Fiction

De mortuis nil nisi bonum_¹

«The Earth is degenerating these days. Bribery and corruption abound. Children no longer mind their parents, every man wants to write a book, and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching». Assyrian Tablet from 2,800 BC²

It was a sunny day in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Kids played loudly in the yard, while a group of elderly women sat on the bench, watching disapprovingly. 

“Do you remember Bakhytzhamal’s youngest son? Well, he died!” – said Katira-apai³ to her neighbor on the bench⁴ with a strong disapproval of the fact in her voice.

“Oh my God!” – sluggishly responded the neighbor, – “What happened? Drug overdose?”

There was no doubt, of course, that the deceased was a drug addict. How could it be any different? Only close relatives were free of suspicion. Well, not entirely free…

“Some kind of illness, I think” – said Katira-apai.

“Sure. Drug addiction leads to sickness” – nodded the neighbor, pleased with her rightness – “We should go and offer our condolences. When is the funeral?”

“There will be no funeral”

“WHAT?!”

“Yeah… Bakhytzhamal had everything planned, invited all the relatives and neighbors, the mullah… And her son ran away!”

“What do you mean “ran away”? He was alive?!”

“No, he died. But he didn’t want to be buried. Said, that it’s boring”

“Astaghfirullah!⁵ How is it possible! What a shame! What a disgrace for a family!”

“Right! Young people are so ill-mannered these days! Bakhytzhamal is exhausted worrying about it. The relatives arrived, mullah arrived, and they even brought the sacrificial sheep. And the boy just ran away! He found a job, can you believe it?”

“So?”

“Well, they didn’t allow him to work. Dead people can’t work. It’s against the law”

The elderly women sat silently for a while, shaking their heads. First, he died. Then he fled. And finally, he lost his job! The youth have completely gone out of hands!

“And what happened then?”

“Well… They tried to persuade him, scolded him. Begged him not to disgrace the family and pass away peacefully. But he just wouldn’t listen to them!”

“Absolutely no respect for the elders! It’s all this television!” – said the neighbor bitterly.

“Yes! It was so different in Stalin’s time!” – agreed Katira-apai.

“What will people think! What example for children he sets!” – continued to lament the old lady neighbor.

“And that’s not even it! Then he went to Japan! Said that he wants to help them with Fukushima, since radiation is no threat to him now” – Katira-apai didn’t know where Japan is, but she did know that it’s definitely not a place for decent people to be.

“I always knew that nothing good will come out of him. He was always hanging out with Russian kids at school. Bad influence!”

“Yes… What’s happening to this world?”

“The Judgment Day is coming! I saw it on TV, a psychic said that the end of the world is coming!”

The old ladies switched to another topic, forgetting the ne’er young man. The day went on as usual.

Glossary

 ¹ Latin “Speak no ill of the dead”

² This quote is quite popular, but is a fake; Assyrian Empire was founded only 300 years later.

³ Apai – Kazakh honorific suffix, used when addressing elderly women.

⁴  Elderly women in Kazakhstan usually spend their time sitting on the bench near their homes, gossiping and chatting, as portrayed in this short story

⁵Arabic “I seek forgiveness from Allah”. A common Muslim expression.

Yeldar Zhurgenov is a psychotherapist born and raised in Almaty, Kazakhstan and currently living and working in San Francisco, USA. Yeldar works with vulnerable population in Tenderloin neighborhood. When not working, he enjoys reading science fiction and dabbles in writing short stories himself occasionally. 

Green, the color of the train was green, dark green. In a dream, the green is there. A flood of green is in the dream, a flood of dark green, a dark and perplexing and greedy green. The dream is unexpected, but not entirely frightening. The flood of green in the dream is all I see before it is gray, then black. In the blackness is the sound of a train, a screeching sound, a deafening screaming match on which I am involuntarily eavesdropping between track and wheel, a tired, familiar, and horrifying sound that becomes an inescapable and unending ringing in my ears. I see lights on in the train, I see people in the train—I am floating up to them against a blank, black space, and they are horrified. 

