Rusty Barnes's Blog: Fried Chicken and Coffee, page 34

Interview with Chris Offutt from the Iowa Review

Don't miss it: Offutt interview by Alex Dezen

APOSTROPHE AT THE WHATELY DINER, poem by Joshua Michael Stewart

The waitress has a hummingbird

tattoo behind her ear. She sings

Volare, over the clanking and clatter.

I sit in a booth next to a window.

I let the sun warm my hands

as I wait for my soup and bread.

This morning I found a nest

of your hair in the upstairs drain.

I scooped it out with a wad

of tissue and flushed it down

the toilet. It's still your bathroom,

your curlers unmoved, my shaver

in the bath near the kitchen. How long

will you keep up with this haunting?

You're the one I wish I could tell,

even if it would break your heart,

that my waitress has eyes so icy

blue they seem silver. Looking

into them is to watch the dawn

break through a forest in winter.

 

Joshua Michael Stewart has had poems published in Massachusetts Review, Euphony, Rattle, Cold Mountain Review, William and Mary Review, Pedestal Magazine, Evansville Review and Blueline. Pudding House Publications published his chapbook Vintage Gray in 2007. Finishing Line Press will publish his next chapbook Sink Your Teeth into the Light in 2012 He lives in Ware, Massachusetts. Visit him at www.joshuamichaelstewart.yolasite.com

 

 

 

Hasty Leverage, fiction by Brian Jones

They haggled out the terms.

"You know I like to go fishing," Ten said, "at least once a week.  I do not like to work indoors.  I won't make much money."

"Well, but I like to have nice things."

"And I understand that, Joley, and you'll have as good as I can provide you with, but you'll also just have to be reasonable."

Joley sipped her beer.  The night felt oily, cold and good, on her bare arms.

"Where'll we live?"

Ten dug a thumbnail into the pop tab of a Busch can.  The white spray flew up at Joley.  She receded, blinking in outrage her eyelashes now dewed with shattered foam; Ten snickered.

"You turd!"

"What's wrong with my place, the one I got now?" Ten asked.

Joley bugged her eyes and slumped accusingly.

"Ten," she said.  "It's a dirty, single-wide trailerhouse.  It's falling apart.  There's a big hole right in the middle of the living room floor.  Nuh–uh."

Ten shrugged.  "All right.  We'll move."

"Okay, when?"

"As soon's you get moved in with me, we'll move."

"Why do we have to wait until then to move?  That's moving twice."

"Because," Ten said.  "Married people move together."

The real truth was that in his heart, and for years, Ten had imagined the entry into his marriage house as a romantic thing.  Drinking beer all day, hauling boxes with his shirt off.  Cussing and farting around, laughing with his friends, who'd help him out.  Taking breaks to eat delivery pizza—standing up, no napkins—while his pretty wife stayed in the house, unloading and organizing the marital estate.  She'd wear a sundress, order the pizza, go on the beer runs–and when they were done for the day, she'd sit on his lap on a chair in the lawn and listen to his buddies' stories and laugh at his jokes, at his own stories.  Laugh when he and his friends started play-wrestling late at night, when the beer got ahold of them.  Then she'd drag him into the house by the buckle of his belt while the boys hollered and catcalled from the circle of lawn chairs.  Tickling his belly with her fingers, kissing him, loving him, holding him, sending fire through his brains–and she'd fall asleep and he'd go back outside to continue drinking beer, and the boys would roll their eyes and make their bawdy comments, and she'd be waiting in bed for him when he returned at dawn.  That's how he'd always seen it.

"But I'll have to move once," Joley said, "then move again."

"Hon, we can't get married and you still be living with your parents.  Not even for a little while."

"Why not?"

"Dammit Joley, there's just a way things are."

***

Joley's mother, Larissa, encouraged the marriage.

"He's just so good-lookin'," she said.

"He is."

"You two'd have such good-lookin' babies."

"Mama!  Do you like Ten, Daddy?"

"Sure I do," her father said.  He was reading a Playboy magazine at the kitchen table.  He was happy at the prospect of getting Joley out of his house:  the grocery bill, the phone bill, the gas bill, her car payments, insurance, her clothes …

***

Ten's full name was Brandon Mustang Bass.  He was the tenth child of Penelope Ruth Bass and Chason Bass, Jr.

The bobber hit the pond and made a thwock sound like a tennis ball.

"Good lay," Jason said.

"That's what they tell me," Ten said.

They sat in Jason's dad's motorboat on swivelchairs that went the full three-sixty, on seat-cushions that wheezed and dripped old water.  The pond's surface was peaceful and reflected the sun and the image of the boat.  They drank beer for three hours without saying hardly a word, without catching a fish, each silently withdrawing his line from the water and replacing the dead or mangled or escaped minnows out of the tin bucket sitting between them at their feet.

Beery, contemplative, half-jubilant from a day of rest and perfected desire, Jason opened the talks.

"You gonna marry Joley Scudder?"

There came a long pause while Ten cleared out his throat.

"Yeah I believe I will."

"You love her?"

"Yep I think I do."

"Well.  I see that."

"Nn."

Jason now paused.  He watched the pond face shudder.

"She's got her that sweet little rear-end now."

"Fabulous."

The night fell and they returned to the shore and became like wild hogs:  snorting, barking, pounding the earth in search of what fueled them.

***

There was a rickety church in Red Oak, Oklahoma where Joley's mother had learned the manners of Christian living.  The crowd who gathered inside its wood-paneled walls to serve as witnesses to the Scudder-Bass Wedding were, by and large, sunburnt, for they were a youthful crowd, and there had been a joint bachelor-bachelorette party held on the beach at Sardis Lake twenty-four hours earlier.  They did things to each other at that party you'd never believe.  There were seventeen girls there, and four of them got pregnant.  That party had a pregnancy rate.

So everyone was sunburnt and hanged over—all with nagging senses of shame at being in church after what they'd done the day before—and the fabric of rented tuxedos and rented dresses scratched at the burned and waterless flesh of the young.  The wedding went by in a shout.  The principals blew all the big lines.

When it was done, the kids stripped out into play clothes, gobbled up barbecue brisket and wedding cake, got drunk, and resumed the fornicative spirit.

***

Joley woke the next morning in a hotel near Fort Smith, Arkansas, her new husband naked beside her under the stiff hotel sheets.  She explored his bones and cartilage until he waked up.  They showered together, dressed, and went out to the mall.  He bought her a bottle of perfume and a pair of sandals, a cassette tape of Garth Brooks's Ropin' the Wind, a Mexican food lunch, two dresses, and a ticket to see A League of their Own.  She cried and cried against his shoulder during the last fifteen minutes of the show.

***

Ten Bass had four hundred dollars hidden in the only book he owned, a copy of The Book of Mormon he'd ordered free from the LDS church when he was sixteen, understanding it to be a kind of western starring Jesus Christ and featuring Indians.

Joley Bass had no idea this was the extent of her new marital estate.  She carried into Ten's decrepit trailerhouse a set of pink luggage filled up with dresses, panties, trinkets, County Fair ribbons, stuffed animals, a denim-jacketed Bible, all of her makeup, and one large magnification mirror.  She never even unpacked all the way.  They were there together four months when she ran out one night, after a fight over how to slice onions.

"What the fuckin' hell does it matter?"

"You're stupid as shit, just stupid as shit."

"You're a dumb bitch.  God!"

"Why wouldn't you do it that way?"

"Because it DOESN'T MATTER!"

"YES IT DOES!"

"NO IT DOESN'T!"

"YES IT DOES!"

Ten had severed the ends, peeled the skin, and set the onion on the flat side for bisection.

"That's against the grain," Joley had pointed out

"Huh?"

"You don't need to cut it against the grain like that.  You need to cut it with the grain."

"Doesn't matter."

"Yes it does."

"Nah."

"Yes, it does."

"It really doesn't."

And so on.  And so forth.

***

Joley was bawling when she slammed the trailer door and bawled as she walked the half-mile through town, from the bare lot of scrub grasses where Ten kept his trailer, to the home shared by her high school friend Margie Diller and Margie's husband, Phil.

Phil stirred a pot of pinto beans while Margie sat on the couch, holding Joley around the shoulders.

"I just want to go out tonight and have fun and FORGET him," Joley said.

Margie sneaked a look back at Phil.

"It's all right with me," Phil said.  He just wanted to eat his beans and watch his TV in peace for once.

They got ready using Margie's makeup and left the house at eight-thirty in a wake of hairspray fumes.  They bought a bottle of Everclear from the liquor store and two extra-large fountain drink Dr. Peppers from the convenience store.  They drove back and forth through town.  They rolled the windows down and sang along with the radio.

***

Casey Green and Shane Lawson were two young men who'd grown up in Talihina but had left for the oil fields.  They were just home that night to get laundry done and visit their folks.  They were sitting in the grocery store parking lot with a pint of rye whisky on shares when they noticed Phil and Margie's car.  They saw the women through the rolled-down window, singing their lungs out and bouncing in the seats.

"Casey?"

"Yup."

Casey started up the motor and handed over the whisky.

***

They trailed the girls to the north end of town.  Margie hooked Phil's car around the marquee-stand of the Circle H Restaurant.  They were idling there when Shane and Casey pulled up beside them.

"Hey!" Casey yelled out, elbow on the door.

