Category: Fiction

This is an old one. I am only posting it to test something that WordPress is supposed to do automatically. A new one tomorrow.

fiction by Jason Edwards

Yee-haaa. It’s a good old-fashioned bar fight. Jed told Ned he was a fool for cheatin’ on Nellie, Ned punched Jed in his big old belly, Jed threw a glass of beer of old Ned’s head, it missed, hit Fred, and the blood flowed red.

Fred thought a pool cue would look good broken over Tim Crow’s back, and James Bear, who hated violence, ran into Big Nasty Louie on his way out the door. He bounced and knocked over The Runt, who because of his size always was itchin’ for a fight. After they pulled the ’67 Desoto out of the window, everyone would agree the fight was The Runt’s fault.

Let’s take a picture. Freeze Frame. Right at the instant when Marylane’s ’67 Desoto was just touching the plate glass of the Bull and Moose Bar and Saloon and Tavern. Look at it there. The glass is bowed just a little bit, just a smidge, there’s a crack moving out about three inches from where Marylane’s right front bumper is kissing it, above a fleck of paint from when her good for nothing boy and who cares if he fought in the Korean war he never amounted to nothin’ after that painted a dresser in a garage and drunk like his mother didn’t put the drop cloth on the Desoto very good. Marylane’s eyes are half-closed in terror, her hands loosely holding the wheel in fear, the horror of what’s about to occur painted in the way her slack lips glisten on the last swaller of Potato Rot and Hair Tonic she ever will have. Nothing bornes Christians again like a big old car crashing into a bar.

The Runt’s got his jaws clamped firmly on Jed’s calf, and Jed’s hand is wrapped tight around David Family’s throat, his other hand pulled back for a punch, a drop of snot from when he wiped his nose after he punched The Runt glistening from his high-school ring, but Jed’s back is arched from the pain in his calf, David Family’s face is twisted to the side on his skull, his hands halfway up to Jed’s arm to try and pull himself away. Standing on The Runt’s foot is Big Nasty Louie who’s eyes are wide but closing as Ned has brushed off one of his meatier punches and is returning one in kind, reaching up to do it, at this exact point in time Ned’s fist is so close to Louie’s jaw that if time continued but everybody stayed frozed but metabolic cellular development was allowed to continue, Louie’s chin would grow a bristle that would tickle Ned’s knuckle in about three and half hours.

Tim Crow’s got James Bear in a head lock but he doesn’t know it, and James Bear’s got one hand on the pool table searching for a ball to grab to hit Tim in the balls with. In the melee Tim mistook James for Fred when James got up off of the Runt and tripped over the good for nothin’ boy that Marylane sent off to Korea who was looking for dog-ends next to Big Nasty Louie’s table. Tim’s kung-fu took over but he was blinded by the pool lamp. Now his teeth are set and his eyes are pulled hard right at the sound of the ’67 Desoto screaming in 2nd gear: the waves propagating from the engine according to the Doppler effect have penetrated the glass and set up a sympathetic vibration in Tim’s cochlea, resulting in a pulse of electricity shooting into his brain and manifesting itself in a pattern which despite the subduing effects of the seven beers James bought him has finally, at this exact instant, flashed into a neural pattern which is the same as the one Tim possesses for: “Oh, Fuck, A Car.”

James Bear’s own brain is filtering out the flash of electricity which tells him he has brushed the three ball with his pinkie in favor of reminding him he can’t fucking breath.

Fred’s cousin Bernice is having sex with her husband, Walter Tightass Mr. Man Banker, about three thousand or so miles away in New York Big Shot Buncha Metros City. For them the episode of sex has been stretched and smeared from it’s beginning a few minutes ago to it’s end in a few minutes, making judging which second is which impossible; at this instant Bernice has both eyes closed, her thighs clamped tight around Walter’s ass, and his hands are scrunched white around the sheets next to her head and his own eyes are rolled so far back he’d be able to see his own brain if he was paying attention. Particle Physicists who insist on the integrity of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle would say that no one knows for sure where exactly the sperm that will on this night penetrate Bernice’s egg is. But Fred, who’s standing off to one side with somebody else’s beer in his hand, the fight having gotten boring after he rearranged the covalent bonds between a few million atoms in the middle of his pool cue across Tim Crow’s back, will one day be the foster parent of the child born from the act, since three years from now Walter Fancy Pants Who Can’t Even Gut a Fish will get himself and Bernice who Fred once played doctor with when they was kids killed in a car wreck with a ’67 Desoto (coincidence). At this moment Fred’s head is back, the beer mug is resting on his bottom lip, the glass is at a 37 and half degree angle, the muscles in his throat have peristaltically closed on one swallow making the other swallow wait here, forever, in this frozen speck of time. The gash on the side of his face is in mid ooze. He’s pretty goddamned drunk.

Skeeter Horizon behind the bar is balanced on one toe as he is about to come around with his baseball bat that’s been sawed off like a shotgun except stupider. His hands are waist high, in close, elbows bent, head slightly forward in his neck since walking is just controlled falling, eyes in a slit, wife freshly divorced, eight payments left on his Ford, bottom lip stuck out, in the middle of an inhale through his nose.

So there they are for ya. Marylane airborne. The Runt biting Jed on his leg. Jed holding David Family’s throat, about to punch him. Big Nasty Louie standing on The Runt’s foot, about to get hit by Ned. Tim Crow holding James Bear in a headlock. Marylane’s good for nuthin’ on the floor, cringing. Fred off to the side, drinking a beer. And Skeeter Horizon coming around the bar. Can you see ’em?

fiction by Jason Edwards

Something wrong with this apartment, but I’m not sure what. Like when you flush the toilet, the oven turns on (not really). Or like when I’ll go to use the microwave, and the TV changes channel. I tried unplugging the TV, but then the shower wouldn’t work. Plug the TV back in, shower works, but only cold water unless I leave the front door open. Unnerving. Try to open the window to see if the dog is still there, the faucet comes on. Let it run once, because I really needed to see that dog. Got thirsty, looking at that dog. Picked up a the remote control where it had fallen off the coffee table, which opened the cupboard. Took out a glass, the alarm clock in the bedroom went off. Water from the tap tasted different than it did if I opened the refrigerator to make the tap run.

Maybe it’s haunted? Can’t really worry about that. Dog. Out the window, down the street, sunny day, dog standing there, on a leash, leash disappears into the bushes. One hundred percent sure the bush is not walking the dog. The dog is not tied to the bush. There’s someone hiding in the bush. I’ll call him the dog walker.

Thirsty again, faucet’s not working, or if it is, it’s working to turn the shower on and off. Think about drinking shower water but when I open the cupboard for a cup the shower turns too hot. Why did I try the faucet before I took out a cup? Go and check the window, bush is no longer tied to the dog. Dog is closer, tied to a mailbox, can’t tell if the dog walker is hiding behind the mailbox. That reminds me, check my email, click on the email icon, Minesweeper starts, play three games until I solve a sixteen by sixteen in less than sixty seconds, which turns on the faucet, so I jump to it and fill my cup and it tastes sort of chalky.

Turn off the computer, which starts minesweeper again, solve a ten by ten in less than ten seconds but only because I got lucky, shower starts, but I have to pee, so I pee and turn off the shower which flushes the toilet. Call that a victory. Open the refrigerator to wash my hands, window slams shut, jump over to it to find the dog. Mailbox is closer now, dog still tied to it, and both next to a different bush, bush probably hiding dog walker. Can’t tell what kind of dog it is.

Feel queasy, not sure why, want water, but decide I’m queasy because I touched the refrigerator and the oven (not really) after I went pee but before I washed my hands. Glad I feel queasy, proves I’m human. Decide to check anyway, open the cupboard to see if it does anything to my body. Nothing. Take out some sani-wipes. Open sani wipes. Nothing in the apartment changes. Wipe down refrigerator handle, window sill. Look for dog but only glance and purposefully not where he just was and don’t see anything and deduce. Feel like apartment is calming down . Feel like I’m calming down. Step on foot pedal of trash can without even thinking about it to throw away soiled sani wipe, TV starts, cupboards open, shower starts, toilet flushes, computer starts, shoelaces come untied.

Run around apartment turning things off and closing things and turning other things back on that get turned off by accident when I try to close something else or open something. Feel sort of relieved that there’s something still wrong with the apartment. Look for bottled water in fridge, find some, at least five different brands. Open cupboard, oven turns on (not really) for a jug, pour all of the bottled waters into the jug. It’s one of those jugs with a spigot. Consider not turning on the spigot. Sort of afraid what will happen if I do. Stare at the spigot for a while. Window slams shut, don’t remember opening it. Look at my hand, remote control in my hand, thumb firmly pressing “play.” That’s funny.

Open spigot, fill cup, walk over to window, open window, dog no longer tied to mailbox, mailbox back where it belongs, dog tied to bike rack, no bikes on bike rack, no bushes near bike rack, but nearby door stands ajar. Aha. Run around apartment turning things on and off and closing and opening things to see if it makes the ajar door close. Ajar door does not close. Try the remote control. TV comes on, advertisement for bottled water. Not sure what language it’s in. Not sure what language I speak. Open mouth to say something, hear a barking come from outside. Can’t possible have come from dog.

Run to window, spill some water on the way, don’t remember not setting cup down. Can’t decide if I should flush the toilet to open the cupboard to fetch the mop or risk taking batteries out of remote to see if it will make the dishcloth fall off the rack by the sink and maybe sudden odd wind from window will swirl dishcloth over spilled water. Or get on my hands and knees and lap it up. Like a dog. Check window instead, open it, computer turns on, ignore that, can’t see dog, mailbox now tied to bike rack, door no longer ajar, bush where mailbox was, not sure if there’s a dog hiding behind it or not.

Turn to check email, slip on puddle, fall, lie in it. Lie very still. Very very still. Try not to think about things. Try not to think about doors and handles and switches and buttons and levers and dials and hydrogen and oxygen and oxygen and dogs and leashes and dog walkers.

Or Melchior, Caspar, and Balthazar.

Or Plath and Wevill and Nicholas.

Or the father, the son, and the holy ghost.

Or lions and tigers and bears.

Become very still. Stop breathing. Refrigerator door half open. Water tap half running, shower half on, toilet mildly swirling, TV on but muted, Minesweeper demo playing itself on computer, water slowly soaking into my shirt and jeans. Am I wearing shoes. Gently wiggle toes to check for shoes. Wearing shoes. They feel loose. They feel like the laces are not tied tight. Close my eyes, imagine sinking into floor. Sinking into yesterday. Sinking into the sink.

Do not fall asleep. Wholly aware of my surroundings. Do not wake up next to a leash, an open door, a missing dog, and an empty bottle of water in my hand. Instead, simply stand, wait for head rush to pass. Calmly shut refrigerator, turn off shower, jiggle toilet handle, close cupboard, shut down computer, look out window. Can’t see dog. Can’t see dog walker. Lean way out to see further down street, no dog, no walker, one mailbox, easy to see it’s too small to hide behind, bush has sunlight streaming through it revealing all, which is nothing, lean out further, lean way out, lean way way out, there’s the dog right in front of my building, leashed tied to hand rail, start to fall, see the front door of my building closing as I fall, sharp pain in my hip, my knee, as shoelace is caught on window when it slams shut.

