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The following Short Stories were written by Mr. Louis Clayton Holliday.  All work is copyrighted and may not be used without the express written consent of the Author.  Any work used published for monetary or other tangible or intangible gain, without the author's specific, express, written permission is subject to the fullest punishment of the laws of the United States, not to mention a good whipping with a venomous snake.

The first story was originally called Foment (aka The Happiness Kit).

The second story is called Coast.

Enjoy!!

author: C. Holliday

1

Enveloped in plexiglass and submerged, along with the entire room, in chlorine-clear water, he pressed his palms firmly against the surface of the dinner table (it had become detached from the floor and begun to rise) and squeezed his eyes shut; upon emerging from the swirling darkness, he was relieved to see that not only had the map unfolded before him ceased to shimmer, but that the room’s other carefully arranged objects had also stopped their gentle undulations: the lime-green salad bowl waited patiently on the kitchen counter to be filled with raw vegetables; Monsieur G—, his son’s plump yellow cat, stretched and yawned atop the television following a long nap; fresh ice cubes stacked in his wife’s amber tumbler formed a crystalline still-life—then popped and crackled as she poured herself another bourbon at the baker’s rack opposite the stove. He now tried to resume his study of the detailed road map of St. Augustine she had surprised him with half-an-hour earlier—tried because it had gradually become more and more difficult for him to concentrate: for one, the narrow cobble-stone avenues (on one of which, he happily remembered, she had tripped and fallen, laughing uncontrollably, very late one night after her right heel had gotten stuck in the crack between two bricks) were represented by hair-thin lines the color of sand and thus were scarcely discernable among the tangled mass of criss-crossing city streets (turquoise and translucent, like a certain brand of monofilament), county roads (pale green—just a shade lighter than the thread he used to tie his favorite top-water fly), and highways (dark purple, no associative qualities). Moreover, every few minutes his gaze would inadvertently turn onto some tangential by-way, and before he knew it he had traveled off of the page and into the past to, say, an obscure, perch-filled pond hidden within the dark woods just outside of Crystal Springs, Mississippi or else (lured, perhaps, by the aroma of the buttermilk biscuits then baking in the oven) to one of the many highway diners he had frequented in his life, for example that rather unsanitary place (called, was it, The Hospitable Spoon?) built into the side of a gas station near Pensacola that served the most delicious flapjacks and raspberry preserves he had ever tasted.

He realized at last the futility of continuing to pour over that dizzying nest of nebulous lines and names, so he forced himself to return home—to Orlando, to their house, built on the shady curve of a cul-de-sac in Pine Lakes East, five years old this month, with its wooden deck, its blossoming orange tree in the backyard (the ground beneath it littered with overripe fruit he would have to collect before mowing the grass on Monday), its dining room and adjacent eat-in kitchen, where his wife now stood slicing a glistening cucumber into thick disks (their son refused to eat them otherwise), which fell onto a bed of broad spinach leaves piled high in the glass bowl her brother had given her at Christmas last year.

That melody she was singing: it belonged to one of those frightening songs forever emanating at deafening volumes from behind his son’s bedroom door, noisy, nearly wordless things in which the occasionally present verse and chorus—invariably sung at a monotonous pitch by laryngitic young men he associated with dirty, rain-wet urban streets, emotional malaise, and unkemptness—were buried deep beneath the piercing screams and tortured pleas of helpless electric guitars being mercilessly and slowly strangled by their sadistic, supposed paramours. His wife’s dulcet voice, however, surprisingly rendered the vocalist’s muddied rantings into a lucid, rather pretty ditty, and as a result his perception of that horrid number was radically transformed: what a relief it was for him to now learn that the singer had not been attempting to indoctrinate his poor son into accepting the dangerous precepts governing a morbid death sect (as he had always silently feared) but rather was merely providing his followers with an innocuous description of his hometown (Raleigh, North Carolina) as seen at daybreak from an ascending hot air balloon. How had she deciphered that garbled message? He slid his rump forward and crossed his legs beneath the table—so as to better think. Repeated listening? Culled from the square booklet which must have accompanied the compact disc?

A mystery—just one of many surrounding her character that made him once again shudder with delight at having been given the opportunity to prove that he had been the most deserving candidate to receive her affections. For him the decision had been easy, as the evidence supporting her case was not only irrefutable but irresistible as well; for example, she feared none of those things that frightened him most: car or boat accidents injurious to her or their son; financial ruin; the randomness with which the annual hurricanes vented their destructive moods; rodents; a viral infection bent on devouring his brain, thus making even the simplest legal request (the drawing of a Last Will & Testament, the formation of a Trust) a hopelessly complex conundrum. And who could contest the charm of her peculiarities? That curious manner she had of always performing her culinary work to the accompaniment of music, which she either hummed, whistled, sang, or listened to on the radio she had had him mount beneath the dinnerware cabinet; the fact that her demure body had somehow managed to retain both its youthful shape and its ability to absorb several glasses of bourbon each evening without exhibiting any of those signs which betray even the most soberly demeanored drunk; how, after an entire day of thankless negotiations on behalf of indigent criminals, wearing just those black rayon slacks and that cotton blouse, her hair (recently highlighted at the salon with sinuous blonde streaks) tied into a pragmatic ponytail, she could still arouse in him the same lust she had inspired when he had first espied her at the law library in Gainesville eighteen years before.

White, knee-high stockings. Her arms overflowing with oversized volumes pulled from the Tort Law shelves. A cry of alarm as they tumbled to the floor in a great heap: the only fragments remaining of that initial glimpse into his future. He returned his beer bottle, now empty, to the coaster perched at the edge of the table, thinking how she could likely recount the same scene in encyclopedic detail—her mnemonic gift being yet another reason why she continued to fill him with wonder. Take, for instance, what she had done earlier in the evening: as he sat reading an article on the aggressive behavior of spawning Micropferus salmoides, she had suddenly come to a halt while bringing him another beer from the refrigerator and exclaimed that she had nearly forgotten something; hurriedly, she had exited the kitchen—without relinquishing his beer—and with great urgency gone upstairs, returning moments later, jubilant, and carrying what appeared to be a brochure. "Recognize this?" she asked, and affectionately wrapped her arm around his neck while taking an impressively generous swig from his bottle. Initially, he couldn’t identify it, but then the purplish, flounder-shaped stain on the brochure’s cover reanimated a long dormant memory: she lying nude atop a thick mauve comforter in their room at Penelope’s, the St. Augustine bed-and-breakfast they had stayed in while on their honeymoon; unexpectedly, she had lunged to his side of the bed to capture between her incisors his "yummy" right earlobe—and in the process tipped over a glass of too young Merlot sitting on a saucer between them, spilling its contents over the map he had just taken out of his suitcase in preparation for their exploration of the city the next morning. Where had she kept it? In a manila envelope, together with all of the restaurant and shop receipts accumulated during their five-day stay, which apparently had been misplaced during their move to the new house. She had found it only a few days ago while rummaging through a crate stuffed with all of the compositions she had written while in college. "I thought I’d never see it again," she said, and returned to the kitchen. Then had begun the questioning: Did he remember that horribly dry salmon they had eaten on their third night? How she had swooned upon reaching the top step of the lighthouse? Or "Mac" and "Matilda" ? (the two peacefully reposing swans reproduced hundreds of times on their room’s wallpaper, so thoroughly entwined that their slender, smooth necks seemed to emerge from the same egg-shaped torso, and of whom she had been envious because they would never have to endure the anguish felt from just a moment spent apart or the interminable despair should, through some unforeseen tragedy, that separation become permanent.)

Yes, yes, he had said, smiling, he hoped, convincingly, for in fact she might as well have been recounting a story he had never read, so unfamiliar to him were the details she continued to catalogue. He was too ashamed, though, to reveal that for him only a few impressions of their original stay had survived the intervening years: the miraculous fortitude of those century-old, wooden planks that, rickety and gray, still held up the country’s first schoolhouse; the childishly small iron balls launched by the Spanish from their equally toylike cannons; and the crusty wart that lived aside the porous nose of that portly man who had stayed in the room next to theirs—a retired assembly-line worker, grandfather of four boys, expert rainbow trout fisherman, and owner of a single pinkie (the left one having been crushed in the teeth of an indifferent machine)—who had been making his way back to Albany or Aspen after visiting the theme parks in Orlando with his wife of forty-three or thirty-four years.

