textfiles/magazines/INTERTEXT/ITv6n1.etx

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===============================================
InterText Vol. 6, No. 1 / January-February 1996
===============================================

  Contents

    FirstText: Old Fish, Teeming Pond.................Jason Snell

  Short Fiction

    At the Dead Mother's Bend....................Mark Steven Long
    
    Decisions.........................................Craig Boyko

    This is the Optative of Unfulfillable Wish.......Kyle Cassidy

    The Greatest Vampire.........................Gary Cadwallader
    
    Twenty-One....................................Wendy J. Cholbi
    
....................................................................
    Editor                                     Assistant Editor
    Jason Snell                                    Geoff Duncan
    jsnell@intertext.com                    geoff@intertext.com
....................................................................
    Assistant Editor                     Send correspondence to 
    Susan Grossman                        editors@intertext.com
    susan@intertext.com              or intertext@intertext.com
....................................................................
  InterText Vol. 6, No. 1. 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 1996, Jason Snell. 
  Individual stories Copyright 1996 their original authors. 
  InterText is created using Apple Macintosh computers and then 
  published in ASCII/Setext, Adobe PostScript, Adobe Acrobat PDF 
  and HTML (World Wide Web) formats. For more information about 
  InterText, send a message to intertext@intertext.com with the 
  word "info" in the subject line. For writers' guidelines, place 
  the word "guidelines" in the subject line.  
....................................................................


  FirstText: Old Fish, Big Pond!   by Jason Snell
=================================================
  
  After five years of editing InterText, after having written 
  twenty-seven of these FirstText columns, I'm constantly in 
  danger of repeating myself when I welcome you to a new edition 
  of this magazine.

  It can get to be a little bit like listening to your doddering 
  old Uncle Phil as you sit on the couch waiting for Christmas 
  dinner. "Uh-huh, right, that's when the Zero came out of the sky 
  and shot you down in the Pacific," you say, having heard this 
  particular World War II story dozens of times while still 
  doubting its authenticity. Every Christmas, Uncle Phil tells the 
  same story, like it or not.

  Sometimes I wonder if I'm becoming a bit like Uncle Phil. Not 
  just because of my column topics -- I mean, if I had expected to 
  write twenty-seven of these columns, I would have never thought 
  of writing a "from the editor" column to begin with! -- but 
  because of the length of time we've been doing InterText.

  When we started publishing this magazine, there were probably 
  two other online fiction magazines. ("Uh-huh, right, that's when 
  Athene got shot out of the sky, and with only Quanta> and 
  DargonZine left standing, you and Geoff entered the fray.") Now 
  I'd guess that there are at least 50 entities that call 
  themselves online magazines and print fiction, either 
  exclusively or as part of a package with poetry, journalism, or 
  opinion writing. Some of them are nothing but glorified home 
  pages on the World Wide Web, others are online arms of 
  paper-based magazines, and still others fit the same format that 
  InterText does -- a traditional fiction magazine, sans paper.

  What does InterText have on these other magazines? On one level, 
  it's sheer age. We've been here seemingly forever, watching our 
  small community of magazines turn into a flood of more than 700 
  electronic periodicals, according to John Labovitz's E-Zine 
  List. We've stuck around. It's also quality -- we seem to be 
  pickier about what we accept and more careful with the text of 
  our stories than some, though not all, other publications.

  But these days, it's hard to get heard over the din of the World 
  Wide Web. When there were only a couple magazines out there on 
  the Net, it was easy to find InterText. But now it's pretty 
  hard, and getting harder. How can we stand out from the crowd, 
  and get interested readers to discover the brand of fiction that 
  we provide every two months?

  That's a tough one.

  For one thing, I think there needs to be a central clearinghouse 
  for online magazines like InterText -- ones that publish 
  fiction on a regular basis. Readers need a place to go to find 
  detailed information about what kinds of stories different 
  magazines publish, so they can match their tastes to the 
  appropriate publication. Another need is for someone (or several 
  someones) with time and guts to rate the quality of as many 
  online magazines as possible, so busy Net users who don't have 
  the time to separate magazines with good editorial filters from 
  online vanity presses can find the best source for reading 
  online.

  Not quite the same solution, but one that's still pretty useful, 
  is Jeff Carlson's eScene <http://www.etext.org/Zines/eScene/> 
  the online fiction anthology. Carlson's goal is to make eScene 
  the first stop for readers on the Net -- a collection of the 
  best stories printed online in a given year. Last year, eScene 
  only received submissions from a handful of magazines (I'm proud 
  to say that stories from InterText figured prominently in that 
  collection), but this year's eScene> has received nearly a 
  hundred story submissions from many of the publications swimming 
  in the Net. If eScene can gain cache from the Net literati, 
  perhaps it can serve as a jumping-off point for readers.

  But most importantly for magazines like InterText, a thriving 
  future on the Net requires word of mouth from our readers. If 
  you enjoy reading InterText, pass the magazine's URL on to your 
  friends. Or e-mail them a copy. A virtual magazine with a budget 
  approaching $0 and three people, all of whom have "day jobs," 
  can't be a marketing juggernaut. We'd love to spend all our time 
  promoting InterText, but we can't. That's where we have to 
  depend on you.

  Our next issue will mark our fifth anniversary on the Internet, 
  and our thirtieth issue. Be sure to be here -- and tell your 
  friends. With your support, we hope to be here for at least 
  thirty more.


  At the Dead Mother's Bend   by Mark Steven Long
=================================================
...................................................................
  Some say certain moments define our lives... and perhaps it<69>s 
  our lives which define the moments.
...................................................................

  Peeto stared at the line of twisted steel bordering the outer 
  edge of Ottawa River Road, which veered left without warning to 
  avoid the gentle, treacherous river beyond. The more he looked 
  at the hideous steel, the more he saw the river.

  Only two weeks ago, a woman in her early twenties had driven the 
  car into the guardrail and was killed instantly. Her little boy, 
  safely strapped into his car seat, suffered only a bruise and 
  instant orphanage. To spare the next of kin, it was decided the 
  woman had lost control of her car trying to round the sharp 
  curve in the road. By that time, the local kids were already 
  calling it the Dead Mother's Bend.

  The city repair crews went on strike the very next day, leaving 
  the guardrail unrepaired. The next car to miss the curve would 
  go through the rail and into the river. Peeto was certain of it, 
  and he had to see it happen.

  He rubbed his crotch and looked up the road, where it came away 
  from a quiet intersection and skirted quickly past the school 
  playground. From that direction, the road took its abrupt turn 
  into a sudden glut of trees, ensuring no driver could see around 
  the bend.

  Peeto looked over to the playground and fixed on a sagging, 
  rusted mass of pipes that were the monkey bars. They were the 
  same bars he'd climbed and fallen off of when he was seven. He 
  remembered leaning over to look at the ground, then losing his 
  balance. It was his most vivid memory: that split second in the 
  air when the trees whisked past and the sky fled as the ground 
  charged at him. The impact broke his arm. He was always reliving 
  it in his mind. To fly, to fall.

  The years built up inside him as he leaped down stairways, rode 
  his bicycle over the tops of earthen dikes, contemplated the 
  high dive at the city swimming pool. Once, Brian and Jeeter 
  Dowell had grabbed him after school and dangled him by his feet 
  out of a second-floor classroom window. Peeto couldn't cry with 
  fear like they'd wanted, even though he was afraid they would 
  beat him up.

  Sometimes, his upper arm still ached where it had been broken, 
  even though he was now in his teens. He'd started spending 
  nights sitting on the bed and hitting his arm to make it hurt. 
  Closing his eyes, he would see the blurred trees, the uprising 
  ground. Grabbing, hitting, twisting his arm could revive only 
  the vaguest tinglings of crunched bone.

  Peeto couldn't imagine wanting anything else from his life, 
  though he knew he was supposed to. He wore long sleeves to hide 
  the marks.

  Tires squealed in the distance. He looked up the road, bouncing 
  on the balls of his feet in anticipation. First he saw a blob of 
  moving color that quickly refined itself into a battered blue 
  Chevy Nova. The motor howled in a hideous bass voice. This was 
  the one -- he knew it was. It was going like a bat out of hell. 
  Or a bat into hell. It was magnificent.

  The car raged past him. Peeto barely glimpsed the driver, who 
  turned the wheel too late. The car smashed easily through the 
  twisted and bent guardrail and hurtled over the edge of the 
  earth and into space. Peeto felt his entire life within him in 
  the few seconds the car hung in the air. The evening sun 
  reflected off the driver's window, exalted the car's polished 
  surface. The Nova spun slowly to one side before drifting 
  downward, as if almost looking back, before it splashed into the 
  river and sank.

  Peeto fell to his knees and couldn't get up, he was quivering so 
  much. The police would simply assume the boy was shaken by what 
  he'd witnessed, and he would let them think it. Now he knew 
  beyond all doubt that he would do this himself some day: he 
  would fly, and fall, and die.



  Mark Steven Long (msl@oup-usa.org)
------------------------------------
  Mark Steven Long is a writer and editor from New York City. He 
  has been published in National Lampoon, Reed, Fiction Forum, and 
  elsewhere. His story "The Nutbob Stories" was nominated for a 
  Pushcart Prize in 1993. This is his first electronically 
  published fiction.


  Decisions   by Craig Boyko
============================
...................................................................
  If we think of ourselves as moral persons, why do we always do 
  the wrong things for the right reasons?
...................................................................


  One
-----
  
  I noticed her as soon as I was through the door, as if she was 
  emitting some sort of signal. Not to me -- maybe not to anyone 
  in particular. Something in the way she sat, the way she sipped 
  from her glass, the way she watched the whole room in the mirror 
  set behind the rows of glasses and bottles perched against the 
  bar.

  I stood there in the entryway, letting the rainwater drip from 
  my coat, just watching her. Expecting her to turn around and 
  smile at me.

  Which was idiotic.

  I sat about three stools away from her. I didn't want to 
  frighten her, or even draw her attention. Gaining attention 
  isn't necessarily a benefit.

  I ordered a bourbon from the bartender, and he grunted. He 
  finished wiping a glass, set it down next to the others, and 
  walked down the length of the bar. I put a five on the bar and 
  looked into the mirror.

  The woman three seats down was leisurely oscillating a swizzle 
  stick around the edge of her glass. Watching her fingers as they 
  moved. Uninterested. Bored.

  She was wearing a blue dress that showed a lot of back, leg, and 
  cleavage. Her wavy blonde hair fell a few inches below her 
  shoulders. Her skin was bluish-green in the bar light. Her 
  expression made me think she was waiting for someone but had 
  given up, knowing they wouldn't show.

  Before I was conscious of moving, I found myself sitting down 
  next to her. And immediately felt out of place and awkward; the 
  stools were too close. My leg was almost brushing her thigh. And 
  most of the bar was empty. No reason for my voluntary proximity.

  Tactfully, she didn't look up -- rule of the city, the bar -- 
  though I saw her shift in the mirror.

  The bartender placed my glass in front of me. I thanked him, 
  looked at the counter, then pointed to where I'd left my five. 
  "That's, um, mine." He nodded, shrugged, and went to pick it up. 
  Feeling stupid, I told him to keep the change. He nodded, like 
  he knew I would say that. Like I should have, for making him 
  walk to get the bill.

  I looked at her in the mirror, and she was looking down at her 
  fingers, lazily circling the glass, which was half-empty.

  "Could I buy you a drink?" I said, hearing my voice as if it was 
  coming from the other side of the bar, or maybe out on the 
  street.

  She looked up, first in the mirror, then at me. She looked 
  amused, curious, nervous. Then smiled. White teeth, pink tongue.

  "You could buy me a drink, yes."

  I waved to the bartender. "Unless, of course," she said, "that 
  binds some sort of agreement."

  I looked at her. She tilted her head, her hand moving from the 
  glass to the counter.

  "Pardon?" I said.

  "I said, unless that drink binds some sort of agreement. 
  Socially. Or sexually."

  I looked at her, feeling my cheeks get warm. Not understanding 
  her, not liking the way she was gazing at me.

  "No," I said eventually, looking at her, then her mirror image. 
  Smiling past the rows of burgundy bottles. "I don't think so... 
  I'm not sure what you mean..." Hating my voice, its high 
  resonance inside my skull.

  She shrugged, the whole dress shifting on her body like a second 
  skin ready to be shed.

  "No, I guess not," she said. "Sure, you can buy me a drink." And 
  she turned back to her glass, and sipped from it. "But maybe I 
  should finish this first," she added, clicking the glass on the 
  bar.

  The bartender stopped in front of me, waiting. "Sorry," I said, 
  smiling. "A little later."

  I looked at her in the mirror, and cradled my own glass, now 
  empty, in my palms.

  She sipped her drink. "That was a line, right?" she asked, her 
  voice as uninflected as if she was asking how far it was to the 
  next subway station. "Asking to buy me a drink. It had to be. Or 
  just an... icebreaker?"

  "Yeah. One of those."

  She smiled and put down her glass. "Good."

  She stood up, and I could only look at the blue fabric of the 
  dress, speculate as to what lay beneath it. My cheeks burned and 
  my throat was sore. I wondered dimly what the hell I was doing 
  there. Avoiding the run, probably.

  "I think I'll pass on that drink, though," I heard her say. I 
  mumbled acceptance.

  "Let's go somewhere," she said. "Maybe you can make it up 
  later."



  The rain had stopped. Though it had been raining before, she had 
  no coat. Her hair wasn't wet like mine, which made me wonder how 
  long she'd been in the Winder. Shit, I supposed, some people 
  never left. She caught my sleeve with a manicured finger and 
  turned down the street, not bothering to see if I was following. 
  As she went, the street lights each provided her a private 
  spotlight. It was hypnagogic.

  Reminded me of Mae.

  She led me around another corner and down a block, her heels 
  clicking on the cracked sidewalk. I followed her mindlessly, 
  like a confused stray dog. I thought then, fleetingly, about 
  turning and leaving.

  Then she turned into a dark niche, an unlit, unmarked opening. I 
  stood behind her there, feeling the night air against my cheeks 
  as it dried my hair. She tapped a keypad beside the door, and it 
  lit up green. I followed her in, closing the door carefully 
  behind me. She hadn't paid any attention to me since we'd left 
  the Winder.

