The Secret life Of A Lie

It wasn't easy. It never is. Not when you're just a college student. Even if you are pretty, and even if you have a record of getting good grades. All of that applied to her. Jenny McCormick was that girl. She was pretty. She had never gotten lower than an A in her life.

She waited outside Crimwell's office with a dozen applicants sitting in low barely-comfortable good-looking plush vinyl stools. It sounded like a paper-mill in the lobby, as students flipped through the information packets Crimwell's office sent to students who had signed their names on the roster that hung from the student bulletin board in the psych building.

No, it wasn't easy especially when you felt the eyes of other students on you, saying: What's she doing here? She looks like a cheerleader. If she is chosen for the internship that means Crimwell has something else in mind, maybe something that has to do with late nights when the psych building is dark and empty. Could be. Could be...

She didn't recognize the others. They all seemed to know one another, though, shooting each other good-luck-grins, while they ignored her. She put her eyes on her packet. She pretended to read it just so she didn't see the naked suspicion that flipped her way.

"Miss McCormick," an older man with grey in his hair with a nametag on the front of his button down. Angelo.

She went in.

***

"Jenny," Professor Crimwell greeted her.

She kissed him on his bearish cheek. "Uncle."

"How did it go?"

"They definitely hate me."

"Good," he replied. "Very good."

"Do I actually have to go through with it?"
"Take the internship? Well, yes I need you." Crimwell got up from a chair, and took her small bird-boned hand in his much larger paw. "You're part of it." He patted her. She winced.

"Stand still while I ---."

She backed away in protest.

He laughed and chased her huffing and puffing in his bulk which was covered in a sort of shapeless overall smock. He finally caught her and put one hand in her hair, ruffling it.

"Now you look like a mess. They'll believe it."

She pouted.

"Okay, now go back out there and put on your biggest shit-eating grin."

So she did.

***

Cole prison was a big imposing place with one entrance. Prison guards in grey patrolled the entrance, and could be seen at the top of the building, silhouettes in the too-bright morning sun. The van passed through no less than two checkpoints manned by guards with cold expressions. Jenny couldn't tell if it was the chilly morning or if that was ala' natural.

At each checkpoint, a guard compared the van's license plate to a digital readout on a tablet, before nodding.

Mr. Shelly The warden met them, shaking hands with Professor Crimwell. The warden was small and his movements frantic with energy. He had a stutter.

"Happy to meet you. Tttt-ake all the time you need with him. Tttt-here'll be guards with you. Of course. Ttttake care."

The little group were led through a steel maze. It wasn't like television. No prisoners sat inside empty cells on uncomfortable mattresses catcalling each other. The cells were all closed. The inmates quiet.

They stopped before a steel door with a little bubble-window. Behind the door was the man they had come to see.

***

He was dressed in an orange jumpsuit numbered on the arm, waiting at the table with his arms crossed.

In all the world there couldn't be many of these. There were undoubtedly more than just this one but there weren't many.

He had a perfectly average face. The eyes were symmetrical, the nose had never been broken, the chin was not blunt or sharp. His neck trunk wasn't too wide or too skinny. His ears didn't stick out but neither were they small or pointy.

He was perfectly average in every way you could think of.

And that's what made him so dangerous. That's what made it so easy for the monster in him to catch people unaware. He was so average and forgetful he could sneak right up on you and even if he had a bloody steak knife you'd think he was just prepping a rib-eye.

How many times had that perfectly average face appeared in a child's window and a soft hand tapped to be let in?

By last count he had eaten - not killed, not burned, no - he'd eaten, as in lip-smacking, as in oh-I-want-some-more-this-is-delicious, yes! Eaten eleven people. That they knew of. He remembered hundreds they didn't know about he'd eaten down to the bone like one of those South American piranha to the power of a hundred.

Maybe he wasn't the only one like this. Maybe there were more like him who never got caught. Men and women who were too damn good at the murdering business to ever come under the microscope of homicide detectives or FBI specialists. Not charming, not scoring high on the IQ charts, men and women who were just too goddamn ordinary to make a splash when they tossed a body in a lake.

None of the interns had known where they were going that morning. Angelo had called each of them the night before and told them just to be ready and standing outside of the dorms at five in the am. It wasn't until they'd left Columbia University, that Professor Crimwell, turned and looked each face in the eye before revealing the details, the meat, if you thought you were a comedian (and everybody does, right?) of the internship.

Not even Jenny knew the details of her uncle's planning until the van ride. All uncle Crimwell had revealed to her was that she was not just an intern. She was also the impetus of a sociological and psychological experiment.

"There is a chance, Jenny, if we play our cards right. You could be famous.

That sounded alright to her.

In the van, her uncle was more forthcoming.

"We're going to Cole prison. There's one still there we're going to visit with today. His name's Richard Wheeler. If any of you are familiar with that name, please speak."

The van was silent, except for the ribbing of the tires on the highway.

"Good. Everyone's going to get a chance to meet with him today one on one and ask him questions, to try to figure out the nature of his crimes." He put up his hand. "No questions. Your job is to discover what Mr. Wheeler's crime was. You're here to observe him in his confinement and you may ask as many questions as you can fit into a half hour during your one on one with Mr. Wheeler."

The interns. Sophie Collins (from Texas) had a giant mole on his temple that sprouted one sleek black curly hair from its center. John Chi was a naturalized citizen originally from Taiwan. Tony Newman was Italian, from New York City's lower east side, and jittery and over-talkative. Then, there was Jenny. She introduced herself and said she was switching from History to Psychology. Then, as they'd discussed, she fluttered her long lashes at Professor Crimwall and licked her lips.

The others glared, except Tony Newman who was too busy talking.

John Chi was first to interview Wheeler. The others waited outside. Tony was haranguing Sophie Collins about the cheapest place to live in New York as Collins looked disinterestedly at the wall. Angelo and Crimwall talked to each other, out of earshot.

Collins went in next.

Jenny got up as soon as Collins went in and approached Crimwall and Angelo. She made it obvious she was flirting, flipping her bangs over her ears and pushing out her chest. Crimwell acted like he was staring at her breasts as Angelo politely averted his eyes.

By the time Sophie Collins left the visiting room, John Chi's self-indulgent smile had been replaced by a scowl. Tony Newman went in and came out, never letting up his stream of constant self-chatter. It was Jenny's turn.

Richard Wheeler looked bored. His eyes were knit, his mouth a dead line.

"So what did you do?" She asked.

"That's all you got? The last one asked me for my mother's maiden name. You're blunt. I like blunt." Wheeler smiled at her, revealing silver and iron fillings.

"I committed a crime," he told her. His eyes raked her. "I did a thing that Uncle Sam says no-no Richie Wheeler after he found out I did it."

Wheeler chuckled.

"I'm sorry. You can call me Richie."

"I'm Gale," she lied.

"Gale. That's a pretty name."

She had no more questions so they fell into small-talk. She liked him immediately. He seemed very droll, but not funny.

There was a minute on the caged clock left when he put his finger to his lips. "Shhh."

"What?" She asked.

"I'll tell you what I did." He looked the clock. "If you don't tell anyone."

She nodded.

"I found out your secret. The one that no one is looking at."

"A secret?" She asked. "Look I don't really care what you did, you see..."

"You're not pretty, you're just average, and your name isn't Gale."

Time was up.

The interview was over.

She forgot to shoot her uncle a sexually-charged glance.

***

"He was in there for rape," John Chi told them. He gave Jenny a look of contempt.

"He was in there for abusing children." That came from Sophie Collins, who looked at his hands angrily.

Tony Newman wrung his hands. "I don't know," he said. "I don't know why he was in there. Maybe he was innocent. Who knows."

Jenny shrugged at Crimwell. He nodded.

"You don't, believe me, actually want to know why he was in there but I'll tell you. Fair is fair." Crimwell scratched his shoulder. "Richard Wheeler was a cannibal. He ate human flesh like you'd go eat a burger at McDonald's. They know of eleven people he devoured."

"The reason we did this little exercise was three-fold. First, I wanted to see what, if anything, Wheeler would tell you. You see, he's never confessed. He was pulled into the New York City police department almost two dozen times. He was given lie detector tests he passed with flying colors. They finally were able to match some DNA from disposed bones. There are still some who say he's innocent of any crime. Even," Crimwall frowned. "When faced by actual evidence. Scientific evidence. That the man ate little girls."

Tony Newman started shaking. "He told me I looked too skinny," he announced. He looked like he was about to faint, eyes circling wildly like a game of marbles.

"Richard Wheeler seems to have an almost supernatural power to fool people. Jenny is my niece. During the process mapped out, you were to think that she had received her appointment as a fellow intern unfairly by using her natural attractiveness." The professor smiled at Jenny. "She's very attractive. My niece. This whole thing was proposed because I wanted to know how that would color your impressions of Wheeler. How would that effect your reaction to him, change your opinion. None of you said he was innocent but notice how, with each implication that Jenny had gotten here unfairly using the possibility of sex, you became more certain that Wheeler had committed a crime sexual in nature."

The interns began to nod, shock turning to reproach and then to understanding. Jenny thought about what the man, Wheeler, had said to her.

You're not pretty. You're just average.


***

She woke.

She sweat. The room was steaming.

She went to the bathroom.

She looked in the mirror.

Who was she looking at? Was this her? Did she look this way? She shook her head. She thought herself prettier than she looked in the mirror. She looked so average. She had just the right amount of pimples under her mouth. There was a crook in her teeth braces might have fixed but now it was too late. Her ears were too high and the lobes disproportionately bulged in over-flaps. All these years she'd been pretending to be beautiful, but now she had to face the hot music. She was just average. She was an impression of who she had thought she had been.

