Other Terrors, page 26
I glide in to the chilling void and swim toward the stranger until it swallows me.
All I hear is my heart.
My eyes are open, and I see nothing.
Once you’re underwater long enough, your most common senses dull, but you start to feel the pulse of other life surround you. Even with your eyes closed, the slightest movements can be detected, minor waves alerting your skin. Something is in here with me.
I can’t breathe.
The water feels heavy, conspiring against every thrust of my arms and legs, grappling me, holding me in place for what’s next. My chest is tightening. All this liquid around me doesn’t feel loose anymore; it constricts, like a bicep on my throat and hard legs crushing my midsection until it isn’t even water anymore, just a myriad of limbs strangling any movement I try to make. Powdered armpits and heavy thighs. Pectorals and knuckles press into me. Sharp cheekbones and chiseled jaws lean on my shoulders, pushing me further into a maelstrom of flesh, eyes, and teeth, wisps of hair tickling my nose in hopes I’ll choke.
I say goodbye to myself as I cease treading and sink.
It can be said there is no light here.
There is no warming touch of a long-gone family member. There are no welcoming kingdoms or punishing pits of fire. There is only nothing. I am ready for it unless someone saves me. No one does, so I breach the surface, gulping air into my lungs. I look around for anyone watching. Scream to hear if anyone is listening—if anyone cares I am about to disappear.
The faces of my so-called friends stay buried in the sand, their bodies a mass of swollen arms, tattooed with tribal markings, crossing over pelvic bones and extended across lowered shorts. Bare chests with faint hairs curling around nipples. Fingers vanishing within folds of skin. The bonfire is dead and so is the music, judging from the broken guitars.
Even in the pale morning light, I can see the pores of their skin gasping. Whether acne-scarred, dark, tan or damn near translucent, all their skin is perfect, screaming to be used. To be touched. To be abused. I imagine the skin of their future bodies, the birthmarks rotting, the ingrown hairs and angry scars, the worrying lines of age, the droop of dying flesh, the rolling pustules where former muscles lay stacked, the hard bulges turned to somber sags. Then the rot sets in. Blackened inside and out, the blood spoils, and the skin is sallow, darkens, ripe no more. Until the edges of bone push out and the gaseous pockets bloat and flutter, the monstrous shake-rattle-and-roll of the final breath. Then stillness until their skin rustles again from the scurrying of the insects within. The guys belch, roll around, moan, smack their lips. They’re ready to do it all again. It’s 1:45 p.m.
The air is a furnace. A hot, constant breath on my face and, in contrast, the shore feels cool and unbalancing like stepping on sloughing skin. Like the flesh of the girl they found last weekend washed up among the jellyfish. We’ve been having a particularly nasty summer of them, dotting the Massachusetts coastline with translucent blemishes.
The cops come for us first. The burners of the boulevard. The fuckups. The waste-oids. What did we see? Who were we with? What were we doing? Like most times, we knew nothing. We saw nothing. Yet they still asked where we were all night. If I have to be honest, she did look a little familiar, but I didn’t tell them that.
She also kinda looked like the other boy they found earlier this summer. The way they died, I mean. We had just finished a show at the Arc and could barely see straight from the whiskey and weed. The screams coming from the beach brought us face-to-face with death. We overheard them say they couldn’t tell if the tears in his body were from teeth or something else. Either way, he wasn’t getting up again.
I can’t hear myself think with the caution tape we tore down, flapping like a loose tongue in the wind. I couldn’t hear myself think over the distant dizzying screams from the Midway. Couldn’t hear myself think over the day-to-day chatter of these people I surround myself with.
Frank, all guns and gums, always talking, always trying to overpower a conversation with poor attempts at humor or some ill-timed remark. Bobby, this sad sack right-hand man who “yups” himself into every bad situation Frank can get him in. Sam, whose wild eyes spin like slot machines and, god forbid, if they land on you, his fists always follow. And me, the guy who they all grew up with, just always there by their side for amusement, argument, or worse.
