textfiles/magazines/INTERTEXT/ITv3n3.etx

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=======================================
InterText Vol. 3, No. 3 / May-June 1993
=======================================

  Contents

    FirstText: Episode 13: He Asks for Money..........Jason Snell

  Short Fiction

    Epicenter_.........................................Jon Seaman_

    Innocent Bystander_................................Mark Smith_

    Mercy Street_.................................Ridley McIntyre_

    Post-Nuclear Horrifics_............................Eric Crump_

    The Nihilist_....................................Kyle Cassidy_

....................................................................
    Editor                                     Assistant Editor
    Jason Snell                                    Geoff Duncan
    jsnell@etext.org                       gaduncan@halcyon.com
....................................................................
         Send subscription requests, story submissions,
            and correspondence to intertext@etext.org
....................................................................
  InterText Vol. 3, No. 3. InterText (ISSN 1071-7676) is published 
  electronically on a bi-monthly basis. Reproduction of this 
  magazine is permitted as long as the magazine is not sold 
  (either by itself or as part of a collection) and the entire 
  text of the issue remains intact. Copyright 1993, 1994 Jason 
  Snell. Individual stories Copyright 1993 by their original 
  authors.
....................................................................


  FirstText: Episode 13: He Asks For Money  by Jason Snell
==========================================================

  Two months _already?_

  Yikes.

  Part of me wonders what I'm doing here now, writing an 
  introduction to the issue of _InterText_ which I've worked the 
  least on ever. Because of an extremely busy schedule -- 
  designing and laying out a magazine and several newspapers at 
  school, in addition to taking a final exam -- Geoff Duncan did 
  far more than his share of the work on this issue, including 
  multiple copy edits of the stories and lay-out of the issue.

  But, yes, I _have_ read the stories in this issue, and I'm glad 
  to say that I'm impressed. We lead off this time with Jon 
  Seaman's chilling "Epicenter." We're also lucky to have the 
  quite odd "Post-Nuclear Horrifics" by Eric Crump, along with new 
  stories from regular contributors Mark Smith, Ridley McIntyre, 
  and Kyle Cassidy.

  During the time when these stories were percolating through the 
  electronic veins of _InterText,_ I was also busy securing 
  employment for this summer. I'll be working at a large computer 
  magazine located here in the Bay Area, and that's all I'm 
  saying. Scan the staff boxes if you really want to know which 
  one -- suffice it to say that it sounds like a good job, and I'm 
  looking forward to starting it.

  This job searching has also gotten me to thinking about the 
  future of the magazine, since I'm a little under a year away 
  from losing network access altogether. (The way I figure it, my 
  accounts at Berkeley will be good through August 1994 or 
  thereabouts.) After that, I'll do everything I can to retain net 
  access, which means I'll probably pay for an account on a public 
  access UNIX system.

  This means money. And this leads me to propose something that 
  Dan Appelquist proposed for readers of _Quanta_ more than a year 
  ago: a system similar to "shareware" software.

  _InterText_ is and will always remain free. But if you enjoy 
  _InterText_ and have some money to spare, please feel free to 
  send a $5 check to keep the magazine going in the future. Hey, 
  most magazines cost anywhere from $12 a year to way beyond that. 
  Consider us a bargain at $5!

  All money will go toward _InterText_: paying for network 
  accounts, paper and toner for all the _InterText_ copies Geoff 
  and I print out, magnetic media to safeguard our back issues, 
  connect time to upload our issues to other computer networks, 
  etc. Though the temptation is there, I won't be putting any of 
  the $5 checks in the Jason-n-Jeff Maui Condo Retirement Fund.

  If you'd like to contribute to InterText, send your check (made 
  out to Jason Snell) to: 21645 Parrotts Ferry Road, Sonora, 
  California, 95370. I'm planning on moving to a new apartment in 
  the next month, and so the above address seems the most stable.

  Oh, and one last note -- for those of you viewing the PostScript 
  edition of InterText, you'll note that our cover art this issue 
  is by Jeff Quan, who was last heard from when he did the cover 
  of our _first_ issue. We're glad to have Jeff, who works for the 
  _Oakland Tribune_ and does some freelancing for _MacWEEK_ 
  magazine, aboard again. He'll likely be doing our covers for the 
  foreseeable future.

  That's all for this brief note. Heck -- you're not here to read 
  this column, anyway. You're here to read stories, and we've got 
  some nice ones. Get to it.

  Jason Snell
-------------

  Jason Snell recently finished his first year at UC Berkeley's 
  Graduate School of Journalism, and has a coveted Communication 
  B.A. from UC San Diego. Between school, work, and editing 
  InterText, he sometimes considers writing more fiction and 
  enjoys using his Macintosh PowerBook. He also likes to drink 
  iced tea and mention monkeys as often as humanly possible.


  Epicenter  by Jon Seaman
==========================
...................................................................
  * Sometimes life is a force of habit: eat this, do that, go 
  there. And sometimes experiences let us see our habits for what 
  they are. But larger experiences can do the same thing... *
...................................................................

  It's four a.m. I'm riding the subway. I'm drunk. There are three 
  people in my car. I'm watching them.

  Particularly, I watch the man in the leather overcoat. I watch 
  that man because he carries a heavy gym bag. I watch that man 
  because he has silver eyes. I watch that man because he is 
  watching me.


  "Midnight Meat Train," she says, lighting a candle.

  "Midnight what?"

  "Midnight Meat Train." She pours more wine into my glass. "It's 
  a horror story."

  I drink. "Sounds more like a porno."

  "Very funny." She sets the bottle on the nightstand. "I want to 
  read it to you."

  "You do?"

  She inches closer. "Yes, I do."

  "Why?"

  She smiles. She skates the tip of her index finger in figure 
  eights down my neck and onto my chest. "So on the subway home 
  tonight, you'll think about it."

  I drink and after a moment say, "Tonight? You aren't asking me 
  to stay?"

  She pauses, slides away, and pulls the sheet over her head. The 
  candlelight makes a dark outline of her body. "You've never 
  stayed once. Not one time. Even if I beg, and I'm tired of 
  begging."

  Her voice bounces all around me. For a moment I feel cold. I 
  crawl above her, pulling at the sheet, trying not to spill my 
  wine. I choose laughter. "Not even a little? I like it when you 
  beg."

  Her face is pressed taut against the fabric and I watch her lips 
  shape words beneath it. Her voice drifts up to me like black 
  smoke, stinging my eyes, choking me.

  "No, I'm not asking you to stay ever again."

  I let the cover go. I try to stare through the sheet and into 
  her mind.

  Eventually she drags the cover away from her face and looks up 
  at me. "If you stay, it has to be your decision."

  I take a big swallow of wine. I take another.

  Her lips tighten. She is waiting.

  I turn my head toward the window. "I can smell pizza from that 
  place across the street. You hungry?"

  There is silence. She reaches around my knee and takes the 
  bottle from the nightstand. She tugs the glass from my fingers, 
  tops it up, and pushes it back to me.

  I look down into her eyes. I should explain. I should apologize. 
  But I say, "Why the hell would you want me to think about some 
  horror story?"

  Her eyes close for a moment and then open slowly. She smiles.


  The man in the overcoat uses every second slowly, murdering me 
  with his eyes, his expert butcher-knife eyes. I feel naked 
  except for the wine on my breath. I'm forty-five minutes from 
  home. The train is slow and old and scrapes through the dark 
  tunnels on its hands and knees. I should move to another car. I 
  should get off at the next stop and escape to the surface of the 
  city. I don't move. I can't. His eyes magnetize me. I feel 
  naked. I need a slice of pizza. The train stumbles and stumbles 
  and stumbles. I start to shake. Between two ceaseless motions I 
  am epileptic. I need a slice of pizza.


  She sets the book carefully on the side of the bed. "What do you 
  think?"

  With my big toe, I push the book until it falls onto the floor. 
  "It's the most repulsive story I've ever heard."

  "Don't you believe it could be true?"

  "Some guy cutting up people on the subway... to feed his 
  deformed children that live under the city?" I gulp down the 
  rest of the wine. "It's fucking ridiculous."

  "Does it bother you?"

  I take a long purple crystal from a basket on the nightstand. 
  "What do you keep these rocks for?"

  "They're crystals. They channel power from the earth. You didn't 
  answer my question."

  I hold the crystal up to the candle and follow a reflection 
  along its geometry. "You don't believe that bullshit, do you?"

  She leans close to my face and says nothing for a moment. I turn 
  my head and look at her. It's like staring into arc welding. Her 
  face is a river of current and sparks. Her voice burns quietly 
  into me. "It bothers you, doesn't it?"

  I try to study the rock, but I can't break focus from her 
  radiation. She has me and she knows it. She pushes her hot gaze 
  inside me. The momentary fusion slows time and for a second my 
  body pulses and tingles. "What bothers me?"

  "There are things you don't understand, things you can't 
  control." She gently reaches and takes my hand. She closes it 
  around the crystal. She smiles.


  There is perspiration around my collar. It feels like the train 
  stops every ten feet. I'm comatose drunk. I feel at the edge of 
  spinning and my vision begins to tumble. I want to close my 
  eyes, but the subway butcher is watching me with eyes like 
  boiling mercury, waiting, his hands on the glowing zipper of his 
  bag. Two cheese slices with fresh oregano and parmesian. Why 
  couldn't I stay with her? My eyes are changing to heavy puddles 
  of lead. Why am I on this Midnight Meat Train? Why did she do 
  this to me?


  She dresses me by the front door. We are quiet. There is a 
  comfort to this ritual, a childlike comfort I desperately need. 
  My fingers are alcohol-blunt and I can't manage my shoelaces.

  She patiently ties them while I stare down at her. A pink light, 
  spilling through the curtains, exposes the naked length of her 
  back. I follow the light with my eyes. A single thought erodes 
  through the gossamer layers of wine. She gives and I take. She 
  gives and gives and I take.

  She rises and adjusts my jacket. With each careful tug on the 
  fabric, I feel her need. I should stay. I know I should stay, 
  but my hand touches the door knob. I feel a snap of static 
  electricity, a realization, and the fading sting of both. Her 
  scheme didn't work. I didn't pass out. I've drunk like a 
  champion and I'm standing, ready to walk out the door.

  This is when she begs. This is when she begs and I kiss her 
  softly on the forehead. This is when I say I'll call, and walk 
  out into the night.

  "Wait..." she says.

  She's going to beg. She'll beg and I'll know everything is not 
  changing. I am relieved. We will complete the ritual.

  "...You forgot your tie." She hurries to the bedroom.

  Her voice is like chloroform. I am sensationless, anesthetized. 
  I am hollow.

  She puts the tie in my jacket pocket. She straightens the clasp 
  of my belt. She smiles. She softly kisses my forehead.

  "I'll call you," she says.

  Suddenly, I'm outside in the night.


  I'm King of Pizzaland. I'm oily and fat. She's my Anorexic 
  Queen, feeding me each bite, never taking one for herself until 
  I remember to nod at her. But I don't nod, I eat. That's my job 
  as Pizza King: to eat, to gorge myself, to become a round planet 
  while everyone around me starves.

  Somewhere far in the distance, on the opaque fringe of this 
  dream, I feel a scratching -- a faint sound of a heel scraping 
  the ground. It begins to move closer, echoing louder with each 
  step. Then I feel him. He's coming for me. A thin windshield 
  explodes into my face, a subconscious detonation.

  Abruptly I wake. Every cell in my body oscillates and collides. 
  It's not a dream, I feel him coming. A dim, pale light trembles 
  above me. I feel him.

  He emerges from blackness in the back of the car. The trembling 
  light strobes his movement. All I see is the bag, swinging like 
  a pendulum at his side, and his silver eyes.

  In my mind, I see the husk of my body hanging upside down from a 
  meat hook.

