They moved house after she came out of hospital. She thought the neighbours knew. Pregnant again, on a new estate at the edge of fields, she was blank here, tabula rasa as the grey cement pouring over the soil and the fields turning to stone.
She couldn’t remember a thing. Perfectly normal, the doctor said after her procedure: a standard series of electric shock treatments. Her memory was gone; they’d given her Valium.
She set herself to her penance, rearing her last child, preparing to meet the next. Her husband worried; they’d come through a nightmare but where was she?
On the first day she went to her kitchen and stayed there. Its window looked onto a green hill mounting to a cloudy horizon. She sat looking out, cigarettes purling smoke from an ashtray, little bottle of tablets never far away.…
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Someone has been replacing his wife in pieces. He first notices it when she pulls a spring dress over her head as they prepare for dinner with her parents, the fabric rustling round her bare legs.
Have you always had that mole there?
She’s distracted, checking her makeup in the mirror. Where?
There. Beside your left knee.
She barely glances at it. I think so. Sure.
Then it’s the scar on her shoulder that she’s had since childhood, crawling under the neighbors’ barbwire fence, tearing her jacket, shirt and flesh. Running his finger along her skin as they lie in bed together in the dimness of early evening, he doesn’t feel its familiar traces.
She shrugs. It faded. Scars do that.
It’s smaller things, too, like one earlobe suddenly thicker than the other, or the pinkie finger on her right suddenly longer, thinner.…
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The old man clutched the young man’s arm. He clasped it with both hands as if he were falling off a cliff. In a way he was. In another way, he was burning.
“Every second counts in this life,” he whispered in his hospital gown. He lay in bed, living through machines for too long, long enough to hold on for the young man to get there from miles away.
“What’s that?” the young man said bending over the old man. “I missed it.” The young man could see the mildew growing inside the old man. He could hear the machines pump electric air into him. He saw the old man’s heart skip rocks along the line on a monitor. But he couldn’t concentrate. Why did he take those mushrooms at his buddy’s house an hour ago?…
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I’m trying to explain to Richard why fonts matter. I’m not sure what to call Richard. Is he a blind date? Is that term even in use any longer? I don’t want to call him my internet date. The sound of that phrase is large and echoing, proof that I should just leap off the Coronado Bay Bridge and get it over with. Blind date, though, sounds as though he should have walked into Lestat’s for our coffee date tapping his cane, eyes covered by dark glasses. He didn’t. By his reaction when he saw me, I almost wish he had.
Let’s just call him Richard, then, and hope this is over soon.
“Times New Roman just has something soothing to it,” I say, sipping my soy chai.…
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I rest in the bed listening to my upstairs neighbors fighting or fornicating, it all sounds the same. It reminds me of my lonely existence. My last boyfriend left months ago and trashy novels have been my only visitor, sneaking in when they are not wanted. I bang my broom on the ceiling as they get too loud, reminding them that they have neighbors. At least our bedrooms are on the corner and they have the top floor. I am the only one they bother. I roll over with my Cosmo, reading about some woman’s drug addiction and return to the real world, pressing my ear to the pillow hoping to block out the noise. Ceiling chips down on me as it often does when they near the end.…
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Shae strummed her guitar angrily in a fit of frustration. She’d been working on the once promising song for days now, and it seemed she was getting nowhere with it. She paused. Then she strummed the chord again, more gently this time, listening closely. To her surprise, the chord was exactly what the song called for.
Delighted, she decided to push her luck even further. As thoughtlessly as she’d strummed the first chord, she played a second, and a third. Both were perfect, almost uncannily so.
She looked up from the guitar over to where her dad’s body lay on the bedroom floor. Blood pooled around his head and shoulders where the carpeting had become saturated. Tonight must be my night for overcoming stubborn obstacles, she thought, taking her penchant for understatement to a new level.…
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He slipped the bullet into the chamber and gave it a spin with a flick of the wrist. The chamber rolled for a few moments before slowing to a halt, and then he cocked the piston and set the revolver down on the table.
We picked up our glasses.
“To the death,” I said.
“To the death,” he said.
I threw back the shot and felt the heat of the poison as it spilled down my throat. The room swam in a shimmering haze as I set down the glass.
Maxim drew a silver coin from his pocket. He held it between two fingers up next to his face. “Heads,” he said.
The coin was scratched and inscribed with odd characters. Pictured was a rudimentary carving of a goddess holding a scale in one hand and a bow in the other.…
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