In the Canyon
by Mark JACOBS
Jones is walking. All morning and then across the afternoon he walks as if he has a destination. He is exploring what people call the federal canyons of Washington, D.C. In mellow October sunshine he traverses block after gray stone block of monumental office buildings where government employees go about their business. Jones has no clue about that business, which vaguely bothers him. Until yesterday he was in the first semester of his sophomore year at George Mason University. That’s over now.
He can’t get a sentence out of his head. An ineffable sadness pierced the young man’s heart. He has no idea where the sentence came from, or why it lingers.
At the mid-point of the afternoon, the day’s warmest hour, he comes to an alley on a numbered street in South West. There aren’t many backstreets in this part of the city. He goes down it.
At the back end of the alley is a green Dumpster. Next to the Dumpster, out of view of passersby on the street, a large, heavily built woman sits on a camp chair. The legs of the chair are so low that her own legs must extend out in front of her to find ease. She wears jeans and a blouse with upside-down flowers, under an Army surplus jacket on one sleeve of which a pink heart is embroidered. Her beefy face is a storm cloud. The brow is furrowed, her gray hair wild. Her clear blue eyes collect the lightning of her mind’s storm.
Next to the woman is a pile of belongings including a sleeping bag rolled tight with a bungee cord. There is also an old blue suitcase with stickers on the sides announcing exotic destinations like Cancún and Singapore and Rio de Janeiro. There is a stack of DVDs, a Gideon’s Bible, a complicated toothbrush.
“What are you looking at?”
“Sorry.”
You’d think Jones would have the advantage, standing over the woman in her low chair, but the opposite is true. She is in control and snorts at his apology.
“Think you’re so goddamn high and mighty, don’t you?”
“No. I don’t think that.”
“You might be part of the machine, but you’re just a little tiny cog in a minor wheel.”
“What machine?”
“Don’t give me no lip, college boy.”
“I’m not a college boy.”
“Sure you are.”
“I was, but I quit.”
The information does not appear to change her opinion of him. He wishes she would ask him why he quit. That might help him figure it out.
He asks her again, “What machine?”
“The exploitation complex. Use any adjective you like. Military, industrial, governmental, technological, they’re all part of it. It gets bigger every year, and the space for freedom shrinks.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Another snort, indicating he is beneath contempt. He stands there wishing he knew what the right question to ask is until he feels something hard and sharp in the middle of his back. He pulls away, swings around fast to see a man as small as the woman is huge. The man is holding a knife. Jones thinks it’s a switchblade. He has a mousey look, as though he has been told to stand in a corner one too many times. His brownish hair is wispy, his skin looks unhealthy, his expression has a kind of determination in it as though he’s nerving himself up to do something scary. Like the woman, he wears an old Army jacket. His has no embroidered flower.
“Put the knife away,” the woman orders him.
He instantly obeys, grinning like a boy.
“This one don’t mean no harm, Reggie, he’s just a college boy lost his way. What’s your name, college boy?”
“Jones. What’s yours?”
“See how lippy he is?”
Jones learns that her names is Dolores. She likes to talk and has a lot to say. He’s a good listener, or wants to be. Reggie pulls up his own camp chair and sits next to Dolores, an insignificant moon in her grand solar orbit.
It’s weird, standing while they both sit, but Jones feels he has something to learn. Why else quit school in the middle of a semester? Apart from Dolores and Reggie, he has told no one. He’ll tell his family, he’ll have to at some point. Right now however he can’t get past the pleasurable sensation of driving forward out of ignorance.
“Jones here claims he quit college,” Dolores tells Reggie.
Reggie’s turn to snort, but it’s a spindly imitation of his friend’s disdain.
“I had him,” he says. His high voice is squeaky. “I snuck up on him good. Like a professional. If I wanted I’d a cut him.”
Dolores admits it grudgingly. That’s one way, Jones realizes, she maintains her power over the man. He craves her approval. This is better than any psych course he could have signed up for.
“This used to be a republic of free individuals,” Dolores informs Jones, starting up out of nowhere. “Rare in the annals of human history.”
“It’s not any more?”
“Hah! The big companies, they bought it when we weren’t looking, then they sold it for parts.”
“Where are you from, Dolores?”
The question takes her aback.
“Why? You with the government?”
“No, I just would like to know is all.”
