The It

Based on a True Story

A clump of popsicle sticks and rubber bands somehow became animate and set out to free solo El Capitan. It did well until two thirds of the way up, when It was caught in an ice storm. The cold made its rubber bands brittle and they snapped and the clump was undone and the broken bits of rubber and wood were scattered. Someone would’ve gone out to recover the body, such as it was, but only one person knew anything about it, and he couldn’t be bothered.

The 25 Bus

It was a clear, warm, summer morning. Jim was doubled over at the bus stop catching his breath. His alarm hadn’t gone off—or he had turned it off in his sleep—so to make his bus he had to rush out the door and run all the way. Now he wasn’t sure, had he missed the bus, or was it coming any minute? He took out his phone to check the time, but—shit!—in his hurry he’d left it back at home.

Five and then ten minutes passed, or at least what Jim thought was ten minutes, and still the 25 bus didn’t come round the bend. It’d be another hour before the next one. Might as well go home, Jim thought. Call into work and tell them he’d be late. But just as he was about to leave, the 25 came toddling into view. Jim was relieved for a moment, and then not: There was something wrong with the bus. It was crawling down the road, limping, dragging itself. A broken-down bus wouldn’t get him to work on time, wouldn’t get him anywhere, so before it had even reached his stop Jim had given up on it and was headed back home.

The bus’s engine suddenly roared and it billowed a cloud of black exhaust and lurched forward, jumping the curb, flattening the bus stop sign—the one Jim had just been standing by—and running down the embankment along the highway. After a moment of stunned inaction, Jim followed the bus, running down the embankment muttering, “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit”, as he went. The bus was still running, the engine still roaring and the exhaust still belching black smoke, but its tires were only spinning in place and digging into the earth now. A fir tree at the bottom of the hill had caught the bus and was holding it in place.

Jim couldn’t see inside the bus, the windows were tinted. He approached several times to try to pry open the doors, but the bus was growling and trembling like a wounded animal, and Jim was scared back. Eventually he did get hands on the door, but he couldn’t pull it open. Water was trickling out of the seams. His hands were left wet, and they smelled, a strange smell, like the ocean, and vinegar, and road kill that’s been left too long and popped.

Unable to do anything to help, Jim stepped back and could only watch. If he’d had his phone then he would’ve called for help, but he didn’t have his phone. Maybe he could flag down a car. He tromped back up the embankment. He looked up and down the street, but there wasn’t a single car. It’d been quite that morning, he recalled. He would’ve noticed if the streets were deserted, wouldn’t he?

Back down the hill, the bus started coughing and choking, and then it shuddered and died. The doors flung open and the water emptied out. The windows, it turned out, weren’t tinted, the bus was just filled with water so murky it looked black— or would a bus full of clean water look just as black? In any event the water that had filled the bus wasn’t clean. Seaweed spilled out with it, and sea stars, driftwood, barnacles… and body parts, human body parts, gooey and partially dissolved. The smell coming out with the water didn’t have the undertones of acidity or brine like the little bit Jim had gotten on his arms. Even from several yards away and up on the sidewalk, Jim started gagging on the smell of death and decomposition almost as soon as the doors were opened.

And still not a car to be seen, until, at last, limping round the bend, came the 25 bus—another 25 bus—with windows tinted black, and water trickling from every seam.

The Good Samaritan

“What’s your birthday?”

“May 9th, 1969.”

