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.

Nebraska Gothic 2

By Graham Swanson

To Loren, 

My childhood in Nebraska went something like this. Cold winters, no furnace, walked to and from school everyday caked in snow. My best friends were blonde kids who helped me fight the Mexican kids who hung out by the abandoned grocery store. Once we beat them up and threw their sleds over the snow drift, we moved on to the big tree hill to fight the Irish boys. All rednecks the lot of them. We righteously steered forth with hard knuckles and swift kicks. We broke their teeth and cracked the bridges of their noses. We took their pot and smoked it. We celebrated our triumph on the battlefield that day and thought ourselves akin to the Vikings of Olde washing up on shore in dragonheaded longships, dressed in silver, armed with spears and swords, becrowned by horned helmets that sparkled in the snow.

After entering the hallow streets of the big city I found myself wandering aimlessly with hopes of killing myself. They always said I’d die in the big city, but despite everything I tried, death did not find me. The creepy, worndown men addicted to alcohol or crack only had things like “God bless you” to say to me. This is because I often gave them money and food. They would never harm me. One time a man in black jumped out from the bushes to accost me. I told him I’m keeping my bike, and he ran away without a word.

Downtown streamed with bright faces and red flags high over the banks and hotels. Even the State Tower glowed red like a crimson tombstone over the tireless foot tracks of a defeated sports program. Yet they still reveled in the hopes of reclaiming the last glory from almost 30 years ago. School just started at the University. A new fleet of fresh young, wealthy faces celebrated all night. I watched the frat houses alone, casing their parking lots, looking into the windows of their sports cars. Uninvited to any occasion, no friends, all alone in this cold circle, as a helicopter from the sky scoured the dark alleys in search of a kidnapped girl.

I took my walks nearly daily. After I learned that no one would attack me, I decide to try jumping in front of cars. This is easier said than done because they have a wide field of vision and can see someone coming from quite a ways off. All my attempts ended with the vehicles slowing down at a green light so I could pass illegally.

Then I went to the tallest parking garage I could find and hung over the edge for hours every single day watching the sunset by myself. I stepped back downtown to my favorite restaurant and I lifted a Barqs root beer. Later I stole another drink from a smoothie bar. While working at a sports bar, I stole Red Bulls nightly. One day I left the parking garage and never came back. I started making friends and focusing on my school work.

As the years went on, these friends started disappearing, but the professors took notice of my work. Unfortunately, I liked to argue in class. I liked to argue with the students and the professor, even if I agreed with them. Sometimes I’d even split the class in half and get them to argue with each other. Sometimes I didn't want to say anything, so I'd get someone in the room to argue FOR me. I started doing this after some slick feminist got her student pets to do the same, and focus their hatred of white mankind onto me. It didn’t offend me because I learned a very clever technique from them. Why fight, when there’s a mob that can fight for you?

Eventually, I took the writing class of aCuban post-colonialist (named 'Franny' to her friends). Having learned my lessons in the past, I decided to stay quiet, say nothing, and lay low. Unfortunately, I sat in the front of the class. She made it very clear on the first day that she didn’t want white people in her class. She couldn’t *say that, so she said things like “no bars, no guns, no dogs, no names like “Andy”- no jeans, no cigarrettes, no horror, no sci fi- just  nostuff like that. She also mention that she wanted us to write realistic material, then went on to tell us how a whale predicted the future and told her not to have children. She kicked me out of her class the next day, for no reason. I didn't speak to her. She refused to meet with me to discuss it. My adviser and the dean of student admissions took her side and helped remove me from the class.

I was so angry, that I went to 4chan, and laid the story at their feet. I gave them all her office information, including office hours and email and cell number. Then I went offline and didn’t hear back for about a year. On my 26^th birthday, a bunch of strangers came to the campus of the University on the day Franny was going to give a big talk to the feminists and the post-colonialists. They stormed in and took the mic over, asking her questions about her writing career, and her old books from the 80s, asking her why she hated white people so much. Franny almost stormed off in a tearful embarrassing mess. She couldn't articulate the words she wanted to say to her friends in the audience because she was too flustered with hatred of who was asking her these questions. When she finally blew up and told the men and women asking questions to “Go Fuck yourselves!” all of them stood up.

They then marched out in single file, having bought all her books from the school bookstore, and burned them right in front of the building. A huge waving fire rose and lit up the square as dark specters added books to the flame. Her pages curled up and turned to crisps. Whips of light spiraled from the confines of the pit as flaming pieces of papers flowered out like a shower of sparks. It was flux with golden light, a ring of guardians protecting its sacred flame, the fire lit up the night and like a beacon I found it. This happened on my 26^th birthday. It was the best present I’d ever gotten.