The water is black with little interruptions of foam, bursts of white static on a dark screen. I often wonder, as in tonight, if I am the only one witnessing each wave as it crashes and dies. Life gone just shortly after it is born, observed by one. If so, it deserved better than me watching over it.
I turn from the ocean, look to the street, devoid of life, absent of movement, and within a flicker of the sodium vapors, I spot a curl of smoke and follow its trail dancing out of the cracked window of a midnight-blue truck. The streetlamps backlight the lone figure in the driver’s seat, until the cigarette’s cherry glows, brightening his eyes, and I feel like he is watching me. No. I know he is watching me.
Morning becomes late afternoon, and I put two beers in my tote along with a piss-scented paperback covered with demons.
The strip is filthy. Detritus from the night before clogs the sewer drains, and stoned teenagers are replaced by manic children with sugar-spun grins and sticky fingers. The arcades bleep and bloop in protest to the maniacs banging their fists on its buttons. Families with bad teeth and scorched skin lurch up and down the strip in hopes for the excitement that, judging from their faces, will never come. They’re all smiles though, faces painted with sickening lights, so I move on, stone-faced and silent.
I’m stuck in a loop. Watching myself walk down the same street, drink the same swill, and get in the same trouble. It’s my own fault. I can’t blame stupid Frank and his penchant for fucking and fighting. Can’t blame the tool bags we hang out with who go to the same places and repeat old stories so often that I wonder how they have time to create new memories. Can’t blame my own sad, squirming brain for wanting something different. No, not wanting. That’s a choice. Needing something different. I can blame myself for not doing something about it.
At the end of the strip, where the new condos shove the wilting cottages aside, signs on the boardwalk mock everyone with slogans such as if you lived here, you’d be home right now.
I think, If I lived here, I’d be dead right now.
I jump onto the sand where the jetty rocks carve a long tooth into the ocean’s face. With each step forward, I slip on the seaweed snot clinging to their surfaces, and in one bad move, I envision myself twisting, falling fast, and splitting the crown of my head open. Then I see it happen again, faster, and this time a pointed rock pierces my eye, punching through my brain. In the next vision, I fall backwards, slap my skull, and slide into the ocean where big fish with rolling eyes wait for me to slip into their mouths. None of that happens.
I close my eyes and imagine the expanse of the ocean’s underworld, past where the light dies, and what lives below. These deities existing without a care for what happens to any of us above. I envy them.
Frank, Sam, and Bobby stalk the arcades, bare-chested and blasted, the neon lighting up their sun-kissed skins. Girls’ eyes devour every detail from the sculpt of their abdominal muscles to the creases in their shorts. Frank will eventually pick them up and lurch back to our cottage to impress with his skills in bed. Thing is, I’ve watched him go at it before with a bunch of dialogue yanked from porn films, and ill-advised offbeat thrusting techniques that probably gave the girls a migraine more than an orgasm. They shouted anyways, and heaved and hawed and praised him, but usually avoided his eyes when they left.
Anyway, this girl that had washed up on the sand, her mouth overflowing with the head of a bloated jellyfish, definitely was one of the girls from the night before. The one who’d said Frank’s lips tasted like cotton candy, and he’d told her no fucking way: It’s for little shits and fags like Whittier. He’d pointed toward me.
I leave the pack by their dying fire and go for my walk, watching the ocean, staring to where the sky meets the water, trying to decipher where the night ends and the sea begins. I turn and see, under the streetlamp, the midnight blue truck, idling, its window cracked, and a curl of smoke dancing out. The engine growls in the dark. I can’t see in, but I know he can see me. I can feel his eyes on every part of me. I return my gaze to the sea to discern if the horizon was even real.
It’s another day though it doesn’t feel like it, and I’m three beers down. I strip down and dive in the water. My head bobs in rhythm with the waves as I float away, letting the current do what it will with me.
