Featured Fiction

The girl’s demeanor is soccer-maternal now, making sure everyone hydrates, making sure everyone gets a pamphlet titled How Sturdy Is Your Belief Structure? which concludes if you don’t pray or stand by your faith then your structure has already crumbled, is already as sad as a Kansas song. Believing in nothing but unintended consequence, I know that my structure is sound. Rand begins to talk, to sweat while thinking about talking, and hits the floor after thinking about a response to the question How are you? What he was thinking about saying is I can’t remember what I was thinking about this time yesterday. The memory problem. The incredulity problem. Florence Green, who lived to be 110, most likely experienced these problems.

That information was this: There appeared to have been some kind of calamity at Parkman Publishing’s corporate headquarters, consequently crippling the phone and internet capabilities of all their satellite offices, the call center included. However, this complete inability to actually do his or her job notwithstanding, no employee was allowed to leave early. Employees were, though, allowed to use their cell phones freely, a flagrant reversal of standard company policy.

Of course, given that the call center was situated in a former fallout shelter composed almost entirely of concrete, and located just to the left of the middle of nowhere, and just barely eked out crap cellular reception on a good day, the employees therein took this more as a taunt from corporate than a welcomed concession. Sheila herself only received the message when she went onto the roof to smoke.

Some of the drawers in the tallboy were hanging part way out, revealing the edges of a tangled mass of grubby looking clothes. The bed was sloppily made, a faded maroon paisley bedspread yanked half-arsed over the pillows. And there was clutter and books—a ridiculous, insane number of books—everywhere: falling off the shelves, stacked against walls, jammed into corners between bits of furniture. Old books, with yellowed pages, their spines declaring the owner’s interest in arcane spirituality and obscure cultures. Life with the Ancestors. Embodied Spirits: Ritual Carvings of the Asmat. Among the Art-loving Cannibals of the South Seas.

The show that night didn’t go exactly as planned. My quartet stood on the cracked wooden stage at Big Ed’s and harmonized all our hits. Numbers like “Oh, Baby, Why You’d Take a Hovercraft to Get Away From Me?” and “I Miss You Like I Miss the Abandoned Textile Factory, Baby” and our signature tune, “There’s a Million Dead Tilapia Outside My Window, Baby (Everything Reminds Me of You).” We wore our trademark uniforms: black slacks, white dress shirts, buttoned down red vests, and of course, boater caps with red trim. But nothing stirred Big Ed or the barflies to delight.

He never had fun anymore because of his BOOK and he rarely thought about anything else. There was no dress code when he worked in his second floor loft office writing it. A jungle of leaves surrounded him. He flailed away the wrens or other creatures who dared perch on the maple tree’s branches. He had to be alone, even though he was in his northside home with his wife and daughter. He was alone in his mind, alone in eternity.

On warm summer days he often sat at the typewriter dressed in his underwear, staring at the computer screen for hours, typing each letter carefully, dissecting every sentence. He had already rewritten the first chapter over 5,000 times. Pieces of crumpled paper were scattered all over his office. Some had only a rejected sentence; others had a rejected word. The top of his desk was so thick with paper that pencils disappeared into the abyss never to be recovered. The room stunk of raw ink.

“But I don’t WANT to be queen. And that rhyme was kind of shitty,” Kerstin replied, somewhat rudely. “You see, I find the king to be an asshole, dear little man, so please do not turn that flax to gold, for I do not wish to marry an asshole! Also, I think he is not attracted to, or particularly interested in anything but my nonexistent gold-producing abilities, and even these, I think, are losing their charm.”

“You shall be queen, by my left toe,
For that is how these stories go.”

“Fuck,” Kerstin spat. “Dude, come on, seriously. Stop rhyming. I can’t marry this guy.”

Henrik used to tell me that for any person to be truly considered great, that person needed a field against which to prove or define his greatness. When he talked like this, my head shrunk to the size of thumbprint; it detached from my body & tried to find some new kind of rhythm. Unfortunately, my hands have always been too clunky to deal with the elegance of grand concepts & my head knew this. This detachment served me well. It reminded people that I was an indomitable presence, but it also signaled that I was pretty useless in other delicate situations.

Like when the whole city starts to shift out of synch so all that’s left is a kind of ghost city, a thin cry that used to be a vivid & fully alive kind of scream. People would look at me & expect me to do more than notate the shape & color of every leaf. Actually, this isn’t theoretical. I’m talking here in generalities, like a case study, when in fact what I am describing is a real occurrence.

“I don’t know exactly how this happened—Heavens! If I would’ve known, why I, I—but it appears anyway that my White House Press Secretary and my backup White House Press Secretary, both of them are tied up tonight. One’s daughter has a thing, and the other one is good friends with the one’s daughter and so, too, is attending the aforementioned thing.”

President President pausing, working out the dual relationship to the thing in his head. Quits (aforementioned thinking of the aforementioned thing).

“So anyway, I’ve got a room full of press in the back, they’re in the garage actually, and I need someone to announce my new motorcycle. I bought a Yamaha. Yamaha’s patriotic, right? American? Just yesterday I saw the most beautiful man on the television, he was wearing dark sunglasses and he had this magnificent black mustache…”

The McBatemans nodded enthusiastically as Brenda showed off his MOT certificates. She was beginning to buzz. She wanted to load up the VHS tape player with her Romancing The Stone video so she could watch it as soon as Jack left. He didn’t like Michael Douglas. He thought the actor was his competition. She restrained herself and instead pulled out Jack’s childhood pictures.

After another round of tea and half of Brenda’s special chocolate digestives were eaten before Jack came through the door. His time keeping was a bit a disappointment but she knew the couple would still be impressed. The McBatemans stood up to shake Jack’s hand but immediately sat back down. Jack’s freshly ironed shirt was now untucked and covered in a brown stain, his hair was tangled and messy and the overpowering smell of the pub and cigarettes hid the delightful aroma of his aftershave. Brenda snatched the tabloid paper, which had a naked woman on the front cover and shoved it down the back of the sofa.

A gypsy tried to sell him a simulacrum of a necklace. Souvenir shops displayed garish, tacky memorabilia of the former Pope. These days Giacomo generally only went to the Vatican to buy cigarettes, since Italian state taxes did not apply there. He crossed the border, and trod once again through the Vatican’s echoing, painted halls.

His destination today was the office of Randall Krone, a Curial Monsignor, an American. Giacomo knocked and entered, and the Monsignor looked hungrily at the parcel Giacomo placed on his desk before unwrapping it.

Monsignor Krone turned the statuette around about ninety degrees and continued to inspect her, as if trying to stare her down. Giacomo felt very weary. Today was swelteringly hot. Monsignor Krone rotated the statuette another ninety degrees. “Big tits,” he commented in English. “Proves she’s a nature goddess.”