The Department of Light & Sound

By Gregory J. M. Kasunich

Sarah Willow screamed and the crowd cheered.

The tears streaming from her colorless eyes chased the dirt away from her cheeks and left behind tracks of pale white skin marred by scratches. Her scalp screamed even louder than she did as the two young priests dragged her by her faded snowy silver hair, the crowd following close behind jeering and spitting and slinging stones upon the girl.

Their voices screamed “for vengeance!”

Their voices screamed “for God!”

Their eyes that screamed for death.

Everything was black and white and dead or dying. The thin fog from the morning persisted into the midday and moistened the already freezing air. Only the sick yellow moon dripped light into the dead, black forest of late October. Even her blood looked black and filled the air with the faint scent of copper as it mixed with the dirt.

The blood.

The blood from everywhere.

The blood that poured out of Sarah Willows spilled out of tears in her skin left a trail of dark streaks in the dust and stained her once immaculate hair.

One frail arm desperately clenching and tearing at her head, flailing, striking the wrists of her captors as they dragged, dragged her along the icy earth, their faces solemn, their garb black and white.  The rocks scraping her milky flesh off her splintering bones, she could not get free. He other hand clawing the ground, scratching for purchase until one by one her fingernails ripped free of her fingers in quick wet snaps and spouting springs of think red plasma from her finger tips, all the time Sarah screamed her throat more raw than her blistering, bleeding skin.

Sarah screamed and the crowed cheered.

She screamed louder, looking for sympathy in the crowd, looking for decency, looking for reason or humility or sanity. Every scream she forced through the chapped cavity that once was her throat was met with an even louder cry from her audience.

            He body was thin and nothing less than brilliant. As was her white skin stretched over a frame of bones. Her black lace dress, though modest, gave her shapeless body form. Her beauty, her effortless aura of sensuality, gave the woman of the town reason enough to hang her, their husbands shooting her surly glances in the square and driving jealously into their wives. There was something more to this ordeal, something known and unspoken among the men and woman alike. The children, although unaware of the reasons, enjoyed the commotion and joined in mocking and humiliating Sarah.

            As they reached the willow and the crowd cried for her end. They demanded her blacken soul released into whatever hell awaited her. The judge and the priests with their black hats and white collars, frowned down on her from above, their eyes full of pity and hatred. A stable boy who was charged with knotting the rope took his time as he looped the thickly spun twine, as to not make a mistake and allow a chance of survival. The crowd teeming around the broken wet girl salivated with anticipation.

“Lift her!” a voice demanded.

“To the tree!” another shouted

The judge and priest stepped aside and allowed the mob to swallow her, lift her, and press her against the willow. Her body light and flaccid gave no resistance. Her eyes still moist with the last of her tears flickered for an instant in the moon.

“Give it to the witch, through the heart with her!”

A man of thirty with arms like tree trunks held Sarah’s feeble frame against the stalk of the tree with one hand. Another man held an iron spike to her chest. Another swung the mallet driving the black rusted metal through the core of her body, pinning her to the tree that bore her last name.

She had no voice left to scream.

She had no tears left to cry.

She had no soul left to save.

Then another and another nail was driven through her shin, her palm, her cheek, her hip. Each time less and less blood spouted from the puncture. Her blood ran quickly down the rough bark and into the dieing ground.

In less than a few moments, Sarah Willows was dead. 

by Gregory J. M. Kasunich

I suppose it all comes down to this, but we already knew that?

There isn’t much we can say, words would be… useless? Like weeds we grow these arguments, using vowels and consonants and whatever to fill in the dirty empty holes of conversation only to have them  plucked and dismissed. The whole process is repetitive and dirty. This thing that we do, this talk we make at each other. All the words we cultivate to fill up the days and minuets and seconds we don’t want to experience. Maybe if we keep pushing sounds out of our mouths we might forget where we are, who were are, or… what was I saying?

But here we are, foreseen and inevitable yet unavoidable all the same. Maybe that’s the big joke, maybe that’s fate: knowing the stupid things you are going to do, but doing them anyway simply to know what part of you will remain after the fire, the flood and the famine. Will you stil exist, will you still be you?

Go ahead, fill me up with clichés, I’ll need them later when the advice on the bourbon label stops making sense and the phone calls stop. These things they tell you, this religion of thought, they were right all along. Funny, you always knew how smart you were, until this, this,this…

By Gregory J. M. Kasunich

Prologue:

She was white. Not just Caucasian, but white.

Brilliant.

Flawless.

White.

Her skin was cream. It clung nicely over her subtle physique, molded neatly on her wire-frame of a skeleton. Her hair was made up of inky strands of black, flowing over her porcelain face. Long and seemingly luminous, it veiled her face and kissed the tops of her bare shoulders. Her eyes: nothing more than two light, blue, droplets in the tight pools of radiant skin that surrounded them. Her eyebrows and lashes were painted black, sharpening and defining her nearly transparent visage.

She was only twenty-two.

She called herself “albino”. I don’t know about “albino”.

I called her an angel. She said she didn’t know about angels.

That night her eyes were wreathed in dark eyeliner. A red dress hung lazily by spaghetti straps and slid seductively up and down her slender body when she moved.

