Summer was half over before it had even begun. With a sense that my life was in the same state, I phoned Lizzie Shaw. She hadn’t changed.

They lived in East Dulwich now, she told me, her and Tim, in a little house ‘practically given’ them by a friend. She had worked for a while as a buyer for John Lewis. ‘You’d have been proud of me,’ she said. ‘I was properly industrious.’ She had bought a Mercedes. Enjoyed the money. Missed her kids. ‘I wasn’t getting home ‘til eight. I had a seventeen year old Polish girl looking after my family, I mean can you believe it?’ Jobs pall, she said, as soon as you start thinking like that. She said she couldn’t wait to see me. ‘People count more as you get older.’ She was thirty seven now. Then she said:‘I’m pregnant again,’ and burst into tears.

That house was always full of sex.

***

‘You will come and see us?’ Lizzie said.

‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘Would that be a good idea?’

‘Please,’ she said.

I thought about it. I drove across London, intending to go there, but lost motivation somehow and fetched up in Brixton or Blackheath instead. Lizzie kept phoning. Would I go and see them again, or not?

‘Why don’t we meet where we used to?’ I suggested. ‘Just the two of us?’

‘It can’t be like that again,’ she warned me.

‘I know,’ I said.

I wanted to put the phone down and not speak to her for another three years.

‘All right then,’ she said. ‘When?’

We had lunch at Angels & Gypsies on Camberwell Church Street. She was late, a little nervous. ‘I can’t get over you,’ I said. The pregnancy threw her off-balance a little, but it suited her. ‘You look so well.’

We talked about her boys for a bit. She had got them into a good school. They were so grown up, she said. So emotionally intelligent. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without them, especially Ben.’ Of the buyer’s job she would only say: ‘I felt it was right at the time. But now I feel it’s right to be pregnant again.’

‘And how is Tim?’

‘Just the same,’ she said ‘You know Tim.’

I smiled. ‘I do,’ I said.

‘He’s converting the loft.’

‘Is he now?’ I said.

‘It’s such a little house,’ she said off-handedly. ‘He thought it would be a good idea. He thought it could be a studio.’ She ate some olives and then some bread. She sat back. ‘This is nice,’ she said vaguely. ‘I always loved this place.’

I knew that tone of voice.

‘What’s the matter?’ I said.

‘Oh, you know.’ She looked away suddenly. ‘It’s all he ever does now, really. The loft.’

I reached across the table and tried to take her hand. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t want that.’

She told me about Tim. Something happened to him, she said, the day he was forty. He went up into the loft. He liked it there, the very first time he stuck his head and shoulders up through the trapdoor. He called down from the top of the ladder, something like, ‘Hey!’ or, ‘Wow!’ and that was it. Something clicked for him. Soon he was up there every available day, working, but not at his job. He had started out to store things up there. Then he was going to convert it. Then he was moving himself into it, bit by bit. He even had his own TV up there.

‘He was forty,’ she said. Looking back, you could see that’s when it began. ‘His life was so good,’ she said. ‘But something went wrong with his view of it.’

After a pause she said,‘He misses you.’

I couldn’t take that seriously.

‘I bet he does,’ I said.

‘We both miss you.’

‘I’ve missed you,’ I said.

‘I know. I know,’ she said. ‘So you will come over? To supper?’

I began to say, ‘I’m not sure that’s such a good idea,’ but she was already adding:

‘Perhaps you can even talk some sense into him.’

‘I’m not the best person to do that.’

‘At least come to supper,’ she said. She put her hand over mine. ‘It’s so good to see you again,’ she said.

***

I shouldn’t have gone, but in the end I couldn’t see any reason not to. I was bored. I thought she might light my life up again.

Their street was like all the others packed between the railway and the hospital. Tubs of geraniums outside narrow-fronted terraces. Roadsters parked two wheels up on the pavement. The house was nice but far too small for them. By the time you had a family you were supposed to have moved down the road to the Village, or out of London altogether. East Dulwich – or Dull Eastwich, as Tim called it – was for younger people. They would have done better, he said, in Herne Hill: but you didn’t get the resale value.

He hadn’t changed much since I last saw him. You found people like Tim all over London. They had rowed a little at school. At the weekend they wore chinos and a good quality sailing fleece. Boat shoes with no socks. They all had the same tall, polite good looks. They never seemed to age: instead, their self-deprecation matured into puzzlement. They began to look tired. Tim liked to cook. He had his treasured cast iron saucepans from the 80s, his five-hob Lacanche range. I watched him, and drank a beer, and asked him how things were.

‘Oh, you know,’ he said vaguely. ‘Could you pass me that? No, the little one.’

Once we sat down to eat it became harder to sustain a conversation. ‘I wish I’d learned to cook,’ I said, as if I’d lived the kind of life which makes a thing like that impossible. He didn’t know what to say to that. Who would? This left things to Lizzie, who grew impatient. ‘It’s a chicken,’ she explained to me. ‘A child could cook it.’ He was quick to agree. ‘You could soon learn, you could soon learn.’ He slotted the plates into the dishwasher while she banged pudding down on the table.

‘Well that was good,’ I said when we’d eaten it.

‘I’m glad,’ Lizzie said. ‘The kitchen cost him twenty thousand pounds.’ When he only smiled at this, she added: ‘No one puts a twenty thousand pound kitchen in a house in East Dulwich. In the Village, yes. In East Dulwich, no.’   Tim shrugged a little. He looked away. Twenty thousand pounds was an exaggeration, the shrug said. It said that if you were going to cook you should have the right things.

While Lizzie made coffee in the kitchen, he gave me the tour. ‘We’d gone as far as we could without opening the loft,’ he said. You could see they had. ‘It was a bit of a push to find somewhere for the boys.’ Tim, you sensed, had turned his talents as easily to family life as to sport: but now he wasn’t quite sure how he came to have a family in the first place. I poked my head into the little room he used as a study.

‘No computer?’ I said.

He’d moved it up there already, he said. There had never been enough room down here. ‘Lizzie told me you were up to your neck in it,’ I said. The study was a mess. He laughed and looked rather tiredly at the heaps of stuff. ‘Eventually all this will go up there.’ I asked him if I could see the loft. ‘It’s a bit dusty at the moment,’ he said. ‘Probably better to wait.’ I didn’t press him, even though I knew Lizzie would have wanted me to; and I left not long later. Tim had his problems, I had mine. One of mine was that I didn’t really care one way or another about him. It’s hard to hide that. He knew it as well as I did, and she was the only one pretending not to know. I kept in touch. I went over there once or twice, for a meal, then let it lapse again. I was working anyway.

***

Three months later the phone rang.

I answered it. I said, ‘Hello?’

‘Hi. It’s Lizzie.’

I caught my breath.

‘Hi,’ I said, ‘I –’

‘There’s someone on the other line, hang on,’ she said. Then, ‘Hi. How are you, I’m sorry about that.’

‘No, it’s OK.’

After a pause she said: ‘It’s a girl.’

‘I can’t believe it,’ I said.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘A girl!’

I sent flowers. I sent a card. I telephoned my friends as if I was the father. In two days Lizzie was on the phone again.

‘The baby’s home,’ she said, ‘but he won’t see it.’

‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘We’re both back from the hospital, but he won’t see either of us.’

‘He won’t see his own baby?’

He wouldn’t see his own baby. He sent notes down from the loft.

‘I don’t know where to turn,’ Lizzie said.

‘Come on,’ I tried to encourage her, ‘he was a bit like this with the boys.’

‘Well now he’s got a girl and he won’t come down out of the loft to even look at her. What am I going to do?’

So I found myself in East Dulwich again, hoping to get a word alone with her. The house was full of wellwishers. Her women friends had long backs and sexy voices. The men were packed with the aimless brutal confidence of people barely thirty years old earning large sums of money at banking. Even their children were successful at something. I felt old and immature at the same time. Tim was nowhere to be seen, but no one mentioned that. He was in the loft of course, but no one mentioned that either. They had called the baby Emma. I held her while Lizzie had a proper drink. I couldn’t believe her fingernails.

‘Look,’ I told anyone who would listen, ‘they come with a manicure!’

The boys stared at me as if I was simple, and Emma started crying. I took her outside. I brought her back in. It was no good. She looked up at me angrily and flexed her spine. Her face went bright red.

‘Give her to me,’ said Lizzie. ‘She wants something you haven’t got.’

This drew laughs all round.

I was there a lot the first few weeks. I helped with this and that. I learned to change a nappy. Lizzie sat up in bed, looking exhausted but pleased. ‘They’ve taken it well,’ she said of the boys. She was proud of them. After a few days, though, they grew thoughtful, painted their faces, spent money on slime. They ran in and out of the small garden whooping and shouting: but magical thinking would not save them. Change was inevitable. The tribe was doomed.

Tim watched it all from a distance. His idea, you could see, was to ride it out. Six months after his daughter arrived, the loft was his home. He cooked up there, he slept up there. ‘He’s living on baked beans,’ Lizzie said. She looked down at the baby. ‘Essentially,’ she said in a tragic voice, ‘he’s left us.’ No one had any idea what he was doing. He hauled stuff up in a plastic dustbin. Whatever it was began coming down again within a few hours. There was a lot of bumping and banging which sometimes went on all night. She asked me, ‘What’s he doing up there, with all those power tools?’

I said it could be anything.

‘Is this something that happens to men?’ she said viciously, as if I was doing it too. Shortly afterwards he installed a good-quality pull-down ladder, but he rarely used it himself and the boys were forbidden to go near it. He was a man living away from his family.

‘He might as well have gone to Blackpool,’ Lizzie said. ‘You’ve got to talk to him.’

I tried. If nothing else, I thought, it would give me a glimpse of the loft. I went up the ladder. I stuck my head through the trap door. I got a confused idea of a much smaller space than I had expected, most of it curtained off by heavy tarpaulins which sagged from the roofbeams. He had put a floor in. Piles of eurothane insulation lay about under an unshaded low-wattage bulb, everything thick with damp-looking dust. It all seemed thoroughly miserable. Tim sat at an old school desk, his legs sticking out awkwardly at the sides, writing something on a sheet of ruled A4. The computer components stacked on the floor beside him were still done up in bubble-wrap. He hadn’t even bothered to unpack them.

‘Hi Tim,’ I said. ‘When do you think you might be finished?’

He got up quickly.

‘Probably better if we talk downstairs,’ he said.

He looked embarrassed. You don’t want your wife’s best friend to see you living in your attic. You don’t want him to think about what that means. I’d hoped I might shock him into talking about things. But in the end we just stood there awkwardly on the landing looking past one another, and all he would say was:

‘You have to get away somehow. You have to get away from it all.’

‘I don’t think Lizzie sees it that way,’ I said. ‘You know?’

This sounded futile, even to me.

After a moment I added: ‘I think she’d like to see more of you. The kids would too.’

He studied the floor and shook his head.

***

But Lizzie did want to see more of him. She wanted to see more of someone, anyway. She called me.

‘Come and meet me for a drink,’ she said. ‘I’m in need of, oh, something.’ She laughed. ‘I don’t know what I’m in need of.’ She left a pause and then said: ‘We could meet somewhere in town.’ I didn’t ask who would look after the baby.

All afternoon she seemed nervous. She kept taking her phone out of her bag, studying it with a faintly irritable expression, then putting it back again. She swirled her drink around her glass. She looked up at me once or twice, began to say something, decided not to. She was wearing skinny, low-cut velvet jeans. When she saw me looking at them she said, ‘Do you think they’re too young for me?’ They were a champagne colour, and they fastened at the back with a lace, like a shoe. She touched my arm.

‘It’s odd, isn’t it,’ she said, ‘how things happen? I always loved this suit of yours. Your only suit.’

She said, ‘I’ve never seen your house, have I?’

She drove us over to Walthamstow in the Mercedes. They always called it that, her and Tim: the Mercedes. As if they had other cars, two or three of them. When I showed her into the house she said, ‘It’s bigger than I thought it would be.’ She stared into the kitchen for a moment, then out into the garden. We went upstairs. She looked at the bicycle in the bedroom and said,‘ It’s so like you, all this. Really it is.’ She got her phone out again. She put it next to her ear and shook it. When nothing happened her expression hardened. Then she laughed. ‘It’s just what I expected, all of it.’

I don’t know what I expected. I’d been waiting for her for three years; longer. After about ten minutes I said, ‘I love your neck. The nape of it, here.’   Then I said: ‘I can’t believe this is happening.’ She twisted away immediately and we lay like that for a minute or two, awkward and embarrassed. My hand was still on her hip.

‘This is stupid,’ she said.

‘Why?’

‘Because it just isn’t grown up.’

I got off the bed angrily. When I looked back she had covered herself up with the sheet.

‘What do you want then?’ I said.

She shivered.

‘Can’t you get it any warmer in here?’

‘No.’

‘I just want him the way he was. I’ll have to leave him, if not. I don’t even know what’s going on in my own loft,’ she told me, with a false laugh. ‘Can’t you at least try and find that out from him?’

I shrugged. ‘Why should I do that?’

‘Don’t sulk,’ she warned.

***

The second time I went up into the loft, I heard a regular metallic scraping noise, more distant than you’d expect in a space that size. The light was off and something was happening behind the tarpaulins. ‘Tim?’ I said. But I said it cautiously, to myself, as if I didn’t want him to hear. I was curious. As much as anything else, I wanted to poke around. The tarpaulins were new, but they looked old. They sagged under their own weight, stiff to the touch, with fixed folds as if the dust had already worked its way into them. Perhaps it had. Around their edges I glimpsed the eerie white flicker of a butane lamp, or perhaps one of those portable fluorescent tubes.

I examined the desk, the abandoned computer, the piles of other stuff. Why would you keep a garden spade in a loft?

‘Tim?’

This time the noises stopped immediately. For a moment we were silent, each listening for the other. Then a draught seemed to go through the loft, along with a smell which reminded me of old-fashioned house gas. I saw the tarpaulins billow, hang, resettle; and he called from just behind them, ‘Hang on. I’ll be with you in a second.’ I backed away until I bumped into the desk, then descended the ladder. He followed me down and stood there rubbing his hands on an old towel as if he didn’t know what to do next. He was covered in white dust. His hands were scraped and banged, the knuckles enlarged as if he’d been doing manual work, outside work. His fingernails were broken.

‘I wasn’t expecting you,’ he said. ‘Lizzie shouldn’t really have encouraged you to come up.’

I couldn’t let him get away with that.

‘Tim,’ I said, ‘for God’s sake. What are you doing?’

‘I’m converting the loft,’ he explained patiently. ‘I’m converting the loft to give us more room.’ He didn’t want to be understood. He was exhausted, and that made me feel exhausted too. In the end I said:

‘You hire people to do the work. You don’t do that yourself.’

He shook his head.

