WRITER’S BLOCK by Jack Bristow

Dallas Grady, thirty-eight, good looking in spite of a life of hard drinking, pill eating, and two divorces, lay on the motel room bed, cigarette in right hand, fumbling through The Yellow Pages with the other. He was working on his magnum opus, his novel, his written testament to counter the notion that his life had been a waste.

He had told the voice on the other end to bring him over a date with blonde hair and brown eyes—she had to have brown eyes, he instructed, more than once. The voice on the other end had been very accommodating. Dallas swore the man was from the east coast originally—something about the voice. He hung up the phone after giving directions to the room and took a swig from the Southern Comfort bottle, walked over to the typewriter and unwound.

The story was only twenty-five pages so far. It was about a war hero whose wife kicked him out after him having returned home from the war. The woman had blamed the man’s drinking on their divorce but the man had known better. His father had always told him, “Dall. You can’t change the past—so don’t you ever try.” The woman he had married—the naive, brown-eyed cheerleader from Detroit—no longer existed when he returned home from Iraq. In her place was this well-read and independent woman, who had gone to too many political rallies, anti-war, and met a lot of people. A lot of men.

Dallas cringed at the thought. Another veteran. Another goddamn veteran of the same goddamn war who had thrown all his decorations over the fence and onto the White House lawn. And Debbie thought that was just great. Wonderful.

And when he got home she’d wanted him to do the same thing. Bullshit. For what? For who? He had earned his medals—they were the only thank-you the man would probably ever receive for putting his life on the line. Why get rid of them—why throw them out on some silly, unfounded whim?

“Shit.” He yanked page thirty-six from out of the Selectric, red-faced huffing and puffing. That was the thing about us Irish, Dallas had thought miserably. We can’t ever hide anything.

He has having tremendous difficulty merging reality with art. But, goddamn it, he would finish the novel. He just needed some human contact. Some intimacy.

He smirked as he looked into the mirrored wall. His face was so different. No longer rosey and filled with life. Sallow. Rings under his pale grey eyes so dark it had almost looked like he was wearing mascara.

The man in the story had made a lot of friends. Chuck McAnderson. Sergeant Darren Thomas and Curtis de Wade. He had wanted to call them, to really tell another human being something but they, too, were in the past. The brave men he had served with no longer existed. Other men bearing those names were with their families now….

He’d hoped to God they’d at least had families who would miss them, that would be able to tell they weren’t the same people they’d left as. That was the thing about war—not wars, because all wars were the same—but war would keep you more in the past than anything.

He had been gone only two years. One tour. But it had seemed like a lifetime.

Knock knock knock on the door. Dallas hobbled off the chair and unlatched the four-chain locks and deadbolt. A grinning man stood in the doorway with a blonde dressed in cheap ivory colored spandex and fake fur. He had recognized the man’s voice from the telephone.

“Hi there. I am Clayton and this is Luicna. Your date.” And then he had told Dallas the rules. “You can do anything with her you like. I don’t care. She don’t care, neither. Back-door. Missionary. Go downtown. It don’t matter. Just no hitting, no punching. Absolutely no cutting and/or strangulation.”

Dallas nodded solmenly, as if this fine, upstanding gentleman were her father, and Dallas some acne-faced geek escorting her to the prom.

“Another thing. And this is mandantory,” the pimp explained. “I’ll be waiting out here for forty-minutes, but I’ll need some collateral first—something to know who you are, just in case you breach our agreement.”

“No problem.” Dallas handed the man his driver’s license. Expired. The face inside it had seemed a little more colorful and vibrant. But this man standing in front of him was Dallas Grady. There was no mistaking that.

***

Dallas looked into those eyes as he went to work on her. Brown. His body kept going up and down coolly, confidently until there was that unmistakable intense feeling, and then it was all over with.

Brother, he thought. Twenty-nine years old and you still make it like you were seventeen.