Neither had visited the city since that initial trip; however, early the next morning, Saturday, they would be returning for the weekend to celebrate their sixteenth anniversary. He fretted over whether she would be happy. Would he be able to recreate the conditions which had made their first stay so intoxicating that upon checking out they had not even known that April had already turned magically into May? What, in fact, were the necessary ingredients? One part moonlight reflected off his temple, one part the memory of his younger, tauter chest pressed against her own? Certainly, that bottle of Cragganmore he had secretly purchased for her—yet he knew he’d have to temper his drinking, at least during the evening, lest he be rendered impotent during that most crucial of moments. And amusing anecdotes. These, too, should be—

A violent sneeze, the cause of which he promptly identified: Monsieur G— had perched himself on an adjacent chair to lick beneath his tail. He decided to await the completion of dinner out on the deck, where the air was free of the dust particles and hair that aggravated his allergies. First, the map of St. Augustine, which still lay spread out upon the table, needed to be refolded. The procedure quickly proved too complex, however, and after several abortive attempts he was left completely befuddled; finally, he hit upon a much simpler idea: fold the map into halves until it had been reduced to one-eighths its original size. Satisfied with his ingenuity, he stood up—too quickly, though, which sent him plummeting through several viscous layers of maple—no, apricot—syrup, towards an inevitable concussion, and it was only because he managed to grasp the corner of the table that he didn’t hit the floor with a resounding thud. His near fall had gone unnoticed, thankfully, so he slowly made his way to the refrigerator, pulled another bottle of beer from the bottom shelf, and, after giving his wife a playful pinch in her favorite spot, exited through the sliding glass door.

The air outside was thick and wet. When combined with the unseasonably intense heat, the sensation created was that of moving through an engorged cumulus formed during a late August thunderstorm. He sat down on the wooden bench they had recently purchased and balanced his beer on one of its narrow planks. A girlish squeal, followed at once by an explosive splash, reached him from the pool party being thrown three houses away. The neighborhood’s requisite muscle-car disrupted the quietude of some distant avenue as it roared towards its destination. Against the wall of the house still leaned the graphite fishing poles he and his son had used the day before on a late afternoon trip to a favorite Kissimmee farm pond. He reached for his son’s rod, then laid it across his lap in order to better examine the new, sophisticated baitcasting reel attached just above its black foam handle: the monofilament surrounding the reel’s spool was a chaos of knots and convoluted loops, the result of a mistimed cast. His son’s surprisingly indifferent response to his first "bird’s nest"—that, technically speaking, it didn’t really resemble any nest he had ever seen—had initially filled him with disappointment, as had the boy’s decision not to try and immediately untangle the line himself, as any authentic angler would have done; instead, he had merely abandoned the baitcaster, taken up one of the spinning rigs they had brought along, and, as his father dejectedly pried the cap off another icy beer, plopped a plastic worm just inches away from a partially submerged tree limb.

From the bottom of his front pocket, he fished out the folding knife his wife had given him for his birthday a decade earlier. Covered with in-laid pearl, his initials carved in inky black at one end, its three regular blades, each a different length, were complimented by a pair of minute scissors, two screwdrivers (flathead and phillips), a plastic toothpick, some tweezers, and a bottle opener. Having decided to fix the reel himself, he cut free the topwater minnow tied to the end of the line, and reflected that, after all, his son had always behaved, well, aberrantly. For example, he had sprung from his mother’s womb neither early nor late, but, rather, on the exact date, April 22, that Dr. Huang had predicted. Once born, he had also failed to act in the manner predicted by the numerous infant care books his parents had devoted so much time to studying: there had been no early morning crying spells, no painful ear or intestinal infections, no difficulty in putting the child to bed or getting him to swallow those spoonfuls of repugnant mashed vegetables and fruit; in fact, he recalled, while separating a particularly snarly clump of line, the only time the boy had ever erupted in a violent fit of wailing—at thirteen months, because, it turned out, the "Complete Nine Planet Mobile" suspended above his cradle had ceased revolving before he had drifted off to sleep—had so alarmed his parents that they took him the next day to see Dr. Huang, who after hearing their description of the incident merely sighed heavily, removed her glasses, and, while rubbing her exhausted eyes, sternly advised that they consider themselves lucky at having been blessed with a practically care-free child.

But such serendipity was soon offset by a sense of private dread as it became clear that his son was following a decidedly queer line of development: obsessed, at five, with ten and twenty-year-old detective shows on television, but supremely bored with all the other fare—animation, athletics, video games—which the infamous box made available to contemporary youths; the sometimes frighteningly quiet aloofness with which he regarded his own life (never getting angry or even mildly upset, even when those absurd requests were denied, such as when, at ten, he had asked for an advance on his allowance so that he might travel, alone and by bus, to Miami in order to study first-hand the colorful architecture of South Beach); that strange diet: shredded wheat every morning, a smoked turkey breast and tomato sandwich each day at lunch, and for dinner one of a limited selection of cheeseless and hamburgerless casseroles, the recipes culled from various international cookbooks, which he would often prepare himself, along with, every two or three days, some highly complex gourmet dessert—cakes, tarts, buns, ice cream—all of which he refused to eat on the grounds that it would "result in unseemly pimples." And the way he talks, thought his father with dismay. As though he were some arcane—but then the whole deck was flooded with light, and his wife, her arms stuffed with his evening’s empties, slid the sliding glass door open with her foot and stepped outside. He noticed she was smirking.

"You know you shouldn’t try and do that in the dark," she said, and gingerly placed the bottles, six in all, into the already full recycling bin next to the door. He looked down at the reel. Without his even knowing it, both his hands had become completely entangled in the fishing line, which was now so gnarled that saving it was impossible. She approached him, her hands on her hips.

"Listen. I have to go upstairs. In five minutes, go in and stir that sauce. Aaron won’t eat it if it sticks, so don’t forget."

"Stir the sauce in five minutes," he said.

"And don’t cut yourself with that knife again."

He promised not to, and she went back inside. The thorough mess he had made of the reel reminded him of the innumerable frustrating hours he had spent during his adolescence unraveling his own bird’s-nests. That his son didn’t find the same experience as meaningful as he did was disheartening. Still, he thought, his hands at last disentangled, he couldn’t deny the profound tenderness he felt for his son, yet he never failed to feel contrite whenever he recalled that he hadn’t fully appreciated this affection until that horrific evening five years earlier: Aaron, entranced by the exploits of his favorite TV sleuth, sat on the floor, every now and then blurting out to his fictional hero the "obvious" clues he seemed to be overlooking. His parents were on the couch, she absorbed in reading over paperwork she had had to bring home from the office, he periodically nodding off. Suddenly, not long after one of Aaron’s outbursts, he watched as his son seemed to deliberately let himself fall backwards until his head had thumped thunderously against the hardwood floor. The sound caught his wife’s attention, and for a moment the two exchanged quizzical looks. Then she called out his name. The only response, however, was a terrifying trembling in his fingertips, the sight of which launched them both from the couch and to his side, by which point droplets of foamy spittle had gathered in the corners of his mouth; moreover, that initial quiver had already begun racing throughout his body, strengthening with each passing moment until he was convulsing and flopping about with such violent intensity that his very survival seemed impossible. When he tried to restrain the boy’s movements, his wife calmly insisted that he desist, then tenderly cradled their son’s head in her lap. Her peculiar demeanor was at odds with his own: panicked, he already felt the crushing weight of his only child’s absence, of his wife’s insurmountable grief, of his never again being able to marvel at the golden flecks scattered among those rich brown fields now sealed from view beneath his eyelids—these, along with innumerable other suffocating thoughts, forced his normally reclusive tears out of hiding, and it was some time—after the boy’s paroxysms had at last abated, after his wife requested that he please sober up and get the car ready, after the emergency room physician had assured them that his patient would completely recover—before he was able to dam up their ceaseless flow.

Two day’s later a Dr. Dumas confirmed what his wife had already diagnosed on their way to the hospital that night: "An abnormal electrical charge in the brain." Her brother had apparently suffered from the same mild form of the disorder for most of his life; thus, she had grown familiar with its manifestations. His only consolation was the fact that he was at last able to pinpoint a cause for his son’s idiosyncrasies; even those frequent occasions when his expression would abruptly go blank, his gaze seemingly fixed on some infinitely distant point in space, were, claimed Dr. Dumas, more than likely brain fits of moderate but non-threatening strength. With these revelations, though, came new concerns: the now persistent thought, for example, that his son would forget to take his medication, or again be seized by one of those terrible spasms, or even have one of those mental lapses and inadvertently step off the edge of a rooftop, as he had read some poor girl had done in Houston.

