “usual stuff” covered a broad range.  The group had formed about twenty years earlier at the dawn of the feminist movement, after a local Pittsburgh woman named “Libby Arnold” was raped and murdered by her husband.  She’d been physically abused on repeated occasions, but the courts always seemed to feel her slimebag spouse was worth rehabilitating.  Mister Misogynist had finally abducted his battered mate from a shelter, in broad daylight, then took her to the shuttered steel mill where he once worked.  He ended her life there, then turned up dead himself, with a broomstick up his butt.  On Halloween.  A self-styled “womyn’s” militia group was thought to be responsible, but nobody tried very hard to prove it.

These days the Libbys conducted bake sales and bike rallies, to raise funds, and provided informal security at shelters and halfway houses.  They were known in hacker circles for using Social Security numbers of dead violence victims to fashion new identities for runaway wives and black-eyed girlfriends.  They were a presence in the yearly Pride Parade, but in a “Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell” world, they generally kept a low profile.

I promised Trudy I would set up a meeting and cut my loathsome client loose.  She seemed satisfied and let me finish the climb to my apartment.

I cracked a beer, collapsed on my couch, and wondered how I could fire my client if I couldn’t find him.  Fortunately, or not, I didn’t have to wonder long as I found a message on my machine from Hagerty saying he would be away from his apartment for a few days.  He left a beeper number, which I called, and surprisingly enough, he called back right away.  I started in but he was calling from a phone on a busy street corner, so we scheduled a face-to-face for the following day.      

The sit-down was set for late afternoon in a cozy club called Desolation Row which served as my sometime office.  I was waiting at the bar, nursing a draft, wondering if there’d ever be anyone I couldn’t live without, when Hagerty softly took the stool beside me.  The Young American Dedicated Dad had seriously altered his style since last I’d seen him.  He wore tight-fitting black jeans, a blousy shirt, and a stocking cap.  He appeared to be wearing make-up and he reeked of patchouli.

“Hagerty?” I asked uncertainly.

“Hello, Frank.  What have you got for me?” he said in a sultry voice that I scarcely recognized.

I almost asked a question that had nothing to do with the case, but excess baggage can slow a man down, so I stopped myself.  Focus, Frank.

“Something to drink?” I asked as the barkeep drifted over.

Hagerty ordered TaB with a twist and let his eyes wander around the dimly lit room.  This was starting to feel like an old Twilight Zone episode.  My client had entered another dimension. 

“I don’t know what you’re expecting from me, Matt.  You gave me nothing but lies to go on.”

“If I’d told you the truth, you wouldn’t have taken the case.”

“Exactly right.  I could lose my license, and you could go back to jail.  Ellen’s not missing.  She’s running away.  From you.”

“I need to see her one last time.”

“Ellen’s your ex-wife, Matt.  You need to let her go.”

He smiled and sipped his drink.  “Ever been in love, Frank?”

“Love?  That’s what you’re calling this?”

“Love’s the only thing that matters, Frank.  When you take the big tumble, you’ll know, and you’ll never be the same.”

How bizarre to be getting romantic advice from a convicted wife beater.  I could hear Rod Serling chuckling away in the shadows.  I was crossing over.

“What do you want from me, Matt?”

“You promised me a lead.”

“That I did, but I’ve got nothing new.  Ellen spent time in court-ordered rehab, then dropped out of sight.  Apparently with the help of the Libby Arnold Society.”

Hagerty sipped his soda, fluttered his false eyelashes, and stared into the milky mirror behind the bar.  It wasn’t the lead he was looking for, but it was as much as I was willing to give.  

“Aren’t they those biker dykes?” he asked at length, still lost in the fog.

“A support group, not a cult.  Long on leather, short on patience with pigs.”

“You have an address?” he asked.

“For Ellen?  I wouldn’t give it to you if I had it.”

“For the Libby Arnold Society.”  

I looked him up and down and remembered Chief Coleman’s advice.  What could I do?  I’d taken his money.  I figured I owed him something.  “They hold their meetings in a back room of the Mountain Moving Coffee House on Tremont,” I said with a sigh.

“Thanks, Frank,” he said as the sly smile returned.  “I can handle it from here.”  Then he slipped from his stool and left the bar, turning heads as he went.

The scent of patchouli lingered on the stale air.  Try as I might, I couldn’t think of anything I needed as much as Matt seemed to need Ellen.  And I hoped I’d never be tempted to take that kind of “big tumble”.  

I ordered another draft and sat for a while pondering the nature of affection and obsession as the jukebox played tales of heartbreak in the background.  It wasn’t long before I’d heard enough of “love” and headed home.  

I only lived a few blocks from the club, and the walk would do me good.  The money-grubbing world was draining away as the neon night snapped to life along the avenue.  It was my favorite time of day.  A time of transition and renewed promise.  I can’t say I was proud of the way I’d handled the case, but I felt like I’d earned my keep.  And I was done with Matt Hagerty.

Or so I thought.  Once again, I was ambushed by Trudy as I made my way up the stairs.

“Not so fast, Frank,” she called through her half-opened door.  “How’d it go?”

“Fine.  It’s all over.  I’m done with Mr. Hagerty,” I said as I crossed her threshold.

“So, you called his parole officer and turned him in?”

“No, I couldn’t do that.  He was a client.  I owed him something.”

“What did you tell him?”

“Just an overview of what I’d done.”

“What’d you tell him about his ex-wife?”

“That she disappeared with the help of the Libby Arnold Society.”

“You stupid shit!” she said as she punched me hard on the shoulder.

“Ow!  What was that for?”

“He didn’t need to know that.  I can’t believe I helped you find her.”

“I didn’t find her.  And he probably knew that much already.”

“What if he goes down there?  I feel responsible, Frank.  You’ve got to do something.”

“Like what?” 

“Go to that coffeehouse.  Let someone know he’s out of jail.”

That was the last thing in the world I wanted to do at that point, but she wasn’t backing off.

“Come with me,” I pleaded.  “I can’t go down there by myself.”

“I can’t.  I’ve got a date tonight,” she said firmly.  “It’s Halloween.”

“Trick or treat?  Tonight?” I said, having forgotten.  “What’s with all these dates?”

“I’m a popular girl, Frank, not that you’d notice.  Now get out of here,” she said, pushing me toward the door.  “I’m serious, Frank.  If you don’t do this, I’m never helping you again.”

She didn’t leave me much choice.  In fact, she physically blocked the stairs to the third floor, so I reluctantly set out for the Mountain Moving Coffee House.

Was I too stupid to live, or what?  If I had a nickel for every time I’ve said to myself, “I can’t believe I did that”, I’d have a couple of bucks, at least.  Obviously, I hadn’t grasped how strongly Trudy felt about Ellen Hagerty, and now I was paying the price. 

I’ll admit my ignorance.  I’m not up on all that feminist, lesbo-goddess blather and, sad to say, I don’t much care.  I’m all for “live and let live”, but identity politics wear me out.  I’ve got enough of my own problems to worry about.  And yet, the fact that I didn’t know my way around a Sapphic drum circle was not what made me nervous that night as I pulled into the Mountain Moving parking lot.  My primary cause for concern was dangling between my legs, and feeling seriously exposed, as I entered the smokey roadhouse alone.

I had an instant lesson in minority living as conversation ebbed and a roomful of hard stares swung my way.  The place was a haven for twelve-steppers now, so they served nothing stronger than espresso, but it still had that “dive-bar”, roadhouse vibe, and strangers were not warmly welcomed.

I took a seat at the bar and ordered a double cappuccino.  I sat and sipped and waited for the buzz to flow back before turning on my stool to scan the room.  Old neon adorned the walls, tables ranged around a small stage in front, and typical tavern games filled the rear of the former gin joint.  As I figured, I was the only one there with reason to wear a jock strap.  There would be no fading into the woodwork, so after a few minutes I got up and edged over to the jukebox which featured the usual tribal, sweat-lodge fare; an odd mix of earnest irony and flowering romanticism.  Life wants a soundtrack, so I played a few classics by Fanny, and Two Nice Girls, and tossed in a couple cuts by the reigning out-of-the-closet, lesbo-rocker, just to show ‘em I was cool, then reclaimed my seat at the bar.