Shane leaned over from the shotgun seat, to let the girls appreciate their numbers.

***

Ten heated up a can of black beans and a can of Ranch Style pinto beans and ate them using slices of white onion like spooning chips.  He didn't know where Joley was, and he didn't give three shits on a slaughterhouse floor.  He listened to baseball on the radio and went to bed.

***

Joley stank of curdled hairspray, liquor, beer, sweat, smoke, dirt (from a fall on her ass in a watershed pasture), dry, mingled venereal fluids and fading perfume; her breath was chunky from all of the above, and from having not brushed her teeth after three hours of sleep in the cab of Casey's pickup truck, and then from having eaten a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos for breakfast.  She had chewed up all her lipstick.  She'd wrinkled her clothes.  She could not have answered with definitiveness which of the two men had put her arms and legs akimbo with hasty leverage in the pickup truck's front seat.  Margie dropped her at the curb near Ten's trailerhouse and pulled away, off to give her own dark accountings.

Joley limped up the rusty stairs (she'd twisted her ankle somehow) and went inside.

The living room air was stale, the morning sun gray and broken.  She stood there a second, letting all the lights adjust.

Suddenly, she heard a brief whistle and a loud thunk.  She flinched and saw an arrow in the wall behind her.  It thrummed at the fletching, like a shook pencil.

Ten sat on a footstool in the corner—his face pale, his body shivering.  He was holding a crossbow.

"Get right the fuck out of here," he said.

"Ten—"

He stood and reached for the pile of arrows at his feet.

"Get out," he said.  His voice lifted and rolled, mad and grave.

"Ten!"

He squatted and fumbled for an arrow and Joley was out the door, screaming like an ambulance.

***

Ten paid a three hundred dollar fine and moved to Ada, Oklahoma.  He lived there for the next four years, working construction.  Joley went back to her parents, and her father watched his monthly overhead rise like a mercury thermometer on a hot afternoon.

***

There was almost no sun left in the day, just a little orange leafing out by the horizon, reflected in the water like night's afterthought, a burn of color to set off the vast and glasslike darkness of the lake.

Ten and Jason sat in the boat.  They kicked a beer can every time they moved their feet, they were that drunk.

"Herrnnh!" Ten said, before a loud and difficult fart plopped out his backside.

"I second that ee-motion," Jason said, and copied Ten.

The grass on the bank sizzled with the mating calls, conversation, gossip and war cries of the wetland insects.  The air was so clean, so cool and aromatic, it touched their nostrils and lips like fingers made of camphor.  Fireflies were starting up.  The balding sky laid bare a crown of stars, hitched together by purple space.

"You ever feel," Ten asked, "like there's jus' somethin' wrong with bein' a man these days?"

"If you're gonna ask me," Jason said, "to do that thing, the … the what's it called … that … choppin' off people's dicks thing … what's it called?"

"Castration."

"If you're gonna ask me to castrate you, so you can live out your lifelong dream of bein' a woman, with a vagina and all—well then, you know I'd do it for you, man.  I'd do anything for you."

Jason stretched out his leg and reached for his pocketknife.

"Give me a second here."

 

Brian Ted Jones was born in 1984 and raised in Oklahoma. He is a graduate of St. John's College. He lives with his wife, Jenne, and their sons, Oscar and GuyJack.

Poems by David S. Pointer

Nashville Punk Scene

Decades & dues before Hank III

cometh with his thermo-chemical

cow punk, Jason & the Scorchers

rolled onto Rock City like a barrel

keg cooler brandishing neon notes

to Nashville's conservative music

establishment stomping Punk's

Liberty Bell hell into the plastered

beer torn psyche's of unfuturistic

fans who would transform the

audience of battleground cowboys

into plum tart gladiators and the

rest of the good timin' globe going

forward with early colony cocktails

and the best new nuclear chemistry

a hot cocktail waitress could carry

 

Off The Farm

The computer

became the global

moneychanger's

milking stool, but

grandpa still

transported his

customer's early

colony cocktails

down moss

mountain in a

'47 Studebaker

pickup on a

stretch of dark–

primitive dirt,

a fireplace tool,

and a .45 riding

bitch and shotgun

 

David S. Pointer currently lives in Murfreesboro, TN. He has a chapbook forthcoming from Writing Knights Press entitled MPs, Snipers and Crime. Growing up, David was the son of a piano-playing bank robber who died when David was 3 years old. David later served in the Marine military police.

Poems by Rosemary Royston

Greasy Creek

The house was made of large, smooth stones

moved years ago by someone unknown,

maybe from the creek out back which snaked

through an Appalachian patch of bamboo.

So much energy went into the outside

that the floor joists gave way long before

they should've.  For three months I lived

with J and C, man and wife.  My upstairs room

a windowed alcove with racks of C's thrift store

clothes and a transistor radio. No cells, no TV.

For entertainment we had skunkweed,

a porch swing, books, a garden.

At least twice a month the pump broke,

leaving us grimy and irritable.

I earned my keep by pulling lettuce, spinach,

squash, cooking biscuits from scratch.

Me with my silly make-up bag and hairdryer,

C with her clear skin and braided mane.

We'd sit on the porch, talk about building

a greenhouse, which never got further

than a dark womb in the earth.

On weekends people appeared—

C's brothers and sisters, or Ed, the neighbor

with the yard full of cars. He was 50, yet had

the slim, tight body of a knife-carrying teen.

His wife, pregnant and smoking, mostly silent.

On Sundays, after everyone wandered

home, C would open the windows

while the sun played on the scratched

wood and Ella's voice filled the room.

I followed that voice to the center of myself,

oblivious to the sinking floor, the wasps nesting

in the corner of the ceiling.

Vonda

Standing behind her you may be tricked

thinking she is 16, all tiny in her snug jeans

and pink hoodie, but something gives her away—

the rounded shoulders, the brittle blonde

with black roots.  When she turns to face you

while waiting in line at the Dixie Quick

there's no doubt she's long past Sweet Sixteen,

if she ever had one.  One son dead, the other in jail.

Three husbands later she owns a double-wide

and the best view in the county, Double Knob

in plain sight from her bay window. As the sun sets

she sits in her plastic Adirondack, taps ashes

into a beer can and talks on her cell

as red bleeds down past the horizon.

 

Rosemary Royston's chapbook Splitting the Soil is forthcoming in early 2012 by Redneck Press. She holds an MFA in Writing from Spalding University and is a lecturer at Young Harris College. Rosemary's poetry has been published in journals such as The Comstock Review, Main Street Rag, Coal Hill Review, FutureCycle, and Alehouse. Her essays on writing poetry are included in Women and Poetry: Tips on Writing, Teaching and Publishing by Successful Women Poets, McFarland. She was the recipient of the 2010 Literal Latte Food Verse Award. She currently serves as the Program Coordinator for the North Carolina Writers Network-West.

http://theluxuryoftrees.wordpress.com/

 

Pruning, non-fiction by Ginger Hamilton Caudill

Last night's storm raged for four hours. A friendly warm sun and brilliant blue sky coaxed me outside with the promise of new growth in the garden.

I inspect my pepper and bean plants first. The peppers are thriving. One even has a shy pair of white blooms nestled beneath a protective green canopy. In a month, they'll be glossy sweet pepper fruit. All but the tallest of the bean plants survived the blowing rain intact. I found it bent at the soil line, a casualty of hard rain, gusty wind, and its own fragility. I lift its limp body and prop it against the bean pole, hopeful it will recover.

I head for the tea rose section. Unattended for a year, the kerria japonica vine is smothering the north corner. It's an attractive plant with nickel-sized yellow pom-pom flowers generously sprinkled on a lush green background. I haven't pruned it since last summer. Rigorous cancer treatment required that my energy remain focused on repairing and healing my body.

The kerria has flourished during my absence. As I cull unwanted growth, I envision my immune system as a distracted gardener who got lazy and permitted cancer to grow first—just in one small corner—and soon the aberrant cells took over. My body's gardener tended a distant orchard and, when it returned, was unable to stop the growth that had taken over my left breast.

As I cut back the kerria, I discover four tiny green rose buds at the ends of long spindly shoots stretching from a rose bush barely the size of a cantaloupe. Somehow this minuscule, pale pink tea rose survived despite my neglect. The rose won awards for its beauty once. Now it's shapeless and wild.

I'm ruthless with the kerria, trimming it back to its assigned three-square-foot section. With the vine curtailed, the rose now stands in a clearing. The scraggly shoots with their miniature pea-sized buds remind me of antennae. The plant relays a desperate signal to the sun: Feed me, save me; I want to live.

A rosarian would say it's no longer a rose bush, yet the blooms smell as sweet as ever.

My left breast itches and I rub it gently after removing my gardening glove. The skin is raw and swollen from a summer of radiation treatments. Seven weeks of radiation treatments destroyed my ability to perspire in the affected area. Heat builds until I consciously provide an outlet for its release.

My rubbing doesn't provide relief; instead, it sets off a chain reaction of more intense itching. It itches, I rub. It itches more.

I gather the clippings and build a neat stack at the curb. The prickly sensation in my breast is more intense now—maddening, really. Under my straw hat, my hair is damp. I can't help imagining the dry San Diego climate. We left San Diego and returned to West Virginia; six months later I was diagnosed with breast cancer. The high desert's thirty percent humidity would be kinder to me. West Virginia's sodden summer air forces perspiration to collect.