“I was raised in a cabbage patch.”
This brings on a snigger from Reggie, who admires her power of invention. Pawing through their stuff he comes up with a chocolate bar, which he unwraps and bites with surprising brutality. He is the kind of man who is always trying to prove himself and never succeeding.
“The cabbage patch to which I refer was situated on a farm in one of the New England states. I won’t go any further than that, thank you very much. They took the farm, didn’t they? The sons a bitches. They gave my mother a drug made her go crazy. Seeped right into her sanity, which was precarious at the best of times. My dad had to stand there and watch his best beloved roll downhill to oblivion. Anybody tells you a man can’t die from a broken heart, that person never met my father. Kelvin was his name, like the thermometer.” She stops to study Jones’s face. “We live in a society that lacks compassion.”
“I know that.”
He says it hoping to get on a wavelength with her; with both of them. But the attempt backfires. With zero warning Reggie is on his feet, switchblade in hand. He is enthralled by the tiny click it makes when he presses the button with his thumb and the blade reveals itself, locked in place. One of life’s small pleasures. He comes straight at Jones, who is easily able to sidestep him. Momentum carries Reggie too far, and he stumbles, falling against a brick wall like a wind-up toy out of juice.
“Pathetic,” says Dolores. She is having difficulty breathing. It’s her state of mind. “You think you’re a full-grown man, Reggie? You think you’re a protector? Think again.”
He hangs his head, returning the knife to his pocket a second time. Jones feels what might be vertigo. What he longed for, leaving George Mason, was something different. Here it is. Is this good luck?
Dolores opens a plastic bag and takes out three bottles of cold-brew coffee. She hands them around. They drink the coffee, which has a strong chemical taste. Jones wonders if she might be poisoning him, cunningly giving him the bad bottle.
The coffee, or the worry, leads by a path he cannot follow to an admission: he quit school because he was restless and bored, and because living on campus felt like being in prison. There has to be more, is one way of putting it.
He would like to hear more from Dolores about the machine that ate America, and she cannot help obliging him. Social commentary is her passion. She takes pride in her point of view.
“They locked me up,” she tells Jones.
Reggie listens raptly even though he has heard the story who knows how many times.
“Where was this?”
“New England.”
“Why won’t you say which state?”
“What if you’re working for them?”
“I’m not, I’m not working for anybody.”
She shakes her head ponderously at his naïveté.
“They own you. With the very first breath your little lungs take in, they own you, Jones. The sooner you admit it, the better off you’ll be.”
“How long did they keep you locked up?”
“Six months to the day, and don’t ask me how I got away.”
“Why are you here, in Washington?”
She looks over at Reggie to make sure he is following the conversation.
“They won’t shut me up. They can try, but I’ll keep hollering the truth at them come hell or high water.”
“Until?”
This question, which Jones asks in innocence, strikes Reggie as a provocation, or an affront. Instantly he’s on his feet with the knife at Jones’s throat, pressing hard enough to score the skin. This time Dolores does not call him off. She pronounces sentence.
“This boy is on the wrong side of history.”
That’s all Reggie needs. The knife impinging, he yanks Jones to his feet. He snarls something hard to understand, then marches Jones back down the alley to the street. Jones feels blood trickling down his neck.
“I’m not on the wrong side,” he insists. “I’m on your side.”
But Reggie won’t hear it. As they reach the street he removes the knife from Jones’s neck. He looks up and down the street, alert for enemies. Then he says in a sinister whisper, “She’s a hero. She’s fearless. She’s all that stands between us and catastrophe.”
“You love her. You’d do anything for her.”
Again his ineffectual snort. “Wouldn’t you?”
Jones has had enough. He has learned something and is ready to be shut of Dolores and her acolyte.
“Listen,” says Reggie, grabbing him by the arm.
In his weakness, Jones realizes, Reggie can be a nasty man. “What?”
“I want to take her out to dinner. Tonight. Not tomorrow, tonight.”
It’s an effective way to put the bite on him, Jones decides. He eases a twenty from his wallet. Luckily, it seems to be enough.
“You were never here,” Reggie says, folding the bill by thirds and jamming it into his jeans pocket. “You never saw her, you never even heard of the woman, right?”
“Right.”