A piercing light catches my eye. On a small island, there is the figure again, this time a brownish blur, shimmering in the waves of heat, distorting my view. I hear the slight backbeat of a drum. A drum that gets louder, the beat heavier, closer . . . my heart. He stands high, impossibly tall, growing in length each time a ripple of water breaks over my brow, and I tread closer, no longer caring that with each push toward this figure, I am further away from what I know. I squint, and his form becomes defined. An impossible body, growing, thickening, and standing tall above the surface.
This figure waves to me and I no longer feel alone.
I hear a muted shout from the shore. I dip below and close my eyes, knowing I’m in too deep to see a bottom. Another shout from land as I surface. This time I squint toward the island and the brown blur has definition, muscle; it is waving its limbs that look too perfect to be real. They wave faster now, and I go under. When I surface he is closer, his limbs engorged, and the shouts get louder when my head rises again, and I realize I am far from the jetty and even farther from shore when the shouts crystallize and I hear the familiar word too late. The last word you want to hear while floating above endless darkness.
Dagger-long teeth punch in and out of my chest and stomach with the impact of fists, their heft tearing me, gnashing my guts, everything moving in and out, emptying around me; everything that is me disperses in the churn of the water, and the only screams I can hear are my own. It rips me back and forth so hard, the water is no longer liquid. Past the point of help, I am witnessing my own final moment and wondering, as it all leaves me so quickly, how it happens so easily. I finally see my reflection in the black eye of the shark before it rolls back into its head and its mouth opens. A final bite severs my neck, and more of me floats away. I look to the island, where the man, his naked back to me, retreats until I can’t see him anymore. I sink as sunlight and foam turns red and the final tug pulls me below.
The next day, the beach is closed. Empty except for a line of cruisers and some new yellow tape, fighting the wind, batting from the blades of the copters scanning the water below. The signs warn the swimmers even though we all know they will be ignored. Frank and the boys are stoned, asleep, nursing deep purple bruises on their knuckles that some kid’s face messed up. Within close proximity of these monsters, wheezing and inhaling the hot stench of their own breath, I down my first beer and walk outside to breathe again. I pull out a cigarette, light it with the flash snap of a Zippo, cough, flick it away, and keep moving before they realize I am gone.
Two more beers go down quick on the walk, so I have a nice buzz that’s morphing into a headache. Feels like I have a soaked washcloth covering my forehead, the kind my mother dressed me with during a fever when I stayed home from school. For a moment, I wonder how she is, and then I take two more pills to forget and watch the kids whip around in janky coaster carts until the bolts come undone and the cars plummet off the track, slow enough I can see their smiles turn to screams, but fast enough that the impact with the beam smashes their teeth clear through the back of their skulls, their scalps landing at the feet of little girls with fists of dripping vanilla ice cream, eyes stuck shut with blood.
The pizza stand is overrun, so I will have to wait to eat even though my stomach is turning and I’m thinking of the dead girl with the jellyfish stuffed in her mouth and the dead boy and Frank and his jawline and his terrible tattoos and the man on the island with the long limbs.
I feel the crush of the crowd, their breath on my shoulders, while I change my dollar for tokens. They all close in, their gums smacking, their red and purple skins sliding against each other, piling up, faces in each other’s armpits, smiling and laughing and screaming, their eyes jittering around in their sockets like electric, haunted house skeletons.
Nothing feels comfortable: these people stare at me; these guys look like they want to fight me; these girls laugh behind closed hands; these parents shield their children’s eyes from me as if they have read my thoughts. As if my eyes project the images of all of them dying in the hideous accidents that loop in my head. I just want to be back in the ocean, dark and cold, slipping beneath the waves, sinking, and then I see the truck. I’ve never seen the midnight-blue truck in broad daylight. No silhouette, no cracked windshield, no curl of smoke. The sun pounds down on all of us, every detail of this circus brightly displayed, no shadows to hide in, and I couldn’t be more frightened. My throat is closing, and I’m afraid if I make a sudden move he will be there by my side, waiting for me to take his hand, to join him, and everyone will see it happen and understand.
I am not one of you.
