Foliate Oak October 2016

Fiction

Intimations of Annihilations--No. 10
By Philip Brunetti

1.
Then one day, all of a sudden, I was old.  I didn’t ask for it to happen.  I was looking out the window of a local café and felt a minor collapse inward, into myself.  And then I felt myself as old, even though I was only middle-aged.  But middle-aged was not young—was no longer youth, and was pointing and proceeding daily toward old age.  And suddenly, I was old.  It didn’t really have anything to do with my numerical age.  And it had only a little to do with my outlook.  No, mostly I was old because I felt old in that moment.  I felt myself like my father even, my father with a young woman—the strange aloofness of my father.  The young woman almost always walking away, bewildered.  And the fear and trembling of my father’s face grown old.  He’d grown old and I’d taken a step toward his grave, which might be my grave someday too. 
 
2.
Simon had done it, in his way.  He’d brought the Revelation of John back to life, brought it back to the place it, and we, should’ve been and had unconsciously gotten to.  Simon’s words were bricks—bricks to the face.  They were short and firm and forceful.  Every word or clipped sentence and one’s head was knocked back.  That’s how I remember it at least.  Reading excerpts of it in the boys’ bathroom initially.  It’d been left on the windowsill by Simon.  We’d—some of us—wanted to read what the King had raved about.  But Simon wouldn’t allow anyone to take the manuscript home or to have it copied.  In fact, no one could read it for stretches greater than 5 minutes—or they’d face the King’s wrath, breaking his 5-minute bathroom edict.  “Take five,” he’d say, grudgingly releasing the hall pass.  “And no more than five,” he’d add with a wicked wink.  The controlling of the bowels, Simon called it, and we would laugh.  The King would grin slyly.  Sometimes he would sigh.  He knew of Simon’s defiance and the strange air of suspicion he received from Simon.  The way Simon circumvented him, dismissed him, and disbelieved his praise even.
 
3.
Deep down, we were afraid.  Afraid of Simon and his renewed Revelation and announcement of the 12.  Afraid of the kind of world he was setting up inside of us.  How he had gotten into our heads and would hold our futures hostage until we wrote our own dark parts.  It was ingenious and sacrosanct and troubling.  The kind of thing only 13-year-old boys could believe in.  Maybe some 13-year-old girls even. 
 
Morags was caught most roughly.   And he’d been living in two ways from the time I met him at age 9.  In third grade.  That morning I was wearing a Captain America-Red Skull sweatshirt and had my broken left arm in a sling.  It was October or early November—but cold.  I blew frosty breath in the schoolyard.  I strayed over to my class’s lineup line, waiting for the whistle to blow.  I wasn’t playing anything.  The kids ran around the yard manically like any morning.   No one seemed to notice my injury.  Except for Morags.   Maybe he’d seen weakness or an easy target.  Anyway he approached me and commented on my shirt.  I learned he was a comic-book freak.  I'd seen him around before then.  He was a big kid and he’d fought my neighbor Mick Rouse on occasion.  They’d had several fist fights that I’d witnessed.  At the time, I’d rooted for Mick Rouse to win.  And Rouse usually won, though he was shorter and smaller—but much more savage and vicious.  A fierce hyena child, snarling.  And Rouse was probably one of the 12 too but, being a born artist, wholeheartedly resented it.  He exploded a few neo-Pollock-like affairs on canvas later in life to expiate himself from the mission.  Or maybe to fulfill it.  Anyhow one of those works was especially incredible and, at least for the time of its creation, allowed Rouse to break free.
 
4.
Morags acted like a doomed man even at age 9.  I might have myself.  I’d already been through the ringer, the ferocity of my father’s house.  I’d been tamed by him and I hadn’t been very wild.  I’d been trapped, boxed in, inverted—obliterated almost.  I barely had a spirit left.  I had watchful eyes.  I had a lifelong wound.  I had crap poetry.  None of this was enough to create or recreate a person.  No, I’d been indoctrinated, drilled into with words.  A severe course had been set.
 
Eventually, I’d feel anger.  I wouldn’t merely feel it.  I’d bathe in it—as one bathes in a deep bath.  I’d bathe in the deep bath of hate.  Wallow in it.  It’d keep me filthy.  And let he be filthy still.  It’d keep me lowdown and demeaned.
 
No, I hadn’t stomached him well, John Baptist.  I’d been born to love him, and did, as his son.  But then I’d been born to become him too.  Metaphysically he forced his way inside me, raped my ego while still in its formative stage.  Then left me as scrap.  Over time I suppose I reformed and all the dispersed shards regrouped.  I claimed a kind of identity—but with severs.  With cracks and fissures.  Anyhow, an identity.  And not very long after that, I met Simon. 
          
5.
Metaphysical rape...call me a victim.  But no, please don’t.  The seizing of my ego—the attempted overtaking of it.  Sometimes with stealth but most times with an uproar.  With lots of wall banging and household drama.  “Get your fuckin’ face out of my fuckin’ sight!”  Just the gist of growing up then.
 
