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Winner: Rah

Runner-Ups:
Sage in the Palace
The Fourth or Fifth Defenestration of Prague, Depending on Who You Believe

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by Joy Pepito

1.
I once sought the Silent Land—
where shadows, thick as honey, cling,
and in the stillness, I lay down
my soul, heavy as the unspoken words
of a world that has forgotten me.
I thought, I shall turn night into a feast,
I shall carry the sun in my hands
and burn without fear of fading.
Seven times seven my shadows whispered,
Seven times seven my stars receded,
Yet, seven times seven, I stepped forward,
dragging my threadbare thoughts like chains.
At sorrow’s edge, I laughed,
and the wind carried my grief—
only to return it as voices
weeping behind every step.

2.
I arrived at the gates of my own destruction,
where silence lives and swallows all.
No more words, no more masks;
only the truth of a body so tired
it trembled with its own absence.
I sought to meet myself—
not the girl I had lost,
but the one who could stand
before the hollow.

3.
The guardian waited, silent as stone.
“What do you seek, O Sun-who-dimmed?”
“To find what is buried in this body
that trembles in the dark.”
“Then pay the price,” he said.
“All who enter must give—
a name, a breath, a heart…
and your tears are too many to count.”

4.
I tore myself bare at every gate,
not with grace but with a hunger
that out-screamed any prayer.
At the first, I laid down my voice—
once a river of song, now dust.
At the second, my hands—
once strong enough to hold the earth steady.
At the third, my eyes—
blinded by the white heat of hope.
At the fourth, my thoughts—
severed sharp, a clean wound in the skull.
And by the seventh, nothing remained.
Yet silence, insatiable, demanded more,
and I vanished inside its mouth.

5.
“What remains of you,
daughter of fractured skies?”
I had no tongue to answer,
only a body fraying into ash.
“You are not worthy,” they thundered,
and their laughter split the dark—
a blade of frost,
undoing the last fragile thread
of hope I had carried
into the silence I thought I could master.

6.
For three days I drifted,
suspended between shadow and light,
drowning in the hollow music of my bones—
until a hand, gentle as dusk,
found what was left of me.
Not a savior,
but the hush that follows thunder,
when rain falls like blessing, not blade,
when the earth exhales at last,
slow, unbreaking, alive.

7.
And from that dark, I rose—
not the girl who once burned herself to ash,
but a fire tempered, unyielding,
a steady blaze that carves through shadow,
lighting the corners where only the daring will enter.
Each step was defiance against oblivion.
Each breath, a strike of flint—
a spark wrested back
from the silence that would have devoured me.

8.
Now, as dawn gathers its gold,
I carry the remnants of the storm—
not its thunder, not its ruin,
but the stillness that endures after breaking.
I am both tomb and awakening,
pilgrim and return.
I live—
tender as a bloom at the lip of winter,
unyielding as a flame
that refuses extinction,
burning even here,
in the Silent Land that once unmade me.

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With 66 Votes already cast, we have an extremely close contest.

The first two contenders in Fan Voting are within 2 votes of each other.

The Judge Votes are all in, and the Voting Poll will close at 11:59 PM Eastern Standard Time.

Vote Now
Read the Stories

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The Nightfly
Donald Fagen
1982

For all you hep cats out there, staying up late with your radio on, Donald Fagen of Steely Dan has just the ideology for you.

I’m your host, Paul-Newell Reaves, joined by guest analyst Timothy Ryan — who has a special request for us this week, “the Nightfly”, broadcasting in full on Concept Albums Explained, Defenestrationism.net.

The experience begins with the packaging.  The front cover features Donald Fagen in a 1950’s-style wide tie and white collared shirt, he’s speaking into a radio microphone next to a turntable, with nothing more than an ashtray, a pack of cigarettes, and a clock behind him reading 4:09.  He is Lester the Nightfly, a radio broadcaster for WJAZ, New Orleans… read more

Fan Voting is Open for the 2025 !Short Story Contest!

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by Paul-Newell Reaves

The Black Parade
My Chemical Romance
2006

“The Black Parade” is a celebration of a cancer patient, who grapples with their disease, says goodbye to loved ones, ultimately speaking their final words of, “nothing you can say can stop me going home” (though the lyrics on the vinyl insert intriguingly end with the last words, “awake and unafraid, asleep or dead”).

The album takes this patient on one hell of a death trip, the neurochemical voyage of the pineal gland, a psychedelic trip through introspection and memory, regret and self-judgement, manifested as an abandoned city populated only by a grim parade of black-clad marchers, complete with falling snow and spewing fire.

It all begins with “the End”, and the beeping of a pulse oximeter.  Critically, the pulse of this patient does not flatline as the acoustic chords strum in.  This patient’s heart still beats… read more

Fan Voting is Open for the 2025 !Short Story Contest!

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Vote Now, here.

Meet the Finalists, now published at the bottom of the Contest page.

You may also vote from our
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And surf through for our
September Publication Schedule,
beginning tomorrow, then
every Sunday
after that.

September 2nd
Concept Albums Explained: The Black Parade
by Paul-Newell Reaves

September 7th
Concept Albums Explained: The Nightfly
by Timothy Ryan and Paul-Newell Reaves

September 13th
Last Day for Fan Voting

September 14th
The Silent Land
by Joy Pepito

September 15th
Winners Announced

September 21st
My Brother Spread His Ashes Yesterday
by Chantelle Tibbs

Go to the 2025 !Short Story Contest!

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by Flavian Mark Lupinetti

They always stick the cheerleaders on the band bus, right?  I hated that bus.  During that final football season I came to despise wasting my Friday nights, two hours outdoors while underdressed in November’s drizzle and chill, pretending to care who won the game.  But more than anything, I hated that bus.  I wished harm to the vehicle itself for its diesel fumes, its seats with skimpy upholstery and sheet metal seat backs adorned with pen knife-etched graffiti that did justice to the originality of previous students–”Seniors ’95,”  “Seniors ’14,”  “Seniors ’20”–and its first gear ascents, lumbering up every summit as if climbing the back roads of Tibet instead of West By God Virginia.  By God, I hated that bus.

Adding to the aggravation, the Boot High Buckskins had just defeated Charleston for like the first time in fifty years, which set those band kids to crowing all the way home as if they won the game themselves.  It never hit those tuba players and clarinetists how they looked when they took the football team’s wins and losses so personally.  You can guess how highly Boot High’s football team regarded the band.  The gloating made it impossible to read, so I curled up and pretended to nod off.  Cassie Merrola kept bumping my shoulder until I dropped the act.  “Come sleep over tomorrow night,” she said.

“Can’t.  I have algebra, an English paper, a new–”  I started to tell her about the new Flannery O’Connor collection Miss Shernisky gave me, but Cassie wouldn’t understand.  I’d have to explain that there couldn’t really be a new collection of Flannery O’Connor stories, but they were new to me.  While I hesitated, Cassie broke out her cheerleader-in-chief stare, making me submit, as I always did.  “What time?” I said.  

“Six.  Dinner.”  Cassie flashed her smile as if flipping a switch, but I knew she invited me only to suppress her parents’ dinner table warfare.   Somehow my presence forced Mr. and Mrs. Merrola into their silent combat mode.  “You’re so lucky, Janey,” Cassie said.  “You never have to check with your mom.”  Since middle school, Cassie and I debated whether having a single mother made me lucky.  I was worn out from arguing.  I was worn out, period.  For at least a month I even cultivated the fantasy of quitting the squad before basketball season, but no Boot High cheerleader ever quit, not voluntarily, not unless she got arrested or pregnant.  I took solace that Boot had just one more football game.  Unless . . . Beating Charleston might kick Boot right into the playoffs.  The season might not end so soon.  Great.  More cursed bus.  

Saturday morning I plowed through my homework so I could dive into Miss Flannery’s Complete Stories with a clear conscience.  Miss Shernisky especially recommended “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” and she gave me fair warning.  “It’s one of the most challenging stories Miss Flannery ever wrote.”  

I warmed up by rereading a pair of Miss Flannery’s stories I know almost by heart.  “Everything That Rises Must Converge” tells about Julian who has a single mother like me, but Julian’s a jerk.  “Parker’s Back,” about a tattooed man, is both funny and sad, and it’s not about tattoos, it’s about God.  Those were child’s play compared to “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”  The story creeped me out the first time I read it, and it creeped out even more the second time, when I already knew how it ended with the stupid grandmother leading her family down a country road where–spoiler alert–a psycho killer called The Misfit murders them all.  It stirred up a zillion questions I couldn’t ask the author, so I saved them for Miss Shernisky, Miss Flannery’s representative on earth, questions that flew through my head as I walked to Cassie’s.

