Interview by Carlos Detres

Lynsey Griswold has quickly become a favorite around The Whiskey Dregs editing room (which is really any place where I can fit a laptop). Her short stories “The Old Goat Man”, “Triple Vision” have become literary favorites and ”Expiration Dates” will be featured in our upcoming chapbook.

Her work has always punched me in the gut. Lynsey weaves surrealism, absurdism, and humor into her writing that merits recognition as clever and entertaining stories. Her quick wit, craftsmanship, and ability to relate subjects such as isolation with ridiculous skill has made me a fan.

Our readers may know only of her fictional exploits but it’s Lynsey’s obscenely funny and casually educational column for McSweeney’s, “The Conflicted Existence of a Female Porn Writer” as well as her contributions to faux porn rag, Whack! Magazine that have generated approbation for her work.

Lynsey sympathized with our cause and accepted our invitation to read at BLACK INK. She and I sat together, at different times, in different rooms, and different computers (thanks to the miracle of the internet) and had a discussion via email. Here are the results.

1. How did you begin to write about sex?

I’ve been writing for adult magazines for about two and a half years now. I never planned it; I had just moved back to New York after a two year stint in several other places, and I needed work. A friend knew someone who ran a porn rag and was looking for a writer, and I figured, “Why not?” I was broke. I started doing DVD reviews freelance. Since then a few other jobs have come up at other magazines. I’ve started work on a sex-related book, also rather randomly, and have been researching human sexuality for that book. One day I woke up and realized that I was a sex writer!

2. Were you the little girl who would build orgies of barbie doll bodies like they were Lincoln Logs?

I wouldn’t say Lincoln Logs, exactly. The idea of orgies hadn’t occurred to me yet. But my Barbies definitely got it on–in pairs. I called it “mating” because that was the term I’d been taught.

3. How did you come to be involved with McSweeney’s?

Working in the porn industry has been a difficult experience for me because although I believe that women should be free to do whatever they want with their bodies, and although I love sex and porn and feel that our society puts too harsh a taboo on these things… The situation being what it is, there is a lot of really upsetting adult material out there. It’s tough to be a feminist and be exposed to it. I’d been wanting to write about the issues I was having with it, and McSweeney’s was having a column contest. They were kind enough to like what I submitted to them, and the rest is history.

4. Your sex column has been pretty successful. What is a highlight from your infamy?

Right now, I’m not at liberty to talk much about it because nothing is concrete yet, but there’s been some interest from several places in expanding the column into different mediums.

5. You’re also a contributor for Whack! Magazine. Could you discuss your role and the theme of this hedonist publication?

Whack! Magazine started out as kind of a a ruse–a marketing ploy for another project. But our “provocative periodical for the cultured degenerate” has taken on a life of its own in the past few months. Who could resist a raucous yet intelligent mix of porn reviews, interviews, commentary, and satire? I’m the editor in chief, and as the only woman on the staff, I’m working to make the magazine more friendly to women and fans of less mainstream porn by doing product reviews of sex toys from a female perspective, interviews with porn performers that discuss more than just sex and porn, and reviewing films from alt and queer producers.

6. Any other upcoming projects you can share?

Lots of ‘em. But I’m a secretive type.

7. What’s a secret you’d be willing to reveal?

Haha, you sneaky bastard! How about this: some say I come across as a hip young sex writer, but my favorite thing to do on a Friday night is stay in, watch Planet Earth on DVD, and play Scrabble. I’m a closet dork.

BLACK INK takes place on Saturday, April 10
Doors open at 7:30pm
Readings at 8:00pm
@
ANGELS AND KINGS
500 East 11th Street
New York, NY 10009
212.254.4090

Kathy’s perfume wafted into his nostrils, drifting up off the peaked collar. Warm stirrings, aroused in his groin, surprised him. Charley needed to flip up, warding off the damp and prowling Autumnal night air eddying about him.

It was a cut-through-your-coat, gusting, swirling, and attacking sort of wind that was visited with a deep, animated cold, almost sentient, and ravenous.

This was a very early, dark morning that he stepped out of the sleeping N train and onto the open and exposed Ditmars Boulevard station platform.

Above him, flew a few of the frozen vanguard at the far end of the platform, high over the exposed incandescent lights. They were a confirmation of the forecasted tempest to come, large, fat feathery flakes.  The undulating platform was a structure of pealing and chipped dark blue painted benches and a black gloss covered wrought iron and steel. It was a fine example of well-used and still operational Early 20th Century civic engineering.  The wind was picking up. It was getting noticeably colder. The platform swayed like a lovesick drunk.

Just forty-five minutes earlier, she had laid her head on his shoulder, there, at the bar. Most of the gang was buying round after round of drinks. The Holidays were now upon them, bonus checks cashed, and everybody having a good time.

The TV on the wall showed football highlights and updates concerning the approaching blizzard. It was to be the season’s first snowstorm, and it looked like it was going to be an honest to goodness Nor’easter.

Under the table, under the coats and under Kathy’s skirt, the fingers were working their magic.

“Stop!” She said huskily.

“Do you really mean that?” Charley whispered in her ear. Tenderly nibbling at her cool bare lobe.

“No.” She giggled.

“Can I come over to your place tonight Kat? We can pick up a movie, a bottle of wine…stop by the CVS annnnnnnnnd get some rubbers…”

“Shhhhhh! someone will hear you!”

She chastised him then clamped her thighs down on Charley’s advancing digits. Twice weekly spin classes had made them a force to be reckoned with.

“My roommate’s family is visiting. They’re everywhere, you can’t, I’m sorry.”

“Okay, come home with me.”

“I’ve got to work tomorrow… early, here in Manhattan. I can’t risk getting stuck out in Astoria after this storm. Charley, please, I need this job. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, me too.”

Flush-faced … he needed some air. Pulling his hand back, Kathy released her warm fleshy vice grip and placed her hand on his hot cheek.

“They’ll be gone in two days. I’ll buy the…”

She gave a quick look around and in a hushed voice said:

“… Condoms tomorrow, Trojan Magnums right big fella?”

With a twinkle in her eye she quickly added.

“Oh, sorry, was that the other guy?”

“Don’t! Don’t even go there Kat!”

In a sleepy voice she said,

“Go where?”

“I’ve got to go, the trains run like shit at this hour.”

He flashed his Metro Card.

“And you’re too cheap to take a cab!” Kathy scowled.

“Yup, and that’s because engagement rings aren’t cheap either.” Charley grinned back.

“Charley! Don’t go there!”

“Go where?”

He winked at her and she pouted back.

Dragging his coat out from under the pile on the bench seat he leaned over and French kissed Kathy right in front of all their friends. This drew a few cheers and whistles from the appreciative, albeit sodden, peanut gallery surrounding them.

Whipping the coat over his shoulders he bolted out of the door and ran down the street to the IND Subway entrance on 57th Street and Seventh Ave., just West of Carnegie Hall.

Paper notices had been posted on the support columns deep inside the station.

“Due to a scheduled track repair” N, R & W Trains between Manhattan and Queens will be out of service from 12 O’clock Midnight to 6:00 A.M.

It was exactly 11:45 PM according to his watch.

Charley strained his head and neck and peered forward out over the tracks. He employed the classic ‘balanced with one-leg back- arms spread slightly apart’ position that all New Yorkers eventually develop while doing this. It was the ever popular, ‘antelope at the watering hole’ defensive posture.

He made a cursory glance at the downtown end of the uptown track.

No crocodiles, but plenty of rats. Some were a chocolate brown, some black and some were an almost a park squirrel gray.

Not one of them showed an ounce of fear.

At 11:50 PM the rodents began to scurry. They always seemed to know first.

Amber light washed over the curved white tiles at the other end of the station. Getting brighter and whiter as the uptown subway cars drew ever closer. Rounding the turn the boxy train shouldered its way into the station. Wheels squealing a shrill metal on metal scream, steeling and edgy. Bright blue sparks popped as the contact shoe and third rail interfaced. The lead carriage bounced and shuddered.

Charley crossed his fingers. An R train would only get him to Queens Plaza, just over the bridge with an hour’s walk through the scary Queensbridge housing projects section then on to Long Island City, Astoria and finally the Ditmars area around Astoria Park and the Hellgate Bridge, often referred to as ‘Northern Astoria’.

The red LED circle on the brow of the lead car said…  He squinted harder at the onrushing crimson halo.

N!

It’s an N train! Wahoo!

Shuddering to a halt, the doors opened.

Diving into the first seat of the lead carriage he turned and saw that he shared the car with one other person. At least he thought it was a person, far away. A pile of clothing topped with rough gray fibrous mover’s mats. The requisite shopping cart replete with five plastic bags five and six ply thick a piece of every color, tied to the handle.  All filled with what appeared to be cans and bottles. A redeemer. The two legs poking out of the bottom appeared to be covered by newspaper wrapped with packing tape.

A loud snapping snore erupted from deep within the fabrics, the pile jiggled. The legs shifted and a long yawn, soon followed by a rather soft and pleasant hum. The pile was as still and quiet as before, there, at the back of the car.

Charley’s gaze returned to the front window as the train left 59th Street and Lexington Ave.

Another fifteen minutes and he’d be home.

As the train surfaced in Queens he could see that the weather was souring.
People literally leaped onboard as the doors shot open. High above all of that infamously forever cluster-fucked Queensborough Bridge approach traffic, horns of every description were blaring on and on.
Ah Jesus! What the- Mother FFFff…

Ding Dong

The doors closed, ready or not. No announcement. Bye-bye.

Some of the more adroit now on board bent over to warm their hands by the calf-cooking heaters radiating from beneath the seats.

The cars jolted forward as the angry laggards left behind pounded their fists on the shuttered doors, shouting curses in at least three or four languages, give or take a dialect.

Those inside could only looked back with palms held upward, trying very hard not to smile.

At last, Ditmars Blvd.! Sprinting down the length of the platform, Charley had his head deeply buried in his collars.

Half running, half slipping, bolting down the stairs, through the turnstiles, a right turn, another right turn, grabbing a banister post as an anchor for his pivot – hurtling down the street level stairs and straight forward to Ditmars Boulevard. Jogging, feeling exhilarated about the prospects of this big storm. It might be kind of cool. Maybe there would be no work tomorrow, a Snow Day!

Two more blocks.

He turned right onto 27th Street.

Taking two steps forward, he then stuttered to a stop, hands and arms hanging loosely.

Where the hell was his “Go” bag?

WHERE WAS THE BAG!

“Ah Shit! Ah No! No! No!”

“I…….. AM……… AN………ASSHOLE!”

Charley screamed and stamped his feet, pulling his arms and fists inward as if he were just shot.

The bar, he had left it back at the bar.

Everything he had been in that bag. His wallet, cell phone, toothbrush and a condom that he won’t need tonight, anyway, and… THE… KEYS!

The keys?

T h e    h o u s e   k e y s

“Sweet Baby Jesus what am I going to do now?” Charley said aloud to the moaning winds.
Charley hoped that one of his neighbors might buzz him inside. But, as he trotted up to the vestibule… there on his right, where the intercom used to be, was a message – on a piece of cardboard, crudely painted in dripping red, silver duct taped to the brick.

It said:

“Outta Odor”

“You’ve gotta be kidding meeeee!”

Charley started to spin in place in front of the door. Three inches of snow on the ground already, the winds were getting even stronger and blowing in from the Northeast.

The wind had become an emboldened frigid entity trying to spin him out into the street and devour him, there, at its pleasure.  The meager shelter of the vestibule offered little sanctuary.

Think! Charley think! There was something déjà vu about all of this, but, it was warmer then.

Two years ago, in August!

Yes, Charley had come down from upstate New York visiting with friends at the Dutchess County Fair. He had flat out lost the set of house keys that had hung on an alleged tribal Shrunken Head key ring. Factually, it looked more like a monkey’s head.   A starving peasant had probably shot the poor ape out of a tree in a game preserve for maybe a quarter, American. A gift from a forgotten girlfriend purchased on a Costa Rican vacation that he was not a part of.  He’d always believed it to be accursed. This only proved it.  Those keys were lost somewhere between camping out, tubing on the Esopus River and the Fair itself.  Gone and goodbye forever.

Charley’s landlord, Big Louie D., was sorting out the glass; metal and paper for the recycling pick-up the following day. He was ultimately responsible for all of that, thank God he was there.

“Lou! I’m locked out!”

“I can let you in. But, you have to pay to get the replacement keys yourself, and I need them back before I leave.”

“Okay.”

So, at that time…  Charley had two sets made.

Later that night he walked by the south side of Astoria Park with a taped shut  Sucrets Lozenges box containing three new brass keys taped together. He chose black electrical tape because it would blend in well with the black paint on this particular iron lamppost that he had in mind, the last lamppost before the entrance to the Astoria Park Pool, on the right, Just across the street from the old Eagle Electric Factory, (a manufacturer of electrical switches decades before) now converted into Co-ops or Condos. The developers were forced to keep the tall yellow brick “landmark” smoke stack as is. (Thanks to The Historical Landmarks Society). They were not even allowed to burn anything in it, just illuminate the exterior.

Charley smoked a cigarette in the shadows and watched as a jogger ran by and a pair of dog walkers, eyeing him briefly, passed him from the other side. Once these three individuals were away, heading in opposite directions, Charley acted swiftly.

He broke the seals on the twin syringes, mixing the liquids to form the epoxy cement. He then put a generous worm of goo on the back of the taped shut box.

A quick shake gave the reassuring clink.

He had earlier pulled off the cover plate on the base of the lamppost using a screwdriver and a small crowbar. Now, on his hands and knees, he reached up inside and affixed the box into position. This took maybe three minutes, tops. Replacing the base cover, tightened the screws, pocketed the screwdriver and crowbar, he walked back home, whistling a merry tune.

That was pretty damned cool.

But that was also two long years ago and for the most part forgotten.

Running stiffly, Charley stalked to Astoria Park. The snow whipped into his face, tearing up and stinging his eyes. He now inhaled snow with each breath. It felt more like drowning when they melted en mass in his trachea.
A White-Out!
Walking on what he guessed to be the sidewalk along the southern side of Astoria Park he trudged onwards counting the poles on his left. It didn’t matter how many there were, he was only interested in the last one. It distracted him from the numbness in his toes.
There! The last pole!
Charley dropped to his knees and started to dig away at the drifting snow, cleared the electrical junction access panel. His bare hands ached.

Sitting back and staring at that panel, he thought, how neat it would be to have a screwdriver and crowbar right now. He stuffed both of his hands deep inside his pants in a vane attempt for warmth and then raised his face to the storm to keep from crying, neither worked very well. While his hands were inside his pockets he noticed something cold and metallic in his left front pocket. His hands now too numb to identify it, he pulled it out to see.
A nail clipper! On a small beaded chain, an impulse purchase from a drugstore. It folded open to reveal the lever handle and the file. Impromptu screwdrivers!

With shaking hands he found the clipper’s lever fitted the slot of the two large screws that held the plate in place. He threw the screws behind him as they came loose and carefully wedged the lever into a gap between the plate and the lamp. It bent in a 30-degree angle but did lift the plate a bit. Nervously he turned the lever around and actually managed to dislodge the cover.

Clawing on the inside of the base he found the box exactly where he had left it, two years ago. His wrists touched some thick electric cables that just scared the be-Jesus out of him. The lid of the box popped open inside the lamppost and something light and papery dropped into his hands.

It was a note, in an envelope.

The note said:

“Climb higher – Up!”

“WHAT?”

So, after a while, in disbelief, up he went.

His out stretched and graying fingers scrapped the ice forming on the Northeast-windward side of the iron lamppost. He had to turn 90 degrees around to get a better purchase on the pole, this now put his face towards the icy part but the hands grabbed better.
Up he went, the wind now screaming at his back. His fingers getting stiff and the leather soles of his shoes were slick.

That first slip of the shoes almost cost him a tooth. In his mouth, there, some grit and a salty taste that could only be blood. Instead of relying on his pathetic leather soled footwear he used all of his remaining reserves of strength to wrap around the pole and try to shimmy upwards. The inhalation of every breath laced with icy needles. The cold black iron sucked the remaining warmth, the very life, from his bare hands. The serrated edged spine of ice on the windward side of the iron post eating into the flesh of his neck and face. His gloves? Also in the Go Bag, Doh! His groin now appeared to freeze and stick to the pole, Charley had been sweating profusely in his corduroy pants back at the bar, imagine that.

A desperate lunge caught the edge of something, tore it. Tape, it was tape.

Like a madman Charley clawed with the other hand too. The intense cold made the tape crack like cheap plastic, another box. It almost went flying off of the pole and into the drifting snow

“No!”

A piece of tape stuck to his right hand, with the box attached.

Charley just let go of the pole, falling backwards; arms and legs splayed out like a skydiver.

It was, maybe a seven-foot drop…into 13 to 15 inches of snow.

Poof!

If he had not then been suffering from hypothermia it would actually have been comfy.

He lifted his right hand and held it up to the light.

The box dangled there like a small black purse.

Charley started to giggle, but it was not a very sane-sounding giggle.
With his left hand he started to cut the brittle tape with his thumbnail. Running it under the rim, all the way around and then…

Pop

In the lamplight above him, Charley imagined that he saw swarmed masses of angry white hornets with wings of frost and stingers of ice. Charley could swear something white wrapped in a Dark Pink silk ribbon spiraled straight down to his face.

What the hell was that?

Charley lay on his back for a good while, snow starting to cover him, before he had the courage.

The courage to look at it.

Just three-brass house keys wrapped in black electrical tape, that’s all he wanted.

Another note.

Charley laughed until a choking spasm hit him, hard.

Gasping, he reached to his face and picked it up.

Charley sat up, propping his back to the lamppost, holding the note up to the light.

Sleepily he moved his limbs as everything grew steadily number. No more pain.

