Due storie

             Kirk A.C. Marchall ~ Katherine Mead-Brewer

 

 

Kirk A.C. Marshall

Evil Green Murder Scene:

An excerpt from Vampire Drive —

 

            After enduring a turbulent commute in the Japanese casino baron’s shark-winged conveyance, his head jostled between the shoulders of Chainsaw Chikaru and Bruno Breakneck, Electric Gazelle started awake with the somnambulist theatricality common to chemically-thwarted eye-witness captives from a James M. Cain paperback scandal, slackjaw and grappling with glottal mastery, and the two disgruntled thugs seized him between each armpit.

            Electric Gazelle thrashed and contorted his sluggish, rudderless body with the fealty and thrift of a moth on fire, and his throat summoned nonsensical grunts that attested to a bestial familiarity with the apparatus of language. He couldn’t break free or make speech, he couldn’t muster his lazy and disobedient tongue to exercise agency over his present mistreatment, he could only resign his brain to the interminable cognizance that now was his last chance.

            The seatbelt restrained him, cutting at a transversal plane across the solar plexus, and the twin hulks with their titillated eyes each tightened their respective hold. Electric Gazelle went ecstatic, balletic; he pitched and wheeled whilst squawking out cinematic accusations, none of which were sensible or idiomatic. Like a scorpion in a shoebox filled with leaf-cutter ants, he spasmed with spineless grace.

            Eventually Brick Picnic entreated the tortured performance from his position in the front-seat, craning his neck around to present Electric Gazelle with a scrofulous expression of simulated concern. His canine teeth were protruding from his lower jaw through the rictus of his puzzled smirk.

            Electric Gazelle didn’t concern himself with idle speculation: here was a reconnaissance with the innovators of a new brutality. They would exhume the agility and music and tonnage from his chest in the instant he inherited a bullet hole from his captors, sickle-shot and betraying a pretense at focus by erupting with meat and smoke. They would dump him in the woods and forsake his wounded, blood-waning corridor of slope and bones. They would shoot and leave, and he would be burdened with a final hour gazing at the undersides of fern fronds, a body to be unearthed the following day from beneath a society of ladybirds.

            Even at this altitude and travelling speed, Electric Gazelle was assaulted by the primal whoops of unfamiliar birds, and he didn’t have to observe the new vestige of greenery they were prowling through via the tinted electric windowglass to discern the forest shapes hectoring the berth of the casino baron’s Mustang convertible. This was elfin country, brush and sawgrass with horse-faced beasts communing in the bellies of strangler-figs. A percussive wallop on the roof of the vehicle heralded the rotten plantain that soon skittered down the windshield and unfolded its flesh around the windscreen wipers cocked at half-mast in alignment with Brick Picnic’s nostrils as they flared magnetic-north.

            Electric Gazelle croaked.

            ‘Where in tarnation are you ill simpletons taking me? We’re in the freaky wastes of Saigon here, or somesuch voided environ, and you marble-brained limpdicks are depending on the driving refinery of that devil-snouted rapist you’ve got behind the wheel? Let me ask you, sir, did a toucan fellate your mama, or did you just escape the clumsy obstetrician’s callipers by a nose?’

            Gazelle’s discourse was rebuffed by an elbow to the eye, one that collided with his groggy sockets in a grim remonstration. He convulsed forward, blood leaking through his fingers, and suppressed a guttural snarl as he fended his face from future blows.

            ‘Didn’t realise it was such a touchy subject,’ Electric Gazelle spat, blood staining his mouth. His eye ached with a geometrical pain beyond the classified dimensions, retaining a corrosive burn that made the lobes of his ears sting.

            Brick Picnic lurched forward behind the fat aperture of the convertible’s steering column and seized the turning dial of the car stereo between his awkward claws. His face assumed an expression of deep, blonde contest, a seething primitivism or slain vanity that monopolised his features and engulfed his spastic mouth in a gaunt pinch-hold of incommunicable loathing.

            Brick Picnic practically had to sit on his hands to resist lashing out. Instead he merely divested all his farcical rage into the task at hand, the grasp of talon, brooding over the body of the radio so that the entire convoy summoned within the car was entertained to candid snatches of song as Brick’s digits strobed through the stations.

            Eventually, after Brick Picnic had worked his jaw in a bilious silence of his own devising for long enough that Electric Gazelle had begun trying to tally the colours of dragonflies that stormed into view as the Mustang thrashed through bracken, the interior of the vehicle was claimed by the mechanised tectonic rancour of a hip-hop channel that blasted synthesised thumps and pennywhistle provocations in surround sound from stereoscopic speakers behind Electric Gazelle’s pulsing scalp.

