Category: short fiction

Palimpsest | Jake Bienvenue

Palimpsest: A Horror Idyll

If you write over something enough, it turns black. Example: Condense this paragraph into one line. When you reach the margin, instead of dropping below, begin again on the left. Repeat.

In this way it is clear that language tends toward the state it seeks to escape. Incomprehensibility. 

It was a school. Then it was another school. Then it was condemned. The records do not indicate anything sinister happened here. Nothing beyond the usual cruelties. No, the only thing the building can be accused of is being large and old. But please, don’t accuse it of that. 

These days we call it the Cultural Center. A very good idea, the Center. Convincing enough for our town’s nobility to summon the millions required to write CULTURAL CENTER over the top of everything the building has been. One more name on the squiggle. One more word in the palimpsest.

I don’t mean to sound cynical. They pay my salary, those estimable bourgeois. I prepare them long reports on culture. I compile their good deeds in dossiers bound with human hair. The accountant handles the books—I say, “This is culture, this is not.” I quantify culture. I say, “Culture is seeing a 12% increase in these sectors.” The people clap. I say, “Please, you are too generous, I will cry.”

I am myself a palimpsest. I am myself two stories of municipal brick. My walls are scaled by teens in moonlight. Conventions convene in my chest. The work of local artists is displayed on my arms. Children with gelled hair and tight bows walk my veins, clicking their heels as they go.

I am the Center’s 13^th Director, and I have been here too long.

Last week the final principal of the old school perished from this earth. She was 111. Her sarcophagus is carried through the streets. They bring her here. They pass her hand-to-hand, chanting, “Feed her to the Palimpsest.” They are a silly people. They live too much in memory. 

We are fortunate to employ a handful of youth who facilitate the many agents of culture that pass beneath our vaunted brick. They wear sky-blue helmets that read: CULTURAL WORKER. We have tried to shorten this title, but nothing has stuck. They call themselves culchies. I do not like this name. It sounds like a folk monster, coughed up from the deep. 

Late at night: One culchy is dragging trash to the dumpster. A ghoul lunges from a bush and grabs her hair. All of it comes off, and now she is bald. This is why we wear helmets. It’s too bad. The Board likes the culchies to be very pretty. It is part of Culture, they say. When board members become lonely, they approach the Center from outside, singing love songs. I watch this happen from my office. I shake my head, but what can I do? They are the Board. I say culture, but they say me.

In all this, the ghoul got away. 

The sarcophagus reaches me finally. The last man to hand her over is a rogue and a blackguard, and when he passes the corpse he laughs and fingers his earring, and the bones inside rattle. I do not have time for him. I have a job to do. I carry the principal behind the old metal door. I take deep breaths: in through my nose, out through my mouth.

We keep the Palimpsest locked away, for safety. It is a site of total collapse. Linguistic singularity.

The Chair of the Board is Norton Dogbody. Really this is a nickname; I don’t know his real name. He was born in the spawning grounds to the north. From an early age, the spiders there suckled him with webs and said, “You were born a Chair, and a Chair you shall become. The world is your Board.” Webs dribble from his mouth when he talks. He says, “Excuse me,” and spits them into napkins. The boardroom is filled with them. Crumpled napkins, wet webs.

At his right hand sits Dr. Lunchmeat. She brings a Germanic efficiency to culture some find sinister. She has no eyebrows and she wears a Luftwaffe cap. She is ruthless in rooting out the enemies of culture. She drives them into attics where they write long journals, never to be published. Herr Doktor has been photographed at certain disreputable locations with Mr. Dogbody. I keep these photos, just in case. The last thing any of us want is a Culture War. But I must be prepared. 

Long ago, the native tribes of our valley would meet at this exact spot, the high point of town. It was called “The Outside Place.” I do not know whether this is the first name in the Palimpsest, but whether the wolves called it something else, we will never know.

Our monsters are not those kinds of monsters, rest assured. No Skinwalkers here. No, ours are ghouls of wood and sea. Cults with strange rites, bonfires in deep groves, women with scales in local bars, who smell of anchovies and salt, and who drink like, well, fish. 

My office is on the 2^nd floor. Every day a trinket is left on my desk. By whom, I do not know. Today, my gift is a pile of bones. Small bones, like those of a leprechaun. The wrists and ankles bear the scars of nails. A note: “St. Patrick crucified by snakes.”

My office is designed around the performance of sexual favors. For example. There is in the corner a jukebox a’swirl with neon, whose only track is the tune of the ice cream truck. Norton, or Mr. Dogbody, rather, will drop in occasionally to watch me dance. All morning he sobs and begs from the culchies until he has enough quarters. Then he bullies me into dancing. If I do not, he will withhold his donations. Then who will feed the Palimpsest?

At times it seems the Center runs on the performance of humiliations. An economy of humiliations.

Last week, the DEI Committee decided the portrait of Norton Dogbody, which depicts our Chair astride a giant spider, plundering some aboriginal village, should be removed, as some of our spiders have begun to complain. Mr. Dogbody and the Board thanked the committee for its recommendation and praised it for its valuable work: “Keeping us all on our toes.” The portrait was relocated away from the nests, which is good, because the edges were beginning to corrode from all the poison.

The Committee, of which I am a member, meets virtually. We begin each meeting with the liturgy, but we rush through it quickly, eager for penance.  

This morning, a new gift from my mysterious benefactor.  A silver key the size of my forearm. I clip it to my carabiner, and it drags my pants to the floor. “Yes, just like that,” Dogbody says. He hums the ice cream song. He spits webs at me. I dance, dragging the key along the floor. 

Up late at my desk. The building is empty, the halls are dark. The pipes in the walls are very old and they thrash and sputter, but I’m used to them; I don’t startle anymore. I’m reading emails. Since the Center was opened, each director has used the same email address, and it has been passed from hand-to-hand, finally to me. All their correspondence is there, on the drive. Some of the emails are so old they are starting to decay. I’m searching for mention of a silver key. No luck. I stand and walk the halls. I step into an empty classroom. The lights are off, but the moon is so bright tonight it is like a presence in the room. I go to the window. A leviathan lifts up from the hills and unfurls its wings before the face of the raging moon.

I have discovered in the correspondence of my predecessor evidence of a monstrous conspiracy. 

Monsieur Blatt was a mime; he never spoke a word. The Board thought him an ideal candidate for director. The reasoning went that, because he was mute, he would offset the semiotic ragings of the Palimpsest. But it sniffed him out, curdled his heart. It was at this point the Center realized the Palimpsest possessed a dumb kind of intelligence, a snowball of names that swells as it rolls. It reached into his silence and planted words. Or not words, only morphemes, just little chunks of meaning, like “-ing,” for example, which by themselves do nothing but which slowly began to interact with the other chunks, combining and recombining, clarifying themselves first into monosyllabic words, then polysyllabic, and so on, until all the words in the English language had grown like mold under his skin. But it went on. Out of the storm of symbols, a sort of super language developed, one thousand times more efficient than English, in which the semantic structure developed into a kind of sonic pictogram, where every word was onomatopoetic, mirroring, or miming, rather, the essential breath of each thing, crossing the eternal bridge between the world of language and the world of the senses, signifier and signified, creating a linguistic realm coeval with reality, self-sufficient, the act of naming so powerful it had actually created another reality, “Let there be light” spoken over the faceless deep. It was as if shadows had emancipated themselves and become subsistent. At least this was what I could deduce, scrolling through his final flurry of emails in which he begged for ten thousand nukes to be directed here at once, this outside place, which would soon give rise to a new species, men made of words, legions spilling forth across the globe. 

Dr. Lunchmeat dispatched the director with her Luger. The two reports of the handgun were remarked upon by everyone in the building that day. Even then, Lunchmeat said, even in his final moment, staring down the barrel, poor Monsieur Blatt raised his hand right back at her, thumb and index finger extended in the mime of a gun, overrun with the drive to mirror. 

My gift this morning is a vial of poison. The note says, “Drink Me.” I twist off the skull, which serves as a cap. I glug the purple goo. And I know without question what must be done. 