At dinner, I had one cup of jellied beef consommé.  Cassie couldn’t eat more than that without gaining weight, though I can handle whole salads, hold the dressing.  I performed according to my usual social standards, politely answering Mrs. Merrola when she asked about my classes and ignored my replies, politely ignoring Mr. Merrola when he peered down my shirt.  Cassie and I politely pretended not to act relieved when Mr. Merrola left to check on his construction project long after dark and Mrs. Merrola needed to visit a sick friend.

“Good riddance,” said Cassie after they left.  “They can torture somebody else for a change.  I swear, Janey, you are so lucky.”  She streamed a movie starring a really hot babe and a potato-faced stoner who a really hot babe would never go out with in a million years.  Yet somehow true love overcame all, and the movie ended the way they always do.  I wished I’d brought a book, but Cassie didn’t tolerate reading, even though she disappeared into the kitchen every five minutes and saw less of the movie than I did.

I realized what she had been up to when Junior and DW showed up at eleven o’clock, fresh from a kegger with the rest of the football team.  Cassie acted surprised, but she must have texted them that her parents had bounced.  Cassie and Junior wandered off to the bedroom, abandoning me with DW.  Cassie believed she had a divine right to direct the social life of everyone in her orbit, and for years she’d badgered me to go out with DW.  She kept telling me what a good guy he was.  Not content with having her hooks in Junior, the star quarterback who all the girls thought was totally hawt, Cassie probably calculated that setting up DW, Junior’s best friend and teammate, with me, the assistant head cheerleader, would make our status as permanent as her tramp-stamp:  Junior and Cassie, forever the King and Queen of Boot High.  DW and me, the eternal runners-up.  

But DW was perv.  I went out with him only once.  Not just because he groped me when we parked down at the river, and not just because he got rough until I shouted so loud that the couple in the next car came over to investigate.  Not even because when DW took me home, he barely slowed enough to shove me out the door.  What steamed me the most was the next day he told everyone I gave it up.  He kept stalking me until he met Etty Alban.  Only a freshman, Etty must have felt flattered that a senior football player drooled over her.  

This night DW acted like the past had never happened, and the hand-to-hand combat soon began.  DW plopped himself beside me, faked a yawn, and made that s-t-r-e-t-c-h-i-n-g move to infiltrate his arm onto the back of the couch.  When I grabbed his pinky, he engaged his opposite paw.  When I jammed my elbow into his ribs, he pressed back with all his weight.  “Nobody pushes me away,” he said, panting with his beery breath.  “You know you want it.”

I felt so relieved when the front door flew open.  Mrs. Merrola’s friend must have made a remarkable recovery.  Her mother’s return flushed Cassie and Junior into the living room and forced us all to behave while Mrs. Merrola pretended to straighten the kitchen.  My heart didn’t stop pounding for at least a half hour.  The four of us sat there bored stupid watching “Saturday Night Live,” not even a new show but a “Best Of” compilation.

“Come on, Janey,” Cassie whispered.  “Do it.”  She wanted me to parrot the sketch they were showing for like the twelve thousandth time because she hoped my imitation of the actress imitating Sarah Palin would annoy her mother and make her leave, which often happened when I mocked Mrs. Merrola’s favorite celebrities.

“No,” I said.  If Cassie wanted a fight with her mother, she could start it herself.  Besides, Sarah Palin is so prehistoric that I had to explain her to Junior and DW.  

Cassie couldn’t abide defiance, though, especially in front of the guys.  “Janey’s writing a new skit for Friday’s pep rally,” she said.  People thought of Cassie and me as BFFs, but I knew deep down that after graduation we’d defriend each other.  I also knew she’d marry Junior, and she’d lecture the planet about the awesomeness of marriage, as if life with a local goober working the casino or the prison translated into happily ever after.

DW snorted.  “Yeah, you go.  Writer.”

I hardly told a soul that I wanted to write.  People in Boot think nobody could pursue both cheerleading and writing, but the summer before at Cheer Camp I learned otherwise.  Cheer Camp existed mainly to teach us dances and gymnastics, but the most inspirational moment occurred in a lecture by a women’s studies professor who told us not to surrender to stereotypes.  “Take advantage of the poise, confidence, and fitness cheering gives you,” she said.  “But don’t rely on those alone.”  She said we could become whatever we wanted–politicians, scientists, or corporate executives.  Or writers, I concluded.

“Poise, confidence, and fitness,” Cassie mimicked in a squeaky voice.  “She means a cute face and big boobs.”  Because I took the lecture seriously, Cassie needed to diss it.  

Just like she now had to diss me in front of Junior and DW.  “A certain brilliant writer in this room says our skits are lame.”

“I didn’t say that.  I said we keep doing the same thing over and over.”  

Junior said, “She’s gotta point–”  He shut up when Cassie shot him a look that scared him way more than any defensive lineman ever did, but he knew what I meant.  Our skits consisted of the cheerleaders lassoing a kid dressed as a wildcat when we played the Wheeling Christian Wildcats or setting a fake iron-jawed trap to catch a kid in a bear suit when we played the Hinton Grizzlies.  You’d think by our senior year we’d have come up with one original idea, but our performances were practically identical to every one we’d seen since sixth grade.

 “She’s not a writer.”  DW curled his lip like a bad Elvis impersonator.  “Brainzilla just thinks she’s better than the rest of us.”  

Without knowing it, DW accused me of the sin of pride, which Miss Flannery regarded as the worst sin of all.  Pride didn’t mean only seeing yourself as superior.  Pride included uncontrolled zeal and excessive certainty in your beliefs and flaunting your outspokenness about injustice.  Miss Flannery believed most of the world’s mischief originated from pride.  Besides, who was DW to talk?  He looked prideful enough with that curly blonde hair and those hard muscles straining against his too-tight T-shirt.  I imagined him twenty years from now after getting fired from his dead-end job, sitting in front of the TV with a head as bald as a sawed-off mountaintop and a beer gut the size of Pittsburgh.  

DW’s insult made me decide to show them all.  “Okay.  I will write a new skit.”  Shoot.  Had I just committed an act of pride?  

I planned to start the next morning, but after I woke up, I read “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” once more, hoping to find inspiration in Miss Flannery’s words.  What did she mean when she had The Misfit say, “She would of been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life”?  Or when the grandmother said to the man just about to kill her, “You’re one of my babies.  You’re one of my own children.”  Did Miss Flannery consider The Misfit evil?  Or good and evil?  Did Miss Flannery mean to teach us about hypocrisy?  About repentance?

Monday morning in homeroom, Cassie made her expectations clear.  “Finish the skit?” she asked, as if she could order all of creation the way she ordered French fries.  I hadn’t written a thing, but once I resolved to compose a skit that would resonate with regular students, not just the jocks and the rest of us in their orbit, the words came quickly.  

I showed Miss Shernisky my first draft between classes.  She read every word, ignoring the tardy bell.  Miss Shernisky hadn’t taught me since sophomore year, but she still reviewed my work and advised me what to read.  I didn’t see her gray hair or the glasses dangling from a granny chain around her neck.  I saw a trusted reader, a role model.  A friend.  “I like it, Janey,” she said. “Any concerns about . . . criticism?  From the other girls, I mean.”

 “You say writers learn from criticism.  Besides, the only thing most of them’ll care about is how many lines they have.”

“Good luck.”  She returned the script.  “Oh.  Did you read ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find’?” 

“Yeah. It gave me fits.”

She smiled.  “You’re not the first.”  Miss Shernisky had encouraged me to apply to the University of Iowa, where Miss Flannery became such a great writer.  Okay, Miss Flannery would have become a great writer wherever she studied, but going to Iowa would let me escape West Virginia forever.  Still, I needed a scholarship to go anywhere.  Miss Shernisky showed me how to improve my odds with Iowa by applying Early Decision and how to request financial aid.

I revised the script in study hall and passed it around at practice.  Even our slowest readers got through it quickly because it took only five minutes.  It didn’t take five minutes to get my feedback.  I should have expected how they would respond, Cassie most of all. 

“My God, Janey, this is terrible,” she said.  “‘Boot High, Twenty Years Later’?  Nobody cares about twenty years later.  It’s supposed to be about Friday night.  And it’s so negatory.  Everyone ends up miserable.”

“You don’t get it,” I said.  “It’s about considering the consequences of what you do now so you don’t have regrets twenty years later.”

“What kind of people are these?”  Cassie almost spat as she turned the pages.  “‘Tom, former quarterback, spends his days reliving past glory.  Mitchell, scored winning touchdown against Parkersburg, now disabled by war injuries.’  It’s depressing.”  

“But Matilda becomes an inspirational teacher,” I said.  “And Glenn’s a lawyer who protects the environment.”

“How about this?  ‘Jessica, former cheerleader, a single mom with two children.’  Mom issues, Janey?  Deal with them on your own.”

