Fear

It’s easier when you’re young, when fear can still be delicious. Think about the ancient, sacred rite of campfire tales. You and your friends sit around a flaring, crackling fire, conjuring ghosts and ghouls and monsters; you tell each other in hushed tones about noises in the woods – the crunching of leaves, eerie wails, words whispered just beyond understanding – and the darkness around you enters within, pounding, threatening to burst through your chest and eardrums. Then the story is done and the throbbing darkness recedes, leaving you terrified, exhilarated, replete with satisfaction. You can think of yourself as brave then for not trembling or jumping at every little sound as the tales were told, or begging that the stories end. When you are a child, you have the luxury of playing at fear, particularly when your childhood was more or less uneventful and you were raised by parents who kept you safe and free from harm. 

But then you grow up, and one bright day, you are walking down the street with your own son Matt, only half listening to his six-year-old chatter, your mind on the list of grocery items your wife has just texted you to pick up on the way home. You hear him call to you, “Hey, Dad! Dad!”, and you realize he has fallen behind you. You turn and see him pausing before a store window, pointing at some video games displayed within. Your eye is caught by an old woman shuffling up the street towards you, looking down at Matt, and the instant you notice her smile the side of her head leaps off in a gush of crimson, chasing the shattered fragments of the store window as they fly inwards in a thunderous crash. You hear a loud pop! pop! pop! from the street and the sound of more glass bursting, and you find yourself lying face down at the bottom of a stairwell to a basement door, eyes shutting away the light, burrowing your head into your arms. You hear screams and yells and more pops and dull booms, and then the slamming of car doors and the screeching of tires, and then the keening of sirens in the distance, coming closer, becoming shrill and maddening. The screams continue, from several quarters, and after an eternity in the darkness, a flicker of a memory rouses you: you have a son; he was with you.

By sheer dint of will, you open your eyes, unlock your frozen limbs, and drag yourself up the four steps to peer into the street. You see Matt still standing where he had been, on a slick of blood, the old woman lying prone at his feet. His tiny body is enlarging, sucking in air like a bellows, then blasting it out in a piercing, wrenching howl. His cheek is spotted red, his face contorted in complete and utter terror. You try to stand up but fail, and so can only start crawling towards him. A flash of dark blue rushes past him and jumps through the open, broken window – and Matt is gone. A gargling, guttural moan escapes you, and another dark blue shape suddenly appears, looking down at you. You see his face mouthing words, but though you hear the sounds, their meaning will not settle in your churning mind. He lowers himself on one knee, puts a hand on your back, stays beside you as he scans the street, his drawn pistol pointing to the ground.

More sirens, and other figures in a lighter blue come running up, and they crouch around you in a circle, and more hands are touching you, prodding you. They bring you to your feet and guide you towards red trucks with flashing lights. You can barely feel your legs beneath you as you stagger forward. In time, Matt is brought to you, wrapped in a blanket, smudges of blood still smearing his face, and you find yourselves clinging to each other desperately, wailing into each other’s ears, the two of you a single creature convulsing with fear and grief.

Speech and wit return to you, in fits and starts, and the putting together of the story begins. Words begin registering again; you hear them from the police, the emergency personnel: bank robbery, automatic rifles, shootout, multiple fatalities. And you start speaking your words, telling your story, what you can piece of it; first to the police, then to the doctor at the hospital, then to your tear-stricken wife, who cannot let go of her tight embrace of Matt. And then you tell it to Dr. Johansen, in weekly sessions in a cozy room with dark, paneled walls, with sunlight streaming in through the slits of green, Venetian blinds.

* * *

Dr. Johansen has reassured me over and over that my reactions on that bright day were perfectly normal, and I have come to believe it, for the most part – though I am still apt to start at sudden noises, my throat still constricts whenever I walk past store windows, and I sometimes still imagine I see flashes of contempt in people’s faces – in my wife’s, most painfully. Matt is doing fine; the currents and eddies of childhood and a blessed forgetfulness have long swept him away from that street, so that the memory of it has no more hold on him than a story of ghosts and goblins. I in my adult circumspection am denied this solace.

It’s a little death, isn’t it?, fear: a touch of oblivion that foreshadows the void awaiting us in the end. Before the fear you are yourself; but while it has its grip, you are gone. You disappear. And you tell the stories afterwards to try to come back to yourself, to find yourself again. Sometimes it is not so easy. Before that day, I was sure of who I was: a devoted husband, a good and decent man – and most of all a loving father who would give his life for his son in a heartbeat. Since that day, I have lived with fear's bitter aftertaste in my tongue, knowing this is not true.