The whole scene reminded me too much of stories my uncle used to tell about traveling the South in the Sixties, sporting hair to his shoulders.  Major mistake the way he told it.  I tried to calm myself imagining the worst that could happen, and it worked, until I spied the biker-dyke foursome shooting pool.  They all wore t-shirts saying, “Broomsticks Cue Club”, across the front, and, “Get Bent at Broomsticks”, on the back.  The back also featured the silhouette of a sturdy woman bending over a pool table preparing to stroke a shot, but instead of a pool cue, she was using a broomstick.

I was ready to book on out of there with my butt unstuck, but Trudy could always tell when I was lying, and my business would be hamstrung without her help.  So, I found my photo of the haunted young blonde who had once been Hagerty’s wife.  I waved the barista over and flashed the snap, but she claimed to be seeing the face for the first time.  

I was about to ask if she knew Ellen Hagerty when I was distracted by the big-boned brunette who had been sitting two stools down.  She had hair to her shoulders and wore a denim jacket, long denim skirt, and sandals without socks.  She had some of the ugliest feet I’d ever seen on a woman, and there was something unsettling about the hipless way she walked.  She approached one of the biker-dykes and must have asked about playing a game of pool.

“Lay your dollar down and find yourself a partner,” the pool player replied, then seemed to focus on the brunette’s hands as she fumbled in her skirt for change.  The hands were too large for the pockets, and I suddenly realized where I had seen that lazy, hipless shuffle before.

“Hagerty!” I called loudly across the room, and the brunette froze for a moment before vaulting onto the pool table.

In one practiced movement, Hagerty pulled a broad-bladed hunting knife from a sheath at the small of his back and leapt toward the pool players on the far side.  He sidestepped an arcing cue, spun behind one of the stick-wielding women, and brought his blade edge to her throat.  Under the wig and makeup, I hardly knew Matt Hagerty.  But with fear in her eyes and a trickle of blood running down her neck, I finally recognized his ex-wife, Ellen.

She’d filled out a bit, her hair was shorter and darker, but the haunted features were suddenly the same.  Matt Hagerty was forcing her to become someone she had worked hard to forget.  He had twisted himself into a vision of someone he thought would win her back.  And yet, his pretzel-logic love would never transform the world into a place the two could live together.

Music continued to blast from the jukebox, but no one moved to the beat.  The air was curiously free of panic.  The only fear showed in Ellen Hagerty’s eyes.  Matt edged his former bride toward a door at the rear of the game room, and no one moved to intercept.  The door opened easily behind them, and the couple remained momentarily silhouetted in the frame, until the fat end of a cue stick swung forward to meet the back of Matt Hagerty’s head.  The cracking thud was audible above the music.  Matt’s eyes rolled up and his knife fell to the floor.  Ellen’s shoulders slumped, but she remained standing and raised her fingers lightly to her throat.

Two firm hands held me in my seat, and I lost the light as someone slipped a burlap sack over my head.  My hands were taped behind my back, and I was led through the gaming area into the meeting room beyond.  I was tied to a folding chair and left to wonder about the preparations taking place around me.

Furniture was being moved but conversation was kept to a minimum.  People passing by would smack me in the head or poke my privates.  My wallet was removed from my pocket and roughly replaced.  I heard grunts and groans in a male voice.  I heard cloth being ripped and knots being tied.  I heard music still playing in the bar beyond.  And finally, I heard fifty broomsticks pounding the hardwood floor in rhythm.  Then silence, and the sack was removed.

I sat in a circle of light on Allhallows Eve, surrounded by solemn women wearing masks fashioned from photos of Libby Arnold taken at her murder scene.  I had crashed a private party and I was paying the price.  I was shown every shot of Ellen Hagerty that had been entered at her husband’s various trials.  I was advised in no uncertain terms to choose my clients more carefully.  Someone promised to be watching.

A woman approached wielding Matt’s knife, but she used it only to cut the cords that bound me to the chair.  Beyond the circle of light, I caught a glimpse of Hagerty, splayed across a pool table awaiting his fate.  I was pushed to a rear exit where I lost the light again as I was led to a waiting car.

Three Libbys gave me a silent ride back to my block in Southside.  The car slowed and they rolled me out into the gutter.  I struggled to my feet, but couldn’t work my hands free, so I sat on the curb with the sack on my head till Trudy returned from her date.

Trudy had been to her own costume party.  She was dressed in black with a high, pointed hat, and she was accompanied by a hunchback.  I was afraid to ask about her missing broomstick.  

Trudy was decidedly unsympathetic.  She and her deformed date kept me taped up till I told all about Ellen.  I promised her that Matt Hagerty had abused his wife for the last time, but I refused any details.  They were more than she needed to know.

I brooded for days about the botched case and scanned the papers for any clue of what had happened to Hagerty, but came up empty.  A week later, against my better judgement, I returned to the coffeehouse and asked about Ellen.  It was made very clear that Ellen’s whereabouts was none of my business.  I explained that I wasn’t looking for her, I just wondered if she was alright.  At length I was told that she was doing just fine, and I went on my way.  It may sound selfish, but it was something I needed to know.

The Nightmare Thieves

The city lives on nightmares. It’s a living city. You’d be better off if they took anything else, but that’s not how it goes. The negative pulses are what it craves. The city is alive. It has hearts and lungs hidden behind building facades, scattered here and there. The hearts pump the nightmares throughout the city, and the nightmares are oxygen for the lungs. The city of terror. The infinite city.

I woke up in my room. Lindsey, or Lydia or someone, was lying next to me. I rolled over and took a cigarette out of a soft pack on my nightstand. I lit it and inhaled. Calming. Relaxing. She — whoever she was — started coughing dramatically.

“Nobody smokes in bed except in the movies. Hell, nobody smokes cigarettes anymore.”

“I suppose I’m special, then,” I said. I told her to get out of bed and get dressed. She was pissed, but she did it anyway. I enjoyed the rest of my cigarette in peace. It would be the last fully peaceful moment I would have for a long time.

I fell back asleep and awoke to the sound of my roommate Billy screaming. I got out of bed, grabbed a pair of jeans off the floor and put them on as quickly as I could. 

Billy was in the living room by the window that overlooked the street twelve floors below. I hurried to the window and looked out. Shit. The Faceless. Dreaded brown clay skin creatures with nothing but a jaw where their face should be. Fatty folds creasing their foreheads. Nine feet tall with sharp claws that paralyzed the victim upon penetration. They caught you and took you — well, nobody was positive where exactly, but it was rumored that they were the ones who took you to the machine that extracted your nightmares.

The Faceless grabbed a homeless drunk that I’d seen many times hanging around the building. It stuck its claws in the man’s neck and carried him away. 

I’d heard that you wake up and find yourself in a hospital bed. They attach wires to your head and those wires are plugged into the nightmare machine. Microscopic needles dig deep into all parts of your brain. They dig and dig, until they find your terrors. Then the extraction process begins. 

At first, it sounds like it might be therapeutic to have your nightmares drained, but you lose a very essential part of yourself. What is a person without their terrors? What kind of person would you be with half your reality missing? Maybe more than half? 

Two days later, Billy and I sat at our kitchen table, trying to forget the paranoia that seeing the Faceless had left us with. 

“Hey, listen,” I said. “It’s not like they come back to the same place very often. I mean, how many have you seen in your lifetime?”

“Four. But that’s enough.”

“But that’s my point, right? The sightings are so far between that you probably won’t see another one for a decade.”

“That guy’s face when the claw went in.” 

“He probably wasn’t even hurt. They say those things sedate you instantly.”

They say that at the center of the city, underground, there is a river that doesn’t reflect. On that river is a ferryman. Pay his fee and he’ll take you to paradise. But you have to match his asking.

Twenty, maybe twenty-five people had gathered at our apartment for a little party. That was how many people saw Billy start to phase out of reality. 

Most of us were stunned, and just stood there and watched. A couple of people tried to grab him, but he wasn’t solid anymore. He was like a hologram. He phased in and out, never regaining anything like a solid form. And then suddenly he was gone. 