            “ I only wear red or black.” She whispered, almost afraid to be heard by the contemporaries that lounged among the overstuffed, angular sofas, spouting bits of Nietzsche, or commenting on the Jasper Johns prints on the walls in order to impresses each other.

            I failed to be witty. Instead I wondered if the tobacco nimbus that hung ominously above the room would give me cancer or make my increasingly thinning hair smell. I didn’t mention this. Instead I told her again she was an angel.

Maybe it was the sincerity in my voice that colored her cheeks rose. I can’t be sure; I was focusing on that smile. One glimpse and I was infected with it and my face broke open in delight as I smiled back and in that moment I was fourteen, in high school again. I was dancing with the first girl I ever loved. And then, I was back.

            It was the first vibrations sent flying by the upright bass player that reminded me of the present and I was embarrassed for forgetting myself in that instant. She looked up from her drink.

            “Because of my skin, I can’t wear anything else.”

            The end of her whisper was chopped off and drowned by the syncopated tapping emanating from the drum kit manned by a young Robert Redford. I know he looked like this because an intimate couple behind me had said so in a discussion I had overheard moments earlier. I don’t even know who Robert Redford is, but the words spilled out of my mouth anyway.

            “I don’t know who that is. Is he a musician? I know I know the name…” She laughed waiting for me to answer. Her attention split equally between the decaf latte she rolled between her milky hands and our conversation.

I was boring myself. We looked away from each other. Her eyes darted to the trio in the corner.

Drums.

Horn.

Bass.

I looked up and watched them flicker about the band.

I used to play.

The candle lamps licked her face with red and yellow.

Then. A spotlight.

The chatter faded with their sources and she was alone in light, the rest of the world swallowed in black. Blue smoke twisted its way in and out of the light and that’s when I knew.

I had said it twice and reiterating it might make me out to be a fool so I exercised the little tact I credit myself with and, in the dark, I slyly issued a food request to the grad student waiting on me.

Act One:

The lights come on and we are back. She turns back and there is decadence defined in white chocolate and raspberries sitting in front of her.

My mind wandered away from the scene and I failed to notice that the favor had been returned. It was the sharp sting that bit my nostrils. And then I was back. Looking at myself reflected in pool of scotch surrounded by cut crystal, a half smile flashed across my face.

“ I’ve taken care of it. Besides, and don’t take this the wrong way, but you looked like you could use it.” She said, right after she slid the fork from between her lips and before she entered it again spilling over with white and red cheesecake.

I took it the wrong way and became instantly aware of the sweat making itself present on my forehead. Her face turned down toward her delicacy, I took the opportunity to empty the drink swiftly into my belly. The gasoline-like vapors seared my throat as they made their way back up my esophagus in a stifled belch. Her eyes turned back up and met mine, and after a moan of approval she leaned in and exhaled the words,

“Thank you.”

“What about pastels?” That was my response.

“What about what?”

“Pastels. You could wear pastels with your skin tone.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“Like Easter colors. Light blues and yellows and pinks.”

“When I was younger that was all I had to wear, I think I’ll stick to the red and black for a while.”

And for a fraction of a moment she was gone. Perhaps she went to that time when she was colored with pastels. But now she was twenty-two and only wore red and black.

Without either of us noticing, our soiled dishes were removed and she asked me,

“Why are you here?”

The question stole the words from my mouth.

“I was about to ask you that…” I said this and realized that it was not an answer. “I like the music. I used to play, but got away from it. Piano. Never got good enough to learn jazz, but,”

I told myself not to make terrible jokes,

“I play a cutting version of heart and soul.”

I made a terrible joke and wished I could swallow the words back up.

Her giggle surprised me and I credited pity with its impetus.

“Music. That’s why I am here too, but I never played anything, I just love how organic it is.”

There! Gone. Back. Where did she go again? Was she lying?

“So what do you do when you’re not here?” Maybe the answer would present itself, I wouldn’t use the term gumshoe, but the word did come to mind.

“You can’t ask me that yet.” She said half serious, half….

“Have I given myself away?

“Yeah.” A smirk accompanied this swift response and was followed with, “Can I be honest? It’s the reason I sat here in the first place. I’ve seen you before, and I guess tonight was the first chance I had to, I don’t know, sit next to you. What I mean to say is, tonight was the first time I had the courage to approach you.”

Was that honest? I was compiling more questions than answers. I told myself not to take off my glasses and clean them with my shirt. Then, I took off my glasses and cleaned them with my shirt.

“I’m glad you did.”

Her eyes conducted a silent interview that I assumed I was failing. Our waitress swooped between the tables; a small cocktail tray with six or seven neon colored frozen drinks teetering precariously on each hand evoked the image of the blind justice statue working in a café. I coughed the word “check” at her and autographed the air above the table with my hand. She shot me a knowing nod and escaped into the kitchen.

“ Is it too soon to ask your name?’

“Yes.” Deadpan.

It seems we both find anonymity to be a virtual comfort blanket and bulletproof vest.

“Is it too soon to tell you mine?”

“It’s not important” she cooed and melted away some of icy insecurities.

The set ended, and with the music gone, the pattering of rain on the façade of the café played like a gentle encore.

The check appeared and I shot my hand out to swipe it before it could even hit the table. Too eager? She caught the price from the corner of her eye.

I paid and she told me she knew it would rain, but ignored her intuition, which left us sans umbrella.

