The Whirligig
Literary
Zine
Issues 3 – 9
Published
by Whirligig Media at Smashwords
© 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2011 Frank Joseph Marcopolos / Whirligig Media
All rights reserved.
Published under the Copyright Laws of The United States of America by:
Whirligig Media
Frank Joseph Marcopolos
4809 Avenue N, Suite 117
Brooklyn NY 11234
All writers retain copyright of their individual work contained within this magazine. Please note that for the MOBI and EPUB versions of this magazine, the infinity symbol (∞) marks the end of one section and the beginning of the next.
EPUB ISBN: 978-0-9834599-2-7
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this editor and all the writers in this anthology.
Editor’s Indulgence
(Or, a decade later, it is reborn)
There is a tiny percentage of the world’s population that would remember this, so it seems necessary for me to say it here, right at the beginning. The Whirligig literary zine originally appeared as a hard-copy publication in 2001, distributed globally by Tower Records. Tower died a few years later (thanks, MP3’s!), as did The Whirligig.
Until now.
I was recently reading a copy of one of those old issues, and I realized that the material was so good, it was a shame that The Whirligig was dead. And it seemed to me even more shameful that no one would ever be able to experience the Powerful Emotional Rides provided by the stories and poems contained (barely) on the following pages. And THEN I realized, “Hey, we’re living in a digital, nothing-dies-ever, age now!” (Yeah, I can be a little slow sometimes.)And I had retained the files, nostalgic bastard that I am. Some of the writers in this e-book have gone on to great literary accomplishments: Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner), Jeff Somers (The Avery Cates series of novels for Orbit), Nick Mamatas, Jim Munroe, Ann Sterzinger…. and I’m sure as time goes on more names will be added to the list of Whirligig alums. It was both an honor and a downright thrill to find these writers before most of the world did, and their subsequent successes were certainly not surprising to me.
So, this e-book is a digital reprinting of issues 3 through 9 of The Whirligig. I hope you enjoy it!
Frank J. Marcopolos, Editor/Publisher
Brooklyn, New York
January 2011
∞
The Whirligig Issue #3
Table
of Contents
FICTION:
In This Slowly Rising
City, So Bereft of Company by Jeff Somers
Christmas Vacation by
Ann Sterzinger
Promise Me the Moon and the Stars by Jim Munroe
All
the Rage by Jennifer Callahan
POETRY:
fatigue by frank
marcopolos
Poetic Suicide / Losing ee cummingS / From:
MAILER-DAEMON@reality.com Subject: Address Unknown, Mail
Undeliverable by Jonathan A. Goldberg
Winter Alone by Q.R. Maber
∞
In This Slowly Rising City, So
Bereft of Company
by Jeff Somers
Ten-thirty at night after one too many whiskey-in-sodas burning holes in my soft-soled shoes and anything can happen, and usually does, if only for me. Everyone else’s life is so achingly mundane, so rooted in the tar and concrete we’re scraping ourselves off onto.
“Dreaming again, Harrigan?”
It all snaps back into focus again, the unfortunate grey-scale focus of night-time in metropolis, the greatest city in the modern sense, the urban sprawl growing to engulf endless acres and unnoticed inches.
I blinked at both of them, Tom and Richie, sweaty in their work clothes. Richie clutched his briefcase to his chest, a precious piece of aged luggage with stained and frayed vinyl. Richie hadn’t worked in six months, but he carried that damn case around as if job interviews might ambush him anywhere and he’d vowed to be ready. I imagined it filled with newspapers and phone books, with advertisements circled in thick red marker. He clutched it so tightly, no doubt, to keep it from bursting open in a frightening flutter of pages escaping into the night, back to their native forests where there was no place for them anymore.
“What?” I blink again.
Tom laughed, the silly, barking laugh which was easily ignored when he was sober but which increased in volume and desperation like a wild animal’s mating call when he drank. “We’re getting ready to go. You okay?”
The place was nearly empty, all the usual drunks and loudmouths had left for the bottles they kept hidden at home for emergencies such as closed bars and ended happy hours. It had that sweaty, smoky feel that bars and really good parties had after they’d ended, the washed feel of spent time. Places like this were shrinking as the city grew. Room had to be made. I looked around dumbly and it looked smaller than it had before, the bar closer to our table, the ceiling lower. I found cigarettes in my pocket but they weren’t my brand, they were unfiltered and harsh. I shrugged and shook one out, but I didn’t have any matches.
As I spoke the cigarette bounced up and down before me. “Sure. Is it three o’clock already?”
“Past.” Tom said, standing up. “The bartender’s about to call the police.”
I grinned, partly because I knew he meant it as a joke and partly because I was drunk, and partly because the police would never get there in time; the streets had shifted slightly as the concrete spread, and many of them led to different places, now, or nowhere at all.
We crowded out onto the city streets, and Tom was taking bets as to whether he would be at work on time in the morning. I pushed my hands into my pockets and breathed in the thinning air which struggled heroically to cover all the new area. I didn’t know what the argument was for: Tom was never at work on time, and it never seemed to bother him much. We walked together for a while, and then we split up, Tom laughing to himself as if everything was funny all at once and Rich just listing back and forth, struggling to keep it all straight while keeping a tight grip on his briefcase, lest it bound away from him, slipping through his fingers the way everything else in his life seemed to. I waved to them both, but they didn’t turn to see.
I stood on a street corner, waiting for the light to change. The street was at least a mile wide, the curbs pulling apart in slow tides. It yawned before me in a tempting, silent way, open and waiting. There wasn’t any need to wait on the light, there were no cars, there weren’t any people. The night air was cool and the wind had taken on the hollow whistle usually found in canyons and gullies. I leaned against a lamp post with my hands in my pockets and watched the streetlight change, red, green, yellow, red. It was even beginning to take the lights longer to change.
Getting home at night was a longer and longer journey, too, partly because of the expanse of the city, partly because I kept having this feeling that something was going to happen, and kept waiting for it to come.
“Talked to Margaret recently?”
