He Changes His Mind

She’s standing at death’s door. Well, not yet – but soon. Of this, he was quite certain.

Well, after all, it is inevitable. All of us eventually end up at that door. Who knows when one’s number comes up? Her number’s up. So unexpected. For her.

So he cleared his mind of all the usual clutter of data and text and … stuff. A clear mind, a stage on which all the possibilities of his future could play out. He set about making a mental reckoning: plusses and minusses, debits and credits, smiley faces and storm clouds.

Of course, before seeing to all of the other practical matters, there would be the grief. Of course. And the portrayal of his grief for the benefit of the living was certainly going to be a chore, but there was no dodging it. He could probably figure that the worst of the dutiful pantomime would be over in five days, maybe two weeks tops. Well, that’s death for you. Get it over with. 

Come on, now, you must truly and deeply appreciate how losing her will darken your life, before you go over and start to add up all the items in the other column. The loneliness; you must figure that in.

She is a kind and loving person who is always by his side. She has her talents, her flair, her imagination. She has certainly borne her side of the financial burdens in their marriage. All of these he would miss. Oh, he would never forget her; that was his vow. She was an all-around good human being.

But when she was no more, what then? Well, here is how the performance on his stage proceeded:

It means I will be alone, a free agent, on my schedule, with no one to veto my fishing trips or make plans on my behalf. He would go to church and the doctor and the dentist, and the gym when he decided to do so. And the barber and the optometrist ….

My retirement fund will go twice as far when I discontinue all her insurance payments and subscriptions. Why, the savings in hair and nail appointments each month alone! Also, her membership to the gym, where she and her crowd met to stand around in yoga pants and crop tops and chatter. He would cancel about five streaming services he wouldn’t watch if someone held a gun to his head. Let’s say that’s five services at approximately $15 a month per, plus that’s probably five movies a month at each – anywhere from $4 – $6 each. We’re looking at $200 or more a month right there. That halfway pays for a housecleaner every two weeks. They also splurge $200 a month on wine (which he hates and doesn’t drink); that right there is the other half of the maid service bill. Yeah, that would work out nice and tidy.

(Except he was going to have to clean the house by himself, top to bottom, one more time. And ‘clean’ the house he would.)

It means I will have lots of her effects to manage. Her brothers and their wives could have what they wanted of her clothing and jewelry, the rest to be donated. He would retain her laptop (wonder what he’ll find there?). He didn’t really need a second car or its expenses, so her Lexus SUV could be sold. Cancel her car insurance. He could think of three kitchen appliances and a couple of pieces of furniture that he had always found fussy and extraneous. He’d probably post them on the marketplace website and rake in a couple of thou on the sales.

It means I will have more space. Lots more space. Closets – plural! And her hobby room. Half the garage full of her collection of dolls (while his pickup sat out in the elements year ‘round). The dolls – there’s another couple thou if he could manage the online sales. His widower’s budget was looking even healthier.

It means I can upgrade the standard of living around here with potentially a bonus bank. If his numbers are correct – who knows – but the positive balance on the ledger is in black and white. He really doesn’t need anything he doesn’t already have. That’s not humblebrag, that’s just him living in the world that suits him. He loves clean sheets, good food, warm clothes (and cottons in summer’s heat). The world that suits him has southern facing windows and perfectly balanced heat/cool year round. His world, his settings, no compromise.

It means I am on my own for nutrition. He wouldn’t starve; of course not. He could enjoy two or three meals out each week. Keep a supply of cereal, bread, fresh eggs, bacon, sliced meats and cheese. I will have sole responsibility for my food choices.

It means I won’t be seeing her side of the family much anymore (yay). How would he finesse Thanksgiving and Christmas diplomatically? He entertained the fantasy of meeting someone who enjoys holiday cruises so that he would then be apologetically out at sea while her folks were having fun arguing about politics and letting their kids run wild. Something along those lines. This would not be a problem if her people didn’t live right here in the same town.

