Percival the Trucker

Pruning

Truth

Tyrofall

It's the little things

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Percival the Trucker
Ross Clapsaddle 

   The semi swerved onto the rumble strips as Percy fiddled his fingers through the papers in the glovebox. Correcting the path of the big rig with his left hand, his right continued the search for his Darth Vader Pez Dispenser. “Where the fuck is it,” he muttered to himself, slamming his glove box closed and moving his hand along the passenger side of the truck and down into the ass-crack of the seat. Feeling a rounded-off bit of plastic that he thought could only be the Sith Lord’s helmet, Percy retrieved his dispenser and popped two caffeine pills out of Vader's throat and down his own. It was nighttime, but his forearms were unaware – they were doing their best impression of the Arizona sun they had been blasted by all day. His hula girl, whom he had dubbed Dulcinea Del Dashboardo, seemed indifferent as well, as she was dancing to the rhythm of the road at her own nighttime luau.
   Percy checked the clock and the speedometer, which read 11:37 pm and 76 mph, respectively, and then checked his gas gauge. Seeing that he only had about a quarter of a tank left, he decided to fill up at the next station. He knew better than to get too low on diesel in Arizona, where civilization was about as rare as the civility within it.
   Percy hated Arizona and the Arizonans it harbored. He saw it as a land in which the hard-working immigrant and the hard-complaining about the hard-working-immigrant came to clash. It wasn’t dissimilar to his hometown of San Bernardino, CA, in that it was extremely hot, and everyone was perpetually unhappy (maybe on account of the heat). Percy often thought that living as a struggling writer by day and a fry cook by night might have jumpstarted his pessimistic outlook; well, that combined with the ever-widening income-to-bills ratio. The words of his sister and ex-fiancé (who had both found their lucrative calling as a doctor and financial advisor, respectively) also constantly echoed in his head, and the thought that he was “stagnant” and “never did anything with his life” kept him up at night. That’s why, when his brother-in-law offered him a union job driving semi-trucks, he welcomed the opportunity to get out of his rut, so-to-speak, and experience something new.
   It had been two years of driving and Percy was still a struggling writer, a tag he thought he might carry for the rest of his life (yet still welcomed). He was prone to recording his thoughts during his long drives and was strangely critical of himself – writing and recording everything as if the whole world were reading or listening to it right then and there. On this particular night, Percy was in the process of rewinding his trusty device to record over what he deemed a ‘useless sentiment’ – an entry comparing the open road to the running water of a stream and something about fossil fuel emissions being as much of a necessity to the earth as a grizzly bear who can’t catch salmon – when he glanced at his speedometer again.
   “Oh shit, these pills are kicking in!” he exclaimed, laughing as he yanked his foot off the gas pedal. He watched as the ticker began its slow countdown from 90. Just as he stopped laughing at what an idiot he was, Percy saw the fast approaching and ever-familiar red and blue lights growing in his side mirrors.
   “Well, fuck. You gonna take the blame for this one, D?” he said, looking at his hula girl as she bobbed and danced. The truck began its ascension out of the stream and onto the side of the road.
   Percy watched through his mirror as the shadow of a motorcycle cop, or the literal chip on the shoulder, kicked out his kickstand, hiked his pants, and approached the front of his truck.
   “How we doin’ there, chief? My name is Officer Bill Sage. Do you know why I pulled ya over tonight?” the cop said, about as naturally as anything Percy had ever heard.
   “Uh, yeah... I lost track of my speed for a second. Sorry, officer...” Percy responded, trying to match the tranquility set forth by the officer.
   “Well I mainly got ya’ for skipping the mandatory Semi Weigh Station a couple-a miles back. But how fast were ya’ goin’?” said Officer Sage, with an almost Wisconsin-like emphasis on every syllable in the word ‘mandatory’.
   “Oh, I was going the speed limit, I think,” Percy responded, evading the officer’s bait, “but I must’ve missed the station. Want me to circle back and hit it?”
   “No, no, that’s alright. Just go ahead and gimme’ your license and registration” said the officer, hiking his pants up even further. Percy thought to himself that if Officer Sage had aviator sunglasses on, he would have pushed them up the bridge of his nose at least six times by now, all while excessively chewing gum.
   As Officer William B. Sage inspected Percy’s CDL license and insurance, as well as his manifest, he chuckled.
   “Everything alright, officer?” Percy inquired, starting to see why a person could dislike the stereotypical cop.
   “Yeah, yeah... all good. It’s just... Percival. With a name like that, shouldn’t you be one of them science guys or some shit?” he said, laughing through a condescending grin.
   “You’re talking, Bill... like, Nye? That’s literally THE Science Guy’s name...” responded Percy abruptly, wiping the smile off the officer’s face (he didn’t bring enough elbow grease for the condescension).
   “Shit, I’m sorry. It’s been a long day,” Percy followed, with a tone full of forced remorse. “What would you like me to do?”
