JOHNNY AMERICA
Soft as a Feather, Light as a Rap-Rock Board
by M. C. SCHMIDT
The only time I ever went to Claudia’s house for dinner, her dad gave me a tour that ended in his mancave.
“This is my band,” he said, indicating a series of photographs on the wall, “at Woodstock.”
“Woodstock ’99,” I clarified.
“Fuck you, Andy,” he said. “Where has your band played?”
“I — ” I said. I was thirteen.
“I’m sorry. That was rude. You’re just a child.” He fished change out of his pocket and dropped it with a succession of muted plinks into a swear jar that occupied one entire cubby of his bookshelf. “It’s just, everyone’s a critic, you know?”
“I didn’t know,” I said. I was aware, at thirteen, of knowing very little. I had only known which Woodstock he’d played because Claudia was always referencing it, emphasizing the year with a roll of her eyes: “He thinks he’s so cool because his crappy band played Woodstock ’99.” Sometimes, she would do a boneless, dainty lady wrist, too, when she said it.
“Well, they are. People are like that. I’m telling you.”
“Okay.”
He crossed his arms and stared dreamily into the frozen wildness of a mosh pit as he reflected, “Was Hendrix better than Limp Bizkit? Was Janis? We can’t know because they didn’t survive their fame. I did, and so did Limp Bizkit. So, are those guys the legends, or are we?”
“I thought Claudia said you were a cop.”
“Exactly,” her dad said, “I lived long enough to be that — unlike Jimmie and Janis. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
I nodded even though he wasn’t looking at me, even though I only had a dim awareness of who Jimmie or Janis were. “So, you guys were, like, famous?”
Claudia’s dad sniffed and animated, taking me by the shoulder and leading me into the hallway. “I think that’s enough of a memory tour for now. They’ll think we aren’t coming back.”
‘They’ were Claudia, of course, her stepmom and her little half-sister, Evanescence.
Typically, when we hung out, Claudia came to my house. On her last visit, though, she had looked at me and said, “Dude, you’re so lucky that it’s just you and your mom.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I mean that having a family sucks. At least, having my family does. Why do you think I’m always over here? You have it way easier with just the two of you. None of the drama.”
“There’s drama here.” For some reason, I felt attacked.
“Yeah, like what? You two are basically the same person.”
Just because I couldn’t think of anything right then, she thought I’d proven her right. “We have things, Mom and me,” I assured her, “beefs,” and I was certain it was true.
Her smile was tight and smug. “Why don’t you just come to my house next time? You’ll see.”
“Whatever,” I’d said, and a few days later, there I was, being led on a tour of her home.
“There you boys are,” her stepmom said as we passed through the kitchen. She was dressing a salad which I hoped she hadn’t made in my honor because there was no chance that I was going to eat a salad.
“I was just showing Andy around.”
“Did he show you his photos from Woodstock?” she asked me.
“’99,” Claudia moaned in a drawn-out, quavering ghost voice like it had travelled to our ears from beyond the grave. Really, it had come from the living room where she was slouched on the sofa beside Evanescence.
Her dad gave her a look that implied that he was only holding his tongue because I technically qualified as company.
“Yeah, it was cool,” I told the stepmom.
“It’s very cool,” she agreed. “Our own personal rock star.”
“Rap-rock star,” Evanescence said. To me, this qualification seemed as demeaning as Claudia pointing out that he’d played the worst-regarded Woodstock. Her dad must not have seen it that way, though, because he only smiled at her, lovingly.
…
At dinner, I mostly had salad. It turned out to be the main course, a mayonnaise‑y seven-layer affair that was probably as many calories as actual food. As I picked out bacon bits and around peas, I longed to share Evanescence’s specialty meal of frozen chicken nuggets topped with torn squares of American cheese. She was currently scraping off the little handkerchiefs of cheese and chewing them out from under her fingernails.
“So, Andy,” Claudia’s dad said, “are you into sports?”
Claudia snorted. “Do you really think I’d be friends with a sports guy?”
“Let the man answer,” he said. “Andy?”
“Um, no. No sports.”
“See?” She was sitting to my right with her dad and stepmom facing us. Evanescence occupied the seat at the head of the table.
“Yes, darling, you’re very wise. Congratulations,” her dad said.
“Guys…” sang her stepmom in a gentle, scolding tone. Then, to me, she said, “You must be into the arts then. What kind of music do you like? Brandon is into aggressive music, obviously, but I mostly listen to lighter things — Josh Groban, Michael Bublé.”
“You don’t like dad’s band, Brenda?” Claudia asked. When I looked, her eyebrows were cartoonishly raised. Her fork was a pendulum, dangled above her bowl from her clasped hands.
“I love them, obviously. Trouser Stain was a great band, and their best songs were the ones your dad wrote.” She smiled at him, reinforcing her loyalty. “I’m just mostly a soft rock gal.”
“Bublé’s a chode. Groban too,” her dad said. “Trouser Stain was a cult favorite, a cult classic some people say. But you haven’t answered the question: what kind of music, Andy?”
“Um, I guess… I’m not that sure. I like the same kind as Claudia.”
“Claudia doesn’t really listen to anything.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, “me too.” I forked a mayonnaise-covered bacon bit into my mouth and winced when it turned out to be an empty pea husk.
“Andy likes TV,” Claudia told them. “He watches, like, a ton of shows.”
“Is TV the arts?” I asked her stepmom.
She squashed her face, thinking, and then said, “Sure it is, I suppose.”
