The Terrorist of Shangri-La 

After working so hard to find contentment, I'm scared now it'll bore me. Have I been aimed at the wrong thing all along?

What I think, lately, is that I should keep marching toward it, as planned, but pack a bag full of dynamite so I can explode it once I get there: I'll be the terrorist of Shangri-La.

We're hiking the Himalayas, me and the sherpa who keeps talking, incessantly, about Elizabeth Bennett. Pierre—the sherpa's name is Pierre, a transplant from Picardy—rattles on with his theory: that Elizabeth Bennett was the first modernist seeker. Her campaign to challenge the mores of her day, and her slow and reluctant seduction of Darcy, were the precursors to this very expedition that he and I are mounting across this glacier toward the lost city of Shangri-La.

"What about Thoreau?" I ask, not because I care for Thoreau, but just devil's advocate.

Pierre makes a poo-poo face in that French way. "Thoreau was a pompous ass-sitter."

We walk on, and he begins humming some sordid love song. Just my luck, halfway around the world, to get a sentimental pseudo-intellectual French sherpa instead of the normal kind.

His humming echoes back off the icy walls above us and I start thinking, not idly, about avalanches. I knew a man in the Alps, a former scout for the Nazis if you'll believe it, who retired under a fake name to Geneva, and we met there on a ski trip. The man had taken up a late-in-life interest in the study of avalanches—the interannual variability of seasonal snowpacks, their effect on the cryospheric reservoirs, that sort of thing. He knew avalanches like Eskimos know snow. But he got to know one a little too well, when it collapsed on top of him and buried him alive, avenging Jews everywhere.

"Just shut up about Liz Bennett already. It's a girl's book and I'm tired of hearing about it. You know how things get done in this world, Pierre? What two things power all of civilization? Pride and prejudice. So just shut up about Liz Bennett."

We climb a while in silence, watching the clouds of a coming storm. There's a thing the wind does when it hits the mountain ridge above the treelike: it whistles. It stirs up the snow in swirls, and they rise off the crest like ghosts. The whole mountain seems haunted.

"Are we there yet?" I ask, a childish sort of peace offering mainly to break the silence. Pierre looks at the ridge and then back at me. "I have a confession," he says in that froggy accent. "I don't know how to get to Shangri-La."

The wind howls and the ghosts dance. We're at 18,000 feet, give or take, with carefully rationed supplies of food, water, fuel, and oxygen, portioned out based on the precise distance between our base camp in Nepal and a destination that Pierre now claims may or may not exist.

Where are we going, then?

My mouth starts watering for the panang curry we ate in Kathmandu, after our plane landed, maybe the last best meal I'll ever have.

"In my defense," he says sheepishly, "no one knows how to get to Shangri-La. I needed your money. For my daughter's hairlip. It's very treatable with surgery. She'll live a normal life now, thanks to you."

I consider jamming a stick of dynamite down Pierre's throat, but then I remember the avalanches. "I'm glad she'll be alright," I tell him.

Then I set off up the mountain.

"Where are you going?" he calls out after me.

"Same as before. I'm going to Shangri-La. It can't be far now."

My crampons in the ice are like a raspy heartbeat. The wind picks up and I can barely make out Pierre's tiny French voice. "There's nothing up there!"

But he's wrong. There is something up there, over the ridge, and I'm going to find it. When I do, I've got a bag full of dynamite and a decision to make.

"I'm not gonna write you a love song," I sing, as I disappear into the snow. 

Brotherhood 

If you could hear sound in space, you'd hear the groaning of metal, creaking, popping, uneasy expanding at its bolts and seams each time the Sun's unbridled heat makes its way around its temporary daily eclipse of the Earth, the metal beginning to stretch and bend as its temperature changes, suddenly, from arid, frigid, airless cold to its opposite: searing burning irradiated heat. If you could hear sound in space, you might hear radiation screaming. Energy makes sound, but not in space. Space is silent.

There's a small crew of astronauts inside the metal can called Bratstvo, "Brotherhood." The craft is Russian, but there are no Russians inside. They take six-month shifts, and on this shift, there's a Swede and an Australian and an American, and for the fist time in Bratsvo's four-year history, the official language inside the can is English.

Though the three of them have only been in space a few weeks, they've lived together, more or less, for the past six years, every day training, sometimes in the old converted Voyenno-Vozdushnye Sily base in St. Petersburg they use for mission control, sometimes in a deep-sea tank in the Swedish waters of the Baltic Sea. The astronauts were chosen partly for their complementary skills — "A scientist, a doctor, and an engineer walk into a space station…" — but mostly because they can stand one other's company without driving each other nuts. They're a quiet, kind, hard-working set.

They each have their own duties: a mix of maintenance, science experiments, and plain old chores. They keep a chart, like roommates, that tells them whose turn it is to cook, whose turn it is to clean, and though they've come to understand the Swede is their most gifted microwave chef, and the Aussie is a bit of mess, at least for an astronaut, still, they share these chores as equally as they can.

