Here is a short story written in 2019 by myself. I have a very bad understanding of the online literary scene and I have been frankly lazy in figuring it out so I didn’t know where might be a good home for it. Just to get it out in the world I’m going to post it here.
—and there was a red light beaming down from the Speedway sign but the ring of light was cast beyond where I stood. From my lonely vantage in the abandoned lot I could hear the intermittent passing of cars and the small whistle of wind through the tree branches and telephone poles.
I was standing alone in a pair of sneakers and a Playboi Carti t-shirt that stuck to my skin. I ran my tongue against the back of my teeth and heard a rustle of footsteps behind me and then I wasn’t alone anymore.
When we stood together, him to my right, I felt small and finite like a gust of wind would topple me and scatter my discrete parts across the ground while he remained like an obelisk looking down at my disintegration with an expression of shame tugging at his features. Nobody I asked could venture a consistent guess as to how long he’d been around; he would appear in the margins of old stories as a passing figure again and again and be thrown back further in time. He stood next to me with his fingers in his belt loops and it made me tentative to reach out and wonder what it was that lay beyond personhood, past the constraints of human beings, into the night towards a form that waited after.
We swapped stories in a perfunctory way. Then we talked more, ambling around the heart of it.
—There’s a way now, a pass in the hills covered in brambles, one where the dirt’s been pockmarked by rain and where if someone comes your way from the other direction one of you has to step off to the side so that the other can pass.
—So I would have to go alone?
—You could go with a partner, but you can only walk single file. If you took the lead you may as well be alone since only the absence of noise would alert you to your companion’s flight.
We waited by the curb and let a few more seconds tick away by our lonesome. He raised a hand to scratch at his unshaven neck. He hadn’t put on airs just to pay me a visit. His shirt was wrinkled and he had a bandana around his throat like a cowboy. He was a peripheral figure and his name, when it came up, was spoken in low tones or with a cocked eyebrow. He was someone who got you things you needed, papers, phone numbers of drug dealers, guns with the serial number filed off, but also forged doctor’s notes and thumb drives with a hundred movies on them. It wasn’t all so serious. I didn’t know if he had a job and I didn’t know if he had ever been involved with anyone.
I ventured a guess.
—People these days have misplaced their faith. They’re not faithless but they’ve chosen to put stock in whatever strikes their fancy. So instead you have a hundred churches with congregations of one or two and no one can agree on canon.
He sunk a hand into his back pocket and rocked on his heels.
—People have always been like that, it’s nothing special to today.
He had a rolodex, an honest analogue piece of plastic with nickel rings and paper notecards inside with contact information written down in blue ink. I didn’t know anyone else who didn’t just use their phone. A thought swam through my head and I indulged it: I wondered if he could induce in me an out of body experience. A car pulled into the gas station playing rap at a loud volume and the bass made a deep buzzing sound through the windows. An experience where I could escape myself and be a floating cloud of nothing and look at my body below and feel totally separate from it, feel weightless. I didn’t ask.
—Louis Mercer once told me that if the arc of history really was that long then it’d bend back towards itself, eventually.
There had been some talk of notes that I was after from the collection of a writer nobody read but whose papers were nonetheless kept in the library at the college. I didn’t know what I was after or what I was prepared to do.
Out of his pocket he took a small knife that glowed white-hot and he turned it over in his hands but it didn’t burn him. I tensed up. He stuck it out into the fabric of the night and tore a slit down through it and reached a hand past the frayed edges into a space beyond. He was a step past my form, a model or a prototype of another species that had centuries ago branched off from the withering tree from which I still hung.
He drew back his arm and reemerged cradling an object the size of a peach and it rolled in the palm of his hands. It had a velvet texture and an inky blue black color and it rang like a low bell that had been struck and reverberated out that you heard from a great distance. He pulled his top lip back and folded the knife into itself and stuck it back in his pocket. Stitching crossed back over the slit he’d opened and it strung itself shut with strands like a spider’s web.
—Mercer also said that through willpower one could achieve anything, even small acts of telekinesis. He claimed he could enter a fugue state via pure concentration and make a small pebble wobble with just his mind. But he also often wore white socks with black shoes, so.
A cold breeze snuck through and tousled my hair. I had a yen for everlasting life, to walk past the end of night and open my eyes on the other side and still feel the blood in my veins. I wanted to shed the confinement of responsibility and obligation of everyday life that was made all the more obscene by the fact of my death. I wanted to sit in a soft chair by a window with the blinds open and when I would think about memories be sifting through a hundred and fifty decades of material.
—Well maybe I’ll take the path with a group of others, like a caravan or a pilgrimage.
He looked at me sideways.
—I’m not so sure that’s a good idea.
I wandered out like a gaucho and saw figures watching at the edge of the mist and saw his shape flitting against the pale dish of the moon. I started to move at a jog and then at a run, looking over my shoulder and still finding him in pursuit. And he had wings sprouting out and he lurched through the air and I heard my shoes slapping the ground and drew in sharp gulps of air. I threw my glance forward and cast about for the break in the tall grass that would the show the foot of the trail, the path I could take without fear of pursuit, the one I had been made to take alone, an easy path that lopes across the countryside that would crest over a ridge and bathe me in golden sunlight so I’d know I’d never feel death’s kiss and shed my rough and calloused skin and be something else, something with a shape not catalogued by science. I kept running but I couldn’t find the path and I started to panic. I wondered if he’d given me faulty directions and gone back on the bargain, started the game with a leg up, and he bobbed closer through the shroud of night and I ran through the brush across the field covered in inky shadows and ringed by mist bleeding red from the gas station’s neon sign.
I looked back once more and tripped over something and crashed to the ground. I picked myself up on my hands and knees and felt around the dirt and found the small dark ball he’d pulled out of the tear in the night by my feet. It rang out in a low dulcet tone and weighed heavy in my hand, glowing a navy hue and hushing the screeches of cicadas in the stalks of grass around me. I brushed a thumb over its surface; memory is a funny thing. When I was younger (how else can I describe a memory?) I owned a copy of a novel that I carried around in my back pocket, the spine broken and the pages dogeared, written by the author whose papers I’d wanted to steal from the library. In the novel a woman comes to the epiphanic realization that her social relations are circumstantial and flimsy, her career a floundering mishap and her family distant and cold, more and more like strangers with whom she shares an obligatory set of customs each day. She realizes this and flees to the countryside, to a family cabin, and resolves to live a simple yet purposeful life. And yet communion with nature does not bring her peace but instead sparks nightmarish episodes culminating in a hallucinatory evening wherein the woodland creatures rise up to lynch her like il duche. The reader is left unsure of the scene’s veracity and that, I thought, was the author’s intention. I thought about that book and the sentences underlined in pencil and the bookmark I used and he fell upon me, brushing his lips against my skin and I felt the night deepen and widen like a chasm and I teetered on the rim and gazed out into the night and began to fall.
Theodore Sovinski 