"I was beautiful once." To be said out-loud, perhaps more than once. "I was beautiful once." Oh, she looked horrible. Then she forgot how she looked. She was herself. The old Jenny, the one who made it through the days being her. What a relief.

In bed, between the feather sheets her mom had sent with her to college, good to curl feet into, she tiredly touched her face. "Oh my God," she yelled.

She was the thing, the average thing that looked at her out of the mirror. She touched her face again. Oh, her eyes had lied, had felt sympathy, and lied again, pretending in the mirror that her face was the old face and not this face of a gobble head. It couldn't be hers. She prodded the flesh. The nose was too-long. God, it was ugly. She cried and wiped her cheeks. She screamed but the scream didn't emerge because she was too conscience of her neighbors. What if they saw her, as she really was.

She turned on all the lights. Even the moon was looking in. Judging this face. Casting its light down and cutting the room into portions, the moonlight dancing lewdly in satisfaction.

Brought the old girl Jenny down, the moon screamed. Brought her down to her fucking knees, didn't we? Cut her down to size, finally. Oh, but now she'll know what it is like to be forgotten. The moon laughed. It bubbled, rabbits, men on the moon, what-have-you, up there, lancing their beams into the room and Jenny cried and hit her pillow with her closed fist.

Then she stopped. She looked in the bathroom mirror again. If she concentrated she could see the old pretty Jenny, gone deep, behind this new face. She took some germ-killing handfuls of hand soap and rubbed it on her face. It itched and frothed like milk. When she dried her face she saw her old face had come closer to the surface. Oh, God, it was closer. She looked around. What else? She swabbed her face with lotion. That seemed to help a little bit. There. Her real face was so close. She dismantled her razor and took the blade from it and touched it to her face. No, this wouldn't bring it back. This would only reveal it. She didn't want that much revelation. She put the razor down.

She waited till morning, sitting in her blankets, watching the sun come up. In the quads, and dorms, students were beginning to stir. Without applying constant soap and lotion her true face was again diminishing.

What had that criminal, Wheeler done? She hurried in her little Toyota to her uncle's house. He answered the door in sleeping goggles.

"Jenny," he said. "What's wrong?"

She pushed past him into his kitchen. He was a messy man. Pots were stacked in the grey sink unwashed with food residue and oil coating.

"My face," she said.

He looked confused.

She explained how she had woken up and discovered that her beauty was gone.

"You don't look any different," he told her. His brow was furrowed in concern and sympathy, as he cracked his knuckles in little sporadic blasts of gunfire. She put her fingernails on her cheeks and brought them down, skinning. She would give him revelation, then. He grabbed her, holding her close until she stopped struggling, breathing snot bubbles and wet into his bulk. She bled on his robe.

"Jenny, I think we've got to get you some help," he told her, at last, sitting her down in a kitchen chair. "Are you on any prescriptions?"

She got up in wrath. "FUCK YOU," she screamed. Grabbed the knife he had been using to butter his toast, and driven by incoherent rage she jammed it into his eye. The knife crumpled the eye. The giant man went to his knees then his head fell causing the knife to go even further until the dull (but sharp enough) end emerged from the back side of his skull, covered in jelly you could not buy in a grocery store.

Her mouth was covered in blood. She had bitten through her own lip. It hung in shreds. Oh, this was rotten. She put one hand on her face, trying to reassemble the lip but it would not go. She finally ripped the rest off, piping up a little scream as she yanked the tender material free. She let her bottom lip drop to the kitchen floor in grief.

She went by bundle of cloth to Cole prison. When she got there she told them that she had been there the day before, was an intern, and the professor sent her back because he'd forgotten his laptop. The guards waved her through. She hid her lip with her hand while she talked. It still bled and when she spoke the blood speckled the soft white of her hand.

She managed to get through the Warden who stuttered politely, who tried to call Crimwell, but of course, couldn't reach him. "This isn't usual," the Mr. Shaw told her. "But of course you are Professor Crimwell's student-t-t-t, and t-t-t-that means a lot."

Richard Wheeler waited for her. "It isn't that often a pretty girl comes to visit ole' Richie Wheeler twice in a row."

He leaned back and folded his arms behind his head and started singing in a girlish whisper. "I love you porgy, don't let him take me. Don't let him handle me and drive me mad. If you can keep me, I wanna' stay here, with you forever, and I'll be glad."

He laughed loudly and put his hand out palm-flat.

"Go ahead and give me your hand and I'll tell your fortune."

She put her hand in his. It was swallowed up in his perfectly-formed hand.

"Someday I know he's coming to call me," he sang.

He held her hand loosely. "Oh!" He yelled. "No, there's no sparks. I just wanted to see how desperate you were, to touch a convicted cannibal."

His face grew serious, the face-muscles smoothing into serious, calm, soothing, the eyes heartfelt, the smile a real God-almighty dazzler. No teeth filed to pricks.

"There's nothing wrong with you," he said. He gazed at the red spot where her bottom lip had once been.

"Sprung a leak?" he cracked. "Honey-bunny, Richie was just a'kidding. I was lying to you." He ran one finger from her wet eye to her ripped lip. "It seems like every time I tell someone a lie they believe me. So I lie. It's a bad habit, hon. I just seem to have this power, fortunate for me, not so fortunate for others." His eyes crinkled in sympathy.

"You really are beautiful," he told her.

And she was. She felt her face, the tear soaked embrasures. She was beautiful. She was. Do you know, Jenny McCormick?, she's not average. Do you know her? Have you seen her? She's striking isn't she.

Even her lip was beautiful. Yeah, it was red and there was yellow infection spreading in it, but certainly that was beautiful to someone, somewhere. Anyone listening?

"Now shoo," he said, flinging his fingers.

"Guard!" He shouted.

She walked through the prison, the guards turning their heads. She walked proudly with her head high and triumphant. Oh, sure she was drooling blood and you could see the white of her bottom teeth, through the rent in her lipless mouth, but she was beautiful.

Later she would go back to her dorm and pick up the naked razor blade and create beautiful vertical lines on her face, then horizontal, in a nice lil' grid, the razor cutting all the way to the white of her skull. Looking in the mirror, yanking flaps of skin back, pulling them off and putting them in the sink and squeezing a bottle of toothpaste out on them. Then brushing those pearlies, and what convenience because now she didn't even have to open her mouth. She could put the brush right there in the new slit and just have at it. By midnight she had discovered that she could put lotion in her skull by lifting open the flaps and applying it directly. They found her next to her mirror with q-tips stuffed in her nose to stop the hemorrhage when she decided to Mabeline her hot wet brain.

Richie lay in his bunk with his legs kicked back. Hell, if you can't eat em' join em right? The warden knelt, licking his feet, sucking the toes like a baby on a pacifier. The warden grinned like a puppy, considerate little wagger, and Richie patted him on the head. He'd told the warden how his voice sounded and the warden had chopped the end of his tongue off to try to be less conspicuous. What they never got, Richie thought, was that he wasn't lying.

It was all true.

"I love you Porgy," he told the warden. "I wanna' stay with you forever. I've got my man."

The End

It's Friday

I wrote this last night in a frenzy. I like it. It was the easiest story I have ever written. I hope that means it doesn't die, wanting.

Maybe Paul saw it coming, maybe he didn't - but Paul didn't stop, and they went off the road into the woods in one of those this-isn't-really-happening-is-it? moments, branches scraping Paul's birthday present, a new white-as-pearl Honda civic, the car so new the interior still smelled plastic, and the aroma of the air conditioning, cold as sticking an ice cube on your neck, was clean and fresh as a spring day just after a new rain.

Paul was yelling his lungs off, that he'd "just got the car for God's sake", but God apparently had other things to worry about, other calamities to plan out. So the car thundered through the patch of woods just off the strip on 30, where it wound around hills, getting steeper and steeper on its way up. Paul wrapped his big hands around his mouth, looked out the window at an old dead oak tree that gnarled its hoses out, nozzles dark and rotten right outside the window. That was it: they'd done it now. The world trembled, tilted, like watching an upside-down television.

"Dad is gonna' kill me," Paul said. He lay his head on the steering wheel, removing it when it honked, the siren loud and clear.

"Maybe it isn't that bad."

"Oh - it's bad. I knew I shouldn't have smoked. Knew it. I knew it, let me tell you. I shouldn't have smoked. Look what smoking's done to me."

"Is that what you were doing? Smoking? 'Cause it looked like -"

"I dropped my," - Paul twisted his fingers - "cigarette, I was going for it but it rolled in the back seat."

"'Cause it looked like, -"

"I don't care," Paul shouted. He unbuckled his seat belt, throwing the shoulder strap wide, and crawled into the backseat, looking for the butte. Davey Shaw averted his gaze from the wide bare crack between Paul's shirt, and his faded black jeans.

"Put it away," Davey Shaw said.

"Put -- what away?" Muffled.

"Your ass."

Finally Paul finished rooting around, and held the culprit up, a big Camel Light, the filter brown with tobacco. It was still smoking. Paul wet his fingers and pinched it. The cigarette died a lonely death.

When they backed the car up, branches shrieking in protest, the woods passing on either side (there was an uncomfortable second when Paul almost hit a trunk - which would be real bad news, since they'd lucked out and he hadn't on the way in) and reached the road, parking on the gravel to inspect the damage, both were surprised to find that the mortifying scream of branches on the car hadn't had any effect at all. With two sets of eyes on full alert, neither was able to find any scratches. Davey Shaw declared in his most strident voice, the one he saved for these sorts of occasions, this was a true miracle and proof that God, no matter how cruel his jokes, was okay on occasion.