There wasn’t much conversation after that, at least not much that included me. I guess they got used to my being there, and I sort of went invisible to them. That was fine with me because it gave me a chance to observe them, like a nature documentary but about a human family that lived on the same street as me. I picked at my salad and listened. They talked about people from their work and made references that were familiar enough to them to discuss in shorthand. It was boring, mostly, except that underlying it all I perceived a tangible unhappiness, no different than if the foundation of the home had been built with the hard, compressed bricks of their unspoken resentments. Claudia expressed it through snark and sass, he dad through sniping, and her stepmom through a phony smile that grew larger and more uncanny whenever the temperature was raised by the other two. Only Evanescence seemed unaffected, perhaps because everyone treated her like a little princess as far as I could tell. I considered if Mom would ever give me that look, raise her voice that way, struggle so obviously to hold back some mean thing she wanted to say to me. No, she wouldn’t, and that pissed me off because it meant that Claudia had been right — her homelife really was worse than mine, and that meant she had won.
When I was younger and asked about my dad, Mom would only ever tell me that he had been a love-bomber, that, early on, he would smooth her hair and marvel out loud about how he had caught an angel. Her big, final line was always, “And I was like an angel — as soon as he started in on his nonsense, I up and floated away.”
“That was a good meal,” Claudia’s dad said after tossing his paper napkin onto the table, balled and battle weary.
I nodded agreement and followed Claudia’s lead when she pushed her bowl toward the center of the table. A peek at it revealed that she had eaten even less than me.
“So, Andy,” her dad said, “do you need to rush off, or can you stick around for a bit?”
“Um,” I said, looking to Claudia for guidance.
She shrugged. I opened my eyes wider, imploring her for help, and she said, “He’s asking you if you want to play board games with us.” There was an ironic joy in her voice when she asked, “Pretty please, can you play board games with us, Andy?”
“I mean, sure, I guess,” I said.
“Board games are dumb,” whined Evanescence. There were crumbles of cheese stuck to her lower lip. “I want to play light as a feather, stiff as a board.”
“She just learned that game at a sleepover,” the stepmom explained as she cleared the table.
“What if Andy doesn’t want to play that, baby?” Claudia’s dad asked the little girl. “What if his family is deeply religious and he thinks we’re black magic heathens?”
“We’re not religious,” I said like I was defending against an assault on Mom’s character. “I don’t know how to do it, but I’ll try.”
Evanescence shot up from her chair. “I can teach you. It’s very magical.” She padded into the living room in socked feet, leaving us with the implicit understanding that we should follow her.
“Are we really doing this?” Claudia asked.
“You don’t want to? It seems like just the kind of witchy thing you would be into,” her dad said. This, I assumed, was a dig at the jet-black she had died her hair over spring break. She responded with a sneer that begat angry eyes from her dad and a concerned smile from her stepmom.
“Are you guys coming?” Evanescence called from the living room.
“Just a minute, sweets,” her mother said. “I need to finish clearing the table.”
“No, now!” The girl shouted.
“Save that for later, honey, would you?” Claudia’s dad said as he rose from the table. I waited for Claudia to get up before I pushed out my own chair.
Evanescence was already lying on her back on the living room carpet, her legs straight and together, her arms at her sides. “I’m the board,” she announced and closed her eyes.
“We’re the bored,” Claudia said.
“Nu-uh,” Evanescence said, not getting it.
We all got to our knees, some of us more easily than others. I ended up kneeling beside the little girl’s right shoulder, an accident that I was happy about when I realized that we had to put one flattened hand under her body. Let her parents touch her legs or butt or whatever. Claudia was across from me, probably having had the same thought.
“I haven’t done this since I was a girl,” the stepmom said. “Do we need anything else to play?”
“Just your hands,” the girl said. “And your concentration. And music. Spooky music.”
The stepmom pulled the phone from her back pocket. “Hmm. I don’t think I have any spooky music on my playlist. How about this one? It’s more sad than spooky.” Piano chords blossomed from her phone followed by the pleadings of a schlocky male singer.
“Manilow?” Claudia’s dad asked. “She said spooky music, not shitty music.”
“That’s a quarter for the swear jar, mister,” the stepmom told him. “As soon as we’re done here.”
“This music is perfect,” Evanescence said, even though it wasn’t at all spooky. She clasped her eyelids tighter, a little smile indicating her thrill at being the center of attention.
In response to the music, Claudia’s dad directed a tongue-out expression at me like one you might involuntarily make while being punished for a crime with a hangman’s noose.
“Now, you all chant ‘light as a feather, stiff as a board’ and try to lift me.”
When we reached underneath her, she giggled. Her shoulder felt warm and bony on my palm. She smelled faintly of processed cheese.
Sloppily at first, and then more successfully as a chorus, we began to chant. There was a saxophone solo. The song really was trash.
My arm shook in small, restrained convulsions as I tried to lift her. Within a minute or so, the girl’s butt, propped by our group’s two strongest hands, rose a few inches off the ground. Her shoulders, with only my and Claudia’s spaghetti arms to support them, barely rose at all.
“I’m doing it! I’m doing it!” Evanescence squealed.
“Yeah,” Claudia said, withdrawing her hand and causing the whole machine to fail, sending the little girl heavily back onto the carpet, “Dad and Brenda lifted you three inches. You weigh, like, sixty-five pounds. Big whoop.”
“At least I don’t weigh five hundred pounds.” She scooted out of the center of the circle, indignant that her miracle had gone unappreciated. Claudia did not weigh five hundred pounds, nowhere near, but no one corrected her.
“So, we’re done?” her dad asked.
“No!” the little girl said. “Everyone goes, then whoever rises highest wins because they’re the purest of heart.”
“I may as well not even try, then,” said Claudia.
“Brenda, get in there,” her dad said.
I felt a sudden panic. The stepmom? Bra straps and side boob and the seductive smells of unfamiliar mom lotions and powders. A horror show of my poorly understood longing.
The stepmom felt it too. She stuttered about how she didn’t need to take a turn. She tried not to look at me so I wouldn’t think that my grubby fingers were the issue, but I knew that, had she been wearing a bathrobe instead of regular day clothes, she would have clasped it at her neck to stop me imagining her body.
