Blush Response

by E. Catherine Tobler

No shit, there I was, behind the wet curves of the ebony Bugatti, watching Kasper cut through the rain like a knife’s sudden edge. He paced outside the automat, clothes wet like he’d been out there a few hours. His silver lighter slid between his rain-flecked hands.

It was too wet to smoke, the windows of the Bugatti streaming with rain that ran quicksilver when I slammed the trunk. It latched with an exasperated splatter and I brushed the wet from my charcoal trousers and straightened to study Kasper.

“Lola.”

Kasper was an ashen smudge amid the hues of gray that coated the world until he thrust his chin toward me in greeting. The clear light falling through the automat’s window caught the rosy colors that banded his cheeks and brow for a long-ago crime, exposing hues unnatural and alien. His left eye gleamed emerald, the other as flat and flint as Chicago around us.

I joined him under the dripping awning, rain tracing my melting jet pincurls while he rooted in his jacket for his silver cigarette case. The minute he opened it, the damp air blanketed the cigarettes and his lighter refused to catch.

“You’re late for your boys,” I said, “and looking like the gutters spat you out.” Sodden debris clung to his shoulders and his shirt was rucked out of his belt. His hair, slate parted to the right and gold to the left, was mussed like a lady’d had her fingers all up in it. But no lady would have her fingers all up in that.

“They in there?” His head jerked toward the automat window.

“You know they are.”

Kasper’s crew, the Rock Ghosts, was sour-faced and focused on the door to the powder room. I unbuttoned my jacket and shoved my hands into my pockets, the motion exposing the black leather holster at my waist. As far as Kasper knew, I was a bruno like him, someone known for keeping things right and proper and orderly. You needed a thing taken or reclaimed, we were also the people to see. Usually.

“You–” The word seemed too big in his mouth and he coughed. “I can ask you something, Lola? In confidence?”

He was going to ask me about the dame, because she wasn’t at the table where she should be. Where he should be, too, because he always saw to her, made sure she had her slice of sweet meringue.

“You can ask me something, Kasper.” I rocked back on my heels, enjoying his discomfort the way I would later enjoy stripping out of my damp suit.

“You seen Wonderly tonight?”

People didn’t much talk about Wonderly; she was a sin everyone desired but none wanted to confess. She was a creature that shouldn’t exist, not so much an angel you hear stories about, but more a creature that should not be possible at all, something no one could ever rightly make. You believe in God enough, angels seem possible. Not Wonderly.

(Continue Reading…)

Pulling Secrets from Stones

by Beth Goder

In the lakebed by the mountains slept stones full of secrets. Waiting memories. Dissipating memories. Rachel could feel the hum of them, their longing for closeness, pressing against her as the sun pressed down.

She slid down to the lakebed. Dust rose around her, obscuring her truck by the side of the road. The air stagnated, heavy and dry, baking itself into the earth.

Her memories were dying–the secret ones, the memories that let her touch the sky, the memories of how to cast a branch to find missing things, or summon a flower in her hand. All of her most important memories. Gone.

She pulled a geological survey map from her pack, jostling her water bottle and a squished peanut butter sandwich. Unfolded, the map stretched farther than her arms. Red marks showed where she had searched. Not much of the map was marked–perhaps half an inch.

Rachel hiked until she reached the edge of her last red mark.

She turned over a stone–memory shaped–then cupped it in her hands. Ordinary. The next stone was the same, and the next. The lakebed stretched for miles, with huge cracks like fractals in the dust. Endless.

Stones, stones, stones. None of them memories.

Wind brushed past, and for a moment, Rachel feared that the woman in the mountains had found her. This close to the mountains, the woman could feel the land as if it were her body–the sweep of wind along mountain backs, the plants that thrust themselves through soil, the intrusion of sun into shaded spaces. The woman in the mountains had described this connection to Rachel, back when she had described everything to Rachel. Before the anger. Before the woman had discovered Rachel putting memories into stones. Before the rift that separated them as no mountain could ever do.

When Rachel looked up, only the sun was above her. Her relief was empty. Dry.  As much as she feared the woman in the mountains, she wished to see her again.

And Rachel did fear her. The woman was like a crash of rain, an avalanche, soaking everything in her path. Unaware. But Rachel had come to love her wild kindness, her fierceness. The woman would mix the colors of the sunset beautiful and bright. She would send goats to look after the elderly, those who had no children. With a splash of soil and a whisper, she could cure sickness in trees, but never death.