◆ 

I remember the color of the train. I remember the brand of liquor he was holding, and the weather. I can’t remember how I first saw him, or the exact date or time it happened, not without having to look. I remember green. Green, the train was green, dark green, the kind of green that is unassuming, that secures itself a sense of confidence from the way it resembles the color of an antique, an artifact. Against the sound of the approaching train, he blew his breath out and stood there on the platform in his worn-out tennis shoes, flat-footed, or so his mother later said anyone could always tell from his soles—holding a bottle of Smirnoff vodka, unconcealed. It was sunny, or the sun was out, because I remember the way the rays blinded me as I looked up to peer at the hanging station clock. It wasn’t warm, and I can’t remember the exact time it was. 

I remember the color of his cheeks. I remember that I stood a couple of feet away from him, but that he seemed so much closer when it actually happened. I can’t remember what the color of his eyes were, or whether he had freckles, or how tall he was—all important markings of a person—I can’t remember. The train, I remember hearing it squealing and screeching against the tracks from a distance, but I can’t quite remember what the platforms signs said. I remember seeing large poster-board ads somewhere about a new city welfare program that was being implemented. Large purple and black letters, orange and white background, people smiling. I remember red Xs, polka dots, my leg shaking because I was wearing a skirt, and it wasn’t warm, even though the sun was out. 

It all happened so quickly. There was a second—one-sixtieth of a minute—and I was exasperated with the train running late, or so I remember. I was looking straight ahead, across to the other side, the other platform dirty and stained with dusty black footprints, food stains, debris, grease. And then there was another second—one-sixtieth of a minute—when a warp of a body tumbled onto the tracks. A blur, he was, except for the clear outline of the old shoelace on his left tennis shoe, which was the last I saw of him before he was crushed by the speeding green train. 

◆ 

His mother gave a live interview a couple of days later, after the incident made the local newspaper. The interview was re-broadcast over and over on local news channels, multiple times a day—in the morning, in early afternoon, in the evening after the sun had set and people were sitting at their dinner tables eating chicken and drinking wine. He was an alcoholic, but he was trying to turn it around, I remember her saying on the television one night. He didn’t deserve it, she said, sitting upright on her floral couch in a cluttered living room. She had a grimace on her face, and there were hairs out of place, sticking to her sweaty neck and heavily-powdered face. He was just going back to school again. He didn’t deserve it, I remember her repeating. 

I sunk further into my chair as she continued. He didn’t deserve it. Maybe what she really meant was that nobody should die stumbling drunk onto the path of a speeding train. Or maybe she was implying that somebody had done this to him, really somebody on the platform that day had pushed him off, out of some sick idea that people who are in pain and turn to alcohol for comfort shouldn’t be given a second chance. Or maybe she was trying to condemn society’s failure to save him from himself. God rest his soul, she said on the flashing television screen. I put down my cup of milk and turned the television off.  

◆ 

I wake up from the dream and can’t separate it from reality. Images, symbols, daydreams, a thought that the brain retrieves after being reminded of the past by a detail only seen by the subconscious part of the body, or a moment that I can remember but never lived. How to separate a blurred mind’s image—like a photo taken with a distorted lens or at too slow a shutter speed—from a memory the body conjures up to live again and again? There is the green, the dark green, the blackness, the train, his tennis shoes. Blackness, green, dark green that is for a split-second unbearable, a low-frequency humming that then becomes screeching, a cold sun, a heart beating, a leg shaking, screeching wheels against old metal tracks, people’s faces, blackness, green dark green blackness of train and tennis shoes slipping down and down and down until the green comes back again.

◆ 

I remember hearing my heart beat as I stood on the platform in shock, like hearing jellied fruit pieces being poured out into a bowl from a can, pulsed into my ears. I remember staring down but not seeing anything on the ground, or even the ground itself. I remember seeing people’s faces, but I can’t remember how many faces. I don’t remember how many seconds went by before the train conductor realized somebody was on the tracks, or how much time passed by before the train finally stopped. Paramedics came, I think, and train staff, as some people on impulse rushed forward to him, while some people watched from the back. When they yelled and pushed me aside, I remember my arms shaking, and that I couldn’t stop them. I remember the coldness of the breeze against my legs. I don’t know why I remember it, but on the platform, I saw coins, one or two, probably dropped out from his coat pocket. And I remember a dollar bill, maybe his, maybe not, stepped on, crinkled, smushed in the ongoing foot traffic. 

Catherine Chang is currently pursuing a Creative Writing Certificate here at the City College of San Francisco. She enjoys fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction.