“Fine,” Claudia’s dad said. “But if you forfeit your turn, you lose music rights. Turn it off, babe.”
When she did, and the room went silent, he let out a sigh as if the sappy music had caused a pressure differential that had made it impossible for him to breath. “Andy, you’re up, bro. Girls, switch placed with us, and get him under the ankles. Only touch his ankles,” he reiterated, narrowing his eyes at Claudia as if she had masterminded this whole evening for the chance to get a fistful of my bony ass.
I looked at each of them pleadingly, but no one spoke up to get me out of it, so I crawled forward and laid down on my back.
“We won’t be able to lift him from his ankles,” Claudia protested.
“You will if he goes light as a feather and stiff as a board,” her dad said. “Now, for some real music.” He looked delighted as he brought it up on his phone.
“Dad, not Trouser Stain,” Claudia said.
“Andy needs to hear it,” he said. “It’s a guy thing. Our audience was always mostly men. Don’t rob him of this experience just because you don’t get it. Don’t be that kind of woman.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” the stepmom asked.
“Anything is fine,” I said to the ceiling. “I don’t think we really need music.”
“We do,” he told me. “We absolutely do. We need this music.” A racket of chunky guitars and bass and driving drums filled the room. Someone started rapping. Claudia’s dad, I presumed, from back before he was her dad. It was a horror show of a different type.
I felt his thick hand go under my shoulder. Other hands followed, reluctant hands, I was sure. In all my life, I had never felt more like a stranger then when those unfamiliar hands were touching me.
“Andy,” he said. I turned my head toward him. “This song is called, ‘Benji’s Dog.’ It was our single. I wrote it about this dog that my neighbor, Benji, had when I was growing up. Also, it’s about how we all kind of wanted to bang Benji’s mom.”
“Brandon!”
He winked at me like, you get it.
I smiled politely and then squeezed my eyes tight like this game was serious business to me and I couldn’t tolerate further interruption. I resolved to keep them closed until the indignity had ended.
The chant began, led by Evanescence. It seemed quieter than before, competing, as it was, with Trouser Stain. The lyrics were filthy, and the rapping was bad. At one point, Claudia’s dad quit the chant and began to sing along to himself, a heresy that broke the others out of the chant too.
“Daddy!” Evanescence cried.
“Turn this off, Dad,” Claudia said, “For the love of all that’s holy, I’m begging you.”
“Maybe now’s not the time, Brandon,” the stepmom said.
He ignored them all, rapping along even louder than before.
This caused another round of complaints, an overlapping burst-dam of repressed emotion. It was grating to hear them fight and yet somehow the perfect accompaniment to the aggressive and angry backing track.
“Listen to this, Andy,” he said at one point, trying to make us a team, he and I.
I was already gone, though, entranced by my desire for escape. My thoughts were on my bedroom and home, on Mom and the Hot Pockets she would have made me for dinner. As they continued to fight, their hands disappeared from beneath me. Maybe they pulled them out from under me, or maybe I just got numb to the sensation of them. I had gone invisible to them again, and they were screaming. Properly verbally sparring. I kept my eyes closed, the purest desire of my heart to be anywhere else but in that living room. They called each other names, said horrible things, but only distantly, from somewhere far away. I was an angel. I was above it all.
I floated.
Filed under Fiction on October 25th, 2024
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Voices
by Arthur O'KEEFE
We decided to make a ghost recording in the woods. It was my idea, though we all agreed to it.
You’ve probably heard about stuff like this, maybe listened to alleged spectral voices on the Internet. Professionals — if that’s the proper term — go to places where they hope to capture messages from beyond, setting up ultra-sensitive audio equipment to do so.
But we weren’t parapsychologists using cutting-edge technology. We were three teenage boys in a podunk town in Upstate New York in the summer of 1979, and our equipment was a Realistic CTR-43 portable cassette recorder.
If you’re willing, come walk with me along the corridors of memory, and I’ll tell you of that attempt, and what became of it.
There were three of us in this enterprise: me, my older brother Marvin, and our neighbor Ronald. I was 13, Marv a year and a half older, and Ron 15. It was the start of summer vacation, those three blessed months of freedom: a catalyst for fun, for mischief, and for the weird notion soon to be planted in my adolescent mind.
Browsing in the town library in the first week of June, I came across a volume titled The Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison. It needs a snappier title, I thought, gazing upon the monochrome photo of Edison in profile gracing the dust jacket.
Opening it, I skimmed the table of contents: “War and Peace,” “Education and Work,” “Man and Machine.” Then the last chapter title caught my eye, and I felt something course through me, like a tiny jolt of electricity.
VIII THE REALMS BEYOND
Life after death
I borrowed the book, got on my bicycle, and went home. Sitting on my bed, I began to read.
Thomas Edison wanted to invent technology to contact the dead. He had a theory about microscopic “life-units” which survive physical death and comprise what we call the soul. It was vague, with no details about how the device would work. Still, this wasn’t the kind of stuff about Edison you learned in school.
The next day, Marv and I went “excavating” with Ron. That was when the idea for the ghost recording hit me.
Our street and Ron’s intersected on the eastern edge of town. Each street had a dead end beyond which were woodland trails leading to the Batten Kill, flowing west until its waters joined the Hudson. With a bit of digging in the woods just beyond the end of Ron’s street, you could find empty bottles from the turn of the century: sarsaparilla, whiskey, patent medicine, what have you. We traded them like baseball cards.
So there we were, having chosen our respective excavation spots, searching with buckets and shovels for bottles to add to our collections. We’d later wash them off with the hose in Ron’s backyard and divvy them up.