Dangling. Feel stupid. Dog just looks up at me, wagging his tail and panting. Blood rushing to my head. I can hear someone open the door to my apartment. I pray to God they don’t do anything to make the window open or I’m dead. I pray to God they brought their own bottles of water.

fiction by Jason Edwards

If you’re reading this book it’s probably because you are student of Guy de Mont Chalice, and want to know as much about him as possible, via further study into the life of his third cousin Gregory Shellaq. This thin, tome, then, will be an utter disappointment to you, as there is nothing more to know about the author of Grendal’s Progress, Adolescence in Constantinople, A Queen’s Reverie, and Forgetful Minions of Flower’s Last Dance. By now you’ve read Watson, you’ve read Everly, you’ve read Tates. If you haven’t, do so. And once you have, come back to this page, and be assured: you have it all. So stop reading, put this book down at once, and go chase women or sniff daffodils or do whatever your sort of person does.

If you’re still reading, then let me be clear: I will not in the least apologize for what you are about to encounter, the vast stretches of nothing that make up the life of Gregory Shellaq and how it relates to his more famous, certainly more erudite, and if not worthy, certainly more interesting third cousin.

What is, exactly, a third cousin? Doing the math suggests that since cousins share grandparents, seconds share greats, and thirds perforce share great-greats, a designation that hardly bears bearing since even with this blasted century’s medical advancements in advancing the time spent wasting away into death the fruit of the advancements nevertheless usually fail to unite an infant with even one if its father’s or mother’s fathers’ or mothers’ father’s or mothers’ fathers or mothers.

Which is language’s way of adhering to nature’s nature as even while writing that last sentence I felt like an epileptic imbecile. We don’t have good words for great-great-grand parentage, because great-great-grand parentage is hardly worth noting; as the only link to a third cousin, it’s barely worth mentioning at all. There were people in de Mont Chalice’s life much closer in blood that no one in academia has bothered with: an uncle in Pennsylvania, a niece by marriage in Romania, a half-brother who died in infancy. No one’s writing books about them, either. Which is at it should be: historical criticism is bunk.

Nevertheless, one must paw at keyboards if one wishes to continue pawing at coeds, which as a replacement idiom for “publish or perish” is far less elegant if, to be certain, however, much more accurate. And so: Gregory Shellaq. Third cousin to the only person to have won the Grand Prix de la Société Littéraire Fantastique three times, bank teller, time traveler.

That’s got you. But I must insist: it shouldn’t. Yes, Gregory had a time machine, which he used for one of the most pointless endeavors imaginable. Imagine  being in possession of a genuine time machine. It sits there in your two car garage. Your car sits in the driveway all the time, and would do even if your garage didn’t have all manner of boxes and discarded bicycles and bags of old issues of France Soir and heirloom furniture too splintery to use but too bequeathed to chuck. Because you are too lazy to carefully park your car in the garage after a long day slogging away at jobs.

You already have the time machine and have sent it back in time to inspire you to build it in the first place, which, thanks to the time travelling itself, is actually the last place. You spend weekends working on it, and it goes slower than you would think, despite having itself as a model before you. It’s a big round metallic thing. It’s got a coned roof that points up into the rafters of your garage. It’s got a door made of corrugated metal, painted red. The door has a smoky window on it. There’s all manner of tubing and bundles of wire running in and out of its outer skin. Inside, for some reason, it’s lined in fake animal furs. There’s a computer console straight out of a 1940’s version of science fiction. Think diodes, think vacuum tubes, think the sound radar screens make as the glowing green arm sweeps and occasional goes bloop.

Your boss at the bank where you count out singles to old women cashing children-sent checks used to hate you, because you were so damn earnest. But lately you’ve been distracted, sometimes even coming in late, and now the old boy is starting to warm up. One day, while cogitating on how to get the freon capacity matrix to synch with the chronostatis maintenance field, you accidentally give a pottering great great grandmother of 90 a stack of twenties instead of a stack of ones. She doesn’t know what to do. She starts to cry. She thinks she’ll be arrested. Your boss seems to enjoy her misery.

He has you come into his office when your shift is over, and he offers you a drink. One of those awful liqueurs that the French were always drinking back then in the late 50s. The one made out of artichokes, maybe. He’s talking about truly witheringly irrelevant quotidia, the kind that explains how the French could have invented the single greatest word in any language: ennui. That’s what Sartre meant when said what hell is.

You drink the foul stuff and nod as appropriate, it’s obvious as hell you’re not paying attention to what he’s saying, because you’ll have to stop by the Bricolage on the way home to pick up some aluminum strips and a few demagnetized soldering irons (you keep melting them because the jockey switches aren’t balanced right and the iridium chamber isn’t shielded correctly). Of course, the problem is, in 1957, there were no Bricolages yet. And then your boss says “I’d rob the place myself and pin it on one of you wankers if I thought I could get away with it.”

Of course, he says it in French, and who knows what the mid twentieth-century French bank manager ergot for “wanker” would be. But something he says clicks. Whatever the word is, it gives you an idea.  Never mind the damned freon capacity matrix, or the stupid iridium chamber. The problem you’ve been putting off for ages, the temporal basin primer, is the real mess. And that fat fuck’s “wanker” has sparked something in your brain. Yes. Or oui, as it were. If you dimple the basin, create dimension n fractal spaces in each, you’ll have tiny little warp coils, not an infinite number of them, but at the same time, a fractional infinity of them, which is, actual, itself, infinite. And you know it would work because as soon as you think of it, you have a memory of it having worked, of having finished the time machine and sending it back to yourself so you could finish it.

What would you do then? I know what I would do. I would smash my rocks glass against the bank manager’s face, run back to my teller’s desk, unlock my cabinet, pull out fat stacks of cash, run back to the bleeding, belligerent, frankly shocked manager in his office, choke him with the bills, pour his disgusting Cynar all over him, set him on fire, kick him to keep him from beating out the flames. Discard my ruined shoes, leave, go home, finish the time machine, and use it to escape both capture and the disappointed, disaffected, disinfecting glare of my fat, boorish, cow of a wife, forever.

But that’s not what Gregory did. He just chuckled. He thanked his boss for the drink, and apologized again for the error with the old woman. Then he left. On his way home, the radio mentioned that his third cousin had won the Grand Prix de la Société Llittéraire Fantastique for the second time, for Constantinople. He considered sending the man a congratulatory text message, but text messaging hadn’t been invented yet.

There was still plenty he could have done, at that point. He could have gone straight to his garage, yanked the temporal basin out the guts of the Dyson housing, and using a golf ball as a model, set to dimpling. And then given the thing a test run. Napoleon at Waterloo, perhaps. Victor Hugo’s ravishing of his cousin Elisa. The birth of Christ, maybe, or even the alleged meteor strike that allegedly killed those goddamned alleged dinosaurs.

But not Gregory, oh no, not him. He did finish the time machine. And he did get in it. He went back about 50 years, or so. How he knew the exact time, no one is sure, but then when it comes to time travel, somehow knowing things is de rigueur. He landed in Issoire, outside a small house. It was night time. All was quiet. Candles lit up a window. Gregory walked to the window, peeked inside, most of his vision blocked by a burlap curtain. Or maybe muslin. Or maybe finest silk; I have no idea.

He waited, glancing at his watch now and again, which of course had stopped working. The time machine’s effect on regular, mundane chronography was predictable: it broke clocks. Behind him, said time machine loomed in the dark, tall pointed cone roof, round body swallowing moonlight, occasional wink of orange or red from the window, steam limply squirting from beneath it. And when he was ready, Gregory turned and walked and burst into the hut.

He caught a fat man with knickers round his ankles mounted on his emaciated wife, there in their one-room hovel. The man immediately jumped off, and the wife jumped up in front of him, covering herself only barely, nearly reluctantly. Gregory wasted no time, turning and running back to his machine before the consequence of his actions could catch up with him and it (he needn’t worry- his being there to witness that he’d witnessed what he done was assurance what he’d done couldn’t be undone by his having done it). He leapt into his machine, forgot to secure the door, set the damned thing for home, and was both bewildered and relieved that the door’s being open didn’t make a damn bit of difference.

And by now I’m sure you’ll have guessed what Gregory had done. He’d interrupted his boss’s parent In flagrante delicto, and in doing so changed the one-in-300-million chance that that particular sperm would reach the egg and make the boss in the first place. You didn’t need to kill Hitler’s great great grandfather to keep Hitler form being born, just give the man reason to wank-off one extra time before mounting der fuehrer’s erstwhile great great grandmother. (People can be so damned violent in their fantasy solutions, can’t they? With a time machine, a wank can replace a gun in almost any historical scenario you might imagine).

The paradoxes that resulted from Gregory’s folly are obvious. Different boss at the bank, so Gregory’s job life was much different. Boss was less of an asshole. Took no joy in the tears that fell from that old woman’s eyes when Gregory gave her too much money. Because  the boss was a different person altogether. Which means he didn’t invite Gregory back for a cynar on ice. Which means he didn’t say the word that inspired Gregory’s eureka. The temporal basin never got dimpled.

Back and forward through time, the paradoxes flexed, then relaxed, were absorbed by fate and inevitability, until all impossibility was accounted for, and only one immutable law of physics had to be changed. A very small one, it turns out. Apparently, it used to be the case that the color red was associated with sadness in the human brain, and not the color blue. Thanks to Gregory Shellaq, and his Worst Waste of a Perfectly Good Time Machine Ever, that tiny law was reasserted back in the big bang, having an infinitesimal effect on the way star stuff star-stuffed and thus how we beings made of the same hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen developed from motes of dust into walking talking feeling fucking humans beating drums to make bears dance.

But there has to be a balance, there has to be a way for time’s arrow to be reversible, just in case, joke’s on us, there is a God, and he wants to rewind the VCR and watch the funny parts again. Enter Gregory Shellaq’s third cousin, Guy de Mont Chalice, author of Pembroke’s Whistle, and the highly overrated When Kierkegaard Roared. For years, absolutely no one has debated why, in the middle section of Flower’s, a minor character gazes at a red carnation and is filled with utter despair. As symbols go, it’s a tiny, easily overlooked hiccup in an otherwise mediocre passage.

But now you know why the carnation is red and not blue . It’s Gregory Shellaq’s fault. My understanding is that, every single time a time machine is invented, this sort of thing happens. And I sincerely do not care. I am utterly and completely indifferent to any of this shit. And I hope you are too.

fiction by Jason Edwards

Jackson points at a cardboard cut-out of Scott Baio, after that, Jackson’s on the back of a hog, giving us the bird and shouting obscenities in Hindi. Jackson was the sort of person who wasn’t very good at anything except not being good at things, so that when he did something you didn’t think he could, you were impressed for about five seconds and then you got over it. If Jackson ever walked on the moon, that would be it for NASA.