            Edamame Mint exhaled through his turquoise throat and retrieved a deck of playing cards from his inner breast pocket as the insuperable and vituperative music slalomed through the plump aorta of the car, enchanting Bruno Breakneck and Chainsaw Chikaru with spring-coiled odes to coitus and convulsive thighs, and nothing else was said whilst the cards were shuffled and some hot mess of a black American powerhouse scorned the five men from between her platinum breasts and through the fm airwaves.

            Edamame Mint’s hands continued their dexterous transactions, parsing through jacks, diamonds, spades and clubs until they had come to extract a cache of hearts from the snappy pack. He placed these beneath his lugubrious snout and took a whiff. Oh the scent of scarlet patterns of ink on stark white daggers of paper: he drew in a drunk breath, and rolled eyes like orange wontons to the swollen hollows of their sockets, his face split by a rueful, bourbon-suppled smile.

            ‘Four hearts for four men, and I deal,’ Edamame Mint burped, the jowls of his face driven into quivers of tiny and inclement fluctuation, less laughter than pure embellishment – an ornament for his attire of loathing.

            ‘Each man will be instructed to draw from the deck, and in so doing commit their card to memory. When we arrive at our destination, my friend Rose Shamrock will be invited to guess the card you drew, and the first person to falter at bluffing upon the advent of an accurate prediction from Rose Shamrock’s mouth will be obliged to dig the first hole. If the results are to our satisfaction, we shall change up the rules – that is to say, play a different game.’

            Edamame Mint allowed these oblique, quixotic directives their moment to afford the car’s occupants fastidious mental repetition, for there was no mistake to be derived in recognising that Edamame Mint’s inextinguishable ultimatum had rattled behind the teeth and rolled off the tongue like a pair of loaded dice.

            It was a threat made abstract by chance, and the expression that Edamame Mint was extolling to Electric Gazelle was the most incontrovertible emblem in a gambler’s octavo of beginner’s notes: snake eyes, the whole chill fist.

            He was marshalling what could account for a tactful demand for greater clarification or starrier disclosure, engineering the least disagreeable sequence of sentence and sentiments from within his sense-decimated hulk of brain matter, when Electric Gazelle caught sight of a crocodile nestled in the trees and his tongue regained its sluggish luggage and slumped like a failed muscle before his rasping larynx.

            ‘You’ve gotta be indulging some pretty fanciful estimates if you sincerely suppose that I’ll cooperate in gambling with my life out here in the primordial coordinates of jungled hell. Heck, if you’re surmising I’d even supplicate like some week-famished street-prowling fuck-dog and disembark this wild city engine to go staggering through the eucalypts, you can all lap each others’ testes because I ain’t dreaming of forsaking this seatbelt. 

            ‘The only rationale that I’d subscribe to for budging from betwixt your threats and farts is if you were inviting me to divorce myself of the cotton on my back to go sailing lazily like a cane-drunk muskrat along the gold slack meander of a river of honey ale. If that ain’t what’s promised in the tree-slandered gape of hell that this souped-up tangmobile is slumping through, then I don’t wanna even profess with a halo hovering above our scalps at potentially lethal altitude that I’m impressionable enough to play dice with the likes of conniving robber barons and their raw sybaritic funk-taxing cunt-slurs which they employ to administer their dark angles.

            ‘Nossir, I can snout a plume of snake-oil and cheater’s excreta even when I’m blindfolded and y’all are pumping that particular demonic pong in factory force, I’ll assure you straight. There just ain’t much wisdom in shunting a suit stitched from butcher’s offcuts in a bid to tousle with impatient foxes. You couldn’t convince me there was even a holy lick.’

            Electric Gazelle’s face was grave with rebellion, and needles of sweat glinted like a crown beneath his soft trampoline-damp hairline. He felt that pure tide of defiance climbing the inner pillar of his throat, and bared his teeth to levee the frothing venom: it seethed between his gums. Tiny bones redistributed themselves in the muscled strata of his closing fists. The fat around his knuckles retreated with an inaudible rasp.

            ‘Well, I’m waiting for a fucking rejoinder, if you missed the drift.’