Luicna looked at her Mickey Mouse wristwatch— the only thing she was wearing. “That was only twenty minutes. You still have another twenty. You paid for it. Just wait and regroup. Most guys your age, it only takes ‘em what? Five, ten minutes? That’ll give us another ten minutes.”

Dallas grinned evilly. A considerate whore. Now he had seen it all. But he knew when she had grabbed his tricep consideration had had nothing to do with it. She had liked him. And only one of them had gotten their cookies.

“No thanks. Sweetheart. Busy night.”

He saw a mild sadness in the whore’s face. This had made him feel important. Wanted.

“Don’t worry, precious. We’ll have other dates.” He pinched her cheek.

***

At the Selectric now, pounding the keys furiously. His fingers barely able to keep pace with his mind. This was the way to do it—the only way you could write about Debbie without going crazy.

JACK BRISTOW has written for several zines, including Inwood Indiana, The New Flesh, Hobopancakes, and Indigio Rising.

FOG by Kenneth Radu

Opening her window to the fog, she wondered if the cat had returned. Just before dark last night she had placed a bowl of mashed sardines under the false spirea bushes surrounding the above ground pool. The fog wafted into her room. She saw very little except shadowy shapes, the top limp branches of a sun-burst locust tree which appeared to be floating, the smoky blue roof of the garden shed. No sound, not even birds who usually woke her up in the morning. The pool itself had all but disappeared, the surface of the water or the deck no longer visible. Leaning out, Cassie peered down, listening for the cat, but heard only her own breathing.

The fog almost covered the second storey of the neighbours’ houses, but she could make out windows, chimneys, and the arch of a gable. Perhaps sardines from a can were not to its taste. Shivering in her thin nightie almost the same colour as the fog on the window pane, she carefully closed her bedroom door and tiptoed past her parents’ room. The hard wood floor was cool to her soft feet. She did not expect either her father or mother to be awake before noon. They had not returned home until three in the morning.

Emmanuel had just left the house minutes earlier, promising to come back and wake her if necessary. He had dared her to let him stay the night in her bed where he left his underwear. Rolling it into a ball, she stuffed it under her own panties in a drawer. Her parents no longer checked to see if she was sleeping. Emmanuel had sneezed over her stuffed bears on the bed. She heard every drunken step up the stairs, her father’s curse on the landing when he tripped, and her mother’s loud, “ssssshh, you’ll wake Cassie.”

After they left last night she opened the tin of sardines. Her mother would never notice one missing from the stockpile of tinned goods she kept in the pantry. Cassie then phoned Emmanuel to say the coast was clear. She had first noticed the cat a week ago, having heard a rustle in the bushes just feet away from the deck stairs. There it was, so concentrated on ripping the head off a bird that it didn’t scurry away when she approached, but continued gnawing on the skull. When it became aware of her presence, it simply hissed. Cassie stepped back and the cat resumed his meal. It was a large calico cat with one ear bent and one eye puckered shut, the fur knotted on its back, skin revealed in patches, scratched and pimpled with black and red sores. She stood watching it eat the poor bird, licking its paws, separating each claw. Then it suddenly pricked up one ear and dashed into the bushes, leaving behind feathers and a bird’s delicate foot.

Her parents refused to let her have a dog although they had once allowed a gerbil. It died within a week and they said she was responsible for its death, so no more animals. Once Emmanuel had hoisted himself over the fence last year and joined her in the pool, she stopped thinking about pets. Still, the animal looked hungry. Why not feed a stray cat? Careful that her parents, if home, did not see what she was doing, she left out food and milk and it returned each evening. Emmanuel wasn’t interested in her story of the wild cat, but pushed her up the stairs to her bedroom where he liked to caress her legs first.