(May 2012)

The White Book

by Emily Isip and Glenn Ricafrente

She closed the book, placed it on the table, and finally, decided to walk through the door. The book had been forbidden to her, but Kayla had read it anyway. She had not finished it, because she was afraid of how it would end. Nevertheless, the book had already started working its magic and things began changing.

It was snowing outside, though she lived in a small village that had never seen snow – and anyway, it was the middle of summer. The landscape and the buildings were the same, but the people were no longer her neighbors, the villagers. They were exactly like the characters she had just been reading about. They were all playing in the snow. Their jaws, mouths, and noses were stretched out in foot-long, downturned beaks – like the protective masks people wore during the plague in medieval times – only the beaks were outgrowths of their faces. They were all wearing silk – the men in stockings and tunics, the women in long dresses with long sleeves that flowed past their arms – and some of them were skating on a frozen pond on ice skates made from animal bones.

A man on a flaming black horse came up the road, and everyone stopped and turned to him – then began running in all directions. Within seconds, everyone was gone. The man, who wore a black cape and black armor (with a helmet that extended outwards to conform to his long beak), rode up towards her. She was petrified. “This is impossible,” she said, “how could the book have come to life?”

She rubbed her eyes, and suddenly felt something push on her hands. She opened her eyes, and saw that her mouth and nose were elongating. She was growing a beak of her own. The black knight drew his sword and spurred his horse onwards, charging directly at her. She screamed, but it came out a loud squawk.

She leaped back inside her house and shut the door. Her beak disappeared, which allowed her to holler, “MOM!!!”

Her mother suddenly appeared right in front of her, a look of alarm on her face. Kayla ran to her mother’s arms, and her mother asked, “What’s wrong?”

Sobbing, she confessed to what she had done. Her mother held back her anger and said, “I told you to never open that book. And yet you did. I can see you are really upset right now, so we will talk about your punishment later.”

Kayla said, “How could you keep such an awful, horrifying book? How could you put a spell on it so that anyone who read it would see all those horrible people come to life? That black knight almost killed me!”

Her mother, who was the village sorceress, stared at her, then said, “It’s not an awful book. It’s just that anyone who reads the book writes the story. Here, let me show you.”

Her mother let her go and took the book from the table. She started opening it. Kayla backed away in fear. Her mother reassured her, “Nothing will happen. I removed the spell for now.”

Her mother opened the book and showed it to her. The pages were blank.

(March 2012)

A Lakeside Tale

I watched the water pour through the jagged crack in the hull and lap on my feet, feeling chagrined more than anything.

“Are you all right?” she cried out. I turned and saw her standing on the dock fifteen, maybe twenty feet away; saw her face, finally, and thought to myself, Holy shit, she’s pretty.

“Yeah, I’m fine. The water’s great.” It was crawling up my ankles now.

She looked at me quizzically. “Are you getting out? Your canoe looks like it’s going to sink.”

“Nah, I’m good. Hey, listen, will you do me a favor?”

“You want me to throw you a line?” She cast about the dock, searching for a rope.

“No. Will you sing something?”

She turned back to me. “What?”

“Sing something. Anything.”

She looked at me blankly. “Umm, why?”

The water was up to my calves. “Is this any time for explanations? C’mon, just sing something.”

She peered at me anxiously. “Why don’t you have a life vest? You can swim, right?”

“Nope. That’s why you have to sing. Now. Before I go under.”

After staring at me a few seconds, she gave a half smile. “You can swim. You wouldn’t be so blasé otherwise.”

Blasé. I was liking her more and more. “Are you going to sing or aren’t you? Look, my canoe’s slipping into the water.”

Her smile was full on now. “You’re insane, you know that?”

The water was starting to soak my cargo shorts. I’d be in the lake in half a minute. “Yeah, and going down with my ship fast. What, you won’t grant a dying man his last wish?”

She shook her head in mock exasperation. Then, after a moment’s thought, she sang:

My Bonnie lies under the ocean

My Bonnie lies under the sea…

Her singing voice was clear, melodious, tinged with mischief – I noted with satisfaction the slight, playful change she made to the lyrics. The canoe, filled with too much water to retain its buoyancy, slid into the depths. I grinned at her as my head sank beneath the waves.