The culchies remark upon my purple eyes. “Mr. Thirteen,” they say. “What happened to you? What are you doing with that key?” A pulse of psychic energy is sufficient to push them away. I am gentle in this. They do not deserve their humiliations.

Reports on the death of Director Blatt indicated the sentient language perished with him, but I know it is not true. The Palimpsest is already broken. My purple eyes see deep into the truth. 

Every night I walk home from the Center, I pass beneath powerlines flocked with crows. They grip that wire and stare. And I wonder if animals will ever evolve consciousness alongside us, like crows or dolphins or elephants. It’s still possible, I suppose. But I wondered in the wrong direction. It is not animals that will achieve sentience. It will be language itself.

Dr. Lunchmeat stands over the corpse of Norton Dogbody. Her Luger smokes. The door I close behind me is the oldest door in the Center. It is made of black iron. We two are alone in the electrical room, where pipes and vents flail in Soviet conflagrations. Dogbody twitches, then stills. Lunchmeat is naked. Her skin is white and every inch of it is lined with text. The words on her skin wriggle like trails of ants. They even line the whites of her eyes. I raise the key. My purple eyes flash. The text explodes off her flesh like the tendrils of a squid. They writhe, whether in spasms of death or jubilation, I never learn. 

For these, too, are only words. 

about the author:

Jake Bienvenue holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Montana, where he was the Editor-in-Chief of CutBank. His work has appeared in The Offing, The Baltimore Review, EcoTheo, and others. He is at work on a novel about the Oregon wine country. He lives in Brooklyn.

Alice | Mikaela Conley

Alice sidled up to the checkout line that stretched into the aisle of seasonal items — Halloween candy in September. She hated drugstores, always had. But old age brought her more often than ever to this place, what with Larry’s growing list of prescribed medications and recommended vitamins and now the regular purchase of Depends, a demolition so deep that neither she nor her husband spoke of them. Not since he came home with samples from the doctor’s office last year. Alice now just kept an eye on the package in the bathroom closet, and when it was halfway gone, bought another and placed it under the one in current use.

She tried to keep the drugstore trips quick, but today there was only one cashier despite four registers sitting dormant. The clerk, probably around Alice’s age with a halo of gray hair, peered over her glasses and poked at the keys the way old people did. Did Alice look like that when she used her phone or computer? Reading glasses down to the end of her nose, eyebrows raised, a general look of confusion? God, she hoped not. There were two other employees, a girl and a boy, probably eighteen, standing at the opposite end of the counter in their long blue vests, giggling as they restocked the Marlboros on the back wall.

“Excuse me, are you open?” Alice asked, walking over with the adult diapers cradled under her arm. Neither looked up, though the girl momentarily paused at the sound of her inquiry. 

“Excuse me?” Alice asked, now with a lilt of irritation. She never would have used such a tone in her younger years; she would have waited in that line with her mouth shut until closing time to avoid ever being perceived as demanding or impatient or a generally unlikeable woman in any way.

At the age of seventy-seven, she hated to think about this now — how much of her life she spent complicit in her own inconspicuousness. Had she known she’d hit a certain age and become invisible to society anyway — well, she probably would have behaved in the exact same way, the desperate approval of her mother far outweighing any other external attention.

Alice had been a knockout in her youth. She could see it in photos now. But in the face of her mother’s hard-nosed expectations of her daughter — humility, presentability, decorum — she spent most of her life thinking she was plain.

“Excuse me,” she asked one more time, just as the boy turned around to pull a carton of Reds from its stack on the counter.

“Yes, ma’am?”

Ma’am. 

“Are you open over here?”

The boy peered past her, then suddenly and frantically drilled on the register keys. “No, ma’am, as you can see, we’re not.”  

The girl barked out a laugh. 

Alice squinted at the two kids, their backs to her now, shoulders touching, giggling again. The tinny of the fluorescent lights was getting louder. She took another step toward the counter, thought about saying something else, but no words came. 

In fact, she wasn’t thinking much of anything as she slid the last carton of Marlboros off the counter into her hand. Then, walking away, she heard herself say, “Excuse me,” to the customers still waiting in line, and when they didn’t move, she turned sideways, compressed herself to get through them. The automatic doors stretched open like a regal goodbye, and her heart banged in her ear as she scuttled down the ramp.

At the car, she nearly fell over, weak-kneed and dizzy. She threw the diapers over to the passenger seat, before getting herself in and examining the carton of cigarettes against the steering wheel. She was laughing, cackling really, as she ripped open the box, pulled out a single pack and untwirled its little plastic string. Her fingers tingled with a strange, luscious delight as she rifled around the glove compartment for one of Larry’s old lighters. She lit the cigarette, inhaled. The rush went to her head in an instant. 

She held the smoke in her lungs with surprising ease, tilted her neck back on the head rest. She had only smoked one other cigarette in her life, with a boy named John when she was sixteen. She cut school with him on a bright blue day, and they sat under the bleachers, passed a Pall Mall back and forth, talked about The Rolling Stones and kissed. Oh, what a thrill it had been to sit there with a boy she thought she loved, defying every one of her mother’s expectations, even just for an afternoon. She had been devastated when John and his family moved away that following summer. 

Alice exhaled, the smoke enveloping her — head in the clouds. John’s face was still so clear in her mind even after so many faces had faded to faceless through the years. She placed the cigarette between her lips again, let it hang there as she reversed out of the parking spot.

Larry was in the study when Alice arrived home. She could see him through the doorframe in his favorite chair, reading a book, as she walked to the bathroom, lifted the pack of opened Depends in the cabinet, placed the new one underneath.

“Hi, honey,” he called, only after she was well out of the bathroom, in the kitchen, at the sink, the pots and pans she’d washed earlier now clanging as she put them away.

She couldn’t remember the last time they’d spent time together. They were around each other constantly, passing by one another in this big house like complacent ghosts, dust floating in the air, fine and indifferent. For fifty-two years, Larry had loved her with a genial and gentle loyalty, offering a secure life in a well-built home and one winter vacation to a warm place each year. There were Christmases that boasted abundance, and a tolerable group of friends who didn’t enjoy gossip. “You’re beautiful, you know that?” Larry said to Alice so often that it lost its meaning entirely, mostly falling on her ears as sarcasm. As far as she knew, Larry never had eyes for another woman. (But how could she know, really? How could anyone really know the inner workings of another’s mind?) He was a stern but joyful and involved father at a time when that simply wasn’t expected of men. And she credited the two of them, and only the two of them, for raising four well-loved children into four well-loved and stable adults. What more could a woman want? she had asked herself so many nights that it had become a type of prayer, lying awake with eyes closed, sometimes clasping her hands over her mouth so that only the faintest whimper emanated from somewhere deep inside her.

“What are you reading?” she asked, approaching the study, dish towel in hand. Larry wore a collared shirt like the ones he had donned every day at the university for forty years, but now with sweatpants and a blanket draped over his knees. The walker was standing a few feet away against the wall. 

Larry looked brightly at her then lifted the book up just enough to display the cover: THE GERMANS.

“Fun.”

He shrugged.

When did he get so old looking? For years, the Parkinson’s had come on slowly, gas-lightingly slow. Had he been tripping a lot lately? she’d wondered for two whole years before voicing the question to him out loud. It took seventeen doctor’s visits — she’d tallied them up once — to get a definitive diagnosis, and when it finally came, what befell them was a cartoonish combination of relief and devastation, like they’d found a life raft in a rushing river just before getting hurtled over a waterfall. 

For a while, they were able to pretend the disease wasn’t there, that he was just clumsy and stumbled a lot, but then came the undeniable tremors and the stiffened movements and the hunched posture of a forever-straight-backed man, the sometimes-slurred speech and, probably the most horrific for Larry, the difficulty writing.

“You doing anything today?” Alice asked, her attention turned toward the paint peeling on the door frame.

“This is it, baby. And I need to go to Verizon later.”

Larry and his phones. She’d seen more smashed phones in the last three years than she had otherwise seen in her lifetime. They were constantly being flung from his body because of the tremors, the imbalance, the falls. Poor Larry.

“Okay, well I’m going to go out for a bit.”

“You just got back.”

