I used to hear them talking when they thought I was asleep.
“Is it good for her, Gerald? Is it good for a little girl to spend so much time where everything is dark and creepy?”
“She's not a little girl anymore, and it's good for her chances of getting a paycheck someday. There are no jobs, Martha. If she gets work at that park, she'll stay in this town. Our town! You know, where we grew up and fell in love and got married, where we know all our neighbors, where we want to grow old and die?!”
“We're barely making ends meet! If you just went down to the community college, they say they'd give you that retraining for almost nothing. You could get certified to do something, and then you could get a job somewhere else. This place is dying. We could go somewhere there's life. You know, young couples in the neighborhood, people moving in instead of out. How many more years do you think your work'll last? Two? Five? One of our sons got into college, and the other one is a punk musician. My beautiful boy's hair is dyed green and turned into two foot spikes! Two foot spikes, Gerald! That's what living here has done.
“Your beautiful boy just got a record advance he could buy a car with, Martha. He's making a good living, and he loves to play. I've never understood it, but music means the world to him. He got out of here. He played clubs in Chicago, and then it was New York. Now it's an album. You really think our son, the big punk rock guy, is every coming back here except to visit us at Christmas? And his big brother called while you were at the store. He ain't coming back, either. Our boy's going to law school. Law school! He and his brother. They're both gonna be rich, important men. Maybe one'll be a rock star or do a big movie soundtrack. The other, maybe he'll be a great lawyer or a politician or a judge. Besides, that park suits her. Mary Isabelle took to it like Joey-, sorry, Aziziel, the lead singer of Razorwolf Dead, took to that electric guitar.”
“We bought him that, didn't we.”
“Yeah, Martha, that year for Christmas. We had to scrimp and save half the year for it, but he still plays that guitar every night. He's never forgotten it. His tool, his toy, his ticket out of here, that scary-looking thing he calls the Marshfire Rose.”
“That is an awful-looking thing, isn't it, but the smile on his face when he saw that monster-”
“Is a lot like the way Mary Isabelle looks on her way to the park.”
“Are you sure we aren't doing a disservice to her. Sometimes, I hear rumors-”
“Of course you do. It's a “haunted” fun park that's been around since 1889. The owner probably starts half of them to drum up buisnes.”
“Gerald, you moved to this town as a young man. I was here as a child, and, well, strange things happen there. There's an edge here, a borderline, two sides to a coin. Some of these murders lately-”
“A lot of it's the poverty and drinking. Crime's got nothing to do with that park.”
“An ax murderer and a cyanide killer within weeks of each other? Those things you sometimes see out of the corner of your eye? All the maulings?
“Bears.”
“The survivors say wolves, and then we don't see them around anymore. The attacks on the diner by things that look a whole hell of a lot like rotting corpses? Crazy things happen in this town, crazier things around that park.
“Even if they do, Mary's tougher than the boys ever were. Martha, she's a fighter. This is what she does. I doubt we could stop her. Besides,” I found myself drifting off, “he told us he intends for her-” I fell asleep.
“A hundred years! But-but that's impossible. Impossible, crazy, but the deeds don't lie. The house is mine. The house was his and his father's. And Delokgate! I grew up here in Delokgate This place is more home to me than Mom and Dad's house. It was here almost before they'd finished killing the Indians. It says here Von Braun bought the land in 1886 from a farmer, and on this page, in Van Helsing's handwriting, that he was most of the way through drinking himself to death. The man's family was slaughtered by things. And then his wife and daughters kept coming back! Vampires. They came back to him as vampires every night. Then the park opened in '89. I knew that, though.
He was there. He was there, watching the old roller coaster rise, breaking open the crates that held the horses on the carousel. Maybe he accepted the delivery of the first costumes. Maybe he hammered a nail here, kept the books there, sharpened swords. How old would he have been? In '97, he was twenty-two. Thirteen. He was thirteen. He did no worse to me than his own father did to him. Child labor-well, I guess things were different then. Childhood isn't something a man of that time would understand. Could it be true? He did appreciate black humor. Did he play some outlandish prank?
No, that's not like him. Not now. He was just too thoughtful. Seven years ago, when he finally woke up, his first thought was to comfort me even though he was three quarters dead himself. He hung on long enough to tell me to bury his brother. He wouldn't leave a mess, a trick. Besides, the lawyer says it all checks out. He did some quick mental math and turned white as a sheet! This paper has his writing on it, and it's old.