Sober, Rich was passably human, even charming in his sad way. We walked through the park (almost grown too huge and verdant to be a park, too nearly-wild) eating hot dogs and drinking cokes. I was abusing my lunch hour, and Rich had no lunch hour anymore. Used to be we could walk through the park in half an hour. Now I think it would take at least twice that, judging from the size of the trees and length of the grass. Overhead, birds discussed our fashion sense, chittering laughter at Rich’s worn and sallow sports jacket.
I shook my head. “No. I don’t know how to reach her.”
“You’ve got her number, right?”
“No.”
He was quiet, then, wondering what that meant. Why people always wanted your relationship to work out, I had no idea.
You couldn’t see the gently drifting buildings from the park anymore, and I wondered, briefly, if maybe the park would overtake the city and devour it, leaving us to live in the hollows and trees, behind rocks. It didn’t seem likely, unfortunately. It was just keeping pace.
“I’ll tell you, Harrigan, the scariest part about it all is that I’m starting to enjoy it.”
I looked at him. In the right light Rich positively crackled with positive energy, an aura of good which clashed unreasonably with the rest of the world. Everyone else, including myself, had maggots in our blood, eating away, we walked about with the soft-bodied slump of the doomed. Rich was straight and tall because although he carried unemployed doom around with him, he hadn’t internalized it. He still had hope in his heart.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Having nothing to do, having my own time.” he replied, smiling. “I don’t want to get a job. I don’t want to have things to do.”
I studied the way the gently drifting trees had come to resemble the buildings from far, distant midtown: huge and looming, domineering. Eventually, I thought it likely we would hollow out the trees to make office space, since the buildings would be far apart, soon. “That’s the most peculiarly brave thing I think anyone’s ever said.” I told Rich. He looked at me and I clapped him on the shoulder.
“The one thing that scares most of us,” I told him carefully, “is having nothing to do. That’s why we waste our time in bars, at restaurants, watching T.V. We’re terrified of having time on our hands.” I squeezed his shoulder companionably. “If you really aren’t afraid of it anymore, you’re a better man than me.”
Rich laughed. Unlike Tommy, Rich had a fine, deep laugh. “Fuck, Harrigan, you’re the weirdest guy I know.” He shrugged. “But, I like you. You say startling things, sometimes, and I feel like I ought to be writing it all down.”
It was the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me, and I told him so.
The bus ride into work was hours long, now, long boring intervals between buildings and the quiet great distance lends anything, even cities. I got cramped and bored waiting. I wondered if eventually the buses wouldn’t have enough gas to make it through their whole route, I wondered if people would stop riding them altogether. There already seemed to be fewer people every morning.
In my office, I stood at my window and stared out at the nothing around us. In the distance, obscured by fog and made tiny, I could barely see the faint, drifting outlines of buildings. I picked up the telephone and the dial tone was faint and full of static; I supposed the lines were stretched to their limit, and soon there would be no phones at all.
On the spur of the moment I took Louise Pennler out to lunch.
We’d slept together once, long before, and had been avoiding each other in the halls ever since. We strolled outside in the breathtaking emptiness, drinking coffee. The horizon was eating away at everything; I could barely see the spikes of the trees in the park, so far away.
“Why now, all of a sudden?” she asked, shyly.
“We might be too far apart, soon.”
She just seemed to accept that.
After lunch I began to realize that the buildings had begun to expand as well. There was no other explanation for the long walk through deserted halls back to my office. I sat at my desk and listened to the quiet for a while, studying my hands for any signs that I might be growing larger as well, to take up the new space opening up. There were none.
I thought of Margaret, I thought about her the way I usually did, about the way I still had little idea what had gone wrong between us. I still had her number, it was a burning coal in my wallet that I carried everywhere. Sometimes, when I told people like Rich that I didn’t, it was wishful thinking.
Putting aside the dim hesitancy that had marked me of late, I snatched up the phone to call her, and paused. The receiver was silent. There was no dial tone. The phones had drifted too far.
The subways, perhaps because they were underground, had remained the same size. As a result, when I got off at my stop I was still a long walk from home. My heels echoed mountainously on the long, empty pavement, and the occasional person I managed to glimpse off in the distance of the other side of the street usually cowered and ducked away. I wondered if, at a distance, I appeared somehow intimidating or fearsome.
My neighborhood had grown increasingly quiet as the time had gone by, and I now found that I missed my neighbors, men and women I had no affection and less tolerance for. All I had for company was the wind and myself, a dead phone and a pack of cigarettes. I stood at the big window in the living room because it looked directly out onto another apartment’s fire escape, and the three tenants were always out there, lounging, staring. It made me uncomfortable. Now I missed them, the whole insolent bunch.
For the first time, I felt lonesome. If the phones had still been working I would have called Rich and Tom and invited them out for a drink; as it was I mixed a drink for myself and then another, and as time crawled by I got drunker and drunker, thinking I would take the afternoon off the next day and stop by Margaret’s job, see if she was still showing up every day.
“You look older. Tired.”
I smiled, playing with my cigarette. “And you look lovely too.”
“No, really, you look...”
“Thin and drawn?”
She paused to consider. “Yeah. Stretched.”
We were in a bar, coincidentally the same bar Tom and Rich had chosen to play hooky in that afternoon. It was a small, smoky place, unhealthy as all hell and sparsely populated. It made it seem as if it was night out even though the day had been bright and perfect. I wondered if they had painted the windows black, or if perhaps it was the Drift (I had begun using capital letters unconsciously not long ago) having an odd effect on the place.
We spent too much of our time, really, in bars, passing drinks about and eyeing each other chummily. Time slowed down and let you look at it in bars, you could really get a feel for how the flow was going, eye every second individually. You also got left behind, if you stayed long enough. The neighborhood bars I remembered had always been full of guys who were still in the seventies, the sixties, the fifties.
“You look good.” I offered.
“Always a smoothie.” she grinned.
I didn’t like Margaret so much, but company was company and it was not wise to squander it. We’d had a love affair not so long ago, a disastrous bitter coupling we were both, I think, glad to see ended. But now I had affection for everyone, and some to spare.
