Posted on: April 10th, 2011 White Snake
By Kyle Hemmings
Upon my travels through Asia, I stumbled upon her—White Snake—whose other name was Ahi, who earned a livelihood by fascinating tourists. Her arms and legs were long and elastic, capable of wrapping around and mercilessly constricting. Her body was scaly, but she had the hollow-eyed face of a woman of human misfortune. Along with human teeth, she had erector fangs.
I paid her owner a moderate sum of money, as I was a promoter of freak and magic shows. In another life, I preformed over a hundred botched abortions upon women too poor, either morally or financially, to afford a new life. I was and will always be a quack of some kind.
On the voyage back to England, Ahi made few if any recognizable human sounds. But what struck odd was that she duly regurgitated most of the food served by the steamship’s foul-mouthed cook. An idea struck me. I paid several of the cabin boys to go below and see if they could fetch some rats and mice. They did, and Ahi swallowed each one whole. The secret to winning over a cold-blooded woman, as my father once told me, was through fine dining.
As an integral part of our traveling show throughout Europe—The Wicked Alice Wonderama—Ahi became a popular attraction, amazing people from all walks of life. Then, over the course of months, I found myself envious of Ahi, her ability to take the spotlight away from me, her trainer and master. A strange attitude developed among her female admirers. They treated her as if she were some sort of goddess trapped in a freak show. Soon I was besieged by hate mail and angry cries—Free Our Sister! She Has Other Lives to Live!
Hating Ahi, and perhaps myself more, I entered her cage one evening. Her dark unblinking eyes met mine as if we were both crippled lovers. I drew a sword and began to hack away at her legs and arms, as if each a childhood memory of being bullied, tormented. But each part grew back again, and then for the first time—I heard her voice. Please Master, I love you!
I ran from the cage.
I gave up on show business and returned to my old flat in London’s East End. With the savings accrued from White Snake’s act, I spent money recklessly, on women of the night, offering them extra gratuities for biting into my flesh.
And during this time, I obsessed over Ahi, as if I had swallowed her venom.
One night, alone in my room, a woman’s head burst through the door, then the freakishly long arms and legs. She stood before me and said: Why did you leave me, my love?
With her immense jaws she swallowed me whole. In her body, in that constricting tunnel, I became lodged in a many jeweled chamber where I saw only reflections of myself—bleary-eyed, bulbous nose, hooked lower lip.
A fitting punishment-I would keep my reflections eternal company. So many of me.
Posted on: March 27th, 2011 The Break
By Amy McLane
The desert sun blazed over my head as I bartered in the market. That was an hour ago. Now Fog was settling into the nooks of the city as I scurried along. I broke into a run, clutching the gyrebreaker to my chest. The Reset was coming.
The gyrebreaker cost me everything I had; the sage dust, the zombie mice, the transit pass. Although I’d loved the way my mice would swarm a bruiser or debt man, it was the transit pass I was regretting the most. I could have been whizzing along right now in the safety of the subway, protected in the anonymity of the dark. Now it looked like my bid to break free from this place was going to cost me my life instead.
“Hey walla!”
I put on the brakes. A gasham poked her crowned head out of a basement window. She waved at me, bracelets jangling on her wrists.
“Got room. You can pay?”
“Yeah darling,” I lied. Fog was settling on my head and shoulders, stinging me through my robe. I started to bleed.
“Slide in.”
I did. Nearly knocked her over, tiny thing that she was.
“Panc toya,” I said, as she locked the window shut, “Who else you sheltering here?”
“Couple other gashams. Juju. A Cop. And you, walla. Where’s your shiny?”
I caught her gold-covered wrist. Her eyes narrowed, her painted lips thinning to a fubuddy sneer. You don’t put hands on a gasham unless you’ve got good cause. This one looked like she could blow my brains out my nose in an eyewink.
“Where’s the Cop?” I whispered.
“Upstairs.”
I showed her the gyrebreaker. Her eyes widened.
“What else you got?” she asked, not taking her eyes off it.
“Nada. But I’ll pay you, I promise.”
“Shilshat. You’re jumping ship.”
“I won’t, not till-”
She grabbed me by the throat with her mind. “Show me your face.”