‘It’s my loft,’ he said, with a certainty I admired.

While we were talking Lizzie came up the stairs carrying the baby. ‘Do either of you want coffee?’ she asked. Then she said to Tim: ‘I heard all that. What rubbish you talk.’ She began to cry. ‘You know it’s rubbish.’ Tim pulled himself to his feet and looked as if he might try to comfort her. She backed away. ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s just an excuse. It’s just another excuse.’

‘Lizzie’s frantic, Tim,’ I told him. ‘You’ve hardly said hello to your own daughter.’

‘Don’t talk about me as if I’m not here!’ she said. She stood in front of me and wouldn’t let me turn away. ‘Can you see me?’ she demanded.

‘Lizzie –’

‘Well I’m real,’ she said. ‘You always pretend I’m not.’ Her voice went from contempt to puzzlement. ‘You’re as bad as he is.’ The baby wailed and waved its arms. ‘Now look what you’ve done, both of you.’

‘You asked me to come here,’ I reminded her.

I left them to it and went downstairs.

‘That’s right,’ she called after me. ‘Walk away. Walk away from everything, like you always do.’

After I left, I drove about in the dark, through Balham and Brixton, jumping traffic lights to the accompaniment of a Sonny Rollins CD. By the time I got home it was three o’clock in the morning, and she had left messages with my answering service. They were a mixed bunch. One said: ‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.’ Another said: ‘Is it any wonder no one will have you? It’s just so easy for you to leave people behind, isn’t it? Just so fucking easy.’ A third said, ‘Please don’t do this. Please answer, oh please, please.’ I could hear the baby crying in the background. ‘Please answer.’ But I didn’t; and I didn’t hear from her again for two or three months.

***

June.

The evening air was hammered like gold on to the rubbish in my front garden. I had been thinking about her all day.

Early summer had always been a dangerous time for us. Tim would be at work, we would go to the park. I would put my arm round her while we sat on a bench and watched the boys running about in the distance and she told me, at length but without ever saying it outright or irreversibly, why nothing could happen between us. ‘I’m making such a fool of myself!’ she would decide at last; then appeal, ‘But you do see some of what I mean, don’t you?’

‘Lizzie, I haven’t got the slightest idea what you’re talking about.’

I knew she would call, because in early summer, desperate with the smell of her, I had always been ready to give her the reassurance she needed.

‘Hello?’ I said.

‘Hi,’ she said. ‘It’s me.’

‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘There’s someone on the other line.’

‘Don’t do this,’ she begged.

‘Can I ring you back?’

She said: ‘You’ve got to come. It’s Tim.’

There was a confused scraping noise as if she had dropped the phone, and then all I could hear was her breathing, and a shout in the distance which might have been one of the boys.

‘Something awful’s happening,’ she said. ‘In the loft.’

She dropped the phone again.

By the time I got to Dulwich it was dark. The front door of their house was open on the empty street. Lizzie stood in the hall at the bottom of the stairs with the baby held along the crook of one arm. She was wearing a white bathrobe and she had her phone up to her ear. The hall seemed too hot, even for a night like that. It seemed packed with heat. Why would they have the heating on in June?

‘He’s up there now,’ she said.

I wondered if I should take the baby off her.

‘Lizzie? What’s wrong? What’s the matter?’

‘I thought I could get him to answer his phone. Get him to answer his bloody fucking phone for once,’ she said.

‘I’ll fetch him down.’

She stared at me. ‘That’s not it,’ she said.

‘I’ll just go up.’

There was fine white dust all over the stairs. I could hear the boys in their room, quarrelling over the PlayStation. The house seemed to get hotter from floor to floor, a dry heat which caught at your throat. ‘Tim?’ I called. Then louder: ‘Tim!’ No answer. I had caught Lizzie’s mood. I felt nervous, jumpy, angry with both of them. Why did I always have to be involved? Why couldn’t they put on their futile theatre without me? ‘Tim?’ Dust had silted down all over the upper landing. I stood at the foot of the pull-down ladder and listened. I went up far enough to poke my head into the loft. The air was full of a grey light which, dim and distributed at the same time, seemed to come from everywhere at once. I could hear a distant, measured chunking noise. It sounded like someone using an old-fashioned pickaxe to break concrete.

‘Tim!’ I called.

Almost immediately there was a loud crash. The house lurched, a powerful draught parted the tarpaulins. That was enough for me. As I went down the ladder I heard him tottering about up there, coughing in the dust. He seemed to be trying to drag some item of equipment across the floor. ‘Tim! For God’s sake!’ I called up from the landing. His face appeared briefly, framed by the trap.

‘The whole lot’s coming down,’ he said. ‘Tell her to get the kids out. See if you can persuade her to care about someone else for once.’

Lizzie, halfway up the stairs, heard this.

‘You sod,’ she said. ‘I’d do anything for those children.’

Everything seemed to lurch again. I got her by the arm and pulled her down the stairs and into the street. The boys, sensing the future like dogs before an earthquake, had already saved themselves. They couldn’t believe their luck. Their house was falling down. The hall was full of plaster. Cracks had opened up in the exterior walls. From above came the shrieking sounds of joists giving way under huge loads. It was so cool. They stood in the quiet street in the hot night air, staring up at the line of the roof where it had sagged into the void of the loft. Their father came running out, then stopped and turned as if he had forgotten something.

His house was done for. Window frames popped. The facade deformed and began to slip. Just before the roof fell in and it became obvious that the whole thing would come down on us if we didn’t move, I saw the tunnel he had been digging out of the loft. It hung in the air, transparent but luminous, perhaps three feet in diameter. Travelling north towards the river, it rose steeply until, at perhaps a thousand feet, it linked up with a complex of similar tunnels all across London. Hundreds of them, thousands, more than you could ever count, they rose up from the houses. A 787 Dreamliner was making its way down between them towards Heathrow, engines grinding, landing lights ablaze. When it had gone, the tunnels hung there for a moment like a great shining computer-generated diagram in the night sky, then began to fade.

‘See?’ Tim said. ‘What would you have done?’

‘We’ll come back,’ I promised him. ‘We’ll come back and find another way in –’

Lizzie didn’t seem to hear this. ‘Twenty thousand pounds on a kitchen,’ she said. She laughed.

Later, she sat on the kerb a little way down the street, with the boys on either side of her and the baby in her lap, thoughtfully watching the fire engines and drinking tea. Someone had given her a man’s woollen shirt to wear, wrapped a foil blanket loosely round her shoulders. The street was full of hoses and cables, generators, powerful lights. Firemen were picking over the rubble, and a television crew had arrived.

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Cover illustration by Jeffrey Alan Love.

A demon is exorcised from a toe, a recovering addict takes on an ancient magus, an author is exposed to the strange totemic power of words, and a ruthless industrialist reaps what he sows during his foray into an unusual form of engineering.  These are some of the ludicrous and unsettling delights to be found in Jeffrey Ford’s latest collection, A Natural History of Hell from Small Beer Press.

The stories meander among “high” (in short story form) fantasy, magical realism, satire, science fiction, and horror, and Ford takes care to demonstrate that these are not mutually exclusive territories.  While they range far and wide within the general realm of speculative fiction, what shines through as perhaps the strongest unifying element is the author’s interest in received cultural narratives, such as fairy tale and myth, and the ways in which contemporary life (relative to whichever story is in question) interacts with and deforms them.  A laundry list of explicit references and subtle allusions abound throughout the collection, and Ford’s penchant for metafictional devices is deployed to great effect in order to create tension between the present and the past.  “Rocket Ship to Hell”, a piece that could be described as an apparent love letter to living science fiction fandom between the 1950s and the present, does not have a great deal in the way of plot, suspense, or character development.  Nevertheless, it manages to create an overall sense of uncertainty by rendering unclear where the division is between the inner and frame stories, reality and drunken bullshitting between sort-of colleagues.

Virtually every story in A Natural History of Hell has as a lynchpin some kind of received tale in the world of the story, and the events which unfold in the main plot are designed to reveal both the strengths and the fragilities inherent to narrative and identity, subject and object.  As perhaps the clearest illustration of Ford’s experimentation with these ideas, in “Spirits of Salt: A Tale of the Coral Heart,” a first-person scholar recounts a legend that rests upon flimsy-at-times evidence from diaries and other such artifacts, a tale which features a third-person character named “-I-” (short for Ismet, but seemingly done to provoke these questions of narrative authority) and another character of a different age and gender with the same long form of the name.  Humans in many of these short works are fragile, rendered into salt in an instant, while stories endure even if in fragmented form through strange forces of quirks of consciousness, as in “Word Doll.”  The mere title encapsulates a conflict between an inert facsimile of human form and the persistent life of the proper case Word from which human consciousness develops, and the story’s namesake is firmly entrenched in the psyche of those on whom it is bestowed, changing their interior monologues in profound ways.

“Word Doll” concerns “Jeffrey Ford,” a writer, and his encounter with a strange anthropologist who unspools a tale largely concerned with the supposed totemic power of words, but it is left artfully ambiguous whether or not in “reality” the eponymous word doll has its power merely by an inherent quality or if the listener is equally complicit in constructing the power of such utterances.  The uncertainty is made possible largely by the author’s inclusion of himself, specifically as a purveyor of words, from early in the story.  “The Thyme Fiend,” one of the strongest pieces on display, features a young Midwestern boy coming of age while dealing with frightening visions and an unsolved murder.  Ford uses playful but resonant references to a number of works, such as Hansel and Gretel and Gotthelf’s The Black Spider (which we’ve covered here before), all of which enrich the story and add appropriate tension rather than descending into overdone pastiche.  The tension and strangeness of the story is balanced by judiciously placed moments that are all too recognizable to most anyone who has made it through adolescence, and the awkward but necessary milestones of transitioning to adulthood make for a fine anchor amidst the bizarre events that propel the plot (and likewise for several others in the collection).

Ford’s stories do not shy away from their heritages, and they unapologetically make frequent use of witches, magicians, reanimated skeletons, rocket ships, and other signposts of specific genres while acknowledging that they are not entirely that same genre.  Often their function as plot devices is purposely eroded by another crucial element of Ford’s fiction: his careful use of violence. There is a kind of precise cruelty contained in the union of fictitious creatures and specifically modern (relative to fairy tale or other folklore used as reference points and context within Ford’s stories) kinds of violence, such as the calculated efficiencies of industrialization applied to living creatures and gunfire used on strange spirits from an ancient folktale.  In most cases, the violence manages to surprise in an artful and convincing manner.

Mixed in with all the elements under discussion is a fine display of humor that often appears at the most unexpected of moments.  “Blood Drive,” while both hilarious and disturbing, reads as a kind of Wayside School Is Falling Down as composed in a strange fever dream conjured by Wayne LaPierre, and although its satirical barbs are sharp and well-aimed, the story feels a bit out of place among the rest of the works in the collection.  The collection’s opener, “The Blameless,” while a fine story on its own seems a bit too absurd to function as an effective overture, even in a collection filled with absurdities.  It would perhaps have set a better overall tone if it was a bit further back in favor of a story like “The Fairy Enterprise” or “The Last Triangle” (which mashes together an ancient magic with the horrors of modern drug addiction and recovery), both of which strike a balance more representative of what would follow.  “The Thyme Fiend” encapsulates many of the ideas explored throughout and is perhaps the best, most robust example of a story that could function as a centerpiece, but it lurks near the end of the book.  In “Blood Drive,” violence itself is the context, which very much seems to be the point, and it works well as satire with a message while not being quite as memorable in terms of plot as stories like “The Fairy Enterprise” and “Mount Chary Galore”, which deploy violence (at times as intense as incidents in “Blood Drive”) on a longer trajectory of cause and effect.  To be fair, “Blood Drive” is itself a depiction of a culture with a warped sense of context and causal relationships, but its effect doesn’t quite linger as much as most of the other stories.

A few minor caveats aside, “A Natural History of Hell” is an excellent collection of stories originally appearing in diverse outlets, along with a brand new tale original to the book.  By revealing the underlying instabilities of foundational narratives and the strange worlds that they struggle to articulate, Ford breathes plenty of life into the Weird and leaves the reader with a pleasant uncertainty as to what they have just experienced, along with a desire to read it again and see what else emerges next time.  This distinctive effect could only be achieved by a thoughtful and unique voice pushing the boundaries created by work that came before even while paying homage to the same.

The post Review: “A Natural History of Hell” by Jeffrey Ford appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Back up beepers and the long roars of an engine hectored me through my earplugs out of a sound sleep at quarter to seven, watery late November sunlight in the curtain folds.  Alone in bed after losing a girlfriendargument aloud I curse streets that can’t go a week without being torn up, houses and apartment buildings scraped and gutted so many times they’re turning transparent and thin like grease-spotty paper bags.  The noise abated within an hour or so, about the time my neighbor’s little white dog started yapping.

I ate my breakfast and took a car to the airport, temples wreathed in scarves of cold metal.  My seat on the plane was right next to the galley.  It stank of overcooked eggs and boiling newspaper.

I turn my head and see the planet.  Through the window, heaven and earth.  The high indigo melting into black.  Reading magazines we hurtle into the world’s shadow while I hold myself literary, if only I knew how many others on this plane were doing the same, and if I could only collect their mental sketches all in a jumble, like a bouquet of incomplete ham radio transmissions.  Write them down just as they are.

