Contes

 

K. Marvin Bruce ~ Jack Delacruz ~ Robin Wyatt Dunn

 

 

K. Marvin Bruce

Night Jogger

 

I am a night jogger.  More sensible people insist that the dangers outweigh the health benefits.  They tell of my neighbor who gave himself stage five stigmata by running full speed into an empty mailbox post while jogging at night in the rain.  Out flowed blood and water.  But the sensible don’t comprehend that running can be from instead of for.  So much to escape as I glimpse first light, so perceptive yet so precarious as I bend over panting on my front steps when I’m done.  I can’t run enough.

 

Five years old.  My father sits before me with that goofy father’s grin private for progeny alone.  He’s going for a jog.  I watch him with the interest of the truly fascinated—I am learning about life.   He pulls the last pair of tube socks from a now dejected and deflated plastic bag.  I never see him wear new clothes, but he buys jogging gear when the old stuff falls apart.  He snaps the elastic band around the top into place with a satisfied report.  “Sad thing is,” he comments, “that elastic will never be so strong again, it’ll never fit so snug again.  With each use it gets weaker.  Socks are new only once.”  He tousles my hair and he is gone down the street.  In my five-year old mind I swear with all the intensity of childhood I will never run out like that elastic.  Now I also run.

 

How was I to live with such a lack of permanence?  Children crave stability—we take so long learning the system we inherit, the rules we’re responsible for knowing.  We’re detained if we do it wrong.  Held back, flunked, or imprisoned, the message is the same—you failed to attain the standard that others have set for you.  In school I learned “he who lives to run away lives to run another day”.  But I also learned that a coward dies a thousand deaths.  At night I jog.

 

Since the ground beneath me is uneven I run the same way night after night.  This town is life’s roadmap—learn the danger zones and avoid them.  It’s a little town so I keep the map in my head.  People are pretty friendly here but they don’t see me when I run.  I’m like pouring hot, black coffee into a black mug with the lights out.  There’s danger here—you could get burned.  But I just scald to say I love you.

 

Even love disappoints in its lack of permanence.  I loved it when Susie’d lose her head, riding me like a pivot point and writhing in ecstasy, screaming as loud as she wanted when the endless trains rushed by like urgent, reverberating thunder on the junkyard tracks.  Those nights I never wanted to end and sometimes I wish I’d see her jogging in the dark so that I might run straight at her, unswerving, close and closer until I’d run right through her, losing myself in a burst of brilliant light; maybe being reborn. 

 

I used to jog in the daylight.  Curious passers-by watched my sweat-stains growing larger, my personal life pouring out through my pores.  So intimate in public and yet there’s no shame in being seen in a sweat.  Some of the highest paid members of society perspire profusely on television screens the size of a Buick.  Extreme close up, look of intense determination, sweat drops the size of softballs on the high-def, wide-screen.  When you sweat the public sees where you’re hot, moistening the valleys down which your waters flow.  And they tell us sex is dirty.

 

I run because I’m afraid sex will run out—that great and steamy vat of joy and fulfillment and meaning spilling and evaporating as dry as the vast Sahara.  And when it evaporates it will be gone completely.  Good things are so easily consumed.  The evil stuff never fails, but the good will surely run out.  Exhausted good, gone for good.  I run from this fickleness and frailty.  I run to be strong, to prevent wearing out.

 

The quirky shadows of the night incarnate themselves into characters of every description.  Some seem to dart so menacingly I almost freeze in fear while others play games across the fence-posts and in the twilight gutters.  Often I have spied a threatening, unfamiliar person in the mist only to have it resolve into a young tree aspiring to vain personhood.  Young trees dream of running.  So lithe, so strong, so persistent.  I see them in the night seeing me.  Silently wishing.