Anyway it was years later and I had a manuscript to write.  It’d been deigned or deemed from the beginning.  And now the time had arrived: I was responsible.  After all, Simon Baden was dead, my father was feckless, and Todd Morags was in a state of paralysis.  For years his poetic efforts had excluded him from the testament.  The testament that masqueraded as a revelation.  Still, Morags wrote some of it.  A few dozen or so pages, out of thousands produced.  It would highlight the future, predicting ever-oncoming dooms and tribulations.  It had creatures.  It had blackness and darkness.  It had wit.  It crept upward through states of being.  It exacerbated sensations.   It tricked itself with language like tabs of gum—one went chewing.  It used facts.  It used fictions and myths and labyrinths of language.  It used visions and marijuana words.  It used Greek and Latin alphabets.  It used cheese, Gouda, Blue and Feral Goat.  It had surprises—sluices of justice and feeling.  But it was a bridge that had busted.  As Todd Morags had busted.  As Todd Morags—and all of us—would have to bust to live again.  That was the implication.  It was inside the holy cross and it was inside the Bodhi Tree.  The bare symbology, extrapolated.  The inner-outer way, redeemed.  But mostly something that had to bust and break free.  Like old Romantic Blake’s mind-forged manacles—busted open.
 
6.
The reintroduction of outlaw Jesus.  That was part of the purpose of the new Revelation.  That,—and the things that had come and would come.  The terrible state of the world: the diseases, disasters, and mass deaths.  These fit in too, poetically even.  It all made lyrical if not literal sense.  But Simon’s style transitioned this, as it leapt from lyrical to literal sense.  Fiery truths excised from a thimble of nonsense.  More surreal than the Revelation of John but more real too, somehow.  He’d deadened it.  The Island of Patmos revisited—but caustically.  And Simon calling on the ontological phone, communicating over time and space, surpassing the trite and the mundane.  But the mundane still present and overwhelming too.  And if a man was sipping a glass of water, that man suffered too.  The water was poisoned—and filled with toxins.  A water of revenge then.  A Second Coming water.  Wine becoming water again.  Other reversals of fortune...Todd Morags wrote there too but got lost in it.  Or stymied or spit out.  “Write the next lines.”  That’s what Simon would’ve instructed.  And the next lines would have to be better than Simon’s because they’d been anticipated for more than 30 years.  But never penned.  Never put down in words.  Not by me.  Not at the moment.  But maybe yesterday, today, tomorrow…  
 
7.
John Baptist only believed in the invisible world but he didn’t really know it.  And for that I guess he had to suffer.  We all did, as a family.  I suffered the most because I was the youngest, the most ignorant and innocent.  I didn’t know what he was getting at, searching over and under and around the walls, like he did.  I didn’t love a wall inherently either.  But I wasn’t ready to bust through.  Instead I’d sit in its shadow for years with John Baptist crucified against it.  The wall.  Quasi-crucified against it.  Banging his head there—speaking in half tongues.  Sometimes threatening me.  Sometimes just slouching away.
 
There’d be the ones to come suffer after us but they’d still be me.  The Jesus Girl, the Tree Girl, Simon Baden, Mick Rouse, Morags—Trunky even.  They’d all be me, and not me.  Because I was them, and not them.  In better moments I felt our infusion—all of us as one giant entity of energy working in synchronicity.  A hive of human bees, not any better than that but good enough.  And still these others were significantly apart from me.  They’d insulated themselves in their own egos and I had my ego too.  We were people, persons, individuals.  There was that solemn task—of being alive.  How it was done.  How one went about it.  It seemed that John Baptist had some objection to this.  A severe objection that started in the first person—but then blitzed into my person.  And I’m a toddler still, having to wrap my head around it and trying to understand it.  But I couldn’t understand it.  So instead I’m filled with fear and trepidation.  And I’m never sure what will be my next move—or what’s the right move.  But of course it was a situation without logic and so there were no right moves.  Just your instincts and even these would be turned into burdens, repressions, half-truths.
 
8.
There were a half dozen or so nurses on shift at the Facility.  I couldn’t keep track of their schedules.  They weren’t attuned or regular or steady.  Unusual for such a facility—this improvisation of nurses, this stutter-step approach.  If it meant something its purpose never materialized, not to me, and it remained a pattern unset.
 
In general, I had no public presence at the Facility.  Meaning I almost never interacted with the other habitants.  When inside, I stayed in my private room.  I even ate my meals there.  In the garden or common room, I said hello or nothing at all.  Usually nothing at all.  I was conserving myself.
 
One day Margo Gwidder called the Facility.  She sounded panic-stricken and manic.  I assumed she’d tracked me down because she’d awakened—her time capsule had initiated.  My clue was she was ranting about the Revelation and Simon Baden’s writings.  Anyway I told her to calm down.  I told her not to worry, even if she was one of the 12.  I told her I was gathering my strength.  I was going to take care of it.
 
She didn’t say anything back for a half minute.  Then she said: “I know what you’re talking about.  But why do I know what you’re talking about?”
          
I tried to explain to her about Simon.  About mesmerism and the wild and weird workings of the unconscious mind. 
          
“I’m not really getting this,” she said.  “Even if I’m getting it.”
          
“Don’t worry,” I said.  “I’m making it my problem.  But I appreciate the call.”
          
“It wasn’t exactly my idea,” she said.  “It just…came to me.”
          
We spoke for a few minutes more.  She confessed she had “made love” to the King back then, which we’d all always suspected.  She also admitted she wasn’t 100% sure who I was.  Yes she had called the Facility and yes she had asked to speak to me by name.  But, she wanted to know if somehow she was speaking to Simon Baden.

