The

Tall Grass
and Other Stories
Joe R. Lansdale

To those readers with a short attention span.
 Table of Contents
Foreword
The Tall Grass
Surveillance
Levitation
The King
Terry and the Hat
The Munchies
December
Coat
Rainy Weather
Hanging
Beatcha
Dragon Chili
The Closet
Willard and the Painting
Dark
Little Kitty
The Ears
Regular Sex and Admiration
Goodies
After the War
Rex
Big Man: A Fable
Boots
Coronation
Ducks
The Boy Who Became Invisible
Hole
Haunted House
Little Blue Bottle
Jack’s Pecker
Hit Call
The Drunken Moon
Private Eye
 Foreword
In the Tall Grass with a Keyboard
I AM A GREAT FAN of short stories.

For a brief period I loved novels even more, and when I was young and
first planned to become a writer, I thought for sure my prose energies, except
for an occasional drift now and then, would be concerned with the longer
form.
As a beginning writer I thought it might be easier, however, to break into
being published by writing short stories. There were quite a few magazines
back then, and there was less investment on the part of the magazine editors if
they were paying for a short piece, and not a novel. I thought I would do a
few, and try and use them as a springboard into novels.
What I discovered early on was that I preferred short stories. I liked the
conciseness of writing them, and it seemed there were so many rich subjects
in short stories, as you could move from one storyline to another quickly,
therefore covering a lot of interesting ground. The more short stories I wrote,
the more I wanted to write them. It took me longer than I expected to
seriously try and write novels. This is not to say I don’t like novels. I do. This
is not to say I didn’t want to write novels. I did. But those short stories, oh,
they were addictive.
Early on I started with the idea that short stories would not only be an
easier way to break in (this isn’t necessarily true, by the way), it would be
easier yet if I wrote really short pieces so I might be considered by an editor
who was less willing to give up pages of magazine space to an unknown. That
didn’t work right off, and in fact my first published fictions were novellette
length, as they were then called. But I soon moved to the shorter fictions
again, and found by that point I was pretty good at it. And my idea that
magazine editors might take a short piece from a virtually unknown writer
more readily than a longer one was probably correct. That didn’t mean I
thought they’d purposely take a bad story. It meant if they had a long story by
a known writer, someone whose name on the cover would attract readers, they
would certainly go with that writer sooner than they would an unknown writer
with a story that might be just as good, or better. Name recognition was hard
earned and was valuable. I respected that.
I went at the short-shorts, as we called them then, which sounds like a
funky wardrobe choice, with a vengeance. I wrote one after another. I leaned
towards the quirky stories like Fredrick Brown wrote, authors of that
persuasion. I studied them inside and out and worked hard to write stories that
I felt had sharp and memorable impact, like ice pick pokes that hopefully left
no wounds.
This kind of story can carry weight, but usually, because of its small frame,
it deals better with carrying clever. That’s what most of these stories are.
Clever stories. I used this reference in describing what I was trying to write
once to my friend Lewis Shiner, a very fine writer, and his response was: Who
said you were clever?
True. No one had. But I went at it anyway. And in time I was clever
enough. Those sort of stories began to sell, and then longer ones, and then
novels. In fact, after writing so many short stories, I found I wrote better
novel scenes and was less wasteful of words.
All that said, I don’t see short stories as mere stepping stones to writing a
novel. I still prefer them. I love novels, but I love short stories more.
The stories included here are for the most part quite short. Many are
nothing more than punch lines to jokes. Some are twist ending stories, which
in my mind is a bit different than a punch line story. They are what are
currently called Flash Fiction. But definitions aside, these stories are for your
entertainment first and foremost. A few of them have a hidden agenda. I think
they work even if that agenda remains hidden. If you find that you have
unearthed the agenda, it might improve the story for you. And maybe not.
Whatever the case, I’m proud of these little ice pick pokes.
 I like to think a reader might pick up his or her e-reader in the morning and
read one or two of these while taking a morning constitutional, or one or two
during their lunch break. Even a slow reader could effortlessly manage that
and have plenty of time left over for a leisurely period of eating their
sandwich and apple, even if their lunch break was only a half hour in length.
One or two before bedtime, like prescribed medicine might work as well. Or
maybe you’re a gobbler, and can swallow the whole book in one sitting.
The bottom line is I enjoyed writing these stories. Most of them were
surprises and came quickly. Do not confuse the swiftness with which they
were written with lack of interest on my part, or lack of intent to craft them as
diligently and as passionately as possible.
This collection is made up of stories from two earlier books, The King and
Other Stories, and Unchained and Unhinged, both published by the very fine
SUBTERRANEAN PRESS. The essays and articles which made up part of

Unchained and Unhinged have been removed, and several uncollected items
have been added; stories that have never before been gathered in one of my
story collections anywhere. An example of one of those is the title story, “The
Tall Grass.”
So, here they are. I offer them now to you.
I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them. That’s
the thing about writing as a career for me. I have been doing it since I was a
child. I have been published since my early twenties. I have been at it as a
professional as of this writing for over forty years. It is still a joy to write. It is
still a joy to see work of mine published. I have not grown jaded, though the
business itself is sometimes less than inspiring. But the work. Oh man, I love
it. I hope that love comes through, even in these very small examples.
Dive in.

Joe R. Lansdale
Nacogdoches, Texas 2014
 The Tall Grass
I CAN’T REALLY EXPLAIN this properly, but I’ll tell it to you, and you can make

the best of it. It starts with a train. People don’t travel as readily by train these
days as they once did, but in my youthful days they did, and I have to admit
that day was some time ago, considering my current, doddering age. It’s hard
to believe the century has turned, and I have turned with it, as worn out and
rusty as those old coal powered trains.
I am soon to fall of the edge of the cliff into the great darkness, but there
was a time when I was young and the world was light. Then there was
something that happened to me on a rail line that showed me something I
didn’t know was there, and since that time, I’ve never seen the world in
exactly the same way.
What I can tell you is this. I was traveling across country by night in a very
nice rail car. I had not just a seat on a train, but a compartment to myself. A
quite comfortable compartment, I might add. I was early into my business
career then, having just started with a firm that I ended up working at for
twenty-five years. To simplify, I had completed a cross country business trip,
and was on my way home. I wasn’t married then, but one of the reasons I was
eager to make it back to my home town was a young woman named Ellen. We
were quite close, and her company meant everything to me. It was our plan to
marry.
I won’t bore you with details, but, that particular plan didn’t work out. And
though I still think of that with some disappointment, for she was very
beautiful, it has absolutely nothing to do with my story.
Thing is, the train was crossing the western country, in a barren stretch
without towns, beneath a wide open night sky with a high moon and a few
crawling clouds. Back then, those kinds of places were far more common than
lights and streets and motor cars are now. I had made the same ride several
times on business, yet, I always enjoyed looking out the window, even at
night. This night, however, for whatever reason, I was up very late, unable to
sleep. I had chosen not to eat dinner, and now that it was well passed, I was a
bit hungry, but there was nothing to be had.
The lamps inside the train had been extinguished, and out the window there
was a moonlit sea of rocks and sand and in the distance beyond, shadowy
blue-black mountains.
The train came to an odd stretch that I had somehow missed before on my
journeys, as I was probably sleeping at the time. It was a great expanse of
prairie grass, and it shifted in the moonlight like waves of gold-green sea
water pulled by the tide making forces of the moon.
I was watching all of this, trying to figure it, determining how odd it looked
and how often I had to have passed it and had never seen it. Oh, I had seen
lots of tall grass, but nothing like this. The grass was not only head high, or
higher, it was thick and it had what I can only describe as an unusual look
about it, as if I were seeing it with eyes that belonged to someone else. I know
how peculiar that sounds, but it’s the only way I know how to explain it.
Then the train jerked, as if some great hand had grabbed it. It screeched on
the rails and there was a cacophony of sounds before the engine came to a
hard stop.
I had no idea what had occurred. I opened the compartment door, though at
first the door seemed locked and only gave way with considerable effort. I
stepped out in the hallway. No one was there.
Edging along the hallway, I came to the smoking car, but there was no one
there either. It seemed the other passengers were in a tight sleep and unaware
of our stopping. I walked through the car, sniffing at the remains of tobacco
smoke, and opened a door that went out on a connecting platform that was
positioned between the smoking car and another passenger car. I looked in the
passenger car through the little window at the door. There was no one there.
This didn’t entirely surprise me, as the train had taken on a very small load of
passengers, and many of them, like me, had purchased personal cabins.
I looked out at the countryside and saw there were lights in the distance,
beyond the grass, or to be more exact, positioned out in it. It shocked me,
because we were in the middle of absolutely nowhere, and the fact that there
was a town nearby was a total surprise to me.
I walked to the edge of the platform. There was a folded and hinged metal
stair there, and with the toe of my shoe I kicked it, causing it to flip out and
extend to the ground.
I climbed down the steps and looked along the rail. There was no one at
first, and then there was a light swinging its way toward me, and finally a
shadowy shape behind the light. In a moment I saw that it was a rail man,
dressed in cap and coat and company trousers.
“You best stay on board, sir,” he said.
I could see him clearly now. He was an average looking man, small in size
with an odd walk about him; the sort people who practically live on trains
acquire, as do sailors on ships at sea.
“I was just curious,” I said. “What has happened?”
“A brief stop,” he said. “I suggest you go back inside.”
“Is no one else awake?” I said.
“You seem to be it, sir,” he said. “I find those that go to sleep before twelve
stay that way when this happens.”
I thought that a curious answer. I said, “Does it happen often?”
“No. Not really.”
“What’s wrong? Are there repairs going on?”
“We are building up another head of steam,” he said.
“Then surely I have time to step out here and have a smoke in the open
air,” I said.
“I suppose that’s true, sir,” he said. “But I wouldn’t wander far. Once we’re
ready to go, we’ll go. I’ll call for you to get on board, but only a few times,
and then we’ll go, no matter what. We won’t tarry, not here. Not between
midnight and two.”
And then he went on by me swinging the light.
 I was intrigued by what he had said, about not tarrying. I looked out at the
waving grass and the lights, which I now realized were not that far away. I
took out my makings and rolled a cigarette and put a match to it and puffed.
I can’t really explain what possessed me. The oddness of the moment, I
suppose. But I decided it would be interesting to walk out in the tall grass, just
to measure its height, and to maybe get a closer look at those lights. I strolled
out a ways, and within moments I was deep in the grass. As I walked, the
earth sloped downwards and the grass whispered in the wind. When I stopped
walking, the grass was over my head, and behind me where the ground was
higher, the grass stood tall against the moonlight, like rows of spear heads
held high by an army of warriors.
I stood there in the midst of the grass and smoked and listened for activity
back at the train, but neither heard the lantern man or the sound of the train
getting ready to leave. I relaxed a bit, enjoying the cool, night wind and the
way it moved through the prairie. I decided to stroll about while I smoked,
parting the grass as I went. I could see the lights still, but they always seemed
to be farther away than I thought, and my moving in their direction didn’t
seem to bring me closer; they receded like the horizon.
When I finished my cigarette, I dropped it and put my heel to it, grinding it
into the ground, and turned to go back to the train.
I was a bit startled to discover I couldn’t find the path I had taken. Surely,
the grass had been bent or pushed aside by my passing, but there was no sign
of it. It had quickly sprung back into shape. I couldn’t find the rise I had come
down. The position of the moon was impossible to locate, even though there
was plenty of moonlight; the moon had gone away and left its light there.
Gradually I became concerned. I had somehow gotten turned about, and the
train would soon be leaving, and I had been warned that no one would wait
for me. I thought perhaps it was best if I ceased thrashing about through the
grass, and just stopped, least I become more confused. I concluded that I
couldn’t have gone too far from the railway, and that I should be able to hear
the train man should he call out for All Aboard.
So, there I was, standing in tall grass like a fool. Lost from the train and
listening intently for the man to call out. I kept glancing about to try and see if
I could find a path back the way I came. As I said before, it stood to reason
that I had tromped down some grass, and that I couldn’t be that far away. It
was also, as I said a very well lit night, plenty of moonlight.It rested like
swipes of cream cheese on the tall grass, so it was inconceivable to me that I
had gotten lost in such a short time walking such a short distance. I also
considered those lights as bearings, but they had moved, fluttering about like
will-o-the-wisps, so using them as markers was impossible.
I was lost, and I began to entertain the disturbing thought that I might miss
the train and be left where I was. It would be bad enough to miss the train, but
here, out in the emptiness of nowhere, if I wasn’t missed, or no one came
back this way for a time, I might actually starve, or be devoured by wild
animals, or die of exposure.
That’s when I heard someone coming through the grass. They weren’t right
on top of me, but they were close, and of course, my first thought was it was
the man from the train come to look for me. I started to call out, but hesitated.
I can’t entirely explain the hesitation, but there was a part of me that felt
reluctant, and so instead of calling out, I waited. The noise grew louder.
I cautiously parted the grass with my fingers, and looked in the direction of
the sound, and coming through the grass were a number of men, all of them
peculiarly bald, the moonlight reflecting off their heads like mirrors. The
grass whipped open as they came and closed back behind them. For a brief
moment I felt relieved, as they must be other passengers or train employees
sent to look for me, and would direct me to back to the train. It would be an
embarrassing moment, but in the end, all would be well.
And then I realized something. I hadn’t been actually absorbing what I was
seeing. They were human shaped alright, but…they had no faces. There was a
head, and there were spots where the usual items should be, nose, eyes,
mouth, but those spots were indentions. The moonlight gathered on those
shiny, white faces, and reflected back out. They were the lights in the grass
and they were why the lights moved, because they moved. There were other
lights beyond them, way out, and I drew the conclusion that there were many
of these human-shaped things, out in the grass, close and far away, moving
toward me, and moving away, thick as aphids. They had a jerky movement
about them, as if they were squirming on a griddle. They pushed through the
grass and fanned out wide, and some of them had sticks, and they began to
beat the grass before them. I might add that as they did, the grass, like a living
thing whipped away from their strikes and opened wide and closed up behind
them. They were coming ever nearer to where I was. I could see they were of
all different shapes and sizes and attire. Some of them wore very old clothes,
and there were others who were dressed in rags, and even a couple who were
completely devoid of clothes, and sexless, smooth all over, as if anything that
distinguished their sex or their humanity had been ironed out. Still, I could tell
now, by the general shape of the bodies, that some of them may have been
women, and certainly some of the smaller ones were children. I even saw
moving among them a shiny white body in the shape of a dog.
In the same way I had felt it unwise to call out to them, I now felt it unwise
to wait where I was. I knew they knew I was in the grass, and that they were
looking for me.
I broke and ran. I was spotted, because behind me, from those faces
without mouths, there somehow rose up a cry. A kind of squeal, like
something being slowly ground down beneath a boot heel.
I heard them as they rushed through the grass after me. I could hear their
feet thundering against the ground. It was as if a small heard of buffalo were
in pursuit. I charged through the grass blindly. Once I glanced back over my
shoulder and saw their numbers were larger than I first thought. Their shapes
broke out of the grass, left and right and close and wide. The grass was full of
them, and their faces glowed as if inside their thin flesh were lit lanterns.
Finally there was a place where the grass was missing and there was only
earth. It was a relief from the cloying grass, but it was a relief that passed
swiftly, for now I was fully exposed. Moving rapidly toward me from the
front were more of those moon-lit things. I turned, and saw behind me the
others were very near. They began to run all out toward me, they were also
closing in from my right.
 There was but one way for me to go, to the left, and wide, back into the
grass. I did just that. I ran as hard as I could run. The grass sloped up slightly,
and I fought to climb the hill; the hill that I had lost such a short time ago. It
had reappeared, or rather I had stumbled up on it.
My feet kept slipping as I climbed up it. I glanced down, and there in that
weird light I could see that my boots were sliding in what looked to be rotting
piles of fat-glazed bones; the earth was slick with them.
I could hear the things closing behind me, making that sound that a face
without a mouth should be unable to make; that horrid screech. It was
deafening.
I was almost at the peak of the hill. I could see the grass swaying up there. I
could hear it whispering in the wind between the screeches of those pursuing
me, and just as I made the top of the hill and poked my head through the grass
and saw the train, I was grabbed.
Here is a peculiar thing that from time to time I remember, and shiver when
I do, but those hands that had hold of my legs were cold as arctic air. I could
feel them through my clothes, they were so cold. I tried to kick loose, but
wasn’t having any luck. I had fallen when they grabbed me, and I was
clutching at the grass at the top of the hill. It was pulling through my hands
and fingers, and the edges were sharp; they cut into me like razors. I could
feel the warm blood running through my fingers, but still I hung to that grass.
Glancing back I saw that I was seized by several of the things, and the dog
like shape had clamped its jaws on the heel of my boot. I saw too that the
things were not entirely without features after all; or at least now they had
acquired one all encompassing feature. A split appeared in their faces, where
a mouth should be, but it was impossibly wide and festooned with more teeth
than a shark, long and sharp, many of them crooked as poorly driven nails,
stained in spots the color of very old cheese. Their breath rose up like
methane from a privy and burned my eyes. There was no doubt in my mind
that they meant to bite me; and I somehow knew that if I was bitten, I would
not be chewed and eaten, but that the bite would make me like them. That my
bones would come free of me along with my features and everything that
made me human, and I knew too that these things were originally from train
stops, and from frontier scouting parties, adventurers and surveyors, and all
manner of folks who had at one time had been crossing these desolate lands
and found themselves here, a place not only unknown to the map, but
unknown to human understanding. All of this came to me and instantly filled
me up with dread. It was as if their very touch had revealed it to me.
I kicked wildly, wrenching my boot hill from the dog-shape’s toothy grasp.
I struggled. I heard teeth snap on empty air as I kicked loose. And then there
was warmth and a glow over my head. I looked up to see the train man with a
great flaming torch, and he was waving it about, sticking it into the teeth-
packed faces of those poor lost souls.
They screeched and they bellowed, they hissed and they moaned. But the
fire did the trick. They let go of me and receded back into the waves of grass,
and the grass folded back around them, like the ocean swallowing sailors. I
saw last the dog-shape dive into the grass like a porpoise, and then it and
them were gone, and so were the lights, and the moonlight lost it’s slick glaze
and it was just a light. The torch flickered over my head, and I could feel its
heat.
The next thing I knew the train man was pulling me to the top of the hill,
and I collapsed and trembled like a mass of gelatin spilled on a floor.
“They don’t like it up here, sir,” the train man said, pushing the blazing end
of his torch against the ground, rubbing it in the dirt, snuffing it out. The
smell of pitch tingled my nostrils. “No, they don’t like it at all.”
“What are they?” I said.
“I think you know, sir. I do. Somewhere deep inside me I know. There
aren’t any words for it, but I know, and you know. They touched me once, but
thank goodness I was only near the grass, not in it. Not like you were, sir.”
He led me back to the train. He said, “I should have been more emphatic,
but you looked like a reasonable chap to me. Not someone to wander off.”
“I wish I had been reasonable.”
“It’s like looking to the other side, isn’t it, sir?” he said. “Or rather, it is a
look to one of many sides, I suspect. Little lost worlds inside our own. The
train breaks down here often. There have been others who have left the train. I
suspect you met some of them tonight. You saw what they have become, or so
I think. I can’t explain all the others. Wanderers, I suspect. It’s always here the
train stops, or breaks down. Usually it just sort of loses steam. It can have
plenty and still lose it, and we have to build it all up again. Always this time
of night. Rarely a problem, really. Another thing, I lock all the doors at night
to keep folks in, should they come awake. I lock the general passenger cars on
both ends. Most don’t wake up anyway, not this time of night, not after
midnight, not if they’ve gone to sleep before that time, and are good solid in.
Midnight between two a.m., that’s when it always happens, the train losing
steam here near the crawling grass. I guess those of us awake at that time can
see some things that others can’t. In this spot anyway. That’s what I suppose.
It’s like a door opens out there during that time. They got their spot, their
limitations, but you don’t want to be out there, no sir. You’re quite lucky.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Guess I missed your lock, sir. Or it works poorly. I apologize for that. Had
I done right, you wouldn’t have been able to get out. If someone should stay
awake and find the room locked, we pretend it’s a stuck doorway. Talk to
them through the door, and tell them we can’t get it fixed until morning. A
few people have been quite put out by that. The ones who were awake when
we stopped here. But it’s best that way. I’m sure you’ll agree, sir.”
“I do,” I said. “Thank you again. I can’t say it enough.”
“Oh, no problem. You had almost made it out of the grass, and you were
near the top of the hill, so it was easy for me help you. I always keep a torch
nearby that can easily be lit. They don’t like fire, and they don’t come up
close to the train. They don’t get out of the grass, as far as I can determine.
But I will tell you true, had I heard your scream too far beyond the hill, well, I
wouldn’t have come after you. And they would have had you.”
“I screamed?”
“Loudly.”
I got on the train and walked back to my compartment, still trembling. I
checked my door and saw that my lock had been thrown from the outside, but
it was faulty, and all it took was a little shaking to have it come free of the
door frame. That’s how I had got out my room.
The train man brought me a nip of whisky, and I told him about the lock,
and drank the whisky. “I’ll have the lock fixed right away, sir. Best not to
mention all this,” he said. “No one will believe it, and it could cause problems
with the cross country line. People have to get places, you know.”
I nodded.
“Goodnight, sir. Pleasant dreams.”
This was such an odd invocation to all that had happened, I almost laughed.
He went away, closing up my compartment, and I looked out the window.
All there was to see was the grass, waving in the wind, tipped with moonlight.
The train started to move, and pretty soon we were on our way. And that
was the end of the matter, and this is the first time I have mentioned it since it
happened so long ago. But, I assure you. It happened just the way I told you,
crossing the Western void, in the year of 1901.
 Surveillance
WHEN JOHNSON AROSE FROM BED he was careful to not scratch himself, and

when he went to the bathroom to do his business, he sat on the toilet with his
pajama pants down and a towel across his lap. Finally, however, modesty had
to be discarded. He finished up on the toilet and undressed quickly and
jumped in the shower and pulled the curtain, knowing full well that he could
be seen by the overhead camera, but at least the one over the door was not
directed at him, and sometimes, he felt that if he could minimize the number
of cameras on him, he could count it as some sort of victory.
He toweled off quickly, wrapped the towel around his waist, and then he
dressed even more quickly, and went down and had his breakfast. He wanted
to have two eggs instead of the one allotted, but the cameras were there, and if
he had two, there would be the ticket from headquarters, and the fine. He had
the one, and the one cup of coffee allotted, went out to his car and pushed the
button that turned it on. It went along the route it was supposed to go, and he
could hear the almost silent twisting of the little cameras on their cables as
they turned in the ceiling and dash and armrests of the car to get a full view of
his face, which he tried to keep neutral.
When the car parked him in the company parking lot, he got out and looked
at the cameras in the parking garage, sighed, went to the elevator that took
him down to the street. In the elevator he looked at the red eye of the camera
there. He didn’t even feel comfortable picking his nose, and he needed to.
He could remember before everything was so secure and so safe, when you
could do that and not end up as an electrical charge on billions of little chips
funneled through billions of little wires, or for that matter, thrown wireless
across the voids, to have the impulses collected like puzzle pieces and thrown
together in your image, showing all that you did from morning to night.
The only place he had found any privacy was under the covers. He could
pick his nose there. He could masturbate there, but he knew the cameras
would pick up his moves beneath the covers, and certainly plenty of people
had no problem picking their nose or showing their dicks or grunting at stool,
knowing full well that eventually some human eye would look at it all and
smack its lips over certain things, or laugh at this or that, but he was not
amongst them.
He arrived at the street level and stepped off the elevator. All along the
street the cameras on the wire snakes moved and twisted every which way. He
walked along until he was a block from his office, and he noticed an old
building off to the side. He passed it every day, but today he looked at it, and
saw there was a doorway set back deep. When he came to it he looked in and
saw that it had a little squeeze space inside, a place that had been made to get
out of the rain or to place your umbrella.
He looked at the cameras on the street, and they looked at him. He stepped
into the alcove and turned so that he was in the little nook and cranny. He
stood there for a while, and then he sat down in the space, and knew for the
first time in a long time, no camera could see him. The camera knew he had
gone there, but it couldn’t see him, and that gave him a great moment of
peace, and soon he found he didn’t want to leave, and he watched as the
sunlight changed and moved and people walked by, not noticing. He couldn’t
see them, but he could hear them and he could see their shadows. He picked
his nose and flicked the boogers, and took deep breaths and enjoyed the
coolness of the stone on his back.
Come nightfall he was still there, and he felt content. He was hungry, but
still he didn’t leave. He sat there and enjoyed it. When the lights of the city
came on, he still sat there, and wouldn’t move, and finally two police officers
came. They had seen the cameras, the film, and they had seen where he had
gone and that he had not come out. They arrested him and took him
downtown and put him in the jail where the cameras worked night and day
from every angle in the cell, and when they put him there, he began to
scream, and he screamed all night, and into the morning, when they finally
came for him and gave him a sedative and put him in a ward with others who
had tried to hide from the cameras. The shots they gave him made him sleep,
and in his sleep the cameras whirled and twisted on cables throughout the
place and took his image and shot it across wireless space and tucked it away
on little cells smaller than atoms.
In the next week, the old building was torn down and a new one was put up
and the cameras were installed. Everything worked nicely. No one could hide
from the cameras. Everyone’s mail was read before they read it, and their
phone calls were monitored, and to be safe they made sure no one had the
chance to use lawyers or complain, and the world was nice and easy and oh so
safe, now that there was nothing left to fear.
 Levitation
ONE MOMENT IT WAS DARK and then it was light. He was driving very fast, and

as he drove, the car lifted up and took to the air.