The image of that child plunging to the sidewalk below reminded him of a task he had neglected to perform, the possible consequences of which made his heart suddenly constrict in fear. He had by now sliced through and removed most of the reel’s remaining monofilament, which had fallen to the deck floor and become twisted around his feet. After some effort, he managed to free himself and stagger back into the house. He passed the kitchen, stumbled through the living-room, and stopped at the foot of the stairs. This would require concentration. He gripped the handrail tightly and began his slow, wobbling ascent. Against a watery screen appeared horrid scenes depicting what might be awaiting him on the second floor. Half-way up, he mis-stepped and nearly tumbled back down again. Once safely on the landing, he turned left and saw, lying just outside his son’s bedroom, Monsieur G—, who in a desperate attempt to attract his best friend’s attention had slid one of his front arms beneath the closed door. Now towering over the diminutive cat, he knocked at the door, which was already vibrating in time with the rhythmical pounding of a bass drum issuing from his son’s expensive speakers. The door, however, remained shut. He tried again, more forcefully this time, but still there was no response, and with each unanswered moment he became increasingly more alarmed at what he might find within that room until, unable any longer to restrain himself, he clutched the doorknob, held his breath, and burst inside.

2

He listened for his father’s heavy footsteps to begin their descent down the staircase, then quietly locked his bedroom door. The entire project had very nearly been ruined, two months of arduous waiting and meticulous labor. It was only because he happened to have been kneeling in front of his stereo about to switch out CD’s that his father hadn’t seen the materials scattered across his desk, which was obscured from view behind the open door—once again left unlocked, an oversight for which he chided himself, especially in light of how often he had very nearly been caught engaged in various activities that would undermine the veracity of the naive and delicate character his kindly parents believed their son to be. They meant well, he knew, especially his father, who mothered him more than the person actually assigned to that role. He went to his dresser—its frame dulled corrugated steel, with red drawers made of a transparent polymer—on top of which he kept his bottle of carbamazepine. He didn’t like fibbing to his father, but admitting that he hadn’t, in fact, taken his pills that day would have only dangerously protracted his stay so that he could reiterate once more the importance of being consistent, how they worried, etc. Since he was two pills behind, he plopped a couple into his mouth and, sans water, promptly swallowed them, doubling his dosage being his normal procedure whenever he forgot to take his medication. Though he felt that his parents’ fear that he would have another grand mal had long since been unwarranted—after all, he had only suffered one his entire life, when he was eleven—he did take solace in the fact that at least the medicine reduced the frequency of those brief "blank-outs" to just a few per day.

After replacing the bottle back on the dresser, he crossed over to his CD player and inserted the latest five-track release from The Asphodels, a four-piece fronted by two red-haired sisters, Hubris and Veloria Droong. Soon his favorite song on the disc began, the title track called "In the Deep End," a seven minute instrumental duet between the deliciously sustained and muddy signals the two sisters produced by manipulating the effects pedals and tonal knobs attached to their matching, beat-up Jaguars. On the way back to his desk, he paused in front of the full-length mirror hanging on the back of his door to analyze the symmetry of his ribcage (he rarely wore a shirt while in his room): he wondered whether Veloria (whose equally emaciated figure adorned the wall above his pillow) would find his body—the appearance of which he painstakingly regulated by strict dieting and daily abdominal crunches—aesthetically appealing. Too feminine, perhaps? And the hair, currently sandy brown and short, worn slicked back with gel, a variant on the style preferred by Neal Brine, his favorite front man. Maybe he should let it—oh, there was no time for this. Thanks to that son of a bitch X. Hammerstein.

At his desk, Monsieur G—, who had entered the room unnoticed, was investigating with his sensitive snout the fascinating paraphernalia spread out across his favorite napping spot. Before he could do any damage, though, he was scooped up, kissed between the eyes, and tenderly deposited on the bed. His companion then resumed the procedure he had previously interrupted just before his father barged in. He lifted one of the two perforated spoons X. had delivered, carefully placed a sugar cube in the center of its rather shallow bowl, then held both above the small, one-quarter-full glass of water he had earlier brought upstairs. With his free hand, he next lifted a decanter and poured its cloudy, emerald contents over the cube, which at once turned verdant, began to dissolve, and along with that pungently aromatic liquid dripped through the spoon into the awaiting water. The last step would require some fortitude: he raised the now full glass into the air, closed his eyes, exhaled deeply—then, as X. had instructed, downed it all in one great gulp.

His throat was immediately set aflame. A puddle’s worth of tears transformed the room into a blurry, undulating scene from a film photographed at the bottom of a pool; moreover, his tongue was instantly drained of moisture, as though he had been sucking on a mouthful of mint-flavored sour balls. After several rasping coughs, he managed to catch his breath, at which point he concluded that, all in all, the concoction had lived up to his expectations. He then noticed that two-fingers’ worth still remained in the decanter. Seeing no reason why it should go to waste, he darted to the bathroom for more water and then repeated the whole process once more.

Now, though, he needed to finish putting his parents’ anniversary gift together. All that remained was to cork the two bottles and arrange them, along with the specially made spoons, sugar cubes, and drinking instructions he had written out (on parchment paper, in his best gothic calligraphy), in the case he had found in College Park. From his back pocket, he pulled out the paring knife he had swiped from the kitchen and began to shave off the sides of the corks he had saved from a couple of his parents’ discarded wine bottles. Despite X.’s frustrating delays, everything had actually turned out much better than he had originally envisioned. Two months earlier, as he made his way to the kitchen late one Saturday night, he had paused to watch his mother and father as they danced slowly out on the deck to the accompaniment of "their song," a ridiculously sentimental number popular some twenty-years ago. Both, he knew, had been drinking all evening, as was their weekend custom, and as a result had become embarrassingly romantic. The scene had made him smile with gentle condescension, but then, as he pulled an apple from the refrigerator, he saw the ample supply of his father’s favorite lager and was suddenly inspired. Two days later, while his parents tried unsuccessfully to clandestinely peruse the History of Erotica aisle at a local bookstore, he quickly researched the methodology of privately brewing his own beer, an enterprise his father had often expressed an interest in exploring. Unfortunately, his discovered that the process was far more complex than he had imagined, due less to the lengthy list of ingredients required than to the fact that one’s success hinged on a number of delicate chemical reactions which, unless timed perfectly, could have disastrous effects on the taste of the final product. Disappointed, he resigned to simply having his uncle help him locate some rare and exotic ale his parents could enjoy on their anniversary weekend in between, he shuddered to imagine, clumsy reenactments of the primal scene.

A distant, sharp pain, then consciousness: a shallow cut now existed in the tip of his left thumb. "Goddamnit," he said, and grabbed a nearby dirty towel to daub the blood trickling down towards his palm. Though only his first of the day, he still lamented each instant of irretrievable time (tens of thousands by now) lost whenever he suffered one of those brief brain spasms, during which for several seconds or, sometimes, several minutes, he would take leave of his own self-awareness, occasionally even behaving like a regular somnambulist, as had also happened two Saturdays ago when, after taking the bus across town to the antique shops in College Park (in search of two green tinted bottles), he had exited Refracting Bezels only to find himself, the next instant, standing if front of the import bin at The Center Hole, a record shop located two blocks away.

Once his thumb had stopped bleeding, he took the now more narrow cork and inserted it into the opening of the first bottle: a perfectly snug fit. After doing the same with the other cork, he slipped the paring knife back into his rear pocket and then wrapped the top third of each bottle in gold aluminum foil. Finally, he held up one of the slender, identical containers for a last inspection: the liquid inside could hardly be seen through the thick, yellow-green glass and was thus rendered pleasingly mysterious; the bottle’s side was adorned with a glossy image of a dainty, nude sprite he had cut out from an old childhood picture book: her saffron hair fell thickly down to her narrow hips, while a pair of translucent wings seemed to lift her upwards towards—where? A dissipating cloudlet? Celestial mist hovering above the surface of some enchanted hot spring? He wondered how a pixie’s saliva would taste. Like a lemon drop? Spearmint flavored chocolate? Maybe—and then the spell she had cast over him was broken. What remained, though, was a pleasant tingling behind his eyes, and he realized that that elixir must indeed have been as potent as he’d been told. He looked once more at the magical name of the drink, which he had painted in gold cursive lettering above the sensuous imp: La Fee Verte. He was certain his parents would be unable to resist its charms.