Philip Brunetti writes innovative fiction and poetry and much of his work has been published in various literary magazines including Word Riot, the2ndhand.com, decomP magazinE, Lungfull! Magazine, and Crack the Spine. Most recently he has just completed the (currently unpublished) antinovel—Newer Testaments, of which this is an excerpt.

* * * 

Kombucha... on Tap!
By Patrick A. Howell

“You are the finest, loveliest, tenderest, and most beautiful person I have ever known- and even that is an understatement”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
 
 
Yes, it was one of the worst storms in recent history. It had been forecast since meteorologist identified it swelling in the Caribbean Sea in October.  I remember one of my neighbors telling me about it and thinking, 'So fucking what? Who pays attention to the weather forecast that far in advance?'  But this storm was worthy- worthy of prophecies.  News reports flashed headlines: 'Wild Weather - El Papi Grande is on a rampage along Pacific Coastline' a byline reads somewhere that El Papi was looking for his baby El Nino.  The comedian in me appreciated that deft touch.  The flash flood warnings we were all given, however, were only moments before La Jolla, Downtown, El Cajon and National City were flooded so severely that California was officially taken off the drought lists.   Floods, snow and sub-50 degree temperatures in Southern California - only two weeks ago, the sun was baking us at 80 degrees in the dead of winter.  I thought we might have a Hawaiian or Trinidadian summer.  From the vantage point of cliffs, surfers looked like a body of sea lions migrating onto San Diego beaches – now the shoreline is a hazard zone, spotless with crashing white water shores and gray coastlines.
 
But after the storm, double rainbows were everywhere galore.  We could look up and all want to grace, fall or fly endlessly into an ocean clear blue sky - clear air renewed us all triumphant for a new year.  People walking around with their smart phones, looking with abandon at the sky above, snapping photos and posting endlessly on Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and Facebook so that what we are dealing with is refracted reality.
 
Now, it feels like the way you would imagine the earth after Noah and the flood - clean, fresh and crispy.  Anyhow, it is a new year and I am happy - happier than in a long while and happy with good reason.
 
My positive impressions are based upon my overall impressions and a review of all my Facebook and Instagram postings- rest, peaceful scenic walks on the beach and in the parks, catch with the dog, catching up with my reading, good quality organic soul food like cooked greens seasoned to perfection, really thoughtful presents and cards- at least everyone I gave a gift to and a Christmas card with some authentic joy... but I think I already said that.   And this, to me anyhow, was worthy of saying I was 'blessed'.  So, blessed holiday season.
 
But then, suddenly, like the denouement of some galactic symphony, the skies cast clouds over the clear blue skies, and the cold air becomes bitter, dank and stark.  I close my eyes, smile and walk though the library doors almost bowing my 6 foot 4 inch frame.  It's a children's library and I feel gangly pulling a seat up to the little kids table with their round tops and red, green, yellow, and orange chairs.
 
So it's just me and this electric vibe filled with promising New Years platitudes, joyous fuchsia, true triumph and zero melancholy.  Well, maybe just a hint of melancholy.   Anxiety keeps creeping into my euphoria but I know better than to give it voice and am determined to have the ultimate affirmative attitude. So I just let go and open up a book by Shel Silverstein, my stepdaughter's favorite author.  When Joy finds me sitting folded on top of myself reading Falling Up, she cracks the most radiant and brilliant smile and I know- I am completely confident that the sun has broken the milieu of those mundane clouds above.  Children shouldn't have such powers but Joy was born to special purpose and children, magical, have always had and exercised these powers.  Adults are dashed dumb and dipshit, made flat by so-called reality, unwise and unhip to the incredible work of these little magical beings.   My wife and I would always marvel and talk about Joy and how she is a special child – how she brought the spiritual world into connection with the material, if even just for moments at a time.  
 
 
 
Today, she looks perfectly cute- ball of psychedelic angel energy in the plaid skirt, white shirt, navy blue cable knit of her girl ' uniform and I ask her, almost without thought  "Do you want to go on a date young lady?"  I put on my trench coat, affix my tie, grab my umbrella and grab Joy by the hand gingerly.  We skip out the school gates.  Shel Silverstein had been saying:
 
“
Birds are flyin' south for the winter.
Here's the Weird - Bird headin' north,
Wings a-flappin', beak a-chatterin,
Cold head bobbin ' back n'forth.
He says, "It's not that I like ice
Or freezin' winds and snowy ground.
It's just sometimes it's kind of nice
To be the only bird in town.
 
"
 
***
 
 
When Joy's mother passed away two Christmas' ago I wasn't sure how to respond.  I loved her truly.  Part of me wanted to lie in the ground with her and eventually travel in the direction ancestors and spirits go.  But Joy remained real – I think intent, focused with purpose and determined to live - and if I loved my wife, I loved her too.  Joy's father didn't even bother coming to the funeral.  So even though Joy was only 7 at the time I basically explained the difference between a sperm donor and father to this little precocious spirit with even larger amber eyes. 
 
"I've always got a father even when my biological doesn't bother" pint sized chimed without the slightest hint of resentment tickling her tone.
 
"That something you wrote Joy?  Take away The Pain?"
 
