Ash Magazine, Issue Two, 2011
Copyright Josh Cook 2011
Lord Haywire
Publisher
Jenn Waterman
Editor
The Mystery of Statement by Adam Roberts
Art by Anna Palmer
Goat Show by Brett Cihon
Art by Patrick Logon
First Responder by Tony Gill
Jenny Gets a Beater Bike by Will Schmitz
Art by Devon Amato
Addiction by Tammie Painter
Art by Eartha Forest
Constellations by Nicholas Utke
Art by Allison Wilde
Boar and Sow by Andrew Dimitrov
Art by Nikole Klinkhammer
Edited by Colin Marshall
Revolution by Elizabeth J. Sparenberg
Art by JazzMinh Moore
Imaginary by Erin Kassidy
Art by Kayla Himmlerberger
Visit AshMagazine.net for news and how to submit stories and art.
The Mystery of a Statement
By Adam Roberts
Adam Roberts’ marvelous short story, The Mystery of a Statement, sits in front of you on your desk. Your teacher has finally realized its greatness and is teaching you to see it, too. He goes to ask a question about the story and you begin to give the “not me” body language, but your plan works in reverse and he aims his eyes in your direction. “Can you tell the class why the ending of Roberts’ story is especially interesting?” He laughs as he asks it in the exact wording from the story; some of your classmates chime in with less passion.
You begin to sweat because you haven’t read beyond the first sentence. Somehow, you muster up an answer. The class listens to your impromptu analysis and your teacher is even partially impressed by what you say, despite your clueless position. You feel strange because no matter what you say, your teacher nods and laughs. You assume it’s that typical “there’s no wrong answer” thing teachers are often far too involved in. Luckily, you were just the tool to get the discussion rolling. Your teacher discusses the technical aspects of the story (who is writing the story, how the second person is working, etc.), as any good teacher should, straying from the story’s plot and ambiguous ending. This is where the story loses many readers, but not you. You were lost from the beginning.
Once class ends, you rise with the rest of the students and make your way towards the door. On the way out your teacher gives you a weird glance and smiles, so you smile back, like the two of you are sharing a nice joke. He is growing to love teaching with the years, and Roberts’ story is a new and wonderful piece that gets some of the lazier students excited.
Your friend Tony is waiting outside the door and you are pleasantly surprised because you don’t have your cell phone on you. He is wearing his only pair of jeans and the striped shirt he wore the night before. The two of you walk to a new pizza place that you’ve seen on campus but have never thought to try; he has something important to tell you but he wants to wait until lunch.
Tony always says everything has an exact purpose, and that it’s just hard to pinpoint. Today he has concocted his philosophy into a simple word: SNID. He tells you it stands for, “Something Needing Infinite Dissection.”
“Everything’s a SNID,” he announces coolly as he toys with his thick beard as though he is some type of genius. You let his idea sit for a second. Before you can respond, he continues. “Love, hair color, microbrews, fate,” he rants on, “they’re all SNID’s, and no one can accomplish the ID part. You’d need infinite time, and even then you’d never catch the end of it.
You ask if the ID part relates to the self, the ego, superego, things like that.
“Sure,” Tony nonchalantly replies. “Everything relates to everything else when you get to the bottom of it.”
“But there’s no bottom,” you correct him, trying to fit into his crazy idea for the sake of conversation.
“Exactly! No top either, just middles.” His eyes light up as he qualifies your statement, but not because you’re finally getting it. It’s because he smells the pizza and sees the bright neon sign that just popped into view from behind the corner of a building.
You sit down at the first table and order a large pepperoni for the two of you. Once the waitress leaves, Tony tells you without hesitation, “I’m breaking up with my girlfriend.”
It’s obviously not a simple thing for him so you try not to act overly shocked. You know the topic will be a reoccurring one, but for now you just tell him it’s probably best. “She didn’t seem like the one for you,” you reason, “and everyone’s single these days, anyways.”
“True, you’re always single and happy,” he says and brushes it off like it’s no big deal and asks how your class was.
“Fine,” you reply. “We read this short story called, The Mystery of a Statement, it’s really good.” You choose to lie because Tony always gets on your case about having no motivation with school. He’s the scholastic robot and is able to keep up with any workload his professors may assign. When lying to him you feel closer to his level and it boosts your confidence in a rather unhealthy fashion.
He asks what’s so good about the story as the waitress brings over your meal. You both grab a slice and you take a big bite to delay your answer.