Today is different. They've put aside their tasks, at least the dispensable ones, so they can watch CNN and Al Jazeera. You can watch CNN and Al Jazeera from space. You can watch almost all television from space. The astronauts have a radio channel open to mission control, and they're receiving incoming calls from their various governments, too. But they can't get a clear understanding of what's happening. Pakistan struck first, or maybe India did, though there are reports that the initial launch may have come from somewhere in the South China Sea — from a submarine. What they know for sure, what's indisputable, what they've seen with their own eyes, is there were twenty-four blasts across Asia, mostly focused in the Indian Subcontinent, but a few spreading into China. There were ten sudden minutes of nuclear explosions lighting up a corner of the globe, and they saw it all.

Nuclear explosions, as you might guess, look beautiful from space.

The clouds of dust that rose up into the stratosphere changed very quickly the picture of Earth from space. The familiar blue orb was suddenly watercolor smudged, burnt sienna.

Every nation and every person on Earth is on high alert, except maybe a remote few who don't yet know what's happening. But the remotest people of all, drifting 350 kilometers above the planet aboard the Bratstvo, see it more clearly than anyone. The three astronauts watch it all unfold on their monitors and in their window, while cries of alarm go up on the news stations: it's happening. The United States, then China, then Russia, while making public pleas for calm, launch their stockpiles into the sky. Each one strikes, they claim, preemptively, at the other. The astronauts behold the longest hour mankind has ever made. From space, it looks like fireworks, like a switchboard, like a blanket crackling with static electricity in the dark, like the sparking neurons of a giant brain.

And then it's quiet. There is no radio. There is no CNN. There is no Al Jazeera. A blanket of rust-colored air rises up and blocks the view from space, and while those below suffer their fear and mortality, some instantly and some slowly, these three in space watch from above, no way out, no way down, nowhere to go, counting the days before starvation, before power failure, before orbital tugs pull them back toward the home they'll never see again. 

Hoopty Time Machine 

(This story will appear in Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine in October 2013.)

Oddfellows Local Volunteer Fire Brigade, pt. 2 

What happened next was this:

Those boys, the Oddfellows, were out in the woods. It was summertime, and as soon as school let out, the three of them went into the woods and settled into that cabin of theirs, and used it as a kind of home base. They said they were up there fishing, and for the most part, they weren't lying. They legitimately loved fishing, or at least the two of them, Will and Phil, did, and Bailey tolerated it well enough, standing next to the other two in the river, wearing matching waders and talking almost nonstop about anything, about his theories, theories mostly about conspiracies and government cover-ups and why the news was reported one way when facts and circumstances made it obvious to anyone who'd look that the reality of things must be quite different.

Will and Phil weren't really the political sort, but Bailey's rants amused them and they'd play along and laugh good-naturedly, and gradually, over time, they probably came around to believe some of his theories, themselves, even if they didn't know they did. His talking didn't bother them in the slightest, as long as he didn't talk too loudly and scare off the fish.

Before you go thinking it's strange a few boys who weren't old enough to drive would be allowed to spend days on end, alone and holed up in the middle of the forest, you have to consider the boys' home lives. Phil was the youngest of seven kids, three brothers and three sisters, and every one of them was the sort of person you'd meet and think, "That person must have had good parenting as a kid." Phil's family were all good people, and they were all raised to treat everyone else like good people, and Phil, growing up in that sort of environment from the moment he was born, well, no one worried much about Phil. He got away from the house for a little privacy, and by his measure, the constant company of his two friends was a lot more private than the constant company of his six siblings; and with all the coming and going in that house, sometimes his parents didn't even realize he'd been gone. But they wouldn't have worried, overly, even if they did notice.

Will was a sweet kid, too, but at the other end of the spectrum, parenting-wise. He'd never known his dad, and his mom took more and more solace from the bottle, and sometimes worse than the bottle. Sometimes she'd worry when she discovered Will missing, but more often, she felt relief: one fewer thing for her to worry about. From Will's perspective, that cabin in the woods was his home, and his mom's place was just somewhere he visited from time to time, to wash dishes and replace the empty rolls of toilet paper.

Bailey was a separate story, as you might expect. No one tried harder to understand Bailey than Bailey's parents did. But Bailey defied most understanding. Even his birth was something of a mystery: his small, blonde, soft-spoken parents had birthed a dark-haired, fourteen-pound bawler. The hospital held him for two days' observation just to try and puzzle out why the kid was crying. Then, suddenly as he'd started, he quieted down, and, at least according to his parents, never cried again.

Instead, it seemed, Bailey internalized. When other babies were already forming sentences, Bailey sat silent, watching, almost brooding behind his black curly hair. His parents took him to a doctor, worried his development was somehow stunted. The doctor offered reassuring words but was at a loss to explain what might be going on inside Bailey's brain. Then, in the kitchen one day, without so much as clearing his throat, Bailey spoke his first words, in an almost-baritone voice: "I don't think I want anymore peas today." His mother was so shocked, she dropped a glass pitcher of iced tea onto the floor, shattering it to pieces.

