Kazuo Umezz: Terror Slithers Into Our Lives

 

Kazuo Umezz: Terror Slithers Into Our Lives

 

A review of Orochi 4

by Graham Swanson

Front Cover of the Viz Signature Edition, 2006.

 

Orochi 4 is a manga book about two scary stories previously published as a comic strip around 1969 and 1970 written by Kazou Umezz. The first story, “Eyes” follows a blind girl who witnesses a murder in her own home. A game of cat and mouse begins between the girl and the murderer as he returns to the scene to retrieve an ID that he dropped inside the house. The second story, “Blood”, follows two sisters. One sister is given all the love and attention in the world, the other is barked at and hit by parents, teachers, and eventually her husband. Both stories are from the perspective of stranger. A girl who follows them yet is invisible to the people she watches.

Page 1

The greatest strength of “Eyes” is it's suspense. Danger unfolds  around this girl and takes control of the safety of her home. The blind protagonist is alone, and tries to save herself but makes many mistakes. She is left by herself after her father is arrested. No one is around for her except the killer himself. The most startling images are how she baracades the windows and doors. She can't hammer a single nail in straight. They all curl around the wood from the force of the hammer. 

The Killer strikes!

     “Blood” is rich in gothic convention, and by the end is truly rabid with terror. The walls are drawn with a deep dark black. The very halls feel haunted. There is sadness in the girl's faces. There is scorn in the faces of the adults. The sadness of the once innocent little girl transforms into hatred.

Risa strikes!

Each story doesn’t just alarm, it does not merely dare to put the book down, it also provides something to chew on. Each work is wrapped in a sensation of very real fear like an innocent father going to prison, abuse of the dying and sickly, buying children, abusing servants, abusing the disabled, and the impact of violence. The book seems to be asking as, “how could this happen?”

As the narrator says in the haunting last pages, “This will never happen again.”

Will it now? Really?

There are some interesting shocks, and subtle manipulations, but what stands out to Castle Swanson are the Gothic tropes throughout “Blood”.

The Monzen family becomes a fallen aristocracy.

 The two sisters Riza and Kasuzu are the last of a bloodline.

Orphans and peasants within the mansion live in fear.

The young orphan girl becomes a maiden in distress.

No one is safe from poundings and strikes of violence.

 Darkness lays in the eyes of characters, in the sky, in windows, and in deep hallways.

The once great family mansion becomes an old, shady palace.

Horror and terror occurs within.

The grotesque transformation of the innocent into monsters. 

The supernatural narrator creeps into people’s lives unnoticed… and uninvited.

There is a moment in “Eyes” that inspires dread. Tt grows from realistic expectations and very real fears, yet seems offbeat. The Blind Girl sends her best friend, a child, to stalk an adult murderer. The boy not only gets spotted by the killer, but the killer is friendly, and gets the kid to tell him all the information he needs to know. It’s uncomfortable to know that this  blind girl just sent a boy into the snares of a murderer. This villain shows that he is not some fool who got worked up in a moment of passion, but actually a clever, calculating professional.

The best part of “Eyes” is the constant danger. This girl is never safe. Even at home she risks burning the house down. If men come to the door, she has no idea who is entering and leaving. If she leaves the house, she doesn’t know where to find safety. If she tries to tell people what she saw, no one believes her because she is blind. She is defenseless, weak, and vulnerable to the very real evils of the world.

The best character, Risa, is welcomed in Castle Swanosn. She is a monster, but we get to see this monster as a child. She didn’t start off this sinister. We first see her off in the distance playing in the grass with her big sister. One small horror, destroying her drawings or her flowers, ripples into tragedy, and unfolds into deeper horrors like car wrecks before finally blossom of torture grow. She is an evil that is never defeated.

There’s a sublime moment when the narrator girl awakens after her long sleep. She saves a young Risa from a car crash, then gets sleepy. She rushes up a mountain and finds a cave to rest in. She dreamed she was in the body of the orphan. She experiences torture, the horror, and downfall of this ill fated family as she is held captive. The mansion she once believed was her dream came true mutates into her tomb. 

Bravery. In both these stories the fear becomes strength, and we see the characters become inspired to overcome the horror they face.

In "Eyes" it is  when the girl raises her cane to fight the killer. She strikes him in the eyes, leaving him blinded. On equal footing, he is now as powerless as she. Unlike her, he has not spend his entire life without his sight. He falls victim to the fears of the blind, and she is triumphant. 

In "Blood" the moment  comes when the narrator awakens from her sleep s after the orphan girl breaks her back falling down the stairs. Fearlessly the narrator rushes back into the mansion. She finds fresh blood on the floor where she last saw the orphan. A red trail leads to the big sister’s bedroom. There she finds the orphan paralysed besides the dying a dying woman surrounded by doctors.

Some parts of this book raise questions.