Moisture clings to the skin until gravity takes over. Rivulets of perspiration slide down my face and neck. I pile on the last of the kerria cuttings and quit for the day. The heat and humidity have won.

I go indoors after setting my gloves and hat on a tower of unused clay pots. My eyes adjust to the dim light, and I'm momentarily refreshed by the cool air inside the house. In another hour I'll need to turn on the air conditioner, but right now it's comfortable.

I enjoy a tall glass of ice cold water before taking a shower. The cold liquid fills my mouth then slides down my throat until my body's heat defeats it and I can no longer sense the coolness inside me. I press the glass against the hot flesh under my shirt, stealing a moment of relief until the cool water of the shower can soothe my overheated breast.

A few minutes later, I'm standing under the strong stream in the shower, lathering up with lavender-scented soap—a gift from my mother-in-law—which reminds me of the kerria vine she gave me.

"It'll take over if you don't watch out."

My fingers smooth across the angry red scars on my chest. I close my eyes and concentrate on the water that beats down on my back.

Already, I feel better.

I won't know until tomorrow if the bean plant survives. The tea rose won't win any contests for a year or two, but for now it's safe.

I'm back on the job, and I think they'll be just fine.

 

Ginger Hamilton Caudill lives, loves, and learns near Charleston, West Virginia. Her fiction and creative nonfiction can be found throughout Internet publications as well as in more than half a dozen anthologies. After a six-year hiatus from writing following a stroke, Caudill is back to producing her unique brand of writing.

The Writer's Arms, non-fiction by Ben Nadler

Last year, Shooting Sportsman published a book entitled Hemingway's Guns: The Sporting Arms of Hemingway.  The idea of the book is that through the cataloguing of the various guns Ernest Hemingway owned over the course of his life – from his first break-action air rifle, to his trusty Winchester Model 12, to the Scott shotgun he used to commit suicide – a sort of biography can be established.  "Hemingway's guns," the authors argue in their introduction, "as well as how he acquired them and what he did with them, tell us about Hemingway as a man."

I understand the skepticism that many people in the literary world have towards such an approach.  The brandishing of guns was certainly an element of Hemingway's macho persona, and it is tempting to dismiss any discussion of Hemingway's relationship to firearms as merely a glorification of this persona.  Furthermore, a book filled with this many pictures of guns is unlikely to appeal to a reader who does not already have a strong interest in firearms.  Nonetheless, I do believe that Hemingway the marksman has a lot to teach us about not just Hemingway the man, but Hemingway the writer as well.

Ralph Ellison certainly thought so.  In a 1954 Art of Fiction interview with The Paris Review, he described the two parallel influences that Hemingway held on him when he was in his early twenties:

I practiced writing and studied Joyce, Dostoyevsky, Stein, and Hemingway. Especially Hemingway; I read him to learn his sentence structure and how to organize a story. I guess many young writers were doing this, but I also used his description of hunting when I went into the fields the next day. I had been hunting  since I was eleven, but no one had broken down the process of wing-shooting for me, and it was from reading Hemingway that I learned to lead a bird.

 For Ellison, learning to control the swing of a shotgun and learning to write a solid sentence were part of the same process.  In Hemingway, he found a teacher who had a fundamental understanding of both the very physical reality of shooting and the more abstract–but no less precise–structuring of prose.

I have discovered this relationship between writing and marksmanship in my own life as well. Last year, I entered the MFA program at The City College of New York.  I was already a fairly disciplined writer, but the structure of such a program can greatly increase your focus and your attention to craft.  If nothing else, you are in an environment where you are expected by your peers and instructors to produce, and to improve.  A few months into my MFA experience, I joined the rifle club at the West Side Pistol & Rifle Range, the last remaining shooting range in Manhattan.  I have shot guns sporadically throughout my life, but this was the first time I shot with enough regularity to really develop a shooting practice.  My girlfriend and I made a pledge that, no matter how busy we were with grad school and work, we would take the time out to get to the range at least once a week, to target shoot with .22 caliber rifles.

What I have found is that these shooting sessions are not so much breaks from my writing practice as they are a complimentary part of the same larger practice.  There is a shared establishment of a regular routine, and a resultant feeling of progress.  There is a growing familiarity with the tools at my disposal, and a growing knowledge of how to wield them with precision.

Over this past summer break, a poet friend, Liat, and I spent some time visiting another friend who lives in a mountain cabin in Colorado.  One day, when our host was off working, Liat and I decided to get some shooting in.  We brought two rifles with us–a semi-automatic SKS, and an older pump action .22–and spent the day chatting and plinking at targets.  We set up cans and sticks, and did our best to knock them down.  We discussed the weight of the guns, the relative smoothness of their actions.  We spoke of the need to breathe deeply and line up the open sights, of the absurdity of firing off rounds just to hear the bang.

During a break from shooting, we sat down on some rocks, and talked about other things.  Liat brought up the book of creative nonfiction that she's been wanting to write, saying said she felt that she needed to put this project off indefinitely in order to devote herself to her martial arts practice.  Her daily training at the dojo was taking all of her focus, and the book project would have to wait until some future time, when she is in a different place.

My immediate reaction was very negative.  I have always been of the opinion that the only way to get a book written in the future is to start writing it now.  I told her that she would only get closer to her project by writing towards it, not by putting it off.  On reflection, though, I recognize that it is not fair to say she is "putting it off," as it is not an issue of  avoiding the work at hand.   Rather, she is engaging in training that will help her in the development of her craft.  The understanding of the body, the understanding of force, the mastery of control and precision in a strike, and the discipline of a daily practice will all contribute greatly to her ultimate engagement with this prose work.  The martial arts side of her practice that she's developing now will brace the writing side of her practice in the future.

At the end of that same day, I was forced to use a gun to kill.  I would have been more than content to shoot nothing but cans, but on our way home I stumbled upon a rattlesnake right outside the cabin's front door.  Had I encountered a snake up in the mountains, I would have simply backed away, and allowed it to go its own way. This rattlesnake, however, was not six feet from the cabin where our friend lived year round, and not two feet from the entrance to the doghouse where his curious German Shepherd napped.  It simply could not be allowed to disappear into the grass, and reemerge later.  We could tell by its size that the snake was young, but this only meant that it had more highly concentrated venom to inject into my friend's foot or his dog's muzzle.

I knelt a couple yards behind the snake with the pump rifle.  It sensed danger, and as it raised its head to look around, I placed a .22 caliber bullet in the center of its neck.

It was a fatal shot, but even after the venom-filled head was completely severed, it took nearly an hour for the body to stop writhing.  When the headless snake finally did stop moving, we skinned and gutted it.  My friends tacked the intricately patterned skin to a board to dry, while I fried the meat in a skillet.

I'd gone out to shoot at cans, and ended up killing a beautiful animal.  This experience made it clear to me that I need to remember, every time I pick up a firearm, that I am engaging in a practice whose stake are ultimately those of life and death.  This is true of sitting down to write as well.  I keep the rattle on my desk so I don't forget.

Ben Nadler is the author of the novel Harvitz, As To War, which was released in November by Iron Diesel Press. Other recent writing of Ben's can be found in The Rumpus, Harpur Palate, and The Safety Pin Review.

Ben lives in Brooklyn, New York.  He spends most of his time at the City College of New York (where he is pursuing an MFA), but prefers to spend his time hanging out on the fishing pier in Coney Island.

 

Hallucinations, prose by David Barrett

Diego is dead. And I killed him. That was the last favor I gave to my dying friend. Healthy in all discernable aspects, but his mind intent on killing him. What must it be like to find yourself suddenly bound naked in a field covered in honey and unable to move as crows and vultures fly overhead? Diego knew how every muscle in the body screams out and the mind wants to move but there seems to be a disconnect between the nervous system and the rest of the body. No matter how deeply you know that you have to move, your body will not obey. It is going to do what it knows. The mind will soon lapse and follow. Nothing can be done, but to be still and hope not to be seen by the birds. Hope is all there is. There cannot be a God or god or Supreme Being. There can't be. If something were out there to watch over me, how could it let me get into this situation? There will be no Deus ex Machina.

Diego wanted freedom. He chased it and only it, negating all else that came his way. He said "No" to so much, to everything until eventually he was chained to his freedom. We all make choices. Sure. But how do you see this coming? How can anyone see the future? It's not possible.

Diego said, "I'm looking for a lifestyle change. I'm not so thirsty now. I moved out of my living situation and into hell." This is not the time for the thirst or old lifestyles or other living situations. That's all another story. This is only about the HELL.

Diego's lifestyle, the one that is about to explained, is not assumed, as say, the first day of school is thrust upon a child. Instead, it's eased into. He flushed himself out of New York City and into the not quite New England, not so Southern, not quite Mid-western crossroads of the Americana town of Pittsburgh. We are also beginning another relationship with Crystal.