Most of Bailey's early years were disappeared into books—children's books, naturally, but very quickly soon after, he began devouring texts of all shapes and sizes. His favorites had dragons or spaceships and scantily clad women on their covers, though he also enjoyed horror stories quite a lot. The ones he liked best involved some kind of overt or covert demonic possession—human behavior that couldn't be explained without some nod to the supernatural. Bailey didn't believe or disbelieve in demons; he just knew he enjoyed the thrill of reading about them.

His parents didn't understand their son's interests, but they tried to be open-minded about them. They took him on a family outing each payday to a bookstore, and let him pick out two new titles each visit, so that, by the time Bailey entered middle school, his shelves and his imagination were both overflowing with fantastical and terrible ideas.

No one knew what precipitated the day that Bailey returned from school, piled his entire collection of books in the backyard, doused it in kerosene, and lit it on fire, watching the flames slowly lick over each page before reducing them to small black leaves that floated, each one, skyward. The process was slow and captivating. Gasoline might have consumed the whole pile of them in a roaring blaze, but his choice of kerosene had a decidedly more hypnotic effect: each page took on a blue glow and shrank, its words still intact, before turning suddenly black and taking to the sky. Bailey had finally discovered something that fascinated him as much as the books themselves: fire. His parents stopped taking him to the bookstore after that day. He kept reading, but he had to get his fill from the library; and there weren't any extra kerosene tanks in the garage anymore, either.

Bailey wasn't the social misfit you might expect: the boy held his own. He was surprisingly able with his peer group; he just didn't particularly seem to care about most of them. He had a respectable outside shot that made him a threat in any game of H-O-R-S-E, and he was better than almost anyone at a pool table. He was also one of the first boys in school with a gun, an heirloom squirrel rifle that Bailey's father had received from his father at the age of thirteen, which made him more adamant and less reasonable than usual about passing the gun onto Bailey at the same age. Bailey pretended to listen avidly to his father's safety instructions before marching off, the very next day, to school, with the small rifle tucked in a duffel bag to show his friends.

The three Oddfellows were an unlikely pair, which is to say, Phil and Will probably would have been friends no matter what, and the two of them fell in with Bailey partly because the boy had a strange charisma, and partly because he lived nearby. Phil's dad, one of the town's last remaining actual lumberjacks, started bringing the other two boys on the hunting and fishing trips he took with Phil into the woods, and this quickly became the thing the three boys had in common, regardless of their other differences. They spent enough time together that their particular differences didn't do much to drive them apart: Phil's growing interest in football and in girls; Will's almost obsessive absorption in fishing generally, then fly-fishing in particular, or the nagging idea he had to fix up his old snowmobile and then ride it across Canada, a not-so-secret quest, the other boys knew, to find his dad; or Bailey, Bailey's interest in Bailey things, which is to say in almost anything, the more arcane the interesting—politics, chemistry, medieval history—the subject changed from week to week, but the intensity Bailey brought to each subject never changed. He was curious, and the subject of his curiosities was in itself a curiosity; but this did nothing to dissuade the other boys, who regularly, loyally, and earnestly called Bailey their friend; and even though he'd never once said the word back to them, at least not to their faces, they trusted that Bailey felt the same, or at least felt something similar, in that Bailey sort of way.

The cabin, which Bailey had dubbed the Oddfellow's Local Volunteer Fire Brigade, was a three-mile hike from the nearest fire road and about ten miles outside of town, so often, when the boys went there, they stayed at least overnight and sometimes longer. The water from the stream was drinkable, though Phil's mom insisted they boil it or treat it with iodine. They'd load their backpacks with apples and peanut butter and chocolate, a flashlight and a lantern and some kerosene taken from Phil's, not Bailey's, garage; books and comic books and old Playboys and some puzzle games; ammunition for Bailey's .22; Will's compass and collection of topo maps and rods and hand-tied flies; Phil's first aid kit and hatchet and 17-tool Swiss Army knife, and a walkie talkie that his dad had him bring along in case of emergencies; and Bailey's assortment of matches, lighters, flares, firestarters, and flares. They'd pile, all three of them, onto the back of Phil's dirt bike, ride precariously up the fire road to the trailhead, and then walk the overgrown path up the mountain, the rest of the way.

The boys did their best to keep the exact location of the cabin a secret, intentionally covering their trail with brush every time they came or went. Each of them had been there so often they could find it, maybe literally, in the dark; and, far as they knew, no one else had set foot in the place ever since the original homesteader abandoned it all those years back. They were, intentionally, as isolated as they knew how to be—and that's why what they saw that day made no sense to them whatsoever:

The man, stumbling, confused, dirty, thirsty, delirious, sun-burned, bruised, lost in the woods, and wearing a black suit and tie and dress shoes nicer than any of the three boys had ever seen, outside of magazines. The man staggered toward them, out of the trees, and then collapsed at their feet, unconscious or maybe dead.