All of us after work walking through the mall. Because we worked at the mall. Who puts a call center in a mall? A guy who knows his shit, according to the guy himself who did it. A mall on its way to rot, to oblivion if we had enough Tyler Durden in us to scratch our itches. Usually our arms were too heavy to lift and so we got used to the itching and felt weird when we were clean.

Franklin O’Harris, a name to get tattooed on the arm you’re going to shove into a chipper to see if you still have nerve endings. Our boss. The genius. They guy who figured out a three month lease on an otherwise empty mall shop was cheaper than a one-year lease in a legitimate office park. The guy who figured out how to minimize overhead by outsourcing outsources. Call center technology had blossomed, from a zit-faced awkward pre-teen girl into a twenty-something roller derby behemoth with piercings and industrial strength dildos. Call center Indians in India were micromonitored 12 hours per day, and the stress to excel at their jobs was too much. Burnout and turnover and training new hires kept costs too high. So Franklin O’Harris picked up contracts and hired dipshit Americans in dipshit America. We never stressed because we knew Franklin O’Harris let the monitoring tools do the work and since he never checked them, we ignored them too. Half the day half of us took calls, the other half made calls. The other half we switched. On a bad day one call would take all day. On a good day we would call ourselves.

Not going to bother telling you who we were because we were as interchangeable as a billion Indians looking for work. If you want to know who we were, just go find a highscool, find the kids who’re dreaming about shooting everyone, blowing the place up, posting weird messages on Facebook and leaving scary post-it notes in the girls’ bathroom. The ones who never get caught, because there’s nothing to catch. And then they grow up and serve time in community college and finally get a semi-decent weed connection and set the cruise-control. That was us.

Jackson points at a cardboard cut-out of Scott Baio, and says, Franklin O’Harris is in love with that faggot.

8 in the morning, a night of call center yippy kay yeah. Let’s say you have a mall with more closed stores than open, how do you help it go even further out of business? Open the doors early. Good for us, though, as we walked empty corridors lit up with nasty neon. We had something to point at and make snide remarks about as we walked to the bus stop at the other end of the mall.

One of those movie stores. They don’t exist anymore. The internet killed everything.

One of us responds to Jackson by recalling a rumor that every girl who visited the Playboy Mansion from 1984 through 1989 had to sleep with Scott Baio. Bunnies included. And not “had” to in the sense that they were forced to, but “had to” in the sense that if you are ever in Arizona, you “had” to see the Grand Canyon.

Someone else suggests that having to see the Grand Canyon is because there’s nothing else to do in Arizona. The actual words spoken are “mother fucking Arizona.”

Someone else tries draw a comparison between the grand canyon and the vagina of a porn star.

Someone else punches that someone in the arm, very hard.

And then it is pointed out that Playboy is hardly porn.

And then it is mentioned that the premier episode of Joanie Loves Chachi was the highest rated show, ever, in South Korea, because in South Korea “Chachi” is slang for “penis.”

And then Jackson says, I have no idea what you faggots are talking about. Jackson used the word “faggot” a lot. When he suggested that Franklin O’Harris was in love with that faggot, that faggot being Scott Baio, he might have been talking about how Franklin O’Harris had a lot of respect for how many Grand Canyons Scott Baio visited at the Playboy Mansion. He might have meant the man respected the man’s work on Charles in Charge and Joanie Loves Chachi. Or, he might have meant that Franklin O’Harris was a homosexual, and that he want to have homosexual sexual intercourse with an accommodating Scott Baio. The point is, Jackson talked a lot. The point is, no one really listened to him.

Except this time, not listening to Jackson meant we were all thinking about how a shitty actor with no chin who could be easily mistaken for Ralph Macchio, for fuck’s sake, gets all kinds of pussy, and we get to work in a call center from 10 PM to 8 AM and will they even lets us drink beer at Denny’s where we go for breakfast when we can afford it before we go home to smoke a little and then fall asleep? No, not anymore. And Franklin O’Harris drives a H2. And Annie Hamilton, a girl we knew, in one form or another, with one name or another, in high school, was finally fat enough now we could probably have a shot at her Grand Canyon, and how pathetic was it that the only way we could ever get with our high school crush was to wait until adipose tissue had annihilated her self esteem.

So then someone else says, my cousin lives right down the street from Scott Baio.

And if Jackson had stopped walking, gotten a wild look in his eye, stood in front of us and had said, We should kidnap that faggot and dump him in Franklin O Harris’s office, we would have ignored him. But he doesn’t. He never breaks stride. He just says, We should kidnap that faggot and dump him in that faggot’s office.

So, when, the next day, same mall, same time of day, same cardboard cut-out of Scott Baio, Jackson says I know a guy who can help us kidnap that faggot, we can’t not know what he’s talking about.

So we go to Denny’s and order beer and they won’t give us any so we get grand slams instead. And Jackson explains how he went to this bar and he was sitting next to this guy in a jeans jacket and a nasty beard and they got to talking about the economy and Barack Bin Laden and teenage fagtards and the guy said something about the American dream was supposed to be about doing what you love and getting paid for it and Jackson said if he was a job creator he’d pay guys to stomp teenage fagtards and the guy said that’s the job for me and they got drunker and drunker.

And then Jackson tells us he hired a biker gang to kidnap Scott Baio.

Scott Baio isn’t a teenager, someone points out.

Jackson says, so?

Scott Baio is actually in his 50s, someone else points out.

Jackson says, so?

Scott Baio is a rabid republican faggot, someone else mentions.

And Jackson says, so?

And then we eat bacon and sausage and ham and eggs and hashed browns and pancakes and syrup and French toast and waffles and oatmeal with raisins and frittatas and one of us has a cheeseburger and one of us has a Reuben and one of us has a club sandwich and after we get done telling as many Mitch Hedberg jokes as we can remember one of us tells Jackson Scott Baio’s address.

Jackson smiles, and stands up, and says, Meet me by the back door tomorrow night. He doesn’t call us faggots. He does walk out without paying.

One by one, the rest of us leave without paying.

***

The next day, or night, we’re there. There’s no way any of it is going to happen. The guy Jackson was talking to, he wasn’t in a biker gang. And if he was, he wasn’t going to be able to get his gang to kidnap someone, let alone 52 year old Scott Baio, out of his home in broad daylight. And if they would, Scott Baio wouldn’t be home. And if he was, and they did, they weren’t going to bring him here, to the back of a rotting mall at night by the door we used to go to work because the mall was closed by then. And if they did, there’s no way Jackson could pay them for it.

This is what we’re all thinking. Someone mentions that maybe we’re the payment. Someone else points out that we can never go back to that Denny’s again. Then we start discussing last meals. What we would eat if we were on death row.

And then there’s a low roar which becomes a little louder and then a lot louder and a bunch of hogs are riding past us. One of ‘em’s got something in a buddle draped across his lap, and shoves it off as he passes us, like it’s nothing, like he’s always shoving bundles wrapped in white off his hog as he rides through an empty mall parking lot in the middle of the night.

The last bike goes by. Jackson’s on the back, giving us the bird and shouting, Bhen ke lode, assholes. We can’t tell if the biker he clings to is a man or woman.

And then they’re all gone, the sound of roaring motorcycles waning but never quit disappearing in the night We walk up to the bundle. It’s roughly man sized, but we can’t tell if it’s Scott Baio sized. It’s wrapped in rope. It’s red in places. It’s not moving at all.

Another roar, this one’s an H2. Franklin O’Harris. He gets out of his stupid faggot car and walks over to us. What’s this? He says. We don’t say anything. He bends over to take a closer look. We don’t say a word, we just fall on him, kicking and hitting and smacking and slapping. We beat the crap out of him. We don’t want to him to find out if it really is Scott Baio.

fiction by Jason Edwards

Liam is afraid to drive across bridges. Which sucks for someone who lives, works, plays and learns in and around Seattle. It’s close to 3 PM on a Tuesday in June and I’m driving Liam’s car. He met me at the airport, gave me a handshake and a brohug, threw my bag into the back seat and then got in on the passenger side. You want me to drive? And he said Yes, Liam is afraid to drive across bridges. In third person like that.

Traffic is terrible but the kind of terrible I’m used to. 6 months in LA. There might be a reason for someone to go to LA, but there are reasons to go other places first and if you’re lucky you’ll die before you use up those reasons.

Liam says, Where’s the party.

Safeway.

Fuck. Which one.

The one on 155th and Aurora.

Fuck. Shoreline?

Yeah.

Why?

I don’t know. Because they don’t charge for bags there, since it’s not Seattle, it’s Shoreline.

Fuck.

***

This part would be in italics if I thought whatever medium, you’re reading this in could handle it. But I can’t take that risk. I got a Facebook message from Kareem. He wanted to tell me he was going to throw a party. In Seattle. In a grocery store. Just let people eat and drink what they wanted and he’d pay for it. Why not. I sent a message back, saying I’d fly up for it. He told me not to tell Liam. So I told Liam, asked if I could get a ride from the airport. The day before my flight, Liam sent me back a message: Okay.

***

The traffic on highway 5 gets better after 130th, about a mile from our exit. I take 145th, a mile to Aurora, which is also Highway 99, old highway 99, not really a highway, just a busy street with old motels, old Taco Bells, and about a thousand tree dispensaries. I turn right on Aurora, and I’d be able to see all the way to Alaska if I had better vision and the Earth didn’t curve. But it does, the Earth curves.

Liam asks me to park his car as far away from the front doors as possible. It’s a gorgeous day. The sunshine is perfect, the blue sky is perfect, the sounds of radio stations through open car windows on Aurora is perfect.

There are two entrances into the Safeway. What time does the party start? Liam asks me.

2 PM.

Fuck.

We make our way towards the entrance more on the left. The one on the right has girl scouts in front of it.

***

Another part in italics. I’m not good at flashbacks—this one is from about two minutes ago. I turned off the car and didn’t say anything. Liam didn’t either. He just sat there, kind of hunched, like he was going to be sick or was finally done being sick. Then he opened the glove compartment. Just in case, man, he said. Then he got out. I looked into the glove compartment—it was empty except for a Sig Sauer P220 Platinum Elite with an ergonomic beavertail grip, front cocking serrations, front strap checkering, and custom aluminum grips (according to the website). It smelled used.

***

Inside the Safeway I lose Liam almost immediately. I see Jordan and Dane walking up the cold beer aisle. Kim has a shopping basket and she’s looking at the wall of gift cards. One of Kelly’s kids comes racing out of the aisle with all of the baking stuff, turns a corner and zips up soups. I walk towards chips and seasonal, and find Van and Shelly. Van’s talking to a skinny guy with bad hair.

Shelly’s smiling. Shelly’s always smiling.

Hey Jason, Shelly says.

Hey.

Long time.

Yeah.

LA?

Yeah.

Suddenly the skinny guy with bad hair throws a punch at Van. Van takes it, laughs. I’d say you punch like a girl, Steve, but my daughter punches harder than that, Van says. The skinny guy stomps off. I head toward milk.

I can’t decide between buttermilk or half and half. I’m not going to drink any. I paid a thousand dollars to a kid in LA to get me UC, so I could work on my abs. I finally choose some non-dairy creamer.