  She walked down a hallway lit by dim incandescents, past 
  unmarked doors with filthy glazed inset windows. Like a 
  miniature version of a high school hallway.

  My mind jumped up then, my vigilant guard dog, through the mist 
  of bourbon. I wondered where she was taking me, why I was here, 
  who she was, who I was... but only for a moment. These things 
  didn't matter; nothing did. Not really.

  Music became louder, and I became aware of it. A deep bass 
  rhythm, a synthetic treble, digitally altered vocals. She turned 
  around and smiled at me, reassuring yet disconcertingly vapid.

  She led me through a door at the end of the hallway, and lights 
  exploded. Rainbow psychedelics everywhere, in my eyes and 
  gnawing away at my nerves. The music was huge, inexorable, and 
  too loud, but at the level where my mind refused to register it.

  It was a tiny room, a microcosmic bar. And there was a counter, 
  a matte black ledge set against the far wall, dainty leather 
  stools lined against it. There were four tables, each with four 
  prosaic wood chairs, no more than ten people in the entire 
  place.

  She sat down on a leather stool; I sat beside her. The 
  bartender, a tall blond kid probably just over half my age, came 
  immediately, ignored me, bent over beside her.

  "How's life?" he said, smiling perfect white teeth, and licking 
  at a stray blond hair.

  "Much the same, Dog."

  "You seen Kleiv around lately?"

  "No. Bill overdue?"

  "Bet your ass."

  "Get us a couple glasses from the special bottle, Dog."

  The kid looked at me for the first time, a blank stare, then 
  stood up and laughed. "You got it." He picked up a white towel 
  and walked into a back room, behind a padded door.

  "What is this place?" I asked her.

  "A little elite club."

  "What's it called?"

  "Doesn't have a name. Doesn't have much, really. Just a place to 
  go."

  The blond kid put down two plastic cups in front of us. I didn't 
  see an actual glass anywhere around us. I sniffed at the 
  contents of the cup, and smelled oranges and alcohol. I looked 
  at her, and she shrugged, then drank it all down. I did the 
  same.

  It tasted awful, and put a sting at the back of my throat like a 
  lead stone. I coughed and wheezed, and she only laughed 
  silently, along with the kid.

  "What the hell was that?" I asked as I dropped the cup back onto 
  the counter. The kid swept them both up and returned to the back 
  room.

  "Special potion. Part vodka, part orange extract. Part 
  aphrodisiac, part truth serum."

  I remember laughing at that and slapping my palms down on the 
  counter, then looking up at her through dry eyes. "Why, are you 
  going to ask me some questions?"

  "Possibly."

  "Who's the kid?" I asked, gesturing towards the dark room.

  "Rude Dog. You know, a working kid." She looked at me then for a 
  long frozen moment, her face a wooden block. "Do you want to go 
  to bed?" she asked, without a smile or a single movement.

  I looked at her face, her body, then her eyes. "Yes," I said, 
  realizing that the drink might actually have included either or 
  both of the last two ingredients.

  She stood up, brushing the front of her blue dress as if from 
  habit, then looked away. "Well, come on then."

  I jumped up, too quickly. She didn't notice. She walked away, 
  the same gait as before, back out to the hallway. I followed as 
  she stopped at the fourth door, opened it, and went in.

  There was an oval queen-sized bed covered in a green wrinkled 
  sheet and a pillow. The tiny table beside the bed held a lamp 
  without shade and a flickering 50-watt bulb. There were three 
  chairs, none of which matched -- kind of like the ones in Rude 
  Dog's bar. A minuscule fridge, with a tarnished and scratched 
  veneer, stood near the corner.

  It reminded me, without warning, of a room Mae and I were in 
  once, for about a month.

  "Sit down," she said. "If you like."

  I did, and she did. I looked at her as she smoothed her dress.

  "So what are we here for?"

  She crossed her legs, looked at the lamp. "That's up to you. 
  Maybe to talk."

  "Oh. So you're going ask me questions now?"

  "Perhaps. What's your name?"

  "Mute. Like silence."

  "First or last?"

  "Only, I guess." I waited then, for a few seconds, for her to 
  volunteer her own name. "What's yours?"

  "Whatever you want it to be."

  I laughed then, but found no humor in my voice or the situation. 
  "This is, isn't it? Like a business proposition going down?"

  "No," she said, all seriousness. "I don't do that."

  "So what's your name?"

  "Giovanna."

  "That's a nice name."

  She shrugged, her dress moved. "I picked it out myself."

  "So who the hell are you?" I asked, only vaguely feeling my lips 
  make out the words.

  "I came looking for you."

  "No, you didn't. We ran into each other at the Winder." She 
  smiled then, and it meant something. Betrayal. Upper hand.

  "You go there a lot, don't you, Mute?"

  I said nothing. Her voice was like a computer, an ATM, an 
  airport loudspeaker. Professional and fluid.

  "You weren't there last night, though. I had to wait until two. 
  But tonight you walked right up to me. I couldn't have asked for 
  better."

  "What... you were stalking me or something?"

  "Like that. In a sense. But not in a bad way. A big sister kind 
  of way. I'm just checking up on you."

  "Checking up on me. I don't even know who you are."

  "But I know you. At least, the statistics. I read your bio. 
  You're interesting, Mute."

  My guard dog barked again, somewhere in my cerebrum, but it was 
  drowned out by a porous sponge, a black fog just behind my eyes. 
  Drink she gave me was drugged, I decided dully. As if in 
  response to my bleak, perplexed look, she spoke gingerly. "I'm 
  here for Mr. Krell."

  My limbs petrified and my mind became sand. My eyes glossed over 
  with oil, my pores contracted and fell asleep. I blacked out.



  Mae was asleep.

  We were supposed to go out. I told her to go back to bed -- it 
  was too cold. The windows were rain-streaked and dirty, the 
  floor was strewn with clothes and cleaning rags and small coins. 
  The rain chattered against the corrugated roof. The electric 
  heater clicked and surged, warming my legs and the bed sheets. 
  Mae breathed. I smoked a cigarette, tracing the fissures in the 
  ceiling plaster with my eyes. I watched Mae breathe. Her body 
  was warm against my thigh. Her skin white and smooth, her hair 
  dark against her cheek. She said something through sleep. "No," 
  I said. It's too cold to go out. Sleep."

  The metallic rain. The cigarette smoke, undulating lazily. Mae's 
  rhythmic breathing, warm and sweet.

  "Wake up," she said.

  "No, too cold out -- "



  "Oh, come on. wake up."

  Black well, spiraling somnolently.

  "I didn't hit you with that hard a dose." Pin-prick light. Red 
  hot pain flare. "Wake _up_."

  Electric light, intense and immaculate. White tiles. Cool 
  plastic or leather against my back. Throbbing pain against my 
  cheek.

  "Well, you opened your eyes. That's something."

  "You hit me..." My voice, but it came from the bottom of the 
  well, through a cotton muffler.

  "I slapped you," said the voice, from beyond my vision. "To wake 
  you up. Now you're up. Any questions?"

  "Who are you?" My voice was like mud.

  "You forget already? Giovanna. I picked you up at the bar. Come 
  on, you've only been out a couple hours."

  I struggled then, my guard dog at full wariness. But my head was 
  a stone slab, my arms bound down by unseen straps, cool and 
  padded.

  And her face came into view. Smiling perfect white teeth and 
  perfect pink tongue. Perfect pool eyes, deep blue, cold and 
  serene. A wave of blond hair at the edge of her mouth.

  "Right, Mute? We're old friends."

  "No," I said. "I don't know you."

  "Perhaps not," she said, and her face was gone. Click of heels 
  on linoleum. "But you remember my employer."

  I stared at the ceiling tiles.

  "Sure you do, Mute. Mr. Krell."

  I told the nauseous fear in my mind to shut up. Krell. The run. 
  Skipping town. Leaving Mae. The run...

  "He'll be here any minute. I'm sure you two will have lots to 
  talk about." Her face was back, leering and satisfied. "Won't 
  you?"

  And then she moved, sharp and extreme, and the pain exploded in 
  my head. The black returned.



  Spots like fireworks, soft and dim. From a dull pulse, hollow 
  and warm, comes a room. In the room, seven, nine, thirteen men, 
  dressed in bloody white lab coats. Scalpels in hand, gleaming 
  virginal silver.

  White, white, white everywhere. Chlorine bleach odor. Anesthetic 
  tubes and rods, tools and drills, knives and forks.

  Me on the white leather table, candles protruding from my chest 
  and eyes. The candelabra. The meal. The lab coat men bend over, 
  candle light flickering fluorescent. Sparkling knives, blood-red 
  cheeks, insane grins.

  Dig in.

  Bloody ganglia. Wires spew forth from my skull and my rib cage, 
  green and red and blue and yellow. LCD and LED, blinking 
  sporadically. Tiny circuitry pops out of my eyes and my hands 
  and my chest, and the bloody men tie knots in the wires, swing 
  them around, cut and paste, solder and caulk.

  They are fixing me, fixing my system, rewiring nerves. I scream, 
  but the walls are soundproof.



  Walls crumble to ruins, and the bloody incisions disappear into 
  rivers, tributaries, blue-gray macadam and cement. The night 
  lights up neon, and the hum of business is a lover's song.

  The run.

  "Hey, Mr. Krell, how's things?"

  Suited Mr. Krell, impeccable in his dark gray jacket. Mr. Krell, 
  smoking his cigars and watching with icy eyes.

  The run.

  "Things are good. The operation was successful."

  "Of course it was. I got a tough body."

  "You do now."

  The run. The job. Mr. Krell, smoking his cigars. Rewired. Faster 
  and better. New system. Doped up. Ready to run.

  The job. First mission.

  Surprise. Disbelief.

  "I own you, Mr. Mute."

  Skipping town.



  I came to quickly, chemically. Some strong smell out of my 
  vision jump-starting my mind and consciousness. I was back 
  again, under the harsh white fluorescents and the square tiles. 
  Testing the arm straps, struggling futilely, I groaned.

  "Welcome back to the world of the living, Mute." Woman's voice. 
  "Giovanna?" I said.

  "Indeed, Mute. You've got a visitor, dear."

  Krell. "So good to see you again, Mr. Mute."

  I said nothing, wishing it all away. My mind leaped and grasped 
  for the tenuous strands of the memory of Mae, the dream.... I 
  wanted it all back.

  "You don't say hello to a former employer, Mr. Mute? And, I like 
  to think, a former friend."

  "We were never friends," I said, and hated myself for it. 
  Because we had been, almost, if only a flash on carbon paper. 
  And then his face was hovering over mine, the same as before. 
  Close-cropped black hair, undoubtedly slicked back with his 
  short red comb that he kept in the front pocket of his Armani 
  jacket. Ice-blue eyes. Jutted nose, bony cheeks, faintest trace 
  of day-old stubble. And his pout, infamous and capricious, 
  always hiding his teeth, which were yellow and straight.

  "I'm hurt you would say that, Mr. Mute," he said, his lips 
  moving the minimum required to produce the words.

  "Sure you're hurt," I said. "You must be real hurt. What exactly 
  do you do with defectors, Krell?"

  His face was gone again. "We try to get them back on the team, 
  of course. Or, if that doesn't work, we do whatever the 
  circumstances necessitate."

  "You gonna kill me?"

  "Oh, I doubt that. I've put too much money into that metabolic 
  miracle that you call a body. See, I've made an investment in 
  you, Mute." I cringed as he laughed. "And you turned tail and 
  ran."

  There was dense pause, with only the hum of the fluorescents 
  revealing any passage of time.

  "Yeah. I hauled ass. You didn't rewire my morals. I had no idea 
  what you had in mind before."

  The laugh again, much shorter, more sarcastic. "See, Mute, we 
  had a deal. We've been in this business a long time, you've seen 
  the way the game is played. What did you think? I'd put millions 
  into that body of yours just so you could _steal_ shit for me? 
  You went into this with your eyes closed. Now you have to try 
  conscious reentry."

  "You want me to come back," I said languidly.

  His face was back, hanging over me, but from the other side. 
  "What the hell else would I want? You're mine, Mute. My machine. 
  I made what you are."

  "Bullshit."

  His face was gone. I strained to lift my head, to look around 
  the room, but my head was strapped firmly in place. All I could 
  see was the juncture of the wall behind me and the ceiling tile.

  "It isn't bullshit. Maybe someday, after you've repaid your debt 
  to me, maybe then you could leave and pretend to live a normal 
  life. But now you are in no position to negotiate."

  "So it's a threat. Go on the juice, or I never leave this room."

  Krell sighed, and that startled me; it was a sound I had never 
  heard before. "I hate to threaten old friends, Mute. But yes. 
  Neither of us has a choice."

  "Right, Krell. Money's involved. So screw me and screw 
  everybody, because you made an _investment_."

  Long silence.

  "Miss Giovanni? Please return Mr. Mute to his unconscious state. 
  I'd like to give him a chance to think about this. I always 
  prefer to sleep on any key decisions."

  Crisp tapping of heels on linoleum. And then she was back, with 
  her blue eyes and blond hair and pink tongue. She lifted her arm 
  over my face, and in her hand was a small black box, like an 
  electric razor. Two cylindrical chrome contacts at the top.

  "All too enjoyable, Mr. Krell," she said, and the black box 
  disappeared beneath my chin.

  "Oh, and one thing," came Krell's voice. "Something to ruminate 
  over. You'll be pleasantly surprised to know that your former 
  companion, Miss Mae Cole, is under our care and supervision. 
  Good night, Mute."

  A fist of electric pain, followed by a pool of blackness.



  No dreams came. Consciousness returned eventually. Thoughts 
  coalesced in my blood, stream of consciousness metastasized.

  I didn't wake up. I thought.

  I thought about the operation, about Krell and his run. I was a 
  drug dealer. I had been before Krell, and I was doing it then, 
  on the lam, for money to live. I guess you always go back to the 
  basics.

  Krell knew my supplier. Probably owned my supplier. Back then, 
  in Nanking, business was a solid, esoteric plexus. It had rules, 
  axioms, conduct and etiquette, unspoken protocol. An 
  impenetrable clan, and like anything, you knew your clan 
  members. The guys at the top watched the guys at the bottom. 
  Krell happened to pick me out of the genus.

