***
Kelly shrieked in the passenger seat as Ron slammed into the sedan again and careened out of control.
The sedan spun through the median guardrail and flipped. Its roof drew sparks from the asphalt.
Ron narrowly escaped a ditch before skidding to an unsteady stop and jumping out.
“It’s him,” he screamed as an officer tackled him.
All eyes turned to the overturned car as its trunk popped open and a small girl bound in rope suddenly plopped out.
Day 2: Richard Godwin
Saturation Point
Richard Godwin
You feel it coming on before the sweat starts. It’s like the crescendo of some huge orgasmic melody, the violins pouring out those notes, the kettle drums making the walls vibrate. All those bodies, trapped, alone, sweating in the dark. The theatre of panic and mayhem began that. It went on from there. I watched them disintegrate, their arms and legs twitching in lurid frenzy. Gratification ran through our veins like a steady trickle of heroin.
They wanted the bodies. They were the final thing they used. Women and men were dragged from breakfast tables in their night clothes and injected with the machine. Normality’s reign, that dark lord of the factory of blood. The stimulations were grotesque, a pornography of the soul, the sleeping ally of the State.
Convulsions on films were played to us in the long tunnels that took us to our jobs. There we were routinely injected. They weighed our blood.
Wires monitored the females’ pleasure. They induced the erotic phasing of all senses. I watched them return from the labs, heads bent, their naked bodies obscene caricatures. They sat and masturbated, rocking on their haunches like lobotomy victims.
The men would be electric shocked to orgasm 9. They rode the dark tunnels exposing themselves at the priests who coordinated the religious efforts, preaching laboriously of the Utopia we had found, and the new god of pleasure, the only living being beyond man under the dying sun. Their faces were bloodless, they existed merely by steady voltage.
Deafening music was played beneath the blinding lights. Sunglasses were banned. An immediate prison term was given to anyone caught selling them. Our senses were violated by overload. There was no respite from the steady increase of unbearable pleasure. We were forced to eat their heavy, rich food.
We routinely dined on the fricasseed hearts of turtles, soaked in a semen enriched gravy made from the pounded shells of mollusks gathered from the Indian Ocean. The skins of shaved deer were wrapped about the tender loins of baby antelopes and fried in the eggs of parrots.
Vomiting was banned and punishable by watching your wife or husband performing in one of the films. They played them at every square in the gold town where the rulers hid behind the mirrors. Erotic acts invaded the night time, corrupting your sleep with sexual frenzy.
Mindlessness reigned in the erogenous fever. Then they began experimenting on their skins. They took them away to the garages. I wandered the empty roads looking for cars beneath the scarred and fractured sky. I heard the constant hissing of eggs in a burning skillet.
Then they tried the 10. They were taking people to the point. It was referred to as Nirvana, the ultimate. We were told they had achieved what all religions before them had failed to do, a living incarnation of the heaven we aspire to. We would be rigged with the new equipment and taken there in a state of bliss. Women were bathed in the milky liquid and men showered with the fluid they said was Manna.
They stood naked and greedy for the desecration by the State, the prelude to disintegration. I watched them ride the current to the final climax, lost in cataleptic divine visions in orgasmic burnout, a cosmic choir bellowing until they went deaf and their brains melted in pleasure’s agonised overload. Orgy’s concubines deranged now by the extremes of pleasure in a sensation seeking age, peeled the skin from their genitals with idiot grins in the dusk filled streets while the priests babbled. Bleeding knives twitched like fish in the dirty ground, as they ushered them into the ravenous maw that clutched at their bodies, glowing with the electric charge, shining in the violated apotheosis they sold to us as the divine womb.
They came for us and I took to the streets. I knew what the point did. I’d seen the wasteland beyond the town, the piles of empty skins. I’d heard the baying of dogs, the banned animal, their watchful, melancholic melody drowned out by the pleasure music.
I evaded their police and priests. I found the blind spots the mirrors created and stood in them, watching the implosion occur. The parade of bodies reminded me of an abattoir. They emptied them of fluids and organs. They rode them there on the erotic high. I dwelt in observation, incorporeal, outside the closed system.
Day 3: Donald Jacob Uitvlugt and J.J. Steinfeld
Late Freeze
Donald Jacob Uitvlugt
The gardener cursed as the weatherman said it again, but there was no denying what was up there on the map. There would be a hard freeze tonight. He hadn't expected one this late in April. He was going to have to hurry if he wanted to save the garden he had just planted.