Oddfellows Local Volunteer Fire Brigade 

This was not an expedition that was bound for success. Anyone could see that, plain and simple, except for those of us who were on it.

When the Bigfoot craze hit our town, and the tourists started arriving in bunches, Dad saw it as an opportunity, a chance to make good after a long succession of making not-so-good. A fresh start. Almost overnight, with no particular field of expertise whatsoever, Dad opened up a "Bigfoot Safari," offering guided tours into the wilderness, promising "real Bigfoots" [sic] and (here's the kicker) "satisfaction guaranteed."

Still, it was good to see Dad excited about something.

The whole plan hung on the Oddfellows, three boys from high school who spent all their free time in the woods, fishing, smoking pot, and lighting things on fire. The Oddfellows' ringleader was a heavyset bandito named Bailey, who'd spent really all of his walking-around life lighting and then extinguishing small controlled fires. That Bailey was a full-fledged pyromaniac, no one doubted; but this habit had also given him an enormous amount of experience with fire, including putting out fire, and when Bailey was fifteen, he was recruited as the first junior member of our local fire brigade. He was on the scene for every major fire in town, anyway—even the ones he hadn't started—and the chief figured they might as well put him to use. 

It was while fighting a small wildfire in the forest that Bailey had come across the old cabin in the woods, abandoned years ago by a logger or prospector or homesteader or hermit, and he returned there later with his two friends, to fix it up—which mainly meant clearing out the bulk of trash and spiders and burrowing animals that had been nesting there, and installing a table and some chairs and a kerosene lantern. Who knows what they did up there. Anything along the gamut between penny ante poker and devil worship seemed plausible enough. From what I saw, mainly Bailey would set things on fire while the two other Oddfellows, Will and Phil, liked to go fishing.

But the three of them knew that part of the woods as well as anybody, and when Dad decided to go into business, his first move, after buying the truck, had been to enlist the services of the Oddfellows. They became his first-ever employees, though the scope of their responsibilities only became clear to the rest of us later.

We Watch 

This entry is not currently available.

Conestoga Wagon 

(This story appears in the February 2013 issue of DOGZPLOT.)

Bigfoot Inc. 

We packed our things into the truck and drove off in search of Bigfoot. 

The trip was a complete surprise. A few days earlier, Dad didn't believe in Bigfoot. In fact, a few days earlier, Dad didn't even have a truck. He dropped me off at school in his old VW and picked me up in a new 4x4. "New" in the Dad sense, not "new"in the "new" sense. 

The truck didn't have a new car smell. It had sort of an old Cheetos smell. 

I'm still not sure Dad believes in Bigfoot. But once he bought the truck, he really wanted to believe. And now he was financially invested. 

I guess it all started because of Mom's cookie business. 

Ever since my parents split up, Dad's been really competitive with Mom. It's understandable, since she was always calling him a loser. I mean, that's understandable, too, because he kind of is a loser. When this Bigfoot craze hit town, Dad did what he always does, which was laugh about it and make fun of the people who believed, and then fall asleep in front of the TV. But Mom, well, Mom's got a pretty good sense of humor about things. So when the town started to get a little Bigfoot crazy, she figured, why not have some fun with it? She started making footprint-shaped cookies and selling them to the local cafe. Then homemade fudge she called "Bigfoot Patties" and which the cafe started selling as "Bigpoops." Soon, she had a whole brand going: Bigfoot birthday cakes, gingerbread men shaped like Sasquatches with two red cinnamon eyes, that sort of thing.  Each day, she'd bake a plastic bigfoot into one of her cupcakes, and the cafe held a contest, a free latte to the person who could "find Sasquatch." She got me to start silk-screening t-shirts in the basement, and she even talked Grandma into hand-stitching Bigfoot sock puppets, and they were so popular at the cafe that some of the other shops in town started selling them, too. Mom was a hit. Mom was Bigfoot Inc. 

And it drove Dad nuts. One day, on his way home from work, he stopped by the cafe to get a cupcake, and he got so angry that he chewed the whole thing down in three big bites and almost choked on the plastic toy bigfoot. Dad won the "Find Sasquatch" contest that day, and it just made him feel like more of a loser. 

"That night," he told me later, "I looked into my heart and I understood what I had to do: I had to capitalize." He looked me in the eye to make his point: "This, son, is the American Dream." 

He bought the truck the next day and told me we were going for a camping trip, and to travel light, because we were going to be backpacking. He didn't tell me his real purpose in setting out into the mountains was to find Bigfoot — find Bigfoot, catch Bigfoot, return with Bigfoot, and become bigger than Bigfoot. 

His real purpose, I figured, in setting out into the mountains was to prove a point to Mom.

His real purpose, I figured out later, was to impress me, his only son, so I might finally see him as something other than a loser. 

And you can guess how well that turned out. 

Belly of the Whale 

(This story will appear in the Spring 2013 issue of Fractured West.)