He was levitating. Flying. Cruising above the highway, no tires touching.
He found too that the car would respond to the wheel as if it were on the
ground.
He couldn’t explain what was happening, but he could steer off the road
and over the fields, and if he pulled back on the wheel, he could go up, like a
jet plane. Soon he was cruising above the trees and birds were flying near, and
his only fear was that he might collide with one.
But he did not. He turned the wheel and headed back to the highway.
He turned to say something to his wife, who had been sleeping beside him,
but as he did, there was a loud thump, and the day turned to night and she
awoke and screamed. He awoke too, discovered her clutching his arm,
realized he had fallen asleep at the wheel, and they were flying through the
darkness, having gone through a bridge. He knew that because he could see
fragments of it on the hood.
And though he was indeed flying over the river water below, it didn’t last
long, and soon the car was in the water, and the water was over the car, and a
short time later the car was filled with water, and so were they.
 The King
IT WAS A LATE SPRING, late afternoon, the sun starting to dip, birds calling from

the trees, when they stopped at a little filling station just east of Nacogdoches,
along the East Texas-Louisiana border. It was a ramshackle place with a little
carport attachment with a grease monkey lying under a pickup truck, twisting
a wrench.
Mary went inside for some snacks, and Monty and George stood outside.
“Man,” Monty said, “I’d love a cigarette.”
“Not a good idea with me gassing up the car,” George said.
“Actually, I’ve quit. I don’t have any cigarettes, but I think about it. I was
looking at that sign for cigarettes on the door there, thinking about buying
some Kools, but I’m not going to. I’m going to be strong. I think.”
George nodded, said, “What do you think about the King? Do you believe
in it?”
“Well,” Monty said. “I know I’m enjoying myself. It’s a nice day, the
beginning of the weekend and we’re in the company of a beautiful young
woman.”
“The King, do you believe?”
“I’ve heard about him all my life. Mainly old people. I don’t know if
there’s much written about it or not. But I’ve heard of it. I’ve heard of the
Goatman too. It’s supposed to haunt the river bottoms.”
“That’s no kind of answer. Do you believe in it? That’s the real question.”
“Depends on what day you ask me. Say it’s on Wednesday, I believe in it,
on Fridays too. Rest of the time, except Sunday, I’ll say no.”
“What about Sunday,” George said, hanging up the nozzle, starting to
screw the cap back on the gas tank.
 Monty grinned. “I have mixed feelings that day.”
“But you add it all up, you got mixed feelings all over. That’s what you’re
saying, aren’t you?”
“I’m saying mostly I don’t believe it, but sometimes, I’m not so sure. It’s
like Bigfoot. Sometimes I believe in that. My cousin says he’s seen them
around here, over in Louisiana. He seems reliable, takes it very serious.
Always on the verge of capturing or killing one, or finding hair or blood or
feces samples that will prove it for sure, but then it never happens. So, I think
good people can con themselves, maybe even know it on one level, that
they’re doing it I mean, but they can fool themselves.”
“You’re saying it isn’t possible?”
“I guess Bigfoot is possible. The woods are thick around here, anything
could hide out there. But…”
“But what?”
“Wouldn’t someone capture one, get a good photo, shoot one, one would
get hit by a car? And it wouldn’t always be one that gets up and runs off like
in all the stories, but one that dies, just like any animal gets hit. Wouldn’t you
think there’d be more solid evidence? Something more than stories of
sightings, a few vague photographs. That film with a guy in an obvious ape
suit?
“It doesn’t seem likely, a bunch of eight and nine foot tall monkeys running
around and no one can find them. But The King, I don’t know. Maybe that’s a
different matter.”
“How is that?”
“’Cause it’s a snake. That could be. There’s lots of snakes around here, and
maybe there really is a King Cotton Mouth. That’s not so fantastic.”
“Yeah, but the King, he, or it, is supposed to be magical. That’s pushing it,
don’t you think?”
“That’s the part I don’t believe, but a big snake, I can buy that. The rest of
it, the magic business, that could have grown up around people seeing a snake
like that. They might think it’s magical. Especially if it’s as old as they say.
Who knows how long something like that could live. I hear crocodiles, other
kinds of reptiles, can live a long time. Turtles, some of them, don’t they get to
be like, I don’t know, four hundred years old or something? Still, I’m just
talking about the possibility of a big snake. Forty feet of water moccasin like
the legends say, that’s a pretty tall order. That’s bigger than an anaconda, a
python. Damn. Guess I’m talking in circles. It’s like I said, one minute I
believe in something like this, the next I don’t. Mostly I don’t.”
“You don’t believe in the King, why’d you come?”
“I don’t know you believe in it either, George. ”
“I don’t know what I believe. I’m curious though. Mary, she believes in it,
and she’s pretty darn smart.”
“Mary believes in astrology, numerology, and every dumb thing like that
you can think of. She’s a good girl, and a smart one, but she believes stuff
because she wants to, not because she ought to. Not because there’s any real
reason. I will say this, I’d love to get her in the sack. I’d like to see she’s got
red hair where it counts. I can believe that’s likely, me finding that out. But,
the King. I don’t know.”
“So, you’re not really interested in this King business at all.”
“I’m curious about it. Some. Just not as much as I’m curious about Mary.
Ever since I met her in the student lounge, well, I’ve been interested in her.
She’s not interested, that’s all right. I like being with her. I’d like to get with
her, if you now what I mean. I’m along for the ride, no matter what happens.
What about you? You aren’t taking a folklore class?”
“Actually, I was hoping to get with Mary too.”
“Georgie, we are scum,” Monty said. “Worse, we’re male.”
Mary came out of the store with a large bag, her thick red hair bouncing
around her shoulders.
“I knew you were getting that much,” Monty said, “I’d have helped you
carry it.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” she said, “You guys want something? I got some
candy bars, some soft drinks, some moon pies. We get down in the woods, I
got jerky, some bottled water. Some tins of stuff, nothing to cook though.”
“Moon pies?” Monty said. “Really?”
 “I wouldn’t pull your chain about something like that. I don’t think it’s fair
to joke about moon pies.”
“What kind of candy you got?” Monty asked.
“Oh Henry bars.”
“That works for me, honey.”
“George?” Mary asked.
“Nothing for me.”
Monty drove with Mary beside him, George in the back.
Monty said, “This snake business. I know you’re researching it for a grade,
but why’d you decide on this?”
“You know how?” Mary said. “I’m interested in folklore.”
“That’s the college part,” Monty said, “but the way you’re going at this, it’s
got to be more.”
“Personal fascination. Snakes interest me too…Really, that’s it.”
“What do you have to do to get this grade, besides bring us along to make
sure you don’t get snakebit?” George said.
“Take some pictures of the area. I may talk to some old-timers about it, but
I don’t know I need to. I’ve done a lot of research. I have a lot of notes, and
recorded interviews Klaus Kaller did with folks around here. He was going to
write a book, but never did. Died before he could really put his research
together. There’s one article he did, and that’s it. A mention here and there.
Maybe I’ll see something. Maybe I’ll see the King. I believe he exists.”
There was a pause, then Monty said, “Well, you believe in a lot of things.
Short time I’ve known you, I got to say, you believe in a lot of things.”
Mary laughed. “So, because I believe in astrology, things like that, stuff
you don’t believe in, you can’t believe in anything I believe?”
“A giant snake in East Texas that’s magical, that’s kind of hard to swallow,”
Monty said. “Like I was telling George, I can believe in a big snake, but not a
real big magic snake.”
“What about you, George?” Mary asked.
George shrugged. “I’m opened-minded about it.”
“I was talking to the man in the store back there,” Mary said. “He believes
in the King.”
“Good looking, long-legged, young woman came into my store, wanted me
to believe in a big magic snake,” Monty said, “I might say I did, even if I
didn’t.”
“He said he knew men, hunters, who had seen it. He said he even knew
someone who had died from a bite from the King.
“Lot of people die from snakebites,” Monty said.
“Not that many do, really,” Mary said. “Not these days. And it depends on
the snake. But he said he knew a man when he was growing up, an old black
man that knew the woods, went out to find the King. Was going to capture it,
thought he could sell it to a zoo or something, make a bunch of money.”
“But it didn’t work out?”
“Oh, he found it all right. The King bit him. Bit him by spreading its mouth
over his head. Bit him on either side of his neck, along the shoulders actually.
From shoulder to shoulder, that’s a wide bite span. Bigger than a normal
snake of any kind. He didn’t die right off. He got away somehow, made it to
the highway and collapsed. His body was so swollen up, he looked like some
kind of monster.”
“If it ever happened.”
Mary scrunched up her face. “You are a true skeptic, aren’t you?”
“I admit it,” Monty said. “I’m even a little proud of it. Makes me less
gullible.”
“He said people in these parts, along the Louisiana-Texas border, the old-
timers, ones grew up around the woods, they believe in the King. Oh, they
don’t say it much out loud, but they believe.”
“The store guy said it out loud,” Monty said.
“I have a nice smile,” Mary said. “So he was agreeable.”
“I can believe that,” Monty said.
“The King,” Mary said, “he’s supposed to watch after things. The forest,
the swamp. He protects this place.”
“Way it’s been going, he isn’t doing such a good job, is he?” Monty said.
“Could be,” Mary said. “But this part of the country, this stretch, it hasn’t
changed much, not in hundreds of years. There’s still some of the big trees
down there. They say there’s trees so big and tall and close together, they
block out the sun, and there’s no undergrowth.”
“There’s big enough trees here, all right,” Monty said, “but I think the
really old ones are gone, or there’s just a small stretch of the big ones left.”
“Maybe that’s all he’s in charge of,” Mary said. “You know, like old sprites
and gnomes and such. They’re supposed to protect certain areas. Some have
their own individual tree, or stream, or spot in the woods. Maybe that’s how it
is with the King. A big spot, but just a spot. That may be why his area has
been left unchanged while areas around him have changed.”
“Don’t those other spots have guardians?” Monty said.
“Maybe not good ones,” Mary said.
“I do know this,” Monty said, “water moccasins are territorial. More so
than most snakes. And they’re aggressive.”
“That’s correct,” George said.
“How do we know how to find the King’s spot?” Monty asked.
“Klaus Kaller,” Mary said. “He drew a map. I got access to his research
materials, found the map among his belongings. That makes it more
interesting, doesn’t it?”
“It does,” Monty said.
They drove until it was dark, pulled over and turned on the overhead light
and looked at the map, the one Mary had found in Kaller’s research materials.
“I don’t know if this road even exists anymore,” George said, leaning over
the back seat, pointing to what appeared to be nothing more than a fine line
on the map in Mary’s lap. “It goes off the main highway, and it could have
grown over. Maybe we’re out of luck.”
“One thing, though,” Mary said. “This highway, though it’s been widened,
it’s been right here for over fifty years, and that’s when Klaus last did his
work.”
“Over there,” Monty said, “that’s water, isn’t it?”
“I think so,” Mary said, looking out into the dark.
“I think it’s a kind of slough that runs alongside the road,” Monty said.
“The slough is on the map. So’s the curve in the highway. It’s broader now
than then, but there’s the curve. So it looks the same. Way the map shows this
path, it’s just around the curve. We go there, maybe we can see it, or where it
was.”
Monty drove back onto the road and they went around the curve and pulled
across the highway opposite the slough and parked. There the woods were tall
and thick and dark and there was the smell of pines and stagnant water.
They got out of the car with flashlights and looked around.
“If there was anything here, a path, a trail, I don’t see it now,” Monty said.
“Hey,” Mary said. “Look here.”
Monty and George looked where she was poking her flashlight through the
brush. They bent and looked where she was looking. On the other side of the
brush the undergrowth was mashed down along a winding path.
“This could be it,” Mary said. “The King, he’s supposed to have made the
trail himself, with his body.”
“So he comes up to the road and goes back?” Monty said.
“I told you he had his domain,” Mary said. “Isn’t it fascinating to think he
might be out there? That he sometimes slithers up to this spot, looks where
the brush has grown up, raises up and looks over the brush at the highway…
There have been reports of that, a great snake looking out of the brush at night
while cars drive by. Several motorists have reported it.”
“Uh-huh,” Monty said.
“Oh, you are a hardhead, aren’t you?” Mary said.
“Well, this could be a hunting trail,” Monty said.
“It doesn’t really look walked,” Mary said. “It does look mashed down, and
it’s in the right spot, like the map says.”
“I guess the only way to find out is to walk down it,” Monty said.
“Or drive,” Mary said. “I got a machete in my pack. I thought it might
come in handy. We could knock down this barrier of brush, and drive down
the trail. Least as far as it’s comfortable to drive. We could pitch our tent
down there.”
“What’s the King going to think of that?” Monty said. “Did you think about
that, Mary?”
“I did.”
“Wouldn’t that be trespassing on the guardian’s property?” Monty said.
“I suppose so,” Mary said. “But, I’m a kind of explorer. And I could get a
really good grade.”
“George?” Monty asked. “What about you?”
“If you go, I go,” George said.
“Suits me,” Monty said. “Damn, I wish I had a cigarette. I was all right till
we stopped, now I want one.”
The machete business was hard work, and Monty and George took turns at
it, and finally Mary insisted she have a turn. It took about a half hour, but they
managed to widen a gap in the brush that allowed them to drive the car onto
the mashed-down grass and foliage. They bumped along nicely for about a
half hour, and pretty soon the land plunged and the trees grew up tall around
them and dripped shadows over the car. The moonlight came through the trees
in pencil-thin bands and made it seem as if they were in a sack punched
through with light and air holes.
“My God,” Mary said. “Who would have thought this was back here?”
“Someone must own this land,” Monty said. “To think someday they might
sell the lumber to pulp wooders. Good God, those are some trees.”
After awhile, they slowed, and Monty said, “We’re going to have to stop.
We’re starting to bottom out a little, and the place is getting mushy. I don’t
want to get bogged down out here. It’s a pretty good hike to the road, and then
there’s no guarantee anyone will pick us up. Well, they’ll pick you up, Mary. I
don’t know about me and George.”
Monty stopped the car and they got out. They looked up at the moonlight
slipping through the trees.
Mary said, “Wow, those trees are tall. You’d think we were in Oregon.”
“When’s our guy, the King, supposed to come out?” Monty said.
“He can come out anytime,” Mary said. “But he likes the night.”
“Oh, good,” Monty said.
“I think we should pitch camp here,” Mary said. “Couple days, I can get
my notes and pictures and be through.”
“You don’t really think you’re going to see the King, do you?” Monty said.
“You never know,” Mary said. “Not out here.”
“I say we sleep in the car,” Monty said.
“Hey, we got tents,” Mary said. “Let’s use them. I’ve always liked camping
out.”
Monty slapped at a mosquito. “Yeah, great. Me too.”
They opened up the car trunk, dragged out and pitched the three little tents
they had rented and built a small fire and sat on the ground with water and
jerky.
“I guess we could have brought some food to cook,” Monty said. “I wish
we had now. You’re not eating, Mary.”
“I’m too excited to eat just yet,” she said.
“You know, we’ve talked about all kinds of things, but we’ve only known
each other a short time, since the student lounge. We don’t really know much
about each other,” Monty said. “What do your parents do, Mary? That’s a
standard question, isn’t it?”
Mary grinned and the grin showed large and bright in the firelight.
“My mother is a housewife, my father works as a pharmacist,” Mary said.
“What about you?”
“My father is a mechanic. My mother sells textbooks to high schools and
colleges. They’re divorced.”
“You’re turn, George,” Mary said.
“My father is in security. I don’t really know my mother. I’m not even sure
who she is.”
“I’m sorry,” Mary said. “We hit a sore spot.”
“Oh,” George said, “I’m not sore about it at all. That’s the way it is. I’m
just stating facts. I’m quite comfortable with who I am.”
“You’re not eating either, George,” Monty said. “Am I the only one that’s
hungry?”
“I’m feeling a bit tense myself,” George said.
“Well, I’m not that excited,” Monty said. “I’m getting mosquito bit.”
 “Get close to the fire,” Mary said.
“Mosquitoes don’t like heat.”
“Problem is, it’s not that cold,” Monty said.
“It’s cold for a spring night,” Mary said.
Later that night, after they had gone to bed, Monty came out of his tent and
sat by what was left of the fire, which was just heat from the coals. It was
chilly now. In another week or two the days would be blazing hot and the
nights would be as warm and sticky as a sumo’s armpit, but right now, this
late, it had turned chilly.
Monty thought about starting another fire, but the idea of gathering wood in
the dark was not that appealing, even with a flashlight. He had heard things
moving around out there, and he thought some of those things might be
snakes. If not the King, at least good old garden variety sized water
moccasins.
He really hated those things. When he was a kid, fishing with his dad, one
had climbed into their boat and had slammed its tail against the side of the
boat, making a thudding sound. His father had beat it to death with a paddle.
It was a big one, five feet probably. Usually they didn’t get that long, though a
five or six footer did happen. But this one, it was huge. Not just long, but as
big around as a man’s forearm. His dad said it was old too, because its
markings had blended into a dark, near patternless mass. What he
remembered most about the snake was, after it was dead, his father had lifted
it up with the boat paddle, and he could see that it had faded black bands
across its yellow stomach, and its jaws were open, showing its long, nasty
fangs.
His daddy told him, “Son, that old cotton mouth moccasin is a nasty one.
They’re the meanest snake there is. They’re born pissed off and they stay that
way. And don’t get in their territory. They’re aggressive, and they’ll hold their
ground.”
“Not sleepy?”
Monty jumped.
It was Mary. She was standing behind him. “Damn, girl, I thought a snake
had me.”
Mary laughed, sat down beside him on the ground. “I couldn’t sleep either.
I was thinking about snakes too. I think the King is out there. I really do. I
mean, can’t you feel it? It’s different here.”
“Actually, I can. I don’t know if it’s the night or my imagination. But it
does feel different, as if this is some kind of…Well, fairy spot, lost in the
woods.”
“And we’re in that fairy spot. That’s neat.”
“Unless something doesn’t want you to be here. I mean, I sort of feel like
it’s not a happy fairy spot.”
“I thought I was the one that believed in fairies and demons and giant
magical snakes?”
“What I’m thinking about are real snakes.” They talked a while longer, then
suddenly they were kissing. They went back to Monty’s tent and made love.
While they were in the midst of this joy, Monty heard a noise from George’s
tent, which was next to his. A kind of rustling. But he ignored it. Mary’s
charms were too inviting.
Mary and Monty drifted off together, but their sleep was interrupted when
George jerked the front flap open.
He said, “I think you should come out here. Now. ”
Monty, startled awake, looked to see George’s shape on his knees, holding
back the tent flap. He thought, uh-oh, I got the girl, and George is mad.
George looked at Mary, who was exposed from the waist up. She hadn’t
made any effort to cover herself, didn’t seem bothered at all. “All right,”
Monty said. “I’ll be right there. Just let me slip on some pants and shoes.”
“I’d do it quickly. Real quickly.”
Monty and Mary dressed rapidly, crawled out of the tent.
George had turned the car lights on, and they were pointing down an
incline. They had stopped the car just in time. They could see it now. From
the car it might not have been as noticeable, but out here it was. It was a not
exactly a pond, but it was swampy. Had they driven just a little farther, they
would have bogged down for sure.
 Another thing.
There were a lot of glowing eyes out there.
Monty squinted, looked closer, adjusting to both dark and headlights. The
eyes belonged to snakes.
“My God, I didn’t think snake eyes glowed like that.”
George was at the car, the back door open. He slipped into the back seat,
saying, “I think you might want to get in here.”
They did, Mary and Monty in the front seat. The engine was running and
there was plenty of gas and the air conditioner was on, so they just sat there,
looking through the windshield.
“My God,” Monty said, “there must be hundreds.”
“Thousands,” George said.
The moccasins lay coiled and still, but they lay with their heads thrown
back, their mouths open, held almost straight up like a white flower awaiting
a bee. It was the curious way water moccasins had of lying at rest, the insides
of their white puffy mouths giving them their cotton name.
“What are they doing?” Mary asked.
“Waiting,” George said.
“Waiting for what?”
“I think you know,” George said. “I think you know a lot.”
“What on earth do you mean, George?” Mary asked.
“The King. He exists. He’s out here. They’re waiting for him. Or word
from him.”
“They’re all so big,” Monty said. “There hardly seems to be a one under
five feet. But, I don’t see any one of them that could be called the King. I’ll
tell you this, though. I don’t want to go back into that tent. I say we spend the
night here in the car.”
“It’s like the legends, the stories,” Mary said. “The King sends his subjects,
his minions out ahead of him before he comes. He takes his time. These
snakes, they’re probably all around us, on all sides.”
“If that’s true, I say we drive out,” Monty said.
George laughed.
 “What?” Monty said.
“The snake hunters, treed,” George said. “It’s kind of funny.”
“I’m not so tickled,” Monty said.
“We could see the King tonight, “ Mary said.
“I think we will,” George said.
“You see, the emissaries, they’re waiting for his arrival,” she said.
“What’s emissary about them?” Monty said. “They’re here. They live
here.”
“True,” Mary said, “but, it’s said that the King’s snakes can transform. That
they can even take human form, move among humans.”
“Yeah,” Monty said, “well, okay. But why?”
“To protect where they live,” Mary said. “To see what goes on in the world
of man. To make sure no one is trying to destroy their habitat, invade the
King’s kingdom. People feared this place in the past, but now, the legends
aren’t believed.”
“And they don’t know exactly where it is,” Monty said.
“That’s right, “ Mary said. “People only know the general position of the
King’s domain. Except for us. We have a map. The only map, most likely.
God…look at them.”
The snakes had begun to crawl toward the car. There were so many, they
crawled and twisted amongst one another like thousands of fingers
intertwining.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Monty said. “And, frankly, I’ve had
enough. I say we drive out.”
“The King,” Mary said. “We can wait and see if the King comes.”
“Right now, I don’t care if he’s coming,” Monty said. “I think if he comes,
he should see our taillights. I’ll turn it around, and we’ll skedaddle…Shit.”
“What?” Mary said.
“The keys. They’re in my tent.”
“Well,” Mary said, “I don’t think any of us want to go get them.”
“We stay here until daylight,” Monty said. “Long as we need to. Until they
go back into the swamp there. Then I’ll get the keys. Damn, I wish I had a
cigarette.”
“Look how they’ve parted,” Mary said. “Like the Red Sea. Like they’re
making way for something.”
The snakes had piled up to the left and the right of the car like living
waves; they were twisted up amongst one another, and the way they rolled
and writhed, it appeared as if they were boiling.
“They creep me out,” Monty said.
“They’re beautiful,” Mary said.
“They are,” George said.
“What in the hell?” Monty said. Something large and dark was moving
across the swamp water. “The King,” George said.
“Oh, bull,” Monty said. “I’m sick of this. There are snakes, yes. But no
King. And no human emissaries. ”
“I believe there are,” Mary said.
“Me too,” George said. “I believe Mary is right. That it is necessary to
protect this spot. This wonderful spot. And to do that, it is important that the
King send an emissary out into the world. To find the loggers who might
come here. The builders. The curious. Even those who believe and love the
King, but are not of his kind. And then, there are the maps, of course. It’s not
right that they are out there in the human world for anyone to see, for anyone
to follow and find the world of the King.”
There was a moment of quiet.
Mary turned slowly to look at George.
But George wasn’t there. Or at least what she thought of as George wasn’t
there. In his place was a large snake coiled on the back seat, thick as a man,
six feet in length, his catcher-mitt-sized mouth wide open and white as cotton,
two fangs like daggers, dripping venom.
George struck.
The strike caught Mary in the face, puncturing both cheeks.
The snake clung to her face for a moment, then pulled back, and hissed.
Mary’s head had already swelled and blackened, full of hemotoxin.
Monty jerked open the car door and leaped out. Then he realized what he
had done. He had leaped away from George, the huge snake, the King, and
had leaped out where all the others waited. Monty leaped to the hood,
scrambled to the roof of the car, stood up.
George slithered over the front seat and slid outside through the open car
door.
George lifted up on his powerful body so that his thick triangular head rose
just above the roof.
“You,” Monty said. “You’re the King. You were among us all the time. But
you got to be George too? Right? Right? You wouldn’t hurt your old buddy,
Monty, would you?”
George dropped down, slithered away. Monty let out a large sigh.
The moonlight disappeared as an inky shadow fell over Monty and the car.
Slowly, Monty turned.
The great body of the largest snake in creation was lifted up high above
him, its head turned down toward him, its white mouth like a pale moon in the
darkness.
Then Monty realized why George had left. He was merely an emissary. A
subject. Monty looked up at the great triangular head, the glowing elliptical
‘cat-eye’ pupils. He felt weak and insignificant, and in the presence of power
and royalty.
“The King,” Monty said.
With a venom-dripping snapping movement so fast it could hardly be seen,
the King struck.
 Terry and the Hat
TERRY BOUGHT A HAT right after a fight with a street tough, and it fit him to a

