Category: Fiction for mojo 11

 

1 – SALUTATIONS

He’s dead. I know this long before they make me look at him. His eyes are closed, unquestioning. That, at least, is a relief.

The room is small, bare, a place of gloom, unconnected to the world outside where the sun keeps rising and children are running free.

I don’t cry when I say his name, as though I’m denying myself the right to mourn. You’re in shock, they tell me. As an explanation or an excuse? I want to kiss him one last time, share my breath, warm his skin. But he would flinch from my touch, recoil instead of reach. My hands are too cold regardless of his state.

After I’ve done my job identifying him, they cover his face with the sheet and try to usher me out. Try and fail. I need to say goodbye, I tell them. Be alone. They retreat from the room, no questions asked, and this power I have as the grieving wife feels deep and endless and wrong.

I approach the gurney, eyes burning with the sting of formaldehyde. I stare at his feet, the shape of them underneath the gray cotton. I remember his toes, the neat condition they were in before we left. The magnificent blisters that appeared halfway through our hike.

The Alps in fall time—a must-see. You should really go when you get the chance and the weather is good.

 

2 – SONG OF A SINNER

They apologized for not retrieving his body sooner. Two French uniforms, bashful, facing the newborn widow in the shiny lobby of a four-star hotel. We are sorry.

What they should’ve said was, We refuse to risk our lives for a man who has already lost his.

Naturally, I wanted to say. When it comes down to it, when we’re forced to choose. We’re all the same.

Before the rains, I was a different person. It shouldn’t be a surprise, I suppose, that death unhinges you, its absolute weight. Nothing holds on to its meaning anymore. My world of thank-you notes and charity donations and organic eggs and separating garbage—gone. Does it matter I never meant anyone harm? In my moment of truth, my ego won and that outcome is what defines me, drawing the picture of who I am.

Strangely, there’s comfort in that. I may cower in guilt for the rest of my life, but I no longer walk in ignorance.

 

3 – GAMES PEOPLE PLAY

I didn’t get lost on my way back to civilization. I returned in one piece from the mountain and reported the events to the local police straight away. I told them everything, for the record, not holding back, despite my throat being so narrow. When I used the word “choice”, they reached for the tissues and sympathetically shook their heads, contradicting me, handing out words like “emergency” and “impulse.”

They gave me onion soup and treated my cuts and scrapes, the scent of disinfectant overpowering the smell of melted cheese, my stomach revolting.

It wasn’t until I broke down and drowned my words, that I wondered, Did I tell them everything so I could be punished or absolved?

 

4 – PROPHETESS

Here in the morgue, I don’t talk to his corpse. Forgiveness is not what I’m after. I’d rather talk to the living, warn you about who I am, about who you are, in all probability, when it comes down to it, about how we do not know ourselves until.

There are so many ways in which we are broken.

 

5 – VANISHING ACT

The story begins in all innocence with a married couple on a fancy holiday in France. They love the outdoors, especially the mountains, which are hard to come by in the flat polders of Holland. Fit and ambitious, they climb quickly, well-stuffed packs on their backs. They think they’re prepared for their first day on the slopes: hiking boots, Swiss water-filter bottles, trail mix.

At a junction, they pause, challenging each other—further up or back down? The pressure of being young. The summit luring.

Up they go, away from the beaten paths. Do they not feel the wind shifting? Neither he nor she lifts an eye at the sky, darkening.

It begins to rain when they’re alone in the wild. They pull up their hoodies and keep going like the good sports they are. When the earth turns to mud, they seek refuge under a canopy of trees, afraid to lose their footing. It will blow over, they tell each other, smiling.

An hour later, the rain is pouring down, torrentially, more furious than before. Husband and wife are drenched and miserable, cold wind hitting their faces. Predictably, the bickering begins. You always want too much. You never speak up in time. As if blame would make their situation any less precarious.

A river forms, sweeping past them, growing fast. Debris flushes down with the water, rocks, branches, clumps of earth. Below them, the dark flow plunges off a cliff into the alpine valley.

The wife assesses. Flips off her backpack. Zips it open. Takes out a coil of rope. With it, she plans to tie them to a tree. But before she can execute her master plan, the river of mud broadens, rushes in, and swallows them both.