How many nights did he do this? How many times? How many of them did he kill during his long life? There's no way to know. How many years will I be here doing the same thing? A hundred? Two? And does it rub off on the people around me? You've been here a long time, Mrs. Tran, and you haven't visibly aged. Not the whole hundred years, right? But you've been here a while. You said this champagne was set aside for my twenty-first birthday. It looks expensive, but I guess money's not something I have to worry about anymore. Here, have a glass. We'll drink to long life. Here's to our health and to all dead ghost riders. Here's to death, as hard a worker as any that ever rode his-my train. Here's to a good man, finally at rest, and the hope that we'll see him again someday.
Mary didn't mind vampires stopping in for a cup of coffee around sunset or the suspiciously hairy-looking set that would stagger in the night after the full moon and take a couple of tables in the front. As long as everybody behaved and everyone paid, she didn't think their lifestyles were her problem. She never felt it was her place to judge others for their humanity or utter lack thereof. She didn't mind the walking dead. They had the money for good tips. It was the shambling, moaning kind that got to her. She loved her hometown and didn't want to move away, but she already ran her diner under fairly adverse conditions. She wondered if the zombies and revenants wouldn't finally kill her, or her overextended patience.
When the decaying shell of the abandoned factory on the hill had begun to glow green, she told the teenage busboy to leave early. When the smell of rotting flesh drifted down from the rise, she told Ivan that he could head out. He stayed, but he put his knives where he could reach them in a hurry. She called the night manager, a single mother of two, and gave her the night off. Mary called the waitress and short order cook who worked the graveyard shift and told them she was having one of those nights. No one was required to show up. Anyone who did would get time and a half.
She told Ivan to look around for oil, grease, cleaning solvents, anything that would blow up or burn. Ivan nodded his assent. The mouth on his broad face seemed like a vestigial organ. He isn't the kind of guy, Mary often thought, that you'd expect to hear much from. Ivan resembled a boulder, heavy, solid, and low to the ground. If she hadn't known him all her life, Mary would have though he was a big stone that one day got the urge to walk into a restaurant ask for a job. He barricaded the front window with tables. Mary tied up her long, brown waves of hair. The last of the staff arrived. She turned the sign to “closed” and locked the door. They came.
She told Ivan to look around for oil, grease, cleaning solvents, anything that would blow up or burn. Ivan nodded his asent. The mouth on his broad face seemed like a vestigial organ. He isn't the kind of guy, Mary often thought, that you'd expect to hear much from. Ivan resembled a boulder, heavy, solid, and low to the ground. If she hadn't known him all her life, Mary would have though he was a big stone that one day got the urge to walk into a restaurant ask for a job. He barricaded the front window with tables. Mary tied up her long, brown waves of hair. The last of the staff arived. She turned the sign to “closed” and locked the door. They came.
I'm the only techie left from the Majestic's early days. I was hired two weeks after the movie theatre shut down and the place opened up again to show live acts. We had all kinds of people here, back then, and I've got some great stories, especially about the magicians. It was one of those that wrecked the stage back in 68'. The Great Ezmanzeraldo, Magician and Illusionist, had one of the most popular shows. On average, I'd say he cut three pretty girls in half every night. I ran the light board for his acts and we went out for drinks after a good show sometimes. That's how I found out he'd been trying to avoid his wife Trudy for seventeen years.
Trudy was a perfect little hausfrau. She was one of those rare women who likes doing the laundry and having dinner on the table by the time hubby's home. Ezmanzeraldo, real name Joseph Smith, couldn't stand it. She was always badgering him about his tuxedo,ss whether there was something for her to let out or hem or drive to the dry cleaner's. She worried over him when he was sick with aspirin and chicken soup. She never left him alone, never let him be. She called herself Mrs. Joseph P. “Ezmanzeraldo” Smith. In public. He looked for comfort in the flask in his breast pocket and his assistants. She never once raised a fuss. After the house emptied, we would go to a bar. Over my Pabst and his Smirnoff, I would always ask him if he wanted a divorce. He said he couldn't hurt her like that. Besides, he wasn't sure if she could survive on her own.
Anyway, one night, she called him six times in half an hour. The last time, it was to tell him she was on her way to his dressing room with six dozen roses. There wasn't much that needed doing, so I went out to get a pizza for the boss. I got back to find that he had climbed into this steel cage he had, an antique piece he was really proud of, a giant bird cage. It had claws and gilding and filigree, the whole nine yards. That thing was nine hundred pounds before you put the anorexic assistant inside. Well, he hadn't set the lift up right, and because I wasn't there to help, he only used five hundred pound rope. I knew when I saw it I had a disaster on my hands. Lucky for his little woman, he'd made good money as a magician the last fifteen years or so and had one helluva life insurance policy. Trudy became a feminist and was just fine by herself. As the rope broke, he waved at me, smiled, and shouted his last words:
“Cage before Trudy!”
