VOICES EXCERPTS
In the Shadows They Hide
“Why are you so afraid of the dark?” Sarah asked. She stood across the room, near the door that separated us from the rest of the world. Beyond the door was the hallway that led to the stairs that went down to where the foyer and hall split off into several rooms. Right then, it was just her and I in the house, me, the fourteen-year-old boy who had never been in a room alone with a girl who wasn’t my mother or sister, and she, the girl two years my senior, her low cut shirt showing more breasts than I had ever seen, even in my dreams.
“I’m not afraid of the dark,” I said, nervously glancing down at my dirty sneakers. When I looked back up, a smile had spread across her face, showing hints of teeth and signs of mischief. To her right was a light brown dresser. Two stuffed teddy bears side-by-side sharing an ice cream cone, sat in its center. Directly behind her was the door. To her left … to her left was what had me fixated. The light switch was the color of sand and less than a foot from her left elbow.
“Come on, Spencer,” she said, and gave a giggle. “Everyone knows you’re afraid of the dark.”
She was going to test that theory. I could see it in her green eyes, hear it in her drippingly sweet voice, feel it in the sweat beading along my forehead. My stomach groaned, rolled and knotted up. It tugged on the muscles of my groin, shriveled my nuts to raisins and sent electric pulses throughout my body like tiny shockwaves dancing along my nerves.
“It’s not the dark I’m afraid of,” I said, my voice a weak whisper. I cleared my throat and repeated, “It’s not the dark I’m afraid of.”
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Chet and Kay’s Not So Marvelous Adventure
They meant to leave much earlier than mid-afternoon when they finally got on the road. It was only a couple of hours to Kay’s parents’ cabin getaway just off Highway 378, but the weather had soured, slipping from the low forties in the morning to just above freezing by lunchtime. Clouds slunk in from the west; a storm threatening to hamper the drive, and maybe the entire weekend.
The first snow flurries fell shortly before two in the afternoon. Chet sat their bags, filled with clothes and necessities on the ground, and looked to the gray sky. “It wasn’t supposed to snow this weekend.”
Snow. In South Carolina. A once in every ten or fifteen-year event came early, by eight or ten years, Chet guessed.
“Is it really snowing?” Kay asked from the front door.
“A little, at least for now,” Chet said.
Kay stepped onto the porch, her hands out in front of her as if she was about to worship or sing praises. Her brown eyes grew wide, her face stretched with a smile normally reserved for children when the white stuff fell from the sky. “It is snowing,” she all but yelled.
“Do you still want to go to the cabin?”
“Yeah,” Kay said, stretching it out, her head twitching as if to say duh.
Chet nodded, though his heart was no longer into the trip, not if it was going to rain or snow all the way there. What if they got stuck on the side of the road or at the cabin? What if there was no power? Then what would they do? He shook his head and tried to brush away Mr. Worrywart.
“You’re not thinking about bailing on me, are you?” Kay asked. She had approached him and now stood only an arm’s length away.
“No. I was just thinking.”
“About?” Again Kay let the word stretch from her tongue.
“Our safety. That’s all.”
“We’ll be okay. I promise.”
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The Scarring
On the bed lay the drunken man, his eyes wide and bloodshot. They darted from side to side. His mouth opened and closed like a fish out of water, but he only managed a few strangled croaks. His arms and legs were bound to the bedposts with ropes. He was as naked as the day he came into the world.
“Do you hate?”
“Yes.”
###
The first scar came at the age of eleven, courtesy of an angry father and a bottle of whiskey. He had ducked when the old man threw the bottle. It shattered against the wall, slivers of glass spraying back at him, along with the remainder of the caramel-colored liquid.
He probably wouldn’t have been scarred if only small pieces of glass had pricked his skin. If not for the old man’s follow-up to the bottle toss, he would have been just fine. But the old man chased the broken glass like a beer at a drinking party, and the smack to the back of the head was unseen. He—Nothing was his name—went sprawling backward, hands out behind him, a heavy sting on the side of his face. A gash appeared from mid-forearm to elbow when he landed among the shattered glass.