A dental assistant is going through the usual routine with a new patient, a forty-eight year old man, clean shaven with a buzz cut, red hair flecked with white, a bald spot on the crown of his head, and dressed nicely with a pastel blue button up shirt, black slacks, a leather belt and shiny black leather dress shoes. He’s sitting in the dentist’s chair, reclined— the cuffs of his pants are hiked up, and the dental assistant can see even his socks are nice dress socks, dark blue argyle. But the man isn’t nice, she can see that clearly enough. Not to say that he’s mean, but he isn’t nice as in nicely dressed. This dentist’s office mostly gets poor people, people on state insurance. The man may be nicely dressed but he’s actually a bum, one that’s been taken in by some religious do-gooder who’s gotten him cleaned up, dressed up, and on state insurance, amongst other things. Their hope for him is that, if they can get him on his feet, he’ll be able to walk, so to speak, but unfortunately they’re wrong, in this case. The man may be kind, and gentle, and clean, as in not a drug addict, but he’s been on his feet before and each time winded up indigent. He’s dressed nicely but his face is weathered and he has the mannerisms of a prey animal, so nobody would be fooled.

“Are you taking any prescription medications?”

The man shakes his head no.

“Are you currently experiencing any tooth pain?”

The man again shakes his head no.

She fastens a cuff around his left wrist to measure his blood pressure. She instructs him to uncross his ankles, which he does, then she places his hand over his right shoulder and starts the machine. His blood pressure is on the high end of the normal range. She raises his chair, and he jumps. She apologizes for startling him, and explains she’s going to take some x-rays. She leaves the room for a moment and returns with a lead vest that she drapes over his torso and shoulders. She prepares a film for the first x-ray, wrapping it in plastic.

“Open”, she says, and the man does. He has no teeth. In place of teeth he has bits of gravel, shards of glass, screws and springs embedded in his gums, which are oozing bright red, fresh blood.

Novice Wizard

Harry Potter’s a lie. Magic doesn’t require wands, and there aren’t different sorts of magic, and it doesn’t have any rules. Magic is simply commanding reality, saying the sky is red, and then it’s red, or that the river is ice, and then it’s ice, or that the young woman manning the tacky little hat shop is an old woman, and then she’s an old woman. It’s as simple as that, if you have magic, and impossible of you don’t.

Here we have a novice wizard. “Don’t lock the door”, his dad had said, because his dad didn’t have the key to get back in. But our novice wizard saw in this an opportunity to develop his magic, so he locked the door and shut it. If his magic was strong enough he would just tell the door to open, and the door would be open.

His magic wasn’t strong enough. Now his dad was angry with him. It was hot outside, and boring, and they were already late for lunch before they got locked out of the house. But these are small things. If our wizard is ever to develop his magic, then he has to lock doors that he has no key to, over and over again, until he finds his magic. And if he never does, then he’s found that he lacks magic, which is almost as good, for it’s a much better thing to find by trying that you have no magic than it is to never find—by never trying—that you do.

Spelunking in Bed

One year, when I was nine, I missed Thanksgiving because I was sick. I was stuck in bed with a high fever. I could hear everyone in the dining room eating and having a good time. Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday, and I wished I had an appetite, or felt like getting out of bed.

I decided to go spelunking in my comforter. When I was little I would put a blanket over my head and pretend I was exploring some deep dark cave. Down in the cave I found the usual things, a chamber of ice, a pool of magma, a monster, a pretty girl, that sort of thing. Then I found my head. It was giant, the size of a two story house. I crawled in through the mouth and proceeded on my hands and knees. It was hot and moist and dark, and the further I went the more cramped it was until I was on the brink of panic and tried to turn around, but the way back was blocked. I ran on all fours down the passage like a dog chasing a rabbit—or like a rabbit running from a dog, more like. Then, without seeing it coming, I found myself in the most beautiful place I’d ever seen, and I decided never to leave.

American, Full Stop

That scene in American Beauty—the neighbor boy’s video of the plastic bag blowing in the wind—was computer generated because, really, there isn’t any beauty in the world.