Outside the fog felt damp and cool to her skin and she imagined herself walking right through a cloud. A squeak, a meow, a hiss and rustle: she couldn’t quite determine the sound as she approached the ring of bushes scarcely visible herself to Emmanuel’s father who had opened his own window and spied her in the fog below. He had seen Cassie leaving food for the cat the other day, and wanted to tell her not to encourage the presence of feral creatures in the neighbourhood. They spread disease, wrecked gardens, and bit children, he would have said, although he had never in fact heard of a cat biting a child.

Last night he shouted at Emmanuel who had come home too late and smelled of recent sex. “Where the hell have you been? Do you know what time it is?” He knew of course where his son had been. Emmanuel shoved past him on the stairwell, mumbling something about needing sleep and “leave me alone.” Emmanuel was sixteen, big for his age, and a student of martial arts. Strictly speaking, having sex with fifteen year old Cassie was statutory rape. He leaned over the window sill as if to move the fog aside with his hands: ah, yes, there, the fog appeared to separate to his advantage and he could make out her shape bending under the bushes. It would be absolutely reprehensible, not to mention illegal, to seduce Cassie. He was afraid to speak to his son.

Since his wife’s death in a year ago in the car crash, he was burdened by grief, insurance policies, grocery shopping, depressed over the declining sales commissions at the furniture store, and perplexed by Emmanuel’s sullen belligerence. Now he had to remind himself that, yes, he had loved Emmanuel’s mother and cried over her death, but he had forgotten what it felt like to caress her flesh. He imagined Cassie wrapped around Emmanuel’s taut and vigorous physique. His hand reached beneath his pyjamas just as Cassie entered the bushes and disappeared.

Fog wet the bushes and soaked her thin nightie, but she circled the pool behind them. Not even Jackson could see her anymore.

“Here, Kitty, Kitty.”

“Cassie, you there?”

Emmanuel had crossed over the fence.

“Here, I’m here on the other side, Manny.”

“I’m getting wet in the fog. Let’s go to the shed with me. Your parents sleeping?”

“I’m looking for the cat. Yes, they are.”

“Forget the cat.”

Jackson saw Emmanuel’s outline as he climbed the fence and pushed into the bushes. Removing his hand from under his pyjamas, he leaned out the window as far as he safely could as if to call his boy home or warn both kids about the dangers of savage and mangy cats. As he dressed he thought now was a good time to speak to both kids, kindly and fatherly, about the trouble they’d be in if Cassie’s parents found out. Well, he’d begin his warning with the cat: a filthy animal that should be put down.

He didn’t see Emmanuel and Cassie running to the shed, nor hear the door shut. Downstairs he stepped outside into the thickness of the fog. He could just make out the steps and the paved walkway leading to a vegetable patch. Above the garden rose the cedar fence marking the boundary between his property and Cassie’s house. He could climb that like Emmanuel whom, he recognized for the first time this morning, stood taller and broader than his own father. Should it ever come to a physical confrontation, Jackson could not be certain of winning.

Straddling the top of the fence, Jackson admitted that he could just as well have walked around the corner to Cassie’s, which would have taken longer. He didn’t want to waste time. They’d be in the bushes, possibly petting the cat, or Emmanuel might even be hoisting Cassie on to his … Jackson took a deep breath. He would caution them about the dangers of disease and discovery.

In the shed Emmanuel sat on a wooden tool box, his jeans crumpled around his ankles. Cassie straddled his thighs, holding her damp nightie above her navel, just as his father pushed into the bushes and called their names. Their breathing was loud and their attention concentrated.

“Cassie, you there? It’s Emmanuel’s dad. Emmanuel?”
The sound underbrush was sharp, unexpected, as he tripped, fell towards the curve of the above ground pool and struck his head against its grey sides. The next sound, his own yell, broke through the fog, momentarily distracting Cassie until Emmanuel pulled her down again. The cat’s claws scratched one fierce time and tore the skin of Jackson’s left ankle. He had not put on socks in his haste to warn the kids.

“Damn!”