We chatted, and drew Rich and Tom to us slowly. Margaret resented Rich a little for introducing her to me, but we could all, in time, get over it. He clutched his briefcase as always, stealing glances at Margaret but afraid to draw her attention to him. I watched them with amused grins playing across my face, finally attracting Tommy’s yellowed gaze.
“What are you so happy about, Har?”
I shrugged. “Good to be out with friends. We won’t be able to do this much longer.”
They looked at me strangely, and then Rich raised his glass. “Bravo!”
“You’re all a bunch of weirdos.” Margaret announced without, to her credit, much sarcasm.
“Not me.” Tommy protested. “I’m with you.”
As long as the booze is flowing anyone can sit and bear each other’s company, especially since it would take all night to walk out and find better choices, if there were any to be had. I amused myself by noting how our table grew smaller, by increments too minute to be noticed, until our knees were touching and our glasses clinking together. I wondered what decided whether a place grew with the city or shrank to make room.
We were all drunk by that point. Margaret had forgotten that she thought we were all strange, and Tommy had forgotten to disassociate himself from us. I played with the straw and ice left in my tumbler and shrugged my eyebrows at Rich whenever our eyes met. Tommy’s laugh cut through everything and smothered conversation; we could only squirm under its weight and try to breathe in sync with Tom, snatching gasps of air when he did. We were all breathing in time and the walls sagged inward when we sucked in air.
Next thing, Tommy was holding Margaret’s hand, tracing her fingers with his thumb. I watched his thick thumb moving back and forth in unimaginative, unsensual movements.
“Maybe we should get out of here.” he said, looking guilty.
I didn’t want to go; I hesitated mostly because I’d come to feel at home in the bar and doubted we’d ever find it again. It would either cave in on itself, disappearing in a quiet implosion of space, or drift into the distant city blocks, beyond our reach.
They were beyond caring what I thought. We stood up and gathered our things, made our listing way to the door. I fell behind. Tired from booze and sorry to see the place go, I turned to stare good-naturedly at the narrow lines and aged wood of the bar, thinking I might need to remember it, someday. Then I turned and stepped outside.
The sidewalk was at least a mile wide; the city was quickly becoming a place for giants, and as we exited they disappeared into whatever remote portion of the urban expanse they belonged in. At my feet lay Rich’s briefcase, as if dropped in sudden shock. The wind was howling and solid, a wall of air pushing against me. I took a moment to look around the concrete plains, flat as far as the eye could see, touched only by the wind, and lit another cigarette.
I knelt on the huge slab of sidewalk and turned the briefcase around to face me, the scrape of leather loud and gone in an instant of wind. I dragged hot smoke into my lungs and flipped the latches back. I tossed it open, curious.
There was a brief and crackling sight of newspaper, yellowed and stiff, before the wind snatched it away.
Smiling around my cigarette, I looked around the dark horizons which surrounded me. Smoke danced about before it leapt away, and with popping knees I stood up, picked a likely-looking direction, and began to walk.
∞
Christmas Vacation
by Ann
Sterzinger
Roger stumbled into the warm, damp office and his cold glasses crusted over with ice. He couldn’t see a thing, but he could hear a female editor mumbling hi. He already had a hard-on, dammit.
After twenty years proofreading at the newspaper (off and on), Roger still made crap for money. He could pay his rent, but that was about it – and he lived a hell of a long way down the shittiest el-train line, in the middle of a Spick and Polack neighborhood. He waited for the train (which was always late, and broke down halfway to work half the time) with the same bunch of assholes he’d waited with for years, and they STILL didn’t try to speak English, always trying to yak at him about how pissed they were about the train in fucking Espanol and Polski (both of which Roger now understood, but he still just glared at them, the verbally-retarded fucks.) Today there was some kind of goddamn blizzard going on, and the train had gotten stuck under the Chicago River for an hour. Good thing Karl, the managing editor, didn’t really care when Roger showed up. Where else was he going to find a literate proofreader in this town who would work for bird shit? Roger had his sack of crumbs for life.
Well, it was better than a lot of jobs. They left him alone, because they needed his type. The paper, an “alternative weekly” that was now the biggest free paper in the city, still tried to water its hippie roots; nobody said anything when Roger padded around the office in mismatched stocking feet and long underwear.
He also, he noticed as he arranged himself in his cubicle, had only shaved one side of his face the last time he shaved. Ah, well, he thought, perhaps it looked sexy. He still had hair on top of his head as well as on his face, a lantern jaw that showed no signs of dissolution, and a lean flexible build. Not that any of it had done him any good, except for getting crazy girls pregnant or pissed off. Here, they cubed the young female proofers and typesetters far, far away from him. They were all completely nuts, but one of the new setters, ugh – he had to get into her or die. She was about five feet tall with the tightest little body he’d ever seen. The poor thing had bad hair and the most pimple scars he’d ever seen on one doe-eyed little face, but you could bounce bullets off her stomach.
She and the rest of the kiddies were pissed off that week because they were working overtime for the Christmas issue. There was usually no paper that week, but this year Karl and his boss, Linda, had devoted a special section to fiction. None of the proofers or setters had been told about the fiction issue till it was time to tell them about the overtime. It wasn’t the overtime that pissed them off so much, of course – it was the fact that they hadn’t been offered the chance to submit THEIR work for the fiction issue and now they had to drudge for other people’s writing. They were ALL aspiring writers, just like Roger had been when he started; that was why they had to (and did) accept such a peonic job.
They still all thought they should, and could, get a fair chance. They gasped and yelped when they read the stories – how could the morons who’d turned them in be FAMOUS WRITERS??? Roger laughed at their grumbling. Of COURSE the shit Linda had accepted was awful. It was all written by somebody’s cronies. It wouldn’t be too long before these kids figured out what Roger knew: that having to have this job at all meant they weren’t cronies, and they might as well give up. Roger had. He only wrote poems for his sisters’ kids at Christmas anymore. And come to think of it, he hadn’t written them yet for this year. Damned overtime.