“I thought I’d go visit Marie for a little while.”

She drove until the pavement turned to dirt, pulling into the river viewpoint beside a lone truck idling. She hadn’t been down here for years, decades. It was the place she’d come when the kids were small, usually on the weekends when Larry was home, and, just for a few minutes, sit perfectly still and think of nothing.

She lit another cigarette from the pack, pressed the window button on the door. A man came walking up the path. He was young, maybe mid-forties. He lifted his fishing rod and tackle box as a Hello. 

“How ya doin’,” he said while passing the car. He looked familiar; probably had been in school with one of the kids.

“Catch anything?” Alice asked reflexively.

“Nah, nothing worth taking home today.” He opened the truck’s tailgate. “Those things’ll kill ya, ya know.” 

She examined the cigarette smoldering between her fingertips. Fucking punk.

“Promise?!” she yelped, her voice cracking just as the tailgate smacked shut, jolting three crows from a branch above it.

Alice watched the truck leave in her rearview, taking in a long defiant drag as it went. Then she coughed it all out — too much.

At the senior living center, the doors pulled open and she was met with a firewall of warm putrid air, that combination of urine and disinfectant and a meal of mush being cooked somewhere. 

Last year, Alice came home from the grocery store to find Larry splayed out on the bedroom floor. “Just send me to a nursing home,” he said in the doctor’s office an hour later, wincing in pain as they waited for X-ray results that would display a cracked rib and a fractured ankle. “You can’t handle this all on your own.”

“I’m not sending you to a nursing home,” she said flatly.

She’d never admit it, but this had been a consideration among the many questions that bombarded her after the diagnosis, like, How was she going to take care of a man who had a ninety pounds and over a foot on her? But then she thought about Larry sitting there, reading his big scholarly books among those smells of human waste and it made her feel like she was going to explode. “I’ll take care of you as long as I can, and then, I don’t know.” She paused. “When I can’t, hopefully we both fall and crack our heads open on the same day, same time, and we’ll die right there in the house and be done with it. The kids can deal with the mess. They owe us that much.” She knew this would give Larry a good laugh, which would allow him an excuse to swipe the tears that had been pooling at the ridges of his eyes, and it did.

“I’m here to see Marie Cunningham,” Alice was telling the receptionist, a young thing with crispy yellow hair pulled tightly back. She was watching a video on her phone. “Is she having lunch? I can just pop into the dining area.”

“Let me check,” the woman said, bored, picking up the landline and talking so low that Alice couldn’t decipher a word. Or was she going deaf?

“Yeah, Marie isn’t having a great day,” she said, hanging up. “Unfortunately, you’ll have to come back tomorrow.”

“Oh, I don’t mind if she’s having a bad day. I can just —”

“Right, well, you might not mind, but Marie would probably mind.”

Alice had known Marie since their sons became friends in kindergarten. She was easy to talk to and had a quick, scathing wit — never would Alice have said some of the things that came out of her mouth. When she was with Marie, she often found herself laughing in a way that sounded devilish to her own ears.

Marie began showing signs of Alzheimer’s a few years ago. That’s what her husband said anyway when he began looking into nursing homes last winter. Alice always got the sense that Marie’s boldness infuriated him, and more than once Marie canceled their plans because “Bob was being Bob,” which, back then, could have been woman code for just about anything. When Marie had a hip replacement six months ago, she was admitted to the senior living center for her rehabilitation period. Then the rehab ended but Marie stayed. 

This wasn’t the first time she’d come to visit Marie and was sent away. The last time was a month ago. As she was leaving that day she saw Marie down the hallway, screaming and punching at the air as a nurse dodged blows trying to restrain her. It felt like catching a glimpse of herself. Alice couldn’t eat or sleep for days after that. 

The receptionist had returned to the video on her phone. There was another smartphone sitting on the ledge of the desk. Alice scanned the room then slipped the phone from the counter into her purse. 

“Okay, well, thanks anyway,” Alice turned toward the door.

“Mind putting that back where it was?” she then heard.

“Sorry?”

“My colleague’s phone.”

Alice’s heart plunged. “Oh! I’m so sorry, I thought it was mine!”

The woman’s eyes stayed on the screen. “Mmhmm. You’d be surprised how often that happens around here.”

Alice nearly threw the phone at the woman before wobbling out the door, woozy and overcome by shame. What was she doing? But, upon exiting, the swell of humiliation lifted and was replaced by something else — something equally disorienting. She wanted to drop to her knees right there on the pavement, thank God for the sun on her skin and that fresh autumn air coursing through her lungs. 

She didn’t want to go home. All that was left for her to do was clean some more. There was always cleaning to do — and then of course the yard work, the basement that needed gutting, the painting, both inside and out. The house had been for years in a state of degenerative disrepair that Alice and Larry couldn’t get ahead of.

The sun was high. She pulled down the visor, took a right onto the main road, merged onto a clear Route 12. It was a Wednesday; kids were in school, adults at work. Retirement had placed Alice in an alternate realm that most people sought their whole lives. She never related to those aspirations of retirement. “Only ten years left!” she often heard friends say when they were in their fifties. She had always cringed at the declaration.

She’d stayed home for more than a decade to take care of the house and the kids, but once she started working, she never wanted it to end, first as a part-time secretary for a local construction company then full-time as their bookkeeper. She loved ironing her clothing each morning and getting into the office early to have the whole place ready to go by the time the bosses arrived. She was good at the job, using the same skills that kept her home running smoothly, and stayed at the company for thirty years until the owner retired and sold the business. After that, she bounced around town doing similar work but was never able to find the stability she had that first time around. The job opportunities eventually dried up as outsourcing and computer programs erased the need for her at all. Retirement arrived unceremoniously when she simply couldn’t find any more work.

She pushed open the door at Verizon and the bell offered up a polite ding. Alice grazed her hands over the phones on the shelf, all bright lines and hypnotic matrices. Larry always insisted on buying the oldest, most neglected iPhone kicking around the back of the store, knowing it would soon meet its demise anyway. 

“Can I help you, ma’am?” a man called from behind the counter. 

“Just looking for a new phone for my husband. He broke his screen.”

“Okay, do you have his phone with you?”

“Oh, no —”

“Well, it’d be a lot easier if you had the old one so we could transfer the data.”

“Oh, we’ve bought one — well, a bunch — here before, without the old one.”

“Yes, you can do that, but —”

“Great, then let’s do that.”

She showed him the phone she wanted, the one tucked in the corner, far away from any sort of display. 

“A lot of apps don’t work on this phone anymore because the software is so old.”

She and Larry knew this by now. They were too old for apps. Larry only wanted a smartphone so he could video call with the grandkids. Still, “Then why sell it?” she asked.

The man shrugged, then, perplexingly, walked away. 

The carpet in the store was faded, and she was sure she could smell it — those industrial chemical fibers soaked in the dirt and grime and shit from the bottom of a thousand different shoes. And again with the lights. So unnaturally effulgent, bringing her body back to Wallace Apothecary, the drugstore now long gone that Alice had frequented as a child, armed with her mother’s prescriptions. She always had to crane her neck to speak to the pharmacist standing on the platform behind the counter and in front of the rows and rows of drugs, like he was some kind of god. Or lord. A drug lord.

Alice was a senior in high school when her mother died of complications from multiple sclerosis. At the end, she was paralyzed and prescribed experimental medication as a last-ditch effort. Alice was convinced the pills were only killing her faster. Still, she obediently doled them out to her, never missing a day.

Alice held the old new phone in her hand. It wasn’t connected to the shelf with a wire like the others. Perhaps not worth the price of the cable to keep it tied down. For the second time today, she dropped a phone that wasn’t hers into her purse. This time, no one saw her. She left the store, the bell delivering another civilized chime behind her. 

Larry had moved to the couch by the time she returned. A glass of lemonade sat on the coffee table alongside a plate of peanuts and a bunch of grapes. She pictured his journey from there to the refrigerator and back again, using the walls and furniture to steady himself. 