The police never seem interested in investigating, and in many cases throughout these two stories, they make conclusions based on a surface level inspection of a crime. For example, in "Eyes", the police arrest the blind girl’s father because he picked up the knife used to kill the victim. Other than his finger prints, there’s no reason to believe he killed this man, he was merely there when the police arrived. The killer’s prints would also be on the knife. Besides, no one saw her father on the bus that day? Or at the bar? Or at work? Why did he show up so late at night? What is the writer trying to tell us here?

Something similar happens in the climax of “Blood”. Risa has framed her sister of terrorizing the orphan girl and to “prove” it, she whips off her sister’s bed covers to reveal to the doctors and staff  a box of nails and a hammer, thus smearing the older sis's good name. But anyone with access to that room could’ve put those there. No one ever saw her big sister leave the room. Where did the nails come from? Who bought them? Who knew where to find them? Again, what is the writer trying to make us think about here?

Without the presence of the narrator, there's not much of anything spooky going on. The narrator is the only uncanny thing. Without her, it's a just a thriller. Horror needs the uncanny- the supernatural- to be a part of the genre. A man crawling through a window at night is scary, but the window lifting open by itself is the essence of horror. 

There is otherwise a lot to admire about this book. It delivers a fun slide into the horror genre, with an uncanny touch, without drowning the illustrations in gore and carnage. It doesn’t have disturbing images like people’s heads turning into centipedes like Junji Ito, but contains a treasure trove of very real nightmares. It’s like a story from the newspaper these comics were printed in, or gossip in the tabloids from the next shelf. It slithers into our lives just as the narrator slithered into the lives of the blind girl, and the Monzen Family.

   

The Terror of "Blood"

 Kazuo Umezz is a celebrated manga artist and horror writer active since the 1960s. 

ARTIST INTERVIEW: CHIAKI MAYUMURA

 

Tokyo Idol Inspires Fans To Do Their Own Thing At Kansas City Naka-Kon

An Interview With Chiaki Mayumura

by Graham Swanson

 

 

Chiaki Mayumura enters stage

Chiaki Mayumura travelled over 6,000 miles, all the way from Tokyo, Japan, to bring Idol music to her American fans in the dusty plains and concrete towers of Kansas City, Missouri. She performed two shows at Naka-Kon over the weekend of May 26^th and 27th. Her first show started late on Friday night. A silver suit sparkled over her shoulders as she stared into the shadows of the hall with a smile towards the stage lights. The audience looked up from the vapor when her voice rose to the microphone. On stage, glowing under red lamps, her laptop and guitars gleamed.

As the show went on, Chiaki took off her ruffled skirt, her shoes and socks, then called on the audience to follow her. She exited the stage and ran like the wind through the shadows. Youthful and mirthful men and women pursued her around the corners of the room. More and more people entered the chase. She led them back to the front of the stage and re-entered the spotlight.

After Chiaki’s performance, I was honored to have the opportunity to stand next to her during the midnight rave. She walked near the front of the stage and invented dance moves on the spot. She stepped into a dance circle, put her hands and feet on the floor, and pushed her hips into the air. Later in the night I noticed her playing Limbo with costumed revelers from the audience and members of her entourage. As the lights came on, I approached her.

Chiaki and I walked out of the room and talked a little bit. She started making music at age 20. She played at Kansas City once before and had a virtual concert during the Covid Pandemic. We stopped walking in front of the heavy glass doors that lead back to the hotel. She tells me how the film Bohemian Rhapsody inspired her to write “Queeeeeeeeeen!” from her album Meja-Meja-Manja. She introduces her kind entourage to me, and then I ask if she’d be interested in an interview. After making some phone calls and taking my Instagram, she happily agrees.

The second performance came Saturday night at 22:30. Chiaki performed a different set of songs. She included “Queeeeeeeeeen!” and others that exhibited a fiercer, more passionate Chiaki than the night before. Near the end of the show, she rode on the back of a giant turtle held up by members of the audience. They carried her around the dancehall, and she showered them in waves of elation. Early that Saturday she performed with her acoustic guitar in the corridor between the convention hall and hotel. Right after her last show she met fans and signed merchandise for them. I worried that she might feel exhausted after such a busy day, but she eagerly came over and sat with me, with a genuine smile and bright eyes. A translator sat with us, and she responded in English for Chiaki.

We began the interview.

Chiaki Mayumura meets fans after a show

TRANSCRIPT

Graham: Chiaki, I noticed, the songs, you changed them from last night.  But you were still free spirited and energetic. Were you always this way?

Translator: She changes them every single performance.

Graham: Why?

Translator: She gets bored easily and wants to change them.

Graham: Me too. I can’t stick to a routine to save my life. Have you always been that way?

Translator: Yeah, she has been that way for a long time, and she doesn’t want to write very similar songs so she wants to create completely different songs.

Graham: Can you tell me something about the Japanese music scene?

Translator: Live music scene in Japan is very on Tic Tok side, or TV show side, and not necessarily the people who do the live performances, being popular and selling lots of music, and she gets frustrated by that. It’s more commercialized. Social media.

Graham: I was going to ask you about that later. Thank you for answering that. What is your greatest fear?