I sat at the bar and looked at my glass of beer, almost untouched. This had been a real bummer of a week. But what was there to do about it? People phased out of reality sometimes. It was just something that, however unlikely, could happen at any moment. But why Billy? Man, it’s hard as hell to make friends when you’re not in your twenties anymore.

The cuffs were cold on my wrists. They were tight enough that it felt personal. I hadn’t meant to start that fight, but that’s how things go sometimes. How was I supposed to know she had a jealous boyfriend when I asked her to dance? And when she put her hand on my crotch, I took it as a sign that she liked me. And so we kissed. 

Anyway, I took everything out on the guy. It had been a stressful week, and I wasn’t having any bullshit. 

We are dreams dreaming of themselves. We have to be taken from the city to understand what the city means. But the city is infinite. So this is difficult to do. 

The most terrifying thing that’s ever happened to me? I once found myself in an unfamiliar alleyway. I was twisted drunk and I wasn’t sure what street I was on. Suddenly, in front of me was a very tall, very thick woman with golden skin and dark gold eyes. She tore at her chest until it heaved open and dozens of tentacles slicked out. I turned to run, but the woman overran me. She grabbed me with her tentacles. They suctioned me inside her chest. I half hung out and tried to wriggle away, but the tentacles held me in. Suddenly we were flying. I screamed, but my terror was muffled by the thickness of her chest fluids as they stuck in my mouth and throat. 

She landed on the sidewalk and I slopped out of her chest. I lay there, all wet and sticky, in incredible pain, looking up as the golden woman laughed at me. 

“It has to do, like,” when they take your dreams and you’re all happy, but you’re not supposed to be that way.” Sherry was drunk again. But it’s not like what she was saying wasn’t true. But that’s not what I had been talking about.

“Sherry,” I said. “What does that have to do with Billy phasing out of reality?”

“Oh, nothing, really. Hey, you want to order some shrimp?”

I went to the bathroom and sat on the toilet for a few minutes, gathering my thoughts.

The meditators levitate in circles and underneath each circle is a fire. They’re a few feet in the air. The fire almost catches their clothes. At least that’s what I heard. But I’ve heard a lot of things. 

I should say, that’s the most terrified I’d been up until the point that I saw a Faceless staring down at me. This past week had driven me to drink more than usual, and usual was a lot. I was stumbling out of Malagoon’s Bar when the Faceless ambled down the sidewalk in my direction. But these sightings were supposed to be rare. And here I was, looking at my second in a week. Well, fuck.

There’s a certain poetry in losing your mind. The machine was nothing like I had expected. It was all ecstasy, yes, but also there was something missing. Something essential. I had visions of my mother and my tenth birthday. It was the day my mother’s wife agreed to adopt me. But it was more than just good memories. It was, how to put it, an abstraction. Light stretching itself around the body. Calm. Comfort. Serenity. Why couldn’t I be like this forever?

Because the body doesn’t last forever. When they took me out of the machine and pulled the wires out of my head, I was barely human. My bones had dissolved and I was a gelatinous mixture of blood and water. I had melted into a kind of flesh sack. There was a man in a tie. He scooped me off the bed. My neck was useless, turning my head was upside down. My legs drooped over his arm.

And then they put me in here with you guys. We slick around all day like snakes and we eat our slop and we’re not exactly sure why except this is what we do. I heard this used to be a problem. And so we flop around on our bellies and we drink from the slop they drop on us after we’ve flipped onto our backs. Something is missing, but we’re not sure what it is. It doesn’t matter, though, does it? We’re happy. That’s all that counts.

The Swamp

Oh, how the swamp stunk in the sticky humid August night. That sweet reek of the endless purgatory in the marshlands. Somewhere lost in the middle was the shack where Brad Gum lived with his wife. He let his toe dip into the black nebulous of the duckweed plated water and watched as the ripples shimmied outward catching the white moonlight on their crests. The oppressive heat sweltered under the arms of Brad Gum and he shifted on the dock as hot beads of sweat ran down his lower back into the band of his three-day-old underwear. He looked out over the bayou through the vapors of humidity and lights of fireflies that winked as the stars above. A frog trilled from somewhere under the ramshackle dock made of rotting, moist planks. Locusts sawed on from the pitch. Brad’s jeans were ripped into capris above the ankle. Oh, did the swamp stink this time of year. 

The axe which was gnawed and splatted with orange rust was leaning restfully on a soggy, moss-capped, timber that was sunk in near the tall grass at the shore. Brad knew the swamp smelt, he knew that his floundering home in the swamp stunk, but he himself could not smell it. Brad was devoid of all sense of smell. His own stink, the stink of others at the store in summer, and the mildew stench of his homeland, of the swamp, were all but scentless steam in his hair filled nostrils. The light of orange embers smoldering at the end of his smoke, and the moon above was caught up in the silvery pools of the eyes of alligators staring, watching, lurking below him. They were invisible apart from this singular give away and would have otherwise been lost to the backdrop as logs or clumps of dirty weed in the murk. But they, like he, were there, part of the night, part of the swamp, predatory and monstrous.  

His wife was upstairs in the bathtub. Happier than he? As he watched the ripples evaporate into the gloom and blackness of the bayou mists perhaps, perhaps not. He could not find the capacity to care. He breathed in deep in a vain attempt to take in the odious bouquet of the marsh but nothing came to him, nothing more than breathing in the vapors over a boiling pot of water on the stove. The only light in the shabby dwelling was coming down in a warm shaft onto the dock from the cracked bathroom window on the second floor. Brad got up from the end of the dock as he heard the grinding of car tires coming along the long gravel driveway leading to his secluded bit of land in the wild swamp. He threw his smoke down from the dock into the water which hit with a sound like a match dying under a faucet. Something jumped at this and splattered in a large waking wave into the black water. He pictured something with pale eyes and ribbed skin that would be eaten by a largemouth bass or a snake upon making such a debut into the stinking surf.  The headlights cut through the stifling summer mugginess in two long glowing poles before the police car. The car came to a slow rolling stop as Brad made his way to greet the officer. 

“Eve’nin’ Offisah,” said Brad. The officer stepped out from the car which had all the windows down on account of the mug in the air.  

“Evening Brad,” said the sheriff, “The missus home?” 

“Aye,” said Brad spitting a large wad from his mouth, “She be in-dis-posed. In the tub. You need ‘er? I’ll fetch ‘er.” 

“No need to trouble ‘er,” said the sheriff. His expression hardened and he stepped closer to Brad. “But Brad, there’s been some odd complaints from the neighbors down yonder,” he pointed to the Landry’s home a bit to the south. The policeman drew a carton of Lucky Strikes from his breast pocket and lit one with his, as Brad would assume it, fancy city lighter, which clacked and clanged as he flipped the lid open and closed. 

Dumb bastards Brad thought to himself. “Complaints, of wut natchya?” Brad asked. 

“Sump’in’ ‘bout a smell, Brad, something ‘bout a smell like hell. Like a rottin’ animal. They say it waftin’ down on them real bad and they want us to take a look ‘round here,” said the sheriff. “Matta of fackt, place is smellin’ awful ripe tonight.” 

“Swamp,” said Brad as he fingered his mildew ridden bellybutton. He sniffed the cheese that he pulled forth from the cavity with indifference even as the sheriff let his hand casually rest on the revolver strapped to his hip. 

“You got one of dem permits now cher??” Brad said before spitting again. It landed with a loud wet pat on the rocks. 

“I don’t, not yet. Don’t want to trouble you with it, but tell me true, there anything I need to know?” The sheriff asked. Eyes reading Brad’s rather vacant and simple face. 

“Swamp always stinkin’, this time of year. Shit, might be a deer fell down a sinkhole. I can help ya look in the mornin’ okay?” he said. 

“Well sure, that’d be just fine,” said the sheriff who turned back to his car but paused before taking a step. “Say Brad, got any coffee on? I could sure use a cup on the graveyard shift, only if ye please.” 

Brad coughed up something large and gunky in his throat and held it in his mouth before discharging it into the gravel at his bare feet. “Sure, I’m sure missus got something for ye.” 

Brad did an overly polite bow to the officer and bid him towards the porch. The timber plank stairs yelled in protest as the two ascended them, almost cutting out the shrill trill of the tree frogs and crickets. The screen door flapped open with a simple and misused wheek before clacking back into its lock as Brad and the officer entered the putrid residence. 