My first find was a thin, blueish bottle that had once held “Therapeutic Mineral Water of Saratoga Springs.” At least eighty years old, I thought, brushing the soil from it. Whoever had bought and drunk this water was likely no longer alive. Who was it? I pictured a young man in a sack suit and bowler, sporting a handlebar mustache, and a young lady in a long skirt, shirtwaist and elaborate colorful hat, sipping the mineral water of Saratoga from slender bottles. She is young and beautiful and a Temperance Unionist, and he is courting her, and even though he enjoys a cold lager after work, for the sake of her hand in marriage he will disavow the demon alcohol.
Who bought this? What if I could talk to them and find out, like Edison wanted to?
Later, washing dirt off the bottles with Ron’s garden hose, I said, “Guys, I’ve got an idea.”
…
There was rain that night, so we put off our self-appointed mission until the next evening, agreeing to rendezvous by Ron’s house at a quarter to midnight and head for the entrance to the woods.
After making sure our mother was asleep — our father was in Florida, as I recall; he wasn’t home much — Marv and I quietly left the house and took our usual route to Ron’s house, squeezing through the corner gap in the fence at the back of the yard to enter Ron’s property.
Dew from the grass stirred about our feet as we walked. The fireflies of early June, happy to be out among the still-damp foliage, floated like a myriad of fairies’ lanterns. I imagined, briefly, one of the fairies warning us to go back, not to meddle in things no mortal man or boy should know. I ignored this fancied admonition and trudged on behind my elder brother. Ron was waiting for us by his house, silhouetted against the streetlights. No one spoke as we exited his front yard and proceeded down the street.
We got to the dead end where asphalt became dirt and gravel, which in turn became the trail into the woods. The entrance struck me as a black cavernous maw waiting to devour us, but I drew a little comfort from the light of the fireflies within.
Don’t! cried the floating, lantern-wielding fairy of my imagination. The forest is waiting to consume you! To eat your soul! I suddenly had to pee. I stopped walking.
“You all right, Bruno?” Ron asked.
“Yeah. Just gonna take a whiz.”
“Sure.”
I stepped just inside the canopy of trees and off to the right. Somehow, the prosaic act of emptying my bladder calmed me.
“OK,” I said, zipping up.
“Did you bring it?” asked Ron.
“Right here,” I said, reaching back to slap my backpack.
“OK. Let’s go.”
We entered the woods, flashlights on. Our destination was Indian Rock.
I’d never heard a definite legend of how Indian Rock got its name, other than the obvious allusion to indigenous people. There were rumors that the site was haunted. It was more or less what the name suggested: a large rock jutting from the earth, a few yards from the river bank. In the daytime we would occasionally fish there.
When we got to the rock, I opened my backpack and removed the tape recorder. There was a cassette inside, 45 minutes per side, rewound on side A.
Under the light of Ron and Marv’s flashlights, I placed the recorder on the surface of Indian Rock and pressed the play and record buttons simultaneously.
Placing my mouth near the built-in microphone, I asked:
“Is there anyone here who can speak to us?”
As agreed the day before, we walked some distance along the bank, downriver, leaving the device to record whatever it could. Marv and I caught fireflies with a couple of empty pickle jars. Ron seemed to view making firefly lanterns as childish, and hadn’t brought a jar of his own.
After about an hour we went back to the rock. The cassette had played itself out. I put it in my backpack, and we went home. We agreed to meet at Ron’s house the next day to play the tape.
…
Ron’s parents were out visiting in-laws somewhere, and his sister was with her boyfriend at Lake George, so we had the house to ourselves. We sat in Ron’s kitchen, sipping glasses of grape Kool-Aid. I removed the tape recorder from my backpack and placed it on the table.
“OK, Mr. Flanagan the younger,” said Ron. “As this was your idea, please do the honors.”
“And just in case the tape recorder is now cursed, I’d rather not touch it,” said Marv. “Just kidding,” he quickly added.
“Great,” I said. I rewound side A, turned the volume dial all the way up, then pushed the play button.
From the speaker came a background hiss. We sat listening, all eyes on the machine. I was tense, torn between fear and anticipation.
A sound came: a deep sigh. Then a whisper, deep and male:
“Hear my message.”
Again, the deep sigh. The voice spoke again:
“Ronnie Richter and the Flanagan brothers are dumbass dorks.”
Muffled guffaws, whispered mockery.
“Dorks.”
“Geeks.”
“Freaks.”
“Morons.”
Ron pushed the stop button and said, “Shit!”
“Steve Barrie,” I said.
“No shit, Sherlock.”
Steven Barrie was the school’s star quarterback, an able athlete and mediocre scholar about to start his senior year. His admission to one of the better Northeastern colleges on a sports scholarship was considered more or less a done thing. That, and being the son of the Superintendent of Schools, made him more than a little arrogant. It was his voice and those of three friends, his entourage of fellow jocks, that had mocked us. (And not for the first time. We weren’t exactly the cool kids at school.)
“How the hell did they find out we were doing this?” asked Marv. “We never mentioned it to anyone.” He paused, looking from me to Ron and back again. “Did we?”
“Hell, no,” I said.
“Me neither,” said Ron. “They must have been smoking weed somewhere upriver and spotted our flashlight beams. Indian Rock’s supposed to be haunted. They saw the tape recorder. Not hard to figure out.”
“Right,” I said. “Well…”
“Shit!” shouted Ron, grabbing his head with both hands. “We’re never gonna live this down!”
“Ron,” I said. “Relax. It’s not —”
“Relax! Christ, man, how am I supposed to relax? This is gonna be all over town by the end of today. We’re gonna officially be the freaks of the school when we go back in September. Shit! This is worse than that stupid survey you did in the fifth grade.” I’d made a questionnaire to learn what percentage of students in my class believed UFOs were real. I thought of it as a kind of social experiment, but it didn’t go over well.
There was no calming down Ron as he then began ranting — albeit in an indirect way — that being labeled such an oddity would likely prevent him from ever losing his virginity. Marv and I took the tape recorder and went home.