   “You can step out of the vehicle for me, sir... that’s whatchya can do.”
   Accepting defeat, Percy unclicked his seatbelt, blew a kiss to Dulcinea, and began to dismount his trusty ‘Rocicante’ (the Cervantes-based nicknames didn’t stop at his hula girl). As he started to lean against his door to force it open, he noticed a new and even faster approaching set of headlights in his mirror.
   Sage, noticing the same thing, slammed his shoulder against the truck’s door as it was about to open, just in time for a black sports car to recklessly swerve by.
   “NEXT WEIGH STATION” the motorcycle cop yelled as he jumped off the truck’s running board and threw Percy’s license and papers through the window. Percy gathered himself and his documents and watched as Officer Bill ‘doesn’t respond well to Bill Nye references’ Sage hopped on his bike and took off in pursuit of the careless driver.
   “A streetcar named scapegoat, am I right?” Percy said, half expecting Vader or Dulcinea to at least chuckle. Neither did.
#
   The rig pushed on, resuming its swim through the moonlit desert. Whether it was heading upstream or downstream, Percy was both unaware and indifferent. Clicking first his seatbelt and then the ‘record’ button on his device, he began to retell the events of his night with a zeal he hadn’t felt since his younger days – the days filled with full pages and fryer burns.
   Amid the (somewhat exaggerated) recount of his encounter with Officer Sage and the black sports car, Percy noticed that his tank was now almost entirely empty. Tossing his recorder onto the passenger seat, he saw a sign (mostly physical but somewhat divine) indicating that the next station was only a mile and a half away.
   “Thank god,” he muttered.
   Percy arrived at the signaled watering hole, a seemingly deserted ‘Lake Exxon’ lit with faint yellow bulbs, this time fully intent on dismounting his thirsty steed. As he began the process of filling up his rig, Percy heard what he later described as a “major kerfuffle,” (before erasing the entry, of course).
   “I SAID, LET ME SEE YOUR HANDS,” Percy heard the voice that he was just describing – for the listening world – scream from behind the run-down gas station. With his eyes following fresh tire marks that led into the darkness around the building’s corner, his heart began racing again. He decided to do what almost all white people do (his name was Percival, after all) and walk towards the sounds of the police altercation, as opposed to running away from it.
   With his phone set on record-mode (a setting that took him much longer to find than that of the one on his trusty device), Percy crept towards the building in hopes of catching some sort of excitement. “HANDS! NOW!” Sage yelled, as Percy walked past the fly infested bathrooms and rounded the corner of the seedy station. His eyes adjusted to the back end of a an early 2000-something Corvette with its engine still running. Just as he began to capture the car’s Nevada license plate, Percy received his wish of excitement and heard the weight of at least two full-grown men slam onto the hood of the car.
   There were only a few short seconds of grunting and slashing about before Percy, his phone, and the wide-eyed and falling-backwards Officer Sage watched as the speed-demon yanked the officer's gun from him.
   The hectic situation was abruptly followed by an eerie moment of calmness, which was even more abruptly followed by a three-way slap of realization. Looking down at his hand as if the gun had been placed there by someone else, the large sports car driver poked his chest out above his potbelly and began to take control of the situation.
   “Let me see YOUR hands, motherfucker,” he said, backed by his new-found confidence.
   Sage, with no real chance of hiking up his pants, uttered a meager “Calm down, man. You don’t wanna do this.” His once-commanding voice seemed to be unarmed and on its back next to him.
   Percy quickly realized that he was unseen by both the officer, and the man holding the officer's firearm and decided to spring into action. With one quick motion, Percy took off sprinting, with the help of adrenaline and Vader pills, and blindly threw his phone in the speedster’s general direction. He later documented that, at this exact point, he began screaming (reminiscent of an 80’s movie shootout scene), which forced the gun-wielding speed-demon to turn his face directly into Percy’s somersaulting iPhone 4s (he also later claimed, falsely, that the phone’s screen was uncracked before the throw).
   Percy heard the gun go off just as he tackled the man holding it (with the intensity Quixote would tackle a man-sized windmill), and immediately felt his left foot go numb. The gun, knocked loose from the tackle after firing its round, was picked up by Officer Bill Sage, who pointed it at the man on the ground.
   “STAY THE FUCK DOWN, ASSHOLE,” he screamed, after ultimately winning the back-and-forth trade of confidence. “Percival... You alright?”
   Percy still heard a dash of condescension in the way the officer said his name, but that was the last thing on his mind at this point.
   “Yeah, I’ll be alright,” Percy responded, with his adrenaline still coursing through him. Wincing in pain, he looked through the bloody hole in his left shoe where he thought his pinky toe should be.
   Percy thought, through the pain, that this epitomized the opposite of “stagnant” and hoped that his recorder wasn’t going to be locked up in the evidence room for long.