tee, but when the swelling went down, the hat was too big.
He tried to find another like it that fit, but alas, it was the last of its kind. He
asked his cousin if he had any idea how he could make it fit, but his cousin
didn’t have any suggestions.
Terry thought it over, came up with an idea. He picked fights and let
himself take head licks, but it was never the same. Swelling in the wrong
places.
He tried a hammer to his own head and this worked better.
After suffering severe brain damage, being forced to live in a chair in front
of the TV, his cousin suggested stuffing the lining of the hat with paper.
By then, however, Terry didn’t know he had a hat.
 The Munchies
TRAPPED IN A CAR WRECK for a week on the side of a snowy highway with

nothing but a dull knife, Jason ate his last meal. Or next to last. But with both
legs and one arm gone, he found it hard to cut off any more parts, and
thought, if rescued, he might need the head and torso.
But the munchies struck late that night, and he used the knife, and when he
was halfway finished eating his own liver, he died.
And, of course, a rescue truck showed up.
 December
DECEMBER WINDS BLOW and they are cold and sharp as knives. The trees rattle

and the brown, withered grass dances a last little dance as the night comes
down, and the little old man in black walks swiftly, carrying a cane on which
he heavily depends. On he walks, and the more he walks, the more that cold
wind blows; it plucks at the collar of the old man’s coat and makes his thin
gray hair stand up on his head and twist about as if electrified, as if it might
come loose of his skull at any moment and fly away into the coming twilight.
On he walks, along sidewalks, across dirt trails, limping through the town,
feet sliding on cobblestones. He walks underneath bare trees that have only a
smattering of leaves left to cling. But as he walks beneath the trees, the brown
leaves come loose and drop and rattle dead and brittle beneath his trudging
feet.
Dogs run, cats screech.
The old man walks.
A couple sees him at the far end of the street, and without either saying a
word, they turn and take a path across a dark, burned-brown-by-winter yard,
turn between houses, walking swiftly, not knowing why, but feeling they must
stay away from this old man in black with a cane. They hurry on toward light
and laughter.
On the old man walks, his face like a leathery pumpkin left to rot until the
chilly, wind-blown month of December, a time when the pumpkin face is
finally caving in upon itself, collapsing into a wad of something dark, even
sinister.
The old man. The month of December himself. Dark of coat, ruined of
face, weak of knees, with a touch like poison.
 There’s a new kid coming, just around the corner, a clock beat away, a kid
named January, so the old man, December, hurries as best he can.
December walks right into the falling twilight as the shadows gather around
him and the wind blows hard and he comes apart like dark lint and flies in all
directions. And then he is no more.
The dark grows darker. The remainder of the day has no heart and no soul,
not even a dark one.
Later, at midnight, town hall clocks chimed in the new year.
 Coat
WHEN JAMES SAW THE MAN in the streetlights, he hated him on sight because of

the coat. It wasn’t fashionable. If the man had been unfashionable in all other
ways he could have ignored it, but no, this was a man who should have
known better. He was a man with a good shirt and slacks and fine tie, and the
best shoes available, and yet, he wore a coat out of style and certainly one that
did not make for a proper appearance. It was an odd coat of undetermined
color and absolutely no substance. It had all the grace of a car wreck. It
flopped in the winter wind at the lapels like bat wings flexing, caught up in
back and whipped backwards like the tail of a swallow.
There was no excuse for it really.
Sure, he saw plenty of unfashionable people, but this fellow must know
better, having acquired the most fashionable and best clothes otherwise. It
was not a matter of being uninformed, he was flaunting a disregard for the
proper and the respectable, and was therefore insulting the very business
James was a part of. Fashion design.
There was no use calling him on it, James was certain. A man like that
knew how things ought to be. A man with his hair perfectly cut and perfectly
combed, and perfectly dressed, except for that horrid coat.
Still, James found himself following the man, deeply bothered by it all. He
was a man that understood fashion, and loved it, and believed it was more
than an expression of self. That it was in fact, a kind of religion, and here was
an insult to his religion.
The man moved out of the street lights and into a dark alley near a
stairwell, and James knew this was a bad place to be walking, but if the man
was dull enough to do so, and in that horrid coat, then he would be brave
enough to do so and call him on the matter after all. He found he just couldn’t
let it rest.
James followed as the man took the dark stairs, and when the fellow was
halfway down, James called out, “Sir, that is an awful coat. I don’t mean to be
rude, but really.”
The man, nothing but a shadow on the stairs now, paused, looked back.
“My coat?”
“Of course,” James said. “Do I have on a horrid coat? I think not, and nor
should you, this is the finest and best of this year’s fashion that I’m wearing.
Perhaps last year, next year, it will be out of favor, but it is all the rage for
now, and you, sir, have plenty of fine fashionable coats to pick from, though I,
of course recommend my own brand of coat.”
“What?” said the man in the shadows.
“The coat,” James said. “Your coat. It’s hideous.”
The man came up the stairs and stopped only a few feet from James,
looking up at him. “You’re kidding, right?”
“I think not. That is one hideous coat.”
The man sighed. “I can’t believe you’re concerned about my coat.”
“It’s just…how shall we put it, an atrocity against fashion and against
mankind.”
“It was once fashionable.”
“And, I’m quite sure that fig leaves over the testicles were once
fashionable, but in our modern society, in our world, fashion is all, and it
changes. Someone once thought the tie-dyed tee-shirt and bell bottoms were
fashionable, but times change. Thank goodness.”
“Look, not that it’s any of your business, but my father was a tailor. He
made this coat—”
“Well, it may have been something before electricity,” James said, “but
now, it’s just crude.”
“He made it for himself many years back, when he was a young man. He is
dead now, gone, and though it’s none of your business whatsoever, this is an
heirloom. It may not look like much, it may look thin, but it’s surprisingly
warm, and very comfortable, very flexible. Happy?”
“Not at all. Look, you seem like a nice fellow. It’s one thing for someone
of…well, the lower classes to wear that coat, but for you to mix fashion like
that, that dreadful coat over those fine clothes, it should be a hanging
offense.”
The man threw up his hands. “I’ve had enough of you. What business is it
of yours?”
“I spend a large part of my time designing fashion, trying to make the
world and those who live in it more attractive. Take what I’m wearing for
example—”
“I wouldn’t take it if you gave it to me,” the man said. “I’m quite
comfortable with my heirloom coat, and you, sir, are a weirdo who needs to
go home and run his head under the shower until it clears, or until you
drown.”
The man turned and began walking down the stairs. James felt himself heat
up as if a coal had been dropped inside his body to nestle in the pit of his
stomach. He let out a sound like a wounded animal and went charging down
the stairway, slamming both hands into the man’s back, sending him sailing
down the steps to bounce on several, and to finally land hard and bloody in a
heap at the bottom.
James stood startled, his hands still out in front of him, like a mime
pretending to push at an invisible door.
“My God,” James said aloud. He eased down the stairs and stood over the
man, called out. “Hey, you okay?”
The man didn’t move. The man didn’t speak. The man didn’t moan.
James bent down by the man’s head and spoke again, asking if he was
okay. Still no answer.
James looked left and right, over his shoulder and up the stairs. No one had
seen him. He looked about. No crime cameras. It had all happened suddenly
and in darkness. He hadn’t meant for it to happen, it had merely been an
angry response. Insulting fashion was not acceptable. And now, the man in
the unfashionable coat lay dead at the bottom of the stairs.
 Well, thought James, dressing like that, talking like that, and knowing
better, he deserved to be dead.
James took a deep breath and rolled the man on his stomach and pulled the
coat off of him, tucked it under his arm, started up the stairs.
He was looking for the first large trash can to deposit the coat into, but
none presented itself. Carrying the ugly coat, even rolled up in a tight bundle,
made James feel somewhat ill. The thing was absolutely without design, as
unfashionable as a hat made from the mangy skins of dead street rats.
Finally, he saw a trash can and was about to deposit it, but, there was a
police officer. James paused, realized it would mean nothing to the officer to
see him toss the coat, but then again, he felt very odd about the matter.
Moments ago he had merely been willing to impart a bit of fashion wisdom to
a man that should have known better, and in the end he had killed him. You
might even call it murder, though that had not been his intent. The more
James thought about it, the more he felt there had been something inside of
him brewing all along, all having to do with that ugly coat and the man’s
blatant insult to fashion.
James passed the officer, still not able to toss the coat, wearing it under his
arm like a cancerous tumor. He walked on, not spying another trashcan of
correct size, unable to dump it. He thought of giving it to a homeless person.
That would be all right. That would fit. No fashion loss there. But no
homeless person presented himself, and frankly, he had come to hate the coat
so much, that the idea he might give it away to someone and see it worn about
the city, even on someone as unfashionable as a homeless drifter, was not
appealing. And there was another factor: it would serve as a constant
reminder of what he had done. Though, the more he thought about it, the
more comfortable he felt with his actions. In fact, it was a kind of prize he had
now, a souvenir of the event, a reminder of the moment when he had
corrected a horrible wrong.
Sometimes, you just had to take the more direct and deadly route to repair
things that were socially wrong, and that coat was wrong, wrong, wrong.
He made it all the way to his plush apartment with the coat, and decided he
no longer wanted to toss it. His thoughts earlier were correct. This was an
important reminder of a blow struck for the fashionable.
Inside his apartment he unfolded the coat and draped it over the back of a
chair. Hideous indeed, and spotted in places with blood. He opened a bottle of
wine and sat at his table with bread and cheese and ate, and watched the coat
as if he thought it might suddenly leap up and run about the room. He
discovered that what he had hated before about the coat, he still hated, but
now the sight of it gave him pleasure with the memory of his deed, and the
blood on it sweetened his thoughts.
His own father had worn a coat not too unlike that. It suddenly came to
him, and the sweetness he had experienced soured somewhat. He thought of
his father, the poor old bastard, working the fields and coming home covered
in sod, the old coat stained with the dirt of the fields, the same dirt under the
old man’s fingernails. And his mother, and himself, they had never worn
anything but rags. No fashion there. None at all.
But through hard work and part-time jobs, he had finished school and
finished his studies at the University, and gone on to study fashion. He found
he was quite good at design, and as he became known, and was able to
distance himself from his past; he changed his past. He made up his former
life, and it was a better one than the one he had actually experienced. Cut
himself off from his father and mother and their little dirt farm, and when he
heard that the both of them had died, and were buried not far from where his
father had turned up the dirt to plant the potatoes and the like, well, he only
felt a minor pang of regret. He dove deeper into his work, deeper into design,
deeper into fashion, until he hardly remembered his old self at all.
Though that coat, that damnable coat had reminded him.
That was it. That was the whole matter of the thing. He had been reminded
of his own father, not a tailor, but a farmer, a man for whom fashion did not
exist, a man of the earth, a man with dirt under his nails. And his mother,
always tired, always frumpy, a face that makeup had not touched, a back that
had never felt the softness of silk. He tried not to think of the shapeless
clothing he had once worn. Or the coat his father had worn, not too unlike that
ugly thing on the back of the chair, a coat perhaps made by the very tailor
who had made this. Tailor; a man who could design such a wart on the art of
fashion should call himself a butcher, not a tailor.
By the time he went to bed, James felt quite pleased with himself. A man
divorced from his old life, a man who had struck a blow for grace and poise,
and the wearing of better material.
He lay in bed for awhile, ran the incident over and over in his head, and
finally he turned to a book, lay in bed with the reading light behind him, but
the words did not form thoughts, they were merely bugs that danced on the
page.
Finally, he put the book aside and turned off the light, slowly drifted into
sleep.
Until the noise.
It echoed from somewhere distant, and then the echo grew and thundered,
and he sat up, only to find that it was raining and that thunder was banging
and lightning was jumping, and a very cool and pleasant wind was slipping
through his open window, making the curtains flap like gossip tongues. He
slipped out of bed and went to the window, stuck his head out of it and looked
down at the dark and empty street. He felt rain on his neck. He pulled back
inside, considered closing the window, but decided against it. It was too hot to
have the window closed. He hoped that the rain would soon pass, and with it
the flashing of lightning and the rolling of thunder.
On his way back to bed, just as he passed the chair over which the coat was
draped, he felt himself brush against the sleeve of the coat. He jerked away
from it as if it were a serpent that had tried to coil itself around his wrist.
Glancing at the coat, he was surprised to find that the sleeves were hanging
loose, and in fact, nothing was touching him but the sleeve of his own pajama
top. He had felt certain that out of the corner of his eye he had seen the coat
move, and that what he had felt was not the fine softness of his personally
designed pajamas, but the coarseness of the coat.
He climbed back in bed, lay with his head propped up on his pillows, and
studied the coat in the flashes of the lightning. When the lightning lit things
up, it was as if the coat moved, a kind of strobe effect.
“Of course,” he said to himself. “That’s it. That’s what it was. An illusion.”
But that didn’t keep him from thinking about the touch on his wrist. He
pushed himself down into his covers, like a product being dropped into a bag,
and tried to sleep, and did, for a while.
He awoke to a rough feeling on his body. It was as if he were wearing the
coat. He rose up quickly, kicking back the covers, only to find that he was in
his pajamas, and that the coat was still in its place; one of the sleeves however
had been blown by the wind and now it lay in the seat of the chair as if resting
an invisible hand in an invisible lap.
James pulled off his pajama top and tossed it on the floor. Tomorrow he
would throw the thing away. It had somehow grown stiff, perhaps in the wash,
starch or some such thing. Fine pajamas were never to have starch. Fine cloth
of any kind was never to have starch. He would have to speak to the maid
about how she did laundry.
Punching his pillows, propping one on top of the other, he put his back to
the headboard, and watched the lighting in the window, listened to the rain
and the thunder, and then the coat moved.
James jerked his head to the chair. The coat sleeve that had been lying in
the seat of the chair had fallen off to the side again. The wind, most likely, but
it made him think of the man he had killed, how it had looked on the man as
he walked, how it had been caught up in the wind, how the lapels had flapped,
how the length of it had blown back behind him. He thought too of the man’s
father, the poor tailor, working away to make himself a coat, and how he had
proudly passed the horrible item onto his son, and then he thought of his own
father, and his similar coat, and how it had been caked with dirt, and how the
old man had had dirt beneath his nails, and then he thought of his worn-out
mother, and how they had died, without him, out there on that god-forsaken
property, and how they lay beneath that dirt, the grit of it seeping into their
coffins and onto their ivory grins. He closed his eyes, saw the young man who
had owned the coat falling down the stairs, remembered how he had stood on
the steps, his hands out in front of him, frozen in position after the act.
 The wind picked up and the sleeves of the coat were lifted and they flapped
dramatically. James felt a cold chill wrap itself around him, and he knew it
was not caused by the wind, and he knew then why he had pushed the man,
and why he had taken the coat, because the coat had belonged to him; it was
the sort of coat he had been born to wear. He had run from such a thing all his
life, but it was his burden, this coat, and it was his past, and it was his. The
coat that should lie on his back, the sleeves that should hang on his arms.
The wind blew harder and the rain came in the window with it. The coat,
perhaps caught on the wind, stirred, then seemed to leap off the chair, across
the bed, and flapped around James, the sleeve of it catching about his neck.
James leaped from bed, screamed, ran wildly, tripped over a foot stool,
clambered to his feet, slammed into a wall. The sleeve was tight around his
neck, and the rest of the coat lay against his skin, and it was coarse, so coarse.
It was his life, this coarse coat, and it wanted him in it, wanted him to claim
what he deserved.
He charged into the chair at the foot of the bed, and stumbled over it, fell
toward the window, hit it with tremendous force, went through head first,
toward the street below, and then he was jerked upwards, his head snapping
back, and then the rough, workingman’s sleeve squeezed tight against his
throat and stole his breath.
Next morning, bright and early, a homeless man discovered him and
pointed up, alerted others. The police came, gave him a look see. The sleeve
of the coat was wrapped tight about his neck, had practically tied itself, and
the rest of it had caught on a nail in the window, and though the coat had torn
severely, the sturdiness of the material maintained, leaving James to hang
there in his pajama bottoms which he had soiled in death.
It was most unfashionable.
 Rainy Weather
BRENT WALKED THROUGH some heavy rain and came to a little town called

Clark. It was still raining when he got inside the cafe, and there were only
three people there, and one of them was a waitress. He reckoned there was
another person out back, in the kitchen, a cook. He could hear pans rattling
around back there.
The other two in the cafe were not sitting together. A big man in a tee-shirt
with a gimme cap that Brent figured went along with the 18-wheeler outside,
huddled over a large piece of apple pie in a booth with ripped seats, and in
another seat was an average-looking man in a brown suit. He had a look on
his face like he might be trying desperately to will himself into another
dimension. Brent could understand how he felt.
Brent sat on a stool at the counter and studied the blackboard menu on the
wall. It made him hungry as hell. But all he had was a couple of dollars, so he
decided on coffee.
The waitress, a plump woman who inherited her blondness from a chemical
solution, came over and stood behind the counter and asked him what he
wanted. He told her, and she brought back some coffee and cream. He asked
for extra cream. He thought if he couldn’t afford to eat, the cream would help
make his stomach settle better, and the cream was free.
Brent drank the coffee and felt some of the cold from the winter rain go out
of him. He sipped the coffee slowly, trying to think what he could do next.
Maybe there was a job here in town. If there was a bus station, he could hang
out there overnight, and maybe tomorrow find some day work. He was fed up
with that kind of business, but that’s about the best he was able to do.
If he’d ever had a chance to make any real money, it was long passed. If he
had ever had a chance to make anything of himself, that too was long past. He
had set himself down a road from which he could not return, and he wasn’t
really sure what kept him going.
He drank the coffee and the waitress poured him a second cup, and the man
in the brown suit came over and sat by him. The man had a cup of coffee with
him. He sat it on the counter and said, “Mind if I sit here?”
Brent shook his head. The man called the waitress over and she filled both
their cups, and the man ordered a bowl of soup. He sat and sipped his coffee
until the soup came. He looked at the soup, then he looked at Brent. He said,
“You know, I don’t know why I ordered this. I don’t really want it.”
Brent said, “That right.”
“You want it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yeah, you take it. I don’t want it. It’s on me.”
“You don’t gotta do that.”
“I don’t, they throw it out.”
Brent slid the bowl of soup in front of him and went at it as slowly as he
could. It was all he could do not to take hold of the bowl and drink it. He
crumbled the crackers that came with it into the soup, then used his spoon and
tried not to let his hand shake. The man looked at the jailhouse tattoo on the
back of Brent’s hand, then looked away, as if he had never looked at all.
“Passing through?” asked the man.
“I guess. I’m looking for work.”
“What kind of work you do?”
“Oh, whatever. I haven’t really got any skills, but I’ll go at a job hard as I
can. I mostly do day labor.”
“Yeah. Little down on your luck?”
“I don’t know that’s your business. Thanks for the soup, but I don’t know
the soup makes that your business.”
“I didn’t mean nothing by it. I just thought I might could help you out.”
“You saw me here and thought you could help me out?”
The man nodded and sipped his coffee. “Something like that.”
 “You got work?”
“Maybe. Well, not exactly work. But something I need done. I’ll pay you
five hundred dollars.”
“How many days?”
“You mean how many hours.”
Brent said, “Explain yourself.”
“I mean what I want you to do, you could do in an hour or two. Maybe
three, tops.”
“Now? In the rain?”
“Finish your soup, we’ll take a little drive, talk about it.”