Steamer 

My granddad lives with us now. We knew each other when I was younger, too, I guess. I don't remember it, but he does: he tells stories about when I was a baby, like a time he was changing my diaper and I peed on his face, or another time when he took me for a walk in my stroller, and got distracted by something, probably a girl, and my stroller got away from him, rolled down the street and through four lanes of traffic, before coming to rest right in the middle of a gaggle of nuns. "If any of you ladies ever has a change of heart about this convent business, you give me a call," Granddad told them with a wink, just like he winks whenever he tells the story to me.

"Where was this?" I ask him.

He shrugs. "Here, in town," even though there's nowhere in town with four lanes of traffic, even though there is no convent here in town.

"I can't remember," he says when I press him for details. That's his usual answer, and I believe him, because he can't remember much. Some days, he can't remember my name, and he cycles through all the other names from his life: the name of his son, my father; the names of each of his other sons; then the name of his wife, even though I'm a boy and he obviously knows it, claiming as he does to have changed my diaper. 

Some days, he doesn't speak much at all, just stares out the window, watching the squirrels squabble with the crows. "Donny," he calls to me, though I've never met a Donny. "Can you get me a whiskey?"

I return from the kitchen with a glass of apple juice, and he stares at the glass and then at me with the same sad disappointment. Maybe he suspects I'm putting one over on him, but can't remember for sure what drink he'd requested; or maybe he's sad that he's aged into the kind of man who drinks apple juice on the rocks, instead of bourbon. But he takes the glass without question or complaint. 

On the days he's clearer-headed, he'll tour me sometimes through the memories he does have. The ones he keeps clearest are all from when he was younger, and in the war, and these memories are so rich and terrifying, it's no wonder his head ran out of room for recording new ones. "We fell asleep each night in a jungle full of eyes. The enemy soldiers were fearsome and cruel but they were the least of our worries. One morning I woke up to find our lieutenant half-eaten by a python. Swallowed him head first and had worked his way, so far, up to his waist."

"How'd you know it was the lieutenant, then?"

Granddad eyes me to see if I'm sassing him. "His boots. The lieutenant was the only one in our squad who's boots weren't rotting off him."

Then, to prove his point, he shuffles into his closet and has me help him drag out the old steamer trunk inside. He throws the combination lock -- on some points, his memory is failsafe -- and pulls from the trunk a pair of vintage combat boots. "There," he says, tossing them to my feet. "There was no saving the lieutenant that day. But damned if I was going to let the snake eat his boots, too."

Granddad's stories don't always check out. I'm not even sure there are pythons in the South Pacific. 

"If they fit you, you can keep them. They were always too small for me."

The trunk is filled with memorabilia, mostly from the war -- flags and uniforms, badges and medals, maps, piles of old letters. That stuff is all fascinating, I guess. But all I ever want to see from the trunk are the piles of old handguns, disassembled rifles, hunting knives, rusty bayonets, a hollowed-out hand grenade -- a secret arsenal that Grandad keeps hidden inside his closet, governed by three simple rules:

1. My dad can never know anything about it;
2. The trunk and its contents are strictly off-limits to me except under the supervision of Granddad himself; and,
3. The entire trunk and all its contents will be mine whenever my granddad dies.

So far, I've learned the first two parts of the combination lock, and I think, today, I finally got a clean look at the third.

"The boots are a perfect fit," I say, already getting used to the way they look on my feet.

"Well then," he says, giving me a salute and then a wink, the same wink he gave to those nuns, or said he did, all those years ago.

Searching for Littlefoot 

No one ever goes in search of Littlefoot, whose tracks blend in, so he’s left alone, an undiscovered mystery. 

The Bigfoot Sighting of Emory Crane 

Before everything, before we were run out of town, before the rockslide and the heavy rains, before the forest fire, before the guns and the chainsaws, before the little girl went missing and before she was found, Emory Crane was up in the woods and he saw a bigfoot, or said he did. 

No one believed him, not least of all because he was Emory Crane.

Emory Crane's credibility problem preceded his bigfoot sighting by fifty-two years, which was one year shy of the duration of his entire life, owing to the time that his parents packed him into a baby basket and set him on the riverbank while fly-fishing salmon. When they looked up, their boy was gone, washing downstream across rocky rapids and waterfalls and finally coming to rest by the town's old sawmill, where little Emory was plucked out of the water by a young couple snuck off for a few moments' privacy. 

His parents told him this tale so often that he felt inordinate pressure, even as a boy, to live up to his Moses-like auspices. He grew up wanting nothing more than to lead his people to the Promised Land, but struggled to understand which people were his, exactly, and which land was the promised one: who and where to? 

Till the day of his bigfoot sighting, Emory Crane had shown no particular wit or talent for prophecy, though not for lack of trying: after years of poor luck at the lottery and some fairly extensive dabbling in the Tarot, Emory had settled himself into a job monitoring a weather station in the woods and then making reports to the local news, a modest sort of prophecy for which he proved to have some diligence, at least, if not accuracy. People forgave him: no weatherman seemed to have clear insight into the future, and why should Emory Crane be judged any differently than the rest of them, the circumstances of his baby basket beginnings notwithstanding?