She laughed, "Noooooooooo!  That's Dr. Shaquille O'Neal!  He dunks the ball with authority but just can’t seem to make a free throw!"
 
And, of course I laughed and we got a meal at Eat 4 Now!  So it's been a tradition for a bit now.  Ever since the accident in 2013.  I found the car redacted to half of its size on the 5 freeway- crushed and smoking- on the way to our home in Del Mar.  What I saw didn’t sit well with me for a long time, still doesn’t – it was as if my spirit had been redacted from it’s body.    I think they call the experience as spiritual “dissonance” – without getting into too much theology, it’s when one’s spiritual world is completely unrelated to reality.  
 
Joy, of course, she would, grabs a coconut and oatmeal cookie almost as large as her head, red deviled cake and wants to order a natural root beer at Eat for Now.  She has wrapped her cable knit sweater on her head like a turban.   To me, in my current state of glee, she looks like a pint sized Carmen Miranda. 
 
The cashier is a young light wave dancer made of cocoa, molasses, coconut oil, brown sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg spices- some vanilla for variance, mahogany and onyx for fiber.  Her face is bursting with tropical fruit- cherries, pineapple and mangoes.  Her core fashioned with gold, maybe copper.  Some silver in the spine- a variety of other gems and stones.
 
She says, I’m not too sure why, lost in thought, ‘Aww, that's so nice…’
 
Ecstatic I smiled a face full of cherries and said, "You too!  There's something lonesome about you too.  Wholesome too though.  I see that a beneath all the fun and sun, you are a gentle soul who is looking for authentic connection.
 
“What?”  She says seemingly confused, “What would you like to drink?  We have beer but also natural Root Beer, Blueberry, Ginger Ale and Kombucha… on tap.”
   
"What's that lady?  Shhheeeeeeeaaaash!  You have Kombucha on tap?  Is it alcohol like beer?"
 
"It's fermented, non-alcohol... sir"
 
Maybe I've seen her eyes before - this lifetime or another but I sense the chemistry is right, alignment too.  Also, I have a tendency to fall in love more often than not.  Dangerous addiction from the Russian gypsy part of my bloodline. 
 
“Kombucha… on Tap!   That's fantastic!”
 
She says again, carefully and slowly, looking me in the eyes this time" it's like beer, fermented, but without the alcohol.  A bubbling beverage of live probiotics.  Yummy for your tummy!"
 
She sounds like a celebrity.  She sounds like some sort of euphoric zany infomercial.   Pretentious, sure, but also, somehow, authentic.
 
There is an awkward silence for a few moments, so I offer, "...I see that a patented black woman side eye comes quite easy to you.   So, I’m wondering if you have several unclaimed lawsuits for copyright infringement that you’re not telling me about.   I see, also… that many men sit outside your door waiting anxiously for her majesty..."  
 
"...Are you a prophet, a clairvoyant or... asylum escapee?" She retorts gleefully, the reflection of me in her eyes.
 
I just smile.  No point in affirming or denying what could or could not be.  But then I say,  "No no No!  I've just been reading people for awhile and I got a.... whiff of your entire vibe, your whole universe inside."  
***
 
Joy and I pick a seat outside by the stone hearth which is lit bright and warm with an intense heat and crystal-like blue stones and she is sulking, has taken the turban off her head and is not interested in her meal, macaroni with green beans, soda or dessert.  She is visibly upset.  Her face though still glows.  The clouds begin to crowd, floating from the ocean, inland.  Hovering over our little beachside city like judgment day.  
 
I know better than to ask but do so anyway.  I see her mother's face in Joy, speaking to me.  "You seemed mad at me pint size.  Did I do something wrong?”
 
“Why were you flirting with that lady at the check out when you are married to my mommy?  Don’t you love us anymore?”   
 
The whole time she is... explaining, I am doodling.  Writing a capsule for this pill- pint size telling a 35 year-old man what to do - and he's fucking listening!
 
She ceases her rant, the smile ever peeled on her gorgeous face, "why are you writing Daddy while I'm talking?"
 
"Nothing baby" I say quietly and gently, "just taking some notes on you while you talk”.
 
She says nothing and grabs the napkin.  After staring at it quixotically for a moment or two, she basically throws it back at me crumpled. 
 
"Yes?"
 
"I can't read it Daddy.  Can you read it to me?  And don't make it up - I know you like to improv– which is another way to say, make things up.  But I want to hear what you wrote, exactly the way you wrote it."
 
"Kay." I say all resigned. Pint sized packs a wallop and never pulls her punches.   She can be all fire and brimstone, scorched earth kind of shit.  I know if I do any of my routine with her, she'll see it in my eyes, hear it in my voice, call me on it and we'll lose our connection.  I'll become a liar dastardly instead of "joker papa smurf" as she likes to call me.  I breath deeply, and read:
 
"Joy is that sweet quality of forgetting and simple being. Joy!  Oh Joy, radiance.   Joy brilliant.  Joy is releasing. Joy is change. Joy is fun! Joy is exercising. Joy is the exercise of dimple bearing... a ton.  Joy is quiet, quieter than the sun. Joy is moreso forgetting than remembering.  Joe flies - free spirits soar. So she is loud too, chile'! Joy is exercising demons.  Joy is a magic of the spirit. Joy is connection. Joy is conscious.  Joy is so, so sweet.  Joy in unconscious all the same. What a treat- Joy is towering but she can also be miniscule, a bedazzling jewel.  Joy is momentary ascension - no need to excuse yourself.  Ha! Joy is raucous laughter with the period of peace.  Joy is the elation of spirit -spirit over mind.  Joy is the transmission of Love Almighty.  Joy is all light energy.  She is energy red, yellow and good. Bursting with color and energy, yes, she is a sweet cousin to depression… and exasperation and desperation. Joy's mother is Brevity.  Her step-father is Humor. Her creator is Love.  She knows something of Hope. - now witness- Joy.   Joy, joy, joy. "
 
Tears are streaming my face.   This was cathartic.   Really must do it again soon – like the next lifetime or, even, never.
 