· · ·

They drove out a ways and Brent began to feel a bit nervous. It occurred to
him the man might have been talking about him making the money by some
kind of sex act. The thing that worried him most was that he was considering
it. Five hundred dollars right now was as good as five million.
They drove down a dirt road and the man pulled over and parked, turned on
a little light on the dash, cranked his window down an inch, got a cigarette
pack from inside his coat and offered Brent one. Brent passed. The man shook
the cigarette out, lit it and puffed. Smoke went up and over the man’s head
and sucked out the window, as if it were in a hurry and had some important
place to go.
Brent thought: Now he lays it on me. Suck my dick or walk.
Brent studied the man. He thought he could go through with it he had too,
but he didn’t have to. He figured he could take the man, and take his money
too. He could throw him out and use the car to go a ways before leaving it
somewhere. A plan began to form.
The man said, “I haven’t got the five hundred dollars on me.”
“What’s that?”
“You’re thinking what I’m thinking you’re thinking, you can save yourself
some time. I haven’t got any money. Five dollars. I’ll give you that. The car
has less than a quarter tank worth of gas.
“You don’t have five hundred dollars?”
“I got it, but not on me. I got more than five hundred dollars you do this
right. And let me tell you something, jumping me won’t help anyway. I’m
rougher than I look and I’ve dealt with bad boys before.”
Brent took a deep breath. The dude could be lying. He could have money
on him. It might be worth finding out.
On the other hand, the guy sounded calm enough to be someone who had
indeed dealt with trouble before.
The man said, “I saw that tattoo on your hand. Jailhouse work?”
Brent nodded.
“Shitty work. You do it?”
Brent nodded.
“I don’t know what makes a con do it, unless it’s boredom. Thing like that,
looks like shit and it’s bound to hurt doing it. Sticking a pocket knife in your
hand, cutting a heart and putting pencil lead in it. Some brain surgery there,
pardner.”
“You brought me out here to talk about my tattoo?”
“No. I brought you here to talk about my wife. Best goddamn pussy this
side of the Atlantic.”
“You brought me here to tell me cock dog stories?”
“I brought you here so I could ask you to kill her.”
Brent thought about that a while. He had killed a man once during a filling
station robbery. It was the reason he had done time, but it had been pretty
much an accident. The man had a gun and tried to protect his money, and he
and Brent had wrestled and the gun had gone off. For that reason, he hadn’t
spent as much time in the slammer as he might have.
Brent said, “She’s such good pussy, why kill her?”
“Man does not live by pussy alone.”
“I’d like to try.”
“That’s what I used to think. I got hitched with her, I thought I could live
on it, but I can’t. Tell you what, you like pussy so much, before you kill her,
you want to try, go ahead.”
“I didn’t say I’d kill anyone.”
“I think you might. I consider myself a good judge of character. I think you
might.”
Brent said, “Say I did this thing, how would it go down, and why don’t you
do it?”
“I want it to look like a burglary. I want to have an alibi.”
“All right, but we’ve been seen together.”
“I don’t think that matters. I don’t live around here. I was passing through
on my way home. My wife’s murdered, it won’t mean anything here. You
won’t mean anything here. I live a hundred miles away.”
“You live a hundred miles away and you’re sitting in a shitty cafe with a
rainstorm outside, waiting on some chump.”
“I been on a business trip, and on the way home I’ve sat in a lot of shitty
cafes. I been thinking about this, and I saw you—”
“And you saw a loser, huh?”
“Frankly, yes. But it doesn’t have to be that way. What you do is I drive
you to Freeport. I show you where my house is. I let you out, and you wait
until I have time to drive back to town and stop at the Red Barn Restaurant. I
got a fellow I’m supposed to see. It’s a late business meeting. He’s a friend of
mine, or he’s supposed to be. We’ll have a bite, then we’ll drive out to the
house for a drink and for him to sleep over so we can go fishing the next day.
He and I will come in and find Anna dead.”
“Me having killed her?”
“That’s right.”
“You said he’s supposed to be a friend. He the guy fucking your wife?”
“Bingo. Another thing. He’s a deputy. That’ll really put me in the clear,
make everything look cozy, cause we’ll call the medical folks in quick like.
They’ll estimate her time of death, and I’m wanting that estimate to be around
eleven thirty. I want you to wait until then, do her in. I come in, I’m in the
clear. I get some insurance. I’m free of the bitch, and the deputy who is
banging my wife is part of my alibi. Ironic, huh.”
 “How am I supposed to do this deed? This murder?”
“With a box cutter. I want it to look especially vicious.
We keep a box cutter on my desk for opening letters. Or rather my wife
does. Right now it’s in the glove box. You do the work, you throw the cutter
down. I’ll identify it, and it’ll look like you surprised her and killed her with
something available. Make it pretty vicious, you want.”
“A box cutter will cut her up all right, but it’s not the best murder weapon
in the world.”
“You may have to strangle her or something, then cut her. I wouldn’t be
bothered you cut her face up good. I want her cut. Especially her face. And
throw stuff around, and I’ll say something’s missing. I got some things put
away so the insurance will have to pay.”
“And how do I get away?”
“That’s the good part. I’ll give you a detailed description of the house as we
drive. There’s a place in the kitchen. I put it in myself Anna doesn’t know
about it. I put it there for no good reason other than I liked the idea. And I
guess I been thinking about something like this for a year now.”
“But the right guy hadn’t come along?”
“That’s right. I saw you in that cafe and I knew I had the right guy. Now
listen. You do the job, then you go to where the refrigerator is, you reach
behind it and pull forward. It’ll roll out on wheels. There’s a wall plank there.
It’s not easy to see, but if you know it’s there, you’ll find it. It slides sideways.
You can grab hold of the refrigerator if you’re standing inside. Pull it to you,
then slide the panel in. There’s room in there to sit down. Fact is, there’s a
chair in there. And a table. Some dried jerky. Water. A light. A chemical toilet.
Stuff like that. Just stay there. Sit quiet. And I’ll let you out of there tomorrow
and give you your money. I’ll see you get to some place safe before I let you
out. I got a change of clothes in the back seat there. You can slide back there
and put them on. You’ll be dry. I’ll get rid of your clothes before I get into
Freeport.”
“How do I know you aren’t just setting me up?”
“I could be, but I wouldn’t want you to have to talk against me. I can make
things work you if you just take the money and disappear. And if you try to
blackmail me later, I’ll just ignore you. Blackmail all you want. It won’t do
you any good. Between you and me, they’re going to believe me. I’ve got a
good reputation. Thing is, you take the money, and just go, and never let me
see you again, and everything will be cozy for both of us.”
Brent sat silent for a moment, listening to the rain drum on the roof of the
car.
“Make up your mind,” the man said, “I have to get going if I’m going to
make this work. You say no, I’ll take you back to town and we’ll say
goodbye.”
“Make it a thousand.”
“Done.”

· · ·

The rain had stopped. Brent was standing in the man’s yard looking at a light
in the window of the man’s house. He didn’t even know the bastard’s name,
and here he was, ready to kill the man’s wife for a thousand dollars. He ought
to just keep going, but to where? Right now, the idea of the money and hiding
somewhere in the warm, dry house was appealing.
Brent went along quietly to the potting shed next to the garden. He watched
the light in the window from there. He crept out of the shed and alongside the
house and went to the back door. The key was on the sill as the man had said.
He felt for the box cutter in his pocket, took it out, unlocked the door, and
slipped inside.
He climbed the stairs. Light was falling out of a room up there, falling
across the hall and down the stairs. Brent went up slowly with the box cutter
in his hand.
He went along close to the wall and tried to stay in shadow. He came to the
doorway and looked around the edge of it carefully. There was a woman with
short, tousled blond hair sitting in a chair watching television. She had on a
short black gown with red and yellow Chinese dragons on it. She had long
legs that looked brown and smooth and she had them stretched out in front of
her, resting her feet on a stool. The gown was split open and he could see she
was wearing very brief black panties and that she was shaved very close. She
had one hand to her mouth, and was chewing a nail. She had pouty red lips.
Brent looked at her and thought about what the man had said. About what a
fuck she was. About cutting up her face. She was the kind of woman could
make a man crazy, all right.
Brent looked down at the box cutter. He looked at the woman. He would
have to settle for the dry clothes and nothing else. He couldn’t do it. There
was a sound in the room, and Brent looked and saw a man come up behind
the woman and bend down and kiss her on top of the head. The man’s hands
reached inside the gown and found her breast, then he leaned way over her
shoulder and slid one hand along her belly until the robe came open all the
way. He slid his hand down inside her panties and moved it around. The
blond moaned. Brent saw that the man was wearing a gun and a badge.
Brent thought: What the hell? And at that moment, the man looked up and
saw him.
Brent made a run for it, but the man bolted after him. As Brent reached the
stairs, the man leaped, tackled him. They both went tumbling down the steps
and through the railing. Brent felt the man’s hands on him for an instant, then
he didn’t feel them. The next instant, he found himself at the bottom of the
stairs, stunned. He sat up. The deputy had gone through the railing. He was on
the floor with his head twisted funny and his ass was in the air.
Brent tried to get up. The woman said. “Don’t.”
He looked up. She was at the top of the stairs, coming down. The robe
opened as she came down, and in spite of the situation, he couldn’t help but
admire the view. She was carrying a small revolver.
She made all the steps and went over to the deputy and bent down and
looked at him. She said, “Shit.” She took the deputy’s pistol, which was still
in its holster. The deputy fell over on his side and the light from the open
room above hit them and made them look like fractured glass.
The woman studied the dead man for a moment. She seemed about as
concerned as if she had seen someone else’s potted plant blown over by a
high wind.
She turned her attention to Brent. He lay on the floor still. The box cutter
had fallen out of his pocket, and it was beside him; her eyes were on that.
She came closer, holding a revolver in either hand. They were pointed at
Brent. She paused and took a good look at the box cutter. She said, “Slide that
this way. Carefully.”
He did. She picked up the box cutter. “This is mine,” she said. “I use it to
open mail. It’s been missing for two days.”
Brent didn’t say anything.
“How’d you come by it?” He still didn’t say anything.
And then he saw a light shift in her eyes. “He gave it to you,” she said.
“My husband. He gave it to you, didn’t he?”
Brent didn’t answer.
“He threatened to cut me with it once…He gave it to you, didn’t he!” She
pointed the revolvers at Brent’s forehead and cocked back the hammers.
Brent said, “Yes. Yes. Don’t shoot. He gave it to me.”
“To use on me?”
“Yes.”
“Why that shit! That sorry shit! He hired you to kill me, didn’t he?”
Brent could see the hall clock behind her. It was eleven o’clock. Her
husband would be home in thirty minutes with the deputy.
Or maybe not. This had to be the deputy.
“Tell me what he had in mind,” the woman said. “Tell me now, and you
best tell it good, or I start shooting.”
Brent considered for a moment, then went ahead and told her. He ended
with the fact that the husband was supposed to arrive at midnight.
“He might be here sooner,” Brent said. “He’s supposed to meet your deputy
in town.”
“Wrong deputy,” the woman said.
“You screwing the entire police force?”
“Everyone except for the drug dog, and I got my eye on him. Get up.”
 Brent got up.
“Way it’s going to work,” she said, “is you and I are going to bring the
deputy’s car around from behind the guest house. We’re going to park it in
front of the house. You’re going to drive it.”
“And if I don’t?”
“I shoot you.”

· · ·

He drove the car around front and parked it. The woman sat beside him with
the gun in her hand. Brent decided he could use a box cutter on this angel
faced devil after all. Fact was, he could beat her head in with a rock and sleep
like a baby. She was one conniving bitch.
As they got out of the car, she took off the Chinese robe and handed it to
him and had him use it to wipe down the seats and dash and steering wheel.
While he worked, he took some looks at her naked breast and the small
black panties and the long brown legs. They looked good in the light from the
porch, but he could still cut her and he could still bash her head in with a rock.
When he was finished, she took back the robe and slipped it on while
keeping the guns trained on him. She motioned him back inside. As they
walked, Brent could smell the air, and it was rich with the smell of damp
earth. He figured he would soon be in it, but not smelling it.
Inside, she cut off the porch light and pointed the guns at Brent. Brent said,
“What now?”
“I’m going to say I called a deputy I know at his home. I called him there
because I heard someone outside, but I didn’t want to make a big deal of it.
Like all the deputies, my husband knows him. It makes sense I might call
him. My husband’s not available, so I call him. I could have called any of
them.”
“Even the drug dog if he’d answer the phone.”
“That’s right. He comes over. You spring on him. You fight. He’s killed on
the stairs from a fall, and I come down with my gun, and you wrestle it away
from me, and about that time my husband comes in and you shoot him, and
then, while you’re busy doing that, I get my friend Bill’s gun, and I shoot you.
That way I get rid of hubby, and you. I collect insurance. I’m a wealthy
widow. Not bad.”
“You don’t need to shoot me. I’ll help you kill your husband. You let me
go, I’ll help you.”
“I don’t think so. Naw. I don’t like that plan.”
“But he’s already here.”
“What?”
The woman jerked her head toward the door, and in the instant she did it,
just as she realized she had been snookered, Brent jumped at her and grabbed
both her wrists and swung her around and onto the floor. But still she didn’t
let go of the guns. They rolled on the floor, this way and that. They rolled
against a table and overturned it and knocked a lamp off and it burst on
Brent’s head, and still they rolled.
Finally Brent got on top of her and bent one of her arms back into her face
and used her own hand and the gun she was holding to rap her across the
mouth. She let go of the gun and it slid away. Brent worked on the other hand
and twisted the gun down, and the woman’s own finger caused it to go off.
She took a shot in the head and lay still.
Brent got off of her.
Shit, it had all gone haywire. He pulled off her Chinese robe, found the box
cutter and wiped it off. He got the guns and did the same.
He thought about taking the deputy’s car, then decided against it. He’d go
across the patch of woods there and on out to the highway and find some
house with an average looking car, and he’d boost it. That beat riding around
in a stolen vehicle that stood out like a bull dick on a goat farm.
He went out of there then. Went across the grass and out toward the road.
He wondered if his prints were on anything anywhere in the house, then he
decided he couldn’t wonder about that at all. He had to keep moving.
He reached the road and saw car lights through the trees, turning around a
curve. He leaped across the road, ready to hunker down in a ditch, and
suddenly something leaped at him. He stumbled back and onto the road and
into the glow of the headlights. And in that moment, the car’s brakes
screeched, and in the peripheral glare of the headlights he saw what had
leaped at him. A mangy yellow dog. It was standing in the ditch with its teeth
bared. He had startled it and it was mad.
But it didn’t matter. The car hit him and he went up and high and onto the
road, rolled toward the ditch and into it. He could feel his arms were twisted
behind him in a funny way, and he was facing the sky, but his stomach was
flat in the ditch. He didn’t feel any pain. He didn’t feel anything. He heard the
dog running off through the trees.
A car door slammed, then he heard someone crashing through the tall grass
around the ditch. A man bent over him and touched him. The man had a
flashlight. He shined it in Brent’s face.
The man with the flashlight whispered, “Did you do her? Did you?”
Brent realized it was the husband. He opened his mouth to say something,
but nothing came out. He heard another car door slam and heard someone else
walking toward them.
“Did you do it?” whispered the man, and his voice was so desperate to
know, his hands so nervous, the light swiveled and shone on himself.
It was the man who had hired him. His brown suit coat was hanging open
and Brent saw something on the man’s shirt that made him laugh. He laughed
and coughed a ball of blood onto his chin. He thought: Of course this
sonofabitch knew all the deputies, just like the wife said. Of course he did.
Just before Brent lost it and went way down into the darkest pit into which
a person can be dropped, he saw the flashlight glint off the badge on the
husband’s chest. A sheriff’s badge, and he saw the other deputy, wearing
khakis and boots and a cowboy hat, come around and kneel next to the
sheriff.
“Who the fuck is he?” the deputy said.
The sheriff had the flashlight on Brent’s face, and he watched as Brent’s
eyes went blank. Then he felt for a pulse. When he was sure there wasn’t one,
he said, “I’ve no idea.”
 Hanging
HE DECIDED TO HANG HIMSELF so he put the rope over the door and tied it to the

knob and then he sat down in a chair on the other side of the door and made
the noose and tied it high so that his feet wouldn’t quite touch the ground, and
then he got up in the chair and put the noose around his neck and kicked the
chair from under him.
When he fell his neck snapped and there was intense pain, but he soon
came out of blackness to discover that the rope had broken his neck, but by
some quirk of fate, by some tenuous grip of the spinal cord on the brain, he
still lived. The rope was around his neck in such a way he wasn’t strangling,
just hanging there, in pain from the neck up, but he was paralyzed below,
couldn’t move and couldn’t feel.
Surely he would die soon. Surely.
The room went from light to dark and then to light again, and still he hung.
After a while he could smell something, realized he had messed himself and
that it had run down his legs and onto the floor, and that something was
moving down there he couldn’t see. He could hear it, but couldn’t see it.
As he hung, and the days passed, he began to hallucinate from lack of food
and water; he felt his time would come soon. He also felt strangely light, as if
all that remained of him was his head. And then he saw the rat on his chin. It
was standing on its hind legs, rearing up to look into his left eye. The rat
studied him carefully, the way a chef might a cut of meat. And then there
were many rats. They climbed all over his face, and they were so heavy and
so busy the rope began to swing, back and forth, and by lowering his eyes, he
could see on the floor his pants and shoes, which had fallen off, lying in his
own feces. He could also see what was left of his feet, one partly in a chewed
sock, and in one swing, he saw that his legs were just bones.
The rats had been eating him for some time, and he hadn’t be able to feel it.
When they started on his face, however, he felt that. He felt when one went
at his eye and began to gnaw loudly and crawl into the socket, but the rats
were pretty full by then, so they rested a lot.
Death by starvation and thirst did not come first. The rats took their time.
 Beatcha
BILL AND WILL were two aging brothers who lived together in a big house that

had long gone to seed.