I relied on my blue bike to get me around town. Groceries, houses, mostly. After five years in school, I finally got hit by a Challenger or some expensive vehicle and the driver kept on moving. My bike broke days later, and I was walking to school. This took all damn day and I didn’t want to take the bus, even though it was probably free college students. My tooth just rotted out, and it exploded in my mouth one morning while eating. The pain kept me up for two solid days. I had no health insurance, no money (yes I had a job) so I just let it fester until I could take it no longer. I stole a bike from the dorms one night. Found a nice, expensive looking one that wasn’t locked up, and I still have it to this day. Returning the favor, as I saw it back then.

Years later after I dropped out and quit my job slinging shitty drinks, I moved to the west where I've always wanted to go. I immediately stole a weapon and sold it. This is the last thing I ever stole. Once it was over, strangers LIKED talking to me. They looked me in the eye, and appreciated what they saw as intensity or toughness. Really, I did something wrong and felt bad about it, and was internalizing what I had done, who I had betrayed, and how crazy I must have really been at that moment in time. I felt so grief stricken that I got into contact with my first love. Of course she moved on long ago, probably while we were still together, but I wondered about what she was doing, what brought her happiness, if she was even still alive.

There was no romantic fantasy. We got into it. Immediately began attacking each other. All of these thoughts and feelings she kept to herself and never told me. I told about how she had an unfinished tiger tattoo on her back, and how she quit school two weeks before graduation (it was a private school her mom was paying for!) And she wanted more freedom, so she joined the army. Dear girl, you do what you are told to do in the army. Stupid city girl. I got her to calm down by reciting Serbian war songs to her. If you don't know anything about the Serbians, they’ve lost every war they ever had, and during the Uprisings in the 90s, they utilized musical propaganda to smooth out the war crimes. These songs are usually racist, combative, and threatening. They worked. It got the American army girl to send me nudes with kissy captions.

We never met up because of the chaos of the Coronavirus. I spent three months isolated in the dark, a black hole opened over my head, and from it spilled forth black clouds and demon warriors descended to the earth in heavy war trucks. They showed me the truth. 

She came back to my hometown around the same time I did but she told me nothing. Word gets around, gossip gets around. There are no coincidences only omens. The love I felt for her is gone, and with it went my love for many things. Such are the principles of nature, the cycles of stars and planets and black cosmic specks. Agony breeds agony, missteps close pathways, and there’s always another bastard who needs a good punch to the throat. Like this methhead I see wandering the streets. He’s got kids, baby mammas, exchanges tattoos for drugs and sex. He’s scrawny, sickly, ugly, and dumb as sack of bricks. His crackhead girlfriends won't save his life, he cheats on them all the time. I'm no criminal, but If I had to start anyplace Id begin right there.

I saw him one winter night walking under the train bridge in the crackhood side of town. I drove a truck onto the sidewalk and stopped it right in front of him. When I got out I pinned him against a column, punched him in the ribs until he coughed up blood, and told him that for now on, if he’s buying meth, he’s going to buy it from me. For now on this is how it's going to be. I have a destiny, a bright future, and reason to live. For some reason, I never felt more alive, happier, and I kept hitting him until he fell to the ground. I dropped my heels on him over and over until he stopped moving. I bent down, and listened to the wind of his chest.

His heart still beat. He still breathed.

My first thought was to drop him off at the DRUG CONSOLING office downtown. They help people get clean. Good people doing honest good work. Yet it also occurred to me as it also began to snow, that things like this happen to addicts all the time. They get into a fight, they pass out, and the snow covers them up until springtide. I climbed into my truck and left.

Months later I get a job at the town tree nursery. I nurse saplings, and plant them in a tree farm. It’s been here since before dirt roads. It’s been owned by so many families that the name is becoming a joke. Julrick-Wuckol-Henry-Hassenroethe-Kriefels-Snyder Arbor Farm. Try saying that at a dinner party fifty times. It’s not unordinary for old women to work here or people fresh off the boat trying to make a living of things. We even host field trips full of children and teachers to come learn about the local arbor industry. On those days I stay in my office and let the others do the talking.