  I look at the other passengers for help, but they ignore me. 
  Then everything stops. I am too numb, too fucking drunk to move. 
  He is standing over me. I can't take my eyes off the bag.

  "You were sleeping. That isn't very smart."

  His voice is a cold, thick fog that envelopes me.

  "You were staring at me. You know who I am, don't you?"

  I can't answer.

  He crouches down. We are face to face. His sliver eyes are 
  dissecting me. He whispers, "You know what I do, don't you?"

   I nod slightly.

  "I'm flattered. Not too many people recognize me. I'm usually 
  finished before anyone notices I was there."

  I feel dizzy. I mumble, "Why me?"

  "It's my gift, you understand, to show how people look on the 
  inside. I'd say right now you're pretty much inside-out. It 
  won't take long."

  I understand. I understand I'm getting exactly what I deserve. 
  He unzips the bag. I squeeze my eyes shut. I hear him take 
  something from the bag. I wait.

  "Open your eyes -- just for a second. Open your eyes."

  My eyes fall open. I am blinded by a flash, and then another. 
  After a few seconds he presses something into my hand.

  "This time it's free, because you knew me, but next time it'll 
  cost you. I'm getting famous, you know."

  My eyes adjust and he stuffs the object back in his bag.

  "I always keep one. I figure you owe it to me. Hell, you never 
  know, someday you just might buy it back." He stands just as the 
  train stops. The doors slide open and he steps onto the 
  platform. The doors close. He is gone.

  I look down at my hand. It's a Polaroid. As the image solidifies 
  I see my face, but I don't recognize myself. I see a man 
  drowning in fear. A man with desperate, lost eyes. A man who is 
  still a child.


  At the surface I find a phone booth. My hands feel like paws as 
  I search my body for change. I bat my jacket pocket, feeling the 
  shape of my tie when I hear the clink and hiss of metal. I claw 
  my tie out and coins tumble in a streak onto the ground.

  The tie unravels like a snake in my hand, and wrapped in the 
  center of its coils is the long purple crystal.

  I stand with my forehead against the glass for ten minutes 
  before I dial her number. I can feel a train pass beneath the 
  street. It feels like an earthquake and I am the epicenter. I 
  have a hard time holding the receiver to my ear. It rings six 
  times and she answers. Her voice is quiet and soggy from sleep.

  "Hello?"

  I don't speak, but grip the crystal until it bites into my hand.

  "Hello?"

  For some reason I am sobbing.

  "Who is this?"

  "I think I love you," I say.

  She is silent, but her silence is warm.

  Jon Seaman  (jes@unislc.slc.unisys.com)
-----------------------------------------

  Jon Seaman says he turned to technical writing rather than face 
  jail, but who are you going to believe: him or us? He has a BFA 
  in Theater and is a published playwright whose works include 
  "Lenses" and "Autumn." "Epicenter" originally appeared in 
  _Shades_ magazine.


  Innocent Bystander  by Mark Smith
===================================

...................................................................
  * When researchers get too close to their work, they risk losing 
  their objectivity. But as one sociologist discovers, there's no 
  such thing as an "outside observer"... *
...................................................................

  The thing that gets me about what happened is this: I didn't 
  have to do my wash at the laundromat.

  I make a good living. We have a big house with a laundry room 
  complete with a washer and dryer. My wife always thought I was 
  crazy for going out to a laundromat. But then, my wife would 
  never leave the house if she didn't have to. That's how we're 
  different, how we each cope with all the free time there is in 
  our lives. We never got around to having children and now we're 
  both too set in our ways to consider it. And living in a Texas 
  town full of nothing but unemployed redneck racists -- with whom 
  we have nothing in common -- we have learned to take our 
  entertainment where we find it. Which is not usually at the 
  Twinplex in the Target Mall.

  So now my wife's idea of fun is to sit in front of the 
  television all day watching soap operas and reading paperback 
  novels. She says it's escape, pretends she's slumming, but I 
  think it's more than that. She's an expert on the soaps, you 
  might say. Even reads _Soap Opera Digest._ She knows the private 
  lives of all the stars, why so- and-so really left _Days of Our 
  Lives_ and that sort of thing. I find that depressing. I told 
  her that's just a superficial fantasy world driven by 
  sentimentality where the only emotions are lust and jealousy and 
  even those ring false.

  I prefer the theater of real people I find at the laundromat. 
  Real people are my specialty actually, my vocation. I'm a 
  sociology professor at the teacher's college in town so watching 
  people, studying them, is sort of an ongoing lab for me. And 
  there's no place I've found -- except possibly bus stations -- 
  better than laundromats for watching people. I tell this to my 
  students all the time. I try to get them to go out and watch 
  people, learn why they act the way they do, how their lives are 
  a factor of their environment. I give them research assignments 
  to go to laundromats, bus stations, thrift stores, soup 
  kitchens. They look at me with just about the same expression as 
  my wife when I head out the door with a load. Their idea of 
  field study extends to bars and coffee shops in the immediate 
  campus area.

  I don't care. I never know what I might find at the laundromat. 
  It's like an avant-garde play where the props stay the same, but 
  the cast and script change every week.

   
  I went down to do my laundry with a small basket of clothes 
  (after all, we do most of the real wash at home). I go to the 
  Kwik Wash in the Piggly Wiggly strip shopping center over on 
  Woodland Avenue. Woodland is something of a dividing line 
  between two parts of town. On one side are mostly blacks and 
  some Mexicans. On the other side there are mostly whites who 
  feel very threatened by the blacks who have begun to make enough 
  to buy houses across the avenue. To add to that, the city's just 
  come along and put in a low-to-moderate income housing project 
  on the Avenue right beside the laundry. It's a little tense in 
  that area, but you know what they say about how fools rush in.

  I had tried other laundromats but none of them seemed to have 
  quite the same mix of people as the Kwik Wash. There are plenty 
  in our neighborhood, for instance, but we live close to campus 
  and most of the people who use those are students. You can see 
  them any hour of the day scratching their hung-over heads or 
  burying their noses in fat textbooks, clutching their pink and 
  yellow highlighters. I figure I see enough students during the 
  week to become intimately familiar with their habits.

  That morning I got to the laundromat at around 11. I was a 
  little disappointed that there weren't many people there yet. Of 
  course, the owner was the same as ever, doing his usual 
  business: wandering around, checking the soap boxes in the 
  vending machines, putting the lids up on the washers nobody was 
  using, checking the dryers for those anti-static things that 
  always get stuck to your clothes. He nodded at me when I went 
  in. He was a gruff sort, though I never had any trouble with 
  him. His usual outfit was a greasy undershirt and thrift store 
  pants a couple of sizes too big for him. He had an unshaven 
  grizzly look and he chain-smoked in spite of his "no smoking" 
  sign. His sign was a variant of the ones with a circle and a 
  slash: inside it said "smoking, soliciting, loitering, pets" and 
  underneath it "Please supervise your children."

  All things considered, he ran a good clean laundromat and I 
  figured that was all that mattered. In my book, there are way 
  too many people who don't give a damn about quality anymore. 
  They slide by with as little as they can and then expect to get 
  paid for it. The way I see it, you take the money, you do the 
  job, regardless of how little you make.

  Aside from the owner there were only two other people in the 
  laundromat. One was a huge black woman -- she must have weighed 
  400 pounds -- sitting in one of the plastic chairs by the window 
  with her basket on the floor between her legs. As she folded the 
  laundry out of the basket she made neat stacks in the chairs on 
  either side of her. She didn't look up when I went in.

  The other was a white man with one leg who was hard at work 
  banging on one of the two video games. He was a lanky 
  middle-aged fellow with a deep tan and horn-rimmed glasses who 
  looked like he had seen some hard living. He had his crutch 
  propped up against the side of the machine and the empty leg of 
  his blue work pants was neatly folded and pinned up. He leaned 
  against the machine and concentrated on working the joystick and 
  levers. The machine made exploding noises and machine gun 
  rattles that sounded like they were coming from the other side 
  of a thick door. Every couple of minutes he would pound his fist 
  on the machine and say, "Son of a bitch!" and then reach into 
  his pocket to pull out another quarter and keep going.

  I set my basket on the floor beside the first available machine. 
  I put all the clothes in, dump in some detergent I carry in a 
  yogurt container, and put three quarters in the little vertical 
  slots. I love the _chung-chung_ feel of the coin slot when you 
  slide it into the machine and then out again. It makes me think 
  of the bolt action of a rifle, though I have to say I've never 
  worked one.

  I had just gotten my load going and was leaning against the 
  machine when two Mexican men came in. One of them had his 
  clothes in a pillowcase with a faded flower print pattern on it. 
  The other was carrying an olive drab duffle bag like army 
  surplus stores sell. They were about the same age -- 
  mid-thirties, I guessed -- and they were dressed similarly in 
  faded jeans and boots, though one wore a Sea World T-shirt that 
  had a picture of Shamu and the other had on a plaid western 
  shirt with mother-of-pearl snaps for buttons and on the pockets. 
  They were talking their Spanish ninety miles a minute and 
  laughing up a storm. After they started their clothes they 
  leaned against their machines and kept right on talking. I'm not 
  afraid to say that it bothers me when Mexican people speak 
  Spanish in public. It's rude and, besides, I have never 
  understood how Mexicans can live in this country and not learn 
  the language. You'd think they'd want to so they could compete 
  for jobs. But competition is an American trait and I guess they 
  live by a different standard.

  Slowly they worked their way over to the vending machine area. 
  There were two vending machines, one for snacks and one for 
  cokes. The snack machine had a heavy grating in front of the 
  display glass to keep people from smashing it in and stealing a 
  bag of Tom's Cheese Doodles or a peanut plank. The coke machine 
  had big bars across it, though there was an opening for the coin 
  slot and where the drinks came out. The Mexicans both bought 
  cokes and stood there drinking them while they jabbered on in 
  Spanish.

  Just then, the glass door on the west side of the laundromat 
  flew open and two black kids ran in, a girl and a boy, no older 
  than seven or eight. They were laughing and yelling really loud. 
  They chased each other under the big high tables with metal legs 
  you use to fold your clothes. They didn't seem particularly 
  destructive, but I could see the owner get nervous right away. 
  He stopped in the middle of one of his little chores and waved a 
  fat sausage finger at the kids and shouted across the room.

  "Hey, now, y'all git on outta here, an' keep out lak I done told 
  you already."

  The kids paused in mid-step and stared at this big, rough white 
  man who looked about as friendly as a pit bull. I couldn't see 
  that he had any grounds to be so upset, but I figured it was his 
  joint and he seemed to have some gripe with these kids, so who 
  was I to say? Maybe he'd been chasing them out ten times a day 
  all week.

  Whatever the case, the kids stood there staring at him, all of 
  their fresh bluster and banter gone, evaporated in a wave of 
  fear of this white man who was older and bigger and maybe a 
  little crazy.

  The owner took a step toward the kids. They broke and ran for 
  the door, disappearing back toward the apartments next door. 
  Everyone in the laundromat--me, the Mexicans, the lady folding 
  her wash, even the guy playing the video game--had fallen silent 
  and watched with careful interest. When the kids were gone, the 
  owner looked from one to the other of us and said to no one in 
  particular, "Goddamn kids. They come from that projec' yonder. 
  They ain't got no sense. They're in here all the time. All the 
  damn time runnin' up and down the place. They don' never do 
  nothin' but scare off my good customers." He shook his head in 
  disgust. "Goddammit!"

  The woman folding her clothes stared at him like she couldn't 
  figure out what planet he'd fallen off of. The Mexican men 
  didn't seem to understand what he'd said and the guy playing the 
  video game pumped in another quarter and nodded his head 
  sympathetically.