It means more time to read, more time for long walks to just think and to marvel at this place unto which I have delivered myself. Gone with her (dear girl) would be the nightly Jeopardy! competition, followed by some diversion for two: cribbage, Scrabble, double solitaire. So between the game show and the games, that’s almost the whole evening at least four nights a week. Yes, they were fun times, but now he would basically have an open calendar after 6 pm every weekday. Okay, so what does that suggest? Poker nights? Book clubs? Gym membership (hard no). He was determined that he would NOT waste three hours every night either curled up with his e-reader, or watching YouTube videos on the flat screen. 

It means I hide nothing from myself, and I reveal nothing to anyone. Other than perhaps a cruise companion once in a while, he would gladly not see anyone at all. Ever. Avoiding people is the most prudent plan for a happily-ever-after. To hell with poker night, book club and gym!

It means that – as I go through the most soul-wrenching moments of human experience – she will be in no position to help and guide and counsel me. She will be there of course, but not for his benefit, and certainly not for her own. How unfortunate.

It means I will need to become a different person. From now on, he must listen very closely to every word uttered around him. And he absolutely must weigh every word before he speaks. He must hold everyone he meets at arm’s length, must always think before answering even the most innocuous question. My freedom depends on living a mistake-free life as long as I can.

It means hard work and dedication from this moment forward if I am to live the life I envision. The life I am facilitating, the possibilities I am creating, the freedom I will win this very day.

It means that if I proceed with my plan, I will never sleep easily again. 

His heart nearly stopped. He hasn’t thought this through – no, no, not nearly well enough at all! She will be through that door in minutes – MINUTES!  – at which moment he must be ready to greet her. With a smile on his face – and the syringe behind his back. 

But now this. Doubt. Doubts plural. What ifs. 

It is said that a drowning man has his entire life pass before his eyes; now I can see every episode of Columbo in a flash. They never got one past him in, what was it? Ten seasons? They always get caught. I’m as good as caught. Life sentence if I’m lucky.

Her car door closing resounded from the driveway. Abort!

The kitchen door opened. Her eyes wide with bewildered surprise at the sight of him looming in the doorway, she beamed a sunny smile at him. 

With his left hand, he reached to relieve her of a shopping bag.

As she stepped through the door, he brought his right arm around her back.

Around her shoulder.

He pulled her close and held her tight.

And kissed her cheek playfully as his plot evaporated in a mist. Oh God, that was close!

What a lucky break for her. He hugged her so tightly that he couldn’t see the four-inch knife blade. Which she stuck with sufficient force between his ribs and into his chest.

As he collapsed to the hallway tile floor – stunned, gurgling, eyes wide with panic – she busied herself with the many small details of cleaning up the murder scene.

Robo Ghosts of Futurail, By Kandy Fontaine

You board the Futurail at 03:33, the hour when Thalassa exhales memory through its infrastructure like blood through cracked porcelain. The train isn’t real. It’s a memory artifact—residual code from a dissolved mainframe, still twitching in the city’s dead grid. It runs on recursion and sonar. No destination. No schedule. Just transmission.

You wear a coat cut from signal-dampening fiber, matte black, stitched with anti-surveillance thread. Your spine clicks—segment by segment—each vertebra a reel of extinct cinema. But it’s not prosthetic. It’s a centipede. Segmented. Semi-sentient. A graft from the Thalassa collapse, wired into your nervous system with salt-thread and carbon filament. It remembers things you never lived. Drowned cities. Erotic executions. The sound of lips parting before betrayal. It sings them in pulse-language—low-frequency, encrypted, erotic.

The train is dressed for spectacle. A carnival of mourning. The walls shimmer with confetti—circuitry masquerading as celebration. Circus-light filaments encoded in orgasmic pulse. Nanotech engineered to simulate grief, loop pleasure through trauma, dissolve the difference. You inhale it. It rewrites your breath. It tastes like climax and static.

Nyx follows. Fossil-machine cat. Tail flicking in Morse code. Recursive. Every blink births another Nyx. One in the pipes. One in the mirrors. One fossilized in the bathhouse tiles. She’s a glitch in your myth. A god in your machine.

You jack in.

Your ports open. Your breath becomes ink. Your skin begins to screen.

Then it begins to scream.

Not in sound. In sensation. An erotic broadcast of horrors stitched into your flesh. Each pore a mouth. Each scar a speaker. Barbara Steele’s scream pulses from your collarbone. Edwige Fenech’s stare burns beneath your ribs. Daniela Doria’s drowning face claws at your thighs. Your shoulder plays Phenomena in reverse. Your moans are dubbed. Your pores project. Your skin sings.