Nothing bled. He cried, and as he did so, his father wailed on him, telling him to “clam it up, boy, or I’ll clam it up for you.”
Mom stitched him up with a sewing needle and thread as thick as fishing line. Nothing wasn’t sure which was worse, the initial slice of skin by glass or the constant poke of the needle and tug of thread.
The skin puckered over time, leaving a pink welt of flesh that grew as he grew, never shrinking, and a constant reminder …
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Claire, The Movie
Her hands shook. She hated when her hands shook.
From her cushiony seat with all the stars surrounding her, Claire’s nerves danced along her skin. Her mouth had grown dry, and the butterflies in her stomach were the size of rabbits, and they thumped at her insides with their large feet.
She glanced to her left. Was that George Clooney? She would swoon if he walked up and talked to her. Not likely to happen, even though she was a young actress up for an Oscar. Johnny Depp passed by only a few feet away, his hair floppy and unkempt, his suit not really a suit at all, but a purple dress coat and dark slacks.
Claire took a deep breath, still not believing where she was and how she got there. She pinched her forearm and winced with the slight pain.
“Don’t do that, Claire,” her father said from her right. She looked at him. He was clean-shaven—a rarity. Jack Edgecomb liked his whiskers, even if his wife didn’t. Claire hated them. His brown eyes were shadowed by his forehead and the dim lights of the theater, but she didn’t need to see them to know what they looked like, to know the hard squint and knitted brows.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m nervous, and I keep thinking this is a dream.”
“It’s not,” Jack said. “We’ve made the big time.” He paused. “Just don’t blow it for us.”
We? Us? She said nothing, but pondered those two words. After a minute, she realized maybe he was right. Maybe this was a ‘we’ moment. He did play a significant role in her acting career, as short as it was, and they were at the Oscars—the Oscars! —hobnobbing with the big names in the business.
“Daddy,” she said, her voice a shaky whisper.
He stared off, not paying much attention to her. In the distance, three women were walking toward them, their tops dipped in low V’s, their dresses hugging their hips. A smile creased Jack’s face.
“Daddy,” she repeated …
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Black Storms
I’m not so sure about this whole end of the world thing. All those post rapture parties and looting and all the trash talk that went on about it. I’m not going to lie and say I wasn’t intrigued by it—I think that’s the right word at least. It’s not the first time someone went and predicted the end of the world and all. None of those other folks had anything solid to back up their beliefs. I ain’t so sure this guy did either, but at least he didn’t try to poison anyone with the red Kool-aid.
May 21, 2011. That’s the date he set forth. Starting with a massive earthquake, the world would be in ruins, and all those who were good Christians were going on up into Heaven, their physical bodies left behind for the spiritual ones they would claim. He even gave us a time. Six p.m. Eastern. I wondered a little about that. No, not the earthquakes and the rapture and all. Okay, maybe I did wonder a bit about all of that, too. But, really, I wondered about the time. This guy said he knew the exact time. If you think about it, that’s kind of scary. Kind of like a death sentence for the world and six-oh-clock was the time the switch would be thrown. My question is simple; who had the clock that would read the right time? If it were six-oh-two at my house, it very well could have been five-fifty-nine in someone else’s. The clock in Momma’s room was set seven minutes fast. Was her six p.m. the time the earthquakes were to hit and end the world or was it someone else’s? Was it six in the evening in Australia when it would happen? If so, it wouldn’t be six here in my neck of the woods.
I didn’t rightly know, and I don’t think anyone else did either. Including the religious radio guy claiming all this.
I live down here in the south in a little town where there are no stoplights, and people can still park on the street without feeding a meter all their hard-earned coins. We all know each other, and we all look out for one another. It’s the way things ought to be: one big family caring about one another, even if a couple of them folks weren’t liked too much to start with …
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Anymore
We’ll be back together again one day.