 

I run because I’m afraid of my past.  At night it creeps near and nearer, casting its spindly shadows across my once secure blanket, forcing me to move.  With the career success rate of a drunken Aeroflot pilot, I was an alcoholic when it came to bad jobs.  From one abusive boss to another, each taking sly advantage they believed me too blind to see.  I see more deeply than they suppose.  Still there was the damned comfort of the expected.  It may be abuse, but it is what I know.  As familiar to me as the delicate contours of Susie’s young body in the penetrating moonlight spilling over the industrial wasteland of our romance.  Back to my bottle each morning, thoroughly depressed by noon, desperate for any way out, any way at all.  Only the nights were mine.

 

My father snaps the elastic into place.  “With each use it grows weaker.”  Its destruction is integral to its very existence.  Persistence is only a cruel illusion.

 

Tonight someone’s after me.  Sidewalks that normally slumber now echo with the footsteps of someone keeping pace with my practiced, smoothly gliding feet.  Rude shouts startle me—they try to snap my picture, their impish flashes momentarily making obstacles invisible, but I know each gap and every slab of concrete heaved upward by ancient, forever prying tree roots.  The first time I jogged this track I tripped and hit the sidewalk with an undignified “oof,” painfully shredding palms and knees.  Nobody saw me fall.  Everybody saw me fall.

 

I feel so vulnerable with this determined effort focused on me tonight—all during my loathsome career who glanced my way in fascination?  Now that I’m gone, why are they after me?  Who are they?  The darkness that has so long been a companion now prevents me from getting a clear view.  I hear their feet, I see their flashes.  Light on my feet, I put on a burst of speed and my unfit assailants begin to fall behind.  When I run I go for distance.  The cheetah is swift, but if she doesn’t make a quick kill, she goes hungry.  The distance runner just keeps going.

 

Still startled by my encounter and afraid they’ll follow me home, I duck into the city graveyard.  Nice wide boulevards and nobody ever comes here in the dark!  My chest still fluttering, I dash inside my house without looking back.

 

After darkness appears, I hesitate.  A creature of habit, I would normally sprint right out.  There’s immortality in my running just as there is immortality in the night.  The dark was there at the beginning.  The dark will be there at the end.  The dark always wins.  Susie once helped me find immortality and I clench it to my breast as I run, breathing in the whole cold atmosphere with its icy fingers touching the very fringes of outer space.  But tonight I tremble and waver.  Will I again be pursued?  Hunted like a deer with a spotlight?  The urge to run is just too strong to defy.  I cannot hold back.  I’m out the door.

 

My usual path is an old friend, a well-worn sweater that fits in all the right places.  The night is as still as only darkness can be.  My assailants are nowhere to be heard.  Coaxing myself to my usual pace I take in the unremarkable sights of my home town.  There’s where eight-year old Rocky tripped over the curb and bloodied his forehead by landing face-first on the solid concrete.  There’s the swing-set where ten-year old Kenny wrapped the chain around and around and spun so many times that he vomited up lunch and breakfast and was still dizzy a week later.  There’s the spooky abandoned church where the boys tried to talk the girls into playing strip-poker out back.  A town has memories just like a person.  I’m one of those memories, jogging through the night.

 

Tonight no one seems to notice me.  A return to my preferred normalcy.  Free to be forgotten.  Thoughts of forsakenness tug me back toward the cemetery again tonight.   Running through graveyards defies forces over which we hold no control.  How many of these poor stones have seen neither blossom nor wreath for many a year?  How many entire families have been entirely forgotten?  Time wears them away like an over-worn shirt hanging in tatters instead of covering the tired body beneath.  Like a great mountain eroded to a tiny pebble on the eternal seashore.  Names wear off of stone.  Nothing is as certain as effacement and loose-fitting socks.  I feel for those who’ve left.  Perhaps foolishly, light-headed with the effort of dreaming, I jog through the cemetery. 

 

Suddenly my pursuers are all around me!  How did they know to hide here?  Last night they couldn’t have seen me here—I left them many blocks away.  Out they lunge from behind decaying tombstones, stumbling in the dark, reaching out their hands for me, pointing strange instruments at me, trying to take my photo.  They shout at me—some even know my name.  I panic, I dodge, I try to deviate from my known path in the dark.