  I nodded too because I understood what the guy felt like. He was 
  clearly a redneck full of hate, but he was trying to run a 
  business and he felt abused. I could see that. He must have 
  thought I was the most agreeable to his position, so he shuffled 
  over to me and kept talking in his too-loud voice:

  "Them damn people don't want nothin' but a hand-out. They want 
  someone to take care of them. They ain't working and they ain't 
  watchin' their damn kids either. I'll tell you somethin': them 
  kids ain't gon' 'mount to nothin'. Them people's just a bunch of 
  trash is all."

  I kept on nodding, though more out of politeness because I felt 
  what he was saying was out of line. They were children, after 
  all, and children are supposed to be rambunctious. I figure they 
  all act a little wild once in a while. That doesn't mean they're 
  bound to grow up bad. But I kept my mouth closed. I'm not one to 
  argue with someone about their point of view. They're entitled 
  to that, aren't they?

  All the same, I was glad when the woman who had been folding her 
  laundry spoke up, erupted in fact, like a volcano: "Hey, 
  mister," she said, looking up at him from where she sat. "You 
  ain't got no right to be sayin' that noise 'bout them kids. 
  Huh-uh. You got a right to keep 'em out your place if they ain't 
  bein' cooper'tive, but you don't go sayin' they trash or none of 
  that talk, now. You could jinx those children you go talkin' 
  that way. And the Good Lord knows they got enough against 'em as 
  it is."

  The woman delivered this speech with one arm akimbo, her hand 
  doubled against her vast hip, using her other hand to point a 
  dimple- knuckled finger at the owner. He stood looking at the 
  woman with something between awe and dismay. No doubt he was not 
  used to being talked to this way, especially by a black woman. 
  The laundromat was very quiet. The Mexicans had stopped talking, 
  the computer game had stopped exploding. The only sound was the 
  low churning rumble of the washing machines and the clicking of 
  buttons and snaps in the dryers. We all seemed to share an 
  uneasiness, I guess because we regarded the owner as a 
  temperamental man, easily capable of violence if provoked.

  The owner seemed about to respond to the woman, his mouth 
  starting to open, when the door of the laundromat flew open 
  again.

  I knew there would be trouble as soon as I saw the man coming 
  in, his eyes glaring with the fury of years of pent-up anger. I 
  don't believe I saw his gun until later, but I knew something 
  was going to happen. His face was mask-like, stiff with hatred. 
  Without so much as a glance at anyone else in the laundromat, he 
  stalked straight over and jammed his face into the owner's like 
  an indignant ballplayer confronting an umpire.

  "Hey man," he yelled at the owner. "What the fuck did you say to 
  my kids?"

  The word "fuck" shot out of his mouth like a bullet. I would 
  have been even more terrified than I was, except the owner just 
  looked at the guy with his same old laconic, half-lidded 
  expression. The owner must have to deal with crazies all the 
  time. He'll know how to handle this guy.

  "I told your kids the same thang I tell 'em ever' damn day. I 
  told 'em to get the hell outta my laundry-mat 'cause they ain't 
  up to no good."

  "You got my kids all upset, man. My wife is upset, too. I don't 
  need you upsettin' my family." I thought I could hear a 
  plaintive tone beneath the father's anger.

  "Go home an' calm down, hoss. You ain't got nothin' to be all 
  hot 'an bothered about."

  "Nothin'?" said the father, his voice so high it seemed to 
  squeak. "Nothin'? Hey, white man, you call this nothin'?"

  It seemed to me I saw the gun earlier, but I don't know how 
  because at that moment the father stepped back one pace and as 
  he did, pulled up his shirt and yanked the thing out of his 
  pants. He held it in both hands, pointed stiff-armed at the 
  owner's chest. The owner looked down at the thing like it was a 
  fifty and the guy wanted change. His eyes never lost their 
  sleepy look.

  So much of our disposable culture -- movies, television, pulp 
  novels, comic books -- depends on this drama of random, 
  unpredictable violence. But for all of that, how many of us have 
  ever seen someone point a gun at another person, much less at 
  ourselves? I was unable to respond. I couldn't escape the denial 
  that it wasn't happening, that I was watching this scene in a 
  movie or on TV. I was locked there, unblinking, numb with fear. 
  My heart was beating fast. I heard a humming electrical current 
  of self-preservation telling me to move, run for the door, hide 
  behind something.

  But I didn't. I did something else, something very 
  uncharacteristic and stupid. Since that day I've wondered why I 
  did it, and the only thing I can figure is that I knew if I did 
  nothing the father would shoot the owner and the owner would be 
  dead. I did not want to see a man die. So I spoke the only word 
  I could remember, the only word in my vocabulary at that precise 
  moment:

  "No."

  That was all: just "no," just once. It shattered the moment as 
  though someone had thrown a rock through the laundromat's front 
  window, except for the sound because it was dead silent. In that 
  silence, I could see the sound of my one syllable register in 
  the head of the father. And when he heard it, he moved without 
  thinking. I could see that. He just pivoted toward me in a 
  single plane, his outstretched arms wheeling in an arc in front 
  of him like the turret of a battleship.

  He shot me once in the chest.

  The doctors said that he just missed killing me. That may be, 
  but I was dead. I knew it unequivocally in every part of my 
  mind. I don't remember falling, only being on the hard floor of 
  the laundromat looking up at the fluorescent light tubes on the 
  ceiling, pushing myself along on the floor with my heels, the 
  redness closing in around the edges, knowing I was dead and 
  thinking only one final absurd thought: who's going to dry my 
  load?

  I don't remember anything after that. They tell me the owner 
  grabbed the gun from the father and I guess no one else got 
  hurt. I stayed in the hospital for a few weeks and by the time I 
  got out the father had been sent to Huntsville for two years. I 
  didn't care. In fact, I didn't want him to go to jail at all. 
  Who can say which of us could get desperate or crazy enough to 
  do something like that? He hadn't meant to do me any particular 
  harm other than a general rage I imagine he probably felt toward 
  society.

  My wife never told me I shouldn't have gone to that place, that 
  I didn't have to go, that I had no business trying to peek into 
  those people's lives. She just came every afternoon while I was 
  in the hospital, and sat in my room and watched her soap operas 
  on the TV over my bed. The same ones every day:
    _Days of Our Lives,_ _Another World,_ and _Santa Barbara._ 
  Watching every day, I began to feel myself tugged into the 
  rhythm of the endless ebb and flow of the characters and their 
  small world, like watching a tiger pace in a zoo cage. I became 
  lulled by their perfect, trivial lives unscarred by any tragedy 
  worse than failed love.

  I haven't been back to the laundromat since. In fact I haven't 
  been out of the house much at all. The college gave me a 
  generous leave. At first some of my colleagues and students came 
  by to visit, but they don't much anymore.

  My wife still watches the soaps, but I'm onto something better. 
  Her brother got a job in a place where they make copies of the 
  tapes from security cameras. You know, the ones you see when you 
  go in banks and Circle-Ks, braced on the walls, panning from one 
  side of the room to the other. He can get me as many as I want 
  and I take a lot. All the interest of watching people with none 
  of the danger: the best of both worlds, and it's all real. 
  Eventually I'll get a publishable study out of them, but for now 
  I just watch them for hours at a time. People coming and going 
  in a black and white world, choosing cans of beer, filling out 
  deposits slips, buying lottery tickets. And all the time I'm 
  watching: miles away, weeks later, over their heads, out of 
  their lives. And they never have a clue.


  Mark Smith  mlsmith@tenet.edu
-------------------------------

  Mark Smith is a regular contributor to _InterText_. He has been 
  writing fiction and non-fiction for over ten years. His fiction 
  has appeared or is forthcoming in _Window_, _Spectrum_, 
  _Malcontent_, _Epiphany_, the _Lone Star Literary Quarterly_, 
  and _Elements_. Mark is also the author of a collection of short 
  stories titled _Riddle_ (Argo Press, Austin, Texas, 1992).


  Mercy Street  by Ridley McIntyre
==================================
...................................................................
  * Technology advances faster than our laws or common morality. 
  Clever as we are, can we support the human costs of our 
  ingenuity? *
...................................................................

  This street is hollow. A tube full of nothing. Empty. Lonely. 
  Like a star. Neon so bright and shiny that it dazzles in the 
  sunlight. Concrete sparkling diamonds across my eyes. Stars in 
  the sunlight.

  Sees other stars and believes in friends. Lies. There are no 
  friends. No enemies. No souls. The sky is full of holes. Hollow 
  holes like this street.

  Hollow boy he cries. Shedding water as if a skin. Sheds until 
  his eyes burn and he's a ball, wracked with pain. Pain inside. 
  Wearing a grief mask, or some pale reflection. There he stays. 
  Lost in a maze. A wilderness of empty soul. Every twist and turn 
  a dead end of the mind. A riddle that doesn't matter. Never 
  makes sense.

  "Understand me. Do you understand?"

  Despite the one way connection I have with him, I have to shake 
  my head.

  "Then learn."


  There's a camera-eye view of the world. Looking through a 
  kaleidoscope. Fish-eye technicolor tunnel-vision of this street. 
  The car is sleek. A joy rider. Young boy full of old ideals. 
  Gonna join Metropol, this kid. Gonna be somebody.

  He's too small. His feet barely reach the pedals and he can't 
  see where the hood ends and the nightlights begin. Company car. 
  His friends laughing and screwing around in the back.

  "Faster, man! Push it to the floor." They goad him and he 
  smiles. Two feet on the accelerator pedal, he closes his eyes. 
  Senses the danger. The wall races to the car and the car is 
  still. The hood crushes. His face smashed against the steering 
  wheel. The crash bag inflates above his head. The engine burns. 
  He can hear his friends screaming as they go over him. Through 
  the glass. Out into space. Then he hears no more.


  Lost in what he was, memory falls on him from on high. Raw bile 
  history burns his throat. Burn in red flames, friends. So-called 
  friends that never were. Just like they burned him. Just like 
  the nearest star burns his skin. Hardens him. Turns him to ash. 
  He crumbles before its gaze. Nothing but a void of chrome and 
  electronics. A brain lost to technology. And there he stands, a 
  living corpse shell of a boy. Sweet smile, spike hair, baby eyes 
  no more. The past has burned the chaff away.

  Now something inside him has died. The part that washed against 
  the shores of life but could only grab sand, torn away. Rip 
  tide. World now an empty space. A world without feelings. 
  Nothing but fast strong currents leading to deep-water holes. 
  Hollow holes like this street.

  "You really don't give a shit, do you?" Dirt runs down his face 
  in thin lines. Greasy smears across his silver skin. "You really 
  don't care who I am."

  I'm silent. Utterly silent.


  He never really wakes up. Not in the physical sense. They switch 
  his eyes on and he can see. They don't let him have a mirror. 
  They don't let him touch himself. Through digital hearing he 
  listens to the doctors. Full prosthetic rehabilitation. A 
  technological marvel.

  Don't want it. Want to be dead. Want to be anything but this.

  The doctors reassure him. They tell him that he'll get used to 
  it. That the bad feelings and the nightmares will pass. Others 
  have and so will he. Sterile tasteless hands show him off to 
  students. Look at what we made. Once a dead boy, now a living 
  machine. No one cares. No one there wants him to be alive. They 
  just want to look. Look at what we made.

  Once a whole person. A young boy with old ideals. Now hollow. 
  Like this street.


  This street is salt. Transforming. Tears raining down across the 
  concrete. Like blood. Like a red storm -- purifies. Constantly 
  changing. Warping in and out in a continuous heat haze. 
  Evaporates into nothing. And the salt trails behind. A bug swarm 
  on the tail of a scirocco wind. Leaving behind only the sound of 
  crying. Echoes in the darkness. Empty voices. Lonely. Like a 
  lost boy.

  Sees other boys. Ghosts of memory. Across the street. The street 
  is full of them. Consumed by them. They are everything. And he 
  believes in friends. Convinces himself. They're real. They're 
  all real. And so am I.