***
“It’s time, B.”
“I know.”
“Let’s go.”
“I’m not ready, H.”
“You never will be.”
They sat in his car—a beat up Toyota, the red flaking off in places—in the parking lot that led to the small town’s Riverwalk. Day was giving way to dusk. In another hour or so the sun would be down and about an hour later, the moon would start its nightly ritual of rising high.
It’s amazing how deserted this place can be in the winter, but in the summer …
His thoughts were cut off by her hand taking his. When he looked at her, B had tears in her blue eyes. His heart sank.
“Come on, B. You can do this. I know you can.”
“I can’t.” She looked away from him and out the window. A man and a little boy walked passed her door. The boy wore a ball cap that was too big for his small head. It was cocked to one side, the local university’s logo clearly visible. The man held the boy’s hand in one of his. A leash was in the other hand, a dog tugging on it as if saying, faster, faster, faster.
H touched her arm. Her skin was clammy, as if it were spilling tears right along with her eyes.
“We can go,” he said, dropped his hand from her arm, and put the key in the ignition. The motor turned over, but H didn’t put it in gear. Instead, he watched five people not much younger than he and B walk by them—two boys three girls, all wearing bathing suits and carrying inner tubes. He couldn’t hear them, but he could see them clearly. One of the boys said something, and the other four laughed …
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Crisp Sounds
When it’s cold sounds are crisp.
Dave’s dad told him that when he was a kid. They had been staring out the window as the snow fell outside. It was a rare occurrence, so watching it in the middle of the night was both exciting and calming for Dave (exciting because he wanted so bad to throw on his warmest clothes and go play in it, and calming because, from inside the warm house, it looked peaceful outside).
“You notice how quiet it is, Son?” Dad asked, his hand on Dave’s—Davey back then—shoulder.
Davey listened. Other than the wood crackling in the fireplace there were no other sounds to be heard. He nodded, “Yeah, it is, isn’t it?”
“When it’s cold sounds are crisp. They are either not there or very loud and distinct.”
At the time he had no clue what his father meant. But now, as he sat behind a tree in a neighborhood he had never been to, he had a feeling he knew.
Before we get to that, let’s go back to the night before.
He woke to the sound of men talking. They weren’t very far away, maybe even just a few feet, at the mouth of the alley. Cardboard and trash bags comprised the bed he lay on. A ratty old teddy bear was his pillow. He was behind a dumpster in the alley between Brewster’s Bar and the little Italian eatery, Mia’s. It protected him from the wind tunnel of the main street thirty or so feet from him.
Dave didn’t move when he heard the voices. Another man, far wiser than he, and one who had been on the streets much longer, once told him something important about being homeless. ‘At night stay as quiet as you can once you find a place to lay your head. If anyone hears you they will do one of three things: arrest you and throw you in the pen for a day or two, run you off and take your spot, or kill you and take your spot.’ So, Dave, having remembered what the old buzzard said, stayed as still and quiet as he could …
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Numbers
He’s out there, beyond the door of rusting metal on the outside and dried gore on the inside. He calls.
“Open the door, Dane. You can’t stay in there forever.”
On the other side of the room, in the corner of a doorless closet, Dane shrugs, her arms wrapped around bruised, bare knees, and the voices—the voices that are in there with her—laugh and whisper sweet destruction. She wants to put her hands over her ears, but fear keeps her from doing so.
“Dane, I’m coming in.”
“Not!” she yells but knows he won’t understand what she means.
Not? Not what?
Sweat beads along her brow, and Dane looks from side to side, her head twitching all the while.
“Dane?”
Her name is four letters. Four-letter words are bad, not like three or five or seven or even nineteen. Those are odd numbers and odd numbers are safe. Even numbers, those are different.
He calls her name again and she cringes.
The doorknob turns.