"That's silly Mr. Man." Joy giggles guff and gruff, not in the least impressed. " It's like that song by Rob Base and DJ EZ Rock" her mother, god bless her eternal soul was a huge hip hop head.  "That’s not improv!  That’s plagiarizing!  Joy and Pain... like sunshine and rain."   Her giggling, this time, intensifies my anger.
 
Why would I cry right?   Joy is a precious morsel of terrorist in the galactic order of things.  But I will say this, in all seriousness - the world seems to me today, to be ethereal, part and parcel, a portion of heavenly cathedral, the spirit world – a cross sectional of effects, vibes, planes and realms.   Perception has everything to do with real effect.  Joy's just a baby - why on God's earth should I take this sweet child seriously?   God bless her.
 
"Joy" I say with sudden authority and sternness, "bus your tray and throw it away in the trash.  Let's go".
 
She does as she is told, comes back and throws her arms gingerly around my neck, "Daddy, I just don't like to see you so sad.  I don’t want you to be mad.  Just glad Papa Smurf Joker.  But I feel The Pain too.  I know The Pain.  You know that, right?"
 
'Mother fucker.' I am thinking, “The Pain is a Mother Fucker.”  I flash a mental image of Al Pacino's Scarface laying waste to an army of Columbian assassins sent to murder him at his Miami mansion for betraying a drug crime lord.  Riddled with bullets but undeterred, animated only by a course spirit and vengeance, Tony Montana spits, "Come on! I take your fucking bullet!  You think you kill me with bullets?   I take your fucking bullets! Go ahead!"
 
"It's ok Daddy.  Don't cry. I miss mommy a bunch too.  Wish she had stayed longer.  She wouldn't want you to cry.  What's done is gone- remember she used to always say that?  She wants us to go on.   I have to go Daddy."   I know. 
 
I'm so sad I called Joy a terrorist in my inner mind, also for all the profanity.  But the regret is short lived.  Ms. Cashier who is now bussing tables gives me her number as Joy is leading me out the door.   Light dancer cashier wrote the number on the back of a card of Eat for Now! It says, “HOPE” and then her cell phone number and email (hope8@yahoo.com) – She whispers in my ear, “You’re so fucking satirical – I loved it!  Call me and let’s see if we can hang.”  The dissonance is no more.  It’s dissipating.  She closes her eyes.   I connect with reality and Joy’s spirit flies off into the heavens effortlessly – I believe because I am connected, even by a smattering, or at least a desire for the future, to Hope.
 
 
Prophesies. Shamen. Lovers. Clairvoyants.  Futurists.  Heavenly bodies.  Good feelings.  Acerbic beginnings.  Shitty endings.  Dissension, the spirit of War.  Fucked up beginnings.   Apocalyptic dissension. Visionaries.  Healers.  Futurists.  All the New Age Dreamers.  Me.  Joy.    Her Mother.   Hope.  Now.
 
I pull out of the street side parking of the ocean-side village.  Palm trees, clear blue skies, winter crisp, and the Pacific Ocean.'  I feel fresh material for my next comedy routines at the Sunset Blvd and Irvine Spectrum Improvs this weekend.  It'll end with the dead-paned line of, "it's all so fucking halarious. Laughing my ass off.   FUCKING  JOKER"  If I do my work well, the audience will be roaring.   Or, I can just drop the mike and disappear into the night.  Ghost.

Patrick A. Howell's early work was published in UC Berkeley’s African American Literary Journal and Daily Cal. His critiques and vision been published with the Quarterly Black Book Review and Vertical Radio. His blogs and essays have been published by MyBrownBaby, The Goodman Project, Opportunist Magazine, XO Jane, jicho.co and equities.com. 

* * * 
The Screaming Man
By Michael Clough
 
That morning the Goon Squad appeared in his doorway.  They told him to strip.  They said it was procedure and he had to live with it.  He left the gray flannel suit on the bed, along with his socks, boxers and shoes.  They marched him naked to Ad Seg, security lights flashing above every clanking door.

They said solitary was for his own safety but there was more to it than that.  He figured that the guards couldn’t bear to be around him knowing what he’d done.  Moving him meant there would be no need for simple human communication, no need to speak to him when they dished out his chow.  It was like feeding a rabid dog, he supposed.  You slam in the tray.  You come back when it’s empty.  You kick the dog and leave it alone to lick its wounds.

You had to wait for permission to enter this corridor and that.  It was a maze of human suffering.  There were kids here who’d done nothing more than burn up on cheap drugs.  By when he got to his cell there were goose-pimples down his arms and legs and he was shivering badly.  He expected he’d get something to wear but there was nothing. 