It was almost seven AM on the east coast, and the sun was not so much as kissing the sea as it was slobbering all over it, and the light lit upon die-hard joggers trotting along the shoreline, kicking up dust clouds and dripping perspiration off their noses; it would have been a peaceful scene, with its gleaming seashells and seagulls (who would have been pretty if only they weren't sea gulls) but for the atomic bomb that went off at 7:01 AM.
Major General Howard Cruntz was having a bad day. He was in charge of, among other things, storing leftover missiles from the cold war under a mountain in a remote corner of Colorado. Somehow, a particularly large and powerful piece of Uncle Sam's apocalypse delivery system was aimed at Rhode Island around three fifteen the previous afternoon, or so said the computers. A little before seven, it had somehow gotten fired at the aforementioned state, which was largely obliterated before its residents had any chance to wonder what had hit them. Someone had been horribly, unforgivably incompetent. Apart from any directly responsible parties, whom he assumed would be jailed if not executed or lynched, he knew that someone in the top brass would have to take the blame. Yes, someone's military or civil service career was ruined, and he desperately hoped it wasn't his. It wasn't, he thought as he stormed down a hallway trying to look busy, it wasn't as if I meant to shoot the thing. What has Rhode Island ever done to me? I'm not in charge of the computers. I haven't even looked at the launch codes in years.
He decided that one of the engineers or computer programmers, one of the scientists, had to be to responsible. It must have been one of those egg heads, he concluded and continued down the hall. Most of the computers got their original programing during the cold war, he remembered. Maybe those professors of computer engi-whatever can say someone who's been dead twenty years actually made this awful mistake. I guess people will be angry they didn't fix it, but at least they'll have some kind of excuse. He walked into his office, picked up a ream of blank paper, and stuffed it into files marked “classified” in large, orange letters. He walked back down the hallway, trying to seem like he was doing something to remedy this awful mess.
“Head on home, Cathy. You're mother told you not to say out past sundown until they catch this sicko.”
“We're neighbors, Clyde. I trust you. So does she. I'll go after I help with this firewood.” Clyde grinned.
“Are you sure I ain't what she was worried about?” He raised his ax.
Bobby read his paper in the diner.
“Another cyanide death, John. One of ours. He lived here thirty years, went to Our Lady, drank his usual cuppa Joe here, and collapsed right outside.”
“And yesterday ax murderer got the Greene girl. Crazy times, Bobby”
“Ain't they?”
“You like yours black, right?”
Sixty year ago, the world was turning dark, and, in the Lady's realm, madness spread like a plague and reigned like a king. The people were insane, insatiable, like rabid beasts. Soldiers deserted the Army, leaders forsook their people, and swindlers and thieves patrolled every alley with more regularity than any police or night watch. The world tree's roots were gnawed by an acidic chaos that crept up through cracks between the floorboards of the world. Everyone was drunk. Everyone was high. People, strangers, made a wild, desperate something that cannot be called love openly in city streets. A fragment of the multiverse was dying, as a thousand do every day, and no one but its denizens noticed or cared. Denizens they were, for it was a land of travelers, vagrants, wanderers, immigrants, and refugees, lost souls and ruined people from a million surrounding dimensions. Each searched for success, trying to cut from the fabric of the place a new and mighty self, a personage able to write off past failures as the work of a pitiable inferior and free from the curse of any prior misfortune. Now, they found their lots cast with a dying country.
Some felt cheated and spent their rage pummeling anyone smaller and weaker who happened to come along. Others became resigned to their fate, declared themselves perpetual losers, and finally lost even themselves in the abundance of alcohol that stayed cheap even as the price of food went through the roof because of obscure economic difficulties that only a few of the wizards of the great bankers could understand. The wizards, mathematician-mages, were slaughtered along with their financier bosses before they could do anything to rectify the colossal mess they had made. Some people cried, others quietly hung themselves or left for parts unknown. Many turned to hedonism, violence, and vice as branches of the old ash tree cracked and fell away, forever, into nothingness. The void's un-stomach growled as it laughed at their coming destruction.
Then the trustees, older than the Lady herself, convened and decided that there was no alternative to a cataclysm of biblical proportions which would wipe everything out. Their sorcery would rip the ash out of the ground and throw it into the emptiness of space. Then they would begin anew. These mortal deities had not visited the realm they handed off to a minor goddess in aeons. The roots of the ash tree proved stronger than anyone had anticipated. The trustees decided they would keep the same topography and find an almost entirely new population less depraved than the half-settled nomads, strangers, foreigners, and freaks who were told tho pack their bags and leave. No one particularly wanted to die, so as far as anyone knew, the eviction notice had one hundred percent compliance. Most of the people went quietly off to other places with nothing more than a few good stories to tell, stories their new acquaintances would likely never believe. A few, however, loved their homes. They left to save their lives, but they swore an oath of return.