  "I care." I take his link from my head and my dreams are my own 
  again.

  Kiss him and he tastes of mercy. Rain salt mercy washing me 
  clean. Dry. Soul desert kiss. But warm lips. Warm steel lips and 
  I close my eyes to him. Warm him. Warn him. Convince him.

  You're not so alone.

  Ridley McIntyre  (gdg019@cch.coventry.ac.uk)
----------------------------------------------
  Ridley McIntyre was born in London, England and now studies 
  Communications as Conventry University. His ambitions are to 
  escape to Canada before he gets conscripted and to make some 
  sense of the Real World.


  Post-Nuclear Horrifics  by Eric Crump
=======================================

...................................................................
  * If you believe the world is coming to an end, does it actually 
  matter if the sky is falling? *
...................................................................

  1.
----

  The morning paper was covering part of his eggs. Banking 
  scandal. Arms talks. Crumbling empires. The waitress was 
  standing right behind him, reciting to the two men at the next 
  table the same list of specials she had recited to him a minute 
  ago, the same she had recited, recited, recited all morning 
  long. Wilkie was nervous. Civil unrest here and there. Cold war 
  over. A photo of four geese crossing a road. A gunman on the 
  loose. He clenched his fist under the table. Unclenched. A child 
  was under a nearby booth banging two spoons together. The men in 
  the next table were arguing. A photo of a burning man falling 
  from a burning building. Wilkie tipped his head to get a better 
  listen.

  "Who said I wanted to be happy?" one of the men said. "Who said 
  happiness was the purpose? You haven't been around much have 
  you?" He snapped his magazine, folded it back on itself, and 
  held it up to his face. Wilkie picked up his doughnut. He 
  stopped at the same cafe every afternoon, drank two cups of 
  coffee, and took notes in his journal. He jotted descriptions of 
  the weather, bits of dialogue overheard, and speculations about 
  the characters who frequented the place.

  The second man leaned forward, chewing hard on a piece of bacon. 
  "You can't just give up like this. The only person who can 
  defeat you is you. Don't you see?"

  The first man put the magazine down, buttered his roll and 
  shoved it, whole, into his mouth. "Thmph mphmm mffmth." Bread 
  bulged from the man's mouth, and crumbs tinkered down his shirt. 
  "Phmmth mphthmm!"

  "You're pretty funny for a chronic depressive," the second man 
  said.

  The man gulped the wad of bread and turned to Wilkie. "Mind if I 
  borrow your paper for a second?"

  The headline on paper said Arms Agreement Bombs! The man tossed 
  the paper at his companion. It landed on his scrambled eggs. The 
  other man began to harangue and harangue. Wilkie looked out the 
  window. A woman with a baby carriage strolled past. A kid on a 
  bicycle passed her. The sun was bright. The waitress was 
  reciting the specials again. The child was crying. The cook 
  shouted "Order up!" The man at the next table began to 
  crescendo. Someone somewhere broke a glass. Wilkie lifted his 
  doughnut halfway to his mouth and paused. Something was 
  unraveling, something he couldn't see was unraveling. Or about 
  to explode.

  2.
----

  Mr. President still had his dark glasses on, even though he'd 
  made it to the underground shelter well before the blast. He bit 
  his fingernails ferociously.

  "I hope Number Two got to the launch sequencer in time," he 
  said. "I hope everything from Beijing to Baghdad is smoking."

  "Sea of flames, sir. I'm sure of it," said Wiggins. He felt 
  compelled to be agreeable. He had made the mistake of stopping 
  the limo as a light turned from yellow to red and as a result, 
  Mr. President had not been able to make it to the Presidential 
  Command Bunker, but had been forced to take cover in an 
  auxiliary shelter originally designed for neighborhood 
  bureaucrats.

  Mr. President was known on Capitol Hill as The Veto King. He was 
  secretly proud. During one session he vetoed fifty-seven percent 
  of the measures enacted by Congress. All but five of his vetoes 
  were overridden. He had VK stitched into his monogrammed towels.

  The bunker had plenty of food and water in it, but no strategic 
  command communications facilities, not so much as a walkie 
  talkie. They'd been in the shelter for twenty minutes and the 
  time had been spent in eerie, uncomfortable silence, punctuated 
  only by Mr. President's occasional lament that he hadn't gotten 
  to initiate the firing sequence. Finally, Mr. President changed 
  the subject.

  "Awfully quiet in here, don't you think, Wiggins?"

  "Yessir." Wiggins was standing at attention. Mr. President was 
  sitting on a cot.

  "Don't you think it would have been noisier? I always thought it 
  would be pretty noisy."

  "The shelter is no doubt designed to keep the noise out, sir."

  "Ah. You're probably right," Mr. President said. "Say, are you 
  getting hungry? What have we got to eat here?"

  Mr. President put Wiggins at ease and ordered him to find the 
  inventory list. The list reported a six-month supply of canned 
  ham, canned tomatoes, canned peaches, canned yams, canned 
  asparagus, and soda crackers. Wiggins found cans of butter beans 
  on the first shelf. On the second shelf he found cans of butter 
  beans. He was reaching for a can on the third shelf when he 
  suddenly realized that history, if it still existed, would hunt 
  him down, bag him, and mount his name over the toilet. He had 
  hesitated. He'd driven the leader of the free world to a 
  second-rate bomb shelter. By the time his hand touched the can 
  of buttered beans he knew that his only hope was that history 
  had perished in the apocalypse.

  3.
----

  Wilkie shook his head. A puff of dust surrounded him. He spit 
  twice and looked around. He was standing in the middle of a 
  blacktop road. Just in front of him was a small store. He had no 
  idea where he was. A few seconds earlier he had been sitting in 
  a Kansas City coffee shop. He was dunking a bagel in his coffee 
  then he was dusting himself off in front of a country store, 
  feeling a little dizzy. He hoped the place had a phone.

  "Do you have a phone?" he asked the big woman behind the 
  counter.

  "Pay phone," she said, and pointed to a relic on the wall. "Cost 
  you a nickel."

  "A nickel?"

  "Hey, buddy, you don't get something for nothing," she said. "By 
  the way, your hair's smoking."

  Wilkie had been to college. For a while. His second course had 
  been The History of Technology. The professor was a personable 
  fellow who smiled as he described medieval medical technology 
  and its effectiveness in combating the plague. "Death got better 
  reviews back then," he said. His motto was "Progress through 
  technology," which he admitted he'd swiped from an Audi 
  commercial. He laughed at the students who pointed out that 
  technology was causing pollution and other world problems. 
  "Luddites!" he said. "If you hate technology so much, why don't 
  you turn off your air conditioners and sell your cars. Give the 
  money to the poor! By God, old Ned Lud must be smiling now, 
  wherever he is." It was the last history class Wilkie took. He 
  left it with a healthy fear of the past.

  Wilkie flinched and looked up. He didn't quite catch sight of 
  his hair, but slender noose of smoke curled down around his 
  nose. He batted his head. Masochistic slapstick. Slappity slap 
  slap slap. The woman frowned. Slap.

  "Here." She tossed a damp rag at him. He patted his hair with it 
  until the smoke seemed to stop flirting at the edge of his 
  vision when he moved. He was out.

  "Want me to call an ambulance? They got a new one up in Platte 
  City," she said. "They'd probably love to take it for a spin."

  "No. I think I'm OK," Wilkie said. He walked out the door, stood 
  on the porch for a moment and considered: he didn't know exactly 
  where he was. He didn't have a car. He'd been through something, 
  he didn't know what. He walked back into the store.

  "I guess I do need a little help."

  "Tell you what," the woman said. "I'll call the sheriff. He's 
  new, too. Just elected him last month. He needs the practice."

  4.
----

  Little girls in big girl poses. They looked uncomfortable, their 
  smiles oddly frozen, their eyes directed off-camera. Were they 
  looking at an adult, searching for the crinkle around the eyes, 
  any sign of approval? or for permission to relax, for permission 
  to get dressed, to go out and play? Mr. President leafed through 
  the pictures twice. He couldn't think of anything to say at 
  first.

  Wiggins placed a small trash can next to the bed. Mr. President 
  let the photos drop into the container.

  "Aren't these shelters supposed to be secure?" Mr. President 
  asked. "I think we've got a security problem here. Did you check 
  that door?"

  Wiggins assured him that the door was locked.

  "What kind of scum would... Jesus," Mr. President said. "My 
  brother had a daughter. If he saw those --"

  Wiggins said nothing. He had two daughters, one of whom grew up 
  and had two babies of her own, boys. Wiggins had once taken the 
  boys fishing in Maine. One of them fell out of a tree and landed 
  in the lake. The boy's brother had pulled him out. He was OK. He 
  hadn't even stopped breathing. But their mother never let them 
  go fishing with him again. She said no offense, Dad, but there's 
  just too much of them in me.

  Wiggins found peace through tomatoes. He grew them in plastic 
  cat food buckets he got from his neighbor. He spent hours 
  pruning the leafy growth on the theory that if the plant had 
  fewer leaves to mind it could apply more of its energy to the 
  fruit. His tomatoes turned out fine every year.

  5.
----

  The sheriff's car reminded Wilkie of a hippopotamus, round and 
  wallowy. Some guys could identify the make, model and year of 
  every car built between 1940 and 1985 (after which they all 
  started to look alike), but he wasn't one of them. This car 
  wasn't like anything built in his driving lifetime. The sheriff 
  flicked his cigarette out the window and pulled the car into a 
  Standard station. He told the fat boy to pump her full. The gas 
  pump rattled like an old clothes dryer. Wilkie asked the sheriff 
  if he could use the restroom.

  "It don't bother me any if you do."

  The restroom door was at the back of the building. Wilkie 
  rounded the corner and came upon a mountain of worn out tires, 
  leaking batteries, rusted tailpipes, and bent chrome molding. A 
  boy was peeing on the tires.

  "Restroom out of order?" Wilkie said.

  "Holy shit!" the boy said, and lurched backward, struggling with 
  his zipper. "No sir, just go on in there, it's fine." The zipper 
  wouldn't slide.

  When Wilkie was nine he had been sent against his will to summer 
  camp. He knew he would be bored, and he was. When he saw a copy 
  of 1984 sitting on the counselors' table, he took it and spent 
  the rest of camp hiding behind the john, reading. He went home 
  without having learned to canoe or play volleyball, but he had a 
  acquired a dread of the future.

  "Can I ask you something?" Wilkie said. The boy looked to be 
  about eight or nine. Probably still fairly honest, he figured. 
  "What town is this?"

  "Weston."

  Weston was about 25 miles north of Kansas City. Being in the 
  general vicinity of where he thought he should have been was 
  comforting. He'd read about Weston once, a feature story about 
  antebellum homes and quaint wineries and old tobacco barns and 
  herds of tourists. It was a place that had for so long not 
  bothered to change that it had become valuable. People came from 
  all over to buy Korean knickknacks displayed in refurbished old 
  buildings. People paid money to wander through 150-year-old 
  homes that had been restored to their original condition and 
  decor, only cleaner.

  "Just curious. How old are you?"

  "Ten." The boy was still fiddling with the zipper. He picked up 
  a piece of wire and was using it to prod the mechanism.

  "When were you born?"

  "January."

  "That makes you four months old," Wilkie said, winking.

  The boy looked at Wilkie and frowned. He dropped the wire and 
  counted off five fingers, silently reciting.

  "Five months," he said. "That makes me five months old. Except 
  I'm ten, really."

  The kid not only lacked a sense of humor, Wilkie though, but he 
  apparently didn't know the difference between May and June. 
  "What year were you born?"

  "Shit," the boy said, and dodged quickly through the junk and 
  around the corner of the building. Wilkie turned around. The 
  sheriff was standing, legs spread, hands on hips, cigarette 
  hanging from mouth, eyes squinting.