Translator: That’s a great question. Her greatest fear is losing her fans. She doesn’t like horror movies, but when she watches it, you know the tissue papers, they are double layered, she would peel one off so she could see through. She’s watching but not at the same time, she’s like filtering by having this one layered tissue paper. She’s interested, she wants to watch it, she just gets too scared.

Graham: Don’t be afraid of the beauty of demons.

Translator: She watched a horror movie on the flight to the United States, and then she was scared of the passenger right next to her.

Graham: Why would you lose your fans?

Translator: For example, social media, or any platform, if she says anything political or anything that isn’t related to Japanese society or society in general, she feels she is going to lose fans and they are not going to be able to listen to her songs and pieces of herself in the same way as before.

Graham: I’m really glad you said that, because I was doing some research on Idol Pop musicians, and I’m not going to lie there are disturbing things, I have some specific examples here, I’ve been reading about things like mistreatment, things like suicide, things like No Dating clauses in contracts, assault, slave labor contracts, sexualization of minors. If this makes you uncomfortable, I understand, have you experienced any of that?

Translator: She has never really experienced anything extreme like to the point where she wanted to hurt herself, but she has seen a lot of her friend who were very pressured, like really a lot of contracts regarding their work, those kinds of friends, their producers have the most power, every single power over them. So they can’t make music, they can’t sing, they can’t express themselves like they want to since they are fearful of the producers who have the power over everything. So whenever her friends come up to her and say “what should I do” then what she would say usually is “try to be yourself. Try not to be fearful of expressing yourself”. For her case, she really doesn’t have a producer who has more power over her, she produces everything, she makes her music, so she directs her own shows, she does every single thing, so that’s why she’s never really experienced something like that, but a lot of people in the industry experience that kind of thing because of the producers having power over them.

Graham: That is extremely interesting. I’d like to hear how you have overcome that. How do you manage without a producer? What’s it like to do things by yourself?

Translator: Japanese pop culture and society, they don’t really have a singer- performer like her. She is almost unheard of, her style is so unique, she kept doing her own thing, and kept writing and performing and she didn’t really have to rely on any companies, any producers, so she just kept doing her own thing and she was fine, so she thinks she’s very lucky. Rather than relying on somebody like auditioning for a talent agency for example, a record company and stuff, its better to keep producing yourself rather than trying to rely on someone else’s power, and then the consequences of you being yourself, and you trying to do everything, that consequence will follow up, will cause lots of fans and supporters. So she just makes her own path, and then someone follows all the time.

Graham: It follows, eh? That ties into so many delightful things I wanted to ask you. How did you come up with this style?

Translator: She used to be in Idol group, three of them, Chiaki and two other girls, and as she kept performing as a group, she started feeling like everybody was so similar, all the other groups and other songs are very similar, so she started to feel like “I want to do my own thing, I want to create my own thing, that’s not at all similar to anything that exists” and that kind of led her to establish her own style of music.

Graham: That’s very interesting. What would you say separates you from the rest of the Idols?

Translator: What makes her different from other groups? Other people? Number one is that she writes her own music, and number two is having a computer and a guitar by her side and perform by herself. That style is not very popular in Japan. And the courage and bravery of doing that all by herself. That makes her different.

Graham: Bravery and what else?

Translator and Chiaki: Courage.

Graham: Good words. I can tell you have a lot of passion out there. I can see it. It’s very physical.

Translator: She started recently started seeing a lot idol groups where for example there was a group of five but one of the five is a producer so as a group they are self producing. She started seeing a lot of them coming up and she believes that style of producing will produce less of the slavery, the contract work, like where the producer has all the power over them. We will make the industry better. A better place to work for artists.

Graham: What else can I say, you’re really a source of positivity in all of this.

Chiaki: Positive?

Graham: I think so. How do your fans react when they see this bravery and courage emerge from you?

Translator: She says male fans start dancing with her, but female fans cry. They get really inspired. But she doesn’t know why they’re crying from the stage. She always asks “why are you crying?”

Graham: Do you ever cry at the movies?

Translator: She cries at parts where the audience doesn’t even cry, she still cries.

Graham: Ok, like what?

Translator: Things like a family having a good time, or not even a middle of the movie, the beginning of the movie she’s already crying. Anything dog related.

Graham: You’re very in touch with your sensitivity, aren’t you?

Translator: she gets more emotional when she sees animals having a hard time or like being hurt. For example, in Samurai era, the Samurais would fight with their swords on top, while they’re riding horses, not even just swords, but guns too, so whenever she sees any scenes where like (Imitates gunfire) and the horses is like (imitates dying horse) she’s like “Nooo! Not the horses!”

Graham: Spare the horses. You’re not alone.

Translator: Not the humans. Rather humans be, and let the horses go.

Graham: What did they do, they’re animals, they don’t know. Alrighty, thank you so much for this. I think I have all my questions. Uhmm, I probably won’t put this in the interview or anything, again I wanted to thank you, I was wondering what you had planned for the rest of the night?

Translator: She’s going to drink beer. That’s her plan. She usually doesn’t drink 24 hours prior to a performance because her voice, her throat, but tonight she’s going to drink to death.