  Being good at what I did got me into this shit. Of course, being 
  inadequate might have gotten me a hollow-tip through the skull 
  years ago. I remember his office, the place they made the offer. 
  It's a funny thing, getting a compliment from a kingpin like 
  Krell. You're scared for your life, just going up there, smoking 
  his good cigars. And so relieved when you actually get to leave 
  again that you remember next to nothing that was said.

  And with meetings like that, you don't say no. The operation 
  came and went in a week. Heightened senses, accentuated 
  responses, intensified reflexes. A fine-tuned biological 
  machine. On the outside, nothing out of the ordinary, except for 
  the pink ribbons on my chest, concealed easily enough.

  And my new system had to be turned on. My switch is 
  betaphenacaine, which I keep in durable hypodermic needles, 
  capped and cased.

  And then the run. Krell sat me down in his office, and I was 
  more confident, so sure of myself, knowing that I was one of his 
  official hired men now, no reason to fear the results of 
  unemployment....

  I felt a dull aching hate, lying there on the table, strapped 
  down, pretending to be asleep. Because he didn't even bother to 
  desensitize me, start me out with two-bit runs. He was too cocky 
  for that, so positive that I was his faithful possession.

  In retrospect, maybe I should have gone along with it all, 
  played the run, killed that guy, one of Krell's business 
  competitors. But it would have changed me absolutely, sent me 
  into an implacable spiral. Killing wasn't something I was ready 
  to cope with, even if I did it every week with the drugs I sold.

  Hardest decision I ever made, ever will. Mae.

  I knew then what I know now, what they were capable of. And I 
  took my chances, leaving Mae, hoping they would never find her 
  or trace her to me. They did. I endangered her.

  I'm an asshole.



  Unexpected metallic cold, then piercing electric pain. I opened 
  my eyes to Giovanna.

  "Good morning, Mute. Have a nice sleep?" I only stared. Then she 
  moved, and instinctively, I moved my head with her. It wasn't 
  strapped down, and I jumped, expecting my arms to be free as 
  well. No such luck.

  I looked around. Plain white room, like a hospital. Giovanna was 
  in black jeans and a white t-shirt now. She sat down on one of 
  two black leather chairs, set in opposite corners along the far 
  wall. In between them, a gray door that looked plastic; probably 
  reinforced and bulletproof.

  "You've been out two hours. Probably closer to five altogether. 
  Plenty of time to get your bearings. So now you're supposed to 
  give me an answer, and there's only one that I'm supposed to 
  accept."

  The tendons in my neck tightened and ached; I let my head fall 
  back to the padded table. I closed my eyes and tried to ignore 
  the silence in the room.

  "Come on, Mute. See, if you don't accept Mr. Krell's offer, I'm 
  supposed to let you ponder it a little more. Unconsciously. And 
  getting there, that's the fun part. I've got all kinds of fun 
  toys. Fun for me, anyway."

  I opened my eyes, and rubbed my teeth together, feeling the 
  lingering pain beneath my jaw.

  "What about you, Giovanna?" I asked.

  "What about me?"

  "Why are you here? You aren't the traditional muscle Krell 
  employs. Don't you think you're better than this?"

  "Traditional? Like you? A wirehead?" She chuckled. "I'm here 
  because it's my profession. I'm just a working girl, Mute -- but 
  let's talk about you. I can let you off the table right now, if 
  you'd like. Even give you a plug of your drug, if you'd like. 
  All you got to do is agree to come back home with Mr. Krell. 
  Doesn't that sound comfy-cozy?"

  "You can't," I said. "You give me the juice, and I'm all over 
  your ass. Doesn't matter how many guns you got, I can be out of 
  here with your head in a box."

  "Not quite. You're forgetting an item Mr. Krell has in his 
  possession. Miss Cole."

  "Jesus. So it's blackmail, then."

  "Pleasant business you're in, Mute. Me, I just get to pick up 
  cute guys at bars, then have my way with them while they're tied 
  to operating tables."

  I didn't want to think of Mae, then. Even if I left, killing Mae 
  wouldn't help them get me. For all I knew, they didn't even have 
  her. Probably just using her name as collateral.

  "Shit," I said, my voice strained and tired. "Okay."

  Giovanna was over me again, without warning. Apparently lost the 
  heels with the change of wardrobe. "Okay, as in 
  okay-we-have-a-deal?"

  "Okay."



  She gave me new clothes, black jeans and t-shirt, which were 
  both too big. I swore silently, longing for my own clothes: I 
  had a couple of hypos in the jacket pocket. Then I remembered 
  she'd offered me a plug, because of Mae, and what they knew she 
  meant to me.

  "So where's my juice?" I asked.

  "Oh, funny thing, that. Technically, it's not your juice. An 
  upper, a lot the same, but it won't make you metaphysical. More 
  addictive, nicer effect. No comedown, either."

  I stared at her, trying to discern her expression. "Fuck it."

  She looked amused, and for the first time I noticed the small 
  gun in her right hand. "I read your bio, Mute. You only swear 
  when you're _really_ pissed."

  "Fuck _you_."

  "Not a good idea to antagonize the girl with the gun, Mute."



  Krell was waiting in a suite on the twentieth floor of a 
  grandiose downtown hotel, complete with inch-thick carpeting and 
  a uniformed elevator operator.

  Giovanna motioned me down the hall to his room with the gun, 
  hidden beneath a leather jacket draped over her arm. She knocked 
  twice, eyes on me. Krell opened it himself. Cocky son of a 
  bitch.

  I sat down in a chair, looked around the room without moving my 
  head. It was a wide expanse of green linoleum that ended in an 
  elevated area, where I saw a king-size bed, a complete 
  entertainment system, and a mini bar. A complete kitchen was to 
  my right, and a bathroom to the left. The ceiling was probably 
  20 feet up; I figured the place took up a quarter of the entire 
  floor.

  Krell picked up a half-full glass from the counter in the 
  kitchen area and walked back to me. "Cherry whiskey," he said, 
  sipping from the snifter. I ignored him, and stared out through 
  the purple-tinted windows, wondering vaguely why anyone would 
  want to look down on a purple city. "Want some?" he asked.

  "No thanks."

  "Well, then, down to business." He walked back to the countertop 
  and picked up a pair of silver tongs. "Miss Giovanna declares 
  you are going to be cooperative. I assume that's correct, or you 
  wouldn't be here."

  "I am. But not the way you do business. No blackmail."

  He plucked an ice cube from a silver bucket and dropped it into 
  his glass. He turned to me and smiled; he'd gotten a new 
  gold-plated tooth put in since I last saw him.

  "I assume you're referring to Miss Cole." I stared out at the 
  Shanghai cityscape and said nothing. "You have to understand my 
  position," Krell continued. "I couldn't have you running around 
  loose, not until I'd gotten my money's worth. That may sound 
  materialistic and shallow, but.... Look, I could give you a 
  speech on what it took to get where I am, but I don't think 
  that's what you're after. Don't worry, Mute. Miss Cole is safe."

  "Where is she?"

  "We're looking after her back in Nanking."

  "How do I know you have her? How do I know that she's still 
  alive?"

  Krell scratched his stomach through the terry cloth and sipped 
  his cherry whiskey. "My word, Mute. After all, what good is she 
  to me, or anyone, dead? I wouldn't do that to an old comrade, 
  especially one that I hope will become a valuable new comrade."

  "Put me on a plane. I see Mae, or screw everything."

  "Already set. You leave in an hour."



  Two
-----
  
  I was expecting a tenement, a squalid warehouse of rotting 
  lumber and broken windows, sitting close to the harbor and 
  reeking of dead fish and discarded canned foods. Instead, I 
  stood in front of a condominium, surely not older than my shoes. 
  It was twenty stories tall, had symmetrical windows and 
  terraces, and a sleek black pebbled siding. It looked exactly 
  like the kind of place Krell would live in, or possibly own.

  "Lives quite the life, huh Mute?"

  I looked at Giovanna, and watched her eyes glimmer as she stared 
  past me at the building.

  "Where are we?" I asked.

  "Mr. Krell's humble abode."

  "What are we here for?"

  "Waiting. He's coming in on his private jet in a little while. 
  We're to wait here until then."

  "Where's Mae?"

  "We wait for Mr. Krell, Mute."

  I frowned at her as our eyes met. Her eyes changed, from some 
  sort of rapt disbelief, to a weary amusement. "I don't make the 
  rules," she said.

  I shook my head and began to walk towards the front of the 
  building. "I don't understand you."

  "Me? There's little to understand. At least, for you."

  "I mean, you're the bait, the lure, and the hired thug all in 
  one. Is Krell hard up these days?"

  "I'm good at what I do. Mr. Krell pays for my expertise. Now 
  shut up, Mute."

  We walked up the concrete steps to the double doors at the 
  front. Giovanna held the gun loosely in my direction as she 
  punched in a rapid succession of numbers on a small digital 
  lock. A hypersonic beep, and then the lock clicked. She waved me 
  inside.



  We waited an hour. Krell's home was just a miniature version of 
  the hotel suite in Shanghai, a miniature version of every place 
  I ever imagined rich people would live in. Phony and metallic 
  and cold.

  The black jeans were too big, and the shirt made my neck itch. I 
  picked at it. "Where are my clothes?" I asked Giovanna, who sat 
  on the other side of the room in an identical chair, and stared 
  at me listlessly, the gun resting in her perfect denim lap.

  "Burned 'em."

  "Well, these are really bugging the hell out of me. Am I going 
  to get to go shopping?"

  She moved the gun to the other hand and hesitated. "Your old 
  clothes are out in the limo, in the trunk."

  "Thought you said you burned them."

  "Lied," she said, with an evanescent smile. She pulled a 
  palm-sized cellular phone from her suede jacket, and popped it 
  open. "I'll get Pedro to bring them up for you."



  She made me change in front of her.

  "What, you afraid I'll attack you with one of Krell's 
  toothbrushes?"

  "I play safe. Rules of the game."

  "Some game," I said, but obeyed. I changed into my old clothes, 
  comfortable, cold, and slightly damp from being outdoors. I did 
  so with as little emotion as possible, avoiding Giovanna's gaze, 
  uneasy about what expression would be on that scalpel-perfect 
  face.

  I sat down and left the rain jacket folded over the arm of the 
  chair. I wanted to check it for the hypodermics, but such a move 
  at that point would have given me away. Better to take it easy.

  I looked up at Giovanna finally, and she was smiling faintly. 
  "All done?" she asked.

  I said nothing for a moment, only watched her. "You have a 
  comment?"

  She laughed softly, and her smile faded into a bored pout. "You 
  think you deserve one?"

  "Never mind."

  "It was a nice exchange of clothing you performed," she said, 
  her face a mix of apathy and seriousness.

  "Thanks." I lifted my left arm in the habitual motion of 
  checking my watch, which was no longer there. I sighed, and let 
  my hand drop to the rain coat on the chair's arm. "When the hell 
  is Krell getting here?" I asked.

  "Whenever the hell Krell wants to." I felt the two small 
  cylindrical needles through the fabric of the coat, safe in the 
  secret pouch I had sewn in months ago. I smiled, then sighed 
  again.

  "Oh," I said.



  I had slipped my hand into the secret pocket, withdrawn one of 
  the needles and transferred it to my front jeans pocket when 
  Krell came in. I put both hands into my pockets and attempted a 
  look of disgusted indifference as he entered and closed the door 
  behind him.

  "Good afternoon, Mute."

  "Yeah."

  "Cheer up, Mute," Giovanna said. "You and Mr. Krell are friends, 
  remember?"

  "Bullshit," I said.

  Krell gave me a benevolent look of disappointment. "But Mute, I 
  thought we'd put aside our grievances."

  "Yeah, my ass. Look, I'll do your runs, however many you think I 
  owe you. Whatever. But the only reason I'm here is 'cause you're 
  threatening me with Mae. So let me see her now, make sure she's 
  okay. Then business."

  "Of course, Mute. We needn't be animals." And at that moment, I 
  felt it, raw and intense, like a poisonous lump in my stomach, a 
  rancid dart snaking through me until I could almost bite down on 
  it. The hatred I felt for him, with his smug narcissism and 
  self-complacency. The way he looked down at everyone like he 
  could shape their lives to his satisfaction with his omnipotent 
  hands.

  I watched, detached, as Giovanna handed him her phone, and he 
  dialed.

  "I thought I was going to see her," I said, struggling to keep 
  my voice uninflected.

  Krell only smiled in my general direction, and turned his back.

  I waited, and he spoke a few soft words into the phone. Giovanna 
  looked out the window and ran her thumb across her fingernails. 
  I heard Krell say "Put her on," and then he turned around to me, 
  smiled again, and handed me the phone. I took it, my arm 
  strained and full of the poisonous hatred. I smiled dully back 
  at him, and it felt like fire.

  "Mae?" I said into the small black receiver. There was silence 
  for an eternal moment, a void of electric blackness from the 
  phone... and then I heard her, soft and timid.

  "Mute? Is that you?"

  I had difficulty finding my voice, insignificant and sore at the 
  back of my throat. "Yes. God, are you okay? What are -- "

  And then she was crying. A surreal static weeping, muffled and 
  painful.

  "Mae, are you okay? What's the matter? What are they doing -- "

  Then the phone was gone, somewhere in Giovanna's hand, and she 
  was walking back to her chair, one furtive eye still on me. And 
  there was Krell, smiling down.

  And Mae was gone.

  "What the fuck are you doing to her?" I heard my voice, but it 
  wasn't mine. I could hear my thoughts coming from my mouth, but 
  I made no conscious decision to speak aloud.

  "We're doing nothing to her," Krell said without looking at me. 
  His tone hadn't changed the slightest. "She is perfectly safe 
  and perfectly well."

  "How do I know that? You're going to let me see her right now."

  Krell looked at me. "No, I'm sorry, Mute. We've got a deal. No 
  premature benefits."

  I stared at him through burning eyes. "Bullshit! You let me see 
  her, or we don't have a deal."