The centipede spine clicks in rhythm. Each segment pulses. The train responds. Its wetware hums. The mirrors bleed.

Then Mira Aoki-9 appears.

Lipstick lesbian robot ghost. Dissolved centuries ago in the ocean bed beneath Thalassa. Archived in sonar. Resurrected through obsession. You saw her once—in a bootleg reel called Throat Sprockets: Submerged Cut. A forbidden film. A fetish for the throat. For the voice. For the interface between breath and machine.

She steps from the mirror. Her heels click like reel changes. Her eyes flicker with reversed whale song. She’s wrapped in chrome-thread silk. Her voice tuned to a frequency that makes your spine twitch. You kiss. The mirrors shatter. The train moans.

She rewrites your circuitry with her tongue. She whispers speculative poems into your spine. Each one a memory cocktail. Each one a sacred infection. Her breath syncs with Nyx’s purr. Her fingers leave glyphs on your skin—ritual code, erotic syntax, a language only ghosts understand.

The train becomes the Surreal Beauty Café. A salon of erotic machines. A temple of Queer ritual. A cathedral of extinct desire. The walls bleed velvet. The floor blooms coral. The carnival spins. Nyx purrs beside the altar. Mira dances in glitch. You serve memory cocktails. You become the Archive.

Outside, Thalassa flickers. A loop of drowned architecture and haunted neon. Moon Camp Americana floats in orbit, broadcasting art porn and Teknopriest propaganda. The finishing school for delinquent daughters is empty. The mirrors cracked. The cameras still roll.

Inside the train, time fractures.

Nyx multiplies. Mira glitches. You sing.

Your voice is sonar. Your breath is ink. Your song infects the fossil circuit. The train moans. The ghosts scream. The mirrors bleed.

You see yourself reflected in a thousand timelines—glam detective, fossil priestess, drowned slut, archive incarnate. Each version flickers. Each version sings. Each version is stitched with horror heroines and haunted code.

Mira holds your hand. Nyx curls around your throat. The train pulses.

You are no longer a passenger. You are no longer human.

You are transmission.

You are ritual.

You are myth.

You are the erotic funeral.

And the carnival never ends.

Young and Alone

“Yo, white boy! The fuck you wearing?”

Sometimes I take a chance with strangers. I look them right in the eye and pretend I am feeling nothing. I tell them exactly how it is.

“Clothes.” My expression remains as bland and lifeless as one of those photo portraits from 1900.

The man’s friend laughs in the most genuine way imaginable. It almost makes me smile when he cuffs his buddy on the shoulder and mocks him. “Yeah, man!” He says, still laughing. “Something you don’t know nothing about: fashion!” He is so boisterous, so loud and full of amusement, that his exuberance cuts right through the silence of a city muted by snowfall.

“Shiiiit,” the first guy says, head down, defeated. Together, the two strangers stroll off, laughter fading with the passing blocks, audible outbursts swallowed by the weather. In front of me, the green walking man urges me to hurry on across the street. He lights up and counts down, as if a threat. Somewhere beneath all this salt and snow is a crosswalk. I cross the road, persuaded more by the golden arches looming with the promise of cheap, bad food and hot, bland coffee than the green man and his tick-tick-ticking away down to zero, to amber, and then red.

Far off, a car horn echoes. I hear a shout, then more laughter. I think of the two men who are now three blocks south of me. I look, and no one is near, so I allow myself to smile. The encounter has left me in a favorable mood.

To the credit of the gentleman that first inquired about my outfit, my style back then was rather outlandish, inviting scorn. From memory, I was wearing cut-off brown suit pants, roughly shorn somewhere between the ankle and knee. Shants, I had proudly called them—neither pants nor shorts, but somewhere in between. I wore variations of them from age 16 and would continue to do so until age 35. Nothing else. No exception. Whether the height of blazing summer or the dead of frozen winter, it was always the same. It was always shants.