I. Meth

Crystal Methamphetamine. I had used a lot of Ecstasy and Mollie…MDMA, ok, methyl dioxin methamphetamine in the past, so I didn't figure this was a huge leap. What took me by surprise were the new sleeping patterns. My first encounter kept me awake for 3 days. I then slept 10 hours. Next encounter 4 days. I then slept 14 hours. This went on–5 days 18 hours, 3 days 15 hours, 4 days 24 hours, 7 days 30 hours, 8 days, 48 hours, 3 days 12 hours. 90% of the awake time I ingested nothing but Meth. The final 10% was spent trying to come down by not doing any more and eating ice cream and Gatorade. The final day or days were pretty much filled with desperation.

Cletus and I  tried to sell. He was from West Virginia; therefore, Cletus. Diego and Cletus ran hard. We ran real hard, selling, buying, smoking it, snorting it and trying to get with women. But, we were too much in the pursuit of the next high to do many women. I had my woman, the divorcee, so there was not much reason to pursue others. Or, so I thought. Shit was going wrong on that front too. She was married. She was one of those married people that didn't wear a ring. She confronted me suddenly with her husband wanting to meet me. A whole tirade ensued and we split, her unwillingly and me out of my mind.

I was up for 4 or 5 days this time. A lot of ecstasy had been floating around along with acid. Cletus and I had gotten our hands on about 50 pills of different varieties and a couple of 10 strips of acid. I had probably taken a hit of acid along with pills on top of a shit load of Meth, but the acid had little effect. I'd say it was a short trip. We had enough pills and Crystal to subdue what acid does, even though it is normally a dominant mind alerter. We had run into a couple of groups of young people looking for ecstasy. It's usually really popular among the college kids, and that's where we were finding ourselves. I know that in the middle of this mind bender I met an ex-hooker turned stripper/squatter who ended up at my apartment for a week or two. After meeting her, about day 3, we continued on, snorting, selling, this being our pathetic excuse for partying. I know that it was a Sunday. It must have been the fifth day without sleep when we arrived at a house rented by a few college girls.

Sleep, the need to sleep and the lack of sleep has been the subject of many studies. With sleep deprivation, shadows begin to move on the edge of visibility. I hear that this is due to tired eye muscles. All I know for sure is that coupled with the paranoia of amphetamine use, this phenomenon becomes personified into a spy-like network of special agents called "The Shadow People." They appear at the edge of normal consciousness, at one of the far outposts on the road leading away from reality.

Cletus wanted to get with one of those college girls, but that was usually impossible with the drugs totally debilitating him. He didn't seem like much of a player before getting high, and I thought he was much too passive-aggressive. Regardless, we ended up at this house. We were fully tweaked before we entered. Our main purpose was to unload a bunch of pills and that we did. These kids were so happy with the product (I guess they had done some the night before) that they rolled a few joints. This is what college kids do. I must say that in general the duo of Cletus and Diego didn't drink alcohol or smoke Marijuana. Both were antipathetic to our goals of speeding out of our minds. We were far beyond such sophomoric activities, which we grouped in with huffing butane from cigarette lighters, holding your breath until you pass out, and taking Ritalin. We were Speed aesthetes. We only did the finest Crystal and could spot cut shit with our eyes closed.

Meth is an honest drug. It puts you down quick and hard. It'll keep you up for days on end, dreaming of sex, but too obsessed with the next hit to do anything about it. As you continue to snort it or smoke it, the chemical burns your mucus membranes, and your throat won't let you breathe or swallow. It swells the entire oral cavity. It tells you to go down. It forces you to get a drink of water, to quench an undeniable thirst, to soothe an interminable ache. Yes, it rids you of all the tortures of the consciousness created by it, ironically enough. And it rides you into oblivion. The coating of shit on your teeth after days of smoking hit after hit after hit won't come off. It feels disgusting and reminds you constantly that you are too. So this marathon of using, dancing, fucking, snorting and smoking turns to obsessing over everything. I would rearrange furniture, files and books over and over. All of this ends with it dropping you. It dropped me time after time. I ran out and I ran out of time, sleeping like a man who hasn't slept for 5 days. And I would be out of life. You are passed out beyond reckoning. There is no waking from that slumber until the grumblings of hunger outweigh your need for rest.

Marijuana is a dishonest drug. You can smoke it for years and it seems to do nothing bad. It provides focus and release from cares. So, when I smoked, I found I was more capable of getting some things accomplished. What in fact was happening was that I had fewer things that I wanted to accomplish. It is insidious in that it is the most socially acceptable illegal drug. I think that all the really smart people dole it out to their rivals so that they can get the really good green stuff. That's just conspiracy theory shit that most potheads are fascinated by and talk about to no end. "Did you know this? Can you believe that? George Bush actually flew one of the planes into the World Trade Center. The way pot became illegal was the result of fancy dealings in Congress to grant the patent for the chemical process to make wood pulp into paper to a couple of America's most famous so they could get rich, well. That's just deplorable!" Crazy shit like that and most of it based in truth. They should let us smoke it! Seriously though, it surreptitiously made me a somnambulist. I found myself an automaton, ready to smoke, play video games, and watch TV. It took away my drive to go out and get a girl. When they were around it was okay, but try to get me off the couch to get one. That shit stays in you forever. Okay, just like a month. Did I miss that it was making me stupider? Yes, at first, I didn't get it. Then I read and realized that it was making my neurotransmitters fire on different paths. It made me actually work harder to think with less desire to do so. Ugh. I was forced to quit thanks to the great laws of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the ultra smooth detective work of the University Park Police. So after two years off, I tried the shit again. Man, it was not fun. I just sat around and did nothing. Sneaky "f-ing" weed.

Anyway, that shit slid right into our good time. It was mid morning. The sun was out, and I had a date with the married one at four o'clock. The Shadow People had stayed with the night where they are comfortable. I had been left alone with Cletus so that we could finish this business and re-up. Out came these blunts. Blunts? I was waiting for 40s of Olde E to come out of the fridge. I was way too good for this, but I imbibed. I didn't want to offend their offering. I mean I was a professional drug addict. If I couldn't condescend to smoke a little pot with the amateurs every once in a while, I myself would look like an auteur. So I took a couple hits as these things went around. I didn't like it, but did my best. The girls and boys seated cross-legged in a circle seemed to get more chatty as they got stoned. They didn't understand they were going to ruin their MDMA. But it was not my place to help these kids achieve their best high. How the hell were they getting chatty? For me, it seemed like the world stopped moving. Please remember I was on FF x64 and suddenly got put on slow motion. Fuck. Everything was so slow, yet I could hear the words coming out of their mouths at the FF x 64 speed (go check your DVD's fast forward speeds if you are confused by this). This was messed up. I was suddenly not having a good time. I thought I caught my name here and there and became extremely worried that they were talking about me right in front of my face, because I assumed they knew that I couldn't actually make out what they were saying.

Cletus caught my eye and he knew something was wrong. I pulled out a cigarette and looked like I was going to light it, though that rarely ever happened with Speed. More often than not we'd just sit with them in our hands for hours, not lighting them, being satisfied to have something in our hands. Cletus knew this trick of ours, but what must have concerned him was my inability to register that someone was talking directly to me, telling me I couldn't smoke that in here.

"What do you want, Cletus?"

I can't hear his answer. I get up and go to the kitchen. I can still hear them talking at this unbelievable volume, yet I can't make out any of the words except for snatches of my name. Cletus follows a bit behind me and asks me what's wrong. I tell him I just didn't hear that guy and I was a little upset that they were talking about me even though I was right there. He said they weren't. I mentioned that I had heard my name. He looked at me strangely. Then I definitely heard my name from the other room.

"There," I said, "she said it."

He was like, "Yeah well you are acting pretty fucking strange."

"Whatever dude, I'm going outside to smoke this. Tell them not to talk about me."

"They aren't."

I look at him blankly. He tells me to never mind and go smoke my cigarette. I go outside.

I can still hear them. I hear them at the same volume now– outside, two rooms away, with a door closed between us–as I did when I was sitting right next to them. Something is wrong. Something is really wrong. I light the cigarette and don't smoke it. I just hold it in my hand. I know the feeling well. I am prepared to curl in a ball and soothe my stomach as the sickness rises to my throat, because I have gotten myself in over my head.

But the feeling doesn't come. I stand there. The voices continue. I still can't make out what they are saying. They know my name. I can hear parts of it. I listen harder. I don't know what I looked like at that moment. I probably resembled a very still, very strange human being. Inside my head was turmoil and in my gut was fear. I couldn't stop this. I can't stop it. I don't like it and still I listen intently.

The wooden and glass back door slams shut. Cletus is walking towards me. He looks like hell in broad daylight, pale with dark circles under his eyes. He is thin. He is so thin he looks like he can break walking towards me. I look at myself. I can tell the clothes I wear don't fit anymore. I am thin. I am wasting away and going insane. I hear voices. I am a college graduate. I am not a drug addict. Yes, I am. I am fucked. I am a drug addict. I hear voices. I hear a voice. I am insane. No. It's Cletus.

"Diego, they are freaked out," he says quietly.

"I'm freaked out," I tell him, exasperated. "I can hear them talking about me and I am 100 feet away."

"Supersonic hearing?" he says knowingly.

"What?"

"You got it. You can hear shit the others can't. It's from the Crystal you're tweaking."

"I'm a paranoid shit. I'm fucking scared."

"It'll stop. It must be from the blunt. How much did you smoke?"

"I don't know. A couple hits I guess. How much did you smoke?"

"Nothing." the ever-wise Cletus remarks matter-of-factly. "I've been up for 5 days. I can't smoke now. I'll hear voices."