On summer days you could find Stella Antoinetti panhandling in front of 7-11 for beer and smokes. She wore a dozen or so jangly bracelets on each forearm and sang to herself to pass the time. Sometimes, if the song was coming out just right and she was coming up on her favorite part, she would forget to ask a passerby for change. When that happened, she was no longer a panhandler, but instead just a half drunk lady with a half assed dye job singing in the sun. 

Her two sons would be at the skatepark a mile away trying to make names for themselves. Mostly they were successful. Skyler, her youngest, had a section in the new Think video, and Raphael was winning vert competitions up and down the state and in Nevada. When they traveled for competitions and video shoots they referred to themselves in the singular, as The Machine. The term encompassed their busted ‘94 Camry, their collective skate careers, whatever mission was at hand, and, as Skyler had expressed it once, stoned before a park heat, the shared consciousness that suffused all things and bent the universe towards their inevitable success. Raphael had been double checking the camcorder batteries during this, his brother’s latest hippie-dippie ramble, but he shifted his focus to the words at hand, and eventually found himself nodding. Then, during his vert heat later that morning he imagined that everything around him, Skyler, of course, but also the dry grass, live oaks, vineyards, blackbirds, and even the lazily moving clouds, all of it was urging him towards a perfect score. And with a 9.4, he got as close as he ever had. 

They stopped by 7-11 on their way out of town to celebrate the new high score. They were headed to the city for the premiere of the Think video, where there would be cheap beer in abundance, Pabst most likely, or Tecate if they were lucky, but in honor of the 9.4 they were going to buy something fancy, something hoppy for the road. They parked and immediately spotted a figure sprawled out in the planter box under the left hand window, the one advertising a sale on taquitos. The figure, of course, was their mother. Skyler went to her and then called out to his brother. He showed Raphael the still bubbly puddle of vomit next to the planter box. It had swirls of red in it and, to Skyler’s eye, looked a little like fiery tie dye.

After some back and forth it was agreed they would drop her off at the ER in Santa Rosa. They laid her in the backseat, but she came to two blocks later. She groaned, said she needed a drink, a cigarette, said she just needed a fucking break in this shit sandwich of a life. When her sons told her where they were taking her, she laughed. 

“Abso-fucking-lutely not.”

“You puked blood, Mom,” Skyler said.

“Again?”

“How many times has that happened?” Raphael asked

“How do you feel?” Skyler wanted to know.

“Thirsty,” she said. 

Skyler went to hand her his gatorade, but Raphael grabbed it from him. 

“For booze. She means she’s thirsty for booze.”

“It’s like you know me,” she said.

Though she hadn’t been in their lives much, the boys did know some things about their mother. Her smell, for example. Coconut and mentholated cigarettes. Even now it filled the car and tugged at something in the boys’ chests. They also knew her laugh, a raspy staccato that had the same texture as a worn out motel towel. But they didn’t know her birthday, medical history, or where she’d been born. They didn’t know any of her relatives, what her first job had been, or what she’d wanted to be when she grew up. They didn’t know her favorite type of dog. They had been raised by their father’s mother, a quiet churchgoing woman who collected porcelain figurines, who was forever reopening her door to Stella, who, like a stray cat unaccustomed to domesticity, would wander right back out of that open door and then be gone for months, sometimes years. 

For her part, Stella knew her sons’ birthdays, but not their medical histories. She knew where they’d grown up, because here they all were. She knew her eldest Raphael had a heightened sense of justice that, while always well calibrated, could use some tempering if he was ever going to squeeze some enjoyment out of life. As for Skyler, she knew him to be a sweet boy with a generous heart, and she worried about him being on his own. Because of that, she was glad she had been mostly absent: it had forced the boys closer. She knew they were much better off with each other than they would’ve ever been with her.

“Where are you two swashbucklers off to this lovely evening?” she asked.

“The city.”

“That sounds more like it. Buying up on the way? Whose dick do I have to decapitate to get a road soda?”

Raphael tried to tell her that she wasn’t coming to the city, that they were going to drop her off at the ER and then it’d be see you later until the next time they dug her out of a planter box, a gutter, or a ditch. He merged onto the freeway. The speed of the redwoods whipping by, the hills flattening out, vineyards that now stretched out for miles, it all had a hypnotic effect on Stella, so that she didn’t think to reply to her son, and instead commented, practically in a whisper, that they should go to the beach. Ocean Beach. She’d taken them all there when they were young. 