He now began to arrange the spoons and sugar cubes (stored in an oversized pill box) inside the small pine case lined with red velveteen he had found by chance when shopping for the bottles. While doing so, he happened to gaze up at the colored-chalk drawing he had recently made and subsequently hung above his desk: depicting in fiery oranges and reds an enraged orangutan, it had been used as a wry piece of decoration for a back wall in his school’s modernized production of The Mystery of Marie Rogêt. All at once, feeling that divine tingling beginning to intensify, he thought of two amusing additions he could make to the bottles and, ecstatic, went to his closet to get his gold paint and fine-tipped brush. This, he imagined, must be akin to the exhilaration Auguste Dupin experienced whenever he would at last unravel those tangled threads of logic and caustic clues—a sensation he felt he had rendered especially well in his performance as the great criminologist. The same, however, could not be said of the rest of the cast, all of whom had lumbered clumsily about the stage, delivering their lines in wooden, monotonous tones—save for X., who had played the Prefect with ridiculously exaggerated effrontery. In fact, he recalled, wetting the tip of the tiny brush with his tongue, the only worthwhile contribution that fool had made had nothing at all to do with the play itself—and this, too, he had very nearly bungled. One afternoon during a break in rehearsals, in order to prolong a conversation he was having at the edge of the stage with the gorgeously waifish and pale Mink Crumb (perfectly cast as Mademoiselle Rogêt), he had recounted his disappointing experience with his initial plan for his parents’ anniversary gift. When he had finished, X., who had been sitting in the second row of seats pretending to be bored, stood up and said that he was wasting his time with that "homebrewed beer nonsense." Then, after jumping up to the stage and suavely positioning himself on the other side of Mink, he announced that he knew of something much, much better if "quality libations" were what he was looking for. Currently illegal in all but three countries in the world, imbibing it had at one point in history been the preferred method "among the cultured" for "transporting one’s self to a higher plane of consciousness." An "exquisite" shade of green ("Similar, Mink, to that stone you’re wearing"), it was so powerful—due to its unique composition—that one had to dilute each glassful with sugar and water. Under its dreamy influence, he said, he had been inspired to write a "brilliant villanelle" on "the passion that prompted Verlaine’s infamous pistol discharge." Privately intrigued, but not wanting to reveal as much to X., he had dryly inquired what, if the stuff was illegal, was the point of bringing it up? "To manufacture it is illegal. But," he continued, "the individual ingredients needed to produce it are all quite lawful to possess." He then proceeded to describe them in detail, along with the brewing process and the elaborate ritual one was required to follow when drinking it. Apparently, after five years of experimentation, one of his cousins had finally perfected a recipe that very closely reproduced the original’s taste and potency. "In fact," he said, "I could, for a price, provide you with all you needed." The mystique surrounding this unusual beverage had by now so captivated him that he agreed at once on a deal: two pints, roughly, plus two of the perforated spoons—all for twenty-five dollars. It would take a couple of weeks, said X., for him to get his hands on the goods, as he would have to wait until he went again down to his cousin’s house in Bradenton. In the interim, he had enthusiastically spent a great deal of time locating appropriate containers then coming up with and, ultimately, executing the design scheme for the packaging; when the agreed upon time frame had elapsed, however, X. had yet to obtain the merchandise ("My father," he said, "is fighting with my aunt and refuses to go and see her"). Each Monday for five weeks he heard the same excuse as to why X. had been unable to travel to Bradenton over the weekend until, with just three days remaining before his parents were to leave for St. Augustine, he demanded his money be returned and frantically began the search for an alternate present. With less than twenty-four hours remaining, having bought nothing but a saccharine card, he was stopped by X. after school and told to walk to a street corner two blocks away from campus where, with a great deal of showy pomp, X. zipped open his backpack and produced ("Voila!") a sealed glass decanter filled with an enchanting green liquid. How had he managed to get it? "I had my cousin ship it to me by mail."

Hubris and Veloria had just begun the five-minute crescendo of crunchy, distorted noise that concluded the disc’s third track, "No Coming Up." He noticed his mind had begun to feel dull and soggy, his stomach painfully hollow. Perhaps that second shot hadn’t been wise. He also realized that all he’d had to eat that day was a small bag of cashews. Wearily, he lifted the brush from the bottle’s surface to examine his work; now printed near the bottom was the cleverly romantic addition he had thought of earlier: "Annabel Breweries. Baltimore, Maryland." He then spun the bottle round to check the spelling of what he had written on the other side—the potion’s enigmatic ingredients (written down by X., then folded and hidden between his copies of Ubu Roi and Une Saison en Enfer, both gifts from his odd uncle, and useless since he didn’t read French): "Grain Alcohol, Wormwood, Aniseed, Fennel, Hyssop, Lemonbalm, Angelica, Star Anise (his favorite), Dittany, Juniper, Nutmeg, and Veronica." He still had to quickly complete the other bottle, as he was planning to present everything to his parents at dinner; that delightful numbness in his temples, though, had abruptly become an incessant throbbing, and his forearms, he discovered, had begun to tingle coldly, as though a billion straight pins were being simultaneously thrust in and out of his skin. He dipped his brush lightly in the glistening wet paint, but as he went to make a stroke against the other bottle, his hand—now twitching noticeably—suddenly lost its ability to grip, and the brush promptly dropped to the floor. A bit of rest before dinner, he decided. That’s all I need. I’ll finish afterwards. Give it to them following dessert. He turned round to lie down for a few minutes on his bed—and was met with a shrill screech: Monsieur G—, secretly sitting behind his legs, had gotten one of his front paws stepped on. His feet now entangled among those of the frightened cat, he lost his footing, twisted back around, and began to plunge towards the floor; his fingers grasped at but missed the edge of his mattress; when his coccyx touched ground, he felt a sharp pain in his lower back, then the horrifying sensation of his skin being punctured, which somehow sparked a scorching fire that immediately spread throughout all of the internal organs on the right side of his body; he turned slightly to the left, painfully aware now of what was happening, then began to spin dizzily within a mindsplitting, distorted vortex as Dr. Dumas’s adamant voice admonished him against certain behaviors, as his disappointed parents looked down at him from high above, and there was the stale stench of a wooden plank in a cold, northern state, the swirling eddies created by the Droong sisters’ relentless—

3

"Of course I do," she said. Then, whispering, her mouth pressed lightly against his left ear: "Olive, with chartreuse sunflowers. I also wore them twenty-six days later—October 7, 1979."

Her breath was hot and sweet, the lingering finish of three bourbons, straight. They were on the couch, she sitting upon his lap, both her arms wrapped around his shoulders. His right hand was deftly making its way up her inner thigh.

"Did you hear what I said?"

"Yes," he answered. "Chartreuse and— "

"No. The date. October 7, 1979."

An important day, he knew, but why remained a mystery. He started to venture a guess, but was spared from making a likely error by the cooking timer that suddenly began to ring.

"My soufflé," she cried, and promptly stood up. "We’ll finish this later. And you better have a good answer. Now go get Aaron."

He got up dutifully and headed towards the stairs, trying desperately to recall the significance of that date. Someone’s birthday? The anniversary of his father-in-law’s death? By the time he reached the top of the stairs, he had dismissed these, as well as half-a-dozen other ridiculous possibilities, and given up: his head was simply too heavy, his thoughts too absorbed with what he wanted more than anything at that moment: to kiss that soft, fleshy area just above his wife’s rear end. He knocked at his son’s door. There was complete silence, which made him wonder why, this time, he was made to wait. He knocked again and, thinking the boy might be asleep, loudly called out his name, told him to get up, that dinner was ready, that he needed to put on a shirt. The only response, however, was the sight of Monsieur G’s— yellow arm now protruding from beneath the door. He concluded, once more, that the cat was insane, then, though he didn’t like doing so (but what choice did he have?), gripped the doorknob and attempted to go in. It took a moment, but he soon understood that he was locked out, that there was no way for him to enter the room. That old persistent panic gripped his heart once more. He rapped on the door more forcefully but then frightfully recalled that his son had always been a light sleeper, and that had he actually been napping he would have already woken up and announced, grumpily, that he was on his way. His breathing became more rapid. He couldn’t alarm his wife, but how to get inside without crashing down the door as he frantically wished to do? At last, a solution: he reached into his pocket and pulled out his knife. Kneeling in front of the door, Monsieur G’s— arm stupidly swinging back and forth, he pulled out the flathead screwdriver in order to remove the doorknob entirely. When he inserted its tip into the screw, though, he discovered that he had, in fact, taken out the bottle opener. He cursed violently, then lowered the opener back inside the knife—in the process pinching a fold of skin on his forefinger; the excruciating pain forced him to drop the knife, which bounced several times on the hardwood floor and landed several feet away. Nothing good could come of this. He heard his wife call from downstairs, wanting to know why they were taking so long. He groped about desperately, but for some reason the floor had begun to shimmer, his brain seemed made of muck, and he couldn’t fathom why he was being made to fumble about trying to grasp that pearlish object resting on the bottom of this murky lagoon, while his son, just a few feet away—and then, dreadfully, he remembered the significance of October 7, 1979, which forced him to endure, simultaneously, the joyful memory of kissing that fleshy valley at the small of her back for the first time and the utter horror of what he instinctually knew was behind that door: entwined, these two unendurable thoughts began to rob him of his very breath, and soon he came to long for the delirious oblivion they proffered, to sink into the thick sludge through which he was crawling—never to be resuscitated.