“You look like you’re holding on for dear life,” Alice had said yesterday when he refused to use his walker for a similar perilous journey to the kitchen. Larry didn’t respond, hadn’t seemed to hear her at all as his big hands clutched the back of the sofa, then the corner wall. But later that evening, as they ate steak tips at opposite ends of the table, he said, “Don’t ever talk to me like that again,” in a tone that scared and shocked and shamed her all at once.

“I’m sorry,” she said into her plate, and she meant it.

“I could have gotten you that,” she was saying now, pointing her chin to the snacks. He waved her away. Then she said, “Got you a phone.”

He took it from her, examined it. The sight of him holding it sent a fresh thrill up her arms.

“Where’s the box?”

“The kid said he couldn’t find it. He said just take it as is.”

This seemed to satisfy Larry. 

Alice stood there for a while, watching Larry’s big hands crack open the peanut shells. He did this sometimes — allowed her to bear witness to his mundane tasks, like she was his audience in the theater production of his life. 

When she heard the knock on the front door, she thought it was another bird that flew into the kitchen window. It happened just last week — a sparrow torpedoed full throttle into the large pane when Alice was cooking at the stove. She was startled to see the bird’s guts on the other side of the glass and the poor thing lying stunned on the dirt below. 

When she heard another knock, this time three quick raps, she went to the door.

It was Don Sullivan. He was friends with Greg in high school and would often stay over at the house when they had early football practice. He used to be a scrawny thing but now here he was on her doorstep, all shoulders and biceps. My god how these kids grew up. 

“Hi, Donnie,” Alice said, pulling the door wide. The cops were always stopping by to talk to Larry; he’d been a selectman in town for years. “Larry’s in the other room. Come in, let me get you something to drink.” 

She heard Larry on the sofa, fists to cushions as he pushed himself to his feet, then listened for his hand to reach the chair then the corner wall, then — 

“No, thank you, Mrs. Parker. I actually needed to come by to ask you some questions.”

Despite a day of theft, she hadn’t thought for a single moment, hadn’t a single sweep of dread, that this boy, with his cruiser in the driveway, was there to speak to her. 

Now, she reached for the molding of the doorframe to steady herself.

“Mrs. Parker, Verizon called in a theft —” Donnie was saying as Larry appeared around the corner.

“Oh, hi, Mr. Parker.”

“Donnie, how you doing,” he said, planting his feet and reaching out a hand. Donnie shook it. “Why don’t you come in?”

“Oh, actually Mr. Parker, I was just telling Mrs. Parker —” 

“What do you need from me, Donnie? To come to the station?”

“That’d be great,” he said, relieved. 

“I’ll follow you there,” she said, refusing to acknowledge Larry’s stare bearing into her temple.

For a short time as a child, Alice had a pet bunny that she took everywhere she went. One day she was at the neighbor’s house playing hopscotch with one of the girls on the front walk. The bunny sat nearby, a puff of marshmallow in the warm summer sun. Alice was hopping from number 8 to 9 just as the girl’s brother came barreling out the front door, taking a flying leap from the top step, sailing through the air before landing directly on the lump of marshmallow below.

Alice ran home wailing, but all her mother did was shush her. “Get yourself together. Life isn’t fair,” she said, gesturing to the wheelchair in which she sat. “You better get used to it.” 

She had no idea why she was thinking about that bunny while following Donnie in her car to the police station — she hadn’t thought about it for decades — but the thoughts were spiraling and bursting and soon she was punching at the steering wheel, the air, screaming to the heavens for that little creature, and for her nine-year-old self, who had been forced to swallow down the anguish of having watched that creature die such a brutal death.

“You can sit Mrs. Parker,” Donnie said to her. She was standing in the door frame of the station, scanning the cement walls and the yellowed linoleum floor. Donnie’s desk was made of the same brown metal as old filing cabinets. On it sat a small, framed photo of a basset hound.

What had gotten into her? Stealing? Not once in her life had she ever even considered stealing, and now here she was at four o’clock on a Wednesday, seventy-seven years old, arrested — arrested! 

“Am I being arrested?” she asked as Donnie rifled through his desk drawer. 

Donnie said the Verizon manager sent him security footage of her visit to the store this afternoon. “Do you think that was you in the video, Mrs. Parker?” he asked, standing upright. 

She cleared her throat. “Yes, most likely.”

Donnie led her to a small room. “We’ll need to get your fingerprints.” 

He pulled on latex gloves and reached for her hand, weeding out her thumb and pressing it down on the scanner. They watched the green light crawl left to right under the glass. He did that again and again, his fingers momentarily intertwining with hers. 

Later, she stood in front of a gray wall; the ropes of fluorescent light seemed to sing above her. The camera flashed and then she heard, “Okay, now we need a profile shot.” 

She turned, and another flash came.

“Okay, and now Mrs. Parker, I don’t usually do re-dos, but let’s do the front-facing again. It’s recommended not to smile in these photos.”

Donnie talked to Alice for a while and she signed some things. Then she was alone in the office, ankles crossed, running her finger along a ridge of the white wall. It had been so shocking, how the bunny went from living to dead in such an instant, from pure white to a splattered blazing red. 

“Now that’s a hardened criminal right there,” she heard. Larry was in the doorframe, leaning hard on his crutches.

“Can I go?”

“You’re a free woman, Alice Miriam Parker — though you’re not allowed to set foot in a Verizon again.”

She stood quickly and smoothed her coat. It was too warm for such a mild day and she should have restitched the pocket. It was her mother’s, though — the butterfly brooch on the lapel too — and she always looked forward to wearing it once the weather turned.

Larry held an arm wide, his crutch dangling from his forearm. She walked toward him, buried her face into his torso.

“Let’s go.”

At the car, he opened her door, then threw the crutches in the trunk without care or regard, opened the passenger side door and sat. “Where’s your car?” she asked from the driver’s side, turning the key in the ignition halfway. The interior lights blinked on.

“Over there. I’ll get it in a minute. I just want to be with you.”

She held the steering wheel at ten and two and looked at him. “Why?”

“A man can’t sit with his wife?”

So they sat for a while like that, the car between stop and go, the warning chime singing softly.

When Larry reached for Alice’s shoulder, he saw the pack of cigarettes sitting in the center console.

“Since when do you smoke?” he asked, reaching for the pack. 

“Since today, I guess.”

Then Larry laughed, a loud rugged laugh that sounded like he was at the bottom of a barrel, a laugh so true that there was no controlling it. It had taken over. He laughed until he was wiping tears away and she was laughing too, laughing at his laughing, and her laugh made him laugh some more, the sound ping-ponging inside the car like atoms bouncing around in space.

When they were both drained empty, Larry gave the pack three quick taps on the meat of his palm like a professional.

He searched the glove compartment, cracked the window. Alice watched him hold a cigarette between his lips as the lighter let out a quick spit of metal on metal, the flame dancing until it found the end of the roll and he inhaled and held it for a while before releasing a slender plume of smoke from his mouth.

“Ah, the ol’ vice,” he said.

Then he turned toward her, holding the thing upright, the smoke writhing then dissipating into the air. Here and then gone. Here and then gone. She reached for the cigarette and placed it between her lips and watched her husband watching her, the light of the day’s end streaking through the windshield, illuminating both their faces.

Bonus audio of Mikaela reading from her story…

about the author:

Mikaela Conley is a journalist and writer based in Berlin. Her journalism appears in Wired, The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times, and many other publications. Her creative writing can be found in The Forge Literary Magazine, The Boston Globe, and elsewhere. She has a master’s in journalism from Columbia University, grew up in rural New Hampshire and is currently working on a novel about friendship and grief.

A Boy Who Thinks Quite a Deal | David Hutto

Ma gave me a piece of lemon pie, then said, “You can’t stay here and get a bomb on your head.”

What if she got a bomb on her head? If I couldn’t stay in Liverpool, why was she staying? She just said, “You have to go until the war is over. It probably won’t take long.”

“There aren’t any bombs where we live.”

“The Germans don’t know where you live. Anyway, Mr. Churchill said the children need to leave the cities.”

“Why aren’t you coming?” I asked.

“Somebody has to work. The men are going off to war.”

“I could be the man of the house.”

“That’s not a job for eight-year-old boys,” Ma said. “You have to be ten for that.”