“The ending,” you say as you finish chewing your bite. The swallow is the kind from cartoons; right after a character lies or says something that might not go over well. Your Adam’s apple rises a few inches and hangs there for a couple seconds before plopping back down.
“What about it?” he pressures you like a professor.
“Oh it’s just extremely unique and open ended. You gotta read it, it’s only ten pages.” You avoid having to improvise an ending by putting the task of reading it on him. Unfortunately for you, Tony will buy it and read it soon and then you two will have to talk about it. When he asks if he can see your copy, you tell him you read it at the school bookstore because it was so short. You’ve gotten a little tense, lying to yourself through Tony. That feels sort of strange, doesn’t it? For knowing you so well, Tony really should be able to pick up on it. But you’re doing a great job.
You put the pressure back on Tony after finishing your slice, “So, your lady. What happened?”
“Just got bored, you know, fell out of it.” Tony’s body language says there’s more, so you pry it out, as any good friend would.
“And that’s it?”
“No,” he admits.
“I haven’t told her, she thinks everything’s fine.” He stops eating for a moment and looks out the window. “Man, I hate this,” he says after a big breath.
You dig in for another slice. In a way, you’re quite proud to not have a similar problem of your own. Tony gets up suddenly.
“I just gotta go do it now, it’s killing me,” he admits. He is visually less secure than his typical self as he stands there in front of you, so you let him go.
“I’ll get the check,” you yell as he leaves the restaurant, pointing out his carelessness. He looks back at you with a pale glance as he continues on his way. Money isn’t on his mind, and you know he’s good for it anyways. You forget to tell him about your phone, which is back at home, almost an hour away.
Your story basically ends there in the pizza place as Tony walks away, but there’s one more interesting thing to mention. About a half hour and almost a whole pizza to yourself later, you sit in the booth, too stuffed to move. You paid for it all, so you figured you should put a dent in it. A homeless lady with a tattered pink dress enters the restaurant with her eyes slowly opening and adjusting, like she’s just waking up. You assume
she’s on something because of the jittery manner in which she moves across the tiled floor. A grey ferret, which you took to be her hair, scurries down her face and into her cleavage. Her unkempt hair is revealed and looks and smells like a dead animal of a similar kind. She walks up to your table like a waitress and the ferret burrows down into her dress as if frightened by you.
You can’t help but watch its outline bounce around her stomach area as she violently points to the one remaining slice on your plate.
“Can’t finish it?” she asks, her arm fat still shaking from when she lifted her hand. A stench is flung in your direction when she tosses down the pointing arm and leaves your table to sit in one of her own.
You assumed she wanted your slice, but were too dumbfounded to offer it before she left to the booth in the corner furthest from you. You leave the restaurant almost as soon as she leaves your table, but you peer through the window towards her booth to see what she’s up to. An old homeless woman such as herself is rarely found dining casually. Her back is to you so you can watch without seeming creepy, as if that is prevalent by this point.
After about ten minutes pass, the waitress brings her a large pepperoni pizza and she eats the first slice as hectically as a homeless person might. You see the waitress collect money from the woman sooner than the standard procedure and this makes you smile because you were wondering about that but weren’t going to wait around much longer. Just as she finishes the slice and are about to leave, she gets up and shuffles from her booth to the one where you were sitting. You can see the ferret climbing back up to her cleavage to see what all the motion is about.
You hide behind a telephone pole, peeking your head out to watch her secretly. She doesn’t look outside though; her head is focused straight towards the one slice you couldn’t eat. She grasps it firmly in her fist, seemingly squeezing it, as she jitters back towards her booth. Upon sitting down, she replaces the missing piece of her pizza with yours and throws her arms in the air, the fat visibly shaking even through the window almost twenty feet away. While her hands are still in the air, she snaps her head back towards the window like a deer, as if she knew you were watching all along and she smiles. You can’t look away for a second, but you snap out of the daze once the ferret climbs out of her dress and perches on her left shoulder to stare back at you, too. You run from your spot behind the pole towards the bus stop a few blocks away. Tony could be anywhere by this point, but you really want to find him and relay the story. Oddly, you won’t have to.
Tony went directly to the school bookstore after leaving the pizza place. Some readers may be thinking, “If you just looked at your copy of Roberts’ story, you’d know where to find him!” Of course, that’s purely pathetic. These dominos have been toppling since the beginning of time. Maybe you’d run directly to the bookstore or perhaps stop at a payphone. It’s impossible to say what you’d do, that’s the funny thing with fate. You can’t not have done what you did.