His mind raced. He could deal with this. He didn't like improvising, but it wasn't the first time he had had to take drastic steps to save his plants. The gardener headed out to the garage and hooked up the trailer to his ATV. Starting up the vehicle, he drove around to the storage shed in his back yard. He unlocked the shed and loaded his gardening tools into the trailer. The sun was already low in the sky, so he added some kerosene lanterns, just in case.
The trail to his far field was rough with the spring rains. At one point he almost got stuck in the mud. The wheels of the ATV spun and spun, and finally caught. What should have been a thirty minute trip took almost two hours. The entire way he worried about how many of his plants he would lose tonight and he planned each step he would take to preserve as many as he could.
The sun had set by the time he parked the ATV. The gardener set up his lanterns by the headlight of the vehicle and then lit them. He laid out his tools. Insects droned softly, not knowing that they sang their own death songs.
He started on the left side of the field with a pair of shears. Maybe if he cut his plants back he could shock them into thinking it was still winter.
He studied carefully and with a surgeon's precision he began to cut limbs. He worked up a sweat as it grew steadily colder. He wept as he saw sluggish sap flow from the cuts. The insects no longer sang.
It was his fault. He had brought them up from the basement too soon. He had been too eager to turn over the rich soil and plant them deep into the earth. He shook off such useless regrets and began to work faster.
When he finished with one plant, he gave it a long drink of water. Then he packed the base tight with a heavy load of mulch. He composted the mulch himself from the remains of last year's planting. Only the best for his garden.
The eyes of one of his plants flickered open. She looked down to see herself buried waist deep in the earth, she looked at the other plants and screamed.
The gardener went over and soothed the plant's hair. "I know, I know. I planted you all too soon. Don't worry. I'll save what I can." The plant whimpered until the nutrients in the water quieted it.
Prune, water, mulch. The gardener worked late into the night, fighting to save his garden from the late freeze.
At the Scene of the Crime
J. J. Steinfeld
The sixty-year-old psychiatrist was eager to leave his office and meet his lover. It was her fifty-sixth birthday and he wanted to celebrate it with the woman he had been having a month-long affair. He realized for the first time that his lover and his wife were the same age, and was surprised he hadn’t thought of this earlier. If he left in twenty minutes, he would be able to spend a full hour with her before having to arrive home for supper. His wife became annoyed whenever he was late for evening meals, and lately she was more annoyed than usual with his unconvincing excuses, not to mention her suspicions that he was reverting to his old adulterous ways.
>
“Unfortunately, we will have to shorten today’s session to twenty minutes,” the psychiatrist told his last patient of the day, even before the upset-looking man had sat down in the oversized chair in front of his tidy desk. The psychiatrist liked to have his desk cleared off before he left his office for the day.
“That’s not fair,” the patient said, scratching hard at his face, drawing blood. He had done this during the previous two sessions, but the intensity of the scratching was fiercer this afternoon.
“Please, you only harm yourself when you do those self-destructive actions,” the psychiatrist told his patient, but his mind was already at his lover’s apartment. He looked at the beautifully wrapped large acrylic painting next to his desk. The painting was taller than he was, and he adored the larger-than-life subject matter. He couldn’t wait to see his lover unwrap it. He had told her over phone a few minutes ago that he had a present for her, and then cryptically expressed the desire for life to imitate art. “Tell me about the painting,” the woman said, but he teased her it would be a big sexy surprise. She told him she was especially horny and brimming over with sexual tension and he told her that sounded romantic to him. He liked his lovemaking vigorous, and so did she, unlike his wife whom he found much too docile in bed. He thought the painting’s title was appropriate, To Each Their Own, and whispered it several times to himself as if singling a seductive little song.
“I don’t know what you mean,” the patient said, forcing his hands away from his face.
“Oh, nothing, I’m sorry. I was just thinking about an earlier patient’s fantasies. I purchased one of his paintings today,”he explained and touched the top of the wrapped package by his desk. “Quite exquisite and quite expensive, I might add,” he said, closing his eyes as he visualized the smiling dominatrix reading a copy of the Marquis de Sade’s La Philosophie dans le boudoir in the painting. His lover read French well and he thought she would appreciate this symbolic reference by the artist.
“I don’t want to talk about paintings.”
“It’s your time, of course.”