He reached for his ankle when the cat slashed again, this time ripping the back of his hand. Jackson kicked, but missed, and the cat dashed away. Holding his hand close to his eyes, he saw streaks of red and felt the heat of new pain. Over the rim of the pool, he plunged his hand into the water. Temperatures had fallen overnight as they usually did in late August when only the kids, braving the cold, still splashed about in the pool. Cassie’s parents would soon close it.

KENNETH RADU’S most recent collection of short fiction, his fourth, is called Sex in Russia: New & Selected Stories, published last year by DC Books Canada. Some of the stories take place either in the Russia of reality or a Russia of imagination. There is sex, both real and imaginary, as well.

THE ANNUNCIATION by Valerie Valdes

It started the Christmas I turned ten. Like most horrible things, it happened abruptly.

“Did I ever tell you,” my mother said, “that you were conceived on Christmas?”

I paused, one hand holding a shred of torn wrapping paper while the other held my very own copy of King’s Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow. It had come out after my birthday and I’d been damn patient waiting for it since then.

“It was in a trailer at our friends’ house,” she continued, oblivious to my slack jaw and wide eyes. “What a night. We hadn’t brought any condoms, and of course your father wouldn’t take no for an answer. ‘It’s okay, it’s only the one time, nothing’s going to happen.’ Don’t you listen if a boy ever tells you that.”

“Mom,” I said finally. “That is so gross.”

“It wasn’t gross at the time,” she replied. “It was pretty great.”

I looked down at the box still clutched in my trembling hand. Twelve floppy disks. With any luck, the memory of that moment would be suppressed by the time my game finished installing.

But once my mother remembers a story, she tends to repeat it. For the rest of the day, she told and retold the tale of her unwilling seduction to just about everyone who called to wish us a happy holiday, then to family members over dinner. We probably had leftover lechon and moros and corn and yucca and plenty of other delicious things to eat, but it may as well have been cold placenta sandwiches. Playing hide and seek with my cousins only meant more time alone to ponder my concupiscent conception.

It didn’t stop there. Every year on my birthday, and on Christmas Eve or Day, and at sporadic points in between, she would remind me of the reckless lust and the rocking trailer at which savvy folks would know not to go a-knockin’. My overactive imagination and the onset of puberty provided me with unwanted images of my old, dumpy parents going at it like dogs in heat, although the California winter had probably been pretty mild at the time.

“Mom,” I would plead. “Please, don’t tell that story, it’s embarrassing.”

“You wouldn’t be here without that story, you know,” was the amused answer.

I was, in a sense, the anti-Christ; instead of coming out on Christmas, I went in. My mother was the deflowered Mary, or maybe more like Leda and the Swan. A shudder in the loins, Yeats had said. A frequent reminder that my parents didn’t just have sex, they had wild sex. In a trailer.

This continued until the year I turned 30. Like most horrible things, it ended as abruptly as it started.

Christmas Eve. What remained of a fractured family with multiple divorces and deaths and aging grandparents was clustered around a long table under a clear night sky. I’d made the lechon that year, and the rice. The leftovers the next day would be fabulous.

My husband cleared his throat and said, “We have an announcement to make.”

“I’m pregnant,” I said quickly, before the speculation could start. The whooping and congratulating lasted a few minutes. My grandparents in particular were ecstatic.

“You know,” my mother said, looking at me but talking to everyone, “you were conceived on–”

“Mom,” I interjected. “If you tell your story, then I’m going to tell mine.” I waggled my eyebrows and gave her what I hoped was a lascivious leer.

VALERIE VALDES was born on a pirate ship that was attacked by merciless Humboldt squid, who killed her entire family in front of her infant eyes. Saved by a pod of dolphins, who raised her as their own before being captured and trained as Seaquarium performers, Valerie has dedicated her life to eradicating the scourge of the seas by eating calamari as frequently as possible. http://candleinsunshine.com/asthemoonclimbs/