Water-stained walls, cabinets left open to expose the chipped china like bone beneath a wound, plates and tins on the counters, two matching rough wood chairs with their arched backs pushed out from the small round table where old coffee was left in metal mugs, the officer sniffed. Stink. Swamp? An old oil lantern hung from the ceiling from some old cabling and was the sole source of light in the room. It rocked on the breeze from the open window and allowed its light to cast odd and sharp shadows around the room giving all a distinctly purgatorial feel. The wallpaper, once painted with bright sunflowers, roosters, and diamond patterns sagged on the walls like an ill-fitted dress on a woman and was bunched and torn by water exposing the ribcage of timbering beneath. 

“Awful quiet Brad, thought you said missus is upstairs?” Inquired the officer. 

“Indeed, she be. Coffee still?” Brad inquired back. 

“Matter a’ fact, think I might have a look upstairs?” Asked the officer. 

Brad turned and poured himself a cup of old cold coffee from the moldy pot. The officer quietly unsnapped the cover of his pistol. 

“Uh sure,” shrugged Brad. 

The policeman made his way around through the narrow kitchen avoiding the dirty walls for the earnest desire not to get the filth on himself. The banister to the stair was unsurprisingly cracked in the pillars and rail and as he assented the dirt smeared steps. The pistol was lifted with a creak from the leather holster as the stained steps quacked beneath his boots. He knocked on the bathroom, no answer. He knocked again upon the door and entered. 

There the maggot ridden corpse of Mrs. Gum stared back. Holes where eyes had been, now just an eggy residue dribbled from the sockets. Skin blackening, lips pulled back around yellow teeth. An undefinable and dark liquid dripped from her mandible. She was mutilated in places and her stomach cavity was a gutted hole revealing nothing but a dark pocket under her ribs. She was not the only, nor by appearances, the oldest one left here. The officer’s eyes scanned over other bodies, reddened with fresh blood and blackened with old. Some missing teeth, others seemed chewed and sawed. A fest of gore. The stench, unmentionable other than it burned with purification, roadkill left to decompose for months was the only comparable testament the officer could fathom in the seconds the synapses of his mind had to fire the thought into consciousness. The bathmat caught his attention as small things seem to do in times of crisis such as this, and even the once floral pattern was almost unidentifiable under the smudge of liquid and tissue that stained it. He turned to the door, Brad was there. He was stripped bare, showing the thick forest of fur that extended from the scruff of his chin to his loins. Brad was looking at Ms. Gum in the tub. 

“Well, hun, they think a God-damn deer is making that stink!” Brad hooped, “But by god come morning, the po-lice dogs ain’t nevah gonna ever find you in that damn stinkin’ swamp!” 

That axe, orange with rust still managed to flash in the light of the single hanging bulb of the bathroom. The axe knocked the bulb but did not break it, flashing strobes of shadow and light in dizzying arrays around the room. The freshest red blood flowed over the black stains of the old and the sawing of crickets, frogs, and the lapping of swamp water took over the night. 

The next morning when more officers came, Brad’s bathroom was as ordinary as yours. Clean and welcoming to the point one wouldn’t actually mind using it, despite the rest of the house. All the while the police searched the grounds around the home, Brad brewed fresh coffee for them from a clean pot, and no one noticed that the police car was missing. Only Brad knew now where the vehicle settled, deep in the stinking swamp. 

Throwed up the Mountain

Edward Marsh stood atop the massive, rounded stone which leaned outward from the mud of the riverbank to the pool below. Peering over the edge, he saw below, into the perpetual current of the Red River; though shallow in most places, about ten feet deep here. He wondered how it was possible that such a perfect, gigantic rock just happened to be leaning into one of the best pools in the river. 

“It can’t be a coincidence,” he thought to himself, “But how in the hell could anyone move a rock like this? It would take a giant to do it!”

Eddie had no fucking clue. 

He thought of Giza; he thought of Stonehenge. He thought of Cahokia—great mysteries of construction.  

Without thinking any more about it, he bent his knees and leapt into the water, making a can-opener formation in midair. He was aiming for his friend, Tater, who was floating on his back relaxed in the middle. 

Tater wasn’t paying attention. Ed landed right next to him, splashing the hell out of him and rocking the boat of his body, its ballast upside down as his belly faced sunward like the bulbous wreckage left remnant after a kraken strike. 

“God dammit, man,” said Tater, “Fuck!”

Tater began dog paddling, spitting green water from his mouth. It spewed into the curly hairs under his bottom lip and thereafter disappeared amidst the dense forest of the thick beard covering his chin before dripping back into its flowing home. 

“Ya’ll want some fuckin’ bud?” came an unexpected voice from the other side of the river. It was loud; amplified by a hand-shaped megaphone from the woman’s throat outward and into the forest canopy, afterward sliding around the bowl of the forest’s shapely ceiling and echoing downward into the boy’s ears before drowning itself in the river; thereafter flowing westward toward an inevitable convergence with the Kentucky River, thereafter that westward to the Ohio, thereafter that westward to the Mississippi, then finally southward past the French Quarter and into the gulf. 

Something brushed across Eddie’s calf. It was small; it wasn’t a snake—probably a bluegill or crappie—but he still jumped.

“Awh, hell,” said the voice, watching Ed splash excitedly, “I know this kid wants some. He over there feenin’!”

“Fuck is wrong with you?” said Tater.

“Something brushed against my leg.”

“Pussy.”

Tater then turned to the couple atop the other side of the river: “Hell yeah, we’ll take a smack of your hippie lettuce.” He then swam to the riverbank. Eddie followed.

Crawdads and minnows tickled Eddie’s toes as he stepped from the river rocky outward onto the jagged shore. A lizard sunbathing on a nearby rock—a small, smooth stone, though to the lizard’s perception likely similar in size to the one Eddie had just leapt from atop—looked at him as if annoyed; a badass creature so apathetic so as to be irritated with the presence of literal giants. 

“C’mon up,” said a voice. It was a different voice; this one was a man. He was hanging from the limb of a firm though swingy tree root slithering chaotically out of the mud of the wall of the riverbank. “Name’s Rick,” he said, “An’ that woman up there offerin’ up our good, stinky grass is my wife, Lisa.”

Eddie took the man’s hand. It was callous though greasy, as if lotioned with bacon fat.

“Don’t worry about me,” said Tater sarcastically from behind, “I’ll climb up myself.”

“I can’t pull your big fuckin ass up, anyways,” said Rick, “I’m older than shit. Only reason my bones and muscles ain’t constantly feel like dogshit is the relief of this stinky outdoor bud.” 

Rick’s lengthy grey beard blew in the wind as if to emphasize poetically his age. 

“Yep, I’m aware,” said Tater. His feet slid chaotically in the mud as he grasped at the dangling tree root. He finally snatched it, though not before muddying his shins up to his knees. 

Rick and Lisa had a crackling fire near the edge of that cliff descending into the river. The fire was mostly dried leaves and twigs—the smoke was thick. On the other side of the fire was a gravel road leading backward out toward the nearby backwoods town of Nada, KY. 

Rick grabbed at one of the adjacent hanging vines and yanked at it absentmindedly before momentarily losing his balance and stumbling backward nearly off the cliff. Sliding in the mud like a cartoon character, he caught himself at the last moment and recorrected, thereafter clutching at his beard as if it needed brushed. 

“Fuck is wrong with you?” said Lisa from her place sitting in a rusty metal folding chair near the fire. She was holding a stick to the crackling, smoky flame, roasting a marshmallow, which was ablaze, further blackening with each second it remained in the fire. “That bud get to ya’?” she continued, “I didn’t realize you could still be such a lightweight, at your age.”

“Don’t chastise me woman,” said Rick, his face reddening with embarrassment as he walked to their beater of a pickup truck—a red and white 1985 Ford Ranger—and sat atop the unlatched tailgate. He took an emptied tie dye bowl from the pocket of his thin, stained jeans and, after using a paper clip to scrape it from the bowl, took a smack of resin. He inhaled deeply before spitting out the smoke and coughing violently. 

“Jesus H fucking Christ,” said Lisa, “The hell is wrong with you?”

