Mother sat bolt upright and stared at Oiwa. “Where is your face?” she cried.
Oiwa reached a hand to her cheek. “I-It is at the front of my head, where it always is.”
“No, only half of it,” Mother replied. She glared at me. “I pledge you to return the other half of your sister’s face. Swear it, Yasuo!”
We are not a cult. Don’t allow any outsider to confuse you. We are a holy order. You’ll never be asked to give up your family or friends; not for our benefit. We only want you to stay pure. If they try to draw you into some distorted place, don’t listen. Your world is a thing of beauty.
Truth is not beauty. Only Beauty is real. How could it be otherwise?
And Myrriden watched, perched on the dresser. Jack saw him through the corner of his eye. A tall man, tall like Daddy, but his legs and arms weren’t right–long and thin, they reminded Jack of spiders.
Myrriden held a flute to his lips. White, bone white. A leg bone, Jack knew that. Little Boy Leg Bone. The soft music sounded like wind through dry leaves and the distant cry of dogs. It made Jack’s shins ache.
Music by Randy Garcia
My chest is heavy, hair brushes against my neck in an unfamiliar way, and my groin… Through the unaccustomed daze, a terrible comprehension floods my mind. I throw back the sheet to reveal a body I’m used to looking at from a different perspective.
“You got beaten up a lot as a kid, didn’t you?”
That’s what Jerry Brower asked me, and the entire Central Carolina Writers’ Workshop burst into nervous laughter.
I looked up from the short sketch I’d been reading from and turned to face my questioner. Jerry Brower sat at the end of the table, down past a gauntlet of laughing faces. He, at least, wasn’t laughing, and for that I was silently, desperately grateful. I nodded to him, slowly.
He nodded back. The laughter stopped.
music by Instant Ambient (a side project of The Secret Life)
Jars line shelves like delicacies in a shop.
Hands clutch brown water.
Eyes and ears and tongues bob lazily in their containers.
Testicles lie shriveled against cold glass.
I have seen these things many times in many ways.
I swallowed. I didn’t want this to happen. I knew the game. Bag Man always called the cops and gave them a code. He gave that same code to the victim. Even after two years of killings, the fucking cranks were still calling 9-1-1, claiming the Bag Man had called them and that they needed protection. His codes solved that problem. He was a damn courteous kid.
Thing was, the codes became more of a warning to the cops than a way to separate out the sick, attention-starved loonies. The cops wanted to confirm Bag Man’s targets — not so they could stop him, but so they could stay the hell out of his way.