“Twenty minutes will not be enough today. It’s not even twenty now,” the patient said and tapped at his wristwatch.“The time is just dissolving horribly.”
“It’s the quality of a session that should be emphasized not its length.”
“My mind is so burdened. I am afraid I will hurt someone. I really do have this fear. There are so many things.
I fear and they eat away at my mind,” the patient said, looking at his hands as if they belonged to someone with the most violent tendencies imaginable.
“You can mitigate your fears if you confront them for the unreal torments that they are,” the self-absorbed psychiatrist lectured as much to his patient as to the imagined colleagues now intruding into his consciousness.
“Even my fear of strangling a shrink during a session?” the patient asked as he stood up and moved hurriedly toward the psychiatrist, grabbing his throat before the man could utter another word.
Day 4: L.W. Salinas and Matthew Wilson
By the Sea
L.W. Salinas
"I don't get how you're so calm," Carolina said. She'd been crying continuously for... she didn't know how long. She could feel the sand sticking to her face. It made her think of glitter on glue. She didn't bother wiping it away, since it would only stick again.
Elena shrugged. "What's to be upset about?" she asked, maddeningly philosophical. "It's over. There's nothing to do any more. Just..." She played with the damp seaweed at their feet, tearing it lengthwise. "You know. Accept it."
"No." Carolina shook her head, more sand flying from her hair. "That's not... this isn't how it's supposed to be."
Elena laughed, sharp and surprised, and raised a hand halfway up to her mouth like she was trying to hold it back. She lowered her hand, looked at Carolina, twisted her face like she was going to say something, and sighed instead. "You're crying again."
"What, runny eyeliner doesn't fit your perfect scenario?"
"It's not... you've got to face these things with dignity," Elena said. "You don't cry for the inevitable, you welcome it. Open arms and all that."
"Fuck you, I'll go kicking and screaming if I want."
"You're being petulant."
"Fuck. You."
"You don't think this is hard?" Elena said, breaking her calm for the first time in hours. "Being like this? I could freak out, if that's what you want. Is it?" She shoved Carolina hard. "Is this better?" She kicked sand at her, fanning it out.
Carolina winced away but scowled, feeling her face flush with anger. "At least you're acting like a fucking human now."
"You're such a goddamn child." Elena stomped off down the beach. The pre-dawn air was cold, the smell of rotting seaweed and salt strong with the wind, and Carolina could see Elena curling her arms around herself.
Despite it all, that was what undid Carolina's resolve not to let Elena have it all her own way. "Come back," she called. "I didn't mean it."
"Yeah, you did."
"No, really. I'm sorry. I can be calm for you."
Elena walked back down the length of beach, shaking her head. "You're still crying."
Carolina smiled through her tears. "Can you blame me?"
"No," Elena said finally, looking up at the sky. "I guess I can't. Let's get this over with." She picked up the knife and nodded. "I can't promise it'll be quick."
Carolina stared at the knife, her eyes wide and fixed on the blade. The light from a break in the clouds glinted off of it. She knew how sharp it was, had seen Elena whetting it earlier. Everything narrowed down to the edge of that knife.
“Carolina? Stay with me."
"I don't want this," Carolina said, backing away, holding up her hands. "I don't--please, Elena, don't--"
"We talked about this." Elena's voice was firm, and when she grabbed Carolina's arm, her grip was hard. Her hands were only a little sweaty.
"Talking and doing's different. Elena, please--"
"No more discussion," Elena said, pulling Carolina in and positioning the knife. "Now."
With a quiet little shriek, Carolina shoved at the knife, panic lending her strength. Elena gasped, her eyes closing and her mouth shutting tightly. Carolina felt the sudden shudder through the knife connecting them. She stepped back, eyes glued to where it stuck out of Elena's chest, just under her ribcage, angled up.
Elena stayed on her feet just long enough to open her eyes and smile at Carolina, then tumbled to the sand. Carolina ran over, too late to catch her, but still in time. "Great job," Elena whispered, just barely audible over the wind. "Now take it out."
She did, and kept her eyes on Elena's face. She saw the flicker of pain, the haze as shock took her. Elena closed her eyes on her own and was still in minutes.
"You'd better be right about the first one being the hardest," Carolina said, swiping at her face. She'd sat to the side, her tears falling on the sand instead of on Elena. Now she stood, brushing herself off, wiping the knife on Elena's clothes, and started the task of dragging Elena to the sea. It was hard work; Carolina was much smaller than Elena.
