Category: Fiction

Brotherly Love

It started with a simple enough gesture, a wink. Winks are harmless when cast by the right eye. And, at the time, he never thought anything of it; the way she looked at him from the other side of the dinner table, the way she held their embraces just a few seconds longer than expected. Thinking about it now makes him want to vomit, and he does. The anxiety spills out in a pathetic splat onto the concrete. The street is silent and empty, but to Tom it feels like the whole world just watched him upheave.

Tom never wanted to commit murder; in fact, he never really meant to hurt anybody. He was the victim here, dammit. Not this dead guy. But they had pushed him.

Justice, right?

Staring into the pile of vomit on the sidewalk beside a freshly mangled body, he thinks fondly on the kind of person he is, the kind of guy who pays his taxes three months in advance,signals for other drivers, and spends time with his mother every weekend. Every single action he made was done with a tremendous sense of family. “We are all in this together.” Sure, he ate fried food, stayed out late, drank, even smoked on occasion; he did those things, but hurting people certainly never crossed his mind. Until now.

We find Tom with a serious problem on his hands: my blood. It was never his plan to push me out in front of the Riverfront Parking Shuttle, but something went terribly wrong with Tom. Maybe it was when she winked at me in between sips of Cabernet from across the dining room table at Christmas? Now I look upward, without the ability to even blink, let alone wink,dead look in the eye and a cemented air of disdain forever on my face. 

My name is Colin, and I’m pretty heavy to carry. I’m also Tom’s brother, and he can tell just by picking me up that several of my ribs are broken. They shift and slide in his grasp,making it almost impossible to keep a firm hold on my lifeless corpse as he half-drags, half-carries me down the street. We’re in the middle of a busy city, just down the road from an intersection that sits at the bulkhead of a nearby river. At the moment the roads are void of life.No cars. No people. Just us. Just me and my brother.

Lifting his shirtsleeve to his face to wipe away the strained asparagus now mixing with the ruby red liquid slowly dripping from my neck, nose and mouth, Tom sniffs his nose and looks around.

No one but the bus driver has seen him, and even that he can’t be sure of. His car is parked only a block away and the decision to transport the body, my body, is made.

A soft orange light hues our progress from the streetlamps above as we strafe along the cracked crags and once-complete sidewalk slabs toward the crossing. Tom keeps an eye to the roads, every so often glancing down at me to see if maybe it was just an act; worried I might leap to my feet and take off running. But I know.

As we move I try to bleed as much as possible. There’s a noticeable trail flowing out behind us like liquid breadcrumbs, and I can tell Tom notices. I bought him the shirt he’swearing. That was three years ago. Maybe I can bleed even more profusely to completely ruin it,I begin to wonder. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen Tom wear it. He casts furtive glances and a frenzied grimace back at the damp concrete now laced with my DNA. And then his eyes return and take to the streets.

Although nothing is around and no one is near, the night welcomes us like a petulant child. I can feel his heart pounding in his chest as we approach the intersection. His car sits lonely only half a block down the alley. A quick, right turn and Tom is home free. I can almost feel the rising sense of liberation in his stride. The closer we get, the faster we move.

Something in the bushes suddenly catches his attention and he nearly drops me onto the asphalt.

“Who’s that?” He calls out. But no one answers.

He looks down at me to find the smile I died with. My eyes are closed, and there’s an odd sort of calm about me, especially for a person that was thrown in front of a bus no more than 10 minutes prior.

Tom looks at his watch, but it’s stopped ticking-right around the same time the clock stopped ticking for me. I bought him that watch. It matches the one I own. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen him wear it.

I would never go so far as to say she wasn’t the love of my life, but she was my wife and I could tell Tom fancied her. Tom always fancied everything I owned. It had been that way ever since we were kids. I bought a car; Tom had to have the newer and better model in a flashier color. I was the first in my family to go to college; Tom got into a private school and graduated with honors at the top of his class. He had money, he had success, but what he didn’t have was Erika. And I did.

The whinny of a supped-up engine roars in the distance and spooks my brother as we turn down the brick-road alley. He nearly drops me, and my legs scrape the concrete as we make the turn. The walls of the buildings surrounding us blend in with the red-stone on the street in the iridescent orange glow. If it wasn’t for the sky, we’d have no way of knowing which way was out. 

Up ahead in the near distance, Tom spies his car sitting next to a sign that says No Parking. There’s a fresh ticket sticking out from under his passenger-side window wiper and he curses into the night sky. The uneven brick makes it hard for him to keep his balance with my body sitting as awkwardly as it is in his arms. My plan to bleed out was a success and now it has accumulated on my clothing so thick I’m one giant, slippery mess. Tom hangs on long enough to make it to the rear of his vehicle and then drops my body like a bag of dirty laundry onto the road with sickening thump.

