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A month ago my brother Marty quit chemo — said screw it, no more billing. Which is fine, that was his call.

But then Marty cashed out and hit the road from Attleboro, Massachusetts, with an 80-pound coonhound — to find someone in the family willing to take Jackson.

That was different.

Jackson is the dog Marty, our sister Carole and I grew up with in Sparta. He’s more or less the same dog our mother grew up with in Missouri. Before that, her Uncle Eli had custody for 40-some years in Indiana.

It used to be considered an honor.

The story is that Eli’s great-grandfather Will, an artillery sergeant, found the dog in a burning cornfield in north Georgia and enlisted him as the mascot of an Ohio mountain-howitzer battery, where Jack attained the honorary rank of corporal.

(Union bivouacs presumably are where the dog acquired his zeal for salted pork belly.)

There’s a faded old wet-plate image that used to hang in our living room – Sergeant Will and Jack in his blue kepi next to a 12-pounder on Lookout Mountain.

Two years later Will brought Jackson home, victorious and deaf. The dog’s been somewhere in our clan ever since.

He’s lost a step or two, doesn’t chase tires the way he did in the ’60s, and he hasn’t been hunting since our Uncle Al died and Marty took him east. The older folks say his speckled coat is grayer than it used to be.

Understand me: I’ve got nothing against Jackson per se. He’s really just a good ol’ farm dog — always the happy wag, the warm nuzzle and those eager black collodion eyes following you around. If all you want to do in life is raise corn, hunt Rebs and sit on your porch counting fireflies, you couldn’t ask for a better pal.

But in all this time Jackson’s never gotten over that hearing loss — the dog won’t let you out of his sight, not for a minute. He’s terrified he’ll be forgotten.

Leave him alone in the house and you’ve got a shattered window. Leave him tied out in the yard and you’ll see Jack in your rear view mirror dragging a clothesline of towels and sheets up the street. Generations of teasing kids have played hide and seek only to learn there’s no escape – once he’s got the scent of your family blood in his nose he’ll find you up a tree or seven miles away at a pizza place.

No fence can hold him. A dog sitter won’t do. Neighbors: No way. Kennels won’t take him — he tunnels, climbs, snaps choke chains, howls a weird decalcifying Helen Keller scream that sets off the other dogs into a tabernacle delirium.

No. Jackson comes with. Or somebody draws the short straw and stays home.

Marty always had more patience on the leash. When he got married he and Jeanine took the dog on their honeymoon — a driving trip along the northern California coast “in search of Francis Drake.”

And there’s no doubt Jack was present at the creation of their daughter Kim: She was the heir apparent. Like her father she used to snuggle up with Jack to read Shelby Foote and do her geography homework, the two of them snacking on bacon bits and manifest destiny.

Ages ago Sergeant Will taught Jackson the “deaf and dumb” vocabulary and Marty expanded it to include signs for car-car ride and TV dinner — but Kimmie claimed to have taught the dog how to read lips too.

And she introduced Jack to the modern wonders of strawberry ice cream – not cones, ladled out of a cup. Everywhere they went Kim carried their little red plastic spoon, just in case.

One day a seminary student was staring in his rear view mirror at a cold sore on his lip, rolled through a red light and plowed into Marty’s car, the passenger side.

Kim died two hours later, internal bleeding. She was 16.

It’s ironic. Our kin are scattered all over, probably like yours. Back in the analog days when we were kids, weddings and funerals used to be occasions when people traveled hundreds of miles to sit around eating fried chicken, swapping legends and rubbing Jackson’s huge deaf ears.

But at Kimmie’s service the dog limped around reading lips and being avoided. Marty in his neck brace recited a long choking eulogy – from which I’ve excerpted some of the strawberry details above.

Duffy, our Aunt Millie’s son, leaned over and whispered, “it sounds like a sales pitch.”

Nobody stepped forward with a new spoon.

The next month Carole’s son Mark took off for Florida to clean swimming pools and hasn’t been seen since. My daughter Rose got a job teaching American history in Nashville: two grandbabies later we’re lucky to get pictures at Christmas. Within a year of each other our parents died in Nevada and Maine respectively. Millie matriculated in St. Louis.

The funerals got harder and harder for everybody to get to. Duffy’s son Mason joined the navy and started his own dog. Marty’s wife left him — said it was either her or Jackson.

My brother spent the last few years holed up with the war hero, writing “children’s books” under a pen name he wouldn’t reveal and working ancestry-dot-com to death.

I didn’t know Marty was on the lam weaving across our nation’s highways with end-stage pancreatic cancer till Carole called — right in the middle of a Packer game.

She lives in Baltimore. We hadn’t talked in years. She was hiding upstairs in her bedroom, peeking out the window, pretending not to be home. Marty was outside with Jackson, ringing her doorbell, looking in the windows.

Carole’s voice was panicky: Buddy what am I going to do, Buddy this is insane, Buddy he looks like Night of the Living Dead staggering around out there, Buddy this is not fair, Marty has no right showing up here trying to make me feel this way.

I told her to call 9-1-1.

I can’t do that.

Sure you can. Do it. They’ll take Marty to the nearest ICU, which is where he belongs, and they’ll put Jack in the pound.

Buddy we can’t do that!

Let that dog find a new family to take over.

Carole started to say something to the effect of “you’ve got all that land” and I cut her off cold, no. No.

Then she squealed Buddy wait a minute … he just got back into his car, he’s leaving, no, they’re sitting there … no … oh Buddy he just waved up here, oh God he saw me, he’s waving goodbye.

Marty backed out and drove off. Jack stuck his head out the shotgun-side window and stared up at Carole. She commenced to sobbing, wailing, 50 years worth of it, why me, oh God why me, which has always been her favorite line.

What can you do? I listened to this for a good hour. Finally her husband came home. Carole straightened right up. He has no idea what this is about. Nobody does.

That was the start of it.

Over the next couple of weeks I got calls from Raleigh and Cincinnati, Gravois Mills, Missouri, and Anna, Illinois, anywhere Marty could find a leaf on the tree, including a couple of second-cousins I’d never heard of.

Buddy do something, Buddy he’ll listen to you, Buddy he scared the kids, Buddy he’s going to kill somebody driving around in that condition, Buddy, Buddy, Buddy.

He got everybody talking, I’ll give him that. Even my succinct son Ryan called from Walmart, Arkansas. I won’t bore you with his remarks.

It was obvious Marty was working his way west and northerly.

All of which brings us to four nights ago, Bella’s All-Day Breakfast, a truck stop on 41, roughly an hour from Waupaca, which is where I’ve been living in relative peace. Marty knew better than to show up here unannounced. He called from Bella’s, begging to meet. I said all right, but you stay there.

I found my brother in a booth by the window, hunched over a cup of cold coffee and a plate of bacon for Jackson, later. He was wearing a Red Sox cap: Crazy-looking tufts of purplish hair were fighting to get out from under it. He looked bad. Sunken eyes, red chemo blotches all over his face and neck, green-gray skin. He stood up to shake hands and almost keeled over.

You should be in a hospital, I said.

He waved me off bravely, vintage Marty: it’s just a bad cold.

Apparently he considered this comment a joke because he tried to laugh, which started him on a coughing jag. He grabbed a wad of napkins and coughed a stream of loud chunky sounds into it.

The waitress was headed our way but she veered off. People at other tables stared.

While this was going on I looked out the window into the parking lot, where I saw Jackson’s staring face in the windshield of Marty’s old Land Rover. He’d parked in the front row, facing our booth, so Jack could take in the proceedings.

Marty finally pulled himself together, cleared his throat and popped a couple of pain killers. I leaned across and in the nicest possible way said if you start that again I’m calling an ambulance – you got me? This is bullshit, what you’re doing.

Out of the blue Marty said: Remember when we were astronauts, Buddy?

I sat back. Is that what you’ve been sitting here thinking about?

Marty was referring to a brief period one summer when we converted a deer blind into a space ship: his idea. This old hunting shack was up on stilts, like a prison guard tower, on the edge of a wood overlooking a hay field, with window-slats to shoot out of.

We hauled two folding chairs up the ladder and set them side by side, Apollo 11 style. Marty designed a cardboard control panel that we mounted in front us. From this lofty venue we “explored the planets” with mail-order NASA binoculars, observing all manner of new life forms such as the Europa sea deer and the Saturn ring-tailed fox, breathlessly reporting these findings into a tape recorder for posterity.

But the only extraterrestrial we ever came home with was Jackson. And the only time in my life I’ve ever felt like an astronaut was right then, that moment, four nights ago — sitting across from Marty in the window at Bella’s, with Jackson outside in Marty’s space pod, staring through the windshield at us, reading our lips, like that homicidal computer spying on the astronauts in 2001, judging them.

I remember, I said.

Marty smiled. He reached his hand across the table. I let him take my hand.

Marty said, I wonder if it’s still there.