Roger went to the copy table to see what was up for him to read. He was looking forward to reading some fiction. It would be a change, at least. There was one big, big story on the table – that would eat up a few hours. He dragged it back to his desk.
“Winter Casino,” it said, by James McManus. Ooh, Linda had gotten a big name in university crap-fiction. Things must be looking up for the rag. Not that Roger was going to get a raise anytime soon. Ah, well. McManus was not too awful, for a famous writer. A quick and painless afternoon.
But Christ, it was the heaviest manuscript he’d ever seen at the paper. He flipped through it. FIFTY-THREE PAGES? For a short story? Ork. He dumped some Bailey’s into his coffee (only the kiddies tried to hide their drinking – Roger laughed when he saw them disappear into the bathroom with their briefcases and purses) and skimmed the galleys, just to see what he was in for.
The first scene was set in a tourist cafe in Italy. “Who wrote this, one of his grad students?” Roger muttered. The story was about compulsive gambling; of course! – that was McManus’s shtick. Made him a “bad boy.” Uh huh. Another transparent autobiography by somebody with a dull and sheltered life. Why, Lord? The first-person narrator started whining about how his wife would only let him use his poetry-prize and review-writing money to gamble – and then started comparing himself to DOSTOYEVSKY, who also happened to be a gambler. “BLOODY, BLOODY, BLOODY HELL,” Roger growled, in his best BBC voice. “I’M A DRUNK, DOES THAT MAKE ME BUKOWSKI??!!” He pounded back the Bailey’s, got more coffee and started on the whiskey. Fuck skimming, he was only going to read this garbage once. It was worse than reading the gardening articles for the suburban edition.
Roger cursed Linda for encouraging this asshole. He marked up a couple of obviously brain-damaged logical errors that Linda had let slip in deference to McManus’s “genius,” then started in on the misspellings and repetitions. McManus used the word “pee” three times in the first ten pages; not coincidentally, he also rambled about his son. “Pee-pee,” Roger mumbled, disgustedly, then scribbled in the margin: “WRITERS SHOULD NOT HAVE BABIES.”
Then he erased it, not wanting to piss Linda off any more than he had yesterday (she was a nice woman, she just had no taste), and chewed on his eraser. “I apparently need to take risks,” McManus had written. “I’m sometimes embarrassed by this behavior, but I’m not gonna (“gonna,” thought Roger, ooh, he’s so colloquial!) stop playing blackjack any more than I’d stop writing poems, a habit that’s much more expensive.” Giggling, Roger scribbled: “WHAT, DO YOU SMOKE CRACK WHILE YOU WRITE?!?” He fell on his desk snickering. That had to stay. It was a logical error anyway: didn’t the narrator also say poetry prizes paid for his gambling habit? Make up your mind, asshole.
Roger decided he needed a breakfast break. He pulled a leftover salami sandwich out of the office refrigerator and chewed. The kids in the next row over were having an argument about one of the stories. One of the girls liked it; it was about drugs and Christians.
“It’s so PHONY!” yelled one of the boys, an amiable enough fellow who still thought he was a genius. He might be, who knew; but he wasn’t smart enough to know that genius wasn’t enough. He still bitched about the stories as though he were comparing them to what HE was writing. Roger was settled and smug; he nitpicked like a science-fiction fan, knowing he’d never be expected to show what HE could do. He had about as much chance, after all, of being granted a shot at a writing audience as he had at being given the run of Lucasfilms.
“Well, it’s not as bad as the OTHER crap we’ve been reading,” he heard the girl say, trying to match the other kid’s bluster. The boy snorted at her and scurried back to Roger’s row. She yelled after him: “ARE YOU SAYING THE STORY ABOUT THE LONG-LOST MOTHER WASN’T PHONY??!”
Roger snickered and went back to the McManus. A few lines down, ol’ Jimmy actually got off a good one. He was bitching because his wife bitched about gamblers wasting “resources” that should go to their kids. (The narrator reminded her that their parents would pay for their son’s education. Roger thought about two different girls whose babies he hadn’t the money to raise at all, so they’d gotten abortions. I have a son: in pieces, in a dumpster.) She accused him of wanting to get something for nothing. “Of course,” Jimmy’s alter-ego said; “Who doesn’t? Gamblers and non-gamblers alike get screwed out of cherished, indispensable things all the time and get zip in return, so it seems only reasonable to want to balance the equation a little.” Roger empathized a little, then got angry. Screwed out of things, he thought – things like the day I have to spend reading this cowshit so I can pay my landlord? He started to write in the margin but thought better of it. He went after a misused polysyllabic word instead, fuming more than usual. This guy had given the paper a piece of absolute crap, and Linda was letting him get away with it.
It went on: Jimmy won at gambling, and all the women around wanted his dick. Unfortunately, his dick wasn’t working, really. A bomb scare scuttled his lucky streak and he fled the casino, grabbing a hard-bodied Japanese tourist who, ooh, wanted him, but as she clung to his legs on the way back to his hotel, he couldn’t get his dick hard. COULDN’T GET HIS DICK HARD??!! Roger pounded his head on his desk. The manuscript prattled on. Good Lord, Roger thought – if I were writing about not being able to get my dick up, I’d stop right there and not be able to write about ANYTHING ELSE. I’d be calling for somebody to SHOOT ME. But James Mcmanus blathered happily away about the curve of the Venetian river’s similarity to a sine wave. BLEEEEEEH... Roger marked the stupidest of the sentences for aesthetic errors. He wasn’t even looking at the manuscript; he was just looking down the typeset galleys for obvious typos now.
And he found one – the galley read: “A man with a handlebar mustache stands off to one side of the statue, having hoist a five-year-old boy onto his shoulder.” HoistED!!! said Roger’s smartass proofer brain. TYPO! Damn, that cute little typesetter just might be dumb enough to go to bed with me, he thought. He looked back at the manuscript to make sure it wasn’t some bizarre mistake of Linda’s, and, holy shit. It wasn’t a mistake at all: SONOFABITCH. McManus had written Linda a note in the brackets on the manuscript: “having hoist [stet, please, as in Hamlet] a five-year-old...”