He stiffly undid what was obviously a gorgeous and expensive Dark Pink silk ribbon.

It was clinging to expensive parchment paper. It appeared to be engraved.

“- If you want your keys –“

“Come to: Park View Towers: PH 5”

“Use the private service entrance on the corner of 21thSt and 24th Ave”

“The Intercom is on the right”

He put this up before his eyes. Read it. Put it down. Pick it up. Read it again.

Always using both hands.

He started to sob.

“Why?”

“Why would somebody do this to me?”

“Park View Towers, where the hell is that? I’m gonna die out here!”

He turned back around the post and faced the street.

There, in front of him.

A big green illuminated sign!

Park View Towers

“How the hell did I ever miss that?”  He wondered aloud.

He staggered to his feet with both hands holding the engraved parchment like it was the winning Willie Wanka Chocolate Bar Golden Ticket.

“Please…..please….please….PLEASE……pl-uh-eeez…..”

Headlong he ran, directly across the snow and wind driven street. Mercifully, there was no traffic, Charley never turned his head.

On the corner – a large black square chute with a door. It ran up the NW corner of the building. The turreted edifice made it look like an arsenal or a fort in this storm.

Charley went straight for the public intercom; not unlike the system on the subway, but with a camera.

Manically he slammed a balled fist repeatedly on ‘PH5’, again and again.

“HELLO!” Charley wailed.

After a while, a cool, low feminine voice spoke through the grill. Two high intensity LED arrays lit up Charley’s face, so much so that it had blinded and stunned him. He staggered backwards.

“What do you want?”

“My keys.”

“Your what, oh wait, yes. Describe them to me.”

“What?”

Charley thought the howling wind and his falling core temperature had him hearing that she wanted a description.

“Ha!”

“How many do you have?” Charley screamed.

“Three keys!” the voice behind the grill cooed.

“I want my fucking keys!”

His spittle froze to the microphone.

“Oh, you are not the nice boy I remember from the sum-mer.”

He couldn’t place the accent. It had vague qualities of British or Australian? Maybe even South African?

“Good night to you rude boy.”

And the lights went out.

That was it.

The sudden end of the conversation and the over whelming quality of the darkness, its heaviness, and the gusts of wind physically moving him about…
…it all caught him in the pit of his stomach, literally brought him down to his knees.

“…..please…..”  He sobbed.

“PLEASE!”

Now caressing and stroking the camera lens.

“I think I’m dying out here”. He croaked.

The lights slowly, steadily grew in intensity.

The soft voice returned.

“Does the rude boy feel sorry for talking to me like that?”

“… yes”

“What?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“YES! Rude boy sorry!”

“Good.”

The latch hummed and clicked, the door opened and Charley fell face first into the elevator.

He had just lain there for a while when the voice returned above, over the intercom.

“Pull your legs inside!”

Startled Charley pulled his right leg inside.

“Both of them Rude Boy!”

Charley curled up in a fetal position. He had a vague memory of the door shutting and the cab lifting upwards, and sleep.

The door to PH5 opened and a tall woman who at first appeared to be athletically lean and in her mid thirties stepped into the cab. As she got closer he realized that she was actually a very, very well kept early forties.
He felt himself being dragged into the apartment by two small but powerful hands.
Like a leopard dragging a springbok up a tree.

“Got any herb?” She asked lowly.

“Catnip.” Charley slurred. The sudden warmth had made him silly and dizzy.

He felt himself dropped to the floor.

Carpeted, but still the floor. That hurt.

She took a strong grip across his left shoulder that flipped him over onto his back.
Two strong legs quickly straddled him. Both shoulders pinned back and long hair brushing his face.

She sniffed him, drawing in long deep thoughtful inhalations followed by moments of silence and finally a decidedly disgusted exhalation. Up and down, back and forth and upon the rise two stunning angry amber yellow eyes glinted back at him.

“No catnip.” She purred.

She pulled in close to his face. Grasped the hair at nape of the neck and squeezed hard, nose to nose.

“You were teasing me!”

“Hey! Hey kid!”

“Kid?”

Charley was very cool to the touch and unresponsive.

“Oh my God, what have I done?”

She slapped Charley across the face then slid her first two fingers just under his left ear, looking for a pulse.

“Oh no….KID!”

She picked Charley up and flipped him over her shoulder in a fireman’s carry, walking directly to the bathroom.

“Don’t die on me Kid, don’t you dare die on me!”

Carefully stacking up Charley’s fully clothed, cold and still body against the sidewall of the shower, she stood up.

Operating the complicated controls of the shower the distracted woman now turned a lever all the way to the right whilst simultaneously pulling it outwards. This caused hot water to jet out of six different showerheads studding the interior of the large walk-in stall shower. It had two seats; Charley slumped in one and she leaned over from the other.

The steam rose in billows.

All at once Charley started to writhe and scream.

“Too hot! Too hot! Oh I’m sorry kid… wait! Wait!”
She turned her back to Charley and reached up to slide the lever towards the left, cooling the waters.

Her white silk teddy stuck to her back, now almost transparent, a vision.

Charley saw things in a gauzy dream state. The warm steam filled his lungs. His entire body tingled and felt like it was burning.

He looked over at the back of the woman who was now in front of him, wow, very pretty! She continued to manipulate the shower’s controls trying to attain a more tolerable water temperature.

He wasn’t on fire anymore. What was that on her back? Is that Arabic?

Charley reached out to touch the raised inscriptions…

“… A tattoo?” He whispered as his fingertips glided gently over her skin.

In a flash she spun around and grabbed his wrist, twisting it downwards, his face pressed into the drain.

“Gurrrrrggggle.”

“Oh my God. Are you all right kid? Are you all right?”

She helped him back to a seated position but Charley now cowered from her.

The shower sprayed on. It sounded like rain in the jungle.

She covered her face and cried, great wracking sobs escaped from her taught body.

Charley could only look across at her in amazement.

“Who are you?” He asked.

Stifling a few sniffles and wiping her nose with her wrist.

“Charley.”

“Yes?”

She looked puzzled.

“Charley!”

“What? How do you know my name?”

“Your name is Charley?”

“Of course it is, and who the hell are you?”

She stared at him a while and then threw her head back and gave a great peal of laughter.

Holy shit this bitch is crazy… where is the phone. Charlie thought.

“I’m Charlene, you know…”

She shook both hands at him as if to say… “Get it, Kid?”

“Charley!”

They stared at each other. Suddenly, they both laughed, long and hard.

Charlene slowly moved over to Charley, palms up, ‘I mean you no harm.’

She wrapped her surprisingly strong arms around Charley, rocking slowly back and forth.

“I’m so sorry Charley. I never meant for it to happen like this. I saw you from my balcony putting a box inside that lamppost … you were so… intense…so cute.”

Charlene leaned back and looked at him from arms length, then made a little pouting face.

“I just wanted to see you again. I’m soooo sorry, please forgive me.”

Charlene began to cry again. She was stunningly beautiful; Charley marveled what she must have looked like in her prime. She was the kind of a woman that men, upon seeing her, walked into trees or down open manholes, honestly.

“Wow…. “Was all Charley could say. They both laughed.

“What does that tattoo on your back say?”

The laughter stopped. Her gaze iced up. Uh-oh.

She collected herself, still firmly gripping both of Charley’s arms. She spoke slowly and evenly.

“It is not a tattoo. It is a brand. It says:”

“There is no God but Allah and Mohammed”

Charley was confused. “Mohammed was a God too?”

“No, Mohammed is his messenger, that’s the rest of it.”

“Why is that part missing?”

“Because the gentleman with the bayonet and the torch didn’t get a chance to finish it, my team found me.”

She stood up and walked out of the shower.

Charley sat there mouthing over the words he’d just heard.

Shortly she returned and pressed three black taped keys into his hand. She then helped him to his feet.

“I had no right to do that to you. I am so very sorry Charley.”

“You tested these in the locks first, right; they are brand new?”

Charley stared down at the keys in his hand and then slowly looked up at her, ‘NO’ was written all over his face.

“Oh Charley.” Charlene said, “What are you going to do?”

Charley squinted through the glass of the sliding door to the patio. Dressed in nothing but a big soft white terrycloth robe and holding a cup of hot coffee.
The sky above, a piercing electric blue, the snow below, a dazzling bright white, it hurt the eyes. The aftermath of the snowy Nor’easter was dramatic. There could well be two feet of snow down there, Charley thought. He saw kids and dogs frolicking in the pure white drifts.

Dogs love this shit. So did he.

“I think your clothes are dry now.” Charlene came over to Charley with a fresh pot of coffee, placing his neatly folded clothes on the table.

“Oh, they’re having fun!” She piped up, putting her chin on his shoulder.

“More Joe?”

“Sure, thanks Charlene.”

She topped off his cup and breezed back into the kitchen.

“I have a travel mug that I can fill with more coffee for you.” She called out.

She poked her head out from the archway.

“In case you have to go back into Manhattan.”

She gave him a comical look of shock before ducking back inside.

Charley almost choked on a swig he already had in his mouth, careful not to spit it out on the white carpet.  Smiling, he then cracked the door open. Super cold air flowed in over his coffee cup causing mini cumulus clouds of steam to rise up. He could now hear the children yelling and the dogs barking.

“I’m adding two keys to your set.” Charlene came back inside and slipped the now five keys on a new ring with a tiger skin fob into the pocket of his robe.

“Elevator and door.”

Charlene pointed to the door he came in last night. She smiled and winked.

Sideling up from the side, she ran her fingers between the robe’s layers.

He took another sip.

“Tired?”

Through the crack, outside, a young girl squealed and a dog howled. Frigid air squeezed inside.

Charley never felt more alive.

, then it may be of benefit to know whether they share the same sentiment. Brotherhood implies devotion and devotion is quite often tested. If one of the two friends happens to share a different sentiment, a proper testing will surely prove the matter. Sometimes this proof will prove painful, and sometimes blood will indeed be a matter of the bond, or lack thereof.

After inducing general anesthesia with endotracheal tube intubation, you will be prepped and draped in the usual sterile manner, most likely with the placement of sclera shells.

If you and the assumed brothers happen upon a group of men vastly outnumbering your trio, and these men pass regrettable remarks upon you, a proper test of brotherhood and devotion may have arrived. If one of your brothers chooses to respond with words equally regrettable, it is your duty as family to appropriately deal with any resulting circumstances regardless of how dire they may be. If dire circumstances do not immediately result, you may find that you have misidentified the situation as a proper test of brotherhood and devotion.

Your left lateral canthus and lower eye lid will be infiltrated with local anesthetic. This is to ensure that the lateral canthotomy and inferior cantholysis do not rouse you from the aforementioned general anesthesia. A transconjunctival incision will be made below the inferior tarsal border with cutting cautery. Dissection will be carried down to the infraorbital rim, where traction sutures will eventually be placed. Then, with that same cutting cautery, the periorbita and periosteum will be incised at the level of the rim. This may expose multiple floating fragments that are characteristic of a comminuted fracture, likely the result of a fracture involving the orbital rim.

If one of the two assumed brothers happens to expediently disappear shortly after you part ways with the discourteous men, you may think nothing of it. They, however, may think differently and choose to launch what many call a “surprise attack.”

The periobita will be meticulously elevated off the orbital floor using orbital retractors and Freer elevators. Cottonoids may also be used to support the elevation. There may be a large fracture involving the orbital floor. If this is the case, the orbital contents will be elevated out of this orbital fracture, and care will be taken to ensure that no additional injury to the infraorbital neurovascular bundle is made during such a dissection.

As a result of such an unanticipated assault, you and your remaining brother will be forced to prove unequivocal devotion to one another. In hindsight, you’ll likely find it unfortunate that your third assumed brother had unceremoniously departed and was unable to stand with you in such an unquestionably uncivilized but unavoidable state of affairs. You may think of many unpleasant words beginning with “un” that you may choose to apply to your absentee acquaintance and the way you choose to interact with him henceforth.

Attention will be directed to the superior lateral orbital rim, the skin infiltrated with local anesthetic. A 15 blade will be used to incise the skin with a sub-brow incision. Dissection will be carried down to the periosteum. The periostium will be incised with cutting cautery. If a frontozygomatic fracture exists, it will be isolated with the placement of traction sutures.

With the number of assailants being more than you and your remaining brother, you may find it difficult to maintain a proper defense. At some point, you may find yourself pinned against a parked automobile by two of these men: one holding you firm against the automobile, while the other ensures your arms are restrained behind your back. A third may then choose to deliver several powerful blows to your face with his fist. You may assume that your best defense is a strong offense by means of those limbs that remain unrestrained. Nevertheless, you will find this to be a futile plan regardless of how many times your foot strikes your assailant in the face as he advances repeatedly with said fist. The analgesic effects of phenylcyclohexylpiperidine will prevent any physical pain from registering within your assailant, while its hallucinatory effects will cause him to interpret your blows in such a manner that only further stimulates the rage psychosis typically accompanying phenylcyclohexylpiperidine absorption.

Kocher clamps will be used to elevate any zygomatic and maxillary fractures into appropriate alignment. A Synthes plate, most likely titanium and of very precise dimensions, will be used to bridge the fronotzygomatic fracture. Several screws, again most likely titanium, will be used to anchor the Synthes plate in place.

Your assailants, being fond of surprises, will indeed be very surprised if your proven brother had a “secret weapon” in his possession for such unexpected, yet entirely possible, situations. If your brother were to use his secret weapon against your assailants to properly defend both of you from their assault, you will find that you must thereafter keep the use of the secret weapon a secret indeed. For a proper test of brotherhood and devotion may come not only in the form of uncivilized circumstances, but also in the form of maintaining confidentiality.

Attention will then be directed to the infraorbital rim where a fracture is also likely to exist. Again, a titanium Synthes plate will be placed to bridge the fracture of the inferior orbital rim, though it will be necessary to form it in an appropriate contour after being cut to precise dimensions. As before, a hand-held manual drill will be used to place several titanium screws in order to anchor the Synthes plate. If any free-floating bone fragments remain, they will be anchored to either of the Synthes plates using stainless steel wire with knots buried in the surrounding tissue.

If you walk down a street with a person you choose to consider to be a friend, and you consider that friend to be a brother, it would be very wise to know whether they share such sentiment. Brotherhood implies a blood relationship, and though no blood relationship may exist, blood may indeed be a matter of the bond…or lack thereof.

The previous owner, and old man whose son told us had kept mostly to himself, had died a few years before. His family had refurbished, repainted, and re-everything-elsed it, and we had jumped on the chance to buy it. The house itself was beautiful, and it was close enough to the city that I could make the commute in 45 minutes or less. But it was still far enough out that we could have our own piece of the earth and quiet nights. Sure, it was a little close to the highway, but after having lived in a shoebox-sized studio for five years on the second story of a building on Main Street, the sound of cars driving by would be comparatively peaceful. Besides, the highway was only a forty-something foot strip of macadam between the house and the West River, which reflected glorious sunsets every evening into our living room, where the light bounced across the brand new hardwood floors and lit up Monica’s eyes. It was perfect.

Three bedrooms would give us plenty of space for guests and maybe even a family. A giant living room with big new windows looked out over the river and joined onto a kitchen big enough for Monica to stretch her cooking muscles. Two bathrooms, one upstairs and one down, and even a small study where I could set up a home office. The basement was a little bizarre, with its dirt floor and noisy old furnace, meat hooks hanging from the beams (we’d been told the original builder was a butcher) and a musty, unfamiliar odor. It might have just been the old dirt, that smell, but neither of us were used to old houses. Monica didn’t like it one bit, so we resolved to use the basement mainly for storage until we had the means to put a new floor down and buy a new furnace.

There was a large back yard set into the hill behind the house, where Monica could set up pa garden for tomatoes and strawberries and whatever else she wanted. We discovered after a few days that if we positioned ourselves just above the house on the hill, we could put the roof between us and the highway, and see only the roof and the river beyond. The small plot of woods behind the house was dense enough to be shady in the summer, but small enough that Monica wouldn’t have nightmares about strange forest beasts attacking her in her garden while I was at work. She was a city girl, born and bred in the urban landscape, not used to bugs or animals, and I wanted her to feel safe from the unknown terrors of Nature.

We moved in hardly a week after we’d bought the place in late April, excited after our years scrimping and saving. We started ordering furniture like mad – a giant L shaped couch with a chaise, a rocking chair, a giant roll-top desk, bookshelves, end tables, coffee tables, a bigger bed, a giant stereo system and entertainment center. We bought pots and pans, new cutlery, china, and crystal. We shopped for art and plants, candle votives, wreaths, holiday decorations. We were swimming in delight. My perfect vision of our new life was of me coming home from a day at the office, amidst the hustle of the big city and the hectic scramble of business dealings, the sunset lighting up the windows of my new home, and finding Monica in the garden with a big floppy straw hat and her work gloves, maybe a round belly, and a basket full of tomatoes for our supper. It seemed as if it would all come true, and soon.

* * *

Things began to settle down after the first two weeks – we had most of the furniture set up and a large part of the decorating finished. We’d settled in for a quiet night of TV when I noticed Monica doing that “I’m trying to be subtle but I’m really freaked out by something” motion: stiff neck, head cocked to one side but twitching occasionally, nostrils flared. Usually this is in response to something I’ve done, so I ignored it for a while, but at every commercial break I noticed her doing it again, so finally I asked what was wrong.

She looked at me, aghast that I didn’t already know. “Can’t you smell that?” Her nostrils flared up again, her eyes wide. I’d been smelling the same air as her all night, but I hadn’t noticed anything, so I just shook my head. She rolled here eyes at me. “It’s like the same smell from in the basement, but… worse. Stronger. I can smell it from here.”