Then Reggie is gone, eager to hear more about the threat to America. Jones wishes he had a handkerchief. He would like to wipe the blood from his neck. He walks, feeling pretty good as he reaches the intersection of the numbered street with a lettered street. It’s going to be hard to top his first few hours as a college dropout.
Filed under Fiction on December 6th, 2024
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Wally
by Eli S. EVANS
A man became very passionate about pulling weeds from his backyard garden. For a long time he’d never pulled a single weed, but his wife had been complaining that he was useless around the house and just to prove her wrong, he went out one morning to tend to the garden, thereby discovering that nothing is quite as satisfying as yanking an unwanted shoot, sprout, creeper, or bush right out of the soil — especially when you get it by the roots — and tossing it aside like so much chaff. And by the way, when I say this man became passionate about pulling weeds, I mean he really became passionate about pulling weeds. For instance, in order to deal with a handful of butterfly bushes that had been left untended so long their stems had turned wooden, he invested in a battery-operated hacksaw with which, in the midst of sawing down the aforementioned eyesores, he managed to lop off one of his own fingers, and all he did was shrug and say, “I guess that’s gone,” and go right on sawing away, which was all well and good since it wasn’t even a particularly important finger, but then, a couple of weeks later, a whole hand popped up out of the ground right in the area in which the disconnected digit had dropped.
“I’ve got to pluck this monstrosity,” the man said when he saw it there.
“No!” cried the hand. “Please! I want to live!”
“Hmm,” said the man (since that was what he always said when he was mulling something over). And then: “I’ll tell you what — I’ll let you be if you promise not to replicate and spread. I can’t have a garden full of hands on my hands.”
“It’s a deal,” said the hand.
“Then shake on it,” replied the man.
The hand was more than willing to comply, since shaking on it was actually one of the only things it could do, but the man double-crossed the gullible extremity; instead of shaking it, he yanked it right out of the ground and tossed it onto the compost pile without so much as a sorry about this, friend.
The bigger problem, however, was that no matter how many weeds the man pulled, it seemed there were always more weeds to be pulled, a phenomenon for which there is an obvious explanation — nothing technically distinguishes what’s not a weed from what is a weed other than whether or not one looks upon it as a weed, and in his passion for pulling weeds the man had come to look upon everything that hadn’t yet been pulled as, precisely insofar as he passionately desired to pull it, yet another weed. In this manner, he eventually emptied the garden of its contents altogether, in so doing turning it from a garden into a big old mud pit.
“Now what are we going to do?” grumbled the man’s wife when she saw it. “Nobody wants a big old mud pit behind their house. Our property value is going to plummet!”
“Hmm,” said the man. “But what if that big old mud pit wasn’t actually a big old mud pit?”
“How could a big old mud pit not be a big old mud pit?”
“Leave it to me.” With that, the man headed straight for the nearest livestock store and bought himself a sixpack of pigs. “Check it out,” he said to his wife after depositing them in the former garden. “Now it’s not a mud pit — it’s a pigsty. And considering the way people are so into backyard farm animals these days, our property value is probably going to skyrocket!”
While his logic may have been bulletproof, it only took until the following morning for the man to realize he couldn’t stand that disgusting snuffling sound pigs constantly make. So, one by one, he loaded the passel of porkers into the car and drove them back to the livestock store.
“Nothing doing,” declared the proprietor when he saw him amble through the door, sixpack of pigs in tow. “Like it says on the sign, returns will only be accepted when the merchandise is in its original condition. These pigs, meanwhile, are clearly all covered in mud.”
“Damnit,” said the man. “Now what am I supposed to do? I could put them in a pillowcase and beat them against the side of a tree until they stopped moving, but I’m pretty sure that would go against my principles as a dedicated vegetarian.”
“You’re a dedicated vegetarian?”
“I sure am.”
“One hundred percent vegetarian?”
“If not more!”
Well, all this talk of vegetarianism got the proprietor of the livestock store thinking that the man’s dissatisfaction with his porcine purchase might be just the opportunity he’d been seeking to rid himself of a certain opportunistic carnivore he’d accidentally ordered from his wholesaler the previous fall, and which had since then eaten ninety percent of his rabbits and no fewer than one goat. “I’ll be right back,” he said, and retreated to the storeroom, returning momentarily with an alligator tugging eagerly at the end of a retractable dog leash. “As I was saying earlier,” he told the man, “I’m not going to be able to give you a refund for those muddy pigs of yours. However, I would be willing to take them as an even exchange for old Wally, here.”