I glanced over my shoulder and my eyes followed a droplet as it traversed the glass, dodging and meeting other drops until its inevitable plummet out of sight.

She bit her bottom lip and her eyes drifted to one side and then like an ornery teenager whispered, “Let’s brave it.”

“Where are we going?”

“Out.”

Act Two:

            We spilled into the streets, our hair and clothes absorbing the drops until the point of saturation. We dripped and shouted between the roar and splash of the frantic motorists.

“Where are we going?” As I say this I realize if I were a cat I would have died long ago.

“Stop asking me that. Enjoy the weather”

And for a few moments the air between us was nothing but comfortable and quiet. Her dress, now soaked, took the huge of fresh bled plasma. Shoulder to shoulder we walked among the towers of plaster and concrete, heads tucked in, we scanned the pavement dotted with tar and chewing gum. I still had no idea where the night was leading us, but for the first time in years I didn’t care.

I won’t lie. I was attracted to her. It felt good to feel again. As the water clung to my dusty glasses my eyes went out of focus and for a moment I was two years younger, walking home from signing the divorce papers, my chest once again an empty cavity, my dignity abandoned in a lost and found box at some nameless bar. And like the clouds above me, my eyes began a silent downpour. In that moment I felt the warmth of her hand slip into mine. And I was back.

 Her fingers wove themselves between mine and my chest lost its rhythm for a moment.

“What are you thinking?” she asked innocuously

I didn’t know how to respond and my throat coughed up a few nervous consonants. Finally, “ I’m just wondering why you took me out. Why you sat next to me. It’s just, I’ve never seen you there before, and, well, I can’t imagine I looked any good tonight.” The honesty spilled out of my mouth and mingled with the rain, yet, I didn’t feel ashamed to ask, that is, considering my intentions.

She smiled to herself and look up from the ground, her black hair thick with water, clinging to her face. Pulling it away from her eyes she whispered, “I didn’t mean to. In fact, I shouldn’t have, but I couldn’t help myself.”

Her translucent eyes pierced mine and it took every ounce of restraint I could muster to keep my arm from slipping around her waist.

“I knew you would be there tonight, and I haven’t been completely honest with you, but I will be. Soon. We’re almost there.”

Quiet again we walked, her hand still entwined in mine. Perhaps her apartment? Doubtful. I dreaded the idea of awaked yet mandatory small talk. I never liked the grand tour, the “can I get you a drink? Would you like some music? No, no, no, you pick. Sorry for the mess…” Pointless. Besides, I never expected to be here. What I feared even more was the eventual end to this evening. Leaving the one thing that removed my heart and mind from their constant anesthesia.

When you lose the life you built, the foundation of your personal existence vanishes. Without that, people are capable of unthinkable things. I had a plan, and when those dreams where prematurely truncated, financially, emotionally, completely, I found myself making a new plan. An exit strategy. 

Drip

Tap

Splash

We walk. I think.

I couldn’t remember when my job at the airport became my career at the airport. That’s all I would ever say to people, “ I work at the airport”, and they assumed the best. Pilot, air traffic controller, flight attendant, never luggage claim specialist. At least I got to wear a tie. I must have some sort of masochistic personality in order to have worked there as long as I did. Everyday hanging for the blunders of the tarmac workers. The luggage handlers, in between pot breaks, and by this I mean both the lavatory and the marijuana, they exchange lurid stories, cigarettes either clenched in their dry, yellowed teeth, or pinched between cracked, chapped, folds of skin that twenty years ago resembled lips, and mindlessly toss the travelers belongings wherever.

Yet, I am the one everyday on the cross, a smile pinned to my face, explaining how to claim a bag and the easiest way to attain a fresh pair of underwear. No one smiles at you. Nobody thanks you.

Ticket

Airline

Flight number

Despised and forgotten. My wife followed suit.

Somebody always has a bigger bank account, more time, better looks, a fatter stock portfolio, a faster car, and more lucrative investments. If you ever attempt to beat them out, you’ll be disappointed by the inevitability that someone else has more. I settled. She didn’t.

Mid-life crisis isn’t the right word, but it comes to mind.

Soon we are shielded from the downpour. Angels and demons stand frozen in perpetual combat over our heads. I know were we are. I know this place. It’s where my parents brought me as an infant, an adolescent, an adult. Where my wife swore to love and never leave me. We stood on the stoop outside St. Christopher’s and my angel of only twenty-two years kissed me.

Act Three:

I remember my first kiss, most men don’t, but then, I was always told about my over sensitive nature. It was nothing significant, sixth grade and too young to know love, but old enough to want it. I sat silent and scared not hearing the explosions of the Fourth of July celebration due to my focused concentration on my fingers as they inched closer and closer to the girl that first kiss me. Our fingers crawled toward each other for what seemed an eternity when finally they tangled themselves together and we slid so soft and awkward into each other’s arms. In that moment the world was gone and there was nothing but that kiss. The kiss that would become the measuring stick for every kiss there after. The kiss that lasted longer than eternity yet was all too short, and then I was back.

This kiss was better. This kiss, now, here, under the arches and raindrops, was ever more significant. This kiss saved my life. My senses where heightened and diminished, I was completely aware and lost. She stepped away. I wiped the fog from my lenses.