All was right in the world: The sky clear blue, the temperature mild, the radio station which mainly traded in a currency of classic rock staples was actually playing the Smiths, Bigmouth Strikes Again.

Paul's driveway was muddy from the recent rain. The Honda swished in, and Paul spun the wheels and the mud blew up in great clods entwined with branches and leaves and muddy water. "A Paul Allen special," Paul boasted, the car slinging around in a 180', before coming to rest in a hackneyed parking job before the garage, sleek as space trawler in a science fiction movie, quiet too, no Millennium Falcon howl on its way between star systems.

No one was home. Paul led Davey Shaw to the kitchen, and they pilfered the turnaround cupboards for two bags of chips, sour cream, and a couple sodas. They brought the food to the den and Paul turned the television on with the universal remote. The television was big, twice the size of any television in Davey Shaw's house: here was a theatre system with twice the bells and whistles and the price tag to prove it. Paul flipped through the channels before settling on an old Addams Family episode. While Lurch creaked his dialogue Davey Shaw looked out the window at the sunny day and thought: ain't life grand, as he divested himself of his appetite, crunching chips followed by sips of his soda.It was Friday afternoon, school wouldn't come again until Monday.

Davey lived each weekend to the fullest, always believing Monday was too far away to effect him. It was, as his mother said, as if he'd gotten her and his dad's very worst qualities, no attention span, no willingness to stick with something beyond two days. He couldn't argue with that. Besides worries were far away, it was Friday, and even if his attention span did stink, even if he did leave off doing what he was supposed to do - what they wanted him to do - he still didn't have to do any of it, for two days. Mr. Brodehouse, his History teacher could screw-off. Brodehouse was always on him about something. The old man with the lazy eye that squiggled in his skull like a possessed marble, who wore suits a gravedigger wouldn't, who parted his silver hair with sour-smelling gel, considered Davey Shaw his special project. Forcing him to stay after school if he didn't complete an assignment, or when he failed a pop quiz (Brodehouse's specialty - the pop quiz, and they were mean ones, born in that Brodehouse smile, heaped with Brodehouse style, there to fuck you up, and keep fucking you long after you wanted it to stop). Brodehouse had a certain pitch he used with Davey Shaw: A high simpering and snide modulation, pseudo-caring, and it made Davey Shaw clench his ass cheeks to hear it, face grow hot. Fuckin' Brodehouse.

Paul flipped the channel to a show where various bikini-wearing models competed to see who would get a contract with a fashion empire.

"Look at that set," Paul said. For a second Davey Shaw thought Paul was talking about the television, somehow reading his mind. But no - the breasts were high and glossy, the woman, thin, with a face like an inquisitive bird.

Paul turned the channel to the weather channel. An anonymous-faced man in a dark suit was pointing at a computer image. "Another sunny day, folks. Not the kind of sun you sun-worshippers have been waiting for, but for the rest of us, it's going to be another comfortable day to let it all hang out -" Paul pushed mute. "He's right, let's go on a drive."

They whooped down the road, the earlier near-brush with disaster forgotten. Paul hit the accelerator until it was flush and they barreled down 30, each curve in the road Paul yelling a fierce curse as he spun the wheel and the transmission proved so tight the car handled the abuse with only a quiet purr. "I can't believe this," Paul told Davey Shaw. "I can't FUCKING believe this." Davey Shaw agreed. What the hell, he thought: it's Friday.

*

Smoking a Camel, Paul's concentration was focused on the radio, turning knobs, so it was Davey who noticed the car. The car was gaining on them. Looking at the speedometer, and judging it, taking the angle into account, he saw they were going at least 75, yet the car was gaining.

"Company," he told Paul.

"What?"

"I said we've got company."

Paul looked at him like he was crazy, an inch of dead grey ash standing on the end of his cigarette. Then he looked in the rear view mirror. Paul burst out in a laugh. "Look at that car," he said.

The car was grey, the front end busted, the bumper tied on with nylon. Paul hit the accelerator. Even with the windows rolled up, you could feel the air, Davey Shaw thought. When Paul hit 90, the roof was buffeted, and there was no point in talking. But instead of leaving the car in the dust, when Dave Shaw glanced at his side mirror he saw it. The ass-crap dinosaur, like something welded from traffic safety school nightmares, stayed behind them.

Paul didn't notice, humming along with the radio. They were back to playing classics. This one was Pink Floyd. One of those songs with a woman wailing her somnambulant guts out. The song seemed extraordinarily loud. Davey Shaw was slightly unnerved by it.

He reached out and turned off the radio. Except for the wind, the car was filled with sudden grateful quiet. "That car's still behind us."Paul looked in the rear view mirror. "No shit," he said.

"You see it?"

"Of course I see it. I can't go any faster."

They were at 100, the fields speeding by.

"I thought this car was new," Davey Shaw said.

"It is new, asshole."

"Then why doesn't it go any faster?"

"Your piece of shit barely makes the speed limit. Hey, maybe that's your car. Should we stop and ask. Maybe they stole it."

"Maybe you're a dickhead," Davey Shaw retorted.

His car was a piece of shit. An old Ford Tempo, stick shift, white if you wanted to be objective, rust-colored if you didn't. "Anyways, your parents buy you everything."

Paul ignored him, watching the car in his mirror. "Do you see who's behind the wheel?" Davey Shaw looked out his own mirror but he wasn't able to make out more than there were more than two, obscured by sun-dazzle. He swiveled around and looked. "No way," he said. He turned back, mouth dry.

He'd had a brief idea when Paul had told him to look around, thinking for some reason that his eyes would meet the eyes of Brodehouse. That wasn't the case.

The bolt-bucket now only two cars of separation behind, was full of old people. Chock-full, there were four of them in the front, four old men grinning fiercely, no, the operative term here was laughter. Four old men laughing. And there were more in the back seat, maybe six more, could even be eight. Davey Shaw had seen heads and shoulders but hadn't looked long enough to count them, a creepy feeling in his chest, because they were looking back like that, and laughing.

"Paul," he said. It was a plea.

"I know," Paul said, soberly.

They passed Chad Dewer's place, a kid they knew. Paul abruptly spun the wheel in a smooth circle, the beat up car with all the old people not slowing, driving past. Davey Shaw wasn't certain but it looked like an old woman had her face pressed against the back window as the antique roared away, black smoke streaming from its exhaust. The woman's face had looked like a skull.

Paul pulled into the Dewer drive.

The Dewers were wealthy but you couldn't tell from looking at the house. It was an old farmhouse, similar to the animal's barns on the spread behind it, except it had windows, churchy windows, and a welcome mat. C'MON IN, the mat said. Paul knocked. Both were looking to the road.(Just some crazy old people, probably on their way to bingo at the American Legion).

That woman's face, though, it had looked like a skull. Davey Shaw was sure of it. Of course, he hadn't seen it in detail, and anyway, didn't you look more and more like a skull when you got old, just a waspish comb over, skin stretched tightly over cheekbones, like leather?

"Nobody's home," Paul said. He reached under the mat and produced a spare house key. "We're going to go in and wait."He unlocked the door and then slid the key back under the sunny welcoming mat. Shaw hesitated.

"Don't be a baby. It says to come in."

Can't argue with a welcoming mat.

Davey Shaw went in behind Paul, who didn't hesitate or take his shoes off, all the things you had to do at the Shaw house if you wanted to keep your head on your shoulders. Paul went to the kitchen and started ransacking drawers. Shaw sat on a couch covered in yellow-flower print that had seen better days, maybe during the Great One. (See Brodehouse, he do know some history). Davey Shaw saw the remote control on a coffee table decorated with an exotic lion-headed lamp and a bowl of fresh flowers, their stems wading in an inch of water. He got a good whiff of the bowl when he grabbed the clicker. The water in the bowl wasn't clear, it was dark brown and it smelled rancid. Maybe it had once been clear, but it hadn't been changed in a long while. The flowers looked fresh, almost freakishly so, brilliant yellow and white wild flowers spread in a healthy glow of vitality and strength.

When the television turned on, the picture resolved into the weather channel. "I know I made a forecast yesterday that we'd have rain this weekend and it really feels good to be able to tell you I was wrong. Let no one ever say that this forecaster doesn't enjoy being wrong once in a while." The forecaster was wearing a jester's cap. "Gentleman this is golf weather. Ladies this weather is perfect to get the girls together and go have an ice cream sundae." Someone offset handed the weatherman a golf club. He swung the club in slow motion. "Hole in one folks. Go outside and enjoy the beautiful weather before," - the digital map behind him darkened into cartoony rain clouds - "You know who comes. Mister Rain!"

"These people must eat out all the time," Paul said. "Look in the fridge."

Davey Shaw went in the kitchen and studied the refrigerator. There were photographs of the family: had to be grandma and grandma Dewer on a sunny beach. It was held up by cow magnets. Next to it were pictures of Chad as a younger guy, next to his dad, behind them a pier and a fishing boat. There were a few magnets from hotels Davey Shaw had never heard of, The Apples Inn, Bedside Road And Breakfast, next to ones he had heard of: Holiday Inn, Econolodge.

"Did you see Chad's sister?" he yelled.

"Did I ever! She's a minx."

She was older, maybe her mid-twenties, but her senior picture held Shaw's attention. The photograph was glossy and over-posed but the girl had a natural light in her eyes and perfect features. She wasn't beautiful, as he supposed the models had been on television, but she had something more than that. She was fresh-faced, heart-shaped, and interesting. His eyes went back to grandma and grandpa Dewer. They had changed positions in the photograph, he swore, the old man who had been holding the old woman's hand had let the hand drop and was now staring at the camera, his tongue out, a wet trail of drool running down his sinewy jaw. He blinked and opened the fridge.