I pushed back my hood.
“Pretty. Cop’ll love you.”
“Don’t,” I choked.
The grinding howl of Reset began. The gasham let me go as the tremors knocked us both off our feet. Her crown slid off her head and rolled into a dusty corner. Without it she was young. Maybe even young enough to run.
“Come with me,” I said. “We can jump now.”
“I’m a gasham,” she said flat, “I’ve got power, money, protection. Why would I want to give that up?”
“You want to live your whole life in a closed loop? Singing birdie in a cage?”
She looked away.
I held my breath. Reached close. Touched her shining hair.
“Gasham, your Juju’s loose!” The Cop ran down the stairs. He saw us sprawled on the floor, the gyrebreaker in my hand, and drew his Ware.
“Put. The breaker. Down.”
I looked at the gasham. Fear was in her eyes, fear and something more. She took my other hand, the one that had dared.
“Do it.”
“You heard her, walla.”
I did. My thumb hovered over the gyrebreaker’s switch.
“What’s your name?” I asked her.
“Ashram Lily.”
“Panc toya, Lily,” I said, and threw the switch.
Posted on: March 13th, 2011 MOD
by Shelley Ontis
I talked about having the top of my ear pierced and he decided he wanted one, a little diamond to glint at him in the mirror. He’s shy, so I was surprised and told him he’d look sexy. I chickened out, hadn’t been that serious to start with. I got infected the first time, I said. And I did, but I was nine and not gung-ho for hygiene.
I reminded him to turn it, but I didn’t need to. He spun it constantly, his eyes lighting up at the little burn. He smiled and walked taller when people noticed and admired it. Within a year he had six holes in each side. He went from studs to hoops, then gauges until he could hook a finger into each lobe.
He suggested a tattoo. I cringed while a man wearing sunglasses etched the outline of a tiger into his back. He liked the sting, the numbness then the new burn once the flesh got used to the invasion. Hurts so good, he said, laughing. I rubbed the shoulder where I’d thought about getting a daisy. The way he smiled as the needle tore through his skin, I knew I didn’t want it.
Serpents, a lion, skulls and thorny flowers joined the tiger. A zombie covered his heart, gruesome beasts protected his belly, tribal designs filled in the fleshy spaces between. Sometimes I stared at his face, touched it to remember his skin. Gauges stretched the piercings in his nose, hoops caged his lips and the ridge of his eyebrows that I used to rub when the headaches came.
I traced my finger from forehead to hip, then down his leg, following a single black line that ran from one hideous image to another. I kissed the tops of his toes, his groin, the palms of his hands, where I could still see him hidden beneath ink and metal. He mused about a barbell in his tongue, but he couldn’t stand the thought. Not his tongue.
I begged him when he showed me pictures of a man’s penis, split in two, curled in on itself, said I couldn’t bear it, how could he think it? So he pierced it, decorated it with rings and inky scales in green and black. I loved the soles of his feet best then for their pale, pink honesty.
Some gawked, some showed him their tattoos and holes like gaping wounds that gave me nightmares. Most stayed clear, crossed the street, tried not to stare. He stopped smiling, wore long sleeves, looked down at his feet, repeatedly licked his black lips with his unscarred tongue.
He wanted a foreskin since I couldn’t bear him splitting himself. I suggested a tongue piercing instead, but he shuddered, said he couldn’t. He stretched and clamped and asked me did I think it was working, and I would say yes, yes, it’s almost covered now. He didn’t stop, but stretched and pulled and clamped and asked does it reach? He’d pull the skin to his sides, covering each hip and I’d said it’s close.
I loved the new flesh, stretched and pink, solid and smooth and whole. He pulled and tugged and trained it until it covered his hips, his legs. He stretched it out beneath him and stepped inside, pulled it up like a cocoon, forced himself in so that only his head peeked out. How does it look now he would ask and I would say you’re almost there.
I woke one day, him next to me with only a small circle of his head showing obscenely out the top, the part he’d shaved and covered in black roses with blood dripping off the petals like dew. By that evening, the hole was almost closed.