They enjoyed the morning paper and their coffee and they enjoyed hating
one another.
Their big moment each day was seeing who would end up first with the
newspaper. Whoever got down to the end of the drive and grabbed it would
then read it leisurely at the table while drinking coffee, and more than likely,
coffee would find its way onto the pages and some sections would get cut by
scissors so coupons that weren’t really needed would be saved.
After years of this, Will developed a bad knee, so he always lost out in the
paper race, got it second every day.
Bill enjoyed this change, and liked to let Will start out with his cane after
the paper, and when he was nearly to the prize, Bill would suddenly jet out of
the house on his two good legs, surpass Will, nab the paper, and race back
inside, leaving Will angry, cussing, and disappointed. To make matters worse,
Bill, sitting at the table reading, always looked over the top of the paper to
inform Will he had lost the race, by saying, “Beatcha.” One day, Will awoke
to find that Bill had already gone out for the paper, come in with it, and died
while reading at the table.
Will was as happy as a pig in mud. If his knee hadn’t been wrecked, he’d
have jumped for joy.
Instead, he called the EMTs and tried to look a little sad as they came out
and looked at his brother and told him what he already knew.
Bill was dead.
Will had Bill buried right away, the next day in fact, and he bought a very
cheap coffin made of a material that was not too unlike cardboard. He had
Bill buried in the family plot out back of the house, and that night, went
outside and quietly peed on the grave.
Next morning, Will got up, took hold of his cane and went down to get the
paper. But it appeared it had not been thrown. This happened from time to
time when paper deliverers were changed, or, once it happened when Bill had
forgotten to pay the paper fee.
Will went back to the house to call the newspaper to complain, but when he
came up on the porch he found the door was open, and inside, sitting at the
table, covered in dirt, and already sporting a few grub worms and lots of ants,
Bill sat at the table with a cup of coffee, reading the paper.
He looked up as Will gasped. “Beatcha,” Bill said.
 Dragon Chili
FROM THE GRAND CHURCH COOKBOOK
THIS RECIPE IS IN RESPONSE to the one I posted here on Share Your Recipes a

week ago that proved to be more popular than I expected. I have been asked
by so many readers to post another, and as I am not immune to flattery or
persuasion—even mild persuasion—I am back with culinary enthusiasm and
this time out I would like to post my recipe for dragon chili.
I know dragons are not normally thought of as an ingredient in chili, but
trust me, they are an excellent source of protein, are low in fat, and the meat is
very clean and low caloric and it does not taste like chicken or the more
popular chili meat.
Dragon meat has gotten a bad reputation due to a misunderstanding about
dragons. First off, for the meat to be good, and for it to work in my chili
recipe, it is necessary that you acquire a very young dragon. The younger the
meat, the sweeter.
You should also avoid the green dragons, as there is nothing you can do at
any time or any age to make that meat serviceable. The brown dragons are the
best. At an early age, when they are no more than three feet long, they are
perfect. Their eyes are just open (which is a sign the toxins in the blood have
passed, which is the way of brown dragons), and the meat, especially in the
tail, is ready to be harvested. The head meat, though darker, is also tasty, and
is best made into ground patties. The body meat is fine as well, but riddled
with bones, so extreme care should be taken, lest you get one of the small
bones that litter the dragon’s torso and appear to accomplish nothing towards
locomotion or the firmness of the body and are extraordinarily hard to detect
during a simple cleaning.
Also, the hearts (remember browns have two hearts instead of one like
green dragons, and like both kinds of dragons, they are large and eight
chambered) and the fatty livers are delicacies and require a different approach
to preparation than I am going to provide here, and some people suggest that
for them to be enjoyed one has to persevere, as they are something of an
acquired taste.
For chili, we are going to consider the head meat and the tail meat. I prefer
the tail meat, as I like my chili meat to be sliced and then chopped, as
opposed to ground. And once again, the white meat of a dragon tail is so
vastly superior to the darker meat of the head.
It is also necessary to prepare the dragon alive. Dragons, the moment they
die, begin to go bad. This is true of all meat, but with the dragon it is a much
faster process than with any other meat known. Within a few hours, unless
cooked, the meat becomes foul.
If the meat is cut from the dragon quickly, and deep fried, or in the case of
other kinds of recipes, boiled or baked, etc., for whatever reason, the meat
ceases to spoil and retains its sweetness, and will keep permanently, though
other ingredients in your recipe can go bad and make the meat inedible.
The way to prepare the meat is to, well, catch the dragon, of course. You
should do this with a net. They can often be found shortly after birth when the
mother dragon is away, searching out cattle or other foods it digests and then
regurgitates into the baby dragons’ mouths. At this early age, if you watch and
make sure the mother is away, the dragons are fairly harmless and the net is
the best way to capture them. The net should be of strong wire. The dragon’s
ability to breathe fire does not kick in until the creature reaches the age of a
year or so, but even at an early age their tail can thrash violently and they
have more than a passing semblance to adult claws. Even the beating of their
little wings can cut you like a knife.
When the dragon has been captured, it is desirable to calm it for a couple of
days. After a day or two of calming the dragon down, it should be placed on a
diet of fresh milk and soft vegetables for about a week. Then it can be
stroked. Once its confidence is gained, it should be removed gently from the
holding pen. Do not excite the dragon, as its claws and tail and wings could
be dangerous. I know I have mentioned this, and I don’t mean to
overemphasize it, but it is an important thing to consider.
Keep the beast calm. This isn’t hard to do as the dragon is by nature
trusting. The best way to prepare the dragon is to lay it length-wise on a
sturdy board as wide and as long as the dragon. A neat trick to help with the
preparation is to coat the board with vegetable oil. Dragons will be attracted
to this and will begin to lick it. Very carefully place a long spike at the back of
the dragon’s head, where the neck joins, and with a well timed and well
placed strike with a hammer, drive the nail through the dragon’s spine and
into the board.
It is advisable to slip a rope over the tail of the dragon before this strike,
and to gently pull it taut while it is preoccupied with licking the board. The
strike, if properly performed, should sever the dragon’s spine, and its ability
to thrash its tail. The sounds it makes will be excruciating, and it will be
tempting to put the dragon out of its misery quickly, but this will ruin the
meat.
The thing to do is to whack off the tail at the base, saving that bit of meat
from contamination should your nail be slightly off the spine. The head meat
does not contaminate as long as the animal is alive, so it is best to use a sharp
and sturdy blade and pliers to slowly strip the skin from the head before
cutting into the bone with an electric bone saw, and then into the brain. I
should also add that wiring the wings together carefully before binding the
tail gently and striking the dragon with the nail or spike is advisable. As I
said, the wings can be as dangerous as the teeth or the tail.
But, I was saying about the stripping of the meat. Only at this point, should
the animal be allowed to die. They are sturdy and can withstand having their
skin removed. You can just let them bleed out, or you can finish them with a
few strokes of your mallet. I find wielding a mallet a messy endeavor, and
generally just let them bleed and die.
Let us return our attentions to the recipe. We now have the tail, and the
head meat. It is suggested that if dragons are not available, that the meat of
small children is equally satisfying and tasty, and they are much easier to
handle. With the large number of children being born, due to restrictions in
the laws, and those that are being placed in orphanages, this is a perfect way
to take care of them, and there are some butcher shops that specialize in
children already butchered and prepared, though this is not as true of the
dragon. Children are perfect substitutes for many dishes, and they can suffice
to duplicate, or at least take the place of, anything from pork to chicken to
beef to fish or dragon. It depends on the parts of the children you use. It all
begins to taste a bit like beef or pork if the child becomes too old, so keep that
in mind. And of course when they are adults they are free to make their own
choices. Eating adults is definitely out, as anyone in their right minds should
know.
Children as meat have become quite popular, and frankly, it is a way the
population can be lowered without it being an unnecessary death, or some
form of stem cell usage which goes against the laws of God and man. Food is
not a waste, and I say here, and without fear, we are all creatures of God, and
God believes we are the rulers of the earth, and though all life is precious, and
all babies should be preserved, it is obviously okay for them, up until that
certain age, to be eaten, as this activity, nourishing one’s self, is in God’s plan.
Abortion clinics of the past gave women a choice, but there should be no
choice. All life is sacred and should be preserved until that moment that it
becomes meat, or it becomes an adult. No babies of dragons or of human
persuasion were killed in the womb for any dish I have ever prepared, and I
am proud of that. I use only fresh out-of-the-womb meat that no one wants, or
has abused, or taken a limb from.
I stress this because there are underground recipes that make use of aborted
embryos, and this is a foul blow against God, and I would not want to be
thought one of their ilk.
Forgive me my distraction, but since this cookbook is designed for the
church, I suppose its dictates and concerns were on my mind. Hail to Him that
is love. Hail to God who knows all and loves all and wants us to protect the
defenseless children.
And remember, dragon chili, with the occasional substitute, is one of the
finest and tastiest meals that one can digest; for it, like the child, comes from
the egg of a female and the seed of male, and none of it has been spilled and
none of it has been violated in the womb. It is all meat, fresh and clean and
unwanted and unloved, except prepared in the manner that I have suggested,
adding plenty of black pepper and a smidgen of salt and lots of chili pepper to
taste.
Cook on.

Brother Canefield: Chef for the Church of Religious Union and Harmony and
the Home of the One True God and His Minions
 The Closet
SEYMORE, LOOKING IN HIS CLOSET for his shotgun, accidentally let the door slam

closed behind him.

He wheeled. Panicked. Beat on the door and screamed. No one answered,
because he lived alone.
Seymore hated tight places. He couldn’t even stand tight clothes. A
wristwatch drove him wild. And now here he was, in a small closet, in the
dark. He beat on the door and yelled some more, but still nothing changed.
He sat in a corner of the closet, the clothes draping about him like a ghost.
Beneath the crack in the door he saw day change to night and back again.
He grew hungry. He threw himself at the door. No good. Solid oak and thick.
He sat down and cried.
Four days went by.
He found the shotgun he had been looking for.
It was loaded. He put it under his chin and fired.
Neighbors, hearing the shot, came looking for him.
They found him in the closet.
Too bad he hadn’t tried the knob. It wasn’t locked.
 Willard and the Painting
WILLARD LIVED IN THE PAINTING much of the time because he was comfortable

there. He liked to climb to the top of the stairs at night when the moon was
right, and by means of a stool, enter the painting.
The painting was of him, painted at his request a year back, and he liked it
very much. Found it flattering, and discovered if he wore the clothes he wore
when the painting was made, down to the correct change in his pocket, and
with an unwound pocket watch, just as it had been the day he was painted, if
he did all that, and the moon was high and the light was right, all he had to do
was step backwards into the painting which hung at the top of the stairs.
In the painting was a soft fine world that was as good as the day the
painting had been made. He had been painted in a small walk-up apartment
by a young lady with golden hair and a beautiful body. He told his wife a man
had made the painting.
Willard and his mistress had long parted, but when he stepped into the
painting, all was as it had been that day. It was quiet there and cool and they
would make love on the daybed, and then he would pose and she would paint.
He supposed that if someone were to come up the stairs and see the
painting in the moonlight, they would not see what they were supposed to see.
What was supposed to be there was him, standing, looking out at the world
with a confident air.
If they were to see him now, they would see him posing for the painting.
Earlier, they would have seen him making love to his mistress. The two of
them caught in time.
Once, he thought he might walk his mistress out of the painting, but he
knew that wasn’t a good idea. Here, this way, he had her forever and she was
always the way she was on that fine day.
When he chose to leave, he merely excused himself for a moment, went to
the south wall…And stepped through.
Each time he returned, the moon was the same and the clock on the wall
showed that he had been gone for little more than a few seconds. And when
he went back into the painting, it was always just as it had been before. His
mistress never knew he was gone.
His wife did, however.
“Where were you last night? I woke, and you were gone.”
“Why, I went for a walk.”
“That late?”
“I sleep better if I walk.”
“Walk before bed.”
“Perhaps I should.”
“And why are you fully dressed? A suit and tie?”
Willard didn’t really have an answer to that. And, of course, in time he
would stop walking for awhile, because the position of the moon would
change and the light would not come correctly through the window; on those
nights the painting was just a painting.
Tonight, however, the painting was ripe to be re-entered. He had become an
expert on the moon, knew how it would shine and how it would strike the
painting. It would be perfect.
All day he thought of it. Stepping into the painting, into that wonderful
moment in time when he was loved by a beautiful woman and was the apple
of her eye.

· · ·

That night, while his wife was outside the great house walking the dog, he
checked to see if the clothes he had worn the day of the painting hung fresh in
the closet.
They did.
 He made sure the correct change was in his pocket. His watch, of course,
was unwound; he never wound it anymore.
When his wife came up to bed and fell asleep, he rose and dressed, went
out of the bedroom and up the stairs. There he saw the moonlight falling on
the painting of himself. He had carried the small stool with him from the
bedroom, and he placed it in front of the painting, used it to step backwards,
inside the frame.
The mistress was there, and as always, it was as if he had never left. He
pulled her to him and they kissed. Soon they were on the bed, making love.
Once, he heard a noise, but when he looked, of course all he saw was the
room. When they finished he felt he had taken a little longer than usual, so he
dressed, said he would pose momentarily, but first he had something to do.
While her back was turned he headed for the wall, which was the backside of
the canvas. But then he froze. He tried to step through, but couldn’t. The wall
was solid.
For a moment, he couldn’t figure it. He jammed his hand into his pocket.
The change was there. He felt for his watch. It was there. He was fully
dressed…
His throat hurt…

· · ·

He had been wrong. His actions could be seen in the painting.

His wife stood at the base of the painting. In one hand she held a butcher
knife. She had seen him in the painting, making love to his mistress. And
when Willard tried to come through, she had stepped up on the stool and
slashed his throat, or rather the throat of the man in the painting. In that
moment, he ceased to move.
And so he stood. The man in the painting. Locked in time inside the frame.
The painting slashed. His throat cut.
His wife burned the painting that night.
She said Willard had run off and no one was able to prove otherwise.
Within a year she sold the house and all their goods and moved to a nice farm
in Kentucky.
 Dark
HER HOUSE WAS HIGH UP ON A HILL, and from the big window she could see the

valley and the lights from the houses below. She was glad they were there and
she was here in her big fine house, alone, and not down there amongst them.
She sipped her coffee and pitied those beneath, most of which she assumed
were clutched up tight in the bosoms of their families. In her mind, the bosom
of the family was nothing more than a fleshy prison with Christmas and
Birthdays.
Up here, she was the Queen. She could set in the semi-dark and drink her
coffee and answer to no one. She sipped the last from her cup, and got up
from her comfy chair and went over to the coffee maker for another cup.
She was independent of relationships, and she had everything she needed
here, thanks to all the money she had made in her profession, from which she
had recently retired. And now, at sixty-five, healthy, and not bad-looking if
she said so herself, she had not intention of sharing her fine-wine beauty with
anyone. All she did now was live alone and love it. She had divorced herself
from the human race and had in the end come out with money and a house
and peace of mind from the split.
Up here in her well-lit house, alone, she was at peace.
She finished off her coffee, went out to the garage where her delivery had
taken place. The garage was closed in and it had a slot for her deliveries, and
she knew a delivery was waiting. It had been waiting all day. But knowing too
there was nothing there of consequence, no milk to spoil or anything that
needed refrigerating, she had let it lie. She had heard the delivery truck come
and go this morning, but she had spent her day reading in silence, and later on
she had played music, Beethoven at first, followed by Bach while she sipped
coffee. But now Bach was done and so was the coffee, so what remained was
to fetch the box of groceries, put them away, then to bed to read awhile, and
then sleep. She would awake when she awoke, get up when she wanted,
breakfast as she chose, take a walk on her property, then back to the house.
She had no husband to respond to, no kids, no pets, no one to look after, and
no one to please but herself.
She took her time, went out to the garage and looked at her nice car parked
there, saw the small box of groceries beneath the metal trap door. She locked
the trap with a flick of her wrist, grabbed the groceries and carried them
through the connecting foyer to the house. Since her hands were full, she left
the connecting door open. With the garage locked up it wasn’t a problem. She
congratulated herself on having a house built with such a fine design. She
went into the kitchen and began to put things away, slowly, relishing her
freedom from worry, and then—
—the lights went out.
She stood where she was, hoping the lights would perhaps flare back on,
that it was a blip, a bump into darkness that would soon turn to light, but it
was not a blip. She stood a full minute in the dark, began to realize that she
had not been as prepared as she had imagined; she made a mental note to
learn from this moment. She had only one flashlight, and it was upstairs, and
she had also meant to buy light sensors that would come on during just such
an emergency, but meaning to it and doing it were two different things.
She waited another full minute, hoping, but the lights still didn’t come on,
and she was left there, leaning on the counter with the dark gathered around
her like a cloak, and already, with the climate control off, it was starting to get
warm.
Moving slowly away from the counter, she felt her way, using familiarity.
When she came to her huge kitchen window and looked out, there was
nothing to see; there was only darkness. The houses below were deep in the
black. This gave her some cold comfort. She was not alone. Others were
inconvenienced as well, and she found that reassuring. Before, she had
wanted nothing to do with them, felt she had nothing in common. Now, she
still wanted nothing to do with them, but presently, it had to be admitted, they
had something in common: They were both in the dark. It was as if it was
prehistoric times and they were living in caves and there was no moon.
Except she lived in her cave alone.
When she turned from the window and looked back into the house, the dark
was so complete she felt her heart sink. Certainly, if she was careful, she
could find her way to the stairs and work her way up, and then down the long
hall and to her bedroom, fall in bed clothed if she had too, or nude. Anything
to keep from looking for a night gown in the darkness.
Making her way toward the living room, she bumped into the couch and
banged her knee. Hopping on one leg and cussing, she sat down on the couch
and took a big breath and held her injury like a mother clutching a baby.
She thought about her situation: A woman in the later years of her life,
sitting in the dark holding her knee. What if I had fallen and broken
something? The phones she owned were hooked not only to the phone lines,
but to the electricity, and when the electricity went off, the lines were dead.
She had gotten rid of her older ones, the ones that had wires and plugged
directly into the wall alone, no electricity; she had gone modern, and now she
didn’t even have a way to call the electric company, and had never bothered
to own a cell phone; she hadn’t gone that modern. An added expense she felt
she didn’t need. Who was there to call to come over and sit with her in the
dark? Not the electric company, that was for sure, and with her phones dead
and no cell phone, she couldn’t call them anyway. Another mental note: Buy a
cell phone.
All right, she thought, finally lowering her knee, putting her foot on the
floor. Don’t panic. You’re being silly. It was almost bed time anyway, and the
odds are someone below, down there in the bosoms of their families, will
have a cell phone, or maybe an older phone that doesn’t have an electrical
connection, just a direct phone connection, and they will call. It’s all right.
Calm down. You are in your castle and you are the Queen, even if it is dark.
The dark. She had never liked the dark. Even as a child the dark had been
something she couldn’t stand, and she would always have a light, even if it
were only a small light, burning at night while she slept. And now, there was
no light of any kind.
She sat there thinking about the dark and then she thought she heard
something move in the house, very close. Turning, she looked in the direction
she thought the sound had come from, the end of the couch. And sitting on the
far end, though it was nothing more than a shape in blackness, was what
appeared to be a human being. She blinked, as if they would help her with the
darkness, but still, all she saw was the shape. It looked to be the size of a large
man, not too unlike Ed in size, the man she had given up for solitude some ten
years ago. As she watched, she thought she heard faint breathing, and her
mouth turned dry as dust and her heart began to thump like a basketball being
dribbled across her ribs.
There was someone in the house. On the couch. Right here.
Where had he been? Hiding in the closet? One of the many spare and
empty rooms? How had he gotten in? And then it struck her. The slot in the
garage. He had climbed in with the groceries. Perhaps it was the delivery
person. He had come with her groceries and thought he might come inside
too, take her by force, rape and murder and rob her. It could be anyone, really;
she had left the groceries all day, and anyone who might have walked up the
road from down below, it they were thin enough, could have crawled through
the trap, hidden behind the car in the garage and waited. He could have
simply followed her inside when she was carrying the groceries. She had even
left the door open to the garage, making it easy. He wouldn’t have had to be
stealthy coming through the doorway; there would have been no knob to turn
and gently open. In fact, he could have been in the house long before she went
to the garage, hiding, and then the lights had gone out.
But how would he have gotten past her and into the living room? When she
sat at the table with her back to it all, looking out at the lights below, that was
how. That was the perfect time.
All these thoughts ran by her head in a flash.
She watched and waited but the shadow didn’t move either. Slowly, she
stood and looked toward the front door. Too far. The stairs were closer. If she
could make the stairs and go up them, she could lock herself in her room
above. It wasn’t much, but it was something, and the doors of the house were
thick oak. They weren’t the kind of thing a man could kick in, even a strong
man.
Why didn’t he move?
Why did he just sit there, tormenting her?
Jumping up, she ran toward where the stairs should have been, but forgot
the foot rest near the couch, and she tripped over that and went down.
Scrambling to her feet, she expected to feel the man’s hands on her neck. She
turned to look back at the couch. The shape she had seen before was no
longer visible.
It had moved.
Or…Or had it been there at all?
Easing to her feet, she looked around in the dark, but all she saw was…
dark.
And then she heard it.
Yes. Something was moving in the house. There was someone here.
Jane felt her way toward the stairs, touched the railing, and then her feet
were on the lower steps and she was climbing. As she went up, she listened.
Nothing.
She let out a sigh.
Nothing had been on the far end of the couch but her imagination. That was
where Ed used to sit, sat there in the dark sometimes, just thinking, and she
had imagined him as of old, sitting on the couch, his thoughts to himself.
It wasn’t the first time she had imagined his presence in the house, but
never in the way she imagined him tonight. Yes, that was it. Imagination. Her
old Ed sitting on the end of the couch, and in the dark her imagination had
gone one step farther and given him shape.
Climbing up the stairs, she began to feel relieved, and then there was a
sensation of something moving past her, very fast, but when she turned to
look, there was nothing.
When she reached the landing and turned down the hall toward her bed
room, she heard a noise at the far end, and something fell and broke.
Freezing, she stood her ground, not because she was fearless, but because
she couldn’t move from it; she was rooted there as surely as an ancient oak.
And then she heard what sounded like little footsteps, like children coming
along the hall. Once Ed had said that someday they would have kids, and
there would be the pitter-patter of little feet, but she hadn’t wanted kids, and
there never were any. Ed had become silent over the years and had sat alone
on that couch below, in the dark, thinking, and in time she had asked him to
go away.
No. Not true. He had gone away without her asking. Yes. He had gone
away.
She had wanted it, though. Down deep she was glad to be alone.
Until this very moment, with the sounds in the hall. Now she wished Ed
were here. He was a big man, and strong, and she had always felt safe with
him, but now what she had was an big empty house and the dark and the
movements in the dark and the sounds in the dark and all around her, dark,
dark, dark.
She pulled up roots and made to run down the hall, and had only gone a
short ways when she hit the wall, hard. It was quite a lick, and she hit her
head, but didn’t fall. She had gotten off track and had come at an angle when
she thought she was going straight, and she knew…KNEW, she had felt
something touch her, causing her to trip a little, veer off course and hit the
wall. Something was in the hall in the dark with her.
Hands on the wall, she moved along quickly, finally came to her bedroom
door, grabbed around until she had the knob, and was immediately inside. She
threw the lock, backed away from the door, listening.
She hadn’t been quick enough. Something was in the room. She could hear
it breathing, could hear it moving about, slowly, carefully.
She wished she had something to fight with. She had always been opposed
to guns, so she had none. Knives were the in the kitchen drawer downstairs.
The flashlight. That was it. She could use it as a club.
But the sounds were coming from near the bed, and the flashlight was in a
drawer beside the bed. And worse, now, even as she considered these things,
the sounds were coming from the bed itself. The thing in the shadows was in
her bed.
She strained her eyes, and she could make out the shape of the bed, see the
covers move, as if pressed down, and she could see a shadowy shape, or
thought she could, and she could hear movement as faint as the rustling of a
hummingbird’s wings.
“Who’s there?” she said, and was terrified at the sound of her own voice.
There was no answer, and when there was none, she moved away from the
door and along the side of the bed, thinking, he’ll never expect me to move in
this close, the flashlight is in the drawer by the bed, and I can use it to fight
with. I can grab it and hit him hard; if he doesn’t expect it, I can maybe hurt
him bad enough to escape. If I can get to the garage, there’s a spare key there
to my car, and I can drive right through the garage door if I have to.
Breathing slowly, trying not to make anymore sound than necessary, she
moved toward the bed, thinking: I’m a fool. He knows I’m here. He is merely
playing with me. Waiting to rape and murder and rob me.
I will not have it. This is my house. I am alone because I want to be alone,
and now there is this…person in my house, and I am no longer alone. He has
violated my privacy. I will not stand for it.
And then, as she moved, thoughts darted through her head: If only Ed were
here. If we had had children this house would be full of light, because we
would have had all manner of emergency lights, for the children. If I had a
dog the man wouldn’t have gotten in without my knowing. If I had a big dog,
a German Shepherd, it could protect me.
But what I have is me, and I’m frightened, and alone, and in the dark, and
someone, or something, or some things, are in here with me. And I am a liar, I
lie to myself. Ed did not go away. He died. He died here in this house. I try to
forget that, because he died when he was ill and he called for his medicine,
and I started up the stairs, then paused, thinking about what the doctor had
said: He must have it immediately or his heart will give out.
She had stood on the steps of the stairs and listened to him yell, and after a
while went up one slow step at a time, considering she might soon be free of
responsibility for another human being, free of waiting on him hand and foot,
even if it wasn’t his fault. Yes, she thought, I had wanted to be free, and I had
gone up slow, and then he had quit calling, and then I stood outside the
bedroom door for such a long time, and when I went in, he was gone, and
ever since I tell myself that he went away, because I don’t like to think of
what I did, and I don’t like to admit that I miss him, and that I don’t like being
alone, even if he was sick, and he went away all right, and I sent him. It was
not the way I pretend he went, but he went away, and it was my fault. My
choice. I made myself alone. I let nature take its course. And he has come
back, or rather he has always been here, and now there is the dark, and in the
dark he is more powerful, more fully himself; a ghost in shadowy-shape that
is here to remind me of what I have done. Here to punish me.
No. That is silly. He is not a ghost and he is not in our bed. It is someone,
something here in the dark.
She edged alongside the bed, trying to determine where the dresser was,
and she found that she could see better now than before, but it was still so
dark, so completely black, that all she could make out was the bed. She could
hear movement on the other side of it, as if the person had moved off of it and
had lain down on the floor.
Was merely lying there, feeling her fear, waiting to do what he or it wanted
to do. To leap out when it was least expected and grab her.
She found and eased the dresser drawer open and plucked out the
flashlight.
Something ran along the dresser and touched her hand, and she pulled the
flashlight out and tried to snap it on, but the light didn’t happen. Batteries.
The batteries were dead; she hadn’t replaced them in since forever.
But I have the flashlight itself, she thought. I can hit with it. It can be my
weapon of self-defense. Unless it’s a ghost of course.
Oh, don’t be silly!
Stop it!
You’re guilt, she thought, is riding you like a horse. You are strong and
alone and glad to be alone.
You liar.
You are alone, but you are neither strong nor glad of it.
She backed around the bed, listening, and then she heard something on the
far side of the bed again, and near the dresser as well, and then she heard
other movement. It came to her then that she had locked this door, but on the
other side of the room was a bathroom, and there was a connecting door there,
and it was wide open. She had left it that way since this morning, and every
morning, and it led to the hall. That was how he or it or them had gotten into
the room. Yes, them. She was certain now. There were many, and they were
all over the house and she didn’t have a chance.
She moved toward the door that went back to the hall. It wasn’t where she
wanted to be, but there was nowhere else to go, and if she could get
downstairs and open the front door, she could run. She would be out in the
open, and at sixty-five, she was in good shape, and she could run fast, and she
could yell for help, and maybe some of those below might hear her. It was a
way out, it was a strong possibility, and she nursed the idea fully because it
was the only idea she had.
Quickly, she fumbled the locked door open, made her way through the dark
to the stairs and started down, but before she made more than one step, she
felt something push by her, something low and to the floor, and she had a
sudden thought as to the children she might have had, and how it might have
been had she not put it off until there was no possibility of it. Children at her
feet, that’s what she strangely thought of as the small, shadowy shape brushed
against her and went up the stairs, up, and past her.
Children. Ed had wanted five. And then she thought: My God, Ed has come
back, and has brought with him the shades of the children we never had. It
was a bizarre thought, but it ran through head and whirled about like a
hamster on a wheel.
Impossible, she thought. You’re nuts. You’re fooling yourself due to guilt.
And then, after making only a few steps, she turned and looked up and saw
shapes at the top of the stairs, and she couldn’t make them out fully, couldn’t
judge their sizes accurately, but they were small, several of them, and she
turned to rush down the stairs, but her foot didn’t turn quite right, and—
—she fell.
It was a long set of stairs. It was a big fall. The flashlight slipped from her
hands and bounced ahead of her as she tumbled. The batteries shook up inside
the flashlight, and the light popped on. The light weaved and bounced and
bobbed, and then, as she rolled, her head facing the top of the stairs, the light
flashing there for less than a second before it tumbled away, she saw the
shapes in its beam, saw them clearly, the tall and thin shape of Ed, and the
little shapes of the children who might have been, and then the lights came on
just as her head turned away, and there was no Ed and no children, but there
were shapes at the top of the stairs, and she knew certainly now that they had
come in through the slot in the garage. A batch of black feral cats stood there
looking down at her. The cats and her imagination and the dark had done her
in this night, that and the loneliness she had refused to embrace, the guilt that
lived inside of her like a tenant.
She thought of Ed.
All this was seen and thought within a partial turn of her tumbling body,
and then her neck turned abruptly on one of the steps, happening just as the
flashlight struck the bottom of the stairs and shattered and went out, and she,
with a loud twisting of bone, was no more.
 Little Kitty
THEY BOUGHT LITTLE MARY what she had always wanted, a little kitty.