I walk towards produce. I see Kim looking at celery.

Hey Kim.

Hey you’re back. She gives me a hug. She’s good at it.

I saw you by the gift cards. Kareem’s paying for gift cards too?

Oh, no. I paid for those myself. It’s my sister’s birthday next week. Where’s Liam?

Liam?

Didn’t he give you a ride?

Yeah.

Don’t let him see the girl scouts.

What girl scouts.

The one’s selling cookies.

Why.

The store manager is letting them sell cookies inside, to us. But not in the cookie aisle.

Maybe Liam’s in the cookie aisle, then.

I hope he is. When are you going back to LA?

Never I hope. Tomorrow.

Celery is too damn expensive.

I know.

No calories.

I know.

You look good.

UC.

Is that why you’re drinking non-dairy creamer?

***

Italics again. A trick I learned at a party in Westwood. Carry something you don’t like to drink, so you don’t accidentally drink it. Because when you go to parties, the instinct is to sip whatever’s in your hand. I learned the trick from a girl with the straightest, blondest hair I’d ever seen. I forgot her name. Either that, or I can’t think of something deeply pithy and symbolic to call her right now.

***

If this was a house party, everybody would be in the kitchen. What’s the equivalent in a grocery store. I walk to the deli. A bunch of people I don’t know. As I get closer, I realize they’re all pharmacists, so they must be Desiree’s coworkers. They are all of them extremely drunk. They are having a lot of fun. They’re talking about one of their coworkers, one of them that they really hate.

I try the aisle that has dog food and baby stuff in it. It smells really horrible. In the next aisle is household cleaners. Alan and Helen are sitting in folding chairs, drinking lemonade and eating chips. Alan has his iPhone plugged into a portable speaker, and they’re listening to Mumford and Sons. Or maybe The Lumineers. Or maybe Phillip Phillips. Alan is a doctor. Hey Jason, he says. UC? Looking good, brother! I honestly believe he is genuinely happy for me.

***

6 months earlier, right before I left for LA. Liam and I went to Uneeda Burger, in Fremont. Why LA? he said.

I’m trying to get UC, I said. I know a guy who knows a guy, and besides…

Besides what? he said, taking a gigantic bite out of his cowboy burger. Barbecue sauce gooshes out and the smell is incredible. Foreshadowing. I gulped down hefeweizen. I hated hefeweizen.

I shrugged. I dunno. Usually this would be the part of the story where I finally reveal that my mom was dead. Or my dad. Or I got dumped by a girl who later got hooked bad on drugs.

Wife? He said, frowning.

Doesn’t exist yet, I said.

And she never will, he said, and we fist bumped. Let’s go get some Tagalongs.

It was the saddest day of my life.

***

There’s no one the Asian aisle, which has Mexican food in it too, and Indian, and Kosher. I walk through it to the front of the store. Chelsea is talking to a check-out girl, and her fiancée Walter is flipping through tabloids. The other Chelsea walks through the front doors, takes off her sunglasses, blinks a few times, puts her sunglasses back on and walks out again. In the video section, there’s, like, a hundred girls scouts. They are terrifying.

***

I wrote a short story, once, called “The Taffy Mafia.” It was supposed to be a sort of spoof on zombies. Except instead of the walking undead, there’s these little girls running around, almost feral, selling taffy for some school fund raiser. No one gets hurt in the story, no one’s even in danger. But everyone is scare shitless. They’re even more scared than when, a while earlier, the town really was overrun by actual flesh eating zombies.

I submitted the story to a literary journal, a no-name rag run out of a no-name community college. It was nominated for a Pushcart prize. It won. I stopped writing after that.

***

The girl scouts come to some sort of conclusion, and scatter. Except for one girl scout, who looks like she’s about nine years old. Her girl scout clothes are pristine. Perfect. Her hair is golden blonde and the curls are absolutely perfect. Her rosy cheeks. Her bright blue eyes. Her perfect white teeth as she smiles. She reaches up to grab a copy of Sex Lies and Videotape. At her feet are other DVDs: Bad Influence, Crash, Two Days in the Valley. I start to get very queasy.

The party’s starting to wind down. The windows are tinted, but eventually the light doesn’t change every time the door opens. So the sky is now the color of tinted windows.

Crystal and Kevin are at one of the self-check lanes. Kevin’s running the same bag of mini carrots over the UPC reader, over and over again. Every time it goes beep, Kevin says “Fuck you, Kareem,” and Crystal says “Yeah.”

The bakery section. Laura, Tammy, Melody, Eric, and Keith are sprawled. They look like dead angels. Greasy hair, flushed cheeks, dirt underneath their fingernails, perfect abs, perfect fucking abs, every single one of them.

I decide to find Liam so I can leave.

***

The last little interlude. The big epiphany. The whole point of the story. The chunk of cookie lodged in my throat that makes me choke. Anticlimax.

***

Liam’s in the cookie aisle. He’s sitting, he’s crying, he’s shoving handfuls of girl scout thin mints into his mouth, chewing them, brown goo pouring out of his mouth. There are boxes all around him, like dead soldiers, dead children in a schoolyard massacre, dead bugs beneath a bug zapper, dead fish at low tide, rumpled up tissues surrounding the most persistent nose bleed of all time. But they’re just boxes, green and cheery.

Liam looks up at me as I approach. Dark circles under his wet eyes, nose is running, and all that chewed up cookie drooling from his cookie-soaked chin. The Safeway fluorescents make his skin look yellow, like old damp newspaper.

Please Jason, he says.

I pull out the Sig Sauer, point it at his forehead.

Oh god, thank you, he says, Thank you god, thank you god.

I pull the trigger. There’s a lot of blood. A lot of blood. But there’s way more chewed-up cookie.

fiction by Jason Edwards

Sober, skinny Jason Waterfalls trots across the tarmac, rucksack wrapped around his back like the shiny shell on a ladybug. The bag is full of treasure, mirror and razor-blade treasure, all of it paid for, all of it precious. The mighty tarmac is windless on a blazing hot day, but a tiny breeze finds Jason’s jacket back under the rucksack and billows it playfully. If it were longer, and made of something sturdier, and this was an old Western Town and he was a gunslinger, it would have looked gorgeous. Instead, it’s unremarkable. Jason sinsg, softly to himself, “Never gonna give you up,” and runs up a set of mobile stairs as if he’s done it a thousand times before, which would be true if he’d done it 999 times before.

Inside is cooler than outside, and cooler too: leather and chrome and a flight attendant on the right side of plump. Asian, maybe. Or Mexican. Jason sits down, is handed champagne, and the door closes, and the plane starts moving. Just like that. Just like a domino falls when a domino next to it falls towards the domino it will then fall into.

The door to the cockpit is closed, the stewardess is behind him and strapped in, so Jason points forward and says to nobody “follow that cab” and laughs and takes a sip of champagne and spills some on himself. Goddamnit. What kind of piece of crap airline are they running here. The lady bug on the seat across the aisle next to him rolls off, hits the floor, and slides towards the back of the plane, out of his sight. Who cares. Not Jason Waterfalls.

“Boy,” the man had said. “We need some new goods. You’re going to go fetch ‘em.”

“Yessir,” Jason replied.

“Like a good boy.”

“Yessir.”

“Like a good dog.”

“Yessir.”

“Doggy like to fetch?”

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

“Yessir.” Jason didn’t need this shit. Except he did. He’d been a courier, a go-between, a messenger, a delivery boy for a while. He’d been promoted from packages wrapped in cellophane to packages wrapped in cellophane that could be unwrapped, skimmed, and rewrapped. Which he’d done. Ray-Bans Vans and tans. Not a lot, but more than he could afford on a courier’s wages. At least it was worth it. At least he looked good. For fuck’s sake.

“City airport, tomorrow, before noon.”

“When?”

“I just told you. Buenos Aires. You speak Spanish?”

“No. Sir.”

“Neither do they.” He’d handed Jason a slip of paper with an address on it. “Don’t fuck no whores.”

And that was that. Jason Waterfalls could have gotten a baseball bat upside his head, some piano wire around his neck, a few bullets through his heart, a knife in his gut, his own Jason Testicles fed to him. But he’s one of those sons of bitches that charms people. It was an iffy business, and it paid the big guys to give the lucky guys a little free rein, see what opportunities they knocked up.

So he’d gone to the airport at ten AM and wandered around and like a lucky bastard found the desk where they organize the private jets and was lucky enough to get the one gal who thought Ray-Bans were sexy and was still new enough on the job to not think it was weird that a solo passenger on a private jet didn’t know where to go and didn’t ask for a passport and was lucky enough to ignore her terrible directions and find the plane anyway and climb on board and was handed champagne that didn’t spill god damn it and took a nap and ate some rare steak and more champagne and a cup of coffee and decent shit in the airplane bathroom bigger than his apartment in Miami and after eight hours landed just like that. Piece of cake.

Cab, address. Some old dude, wrinkles like ravines, terrible job at shaving, yellow eyes with bursts of red. Backpack. Called it a rucksack. He looked Jason over for a long time. “Abatido” he said.

Jason just shrugged. “Arigato,” he said back.

The old man laughed. You expected, when an old man laughed, a mouth with just a few rotten teeth left. But not this guy. Huge perfectly white teeth. Scary goddamn teeth. Handed Jason the backpack. “Don’t fuck no whores,” he said.

Jason went out and fucked some whores.

Sometime in the night, lost his Ray-Bans. Sometime in the night, lost his Vans. But he never lost that backpack. That shiny red backpack. Never opened it, either. Was tempted. Could use some blow, after that night, those whores. “Como se disse blowjob?” he said. “I don’t speak Spanish, asshole,” the whore said, but in a good natured way, and then she blew him. He paid with stolen cash, but that was all right. He’d stolen it before he’d gotten this assignment, and since they hadn’t killed him, but given him the assignment, that was like permission. Thankfully, she took US dollars. It occurred to him he should check her, see if she was really a dude. He’d heard that sort of thing happened in Argentina. He decided to rely on his luck. The next whore, anyway, had a vagina.

She was actually kind of sweet, a young thing, whimpered a few times as he went at it, a longer session thanks to the earlier blowjob, asked him his name, smiled at him, fell asleep next to him, woke up when he was putting on somebody else’s shoes in the little house she lived in. “Don’t go, Jason Waterfalls,” she said, and if he wasn’t carrying eight pounds of cocaine for a Lupe Blanco and wasn’t starting to feel like he needed a few penicillin shots and didn’t think the water here was going to kill him and didn’t think, all things considered, Buenos Aires was a filthy town which he was rapidly becoming extremely sick of, he might have considered it. But if she wasn’t eighteen she was sixteen and in the morning light he could see she had one of those Latina-girl mustaches so he got up and left.

Cab, airport, tarmac, stairs, champagne, fuck.

The plane levels out and the stewardess walks up, with the backpack, setting it on the seat next to him across the aisle. She sees his empty glass, the wet stain on his shirt, makes a face, trots away. Jason squirms in his seat. The wet on his shirt, the heat in his crotch, an itch in his shoes—he wants a shower, and bad. This is a private jet, right?