I looked into her cool blue eyes and followed the black droplets of mascara that slipped from her eyes like dark tears and she stared into mine, brimming with bewilderment and calm. We looked at each other for what was forever and all too short, and an entire wordless conversation took place. One where she told me that it was ok. That this life goes on and brings us to unexpected places. To exhaust filled garages and emergency room tables.

To empty apartments and endless frozen dinners.

To clinics and clubs. To bleak bars and no way home.

To coffee shops and jazz cafes.

To rain soaked streets.

To St. Christopher’s Cathedral.

To now.

She didn’t say everything happens for a reason, just that everything happens, and when it’s over it’s over, but when it’s not, it’s not, and while we still have it, we have the chance to make it good.

All with no words. I wanted to cry and fall into her and melt into a puddle with the rest of the water and flow into the oceans with her. But I knew I couldn’t, not yet. I had to say something. I had to say…

“ Thank you.” Slow and deliberate it came out.

“Thank you.” She echoed carefully.

“This night…”

“Was for us… is for us.”

“Why did you take me here, I, don’t really even know you and…”

“Shhhhh” she playfully cooed, “because maybe I needed you more than you needed me. Maybe this entire night was set-up by someone or something, I don’t know, I can’t know, but what I do know is that some time ago I ruined a piece of my life, and when I saw you there I felt like I had a chance to get back what I lost. I may be only twenty-two, but I assure you, that is more than enough time to make a lot of mistakes.”

More than she had spoken all night, and with a faint click and buzz the street lamps clicked on overhead and surrounded her head in an electric halo. I didn’t care what she had done, my angel, she had saved me, and I her. And as she smiled and stepped back and trickled away into the night I stood standing alone on the steps my parents walked with me as a child and realized everything at once.

We all fall for a reason. 

Epilogue:

            That night I fell asleep on the stoop of the church and dreamt that I died. At first I went to hell and the fire kissed my hands as I walked though the Black Door that opened to the caverns of the damned. The devil greeted me and asked me if I had expected such a fate, and I told him I couldn’t care less. Then powerless, the devil laughed a defeated laugh and sent me away on the back of a lion who took me to heaven and complained the whole way about back pain. When I arrived in heaven she was there and I said “I told you so” and she laughed. She took my hand in her hand, which felt like mint, and we walk for a thousand miles. At the end of our walk she lay down to sleep and said to me, “never remember the reason to go, just the reasons to stay”. I nodded and she was gone.

I woke up to find myself hung over and without my wallet. I walked home in the new morning sun and was filled, for the first time in a long time, with warmth. 

By Gregory J. M. Kasunich

Remember when I lived inside your skin? Two winters ago, when the sky looked just as it does today. Grey and silver and ready to break open and dust the chattering people below. I remember. You said it was cramped and that I should have sub-let someone else, but you were willing to offer the place if that was ok. There was a little friction to begin. You said I nagged. I didn’t nag, I reminded. There is a distinct difference. You should know, being a professor of words and sentences and commas and apostrophes. You know them by heart, I before E except after C. You played favorites, you told me so, and when I was wrapped up inside you I could see them, sliding behind your eyes and laughing at me, I didn’t always like your favorites. They were kinda mean and didn’t wipe their feet and spent way too much time with you, time I should have had. The double O, you loved them, the way “tion” sounded like “shun”, E and U and sometimes Y. No matter, I was the one wearing your skin.

Remember how I would comb your hair? Slick, slick, slick. We didn’t leave until it was dry, didn’t want to get sick, catch a cold, and have our nose run. Not too much gel either. Sometimes it would get crispy and when your uncle George would rub your head and tell you what a handsome young lad you were, an avalanche of gel flakes would fly up in a fluster and make everyone at the Christmas party frown. You were handsome then, in the cold of the winter, dodging wind gusts, your cheeks painted rose like a porcelain doll, your hair delightfully blown out of place like a movie star.

Remember when you bought that wool coat? The one I said made you look like a sissy, better suited for a bag lady? We had to wear it everywhere. I hated that thing. It was itchy, and I think I might have been allergic to it. All the girls loved it, they wanted to touch it, and they wanted to touch you, which meant that they had to touch me. I never wanted to be touched by those girls. So many touches I didn’t want. But you smiled and they melted and I saw them dance behind your eyelids for hours after they left. You know, I had to entertain them for you. It was nice to get some girl talk in but… sometimes I would make tea and biscuits and they never said thank you. Then they would ask for cosmopolitans and olives. But I had already made tea and biscuits and I was not going to drag us to the store again. So they would frown with disapproval and whoever was living in their skin undoubtedly saw you dancing behind their eyes while they giggled and ate and let the tea go cold.

Remember when all I wanted to do was sleep? Remember when all I wanted to do was dream? Remember when I could do neither? The doctors called it insomnia; I called it love. I know it was clearly stated in the lease, no inter-body romances, but how could we have expected anything less? Living is such close quarters, learning each other’s habits and favorites, and feelings, and political opinions, and each other’s smell, and taste, and touch. That winter, the snow barricaded the doors and the windows and only milky white light leaked though the windows. It was the closest to heaven I had ever been. We held hot chocolate in out hands, steamy ghosts rising from our ceramic mugs and teasing our nostrils with sweetness. We burnt our tongues and laughed and the fire licked orange and red light across your face. The ginger bread, the games of scrabble you would let me win, the moment when we knew that even though I had lived inside you for weeks we had never really touched the way we wanted to touch each other. Amongst the fire and the white and the chocolaty aphrodisiac running in our veins we finally touched.