Graham: Awesome. I have some alcohol in my hotel room if I could join you.

Translator: She wants to play uno the card game, and also teach her American friends the drinking games in Japan.

Graham: What are these games? – (audio cuts out)

Sai, Chiaki's latest album

You can find more of Chiaki Mayumura's music on spotify. 

https://open.spotify.com/artist/4DjusI9WuKLk3cmsJGtl8T

You can find her latest music video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIG4pFtsIEs&ab_channel=Channel%E7%9C%89%E6%9D%91%E3%81%A1%E3%81%82%E3%81%8D

Poetry That Otherwise Will Never Be Heard (for better or worse)

to Sh

THE FATAL HOUR

by Graham Swanson

 

I found you in the rivers at the bottom of your heart

A screw driver in your windpipe

I'll grab you by the roots of your hair and make you eat garbage

I walk in the daylight. Where else could you see me?

I walk in the middle of the day. Where else could you find me?

I know where you pray

I'll let the air out of your tires and hit you with a bike lock

I know where you sleep

I'll let everyman out of prison

I know what you love

I'll open every grave and swallow your children

I can see from here that you're all haunted

Some good. Some bad. 

When I sleep I see dead bodies

They are my dearest friends

I AM THE CRIMSON DRAGON THAT PULLS THE PALE MOON'S SILVER WAGON

Crossed by double silver handled twin daggers

Alone on my pedestal 

at the center of the world!

Drink the blood from my golden chalice

All your wishes will come true. 

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CLOWNS AND JESTERS

by Graham Swanson

A Clown performs in the street

in the dirt

That's why he is dressed the way he is

To distract from the fact that he lives in the filth of Parisian streets.

A Jester, to the contrary, 

performs in the King's Court.

He is respected, noble. He knows the room

better than anyone. He knows

the secrets. He holds political power.

He whispers into the King's ear, and makes him laugh. No one

fucks with a jester. Because he will

Unviel them in front of the entire court.

In song. 

A Jester can SEND MEN to the dungeon.

A Clown watches the mirth of a castle from the cold alley ways.

When  YOU are alone in a dungeon-

when you're awoken by a rat gnawing

on your ankle bone

And all you had to eat is moldy bread,

it'll be the face-the mask- of a Jester smiling back at you.

The Clown, sad and lonely, plays sticks in the alley. He spins bottles, honks a horn.

The Jester sharpens a knife on his tie-

Shatters windshields with the sharp end of his cane.

A Clown stumbles into the frozen mud to chase a lost balloon

A Jester will laugh in your face because you will never know who he is.

A Clown slips and falls in horse shit.

A Jester will always be in the dungeon. Watching and laughing, making googly eyes, and inventing new ways to torment his prisoners.

A Clown sleeps in the cold, takes his wig off, his gloves off, and make up off.

I CAN'T FIND HAPPINESS

by Graham Swanson

It's okay to have feelings that *you* don't like

When I see a smile its a mask- I feel your sneer

those trees are prison bars

the sun shines with hate

and burns the supple flesh

Under that mask I see the scorchmarks of the sun

I see freckles, rashes, and cancer.

From wild Green hills to my hometown- it's a bus 

ride full of desperate fugitives escaping the ever 

widening void 

                    Ever hungrier- moving at the speed of

                    Light

They smile at me but think I am strange, crazy,

a serial killer- why- just ask them why? They shudder.

    I walk the streets alone in search of those neon

monsters of mirth and I drink believing merrymakers 

find happiness in the gas 

Only to discover adulterers, men who punch glass, and drug dealers. 

    I search the mist and alleyways for love. All I 

find are games of Russian Roullette

    Meth addicted, beautiful women- kiss me, then I drop them off at dark apartments or RVs

once the sun goes down

They are the Valentine's Day Muggers- we share

one similarity, that we'd rather find elusive death

yet something drags us forward into the dark-

with no hearts, we share a strange hour

Neither one is alone- yet crushed by the 

Moon, and joined by the chants of

10,000 screaming banshees

A heart beating in a drawer

Lungs wheezing in a glass

Smoke burning at midnight

swollen knuckles, fist warmed inside 

pockets.

    I am the man alone walking from alley to alley.

I cannot find happiness in this 

world.

    To me, its only a moment on TV

when they're trying to sell you shit

you don't need.

Or a moment when you get too drunk to remember

that you have work in the morning.

I walk between monsters and rows of dead stalks

I sleep in abandoned houses, 

and burn books to stay warm.

Stella's Graduation

                                         Stella's Graduation

Graham Swanson

Written in 2020

On the night of Stella’s graduation she rented a room in the big fancy hotel to spend a night with her boyfriend before they moved away to the bright hanging cities over the river. She went there alone with a basket of perfumes and a change of outfits, checking her phone in anticipation of her lover arriving. He texted her in the morning, so she left him another message reminding him and tempting him to come to the hotel that night. She provided a template of her figure in an accompanying photo taken by the bench among the trees. He didn’t text back right away.