author: C. Holliday

Traveling now at impossible speeds, Rusty Farr was fast approaching that explosive moment of absolute joy when everything (for example, the red, mocking numerals of his digital clock, the engorged pimple that had burst through the skin just below his left eye, his mother’s grim countenance, Peter’s pink, rough tongue—everything, that is, which added by its irrefutable existence to the weight of his daily despair) would dissolve into nothingness, thereby affording him a glimpse, albeit ephemeral, into some otherworldly bliss. He had transformed himself, this time, into a muscular, thick-tired bicycle, his torso its hard, titanium frame, his neck the rigid seat-post, his upturned face the comfortably soft place where now there rested the even softer rump of Emily Luce, the coed with creamy calves and a dainty splash of freckles dotting her cheekbones who lived in the unit adjacent to his own; she had been working the pedals (which were his hands) steadily and with enthusiastic vigor for some time so that her inner thighs had become moist with warm sweat; each successive leg thrust resulted in a several yard gain down the nearly vertical, onyx paved road, the terminus of which, now less than a minute away, was a ramp that would send them airborne, floating high and rapturous above the glassy Atlantic; Rusty had just begun to sense those initial tinglings of jubilant weightlessness when, from another, despicable dimension, he heard a familiar dog yelp once, twice, then three more times, and before he could enter that luminous cloud hovering patiently in the near distance, the entire scene abruptly slid from view, replaced by the dull white of his bedroom ceiling.

Profoundly disappointed, sockless, Rusty was left, really, with but a single option: reach down and retrieve his favorite sneakers from their hiding place beneath the bed.

Having put in over two years of dedicated service, the shoes had become encrusted with a thick, brownish mixture of playground dirt, rain puddle residue, and road dust; their laces, once thick and white, were now so soiled and frayed that only a few resilient threads were available for forming the necessary loop knots; in addition, identical, quarter-sized holes had formed under each of his biggest toes. Unlike his mother, though, who the previous day had grown so indignant upon finally seeing the extent of his footwear’s decrepit condition (he had kept their soles carefully concealed from her for months) that she went out and purchased him a brand new pair (glaringly white, two garish red stripes), Rusty interpreted those scars and scrapes as proof that he was taking proper advantage of the few hours available each day for "living," which for him meant, in part, precariously long (and forbidden) exploratory trips into the surrounding neighborhoods on his bicycle, games of tag football in the parking lot, even (begrudgingly, only on especially desperate days) assisting his frighteningly silent and aloof father with maintenance work around the complex—essentially, any activity that would allow him respite from the odious confinement of the apartment’s implacable walls.

Upon opening his bedroom door—which he was permitted to close but never, ever to lock ("What if there’s a fire?" his mother had screamed, disingenuously, he believed, the first and final time he had dared try to afford himself a bit of genuine privacy)—he was met, like every other morning, by the eternally complacent gaze of Peter, the pearl-colored poodle his mother had adopted a year earlier from an oversized litter delivered by the family pet of an impoverished parishioner at their church. What pleasure it would have given Rusty to shatter that despised beast’s jaw with a violent kick, then watch as it sailed (crying miserably from the unexpected blow) across the living room, its spindly legs askew, the painful throbbing in its mangled snout ceasing only after it had smashed through the quartered window pane above the couch and crashed, skull first, upon the indifferent sidewalk outside. Only by summoning all of his patience and self-restraint ("A boy’s best friends," according to Father Dimm) did he manage to resist giving in to his dark urge.

"Come on," he grumbled and proceeded down the hall. Peter—aware, apparently, of his own eminent freedom—ran on ahead, and when Rusty arrived at the front door was hopping ecstatically on his hind legs, his front paws frantically scratching at the polished brass knob.

Once outside, Peter darted immediately towards the young pine tree he reluctantly shared with a neighbor’s Great Dane. Suspicious and serious, he plunged his nose into the dew-wet wood chips surrounding the narrow trunk, and not until he had twice circled the tree did he at last pause, glance warily in the direction of the second floor window where the Great Dane could often be seen surveying the kingdom below, and shamelessly lift his rear leg. Rusty suppressed a yawn—born one-half of drowsiness, one-half of pure boredom—and leaned back against the black iron fence erected along the complex’s eastern property line, which passed a mere ten feet in front of their apartment. A small engine struggled to life in the distance; he turned round and, squeezing his face in-between two of the fence’s vertical bars, absorbed the sumptuous details making up one of his most beloved scenes: the middle-ground consisted of Paradise Lakes, a subdivision built across the street; it was filled with powder-blue and gray-trimmed homes, their exteriors frosted with thick stucco (more appropriate, he imagined, atop a sugary sheet cake than in the outskirts of a city), and the shimmering surfaces of colorful new cars and trucks parked in identical driveways or jutting out of identical opened garages; to the right, upon a meticulously landscaped lawn, that bald, obese man who emerged from hiding only during the summer months, a thick forest of curly black hair stretching down the valley of his back, laboriously pushed an aging mower that sputtered and choked, gasping, it seemed, for its final breath. A survey taken a year earlier, when he had first pedaled at a leisurely speed through the recently completed neighborhood, revealed that the streets were laid out in large concentric circles, each growing smaller and smaller in circumference until one arrived at the very center where on the sun-dappled surface of an artificial pond an observant gazer could enjoy the reflected images of screened-in porches, volleyball nets, and private kidney-shaped swimming pools. Overhead, another airline jet continued its angular ascent from the runway located six miles to the south. Rusty, whose travels thus far had been limited to a hundred mile radius, envied those lucky passengers; often he would stow away in one of their suitcases or trunks, concealing himself beneath swimming suits or stacks of folded linen, and once inside some foreign hotel room clandestinely make his escape to spend the remainder of his days running over the hot sands of the Riviera or exploring the lush forests on one of Hawaii’s smaller, less populated islands. To his left, just visible in the background, the Expressway underpass could be seen some three hundred yards away. He recalled having taken it several times in the past, back when his parents still made each other laugh at least once daily by means of an obscure system of winks and knowing glances; on those Saturday afternoon excursions to the eastern shore, he would lay on the ribbed vinyl backseat of the family sedan, his head propped against a door handle, his feet positioned on either side of the opposite window, and admire the intermittent gaps of blue that appeared between long stretches of green tree tops until, three-quarters of an hour later, when the car engine would begin to strain as it started up a steep incline, he would raise his head and enjoy from the top of the arching causeway a picture available no where else: the window filled half with translucent sky, half with mottled sea. He faced again the dismal complex and sadly calculated that almost two years had elapsed since he had last savored the taste of cheesy corn chips dusted with wind-blown sand, of the sticky residue left on his skin once the sun had baked him dry following a swim, of deliberately throwing the frisbee just wide enough so that his father would have to make a clumsy (and invariably unsuccessful) lunge for it, his belly slapping humorously against the ocean surface.