---

 

Pruning
​Josh Wilson

“It was just a colour out of space—a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it—H.P. Lovecraft, The Colour Out of Space.
​-------
   Poison had made it into the soil. Inez held the gardening shears at her side, anxiously opening and closing blades dark with earth as she stared up at the dead tree. The sycamore stood at a deranged angle, leafless, its branches so dry and twisted they looked like antlers arranged in some pagan configuration against the blasted-white winter sky. She fixed her eyes on the distance that rolled on and on into a landscape hardly more than ash.
   Inez found it difficult to accept a land so dead and pigmentless had been lush and green just a few short months ago, but the thing in the mine worked quickly, quicker than anyone could have imagined. Ray-John Webber, who worked for the J&A Coal Company since ink had wet his high school diploma, had been the one to find it.
   “I thought it was just some sort of artifact,” he told the regulars down at Spigot’s Taphouse, wrapping soot smudged fingers around the condensation beaded neck of a Coors. “Like the arc of the covenant in ​Raiders. ​I didn’t even know it was there until my pick hit it and it started gushing this red gunk everywhere, almost red like blood but faded, like the worn side of a penny.”
   The thing in the mine leaked for weeks. It leaked while the professors of archeology and anthropology who came all the way down from the Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts took photos and studied the symbols etched across its ebony surface. It leaked until its strange fluid flooded the mineshafts and they waded through it with their jeans wrapped up to their knees. It leaked until its blood seeped deep into the soil. Nobody cared much, at least not until the bass and trout started to float dead-eyed in the river, a string of white bellies that flipped up and bobbed in water that had turned into the color of moving rust.
   The river still ran red. Inez’s grip tightened on the shears’ rubber handles as she watched the rapids coil over each other like the dark bronze backs of copperheads. She thought of her mother, a good country woman who’d traveled to this land all the way from Venezuela, how the old woman would bend to the crops in the morning, muttering thanks in the manner her own mother had taught her. Inez didn't know poison had ebbed into the well. Her mother complained of feeling funny, not sick exactly, but not quite right either. She shut herself in her bedroom and napped off and on through two days. Inez was the one that found her. She dropped the breakfast tray she was carrying, both soup and the shattered china bowl scattering across the floor when she caught sight of her mother’s eyes. They had filled up overnight, nothing more than two jellied eggs in an ashen face, a corpse staring through a hollowed body that had been eaten from the inside out.
   Remembering her mother, watching the crimson current, Inez bent to the soil, the shadow of the way her mother would mutter thanks to the corn and, after sifting through the ash that had replaced the greenery, she slipped her finger between the shears—the first joint, the first segment, that crease in the flesh pinched between the serrated edges—and snipped. The tip of her pointer fell into the soil, small and pathetic, a pink rose petal with a half-chewed nail.
   The pain was hot and bright as the blood that gushed forth. Inez clenched her teeth, moved her finger up, the second joint, the second crease now snagged between the blades. Her husband had died next. Inez remembered seeing him that last time, only seeing his head shivering in the toilet at the hospital. He’d looked up once, blinking in confusion, unable to remember her name, and she missed the way he used to say it, each syllable spoken tenderly off the tip of the tongue, always like a song sung sweetly but out of sync. But by then he’d forgotten the sound, the poison he’d drunk clouded its shape, the memory of it leaking through his ears with the gray matter and brain that dribbled down his temples. She still wondered why the water had never made her sick, was still waiting for the signs: the veins that ran in a black web through skin, the teeth going loose in their beddings. Sometimes, after all she has lost, she probes her molars, hoping to feel one tilt, hoping for an end to all the pain.
   Remembering her husband, Inez snipped the shears and the blood spattered onto the dirt in dark patterns she could almost read. She moved the blades farther down, the next segment, the rest of her finger trembling and waiting. She did not want to remember what came next, how by then the river had went to her father’s brain, made him crazy, made him fanatic.
   “It whispers. It talks. Can’t you hear it? It mutters just beneath the rapids.” He’d said after shoving Inez to the ground, wiry in old age but still unbelievably strong from the years he worked laying brick. Immovable as stone itself, he grabbed Inez’s son, grabbed her Guillermo around the neck and guided him toward the copper tinted water.
   “I can hear your mother,” He gazed deep into the water’s scarlet undulations. A blood drop emerged from the corner of one rheumy eye. “She cries out below the current. She says the most beautiful things await us all, the most beautiful colors, like Christmas lights in a rainstorm. ¡Novia! Mi astuta-loba, ya voy ¡quiero ver!​”
   Inez’s father edged off the muddy bank, the river frothing over he and Guillermo’s shoes in foam the ugly shade of iodine. Guillermo reached for Inez, his stubby child-fingers splayed and grasping the open air.
   “Momma!”