From outside she looked to the top of the hotel, saw the clouds swirling across the stars and the moonlight, and the spires over the highest windows. Lights filled the rooms above except for two windows. Against the sharpest edges of the roof, a hooded figure loomed down from between two broken chimneys. Even as Stella saw the glimmer of its eyes met with hers, it did not retreat, but offered a gentle wave. The cold blew freezing gusts of frozen mist into the streets and against Stella’s bare legs. 

Stella figured her boyfriend might be stuck at work or at practice, so she went inside to avoid the cold. She couldn’t wait and looked again at her phone on the elevator. The message was sent. The doors blew open and she hurried to hide her phone as she pulled luggage onto the orange carpet. The maid pushed a cart into the hall with her mouth unsmiling mouth hanging open, her spinal cord twisted into a large knot at the base of her neck, and missing teeth that she tried to hide from the young pretty girl swinging her hips down the hall. She went into the red door by herself. The maid lifted her head into the light, her yellow eyes dull and sunken, her balding head losing strands of hair, and when she thought the young girl was gone into her room, the maid went into the cleaning closet and lifted the back of the cabinet. 

A short opening fell open, too short to stand up in, but just snug for the hunchback. It led her down narrow gaps in the walls to small lenses which revealed the interior of each room. She went to the room the young girl just checked in, and she watched her undress, put on silky underwear, and checked her makeup. She constantly looked at her phone, each time with heavier disappointment. An hour passed, so she sent a long grueling voicemail pebbled with angry insults and threats. 

Stella paced around and looked out the window down at the empty parking lot. A few lonely cars sat still. A group of vandals lurked from the darkness of the park and smashed a car window, smashed the tail lights, and smashed the windshield. They left a note on the steering wheel and lit a fire in the back seat. The hooded figure watched from the bench, but did not notice the vandals, but instead kept searching for something in the windows. She closed the blinds as the vandals scampered back off into the dark in the direction of the old factory. 

The maid scratched the fine hairs on her chin. Never had she seen a young girl so upset and it 

made her feel depressed, but also less lonely. Just then a knock came at the door, the girl gasped and dropped her phone to the floor. 

In the bygone times of broken wheels and violent street whipping there loomed a huge smoking factory under where the viaduct is today. Thirty buildings all boarded up and stacked full of belts sculpted from the scales of endangered animals crossed the middle of the village. This place used to be busy and flowed train carts of soup and pudding to cities all over the country. families built mansions around the outskirts of the factory and one thousand other people got jobs working there. It did not last, as the village elders agreed in a secret meeting to sell the factory to a shadow who came at sunset and left at sunrise. 

No one knew of the secret meeting or the plans the elders made. They took the money, stored it in a castle of a bank, returning only to rob the bank and go back to their golf courses on the sweltering coast of alligators and tree snakes as the village fell to squalor and ignorance.

The once glorious mansions remained devoted castles to the families, but not the kind that brings up children to do great things. They became hoarded with garbage, packed full of strange folk, doors always locked and curtains always drawn to keep the fumes from escaping. The sons and daughters of the elders live in these places to this day, all D students who live in the lap of never ending gold, and each one in the pocket of drug gangs from other states. They live alone for the reason of cooking strange potions with gems, propane and chemicals, selling the refined experiments to the enforcers, and selling the bottom of the barrel to the peasants across town. 

The old factory itself became a gruesome outlet for gas squeezed from the cracks of the earth, and for strange creatures who followed the escaping rats up onto the factory floor. These things did not look like you or I. They had the form of a human, but they did not evolve from the apes that climbed down from trees and walked everywhere to hunt their food like us. They evolved from poisonous frogs that lived in pools underground. They can't turn their heads because they have no neck, their eyes are yellow, and they eat molten coals and bathe in hot paint. 

No one came near the factory. Those few crackheads who sought shelter from winter found themselves dragged through grain chutes, then clamped by the head in the clasp of bow hooks, and carried into the air as the rail delivered them to the otherside of the factory. They hung like angels going to heaven, blood gushing from their temples and mouths and soaking their shoulders and feet. Rats followed the trail of blood droplets. The frogmen tore the clothes apart and devoured them for the mites living inside.

Fun Fears, Being Watched

What's In The Attic?

 Whats in the attic?

By Graham Swanson

1: instillation, cobwebs, mouse turds, asthma attacks, heat. Shit. 

2:big teddy bear

3 the control panel for all the towns roads and explosives

4: a floating magical eye that sees all

5: the last evil gnome with the family shotgun

6: my secret pack of cigarettes.

7: my weed plant operation

8: the sniper rifle that *really* shot jfk

9: a ladder to an observatory on the roof

10: gold bars protected by a nail bomb.

Last Meal at a Highway Sonic in Bellevue Nebraska This November In Cold Rain

Last Meal At A Highway Sonic In Bellevue Nebraska This November In Cold Rain

 

by Graham Swanson

        written November 2020 

Cold fog flowed over the highway from the mud fields but the van driver knew police trucks followed him. He kept an untriggered bomb in a baby carriage in the back. They’d catch him soon enough, maybe before he even gets to his destination. The cops already arrested the movement’s leader, and now they searched for those on the forum with him. They all talked about blowing up the capitol building.