On the Surface of the Sky

A damp, soggy, gray and sunless afternoon, typical for November. And on this typical day we find three friends, middle schoolers, killing time in their typical way, meandering down the train tracks and staying out of sight while they do things they’re afraid to be caught doing. In this case they’re smoking cigarettes. Joseph—everyone but his friends call him Joe—had snuck four cigarettes from his dad’s pack. Once he and the others were far enough down the tracks, Joseph would take one out of his pocket, light it, take a puff, and pass it to one of the others, like it was a joint. It would make its rounds while the three complained about school, teachers, parents, younger siblings— except for Virginia, who did have a younger brother but didn’t see him, and who didn’t live with her parents, but with an aunt and uncle. When the first cigarette was gone, they’d light the next and do the same with it. After two cigarettes, none of them would really want to smoke a third, but they’d all pressure each other into it. The fourth cigarette would be lit, but never would anyone take a drag off it; they’d take turns holding it for as long as they could stomach being so close to the smoke.

Things had been getting awkward between the three of them. Joseph could sense that something had changed, but couldn’t put his finger on it and didn’t want to bring it up. What he was noticing was that Virginia and Josh—the third one—had become boyfriend and girlfriend, but for the time being were keeping it secret. They talked on the phone for hours each night, sent each other pictures back and forth, exchanged meaningful looks around their friends, and sometimes they even went down the tracks, just the two of them.

They walked for a while and were far out of sight from anyone, but Joseph wasn’t yet comfortable. Josh grew impatient, but he didn’t say anything. But then, a miracle. It was Virginia who spotted it, a six-pack of beer, unopened and unsullied, lying in the gravel by the track. It was a great and wondrous find, but it also meant they’d have to go further still down the tracks. This six-pack could be a trap, Joseph argued, left by the cops to catch underage drinkers, or it could belong to a bum who was off in the brush taking a watery shit, or who knows what. Everyone agreed to go further down the tracks. Josh took up the responsibility of carrying the beer, which he wrapped in his coat to hide, and the three of them pressed on, abuzz with excitement.

They walked further down the tracks then they had ever before, and as they went the railway grew more and more poorly maintained, with broken and misaligned tracks, and trees encroaching on either side. The woods got thicker and darker and the path they followed, with the trees walling them in, got to feeling more like a cave. Virginia and Josh were getting afraid, and they were saying things like, “We have just as far to go back as we’ve come”, but Joseph was excited, and he wanted to go further and to see what was at the end of the line. It got to the point that they had to duck and weave to get through brambles laced across the tracks, and now Josh was even direct enough to shout—at Joseph, but plausibly at the thorns—“This is stupid!” But they all went through, and together they emerged into a clearing.

Here was a second, dreadful miracle. In the clearing was a Boeing 747, stood on its nose. Maybe it was touching the ground, or maybe it hovered an inch above it. Maybe it was resting on the tip of a blade of grass. In any event, there it stood, pointing straight up and down, motionless and without a sound. Josh and Virginia immediately ran away, Josh dropping his jacket as he fled, and the cans he was concealing in it burst open, spraying jets of beer. He and Virginia dashed through the brambles and got cuts all over, but they didn’t care. As they ran, they didn’t question if Joseph was running with them. They ran without stopping until they reached the place they’d found the beer. They stopped to catch their breath, and it was only then that they noticed Joseph was gone. “He must’ve run through the woods”, Josh said.

But unlike Josh and Virginia, Joseph didn’t run. He was transfixed by the sight, and couldn’t tear himself away. There were people inside the plane, and they didn’t all tumble down to the nose. They sat in their seats, and walked down the isle, just as if nothing was out of the ordinary. Their down was a different down than Joseph’s. He watched them through the windows, watched them killing time on their computers, or watching movies, or reading books. He watched them getting little drinks, making little trips to the bathroom, adjusting their light and their air. Joseph wondered where they were flying to, and he wondered what they saw through the windows, looking out instead of in. Then they all seemed startled, like there’d been a bump, and then another one. Turbulence, though, from the outside the plane was standing as still as ever. The turbulence got bad. The people got scared. Then all at once they shifted, like when a cook tosses some hash into the air from a skillet and catches it. But still, on the outside, the plane remained absolutely motionless. Joseph could see that their bodies had flown ten or twelve feet in a fraction of a second, and he could see them slam into the walls, ceiling, and floor of the cabin, and he knew that it was all terribly violent, but from outside it was so quiet and so still, so that it didn’t feel violent.