The fridge light was broken. The food jars, leftovers, were in a state of open decay. He put his hand over his nose. A plate covered in saran wrap had a cut of meat on it. There were maggots on the meat, interacting with the wrap, making noise horrible and somehow... contemplative. It sounded like someone squeezing huge chunks of packing Styrofoam. Even more terrible, the milk carton, quart-size, had flaps that hadn't been pushed down far enough and they were slightly open. A tiny green worm hung on the carton flap lip in milk residue.

He slammed the fridge door.

"I know man, these people travel too much."

Paul stood there, nodding. "Did you see the worm?"

Davey Shaw nodded."I've never seen anything like that," Paul declared.

Davey Shaw could only nod in reply. "Wonder where they went? I saw Chad yesterday."

"I don't know," Paul shook his head. "You know what's weird. That weather channel guy keeps talking how everyone should go outside. You have to see this."

Sure enough, the forecaster was now wearing a pair of Bermuda shorts and white stockings unfashionably pulled up to his knees. "It's the weather of the century if you ask me," the forecaster said. He had rid himself of golf clubs and now held a racquet. "This is tennis weather. I know you're out there, America, taking advantage of the weather, the score tied. I'll tell you what, when I get off," - the forecaster looked at his watch, - "I'm going to go for a nice swim."

"What a clown," Paul said.

"Yeah," Davey Shaw answered.

"I think we should get out of here."

"I couldn't have said it better myself."

*

They drove slow. The town of Liberty was just over the hill. The road here had a construction sign where the city had begun grading the gravel intending to lay down blacktop.

They passed the Gentle Sands cemetery on the right. Paul slowed. It looked like there was a parade, there. Hundreds of people mixed together, and there was even a cheerleading squad. Davey Shaw didn't recognize any of the people and he wondered why they would have a parade in a graveyard.

"I've never seen any of those people in my life," Davey said.

Paul squinted from the driver seat. "Me neither," he said.

It was strange, Davey Shaw thought, because the girls on the cheerleading squad were wearing Liberty Tiger colors, but the uniforms were not quite the same.

Paul put on the brakes, the car smoothly coming to a halt, and he turned into the Gentle Sands lot. They crawled forward. Davey Shaw got a much better look at the parade - which wasn't a parade at all. The cheerleaders close up had blank sunny smiles and he heard their chant: "Tigers always win, T-I-G-E-R-S, don't worry when you see them P-L-A-Y, Tigers W-I-N and are here to S-T-A-Y". The cheerleaders hurrah'ed. They jumped out of formation and continued to jump, spreading their legs, hands on their thighs.

"Look at her," Paul said. "Her" was a blonde, a real stunner, with leg muscles that were tan and fit and each time she jumped they flexed, the muscles sleek and shiny.

"We should go," Davey Shaw said.

Paul didn't argue, putting the car into reverse, backing onto the highway, back the way they had come.

When Shaw threw him a questioning look, Paul shrugged. "I'm tired of driving."

They left Gentle Sands behind them. The sun was creeping lower into the horizon, and Davey Shaw pulled the visor down. Still, his eyes were attacked by afterimages, the countryside multiplying and become a blot like a rorsach, scorching his retina. He rubbed his eyes. When he opened them he saw black spots in his vision. They seemed like ravens attacking his eyes, wanting to peck the jelly out. He rubbed his eyes. He looked in his driver's side mirror: the car.

It was covered in beads, like from a celebration. They were wrapped over the hood. "Jesus," Davey Shaw said.

Paul didn't reply, but hit the accelerator with all his weight. Shaw closed his eyes again. When he opened them the car was behind then - had gained on them. He looked in the mirror, paralyzed. An old man leaned out the passenger window and he was screaming and laughing, the wind blowing his white hair. But that wasn't the worst. The old man had a hammer, the sort you'd find in a tool box. He was holding the hammer like a batter ready to make a swing. The old man's face rippled. The hammer was the kind Shaw's dad used to drive in nails to hang pictures.

"Go faster," Davey Shaw screamed.

"I'm trying." The car speedometer was all the way up past the red.

"This car's a piece," Davey Shaw said.

"Shut the fuck up. It's going." The car was going faster, but now that it had reached its maximum allotted speed, the gain was slow. They ran along 30 this way, just behind them the car full of oldsters, "fucking bingo-players," Shaw thought. 30 was a highway that spun like taffy, the corners 90 degree death-traps.

"Here they come," Paul shouted. They were coming. The grey beater rode up beside them and Shaw briefly wondered if he'd left reality. The old man with the hammer was giggling. Shaw covered his head. The hammer cracked against his window, glass busted all over his knees, sharp pieces rang like chimes. He covered his lap.

"Jesus," Paul screamed and swerved. There was a grinding of metal, that sounded a lot like an impromptu shop class orchestra of saws, a conductor hyped on speed, pushing the orchestra to a frenzy. Davey Shaw opened his eyes, when he felt something wet on his cheek. He touched it: blood. He looked in his mirror. The oldsters had slowed. The old man with the hammer was gone.

"I got him," Paul said. "I got that son of a motherfucker." Paul grimaced. "I think."

Davey Shaw couldn't say, for along with his rapid heart beat, his brain was undergoing a tap-dance. The Liberty Tiger cheerleaders were in his head, the girls naked: "Tigers always win, T-I-G-E-R-S, don't worry when you see them P-L-A-Y, Tigers W-I-N and are here to S-T-A-Y". The cheer dissolved into a slap.

"Get it together," Paul said.

Davey Shaw kept one eye on the road ahead, one on his mirror.

*

They went to Davey Shaw's house. It was strangely empty. Davey Shaw forced Paul to take his shoes off and leave them in the front landing, under the busy white plastic shoe-rack. Paul did so, with a reproachful look. They went into the living room and both sat on the hydabed couch that had been in the Shaw house since Davey was born.

"What do we know?" Davey Shaw asked.

"We know you made us take our shoes off like little kids," Paul replied.

"Shut up, I'm serious, what do we know about these ... old people."

"I'll tell you what I think," Paul said. "I think they are escapees from a retirement home. I've heard about stuff like this."

Davey Shaw scoffed.

"Or," Paul scratched his ear. "Maybe all the old people in the world have rose up and said, 'screw the youth, fuck generation Z', and they're doing this everywhere, getting rid of us."

Davey Shaw wondered if Brodehouse would be considered young or old (the elderly in the beater car were ancient like yellowed newspaper). He hoped, if Paul was right, that Brodehouse fell in with the young. It'd almost be worth it. Almost.

Davey Shaw turned on the television.The screen was static. He flipped through the channels. Every channel had the same white and black noise, the same rainstorm of electronic ash. Except for the weather channel. The forecaster was dressed in a slicker now. "Looks like I made a bbbiiigggg mistake," the forecaster said. His hair was plastered to his forehead. "But then again, that's what we are here for. Your emails tell me all the time, Hey mister weatherman, why was the forecast so...off? Well, folks, I've got the same answer for you. I don't control the weather. No one does. The weather, hell, it's arbitrary." The forecaster giggled. "Can someone turn on the bleeper. Wait - can I say hell?" The television screen went black. The power was out. Davey Shaw looked out the living room window. It was raining. Lightning split the clouds, great big thunderclouds that swam in the sky like it was an aquarium.

"Let's go," Davey Shaw told Paul.

Paul shook his head. "It's raining."

"Look, I have a theory," Davey Shaw told him.

"What?"

"You'll think I'm nuts."

"You're my best friend," Paul said. " I already think you're nuts."

"Okay, so let's go."

They drove from his house. Davey Shaw looked back wondering if this was the last time he would take his shoes off to please his mother. He wondered about tears. Had tears ever cured anything? Besides, he wondered what he had to cry about. The world was always strange, it hadn't changed, the strangeness had just come home, was all. Shoes were shoes.

"So what's the idea?" Paul asked.

"Follow 30, toward the Dewer's."

They drove under clouds that boiled in the sky, splashing and enraged. Paul hunched in his seat, his eyes close to the windshield while he drove. Davey Shaw was soaked: where the old man had broken the window the rain bled in, though most of it was kept out by physics, since the car was traveling at a pretty fast rate, most of the rain darted past his window harmlessly. He poked his head out the window, looking back. The dinosaur car full of old men had reappeared, just a few hundred yards behind them.

"Pull into the Dewer's," Davey Shaw ordered.

Paul did as he was told. He slowed and made the turn.

They hadn't locked the door the last time. The wind had knocked it free and it creaked back and forth. The power was off. Davey Shaw in the lead, they went inside the Dewer's house. Davey Shaw stood, dripping rain water on the floor. "What the hell, Shaw," Paul said. Davey Shaw looked at the drive, watching the old people turn in. Their engine whirred and popped like someone squeezing giant sheets of tinfoil into balls. The driver or the passenger, Shaw couldn't tell, flicked on the car's interior light. It was red. The pack of old people made maniac expressions, red light submerging their features so it looked like they were sinking in a car filled with blood.

Paul was busy looking for a weapon when Davey Shaw walked out in the rain. He strode right up to the front of the car, stood in the headlights. "I'm right here!" He shouted. "Come and get it." The old people cackled, resembling witches in some vehicular black mass, their faces strange, their motives stranger.

"What the fuck are you doing, Shaw!" He heard Paul yell.