 Remember when you kissed me? You had to look into the mirror to do it, and I smiled and kissed you back and sometimes I would get so lost in the moment that I would close my eyes and float and float and float until I could float no higher, as if there was a ceiling made of cotton candy and I didn’t want to break though. I just wanted to lay in the warm sugary nothing and think about where we would go next. And when we had been up all day molding minds and ruining futures we would fall asleep to the words of Poe, or Yeats, or Plath, and wonder why we were never as good as them and if we would always be stuck in that damned high school. Sometimes I would see your thoughts. I know you told me not to look, but sometimes I had to. If I were a cat I’d be dead. Sometimes you wondered if I would stay forever. Sometimes that made you happy, and then sometimes it would make you sad or scared or confused and that’s when I learned never to look in your thought-box again. Like Eve I was shaken awake and the ceiling of candy was now just plaster.

Remember when the first scent of sprint drifted amongst the falling flakes and brought with it a sense of new? The snow had ceased to stick and patches of green and brown broke through the white and made the ground like Swiss cheese. The birds could be heard but not seen and we wondered if they came home from vacation a bit too early. The yards were fields of dying snowmen sinking and sagging into the mud, their eyes and ears and noses and mouths in pieces around them. We drove past the schoolyard and watched the anorexic snow-people waste away. We sat on the swings and I got nauseous but you kept swinging and when there was a time when we would have laughed in spite of ourselves at our own simplicity and childishness, now there was nothing but angered and hurried faces. And more and more your favorites took up time behind your eyes and more and more I was not one of them. I needed to look into your thoughts, but was too afraid to know.

Remember when you told me my lease was up and I asked if I could renew it, nothing but a strong silence sprung from your mouth? Silence. Silence. Silence. And in that silence you said more than a thousand years of verbalization. And you took the job in Georgia where it never snows, where you might never have to host another lonely tenanted. You told me your body wasn’t nearly big enough for one, that your heart could only handle so much, and together we stretched and bent it all out of shape. You said you knew I looked, looked into the place I told you I wouldn’t and despite it all, you said, you didn’t evict me. So that spring I tried by best to repaint the walls a sterile white, but I could never get them as brilliants as they once were. I packed up my things in big brown boxes that we got for free from the hardware store. And that spring I moved out. And although I have that feeling, deep inside, right down there in my stomach, that perhaps I had forgotten something, left something behind, it’s ok, because I know when I left I took a little something of yours with me. 

By Gregory J. M. Kasunich

I’m going to fucking stab that bullshit moustache off his face!

Flecks of not-quite-chewed Parmesan and rosemary croutons flew out of her mouth as she said this and held a knife covered in five-layer tort in the air.

Standing there, in the middle of the warming kitchen, head to toe in her black and white banquet sever outfit, Sarah looked like a murderous, albeit classy, penguin.

First, that’s a cake knife. Second, how do you stab a moustache off?

David, or Dave rather, her brother, quipped through a mouthful of cold prime rib and burnt twice-baked potatoes, which he had just shoveled into his mouth without the aid of utensils.

Don’t have kids if you don’t want them. Don’t…

She wasn’t going to cry. She never did, but this seemed to be the closest she’s come. David turned his attention back to the extra wedding dinner he absconded with hours earlier.

I don’t want kids, ugh, the pooping and the screaming and the…

A jet stream of smoke shot across the room toward the siblings.

…the smell and the drooling and the…

Janice’s eyes crinkled as she held up her fifth gin and tonic and searched for a word, perhaps attempting to pinpoint aversion to children.

…and the responsibility.

The words soaked in gin and disgust. She shivered and vacuumed another sip through her bendy straw, her glasses now halfway down her nose, unnoticed. Time check. All good.

The bass pounded through the door and the fait warble of some sad Sinatra crooner faintly lapped the ears of the County Club’s wait staff as another waft of smoke pooled in the corner of the cramped, sweltering kitchen. Perched on a stack of unutilized chairs David sat silently, waiting until the awkwardness passed.

I’m not a baby sitter, I’m not a fucking maid, and I’m not interested in a game of grab ass in the linen closet with a forty seven year old pervert.

Golf membership be damned.

David’s joke didn’t land and the room continued to fill with heat and smoke and silence.

With her eyes unfixed and her hands wrapped around her glass Janice sighed through her tobacco worn larynx

Child, this is the thing you have to know. To some of these men, it’s still 1902. We don’t have Jews here, woman can’t golf without a man. That’s the way they want it, that’s what they believe. We get paid to make them feel that way.

She looks at her watch, adjusts her bra and looks at the seating chart.

Taking the cue, David disappointedly snuffs his half burnt Salem and gulps down the rest of his carbs and protein before checking his teeth and hair in the stainless steel icemaker.

Janice takes one more look at her crew and pulling her glasses off her face, she croaks,

Let’s clear dessert.

By Gregory J. M. Kasunich

            The paper dolls lay massacred across the barren apartment floor.

            Murdered.

            Dismembered.

            Dead.

            All of them, silent, still, deceased.

The world was better for it.