I took a deep breath, sampling the air for anything abnormal. The smell was there, faintly, but stronger than usual underneath the soft cinnamon scent of Monica’s candle burning in the kitchen. “Hm. Yeah, I do smell it. Well, it’s been kind of damp weather lately, I’m sure that’s bringing the smell out.”

Monica chewed on her lip, crossing her arms. “Will you go check it out?” she asked eventually. “Just to be sure there’s not something wrong down there?”

I glanced at the TV. The commercial break was nearing an end. “What could be wrong?” I asked. “It’s just a smell.”

”Oh come on, Ed, just to be sure. I mean, it could be flooding or maybe the furnace is acting up. If there’s a problem down there…”

“Fine,” I said, throwing another glance at the TV and mentally giving myself the next 30 second commercial slot to get to the basement and back.

Monica had been right, the smell was worse than usual. On a typical day you couldn’t smell anything unless you were actually in the basement, but now, the closer I got to the top of the stairs, the stronger I could smell it. It was an unclean smell, like an animal on a hot day, mixed with something more unpleasant, nauseating, almost… sinister. Maybe it’s just hindsight that makes the smell scary, but even then I felt a little flip in my stomach as it grew stronger. Something unsettling in that stink.

Pressed for time as I was, I nonetheless hesitated at the door to the basement stairs. If there were something wrong with the furnace, that would be a lot of money spent on fixing it, and if it were flooding… I hated to even think about the possibility. Living across from the river, I imagined that flooding was a very serious possibility, and I made a mental note to start researching flood insurance.

The smell hit me when I opened the door like a damp rag, reeking of something unnamable. It came at me so strong that I reeled backward, gagging. There was a sound in the depths of the basement, quiet and hardly noticeable, sensed more than heard, a rustling like someone passing by me, then silence. I struggled forward against the stench and flicked on the light to the basement, straining my eyes down the stairs to see…

Nothing. Just the bare dirt floor, dry as ever. I descended a few steps, hesitantly at first, then faster as more of the basement came into sight. Nothing on the floor, not even a puddle or a damp spot. Certainly nothing moving; the noise I heard must have been the musty basement air moving as the draft of fresher air hit it. And now, as I sniffed, there was hardly even a smell. Just that same old musty basement odor with a little bit of nasty mixed in. It must have just been collecting down there, like in a room where the gas has been left on, and now it had aired out. We’d kept the door shut almost since the day we moved in and I supposed we’d just have to leave it open at night while we slept from now on, and get a decent floor put down in there.

I bounded back upstairs just in time for the commercial break to end, and told Monica my findings. She just nodded and didn’t even look away from the screen.

* * *

A few weeks later I came home early from work to find Monica in the garden. She’d been working at it steadily, turning up the dirt in patches and planting a little at a time. First carrots, then cabbage and onions, then some string beans and squash. Being so close to the river, she told me, the soil was exceptionally rich. Dark and soft and full of moisture, as if it had been fertilized for years. Monica was bound to have a full harvest this fall, and she could hardly be more excited. She’d always wanted a garden in lieu of the pets we could never keep because of my allergies. She needed something to care for, something to divert her maternal instincts for the time being. We’d started trying for a baby almost the moment we bought the house, but had had no luck yet.

I loved coming home and seeing her out there – no floppy hat, but sometimes a bandana or baseball cap. She’d be all dirty and sweaty and beaming with pride in her work. So satisfied and confident. The woman I’d married years ago, sweated away the hot city nights with in our cramped apartment, dreaming of one day when we’d have space and grass and a garden. Here she was, on her knees in the middle of our success, and I thought then that I hadn’t loved her this much since the moment we said our vowels. But the wait had been worth it. She was beautiful. The late afternoon sun was reflecting orange light off the river and making her dark brown curls look red. Her small frame was posed in an attitude of deep thought; she was on her knees facing away from me, with her trowel in her left hand, examining something in her hand.

She didn’t move beyond cocking her head from one side to the other as I walked up the hill toward her, and she started violently when I tapped her on the shoulder. She turned her face up at me, a puzzled expression revealed in the late afternoon light. “Look what I found,” she said thoughtfully, stretching her hand up to me and dropping something hard into it.

It was small, hard and smooth, not as heavy as a rock, but harder than wood, covered with dirt. It was small enough to fit in my hand easily, rounded but with a split down the center, with one side flat and the other rounding off irregularly in a protrusion of a slightly different, harder material. “What is it?” I asked. “A root or something? Like a tuber?”

She shook her head, looking as confused as I felt. “I don’t know. I dug it up trying to plant pumpkins. It wasn’t too far down, but it doesn’t look like any plant I know of. Look at that stuff on the top,” she pointed to the pock-marked, harder material above the split section. “It looks like… well, like bone. I think it’s a part of an animal!”

I stopped turning it in my hand, looking more closely. “But what part? I mean, what bone looks like this?” I pointed at the split section, knocking my fingernails against it gently.

She shook her head. “No idea. Let’s take it inside.”

I didn’t really want to bring a random animal part in the house, but my curiosity was piqued, so we brought it in and did an extensive internet search on animal bones. It took us some time, since we ended up at a lot of university websites with unintelligible biology jargon, but we eventually identified it as part of a hoof belonging to a cloven-hoofed animal of medium stature. Probably a sheep or a goat. Monica was a little unsettled by it at first, but we both realized that the basic structure of the house was over a hundred years old, and the people who’d lived here back then were sure to have some animals. Hell, a butcher had built the place. Finding bones made sense, even if it was a little creepy.

Having gotten past my initial hesitation, I convinced her that we should keep it on the mantel in the living room as a reminder of our house’s past. We washed it a few times and when it dried out, it was actually kind of beautiful.

* * *

The next weekend Monica and I made our first outing to the local bar, “The Almanac.” We hadn’t had a chance yet to meet many of our neighbors and didn’t know what to expect, so we were a little nervous that we’d find ourselves surrounded by rednecks. But most of the people there were friendly while they weren’t exactly rednecks, they were certainly the salt of the earth. It was refreshing to meet people who could give Monica gardening hints, and provide home improvement advice for me; in the city we’d have been met with confused looks and suggestions of who was the best person to hire. And they knew how to be hospitable, and how to drink.

We ended up being there much longer than expected, listening to stories about the area and how it had been changing over recent years. There were still farms around, they said, but not like there used to be. Most of the old farmers had passed away or been shut down by the bigger operations. Most of the area was now suburbanites and gentlemen farmers who liked dealing with crops or animals, but who made there real money elsewhere. We were a little to drunk to feel guilty about our gentleman-farmerly ways at that point, and when we finally got home late we passed out sprawled across our new bed.

I woke up sometime in the night to feel Monica smacking me in the back. Groggy and still inebriated, I grunted a few times and swatted her hand away, but she was persistent. Eventually the fog in my head cleared enough to hear her. She was whispering urgently, almost hissing: “Ed, Ed, wake up! There is someone in the house! There is someone in the house, wake up! Oh Jesus!”

My heart stopped. Those are words I hadn’t wanted to hear. I sat up slowly and put finger to my lips to quiet her. But I heard nothing. Monica was sitting up straight, the covers pulled up high, her eyes so wide they reflected the moonlight off the river. “I don’t hear anything,” I mouthed.

She shook her head. “I heard something downstairs. Someone walking. I swear I heard it. Go check!”

I started to argue with her, my head spinning a little with fumes form the booze, but just then there was a creak from the staircase, and a loud thud. I sobered up. Monica seemed to get smaller beneath the blanket, her eyes opening wider as she nodded frantically at me. The thudding continued, certainly but unsteadily making its way up the stairs. It sounded like at least two people in heavy boots. As I slipped out of bed and moved toward the sound, I vaguely wondered why burglars wouldn’t take pains to stay quieter as they approached the bedroom in a sleeping house. They were being ridiculously loud. Then I realized that maybe they didn’t intend to sneak through the house and rob us. Maybe they meant to hurt us, even kill us.

My heart stopped when this thought occurred to me, and I forced myself to keep moving toward my dresser. I opened the top drawer and withdrew my handgun from beneath the socks. I heard Monica draw a quick breath behind me, but I was focused on the noise outside. The slow, faltering clatter of feet on the stairs. The growing certainty that those footsteps were aimed toward my wife with ill intentions. I tried to block out the mental images that sprang up of Monica, bloodied and broken… I cocked the gun.

Monica had argued against me buying it, but ownership of our new house had sparked a protective instinct in me. I was glad now that I had the cool metal in my hand, the surprising weight of the weapon reassuring in the dark night. I glided silently across the bedroom floor to stand behind the door, every sense piqued. The intruders were near the top of the staircase now, their loud, clumsy footsteps obviously intent on reaching the landing just outside my door. I tensed, waiting for the perfect moment to spring, one hand resting lightly on the doorknob, the gun heavy in the other, every muscle tensed and every hair on end. I could hear Monica trying to breathe quietly but trembling on the bed behind me.

The footsteps reached the landing and stopped. Letting my mind go blank for a split second, I exploded through the door, yelling something out of a police drama. I don’t know what I said exactly, but I found myself on the landing, gun straight out in front of me in both hands and aimed at where I expected the chest of the intruder to be. It took a few seconds for the adrenaline to clear enough for me to notice that there was no chest in front of the gun. No person in front of the gun at all. My over-stimulated brain stopped working for a moment, confused.

I lowered the gun and looked down. It was a goat. A big, stupid-looking, black and white goat with small horns and big floppy ears. It looked at me for a moment, uninterestedly chewing on something. I stared back at it, stunned. The adrenaline was still buzzing in my ears, but my embarrassment at having gotten so worked up over the animal buzzed louder. I shook my head at it. The goat made a small bleating noise and shook its head, too, then clopped away from me and into the spare bedroom we’d been using for still-packed boxes. I gaped after it. A goat. No way.

I scratched my head, the alcohol swimming back into focus as my brain tried to wrap itself around what had just happened. My brain, detached, informed me that the four hooves on the stairs explained why I’d thought it was two loud, evil-intentioned men. I found myself nodding in assent. But wait. Hold on. How in God’s name had that thing gotten in? I tried to remember if I had locked the door – hell, if I had even closed the door – when we’d come home. I had been drunk, but definitely not drunk enough to have forgotten something as simple as that. I didn’t have a clear memory of it, but there was a possibility I’d left it unlocked. Maybe it just hadn’t been closed the whole way and the goat had head-butted its way in. I’d heard goats did the head-butting thing.

Just then I heard a clatter from the spare room, as the goat sounded like it ran into something large and wooden. I realized I’d better get it out before it started head-butting our possessions; never mind how it got in. I tiptoed over to the door and peeked into the room. No sign of the animal, but the room itself was eerie in the moonlight, stacks of boxes piled higher than my head and vaguely shaped furniture covered in sheets. No sign of the goat. I felt a cold shudder pass through my body as I realized I was apprehensive about facing the goat. Its mysterious presence in the house made it seem almost as formidable an enemy as the human intruder I’d expected. And anyway, I knew nothing about goats or their habits. The thing could rush at me, horns lowered, and gouge me to death, or somehow get into the master bedroom and do the same thing to Monica. I heard a soft sound from the corner, maybe its furry side rubbing up against a box. The sound sent chills through me.

I crept into the room, senses running high as the leftover adrenaline from earlier kicked into action. I set the gun down on a box nearby as quietly as possible and stood perfectly still. From across the room I could hear an almost steady succession of noises from the animal, the clatter of its hooves on the wood floor as it moved about, a constant chewing noise as it chomped on something (probably our dish towels, the bastard!), a subdued snuffling. I came around an old wardrobe we’d been pondering selling and saw its tail disappear behind a stack of boxes just ahead. I tiptoed forward, ready to spring, and crouched down to prepare myself. When I peered around the boxes I found myself face to face with the beast – it had turned around and, rather than sneaking up behind it, I was now starting into its strange eyes, both of us frozen in surprise. I’d never looked at a goat’s eyes before; they were yellow and vacant, with large, square pupils that contracted into rectangles as it stepped toward me, snuffling at my shorts around a large chunk of something in its mouth. As it got closer I remembered my intention and hunkered down to lunge at it, coming almost even with its mouth, and suddenly stifled a yelp as I leaped backward.

It was chewing on a piece of flesh! It wasn’t meat, exactly – it didn’t look like muscle, but it was certainly part of an animal. It was blloody and dripping, bits of hair falling in clotted chunks as the goat gnawed it lazily. The animal’s jaw was covered in blood, its bizarre rectangular eyes focusing on me as I found myself backing slowly away, horrified.

I turned the corner away from the goat and ran for the door, which I slammed shut behind me. I stood still, re-evaluating the situation at hand. How was I going to grab the goat without getting myself all bloody? For that matter, how was I going to get it down the stairs? I hadn’t even thought about it before, but the thing was pretty large, its head above my waist by a good six inches, and it would probably flail and bleat and kick and head-butt if I tried to pick it up. And, even if it didn’t put up a fight, the simple mechanics of getting a hundred-pound, hoofed animal down a flight of slippery wooden stairs in my socks was daunting. I had to rethink my strategy.

And, shit, I mean, a carnivorous goat? I’d always heard that goats would eat anything, but I had thought their diet was restricted to bizarre household objects and plants, and anyway, where had it gotten a bloody piece of hairy meat? Had it run down a neighbor’s dog? Grabbed a bite of roadkill from the highway? Wherever it had come from, I wasn’t sure I wanted to mess with this bloodthirsty animal just now, particularly after the nonchalant way it had stared at me, unflinching, gnawing on some other furry animal’s hide!

Several moments of unproductive thought later, I shook my head and turned toward the bedroom. I’d have to get Monica to help; there was no way around it. I’d just have to hope she didn’t freak out about the blood.

I tip-toed in and approached Monica tenderly. “Babe,” I said softly, shaking her, “wake up, I need your help.”

She bolted up, eyes wide. She hadn’t fallen back asleep, it seemed. “What happened?” she whispered frantically. “Are you ok? Where’s the gun?”

I realized she was shaking, her eyes huge and her hands gripping the sheets white-knuckled. I put a hand on her shoulder. “Everything’s fine,” I smiled. “There wasn’t anybody out there. …Kind of.”

“Kind of? What do you mean kind of?” She dropped the sheet to her lap.

“Well, there was something there, but it wasn’t an intruder.” I felt ludicrous saying this. “It was… It was a goat.”

Her shoulders, which had been up at her ears in anxiety, dropped, and her frightened look was replaced by one of annoyance. “A what?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know how it got in here, honey, but there’s a goat in our spare room. You heard him clopping up the stairs. Not a burglar.”

She just looked at me for a while, probably trying to determine if I was lying. I just shrugged again. Finally she looked away. “Stupid farm country. I should’ve known this would happen eventually. Move to the country, get broken into by a barnyard animal. Ridiculous.” She shook her head and laid back down.

I touched her shoulder again. “No, honey, don’t go back to sleep. He’s still in there and we’ve got to figure out how to get him down the stairs.”

She rolled over to look at me with contempt. “I don’t know how to do that,” she said.

“I know, but neither do I. He’s pretty big. This is going to take two of us.”

She made a disgusted noise and threw back the covers. “Oh, for Christ sake. Fine, show me the goddamn goat.”

We headed across the landing together, with me silently praying that the animal had put down the bloody flesh.

I stopped at the doorway and looked back at her, motioning to keep quiet. “My plan is to stay quiet so he doesn’t take off running,” I whispered. “Then we’ll have to grab him, maybe by the horns, and pull him to the stairs. And we’ll just go from there. I’ll go around this pile of boxes to the right, you go left. We’ll come at him both ways.”

She nodded wearily.

We slipped into the room and separated. I got that same apprehensive feeling I’d had the first time. The hair prickled on the back of my neck and my forearms as I moved slowly around the room, listening for any sounds from the animal, but all I heard were Monica’s feet shuffling around the stacked boxes from the other side. I heard no clopping, no snuffling, no chewing. He must be holding still, waiting for us somewhere in the dark. Suddenly I caught a flash of movement from the corner of my eye and jumped around a corner to find myself facing Monica again. I whirled back around, thinking maybe I had overlooked him, but I knew that if neither of us had seen him in our circuits of the room, he must not be there. He was too big to miss. Maybe he had left while I was getting Monica, although I hadn’t heard his hoofs clattering down the hallway to the spare bedroom.

“He must have gone somewhere I else,” I said, shrugging. Monica’s face was pale, her eyes wide. She must have shared my unexplainable unease. Even if the intruder was an animal, I supposed, it was still unsettling to know it had gotten into your house while you were asleep. Especially if the intruder was a carnivorous, blood-covered quadruped.

“Let’s check the other rooms,” I instructed, trying to ignore the flipping of my stomach. “You take our bedroom, although I doubt he could have gotten in there without us noticing. I’ll take the other spare room. Shout if you find him, and close the door till I get there.” She nodded slowly, the ridiculousness of the situation weighing on her, and we went to check our respective rooms. I shut the door to the store room firmly to be sure the goat wouldn’t re-enter.

I went to the other bedroom, which we’d fitted up with a bed and dressers for guests. Tiptoeing in, fully expecting to find the bastard chewing on our 300-count sheets, I scanned the dark room for signs of the beast. It was difficult to see in the shadows, but I didn’t sense any movement except my own breathing and pounding heart. I felt my hair begin to stand up again, though, and my stomach somersault in the now-familiar apprehension of the animal’s presence. I switched on the light and squinted, and simultaneously felt the goat brush by my leg on its way out the door. I spun around and leaned into the darkened hallway, my eyes scrambling to adjust, but saw nothing except moonlight streaming in from the window on the landing and the open bedroom door. Had it just been an air-pressure change, or my own hyped-up senses fooling me? I looked back into the spare room. Nothing. My blood was rushing in my ears, but still I was sure I’d have heard the clopping of its hooves on the hardwood floors if it had been there.