“You got any of that shit for us?” Tater interjected.

“’Course we do,” said Lisa, her tone softening maternally now that she was speaking with a different, younger person, “Here ya’ go there, boys,” said Lisa after refilling the bowl with fresh bud.

Tater took the lighter and bowl from Lisa and flipped it ablaze and took an enormous drag as if showing off.

“Don’t torch it,” said Lisa, looking with concern at the way Tater was carpet bombing the surface of the grass. 

“He always does that,” Eddie said, “He sucks dick at smoking weed.”

“Fuck off,” said Tater, now coughing politely into his bicep as if interested with the pungency of his pits.

Eddie took the pipe and ripped a hit as well. He also started coughing up a fucking lung, though the way he coughed was more frantic, as if he were somehow afraid he may at any moment need to be shipped off to the hospital.

“You boys are bad as Rick,” said Lisa, “Mayhap that’s why he befriended you—he needed someone else for me to rag on.”

“That would make sense,” said Tater, “Say,” he continued, “You got any more of those marshmallows? I need to get the taste of weed out of my mouth.”

“If you didn’t torch it, it wouldn’t taste bad. Weed is like any other plant—hell, it’s like toast! You burn it, it tastes burnt; you don’t burn it, it tastes like it’s ‘sposed to.”

“I like burnt toast.”

“Hell,” said Lisa, “I like burnt marshmallows.”

 “Is that a yes?”

“Here you go.” 

Lisa handed Tater a Kroger brand marshmallow from the bag wedged between her wrinkly thighs. Tater ate it raw, smacking his lips as the mallow stuck to the roof of his mouth and thereafter his tongue and then again back and forth continuously.

“You ‘sposedta’ roast it. The fuck it wrong with you? You takin’ things either burnt to shit or raw as hell.”

“That’s just my personality,” said Tater, grinning. 

Eddie had lost touch with reality, or at least with his perception of it. He was buzzed-off hard from the morning and afternoons PBR’s and the rip of the bowl was the Finish Him type of Mortal Kombat moment metaphorically uppercutting him through the ceiling and sending him crashing back downward into the fucking spikes, his blood spraying everywhere as his combatant—the bowl—posed triumphantly the winner. Flawless Victory. 

Eddie blinked at this thought. He was fucking losing it. He sat below the hood of the overhanging tailgate, his ass itching upon the surface of the gravel. He was using the shelter of the tailgate as a sort of burrow; he considered himself at this point a prey animal—like a rabbit; one of the local eastern cottontails—he needed to hide. 

He was fucked up beyond repair. 

He squirmed around in the gravel, thinking he had lost touch with his senses and as a result become incontinent. 

He was afraid he might shit himself. 

“Hey!” came a booming voice from the other side of the river. 

It was Percy.

Percy was standing at the edge of the riverbank staring in confusion across at Eddie and Tater. Sliding down the muddy bank to the rocks of the shoreline, Chelsea joined Percy at his side, putting her hands on her hips and glaring through sun beams puncturing the overheard tree canopy.

“I’m coming back,” mumbled Eddie, unaware they couldn’t hear him. Unlike him, they weren’t fucking rabbits; they didn’t have satellite ears. 

Eddie limped over the eroded side of the riverbank into those now exposed places where the river had in the past risen. He made to descend the slope and slide gallantly into the water. 

He didn’t make it very far. 

He fell over the edge, tumbling wildly down the surface of the mud. Momentarily catching himself and standing atop the rocky shoreline, he then tripped and fell into the river, fumbling more than swimming as he made his way to the other side.

Chelsea cackled and pointed like a maniac while slapping her thigh with her other hand: “Holy shit,” she said, “What did they lace that weed with?”

At the same moment—when Eddie had just made it back onto the other side of the river—a stuttering rumble was heard atop the riverbank, near their campsite. 

It was a gurgling moped—a true hog—one clearly missing a muffler. The engine wailed and groaned rhythmically before abruptly ceasing as if suddenly slaughtered. 

“Fucks going on down there?” came a voice unknown.

“Who the hell is that?” whispered Chelsea to Percy.

“Fuck if I know,” said Percy, wiping his sweaty palms against the denim clothing his ass as if it might prevent recognition of his building anxiety.

“It’s whoever the hell that guy is,” slurred Eddie, pointing up the riverbank. Percy and Chelsea stared up the slope of the muddy bank. 

“It’s me!” came the response, “Name’s Albert Joseph Crum, but you can just call me AJ, or Crum—I don’t give a single shit.”

“Uhh…” stammered Percy, “Nice you meet you… What’re you doing here?”

“What am I doing here? I fuckin’ live here, goddammit! I tell you what, boy—I’m here to have a good goddamn time. Ain’t that why we all on this spinning rock twirling like a demon-ballerina ‘round the sun?”

AJ walked to the cooler by Percy’s parked 1990 Volvo, opened it, and removed a Bush Light, which he cracked and chugged fully. He crushed the can and threw it down the side of the riverbank to the rocks below, near Chelsea’s feet. He then slid down the muddy embankment in his Wrangler jeans, the collected mud of which he dusted from his ass upon reaching the bottom.

The dude looked and smelled like shit.

“Uh…” said Percy, “What brings you here?”

At that same moment, Tater—who was at that point so stoned he wasn’t even cognizant of where he was—was being helped across a shallow part of the river by Rick and Lisa. He was between them, using each of their shoulders as a crutch. Rick and Lisa strained to walk, slouching in the mud and groaning; Tater was a lot bigger than both of them, and they were pretty old. Tater didn’t give a single shit about that, though—not at this moment, at least. 

“Thanks a bunch,” Tater imagined he said as he sauntered across the rocks and moss like a hobo wino. “Ahhhh!” he wailed abruptly, stumbling violently before recorrecting, “Fuggin’ tadpo’ just touched me. Slimy fuck…”

Eddie smiled while watching from the other side, recognizing his friend’s hypocrisy. 

Percy ran to the tumbling white-capped crossing and grabbed Tater from Rick and Lisa, helping him to the other side.

“Who’s that you got over there with ya’?” said Rick.

“Oh,” said Percy, “I don’t know him. He just showed up. Says his name is AJ Crum.”

“Fuck,” said Rick, “You need to tell that bastard to get on out of here—ride like Clyde—and quick. He’s bad news, and if I’m calling someone bad news, you know they’s really bad news. 

“He’s right,” said Lisa, “Get his ass the hell up out of here. He gets strung out on pills and booze and rides that moped wobblin all along the road, firing his magnum at signs and trees and shit. That sumbitch been arrested buncha fuckin times.”

“He’s got a magnum?” slurred Tater.

“Oh yeah,” said Lisa, “Guys the dumbass in a crowd of other dumbasses.”

Tater, turning away from Lisa, clawed miraculously up the muddy side of the riverbank back toward the campsite like a Morlock on the scent of alien meat. 

“Hold up,” yelled Tater upon cresting the summit of the spongy riverside mound, “Don’t you just think you can just steal my Busch lights!”

“The hell you talkin about?” said AJ, “I’ll thieve a Busch from ya if I goddamn well want to. I say it’s mine, it’s mine. You better believe that shit.”

AJ then reached into the backpocket of his jeans, cakey with the slime of years of wear. 

“You let me fire that gun,” said Tater, “and I’ll give you a beer. Hell, a beer for every shot!”

“Ammunition ain’t cheap,” said AJ, stumbling drunkenly like a practiced barn dancer through the adjacent thick nettle, “Two beers for every shot.”

“Deal,” said Tater.

Tater pointed the firearm toward the river. He fired. The kickback combined with his intoxication made him fall over. He got back up, cocked the weapon, and made to fire again. 

“You might wanna chill out with that thing, Spud,” said Percy. 

“Eh, I’ll be fine,” said Tater.

Tater fired again.

“That’s four beers,” said Albert Joseph. 

“Give me one more shot—may as well make it an even sixer for ya,”

“You got yourself a deal.”

This time, Tater pointed at the huge stone across the river. 

“Can’t miss this big son of a bitch,” he said, trying unsuccessfully to close only one eye as he aimed, wobbling from drunkenness.

Tater fired. 