Covert trucks and suvs talked on radios and the van driver’s scanner picked up the whispers into their shoulders. They followed him out of Omaha and pressure built up in his rolls of fat with each passing car on the speed lane. He saw no cops on the highway, but the scanner sounded like a party. He left his apartment unlocked, his computer on, and everyone he talked to expected to see fireworks for the movement. He gasped in defeat, but then a shimmering light in the fog saved him.

All the driving made him hungry. His wrists so fattened that they swallowed his hands, and his fingers like short stubs in a potato. Every doctor told him to eat better and quit smoking. Butts spilled from his ashtray, and got lost in the stomped carpet of fast food bags. The van down at the press of a pedal, and the SONIC sign beacon lured him from the dangerous high speeds of the highway to the safety and warmth of those red and white colors of the logo and the smell of salt and oil, but the feeling of hot grease burning his fingertips remained in his starved memory. He counted a few dollars, and looked behind him to make sure the FBI saw him. To his surprise they didn’t close in on him while he hesitated in his van, therefore not even a shred of doubt entered his mind.

    The van driver pulled a shotgun from under his seat. He left the heater run in his van with the drivers side door wide open. The weapon leaned against his shoulder and the scanner swayed in his pocket. Voices echoed in the sand and fog of static about a trash can with a bomb in. He had time while they scurried away.

    Echoes fluttered. The sounds of the highway traffic, the burning furnace of the Sonic, the patter of shoes on wet pavement, the windy rain beating the van driver’s neck, he pulled the gun from his shoulder and crossed his heart with it. He kicked the door open and stopped in the middle of a line of masked people coughing and sneezing into the fabric over their mouths. So many good days spent driving past this place, without ever stopping here. Maybe in some world he used to work here, or perhaps he spent someone else's money on 100$ worth of hamburgers and corndogs. Of all the people inside, he saw old grumpy clerks from Omaha in their suits and ties, weary travelers resting, people talking on phones. It was the Sonic workers who he decided deserved to die. 

The van driver took one glimpse behind his back. He assumed the wires malfunctioned and instead of exploding and taking them all to hell to be with the movements leader once again the bomb just lit his van on fire. People sipping coffee and using the wifi to send job apps on Indeed sat by the wall sized windows noticed first. Then others chimed in "Hey, call the fire department". Right in front of the van driver sat four fast food employees on break. Each one young enough to perhaps enter a bar to buy a beer at the most, otherwise will in high school. They sat together eating, drinking MONSTER energy drinks, and laughing over each others phone screens. They looked pale, polite, vapid and thin if a little out of shape, but washed up, colored stylish hair, smart kids talking bout their classes in school, or articles concerning the state of pandemic lockdowns, and the election sealing the fate of movement’s political ambitions. Yes, yes, the van driver though this, "these are the enemies of the righteous. I am the last of a noble line of conquerors, a family of tribute denied to him by the fake news the sheep consume and vomit back up. Yes, yes." The more he thought of it, the clearer it became who around here deserved to die. 

Some say a man who carries out such a mission must be insane. Completely false. The van driver never felt more at peace, more in tuned with nature and the universe. He accepted his destiny, but some cowardice prevented him from facing his adversaries. He just needed to know that his leader watched him, and that he loved the leader no matter what. In that moment before he blew the arm off one of the young girls in their sonic uniforms, he knew exactly just how competently and cleanly he delivered the burst of shrapnel fire, and no crazy person can do that. 

The van driver coked his shot gun. A shell simmered on the floor by his crocs. Everyone stayed stifled in silence, like a herd of cattle, powerless behind a fence, the danger of their phone screens suddenly up close, so close that they smelled him on their tongues. The second shot blew a young man's head over the table and into the eyes and ears of his friends. The third shot hit the middle of the table, but pieces of table pierced their necks and cheeks as pieces of metal b.bs bounced around on the laps of the people waiting in line. The fourth shot came as the van driver stood directly over top of a young girl. He killed her off with  a wild grin spreading his neck apart. The fifth shot came as the last one crawled through a gushing pool of shimmering blood. The van driver shot her in the spine and her final breaths bubbled in the crimson on the tile. By this time the police lights shined in the parking lot, and the FBI pulled armor and assault rifles out of the back of jeeps. They waited for him to come out. 

The van driver felt sleepy. He looked around with the gun at his hip. It looked to him

like he killed everyone, he took the movement one day further as its enemies trembled in

fear, as any devoted warrior against the dark world order would do. If anything else, he

valued the love of the world more than any of the police out there behind their flashing

lights and jackboots. He expected them to storm in and take him, but instead they hid behind

dumpsters and walls, waiting for him to leave. He left his gun inside by the final struggling

body shivering on the floor. Outside he found Christmas music and the smell of burning

plastic. He laid face down in the parking lot, and let the police arrest him, because he heard

the news cameras rolling, and he knew that his story would be a lover for the other would be

spree killers to find, and get inspired by. So in his mugshot, despite the jail cell shared with

hardcore gang convicts, he smiled to let them know, Mission Accomplished.