Shakily, I closed the door and made my way to the master bedroom, where I found Monica looking confused, as well. “It’s not in here,” she said from the edge of the bed where she sat. “It’s weird, though. I’m like… terrified right now. I feel like I just got in line for a rollercoaster or something. I’m kind of freaked out.”

I sat down beside her and put an arm around her. “Me too,” I admitted. “It’s weird to think that an animal could just wander in. I guess we’ll have to be more careful from now on.” She leaned on me and I felt her heartbeat racing, her chest heaving, like my own. I patted her on the shoulder. “Well, it’s got to be here somewhere and we’ve got to get it out before it breaks something, or eats something. I hear goats will eat anything-” I got a snapshot vision of that piece of flesh dripping blood and clotted fur onto the floorboards. I shook my head again to get the vision out, my breath catching as I did so. I set my shoulders and stood up, helping Monica to her feet. “It must have gone downstairs.”

We searched every room in the house, twice. Even the basement, which had started to reek of whatever-it-was again, musty and unexplainable and disgusting. We turned on all the lights and looked in every corner, went back upstairs to double check, and shone a flashlight around the attic. But the animal was nowhere to be found. My heart was in my throat the entire time, the memory of the bloodied chunk of meat and those unsettling yellow eyes on mine keeping my adrenaline pumping. Even more unsettling than the animal’s conspicuous absence was the fact that both our front door and the side door were closed and locked. The doorknobs themselves were locked and the deadbolts drawn. Even if the goat had had opposable thumbs, he couldn’t have gotten into the house. Unless we had been so drunk that we had let a blood-smeared quadruped into our house when we walked in – which we had definitely not been – there was no way to explain its presence.

Maybe I had still been asleep when I’d seen it – maybe I had had a waking dream. But I couldn’t forget the distinct feeling I’d had of its presence, the hairs on my neck prickling, the flips of my stomach. I knew the difference between dreams and reality. That thing had been real. I couldn’t explain it. But I told Monica it must have been a dream, that I must have thought I saw something that wasn’t there. I’m not sure she believed me, but the alternative explanations for what had happened were so bizarre that we both allowed ourselves to believe it, at least enough to go back to sleep.

* * *

The next few weeks passed quickly. I was busy at work and had been spending long hours at the office. Monica, upset by the goat incident, had been spending a lot of time out of the house as well, running errands and gardening during the day. Her unease in the house was compounded by the smell from the basement, which seemed to be getting worse every day. It was midsummer, and the days were hot and humid, so smells were magnified. Especially so close to the river where the ground was damp and the air more humid than elsewhere, it made sense, but understanding why it smelled so bad didn’t make being in the house any more pleasant. We called a local flooring company about pouring cement down there, but we had a month-long wait until they could come out to the house.

One day I came home late from work to find Monica sitting on the porch with a stricken look on her face. She was dirty as if she’d been in the garden, her gloves beside her on the floorboards as she wrung her hands. She looked like she had been crying. I settled beside her on the porch without saying a word, and she clung to me, shaking, then burst into tears.

“Monica, Monica, hey, what happened?” I stroked her hair as she heaved giant sobs into my shoulder.

“The…. the goat -” she gasped. I felt a chill go through me. Not this again. “It – it got back in… into the house! It’s in there! I – I saw it!” A giant sob wracked her shoulders. “And… I tried to get it out. I tr-tried to get in, b-b-but it locked the door! It l-locked the damn dd-oor and…” Another sob. “I’ve b-been out here f-for hours! And… and I’m scared!”

“Woah, woah, woah,” I patted her back and held her to me. “What do you mean, you saw it? Where did you see it? How did it lock you out?”

She sobbed a few more times. I knew she was probably getting tears and snot all over my work shirt. “I heard a n-noise, like… like a noise a goat would make, you know?” She seemed to be collecting herself. “A-and I was in the garden. And I looked at the house and I saw it. A-at the window in the spare bedroom, just looking right back at me!” She sniffled and sat up, wiping at her face with the back of her hands. She squared with me and continued, the sobbing subsiding. “So I ran to the door and it was locked. And my keys are inside! So I’ve just been sitting here and waiting. And I haven’t seen it again, or heard anything from inside. But… but I saw it up there. I know it’s in there, probably eating things, and breaking things, and… and I don’t know why, but it’s just like last time, I’m scared of it. How did it get in there?”

She leaned against me, done crying, but still drawing in giant breaths. I rubbed my hand along her arm. “I’m sure there’s some explanation, babe,” I said, knowing in my head that I couldn’t think of a single one. “Don’t worry, I have my keys, and we’ll go in and look around.”

She looked up at me, tears welling back up in her eyes. “B-but what if… what if it’s like last time and we can’t find it? I’m just… I don’t know what to think… I don’t think I can take that again.”

I nodded. “I don’t know what will happen, but I bet we’ll find him in there somewhere. A big goat like that can’t disappear twice, right?”

She nodded, but the look in her eyes must have mirrored my own. We were both nervous. We took a few deep breaths, then I unlocked the door and we entered quietly, locking the door behind us to block the animal’s escape route. We separated like we had before, our hearts both beating fast and our senses running on high. I have to admit, I was on edge. The animal’s presence was so unexplained and unsettling. I’m the kind of person who likes knowing how and why things happen, especially in my own house, and yet this goat thing was totally beyond me. It was possible that I had been half-asleep when I thought I saw it the first time, and that maybe my story had upset Monica so badly that she’d locked herself out and imagined she had seen it, too. But something rang false with that explanation, and that same something made the idea of it seeing it again unsettling.

We searched the entire house, and to neither of our surprise, we found nothing. No traces of an animal having been there, and certainly no goat. Nothing was out of place or chewed up or broken. In fact, nothing even hinted that a large hoofed animal might have passed through. Monica and I finally reconvened in the kitchen, where I cracked open two beers to help us calm our nerves.

She looked at me earnestly from across the kitchen table while I took a long gulp. “Ed, I don’t like this,” she said. “Something’s not right here.”

I stopped myself from nodding. “Well, let’s face it,” I replied. “We’ve both had a bad scare. What happened that night was bizarre, and we’ve both been on edge because of the basement smelling. Our eyes and our brains must be playing tricks on us. There’s no reason to be so upset. I’m sure things like this happen all the time.”

She shook her head. “I know what I saw, Ed. There was a goat upstairs.”

I sipped my beer. “Well, I thought I knew what I saw, too. But it just can’t be what actually happened. It’s impossible for an animal that size to be prowling our house without us finding it, or at least some evidence of it, Monica.”

She crossed her arms and stared at me.

“Well,” I pushed on, “think of it this way. We’ve just made a giant transition in our life together, you know? We’re both a little scared of being out in the country for the first time. And I mean, if you put it all together, the night I thought I saw it, we’d just come back from the bar, where the locals were telling us about all the farms in the area. I mean, it’s perfectly logical that our nerves were more on edge than we realized and we just kind of freaked out together. And I know you were upset by it… maybe we’re just feeding off each other’s fears. Maybe we need to just calm down a little.”

She was shaking her head between sips of beer. I stumbled on: “Who knows, maybe this smell from the basement is some sort of gas that’s interfering with our brains somehow. Radon, or whatever it’s called. We’ll get it checked out. I bet that once this flooring gets put in and we’re more settled, this will all go away, and we’ll laugh at ourselves for it.” Even as I heard myself talking, I didn’t quite believe it.

Monica was quiet for a minute, thoughtfully peeling the label off her beer bottle. “Ok,” she finally said, leveling a piercing look at me. “Here’s a question: What did the goat you saw look like?”

The image of the beast, grizzly scrap dangling from its maw, its face and body streaked in blood, popped into my head so clearly I almost choked on my mouthful. But I pretended to have to think about it for Monica’s benefit. “Wow, it’s getting kind of fuzzy now, like a dream or something…” I sipped my beer and peeked at Monica. She did not look convinced. “Well,” I said, wiping my mouth, “I guess it was pretty big, at least up to my waist. And it had horns… not big curly ones or anything, but pretty serious horns. And floppy ears. And it was black and white, not spotted, but blotchy, almost like a cow. You know, just a normal goat.”

Monica waited while I avoided her eye, her stance assuring me that she was about to say something I found unpleasant. When I was finally looking her in the eye, she said slowly and distinctly: “That’s exactly what I saw. It was the same goat.”

I shrugged, “Well that makes sense, I mean if we’re both unsettled by all this, of course you’d imagine seeing what I saw, right?”

She picked up her beer. “But Ed, you never told me what you saw. We didn’t talk about what it looked like.” She threw back her head and took a few big swallows.

I wanted to argue, but I knew she was right. I’d never described the animal to her. She’d never asked. We stood in silence for a few minutes, nursing our beers. I didn’t know what to say, and she knew that she’d made her point.

Finally I put my empty bottle down. “Hey, why don’t we go to the Almanac and have dinner and a few drinks? Just get out of here and relax, and see some of our new bar buddies. I bet it’ll get our minds off the goat, and that’s exactly what we need.”

She looked as if she wanted to argue, but there really was no point. We weren’t going to get anywhere by debating who saw what. So she agreed and headed upstairs to take a shower while I tried to figure out what could be happening with the mystery goat. By the time she was ready to go 45 minutes later, I had still not come up with an answer.

* * *

We were greeted heartily by the crowd of regulars we’d met the last time we’d been at the Almanac. We had a nice meal – I got a steak that beat anything I’d had in the city, and Monica had a salad the size of her torso – and a few drinks, and slowly felt ourselves unwinding. It was a load off to be away from the house, the smell, the creepy feeling the goat had left, and it was amazing to realize just how anxious we had been as the anxiety slipped away into the evening. Midway through our meal, I saw Justin, the son of our house’s previous owner, walk in. We’d met with him a few times over the course of the buying process; he’d helped the realtor do the walk-through of the house and had negotiated a lot of the terms with us. I made a mental note to talk to him about the smell in the basement when we finished eating, to see if he’d heard anything about it or had any hints. I thought of asking if he’d heard of anyone nearby missing a goat, but thought better of it. If I had been imagining it, everyone up at the bar would either think I was crazy or drunk.

When we’d finished and paid for our meal, Monica went to the bathroom and I headed up to the bar. I clapped my hand on Justin’s back and said hi. He looked excited to see me, maybe a little sloshed. I hadn’t been watching him, but he must have been sucking his lagers down pretty fast while we’d been eating.

“Hey, Ed!” he grabbed my hand and shook it energetically with both of his calloused hands. “Good to see you! How’s Dad’s old place treating you two? Is Monica here?”

“Yeah, she’s in the bathroom. The house is great – beautiful as ever.”

“Fantastic,” he said, slapping me heartily on the back. “Hey, let me get you a beer! What are you drinking tonight? And your lady, let me get her one, too.”

After the appropriate hemming and hawing over who should pay for whose drinks, Monica returned from the bathroom and we settled down next to Justin for a few rounds. He told us more about his job and family; he owned a local plumbing company, which was doing quite well, and was married with a second child on the way. He seemed like a really decent sort of person, a “gentleman farmer,” I guess. He seemed happy.

I finally decided it was time to bring up my gripes, and to see if I could press him for more information on the smell, and maybe the history of the house. If there was anything weird behind the problems we’d been having, I thought he might be drunk enough to reveal it without thinking I was out of my mind. “Hey, Justin,” I asked as the bartender set another round before us. “I have to ask you something. Your dad ever mention a nasty smell coming up from the basement of that old place? We love the house, but there’s something foul down there that just makes it reek when the weather’s warm.”

He paused, looking into his cup for a little while. Maybe a little longer than he should have. But he was pretty far gone. “Well, Ed,” he looked up at me. His eyes were wide. He looked like a cornered animal. “That’s a… that’s a real old foundation you’ve got under that house, you know. You knew that when you moved in. Lots of weird old smells in a dirt floor basement like that, in any house. Especially—“he burped quietly “—especially near the river like that.”

“Oh, yeah, we know. It’s just pretty foul sometimes. We’re going to get a floor put in down there, but in the meantime it’d be great if we had some advice on how to keep the smell down. Any tips?”

“Sure, sure,” he smiled broadly, relief evident on his face as if he’d dodged a very touchy subject. “Well, you know, that old place is bound to have its issues, you know. There could be a plumbing problem, of course, but honestly I don’t think much of the piping runs down there. It’s mostly outside into the septic…” He took a swig. “It might be more just the age of the place and the dank air, down there, you know. And yeah, the guy who built it was a butcher and all. All those creepy meat-hooks in the basement. There are bound to be some unpleasant things hanging around after all that, even if it’s just a bit of a stink…”

His eyes opened a bit wider as he said it and he turned back to his beer, very much in the manner of someone who had said too much. “I’d be happy to send some guys over there to look at the plumbing if you want,” he mumbled into his beer, then back at me with a wide, open smile. “Free of charge!”

“Oh, Justin, you don’t have to do that,” Monica joined in. “We just thought it’d be worth asking about. If your dad had every mentioned the smell or what he did to keep it down, you know. We’ll figure it out.” She laid a hand on my leg. When I looked at her, she gave me a piercing stare. She was suspicious of him, I could tell. Something about his behavior was more erratic than the beers he was downing could explain. I nodded.

“It sure is an old place,” I turned to back to Justin. “I love being somewhere with so much history. You don’t get much of that in the city where everything’s built over so fast.”

He nodded enthusiastically, to change the subject. “Sure does have history,” he said. “Hell, my dad used to tell me all kinds of stories about that place. Never sure I believed them, though. He was a… Well, he was a different kind of man. I never spent a whole lot of time in there, what with all the animals.”

I felt Monica’s grip on my leg tighten. “Animals?” I said as lightly as I could, my heartbeat picking up. “He had a lot of pets, huh?”

“Sure did,” Justin replied, shaking his head a little. “He was like Noah over there. I always had real bad allergies as a kid, so we never had pets even though Dad was a big animal lover. So when we were all grown up and he bought that place, he just went kind of crazy with pets. He had every kind of animal you can imagine at one time or another. Hell, I think he had a fox or something once. No idea where he got it.”

“A fox! What a thing to have for a pet!” I laughed, feeling Monica’s hand squeeze on my leg again. We were on to something here. “Did he keep it in the house?”

“Well, yes and no,” he answered. “Most of the critters he had over there came and went as they liked. He had a big fence around the place so they didn’t run off, but the door to the house itself was usually open so the animals could come and go as they pleased. He was like Dr. Doolittle over there.” He drank the rest of his beer in several gulps and laughed, shaking his head.

“What a hoot,” I smiled at him, flagging down the bartender for more beer. “I’m glad you rehabbed the place before we moved in! I love animals and all, but not in the house!”

He laughed as his next beer was set before him. “I hear you! I mean, if I didn’t have allergies I’d be fine with having a dog or a cat inside, you know? But I could never have lived like that, with all kinds of animals crawling everywhere.” His face fell a bit, as his memories seemed to take on a more somber note. “Yeah, it was a real zoo. And I hate to say it – I mean I don’t want to be disrespectful to his memory – but by the time Dad passed on, he’d gotten a little strange with the animals. Had them everywhere, only one room of the house to himself and that was his bedroom. People round here…” he looked up and down the bar, then dropped his voice so the other patrons wouldn’t hear him. “They used to call him the ‘Old Goat Man.’”

I clamped my jaw shut to avoid looking too excited. “Really? ‘Goat Man,’ huh?” I goaded him on.

Justin nodded. “Yeah,” he mumbled. “He had so many of them. We tried to convince him to get rid of some of them, but he loved them like they were his own children. Like most people would love a cat or a dog. After a while, well, the damn goats nearly took the place over… Dad wasn’t really all there at that point.”

I saw Monica straighten up on the other side of me, her eyes wide. Justin took a long drink, looking forlorn. Trying to salvage the conversation, I smiled again and held my glass up in a toast. “Hey, man,” I said, “at least he did things his own way. Not many people can say that, right?”

Justin looked up at me blearily and clinked his glass to mine, a smile spreading over his face. “You know, Ed, you’re right. He did things his way. Here’s to The Old Goat Man.”

“Cheers!” Monica and I shared a meaningful glance over our mugs as we toasted the Old Goat Man.

* * *

Monica and I drove home in silence, our thoughts obviously following the same trail as we wound our way back to the house over the country roads. None of the information we were mulling over had explained or helped our situation, and yet there it was, ringing in our ears. “The Old Goat Man. He had so many of them.” My brain was screaming at me that somewhere in Justin’s drunken intimations was an explanation. Maybe one of the goats had stayed in the woods nearby and come to visit its old home, that something logical had to come of this. But logic seemed to fail me every time I thought I’d explained it. My intuition was pushing away all my trains of thought, trying to force something else through: an explanation that wasn’t even an explanation. Just a weird idea. Just nonsense. But it wouldn’t go away.

When we pulled up to the house, Monica turned to me. “Ed,” she said seriously, “let’s pretend, for now, that that conversation with Justin didn’t happen. I just want to sleep and not think about it.” Her eyes were a mirror of my thoughts: confused and serious and tired.

I agreed. We went inside and, while Monica got ready for bed, I made myself a little snack of chips and salsa in the kitchen. “The damn goats nearly took the place over…” The words echoed in my head, and I shook it, refusing to let my thoughts continue down the path they were on. Instead I moseyed over to the basement door to let some of the reeking air from the basement out overnight. The door swung open, squeaking just a little. The smell hit me harder than I’d ever experienced it, sending me reeling away, gagging. My hyperactive brain tried to label it – decay, or droppings, or … death. I shook my head again and forced the thoughts away once again, heading back to the kitchen.