“No, you didn’t,” Raphael said. 

“How old were we?” Skyler asked. 

“Two and three. Seems like you boys have somewhere important to be tonight, but look. A beach sunset with your old mom. Then you get off to your thing. I have people I can stay with in the city. Then we’ll just see each other in that ditch you mentioned.”

“We’re taking you to the ER,” Raphael said.

“No, you’re not.”

“Mom, you puked blood. That’s a big deal,” Skyler said. 

“I didn’t. I had Hawaiin Punch. Your dear old mother got nostalgic for a redneck daiquiri, that’s all.”

“Fuck me, why didn’t you say that?” Raphael asked.

“Because here we are, and it’s been too long.”

The corniness of her phrasing, the twenty five cent poetry of it, something about it made Raphael, if not agree with her, at least lose interest in arguing. Skyler, of course, needed no convincing. He found his mother’s words sublimely philosophic, without realizing, of course, that he too often spoke in the same airy tones.

They rode the rest of the way to Ocean Beach in silence. The boys continued to take in their mother’s scent. Stella, for her part, wedged her sons’ backpacks against the door, forming them into a cushion that she lay against. They had both packed fairly dirty clothes that stunk mildly through their packs, and she could tell which bag belonged to which son by smell alone. She knew Raphael’s bag for his heavy metallic twang of old pennies, while Skyler’s smell was citrusy and light. She pretended to sleep, but with each inhalation more fuel to the fire of memory was added. She remembered the boys as infants, fat faced and with milk perennially on their chins; as toddlers, sitting on their grandma’s living room floor in the sun, babbling away while their father, who hadn’t disappeared to Alaska yet, drank a fifth of schnapps on the couch and laughed until he fell asleep sitting up; as little boys, always hungry, and the smell of grilled cheese with ketchup, one of the few things she’d ever cooked for them. By the time they got to the beach she was drunk on these memories, so that when Raphael said he was walking to the liquor store to buy up and asked her if she wanted anything, she replied she was good.

She walked down to the sand and set up their spot close enough to the water to watch the surfers, but far enough away that the tide posed no threat. Once the boys were set up with their beers, she walked up to the liquor store and bought chips and peanuts. She unshelled peanuts for herself while her boys flew through the two family size bags of chips before the sun had hardly moved. 

The sun went down and the surfers started filing off the beach in their shining black wetsuits. Some passed near enough for Stella to wave to them. The surfers smiled, waved back. To them it would’ve looked like a normal enough scene: a mother enjoying a sunset with her two grown sons. 

*

Years passed. The boys no longer wondered when they’d see their mother next, or even if they’d ever see her again. They were no longer boys in that way. 

“Nice truck,” Skyler said as he kicked off his shoes in his brother’s entryway. When Raphael had bought this sprawling tract home he considered the proximity to the skatepark a bonus, though neither of them skated very often anymore. The house was also close to the 7-11 where their mother used to panhandle, but if Raphael had any feelings about this he didn’t express them to anyone, not even his wife. 

“Better be. The insurance alone.”

They went to the backyard and sat on patio furniture that still smelled of spray paint. Skyler talked at length about the challenges of managing a team of skaters. 

“These kids are so sensitive. I don’t remember ever being like that.”

Raphael nodded. He talked about his own recent promotion, the one that had afforded him the new truck. He was in charge of all purchasing for the biggest lumber company in town, but he missed being down in the yard and working with the product itself. He especially missed the close up smell of freshly cut timber. Now things were more complicated, more abstract. His brother agreed that they needed to get back to basics. They needed to go for a skate some time. Maybe hit some spots in the city, like back in the day. They could even try to find that warehouse they’d skated and slept in after the Think video premiere, after the sunset they’d spent with Stella.

“Speaking of that,” Skyler said, “Look what I brought.”

He took out a bottle of Hawaiin Punch and a fifth of Captain Morgan’s. 

“God damn,” Raphael said, “Redneck daiquiris, huh?”

“It’s Friday. You have ice?” Skyler asked.

Skyler fixed the redneck daiquiris and they moved to the kitchen. It had been dark for a while, and the frogs were going wild in a nearby drainage ditch. 

“Tastes like hummingbird feeder,” Raphael said.

“Well, those little guys move pretty good.”

“Wait a second.” Raphael got a lime from the fruit bowl and cut it into thick wedges that he then squeezed into their drinks. They drank.