            He seemed to be entangled in ropes of rhetorical poison recently, an emotional throwback to those years of his youth in which everyone practically inhabited a vulnerable state of physical antagonism because the rewards of teenage rancour availed one’s shrewd soul the legacy of sexual certitude. You could eat up a mile of pussy if your teeth had been cut first on the axis of early spite.

            Electric Gazelle couldn’t understand from whence all the bile had been summoned but knew it had to be a development deriving from the nimbus of resent seething between he and Brick Picnic whenever they were in conscious proximity of the other: it was as though they each purged and expelled terminal pheromones of an electric musk from some sympathetic gland that remained secret beneath their respective scrotums, the way that fall-gilded deer rinse piss from their Egyptian gold pelts beneath the glowering eyes of their Yoknapatawphian rivals on territory so easily seized and so often it was almost seasonal.

            Their heartfelt repulsion for one another was steeped in such mythical opposition as to appear almost theatrical, the way Lex Luthor must have been enswarmed in toothy vexation upon shaking Clark Kent’s big bland inviting hands. Electric Gazelle scowled again, this time directing the sudden blood and rancour at himself, and studied his cuticles the same way a tree-herder identifies the age of a redwood by examining the knots and calluses rippling its trunk.

            He was old enough to know when he was bested, a vestige of sorrow remaining, some borrowed cigarettes. He’d dreamed of being an archaeologist, parachutist, stegosaur jockey, Jedi Knight, black minister, greenbelt, Steve McQueen when he was a child. It only demanded a single botched risk with addiction for all those plans to vanish, all those insights to be violenced and cast asunder. He squinted at the tiny fractious cuts buried in the flesh of his fingertips, and decided that the legacy bestowed by gambling was that which shaved off the soft contours of your hands. Those slow and stiff and inflamed knuckles had shuffled too many decks, wrangled too many casino chips, haggled for so many goodwill gestures from bygone croupiers past. His throat felt tight from invading hate.

            ‘You want me to dig a hole? Let’s forget the goofy card draw and heft me over the shovel. I’ve got enough oblivion within to work a sweat between my shoulders.’

            Brick Picnic exchanged glances with Edamame Mint whilst the convertible stalked through ginkgo boughs. Eventually the casino baron flared his nostrils and twisted beneath his seatbelt to calculate Electric Gazelle’s sincerity. The cardshark had never before seen a face as grotesque, as envisioned by Odilon Redon and crippled by stark monster ungainliness, as this one directing its empurpled pupils from between cheeks of muscled puff. There was just no way Siouxie Violet Kong could submit her tender rump to this freak’s affections.

            Soon Bruno Breakneck’s palm was over Electric Gazelle’s mouth, and Edamame Mint was smiling. No amount of thrashing sanctioned release. The first thing they did, when the engine was choked and its rumble through undergrowth subsided, was to thrust his nearest hand against the upholstery so that Edamame Mint could insert his hidden blade deep into Electric Gazelle’s fumbling flesh. It took a few minutes to sever his whole finger.

            ‘The pleasure is mine, I assure you,’ Edamame Mint drawled, transfixed in his labour. ‘You’ve been digging that hole your whole life.’

 

 

Kirk Marshall is an award-winning Australian writer, and teacher of Creative Writing, English Literature and Media (Film & T.V. Studies) at RMIT University. He has written for more than eighty publications, both in Australia and overseas, including "Word Riot" (U.S.A.), "3:AM" Magazine (France), "Le Zaporogue" (France/Denmark), "(Short) Fiction Collective" (U.S.A.), "The Vein" (U.S.A.), "Danse Macabre" (U.S.A.), "WHOLE BEAST RAG" (U.S.A.), "The Seahorse Rodeo Folk Review" (U.S.A.), "The Journal of Unlikely Entomology" (U.S.A.) and "Kizuna: Fiction for Japan" (Japan). He edits "Red Leaves", the English-language / Japanese bi-lingual literary journal. He now suffers migraines in two languages.

 

 

 

Katherine Mead-Brewer

The Death Clause

 

            I am determined to beat this. To beat the Devil at his own game. And, now that we’re together, Voyager, I’m more confident than ever.

            I know this probably sounds crazy but it’s not like there’s anything left by which to measure sanity now, so I’ll just come out and say it. This is the way it happened: I was young, practically newborn, and I was a fool.

He came into my room in the hospital one night—I was one of those super-duper always-lucky kids who’d been diagnosed with cancer early on (likely because of my mom’s habit with Lucky’s, funnily enough – HAR HAR HAR), and it was a disease that just followed me on through to my twenties, my twenties which were, by then, nothing more than a poison-riddled haze.

