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Books and authors mentioned in this episode (by using our affiliate links to buy these and other books, you’ll grow your library and help us pay our interns! )

Rebecca Brown: He Came to Set the Captives Free (Amazon / indiebound) / Prepare for War (Amazon / indiebound) / The Terrible Girls (Amazon / eBooks / indiebound)

Brian Evenson: Dead Space: Martyr (Amazon / eBooks / indiebound) / Immobility (Amazon / indiebound) / Last Days (Amazon / indiebound)

Angela Carter: The Bloody Chamber: And Other Stories (Amazon / eBooks / indiebound) / Nights at the Circus (Amazon / eBooks / indiebound) / The Magic Toyshop (Amazon / eBooks / indiebound)

The Tale of the Missing Girls

The term began as any other at the mid-range state school in Virginia. The early reaches of autumn hadn’t burned off the humidity in the valley, but the imminent change of leaves that hovered over the patches of mini-reunions on the quad marked the unofficial commencement of another academic year.

Everyone was here—the returning students, the rumpled professors, the eager freshmen, the apprehensive groundskeepers, the haggard librarians, the dipsomaniacal grad students, and the haughty administrators—marching across the grounds and through the hallways of the “historic” campus. Even the girls who would soon go missing were here.

On the first day, the lecture hall was so full it was difficult to find a seat. Students, it seemed, sat on one another’s laps, twined their arms around each other to stretch their pens to the college-ruled lines of their notebooks. They leaned forward, breathing hot on the backs of others necks, anxious to hear every word, record every point, take a copy of every class syllabus from the giant stack that slowly made their way around the room, winnowed one copy at a time, each pause a painful interval for those waiting in back. In the meantime, they distracted themselves by scribing in furious silence as the professor delivered, with oratory flourish, the foundational lecture of the course.

The professor, who was not a tall man, managed to dominate the space at the front of the hall, of which he was the sole occupant. He paced back and forth as he revealed the distinctions between the two dominant theories, inserting, through facial expressions and a variety of arm waves, his own opinion as to the validity of each. He was, the students realized all at once and in awe, an expert on the subject.

This scene was repeated in every classroom in every subject in every building throughout the day, except sometimes the professor was female. At night, this enthusiasm, diverted from the academic buildings, overflowed from the dormitories to inundate the roads, sidewalks and well-traveled shortcuts that snaked to and from campus as busty coeds and stalwart young men made their way to parties and bars. Though a university, unlike a middling city, has a limit on the number of entrants, when every one of that number is simultaneously wandering the streets and footways of the town at night, the possibilities seem endless.

Best intentions, however, even when enacted en masse, only last for so long. Within weeks students began to sleep in and miss early morning classes. The sense of camaraderie among the student body fizzled as it broke into cliques. The professors’ lectures, once so robust, took on a new lethargy that reciprocated the thinning class size. Some professors, especially the males, observed this trend each year and could not help, especially the literary ones, to see this as a metaphor for their thinning hair, muscles, and will.

In reverse proportion to the attendance in classes, the bulletin boards located in the common areas of the dormitories and academic halls filled with flyers, mostly promoting events. No one ever took it upon themselves to remove outdated signs, so papers were stapled over each other, creating an unofficial records hall of things you may or may not have known had happened. It was on such a corkboard in one dorm’s foyer that the first flyer of the first missing girl appeared. She had gone out one night. She did not return. She was last seen 10/19/1987. She was wearing a blue shirt and jeans. If you had information you should call this number.

You had to act quick though, because suddenly a notice for a concert at the Larimer Lounge had been tacked over her face. You had to be 18 and older. If you brought a girl friend, you would get $5 off.

Things like this happened again and again in the following weeks. Two girls, tired of walking in their heels up the steep hill to the party would stick out their thumbs, jut their slender legs forward as they’d seen actresses do in movies to sometimes seductive and sometimes comic effect. The next day, black and white photocopies of their pictures would hang from bulletin boards across campus, reading, “Missing. Last seen. Call.”, and were quickly covered by notices about events, “Meeting. Concert. Tomorrow. Next Week. Free. $5 cover. Come.”

When she returned to her dorm one evening after a late class, a man and a woman were standing in her room.

“Have you seen our daughter?” the man asked.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“She’s your roommate,” the woman said impatiently.

“I don’t remember when I last saw her,” she replied.

The girl’s mother was incredulous. “She’s been missing for over two weeks!”

“I thought she was at her boyfriend’s place,” she responded. She had no precise recollection of when she last saw her roommate. If pressed, she doubted she would have any precise recollection of her roommate at all.

Soon other parents arrived, also looking for their daughters. Some girls had been missing for weeks as well, some for months, a few for years. They wanted to know who had seen them, when and where. They wanted to know what was being done about the situation. They wanted to hang more flyers and resurrect forgotten faces. They wanted anonymous tips and surveys of the surrounding town.

Even more parents made the pilgrimage to the place of their daughters’ last known whereabouts. They erected a marquee in the middle of the quad and filled it with telephones and fax machines and photocopiers. They stretched dozens of electrical cords like a sinuous root system across the manicured ryegrass of the campus grounds and into the nearest outlets of the surrounding historic buildings.

The parents organized search parties. Local volunteers, university students and town residents, were formed into groups standing shoulder-to-shoulder, beginning at the tent, and slowly marched across a marked swath of ground in different directions, radiating like spokes on a wheel, on the lookout for clues. Some prod the ground with sticks, others with metal detectors, but the only things recovered were a few bottle caps, hundreds of cigarette butts, a missing wallet that was returned to its owner, a stripped and abandoned bicycle, a set of unlabeled keys that looked as if they belonged to the stout locks of a dormitory, and a notebook whose last entry on Henry David Thoreau yielded nothing of significance.

Despite the lack of success, the parents pushed on. Class attendance continued to dwindle, along with the trees, whose colors blazed brightly for a moment before a leaf broke free to inter itself with the others lining the grounds. “Much like,” the parents who could not stop themselves from thinking such things though, “our daughters.”

“This seems to happen every year,” the Resident Assistant, who was hanging new flyers on the boards in the dormitory’s common area, told her when she walked in. “Last year, two from my floor alone went missing.”