* * *

I had seen her from afar as I paddled along the lakeshore. She was sitting alone on a dock, leaning against a wooden post, her face shaded by a wide-brimmed Havana hat, her eyes by turtle shell sunglasses, her nose buried in a book. Yes, yes, her body was what caught my eye at first. She was fair and long limbed, and the cut-offs and aquamarine bikini top she was wearing revealed and concealed her figure in all sorts of enticing ways. But – honest to God – what drew me in was her face; that is, curiosity over what she looked like, since all I could see were the parts not hidden by the book, the sunglasses, and the shadow cast by her hat. I came in closer to get to a distance and an angle from which I could her face clearly. Since she didn’t even glance up at me as I glided by, I gave up on any pretense at nonchalance and was unabashedly staring at her – so intently that I failed to see the orange warning buoy I had inadvertently steered towards, not noticing it until my canoe had already crunched on the rocks just beneath the surface and scraped over them, mortally wounded.

I hung suspended in the cold water ten feet below in silent contemplation, until my chest began to tighten in its desire for air, and I started swimming up.

* * *

I broke surface with a gasp and with a few strokes covered the distance to the dock. I reached out to grab the overhang and looked up to see her relieved face looking down at me. She said, “Damn, I thought you were dead.”

I combed my dripping hair back, shrugged, and held out my hand. “Would you help me up?”

She crossed her arms, head tilted to one side, lips tightening around a suppressed smile. “Umm, I don’t know. I’m not sure I want a strange guy up here who, one, scares the shit out of me making me think he had drowned, and, two, makes me sing. What was that about?”

I sighed and retracted my hand. “Well… I felt stupid. I was – and I say this totally shamefaced – I was looking at you and didn’t see the rocks until I’d hit them. Since ‘idiot capsizes canoe ogling pretty girl’ makes for a fairly ridiculous story, I thought if you sang to me, I’d at least be able to embellish a little and make it like it was, you know, your singing that made me crash into the rocks.”

“My singing,” she repeated, uncomprehending.

“Yeah, you know. Like the Greek myth.”

After a pause, she said hesitantly, “You mean like the Siren? The Siren’s song?”

I smiled. I was really, really liking her. “Yeah. Stupid, I know.”

Her brow furrowed. “But you crashed before I started singing.”

“Blah-dee-blah. Details are meant to be fudged.”

She looked at me sidelong. There was an almost imperceptible shift about her face, the kind that comes over women when it starts dawning on them that power over a guy was being slipped into their hands. “So, I’m a Siren then? Enchanting seafaring men into a watery grave?”

I gazed up at her, nodding my head slowly. “I think so. I’m still kind of drowning right now.”

“Uh-huh.” She uncrossed her arms. “Okay, good line. And I’ll give you points for creativity. You’ll have a good story to tell your friends.”

“We’ll have a good story to tell our kids,” I said, “about how we met cute.”

She arched her eyebrow. “Oh, really now? And what makes you think that this goes even one step further?”

I grinned. “Because I’m your Bonnie; you said so yourself. And here I am, brought back to you from the sea. Now, will you please help me up?” I said, extending my hand to her again.

(May 2012)

The Siren by John
William Waterhouse 

Notes on the Previous Six Stories

Sometimes stories come at you sideways. Working late one night, the image of a guy lying in bed in the dark seeing the visage of a lost love just as a new love has become a possibility came to me unbidden. So I put work aside and wrote “Night Voices” as an exploration of that image. Some things are just more important than work.

The latest round of the Three-Minute Fiction contest opened in March, and this time the challenge was to begin a story with the sentence “She closed the book, placed it on the table, and finally, decided to walk through the door.” As always, the story had to be 600 words at most.

I kept playing around with so many story possibilities that went nowhere that I decided to go meta and incorporate several story beginnings into one whimsical tale: “Round 8.” The story was too self-referential to be my entry; in fact, I hesitated even posting it here (a lot of the bits are inside jokes), but obviously I decided in the end what the hell.

“Canciónes de Amor” started off as a possible entry, with the contest line being the first line of the song stanza that starts the story. But the stanza kept bugging me; the story required lyrics that were mediocre, and what I had written was downright awful. So I chucked the original stanza and came up with a different one – and there went the first line mandated by the contest.

The story I ended up submitting for the contest was one that I co-wrote with my niece Emily (which I can’t post here until the results are announced – in a few weeks). After we had sent it off, I felt that I needed to write just one more story that wasn’t a lark, that actually had the required first line, that wasn’t co-authored; just a straight-up story of my very own in response to the contest challenge – just for my own satisfaction. “Stepping Through” was what I came up with.