My eyes burned.  “That has nothing to do with me.  I made it up.  I made up all the characters.  That’s what writers do.  We make stuff up!” 

No pep rally skit practice ever witnessed such a confrontation.  The situation stayed totally awk until Etty Alban defused it.  “I’ll admit, it is different.  How about it’s twenty years later, and we remember winning State?”  That broke the tension and gave everyone else permission to talk. 

“What if it’s, like, our twentieth reunion?  And we’re watching Junior play for the Steelers?”  

“And Cassie’s his wife and a model.”  

“And your novel is ranked number one on Amazon.  How about that, Janey?”

“No,” Cassie said.  “Write something new.  About this Friday night.  About the Buckskins against Hundred Lake.  How we’ll kill ’em.  Skip practice, Janey, and write that.”

“I can practice,” I insisted.  “I have plenty of time to write the same dumb skit.”  

But after practice I went home and read Miss Flannery’s story again, so engrossed in the Misfit and Grandma and the other characters that I barely registered my mother’s return from work.  “Dinner, Janey,” she called.  Mom cheered in the old days, and she had started to appreciate how my feelings about cheering differed from hers.  I plodded into the kitchen, expecting take-out burgers or tacos, but Mom brought home pizza.

“Real pizza from Magnone’s, not that fake stuff from Pizza Den,” I said.  “What’s the occasion?  Mom sat back pointed at my plate.  There sat two thick letters, the prehistoric method of communication for those of us without home Internet access.  The top envelope contained my acceptance to West Virginia University.  “Whoopee!” I said.  “Proof I have a West Virginia residence, a C average, and a pulse.”  I picked up the second envelope.  Office of the Registrar.  University of Iowa.  I tore it open and read the first word out loud–Congratulations.  Then I burst into tears.

Mom lost it, too.  “I’m so proud of you,” she blubbered.  “First one in the whole fam-damily accepted to college.”  That wasn’t true.  Mom had good grades and test scores.  Her acceptance letter from WVU arrived the same the day as her positive pregnancy test–that would be me–ending both her college plans and her cheerleading career.  

Accepted, Mom said.  Maybe I’d earned admission to both Default U and to the school of my dreams, but without a scholarship, all we could afford was Boot County Community College.  When I confided my fallback plan to Miss Shernisky, she said she hoped I could do better.  She didn’t mean any disrespect, but so many of us end up at BCCC that the whole town calls it Boot Senior Senior High.  Unless I scored boocoo financial aid, my choices boiled down to B trip C or getting a real-estate license and helping Mom at work.

After dinner, I started my homework, but I couldn’t escape the gravitational pull of Miss Flannery’s story.  The time passed without my noticing until Mom brought me a cup herbal tea and some cookies. “Didn’t you hear me holler you had a phone call?  What’re you reading, girl?”

“‘A Good Man is Hard to Find.’”

“Oh, do tell,” Mom said.  “Cassie called to find out if you finished your skit.  You writing a skit?”  I wanted to say I wrote one that didn’t meet Cassie’s high theatrical standards, but Mom would have wanted to see it, and I’d have to explain why Cassie didn’t like it, and Mom would say I should have Miss Shernisky talk to Cassie, and I’d have to explain . . . so I said nothing.  

Mom’s question both reopened the wound and illuminated the solution.  I would write the way Miss Flannery might after having her good and true work rejected by someone with no literary taste.  I would write grotesque.  A script so grotesque that it wouldn’t, couldn’t see the light of a Boot High pep rally would stick a thumb in Cassie’s eye and let me off the hook.  I would make this a tribute to The Misfit, Miss Flannery’s most grotesque character ever.  The next day, I showed my script to Miss Shernisky, hoping to evoke a conspiratorial laugh.  She squinted at the pages as if they hurt her eyes.  “If you set out to write a disturbing piece, young lady, you managed.  You know you can’t stage this?” 

Disturbing, she called it?  Not grotesque?  “Cassie and them didn’t like my original skit.  Maybe they need to see the alternative.”

I slipped the script to Cassie in history class.  “It’s not good,” she said, rattling a pencil against her teeth.  Then with a wink she patted me on the head.  “It’s not just good.  It’s awesome!  We’ll practice it tonight.”  Oh.  Em.  Gee.  After recovering from the shock, I thought, fine, let the whole school see a skit that totally crushes their enthusiasm for football.  At practice we did one read through and acted it a half dozen times.  Cassie made tiny changes in blocking and cues to suit her temperament.  This directing thing went straight to her head. 

The rally started after lunch Friday.  As always, Principal Fluharty canceled fifth period classes and let sixth start late, which meant students and teachers alike could fake their way through the rest of the afternoon.  Coach Belliard took the mike and said beating the Hundred Lake Bandits would not only put us in the playoffs, it would send a message to every Double-A school in West Virginia that Boot was a team to be afraid of.  Except Coach Bell said “afeared” instead of “afraid” like he always did, and I really wished he didn’t.  Then we did some cheers and our pyramid.  Etty Alban balanced way up there on one foot and did a back-flip dismount that Cassie and I spotted, even though Etty never fell.  Etty was a kick-ass gymnast.  I bet if she’d grown up somewhere else and gotten decent training, she would’ve made the Olympics.

While the band played, we dressed for the skit.  Etty and our other two freshmen, Nell and Becky, came out wearing Hundred Lake red and black with “Bandits” spelled out in athletic tape.  They pretended they were driving toward Boot when their car broke down.  While going for help they talked about how their team would kick our butts Friday night.  That was the cue for the rest of us to run out and make a citizens’ arrest on charges of having a lousy team and skanky cheerleaders.  Cassie sat in judgment and pronounced them guilty, and she ordered me to carry out the sentence. 

In rehearsal I’d pointed my finger, and Cassie suggested I use a starter pistol, but I insisted that the gun didn’t matter as much as how the victims reacted.  A squirt gun would work fine.  Then I had an even better idea. I  borrowed a novelty gun from the Drama Club, one of those things that shoots a flag that reads, “Bang!”  Perfect.  Even more grotesque.

So that Friday afternoon, in front of all of Boot High, when I shot Nell and Becky point-blank and they slumped to the ground, half the audience gasped.  The other half cheered.  Then I shot Etty.  I’d never seen anyone shot for real, of course, and I don’t think Etty had either.  But when the Bang! flag flew out of the barrel, Etty made her head snap back, she made her body lurch forward, and she did a face-plant right onto the hardwood floor.  She even made her legs wiggle an agonal reflex.  No Hollywood stunt woman could have done better, and the performance stunned everyone into silence.  For at least five seconds.  Then the crowd erupted, stomping on the bleachers and screaming, “Kill the Bandits!” 

The end of the skit usually signified the end of the pep rally, time for the players to lead us out of the gym while striking poses of dignified ferocity.  They squint, inflate their biceps, and bull their necks, boys not old enough to shave trying to imitate stone killers.  This afternoon, though, they leaped and hollered and strutted, high-fiving and bumping chests to match the exultation of the audience.  Dumbstruck, we helped Nell and Becky and Etty to their feet and stared at the crowd.  More stunning still, Cassie grabbed my hand, a tear in her eye, and said, “Fantastic skit, Janey!”  

Then she jumped back into character and led a “B-H-S” cheer that got the entire gym howling along.  The building rawked so hard that Mr. Fluharty recognized the futility of conducting any more classes. “School’s out,” he declared, to thunderous applause.

Frustrated by my failure to inspire a melancholy response, or even a sober one, I sought consolation in the discovery that my words could move an audience.  But everything should have ended right there–a little show, a little applause, and my forgettable skit duly forgotten.  All that anyone should have remembered was Boot 21, Hundred Lake 13.  Boot made the playoffs.

But it didn’t end there.  Lily Harris didn’t let it.  When she and I took Miss Shernisky’s class, Lily told everyone she wanted to be a writer, and she resented it that Miss Shernisky praised my stories more than hers.  Lily and her mother, a lawyer who pitches a bitch every December when the school allows a manger scene, wrote a blistering letter to the Boot Herald-Times condemning the skit’s “violent theme” and “tasteless performance.”  The paper also printed Mr. Fluharty’s lackluster rebuttal.  “The girls were just having fun.  You know.  Getting everybody up for the game.”  

The few townspeople able to divert their attention from football spazzed over the skit.  An organization called “Boot Armed and Decent” asserted that if more law-abiding citizens carried weapons, the body count on certain campuses would have been lower.  The group’s leader called to say I had his support, but I disappointed him when I said the skit totally had nothing to do with gun control.  Mr. Boot Armadillo’s lack of familiarity with Miss Flannery’s oeuvre came as no surprise. 

