Featured Fiction Writer: July 2010 Vol. 2 #4

RPechous-1

Rick Pechous

 

Rick Pechous is pursuing his MFA in fiction at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Elements, Practice: 12 Short Stories and Novella, and Underground Voices. He's interested in absurdist, outsider, and post-apocalyptic literature.

 

 

 

Impossible, Probable

 

I’m startled by a rabbit as I dash around the corner, his tail a white flag in the darkness jaunting away from me, and in the front yard of a dimly lit red ranch house the rabbit’s first hop provides enough momentum for an improbable second, launching him thirty-five feet into the air where his image momentarily coincides with the placement of the moon, and I can see him posturing there as if he’s done something fantastic. His little paws extend away from him and his bright eyes shine down on me because he wasn’t startled, he was only waiting for an audience.  And just when I think it couldn’t possibly get any better, he falls to earth perfectly as if concussing upon the center of a giant trampoline, and on this third, astronomic bounce, the rabbit is flung off into the sky, past the clouds, where the higher he gets the larger he becomes until he lands on the moon more visible there than when he was standing only a few feet away from me.  A red fire hydrant gnashes at me as I pass, tearing my calf from the bone with the teeth of a Great White Shark. “Dear God, help me!” someone yells and all at once the lights of the neighborhood come on and each door opens in unison and fifty sleepy husbands with frizzy hair say together in an omnipresent, monotone voice “What seems to be the problem here?” It echoes all around me like the chants I used to hear every Sunday at St. Marks Lutheran Church, singing in response “Glory to you, oh Christ.”  Each light within a million miles comes on, even those we hardly use, like the oven light I never found the switch for because it was hidden on the side of the display mount, and the lights are so bright around us that the sun decides to rise out of pure envy. When I look into the sky a hot air balloon decends upon me and inside there’s a doctor in a green tuxedo jacket, but I decide I don’t need him to repair my ravaged calf and just like that it’s fine again. And I’m no longer sweaty or jogging or imperfect but immaculate, the most attractive person ever. I allow the hot air balloon to float to the ground so I can climb inside even though there’s one thing I can’t change about myself and that’s the fact that I’m afraid of heights. Knowing me, since this is my world we’re dealing with here, once I’m up there I’ll have no choice but to let myself fall to the ground and go splat, because if nothing else I’ll at least get the chance to see what death might feel like.

 

So I wait until I’ve ascended six miles into the air and I can no longer see the tiny perfect plots of land like dead grass that’s lost its color and the only thing I can see for miles is the grey, fluffy thickness of the clouds in all directions. I disengage the hot air function so the balloon hovers there immobile and I cower in the basket with my eyes closed waiting for my self to eject me by causing the bottom to fall out like a trap door. And of course the fall itself is horrifying, my body convulses as it drops, gaining speed, my hands reaching for something, anything, frantically, bursting through the cloud cover, rocketing toward the ground with my balls in my throat and my heart throbbing somewhere else entirely. But I decide I can’t kill myself, even if it’s fiction, because what if like a dream where I keep on falling my brain is so attached to the reality of the idea that I suffer an aneurism and drop to the floor? So I gain so much momentum that I turn into a golden bullet and when I finally do hit the ground I slice right through and end up two miles beneath the surface where I’ve incarcerated a poor, lonely man in a carved out section of the earth roughly the size of a prison cell. “Finally,” he says. “You’ve come to set me free.”

         Not so fast. What makes you think this is going to end well for you?”

         “Why are you doing this?” he asks and I want to tell him that it’s all just pretend but that would ruin everything because then he wouldn’t care at all that he was about to be disemboweled by a cunning velociraptor (which will be me, of course). I make it so a tunnel opens up to his right and that he thinks it has always been there and for a moment he’s confused because he wonders why he didn’t take that way out from the very beginning. Cleverly, he runs, but I make the tunnel a mile long and at the mouth of the tunnel a county courthouse, and I transform into the velociraptor, black with a white scaly belly, claws so sharp they could rip through glass, teeth so adept at tearing I could thrash God if I needed to, but I won’t, because in this world I am God and like God I’m afraid of dying. The courthouse will be dark, it will be after midnight and the man will have never been there before, and he’ll be trapped on the second floor of the building, which they say is riot proof. I wait until he’s halfway through the tunnel when like a bird with extraordinary strength I bow my head and charge toward him forgetting that I ever was human and that I’ve been the one trapped in a cell beneath the earth for sixty-five million years without a thing to eat. This poor, lonely man will have to suffer for it.  I’m ravenous, velociraptorous, aerodynamic as I careen through this tube, my mouth sopped with saliva which is flung upon the dirt walls that writhe with grubs and leak with ground water as I pass. After four minutes of sustained running, which to me feels pleasantly natural, I can see the unmistakable shape of a human being at the end of the tunnel. I make a sound like a thousand razor blades tearing through a windshield and the human ahead of me sweats his fear so that I can see it like a neon light, causing my stomach to howl louder than this poor man screaming for his life. I’m so obsessed that I come crashing through the opening and even though I can no longer see him, I can hear him breathing and I can smell his fear and I can taste his sweat in the air so I know within seconds that he’s hiding in the bathroom, which is foolish, though he never was going to get away from me. Words can’t describe the fear this man feels when he hears my claws scraping slowly against the floor, taking my time because he isn’t going anywhere—if I wanted I could make anywhere into everywhere I am without him even knowing it. So I posture like that rabbit in the sky, destroying the room around him in a rage, wailing with my raptor voice so loud that the façade, which is made of glass, shatters from twenty feet away, the fragments hanging loose while a stiff wind enters the building, and to show this poor, lonely man the awesome power of my claws I rip apart the door he hides behind in one fell swoop. The smell of piss and shit stifles me for a moment but soon I decide it’s time to give the reader what he wants and I use my teeth to grip this man by his neck, inflicting a dozen little fatal punctures that ooze a triumphant burgundy bile that couldn’t wait to escape. And I can taste the life of it dripping onto my tongue. It’s metallic and fresh and I never want to taste anything else ever again. He flails around and for a brief moment we lock eyes and I wink just once before tearing apart his left inner thigh. I let go to watch him seizure on the floor, the entire bathroom filling slowly with his blood until I’m certain there’s none left inside of him and I can eat the meat without it being saturated. Right before he dies I switch to his perspective so I can feel his pain if only for a second, and I’m surprised to find the sudden onset of death alluring.