The stewardess returns with a towel, crouches next to him.

“Is there a shower on this plane?”

She shakes her head, saying nothing. She dabs at his chest with the cloth. It does absolutely nothing. “Nevermind,” he says, pushing her hand to the side. She growls, slaps him, and goes back to daubing, her face once again calm, betraying nothing.

It had happened so fast he was stunned. It was so out of place, had it happened? He’s about to say “what the fuck?” when she stands up and walks away again. This is not the same stewardess as on the plane on the flight down. That one had been blonde. Not a milf, but, like, older-sister age. This one, Asian one, can’t tell her age. Jason turns in his seat. She’s back in the galley. She’s rattling something around. The clink and clank of what is probably bottles and can sounds like heavier, shinier metal.

He hasn’t had much sleep, has been to some pretty greasy parts of town, has eaten and drunk and smoked and snorted some things, so, clearly, he’d imagined the slap. Some bygone memory from when he was a kid and his mom had done something like that, out of frustration.

He settles back into his seat. She’s bring him lunch, he’ll eat that, take a nap, take a shit, watch a movie, get off the plane, go home for a shower, deliver the rucksack. Just another day in the life of Jason Waterfalls.

The stewardess comes by with a tray, but doesn’t set it in front of him, going instead to the cockpit. Door opens, door closes. She’s in there for a while. The fasten seat-belt light comes on. They hit some turbulence, and the backpack falls onto the floor again. Jason leaves it there. She can pick it up again.

At last, the cockpit door opens. Is the stewardess adjusting her skirt? Is she touching her lips, making sure her lipstick isn’t smeared? The little slut, he thinks. But in an admiring way.

She walks down the aisle, stops at the back pack. “Did you open this?” she says.

What the fuck business is it of yours? Jason doesn’t say. “No,” he says.

She glares at him, picked up the sack, puts it on the seat, shoves it all the way to the window. Walks away again.

Jason rubs his eyes, runs his fingers through his hair, allows himself a mighty yawn. Fuck it. Sleep first, then eat. He closes his eyes.

He openes his eyes. He feels like hes glued to his seat, shoved down into it like a blanket stuffed into a tiny closet. He pries himself up, stretches. Looks back towards the galley—the stewardess is there, strapped into a jump seat, lolled, her legs spread apart just a bit, a little unlady like. He takes a few steps towards her, trying to make out—is there something staining her stockings? He wants to smile, takes another step, almost trips on the backpack. It’s on the floor again.

He picks it up, looks at it. Shiny and red. He’d known his luck could only go so far, and that he was pushing it if he wasn’t careful. Not opening the backpack, it was sort of a gesture. Because after all, nobody told him not to open. Not Blanco, not the old man. The only one who brought it up was the snoring stewardess. And you know what, Jason Waterfalls, she had, indeed, slapped you. So what are you going to do, fuck whores, or take orders from them? He decides to open the rucksack.

And so he does He kneels down, right there in the aisle, and unzips it. There’s a hiss of gas escaping, a truly awful smell. Like what vomit would smell like if it was rotten meat taking a shit. Jason tries not to gag. The stewardess comes instantly awake. She unbuckles and runs towards him.

“What did you do?” she says.

“What the hell is it?” Jason says, knowing she wouldn’t know, but knowing somehow she would know. He wants to look inside, but he wants to be away from the smell. He stands up.

“Pituitary glands. But you broke the seal, and now they’re ruined.”

“It’s not cocaine? I thought I was picking up cocaine.”

“No, you dumb asshole.”

Something funny about her voice. Did Jason think she was Asian? Her mouth seems to have a lot of teeth in them. Her eyes seem to have a lot of yellow, with red bursts in them. He takes a step back. “What the fuck.”

“Well, I’ve got one, I guess I can get another.” She hosld up a hand. Is she holding a knife? No, her fingernails are knives, big long yellow crusty knives. He takes another step back, and then another.

“Where are you going to go, asshole? You’re on a plane.”

Jason turns, jumps at the cockpit door, opens it, slips inside, shuts it, looks for a lock.

The smell of copper, hot copper, Blood everywhere. Every surface, every angle. Pooled on the floor. Jason falls over. Something on the seat, torn clothes and clumps of something meaty and bloody. And heat, the cockpit is tiny, drenched in blood and hot like a sauna. Jason’s head starts swimming.

A wrenching sound, the cockpit door ripped away. The stewardess, skirt torn, blouse torn, stockings torn, not stained, but torn. Covered in hair and muscle. Her nose is getting longer. Her eyes are getting yellower. Jason is trying to scream but he can’t.

“So, asshole,” she says. “Did you fuck any whores?” She leaps. The pain is outside of him. Who was going to land the plane, he thinks, as she stands over him, ripping his body to pieces, scratching huge chunks out of his forehead.

fiction by Jason Edwards

Folks, if you’re hunkered down for the night in some abandoned house, hiding behind a make-shift barricade, curled around a small transistor radio with the volume turned down low to save batteries and so the zombies won’t hear and come crashing in to devour your flesh, if over the past few months you’ve seen loved ones massacred by hungry monsters, some of them still alive and driven to madness by our now lawless society, well, I can finally tell you who’s to blame for all of it. It’s Joaquin Phoenix. Yes, the movie star, the man who used to delight you in such films as Gladiator and Walk the Line. Joaquin Rafael Phoenix, of Puerto Rico, brother of the late River, and I’m sad to report, also now late Rain, Summer, Liberty, and half-sister Jodean, all of whom were consumed at the Phoenix compound, in, ironically, Mesa Arizona. Joaquin Phoenix, nominated several times but never winning Academy Awards, Golden Globes, and BAFTAS, whatever those are. Joaquin Phoenix, once called Leaf, is whole responsibly for the zombie apocalypse.

It seems Joaquin got it into his fool Hollywood brain that he could reunite the Grateful Dead, and not just a few of the surviving members, but the original band. Including Jerry Garcia—Joaquin told the New York Press that the Dead without Jerry would be like peas n carrots without peas. Never was a Dead fan, myself, and found it a bit odd that the man who portrayed Johnny Cash would have any interest in that kind of music. But that’s Hollywood for you, which just like God, works in mysterious ways.

Old Joa tried different methods to bring back Jerry. He tried séances, in an attempt to have the ghost of Jerry Garcia possess, in turn, the bodies of Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Jim Gaffigan, Zach Galifianakis, and interestingly Dakota Fanning. But of course, none of that worked. He enlisted the assistance of Tom Cruise and John Travolta, who helped Joa rig up an erstwhile Frankenstein’s laboratory, complete with Ron Howard’s brother Clint as an Igor—their second choice, it seems, as they originally wanted Michael John Berryman, who was too busy signing autographs at a record two-thousandth sci-fi/horror convention.

But no dice. So off he went to the Caribbean, to look for some of that voodoo mojo, some of that serpent and rainbow. Meanwhile, other bands got in on the act, in an attempt to placate Joa Q. What was left of the Dead, a group called The Other Ones, and then The Dead, and then Furthur, sent Mr. Phoenix several telegrams assuring him they would take no part in a reunion with a reanimated Garcia. Other jam bands expressed interest in helping him with the project using non-zombie methods: Phish, Reel Big Phish, Fishbone, Bone Thugs ‘n Harmony, and Markie Mark Harmon (a hybrid Markie-Mark/Mark Harmon impersonator know for shopping mall performances of 20-minute jam covers of Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up”) all submitted proposals via text message. Blues Traveler’s John Popper jokingly asked if Joaquin would consider resurrected his dead career, and more than a few thousand fans offered to kill Dave Matthews so that he could be brought back to life.

Joaquin stuck to his guns, and insisted on pursuing a means by which to revive Garcia himself. Many of us in the media became complacent, as we were certain this Hollywood yahoo would be too inspired by film and television, and would never hit on a non-fictional solution to his endeavor. Alas, that hubris would come back to bite us in the ass, figuratively, and literally in the case of Brian Jennings, one of the first news anchors to be eaten by a zombie—but that came later.

What came first was Joaquin returning in triumph to the United States, covered in hair, tribal tattoos, and smelling sharply of formaldehyde. At this point the internet finally got involved, and the most prominent theory was that Joaquin was in pursuit of a very elaborate ARG, or Alternate Reality Game, one of those marketing tricks where consumers look for clues which leads them to solve puzzles surrounding some new brand identity. Veterans of Halo’s “I Like Bees,” Cloverfield’s “Slusho”, and Nine Inch Nail’s “Year Zero” began a massive investigation, stumbling across and pre-solving neo-nascent ARGs for Disney’s Cars 4, a new book by Mark Danieliewski, and even a non-existent ARG for A Night Without Sunshine (the team who solved it were treated to an all-you-can eat day at a Seattle Taco Bell, location undisclosed to protect the innocent) .

Meanwhile, Joaquin and his team of 3.2 GPA MIT scientists landed in San Francisco and headed straight for the funeral home in San Rafael where Garcia had been cremated. There, they constructed an elaborate device made from the scales of starfish, dinosaur bones, radioactive carbon coated with toad DNA, and twisted –up pages from a graphic-novel version of the script of the film version of the Necronomicon. Little did Joa and company know what was in store for them—while they set up shop inside, much to the chagrin of the assistant manager of the funeral parlor who was only then made aware of the huge pay-off Phoenix had made to the owner, outside a large protest was forming, a silent vigil, fans who had gathered to both stop and worship the monster Garcia if/when it emerged.

The night sky was lit up by purple and green flashes coming from the windows (the neighborhood otherwise dark due to the power-drain caused by Joaquin’s equipment). Leading the crowd was Chuck Garvey of a certain jam band (I can’t really do justice to their name on air, as it requires a peculiar capitalization and punctuation—but it looks like the name of bartender from the Simpson and is coincidentally a Japanese slang term which has something ambiguously to do with being a fan of anime-style pre-pubescence especially personified in non-animated and no- pre-pubescent things). Garvey and String Cheese Incident’s Jason Haan assured the crowd via a 20-minute improvisational megaphone rap-battle that as long as the lights were not blue and red, all was well and Garcia was still but ash scattered in the Bay and the Ganges.

This was when the lights turned blue and red, the windows shattered, and the ground shook for miles around. All went silent, the crowd tense, eyes wide in the darkness. A low moaning was heard, and then a sharp scream, and Joaquin himself burst through the doors, standing before the crowd, covered in blood, most of it coursing from an open wound on his neck, barely visible beneath his mighty beard. And then Jerry Garcia was upon him, knocking him down and ripping viscera from his body and flinging it about him as he tried to shovel it into his face.

Folks, he was even still wearing those little glasses.

It turns out that the ashes Deborah Koons thought she had scattered were, alas, not Jerry Garcia. His body had been preserved and hidden in the funeral parlor, a fact that Joaquin had discovered almost by accident during that whole mockumentary “I’m Still Here” nonsense. (When asked to comment, Werner Herzog reportedly said something incoherent and predictably German, mentioning black-footed gray langurs, or something).