The plane is descending.  Shadow hills haphazardly sequined with lights roll under the floor, the stars are standing up again, the airport swings our way like a luminous cape.  There’s a long wait in jammed aisles until the plane is uncorked and passengers swill out into another airport and causeways and ramps and staircases and escalators and moving sidewalks.  Finally outside, I can almost smell the ocean through the diesel.  Hale a cab.  Now I’m on the highway, a trench cut across the conurbation, air blundering in over the top of the window I lowered a little, dry desert, dust, herbs, smell of snakes and beetles.  The eastern horizon reradiates the glow of the Roseate Lamina like a countersunset …

*

… There’s a big washer, like a blank, punctured coin, lying in the middle of the street.  I look down at it, white metal against the blacktop, and then up again, and the sky above this tree-lined suburban street has turned into the sky above a cemetery at dusk when the gates are closing and you realize you’re being shut in tombs and graves, the wiry nerve lace of bare branches turns black against the blanching peach.  The washer’s an obol, leave it there and walk on with the street as it rises into that soothing, cold sky the color of undead flame like a ghost lantern and the high steady wan cool piccolo note of the idea of death accompanies me at the zenith.  I don’t know how to talk it any more — the magic left, the magic came back, or what the magic is or if it is, I don’t know, I don’t know.  I don’t know, I don’t know, I know you though, I know you, leaf raker, you, you’re a spoiler, you’re a spoiler, I know you for what you are, you’re one of those … ruiners … sent to tamper.  With this label I escape you, you don’t even know it yourself you blind, you … No I don’t know, I only know how I feel in the cold street under the graveyard heaven with the trembling, shaking silhouetted nerve trees bystanding all around.  The lights are coming on in some of the houses but not many, and most of the windows still have that smokey darkness that is so grimly menacing, like the house wants to puke.  Puke grey lint, and lunge the walls to and fro across the street.  I don’t know what I mean;  there’s no point in recording these impressions.  Blue twilight on my hands and face like cold clay I walk on to the car dealership …

*

… I spent the night at the motel.  Now I’m at the right address, a shining crystal cube on a broad, palm-lined, empty, avenue boulevard street.  I’ve been sent here to attend a “professional development seminar,” but at the last moment I turn aside from the gleaming doors and make my way around to the back, through the parking lot and a planter with tall, thin white tree trunks high rattling weeds and through another, considerably less well-maintained parking lot, in among a herd of dilapidated bungalows stirring with sluggish activity.  I register for a class with the school’s proprietor, who has a way of gesturing with his right hand, index finger up and striking an invisible bell with the heel.  He is unctuous with a smooth masklike face, but our instructor is a disheveled elf who strides into the classroom with his eyes on the floor, not so much as a glance in our direction, scratching his head and heedlessly dropping a cubist surf of white pages from an ivory folder.  I saw him earlier in the parking lot, pacing up and down at the verge of the blacktop muttering to himself and craning his ear to a cell phone that leaked tinny music, eyes screwed shut, the desperate head churning up and down to the rhythm.  He sits at his desk.  His irises are large, the color of forest canopy as the leaves just begin to turn, but there are bags under the eyes and indigo rings around them in the albuminous flesh.  Looking into his eyes I saw again the dead faces, all blue, bleached, actinic, and grey, standing beside their headstones like dim sentries at the end of dusk.  The classroom is chilly and there are no lights, only a wall of glass louvers.

After mellifluously calling the roll and taking a moment to gather strength by pinching the bridge of his nose –

“All right,” he sighs theatrically, steepling his fingers.  “The subject of this class is time.  In the course of this seminar you will learn (hope springs eternal) the difference between duration and metric time, how to decouple yourself with the aforementioned metric time, how to censor, how to remote, how to bend, and how to finish.  That is, to die.”

He opens both his hands to emphasize this last word and the baffled silence that answers him proves we really are a class.

“We begin with a diagnostic.”

Each student — and the others here are literally indescribable — gets a topic to look up in the school librarian [sic].  I got “remoting dead.”

These classes went on for months, but they were considerably cheaper and less horrible than the “professional development seminar,” so I was able to keep up with the work by making a few economies, come fasting to school.  We began with Bergson, all very plausible and clear.  The mistake has been to think of time the same way we think of space, and this gives rise to flim-flams like Zeno’s.  Metrical time, divided in seconds, is handy, but duration, which is time as experienced by conscious beings, is indivisible, the cosmos is antics without beginning or end.  The pain of waking up at 6:45 AM is the pain of bolting duration onto the rack of metrical time.  Now Bergson says duration is “our” element, which is why time seems to pass at varying speeds for us but not for clocks.  But, according to the haggard wight who never gives us his name and thus is known only as “teacher” to us, thanks to recently discovered calendrical shamanic inscriptions of the Inca Tajiks and breakthroughs in deciphering Dero rock books the secrets of retrograde time-censoring are becoming known.  He pauses and turns to look at the class, the tip of his chalk still pressed to the end of a spiral on a green blackboard.

“You can go back,” he says.

He harps on about the dangers.  Going back and making changes could return us to unrecognizeably altered present times.

“Then why teach us something so dangerous?”

“Everything’s fizzling,” the teacher answers.  “There aren’t enough frontiers.”

He holds out his palm toward the louvers, allowing the pale daylight to cross it.

“Hardly the same sun that lit Odysseus the way to Ithaca and Persephone is it?”

“Wasn’t Penelope his wife?”

“P‑Penelope,” the teacher stutters hastily, lowering his eyes.

The technique is pretty simple but it takes constant practice to make it work.  No breakthrough, just constant effort and the results form a kind of fog of happenings.  You begin with a series of computations performed by the moon, which is doubly important both as a calculator and as a focus, because, when it is a bright moonlit night here, that moonlight is the light of the lunar day;  day and night at once, exploit uncertainty of time categories is a permeable seam.  So there are the lunar calculations, and then the dragon.  Sometimes it’s a far eastern dragon, other times it’s western, and other times it’s a snake, or serpent rather, who once was an eel that sprouted legs and came out on land, then dove into the earth as if it were water and went back to not having legs again.

You have to make yourself light enough to travel.  You go back fasting, no problem for me there, but you have to unburden yourself of memories yearnings fantasies, all of it must go.  If you don’t forget it all, and that includes forgetting your purpose in going back, you won’t budge.  However, so as not to arrive in the past moment without the faintest idea what you’re supposed to do once you’re there, first you have to fashion your time release capsule:  a cache of instructions insulated by an ablative coating that dissolves at an absolute rate.  You drag that with you as you first begin to go, then, at exactly the right moment, you slingshot it ahead of you so it will be there waiting when you arrive.  Then you get lighter and lighter, opening up like a cape of empty pigeonholes and you’ll be bright, fired up, and ready to censor.  Meanwhile that TRC is waiting there for you, dissolving in time, and when you arrive the capsule will crack and those memories will spring up again before you like a spy briefing out of a microdot.

You go back body and all, although the body changes, becomes like a cartoon body, during the trip.  You feel the tug of the present as you whirl out from it in all directions like retreating back up a cone toward the wider end with a merry-go-round whose center is inside you.  You swarm together over your own life;  it’s like cradling an infant or a cat or a water balloon, always in danger of oozing out of your arms and impossible to hold.  You stare in awe at the panoply of your own life, laid out like a strip of landscape below you, too terrified to think of making any changes.  You can’t tell yourself “it’s just my life,” trying to adopt an outsider’s point of view, unmoved and unawed, no matter how detestable it is.  You arrive on time, you relive your moment of choice not daring to change a thing, then it’s time to go, you swarm up out of the past again having carefully kept shut your bag of untouched spoilers, vibrating flocks of pink cotton candy cunts engulf you and wing you on rejoicing;  the way forward is a cinch, a cinch, you come home in a dance.

Then you get your first preshock.  After my first trip it took me weeks to get used to the sight of my hands, which now were black, as was the rest of me.  Everyone takes me for a Brazilian, as if a Brazilian would waste his time in a hole like this.  I’m sure they can afford their own quack seminars in Brazil.  I had gone back to find, was it Carla?  Her name is one of the things that the trip has blurred for me.  What about her do I remember?  She gave me an amulet that would show me how much she loved me that day.  It had a place for three digits, which I guess switched and changed as the thing was tossed around on the lanyard about my neck.  She said 060 was the middle.

“The middle of what?”  I asked.

“I love you in the middle,” she answered, and explained it was read hieroglyphically, two circles balanced by the 6.

“Wouldn’t the balance be shown better by number 1?”  I asked unseriously.  “010?  So the straight line is the balance?”

“No you need a lopsided number there!  If it’s straight it has no reason to shift one way or the other way!”

What had I done with it?  Carla, Carolyn?  I had fooled around with her friend Denise behind her back, then left her, without any explanation.  The day she found out I’d moved in with Denise, she was humiliated, and later that same day she was badly injured in a car accident.  I’d had a good thing with Denise, but the accident, the hospital bed, that awful scar, followed us wherever we went.  So, to head off that whole debacle, I will have gone back to break off with Carla well in advance of the day I first kissed Denise.  Denise and I would then will have gotten together in the clear and Carolyn would have been come out of it more intact for not having will been betrayed.

The first time I set eyes on Carla for the second time I was completely unprepared.  I never got out of the astral boundary, paralyzed by the sight of her, like an actor with terminal stage fright frozen in the wings, staring glassy-eyed at the stage.  Brilliant daylight flung its javelins over me in a den of thick hedges and shimmering grass and blue and white hellparadise sky.  She wasn’t as pretty as I remembered, and more pretty, different and the same;  her face was a succession of gestures tied to bricked-up memories and taking them in was like having a heart attack, that way of flexing the lips around a crashing word, the quick push-up to the bridge of her glasses, the fragrances.  I couldn’t do anything.  I was staring at this woman I’d betrayed and left behind without a second thought, and now she stood within reach of my arms, seeming like an incarnation of God.

I came back to the present and let my head fall in black hands.  The vision knocked her name loose like a bar of wet soap I couldn’t get hold of — got to go back again.  I should censor Denise, stick with Carmen.  Try it.  Outside my window, a voiceless Theem wafts by on its long, stalklike legs, trawling among the clouds its web, a plume of black smoke.

The circular communicator dish blinks at me.  I thumb it off.  I can’t talk to her.

The people here are all afflicted now, sensitive tulip-like growths sprout from their faces and open at a touch.  I can feel the flat, coin-like buds now in my own face.  Outside, on the pathways, they stop in pairs or glide along as light as phantoms, their perfume, so quiet I can’t smell it even with the window open, rises from them in trembling manes of hot breath around their heads.  Heads like comets, charred and pitted and oozing icy, glabrous vapor.  A vast shadow sweeps across the landscape, like the shadow of a hand near the lens of the slide projector, and the sky color changes to bottle green, long shredded wheat clouds splintering apart into fibers against a Brazilian horizon.

Back.

Concentration.

The moon.

The numbers.

Dragon.

Capsule.

Back to the night we met.  Whatsername and I.

School night.  I resolve out of rags of fast-moving salmon clouds under a higher cover, torn here and there to expose the oceanic blackness of the sky above that, raw cold of a rain-blustered day, wind tossing all around.  I will have had met her here, at school, introduced by a mutual friend.  I have to see her as she was have been and above all I will had to see how she would will have seen me, what she will would have saw.  They’re in there now, the recital has have began in the hall covered in golden lanterns;  I stand just outside the ring of light, hidden among the scaly trunks of the palm trees.  The campanile rings, I go in now.  Now.

I stay right where I am.  I watch from the shadows.

Let the moment go.  Don’t go inside, don’t meet her.  I will have never been entering the hall, and she never had will met me at all.

I can’t resist the temptation, now that I have the power to unravel my whole future, my actions tell me why I would have will come here …

*

… One by one, the lamps are put out.  She has gone home, without ever will would having had met me.  Neither of them have will.  I thrill to the absence of their names in my diminished soul.  My soul is smaller, emptier.  That’s both of them censored, all neat and tidy, and the whole mess diverted into unlife.

I am readying myself to go to a new present again when I will caught sight of him, there in the gap between the hall and the library, where the shadow lies reflecting the black sky like a polished blackboard on the wet, ice-cold grass.  But it’s not there;  not in anything or on anything.  It’s an astral vent opening in coils, the spiral the teacher with dire warnings drew on the green blackboard, the image striking my eyes with the feeling of light, but without light.  In the middle, the serpent, old tempter, transparent, and edged with a sinuous force that is neither strength nor weakness, not motion or immobility, but a pure power of relating.

Down in there is the gateway to earlier still, and earlier and earlier censor opportunities remoter and remoter, down the cone toward the apex which was a fundamental, organic decision causing me to be, the moment of birth, of conception, of the conception of my parents.  The serpent shows me the golden, final apple of censorship, and out of rainswept childhood skies and wild electrical nights I plunge earlier and remoter to collect that primary opportunity.

***

New Draft

“I’m just a bad person, I guess,” the man in the corner says, lighting his pipe in defiance of a mildly disapproving look from the woman behind the bar as I step through the open glass door and onto the beach, the wind snapping in my face and a shower of daylight.

Later, the voice comes back to me, did it say person or version?  She is waving for me in sunbillows, her mouth like a dark V.  (As you die, someone will breathe it into your dying ear, whisper … what?  what?  You of noble birth … then what?)  We spent the day on the beach, the sun blowing glass bubbles around the two of us.  She swam, I didn’t.  I sat on the beach reading, glancing up at her from time to time through the smouldering pink.

That night, she telephones somebody and I step out through the glass doors for a moment.  The pipe smoker is sitting on a bench by the door, black cap on his head like a huge period.  He mutters something, his voice thick with smoke, to get my attention, a word like “mincore,” as if I should know it, like a code word.  I’m surprised, confused.  Still without lifting his head, he repeats the word, mumbling blobs of smoke.  He’s all black except for his hands and face, and the pipe is orange with a cream colored stem.  The bill of his cap blocks my view of his face in the gloom.

I ask him if he’s introducing himself.

“That’s right,” he says, soft and flat.

I tell him I believe I saw him as I was leaving the cafe earlier and the cap nods and puffs smoke.

“And you will see me again.  And they will find you, sooner or later,” he says.

I tell him I’m not hard to find.  He found me, and I supposed anyone could if they wished.

“I understand you’ve taken a certain class,” he says.

I get his drift with a distinct snap.  The haggard wight.  Censoring time.

“Reincarnation in the same body,” the figure says.  The pipe in his teeth wiggles.  I see he is handling something indistinct, which could be dried roots, or vines, or unravelled rope.  He seems to be braiding them, or unbraiding.

But that “class” was just a daydream of mine.

“So’s this,” the figure says.  One eye crawls into view around the brim of his cap.  The eye is intolerably strange, like a fractured ice lake under sunset light but concentrated the way twilight never is, and looking at it I feel something like a felty black fingertip pressed against my heart, stopping it like a pendulum in midswing.  Recoiling, I look away and the sensation vanishes.

“They will find you, sooner or later …”

Is he repeating himself, is that something I read in his glance, or is my memory repeating the phrase on its own initiative?

“First the one axis, then the other.  I suppose now you think you know me — back.  Night across the transfer forks — well, all of us in time.  They’ll kill.  In the old days they wait and wait.  The class was censored into your past, and I am being censored into here.  You, and I.  Two distinct, living souls.  It’s the Moment that makes us one.  You’re already hours.  They will find, sooner or later.”

He looks up at Orion’s belt through the dead trees on the hill above and nods familiarly.

“Going to die anyhow … that way will get you something.”

The two windows, blank white in the black silhouette of the house up there.  His words become an internal chain of speculation, as though I were alone.

“Everyone dies constantly.  As you move through time you throw off deaths like a schooner dashing up sequins of foam.  You have countless deaths.  A finite, countless number.  All numbers, all kinds.  You die one death into another, cancel one and find another.  That’s what it means to live countless simultaneous timelines, living all possibilities no matter how incompossible, living in multiple time branches.  Every choice happens.  You die in the plane crash and you survive.  You throw your arms around your brother’s neck and you crush his windpipe in your hands, and he died before you were born.  Your life itself makes time branch, and all time branches have death twin branches.”