  "You done with your business yet?"

  The restroom no cleaner than any other he'd ever been in. The 
  blue paint was peeling from the cinder block walls. The toilet 
  was choked with paper and cigarette butts. Someone had emptied 
  an ashtray. There was a spare roll of toilet paper in the 
  urinal, soaked. Wilkie found this reassuring. He thought it went 
  a long way toward supporting his theory that nostalgia was 
  essentially dangerous and wrong. He knew he wasn't where or when 
  he was supposed to be by a few miles and a few years. It was 
  good to know that gas station restrooms were dirty, 
  nevertheless. What was most unsettling was the missing month.

  6.
----

  Mr. President and Wiggins sat on opposite sides of the shelter. 
  Wiggins had dragged one of the cots over near the door and was 
  looking for a pillow when the lights went out. Both men felt 
  their stomachs clutch and each turned, eyes as wide as they 
  could go, toward the other, unable to see anything but the 
  shapeless night. But only Mr. President said anything.

  "Shit."

  Mr. President drank too much at his inaugural celebration. He 
  looked like he was going to tip over at one point, so his aides 
  suggested that he take a break to freshen up. He said sure why 
  the hell not and walked into the women's restroom. He tried to 
  retreat, but a bottleneck of Secret Service agents had formed at 
  the door. News photographers swarmed, jaws snapping their gum.

  Mr. President and Wiggins remained quiet, barely breathing the 
  dark air, for some time, waiting for the emergency generator to 
  come on and return the light. Finally, Mr. President observed 
  that if the lights were out, the ventilators were not working.

  Another extended silence ensued. Both men watched the dark air 
  for signs of thickening. Soon both were convinced that the air 
  was becoming soupy. They labored for breath. They panted.

  Wiggins felt the panic of the end in the sluggish air. He wanted 
  to get past the panic and die peacefully. He wanted to feel the 
  liberation of no return. Wiggins had driven for Mr. President 
  for eight years. One night, when Mr. President had only been Mr. 
  Governor, he inadvertently signaled right and turned left. He 
  never forgot the terror he felt when the limousine came to a 
  stop, wounded and rocking gently, and he never forgot Mr. 
  President's kindness and understanding. "Could have happened to 
  anyone, old boy," he'd said and patted Wiggins on the shoulder. 
  Now Wiggins would be glad when nothing could be done and nothing 
  would matter, when Mr. President would be nothing more than his 
  twin, a pile of bone and flesh not distinguishable in any 
  important way from his own.

  Mr. President seriously considered making a run for it. Panic 
  scared him more than death. The thought of twisting on this 
  concrete floor, clawing for oxygen was more horrible than any 
  violence. If the blast had not been too close and if there 
  wasn't a firestorm outside and if the car hadn't been 
  incinerated or vandalized, they might be able to make it to 
  another shelter without exposing themselves to much radiation. 
  If they held their breath. If they made good time.

  "I'm not going to just sit here and choke on your breath, 
  Wiggins," Mr. President said. "I think we should head for the 
  Command Bunker, where we should have been in the first place."

  Wiggins considered for a moment. The outside death or the inside 
  death. "With all due respect, sir," he said. "Go to heck."

  Mr. President was too shocked to move.

  7.
----

  The sheriff drove through town, past the police station, past 
  the bank on the corner, past the Hotel Weston, which was still a 
  hotel, and past Rumpel's Hardware. Weston used to be a river 
  town. It was just about to blossom with prosperity, like all the 
  other river towns did in the mid-nineteenth century, when along 
  came the flood of '51 and the Missouri River, the spastic snake, 
  lurched three-quarters of a mile west. Weston was too stunned to 
  grow. Mr. Rumpel was sitting on the front porch. He was already 
  old, which was somewhat reassuring to Wilkie, who had wandered 
  into his store during his one visit to Weston. Mr. Rumpel was 
  ancient then, his eyes watery and clouded. Mr. Rumpel waved as 
  the sheriff's car went past. The sheriff drove around the block 
  and cruised through town again.

  "Where are we going?" Wilkie asked. "I thought the county court 
  house was in Platte City."

  "I got some business to attend to here. You aren't in any rush 
  are you? Don't got any appointment to get to, do you?" He 
  laughed and flicked another cigarette.

  "Nice car," Wilkie said. "New?"

  "Nope. Had it two years," the sheriff said. "Guy who was before 
  me paid too much for it, which is one of the reasons he ain't 
  sheriff anymore. I'm thinking about trading it. Forty-nine Fords 
  don't last. Friend of mine had one that shucked a trannie at 
  10,000 miles."

  On the third trip around the block he looked up and down the 
  street quickly and pulled into the driveway of an old white 
  house. He drove the car into the back yard and parked it behind 
  a shaggy lilac clump.

  A woman who looked very tired and very sane answered the back 
  door. She was leaning toward the sheriff as if to kiss him but 
  stopped short when she saw Wilkie.

  "Who's this?"

  "Just some guy who wandered into Martha's store with singed 
  hair, lost," the sheriff said. "Don't worry. He'll stay in the 
  kitchen." He turned to Wilkie. "You just stay put. Don't forget, 
  I can arrest you if I want."

  "Arrest me for what?"

  "Vagrancy. And don't think I won't."

  "Good Lord, Ray. Being burnt and lost doesn't make a man a 
  vagrant," the woman said. "Did you even ask him where he lives? 
  He's new at this, mister. Don't take it personal. Besides, 
  honey, the boys are still here. Their Aunt Donna woke up with 
  cramps."

  "Christ, Ruth Mary, when am I going to get a break? Life's a 
  crap game and I just rolled snake-eyes."

  "Oh, don't be a cry-baby. What's your name, young man? Come in 
  and I'll get us some cokes. Don't have any ice, I'm afraid, but 
  it'll help some. Wet your whistle. Supposed to hit 90 today, I 
  hear."

  Ruth Mary sometimes hid from Ray and the boys in the storm 
  cellar behind the house. It was a comfortable place, stocked 
  with canned goods and candles and cases of Coke in case a really 
  big storm or some other disaster came along. She also had hidden 
  there, behind the shelves, books. A Tolstoy, two Henry James, 
  and Gone with the Wind. She thought Ray might marry her someday 
  and she wanted to get her reading done.

  8.
----

  Mr. President stood at the top of the shelter stairs, the last 
  bolt in the last door in his hand. He was trying not to breath, 
  trying to pick up any hint of what was beyond the door. What 
  would the devastation look like? Would there be bodies all 
  around, broken and ghastly, or did the fire consume them? Would 
  the ash of human remains be in the air, coat his throat, choke 
  him? He almost returned to the shelter. He couldn't hear 
  anything. That could be good, could be bad, he thought. I might 
  be about to die. He pushed the door open.

  The sun was shining. The limousine was where they'd left it, 
  sans hub caps. Mr. President was glad, for a moment, to be 
  alive. He called to Wiggins and told him everything was OK. Then 
  he realized that the worst possible thing had happened. It had 
  been a false alarm.

  He was going to look like an ass on CNN.

  He passed Wiggins, who was grinning giddily at the sun, on his 
  way back down the steps.

  "Have someone send me something that goes well with butter 
  beans," he said.

  "But, sir. But, sir, everything is fine," Wiggins said. "Oh, I 
  see, sir." He climbed into the limousine turned on the radio. 
  Nothing. The battery was either dead, or missing.

  9.
----
  
  "Are you sure you've never been in an asylum?" Ruth Mary said. 
  "You sound like you came right out of one of those science 
  fiction comics my boys read."

  Ray's hand was resting on his gun. He was squinting through the 
  smoke from his cigarette. He hadn't said much, but he'd muttered 
  a little while Wilkie told his story.

  "I think it's odd that you were in May there and you ended up in 
  June here," Ruth Mary said. "Don't you think that's odd?"

  Wilkie agreed. That was the oddest thing from his perspective, 
  too. Ray stabbed out one cigarette and lit another. "He's a 
  fruit- cake, Ruth Mary. How am I going to explain something like 
  this? I'll be impeached."

  Two boys came running through the room. One of them was chasing 
  the other with a six-shooter aimed at the back of his brother's 
  head.

  Ruth Mary's eyes narrowed. "You're not going to wake up all of a 
  sudden and realize that this was just a dream, are you? That's 
  been done, you know."

  "Yeah, and where would it leave us?" Ray said.

  Wilkie said he didn't think waking up was the answer.

  "I don't know if there is an answer. I've either stumbled back 
  through time, or I'm nuts, or I'm dreaming. There's no way to 
  tell which it is, near as I can tell."

  The boys came charging back through the room. This time they saw 
  Wilkie and stopped.

  The one with the six- shooter carefully aimed it right at 
  Wilkie's nose.

  "This is an atomic ray gun," he said.

  "Stop it, boys."

  "ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZam!" the boy said. "You're fried."


  10.
-----

  Mr. President and Wiggins sat on the same cot in the shelter. 
  Light from the doorway above fell on rows and rows of butter 
  bean cans. The two men were so completely unable to choose 
  between joy and despair that they had given up trying to decide, 
  opting for silent reflection instead.

  Finally, Wiggins cleared his throat.

  "We could go get some chili dogs and beer."

  Mr. President considered for a moment.

  "Yes, I think that would be the best thing to do."


  Eric Crump  (LCERIC@MIZZOU1.missouri.edu)
-------------------------------------------

  Eric Crump helps run the writing center at the University of 
  Missouri, where he moonlights as a graduate student in English. 
  He continues to write short fiction -- even though people 
  discourage this sort of behavior -- and his wife and daughter 
  love him anyway.


  The Nihilist  by Kyle Cassidy
===============================
...................................................................
  * We're part of a living web, intricately bonded to others and 
  the earth. And when we can't understand the point to our lives, 
  sometimes we understand the bait on our hooks... *
...................................................................

  1.
----

  It's midnight and Dominique wants to go to The Rat. She wants to 
  be around a lot of people.

  "Yes, go out," she says, "like to a bar or somewhere. I'm tired 
  of hanging around here... and I have a baby-sitter."

  We meet a bunch of annoying people and a horrible band is 
  playing good songs. I run into this guy whom I used to live 
  with; I haven't seen him in a long time and we start talking. 
  Dominique buys me a beer in a plastic cup. I listen to the band 
  and I'm relatively happy. We're there for an hour and they turn 
  the lights on. It's pretty late and the bar starts to close. 
  Nivin and Sandy's friends are sitting in the corner, maybe 
  twenty of them. It was dark before and I hadn't noticed them. 
  "We're going over to Nivin and Sandy's," says one of them.

  I ask Dominique if she wants to go back there, and she says 
  "Yes," and that she'll wait outside for me. She is talking to 
  some guy at the door. I sit down with a small woman with black 
  hair, dressed in overalls. "I'll see you guys over at Nivin and 
  Sandy's then," I say, and wave.

  Dominique is sitting outside the bar watching television. We get 
  up and walk back to the car.

  "Do you want to know what our problem is?" Dominique says 
  suddenly. "Do you want to know why I don't love you?"

  "No. I don't want to know," I say. I get out of the car and slam 
  the door. "It's pointless. I don't care. I really don't 
  anymore."

  I start back across 322, heading for my house. She's yelling at 
  me across the street: "Remember this! You're walking out on me! 
  You're the one who's walking away from this relationship!"

  I get home and it's about two o'clock. I sit around the 
  apartment for a while holding my face in both hands, like I'm 
  trying the Vulcan Mind Meld on myself, and then I call my sister 
  in Oak Park, Illinois. She's not home and her answering service 
  gives me a number in Florida. I call her at the Holiday Inn in 
  this town called Stuart.