 

Mind still spinning, I find myself at the train tracks where I used to park with Susie.  This was our secret spot.  No one will find me here.  I think I see a single car, silver in the moonlight.  All around lies the detritus of life, the rubbish no one desires collected along these endless rails that stretch through every town, taking people away from each other.  Scattered wooden pallets with broken boards; fractured glass bottles, green and brown, sparkling like gems in the night’s forgiving magic; discarded paper, misshapen from damp and soiled from prolonged exposure to the earth.  Even bald tires and rusty axles are carelessly cluttered about as if cars aren’t safe from vultures.  The only ones who come here are the lovers and vandals, those who don’t wish to be seen.  But tonight there’s a car.

 

I’m no peeping tom, but that car is so familiar.  Each rust-spot and bumper sticker I recognize with an intense flash of emotion.  Yes!  It is Susie’s car!  I dare to fear a dangerous hope that she’s come here looking for me.  Trembling, I jog closer, remembering how she’s been so dead to me for so long.  Now here she is, voluntarily back at our old spot.  The distracted crickets chirp as the fireflies play tag in the dark.  The wasteland has never looked so ethereal.

 

My stomach clenches—what am I going to say?  What is there to say to someone who’s experienced every part of you, someone who’s felt your very soul?  My pace has slowly padded to a walk.  I stop running.

 

The car lurches as if moved by an unseen force.  No!  Susie’s not alone?  Each night of this long year apart I’ve held out the hope we’d find one another again, but we’d find each other alone.  Ready to renew our train-track romance.  I can no longer control my motions—I drift to the car unable to come to rest.  There she is, wrapped up in another man.  Patches of exquisite flesh bared in the moon’s soothing glow.  She catches sight of me.  A scream rips the solitary, dilapidated air.

 

This boy I do not know finds himself thrown aside as Susie shoots bolt upright screaming my name.  “Oh god, it’s Jeff!  He killed himself a year ago!” I hear her screech as I turn and resume my jog.

 

As my father snapped that elastic into place with his off-hand, fatalistic remark, he unwittingly set my eternal course.  I had vowed I would never wear out.  Even when I tried to change my fate a childhood vow is stronger than the grip of brand new socks.

 

 

K. Marvin Bruce has been jogging since high school.  He is a lecturer in an obscure subject at an obscure university.  His fiction has appeared in DM and Jersey Devil Press.  His first novel, The Passion of the Titans, is due out shortly from Vagabondage Press.

 

 

 

Jack Delacruz

Long Live Mason Hardwicke

 

Overhead, black birds circle behind the moistened leaves of November trees, all crying horrid hymns of a man once known as Mason Hardwicke. They pass it along, these birds—they know. They once choked on the chimenied air of a town called Shepherd's Staff; plucked at the putrid remains of emptied outhouses and would often peck at the shutters of its most prominent citizenry and its most debased alike.

 

Down below, they had seen the carriage of Mrs. Darby and her daughter Annabelle rattling frantically through the muck and brush of the New England countryside. Ever the curious flock, members of the blackened mass swooped down for an earshot of whatever queer force was driving them away from that otherwise deliriously quaint settlement. Ducking her head clear of their spiraled descent, Mrs. Darby straightened her bonnet proper and took a moment to piece together this new and ever tormenting reality. She could not help but side with the actions of Mr. Hardwicke over those made by her husband. It was, after all, Mr. Darby who was responsible for bringing the horror to Shepherd's Staff. Mason Hardwicke had just been a young man, not much older than Mrs. Darby herself. But he was the hermit of this hamlet and with that came great distrust in his character, mainly out of uncertainty.

 

He had lost his family in the fire which nearly spread throughout the entirety of Shepherd's Staff five years ago—the cause of which would never be properly deduced. The air hissed and crackled with all the ferocity summer offered each year and the cabins laid down generations before were merely tinder in its wake. He would be cared for by the Jackson's whom his own family had known since the very founding of the settlement. And as the birds sifted through gentle mounds of graveyard dirt for the pinkened tendrils of their morning quarry, they took notice of the young Hardwicke and were the first to recognize that he never spoke another word after the burial.