Puffs of smoke scatter in all directions.  His hands work, spreading what might be a fan of cards or a gill of fungus.  Under his massaging thumbs, slender twigs or wires are threading through the pale crescent and extending beyond its edge in a friable rake of kinked angles.

“When you travel in time, when you leave the present, there is only forward, no backward.  You live by constant reincarnative steps in the same body.  But folks don’t all move toward the future at the same rate;  some arrive before others and call back to them.  Some live in the future already — you arrive to find others have been there waiting for you.  Sometimes you find the traces, or even a trail.  It isn’t a question of being this or that person, or belonging to some organization.  Anyone can do it, and people do it more often than they know.  It’s a mistake to think you’re part of an elite.  Your classroom participation was censored in.  You learned how to move along one axis…”

He turns the white object in his hands ninety degrees, showing me a dully phosphorescent line in the gloom.

“… backwards and forwards.”

He holds out the thing to me and I take it in both hands.  A gill of fungus, cold and plastic, laced with twigs and root tendrils, in hands that suddenly seem black and rough and old.  Still mine, but black and rough and old.

“… Next step is transit in cross-section across all possible forks, and censor yourself across the screen and live multiply.  You’re going to start seeing gods.”

I look back but the bench is empty.

“Just thought I’d warn you,” the voice says in my ear.

She’s off the phone, and we go for a walk.  There’s no moon.  The stars slide by behind the trees.  Outer space is a forest I can wander off into.  The street has no sidewalk.  Out past the streetlights there are only the occasional outdoor lamps on the houses;  looking at them with my darkness dilated eyes gives me in the head a feeling I recognize from before, that chalk finger lightly pressing the heart.  We pass a huge mansion set back from the road in dead trees with tiny spectral lights in each window, like the funereal mansion of the night sky.  Groans of pain — the heavy front door draws silently back on darkness inside and the woman opening it, the front of her night gown open, the naked body dim in its long drapery — smiling faintly she admits the corpse, escorts it upstairs to the boudoir, casts off her nightgown and lies on the bed, the cadaver climbing stiffly on top of her, its sex is a brittle, dented little paper cone in a ragged crotch, it embraces her and works up and down as she caresses the cracked, leathery back and exposed bones.

Other, smaller houses now, as we climb the hill together quietly talking.  The night fuzzes them over with trembling blue lint.  The de-animalized house holders are wrapped up inside asleep at ten PM.  I cross through the fence to examine the old burial ground, the maroon stones are too crumbled and lichened to read.  She is anxious, doesn’t want me alarming any of the houses scattered around the graveyard.  And she gets chilly in no time.  We walk back down the hill to the bungalow, she so lovely in the star light, my sidelong glances at her are like flashes of memory, the way I will see her in a moment of sorrow and longing to come when I look back at her beauty in an agony of intervening time, to reach back with younger, stronger arms.  I can’t grab hold of her and keep her now, it isn’t the right time for that gesture, it would be all out of order, an autistic stubbornness won’t let me grab hold of her now, in the street, she happily baffled by my weird, spontaneous ardor, weird because I’m really acting on behalf of another self who can’t be here right now, but who transmits his feelings of love and anguish through me.

The greater starry sky up above a pebbled plaster ceiling like an inverted white sky with black stars.  She sleeps beside me and I don’t sleep, her images flashing across the multiply blue squares of the dreamfield as if I’d already lost her, and the woman sleeping beside me is some other.  Who sits outside the house now, smoking thoughtfully in the cold and the black dark?

She and I were arguing.  Same old soap opera.  Unmet needs on both sides.  Long silences full of pain.  A looming tall god came in through the door as we spoke at once and crossed the room.  He was invisible inside a heavy terrycloth bathrobe with a hood flung up completely covering his head.  Drawing a loop of beads smartly from a sacklike pocket he sat down on the divan and began counting them, gazing on vacancy, as we argued.  She didn’t notice him, and I, whenever I wasn’t actually looking at him, had no feeling of an additional presence in the room.  But he remained when she left, silently counting.  Loops of that kind have, I think, a sort of a longer bead to mark the beginning and ending of the count, but I didn’t see one on his.  For all that it was tempting to think of him as a symbolic figure, whenever I saw him, and I saw him more than once, he was simply himself, and his bead counting was always only bead counting, a simple task that was complete in itself and secreted no reward for interpretation.

The next day, the day room, I registered aloud that she was busy and told her I’d come back later.  I knew she would be too embarrassed to admit she wasn’t really busy.  Her uncertainty, and a basic inertia, would do the rest of the work.  The moment for telling me she wasn’t really busy, contradicting my cheerful assumption, would slip by, and that would become the truth.  This shitty maneuver prevented her from detaining me and concealed my own desire to get away, to be alone, at the same time.

All shitty every paltry day paltry shitty stratagems.  Dedicate yourself entirely to the time and get rid of these distractions.  I tell the bit of wind flapping by my face it’s over and I mean the whole thing is over, no more love-pretending with her or with anyone any more.  My happiness is no different from any other man’s and not worth thinking about even for a moment.  The only thing different I do is the time.  Looking around me now I see my life in flames, and rejoice;  the prospect causes me no more distress than the immolation of a fictional character.

Another god, through the glass door of another bungalow;  she was a squat, middle-aged woman with short, red brown hair done up in the kind of coif I associate with television, nearly doubled up perched inside a wooden desk chair, spinning round and round in place.  She had cigarettes in between the fingers of both hands and she clapped one or the other to her lips as she twisted the chair this way then that, sending angled arcs of smoke up around her in a fraying, punctuated coil.  Smoke gathered against the ceiling, forming an inner cloud that reached down below the upper edge of the door so that I could see a cross-section.

You were right the first time old boy, adult life is glittering bullshit.  The glitter sprinkles down onto you when you’re a child, but you have a beastial wariness about it like a suspicious animal.  Live multiply, across a simultaneous section of all possibilities, we having fought not having fought having died having broken up long ago having broken up and reunited and so on.  Taking a walk staying in being dead and rotting never having been born, is how radical it can become.  Why would I want anything so terrifyingly unknowable as that, and what would hold me back?  Considering I have already will might done it since.

Some subatomic particles are so small they can never be located with any assurance, because the means of detecting them will always cause them to move, so they can be localized only roughly.  They occupy zones, rather than positions, and the size and shape of these zones is determined by the activity of the particles.  Since the particle is equally likely to be at any position in the zone of its action at any time, this means the entire zone is more or less equivalent to the entire particle and will have the same shape.  A human being living multiply across the branches of the possibility spectrum would experience existence in the same way;  he would be impossible to locate except in probabilistic terms, but, since the overall shape formed by the activity of the human agent would correspond to the human body in the same way that the zone of activity of a subatomic particle would have the same shape as that particle, projected and diaphanized, the human agent would not suffer dispersal.  On a certain level, the human agent, consisting of countless dimensional extensions into all possibilities, would be itself a diaphanated titanic projection of the body.  Like the Brocken spectre.  My time image, the giant.  Get out into the wider switching yard of timelines and see the world like a wide-eyed draftee, not confined to this or that moment anymore, but in a Moment Image that spans the wider branchings.  Not just an atom, a dick, an asshole anymore, but getting a head, getting the whole, and a hard-on in every timeline at once, coming in every line.  A level of smart alec never dreamed of before, and a withering intensity of time’s sarcasm concentrated and focussed mercilessly on me until … what?  Something set free, something dies.  A change ensues.  I see my hand across the room, many rooms.  Reach out and take it by the hand, unmask gods.  Back.  Back from the beach to the apartment choking with unspoken smog.  Today on the subway I saw three musical instrument cases, and three strikingly beautiful women’s faces.  I see the two of us in silent conversation.  Life’s waters bear you away, you’re leaving me.  There’s nothing I can do about it, unless I decide otherwise.  I’m not tied up, watching helpless as you’re being dragged away, but will I do something?

There’s the moon, the numbers, and the dragon, like before.  There’s no time, I have to go cross country tomorrow, I have to attend a professional development seminar.  I set my alarm.  All my life’s possibilities flash like landscapes past a bullet train, spotlit platforms whirl up and away again populated with figures, many of them familiar, who flit by in an effusion of discrete gestures, with each gesture the dancer is a new person.  I distinctly see a meadow bordered by a screen of trees, a black, felty figure in a cap detaches from the background like a distant passerby in a Munch painting and pads noiselessly off the canvas with electric swiftness. Across section whose edges are the Five Escapees.

Step off the carousel speeding train to Nan Madol.  The music of the Five Escapees each with its own repeating phrase one is a series of notes that descend like gifts or like the buttresses of the cathedral, one is a series of notes that ascend like desire or the lofty height of the cathedral, one is a continuous oscillating wailing like anguish or the various doors and screens of the cathedral, one is a different set of oscillating high pitches like language the sound of creatures joining themselves to luminosity above them in the air, stars and constellations or like the dappled colorful light through the stained glass windows of the cathedral, one is a violent beating like anger or the solid libationsaturated foundations and stone fabric of the cathedral.  Hectored out of

a) sound
b) troubled

sleep at

a) quarter to seven,
b) nine thirty, missed flight, went to church, became nun
c) eight exactly

a) watery
b) diamond

a) late November
b) June

sunlight in the folds of the

a) curtains.
b) blinds.

I

a) ate
b) skipped

my breakfast and

a) took a car to the airport,
    a) caught in traffic, missed flight, went to church, became nun
b) haled cab step into street run over by police car — returminus.
c) swam to the train station,

now the plane is descending.

a) too fast and crashes
    a) into mountain — returminus.
    b) into ocean
        a) and I drown — returminus.
        b) and I survive, swim to train station, adopted by dolphins.

The highway trench across the conurbation. I walk on to the car dealership.

a) Crossing street run over by police car — returminus.
b) I walk on to the car dealership.

I spent the night at the

a) monastery.
b) motel.

Now the

a) right
b) wrong

address, I

a) enter and attend a professional development seminar, return home afterwards, my profession
    a) develops
    b) does not develop
b) turn aside and our instructor is a disheveled elf. “The subject of this class is time.” These classes went on for months. The pain of waking up at 6:45 AM is the pain of bolting duration onto the rack of metrical time. He pauses and turns to look at the class, the tip of his chalk still pressed to the green blackboard. “You can go back,” he says. You begin with a series of

a) computations performed by the moon,
b) phases of illuminancy performed by an artificial intelligence,

then the

a) dragon.
b) tiger.

You have to make yourself light enough to travel. You go back fasting with a cache of instructions. You arrive

a) in the wrong place, run over by police motorcycle — returminus.
b) late, Carl is already married.
c) early, discover Carolyn being ravished by dragon.
d) on time,

you swarm up out of the past again having carefully kept shut your bag of spoilers, vibrating flocks of pink cotton candy cunts engulf you and wing you on rejoicing, then you get your first preshock. I will have gone back to break off with Carla well in advance of the day I first kissed Denise. The first time I set eyes on Carla for the second time I was completely unprepared. She was an incarnation of God. Go back again.

b) Don’t go back.

I should

b) not

censor Denise, stick with Carmen. Back. Concentration. The moon. The numbers. Dragon. Capsule. School night. I resolve I will have had met her here, see her as she was have been and above all I will had to see how she would will have seen me, what she would have saw.

b) Police car runs over Denise.
c) Carolyn arises before me in icy skirts of ether that wash over and engulf my legs in waves of freezing vapor, the vibrating cling of her hellpearl eyes holds me as the robed god enters the room, pulling the rope of beads smartly from his pocket.

That’s

a) both of them
b) myself

censored into unlife. There in the

a) gap, the serpent,
    a) the paragraph,
        a) the hellparagraph,
    b) the tiger behind the door.

b) barrier I crash into

the gateway to earlier still, earlier and earlier remoter and remoter, the final apple out of rainswept childhood and paradise sky of wild electricity I

a) plunge
b) crash

I

a) set my alarm.
b) don’t.
    c) I set my alarm for days in the past, awake in the past, get up, get dressed, put black cap on, call pipe down from hell-rafter-lair, load pipe with helltobacco and basiliskembers.
        a) Like making my way through a crowd I weave toward the backyard seat by the door behind the bungalow through constellations and solitary stars alike, step out from sky to night sit down by the door set my alarm.

New Draft

Lap One

begins

(May is already in motion, having jogged to the track as usual)

when she passes the gate and steps directly to her lane, the second outermost.

She will mark a lap every time she passes this open gate. The same gate, the same track, the same lane, anticlockwise as usual.

Speed up, you’re at the track now.

No need to go that fast, don’t use it all.

Night sky, stars, Orion’s belt, clouds, very fast moving, drawn like the bow over a cello.

The alarm was set back at home, by the front door, during impatient preparations. Warm enough. Light enough to travel.

Coming around, the moon. Waxing. One edge still darkened by the world’s shadow. Run better the fuller it is, or easier. A bit more than two minutes a lap. Faster almost never. Should go faster, all out. The sprinters here, end up doubled up in two panting. Then go again. Not me.

Lap Two

Two minutes and twenty seconds. Stinks. Go faster.

The clock in the scoreboard used to run slow. Didn’t realize that at first. Led to an initial misconception, thinking I was surprisingly fast. Scoreboard is left off now. They started leaving it off. Actinic moonlight on tiger face of the mascot beside HOME and a black rectangle with black beads of unlit incandescents.

Keeping it up, good, one, two, three.

Don’t count. You’ll go crazy. Nearly empty, good. People are aggravating to weave around, pushing strollers. Not totally empty is better, no one around is dangerous. No one around means someone you can’t see.

Not paying attention to the music. Same music. Batteries.

Lap Three

Two minutes and eleven. Keep it up.

You’d think, after all these years – nine — it would be faster. Less time. Plateau’d. Healthier though. Running from death. Every step. Snatched from.

The center of the field is her dead body laid out on a table and she running placidly around and around her center of gravity, her body dead, her body not dead yet. So many steps in the same body, working hard.

Rushing up subway stairs she’d arrived panting at the top felt a pain in her chest and thought … Went out the next day and bought shoes, running clothes. A deep hood. Muffled up a haggard wight she’d begun sheepishly. Nine years around the track. The longer outer lane, but not the outermost, where chainlink claws could rip her clothes, snag her headphone line.

Lap Four

or was it? How many has it been? Already four, but not four done, three done. Now four. Not so much, not already. Disappointingly at just its time. Long way more. Agony of intervening time. Steady push and pull. Breath. Heroic slow motion image of long-striding runner. Legs flung deliberate like javelins, not that way with me. A horizontal tumble, rolling. Feet flung out to stop me plunging headlong. Repeated protofall.

Time I fell. Cracked, unsettled pavement, hidden in a treeshadow. Sprawling, wind knocked out. Groaned like a cow. Permanent blemishes on my knees.

Pass exercise stations. Pull up bars for younger, stronger arms. Sit up bench. Stretching beam. Bleachers. Sometimes smokers, fuckers. Blowing smoke where people gasp for breath.