She was excited to see the kitty and she stroked it and checked its health
the way she had been taught.
It was a good kitty and when she killed it and skinned it and cooked it, she
fixed the meal exactly as she had been taught to do. The kitty was served to
the family, and everyone was pleased and said it was the best kitty they had
ever eaten, though the mother secretly thought it was too salty and reminded
her of the next door neighbor’s child they had stolen and cooked; a trifle
tough as well as too salty, and they had both been prepared with too much
gravy.
 The Ears
IT WAS A THIRD DATE. The first date had been dinner and a movie and a kiss

goodnight, dropped off at her door, that sort of thing. The second they ended
up in a hotel room. Tonight, she was at his place, had driven over. They were
going to have dinner at his house, then go to a movie. All very casual.
Nothing highly romantic. She liked that. It made her comfortable; two lovers
who were starting to know each other well enough not to do anything fancy.
When she got there he let her in before she could knock, like he had been
watching. The place was lit up and she could hear the TV going and could
smell cooking. He was wearing one of those novelty aprons that said KISS THE
COOK.

“This is it,” Jim said, waving his arm at the interior of the house. It was
nice. Nothing fantastic, but nice. He was neat for a guy, especially a traveling
salesman that went all over the states and didn’t stay home much.
“You wore the ear rings?” he said.
“You asked me to. You like them that much?”
“Liked them when I bought them for you,” he said.
“Date three, thought they might get a little old,” she said.
“Not yet. You want a drink?”
“Sure,” she said, and followed him into the kitchen. The TV prattled on in
the other room. He poured her a drink.
“You know,” she said, “we could stay here tonight.”
Jim was at the stove, stirring spaghetti in a pot of boiling water. He turned
and looked at her. “You want to?”
“You got some movies?” she said.
“Yeah, or we can order one off the TV.”
 “Let’s do that, and then let’s go to bed. You can fix me dinner tonight and
breakfast in the morning.”
“That sounds fine,” he said, smiling that killer smile he had. “That sounds
really nice.”
“I hoped you’d think so,” she said. “bathroom?”
“Down the hall, around the corner to the left.”
She walked down the hall and turned the corner, opened the door to the left.
She had missed the bathroom. It was the bedroom. She started out, saw a
dresser drawer slightly open. He was neat, but not that neat. She, on the other
hand had a thing about open doors and drawers. She slipped over quickly,
started to push it shut, saw what was blocking it. An ear.
Taking a deep breath, she thought, surely not.
Sliding the drawer open she got a better look. There was a string running
through the ear. She pulled it out of the drawer. There were a number of dried
ears on it. They had a faint smell, a combination of decay and the smell of
pickles; they had been in some kind of preservative, but the flesh was till
losing the battle. Something sparkled on one of them.
“It’s from the war,” he said.
She turned, gasping. He was standing in the doorway, his head hung,
looking silly in that apron.
“I’m sorry,” she said, because she didn’t know what else to say.
“My brother, he was in Afghanistan. Brought it home with him. This will
sound odd, but when he died, I didn’t know what to do with it. I kept it.
Thought I had it put away better. I should throw it away.”
“It’s pretty awful,” she said, lowering the ears back into the drawer,
pushing it shut.
“Forgive me for having it, for keeping it.”
“He died in the war?”
“Cancer. Came home from the war with his collection, those ears. Come
on, forget it. I’ll throw them out.”
She went back to the kitchen and later they ate dinner. When he went into
the den to pick a movie she slipped out the front door and drove home, trying
to remember if she had told him where she lived, then thinking, even if she
hadn’t, these days it wasn’t so hard to find out. Easy really.
In her house, sitting in the dark with a fresh drink, she felt stupid to have
fallen for Jim so quickly, to not know him as well as she should have. Guy
like that wasn’t a guy she wanted to know any more about.
She finished her drink and went to bed.
In the middle of the night she was startled awake, sat up in bed, her face
covered in a cold sweat.
She remembered Jim said on their first date he was an only child, but
tonight he said he had a brother, said the ears were from Afghan warriors.
Several thoughts hit her like a barrage of arrows. She hadn’t just awakened.
She had heard something moving in the house; that’s what brought her awake
with her mind full of thoughts and questions. That sound was what woke her
up. And in the moment she realized that she remembered all those ears were
small and one of them had something shiny on it. She knew now what it was.
She had only glimpsed it, but now she knew. A woman’s ear ring. Not too
unlike those she had worn tonight.
Something banged lightly in the other room, and then her bedroom door
opened.
 Regular Sex and Admiration
TOMMY’S LIFE SUCKED, so he bought some books on magic and witchcraft and

summoned up the devil.

When Satan arrived, red and horned and wearing a black baseball cap, he
said, “Hey, Tommy, my man. How’s it hanging?”
“Not so good. I’m not happy. I want sex and I want respect. I get neither.”
“That ain’t good. So, what you want me to do?”
“I want a life that guarantees regular sex, and I want admiration. I’ll sell
my soul for that.”
“All right, let’s make that deal in blood." Satan cut Tommy’s hand, cut his
own, pressed them together, said, “And your wish is granted, and your soul is
mine.”

· · ·

Tommy stood in front of a wooden bar. His head was tied to it by means of a
rope. He turned his head, found that he could look to his left and see…cows.
He realized, suddenly, he too was a cow.
He tried to speak, but only mooed.
He thought: This isn’t what I asked for. About then, a young man in
overalls with a milking stool showed up. My God, thought Tommy, on top of
everything else, I’m a female cow, and he’s going to milk me.
He was wrong. He was a female cow all right, but not a milk cow.
The young man put the stool behind Tommy and stood on it and unfastened
his overalls.
The next minute Tommy felt something in a place he hadn’t had before. He
let out a bellowing moo.
 He realized, now, he was having sex.
This isn’t what I had in mind, he thought, but for the next six weeks, he
lived the life of a cow, and had regular sex. Even though he didn’t want it.
But one day the boy got caught by his father and they took Tommy out of
the barn and loaded him on a truck, like it was his fault.
When the truck arrived at its destination, Tommy discovered he was at a
slaughterhouse.
The whole thing wasn’t very quick. He had to stand in line and wait his
turn and there was nowhere to go, and no one understood his mooing or the
mooing of any of the other cows.
Within the week, after being slaughtered, Tommy was cut into steaks and
sent out all over the country, and everywhere they served steaks made from
Tommy, people ate them with admiration, and thought them the finest steaks
they had ever eaten.
 Goodies
ONCE UPON A TIME the skies gave up goodies.

That was a good thing, because it was during a time of war.

Late afternoons, just before the sun went down, the planes would appear.
And then the parachutes.
Members of the countryside would gather toward the center of town where
many of the chutes fell, and there they would collect the goodies.
But there was another place, outside of town where a few planes, for
whatever reason, dropped goodies.
Perhaps they did it because they knew it would provide for those unable, or
less able, to make it to the center of town. Maybe the pilots had lived there, or
a place like it, and that was why some of the chutes dropped there.
And perhaps, as James thought, they dropped it there to rid themselves of
their load as soon as possible. Their load was perishable, and they had to free
themselves of it.
Fresh food only kept for a short time.
But it was food, and James and I would go there, not far from where we
lived in the woods, and we would wait in the clearing, and every Saturday,
like clockwork, the planes would drop their load.
We had come not only to appreciate the food, but the bright parachutes as
well. The war had not come to us, really, but livestock were rare and canned
goods and the like were almost impossible to get, with the big cities bombed
and all.
Oh, we had vegetables. But no meat to speak of. That was what we liked
about the planes. They dropped us meat and the chutes made good shirts and
even pants. Soft but durable cloth.
 It wasn’t a great way to live, or even a good way, but it was good enough.
Before the planes and their supplies there had been famine, and death, and
there had been much violence in the towns, and our little town had not been
immune.
Now, things were better, and we went out and gathered up the meat,
knowing full well that we still had to spend time preparing it, because not
only did it have to be cooked, but it had to be cleaned extensively, because it
was not encased or protected by packaging.
It was that fresh. Raw. And sometimes it didn’t fall on pine straw, but on
dirt. Right from the battlefield, the hot mauled flesh of dead soldiers.
Sometimes, the uniforms were still on the legs and arms and torsos, and
occasionally, a soldier would be dropped who was all together. Head. Torso.
Arms and legs and feet.
But mostly, the meat came in pieces, torn asunder by the might of the
battlefield.
And, now and again, the uniforms they wore would be that of our own
soldiers. Waste not, want not.
Once, I even found a cousin. But I never let on. That night at the table I
thought about it. Once. But only for an instant.
It was meat.
It was a way to live. It was a way to not rise up in our town and slaughter
one another for want of food. It was a way meat was given, and at the core of
it, the deaths of these soldiers fueled a real cause. A war to rid the world of
war.
It had been going on for forty years, and word was, we were making
headway.
That was what mattered.
That and the meat. Survival.
 After the War
ON THE DAY AFTER THE WAR, only two people survived. On the second day after

the war, one of the Siamese twins died.

 Rex
BENNY WAS AT HIS OPEN bedroom window, looking at the stars through his

telescope, when the space ship fell silently out of the sky, drifted like a feather
behind a great row of trees in the distance, and went out of sight. There was a
white puff of smoke, then nothing.
“Rex,” Benny said. “Did you see that?”
Rex, the family dog, a Great Dane, was lying on Benny’s bed, and he
hadn’t seen a thing. He hadn’t been thinking about a thing. He lifted his head.
“A space ship,” Benny said.
The dog said nothing, of course.
“We ought to go look.”
Benny paused. “No. I should tell Mom and Dad…Oh, that won’t work.
They don’t like being woke up. And who’s going to believe me?”
That was when Benny realized the only thing to do was go take a look
himself. If he could find the ship, then he would be able to take his dad there
and show it to him. He could even pretend he wanted him to go for a different
reason, because that whole “I saw a spaceship fall out of the sky and hit the
earth without making noise” was not going to fly.
Benny moved the telescope, shrugged out of his pajamas, put on his
clothes, and climbed out the window. “Rex, come on, boy.”
Rex got off the bed and bounded through the window. They raced like wind
blown shadows across the yard, running toward the great line of trees beyond.
It took a while to get there, and when they did, they had to ease down a hill
and cross a creek. They went through the woods, Benny thinking on things,
trying to figure where the ship might have landed.
The forest trail was narrow, but Benny had been down it many times before
with Rex. Rex was always with him. Rex never failed as a loyal dog. Rex
even took the lead, Benny thinking it was because he was hoping he might
startle a sleeping bunny, scare up some low nesting birds. Then, smack dab in
the middle of the trail, where it widened, right before the trees broke into a
clearing on the other side, they saw it.
It was at an angle. It had knocked down a couple of trees and smacked part
of the way into the ground. The wound it had made in the earth was what was
holding it up. It was a small space ship, a saucer. It was maybe the size of
Benny’s bedroom.
There was a round portal in its side and it was open. A bit of white smoke
drifted out of it, but that soon turned clear. Benny could only see darkness
through the gap. A thought occurred to him. Whoever had flown the machine
might have gotten out of the saucer and was decided to wander about. Or
maybe it had only opened the portal and had not been able to get out. Maybe
whatever had been in the saucer was still in there, and injured.
Benny looked around, found a bit of limb that had fallen off a tree. It was
small enough to handle, big large enough for a club. If he could get on board
and bean him a man from outer space, kill him, then he would be hero. He
could say it had a ray gun or something. No. They’d look and not find one.
That wouldn’t do. Whatever. There was a good lie to be told, all he had to do
was tell it, because the rest of it was real. There was a space ship in the woods
and he was here with it. Him and Rex.
Easing the ship, Benny came to the gap and looked inside. Dark. Nothing
else. Just dark. It was scary.
Benny put a hand on the ship, to step up through the hole, and found he
could lift it. Lift the whole thing, the entire ship. It occurred to him it might be
cardboard, that he may have seen a special kind of kite fall, and this was it.
He had been fooled.
No. This was no kite. Too big for that. The answer was simple. It was made
out of very light material; some kind of super space science. Benny sat the
saucer down so that it rested in the middle of the trail, where the clearing
started.
 Rex put both paws on the gap, looked inside the ship and growled.
“Is it still there?” Benny said.
Rex wagged his tail.
“Go get it,” Benny said. “Kill it. You get it down, I’ll come in with the
stick.”
Rex turned his head and looked at Benny.
“Go get it,” Benny said again.
Rex didn’t want to go, that was easy to see. But Benny kept urging him,
and faithful as always, Rex climbed inside with a bit of a boost from Benny.
Benny could hear Rex running around inside, hear his paws scuffing over the
floor. After a while, Rex barked. Then there was silence.
Benny called for Rex, but Rex didn’t come out.
All of a sudden, Benny didn’t want to hit the space man anymore. He didn’t
want to be there. He felt sorry for Rex, but in a case like this, it was every
man (or dog) for himself.
Benny threw down the limb and darted back the way he had come, over the
creek and up the hill, across the clearing, and back through his bedroom
window.
He sat for a long time on the edge of the bed, looking out at the night. And
then he saw the craft lifting up from behind the trees. Whatever had been
wrong with it had been repaired. It was leaving, and he had no way to prove it
had been there. He wondered if Rex were inside. He watched it rise high.
Then there was a puff, and it looked like plant seeds were scattering and
falling out of the sky.
Poor dog, Benny thought. But, he could get another one.
He fell asleep.
When he awoke, it was to an awful smell. He looked up into Rex’s face.
The dog was on the bed, standing over him, panting, and its breath was awful.
“Rex, you made it back.”
The dog sat down on the bed and studied Benny for a long time.
“You abandoned me,” said the dog.
Benny was stunned. “You spoke.”
 “Yes. My name is Zinx. I am also Rex now. I was damaged, but the dog
was not. I have taken over his mind and body. I am speaking my thoughts to
you, not words. But you hear them as words. You were going to kill me. Rex
told me. I was dying, and you were going to hit me with a stick. Rex here, he
licked my hand, all seven fingers. It was gummy, a little unpleasant, but I can
read minds, and he meant well. I took over his body and I control his mind,
mostly. We share this body and mind, actually. Rex and I both agree, you are
a little scum.”
“So…you’re the one in the spaceship?”
“You’re also not very quick, are you, Benny? I just told you that. I sent the
ship back into space. It would only go so far and disintegrate. It no longer had
the power to go back home. Only to rise up high enough and break into many
small pieces; a mechanism designed to keep our craft from being discovered.
I was able to get it to float that high. That way the evidence is destroyed. But
me, I had to stay behind. Inside Rex. And you know what, Benny? I meant it
when I said Rex is in here with me still, and he has his own thoughts. I like
him. I really do. There’s something fine and noble and loyal and simple about
Rex. You know what he tells me?”
Benny shook his head.
“That he is a faithful dog and you are an unfaithful boy, and that you left
him to me, not knowing what I would do to him, not caring, and it’s only a
miracle that I’m not an evil alien. Thoughts to that effect.”
“Holy cow,” Benny said.
“Yep,” said Rex/Zinx. “And Benny, now that we are such good friends,
don’t try and tell anyone I’m from outer space and inside the dog. They’ll just
think you’re an idiot. Just live with your knowledge. But Benny…”
“What?”
“Watch your back, kid. Because Rex does not forget.”
About a week later, Benny got hit and killed by a car down on Main Street.
A woman who saw the whole thing said Benny and the dog that was with him
were crossing the street. There was a car coming, and she said the dog rose up
on its hind legs and pushed Benny with its front paws. She said she figured
the dog was smart, that the dog was trying to shove Benny out of the way of
the car, but instead had pushed him right into it. She said she thought it was
because dogs didn’t have good depth perception; she had read that
somewhere. It was a terrible accident. Benny was knocked right out of his
shoes and dragged under the car for a block before the car could stop.
The dog, called Rex by his family, ran away and was not seen by its owners
again. But the same woman who saw the accident swore she saw the dog
again, later that day, when she was coming out of the police department, after
filing her report. She said the dog was driving away in a car. Her story was
the dog, a big one, could easily reach the pedals on that foreign car, and it was
driving with one paw on the steering wheel, the other front paw dangling out
the window. It’s mouth was open and its tongue was dangling.
It was silly, but everyone liked the lady and tried to be as agreeable as
possible. To make matters worse— and what made the woman adamant she
knew what she was talking about—was a small foreign car got stolen that
very same day. And to worsen matters even more, the car belonged to the
family of the poor boy who got ran over and killed on Main Street.
 Big Man: A Fable
TIM BURKE WAS THE ONLY ONE to take the experimental pill. Nothing as