  "Hey, what's up Big Bro?" she says. That's what she's called me 
  since she was about five. Before that she called me "Beehee," 
  which was her best attempt at enunciating the difficult 
  collection of consonants and vowels in my name. She doesn't 
  sound as though she were asleep.

  "Nothing," I say. I haven't talked to her in a long time; apart 
  from holidays I haven't seen her in seven years and I hardly 
  know what to say. "What are you doing?"

  "We're busting a firm here in Stuart," she says. My little 
  sister is a secret agent. She works for the government in the 
  Department of the Treasury. I say it like that because it sounds 
  glamorous. What she does is pose as a naive investor with a lot 
  of money and go to brokerage firms and get defrauded and then 
  pull out a gun and a badge and a calculator. A bang and a crash 
  and a whole squad of SWAT accountants come in and take over all 
  the best offices in the building and start to dismantle the 
  place by paperwork. There is a lot of sweating going on and 
  sometimes, I suppose, people jump out of windows or run to 
  Paraguay or call their mistresses and tell them to get the hell 
  out of the condo before the accountants find out about it.

  "Are you okay?" she says.

  "Okay? I'm fine."

  "You sound listless."

  "I'm always listless. I'm having a crisis."

  "Oh. Well, hey, why don't you come down here?" she says. There 
  is genuine concern in her voice. "The weather's nicer and it's 
  therapeutic."

  "No money."

  "Ha," she says and there's some giggling. I think that maybe 
  there's somebody else in the room. She says, "Hold on." A click 
  and a mechanical silence and I'm on hold for what seems like an 
  hour. She comes back on the line. "You have five hours to get to 
  the airport for the 7:20 to West Palm Beach. It's USAir and the 
  flight number is 302. Is that okay?"

  "Okay? That's great."

  "Do you have any classes?"

  "Classes? I don't need no stinking classes. Hell with classes."

  I'm really glad I have a sister.

  On the plane ride down I sit next to a zombie who sleeps the 
  whole way and keeps retching, like he's about to hock up a 
  hairball. I eat a lot of Eagle peanuts and write a letter to 
  Dominique on the barf bag.

  West Palm Beach: I'm going down the escalator towards baggage 
  claim and I can recognize my sister by her feet because she's 
  wearing really stupid shoes. The rest of her comes into view and 
  she sees me and runs up the escalator and throws her arms around 
  me and almost knocks me down.

  "Hi big bro! I missed you! I really have!"

  "I missed you too, little sister."

  "What's your crisis? You sounded so awful on the phone. Want to 
  talk about it?"

  "I don't know how. It's a moral crisis. I think. Maybe it's a 
  generation thing. Are you suffering from angst, nihilism, 
  boredom, and depression?"

  "Ah, no," she says, "I suffer from Lawn Doctor, condo payments, 
  and inadequate tax shelters." My little sister makes a lot of 
  money.

  "How long can you stay?" she says.

  "I don't know. Until I go back."

  "Won't they miss you at school?"

  "They'll survive," I say.

  She squeezes me really tightly and we walk outside. I'm blown 
  away by the weather which is amazingly warm, while I'm dressed 
  for New Jersey where it's about two degrees above freezing. We 
  talk on the car ride back about stupid things, and then she 
  says: "How's Dominique?"

  I sort of grunt and look out the window.

  "Is that your crisis? Did you guys break up or something?"

  I think about this for a while. "We broke up, but I don't think 
  that's my crisis."

  "Do you and Dominique get along?"

  "No. Not really."

  "Wow. It's been how long now?"

  "Off and on, five years."

  "And it's not getting any better?"

  I laugh. "Ha. It's never gotten any better. I've spent five 
  years in an unrequited maelstrom of emotion and panic."

  "You're being melodramatic."

  "Of course I am."

  "And you're not being fair."

  "Of course I'm not. Dominique? No -- she's not even part of it 
  -- it's me, there's something inside me, like a magnet, or a 
  black hole that's pulling everything into this singularity -- I 
  have a feeling that my universe is about to implode. But that 
  has nothing to do with..."

  "With what?"

  "With anything," then I add, "I don't know if it's me who's 
  crazy, or if it's the people around me."

  I look out the window again and I'm wondering what's wrong with 
  me, or if there's anything wrong with me. I figure that there's 
  nothing wrong with me.

  We don't talk the rest of the way back to the motel. When we get 
  there she introduces me to the Attack Accountants, David and 
  Joe. David has red hair and freckles, so does my little sister. 
  Joe is a stocky guy with black hair and glasses.

  "He's a republican," my sister whispers in my ear as I shake 
  hands with him. His hand is slimy. The two of them are sitting 
  in Joe's room, watching some basketball game. Joe is talking 
  about The Symposium and gets into a fight with my sister about 
  absolute beauty and homosexuality, or five armed lovers, or 
  something weird like that. I'm sitting on the edge of the huge 
  bed not really paying attention, staring into the upper left 
  hand corner of the television picture. Joe accusingly calls my 
  sister Cartesian, and somebody says something about breakfast. 
  As we get up my sister is saying: "Cartesian? Me? You stink, 
  therefore you are."

  Though I'm full of peanuts I go along with them to Denny's. 
  About a billion old people live (expire?) in Stuart, which 
  boasts an enormous billboard which bears only the isolated word 
  RETIREES! in huge white-on-black letters just as you enter the 
  town. All the old people are bloated and they keep looking at my 
  long hair and calling me "ma'am." They are also all at Denny's. 
  This doesn't put me in a good mood. But then David buys a paper 
  and gives everybody a part of it while we're waiting for our 
  food. I end up with the Lifestyles section which has a big 
  article on Ernest Hemingway teaching F. Scott Fitzgerald's 
  daughter, Helga or whatever, how to fish. Picture of him 
  standing on the back of a boat with a machine gun. The caption 
  says that he used the machine gun to shoot sharks while fishing 
  in Key West.

  "You know," I say, "while I'm here I'd like to go to Sloppy 
  Joe's, that bar that belonged to Hemingway."

  "You know," says my little sister, "Ernest Hemingway was born in 
  Oak Park. His house is right down the street from mine, like a 
  block away."

  "That's cool," I say, "I never knew that."

  "Yes," she says. "He called Oak Park 'the land of wide lawns and 
  narrow minds.' "

  "Ha ha. What did Oak Park think of that?"

  "They named the library after him."

  After breakfast I fold up the Hemingway article with the intent 
  on taking it home and reading it, or at least hanging up the 
  pictures on my bulletin board, but the maid is going to throw it 
  out the next morning when she cleans the room.

  My little sister and her squad of Stormtrooper Bookkeepers run 
  off to work to make peoples' lives miserable, and I sit by the 
  pool reading a tattered copy of The Fifth Column, which was on 
  the night table, a spy thriller by Paine Harris called Thunder 
  of Erebrus, as well as a rather quaint little book called The 
  Abortion by Richard Brautigan. I'm so bored that I read about 
  six pages from each at a time and then switch.

  The sun broils down upon me and old people thrash around in the 
  pool in front of me and I can never tell if they're drowning or 
  not. Every couple of minutes I look up over the pages of the 
  book and pick out the ones worth saving if they do start to 
  drown. I figure that I probably wouldn't save any of them. But 
  then I could be wrong.

  On the ground by the pool tiny lizards dart out and snatch up 
  huge, black, radioactive ants off of the concrete, chewing with 
  thoughtful pause. The lizards are very swift and disappear 
  beneath the sheltering branches of low shrubs.

  I pick up my journal and write down some observations about the 
  people in the pool. I think these observations are pretty shrewd 
  and fairly articulate (if not disquietingly misanthropic), 
  though unfortunately very Hemingway. My delusions of literary 
  grandeur will however be put aside a week after I get back; the 
  good people at Coma get extremely upset when they read these, 
  especially a strange young girl with straw-yellow hair who for 
  some odd reason thinks I am insulting her grandmother.

  By four of the clock I have finished both The Abortion and The 
  Fifth Column, but of all the things I was reading the one that I 
  found most entertaining was the spy novel. I wonder about this 
  and go back to the room.

  I take a shower and notice that I have a pretty good burn 
  started on my front and back. As always, my sides have not 
  tanned, neither has my neck nor the underside of my chin. These 
  white spots are in collusion with the iron shaped white patch on 
  my chest. It's the 'I was reading a book' sun tan -- the only 
  kind I've been able to get.

  I watch TV for a while and then write in my journal about an old 
  woman and her granddaughter I had watched fighting at the 
  airport. The woman was so old that she had forgotten that she 
  was once young and the granddaughter was too young to imagine 
  getting old. They sat facing one another, despising one another, 
  and making no attempt at understanding one another's position.

  Nothing there on television, so I grab my books and wander back 
  to the pool, thinking to do a few laps or something. The pool is 
  too small to do laps, but I want to get in the water for a while 
  if only to justify my being in Florida.


  2.
----

  "Hello?"

  "Hello Dominique."

  "Oh, hi. How are you?"

  "Well, I'm under the delusion that I am Ernest Hemingway. I'm 
  warning you now."

  "It's the fair thing to do. Thanks. Hey, about last night--"

  "I'd rather not talk about it."

  "Sure, of course."

  "I mean I'm sure you've got your reasons and all... I don't 
  know. I just can't think about anything."

  "Do you ever think of anything?"

  "I am the architect of my own destruction. Sometimes I just 
  can't do the right thing even when I know what it is, when I 
  know I'm doing something wrong, something that I'll regret, I 
  just go on and do it anyway. I mean, sometimes, well, most time 
  I guess it looks like I don't care, but I do, I mean about 
  everything. I care, I'm just not... there. Hey, I was a poet and 
  was unaware of it..."

  "I think that sometimes you don't know what you're looking for 
  and that sometimes you don't know how to get it. I think that 
  sometimes you won't talk to anybody and that pisses people off 
  and they think you're a snob or something."

  "That's not it at all. I mean, sometimes I won't talk to 
  anybody, but that's because nobody knows what I'm thinking. And 
  I can't articulate myself to anyone. Sometimes I'm not even 
  thinking about anything, sometimes I'm just there and people 
  look at me like I'm out of my tree or something. I feel like 
  I've got to be doing something all the time or I'm letting 
  someone down. Hey, have you read "Everything Always Reminds You 
  of Something?" It's about this boy whose father is a famous 
  writer. Not only is he a famous writer, but he's good at 
  everything else too; everything he touches turns to gold. He's 
  especially fond of sports, he shoots pigeons -- they shoot clay 
  ones now, but these were real -- and he shoots them really well, 
  like 99 for 100, and the last one limps, ya know?"

  "Yeah, I know. Right."

  "So the kid's got to live up to this father, who has tremendous 
  expectations of him. The father's not pushy or anything, well, 
  actually he is... just by being so great at everything, he's 
  pushing his kid to be really great at something. So the kid 
  starts to shoot pigeons, and he's really good at it, and the 
  father marvels at how great the kid is at this and he's proud 
  and happy and all."

  "Yeah.... A football dad."

  "And so one day, the kid brings his dad this story that he's 
  written and the father is cowed, completely floored -- the story 
  is fantastic! It's amazing, the father has never seen anything 
  like it, he's sure his kid is a genius, and he starts pushing 
  him even more, slowly, subtly, like he's trying not to, but he 
  is..."

  "Yeah...."

  "And the father keeps saying to the kid, 'Why don't you write 
  something else? You can show it to me, and maybe I can help you 
  with it. If you want to.' And the kid says, 'Yeah, sure dad, I 
  will.' And the kid goes back to boarding school, and like two 
  years later the father is in the kids room at home looking for 
  something and he finds a book of short stories by somebody and 
  the story that the kid says he wrote is in there, he plagiarized 
  it, word for word, including the title, just to impress his old 
  man."

  "So what are you saying?"