After a moment of sullen quietude, Rusty glanced mechanically in either direction and, slowly, registered an alarming fact: he was alone. His mother’s thick palm swooped down from above and struck him in the jaw, leaving the shadow of its likeness in the form of a smarting red welt. Panicked, he called out the dog’s name; the only response, however, was the solitary echo of his own voice. He broke the world over his knee, then headed towards the far side of the building to investigate Peter’s latest disappearance. He had scarcely taken three steps, though, when his charge sprinted from around the corner, looked momentarily in Rusty’s direction, barked stupidly, and squatted in the grass a few yards away, his face contorted in a fit of intestinal agony. Rusty, both relieved and annoyed, took the opportunity to examine a trifle he had happened to notice while making his way along the sidewalk: an amber plastic bottle of sun-tan lotion resting on a crumpled lavender towel outside Emily’s front door. Stealthily, he walked over and lifted it to his nose—cocoa butter, paradise; he then treated himself to a screening of his most treasured slideshow: rich, color-soaked images of Emily stretched out upon her lawn chair in the grass next to the fence, three meager scraps of bright pink rayon stretched inadequately over those magical regions forbidden to public perusal, her mauve-painted toes wiggling in time to the poppish rhythms emitted from a portable radio, all recorded from between two imperceptibly separated slats in his bedroom window blinds; already he anticipated those dangerous midday sessions of secret surveillance still to come (nearly three months worth), and since Emily had in certain areas grown slightly plumper over the last year—again, a series of high-toned yelps forced Rusty to cut short his furlough from the world. He looked up to see Peter squeezed two-thirds of the way through the fence, his rear legs kicking desperately so that the remainder could follow; across the street a toddler crept down the sidewalk aboard a purple tricycle, followed a few yards back by a young blonde pregnant woman being pulled against her will towards the street by a sleek powerful Doberman attached to a blood-red leash. Simultaneously—or fortuitously—the chest-rattling roar of a mufferless engine suddenly erupted off-screen and drowned out the barking dogs (Rusty recognized that signature sound: in a moment a yellow hot-rod, piloted by a tempestuous, cropped-haired teen, would come flying down the street). A pulpy clump of brains, fur, and blood? Or a limp, deflated corpse, in tact save for the sizeable chunk of flesh ripped from its neck? Both possibilities were equally satisfying. Fed up, Rusty bellowed in his deepest, most terrifying voice for Peter to come and then ran briskly toward the fence. The words penetrated Peter’s hide and traveled up his spine, turning it to jelly; quivering, he looked back, saw that a far more murderous and red faced Sirius was charging down upon him, wisely shifted into reverse, and scurried quickly back to the apartment. Rusty then watched as his counterpart across the street, who had by now been dragged to the curb, gave the still-growling Doberman a hard whack across the back with a plastic toy bat and yanked on the leash—just as the hot-rod, which had switched to the English side of the road, thundered passed, its driver laughing demonically, a cigarette clinched between his teeth. Rusty now became aware of a warm, soft substance (chocolate pudding?) seeping into the hole on the underside of his right sneaker; he looked down and, lifting his foot, saw the ringed impression of his shoe sole (complete with an encircled toe print) pressed into a moist mound of lime-green mud.

"Son of a bitch," he said, his left forearm pressed tightly against his nostrils.

2

Ever since sitting down to breakfast—a plate of arid grits and butter-drenched toast left by his mother atop the stove—Rusty had been struggling to realign the universe. The bubble normally suspended directly behind his sternum, its position there indicative of cosmic equilibrium, had inexplicably undergone a lateral shift. Rusty would experience these occasional displacements as a vague discomfort originating at the upper-tip of his spine and then traveling from node to node along his synoptic pathways until his entire body oscillated with a dull pulse that effectively prevented him from satisfactorily integrating either his corporeal or psychical self into the surrounding matter. Thus, he kept having to rearrange his numbed, cramped legs beneath the table’s surface, his fork refused to pass between his lips without pricking the perimeter of his mouth, and the watercolors adorning the opposite wall (a droll farm with penned-in horses, conventional seagulls circling above a conventionally ominous promontory) had somehow seized control of his gaze and locked it onto their dreary vistas. Recalibration typically occurred as soon as Rusty realized why he had been dislodged in the first place: a book returned upside-down to the shelf, a forgotten and therefore unfinished chore, that he had ventured too far from home on his bicycle and thus missed his curfew (evidenced by the streets suddenly being awash in twilight’s blue-gray hues). He had considered and dismissed already several possible causes when, as one of the fork’s prongs again nicked his lower lip, the front door abruptly opened—then slammed shut; immediately he regained control of his senses and, just as quickly, understood what had triggered this latest episode: his mother had yet to make her first appearance of the day.

She stood in the foyer (having walked, he assumed, over to Mira’s, an obnoxious, chain-smoking neighbor who allowed her twin daughters to roam about in diapers rather than "suffer" too many "intolerable treks" to the complex’s laundry room), one hand perched defiantly on her hip, the other holding aloft by the shredded ends of their laces the shoes he had left outside. Slowly, in terrifying spondees: "What did I tell you to do with these?" her voice trembling with a familiar portentous rage. He told her, then readied himself to duck. In the suspenseful silence a decision was made: her eyes (swollen; inviolable dark rust contaminating reddened fields) fixed on the bridge of his nose, she unstuck herself and, wordlessly, carried his doomed pals to the kitchen, untied the bulging black trash bag (which he had forgotten, again, to take out the night before), and shoved them with unnecessary force to its soggy center. Only then was he at last released from her hypnotic grip. There followed the customary, exaggerated "Umph!" (meant, he knew, to both register her disapproval and engender guilt) as she threw the re-closed bag over her shoulder and lugged it out the front door.

Steam, infused with the rich stench of mustard seed, escaped the pasty grits he had raised to his lips. He couldn’t stomach another forkful, for even her cooking had been affected by the mysterious condition responsible for the drastic mutation she had been undergoing over the last two years. He didn’t know which disgusted him more: the paralysis induced by her venomous disposition or the burdensome fact that there had once existed another creature—watery breath, warm lips against one’s earlobes—whom he could visit now only in the prison of memory. That former being, for example, would have sweetly taken the plate he now pushed away and replaced it with a bowl full of sugary cereal as compensation for a failed culinary experiment. And those groggy, now cherished weekday mornings: by the time her gentle nudging would release him from the clutches, say, of a dough-cheeked dream-nymph, she would have already risen, bathed, and poured her slim figure into one of those smart suits, lit up by oversized gold or pearl buttons, which she wore each day to the office; sections of her hair—then a ruby-rich shade of fabricated red—would be wound around half-a-dozen fat cylindrical curlers, the remainder being left free to fall to the lower reaches of her back. Perhaps if he had greeted her with hugs instead of those grumpy protests against the tyranny of school? Then again, perhaps—but it was useless; countless hours of exhausting ratiocination had produced only a few inconclusive clues: a series of visits to the doctor, muffled sobs late into the night, a brief hospital stay (to have, said his father, a "simple procedure"), then weeks of sustained silence (save for a mumbled acknowledgement when he had delivered those six fiery sunflowers—stolen from an exploding garden nearby—to her recovery room), more trips to a different doctor (on Tuesdays and Thursdays, for almost a year), the sudden desire to own a dog, and the final emergence, from what black mire thick with hate he did not know, of the hideous brute who subsequently usurped his true mother’s role—at which point, all smiles stopped.

The garbage disposal greedily swallowed a triangle of toast while in the sink’s right compartment his hand searched through the murky stagnant dish water for the metallic sponge—found it. Suddenly, a broad shaft of sunlight traveled from right to left across the solemn kitchen. "Did your father come by?" said her voice, more accusatory than inquisitive. Rusty answered no, and with wall-rattling strength darkness reigned again. He dreaded having to look at her. She had taken to wearing sleeveless "house dresses" of the billowy, floral-patterned variety that hung loosely and stretched down to the middle of her prickly shins; her jowls, which had doubled or tripled in size along with her thighs, slouching breasts, and overall girth, bunched together in thick folds beneath her ever dissolving chin; and those colorless thin lips, that splotchy complexion (she had renounced make-up: "What’s the point?" she once shouted in sob-choked despair to his inquisitive father), the butchered, chemically destroyed hair (dung-brown, scarcely two inches long, and styled with a hand blender)—it was all too much. She would by now be cradling the dog in her arms, cooing into its wet nose and rubbing its hot stomach. Rusty pulled the plug free of the drain and watched the water retreat. Having decided to use his usual story, he put the escape plan into action.

"I’m going to Chris’s," he said, and started towards his room.

"For what?" she demanded to know, her head tilted back to avoid the dog’s enthusiastic tongue.

"The usual reasons."

"You know I dislike that foul-mouthed little wretch."