A few months ago, I found a flash fiction website, Flash Fiction Friday, that offers weekly story prompts that anyone who cared to could use to write stories. The next two pieces arose from a couple of the prompts.

“Wild Heart” emerged from the cue: “Take your typical fairy tale villain or monster and make them the protagonist. Must use ‘something wicked this way comes’ as a line in the story. Word limit: 1,200 words.” Rather than write about a wolf or a witch or a wicked stepmother, I went with a creature from Philippine folklore instead – the tikbalang – and wove a fable around it.

“Driving Away” was in response to the cue: “Write a story where your protagonist is mistaken about something they ‘know’ to be true. Length: up to 1,200 words.” The obvious route was to create a character who was cocksure about some belief, comfortable in his certitude. Contrarian that I am, I decided to write instead about someone who was absolutely certain about his flaws. Someone, in other words, a lot like me.

Driving Away

Paul sat in his car in a patch of darkness between streetlamps, across the street from the McMansion. When he saw Ethan emerge from the bushes lining the front yard, his grip on the steering wheel tightened reflexively. Ethan looked both ways cautiously, crossed the street towards him, and got in the car on the passenger’s side.

Ethan’s face was grim. He didn’t have to say a word. Paul’s shoulders sagged.

Ethan said, “I’m sorry, buddy.” Then: “You all right?”

It took a long moment for Paul to reply. “Yeah. Let’s get out of here.”

Ethan tried to make out Paul’s expression in the dark. “You okay to drive?”

“Yeah.” Paul started the car and drove off slowly, only turning the headlights on after he had driven past several houses. But they had not even gone three blocks when he pulled over, placed his head gently on the airbag casing, and started shaking. “No, I’m not. Maybe you should drive after all.”

"All right." Ethan got out and went around to the driver’s side. Paul sidled over blindly to the passenger’s seat, snagging his thigh on the gear shift and not even feeling it. Ethan got in and took over the wheel. Paul spent the 20-minute drive home hunched over and trembling.

Ethan parked in front of Paul’s apartment building and turned the engine off. He sat back tight-lipped, looking sideways at Paul.

“You warned me, didn’t you? Five years ago,” Paul said quietly, bitterly. “You said it was a mistake. You said I would never measure up to her.”

Ethan raised his eyebrows. “I’ll cop to the first. Never to the second. That’s kind of your formulation, not mine. What I said was I thought she was the kind of woman who would always be strongly drawn to authority figures.”

“Alpha males. Which is what her boss is. Which I’ll never be.”

Ethan snorted. “Alpha, beta, soup,” he said. “Fuck that. You’re a good man. That’s what counts, not that baboon social hierarchy shit.”

Paul shut his eyes tightly, rubbed his temples, and said, almost meditatively, “I was so pissed off at you.”

Ethan replied wryly, “I know. You barely spoke to me for two years.” He continued, in a measured tone, “What I think – what I always thought – was that she didn’t measure up to you. She was always…” – treading even more carefully now – “…She keeps looking for Daddy, you know? And you, my friend, will never be that. Except to the kids you’ll have someday.”

Paul shook his head. He muttered, in a tone dead with resignation, “Not worthy…”

Ethan shook his head in turn. “You were always so sure of that…”

They fell into a long silence.

Finally, Ethan sighed and said, “Paul, what do you want to do?”

The muscles along Paul’s jaw started working. He whispered harshly, “Knock her fucking teeth in.” Then he took a deep, halting breath. Then another. Then another. He scrubbed his eyes of tears with the heel of his hand, straightened up, and blinked his eyes open. “Which is why I probably shouldn’t be here when she comes home.” He turned to Ethan. “Would it be okay if I crashed at your place tonight? You think Sonny would mind?”

“Never. You can stay with us as long as you like.” Ethan turned on the ignition, glanced at his friend as he put the car into gear. “Like I said,” he said, smiling softly, “a good man.” He steered the car into the street.

(April 2012)

Wild Heart

You were a spindly child of eight or nine the night you first came into my woods. You had stolen away from your sleeping hamlet to see for yourself if the stories of my existence were true. I spied you through gaps between the gnarly, epiphytic roots of a balete tree from the grove where I was resting as you walked up the path, holding before you in one hand and cupping with the other a pearl of light: a small, brave glow in the deep gloom of the forest.