Not knowing what to say, she said, “They should really mention that on the campus tour,” which sounded more reasonable than she wanted it too.

The RA paused and looked at her. “It’s a serious problem, you know.” Then she picked up the cardboard box full of flyers and headed for the exit. She considered running ahead and holding the door open to demonstrate mutual concern about the situation, but instead she stood there and watched the RA balance the heavy box across her thigh and reach her free hand for the handle. When she glanced again at the bulletin board, the photo of the most recent missing girl that had just been posted was already covered by a flyer promoting the Spelunking Club’s next expedition.

Eventually, the parents who had been there for weeks, months and years, who had posted hundreds of notices and manned silent phone lines, who had organized fruitless searches and interviewed absent-minded witnesses, who had fought off the hollow cries of their daughters in their dreams to maintain their last semblances of hope, these parents, all of them, began to lose their curiosity. It’s not that they didn’t want their daughters back, (in fact, that’s all they wanted,) but they no longer cared what had happened or was happening to them. They no longer cared to find and punish those responsible. In short, they no longer cared about justice; they just wanted their girls back.

They increased the reward. Maybe, they thought, it’ll be enough for someone to rat someone out. Though in their unspoken minds they knew crimes like these, crimes where people go missing, are not driven by money but by some darker desire. All the information that could be gathered was synthesized into a profile of a single suspect. They were looking for a

White male, 20 to 40, above to below-average intelligence, who may or may not stand out among the campus’ 20,000 residents. He lacks a moral conscience and/or fear of consequences for his actions as well as a respect for cultural impediments—such as religious beliefs, the legal system, or social inhibitions—that normally prohibit the average person from doing anything he wants. The suspect most likely suffers from narcissistic personality traits and exhibits anti-social behavior, though at times can seem both charming and outgoing. He’s likely attempting to rectify issues with an overbearing mother figure and/or to compensate for feelings of or actual impotence. He has access to a vehicle large enough to transport a college-aged female, and owns or rents a private dwelling.

This description was distributed around campus, and many professors began their lectures by reading it and asking anyone who met the criteria to proceed to the large white tent in the center of campus for questioning. Several young men (and some young women) would stand and leave, but only a few went to the tent. Most simply wanted to an excuse to cut.

In History class the professor read the profile of the suspect and also held up a copy of the Missing Persons flyer that the parents-turned-detectives had distributed. He needed only one flyer because, much like the parents had created a single profile of the suspect, the parents also, through a police sketch artist, created an amalgamation of all their missing girls. They circled the artist and each described their daughters until a single photo emerged.

This new missing girl, this Everyvictim, had straight brown hair interrupted by that wave caused by swooping it behind an ear; a nose with a linear bridge and rounded nostrils; lips that were not too full, not pouty or inquisitive; cheeks that had just lost their baby fat; and eyes that, either due to their own constitution or to the poor resolution of black and white photocopies, revealed nothing at all. She was any and every girl, and she was missing.

“Let’s tell her story,” the professor said to the class, shaking the picture to make a slight crinkling noise.

“She is young,” he began. “She has just graduated high school and is looking forward to college. She will miss her friends from back home, of which she has plenty, mostly from the field hockey and student government, in which she played a minor role, such as treasurer, because it was easy and looked good on a college application. She has chosen a college, this college, because it has the right balance of academic rigor and social outlets. She plans to pledge a sorority partly because she admires the pseudo-Victorian style of the houses on Greek Row that run alongside the piddling stream cutting through our campus.

“After her parents drop her off and buy her some dorm room necessities, she says her tearful good-byes and then is on her own for the first time in her life. It doesn’t take her long to adjust to campus life, and she quickly befriends the girls in her pledge class.

“One night she finds herself at the brother-fraternity of the sorority she is pledging. There is a tradition. She is sent to one of the senior brother’s room. She is told to do whatever he asks. She is drunk, and on her way up the narrow wooden stairwell she plays out in her head the things she is and is not willing to do. She is willing to do more than the average girl since she is both drunk and pledging, but she does, she tells herself, have limits. As she gains the top of the steps, however, the clear line she has drawn in her mind wavers. She enters the room.

“Three minutes later she returns downstairs. We are left to wonder what happened there.

“Later that night, after still more drinking, she wants to go back to her dorm room and sleep. She tells this to a fellow pledge who lives in the same building. This girl does not want to leave the party however, and so our girl sets out on her own. Her dorm is not even a half-mile across the well-lit campus.

“On her walk she crosses the small bridge that swoops up and over the tiny stream separating Greek Row from the body of campus. A young man approaches. How young we do not know. He is average height and build and his face is shadowed from the lampposts along the walkway by his ball cap. He begins to walk with her, making polite conversation.

“When they come to an area of the path that is shadowed, he pauses and she pauses too. They do not hear any voices from late-night revelers floating across the manicured lawns. This suggests they are alone. Not necessarily in this order, he bludgeons, rapes, kills, transports, and then buries her body in a shallow grave.”

The professor set down the flyer on the table in front of him and paused as a few students finished jotting notes from this lecture. He reminded them of the reading due for next class and dismissed them. The students filed out of the room, through the building’s heavy double doors, down the stone steps and stood on the lawn to shield their faces against the burning sun. Or was it the glare off the taut white top of the tent in the center of campus that they were protecting their eyes from?

**

Born in New England, Dani Rado bounced around the country until she settled in Colorado, where she currently divides her time unevenly between work, the outdoors, and writing. Her stories have appeared in Mochila Review, 5th Wednesday, Floodwall, Bloom, Clackamas Review, Unstuck, and Liar’s League NYC, among others. She’s been awarded an artist’s residency at the Prairie Center for the Arts and the Sundress Academy for the Arts. She was a professional student for as long as she could manage, but is now a Professor of English at Johnson & Wales University in Denver, where she teaches writing and literature. She currently lives in that city with her fiancée and their four accidental cats.