We drank lemonade in the kitchen. Our mother was in the living room, watching an afternoon rerun of The Love Boat. Marv, seemingly undistracted by Captain Steuben’s advice to a lovelorn passenger, sat reading a collection of stories by H.P. Lovecraft. (I briefly imagined greenish tentacles emerging from the sea to creep toward the good captain.) The tape recorder lay on the table between us. I stared at it, arms crossed, in silent turmoil.
I realized Ron was right. We would all be labeled certified freaks who hunted ghosts in the wee hours. The mockery would be instant, merciless, and unrelenting. Marv seemed coolly detached about the whole thing. He wore his outsider status as a badge of honor.
I was far less equanimous than my brother. Silently, I began formulating ways to exact revenge upon Steve Barrie and his Neanderthal underlings: keying their cars, putting sugar in their gas tanks, having hardcore porn sent to their homes, in their names but addressed in care of their mothers. Then a new thought struck me.
“We haven’t listened to the rest of the tape,” I said.
“Yeah,” answered Marv. “Maybe a voice will say, ‘You fool, Warren is dead!’”
“Huh? Who’s Warren?”
“It’s a line from Lovecraft.” He pointed to the book he was holding. “‘The Statement of Randolph Carter.’”
“Oh.”
“You ought to read it.”
“Yeah.”
“All right,” he said, getting up. “But I think The Love Boat’s going to interfere with our listening. Let’s play it in my room.”
Marv’s room had a bookcase lined with volumes he’d told me about, but I’d never read. Not yet. Books by or about occultists such as Aleister Crowley and Eliphas Levi, fiction by Lovecraft, Poe, and Algernon Blackwood. I was the more conventional Flanagan brother, though Marv’s interests had begun to rub off on me.
“Look, this whole thing,” he said as we sat on a couple of beanbag chairs, “about using technology to listen to ghosts. It’s nothing new. You read about Edison’s idea, right?”
“Yeah.” I’d shown him the book from the library.
He got up, pulled a book from the top shelf, and handed it to me. “Well, check this out.”
The title was Electronic Voice Phenomena: Seeking the Voices of the Dead. It was kind of like a manual, with no author credited.
“People have been trying this stuff for decades,” said Marv, “using sophisticated technology. Ultra-sensitive audio equipment. Receivers that can pick up signals from any radio frequency.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, wow. And the evidence so far has been vague at best. It’s not as if a few kids with a Radio Shack cassette recorder are going to pick up messages from beyond the grave.” He had this lecturing way of speaking at times like this, like a 50-year-old professor trapped in a 14-year-old body. It was annoying.
“Then why didn’t you say anything about this before?”
“Even if I had, you would’ve done it anyway.”
“Yeah, you’re right. But you seemed just as hyped about it as me and Ron.”
He shrugged. “I had my hopes, I guess.”
“So, odds are…”
“There’s nothing else on the tape except background hiss. Unless Barrie and his boys came back to insult us some more. I can take it if you can.”
“OK.” I pressed the play button, and the tape’s hiss filled the room.
Marv passed me a thin volume titled Flatland. “This is a good one,” he said, settling into the beanbag chair to read his Lovecraft. I was in no mood to read. I held the book closed, staring at the recorder, keeping my ears attuned to the slightest sound from the tape.
There was nothing but background hiss.
That same evening, we learned that Steve Barrie and his three friends had been killed the night before near Lake George when Steve’s car crashed head-on into a light pole at high speed. They’d apparently been drinking. Word was that the paramedics had to literally pick up the pieces. It happened around 11:00 P.M., about an hour before we’d started recording at Indian Rock.
Our feelings were a strange mixture. We hated Barrie and his buddies, but they were classmates who had died a horrible death. We also felt relieved that our midnight mission at Indian Rock would remain a secret. And then there was the apparent evidence for life after death.
The next day, the three of us sat on Indian Rock in the afternoon sun, talking it over. We agreed to tell no one. Analog cassette recordings had no date & time display. It would simply be assumed the recording had been made by the living, physical jocks at some point before the car accident, and that we were lying. I could picture the bereaved parents accusing us of exploiting the deaths of their sons for the sake of public attention. No, thank you.
“Maybe that was the point,” said Ron. “To give us proof of a ghost audio, yet not really proof.”
“A final act of mockery,” said Marv.
“Those dickheads,” said I.
Ron was pretty handy with electronics. With Marv’s assistance, he took the recorder apart, took Polaroids of everything, and somehow managed to put it all back together so that it worked. There seemed nothing strange about its components, nor the cassette. We decided I should keep them, along with the photos, taped up in a box in my closet. I was appointed Keeper of the Paranormal Technology, if that’s what it was.
Maybe there was something about Indian Rock that attracted Barrie and his friends, and any tape recorder would have worked. Or maybe it was both Indian Rock and the recorder, a supernatural combination of location and equipment. But if that’s true, who or what made the recorder able to do what it did?
We agreed to try again, to figure out how this had happened: to experiment by using the same recorder at a different location, and a different, more sensitive recorder at Indian Rock. But we never did, and neither Marv nor Ron has mentioned it to me since.
I still have that sealed box, which to this day I have never opened. On the rare occasions I am reminded of it, I feel the urge to throw it into a blast furnace, or sink it to the bottom of the sea. And yet there is also the thought, unaccountable, that I may need to use it again someday.
I have no idea why. It scares me a little.
Filed under Fiction on October 18th, 2024
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A Good Boy
by Raisa NORBERG
Up until Halloween of 1989 I was a well-behaved kid. I’d never really left my bedroom. That’s why I felt like it was time for a change when my cousin, Kimberly, booked The Grange in Smithfield, Rhode Island for what she called her “Big Halloween Bash.” I’d never attended a party, never mind a bash, in my life by that point.