More, more came muffled from inside the sack of flesh. His tongue appeared through the slit, tensed and straight. I cried as I kissed the pink, perfect tip of it, then fetched the hole punch, a needle and thread.
Posted on: February 27th, 2011 Dawn
by Cezarija Abartis
Tithonus told me he was the best speller in his academy at age ten. He could spell “irony” and “cicada.” As a child, I was able to spell “hypotenuse,” “dementia,” “metamorphosis”; I would have out-spelled him. When we met he was as handsome as the sun. He wore a gossamer mantle over his broad shoulders, so that he seemed to have angelic wings. He was a Trojan prince, accustomed to command. His eyes radiated humor and confidence. I’ve always had a weakness for a good joke. This time the joke was on me.
“What do the gods want with mortals?” I asked. “Immortal porpoises,” he answered and clapped his hands in childish glee.
“Upsy-daisy,” he said and joined his hands into a step so I could climb onto my morning horse.
My thoughts of rigorous daylight melted.
When I was little, there were mice in my parents’ palace. Cats too. Mother told me a parable (she was afflicted with depression, which I am not). She explained that the mouse is an omnivore, and scurries out on its tiny feet to scavenge the rotten food left behind by other animals; no doubt it wishes it were a cat and had fresh food in its bowl when it wanted. The cat, in turn, wishes it could open the larder and choose the food itself. The human wishes he were a god. I asked Mother what the gods wish. She looked at me with her shining eyes and said, “To die.”
This is not a good story for a child. Thank the gods that I am a cheerful being not usually subject to melancholy. I was angry with Mother about her not giving me a beautiful white horse. I stamped my foot on a bug and heard it crunch beneath my sandal. Mother said I was heartless.
My darling Tithonus was angelic, if a little dopey. He told me to request eternal life for him, so he could be my immortal equal. “We can stroll around Mount Olympus forever. I’ll be by your side.”
The Council met to consider his request. They were reluctant; I begged for the potion, citing the precedents of Helen and Hercules, humans given immortality; the Council members exchanged glances, winked , smiled, and granted our request; I brought him the potion and he drank it. He took a knife and slashed his forearm. (That’s how much my beloved trusted me!) Golden ichor seeped out, and his skin healed over as if it were liquid. He was transformed into an Immortal.
We traveled hand-in-hand over Italy and Greece and Asia Minor. We did this slowly so our eyes could take in everything. We saw beautiful temples built to the gods, bridges that were engineering marvels, and old people dying with boils and scabs, coughing blood. “Too bad about mortals,” I said.
“I was mortal once,” he said, with great pity.
We saw verdant gardens and dust-gray fields beset with drought; we saw ships sailing to explore new lands and armies amassed to invade countries. Sad, but that was not my lookout.
My darling and I were happy, eating ambrosia, drinking nectar, dancing to the music of the locals. He told me he once wanted to be a powerful warrior, but that he abandoned that dream when he met me. I told him that I had similar ambitions, but now I was content to walk by his side. Unlike the other Immortals, we did not want many children to intrude on our happiness, complete as it was. He was my alter ego, my perfect self. Oh, the light we made! One morning, I even forgot my responsibilities and stayed in bed, until I was awakened by the din outside asking for the day. I stretched and turned on my smooth, silk sheets until he nudged me toward my light duties.
And then my darling grew tired, coughed, slumped; moles and boils erupted on his fair skin. He became thin and frail, wheezed and crept on the floor, unable to stand upright. He would not die because he was immortal, but because we had not thought to ask for eternal youth, he got eternal age. After a century, his mind crumbled. He could still spell, but only simple words–”tired,” “old,” “sad.” There’s no outwitting the powers. I gave him another potion, and he is now an insect in this jar, droning and shrilling.
I have gained a heart. I do not like that.
Posted on: February 13th, 2011 The Excision
by Nicole M. Taylor
Sheila considered it an unexpected stroke of good luck. She had little reason, after all, to think that anyone would ever take an interest in her heart again.
“How ridiculous,” the magician told her, in response to this, “they aren’t exactly going begging, you know.” He said he was constantly amazed at how incompletely people understood the value of things. “Do you know what some would pay for baby teeth? And what to people do with them? Shut them up in drawers. Put them in scrapbooks!”