   Inez seized her father’s arms, his muscles alive with insanity beneath her fingertips, jerking and twisting as if she she’d snatched hold of a sack stuffed with viscous centipedes instead of a man. Inez hadn’t expected the knife, the small foldout blade he’d bought in Italy during his excursions in the Navy, the one she’d watched him whittle with on the porch countless times, so oddly gentle in the way he would manipulate its movements against the wood. There was none of that craftsman’s care and skill when he plunged the knife into Inez’s side, lodging blade between ribs.
   Inez stumbled backwards, stricken into an appalled silence as she glanced down and saw where he had their family name ​Vasquez e​ tched deep into the handle that now jutted from her stomach. Her father waded into the scarlet-kissed water with her son. He gripped the back of the boy’s head, a twisted holy-man about to administer a blasphemous baptism.
   “It’s okay,​Nieto,​” he said, soothing the boy. “Your grandmother says it’s the most wonderful place. Can’t you hear her in the water? She says it’s a dream land. Don’t be afraid, my little ​pollito.​ There are baseball fields there for you to play on where the children laugh until they scream because the games go on and on and on. There’s snow cones there, too, the cherry syrup so sweet the coating never leaves your tongue, just stays there cloying and sour forever and ever.”
   He lowered Guillermo’s head to the poison-apple colored water. “Can you smell it, pollito​, can you smell the snow cones of your dreams, so sweet and maddening it's like sugared moth wings beating in your skull. That’s the smell of dreams, ​pollito​. Something familiar but not quite right. That’s the smell of dreams.”
   Her father dunked Guillermo under, the bubbles from his scream churning in the coppery current. Inez tore the knife from her side and buried the blade deep into the soft crook of her father’s neck. Warm blood gushed between her fingers, then streaked and vanished in the red water. He turned and looked at her, his expression wounded. Reaching up, he touched Inez’s cheek the way he had when she was still a small child perched on his knee, his fingers feeling like they did then, tough and leathery from working with land and stone, but so gentle, always careful to use only the tips where there were no callouses.
   “​Mi niña, pequeña angelita​, I only wanted to see the lights.” The ones’ in his eyes were already fading, and Inez clung to him, weeping into his bony shoulder and desperate not to let his body fall and become further desecrated by the red river.
   Remembering the grizzled but careful touch of her father’s fingertips, Inez clenched the gardening shears’ rubber handles and snipped the third segment. The pink wad dropped bleeding with the others at her feet. She could feel herself growing weaker, unsteady from blood loss and oddly cold as the beginnings of shock began to ebb into her body. She moved the blades over the final crease of her index finger, set right against the bony ridge of her knuckle, the remainder a pale and bloodless stump that shuddered in the cold air.
   It wasn’t long before what Guillermo ingested from the river began to change him. His back pulled down into an arch as he walked, the spine bending him forward until his gait became a regressed troglodyte stoop, until finally instead of walking he rooted through the house on all fours, snorting and grunting in chopped, pig-squealed syllables that resembled nothing of humanity. Her sweet boy who she once watched sing in the lightest voice, unashamed before all his classmates at the Christmas assembly, began to warp before her eyes. The fingers on both hands melded together, becoming fleshy cloven hooves with two trowel shaped black nails. His nose upturning and flattening, the nostrils shrinking into bestial slits. It came so she couldn’t stomach the sight of him anymore and locked him in the cellar. She did peek through the trapdoor once and saw a dark piggish shape crouched in corner so terrible that it made her scream at the top of her lungs and never want to open the cellar again.
   It wasn’t long before she began to hear the red river whispering, too, faint muttering voices that drifted across the fields that had withered to ash and crumbling charcoal, the voices of everyone she lost chanting promises of resurrection in turn for sacrifice. A pain in exchange for the pain she felt at each loss, crucial pieces of herself given for each loved-one taken. The pieces and severed segments of her finger piled at her feet were offerings to their absence. It was a living thing, this river, a slithering copperhead-god that squirmed from a black universe older than time itself. Inez could see her family in the current—her mother, her father, her husband—distorted screaming reflections that shimmered across its faded bronze surface. Both her severed finger and the gardening shears dripped. There were still so many loved ones to go.
   There was Auntie Maria who’d drowned herself in the river’s depths, nothing more now than a body that floated and bloated the floral printed dress she always wore. There was Uncle Nino who used to do a spot-on yodel just like those old Ricola commercials until the river water rotted his esophagus and collapsed it into his chest. This wasn’t even counting distant relatives: stupid cousin Stanley with the lisp, cousin Martha, George, Ronnie, Louisa, Jose, Winslow, Benny, Franklin, Joey, Rosie, Ricky, Caleb, Ronnie, Joe-Joe, Suzie, Larry, and even great uncle Tony with the limp. Southern family roots run deep.
   Inez opened and closed the gardening shears and flexed her remaining fingers. She would probably have to finish off on her toes.