…
I lived with my mother and four siblings in a two-story house on a dead-end road. My siblings had technically been moved out for a few years, but there were daily visits since Mom never locked the door. Likewise, Aunt Mabel lived in the raised ranch directly to the left of us (if you were facing the house) and her six adult children were in and out. Beside her house was an immediate drop of an unspecified distance but more than ten feet to a pit of gravel and garbage. We called it The Abyss. None of us dared go near it. One night I saw my brother Tommy get into a fight with this kid Keith from a few roads over. Tommy got a hold of his collar, dragged him to the edge of the drop, and shoved him. I never saw Keith again.
…
Hearing the sequential opening and closing of the screen door and footsteps heavily landing on the stairs, reaching a crescendo, I felt a presence in the doorway of my room. My back had faced the door with the way I arranged my desk. Having myself positioned in a way that the front of me faced the door caused me to feel too vulnerable.
“Halloween bash tonight,” 22-year-old Kimberly said. “My big Halloween bash.”
For a few long moments, I ignored her. Slowly, I turned around to see that she was still in my doorway, excited as all hell. “In The Abyss?” I asked.
“No. The Grange,” she said. Without a word, I turned back around; I’d been in the middle of The Adolescent by Dostoyevsky, because as I said, I’d been a well-behaved kid. “Are you coming or not?” Kimberly was still in my doorway. Cousin Kimberly lacked awareness; she was the type to stand in a doorway until you told her to leave. “Are you coming or not?” She asked again, more whiny than curious.
I responded with a hmph, and then, without turning back around, “Why would I go? When have I ever done anything?”
Silence. There was still an entity lingering around me, so I knew she hadn’t left. “There’s going to be a costume contest.”
For the first time in twenty-three years, I had reconsidered my voluntary confinement to my dismal bedroom. Costume contest.
…
“It’s at The Grange,” I said into the phone, leaning against a wall in the kitchen, twirling the phone cord with my finger. I’d watched my mother talk to her girlfriends on the phone so often that I adopted her mannerism. On the other line was my girlfriend, Amy. Technically, she wasn’t my girlfriend; at the same time, technically, she was. Amy was the only girl I really spent time with who wasn’t one of my sisters or neighboring cousins, and by spent time I mean she was the only girl who’d sit in my room in dead silence while I read Russian literature. I wasn’t an emotionally available sort of person, and we’d never established that we were together, and come to think of it we never even kissed or anything, but there was something unspoken between us that we were just… together.
“I’m going to be Pee-Wee Herman,” I said to Amy. The sliding door behind me hissed as it opened, prompting one of the four resident Maine Coons to slip out into the fenced backyard. Tommy stepped in from the cold sunset wearing blue jeans, a white t‑shirt, and a leather jacket. I always thought he looked like a prick. He always tried to look so tough. To be fair, he was extremely tough, and I never crossed him. As he passed me, he yanked the twirled cord out from between my fingers. I was shocked that he didn’t call me gay or a bitch for twirling the cord, which in his caveman brain was only what women did because Mom did it.
Amy let out a shrill squeal of delight, which was not only ear-piercing in person, but was like a dog whistle over the phone. “I’ll be Chairry!” She said.
I pinched the bridge of my nose and sighed. “Don’t.”
…
It smelled like it was going to snow that night. There’s a certain kind of weather in the Northeast where the air is sharp and it brings about a sort of scent that you instinctively associate with snow. It probably happens elsewhere, but I’d never been elsewhere.
I pulled up onto the lawn of The Grange in my woodie station wagon with Amy beside me. She wasn’t dressed as Chairry, but the girl from The Exorcist, “pre-possession,” she said, which was just some girl in a nightgown. “I didn’t really like all that shouting and levitating and head rotating,” she said, which was the whole movie.
When we got out of the woodie, I looked up at the deep, dark sky full of stars. From within The Grange I could hear various one-hit wonders pouring out of the jukebox. I truly did find that the Eighties was the time for obscure groups to make a million dollars off of one song, then fall off the face of the earth.
Amy pulled out a 35 millimeter Kodak camera from thin air. “This nightgown has pockets,” she said. “I didn’t even know when I got it! What a score!” She wound the film and looked through the viewfinder at me. I had no time to process what was happening as the flash hit me like a dodgeball. “So we’ll never forget this night,” Amy said enthusiastically.
We headed for the front door and I scanned the darkness for a car that I could recognize. Just above the entrance to The Grange was a banner, poorly hanging. It said, “Big Halloween Bash In Cool Letters.” I imagined that Kimberly asked the banner making people, “Can it say: Big Halloween Bash, in cool letters?” And the banner making people did exactly that.
I had felt so confident as Pee-Wee Herman that I knew in my heart of hearts I’d win the costume contest. The initial hype of Pee-Wee was over, I thought, and nobody would be dressed as him. It wouldn’t be the costume that would get me to win the contest, no; it would be my admirable commitment to the character. I had an uncanny impression of Pee-Wee Herman under my belt, which had taken two years of devoted practice to fully master.
“David!” I heard Kimberly exclaim as my hand grasped the door handle of The Grange. Out of the corner of my eye, a motion detecting light flashed on. There was a strange figure under it, and I felt it looking at me. When I glanced at Amy to my left, she was looking straight past me, gawking at the figure. Becoming terrified at the thought of what heinous beast was waiting for my shrieks of terror, I turned to face my fate. Kimberly stood under the light, dressed as an infant. She had a white shirt on, a pink diaper, a bonnet, and a sash that said, “It’s A Girl!”. A pacifier dangled on a string around her neck.
“Oh my god,” I said in a tone of disgust, accidental but completely genuine. There was never really a line I had drawn for someone to step over in order for me to lose all respect for them until that moment. Seeing my adult cousin dressed as an infant truly crossed the line that never existed before that.