In practice, the weather station required very little monitoring. It collected measurements and reported them back through the network to the weather service, just one set of data points on a vast grid of teeming information. The science of weather, be it what it is, tells us that looking at small things, closely, can't compare to looking at broad things, systematically: patterns are more important than points, and computers much more capable of processing the patterns than people ever were. No weatherman was needed, strictly, at the weather station. Maintaining the place meant mostly applying occasional oil and resetting the cable modem.

Still, Emory Crane liked jotting down the data into a hand-written journal, and comparing it, year on year, to the weather of days gone by. He liked almanacs. He liked watching the twirl of the anemometer. He liked the varieties of clouds. 

On this day, the sun shone through the wispy cirrostratus nebulosus such that Emory Crane predicted a medium-to-high chance of rain before evening, and it turned out he was right; but having stared so long toward the hazy sun, he couldn't quite make out the details of the tall, too tall, humanoid creature that stood in the clearing between the weather station and the edge of trees, stood, stock still, staring right back at Emory Crane and then suddenly dashing off to disappear into the forest.

"I know what I saw," he maintained later at the bar, though how could he? He was seven kinds of crazy and had been staring at the sun all afternoon, and there was no way he could have known what he saw. So everyone laughed and drank and turned it into the town joke, for a while, and would have forgotten it soon enough, except for what happened after that....

Smokejumper 

There’s a fire now up in the mountains and I’m thinking of volunteering to fight it. I have no training in the fighting of fires, and my presence among the actual firefighters would cause, I’m sure, more harm than good — would slow down their efforts, would put me or, worse, them, in mortal danger. But still I want to do this. I want to drive down to the ranger station tomorrow, with my hatchet and my spade and my best hiking boots and a rain coat, and volunteer to help. “Where’s the fire?” I’ll ask — though the answer is obvious, because there’s a pillar of smoke filling the horizon, and where there’s smoke there’s fire. “How can I help?” I’ll ask. “Do you have experience fighting forest fires?” the rangers will inquire. “I once tried to write a movie about smokejumpers” is my only answer. This way the rangers know who they’re dealing with: not a firefighter, true, but a serious person, at least — a person who writes movies, a person who knows the word “smokejumper” and knows that the word is relevant to the current situation. I won’t tell them that I abruptly stopped working on the script early in my research phase when I heard that Kristin Scott Thomas was starring in an as-yet-unreleased movie about smokejumpers. Kristin Scott Thomas is a fine actress, but she was also one of the dancers in the Prince movie Under the Cherry Moon, and thus she is obviously too short to be taken seriously as a smokejumper; and if this is an indication of the respect that Hollywood intends to pay the subject of smokejumping, then my time is better spent elsewhere. Though I later learned that Kristin Scott Thomas was not starring in this movie after all, but rather it was an actress named Brooke Burns, who was in forty-six episodes of Baywatch and also Titanic II, and in this movie she was playing a character named Kristin Scott, who wanted to become a smokejumper, like I do. Though I don’t have any skills in firefighting, I believe the real smokejumpers would appreciate my company on the mountain, on account of my extensive knowledge of movie trivia, for instance. Smokejumpers do death-defying work, and I’m sure they’d appreciate a little levity. I could also go on beer runs or water runs or whatever kinds of runs they need. I drive stick, it’s one of my “special skills,” and that’s bound to come in handy up on the mountain. So I figure I’ll set my alarm tomorrow and head to the ranger station and convince them to let me help. But I oversleep, and I figure anyway the ranger station is probably closed, because there is a fire, after all, and all hands are on deck, fighting it. It’s a serious business up there.  

Loose Change 

The boy stands in the living room, straddling a suitcase, wearing dusty sneakers, pants too short, and a worn hoodie.

In the next room, his father is running his hands through his still-unwashed hair and talking into his phone.

Well I can't, he says. No. What were you thinking? Fair, you want to talk about fair? After everything? No, that's —. No. He's not welcome here.

The man is talking too loudly. He thinks of the boy in the next room. Max? Can you hear me?

The boy shifts on his feet and clears his throat. He doesn't know what to answer.

Max, you're —. Make yourself comfortable. Have a seat.

The boy sits down on his suitcase.

I need to sort out some logistics with your mother.

Back into the phone, the man says her name, Maddie, but the line is dead. She's already hung up. She doesn't answer his return calls.

The boy sits now at the kitchen table. It's formica with the edge peeling up, and a stain shaped like a butterfly. There are loose coins scattered across it, pennies and nickels mostly, some Canadian, and they're hard to pick up because of the smoothness of the table and because of the metal lip that runs along its edge.

Why did your mom send you away? the man asks.

The boy doesn't speak. He hasn't spoken since he arrived. The boy has been asking himself the same question, of course, and he has some guesses at answers, but none he wants to share with the man.

You hungry? the man asks him. You want eggs? You want pasta?

This is where you live? the boy finally says.

Yeah, for now.

It's different than I pictured it.

How'd you picture it?

Bigger, I guess.