Dane tries to shrink deeper into a closet filled with only her.
A skirt lies on the floor, tattered and blood-stained. Its owner was thirty-eight and her name was six letters long: Aubrey. A double whammy. She didn’t understand the laws of the numbers, didn’t see the way the demons licked their lips each time she said an even-lettered word, each time she stressed Dane’s name in her speech.
On the floor, in the center of the room, a pair of sunglasses, twin mirrored lenses, reflect a double image of the skull lying near them, skin and hair still attached to the crown. He wore a suit, and his name was Steven, six letters. Forty-four years old. A double whammy. The sunglasses didn’t belong to him. The skull did …
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To Bleed
I am pain. To know me is to feel me. To feel me is to hurt. To hurt is to bleed. To bleed is to live …
***
Kimberly sits naked in the center of the crumbling house. Flickering candles encircle her. She clutches a knife in both hands. The blade touches the floor—a splintered hardwood.
The house groans, its roof sagging. Dry rot has set in on several spots in the floor. Brown patches of mold cling to the ceiling. The walls, miraculously, are not damaged with holes. Only Time’s wicked finger has caused buckles near the ceiling that push outward in places. Images, offered up by many others, line the room from corner to corner, intertwining with each other; visages move and swirl, as if breathing. Prophets clutch tight to Bibles, graffiti gangsters hold old school boom boxes, music notes spilling out in whites, blues, yellows, and oranges; a knight in dull armor sits on a hobby horse, its stick drawn with a splintered end, and an angel with black wings, a white shock of hair and blue eyes.
Outside, rain pours, lightning flashes and thunder bellows. Wind batters the ancient house, racing through empty windows and forcing a cool draft through the halls and beneath the door of the room she is in. Her hair stirs as a puff of wind blows through the room. Somewhere someone is calling, but the voice is too far off for her to care, for her to listen to the pleas of a distrustful lover.
I am pain. To know me is to feel me …
“I feel nothing,” she whispers. “I want to feel again.”
She lifts the knife, its blade glistening yellow/orange in the candles’ dancing flames. A distorted reflection of herself looks back at her from it.
Feel me …
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Not Like You
“There is evil in those who do nothing,” Pastor Michaels said from the pulpit. He waved his Bible over his head, his gray peppered brown hair neatly cut, suit wrinkle free. “Those slothy people who do only for themselves, and sometimes not even that much—they are the devil’s tools. They get under the skin of hard workers, causing the sins of gossip and jealousy, causing anger and frustration to the righteous. Oh, yes, there is evil in the lazy …”
Brian’s ten-year-old mind took in the sermon, soaked up every word as if Pastor Michaels talked directly to him. He focused on the yelling man behind the pulpit, the rest of the world shut out, the church, his brother and sister’s constant wiggling, the grandparents on either side of the trio of siblings, the choir behind the preacher and the constant cough from Mrs. Hagler in the second row, her seventy-three-year-old hack more like a dog barking than an old woman clearing her throat and chest of phlegm.
A nudge and a hollow voice brought him from his trance. “You ready to go?” Granddaddy asked. He stood, slightly hunched over, and waited for Brian to respond.
“Yes, Granddaddy,” he said, his voice still holding childish wonder in it, even through several years of neglect, of little food and filthy diapers, unchanged for two and three days at a time, blood from the rash dribbling along the floor when he crawled or walked through garbage and roaches. Six years in the past, the effects of being alone for hours, sometimes days, still lingered.
At home, he sat on the bottom of the bunk beds he shared with his little brother, who was only a baby when they came to live with Grandmomma and Granddaddy. The room was crowded with a long dresser, a television sitting on top of it, and a tall shelf unit where toys and excess clothing went. A mirror sat opposite Brian, hanging on the closet door …
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The Sad Woes of the Trash Man
Most stories begin the way they end. Most folk don’t know that.