Da went to the army, and sometimes he wrote letters. Ma would read me the parts he wrote for me, but I missed Da. Before he went in the army, Da worked for the BBC on the radio every day. Two times when I was home sick from school I heard him. He was talking about adult stuff, but even if it was boring, I still liked hearing me Da on the radio. The best thing was when he would talk to me after work.

“We learned kinds of trees in Norway,” I told Da one day.

“Did you? And what kinds of trees grow in Norway?”

“Oak trees, like here, and birch and spruce. Maybe ash. I’m not sure if that’s a tree. I don’t remember all of them.”

“That’s a lot to know,” Da said. “Maybe I should start studying to keep up. If I need to know Norwegian trees, I’ll have to ask you.”

I especially liked when Da would read me stories. Me favorite book was The Leprechaun’s Album of Lively Tales, because it had stories like the one about the brown hen tricking the fox or the one with the seven dogs and the seven thieves.

Then I got sent to live in the country with me grandma, Nanna Evans. I used to like Nanna Evans’ house when we went to visit sometimes, but it felt different after I had to go live there. Ma brought me right after school, so instead of playing all summer with me bezzies Julian and Ralph, I just had the toys Ma let me bring, a train set and a box of toy soldiers Da gave me and a ball. There weren’t any kids around except the cook’s little girl Amelia. Amelia was only four and she was a girl.

The day Ma brought me on the train, Nanna Evans picked us up in her car and we drove to her house. We were having tea, and she said, “Well, Archie, I hope you’ll enjoy a little time here. It’ll be like a summer vacation. Aren’t you in the third year of school now?”

“Yes ma’am,” I said.

“I hope you’re studying hard and learning.”

“He does well,” Ma said. “He’s got a hard head, but it has things in it.”

“I know the names of some countries in South America,” I told Nanna Evans.

“Good for you, Archie. I suppose Brazil is one of them. Would you like some more peas?”

“No, ma’am.” 

Ma only stayed two days and then left. Nanna Evans knew I was sad, and she said, “Why don’t I take you to see the horse who’s staying here. We didn’t have a horse when you were here before.” We walked to the pasture, and I saw a gray horse who Nanna Evans said was named Napoleon. When the horse saw us, he came to the edge of the fence and nodded his head up and down and Nanna Evans gave him a piece of apple.

I said, “Are you afraid he’ll bite you?”

“No, he’s a tame old horse.” Then she petted him on the nose.

Elizabeth Evans to her friend Hetty Bevan:

Just as I wrote before, Jennie brought my grandson Archie to live with me until the war is over. I’ve asked Wendell, the dairyman, to deliver extra milk while the boy is here, and Wendell agreed that he’ll exchange the milk for apples from our trees. Archie is a pleasant boy, well mannered, and Jennie deserves credit for that, more than her husband, as far as I’m concerned. The boy speaks with that unfortunate Scouse accent, but a proper education can take care of that. I know Archie is sad to be here, and I can’t say I blame him. I myself would not like being uprooted from living here in Lindenchapel. If anyone is to blame, of course, it’s Mr. Hitler.

A week after Ma left, I saw a bush with white flowers, and a lot of petals fell on the ground. The petals looked like snow, like it was winter with snow everywhere. I started to think about polar bears and what if I was hunting them? Then I found some polar bear tracks and followed them to the big ice wall behind the house where the polar bear lived. Polar bears can be dangerous, so I didn’t get too close.

“What are you doing?”

I turned around and the girl Amelia was standing in the yard.

“I’m playing,” I said.

“You want to play having tea?”

Who would want to play having tea? “No,” I said. “I’m chocker.”

“What is that?”

She didn’t even know how to talk to Liverpool people. “Chocker is busy. I’m hunting a bear.”

“OK, I’ll hunt a bear, too,” Amelia said.

“Little girls can’t hunt bears,” I said. “It’s too dangerous.”

She looked like she might cry and said, “Jesus says to be nice to everybody, so you have to let me hunt a bear.”

I didn’t want her to start crying because I might get in trouble, so I said, “OK, the bear’s behind that ice.”

“I don’t see any ice.”

“Right there,” I said.

“That’s a fence.”

“No, it’s an ice wall.”

“Oh,” Amelia said, “pretend ice.”

But the polar bear had already left, because it knew little girls aren’t supposed to hunt them. In a few minutes we gave up. I couldn’t play with Amelia. She was too little.

One day Nanna Evans asked if I like to read, and I said I do. She took me to Granddad’s old room and said maybe I could find a book I liked in there. There was a big desk with a lamp and an old radio on it, and a bookcase with a lot of books. “You can come in here whenever you want and look at the books,” Nanna Evans told me.

I was in there a long time looking at Granddad’s books, but the only book I liked was one that had photographs of other countries, like a desert with snakes and some place with a lot of people dancing with big things on their heads. I wished I had more books that told stories or had adventures. Something I liked in that room was a picture on the wall of Ma when she was a girl. It was really strange to think the girl in that picture was me Ma. I kept looking at the picture, and then I think the girl winked at me and she said, “Someday you’ll be me little boy.”

Elizabeth Evans to her friend Hetty Bevan:

You remember the lower pasture where we used to have those two bulls Walter finally sold, that he didn’t get a proper price for because he waited too long. Water under the bridge. In any case, we have an old horse in that pasture now, from one of my neighbors, the one who used to be the chemist here in Lindenchapel. He’s left to join a medical corps, and while he’s gone, he’s paying me to keep the horse,  which belonged to his father. I’ve had the vet take a look at the animal, and he says the poor thing is on its final legs. If the war does not end soon, I’m afraid my neighbor will come home to find his horse gone. For now I’m glad to have the beast here, as I think it cheers Archie up to see it, but he’s going to need more cheering than he’ll get from one old horse. When we were leaving the horse, Archie said “ta ra” so I had to tell him we are not in Liverpool, and please learn to say goodbye properly.

After Nanna Evans showed me the horse, I went to see it sometimes. Napoleon is really old, and Nanna Evans let me take an apple to give him. I was a little bit afraid, but I was pretty brave, and I gave him apples. One day I figured Napoleon must be so old he came from King Arthur days, because the knights back then rode horses like that. The next day when I went to see him, I was thinking he used to carry a King Arthur knight and they would fight dragons and monsters and maybe worse things, only I don’t know what would be worse than dragons or monsters. “Do you miss doing that?” I said and he nodded yes. “You’re probably bored without a knight to ride on you,” I said. “I bet you hate being bored.”

After I talked to Napoleon, I went back to the house to play in the garden, but I heard Amelia there. She was singing the song “Jesus Loves Me” and I know it because it was a song we used to sing in church if Ma took me, only we didn’t go to church much. When I heard Amelia, I was glad she didn’t see me, so I didn’t have to play with her. I went back to the stream, where Nanna Evans told me not to go, but I was only going to look at it just a little bit. There’s a big tree at the stream, the kind that droops down like it’s sad, and I knew that tree was where fairies live. I know a lot about fairies because I read about them, so I knew fairies live next to streams, and I was pretty sure they like big trees, even the droop-down sad kind.

When I was close to the stream, I got down low so I wouldn’t scare the fairies. The queen of the fairies sat under the droop-down tree, and servant fairies brought her some fairy food. The queen said “thank you” the way Ma says you’re supposed to when somebody gives you something, and after she ate the food, the fairies started dancing.

I liked seeing all the fairies and especially the queen, but I wished I had somebody else to play with. Even to hunt polar bears would be more fun with Julian and Ralph, because then you could say, “You go over there, and I’ll go over here and we’ll capture the polar bear in the middle.” Three of us could catch a polar bear.

Elizabeth Evans to her friend Hetty Bevan:

Archie was telling me the other day one of his little tales about leprechauns. I like to give the child a chance to play, but I wasn’t listening too closely because I was peeling apples. I do still like to bake a pie now and then. I know you, in particular, remember how I would win prizes at the fair, when they had judges who could recognize a proper pie. My new cook is willing to bake pies, but I enjoy doing it myself. Archie talked on for a few minutes while I was peeling, but I suppose the poor child realized I wasn’t paying him much attention, so he went outside. Perhaps I missed out on the leprechauns. It seems to me he is a boy who thinks quite a deal. I don’t believe Jennie was ever like that when she was a girl, always such a practical little thing. I suppose I had an easier time raising a girl who was more down to earth.