He is joking. I am not. I am shit scared. No one else is on this trip. Those kids inside are a bunch of innocent potheads, the most annoying and boring of wanna-be bad asses. My judgment against pot may be justified by this strange confluence of sensations.

"Cletus. It's the Shadow people."

"What?"

"They're talking to me and I can't make out what they are saying."

He mumbles something.

"I can't make you out over them."

Strange look.

"They are loud. I'm telling you this is crazy. It's like white noise blocking out everything. I'm fucking scared."

As worried as I had ever seen him, he said, "You got to get home."

"No shit. I gotta get out of here."

We leave the house. My apartment is not that far away. I am earnestly still ready to go do what we have to do, but it seems as if there are not more sales to make. I find comfort in the banal chatter. Figuring out what we are going to do now. The voices won't stop. Maybe I'm going to be stuck like this. Is this what they mean by "hearing voices"? Have I permanently damaged myself? What? I obsess over my situation. Suddenly we are at my apartment. Cletus is going to sleep at his place. He says I should do the same. I am too shit scared to think about sleep.

I obsess. I find a solution. My woman, my married woman. She is coming to see me at four and she will be on time. She is desperate to find love with me. This seems to be a strange phenomenon of married women in undesirable situations. She doesn't care if I am out of my mind on Meth or whatever chemical I am putting into my system. Perhaps I am just a ticket out for her. I don't really care if she is using me or even just using my apartment. Whatever the situation is today I will take full advantage of all she offers.

I call her from a payphone down the street, since I have dropped my last cell phone in a toilet while reaching for drugs in my hoodie pocket. My mind is still reeling and I am still hearing voices. Paranoia has taken over the greater part of my consciousness.

"Hey."

"Hi, what's up? I'm kinda busy but I will see you soon." she says into her cell.

"I need you."

"Oh, do you? Well you are going to have to wait a little while. I'm at Janice's Cheerleading competition," she says.

This makes no difference to me. I need comfort. I need to be held through this situation. She is all that I can find, she is all that I have. She's my only hope.

"Please just get here."

"I will, baby", she says as she hangs up the phone.

She arrives, as scheduled, and does for me what I need. The voices eventually stop and I fall asleep. But, to my detriment, this situation cements into the very fabric of our lives, the symbiotic need we have for each other. This brings great passion, hell, joy, terror, bewilderment, broken hearts, broken minds and broken bodies.

A day or so after this episode I got a call from Susan's husband. That accomplished a small respite for me. He was putting his foot down, but his edict only gave her more determination to be with me. I decided to stop using meth and went to visit my friend Pedro. He supplied me with two bags of heroin. I sniffed them, and the habit took it from there. Sick in the morning, off sick with one, high with 2–6 bags, then maintain for the rest of the day.

II. Heroin

 

I am in the sunlight. It is beating on me, though not harshly. There is no humidity, just comfortable heat. I sit on a tongue and groove porch painted grey. It is low to the ground. There is a wooden railing around the edge and the porch surrounds three sides of a white house. The ground is flat around the porch, lush and green. There are large bushes rising two feet above the railing. They bear many small dark green leaves. They lie mostly in the shade of several enormous Maple trees, which have spread their branches far, blocking most of the sun. I can feel the rays hit my face. There must be a clearing in the branches. And it soothes me. I am sitting on a gray rocking chair, moving effortlessly back and forth. I seem not to shift my weight, yet I am rocking back and forth. This speaks to me. It speaks softly, nicely informing without words. I am at peace. All is well.

I am looking at a picturesque scene. I can almost match it with the artist. I remember him from the Saturday Evening Post. I don't remember the actual publication. I remember calendars. What was his name? He painted idyllic America. He painted a fantasy. He painted my childhood. I lived a fantasy. I relive it now. I live it well. I lived it well. Norman Rockwell. This looks like something out of one of those calendars. An elderly man, thin, with healthy eyes that speak of hard work and satisfaction, sits on a porch at peace with himself and the world around him. I can see a general store, the dusty window with a hand scrawled sign marking the day's best buy. But I am leaving it, willingly. I don't mind. I can't go to someplace bad, not from here. Not from these beginnings. But somehow growing up in one of the "perfect" places to raise a family in America became a torture as adolescence waned to young adulthood. I grew up in the Poconos, where every location, wooded with streams, offered boundless opportunity for imaginative play, where I play-acted many different Daniel Boone/Davy Crockett characters, where one summer was spent collecting young trees that had fallen, using them to construct a fort, deep in the woods, though the area was surrounded by country roads on all sides. On the days of extreme heat and humidity, in late July and August, we would ride our mountain bikes to the reservoir where an old bridge, long ago burned out, still spanned the body of water. It was a steel skeleton, providing a launching pad for our young bodies to fly to the cool water. In late February and March, my two friends and I, along with our fathers, would tap local Maple trees. We collected hundreds of gallons of sap and spent hours and hours cooking it down. This was made into 40 gallons of Maple syrup annually, spoiling our three families terribly. We used it as a sugar substitute, on ice cream, pancakes, waffles, peanut butter sandwiches, in baked beans, cakes, rice pudding, anywhere brown or white sugar was called for in a recipe.

It's no surprise that I am hallucinating Maple trees. As I separate from the scene, I still do not feel fear. I am rising upward. The trunks disappear beneath a canopy of leaves, their 5 points so familiar to me. I see the gray-shingled roof and green lawn surrounding the house where I just rocked on the porch. I roll over and the sun blinds me. I open my eyes.

Seemingly awake, bathed in the not-so-late afternoon sun, I am naked. The heat through the window and closed blinds feels good on my shoulders. I hold myself up with my hands and someone is beneath me. It's Susan. My god, I am inside her. Reality flies back in my face. I am doing this act because there is nothing left to do. We just finished the last bag. I have no hope of finishing what I've started with her. No hope, dope does that to you. It did it to me. I had gotten the respite that this bag, this last bag would give me. It was time to get up off the dirty carpet of my apartment, put clothes on and figure out how to scam money to get what we needed to make it through the night. Heroin demands that it be taken regularly. Its main threats are intolerable total body pain of the most horrendous nature, something along the lines of passing a kidney stone; histamine action that causes incessant watering of the eyes, running of the nose and ear canal blockage; and your insides coming out, either through your mouth, anus or both usually resulting in hemorrhoids and ulcers. So there was no question. Get more stuff.

III. Crack

 

Detox from dope accomplished.

"Babe, we still owe EL NINO for the last bundle." Susan says.

"But I know from rehab that if we are quitting drugs we don't have to pay the drug dealers we owe."

"I really feel like we owe him, he's been very good to us." she reasons.

"Okay, whatever…what do you say we get an eight-ball to take the edge off."

"Sure that sounds like fun," she says. Like anything was fun at that point.

We get hooked on coke shortly after that, the kind of coke you smoke, 'cause that's all EL NINO has that day.

We change up scenery, get out of my apartment. Then, when Susan and I have just entered her bedroom–a safe place because her husband has taken the kids to the cabin for the weekend, supposedly– he's all of a sudden pulling up the driveway.

"Shit!" she says.

I'm ushered into one of the other bedrooms and the thought of being caught brings on an extreme case of geeking out. I am left to hide among stuffed animals in a young girl's bedroom. I'm so scared. The only solace I can find is smoking hit after hit of the ready rock. I can only imagine how pissed Susan is going to be after she finds out how much I have smoked. But that doesn't matter as I hit the pipe again and again.

She meets him downstairs, and he does some moving around the house. Then they settle on the front porch. I can only hear these actions and that's tough to do. I get up from my position amongst the Care Bears and edge toward the door. I peek out and can hear muffled voiced outside. I am apprehensive but can no longer wait to be released from my plush prison. I stealthily creep outside of the room and can see the front porch from my position on the top floor of a loft-like house. I move as silently as possible down the stairs and around to the back door. It's a sliding glass door. You have to understand that I'm a sitting duck the entire time I'm moving. All Susan's husband has to do is turn his head, which I can see clearly through the large front windows, and he would see me. The house is open from the first floor to the roof for most of the structure and that's what I have to navigate without being seen to make my escape.

I felt almost like James Bond in my movements. I assure you I was not. My skin was hanging off me because my muscles had atrophied so much. My clothes didn't fit properly and most likely hadn't been washed in months. But I made it outside, around the pool and into the woods that bordered their property. I believed I had made it to safety. I leaned against a tree and breathed a sigh of relief knowing that the road was only a few hundred yards beyond.

I didn't realize the hell that was to ensue. It was all encapsulated in my mind. I know that now. Yet at the time…

At this point Diego falls silent. Seated with his elbows on his knees his face falls to his hands. He weeps.

Fuck it dude. I was in the woods and started to make my way to the road. This was especially hard going. I thought Susan's husband was going to be able to hear every twig cracking and every step I took into the dried and crunchy leaves. I was certain that he had followed me into the woods, though I had no evidence of this. It was what my mind told me. I took some solace in another hit here and there. And this only complicated the problem. The more coke I got into my body, the faster my brain went. My imagination took off. I had hidden the coke in the band around the inside of my baseball cap. I had taken it off to get another large hit and packed it into the pipe. I left the bag in the hat and lit up.