**

Image: Flickr / Hernán Piñera

A Note: Help The Other Stories by using our affiliate links to buy these and other books – you’ll grow your library and help us pay our interns! We now have both print and e-book options for your reading pleasure

Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (print / e-book) / The Yiddish Policemen’s Union: A Novel (print / e-book) / Telegraph Avenue (print / e-book)

Jay McInerney: Bright Lights, Big City (print / e-book) / The Good Life (print / e-book) / Bright, Precious Days: A Novel (print / e-book)

Irvine Welsh: Trainspotting (print) / Filth (print) / Last Exit to Brooklyn (print)

Paul Aster: The New York Trilogy (print / e-book) / Timbuktu: A Novel (print / e-book) / The Brooklyn Follies: A Novel (print / e-book)

He’s Doing Just Fine

Nate’s doing great.
He has strategies. He knows his triggers. He keeps a little red notebook in his back pocket. He picked that one up during his ninety-day stint.
His councilor said, “It’s a good tool to maintain a level of self awareness you may not have had in the past.”
His support group leader said, “All adults struggle with the difference between knowing who they are, and what they think they can handle.”
But it was also said that addiction doesn’t take sick-days, and the notebook’s a reminder.
So Nate scribbles notes, makes lists. There’s a list of things he shouldn’t do anymore. There’s a list of place he can’t go. There’s quite a bit of overlap between the two.
He writes, Jason’s house.
Then, Medusa Lounge.
Then, Jersey.
Nate’s encouraged to show his notes to his family members. Just so they know that A.) He’s doing what he’s supposed to during this crucial post-rehab period, and B.) They can provide any assistance they need to if ever he makes the decision to return to his old habits.
His father says, “You used to love the beach.”
His mother says, “You loved the boardwalk.”
And Nate says he never wants to smell the stink of that state again.  He says, “Plus Jason always got his stuff over there.”
His father says, “Don’t talk to Jason anymore.”
His mother says, “Already on the list, see? Good for you, Nathan.”
Nate’s brother Tony calls, says he’s not making dinner tonight, says he can’t talk.  So Nate, his mother and father, eat a pasta dish his mother always makes when there’s something to celebrate. They talk about how nice it is to have Nate home again.
“How’s Tony?” Nate says.
His father says, “You know Tony. He’s standoffish.”
His mother says, “Stop it.  He’s just busy. He works hard.”
“That’s new,” his father says. He winks at Nate. “He’s trying it out.”
Nate’s mother reaches across the table, slaps his father’s hand, says, “Stop it. Try calling him up, Nathan.”
Nate doesn’t tell her he has called. A couple times. Left messages from rehab. He would text now, but the papers he signed explained he no longer has the privilege to own or use a cell phone. By the time he’s able to use one again it may very well need to be implanted in his ear—or his eye. Unless, of course, the judge views the progress he’s making as permanent change. Not the Band-Aiding of a wound that’ll get ripped open ever other every-so-often.
Nate eats, tells his mother the food’s delicious, says he’s going to go write a bit.
Before, any excuse to leave a room would mean something else. So his parents stare a moment before seeming to remember the progress he’s making. They smile. They nod. And Nate steps out of the kitchen, passes photos on the foyer walls. In one he’s featured in a football uniform. Another, he’s holding an oar with the rest of his rowing team. A third, in a cap and gown, his arm is wrapped around his pimple-faced little brother’s shoulder.
In the room he slept in as a kid, he writes another list.
Ways to Make Everything Up to Tony.
He writes, Save up, replace stuff I stole.
Then, Apologize.  For everything.
Then, as an addendum, he writes, Don’t fuck up.
***
Nate’s making excellent progress.
His former boss says he’s heard as much while they shake hands. “I want to do this,” he boss says. “I don’t have to.”
Nate nods. His father, beside him, does the same.
“Your dad’s a good man. I trust him.”
Nate’s father shakes his head, mouths, no, no, no.
“We’re going to reinstate you.”
“Thank you,” Nate says.
“Under three conditions. One. You’ll be under probation until your court date. Since we don’t know what will happen, you’ll be taken off probation only if you return.”
Nate says, “Okay.”
His father says, “That’s fair.”
“Two. Weekly and random drug tests.”
Nate says he has to do that anyway.
“And three. If at any moment there is evidence of a relapse, no matter what the circumstance, you’re out. Whether you’re standing funny enough for people to think something’s up, or you look just a bit too sleepy, that’s it.”
“I understand.”
His boss says, “I’m taking a risk. But I think it’s a good one to take.”
“Thanks, I—”
“Remember how many people are sticking their necks out for you.”
“I will.”
“Good. Now, out. See you in the morning.”
Nate watches his father shake hands with the boss. They use each other’s first names, they smile, they pat each other’s shoulders. Nate stays still, stares at his father’s face smiling and saying thank you.
In his notebook, Nate writes, Learn to make/maintain positive relationships.
And, Stick out neck.
And, Take good risks.
His father asks him if he’s ready to go.
The walk across the shop floor is filled with factory sounds that used to lull Nate to sleep. While he was standing. They pass people who filed complaints against Nate. They pass people who looked the other way on the real bad days. They pass a guy who said he’d quit if Nate ever walked into the building again.
Nate writes while he walks. When he’s not writing, he’s staring at the floor ahead of him. He’ll make eye contact another time. Tomorrow. Or maybe only when he has to.
His father says, “You should be happy.”
“I am.”
“Then what’s this about?”
Nate says nothing, sidesteps someone who says hello to his father, but not him.
His father says, “All you need to do is show them how much you’ve changed.”
In the car, Nate sits on the passenger side. He writes that he can’t remember what it’s like being behind the wheel. He writes that he can’t remember the last time he drove sober. How driving high felt. Every word is positive.
His father puts his hand on Nate’s shoulder, says his name.
Nate’s scratching notes into his notebook makes his father’s voice sound as if he is speaking to him from inside a glass box. Filled with water.
His name is said a second time.
A third.
“Yeah?” Nate says. “Sorry.”
His father doesn’t say anything for a moment. Like he used to when Nate was high, after Nate would have to blink himself into understanding where he was and how he got there. Then his father says, “We need to talk about money.”
Nate doesn’t argue when he’s told that his paychecks will be deposited into an account that he won’t be able to access. That money will be taken from the account using a debit card his father will control. That Nate will be handed cash to buy lunch while at work. That he’ll need to give up the change. That his earnings will be socked away for the future. It’s unclear if that means until there is little doubt that Nate will relapse. Or that he’ll have to be given an allowance by his parents for the rest of his life.
Nate nods his head, says, “Okay.”
His father says, “I hope you’re not looking at this as punishment.”
“No. I did this to myself. I was just hoping—”
“What? Hoping to what?”