###
I have me a little story to tell, but ain’t had nobody to tell it to. Sometimes it eats a man up, right down to his gut and causes him to bleed on the inside. That ain’t no good, and it ain’t no way to be. Keeping secrets, especially big ones like the one I have, will ruin a person.
So I need to tell someone. I ain’t got no wife. Well, I had one, but it just didn’t work out. I ain’t got no kids, not a one at all; I ain’t one of them men who had three or four or five kids, all by different women. I ain’t really had but one long term relationship—seven years it lasted, right up until I went to jail. I don’t blame her for divorcing me. I was a criminal, a piddly old car thief who got caught on the first try. And she was a nice woman with a nice family, and she ain’t needed me no how anyways. I reckon her pappy was all right with that—back in them days it was frowned upon for a white girl to marry herself a man of color, and my skin is just the right shade of mahogany to make her pappy and mammy, and a whole bunch of others, right mad.
I can see the old buzzard now, sitting in his recliner. Mind you, he ain’t had no problem sitting in a chair the same color as me, but let me get up next to his little girl and the color sure did matter then. And he probably sat there with Michelle across from him on the couch, her blue eyes full of tear and the skin all puffed up around them, probably rimmed red from crying and rubbing, crying and rubbing. Her hair was probably pulled back in a loose ponytail—ahh how I loved her ponytails, but that be another story for another time …
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The White
It wasn’t quite dark when Danny arrived at the ballpark, the stomping grounds from his childhood that remained as much in his adult years. His kids, almost grown and out of the house, were out and about, no longer hanging out at the field where they first learned the game, their dad as the coach for a few of those years. No, the boys, Danny Jr.—or Danny the Younger, as his ex-wife was inclined to say—and David Allan, were out with their girlfriends, probably at the movies or down by the Old State Road dock where the kids were known to make out.
The boys moved on to high school ball when their time was done in the Under Fourteens, but their dad stayed put at the ballpark where he grew up and then coached as he had since his boys were in Tee Ball.
Not this season. No, this season, Danny the Elder took off to enjoy Danny the Younger’s senior year. It had been a good one, and the playoffs were just around the corner. He reckoned he would also miss the next season for David Allen’s final year of high school ball. But with no games for his boys that Friday night he went back, like a moth to the light, always returning, always drawn to the diamond.
He parked on the far right, furthest from the fields—something he had done since the first game he coached when Danny Jr. was only four years old. A moment of nostalgia swept over him as he thought about it. He suddenly realized it had been thirteen years.
“Long time ago, old boy,” he said and got out of the car. “A lot’s changed since then.”
He made his way across the parking lot. Gravel and rocks crunched under foot. He stopped to let a car go by. The driver honked, gave a wave.
“What’s up, Coach?” James Hardison yelled out the window. He was a year older than Danny Jr. but had started a year late. They had played together right up through the Under Fourteens and separated only because they were zoned for different high schools. James was bound for the majors in a couple years …
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Apartment 306 and Poor Jenny Harris
It’s a dirty place, where we live. The walls might have been white once, but now they’re a dingy gray color. Down the hall before the elbow that leads you to the elevators, there’s an odd brown handprint. It’s been there a long time—since before Jake or I were ever thought of, according to Dad. You’d think someone would have washed it off by now, but not here, not in this rat hole at the edge of the city in a neighborhood called Crack Alley.
Crack Alley? That’s a welcoming name to give a neighborhood. I guess it fits. You can go to any street corner around here and get a decent supply of drugs on the cheap. The pushers sell it at a discounted rate just so they can make a buck—everyone here is too poor to buy any of the good stuff that makes your head swoon in ecstasy and your body tingle all over as if you just had the best sex of your life. Nope, we get the dollar dosage around here, and that ain’t enough for some of these folks. One time, I saw Mrs. Harris from apartment 311 offer up her nine-year-old daughter to one of the dealers—a skinny dark guy by the name of Terd—for a hit of some of the good stuff. The deal went down, and poor Jenny was slung over one of Terd’s thugs’ shoulder and carried off kicking and screaming and clawing. I’m sure they had a grand time with her. Little Jenny was never the same.