The magician worked at the Shop n’ Go in the bakery department, but that was just temporary. That’s where they met, in the bakery department. Sheila was staring into the plastic donut case, attempting to decide between an apple cruller and a lemon custard. She was clutching her shopping basket in her hands and her fingers were white and red from holding on so tightly and she realized that this was a terrible thing she was feeling. This awful urgency, as though some part of her world would fall away if she made the wrong choice.
“You look like a woman in need of some help,” the magician had said.
The operation was a simple one, as Sheila understood it. It was performed in his apartment (which was over the Save n’ Go) and she had to lie down in his bathtub, to ease clean-up afterwards. It was a little tight, her legs were smushed up into an inverted V in front of her. She had to unbutton her shirt, but the magician told her she could keep her bra on.
“Will it hurt?” she asked him as he drew on her chest with a black Sharpie. Little arrows and dashes, like a football play.
“Doesn’t it hurt now?” he said
There was no need for anesthesia. Sheila felt quite calm and clear headed and she watched the magician as he washed his hands, scrubbing carefully underneath his fingernails with a soft white scrub-brush.
“What was his name?” the magician asked as he knelt down beside her.
“Jackson,” Sheila answered.
It felt like going to the dentist. Sheila could feel pressure and industry moving through the bones and skin of her, but it was deadened. A thing she considered, rather than felt.
“It’s a pretty good heart,” the magician pronounced, holding it aloft. Little red droppets fell from it and pattered onto Sheila’s shirt. Distantly, she was annoyed. It was a white shirt. Those stains would not come out. “Look,” the magician said.
The heart was bigger than she had expected, and darker as well. Almost purple, rather than red. She could see the heavy black estuaries of veins that moved through it.
“It flutters,” the magician smiled as though he had never been so delighted by a thing.
“Yes,” Sheila said, “I remember that.”
The heart was slightly damaged. There was an aching fissure in one ventricle. The magician told her that it was slowly expanding and, eventually, her heart would have separated into its component parts, connected only by the toughest, most determined strands of tissue.
“But there are lots of people who’d pay for flaws like that,” the magician explained. “It’s like distressed jeans.”
Sheila wiped the blood off her chest with a ragged washcloth, but left the marker directions. She buttoned up her shirt and stared into the mirror to see how obvious her bloodstains were. They looked like polka dots.
The magician put the heart into a plastic bowl with a snap-on lid. He’d written something unreadable on one side with the Sharpie. He set it down in the refrigerator, in the crisper, which was otherwise empty.
The magician escorted her to the door. “How do you feel?”
Sheila thought about this for a moment. She looked down at her still, hollow chest and remembered a time when Jackson rested his head there. For the first time in so very long, she did not feel an immediate electric-shock spike of pain.
“A little cold,” she said. The magician nodded. He had told her that that was common. Just as well, Sheila liked sweaters anyway.
On the way home, she stopped by the market and bought an apple cruller. She ate it all as she walked and licked the gritty sugar from her fingers and palms in the cold sunshine.
Posted on: January 30th, 2011 Thin
By Sara Kate Ellis
Here’s how bad the epidemic was. Nobody noticed.
I show up at the ward and no one even looks at me. I find my locker, the utility closet with the mop and the non-flammable solvents and go about swabbing down the corridors. I have to do this three, four times a day because the spread rate’s high. I don’t care. I get overtime.
I’ve been a cleaner for ten years, and I like the smell of the chemicals. They remind me of the lot behind my mother’s house where there were still a few pines left. I’d go there and sit just out of sight of the kitchen window, and smoke one of the Kools I’d stolen from her purse. And if I closed my eyes, I could sometimes imagine there wasn’t a big ass freeway to our left.
When she got sick, we had to leave. Mom was one of the first cases, but they didn’t know that then and her insurance wouldn’t cover what they said was a clear case of inhalant abuse. She couldn’t think straight anymore, couldn’t pay the property taxes against her medical bills, and by then there’d been lost jobs and court dates. The bag the police used as evidence was one she’d used to pack my lunch. It still smelled of banana peels, but they told me thinner is sweet like that.