(It isn’t.) I said that was a long time ago, kid.

He nodded. His eyes got glassy. He stared at me with those wet-plate Jackson eyes. Buddy what happened to us?

I did not reply.

Marty reached into his coat and pulled out a brown envelope. It was marked “Jackson.” He moved it across the table toward me. He said this is all I’ve got Buddy.

I looked inside. It was cash, thick bundles of cash. Marty said think of it as boarding fee. You never know, Bud, maybe someday Ryan or Rose will come home.

I shoved the envelope back at him. I wanted to slap him. This is exactly what’s wrong, Marty. You make it too goddamn hard for people. Don’t you see that? You make it too hard.

Marty looked at me. He never did get it.

* * * * *

Last night I got a call from the chief of the park police at Point Reyes National Seashore (north of San Francisco) asking do you have a brother, Martin.

Now hear this.

There’s a famous old lighthouse on a cliff at Point Reyes, you’ve probably seen pictures. I looked it up online: It’s a tourist site now, a museum. Apparently that’s where Marty and Jackson ran out of road. Somehow they broke in there, spent the night in the lighthouse.

Yesterday morning the “resident ranger” found an empty box of strawberry ice cream and Jackson wandering around by himself in the so-called mirror room, doing his Helen Keller howl.

The chief said we’ve had teams searching the area all day — volunteers, divers, not a trace. The tides are extremely powerful here.

I was the only family member he’d been able to reach. He said I’m sorry.

He was very professional. I was impressed.

Any idea why your brother would come here?

(Between us, my suspicion is Marty and Jeanine stopped there once upon a romantic time — with Jackson of course. ) I said no, but Marty was ill, very ill, he wasn’t making a lot of sense.

Sir, there’s something else. In the glove compartment of his vehicle we found an envelope containing $41,276.

Forty-one thousand dollars?

That’s right. Everything has been inventoried and impounded. There was no note, nothing to indicate foul play, only his address book and some maps. It looks as though he’s been on the road for quite a while, sleeping in the vehicle. Any idea why he would be driving around with that kind of money?

It’s a long story.

There was a long silence on the phone. I said nothing.

Finally the chief brought up Jackson. He said the resident ranger lives year-round in the park with his family. They have three children. The dog was “pretty shook up” but the kids were able to calm him down. He’s very affectionate. The kids are crazy about him — won’t let him out of their sight. For the time being we decided to keep him here on the premises.

You know how kids and dogs are, the chief said. They think it’s some kind of miracle, finding him this way.

That’s fine, I said, keep him. Marty would want that. Yes, I do know how kids and dogs are.

There’s no collar, the chief said. Do you know his name? Is there anything about the dog we should know?

Michael Plemmons is the author of a number of short stories, and of Fianna, a history of the Irish-American Fenian invasions of Canada. His fiction has appeared in The North American Review, Flash Fiction Online, Sudden Fiction, and in diverse anthologies, and has been featured on NPR. He lives in Wisconsin.

It has been years since I last made this journey. I am slower and more easily tired. My footfall is not as sure as it used to be, but nor is it as bitter, as sad, as resigned.

Up the slope, near the edge of the rock, they stand along the ridge. Waiting, without conversation, silhouetted against the late-afternoon sky. I am joining them.

The ground is dusty, sandy with scraps of sun-browned grass, like the dunes before a beach.

Taken two months before today, the now-faded photo on my desk records our last family trip to the beach. Madeleine looking out from beneath the sunshade of her hand, her light smile overseeing the girls. Nell in her purple star sunglasses and pink flower hat, her mouth drawn in shadow — a preview of adolescence between the giggles and play. Where Nell’s sandcastles are numerous, ordered and well-formed, Cathleen’s are few and careless. Squinting and sunburnt, her sunglasses and hat willfully thrown aside, she beams a big camera smile, all teeth and gaps.

Perfect in so many ways, imperfect in so many others. The eyes are hidden. I imagine I remember their glint and color, but I check other photos to be sure.

I recall the sound of sea, but can I recall the sounds of that shoreline, those waves, on that day? Voices are easier. I can recall the mutter of idle nothings and words of comfort, although the words themselves are gone. And where are the smells? Of sea, of suncream, of Maddie’s hair. Smells hide in memory, found only with a map that is also the key that is also the trigger. Perfectly locked, perfectly lost.

I reach the top of the slope, catching my breath in the still air. No ocean, only scrubland and rocks and a road. The smell is of desert.

The crowd is all gathered, all but one. Madeleine and the girls will be along soon. We will watch them pass, these different ages of me. Compelled to migrate, we return to this past as our present is marked out by anniversaries, birthdays and other remembrances.

We will watch the accident and wonder the same things. Was it the fading light? Was Maddie tired after so long behind the wheel? Were the girls squabbling, distracting her? Was there something on the road? Or perhaps a fault with the car? Was there anything we had missed? Something we could do to change the outcome, anything to alter time and replace tomorrow.

Across the crowd we each wear age differently — haggard and kempt, mawkish and resolved, resigned and hopeful. Chasing possibility, three scan the road with binoculars while three others pore over notebooks of lists, figures and calculations. Each looking for the overlooked. Each hoping for a contradiction to be confounded, to be unravelled to reveal an alternative.

But hope is not common among us. A few look only at the ground in front of them. Most gaze across the desert at the darkened foothills and fading mountains. I catch momentary glances and a few stares. I remember being those others looking at this older self, noting the one in the crowd of selves obviously older and frailer than the rest, none older.

The last to join the crowd is walking up the slope. There are thirty years between us. His journey is the first I made to come to this rock, to watch the accident from afar instead of attempting intervention. He sees me. He pauses, fists clenched. I remember the resentment, the feeling of being boxed by fate, of wanting to lay blame at the feet of who I am now for what I had told him — words of comfort, words of despair. He looks away and takes his place in the crowd.

The car is seen before it is heard. Everything is leading towards that moment, the moment I have seen, heard and felt so many times.

A figure is running towards the road. His is the first time I made this journey. The technology had worked, but not with the precision I had hoped for or relied upon. I was running to recover lost time. Running to reach the road, to stop the car, to change everything.

But I was not alone. There were others running towards the road. I heard them and turned, hesitating, shocked, unable to make sense of these apparitions of myself.

I believed I had fooled causality. I had found a way to pass through the surface of the present into the past.

At the last moment I look away to watch the faces of the crowd. Some look, others turn. Despair is written on the younger faces. The older ones cannot be read. The air carries and thins the cries of those running towards the road.

We each remember the phone call, the interruption before we were due to present our paper, pulled away from the conference and weekend together that Maddie and the girls had been driving across states to reach. The hotel, the departure, the hospital, the identification.

Moments blurred together in an instant that took forever.

There is nothing to be done, nothing to be said. The crowd disperses. Some linger, some rush away. Out near the road they do the same. But one of them looks to the horizon rather than the ground or the wreckage. Singled out by the sunset, he catches sight of movement, of figures on a distant rocky edge.

I will wait for him.

What has happened has always happened and always will have happened. Time is like a river, but frozen, not flowing. Eddies, pools and falls are fixed in place, timeless and immutable. Closed curves in time allow my presence here and now; temporal entanglement demands it. But the logic of time loops is self-consistent and cannot be hacked.

I will take all this to my grave. This knowledge. This technology. This curse of impotence and reliving. The lid will close and my work and all the sadness it brings will be gone.

The only markers will be an early paper, unpresented, obscure and seemingly little more than speculation, and the curiosity of my cancer — a novelty and a puzzle and, eventually, a memory for the doctors who gathered round and sampled and discussed.

I turn. He is coming up the slope.

I cannot remember exactly what was said, but it was words of comfort, words of despair. He walks to the edge, just along from me. He looks at the wreckage and the road. He looks at me, to me. Troubled. Uncertain. Desperate. He walks over. He wants to ask. He wants to plead. He needs to know.

I take his arm. Whatever I say will be the right thing. It will have been the same thing. Nothing can be changed. Words of comfort, words of despair.

“I know. It’s OK. There is nothing you can do.”

Kevlin Henney writes shorts and flashes and drabbles of fiction and articles and books on software development. His fiction has appeared online and on tree with Litro, Fiction365, Dr. Hurley’s Snake-oil Cure, New Scientist and FlashStories.net. He blogs at asemantic.net, tweets as @KevlinHenney and lives in Bristol, UK.

Yesterday, she was doing it again, soaring above my head during her regular shift. She flits around on her broom above the sleeping cities, wearing espadrilles and doling out flour to the people down below.

Bake when words fail you, she says, sending little pouches of flour — taut in a cellophane wrapper — spiraling down through the chimneys, in through the open windows.

The ribbon coiled around the pouch glimmers in the moonlight and momentarily turns gold as it cuts through the cone of light from the streetlights.

Silent or foul-mouthed, just bake, the bread muse says.