He pauses for a moment after he has me propped up to catch his breath and eyes me over.I can see frightened tears welling in his eyes that glisten momentarily in the light from an overhanging flood lamp, which he quickly wipes away and conceals with a deep breath.

And then I feel the car move, and my soaked-through shirt nearly causes me to slide right off the bumper.

A large pool of blood is forming in my lap. Although I can’t smell it, I know the metallic stain of blood is heavy upon the thick, summer air. It’s the smell of death, a smell this alley has probably known all too well.

Tom has taken a seat on the hood of his car and is staring off toward the crossroads. He sits there for several minutes and does not move. He’s just sitting there and sitting there, and all the while I’m just lying here and lying here. The ground is cold and wet and I suddenly wish to know what that is like.

Then I hear a soft chatter. Tom is on his cellphone speaking rapidly but in a low tone.The phone call is brief and soon there is only silence again, and the soft din of traffic.

I begin to think of what my wife must have felt when I shot her. Could it have been like the smack of the bus against my unsuspecting body; the bullet that tore through her forehead carrying the same impact as a 15-ton public bus speeding down a deserted city street? A thick spray of blood splattered a couple of photographs hanging on the far wall as the bullet exited the back of her head. They were pictures of us, when we were happy. She had lied about Tom, and I had caught them in the act. He got away. She was not so lucky.

Now Tom’s face is in his hands and a few hard sobs can be heard over the low commotion of the distant traffic. We’re waiting for something, but I’m not sure what. Tom checks his watch a couple times and then gets up from the hood of the car and begins to pace back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. He stops periodically to wipe his eyes or scratch at his forehead, but continues to pace.

He’s thinking of a plan!

But what on Earth could he be thinking ? I wonder. Doesn’t he know he’s a dead man?

They’ll fry him for this. I’m sure of it.

No more than a few seconds after I began entertaining Tom’s trial does a low rumble rise and echo and fill the street. It’s the unmistakable growl of a Harley Davidson, and the owner drives with purpose. Soon enough, an all-black bike with chrome finish pulls up in front of the Volkswagen. Tom is the picture of casual surprise.

A scrawny, unassuming man wearing cheap sunglasses and an old bandana hops off the bike. His features are hard and worn.

Tom immediately walks over to the man and shakes his hand.

They say a few quiet words to each other and look back at the car every now and then.

Another noise suddenly fills my ears, sirens.

Tom and Harley take note of the noise immediately and it appears to stir motivation in both men.

Their conversation turns violent and I can hear them arguing with one another.The Harley suddenly roars up again and begins idling, but not for long. Soon, Tom and the stranger are fading noise in the early morning twilight. But the space between us abruptly stops. The sirens are close now; very close. I hear a few shots ring out across the intersection. A man on a megaphone announces something authoritative, but the shots continue. Soon more shots ring out and the once idle and deserted streets become alive with gunfire and wailing sirens. Reds and blues illuminate the back alley; the colors flashing in specific and maintained order. Bright white follows each pop. There are more of them now than before, and create an electric light show.

The sound of the motorcycle fires up again, and I can hear its roar approaching. 

Moments later, Tom returns on the Harley. The stranger is nowhere to be found. 

When he dismounts, Tom’s chest is heaving and sweat rolls in thick droplets down his forehead. He’s also wearing more blood than when I last saw him, but the same panic and terror wells in his eyes.He moves runs over to where I’m propped up against the back end of his car. He grips his head and whines as his eyes search every square inch of the alley. Something isn’t right. The police haven’t given chase. The sirens in the street remain the same frequency and pitch,although a new slew of sirens can be heard rising from the west.

My skin is now a pale shade of what it used to be and my lips are turning blue. One of my eyes has rolled back, leaving only the whites visible.

About a month before, I had approached Tom about sleeping with my wife. I suspected something going on between them about a year beforehand, but couldn’t bring myself to say anything. I instantly recognized Tom’s car parked next to my wife’s in the driveway when she was supposedly out with friends. They didn’t even try to hide it. At first I just sat in my car with the engine on and the lights off pondering whether or not I should burst through the door and put them both out of their misery or just walk away and never return. I eventually chose to just peak through the window, and sure enough, there was Erika sitting on top of Tom with her bare legs wrapped around his waist.

Two minutes later, the bastard begged and pleaded for forgiveness like a small child might for a toy after having it taken away. He cries now, as he cried then.

As he approaches, my brother slips momentarily on the puddle of blood around me. For a second it looks as if he is bending down to pick me up. When he regains his balance, he does.His efforts, however, are slowed due to my sopping clothes. Tom can’t get a right handle on me. His hands slide and slip all over my cold, wet frame. I begin to wonder if this is how my wife felt.

“God dammit, Colin!”

He grunts and groans with each attempt to pick my corpse up off the ground. The plan she has for me, I know not, but his efforts are highly amusing and grow more frantic as the wailing in the west begins to catch up with us.