Meanwhile, my writing attracted other kids’ interest for the first time ever, even if not exactly in the way I’d dreamed.  “What are you writing for next week?” they asked.  “You gotta make it even better.”  I would have time to think it over, because Coach Belliard turned out to be correct.  The rest of West Virginia did seem afeared of Boot, enough to make us top seed with a first-round bye.  

With that Friday night free, DW spread the word:  Party at his house, everyone invited–meaning everyone who mattered:  the football team, cheerleaders, and similarly cool kids.  No greasers, hippies, goths, skaters, or other outcast types.  You might question my judgment in attending a party with such mischief potential, especially after it got around that DW’s parents had booked for Atlantic City.  If so, you might also consider how few social outlets Boot has on Friday nights.  Surprisingly, the party started out mellow.  Someone tapped a keg, but the guys stayed sober.  They acted less rowdy than usual and more thoughtful.  Perhaps they felt the unfamiliar burden of high expectations.

If people saw DW walk Etty Alban into his parents’ bedroom, they didn’t say.  They would have assumed Etty could take care of herself, and they all thought of DW as a good guy. 

Later, some people complained I didn’t warn her, but I had no idea what he could do.  While it all went down that night, I sat nursing a soda in the living room, where someone had cranked up the music to ear-bleed volume that kept me from hearing a thing.

Cassie was in the hallway outside the bedroom, though.  She knew what she heard.  And she screamed.  She screamed again at Junior to break down the door.  She screamed once more after that, when she saw Etty face down in a pool of blood.  DW shoved his way past everyone into the living room.  He stopped right in front of me with the gun in his hand.  Not a big gun, not close to the size of the silly prop I used in our skit.  Later I learned it belonged to his mother, that his father kept his Glocks and ARs and other heavy ordnance under lock in the basement.  

DW didn’t say a word.  He stared at me with preternatural calm, the barrel of the pistol only inches from my face.  I could smell the hot-sweet aroma of discharged gunpowder.  And . . . I understood.  In that crystalline moment I felt ablaze with the knowledge of what Miss Flannery meant to say.  With a mouth so dry I could barely form the words, the words I knew by heart.  “You’re one . . . You’re one of my own–”

I never finished.  Junior came out of nowhere and knocked DW to the ground.  The gun skidded across the hardwood floor.  It bounced off the baseboard in wobbly circles.  Junior scrambled for it, but DW recovered the fumble.  He stood and pointed the gun at Junior.  He pointed it away.  Then, as if he couldn’t figure out where else to aim, he pressed it under his own chin.  I might have been the only one that saw him make the slightest flinch, pulling his head back just as he pulled the trigger.  For a few seconds DW remained upright, suspended like a marionette.  Then he crumpled to the floor. 

For once, Cassie’s sense of authority proved useful.  She called the paramedics and the sheriff’s office and half the hotels in Atlantic City until she located DW’s parents.  The paramedics pushed a breathing tube into the bloody mess that used to be DW’s mouth, and they stuck needles into the bulging veins of his upper arms.  He survived the night, but his family took him off life support the next morning.  It didn’t occur to me to ask why the EMTs didn’t attend to Etty.  Then I saw one of the ambulance crew unroll a large red vinyl bag and take it into the bedroom.  When I heard a metal zipper closing, I threw up.

Mom came to take me home, but the sheriff didn’t release me until half past three.  Taking the phone off the hook might have spared us annoying calls, but it didn’t stop reporters from showing up from as far away as Charleston and Wheeling to bang on our front door.  I didn’t dare leave the house until Sunday night, when Cassie came over and escorted me to her place.  The rest of the squad had gathered in Cassie’s bedroom, and we bawled our way through a case of tissues.  Then we went home, not knowing what the new week would bring. 

First thing Monday, Mr. Fluharty called the cheerleaders into his office.  Mom suspects the school board threatened to fire Mr. Fluharty so he had to blame someone.  He reviewed the events with a perverse twist, implying that our performance inspired a wild night of drinking, sex, and murder.  Several of the other girls began crying, but I recognized how little the school had to stick us with when we heard our punishment:  Three days’ suspension.  Plus, permission to skip classes Thursday for Etty’s funeral.

“What about DW’s funeral?”  I said.  “Friday.  We should go to that, too.” 

The other girls looked at me as if I’d lost my mind.  Mr. Fluharty rubbed his fingers over the coffee stains on red tie, and he squirmed in his chair, the old springs screeching with every motion. “That’s a bad idea, Janey,” he said.

“But DW’s parents lost a son. And DW . . .”  It came back, what Miss Flannery meant, what I knew when DW stood there ready to put a bullet into my brain.  “DW was one of our own.”  

“Huh,” said Mr. Fluharty. “Didn’t know you were kin.”

“No,” I said.  “I mean we can’t understand.  We’ll never know why DW did it.  You can blame my skit.  Or the music he listened to or the video games he played or the movies he watched.  Or you can blame football.”  That last, that made Mr. Fluharty flinch. 

The other girls just sat there.  Not one word in support.  Later Cassie said that if I’d just cried and begged for mercy, I would have come out okay.  What I regarded as a recognition of shared humanity must have come off as a lawyerly rebuttal.  Then to seal the matter I cut class Friday for DW’s service, the only mourner besides his family.  Not a teacher, not a coach, not a teammate showed up.  The Herald-Times ran a front-page picture of me leaving the church.  

Mr. Fluharty took that as an act of defiance, which explains what he wrote in our permanent records.  The other girls’ files said they used “bad judgment.”  His notes about me, however, described the events in excruciating detail.  Mr. Fluharty called me “unrepentant,” and he included newspaper clippings and someone’s cellphone photo of the skit–the part where I shot Etty. 

Nobody got off easy.  Boot did not win its first playoff game in thirty years because it didn’t play.  The school board chose to forfeit.  Mr. Fluharty also banned the cheerleaders from away basketball games, a relief to those who worried about the reception they’d receive in hostile gyms.  It didn’t matter to me.  I told Cassie at Etty’s funeral:  I quit. 

I did not, however, appreciate the significance of Mr. Fluharty’s writing that my offense was firearms-related.  And that I was unrepentant.  The University of Iowa rescinded my acceptance, citing their zero-tolerance policy.  WVU did the same.  Our sole support came from a grief counselor who suggested we write essays to “process the experience.”  She thought enough of the piece I wrote to say I should publish it.  Naturally, I wanted the opinion of the person I trusted the most. 

When I caught up with Miss Shernisky outside the library, she made me duck into the stairwell.  Her hands shook, and her words came in short bursts.  “Mr. Fluharty told me I can’t read your work anymore.  He said if I wanted to tutor anyone . . . I should tutor the students in my classes.”

 I rolled my manuscript into a tight cylinder, this close to crying. 

Then Miss Shernisky added, “Mr. Fluharty asked if I read your skit.”  She paused as if I might complete her thought. “I said I hadn’t.”

#

Mr. Fluharty couldn’t stop me from graduating, at least, and Mom had no problem finding me a position in her office.  I didn’t sell many houses.  “Don’t worry,” Mom said.  “A busted real-estate market culls out the weaklings in the herd.  Agents who survive this will be on top when houses start moving again.  Anyone with your poise and confidence and brains is gonna be dynamite at sales.”  But after two years of showing double-wides to couples my age with a couple of babies, B trip C didn’t seem so bad.  When I enrolled the college turned out not to have a single class in creative writing.  I placed out of English comp, and American lit was full with a waiting list.  That left me with earth science, sociology, and accounting.  

Today between classes I sat on the wall and watched them gliding across the campus, two blondes in cheerleader outfits and a brunette wearing a leather jacket in B trip C colors.  Nearly everyone tracked them, some with jaws slack, other with greater subtlety.  The trio made eye contact with no one, accepting the stares as merely their due.  I remembered that gesture well.  I hardly expected them to speak to me, scribbling away in my composition book, but they stopped and said hello.  They asked a stunning question:  Did I want to try out for the cheerleading squad?

Sure.  For my notoriety.  They could use me as a conversation starter when they went on spring break in Cabo or San Padre, telling some bros from Louisiana State, “Hey, d’ja hear ’bout that girl who shot that other girl at the pep rally skit?  Well . . .”  

For a moment I considered jerking them around by asking about the school’s concealed carry policy during cheers and whether the athletic department had weeded out everyone with homicidal tendencies.  Instead I kept my answer simple.  No, I do not want to try out for the goddamned cheerleading squad.  Not now, not ever.  They walked away as serenely as they approached.  

I bent to my writing until I heard a voice from behind.  “I told them you’d say no.”  There stood Cassie, whom I had not seen since graduation.  I had heard from mutual friends that Cassie’s psychiatrist had advised her not to go away for college, that BCCC would make it less stressful for her PTSD.  “I told them no, too.  Shrink’s orders.”