“Wow,” Skyler said, “The lime kind of makes it.”

“It does, doesn’t it?”

“I wonder if she ever made it like that.”

“I wonder.”

*

Stella Antionetti was drinking at the B&B Lounge when she met the retired cabinet maker. He looked natty but endearingly uncomfortable in the gray suit he’d worn to his nephew’s wedding earlier that day. The man was hulking, bearded, had dimples you could drink milk out of, and Stella found herself inching closer and closer to him throughout the night, until he finally put his arm around her. She wasted no time, immediately burying her face into his meat slab of a shoulder. Despite being retired, he still smelled like dry wood and lacquer. She kept her face in his shoulder for quite some time, didn’t ever want to take it out, in fact.

His name was Len, and though he was originally from the area, he had been living by himself down near Joshua Tree for years now. He invited her to come down for a visit anytime, and a week later she showed up with all her things. They stayed up all night drinking and talking that first night. The next morning he proposed marriage. 

Most evenings Stella sat on the little patch of astroturf in front of their mobile home drinking beer and smoking her third cigarette of the day. The flagrant purples and pinks of the sunsets more than made up for the bleakness of the daytime desert. Sometimes while sitting out there she would get so nostalgic that she would make up her mind to get in the car and drive the seven hours up to the boys’ grandma’s house. She could sleep in the guest bedroom and then be fresh enough the next day to go and pay each of them their own visit. The idea excited her so much that she usually ended up drinking too much and passing out right there on the patio furniture. 

Soon, though. Because these days she only drank enough to steady her hands, and it was rare that she got fall-down drunk anymore. She had been to see a doctor at the free clinic after that day with her boys (it hadn’t been Hawaiin Punch that she’d vomited, it had been blood). The doctor she’d seen told her in no uncertain terms that she was drinking herself to death. She remembered looking at his hands, soft looking hands with perfectly trimmed nails, hands where even the dark hair on the knuckles appeared well cared for. These were hands she could trust. She knew that. After the visit she made sure to shake his hand. Sure enough, it was warm and smooth, like one of those hairless cats. Though he hadn’t asked her to, she promised that she would cut back on her drinking.

“This is just what I needed,” she said, and Dr. Kerner couldn’t have known that she was referring to the handshake, couldn’t have known that she was drawing power from it, and that she would for years to come. 

Cutting back meant she could hold a job at the Goodwill. Holding a job at the Goodwill meant she could afford drinks at the B&B, which, of course, was how she’d met Len. Somehow she’d known that doctor was an angel, and after all these years she still remembered his name, Dr. Kerner, the patron saint of not destroying your liver. 

One evening she invited Len to join her on the little patch of astroturf. It was understood that sunsets were her alone time, but for this occasion she had lit candles and gotten out the nice glasses. She even put ice for the drinks in a crystal bowl, complete with little silver tongs that she’d dug up from somewhere. She served the redneck daiquiris and looked at him expectantly as he took his first sip. Like her, his customary drink was beer. 

“It’s good,” he said, “Surprisingly good.”

“I’m glad you like it.”

She told him about her boys. He’d had no idea she had kids, but he wasn’t bothered. In the few months they’d been together she’d learned there was practically nothing she could do to bother him. Sometimes this irritated her, but at other times, like now, it came in handy. 

“Raphael’s the serious one. I bet he’s some type of supervisor by now. I’d be surprised if he didn’t have kids, and if they weren’t little A plus students. Skyler took after me, bit of a free spirit, bit of a rule breaker, but also a people pleaser. I’m not too sure where he got that, maybe just wanting his older brother to accept him. They were always close. Even when they were infants in separate cribs, they would reach out to each other. They’re a little team, the two of them, I doubt they’ll ever live more than a few miles from each other.”

“They have you to thank,” Len said.

He was right, of course, but not in the way he thought he was. 

“Enjoying your drink?”

“I am,” he said, “Pretty sweet though. I don’t think I could have more than one”

“Yeah,” she said, “you’re right. Something’s missing.”

Despite the cloying sweetness, they kept drinking the redneck daiquiris late into the night. They drank until the coyotes started talking to the darkness, and they found that the more they drank, the more they forgot what was missing. 

Christopher Williams lives in Oakland, where he works as a medical interpreter. He writes fiction in his spare time and frequently visits family in Healdsburg California, where he was born and raised, and where “Redneck Daiquiri” is based.