When the morning swings its celestial gates open, forget the slippers, forget the Hail Marys or looking for the keys. Instead, take some flour and some water and mix it up in a bowl.

Speak your passing troubles aloud and watch them swirl right in and leaven the dough.

Draw an egg with your finger on the fogged-up bathroom mirror and hold out your hand — you’ll discover the jittery orange yolk in your palm. It’s got to be mixed in, too, and stirred well.

And bake pies, my friend, make waffles, fry pancakes, whip up the flaky pastries, she says.

If it seems too late, bake. If your partner draws the curtains shut to block out the sunlight sifting through, then bake in the dark.

Call in sick, and bake.

Don’t walk the dog first, just bake.

If you don’t know how, do it anyhow. If you’ve resigned to the idea that chopping and stirring and wishing leads to disillusionment so why even try, then grab yourself a bowl and start mixing.

Soon, when the dough starts to rise and crawl over the edges of the bowl, it’s time to roll it out on a smooth surface.

Knead it into shape with your fingers, with your fists, with your pounding, with as much salt as you can set loose from your eyes.

Permit the warmth of the oven door to tickle your knees and make your nose itch. The process has begun.

She’s no magician, that bread muse. She’s no fairy godmother. She just does her thing: deliver flour to the sleeping people who’ve left their window open and their chimney free to look up to the sky.

When the baking’s all done, eat the entire loaf, right then. Nobody else needs to have this, the bread muse says. Not the housemate, not even the dearest, sickest friend. None should have a piece, but you. This is your sustenance for the day.

Eat it all.

Well, almost all.

When you’re satiated and light-headed from the all the labor and the eating, save the last bit, she says. Bundle this piece back in the cellophane wrapper and rest it by your pillow at night.

The next morning, you will find a brand new pouch of fresh flour, delivered by the bread muse.

Start baking all over again that morning.

And the following morning.

And the one after that.

One day, surely, there will be dancing, and succulent rye loaves to feed a village; there will be singing and the giving of thanks; there will be dawn with its tantalizing dew and those butterflies, that hunger for all things; there will be fluffy scones for teatime and raspberry cream cakes for weddings.

All this will be, in due time.

But tonight, just save a little bit of bread crust next to your pillow.

Masha Rumer teaches college journalism and writing in San Francisco and holds a Master’s degree in Comparative Literature. Her work has appeared in Vestal Review, SFWeekly.com, The Moscow Times, The Huffington Post, Dow Jones Newswires and others, and won awards from the New York Press Association.

         To Whom It May Concern:
         I just didn’t want to go to work today.
         —Me

The scribbled note lay haphazardly on the freshly made Pottery Barn ensemble. Her body sprawled unnaturally at the foot of the bed with scattered yellow and pink and white pills littering the raw linen coverlet.

The multitudinous silk throw pillows sat untouched and nicely fluffed at the top.

She was very dead.

Snapdragons were her favorite flowers and a freshly arranged pot of them in yellow and pink and white tones cried in the corner.

“She was such a happy girl.”

“We never knew.”

“She never said anything.”

“She arranged us with such precision, such care.”

“She didn’t seem crazy.”

“I need more water.”

The silent room waited for decomposition. Her body unfortunately emptied itself and slowly seeped, embedding her urine in the mattress. The bed didn’t mind, per se. It knew her.

Yet the lonely pillows only knew her smell, and longed for other heads and bodies to wrap themselves around their downy fillings.

Megan had longed for the same. She often complained to the listening air about her lonely vagina and listed her wants in a mate.

More than sex, she desperately wanted someone to hold through the night. She wanted to nuzzle her nose in his neck and enwrap him in her arms. She wanted to laugh out loud.

“He has to be funny. He has to get my brand of humor. He has to like bacon.”

Her list was short; she didn’t demand much, but they never fulfilled. She knew she could have sex with most men, but craved respect.

She never brought them back to her pristine haven if she questioned their accountability. She didn’t like washing her 400 thread-count sheets more than once a week. She worried about breaking down the fibers — and it’s practically impossible to get semen out of silk.

The pillows thankfully agreed.

Sunlight poured through the puffy window swag and bathed her dead body in striated magical light. She almost looked alive. She would not be discovered for three days.

Three days later, thoughts burbled up from the cubical walls as her coworkers gossiped about the event that would be forgotten in less than a month; no one cried at the office.

“She was such a happy girl.”

“We never knew.”

“She never said anything.”

“She worked with such precision, such care.”

“She didn’t seem crazy.”

“I need more water.”

Gopher heads popped up above their shortened walls among the buzzing computers and plastic flowers.

“Did she say anything Friday?”

“Did she eat lunch alone?”

“Someone must know something.”

“She liked Pottery Barn catalogues and read them in the break room over lunch.”

“Alone?”

“She was always alone, by choice.”

“Never went out to happy hour.”

“Weird. Did anyone see the signs?”

Megan left no signs. She worked diligently and refused to call attention to herself at the office. Work was work. Work was for money. She derived no joy from numbers and phone calls and angry cat ladies yelling about “full coverage.”

Megan’s real life was secret, and she needed grand separation between work and play.

She purposely made sure no one knew her and flew silently under the radar.

Megan liked drugs.

“Dani trabajo aqui?” She ran from shop to shop in Mexico looking for the infamous Dani.

She heard from a guy at the taco shop that he was willing to sell Oxys and Flexural and Ritalin and Aderol and maybe a spot of coke and Valium for a buck a pill.

Oxys were significantly more expensive, but worth the drive across the border.

Megan was a mule.

Taking orders for all, she ran down to TJ once a month in pants without pockets, two pair of underwear and clean American smile. The border guards never suspected the bouncy little redhead held hundreds of little yellow and pink and white pills rolled in plastic baggies discretely tucked between undies.

They were never looking for her. The guards had their eyes on shifty men with baggy pants or fakely pregnant women hiding kilos of coke under flowered mumus. Cute, thirtysomething, obvious Americans weren’t on the manifest; she slid through unscathed every time.

Roaming in and out of sterile mirrored pharmacies desperately seeking Dani, Megan played her part. She was a darling, white-toothed American girl looking for a few recreational drugs.

Her favorite former pharmacist disappointed the last three trips. She crossed the border with a belly full of churros and no pills. Customers disappointedly looked elsewhere and Meg didn’t get to drink whisky at her favorite bar that week.

This monetary side project was necessary to support her secret rock-and-roll life style. Project Management just didn’t pay, and the commission checks were light this quarter.

She was looking for a new pharmaceutical safe zone, and the bald, heavily tattooed Mexican with the 42 emblazoned on his lower lip seemed trustworthy. She liked the number 42 and trusted the Virgin Mary colorfully marking the side of his head.

He would know where to get drugs.

She flittered up with hands clasped behind her back batting lashes coquettishly: “Hey, do you know which pharmacy will sell me some Ritalin without a prescription?”

“Que?”

“I’m looking for drugs.” Her eyes gleamed and cheeks crunched with genuine smile.

A dangerous grin split his face as he flipped open a cell phone and made a call. Megan knew no Spanish, but intently attempted to decipher. She heard “bonita” and “loco” and “puta.”

Pretty. Crazy. Whore.

Megan was not offended. He was finding her drugs.

“You’re looking for Dani. Go to Revolucíon, right side. About three blocks in. Ask for Dani. Dani trabajo aqui? Can you remember? Please repeat.”

“Dani trabajo aqui?”

“Bueno.”

“Gracias, señor.”

He turned back to his tattooed brethren in baggy pants.

Finding things was easy for Megan. No one expects the tiny redhead to be involved in underhanded dealings. No one suspects the little smiling sweetheart.

An astute actor and a pathological liar, she went pro on the Imposter Circuit in 1998.

She made her way down the busy street past the zebrafied donkey and 2 x 1 margarita specials. She easily passed kissy-faced men peddling their overpriced Mexican silver, and refused the urchin offers for Chiclets and hair braiding.

Megan was not a tourist; she was on a mission.

Seven pharmacies later, Megan found no elusive “Dani.” He did not seem to “trabajo” anywhere, and her thoughts began drifting into churros.

Sweet crunchy deep fried churros might be her only souvenir, again.

Her once-productive side business would be closing its doors forever with her inventory and supply cut off. She damned the “Homeland Security” tightening rules and cursed at a skittering cockroach.

This would be her last effort.

“Dani trabajo aqui?” She questioned half heartedly. Her cheeks hurt from smiling. Her act slipped. She meant to wink and smile and bounce, but could no longer hold the charade.

“No, no Dani. What do you need?”

He opened the door.

“Ritalin and Valium?”

“I don’t trust you, American.”

“I don’t trust you, Mexican.”

He tentatively pressed his hand into hers and shook. “We don’t trust each other. How many?”

She smiled genuine, and pulled a folded paper from her pocket. He smiled genuine, as his family would be eating well for the next month.