 

Two years later he would build, by himself, a home just beyond the borders. Here, he would be able to find the solace that comes with such solitude and as a result, the townsfolk whose hearts had once been full of pity for young Hardwicke had, with the passing years, become soured with his lack of participation in the spirit of community. He no longer attended Mass on Sundays and some of the townsfolk, after the service of course, had even reported seeing the young man working, knowing full well of his duty as a Christian to keep the Sabbath holy. Heathen, they would cup their jests into each other’s ears. Mrs. Darby did not share the suspicions of her neighbors; she had once known the pain of losing loved ones to tragedy and this was the reason why her daughter was an only child—the only one in Shepherd's Staff. But this isn’t proper to know. One shouldn’t always be privy to such sensitive subjects. Annabelle is an absolute blessing all her own… if only one of many who had been lost to the pride and pestilence of the times. It can be said that Annabelle had long carried a curious kindredship with the lonesome Hardwicke. A childlike recognition of their independent spirits often lured her to the far edge of town, just across the way from his ramshackled residence. The other children had come to view Hardwicke as their very own boogeyman, often chaffing one another into knocking on his door or throwing a rock into his already pockmarked accommodations. And as much as she disagreed with her toddled colleagues, Annabelle was always incapable of offering anything past a fleeting glance kept hidden behind the skeletal silhouettes of the forest which girdled Hardwicke’s property. His house was, after all, the one no one was to ever come across—lest you wished to disappear like all the others.

 

For three years, there had been, on occasion, several vanishings said to have been the fault of the hermit Hardwicke. Thomas Darby, Mrs. Darby's husband and town elder, was repeatedly notified of the town's collective accusation and, to his credit, had no reason to share in it. His torch and pitchfork would not act until the day his brother, Isaac, would come forward to the town council and report seeing his mistress, the young Lily Ackerman, butchered and carried off by Hardwicke into the woods. Had it not been so easy for them to find the body of the poor woman, the council might have dismissed Izzy, as his word was one the town did not frequently lean on; touched in the head was the younger of the Darby brothers. “A menace most nefarious!,” Thomas exclaimed in outrage. Organizing a group of men that very night, the young Hardwicke was burned to death in the house he built with his hands. The birds, looming high atop the tree line, watched as the inferno died down to the smolders of a few remaining floorboards—their murderous caws a forecast of the terror that was to come.

 

The light of the following day was one of quiet rejoice. The morning dew seemed sweeter in the way it brushed past the nostril hairs into the wooly layered chests of the townsfolk and their Sunday best. “Yes, and a lovely day to you as well,” they offered in passing by Mrs. Darby’s estate. But the soreness of her forced smile began to show in the creases of her eyes and for Annabelle, in her lowering posture. More and more the eroding calm seemed to wash over them and recede into the backhanded and two-faced commentaries of this new day and all its nectarous possibilities. But later that evening, one that Mr. and Mrs. Darby would somehow sleep all the way through, Father Ellison, while on his way to tend to his garden, was witness to a ghastly occurrence. To his fright, he reported seeing the maddening visage of Mason Hardwicke. Laughing and spouting obscenities into the night, Hardwicke walked through the center of town, waking many of his neighbors and swearing terrible vengeance on their names. “Friends, neighbors, philanderers and neerdowells! How good it is to feel the tingle of earth and mud resonate within one’s vessel. How I have long ached for the bittersweet lip lock of Death’s grimace. To whom do I properly express my gratitude? I bring the gift of life-everlasting! I will cement your names on both the phantasmic pillars of Heaven and the gluttonous jaws of Hell. Your glory will bleed forever under the weight of the letters which call forth Mason Hardwicke!” Shortly after his disappearance into the surrounding woods, Father Ellison made his way to the revenant's point of origin and found an open grave with its headstone thrown a few paces away from it. As was his nature, Thomas did not act and suggested to the holy man that he no longer partake in the “occasional” drink. The remaining reports—a simple case of hysteria. The grave, headstone and missing body—desecration of a sinner's resting place. Nothing to mourn.