            And it was through this haze that he came to me, and offered me an opportunity to escape what he called “the Job Clause.” Enjoy life, he said, enjoy a lot of it. Was I wrong to accept his offer? To accept the lush hand of an incredibly lush man when I had never so much as been on a date with anyone before?

            Don’t get me wrong, I was never one for that A Walk to Remember-“Don’t Fall in Love with Me” bullshit. All I had ever wanted was to either simply be alive or be dead. It didn’t matter which one just so long as it meant I wouldn’t be trapped in that druggie, useless in-between place anymore.

            So, I asked this man, “Are there any other options on the table? Does your interest in my soul mean I’m already cleared for something a bit higher up and this is just some…what? A last ditch effort on your part? Something you yell at people who’re fixing to walk off your lot without putting any money down?”

            Then he’d smiled smoother than I’d ever seen anyone smile before. It was so beautiful; I wish you could’ve seen it.

He just had this…awesome glow about him, as if he were some super sexual, pregnant, father, celebrity, mystery man—some mad, energetic mix of everything I’d ever wanted and everything I’d always been told to want. You ever get flashes of yearning like that? I’m talking about those nostalgic little mind-slips that take you back for just a flash, for just a half a second, to where you were happiest, somewhere green and mountainous and river-like?

            I remember reading that you spent a fair amount of your Earth-life in Florida, so I’m sure you’ve got some longing for the beaches and the marshlands just like me. I’ll bet you know exactly where I’m at with this. Well, that was how he made me feel in that moment. Just looking at him was like looking into this euphoric green snapshot of my whole heart.             And, for a moment, I even saw there in his eyes the same trees I’d once seen and loved as a little girl at Yellowstone Park, trees with so much color that they’d appeared to me as my mother’s make-up brushes, all of them standing neatly on her vanity and dusted with rouge.

            Now you tell me, how do you say no to a salesman like that? And how do you say no to a salesman like that when they smile at you and say, “If this is how you’re treated now, when you’re brand new, do you really want whatever eternity is in store for you ‘a bit higher up’?”

            Of course, that’s an old line but he had one thing spot on: I was brand new then, and I didn’t know what was old from what had never been real in the first place. And, all the while, in my head I was thinking about my gran and how she would disown me just for talking with this guy, with this evil, let alone for actually entertaining him and his offer. But then again, my gran had never been sick a day in her life. She lives to ninety-three without needing so much as a hip replacement and I’m not even old enough to rent a car before I’m left to my deathbed? And there it was: somewhere between my anger at the judgment my gran hadn’t yet passed and the look of my hand forever stuffed with that damned I.V. cable, I made up my mind.

            Can you believe that? Fuck, but my gran would be spitting-mad if she knew it was on thoughts of her that I tipped over the edge and into Satan’s hand. But that was what I couldn’t understand, what I couldn’t handle as a spiritual weight: Why me? Why anyone? Of course, now I can recognize that thinking as childish, as petulance, but it was my entire reality then, it was my identity.

            So, with that I.V. sticking out from my hand and every other kind of tube coming out of my nose and elbows (I even had one in my bladder at one point so I could piss right there where I laid, if you can believe it), I shook the man’s hand.

            Naturally, I’d made all my contingency demands ahead of time though: I want to be indestructible—no Death Becomes Her remakes; I want to be ageless and beautiful; and—this is really where I proved to be ingenious, I think—I said I wanted to be able to simply call upon him whenever (if ever) I decided I wanted to die, and that, should I so prevail upon him, he would be required to kill me quickly and painlessly, and then and only then could he claim his prize from me. I could see the shock on his face, clear as glass, but I only think it surprised him because he had already been planning on tacking on some like measure to the contract, believing it would work to his advantage rather than to mine. I watched him think on it, watched him search his world for some situation wherein such a clause might not somehow work in his favor. But, in the end, he must not have found any, because he only threw me another one of those dazzling smiles and agreed.

            But, really, if Rod Serling could come up with such a condition (which he did—don’t think I didn’t sit through every damn episode of The Twilight Zone and not pick up a few things), then you’d think the Devil could be just as if not a bit more creative. After all, if Serling taught us anything about genies and devils, it’s that you have to get all the specifics down straight as an arrow at the outset of any deal.