Megan found it best not to tell everyone everything. Withheld truth is not lying.

She practiced avoidance and mastered silence. She didn’t care if people labeled her smug. She wasn’t a quiet person, but it’s best to be wordless if faced with the necessity to lie.

Megan had a lot to hide. Double life can be rough on the soul.

Remembering what you said to who, contemplating how much to reveal to which individuals, knowing who to trust and how far — these concepts rolled about in her brain, clanging on the edges of sanity.

Megan was plagued with headaches. The white pills helped significantly.

She tried not to indulge in her own pills; drug addicts make bad business people, and this was a business. Megan supplied happy pills to a small contingency for money, and dipping into her stash cut profits significantly. She had other habits to attend to.

She liked to joke about whores and the dog track, claiming she would give them up for Lent, but it was whisky (not whores) and horses (not dogs) that plagued her thinning Brighton pocketbook.

She slept with her two favorite boyfriends, Jim and Mark, bottled next to the bed. Jim Beam was the only man who truly understood her and had no qualms about a threesome with Maker’s Mark. They got along famously with the other men in her life, Johnny and Jack (Walker and Daniels, respectively), and made Megan feel warm and loved inside.

They snuggled her nightly and didn’t douse the bed with unwanted man juice or errant pubic hair.

Megan liked to keep things clean, and liked to keep her life in separate boxes. She liked to know where her tax return from 1998 was filed. She liked her buttons stapled to paper and alphabetized. She had no junk drawer. Organized to a fault, Megan believed every item had a specific home.

Megan knew she had a problem when she started betting over televised races.

Initially, she claimed to enjoy the smell of the track; she liked to look at the horses and judge by the musculature she pretended to understand from her days collecting plastic horses.

She always loved horses. Her parents promised to buy her one when they moved far from the city. They took away her friends and her life and her stability in exchange for a promise.

She agreed, they moved, but the promised horse never arrived. She kneeled bedside, pretending to pray to an invisible god she didn’t believe in loudly enough for her parents to hear.

“Please God, let my parents not be liars. Let them buy me a horse.”

She watched “International Velvet” every weekend. She hung around Joe’s Feed and Tack Barn looking at pictures and pulling flyers to send to her parents in the mail without signature or return address.

Her obsession grew daily. She named her plastic horses and lined them up on self-built shelving around her room. She drew exquisite horses on the wall by amber night light after bedtime.

Pushing her bed from the wall, she sat cross-legged with markers in hand, flowing detailed colors into hindquarter muscles and shimmering waves into manes and tails.

Her lack of sleep evident, she napped and drooled over horse doodles in class.

She needed her horse; it never came.

Megan wore hats at the races. She stood along the rail and yelled at the horses and tiny jockeys in bright satin garb.

She often picked winners based on the colors alone; Megan was partial to yellow and pink and white and often matched her hats to the colors that felt lucky for the day.

She loved the adrenalin force as they took the back stretch, knowing that she could win or lose. That feeling was worth more than money to Megan. She felt alive.

Megan was lucky, in the beginning. She couldn’t lose.

Picking numbers from tarot cards or street signs that popped out on the way to the track or dreams or the color of the man’s shirt three rows back, Megan’s system of no system won her money. Money made her momentarily happy as she ticked items off her list of wants:

• Down comforter
• Silk window treatments
• Cashmere Pashmina throw
• Matching Tiffany-style lamps
• Hand-woven wool rug from Pakistan
• Pottery Barn bathroom vanity collection in white
• Set of eight matching tea cups with saucers
• Silver Tiffany bracelet
• New laptop
• 50-inch HDTV
• Yellow KitchenAid mixer
• Pink bathrobe
• White 400 thread count Egyptian cotton sheets
• Boyfriend

“Why am I still on the list?” her never-boyfriend whispered from the note.

“Because you hate me,” answered Megan. “I have too many secrets and can’t buy you in a store.”

She pinned him to her bathroom mirror and re-read him every morning. She added one thing to him every time stuff was crossed off.

Things and stuff were important to Megan; she had little else to fill time with. She was lonely but surrounded by things — expensive things. Stuff to build pride from.

No one ever saw her prized things; she never invited men in to see her stuff.

Megan liked men. Actually, she loved them. She had all their greatest hits, including “You’re too Crazy for Me” and “Why Won’t You Just Shut Up and Suck my Dick.”

They took her home from bars, many men, and she held and loved them as long as they would let her. They never called. They were transient things, stuff to hold onto for a little while, but she smashed them into crystal bits and cut her feet walking to her car the next morning.

She never stayed for orange juice.

She refused to count her number. She figured it over 40, possibly into the 60 range, maybe over 100.

She always used protection and was free of disease. Megan liked things clean; she always fucked on top to avoid whomever’s droplets of sweat.

Megan rarely had orgasms. Too distracted by errant body hair or unbalanced items in single men’s rooms, she often rearranged furniture before she slunk out the front door into the grey morning.

Pushing sofas on angles, re-stacking bookshelves, straitening rugs, folding laundry, she usually took out old newspapers to the recycle bin.

She attributed their not calling to her strange post-coital behaviors; if they’d let her fold laundry before sex, she might have cum.

It took her less than thirty-three seconds when alone.

“You got my fucking drugs or what?”

She quizzically squenched her face, “Not if you talk to me like that.”

“I want my drugs!”

“It’s good to want things, dear. Builds character.”

Megan became very calm when verbally attacked; she learned this technique through years of customer service. She ran the angry phone gauntlet daily and knew how to deal with the crazy, enraged souls crackling on the other end of the line.

Gerry taunted Meg for weeks about his stash. She made a judgment call in cutting him off. He took too many, re-ordered too often.

She would supply for recreation, but refused to play party to his suicide.

She was a good drug dealer: no kids, no addicts, no pregnant ladies. She had rules and boundaries, limits and structure, holding fast to her ambiguous moral compass.

“Seriously. I need that shit, Penny.”

Megan used pseudonyms with her clients. She answered to Jenny, Penny, Peggy, Pammy, Cammy and Sue. She liked names ending in “Y.” They bounced off the tongue and made her sound younger and cuter than she believed herself to be.

She had a different cell phone number with separate bill for her dealings. She carefully marked her profits and knew the expense of her business. She never dealt from her home.

Megan was clean and careful. Work was work. Business was business. Sex was sex. Bars were bars. Betting was betting. Every detail stapled to a small cardboard backing, buttons color coded and lined in a box just so.

Her mother collected buttons.

At approximately three years of age, at approximately three in the afternoon, little Meggy Poo Poo sat in the center of the floor surrounded by yellow and pink and white buttons.

Cardboard backing littering the floor around her chubby baby legs, she tossed the buttons into the air and laughed and cackled and giggled and shook her little red curls playfully.

Her mother turned the corner down the stairs. Screaming, she tossed little Meggy across the room and attended to her beloved buttons.

“How could you? You filthy brat! Look!”

*slap

*cries

“You want something to cry about?! I’ll give you something to cry about!”

*slap

Little Meggy Poo Poo stopped crying. She never cried again.

Not when her mother hovered over her feet with a hammer screaming about buttons and slamming toenails into floors, or threw hot potatoes at her head during dinner because she brought her favorite pink little pony to the table. Not even when her mother put dirty dishes in Megan’s bed or threw her clothing out the second story window into the pond.

Megan learned not to cry. She learned to compartmentalize feelings and ideas. She learned that being quiet is better than talking. She learned how to lie to herself.

“Mother, I’d like to take my horses.”

“You can’t. I threw them away when you left for college.”

“You what?” Megan almost started crying. She recently completed the shelving units to house her collection in the new apartment. “Mother, I collected those for years. They were very important to me.”

She became very calm as the onslaught began.

“You fucking little freak. Horses? Horses! That’s what you care about? You called about those stupid plastic horses? What about me? Did you want to talk to your mother? Did you want to ask me how I’m doing? It’s been three years! Three God-damn years and the first thing you say is ‘I’d like to take my fucking horses.’ You ungrateful piece of shit. Stick your fucking horses up your ass and don’t call again. You got my fucking drugs or what? ”

The receiver clicked and she spoke calmly to the tone, “Not if you talk to me like that.”

Her mother used a cocktail of yellow and pink and white pills and washed them down with Vodka or gin. She liked her pills colorful and alcohol clear.

She was terribly kind and sweet to the neighbors, bringing casseroles and lasagna over when babies were born, baking cakes with homemade buttercream frosting for school cake walks, she played well with others, but never with Megan.

She never counted her pills.

Megan stashed a few every week and amassed a rainbow of drugs. She never knew which were which and chose based on color alone. She was very lucky. Smart enough not to mix colors, she took only one at a time. She was careful and organized; Megan was clean.

“What did you know about Penny?”

“Who the fuck is Penny?”

“What did you call her?”

“Pammy. My dealer’s name was Pammy.”

“Short? Red? Smiley?”