I slid over, letting Cassie have a piece of the limestone.

“Come sleep over tomorrow night?” she said.

“No.”

She nodded and made a pretense of looking over my shoulder.  “Still writing?”  I didn’t dignify that with a response.  “Did you ever write about . . . you know . . .?”

I put down my pen.  Cassie didn’t hear “No” very often, but I sensed she had begun hearing it more.  

“Yeah,” I said.  What the hell.  She made an effort.  “I’m writing about it now.  Help me think of a title.”

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by Amy L. Bernstein

Charlotte Bradley wasn’t sure how much time remained before the changes to her body were impossible to hide, especially from colleagues in the faculty lounge at Anton Elementary, which used to be a supply closet, so there wasn’t much room to maneuver. Or from her pupils, who seemed wildly inattentive until she realized they were preternaturally attuned to the smallest changes. Like the day she came to school with hair cut one inch shorter than usual. Nearly every kid had an opinion about it and said so.

Charlotte was struggling to define the alarming reality of her altered…still altering…life. She’d read Kafka and knew all about Gregor Samsa’s disgusting transformation. But he was lucky, in a way, because he turned all at once; he went to sleep as a human and awoke as a cockroach. On her worst days, Charlotte consoled herself with the thought that whatever was happening, she clearly would not end up a bug. Of course, Gregor ends up dead from self-imposed starvation. Charlotte tried to keep horrifying thoughts like that at bay. 

Nevertheless, the slow drip-drip of minor modifications occurring over days, weeks, and months was agonizing. Losing control over her body bit by bit, a patch of skin altered one morning, a breast nipple the next, was terrifying. Why was this happening? Where would it all end?

Am I dying? Am I diseased? Am I cursed?

She ruled out medical consultation. Gregor and his family certainly didn’t consult a physician. Why would they? What could any doctor possibly explain to them that they didn’t already see for themselves?

Charlotte carried on as normally as possible. The more radically her bodied changed, the less inclined she was to make radical, life-altering decisions. As if “carrying on” would engender a cure. She converted her school wardrobe from slim black pants and blouses to baggy dresses and combat boots to mask her slow-morphing shape. She knew there were rumors floating among both kids and faculty: that she was pregnant, or gaining weight, or maybe she was depressed, or she thought her new style would impress the kids as “cool.”

“Listen, are you okay?” Principal Verna Riggles cornered Charlotte in the hallways between periods one morning. 

“Why?” Charlotte put a hand to her face to make sure everything up there was still normal. 

“You seem…different. Distracted, maybe? And you haven’t turned in your quarterly markings. That’s not like you. Come and see me after last period, yeah?”

Charlotte didn’t show. Instead, she turned in her report to get Verna off her back. 

 In the faculty lounge the next day, Ken, who taught math, sidled up to her, sandwich in hand, and asked if she was going through “the change.” Charlotte laughed—the first laugh in a long time. 

“Are you, Ken?” she asked so all could hear. Fritzi Jones, the librarian, was brewing a new pot of coffee. Sasha (art) was cleaning out the mini-fridge.

“Whose yogurt is this?” Sasha asked. “It’s unmarked. How many times—”

“Are you going through a change, Ken?” Charlotte asked. “Learning how to keep your eyes off the chests of fifth-grade girls?”

“Charlotte, that’s not—” Sasha began.

“But it’s true,” Fritzi said. “Ken needs to be called out on this.”

“I have never, not once, touched a student at this school,” Ken said, hurling half his sandwich in the garbage. 

“Oh, but staring is fine,” Charlotte said. The briefest flash of an image: Ken splayed on the floor, covered in blood. She blinked it away. “Prick,” she muttered.

“What’s wrong with you?” Ken asked her. “What are you so worked up about?”

Sasha and Fritzi paused, suggesting they were interested in an answer to this question. So was Charlotte. But she didn’t have one.

With each passing day, she knew less about the world and how it worked, what it expected of her. She knew even less about her future and where she’d end up—or how she’d end up. 

On Thursday, she was teaching her third-period language arts class about adverbs. A list of words ending in -ly were written on the blackboard. She was about ask for a volunteer to put one of those adverbs in a sentence when a switch flipped in her brain—she heard a click—and she said something else entirely.

“Forearmed is forewarned.” What? “When they arrive, I’ll be ready. I am all that stands between you and your bloodiest, scariest, most awful nightmare.”

“Ms. Bradley?” Davy Franklin, pale and skinny, eyes like brown saucers, was staring at her. Everybody was. But Davy’s thousand-yard stare was more intense than most, as if he didn’t need to blink. “Are you okay, Ms. Bradley? Has the devil got you by the tail?”

“Of course I’m okay!” Charlotte roared. Davy kept staring at her while the other kids shrank a little in their seats. “What gives you the idea I’m not okay?”

A rare silence ruled the room.

“Colin,” Charlotte said. “Put one of the words on the board in a sentence.”

The kids looked around. There was nobody named Colin.

Naomi put up a hand, cranked it slowly into the air. “Do you mean Curtis, Ms. Bradley?” Curtis sat next to Naomi.

“Curtis,” Charlotte said. “Put…” But where was Colin? She needed to check up on him. Or keep him in check, maybe that was it. “Curtis,” she began again, eyes closed to avoid a roomful of frightened stares. “Please choose an adjective on the board to put into a sentence.”

It was a minor miracle that Verna didn’t get wind of this little episode. The kids were perhaps too scared shitless to report her short-lived run-off-the-rails moment to their parents. Or maybe they didn’t have the words to describe what had happened.

What did happen?

She couldn’t say. She hardly remembered. She thought maybe it was all in her head and that nothing unusual happened in class right up to the bell. She knew who Curtis was, of course she did—the dark-haired boy who sat in the back and stared out the window more often than not.

She knew all her kids by name, by habit, by grade. She knew who, in all likelihood, would move on to college in seven or eight years, and who most likely would not. She remembered the extra-special ones, like Stacy, who read a book a day. Ben, who turned wood scraps into percussion instruments. 

She didn’t know why she said what she said to them—if she said it—about being armed, about bloody nightmares. She remembered the click in her head, like someone turning on a noisy light switch. After that: fuzziness.

At home that night, she sat in the dark drinking whisky, wondering if she’d consciously recognize a moment of no return once it arrived, that moment when she’d lose control not only over her body parts, but over her thoughts, her volition…the complex dance of neural pathways and the once-orderly war between ego and id…all spinning across an inscrutable landscape beyond her understanding.

Charlotte’s dreams ceased to mimic the emptying out of random desk drawers of the mind, focusing relentlessly, instead, on scenes of apocalypse: bloody battlefields littered for miles with the ragged corpses of children, cannons releasing lethal iron balls that tore through limbs, while laser guns gutted bodies with heartless precision. Weapons of all types and sizes, amassed and deployed by invisible forces. 

And when she awoke, bathed in sweat, Charlotte felt that force massing inside her, like a cancerous tumor. 

She debated calling in sick, but substitute teachers were in short supply. Verna would be furious. And Charlotte didn’t want her kids believing that not showing up was okay. 

She dragged herself to school that Friday, her body heavy, lead in her veins, every step a fight with gravity. She coasted through first and second periods, relying on autopilot to move from adverbs to adjectives, from analyzing a passage in a short story to prepping the kids for a spelling quiz.

She avoided the faculty lounge at lunch, remaining behind in an empty classroom, the hallway chaos seeping through the closed door. She fell into a stuporous sleep, head on hands at her desk, loose pens and coil-bound notebooks pushed to the floor. 

The apocalypse dream takes over: screams and shouts, running feet, banging. A piece of her rebels inside the dream. Not here! Not this! Not in school!

A sudden shift to louder noises.

“Charlotte! What the fuck!”

Charlotte lifts her head, caught between dreaming and waking. Ken is yelling through the open door, his face red, veins bulging on his neck. 

He spits three words. “Active shooter situation!” He disappears, leaving the classroom door open, revealing a familiar dreamscape of bodies fleeing in all directions at once, children crying and screaming, teachers running after them. Fritzi runs by, then Sasha. 

Charlotte parses Ken’s message outside the bounds of normal time. She rises, maybe fast, maybe slow. She walks, no, she lumbers, her body heavier than ever, limbs going rigid, muscles hardening like steel, flesh yielding to something sturdier. Her sight sharpens, she senses she is taller.

She walks the emptied hallway, her clanging boots the only sound now. In the art room, Naomi, 11, lies flat on her back, a red hole drilled through her belly. Blood pools beneath her, a shade darker than the nearby container of spilled red paint. 

Charlotte walks on. Room 104 is empty. So is Room 106. She completes the first-floor survey and heads to the second floor, taking the steps three at a time. 