Just as I am getting ready to exhale, a helicopter comes over the horizon. The noise is deafening. It is flying so low. I am scared. I know they can see me through the canopy of leaves, because I am sure the husband has informed the police and they have readied the most sophisticated observation techniques in the world, though I am in rural Pennsylvania. I cover the glass pipe with my hand and burn myself. I drop it in the leaves and drop to find it. I can't, I am panicking and I know they've seen the hat. Then the helicopter leaves. I stop. I look around and it seems as if I am alone. I don't feel alone. I feel like I am being watched. I pick up the hat. I must have kicked it and lost some of the coke. I find the pipe. What shit!

I put everything away, light a cigarette, and start on my way again, when the helicopter comes back. I hit the deck. I try to cover myself in leaves. It's not working. I know they can see me. It hovers over me. It hovers. Not over me, but I am convinced it is looking for me. It hovers for what seems like an eternity. I make the decision that I should leave the pipes by the tree. I can come back and get them when the coast is clear, but for now my mind tells me it is better to be caught without paraphernalia. I imagine it won't make much of a difference really, as I also assume there are dog teams out looking for me, taking my scent from a stuffed plush animal. I run through the barren branches of early spring trees. I scrape my face, my arms. I run holding my hat onto my head. What is inside is more important to me than the FBI chasing me.

Now I can see the road. It is ahead of me. Like most American country roads, it has little traffic. There is a steep hill leading down to it and a more tightly growing cluster of shrubs bordering it. I lower my shoulder and rip through it. I pay no attention to what is actually in there. I do not think of the steep hill on the other side. I must get away from the dogs and helicopters. Somehow my mind assumes that the road is a safe place. If I can make it there, I will be safe. I put all my effort into getting there.

Shrubbery does not have a mind of its own. I assume most clear– minded people would go around the shrubbery I went through. I'd like to think I would have were I not being chased by a team of snarling German Shepherd's leashed by unsavory law enforcement agents and helicopters issuing numerous swat team members rappelling from ropes to pursue me. I am sure I would have gone around the shrubbery if it wasn't so imperative that I get to the safety of the open air.

I didn't go around, I went through. I went through ridiculously! I wasn't able to burst through as I thought I could. Immediately I ran into a tangle of branches that held me back. It felt as if I'd hit a rubber band wall. I forged ahead only to be shot back again, but this time I had made more progress. Again! Finally I could see clear to the road for a split second. As the tangle of branches closed behind me, my fears subsided, but the ground gave way. Actually, there was no ground, just a steep incline covered by grass. My feet went first and my ass hit the ground. Gravity pulled me straight to the rain gutter on the side of the road. With my hands on my hat, covered in brambles, briars, brush and branch scratches, suavely, or so I thought, I emerged safely. I had just turned onto the road back towards the house to find a phone, when I saw the compact white car with Susan's husband driving it coming directly towards me.

I stood there paralyzed with fear. He saw me. We made eye contact. My pupils dilated, he passed me. He must have been laughing to himself. I ran as fast as I could to the nearest house that had a Gazebo in the crushed stone driveway. I felt a bit safer. It seemed as if the sudden jolt of terror, the white compact car, had stripped away the delusional fantasies of being chased by highly armed authorities.

The front door of the house opened, and an elderly gentleman came out. I made my way over to him, asked to use the phone and called Susan's cell.

"Hello," she answered.

She was way too calm for me, Mr. Paranoia.

"Hey, did you notice I was gone?" I asked.

"Yes, where are you?" she asked.

"I'm at the nursery down the street; I will be waiting in the gazebo." I whispered.

"The Gazebo?" she asked.

"Yes, please just get here fast."

It seemed like I waited there all afternoon. But it was only a half hour in which I managed to unpack cigarettes to use them to smoke crack, which was wildly unsuccessful, so I gave up on it and waited. She arrived and we headed back to my apartment, making stops to get more pipes and more coke.

Several hours later, safely ensconced in my pitiful apartment, night fell. What once was a simply decorated bachelor's home had devolved into a stopping post for drug addicts and a haven for my married woman. We re-entered and I looked at an unfamiliar sight. It was the apartment I had rented, but it had turned it into a crack house. Dirty dishes had taken over the modest counter space. My desk and kitchen table were covered with papers and shit to no end. She and I rarely used that room. So we made our way to living room, to our place in front of the sleeper sofa, behind which was located a large alcove that I used as a closet. Back there dirty clothes covered the floor, two feet deep. I had none that were clean. Most of my other possessions had been sold.

We were in my wretched apartment. My stinking festering abode. Home. Night had fallen and the college students up the block were having a party. The windows were opened behind closed blinds, letting in what little breeze existed, along with the heat, noise and coal dust. The dust came from north and south, east and west. Wretched, like I said. Other college students were arriving and walking up the street. I could hear their conversations, their yelling and general merriment. But it seemed as if they were calling for Susan.

Here it comes again. I can see it now. It was as if a tsunami forty feet high, seen a mile out from the beach, was heading inexorably, descending to reek havoc on the normal existence of defenseless creatures. I could see it coming, so I did what any addict would do. I took the largest hit I could, trying my best cowardly defense against what my twisted little mind could foresee. However, instead of doing what I wanted, instead of wiping the slate clean, instead of bringing me the nescience I desired, it only amplified what was going on in my brain.

Susan made a movement towards the window. I thought she was making a signal to the men waiting for her. I heard a noise down below. Suddenly I was convinced that her pimp had taken up residence in the abandoned first floor apartment. I was delusional. I was cowering in fright. Susan closed the window. In doing so she had to lift the blind. I believe I see a gathering of young men on the hill waiting patiently for me to fall out. Little do they know how high I am. I know what I have to do. I tell Susan to take a hit. She gladly does so. We fuck. I get her in front of the window and open the blind. We are standing in the small alcove in front of the window. Her back it to me, her hands stretched high onto the wall, her waist and knees bent slightly. I am behind her, gripping her waist hard with my hands.

"What are you doing?" she says with such ease.

"Giving them a look at what they want," I reply knowing what she is planning to do.

"What are you talking about?" she asks, becoming concerned.

"The guys who are waiting out there for you."

"There's no one out there waiting for me. I'm here with you." she ways with that dripping sanguine liar's tone.

"Susan, I know about Jerry downstairs." I dropped the bomb.

"Jerry? What the hell are you talking about?"

"You know."

"I don't talk to him unless you are with me.

"Isn't he selling you for more rock?"

"What's wrong with you?"

"Nothing." I try to cover. "I'm sorry. Can we just do this?"

So we begin. And after months and months of superb performance, where I was never left with a wilting phallus, it finally happened to me. It often does so with addicts. We often get so high that most bodily functions are rendered moot. I have always prided myself on my virility. But now, when it mattered most, when I needed to show the goods to the buyer to up the price, I was left limp.

Susan sees me looking out the window from her knees in front of me. I am caught. I can't help myself. I am convinced that she is the center of a large prostitution ring and that somehow between fulfilling my needs, her husband's, and her five children's', she has time to entertain thirty to forty men simultaneously. We disengage. She screams.

I can't remember the fight. I only know that she left to go home and came back. This was the beginning of a short but ruthless breakup.

And that is a story for another time. That was 5 years ago. Diego is dead. I excised him from me. I lifted his weight off of my brain, removed his spindly fingers from my throat, washed the clamminess he left on my skin, and I wept. In poetic terminology not suitable for Hallmark cards, I was driven to madness by his incessant need for more. It was like taking the wrong turn into a desolate land over and over again. It was a desolate land where chemically induced paranoid schizophrenia existed side by side with reality. Diego was frightened of it. I've never seen him scared of anything else.

I've mourned the loss of Diego. I miss his swagger, rapier wit, and sugary tongue. I don't miss his headlong pursuit of death. He loved with no thought of being hurt. He wept without fear of repeating it. And he laughed with impunity. But, as I said, Diego is dead.

 

David Barrett is currently a writer living in Philadelphia. He graduated from Penn State University a couple weeks before September 11 2001. He went on a self destructive bender for a few years but has since returned to tell many stories in many formats. He has had "Single Cell" and "Menage a Trois", two one act plays performed in a staged reading in New York City. Most recently his one man show "More Better Life" had a successful run in the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. At the urging of a theatrical producer he has endeavored to tell the story of his recovery from addiction. "Hallucinations" is the first attempt and subsequent chapter in that story.

"Hallucinations" is a short memoir in which I deal with my past addictions through the eyes of my alter ego Diego. It takes us through my twenty-fifth year of my life which I spent in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. The three hallucinations serve as markers for both my self-destructive spiral and growing co-dependency. I've written this story four years after I stopped using to purge my demons, and share my story with friends.

Cripple, fiction by Jeff Wallace

"You got anything for me?" I asked Kyle. I was sitting in his wheelchair and he was lying in bed. He was pretty well naked, but he was generally naked when he was at home. Maybe some sweatpants, sometimes. But right then he'd just got out of the shower, and lay there under just his sheet.

"There's some T-3's in that bottle," he said, pointing towards the shelf on the far side of his room. His grandpa was down in kitchen, just a short ways off his room, and was making dinner. Samantha was helping him. "You got anything for me?" he asked.