“I’d describe her as bouncy, but yes, that’s Pammy.”

“Damn. What a waste. Where do we get our drugs now?”

Their concern lasted mere seconds as they discussed her death. They would have to find a new source. This suicide was very distressing and would ruin their weekend plans.

“Did you hear she was in there for three days?”

“The neighbor noticed the smell. They thought it was a dead rat, opened the door and, you know, dead lady.”

“Gross. How’d she do it?”

“There were yellow and pink and white pills all over the bed.”

“What … Flexural, Diazapam, Vicodin? Quite a mix. I thought she didn’t do drugs.”

“Dude, we didn’t even know her name. I bet she did a lot of things no one knew about.”

The doorbell rang unexpectantly. No one knew where Megan lived: not workmates, not clients, not fuck buddies, no one.

She crept beneath the view of the convex peek hole in case whoever was out there was watching.

Crawling up to the closed white wooden shutters with yellow-silk roman shades pulled half way up, she peaked between the slats to see the tapping toe of a familiar red Anne Klein pump. Her mother rang the doorbell repeatedly and began to bang on the door.

“I found you, you little whore.”

Her singsong voice wouldn’t upset the neighbors. She banged again with a hollow pink object. The empty shelving units shuddered with the incessant pounding.

“I know you’re in there. I saw something move in the peep hole and you’re larger than and allergic to cats. Fucking let me in before I start to scream.” She continued on with light and happy tone.

Megan knew she was smiling without expression. She’d been using Botox for years now, smoothing her forehead to match her marble heart.

“I’ve got some things you might want in exchange for some stuff I need.”

Megan saw the nondescript paper bags lining the porch beneath flower boxes filled with yellow and pink and white pansies and snapdragons and baby roses.

Her mother continued to pound the door with the disembodied head of a vintage My Little Pony. The fuschia-plastic mane fluttered and peeked between the fingers of her French manicure as she rapped on the door. “I know you want them.”

Megan breathed deeply with back pressed against the bottom of the window sill. She would not cry; she was an adult now. They would make a business agreement. Megan didn’t do business from the house, but she would make an exception for those bags of horses.

She would do it to reclaim her childhood.

She would make a deal for Sunshine and Sandy and Silver Moon and Take No Prisoners. She would open the door to kiss Gilbert and Secret Boyfriend and Takes the Cake. She would get her horses; they were worth the painful interaction to come.

“Let me in, little whore.” She sang menacingly.

Megan stayed in her hiding place but reached a bare foot to unlock the latch and throw the toggle down on the door. She remained huddled, arms around knees, as the red shoes stepped confidently onto her Italian rolled marble entry.

“What a dump!”

“Mother, wonderful to see you. What do you need?”

Her head remained buried tightly in knees, but Megan’s voice sang confidence.

“Yellow mostly.”

“You know I don’t do business from here. How did you find me?”

“You send in the mail. I have Internet. You have phone. I’m a smart woman, child. I have your precious horses.”

“How many do you want?”

“As many as you got. Mama’s out.”

“Bathroom. Medicine cabinet. Third bottle. Third shelf. Take it. Leave the horses. Leave.”

Megan’s head remained glued to her knees. She needed to shave; the bristles of hair tickled her nose.

Her mother rifled through cabinets knocking down plastic bottles that bounced and rattled on the imported marble. “Wow, I’m taking some pink too. You’ve got great stock, but this place looks like poop, Meggy Poo-Poo. What kind of towels are these? Not nearly fluffy enough. Try Polo next time. Fifty bucks a piece at Macy’s. You never could shop worth a shit.”

She kicked the brown paper bags into the center of the living room and slammed the front door closed.

Megan refused to move for thirty-three minutes, frozen in fear and plagued by past.

Finally, she stretched legs across Berber carpet, raising her head and creaking neck to creep toward her beloved horses.

On hands and knees, she crawled across the floor to the spilled bags cradling her childhood friends.

They weren’t talking.

Megan began to sob.

Horse manes mutilated, plastic flesh scorched and melted, the smell of death and sight of crinkled destruction, My Little Ponies and plastic horses without heads and broken legs littered the living room. Megan sat centered in the pile of past and reached for a scrawled note inside the third bag.

“Now you understand the buttons — Mommy.”

She collapsed upon the carcasses of her dreams. Her business would suffer the loss.

Megan showered and exfoliated with Bed Bath & Beyond’s excellent Lavender Oatmeal scrub, picked out her favorite yellow sweater set with pearl buttons, clasped her Tiffany pearl necklace around her neck, and tilted her favorite yellow hat jauntily upon her head.

She lined her eyes and powdered her nose with MAC cosmetics and buried her toes into her favorite white Anne Klein sandals.

Heading to the track with three thousand dollars spread her lips to a grimacing smile. She took three shots of Oban Scotch, filled her flask with the remainder of the bottle and placed it gently in her pink and yellow Coach purse.

She would not win.

After the three thousand disappeared on “Mommy’s Best Girl” (the third horse in the third race), Megan sold her Coach bag to a woman in the bathroom for three hundred dollars.

Worth significantly more, the woman readily handed over the cash.

After the three hundred disappeared on “Mexican Night” (wearing yellow and pink satins in the seventh), Megan ran around barefoot.

Her size seven sandals went for thirty-three dollars to a woman in the stands.

After the thirty-three disappeared on “Penny Lane” (the third horse in the eighth race), she slammed the rest of her flask and made out with a janitor behind the bar for three dollars.

Megan missed the last race of the night. She didn’t place bets as she passed out with sweater back to garbage can as white slips of lost bets littered her shoeless feet and fluttered into her lap. Dead butterflies of hope covered her body.

Someone stole her hat.

“Megan? Is that you?”

A gentle hand shook her shoulder.

Megan threw up on Paul. He sat behind her at the office. Mortified, she tried to stand, but crumpled into his puke ridden arms. He lifted her off the ground and carried her to her car.

“Let me take you home.”

“No, no, I’m drive. I can fine.” She slurred and jumbled words, eyes tracking dangerously, missing the keyhole and running long scratches down her yellow BMW.

“I’ll follow you home.”

“No, no. I’m private. I don’t want to tell you where I live. I deal drugs from my house. Shhhhhh, it’s a secret.”

“Right. You’re drunk. Sleep it off, love. I’ll see you Monday at the office; I’m taking a long weekend. Maybe you should too?”

Megan came to as the cop rapped on the window.

“You gotta go. Gates closing.”

“Yes, sir. I’m sorry sir.”

Darkness bathed the empty parking lot; Megan started home sans winnings, hat, shoes, purse and dignity.

It was over. Paul saw her; he knew.

Her past had found her. She told him about the drugs. She blew her safety wad at the track. Her mother stole her pre-paid stash. They would be coming demanding their drugs, and she would have to explain her life.

She refused to explain anything to anyone. She could no longer hold on to the lies; it was time to die.

“Hey Jim. Let’s you and me have a good fuck.”

Megan swallowed him with thre bottles of pills while crafting the clearly printed note.

“I’ve always loved you,” Jim whispered as he slid down her throat.

“You’ve been a good friend,” the Beam bottle cried from the recycling bin.

“The sun will always shine on your face,” the snapdragons sang in high pitched chorus from their arrangement on the table.

“We looovvveee youuuuu!” the horse ghosts screamed from their twisted mass grave.

Megan fell asleep staring at her only family photograph; her father held her tight in his arms of safety.

         To Whom It May Concern:
         I just didn’t want to go to work today.
         —Me
Pam Benjamin is a writer living in San Francisco. Awarded an MA in Fiction from San Francisco State University in 2010, she is also working on her MFA in Poetry because pieces of paper look nice framed. Ink. published “The Pigeon Chronicles or Bike Messenger Assassins” in Summer 2010. She is the co-host of “Common Threads” on the PCR Collective in San Francisco. Her poetry has appeared in several literary journals. Pam also really likes to bake cookies.

Part I: Hard to Parse

On the concrete — a dead man. Did anyone care that when he fell his legs snapped like carrots and that his blood ran slow like ranch dressing? People were interested — casually (onlookers) and professionally (la policía) — but care, not a chance.

Those that knew the dead man were surprised he had not leapt before. He had no one. No one who cared. Sure there were those that were invested, but always for their own self-servicing ends. One of these people was witness to the dead man’s death. But did anyone, did anyone…

Truth was the dead man had not committed suicide. Nor was it murder per se. It was accidental — an aggravated accident.

No prints or DNA evidence were discovered in the man’s sixth floor apartment, from either the dead man or the presence (person) present as he fell. The reasons were twofold:

• the dead man had no fingerprints or DNA, and,

• the presence present was covered head-to-toe in cellophane.

Forensics drew dozens of vials of blood, examined yards of skin, drilled into teeth and marrow, but found no trace of identity.