  "I don't know. That's my point, I'm not saying anything. Do I 
  always have to be saying something? I can't be profound 24 hours 
  a day. I mean, it's just a good story, and I've been thinking of 
  Hemingway and of, you know, crashing through the waves and 
  catching marlin and harpooning them and machine-gunning sharks 
  that attack my catch.... I think like that sometimes. It's in my 
  universe."

  "This is pointless. Look, Bradley, I don't want to talk about 
  this anymore. Maybe you think like Hemingway, maybe Hemingway's 
  in your universe. It's nice to know that somebody is. But you 
  don't have any space in your universe for me. You never have -- 
  you've always been alone with yourself and in love with 
  yourself. I've made up my mind. We're through, you know. 
  Forever. There's someone else in my life now, someone who 
  doesn't fill me with empty spaces and dread and nihilism. I've 
  given this a lot of thought. I don't love you. I've never really 
  loved you. I'm sorry. I don't want to talk to you anymore."


  About an hour later I hear the carload of economists pull up 
  outside and three doors slam in rapid succession. Joe is talking 
  about some contraceptive device they've been testing on 
  chickens, he'd read about it in some agricultural magazine. It 
  was some sort of body condom. Then I hear David remark: "For the 
  hen-pecker?" They all laugh, and I can't help but snort myself 
  from where I'm sitting on the bed, dripping wet hair into my 
  journal.

  My little sister comes into the room and I say "Hi," and am very 
  glad to see her. She is smiling; we look for movies on T.V. 
  There is one on with Adam West, the guy who used to be Batman. 
  It's a campy thing about some race of aliens trying to recruit 
  high school kids to go back to planet Mung with them or 
  something. I'm not really paying too much attention, but it is 
  funny and sad in parts. We watch this movie for a while and then 
  my little sister wants to go out to eat. These attack 
  accountants, they eat out a lot. We go. I am not hungry, but I 
  eat an omelette stuffed with mushrooms anyway.

  My little sister had three books on her night table, the 
  aforementioned Fifth Column, which I'd since thrown into the 
  pool, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, and 
  Foucault's Pendulum. When we get back to the motel, she sits 
  down on her bed. I've always held that you can learn a lot about 
  a person by knowing what books they're reading.

  "What the hell are you reading Catcher in the Rye for?" she 
  asks. She is going through the books on my night stand.

  "It's a good book. Aren't I allowed to read good books?"

  "Brad," she says heavily, giving me a sort of serious look. "I 
  trust you, big bro, really I do, more than anybody else in the 
  world, and sometimes when I think that I've done something 
  really clever, I look back and think of something even more 
  clever that you've done."

  "Yeah?"

  "Sometimes though I'm afraid that you're deluding yourself."

  I frown at her. "Of course I'm deluding myself. I am deluged 
  with delusion. All of it self-indulged. Of the most deluxe 
  varieties. How am I deluding myself?"

  "You're an idealist."

  "Yeah."

  "You're an anarchist."

  "So?"

  "But that doesn't work. It doesn't work outside of Walden Pond 
  and it'll never work as long as there are more than thirty 
  people on this planet. The vanguard is gone and the current 
  leaders are deranged."

  "I'm not really an anarchist." I can't think of anything to say, 
  any way to explain anything to her. I suddenly feel very 
  inarticulate. "I used to know this guy named Bateman, he was a 
  chess player, still is -- it's weird, all these things that have 
  happened to me that you don't know about. It's been a long time. 
  The thing is, he's crazy as a loon -- Bateman that is -- 
  excellent chess player, but he talks to leaves -- I mean the 
  kind that fall from trees. He's crazy, completely, but we used 
  to play chess all the time together. Anyway, he admitted to me 
  once that he didn't like to play chess. He couldn't stand it, 
  but he liked the way people looked at him when they knew that he 
  was a professional chess player."

  "What are you saying?"

  "Nothing. Whatever I'm saying I guess I'm not saying it very 
  well. I'm not really an anarchist. I don't believe the 
  anarchists. They just dress really well."

  When it gets late we turn out the lights, but the curtains are 
  open a little and the light pours in yellow and bright and stark 
  in a manner which is particular to motels. We're both sitting up 
  in our beds, and the entire place feels like a motel. Even if I 
  closed my eyes and shoved my fingers in my ears and pinched off 
  my nose, I'd still know that I was in a motel somehow. The bed 
  feels like a motel bed, the sheets feel crisp and cheap like 
  motel sheets. I've already stolen the Gideon's Bible, which I do 
  every time that I'm in a motel for some reason. I've got dozens 
  of them. I don't know why, I suppose it's a character flaw. It's 
  a lousy translation anyway.

  My sister bounces a couple of times in bed and starts talking 
  about the form of Zen she's been practicing, how she's been 
  sitting zazen in the full lotus position with her legs bent up 
  all crazy around her neck like pretzels. No one in my family was 
  Zen before her, it requires far too much discipline. My sister's 
  really practicing hard, though. From the way she's talking, I 
  doubt that she's searching for, or even believes she will attain 
  any form of enlightenment -- whatever that may be -- but she's a 
  lot more peaceful than anyone else I know. My little sister is 
  considerably more relaxed within self than I am. She's more 
  forgiving and less cathartic. She's been able to forgive me in a 
  way that I never have and let dead things pass.

  We talk about what we want to do tomorrow. I say that I want to 
  go snorkeling or go to Sloppy Joe's. She wants to go deep sea 
  fishing.

  I plop down on the bed, still laying on top of the covers. It is 
  quiet for a long time. Then my little sister says in an 
  amazingly quiet voice:

  "Brad?"

  "Yeah?"

  "Are you alright?"

  "I'm fine, really."

  "You sounded so bad on the phone, you sounded awful."

  "I'm sorry about that. I just got carried away, I mean, I 
  overreacted to everything I guess. You know how I always 
  exaggerate stuff... nothing happened and I made a big deal about 
  it."

  "You sounded like you lost... everything."

  "Heh, no. Really I'm sorry, sis. Nothing happened. I'm okay. 
  Okie- dokie. Sometimes I just get pissed at the world because 
  it's not what I want it to be. That's all. No cause for alarm."

  "No."

  "Ya know..."

  "What?"

  "This is the first time that I've known you as a grown up. Like 
  you're a real person now. I haven't really seen you since you 
  were in high school."

  "No."

  "This is the first time I've ever met you, it seems like. I'm 
  really sorry. I must have sounded like a wreck on the phone, but 
  really nothing's wrong. I'm fine, though I'm afraid that I'm not 
  a very likeable narrator."

  Sometime during the course of the night I fall asleep.

  The next morning we eat at Denny's again. The place is packed 
  with octogenarians who all look at me weird. I'm getting tired 
  of this so I start looking weird back at them. David tells us 
  that his older brother Rob played Oingo or something on The 
  Banana Splits Show, back in 1968 or whenever.

  "Like sports?" he says to me.

  "Nope," I reply, looking up into his sort of thin red face.

  "There was this one guy, he owned a baseball team, I shouldn't 
  say who he was, but we busted his parent company -- when?"

  "February," says Joe.

  "Yeah," says David, "February. Joe and I went in, he had a seat 
  in the futures exchange, and -- "

  "I don't understand any of the economics stuff," I say, "it's 
  all over my head."

  "Oh," says David, looking disappointed, as though the best part 
  of the story had to do with decimal points and pork bellies. 
  "Well, uh, after we busted him, like there were cops and 
  treasury department agents crawling over this guy. He had a 
  hundred and ten safes in his building and we pulled all the 
  papers, everything and this guy was rotten, let me tell you, 
  every scrap of paper we looked at, even the toilet paper, it was 
  all adding up: this guy was crooked as a corkscrew. He was 
  lookin', just from a preliminary standpoint mind you, at six, 
  seven million dollars in fines. Your sister just threw him the 
  hell out and set up in his office. He was sitting in this 
  meeting room across the hall with two treasury police just 
  shaking like a leaf and your sister was calling him in every ten 
  minutes for files -- she even sent him out for doughnuts -- and 
  he couldn't take it. He just hit the bottle, got completely 
  sloshed. Plastered, this poor guy was, drinking whiskey or 
  something, sloppy all over the place and when we closed up for 
  the day to come back to the hotel he asks your sister if she 
  wants to go out to some bar with him -- what one?"

  "Scaramuchi's," my sister says.

  "Yeah," says David. "Scaramuchi's, ever heard of it?"

  I shake my head.

  "God, killer expensive this place. Well, anyway, she says yes, 
  and they go out to this bar and he's there, young guy, maybe 
  thirty five, watching his life going down the toilet. I guess 
  she felt sorry for him or something."

  My sister shrugs.

  "And there's a couple other people from his company there, his 
  golf buddies or what-not, and they start doing these drinks 
  called Flaming Liberties."

  "Statue of Liberty," says my little sister.

  "What?"

  "The drink is called a Statue of Liberty."

  "Oh, right, yeah. Well anyway, this drink it's like a shot of 
  Everclear, grain alcohol, like 190 proof or what-not, and you 
  stick your two fingers in the shot glass, your index finger and 
  your middle finger, and then you hold them over your head and 
  somebody sets them on fire with a match. You hold them over your 
  head like the torch on the Statue of Liberty and you do this 
  shot, like you drink the grain, and then you put your goddamn 
  fingers out in your mouth and drink a chaser of fruit juice. And 
  they were doing these things and this guy was already drunk, I 
  mean, wasted, and here he was doing shots of Everclear.... Well 
  anyway, 'bout his third shot he dips his fingers in the glass, 
  holds them up in the air -- your sister sets them on fire, 
  right? So his fingers are flaming... he throws the shot into his 
  mouth but he forgets to swallow it, shoves his fingers in there, 
  and BOOM! Blows his face off."

  "Not really," says my sister.

  "Well," says David, "there was this huge fire ball and he burned 
  all the hair off of his face, like his goddamn bangs and his 
  eyelashes and his eyebrows, and they took the poor guy to the 
  hospital. That's about the funniest damn thing I ever heard of."

  "Pretty funny," I say. "The world's a dangerous place."

  "Hey, you wanna go deep sea fishing today?" asks David.

  "Fishing," I say. "Sure. Sounds good."

  A map is produced and over breakfast some decisions are made as 
  to the why's, where's, and how's. By the time the check comes we 
  pretty much know what we're doing and we head out of Denny's 
  into the Stuart sun, aimed for coastal waters.

  Captain Joe is a scruffy looking character who ought to have 
  been in Jaws. He sits in the fighting chair on the back of his 
  boat the Lady Skids -- whatever the hell that means -- burned 
  almost black by the sun, squinting at us through creviced eyes. 
  He is probably fifty or sixty and he looks us over as though he 
  knows we will never amount to anything like what he has -- even 
  if we live to be a thousand.

  "Are you Captain Joe?" asks David as we get out of the car. "You 
  charter, right?"

  The captain nods.

  "My name's Joe, too," says Joe with an idiot grin. The captain 
  nods again.

  "Hi," says my sister, squinting back at him. "I'm Rachel."

  The captain says nothing, looking us over warily with a creased 
  face like worn leather. His eyes are white-blue, like a pale sky 
  and they are incongruous on his dark face, like that girl on the 
  cover of that National Geographic. He seems strong yet tired and 
  in his hands he is absently tying and untying a piece of twine.

  "I'm Ernest Hemingway," I say, stepping forward and staring 
  solidly into his eyes. The captain's face slowly splits in a 
  huge grin and thirty teeth like white doors clap together in a 
  mastication of a laugh.

  "HoHoHo!" he bellows like a jolly Florida Santa Claus, slapping 
  his leg. "Well by all means then, come aboard, Papa! What you 
  after? Spoonbill? Swordfish? Sailfish? or Marlin? Cobia? 
  Dolphin? Kings maybe? Blues? Grouper? How about Spanish 
  Mackerel? We got it all, it's all out there, in the water. 
  Water's blue, like your eyes are blue. Barracuda! Sharks! Eat 
  you whole they will, won't they Papa?" he says, looking down at 
  me with a stern but manageable eye.