I was thinking about Ma and Da and I wished they would come and get me and then we would go home. Because I was thinking about them, I went back to Granddad’s room to see the picture of Ma when she was a girl, and I looked at it for a long time. She was smiling in that picture, and she had a bow in her hair, not like now. Ma doesn’t smile much now.

Then I looked at the radio on the desk and turned the knob. It made a crackle noise like the radio does at home when Ma turns it on. People were talking on the radio, the same kind of boring talk Ma always listens to. But in a few minutes a man said, “Hello to all the boys and girls listening out there.” He sounded like he was talking from far away. “We’re bringing you this program during the war, and every week we’ll have a different story for your enjoyment. We hope you enjoy hearing our little story.” I couldn’t believe they were going to have stories for children, and I was glad I turned on the radio. Then I heard another man start talking, and it was Da!

“Hello, boys and girls,” Da said. “I’m going to read you a story from a book called The Leprechaun’s Album of Lively Tales.” I was so happy Da had that same book from home, because I really liked that book.

“This story is called Going for a Lucky Walk. There was a woman who used to take her baby out for a stroll, and usually she would take the dog on a leash, so the dog could have a walk. When they went out for walks, the dog would notice things, like cars driving down the street or birds flying overhead. Then when the dog got home, it would talk to the cat. As we all know, cats can’t walk on a leash, so the cat couldn’t go for walks, but the cat was very curious about what was happening outside. Whenever the dog came home, the cat wanted to hear all about it. One time the dog was in a mischievous mood, so when the cat said, ‘What did you see today?’ the dog decided to torment the poor cat. ‘Oh,’ the dog said, ‘there was a parade that went by, with lots of people walking down the street, and everyone was pulling a piece of string attached to a ball of yarn. A hundred balls of yarn were bouncing up and down on the street.’ The cat thought of all those balls of yarn and how he could have been jumping at them. He was very jealous and said, ‘Oh, oh, oh, why can’t I go for walks?’ Then the dog said, ‘And when the parade passed by, a hundred parakeets came down to the street. They were so fat and lazy they could barely fly, and some were just walking on the ground.’ Then the cat was so jealous it began to meow and howl. ‘Oh, why am I stuck in the house? Why can’t I go for walks? Meow, meow!’”

It was funny to hear the story and how Da read it, how he sounded like the dog and cat. I felt really happy after I heard Da reading a story on the radio. After that time every week I would go to Granddad’s room to turn on the radio and listen to another story, like one about Kulijolli, a god from old days who lived in a cold stone house. One day Kulijolli got tired of shivering, so he made a warm spot in the house and it got so warm a fire started, and that’s where fire came from. Another story was about singing butterflies, who could sing better than anything in the world, but people couldn’t hear the butterflies, so they went to sing just for bees.

One day Nanna Evans said, “Archie, you seem to be enjoying your grandfather’s room. Are you finding interesting books in there?”

“I found the one with pictures,” I said. “But I’ve been going to listen to Da on the radio.”

“Is your father still on the radio?”

“Yes, ma’am, he tells stories for children. I listen to him reading stories.”

Elizabeth Evans to her friend Hetty Bevan:

Hetty, I have to tell you what happened this afternoon. I’ve allowed Archie to go to Walter’s old office, which hasn’t been used since he died. I thought the boy might find a book among Walter’s things that would give him some amusement, and of course I made sure to remove the things Walter never should have had to begin with that are not appropriate for a child. There’s a radio in there, and Archie told me that he’s been using it to listen to broadcasts of his father. I was so surprised that I went back to the room when Archie wasn’t there to check, and I was right, that radio has been missing its cord for years. I’m concerned about Archie, and he deserves to know what happened to his father.

One day when Da wasn’t on the radio, I went to me room where I had the toys Ma let me bring. I wanted to throw the ball, but I didn’t have anybody to throw it to, so I bounced it on the floor, except that wasn’t much fun. After that I got the box of toy soldiers Da gave me, and the soldiers fought a big battle, and I let one of the soldiers be Da. Then he said, “Next time I’m on the radio I’ll tell me little boy about how we won.”

Bonus audio of David reading from his story…

about the author:

The good life is..
(1) Feeling contented with who you are, and with how you live and what you do. (2) Having a glass of wine, some chocolate, and a comfortable couch, with something you really love to read.

David Hutto’s work is forthcoming in Little Old Lady, Bookends Review, and Carmina Magazine, and has recently appeared in Southern Quill and Avalon Literary Journal.  In 2024 his work appeared in Paterson Literary Review, The Hemlock, Brussels Review, Literally Stories, Cable Street, Galway Review, Symphonies of Imagination, Mediterranean Poetry, and Mudfish. His experience as a writer includes a residency at the Vermont Studio Center in 2003, as well as writers’ retreats in Mérida, Mexico in 2024 and Dublin, Ireland in May 2025. Website: www.davidhutto.com

Looking for a Friend | Ben Seabolt

“This is the end of the road.” Mr. Sharpeton pulls the red Tacoma to the side of 421 and parks in a pool of moonlight. 

“Are you fucking kidding?” Sam Humbert asks.

“This is the end of the road, for me.” The sign to exit into Yadkinville, North Carolina sits about 70 yards ahead of them. 

Sam pulls on his cigarette and blows the smoke across the dashboard. His scraggly brown hair falls into his eyes but he does not flinch to move it. “Not even halfway, huh?” 

“I’m done. I think if I keep going I’ll go crazy.” Mr. Sharpeton sits straight, his well-ironed flannel shirt and oiled beard collecting remnants of Sam’s last exhale. His eyes follow the few cars passing by. 

“You know what, old man? You’re already crazy. You’ve got your priorities turned all the way around.” 

“He’s your friend, Sam.”

“He’s your son, Jack.” The informal first name falls between them like a ship washed onto shore. Neither can row it back out. 

“Why don’t you just get out of the car, Sam?”

Sam opens the car door and leaves it ajar. He stands dangerously close to the right lane. “I don’t know what to take from this. You don’t care or you have no hope?” His gaze settles onto Mr. Sharpeton’s flickering eyelashes, now aimed towards a gold pendant of the Mother Mary swinging from the rearview mirror. “Or, no, hold on, I know: You’re hoping this time he really is gone. Your hands are washed from it and now you can soak in the celebrity of a humble, mourning father. I’m sure Mrs. Sharpeton would love to share that spotlight with you. Maybe you can even get your photo taken in the Watauga Democrat.” 

Sam continues to gaze into Mr. Sharpeton’s face. For the first time in a week, he can read the sadness etched into the crevices, between the wrinkles accumulated in the mountain wind and the dimples in his forehead formed by a lifetime of bewilderment. Mr. Sharpeton is silent, still looking forward, but oncoming headlights catch the tears rolling down his cheeks. Sam closes the door and walks on down the road to a Motel 6, briefcase jumping against his leg, his heart carved out and left for the foxes and deer along the highway. 

* * *

In the motel room, Sam sets his briefcase on the desk. His hands shake. Sweat seeping from his palms runs down along his fingers, wetting the paper of a Marlboro Menthol as he lights it. The fingers of his left hand trace the figures of fat-bellied, stout-faced little angels, like those found in Renaissance oil paintings, carved along the edges of the briefcase’s leather. He looks out into the empty parking lot and watches the summer condensation fog across the window. Across the street, a blinking neon bar sign advertises bottomless beer, and Sam feels the desolation settling into his bones. 

Of course, this is all inevitable. A week at the Sharpeton’s farm in the West Jefferson hills, scouring letters, text messages, Tweets, bank statements, and pure intuition to locate their son, David, and all Sam got was a whirlwind of distraction. Mr. Sharpeton ran in circles putting Sam to work on the land and Mrs. Sharpeton laughed and watched and called him ‘our favorite donkey’ like they’re some backwater 19th century homestead and not the quiet recluse of wealthy retirees. He knows this family, has been through this exact scenario with them before. It all led, like blood channeled to an open wound, to tonight’s abandonment. There wasn’t anywhere else it could have gone. 