  "No." Krell's ice-blue eyes were now directly on me, his face 
  was stone, and his voice matched his eyes. "Miss Cole is our 
  property until you perform your responsibilities to me, which is 
  precedent, and..."

  I didn't hear him. My ears had gelled over, my hatred thick and 
  putrid in my veins. I did not notice that my hands were in my 
  pockets, clenched in trembling fists, my left hand crushing the 
  hypodermics.

  And then I did notice, and thoughtless conviction washed over me 
  as my thumb popped the cap off one needle and my hand grasped 
  it. Without hesitation or regard, I plunged the needle into my 
  thigh and emptied it.

  The juice burned with equal passion, and it melded slowly with 
  my blood and anger.

  Krell talked, calmly and coldly.

  Memories of Mae, her frightened voice, her soft skin, her 
  warmth, her soft electric crying... they all reached me at once, 
  as if a side-effect of the drug that now coursed through my 
  blood stream.

  Five seconds passed.



  Having the juice running through me is, put simply, a weird 
  experience.

  It's a common street drug, but a controlled one, so you don't 
  have to worry about purity. They call it bloom sometimes, or 
  rapture, or just junk. It's an opiate, your regular domestic 
  upper. Makes the kids fast, reckless, excited. For me it's 
  different, because of the operation.

  Like splicing a nerve. Like crossing the wire. The juice 
  heightens my senses. My nerves burn, my eyes crackle, and I can 
  feel every hair on my body. Then a brief pathos settles over me 
  in an icy spinal wave, and I'm in the domain. I don't usually 
  call it the domain, but I don't know what the hell you 
  _would_ call it.

  I feel things I'm not supposed to, like the way my eyelids brush 
  the fluid from my eyes when I blink, the brush of taste buds 
  against the roof of my mouth, and the blood rushing through my 
  veins, and my sweat glands expanding and contracting.

  Everything slows down. Technically, of course, I'm speeding up. 
  I'm twice as fast, my reflexes kick in three times sooner. But 
  to me, all of that is bullshit, 'cause the world, it just slows 
  down.

  That day, in Krell's posh, frigid apartment, the anger left me. 
  It mutated and mixed with the juice, I guess, but it just 
  stopped mattering. And so did Mae, and so did Krell, and so did 
  everything around me. It was like a switch; once that derm 
  emptied into my thigh, I was on cruise-control.

  I know I jumped up and grabbed Krell around the neck before his 
  expression could even change, though I don't remember actually 
  making the effort. I watched vapidly as my hands closed and my 
  fingers clamped down on his perfect Bermuda-tanned skin. My 
  thumbs dug into his esophagus and crushed his trachea after what 
  seemed like eternity. Blood welled over my fingers, and I didn't 
  bother to look into his dead icescape eyes before letting him 
  drop to the floor.

  I turned and felt the air circulating through the room, cool and 
  sterilized as it caressed my skin and the hair at the back of my 
  neck. Giovanna was just getting up, an incredulous yet coyly 
  professional grimace crawling across her lips.

  Before she had moved another inch, I had her pinned on the 
  floor, her sleek black revolver chill against my palm, the 
  hammer cocked, and the barrel lightly placed against her perfect 
  pale forehead.

  "Where is Mae?" I heard the words with my ears, but I also felt 
  my lips form them and the air pass from my lungs into my mouth 
  and out into the open where it mingled with Giovanna's heavy 
  breath and the apartment's neutral undulating current.

  Her lips began to move, but it was too slow for me. "I don't 
  want to hurt you, you're kind of cute. Tell me where she is 
  now!"

  "The phone, my front pocket, has a last-call function and a 
  display. I don't know where she is." Her lips trembled only 
  slightly, and her eyes remained dry, her face stolid. Pro.

  And then the phone was in my left hand, and I was hovering two 
  feet over her, the gun pointed at her neck. She never even 
  shivered.

  I tapped the green button on the pad that read LAST, and the 
  small green display lit up with seven numbers, followed by CALL 
  and a question mark.

  I didn't dial it, didn't bother phoning the operator or 
  information. I knew the number. It was mine.



  I was in front of my old building before I knew how I had gotten 
  there. I looked behind me and saw the limo I had arrived in, and 
  I knew if I were to open its door I would see the driver's blood 
  on the seat, but I didn't remember it. I shouldn't get lapses 
  like that when I'm on the juice.

  I turned back to the building and that feeling, stinging and 
  cellular went through me and through the drug, right to where it 
  hurt. I'd been here eight years of my life and it doesn't go 
  away, the gestalt of emotions and memories tying my life wholly 
  to this spot. Nothing more than a ten-story tenement with tiny 
  rooms for rent, crawling with bugs and peeling plaster.

  And then it happened again. I was in front of the door to my old 
  apartment, staring dully at the gilt-crusted 303, not recalling 
  how I came to be there. Lapse.

  And then again, but much shorter. The door was collapsed inside 
  the room and I was walking in. And for an ephemeral moment I 
  didn't know or care why I was there. Nothing mattered.

  I was back home.



  There were two of them with mae. I didn't look at their faces as 
  they turned around slowly, so slowly. I just waited for the 
  juice to take control of the situation.

  A thought occurred to me as I watched them leap to their feet, 
  so slow they seemed to defy gravity: I should have taken another 
  hit, just for good measure. And I should have, because one 
  already had a gun in his hand and the other was reaching.

  I went for the quick one, and I had little trouble shoving his 
  gun into his face. I don't like to kill but the juice told me to 
  get a move on because Thing 2 behind me would be a pretty good 
  shot at two feet.

  I was and turning around just as the gun in my hand erupted and 
  the body beneath me shuddered violently, once. And what felt 
  like minutes later the second gun was fired. I thought for a 
  moment there was a lapse, since I couldn't remember pulling the 
  trigger, but then I felt the bullet rip through my left 
  shoulder.

  The drug made every nerve sear, and I could feel every shattered 
  cell in the bone. I screamed, pure reflex. But so was jumping to 
  my feet and breaking my attacker's neck with my right hand. He 
  fell, and it seemed that the apartment had never been so quiet. 
  The juice stopped dead, and all adrenaline drained away into an 
  amorphous vacuum in my stomach, surrounded by a raw nausea.

  I looked at Mae. Her face was cool and dry, with only the finest 
  trace of shock. A single black strand of hair touched her pale 
  cheek.

  I looked down and watched as blood from my shoulder dripped down 
  to the filthy floor where it mingled with dust and the other 
  men's blood.

  I coughed once, looked at Mae.

  "Mute," she said, her voice slow and smooth. Then the pain in my 
  shoulder receded and the world turned black.



  Electric light, intense and immaculate. White tiles. I was sure 
  for a moment that it was all a dream, a sick unconscious joke. I 
  was back in the white cubicle, Giovanna just out of sight, 
  filing her nails or polishing her gun. Krell was on his way, 
  landing in his gray-carpeted luxury jet, coming to talk to me 
  about the run.

  But he was not.

  Mae bent over me, her face blank for a long moment. She smiled 
  sadly, and one perfect tear slid down each pale cheek.

  "Mute, you're okay," she whispered, not a question.

  "My arm..."

  "In a cast. We're at Royal Mercy. The doctors said you'll be 
  fine... I hardly even saw you come in," she said, and then her 
  bottom lip quivered.

  "You're okay? They... didn't hurt you?"

  "No, dammit." She stood up, walked out of my field of view. I 
  struggled, pushing with my good arm and trying to keep my 
  balance, trying to sit up. When I did, my back crashed against 
  the headboard. No strength left in me.

  Mae was looking out the window.

  I waited. Minutes, hours.

  She looked at me. More tears, new ones probably, glistening 
  against her cheeks. "You don't understand, do you? You can't 
  just keep doing this to me..."

  I wanted to ask what I was doing, but maybe I knew. "What's the 
  matter?" I asked, finally.

  "You don't get it. Nothing ever works..." And I just stared at 
  her, wanting things to be all right. "There's somebody else," 
  she said.

  "I know," I said. But I don't think I did.



  I like the rain. It's strange, but I find some sort of comfort 
  in it. I'm getting wet, but I don't much care. Above me to the 
  left, the rain is hitting a blue neon sign. Making it crackle 
  and hiss. And that too, for no reason, is comforting.

  I walk. The street is crowded, the sun below the gray buildings. 
  The night life is starting to kick in, people coming out to play 
  in their bars, clubs, joints. Business crowd. I wonder about 
  work. About runs. About getting some money, maybe a warm bed to 
  sleep in.

  Across the street, darting into a doorway, I spot Giovanna. Not 
  in her high-gloss costume. One of the crowd. I almost wave, but 
  she's gone. Or maybe she was just the rain. Wet hair is hanging 
  in my eyes.

  I need a haircut, or maybe a hat.

  Decisions.



  Craig Boyko (chlorine@microcity.com)
--------------------------------------
  Craig Boyko lives in Canada, and spends most of his time in his 
  room, which is very dark and doesn't smell at all. Besides being 
  a necessary biological function, sleeping is his hobby. He is a 
  senior in high school, and dreams of someone who will fill the 
  myriad of vacancies that make up his life. That, and fudge.


  This is the Optative of Unfulfillable Wish   by Kyle Cassidy
==============================================================
...................................................................
  "In present and past unreal conditions the prostasis implies 
  that the supposition cannot or could not be realized because 
  contrary to a known fact." -- Smythe's Greek Grammar 2303
...................................................................

  After graduation I left my apartment and moved across the river 
  into a house. It is a big, fat house on the hard edge of the 
  city -- edge enough that the houses here have backyards and hard 
  enough that they're surrounded by razor wire.

  "Welcome to the 'hood," my new landlord had said, the ink not 
  even dry on the lease. I found him looking at me, grinning with 
  the disquieting implication that he knew more than he was 
  letting on. The move itself was five leisurely trips in a 
  borrowed green pickup truck whose tired radio dribbled 
  country-and-western music from one melancholy speaker and whose 
  fan buzzed ceaselessly like a steel bee in a trash can. I had, 
  at the time, possessed reservations about moving to the city, 
  but I signed the lease with reckless glee and the witless 
  assumption that Dr. Pangloss was right and everything was for 
  the best.



  Here everything seems vague, like a picture in a museum you 
  looked at with no particular interest before finding out that 
  the artist shot himself in the eye with a ten-gauge shotgun 
  because he was jilted by the queen of Turkmenistan, and now that 
  you're interested, you can recall only general shapes. The faces 
  come and go. This house is a port town, inhabited by nomads who 
  have other destinations in mind. We are mobbed by transient 
  sailors who leave Chinese food in the fridge and then depart for 
  exotic and faraway lands, leaving others as Keepers of the Slime 
  Molds.

  Not all of the faces here are so ethereal -- some have remained 
  constant. It is, as often as not, friends and relations who 
  traipse through the house like hobos. None have remained so 
  stolid as Sir Fickwickwood, the affectionate gray tabby of 
  unsubstantiated ownership who last night amazed us all by 
  surviving a three-story fall into the backyard after making a 
  heroic leap from a nearby rooftop into the window of 
  David-the-Archeologist -- thwarted by a pane of glass.

  Aside from David-the-Archeologist, there is 
  David-Who-Works-For-the-Discovery-Channel, where he produces 
  educational films about insects. His room on the third floor is 
  stuffed with raw videotape footage, most of it silent and much 
  of it dull, which he watches endlessly: scribbling down counter 
  numbers and sending out for rough cuts, slowly distilling 
  hundreds of hours of film, thousands of hours of lives, into 30 
  minutes that will keep a fourth grader interested. He, like 
  Gregor Samsa, is slowly turning into a bug.

  There is also Marty-the-Other-Archeologist (most places can 
  barely afford one archeologist; it is a flagrant and vulgar 
  display of wealth for us to support two): Martine, who was born 
  in France to wealthy parents and came here to study dilettantism 
  where it is best practiced. At dinner he informs us that ancient 
  Greeks measured dry goods and food "by the assload." We think 
  this is perilously funny and can't stop snickering all evening.

  Marty works for a company that produces a popular series of 
  books instructing readers on how to lie convincingly about their 
  occupations, ostensibly for the purpose of picking up women. The 
  volume he is currently writing teaches the layman how to carry 
  on a conversation as though he were a foreign consul. The guide 
  gives lists of answers to questions frequently posed to 
  diplomats by attractive young coeds at parties, names of exotic 
  countries that one may claim to have been stationed in, the 
  proper attire, a list of buzzwords that no one understands, and 
  a smattering of phrases in ludicrous languages. I ask him if he 
  wants to write books for the rest of his life. He tells me an 
  idea for an archeology book. It would claim that the Pharaohs 
  were from outer space; that the Greeks had conquered time and 
  death, invented the toaster, and discovered electricity; that 
  crop circles were telegraphs to God fashioned by 
  superintelligent boll weevils left here as the overlords of 
  humanity; and a thousand other wild things. "I would be hated by 
  my colleagues," he says, apparently in a trance, "but my book 
  would sell millions." And in the end, what is so wrong about 
  misleading a few million rubes? I realize that he has thought 
  long and hard about this.



  Every afternoon after waking, I make the adventuresome trek into 
  the backyard, where I sit beneath the rosebush and trudge 
  through Moby Dick. I plow like a bullock toting its load, I plod 
  from line to line, furrow to furrow, digging channels in my mind 
  and filling them with Transcendentalist droppings. This is 
  perhaps the twentieth time I have attempted to read Moby Dick, 
  and I am sworn to finish it this time. I have vowed to see 
  Ahab's beckoning arm as the white whale sounds for the last 
  time, the Pequod sinking from sight and Ishmael bobbing along 
  like Job's last servant, clinging to Queequeg's coffin. And what 
  after this? Perhaps a week of science fiction novels to clear my 
  brain.

  Today the neighborhood children are out back, jumping over a 
  jagged razor-wire fence into the sanctity of an old woman's 
  garden, quarantined from all but the youngest and most bored by 
  these gleaming, lacerating steel ribbons. I divide my time 
  evenly between the thickness of whale blubber and looking up at 
  a long string of kids who are laughing and leaping over the 
  blades as though they are playing on a water slide. A ball lands 
  in my yard. Gleeful at the opportunity for legitimized fence 
  scaling, the neighborhood queues up. "Wait," I say, lifting the 
  ball, "I'll throw it back." Long faces -- no opportunity to test 
  young limbs against metal and thorns. This urban 
  army-in-training might defeat the wire, but the rosebush would 
  claim victims.