By this time he had entered the hallway, and since he in fact shared her opinion he chose not to come to Chris’s defense. Before he could reach the sanctuary of his bedroom, however, she brought him to a halt with a screeching "Don’t walk away from me!" Calmly, he turned round to await the scene’s end. She entered the hall, Peterless. "First of all," she began, "if need be, I’ll gladly demonstrate, again, how to show me the respect I deserve." A hot shiver shot through the back of Rusty’s thighs. "Second, your agenda, I’m afraid, is already full for the day." She then proceeded to fire off one of her infamously dizzying lists of tasks (devised, he believed, especially for his own private torment), only some of which actually managed to penetrate his consciousness’s nearly impermeable shell: these included picking up a "package" Emily had for her next door, locating where in the complex his father was "hiding" and keeping him company ("How you do it I don’t care," she said. "Just don’t let him out of your sight."), and making sure he was back home by one-thirty, showered and ready for the two o’clock appointment at the barbershop she had made without his knowledge. "I won’t have you embarrassing me at the retreat with that mop of yours," she said with finality. Momentarily stunned by the deluge of information, he struggled to decide which to respond to first. He chose the last: "Retreat?" he said, incredulously. "That’s not till July." "I’d suggest you review your calendar," said his mother, and triumphantly exited the hall. The next instant he was at his desk and pulling from its bottom drawer his Twelve Apostles Yearly Calendar. To his dismay, beneath Judas’s wry grin, he discovered he had confused the departure date of his church’s annual Bible Camp Retreat, for there, in angry black ink on the twenty-seventh of June, was the inverted cross he had scrawled to indicate the temporary end of his freedom.

Four days away. Three weeks imprisoned in the airless barracks (or "log cabins" as his youth group director called them) deep within the muggy, mosquito infested Ocala National Forest where he would have to suffer the inane ritual of morning, afternoon, and evening "Bible study," white bread sandwiches, Tony and Todd Bunkle’s torturing of small mammals and reptiles (as well as their treacle smiles from the back row of the choir), cold showers, "campfire songs," and countless other equally repugnant "activities" meant to "enrich the soul" and "strengthen one’s faith" (this from The Word, the church’s monthly newsletter). The stratagem he had devised back in April of contracting a debilitating strain of diphtheria or bronchitis (by walking barefoot in the weedy, bacteria-thick shallows of the pond at the center of Paradise Lakes or by visiting his chronically ill uncle) now had to be abandoned, as would his grandiose plan of traveling farther than ever before on his bicycle (all the way, even, to the university, some five miles to the east); most disappointing of all, though, would be the twenty-one missed opportunities to absorb the oiled-up minutiae of Emily’s prone, sun-roasted limbs; he had even concocted—and then, all at once, the irritating symptoms of his immediate future were relieved by a warm infusion of unexpected joy as he realized—Could she be that dumb?—the true implications of his mother’s most recent speech.

3

For the third time in half-an-hour, Rusty hastily removed his shirt to ponder what was arguably one of the most significant questions to be raised thus far in his life: Would Emily find his bony, hairless torso irresistibly attractive, or just plain repulsive? He felt his nut-brown tan and flat abdomen would be sure to catch her eye. So, too, the masculine bravado of the inch-long scar stretching diagonally over his heart (a remnant of the dog’s "playful" youth). His pectorals, however, were decidedly, well, adolescent. Trisha, a bespectacled neighborhood fourth grader, rolled by on her old-fashioned metal skates and gave him a curious look (he had been standing outside Emily’s door for nearly ten minutes), and it was at this point that he decided against the raw sensuality of shirtless summer fashion. So, following some initial confusion over which appendage belonged in which hole, he squeezed his head back through the bright red, pocketless T-shirt’s narrow opening. A palmful of mousse filched from his mother’s bathroom had allowed him to create a perfectly straight part down the middle of his cotton-white hair and comb the longish, limp bangs so that they remained on either side of his eyes (whose sky-blue depths, according to all of his female relations, were his most alluring physical trait) and concealed, he hoped, the pimple he had pinched dry before stepping into the shower. A pair of baggy, emerald-green shorts and standard two-dollar flip-flops completed the ensemble.

As the familiar lyrics from a current radio hit issued forth from the apartment, he rehearsed again the carefully prepared remarks he had written and re-written in his head over the last hour. Though he had been to her place twice before, this would be the first visit not tainted by his having to silently lurk behind his mother’s bulky frame as she collected old clothes for the church’s charity drive. He made a final inspection (zipper: closed, breath: toothpaste-fresh) and nervously raised his trembling fist to knock. Just then, the door swung open, and a girl—not Emily—burdened with two overstuffed trash bags in her hands stopped abruptly on the threshold. "Jesus!" she shrieked. Rusty quickly backed away, stammering his apologies. "You scared me," she said, now smiling with relief. After identifying himself, Rusty then managed to explain his purpose for being there. "Okay," said the girl, who then turned and shouted Emily’s name over her shoulder. "You can wait in here." She wore her hair in a ponytail and no make-up—the look of choice, he had noticed, of hard working females. While passing him on her way down the sidewalk, she expressed the usual disbelief at how hot it could become on a June morning in Florida. Rusty concurred with an insightful "Yep." He then concluded, somewhat guiltily, that it was quite possible that this girl—barefoot, the wispy white threads dangling from her cutoffs clinging to her sweaty thighs, the tails of her T-shirt tied into a knot several inches above her navel—was quite possibly even more ravishing than Emily.

Inside he discovered that he had interrupted some type of cleaning operation: the walls were completely bare, the television, VCR, and stereo had been grouped together in the middle of the living room, dishes (some wrapped in tissue paper) rested in neat stacks on the kitchen counter, and three or four cardboard boxes sat patiently on the floor, their open mouths waiting to be filled. A loud thud emanated from another room, followed by a "Damnit!" in Emily’s always dulcet voice. Rusty cleared his throat. A moment later she appeared, vigorously shaking her yellow-kerchiefed hair which released into the air a flurry of silver glitter, a good deal more of which was splattered over the front of her overalls. Without looking up, she said, laughing, "That stupid box of Halloween decorations fell on my head." "Your sparkling radiance needs no further decorating," said The Aspiring Poet, located, apparently, in some hidden corner of the room. When Rusty realized that those words had in fact come from his own mouth, he grabbed a pair of scissors from the coffee table and promptly cut his tongue in half. "What?" said Emily, who now glanced up and saw that she had a visitor. "Rusty!" she said. "Ça va?" Having narrowly escaped a potential disaster, Rusty thought it best not to improvise anymore and so stuck to the script. He had come over, he said, to pick up a package for his mom. "Package?" said Emily, her forehead delightfully wrinkled in puzzlement. Then, after a few seconds of reflection, her eyes widened, and she aimed her forefinger heavenward: "Ah, now I remember. But where did I put. . ." She then began darting from box to box, peering inside of each while at the same time keeping up a barrage of questions centered around Rusty’s present state-of-affairs. Yes, he answered, school was over. Four "A"s, two "B"s. Not much, really, just relaxing. No, no where special. Just to Ocala for a—"I think it’s in my room," she said suddenly. "I’ll be right back." In her absence he tenderly held around the hips her far more acquiescent twin and removed, one by one, each particle of dazzling glitter from the surface of her creamy cheeks with the moist tip of his tongue. At about this time the friend returned. "Did you find her?" she asked, somewhat out of breath. "Yes," he said. "She went to her room for a minute." "Ooh, I love this song," she said, and proceeded to the kitchen where she turned up the volume on the radio and started removing glasses from the cabinet. Feeling confident once more, Rusty ventured a conversation. "So," he said, "you guys are really cleaning up the place." He walked a few steps closer in her direction. "Actually," she said, "we’re packing. Emily’s moving in a couple a days."

Rusty watched in silent befuddlement as she wrapped a heavy ale goblet in pink tissue paper while gently and obliviously swaying to the radio’s happy rhythms. Having just experienced the equivalent of a cosmic hiccup, he hoped he had merely inserted into her sentence a random word from the song then playing. "Pardon?" he said at last. "Packing," she responded in a louder voice. "Emily’s moving to Miami this weekend." Moving? To Miami? Not only was it inconceivable that she would no longer be sleeping in a room separated from his own by a few scant inches of plaster, but the very notion that she would leave him for what the TV suggested was little more than a composite of pedestrian-thronged sidewalks, beach bikes, and checker-playing Cubans was impossible to believe. Therefore, suddenly turned detective, his tone surprisingly serious, Rusty set about interrogating her to discover the real reason why he was being abandoned. "To study dolphins," she answered. "You know, marine biology. She’s transferring to a different school. We’re gonna be roomies." At this point Rusty dealt a final, fatal blow to that figure, that unquestionably sadistic force, responsible for plotting the miserable events of his life. He now felt ridiculous, effeminate even, in his silly red shirt and green shorts. He had an uncontrollable urge to violently dishevel his carefully sculptured hair. And when Emily re-entered the room, holding a square object wrapped in a brown paper bag, smiling at him with those glistening green eyes, those naturally straight teeth, he for a moment wished her to meet a horribly painful death. "Here you go," she said cheerfully. As he accepted the package, his fingertips grazed the back of her hand and, simultaneously, the hot animosity nearly urging him to tears subsided as he relinquished his self in quiet surrender.