Roger’s brain got hotter than it had been in a long time. STET, PLEASE, AS IN HAMLET???!!! He pushed his chair away from his desk. Cocksucker. “Cocksucker,” he said aloud. And Linda was letting this pretentious bastard do it, too. Did Shakespeare ever ask his audience to let him write in Greek? “That’s how Plato wrote! Enjoy, folks!!” Roger walked away from his desk, put his coat on, and stomped right past Karl out of the building. He went to the bar on the corner.
He got a shot and a beer. He could get away with it, but right then he would have done it no matter what. Few things got past his shell, but Linda letting that bastard piss on the bard really made him need to go to the bar a while. He felt all the little crappy things about the job pulling into one ball of piss. He could see just walking away and quitting – this morning, he would’ve never seen this coming. But this McManus shit was too humiliating. He had gotten used to letting a certain amount of crap slip by, but – arrrgh, stet, as in Hamlet? He noticed that the shot was gone and he was halfway through the beer. All of the paper’s regular writers were bad. They were all dippy spoiled kids who wrote about dippy spoiled kid SHIT. Roger was sick of making them sound good. One paragraph without the help of the editors and proofers, and everybody would see how much the freelance writers deserved their freedom.
The bar was all right. It was in the middle of the expensive part of downtown Chicago, but somehow it stayed cheap and seedy. There were other newspaper grunts there, real hardcore losers from the dailies; there were girls who worked the strip club; and there were the panhandlers, smugly spending the loot they’d hustled from working dummies. Work, dummy, work. I should quit, Roger thought. See how fast they can replace me. See who else is stupid enough to wade through their GARBAGE and smart enough to fix it.
But what would he do when he quit his job? His job qualifications included: a perfect command of written English, a string of shit jobs in factories and kitchens, the long-crapped-out ambition of being a writer himself, and, er, this job – what else was he going to do? Three times in the last two decades he’d gotten pissed off, told Karl to go to fucking hell, and stomped out that door; three times, he’d found himself back in a kitchen, struggling along as an aging line cook. That was a young man’s endurance contest; there was a short time for losers to feel free. If he quit and wound up in a restaurant now, they’d probably shove him back in the dishroom. Dishwashing was a full-circle job: it was where you started as a teenager, and where you wound up at the end if you failed in the middle. He was better off with his querying pencils. It was harder to hide exhaustion than senility.
So they had him. This was where he would be when his liver gave out, grumbling good-naturedly about work. This was his cell, his cage, the end of his story. He felt the squeeze of a snare that seemed to have been waiting softly for him since he were born. He didn’t know whether to feel stupid, because he didn’t know whether there had ever been any way around it. God knows what he’d given up to avoid traps. Credit cards, suburban homes, demanding wives who wanted resources for their offspring, none of those working-class assholes had gotten him. But with old age in sight, they had one on you just because you still had your body: it was too dangerous to live without health insurance. And where would HE ever find another job that provided it? You can’t outsmart your liver. Well...it was better than a lot of jobs...he wiped one tear into the frost of his mug. It was a good bar. Good cold beer. Another job amenity.
“HeeeEEEEY!” yelled one of the drinking panhandlers, shoving his way into Roger’s brain. He threw some thumb-smudged Xeroxes between the worker and his beer.
“I SEEN you walkin’ down alla time from the PAPER upstairs...you think you FAMOUS or somethin’...whiteboy...you FAMOUS!!! My name Ernest, I’m a POET maaaaaan, you know the talk, you walk the walk, you get ole Ernest FAMOUS TOO, man? Yeah?”
“Huh?” said Roger.
“You got a dollar?”
“FUCK no, Jesus Christ...” He went to the bar for another shot and a beer. Ernest followed him.
“Have some res-PECT for yo’ fellow MAN, whiteboy! Don’t you have no reeee-SPECT?!”
“Uh huh.” Roger sucked back the shot. Ha ha ha, I so famous. I so lucky.
“C’mon, jus’ take ‘em up there. I know if I get a chance I can make it. Every man got to get his chance!”
Roger looked blearily at the poems. They looked like Ernest had been eating dogshit off them. And they read like misspelled corporate-motivational posters, patched with riffs from Hallmark cards. What possible connection was there between sleeping under the bridge in one’s own vomit and such goopy, smug, up-with-life finger-wagging? The guy was obviously living in a fantasy world. He’d just decided he was so smart he didn’t need a job. He probably thought he was James Baldwin.
“Yeah, that’s the shit, Ernest, you’re a genius,” Roger said, rolling the papers into his pocket. “I’ll take these upstairs, for sure, and I’ll use my influence to help you. If you don’t hear back in two weeks, you can assume you deserve your current level of success, okay?”
Roger struggled over a growing snowdrift between the bar door and the office stairs. It seemed too cold to be snowing, but the snow came down in ragged curtains. On his way past Karl’s desk, Roger flopped the filthy sheaf of poems into the submissions box.
“What’s that?” said Karl, looking up miserably from his fifth conversation that day with a “writing genius” who needed an explanation of the fact that space in a newspaper was finite.
“New submission. Just came in.”
“Oh...from who?”
“James McManus.”
Roger went back to “The Winter Casino” with a rotten feeling in his stomach. How much was this garbage affecting his brain? All of the fire scares and terrorist bombs in the story were flat background decoration; they never touched Jimjim or his collapsed song of his tiny little self. Jimjim felt mechanical remorse because, of course, his stupid wife and son were very special. Then why was he cheating? He displayed no burning need. None of it made any sense; the author had no heart. Well, he was a winner, so what did that matter? Roger leaned back in his chair and shuffled the papers very seriously as the little zit-faced girl teetered past his cube on her spike-heeled boots and his pants grew so tight he thought he would faint. What a fuck HE would give a Japanese tourist...she’d be smiling for a week! He spent a few minutes on that delicious thought and then looked at his watch. Shit, he’d been there eight hours already and hadn’t finished reading a single piece. When were they ever going to fire him?