No longer hungry with that smell following me into the room, I stared at my salsa, feeling nauseous. The house was almost silent, except for Monica’s small noises from upstairs, but there was a murmur from the basement. I almost sensed it rather than actually hearing it – quiet movement, as if many feet were moving around on the dirt floor, shuffling. I couldn’t be sure if I was really hearing anything or just letting my imagination run away with – No. No, that wasn’t my imagination. That was a sound. Maybe the fetid air escaping upward. Or maybe…

Bullshit. I was making myself crazy over the drunken ramblings of a plumber whose dad had gone crazy and goat-happy. Mere coincidence, and I damn well knew it, even though my stomach was flopping around like a fish out of water with apprehension. I’d have to show my stomach who was boss and go down there, take a look around. Show it, and my growing fear, that there was nothing out of the ordinary going on here. Teach the hair on my neck to lie back down.

I took a deep breath and walked to the open doorway, holding my breath against the stench from below. I flicked the light switch on the wall. Nothing happened. The old bulb hanging from the ceiling down there must have blown out. Perfect timing. I took a deep breath through my mouth to avoid smelling the air, and took a few steps down before stopping to let my eyes adjust.

There were faint stirring sounds coming from below as before. Probably rats or bugs, I told myself. I peered downward, my hand tight on the railing and my every hair standing on end. My stomach flipped particularly violently and, then – there it was. That same goat. Standing a few steps below me. Chewing on the same piece of flesh and staring at me.

I froze, my mind hitting a brick wall of terror for a moment before I closed my eyes and tried to breathe evenly, willing myself to calm down and for the animal to disappear along with my fear. It probably was all in my head, I remember thinking over and over. Not real. Not real. But when I opened my eyes again, it hadn’t moved, and it hadn’t disappeared. In the darkness, I saw its short, tufted tail flick from side to side as it tilted its head and sniffed at me. The stink was overwhelming. A piece of flesh fell to the ground, fur coated in charnel.

Suddenly my brain snapped into action, propelling me forward down the stairs in a quick change of heart. I was suddenly furious. This four-footed tyrant had been ruling my life in my own damn house, and I didn’t care whether he was really there or not. “You son of a bitch!” I shouted, hurtling myself down the stairs with one arm raised, fist pumping. “You goddamn goat! Get the hell out of my house!” In my rage I misjudged the distance to the next step and slipped. I found myself falling backward, twisting as I fell, and then landed hard on my butt on the stairs. I grimaced, turning my face away from the goat for just and an instant as I tried leverage myself up using the banister. There was a splintering sound, and the banister gave way beneath my hand as I realized in horror that I was going with it. Into the darkness and the stench and the sinister sounds of movement with no source. I heard the goat on the stairs bleat, and then my vision went white with pain as my shin landed on something hard that did not give way beneath my weight. My right foot went numb while the rest of my leg exploded in agony. I yelped and struggled to push myself into a sitting position. My leg was throbbing, screaming in pain, I was seeing a succession of stars and fireworks with each heartbeat. I touched the shin lightly with my hand, which came away wet with blood. I retched but stopped myself from vomiting, and tried to move my foot but felt nothing below the searing pain in my shin. It seemed I had broken my leg.

I sat still for a while, the pain and shock finally receding to a point from which I could try to get my bearings. I could see the light from the kitchen far away overhead and the outline of the staircase below it; I’d fallen almost straight down from the steps and landed directly to the right of the staircase. From memory I realized there was some metal piping running along the side of the staircase over here – I must have landed on it with my now-shattered shin. I’d have to get myself around to the bottom of the stairs and drag myself using the remaining intact banister. I didn’t want to call Monica – if that goat was still around here somewhere she might very well pass out at the sight of it and fall down the stairs herself. I’d wait till I’d gotten myself up to the first floor.

Just then I felt something touch me gently on the shoulder. I whipped my head around in the darkness, my eyes finally adjusting, and came face to face with the goat. I felt my heart jump into my mouth, but somehow stifled a scream that would have brought Monica running. I tried to scramble away, but my leg reminded me in no uncertain terms that I was not going anywhere just yet. The goat balked at my movement and let loose a frightened “Baa,” but didn’t move away from me. He was literally only inches from my face, those bizarre eyes staring intensely into mine, his rotten breath fanning my face around his bloody prize. I stared back, my mind racing but unable to think of any escape over the agony in my leg.

After a few minutes, however, my brain slowly came around to observing the goat I was staring at. It was not the same goat. It was much smaller – its eyes were on a level with mine as I sat, panting, on the floor. And it wasn’t spotted. I couldn’t tell its color in the dark, but I could tell that there were no horns on its narrow head, and its fur was dark. Its nostrils flared as we regarded each other, then it turned abruptly and trotted off into the darkness. 2 goats. God, they were in cahoots down here. I shivered with pain and fear as I peered into the blackness where the second goat had disappeared.

I followed its vague form in the darkness until it moved through the rectangle of light falling from the open door at the top of the staircase, then gagged as I saw a gaping wound in the animal’s side, near its hind leg. A huge red gash was hanging open, tattered flesh flapping around its glistening edges. Its sides and legs were smeared with blood. And, I realized as it moved back into the shadows, the thing was only using three of its legs… its back left leg hung useless from an obvious break just below the knee… had it fallen down the stairs too?

I continued to watch it as it made its way to a dark corner where, as my eyes adjusted, I realized with horror that there were more goats lurking back there, all in a group as if they were huddled around something. Their tails were twitching and their heads lowered, as if around a trough of food. I peered into the darkness, knowing instinctively that I didn’t want to discover what they were doing, but I was unable to look away. The returning member of the group shoved its way into the fray, pushing out several others, which stood back and stared at each other stupidly, then turned slowly toward me with vague curiosity.

Through the gloom I could see that their hides were ripped open as well, in different spots and to different degrees, but even in the dark I could see blood and gore spilling from holes in their sides, necks, even faces. They all carried pieces of flesh in their mouth, their muzzles covered in blood, and many some had broken legs. I felt my brain getting fuzzy, approaching a state of fear and sensory overload – a scream was rising up my throat and I was hardly feeling any pain from my leg, so great was my desire to run. I forced myself to look away from the slowly limping goats, focusing as well as I could on getting up the stairs. I didn’t want to know what they were all crowding around in that corner or why they were all bleeding. I just wanted to get the hell out of there.

Knowing I should try to find a way to brace my leg, but too terrified to look around for the broken piece of banister or take the time to rip up my shirt, I began frantically dragging myself backward toward the base of the stairs. The pain was overwhelming as my leg trailed behind me, every clot of dirt or bump in the floor sending me into new reaches of agony, but I kept moving. I was trying to keep my head turned to look over my shoulder and avoid another unexpected run-in with an animal, but in my peripheral vision, the sight of the churning, twitching mass of bloodied goats in the corner drove me onward. The few that had turned toward me seemed to have lost interest and turned back toward the fray, and I could only hope that I could get to the stairs without attracting their attention again.

I had almost reached the stairs when I dragged my leg over an unexpected stone in the dirt floor. It bumped directly against my wound and I let out an involuntary gasp, then stopped still. They’d heard me, and for some reason this time they were interested. All motion in the corner stopped for a split second, then the bodies of the animals all seemed to turn in one motion, broken legs and open wounds all pushing into one another, smearing blood on fur, ears flopping, hooves stamping. This time I couldn’t hold back a cry of fear, no longer caring what Monica saw if she could only get me out of the basement. With an act of sheer will, I flipped myself over, my leg sending splinters of white-hot pain through my body, and pulled myself up onto the fist step with my arms.

A few of the large, more curious goats stepped forward tentatively, their muzzles dripping gore from whatever poor thing they were eating. In the background I saw a large, horned animal whirl suddenly around on a smaller one and bite it hard, then pull away and actually rip a piece of its ear off before stepping toward me, chewing contentedly as the other stood strangely still and kept silent. There were at least six of them moving slowly toward me, nostrils flaring and lips twitching, dripping blood from their wounded hides and hideous mouths alike, all quietly breathing out that horrible stinking breath.

I closed my eyes and pulled myself up to the second step, exhausted but determined. The largest of the goats stepped onto the first step a few feet below me, dragging one broken back leg behind it in a limping, zombie-like motion. It belched, then sniffed at my left shoe lazily. I scrambled backward, the step above me grinding into my back as I tried to force myself up. I realized I was talking out loud as the goat slowly and casually followed my broken leg, which was still mostly on the ground as I struggled slowly upward. “Ohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygod…” I was repeating.

The goat began to nibble at the laces of my shoe and I felt my mind buckle. I let loose and screamed, praying silently for Monica to come rescue me. If I had been able to move my foot I would have kicked the animals away, but I was immobile and the blood dripping down my leg seemed to draw the animal on. I finally got myself to the third stair and saw my foot start to rise above the ground level. From somewhere very far away I heard Monica’s footsteps coming down the stairs from the second floor.

The first goat was following me steadily, gnawing on my shoelace, and its friends were following it, two on the stair behind it sniffing the air. They moved slowly and steadily, my foot out of their reach at last. I grasped onto the frantic thought that maybe, with their broken legs, they wouldn’t be able to mount the stairs to follow me. I was still talking: “Ooooohmygodohmygodohmygod….” I tried to look away from the gore-covered animals, into the darkness of the basement, but immediately regretted the decision. They had all finally moved away from what they had been eating, enough that I could make out a vague shape in the dark corner. It was a human form there in the darkness, glistening with blood, quiet and still in the dark. It had to be…

I felt my head begin to swim, and the stars of pain I’d been seeing became clumps. I tried to pull myself up another step, but knew I was too weak. My vision began to fail and I realized vaguely that I was passing out from terror and loss of blood. The biggest goat jumped forward somehow onto the stairs and began to sniff the dribble of blood on my shin. My head dropped back onto the step behind it…

And then there was Monica behind me, her arms wrapping themselves around my chest. She was talking but I just let myself fall into her embrace. Somehow she got me up the stairs and closed the door behind us.

* * *

We left the hospital the next morning around seven. I was in a full leg cast and had been given crutches, which would take me a while to figure out. I had been given a strong dose of serious pain medication and was grateful for the fog of indifference it had lowered over me regarding the night’s evens. Monica hadn’t said much beyond asking what had happened. I’d told her I’d fallen through the banister and had seen the goat again, and that seemed to be as much as she needed to hear. She’d just nodded and said, “I knew it,” then turned back to her magazine as the doctor came in. I was glad she’d let the issue go for the time being – I was in too much pain to have explained much more. I knew she would have believed me, but I think my silence told her just as much as the whole story could have.

We pulled up to the house and I started to ready my crutches. “No,” she said, putting a hand lightly on my arm. “I’ll just be a minute. Stay here and rest.”

I just nodded and let her go, too drugged to care much and relieved in my own cloudy way that I didn’t have to go into the house. I may have fallen asleep, but it didn’t seem very long before Monica emerged from the house with two duffel bags. She threw them into the backseat of the car, then dug into her pocket. She pulled out the hoof we’d found in the garden and had been keeping on the mantel. It seemed like years ago that we’d found it.

I watched her as she walked down to the highway, waited a few minutes, then ran across the four lanes in one dash. She stopped for a moment, looking at the hoof she held in her hand, then threw it far out into the river.

She came back to the car. “I’ve been wanting to get rid of that thing ever since we brought it in,” she said. “Gave me the creeps.”

She turned around and unzipped one of the pockets on the duffel bag behind her, then turned back around with a business card in hand. I craned my neck to look at it, but gave up when a nerve went shooting down my neck toward my leg. She tucked it into the dashboard in front of the odometer. “You get some more rest,” she said, and turned the car back on.

“Where are we going?” I mumbled.

“To get some answers,” she said. “Then to a hotel.”

I just nodded and let myself fall back into a blissfully dreamless sleep.

When I woke up again, we were parked outside an unfamiliar ranch style house. A large van sat next to us in the driveway. “J&J Plumbing,” it read along the side. The wording rang a distant bell, but my medication didn’t really let me recognize it.

Monica was at my door, opening it and helping me onto my crutches. I got myself upright somehow and began the slow process of moving myself forward, following her up a slight incline toward a well-maintained yard. As I got going, though, some of the painkiller-and-sleep haze started to wear off and the name on the truck struck a chord in me. “We’re at Justin’s?” I asked blearily.

Monica nodded. “This sonofabitch knows more than he’s telling. I’m asking him about the goats.”

She helped me hobble my way up the front walk, then rang the doorbell. There was no immediate answer, so Monica – always the insistent one – knocked on the door. It took a few minutes, but finally Justin, clad in morning stubble and a bathrobe, with a cup of coffee in his hand, answered the door. He looked at us through the screen door, puzzlement and wariness mixing on his face. “Well hi, folks. Didn’t think I’d be seeing you again so soon. What can I do for you?”

Monica smiled, but her voice was hard. “Can we come in, please, Justin? We need to talk to you about last night.”

He hesitated, glancing nervously over his shoulder. “Last night? I… uh… Was I drunker than I remember?”

Monica smiled again and opened the screen door. “No, not at all. Nothing like that. But we do need to talk.”

He looked over his shoulder again, then shrugged and opened the door for us. Monica thanked him and as I hobbled by I smiled resignedly. Justin’s eyebrows rose as he realized I was on crutches. “Oh my god, I’m sorry,” he said as I passed into the well-kept living room. “I didn’t see that… Are you ok there, Ed? What the hell happened to you?”

Monica closed the door behind her. “That’s what we’re here to talk about. Could we sit down somewhere?”

“Sure, sure,” he said, his bemusement growing as he looked from her to me and back. “Why don’t we go into the kitchen and I’ll get you two some coffee. You look like you’ve had a long night.”

He led the way and I settled into a roomy wicker-backed chair at a large kitchen table. The room was decorated with pictures and ornaments of chickens. I was vaguely grateful they weren’t some other barnyard animal. The sound of a running shower came from somewhere down the hall.

Ed settled into the chair at the head of the table after handing us two brimming cups of delicious smelling coffee. The scent of it kicked my brain another gear toward functionality. I took a sip.

Monica looked at hers for a moment, then straight at Justin. “Justin,” she said sternly. “Ed fell down the basement stairs last night when the banister broke. He landed on a pipe and broke his leg.”

Justin nodded soberly. “Well I’m mighty sorry to hear that,” he said, shaking his head. “Those stairs are tricky, I’ll give you that.” I could hear that he meant it, but there was an edge to his voice. I think he was afraid we’d ask him to compensate us for the medical expenses, since he’d installed the banister.

Monica smiled. “Well we’re certainly not blaming you,” she said warmly. “It could have happened to anyone. But we do need you to be honest with us about something.”

Ed looked down into his coffee, as if he knew what was coming.

“What happened in that basement, Justin? There is something not right happening down there and we need to know what it is. It’s not just the smell anymore and I think you know what we mean.” When he was silent for a moment, she continued: “Ed wouldn’t have been going down there in the first place if it was just the smell bothering him.”

Justin nodded, gathering himself before he looked up and spoke directly to me. “I should’ve told you folks, I suppose,” he began slowly. “But, frankly, I’m something of a skeptic, and I guess I was just hoping it wouldn’t ever become… an issue.” He looked at Monica, then took a sip.

“My father,” he continued, “was real eccentric, like I told you last night. And, like I said, as he got older, he started keeping animals as pets that should never have been let in that house. He had pigeon roosts and chicken coops inside, some wallows for pot-bellied pigs out back. I told you about his fox. He had a donkey or two out there from time to time, even some giant godawful lizards. I don’t even know what all he had most of the time ‘cause the place smelled awful, and with my allergies I could hardly be there ten minutes without sneezing my head off.”

He took another sip.

“Well, one day I went over there and he had a new ‘pet.’ A big old billy goat he called Rex. He was just in love with that thing, Lord knows why. The animal smelled terrible, just crapped anywhere it felt like it, and chewed on everything in the house. Just a lousy animal. But Dad had a soft spot for it. Kept it at his side all the damn time. Let it go anywhere it wanted.” He shook his head. “The next time I went over there was a few months later, and, well, he’d started up a whole herd of goats! A whole damn flock of ‘em. Must have ten, fifteen goats roaming through his house.” He chuckled derisively, then looked at me.

“I mean, can you imagine? An old man, in his seventies, living in a house with a pack of goats! And the damn things are dumb as a box of nails – can’t walk down stairs but they can damn well walk up ‘em. And here’s my old man, who thinks they’re the be-all, end-all of domestic pets, and he’s carrying eighty, ninety-pound animals down flights of stairs when they get themselves stuck at the top.” He took a long sip. “I told him, I said, ‘Dad, you can’t keep doing this. Those animals would be better served living outside where there ain’t any stairs.’ I said, ‘You’re gonna fall down one of these days and break your damn neck.’ I offered to build a shed outside for them to sleep in, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Said something about how his babies were worth the risk. I just left. Couldn’t stomach the thought of my father living like that. Had to get away, you know?”

He looked down into his coffee again, as if the scene were playing out on its surface, then started speaking again, softly. “Well,” he said, “it didn’t take long for the locals to give him that nickname I told you about, and damned if I didn’t join in. Some things are tough to face like a man. I should’ve gone over there and built him a shack for the damn things whether he liked it or not, forced him to listen to me, but it seemed like his dignity was already near gone. I didn’t want to go bossing him around, taking the last of it away, you know?”