  Inside, my abstract housemates are engaged in a long variety of 
  Sysiphian tasks: doing laundry, guarding the television (which 
  must be kept on the Discovery Channel at all costs), cooking 
  packages of frozen food, typing... one is learning Chinese, 
  another laboring over Sanskrit... these are all very dedicated 
  if ambiguous people, toiling over self-imposed afflictions of 
  arduous endeavor with no tangible reward. The archeologists 
  sgrpeak ancient Greek to one another over dinner -- a more 
  amazing feat than one would imagine, as ancient Greek is 
  apparently not a language that lends itself to conversation: the 
  grammar is so astoundingly complex that it takes a full five 
  minutes of brain-bursting concentration to properly conjugate 
  "Please pass the butter." After seven or eight sentences 
  punctuated by long silent minutes of sweating frustration and 
  hair pulling, the archeologists crawl away from the table like 
  whipped dogs and into the relative safety of the living room, 
  where a new episode of Beavis and Butt-head is on television.

  We are all graduated, degreed in something equivocal and useless 
  and pursuing loftier goals for lack of anything better to do. We 
  are comfortable in academia and we also realize that once we 
  leave this succoring bosom, we are largely qualified to perform 
  no task for which money can be gotten. For this reason, our 
  diplomas ceremoniously line the bathroom wall. Marty's B.A. from 
  Rice University is conspicuous for the glob of pizza grease 
  smack in the middle, which I dropped on it one drunken evening.

  There is no idealism here in our house of learned fools -- no 
  lofty politics guide our conversations, which are just as empty, 
  though more extravagant, as those we enjoyed when we were 
  undergraduates.



  Claudia walks through the house, trying on a shapeless black 
  beret in a number of arrangements that make her look, in turn, 
  like: a New York debutante; Lorenzo de' Medici; an acorn. None 
  of these please her. The original goal, I am now told, was to 
  appear "French." Claudia and I have become abstractly involved 
  and spend much of our time milling about in thrift stores and 
  trying on one another's clothes. Sometimes Claudia says that I 
  seem distant, but it is only because I am thinking. I have told 
  her that. Claudia herself spends much of the day dancing in 
  rings to music that only she can hear.



  I have devised elaborate methods of keeping my food hidden from 
  transient tenants, all of whom are voracious eaters and 
  prodigious book-borrowers. Over the past months a veritable 
  hoard of houseguests has been steadily picking at my stores of 
  rice and beans and has left me with only skeletal remains of a 
  once-noble collection of the works of Mark Twain, complete in 31 
  volumes. They are all looking for something, moving like turtles 
  with all their worldly possessions upon their backs but lacking 
  that animal's grace and packing sensibility. They bring with 
  them the most amazing assortment of broken and useless devices: 
  telephones that do not dial, umbrellas made of wire and rags, 
  televisions whose pictures continually jerk to the right in a 
  sort of drunken vision -- but above all, dishes. Our kitchen 
  resembles the crockery department at Woolworth's after a minor 
  earthquake. We possess place settings enough to invite the whole 
  of Congress to lunch. Perhaps four of these plates match one 
  another. Most of them spend their time lying in the sink, coated 
  with hardened spaghetti sauce and miscellaneous bits of crusted 
  things. Teapots are best filled in the bathtub, where the 
  spigot, though white with dried soap, is largely unencumbered. 
  We also have silverware in great abundance. If smelted down, all 
  these utensils would provide ample raw material to fashion a 
  cannon and enough ammunition to sink a sizeble navy.



  There is someone living in the basement. I've seen him only 
  once. In the kitchen he scurried past me and down the stairs, 
  muttering, 'scuse me." I can't even see people anymore; 
  they have evaporated from my head. But this one I can hear 
  playing video games with the rapt attention of a Buddhist monk. 
  Zaps and bangs and squeals can be heard through the floorboards 
  for twelve or sixteen hours a day. One afternoon I hear him 
  leave, and I sneak into his room, feeling the constricted glee 
  of one committing a crime. It is like looking through a dead 
  person's belongings. Nameless people in creased photographs 
  lying under old newspapers and cigarette butts. A mammoth 
  television with a Sega Genesis plugged into it. A bleeding 
  beanbag chair, a dirty mattress, and a broken copy of Atlas 
  Shrugged. Indecipherable albums by disco musicians. I back 
  away in revulsion.

  There are sirens all day long here. It is as though the city is 
  burning down forever, one house at a time. The homeless people 
  are not affected by the fires -- the whole city could burn to 
  ashes and they wouldn't lose a thing. If tomorrow Philadelphia 
  were expunged like another Gomorrah they would be the luckiest 
  people alive. Amidst the wailing and gnashing of teeth over the 
  loss of fortunes and houses hard won, the vagabond would suffer 
  only his daily dose of melancholy. A reprieve from the gods -- 
  when you've nothing to lose, you've nothing to lose. Rain 
  bothers only those who live above the water.



  Claudia: baiting Sir Fickwickwood with the anchovial remnant of 
  a pizza. The cat is not interested and remains perched on a 
  wall, awaiting the Second Coming. "We're adults," she says. "We 
  can let the cat climb up on the table, and we can let him eat 
  off of our plates."

  "I never felt like an adult," I tell her, "until I bought my 
  first bar of soap. In the Acme, after I had first moved out, 
  when I realized that I didn't have to get Dove anymore because 
  **I** was paying for it. It was going to be my bar of soap, 
  and I could get any bar of soap that I wanted. I could get Lava, 
  or Irish Spring, I could get Ivory because it floated in the 
  tub. I'd always wanted a bar of Ivory soap because it floated in 
  the tub. It seems so practical."



  In this pocket world that exists within the razor wire we have a 
  collective definition of reality: house rules -- codes of 
  conduct upheld and violated by all alike. Whose turn is it to 
  buy detergent? Who takes out the garbage? Don't leave the front 
  door unlocked. Don't park in front of the garage....

  All in all, we are good people -- in that belief I am secure. We 
  are well intentioned, motivated and aimless. We have picked 
  directions and blindly pursued them because we cannot see 
  further than what's on TV this afternoon. "Our whole generation 
  has been brainwashed by MTV!" I shout up the stairs after Marty. 
  "That's not true!" he calls back, "heh-heh heh heh heh." We are 
  all cyberpunks, digirati. We are capable of carrying on 
  meaningless conversations at the speed of light and we can't go 
  an hour without reading our e-mail.



  Claudia hands me a lime freeze frosty. The green ones are the 
  best and we both know this.

  We are sitting in the backyard. As I tilt my head back and pull 
  on the plastic, a child's balloon hurtles by overhead, far above 
  the razor wire, a spaceship of sadness and desolation. "Look," I 
  say to Claudia, pointing, "aliens."

  "I can hear a kid crying," she says.



  I call constance, who lives three blocks away. "Come on over," 
  she says, and I do. At one time Constance was my best friend, my 
  confidante, my accomplice. It's been a long time since that hazy 
  and distantly remembered summer when we spent almost every day 
  together, mostly eating and planning with sumptuous complexity 
  the location, consistency, and duration of our next meal. Seven 
  dodecahedrons and one lone cube of hot summer days rolled over 
  us, banging their hard and lumpy sides down into our world, 
  clump, clump, clump. In pieces they were completed, their 
  facets not too terribly distinct from each another -- yet 
  together they formed a perfect shape.

  There were dots of adventure, such as the August when I cut her 
  lawn for the first time. It had grown to a height of perhaps 
  four feet, tough and sinewy weeds that the lawn mower would not 
  even begin to consider devouring. So, dressed in blue denim 
  cutoff shorts that I still own, carrying a scythe we found in 
  the shed, I spent five absorbed hours playing either Willa 
  Cather or Death, garnering a set of monumental blisters, hewing 
  down cities of straw. Dynasties of entomology crashing before 
  me, I the tyrant, I the destroyer: Your worlds are dust. Where 
  was David-Who-Works-For-the-Discovery-Channel that day when I 
  made homeless a thousand crickets and their myriad children?

  Constance is somehow better than when I last saw her. Her hair 
  has acquired some definition if not purpose. Her clothes have 
  achieved a mature sense of style. She is sitting on her porch 
  playing guitar, waiting. I have never been to this house of hers 
  before, and it is late at night.

  "Guess what," she says when I climb the porch stairs. She smiles 
  and I say the first thing that anybody thinks when an old friend 
  says "guess what" to you like that.

  "You're pregnant."

  "I'm pregnant," she says, giggling.

  "Is this a Good Thing?"

  "This is a Good Thing."

  "What are you going to do?"

  "The Get-Married, Buy-a-House Thing. The Whole Thing."

  "Big wedding and lace?"

  "The whole thing. The big thing, and I want you to be there. I 
  want you to take pictures at my wedding."

  "Congratulations." I hug her and it is good to see her again, 
  but still there is something missing. We are no longer the crazy 
  kids we once were, though as we go inside I am gratified to see 
  that she still has the lamp that I made for her out a 
  dressmakers' dummy. It is wearing a new shade, green and sloping 
  with tassels hanging from clamshell fluting, and a denim jacket. 
  Thankfully this is touting a collection of buttons printed with 
  left-wing slogans. I am glad to see everything that remains.

  Constance makes popcorn. We eat it and wipe our fingers on cloth 
  napkins. I tell her about Claudia.

  "Did I meet her?"

  "Yes, I think so, maybe that time -- but we weren't, she and I, 
  not then..."

  "Yes, maybe."



  There is something we had before that we no longer possess. 
  Perhaps it is passion, perhaps it is recklessness, or perhaps it 
  is that now we are aware of our boredom. In 21 years, 
  Constance's child will lie in the grass with a great friend and 
  mull over what can be the most important thing in the world only 
  when you are still 20 years old: What shall we do tomorrow? And 
  the next day, and the next? And the next 20 years? But today, 
  Constance and I sit at her dining-room table and we talk about 
  the things of no importance that are now our lives and although 
  we talk and smile, we are both only half there, the other half 
  is buried away in some lost summer. And in the backs of our 
  heads, a dull, relentless, quiet voice asks us: What is it all 
  for? We talk and we grasp for the things that are left in the 
  dark hole that was once our youth. We try to remember what it 
  was like, and pretend that this is better.

  And in the end, some second of our life will be our last. And in 
  that span of time, the stoic face of Death will look down at us 
  and ask: What have you done?



  Kyle Cassidy (cassidy@rowan.edu)
----------------------------------

  Kyle Cassidy lives in Philadelphia with his lovely wife Linda 
  and her 28-pound cat Thunderbelly. He has been a frequent 
  contributor to InterText and can be found on the Web at 
  <http://www.rowan.edu/~cassidy/home.htm>. He also has a great 
  collection of fountain pens.


  The Greatest Vampire   by Gary Cadwallader
============================================
...................................................................
  Submitted for your approval: a tale of one relationship dying 
  while several others, bonded in blood, are being born.
...................................................................

  "Great vampires have always been women," my wife said. She 
  nudged me in the darkness of the auditorium as Luchesa, Queen of 
  Witches, Greatest of Vampires strode toward the lectern.

  "What about Dracula?"

  "The real Dracula was mortal," Carla whispered. "But look at 
  her!" Carla's breath was hot in my ear. "She's magnificent."

  And so she was, this Luchesa, who walked like a man but whose 
  pale body made me ache. She stood tall and was sensuously thin, 
  white as an albino. She captured her audience with quick 
  movements and sparkling eyes. Her presence was ethereal.

  Her clothes were businesslike. A gray felt suit and peach 
  blouse. Small gray pumps emphasized shapely legs. Perhaps we 
  were to imagine her working in a law firm downtown, but I kept 
  sensing the clothes were a mask.

  "Great women have always been vampires," I whispered to Carla, 
  in a poor attempt at humor.

  Carla dug her nails into my palm and looked at me sideways. She 
  wanted to chew me out, but Luchesa saved me by starting her 
  presentation.

  Luchesa's eyes swept the crowd and locked too long with my own. 
  I looked away dizzily and saw blood welling up from the floor. 
  It splashed across my shoes and sopped into my socks. It was 
  warm against my ankles.

  A hallucination! I shook my head. Luchesa still looked at me. 
  The air was heavy with steam and the smell of human entrails.

  "That's a horrible thing to say!" Carla whispered.

  "What?" Less than a second had passed and Carla had just 
  answered me. Luchesa's eyes moved on. I mumbled an apology and 
  sank into the chair. Was I in the presence of the real thing? 
  I'd taken it for granted Luchesa was a fake... who wouldn't, 
  besides Carla?

  But my head hurt. Single words from Luchesa's speech came to me 
  as images in a fog. Freedom: a wolf lunging through the gray 
  woods, tracks like flower petals in the snow. Ritual: a den of 
  serpents tangling in sexual frenzy. Blood: a vision of a 
  Vietnamese child stepping on a popper. A small leg shoots up in 
  the air, turning end over end and spattering me with a fine red 
  mist, throwing blood across my lips and face.

  I looked at Carla. Tiny droplets of blood, like beads of sweat, 
  were in her hair. I reeled in the chair, which seemed miles 
  wide. I bounced off the back and was propelled to the floor.

  I'd never been a believer. Not like Carla. I could deny this a 
  thousand ways. I got food poisoning at Don Choo-Choo's. Some bad 
  acid from 1973 was coming back to haunt me. I was having a 
  stroke.

  But all excuses fled when I looked at Luchesa. If she wasn't a 
  full-fledged witch -- or vampire -- then my brother Billy didn't 
  burn up in a Huey helicopter and I didn't work as a computer 
  programmer. Nothing was real. My mother was Einstein and 
  nobody's old man ever drank too much. This woman was bad news.

  Carla looked enraptured. She couldn't have missed the fact that 
  I was hunkered on the floor, but she was hanging on Luchesa's 
  every word, while a pounding headache kept me from calling out 
  to her.

