Skip to main content

Review

 “It’s you this time.” 


Look at everyone. All the staring faces. So many wide, watching eyes trying to mask their terror. The macabre interest hidden just behind is all to obvious— because you’ve done the same thing when the Calls came. It was you a few days ago, watching the Selection, feeling the strange thrill spasm through you. Fear from the potential, arousal from the promise, and all of it mixed by relief when someone else was chosen. You too had been part of the many quiet whispers and loaded, meaningful wordless looks. Thinking. Who would it be this time? Who? Why? Why were they chosen? 


Someone coughs and all your thinking implodes. That was then. This is now. It’s you. The stares, the quiet whispers and exchanged glances; a solar system of human emotion all about what you will undertake. You lower your gaze to the Phone. 


That’s just what it is. A Phone. Sharp, elegant glistening black. It should be worn, scuffed from all that usage, it’s paint changed from how many gripping sweating hands have held it tight to their faces. It seems almost embryonic. Fragile. Too small for the transaction it undertakes. But that’s the power of it, you think, isn’t it? That’s why all of this happens, why it all comes through. Because the thing itself is part of it, because— 


The Phone rings. The hand holding it trembles. Slightly. The presenter has been holding it too long already, you should’ve already been holding it, already waiting and prepared. Suddenly you are drenched in sweat, slick like something caught in a downpour, needing to be shaken and dried and cleaned. Your suit is your tomb. It clings to your skin, mummification robes prepared. Completed. 


The Phone rings. A second ring is unheard of.  Sacrilegious. Anger and fear splits the clustered crowd across so many watchful faces, dances from expression to expression. You study each finger clinging around the receiver. They are bone-white. Will they even let you answer?, you think, seeing each finger curled around them like that. So tight. 


A blink and the Phone is in your hand. Your fingers are the ones tight around it, gripping, sweating against the impossible paint that refuses to wear. Flesh against cool, black metal. Everyone is watching. Holding their breath.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Something Growing In My Basement

Something is growing in my basement.  Plump and bold red mushrooms coat the stairs like little crimson forests, and through what little light remains I can see their spores drifting. It’s damp, humid.  When it sighs the whole house shakes, my windows rattling by a wind not from outside but *below*.  I dream of horns, black and curving and many, like bony branches thrust up out of the dirt. Crisscrossed by red roots.  The mailman throws my packages, hurls my newspaper. My neighbors eye me and my home like it’s something mad, something hungry, and when I finally sit at the table to read I can’t help but feel that the floor is sinking under my feet. Listing into swallowing earth.  I know soon I’ll wake up, stiff, entombed by so many blood-colored caps. Tenacious roots spilling over me. The thing in my basement will speak instead of sigh and all that rotting wormwood will come down, down, down. And it will be free.
Post a Comment
Read more

Lepidopterophobia

You are dying.  Doesn’t matter how.  Feels so far away now— doesn’t it?  That’s it. Take it easy. Let that last breath slip away, like the warmth that comes in a killing cold. Gentle into a silent night. No more looking up at those crowding, concerned faces; a herd of pale, pained moons.  - - - - - ___________ A dark tunnel. Familiar, but not. You’re welcome all the same. Hands groping, grasping against glassy coolness, stumbling—  Light.  The most perfect, pure sunlight. Every idealized summer, every perfect candlelight and warming fire, all that condescend sun-sure dances across a lifetime of days. It’s mere existence is the most pristine invitation. In illumination alone it says come closer . If you had a heartbeat it would be racing.  Up. Up. Forward. Scuffing, almost tripping. Surging forward, hands outstretched.  You’re here.  The Light. The Light   It’s so— wrong . It’s purity vanished, replaced with an organic and oily sheen. Like firefly glows made rotten, morphed in the shape
Post a Comment
Read more

Betty and the Storm

 Betty takes a mercifully long drag on her All-American Stag , feeling the Kansas breeze. It’s a beautiful summer day with big sky country blueness everywhere and only faint, grey-streaked clouds far off on the horizon. Betty loves prairie storms, how they turn her world into blues and blacks cut ragged by hungry lightning. That familiar, lovely earthy smell that lingers even after the clouds have gone southward, down to the more welcomingly humid gulf.  A bit of incoming stormy wind snaps at the clothes on the line and Betty stands sighing and a halfway laconic smile, feeling long hours of chore caused aches lessening with each puff of the Stag . Reaching out a hand to fix one of Teddy’s work shirts, Betty unclips it, hoping to smooth the wrinkles with an absent hand as she turns again to watch the storm roll in.  When Betty sees it, it’s almost slippery in her vision. Like she’s got something in her jade green eyes, something that makes focus hard and dizzying. Betty squints. Scrunch
Post a Comment
Read more