  "Splashin' and hollerin'," I say out of the corner of my mouth, 
  looking back at him, "and the eyes roll white when they bite 
  down..."

  Captain Joe laughs again and holds out his hand. I take it and 
  he pulls me on board and the others after me.

  My sister gives the captain two hundred dollars, which he 
  counts, first wetting his thumb on a wide slab of tongue, then 
  counting the fifties out loud.

  "We got the two mates comin' aboard and then we're off." He 
  clambers up the stairs and a few seconds later a loud boat 
  whistle sounds. The captain returns and shortly a pair of even 
  scruffier- looking characters approach and board the boat. The 
  first is tall with long, curly brown hair and sunglasses. He 
  introduces himself as Bayan. The captain jerks an impatient 
  thumb at him and he immediately climbs the stairs. The second 
  individual is a seasoned salt named Matt, who has short, poorly 
  groomed hair and a beard almost two feet long. He is wearing 
  blue overalls and one cotton work glove on his left hand. His 
  eyes are permanently lost behind dark wire sunglasses and I 
  wonder if he even had any eyes.

  We get under way and Matt starts explaining how we're going to 
  be fishing, what we're using for bait and all. Basic crap like 
  that. All I'm worried about is not getting seasick, which is an 
  experience I had once at the age of twelve. It is not one which 
  I would care to repeat.

  As we are crashing through the waves at speeds which can only be 
  considered reckless, a flock of pelicans flies along side of the 
  boat, flapping their wings easily and remaining motionless in 
  the air, stationary ten feet away from where I stand at the 
  rail. Matt throws things at them and curses. And I start to 
  think, somewhere in the dank recesses of my head:


   The pelican begins with its vengeance,
   A terrible curse of thirst has begun,
   His shipmates blame bad luck on Matt-the-Mate,
   About his neck, the dead bird is hung....
   
  3.
----

  Joe -- the accountant, not the captain -- is sitting on a bench 
  upstairs looking rather green. I sit down a few feet from him, 
  mostly because there's less wind up there behind the flying 
  bridge and it's still outside. My sister and David are inside, I 
  think, where somebody is handing out small orange bags of potato 
  chips, that they may be thrown into the ocean and choke whales 
  or something. The boat continues in this heedless manner for 
  about half an hour, after which time the captain drops anchor -- 
  no doubt after consulting his sonar rig or something. 
  Matt-the-Mate comes around and throws a bit of squid on 
  everybody's hook and we drop them over the side. No sooner has 
  my bait struck the bottom than something hits and my pole bends.

  "Hey!" I call, "I got one on!" There is a sudden rush of 
  exhilaration and Matt-the-Mate comes to stand beside me. I reel 
  the line in. There's not much resistance and I can tell that 
  it's a small fish. Looking down I can see an insignificant 
  silver shape, maybe ten or fifteen feet down. This is my fish. I 
  watch it as it gets closer to the surface. It breaks and I lift 
  it out of the water. It is a sea bass, about nine inches long or 
  so.

  "I'll get that for you," says Matt-the-Mate.

  "It's too small for anything -- " I am saying when he grabs the 
  fish in his gloved hand and removes the hook.

  "Good for bait," he says laying the fish down on a table and 
  cutting into it with a long knife. He cuts down behind the 
  dorsal fin and then drags the blade along its spine, fillets the 
  flesh from its body. The fish flops madly but Matt-the-Mate 
  ignores this. He flips the fish and repeats the procedure. There 
  is very little blood. He chops the meat into chunks, sticks one 
  on my hook and walks away.

  The fish looks up at me with that wide, round, black, unblinking 
  eye for a long time, flapping slowly. His mouth gasping air that 
  goes to nourish nothing; all that is flapping seems to be a 
  spine and the visible row of thin ribs. His body is gone -- to 
  tempt and be consumed by a dozen other fish before that eye 
  winks out, black within black.

  "I'm sorry," I say to the fish. I am horrified and I can't stop 
  looking at it. I know that this is my fault, that if I hadn't 
  dropped my line into the water this bit of the world never would 
  have been disrupted. I wish that I had not come.

  "Ha!" says Matt-the-Mate, when he sees me staring at the fish 
  finally. "That's nothin. I seen 'em live hours after ya cut em 
  up. None of the organs is in the parts you use for bait. We just 
  throw 'em back in -- blood's good in the water." He picks up the 
  fish and flings it into the sea. The fish floats, a white patch 
  on the blue surface for a while, wiggling slowly. It is unable 
  to right itself and swims sideways. From beneath it rises a 
  long, brown, torpedo- shaped shadow -- there is a flash of white 
  and a furious splash and the fish is gone.

  "Barracuda!" shouts Bayan from the bridge. "Big ol 'cuda!" I 
  look up and see him pointing into the water. Later we see them, 
  there are two, slowly circling the boat just below the surface, 
  each maybe five feet long.

  "Anybody feel like a swim? Hahaha!" cackles Matt-the-Mate. This 
  breaks him up and there is much knee slapping on his part. A few 
  minutes pass like this and then Matt-the-Mate notices that I 
  haven't put my line back in the water.

  "Hey," he says, slapping me on the back with his gloved hand, 
  "can't catch 'em if you ain't got your line in the water. Gotta 
  get your end in. Hahaha!" This sends him off on another laughing 
  tirade. He shakes his head and walks around the corner.

  Bayan comes down the steps half way and sits down, setting a can 
  of Coors between his legs.

  "You folks doin' all right?" he asks.

  "Yes. We sure are," says David. "You do this every day?"

  "Do what?" says Bayan listlessly, looking over at David.

  "Fish, out on the water. Like this."

  "Most days," says Bayan. He looks out into the water.

  "Some days there's no customers?" asks David.

  "Some days. Some days there's no charter."

  "What do you do then?"

  "Cut bait, drink beer," says Bayan.

  I'm standing in the corner, holding onto my rod. The bait is 
  swinging freely on the hook as the boat rocks up and down. It 
  slaps me in the side of the face. I can feel the wet flesh and 
  the metal of the hook in that instant. I touch my face and there 
  is blood on my fingers: not my blood, it is mixed with scales. I 
  tuck the hook into one of the eyelets on the rod.

  About three minutes pass and David hooks a small green fish 
  which has swallowed the hook and he looks at it helplessly, then 
  around for Matt-the-Mate.

  "Just rip it out," says Bayan from his seat on the steps. "Don't 
  be afraid to hurt them fish, there's one fact about this world, 
  and it's that organisms eat other organisms. So don't worry 
  about that hook, don't worry bout them fish, just tear it right 
  out. Nature is not pretty." He sits with his elbows resting on 
  his knees, which are spread far apart, in a wide "V." He leans 
  his shaggy head across us like some grizzled guru instructing 
  neophytes.

  I look away from the boat into the water and wonder if I could 
  swim to shore. I can see the buildings plainly, but am not sure 
  how far away they are. The sea is flat like a table. I guess 
  that it is about half a mile. In the distance a school of 
  porpoise pass, their backs moving out of the water in a 
  semi-circle and then disappearing like the pistons of some 
  Atlantean engine.

  Meanwhile my little sister hooks a fish and we watch her fight 
  to reel it in. Her rod bends and she is shouting and laughing 
  with her mouth open. She has put white zinc sunblock on her 
  nose, which protrudes incongruously from the dark lenses of her 
  sunglasses. The butt of the rod is wedged high in her armpit and 
  she pulls up and cranks down in turn. We all look over the side 
  and finally a fish breaks the surface.

  "Red snapper," says Matt-the-Mate, "good eatin' fish." He eyes 
  it a bit. "Too small to keep. They gotta be thirteen inches ta 
  keep. Ya gotta throw this one back. But let's ya catch somethin 
  really big...." He takes the fish from her hook and sets it 
  down. With his knife he cuts the fins from its body and then 
  forces the hook through the spine and casts it back into the 
  water.

  "Watch this," he says. The snapper flaps in the water and swims 
  in circles, trailing blood. Only twelve feet away we can see the 
  circling shapes of the barracudas, two or three feet beneath the 
  surface. They seem to notice a difference in the water almost 
  immediately and begin to swim towards the snapper. One of the 
  barracudas sinks out of sight and the other noses slowly towards 
  the injured fish. There is a flash and a spray of foam and a 
  harsh buzzing. Rachel shrieks as line begins to run from her 
  reel.

  "Hit him," says Matt-the-Mate. "Hit 'em hard, pull up, pull up 
  now!" Rachel pulls back and the hook sets. She grabs at the reel 
  but Matt-the-Mate is right behind her.

  "Don't waste your time. You won't be able to pull him an inch. 
  Let him run. Let him tire himself out. Hoo-Hee, you got em on!" 
  Then he calls up into the air, "Got a 'cuda on down here!" 
  Everyone begins to crowd around my little sister, Matt-the-Mate 
  keeping them at a healthy distance, giving her room to move.

  "All lines up!" he shouts. "Lines up! He's moving, he's moving. 
  Follow him around, little girl. Walk him around the boat." The 
  fish has begun to pull towards the bow of the boat, dragging my 
  sister along she walks around and a crowd follows her. I climb 
  the stairs and look down. Her line disappears into the water at 
  a sharp angle; the fish is diving. Along the other side of the 
  boat the other barracuda keeps swimming as though unaware of its 
  companion's absence.

  Rachel fights the fish in the hot sun for forty-five minutes. 
  Sometimes she is on her knees, laying against the bulwark. Twice 
  she tries to give the rod to David, but Matt-the-Mate won't let 
  her. He makes her hang on even though there are tears streaming 
  down her face. After three quarters of an hour she has brought 
  the fish to the surface and it swims alongside the boat, 
  exhausted. Matt-the-Mate has her walk it to the back of the boat 
  where a gate is opened and Matt- the-Mate and 
  Bayan-the-Other-Mate gaff it through the side and pull it into 
  the boat. The fish is huge, amazingly large. Five feet long, 
  shaped like a loaf of bread, it is brown and silver and its 
  teeth are many and curved into an evil looking smile. It lays on 
  the deck of the boat, its mouth moving slowly. Once it starts 
  flopping and smacking its mouth shut and people scream and jump 
  back. But Matt- the-Mate puts his foot on its head and holds it 
  down while Bayan takes a picture of Rachel and the fish. Then 
  Bayan kneels down in front of the fish and slits it open from 
  its throat to its tail. Entrails begin to slip from the thin gap 
  which looks like the cut of a razor blade through smooth, thick 
  rubber. The fish flops tremendously but Matt-the-Mate keeps a 
  good hold of its head and they shove it back over the side.

  "Watch this," says Bayan, and leans over the railing to watch. 
  "They're gonna tear each other to pieces. Heh heh."

  The barracuda swims slowly in a tight circle, trailing blood and 
  moving its head from side to side as though searching for 
  something. From beneath the boat rises the second barracuda in a 
  shimmering cloud. It bites down hard on its companion's side, 
  quickly tearing a piece of flesh from it. Matt-the-Mate points 
  and laughs.

  "Now it'll get good," he says, but I am no longer watching. 
  Rachel has come up the steps and is sitting on one of the long 
  benches. She is covered with sweat and is resting her head in 
  her arms. She breathes heavily and below I can hear splashing 
  and laughter.

  "These people are not nice to fish," I say.

  "No," she replies, looking up at me. She looks at me for a long 
  time without saying anything and then puts her head down on the 
  rail.

  Kyle Cassidy  (cass806@elan.rowan.edu)
----------------------------------------
  
  Kyle Cassidy is still 26 and still at Rowan University. He tries 
  to divide his time evenly between his Macintosh and his 
  motorcycle -- but we also understand his mother would like him 
  to get a haircut.


  FYI
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