There’s sliding and falling and screaming and reaching for branches left and right. The wife seizes a root, and in a flash, the husband grabs a strap of her backpack. The pack is almost jerked out of her hand, but seeing her husband in need, she squeezes her end tightly.

So they hang, suspended against the odds. With one arm she bears the weight of two people while a dense stream of mud pushes past. The husband begs for her to hold on, and she does, hold on, tries to at least, crying, straining, and then not. Not anymore. Something happens and both her hands are above her head now, merging with the root. She closes her eyes and waits for the echo of a body tumbling down into the abyss.

 

6 – A RIDDLE OFFERING NO ANSWERS

Did it all happen this way?

Of course not. I don’t really know what happens when the earth crumbles and the life you’ve built for yourself is flooded out from under you; when darkness breaks into your mind, a darkness you intend to fight and against which you’re helpless nonetheless; when you struggle for every breath and your heart is bursting and the dreadful anticipation of pain is somehow the only light in all that darkness; when in spite of your efforts, the darkness wins and you admit to yourself that the man with whom you are bonded, in sickness and in health, by the strap of your backpack, is actually dragging you down, is hanging between you and life, is killing you unless you intervene.

There’s only an approximation of events. This is, sort of, what happened.

 

7 – LESS IS MORE

I leave the morgue with a few of his belongings in a plastic bag. A water-logged Swiss watch. His hiking boots.

We shouldn’t get attached to things in this world, the Buddhists say. All things are temporary and will soon be gone.

The moment I let go of my backpack, willingly, consciously, I learned everything there was to know about myself.

Put to the test, I’d failed the one I loved the most.

I’ll never forget his eyes in the seconds before I sentenced him to die. Panic, accusation, incomprehension. My face must have shown him what I was about to do.

 

8 – EXODUS

I dine alone in the bustling hotel, sleep alone, wake up alone. I pack our bags and rebook the train. Before I leave, there is one last scene in the deserted mountains. Deserted paths, deserted flowers, deserted rocks.

The Alps in fall time are beautiful—a must-see. They look like they can kill you, but only as a faraway possibility that isn’t relevant to you. The wind in the trees blows as a reminder of hazards to which you pay no heed. The air above the peaks is crisp and clear.

I sit down on a boulder we passed the other day, suspended between beauty and death, between meaning and its disappearance, the bitter taste of absurdity in my mouth.

The ego is a twisted thing. You may train it to lay low and talk softly. You may not even realize it’s there. But threaten your ego with destruction and it will rise to possess you. The sinking, the crush of culpability, the desire to erase yourself—these only come afterward, when nothing remains to be done.

I peer over the mountain ridge into the abyss, dizzying myself, contemplating. What has happened in these mountains surrounds me as a threat, as something that is yet to come, and I gladly accept this reversed chronology. Between terror and regret, I will choose terror.

When I finally get up, a flock of starlings rises. They circle over my head and disappear into the void.

How human that we end up hating the selves our egos fight to protect.

Study the unexplainable long enough, and you’ll learn there’s usually an explanation.

 

The gryphon? Just protoceratops bones, discovered by Proto-Greeks who didn’t understand what they were seeing. The centaur? Horse archers of the Eurasian steppe, so adept on their steeds that they seemed to merge into one being. The roc, a bird big enough to carry elephants in its claws? Just the bones of bird-hipped dinosaurs with elephantine claws.

 

The crocotta, however, is real. I promise.

 

When I arrived here three years ago, looking to learn more about the animal, I was of the opinion it was just a case of the ancient Romans having never seen a hyena before, and exaggerating its size the way they did their opponents’ armies. When the locals would tell me the crocotta could change from male to female at will, I explained that hyenas are one of the few animal species in which males and females look alike. When they told me that the crocotta called out names in the night, I talked about the strange pitch of the hyena’s voice and how it can sound human.

 

I believed everything I said, and never questioned it. Until Joseph.