The crowd reacted predictably. Some surged towards their masters, to touch Garcia, to save Phoenix. Same fled. Some shed their clothes. And even as other bodies began to emerge from the funeral home, shuffling, reeking of rotted flesh, already in advanced states of decay despite being freshly dead and freshly reanimated, still it might have been only a minor incident and easily under control if Les Claypool and Kevin Bacon hadn’t chosen that exact moment to fire up generators, amps, and guitars, starting a bay-area funk jam fused with New Orleans style neo-Dixie, which the crowd, clothed, naked, gnawed-on or gnawing-on couldn’t help but dance to, play hacky sack to, attracting still more souls from miles around.

The heady stink of mary jane and blood covered all, and the zombies apocalypse began in an orgy of free love, craft-brewed IPAs, and more 8-gig thumb drives than had ever been collected in one spot. Some were killed and eaten outright, some were only bitten and converted on the spot to zombiedom, and still others were so overcome with THC as to call their bosses, quit their jobs via voicemail, and start bidding on VW microbuses on E-bay. But whatever happened, the zombie sickness spread. From San Rafeal to San Francisco and Oakland, San Jose, even Fresno in a matter of a few hours. The National Guard were called in, but instead of police chatter and instructions their headsets only played The Allman Brothers and Widespread Panic.

For a few days the apocalypse was contained between Yosemite National Park and the Pacific Ocean. But once it leaked into Los Angeles, all was lost. The US Government scooped up potential zombies and sent them to Afghanistan, Japanese school girls began to collect Joaquin Dead stickers laced with zombie DNA, sales of crossbows sky-rocketed, and women started naming their newborns Little Ass Kicker. The beginning of the end was in full gorge. Seattle fell, Chicago was overrun, New York fought back, gamely, but was eventually undermined by its own gridlocked streets and survivors’ confusion of the word “fuck” between either a triumphant shout or a call for help. Atlanta, of course, never stood a chance.

The last major metropolitan hold-out was in Toronto, Canada, thanks to a mixture of cold temperatures and Justin Bieber fans, who have long-been recognized as some of the most virulently anti-zombie and anti-jam-band people on the planet. They put up a game defense, but over the course of a few weeks, they too were chased down, tripped up, slaughtered, their iPods blasting “If Only You Love Me” shattered and silenced.

And so here we are, folks, scattered and broken, small groups of us clinging together for survival, fighting off the occasional tie-dyed hoard even as we fight with one another over the few remaining scraps of dignity left to us. Even as I broadcast this message, there are zombies collecting around the building that houses this studio, and I fear my own end is near. But there’s plenty of battery left, and I know some of you out there are still grasping for a bit of hope, huddled as you are around your little radios. So I’ll cue up the longest non-jam song I own,” Thick as Brick” by Jethro Tull, and set it on repeat.

Fiction by Jason Edwards.
This story was a gift for a friends’ birthday.

Mabel Francis, 52, eyes of blue, five foot four, sun dress, inappropriate for the weather, appropriate for the season, inappropriate for what she’s doing: chasing a dog. Appropriate for 197 pounds? Maybe. Mabel’s been seeing a therapist for a few years now who’s been trying to convince her how sad she is for having a BMI in the 30s when really she’s been not only fine with it but actually quite happy since she was 47 and her husband left her for someone who was skinny and who then got cancer and Mabel would never wish misery on anyone and she wasn’t glad the skinny bitch got cancer, just glad it made her husband sad when the skinny bitch kicked him out for thinking the cancer was his punishment for leaving Mabel. She’s seeing the therapist because she feels guilty for being glad her ex-husband’s sad. Good Christians don’t feel glad when people are sad. But the therapist won’t stop asking her if her weight affects her mood (it doesn’t) so she’s thinking maybe she should just give up Christianity altogether because then she can feel good about smiling and say, in all sincerity, Fuck you, Carl.

She’s chasing the dog because he stole her purse, the little shit.

She’d woken up and looked outside and saw the sun and thought, screw it, screw work, screw therapy, why not put on a sun dress and walk down to the bakery where they have fudge cake and cute Mexican boys who don’t speak English very well but always smile at her? So she’d done that, put on the dress, and stepped outside, and the sun had been warm and she’d been in a cocoon of happiness and potential and then she’d stepped off the porch and the clouds and raindrops and the voice of Carl saying where you going dressed liked that people can see your legs, Mabel. Good Christians don’t use the middle finger, certainly don’t lift up one high and point at the sky where Jesus himself might be sitting. No offense, Jesus, so instead of flipping the bird she’d decided to weather the weather; it was a short walk to the bakery anyway.

Maybe she’d get soaked to the skin and it would look sort of sexy.

She hadn’t it; it didn’t; the rain had stopped before it had even started although the clouds had been persistent and there was a little wind. But then she’d gotten to the corner where she was supposed to turn and she was just thinking about the skinny bitch, who wasn’t really all that much of a bitch, not really, not her fault she’s attracted a man like Carl, not like she’d gone out of her way to find Mabel, find her husband, seduce him with her jeans and her sports bras and her nose piercing, seriously, who the hell has a nose piercing in their 40s? No, Carl had chased her, and left Mabel for her, and gotten cancer and finally wised up and kicked his fat belly and his sunken chest to the curb, and one day out of audacious curiosity Mabel had gone to where the woman worked and looked at her and she actually seemed nice enough and if there was any Jesus, I mean justice, it would have been Mabel who made friends with the skinny bitch and Carl who’d gotten the cancer.

Thinking about all of this when a cloud opened up and a ray of light stabbed Mabel right in the eye. She blinked, and there was a rainbow. And out of nowhere that loud rushing noise she’d been ignoring was all of sudden a truck racing down the road, within inches of her, and in the window an old Mexican guy with a lecherous smile, who made a kissing face at her. The shock of the truck made her drop her purse, the kissing face made her blush, the wind whipping at her dress made her feel like a little girl, and the dog that was running past her snatched up her purse and kept running.

And Mabel was running too before she even knew it. Running after the little dog, white with orange spots, orange blotches, blotches like the one’s on Mabel’s cheeks, like the one on her knees, like the one’s on the skinny bitches cancer-bebalded head. Show some decency, girl, show some self-respect, wear a scarf, that’s what cancer patients are supposed to do. Honestly, what kind of person would attract a man like Carl in the first place? Plenty of skinny bitches out there, plenty of nose piercings, why this one?

The dog darts around a corner and Mabel’s right behind him. He’s not running that fast, burdened by her purse, but he’s not even going as fast as he can, and Mabel’s doing that sort of bent-over run, the one with both hands in front and palms up like she’s going to catch him. As if. 197 pounds, divorced, sun dress, windy, clouds, occasional drop of rain, skipped work, wants fudge cake, doesn’t get much alimony from Carl but spends half of it on therapy and the other half on the collection plate.

Mabel gets close, swipes at the little shits tail, but he does a thing with his ass where he’s going two directions at the same time and then he’s out of her reach again and running across the road. Mabel’s half-way across the road before she realizes it and she comes to a stop just in case there’s more fast-moving trucks with smiling Mexicans. Alas, no. The road’s empty. The dog stops too. Looks at her from the other side of the road, purse in his mouth, panting. She leaps towards him and he’s off again. Damn it! She half giggles.

Around another corner, across a yard, Mabel would never think to trespass but it’s her purse and she’s chasing a skinny little white dog with orange spots, there has to be an allowance for that. Her shoes are gone. The grass is wet, cold, stings her feet. Now he’s trotting down a sidewalk and her feet are filthy. She’s never been in this neighborhood before, lived here ever since she got married and she’s never been here, less than even a mile away. Because they can’t have run miles yet, there’s no way, there’s no way Mabel could run even a mile, could she?

Mabel’s out of breath, slowing down. The dog’s nowhere to be seen. She leans up against a wall, panting. Her purse. Her white one, the small one, just her checkbook and her driver’s license and some tissues and a lipstick. Call the bank, get a new license, tissues are cheap, the lipstick is tawdry anyway. Stupid dog. Stupid sunshine, stupid clouds. Maybe her therapist was right, two years of therapy, maybe he was onto something. She’d been 197 pounds in high school, captain of the debate team, took them to State, almost won, maybe she’s been sublimating all that fat self-hate, just like he said. College, economics major, 4.0 thank you very much, 197 pounds, who’s going to ask her to Frat parties, of course she got good grades. And then Carl, called her his pudgy princess, married her, 197 pounds on her wedding day. Stupid sunshine, stupid fudge cake.

She’s hadn’t changed in thirty-six years. Not one bit. Oh she’d gotten her diploma and her degree and her marriage certificate and her divorce papers, but she hadn’t really changed. Carl went from nice guy to asshole, the skinny bitch had gone from healthy to cancer, even the day had gone from sunny to cloudy. But she was still the same old Mabel. She went to church every Sunday, and asked Jesus to forgive her for being glad Carl was getting his just desserts, and all the old women in the pews looking at her sitting there alone, like she had done something wrong. Maybe she had. Maybe she should have gotten skinny for Carl. But she hadn’t, hadn’t changed a bit, stayed the same old Mabel she’d been since she was sixteen and lost her virginity to Rodrigo. And now here she is, she’s lost and tired and wet and cold. And hungry. She’d just chased a dog for 15 minutes. How many calories was that? How much fudge cake is she going to have to eat to get back to her usual 197 pounds?

Mabel looks down the sidewalk. At the end, the dog sitting there, big smile on his face, purse in his mouth. She walks towards him. He’s just sitting there. She can see his tail, wagging. He drops her purse. Lies down on the sidewalk. She walks up to him, reaches for her purse. The dog shoves his head into her hand. She has to scratch him behind his ears. He wags his tail even harder.

Mabel decides: fuck her therapist. She’s glad she weighs 197 pounds. She’s glad Carl and their marriage and his betrayal and their divorce didn’t change her. She’s glad the skinny bitch got cancer. Fuck church too. She’d been happy before she met Carl, happy after they got married, sad for a bit when he’d left her, but she was happy again and there was nothing fucking wrong with that.

A smell, a wonderful smell, a deep rich lemony smell. A man is standing behind the dog. He’s holding a paper sack. The amazing smells is coming from that bag. Mabel looks up at the man. He smiles at her. “I see you’ve met my dog.”

“Oh, is he yours?” Mable stands up. “The little shit stole my purse!” She giggles.

The man blushes. “Ah Jesus, I’m sorry. He does that. Here, let me give you a lemon square. I just bought them.”

Before she can say no, he’s handed her the square. Despite herself, she takes a bite.

It’s the most amazing thing she’s ever eaten.

Mouth full, dress clinging to her in spots, Mabel says “What did you say his name is?”

The man takes a bite of a lemon square too. His eyes fairly twinkle, and she can tell, he’s loving the lemon square too. “Cymbal” he says.