Starting almost a decade ago in his early twenties, David Sharpeton has disappeared five times, cell phone tossed along some interstate, whatever apartment he’s living in ran through for supplies, robbed by its tenant. Sam has found him each time, in New Mexico slouched over a slots game in a casino chair, in an Illinois motel among endless rows of corn, in a West Virginia parking lot between disused smoke stacks, in a New Jersey club under strobing lights, and in a tent by a creek about ten miles from his parents’ North Carolina farm. Alone or surrounded by strangers with leering faces, Sam found David with his own face unrecognizably stretched, his high cheekbones more prominent, his speech pulled into long, dreamy ramblings that seemed to mimic the distances he traveled. “Come home. Your parents think you’re dead,” Sam pleaded, to which David obliged, every time, with a signature smirk under bright eyes searching the horizon and its promises. 

“Okay, buddy. It’s time for my resurrection,” David would say.

Each search started around the Sharpeton dinner table, clues piling up in printed out text messages and scribbled notes of conversations passed over weeks before, Sam at the helm like some degraded captain. Mr. Sharpeton at Sam’s right hand side, Mrs. Sharpeton scurrying about with biscuits and coffee. On the wall, at the dining room’s center, a printed photograph of a sun-flecked cloud bursting through with what Mrs. Sharpeton swears is the image of a pregnant Mother Mary walking the desert. Mr. Sharpeton and Sam would talk through their clues, Sam’s Raleigh Police Department badge, Detective #4679, buried in his luggage upstairs. He came to their table as a friend and a friend only. Mrs. Sharpeton would nod along, her eyes darting from the photograph and back to the table as if trapped sunlight burst from the photo’s surface and guided the three of them from clue to clue. 

And at each investigation’s conclusion, with a decision made on where to begin the search for David, Mr. Sharpeton would unlock the liquor cabinet at their feet, pour three glasses of whiskey, hand them around, and wait for his wife’s closing statement. And Mrs. Sharpeton would commence, draining her glass of whiskey and beginning in a whisper: “Oh Lord, our son is lost in this world. There’s a job to do here, in these hills, and he’s lost in this world.” And her voice would rise: “It is important to be rooted. To find your piece of Earth that grounds your journey to Heaven. We’ve kept him close. We’ve checked on him, helped him with money when he runs out. We’ve turned away people who have come to our door looking for him, these strangers looking to take something from him. These same people he runs off with. Beggars, opportunists who use people because they have nothing of their own to offer. And when you have nothing to offer you have nowhere to be. You’re unrooted because you’re rootless. Wild-eyed people. But Sam, you’re David’s oldest friend, the only one that’s stuck around through it all. You see straight. You’re good police and good people. I know you can bring him home. Show him he’s still worth something in this world.” 

And she would finish, and Sam would drain his glass of whiskey, his head fuzzing with the familiar lick of calm preceding chaos. He would take Mrs. Sharpeton’s hand and imagine David marching along some interstate, maybe blasted drunk, maybe limping from some heroic leap from a moving freight train car, and yet maybe altogether weightless and unburdened. And he would gather the clues compiled around the table into a folder and prepare to head out on the search. 

This time, however, there were no real clues, save for one, hidden in Sam’s briefcase, unnamed and unmentioned. A letter, sent by David right before his latest disappearance, sealed with a wax emblem of a coffin, the envelope scrawled across with the words He not busy being born is busy dying. Sam kept this letter from them. He read it, hid it away, and simply waited for the Sharpeton’s call that David had run off again, which they usually discovered through a landlord asking them where their son was and why he had not paid the month’s rent. Other than that, David had been silent for months.

This time, as Mr. Sharpeton concluded their deliberation in the dim evening light around the dinner table, Sam found it impossible to look into his eyes: “What we know: his car is still here. Okay. My guess, he must have hopped the freight trains to Raleigh and then taken the Amtrak to Baltimore. He’s got some friends up there in Maryland. Yeah, I’ve heard him mention Maryland.” 

There is a finality to Mr. Sharpeton’s words, always tinged with command. Sam was to take the Amtrak from Raleigh to Baltimore and ask around with the workers if they had seen David within the past week and a half. If not, the search was to begin in Baltimore. So, Mrs. Sharpeton kissed both of them goodbye in her nightgown and Sam and Mr. Sharpeton started the drive to Raleigh, about three hours east into the downward Piedmont hills. Sam’s visit lasted exactly a week, too clean and perfect to be an organic period of decision-making. As Mrs. Sharpeton said goodbye in the buzzing darkness of the driveway, she laughed and clutched Sam’s wrist as if to say You know David is just crazy. He’ll be back.

And yet, the show of giving up 130 miles from the Amtrak station and turning around to sit on the porch and sulk? Like it’s smeared into their DNA, this cycle of disappearance and miraculous reappearance? The Sharpetons hadn’t given up on David, they had given in. 

Sam unlatches his briefcase atop the motel desk and checks the contents. Four wool shirts, two pair of slacks, seven pair of underwear (only three beginning to rip), four pair of wool socks (only two beginning to rip), a copy of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping marked in sloppy red ink, a polaroid photograph of David squinting and pointing his tongue out over a bonfire, David’s letter screaming its silent scream. And tucked inside a zipper compartment, Sam’s detective badge and cell phone. His cellphone is awash in missed calls from the precinct and his partner, Detective Sonia Gonzalez. 

He closes his briefcase, returns his motel key, and heads out onto the dark highway. At about three a.m., a young woman picks him up along a soybean farm and takes him the rest of the way to the Raleigh train station. He sleeps intermittently on the drive, dreaming, or just floating in pools of memory, of David and him pitching a tent under a great grey oak tree on the night of their college graduation, huddled together against the screaming wind. In the dream, Sam wakes up in the morning and finds David standing shirtless in the clearing beyond the tent, his back opening in gashes under his shoulder blades. Wings, beautiful blue wings, feathers brushing out along the bottom, in the earliest stages of development, poke out. The light through the spring leaves makes them look spotted. In the car, Sam just sleeps and grumbles with his head leaning against the window. The young woman glances over at him and pulls his jacket to blanket his arms, soft with pity. 

* * *

Raleigh Union Station is all glass brimming in the morning light. Crowds murmur about the landing doors and wait in rows of brown, leather-stitched chairs like schoolchildren. Sam adjusts his wire-rimmed glasses and straightens his jacket’s corduroy collar before the ticket attendant. He flashes his badge.

The attendant is young, college-aged and baggy-eyed, headphones hanging from her shirt collar, but lacks all the pliance of youth.

“What is this?” she asks.

“Raleigh Police Department. I’m conducting an investigation into the whereabouts of a missing person. If you could look up to see if their identification was logged in the system within the past ten days.”

The attendant is calm, smirking and glancing at the waiting bodies in line behind Sam. “You have a warrant?”

“I have reason to believe this person came through Union Station and bought a ticket.” Sam shuffles on his feet. 

“I have reason to believe I can’t help you.”

“Is there a supervisor I can speak to? I -” Sam’s phone rings. Gonzalez is calling. “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he mutters as he steps out of line with a smile to the attendant. He picks up the call.

“Sam, where the hell are you?” Her words sputter out at once.

“Sonia, I told you, I’m helping a friend.”

“Well, you’re losing one here.”

“It’s only been a week, Sonia.”

“There was a fucking body found in the Neuse River on Thursday, wrists and arms all bruised up. An old man.” Sam can see her feet wedged into the carpet and her right hand hovering above the white cactus she keeps on her desk. The photograph she keeps of her and her ex-husband sweating under the Outer Banks sun is face-down, still not removed. 

“And they’ve got the best investigator in the Carolinas on the case.” 

“You can’t just leave. The lieutenants are all over me about this. The god damn mayor came to my office – my office! – to ask me if you’re emotional, if you’re drinking. Like a fucking toddler. You know what they would do to me if I tried this? ” She pauses for an endless breath. “I am not going to be here to clean this up for you anymore. I am not your mother.”