 

One night, a few weeks after I arrived, he returned home from his job at the local fruit market. According to his teenaged daughter, he made dinner for the two of them, then sat up reading a book until he heard someone calling his name. Marie said she didn’t recognize the voice, and that it said nothing except Joseph’s name, every few minutes, in a pitch so clear that it sounded like the speaker was inside their small home. Her father told her to go to bed, and not to worry about what she heard. When she woke up to use the toilet a few hours later, Joseph was gone. She could see from the window that he had left town and was walking into the forest.

 

He never came back. By the next morning, it seemed the whole town was convinced that the crocotta had called him to his death and eaten him alive. A few men followed his footprints to the edge of the forest, but they were too scared to go in.

 

The next several weeks were quiet, and I tried to assure everyone that it had just been a coincidence, that there had to be a rational explanation for why Joseph went into the forest. An old beggar woman refused to believe me, insisting the man had been eaten alive, and that he was just one of many. She brought me little balls of coarse fur that she claimed the crocotta left on the forest floor, but they felt like they could have come from a dog, or even a wild cat. She warned that the quiet period only meant the monster’s appetite had been satisfied, and that it would hunt again.

 

A few months later, a man I never met left home unannounced, and the rumors swirled again. Then a young girl. I tried organizing a party to search the woods and find evidence of what had happened, but most people were too terrified to help. I started to notice that calm actually birthed their fear; the disappearances were almost welcomed, with relief it wasn’t them. When the beggar woman went missing, nobody even claimed to hear the crocotta call her, as she had nobody around to fear for her.

 

Months went by before Marie heard her name. I was with her at the time, as she had agreed to accompany me to the woods for a search, so I heard it too. The voice was hard to distinguish, neither male nor female, but somehow both. It just said her name, calmly but forcefully, and I’ve never seen anyone as afraid as Marie was when she heard it. She froze in place, and looked at me to see if I’d heard the same thing. When I nodded, she began to run back the way we came, yelling for me to follow.

 

I ran after her, but she was younger and more athletic, and I wasn’t able to catch up. I lost sight of her until I stopped to catch my breath. There was a noise far behind me, and though I turned expecting to see an animal, I saw Marie walking in the wrong direction, back into the forest, as if in a trance. She didn’t answer when I yelled her name, or even seem to hear me, so I followed her as well as I could. Still unable to gain ground, the last thing I saw was the shadow of the beast’s gaping maw, and the last thing I heard was a sound of crushed bone. Marie never screamed, nor yelled for help.

 

Thinking there might still be time, I ran to the spot, but the only sign that she had ever been there was a line of her footprints in the mud, and a similar line of prints like a dog’s, but they had to come from a dog larger than any I’d heard about. Once I gave up hope of finding the girl alive, I searched for fur, scat, anything to take back and analyze. I didn’t find anything, but I felt like something was watching my progress from the thicket.

 

When I told people in town what had happened, I mostly received recriminations about why I didn’t believe them before. Nobody seemed to think I should have been able to save the girl, or wondered why I couldn’t find proof of what happened. Only I questioned what I had seen, and came to believe the voice in the night that terrified ancient peoples, from Ethiopia to Rome to India, had belonged to something more sinister than a scavenging hyena.

 

I tell you all this because I heard the crocotta’s voice again tonight. This time, it was calling my name.

 

 

 

Exchange Student

Mayo is an exchange student from the moon. He arrives in our classroom: disheveled, silver hair and orange-shot eyes; introduces himself as someone who has been drifting in the cosmos.  He sits next to me, his tight posture wrong and upsetting, making me believe he has no bones. His clothes are snug, as if stitched to his skin. He smells like cardboard.

I extend my hand. He looks at me and blinks continuously like transmitting Morse. Then he rubs his forehead. I ask him if he has a headache. He tells me he walked all night. Pressing his temples, he slowly hums. A transparent device on his wrist shines.

After the second class, he shows me a detailed map of the moon. Bubbles of artificial atmosphere inhabited by celebrities and billionaires. Chemical plants to create water. His home next to one. It is the most astonishing thing: tiny grids thriving with life despite lesser gravity and atmosphere. There’re no holidays on moon, Mayo says. There’s no God.

The teacher is deep into calculus when Mayo asks to be excused to go to the bathroom. I can’t stop looking at his long legs and firm butt. The way he walks: calculated strides cutting the arcs of light, staying there for a moment before moving again. When he comes back, he’s wet all over his pants as if he peed on himself. What happened, I ask. Release, he says and sets a timer on his device.