---

 

Truth
Julianna Vaughan

   The two o’clock trolley arrives five minutes behind schedule to pick up the group waiting on Wilson Street. Two men and two women board; the women on their way to the grocer and the doctor, the men don’t say where they’re headed (but the stench of whiskey reeking off of them tells me where.) The men haven’t bathed in days, but when they board, they carry themselves with an air of dignity, a lie they upkeep to prevent the gossip, but everyone knows—they just don’t talk about it.
   “Did you hear,” Mrs. Stein leans over to whisper to me, “about poor Mr. Armstrong?” Mrs. Stein is small and stout. Her warm smile and twinkling eyes have a way of drawing people close to her, and one would imagine she has many friends. (With how inviting she is, she often wonders at night why her husband doesn’t love her, why her two boys disrespect her the way they do. Neither have come home since leaving for college. On Christmas, two places remained empty, and there were far too many leftovers.)
   “Poor Mr. Armstrong?” I echo just over the driver’s holler— 15th street and Franklin. (They should say poor Mrs. Armstrong. She’s been through her share of troubles, but it’s easier to blame her for those troubles instead of acknowledging me.)
   The trolley stops, the two men exit. I see them walk straight to the bar. There is shame in the way they hang their heads. (They’ve been out of work for a while. Their children are hungry, but their addictions are hungrier.)
   “Mrs. Armstrong has always been an attention seeker,” Mrs. Stein continues, touching my seat just inches from my knee, but not quite, “I told Patrick not to marry her, but did he listen?”
   “He was bewitched by her beauty, but he’s regretted marrying her since before the ink dried on their marriage license.” The other woman, Mrs. Russo, adds solemnly. She’s Mrs. Stein’s next-door neighbor, heavily pregnant with her sixth child. She’s naturally pretty, can’t be older than thirty. She wears a shiny diamond ring and earrings Mrs. Stein has always desired for herself. That’s not all that Mrs. Stein coveted, though. She has always believed Mrs. Russo has the perfect life: beautiful children, a handsome, kind hearted husband, a well-trimmed garden in front of her white-picket-fenced home. (Mr. Russo died just two months ago. Killed in a fire at the factory. Her oldest boy, Sam, who’s only thirteen, just had his first day of work yesterday at the same factory his father was killed in. She stayed up all last night in constant prayer, terrified he wouldn’t return home.)
   “What did she do?” I ask the women, who simply exchange looks and shake their heads.
   “I don’t want to sound rude, but... you’re the last person who I’d tell her story to.” Mrs. Russo smiles kindly.   The driver hollers back, 18th street and Washington. “That’s me!” Mrs. Russo struggles to stand under the weight of her growing stomach. She’s so round she could pop any day now. “Goodbye, Jennie,” she nods to Mrs. Stein. She turns a blind eye to me. We watch her waddle towards the nearest building, smile still on her face. (She’s ten minutes late for her doctor’s appointment. He probably won’t see her anyway, she hasn’t been able to pay her medical bills, even before her husband died. She wonders if she can teach her oldest daughter to deliver a baby to save on the crushing weight of the hospital bill when the time comes.)
   To our surprise, Mr. Armstrong climbs onto the bus. He brushes past us, but I catch up to him anyway and we are seated together. He avoids me like the plague and he hates hearing what I have to say. Still, I ask him, “What happened to Mrs. Armstrong?”
   “It’s her fault.” He can’t look me in the eye. (It isn’t her fault.) “How are you, Mrs. Stein?” He asks the woman in front of us, because he knows he can’t talk to me without bending under the pressure of my gaze. No one can look me in the eye while they fabricate a story.
   “I’m well.” (She isn’t. For some weeks now, she has lacked the strength to get out of bed in the morning. She seldom is able to eat).
   “What’s the news on Alice?”
   He sighs as if he is stuck in a traffic jam, like his wife is nothing but an inconvenience. “There’s not a thing wrong with that woman’s life,” (there were, actually, quite a few things wrong with Alice Armstrong’s life), “and yet she insists I’m the root of all her problems and she won’t come back to the house.” (He is actually the cause of nearly all of her problems.)
   “I’m sorry that you have to go through this.” Mrs. Stein says softly. “I can’t imagine how difficult this must be for you.”
   (But it is far more difficult for Alice, the woman who has been trapped in a cage by this wretched man for twenty years.) I’ve a good mind to look Mr. Armstrong in the face and make him confess out loud what a right fool he is, but not yet. He’ll reach his breaking point soon, when he’ll have no choice but to confess. “I did everything for her, gave her the life every woman could ever dream of. And this is how she repays me...” Mr. and Mrs. Armstrong live in an (un)pleasant apartment complex in an (un)pleasant part of town, but never have to struggle with the bills (Mr. Armstrong used much of his paycheck to gamble). Alice Armstrong is an excellent cook. She is very smart. She daydreams often, of a world where she can speak her mind and vote. The other women think she is eccentric and a little bit strange in her habits (some of them wish they had the courage to attend suffrage meetings downtown as she did). “I can’t think of a single reason she did what she did.” (I can think of hundreds) “She has always been very happy with her life here.” (There’s never been a day in her life with that man that she has felt genuinely happy) “Women are always complaining for nothing. Us men, we work all day, every day. And they think they have the right to claim they’re tired at the end of the day. They think we should have to help with the kids or do the dishes. It’s never enough for you women.” Mr. Armstrong considers this fact. Even if he said this to me, his words wouldn’t change one bit.
