Stories

From The City

Eliza Victoria

I. There is a witch who loves to watch musicals with her boyfriend. Unfortunately
tickets to plays are so expensive, and so they can only afford to watch from balcony
seats. This means no nice dinners, no beach trips, no movie dates for months, just to
save enough money to see a musical that appears in miniature. During the show, she
sees some politicians in the orchestra seats downstairs, and she starts wondering
about her life decisions, why she even willed herself to be good and non-magical and
normal. Days later, her boyfriend is still singing key songs from the musical, saying
how he really wants to see it again. She agrees, she does want to see it again, but
from orchestra seats this time. And so she waves her hand and turns her boyfriend
into a big bag of money. She hears a witch two streets away has turned her lover
into a gingerbread house; and that is just absurd. What will a gingerbread house do
for you in this economy?

II. The situation with the trains has become so bad that some commuters have
resorted to blood sacrifices. Just last night a man stood at the top of the staircase
during stop-entry and slit open a chicken’s throat. The blood came forth in spurts,
but this still didn’t bring the trains. During Monday rush hour, they got a virgin from
the crowd and threw her in front of an oncoming train, hoping the blood on the
tracks would ensure that more trains would come. It didn’t, and everyone on the
platform shrugged and said, Well, she’s probably not a virgin. These days, the more
extreme commuters are cutting out their hearts and slicing a piece of it off to jump
the line and pay for their single-journey tickets at the counters. (Proving that anyone
bleeding from their chests could jump any line.) Some say half a heart or a spleen
will get you the stored-value card.

III. A tiyanak got tired of scaring people and decided to grow up. She took a bus to the
city and became a corporate communications officer. One day she forwarded a
write-up to a colleague, only to find that was given the wrong deadline and that the
document was already late. She got scared because her performance evaluation was
coming up, but her colleague, whom she considered her friend, allayed her fears.
Take it easy, she said, it’s just a stupid report. Later, she heard her talking to their
boss, telling him that she’s an irresponsible worker, inconsiderate to her teammates,
sloppy with deadlines. The corporate communications officer who was a former
tiyanak felt a new sensation, like a sinking to the depths. She couldn’t believe people
were capable of doing this, of pretending to be something else. She thought of
calling her neighbor. Maybe the witch next door could turn this pathetic,
backstabbing colleague of hers into a toilet for her new gingerbread house.




 Paris
Tim Tomlinson

She was rear-ended coming off Carrolton Avenue at the corner of Dumaine. The collision was
not high speed, but the damage was significant. The trunk folded like an accordion, and the rear
windshield cracked in a jagged puzzle. The rear axle, however, remained intact, as did the
differential. A mechanic assured her that the car remained drivable without repair.
Her insurance company offered her twenty-six hundred dollars in damages. But the
damage, her boyfriend insisted, was cosmetic. He was an older guy from up north with tattoos
in foreign alphabets and a pair of advanced university degrees in disciplines that turned out to
pay dick. “Damage is character,” he told her, “and character is formed by experience, not
smooth fenders. So fuck repairs. Let’s go to Paris.” She took the insurance money and
purchased round trip tickets to Air France.
Paris was a dream for her – she was twenty-one, from Kentucky. The only body of water
she’d ever crossed was the Ohio River. She’d never been farther east than Cleveland. Once, in
Community College, a professor assigned The Flowers of Evil. From that text, she formed an
impression of Paris as a vast garden of opiated deceit and decadent enslavement to passion.
Now, she would tour the book’s landscape, with a guide who’d actually read it in its original
language. Her boyfriend once lived in Paris. He knew how to stretch limited resources into
unlimited weeks of travel and habitation in foreign cities.
Her roommate drove them to the airport in the rear-ended car.
“Be careful,” the roommate told her.
The boyfriend said, “That’s what I’m here for.” He patted the pockets of his vest – four
of them, stuffed with boarding passes, passports, and cash. Her new camera dangled from a
strap over his shoulder.
She got airsick on the flight. The boyfriend moved to an empty seat near the cabin’s
front. When they deplaned, he wasn’t waiting at the end of the loading bridge. She didn’t see
him on the long walk from the exit to immigration. He had been carrying everything except the
books she’d brought along to read. He’d once told her that he experienced periods of
constipation followed by diarrhea. Maybe he’d eaten something on the flight, then rushed to a
rest room where he might still be passing waste. She sat against a wall and took out her Lonely
Planet. She’d marked the page with Baudelaire’s tomb.
Half an hour later a customs official prodded her shoulder. Communication was a
struggle, but she gathered, finally, that she should produce a passport. How could she explain
that her boyfriend with the irregular bowels kept all her documents?
The customs official led her to a brightly-lit waiting room where several women in
headscarves muttered in a strange language. One of the women had been crying. She wanted
to assure the crying woman that everything would work out for the best, that experience
formed character.