In the beginning, it was dark. It was cold. I was floating around, an idea waiting to be had, a baby waiting to be born. I was a soul tapping my foot in a lobby hopping my number would come up and whoever's in charge around here would incarnate me already. I was about twelve, then. I knew I was divine, you know, not in charge of the multiverse or anything, but clearly not one of the little breathing things running around down there. Except there weren't any little, warm things running around living and dying the way they do. There was just me, floating in the aether, so incredibly bored. It went on like that for a while, a couple of years. Then an old robber baron looking for something meaningful to do before he died wandered through the nothingness with a handful of dirt and a seed. I was still twelve.
(-) :)>@:'
o'
A girl who wished she could be somewhere, anywhere else stared at her paper, thinking about how she had never had a dentist appointment that she found as unpleasant as third period. She was annoyed at her teacher for ignoring, as usual, the difficulties of having to use a computer for everything. It wasn't like she had many other options. Her handwriting became illegible if she wrote at any speed. She found a way to enter the thoroughly stupid picture on the board into her laptop. She was instructed to turn it into something. As much as she had liked such assignments in the second grade, she could think of a million better uses of two or three minutes of her time as she sat in one of her twelfth grade classes. She added some symbols on her keyboard, thinking to make a monkey wearing a hat. It didn't come out looking much like a monkey, and she found the hat annoying. She decided it would be some sort of ray gun. That better fitted her mood. Then it occurred to her that her school might have a zero-tolerance policy and decide she was a sociopath preparing to kill her classmates if she called it a gun of any kind. She realized she had already mentioned a switchblade in a poem that day and figured she had better not push her luck. She was also worried about ticking off the teacher, or giving the teacher the idea that she was some sort of homicidal sociopath because she was a few hundred miles from anyone else who might write her a college recommendation and felt it behooved her to make a good impression. She added some symbols, hoping it would begin to look like something. Nothing was forthcoming, so she called it a penguin and claimed she had forgotten to add the right wing.
Portrait in Crayola
My outer edge is frozen steel,
A razor drawn in blue and gray,
A switchblade shining in the sun.
That wicked knife, that cold abyss
Uncaring as the distant stars,
Holds those at bay I will not tell
The spending of seventeen years
That makes them longer than an age.
Follow light dancing down the edge.
The metal's pale, blue tint grows rich,
And it becomes the royal hue
Of the people and birds and beasts
Capering on old china plates
In my grandmother's dining room
And curtains hanging dark and thick
From a hall's ceiling to the stage.
My memory is bound in threads
Of mystic azure; locked and bound,
There lie tales I may someday tell.
Walk along those threads of sky
All through the many days and nights.
Pass the shores of a distant lake.
See the haze of approaching heat,
The red of rage, of blood, of flame.
It is the red that drives me on,
Makes my disused tongue a lash.
The red of all-consuming flame,
Of love that, burning, will not die
Orders my days and set my course.
It drew a reader from her chair
And sent her on a strange crusade.
Know this, my nature in crayons,
My story on the color wheel,
And you know more of my nature
Than most I meet will ever learn.
Sonnet to Aria
Where all the days are long and gray, you shine,
My light in darkness, and you pierce the fog
Of hours that grind past wasted and the smog
Of years trying to make more mindless swine
Of intellects bright burning; you're the pine
Bough blazing on December nights, the log
Melting the snow, and, in the spring, the frog
Heralding the first summer night; your fine,
Polished brass sings the contours of my soul.
Golden companion, some would call such love
Of a tuba the stuff of old freak shows,
But your rich thunder, steadfast and whole
Inspires a fountain and a deluge of
Poetry to a muse that no one knows.
The American Vampire
There once was a vampire who ate
More girls than he needed to sate
His thirst; he grew fat.
The doctor says that
He'll have to start watching his weight.
Lunch in the School Courtyard
We laughed around the dusty table.
The food is stale; at least we ate.
These brick walls have us surrounded,
But, out here, in the courtyard,
We can see a pretty sky.
We talked about the stuff outside this,
Where the walls don't rise so tall,
Drifted into where things happen.
It's not much; it's all pretending:
Just aliens on TV,
But there won't be a quiz.
No one shutting down our voices,
Letting us know what we're supposed to think.