            I’m sure you got to see a few of The Twilight Zone episodes yourself, Voyager. After all, they were 1960s and you didn’t ship out ’til the ’70s. Anyway, I only wanted to make sure that, if there was to be a Death Clause (which, of course, there would be), then the details would be written by me. That I made perfectly clear—the death, if I chose it, would be swift and painless in its own right, no hospitals, no lingering ailments or illnesses, and absolutely no, no, no cancer.

          But, I suppose, you never actually think of everything. Who can when put on the spot like that? The house always wins, right? Well, I’m not gonna let him win. In fact, I may have already won. He thought he’d beaten me for a while there, but who’s beaten now? Who’s the one floating about with their dearest friend even after the world’s ended?

How do you think I made it all the way out here to you anyway? It wasn’t by sitting around and taking his crap, I can tell you. I know you’ve had your own hardships, after being sent all the way out here to die alone, and I certainly don’t mean to compete with you on that end.

          My poor friend, always sending reports and photographs of distant worlds back home without ever receiving so much as a birthday or Thank You card in return. All they left you with was this silly phonograph—as if aliens would actually be interested in hearing humans say “Howdy” in fifty-nine different languages. Why should they care more about aliens than you in any case? But, I suppose, we can at least be grateful that they bothered to include a few tunes on the phonograph.

          I just want you to know that I always thought of you, Voyager. I never forgot about you.

Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve always been fascinated by you and your journey into interstellar space. People were all so impatient with you; it barely took half a century before they lost interest in your progress. And after that, when your nuclear heart finally gave out, it took less than five years before they’d stopped talking about you entirely. As if you’d never even existed.

            But I was always there, tracking your steady progress toward the heliopause, combing every news station, webpage, and magazine for any and all mentions of you. I was always there, holding you fast in my heart.

In fact, after I was diagnosed, one of the very first gifts my parents got me was a telescope. It was something that didn’t require much physical exertion but that allowed me to dream and exist far beyond the bedrooms, the doctors, the disease, the chemotherapy—I just wanted to be out here with you, as far away from everything else as possible.

I even wrote you letters for a little while. All kinds of letters, some asking you where you were, some what you were seeing, some wondering if you got chilly, what smells you could smell, what sounds you could hear, what close encounters you’d had. But when I sent them to NASA with instructions to pass them along to you, the only note I received in reply was one of those patronizing, Aren’t-You-Sweet nothings. You know the type. Even being as young as I was then (and I really couldn’t have been older than seven or eight), I realized right away that they were lying to me about forwarding them along to you. I knew it the same way I’d known those red mailboxes in malls were lying to all us little kids at Christmastime when they said they’d forward our letters along to Santa Claus at the North Pole.

            To the surprise and dismay of my parents, NASA’s response actually threw me into a real and solid depression for a while. I simply didn’t know how to handle the knowledge that I’d never get to hear back from you, the knowledge that you’d never get to hear from me in the first place. I suppose that’s why I couldn’t wait to get out to you, and I suppose that’s why I carved right into you without even asking permission first:

 

V & V

 

            (I sincerely hope you forgive me for that.) But I really felt bonded to you then, my lonely soul.

            More than anything I wanted to be away from the world and to just float up to where you were and wander with you across the stars. I wanted to see Neptune and Pluto, to feel the solar winds across my face, and to take that first step with you across the heliopause and into the Big Everything. I knew you, the quintessential Lonely Traveler, would understand me as no one else could and as I had always understood you in my heart.

            Of course, that’s what the Devil managed to leave out of our little agreement—the Loneliness and Misery Clause. Not only were there zero requirements in our contract that he let me lead a happy, family-filled life, but there were also no guarantees that he wouldn’t take an active role in attempting to drive me toward suicide for the rest of it.

            I realized what he was doing as soon as my father died. I realized he was trying to force me into surrender, to give up the race before I’d even made it out of the gate. But, after living as long as I did with cancer, with cancer that keeps a person lonely, pained, ugly, and inundated with false hopes, I guess I’d grown more used to living with such things than Satan had given me credit for.

            So, I determined to use his efforts to destroy me as only a greater impetus to keep on living.

            Although, to be honest,—and I don’t know why I should or shouldn’t be at this point—Satan very nearly did win me over early on in the game. It was a trick I’d never dreamed he’d pull. There was just something so childish about it, so silly: the Devil tattling on you to Mommy and Gran. But it was something I truly hadn’t counted on, and it was something I paid dearly for.