   “I’m sure you are tired.” is all Mrs. Stein says. She isn’t smiling anymore. (She doesn’t agree with him.) The driver hollers: 24th and West Baltimore. “Ah, my stop.” She nods at Mr. Armstrong. She bites her lip when she notices me watching her, and quickly looks away. Mr. Armstrong doesn’t care to watch her walk down to the grocer and tips his head back against the seat. (But I notice the way she recounts the money in her wallet, knowing that she hardly has enough...)
   For a while, it is just Mr. Armstrong and I on the trolley, waiting for the other to give up and leave. But Mr. Armstrong won’t stand up and exit, not if there’s a chance he’ll have to look at me. (He’s afraid of me. He’s afraid of being proven wrong.) “Are you headed home now, Mr. Armstrong?” I ask. My stop is approaching, I have somewhere to be.
   “Yeah.” His eyes are shut.
   “Bet it’ll be quite the change, having the house to yourself.” I hover over him, knowing as soon as he opens his eyes, he’ll see me. I think I’ve almost got him.
   “I’m looking forward to the peace and quiet.” He turns his head, eyes open only when I’m out of possible sight. (He’s terrified of the quiet. Ever since Mrs. Armstrong left him, he hasn’t gone home once.)
   We’re almost to my stop. The trolley’s starting to slow. “​Patrick​, look at me.”
   “I can’t.” He whispers.
   “You have to face me, Patrick. It’s the only way you’ll ever be able to move on.”
   “I ​can’t​! I will not—” I grab his face, turn his head. I watch the fear wash over him. It’s the fear of realizing that I​ know ​what he’s done, and maybe something far more. Maybe when he faces me, he’ll know he isn’t innocent, that he’s never getting the life back that he wasted.
   “36th and Prospect.” The driver hollers back at us. I nod as I let go of Mr. Armstrong. “Remember what I said.” I warn. I hear him gulp.
   I stand up and walk to the front of the trolley. The driver glances back at Mr. Armstrong, whose hands now cover his eyes. He shakes his head. “Some people never learn.”
   “I guess they don’t. No one ever wants to face me, and until then, they really can’t learn, or change or grow in any way. But for some, facing me is more frightening than being miserable.”
   “Have a nice day,” He smiles, having nothing to say on my words. They aren’t for him, anyway, he and I have spoken often and have an understanding of each other. (His smile is always forced, there is pain in his eyes, and sometimes he struggles to stay kind to the people of this town, who treat him like he is beneath them. They will never know what hardships he endures off this trolley, but God knows I do. His wife is very ill, in the final stages of her disease, yet he has to work so she can stay in the hospital. He longs to be at her side. He’s afraid that she may die while he isn’t there.)
   I meet his eyes. His pain is close to seeping to the surface, and I wonder how much longer it’ll be before it does. “You will find peace soon,” I say, and I never lie. Hearing it come from me, I can sense the wave of relief wash over him (his family has suffered for so long).
I step off the trolley onto Prospect, watching it roll away until it’s out of sight. Mr. Armstrong is still covering his eyes. He might not move his hands until he’s forced off the trolley, miles from here. Nearby, Alice is waiting for me. “Sorry I’m late,” I stride over to the bench she is patiently seated at, “now tell me, how are you?”
   Her smile is genuine; she hasn’t felt this way in decades. She doesn’t have to say, I already know.
   (Some days ago, she faced me for the first time in her marriage and realized there was nothing more she could do to make things work between herself and a man who did not care for her. She admitted everything to me, and by telling me she understood that none of it was her fault, and didn’t feel guilty for doing what had to be done.)
   Alice gathers her bags from beside her as she stands, smile turning into a beam. She doesn’t have much, but it’s enough to get her by for now. “Thank you. For everything.”
   “No need to thank me. Your strength came from within. Telling me only helped you realize that.” I point out. “Now go on, you’re going to miss your train.”
   “You’re right.” She checks her watch, surprised at how fast time seems to be going recently. I watch her hurry towards her train, board, and speed away on ​Opportunity.
   It is quiet on Prospect today. It gives me time to think. About Alice, Mrs. Stein, Mrs. Russo, the trolley driver Mr. Miller, the men headed to the bar, even Mr. Armstrong. Many of them live lies to hide from me. It is easier to pretend that their lives are better than they really are; to put up a facade is all some of them have ever known. But on most of their current paths, they will never know real happiness, they will never be free from the lies they’ve buried themselves in, that they’ve convinced everyone but themselves is reality. All they have to do to redeem themselves is tell me... it seems quite simple, doesn’t it?
   But no one wants to tell the Truth.

---

 

Tyrofall
Phillip Fralin

   Decrepit brass pipes line the walls. Sweaty humans clump together, waiting for the next transport to come in. What little space that isn’t taken up by them is filled with plumes of toxic smoke that rose up to form a collective black sky under the roof.
   All in all, the train station in Tyrofall was probably one of the nicer stations I’ve been to in recent memory.
   A woman urgently pushes through the crowd arriving at the bench that I’m sitting at. She’s hunched over, sweating profusely and stumbling. She gets beside me and belches forth the rejected contents of her gut. It comes down in waves, splatting on the ground behind the bench. When it is all out of her system, she turns to me and apologizes as discolored spittle drips from her bottom lip. Without responding, I reach into the jacket of my sports coat and hand her a handkerchief. It’s covered in flakes of dirt, but it’s something. She looks at it as though I hold the very essence of perfection in my hand, then swipes it greedily, covering her mouth with it. She looks at me again and eyeing my metallic arm that is draped across another man. Her muffled mouth offers another apology, then thanks. An announcement over the loudspeaker warns of train’s imminent arrival and she leaves, reluctantly squeezing back into the crowds.
   I turn my head to look at the man under my arm. The rest of the world fades away and I can only focus on him. His head lays against my chest, eyes are closed, and his mouth hangs open just a bit, completely at peace even in a place as broken as this. I chuckle. It’s honestly cute.
   The first train arrives, and people clamber on in droves. For a precious few seconds the station has breathing room, but the space is almost immediately filled with more tortured humans, this group seeming to be sicklier than the last.
   When the second wave of people fill out the station, a man pushes through the crowd, striding toward me with purpose. He’s wearing the same clothes as me; dress pants and shoes with a dress shirt and a large sports coat. And yet, he doesn’t sweat a drop.
   “Excuse me, sir." I raise a hand to get his attention. “Maybe you can help me. I’m looking for a neuromancer. Do you know of any around here?”
   He nods. “I know a man in town. Answers to Zero.”
   I cock my head to the side. “You’re late.”
   “Sincerest apologies,” he says. “You wouldn’t happen to know anyone by the name of Roy, would you?”
   I press a finger to my lips, my eyes indicating the man under my arm.
   “I’ll need to authenticate,” the man says.
   “Of course,” I reply.
   The man leans down, opening one of Roy’s eyelids. A scanning beam goes from the man’s eye into Roy’s. After a few seconds, the identity is confirmed, and the man stands up.
   “Very well,” he says, reaching into his sports coat for a handkerchief. I move my metallic hand and bladelike fingers depart from Roy, caked in blood.
   I take the handkerchief and stand, arranging the body so that it lay across the bench, in cold slumber.
   “I have to know,” the man asks as I wipe my hands. “How’d you get him so easily?”
   “You and your employers must have run him ragged,” I say. “Found him right on this bench, sleeping like a baby.”
   He chuckles. “How frustrating. Well, I suppose it can’t be helped.”
   He holds out his metallic arm, palm facing me. I touch his palm with my own and a transaction is made. The HUD in my eyes shows me just how much is being transferred. An extra couple thousand is paid on top of the agreed amount. I give him a look.
   “Clean kill in a timely manner,” He explains with a smile. “You deserve it.”
   “And the catch?”