Judge sent Mom to a state rehabilitation center and me to a foster home. Said it was temporary, until she could get better.
First time I visited her, she started smacking herself across the face.
“I’m seeing lights, Harry,” she said. “They’re so pretty. Buzzing around my head like goddamned bees!”
The orderlies were on her then, had her arms pinned behind her back as they led her back down the hall.
My foster father Bill had a mail order business. He put us to work stuffing packets and licking stamps. My new sister made me do it, said each stamp was five calories, and an envelope was ten. But I liked the taste, sweet and fresh like a forest.
Then the cases started piling up. I remember finding a copy of Time on Bill’s desk and putting its slick, shiny cover under my nose. The remains of a burnt out trailer and the photos of three dead kids stared back at me. “Plains Inhalant Epidemic,” it read. “The Thinning of Rural America.”
They didn’t ask why the crime rate hadn’t risen. Didn’t ask why patients continued to deteriorate after they’d been locked up for months, or why it was spreading in other countries. They did make up some bogey substance with a few bogus names: Wiper, fuzz, snifter – that last one was good.
When I saw Mom about five years ago, her hair was white and thin, just a few taut strands barely covering her scalp. Hospices and care centers were overrun by then, and they waived half of her bill just to get me to sign. I bent down and kissed her before they pulled the plug. She already smelled like formaldehyde.
Then I went out to the truck, pressed a gas-soaked rag over my face and inhaled as hard as I could. I saw them that night for the very first time. Such cold, clean light. They floated around me, not seeing, but I could see them.
When you enter a hospital these days, you don’t so much smell the chemicals as the patients. They secrete it through their skin, their eyes. It coats their tongues until they can’t eat anymore. The ones who can afford it get a procedure to deaden their taste buds. They eat runny porridge, crisp salads, anything with texture.
Took them fifteen years to figure out it was a microbe. Fifteen years of paranoiac crackdowns, incarcerating entire families, beating down on people already so beaten up, they started sniffing on their own.
They’re still alive.
“You can fake ‘em!” a guy once told me. We were out behind a paint store, spraying streaks of purple into a brown paper bag.
“That’s just your missing brain cells talking,” I said.
The alarm sounds in the ward, and I smile as a few panicked docs rush past. Happens all the time. Then I close my eyes and inhale the scent of fresh pine, remembering the feel of their needles in my fingers. So soft, and thin.
by Ben Godby
“I’ll take you from Brazil to North Africa,” the man said, and something made me inclined to believe him. And it was a tough sell, mind you, because I live in Cape May. But he spoke like an Islander and he had skin like a Congolese, and though I was born economically distrustful of people looking like that, I’ve been inclined to believe them in mystical matters–ever since I saw Live and Let Die with Roger Moore.
Baron Samedi, am I right?
So I said sure, and sure enough, the mouth of the Amazon receded behind us as the old man shoved us off with his long wooden pole. (Do you call it a punt, or is that the ship? Because it wasn’t a punt; he was piloting a raft, did I mention?) Across the burgeoning swells of the Atlantic, we shook and we quailed; but I didn’t mind the jaded turbulence of the seas. Just so long as my pilot didn’t hand me a midget’s top hat and some bloody chicken feathers, I’d follow him from the ends of the Earth to the coasts of Venus and Mars.
He paddled with that stick, and I tell you, I never imagined the things you’d see crossing from Brazil to North Africa. On a Risk board, it all looks pretty bland: basically just a bunch of dots and dashes, y’know? But there were dolphins and whales, and gulls big as my torso–they must have roosted on whitecaps–and I suspect there were other things lurking below the surface that didn’t show themselves at all. Once, I thought I saw a castle, floating–floating!–on the water, all the way out to the south; but then it slid apart, like a mirage, or a glacier, and tumbled down into the sea.
So it was either a metaphor, or a glacier. The end’s coming, can’t you hear?
When we finally reached other side, it was just as I’d expected: brown earth and sand and palm trees, and golden-blue surf crashing against pristine beaches. The man set me ashore, pushed off, and waved goodbye, and left me to wonder how he’d brought me from Cape May to Brazil to North Africa–and then back again.