Come on.

Working hard.

Older woman boogieing along in her cute yellow pastel tracksuit with white piping, weave around her on the outer lane with a wave of acknowledgement.

Lap Five

Five, five, five, two minutes nine seconds, under the double digit. nine. Nine seconds. Best time something like one fifty. That’s three minutes for two laps no not one point five one fifty ten seconds shy of two so two is twenty shy of four that’s that’s that’s shit forty three forty, two minutes one hundred seconds which is sixty that’s three and then forty right. Forty and sixty one hundred is fifty twice. Three forty for two that’s six eighty for four which is a mile, seven twenty a mile better than less than twice four minute mile, which is beyond the pale, beyond the pale, professional, Olympic.

Come on.

Working hard.

Faster.

Blanching peach of the moon descending in clouds. Sky like fractured ice lake of soaring floes. Stars over.

You’re easing up. Harder.

Lap Six

Two nine, no let up.

Angry. Wide open.

Gust dying away. Don’t drop down.

Counting. Mile and a half, not yet. After lap. Then mile and half. Better than a fifth, twenty percent above twenty percent. Two more than one, that’s four, and two is six, six out of five, which is four each, twenty. Fourteen left. Many. Not as many. Six twenties is half sixty percent is thirty, nearly a third. Seven is a third of twenty almost. Three tens, thirty percent, really? Yes.

Lap Seven

Two seven, is it seven or is it lap seven? Constantly counting the time. Drives you crazy. Time is impossible to think about. Always hated stories about time, never able to follow. Story about the time travel class. Turned into. Cosmic travel. One is all and all is one.

Still only one mile and a half, just finished that one. Now heading into a nothing number, three quarters. Less encouraging than half. Two seconds faster, that’s better. Working hard.

Working hard.

I’m dying.

Working hard. Come on.

Lap Eight

already lap eight? First time around was stars, cloud bow. Second was scoreboard. Dead body third. Fourth thinking about the time I fell. Fifth was moon second time. Sixth don’t know. It can’t have been only one lap between fifth moon lap and now. More time than that it’s been. Divide difference by average of two minutes a lap and there, must be eight. Halfway. It will be.

Lap Nine

Remember check time this time forgot last time. So can’t know how long it’s been. But you can know when you were at the gate I mean when you started. Started this lap. Necessary for counting for the next one.

I’m dying. Work hard. Can I quit, it’s like I couldn’t. Can’t imagine stopping. Can. Dropping pace down to jolting trot. Momentum clatters down around me like heavy juggling pins. No reason you can’t stop and start again. Have to stop if you get dizzy. A little dizzy.

Don’t slow down. Keep up this one lap you can ease up the next one.

Lap Ten

Two minutes one, that’s good! Good! Ten down, that’s half, it’s downhill now. Over the hill. The hump I mean. The crest. Crest of the wave. Now. No, later. Still time. After this one half. Finish this one. Stay at two minutes. Two miles and a half.

Ten laps to go come on.

Ten laps to go come on.

Eyes on feet. Big washer on the track, metal loop, loops of that kind. A little queasy, nauseated. Should stop. Weird breeze from the left. Cold on me like rubbing alcohol. Tingling. Something’s happening. Happening to me – it isn’t a breeze — my left side is numb.

The End

When May falls and lies where she fell, the jogger coming up and around rushes over and kneels beside her.

“You all right?” she pants. “Miss? Miss?”

Lap Seven

Two seven, is it seven or is it lap seven? Less encouraging than half. Two seconds faster. Working hard.

Working hard.

I’m dying.

Ten laps to go come on.

Ten laps to go come on.

Rubber top of the track reddish and pebbly like old blood clot the left side of her vision area explodes in basiliskembers twirl blend and pitch together drawing a luminous cape across the inside of her optic skull chamber, breath pounding steadily in and out.

Ten laps to go come on.

Ten laps to go come on.

The End

A small group, skinny men with their hands high on their hips, a pair of huge women walkers, pair of young girls all legs and long hair, a little knot of women in fiery Southeast Asian regalia, athletic young man with his head down against his phone.

“… She’s unconscious …”

“… On the track …”

“… She just fell …”

Lap Four

or was it? How many has it been? Not so much, not already. Disappointingly at just its time. Long way more. Agony of intervening time.

Ten laps to go come on.

Ten laps to go come on.

Time I fell, cracked, unsettled. Pavement hidden in a treeshadow.

The End

Older woman in a pastel yellow tracksuit with white piping kneeling over her tousled body, check eyes, pulse.

The ambulance.

The stretcher.

Young girls stand beside the older woman.

Unlock the wheels and roll the sheeted figure to the gate, the gaping ambulance. The driver spins the wheel, the wheels turn under and the ambulance creeps out of the park, rounding corners, lights spinning and flashing.

Lap Nine

ten laps to go come on

ten laps to go come on

ten laps to go come on

The End

The elevator doors part. The stretcher sweeps down hospital corridors, doors flash by, weave around a little knot of women in fiery Southeast Asian regalia, hands check eyes, pulse.

Lap Four

Time I fell. Weave past older woman in pastel yellow tracksuit with white piping boogieing along. Wave at her. Young girls keeping pace with me a moment on the other side of the chain link fence.

Ten laps to go come on. Come on. Come on.

Can’t feel my legs come on. Legs light as air my feet slam the ground like mallets. Ten laps. To go, come on. Come on. Baskets of verbs. Incomplete baskets. Something’s blocking the lane, a whole crowd, run around them. Ten laps. Come on. Come on. Come on. On. On. On. On. Stroke. Stroke. Stroke. Stroke. Stroke. Stroke. Ten laps to go come on. Ten laps to go come on.

The End

Nothing to check. No pulse, no eyes. Empty hospital corridors, empty rooms flash by.

Lap Lap

When the surrounding complexities of the present contract into the mind in a single starlike focality, all desire all fear all rage all love all pain is there, the towering universe funneling into it, all around it the mechanically ordered processes of life, stripped naked to intensity that burns imagination, perception, understanding, intuition, memory, emotion together in faceless incandesence. The track is a perfectly straight strip to the horizon, striped like a guitar neck, she plants her feet one squarely before the other exactly down the centerline of her long lap, each lap is one rotation of the two feet on the long lap which is like a loop viewed edgewise not from above, it’s a line because it’s a circle.

Ten laps to go come on.

Ten laps to go come on.

Ten laps to go come on.

Flashing by the moon’s actinic light on the stylized face of the dragon mascot and the black rectangle of the scoreboard with its dead teeth of black incandescents, first flakes of summer snow twist golden in rippling heat of winter sun. Feet drumming the ground. Jolts each through her like a deep ripple across a sail. Legs, body, light, light, ten laps, come on. Ten laps. Ten, come on. You’re halfway there.

The post Time Drafts appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Art by Michael Garlington. Design by Scott R. Jones.

Everyone knew our town was dying, long before we truly saw it. There’s a certain way a piece of fruit begins to wrinkle and soften, caves in on itself around the edges of a fast-appearing bruise, throwing off the sickly-sweet scent of decay and death that always attracts some creeping hungry thing. Some part of the town, an unused building sinking into its foundations, a forgotten alleyway erupting into a slow maelstrom of weeds and cracked stone, was succumbing, had festered, had succumbed: and now threw off the warning spores of its demise. Everywhere in the town we went about the ins and outs of our daily lives and business, telling ourselves everything was normal, everything was fine. And every now and then a spore drifted into our lungs, riding in on a faint thread of that rotting fruiting scent, and though we did not pause in our daily routines, we stumbled a bit, we slowed. It was the last days of summer, I had just turned thirteen, and the leaves were beginning to turn, people were gathering the final crops of their fine little backyard gardens, culling the lingering remains of the season’s foods and flowers, smoothing over the soil. My grandfather had placed a large red-rusted oil barrel off the side of the garage, and every evening he threw the gathering detritus of summer into the can, and set it on fire. Great plumes of black smoke rose into the warm air, feather-fine flakes of ash and hot red sparks. I stood on the gravel path, watching the bright red licks of fire crackle and leap from the barrel’s jagged edges as my grandfather poked the burning sticks and leaves further down. An evening wind carried the dark smoke up into the canopy of branches overhead, tall evergreens swaying and whispering as they swept and sifted the ash further into the sky. We watched in silence. The air smelled gritty and smoky and dark, in that way the air only ever smells at the end of a dying summer, the smell of the sinking sun and dark approaching fall. The trees shifted, the branches changed direction, and the sickly-sweet scent caught in our throats, driving the smoke away.

—What is that? I asked.

—I don’t know, my grandfather replied. He rubbed ash from his eyes, and stared out into a distance place neither of us could see. —Something’s wrong.

***

Summer officially ended, school began, and the town continued. It was easy for all of us to say that everything was fine. The dissonance in the air was the usual changing of the seasons, we told ourselves. Near the downtown area, on a small lonely street along the outskirts of the factories and warehouses that ringed the downtown district, that strange and troubling area where suburbia fizzled out to its bitter end and the so-called city proper began, a number of small businesses closed with no warning to their loyal long-time customers or to those who worked for them. I knew of this only because my mother drove down that particular street one early afternoon, having taken me out of school for a dentist appointment. My mother had frequented most of these stores in her childhood, and she loved driving down the street as an adult, pointing out to me all the various places she had been taken by my grandfather. A small confectioner’s store that supplied those queer square mint-tinged wafers that were both creamy and crunchy, the pastel sweets popular at weddings and wakes. A stationer’s store, where my mother’s family had bought boxes and boxes of thick cream paper and envelopes with the family crest, a horned griffin rampant over a field of night-blooming cereus, and where my grandfather bought business cards and memo pads with his name printed neatly in the middle, just above his title of supervisor for the town’s electric and water company. A dilapidated movie theater that showed films in languages no one had ever heard of, from countries no one could ever seem to recall having seen on our schools’ and library’s aging maps and globes. A haberdashery where my father once had his soft brown wool felt fedoras and thick lambskin winter gloves blocked and stitched to his exact measurements and specifications. It had been taken over just that spring by the son of the former owner, an earnest and intense young man with perfect pale skin and unruly black hair, and unfortunately large black eyes. All three of those stores and more sat dark and fallow all along the block, faded red CLOSED and OUT OF BUSINESS signs swinging against padlocked doors, display windows choked with cobwebs and dust, the now familiar odor of sickly sweetness lingering in the air.

—Why do I keep smelling that, I said, pinching my nose shut. —What is it?

—It smells like camphor, my mother said.

—What’s that?

—Like the mothballs in our closets, she said. —You know, what I use to keep your father’s and grandmother’s things from molding and rotting away. To preserve things.

—Preserve? Like jam?

—In a way. To protect things. So they’ll never grow old, and always stay the same.

That afternoon as my mother steered the car along the narrow meridian dividing the street in two, the pale young man stood outside the haberdashery’s doors, his long arms wrapped around a bolt of fabric as if he were carrying the body of a dead child. I started in shock to realize it was not a bolt of fabric, but a length of thick grey wool wrapped around the stiff body of a large bird with two beaks twisted into a hideous spiral and a spider-like cluster of lidless coal-colored eyes. My mother stopped the car, and we stepped onto the dry worn street sitting under a cool and cloudless sky crowned by telephone wires. No one else was here this time of the afternoon in this part of the town, a part of the town in the middle of everything yet nowhere in particular, where the buildings rose no more than two stories before flattening out in resignation and despair, where you could walk down the sidewalks for hours, see no strip mall or market or house that didn’t look like the one behind it and before, hear only the soft crinkle of your shoes against cracked cement and the occasional miserable distant bark of a dog. In hindsight, we should have been more vigilant, more aware that these were the places of a town where septicemia and putrification creep in first, those lonely and familiar sections we slipped into and through every day without concern or care—not the seedy crumbling but flashy edges where decay was expected, and, from a certain element of our small society, even accepted and encouraged. These quiet streets of lonely backwater districts, these were the places we never gave a single thought about, because we thought they would be here forever, unchanging in the antiseptic amber of our fixed memories. These quiet streets of lonely backwater districts were always the first to go.

—Don’t come any closer, said the pale young man to my mother as she stepped onto the sidewalk.

—What happened to all the stores? my mother asked. —When did everything close?

—Don’t go near the windows, said the pale young man. —It’s terrible, don’t look. He stepped forward as if to block her, his already too large eyes widening further, the rims and lids as purple-red as the leaves on the trees, as if he had been weeping for hours, for centuries. My mother, a woman who, like her father, my grandfather, did not pay much heed to the general spoken and unspoken rules of a town, brushed past him, and I followed in her wake, already at thirteen very much a similar stubborn member of my family. My mother stepped up to one of the display windows, and I to the other, cupping my hands around my eyes to block out the sun as I pressed my face against the glass. —Don’t look, the young man repeated, but he did nothing to stop us, only stood on the sidewalk cradling his many-eyed black-feathered bird wrapped in fabric, shivering in the afternoon sun. Inside the store, everything appeared covered in the light dust typical of such a place, but nothing appeared out of the ordinary. I had last been in the store five years ago, to help my mother pick out a fine linen handkerchief for my father for the holidays, before he had disappeared in the deep network of tunnels and passages owned by the town’s electric and water company. I kept staring through the glass. Bowlers and fedoras slumping over the resigned foreheads of cracked mannequin heads, weary trays of uneven chevron-covered ties, unpolished cufflinks depressed into velvet folds of faded burgundy. My breath fogged the glass, and I wiped it away with a pass of my hands. Everything was quiet, peaceful, still.

—I don’t see anything different, my mother said. —Everything looks the same as I remember. This is the way it should be.

—I know, the young man said. —It all looks the same on the outside. It always has. You have to look underneath.

—How can one look underneath? I asked.

—You just do. You just know.

I’m not certain how long we stood on the quiet sidewalk of the lonely street in that empty part of town, staring through fingerprint-smeared windows into darkness. I now only remember how after a time had passed and as the afternoon sun hitched further down toward the town’s jagged horizon, everything in the store seemed to recede, sink into an interminable black fuzz not unlike mold spreading across fruit. Soft sweet mold and mannequin heads, and no life at all in the displays and counters and fixtures and heavy folds of fabric, only the amber-tinged cool approaching dark. My eyes adjusted to the fading light, and everything in the haberdashery blurred and shifted into a single indistinct mass: for one wild terrible second I felt like I was staring into the only place left in the world, that there was only my face pressed to the glass front of a dead forgotten store endlessly out of the reach of my immovable limbs, and everything and everyone behind me, including myself, was forever gone.

—Nothing’s changed except the sign, my mother said. —This is unacceptable. The stores must be reopened, so we can shop here, as we’ve always done. That’s how it’s supposed to be.

The young man replied, —Yes. And it will never end.