“Mel. Mel. Melody. Wake up. Wake up!” Jo tapped Mel’s leg with an insistence that made her want to boot him out of bed and into next week. Then she remembered she loved him. 

“What the fuck, Jo? Damn. I was dreaming.” 

“What were you dreaming about.” 

“I don’t … I can’t remember. Damn.” 

“Sorry.” 

Mel rubbed her eyeball and turned onto her left side. “Mel, I think we’re dead.” 

Mel thought about it for a second. It wasn’t completely out of the question. She imagined the two of them as brains in jars sitting side by side on a shelf in some psychology professor’s office. Some Anna Deavere Smith looking woman who had spent a lifetime exploring the inner cosmos of neurons and biochemical interactions. Gravitas and dignity in all of her gestures. “You see this?” she would ask students who visited during office hours. “This is all that we are. And one day the jar will fall from the shelf, the glass will break, the liquid will seep out and soak into the carpet, and that will be that. So my advice to you is to take a deep breath, enjoy your life as much as you can, and stop wasting your time arguing about a point on a test when you could be spending it so much better by actually reading the textbook in the first place and filling yourself with useful information.” 

“We’re not dead, Jo.” 

“How do you know?” 

“You can’t dream when you’re dead.” 

“What?” 

“You can’t dream when you’re dead. And I was just dreaming.” 

“But you said you can’t remember what you were dreaming. Maybe you just think you were dreaming, but you actually just died and woke up in whatever comes next. Maybe that’s why you can’t remember.”

“Jo, I have work in the morning. For that reason alone I would love nothing more than for your theory to be correct, but just in case it isn’t I’m going back to sleep.” 

Joseph was silent, sitting up in bed staring into the somehow alien darkness of their bedroom. They had lived in this apartment for five years. He had seen this place with the lights off more times than he could count. In every season. Moonlight shining in from any number of angles. Streetlamps silent during the recent rolling blackouts or so bright he had to draw the curtains to sleep. But now it was uncanny. Eerie. Stale. 

He sat there in the stillness with Melody breathing in and out. The covers rising and falling beside him. He listened closely to the electric whine and hum that came from everywhere around him, and he felt certain and cold in his knowledge that there would be no more future. The darkness had eaten it up. The hum was an echo of all his human experience and everything he had ever known. It was even possible that the real Melody was actually still alive somewhere on the other side of all this humming and stillness, and that this woman resting beside him was just a figment of his imagination like a character from a dream. Either way, this moment, this place in time, this bed he shared or had shared with Melody was all that his brain could piece together to give him a semblance of life in the after life. This was all there was now. This was eternity. 

He decided that it wasn’t so bad, and he laid down, and he closed his eyes and he slept. And he slept. 

Melody awoke in darkness. At least an hour before her phone alarm would go off. She had to pee, but she didn’t feel like getting out of bed just yet. She wanted to savor the early morning darkness before dawn in bed with Joseph. These quiet, unworried moments were as precious as rare earth, and she meant to mine them for all they were worth and store them in her memories as a safeguard against the sadness that would come when he was gone.

It would be soon now. The doctors had said so. They had even stopped his treatments saying that the cure would kill him quicker than the disease at this point. There was nothing left to do but keep him comfortable, and say I love you. 

There were bills to pay, and she could not afford to stop going to work, but at the moment all of that was very far away. So before she had to mourn this man that she had spent so much of her life with, while there was still time, she meant to enjoy his presence. 

She smiled to herself, and turned over on her right side. Then she touched him, and she knew. Ice cold and too still, even in all this restless heat. His body was a glacier now. It had carved its path through life and finally come to rest beside her. Even so she tucked herself into him, and her tears wet his collarbone, and through the uneven breaths of her settling grief she said, “Goodbye.”

Ron Chapman is an actor and writer who believes in the power and necessity of storytelling. This is his first time being published anywhere on this planet and he is honored to be included in these pages.

A lantern bobbed in the fog enshrouding St. Joseph’s Cemetery. 

The chilled air was thick with the smell of rain and rot and in the gloom of near-dawn headstones emerged from the mist as jagged, crumbling gray isles overridden with moss. Two men, disparate in height and expression, plodded across the soggy grounds with shovels slung over their shoulders, mud and grass already staining the hems of their trousers. 