I nodded when he looked up, but he looked away again, out through the glass doors onto a patio where a large grill shone in the morning light. “After a few weeks I went back over there to check on the old man, and… I couldn’t find him anywhere. Him and his goats, just nowhere to be found. The chickens were there, and the dogs and the cats sniffing at ‘em like they hadn’t been fed in ages. But no goats and no ‘Old Goat Man.’ But his old station wagon was there. I let myself into the house and… well… you know that smell you were telling me about. I hope to hell it ain’t ever been as bad for you folks as it was when I walked in there. Smelled like animals and their shit and something rotten. I went down there and…”

He sighed and looked back at us, his eyes filled with sorrow. “There was my old man, dead in the corner. His leg was broken.” He nodded at me. “Just like yours. The bone was sticking up through his skin and all that. And he was… he was gone, must have fallen down there and couldn’t get back up and wasted away, or maybe hit his head, too. Probably carrying a goddamn goat down there for something. And all those goddamn goats were down there with him. Stupid bastards followed him down the stairs, except of course they can’t walk down stairs. So they’ all fell. And they all broke their damn legs, too, falling down the stairs. So none of ‘em could get the hell back up! And they…” He shut his eyes against the tears. “By the time I got there they’d started…”

I held up my hand to stop him. I knew what he was about to say and I didn’t need to hear it. But he shook his head and squeezed his eyes shut. “They’d already gotten to eating him. My old man. Goats’ll eat just about anything if they get the notion… and not just that, but they got the taste of meat and it looked like they started going after each other down there, too.” He opened his eyes again. “It was like something out of a horror movie, I tell you. All these dead goats laying around, and my old man, stripped down to bones in some places, with the live ones mostly limping around like zombies, all covered in blood…”

He stopped talking and swallowed, then took a few bracing gulps of his coffee. He looked back at Monica and me. “I should’ve known better, really, than to try to cover it up. I had a closed-casket funeral for him, told everyone he’d died in a farming accident and left it at that. Nobody except me and the coroner and undertaker knew what’d happened. I got all those goats and carcasses out of there, and I just hoped if I fixed the place up, there’d be no need to tell anyone. Just get it off my hands, you know. It’s a nice house, structurally, and all.” He paused. “I should’ve known something like that would leave a mark on a place. You can’t expect that kind of thing to just go away. But I’ve never been one to believe in ghost stories and all, so I just hoped… I should have at least put a new basement in, with a decent floor and lighting, but I just… I couldn’t bring myself to go down there any more than I had to. I just left it.”

He looked right at me. “I’m awfully sorry, Ed,” he said. “I should’ve known better.”

I just nodded. It all made so much sense when it was said aloud. I’d been right all along but hadn’t been able to voice it. Monica put her hand over mine on the table.

* * *

We sold the house shortly thereafter and were able to negotiate to be released from the mortgage. We moved back to the city, our experience with rural life having scarred us both for good.

We never found out if he told the next buyers about what had happened to his father or to us, but when we came back to check that everything was out, a cement floor had been poured in the basement and a new wall was being put up over the old stones.

It still smelled terrible.

Despite my predicament, I’ve found my surroundings to be quite pleasing: my residence, a two-story Victorian settled on a spread of land a half mile from its closest neighbor; the town, quaint, one traffic light and a dozen local businesses catering to my nonabundant demands; my office, situated within the leisure of my home.

I cannot boast many genuine friends, but my wife and daughter provide me with all the support and comfort I need. Thank God for them, and thank Him again they are healthy, so far untouched and unaware of the danger that exists.

As the sole physician in this old-fashioned county of woodland, pastures, and colonial architecture, I have made the acquaintance of nearly every resident and proprietor, as majority have sought my treatment at one time or another for minor aggravations: colds, influenza, an occasional broken bone. But, and even though I sometimes pray it on another, never has a town member sought my assistance for the same clawing, agonizing pain that I suffer.

No other soul, as far as I can tell, has been anguished by the people with golden eyes.

The first one I met went by the name of Fenal, or so I remember it as that, for it was some time ago, although I did not determine his name until later on. He was young, really only a boy–not yet at adolescence but perhaps bordering it, with brown hair, wiry streaks of black and even a touch of gray it had seemed. Shoulders severely stooped as a result of spinal curvature, but bigger than most of his kind.

Of course the first peculiarity I marked were his eyes; I remember the night quite clearly. Sleep had struggled to find me as memories of the day’s patients whisked about my head in circles. Efforting to release the pressure, I allowed myself to rise and take seat at my desk.

Once there, my sights roamed casually around my office with its hardwood floors and Monet prints, through the floor-to-ceiling bay window overlooking the moonlit garden and fountain birdbath (I’ve always made certain that a few moments were spent stabilizing my rationality–gazing at the art, looking out beyond my paradise into the distant woods–even if work ran late and the scenery suggested only fringes of itself in the pale moonlight. Tonight became no exception). The lamps were out, the streaks of embers in the fireplace long extinguished leaving the moonlight shining through the bay unshared by anything as contrived as a flame or bulb. My eyes were set upon the droplets of water cascading from the fountain when I saw the golden eyes–round as orbs, pitch-black points at the crux of their focus–alongside the base of the fountain. They climbed the night air to a height of four feet perhaps, blinked (confirming that indeed they were eyes and not a fatigue-drummed illusion of something otherworldly), and in a smooth and unhurried pace advanced through the garden toward my place in the window, though the body they had been attached seemed not to take steps forward, but moved in some other way I really couldn’t indicate, as though drifting.

The effect upon first sighting the eyes was very intense and unpleasant for reasons obvious. Soothed to a degree that no other from my family would share this dreadful vision, I shuttered my eyes in effort to cleanse the tender state of mind threatening me, but the image of the fiery eyes stayed with me much like the lingering impressions of a dream immediately after waking. When I finally divulged my sights through the bay window once again, the nightmare had preserved itself, enhanced itself, undermining the frightful sensations thrust upon me just moments earlier, and I could only stare, frozen with a unique icy fear as something grotesque pressed against the glass, staring at me.

Although common sense told me otherwise, it looked like a street kid from the city, the kind that huddles in a cardboard box erected in some alleyway foul with refuse: clothing dark with sweat and hanging upon its body in dirty strips, barely concealing the unwashed skin of its emaciated torso; long lank hair falling in damp strings; scars–one a red twisting streak–running across its scrawny cheeks.

But the appearance of the bulbous eyes quickly rejected this street-kid hypothesis, their glow professing it not borne of human genes, but that of something beastly.

Like a wizard in mid-charm, it slowly raised its angular arms and scraped ten lengthy yellow claws against the glass of the window. I shuddered as the terrifying screech passed through my body like a powerful drug and paralyzed my senses and body to a state of dreamlike inaction.

A veil of blackness threatening me, I stayed unmoving for what seemed a prolonged time, helplessly charting a territory in my mind previously unexplored, allotting a significant capacity to store the depths of the mystery before me. I wondered if it were an aberration, or whether more like him could be hidden away in a faraway place that no human could project even a perspective of, even if drawn from the most imaginative region of the mind.

The pain darting through me suddenly intensified, a repercussion to my tensed-up muscles, then, still staring, still scratching the glass, the thing pulled its dirty cracked lips far apart and flaunted a mouth rife with gnarled brown teeth.

At once I had the sense of hearing words from those gaping jaws, as if they loomed from his silent mouthing directly into my mind, but I heard and recognized them in my own voice and not in the distorted growls most apt to escape its throat. Nonetheless, it did not matter, for the meaning was all the same, and I finally found the will to shudder again, for now I knew why it came.

It needed me.

I tried but still could not move, fear holding every muscle in my body immobile.

Then, something horrible.

Beneath my pant leg, between the calf and knee, a stroke, gentle yet steady, determined.

Sickly confusion struck me. I looked down to assess the source of this strange sensation and beheld a smallish figure like the being in the window stooping under the desk, its clawed hand no longer caressing me, but now groping my shin painfully hard, its mutilated stare meeting my terrified one, its golden eyes glowing beneath a black mask of soot.

I tore my sights away, so strongly wanting to believe that somehow my bleakest, most terrifying nightmare had released its delusions from my subconscious and placed them within my home to terrorize me.

But my poor fortune would have it otherwise.

Somehow I found the strength to hobble from the chair, to no good use as the demon beneath the desk held me firmly, and I stumbled to the floor. I managed to look up, saw another golden-eyed demon only feet from me, doused in ashes like the one still gripping my leg, face-down on the floor but pushing itself up on all fours. Behind it another wriggled in from the tight sweep of the chimney, arms dangling, reaching for the concrete hearth. Rustling sounds emanated: more pushing their way down the length of chimney. Coming for me.

An unnameable, gristly odor so high suddenly invaded my nostrils, and my eyes automatically released sour tears. A gray cloud veiled my sight, and simultaneously with my slamming heart, tiny scraping footsteps pattered about the hardwood floor all around me.

And all I could see were their eyes, flying about my head like fireflies, eight, ten, then more than a dozen golden lights, dizzying me.

Many hands groped me, tore at my clothing, dragged me.

Sweat, hot and odorous, fell upon my skin. Transient whispers brushed my ears.

I prayed for death to take me, and thought it had. Until I woke and found myself in Hell.

I awakened in the same manner I had swooned. On my back.

I heard murmuring throats, grinding teeth, then the soft sounds of movement, of tentative feet shifting stealthily about me. Breaths, hot primitive sighs danced across the surface of my skin.

Their lair. The people with the golden eyes.

I suspected more movement, but could not see quite yet. Suddenly I perceived a dark shadow looming over me, a misshapen silhouette, eyes shining through the curtain of haze obscuring my vision. A rough hardened object touched my face. A claw. I shivered, a prisoner–and witness–of their camp, and I wondered with great trepidation if it had intentions to silence me.

The gray haze cleared and in the midst of the burning firelight one of the monsters came into view. It groveled immediately to my right, head tilted down, sniffing me. Its hand, still stroking my face, did so quite gently, and I could see something within the glow in its eyes, something thankful that I was here.

A stirrance erupted and the thing next to me scurried away on all fours, legs as thin as broomsticks pushing clouds of dirt up as it disappeared into a hole in the dirt wall. A chorus of growls and grunts spewed out from the mouths of many. Many. Not three or four or even a dozen. Many.

I forced myself up on my elbows, peered out into the distance and saw hundreds of small glowing lights in the gloom. Eyes. In my direction.

I had quit praying years ago, scoffed religion for scientific beliefs, but for this I quickly reinstated my faith through an urgent internal invocation.

A beast approached me, the smile broad upon its deformed face–a face with a gash racing along its cheek–and I recognized it by the horrid feature as the ghoul that had first appeared at my window.

Kahtah! he yelled raising its sinewy arms in the air. The crowd, a multitude of voices, repeated the foreign gesture: “Kahtah!”.

I remained silent.

It drew a claw into its body. “Fenal,” it said in a deep, gravely voice, head tilted in my direction. There was a damn frightening silence, and then it said, demanded, “You…will…help,” and placed my medical bag before my feet.

The creature–Fenal–forced me to my feet and hurried me along a cave-like corridor lined with red soil and slimy moss, the brutal odor here reminding me of the summer stench that rides the wind over from the neighboring farmlands. Brisk, meandering activity surrounded me as the twisting passage widened, some sections breaking off into branched corridors. Bodies scampered by, hooting as they did so, and I continued on, the blind being led by an untrustworthy source, gripping my bag as if it were my only means for survival.

Soon I found myself at the forefront of a large room that seemed to have been either constructed within a mound of dirt, or built entirely underground. It appeared to act as a hub, hovels dug out in the muddy walls, glowing eyes peering from within their far-away depths. Hundreds of torches burned, igniting the chamber to a ghostly yellow luminescence, and I saw a group of the strange people gathered at one of the gouged-out areas at the opposite end of the room.

Fenal ushered me in, gently in fact, every damn creature in the place pinning their golden irises upon me. I ignored the reek of sweat, blood, and feces as I followed Fenal’s lead to the opposite end of the dirt chamber, to the gathering at the far wall. Upon my arrival the crowd there dispersed, some on two legs, most on all fours. Fenal pulled aside a burlap bag used as a curtain and allowed me access to a smaller chamber scooped out in the wall.

The interior of the room was miserable, cramped, and I could barely stand up. A dozen or so candles carved the dark interior with various sized flames.

“Help…Cerpdas,” he said, pointing.

I followed his finger to a being–Cerpdas its name–not unlike himself, laying barechested and trembling along the slime-ridden wall, a spread of rags for a mattress beneath it. She–I say this as the breasts, however flattened and mottled, were evident upon the exposed torso–had been covered to the waist with a burlap bag, fresh bloodstains saturating the upper half.

I gazed at Fenal and he peered back at me, the same emotion I saw through my bay window pasted again upon his deformed face. Suddenly, for reasons I could not explain, I no longer felt fear. I felt only pressure now for I knew for certain that I was brought here to perform what would perhaps be an impossible task. Fenal squatted next to the injured Cerpdas and stroked its shoulder. Her eyes rolled up, the glow diminished to a dull luster. Sick.

I placed my bag down, took a deep breath of rotten air, then slowly rolled down the burlap bag, a few inches at a time until I saw the first splash of crimson washed across its distended abdomen. A powerful stench of waste and rot assaulted me, hinting that it hadn’t been away from this spot for quite some time.

Wanting to get this over with, I tugged the cover away…

…and stared in horror at the freakish sight laying on the rags before me. It was beyond believability. Yet here in my presence, much too real to renounce.

The female creature’s legs were spread eagled, a pool of blood and substance tiding from the vaginal canal.

A gnarled claw protruded crookedly, wriggling like a worm out of earth.

“Help Cerpdas,” Fenal begged, gently stroking the rotting strands of hair on her pear-shaped head. Help.

So I worked, trying not to think about what I was actually doing, because now was not the time for me to doubt my abilities, ask myself questions. All I could do was remain strong–and sane–and convince myself that this was just another patient, a woman in need of an emergency c-section, and not whatever else she might be. I cut her open, plucked the bawling creature from the womb, cleansed her wounds and crudely stitched them back up. I buried all her injuries under a thick layer of bandages, fed her a dose of penicillin, and acquiesced myself to the fact that this was all I could do.

Once done, I backed away, shaking, leaning against the dirt wall in the shelter, the back of my head pressed against a patch of fungi. In the soft glow of the candles I observed the others in the room with me: a half-dozen of them, silently scrutinizing me, their glowing eyes now full of questions. One being, horribly deformed, separated itself from the horde and slowly writhed across the room, its leg dangling helplessly behind it like a wet noodle. It confronted me, tracing a finger through a damaged gnarl of skin on its thigh.

Gunshot wound.

Another leaped from the group, pushed the fiend in front of me aside and grasped my arm, tears flowing from one golden eye. The other hung shriveled and lifeless from the socket like a pendulum, the miraculous gold changed to a stone cold gray.

Fenal intercepted. “No Pentaff! Savior needs rest.” Fenal gazed at me, his golden eyes glowing with admiration. Savior?

Dizzied, I stumbled back into the large antechamber. They immediately rushed forward, groping me with broken bones and mangled limbs, mouths dripping fetid with disease, their wails echoing in helpless pain, desperate for my aid. Yet with this all suffering, their eyes still glowed, bright with hope, desperate that I would be the one to nurse them all back to health, give them the chance to thrive as they once did, lest they face extinction.

Savior…

Overwhelmed, I felt a wave of darkness consume me, and I gratefully succumbed to its grasp.

And now, so tired, I sit–a year later–at my desk in my office with the hardwood floors and Monet prints, looking through the floor-to-ceiling bay window, to my garden and into the woods beyond.

Within the darkness, I see the golden eyes.

This is my sign–no, warning–that it is once again time for me to go, treat their sick, assist their injured. It’s like the old saying goes: feed a cat once and it’ll keep coming back for more. How true, how true. Only here, I have no choice. I must go. Too great will be the ramifications if I do not. Additionally, as I mentioned, they will never let me leave. I’ve tried, and have paid dearly. The bite marks I’ve suffered tell the stories of all my attempts.

I know when the sun brings a new day, my wife will again implore me to take her and our daughter away someplace nice, on a vacation that they both so greatly deserve. I can’t, and I won’t. My reasons are obvious.

God help them if they decide to leave on their own.

****

This is the first part of a triology of stories, which lead to Michael Laimo’s most popular horror novel, Deep in the Darkness. He has also written Fires Rising and Dark Ride.

By Nico Lustgarten

“Godless,” a greyed man says. His thick dark eyebrows furrow with some bad kind of tension. He sips from a cup. The weight of a man compacted in 70+ years of life and what lies before him is the pleasure born between a man and woman resting one body top of the other – me and my female companion.

The swirling vapors from the hot coffee blow with his words. “This whole goddamn society is godless.” He steps away and walks a path that leads to Fifth Avenue. The grass does a nice impression of his boots hunkered down into the ground and it’s the ghost of his footprints that haunt me.

Myra laughs and her naked breasts bounce with every heave. I didn’t cover myself either but am more bothered by what he said. “Wasn’t Adam and Eve naked in the Garden of Eden?” I ask Myra. She balances a cigarette from her lip and digs into her jeans, which are spread across the grass.

“You want more?” Myra opens her palm and inside the small of it is a bag half way filled with sweet white cocaine. I needed more to stay awake and watch the sun.

I dug a key into the bag and snorted from it. “Fuck, shouldn’t we have had some kids by now? I don’t mean you and me – we’ve just met but shouldn’t we be doing the American Dream?” I wish I could remember why I had moved to New York.

“Look around you, Nico.” Her smeared mascara circles small bruises around her brown eyes. “The American dream is fucked.” She passes the cigarette to her other hand and inhales deeply into the bag I’m holding. “The American Dream, just like you and me, is fucked.”

The sun sheers through the clouds and little birds whistle through them like flying knives. The smog lifts from the streets and the heat from the day before makes the whole cityscape appear like a post-apocalyptic survivor.

I didn’t want to think that the American Dream was fucked. Being naked with a stranger and lying on the Great Lawn should mean something. I wonder if I could repopulate the world with Myra if everything were to implode.

****

A flash of memory from last night – we were in the street. We had a heart-to-heart for the first time about nothing that I can remember. It was a vibe we shared. There was a dream hidden in the alleyway near a stony Lower Manhattan street and the shadow of a tall tenement kept the Norman Rockwell nightmare in the dark. There was something in the past that made the future seem imminent and all prospects bleak.