* * *

But I can’t bring myself to go along with it so I decide to see what the universe is made of, stranding myself again in the bottom of the basket of the hot air balloon so close to the edge of the atmosphere that I can reach out and grab a piece of the cosmos and use it to live forever.  I ignite the hot air function and turn the dial to ABNORMAL so in the matter of seconds I’m streaming past the rabbit on the moon, except I need more juice if I’m going to get anywhere any time soon so I reach up and adjust the dial to IMPROBABLE, which gets me out of the solar system once and for all. God knows I can’t look down now because like most people I’m frightened by improbable speeds, but it isn’t long before I realize that improbable just isn’t enough and if I’m going to see anything worth seeing I’m going to have to set the dial to IMPOSSIBLE. I’m forced down against the floor while an unGodly nether roaring causes my eardrums to burst and blood to trickle out my ears.  I’m not worried though because I can still hear just fine, and right before my body is about to be compressed into a particle no larger than an atom from the pressure, I’m drowning in a sea of blood. I can still breathe so I swim away from the hot air balloon which has become a hindrance. At first I’m afraid to open my eyes but I soon discover that I can see even through the thickest and blackest of blood.  I notice a tiny little muscle pulsing with all its tiny little might and something inside me knows that this is the beating heart of an unborn Australian Shepherd living in some obscure corner of the flattest part of Holland. I’ve materialized out of one of a million blood cells drifting around me and suddenly I’m standing outside looking down at the mother of the dog in the bedroom of a drafty, wooden house. Something tells me it’s been overcast for days.  For a moment I want to find another hot air balloon to keep me soaring through the layers of existence, but like a house of mirrors I know it doesn’t matter how high or how far I go, the result will always be the same—there are some things I just can’t change. But there’s a shotgun leaning against the wall of this bedroom which is strangely reminiscent of a place I spent a lot of time in as a child, with faux wood wallpaper, yellow carpeting, and brown discolored water stains laced along the ceiling.  I think to myself that I could obliterate the universe in the way of a harmless shotgun blast that no one in this world would even hear, but I know the only way to stop this is to turn it on myself. And I’m prepared to finally do it but when I place the barrel in my mouth and move to squeeze the trigger, I’m reminded of a memory my mother told me when I was young and we were working in the tent outside my aunt and uncle’s ice cream shop selling ice cream for a fair.

 

She stepped off the school bus with her cute little polka-dotted bow and her hardcover books held close to her chest and did I mention that it’s 1973 and I’m one of the Dawson boys, the oldest? I’ve found a litter of kittens beneath my parent’s porch and because I’m home schooled I’ve been off since two and I’ve had just enough time to bury them in the ground with nothing but their heads showing. “Hey, Bonnie,” I say, smiling at her friend who lives kiddy corner from me, whom I’ve never said a word to if it weren’t first directed toward Bonnie.  “Do you want to see the kittens we found beneath our parents’ porch?” She reluctantly complies but she’s skeptical and refuses to let her guard down. That’s why my brother Denny is waiting near the kittens, which can’t move an inch in the dirt and issue meek little whispers he doesn’t hear as he waits for beautiful Bonnie to come around the corner. “Olly Olly Oxen Free!” I shout as we approach the edge of the house where Bonnie and her friend see the pretty little kittens waiting to be freed. Denny grabs Bonnie and says “Hey, Bonnie, hold on!” and I run to the lawn mower I left a few feet behind the kittens and prime it up by depressing the button ten times fast, and then I pull the cord and pull the cord and pull the cord until it revs to life. With pure adrenaline rushing through me and a boiling laughter foaming in my gut, I start to whistle even though they can’t hear me. I move the mower forward and though my mom is only twelve she knows better than to look at what’s about to happen. But she can’t escape the sound the blade makes when it slices through the first kitten’s face, the sound of the skull being torn apart like a stick being wrenched from the ground and spit out into the yard, but this expulsion is red and white and consists of a sick gore the likes of which few people have ever had the chance to see. I’ve lined them up in a row with a half foot between them so when the whirring blade approaches and gets a hold of something solid the din grows louder like a chainsaw getting through to the center of a tree.  And I can think of no better way to experience death than to see it from the perspective of the last lonely kitten trying with all its might to wiggle free from the ground that holds it tight. Nowhere left to go, struggling against the earth around me, the sound of the motor roaring up above like a cacophony of violence, the whirring of the blades, the smell of the grass, the guts of my brothers splattered on my face, my own little voice crying out so loud but never being heard—this is it, death at its best, nothing left to do but let it happen. The mower moving forward, the blade drawing near, the way it burns as it catches, slicing me up, time enough to feel it if only for a second, before all I ever and always see is that blade churning and burning my face, over and over, pushing me away and drawing me in like a wave crashing and receding, or the second hand of a broken clock sputtering upon itself, stuck in place, never moving forward, but never moving backward, either.


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