“Come on, come on! Son of a bitch!”

Through gritted teeth and a nostril symphony of breath he begins pulling at my legs. My head hits the redbrick hard as I slide down the back of his car, which reveals a long, red streak smeared across the bumper, and a fresh pool begins to form where my head now rests.

Everything is saturated by the humidity in the air. The cold smell of death lingers on the wet atmosphere like soup in a damp cloth. It’s electric, and I can almost see it fuse with Tom’s fear.

The sirens are now only a few blocks away, but I’m not budging.The trunk is open and ready for loading, his keys are in the ignition and the engine is running. The only piece of the puzzle missing in his daring escape is my swollen and bled-out body lying lump in the back of his car. But then he hears a call cut through the night.

“This is Detective Robert Rein,” a voice orders in uniform tone from the far end of the alley. Tom looks over his shoulder to find a man with a shotgun.

“Put your hands in the air where I can see them and keep them there!”

Tom hesitates and the man calls out again in a much more declarative manner.“Do it now!” 

I can’t see either one of them, but I can hear them both moving. Tom has moved away from my body, away from the car, and is hiding behind the lamppost. The man at the end of the alley begins to move forward. Hard, Italian shoes scuff the pavement with every step. I,meanwhile, stare blankly up at the sky with my one good eye. The moon has just peeked out from behind a large patch of clouds and a few stars dance vibrantly nearby. Perhaps the stars are shining brighter than usual due to my current state? I somehow feel more connected with them,and everything around me. I hear Tom breathing, I feel the river flowing. It’s as though I have a heart, though I haven’t felt mine beating in quite some time.

And then a very funny image comes to mind. It’s my junior year of college, and I’m about four months from graduation. I’ve been hospitalized for a nervous breakdown. I tried to kill myself. Tom was the only one in our family who came to visit me. While in the hospital, he promised he’d always look after me.

Perhaps, in the case of Erika, he looked after me a little too well. And tonight he threw me in front of a bus.

Tom crouches down next to my body and says something I can’t quite understand,although I’m not sure why I don’t. His expression tries to tell something, as well. There’s a look of authenticity and genuineness I haven’t seen in him in a long time, not since my stay in the hospital. He looked the same way when I approached him about sleeping with Erika.

Everything begins to fade. Several more shots ring out that sound like fingers flicking tin foil faintly in the distance. Time lapses indistinctly after they stop. Sometime later, I find myself propped up and almost feel as though I’m in Tom’s arms. The groping and prodding at my ribs feels more like a massage; yes, they’re definitely his fingers. Then something loud slams and I hear a car engine choke to life. Sirens wail loudly all around us now. The world suddenly gains motion and takes a hard turn. Now another hard turn. My face presses forcefully up against thin plastic covered in cheap fabric. I realize I’m in the trunk, and we’re racing down Central Parkway toward the river. The sirens give chase, but they never catch us. Everything is momentarily suspended like the split second when the elevator first drops; there is no up and there is no down.When the car regains a sense of gravity, we smack a fluid surface with enough force to pop the trunk and I tumble out into the black dark of the river.

As I toss and turn in the river’s silent currents, Tom’s body floats lazily into view. He, too, is now lifeless. A new trail of blood not of my own diffuses its way over toward my floating and suspended corpse; a few last bubbles of air birth from his lungs. His eyes are bulged, and his neck bleeding. The blood looks like giant, spiral fingers reaching through the water. What little blood I have left in me now mixes with Tom’s but refuses to fully blend with the river’s waters.

We are the same in that moment, brothers, as is our blood, and the feeling of everything as one sweeps over me again.

Overhead, the muffled sound of sirens approaches the river bank. Underwater they almost sound like the adults in the Peanuts cartoons.

Just before everything completely fades away, Tom tells me he never meant to hurt me and that he’s sorry. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard him apologize, and it’s the last thing he says before he tells me he loves me and always will.

Chad W. Lutz was born in Akron, Ohio, in 1986 and raised in the neighboring suburb of Stow. A 2008 graduate of Kent State University’s English program, his writing has been featured in Diverse Voices Quarterly, Kind of a Hurricane Press, Haunted Waters Press, and Sheepshead Review. Chad currently works in North Canton writing content for an online job resource site and manages an online magazine called AltOhio.com. Chad runs competitively and won the Lake Wobegon Marathon in May 2015, setting the course record by nearly three minutes in a time of 2:33:59. He aspires to qualify for the Olympic Trials.

Crease

I asked Mama how to draw an upside-down man, and she said to just draw a man and turn the paper the other way round so that he was upside down.

“He does not look like he is falling,” I said. “He is supposed to look like he is falling.”

“Well, then, he is not falling,” Mama said.

“He looks like someone tied a rope around his ankles and is dangling him from the ceiling,” I said.

“I don’t know,” she said.