He thought for a second about how he'd envied Paul's large television, his new car. An ancient stumbled toward Davey Shaw, his lips the substance of a pavement crack, drooling, a dribbling nectar: mix of what looked like a stool sample, blood, and spit, down the sides of his mouth, like a vampire who'd just finished sucking. The old man stopped a few feet away from Davey Shaw.

The oldster cackled, the sound worse than chalk on a chalkboard, try razors on skin, moist, the sound a snake skin makes in the wind, dry husk floating away from molted serpent.

"I get it, I think," Davey Shaw told the old man.

The old man nodded eagerly.

"We didn't make it without a scratch, did we?"

The old driver shook his head, still bearing his eager smile, though Davey Shaw saw it wasn't really a smile at all, not technically. It was more a clown's sad grimace.

"I get it," Davey Shaw told the driver. The driver nodded, turned to the car and put a hand up, open-faced. The headlights abruptly went off, leaving them in the darkness and rain. Why was the old man so much younger-looking now, Davey Shaw wondered. But then again, why not, it was a night built for mystery. The young/old man waved and went back to the car, whose engine idled in the throes of desperation.

Davey Shaw turned and saw that Paul was half-in the rain, half-out, his hands moon-white and folded at waist level. "We've got one more stop," Davey Shaw told him. "Then we can go."

"Go where?"

"You'll see."

They drove back on the 30. The rain had abated some, the storm clouds passing. "Here," Shaw said. Paul pulled off the road. "What did you say to that old man?" Davey Shaw ignored him, and got out of the car and walked into the woods. Paul waited, then got out, shut his door, pushed his keychain to make sure the Civic auto-locked and followed. The path was a sharp descent, the grass wet. Davey Shaw led the descent.

"There," he said.

Davey Shaw pointed.

There were bodies hanging in the trees. The cracked up remains of the Honda Civic, burnt out, still smelled like engine.

Paul cursed.

"Lets go," Davey Shaw said.

"After you."

They walked back to the car, up the slippery slope, the rain now sprinkling like an afterthought. "You drive," Paul said. He tossed the keys underhanded at Shaw. Shaw looked at him curiously. "Why the hell not?" They got in the car and turned the beams on. The night was filled with shadow, the road filled with more. It wasn't long before they were laughing and talking, and if Davey Shaw had any regret it was that they hadn't stayed for the parade, and that he hadn't ever met that beautiful girl on the Dewer's fridge, Chad Dewer's sister. But he whooped when they got to the cemetery, and Paul joined in. Their parade was just now coming to full-swing, trumpets blazing, a full brass band with legions of drummers marching to a joyful cadence as the parade wound among the stones of the departed, their passage well-rehearsed.

The Phantom Of The Metro

With the limelight-popularity of comic book hero movies, I think I obsess on homocidal men dressed up in costumes. This one also gave me the opportunity to indulge in "purple-prose". Hope you enjoy, thanks for reading.

***

His second week working the night-owl shift at the downtown metro-line station, Ben Reynolds couldn't hold it. He left security, took the stairs, his footsteps echoing the late-night emptiness. The men's room crawled with yellow, poorly-caulked tile. He usually avoided public bathrooms, a prejudice inherited from a mother who called public bathrooms 'the pits' because of the people who frequented them, the dull-eyed, the incontinent, people without decency enough to hold it until they reached the privacy of their own homes. His mother would have set aside a special portion of her despite for the Metro's bathrooms where strangers defecated on their way to 'somewhere else'. For although Ben didn't share the sentiment, having no leftover feelings for the father he'd barely known - since his father had disappeared to the place of mysteries called 'somewhere else' without a word, or even a note, Ben's mother was naturally disposed to hate 'somewhere else' and its mysterious travelers above all else.

Ben was still in the Metro-line training program. Not that there was much to learn, to help with frustrated passengers who'd missed their connections, or the homeless who came to huddle in the station's empty alcoves, forlorn and ragged. According to Richard the night-owl shift (eight in the evening to five in the morning) was where you learned the secret art to the job - how to keep things that wanted to fall apart together.

Bald Richard, pierced and inked, scarecrow in his company uniform was off on patrol, acting as priest and confidante, bouncer and general, kissing with the left hand, pulling hair with the right. Ben went in the largest stall. He unbuttoned his dress pants and slid his underwear down, wincing at the cool touch of the toilet seat.

Upkeep of the bathrooms was one of his duties, not to scrub them clean but to make sure no one in the night and early morning destroyed them, keep the towels stocked and the toilet paper dispensers rolling. This being the very first time he'd made use of the facilities himself, from this vantage, he thought that other occupiers should feel blessed he took his duties seriously and in the two weeks he'd worked here had replaced the toilet paper religiously. The stall door was dark-stained, there was graffiti, some etched, some markered, or scrawled in ball-point. He sighed.

He heard footsteps.

He panicked, pausing in the midst of his ablutions, staring at the graffiti to calm himself. All Hail The King Of Porn. Bailey And The Bleeders. Call Derek If You Find Out About His Zipper After Midnight.

The splash of urine hitting the bowl.

A poem caught his eye. The poem's author had went to great lengths to make sure his work was permanent, etching it deeply into the door.

The Toiloet Makes Lakes And Earthquakes
He Smells Ripely As He Makes His Cripey

The piss-flow shorted to a few drops.

After interminable moments, in which he dare not do more than catch silent breath through his nose for fear of unclenching his bowels and releasing his lunch, there was a flush and the footsteps receded.

He waited until the coast was clear.

Eeny Meanie Miney Mo Catch A Tiger By His ASSHOLE - He slumped in relief.
Back at the office desk, Richard played a handheld electronic poker game.

"I was in the bathroom."

"Spare me the details," Richard said.

Richard played his game into the wee hours of the morning, cursing when he lost, ignoring Ben, who at various times throughout, had to toss out an old codger talking to invisible cockroaches, break up an argument between two well-dressed men who appeared to be business partners and had suffered a loss from wherever they had come from. Ben left the two shaking hands and holding identical bowler hats in shame. Most horrifically, a woman accosted him, declared her child was missing, "my baby is gone," she whispered, nails biting his wrist. "He's been eaten." He'd intended to call the cops until the woman's husband showed up on scene, a man who seemed to have taken fashion hints from American Gothic, who glared at Ben before leading his wife away.

At the end of his shift he learned something he wasn't sure he wanted to know.

"There's coffins on these late trains," Richard told him. "They send them when everyone's asleep."

Angela was leaving for work when he put his key in the door. She was a bank-teller and worked regular hours. He tried to make her late but she was having none of it, scooting out the door and escaping.

"I'll call you," she said as she darted down the hall to the elevator.
He fell asleep still dressed. There was a trashy television show on in which a woman was determined to tell her husband she was sleeping with his brother. No matter how she tried; going so far as to bring the brother in question to the stage; a plump brother with shaggy blonde hair, his penis purple, which he stroked while he laughed heartily. The crowd jeered when the wife straddled her husband's brother, sitting on his cock with a breathy, exultant expression - yet even when she stood dripping seed down her leg, the husband still shook his head and declared his disbelief.

He woke wondering where the hell the host had gotten to.

Angela was shaking him.

"You need to clean up," she said wrinkling her nose.
Angela made him a quick meal, before sympathetically sending him on his way carrying her soft kiss into the darkening sky. He was early. Of the two men on duty, neither of which he'd seen before, one reminded him of his uncomfortable dream, of the brother gone to fat who pranced in his sex and nakedness like a satyr. Dream-Brother introduced himself as Mitch.

"I'm new too," Mitch said. The other man said nothing, concentrating on paperwork.

"Dave," - Mitch gestured at his companion - "says that when it gets cold the homeless look for somewhere to stay."

"Yeah?" Ben asked.

"I've got the cops on redial just in case."

Richard was late. "Can't be too careful," he said when Ben told him what Mitch had said. Ben wandered the station. He was stopped by a boy, about twelve, with a bad haircut and a ratty T-shirt that had been washed until the logo was indecipherable. The boy's mother (there was no question - she hid her features but sported a head of identical hair) slept nearby. The boy clutched a comic book.

Ben felt sorry for him.

"What's the book?" He asked.

The boy stared at him. "It's not a book, it's a comic."

"Okay, what's the comic?"

"It's about a creature called the Phantom who lives in the sewers and fights monsters, like giant albino alligators."

Ben decided to keep walking but before he took a step the boy must have decided something.

"You want to borrow it?" The boy asked shyly.

"You bet," Ben answered.

While the boy tried to pretend to only half-watch, Ben thumbed through the comic. The phantom was an albino mutant, the product of a government scientist's genetic experiments. The artist had rendered him with the claws of a cat, who hid his identity in a black cape when he emerged from the sewer to walk the city. Forget the villains and forget the duplicitous action panels, the Phantom's eyes were moody and human, remarkably human in their riveting desolation.

"How long do you got to wait?"

The boy seemed surprised to be addressed - "Oh, - tomorrow," he said, glancing in concern at his sleeping mother. "We're going to live with my grandparents."

"I'll bring this back in a little bit, along with something of mine for you." Ben spoke of the comic in lost and found. Surely this lonely boy would be the better caretaker.

"Where'd you get that?" Richard asked, when Ben returned to the office.

"A kid."

Richard didn't say anything for a while then got up, picking up the comic where Ben had laid it - apparently thinking to take it with him - "Hey I have to return that," Ben protested.

"I need something to read."

"Find something else."

"Whatever," he said. "Keep it then."

Richard had been friendly the first few nights but each occasion when Ben did not pander to the bald scarecrow, Richard showed less of his friendly nature and more of the unfriendly. It also hadn't helped, Ben thought - when Angela had visited and Ben and she had retreated to a dark corner in the Metro, to steal a kiss between her big breasts capped by almond nipples, the soft skin like the gentle touch of velvet on cheek.