“We’re human,” Myra begins. “We’re not that special. Our conscience dooms us.” Her glassy eyes were focused on a bush.

Myra has been working as a prostitute for the last few years. She told me last night that she hadn’t developed any skills to make an honest living from. This was easy for her she said.

“I count the holes in the ceiling,” Myra tells me. “The whole time they’re fucking me, I’m not even there. I’m watching from above and afterwards, they throw me some money and it’s done. Over. Easy, right?”

She must have been beautiful once. There’s still some sparks of innocence pocked in her sunken cheeks, her thin arms, her natty hair. Out there somewhere is a father, her dad, her god maybe thinking of a place she might be. What she’s up to. With me here, those memories must be a long ways away in her mind.

****

My rumination returns to us in the present, Myra grabs my hand and helps me up. “I want to take you somewhere,” she says. I exchange her bra for my shirt. My shoes for her fishnets. She pulls her long curly hair back. In the glow of the sky, the sun crowns her head like a halo; as if she’s some golden goddess who’d lost her way to the heavens.

“I want you to meet someone.”

We’re walking through 32ND Street in Midtown Manhattan, close to Penn Station, watching the people climb out of the subway station, battered and butchered from a New Jersey whatever. Men in suits with their coats hanging by threads wear the wretched cologne of stale beer blowing from the street.

“When you walk in, I want you to pull me closer to you like you mean it.” Myra says to me. I can hear our destination before she tells me what it is. I don’t ask. I all ready know.

A door blows open and two men stagger out, clutching onto each other’s shoulders, breathing in each other’s foul air. My cocaine dreams running out of steam. I need another bump, something to numb me. I reach into Myra’s pocket and she stops my hand short of pulling out the bag. “What happened?” I ask.

“Not here.”

She pushes the door open and inside is a disorderly shit house. Men drunkenly croon over the sleeping old body of a woman, beer bottles broken on the floor while people slip in their own vomit. I didn’t know that bars like this still existed in New York.

I tell the bartender to deliver to us a pair of brown bottles of beer so we can sit, chat; let our minds settle onto the scene. The bartender might have been a pretty woman once but the smoke rising from these scum bag’s backs stained her skin with premature age.

Myra’s foot thumps on the floor like a looned rabbit and she’s tapping the top of the bar with the tip of her finger. There’s a man who sits alone at the end of the bar wearing a grimace and a hollow face. His hair is tousled while one eye looks one way and the other looks at me.

“Have you ever seen anyone paint a scene like this before?” Myra asks.

All I can think about is that bag that she has in her pocket and how I’m going to get it out and use it on myself. I want to feel beautiful again.

“Hey, little girl,” a man in a blue pea coat says to Myra. “Wanna hear my rattlesnake shake? Sssss.” He looks like Earnest Hemingway had he survived the suicide. I can smell his whiskey-laden breath when he bellows laughter. The bartender climbs over the bar, holding a beer bottle in hand. She yells, “Frank you sit your ass down.” She motions her head over toward the other side of the bar where the man who’d been staring over at me for the last half hour sits.

“Jesus, Margaret. I just wanted her to hear my rattlesnake. Sssss…” He laughs into his glass of whiskey, his breath pushing bubbles from the drink.

“I told you to pull me in close like you mean it.” Myra says. I draw her in and can smell the all night sweat on her neck. Some of it might be mine. Some might belong to other men. I can almost taste the salt.

Myra grabs the bottle and chugs its contents down in three swift gulps. I motion the bartender for one more.

“I grew up around men like this my whole life. All of them had something, lost something. You understand that this is all I know.” Myra tells me.

All I can think about is how I got here in the first place.

“I mean, why do you think I do what I do?”

I know she has my fix in her pocket.

“I wish I could just end this. Start over. That kind of thing. Nico are you listening?”

My thoughts elsewhere like the bottom of her pocket.

“Yeah, I’m listening but maybe we should go into the bathroom for just one bump. Two?”

“We can’t go just yet. There’s someone I want you to meet so you can see who my role model is.” She laughs and takes a swig from her beer.

A beer mug slams hard against the bar and the man who did it grunts and stomps out of the door. He’s the one who was staring at me earlier, looking for a pause, I guess to swirl in his anger. Myra looks at him through the window as he walks down the street, her eyes swell with what might have been a clogged pool of tears had she not become so dry herself.

“OK. Now we can go use some of those bumps,” she tells me.

My heart swarms with the buzz of delight, warmth and all of those euphoric sensations of a starving man about to eat. It’s better than getting sex after watching strippers grind against your buddies all night. It’s better than hearing a good Rock and Roll song the first time. It’s better than falling in love.

We close the door behind us. No one sees but their voices, hollers, still reverberate through the walls; a bunch of clumsy old men, retiring underneath the shredded doubts of inebriation. I’ll be joining them soon with my song, my love, my drug.

She takes a long whiff from the bag, another one and another and she squeaks out a whimper but holds it back. “Here,” she says, her voice broken but I’m too damn fixated on my fix to ask why her voice went weak.

A door slams open and there’s the man who had just left the bar. One eye staring at Myra, the other staring at the toilet. Her face did something new. It went soft, it went limp and her lips curled into a sour sad hope. The man’s face wore the same lips, the same mouth…his nose, slightly crooked matches Myra’s.

“You whore! You slut! How many times did I tell you not to come in here?”

Myra’s silence looms larger than the man’s thick frame. His hardened hands curl into a fist and then turns his large bull head to me.

“You’re lucky that I wasn’t around enough to act like her father.” Spit flies in my face and I can taste the vodka from his gut.

“But you,” he continues looking at Myra. “You’re the slut that dragged this piece of shit in here. My place. My home. My own…” and with that he opens the door, slams it closed.

Myra straightens, wipes a single tear, and strengthens her face then she’s back to her stoic self; hardened like an egg whose soft shell had been broken and taped back together.

“That’s my dad,” Myra says. “Your American Dream.”

Myra, me…her father and all of those sad old men out in the bar — we’re all tragic children picking apples from some utopian garden waiting for an unpleasant god to tell us we’re wrong.

An obese woman and her 25-years-but-out-on-early-release-for-good-behavior boyfriend are dancing.

They’re not just dancing. They’re writing a poem about long-suffering hope fulfilled and the joy that comes with it.

I bet 10 cigarettes and your shift in the laundry room that this is the first time he’s smiled like this since the peyote joyride in that hot-wired Camaro.

She’s faking the smile that she wore with all her heart only five minutes ago. Before they showed up.

They’re the only white people in here besides me. They’ve stumbled in here by accident, much too drunk to find somewhere else to go. Their inebriated lurch to the table next to me is quite the antithesis to the graceful movement of our dance floor lovebirds.

Abercrombie points to “two of these burritos. Pork, alright? You understand me…? Right? None of that beef crap. And one of these chili relleno things, whateverthehell that is.”

His buddy chuckles in approval and tosses up the sloppiest high five I’ve seen on this side of the Hudson. Abercrombie’s girlfriend is inspecting her manicure until:

“Ohmygod, Bobby! If I ever get that fat, I’ll…I’ll, uh (hiccup)…you better not ever let me get that fat!”

And the ridicule begins. They laugh and point. More high-fives between the “bro’s” in celebration of some totally-awesome fat joke. I could say something, but it wouldn’t matter.

Fifteen feet away, my overweight friend and Jailhouse Ink continue cutting up a rug. They can really move. Dancing was conceived by people like this. Yet I wish she was enjoying it more. She’ll never enjoy it again.

See, I understand why she’s faking her smile. The same reason she’s attempting to dance in a way that keeps her man’s back toward the hecklers as much as possible. She knows it’s only a matter of time until the bliss of this long-awaited moment with papi is broken when he notices them. And if she stops smiling, well…he’d notice.

She’s right. I know this man. I know that all those years of good behavior were harder for him than serving out the rest of his sentence in yard duty under the summer sun and through the winter’s bitter cold.

It’s difficult for a beast of this nature to tame himself.

There wasn’t much provocation from other inmates to deal with. They knew what he was in for. They saw the tempest in his eyes. Whatever clout they might gain from challenging him would surely not be worth the consequence of unchaining such savagery.

Yet despite the lack of deliberate confrontation, he toiled to contain himself nonetheless. The klutz in the chow line never knew what sort of restraint was exercised. Nor did the shower boys understand the tremendous feat of self-control they witnessed when he caught their lusting eyes.

She’s holding her smile. And she’s praying silently the same as me. “Please, God…don’t let this…”

And then it happens. Just as the song comes to its climactic and abrupt end, he spots the sneering table to my right. And in the silence thereafter, he catches Abercombie’s three-word blasphemy.

“What a pig.”

Our silent prayers go unanswered. The beast has been awakened.

Abercrombie has no idea what’s about to happen. All the alcohol has brought his trust fund arrogance to a delusional height. He doesn’t realize that the Majesty of Rikers Island isn’t like any other pissant that his daddy’s lawyers or his mother’s checkbook have delivered him from in the past. Ego drunkenly reckless, he just can’t imagine that anyone in a place like this would ever think to serve him the feral judgment that is now upon him.

A few feet to my left, the lovers part. He walks with profound purpose to my table and grabs the Corona bottle I’ve just emptied out. Looking over his shoulder, his eyes say goodbye to the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen. The buck-sixty she put on while he was away means nothing to him; she’s the only woman amazing enough to wait so long, so faithfully, for someone like him.

He looks at me briefly and says, “Take care of her, hermano.” I can tell that he’s just disposed of everything he learned about in that Book he spent so much time with over these past years. I nod respectfully. I could say something, but it wouldn’t matter.

He spits. Holding it by the neck, smashes the bottle against the edge of the table. And I watch the most powerful stride I’ve ever seen as he steps forward into the rest of his life.

Abercrombie’s last words are smug and insignificant. “Dude, why don’t you just…”

I am now a witness. I witness a long-suffering hope unfulfilled and the sorrow that comes with it.

on the uneven pavement, you retching and trying to hold it back so you don’t have to go near him in your lowered-tolerance inebriation, watching the rear-end of a piebald horse at the gas pump in front of you and wondering if there’s just one funny thing going on in this situation, or too many to count. Given you’re seeing three of everything anyway, it can be hard to keep track.

Being just out of college and stranded in an ocean of ancient ani-misticysim that still makes more sense than the insular ultra-Catholicism of your virtual-strangers-even-after-seven-months housemates can also throw off one’s perspective. Spending most of your waking hours feeling oversized around kindergartners and their tiny chairs can be a little discombobulating for a 5’1”, 100 lb misfit who’s never been bigger than anyone in her life, but leaving the classroom every afternoon for the driver’s seat of a full sized school bus throws things into an even more Alice In Wonderland kind of perspective. Being out here, a hundred miles from anything like civilization and yet parked at a 24-hour convenience mart, just back from the legion hall dance you crashed with your fellow volunteers, waiting for the teetotal-ling designated driver to emerge form the store with some Cheetos, trying to remember what the hell happened over the past three hours, is mind-fuck-quality surrealism.

And then there’s the horse. Standing there, still as a car idling except for a slow swishing of the tail, right in front of your housemate’s Neon, as if it belonged at a gas station at 3:00 in the morning. Refueling. You guess the rider’s inside, probably also buying Cheetos. People out here love Cheetos. Not the regular kind so much as the hot kind. Not sure why, really, they’re pretty distasteful to you. But people here also tend to eat lemons without sugar, and they love – love – pickles. Who knows. They also ride horses around on weekends and take them to the gas station. It makes sense, really; the reservation has one of the highest drunk driving mortality rates in the world, and while a car will take you right into a ditch if you pass out drunk, a horse will get you home no matter what. Unless it comes across Bigfoot or The Tall Man or some other spirit, which according to the locals happens quite a lot and isn’t always a pleasant experience. But so long as you can keep your seat on the animal, which most of the people around here can, having been riding since they were preschoolers, a horse is a safer way to get around on a long howling-at-the-moon night than a piece of heavy machinery.

The horse’s tail swishes at you again. The sound of vomit hitting pavement from outside has stopped. The obvious mental image of the rider coming out of the gas station, pushing a few buttons at the pump, and inserting the business end of the nozzle into the business end of the horse continues to cross your hazy mind, but it seems passé somehow. Too obvious. Yet you still wish you had a camera. Another wave of nausea is coming over you – you steel yourself against the tidal force of bile. God, you think, I hate tequila. Dammit. You’d promised yourself to take it easy tonight – only drink one kind of beer and one kind of liquor to avoid mixing, but the first shot the now-barfing mass outside the car door bought you was Cuervo, and you got locked into a Mexican binge all night. Never a good idea. Nor is busting into the legion hall of a tiny Nebraska town known for its history of lynching the Indians you’re out here volunteering to teach for a year. It was fun at the time, but…

The back door opens and your ex-lover tumbles in, smiling the relieved smile of the empty-stomached drunk. “So where’s Pete with those Cheetos, dude?” His breath stinks but you’re so close to vomiting already that it hardly makes a dent in your confusion and misery. “Dude, I can’t believe you want to eat. You just puked everywhere.”

“Yeah,” he replies, “more room for Cheetos.” You grimace and turn back to the horse at the pump; it takes a moment, but the blurry double-image your drunk eyes perceive eventually focuses into one. Its tail is swishing. A big-boned Lakota woman is climbing up into the Western saddle, cradling her cell phone between her ear and shoulder – you’re constantly marveling at the skill set of people from the prairie. It’s entirely different than what the city taught you about swiping a Metro Card or avoiding other pedestrians mid-crosswalk in front of raging cab drivers.

Your ex watches with you as the animal trots off down the main street of Pine Ridge, South Dakota and into the wild void of the black prairie night. A dog barks in the distance. “So, hey,” mutters Bryan in the slurred late-night tone you came to know during illegal late-night beer binges at his tiny house in Oglala, “I know it’s been kind of weird lately but, we should really…” he hiccups… “get together again before you leave, you know? For old time’s sake.”

You eye him, curled in the corner of the Neon’s backseat, his hands gesturing clumsily as he talks. The high school girls’ basketball coach, now a member of the paid staff after three years volunteering. The only attractive non-Indian for miles around, and an alcoholic. Go figure. You just shake your head and turn back to the night outside the bright 24-hour lights of the parking area. It’s quiet now. You’re the only car in the parking lot. It’s finally gotten late enough for the reservation night to wind down. The Legion Hall kicked you out almost an hour and a half ago and the drive back was interrupted by Bryan’s several vomit stops. You wonder vaguely how Peter, the constant DD, can stand people like the two of you, who drag all the volunteers out into the night to witness your helplessly post-collegiate debauchery. You wonder how this will be remembered. The night everyone got kicked out of the legion hall? The night Bryan puked for two hours straight? Your birthday party?

Too many options, and the mind begins to spin again as nausea bears down on the backseat. If Peter would just get his snacks and get the hell out of Big Bat’s you could make it home without puking, no problem. Maybe one of his students is working the late shift, in which case you probably shouldn’t go in to get him. The sight of a drunken 3 am teacher from the school is a death blow to the reputation at any school, much less one where 90% of the students’ parents are diabetic and abusively alcoholic.

“I mean,” Bryan continues, seemingly unaware of your unresponsiveness, “it’s not like we had a fight or anything. I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings. It just went weird, you know? We should hook up again. It was fun.”

You stare at him for a moment. A flash to the night he invited you over to the Oglala pad, the night you decided a year of celibacy wasn’t in your future. A mistake, for sure, but one that could be made again for the sake of satiety. His form contorts as a deep hiccup issues from his throat. You roll your eyes and look away to see the door of the store opening, Peter emerging with Cheetos and Gatorade. “Thank GOD, dude,” you say as he opens the door, remembering a moment too late, as always, about how he views taking the Lord’s name in vain. “Sorry,” you mumble as he hands you a blue Gatorade.

And in a moment, with the car interior reeking of processed flour and cheese powder, Bryan crunching away and hiccupping as you nurse your drink and try to hold it down, you’re off again, into the blackness of the reservation night, rez dogs starting up by the side of the road and fading into the dark, the light of dawn approaching greyness from the East. Back up the hill to the volunteer house that’s not quite a home.

[EDITOR'S NOTE: This story was originally published on Lynsey Griswold's blog.]

The bathroom of Pirate’s Alley stinks of shit, and disinfectant. The stench sneaks past the coke that I’m stuffing into my nose and C.C. Rider smiles and laughs

as if there isn’t a pound of shit clogging the toilet just a couple of feet from her. With my black-handled pocket knife, she etches a message into the wall where it will remain amongst a universe of carved names and dates that go back to the 1920′s.

Her inscription reads: C.C. was sold to New Orleans. 8/07.

This is my friend, C.C. Rider – the lesbian queen, the beautiful brown-haired girl with shiny beads of green, purple, and gold dangling from her neck. I pass her a bag of sweet powder; she tilts her head, and takes a deep snort – my sweet Hoover vacuum cleaner in three-inch heels; the woman who has swatted away many attempts to adjoin my lips with hers.

“This is really peaceful stuff, man,” C.C. says, handing me the bag. I dig a key into the little plastic baggy and deep into my brain the cocaine goes. I’m really happy about this. You have to see my face – no, you should see C.C. dancing. C.C.’s hips shaking to the sound of a snort-snort here and a snort-snort there, here a snort, there a snort, then she vomits into the garbage can.

“No more margaritas for you, baby doll.”

“Give me a sip of your drink,” she says, wiping her mouth.

“You’ve lost your blinkin’ mind. Gimme me a kiss.”

“Ew!” she says and slurps from my glass of whiskey slamming it into the porcelain of the sink, fracturing the glass.

“Now that drink is no good to anyone, you clumsy klutz!” She kisses me on the cheek, licks my chin. “This place is a shithole.”