"Next time I'll be calmer," she told Elena's body. "Next time I'll be more like you."
Reflections In Shallow Water
Matthew Wilson
Of course I told Richard about the island.
Since small, he'd always had a natural curiosity toward the sea. Pirates had used this as a haven to bury treasure, make camp and fight duels. At least that's what I told him.
The real facts were that every day, the sea would sweep back and reveal the land, connect the tiny island to the shore before, later that afternoon the tide turned and the bridge of earth would be swallowed again. Leaving the island, alone.
The thing that interested me most was the earth had no time to harden. It was more a mire of mud and mess. Home to scuttling Crabs and limping seagulls looking for stranded fish.
I set the plan of action for Saturday a
s that was when mom went Christmas shopping, and as dictated by her, we'd share some bonding time. Since the brat came along and money was tight, I'd no pocket money for movies or computer games.
A defence mechanism against boredom, I had to fill my mind with something else. Even if it was just a ghastly idea.
All we had to entertain us were woods at the back of our house. And of course, the island.
I made his eyes burn like doubloons as I told him all my mish mash of pirate shanties cut together from TV programs he was too young to see. Books too mature for his sweet nature.
Mother said I could watch and read what I liked. I was a lost cause, like my walk out father. She didn't care what happened to me. But I had to make sure I looked after my younger brother.
I would.
I waved as he took off at a gallop toward the island. It was only forty feet away and I was right here, he'd nothing to fear. I wasn't going anywhere. I would watch him.
Everything.
He stopped laughing when he got half way, his feet started sticking in the brown glue-ish mud. He yelled and called at me to help. Of course I feigned deafness, waved back. As he went down, terror took hold of him, amplified his voice so over the cry of Gulls I could snatch words from the screams.
Apparently he was stuck.
What a shame.
I thought of silencing him on the off chance mom might come back early. There were many rocks round me and a well placed shot may crack his jaw. But it was over quickly, quite returned as he disappeared among the bubbles beside the squawk of feeding birds.
I had to admit I shed a tear or two. I was no complete monster.
Of course, the mud was the first place the police looked, but by the time mom got home and bought my story of losing baby brother when I went for a whizz, the tide was already in and a search postponed till morning.
A nice ending came of this, for the first time in years, mom held me. I was the bad boy, but all she had. She cooed and said she loved me after all, she asked that I didn't leave her. I promised I would stay.
All those years since father walked out on us, she'd burned the bridges between us, put all her love on baby brother. Now I was back in the game, and more like mother than she cared to admit.
I had followed them through the woods that dark night when I was no older than baby brother. When mom got angry at dads many infidelities.
I watched her suggest they play a game.
Last one to the island was a hardboiled egg.
I have always been a spiteful child, but not much of an imaginative one. I'd gotten the idea from mom, although I didn't think she'd appreciate being informed of my tribute act. She had taken something I loved. Why was she exempt from me returning the favour?
It would hurt her terribly to know her son knew.
I'm no complete monster you know.
Day 5: Donald Jacob Uitvlugt, J.J. Steinfeld and Anthony Cowin
Trick or Treat
Donald Jacob Uitvlugt
"Okay guys, this isn't funny anymore!"
Nate tried the door on his right. It was locked, but the door on his left opened. He counted to three. Nothing jumped out at him. He went through.
The emergency lights cast red shadows over a long hallway with doors on either side. Nate stepped along, conscious of every sound his shoes made on the floor. It had seemed such a great idea. The place billed itself as the largest haunted house attraction in the state. But thirty bucks was way too much to pay to have some winos in rubber masks jump out at you. Why not break in after midnight and have a little fun scaring each other silly instead?
"Jim? Alex? Anybody?"
Alex had gone in search of the main power switch. Jim and Nate had messed around in the torture chamber, dry humping the iron maiden, pretending to nap on the rack. Jim knelt in the guillotine while Nate took pictures with his phone. Then they switched places. While Nate knelt there was a bright flash. When he looked up, Jim was gone.
He tried the hallway doors one by one. The third on his left opened. He waited again for one of his friends to jump out at him. When no one did, he walked into the room.
Row on row of chains hung from the ceiling, like S&M party streamers. Nate brushed past them, setting them rattling like bones. Something sticky coated the chains and smeared against him as he walked. The room stank of piss and shit. Something lukewarm dripped onto his face. Nate cursed and pulled out his phone, shining its light upward.