The wing nearest Joseph came off in a ball of fire and streaked upward, disappearing into the clouds. People came flying out with it, and followed. Some were on fire. Then, suddenly, the plane… the people… it was all rubble, bits and scraps and flaming chunks scattering and flying— or falling— or trailing into the sky. Then, nothing. Not a trace of the plane remained. It was strewn about up there somewhere.

Joseph took out one of his dad’s cigarettes, smoked it by himself, and threw up.

Pet

Mr. Paper had been running out of money for a few weeks. He tried to get more money, and he tried to stretch what he had, but now all the money was gone. The first morning Mr. Paper had no food for his pet cat, Marvin, he felt so badly about it he tried to share the toast and coffee that was his own breakfast. Cats don’t care for toast though, and they don’t drink coffee. That night Marvin ran away. Mr. Paper was sad about it—he liked having Marvin around—but he was also glad for the cat. He imagined Marvin being taken in by a kind, rich old lady that would love him and spoil him and feed him gizzards and fish heads.

Mr. Paper could get bread from the bread line, and he could swipe a bag of coffee from the grocery store every so often, and between the two he could get through the day, but he couldn’t pay rent like that. He came home from a long day looking for money and found his apartment key wouldn’t open the door. His landlord had kicked him out and sold all his things to cover a little of the rent Mr. Paper owed him. Mr. Paper could still get bread from the bread line, but without a pot he couldn’t make coffee, and now when he was stuck out in the cold and could use it most.

One night, the smell of bacon wafted into Mr. Paper’s dreams as he slept uncomfortably on a park bench, and the smell stimulated in him visions of Christmas mornings like when he was a little boy. A sharp sound startled him awake, and the dreams fled, leaving behind them no memories. Mr. Paper shot up, expecting to find a cop or someone trying to rob him. Instead there was a cat, a couple yards away, sitting under a streetlamp. The cat sat placidly for a few beats as Mr. Paper met his gaze. Then the cat meowed, an urgent meow, and Mr. Paper recognized the voice— it was Marvin! He got up and approached the cat excitedly. They met in the middle and exchanged affections, Mr. Paper stroking Marvin and Marvin snaking around his feet, but then Marvin suddenly broke off and trotted back to his spot under the streetlamp. Mr. Paper followed.

He found a dinner plate sitting under the streetlamp holding two slices of toast, one buttered and one with raspberry jam; two fried eggs; and five pieces of pepper bacon, thickly sliced. Next to the plate was a mug of hot coffee with sugar and cream, steam billowing from it into the cold night air in great curls. He pounced on the food— more food than he’d seen at one time in weeks. He offered the bacon fat to Marvin, but Marvin wasn’t interested.

Once the plate had been cleaned, and the mug had been emptied, Mr. Paper sat cross-legged under the streetlamp a while, with Marvin curled up in his lap, purring happily. But again, after a while of that, Marvin darted off, trotting a few feet away and looking back at Mr. Paper, beckoning him. Again, Mr. Paper followed. They walked a long time. Eventually Marvin led him to a nice looking apartment building in a nice looking part of town. The doorman let Marvin in— Mr. Paper blew in with the wind. They took the elevator to the eleventh floor, and Marvin let Mr. Paper into a nice looking two bedroom apartment, with central heating and air, and HBO, and good internet service— Mr. Paper’s new home.

From then on Mr. Paper had it easy. He’d wake up Marvin in the morning when he was ready for breakfast. Marvin would feed him before going to work. Mr. Paper would hang out at the apartment during the day, napping and watching TV and internetting. Then, in the evening, Marvin would get home from work and make him dinner and chill on the couch, curled up in Mr. Paper’s lap and purring happily until finally turning in for the night. Then Mr. Paper would sneak out of the house to roam the streets, fool around with women, get into fights with men… but he’d always come back in the morning, hungry for his breakfast.