Mabel laughs. “You gotta be shittin’ me.”

fiction by Jason Edwards

Theseus had been walking for seemed like hours, and at first he was tense, walking slowly, shield up and sword at the ready. But after a while of nothing happening, of twisting corridors, left turns and right turns and seemingly endless miles of wall, he had become a little less vigilant. Now he walked with plodding steps, head almost hanging, sword dragging. His shield was gone—he’d set it down to take a leak, and then forgotten it. The truth was he was bored, just so damn bored. Actually, taking a whiz on a random wall had been the most exciting thing that had happened in the last 60 minutes.

The walls weren’t all exactly the same, but their difference was starting to blend together. Brick, stone, wood in places. Earthen walls and walls made of marble. Occasional graffiti, mostly in Greek, sometimes in Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Sanskrit, the familiar scrawls and dirty pictures. None of it interesting. One message in larger, more angry letters read “Go back to Athens!” and if Theseus was less bored he would have scratched in his own “Crete sucks” beneath it, but couldn’t really be bothered.

He’d had such high hopes, too. An adventure! Volunteer for sacrifice, enter the labyrinth, stalk the minotaur, kill it, free his people from ritual sacrifice, live forever in legend. Yawn. Such great plans, as they say, or will say, or whatever. Theseus was bored, had probably been bored when he’d decided to do this, and now he was reaping what he’d sown.

He could smell himself, the fear-sweat dried now and the sweat of tedium and worthlessness settled on him like a shroud of misery. Is that what he was, miserable? Yes. He almost wished the minotaur would come along now and just lop off his head. And of course it occurred to him that this was exactly what the labyrinth was supposed to do to a man, break his will. Well, Theseus wasn’t so sure his will was broken, exactly. He was just becoming fully aware of the tedium of everything.

You get up, take a leak, eat something, run around the city like an asshole, take a crap, screw somebody, go to sleep. Wash, rinse, repeat, except for the wash part unless you lived near a handy hotspring, which most folks didn’t, and the lucky one who did stank like rotten eggs anyway. Who fucking cares.

Theseus sat down, counting his breaths, looking at his sword. Fine craftsmanship, but then every man said that about his sword. To hate your own sword was to beg for another man’s sword, which was some kind of metaphor, probably. Or wasn’t. Sometimes a sword was just a sword. And swords are for killing people, of course. Either the minotaur, or Theseus himself. Is that what’s supposed to happen? Is he supposed to kill himself with his own sword? And the minotaur is a symbol of, what? The beast called depression? No, that’s stupid. Sometimes a minotaur is just a minotaur.

Across the corridor where he sat, Theseus saw something at the foot of the wall, something in the dirty shadows. Something orange? He scanned the base, and saw the cord stretching along in both directions, disappearing around a corner to his right, dwindling to invisibility to his left. Theseus got up to take a look, sword left behind him. On his hands and knees, he crawled to the opposite wall. Yes, some kind of cord, about as thick as a finger, and made of, what, some kind of rope, coated with a thick wax. He lifted it up—it was heavy, not so heavy he couldn’t lift it, but heavy from there being so much of it.

Theseus looked up and down the corridor. How had he not noticed this before. He took a deep breath. The air stank of muddy plains and old lightning. Maybe this was a guide of some kind. Yes, that must be it. That girl, what was her name, Adrian or something. Amy. Annie. She’d said she would leave him a sign of some sort. He hadn’t really paid attention to her. She had spots on her face.

Theseus went back for his sword, and half expected the cord to be gone when he turned around again, the hallucination of a mind fevered by boredom and fatigue. But no, it was still there. He tried to remember which way he’d been walking. Which way had he come from? He took a few steps to the right of where he’d been sitting. Then back and a few more. Neither way seemed better. He shrugged, decided to keep going left.

After a few hundred feet, there was a knot in the cord. Well, not a knot exactly, just a thicker spot, sculpted and square. Theseus knelt to look at it. The cord changed color here, from one shade of orange to almost, but not quite, the exact same shade And where the cord was flexible, this knot seemed very rigid. He plucked at it, then set it back down. He walked on.

After several hundred more feet, a four-way intersection. Theseus had been using the good-old fashioned right-hand rule, although he had been using his left hand, his shield hand. But here the cord went around the corner to his right. And there was another knot, and another change in color—still orange. Was this some kind of strange beast, sewn together, or perhaps a new kind of wool, spun from an odd kind of sheep? Theseus scratched his cheek. He needed a shave. His feet were sore from walking. His scalp itched. He was hungry, thirsty. His eyes felt full of sand, and burned when he closed them. He moved on.

More cord. Hundreds of feet of it, and dozens of those thick spots, the change in color. This was becoming as pointless as his earlier, aimless wandering. He decided to inspect one of the knots again. He picked up the cord, and crack appeared in the knot. Theseus pulled, and the knot came apart with a reluctant, smooth pop. On one side, three metallic prongs. On the other, three aptly shaped holes. In the distance, a loud, low scream of rage.

The hairs on the back of his neck stood up, a chill raced down his spine. Theseus looked in the direction of the scream, the direction he’d been walking. The scream continued, although it did not get any louder. Theseus stuck the knot back together again, and after a few seconds, the screaming stopped. Theseus dropped the knot, put his hand on his hip for his sword. It was gone.

He looked around him, but he couldn’t see it anywhere. He trotted back the way he’d come, but he didn’t find anything. Damn it. How long had he been walking? Hours? Days? Most of his waking life? Nevermind. He’d deal with… whatever on his own. He didn’t need a sword. He went to where he’d pulled the knot apart, and kept going, following the cord. Picked up the pace a little. Around a corner. Panic for a moment when he couldn’t see the cord anymore. But there it was, wedged tight against the wall and the floor, which was, here, some sort of bushy grass. No, not grass, some sort of rug. Tight little fibers, and the cord wedged underneath a wooden footing at the base of the wall.

He kept going. The wall was white, not glass smooth but smoother than stone. The ceiling was the same material. There were framed pictures here and there in the hallways. Landscapes, pictures of tall, monstrous structures. One of them so well rendered, he thought it was a real person, frozen inside a window. But it was just a painting. And in the ceiling, holes letting in sunlight. He must have walked all day and night, and now it was morning again outside, so bright he couldn’t see the sky past the glare.

He could here sounds now, coming from a door way at the end of this corridor. What sounded like music, and tinny, distant laughter. As he approached, he could make out dialogue, a man and woman. He couldn’t understands what they were saying, but every other line was punctuated by more laughter. Theseus nodded, understanding at last. The center of the labyrinth was probably an auditorium, where the people of Crete could watch the final battle between whoever found their way and the minotaur himself. Disgusting. Well, they’d see a different slaughter today. Theseus was angry.

He wished he had his sword. But he’d tear the Minotaur with his bare hands. Such idiocy, this whole labyrinth thing. The ritual sacrifice of Athenian youth, and for what? Revenge? Because some jealous assholes killed Androgeos, son of Minos? To avoid the subsequent plague? A plague on that plague. A plague on Minos. A plague on fools who ask gods to kill for them. Theseus would kill this Minotaur, end the sacrifices, and then he would… and then he would… and then he would think of something else to do.

Theseus reached the doorway, throwing caution to the wind, and stormed through. But this was no auditorium. This was a room like any other. Large, very large, ceilings high. The cord snaked across and ran up into a large box in the middle, which was throwing colored lights from the other side. Across from it a fat man sat in a large overstuffed chair. He was surrounded by piles of thin boxes, all of them filthy, greasy. A wave of smells hit Theseus, thick, sweet, savory rotten smells, making him hungry and nauseous all at the same time.

The man looked up as Theseus entered. “Come in!” he shouted, smiling. “You want some chicken wings?” he started to rise from his throne. He got to his feet, then winced, putting a hand to his back. He was wearing some kind of short tunic on his chest, white but filthy with food stains, shoulders exposed, large belly protruding from beneath. Short pants beneath that ending above his knees, some kind of flimsy material, also white with faded red heart shapes scattered around. The man sat back down again. “Ouch.” He said. “Go ahead and just help yourself.”

Theseus approached the flashing box and the man in chair. The box was emitting the sounds of speaking and laughter and music, still tinny and far away, as if it were a spy-window on some auditorium—perhaps below the room they steed in. “I’m looking for the minotaur,” he said, finally.

The man’s eyes were glued to the box. “Where’s your sword?” he said. His fat cheeks rested on his chest, half-reclined in his chair. His balding forehead shone with lazy sweat. He grabbed a cup sitting next to him quaffed its contents, and then crushed it with mighty strength and tossed it behind him.

“I don’t know. Do you know where the minotaur is? I was following that orange cord, and it led me here..”

“Oh! So you’re the little shit who unplugged my TV!” the man barked with laughter. “Thought I was going to have a heart attack, I was so mad!”

“That was you who roared?”

“Yeah. I’m the minotaur. You found me. Ready to fight? It’s to the death, you know.” The man chuckled.

“The minotaur is half man half beast, the foul offspring of the Creten Bull and the king’s wife Pasiphae.”

“Yeah, or, he’s the bastard child of a blacksmith and a whore who knows how to tell a good lie to her idiot husband.” The man laughed again, picked up a rod from within the cushions of his throne, and pointed it at the box. The colors shifted, and the dialogue abruptly changed. “Be for real, man.”

“If you’re the minotaur, than it was you who consumed the tribute every year, seven boy and girl virgins from Athens?” Theseus took a few steps closer, wanting to see what was inside that box.

The man shook his head. “Naw, not unless you mean seven pizzas and a few dozen orders of hot wings.” He laughed again. “Yeah, we got that ‘tribute’ every year. I think most of them just wandered around until they found the exit, then, like, got jobs or something. I don’t know.”

“But then what do I…” Theseus was at a loss. Confused, tired, and much to his shame and horror, finding the conversation altogether more boring than even the walking through the labyrinth had been.

The man shrugged. “I don’t know. You can hang out here, if you want.” He shifted on his chair, emitted a loud sound of flatulence, made a face. His eyes never left the box.

Theseus finally stepped close enough to look at it. It was indeed a window of some kind. Inside, tiny players spoke in a rapid-fire tongue, the stage behind them a mottled, chaotic scene. He couldn’t make any sense of it at all. “What is that?” he finally asked.

Something one of the players said made the man laugh. “It’s called Friends. I’ve seen, like, every episode, like twice. But it’s the only thing on until Seinfeld.” The man heaved a bowl onto his lap, overflowed with small white kernels, which he began to shovel into his mouth. “Of course,” he said, mouth spilling gruel “I’ve seen every episode of Seinfeld twice, too.” The man laughed again.

Although he couldn’t understand what they were saying, Theseus found himself transfixed. One of the players opened a door, and another behind it screamed. Theseus felt a smile cross his lips, the first one in ages. Or perhaps ever. “Why is that man wearing a goose in his head?”

“It’s not a goose, it’s a shower cap. And that’s not a man, it’s a–” the man started coughing. “It’s a woman, she’s the—“ he coughed again, louder.

Theseus turned to look. The man’s face was turning read as he coughed, louder, as bits of food flew from his mouth. His eyes were wide, and drool was spraying from his mouth. The man clutched at his chest, waving his other arm in the air. “Water!” he shouted, and continued to cough. He was shaking back and forth in his chair, tipping it side to side, taking in huge gulps of air in between coughing fits. His nose was running, his tongue protruding, his face shifting from red to purple. And all the while the noises and the laughter from the box continued.

The coughing came in smaller bursts and the man’s breathing become more rapid but shallow, increasingly shallow. His eyes started to close, and he stopped shaking the chair back and forth. He continued to clutch his chest, but then the hand finally flopped down at his side. He coughed once more, took a deep breath, and then stopped moving as the breath leaked out of for a long time. He was still.

“Minotaur?” Theseus said.

The Minotaur didn’t move.

Theseus turned to the TV. A man was pouring something from a bag into a bowl, and dog nosed its way into the bowling, eating. Theseus took a deep breath, and smelled something delicious, cheese and onion and garlic and tomatoes. In front of the dead minotaur, on a low table, a thin box with a large round bread, coated with flavors. Theseus started to drool.

Eventually, he got the dead minotaur out of the chair, and rolled the body off into the shadows. Theseus returned to the box, sat down in front of it, and watched as he began to eat. Soon he was laughing hysterically.

fiction by Jason Edwards

The vampires in Portland are pretty cool I guess. Found one in this dive bar called Toreador, in the Alphabet district. I didn’t notice him at first because when I went in I had to take a wicked piss, so I made straight for the men’s room. Doors within doors. There were two guys at the urinals, frozen, or so it seemed like, and really creepy, in their identical baggy pants, thermal underwear sleeves under t-shirt, knit woolen caps. Like that guy at the end of The Blair Witch Project, just standing there. I mean, of course they were pissing, but it made me pause for a second. But only a second. No one was in the stall so I went in, another door, closed it, toed up the seat with my foot, and made a noise like one of those porno guys. Jesus Christ. But not as much blood in my urine, so I guess I was healing up.

When I was done I washed my hands and didn’t really notice there was no mirror above the sink, just a frame. But then I left the restroom and saw the vampire sitting at the bar, plain as night, and I realized he’d been there when I came in and I had missed it. That sent a shiver down my spine. Back in the day, missing a vampire and walking into the men’s room would have been my death sentence. They’ve got incredible instincts, and I know he would have clocked me for what I was, followed me, and did me right there. I stood there for a second, staring at him, and vampires are commonplace nowadays I guess but no so common that they’d don’t get stared at, but still. I shook myself out of it, shoved my hand in my pocket and cupped the tooth I had in there, then went and sat at the end of the bar. Ordered something local. Portland’s supposed to be famous for their hops or something.

Back in the day was about a year ago, and I was just getting good at vampire hunting, but I had to get out of it. My old buddy, Rebus, was closing in on his hundredth kill, but he was getting sloppy, and the vampires were just popping up everywhere. They were getting bold, just hanging out in places out in the open, and people were just accepting it. It kind of soured things, like, we sort of enjoyed the hunting and the shadows. Then we’d just see them places and we’d wait and follow them home and do them there. But it was too easy, and then it was like what’s the point? But Rebus wanted his century, and one night when I was doing something else, he followed one to a nest but one got away and followed him home and that’s where I found him.

It was pretty gnarly. He was naked, which made me nervous, because I didn’t know if the tooth in your pocket worked only when they did you or if it had to stay on you in the grave. If Rebus came back I’d have to do him and I did not relish the thought. I cleaned up the mess and tossed him an old factory incinerator we used when the ones we did didn’t go to ash, and I decided that was it for me, no more hunting. Still kept my tooth, just in case, but I’ve met several vampires since then, in bars and places and they can always tell. Like I said, instincts. But it’s like, they can also somehow tell that if I’m done it’s because they’re done so what’s the point in doing me if they don’t even know of the ones I did before? Vampires don’t have racial pride or anything like that.

So I sipped my beer and sort of glanced over at the vampire now and again. This bar didn’t have a mirror behind it, either, and I was getting the idea this was the guy’s main hang out. He was dressed like a punk rock reject from the 80s. Greasy black hair that had been spiked up and then neglected, one ear pierced with a dangly feather, black leather jacket all beat to hell, studded dog collar, dirty black pants. His skin was pale, of course, and his lips were pale too, like he hadn’t had a feed in a few weeks. Probably, if he had followed me into the bathroom, I could have held him off. He didn’t look like much.

I looked away and thought about Jenny and then got that cold shiver and he was sitting next to me, all of sudden and just like that. I tried not to react, but ended up cupping my arms around my beer like where in a prison lunchroom or something. “Hey there, hunter,” he said, in a thick British accent.

That made my stomach drop. I put my hand in my pocket again and he just laughed, throwing his head back and showing his fangs. They were yellow, dirty, so yeah, he hadn’t fed for a long time. “Thought so, I could smell it, when you came in. How’s tricks.”

I turned away. I was having second thoughts about whether I could, afterall, take him. He did look scrawny but he wasn’t jumpy at all, his eyeballs weren’t bouncing all over the place. He was all confidence and charm, like he kept a little girl on a chain in his backroom and didn’t need to feed unless it was for sport.

“Don’t worry, I don’t do that anymore,” I said. I took my hand out of my pocket and gripped my beer. Took a sip, pretty damn bitter.

“Oh I’m not worried, hunter. You mind if I call you hunter, even though you don’t hunt anymore, hunter?” He locked his eyes on me, tiny dots for pupils, no irises, bloodshot. Freaky shit unless you’d seen it a hundred times before. No stink on his breath, none at all.

“Call me whatever you want,” I said, and then reached into my jacket. I grabbed the stake, then turned to the other side as I turned to look away. Just like I thought, he switched sides on me to look me in the face again, and I already had the stake pointed at his chest. “I told you, I don’t do that anymore, but I could if I had to.”

He looked down at the stake, and I had it back in my pocket again as he reached to grab it. Then I went back to my beer. I’m not faster than vampires, or stronger. But they’re so damn predictable.

The vampire licked his lips, then laughed again. “Shit!” his accent was gone. “I know when I’ve met my match. Harry! Next round for the hunter’s on me.” Then he stood up, at normal speed, patted me on the back, and walked back to his seat.

The bartender poured me another and brought it over, so I knocked back what was left of the old one and grabbed the new one. I thought about Jenny again, about how much she hated vampires, but hated what I told her I done even more, like somehow I was cheating on her, doing vampires. I chugged the second beer.

Thought about ordering another, but I had to piss again and I thought about what I would do if I walked into the men’s room and those two guys were still there, still standing still, still pissing. I looked around the bar, at the other people. The bartender looked normal, or at least Portland normal, in his full beard and mustache, pink t-shirt, tattoos. There were a few other patrons sitting at tables. A DJ with dreds mixing old B-52 songs, and doing a horrible job at it. A Korean kid shooting baskets on one of the pop-a-shot machines. None of them seemed to be in thrall. None of them seemed to not know the punk was a vampire, or to know and not care. He was just another weird thing in a weird place in a weird town. So much weird, nothing was weird.

Except for those guys at the urinals, so I dropped a few bills on the bar, and got up to leave, to hunt down a cafe or a diner for some eggs and hopefully a less occupied men’s room. Walked outside, and the cold hit me like a slap and sunk into my bones. I shoved my hands in my pockets and made it a few steps before the vampire was next to me with his arm on my shoulder. “Where to next, hunter?” He said.

I kept walking. We looked like lovers. “I’m hungry,” I said.

He laughed again. “Oh, I doubt that,” he said, and then he was gone.

I walked a few more blocks and thought about Jenny some more. I didn’t want to. I never wanted to. About the way she looked the first time we met, in that sun dress and the sun behind her like a halo, so fucking corny, long blond hair and freckles and green eyes and she smelled liked shampoo and peppermint candies. How I was outside of myself, talking to her, no way I could have done that on my own, I must have been possessed, and it never occurred to me there was something wrong with her, had to be, a girl like that talking to a guy like me, and us on the stupid futon, me too poor to even afford a frame for the damn thing, and the way she looked at me.

How it freaked me out, the first vampire I ever did, that same damn look in her eyes, somehow, and me again feeling outside of myself, no way I could do something like that, kill a living creature, undead but alive, whatever, not even a futon, just a bunch of filthy blankets wadded up on the floor, the vampire all coated in scars and dried up blood, her hair matted and black, but that same look, and damn me to hell, that same feeling when I drove the stake in, a dry tearing sound, a wet squelch and poof she was ashes.

Getting drunk, going home to Jenny, not telling her, and her so trusting. And I did it again, and again, and finally told her, and she acted like I was the monster, and left. So I did ten more. Goddamn I was good at it. And then ten more. And you know how this ends, the way stories like this always end, number 37, and it was her, same blonde hair, same freckles, but her eyes weren’t green anymore, they were red, blood red, full red, and I wasn’t outside myself anymore, I was right inside me, and I did her, right there in that great big ass mansion, huge four poster bed, blood everywhere, no ashes, and we did the owner of the place too, and bunch of other little new vampires, I was up to 43 end of that night, Rebus was in his 80s, and we felt like shit, we felt like total shit.

I walked around the corner, and the wind died down a bit, things were quiet except for my boots on the pavement. Through the midnight gloom I spotted some neon, a hole in the wall, every god damn place in Portland is a hole in the wall. I just wanted to some eggs. Went inside. No one else was there. It wasn’t dark inside, filled with a yellow light, but not the light you could really see by. Ordered some eggs, found the men’s room, took a wicked piss. No blood at all. Beer cures everything.

I ate my eggs. Added too much salt. Too much pepper. I really didn’t have what you could call taste buds anymore. Everything tasted like ash. But I drank a huge cup of coffee anyway, milk and sugar. When I was done I wasn’t full, but I wasn’t hungry anymore. I paid, then went back to the bathroom to wash my hands, wash my face. Checked this time– there was a mirror. Not sure if I had noticed it the first time. I took a long look at myself. I didn’t see much.

I left the bathroom in time to hear the soft ting of the bell above the door going outside- someone had just left. Whatever. The place had been empty when I’d come in, so who knows. I shoved my hands into my pockets for the cold, felt that tooth again. To become a vampire would be the worst thing that could possibly happen to a person.

I wasn’t exactly lost, but I wasn’t exactly sure where my car was, either, and I wanted to get on the road. So I walked around for a bit, stiff against the cold. I started recognizing places that I’d walked by already that night, so I kind of got my bearings and headed in the right direction finally. Turned a corner, and of course, right across the street was the 80s reject punk vampire, up against the wall, some girl shoved up against him, lots of red hair. She was bleeding freely from the neck, but she had her hands all over him, and he was just taking it, smiling, his chin stained with her blood. He saw me, licked his lips, smiled, and gave me a thumbs up. The girl kept kissing him all over, and he’d occasionally tilt her head to the side and suck. But he looked bored. I stopped watching and kept walking. Whatever.

I found my car, and got in. Checked my phone, found the easiest route to the highway. I had enough gas to get to Seattle. I figured I’d drive up there next. I haven’t slept in weeks, not since that old vampire, the one I’d met in a bar in Oakland, told me that if you don’t see them go to ash, or turn them into ash yourself, then they’re not all the way dead. And there’s ways for them to come back.