The cell was grey and damp, with a thin mattress in the corner and a stool that had been bolted to the floor.  There were no shelves for books or anything.  Once they’d gone he lay on the mattress in the fetal position, wrapping his arms around his legs to keep warm.
 
He could only guess at how long he’d been here.  They hadn’t fed him and his stomach ached with hunger.  He supposed this was all part of their plan to forget about him, forget what he’d done.  Don’t feed the dog.  Let it die a slow, agonizing death.  He could holler all he liked about the rules and regulations they’d to abide by, all that wordy legal talk.     
 
At last he heard the distant clanking of doors and then footsteps approaching, voices.  Whoever it was, this con wasn’t coming without a fight.  He could make out a lot of cussing and the sort of deft punches and kicks that the Goon Squad took pride in. 

The screaming began.  It continued for how long he didn’t know.  He fell asleep and then woke back up to it, longing for silence.  Occasionally he heard a thud, as if his neighbor was throwing himself against the walls.

He called out to him but all this did was to make him more frantic.  There was more thudding now, and more screaming.

What was the point?  After all, once you were down here there was no one to hear you, at least no one who had the power to do anything.  And even if there was someone, there was no reason why they should care.  The screaming man was screaming for the sake of it, for his own troubled soul, and there seemed little point in that.

He wanted to communicate this.  He wanted him to know that he was not alone.  He wanted him to know that he too was suffering, only silently.  There was a black lead pipe running between the cells and he decided that he would tap out a tune on it, from an old show he liked to watch.  It was from his childhood, and there was a comfort in hearing it, even in this cold, echoing chamber.   

The screaming stopped but it took a while for his compatriot to tap anything back.  These taps were hard and then soft, tat, TAT, tat, TAT, and he wondered whether it was a code.  Morse.  Perhaps it was that.  The screaming man knew Morse. 

He knew his initials and a few words.

HELLO.

HAPPY.

SAD.

SOS.

He expected an acknowledgement, a new word perhaps or the screaming man’s name, but all he got back was his own sequence.  At least the screaming had stopped.  If he wanted he could get some sleep. 

He closed his eyes and almost at once began dreaming.  He dreamt he was back in the world.  He was on a bench in the park he liked to go to being towered over by three officers; they said they would beat him to a pulp; they said they would dump him in the river.  He told them he wasn’t doing anything, only looking, but they cuffed him anyway.
 
He woke to tapping.  He was parched and he needed to defecate.  There was no toilet, not even a bucket.  He paced for a while, and then he sat on the stool holding his stomach, all the while listening to his neighbor tapping.  There was no rhythm to the tapping, no meaning, and it was right there in his skull, inescapable. 

He slumped on the mattress and again tried sleeping.  He did better.  There were no arresting officers, no parks, only darkness. 

Time had gone by, but how much he didn’t rightly know.  His eyes were heavy and his mouth dry.  The screaming man had gone back to screaming. 

He hammered his fists against the door.  “I have rights, you bastards!  Hey!  I have rights!  I have to have food.  I have to have water.  An’ I need to take a shit.  There’s no place to take a shit in here.  What the fuck.”

Footsteps approached but whoever was there didn’t say anything, and this was the worst punishment of all.

“You can’t keep me down here.  Not when I haven’t done anything.  At least provide me with food and water.   Common decency to do that.  Common humanity.”

At last the guard spoke, “And what would you know about decency, humanity?”
He emptied his bladder in the corner.  He watched the yellow liquid gush around the stool, against the mattress, and it disgusted him.  

He couldn’t help but think of how he’d been a bed wetter.  The psychologist said it could be a cause, standing around miserable in soiled pajamas watching the sheets being changed, an abuse of sorts.  He couldn’t be sure.  He didn’t rightly know.  All of that was in the distant past when he was a kid.

He sat on the stool looking at the wall, imagining it had a window through which he could see things, moonlight streaming through a valley, that kind of thing.  And then it happened.  On the wall the figure of a girl appeared, no older than twelve he guessed, her golden locks flowing down her back and across her bright blue eyes.  He raised his hand to touch her.  He wondered what it would be like to take her into his arms.  He couldn’t decide whether he was awake or dreaming.  His eyes were closed and then they were open.

The stench of his guts rose up around him.  Reaching down he felt a sticky residue on the backs of his calves.  The tune was being tapped out on the pipe, over and over, unbearably loud. 

A while later, the door clanked open and he saw two guards coming towards him.  They shouted and screamed, which he expected – he’d shit himself after all. 

They swore at him, said they were going to teach him a lesson.

He was dragged by his arms along the corridor.  “You’re a filthy bastard,” they yelled.  “A filthy bastard that needs putting down like a rabid dog.”  Later he would wonder about that.  He would wonder whether he’d been frothing at the mouth, thinking of the girl.   A frothing rabid dog, the judge had said to him. 

He made no effort to resist.  What was the point?  It would only make it worse.  He took their punches without saying anything. 

They’d brought him to a shower room that stank to high heaven of shit, vomit and death. 

“One minute,” he was told.  “You got one minute.”

“I’ve not been charged,” he said.  “You can’t keep me down here if you don’t put a charge on me.”