            I can still see the look on my gran’s face as that man stood before her in our old, gold-and-olive living room. He just stood there and let the whole story fly, all while keeping a big, circus-time grin on his face, his mouth full of horrible, brown cheese teeth, and his presence no longer evoking mountains and children and trees, but rancor and rot and teeth on tinfoil. He sure pulled it out of the hat that day, revealing himself to my family and the world, showing everyone what I’d done, what kind of a person I was, and—worst of all—showing them what I was now capable of.

For years after that, for over a century after that, I was forced to endure the world’s judgment. I was forced to watch my mother and gran whittle away beneath the weight of my decision, beneath the weight of Daddy’s death. The way Gran had looked as she died, terrified, begging me to leave, weeping with the effort of it—that look was a cancer all its own. I guess that’s why they call the Devil dirty; there are all kinds of evils ready to eat you up from the inside that don’t require any help from rogue cells. One way or another, I knew he wasn’t going to let me slip by without thumbing a few choice seeds into me first.

            For years I was forced to deal with a third of the world reviling me as Satan himself, with another third seeking to submit me to every test and experiment known, and with the final third seeking to worship and sacrifice to me.

It took nearly one hundred and seventy years for me to finally drift into legend, for people to forget about me and let me reinvent myself.

            But, yah know, what are a couple of centuries in the scheme of a life that would be and that now is billions of years old?

            This was the thought I carried with me throughout the years. This was my security blanket in times of both sanity and insanity, in times of both depression and elation. I spent a lot of my time in those Forgotten Years studying every scrap of devil and demon mythology I could find. And it wasn’t until then, until I started actively investigating him that I realized just how little I’d known of the salesman who’d appeared at my bedside all those years ago. I became obsessed. And I used this obsession to empower me whenever I began to unravel (which happened more times than you’d imagine).

            But, who knows? If Heaven is as tough as I’ve heard, then perhaps they’ll come to see my defeating Satan as reason enough to readmit me one day.

            Truth be told, I always knew, somewhere in the back of my mind I always knew, that I would be able to defeat him. Especially after I hit my two hundred and twenty-fourth birthday, I knew I’d won. I knew that if I could last that long, then I’d be able to go the distance. I’d be able to outlast evil.

            After all, even as I’d realized my inability to make out all of the Devil’s fine print, I knew I could count on him not being able to make out all of mine either. Namely, if I was to be indestructible and immortal as our contract dictated, then wouldn’t it be possible for me to simply outlive the bastard? I mean, if Old Scratch was destined to be consumed by the furies of whatever Heavenly forces awaited him on Judgment Day, wouldn’t that make him as finite as everybody else (everybody else but me, of course)?

            Outlive the Devil.

            Yet, even as I lay here, clinging to you now, my only friend, I’m realizing that this may not have been the wisest choice either. Now that Satan is dead and gone,—if Satan is dead and gone—what is to become of me? I cannot die, and now there is no one left to take me away even if I wanted to be taken.

            After all of my billions of years, the World has finally forgotten me entirely.

            The Earth is gone, consumed by its own star, and it was only by sheer luck that I even managed to find you before my shuttle gave out and sputtered into uselessness. You see, even as I obsessed over Satan, you were my ray of hope, Voyager. My desire to beat the Devil may have kept me from killing myself, but it was thoughts of you that reassured me the race was actually for something.

            Oh, who knows? Maybe you and I will just drift until we find some new planet ready for or already home to Earth-like life. Maybe we’ll just drift endlessly until we fall asleep like Snow White or Sleeping Beauty and rest until some alien finds and kisses us all over. Or maybe we’ll crash-land somewhere and make up a whole new world together, just the two of us.

            I do like the sound of that. Even if I can’t actually hear anything out here and even if you can’t hear me in any case, I remember, like a flash of mountains and rivers and mother’s make-up brushes, just how much I always loved the sound of that phrase: together, just the two of us.

            No more devils. No more doctors. No more cancer. No more disappointment. And no more weeping grans.

            Together, just the two of us.

 

 

Katherine Mead-Brewer earned her MA in American Studies from the George Washington University and currently serves as an editor for Bancroft Press in Baltimore, MD. Her previous publications include The Trickster in Ginsberg: A Critical Reading published with McFarland & Co., and a science fiction short story, “Delicious Connotations,” in Ellipsis…Literature and Art magazine. She has been commissioned by the Policy Studies Organization in DC to introduce their new editions of A. Edward Newton's The Amenities of Book-Collecting and Scaevola's A Study in Forgery.

 

 

 

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