I went away in the fall, to live with Dad, and Jeanie went to live with Mama. They tossed us back and forth, so that I was with Mama all summer and Dad the rest of the time. Jeanie had to be with Mama, they said, because Jeanie was younger and she needed Mama. And Jeanie didn’t need me.

Dad had gotten a new girlfriend that summer and she was very tall and very tan and she called everyone “honey.”

I asked her how to draw an upside-down man and she smiled and said men aren’t supposed to be upside down, honey.

That year in Mr. Kessler’s English class, we were supposed to draw pictures for the reports on the book we were reading, and Dad said in the car that he would help me. But after dinner, he went into his room with his girlfriend and I drew the pictures myself and stuck them all on the board upside down.

Danny who sat two seats away laughed and asked if I was stupid. I said I wasn’t. Mr. Kessler gave me a C+.

Mama got older every summer that I went to see her and I guess Jeanie did, too. I didn’t really see her. I knew she had started to wear black underwear when I found a pair in my suitcase when I was going back to Dad’s. Mama said I grew, too, every year until I was not seven anymore but seventeen and too small for my hands.

Dad married his girlfriend and she said to just call her Lou, honey. Only Dad called her Louise.

Lou was always fixing. She fixed me snacks when I got home, she fixed my bangs when they were getting too long, she fixed Dad’s shirt and his flat tire. She always said she was fixing to open a shop of her own.

Dad asked me if I was still making my little drawings when he saw the dog-eared sketchbook on my desk.

“Can I see?” He reached for it.

I watched him look at the drawings of Mama and the one of Jeanie after she had just gotten out of the shower and her hair was a dripping net on her back.

“Your sister’s gotten big,” he commented, carefully flipping past a sketch of Mama, bent over the kitchen sink as she washed the dishes.

“Yes.”

“Is she taller than you, now?”

“Maybe. Almost. I don’t know. Maybe.”

He said okay and left. He looked maybe like he wanted to say something more, but he didn’t.

I went to school and I sat by myself during lunch because Lacy who usually sat with me was sick that day.

“I’m going to be sick tomorrow,” she had said.

“Okay.”

“I’ve got a big test tomorrow, so I’m going to be sick.”

So Lacy was sick and I didn’t know what to draw because I usually drew Lacy.

“Why are you alone?” A boy came to sit next to me. I knew him, he sat diagonal from me in math class. He had a big chin, he always stared at the board with his chin in his hand.

“Lacy is sick today,” I said.

“Cool.”

“She has a test today, so she’s sick,” I explained. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I didn’t want him to think I was stupid.

He laughed. “So what are you drawing today?”

“Nothing.”

“Can I see?” He moved over so that his arm was touching mine.

I showed him the blank page. “Nothing today.”

“Well, why don’t you draw me?”

I looked at him, and I saw his nose, which was big, but not as big as his chin, and his eyes, which weren’t big.

“I can’t right now,” I said. “You’re too close.”

“Why don’t you meet me today after school?” he said. “I’ll see you in the parking lot. We can go somewhere and you can think about how to draw me then.”

I knew Dad was going to be helping Lou. He always seemed to be helping her with something, so I said, “Okay.”

I stood by the curb after school, and the boy drove his truck up to me. It was a tired truck that smelled like rust and sex, but I was only guessing, because I didn’t know what sex smelled like.

I told him that and he laughed. “The rust is there for sure,” he said. “This is an old car.” He rubbed his hands along the steering wheel.

“And the sex?”

We drove and we drove until I didn’t quite recognize where we were anymore. Sometimes he would hit his palm against the radio because it stuttered.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Here.”

He pulled up across the street from a very nice-looking house where I imagined nice-looking people lived. It had a trim lawn and dark brown doors and white windowsills.

“Do you live here?”

“My mom does.”

“Oh.”

“Have you thought about how to draw me?” he asked, looking at the house.

“Not really.”

“Well, get out your sketchbook, and you can think about it as you draw.”

He was still looking at the house. I dug out my sketchbook and a pencil and wondered if I should draw the house, or the people who probably lived in the house.

He leaned in very close, so that I could smell his cafeteria meatloaf breath, and said, “You’re a very beautiful girl.”

“Not really,” I said. “My sister Jeanie, she’s beautiful.”

“You’re beautiful,” he said. “You’re the kind of girl who’s most beautiful without clothes, you know?”

I didn’t.

“It’s really hot in here,” he said. “You should take off your jacket.”

And then he tugged on my sleeve, and I tried to shake him off, but he was clinging onto my jacket, so I shook off my jacket.

“That’s a good girl,” he said.

“I think I want to go home,” I said, and tried the door, but he had locked it.

“I’ll drive you home,” he said. “But you should pick up your pencil first.”

I had dropped it when he had grabbed my arm, and it was now under his seat. I reached over to pick up the pencil, and he put his hand on my head and pushed me down.

And so I was sprawled on the floor and his fingers were knotted in my hair and he pulled me up so that my head rested between his knees.