“Awh, fuck—God dammit!” yelled Albert Joseph. He began hopping around on one leg before falling down into the nettle and screeching like a wraith. 

“You fucking plugged him in the shin,” said Rick, “I’ll tell ya what—that shit hurts. Must had ricocheted off the rock. I seen that happen before, once or twice. Unlucky as hell.”

“No shit, you old fuck,” said Albert Joseph, who then lifted himself from the ground and limped atop his moped. 

“You shouldn’t be driving that damn thing, not right now,” said Lisa, “Why don’t you let us taxi you to the doctor’s?”

“Shut the hell up, you dumb bitch,” said AJ, twisting the key into the ignition. 

“Hold up, now,” said Lisa, unaffected by being called a bitch, “You gonna be hurtin’ good. You want something for the pain?” 

She then reached into her pocket and removed a prescription pill bottle of oxycodone, gesturing toward AJ and shaking the bottle. The pills rattled percussively:

“Eastern Kentucky mating call,” she said, grinning. She handed him the bottle. AJ opened it, popped out three pills, tossed them into his mouth, and swallowed.

“Should of only took one or maybe two at most,” said Lisa, “Those bastards are strong.”

“I’ll be fine,” said AJ. He then revved the engine and, after wobbling unstably atop the moped, its wheels spinning and kicking up mud backward across Percy’s chest, was soon out of the campsite and out onto the road. The squealing motor shrieked as if something supernatural before finally drowning with distance off into the night like some specter shrinking muffled into oblivion. 

“You think he’ll make it?” said Eddie, “He’s already drunk, and those pills are gonna fuck him up.”

“No idea,” said Lisa, “But I figure the pills will give him a better shot. Them pills are no joke—you right about that—but Albert Jo is an experience substance abuser. He drives drunk and high every day, damn near. The pills might distract him from the pain long enough to make it to the doctor’s. AJ gets distracted easily, as I’m sure you’ve fount out.”

“Yeah,” said Tater. Fuck…”

“Yeah,” said Rick, “Yous one hell of a dumbass, but that’s all right—shit happens when you party wasted.”

“True that,” said Chelsea, grabbing a collection of Busch Lights and, doing her best Joe Burrow impersonation, tossed one overhand to everyone. Lisa cracked hers and took a swig, her Adam’s apple dancing up and down her neck like some giant beetle stuck in her throat:

“Tell you what,” she said, wiping remnant suds from her mouth, “Let’s make a fire and sit down. I’ll tell ya’ll about the sasquatch roamin’ round these woods.”

“Sasquatch?” said Eddie, “That shit isn’t real.”

“Hell yes it is,” said Rick, “Lisa and I have seent ‘em. They run up and down the hills, hootin’ and hollerin’, banging tree limbs together. We got all kindsa stuff back in these woods—‘specially deep in the dark spots; far off from town—we got sasquatch, we got wolves and bears, we got mountain lions, I reckon we even got gators. Probably some fuckin’ emus.”

“No way,” said Eddie. Only bears in Kentucky are black bears, and there aren’t any cougars or wolves—they’ve been extinct for a long time. There have never been any alligators this far north. And emus aren’t even native to this country.”

“Just ‘cause they ain’t native don’t mean they ain’t there,” said Lisa, “This whole country is immigrants—immigrant people and immigrant animals. We like to call the animals ‘invasive’, though—we ain’t call people invasive. Wonder why? Anyway, we got it all back in these woods; all of it and more. Sharks in the rivers, every once in a while. Now sit down and let me tell you about Big Foot.”

Though disbelieving, they all sat atop their preferred rock and listened to Lisa’s story, which was told so well that Eddie found himself becoming nervous and looking out into the darkness of the adjacent woods. 

Everyone sat drinking well into the morning as the shadow of the fire flickered shadowy against the tree canopy, smoke all the while wafting skyward into the empty black sky. 

The moon hung dimly overheard like a dying soft-white lightbulb.

*  *  *

 A police officer kicked at the tent. 

“Open up, boys. Unzip this damn thing or else I’m gonna rip her up.”

Percy unzipped the tent and looked outside, squinting from tiredness into the glaring eyes of the cop. He then looked across the river. 

Rick and Lisa were already gone.

“Something you need, officer?”

“God damn right. Albert Jo Denniston is dead. Heard he was hanging ‘round here last night.”

Tater exited the tent: “Who did you hear that from?”

“None of your goddamn business, stranger.”

“Albert Jo is dead?” said Percy.

“Sure is. Dead as hell. He wasn’t sober, which I’m sure comes as no surprise to anyone, but it wasn’t just booze he had in him. Seems the fucker had bought some pills.”

“You think we sold him pills?” said Percy.

“You was hanging out with him.”

“Do any of us look like the drug dealing type?” 

“Don’t matter what you look like. I ain’t no profiling cop; I go by the facts. Albert Jo was here, he got some pills, and then he died. Seems clear cut.”

“Where did you find him,” said Eddie, finally looking out of the tent, “Just down the road?”

“Naw. He was throwed up the side of the mountain—way up the cliff. Don’t know how he got his bike all the way up there—fucker must have been speeding good, in more ways than one.”

“Up the side of the mountain?”

“Yessir. Never seent nothin like it in all my goddamn years.”

“Well,” said Percy, “We didn’t sell him any drugs.”

“That ain’t what the evidence says. Evidence points to you did it.”

“What evidence?”

“Eyewitness report.”

“From who? Rick and Lisa?”

“Don’t reckon that ain’t none of your goddamn business.”

“It had to have been them; who else could it be?”

“Ain’t none of your business. Anyway, you need to come with me.”

The officer, removing the cuffs from his belt, then gestured to several of his partners, who were until that point hanging back by the road, away from the campsite.

“Don’t try and do nothin’ dumb.”

“You can’t arrest us just because a couple random people said we did something,” said Eddie, “Rick and Lisa aren’t even reliable witnesses. Plus, they were the ones with the drugs, anyway. They gave the pills to AJ!”

“Don’t you go shit talking Rick and Lisa. Lisa’s a cousin on my mom’s side—some once-removed typa cousin, or some shit. Don’t know exactly how it works. Anyway, she’s family. You go shit talking people’s family ‘round these parts, you in for a good ass whoopin’.”

“You can’t just beat me for saying something you don’t like. It’s not legal.”

“’Round here it’s legal. No one will give a single shit biscuit if I beat your little ass. So stop bad mouthing Lisa. She and Rick are good honest folk.”

“They’re crazy!” said Eddie. “They think there are sasquatches up in these mountains.”

“There are, dumbass,” said the cop. “Matter of fact, that makes sense. I never seen a moped throwed up the side of a cliff like that. Somethin’ like that just ain’t happen, ‘cept for maybe it got throwed up there by a sasquatch.”

Eddie, Percy, Tater, and Chelsea collectively stared ahead, dumbfounded. 

The cops then ushered them into the vehicles and pulled off toward jail. 

On the way, Eddie looked out the window, thinking about what a miserable camping trip this had turned into. 

He saw something move way up the cliff, in the mountains—in the forest. 

It looked big. 

The Penny Walk

“Do you understand that by participating in The Penny Walk you are legally consenting to a full body search before and after entering the fairgrounds?”

I feel light-headed. I should have eaten more before I left, but my nerves made it impossible. I only vaguely recognize the question as one which I should respond to in the affirmative.

“Yes,” I breathe out. My voice seems to trail off even on the one syllable word. I don’t know what I was thinking. I don’t know what made me agree to join this year. It’s not mandatory if you’ve lived in Church your whole life. This is Piper’s fault. It’s not. It’s mine. Fuck. The guard is still asking matter-of-fact questions, when I find my voice. “I’m a contestant. I already filled out a consent form.” He looks pissed. I should have said something sooner.

His voice is monotone now, and I assume he is trying to hold back his temper. “You are at the wrong gate. Contestants enter at the East entrance. That was in the packet that you would have received when you turned in your paperwork. You will have a more extensive search and a weigh in at Gate C. There’s a field on that side of the grounds. You’ll receive a blessing in case anything goes wrong during the ceremony.”

“You mean sacrifice,” I blurt, accidentally. Whatever control he had a moment ago vanishes. His lip curls, his eyes roll, and he shoves me out of line, already beginning to speak to the person behind me.