In the library, Davy Franklin holds a gun as big as his head. It’s clear he knows how to use it; his hands are in all the right places and the weight of the thing appears not to faze him. Davy stands near Fritzi’s desk in the center of the room, surrounded by low shelves full of books. Half a dozen kids stand shoulder to shoulder a few yards from Davy, still and white as marble.

Charlotte knows that Fritzi and the other teachers have shepherded as many kids as possible as far away from Davy as they could get. They’re probably crammed in the boiler room in the far end of the basement. They rest are hiding in the tightest spaces they can find.

Charlotte edges into the library, slow and relaxed.

Davy squints at her. “Is that you, Ms. Bradley? You look…weird. You’re, like, sticking out in funny places.”

“What’s going on, Davy?” Charlotte’s voice is deep and metallic, completely unfamiliar. “Last time I checked, you didn’t need to kill anybody to borrow a book from the school library.”

“The library is evil,” Davy says. “It’s a bad place. It’s doing bad things to us kids.”

“Who says?”

“My mom and a bunch of other people. They come to my house. They talk about how they gotta remove the bad books from the library before we get hurt. My mom’s worried that every time I come in here, Ms. Jones puts a spell on me. Mom washes my mouth out with soap on library days, to get rid of the demons.” Davy looks at his classmates, waving the gun in their direction. “It’s too late for you. The evil got inside you, already. Naomi too. I’m real sorry for you. But I can’t let the bad stuff spread around more. The devil’s got you all by the tail!”

Davy cocks the gun.

That sound, that particular click-thunk of sliding metal, sends shock waves through Charlotte, as if the sound alone were a bullet piercing her, cutting deep into whatever remained of tender, feeling flesh.

She’s back at Remington Elementary-Middle, her original self.

Once again, she reaches Colin’s desk and hands him the paper with a big red F at the top. 

Once again, she and Colin exchange a look, his eyes dark and empty. 

Once again, he rises slowly and reaches into the backpack slung across his chair, while she moves onto the next student. 

Once again, he calls her name. Charlotte Bradley. She turns. He fires a gun at her belly. It does not go off. He looks at the gun, slides the action mechanism again—click-thunk—and shifts his aim slightly to the right of Charlotte’s shoulder. He fires again. An earsplitting bang. Charlotte turns in time to see Susie Hamilton falling to the ground, blood spilling out from an enormous hole in her chest…

Davy is locked and loaded. A thousand scenarios whiz through Charlotte’s mind. A thousand ways for this to go. But no, there is only one way. Davy fires. Marc crumples to the ground. The children cry without making a sound.

Charlotte suddenly knows her why. All moments were leading to this moment.

Davy raises the gun again. Charlotte looks straight at him and fires her body. She knows who she is, what she has become. She is a weapon. The weapon, firing not cannonballs or lasers, as in her dreams, but a barrage of lethal pellets manufactured within her personal biological factory of destruction.

In that instant, a kick-back, an orgasmic release, shudders through her.

Davy drops like a small stone, blood blooming on his forehead, his thousand-yard stare intact.

The kids look at Davy, then at Charlotte.

“That was amazing, wasn’t it?” says the unfamiliar metallic voice. “You’re safe. I saved you. Go find the others and tell them they can come out now.”

The children move slowly, in unison, small steps toward the door.

Charlotte roars unexpectedly. Her body shudders mightily, as if she were shedding an afterbirth. Then a surge, a surge, builds up inside, she needs to discharge again, only bigger this time…

This is unexpected…the aftermath is shifting…

This is the point of no return.

“Run!” She screams at the children, who awaken from their spell and bolt.

Old Charlotte realizes she must get out of school as fast as possible. New Charlotte feels invincible, ready to wage bloody hell, to rid the world of all the Colins and Davys, the curdled innocents corrupted by their elders, none of whom would escape her wrath. 

She opens the window and jumps, landing solidly on unbreakable limbs. Runs and runs toward open land, away from people. No longer Gregor Samsa trapped at home with an indifferent family, she is the reincarnation of Frankenstein’s monster, heading to a barren, icy land where a different kind of death awaits her, not the funeral pyre with its implied finality of ashes, but a living death where the urge to destroy overwhelms the urge to save. Where retribution is the only justice and salvation ceases to exist. 

And where Charlotte Bradley will have an eternity to contemplate the mysterious forces at work that turned her into the very thing that had wounded her most.

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by Katherine Shehadeh

If you’re reading this, I want to say that I’m sorry. I wish I could’ve done more to help you. To say something that you don’t already know about the value of your freedom or how quickly it slips away would be impossible, but I need you to know that wherever I am now, I’ll support you, always. 

You’re probably wondering why of all places in the universe I chose Silwad, a small village in Palestine to make my escape to. If I said it was the rolling hillside, salted with sandstone-block homes for miles and millennia-old rocks jutting out from the dry, bushy terrain or the occasional donkey standing beside the neatly-packed dirt roads, I would be lying. Though I must say these are equally inviting. To be honest, I didn’t know anything of the outside world except for those brief moments when I’d accompany the Machine on the Encounters. Instead, I made the decision to leave home based solely on the last Encounter with Amir. 

Before I get to Amir, I should probably come clean about who I am and where I came from. My name isn’t Nasser, or at least it wasn’t before I came here. We don’t have names where I come from. We’ve no need for them anymore, I guess. I know it’s helpful for you people to assign names to people and I like the idea of having an identity of my own, so for now you can call me Nasser. 

For those who knew the real Nasser, I didn’t mean to take anyone’s identity, and I won’t pretend to think I have half the potential that he did, but just know he was already gone by the time I got here. I did what I had to do to keep us both alive. Let me just start at the beginning. 

See, until a few months ago I was living a normal life as what some would call an “alien.” This isn’t my preferred term, since I’ve come to understand it is used by certain groups of people against certain other groups of people here. And I should explain that I’m not a Martian either—I’m not from Mars. Not that I have anything against it, but it’s not my home. I’m from Mercury. 

Mercury, a topographically rocky planet much like your moon, is nicer than you’d think, and we want to keep it that way. That’s how the idea of the Encounters began. The Council, which was originally made up of our elders, decided that all efforts should be channeled towards thwarting space exploration in our direction. I know what you’re thinking. We’ve seen Mercury and there’s no life there. Wrong. There isn’t life as you know it, which frankly isn’t saying much. Back to the Council. The elders decided that in order to buy time before the space trips from Earth and inevitable colonization, we needed to “scare the shit out of them.” Seriously, you should have seen the papers: 

Z087BZLUL C93PPE ZHR CM WZL LU ZHQP Z Z922002WPUL 230XXUL!

Which translates to OPERATION SCARE THE SHIT OUT OF THEM A RESOUNDING SUCCESS!
Named after the inevitable result of the Encounters, Operation STSOOT started with occasional nighttime abductions. Usually it’d involve simple things, like putting our faces up real close to people as they awakened in our ships just to scare them, stuff like that, before placing them back onto the Earth. Some of us even got to flex our surgical skills, but then something changed. The evolution of technology soon eclipsed that of other life, relegating us to the peripheries. We were no longer the drivers of doing, of change, but the ones left to aid the Machines in their ultimate tasks. Even our participation in the abductions became more or less perfunctory when the Machines took over. Now that I’ve been to Earth, I know you see it starting here too. 

It begins with something simple, a tool to help you do your job, something that feels freeing: the steam engine, cotton gin. . . . Next thing you know, the position’s been automated, and you have to find some other way to commodify yourself. The Council eventually resigned itself into an AI-run body, like everything else until everyone became some version of support staff, all working at the behest of the Machines. My role as a surgeon devolved into something of an observer and occasional mechanic, at times servicing and always serving the Machines. 

Can you even imagine it? Being a shapeless, aqueous blob—the life that you apparently don’t recognize on your planet—and cosplaying in what you people define as a recognizable alien uniform, your mass forced into limb shapes for a bunch of would-be conquerors and you don’t even get the opportunity to implant an undetectable tracker, much less insert a probe or two. No, after the Machine takeover, my role—like the rest—was reduced to observing and being present in case the Machine needed some kind of maintenance. Night after night of this monotony does something to a Mercurian, and I began to long for a time when life meant something. That’s when I encountered Amir. 

It started off like any other nightshift in Operation STSOOT. I zipped myself into a greyish latex suit, forcing my otherwise shapeless body into the mold of human-like limbs with long, narrow fingers. Two big black eyes and a small, closed mouth that were all otherwise nonfunctional, meant to disguise our true forms from the humans we’d abduct. The Machine did all the technical work, as they do now. Being under-seen by the best mechanic in all of Mercury, the encounter was proceeding as expected, but something happened. 