“I’ll drive you home,” he said, “but you haven’t drawn me yet.”

With some difficulty, he worked his zipper down and all the while I was stuck so tightly I could hear his knees in my ears.

He held my head with one hand, his nails piercing my scalp, and used his other hand to force himself into my mouth.

I was crying, or maybe I wasn’t, maybe I was just choking, but I couldn’t breathe, and I couldn’t move, and I couldn’t do anything but beat uselessly against his legs with my hands, and the hairy expanse of him clogged my screams in my throat.

I heard him say “bitch” and I heard him groan and I heard him say “bitch” again, but I couldn’t be sure, because I could mostly only hear my own heart slapping the walls of my chest.

So instead I looked up, at his chin, at his big, big chin, and it was all I saw.

When he was finished, he let go of me and watched me clamber back up onto the seat.

“You don’t tell anybody,” he said, “or I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you, and I’ll kill your sister.”

I could still feel the weight of him crushing my throat and my head and my ears, so I just nodded.

“Besides,” he said, “who would believe a freak like you?”

I didn’t say anything on the way back to school. I didn’t think I’d ever say anything again.

“Clean yourself up,” he instructed, before he drove away. I stood alone in the parking lot for a long while, for long after the sun had set, before I called Dad.

“What happened to your hair?” Dad asked. I hadn’t combed out all the knots.

“Nothing.”

“Is that blood?” He leaned over and I flinched away.

“No.”

“Next time you want to try something with your hair, ask Lou for help,” he said, smiling. “Then maybe you won’t hurt yourself.”

I went home and I thought about how to draw him, and then I drew him with the bitter taste of him in my mouth, and I started with his big chin, and I drew the rest of his face and his body, and when I finished, it looked like a picture of him standing up from the point of view of someone lying below him.

Then I turned it upside down, and it looked like he was falling, falling headfirst.

Falling.

Lisa Liu is a senior at The Harker School in San Jose, California. Her poetry and prose have been featured in Textploit and Phosphene. She is a graduate of the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio.

Farrand Pride

I drove Bonnie from the airport to the hotel in a rented car. As we zipped through Farrand, Texas, I gave a running commentary on all little details and stories from my childhood.

We’d be driving through what looked like just another desolate stretch of urban wasteland when I exclaimed something like: “Hey, that’s the old Hippodrome! My class used to take field trips there all the time to see plays like ‘Our Founding Fathers, American Superheroes: A Musical Adventure to Teach Children American Exceptionalism!’ Of course, back when I was in fourth grade, it went bankrupt and since then it’s pretty much just been a squatter haven.”

Or, “And that’s one of Farrand’s many wackjob churches. They found out the priest had a stockpile of guns and twelve wives and was telling everyone the world was going to end in 2003. A lot of my babysitters went there.”

Or, “Look! Over there! That’s the old Arbor Valley Cigarette Museum, the site of another one of my school field trips. I remember they had this moving, smoking animatron designed to look like Dr. Moe A. Gallagher (founder of Arbor Valley Cigarettes) and it was so lifelike and creepy I thought it was a real guy stuck behind a glass case.”

Or, “Hey, that’s the strip mall where I saw a clown selling soiled furniture!”

I went on and on, talking more to myself than to her.

By the third or fourth landmark, I noticed she had stopped nodding politely whenever I made a passing comment about the messed up stuff I was surrounded by as a kid and but stared out of the window, not at the seedy streets drenched in the flickering urine colored glow of the streetlights but rather up at the sky, where you could make out a couple spare stars and a slice of the moon, but mostly just the same dismal light of the street lamps reflected by clouds.

I shut up, set my eyes on the road. I noted mementos of my past silently, even the ones that didn’t have to do with crime or cults or clowns.

We drove in a kind of tense silence for awhile, through the slums and streets thick with filth and houses that had been falling apart since I’d left.

“I’m sorry,” Bonnie said eventually, when it became clear I wasn’t going to say anything. “It’s just, it’s a lot to take in.”

“What? This place?”

“Sort of, I guess, but more than anything how it relates to you.”

“Huh?”

“It’s just, at college you acted, I dunno, just like everyone else.”

“Like everyone else?”

“You know what I’m talking about, like you had, y’know, resources. It’s just, this is the last place I thought you’d have grown up. It’s a side of you I’ve never seen, never even considered before.”

It took a moment for me to get my bearings, to come up with a response. “But I didn’t grow up here! Not where we’re driving, anyways, not this part of the town. Just wait, tomorrow I’ll show you the house I grew up in. Or mansion, more like. Yeah, mansion’s the right word. It’s in a beautiful neighborhood. There are swimming pools and an artificial creek running through the backyards and tree lined streets to shelter us from the harsh Texas sun. It’s literally the epitome of American suburbia! Look, I’m sorry to say it, but you’re just plain wrong. I didn’t grow up here.”