My mother looked at him, but did not reply.

I stepped back from the glass, and as I did, I caught a glimpse of the pale young man’s face, reflected beneath the faded gold letters of the haberdashery that bore his father’s name. I saw underneath him. I saw his wide unmoving mouth, his tiny painted teeth, his lidless lashless eyes, his cool matte porcelain skin. It was then I remembered I had crushed on him briefly, that last spring. I’d told my mother how handsome he looked, how comforting and familiar, and she’d laughed me into embarrassed silence, and so I’d driven it from my mind. The young man turned from us, and as he walked down the sidewalk back into suburbia, trailing oily iridescent feathers at his feet and the numbing sweet smell of camphor through the air, I caught a glimpse of his neck below his black, black hair, and the straight bloodless seam like a strange new road, slicing through every part of the town I’d ever known.

***

My mother drove us home in silence, and we never spoke of the incident to each other again. I believe I was afraid to ask my mother what she meant when she said she saw nothing underneath, whether she meant she saw nothing out of the ordinary, or if she meant that she had perceived that same black nothingness the pale young man claimed he saw welling beneath the surface of the haberdashery, the nothingness that had spread throughout that entire row of stores. I was afraid to ask my mother what she meant when she saw nothing underneath, nothing changed, and said that was the way it should always be. I believe I knew then what I was afraid of, or rather there was a confirmation within me of what I had always known that I was afraid of; and my mother knew that I knew, and together in silence we drove home.

We drove down the street several weeks later. All of the stores displayed their usual faded yet cheerful red and white OPEN signs, but my mother didn’t slow the car, nor did she spin her usual tales of how her family had frequented the various shops over the years and what items she bought that were still somewhere in our house, carefully packed in cedar boxes lined with tissue paper and small white mothballs. I slid down in the car seat until my eyes were level with the plastic button lock on the door, and stared out the window at the haberdashery. Sitting on the sidewalk beside the dusty glass door, still holding the stiff deformed bird bundled in wool felt, I saw the pale young man that for one brief second in my past I had crushed on like the soles of my feet against soft gray gravel, standing, staring out into the street, the look on his face not unlike that of my grandfather when he stood over the can of burning leaves and ash. I had never told my mother what I thought I’d seen that strange afternoon in the face of the pale young man, or at the back of his neck. I didn’t need to. My mother smiled, and stared ahead, and drove on.

Fall deepened and thickened and the air above and over our heads grew cold, but the gold and red leaves and the earth itself were still hot to the touch, as though the trees were drawing up and throwing off some unseen underground fire. I woke up early in the morning, having slept every night with the light at my desk never off and the small television always tuned to movies so old even my grandfather had never heard of them. I dressed for school to the snowy images of sleek, long-dead women and men, drifting through a world constructed solely of pixilated shades of black and grey. My grandfather seemed never to sleep, spending evenings after work in the kitchen, spreading maps and charts of the town’s systems and infrastructures over the table, scribbling indecipherable equations and geometric shapes in blue ball-point pen across the outlines of our streets and neighborhoods he’d traced onto wide sheets of translucent onionskin, the low light of the kitchen lamp falling over his thick white hair and worried face. I would tip-toe into the kitchen to make breakfast, expecting him to be fast asleep, slumped over the table, a pencil drifting out of his large hand. He was always awake, sitting straight in the chair, on his face the same indeterminable and unfathomable look as when we stood at the barrel while summer died all around us, watching the ash disappear into the thick grotto of whispering evergreens.

—What are you looking at? I asked, as I pulled up my chair and sat beside him. —What is happening? What do you see? I asked those questions every morning of him, never sure what I was really asking. Was I asking what he saw in the maps, or what he saw in the false autumn air? Every morning his answers were very different, and very much the same. Picking up a piece of onionskin paper covered in small diagrams and paragraphs thick with words, he would place it over the part of the town map to which it corresponded and point to a specific cluster of words or diagrams now floating over a specific building or street, I would ask the question, and he would speak.

—The B&I Circus Discount Emporium, along South Tacoma Way, where Mom used to buy my winter clothes?

—The woman found her children on the carousel, the one in the middle of the store. You remember it. Employees dressed as clowns, and a dying ape in a cage. She left the girl with the son, an older boy, while looking for a pair of boots that had a left and a right foot, and a pair of pants that had two legs instead of three. Popcorn crackling and calliope music filled the air of the low-ceilinged acre-wide room. Cash registers and conversations. No one could have heard the screams. Maybe there were none. They all left their children there. She returned, all the parents returned, to a circular wood platform wobbling unevenly. Circus animals taffy-warped, the bodies of their children spiraling in ropes of blood and bone around wooden saddles, wooden poles, wooden stars. Store mannequins, plastic boys and girls with bright-eyed smiles, inserted like obscene arrows into delicate flesh. Calliope music, warped and stretched, washing through the air with their howls. Across the store, across a forest of metal clothing racks and rotting sales signs under a flickering fluorescent sky, the woman saw a store clown, bloated and swaying around a cement pillar like a dying parade float, slowly tearing the ape apart like cotton candy and cramming the pieces into its peppermint-striped mouth.

—The Safeway Supermarket, in the Highland Hills district, where you used to take me shopping when I stayed overnight with you and Granny?

—A young boy on a shopping trip with the mother of his best friend, who was playing in the refrigerated food aisles. Opening the doors, letting the frost collect on the warming surface, then drawing pictures and writing his name on the glass, like you used to do. His friend and mother were gone only for a few moments, looking for ice cream in another aisle. When they returned to the aisle, the young boy had vanished. Everyone was gone. No traces—no half-filled shopping carts, no purses or wallets on the linoleum floor, no cash registers open in half-completed transactions. The woman saw the boy’s words behind glass, the last letter elongated as if the hand writing it had slid down and away. She opened the door. Behind the milk bottle shelves and the thick strips of plastic curtaining, the movements of something quiet and colossal. A thick stench of sweet decay blossomed out into the aisle, hitting the woman so hard that she turned as if slapped, vomiting on herself as she ran from the store, ran from displays molding and blackening on the shelves, ran from open bins of vegetables exploding in clouds of insects and spores, ran from meat that slithered and whispered as it burst from its packaging, dissolving and reforming into something greater than the sum of its blood and gristle and bone, something that might have vaguely resembled a monstrous, profane, and profoundly damaged reconstruction of the missing young boy.

—Point Defiance Park, at the northernmost end of Old Town, where Mom and Dad took me to see the old fort, and the animals at the zoo? Mom got sick there one time. She said it was the hot dogs. We never went back.

—You were too young to understand. They took you along the road that winds through the old-growth forest, called Five Mile Drive, up to the abandoned logging camp. They took you to the small unpaved street of wood plank houses and shops, to the remnants of the railroad tracks where a single steam engine car sat for a century, its giant blackened pistons and wheels locked tight with rust and rain, the engine car your mother rested in while your father took you to the fort. Day and night, now, park rangers hear the thunder and roar of the engine, blasting and crushing and consuming its way through the woods, leaving behind two deep oily grooves of blistered burning earth that no normal plant or tree will grow in again. Other things are found in the self-made tracks, things the rangers have taken their axes to, then buried deeper in the ground. The desiccated remains of animals, lions and orcas, polar bears turned inside out, their bones splintered and shot through with iron splinters. Bubbling jellicular mounds of placenta, slick and hot with blood, the aborted machine-like creatures within them tearing feebly at the thick membrane with inverted limbs and jaws. The entire park has been shut down, but eventually, everything once alive within it will be eaten and rebirthed as something else. After that, who knows where it will go. There’s nothing to keep it from leaving.

—Narrows View, in the University Place School District.

Our district. My fingers traced wild ink spirals over to my old elementary school, just a block away from our house. My mother used to walk me up to the corner every day, then watch as I made my way halfway down the block then across the two-lane road, walking carefully within the thick white lines of the crosswalk. I used to imagine that if I stepped out of the lines and onto the worn black surface of the road, I would sink into a river of soft blacktop and tar, be pulled under even as my classmates continued across the wide parking lot and onto the breezeway that connected each of the ten low buildings that made up the school. They would run and dash through bright orange painted metal doors, disappear down linoleum-lined hallways into warm and humid classrooms, shedding coats and fluttering into chairs like autumn leaves. Bells would ring out, harsh and long clanging that echoed over the rooftops and trees, and the heavy yellow buses would belch smoke and squeal out of the parking lot and down the road; and then silence. And I, slowly sinking in the road, my school just yards away, my hands outstretched as if I could grasp it. I couldn’t. I never could. And my mother, standing at the crooked red stop sign at the top of our little street, hands at her side, the edges of her brown coat flapping in the cold morning air, watching expressionless as I screamed, then pleaded, then struggled, then gave up and stopped moving at all, just watched her watching me, watching the whole world around us grow dark and still, until we were both trapped in an endless moment in time, never to grow old, never to live, never to die. My hands, forever outstretched for her help. Her eyes, forever burrowing out hollows in mine.

I lifted my fingers from the map. The tips were so blue with ink, it looked like they were rotting away.

—They found a girl in the road, my grandfather began. His large hand covered mine, and placed it back down on the map. He looked so tired, so old. —The skeleton of a large girl, a colossal girl, a giantess. Rising up from the blacktop. Bones like deformed corkscrews, each bone fused from the skeletons of many smaller girls.

—Not different girls, I said, slipping my hand away. —The same girl, trapped in the same part of the road a hundred thousand times. Layers of the same girl, trapped over and over again from kindergarten to sixth grade. Seven years, ending only last spring.

—Yes. My grandfather rose from the table, and started to fold up the maps and diagrams before my mother came downstairs. He didn’t have to ask me how I knew.

***

My grandfather abandoned his maps not long after that. It wasn’t that he lost interest. So many incidents occurred, it became useless to record them all. All put together, the entire town became an incident, and the map drowned beneath the network of inky words and roads, until all that remained of white paper was the tiny dot we called home. I don’t think either one of us could bear to fill in that small, lonely white circle. We knew it would happen. My grandfather placed everything in the trash can barrel at the side of the yard one day, and we watched it curl into grey ash and float away in the sweet hot air. And after a while, no one remembered what day it was, or what week, or whether the season was fall or winter or spring. It was all the same season, the same day. I woke up to the same ghostly, lifeless images on the television as the day before, dressed for a school day I wouldn’t recall going to by evening’s end, when I sat at my desk, looking through books and papers for homework I never found.

And then one afternoon, although which afternoon of which month of what year it was, I would never know, my grandfather didn’t come home. He left early in the morning for his job at the electric and water company as he always had, his soft grey fedora over his white hair, a thermos of milky coffee tucked into his briefcase. He kissed me on the forehead and told me to be safe, then drove off in the large car he had bought years ago when he became supervisor. I got ready for school, but I can’t say if I went or not. The day passed, like all the days, in a soft haze of warmth and numbing sweetness that festered into early evening; and then the sun was pushing long bands of shadow and sun through the windows, over the dinner table. My grandfather would never abandon me. He wasn’t coming home, I realized, because he couldn’t; and the shock and sorrow of it sent something cold and hard trickling through my veins, and for the first time in what seemed like forever, I felt I was awakening from a terrible, suffocating dream.

—Are we going to wait for Puda? I asked my mother.

My mother set the casserole dish on the table, and stared at me. In her face, traces of what I might become, in another time, in another town. Her eyes, bright and furnace dark. Unbearable and all-consuming; and in her pupils I saw the small reflection of myself sink into the road a million times. I knew her answer then, before she said it.

—No.

She poured me a glass of lukewarm milk, and sat down. We ate in silence. The shadows lengthened until there was no more sun, and in my mind, I saw my gentle grandfather filling in that one remaining dot of white on his map with ink as blue as his eyes. And then he, too, was gone.

The next morning was not the same as all the other mornings. In the sleepy-sweet air, I dressed for classes I knew I had never attended, and never would, for friends and teachers I had never met or seen. Silvery thin men and women danced and fought in the snow of a television set that had long ago lost its cord. Images that did not exist. Everything in the world around me, a perverted misremembering, a suffocating lie. I put my schoolbooks under my bed, then changed my mind and stuffed them into the backpack. I had wanted to go, I had wanted to learn. I wanted to grow up. I had wanted the pale young man with the red-rimmed, pool-black eyes.

In the kitchen, my mother folded the top of my paper bag lunch as I drank my lukewarm milk. She licked the palm of her hand and ran it across my hair as I stared at the empty surface of the table, where my grandfather’s hands had drawn rivers of blue ink over the map of my life. Her breath was whisper-cloying, as though I had walked into a web. In the distance, a train sounded out, mournful and low and long. I stared up at the ceiling, watching small spores detach like faint candle sparks and float down through the thick amber air, wink out as they hit my face, my skin, the ground. Everyone had known that the town had been dying, long before I truly saw it. The ground trembled and buzzed beneath my feet. I thought of my grandfather and the pale young man, and my face grew porcelain-tight.

—I have to go to school, I whispered. Each word took a century to slip from my mouth, as slow as the dying spores.

—No, you don’t. My mother clasped my hand in hers, hard, and I felt our bones shift and crackle, our skin cake and fuse together like velvet and mold.

—Let me go, I said.

—No, she said. —I don’t have to.

—Yes, I said. —You do.

A century later or more, I pulled my hand from hers. Her fingers stretched like taffy, wriggled and dropped away. Centuries later, my other hand thrust my grandfather’s pen at the pulsing hollow of her throat. Droplets hung in the air, ruby and indigo comets catching the light as they orbited our wounds. Outside, the sun fell and rose as many times as the stars in the sky, and in that epoch my mother curled back her cracking lips wider, wider until there was only teeth and the volcanic black of her open mouth. With each step back from her and away, she bloated and burst, exponential in rot, pushing away the flimsy walls of our home, her veined translucent flesh pulsing with all the unborn variants of my life pushing outward to be free. In the molasses air, I turned, a millennium spent directing my terror and trembling legs away and up to the end of our street. If I cried, time looped back and ate the tears before they fell from my eyes. Only the pounding of my heart, a beat for every revolution of the galaxy, only the echo of a footfall with every dying star, only my mother always behind me, exploding, grasping, expanding, only everywhere the low dark roar of thunder and never rain.

—They found a girl in the road, my grandfather had begun, in another universe. —Bones like deformed corkscrews, each bone fused from the skeletons of many smaller girls.

Down the street, past the crosswalk and the thick white lines, and after that each step was quicker, and the centuries burned away. I never looked back. I passed myself, stuck in the blacktop a hundred thousand times, the giantess made of a hundred thousand girls, each one falling apart and clattering to the ground. And I ran to the edges of my northern town and past it and slipped beyond into the world, as all the cold bright skeletons of who I could have been swarmed behind me, plunging into the quivering moist mountains of putrescent flesh that had birthed us all, sinking her into the road where she lost me, all of them dying within her desire like little miscarried dreams.