            A pair of dull scissors jutted angularly from the coffee table, the murder weapon left out in the open; a purloined letter of evidence hidden in plain sight. The culprit; splayed out, belly up and naked on the disintegrating sofa.

Her body, motionless; stagnate, beautiful.

Only the cigarette, balancing between her slender fingers and spitting fumes into the empty space produced any semblance of movement across the murder scene. Overhead, the lingering plumes, drifting from the red ember that tipped her black cigarette, accumulated into a wispy storm cloud, and grew ever more ominous with each exhale.

Turning her head and simultaneously extinguishing the smoldering filter, which threatened to singe her already bronzed flesh, on the bare coffee table; she surveyed her work, the aftermath of her torrid slicing spree that ended only minutes earlier.

The chips and sheds.

The ink and paper.

The shards and scraps.

She smiled at the sight and lit another cigarette from her quickly diminishing pack. Again, she exhaled and fortified the cumulous clove clouds above. She needed a storm, a torrential downpour from the sagging, stained ceiling. She needed a biblical flood of thought, of light, or static. Of water or fire, to wash her one-room studio clean.

Soon. Too soon, the detectives would be here marking miniscule calk outlines on her oak wood floor. They would come with sharp eyes, pens at the ready, firing questions through bare body like linguistic bullets. Cameras would be aimed at the pulpy carnage. At the empty open fridge. At her.

Snap.

Click.

Whrrrrr.

She stood, slowly, waking from her momentary mental/physical paralysis placing her feet evenly on the floor, taking effort not to disturb the paper flesh of a hundred tiny, self made and subsequently self destroyed, effigies.

She checked the locks her door, the chain, the deadbolt. Perhaps to buy her some time before the authorities snap her into cold cuffs and rattle off her rights. By that point there would be no time, no chance to clarify, to explain how no one was hurt in the incident. The pieces that lay before them were nothing more than fragments of her former self, snipped to bits for the betterment of all.

Nevertheless she exhaled again and prayed that the blue nimbus above would burst and purge the apartment of any incriminating evidence leaving her personally and lawfully exonerated of her transgressions. Not against society, but against herself.

In front of the fridge, the only appliance offering relief from the warmth, she paused, the wafts of Freon frosted air grazing her golden brown skin, running over her face, dripping down her lips to her stomach to her thighs and feet.

Exhale.

The summer heat had preceded the season’s arrival, as it was only May, but she knew the temperature was less than culpable for the first-degree extermination. The subtle chill slowed her thoughts, if for a moment, and like the static thunder growing above, she realized her motivation.

Inhale.

Hold.

Puff.

Perhaps had the choices made for her, to her, maybe had they been different, such extreme measures could have been avoided. But no, the repugnant rapids were hers to weather from birth; and even that decision might have been taken from her. Regardless, her father both gave and took all too much of her twenty-two years ago and despite her mother’s unyielding search for an antidote, the inevitable inebriation would eventually wear off.

The only solution was to kill herself a million times over, and then a million more, until all that remained was nothing like it was.

The clouds circled sending miniature bolts of lighting streaking through the apartment. She shivered and knew it was any moment now. Making her way back to the sofa she sat and pulled the thin blanket across her naked body.

She exhaled and snuffed the last of her cigarettes, the lingering pillar of blue smoke adding just enough to crack the clouds apart.

by Gregory J. M. Kasunich

He said he liked me, and that was enough.

He said he loved me, and that was enough.

He said he’d die for me, and that was enough.

He was dying, but not for me. He said it was normal to die. 

He said everyone does it sooner or later. He failed to make me laugh.

I always laugh at his jokes, but not this time. 

Amongst the miles of tubing surrounding him, running through him, filling and draining him I sat, unmoving and silent. Silent so I could hear the hiss and beep of the machines that kept his lungs moving inside his fragile chest. The machines: more alive than him. I sit so still, so very still and train my eyes to hold back, to stop from leaking their salty drops onto his cloudy cellophane skin, so pale it’s almost transparent. 

He coughs and it rattles every bone like the bean shakers we used to make in school. Two paper plates and some hard beans stapled inside. We would make music together, late nights on the porch when the sky was an endless pool of ink, and the stars swam in nothingness. He would sing to me and I would sake the bean shaker and we would laugh until the sun scattered the stars from the sky and we awoke to find morning dew in our hair. We still make music. The heart monitors the metronome. The tubes, guitar strings. And he is the bean shaker. 

It’s fast. One day, two weeks, three months, four years and your married. Studio apartment, two-bedroom apartment, a condo, a house and you have made a home. More than brick and mortar and carpet and pipes, it’s a home and it smells like your mothers cookies baking in the oven. And it smells like the pine tree in you grandfathers garden. The one he would take you under and tell you you were the queen of England, and this was your palace made of wood and bark and innocuous needles safe enough to touch. And it smells like him, like musk and man. And it smells like home.  It is home. He works at nights and silently slinks in at four-thirty in the morning and I stay awake just to smell him. To touch him with soft hands and kiss him, inebriated on sleep and moving on instinct, I could see his smile with my eyes closed. I would wake up and he would still be lost in sleep and I would sit on the bed, unmoving, as not to shorten his slumber. Like a child he slept then, swimming in peaceful lucidity, and I watched losing myself in his tranquility and matching my breaths to his.  And when he woke, breakfast would be there, right there where he liked to sit and eat, and everything would be covered in maple syrup, just the way he liked it and we were happy. 