Do you remember, when everyone graduated from college, and they all went on stupendous travels–to help orphans in Nepal, to party like wild animals in Thailand, to absorb culture in Paris, to do ecstasy and fuck hookers in Amsterdam–but we didn’t? We hung out in Cape May, the town we grew up in, and lay on the beach, wondering where each piece of flotsam and dross that washed up came from. But maybe that’s because we never graduated; or maybe, if we bumped up on some distant shore, bloated bodies, rotted with age, in some patch of land yet unknown to us, they’d wonder where we’d come from–and maybe they’d pick us up like driftwood and hurl us back into the sea.
It’s not so sad, really. That old man? He never went on stupendous travels, either.
Posted on: January 2nd, 2011 Serapis
by Fritz Swanson
When George Washington was a boy, he cut down 100 old cherry trees.
His sister, Betty, caught him.
“You’re smoked,” she said, and shook her head.
George stuck out his tongue. Betty ran off.
Sassafras, a young slave George’s father had just purchased, claimed to be from Egypt. He had written a word on a curl of paper for George.
With his knife, George carved the word around the trunk of the 100th tree.
When he came home, George’s father Augustine said angrily, “We’ve talked about cherry trees, George!”
But George just smiled.
George and Sassafras had all of the trees milled into lumber and George made tools from the wood of the 100th tree. He used these tools to carve a small bird.
*
After dinner, George sat by the fire and whittled tiny feathers and a blunt beak
“What’s that, Georgie,” mother Mary whispered.
“A present,” he whispered back.
Earlier, George had gathered dead twigs and branches from the trees. He had put them in vases all around the house.
“Oh, what a mess, George!” His mother had scolded.
He scratched strange letters on the bird, breathed on its neck, and tossed it into the air.
The wooden sparrow came to life, fluttering around the dead wood. The leaves unfolded green, and the blossoms bloomed pink.
Augustine took hold of George’s ear.
“We’ve plants to move, George! Wagons to mend, soil to prepare, not to mention an orchard of stumps!”
But Augustine saw George’s determination.
“One more day,” Augustine sighed.
*
George put Old Ben the carpenter in charge and had the slaves set to work on the still green lumber. Sassafras insisted they had to move quickly.
They made desks, chairs, card tables, chests, cabinets, secretaries, canes, cases, boxes, and picture frames.
Sassafras and George set aside a pile of the wood for themselves. Under Sassafras’s direction they had this carved into little animals. There were cows, goats, sheep, pigs. But they also made leopards and giraffes. There were crocodiles, turtles, all sorts of snakes. And then strange deer with twisted horns. Finally there were men and women with the heads of animals. As soon as each piece was done, a slave child would start playing with it.
The last thing George had made was a door.
*
“Are these toys?” Betty asked. She and two slave girls pushed cherry-wood bulls through the dust.
Sassafras checked each creation.
“What about the door?” Betty asked.
Old Ben leaned the door against a willow. Sassafras opened the door and out rushed a hot dry wind, strange music, and the bellowing of unknown beasts.
When the wind struck the nearest wooden animals, they leapt from the hands of the children. A leopard, like a kitten, mewed as a little boy held his tail. Six tiny elephants stampeded to the open door.
Sassafras held open the door and looked to each slave.
One of the old men looked up to George’s father who stood away at the door of the house on the hill.
A mother cried and pushed her little son to the door, but he wouldn’t go.
Sassafras sighed and went through the door, closing it after. When the door shut, it fell forward, dead upon the ground.
by Nancy Stebbins
Rob Barron delivers a lecture on fish. Yesterday he knew almost nothing about marine life, but facts now multiply in his mind and he experiences a passion strong enough to muscle its way upriver with spawning salmon. He envisions a series of lectures, each covering a different species.
“Today’s fish is a catfish.” Rob, who isn’t wearing pants, paces as he speaks, spanning the raised platform in five strides. Its newly-waxed floor squeaks under his bare feet. Fifteen years as a Spanish professor and he has finally discovered his true calling.
The students are accustomed to half-naked professors. They would think it gratuitous and impolite to point out the obvious. Besides, it never does any good. A joke occurs to Rob about a leprechaun and a flounder. As he delivers the punch line, he realizes it isn’t funny. A female student in the front row doubles over with snorting laughter.