I never stopped running.

Neither did she.

***

I’ve lived in this southernmost town for many lifetimes now, having lived in many other towns, each further south than the last. But all of the towns of this world have succumbed, as I knew they would, and there are no more towns beyond this one. There is nothing beyond this one, except the vast southern ocean, fields of ice, cold skies, colder stars. Here, winter is a diamond-hard fist, and summer an impossible dream. Or so it used to be, when I first made my way here, centuries or eons ago. I feel her now, again, in the air, in my bones. The days have begun to blend into each other as they did in all the other towns, the minutes and months and years, and a numbing sweet languor warms and slows us down until we no longer know or care. Everyone has known that the town is dying, long before we could see it. But only I know the reason why. My mother is coming for her little girl, once again burning the world away until there is only us and the memories of us together, until there is only her memories of how it used to be, how it should have been. And there are no more towns left to hide in, no more versions or dreams of me left to fight.

So I sit at the window of my apartment in that southernmost town, watching leaves turn red and gold that had only for the first time yesterday been green, watching the sun wax fat and throw off the late summer sparks I knew so well when I lived in the northern town, feeling the air grow camphor-bloated warm and sickly sweet. I sit at my window, turning the pages of schoolbooks I’ll never learn from, watching the buildings do what I have never done. They age, morph, change. They bloat, fuzz over, and release soft spores from fat cankers sagging off their rotting faces, they malform and reform, they become more familiar with each calcifying day. The southernmost town is disappearing, and the northern town is rising, again. A steam engine howls in the distance as it gobbles up the miles, and so much more. The townspeople’s movements weaken, slow, stop. They fade and drift away like vapor. The face of the pale young man appears in the windows, sliding from the flickering edges of my sight into full view as the weeks pass: and then the day will come when he will stand in the street below, as he has stood in all the other dusty streets of all the other towns, his large black eyes fixed on me as the twin-beaked raven in his grasp grotesquely struggles to call out my name, all the names of the monsters of my mother’s memories. Behind and around him, behind and around me, the fully formed streets of my childhood soon will stand, birthed out of the ruins of the southernmost town like a still-born giantess, a puppet of calcified dreams and bone, pulled into unwanted existence by the strings of someone else’s desire. This, this is my mother’s endless suffocating desire, slowing time down around us, winding it back, back, until it becomes the amber-boned river in which I am always and only her little girl, eternal and alone.

I place the blue pen at the small pale circle of my throat.

I can stop time, too.

The post Furnace appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

I wish it was me who had found her and not my husband. I kept wondering what she looked like in her natural state, so to speak. What if Gerald had moved her around?

Gerald didn’t notice me when I got there. He was walking around in a semicircle as if he wanted to get closer, but her body was letting off a magnetic force that kept him away.

“Who does she belong to?” I said. I was out of breath and leaned against a tree.

“What?” Gerald said, turning around. There were a few cows nearby. They were looking at the three of us with large eyes.

“I mean, she’s half on our land and half on the Smiths’ pasture.”

“Ah,” he said. “I’m not sure it matters.”

“The head is on our half,” I said. “I think that should count for something.”

I had been folding laundry when Gerald called. I liked doing it right when it came out, when it was so hot it almost burned my hands. I could feel his excitement through the little speaker beside my ear. Gerald told me he had been walking near the edge of our property and found our cat, Mitzy, chewing on a dead woman’s face.

We’d lived on this backwoods land for two years, Gerald and I. It was a twenty-minute drive from town. If you walked through the woods, you’d come across a cow pasture cut out from the forest with rusty barbed wire. When we first moved in, we used to drink a bottle of wine and go and stick our hands through the fence so the cows would lick our palms for salt.

Gerald had already placed his bandanna over the woman’s head. He said it was the Christian thing to do.

“Oh, Gerald,” I said, and threw my arms around him. “Who would do something like this?”

“It’s deer season,” Gerald said. “She was probably shot by a hunter who realized his mistake and fled.” He was looking past me. He had a large beard at that time, and his face seemed to be shrinking into it as he talked. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s probably what happened.”

The woman was on her belly beneath the barbed wire, legs jutting into the cow pasture. You could tell by the color of the dirt that there had been a lot of blood, yet her jeans and green button-up looked untouched from the back. They could have been pulled fresh out of the dryer.

“I think I have that exact same shirt,” I said. “I bought it on sale at Gap.”

I squatted close to the body. I thought she would look peaceful, and that I would feel a spiritual calm spread through my veins, but it didn’t happen. With her head hidden under the bandanna, she looked more like a mannequin. I wanted to reach out and bend her limbs into a livelier pose.

Gerald squeezed my collarbone with his hands. He bent down and put his dry lips against my cheek. “The cops said they’d be here soon.” He said it so matter-of-factly. She was already passing out of our hands. “We should go back to the house.”

“No,” I said. “We need to be with her till they come.”

My husband sighed and sat on a stump with his hands on his knees. I stayed in the damp grass near the body. The woman was laying belly down, with her arms curled in front of her head. I could imagine sleeping like that, with a pillow under my head instead of mud. I kept hoping the wind would blow the bandanna off her head. There were a few bugs crawling over her body. One flew onto my foot, and I flicked it away.

“I’m getting kind of hungry,” Gerald said after a bit.

Not much normally interrupted our eating out here. We inherited the house from Gerald’s parents after his father died of a stroke and his mother gave up and moved to Florida. It was a quiet place, but close enough to town that we weren’t hillbilly hermits.

Gerald and I had met in high school. He had been on the state champion football team, although I always forgot which position. We’d been together for long enough it felt like nothing at all.

It was already getting dark when the police arrived. They turned the forest upside down with lamps and walkie-talkies. They took Gerald aside, and I couldn’t hear what he was saying. He seemed to be giving a description of our cat.

I watched the police dump out the woman’s backpack. There was a bag of trail mix, three tubes of beauty product, a bottle of red wine, and a digital camera. All objects I own and use myself. They put these in plastic bags that they zipped shut. At one point I thought I saw Mitzy, her eyes bouncing beneath a bush like glow-in-the-dark balls.

The police only asked me if I’d heard any unusual noises. I said no, and they said they might need to talk to me down the road.

After that we had to leave the area.

***

When we got home, I went to the bathroom. I flushed the toilet and then looked in the mirror and tried to cry. I walked around the house, calling for Mitzy. She kept darting under different pieces of furniture.

Gerald was snacking in front of the TV. I sat down next to him and took a handful of chips.

“Was she beautiful?” I asked.

“What? I didn’t know her,” he said quickly.

“But you saw her face before you covered it up,” I said. “What did she look like?”

“Christ, Carol. I dunno. Normal?”

“That’s it?” I said. “You don’t remember her eye color or anything?”

Gerald stood up and walked over to the trash can and spat out a plum pit, then walked back and sat down.

“She had brown hair,” he said. “About your length. I dunno if you’d call her pretty. Pretty enough I guess. Her face was wide open and stuck in the mud. I didn’t want to keep looking at her eyes.”

“For some reason I want her to be beautiful,” I said.

I could have been doing anything when it happened. Slicing an apple, napping on the porch, wrapping my fingers around Gerald’s privates. And out there, she was breathing her last breaths. The police had taken the body away in a dark bag, but I kept wondering about her. I would try to imagine her face, and it would be the face of a sister of mine. A twin sister I never knew I had, a mirror reflection I had failed to protect.

I didn’t dream about her, or didn’t remember the dreams, but I also didn’t sleep much. I rolled onto my side and watched a small pool of saliva leak out of Gerald’s red mouth.

At breakfast, I couldn’t help myself. “Would you say she was older or younger than me?”

Gerald was dipping pieces of bread into his runny eggs. He took the piece that was halfway in his mouth and placed it down on the rim of the plate.

“It’s in the past,” he said. “Death is just a part of life. I think we should let it go and move on.” He put the toast back into his mouth. I got up to refill my coffee.

It was a bright day outside. A ladybug flew into the window. I thought I heard gunshots in the distance.

“Hey, maybe we could go in and see a movie later tonight,” Gerald said. He scraped a large chunk of butter across his toast. “Wouldn’t that be fun?”

“Her skin was pale. It seemed like she might have a lot of freckles, like me,” I said. “Do you remember her freckles?”

“Christ,” Gerald said. “Sometimes I wish we’d never even found that thing.”

Since the economy had gone sour, Gerald hadn’t had much work. He got a call every now and then to fix up a rotted porch or help build a new staircase, but most days he sat around. That day, he put on his coat and gloves and drove off like it was any other Tuesday. He’d finished up his breakfast while I was in the shower.

“Gonna go put in some applications,” he said. “You never know when things will pick up.”

Mitzy came out from behind the stove and jumped on my lap. I ran my fingers over her head a few times. “You weren’t really chewing her face, were you? You were just licking it clean to get a good look.”

I listened to Gerald’s pickup sputter off, then walked over to my jacket and pulled out the policeman’s card. I told the lady who answered my name and said I wanted to know what they had learned. “Did the autopsy reveal anything? Has anyone identified the body? Do they have to do that before the autopsy?”

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” she said. “That’s privileged information. We can’t give out information on ongoing investigations to anyone who isn’t a relative of the victim.”

“How do I know if I’m family or not if you can’t tell me her name?”

“I’m sorry, you’ll have to wait for the public announcements same as everyone else.”

Mitzy yawned and hopped off my lap to find her bowl of water.

“The secret to a good red sauce is brown sugar,” Margaret said. “You might not think it, but that’s what all the restaurants do. Mix it in until it’s muddy and mix in the noodles.”

We were drinking vodka cranberries on her porch. I’d decided to get off the property, sit somewhere where I didn’t feel the presence of the spot by the fence.

“I used to use powdered sugar, but it always tasted like some trash from Olive Garden.” She gave a laugh. Margaret liked to repeat the tricks she’d learned on cooking shows. I waited for a lull to release my secret.

“Margaret, we found a dead woman on our land,” I said, taking her hand as if to protect her. “She was by herself and bleeding all over the ground. The killer is still out there.”

I waited for her shock.

“I know, isn’t it awful? You poor darling.”

I pulled back. “How did you know?” I’d been watching the local news every night and hadn’t heard a peep.

“Gerald told me. Raj and I ran into him at the store.” Margaret took a sip from her drink. The cranberry juice left a thin red sheen above her lips. “What can you do, though? Last week Asha’s goldfish went belly up, and she woke us up screaming. She was in our bedroom doorway with the sad, slimy thing in her hands. Just have to put it out of your mind, I guess.”

There were a lot of paths in the woods. I kept thinking someone would spring out from behind a hill or oak and twist a knife into my stomach. I picked up a large stick to walk with. There was a chunk of wetness around the top, some fungus or mold, and I dropped it back down.

When it was Gerald’s turn to pick our movies, he always chose detective films. His favorites were the French ones that were filmed in such dark shadows that you’d think the sun never flew over Paris. I never quite understood them, but Gerald would squeeze the popcorn in his fists into tight wads of excitement. And yet here I was scouting the woods alone.

The spot seemed all wrong without the body. Even though I had visited that corner of the pasture dozens of times, noth- ing looked right. The barbed wire was spaced too far apart, and the trees had been moved a few inches to the left. I stepped on a small plant with foreign-looking leaves.

I walked around stooped over until my back hurt. I didn’t find any clues. Even the bloodstain seemed to have been soaked up by the dirt.

There was something peaceful about the spot though. I went home and packed a small lunch and came back with a blanket and a book. After a time, Mitzy came by and jumped on my lap. Together we dozed off and woke only when Gerald’s truck pulled into the driveway.

Gerald peeled off his undershirt and approached me in bed. His beard glistened with flecks of water from the sink. We had the window open, and the wind moved over my face and shoulders. Mitzy watched us from the foot of the bed. When Gerald’s fingers landed on my neck, I rolled myself onto him. Gerald was silent as I grunted. Something had been welling up inside me, and I let it out until we returned to our sides of the bed covered in a sheen of sweat.

“Well sure, I could be over there in an hour,” Gerald said. “What’s happening?” I said. “Was that the police?” It was two o’clock in the afternoon, and we’d been playing cards on the living room table.

“It was Wallace Smith.”

“Oh my god, Wallace? He did it?” Wallace was our neighbor who owned the farm the body was half on.

“What?” Gerald said. “Wallace wants me to help reshingle his barn roof.” He smiled and got his measuring tape out of the top drawer. He pulled it out a few inches and let it snap back. “I guess he heard about my employment status. ‘Neighbors help neighbors; that’s what we do’ was how he put it. Funny guy.”

It didn’t sound right. Wallace Smith had never called Gerald for any help before. In fact, when we’d first moved in, we had a big dispute over the land boundary. For a while we thought we were going to have to hire a lawyer.

“What if he thinks you know something?” I said.

“I know a lot about roofing. That’s why he’s hiring me.”

“No, Gerald, about the murder.”

“Murder?” he said. “Are you still on about that? Wallace is just a nice old man who needs a hand. I think he got an arm twisted under a tractor or something. But don’t worry, I’ll be careful.” He winked and gave me a kiss on the cheek. “It’ll be nice to have a little extra cash flowing in, eh? Maybe we can see that movie.”

***

Margaret was insisting I try a new Thai restaurant with her in town. She said I needed to breathe some city air. I was afraid something would happen, and I would miss it.

“Gerald,” I said, “do you know where my shirt is?”

“What shirt?” He was shouting but standing only in the other room.

“My green blouse. The button-up one with the pockets from Gap.”

Gerald walked around the corner. He had Mitzy in his arms and was pulling back her ears. He shrugged. “If it was stained, I probably threw it in the wash.”

On one path, I found a candy bar still in its shiny wrapper. On another, three crumpled beer cans and a full pack of cigarettes, which looked like hunter trash. It was almost cold in the shade of the woods. All the bugs and animals were hiding from me.

I went back to the spot. I placed my hands carefully between the barbs of the fence and maneuvered into the cow pasture. A barb caught my thigh and ripped a hole on the way down. I could feel a trickle of blood dampening the denim. There were a few footprints in the mud and cow pies. They led in different directions. A cow wandered over and licked my hand with a rough, pink tongue.

The pasture was a few hundred feet long. At the end of it I could see the Smiths’ barn. The only thing on the roof was a rusty weathervane. Had Gerald lied to me? What was he doing instead of roofing?

I thought I could follow the line of trees on the far side along the barbed wire without being seen. When I got close, I crouched behind a row of hedges and listened to Gerald and Wallace Smith laughing. Gerald had something in a blue tarp about the size of a body draped over his shoulder.

“Just hurry with it if you want to get paid,” Wallace was say- ing. I was trying to breathe as quietly as possible, and it was hurting my lungs.