 

His estimation would come under severe scrutiny the next morning when Annabelle, opened the door and screamed ungodly hysterics. “Murder! Murder! Oh! Father, come quick!” To the family's shock, strewn about into nearly indiscernible halves and quarters, their mouths twisted and eyes locked in a state of statuesque torment, the townsfolk laid dead in the streets. Izzy's body rested on their front steps and when Thomas rushed to his brother's aide, he turned him over only to find that his blood had been let out from his throat, “Oh, Isaac! God forgive us both!” He then looked at his wife and daughter and finally understood the meaning of tragedy and loss. “There will be an answer! Do you understand me? I will find you out! Do you hear me out there?! There will be an answer for this depravity!” And when his family gathered on the floor next to him, the door slammed shut and when Thomas looked up, he then understood the meaning of fear. Scribbled along their door, in the blood of his brother, were the words "Long Live Mason Hardwicke"—there could be no doubt; an evil had come to Shepherd's Staff, an evil he had made.

 

It was only while on the road that Mrs. Darby began to let the words of her husband sink in. Before helping her onto the carriage, Thomas took his wife aside and revealed why he had to stay behind. “”Please, forgive me for what I have to tell you,” his outstretched arms pleaded with her shoulders. On the day Izzy had given his testimony, he had first approached Thomas on the matter. It seems Izzy was not the kind of person well-equipped with the knowledge of his own strength and while having an argument with the mistress Ackerman, her neck gave way to his grip. With this came a scapegoat, the obvious perpetrator of all vanishings. The woods are rife with danger and it was not uncommon for people to sometimes go missing. Disappearances had already occurred long before suspicions of Hardwicke began to make their way around. It all presented itself so enticingly—it had to be the hermit Hardwicke. The decision did not weigh heavy on his heart; Thomas ate and slept well that evening. And as the night descended on their journey to the nearest town, Mrs. Darby and Annabelle looked out to the fire rising in the direction of Shepherd's Staff and knew that Thomas had set fire to the town. And through the light of the passing trees Mrs. Darby could see the shape of something lift up into the sky and in its arms, she could see another of its size. Her eyes returned to the trail ahead and until she would reach the next town, Mrs. Darby thought only of the peace she hoped Mason Hardwicke would find in the next life. And to this day, when the sun is low and the dewy leaves of the forest run dry, the birds swear by the curve of their beaks that they can hear him; his ragged remains whirling through the charcoaled clouds and a man’s terrified scream rising, forever rising.

 

 

Jack Delacruz is a creative writer in attendance at SFSU. He’s had the added honor of being an instructional aide in his second semester and the experience has left him with a strong interest in teaching. When not running about causing general acts of chaos and kindness, he likes to sit and write down all the madness that clunks around his soiled noggin. His inspirations include William Golding, H.P. Lovecraft, Stephen King and Ray Bradbury.

 

 

 

Robin Wyatt Dunn

Beat Puppet

 

I can’t even describe it.  Some of you may know that women can have orgasms that last for hours, but this ―

Well.  It’s frightening.  But for those of you who are just logging in, welcome!

 

Welcome, to all my new viewers here on Luna!  Kill me in your sleep for your own enjoyment!  Rock me to bed with your own garage music style, while I recite the lyrics of your choice! 

 

Yes, time for a disclaimer:  I do have a vagina, yes, and I am available to accentuate your exploits and/ or hang upon your large phallic piece of metal in order to accentuate its homoerotic qualities.  Like, my God, that cock is almost as big as the girl!  Yes, some of them are!

 

But I’m getting ahead of myself, folks.

 

To be honest, Lunar life isn’t what I thought it would be.  I graduated out of the Texas Academy with the idea in my head that the evils of corporate living would be everywhere, that I would be able to undermine the aristocracy with my heart, with my mind, with my soul, with my tits, even.  My mammaries could be exo-bio-genetical tools for democracy.  But it’s never like they tell you in school, always it’s shades of gray, and shit, they teach you that in school too, but it’s recognizing the gray that’s the hard part, that’s what they call field work, that’s what they call life.