Tenants told police the man’s name was Joakim Summer-Festival. The current building owner said the man had lived there prior to his purchase of the facility (which he acquired after the previous owner and all his documents had been burned in an off-site fire) ten years earlier.

The dead man had no documents on his person but in the apartment there were birth certificates for Mr. Summer-Festival and two others: Johnny Crackcorn and Li Xi Li. Unsure, the authorities placed him in the John Doe file and sent the body to the morgue.

Truth was, all four names (including John Doe) were legal, though not connectable to the decomposing flesh that was the dead man, now lying in a cold drawer at the morgue awaiting (patiently) his incineration.

The dead man was four men in one — and several more, actually.

Had the dead men’s complex been authored in the late ’50s, perhaps it would’ve been written that they had been transformed during a nuclear accident.

During the Great Depression each life would’ve been examined within a full novel of its own.

If their stories had been laid down ninety years before, it could’ve been said that the men possessed kaleidoscopity.

Three hundred years previously, they might’ve been said to be blessed by innumerable angels as foretold by a monk from his seclusion.

But the man (men) simply existed, barely quantifiable in any era as separate parts of one whole.

What kind of life did this collection lead? Were they a circus performer? Or did they spend hours reading serial crime fiction? Perhaps they spent hours talking to himselves? Did they have problems with alcohol? Maybe only one did, while the others demanded sobriety.

This collective of men were rather busy, despite their solitary existence.

The group breathed in oxygen and exhaled microwaves — they were contracted as a cell phone tower.

They ate bologna and cheese, later defecating mice which were donated to schools for classroom pets.

The rows of eyes watched internet pornography excessively in order to ejaculate independent film scripts.

In a boxed garden strung with hydroponics under halogen, multiple gardeners grew cans of minestrone soup, nicotine patches, biodegradable bullets, and peach-flavored condoms.

Impeccable intentions aside, it was a sad reality that some of these altruistic commodities passed through malicious hands (Regional Directors of Telecommunications, Sous Chefs, Casting Agents, etc.) on their journeys to those in most need.

The presence-in-cellophane was also an extension of a capitalistic need-desire seeking a value injection — i.e., there to steal as much as it could carry.

The entity called itself “Hyde.” It was a manifestation of simultaneity: It was the already-been, already-always-been, always-will, the present-as, the present-as-not, will-soon-to-be, will-never-be, and what-cannot-be-named contained within a five-foot-six human frame.

Forever kinetic.

The cellophane kept all-possibility from spilling out and negating its existence.

“Hyde” was an entity which did not mean harm but had some bills due and could not let its influential stepfather (a judge of sorts) know how much trouble it was actually in.

The entity-presence was a castaway yet forever being watched.

“Hyde” had climbed in the collective’s apartment via the fire escape while the men were out stocking up on bologna. A small creature, the presence was able to snoop around without making much noise, although in a short time there was to be a verbal confrontation.

Long existing on the edge of hunger, “Hyde” was quickly drawn to the garden in the living room. The entity-thief plucked a can of minestrone from the nearest plant growing beneath the halogen lights and observed the improbability in its shining, cloudy hand.

Loosening a layer of cellophane between the shoulder blades, “Hyde” created a papoose and filled it with four tin fruits. A fifth can was to be carried out the window with whatever else could fit in its arms.

Of the many treasures in the apartment, most were too large for the presence to escape with. A number of extravagant souvenirs were too delicate to survive the rough getaway planned. A great bookshelf and several tables stacked high with tomes were also passed over (since books don’t usually fetch money at pawn shops) — except for one book, lying on a table near the window.

It was a book that appeared ancient: the binding was faded leather, around the edges short tassels had formed from usage. The pages smelt from afar like decaying orange peels (always a sign of a well-aged volume).

On the cover was a brilliant red opened hand. It was like someone was extending a hand from within the pages of the book to (failingly) halt “Hyde.”

Books, despite their inability to earn a reasonable sum, appealed to the thief mostly for aesthetic reasons. Those that it had managed to parse frequently left the presence wanting to read on.

There was no title. The entity opened the weathered cover and started to flip through the pages to see if the book was important — or if it would perhaps speak to some intangible mystery that the presence had once wondered about.

But the contents were mostly unintelligible. Sentences went on for pages without any verbs, followed by pages without any nouns, interspersed with mystifying voids.

“Hyde” puckered its lips after reading through several pages, terribly vexed.

“Put our journal down,” came a muttering voice which sounded as if a series of whipping winds were skirting between “Hyde’s” legs.

The two bodies stared at one another.

It was the entity-thief which appeared to be the strange one (as the men could not be viewed by normal vision) — and “Hyde” felt the eyes of the men scanning its frame from head to heel (a feeling it was long used to).

Still: Being scrutinized by appearance left the presence unconsciously vulnerable, and “Hyde” was now doubly susceptible (being now guilty of crime while also judged aesthetically). Meekly, the presence-in-cellophane cowered against the nearest piece of furniture, a table piled high with papers.

Perhaps on another occasion the men might’ve let “Hyde” slink back out the window without reproach, as they knew the cost of doing the manner of business they had entered into with so many less-than-saintly consumers — but something about instantaneous surrender preternaturally incensed the men.

“Thief!”

“W—wait … I’ll give you back the soup, just let me leave. I don’t want no trouble.”

“You know what? You can have that soup. In fact, here’s some more.” And the men started heaving minestrone fresh off the vine.

Because of the cellophane, however, “Hyde” had very soft hands, like two catcher’s mitts, and the cans did no damage. The men stopped after the third container of beans, assorted veggies, and condensed broth crossed the room without causing any harm to the intruder.

“That was impressive.”

“I—I used to play wallball by myself for hours every day when I was younger. It was all I ever did, really.”

“Our pastime was always writing. Little stories about how the day should’ve gone or how we would’ve liked it to go. Sketches of people we observe from the windows. Most of these books here are journals filled with whatever we felt needed to be written down on that particular day. A lot of it is nonsense, but at the time it seemed relevant—important, almost.”

“So that’s what this book is about, then? I couldn’t understand any of it.”

“That one’s our latest journal. Our most private thoughts yet. We are truly coming upon some grand realizations about how and why we exist.”

“Sounds great, but how can anybody read any of it? It’s just a jumble of words …”

“How much did you read?”

“Not much. It’s not like I could make anything out of…”

“Not much! ‘Not much’ is too much! Trying to steal from us is one thing, but — our journal — that’s too far!”

The men spun around and grabbed a table leg from a pile of spare parts that had accumulated in the apartment. Brandishing the leg, the men approached “Hyde,” grunting. But only a few feet away, they stopped.

“We just realized that threatening you won’t do much good. With all that plastic on you, you probably could withstand a ten story drop.”

“Maybe. Probably not more than six floors though. There was this one time when I was trying to run away from my old boss, he had accused me of stealing some outrageous amount of money, and I had to leap out a window into a dumpster. It didn’t hurt at all, just a lot of vibration, but I was fine.”

“So this isn’t the first time you’ve tried to steal from someone, huh? Just like you were trying to steal soup from us, you son of a bitch!”

This time “Hyde” lunged for the window, but on the table where the book lay was an ornamental cactus on which the entity-presence-thief caught itself on a spine just above the hip that opened a slight tear in the cellophane.

Causing a spire of will-never-be to flare out with mutant velocity.

Launching the men out the open window onto the concrete below.

Part II: The Veil

Although “Hyde” had no memory of its earliest days, the presence had from moments after its birth been dangerously close to splicing itself into untenable pieces.

Wrapped in hospital swaddling blankets, the entity began to show its unfortunate stigma of instability. Its mother shouted at nurses and doctors from the adjustable bed as she witnessed her child’s uncovered face bubble and toil under its skin, flaring close to eruption numerous times.

From then on, “Hyde” was to see the world through fettered means.

One of the presence’s first memories, while peering through a flannel bandana, was the look on its mother’s eyes as she mentally assembled the virtues of cellophane (especially the promise that the polymer could lock in freshness).

The constraints which kept the presence alive had, of course, numerous side effects, most evidently contributing to “Hyde’s” short stature — which had subsequently allowed it to become a decent criminal.

More lingering than its height, however, was the disconnection the entity was to have with the world.

Even though “Hyde’s” mother tried to compensate for the considerable barrier (between her child and its worldly interaction) with tender and frequent hugs, it gradually accepted a permanent feeling of separation from other beings.

Always looking through fibers (even those as narrow as those which construct the layers of plastic holding itself together) at its mother’s face, at the pages of schoolbooks, at its bank account figures on an ATM screen, at the men, “Hyde” was never able to encounter things as they truly were — or could be.

Unfortunately, the most unkind fallout from its failed attempt at stealing a few cans of food was that the specific will-never-be that killed the men was that the collective and the entity-presence could’ve been great friends.

What never-could’ve-been were hours of laughter-filled conversation, as both were exceedingly lonely — and lonely individuals have the most fulfilling conversations upon the mutual recognition of pathos in one another’s eyes.