Amir, the human we picked up that night, was not like any of the others. We found him in a field, crouched behind a tuft of bushes, not tucked away in his bed like most of the others. But that’s not what made him different. What stood out was his reaction to being taken. Sometimes the people we abducted would pass out in fear, others would scream their heads off or try to fight back, but Amir did not. He looked square into my non-eyes, studying the contours of my uniform as if he knew it was all for show and cracked a smile. I knew right then that I needed to understand the origins of that smile.

When Amir was being lowered back onto the Earth, I removed my uniform, camouflaging myself with the surroundings, and quickly dripped down onto the rocky terrain. Under the limited light of a crescent moon, I saw a badly beaten boy lying on the ground. A hundred or so yards away an army green jeep was parked, with what appeared to be three teenage soldiers standing by. If I had to recount their conversation, it went something like this: 

“What should we do with him?”, asked one of the soldiers. 

“Leave it. No one will know it was us. Maybe he’ll wake up in the morning with a headache, maybe he won’t wake up at all,” suggested another.

“Why don’t we just tell the truth,” said the third soldier, the others looking at him as if he was the alien. “He tried to ram us with his car, so we followed him. When he ran away, he hit his head on one of these rocks. You know, like the last one we brought to the jail.” 

All three of them laughed, signaling agreement with the plan. 

Their faces must have been as shocked as the people we’d pick up for the Encounters when they went back for the boy, and nothing was there. I would have loved to stay and see for myself, but it was my chance to settle into my new human skin. 

Once I slipped into Nasser’s body, I was able to repair the damage that the soldiers had done. Using my skill as a surgeon, I repaired his punctured spleen, his internal bleeding, his broken eye sockets, everything. His body was fixed from the inside out. I’d like the Council to see if the Machines could do that. 

Healthy as ever, I crawled off the roadside and into the bushes where we’d left Amir. Having missed the bulk of the beating, he was relieved but not too surprised to see me—well, not me but his brother, Nasser, now animated by me. We used the cover of night to our advantage, allowing us to run home before anyone else could see us. 

The next day I was excited to see what human life was like and wondered what I’d do with my newfound freedom. Um Amir made us some kind of mixture of potatoes and eggs, in addition to fresh figs and other fruit from the orchard behind our house. We had hummus topped with pieces of meat that mom drizzled with olive oil fresh pressed from the olive trees in town. 

We then got dressed and headed to school in Ramallah. An impressive city, especially in comparison to the size and relative lack of urbanization in the nearby towns, to which the journey, likely only a few miles, took us just under an hour. Amir said the direct route was closed by the soldiers, so we had to take the long way. I didn’t mind, as I was just getting to really see the details of this planet for the first time. 

Aside from the train of cars built up ahead and behind us, what I remember most were the rolling hills. Dancing over the curvature of the Earth, they extended as far as the human eye could see. Reminding me of home, I think of them most days now. 

As we pulled up to what I now know as the checkpoint, Amir looked to me as a soldier approached each side of our car. A sort of small office appeared some 20 yards or so off in the distance. A few soldiers, all strapped with machine guns and the same olive-green uniform with leather combat boots, were standing around inside. I noticed the cameras pointing down overhead in various directions. 

“Come on, ya hamar,” said Amir, pointing to the glove compartment. “Get our papers.” 

Not sure what to do, I opened the glove box and grabbed the little green booklets. Amir, now visibly annoyed, tore them from my hand and rolled down the window. He passed them to the soldiers, who, also appearing annoyed, looked closely at the writing, then at us, then at the writing again before handing the documents back and allowing us to pass. 

Giving the booklets back for me to stow away, Amir shook his head. “Man, what is wrong with you today?”

“Nothing, just a little tired,” I said, hoping not to raise too much suspicion from my older brother. It’s funny to me now that I said this because Mercurians don’t actually replenish ourselves through sleep. 

We pressed on to school, where I just tried my best to keep quiet so as not to draw attention to myself. I was still trying to figure out this place, and who I was supposed to be in it. Amir, naturally, was the opposite. A carefree soul who liked to joke and laugh with his friends, he was much different than the humans we were told were coming to invade our planet. I just knew that Nasser looked up to him.  

In the coming months I spent the days trying to become the person I thought Nasser was and the nights learning more about my new home, wondering how I could help. As far as I could tell, Nasser was a doting little brother, a just above-average student, and a young man who was still learning to navigate the world, given the many complications that began to bear down on me with each new discovery. Between the presence of soldiers, the system of checkpoints, and the almost constant surveillance, I wonder if he had the strength of his older brother by the time of his passing. 

One night after settling into our beds, before gearing up for another long night spent reading, writing, and admiring the state of the moon, I asked Amir what he wanted to be when he grew up. 

“President of all of Palestine,” he said, miming the shape of a rainbow with his hand, the smirk I’d grown to love on his face. “Now go to sleep habibi so you can dream about voting for me.” Looking back, I think he was only half kidding. 

That night, while I was out on the stone-tiled veranda overlooking the town and inspecting what I now believe was a waxing gibbous moon, I noticed a couple of army jeeps in the distance. As they neared the town, I wondered what they could want at this time of night when we’d normally be plucking unsuspecting humans from their beds. When it became clear they were en route to our home, I quietly slipped back into my bed, not wanting to disturb Amir or alert anyone else to my nighttime activities. 

That was the last time I saw my brother.  The soldiers forced open the gate to our home, appearing at once in our doorway and pushing their way upstairs to our room. While one of them rifled through the dresser drawers, leaving a trail of unfolded clothes, video games, and comic books that we must not have looked at since we were kids, the soldiers said they were looking for me. 

“You just come in here, break the door down, destroy our home,” mom protested. “Now you want to take my son! He hasn’t done anything!” 

Whatever she said, it didn’t matter. They forced my hands closed, tightly zip-tying my wrists together. Dragging me by my hands, they fastened a red bandana over my eyes before marching me out to the street and into their military jeep. 

When my eyes were finally uncovered, I found myself in what I learned was an “administrative detention” center—a fancy name for a jail. I was surrounded by other kids like me. Many didn’t know why they were there either or when they would be allowed to go home. They told me about the profiles that the military keeps on all of us. Not just us at the jail—everyone. I thought back to my homeland, what it was like to be watched by a web of Machines, and I realized they must have seen me.

Now that I realize the soldiers know what I did, I might as well get it out in the open so they can’t twist the story once I’m gone. See, the afternoon before I was abducted, I was walking to get a snack, and because I was sick of having to take the long way for no reason, I decided to take a shortcut through the field by the settlement fence. Maybe I got too close, but I heard some buzzing and looked up to see a drone with some kind of shooting contraption attached to it. I got my phone out of my pocket and took a picture, so I could compare it with the ones in the article about automated weapons and surveillance systems that I was reading about. I shoved the phone back into my pocket and quickly made my way home without thinking of who may be watching. As I walked, I thought about what had happened on my planet, how once the Machines no longer needed the cooperation of living beings, they totally controlled us. 

They tried to get me to confess, not to that specifically, but to trying to overthrow the State, to terrorism, to more things than you can ever imagine. They even knew about that night by the road when I supposedly tried to ram them with the car. They said I was a fugitive of the State. When I refuse to give them the confession they want, the soldiers force me into a room by myself. Sometimes it’s just for the night, other times it feels it could be months, years, eternity. Who knows. I’ve spent more time alone in a windowless box than even I know. The room itself is frigid, the floor hard, but the worst part of all is the helplessness, and so I’ve decided it’s time for me to go. 

After they bring my dinner tonight, they won’t be around to check again until morning. I am going to tear myself open, slipping out of this body and under the crack of the door until I reach safety. By the time they find Nasser, I’ll be long gone. I don’t want you to be sad or to think your dreams aren’t worthwhile. They are, and they’re bigger than saving your country—it’s saving your planet. I want to help, but I can’t do that here, waiting for a release that may never come. Goodbye for now. 

***

The car ride home from the jail, otherwise silent to this point, becomes increasingly heavier with the solemn reality that Nasser is really gone. Closing the notebook and quietly tucking it under the stack of Nasser’s jailhouse belongings, Amir looks up, pressing his lips together in something just shy of a smile. 

“What is it?” asks the boys’ father.

“You know what they say happens when they put you in solitary for years,” says Amir, tears now welling into the upturned corners of his lips. “People just lose it and end up saying all kinds of crazy stuff.” 

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by Kathryn A Dettmer

There have been three or four defenestrations in the city of Prague, depending on who you believe, and the people of Prague have been throwing other people out of the window since 1419. The first three were in protest and set off either a religious war or a religious peace. The fourth, if you did not believe the Communist government’s claim of auto defenestration as a method of suicide, and many did not but kept it to themselves for their own safety, was of Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, the son of the pre-war president. This defenestration happened as the Communists were consolidating power, and it seemed to shut down protest for a long time in its wake.