  Carla had always been a believer. She still thought the Beatles 
  were getting back together. I tried to tell her one of them was 
  dead, but that didn't matter. "It won't be on this plane," she 
  said. We were the couple about whom people said "opposites 
  attract." People had been saying that for twenty years and it 
  was still true today. All I wanted was another twenty years with 
  my crazy wife.

  Without Carla, I'm a shark. No feelings, no motivations beyond 
  the primal, nothing. I need her spiritualism and astrology. I 
  need her delving into the unknown to fill the emptiness in my 
  soul. I'm not stupid, I know what people say: "Roger's all 
  control, and Carla's -- Carla's a flake." We were the perfect 
  yin and yang of couples. What one lacked, the other had in 
  abundance. Carla gave me control. Without her I was the vampire.

  So there was something familiar in Luchesa, something warlike in 
  her thin body. She looked like starving children I'd seen in 
  Vietnam, like fresh corpses beside the road. She had my 
  attention like nothing had since a cobra had crawled across my 
  chest while I lay half asleep in the jungle.

  I knew her hallucinations, too. In college, the days were long 
  and drugs were easy to find. After that was the war, and don't 
  think we didn't try to fill our emptiness with whatever we could 
  find.

  Was Luchesa making some promise of eternal youth? That would 
  tempt my Carla. Her disappointment with her own body usually 
  came as a put-down of mine. I took it quietly; I had a paunch 
  but didn't mind aging. Carla not only hated it -- she feared it.

  "I'm sick," I mumbled and crawled to the aisle across the 
  unmoving feet of strangers. Carla didn't notice. I saw rows and 
  rows of glassy, unblinking eyes staring at Luchesa. No one 
  watched me as I hurried to the door, not daring to look back.

  The lights and fresh air of the lobby gave me the strength to 
  make it to the toilet. I threw up. The white bowl was cool 
  against my hands. The tiled floor sparkled with the 
  extraordinary vision given to those with fever. My retching 
  slowed, then stopped, and my eyesight returned to normal. I 
  slicked the sweat from my forehead and rose with increasing 
  strength. That had been a tough attack of... of what?

  In the hard fluorescent glare of the men's room, my vampire 
  theory didn't hold up. Just nonsense. I must have been out of my 
  mind.

  "You okay, buddy?" A hand touched my shoulder. A well-fed, 
  bearded man with a nose like a red cauliflower was looking at 
  me. "Your wife sent me in to get you. You okay?"

  "Yeah, sure." I patted his sleeve and walked to the door. I felt 
  his jaundiced eyes following me. "Really," I said. "Just 
  something I ate."

  He grunted. That was something he could understand. His hand 
  found its way to his ample belly and stroked it absently.

  I walked out into a darkened lobby that smelled of cigarette 
  smoke and orange soda. That didn't seem right at all. I saw the 
  glow of Carla's white dress among the shadows before I saw her 
  face.

  "Where the hell you been?" she started in on me. "The lecture's 
  been over for forty-five minutes, and I wanted to go talk with 
  Luchesa. You've ruined -- "

  "Wait -- what do you mean the lecture's over? She just started 
  five minutes ago."

  "You're nuts. Did you fall asleep in there? I swear, if you've 
  been drinking..."

  "No, of course not. I haven't had **time** to get a drink!"

  "You've had almost four hours. Don't play stupid! Luchesa talked 
  for three hours with a break in the middle. And I been waiting 
  out here for God knows how long! I finally sent the manager in 
  to check and out you come like nothing happened? Well, listen 
  mister, I'm pissed!"

  "Baby, I was sick." Could I have fallen asleep?

  Carla looked skeptical. "You're never sick."

  "I know. And I'm freaked out, okay? I don't know what's 
  happening, but I blacked out or something."

  She put her arm around me. "Did you fall down?"

  "No. Are you sure it's been that long? I know, of course you 
  are, sorry -- I did throw up."

  "Maybe you passed out."

  "No, I'm sure. I threw up, then I came right out. I just lost 
  four hours somewhere."

  "That's crazy."

  Carla, the ditz, was calling me crazy. "Is this some kind of 
  role reversal?" I asked.

  She laughed. "Let's get home to bed. I'll drive."

  That night we had the greatest sex of our twenty years 
  together... and then I saw Luchesa outside our second-story 
  window.

  She floated as in a dream and my vision was blurred. It could 
  have been a dream. Except for the sound. I don't hear sounds in 
  my dreams.

  Luchesa was beside Carla and they were caressing. Luchesa stared 
  at me with amber, metallic eyes. She bared her fangs and sank 
  them into Carla's soft neck. I tried to scream a warning but 
  found myself floundering under waves of shock. Luchesa was 
  overloading my nervous system with swells of sensation.

  Sound and feeling and imbalance struck me, forcing me out of the 
  bed and onto my knees. I struggled to raise my head and it was 
  like putting my face into a campfire. The heat seemed to peel my 
  skin away. And the smell brought a picture to my mind. It was a 
  picture of small fingers, chopped and placed neatly in a bowl of 
  vinegar, their bloody nails all pointing at me accusingly.

  I looked at Carla and she was sinking into herself. The life was 
  draining out of her. Her beautiful skin, which had been so hot 
  and soft moments ago, looked like dried tapioca on concrete.

  And Luchesa threw back her head and roared. She was a lion and I 
  was less worthy than carrion. She slit her own throat with a 
  sharp thumbnail and pressed Carla's lips to it. And Carla began 
  to suck.

  That sound petrified me. That sucking. That awful adult suckling 
  that only the terribly hungry can make. And I wet myself with 
  tears and urine, and I trembled with fever until, mercifully, 
  Luchesa let me pass from her hypnotism into unconsciousness.



  "Darling," my Carla said, "what are you doing on the floor?"

  I unwound like an ancient cat, sore and stretching. My head was 
  bruised, my neck was stiff. I looked at her with bleary vision. 
  "What happened?"

  "You were on the floor."

  "No, I mean last night. What happened last night?"

  "I slept like a log."

  I stood up and nearly fell across the bed. "I had the strangest 
  dream... about Luchesa." I pulled Carla's robe away from her 
  neck. No marks.

  "Roger, what are you doing, silly?"

  "Never mind," I said. "It was just a dream... I guess. But it 
  was so real."

  "And that's how you ended up on the floor?"

  "Forget it. Let's get some breakfast."

  On weekends, we did a few chores around the house and then went 
  to a movie. But Carla suggested we drive to St. Louis, maybe 
  take in the zoo, go to a riverboat. It sounded good to me and I 
  wanted to get out of the house.

  So we drove for five hours and had lunch along the way. It was a 
  nice, calm trip. I enjoyed the scenery, the river, everything. 
  That is, until we got there and Carla asked me to buy a 
  newspaper.

  Somehow, she knew exactly what page to turn to. She found the ad 
  for "Luchesa, Queen of Witches, Greatest of Vampires" on page 
  twenty-four.

  "This is where I want to go," she said.

  There was a subtlety about her voice that I found odd. I looked 
  at her and knew why we'd come to St. Louis. It was the next stop 
  on the vampire train.

  "We can't," I began. "It's impossible," I stammered.

  I sputtered like a dying '73 Bel Air. I searched for reasons we 
  couldn't go. There had to be one that didn't involve the very 
  things I didn't want to talk about, the supernatural events in 
  our bedroom. Finally, I just yelled. "I won't have it!"

  She looked at me like I was a dog. She challenged me with her 
  eyes to give her the real reason. But she stayed absolutely 
  silent and left the next move to me.

  "And that's that!"

  She slapped me hard across the face. My teeth felt like they 
  would fall out. And I bit my lip.

  "What the hell you do that for?"

  She hit me again.

  I doubled up my fist and she looked me straight in the eye. I'd 
  never hit her in twenty years. I wanted to then, but I didn't. I 
  feared that once I started.... No, no, I couldn't hit her.

  "You're so full of shit you squeak," I said, and turned away.

  We didn't talk much that afternoon. We found a motel room. We 
  ate dinner. I watched the clock, waiting for eight, when the 
  show would start. What was it going to be like this time?

  I never found out. Carla sneaked out while I was in the 
  bathroom. I heard the car starting and knew she'd left me to 
  wait in the motel.

  I spent the next several hours in a state of agitated denial. 
  Nothing's wrong, I thought, pacing the floor. It didn't really 
  happen. I passed out, then I had a bad dream. That's all. 
  Carla's only into this vampire business because she's nuts. 
  Crazy Carla, the ditz. She even called herself that.

  But as the hour grew later, I worked up to full panic. She's 
  leaving me. With that thought I saw a truth more frightening 
  than the supernatural. I'm not worried that she's in danger, or 
  even in love... I'm worried because I don't want to be alone.

  I had to do something. I called for a rental car and headed for 
  the theater.

  I don't know what I expected to find on that deserted street. 
  All the people had gone home, the show was over. Hot wind blew 
  off the river. The theater was locked up and I was out of places 
  to look. I began cruising, like a mother looking for her lost 
  kid. Driving up and down without hope of seeing a sign. But you 
  have to keep moving because you're so worried.

  And I found a restaurant that looked right. Not for Carla maybe, 
  but it had Luchesa written all over it. A classy place, darkened 
  and smelling of red wine and redder meat.

  They were there.

  I think they wanted me to find them. They were in a booth close 
  to the front. I could see them from the window. I got out of the 
  car and pressed my face to the glass. None of the diners paid 
  any attention to me.

  Only Luchesa saw me. She smiled. Her canine teeth were razor 
  sharp. She found Carla's hand and bit a huge, ragged hole in it 
  between the thumb and first finger. Blood ran down Carla's arm. 
  Luchesa looked up, lips and teeth bloody, then held Carla's hand 
  over her wine glass and slowly filled it with blood. I screamed. 
  I hammered on the glass. No one even looked up.

  I scrambled for the door and lost sight of them for a moment. I 
  rushed in past a maitre d' who grabbed at my shirt. A table 
  spilled over. People began to scream.

  A man cursed me and his wife laughed. I found the booth, but it 
  was empty. The glass of blood was gone. There were no blood 
  stains on the tablecloth. It was as if I had dreamed it all.

  They threw me out into the street and I fell to my hands and 
  knees in the gutter. The concrete tore my pants. A rat ran 
  across my hand. I could smell the river sweating in the 
  distance. I saw a bum urinating against a trash bin. The wind 
  screamed in my ear, "She's gone."

  I picked myself and limped to the car. Back at the motel, the 
  few things Carla had brought were gone. She'd left a note: 
  "Don't try to find me, Roger. I don't love you anymore." It was 
  on amber motel stationary with a picture of the St. Louis Arch.

  I sat on the bed and stared into space for two hours.

  Finally, I decided to go after her. I didn't care if she loved 
  me, that wasn't the point. What I cared about was whether she 
  was alive or not. Was she some kind of walking dead now?

  I went back to the theater and broke in through a side door. I 
  turned furniture over and tore up the lobby until I found what I 
  wanted, a pamphlet showing Luchesa's next stop. Indianapolis. 
  She was headed straight east on I-70. I was going to catch her.



  It was past two in the morning by the time I crossed into 
  Indiana, and I was wondering some pretty strange stuff. Like, 
  was it legal to kill a vampire? Did they have rights under the 
  Constitution? Should I even go after Carla? Maybe being a 
  vampire was her choice and I shouldn't interfere.

  I was all mixed up, but I kept driving. One thing was clear to 
  me: I didn't need a wooden stake to kill Luchesa. She wouldn't 
  have bothered with all those hypnotic fireworks unless she was 
  afraid of me. No, a gun would do, or a heavy pipe... maybe I 
  could even strangle her, as long as I didn't let her get to my 
  mind.

  The stars were painfully bright, and I was alone on the road. A 
  farmer's light shone off to the left a mile or so ahead. My 
  headlights outlined corn growing right up to the shoulder. I saw 
  more stars than I'd seen in years. Under other circumstances, it 
  would have been a wonderful night.

  I rounded a corner at eighty and saw Carla standing in the road. 
  She had on a white full-length nightgown and her skin was yellow 
  in my lights.

  I pulled the car hard to the left and jammed on the brakes. The 
  car jumped into the air and flipped over. The car turned over 
  once -- twice -- and landed upright, facing backwards in the 
  median.

  Carla was gone.

  The car wouldn't start and I had a headache that wouldn't quit, 
  but I seemed unhurt. The doors were jammed shut, but I pulled 
  myself out through the window even with the broken glass 
  everywhere.

  "There was no reason for that!" I yelled. Damn women had ruined 
  a perfectly good car. "I'll wring your chicken necks!" And I 
  waved a fist at the sky.

  I thought I heard giggling in the cornfield. It scared the hell 
  out of me. Ain't going in there, I thought. I'll walk until I 
  come to a house. Let 'em fight on my terms. And I set off for 
  the lights I'd seen just down the road.



  I came down the farmhouse road into the circle of light and saw 
  a man on the porch with a shotgun. He was about fifty and 
  balding. White hair rimmed the sides of his head. He had on red 
  plastic glasses, an orange checkered bathrobe, and those brown 
  slippers men used to wear in the fifties. Skinny white ankles 
  showed under his pink pajamas.

  "That your car back a ways," he said. It wasn't a question. 
  "Those vampires do it?"

  I stopped. The shotgun -- a Mossberg, Marine issue -- was 
  pointed at my chest. This old boy had been in a war, too. One of 
  his legs was plastic and metal; the foot inside the slipper was 
  flesh-colored, but smooth as glass.

  "They took my wife," I said.

  He grunted and hobbled down from the porch. "She's gone, mister. 
  Come with me." He walked away from the house expecting me to 
  follow.

  I thought he was going to kill me. I thought I didn't care. It 
  might be a good thing.

  He led me to a foul-smelling barn and slid back a heavy door. 
  The door was big enough to drive a tractor through and I heard 
  animal noises inside. He flipped a switch and blazing light 
  blinded me for a moment. This is it, I thought.

  "They done this," he said. "There was two. Reckon your wife was 
  one." He pointed into a horse stall, expecting me to turn my 
  back on him and have a look.

  My heart thumped as I looked inside.

  "Jesus!" I screamed, and began to throw up.



  We were having coffee in his kitchen when he asked me to do it. 
  I didn't want to, but it seemed like I owed him. My wife was 
  part of this, after all.