During the lunch hour, we buy two pizzas and a bottle of sparkling water. He talks about the mining expeditions, dead volcanoes and oceans of lava, all along his eyes watching the bubbles in the bottled water.

I like to be wet, he says. It’s like going through summer and winter at the same time. If it was up to me, I’d stay wet forever.

After the classes, we buy coke and sandwiches and sit on a park bench.

Why’re you here? I ask.

It was my turn, he says and shrugs, a drop of ketchup drying on his cheek facing me. Then he turns on the device, logs into the Deep Web, sends an email to me.

I’m not sure if it will work, I say, looking at the message, a strange mix of characters.

It should. Deep Web is like outer space.  There’s no surfing and stumbling upon things. If you know where you’re going, you’ll find it.

I nod my head.

When the day ends, Mayo shakes my hand.

You came all the way just for a day? I cannot hide my disappointment.

He looks at his device. I should be home at least a few hours before the plant opens.  I still have about twenty nine earth days to make it back there.

We stand close. His lips are shining wet; his pants are not dry yet. The cardboard smell is filling inside me. As he blinks, I see slivers of moons inside his eyes. I wonder if I smash his nose will there be blood? If I kiss him, will he stay wet forever? The sky is stuffed with clouds. He moves and sails away like a ship, cutting light and air, pretending to look at me and I pretend to look away.

 

 

We’re Waiting to Hear Our Names

We’re kissing in the back seat of his ’86 Chevy. Two country songs down and we’re still locked in each other’s mouths like lightning and thunder.

We’re leaning against our Chevy, its front hood up. Cars, freight trucks slam by, weakening whatever honeymoon excitement still holds our dust-dimmed minds in caucus. We’re waiting for the AAA, roving the radio dial: Keep the Baby hotline, punk rock and weight loss pitches. We’re getting into an argument. We’re looking at the horizon where the light scatters and fills the stars.

We’re rocking our twins, a boy and a girl. We’re dreaming with them, without them, swimming in a space where we’re popular names scuba diving in Hawaii and writing our love song in Bali.

We’re spending Christmas with my in-laws, we’re buying a thirty-year-old two-bedroom home that needs a clean carpet and a washer. The choices offered and the choices made, the No Man’s Land between them where we stand. We’re standing next to the lawn mower, arguing whose turn it is. We’re our hurried sex and laundry inside out. We’re Children’s Motrin in several flavors; we’re bunk beds withering into nights too short.

We’re still dreaming: riding bicycles: hair blown by the wind, cheeks red with sunlight.

We’re walking to school, driving our kids to games. We’re trying a new hair color, getting attracted to other men and women.

We’re baking cookies and cleaning the grill. We’re welcoming our kids and their fiancés. After they leave, we’re sitting on the couch together in silence. We’re going up and down the stairs. There’re only crumpled sheets and time waiting in every room.

We’re yoga in the morning, lumpy fried potatoes and meat with greasy throats in the afternoon, TV’s blank face in the night. We’re fixing the roof, changing the wallpaper. We’re growing stingy with love. We’re thinking of getting a divorce.

We’re waiting for the doctor to tell us how bad it is. We’re lying in the bed nestled with a drip. We’re asleep on the rocking chair next to the bed, an unread novel latched to our chests. We’re getting used to the sound of heart monitor, the sight of life flickering against time, the growing knots in our stomachs. Sometimes, we’re trying to laugh, laugh really hard.  We’re lighting candles, thanking God for all we have, thinking we never really had a chance.

We’re waiting for our turn to speak at the funeral, to talk about those moments of intermittent joy. Signing the paperwork, we’re lonely below the dotted line. We’re moving into assisted living, our kids, and grandkids waving at us, belted and secured in their SUVs, eager to leave. Wheel-chaired outside we’re talking to ourselves, watching the onyx sky lit with smoking streetlamps.

We’re lying in our graves separated by five years. The dirt is full of answers. Sometimes, we’re whispering each other’s name, and the dry flowers above us stir. And we’re dreaming and waiting. We’re waiting to hear our names.