Nebraska Gothic 3

 

                                                                                        

Written by Graham Swanson

to My Friend J

Hasel Kenny Lee used to get pulled into the teacher’s office after school. The educators moved 

mountains for her to graduate. Her father owned The Imperial Dragon, the only restaurant in town 

around since the 1980s. She was the man’s only daughter, but she seldom came to class, when she did 

she never turned in any homework.

“You're such a terrific writer! You’re so smart, you could get into any college you wanted, become anything you wanted. A doctor, an Artist, anything you want, but you have to finish your classes, Hasel.” The teachers tried to reason.

Hasel passed out onto the floor and when they tried to grab her she bit and kicked at them. She didn’t give a fuck. Her boyfriend waited outside and he had meth for her. She knew that as long as she held her legs open he’d give it to her. She hated school. She hated her teachers. She hated her father too.

All night long her boyfriend, fresh out of jail, drove her around in a beaten up truck with no back window. They made sloppy, yeasty love, feeding each other rocks and breathing in the fumes from paint cans.

“Will this hurt your baby?” He asked her because she was 7 months pregnant.

“No. It's okay.’

They made each other angry to turn each other on for more sex. He punched a hole in the wall and screamed at her. She called him trash and made fun of his shitty truck and a little house. She liked stupid men that fell for it. They didn’t care how many felonies she accumulated or that she would drop out of school later that year and have her first baby. She was a hot, hot mess with black hair and blue eyes.

Mr. Lee, her father, suffered a brain fissure. One night, something exploded in the folds of his brain, and he had to close the restaurant. He woke up in the hospital. Too much work, too much stress on a man getting older every day, almost 70 years old, orphaned in the Korean War, saw his family die, and came to the States where he made lots of money.

Girls are not supposed to run Asian restaurants, and the Chinese already didn’t like a Korean man learning their recipes to serve Krouts out in the Midwest. But he needed Hasel to take over.

Mr. Lee snuck Hasel into the kitchen one night and taught her to cook the food. The first thing he did was drag her from her friends smoking pot in a barn in the flooded river plains where the animal carcasses hang all year.

Hasel turned on music so she could work to something she enjoyed. Her father turned it off with one long finger and jabbed at her with it.

“Concentrate. I need you to cook this.”

Hasel kept burning the food and piling waste behind the sink. The old man about tore his hair out. He kept his voice down this time. His ears rang, and she gritted her teeth at him.

“fuck you, dad.” she scowled at him.

Mr. Lee would’ve slapped her, but he didn’t need anyone finding out that he was teaching her how to cook. If the restaurant next door found out, or his cousin who lived next door found out….

“I'm sorry, sweetheart. Just concentrate.”

Despite her indifference, perhaps Benzo withdrawal, she did put her brain to use and finished each dish on the menu. Her dad turned the lights on and took her to his office. He poured her a shot of whiskey.

“I'm so proud of you right now, Hasel. But you must come to work for me. The Doctor says one more stroke will kill me. He said that if something hits me in the head, or if I take a hard fall, I will die. Please. After school on Friday. Can you do that, Hasel, my love? Will you?”

“Sure, dad.”

Mr. Lee hugged her and for the first time in her life, she heard him cry. She hated the sound of it. She hated his restaurant- his sweltering dungeon. She had her own choice in mind.

Hasel didn’t go to school at all that Friday. She watched a guy named Alois cook meth in the basement of his family’s house in the majestic plains around Welles village. By the time her shift started, the party started. Everyone there let needles hang from their arms, and she let three guys fuck her, yelping and belching, fat tits hanging from their chests, toothless and scabbed, she let screw her as long as they kept the free drugs coming.

That night the Chinese man who ran the Imperial Dragon Enterprise sent an emissary to check out Mr. Lee’s restaurant.

“Mr. Lee, we’ve heard some troubling rumors about you teaching your daughter how to cook our food.”

“Yes. It's true. I can't run this place anymore. I had no choice.”

“Condolences. Where is she right now?”

“Not here.” He hung his head.

“Is it true your daughter has been in jail, Mr. Lee?”

“She made some mistakes but she’s not a bad person.”

“Mr. Lee, we’ve decided to let Mr. Zhang run this business in your absence, or you must sell it.”

“I've been the owner here for more than forty years. I’m sorry. I beg for your forgiveness.”

“Begging from a man of precarious honor means nothing. You were going to teach your girl to run our restaurant, and now she’s out there with our recipes. You will show Mr. Zhang the ropes, and then you will retire.”

When Alois got out of prison, he had lost his farm and house, so he had to move. Hasel, with her second child, Trace, a boy that Alois claimed was his, though, no one knew for sure, wanted to buy a shaded spot of land where the grass turned purple in the sunset and she could listen to the sound of the creek running in the back.

“Maybe when dad dies, we can move there.” She said. She had a felony too now. They bonded over jail and meth, and stayed close despite constant fighting. Best friends for life. They moved into an old house next to Kznucls Lodge in Prairie District- where all the old slave houses used to be who worked in his house and his farms.