They might’ve become lovers just to feel the soft, smoldering force of another’s body wrapped in one’s own embrace.

It would’ve been convenient as well, given that “Hyde” was wrapped in prophylactic-like material.

But the innumerable probabilities of the men and the entity-presence’s shared-life-that-was-never-to-be all ended when the men hit the concrete.

Vanquished could’ve been the uncertainty of their daily search for but one kind heart to empathize but not pity.

Gone was the refuge of the way-too-late phone call after the threshold of melancholy is breeched.

Gallons of whiskey (Irish — which both treasured) slung back were never to be consumed, never to be fermented, never to be distilled.

Now neither could be allowed to forget ever feeling foolish after attempting to press one’s lips to or copulate with a daydream phantom whilst napping midday on the couch.

The resulting consequence from the will-never-be meant that a moment — when the two bodies could have finally ceased the brutality of slicing at one’s self internally with memories of better times and missed opportunities — had disappeared forever.

Forensics closed the investigation weeks later, unable to resolve the negative test results, unable to determine an identity. After saving some blood, tissue samples, the jawbone, and taking several ubiquitously grainy photos, they put the dead men in the incinerator.

The ashes were to be disposed of the following morning with the rest of the medical waste, but before that could happen, the entity-presence snuck into the police complex and stole them.

“Hyde,” too, had been launched out a window, but had survived with only a bruised backside as evidence to its involvement in the accident.

Further leakage from the wound was averted as the heat generated from the fissure had resealed the cellophane.

The entity-presence managed to slip away before the police arrived, sequestering itself thereafter in its own apartment for days afterward, afraid to go out, afraid of the power that it possessed, afraid of the judicial consequences, afraid of — afraid of —

Rapt with despair was “Hyde” following the men’s demise, but when it heard of the forthcoming disposal, the presence felt obligated and optimistic enough to forward reparation by spreading the remains in a scenic locale.

Even though “Hyde” did not know the collective, it understood that even average men deserve more than a garish lawn ornament to remember their existence.

Because what is a tombstone, really? Dates, full name, maybe a few words in memorium — that is all that remains for some as proof to their years on this earth: no conflict, no flesh, no laughter, no tears, no sense of purpose — just chisel marks in polished rock.

Dead souls never leave their lots, as stone angels cannot fly.

“Hyde” had once pondered if beings are only granted a certain, limited number of words to express themselves before they are caused to expire.

Even though the presence (by nature of its appearance) did not speak with others very often, it was always chose its words carefully, afraid that stammering might lead to an early death.

Now, again, “Hyde” had taken up this thought, hoping that it had not caused the men to vanish from this planet before they got to the most important things to say.

Of course, the presence, being unaware of the men’s collective existence, if its supposition were true, could not fathom the exponential figure of words its victim(s) might’ve had at their disposal.

So involved in this worry was the presence that it did not fully grasp that it was speaking its thoughts simultaneously as they crossed the greyness between the sealed space of its head.

The entity-in-cellophane carried the ashes to a poppy hill on the inland side of the Pacific.

The sun and the breeze oscillated warm and cool on “Hyde’s” brow.

While chanting solemnly words recollected during its days working for its most notorious employer (words which were said to grant the deceased access to superstitions known only on the other side of living), “Hyde” scattered the remains of the dead men.

Watching the ashes float from its hands, the presence added sighs as it thought about how handsome the men was (were), about how a two-day beard might’ve sounded when dragged across its neck, about the kisses never swapped, about long looks for no other reason than to remind one’s self of how lucky it was, about liberated passion long overdue for release finally allowed to spill bliss into every capillary, and about how it was all its own responsibility.

“Hyde” was not careful, therefore, to avoid depositing ash inside the blossoms.

When noticing its carelessness, the entity bent over, plucked a flower, and tried to fan the remains from the exposed crocus. The entity-presence fanned harder and harder, unable to remove the men from the flower’s innards, until suddenly the blossom leapt from its hand and took flight with miniature ochre wings, circumspectrally rising off and out of vision.

As the blossom ascended, words tumbled from it like acorns dropping off an antiquarian oak during the first great storm of spring, landing upon and around “Hyde” with dense, striking thumps.

But it was only words that fell — there was no force behind them to be voiced.

And a voice cannot be heard if there is not muscle to push breath out a mouth which wishes to speak.

Nevertheless, it was a marvelous sight: the (seemingly) what-never-could’ve-been becoming the present-as-already-always-just-happened.

The presence might’ve mused at length about what a poppy-blossom bird ate, where it nested, or what its mate looked like (mallards and blue jays are negatively paired, for instance).

But before wonder could consume the entity, an incalculable sacrifice — a deed allowing nature to flourish beyond its limitations — was conceived of within the cellophane and acted upon without pause.

“Hyde” clasped at its exoskeleton along the temples, pulling the polymer vigorously apart, screaming with ravenous exertion. Its thought dedicated solely to the task.

The cellophane stretched and strained until reaching the edges of the presence’s arms.

Then it ruptured and the presence raptured.

The resulting sonorous percussion sheared the whole of the hill — and every blossom took flight with silken orange wings into a sky so clear and deeply blue that one could almost detect the expanse of outer space, its dark void pushing that rich, azure hue closer to Earth.

With this noble fissuring, the blossoms finally had force behind the words for them to now speak. From high altitudes what was said could not be discerned by human ears.

But across the valley, the flutter of murmuring voices drew thousands of eyes to these daylight stars of rising poppy-blossoms climbing to meet divinity and supplant its place among the skies.

From the foot of the hills, however, the words bade forgiveness to “Hyde” for its attempted crime, to business associates fueled by avarice, to the men’s neighbors who had neglected a solitary heart(s).

Forgiveness was given to all, whether they deserved it or not.

James Hirtz is a graduate of Kent State University and the University of Akron. He writes on the authorial experience for his blog Now Trending. Previously published fiction can be viewed at Blood Lotus, (A Brilliant) Record, Slow Trains, Unheard Magazine, and Southpaw Journal (Editor’s Choice selection). His poetry can be enjoyed in Psychic Meatloaf and The Monarch Review.

Jamie saved up her babysitting money for the tattoo. It hadn’t taken long, her dad liberal with his guilt money. He paid her well to handle his responsibilities — Jamie’s twin half-brothers — while he wined and dined his new wife.

They left for the city at seven in the morning, Sean driving his mother’s black SUV slowly in the rain, the windshield a tablet of liquid gray the wipers pushed about uselessly.

His mother, like Jamie’s, thought they were taking their SATs.

“I feel a little guilty, lying. She left me a good luck note with the keys,” Sean said.

An image of Jamie’s mother flashed into her mind. “No tattoos!” she’d said. “They’re permanent, Jamie.” Something else her mother didn’t know. Nothing was permanent these days.
 
 

Getting the teal-colored dragon inked on her upper arm didn’t hurt the way Jamie had anticipated. What she didn’t expect was the ache in her bicep, long after the scabbing was gone.

But each day at school Sean inspected the tattoo and pronounced it fine.

Over time the ache lessened but the tattoo kept Jamie awake at night. Or rather, it woke her.

Dreams.

The dragon left his roost on her arm and towered above her, stared her down with glittering, garnet eyes displaying an emotion she couldn’t identify. Something the creature had drained like osmosis from her body. She always woke before she discovered the dragon’s intentions.
 
 

Jamie first saw the fire one night when, fresh from the shower, she was toweling dry. A scarlet-colored cloud roiling from the dragon’s nostrils. She ran her fingers over it.

It couldn’t be infection — the fire was as well defined as if it had been inked there. She pulled on her nightgown and called Sean. They agreed to meet by the tennis courts before school in the morning.

In Jamie’s dream that night the dragon was immense, spewing a dense blue smoke that paralyzed her. The swirling smoke pulled apart in patches to reveal the twins’ cribs. Jamie woke sweating, her nightgown plastered to her chest.

Heart pounding, she carefully pushed up her sleeve. The flames were now a deep magenta.

In the morning Sean walked her to the nurse’s office. The school nurse called Jamie’s mother herself, reporting that though Jamie didn’t have a fever, she’d come down with something; her face was pasty white.

At home, Jamie slept all afternoon — no dreams.

That night she was wide awake; she sat in her desk chair looking out the window upon the silvery lawn, the maple tree a solemn sentinel. The stillness held something.

By daylight the dragon breathed purple. Jamie went to her mother, shook her shoulder, and announced that she was still sick. Her mother’s sleep-puffed face tugged at Jamie. She wanted to climb in beside her, nest into her mother’s side. Her mother sat up and pressed the alarm button off with a short capable finger.

“Go back to bed,” she said, swinging her feet to the floor. “I’ll see if I can get you into the doctor’s today.”