            High, Nate would laugh whenever his father’s voice went urgent. It’s still a bit funny. But he doesn’t laugh. He keeps his face straight by crossing off the list item regarding Tony’s repayment. He writes, Figure something else out.
Nate says, “Nothing. I understand.”
***
Nate is taking on responsibilities.
He tells his parents he’s planning on going through all of the junk in the basement to find some things worth keeping. And others worthy of a trash bag.
His mother says, “Good for you, Nathan.”
His father says, “You’re crossing things off my honey-do list. Clean out all the junk-drawers around here for me when you’re done.”
In the basement, Nate digs through boxes of Transformers with pieces missing, preventing them from transforming to vehicle mode. He goes through a bin of Ghostbusters figures that stay or go depending on discoloration and nostalgia. He tosses Mighty Max playsets, motorized board games with battery acid caked on the pieces, Power Rangers with missing arms, or legs, or heads.
And he works every day after he and his father come home from the shop unless they work doubles.
He’s told at his meetings that the formation of good habits will overrule the bad ones.
He’s told that strides toward recovery—while they may seem small—are in fact creating a path that he can follow if ever he feels himself slipping.
But walking on ice is fucking hard.
When Tony stops by, Nate hears his parents upstairs telling his brother about all of that—everything they’ve read in his notebook, anyway. They use all the words he’s heard over and over. All repetitive, but all positive. And he hears Tony say, “Good,” and, “Glad to hear it,” and, “I guess he’s busy, I’ll take off.”
Nate listens to the muffled voices, works through a box full of Ninja Turtles.  Figures, and vehicles, and pointy weapons that shouldn’t have been included with kids’ toys. Then, the costumes. Old foam turtle shells. Cloth masks with green plastic noses attached. Nate always wore red.
He ties the mask around his head, tries to ignore the mildew latching onto his nose hairs. Then he waits for the conversation upstairs—which at this point sounds like an argument—to end. But that could just be how the words seep through the floorboards.
The door opens. And Nate waits for the footsteps to end.
He jumps out from a closet, yells cowabunga dude, and scares the shit out of his brother.
“Holy shit,” Tony says. “Fuck.”