complex as this pill had ever been invented, but since he was five foot one,
his penis was small, he was balding, had flat feet and one leg shorter than the
other, and an oversized mole on his nose that made that part of his face looked
like an odd-shaped potato, he thought, what the hell?
As it was, his time on earth had been lowdown, sexless, without need of a
comb, and much of his free time spent in search of well-fitting shoes, so he
took the pill for the promise of all things better, and didn’t care if it killed
him, which he knew it might. He took the pill and in one day he noted a
difference. He didn’t get taller or gain hair or grow inches on his penis and his
feet were still flat, but he noticed that he looked younger than his forty-five
years; the pores in his skin were as smooth as African ivory; even his teeth
looked thicker and whiter and the gums pinker and tighter around his teeth.
Within a week he not only looked younger in the face, dark tufts of hair
like planted vegetables sprouted on his head, and he was waking up with a
hard-on you could use to pop a tire off a rim, not to mention that he was
having nightly emissions of the size and quality that might require a
mayonnaise jar to contain. The potato had abandoned his face to be replaced
by a fine, straight, masculine nose. Sometimes he awakened to the movement
of his bones and muscles and nerves in his skin. They crawled, they flexed,
the popped, they changed.
Another week and he was taller and more muscular and felt better than he
had ever felt. He discovered he could twist a fire poker into a knot without so
much as straining. He could pick up the back end of his car, bend, and support
it on one knee with his hands free.
 He had to buy new clothes and new shoes, and the drug had even corrected
the flat foot problem. He stood now at six-two, well hung, with a head and
chest-full of black hair you could have used to knit a sweater and a throw rug
and maybe one mitten.
It was terrific. He went out with women for the first time. In fact, they
came to him. He enjoyed sex and he enjoyed the way they squealed when
they saw his equipment, and the way they squealed more when they
experienced it.
A couple weeks later they didn’t squeal, they shrieked. His penis was
almost to his knees, flaccid, and erect it was no longer an organ of sensual
pleasure-it was a battering ram.
His feet were soon hanging off his bed. He had grown taller and wider. He
was in perfect proportion, but there was a lot to be proportioned. He called the
doctor and got a quick appointment. The doctor measured and weighed him,
stuck a finger up his ass and palmed his balls like a shopper choosing
grapefruits.
“Well,” the doctor said. “You are now six-eight and you weight three
hundred and ten pounds, all of it muscle. Your penis, flaccid, is twelve inches
long and your testicles weigh four pounds and three ounces each and your feet
aren’t flat, and frankly, I can hardly recognize you with that face and all that
hair. And you’re still growing.”
“Still growing? I don’t want to grow anymore. You said the pill would fix
my body, make it healthier, make things work beautifully. That’s what you
said.”
“I said if it worked, and, it has worked. You are a stronger, finer, and better
looking specimen than when you came to me.
Tim studied the overweight doctor with the gray patches of hair over his
ears, his head shiny as a baby’s ass. “Why don’t you take the pill?” Tim
asked.
“Side effects.”
“You didn’t tell me about any side effects. You said it could kill me, things
went wrong. Dying is one thing, but this, this isn’t dying. This is…well, this
is…it’s a mess.”
“I told you it was experimental and that you were the only volunteer, and
we had no idea what it might do.”
Tim remembered this to be true, but he didn’t like it. He had been so
anxious to try anything to change his life he hadn’t embraced the potential for
negative possibilities.
Tim thought a moment, said, “Am I through growing?”
“I don’t know. I hope so. You should be. Maybe. Can’t say.”
Tim left the doctor’s office feeling confused. The pants he wore were up to
his knees and he was barefoot. He had on a triple-X tee-shirt, and it was
splitting across his broad shoulders. He could hardly get in the car, it was so
small. He drove over to a place that sold clothes to big men and bought sizes
that fit and sizes were larger than he was. Within a week, the over-large sizes
were too tight. He was seven-five in another week, and then it was as if the
pill really decided to kick in.
Within a month, he was ten feet high. He was also four feet across and if he
dropped his pants his penis coiled out of it like an anaconda descending from
an overhanging limb. He had to take a sheet and hitch his testicles up so they
wouldn’t bang against his legs or swing painfully. He couldn’t find any shoes
that fit now, and he had taken to making flip-flops out of patches of leather.
They were thin and uncomfortable. Hair sprouted from his nose and ears and
groin area, and he was covered in a dark pelt from head to toe. He gave up
shaving. It was like trying to cut through wire. He tried waxing once, but
when he went to have it done, took off his shirt and his dark chest hair sprang
free, the lady attendant whirled and vomited into a trash can. He went home.
He had a computer job, so he could stay home easily, which was good in a
way, but it was one reason he had taken the pill, to be normal. To go out of the
house and meet people and live a life. Now, even though he was healthier, he
was a freak. The benefits of the pill had disappeared.
He had been ducking through doors for some time, able only to stand up
fully in the living room area with its twenty foot, beamed ceilings. But pretty
soon he was brushing his head on the beams and was forced to live outside, in
the yard. Which was bad enough, but in rainy weather it was horrible.
Finally, with his bare hands he ripped open the back porch, tearing out the
door, and ripped a section wide enough where he could crawl inside and lay
down and sleep through the night.
One morning, he awoke with his head, arms and legs jutting out of the
porch’s confines. His head was hanging off the end of the porch, and he had a
neck ache from it. His left arm had punctured the wall to the house, and his
right poked through the side of the porch and was lying out in the yard. His
legs and feet were jutting out into his driveway, and they had overturned his
car, which was all right. He had traded several times for bigger automobiles,
but he hadn’t been able to get inside his Hummer for a long time now, let
alone drive.
He had taken to wearing only the sheet around his groin, and on this day he
took it off and went to town naked, letting his testicles swing like a pendulum,
his penis like a bridge support cable; there was no longer any pain. In fact, the
rhythm of their swing seemed to balance his walk. People screamed, cars
crashed.
Tim went to his doctor’s office and ripped the roof off the place and
reached in and got his doctor and wadded him up like a piece of aluminum
foil. The nurse screamed all the while he did it. He picked her up and bit off
her head and sucked out her blood and threw her away. He went to a nearby
grocery store and hammered a hole in the roof and drank a whole refrigerated
case of orange juice and ate about three thousand packages of sweet rolls,
honey buns, chocolate cakes, and four cans of Spam, thinking: Got to have
your protein.
On the way back to his house he stepped on cars, kicked a young woman
with her child about a thousand yards, and by the time he was home,
helicopters were buzzing overhead and there were police and sheriff’s cars
and people in black vehicles wearing black suits with megaphones.
He grabbed up cars and people and chucked them high and far, tore the
roof off of his own house and dropped it on them. It looked like a busy ant
farm below, watching all the law scrambling about, and he realized that
during his trip to town, he had grown once again, this time not in inches, but
in feet. He had to be twenty-five to thirty feet high, and he was broad as a
barn. He marched off and left them and they followed, buzzing overhead like
bees, below like ants and beetles. He walked by a skyscraper that was slicked
out with solar panels. He saw his reflection there; he looked like a giant of
legend. Long haired, bearded, the beard matted with brains and blood from
the nurse he had eaten, as well as all manner of slop from his meal at the
grocery store. His penis and testicles swung like God’s own mallet.
Stalking on through town, he ripped the tops off buildings, and finally
squatted over the roof of one and shit in it, filling it up. He grabbed up some
of the police and wiped his ass on them and flung them to all points of the
compass. He went on through town and down to the lake and got down on his
knees and drank it dry, feeling a prod in his ass as he did.
When he stood up, he felt something between his butt cheeks, pulled out a
hand launched missile that had failed to go off. He crushed it in his fist, and it
exploded. He felt nothing; it was as if there was nothing to feel.
They kept after him all day, shooting him with this, shooting him with that.
They even dropped a small tactical nuke on him. All that did was take out
some countryside and make his eyes water. This went on for days. Finally,
they just gave up for a while and went home and left him where he had ended
up, on a mountain, contemplating his situation.
From time to time the army regrouped and tried to take him out, jets with
napalm even. But all it did was burn some hair off his head and skin. He had
grown impervious. Soon he was so big that at night he slept lying down in a
valley. If it rained, he had to take it. If it got cold, he had to take it.
But the thing was, it was nothing now. He could hardly feel anything
anymore.
He grew larger and larger, found that his eyesight had improved; he could
see like a goddamn eagle, for miles. He saw towns in the distance, cities. He
went to them and he tore them up; he pissed on their downtowns and shit in
their reservoirs, continued to wipe his ass on humans, but he had grown so big
and they were so small, there was too much break through. For a while, cows
were good.
He was so large now, he found he could walk across much of the Atlantic
Ocean, swim the rest with ease. Sharks would attack. They broke their teeth.
He slapped whales around, he sucked in and chewed up dolphins.
When he got to Africa he stalked through the country and ate what he could
find and the people starved in his wake, and sometimes he ate them. He
fornicated with holes in the sides of mountains; had Kilimanjaro been a
woman, she would have been pregnant ten times over. He killed anything he
saw, people, animals, vegetation. He breathed air so deeply, other living
things died from lack of oxygen.
Soon the messes he made, the piles of shit he left, the urine he pooled, took
their toll. The world stunk, and he, who merely thought of himself now as Big
Man, didn’t give a flying fuck through a rolling doughnut about the world, or
about himself. It was all a matter of the now and not the tomorrow.
He had always wanted to see Paris, and did, ripping the Eiffel Tower out of
the ground, using it to pick his teeth. In England the army came out and a man
on a tall trailer gave a speech over a megaphone saying how the English
would like to live in peace. He sat on Piccadilly Circus, listened intently.
When they were finished, he ate the speaker and any of the others he could
catch. In Ireland they just said, “Go fuck yourself.” He ate them too.
Big Man walked across Europe. He was still growing, his head was poking
up near the empty black of outer space. He had trouble breathing. He walked
with his head ducked, and finally he crawled, crushing Rome and Athens and
everything in his path. He crawled all the way to China, wrecking it. Nuclear
bombs were tried there, not tactical nukes, but the big boys. They made his
skin itch and made him mad. He destroyed everything in his path. He had a
large Chinese dinner.
He took to hanging out in the oceans, floating there to keep from standing.
It gave him a feeling of comfort. He didn’t bother to leave the ocean when he
relieved himself, one or two. He didn’t wipe anymore. He just filled the
oceans with his waste. Pretty soon, he lay in piles of his own shit.
Finally, he stood, wobbled, walked, his head bent low. It was
uncomfortable to walk. Crawling was uncomfortable. To do almost anything
was uncomfortable, and he had wrecked what there was of earth worth
having.
Big Man took a deep breath and stood. His head was in outer space, and he
could see all manner of man-made debris whirl by. He felt himself growing
even as he stood. He ducked his head back into the atmosphere and sucked in
a tremendous breath. Anything that breathed air nearby died from lack of
oxygen.
Standing, his chest full, he discovered that his upper body felt light. He
bent his knees and sprang. He went up, and up, and up. It was fun. It was
glorious. And then he didn’t drop. No gravity. He was floating in the black,
star-specked void of space. And he kept growing. His air ran out. He stopped
breathing. He stopped knowing. He stopped being. Still he grew. His body
became so big that from earth below, what was left of mankind could see his
shape against the sun; he looked like a tremendous paper doll cut from black
velvet.
Big Man entered the gravitational pull of the sun. He shot toward it like a
rocket. He grew so big his body blocked out its rays, and on earth it went dark
and cold and people and animals and vegetation died. And still Big Man grew
and grew and drifted toward the burning hot light of ole sol. And when he
came to the sun, he was so big, with his arms outstretched, if there had been
anyone left to see him, they might have thought the big dark man was about
to catch a huge yellow ball.
The sun greeted him with fire, and it was all over for Big Man. He was a
huge puff of flame. Below, the cold, dead ball of the earth continued to turn
and whirl around the weight of the hungry sun.
 Boots
ONCE UPON A TIME a little man sat by the side of the road selling produce to

motorists, and while he sat there, a pair of boots walked by.

Nobody in them. Just the boots.
He couldn’t believe it. They were good boots, no one following them. They
were strolling along at a pretty good clip, big and beautiful.
He thought, you know I’d like to have those boots, so he ran after them.
But the boots ran faster.
The old man ran and ran, until he fell over dead of a heart attack. The boots
turned around, went back and kicked him a couple of times and walked off.

· · ·

The boots went along for a couple of days, and a fellow standing out in his
yard watering his dog saw them come by, and he thought, those are nice
boots, I think I’ll nab them.
He went after them, but they ran off. He quit chasing, got in his car and
started after them, but the boots were running faster than the car, and he was
driving seventy. The boots made a short turn, headed into the woods, and the
driver lost control of the car, hit a tree and was thrown clear. If he hadn’t hit a
tree head first he might have been all right.
As he lay dying, the boots came over and kicked him.
The boots stalked off.

· · ·

Well, the boots walked along, and that night, they came to a hobo camp.
There were two hobos in the camp, and when the boots walked up, they
looked at one another, and the oldest, and craftiest, said, “Boots, why don’t
you come up close and warm yourself?”
One boot rocked back on its heel and dropped its toe in a kind of thank you,
then the boots edged over to the fire. The heat was so good the top of the
boots flopped over with pleasure.
In the night, when the boots laid down beside the fire, the younger of the
hobos, thinking they were nice boots, and his shoes were worn, slipped off his
footwear, leaped up, grabbed the boots, and while he sat on one of them, he
pulled the other on his left foot. Then he pulled the other out from under him
and slipped it on his right foot.
Immediately, he began to dance around and around the fire. He was
dancing and yelling so furiously, the older hobo awoke. The boots danced in
the fire and the hobo’s pants legs caught on fire, and pretty soon the whole
hobo went up in flames.
The older man watched all of this, and noted that the boots were not burned
at all. In fact, they had stomped out the fire with the younger hobo in them.
Now they slipped off the younger man’s feet and stood by the remains of the
campfire.
The old man sat and watched his younger partner burn and smoke beside
the remains of the fire. The boots looked very alert. The tops stood tall, and
there was a stiffness about them. They waited for the older hobo to strike.
But the old man didn’t move. He lay there, raised up on one elbow, said,
“Well, he should have left you alone.”
The boots rocked back on their heels and dropped their toes forward in
agreement.
The old man, with the stench of his partner in his nostrils, lay back down
and fell asleep.
When he awoke, the boots were on his feet.
He stood up and started walking, and the boots were soft and kind to his
old, tired feet.
The boots were his now, and he knew it. And he thought:
You never know when kindness pays off.
 He had invited the boots to be warm, he had not bothered them in their
sleep, and he had not helped his partner to steal them. And he had not run
away from the boots in the night. He showed the boots he understood their
position and was not afraid of them. And now he was rewarded.
The boots walked him along the road for a mile, and it was like walking on
air. When they reached the river, however, they turned toward it, in spite of
the old man choosing to go elsewhere. But they did not respond. They walked
him right into the river and the water went over his head and he was drowned.
A few moments later, the boots came out of the river squishing water,
covered in mud.
They rolled along the bank tossing water, like a happy dog, then they began
to walk, and by midday the mud was dry and falling off, and just up the road a
young man saw them coming and thought he might like to have them.
 Coronation
LEWIS ATE THE FEAST before him with enthusiasm, and when he finished, they

came for him. He felt excited and thrilled.

It was his coronation.
The little country of Novania was making him its King.
He couldn’t understand why he deserved such an honor, and it had all
happened so fast. After he killed the dragon, he couldn’t believe his luck.
Well, of course, the dragon was the reason. But the dragon had been no
problem. Guns take care of dragons easily.
And, of course, he had rescued the princess.
They took him down the long hall and through the green door and into the
coronation room and led him to his throne. He sat down gently and they
placed the hood over his face and the crown on his head.
He noticed he couldn’t lift his arms, but thought little of it. He was quite
tired.
He said, “I will be kind to my subjects.”

· · ·

“He thinks he’s being crowned a king,” said the warden. “Been talking about
it all week. He’s lost his nut. It’s the way he’s dealing with things. Thinks the
guy he killed, guy messing with his wife, was a dragon. Thinks the wife was a
princess he saved, not some slut. Ain’t that something? Thinks he’s in some
country he made up, that he’s getting crowned. Turned it all into a fairy tale.”
“He’s smiling,” said the reporter.
“Not when they throw the juice. He won’t smile then.”
“He’ll never know, will he?”
 “Not as far gone as he is. Lucky bastard.”

· · ·

And when they pulled the switch, Lewis felt a surge of what he thought was
enthusiasm at having been crowned; in an electric fast instant he wondered
when they would remove the hood, if it was part of some ancient custom.
Then his brain was fried.
The warden was wrong though.
Even after they threw the juice, he was smiling beneath the hood, but it
wasn’t pretty.
He showed all his teeth all the way up to the burnt and smoking gums.
 Ducks
ONCE UPON A TIME a little boy saw a little duck and followed it as it went down

toward the pond.

The little boy liked little animals, especially for torture. And the duck was
on his agenda.
As he followed the duck, he picked up a large rock.
When he got down to the water’s edge, the little duck began to waddle
faster, and the boy began to run faster, and the little duck ran down between a
row of thick tall weeds.
The boy ran faster and faster and pretty soon he was right on top of the
duck. He raised the rock, and then the tripwire got him.
It caught him across the ankles and down he went, the rock flying from his
hand.
He rolled on his back and tried to sit up, but didn’t. He was too startled.
He was surrounded by ducks. Lots of ducks.
Hundreds of ducks, and more were coming out of the brush and from the
pond behind him.
“We like little boys,” said one of the ducks in very good English.
“We don’t get many, but when we do,” said another duck, who with its little
wings was showing surprising dexterity as it rolled up the tripwire, “we really
try and enjoy ourselves.”
And in a moment the little boy knew what the old saying “nibbled to death
by ducks” meant in the most literal fashion.
 The Boy Who Became Invisible
THE PLACE WHERE I GREW UP was a little town called Marvel Creek. Not much

happened there that is well remembered by anyone outside of the town. But
things went on, and what I’m aware of now is how much things really don’t
change. We just know more than we used to because there are more of us, and
we have easier ways to communicate excitement and misery than in the old
days.
Marvel Creek was nestled along the edge of the Sabine River, which is not
a wide river, and as rivers go, not that deep, except in rare spots, but it is a
long river, and it winds all through East Texas. Back then there were more
trees than now, and where wild animals ran, concrete and houses shine bright
in the sunlight.
Our little school wasn’t much, and I hated going. I liked staying home and
reading books I wanted to read, and running the then considerable woods and
fishing the creeks for crawdads. Summers and afternoons and weekends I did
that with my friend Jesse. I knew Jesse’s parents lived differently than we did,
and though we didn’t have money, and would probably have been called poor
by the standards of the early sixties, Jesse’s family still lived out on a farm
where they used an outhouse and plowed with mules, raised most of the food
they ate, drew water from a well, but curiously, had electricity and a big tall
TV antennae that sprouted beside their house and could be adjusted for better
reception by reaching through the living room window and turning it with a
twist of the hands. Jesse’s dad was quick to use the razor strop on Jesse’s butt
and back for things my parents would have thought unimportant, or at worse,
an offense that required words, not blows.
Jesse and I liked to play Tarzan, and we took turns at it until we finally both
decided to be Tarzan, and ended up being Tarzan twins. It was a great
mythology we created and we ran the woods and climbed trees, and on
Saturday we watched Jungle Theater at my house, which showed, if we were
lucky, Tarzan or Jungle Jim movies, and if not so lucky, Bomba movies.
About fifth grade there was a shift in dynamics. Jesse’s poverty began to be
an issue for some of the kids at school. He brought his lunch in a sack, since
he couldn’t afford the cafeteria, and all his clothes came from the Salvation
Army. He arrived at history class one morning wearing socks with big S’s on
them, which stood for nothing related to him, and they immediately became
the target of James Willeford and Ronnie Kenn. They made a remark about
how the S stood for Sardines, which would account for how Jesse smelled,
and sadly, I remember thinking at that age that was a pretty funny crack until I
looked at Jesse’s slack, white face and saw him tremble beneath that patched
Salvation Army shirt.
Our teacher came in then, Mr. Waters, and he caught part of the
conversation. He said, “Those are nice socks, you got there, Jesse. Not many
people can have monogrammed socks. It’s a sign of sophistication, something
a few around here lack.”
It was a nice try, but I think it only made Jesse feel all the more miserable,
and he put his head down on his desk and didn’t lift it the entire class, and Mr.
Waters didn’t say a word to him. When class was over, Jesse was up and out,
and as I was leaving, Mr. Waters caught me by the arm. “I saw you laughing
when I came in. You been that boy’s friend since the two of you were knee
high to a legless grasshopper.”
“I didn’t mean to,” I said. “I didn’t think.”
“Yeah, well, you ought to.”
That hit me pretty hard, but I’m ashamed to say not hard enough.

· · ·

I don’t know when it happened, but it got so when Jesse came over I found
things to do. Homework, or some chore around the house, which was silly,
because unlike Jesse, I didn’t really have any chores. In time he quit stopping
by, and I would see him in the halls at school, and we’d nod at each other, but
seldom speak.
The relentless picking and nagging from James and Ronnie continued, and
as they became interested in girls, it increased. And Marilyn Townsend didn’t
help either. She was a lovely young thing and as cruel as they were.
One day, Jesse surprised us by coming to the cafeteria with his sack lunch.
He usually ate outside on one of the stoops, but he came in this day and sat at
a table by himself, and when Marilyn went by he watched her, and when she
came back with her tray, he stood up and smiled, politely asked if she would
like to sit with him.
She laughed. I remember that laugh to this day. It was as cold as a knife
blade in the back and easily as sharp. I saw Jesse’s face drain until it was
white, and she went on by laughing, not even saying a word, just laughing,
and pretty soon everyone in the place was laughing, and Marilyn came by me,
and she looked at me, and heaven help me, I saw those eyes of hers and those
lips, and whatever made all the other boys jump did the same to me…and I
laughed.
Jesse gathered up his sack and went out.

· · ·

It was at this point that James and Ronnie came up with a new approach.
They decided to treat Jesse as if he were a ghost, as if he were invisible. We
were expected to do the same. So as not to be mean to Jesse, but being careful
not to burn my bridges with the in-crowd, I avoided him altogether. But there
were times, here and there, when I would see him walking down the hall, and
on the rare occasions when he spoke, students pretended not to hear him, or
James would respond with some remark like, “Do you hear a duck
quacking?”
When Jesse spoke to me, if no one was looking, I would nod.
This went on into the ninth grade, and it became such a habit, it was as if
Jesse didn’t exist, as if he really were invisible. I almost forgot about him,
though I did note in math class one day there were stripes of blood across his
back, seeping through his old worn shirt. His father and the razor strop. Jesse
had nowhere to turn.
One afternoon I was in the cafeteria, just about to get in line, when Jesse
came in carrying his sack. It was the first time he’d been there since the
incident with Marilyn some years before. I saw him come in, his head slightly
down, walking as if on a mission. As he came near me, for the first time in a
long time, for no reason I can explain, I said, “Hi, Jesse.”
He looked up at me surprised, and nodded, the way I did to him in the hall,
and kept walking.
There was a table in the center of the cafeteria, and that was the table James
and Ronnie and Marilyn had claimed, and as Jesse came closer, for the first
time in a long time, they really saw him. Maybe it was because they were
surprised to see him and his paper sack in a place he hadn’t been in ages. Or
maybe they sensed something. Jesse pulled a small revolver from his sack and
before anyone knew what was happening, he fired three times, knocking all
three of them to the floor. The place went nuts, people running in all
directions. Me, I froze.
Then, like a soldier, he wheeled and marched back my way. As he passed
me, he turned his head, smiled, said, “Hey, Hap,” then he was out the door. I
wasn’t thinking clearly, because I turned and went out in the hall behind him,
and the history teacher, Mr. Waters, saw him with the gun, said something,
and the gun snapped again, and Waters went down. Jesse walked all the way
to the double front door, which was flung wide open at that time of day,
stepped out into the light and lifted the revolver. I heard it pop and saw his
head jump and he went down. My knees went out from under me and I sat
down right there in the hall, unable to move.