  "Take the gun," he said. "Make it quick if you can."

  So I went into that barn that smelled like cats had been using 
  it for an outhouse, turned out the light, and waited for my 
  night vision to return. And I stalked his poor nine-year-old 
  granddaughter like some gook in the bush. Only she couldn't go 
  anywhere, because he had her chained in the horse stall.

  She was still making that awful sound, the same sound I'd heard 
  the night Luchesa had visited our bedroom. And the last of three 
  white lambs was dying in her arms as she tore at its neck and 
  spilled the blood down her throat. The other two mutilated 
  corpses lay at her bare feet. The chain, bloodied and strained 
  to its limit, was around her left foot. She had on white cotton 
  panties and a sleeveless t-shirt, stained red with lamb's blood.

  And I murdered that poor little girl. I shot her through the 
  neck, blast after blast, until what was left of her head came 
  off. It looked like a slaughterhouse in there.

  And I buried the body away from the head, like the old man told 
  me to, with the body behind the barn and the head across the 
  highway. I prayed over both mounds. I prayed God would forgive 
  me for killing a child. I prayed God would forgive Carla for 
  making the child into a vampire. And I prayed I'd find Luchesa 
  and kill her, because I knew she'd hurt the child just to slow 
  me down.

  I went back to the old man's house. There was a note in the 
  kitchen along with a K-bar fighting knife and a greasy blue 
  Colt .45 automatic. There were three thousand dollars wrapped
  up in the note.

  "Roger,

  "You did the right thing. You may not believe it in the morning, 
  but it was right. Do me one more favor... I can't face my son 
  and tell him how his daughter died, and it seems I can't do this 
  myself. The police will be after you when they find the bodies 
  and your car, so take the shotgun, the money and the rest and 
  kill those blood-suckers for me. Please. One Marine for another.

  "Semper Fi."



  I thought about what he wrote for a long time. And then I 
  silently went upstairs and found him asleep. I slit his throat 
  with the K-bar -- it seemed like a good way to die. By then it 
  was dawn and I took his truck and headed for Indianapolis.

  I'm gonna find Carla, if the cops don't find me first. And I'll 
  kill her. Luchesa too. Then I'll do myself. I suppose they'll 
  say another vet went nuts.

  Maybe I am. I killed a nine-year-old girl and an old man I 
  didn't even know. Now I'm after my wife. If that ain't nuts, I 
  don't know what is.



  Gary Cadwallader (rmcheal@tyrell.net)
---------------------------------------

  Gary Cadwallader lives in Blue Springs, Missouri. When not taking 
  one of his four children to football practice or cheerleading, 
  he works for a major hospital complex in Kansas City. He is 
  editor of the Internet 'zine Clique of the Tomb Beetle
  <http://www.tyrell.net/~rmcheal>.


  Twenty-One   by Wendy J. Cholbi
=================================
...................................................................
  Most people play solitaire with cards. For others, it's not just 
  a game -- it's a state of mind.
...................................................................

  It is my twenty-first birthday. It's also a Friday night. I can 
  do whatever the hell I want. Everything except paint.

  Is there such a thing as artist's block? Writers get blocked, 
  and they're artists, sort of. Or is there some other reason the 
  paper stays blank, all the brushes in their holders, tubes of 
  paint unopened?

  I have my back turned to my work table as I deal cards onto the 
  floor. I made that table myself, particle board on cinder 
  blocks, and it's just the right height for me to sit at and 
  paint. It's even and solid and square. I spent a long time 
  moving the cinder blocks under the wood to balance it and 
  compensate for the warping of the floorboards.

  It's the right height to sit at and play solitaire, too, but 
  even though it's empty, I am playing on the floor. I feel too 
  guilty for not painting. The emptiness of the table would accuse 
  me.

  I feel hungry. As I finish the game that I'm losing, I promise 
  myself that as soon as I win once, I'll eat. I deal myself 
  another game. Looks bad. No aces in sight and I can only do one 
  move at first, put the seven of clubs on the eight of diamonds. 
  I start to flip my way through the deck.

  I am a master of solitaire. It is a constant in my life. I use 
  it to dull my mind when I'm upset, to while away the time when I 
  can't sleep, to smooth the flow of my subconscious when I'm 
  frustrated with working on a painting. I also use it to bribe 
  myself -- I promise myself an uninterrupted round as soon as I 
  finish a painting. Or after I call my mother. Or I use it to 
  delay the inevitable, as I am doing now. As soon as I win, I 
  will look up from the worn cards, survey my shelves, try to find 
  something edible.

  The games are also keeping me from panicking over the naked 
  sheets of thick paper, thirsty to soak up water and color. I 
  haven't set brush to paper in two weeks. The last thing I 
  painted that I was really happy with was about three weeks ago. 
  It was a crow sitting on a streetlight. I was pleased with the 
  way I managed to catch the highlights of his feathers, with that 
  kind of dusty shine crows have. And his one yellow eye, his head 
  cocked. Last week I turned that painting to face the wall, 
  because it had begun to seem like he was staring at me 
  accusingly.

  I'm worried that my brain will dry up with my paint, if it 
  hasn't already.

  It's also been two weeks since I've been to the grocery store. 
  The last two nights I have ordered out -- pizza last night, 
  Chinese before that. I went to the liquor store today, though. 
  On my way home from work I stopped and bought a bottle of scotch 
  with the last of my petty cash to celebrate today. Tony at the 
  liquor store knows me. I've been buying stuff there since I was 
  seventeen.

  Two aces show up in a row: hearts and spades. Hearts in spades. 
  I should have spades and spades of hearts. I don't want to think 
  about that now.

  The year I moved out I was seventeen. My parents split up when I 
  was fourteen, and the day the divorce papers were signed I 
  resolved to get out as soon as I could. It was the usual 
  arrangement: I lived with my mom, spent weekends once in a while 
  at my dad's place. Nobody asked me who I'd rather live with.

  They're OK, my parents -- they didn't beat me or anything. My 
  dad even came to see the student art show my sophomore year. 
  It's just that the divorce was very messy and anyone could see 
  that they had more important things to deal with than me. I 
  checked out my options.

  I was working one night a week stocking at a local comic book 
  store, and they needed part-time work at the main warehouse. So 
  I worked there after school most of my junior year. They hired 
  me full-time as soon as I got out for summer, and I never went 
  back to school. After a month I was making twice minimum wage, 
  taking orders over the phone. I rented an apartment on the south 
  side of City Park, a small place, just to get out. After my 
  first six-month lease was up, I found this place. It's much 
  better than the last one, on the north side, closer to work, 
  with lots of windows. I could say to my friends that I had light 
  to work with now. I told my mom I was barely making the rent 
  payments, and with the two hundred dollars she gave me I bought 
  a brown-and-red Ford Fiesta.

  The first time I made love with Jason was in the back of that 
  car. But I'm not thinking about that now, as I lay the four and 
  the five and the six of hearts on top of the pile. I sold it for 
  parts three months ago and bought a Chevy Citation with an oil 
  leak. I repaired the leak myself with duct tape.

  Besides, it wasn't making love. It couldn't have been.

  The sun is setting. I can tell because the light is getting red. 
  I can't see the sun when it sets -- the buildings of downtown 
  Denver are in the way -- but I don't mind. Afternoon light is 
  best to paint by, and the afternoons will be longer soon, when 
  daylight savings time starts.

  My dad's place, where I used to spend weekends, had great light. 
  It's in the mountains, and it's very quiet and all that. I used 
  to wish that they would let me live with him instead of my mom, 
  but there would have been no way for me to get to school. So I 
  had to spend weeks at my mom's place, with her and Dave. Dave 
  always tried to be nice to me, but his idea of being nice was 
  offering me a beer. I hate beer, and they drink too much. 
  Besides, I didn't care if he was nice to me. I just wanted him 
  to leave me alone, so I could play solitaire and think about 
  what I would paint the next weekend at my dad's. I had a deck of 
  cards with cats on the backs that I used until I lost the jack 
  of diamonds. These days, cards take a couple of months to wear 
  out between my fingers, but I keep a spare deck around just in 
  case.

  When I started drinking, I drank vodka, just like every high 
  school student. It's cheap. But the first time I went into 
  Tony's liquor store, I knew if I tried to buy vodka, especially 
  dressed the way I usually was, in jeans and tennis shoes, he'd 
  know I was underage. So I put on a pair of costume glasses and 
  styled my hair in a French twist. My hair was long then.

  After Jason left for college I cut my hair. I read somewhere 
  that a lot of women cut their hair after ending relationships, 
  but I didn't end it. He did. I cropped it short, not more than 
  an inch long. I did it myself, standing in front of the bathroom 
  mirror. I did a pretty good job of it, too, and I've gotten 
  better, since I have to trim it every month or so.

  I wore heels to the liquor store, and a skirt and blouse. I 
  asked the man, who turned out to be Tony, for his 
  recommendations on what wine to drink with grilled fish and 
  rice. He asked me what kind of fish, and I said halibut because 
  I knew it was a fancy type of fish. He recommended a French dry 
  white wine from Meursault-Blagny, whatever that means. I only 
  remember it because I saved the bottle. I put flowers in it once 
  in a while.

  I thanked him, and bought it, and he didn't card me, so the 
  fifteen dollars I spent on the wine was worth it. The next time 
  I went into the store, I wore a short skirt and a blouse with 
  three buttons open and bought some Grand Marnier. After that I 
  knew I was safe. He's never carded me, even when I've bought 
  vodka.

  When the jack and queen of spades show up in the right order, I 
  know I've won the game. But I play to the end as I always do, 
  and then slide the cards together into a pile. I've played so 
  much solitaire, it's become another art to me. I know a lot of 
  different games, from clock solitaire to forty thieves, which is 
  a two-deck version, to portable solitaire that you can play in 
  one hand. The person who taught me portable solitaire said it 
  was great for airplanes. I've never been on an airplane.

  I still have staples left. Rice, flour, spices, that kind of 
  thing. Some cans of tomato paste. I put a pan of water on to 
  boil and measure out rice. I don't sit down to play again 
  because I know that if I do I will let the water boil down to 
  nothing rather than interrupt my game. I glance at my painting 
  corner as I salt the water.

  I really should paint something, but I've been telling myself 
  that for days. My half-finished efforts, except for one, are 
  stacked behind the table. I hate most of them. I tried painting 
  my hand holding a deck of cards, I tried painting a group of 
  people playing poker, and finally I just tried to paint a big 
  king of spades. When I noticed that it had Jason's nose, I tore 
  it up.

  I wander into my bedroom and throw a couple of dirty shirts into 
  the clothes basket. I'm normally very neat, it's only during 
  this dry spell -- that's what I'll call it, it has a nice ring 
  -- that I've thrown my dirty clothes into the corner instead of 
  in the basket.

  When I was finally ready to show Jason my place, my apartment 
  that was a studio even though it wasn't a studio apartment, I 
  thought maybe I should throw some things on the floor. It's 
  usually very clean, and I didn't want him to think I had cleaned 
  up for him. We made love -- no, we had sex on my bed, which is 
  really a mattress on the floor. He didn't stay the night, 
  because his mother didn't know where he was. He was eight months 
  younger than me. I had forgotten that people my age still lived 
  with their parents, still listened to their mothers, still 
  called if they were going to be out late. So he left me with 
  kisses, saying he wished he could stay. At three in the morning 
  I woke up and couldn't get back to sleep, because I could smell 
  him in the sheets. It bothered me. I felt fiercely territorial 
  about my place. So I got up and took a long shower and changed 
  the sheets on the bed. I put the dirty ones in a pillowcase to 
  separate them from the other untainted laundry. Then I felt 
  better, and I went back to sleep.

  The water is boiling, and I dump in the rice. I make a deal with 
  myself that I can play solitaire, but I will interrupt my game 
  to get the rice. In payment for this, I am allowed to cheat. I 
  have devised several ways of doing this. There are rules even 
  for cheating. Sometimes I give myself permission to go through 
  the deck more than the specified number of times. Sometimes I 
  can switch the positions of certain cards. Sometimes I let one 
  card be wild. Tonight I play that black can go on black and red 
  can go on red, but only if they're opposite suits.



  Jason had this deck of cards that he had drilled a hole through. 
  That was the first thing that I noticed when I met him. He had a 
  job at the same warehouse I did, but in a different department. 
  It was my second summer there, and his first. He was going to 
  work full time for a year, to earn money before he went to 
  college.

  I came down to the break room for a Coke and he was playing 
  solitaire on the lunch table. I noticed that he didn't play very 
  well, and that there was a hole in every single card. The holes 
  weren't in the middle -- they were a little off center, toward 
  the top left corner. We were the only two people in the room. I 
  knew better than to suggest moves to him. I also knew that 
  everyone probably asked him about the holes in his cards, so I 
  didn't. I just sat down across from him and drank my Coke.

  He was kind of cute, I'll admit that. He wore glasses and had 
  curly brownish-blond hair. His fingernails looked like they 
  hadn't been cut in weeks. He didn't look up, even though I knew 
  that he knew I was there. I knew that the holes in his cards 
  were a conversation piece with him when he picked up the jack of 
  diamonds from his pile, and, before playing it, held it up at 
  arm's length so the light shone through it.

  "Don't you ever cut your nails?" I asked him.

  He opened his mouth, then shut it and looked at me funny. "What 
  did you say?"

  "I said, 'Don't you ever cut your nails?' They're pretty long, 
  for a guy." I raised one eyebrow.

  "Yeah, so?"

  "So, nothing. I was just curious." I tossed my hair back and 
  drained my Coke. "I gotta get back upstairs. Where do you work, 
  anyway?"

  "The subscription club. It's hectic today, and I just had to 
  take a break." He spread his hands over his cards and smiled. He 
  had a nice smile.

  "Listen." I lowered my voice. "You must be new around here, 
  because you don't know how bad it would be if they caught you in 
  here playing."

  "What can they do?" He smirked.

  "Fire you."

  "No they can't."

  "Sure they can. Darth Vader up there," I pointed at the ceiling, 
  toward the office of William Kozanski, the president, "owns this 
  company. He can fire anyone he wants to. And he's not very nice 
  to anyone who plays cards on company time." I was going to catch 
  it if I was away from my desk much longer.