As you came closer, I moved behind another tree, taking no care to avoid rustling the leaves on the ground. I meant to signal my presence, to presage the terror I was about to loose upon you. There was no question of mating with you, since you were too young to have borne my child, so what remained was to stalk you, harry you from behind the trees and the branches above, taunt and hunt you until your heart pounded in your head from the running and the fear and you were so turned around and lost you could not find your way back. And yes, I meant to chase you down in the end and trample you into the earth, since you seemed so small and helpless.

But you heard me stirring in the grove and, instead of fleeing, stood still and peered in my direction, holding out your tiny flame and trying to make me out in the black, tangled mass of tree trunks and hanging vines. You could not see me. I with my nocturnal eyes was caught by yours: dark and shining, curious and questing. I snorted loudly and pawed the ground to see if that would change your expression. You stepped forward, cocking your head from side to side, still trying to catch a glimpse of me. I forewent all thought of hunting you then and stepped out from behind the tree, to see if your seeming courage was true. I stretched to my full height and walked towards you until I stood towering over you, the hot breath from my nostrils falling upon you like a haze.

You looked up at me in wild-eyed wonder. You must have been afraid then, for you dropped your candle and I could hear your heart pulsing madly in your bird-like body. You knew that in my hands and my hooves was your death, the likely price you would have to pay for your curiosity. Yet you stood your ground and did not flinch. And I knew then that here was a creature who was even fiercer than I.

I bowed, turned around, and stooped to the ground. After a moment’s confusion, you understood and clambered upon my back. I galloped deep into the forest and up the tree branches, the wind and the leaves whipping our faces as I leaped from limb to limb under the stars. My booming neighs and your joyous screams carried over glen and glade, terrifying what forest creatures were about. We ran till near daybreak, when I brought you to the outskirts of your village, so you could slip back home and catch a little sleep before the light crept into the sky.

You came to me many, many nights afterwards, whenever you could escape your daylight world – and it was never often enough for me. You grew taller and sturdier as the years went by, though of course you remained minuscule compared to me, and no burden at all as I bore you on our midnight runs. Indeed, at times it felt as if you were the one carrying me on those wild flights, the beating of your heart against my back the hoofbeats that drummed our passage.

Sometimes when we stopped to drink from a pool of water or rest on a mossy crook between branches, you would whisper to me of your desire to go even farther than our gallops could take you; to mount steeds faster than me that would sweep you away from your village, past the towns in the plain, through the heavens and over the waters that ringed our island, to distant lands you longed to see. Perhaps you thought since I could not speak your tongue I did not understand your words, and therefore felt free to entrust me with your dreams. But I did understand. And I knew from the start you were not a creature to be confined to one place, not even the vast forest though which we bounded. Who knew better than I how untamable you were? Still, it pained me to hear your schemes of going beyond where I could take or follow you.

When you turned twelve, I plucked the thickest spine from my bristly mane and gave it to you. I knew your people believed that such an object was an anting-anting, a talisman that binds the will of a creature like me into servitude – which was ridiculous, of course. Who among your people could have come upon one of us unawares, or leapt upon our backs to take a spine against our will? And were this even possible, why should obtaining it have rendered us helpless and witless? It’s just hair. But it was right that I should give it to you – not as some magical device with which to tether me to you, but as a token that I already was. You fastened it to a loop of twine that you wore around your neck, and you swore you would keep it with you, always.

As you grew into a woman, your visits became fewer and fewer, until one night, you held me tight about my neck before dismounting, then walked away without a word or backward look.

Since then the world has changed beyond recognition. The towns have spread across the plain like mold on a fallen bole, until your little hamlet was overrun and my forest encroached upon. Countless trees have been felled and swaths of woodland cleared and overlaid with farms and roads and the dwellings of men. Something wicked this way comes, from all sides. Your people are still unable to catch more than a glimpse of me – I have not lost my swiftness and I can still vanish into the trees before they can come near – yet more and more I am hemmed in. Now I am the one who is harried, I am the one whose way is lost. It has been many, many years now since you left, and I can barely keep alive the spark that I cup in my heart: the hope that you will yet return before your world closes itself on me like a fist.

Oh, I know you will not be coming back. Why should you, who are free to roam the endless earth? I would not, if I had the same chance as you to fly away. But if it is foolishness to long for your return, then allow me to hold on to this much at least: I hope you have kept the gift I gave you; I hope it reminds you of me sometimes; I hope it continues to see you safe.

(April 2012)

tikbalang by cownose