· · ·

When they went out to tell his parents what had happened to him, that
Marilyn was disfigured, Ronnie wounded, and James and Mr. Waters were
dead, they discovered them in bed where Jesse had shot them in their sleep.
The razor strop lay across them like a dead snake.
 Hole
AND SO THE DAY WAS ALMOST DONE and they, Janey, Joey and little Tommy, had

played out all the games they knew, and then it was decided the three of them
would dig a hole. They got digging tools from the garage and took turns
digging, and by the time it was dark the hole was about a foot wide and not
too deep and it smelled strongly of damp earth. The way the early moon was
shining into the hole it looked as if something silver were down there, and
Joey got down on his knees and looked in, and said, “There’s something
here.”
Janey and Tommy got down on their knees and looked, and Joey reached
out and took hold of the shiny object and lifted it. It was a funnel turned
upside down, silver and shiny and there was a little hole in the narrow end,
and Joey put it on his head, and said, “Look, I’m a Chinaman. I’ve got a
Chinaman’s hat.”
Tommy said, “That’s not nice.” But he thought: You know, it does look like
a hat.
Joey said, “We dug a hole all the way to China.” He began to dance around
the hole, waving his arms and kicking his feet.
A hand reached out of the hole and took hold of one of Joey’s legs and
jerked him down and into the hole which seemed way too small for him to go
into, and then there was nothing left to see but the metal thing back in place,
and then it lowered slowly down until there was only darkness, and when they
peered hard into the hole, and even went to get a flashlight for a better look,
they found the hole had a bottom and there was no metal object and there was
no Joey, and when they came back the next day looking for Joey with their
parents and all the neighbors, the hole was still nothing more than a narrow
and shallow hole, but now Joey’s clothes, the pants and shirt, were neatly
folded beside it, and his tennis shoes were tied and placed on top of the
clothes, and in the shoes were feet, and they appeared to have been bitten
neatly off at the ankles and there was a little card lying there amongst the
clothes, and the card said in very clean English script:

THANK YOU, COME AGAIN.

 Haunted House
“WHO LIVES IN THAT HOUSE?” the boy asked.

The other boy said, “Ghosts.”

“Aw, come on. I don’t believe in ghosts.”
“I do.”
“Well, I don’t know you all that well, so I don’t know if I can believe you.”
“I’m new here, but I’m trustworthy.”
“So you say.”
“You been here so long, why don’t you know about the house?”
“I don’t know. I just haven’t been up here before. I don’t know you or your
family.”
“I don’t know yours either.”
“Yeah, well, okay. That’s fair…I mean, I did say hi when I saw you at the
bottom of the hill.”
“You did.”
“I didn’t ask you to walk up here with me.”
“I know…I just wanted to be friendly.”
“We could be friends, you know. We could do something fun together. Let’s
break in the house tonight, and you’re so sure it’s haunted, prove it to me. Do
that, you and me are friends for life, ’cause then I’ll believe anything you tell
me.”
“No use waiting for tonight. I can prove it now.”
“They’ll see us break in.”
“Who’s going to break in?” the boy said and put his hand against the house
and went right through the wall. He called from inside.
“Do you believe in ghosts now? Are we friends?”
 But the other boy was already halfway down the hill, heading fast toward
home, almost to the street.
And as he ran across the street, a car passed through him, just as it did
every day since the day he had been hit by one in nineteen fifty-eight.
Sometimes, it takes a while before you know you’re a ghost.
 Little Blue Bottle
ONE TIME, THIS GUY found a little blue bottle down by the sea, and when he

removed the cork, inside the little blue bottle was a little blue imp wearing a
little blue coat and little blue pants and a little blue hat and little round blue
shoes because he had round blue feet.
The man said, “Holy shit, a little blue imp in a little blue bottle.”
“Yep,” said the imp.
The man had one eye against the opening of the little blue bottle, and that’s
how he could see the little blue imp.
“Do you grant wishes?" asked the man.
“I do. Well, I’m supposed to.”
The man removed his eye from the bottle so he could talk directly into the
opening.
“What does that mean? Do you, or don’t you?”
“I don’t. I should, but I don’t."
“Why?”
“’Cause, if I grant a wish, and it’s fulfilled, I owe the person who has
pulled the cork from the bottle three wishes. And after I grant the third wish,
I’m free to go.”
“What’s so bad about that?”
“Don’t want to go.”
“No?”
“No. Actually, it’s quite roomy inside here. I get twenty-four hour super
cable, one million channels, all the food I could want and plenty of women
and booze. What’s to want? When you’re my size, a place like this is really
roomy. And it has a downstairs you wouldn’t believe. I mean, I got the perfect
thing here. No work. All play. Everything at my fingertips.”
“But don’t you have to grant me a wish, even if you don’t want to?”
“Well…yeah, you got me there. I’m supposed to grant you three.”
“Then you must.”
“Look, life isn’t that bad for you. Not really. Working for things makes life
better. It’s the way to go, not getting it wished to you.”
“Did you work for what you got?”
“No. I sort of…inherited it. Fell into it, so to speak.”
“Then why should I work?”
“Guess you have a point.”
“First wish, lots of money.”
“Okay, done.”
“Where is it?”
“In your bank account. No matter how much you spend, there will always
be more, and the taxes will be paid. All you have to do is spend the money.”
“Cool. For my second wish, I want the best looking nasty redhead you can
find to be my constant companion.”
“Done.”
“Wow,” said the guy, his arm around the redhead, “this is nifty. Are those
natural?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Purrrr,” said the redhead.
“Now for my last wish.”
“Go for it.”
“I want to be you.”
“Whoa!”
“No, that’s what I want. You’ll be free, and I’ll be you. All those channels,
and all those women…Hey, I should have saved the redhead wish.”
“Too late for that.”
“So, for my third wish, I want to be you.”
“Very well. You’re me.”
And he was. The formerly little blue imp was now outside the bottle, and
he wasn’t blue anymore. He was now a nice looking man with his arm around
the redhead. Inside the bottle, the man said, “Hey, I’m blue.”
“You said you wanted to be me.”
“Hey, there’s no downstairs.”
“You found that out.”
“It’s small in here.”
“Very.”
“There’s not even a television, let alone cable with a million channels.”
“Noticed that too.”
“And where are those other women?”
“I lied. Aren’t any.”
“Can you do that?”
“I can. You got all your wishes, but it isn’t what you thought. And hey, I
got the one I wanted most, to be free. Only catch is, for me to get free, the
third wish is you have to want to be me. Not everyone falls for it.”
“How do I get out?”
“You don’t. Not unless you convince someone to be you, same as me.”
“You turd.”
“Yep.”
“What about the bank account?”
“You won’t need it in there. Nothing to buy. Oh, and it’s in your name. I’m
you now. You’re me. I don’t have powers like I had before, but that’s okay.
That’s the price of being free. And I got the redhead.”
“But now I have powers?”
“Sure. To grant wishes to others. It’s a pretty sucky position really.”
“Shit.”
“Yep.”
The formerly blue imp who was no longer blue or an imp, removed his arm
from the redhead’s waist and put the cork in the bottle. He flung the bottle out
to sea. The waves picked it up and carried it away.
The man and the redhead walked across the sand, toward town, and the
bank. He thought he ought to withdraw some money for dinner and the
weekend.
 Jack’s Pecker
JACK AWOKE TO FIND the redhead beside him had thrown off the covers. She

looked good lying there, long and lean and white. Well, not all of her was
lean. There were parts of her that were full and rounded and very fine, and she
had certainly been fine to him earlier, readily allowing him access to the lean
parts and the rounded parts. It was a one-night stand that might have one more
bonus round available.
As he looked at her body, lean and muscular, lying there on his satin sheets,
he realized that he felt nothing. Sure, he had used up a lot of energy, as had
she, but he felt certain that he should be able to do the deed at least one more
time.
Yet that should-be familiar tingling in his groin was absent.
Finally, he pulled back the sheets and gave himself a look. His penis and
testicles were gone. He was all smooth down there. He came out of bed in one
leap, yelled loud enough the redhead rolled over but didn’t wake. She merely
began to snore.
Jack was of the opinion that perhaps he should scream her awake, check
out her vagina, see if it had sucked up his equipment, but then he realized that
was ridiculous. He had had his penis and testicles when he had finished with
her, and now he didn’t. Where had the little bastards gone?
Jack looked in the bathroom, and all about the house, but no dick and balls.
Finally he heard the redhead awake in the bedroom, calling his name. He
went to the bathroom, wrapped a towel around his waist and went to her.
“Listen,” he said. “I’ve got a problem.”
“Problem?” she said, sitting up in bed, nude, tossing back her hair with a
slight shake of her head. “What kind of problem?”
 “My penis is gone.”
“Say what?”
He removed the towel. The redhead let out a scream.

· · ·

After she left, Jack dressed, felt odd pulling on underpants and feeling no
weight there. He went back to the bathroom, stood in front of the full-length
mirror and pulled down his underwear, took a peak at his reflection.
No doubt about it. His penis and testicles were gone. They hadn’t been
hiding behind his ass. They were gone. He looked like a Ken doll. He pulled
up his underwear and sat on the floor and wept.
He really liked that penis, those testicles, and now they had deserted him.

· · ·

In the kitchen, he found a note.

It was written on a note pad page, and he had not noticed it before, partially
because it had been covered slightly by a place mat.
He snatched up the note and read it:

Jack. You keep me way too busy with all the girls.
I like girls as much as the next dick, but you change around too much.
I fear a disease. Besides, to be perfectly honest, I needed a rest.

All the best

Your Penis.

P.S. Your balls say hi.

· · ·

Jack spent the day walking the streets. He went to all his old haunts, thinking
they too would be the haunts of his penis, knowing the penis was the brains of
the trio, and besides, what could his penis know that he couldn’t know?
But, alas, in all the gin joints and in all the restaurants and movie houses
and places he knew, he found no sign of his penis. Girls he knew saw him and
said hi, but he was too depressed to wave. He had only wanted one thing from
those girls anyway, and now that was over with. You couldn’t good time them
or good time yourself without a penis. Oh, you had the tongue and you had
your hands to do them good, but where was the good for yourself?
The only advantage he had found was that he could walk more
comfortably. He had never known his dick and balls had been in the way
before, and, of course, he felt light in the trousers, not an entirely
uncomfortable feeling.
He went by the police station, placed a missing person report, but no
answers there. They said if his dick turned up, they’d give him a call.

· · ·

Sitting home late at night, drinking, feeling lousy, wanting to have the warmth
of his privates between his legs—for he discovered that without his
equipment, he was quite cool down there, a little on the uncomfortable side—
he brooded. Finally, growing colder in the crotch, he packed his underwear
with cotton, went back to drinking.
As he sat there sipping, the phone rang. Reluctantly he picked it up.
On the other end was a sound like something smacking, a kind of snapping
sound that he knew instinctively was the uncircumcised tip of his foreskin
smacking together. The sound came again and again, repeating itself. Jack
grabbed up a pen and paper, took notes. There were long smacks and short
smacks.
Code.
Then the phone went dead.

· · ·
Next day, with the help of a book, Jack deciphered the longs and shorts. They
were in fact Morse code. He penciled down the results:

Miss me? I’m out here seeing the world.

Doing all the things you never had time to do, because you were
always using me to satisfy yourself. I have a greater purpose than
you’ve given me, and I’ve discovered it.

Your Pecker.

P.S. Hope this doesn’t cause you too much problem when you need to
urinate.

· · ·

Days went by, and Jack did not leave the house. He thought his pecker might
call. But the phone remained dead. A week later, when the mail came through
the slot in the door he found a post card. It had a picture of the Eiffel Tower
on it. On the back was a note.
It read:

Having a good time. Glad you’re not here. Miss me? Miss what I can
do?
By the way, French food is overrated.

Sincerely,
Your Pecker and Balls.

· · ·

The next card was from Germany. On the front was a shot of the Rhine river
and the city of Cologne. The note was simple:
 Wheeeeee!

Your Pecker.

· · ·

Jack went for days without shaving. He found he no longer had to pee. This
was a plus. He kind of lost his will as well. Finally, with a last push of
determination, he cleaned up and went out on the town. He met a very nice
but not overly attractive woman in a bar. Fact was, she was kind of pudgy.
They sat and talked for hours. He discovered he was really listening. Without
his pecker pushing at his pants, he was not preoccupied. He didn’t worry
about who saw him with her either. Before, just being seen with a not so
beautiful girl would have embarrassed him.
But tonight…Well, he discovered that he was enjoying himself. The girl’s
name was Janet and she had brown hair and she was a little plump, but she
was very smart.
A week later he was still seeing her. All they did was hold hands.
Two weeks later he invited her home to his apartment.

· · ·

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I like you with or without a pecker. A pecker is
nice, don’t misunderstand me. But, well, it’s not like I’ve been invited to see a
lot of them. Not someone plain—looking like me.”
They were sitting on his sofa, holding hands. He found it very comfortable,
and as far as Janet being plain, she had begun to look just fine to him. He was
having a hard time remembering what beautiful was or what it meant.

· · ·

Next day he got a series of photographs from his pecker. In one his penis and
testicles had crawled up on the statue of David in a museum in Florence. They
had nestled on top of David’s stone penis so that the only dick and balls
available to view now were Jack’s. It was kind of funny. On the back of the
photo it read:

Yours is bigger.

The other photos were of his dick and balls being held in the palms of
young women and friendly men. Jack had no idea who was taking the
photographs. Probably some volunteer.
The last couple of photographs showed his pecker sitting on a stack of
phone books in a restaurant, a plate of spaghetti in front of it. The tip of his
pecker was red with sauce.
The cards and notes and photographs continued to come in from all over
the world. Sometimes they were taunting, sometimes merely comical.
Jack discovered he was less interested. He had his mind on other things
now. Like Janet. She was smart and he had learned to just sit with her for
hours and talk, snuggle in bed. He even used his tongue and fingers to get her
off. What he got in return were kisses. He found this was enough.
Fact was, he had come to the conclusion that his dick and balls had been a
nuisance. They had guided his life more than his brain, and made him stupid.
For the first time in his life he was truly happy. And the reason was Janet.
Janet. Janet. Janet.

· · ·

About six months later, on a rainy night, Jack was awakened in his bed by a
noise at the window. It was raining outside. Lightning was flashing this way
and that across the sky and thunder was tumbling. At the window he saw a
small shape.
He sat up in bed and strained for a look.
When the lightning flashed he saw that it was his penis, pressing its
uncircumcised “face” against the glass, smearing it, dragging his balls around
on the outside brick window sill.
He watched it for awhile. It pecked at the glass. Finally it wrote a note on
the wet glass backwards, so that it looked correct from inside the house. It
was a simple note. It read:

I’m back. Let me in.

Jack got out of bed and went over to the window and gazed out at his dick
and balls. It was pathetic looking out there on the sill, like an oversized grub
worm with huge warts on its ass and nowhere to go.
Jack thought of all the good times he and his pecker had experienced, and a
slight pang of regret moved inside of him. But it moved only a short distance,
then laid down.
Jack studied his pecker on the sill for a full minute. Resting on the testicles,
the pecker rose up and moved about, and finally grew hard. He thought he
remembered how that hard-on had felt, but it was distant memory.
Lighting flashed. The rain pounded.
Jack pulled the curtains and went back to bed. He put his arm around Janet
and pushed his face into her hair.
After a little while, he no longer heard his pecker tapping on the glass,
because it no longer mattered.
 Hit Call
“HEY. IT’S ME.”

“Is it done?”
“Lady, it’s done.”
“Did he suffer much?”
“Just like you wanted him to. About the money?”
“You have to give me what I want out of this. Remember?
“I don’t like talking over the phone. It’s not safe.”
“This is a burner. First and only phone call I’ll make on it. Tell me.”
“It was slow. He suffered terribly. He cried. Kept saying he didn’t know
you. Tried to get out of it hard.”
“Know what?”
“What?
“He didn’t know me.”
“You’re confusing me.”
“I’m not his wife, and I didn’t hire you because he was beating me.”
“You said…You showed me things.”
“You can do wonderful things these days with a long distance camera and
photo shop. And I’m a good liar.”
“I don’t care what he did or if you’re married to him. You owe me five
thousand dollars. You said when it was done, you’d pay me.”
“Picked him at random. Learned some things about him, then I found you.
Wanted to see what I could get done for a promise of money. Didn’t even give
you up front money.”
“I know where you live.”
“You know where you think I live. You don’t even know my right name.”
 “Why would you do this?”
“Because I can.”
“You bitch.”
“This phone, it isn’t really a burner, but it won’t connect to me. It’ll
connect to you. I’m mailing it to the police.”
“They get me, they get you.”
“You don’t know who I am. You’ll take the fall for it. They’ll look for me
in all the wrong places. For all you know, I might not actually be a woman. It
wasn’t like you looked down my pants. It’s been a thrill, dumbass. For me.
Good bye.”
“Hey…Hey…Hey. Hello. Hello. Damn.”
 The Drunken Moon
HE WAS NOT THE MOON, but I thought he was when I would see him in the dark,

coming down the road by our house, wearing dark clothes, his pale face
floating above his collar. He was always drunk and staggering and singing to
the sky, his lunar face splitting open to reveal the crater of his mouth; a dark
hole that led to nowhere.
The real moon looked far less white than his face. Like his lunar twin, he
was nothing more than reflected light from stars and the real moon, orbiting
our little town by route of the circular, dirt road that made its way completely
around our fistful of stores, two churches, a smattering of houses, and a storm
shelter or two.
At night, chasing fireflies, when I saw him coming, for reasons unknown, I
would hide, watch him stagger by, his face a bouncing moon, moving toward
morning and a hangover. While I was up and on my way to school, I was
certain the Drunken Moon, the night walker, would be sleeping between
covers and bad headaches.
My friend Tommy, who always wore a Hopalong Cassidy hat, said, one
day, I will jump up behind him some night, scare him sober with a yell. That
will teach him not to drink, not to stagger down the road at night, white faced,
beneath the pale moon light, scaring everyone with the way he walks. I’ll
scare him.
One cold October the Drunken Moon’s house caught fire. People rushed to
put it out. There was no fire department. No police department. Just a fat
sheriff and a bucket brigade, a big man with an axe, and watchers who liked
the heat and the minor thrill of it all.
The Drunken Moon was not home. He was long gone and never seen again.
 The house was nothing more than a little room, a blackened shell of
scorched, framed wood, covered over in fire-crinkled ply-board; a room filled
with the bones of animals and children, and lying on the floor, partially
burned, was Tommy’s Hopalong Cassidy hat.
 Private Eye
WILLARD LAUGHED AS HE WALKED and said he was being followed by a private

eye.
Turned out the eye was quite public and easy to see as he pulled it down the
street on a string, and from time to time called it by his wife’s name.
 About the Author
With more than thirty books to his credit, Joe R. Lansdale is the Champion
Mojo Storyteller. He’s been called “an immense talent” by Booklist; “a born
storyteller” by Robert Bloch; and The New York Times Book Review declares
he has “a folklorist’s eye for telling detail and a front-porch raconteur’s sense
of pace.”

He’s won umpty-ump awards, including sixteen Bram Stoker Awards, the
Grand Master Award from the World Horror Convention, a British Fantasy
Award, the American Mystery Award, the Horror Critics Award, the Grinzane
Cavour Prize for Literature, the “Shot in the Dark” International Crime
Writer’s Award, the Golden Lion Award, the Booklist Editor’s Award, the
Critic’s Choice Award, and a New York Times Notable Book Award. He’s got
the most decorated mantle in all of Nacogdoches!

Lansdale lives in Nacogdoches, Texas, with his wife, Karen, writer and editor.

Find him online at www.JoeRLansdale.com.

 See Also
If you liked The Tall Grass and Other Stories, you are in luck! Joe Lansdale's
been stringing words together for decades, writing everything from Westerns
to Horror to Police Procedurals to Bildungsroman and back again, by way of
Southern Gothic. And about seventeen other sub-genres. The man's prolific.

You could probably pick up just about anything Joe's written and have a good
time with it, but seeing as you've just read a short story collection, maybe
that's the kind of thing you fancy. Assuming it is, we'd direct your attention to

HIGH COTTON: SELECTED STORIES OF JOE R. LANSDALE

It's twenty-two of Joe’s finest, chosen by his ownself, with lil’ introductory
bits for each. Do yourself a favor and grab a copy wherever fine ebooks are
sold.

Oh, and you know what? If you did like The Tall Grass and other Stories, do
everyone a solid and head back to where you bought it and write a little
review, with such stars and upthumbs as you see fit. It's one of the nicest
things you can do for an author. Thanks!
 Also by Joe R. Lansdale
“Hap Collins and Leonard Pine” mysteries

Savage Season (1990)

Mucho Mojo (1994)
Two-Bear Mambo (1995)
Bad Chili (1997)
Rumble Tumble (1998)
Veil’s Visit(1999)
Captains Outrageous (2001)
Vanilla Ride (2009)
Hyenas (a novella) (2011)
Devil Red (2011)
Dead Aim (a novella) (2013)
Blue to the Bone (???)

The “Drive-In” series

The Drive-In: A “B” Movie with Blood and Popcorn, Made in Texas (1988)
The Drive-In 2: Not Just One of Them Sequels (1989)
The Drive-In: A Double-Feature (1997, omnibus)
The Drive-In: The Bus Tour (2005) (limited edition)

The “Ned the Seal” trilogy

Zeppelins West (2001)

Flaming London (2006)
Flaming Zeppelins: The Adventures of Ned the Seal (2010)
The Sky Done Ripped (release date unknown)
 Other novels

Act of Love (1980)

Texas Night Riders (1983) (published under the pseudonym Ray Slater)
Dead in the West (1986) (written in 1980)
Magic Wagon (1986)
The Nightrunners (1987)
Cold in July (1989)
Tarzan: the Lost Adventure (1995) (with Edgar Rice Burroughs)
The Boar (1998)
Freezer Burn (1999)
Waltz of Shadows (1999)
Something Lumber This Way Comes (1999) (Children's book)
The Big Blow (2000)
Blood Dance (2000)
The Bottoms (2000)
A Fine Dark Line (2002)
Sunset and Sawdust (2004)
Lost Echoes (2007)
Leather Maiden (2008)
Under the Warrior Sun (2010)
All the Earth, Thrown to the Sky (2011)
Edge of Dark Water (2012)
In Waders from Mars (children's book) (2012)
The Thicket (2013)
Hot in December (2013)

…And that's not counting the pseudonymous novels, the short stories, the
chapbooks, anthologies, graphic novels, comic books and all the rest. Get the
full story at www.JoeRLansdale.com.
 Copyright
This digital edition of The Tall Grass and Other Stories (v1.0) was published
in 2014 by Gere Donovan Press.

If you downloaded this book from a filesharing network, either individually

or as part of a larger torrent, the author has received no compensation. Please
consider purchasing a legitimate copy—they are reasonably priced, and
available from all major outlets. And if you enjoy it, leave a positive review.
Your author thanks you.

© 2014 by Joe R. Lansdale

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead

—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
 Errata
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