The plumbing only works half the time in our apartment. Dad says there is a clog somewhere in the system. I think there is too much stuff being flushed, and the pipes can’t handle most of it. Dad says the landlady is too cheap and lazy to have everything fixed properly. We try to go to the bathroom a little later than normal just so we don’t have to pump the toilet. I hate the plunger, and I hate having to clean the floor when the toilet backs up and overflows. I’m sure the folks in 204 below us don’t care much for it either.
The heat works when it wants to, and there are no central air units like in some of those fancy apartments in other towns. The window unit we have barely works …
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A Memory Best Left Alone
The gloom of the cemetery fit her mood. Stephanie walked along the familiar red brick path, tombstones on either side of her. Trees dotted the graveyard, Mother Nature’s tall, thick guardians of the dead. The wind rustled leaves, pulled them from their limbs and sent them fluttering along the dying grass.
Stephanie wrapped her arms around her chest, hugged herself tight. Fingernails dug into the skin just above the elbows, leaving in their wake slivers of pain that lingered for a second or two before fading away. She found a spot by the crumbling wall on the west side of the cemetery. Cracks lined a deteriorated head stone leaning a few feet from the wall. Most of the engraving had long since faded, but she could read the first name: Susanna.
She sat on the soft grass, her knees to her chest, arms around her legs. Stephanie cried …
… and she remembered.
​
###
“Stephanie, how do you feel today?” Doctor Clayburn asked as he pushed his glasses up on his nose.
“The same,” she whispered, not looking at him.
“The same? The same as what?”
“The same as always.”
“The same as always?” he asked. He shifted in his chair and crossed one leg over the other. “But, you weren’t always like this, right?”
She looked at the white walls. Four lights pointed from the middle of the ceiling toward the corners of the room, leaving the center of it in a gray shadow. She shrugged, shifting her eyes to the red carpet, which was not bright, nor dull.
“Why a red carpet?” she asked and looked up at Clayburn. Their eyes met momentarily.
His brows lifted. “Why not?”
Just like a shrink to answer a question with a question.
“It looks like blood.”
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Bonus Story: Afflicted
Pryor jerked awake, a scream tearing from his throat. Darkness surrounded him. He rubbed his eyes. Behind tired lids he saw the remnants of a dream, the images fading until they were nothing.
He pulled the lamp chord. Darkness ran for the corners as light flooded the room. Pryor sat up the best he could, his arms shaking beneath him. Pain raced up his spine and into the back of his skull. His hands quivered as he reached for the pills on the lamp stand. He dry swallowed two of them and laid his head back on the pillow.
After several minutes, and with great effort, he pushed himself up and propped his back against the headboard. He pulled the sheets away. A road map of scars dotted his legs, ran down into his white socks and up into his boxers. An indention sat where his left kneecap used to be, reminded him …
Screeching tires; the sound of metal on metal and screams—his. Smoke and the strong scent of gasoline; heat wrapped itself around him. Then nothing. No feeling, no sounds, or smells. Only weightlessness.
“Stupid drunk,” Pryor said and punched the mattress.
The hospital stay lasted two months. Surgeries—a seemingly endless amount—did nothing for the almost unbearable pain in his legs and back. Shattered bone and shredded ligaments made the procedures to repair his knee more difficult than the doctors would have liked. Though they had replaced the knee with a hinge, the indention remained. He could walk, but not without a cane.
Pryor eased his legs over the edge of the bed. Tears soothed his tired eyes and blurred his vision. He reached for his cane, tipped off balance and fell forward. He landed hard on the cold floor, and a bolt of pain streaked from his left ankle up into his hip. It traveled along his spine and into his head where yellow orbs danced in his vision. His scream gave way to crying …