The owners never came to town except to collect rent. 950$ a month for a house with one bathroom, several rooms with no light fixtures, and only one sink with running water, so they did their dishes in the bathroom. Sometimes in the bathtub.

“Please take care of this house. It's very old, and is historic.”

The landlord showed them the panels that opened to secret passages from room to room and basement to basement. Even one too small to stand- only crawl in. They had huge rooms hidden in the basement and papers going back to 1838.

Trace kept yelling about the purple lights in his closet and under the floor. he’d heard laughter as someone kept turning his night light off. Hasel screamed at him for she believed he kept getting out of bed, so she locked him in the closet for the night while the purple lights danced overhead, unlocked the door, and covered him in a blanket as he slept.

Alois drove around his cousin’s farm. He held the phone live streaming the footage to social media. He wanted to hold the AR 15 but felons can’t have guns. If they caught him holding one, he’d go right back to prison.

“He’s there.”

“Got ‘em.”

They sped up on two deer in the dew of morning. One a doe with a thin coat of fur and a younger buck with tiny antlers. They rode up along the deer in their go-cart and ran one over, backed up, turned around, and shot the other one in the back thigh. Alois cousin unloaded the entire clip and blew the animal to pieces. Then they went back to the injured doe and crushed her skull with the butt of the gun.

When Alois got home, Hasel was passed out from drinking a concoction of Absolut Vodka and NyQuil. The baby girl screamed in the crib and Alois took his “son” out of the room to show him the footage in the garage.

“We hunted them!” he explained to Trace.

“You like to hunt?”

“Yeah, they came onto our land, so we hunted them.”

“Can we eat them?”

“You can’t eat these ones.” Alois laughed and laughed. “When I was your age and your bitch mom hadn’t gotten me in trouble 'n lost my farm, I used to have a shotgun.”

‘You did?”

“Yeah, and I’d go around and shoot the cats, the goats, and the sheep. It was fun! One time I cut a cat in half and it crawled on the barn floor so I cut its head off with a machete.” Alois laughed so hard that he couldn’t articulate anymore.

“What’s that?”

“A real big knife" Alois caught his breath. "Maybe someday I’ll show you how to use one since the damn government thinks I can’t have my guns anymore.”

Trace liked to fix things. He walked around the house with a toy drill and a screwdriver. He took a break from playing with trucks outside and in to inspect the damage. He went around and found cracks in the wall where one of the bricks went missing. He applied his toy drill, it made a sound and lit up. Then he twisted his screwdriver around a little.

“All done. It’s fixed.”

Then he’d go to the sink that only ran cold water. He applied his tools.

“Fixed it.”

Then to the part of the floor where the board came right off the nails.

“Fixed it up.”

Then he saw his mom’s phone left where she hurled it against the counter during last night’s fight. The glass of the screen still shattered from when she slammed her fist into it.

Trace picked up, pressed the keys on the side, pushed his screwdriver into the auxiliary port, shook it around, and pressed the drill into a fragment of the screen, the screen turned purple and it turned on. The screen went from purple to pink, to green to orange, bright and blinding, and a burst of happy laughter came from the mic. Elated, he set it back down and told his mom that he fixed her phone.

“You got onto my phone?” She hit him over the head with a bag of sugar and pressed him against the wall by the throat. “You little asshole.”

Hasel ripped the drill from his hands and tossed it into a heap of garbage, dirty carpets, uneaten fast food, and cold pizza boxes.

Outside Alois tore the grass out of the backyard with a shovel. He told himself there would be a sandbox for his “boy” to play in, but he almost uprooted the entire yard and hadn’t gotten any sand yet.

Trace pointed at a light bulb burned out in a lamp.

“I fix that, mom.”

“Fuck you.” She got down to his size and bore her eyes into his head. “There’s nothing wrong with that lamp.”

One night, Alois brought home something special from Tractor Supply. A box full of chirping, and full of movement. A dozen little yellow baby chickens. The kids cooed and applauded them in joy. 4 died under the heat lamp that day. 3 more died of infection spreading from their lungs into their heads. 2 more got carried off my cats, and one more got eaten by a rat. Only two remained.

One night Trace followed the purple aura from his closet, down the low tunnel. He crawled on his hands and knees beckoned by a bright singing voice and the impact of a power drill. He pushed down the tunnel until it ended, and he saw the purple aura glowing along the cracks of a trapdoor overhead. He pressed it open and found himself in the garage. He stood over the two surviving chicks sleeping in their box of straw.

He grabbed one like he always did, he petted it and kept trying to grab its wing. It didn’t like that. He only tore out some feathers, so the chick pecked him so hard that it drew blood.

Trace grabbed it by the neck and flung it around until it stopped making noise and hung there in his fingers. Then he tore off its wings, tore out it's feet, and tore the beak. Then he reached inside of its wounds to tear out some organs. Then he moved to the next bird and did the exact same thing.  

Art: CrOPPED, Xelanoj Art, 2022.