My eggplant socks clashed beautifully with the golden-brown, hybrid legwear. My bruise-hued wing-tip shoes were so worn and damaged from salted, winter streets and general misuse that they were broken at the toes. I think I wore a white sweater that day; way too large, in the style of the early 90s. Loose collar, little zig-zag dashes of yellow, pink and blue arranged in random tallies across the breast. The ensemble was loud, but gorgeous. Gaudy, but fun. Not unlike those delightfully outspoken strangers who I could still manage to hear at the Sinclair a quarter mile down the road.

Snowflakes fell to inhabit my curls. They sat on my brow, big and glittery, a bejeweled tiara. Don’t even get me started on my hair—my jewfro was special, the size of a baby elephant. A woolly mammoth. Truly, the motherfucker was terrifically large. Despite the cold, I couldn’t possibly cover up my pride and joy with a stocking cap. I didn’t know it then, but those curls would fall lank in later years. Gravity would have the last laugh. It always does.

Anyone sensible was indoors, so I had St. Paul all to myself. This was before Uber Eats and streaming services, so people were being social, meeting each other, feeding and entertaining themselves without the aid of digital assistance. I was the only asshole out on my own, out in the cold on the streets. I guess I was desperate, at odds with my fuck-the-world stance. I couldn’t ignore that I was also lonely, that I wanted to connect. I’d make a big show of pushing away. But really, I was just reaching out.

As a whole, I looked the part: a real attention-seeking, sullen youth. Anti-social misfit meets spotlight-seeking spoiled brat. Suburb kid moves to the city. Dime a dozen, even if the outfit and hair separated me just a little bit.

Outside the Mickey-D’s, I saw sad faces from within, each one buried behind a flat burger or one of those dinky apple pies, gloomy expressions lost in steaming, polystyrene cups. At the time, the month before, someone had made millions after suing for burning their hand on spilled, hot coffee. As a result, all the cups came with a warning: CAUTION: CONTENTS VERY HOT. It’s coffee. It better be fucking hot.

Without a vehicle, sometimes I walked the drive-thru. This action received mixed reviews. Smiles and winks at the service window; warnings from some tight-lipped manager that it better be the last time; cordial honks from the car behind me in the queue; heckling slurs from drunks trying to feed themselves and get home before they acquire another DWI. One time, at a Taco Bell, I got a marriage proposal with my Crispy Chicken Burrito. On this particular occasion, however, the night had been as cold as a Dairy Queen Blizzard. With the elements as harsh as they had been, I elected to go inside.

The girl taking my order was enormous, but her face was perhaps the prettiest human visage I had ever seen outside of Hollywood. Her smile was impossibly white and seemed to come easy. She had  massive cheeks that shined like grease on a Big Mac patty. I read her name-tag: Patty. Our hands touched when she handed me my burger. I sort of fell in love.

I found a seat facing the menu and the staff. I took my scalding coffee and read the label. I traced a finger across the bold, capital letters, large and red. CAUTION: CONTENTS VERY HOT. I burned my lip on my first sip. I winced and spilled a dribble on my lap, gasped in pain. I had been warned. There will be no suing this golden empire. I guess I’ll have to make my millions by nefarious trade, or —Lord save me— by climbing the ladder. 

I watched the big girl, playing out fantasies in my mind that included dinky apple pies and straining for breath. I gazed at Patty, large and red. She saw me and smiled. She waved, her press-ons like sorceress talons the exact shade of her work shirt. It was impossible not to think of an awkward handjob.

I smiled back and drank my coffee, which still burned. I devoured the image of Patty with unblinking eyes, savaging away at low-grade beef with my molars. I wished for nothing more than to go home with this woman, to feel the weight of her love on top of me. Corrosive, my beverage burned my tongue, scourged my oesophagus down to my core.

Patty turned away from my leering, looked to the door when it opened with a gust of frigid air. No one was there. It was like a ghost had walked through the entrance, paused, and changed its mind. Through the open door, I heard laughter. It was far away, muted by innumerable snowflakes. I got up to go, waved goodbye to Patty’s epic backside. She was flipping burgers, miles always.

I hefted my mighty jewfro. I brushed burger shrapnel from my shants. I walked out into a city buried in snow, and, trudging along, searched for something, anything. I took a sip and frowned—without the slightest warning, my coffee had gone totally cold.