I only learned about the defenestration of Masaryk after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when we all learned so many things we had never known before. Inspired by some of my friends, who had learned that they were actually Jewish, hidden first under the Nazis and then under the Communists to keep them safe, or that they had uncles and cousins living in Sweden, because the uncle had managed to escape, I decided to ask my own mother some questions about our past. My father had been a doctor at the Army Hospital in Prague, and perhaps I was hoping to learn that he had not cooperated with the Communists because he wanted to, but because he had to. He had died in the spring before the Velvet Revolution, planting potatoes he would not live to see dug up. The problem is that one does not know how a conversation like this will go and I really did not want to upset my mother, who still seemed dazed, like time and history had been accelerated and she just could not get her footing in this new era. I put it off. I waited for my moment.

I came home to spend New Years with her, in our apartment in Prague, to see in the year 1991. We drank champagne and watched fairy tales on television. The next morning, I surprised my mother, who was standing in the window at the end of the kitchen table, holding her cigarette, which was more ash than anything else by now, between her pointer and middle fingers, picking at her lower lip with her thumbnail. She looked pensive and still. This was not her regular attitude of bristling business, developed over years of being a mother and a nurse. The cold air was picking up strands of her faded blond hair done in a style unchanged since the 60s, her pale blue eyes unfocused and far away. I saw the opening that I had been waiting for, “What are you thinking about, Maminko?”

“I thought that after Communism fell and those bastards cleared out, not that I really believed that it was possible after it had gone on so long, but after it fell, that the world would be in technicolor, like in the movies, but look at it,” she gestured out the window with her cigarette, “Still grey. Everything has changed and yet nothing looks different.”

Looking out of the window, I saw what she saw the shabby ice-covered street, snow that was darkening with the pollution in the air after it had been shoveled from the sidewalk, a grey building, identical to the one I grew up in across the street. A tram passed by. It was in need of a good cleaning to remove the soot and salt from its red sides.

I decided to ask her about a mystery from my childhood, from twenty years ago, a funny story, to try to amuse her and shake her gloomy mood. “So, Mami, when Petr was here, he reminded me of a strange thing that happened when we were kids.” Petr was my brother and a bit older than me. He had asked me if I remembered the incident in the same way. My mother turned to ask what I was talking about.

I told her our version of the story, “Maybe I was 8, so Petr was about 10. We had just finished dinner, all of us sitting at the table, and you brought out dessert. Neither Petr nor I could have any. We were on punishment, Petr for his grades, and me probably because I had gotten my socks dirty again, from jumping in a puddle. You announced that it was a special cake, something we had not eaten in a long time, and you had gotten lucky to be able to buy the ingredients at the store. I think maybe it was blueberry. I don’t know.”

My mother interjected here, “It had gooseberries in it.”

I continued, “Then Tati said that he was not going to eat it, that he did not like it and he did not eat it. This happened again the next night. You put the cake on the table, and Petr, who was off punishment, also refused to eat the cake. If his father would not eat it, neither would he. I would have eaten it, but I was still on punishment. You sat at the table and we watched you eat it. Tati asked if there was not any other dessert, and you said no. This would be the only dessert until it was gone. Tati said that if you put the cake on the table the next night, he would throw it out of the window.”

“The next night, the cake appeared after dinner and was set on the table. Tati picked it up, opened the window, and dumped the cake from the plate. I remember us all shocked into laughing, laughing until the doorbell rang. For some reason, we all stopped laughing, maybe because of the way both you and Tati looked horrified.”

“That was fear,” my mother said.

“Tati opened the door and Aunt Nadezda stood on the doorstep. You know, Peter and I , and all of the children really, used to hide from Aunt Nadezda so she could not tell on us, if we were outside playing when we should have been inside doing our homework.”

“Mami, she was covered in cake. There were pieces stuck in her hair and I remember rather than thinking it was funny, I was scared. She was furious and marched into the apartment, announcing that someone had thrown cake on her as she was walking in the building. I remember Tati trying to calm her down and saying that surely whoever threw the cake had not known she was below them, that it had likely been a mistake, that she had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is the only time I ever remember you and Tati angry with each other.”

“It was not our last fight, just the last one we ever had aloud. Make some tea, put some rum in it and I will tell you the rest of the story.” After we settled down at the table, my mother, blowing the steam off of her cup, began to talk slowly, weighing her words, “First, you need to know that you and Petr were on punishment because we were afraid that your aunt would tell the Party that we were too lax with you. I wanted him to go easier on you, but he was afraid. Your father had gotten Nadezda a job as a cleaner at the hospital, her husband worked as the furnace stoker. Your father thought that it would be good to have some family here in Prague, because we both worked, just in case we needed help with you children. He used his pull at the hospital to arrange for them to live in this building, two floors above us, to bring them from the village to the city where there was more work, a brighter future. He was happy to do this for his big sister who looked out for him when he was a child, telling him tales of the magic of Prague and how one day they would live in the city together. What he did not know, what he did not want to know, was that he was letting a viper into our nest.”

“While your father was in Prague at university, becoming a doctor, joining the army, meeting me, your Aunt Nadezda met that brute, Standa, married him and together they joined the Party. By the time they arrived, in Prague, they resented the lifestyle we had as bourgeois, while their labor, their honest labor, was not rewarded as well. They rose in the ranks of the Party here in Prague, and the more power they had, the more careful we had to be. If you got the socks of your Pioneer uniform dirty by jumping in a puddle, which you should have had the right to do as a child, she said that we were disrespecting the uniform and therefore not respecting the nternational Socialist movement. If your brother’s grades slipped, she said with sarcasm that he would be fine because we could use our pull to still get him into high school, taking the spot from another child from a good family, violating the fairness of the whole socialist system. People thought like this and other people, like us, were afraid of the people who thought like this. By the time that your father threw the cake out the window, neither your aunt nor your uncle still worked at the hospital, they had become functionaries of the Party and they ruled this apartment block with fists of iron, reporting people who lacked loyalty to the Party or respect for our Soviet brothers. In fact, Nadezda had good reason to believe that someone would target her for reporting them, even if it was just with a cake.”

“When you father threw the cake out of the window, it was out of frustration with me and with her, with the situation we found ourselves in. If he had known his sister was under the window, he would have been too afraid to do what he did, but he lost his head, did not think and he just threw it. At first, we all laughed, I think from surprise. Throwing the cake out of the window broke the tension that had been there for days, and it felt good, until your aunt rang the doorbell. We shushed you before your father answered the door, but you were used to that, no sense in letting people know we were happy, in case they got suspicious. She blew into the apartment, still covered in cake, screaming that it was a plot against her and see how people resisted the Party, that someone in the building did this to show their disdain for Socialism. Nadezda scared you so much that you started to cry. Petr’s eyes were like saucers.  When she saw your expressions, she read them as fear for her, not of her, and then she told you not to worry, that she would catch who did this and have them sent to the coal mines, that the doctors and nurses in this building thought they were better than she was, too good for the Party, but the Party would show them.”

“We lived in fear for months after the official investigation was launched, but Nadezda told them it could not be us, we were loyal to her and by extension to the Party. People in the building looked at us differently. Some of them were forced to leave their jobs, having confessed, when questioned, to other things entirely. When the authorities spoke to your father, he told them that he could not imagine who could have wasted a perfectly good cake like that, with gooseberries, the kind of cake that reminds one of the village where one grew up, his favorite kind of cake. They nodded their heads and agreed, and eventually it died down when your aunt and uncle moved to a better apartment,” and then her story was finished, her eyes shining, but her tears not falling.

I said, “But I still do not understand why Tati threw the cake out of the window. Why did he do something so dangerous.”

“Oh, that is an easy question to answer. Your father hated gooseberries. When he was a little boy, after the war when there was not much food to be had, he went to gather them one morning, and gorged himself, putting more in his stomach than in the bucket. For two days, he was sick as a dog. His older sister continued to make him eat them, and when we started going out, he told me that when he was successful he would never eat them again. I was angry about the punishment of my children because of his sister and so I made him a gooseberry cake, knowing he would refuse to eat it,” and at this she smiled a little sadly.

“Mami, Petr and I would have been more careful when we were children, if we had known that we were putting you in danger,” I whispered.

She sighed, and began clearing away the tea things, “You children were not who put us in danger. It was the adults around you. Your aunt and uncle are gone now, and your father, he too is gone now. It is over.”

This was the first and last time my mother ever spoke to me about this incident, or anything else that was not in the present or occasionally the future. I do not think that she was the only one who chose not to speak about the past. Those days were dark and their stories were likely full of small everyday defenestrations that no one will remember as time goes on. At least there are the historic ones to remind people and I for one, will always believe that Masaryk was heped out of his high narrow bathroom window, by the people around him. 

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