“You’ll be charged, you stinking bastard.  You just get in there and keep the fuck quiet.”
Afterwards he paced the cell.  He did press-ups, push-ups and sit-ups.  He tapped the tune on the pipe and when there was no reply he shouted at the wall. 

In all likelihood his neighbor couldn’t hear him, or he was choosing to ignore him.  Perhaps his neighbor was dead; perhaps he had likewise shat himself and the guards had taken him to that shower room and strangled him.  It would account for the smell.

In his mind he wrote a letter to the governor.  It began, “For certain my rights as a prisoner have been violated.”  But it got no further.  His mind was blank.

Anyway nothing could be done about that, not for the moment.  He had to wait it out.  Still, he determined that on leaving Ad Seg he’d find someone who knew something of the law, someone who didn’t know what he was in for.  He would not let them get the better of him.

He had erred.  He had to be punished.  But this was a step too far.  They’d put him in here for his own safety, after all, and because they couldn’t bear to look at him.  He was not up on a charge.

He sat next to the pipe clanking out the tune.

Later a guard unlocked the door.  He wanted to know what he was doing trying to damage state property.  “Those pipes are old and brittle and they could easily break.  The cell will be flooded then and you’d have to pay for repairs.”

“I was communicating.  Speaking to my fellow man.”

“Ain’t no one around, baby.”

The guard towered over him and slapped him hard eight or nine times. There was nothing he could do.  He could only curse the bastard and take it. 

Once he’d left he could barely move.  His stomach was wet and there was wetness on the floor.  At first he thought it was blood.  It took him a moment to realize he’d urinated. 

A tray was pushed through the slit; it had on it dry bread and a cup of water.  He crawled towards it.  He gulped down the water.  He devoured the bread.  And then he slept and dreamt she was bending over him, kissing him.  It wasn’t right but he couldn’t help his dreams.

He woke to see a sliver of light coming from the corridor.  The screaming was back.  He cursed the screaming man; he wished death upon him.  He didn’t care that the Goon Squad was in there with the bastard, kicking and punching him. 

It would be his turn next, he knew that.  He had to prepare for the worst.
 
They were in their vests, shields and masks, although there was no need for that, not with three against one.  One of them held a bone towards him, which he accused him of making.  There was no point in disputing this.  There was no point in disputing anything.  He kicked out with his remaining strength but there was not much too it.  If anything it only made it worse.   
He felt the cold steel of the bone against his throat. 

No one said anything.

Once they’d gone he tried standing but fell uselessly back on the mattress.
He didn’t know where or when.  He had to constantly readjust to keep anything in focus.  A tray had been posted.  He drank the water but left the bread.

He sensed that someone was in there with him, and the cell seemed much brighter than before.  

“Your room stinks to high heaven.”

“It’s not my room.  It’s my cell.”

“Not a hotel.  You think this is a hotel or something, well it’s not.”

“Some hotel.   Bit of bread and water.  All I’ve had in I don’t know how many days.”

“That’s no good.  That’s no good at all.  You’ve got to eat.  Three square meals a day is what you need.  Three square meals.  That way you become fit and strong, you become a man.  And you listen.... if ever I catch you doing that again, I’ll do more than take my belt to you.  I’ll kill you with my own bare hands.  We’re lucky they didn’t involve the authorities.”

And with that his father was gone. 
​
He could hear the screaming again, loud and persistent.  He moved towards the pipe and tapped out his tune.  There was no reply and he knew then that the screaming man was gone.

Mike Clough pays his bills by teaching English.  He has published stories in literary magazines in North America and Europe, as well as contributing articles to a national newspaper.  He has also taught in British prisons. 

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The Leaf Moths
By Elizabeth Genovise

The husband and the wife are twenty-four, newly wed and freshly ensconced in a rented house in Clinton, Tennessee. The mountains curve around the house from behind like two great arms, and the road that winds its way from the main thoroughfare to their home looks like a glimmering river when the moon is out.

It is May, and the wife, finished with the school year, delights in waiting for her husband to come home from the highway crew. She stands on their front porch with its five concrete steps and moves her hand along the warm brick of the wall where they have arranged a family of miniature cacti, each one wearing a pink or coral blossom like a showy little hat.

“Quite a fashion statement, that,” the wife whispers, bending low over one of them. She could kiss it, prickles and all. She is in that stage of love when all things have the power to call up both joy and sympathy; earlier, checking the mail and finding a small brown envelope from the postman with a note asking for twenty cents to cover postage due please for a package a cousin had sent, she had a wild impulse to leave the postman a big tip along with the two dimes, or maybe a card, thanking him for his faithful service. The envelope, so quaint in this time of phones and flickering screens, seemed to need her protection.

On a wicker table purchased at Goodwill is a stack of books from the used bookstore. The wife has not opened any of them, as it is their policy to wait for each other when they open books. They have a strange luck when it comes to used books; frequently they unearth mementos in the old pages, everything from plane tickets to letters to bank notes. They cherish these odds and ends, talk about the people who at one time possessed them. Once, finding a note tucked in a book that stated, Margot and Dean: We hope this sparks the renaissance you’ve been waiting for, they wound up talking long past midnight on this porch, plotting out their future, one in which renaissances always came, always revived what the years threatened to subdue. At twenty-four, they claimed to know all about it, love’s depreciation. They said it to each other: I know what can happen.