I put a five dollar bill on the bed, just out of his reach and I stood, the straightening of my knees pushing the chair backwards and away. I walked across the room and shook two pills from the bottle. I chewed them like Tums and walked back to the side of his bed. If I was to get him out of the house tonight, first I'd have to get him dressed.

"Samantha," he hollered. He didn't reach for the five or even watch me as I moved. His eyes were tuned to his TV, his mouth towards the door. He never turned that TV off, not even when he had his radio on. It was a constant roar in the little room. The paneling shook, and the heavy cigarette smoke, pulsed.

"I'm hurrying," she shouted back.

I hadn't seen her except when she opened the door to his room for me. She had been dressed plain and easy, a simple white t-shirt and jeans, but she still looked good. I don't know how he got her to stay, she just seemed to stay. But for what one don't know.

"Hurry up, Goddamn it. I can't take my pills without any food," he said, all of us knowing he didn't need not one more. But what's a person gonna tell a cripple?

Kyle had got hurt when the skidder he was running had tipped over. He'd rolled down a hill, the roof landing on him at the bottom. When I'd heard, I'd pictured the top of that yellow Caterpillar tipping and coming down on him like a jaw. It had nearly bit him in half. When I'd heard, I kept thinking about night crawlers and how we'd pinch them in two when we fished. He would have died if his boss hadn't found him and called the paramedics. He was lucky.

"You need to get out of here," I said. "Get your shit together, and let's get."

"You going to dress me? It'll be fun." It wasn't exactly humor filled. His black hair hung loose almost to his shoulders. It had been long before the accident, but he had refused to cut it since. "Hand me my cowboy hat," he said, pointing towards a black Stetson on the floor to my right. I didn't move. Samantha would help him change after she brought him dinner. I would go and sit with his grandpa while she was doing it. He would ask me about my folks, about my long gone brother. But the whole time I would be thinking about her rolling him, shifting him. Eventually she would come get me and we would go.

"You're going all-out tonight, then?" I asked Kyle, straight.

"If you're gonna go, it might as well be all the way." He turned his face towards the door then back to me. "Where in the fuck is my chicken?" he asked. His eyes, dark brown, looked flaked.

***

We got to McNeal's about midnight. Kyle didn't get up before late afternoon any day of the week, so midnight was the middle of his day. I was tired, and not just because the pills had started to work through me. But my nose was itching. The thing about pills like that, at least as far as I'm concerned, isn't that they make you feel better. A lot of the time they just make things bearable. Smoother. Life gets to be like the sound of ice skates, if that makes sense.

Kyle had sat beside me during the drive over, while Samantha had been wedged in the backseat with his wheel-chair. We took my car because her car was too small for the four of us, if you count the wheel chair as one. She had to sit in the broke down pieces for everything to fit. My trunk was full of clothes, so we had jammed it into the seat.

The unloading was tougher than the loading. I didn't know what to do to help Samantha, so I just stood back. He nearly hit the ground when the board he used to slide himself into his chair tilted back. He caught himself on the top of my door. I heard the cheap metal of my car bow, his weight bending something.

"That door ain't gonna shut right," he said. He arranged himself in the chair. I started to walk and Kyle didn't roll forward, just sat there looking.

"Do it yourself," I said. But it wasn't mean spirited.

"I'll do it, Jimmy," Samantha said. She had changed from the t-shirt into a yellow tank top. She had kept the jeans. I had watched from behind as she changed in Kyle's room. She hadn't been shy about it. She turned around and pulled her shirt off. Her browned skin was white where her bra line was. Angry red bands stood out on her shoulders from the straps. I could see light hairs forming a v-shape above the waist of her jeans. Kyle didn't even look.

"Push me, woman," Kyle said, and I shook my head.

Samantha didn't say a word, just grabbed the chair's handles, and pushed through the wet grass. I thought she would slip in the dew, but she didn't. He pulled a cigarette from a pouch somewhere on the chair and struggled to light it as she worked her way to the backyard. We could hear the music and talking from where we were. The McNeal's were rich. They'd gone to Tennessee for the week, a vacation, and left their only boy to watch the house. He had his own place outside of town, but was throwing a party like he was still in high school.

"People will think that I'm shittin'em," Kyle said. He couldn't get the cigarette lit, the jostling of the chair making his hands bounce and the tip of itdance.

"They all know," I said. Not very many people visited him now.

Lots of people came in the beginning, but as time wore on, and the novelty, something, wore off, fewer and fewer came. Now it was me, Samantha, and a couple more. Our other good friend, Dale, had moved away pretty recently. He went sober and moved to Columbus. It seems funny to move to a city to get sober, but sometimes it works. It's not really the sober part that's surprising, it's that he was able to stay out.

It used to be that the three of us, Dale, Kyle and me. Once, when Dale, Kyle and I lived together, Dale and I talked about Kyle and Samantha. This was before the accident. I told him that Kyle didn't deserve Samantha and he said I was right. Kyle was cheating on her with some little blonde. That girl was married to a guy in the army. He was in the Iraq, and Kyle was sleeping with his wife. She kept seeing him after the accident, even after Samantha moved in. She didn't stop until she saw Samantha put a catheter in him. Dale had said that Samantha would look a lot better if she'd lose the ten pounds she'd put on since graduation. "I'm not saying she ain't good looking, I'm just saying we'd all be better off with a little less extra poundage."

But he wasn't going to be here, and Samantha didn't need to lose any weight.

"Well, hello there," Kyle said, laughing as we turned the corner of the house. A fire was burning close to the deck of an above ground pool. Extra wood lay underneath the deck, up to the edge of the pool. Even though it was hot and there was a fire, the pool was empty except for the dozens of floating beer cans. Trucks were circled like wagons in the grass, their lights all pointing inwards towards the fire. The music blared from the trucks' radios. It was pretty organized for that group, all the radios on the same local station that played new country. One truck, a red-cabbed flat-bed dually, was backed up to the very edge of the pool. The treble on its radio was threatening to shred the speakers.

"I need something to drink. You want anything?" I asked them.

"See if anyone has a bottle of wine I can buy," Kyle said.

"I'll get my own," Samantha said. People who hadn't been to see Kyle were beginning to inch towards us.

I had always thought Samantha was tough, but these last few months proved it. Her father had left when she was young, and then everything that happened with her own grandpa, but she didn't talk about it. Really, she didn't talk much. But when she did, she seemed happier than she had any right to be.

I walked away from them, trying to get lost in the party. My head buzzed from the drugs, I knew I would get sick eventually, but didn't care. I went around and thought about begging beers. I didn't really talk to anyone, but I wasn't the most popular guy in the world. I stood next to the fire, kicked at it, made sure it kept burning. I watched Kyle and Samantha. She stood behind him, drinking slowly from a bottle, and he held court. That's what it looked like anyway.

***

It's easier to get lost in a party of thirty than people think. Somebody had turned the outside lights of the house on. People had been pouring in and out of the first floor. It was beginning to become a mess.

I'd surprised myself by not drinking. I'd got to talking with some boys I'd gone to school with, Turley and some other Jenkins. It may have been one of his brothers. All those boys seem to get rolled up. Big and tall the lot of them. But I'd rode those pills out and was beginning to feel myself.

Turley was nearly kin now. He was gonna marry a cousin of mine, or so the story went. After what my uncle had done to him after he got my cousin pregnant, I don't see how he could. I would've been scared to come within a mile of the girl, but Turley still kept hanging around. I'd asked them if they had any wine, finally, feeling guilty. Turley had laughed and had walked into the house. He brought a bottle back out and held it by its neck. His hands looked big enough to wrap the neck twice and strong enough to wring the cork straight out.

"I found it," he said. "Swear to God. Right there on the ground. Just laying. Someone must have dropped it." His cousin or his brother slapped him on the shoulder, laughing. I grinned back at them. Their arms thick as rolled rope, seemed to grow like branches out of their t-shirts.

"Take care of that baby cousin of mine," I said. I took the bottle by its bottom

Turley counted up on the fingers of his just emptied hand. Counted up through four, and when he got to his thumb he looked at me, serious as a heart attack, "Which one?"

I stared at him. I knew he was joking, trying to rile me. I spun the bottle in my hand. The label on it looked weathered. I wondered if it was old or if it was just treated to seem that way. It rasped as I spun it, the edges catching on the hack-sawed edges of my nails.

"You love that little girl?" I pointed the sealed cork at him. The red and purple foil caught the light from the fire. It would flash and crinkle gold.

"Aww," he said. He moved towards me, slightly down the long aching hill that ended somewhere off this ridge, down in some hollow somewhere. "That baby's mine," he said. He turned and seemed to look at the pool. "That ought to be enough." The brother walked off, knowing when, I suppose, to leave something alone.

"I hope it is," I said. I wasn't sure what I was protecting, or even if I was.

"Let's open that thing," he said. He jerked it out of my hand and walked back towards the house. I followed him. He walked straight in the sliding glass doors straight into the kitchen. His big work boots, light brown and leather, thumped across the hardwood of the kitchen. There were other people inside. Hid off in bedrooms and on couches. The glow of a TV quivered around a corner. Turley dug through the drawers swearing.

"Goddamn," he said, "folks as rich as this ought to have a corkscrew laid out in the open."

"Yeah, I reckon they ought'a," I said. The kitchen and the dining room were nearly on top of each other. There was a little table that looked out onto the lawn and the pool, and I sat down in one of the wooden chairs. The seats of them were faced with cushions, blue and red checks. They were tied to the backs of the seats by ribbons. It felt almost like I was sitting in the kitchen.