The man cracks an egg into a cold frying pan and puts it on the stove. The boy starts unlacing his boot but can't get the knot out. The lace broke while he was on the bus, and he tied it in a good tangle to keep it from slipping off, but now it's stuck on his foot till he can manage to unsnarl it.

I can help you with that, the dad offers.

No, I've got it, the boy says. But he hasn't got it. He bites his fingernails and now they're too short to grab onto the tied-tight knot. He picks away at it and then instead tugs at the boot to try and free his foot.

You're just making it worse, the dad says, watching on.

But now the egg is burning, and the dad says Oh shit oh fuck to no one in particular. He should have used oil and he should have used lower heat but he's so distracted by the boy. He reaches for the frying pan with his bare hand and burns himself a bit but moves the pan to one of the cold burners on the stove. He flaps his hand to cool it off while with the other hand he starts scraping at the lost egg with his fork. I've made a mess of it, he says to the boy.

That's OK, the boy says. He reaches into his suitcase and pulls out a peanut butter sandwich, mashed up inside a plastic bag.

Give me your foot, the dad says. He uses the tines of the fork to pick open the knot, and then tugs off the boot.

Your feet. The man wrinkles his nose. Stink.

Can I sleep a while? the boy asks.

Sure, the man says. Take the couch. No. I have to go to work. Why don't you take my bed, for now.

OK.

You'll be here when I get back?

The boy shrugs. There's nowhere else to go. 

The Kingdom of Frogs 

During the last week of her mother's life, we sat on the back porch listening to the frogs while they lurked and murmured around our lawn sprinklers. They sang while the sun set, and she and I sat in our matching Adirondack chairs, sipping beer and holding hands and listening.

"It's almost time," she said to me. 

"I know."

"It's for the best," she said, probably to herself. "Or it will be soon."

They weren't bullfrogs. They were small, skinny things, all legs and eyes. They were louder than their little bodies should have allowed, but in a pleasant way, a warm rumble that was comforting, at least to some people, at least sometimes.

While we sat, one of them hopped onto her foot, and stayed, staring up at her with its brown lidless eyes. She didn't flick it off, or even move, and the two of us watched the little frog, waiting like for some nod, some sign, to tell us that all of this—this horrible time during which her mother was no longer her mother but just a broken sick thing, turning to rubbish—that it was over, and she would move on, as we all do, in death, to join the frog, and the kingdom of frogs, a truly better place.

Guidance Counseling 

In high school, he'd flummoxed his guidance counsellor, Mrs. Marsh, who told him: "Theo, I don't know what to do with you. You're too talented."

"I'm too talented," Theo agreed wholeheartedly.

"Normally, I tell students to play to their strengths, but between you and me, we both know that what I really mean is, they don't have a lot of choices. Frankly, most of the students who come through my office are screwups."

"I'm no screwup," Theo nodded.

"You're getting offered so many prestigious academic and athletic scholarships. You realize one of these schools offered you a full ride to be on their football team, and they don't even have a football team? The easiest scholarship ever."

"But not one that would offer me chances to improve or to learn from my mistakes, if I ever make one."

"That's the spirit. Meanwhile, you've already been accepted to that accelerated MBA program, the first ever high school junior. I didn't even know you were applying to an MBA program."

"No, ma'am, neither did I. They just sent me the acceptance letter in the mail one afternoon."

"I didn't know they were allowed to do that. So, Theo, that leaves us in a weird place. Generally, I sit down with students and help them understand what their options are. Really that means I help them understand what their options aren't. Like, just before you came in—do you know that girl Sally Melbourne?"

"That scoliosis is really unfortunate, isn't it, Mrs. Marsh?"

"Did you know Sally Melbourne told me she wants to be a Broadway performer? Would you believe? She stuttered through our whole interview: 'I w-w-want to b-b-be an a— a—actress!' Do you understand how easy my job is most days, Theo?"

"I thought hers was an interesting interpretation of Our Town."

"In your case, son, I'm not going to try and tell you the things you can't do, because frankly, I can't think of any. So instead I'm going to ask you to think about this before we meet again: what do you want to do?"

"Thanks, Mrs. Marsh. I really do appreciate your time. I better run off to lacrosse practice now."

"Let's meet again next week, Theo. Close the door on your way out."

Renewal 

(This story will appear in Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine in October 2013.)

Headlines from Surrealist Newspaper 

Little girl, burrowing to China, arrives.

Woman raises house full of spiders.

Astronauts in space so long, Earth forgets about them.

Volcano appears overnight in small town.

Sad woman's face disfigured into permanent smile; everyone assumes she's happy.

Housewife buries herself alive for peace and quiet.

Lifeguard saves child from nightmare about drowning.

Man, looking for lost love, finds it in his attic.

Bride of Frankenstein 

During the sex scandal, the Bride of Frankenstein stood by her man, silent and strong.

---

Poseidon's Net 

(This story appears in the Spring 2013 issue of Rose & Thorn Journal.)