You’re just plain wrong is always the wrong thing to say to your girlfriend.

“But you sort of did,” she muttered softly, so softly, hoping I couldn’t hear it.

That’s one thing I hate about her. She’s got this bizarre moral thing where she always feels some innane need to say the truth.

There was some more silence, more landmarks. The fast food joint that had gotten shut down by the health department and sold the space to a divorce center that forgot to take down the little statue of an anthropomorphic, smiling hotdog point to what used to be the drivethrough. The concrete flatland where they had the state carnival, which was more dangerous than skydiving into a shark cage if you compared body counts.

“Should we turn on some music?” asked Bonnie.

“By the time you find something besides Theological/Political Yelling, Country Music, or stuff in Spanish, we’ll already be at the hotel.”

Out of what I think was spite, she turned it on anyways.

“Oh, my baby left me so I shot my tractor-” sang the first station.

“That’s country music, I think,” I told her.

She changed the channel. “¡Hola! ¡Este programmadora es Tito 103! ¡Nuestro primero persona de telefono es-”

            “Strike two,” I said.

A disgruntled grunt and a station change.

“And no church can truly call itself Christian when it lets the gays and their supporters freely into what is supposedly the house of God!” screamed the guy on the radio. I recognized the voice. It was the same guy who had stockpiled weapons and brides. Guess he’s got his own radio show now. Good for him.

“Give it up. You’re not going to find anything,” I told her.

She changed it a fourth time and by luck, pure dumb luck, she found herself on the one decent station in the entire town: college radio.

“They heard me singing and they told me to stop!” sang Arcade Fire.

Bonnie smiled. She loved Arcade Fire, and for that moment I secretly suspected it wasn’t because she liked the music or message or any of that shit. It was because both she and the members of the band had been raised in the preppy suburbs of Montreal.

“Quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock!”

            I sighed, but she didn’t hear me over the radio.

“Sometimes I wonder if the world is so small-”

            The light was red, so I stopped a car. Glancing out the window absentmindedly, I saw a homeless teen, grey hoodie pulled over his head, sprawled out along a bus stop bench advertising the smiling face of a sleazebag lawyer. He was either asleep or, judging by the bottle in his hand, too drunk to get up.

“That we can never get away from the sprawl! Living in the sprawl! Dead shopping malls like mountains beyond mountains!”

Even when I was young, I knew that I was worlds away from that homeless guy.  I had seen people like that and realized that there was a barrier much stronger than the metal and glass of the car door separating us. He was poor, I was rich. We were different. It was simple. But now I realized a new dimension. The girl with me in the car was also rich, yet somehow there was still a wall between us. Bonnie, that passed out guy, and I, all spoke the same language. We were of the same nationality. We were around the same age. Yet our circumstances, the lottery of birth, had set us each in our own little worlds from which it was unlikely that we’d ever escape.

“And there’s no end in sight! I need some darkness, won’t you please shut the lights?”

            That was one thing Montreal suburbs and Farrand had in common: the sprawl. Whether driving through neighborhoods of beautiful houses or seedy strip malls, they both seemed to go on forever, endless grids of streets under a sky glowing orange from light pollution.

Eventually the song ended and it cut to the drunk college students in charge of the station talking to one another. Apparently their views on gay rights were identical to that of the ex-doomsday cult leader.

Bonnie turned off the radio and tried to take another stab at conversation with me.

“So when are we getting the details about your uncle’s will?”

He had died two years before, but a long and very confusing legal battle meant they weren’t releasing his will until now.

“I dunno,” I said. “I think the meeting with the lawyer is tomorrow, but it might be the next day. No, he wouldn’t schedule it for a Sunday. But maybe the day after that. I’ll check the email when I get home.”

“Do you think he left you his house?”

“I dunno. If he did, I wouldn’t have a problem with selling it.”

I find lying much easier than Bonnie does.

“You know, we’re here to claim the possessions of a man I don’t know anything about,” she said.

“Do you feel guilty?”

“A little.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be. Just tell me about him.”

“I don’t think you want to hear.”

“Why not?”

“Because he’s, well, a lot like Farrand, and you didn’t want to hear about Farrand.”

“I didn’t…”

She couldn’t think of the next thing to say.

“Do you want to hear about him?” I asked.

It took her awhile to think of what to say. Like I said, she’s honest.

“I feel like I should.”

“Okay, well, he was racist. That’s the first thing that comes to mind. Always racist. Hardcore racist. I think when he died two years ago, he was the last surviving eugenicist. If he knew I was dating a Jew, well, he’d have quite the conniption, which, come to think of it, is why I never told you about him until now. And he drank like a fish, I don’t have many memories of him without a bottle of something or other in his hand. A cigar in his mouth too, always one of those. He was in the oil business, so his cash supply fluctuated, and he wasn’t particularly good with money. I remember when times were good he’d invite the whole family to some fancy steak house out in Houston, and when times weren’t so great and we’d come, he’d just sit and drink and yell. Every time we drove up to his ranch house and there would be the Confederate flag, waving in the wind-”

“That’s enough.”