The hardwood stretched through both, and it all smelled like lemons and bleach. I thought back on that little trailer that we used to share, me, Kyle and Dale. Cigarettes and whiskey. It's not such a bad smell when you get used to it. Sweet warm beer, sticky in the morning sun. The table was clean and smooth, not even crumbs from their toast or sugar from their coffee.

"Found one," he said. He held both up to me. The corkscrew was ivory handled and shaped like a 't'. The screw of it seemed about two inches too long. There was a roar from outside, and I heard a truck rumble to life. I didn't look outside, afraid the fire had done something. "This thing's worth more than both of us put together," he said.

Turley stabbed the cork through the foil working it in, setting his jaw like a man who was enjoying his work, a pleasure from a job hard done. He tugged twice, then a long slow shuddering pull, and the cork popped out. He smelled it, waving it in front of his nose. "Very fine year, sir. Some of the best wine I've ever found." The tip of the screw had burst through the under side. Pieces of cork clung to it. I was afraid he would catch the end of his nose. He didn't get glasses, just sat down beside me, collapsing his long body into this family's kitchen chairs.

"So how about you, Jimmy? You got a woman?" He drank, the green rim of the bottle hidden behind his lips. His black hair was shaved short. It was summer. His kid was six months old.

'I don't know," I said. I took the bottle from him. I wanted to wipe it off, but then thought how that would look, him nearly my own blood, and just drank. I could feel it in my teeth, the acid of the wine biting my tongue and my gums, burning and hurting. "No." I said.

"Aww," he said. "But I saw you looking at that little girl out there. Your boy's girl," he started snapping his fingers, looking down and away. The TV in the other room was laughing and blue, footsteps thumped upstairs, and for a second my world lurched and I wondered if this was what life was really like. "What's her name," he said. "Grandpa just died?"

"Samantha." I said.

"Yeah, Samantha. I seen the way you look at her."

"Just looking," I said. I handed the bottle back to him. "You know how it is."

He drank from the bottle. I watched the apple on his throat move up and down as he drank the McNeal's wine. When he lowered it there was red around his lips. His teeth were stained purple. "I know," he said.

There was third roar from outside, this time louder and I looked out. The flat-bed truck, raised high on its suspension, had been backed closer to the edge of the pool. People were diving in off of the flat of the back. It was somebody's dad's work truck. Kyle had positioned himself next to the wheel-well. I could see him shouting up at the four boys in the back of the truck. They were all stripped down to their underwear. One was in briefs, the other three in boxers. The red and brown hair of their heads was slicked back. They glowed in the light from the fire which had grown considerably. It had worked its way up to the deck, smoldering and scorching the treated lumber. Everyone seemed to know what was going to happen, but no one cared.

I stood up from the table, the chair pushing back and away from me. Turley seemed to say something to me as I walked out. I slid the door hard, angry at what was going to happen. It banged into the house, and I grimaced thinking about the sound of all that plate glass. Samantha was at the truck, her shoulders barely coming to the door handles. I could see the mud sticking to the underside of it. She was trying to talk to Kyle. The four boys jumped down barefoot and heaved him up onto the wooden bed. I jogged to the bed, licking my lips trying to get the stain off.

Kyle was in the back of the truck, the light from the growing fire licking at the treated lumber—swelling up around it—and he was smiling. He was wearing his cowboy hat but had taken off his shirt. The scars from the accident looked purple in the light. There were four round scars the size of quarters from his chest tubes. There were scars running down his belly disappearing into his sweats where they had fixed his pelvis. I could see scar running down his shoulders, disappearing onto his back. It's hard to tell sometimes where the doctors stop and the accident starts.

The other boys scrambled back onto the bed. I looked at Samantha.

"He won't listen," she said.

"Goin' all out," Kyle shouted. The music bounced into the heady night air. He leaned forward. "You all want to see something crazy?" He started to push at the wheels as hard as he could. The bed was seven feet, and when he'd reached the end, he'd barely reached any kind of speed at all. The chair seemed to tip off the back of the truck. One wheel caught the aluminum edge of the pool, snapping him down into the utter black of the water, his voice, disappeared a sudden. The music kept up, so did the sound of the flames. No one moved.

The chair floated to the surface, the seats on it lifting it, but Kyle didn't come back up. I felt Samantha's hand on my arm. I wasn't sure whether she was holding or pushing but I went. The boys on the truck didn't move. I heard Turley shut the door to the house, the same rasping and slapping sound it had made for me. I lunged over the edge, my knees banging and shaking the whole thing.

I didn't go under but for a moment. My shoes finding the bottom, my hands finding Kyle, his arms thrashing and beating in the water. He struck at me hand and at my wrists. My fingers slipped over his skin. I felt his scars, the soft and always tender lumps of his flesh. The pink puckers of skin where the doctors had fixed what was nearly ruined. I dug at him, going under finally, into the ink of the water, grabbing him not with my hands but my arms. I raised him up in an embrace, gripping him tight under his arms. We came out of the water together, his legs touching mine like tentacles. I remembered when we were kids, fighting and rolling with him, testing each other like animals.

He sputtered water into my face. "I'm swimming, Jimmy," he said. His long black hair streaked back from his raising straight from the water. It made him look younger. His face was nearly translucent, and I wondered the last time he'd seen the sun.

"You was drowning, Kyle," I said. He was taller than me. I had forgotten. I could feel his thighs bending back and away from me as I held him, my hands locked behind his back. I looked first to the deck, but the flames had covered it. The crowd had moved to watch it instead of Kyle. They were cheering it to go, hoping it on. I carried and pulled him towards the truck, the water sickeningly warm. Samantha watched us, watched him. She glanced at me and nodded, sharp and hard. She was asking for him. I stopped, the waves pushing us together, lapping at us. The warmth of the fire made me think that it would circle us, surround us, the aluminum, melting and dripping into the grass, the edges, bow and bend, before they gave  way, and the two of us would be washed out and rushed towards Samantha, towards her feet, a mess of arms and legs. But the real light from the flames cast her shadow back and away, up the slight rise towards the house. It stretched to Turley, the dark bottle in his hand—Turley, who watched us all now, was covered in the ink of her.

Jeff Wallace received his MA in American Literature and his MFA in Fiction from Indiana University. He is the author of numerous short stories and has been published in magazines such as The Louisville Review, Appalachian Heritage, Keyhole Magazine, Plain Spoke, and in such online journals as New Southerner, and Still:The Journal. He lives in Mt. Orab, Ohio with his wife Emily, son Oscar, and mutt Memphis. He currently teaches at Southern State Community College and is working on his first novel The True Story of the Appalachian Revolution.

 

Newbie Down Undah, poetry by Dennis Mahagin

After the Narcotics Anonymous meeting, they stopped to chat

under a maple tree in the parking lot; she said to him "so… you

wanna get coffee at the IHOP, hon?" He replied "awwww … some

place, yeah, but really, anywhere, but there." … They ended up

at the Denny's by Portland State, in a window booth across

from a counter that's the same everywhere, really, not so instant

replay, a Polaroid or forgery of one's name. When the coffee

came, she told of getting trapped on a cruise ship with this prick

named Tad, who talked and talked nonstop in a fake Australian

accent got really old, really quick, she said, taking a tentative sip

of coffee. He liked the way she opened the sugar packets with a

gap in her front teeth, the little creamer containers succumbing to

thumb nail. He said "well I can only imagine," looking up to see

the young Jamaican waitress in her Kelly green dress humming One

by U2 as she held the muddy refill pot. His hand shook hovering

no thanks above his cup. She said this guy Tad kept saying things

like Oy! defenestration, subdural hematoma; red skies at night, stuff

like Crikey that's a knife. "It was bad," she said, "really really bad"

He nodded past his jitters, his naked, nascent sobrietry; he said

"yeah, so, the phony Aussie Tad, sad killer of the sea cruise," and she

giggled a little; they looked out the window upon a darkened Arthur

Street, half past ten at night, swan's neck streetlights blazing through

winter mist, hothouse globes the color of honey. When she touched

his barely trembling hand across the table, his reflection in the glass

did the double take, he watched stolid as any plastic Ken doll atop

a wedding cake. Then a voice came, said fucking be yourself it can't

hurt forever; he said, "I've only ever ridden a ferry… I guess the fact

is I've been very lonely." She was quiet, as the waitress came back

with the same heart-shaped smile, dreadlocks swinging, she set down

their check. They got up to pay, and she said "that's okay," squeezing

his hand, "on your worst day you're still thousands of light years ahead

of Tad." They laughed some more, she said, "so what is it anyway, you

got against IHOP, hon?" that was another story, tucking her head into his

shoulder, how he supposed lovers did, well on their way, and he tried

not to trip, through glass doors that rocked on a surf swell into the

night a pure aluminum star gazer God may have righted the ship.

 

Dennis Mahagin's poems and stories appear in Juked, 42opus, Exquisite Corpse, Stirring, Absinthe Literary Review, 3 A.M., Night Train, PANK, Storyglossia, and Smokelong Quarterly, among other publications. He is also an editor of fiction and poetry at FRiGG magazine. Dennis lives in Washington state.