He put the McManus back on the table–it was Linda’s fuckin’ problem now!–and got another cup of coffee, unfortified this time. He hadn’t been this drunk at work in months...not since the poetry issue, come to think of it. He picked up a regular article, a bland review of a bland local artist. What a relief, to be back in the familiar world of mediocre boilerplate that didn’t pretend to be anything else (except when it called something else “boilerplate”.) He could fix a couple of grammatical errors, rewrite a clumsy sentence or two, fix the craftsmanship, and not be bothered by the content at all, since there wasn’t any. A couple of hours sped by, and Roger decided he’d done enough. It was time to get home, read and drink till he passed out, and make it back in for the 14-hour deadline day that faced him in the morning.
He stopped for one more shot and beer in the bar downstairs. The night crowd was in; the reporters from the daily papers gossiped about the presidential election with retarded smugness. Most of them were Republicans, the morons – what did they make, thirty grand a year? They might as well stick knives in their eyes. Roger ordered an extra shot, then wove out into the snow. It wasn’t too cold, but the wind whipped hell down every street in the city. The street crews had tunneled out all the sidewalks in the Loop; Roger felt safe as a field mouse scurrying to the el station. He was glad that he got on where the train was a subway, not an elevated platform exposed to the wind, because he waited half an hour for one of the damn things to show up.
Once Roger got on the train he employed his favorite tactic for getting his own seat: he sat in front of the smelliest, most obnoxious guy in the car. Smelly weird guys behind him was one thing; some fat broad or jackass with kids or Mexican with his knees spread wide squashing into the miserly seat next to him was unbearable. Roger put his nose in his book and waited to be returned to his own hole for a few sweet hours.
The train stopped under the river, and stayed for fifteen minutes. Roger got angry. The train stopped above Wicker Park. The conductor mumbled something about snow conditions over the P.A. Roger got angrier. You’d think there had never been a fucking snowstorm in Chicago before. It was going to be time for him to go to bed soon, unless he wanted to go to work on three hours of sleep AGAIN tomorrow. If this FUCKING city had its way, he thought, all the worker bees would spend the ENTIRE FUCKING NIGHT and EVERY SINGLE WEEKEND stuck on the FUCKING EL TRAIN where they COULDN’T MAKE TROUBLE. Or have one FUCKING moment’s peace, for that matter. The third time the train stalled, just one stop from his house, and some fat Latina’s four kids began screaming, Roger decided he was tired of being helplessly angry and forced his concentration onto his book. Until he realized he’d read twenty pages and they still hadn’t gone anywhere.
The train doors were spastically opening and slamming shut, hard, at random. They were in a subway station, but everyone was afraid to jump out of the doors, even if it was their stop. The conductor was silent. Maybe the P.A. was broken, too. Roger heard a screech and grind in the tunnel behind him. We’re going to get hit by the next train! he thought. People stared numbly at him as he leapt from his bench and through the door the next time it slammed open.
The next train wasn’t going to crash into Roger’s; it was already stopped in the tunnel behind it, and a third was blocked up behind that. There was no way to get them around the crippled train. Roger went up the stairs and asked the station attendant when the trains were going to be moving again. She laughed at him and went back to her magazine. “Could take hours to fix that train,” she mumbled. “Snowin’ pretty hard on them poor things.”
Roger stomped up the broken escalator and into the storm. He had to get some sleep. It was a mile to his house, and out in his neighborhood the sidewalks hadn’t been cleared; they were feet deep in drifts, the snow was wet, and he was wearing tennis shoes. His toes already felt frostbitten. I need a cab, he thought, or this is going to be downright dangerous. But there wasn’t a car on the street. The wind blew like an avenging hag, screaming about all the injustices that had built a world big enough to build more crap on. His long underwear was in his bag and there was no place to put it on; the taquerias and dance clubs were shut tight and dark. He might as well be deep in a forest.
The curbs of the streets, the bushes and fireplugs and mailboxes, were hidden treacherously beneath the snow. The first time Roger tripped over a curb and fell, he struggled back up right away. His old jacket soaked through instantly, and he hated himself for refusing to go get a new one in time for the cold. You could only be so frugal; you had to be ready for the world, no matter how little they paid you. He began to shiver convulsively as he turned onto the windiest street in the world. The snow seemed too heavy to drift, but somehow it was blowing and piling in sick, mad bulges. He wandered through up to his ankles, up to his knees, up to his chest, hit an old icepile, and fell down a second time. His “lean build” was beginning to just feel spindly. The third time, he tripped over a curb again and barely crawled back to his feet. Finally, he saw a cab. It was empty. He waved frantically at the driver. The driver gave him the finger, turned on his “Not For Hire” sign, and sped away laughing.
Roger fell again – he was upended by a child’s wagon lurking below a drift, hit his chin on the ice under the snow, and suddenly he couldn’t move. He realized he hadn’t eaten anything but that rancid salami since the day before. He was upside down in four wet, heavy feet of white and the cold was stronger than his engine. So Roger blinks out like this, he thought. That’s bitter, life, real bitter. He sighed. Well, he thought, staring at the white wall before him, at least I’ll never have to read James McManus again.
He felt slighter and slighter in the world, but kept laughing inside at that last thought, because he felt the completely senseless hunch that some fellow human being was going to help him out.
Sure enough – two floors above him a girl called Kathy Sondag had been watching the funny little man struggle down her street. She had gone for another beer and a piss, and when she came back, there her little man was, stuck upside-down in the snow. She laughed, until she realized he wasn’t kicking his legs anymore. So Kathy zipped her shrinking jeans over her thickening belly and got down her stairs just as everything was going black for Roger.
She didn’t have to carry him up to her couch; in fact, once he gathered a dim outline of what was happening to him, he perked up immediately. Kathy got him a beer and wrapped him in a mound of ratty quilts, and he began to feel much better indeed.
“What on earth were you doing out there? What’s your name?”