  "Well, I may be new here, but there are two things I know that 
  you don't. The first thing is that I punched out before I 
  started this, so I'm playing on my own time. The second thing is 
  that this is my lucky deck." He tapped a card with his 
  fingernail.

  I rolled my eyes and said, "OK, I give up. Why did you punch a 
  hole in every card in your deck?"

  "It's a bullet hole." He said it very calmly, but he had the 
  same extra tone in his voice that my dad does when he's playing 
  a trick on someone. I knew he was making it up.

  I raised the other eyebrow and gave him a half smile. "Look, I 
  really have to get upstairs. I'm going to be in trouble if I 
  don't. What's your name?"

  He looked disappointed. "Jason. What's yours?"

  "Miranda."



  Three games of solitaire later, two of which I win thanks to my 
  extra rule, my rice is ready. I like butter on my rice, but all 
  I have left is margarine. I make a face at the fridge and dump 
  the rice, butterless, onto a plate to cool. Then I pour myself a 
  shot of scotch. It smells less like rubbing alcohol than vodka 
  does, but I pour myself the last of my grape juice for a chaser 
  anyway. I drink another shot and deal myself a game.



  "But aren't you going to college?" He was walking around the 
  warehouse with me on our morning break. It had taken him about a 
  week for him to digest the fact that I was nineteen, I lived by 
  myself, I was a high school dropout, and I was perfectly happy.

  "College? What would I want to go to college for? I'm an 
  artist." I laughed.

  "Do you really think you'll be able to make a living doing that? 
  I mean, what if you end up working here for the rest of your 
  life?" He didn't need to point at the warehouse. It dominated 
  us.

  "Jason, it doesn't matter if I work here for the rest of my 
  life. I don't need to make a living from my paintings. All I 
  need is to be able to do them. I work here so I can pay the 
  rent, and then I go home and paint. It's simple."

  "But how can you stand to know that you'll be working here? I 
  know I'll only be working here for a year, and most of the time 
  I still hate this place. I mean," he stopped and faced me, 
  "until I started talking to you, I ate lunch with my lucky 
  deck."

  I shrugged and smiled at him, and that was when he kissed me.

  I tell myself that I wasn't surprised, that I had noticed how he 
  touched my hand every so often when we talked, that I had seen 
  him looking at me. I tell myself that I knew all along that he 
  was interested in me.

  But I was surprised. I was surprised and delighted and I felt 
  warm inside even though he was a lousy kisser and I had to wipe 
  my chin afterward.



  I win one more game of solitaire, using a different rule this 
  time (all face cards can be put in an empty space, not just 
  kings), drink another shot of scotch, and finish my grape juice. 
  The rice is now cool enough to eat, and even without butter it 
  tastes like the best rice in the world.

  I hope I'll be able to sleep now. I don't want to think anymore, 
  don't want to worry about not being able to paint anymore. Don't 
  want to remember anymore. It's seven o'clock. I curl up in my 
  blanket without bothering to take my shorts and t-shirt off and 
  doze. I do not dream.

  When I wake up the clock says it's only two hours later. I feel 
  defeated. Nothing is right. I can't even sleep through the 
  night. This is crazy. I'm too hot from being twisted in my 
  blanket and there's a sour taste in my mouth from the scotch. 
  I'm hungry again. I feel like I want to cry but I don't.

  "You stupid fuck, stupid fuck, stupid fuck." I can't tell if I'm 
  talking to myself or Jason as I trudge into the kitchen. I have 
  to get out of here. I know that I probably shouldn't drive, but 
  I put on my shoes anyway and have one more shot, no chaser, 
  because I don't care.



  He shouldn't have promised me it would work. And I shouldn't 
  have believed him. He was going to Colorado Springs. Only fifty 
  miles, but it might as well have been a thousand. We both had 
  cars but he was usually too busy to come up to Denver for the 
  weekend. "College isn't like high school," he told me. "Things 
  don't just stop on Friday after classes." So I drove down to 
  visit him a few times on weekends. His roommate was really 
  freaked out about me staying in their room the first time. He 
  was a little nicer about it later, but he was creepy in general. 
  And I started noticing that Jason had all these friends, friends 
  who were going to have careers, friends who were in the same 
  clubs, friends that had more in common with him than happening 
  to work in the same warehouse all year with no one else to talk 
  to. I couldn't talk about the same things as they did. I could 
  only tell him I had finished a new painting, when I actually 
  had. It was hard for me to work for awhile after he left, and I 
  mostly did boring park landscapes. Or I could tell him about 
  things that were happening at my job, which he didn't care 
  about. My last resort was to take my clothes off. Then we 
  wouldn't need to talk at all. But even that didn't work for very 
  long.

  The last time I visited him was in November, for his birthday. 
  He was twenty. His college friends threw him a party and brought 
  a keg and they all got drunk. I didn't. I left after he 
  disappeared with a girl from his drama class. It was a long 
  drive.



  It's a clear night. There seem to be very few cars out tonight. 
  I check the clock in my car to be sure I read the time right, 
  and I did. I drive towards Bill's house. Bill manages one of the 
  branch stores, and there are usually people hanging out at his 
  house on weekends. Sure enough, there's something going on. It 
  looks like a party, in fact, even though no one knows it's my 
  birthday.

  The door is wide open with music and people floating in and out. 
  As I walk into the hallway a man appears from another door in 
  the hall and points at me, saying, "You, you, I haven't kissed 
  you yet." He grabs me and kisses me and I let him because I 
  can't think of a reason not to. Then he walks out onto the front 
  porch and I hear him saying the same thing to someone else. I 
  continue into the house, looking for someone I know. There are 
  people dancing in the living room, mostly high school kids in 
  leather jackets, and two girls playing with a cat in the 
  bedroom.

  I find Bill pouring drinks in the kitchen. He hands me a glass 
  with about an inch of brown liquid in the bottom and introduces 
  me to Eric, Sebastian, Angie, and Willow. Friends of his.

  "What's this?" I hold up the glass.

  Bill shrugs. "Someone brought it. It's some fruit thing, I 
  think." It smells like whiskey. I chug it and make a face. One 
  of the guys claps. The other three continue their conversation 
  with Bill. They're discussing levels and spells. It blows my 
  mind that Bill must be thirty and still hangs around with high 
  school kids and plays Dungeons and Dragons.

  "Are you Eric or Sebastian?" I smile at the one who clapped, 
  who's staring at me appreciatively. He's got round black 
  sunglasses perched on his head and I can tell his black hair is 
  a dye job because lighter hair is showing at the roots.

  "Sebastian Wolf at your service." He bows deeply and I snatch 
  the sunglasses.

  "Thanks." I put them on and strike a pose to make him laugh. 
  Sebastian Wolf, yeah right. No one is named Sebastian Wolf. If I 
  hadn't already been introduced as Miranda I would have said my 
  name was Moonlight or something.

  "I'm going to dance. Coming?" He follows me and we dance in the 
  living room to loud music with lots of synthesizers and drums. I 
  lose myself for a while in the movement of my body and the 
  rhythm shocking up through my feet and legs to the rest of me 
  and the faint smell of alcohol being sweated out of people. I do 
  not think about Jason and his college friends. I do not think 
  about Jason having sex with his college girlfriend and calling 
  it making love. Someone changes the music to a ballad, still 
  with synthesizers and drums. I walk to the porch and 'Sebastian' 
  follows me. There are three or four people standing outside, 
  smoking or making out. I've only been leaning against the 
  railing for a few minutes before Bill comes outside trailing 
  high school kids. "We're going for cigarettes. Want to come?" I 
  shake my head and wave at them. They pull the other people on 
  the porch with them.

  'Sebastian' edges closer to me and I don't move. I think, I know 
  what he is going to do and I don't care. I'm mostly right, 
  except he's not pushy. He puts his arm around me and in a minute 
  he's kissing me, and in another minute he has me pressed against 
  the railing while he kisses my neck and tries to slide his hand 
  underneath my shirt. I hear the noise of the people coming back 
  from buying cigarettes and I push him away and say, "Do you need 
  a ride home or something?" I jingle my car keys.

  At his place, his roommate is asleep and we watch Star Trek. 
  When he starts kissing me again, I let him push me back on the 
  couch and after a while he stands up and takes my hand. I let 
  him lead me back to his room. He does me the favor of turning 
  out the lights before we undress.

  In the dark I close my eyes and let him fuck me. It is easier 
  than I thought it would be. I let part of my mind float away and 
  imagine I am watching myself from the corner of the ceiling. I 
  want to laugh but I change it into an appropriate noise. I feel 
  nothing.

  When he is finished, he lies on me for a minute and then rolls 
  off to the side. I am wide awake and looking at the ceiling. My 
  eyes have become used to the tiny amount of light that seeps in 
  from below the thick curtains from the street light outside. I'm 
  cold and I pull the blanket up over me. He helps me and I'm 
  surprised because I thought he was asleep. He puts his arm over 
  me and pulls me a little closer. It is a small act, probably 
  meaningless because he doesn't know me at all, he doesn't even 
  know my last name, and he certainly doesn't know that I'm a 
  painter or that it's my birthday or that I never do this kind of 
  thing but I'm so lonely tonight that I was willing to do 
  anything to feel close to someone.

  And of course it didn't work. I tried to convince myself that I 
  maybe felt a little bit close to him, and maybe for just a few 
  seconds while we were physically close I almost believed it, but 
  then it was over and I realized that all I felt was empty, empty 
  and hollow and worse than I did before. And him putting his arm 
  around me has just enough tenderness in it to make me realize 
  all of this. I will never make love with anyone. I did that and 
  then it turned out not to be lovemaking at all. It was just sex 
  and that's what this is now. Foolishly, I start to cry. I am 
  very quiet but he is right next to me and he must feel me 
  shaking.

  "Hey, hey, what's wrong? Are you OK?" He touches my face and 
  then pulls the sheet up to dry my cheeks.

  "I'm -- I'm OK." I struggle to control my voice. I refuse to 
  hold on to him and press my face into the hollow of his neck and 
  say something ridiculous like 'hold me.' I take deep breaths and 
  finally I'm able to laugh just slightly and say, "I'm just 
  pretty tired, I guess. I'm sorry."

  He doesn't say 'everything's going to be all right.' He doesn't 
  say 'tell me what's bothering you.' He strokes my hair once or 
  twice. I am grateful.

  His clock says it is 12:03. Goodbye, birthday. I am still 
  trembling inside even though I know I won't fall apart again in 
  front of him. I close my eyes because it's true that I am tired. 
  But I realize that I can't face waking up here, with this person 
  who calls himself Sebastian Wolf. I know he won't hurt me and 
  he's nice enough in his way, but I need to be in a place where I 
  know where the light comes from and the sheets smell familiar. 
  "Sebastian." I kiss him on the forehead. "I need to go home." I 
  get up and find some of my clothes.

  "Are you sure?" He props himself on one elbow, a dim outline.

  "Yeah." I do not lie and say there are things I need to do in 
  the morning or that my parents are waiting for me.

  "I'll let you out." He starts to rummage for his own clothes. He 
  sees me to the door. That's nice of him, I guess. We don't hug 
  or kiss or anything. I have the brief thought of shaking his 
  hand and almost laugh. I say goodbye and turn to walk to my car. 
  He calls after me softly, "See you around." I don't say 
  anything.

  I get into my Chevy and drive three blocks, so he'll know that I 
  am gone, before I stop. I let the engine idle as I lean my 
  forehead against the steering wheel and cry quietly. I cry until 
  I'm finished, and when I am breathing normally again I shift 
  into Drive and go home.

  I turn on every light in my apartment and take off my clothes 
  and put them in a pillowcase. Then I take my deck of cards and 
  rip each one exactly in half. It doesn't matter because I have a 
  spare deck. I'm just sick of the old one, that's all. Then I'm 
  on my way to take a shower, but before I get to the bathroom I 
  see myself walk past the full length mirror in my bedroom. I 
  watch myself and I do not look at my face. Without thinking 
  about it I walk to the mirror and turn my back on it. I stand 
  with my feet a yard apart and bend from the waist until I am 
  facing the mirror again, one good hard look and then I stand up 
  straight. I close my eyes and see the negative image of the 
  tangle of hair between my legs and fix it there.

  I kneel deliberately at my painting table, close my eyes once 
  before I rub my brush in the paint. It comes very easily, 
  surprising me with the long strokes that flow from my hand. It 
  is quickly and deeply done. When I am finished, my knees are 
  numb and there are goosebumps on every inch of my bare skin but 
  I ignore the cold. I am breathing normally and I look at what I 
  have painted, and it would probably scare a lot of people. It is 
  simply painted with broad strokes of red and black and pink and 
  peach. It looks like Georgia O'Keefe has taken some bad acid.

  I get up to clean my brush and my knees explode into feeling. I 
  decide to take a shower before I paint any more.

  When I am warm and clean and dry I put the first painting on the 
  floor and start another one. This one is mostly peach, and gray 
  and black. I blend the colors more carefully this time. I work 
  on the edges. Things have to have edges, but they can't look 
  like edges. I keep my mind fuzzy and I am pleased when I am 
  nearly done. It looks very much like a desert landscape, I even 
  make the background a wash of the palest shade of blue. But a 
  few more minutes of working with a black and gray spot and I can 
  tell that it's a navel. I make sure that the rise behind the 
  woman's body is a slightly darker shade so I can tell it's a man 
  next to her. I am pleased enough with this one that I sign it 
  with my tiny curling M in the corner and the date. The stars are 
  beginning to fade as I turn out all the lights.

  It is Saturday morning and I am twenty-one and I sleep naked in 
  sheets that smell like me.



  Wendy J. Cholbi  (wjc4f@virginia.edu)
---------------------------------------

  Wendy J. Cholbi lives in Charlottesville, Virginia with her 
  husband. She is a technician in a biology lab by day, a writer 
  by night. Her absolute favorite thing to do is read. She also 
  likes to cook, though she cooks more than just plain rice. Her 
  life is slowly being consumed by the Internet.


  FYI
=====

...................................................................
     InterText's next issue will be released March 17, 1996.
...................................................................


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  Hey, where I come from only farm animals have nose rings.

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