And the nurse says five more minutes. And the tin can intercom pages another doctor to the E.R. or O.R. And his eyes flutter open and then closed. And I know he is using all the strength he has to hold open his lids for just one more… one more… one more moment. I want to shout at him. Just tell him to stop, to fucking stop this dying shit. Tell him to come back home and I’ll make meatloaf like I promised that one night. The night you told me you missed you mother and I spent all day learning the recipe. I want to tell him to save his strength, to rest, but I can, the words lodge themselves in my throat, they cling to my uvula and dribble back down my trachea. I can’t because I know the moment those lids close might be the moment I never see his deep chocolate eyes again.

And gone, before the morning sun would finish rising. He would work so hard. I could see it in his hands and in his face. Once soft and radiant, now a little harder and a little duller. Each day, little by little, until his skin was textured like soft leather. You’re going to make yourself sick, I would say and he would scoff and tense his muscles, his strong arms, to prove his invincibility. The arms that used to hold me up. The arms that could hold the weight of the world, the weight of the universe and more, now crippled and useless, atrophied arms sprouting out of his emaciated torso like saplings covered in gossamer sheets. So withered and thin I turn off the oscillating bedside fan as to prevent the swaying gusts from unhinging his insubstantial arms. And he never complained. Tired and sore. Beat and battered. Aching and exhausted. Never a complaint. He would come to bed and smile, and when I asked why, he would say, because I love you, and that’s enough. 

Two jobs to buy me the house, the house on Great Lakes Drive. The yellow one, like the sun, like flowers, so bright it leaked yellow beyond the shingles and into the neighborhood. The one you smile at because you know someone happy lives inside. Two jobs and two mortgages and two parents-in-law. He had everything to hate, but it wasn’t in him. Even then, looking at the house that would be our home, my heart swelled and though I never believed in God, I thanked him anyway. It was those years that made it worth it, it was only five years, but it would never be enough. An eternity would never be enough. After the stars burned themselves out, and the skies spilt themselves back into nothingness, I could still lay with him. But not now, the doctor said two months, maybe. Maybe. Maybe.

The years of good keep me here, watching him waste away to nothing. The years of hope and joy and love hold me to his bedside as he become less and less of the man I knew and more and more a corpse. And I would stay here forever and watch him die for everything he had been, for everything he had given. I sold the house, to pay the medical bills. I started working to feed the unborn child he does not even know is growing inside of me. I cry more tears than I knew I had, and some nights in the small apartment I run out of tears and dry sobs keep me conscious. And that is enough.

By Gregory J. M. Kasunich

Rachael Kitterage had decided to get fat: a decision her friends and peers and family colleagues and coworkers and neighbors and doctors and distant acquaintances vehemently and passionately protested.  Not obese or unhealthy, just 

Delightfully Jiggly

as she put it.

When she went public with the decision, the letters of objection and remonstration poured in, flooding her P.O. Box and forcing her to order her local postal branch to return all parcels to their rightful senders, much like her favorite Elvis Presley tune, 

[to her, he would always be The King.]

Her e-mail inbox suffered a similar fate, and after a few days she had spammed her entire contact list, not out of spite, but pure necessity.  

Illogical: an apparent cry for help

wrote the physiatrist.

Your cousin Jerome got fat; let me tell you, it was ugly.

wote Aunt Lisa.

Stupid: just plain idiotic.

wrote the Pastor Edwards. 

Her only supporter in this matter was her now best friend and then boyfriend Samuel Stall. Fortunately, an accord was signed only a year ago when the twenty something couple agreed after a few weeks to call off any romantic interest in order to procure a protracted and perhaps life-long friendship. 

[They only made out a few times, so you know…]

So far both parties seemed satisfied with the terms of the arrangement as they prattled on about everything and nothing over a boat of cheese fries and since Samuel was neither fat nor thin and therefore remained a perfect neutral party. When she pitched the idea to him upon its conception somewhere in the vicinity of two in the morning at some sort of all night diner just outside of Flagstaff, he paused only for a moment, until he got it, until he completely understood, and ordered a side of buttered waffles and bacon for her. 

[Elvis wrote his best stuff when he was fat.]

Outside of this one anomaly of comprehension and empathy, the world was against her. Then again, maybe he was just being supportive as per the agreement. 

She was set, her mind was made up weeks, even months ago, and only recently did her latent yearning mature into an unyielding personal obligation that could not and would not be quelled by even the most personal and logical of detractors.  She was going to be plump and that was that. And why not? She had been thin all her life; the unsympathetic victim to a lively and over zealous metabolism leaving her trim despite conspicuous past attempts to fill herself out. Late night fast food runs and buckets of rich double chocolate peanut butter fudge ripple ice cream gobbled down with brain-freeze speed during 007 marathons seemed no match for her prodigious metabolism. 

[The Kittridge Curse as it was known around her dinner table]

 While her family would down mounds of mashed potatoes and mouthfuls of meatloaf, any outside observer might believe that the party of four was feigning consumption in order to throw off the Jones’s. Only her cousin Jerome, a man with an iron constitution and a stomach for success had any semblance of mass to him at all, and now he had enough for at least half the Kitterage family tree. 