“Sonia, it’s David again.”

The other end of the line is quiet with a body releasing its anger. 

“Something tells me this time he’s gone for good,” Sam breathes, almost in relief.

“Where are you following him to this time?” 

“I’m heading to Baltimore on the Amtrak.”

“Baltimore? Why not drive?” Sam sees her leaning over her mahogany oak desk, her voice dimming into worry.

“I just spent a week getting nowhere with his parents. His father suggested this.”

“And?”

“And I need to make good on a promise.” Sam looks up from the floor and checks the departure times. 

Sonia laughs and clucks her tongue. Sam can feel the hot breath through the icy glass of the phone. “When will you realize you don’t owe them anymore? Never did.”

Sam is silent, watching the rows of chairs empty.

“You’ll find him, Sam,” Sonia says.

* * *

Sam settles into a window seat and watches oak, pine, and hickory forests blur into a dank stew. The air conditioner drones and the windows spray with rain, refracting the passing forests in centerless dots of green and gray. A house falling in on itself appears to be opening its  eyes to the bleak sky. A couple behind him argues about loyalty, accusing one another of heinous misunderstandings, of watching life fall down around them and doing nothing. There are businessmen in their smart suits, families with small children climbing about the seats, and those as alone as he is, shooting across the Earth’s curved edge into some unknowable oblivion. 

Sam orders a vodka tonic at the bar and shakes as the liquid pours down his throat. He asks every passing train worker about David, showing pictures of him beaming under blue eyes and curly hair pulled back in a headband. The workers shake their heads and say “No, I’m sorry,” but they really mean he passed through going somewhere unreachable. He orders more vodka tonics. One. Three. Five. Six. His brain soaks, his chest opens, and his vision warbles around the edges. He begins asking fellow travelers in the car about David, and then moving about to other cars, searching, searching endlessly for a single set of eyes to glaze him over with recognition. Families huddle about each other and a businessman wearing a straight face warns to leave him alone, throwing his hand up as Sam approaches. 

Sam returns to his seat and slumps into the leather. The rain hits harder against the glass. The train drones along the tracks. Somewhere in central Virginia, it comes to a halt above a river thick with mud. The passengers murmur and the intercom cuts in with a reassuring voice: “We are experiencing some difficulties with the track. Our conductors are working on it now and the journey should resume within the hour. Please remain seated and let our Amtrak staff know if there is anything you need.” 

The windows fill with faces peering around the edge to see the problem, but it remains out of sight. Sam unlatches his briefcase and retrieves David’s letter, smirking at the loose handwriting scrawled across the envelope in frenzied impatience. His breath catches as he opens it:

Sam, my brother,

There is so much to tell you, to ease your worry. But I know you will come looking for me, that my parents will set you on the task. But I want you to remember something. Do you remember? That night on King’s Mountain. We left the saloon, all those people looking to me for the next action, all of our friends. We set out under the moon, just us two, and climbed the hill until we found an empty vacation cabin. It was quiet, there were astrid gardens and spruce trees lining the front of the house, hiding it. But nothing can hide from us. Do you remember? You picked the lock. Don’t pretend you weren’t a willing adventurer that night. It was fall, but inside it was warm, as if the owners had just left that night. We lit the fireplace and huddled around, casting our hopes for the future into the flames. You wanted to be a detective and I couldn’t believe it. My best friend, a cop, like a badge and a gun could cover over what you really are? You said you wanted to help people, to find those who have gone missing. You said the world is full of energy that pulls each of us into our own oblivion, and that if you could just access that energy, anyone can be pulled out, back into the world of daylight again. And I just couldn’t believe it. My best friend, a cop? And you asked me what I wanted to do or be, and I said nothing. I didn’t have an answer and I still don’t.

We drank bottles of wine left in the cabin pantry. It was tart – expensive, I bet. We raved and raved until the black hills around seemed to move about with us. Do you remember? There was so much hope. You were going to graduate and move to Raleigh a man – a man in this world! I clapped for you, carried you about the room on my back until we fell laughing into the floor, where we didn’t wake until a woman with a crooked nose stood over us, pouring wine on our heads. Her husband stood there with a gun, itching to use it. “You’re not leaving unless it’s in a police car,” they told us. You didn’t like that idea. So we ran. We jumped off the back porch and crashed down the mountain through brambles, the early fallen leaves sliding underfoot. You broke an arm, I broke an ankle, and we sat in silence at the base of the mountain throbbing with shock. And do you remember what you said to me, squinting against the morning sun, the hopeful new day? You told me you were done with me. It was time to grow up. What do you want to be, David? You asked me this and I didn’t have an answer. I still don’t. That was ten years ago, now, Sam, and I still don’t have an answer. 

I’ve been working. On a goat farm about an hour from my Mom and Dad’s place. I rise each morning with the milking and talk to the goats like old friends. I rake the land and fix the fence when it needs fixing. The couple that hired me pays fair, and I sleep in a lofted room above their house. But it’s not enough. My parents come to me with news of Jesus. I am the one they can save, their Fall to be redeemed. They don’t understand that being saved is not enough when there is nothing to save. My mother cries when she sees me. She says every time I reappear my eyes are more crooked. That I can’t even see the path to salvation now. You’ve said the same, in your own way.

I’ve seen the news, Sam. You’re a damn hero. My parents have printed out the headlines of the missing children and wandering old folks you’ve found in Raleigh. They pasted them up in the garage, as a reminder that when they leave each day there is always hope of coming home. But my best friend, a cop? You know we don’t like cops, Sam. Their wielding of death as an instrument over the rest of us. Don’t you remember? For every life saved, another destroyed completely. Every time you’ve found me in some musty motel room or rusted out car, just know there were friends there with me who have had everything taken from them. But you’re doing your part, I suppose. I think it’s time I do the same.

There is a nation of wanderers out there, and I intend to join them. I’m leaving today. I know my folks will call you in again, and set you into the game we’ve been playing for years. But I know they’ve let go. It is just a sense of guilt that they are working out. Help them, eat with them, sit with them, work with them. Go wherever my father sends you. But know it’s for them, not for me. Return to them knowing you need to let go, too.

The signature trails off into incomplete letters, slashed across as if in anger.

Sam’s head pulsates at the base of the skull. He grips the seat’s edge to steady himself. He rises from the letter and tears it into pieces that carry away in the stampede of bodies flowing past to the head of the halted train car. He closes his briefcase and joins the crowd, craning over an old woman gasping for a view. “Are those – are those people on the tracks?” she groans. 

Sam peeks over the crowd and sees a small group standing at the tip of the bridge. Rain wearies their faces, their nylon coats catching and folding like limbs. Five people, standing around the conductor in her flat-topped cap, their eyes mad with pleaing. 

Sam breaks through the other passengers, opens the door at the end of the car, and falls into the mud lining the tracks above the river. The wind sings around his ears with angel’s falsettos. The rain washes cold against his scalp. A tent, curled into itself and running with mud, leaking cookware and blankets, flows down the river and catches on a branch leaning into the water. Laying in the mud, Sam watches the tent twitch in the current. Then, he gets up and lopes to the end of the bridge, where he sees bulldozers and shovels picking away at a mudpatch pooled over the railway. “Get back in the train. There’s been a mudslide. Get back in the train!” a uniformed man yells at the stranger in the mist, his voice carried away by the pulsing water below.

Sam walks on, searching the faces before him. “David?” he says. “I’m looking for my friend, David. Have any of you seen him? Have you heard his voice?” The railroad workers look at him with open mouths and still eyes. The bulldozer motors hum along and no one says a word. All there is is silence, merciless silence blanketing the land around, the underpasses and gas stations, the hills and valleys and strip malls, the coasts east and west crashing in as if someday they’ll meet, and it will all be over then. 

Bonus audio of Ben reading David’s letter to Sam…

about the author:

Ben Seabolt is a bookseller and educator raised in North Carolina and now based in Chicago. He received an MA in Literature from North Carolina State University. His creative writing career is just getting started. When Ben is not reading and writing, he can be found playing pick-up basketball as a pass-first point guard.