It was a long day, and the field trip arrived, so I sat in the dark watching the children from my window. I could hear the cacophony and the endless clamor of screaming children flood the building. I get interrupted by someone coming in the door. It's not my boss, it's not one of the ladies, it's an old fat man in a dorky sunhat. He just enters and sits in my office. I offer to tell him about what we do here, perhaps get him a job, but he says “I already know everything.” He goes on and on and on and on about bones under the earth and how difficult it is to hide them from the government. Half a million dollar fossil found in the earth, and the federal authority takes a share. Then he broke down into tears when I asked his name. “Mr. Hassenroethe” He managed to spit out, shaking my hand. “My son was getting into drugs. We kicked him out of the house because he wouldn’t get clean. He went to stay with his druggie friends, they beat him up, and left him in the snow. He froze to death 6 blocks away from our house.”

I froze in my seat, lowered my jaw, leaned forward, but inside a race horse gate lifted.

He continued “My son had such a bright future. He could've done anything. A doctor. A psychologist. A movie director… and he promised us he'd get clean so many times….”

I asked the old man to stop it, stop rambling about some dead man that had nothing to do with me. The more he talked about it, the more I saw his scratched-up face, and the more I heard the raspy breaths fainting like steam. I rose my fists and demanded that he shut the hell up, but he didn’t. He kept whining and crying like the man I beat to death. He even started scratching his face, picking at scabs, shuddering from the cold as the ancient wind of a Viking Winter blew in from the window.

No. Before my eyes, his face transformed from the old fossil baron to the droopy spacey face of the man I put down so so long ago. It couldn’t be the same person, I told him, It cant be! I felt the explosion of euphoria as the man before me looked exactly like him. Even wearing the same knitted cap and mittens shivering in the cold moonlight.

My instincts kicked in and I wasted no time beating the living shit out of the methhead again. I crashed his head into the window and beat him down with a paper weight. Not two seconds later, the methhead comes back and is standing in my doorway screaming like woman. I beat the shit out of him too. More and more crackheads start running down the halls towards the school bus. I grabbed as many as I can and beat them down with a fire extinguisher. More and more of the exact same methheads tried to run out the door but they moved too slow, like children, and so I clobbered them good. More and more swarmed the room, they packed the walls, they came in from the windows, from the doors, from the ceiling. I heard the little Viking songs my mother sung to me as a child as I wielded my weapon and ignored their cries, frozen in a moment. 

The Burning Tower

The Burning Tower

Graham Swanson

 

Severe ulcers of regret channel tragic outcomes to the fortune teller under the distant tent. Her smoke is in the

air, but no one dares cross the creeks and old roads covered in thorny branches coveted by the badgers and

nighthawks. The prince of sorrow stood petrified with his lance still in hand, the chipped blade covered in moss

and spider webs. He sent a mean text message, then another, and another, completely vindicated,  because right

before sunset over the horizon of his earliest lovedreams, the ire of poisonous rats infected the brains of the once

wise wizards in the castles of victimhood, and bred the greed of the vaultkeeper to enlist his rioters to loot the

secret catacombs for the lost master manuals. The prince offered warnings to his witches after these rioters

appeared in the night to demand ransom for the safety of the manuals, and he paid with blood, his lust, and by

taking on a curse never to sleep again. The rioters didn’t know that the naive prince knew nothing of these

manuals. 

Other elites rode stallions up mountain slopes past the peasants hauling barrows of filth, called themselves warriors because they witnessed some battle or another and knew an armbar or two, or they stayed in their estates practicing harpsichord and studying the poetry of the elder warriors who conquered the world 10000 moon cycles ago. This prince maintained an unspoken romance with the young nuns of the old convent, and the ancient witches of the blackwood coven while practicing his honor of lighting all 10000 candles of the glass cathedral.  The nuns listened to him chop wood from the other side of wooden doors, and the witches summon demons to bow before him. Orphans hidden under black hoods followed him through the trees to witness his cruel betrayal. The insane wizards rewarded them with droplets from the essence of smoking elixers.

Despite the falling leaves and brief daylight, the clouds scattered and kiddie pools evaporated. Wasps built cities within the doors of broken-down trucks. Limping garbage rodents fled the gunfire of blind old men on the higher porches of ghetto homes. Neon vested and protected in heavy boots, the oppressed peasants of the land sipped hot coffee and battled to move their dying vehicles from the bare patch on the lawn. It's all gone, the good things, the young beautiful witches masquerading with fruit in their laps, and the saintly maidens soon heard the war horn blow, and they went off to battle in the desert. Yet the prince took his impunity when the forbidden tomes fell into his lap to take the crumbling pages to the moonlight, and he stayed there until the peasant vehicle erupted in the morning sunrise and finally left. Fugitives from the alleyways reeking of crystal meth and propane peeked into windows and looked under a neighbor’s boat. 