 [Like a watermelon growing from the branches of an oak tree] 

Honestly, she was tired of it all. She was annoyed with the looks, the leers and glances that men of all ages sent her way. She was done with the skimpy, form fitting clothing. 

She wanted more out of life.

She wanted to look good in an oversized hooded sweatshirt. 

She wanted love handles and a potbelly and a double chin. A double chin! Why have one when you can have two? 

She wanted to wiggle and shake when she walked. She wanted a padonkadonk and by God she was going to have it.  

So her training began. She was going to have to work up to the all-you-can-stomach buffets, but she would get there. Like Rocky mounting the steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum, Rachel ceremoniously set into an In-N-Out Double Double and Fries just outside the drive through window.

At night she did her best to slow her digestion though some form of meditation she saw on daytime television.

[If it worked for Oprah…]

And she would think about what she was doing, what was the attraction. She would second guess herself and think, just for a moment, that maybe everyone was right. But then, she would remember. She would recall all the people in her life, and how sadness seemed to flow from those who appeared happiest, and how they envied others with less.  Rachel envied those with more. Not more money, or more time, or more love, but those with more of themselves and more than anything she envied the smiles. The warmth and sincerity that somehow weeviled its way to the surface of these portly people. Impossibly they had found it, the secret, the ability to endure ridicule and rejection. They possessed a resilience and forgiveness that she wished she had; that she wished the world would have. 

And on that thought, she silently slipped down the stairs and with a sliver of light emanating from the refrigerator; she would muster the strength to down another six-pack of Jell-O pudding cups.

By Gregory J. M. Kasunich

The crack in the pavement allowed the feeble green sapling to poke through. Maybe the break was produced by the pavement itself, from the asphalt leaning and bending away from the neonate plant. The tickle of the germinating seed, the itch of the woody stalk. Maybe it was too much. 

The pounding, the traffic, it could take. It was made for that. The hot rubber and the oil and the rain, the incessant ignorance of everything above, it was used to that, not to this. This thing that was new, and alive. It could protect itself, but the cement and gravel refused to snuff out something fresh. Right? 

Little Maggie Friedman thought this as her parents dragged her though Shenly Park, her eyes on the ground, watching her steps. Watching to see if they got ahead of her. She focused on the pebbles and the black, petrified chewing gum as her father held one hand and her mother the other. 

She didn’t know that in seven years, four months, two weeks and six days her parents would be separated. She didn’t know what the reason would be, and why everything around her would always seem to be crying. The sky and the grass and even the old appliances in her home, leaking tears.  She didn’t think of these things. 

Right then, there in the shadow of the University’s cathedrals, among trees, her Keds treading softly on the genial pavement strung between the young husband and wife, she thought of this plant, and how the street must have bowed and broke to let the little thing breathe. 

By Gregory J. M. Kasunich

He wanted the full cowl, not the rinky-dink eye mask.

He wanted the long cape, not the one that only came to his waist.

He wanted kick-ass utility belt with the spring loaded suction dart launcher and battery powered laser sight, not the two wire hangers and length of twine that made up his pathetic excuse for a grappling hook.

He wanted more than to be the sidekick.

He wanted more than to be the  #2.

When it was “Cops and Robbers”, he was never on the right side of the law. When it was “Explorer”, he ended up the savage native.  When it was “Cowboys and Indians”… well, let’s just say he wasn’t wearing a ten-gallon hat.

He brought up his discontent once or twice before, but after a lighting game of Okca-Bocka-Soda-Crocka or Bubble Gum Bubble Gum in a Dish, (the later he still believed to be rigged as he was certain he counted out the right amount of pieces when asked how many his sister wished), he would still end up as the evil villain and Brad would end up the secret agent, fair and square.

Something had to be done.

What did it matter that Brad’s dad was some sort of something important, leaving the house every morning just before the bus came, wearing his suit, his hands juggling the Times and a briefcase and a silver coffee mug? Who cared that Brad got all he new toys? The repeating Nerf Gatling gun. The Lego pirate ship; the big one, the one that came with the colonials and he castle and had, like, ten masts. The Spy-Tech Jr. Forensic Kit that had the black light and the fingerprint dust.

After he got that, Brad was either James Bond or Sherlock Holmes.

He ended up as Q or Watson or the dead body racked with clues.

It sucked. Just because Brad got the better stuff and he had to fashion his accoutrements out of sticks, and glue, and rope, and old bed sheets shouldn’t have any bearing on who is the leader and who is the #2.  So that Tuesday, the first Tuesday of Easter Break, he decided the ranks had to change. It was two days in the planning and he had decided not to comit his preparation to paper, just in case his mom or dad found it. Unlike Brad, his mom was always home and his dad always saw him off to school or was there shortly after he got back. No real privacy. The risk was too great; he had to commit the plan to memory.

He made the call; soon Brad would be on his way over. Everything was set. The box fort stood strong in his basement, the lights were dimmed, in a few minutes, he would have Brad exactly where he wanted him. He would spring his trap catching Brad in the sheets that hung above the boxes, and in an instant, make him scream uncle. Uncle! The sweetest word, the word that meant he could call the shots. He felt lucky Hasbro didn’t make a friend trap or else Brad might have already gotten the deluxe model.

Finally he would no longer be the villain, he would be the one in charge. He would no longer have to play in Brad’s shadow. No matter what, no matter how, he would never again be the #2.