“I didn’t think you were going to show up,” Kimberly said, pleasantly surprised. “Food, drinks, and the jukebox is inside. The real party is out under the canopy, though,” she said in a mischievous tone, and gave me a wink that involved scrunching half of her face. It was more of a bizarre spasm. Amy, Kimberly, and I stood in our respective spots, frozen in place. Kimberly stared at us, and we stared back. So much time had passed, that the motion detection light turned off. When it turned back on, Kimberly was gone.
…
The Grange served as a community center and consisted of one long room with a small stage at the far end. There were fold-out tables and chairs available in the minuscule kitchen to the right of the stage. Due to historic preservation and a questionable town budget, the wooden floor was splintery and most definitely rotting away. With the amount of people standing around it was amazing the floor didn’t cave in that very night.
Finally I began to recognize people. “David!” They exclaimed, like I was a cryptic legend and was spotted on a rare occasion. This was partially true; I wasn’t a legend, merely the village cryptic. Usually sporting a worn out, raggedy flannel with corduroy pants and deteriorated converse, my peers were pleased to see me so put together, even if it was to replicate Pee-Wee Herman. That Halloween was the cleanest I’d ever looked.
For a few minutes I stood in the center of a few acquaintances and strangers, doing my killer impression of Pee-Wee that brought the house down every time. They laughed and applauded, and I felt not only like a god, but that I would easily win the costume contest.
“So, what are you, the sexy Oregon Trail?” This guy, Jared, asked Amy. He was smug and drunk, swaying back and forth, not in costume at all. I saw a scar below his right eye. He must’ve crossed Tommy.
“Firstly, the Oregon Trail was an era, not one person,” Amy said, “and I’m Regan from The Exorcist. Pre-possession.”
“So you’re just a girl in a nightgown,” someone dressed as the Phantom from The Phantom of the Opera said. I liked him for sharing my sentiment regarding Amy’s non-costume, but I hated him for having a costume that could totally take first place in the contest. Everyone loves a phantom.
Amy seemed actually bothered by the Phantom’s observation, and she was my kind-of-girlfriend after all, so I felt obligated to defend her. “I know you are, but what am I?” I asked in Pee-Wee’s voice. The people around me hollered and laughed in the Phantom’s face. Once again, I had the higher ground.
“I didn’t say you were a girl in a nightgown,” the Phantom said, not understanding my shtick, but my attention had gone to someone else across the room. I recognized the slicked black hair, gray suit, and white loafers anywhere. It’s another goddamned Pee-Wee Herman.
Tunnel-visioned, I marched through the crowd I’d created, heading straight to my brand new enemy. I extended my arm, firmly gripped Pee-Wee Two’s shoulder, and spun him around.
“Keith! You’re alive!”
…
The midnight air bit at me as I stepped out of The Grange’s back door to the canopy. It was this idle, wooden roof that was held up by beams, and under it was a drab concrete rectangle with two unkempt picnic tables. Electricity ran to it, so there were Christmas lights that dangled from under the roof. Indeed, it was more busy under the canopy, a strange mass of people huddled together, clouds of smoke rising up occasionally like a natural hot spring.
Tommy and his Girlfriend of the Day, What’sHerFace, came out of the back door and headed for the canopy. He was dressed as a ninja, and his girlfriend was a witch with barely any clothes on.
“That’s disrespectful to the actual women who were persecuted during that era,” Amy said. Tommy gave me the finger even though I wasn’t the one who said it. He probably knew that I was thinking it.
The cloud of smoke traveled up and down, left and right within the crowd. Kimberly squeezed out of the crowd, her long-term boyfriend Reggie trailing behind her. The two of them stood in front of me and Amy in their infant costumes. Reggie was Kimberly’s counterpart, with a blue diaper, bonnet, and sash that said, “It’s A Boy!”. I always thought Reggie was a douche, but this made all of his other disappointing traits seem respectable.
“Why…?” I began but trailed off as Reggie extended something towards my face. It was a marijuana cigarette. The source of the traveling smoke.
“This is the good stuff,” said Reggie. He dragged out gooood and stuuuffff, nodding at the same pace as his words, eyes glossy and red. Kimberly slapped him on the shoulder.
“You know David doesn’t smoke. He’s a good boy; look at him.”
The term good boy bothered me for some reason. I felt like a crystal glass shattering due to a high frequency. Involuntarily I cringed at Kimberly’s perspective of me, especially realizing that this was what everyone thought. Here I was, twenty-three years old, Dostoyevsky reader, master of the hacky sack and Pee-Wee Herman impression, who’s never even smoked a cigarette. Of course I was a good boy. Everyone in earshot heard Kimberly, and at that point she was gesturing to me, so a good amount of people were staring. I felt like a tool.
“Aren’t we lacking good boys in this society?” Amy offered in response. In no way did she sound confident of this rhetoric.
The marijuana cigarette was still extended towards my face, and Reggie was getting impatient. “Dude, are you taking a hit or not?”
All eyes on me, surely losing the majority vote for the contest, I had to get the people back on my side. Plus, I was becoming susceptible to societal pressure, and didn’t want to be viewed as a loser for not smoking weed.
“Put ‘er there,” I lamely said, holding out my hand to accept the reefer. Those who were spectating gasped and clapped, having known me for most of our lives, and it being common knowledge that I was the epitome of straight edge. Acting like I was aware of what I was doing, I slowly brought the joint to my mouth, and inhaled for longer than recommended.
“Yeah,” Reggie said, “you don’t say put ‘er there when you want a hit of the J.”
When I separated from the joint, I held my breath, then exhaled. Suddenly, a coughing fit of which the likes I’d never experienced washed over me — or rather, hit me like a train. It was like whoever was living in my lungs had closed the door and nailed it shut. I’m saying that I couldn’t breathe. While I was keeled over, trying to not die then and there, wheezing and hacking, I didn’t notice the silent dispersal of my peers. I did, however, from the corner of my eye, acknowledge the headlights shining directly on me.