Cecil MacIntyre was the taller and thinner of the two. He bore a lantern of flickering flame that cast a pale glow across his narrow face, long nose, and a left cheek pockmarked by scars of childhood pox. He held the lantern low to provide reading light for the man beside him who was scrutinizing a map of the cemetery and stopping every few meters to investigate the names on the headstones they encountered. Burton Lee was a full head shorter than Cecil, with a square, stubbled jaw and a mouth that curled in a perpetual scowl. His dark hair was receding, making his forehead look rather large. The fog dampened all sound save for what was confined to the dim circle of light the lantern provided, making the squelch of their boots seem overloud in the stillness.

“Zebra,” Cecil said. 

“You what?” Burt replied. Neither of them stopped walking, through he looked askance at Cecil rather than the map. 

“X marks the spot,” Cecil said instead. He thrust his shovel into the soft, wet earth before the object of their search. The headstone was so new that moss hadn’t the chance to encroach on the letters yet. It read:

Private Eugene Gibbous Quagmire

Royal Irish Regiment 

24th March 1918 Age 24 

“No, what did you say, Cec?” Burt insisted as Cecil set their lantern atop the headstone. “Zeb—what?”

“Five across. What’s the name for a striped animal?”

Burt roughly folded up their map and stuffed it into one of his coat pockets. “A bleeding ‘zebra,’ I suppose?” he snapped. 

“Impressed are you?” Cecil replied with a grin. “It’s from the crossword. Thea’s got me doing ‘em every morning nowadays. Says they’ll keep my mind sharp. You know what a zebra is?”

“Ta,” Burt grunted, because he did not. When Cecil laughed at him, he barked, “Shove off! Rain’ll start any minute now. Help me dig this hole before the wailers come out. Or worse, Father Misery.”

“Y’know, Burtie, you’ve got to work on improving your vocabulary,” Cecil said cheerfully, yanking his shovel out of the dirt. “How’re you gonna land a bird like my sweet Thea if you don’t know what words go right where?”

“Nutter you are, bangin’ on about your bird,” Burt said, burying his shovel in front of the headstone and turning over a pile of grass and pulpy earth. “Maybe you heard what I said about helping me dig?”

“No need to rush unless he brings out a live one, aye?” Cecil said, joining him on the plot. They stood shoulder to shoulder as they began digging Eugene Gibbous Quagmire’s grave. 

“Keen eye, Cec, you great git,” Burt retorted testily, driving his shovel into the ground with greater force. “As if they haven’t been living all month.” 

After a quarter of an hour, the grave was two meters deep and half a meter wide. They were still standing in it when they heard the sound of a wheelbarrow trundling through the grass from the general direction of the church. The fog was too thick to tell where the steeple was, much less the church itself, and it took another minute before the black of Father Misery’s cassock became visible. Appearing first as a dark smudge that gradually darkened, it nearly came as a shock when the man himself emerged from the fog’s gnarled grasp. Father Ignatius Misery was a stout man sporting a full head of curly grey hair and a wrinkled, cherubic face. Sitting in his wheelbarrow was a dirty, bulging potato sack.

“Hullo, lads,” he said pleasantly.

“G’morning,” Burt grunted.

“Morning, sir!” Cecil said with considerably more enthusiasm. 

“Fancy a spot of tea when you’re done?” Father Misery said, leaning on one of the wheelbarrow’s handles. 

“Every day you offer, every day I says yes, Father,” Cecil replied with a laugh. He wiped the sweat off his brow with a thin handkerchief before climbing out of the grave. He offered Burt a hand up, as he was too short to climb out without embarrassing himself. 

“Does me good to hear, all the same — oh dear me.” Father Misery sighed as he watched the potato sack in his wheelbarrow begin to wriggle. A moan warbled from within as one trembling, rotten and gangrenous arm began to snake out of the opening. “Can you believe Mr. Quagmire refuses to stay dead, and even after I wasted my last good cricket bat on the poor bugger?”

“Best if I take care of it, sir,” Burt said, raising his shovel. 

“Yes, very well,” Father Misery said. He opened the potato sack so Burt could cleave the very undead Eugene Gibbous Quagmire’s head in two. 

Anna Nicole Torres is an MFA student at Saint Mary’s College of California. Her work was previously published in the Sad Girls Club Literary Blog. She loves writing horror, but not watching or reading it.