When they returned flushed, and he bid Angela goodbye, Richard hadn't said anything. It was long into the quiet hours of morning when Richard had begun talking in a bullying way, sharing his views on 'mixing the races' with looks at Ben to see if Ben would protest. Ben, of course, said nothing, used to similar from his mother, the same unrepressed criticisms, though culture had long ago, at least publicly disbarred such thinking, the lease of judgment was not easily gainsaid, or the fruits of such judgment, the reward which was the act of judgment itself - feeling of superiority.

He pitied Richard. The man probably went home to an empty one-room apartment, his only company his tattoos of zippers, and poorly drawn demons. Ben watched Richard on the closed monitors. Too tall, too bald, desolate enough to be sympathetic, as Richard trudged from the men's room to the public seats.

He picked up the comic book, quickly setting it back down when he felt his stomach quiver. "Shit," the word about to emerge into reality in his pants. For the second night in a row he hurried down the stairs to the men's room. Sitting on the toilet on his haunches he couldn't help but think Richard had just vacated this same bathroom hopefully - with a twinge - not the same stall. Why was it that the monotony of all the endless hours was not broken by lunch or by breaks or phone calls or even the occasional event? It was only the prayers to the bathroom God, delivered a salvation against the crushing boredom. He found himself thinking of his mother. Rheta Myers lived alone. She didn't approve of Angela, not only because Jesus the Savior did not approve of living in sin but because she had no room for non-whites destroying the foundations of her world. Ben and she were not close, he'd been a quiet, meandering child whose temperament was inherited from his father and she had wanted a child the very opposite of his dad - but there had never been open war either, not even in adolescence; when his peers were feeling the desperate mix of sex and rebellion and molting into new creatures with agendas their parents despised; Ben felt none of it, at best only easily-ignored desires. He'd continued to live with her after high school, not pursuing higher education since he had little interest. Then he'd met Angela. She'd appeared like a dream in his life and he'd seen in her something that from the very beginning thrilled him, opening new avenues of delight and he'd not been fool enough to let this dream escape. Within knowing her two months he asked her to marry him; the next day she allowed him to move in with her.

They scraped.

They lived for weekends when he wasn't scheduled (she worked a regular week) spending entire Sundays making passionate love, eating in the nude, ravishing each other, casting each other's organs in the centrifuge of memory. Neither were church-goers and Ben took private pleasure imagining his mother's head bowed in piety in her church while he heretically fucked his girlfriend blind.

(thinking these thoughts, gazing with hypnotic intensity at that poem)

The Toiloet Makes Lakes And Earthquakes
He Smells Ripely As He Makes His Cripey

He heard footsteps enter.

They were heavy, dragging steps, accompanied by bestial grunting.

To his surprise, Ben sat on the stool and prayed. He didn't pray to the God he'd forgotten or the God he and Angela had created; God of sleek flank and soft tissue: God of fucking. He prayed to the God of the bathroom. The silent, private God who had a dependable acolyte in everyone, whose protection must be surfeit.

How he hated Toilet-Talkers, men who unburdened more than their bowels, making conversation, who considered the bathroom a provocateur's Eden. Listening to the grunter he wished he had one sitting in the next stall.

"Ben how's tricks; see there's news of another War?"

In silence he mentally composed additions to the Toiloet's poem.

Next Time Ben Makes Cripey He'll Do In His Pants
He Will Not Come Here, Not Even To Peepee

The stall next to his banged. There was a sound, like smacking flesh. The grunter moaned. It was a dog's moan. The sound of slurping. Someone down to their very last drink with the straw sucking air. Then the grunting which seemed right next to his ear withdrew, it was gone. The stall rattled, dragging footsteps receded.

Ben flushed. He emerged into the empty bathroom feeling like an interloper. He bravely washed his hands, the hair on his neck standing like a bird's plumage.

***

A woman in a saffron sport suit on her way to see her family found the head. She intended to throw away a Styrofoam coffee cup familiar with the name of the chain, and screamed when she glimpsed what had already made itself a home in the garbage. The head rested surrounded by pieces of flesh for all the world like a flower bouquet. The boy's eyes open with surprise: it had been savagely sawed at the neck as if chewed, the face liberally spotted with blood-spatter.

***

Travis Corrigan walked the tracks. He took to the under-tunnel with nostalgia. Growing up, he'd heard the stories of the trains from his grandfather's lap. They'd once been an integral commercial industry - now their importance was dwarfed, their existence lay moribund as they steadily lost money, with old lines closing one by one, no new being birthed, amid the four letter words, words like bankruptcy (a word like fuck or spit) came the swell of other, cheaper transportation. In his grandfather's words, trains were the Corrigan franchise. A Corrigan had been there during the very first day when hammers were laid in sweaty, blood-soaked hands, days of cheap labor and cheaper life, to the boom when dominion was an unspoken law, work and industry had been plentiful, and then into the gradual diminishing. Travis's father Philip was the first Corrigan to break the continuity of the franchise, beginning a new franchise the Irish-American clan could hold close: Police work.

Corrigan hoped Arbogast had better luck. He was searching the other direction, where the trains eventually spilled out to East Chicago and ran unbroken to the Atlantic. Corrigan, was trekking west; trains had been called off for the duration of the search.
The boy's mother was in hysterics for good cause. Corrigan supposed that the discovery of your son's head in the garbage would do that; at the scene it had required both Corrigan and his partner Arbogast to control the woman who previous to their arrival was going through the garbage in a gruesome, heart-wrenching frenzy, tossing the evidence with soaking red hands. They'd had to manhandle her.

He'd had enough, the nostalgia worn off. The underground rails gave no evidence. Corrigan thought it likely the boy's assailant had taken the rest of the body from the station for whatever horrific purpose, whatever keen impulse that, like leaving the blood-filled head in the trash- compelled this madman.

His flashlight bobbed as he walked awakening spiders in their webs, illuminating water-colored cement. Thinking of turning back when his light found something. A pair of pants. He pulled his gun. The pants were a boy's. Next, the shoes. He lifted one tennis shoe. There was blood in them; and reflexively he dropped it, blood running down his hand. "Jesus," he said. Here were streaks of blood on the tracks, and shining his light up, more on the tunnel walls. A final wreath: the boy's shirt sopping with scarlet. Someone had bathed in the boy's blood, but what had happened to the flesh?

***

"You can always quit," Angela told him, brushing her sleek hair.
Shirt open, Ben hopped through television channels. "I can't quit right now."

"I make enough," she said.

"I'm not a baby," he replied.

She snorted. "A boy's head, what, chopped off? That's not something you deal with at a bank. Ben."

"I'll quit then," he said. "Tonight."

He wouldn't. Yet she seemed at least partially satisfied with his admission, insincere though it was.

He was late for work. When he got to the Metro, a cop was waiting out front. The plainclothes officer introduced himself as Detective Corrigan.

"They found the body," Corrigan lied.

"He wasn't in good condition," Corrigan went on. "Freak thing. Maniac chopping a kid up. But I guess you get that in these old places: a bad crowd. These's like cruise ships. People vanish all the time. Maybe it's part of the attraction, that you might not make it. But a disappearance doesn't hold a candle to this...maniac."

Corrigan paused, a brief flicker of interest, as though surprised at his own loquacity. "What I wanted to ask you Ben, was that your co-worker mentioned the kid gave you something?"

"The kid gave me a comic book," Ben answered.

"May I see it?"

"Sure," but when Ben led Corrigan to the train security office, and rifled through the desk drawers all he could find were work inventories. "I left it here last night," he said.

"Oh, yeah, you were in a hurry to get home?"

"Sure."

"How long have you been employed by Metro-Lines?"

"Fifteen days."

Richard strolled into the office. Corrigan looked Richard up and down as if Richard were a new breed of animal allowed to join the population on a probationary basis.

"Officer," Richard said. "You looking for this?" He held the comic book. "Sorry it gets pretty boring around here. Not always as exciting as last night, no Sir. Hi there Ben, I hope I'm not interrupting things."

"Son that's evidence," Corrigan told Richard.

Richard shrugged. "So officer," he said leaning against the wall - "is he hiding in the train tunnels?"

Corrigan debated his answer. "The tunnels, no, somewhere in the station, that I don't know."

***

Corrigan dunked an ash into his coffee. "Shit," he said. Arbogast sat across from him in the booth, not partaking of late night libations, rumitively studying the contents of a manila folder.
"Hey Marleboro Man, those are gonna' kill you long before a perp gets a chance," Arbogast said.

Arbogast passed over the folder.

"Anything?" Corrigan asked.

"Just a can of worms," Arbogast replied.

The waitress brought their breakfast, hot waffles for Corrigan topped with melting butter, corn flakes for Arbogast, sugarless and still crackling.

Eating, Corrigan reached for the file. Arbogast slapped at his hand. "Don't stain it." They ate in silence. Arbogast shoveled corn flakes into his mouth, napkin tucked into his shirt, while Corrigan cut his waffle into shrapnel, forking each bite twice before bringing it to his mouth.

In the folder was a history of the Metro-Line, from its swift inception to its slow failure as trains became antiquated, expensive to run and maintain, replaced by innovation. Metro-Line continued to eek out an existence serving the business class with corporate discounts for riders, sold at a rate equivalent to a bus ticket, advertising for those who wished a mediocrum of comfort unavailable to bus-riders, sleeping cabins, a dining car, the company of better-heeled men and women than found in the musty seats of the bus. Born in Chicago the business had regularly changed hands through each generation, rarely turning a profit. Metro-Line was under investigation for ignoring safety standards, a trouble they'd likely duck out of, citing the very real possibility of bankruptcy if leveled with excessive fines and resulting bad publicity.