“What’s going on, bud?” A manly man’s voice asked me. He was trying to be friendly, but when I glanced up and squinted, my eyes adjusting to the silhouette in front of the lights, two cops were staring down at me. One of them shone a flashlight into my face like the high beams weren’t enough. “We got a noise complaint from someone in the neighborhood. What d’ya got there?” The flashlight cop asked, nodding to the joint. Obviously he knew it was a joint.
“Cigarette,” I said, and by said I mean that I emitted it so weakly out of my mouth that I sounded like a dying tea kettle.
The two cops exchanged knowing glances.
“It looks an awful lot like a reefer,” the other cop said. He was probably in his thirties and had aviator sunglasses on despite it being the middle of the night.
I stood up straight and flattened out my gray blazer, remembering that I was still in Pee-Wee Herman garb. “My mother hand rolls cigarettes,” I said. If anything, they couldn’t blame me for trying.
Aviator Cop stepped forward and snatched the joint from me like it was some secret weapon and he was a supervillain. With my own eyes I watched him carefully inspect the joint, bring it to his mouth, and take an elongated drag. I turned to glance at The Grange to see everyone peering out of the windows or standing just outside, watching. Nobody could believe the sight before us.
Aviator Cop exhaled. “It’s marijuana,” he said.
Flashlight Cop nodded and held onto his belt like a cowboy. “Uh-huh. You know that smoking marijuana is against the law, right?”
“He just did it,” I said, pointing to Aviator Cop.
“To determine if it was drugs!” Flashlight Cop shouted. He stepped towards me and got all in my face. “You are aware that you’re a criminal now, right? How does that make you feel?”
I’d never had a standard of what was manly and what wasn’t, and I had never tried very hard to be a man, whatever it meant, but this was a severely emasculating experience. Here I was, having done nothing wrong in my life, now dressed fully as Pee-Wee Herman, getting the business from a cop in front of everyone I’ve ever known.
“You’re in deep shit, kid! You understand?” He yelled.
Suddenly, Kimberly stormed past me and got in Flashlight Cop’s face. Meanwhile, Aviator Cop arrested me. “Don’t yell at my cousin, you freak!” She said. I wondered what her definition of a freak was, and if it involved dressing as an adult infant. Aviator Cop shoved me into the back of the paddy wagon, and Kimberly continued reprimanding Flashlight Cop. “You can’t just go around arresting people willy-nilly!” Here was my cousin Kimberly, in a diaper and bonnet, trying to tell a cop how to do his job. Yet, I felt like the jackass.
“Shut the fuck up, Kimberly! Just shut up!” Said Tommy. He and Kimberly hurried over to my window as the two officers got in.
“We’ll get you out, David. I promise,” Kimberly said.
“This is what you get for twirling the phone cord,” Tommy said. “Are you gay or something?”
That was the last thing I heard before the policemen drove me to the station.
…
I hung on the bars of the holding cell, staring at the door, waiting for Flashlight or Aviator to come in and tell me that I’m free to go because I’m such a good boy. Behind me were other weekend criminals. All of them looked much tougher than me. Probably because they didn’t get arrested while dressed as a beloved television character.
Abruptly, Amy came barreling in, and the delinquent men who were otherwise bored on this Halloween night were suddenly very interested in my maybe girlfriend. They stood up or at least looked more alert, looking her up and down.
I grimaced at them. “She’s dressed as the girl from The Exorcist, pre-possession.” Every last one of them averted their eyes.
“I got here as soon as I could,” Amy said.
“It’s been two hours,” I said.
“Well, I had to stay for the costume contest. And your brother Paul had bail for me to get.”
I ignored the latter half. “The costume contest? You were there for the results?” She nodded. “Who won?”
“Tommy,” she said.
“What?” I exclaimed, perplexed. “He was a ninja!”
“Well, it was the most mysterious costume.”
Like a confused dog, I tilted my head. “What other categories were there?”
Amy shrugged. “It was just a contest for the most mysterious costume.”
It felt like it took hours for my brain to process the information. “The contest was themed? How the hell was I ever going to win as Pee-Wee Herman when the objective was to be the most mysterious?” I couldn’t believe it. Then, something struck me that made me even more perplexed. “So why was Kimberly dressed as a baby?!”
She shrugged, “Maybe she thinks that babies are mysterious. I think they are. They speak gibberish, but you can tell that they mean it, and it makes me think that they have crucial information we don’t know about but ought to know. Like which god we’re supposed to be worshipping.”
I sulked. I wish I’d remained a good boy and didn’t give into peer pressure. I felt like I was in an after school special. Amy stood there, staring at me.
“If you take a picture, it’ll last longer,” I said.
Silently, Amy pulled her Kodak from her nightgown pocket, held it up to her eye, and snapped a photo, the flash briefly blinding me again. “I should’ve been arrested right along with you,” she said with armchair sympathy. And something hit me: if I’d only made a run for it into The Grange, those cops could’ve arrested that asshole Keith, also dressed as Pee-Wee Herman. I would’ve really been a legend amongst my peers if I dodged Weekend Jail. I wished Keith had died in The Abyss after all.
“You said Paul had bail money?” I asked her. She nodded between the specs of lingering light in my eyes. “Do you have it?”
She patted her pockets and slapped her forehead. “Gosh, I forgot to stop at Paul’s house!”
Defeated, I sat on the cold, wooden bench beside a normally dressed degenerate. The degenerate looked me up and down. “What are you in for? Being a tool?” The other insubordinates laughed. I could only nod because he was exactly right.
Filed under Fiction on October 11th, 2024
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Bigfoot evolved mimicry skills. All I’m sayin’.