The Thousand Year Echo

Meryl was weeding in her garden when she heard the first voice. It spoke clearly, like it was the neighbor calling over the fence to her, but she didn’t understand the words. She looked around after the voice, but saw no one.

“Hello?”, she said, rising hesitantly to her feet. The voice was still speaking— had been speaking, uninterrupted since she first heard it. Meryl peeked over the fence. Maybe the neighbor had turned on the TV, or a radio. But when she got up on her tiptoes to see over the fence, she noticed the voice was gone. She made a sour face, then brushed it off and went back to weeding. No sooner had she knelt down to take up her trowel again than did the voice come back, along with several others, laughing.

“Who’s there?”, she demanded, stamping her foot as she stood up again and holding the trowel like a knife. No answer, just more of the same talking she couldn’t understand. She checked the other fence, and the other other, both with the same result. She returned to the spot she was weeding and listened. What language was that? Russian? Chinese? No, not quite. Was it just a bunch of babble? Was she having a stroke, or a seizure, and this was a symptom? She took out her phone and looked up “symptoms of a stroke”, and “symptoms of a seizure.” Neither seemed likely. Just making the search and reading the results was a strong indication, in and of itself, that she wasn’t having a stroke or a seizure. Then what was she hearing?

She stood there in her garden, completely baffled, listening to the voice carry on. Could somebody be playing a trick on her? How? Could the metal plate in her head be receiving radio signals? (She had no metal plate in her head, as far as she was aware.) Maybe it was time for a cup of tea, Meryl thought. She dropped her trowel where she stood, took off her work gloves and left them with the trowel, and walked to the back deck. When she stepped up to the deck, the voice cut out, like a radio losing reception. She stepped back down. The voice came back. She flossed the step, up and down: Up, no voice; down, voice.

Meryl skipped the tea. She went to the hardware store and bought a hundred orange marker flags. She systematically combed over each square foot of her back yard, row by row, like she was mowing the lawn. She’d take a step, listen for the voices, and, if she heard them, mark the spot with a flag. When she had covered the whole of her back yard there now appeared a swirl of markers, a spiral galaxy of orange flags with Meryl’s gloves situated in the center.

Over the next two weeks Meryl made a few more trips to the hardware store. She dug up her garden, digging along the contours she’d mapped out with the flags, then filled the area in with poured concrete, making herself a nice, if not oddly shaped and bizzarely placed, new patio. She put a wrought iron bench in the middle of it, and on either side of that, a flower box. It became her habit to spend much of her free time out on that bench, listening to the voices.

It had been a man’s voice the first time, but it wasn’t always. She’d hear, now a gang of children at play, now a young man and woman talking, and a baby crying. A whispering woman—and she could’ve been whispering right in Meryl’s ear—frantically muttering what sounded like a prayer was a recurring one. Always the voices came in that uninteligible, unplaceable language— apart from the baby’s.

Meryl looked for that language, scouring the internet for samples of any she’d never heard before. None of them were right. The more she listened to the voices on the patio, the more unlike anything else their language seemed. It was heavy, and solid like blocks of carved, polished stone. Every other language she could find was a twittering of birds by comparison.

One afternoon Meryl had friends over for dinner. She took the table from the back deck and set it up on her new patio, where they all dined that night. She was nearly as shocked as her friends were when they heard the voices. She’d been operating under the assumption this whole time that she’d gone discreetly and pleasantly insane, or something like it.

Jason—she’d had the biggest crush on him in high school, which no one ever knew about, and when he ended up marrying her sort-of friend, Dawn, Meryl drew closer to her out of some masochistic impulse—was particularly excited by the phenomenon and, after a few beers, announced to the dinner party that he was resolved to solve the riddle. Everyone laughed at this, except Jason. Conversation moved on. No one thought much of the announcement.