            Tony’s cursing is familiar. Nate heard it when he sold off most of Tony’s CD collection. When he pulled out and pawned Tony’s car stereo. When he emptied out Tony’s checking account by assuming that he—like the rest of the family—used his birth year as the ATM pin.
“Sorry,” Nate says. “Look what I found.” He holds an orange mask out for Tony to take. “You can keep it if you want.”
“That’s a little small for you.”
Nate takes off his mask, pulls it up over his head by the nose, says, “The shell’s in here, too. You want it?”
“Thanks. But, no. I don’t think I have anywhere to put it.”
Nate swallows, shakes his head, looks at the floor. “Yeah,” he says. “I’ll probably just throw it out anyway.”
Tony holds out his hand. Nate puts the orange mask in it.
“No, here,” Tony says. They shake hands with their lefts.
Nate says, “How are you?”
“Good. You good?”
“Yeah. I’m good.”
“Good.”
“Yeah.”
“Glad you’re home.”
“Me too.”
“Sorry I haven’t returned your calls. Things get crazy sometimes. You know.”
“No. No problem. It’s fine.”
They talk a bit longer. About nothing. Pleasantries. Work. They don’t get any closer than a handshake apart. And after a pause, Tony goes into how much he needs to do tonight.
Nate says, “Before you go. I wonder if there’s anything I can—”
“Don’t worry about it, okay?”
“You don’t know what I was going to say.”
“Yeah, I do. I know how those programs work. And it’s fine. I’m fine. We’re good. You don’t need to make up for anything.”
“It’s not really the program that makes to me want to—”
“I’m not someone you need to worry about.” Tony extends his hand again, says, “Let’s get dinner sometime, okay? Just give me a call.”
Nate shakes his hand, doesn’t look into his eyes, says, “Yeah, I’ll call you.”
Once Tony is upstairs saying goodbye to their parents, Nate gets back to work. With a Sharpie he scratches Tony’s name into the side of a box. He puts the orange Ninja Turtles mask, a foam shell, a pair of plastic nunchuks inside.  Then he roots through the stuff he’s already thrown into trash bags trying to remember which toys were his brother’s.
***
Nate’s doing just fine.
The calls that go unreturned don’t stop him from going to group, seeing his councilor, going to work sober. Wishing he was high, but staying straight. They don’t stop him from discussing realistic options with his lawyer.
And he does have options.
Plead guilty. Or don’t.
His lawyer says, “It won’t be as bad if you plead guilty.”
Nate doesn’t feel his face change. It’s not as if he’s surprised. But to his sides he can almost hear his parents’ faces sliding off tensed muscle while the lawyer’s words soak into their brains.
Nate’s mother says, “What is he looking at, at best, if he does that?”
“Couple years. Parole.”
Nate’s father says, “There’s nothing that can be done? Even with all the progress he’s making?”
“Progress is great. Really,” the lawyer says. But then he begins discussing the massive destruction of property. That not only was Nate high and driving, but he left the paraphernalia with which to get high in the car. “Yes, you went through a program. Yes, you’ve been conditionally released. But there is a reality here that we will fight and lose.”
Nate stops his parents from speaking, says, “I still have time at home. I’m fine with this. I understand it, and I’m fine.”
His father excuses himself to the bathroom, blames being an aging male.
His mother dabs her eyes with tissues from a pack she pulls from her purse.
And Nate shakes hands with his lawyer, says he’ll see him in a few weeks.
The ride home is quiet. Nate writes in the backseat while his parents listen to news radio. He writes about Tony lying about wanting to get lunch. He writes about calling Jay, getting sent to prison early. Then he writes about what he said in the lawyer’s office.
There’s time. Plenty of it.
He writes that he can still fix things.
***
Nate’s adjusting very well.
Having to ride in the passenger seat as his father drives the long way to work—to avoid the empty lot that used to be a house—is routine now. It’s better that he can’t see the lot anyhow. It would bring back how it felt having to be pulled from the wrecked car embedded in the front of the house. It would bring back the EMTs having to examine him with his one arm handcuffed to a stretcher. It would bring back the family standing in the street staring and crying as the shattered support beams gave out and buried Nate’s car with the master bedroom.
When he’s at work, he’s quiet. He says hello to people who say so first, but otherwise he keeps his eyes on the shop floor. And the machines he works on. And the change handed to him when he pays for his lunch. And the look on his fathers face when he hands over a smaller amount, making sure it goes unnoticed.
What he keeps, he adds to his total. Then updates a list he keeps in a second notebook that he doesn’t share with his parents.
Only $146.82 more until he can buy a used Nintendo 64 for Tony.
Only $113.04 before he can buy the Nintendo 3DS that’ll have to make up for the Game Boy Advance.
Only $27.69 before he can replace the VCR with a DVD player.
The list is long, but he’s doing well with his priorities.
Then again his court date is coming up. And even though they go the long way home, there’s the amount he’ll have to pay in restitution. There’s the amount of time he will spend in jail. There’s the possibility that after a couple years in a cell, Tony will change his number to save himself from having to ignore Nate’s calls.
At home, Nate watches his parents. How they act. How their vigilance slips with his progress. He’s just doing so well with everything.
He has remind his parents to check his notebook—the official one—a time or two.
His father leaves the car keys on the kitchen table for almost a half an hour, but curses about it later.
His mother lets him alone in the basement without calling down, asking how he’s doing for longer stretches.
And Nate keeps track in that second book. Sitting alone in the unfinished basement, all cement and two-by-fours, Nate sits and scribbles. His red mask tied around his head.
He writes, Time’s running out. I’ve wasted all my time.
Then it’s the footsteps on the stairs.
Nate hides the notebook next to an envelope filled with the money he’s saved behind boxes labeled with Tony’s name in Sharpie.
His father says, “Everything okay down here?”
“Hmm? Yeah, why?”
“What’s with the mask?”
Nate pulls the mask off of his face, says, “Nothing. Just memories.”
“Dinner’s ready.”
His father looks funny. Not the funny Nate remembers while coming down during holiday dinners. But funny.
He says, “Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you think I could use some of my money to replace some of Tony’s stuff? Like, the stuff I took.”
His father smiles, walks across the room, puts his hands on Nate’s shoulders. He did that when Nate was in high school. Less in college—not at all after he was kicked out. But, now, enough. And it’s something Nate would miss if it disappeared again. His father says, “I think just being home and doing as well as you are is enough for your brother. Don’t you?”
“I don’t know if that’s—”
“That’s one area you don’t have to worry about. Okay?
Nate lets out the breath he was holding, says, “Okay.”
“Good.”
The hand’s taken away, his father’s back is turned. Then his father says, “We’re going to need that money for court fees, anyway. Know what I mean?”
Nate waits at the bottom of the steps, tells his parents he’ll be right up. Then he drops his red mask into one of Tony’s boxes.
***
Nate is cultivating positive routines.
The day after of a week of doubles, Nate wakes up, tells his parents he’ll be in the basement if they need him for anything. His mother asks him to stay upstairs, tells him he spends too much time down there anyway. “Why don’t you watch TV with us this morning?”
“I told you I’d clean out the basement. I’ve been working too much, but I’m almost done.” He closes the door behind him, ignores his mother’s next sentence.
He stops at the bottom of the stairs.  He checks the closets, the alcove with the water heater. The bare cement floors echo his footsteps more than he remembers. There’s nothing for the sounds to bounce off but the floors and the walls. No trash bags filled with toys. No boxes marked with Tony’s name. It’s just Nate’s voice calling for his parents that ping-pongs from wall to wall.
From the top of the stairs his mother tells him she thought she’d lend a hand, took everything to the dump during his double yesterday.
“What about Tony’s stuff?” Nate says.
“I texted him about it,” she says. “He didn’t want any of it.”
“Was there anything else? Did you find anything else?”
“That’s why I wanted you to spend time with us today.”
Nate skips steps, pushes past his parents, yells at them, tells them that money was for Tony. No one else. “That was for him,” he says.
He pulls the phone from the wall, dials Tony’s number. It rings, and he screams things at his parents he hasn’t since before his ninety days. He calls them, “You fucking people.”
Tony’s phone goes to voicemail.
Nate dials Tony again after dialing halfway through Jason’s number.
“Nathan,” his mother says, “Try to calm yourself.”
“Calm your fucking self. I had a fucking plan. I was doing what I needed to do, and you fucked it up.”
His father says, “Don’t talk to your mother like that.” Hand on Nate’s shoulder, he says, “We saw that second notebook, the money. We’re just doing everything we can to make sure—”
Nate pushes his father away, points, says, “Shut. Up.”
Over the phone, Nate begs Tony’s voicemail to call him back. He says, “I need to talk to you,” and, “Please stop ignoring me,” and, “I’m your brother, man, come on.”

            Then he hangs up, leans against the wall, and slides to the floor.
Both his mother and father sit down next to him. Then it’s all arms, and back rubs, and Nate screaming on the floor.
***
Nate’s okay.
He goes to work, comes home, goes to bed, wakes up and does it over every day.
He hasn’t added anything new to his notebook. He can’t see a point to it anymore.  Soon enough he’ll be in a cell doing a multi-year sober stint. His track marks will fade all together. He’ll put on weight. Maybe he’ll get a degree.
He’s reconnecting with old friends after his parents go to bed. Jason, who Nate wrote he would never be in touch with again, is nice, asks him how he’s doing. And Nate says he’s doing fine, but he needs a favor.
Since Nate stopped calling Tony, he’s watched his father. Before work. During work. After work. Watching, taking mental notes. After double shifts, the guy’s shot. He forgets things. He leaves stuff where he shouldn’t. Car keys on end tables. Bills on the kitchen counters. Then his wallet in the master bathroom.
It’s a matter of Nate telling his parents he’s taking a shower after dinner. Then popping into the bathroom and replacing the orange PNC Bank card linked to his account with an old one from a junk drawer linked to nothing. Then standing under the water until enough time passes to suggest he did in fact shower.
He takes the trash to the end of the driveway. He leaves the card, wrapped in a sheet of paper telling Jason to try Nate’s birth year as the pin.
Nate goes to bed nervous, but falls asleep over the possibility of feeling better.      He wakes up early.  Early enough to beat the sun out. The mailbox holds the things he asked for, but the card wasn’t left behind. He’ll figure that one out later.
He waits until his father’s alarm goes off to run into the bathroom. He jams his fingers down his throat, pukes up what little was left from dinner last night.
“You okay in there?” his father calls through the door.
“Yeah,” Nate says, “But I think I caught something.”
It’s back to bed for Nate. His first sick-day since being home. His father tells him not to worry about it, he’ll explain everything. His mother tells him to reach her on the cell if he needs her.
Then he’s alone.
Everything comes back to him. He’s cooked up doses enough to ballpark his standard, functional high.
After, Nate will call Jason, ask what the fuck about the card.
After he can empty out his brain for a bit, he’ll accept that he’s heading to jail a little early.
After this, he’ll call Tony, tell him not to worry about ignoring him, even though he’s sure Tony’s not worried about anything.
But for now he gets comfortable. He folds his legs, sits like he did in kindergarten. Then he’s tying off an arm, slapping a vein swollen. Then he’s poking through skin that’s thickened up enough to send a signal to his brain telling him that shit hurts.
But the pain fades first. Then it’s the room that blackens at the edges.
And he feels wonderful.