First Sam, his best friend in the complex and in the world, had been taken three months earlier to Titusville by his recently divorced mother. And now Emily, the only other person around who didn’t thoroughly disgust him, was leaving, never to be seen again. Rusty didn’t know how he would survive the summer, much less the coming year. He glided slowly to the edge of the curb, then stood up on his bike’s pedals for better leverage. Just before pulling back hard on the handle-bars, though, he reconsidered: the chain, nearly rusted through, had fallen off the sprocket again a few minutes earlier. A violent landing might dislodge it once more. He therefore let first the front, then the rear, tire fall gently onto the asphalt. From the direction of the pool came the regular cacophony of hysterical shouts and subsequent noisy splashes. Roger Borne, a mean-spirited seventh-grader whom nobody liked, sat on the bumper of his older brother’s beat-up truck, guiding a remote-controlled car back and forth over a twitching, upturned palmetto bug. The metal teeth of his bicycle’s pedals cut painfully into Rusty’s feet, for though he had changed into his favorite riding shirt and shorts, he had refused to don those too tight new shoes and so was currently barefoot. Soon, however, he arrived at the blue dumpster located next to his building. Fortunately, it hadn’t been emptied in several days, so the bag he sought wouldn’t be buried too deeply. He leaned his bike against the dumpster’s side, lifted its heavy steel lid, and was hit by a thick wave of hot stink. As expected, he saw his mother’s signature double-knot atop a bag not too far from the opening. He reached in and removed it to the grass so as to spare his tender soles from the asphalt’s scorching surface. The plastic tore easily, and a quick search subsequently located the sneakers beneath one of his mother’s empty pill bottles. Smeared with a touch of raw egg white and pepper-spotted flour, but nothing a trip to the water faucet couldn’t cure. He slipped them on, leaving the laces untied, and rode away towards the center of the complex.

Per his mother’s orders, he was also on the look-out for his father; however, ever since their relationship had deteriorated into a series of trivial domestic exchanges consisting, at best, of two or three sentences ("You seen the remote?" or "Tell your mother we’re out of rum"), Rusty had come to dread those uncomfortable and sad occasions when they were forced to spend time together alone. Luckily, since Russell senior left the apartment by seven-thirty each morning and often vanished again after dinner on emergency calls, such situations rarely now arose. Were it not for the fact that his mother would be sure to inquire later if he had done as she had demanded, Rusty wouldn’t have bothered wasting the rest of the morning (not to mention a vile dark mood—the best fuel for attaining top speeds on empty avenues) handing his father tools or making trips for him to the maintenance supply shed. While rounding one of the sidewalk’s sharpest and therefore most exhilarating curves, Rusty came upon a disappointing scene: the golf cart his father drove when traveling about the complex. Stacked in the back were two-dozen or so new air conditioner filters. "Goddamnit," he said, for the first time without fear of reprisal. The filters, replaced every year at the beginning of summer, meant he would be spending hours inhaling thick, dry clumps of dust and hair, tedious effort for which even the glasses of cold iced soda the tenants would often give him as he worked couldn’t compensate. As he made his way down to the outdoor faucet at the far corner of the building, he resolved to change—somehow, oh, even something drastic—this wretched state of things.

The faucet handle, of course, had been tightened by one of Goliath’s brawny descendents, so it was some time before Rusty’s meager strength was able to twist it open; moreover, instead of the slow trickle he desired, the tap let loose a powerful thrust of water that promptly soaked both his shoes and his shins. "Swell," he said, thoroughly dejected.

Half-heartedly, he raised his bike up and began pushing it back down the sidewalk (believing by doing so that his shoes would dry out sooner). Just then he saw his father emerge from unit 1204 and toss a dirty air filter into the back of the golf cart. He had lately lost a good deal of weight and, furthermore, had started shaving on a daily rather than a weekly basis; with his new austere jaw line and short cropped hair, he closely resembled that younger, athletic self Rusty had seen in photographs taken during his father’s stint as a supply sergeant in the Marines. He tried to imagine his mother’s nervous, shy reaction the first time she saw—but then, without warning, the planet shifted violently on its axis, and Rusty was momentarily paralyzed: as his father stood bent over the cart, a woman in a leopard-spotted bikini crept on tip-toe out of the apartment, a mischievous grin on her face, and wrapped her arms around his father’s chest from behind. Rusty then saw him smile broadly, turn round, and kiss her tenderly on the mouth, those rough, strong hands of his resting softly on her hips.

The few seconds that followed would be lost forever. As remembered later (with a shudder of despair), the remainder of the scene consisted of only two details: himself pedaling as fast as he could in the opposite direction, and the sonorous, perhaps even desperate, sound of his name being shouted as he rounded the corner with such recklessness that he nearly lost control.

That he could out race that battery-powered golf cart was undeniable, but whether he’d be able to reach his mother and win back her grace by communicating the mystery that had been revealed to him before his father burst in with explanations, with contradictions. . .

At last the door gave way (it had been locked; the key, the key, yes, in his pocket) and slammed against the wall. His frantic calls went unanswered, though; then he remembered: she had gone to the church to help set up for the bake sale taking place the next day. She had told him she wouldn’t be back until one-thirty. What now? Paradise Lakes: he would wait in the shade of that great oak located on the far side of the neighborhood. He rushed outside to his waiting bike but was suddenly given pause: the dog. Where was the dog? He ran back inside, shouting Peter’s name as he went from room to room. He must have escaped out the open door. Just as he crossed the threshold, Rusty caught sight of a flash of white darting through the fence, of a little girl standing transfixed across the street as a terrified Pomeranian crouched against her leg, of a red motorcycle speeding down the street at precisely the wrong moment—

4

A vast swarm of wasps plunging their stingers into his bubbling flesh. Tortured throats howling in the impenetrable blackness—then a powerful gust of wind, created by a semi roaring by, nearly toppled Rusty over. He regained his balance, ignored for the moment visions of his likely future, and concentrated instead on maintaining his present course and speed. The tears had subsided some fifteen minutes earlier, not long after he had pedaled up the on-ramp to reach the Expressway, but he could still feel their dried residue on his cheeks and chin. His burning thigh muscles were separating him, forever, from that self which had existed just half-an-hour earlier. By morning, at the latest, he would be safely ensconced beneath a pier, conversing with the seagulls. He lowered his head and tried to pedal faster, the bike’s sprockets and chain rattling violently at the uncommon strain being placed upon them. He had already worked out the details of his escape: after resting for a day, he would sneak aboard an empty rail car and travel as far as it would take him, at which point he would begin anew, living only on what he could steal. His baggage would necessarily be light: his bike, and those images he knew he would never be able to leave behind: his father’s sickening embrace, the light-blue cursive script on the cover of that paperback, it turned out, Emily had given to his mother (Satisfying Your Man: Secrets to Luring Him Back), the look of genuine despair on that emaciated Asian man’s face after he had removed his helmet and helplessly watched as a half-moon of blood formed at the side of Peter’s body, and that smile he had once been so fortunate to have seen each morning, the extinction of which, he now believed, he was in part responsible for. He was approaching a gentle rise in the highway. So as not to lose speed, he stood up and started, essentially, to run in place. At the top of the incline, he ran even faster, thinking that the momentum created would allow him to rest while coasting down the other side. As he lowered his right leg with especially powerful force, something cracked, a rift formed in the tectonic plate beneath the highway, in the concrete beneath his wheels, in the heart beneath his heaving chest, and looking back over his shoulder he saw the bike’s rusted chain tumbling in his wake. Ahead, the highway, bordered by thick stands of pine, empty save for that single diminishing tractor trailer, eventually entered the sky, and his legs, still faithful to their purpose, continued their desperate effort to propel him into its cobalt