Rob says, “Found in all sorts of freshwater environments, catfish are named for their–”
A man in the back raises his hand and shakes it so violently, Rob fears it will come loose and fly across the room. Rob calls on him, but the woman in the front row is still laughing and he can’t hear the man’s question. “What?”
The man shouts, “The weather, sir?”
Rob says, “Same as yesterday,” and picks up his lecture. “Catfish are named for their prominent barbels, which look like–”
A student in the front row, not bothering to raise his hand, says, “Barometric pressure, sir?”
Rob says, “Catfish have no scales. Catfish are bottom feeders.” He becomes aware that he is holding a live but cooperative catfish, so he lifts it high for the class to see. Other students begin bombarding him:
“Humidity, sir?”
“Visibility?”
The catfish yawns. Only now does Rob notice the flashing neon sign in the lecture hall that says “Meteorology.” He sidles off the stage, covering himself with the fish as best he can. “I’m truly sorry. Forgive me.” Being in the wrong classroom is far worse than forgetting one’s pants, which happens to professors every day.
***
The new semester will start soon. Despite all his years of teaching Spanish, Rob is having the dream again. It’s so real that after he wakes up, Rob can still feel the smooth skin of the fish. He can smell it on his hands. He consults sleep specialists, internists, acupuncturists, even chiropractors. They say nothing can be done.
His fiancée, Haley, teaches math. She tells Rob that she used to have anxiety dreams, too, until she learned to trust herself as an educator. “Everyone has them at some time or other. I’ll bet even your chairman has had them.”
Rob can’t imagine his sleepy buffoon of a chairman, who delegates everything except naps, suffering from any sort of anxiety.
“It’s all about self confidence,” Haley says.
***
The foreign language faculty gathers in the language lab to learn about the department’s new interactive audio program. On a table in the front of the room is a cardboard box full of headsets. The chairman instructs one of the new lecturers to distribute them.
Rob sits between Ada Martin and Gwen Jones. The two women lean forward to talk across him as they extract their headsets from the plastic wrapping. The noise sounds like static.
Ada says, “I hear the new program corrects a student’s pronunciation.”
“Thank heaven,” Greta says, “They won’t have to flounder anymore.”
“What did you say?” Rob asks her, but now Greta is talking into her microphone.
“Pez.”
“Pescado.”
“Tiburon.”
An unfamiliar language issues through Rob’s headset. He raises his hand for the chairman’s attention, and that’s when he notices: the chairman is naked and holding a trout.
***
Haley cocks one eyebrow. “You had the dream for your chairman? That’s pitiful, Rob.”
He smiles. They’ve just woken up from a Sunday afternoon nap, and are lying on their sides, facing each other. Classes will start tomorrow and the dream will disappear until the spring semester. He says, “You really used to have anxiety dreams?”
“Oh, it was awful.” She shakes her head. “I would hear the same joke over and over. It was never funny, but I couldn’t stop laughing.”
He says, “Did you hear the one about the minnow and the priest?”
She raises her hand. “Rainfall, sir?” she says. Her laughter is familiar.
by Tina L. Jens
The ex-ballerina and soon-to-be tonsured priest waited, order pads poised, to take the monster and angel’s orders.
The monster was a humanitarian…in the way the ex-ballerina was a pescatarian and the pre-priest a meatatarian. The angel, one of God’s henchmen, ate dreams and sin. Neither the chicken quesadillas or the ham and cheese panini appealed.
The Bistro’s terrace overlooking Lake Michigan was the perfect place to watch the rise of the blood-red moon.
“Snookyookums,” the monster cooed, “you could have the creme puffs with fudge sauce. I’m sure it’s sinfully delicious.”
The angel caressed her fur. “Fuzzyuzzums, I’m more worried about you. Cows are fed human growth hormones…could you eat the corned beef?”
“I suppose the Bloody Mary…”
“Is a metaphor,” the ex-ballerina assured them.
The angel paid.
The priestlet — busy wondering if he was duty-bound to report the company the angel was keeping — gave them the wrong change.