            Nothing matters.

            Nothing hurts.
And when Nate’s chin meets his chest, everything sort of fades away.

**

The story was originally published in Derails Review.

Nick Gregorio lives, writes, and teaches just outside of Philadelphia. His fiction has appeared in Crack the Spine, Hypertrophic Literary, Maudlin House and more. He is a contributing writer and assistant editor for the arts and culture blog, Spectrum Culture, and currently serves as fiction editor for Driftwood Press. He earned his MFA from Arcadia University in May 2015 and has fiction forthcoming in Zeit|Haus, Corvus Review, and Rum Punch Press.

**

Image: Flickr / Brady Kenniston

A Note: Help The Other Stories by using our affiliate links to buy these and other books – you’ll grow your library and help us pay our interns! We now have both print and ebook options for your reading pleasure

Shadows Over Main Street: An Anthology of Small-Town Lovecraftian Terror (print)

Tracy Letts: Bug: A Play (print) / August: Osage County (print / ebook)  / Killer Joe (print / ebook)

Peter Watts: Blindsight (print / ebook) / Echopraxia (print / ebook) / Starfish (print / ebook)

H.P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft (print / ebook)

Victor LaValle: The Ballad of Black Tom (print / ebook) / The Devil in Silver (print / ebook) / Big Machine: A Novel (print / ebook)

Stephen King: 11/22/63 (print / ebook) / Doctor Sleep: A Novel (print / ebook) / Mr. Mercedes (print / ebook)

First Souls

The waitress brings us our coffee, dishwater pale murk in cracked porcelain cups. Behind the thin surgical mask, her face is unreadable, but her gaze flicks from me to my companion and back again before she leaves without a word. Mickey watches her go and then fixes his eyes on me. For a long moment, the silence continues, as our eyes confirm what our hearts seemed to know the instant we passed on the street.

“Okay, Dale,” he says, his voice hoarse and still raw, like my own. There is an accent I can’t place – perhaps a district on the other side of the city. “I’m going to ask you a couple of questions, but I think I already know the answers.”

I pick up the coffee, finding it smells as weak and thin as it looks, and contemplate taking an exploratory swig. Around us the few lunchtime patrons of the dingy coffee shop are listlessly eating, lifting up paper masks to shovel in crumbling and greasy burgers, backsides squeaking on red vinyl seats. Those that aren’t eating are staring at us, at our uncovered faces.

“Okay,” I say, “Shoot.”

**

First souls was originally published in the Summer 2016 issue of FLAPPERHOUSE. Read the full story here, and enjoy the excerpt above.

**

Cameron Suey lives in California with his wife and two children. He works as a writer in the games industry, most recently on “Rise of the Tomb Raider.” His work has appeared on the Pseudopod Podcast, anthologies including Shadows over Main Street, and was featured in the first issues of Jamais Vu and Flapperhouse. He can be found on the web at cameronsuey.com, and on twitter as @josefkstories.

**

Image: Flickr / Marco – Clef de Peau

Purchase today’s featured book, The Infinite

The Infinite excerpt

1

The river was there, broad and brown. Calm, it seemed. Clouds swept low, fled with the current. Luz sat with Jonah on the levee between river and sky, a nowhere place. He took her hand and the river did seem calm, but she heard the water at its turbulent depth, beating against a floor carved through millions of years.

“We used to come up here a lot,” Jonah said. “My family.”

“No more?” Luz asked. Over his shoulder, a gull shrieked and banked toward picnickers along the riverwalk.

“Nah,” he said. “My brother moved away.”

“Your mother?”

“My mom died when I was little,” Jonah said. “A car wreck.” Luz tried to apologize, but he interrupted to say, “It’s all right. It feels like a long time ago.”

A tug drove a column of barges in the middle of the river. A beat emerged from the wind—a

kid playing drums on overturned buckets for the dog walkers and the joggers and the tourists arm in arm. Upriver, a cruise ship squatted heavily in the water against the bridge, near the hotels and the casino.

“My mamá,” Luz said, “she passed away, too. Almost six years now. Sometimes, yes, it feels like a long time ago. But only sometimes.”

Jonah’s grip on her hand grew firmer.

“After that I came to the United States. To be with my papá.”

“Wow,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“She was sick,” Luz said, a small smile. “We didn’t know.”

The wake of the tugboat and the barges finally reached the bank, cresting against the rocks of the levee. It was spring, and the river was high.

Jonah wanted to know if he could ask something.

“Okay,” Luz said.

“Did people tell you to talk to your mom? Like, talk to her in your head because she’d hear you and all?”

And she was there, at home in Las Monarcas, in her grandmother’s apartment. The old woman held her hands and peered at her through her glasses. An uncle lingered in the doorway, waiting to ferry the little girl to El Norte and her father, and her grandmother said good-bye and told her to pray to her mother, always, for her mother would be watching and listening. “My abuela told me to pray.”

“I got that a lot, too. The priests at school. Everybody.” He was looking at their hands—hers

was small and bronze; his was large and fair, some freckles. “Does she ever answer you?”