Warming in the kitchen now is a carefully-gathered dinner, meatloaf and baby carrots and sweet potato fries the wife has prepared while dancing to music blaring from a 1940’s radio they found in an antique store. She likes to see her husband eat enormous quantities of food after his long day. She likes his posture as he eats, and the way he takes off his cap and moves one hand over his eyes first as though to wipe from his mind the parts of his day he doesn’t want to bring to their table. He is a good man, a descendant of ancient kings, she sometimes thinks. Quietly noble, even plastered in grime.  

Her husband’s battered truck is now visible, coming around the bend where a stream meanders beneath the road. The truck rumbles its way across the planks of the old bridge, making the boards murmur coming for you, coming for you. A storm is gathering in the distance, behind the truck—bruised clouds huddling together as though seeking safety in numbers. The wife can smell rain. She turns swiftly to press her nose to the mesh of the screen door, which always wears the scent of wet pennies when the air is damp.

The husband snaps off the radio in his truck as he pulls into the gravel drive. He’s been listening to two people talk passionately about the disappearance of bees from bee farms across the Southeast, and it troubles him enough that he’s been talking back at the radio for ten miles: “Where are you, bees? What’s happened to you?” He has a memory of his father stroking the furry back of a bee and telling him, “They’ll surprise you, with this patience.” His father has been gone a year—went into a coma after a stroke and didn’t come out—and this morning, penciling out directions to a worksite on the back of a gas receipt, the husband saw that over the years his handwriting had become a perfect match for his father’s, down to the last letter. He wanted to tell his wife about it but she was so sensitive, so easily moved to tears, that he knew he couldn’t.

Just last night they got to talking about childhood toys and obsessions, and he told her about a careworn GI Joe figure he’d had, a plastic man whose arms and legs had repeatedly fallen off and been tied back on with rubber bands and string. “I always got him working again,” he told his wife, whose eyes were large and wet. He, too, caught himself blinking fast when she spoke of a troll doll she’d gotten at a piano recital, when her teacher was handing out prizes after all the performances were done.

“Nobody wanted her prizes,” his wife said. “That poor lady had no idea what kids liked. Everything was so strange.” She’d made a point of choosing the ugly thing and had kept it in her hands for the duration of the party so that her old teacher would see.
His wife is waiting on the top step of the porch, wearing a fluttery white blouse. When he climbs out of his truck, she moves quickly toward him, arms open. He tries to warn her about the dust and debris on his clothes but she wraps herself in his limbs in that way she has, like a gift wiggling its way into the paper and the bow. He smells vanilla in her hair. “Shower with me?” he mumbles into the sweetness.

“Oh, yes.”

“Any headaches today?” Over her head, he scans the porch rail for the damp cloth he sometimes finds draped there when she’s been in pain.

“I finally had a day without one.”

“Good. Good.”

They start up the steps together, awkwardly because he is so much taller than she is, her hips so much wider than his. One day soon, he thinks, they will have children. Children who will look like them and like the parents they have lost. Those children will plant jelly beans in the garden in hopes of growing candy flowers and they will scribble maps to hidden treasure in the mountain laurel. They will hide in closets and under beds, falling asleep there until the husband or the wife taps them on the shoulder to awaken them.

“Stop,” his wife says suddenly, grabbing his forearm.

“What?”

She motions him to crouch down with her on the steps. She points; motionless on the concrete is what at first looks like a stray autumn leaf, palest brown, veined and delicate, a ghost of its once-vibrant self. But when the husband leans forward, he sees that it is actually a moth. The creature’s wings are outspread but utterly still. He can see its rounded body and head, its fragile antennae.

“Is she dead?” his wife asks, turning her wide eyes on him.

“I don’t know.”

With exquisite gentleness his wife takes one wing between finger and thumb. She lifts. The creature does not move.

“She’s fighting me,” his wife says in surprise. The moth shakes her off, hopping to the left and then taking sudden flight. The husband watches it move on the wind until it vanishes into the woods behind the house.

“She’s okay,” his wife breathes.

“She’s okay.”

They go inside together, arm in arm. “I wonder who they are, where they go,” his wife says.

“The leaf moths.”

“You mean, what they are,” the husband teases as they begin to undress each other.

“I mean who.”

He is forty-four now, married to another woman, hiking in the Smoky Mountains with their eight-year-old son. The two of them kneel together in the shallow waters of a trailside stream. It is May and the river stones glitter blue, rose, and gold beneath the tiny rapids. Something catches the man’s eye. It is a lizard, under the water, camouflaged among the stones. The man thinks he can see its tiny pulse, or perhaps it is only the current, bobbing with the sunbeams over the lizard’s silken skin. The boy follows his father’s intent gaze. His hand shoots out to grab the creature—a child’s instinct—but the man seizes his wrist with such force that the boy lets out a little cry.
​
“Don’t,” the man says. “Leave it be.” He doesn’t want to know if it is dead. And yet he can’t bear to see it dart away, out of sight.

Elizabeth Genovise is a 2016 O. Henry Prize recipient and has published two collections of short stories- A Different Harbor and Where There Are Two or More. Her fiction has also been published or is forthcoming in Natural Bridge, Cimarron Review, Southern Indiana Review, One Throne, and many other journals.

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