“Hmm,” said the man. “Okay, why the hell not? I’ve heard alligators actually make great companions!”
And in the weeks that followed, Wally more than lived up to this reputation. Among the many activities he and the man who’d exchanged him for six pigs engaged in together during that happy time were:
- Going to the movies
- Swimming
- Hiking
- Parcheesi
- Watching TV
- Prank calling numbers selected at random from the phonebook and asking whoever answered if their refrigerator was running
- Smoking Dad Grass-brand CBD cigarettes
- Becoming frustrated attempting to learn the cello
- Collaborating on contemporary rewrites of traditional folktales
- Electric boogaloo
Then one day, Wally disappeared. Simultaneous with this disappearance, the man’s wife underwent some peculiar changes. To begin with, her skin, which had previously been generically Caucasian, turned scaly and green, and her teeth grew several centimeters in length and in addition appeared to have become as sharp as daggers. Moreover, when the man asked her whether she’d seen his missing crocodilian pal, rather than answering with the regular human words she’d always employed in the past, she instead let out one of those loud, throaty roars, also known as “chumpfs,” that alligators commonly employ as a mating call.
For a time, following these changes, their marriage continued on as strong as ever. Then one day, the man disappeared.
Filed under Fiction on November 22nd, 2024
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How to Throw Hands Like a Modern Man
by Javy GWALTNEY
Look, this guy Doug, he was asking for it. His eyes zigzagging along your date’s curves as the two of you stood at the garden bar during the reception, the bulbs of string lights dancing in a gentle sway above the wedding party. The nerve of this asshole: a groomsman assaulting a guest — a vulnerable woman, mind you — with his eyes like that. It was an insult to her, really and the sanctity of the wedding as a whole. This is why your fist is speeding like a train toward Doug’s stupid, squashed face, destined to become even more squashed in a moment.
What a shame it’s come to this, because you know you’re not that guy. You’re educated. You believe in diplomacy. But sometimes a motherfucker needs to be punched.
Sure, she was saying “Michael, don’t,” but let’s be real: she wanted you to. Even though you’ve only been on two (and a half) dates, you have this deep, intrinsic connection that gives you the ability to peek deep into the recesses of her mind. Such is the power of a modern, perceptive man.
And yeah, okay, you’ve never been in a scrap and your dad never gave you the lowdown on how to properly use your ham hands for the sake of harm in spite of a temper suggesting he was an expert on the subject, but that’s beside the point. You are righteous, and maybe a little drunk, but mostly righteous and that’s its own kind of virtue. Your hand is getting closer now, by the way, already tightened into a death-dealing ball of knuckles — but something is off.
You think you should feel like Ray Liotta pistol-whipping that one guy in Goodfellas. You do not feel like Ray Liotta. Doug’s eyebrow is raised. Your fist is no longer sailing through the air but doing this weird kind of wobbly motion as you realize that oh shit oh god you did not plant your feet and now the entire world around you is being propelled alongside your fist.
Your whole body is moving and, brother, it is not graceful. In fact, you’ve never been more aware of how clumsy and heavy and pale and fragile and out of control your suit of meat is than in this moment. Oh god, you’ve missed. Doug is looking at you, not really angry but more awed and concerned as you start to unintentionally perform a tipping, flailing pirouette that sees you spinning down toward the cold ground. You close your eyes to prepare yourself for the thud and ensuing darkness, wondering if your date will spend the rest of her life tragically celibate and in mourning after Doug stomps in the head of the most educated, sweetest man she’s ever laid her eyes on.
But consciousness remains. There are several gasps. You open those peepers to discover you are floating, having never touched the ground, now soaring above the bar, the garden, the wedding entire. As the screams spread, more and more people look up. The best man is pointing at you. The bridesmaids are shrieking and laughing as they snap pictures on their phones. Doug’s stupid donut of a mouth is agape. The bartender, who has seen some shit in his time, sighs and starts spinning a lasso out of the unused string lights beneath the counter.
Your date sullenly turns back to her drink as the wedding reception screeches to a halt, everyone scrambling to try and figure out how to bring this modern man back down to earth.
Filed under Fiction on November 8th, 2024
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Reader Comments
The illustration makes me feel a little… tingly. Is that wrong? Fun read.