“Roger. I was coming home from work, of course.”
“Why were you WALKING??!”
“The CTA broke down, of course.”
“Oh, of course. Took me two hours to get downtown today.”
“I’ll bet you didn’t almost die, though.”
“Oh, you weren’t going to die.” She smiled beautifully. She was maybe twenty pounds overweight and seemed self-conscious about it, but she had a stunning face and was the inevitably attractive kind of woman. She went to her stereo and Roger braced himself for some awful girl music. Miraculously, the Insomniacs came out of the speakers. They smiled at each other, so he braced afresh for an awkward conversation.
She had the creamiest skin he’d ever seen – not the albino pallor that lets sick blue veins show through, but a perfect, painted ivory skin, smooth and filled out with white flesh. She had natural ember-red hair and wide, unswept chestnut eyes. “You aren’t Mexican, are you?” he said.
She shook her head charmingly, freshly amused by a question that, just yesterday, she’d been sick to death of. “I’m Swedish and Japanese,” she said.
“So what are you doing in THIS neighborhood?”
She laughed at him. “What are YOU doing?”
“It’s the only neighborhood I can afford that allows white people...”
“Oh, that’s a new way of putting it,” she laughed. “The Dollar Store Strip.”
“So...what do you do?”
“Eat and masturbate. Can you tell?”
“No, I mean –“
“Oh, and I suppose you’re proud of YOUR job? What do YOU ‘do’?”
“Er...point taken.” He shuffled his wet feet.
“Let me take your shoes off...let me get to the point, actually,” she said, getting his shoes and socks off and wrapping his feet in a towel with one professional motion. He guessed she was a waitress, or maybe she sold clothes. “I’ve put on some weight since my boyfriend left me, if you hadn’t noticed.” She lifted her shirt and patted her snowy paunch. “So I haven’t...had a man...in a while.” She giggled. “I usually wouldn’t be so forward, especially considering the...shape I’m in, but...well, I saw you in that snowbank, and well, look at you!”
“What’s wrong with me?!”
“Did you notice you only shaved half of your face? And you’re pretty scrawny. Not to mention that you live out here. At your age?” She laughed, but not cruelly.
“I...forgot about the beard...” he said, rubbing his jaw, hoping she’d notice the firm lines under the scruff. “I don’t usually...”
“I think it’s SEXY,” she said, and took his arm. He sure didn’t give her any resistance. His penis had been strangling itself against his pants ever since she cracked the beer. “You’re so fucked up,” she said, forming her firm wide lips into a sarcastic smile, dragging him into the bedroom. “SOOO fucked up, it’s SEXY...”
She tore off her clothes herself. He tried to savor the soft sea foam glow of her skin, but somehow, before he could try to hang on to anything, he was in her up to his balls. She screamed with glee. THIS IS LIFE! was all he could think. LIFE!! LIIIIFE!!!!! She was so wet he could barely feel how goddamn TIGHT she was! He finished as fast as any kid, but she came, too, squeezing and squealing, a thick wet alto moan of feminine cupidity that had him ready to go again as soon as she was through. They slammed back together, over and over, their tongues turned from word into flesh, flesh, flesh...After the second go he had to sit on the edge of the bed and pant for a moment, his Adam’s apple bobbing. She took it gently into her lascivious fingers, like a swollen clitoris, and let her other hand wander down his neck on the way to his groin. She began to squeeze at his throat until the panting changed to panic, then let go and clutched his dick between her soft thighs...his hidden savior in the forest...oh, god OGOD! he screamed.
For an hour, they napped. But only one hour. When the sun grew high on the capped white world, as she buried her face between his legs to make sure he was ready for one more round, he happened to look at the clock. He was two hours late for work already. He smirked and pulled her up into his lap. “Ahhhhhh,” she sighed, “I think you can do this forever...”
“Can you hand me the phone babe, I gotta call my boss.”
“You’re not leaving now??!!”
“Oh no.” He dialed the office and asked for Karl’s extension. His voice broke a bit as Kathy bounced between his legs.
“HellO???!!!” Karl snapped in his usual panicked tones.
“KURT, IT’S ROGER!”
“Roger, where the hell are you?”
“KARL, MY DICK IS ROCK HARD! ROCK HARD, KARL!!! I’VE BEEN SCREWING FOR TWELVE HOURS AND MY DICK’S A CHERRY POPSICLE!! JAMES MCMANUS, HA HA HA HA HAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!”
Karl sighed. “Well, Roger, just...make sure you come in eventually, okay?”
∞
Promise Me
the Moon and the Stars
by Jim Munroe
I work the night shift so it’s easier for them to get me.
“Hiya Max. What’s up?”
“Not too much, Mark,” I say. “Just woke up.”
“Oh, shit, sorry—I forgot, the night shift.”
“S’okay, hadda get up anyway.”
“So what have you been up to lately?” Mark said. It sounded like he was eating something.”
“Went to a movie yesterday with Flora.”
“Oh yeah! The girl... well, how’s it going with her?”
I shrugged. “I dunno. I didn’t get any signals, so I didn’t...”
“Aw man!’ Mark chastised. “Forget that crap, Just Do It!”
My stomach dropped. I had known Mark since third year at college. Five years. But I continued, just to be sure. “What about you? What you been up to?” I tried to sound distracted, casual.
“Aw, not much. We were supposed to go to this restaurant yesterday but then I saw the prices. We went to McDonald’s instead. Hey, have you tried the McSoyburger? It’s really—“
I slammed the phone down. Bastard. I mean, sloganeering is one thing, but a fucking product endorsement? I brought up his name on the phone and told it to block all future calls.
I thought back to the last time we had lunch. He had picked up the tab. I was surprised—he’d just been laid off. Don’t worry about it, your nuts and berries don’t cost that much, he said.
That was another thing—there’s no way he would have eaten a McSoyburger! He was always veggie bashing, despite the few friends it made him. One in four people didn’t eat meat, for Christ’s sake, it was a significant demographic—
That’s when it all made sense. He would have stood to make a bundle if he could have pulled it off—a product placement with member of the target demographic. It would have been worth a lot if he was working for one of the new personal marketing startups. More than our friendship, I guessed, and with a heavy heart I erased him from my speed dial.