   “Well,” He scratches the side of his head, playing coy. “Turns out, Tyrofall is a bit of a destination spot for runaway Crawlers.”
   “Makes sense,” I say. “’Bout a quarter of the state population lives here. It’s a goldmine of information and even easier to disappear in the crowd if need be.”
   He holds out his hand and our palms touch once more. My HUD shows an image of a pretty woman.
   “Her name is Tsaro,” He says. “If possible, I would appreciate your services once more.”
   “Aw, hell,” I say. “Part of me feels like I’m not really allowed to say no. I’ll see what I can do.”

---

 

It's the Little Things
Rachel Schlosser

   This was like the epic moment when the fallen angel crash lands into hell from where God has flung him from heaven. Both actions would be without regret. He looked up at the night sky. He breathed in the crisp air. It had been snowing on and off all day. He wouldn’t land as gracefully as the flakes did. He looked down at the road. At this moment, he didn’t care if it hurt or not. At this height, he was guaranteed to fall and die. The only thing that would bother people would be the amount of work to clean up after others “who were not strong and brave enough for this world."
   He always thought that was the dumbest definition to label for accepting death over life. In reality, it means that the people in question didn’t have the right support. It was the people around the person of question that were to blame, not the person who accepts death. For some reason, the victim is always blamed.
   The street lights were on and they revealed shadows. There were hardly any shadows to speak of that belonged to living creatures, let alone humans. Maybe one of them belonged to a demon. Maybe it was even the same demon, along with his demonic and angelic brothers, which stayed inside of him. They’d feast on any light he had left inside of him, until his insides revealed his like a rotten apple’s.
   This wasn’t the right time. It was hard to see through the snow and it was only starting to get heavier. He won’t jump tonight. He didn’t have enough incentive. It was too cold and his wings weren’t ready.
   As he carefully made his way off the concrete covered roof, he still wondered what it would have been like soaring through the frozen air. A more cheerful day would be better. It was winter now and the thought of flying among flowers and petals was a more appealing thought. His destination is not far and it was easy to get to. For now, he will go home and wait.
   He was unable to sleep. He laid in the bed, staring at the ceiling of his room. It was covered in glow in the dark paint in different shades of blues and greens: Starry Night.
   When the lights were on it looked like normal paint, but when he felt like being alone in the dark cover of his room it looked like an ocean of sick, drunken fireflies managed to make a city rise to the surface of the sea where waves crashed against stone sides.
   He reached up and touched the low ceiling, carefully petting each individually splashed flick, like thick curls, that he could reach, then touch the unmarked plaster. He often loved to touch the face of the plaster wall, switching his caress to where there was no colorful make up covering it. He loved the contrast. He loved how the white reminded him of the possibilities. He could become a cosmetologist to each surface.
   It wasn’t that he disliked the dark. In fact, he much preferred it over the light. Maybe it was more of a need to see that inside the darkness there was a light. Maybe he could harness that, and swallow it up so that he wouldn’t be so dark on the inside, hollow.
   He won’t jump in the morning. He would miss his fake sky too much.