Once he learned all that he thought he knew belonged to the minds of good lords who died back when paper money earned enough people a house to call their own, and how they created races of carnivorous monstrosities to roam the world on the book, how they rendered the civilization of the elves to smoldering ruins, and how they grew mighty speaking forests, and how the drug addict and the alcoholic created a spectrum between a depressed doomer who gets stabbed to death in an alley and dies huddled in trash, promiscuous ladies who travel all over the world but always end up either going back to their vineyards or being strangled with telephone wire in a motel, power hungry, resentful men who understand psychology and the weaknesses of power, and the hermit living in solitude on a mountain sanctuary. All those faerie tales about true love and defeating the dragon fell mute because the peasants received the benefits of association in relation to their lords, but few maintained the charms and splendors illustrated by warrior sainthoods. 

Books existed to help the peasant, but the peasants used visual language not written to communicate, so without alcohol the information interested too few, and most came away believing that any talk of helping peasants overthrow their lords came from the mouths of assholes who just wanted to strip religion from the land and let foreigners invade. They gladly worked in their lord’s field but grumbled every springtime when they had to give the lord an egg for the fertility festival. When gold rained from the sky, the smart peasants left for the college while the others birthed more children and beat each other over the heads with clubs. 

This made them fun sport for the knighthoods with no battles to claim for their ancestors. On misty mornings they hurled lances through the chests of peasants armed with wooden forks and butter knives. Those peasants were no match for the full suits of armor and storm bridled horses. The peasants wondered why the knights didn’t chase after the giants who stole their pigs, but their foolish fathers just made things worse every single time they tried to get the knights to stop attacking them and maybe do something about the monsters. Peasants really just need to work harder, because this land belongs to the honored ancestors of the conquered legions unrivaled to all the malcontents created by war and neglect. 

The prince closed the books, and called the witches to tell them what he read, but despite ancient wisdom of the zodiac, the information changed nothing to them, because they lived in the woods, and so what if they lived under the spell of relief from a turbulent home, they remained in their swamp covens. And since he read forbidden words, on the day the zodiac restarted all the knights died in the armor, and their castles crumbled. Prisoners trapped in the dungeons went free because rats carried keys to them from under the cages. The prince slowly, painfully turned to wood, then stone, and the saints still visited him to give the idol whiskey and kisses for good luck in the coming harvest.

Night Echo

 Night Echo

by Graham Swanson

Kale enjoyed the quiet hours of midnight in the village between time zones. She worked at the gas station between two village hotels and the abandoned theatre. She scrolled on her phone and made nasty remarks on social media until the censors banned her accounts. During the usual night, a few young cops might come in to use the bathroom, unless a bus stopped. Then she faced the nightwalkers, midnight drifters, and mystical gypsies as she rang up blue Gatorade and cigarettes coming in from smoking borders behind the darkened rails.

The magical woman asked Kale if she wanted to see the love of her future, the outcome of a journey, the wealth of gold. Astrology. Tarot cards. Crystal balls. Magic amulets. Kale watched them all shuffle back onto the bus and turn to steam under the currents of freezing rain and speeding bursts of light. On their way fast to nowhere. Sleeping like angels. 

  Overall Kale enjoyed her job but the way some of the hooded men lurked in the parking lot looking into the windows without coming in made her wish that she had a co-worker there with her. She kept her cell phone at hand, leaving it on the charger, looking out at the sifting wind dragging strangers with the red wheat. Sometimes they waited in their cars outside the building, sometimes they walked out of the wheat fields and grouped together around burning barrels in the alley. Sometimes they turned up beaten and stabbed in a turned over boxcar not far from the gas station. Most soared away into the speeding oblivion of highway traffic and joined the blank faces on the wall. 

     Kale just turned 28. She hoped to resume classes at one of the small local schools along the riverfront for outcasts. She quit school the first time. Every single day she woke up and thought about finding a shotgun and shooting him in the face or smacking his skull with a baseball bat. He married a stripper from the dance club down the road. She didn’t like to think about it. She didn’t like to call it that. She just scrolled on her phone, tightened her mask around her ears, and looked out for tramps getting gas. 

At the flickering of lights, a stranger pressed against the fogged glass walls. This hooded figure didn’t wander off into the ether, he breathed into the glass and left bloody handprints on the condensation. He burst through the doors gasping, one arm missing, blood jetting onto the linoleum tiles and smearing across the glass, leaking down his jacket, pant legs. Buckets of blood splattered onto his boots as he hobbled over to Kale, blue faced, his eyes reddened and his pink mouth balking, soundless moaning for her to call for help. Kale reached for the store phone and pressed the emergency key but no tone rang on the other end. She dialed 911 on her cell phone just as the power went out and the man fell to the floor. 

Only his twitching boots made noise scraping on the floor, blood gushing out of his socks. A stick of bone still grinded on the tiles. Kale bowed over the counter to examine it under her flashlight. Little bite marks gnarled the wet joint bone. A heavy shadow fell over the gas station and even the lights outside the pumps went off, and then the cash computer went off, and the beer cooler shut off and melted under the door. 

Kale kept telling herself that a car is coming. A car will come and help will arrive. Something scraped at the ceiling over his head. It started with small scratching but then it turned into long deep raking sounds. The heater stopped working as the air conditioner and vents fell from the ceiling and crashed down on the coffee station she just finished restocking. Heavy breaks of thunder fluttered overhead, and the shadow lifted from the store. The ceiling pressed down as a tornado of cold air cycloned the building, shattered the glass and hurled the dumpster into the gas pumps. On the other end of her phone call, 911 emitted a tornado siren.  She kicked the lottery machine. Outside a fire started over the gas pumps.

Late January snowfall built up around the ditches. Kale stole a bunch of food and stuffed it in her jacket. She hurried out the door to find her car flipped upside down on top of one of the hotels. The clouds dropped lower and lower as horrendously warm winds thawed the frozen moisture on her cheeks. She hurried to reach the lobby of the hotel before whatever lurked above the clouds found her there. Once inside she began to eat the snacks she pulled from the shelf. Instead of a cool, lit up lobby with the night clerk she has a crush on waiting at the desk, she found wind blowing against curtains, and shattered fountains. No one around. A lamp lay broken on the floor. The paintings lay face down. Only one room light burned under the door. Kale finished her snack and left the garbage in a broken pot. She knocked. “It's an emergency. Let me in. Let me in.”

The door floated open and inside sat a pretty redhead at a table with a glass orb and desert crystals all around her bed. The magical woman from not long before. Kale saw her sometimes with a backpack asking for rides in the parking lot. The strange woman recognized Kale too but she never learned the face that went with the name.

 “I am the mistress Night Echo of Silverchair ,” she told Kale, and offered her a glass of bitter elixer next to the table amid a ring of candles. 

Kale shook her head. A shattered mirror lay on the table. A dagger buried in the hardwood sparkled in the candlelight. She thought she heard whispers from the tiny purple flames. The strange woman looked younger than her, yet tattoos covered her shoulders, fingers, and bare feet. A deep resentment fell over her face when she looked away from the light, like she was waiting for someone to die. 

“No, no." Kale said. "We need to get out of here. Something just wrecked the gas station. Someone is dead.”

“Yes, I know. You can leave if you want, but it won't go away. Yes, Kale. I've seen you around. Slip out of those terrible work clothes. You don't need them anymore. I have some nice comfortable robes in the drawer. You’re welcome to them.”

“We can’t stay here.”

“Why not? I've been waiting for you to come. That thing outside. I saw it. It won't be coming back for a long time.'' She touched the largest crystal with love and care. Inside, a heartbeat. “You see, I summoned him. I summoned him here, Kale.”

“That's not possible.”

“Not at first, but here, where the time zones never change, I find that there are many stars that don't shine in the rest of the world, there are places that don't appear on any map, and there are lost men and women who come and go like a bus stop.”

‘Why, why did you do that?”

“Sit down. It's 60 degrees outside. Soon tornados of ice will fall, and you’ll freeze to death before you can reach your… little home. That's right. That must really bother you. I see it in the crystal, Kale. Sit down, it's warm in here, there are two nice beds, and there’s me, the arms of Night Echo, the sorceress of doom.”

Kale looked into the crystal beyond on the center of the table, and she felt the dark rings around her eyes pull her under. The door slammed shut. The chair felt comfortable. She’d been standing all day. Warm too. Despite the frost growing on the window, the power lines down sparking in the parking lot, the fields of snow melting under the small fires, warm clouds blowing fog from empty field to empty field.

“Now, let me read you.”

art: The Sorceress, Jan Van De Velde II, engraving, 1626