I’m not telling this very well, I’m sorry, please vote me at least 3 ½ stars, I’m sorry, really, really, I am.   Just underline the story on your notebook, in the next 3 standard time units, would you?  Please?  I promise, I promise, if you do that and I get a designated sponsor because of your support, my next story will feature you or your likeness in a semi-permanent narrative role.  I promise, OK?

 

Thank you.  Thank for your support.  It’s not easy being a Beat-Puppet.  But we work hard, and we know.  And I an’ I can tell, that that mountayne goan come down to this sista right now! 

 

Just kidding.  Sorry.  I know, ethnicity is not ironic.  I was kidding.  But see, the mountain did come down.  It came down on me, and it was indescribable.

 

As my fans know, I live in the red light district of Luna.  I know, it’s not fashionable any more, but when I moved here it was the kind of address that really gave you some street cred.  You didn’t even have to be doing any anthropological work, you could just be living amongst the whores without being of the whores, living like the whores without being like a whore, and that was the thing that brought me a lot of my initial notebook underlines.  And I appreciate that.  I do.

I’m getting an alert here.  I think it’s (shh) one of my younger viewers. 

 

“What is it like to open yourself to the Atrocity?”  Sent in by Johnny Abrams, from the Sea of Tranquility.

 

Well, Johnny, it’s like more than you could ever understand.  You’ve seen the Atrocity’s many ships, in their many colors, here in orbit on the videolinks, and some of them even moonside at the ports.  You’ve heard about their communist evil, their resemblance to Soviet Russia of the 20th Century.  But have you ever really watched people from the Atrocity, Johnny?  People like me?  We can see now, Johnny.  We can see.

 

*

 

I know what some of you say, that the Singularity is a myth, or some new drug the corporations have devised.  And then many of you say it surrenders Man’s God-given freedom.  You say it only hastens our doom. 

But let me tell you, I have never felt more free and I have never felt more alive.  I have never had more pleasure and I have never had more spending credits available.  Because the Singularity is Freedom.

 

Ooh, I’m getting a really interesting request from one of our listeners, so retro, this idea!  So retro!  A debate is suggested, between yours truly and the Mayor of Luna!  Well, what do you say, Mr. Mayor?  Can we pencil in some face-time for our fans’ sake?  Ha ha ha.

 

Okey-dokey then!

 

While we’re priming the set with the viewer-selected decorative motifs, let me get to one more viewer question:  “Is being a Beat puppet any different from being part of the Atrocity?”  Oh, now that’s a really good question Toni from Copernicus Heights asks.  Well, yes and no.  Beat puppets have to respond to viewers’ needs on schedule or they have to find a new line of work!  Everyone knows that.  And because of all the changes since our visitors arrived, me joining up and becoming part of the Singularity has meant I’ve had a lot of tight scheduling.  But the difference is, now I’m free. 

Now I’m free to give you, my beautiful viewers, the kinds of shows you deserve, the kinds of shows you’ve been needing, been wanting, and that’s all been made possible because I decided to go inside and do it.

 

As you know, joining with the Singularity is entirely voluntary, and you’d better act now to get your valuable prizes that come along with it!

 

Like, a new Lunar Scooter!  Model 77X5!

 

Or, over a dekagram of FocusOntheNeedOrg, bone white, granular, straight from Argentina.

 

Or even a third legal personality, with all necessary documents, visuagrams in 2 and 3D, and authorized backstories with notebook underlining tie-ins!

 

Gosh folks, it looks like my viewers voted me the de facto winner of the debate before Mr. Mayor even got over to this camera uplink.  Sorry, Mr. Mayor!

 

But for me personally, folks, let me tell you, going inside was out of this world.  You’ll never be the same again. 

Translation is beauty.

 

Until next time, this is Beat-Puppet Brittany saying “I walked Luna’s streets at dawn, looking for an angry fix, until the Event Horizon carried me away!”

 

Smooches!  Kisses!  Love all of you!   XXXOOO!

 

 

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