Webbed onto the ceiling by lengths of chain were pieces of Alex's body. Feet here, arms there, hunks of torso scattered above. Blood drooled from the severed neck while Alex stared down at Nate with glassy eyes.
His phone screen dimmed, returning the carnage to the shadows. Nate swallowed his bile and ran out of the room, the swinging chains chasing him with their chattering laughter.
The door at the end of the chain room opened onto the torture chamber he had been in with Jim. Jim. It had been his idea to come here, mostly. This had to be some twisted revenge scheme. But now Nate knew what was going on. He pulled an iron poker from a mannequin. He was ready for Jim to come at him.
Something hummed and the hairs on the back of Nate's neck stood on end. A blinding blue spark strobed in the darkness. In its flash, he saw Jim strapped to an electric chair, duct tape over his mouth.
The electricity sparked again, but this time it didn't cut off. Jim screamed into the tape and convulsed. Nate smelled burnt hair and roasted meat. This time he did vomit. He started running before the electric chair switched off. The smell followed him.
He wound up in the hall of doors again. Every door he tried was locked except the last door on the right. As he turned the handle, a voice boomed out over a tinny PA system.
"Trick or treat, Nathan!"
Nate paused, gripped the handle of the poker and stepped through the doorway into darkness.
Mythical and Astonishing Woman
J. J. Steinfeld
I must admit I’ve been struggling lately with drawing a strong editorial cartoon. Actually, it’s a lot more than lately. A gigantic creative block seems to have entered my life after the publication of my first collection of editorial cartoons six months ago. Worse still, I’ve been thinking I have nothing new to draw or say. I had jokingly proposed to one editor at my newspaper a series of cartoons about “The Castrating Perils of Technology,” and she said, sure, go for it, and I had to tell her I was just darkly joking. I want something with substance about the human condition, I said, and she suggested doing some cartoons on the perils of politics in an age of short attention spans. I told her I would get back to her.
It seems, following the publication of my book, I’ve lost or misplaced the creative tension that used to inspire my editorial cartooning. After my little chat with the editor, I decided for either sentimental or psychological reasons to go back to the bar where I had drawn my first editorial cartoons. I was amazed: the same ill-tempered bartender, the same ersatz great-outdoors decorations on the walls, the same heaviness of despair hanging in the air. Unbelievably, even the patrons at the bar seemed to be the same ones who had been there five years ago when the ideas and images started flowing. The only person I didn’t recognize was an elegantly dressed woman wearing the most incredible earrings. The earrings appeared to be from another culture and an ancient time, and similar to jewellery I recall seeing in a museum when I was a little boy, my mother holding my hand, she saying that if she had earrings like those on display she’d feel like a goddess no one could harm. I also remember that my mother died a few months after that museum visit, and she had very plain earrings on when I saw her in the casket.
I kept looking at the woman as the small, talkative man sitting next to me told anyone who would listen that he had a grandfather who had just missed being cast as a Munchkin in the Wizard of Oz had it not been for a long night of carousing and a tall woman who made excessive demands of his body. Then he would laugh and pound the bar counter, blissfully alongside the irrepressible Munchkins w
alking down the Yellow Brick Road. It was a great barroom story but he had told me the exact same story five years ago.
Then as I was starting my third beer of the evening, it happened, unannounced and unheralded: the earringed woman transformed herself into something no one in the bar could name or categorize, more like a mythical creature than an ordinary human. She had the penetratingly dark eyes of a soaring bird of prey and the otherworldly face of an exotic iguana yet her body became shaped like an amalgam of the most ferocious lion and graceful gazelle locked in mortal battle. Was this transformation life imitating a tabloid headline or a trick of a devilish illusionist practising deception in one the city’s more sorrowful drinking establishments? My thoughts, not to mention my journalistic cartooning career, were scattered all over the place.
A few of the bar’s patrons fled, forgetting to pay tabs or leave tips, running to their TV sets to see if the woman’s astonishing transformation made the late-night news. Some kept on drinking, resigned to this visual defiance, to this tampering with the laws of Nature under the influence of misdirected lives and shopworn dreams.
As for me, with my cartoonist’s ways, I quickly did a few drawings but knew no one would ever believe me or the small, talkative man going on about his grandfather’s brush with cinematic immortality.