But there was more.

There had been disappearances. A few here, a few there, not numerous enough to draw the attention of the black suit specialists at the FBI. People had a natural tendency to disappear. Unhappy husbands and petulant wives, run off with lovers. On their way from the office, returning from a vacation in some exotic Summerland, an unobtrusive trip to a grocery store for milk and eggs. But digging further: there was more that didn't settle the stomach. The disappearances tied in with the Metro-Line Chicago station, didn't fit the schematic of unhappiness. A traveling soap-salesman from Cedar Falls, Iowa, disappeared a year back. A twin due to visit a sick sister in Duluth, Minnesota. A midget stuntman hired to play a dwarf-jester in Hollywood's latest spectacle. All, among others, seen disembarking in Chicago never to be heard from again. The twin in Duluth had expired complaining of her twin's pain, talking about her sister's excoriation, her last moments spent as wild-eyed as her first. The salesman's pets had starved, battered beyond recognition - animals that had waged war against each other snapping teeth as their own bones snapped, hides rotted. The Hollywood epic used special effects to reduce a man's stature, had gone on to sell millions of tickets, responsible for millions
of empty popcorn buckets tossed in a landfill.

"More coffee?" The waitress filled their cups. Her nametag read Gretchen. "You two cops?
Yeah, I can tell, my dad was, in Utah." Gretchen's words rushed out and piled at the end with a "look, no brakes, ma."

"Oh yeah?" Corrigan asked. "Can you bring me a toothpick when you get a chance?"

When she was out of ear-shot, Arbogast winked. "Monkey's uncle, what do Utah cops do? Arrest Mormons with too many wives?"

"Called polygamy."

"Yeah."

The two were silent.

"This one's gonna' make us or break us," Arbogast said.

Corrigan tired of Arbogast's pretentious belief in a partnership that relied on the Wizard Of Oz; Corrigan a medley of the three: Tin man, Straw man, And Cowardly Lion, while Arbogast himself played Natalie Wood, a six-foot tall Dorothy, unshaven with spoilt features. They'd been partners two years and Corrigan had yet to find something he liked about the socially-inept man.

"There's a goddamn labyrinth under that station, probably rats the size cattle-dogs down there," Arbogast said.

"You don't say?" The man's ability to overstate the obvious was particularly grating. Corrigan's cell rang. He switched it on, thinking to give the caller the hard time Arbogast deserved. He listened, annoyance turning to excitement.

"It's that kid, Ben Reynolds, on the phone. They've got the guy on video," he told Arbogast.

***

A lonely man turned out to be the watch supervisor, Mr. Munst, who with droopy eyes, stood uncomfortably next to Corrigan and the Reynold's kid. The video quality was abominably bad, made worse by a poor angle. Corrigan thought that before he left the office, he'd have a word about camera placement with hang-dog the monosyllabic supervisor from hell.

There. A fat grey coat. Moving quickly (too quick for a good look).

The boy looking at a map, a large one showing all the cities the Metro-Line served. Corrigan watched the bulky figure in the grey coat, the sort a business man might wear but even in the grainy images Corrigan thought the coat looked dilapidated. Grey-coat stalked up behind the boy.

The right word for what grey-coat was doing was mincing. Playful.

Dreadful.

Grey-Coat grabbed the boy, pinning his arms and dragging him off camera. Corrigan felt a kind of horror, watching this, like a peeping tom. Had Grey-Coat taken him directly to the train tracks? Through the figures milling, waiting with tickets? Corrigan doubted it.
While the mothers sleep their children weep; something dull Corrigan remembered from Sunday School. Corrigan passed through a corridor plastered with advertisements for discounts: Ride Free From The Colorado Mountain Tops To Topeka Kansas, To Los Angeles, All The Wayward Miles; If You sign Up For Metro-Credit; Let Us Pay You. He reached the map-board. If Grey-Coat had wanted to evade notice he might have first went to the bathrooms.

Arbogast came up. "Any ideas on the 'perp?" He asked.

Corrigan seethed. How did he get such a nonsensical man for a partner? One who never missed an opportunity to use the word 'perp'.

"No idea, Tom."

Arbogast rubbed his stomach. "I think I've got a bladder infection," he complained.

"Be careful in this place's bathroom," Corrigan said.

"Why?"

He really was clueless, Corrigan mused.

"The 'Perp'," he said, saying the word slowly - "hacked the kid's head off in the bathroom, left it for someone to find in that trash can." He pointed."He hid the rest of the kid, took him to the maintenance shaft to the tracks and I imagine the boy's clothes I found were a leftover from a passing train."

Arbogast looked contrite.

"Just go to the bathroom," Corrigan told him.

***

Ben did a round. It was after midnight. He had no idea where Richard was, probably in a corner somewhere logging more hours with electronic poker - at present he didn't particularly want to find Richard. Earlier, as if Ben was his new best friend Richard had told him about a girl. "You'd like her. She was Mexican. Big ugly flabby tits. I put three fingers in her ass while I fisted her. She was bleeding like a boxer. Then I made her lick up all her shitty blood from my fingers. It was a real finger-licker."

At Ten-thirty PM he'd expelled a junky who brought her works out in public to get her fix; she'd spit curses. Well-heeled passengers pretended not to see the haggard thin woman with brutal lips and package of needles. She was loathsome to them, therefore invisible. Where mothers should have covered children's eyes and fathers tuned to the inner television station where they broadcast deeply authoritative displeased frowns - when he came upon the junky, she'd already tapped a vein, to general disinterest.

He supposed he ought to check the bathroom. Mr. Munst had put a note in the log book.
Check all facilities during normal rounds.

The women's room stank. He didn't spend more than an uncomfortable second there. It was the men's room where all he was, heart and blood, ligaments and persuasive cells masquerading as himself; the stability Ben had always known, even in his fatherless world in which Jesus Christ was a profundity, his mother's 'thing', an image wake only to her penitent woes of flagging exhaustion, a necklace totem to hang between superstitious breasts. His sense had drawn him unerringly, like a water-dowager to the stall he'd used with the poem by the Toiloet.

The Toiloet Makes Lakes And Earthquakes
He Smells Ripely As He Makes His Cripey

Beneath this:

I enjoyed the meat

In blazing black marker, squiggled at the ends in a half-caste cursive.

Ben's heart ripped. Beside the words the artist had drawn a cartoon meat cutlet attached to a bone. He listened for footsteps, the inimical sound of heels on cheap tile. He imagined the maniac feet propped, waiting in another stall, a figure in large rubber waterproof gear, trails of fresh black splitting his horribly beast-retarded face, mouth holding a reservoir of brackish, swamp water, as if sucking on the stale stuff, waiting.

But the bathroom was empty. He saw himself in the never-adequately cleaned mirror. To this splattered maniac, the boy had been nothing more than a ripened steak.

(Red and bloody please and hold the sauce.)

He walked, shell-shocked, back to security. He saw Richard on camera, sauntering near the maintenance shaft. Ben had heard of the world-underneath and the hatch was locked and off-limits but he also knew that was where Richard smoked.
He picked up the phone, reached into his pocket for Corrigan's number. He called. There was no answer.

"Fuck," he said to no one in particular. Still staring and thinking at long distance, he jumped at
Richard's touch. Richard's face was flush with excitement.

"I've found him I think," Richard said.

"Who?"

"The maniac, his nest anyway. It's creepy man. You been down in that shaft - you ever went deep?"

***

Corrigan plugged in the camera, wires hanging from the computer like the entrails of some future-beast. He played the Clash on his radio. London Calling. He and a reluctant Arbogast had placed a camera in both Metro bathrooms. He'd already skipped through the women's. A cheap small and highly serviceable camera made to record movement. Technically, he'd need a court order to do this (thus Arbogast's reluctance) but most travelers wouldn't notice if an elephant were stuffed in the stall they were using.

Corrigan ignored a group of rough young men smoking pot in front of the mirror. Fascinated, he did watch a homeless man with long white hair preen in the mirror.
The camera, like the one in the lady's room, was small and innocuous, buried under a soap dispenser.

Not that everyone would mind putting on a peep show for a voyeur, Corrigan believed. They'd
find it painful to admit but human beings cried out for an invasion of their privacy. It pleased the ego. They also dearly loved to be recorded, immortalized as they experienced the consequence of mortality. Certainly not all but many had a private fantasy through all the storms, upheavals, regrets for which there was no answer, to live on no matter how that life was obtained, the easiest being a film record. Actors must have it easier, already living their immortality. Was this any different? to be seen at one's most natural.

The footage was grainy-green, and choppy. Corrigan forwarded it through men pissing and farting, so they unbuttoned and refastened their pants in fast-forward. Men flushed or didn't some picked their nose as they urinated, wiping the ill-gotten goods on the already sour-smelling walls. Barely any washed their hands when they finished, no matter the surgeon general's warning.

(There - wait.) A little bit after midnight. The figure in the fat grey coat drug a struggling thing into the largest stall. Whatever Grey-Coat was doing required the door remain closed, and closed it stayed.

A few minutes later the door slammed open. Grey-Coat carried the boy's head in gloved hands, blood bubbling under his fingers. This Phantom - and that was what he was Corrigan thought (he had studied the boy's comic, the name had got into his conscious when describing this madman), the Phantom of the Opera, but no piano or woman, this phantom's obsession was the murder of innocents. Whatever, or whoever was stalking this station, it was death, and as inevitable, as breathing.