“The bathroom or the bar?”

“Both.”

If you don’t know New Orleans or even the French Quarter then the location of Pirate’s Alley means nothing to you. Even if you know the alley off Conti Street that it’s packed into, it still wouldn’t make a hell of a difference, but that’s where we are, warm, wiry and confidently seeking the good times, hiding from the commercial hub of Bourbon Street where all of the touring maniacs toss trinkets into the air and revelers feed on beads like goldfish in a large fishbowl.

Laissez les bon temps rouler.

“Nico, baby, let’s ride the wild horses tonight, go to that strip club and bite some labia,” C.C. says.

“Well,” I say, stirring the drink to look for splinters of glass. “How about we get along tonight in this bathroom? Get along real close, you know? Then we can move on and on.”

She lifts an eyebrow, turns her head and walks back into the stall.

“You mean, you want this?” She says, propping one stocking covered leg on top of the toilet with the evacuating shit inside. “You will never have this.”

“Well, your resolve is steady but keep laying tracks up your nose and maybe your perspective will change.”

“Doubtful, Nico, but keep trying.” Then of course she laughs at me.

“How serious are you about this strip club?”

“How serious does this look?” She reaches into the pocket of her tight jeans and out comes a thick wad of money.

“Where did you get that from?”

“Shhhh…” she smiles, grabs my hand, pushes the door open and leads me into the visual ruin of the bar’s neon lights.

Here are some rules for your New Orleanian exploit:

1.  Bring a good supply of narcotics.

2. Always have a dollar ready to spend.

3.  Forget wherever you left. It no longer matters.

4. Beware of strip club bouncers. They can be more brutal than a South Korean combat unit.

5. Fights are common in the French Quarter. Bring a knife but never use it. It should only be for show and tell.

6.  If a drug dealer asks you to follow him into the bathroom then ensure a sentry is on the lookout from the outside. Dire consequences will result without a full strategy implemented for such a scenario. Pack your wits and you’ll have Marie Laveau’s graces.

7. If you don’t know who Marie Laveau is then ask the minute you check into your hotel. You need to know who Marie Laveau is. When you find out, pay her a visit.

8.  If you think you’ve had enough just do a little more.

9. What happens in New Orleans never happened.

The extra special super bonus:

Turn yourself into a fist and punch holes into the infinite memory bank of New Orleans. You are a metallurgist building a new sculpture in Louis Armstrong’s Park for the insane. If you adhere to these rules then your mother will feel shame for birthing you. This is OK. It’s part of the action.

So then we’re in a different bathroom, the men’s bathroom of a strip club. How the place works is like this: you walk inside, the man pays the cashier but the woman, C.C. in this scenario, doesn’t have to pay because her participation – they expect – will cultivate more money for the dancers. The bathroom we’re in is in the back of the courtyard behind the strip club.

The muted boom-boom-boom coming from inside the strip club speaks to my heart, which is banging away with all sorts of anxiety. The wrinkly old black man sitting on a chair looks us over with severe suspicion. I appease him by offering ten bucks in exchange for unlimited access to the bathroom stalls – no questions asked. He wants to know if he can watch and I tell him that I’d even let him touch her but she only digs girls. He folds his arms and says, “Mmmm, hmmm…” and leaves it at that.

We get comfy in the bathroom stall, which is real tight and away from the ramble of strip club dandies. Our shoes splash on the wet floor rendering the soles untouchable. She gives me a different bag so we don’t have to share anymore. We walk out rubbing our noses and sniffling.

“Bad colds,” I tell Mr. Bojangles.

“Uh huh,” he says.

I give him a ten, pick a mint from the tray of treats he is guarding and walk out of the bathroom. I hear him say, “Thank you. Come back soon.” Oh we intend to, Mr. Bojangles. We surely intend.

The sound of the strip club gets louder as we walk closer through the back entrance. The doors burst open and it’s a cacophony of screams, dance music, and men hollering at waitresses. Dollar bills rain from the second floor as the dancer on stage shakes her bare breasts at the ceiling. The closer we get to the stage, the more menacing the patrons become. A fifty-ish man with a clump of dark matted hair and a thick gut watches us through one eye. The other eye is covered with an eye patch. He looks at C.C., lifts his eye patch, and where the left eye is supposed to be is just a dark hole covered with concaved scar tissue. He says “This is me winking at you, baby” and guffaws while C.C. scrunches her face.

We sit down next to this other guy, he’s younger than us and his green snake skin boots are crossed one over the other on top of the stage.

“My name’s Ray. What are y’all called?”

He digs into his pocket and pulls out a thick wad of green bills. He unfolds them, and counts 20s like they were pages of a novel. Page three has the dancer’s name all over it. It says, “In God We Trust.” Andrew Jackson’s face is one long dignified scowl. Ray places the twenty inside the stripper’s stocking and there’s Old Hickory now, his face sweaty and pressed against one of the most beautiful strippers I’ve ever seen. The man who saved New Orleans from the Brits is now wearing glitter at a raunchy strip joint.

“You know, I didn’t even want to be here,” Ray says, flashing the fan of twenties. “My buddy dragged me and now he’s in the back getting a lap dance that I paid for but like my granddaddy said, ‘don’t ever let money get in between friendships.’”

“Can I be your friend?” I ask Ray.

“That your girl there?”

“Sure that’s my girl.”

“Give her fifty bucks to get on that stage and take ‘er top off.”

“Christ, that’s a tough request,” I tell him.

“You or your lady know where I can find me some blow?”

C.C. peers between us, throws an arm around my shoulder and says, “No, we don’t have anything.” She puts her mouth close to my ear and slyly whispers, “No sharing.”

I mouth I have to Ray.

He winks and says, “I’ll pay.”

The dancer leaves the stage and the DJ announces from the intercom, “That was Mary Chain, boys. Give her a hand and maybe she’ll give you hers tonight. Alright, now I hope you’re ready for Candy Cane. She’s Ms. Dancing Louisiana 2006 so you boys better give ‘er some respect.” Everyone cheers. Everyone howls. The good ol’ boys from the bar swarm around us, knocking our chairs together.

It’s a nasty crowd and you can smell the Bayou sweat and even the carpet bagger money swishing in the pockets of Northern men. I have just enough space to squeeze my drink into my mouth. C.C.’s annoyed but then Candy steps on stage, wearing red and white striped top and red stockings. She walks to the pole, gyrates around it, flirting with every one in the crowd. Men point to themselves, yelling, “Me! Me! Me!” I point at C.C. and yell, “Her! Her! Her!”

C.C. looks at me and laughs; she bounces her head to the music, watching Candy amble from center stage. C.C.’s eyes have that sparkle that you get when you revive from a knockout punch. Candy stops her strut in front of C.C., grabs her hand and pulls her onto the stage.

My chair is pushed so close to Ray that we don’t have to whisper our transaction. On the stage, C.C. slowly lowers onto her back. Candy steps above C.C.’s face, crouches on all fours and plants her head between C.C.’s thighs in a sixty-nine position.

“Oh man. That’s a good woman you got there. How much do you want for that blow of yours?”

“Brand new bag, friend. Never been open. I’ll take forty for it.”

I drop the bag between our seats. He picks it up and replaces the bag with a pair of twenties.

Candy’s buried head moves in circular, determined motion like a seductive ostrich. She arches her back, glides back up from C.C.’s stomach, lifts my friend’s shirt, and licks her right nipple. Money rains from the second floor again eliciting a roaring cheer from every patron in the room. C.C. points to the money and looks at me. I grab the cash, floating like green snow flakes. My little C.C., my dear lesbian queen. I can see where her wad of money had come from.

Ray hands me a fifty dollar bill, points to C.C. and says, “That’s for her.” While Candy gropes on C.C.’s leg I get up and stroll to the bar for a glass of whiskey. I give the bartender the fifty and put the change in my pocket.

There’s C.C., getting her body molested by this stripper and I’m thinking, pop your hip in her face. Pop your hip in her face. And Candy goes with her bony little waist into C.C.’s face:

Pop.

Pop.

Pop.

C.C. sticks out her tongue and whip-lashes the lovely stripper’s ax wound. The stripper, Candy Cane, smacks her pelvis real hard into C.C.’s mouth.

C.C. grabs her mouth, her bottom lip all ready swelling. “You dirty slut!” She yells to the stripper.

Candy stops her dance, turns and waves her hand to the bouncer. The big man, he’s stocked with muscles, packed with so much meat that his neck disappears into his shoulders, he comes trudging through the dark drunken mass of men still waving dollar bills at the stage. His big bald head, with two thick flapping lips, says to C.C., “You causing trouble here again?”

“Whatever Candy says isn’t true,” I say to the bouncer.

C.C. sits back into her chair, supports one leg on the stage, looks down to light a cigarette and when it lights, she turns her eyes to the menacing bouncer. “No, Tommy. The only problem here is Candy’s taste.”

Candy looks flaming mad, caramelizing on the stage as her skin turns from white to red. She points to her crotch and says, “Tommy, she licked me…like right here!”

“OK, you two,” Tommy says. “Get your asses out of here. C.C., I’ve told you before to stop harassing the dancers. Take your money and get out. ”

I tell him, “We’ll leave after this drink and then after the next one too.”

Ray shakes his head and says, “No, no, no. Don’t do it, man.”

“I’m not doing anything,” I say to Tommy the Bouncer. “I’m enjoying a drink.”

Ray’s jaw slackens, his eyes widen, and his fan of twenties wilts away. My cocaine courage is flaring from my brain to my arms. My fists clench and then my right smacks into Tommy’s face. The whole room goes cold. The music stops. No whisper, no squeaking of ass to pole, no clinking drinks – nothing. The bouncer falls to the ground in one big whoompf.

The other bouncers pour into the room like a bunch of angry bulls with shaved heads. I thrust out my open hand, exposing a raging palm. The black-shirted bulls stop and look at me like I’m crazy and maybe I am but I want to win this moment. I go into my pocket and pull out my knife. The light bounces from the disco ball and shines onto the serrated blade of the knife, making it look more dangerous and lethal as if the gods placed the weapon into my hand for an occasion such as this one.

“Now we have a knife party, “I tell the bouncers switching the knife from my left hand to my right.

C.C. beams at me and softly claps.

Except this isn’t what happens at all. Tommy has me by the shoulders while another bouncer drags a very loud and screaming C.C. Rider out of the door. I try to push him with all of the adrenalin rumbling around in my veins but the man – he’s a marauding brick wall and he doesn’t move except closer to the door.

“What’s the big idea?!” I yell.

Tommy looks at the cashier and says, “You don’t let these two back in here, right?” He looks at C.C. and says, “Never.”

The cashier nods her head and gives in. These people release us into Bourbon Street. Poor C.C. has scrapes on her hips from those maniacs and a busted bottom lip from the stripper’s pelvic jab. I grab her small hand and tow her through Rue Bourbon, her eyes slowly closing as she screams, “I’ll be back!”

C.C. lets go of my hand and yells, “Fuck you! Fuck you, Nico! I don’t want to go home.” We exchange a knowing look, one shared between two people silently thinking the same thing. She relents, grabs my hand to let me walk her home

Her apartment on Esplande Avenue is inside a large Victorian looking home along the border of the French Quarter, cradling in the shadows of round, grandfatherly oak trees. We walk together up a small set of steps and stop at the door.

“Here,” I say and open my hand to give her twenty-five bucks. “Ray wanted you to have this.”

It was a rotten thing for me to do, keeping the other twenty-five but at least I didn’t keep the entire bounty. Her eyes twinkle like stars but not like the way stars look in the emptiness of the sky. Like the way stars look when you see them reflect in a dark pool of rippling water. She slips her cold tongue into my mouth, relieving the desire I’ve waited so long for her to address. It’s better than I imagined it could be. The metal taste of her mouth and the sour mix of spent vomit…the expression of our night together placate my pallet.

C.C. pushes me back, recoils in disgust and screeches, “You’re an ass, Nico!”

Photo by Zsuzsanna Kilián

I awoke with shit clogging the muscles of my shoulders; the fibers of my tendons, tensed.

My shoulders creak.

The stale glow of an overcast morning glitters onto my locked eyes. I see red dots from underneath my eyelids. I see black enveloping my vision.

I open said eyes.

I see books on my bed. Some shut closed. Some open. I sit up, squeeze my eyes tightly and drag my palms against my face then through my hair.

I’m naked. My pants lie akimbo on the floor. I can’t remember how this happened.

The bright red light of the clock fill a pattern, molding into sharp lines, burning a sharp light, extending its influence across an unknown day, generating numbers emerging as 6:30 a.m. The last words I read before I fell asleep was, “Tomorrow will be a better day.”

I recall dreams. Bad dreams. Scary dreams about work. Dreams that I was there in a cubicle, bathing in the yellow death glow from fluorescent lamps. Dreaming that I had much work to do but my fingers couldn’t type. Couldn’t see the breadth of details required to complete anything. Blurred thoughts. Phone calls from the micromanaging shepherd. This dreamer baas then awakes from said dream to quickly eat breakfast then scram out of the door to eventually drift within a large corral of cattle at Grand Central.

I’m in a crowded clutter of fellow les miserables.
We climb steel metal steps,
heavy from the gravity of our own weight,
which equal tons and tons of watchers of television.
Which equal drinkers, who consume gallons and gallons of alcohol every night.
Who smoke a plethora of cigarettes.
Marlboro, Parliament, Camel,
Jack Daniels, Miller High Life, Blue Moon, Grey Goose,
buckets of Smirnoff, Svedka, Crown Royal, Johnny Walker, Absolute, Maker’s Mark, Southern Comfort, Duvel Beer -
blonde, dark, amber, honey, nut brown ale,
Red Wine, White Wine, Blush -
rivers into waterfalls of drink,
washing out our insides,
covering our cancer in a bath of intoxication,
smoking, watching,
bad thoughts cycling in our brains,
reproducing as negative scars,
x, x, x.

Are we human?
Are we Walden?
Are we couches?

This hulking mass trots along; oppressed by people moving in the opposite direction who are descending into the station to catch the 7 train, the 6, the 4, and the shuttle too. We push into each other to make space for others to move through as they descend. We ascend. They descend.

We are Clash of the Titans.
We are a gridlock.

The herd I’m in shimmies up the railed steps, grasps for space, gasps for air. Finally up the escalator, I can feel wisps of cool air brush against my brow, blowing my hair just a little back behind my forehead. The outside world inhales and then exhales the foul breath of us out into the streets until we are open unto the bluish and grey hue of the sky.

I’m a good sheep.

My shepherd doesn’t have to prod me to the office with a cane or anything. I go on my own. Baa. Baa. No border collies or German shepherds barking near me. Baa. Baa.

At work, I’m bathed in the yellow death ray of fluorescent lights. I’m seated in front of a computer that is equipped with an internet browser dated before 9/11. I think of office workers falling 88 floors, writhing like ragged dolls, flowing in the wind of a great fire like some kind of macabre flag. I think of a short story to write. The concept’s potency diminishes by lunch time, when I’m gorging on mass quantities of MSG-based foodstuffs, drinking caffeine, and scouring the edges of the internet to prove that it’s round. I always return to the same sites. Everything is flat.

By 3PM, I’m outside smoking a cigarette, enjoying the daylight. I’m enjoying the warmth of real sunshine, enviously watching people who, in nice trendy clothes, drift along the street, talking on cell phones, pushing baby carriages – smiling. After fifteen minutes of being outdoors, I am enclosed in a steel box that will return me to the floor where I work so that I can continue more monkey labor. More tap-tapping of the keys.

I scarf down a bag of peppercorn flavored chips. Feeling the savory crunch of a chip, grinding the corn-based product, tasting the homogenized chemicals, which tell my brain that this tastes good. It feels fine in my stomach. I think of sharks horny and hallucinating, bumping into each other clumsily after foraging on the large rotting carcass of a whale.

Morale is down.
Production is low.

Only a couple hours left and I have just enough of an idea for my short story to get me through the ride home.

Finally, it’s time to leave. It’s good to return to the sunshine, but I’m cowering away from the building, moving so fast, speeding through small packs of people until I’m back at Grand Central, descending on the escalator, still speeding through, bumping into people annoyed with folks like me who are too afraid to look back in the direction from whence they came as if there was a T-rex on my heels. A pair of velociraptors hunting those who smell most of fear.

So, I sit down somewhere in the middle of the 7 train, flipping through a book of short stories by Jonathan Lethem. Not really looking to read anything. I just want to look at words. A man ambles through the cars of the train, pulling a rope that is attached to a pallet cart with a large rectangular box covered by a black tarp.

Through this man’s hoodie, I see a black face with a yellowed grin speckled with dark gaps where teeth should be and wafting just five seconds behind him is the stomach-belching perfume of a man unable to engage hygiene. The scent follows him like a poltergeist that goes around pecking my nostrils for attention. This scent is successful if that was the intention.

The man stops and leans against the door of the car. I return to my book to continue where I left off earlier this morning. It’s a short story about a man who lives half his life in Hell – some mainstay of childhood but I’m unsure. I’m only on page seven. The writing’s not bad but the timeliness of my judgment may be unjust. The scent of this vagabond is formidable and it skews my concentration. His voice hums a song, ascending crescendo until unintelligible words break free from his languid mouth. His teeth surely clattering insanely in his gums; crazy in his nerves.

Of course, I feel something terrible for this man. He’s in bad shape but he does not ask for money. He does not request food. Does not demand a donation and I may have given it to him too, but he just stands. His legs are covered in socks made from pus, scabs, and dried blood. His calves are thick with infection and rot. He carries his song through a whistle, minding his own business. A few stops later, he shuffles out slowly, dragging all of his worldly possessions close behind.

I open my journal, turn to the last page and begin to write: “I awoke with shit clogging the muscles of my shoulders; the fibers of my tendons, tensed…”