Honesty.

I wish she hadn’t cut me off before I got to the part aside from all the southern stereotypes. Goddamnit, why had I opened with the bad stuff? When she cut me off, the image in her mind hadn’t even been a real person. He was just a monster, a collection of all these horrible things that embodied this horrible place.

I hadn’t had time to tell her about the small moments. The time I spent with him, exploring the backwoods of his property that even he didn’t know about. Or the stories he told.

“I’m sorry if. I’ve shut you down or anything. It’s just… this place… I can’t-” Bonnie was struggling to string the words together. Here’s what she finally came up with: “I just can’t imagine you growing up here, surrounded by this.”

I opened my mouth to say something, but I couldn’t say it. I could only think it while my silent mouth hung open, like the fish I’d find floating belly up in the putrid stream running through my backyard when I lived here.

Here’s what I couldn’t say:

“Well, you know what, Bonnie? I’m going to be really honest here. I just can’t imagine you growing up without any of this. I can’t imagine that for anyone, actually. Like, my brain is physically incapable of comprehending how anyone spent their formative years not surrounded by the sights and sounds and strip malls of Farrand.

“Where can a child be raised except in a two story red brick house with a decaying wooden playscape in the backyard which is more dangerous than most firearms? What neighborhood could you explore in your formative years besides a half mile-by-half mile scrap of the middle class bordered by busy streets and surrounded by poverty on all sides?

“I’m racking my brain trying to understand if the human mind can fully develop if it isn’t exposed to five church services a week in a tiny, expensive, failing, private Baptist school.  Or if the human nose can become fully functional if it isn’t attacked by pollen storms every spring. Or if the pre-adolescent mind can have nightmares about anything besides the living animatronic Dr. Moe A. Gallagher from the Arbor Valley Cigarette Museum coming to eat you.

“But the thing that is most infinitely impossible to imagine is that it is possible to grow up somewhere where beauty is everywhere. To learn about beauty as some readily available resource, rather than something rare and valuable that you have to cherish when you find it, like the crimson light falling from a stained glass window and onto the floor when the sun hits it at just the right angle, or the perfect patch of blue flowers on the side of an interstate that you only get a short glimpse of as you zoom along at eighty miles an hour.”

By the time I was done not saying all those things, we had pulled into the hotel.

* * *

Once I was assured by her snoring that she was asleep, I slipped out of bed. We had very different sleeping patterns, she and I. She had a tendency to sleep in one, heavy, uninterrupted, six hour streak while I usually got up four or five times in the night. I knew that, unless there was an explosion one block over or an earthquake broke out or some other highly improbable circumstance, I could be gone for hours and she’d have no idea.

I got in my car and drove. For awhile I navigated solely based on landmarks from my childhood, but before long I made a wrong turn and landed myself in a section of the city that, in my fifteen years living there, I had never before come across.

Turns out I didn’t know Farrand as well as I thought.

I drove for awhile, eyes peeled for something, anything to tell me where I was.

I found nothing, absoluetely nothing familiar.

I knew I couldn’t keep driving forever, on and on into the hundreds of miles of empty highways and grazing cattle beyond the city lights, which is what I’d do if I stayed on my current trajectory. But I couldn’t go back to the hotel either.

So, safety on the backburner, I decided to try and find somewhere to duck into.

I got out of I parked my car on the side of a road, next to a defunct streetlight which was bent sharply from what I assume was a drunk teen driving accident, probably on the way back from a high-intensity party.

That’s something about me being in Farrand: when I don’t have a disturbing story about a place, I tend to make one up.

Exiting my car, I realized that my options for places to go weren’t exactly great. There was an old, burnt out brick building, a defunct flower store with windows shattered, and three liqour stores.

I chose the most inviting of the liquor stores (which was not saying much at all). It was bright inside, humming with hard floreuscent lights, and I counted four American, twelve Confederate, and twenty Texan flags tucked away in no particular pattern between the stacks upon stacks of booze.

“Howdy,” said the man behind the counter. He was bald, thin, older, with liver spots on his head and an eye patch that gave him a menacing look. If that wasn’t enough to scare someone straight,  he had chosen to wear a white shirt, which made the black, unconcealed holster across his chest like a seatbelt all the more evident. In case you’d missed the incredibly obvious gun, it was politely pointed out in the sign below the counter: The Cashier is Armed. Below it, someone had scrawled So Don’t Go Trying Any Funny Business in what looked like red crayon.

Despite all this, the cashier’s tone seemd friendly, even welcoming.