Luz closed her eyes and reached for her mother. The clouds broke and the sun was on her face. “No,” she answered. “Not so that I can hear her.” The gull screeched. A jogger passed, brief and mild hip-hop pumping from his headphones. “I believe she hears me, though.”

He nodded, watched her. His eyes were green, almost gray, and steady like the river seemed to be. But Luz sensed the pull beneath Jonah’s eyes, and it made her ache.

2

Jonah and Luz grew closer as the summer passed and edged into fall. He had been living alone in the camelback shotgun house in Central City, New Orleans, where his family, the McBees, had lived for three generations. Flaking lavender paint, a sagging porch, a dirt backyard shadowed by an ancient live oak. Jonah’s older brother Dex owned the home, but he lived like a recluse down the bayou. On only a few occasions had he come back to the city—the last time being for their father’s funeral, after the old man’s heart attack. Dex had stayed until Jonah turned eighteen—that is, until Dex’s legal guardianship had ceased—and then returned to the swamp and the old family fishing camp, where he made his living as a hunter.

“Me and Dex, we hardly talk,” Jonah told Luz. “He sends some money every now and then to help with bills.”

Jonah’s brother was his last living relation. The absolute nature of Jonah’s loneliness had staggered Luz, but it was of course familiar, and part of what drew her to him was this residue of his experience. It suggested he might be able to understand her in a way that nobody else—not her track teammates, not her father—was able.

During afternoons when there was neither work nor track practice, they took to reclining on the couch in his living room and talking, learning each other’s histories. Jonah had pictures all over the walls of his home, photographs of his family. He had explained to Luz that while he was growing up his father never wanted to see the images, wanted to leave them buried. They reminded him of too much. “At the camp, here at the house, bare walls,” Jonah had said. But once Jonah was alone, he put them up. He was much younger than his brothers, nine years junior to Dex and ten to Bill. Jonah had been six when a drunk driver blew through a stop sign and broadsided his mother’s car less than a mile from their home. He needed the pictures, markers to trace out his own beginning.

Luz got up from the couch and circuited the living room, looking at the framed shots while Jonah commented on each.

There was a photograph of his father in which the old man stares through the grass of the duck blind, hair rumpled and face confused—as if wondering why this moment called for a permanent likeness at all—as droplets of mist freeze in the flash against the predawn dark.

There was a photograph of Jonah’s mother, a blond bob and green eyes, and she stands on the riverwalk, slightly turned from the camera, her hands resting atop her belly.

“Maybe she’s pregnant with me in that one,” Jonah said.

Luz watched the wide river roll behind his mother, the steeple of a church on the far bank. The view was not far from where Luz had first sat with Jonah on the levee.

“I remember small things,” Jonah told her. “Just flashes. Mom walking me to church while my brothers watched football with Pop. Tracing symbols on my back after she tucked me in.”

Luz smiled and returned to the photograph. Jonah’s eyes were like his mother’s. Luz imagined his father taking this picture, pride swelling. A wish rose for her own possible future with Jonah.

Luz prayed, quick: Please, señora McBee, help us.

Jonah did not pray to his relatives, so Luz had begun to speak to his mother. It was a small thing she could do for him. Luz imagined Jonah’s loss as an anchor obscured by dark water. Jonah neither saw it nor understood how it restricted the range of his drifting. If you would only reach for her, Luz had tried to tell him.

Luz paced the living room and stopped opposite the couch, where in the center of the wall there waited a photograph of Jonah’s eldest brother, Bill, with a crew cut and in dress blues. The American flag the government sent, cotton folded in a triangular frame, hung next to it. Jonah told her that a land mine had killed his brother. Something old, something the Soviets left in Afghanistan more than twenty years before Bill showed up. “How fucked up is that,” Jonah whispered.

Alongside the jamb of the kitchen doorway Jonah had hung the only photograph he had of him with both brothers. Little Jonah stands in front of them. Bill and Dex are in high school. Bill is eighteen, just before he graduated and enlisted. “He’s my age now in that picture,” Jonah said. Bill was sandy haired and green eyed like Jonah, but he was stocky where Jonah had become tall. In the photo Dex is darker, rangier, wearing a sour look. All three stand on the dock at the camp, the cypress and the early pale sky behind them.

“Think I’ll ever get to meet Dex?” Luz asked.

Jonah shrugged from the couch.

Luz again sensed the implacable sadness roiling within Jonah and tried to find something to say. She glanced over the photographs and told him that he looked like his mother. “You and Bill both,” she said.

Jonah grinned and picked at a thread in the couch cushion. “You must look like your mom, too, huh?” He had seen her father once or twice, though he’d not yet spoken with the man. Her father was lanky and his skin was cooked like a baseball glove and his eyes were blue, which had surprised Jonah.

“I do look like my mamá,” Luz told him. She explained how her mother used to tell her that they were descended from Guachichil warriors, who had lived five hundred years ago and fought the Spaniards. The Guachichiles were the fiercest of the Chichimec people. As Luz grew older, she began to understand that her mother couldn’t know for certain whether they had Guachichil ancestry as opposed to anything else—all that history was lost—but it didn’t matter. It was more, Luz recognized, a matter of what they wanted to believe and what that belief could do for them. Her father couldn’t care less, practical as he was. But her mother liked the stories, appreciated their power: This history makes

you strong, my Luz. And Luz saw it, watching herself age in mirrors. Sometimes, now, she looked at herself before track meets, narrowed her eyes like a hawk, and imagined herself to be a warrior.

“What do you mean, you don’t know for sure?” Jonah asked.

“I don’t know,” Luz said. “It doesn’t matter.”

But this troubled Jonah, how something could be unknown and known at the same time. Something so essential. He could know, for instance, that the McBees had lived in the Scottish Highlands a long time ago. Then they left those for New World highlands. Sometime later they showed up in New Orleans, and here he was. It made sense.

“Look,” he said, getting up and directing her attention to another frame on the wall. Within it a sheet of parchment depicted the McBee family crest—a disembodied hand running a sword through a green dragon. “I don’t care that much about it all,” he said, “but it’s something I can know, at least. Doesn’t it bother you at all, that you can’t know for sure?”