Jamie dragged her leaden body back to her room, tunneled under the covers she knew offered no protection. Soon her mother appeared bearing tea and toast on a tray. Food was her mother’s answer to everything. “I got you an appointment for ten.”
 
 

Doctor Snedden found nothing wrong. Did Jamie have something on her mind? A lot of teens went to counselors. She wrote down a name and handed Jamie the slip of paper.

Her mother dropped Jamie at home, saying she needed to go into the office for the afternoon. Jamie should get caught up on her homework, prepare to return to school tomorrow. “Warm up some soup for lunch,” she said.
 
 

“Jamie?” Her mother, from the foyer.

“Out here.” Jamie slid her sleeve down over the dragon whose fire was now blue, orange, chartreuse. The dragon’s belly had transformed: carnation pink, parrot yellow.

“I stopped on the way home.” Her mother placed a pizza box on the counter and opened it to show Jamie. “Vegetarian. Black olives, too.”

Her mother’s dimpling face, its eager expression filled Jamie with a vicious rage. “Can’t you think of anything but food?” Her arm jumped, swiped the pizza to the floor. Sauce splattered across the tile.

For a moment they stood together silently. Then her mother sighed and took up the roll of paper towels.

Because she didn’t know what to do, because she hated her mother on her knees, hated herself for putting her mother there, Jamie spun and punched the arm through the window.

It didn’t hurt.

Blood streamed from her cut hand down to her elbow, leaking off onto the floor.

Her mother’s face was white as she wrapped a dish towel around Jamie’s hand, squeezing pressure to the cuts. With her other hand, she moved a wad of paper towels up Jamie’s arm, mopping blood. Then she saw the dragon appear from under the sleeve.

Jamie watched her mother’s face. Then she, too, looked. The fire was gone. The tiny teal-colored dragon sat placidly, almost comically.

Her mother licked a finger, rubbed the ink. “It’s permanent?”

Peg Alford Pursell is a National Endowment for the Humanities Independent Study Fellow and the founder of the Creative Writing Program at the Charleston School of the Arts. She teaches classes on fiction writing in the San Francisco Bay Area, received the South Carolina State Fiction Award, and is an American Fiction Award finalist.

What he saw was only more smooth, hard ground, extending in every direction for as far as his two yellow eyes could see. There was nothing but a great expanse of brown nothingness. Overhead, the sky was a pale blue, as the sun sat muffled behind a cloud, hanging in a state of twilight.

“Well, at least it’s peaceful here,” Slub Glub said to himself, and then went back to sleep.

A little while later, having awoken from his nap, he decided to go exploring in his new home. He started walking, and walked for quite a while. There was nothing here, however; just endless smooth ground beneath a cloudy sky. No sounds, and no life, so far as he could see. Slub Glub started to get tired, and sat down, talking to himself. “I wonder why there’s nothing around, except this very smooth ground?”

As if in answer to his question, some green figures appeared on the horizon, moving towards him rather quickly. As they got closer, Slub Glub could see that they were trees. In fact, they were willow trees. “Oh, maybe Willowmina decided to come here after all?” he wondered, but soon realized that these willow trees were much bigger than Willowmina or the other ones back on Earth; they had great drooping branches, full of green leaves, which draped across the ground, kicking up clouds of dust as they whisked forward.

There were three of these great towering willows, and they didn’t even notice Slub Glub as they skimmed past, and he had to jump to the side, or he would have been flattened by their branches as they scraped along the surface of the ground. He watched as they scurried off into the distance.

And that is when Slub Glub understood.

“Aha! The ground is smooth because these extra-long willow branches are sweeping it clean. And the reason the branches are so long and leafy is because no raccoons are nibbling on them, keeping them short. And therefore, nothing else is here but some fast-moving trees and some very smooth ground, as the willows are wiping the planet so clean that nothing else grows or lives.”

Satisfied at having figured this out, Slub Glub sat down and did nothing for a while. Every half hour or so he saw some of the giant willow trees whiz by again. Soon, he was as bored as he’d ever been. “This planet may be peaceful, but it sure is dull,” he thought. But he had an idea.

Slub Glub waited for the next willow to pass by, and when it did, he grabbed on to one of the branches as it passed and climbed upwards on the fast-moving tree. The willow was so large that it didn’t even notice that Slub Glub was climbing on it, until Slub Glub took a large bite from one of its leaves.

Then it stopped moving, and started crying.

“Ouch! Why did you do that?” the willow tree asked, now noticing that there was a strange, small blue creature perched in its foliage, nibbling at it.

“I’m sorry, but with no reason to weep, all you do is sweep,” Slub Glub said. “And there should be more to life than that.”

The willow tree, having never seen a blue mutant before, and never having cried before, had no response to this, and continued to blubber. As its tears fell, the ground softened beneath them. “Now watch what happens,” Slub Glub said, pointing to the ground below the willow’s roots, which was made muddy by the pool of tears.

Weeds were starting to grow in the mud; new life was coming into being. Slub Glub had disrupted the harmony of this planet and tilted its balance, and soon all would be right, or rather wrong, in the new world.

THE END

Table of Contents: “Slub Glub in the Weird World of the Weeping Willows”

Get the graphic novel from Eraserhead Press.

Illustration & text copyright (c) Andrew Goldfarb

About the Author: Andrew Goldfarb resides in San Francisco, where he draws the long-running underground comic strip “Ogner Stump’s One Thousand Sorrows,” which tells of the trials and tribulations of everyman Ogner Stump and his blue mutant sidekick Slub Glub. He also travels the country performing as a one-man-surrealistic-rock-and-roll-band under the name “The Slow Poisoner.” A patent medicine salesman, his Genuine Slow Poisoner Miracle Tonic is proven effective in the treatment of Elephantiasis, Cholera, Barnacles, Boils, The Fits, Excessive Abscesses, Necrosis, Lavender Fever, General Wasting, Consumption, Women’s Troubles, Gout, Neuralgia, Wandering Limbs, Stoutness, Onanism and Disinterested Bladder. This is his second prose book, following “The Ballad of a Slow Poisoner,” which was published by Eraserhead Press in 2007. He will plunge to his death over Niagara Falls in 2068.

Lately she’d been waking with the sense of having an important dream forgotten in the moment of opening her eyes. The dream would be transformative if only she could remember it.

Each day as she slipped on her brown uniform and tied her apron with its big pockets for holding the necessities of her job, she wondered why if it was the same dream, she could not remember a single detail.

She drove to the hotel feeling that the day — the sun an orange ball stuck to an ashy gray backdrop of a sky — was the unreality. What she’d left behind in her wide bed, before she washed ashore from sleep, was maybe her true life.

The cars stretching in a chain before her on the highway seemed like toys. The road signs accessories some giant had sprinkled about.

One morning on her way to work she caught herself just in time from running into the red pickup in front of her, something she’d had the urge to do, to test if there’d be an impact or if the vehicle would crumple like the paper cut-out it seemed to be.

A horn blast from behind got her moving again. If only she could remember her dream!

At the hotel, she was assigned the top five floors of the east wing.

In room 501, the second bed was untouched, and she removed her shoes and spread herself across it. Turned off her phone.She spent a long while trying to let go. To forget, temporarily, her duties. To ignore the collar stiff on the back of her neck.

Her legs were cold and she covered herself, pulling the sheets and blanket up to her waist. She breathed deeply, holding the inhalations and exhalations each for counts of five. Focused on relaxing bit by bit each part of her body beginning with her toes.

She may not have gotten beyond her knees. She was curled on her right side, the sun through the windows warm on her eyelids when she felt the body slip in next to her.

His arm wrapped around her waist in an embrace that seemed familiar, the press of his chest on her back natural, his breath rippling her hair somehow expected.

Transformation, she thought, unwilling to open her eyes.

Peg Alford Pursell is a National Endowment for the Humanities Independent Study Fellow and the founder of the Creative Writing Program at the Charleston School of the Arts. She teaches classes on fiction writing in the San Francisco Bay Area, received the South Carolina State Fiction Award, and is an American Fiction Award finalist.

Slub Glub turned to Willowmina and hugged her drooping branches. “Goodbye, Willowmina, I must explore new horizons free of annoying mornings.”

“Good luck to you, little blue thing. I’ll be heading home now.” She shuffled off the park bench and headed back in the direction they’d come from, to the beach, the ocean, the babbling brook, and eventually back to the forest and her grove of trees.

“Are you ready?” the man with the shopping cart asked, his eyes glowing.

“Let’s go!” Slub Glub said, flailing his tentacles, as the sky suddenly went dark and the pavement around them melted into a cascade of melting colors, like paint going down a drain, or poop into a toilet. He had the sensation of falling, and this continued for quite a while, until Slub Glub grew bored and went to sleep.

To be continued.

Table of Contents: “Slub Glub in the Weird World of the Weeping Willows”

Get the graphic novel from Eraserhead Press.

Illustration & text copyright (c) Andrew Goldfarb