The man on the island never returned. He might have never been there. I sink beneath the waves into the black waters, so deep that even the light glinting off the surface has the appearance of luminescent minnows so far from my reach. I can only hear the muffled pound of surf punishing the land.
The somber slap of my heart in my head.
I am still, holding my breath.
Eyes open, stinging with salt.
Expecting a dark shape to appear from the darkness below, with its eyes rolling back, and its jaws open to take me in.
If I can fit between its teeth.
These white daggers.
I tighten my legs together to descend quicker. I open my eyes and see nothing below the pale ghost of my imperfect body, and I expect my last vision will be to disappear into its gullet, whole.
I wake to a rumble, and I believe I am in its stomach.
I hear the chug of a motor, and my eyes open, and I see his tanned, tight chest and my chin moves against the soft hairs, my cheek brushes his throat. We hear the cries of the children at the amusement park. I can see the crackle of a bonfire as Frank and his boys splay out with a group of strangers, telling the same stories, drinking from the same bottles and singing the same songs. The window is cracked and the stranger is smoking. The curl of smoke trails his nose, around his cheek, and swirls outside the midnight-blue truck parked under the streetlight. We are backlit silhouettes to anyone watching us from the shore, wondering who we are and what we are doing here.
My name is John Whittier. He is still a stranger. For now, that’s all I need.
The Voices of Nightingales
by M. E. Bronstein
After day one at the Accademia, Lynn needed two things: a drink and quality time with the ruins. And so Jenny grabbed a bottle of cheap grappa, and Lynn and Simon followed her downhill. They passed the bottle back and forth, took long swigs as the night’s first stars slipped through the teal and orange dusk.
They came to the sunken amphitheater carved into the hillside—the last real remnant of the Usignoli’s original presence here. It was full of scattered columns, jumbled piles of gray brick, tufts of yellow-green grass. A bubble of history, loudly different from the telephone wires in the distance, the bright lights that glowed in the Accademia’s entrance uphill.
The three of them stretched out in the grass while the cicadas buzzed and the wind stirred their hair, and they mimed, raising cups to each other.
“I really hope you’ll change your mind,” said Simon.
Lynn shrugged and hoped he’d leave it alone.
“Simon’s not wrong,” said Jenny. “You know you’ll learn the language better if you try producing it actively. Whether Traccia’s your end goal or not, taking at least half a whack at it’d be useful.”
Simon nodded vigorously.
Lynn didn’t answer for a moment, but made a mental note to reprimand Jenny later for taking Simon’s side. “Maybe,” she said. “I’ll think about it. I’ll admit I’m starting to develop some weird affection for pieces of it, anyway.”
“I have decided that I love the shit out of Traccia,” said a slightly drunken Jenny. “It’s so fucking weird. Potent feelings, you know? Love ’em. Even the bad ones. Fear and hate. Look at the gross and pretty pictures they’ve given us. Scaly words with forked tongues. Nightingales’ blood staining the sunset. Lactating monks.”
“Love me a good lactating monk,” agreed Lynn. She aped the tenor of Traccia: “‘Thou shalt suckle at the breast of the true man’s word, rather than the teat of the poisonous Nightingale.’”
Jenny collapsed against Lynn as she cackled, and Simon had to rescue their bottle of grappa so it didn’t all spill in the grass. He looked a little confused, but chuckled along anyway. Probably thought he had gotten his way.
Earlier that day, their first lesson had taken place in an airy gray room lined by pale and bony columns, snarling faces carved into their capitals. Their instructor (Paolo) introduced himself. He paced before a chalkboard and summed up what most of his audience already knew: how the medieval writing system known as Traccia first evolved from an elaborate censorship project (though he didn’t call it that), an effort to suppress the writings of a small group of Apulian poets generally known as the Usignoli.
Abbreviations were standard form in Latin manuscripts. For instance: “puella” meant “girl,” while “puellam,” in the accusative, situated “girl” as a direct object. Paolo wrote on the board, his chalk chirping:
