Salvation, by Beto Palaio
Insomnia, by Grant Loveys
Spots On Known Planets, by Jeffrey S. Callico
Intention, by Jeffrey S. Callico
Green Dust, by Jeffrey S. Callico
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Salvation
Beto Palaio
Finally a light was sprinkling on our cousins that were the clouds and the birds flying in the blue sky... and so Cherubim knelt before the man he had to arrest.
"That's right," the man said. The sun wasn't high, and the sky was not an official court to the crows. Not yet…
Two of his brave dogs began to bark.
Cherubim was talking about a remote kingdom.
But the man was not sure, so he demanded proof.
“A cricket never cares for his own shadow”, said Cherubim.
So the man and the angel went to Guadalupe, as the bishop said they would. It was still dark there, so they camped outside the city, on the bank of a furious river.
Not long before, they’d released their horses in an alfalfa field.
“My mother has a river like this one.”, Cherubim told him.
“It’s a huge river”, he said.
“Yes,” replied Cherubim. “Very huge”…
A cricket started to sing, not far away, and the man remembered about the shadow talk they had before. So he started to be afraid, but not too much, just a little…
Insomnia
Grant Loveys
Since Jen died I haven't been sleeping. People come to check on me now and then, each of them holding out foil-wrapped offerings like an admission ticket. Time heals all, they say. Must get your sleep, they say, handing me blister packs and rattling bottles and fat capsules full of smooth narcotic syrup wrapped in twists of toilet paper. In the morning, the sun shines through the pills spilling hazy green light on the nightstand. I don't want to sleep and dream of her only to wake and lose her again.
I pass the time with TV. Old Match Game reruns start at midnight. She often dreamt of slogging her way back through time and becoming a contestant. Stranger things have happened, she said.
When the time comes, I stretch her little socks over my feet, gather up the nest of her hair I found in the hairbrush and watch a panel of dead celebrities crack jokes to a dead host ten years before Jen and I were born. They're dead on paper, sure. The period has been pointed at the end of their sentences. But each night I wait for them, and each night they arrive, and who is to say they are gone if I can still see them? By now their voices murmur on radio waves reaching ancient tangled galaxies splattered over the universe, and if their syllables can snag on a comet's tendril arm or plunge into an infinity of boiling gas only presumed to exist, then nothing can ever truly end.
Maybe one day I'll make my way out to where she is. Maybe I'll see that a tree has burst from the earth, and under that earth will be a webwork of roots which have wound their way through her body, rummaging her flesh with their greedy mouths. Maybe that tree will flourish and hum with vitality, and each bud or leaf will be built from what I have lost. I hope so.
But there will always be Match Game. What has been will always be. And if Jen should happen to wander onto the screen, her body reborn by a million points of light driven hot through circuitry, I will take the pills. I will sleep. And I will listen for her voice through the static already on its way to the stars.
Spots On Known Planets
Jeffrey S. Callico
I am breathing now so give me the tablet on the dresser. It will taste
like cinnamon because it is a tablet that is cinnamon-flavored.
I love the sunshine that bleeds through my small windows. The windows here are small and the sun shines in a small manner.
If you tell me how it was at the very beginning I will tell you how it
will end. But I will not give you much to go on. Only what is left of
the rest of the story. I this. I that. I everything else.
Intention
Jeffrey S. Callico
Morning struck hard against his eyes. The motel was small, just off
the main road. He woke to voices passing his door, voices laughing,
people he didn’t know and would never meet. The voices faded, leaving silence in their wake. He turned away from the hard light to face a blank wall. The room smelled of something he couldn’t define but his brain seemed to know what it was but wasn’t telling him. There were no dreams he could remember. He glanced at the television a couple feet from the foot of the bed and considered turning it on but the remote was too far away to reach on the bedside table.
But the phone was close. All he had to do was turn toward the light
and pick up the receiver. There would be the dial tone, like a sexless
monotone voice, and he would remember the number but change his mind just before his finger pressed the first digit. The motel would be his holding place until he got enough strength to move on, to get his pack together and keep walking. If the weather held out he would make it in two, three days at most. For now he would remain in the lumpy motel bed and think about how life used to be before he disappeared, before he became what he had become.
Green Dust
Jeffrey S. Callico
When he woke that morning he knew anyone could kill anyone and that dead things were living in his head. The bedroom wall was a bleak yellow and the bed was full of insects he couldn’t see but knew were there because his skin could feel them in the sleep of night. In a
room downstairs people were talking in voices he knew existed in their throats but the names refused to materialize.
He threw off a soiled sheet and made his way to the left. After
drippage he clothed himself and looked at himself in a smeared mirror. He said nothing then left the room. The downstairs voices had stopped.
Someone looked up and he was standing before everyone. No one said anything to anyone else. He grabbed a box of stale cereal and sat at the dingy table. The window above the sink was shattered and flies were buzzing in and out. The flies looked the same as the ones he had seen the day before and he knew that either they were the same flies or different ones but in essence they were all the same.
The cereal tasted not like soggy cardboard but drenched re-dried kelp. He ate it anyway and faces looked on with voices muted by his
presence. He was a killer but they didn’t know anything about him.
Nothing specific. Not that he was a killer and that anyone could kill
anyone else if anyone thought about it long enough.
He took the emptied bowl and dropped it into the sink. The flies
swarmed around the bowl which still had straggling bits of milk-sopped kelp-flakes in it. He knew that behind him the faces were still looking and that a couple of them were staring and that those who were just looking were the ones he wanted to kill the most.
He turned and faced them.
The flies were buzzing.