After waiting in the wrong line, I am running late. I should pick up my pace, but my mind is wandering. 

Every year at the end of the dry season, Church hosts The Penny Walk. The actual festival is a requirement for every citizen. The first half of the day is filled with carnival rides and fair-food. The games and rides are simple, but they help bring the community together. The town really puts everything they can into the day. We don’t have much to look forward to in Church. Most of us can’t even afford the extra butter and flour for cake on our birthdays. There is a donation center for anyone who has leftover rations to help fund the ceremony that comes just before sundown, and you are also allowed to buy participation tickets that are then converted into pennies. It’s mostly men who buy tickets, although I have seen a few women join in before. Any girl that has had her seventeenth birthday is allowed to enter as a contestant. The winner gets to give the money to their family, meaning an end to the perpetual squalor that the majority of us live in. The ritual can be dangerous if you don’t know your own limits, so you are only required to enter if your family is new to the town for this crop season. It’s a way to pay for your rations since you weren’t present to help throughout the year. Most of the younger girls in town enter, anyway. The idea of saving your family from having to ration away the rest of their lives is enticing.

This season, I turned nineteen. Despite that fact, I have never entered The Penny Walk before. My twin, Piper, has entered both years that we have been allowed. She hasn’t won, but she hasn’t lost either. That is more than a good amount of past participants can say. I hate even going to the festival. A lot of the residents love it. It’s a chance to socialize and to pay our debts to each other. It’s a clean slate with a party. Maybe if I was a man, I would feel differently, but I can’t make myself see it as anything more than archaic. Piper has always seen it as an opportunity that our elected officials are providing us. An opportunity to better ourselves and our land. I’ve never been able to figure her out. I know twins are supposed to be some sort of soulmates, but I don’t have that gift of connection with her. She begged me to enter this year. And last year. And the year before. 

“Mari, just think about it. We would not only have double the chance of winning, but twins. I mean, everyone loves twins. Way more people would donate and enter if they knew that there were going to be twins to watch this year. It would basically be impossible for one of us to not win,” Piper pleads. Her voice is more breathy than mine and I have a scar on my right thigh from climbing a fence, but aside from that we are identical. Her curls are falling across her eyes, when they would normally be artfully tossed back in a type of gravity-defying wave. The dishevelment tricks me into an intimacy that makes me want to agree. I want to be a team with her. My insides are at war. The practical part of me can see that this is not anything resembling a fool proof plan, but the twin part of me has aimed a gun right at the heart of practicality.

I look down into my lap, avoiding eye contact, “I get what you mean about people loving the idea of twins, but that doesn’t mean that we would win. Piper, you have entered twice, and you still haven’t won. You know it takes more than just getting the most support in order to win. You have to have the fortitude to make it until the end. Anyway, I am not in touch with myself the way that you are. I don’t know that I would know when to stop. ” Not to mention that Piper is fearless, and I am nothing short of a coward. “And don’t you hate the idea of women being some kind of repayment of debts? Isn’t that kind of fucked up? We aren’t currency, Piper. I don’t want to be some kind of offering.”

Her voice drops, “Listen, you can’t talk like that. Obviously, none of us want to think of it that way. Think of it like this, they respect us so much that we are their most valuable resource. That has to mean something. We need the money. You have to know that we need the money. Besides, we would look so good up there together. So tempting. Think about it.” She cups her hand around the back of my neck like she is going in for a hug and pulls me closer. Her already airy voice is almost too quiet to catch, but I just make out the whisper, “We’re being watched, Mari.”

Practicality drops their weapons, as trust slices their practical throat.

I’ve been uneasy since the warning. I figured that if I just entered the contest after refusing that it would seem out of character, but Piper didn’t bring it up again. I don’t know how Piper would have figured out that we were being watched. Or that we were being watched any more than every other citizen of Church is watched. But if she is right, our family will need the money before the next growing season. Our father is older. He isn’t exactly elderly, but he has spent his whole life working the fields in Church. He’s weathered. He was sick for a long portion of the last year. Mostly respiratory issues, but he didn’t put in as much time as would usually be expected. If we are being watched, it is because of his failing health. It’s not unlikely. In Church, you work for your rations until you cannot work anymore. When it seems like you are no longer doing your part, you have two options. Someone in your family can pay for your daily rations using part of their own, or you offer yourself up as a sacrifice to the growing season. Most of us barely get enough to sustain our metabolisms in order to make it through the work day. It is rare that someone does not choose to be a sacrifice. My father would never take any of our rations. The sacrifice is quick and non-violent and taking from one of us would make him feel like a burden. He would never want to live like that. He has never even pushed either of us to join The Penny Walk like some other families do. Mama has never joined either. Her and a few other ladies do the town’s laundry. Piper and I are teachers. We are all our own responsibility in his mind. Nevertheless. If we had the money from winning, he wouldn’t need to worry about working or taking anyone else’s earnings. 

Two weeks after Piper and I talked about entering, the registration came in the mail:

CHURCH’S 130^TH ANNUAL PENNY WALK!

Fun for the whole family!

Rides and games open from sunrise to sundown!

Free food!

Live music!

Don’t forget The Penny Walk Ceremony is open to all female residents 17+, with split the pot prizes and free citizen rations for life to the winner’s family! Ceremony will begin at sundown, and fireworks will take place after the show!

Registration to join the contest is enclosed as well as the option to purchase advance tickets to participate in the show.

Festival begins at the sunrise before the full moon.

*Attendance is mandatory for all residents.

I pulled out the registration sheets, left one on Piper’s desk, and took the other to my bed to look over. I slipped the form inside of the book I had been reading so that she wouldn’t see it if she came in. We share a room, and I didn’t want her to know that I was considering entering because I didn’t need her to persuade me one way or the other. I wanted to be able to make this decision on my own.

The form doesn’t really give much more information than the average citizen already has of the contest. To be fair it is a pretty straight forward thing. It is basically just an outline of the ceremony along with information on what happens to the prize money if you are the winner. It states that if you win but do not make it through to the end of the show then your prize money reverts to your next of kin. If you live then you have the option to accept half the pot and split the rest with the town or to offer the entire winnings to your family and take none for yourself. Everyone knows that the next of kin almost always gets the winnings. I mean. Most of us wouldn’t want that money even if you paid…well. It feels wrong to keep the money after you win. Either way you get your lifetime food rations, so you’re safe until you’re too old to work, and have to hope that one of your living relatives still has the means to take care of you. Otherwise, you become a growing season sacrifice. The rest of the page is devoted to legal nomenclature stating that you or your family will not sue, due to the fact that you are consenting to possible bodily harm and even death. There’s a disclaimer about how if you live, but are harmed in a way that requires medical attention the town will elect a medical professional to intervene and improve your chances of recovery. Obviously they wouldn’t want to lose out on any valuable little worker bees. None of the men ever want to take any of the sewing or cooking jobs, so it wouldn’t be ideal if they lost all of their women to the contest. The last sheet explains that you are aware that you will likely be physically touched, and that you will not inflict harm on any of the participants. It is three sheets worth of language that likens me to a piece of property for the men of the town to digest as they see fit.

That night, I filled out the forms after Piper went to sleep. I thought about telling her. I didn’t want her to worry anymore, but it felt like a concession. It felt like I was losing my humanity. I had spent my entire life claiming that I had too much dignity to lie prostrate at the town’s feet, and now I was readily submitting. I slept deeper than I had in years. The weight of my decision crowded my dreams and held me under like stones in the pocket. In the morning, I woke before the rest of the family and walked the forms to the Town Hall. I came home and washed the dust from town from my shoes. Once they were clean, I made breakfast for everybody in the house. By the time I was done mama already had two people drop off their laundry for the day. We had weak coffee and an egg each, while we chatted about who might join this year, who would be a crowd favorite, and who would make it until the end. I interjected rarely, ate quickly, and then Piper and I left for our jobs at the schoolhouse while my father walked the opposite way toward the fields.

I turn all of this over as I make my way through the dusty, tall grass to the East entrance. I remind myself that this was my own choice. No one made it for me.