The memory of the woman hung above Rachel like a dark sky, full and treacherous. Waiting.

(Continue Reading…)

Jenny Come Up the Well

by A.C. Wise

Jenny come up th’ water

Jenny come up th’ well

Ne’er let Jenny touch you

Or she’ll drag you down to Hell

The car had always been there, a 1981 Oldsmobile Cutlass sitting on rotting tires in the woods behind the cul-de-sac where I lived. Even though its manufacture date meant it could only have been there since I was born, it felt older — like it predated the trees, like the woods had grown up around it. No one knew where it had come from, who’d left it there, or why.

It was called the Beater, not just because it was junked-up, tires dry to crumbling, stubborn, whip-thin trees growing up through the frame, but because kids went there to beat off.

A perpetually refreshed stash of porn could always be found in the glove box, which, like the car, no one ever admitted to leaving there.

It was one of the Beater’s many unspoken rules — the magazines were shoplifted, or stolen from underneath older siblings’ beds, but never bought. You never talked about the Beater directly. You never brought anyone to the Beater with you. Nobody went there under the age of twelve or over eighteen. If you took something away, you had to leave something behind. And that kept the Beater’s magic working.

Even though I was an only child and didn’t have to share a bedroom, I still went to the Beater. It was a rite of passage — sitting in the stuffy front seat, light coming through the cracked windshield, leaf shadows throwing patterns on the dash.

I gathered up images there and played them back later in the dark, spinning elaborate stories with the sheets pulled over my head and my fingers between my legs. The Beater existed outside time, outside normal rules. There, I could pretend the women displaying themselves for men were displaying themselves for me, and it felt like it could be okay.

(Continue Reading…)

Rewind

By Josh Rountree

MONDAY

The dust biker comes into the video store that afternoon looking for slasher flicks. He heads straight to the horror section, not bothering to remove his breathing apparatus, and pulls a couple of classics from the shelf. Friday the 13^th Part III and the original Halloween.

“You like this kind of stuff?” I ask when he hands the tapes to me for checkout.

“Yeah, so?” His voice is a mechanical whine and the desert winds have rendered his gray body suit smooth and practically transparent. I can’t see his eyes through the scored surface of his goggles, but I can feel the edge in the way he’s staring at me.

“I like them too,” I say. “I’ve seen hundreds of them. Slasher flicks, I mean.”

“Yeah, so what’s the best one?”

I don’t even have to think about it. “You ever seen Sleepaway Camp?”

His neck makes a stretching, leathery sound as he shakes his head side to side. “No.”

I sprint to the back of the store, pull the sun faded VHS box from the shelf, and add it to his pile. “On the house. Just let me know what you think when you drop it off.”

“You aren’t charging me?”

“No, just a favor from one fan to another.”

He might be smiling but I can’t see through the grill of his mask. He looms there like Jason Voorhees, silent and unreadable. Dust rides the creases of his suit and he reeks of illegal petroleum. He’s s seven-foot shadow come to life, an abstract artist’s rendering of torn metal and melted rubber pooling along an endless broken highway. He exhales heavily and it sounds like the rattle of failing pistons.

“Do you have a bag?”

I bag up his tapes and he grunts his thanks on the way out the door. The front wall of the store is made of glass and I watch as he starts his bike and speeds away toward the shimmering red horizon.

I hope he likes the movie. (Continue Reading…)

An Empty Cup

by J.T. Greathouse

1

Eshi the Boy

As for every child of the Islands, when Eshi was born a zephyr descended from the Upper Air to alight on his shoulder. Grandmother Sul burned precious driftwood, inhaled its cinnamon scent, and begged the zephyr to give her grandson the gifts of a healer. There were never enough healers on Eastwind Island, and healers were well regarded and well positioned in life. Eshi’s father, a less ambitious and more realistic man, burned driftwood of his own, but asked only that his son’s zephyr grant a talent for fishing or for hunting, or even for whipping the wind. Practical talents, but more common. Talents the community could use.

Eshi’s mother, too, burned driftwood. Her prayer was the simplest. She asked only for her son’s happiness, and that his zephyr would give him a talent to match his soul.

If not for that prayer, perhaps Eshi would have lived an easier life.

(Continue Reading…)