The Lost City 

The architect was busy drafting plans—measuring out smooth assured strokes till the building became clearer in her mind. It was different than other buildings: for each room above ground, there was another crawling underground, so the building sprawled higher, wider, and downward, too—a network of underground towers, spiral stairs, bridges. She was creating an underground city—not tunnels and caverns but a fully realized metropolis, such that excavating it later, hundreds of years from now, would reveal it as if it had once been above ground—the spires and cathedral tops would be the only hint, above ground, of what lay beneath.

She was building a lost city, from scratch.

---

 

The House of Doors 

Though the boy was scared and knew better than to enter the old house, his sister was curious and brazen and never did admit her fear (which made her a sometimes difficult playmate). "It looks like no one's been through this door in years!," and she charged off into the darkness. The boy followed reluctantly behind, hoping there wouldn't be too many cobwebs.

Instead of an empty house, they found an old man seated at a wooden table that he'd already set with three tall steaming mugs. "Well there you are," he smiled, not at all surprised to see them. "Would you like some hot chocolate?"

The boy blinked while his eyes adjusted. "Nobody drinks hot chocolate in the summertime." But his sister was already climbing into the high wooden chair toward the mug.

"Some people like hot chocolate in the summertime," the old man said. "In fact, if it's summertime here, that means it's wintertime somewhere else. I suppose everything is in fashion, somewhere."

The girl, who was often told at school that she was very unfashionable, got curious about these other places where unfashionable things were in fashion. She sniffed at her hot chocolate. "What's on top?" she asked. "Whipped cream?"

The old man chuckled. "It does look like whipped cream, doesn't it? On each cup of hot chocolate, I put a dollop of cumulus cloud, fresh from the sky. And this is very special chocolate, given to me by the ancient Aztecs. I travel a lot, and I like to bring back souvenirs."

The boy joined them at the table. "I've never seen an ancient Aztec."

"Of course not," said the girl, pushing up her glasses. "They're ancient. They all died a very long time ago."

The old man nodded. "But that doesn't mean you can't meet them."

"My name is Clarissa," the girl announced, suddenly aware of her manners. "And this is my brother Finley. He's shy."

"I'm not shy," said Finley. "I'm just cautious! Sorry we barged in your door. We thought this house was empty."

"Not at all. I was expecting you. My front door is always open to you. But if you're going to be a guest in my house, then I'm going to have to ask you to be more careful about charging through the other doors."

The children noticed then that the old man's little house was full of doors, but not the kind of doors that one finds in normal houses. The doors in the old man's house were all in the wrong places: some were in the middle of the wall; some were on the ceiling. There was a door set into the stairs and a door set into the sofa. There was even a big knob set into the kitchen table, and the girl realized suddenly that the table was a door. Some of the doors were square and some were round and some were wood and some were metal; some had elaborate handles and knockers and peepholes, and one had a big metal wheel that sealed it shut, and some were just normal unassuming doors. But the doors filled up the house, and they were all closed.

And a metal loop tied to the old man's waist held hundreds of keys that clattered and jangled whenever he moved.

The old man looked at his enormous watch, and stood up. "Please drink your hot chocolate. We have quite a day ahead of us, and I don't know when we'll have time for another snack."

 

The Labyrinth, Part 1 

There was a monster.

There was a horrible monster.

A long time ago, there was a horrible monster.

A long time ago, in a kingdom called Crete, there was a horrible monster.

A long time ago, in a kingdom called Crete, there was a horrible monster, half man and half bull.

A long time ago, in a kingdom called Crete, there was a horrible monster, half man and half bull, and the king had him imprisoned inside a deep maze, called the Labyrinth.

The monster was called The Minotaur.

But his name was Asterion.

A long time ago, in a kingdom called Crete, there was a Minotaur, and the king had him imprisoned inside a Labyrinth, where he wandered, hungry, savage, and alone.

Every year, the king required seven men and seven women to enter the Labyrinth, and none of them ever returned.

Every year, the king required seven men and seven women to enter the Labyrinth, where they almost certainly died.

Every year, the king decided, rather than kill the monster, to feed it seven innocent men and seven innocent women.

The monster's name was Asterion—which was also the name of the king's father.

So, this story is more complicated than it might at first appear....

The Architect 

We noticed it gradually at first. A few people here and there started talking about it. Then it caught on and everyone was noticing: somehow we'd all started to share the same dream.

We would drift off to sleep and enter a fantastic world, and somewhere in that world, everyone else was dreaming it too.

So our lives became split between two worlds: the world where we were awake and worked and kept our families, and the world where we lived while we slept, a world where we were able to start over and make fresh choices and try things anew.

It's easy to understand why people started spending so much time in the dream world, while their real lives slipped farther and farther out of mind. We invaded this new world like explorers: all of it was waiting to be discovered. It was exciting and it made us feel alive again.

And before long, people started to wonder about the one who had designed this world, and how it came that we all collectively entered it in our dreams. We called this person the Architect, and more even than we wanted to sleep, we wanted to find this person, and have all of our questions answered....