###
I missed Mark. He was, in a way, my only tangible link to the average person on earth. I didn’t trust anyone who trusted the corporations. Flora and I had a bitter fight after I told her I couldn’t bear another movie about soda pop choices and the young people who make them.
I got involved more deeply with a group of malcontents called the Harmless Cranks that met every week. When the news about AT+T’s A Big Step For Mankind campaign reached our stuffed ears—none of us enjoyed infotainment—we took it hard. But preparations were made.
The AT+T people said that the billion dollars it was donating to the special children fund would spark a billion smiles. They said if they didn’t do it, someone else would do it anyway. Murphy Brown, in her straightforward manner. explained that carpet-bombing the moon would actually go a long way in making it habitable for humans.
One of us Harmless Cranks had a job safety testing personal shuttles. They didn’t have weapons, unfortunately, but another one of us said quietly that he might be able to jerry-rig some disrupters. We nodded without smiling. It was not exciting, this project, it was numbingly dreadful. But it needed to be done. I agreed to coordinate the first wave. I would not live in a place where night was sponsored by a telecommunications company, its logo glowing yellow-white over all future midnight rendezvous. No.
###
My mom gave me the news. It had been tied up in the courts for months and I had hoped the campaign would die a horrible death.
“Now I know you’re upset, dear, but if it wasn’t them it’d be Coke or Pepsi or McDonalds or something. Plus, that billion dollars will go a long way. Remember those kids born with cancer?”
“The ones with the parents who worked at the cell phone factory?” I said dully.
“Yes, Sony, I believe. Was it Sony, dear? I can’t remember...”
I didn’t say anything for a second. Then got up. Looked through the closet for my suitcase. There it was.
“It was the one with the little jingle, ‘Forward, forward to the future world!’ Yes, well, how has it been at work, dear?”
I scanned the contents of my silvery suitcase, wondering if she got extra money for singing the damn thing. Probably. “Work’s been fine. But I’ve got more healthy concerns now, like protecting the moon from hateful, filthy bloodsuckers.”
I snapped the suitcase closed, listening for my mom’s reaction. I could hear her breathing. I hefted the suitcase in one hand. Plutonium cells were heavier than they looked!
Slyly, I said, “So I’ll leave the phone off the hook so you can register a few more product endorsements, OK?”
“Oh, thank you dear,” she said, tittering nervously. “It’s just that things have been so tight recently, with the payments doubled up. Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft, Micro…”
My suspicion confirmed, I hung up immediately. I had a sudden, irrational image of Mom stealing the coins from my dead eyes.
For neatness’s sake, I blocked her, then erased her from my speed dial. I couldn’t remember what her face looked like. Then I pressed the only button left.
The Harmless Cranks.
“George’s Carpet Cleaning Service,” Romano answered guardedly.
“Max here.” I took a breath. “It’s time.”
∞
All the Rage
by Jennifer Callahan
Live flesh has amnesia; it can forget an affront in the time it takes to adjust the shower head. A corpse is far less forgiving. If dead men tell no tales, dead bodies certainly do. Sean has leaned over the slab in advanced anatomy and read these accounts firsthand. Pulmonary edema, usually an indicator of heart disease but occasionally a signpost for electric shock. Charred lungs describing a lifetime of abuse in stark, minimalist prose.
The privilege of the last word is the sole advantage that the dead hold over the living. No mortal being can dispute a corpse. Her version of events would be written plainly in bruises and scrapes; her stomach, laid open and probed, would reveal the pizza they had shared less than four hours ago.
The paper plates still sit on the floor, the half-eaten crusts an invitation for the duplex’s nest of carpenter ants. Alexis’s plate is easy to spot from the stack of pepperoni circles that she’d excavated from the folds of cheese. She never ate meat. He should have remembered that.
“She awake?” The voice carries down the stairwell. Head. So nicknamed, despite rumors to the contrary, for his superior thought processes. Donovan Headley, the brightest light in any harbor; the dead lock for valedictorian come spring; the bastard who broke every grading curve. It had all been his idea.
“Not yet,” Joel shouts over the muted applause emanating from the stereo. One of Sean’s many bootlegs of Dave Matthews Band, sound quality terrible but hopelessly authentic; proof that he was there. Joel steps over Sean on his way down the stairs. He disappears into the kitchen and returns with two beers.
“Smile, Sean,” Joel says, attempting to push his glasses up the bridge of his nose while carrying a bottle in each hand. “It’s a party.” He offers a beer to Sean.
“I’ve had too much already.” Sean takes it anyway.
Head comes down the stairs, sandy hair plastered to his scalp. Clad only in a ratty towel, water droplets cling to him in much the same manner that fine women and good fortune always do. “Move it, boys; you’re blocking my path.”
Sean remains rooted to the fourth step. Joel sprawls onto the landing.
“Is that the last beer?” Head asks, pointing to the bottle that Joel clutches to his chest, the neck pointing to heaven, like a sundial.
“Yup.” In the past six hours, they have finished an entire case. Joel has done most of the work.
Head leans forward, adjusting his towel to compensate for the movement, and lifts the bottle from Joel’s unresisting hand. In this house, Head has tacit permission to take whatever he wants.
“Why don’t you go for a beer run, Sean,” Head says, in the genial tone that teeters dangerously between a request and an order. “You can drop Alexis off on the way.”
“She’s still asleep,” Sean says weakly.
Head stands over Joel, tipping the bottleneck until fluid gold spills onto Joel’s forehead. Joel squeezes his eyes closed, brays with laughter. Head adjusts his trajectory and aims the next splash directly down Joel’s throat.
Joel rolls onto his side, dribbling beer onto the already-stained carpet. “Gimme a chance to swallow,” he sputters.
“She’s still asleep, Head,” Sean repeats.
Head scratches himself under the towel. “So? Just walk her to the door and go.”