Meryl herself wasn’t very curious about the voices. Or, she was, just in the way that she wanted to listen to them, rather than in the way that she needed to have an explanation for them. It was troubling enough to know other people could even hear them. Finding out what the were, where they came from, what cuased them— to Meryl that would just be making matters worse. Jason started emailing her frequently, asking questions about the voices. She answered his questions. He was no trouble to her.

Until one day he showed up with a small crew of—were they scientists?—all duded up in hazmat suits like she had E.T. stowed away in her back yard. He promised her that it would only be two hours, tops, and then it’d be like they were never even there. They just needed to collect some data, he told her, that’s all. He pleaded with her, and flirted, like he always used to do in high school. He was old and ugly now, and the display was farsical, but in fairness she was old and ugly too, and anyway it worked. Meryl relented.

They were in and out in two hours, and they had left no trace, just like Jason said. Then, years passed, and Meryl never heard what came of it. Dawn and Jason had divorced not long after, (but unrelated to), the data collection episode, and their divorce had let the air out of her friendship with either of them. She fell out of contact with a lot of people, as it happened, and drew closer to the voices. She had, over the years, developed an understanding of their language, but she couldn’t articulate their meaning. To listen to a language for years, but never speak it… you get a sense of it, in your guts, like a dog must have for the way its human relatives speak. But a dog doesn’t have the equipment to talk back, and neither did Meryl.

In the same time, she had also developed lung cancer, which she fought and “won.” The sad truth is that one does not win against cancer. Meryl was down half a lung. Her life would be shorter than it otherwise would have been, because of that. And still, not a day would go by, from the first day she was diagnosed until her last, that wouldn’t be in the shadow of her cancer, or its returning. She didn’t think of herself as having won a battle.

Oh, and money. Not much of that was left, meaning the voices that had kept her company for so long now would be repossessed by the bank, along with everything else. This would happen, she was certain, save for a miracle. Then, a miracle.

Jason called her, out of the blue, to tell her that they’d found what the voices were. They were an echo. An echo from a long, long time ago. Using a lot of sciencey words that meant nothing to Meryl and that, truth be told, meant nothing to him either, Jason explained to her that any sound waves propagating through the space enclosing that little patch in what used to be her garden would be repropagated exactly, through that same space, some one thousand years later, by a process distinct from the one which causes familiar echos, but roughly analogous. Jason was very excited about all this. Meryl wasn’t. But along with this news, Jason had also called with a proposal: To make that special little patch of hers a destination. People would pay good money just to sit on her bench and listen to the idle chitchat of our distant ancestors, and even better—he said even better, but to Meryl it seemed even worse—they could leave a message of their own, to be heard by who knows who in a thousand years’ time. “Can you imagine it?”, he asked breathlessly.

Meryl hated the idea, but she did believe it would pay. Again, she relented to Jason. She kept the house, and raked in money besides. She even got to hear the voices still, on Sunday’s, when the house—not her house anymore, the house—was closed to the public.

She thought it was kind of sad, watching all these people come to leave their own personal messages for the next millennium. She understood, like she understood the voices, in her gut, not her head, that there simply wouldn’t be anyone to recieve them.

A Spell

All you have to do is lay out his clothes on a bed, a button up shirt, a pair of trousers with underwear inside them and socks slipped into their cuffs. Lay them out, then take them off, carefully, like you’re undressing a person. Unbutton the shirt, then pull first one sleeve over the hand and slip the arm out, then do the other. Unbutton the pants, and unzip them. Pull the cuffs of the socks over the heels, then pull by the toe, slipping them off the feet. Grip the waistband of the trousers and pull them down over the hips to the knees, then tug alternately at the left and right leg until they’re off. Last, pull off the underwear.

He wasn’t there until you undressed him, but at this final stroke, by magic, he’s there, back on your bed again like he’d never left. Don’t get excited though. Nothing important can be done by magic, and this spell has only brought back his body, cold like mud and as dead as a memory. But he will be there, which—maybe—is better than nothing.