They don't care about our stories.
I guess that's how it should be.
A story's safe when they throw it away,
Call it stupid, leave it in the bin at the curb.
No one's gonna pull out its guts
Looking for symbols and themes.
But, before we got done,
A train whistle buried our words.
Then the bell rang like rusty chains
Dragging on ugly, tile floors.
Ballad of a Tuba Player
I'll tell you the tale of a man I once knew
Whose sad story still grieves me even to this day.
For years, he played tuba in so many bands
In a half-ruined school all those long miles away.
Where the brick turned to dust, he worked his hands raw.
In the sweltering band room he sweated, he swore.
Years of wear fell off every tuba he touched
As he labored over them on the grimy floor.
He was first to arrive at every concert,
Walking in the gloom of the still-empty house there,
Lifting weights it was thought that no other could move
Except for a woman with a gold mist of hair.
He didn't just play out his soul on the stage.
Every daily rehearsal, he thundered and roared.
Though the weeks ground like millstones, through sickness and floods,
Over dust, over heat, his song always soared.
He ruined his shoulders; he ruined his back,
But the love of it that burned in him never waned.
He had so much trust in his band directors,
And I hope that they know how their hands are now stained.
He was good at making new tuba players,
So they kept him in lower bands and made him teach.
His reward for showing the young ones how to play
Was to have all advancement kept out of his reach.
Each year they told him it would be the last time,
He'd stop being held back for this reason, they swore.
Each April, like clockwork, they said the same thing:
That they desperately needed him there one year more.
He loved the section leader in the top band,
And long the two yearned to work beside each other.
They were kept distant as the two poles; their chance
To play together they cannot recover.
They bounced him between lower bands as needed
Until a new teacher felt his ensembles could
Do without their steel spine; the tuba players
Were broken in the name of progress and the good.
When he was caught in nets of red tape, not one
Of those he served, body and soul, would stand by him.
No band director would defend their willing
Workhorse; to let their man hang was their heartless whim.
Now he finishes his diploma in dark,
Beneath a shopping mall, so far from all the friends
He had in better days, left with the fading
Hope of salvaging something from all the loose ends.
They left him with his sorrows and the haunting
Memories quick to goad him, slow to disappear
And the specter of a fierce, green-eyed woman
To whom he knows he will never again draw near.
On the Occasion of Breaking Up
The movie ends; the credits start to roll.
Thoughts I cannot express, words I can't say,
Collide in me like clashing thunderstorms.
The world we made, the things we love turn cold.
Someone made rousing speeches on progress.
We knew change sometimes takes her fees in blood,
But no one cared until your name went on
That list with many more we knew and loved.
Friends slipped away into their private tears,
And left us with no band, no hope, no home.
I know you'd tell me to leave you behind,
To journey past the bounds of this lost land
Where I'm just one more looser on the wrong
Side of the times; too old, too brave to bend.
You'd say to run so far, so fast, this flood,
These rising waters, cannot bury me,
But I can't bear those words, to hear you say
That I should live when what we dreamed has died
That I should flee alone, leave you behind.
I lie, and I tell you there was no choice
But to depart so that you cannot say
There's nothing to forgive; you understand
Why I came here tonight to break your heart.
The credits finish, and the lights go up.
Those sticky seats reluctantly release
The threadbare bottoms of our worn-out jeans.
We walk outside, and we say our goodbyes
Standing in the halo of the marquee
That glows above us like a cruel mirage.
Half-Dreamed
A boy sits on the floor dressed in strange livery
Of thick, plush cloth in crimson, gold.
Afraid and near to tears, he waits for me.
I wade through the cacophony, the storm,
Between the drops of madness coming down like rain,
The crowds that snatch up instruments and flow into the hall.
I kneel beside him; black and white
Are thrown against the red and gold.
His silver tuba flashes on my dark jacket.
I work; this is his first concert.
Within a quarter of an hour, within ten minutes,
Two; these mangled valves must move.
My white shirt shines, fresh-ironed yesterday,
Tucked into pressed slacks over studded boots
The hue of the abyss that I polished as the sun sank low.
My tie is straight.
My hands unbend, remake.
I am Order; I walk through the tempest, and, unharmed,
I carry on; the colors on my vest,
The band, the place the day,
Are all irrelevant; now, clear and cold,
I save the night, the show for him.
The dogs begin to how, and jeans are scattered on the floor.
I barely hear; a paper ball,
This morning's news flies past my ear.
Its path bends
Around our warded circle on the dusty tile.
I wind something in wire and pray.
They move; it fades away,
Another miracle well done.