(He watched the video again, analyzed it again thinking to unravel it by memorizing the grisly murder. Did this thing, both phantom and record, ultimately make a permanent scar, even as it was diminished into bytes of sound and color?)

***

Dawn came and with it passengers disembarking. When Ben and Richard were relieved by their adjuncts, Richard led Ben to the Maintenance shaft.

The shaft-hatch was branded metal. Its incisors flush with the floor. It was a matter of unlocking the padlock and unscrewing the bolts that held the hatch in place; Richard did this, stripping back the bolts and lifting the hatch, revealing a smooth iron ladder wet with moisture.

Ben hesitated at the shaft's lip.

"Let me get ahold of this guy, Corrigan," he said.

"We're the security here," Richard replied. "We're what stands between people and this maniac."

Ben acquiesced.

"Just to this nest?"

"There's two of us. Don't worry."

Richard's flashlight's powers were at best vague against the onslaught of the dark. The dripping wet surfaces, the scuttled echoes of their own feet, conspired to unnerve Ben, walking behind Richard. Richard led the way, guiding their steps like a man used to it. His tall shape, however, didn't bring the sense of safety instead an intimation of doom - the tall, gaunt Richard could have been a crow-feather mantled reaper leading a journey through a formless purgatory.
They headed down wet corridors, the fauna gradually changing from cement to an older material, the two having to climb over a broken cinderblock, shattered, and distressingly the stone of the block had been beaten into a design, of a fly's face. The edges of the stone fly glowed an eerie green. "Moss," Richard said. "It's completely harmless," answering the unvoiced question. "It's the same as algae that grows in the sea."

Would this tunnel put them out at the edge of some great underground lake? Was this a vast aqueduct? If so time had not been kind. Age had left its mark on the squalid passages where the stone crumbled to the touch. It seemed as though all of it must be held up by some other-world Atlas grown weary. The titan's eyeballs jellied in their socks, his veins burst into plain sight and dangling from concentrations like shrubs. These natural caves that had been stitched by unknown engineers at the genesis of Chicago, would, no doubt, fall. It was an eventuality that this underbelly could not survive forever, and would one day collapse. Not, Ben hoped, before they got out.

Ben heard the buzzing of flies. They entered a chamber that was so large Richard's flashlight didn't touch the walls. Little flies moved into flashlight beams, their movements furious, these maggot-born.The scent of raw waste was in the air. Ben tried not to take deep breaths.
Richard paused, motioned to Ben.

"This is madness," Ben protested, looking behind him.

Richard shone the light on Ben's face, blinding him, then shone the beam at the center of the room.

"Look," Richard ordered.

Ben wiped a sweaty hand on his front, and did as Richard bid, looked down into an abyss. It was a black environ of deep terror spiraling down: a limitless throat. The void must be where the shaft became Chicago's sewer. It was a long way down, and Richard who had come up beside him, shone his light into the gulf, a light that did not pierce the black depth but did illuminate thousands and thousands of flies clinging to the moist walls of the pit. They buzzed at the interruption, their wings in multitude giving voice to a raspy hiss.

"You think he lives here?" Ben asked.

"Yes," Richard answered. He pinned Ben's arms. Ben felt the air underneath him as Richard tossed him into the void with the tenderness of a mother flinging her newborn from a burning building. He screamed, mouth filling with flies, swelling his cheeks, a few transparent wings fluttering from his nose: they'd moved into his sinus. He fell gagging into the dark hole, faster than the piss-spray from his pant leg.

Richard surveyed the darkness with a broken camera's solemnity. His blood was hot. He'd long ago perfected the art of the home invasion. It wouldn't be hard to break Ben's black bitch, spread her open. He whistled, shut off his flashlight, and the thin man turned into the darkness, eyes adjusting as he walked, in no hurry for his appointment with Angela. Ben lay broken in the dark and wet bottom. He did not think, the dead do not think. When the flies came and roosted in his remains, he did not flinch. As they moved through his memories Ben did not try to hide anything from the shit-flies, not even when they cracked his innermost hidden truths, and sorted through his dreams.

***

(Corrigan had a dream of Halloween; an eyeful of shape, Grey-Coat prancing, dancing a jig, face-hooded, submerged in pulled-up coat collars. It danced back and forth, turned, bent over, and lewdly patted its rump. He woke up sweaty).

Since Reynolds and the other man had went into the shaft and Reynolds had fallen, the phantom had been quiet. They hadn't recovered Reynolds body.

Corrigan looked at himself, in the mirror. He'd escorted Ben's girlfriend to the funeral, a beautiful girl, and since then he'd been seeing her, now and again. The funeral had been on a high, cold day, and as Angela wept, and Ben's mother was even moved to her side in sympathy, the leaves turning, the air skin-chapping, Corrigan saw a shadow at cemeteries edge, watching the mourners, in particular, Angela and Reynold's skinny, former co-worker who had shown dressed in a mottled dusty sport coat with prodigious holes and smelled like he hadn't showered for the occasion.

The figure turned.

Corrigan wondered if that was the phantom, and later that night, in his boxers, he watched the video of the killer in the bathroom. It'd been the first time since Reynold's accident.

***

They closed the Metro later that year, the final workers talking of a face, white with fly eggs and a tongue of fly wings; eyelids black, bulbous, eyes scarlet with poisons; a rotten face.

Rumor became legend.

Richard after he heard sounds in the night, and though he never gave voice to the thought, he felt trapped and wanted, being stalked even as he stalked Angela. This phantom like a dead man's memory, waited, long past the rational - to give Richard torments due. Proving of course, that the cycle of death and revenge, comes for all.

The End

'arson' first bit

Sorry that I am late getting stuff on here, it's taking me a long time to get this one out. Any thoughts appreciated.

------

In her own day she was one revered, and that she was a woman and in better shape than most of her male counterparts helped her transcend the usual fear that her position inspired and become something else entirely: terrifying and alien, unnatural. I suppose it probably seemed to the recruits under her charge to be some sort of cruel joke, that they had entered such a manly world as the military to be dominated by an indomitable woman. She never spoke much about that era to me, but I saw the expressions of the men on the base as my mother and I made our way from the small clapboard house we occupied to the on-site grocery store, or to the mechanical building to borrow a jeep to go into town. The faces of young recruits: clean, closed, brash, strangely frightening with crew cuts that made their eyes seem beady and calculating – such were there expressions when on duty. A remarkable change, though, as we passed: the faces opened and the eyes grew fearful. Or not that they opened, on their own, exactly: there was no blooming in the presence of my mother. Rather it seemed as though as she passed her aura came out of her and peeled away their faces like oranges, dug deep into the new layers of flesh and revealed the old boyhood that the recruits wanted so desperately to keep below the surface. Whether the power to make men into boys rather than the other way around was perhaps counterproductive to the base’s training goals was, I later came to understand, constantly at issue in brass meetings, but because my mother’s power extended equally to transforming the fat and hairy commanding officers into their boyish past lives, the discussions always ended in her favor.

I spent my life growing up on the base, living with my mother and making my transitive friends as they came. Two years or four, sometimes a career-man but even he would be off for advanced training after not too long. I learned to make friends for utility, rather than soul mates. The base was large enough to operate its own small school, which my mother favored over city schools I suspect in order to set an example for the recruits and young officers with family of their own. Certainly there was nothing glowing to say about the education itself, officiated by one aging vet with belt-concealing paunch and a bald head that lost flakes of skin the size of quarters.

Most of my time was spent with recruits on break, either on their way from or to the city, or otherwise with some free time. We played football, and I learned about its great men, and even at a young age could feel that something about those heroes was what motivated the man-boys I tried to play with. Season after season elapsed, and teams grew and changed. Recruits aged out and went to school or war or another base. I and the few other CO kids did what we could to maintain our own legends of the immortals we had seen: Joe Santiago, the unstoppable runner; Jefferson Cole, one of the only players to ever have developed coherent and still-used plays for our informal games; and Charlie-Come-Lately, whose nickname I did not understand until I was old enough to hear about his travails with a visiting senator’s daughter, but who in any case was the only known player to have climbed up and leapt off the roof of the small supply shed next to the football field in order to catch (successfully) a wild pass – also the only player to have attempted and failed this feat two more times. My own private history of our pickup heroes actually begins earlier, with an unremarkable player named Mason who was the first man I fell in love with, though at the time I was too young to understand it.

My understanding of my role with these energetic and generally friendly men grew and changed with my understanding of their role with my mother. It was for a long time a point of great pride to see the woman who took care of me rule so effortlessly over men who had only moments before ruled over myself in similar fashion in games, either by running over and hurting me, or picking off my pass with their towering frames, or the cruel rejection of being sidelined early on for being too young.

As I grew older, though, I began to resent her intrusions. The long green field, kept in excellent shape through all but the deepest winter by the grounds crew, lineless (always two completions for a down, and particular trees for touchdowns and touchbacks); the light woods bordering its far side, a maintenance building and supply shed the closer one; cloudless sky and the cool afternoon of North Carolina at its best: this scene became the staging of countless battles and betrayals. And always she won. The men opened their boyhood to her and folded, jogging off to resume duties wherever there was work to be done, chastened. And I, a boy of 14, after years finally having become enough of a man to be similarly undone, sullenly hunched and walking back to the house to take care of some pitiless task. From me she never received more than a glare, and though I have no doubt that the men’s fear of her was in its way more intense, I likewise do not doubt that mine was in its way harder to overcome.

At home we changed roles. Where I had once been talkative she found my enthusiasm, and where once she had been stoic I found refuge in silence. My anger is directionless but it feels righteous. Do I hate her?