Gerald and Wallace went around to the door of the barn, and I squeezed my way between the fence slats. “Fuck, this shit is heavy,” Gerald said.

I thought about all the little moments in my life that had brought me to this moment and how pointless they all seemed. A brown chicken walked around the side of the barn, and I tried to shoo it off. It moved closer, bobbing its head. It seemed to be staring me right in the face.

“Carol?”

I looked up. Gerald had materialized on the roof. The rolled-up tarp was at his feet. He held a hand over his eyes to gaze down at me, making his face pitch black.

“What are you doing down there?” he said. He had a big smile sliced into the center of his beard. The sun was shining hard on him.

“Who’s there?” someone said. Then Wallace hobbled around the side of the barn. “Why if it isn’t a pretty lady,” he said. He reached out with his good hand. The other was limp in a sling. “How are you, Carol? I didn’t expect to see you again so soon.”

“I was just out for a walk,” I said. I could feel my heart thumping impotently against my chest. “How’s the roofing?”

“Coming along,” Gerald shouted down. “Hot day, though. If you’re walking back through, could you bring me a glass of lemonade?”

I found it harder and harder to talk to Gerald. He would come home sore and hungry and ready for the TV. We would eat dinner, make love or not make love, then go to sleep. I stopped asking him about Wallace or the body. The roofing job went on and on.

When his snores started, I slid out of bed and searched through his clothes. There was nothing unusual, only some movie ticket stubs. I didn’t know what clues I was supposed to be putting together.

The corner of the fence was still a quiet place for me. I would go there to read and think. I rubbed the dark veins creeping up my calves. I could calculate only a year or two before we’d probably want to add a child. Life settled into its mold no matter what you did.

____

“Things Left Outside” is reprinted by permission from Upright Beasts (Coffee House Press, 2015). Copyright © 2015 by Lincoln Michel.

The post Things Left Outside appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

The name of Alfonso Reyes reoccurs throughout any discussion of Latin American literature. In his native Mexico, he is considered a major 20th century author, and more than one street has been named for him there. Roberto Bolano referred to him in the short list of those writers he included in his own personal canon, Borges celebrated him as the greatest of all Spanish prose stylists. And yet, for all that, his work has gone virtually untranslated in English. As near as I can tell, “Major Aranda’s Hand,” published by Alberto Manguel in the second of his marvelous Black Water anthologies, is the only piece by Reyes in English.

After reading Bolano I became curious about Reyes and sought out his stories, largely in vain. So I decided to try translating some of his fiction myself, since I didn’t think it acceptable for me to remain wholly ignorant of him. The decision to translate “La Cena” was largely dictated by the preeminent place it occupies in Reyes’ corpus; “The Supper,” written when he was still a student and published in 1912, is a dreamlike story reminiscent in certain superficial ways to the work of some of the Continental decadents but, in its basic character, thoroughly original. Reading a later work, such as Carlos Fuentes’ beautiful novella Aura, echoes of “The Supper” return again and again. The ghostliness of Juan Rulfo’s novel Pedro Paramo likewise has a Reyes-like air to it. It may be that it was Reyes who made it possible for Mexican writers to adopt a less rigid idea of realism, and to escape the confines of a literary conservatism that endured well into Bolano’s time.

– Michael Cisco, Translator

***

Supper, which delights us and inspires love.

– San Juan de la Cruz

I was running through unfamiliar streets. My destination seemed to recede before my steps, and the appointed hour was already humming in the public clocks. The streets stood empty. Electric lights danced, streaking like snakes, before my eyes. Circular plazas were constantly springing up before me, their vegetation endowed with an unreal elegance in the night’s artificial light. I believe I passed an incalculable number of towers — I don’t know whether they were among the houses or the squares — flaunting to the four winds their four round clock faces, illuminated from within.

I hurried, egged on by a superstitious presentiment about the time. If the nine strokes of the bell, I told myself, surprise me before I get the door knocker in my hand, something bad will happen. And hurrying frantically, I remembered having hurried once before at this same hour to this place and with similar eagerness. When?

Finally the pleasures of this false memory absorbed me so completely that I slipped into my normal pace without noticing. And by and by, in the lapses of my thoughts, I saw that I was still travelling, and there unfolded before me new perspectives of electric lights, of small planted squares, of illuminated clocks … I don’t know how much time went by, it was as if I were asleep

and sick, struggling to breathe.

Suddenly, nine sonorous chimes slithered across my epidermis with a metallic chill. My eyes, even as my hopes failed, fell on the nearest door: this was my destination.

Then, pausing to compose my spirit, I reviewed my reasons for coming here. For yesterday, the postman had brought me a brief and suggestive invitation. In a corner of the paper there was written, by hand, the seal of a house. It was dated the previous day. The letter said only:

“Dona Magdalena and her daughter Amalia hope you shall dine with them tomorrow, at nine in the evening. Ah, if he does not fail us! …”

Not one letter more.

I always fall in with unexpected experiences. This case, besides, presented a singular attraction: the tone, familiar and respectful at once, with which this unnamed person was addressed by these unknown ladies; the morose “Ah, if he does not fail us! …”, so vague and so sentimental, that seemed suspended before an abyss of confessions, all combined to decide me. I went, anxious with an unnameable emotion. When, at times, in my nightmares, I evoke again that fantastic night (whose fantasy is assembled out of quotidian things and whose equivocal mystery grows from the humble root of what is possible), I seem to rush panting along avenues of clocks and towers, solemn as sphinxes lining the aisle of some Egyptian temple.

The door opened. I had been facing away, toward the street, when a square of light suddenly fell on the ground, and in it my shadow was joined by the shadow of an unknown woman.

I turned around: with the light shining behind her and into my dazzled eyes, to me this woman was nothing more than a silhouette, on which my imagination could paint various hypothetical physiognomies, without any one of them corresponding to her contour, and in this state I stammered some salutations and explanations.

– Enter please, Alfonso.

And I entered, astonished at hearing myself summoned as if into my own home. The vestibule disappointed me. Upon the romantic words of the invitation (at least, they seemed romantic to me), I had founded hopes of an encounter with an ancient house, full of tapestries, old portraits and huge armchairs; an ancient house, lacking in style, but full of respectability. But instead of this, I was confronted with a diminutive vestibule and with a flimsy, unelegant staircase; which foretold the cramped, modern dimensions I could expect in the rest of the house. The flooring was of polished wood; the few bits of furniture had the chill luxury of things from New York, and on the wall, covered in bright green paper, there grimaced, with unpardonable indications of impertinence, two or three Japanese masks. I even began to doubt … But then I raised my eyes and my calm returned: before me, dressed in black, slender, dignified, the woman who had come to guide me pointed to the door of the salon. Her silhouette had taken on a coloring of features; her face had no special significance for me, its only noteworthy aspect being a reverent expression; her chestnut locks, done up in a somewhat slack way, completed the formation of a strange conviction in my mind: it all seemed to knead and mold the suggestion of a name.

– Amalia? — I asked.

– Yes. — And it seemed as if I had answered my own question.

The salon, as I had imagined, was small. The decorations, which seemed to answer my previous expectations, clashed infamously with the decor of the vestibule. Here were the honorable tapestries and the massive armchairs, the bearskin on the floor, the mirror, the chimney, the vases; the piano complete with candlesticks and full of photographs and statuettes — the piano that no one ever touched –, and, beside it stood the prominent easel, with an enlarged and obviously retouched portrait; it showed a gentleman with a parted beard and a vulgar mouth.

Dona Magdalena, who was already waiting for me installed in a red armchair, was also dressed in black and bore on her bosom one of those colossal jewels of our ancestors’ time: a glass orb with a portrait inside, surrounded by a ring of gold. The mystery of the family resemblance took hold of me. My eyes shifted, unconsciously, from Dona Magdalena to Amalia, and from the portrait to Amalia. Dona Magdalena, noting this, abetted me in my investigations with some timely explanations.

It would have been more proper for me to have been awkward, expressing surprise, so as to prompt an explanation. But Dona Magdalena and her daughter Amalia hypnotized me, from the first moment, with their parallel gazes. Dona Magdalena was a woman of sixty; so she passed on to her daughter the bother of initiating me. Amalia conversed with me; Dona Magdalena watched me; I was completely exposed to the whims of chance.

It occurred to the mother — this was de rigeur — to remind us that it was already time for dinner. In the dining room the conversation became more general and topical. I ended by convincing myself that these ladies had wanted nothing more than to invite me to dine, and at the second glass of Chablis I felt myself overflow in the perfect egoism of a body charged with generous spirits. I conversed, I laughed and displayed all my ingenuity, inwardly trying to play down the strangeness of my situation. Up to that time the ladies had been making an effort to seem nice to me; from then on I felt I was striving to make myself agreeable to them.

The reverent aspect of Amalia’s face migrated, at moments, to her mother’s face. The entirely physiognomic look of satisfaction on Dona Magdalena’s face descended, at times, over her daughter’s face. It seemed that these two attitudes floated in the ambience, shifting from one face to the other.

I never could have anticipated the pleasures of this conversation. Although there were vague hints at I don’t know what evocations of Sudermann, with frequent recourse to the difficult terrain of domestic responsibilities and — as was natural with women of strong spirit — sudden flashes of Ibsen, I was enjoying myself as much as if I were visiting the home of some widowed aunt, in company with some friend of my early childhood, now becoming an old maid.

At first, the conversation concerned itself entirely with commerical matters, economics, in which the two women seemed to take pleasure. There is no better subject than this when one are invited to the table as an outsider in an unfamiliar house.

Later, things took on a different aspect. Everything we said seemed to fly away, like petitions dispatched into the distance. Everything moved toward an end that I could not foresee. In Amalia’s face there appeared, at last, a pointed, disturbed smile. She began visibly struggling against some inner temptation. Her mouth trembled, at times, so anxiously did she speak, and she ended her every phrase with a sigh. Her eyes widened suddenly, fixed with an expression of fright or abandon on the wall just over my shoulders, so that more than once, rattled, I turned my head to look myself. But Amalia did not seem aware of the alarm she caused me. She went on with her smiles, her frights and her sighs, while I shuddered every time she looked over my head.

Finally, between Amalia and Dona Magdalena, I was caught in a true colloquy of sighs. I was already getting tired of them. Near the center of the table, and, by the way, so low that it was a constant inconvenience, hung the lamp with two lights in it. And upon the walls it projected the faded shadows of the two women, in such distorted shapes that it was not possible to trace the correspondance between shadows and persons. A heavy depression invaded me, and a spirit of tedium was taking hold. Was that what drew from me this unexpected invitation:

– Let’s go into the garden.

The prospect of novelty revived my spirits. I was conducted across a patio whose cleanliness and sobriety put me in mind of a hospital. In the obscurity of the night I could make out a little garden plot, small and artificial, like those in cemeteries.

We sat beneath the arbor. The ladies began telling me the names of flowers that I could not see, relishing the cruel delight of quizzing me later about what they had told me. Ill-equipped to deal with such eccentric experiences as this, my imagination would not stop racing. They only permitted me to listen and gave me barely time enough to answer. The ladies were smiling (I guessed) and fully aware of the state I was in. I was beginning to confuse their words with my fantasy. Their botanical explanations, as I remember them now, seem as freakish as something out of a delirium: I believe I heard them telling me about flowers that bite and about flowers that kiss; of stems that uproot themselves and climb your body, like serpents, up to the throat.

The darkness, the boredom, the dinner, the Chablis, the mysterious conversation about flowers that I couldn’t see (and which I don’t believe they really had in that stunted garden), all conspired together to lull me to sleep; and so I fell asleep on the bench, beneath the vine.

– The poor captain! — I heard when I opened my eyes –. Full of illusions, going off to Europe. The light was taken from him.

Around me the same darkness still reigned. A warm breeze shook the arbor. Dona Magdalena and Amalia were still conversing with me, resigned to overlook my silence. It seemed to me that they had exchanged seats during my brief dream; that was how it seemed to me …

– He was a captain of artillery — Amalia told me –; young and handsome as they come.

Her voice trembled.

And at that moment, something happened that would have seemed natural to me under other circumstances, but which just then startled me and made my heart leap into my mouth. The ladies, until then, had only been perceptible to me by the murmur of their conversation and by their physical presence. At that instant someone in the house opened a window, and without warning the light fell on the faces of the women. And — oh heaven! — I saw them light up suddenly, automatically, suspended in the air — their black garments indistinguishable in the blackness of the garden — and with that reverent expression welded into their features. They were like the illuminated faces in the paintings of Echave the Elder, like stars, enormous and fantastic.

I jumped to my feet, unable to control myself any longer.

– Wait — Dona Magdalena cried then –; you have not yet heard the worst.

And immediately, speaking to Amalia: — My daughter, continue; this young man cannot go away and leave us now without hearing it all.

– All right — Amalia said –: the captain went to Europe. He bypassed Paris that night, for he was summoned to Berlin with the utmost urgency. But he yearned with all his heart to see Paris. In Germany he had to study something, I don’t know what, having to do with the manufacture of cannons … On the following day, a boiler exploded, and he lost his sight.

I was going crazy. I wanted to ask questions; what questions would you have asked? I wanted to speak; what would you have said? What was happening to me? Why had I been invited here?

The window was closed, and the faces of the women turned invisible again. The voice of the daughter resounded:

– Ay! Then, and only then, was he summoned to Paris. To Paris, that he had wanted with all his heart! Picture him passing beneath the Arc de Triomphe de l’Etoile: a blind man passing beneath the Arc de Triomphe de l’Etoile, guessing at everything around him … But you will tell him about Paris, won’t you? You will describe the Paris he could not see. It would do him so much good!

(“Ah, if he is not missing!” … “It would do him so much good!”)

And then they dragged me to the drawing room, carrying me by the arms like an invalid. My feet were tangled in vines and shoots from the garden; there were leaves in my hair.

– He is frozen here — they said, showing me a portrait. It was a soldier. He wore a helmet, a white cape, silver braid on the sleeves and cufflinks like three trumpet valves. His beautiful eyes, beneath the perfect wings of his eyebrows, held a singular pride. I looked at the ladies: the two of them smiled as if with relief at having completed a mission. I examined the portrait again; I looked at myself in the mirror; I verified the resemblance: I was like a caricature of this portrait. The portrait had an inscription and a signature. The handwriting was the same as the writing on the anonymous invitation I had received that morning.

The portrait fell from my hands, as the two ladies gazed upon me with a comical reverence. A noise sounded in my ears, something like a crystal chandelier shattering against the ground.

And I ran, crossing unknown streets. Rays of light danced before my eyes. The clocks in their towers spied on me, concatenations of light … Oh, heaven! When I reached, panting, the familiar boards of my door, nine sonorous chimes shook the night.

There were leaves in my hair; in my buttonhole, a modest little flower that I had not picked.

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