The attendant at Gate C is a woman. I think I have seen her around before, but it’s hard to be sure. Most of the time, the people of Church look like they have been wearing the same clothes for a week and before they donned them they took them for a proper roll in the dirt. From the frequency my mother gets laundry from any single house at once, most of the folks in Church probably do wear their clothes for about a week at a time. For the festival, though, everyone is in their best attire. There are few excuses to wear anything other than work clothes, so we take advantage of the opportunity. The woman is in black pants and a clean grey sweater, and she has her face tilted up to soak in the end of season sun. The blush at her cheeks and the bridge of her nose puts me at ease. I clear my throat, “Miss? I think I might be late, but I’m a contestant this year. Last name is Grace.”

To my dismay, she frowns. “Grace already entered.”

“Oh! That was my sister, Piper. My name is Mira. Sorry, we should have just come in together, but I got held up this morning.” I hope that she’ll take that as an explanation and not ask more. I don’t think I have it in me to go into my morning anxiety and how I haven’t even told Piper that I entered.

She looks through a list of names, finds mine, and nods. “Ok, love. You are going to go through here. We do require a cavity search. After you get to wash up. Then they’ll get you a dress and lead you out to the field for the blessing. By the time you make it through all of that, it’s usually dinner time. Afterwards is the ceremony. Your packet should have explained all of that, but I do like to go over it one last time. In case you have anything on you that you maybe don’t want to bring into the ceremony. It’s better to leave it with me than it is to let them find it on you during the search.” She’s fidgety as she finishes up the speech. She is looking into my eyes like she is trying to say more than she can with words.

I’m not sure what she is trying to convey, but I appreciate the way I can feel the empathy radiating from her. “I’m good. Nothing on me. Thank you, though,” I reply with as much calm as I can muster. She nods again and opens the gate. As I walk through she pats my arm and wishes me luck. 

The cavity search isn’t as bad as I am expecting. Another woman performs it, and she is quick and gentle before she leads me to the shower room. It is already wet with sticky heat since I am the last girl to enter. The drain is clogged with hair, and murky water swells around my feet as I wash. As promised, when I am cleaned up there is a bleached, cotton dress laying with my towel. After I dress, I head into the gathering tent. I spot Piper immediately and shyly make my way over to her. She is talking to a group of girls in the same white uniform as me. When she spots me her eyes go wide. “Mira! What the fuck? I can’t believe. When? What are you doing here? Never mind. Get over here. We are about to make flower crowns.” My voice is caught up and clotted somewhere inside my windpipe, so I silently take a seat next to her. She hugs me tight and grabs my hand. Her voice in honeyed-sweet, and slightly higher than usual when she speaks again. “Oh, I just knew that you would come. I am so excited to do this together.”

Once we are all crowned in lavender and orange blossoms, we head out like cattle to slaughter. The grass of the field is only about shin high, since the harvest wasn’t long ago. It tickles when the wind dances across us. I don’t pay much attention to the blessing. I have heard it before. It sounds like all of the ancient, “out of date” blessings I have ever heard from all of the religions that we denounced. Please protect these women as they give themselves to our town. Please return their bodies to the land as payment for all it gives us if they perish. That sort of nonsense. Some of the girls start crying during the recitation, but I just hold Piper’s hand and wait for supper. Unfortunately, it ends up being nondescript meat, potatoes, and bread. It is more than I have had in a year, but I would have preferred the free fair food. Fried dough covered in cinnamon and spun sugar on cones may not be exceptionally filling, but it would have been more of a comfort. I am just finishing using my bread to sop up the last of the juices from the meat, when an attendant comes in to shepherd us on to the stage.

Piper turns to me, eyes gleaming, and smirks, “It’s time.”

The attendant takes our dresses as we head out to the clearing. The sun is down, now and the wind tempts my skin to rise. My nipples harden. My lips feel dry. I am trying not to shiver. Piper continues holding my hand. I always thought that she must be braver than I am to walk out in front of the town with nothing on, and hand herself over this way, but I feel her trembling. Knowing that she is just as scared as I am sends a chill up my spine, and I have to close my eyes and let her lead me in order to stop myself from shaking. My eyes are still closed when we stop, and a disembodied voice booms across the grounds.

“Welcome! We hope you all have enjoyed the festivities tonight. We are about to run our 130th Penny Walk Ceremony at this time, and we need all residents to make their way over to the center clearing while we introduce our contestants this year. As you know, The Penny Walk is open to all female residents of at least seventeen. If you are a new resident this year, you must present at least one female of age as a contestant in order to pay for your family’s rations from the past year. This year we have 32 women participating! That’s a record, folks!”

At this, the announcer begins going through our names, ages, and what family we come from. When he makes it to Piper and I, the crowd whistles and whoops. She was right. They love twins. I lose focus after I hear my name, and by the time I tune back in everyone has already been announced.

“I need anyone who bought a ticket to step forward at this time. Miss Clara is going to take your tickets in exchange for a basket full of pennies in the corresponding amount. We have also evenly split up the amount of pennies that were donated between the number of ticket holders, so everyone has a fair shot. There are a few rules that I will go over while you claim your baskets. First, the girl with the most amount of pennies at the end is our winner. One small disclaimer on this, is that the girl must be conscious. We have in the past had some families try to stuff their girls after they passed out. Because of that, this year we have decided that we will now remove any unconscious contenders before that can happen. Second, you are allowed to touch the girls however you like, but you cannot cause purposeful bodily harm. The contestants are aware that there are occasional injuries as it is an overwhelming game, but as a ticket holder you have agreed to not purposefully inflict pain upon any participant. Medical professionals will be standing by to help with injuries. The third and most important rule is that we now allow contestants to leave the clearing if they are in too much pain to continue. If you leave the clearing you do forfeit your chances of winning, regardless of how many pennies you have received at the time. Ticket holders, please do not attempt to offer pennies to a contestant trying to leave the field.

Now, it seems that everyone has their baskets. I would like to take a moment and thank these women for offering themselves up as payment for the things we require to live our lives. Before the ceremony each of these contestants received a blessing so that they might become an offering if they do not survive the ceremony. We are going to take a moment of silence to honor their sacrifice. At the sound of the bell, the 130^th Annual Penny Walk will begin.”

The seconds between the echo of his words clipping off and the chime of the bell are excruciating. I am crying silent tears, and Piper is squeezing my hand so hard that my wrist throbs. The bell explodes through the crowd and reverberates across my skin.

The men swarm us. I stand as still as I can, though my first instinct is to cover my face. I am staring straight ahead, elbow brushing Piper’s elbow, when the first man comes to us. He licks my cheek as he slides a penny into Piper’s cunt. She is crying, but she doesn’t move. Next he walks behind me and shoves two inside of me. The metal slides inside easily, and my body swallows it up. He leaves with his basket and continues up the line to see what else he might like. Before I can look to Piper two more men are on me. The first is underneath me pushing penny after penny into my pussy. If I were wet it might not be that bad, but I am terrified, and each one hurts more than the next. I think he must use up his entire basket on me. The other man is holding my mouth open and sliding the pennies across my tongue before he stuffs them in my cheeks. He lingers too long on my lips as he slides the fifth one in, and I have to concentrate hard on not vomiting. He sucks at my nipple, as another man approaches. I am sliding the pennies under my tongue in case someone else wants to use my mouth, when I vaguely hear that three contestants have left the field and two have passed out. My mouth tastes like blood, and the only thing I can smell is copper. Another two contestants leave, swatting at men trying to follow them out of the clearing. Someone else is holding my hands behind my back as they bend me forward to slide more pennies inside of me, and I barely catch a glance of Piper. She is on the ground now, and she is still crying, but her eyes are open. I feel blood trickling down my leg as the men continue to push in as many coins as they can fit. A large man pushes me down to my face to shove pennies in my ass, and I shit all over myself and him. The blood from my overstuffed pussy is pooling around me on the ground. He licks me from my neck down to my ankles. Acid makes its way up my throat, and I carefully push it back down, while still holding the pennies in my mouth. Someone rolls me over, and I notice that Piper is gone. There is only one other girl in the clearing with me. She is on her knees and leaning forward as a man slides pennies into her bleeding holes. I lay back and spread my legs wide. Pray for more pennies.