Still, I felt his eyes follow me as I pretended to survey the sea of diverse tequila options. Then, when I glanced up at the counter to make sure the whole subheading on the sign wasn’t just my mind making the whole situation even more cliched, I noticed a little ad for Arbor Valley Cigarettes.

I had no interest in smoking, but I decided it couldn’t hurt to indirectly support a corporation that made its fortune poisoning and killing millions as long as that corporation was from my hometown.

I moved towards the cash register. “One pack of Arbor Valley Cigarettes, please.”

“Sure,” he said, reaching down. While his torso was still bent over, rooting around for my particular brand, he commented, “Y’know, we don’t get many out of towners ordering local stuff like Arbor Valley.”

“Oh, I’m not an out of towner. Well, I guess I haven’t been here in a while, but I was born and raised in The Great State.”

“Really?” he said, coming up with the pack. His good eye had a look of something akin to admiration, as though being born in Texas was the highest honor one could attain. “Born and raised?”

“Well, not really born, I suppose. I spent the first three years of my life in Grosse Point, a suburb of Detroit, but I hardly even remember it. All my memories are of here.”

“Detroit, you say?” He typed the price into the cash register, which showed it as $5.12.

“Yep,” I got out my wallet.

“Well, you’re better off keeping it simple, saying you’re from The Great State. Don’t want anyone thinking you’re from Detroit.”

“Why not?” I felt a tiny wince of hurt. I guess I never knew I had any pride in my birthplace up until someone else started talking about it. Sort of like Farrand, I suppose.

“It’s too far north, the cold freezes people’s brains out. Plus it’s a big city, almost on the coast, nearly as bad as New York. I don’t trust them boomtowns, the places everyone thinks is the big deal. They always fall, and fast. And Detroit’s been falling faster than anyone can understand for the past forty years.”

I laughed a bit (I’m not sure why) and handed him the money. “But it wasn’t really in Detroit, even. I was born in a wealthier suburb.”

“It doesn’t matter. When a city goes down like that, everywhere nearby gets pulled down in the vortex of poverty and decay.” He opened the cash register with a pleasant ka-ching that I didn’t know cash registers even made anymore.

I laughed again. I liked how this grisled southerner had a weird spurts of eloquence, like that thing about the vortex. “Well, I live in Iowa now. Got any gripes with that?”

“Iowa? Ya’ll got more corn than people up there.”

“Most states do. But I live in one of the human-based settlements, Iowa city.”

He handed me my change and cigarettes. “Oh, I’ve been there once to visit my daughter. Pedestrians jaywalk all the time, no respect for automobiles, so infuriating. All in all, it’s nothing but another junky hipster collegetown cesspool.”

 Another junky hipster collegetown cesspool. I had to use that phrase in casual conversation. Or make it a band name.

“Want a light?” he asked me.

“Nah,” I said, a little bit ready to open up to this stranger a little bit. “This is more of a sentimental pack.” I pulled out a cigarette and put it in my mouth, though, just for the heck of it. It fit in a perfect way I didn’t expect it to, sliding between my teeth like a key in a lock. “You know what, I take that back. I would like a light.”

He pulled a lighter from his pocket and ignited the tip, which flamed for a moment. I inhaled, and immediately I felt a weird substance tumbling down my wind pipes, definitely unpleasant and not at all natural. Then I remembered my asthma.

I was coughing for around five minutes, trying desperately to get that filthy taste out of my throat and lungs. Eventually I gave up, taking a little bit of pride in the fact that at least it was filth specific to my hometown.

The cashier was chuckling heartily at my complete ineptitude at smoking, and then he began coughing too, hinting that maybe he’d smoked his fair share of Arbor Valleys in his time.

We spent a while like that, just coughing to our heart’s content.

Once we were both breathing normally again, I had one final question. “So you don’t like Detroit, you don’t like Iowa city (or the entire state of Iowa, for that matter).”

“Yep.”

“What is the best place to live, then? Where are all the good people of the world hiding?”

He answered automatically, taking no time to think.

“Right here in Farrand.”

The streetlight outside, the one that had been bent to an intense angle, flickered randomly a few times, then sent out a long, consistent stream of pure white light on the dingy Farrand sidewalk.

I remembered my first days in Iowa city, how I’d distrusted it so thoroughly just because it was anywhere other than where I was from. Or the first time I saw snow, real, actual, significant snow, and stayed in my dorm all day out of fear of nothing in particular besides the unknown cold substance cloaking the ground.

“So that’s it, after all,” I murmured, telling the truth to myself in hope no one else heard. “It’s all just micronationalism and xenophobia.”

“Xenophobia? I think I know that word, fear of open spaces, right? No, that’s not it. What does it mean again?”

            “Nothing,” I said, “it means nothing.”

John S. Osler III is a rising senior at Edina High School in Edina, Minnesota. He runs an underground satirical newspaper called The Southern View. He is an attendee of the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio 2015. He is a coach in his school’s writing help center and has edited his school newspaper in the past.