Luz, though, was thinking about all the countless things that had happened on different parts of the planet in different eras in order for her and Jonah to be together now in New Orleans. It was a strangely sobering thought. An image popped into her head: she saw them as an impossible couple, five centuries before. Jonah wore a plaid skirt and swung a sword, and straw-colored dreadlocks fell over his bare shoulders. She clutched a spear and wore the head of a wolf for a hat and painted her face red and munched peyote before battle. She began to laugh.

“What?” Jonah said, breaking up before he even knew the joke. “What’s funny?”

Luz shoved him so that he fell backward over the arm of the couch. She leaped after him and, in the breath before she kissed him, she said, “You are, Jonás. You.”

All the guilt that had been there after their first time and the times after—it eventually passed when the retribution Luz had been taught to expect never arrived. It amazed her, how quickly they learned each other. She figured him out without a word, and once the guilt ebbed, giving in felt good, and with it came a new and special understanding of the world. After a while she imagined that God might consider them a special case. And if not, she might convince Him otherwise. Maybe they had been given a unique opportunity.

And likewise, Jonah learned to treat the geography of her body with diligence, with the terrifying knowledge that the moment would end. She was small, she was strong. The first time she threw her leg over him, he was surprised by the hardness of her muscle, the solidity and weight of her leg, and he could summon that moment any time he wished and it would excite him. They discovered their own rhythm, created it between themselves, called on it together in his bedroom. Sometimes

Spanish words left her lips when she forgot herself, and this was a fact no other man but Jonah possessed. Sometimes she called him Jonás. It was a thing with which he came to define himself.

**The Infinite is written by Nicholas Mainieri and was published by Harper Perennial on November 15, 2016**

Nicholas Mainieri’s short fiction has appeared in the Southern Review, Southern Humanities Review, and Salamander, among other literary magazines. He lives in New Orleans with his wife and son. The Infinite is his first novel.

Books and Authors mentioned in this episode:

Junot Diaz: This Is How You Lose Her / The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao / Drown

Today’s story was originally published in FLAPPERHOUSE

From the Master’s Table [excerpt – full story here]

Mr. P was never one to vouch for heaven but considered God a useful trope for making conversations with people he wanted to keep at bay. He has always been attracted to the idea of being alone, and that’s why being a history teacher seemed like a good idea.

History always seemed to him like a useful way of rewarding and punishing the good and the bad (and sometimes the bad and the good). For this reason he could never take heaven seriously, because waiting until someone was dead to dole out the true consequences of their actions appeared counterproductive at best. He preferred to pay people back while they could still bleed.

He is one of the few functional schizophrenics that I know. I say functional because he is not homeless and owns a Craftsman-style grey house on the West side of San Pedro, in a neighborhood made up of right angles, seven minutes from the ports where he unloaded boats carrying precious Chinese cargo or the occasional carcass, and where celebrity-themed cruise ships now forage for travelers afraid to fly.

When he was in his first year of teaching at West High, several seasons before he was shamed into renouncing vagabondage for a more stable routine of the conjugal kind, Mr. P would spend entire nights at the Coffee Cartel, rambling on the backs of 5-page papers on the necessary prerequisites of civil society, the threat of a perpetual police state thinly veiled by democracy and terrorism, the disappearance of childhood, NPR, the Big Sort into like-minded communities, credit cards, the problem of consciousness, and beauty—usually of the agonizing, thoughtful, forbidden kind. He loved talking to strangers and his students were no exception, though he did not like hugging, which some of them found out the awkward way.

**

Christine Ma-Kellams is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of La Verne. Her prose has appeared or is forthcoming in Gargoyle, Hypertext, Blue Earth Review, Straylight and the Wall Street Journal

Image: Willem Clasz. Heda – “Breakfast Table with Blackberry Pie”

Books and Authors Mentioned in This Episode:

Jean Ryan: Lost Sisters / Survival Skills: Stories

Lorrie Moore: A Gate at the Stairs / Bark / Birds of America

Helen Simpson: Getting a Life / In-Flight Entertainment

Amy Bloom: Lucky Us / Away / Where the God of Love Hangs Out

Antonya Nelson: Nothing Right / Female Trouble / Funny Once

Gene Thompson: Lupe / Nobody Cared for Kate

Annie Proulx: The Shipping News / Barkskins / Close Range: Wyoming Stories

Marisa Silver: Mary Coin / The God of War / Alone With You

Joy Williams: The Quick and the Dead / Honored Guest / The Visiting Privilege

Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale / Oryx and Crake/ The Blind Assassin

Annie Dillard: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / The Writing Life / An American Childhood

Edward Hoagland: On Nature / Sex and the River Styx / Children Are Diamonds: An African Apocalypse

Barry Lopez: Arctic Dreams / Of Wolves and Men / Crossing Open Ground

Rick Bass: Winter: Notes from Montana / The Watch / The Ninemile Wolves

“A Sea Change” was originally published in The Summerset Review. Read the full story there. Below, please enjoy an excerpt of the story.

A Sea Change

My mother lights another Winston and, eying me closely, blows the smoke out the side of her mouth. She is circling, looking for a way into my confidence.

“So she’s moving out?”

“Tomorrow.” I am watching the frantic maneuvers of a hummingbird confused by the red plastic flowers.

She tilts her head; I can feel her frowning. “Did something happen, Jenny? Did you have a fight?”

I shake my head no.

She leans forward, lowers her voice. “Another woman?”

I look at the black windows of her sunglasses. Cosmetic surgery has pulled out most of her wrinkles and her face, shiny and taut, is straining with anticipation. Her glossy red lips are parted. Even her hair is shimmering, waiting.

I know she blames me for losing Antonia. I don’t fix myself up, she contends, don’t pay enough attention to my clothes and my nails.

She cannot imagine how hard I tried—first my methods and then some of hers. How can I explain that it wasn’t my fault, that I was up against an octopus and never stood a chance.

********

It started, of course, at the aquarium. Everything was fine until Antonia got a job at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Not two weeks later I brought some oysters home and when I put them on the table she blanched, nearly knocked the chair over getting to her feet. That was the beginning of the end.

Which is pretty ironic considering how we met. Imagine a lovely dark-haired woman sitting alone in a restaurant. She is watching the sun melt into the Pacific. Her wine glass blazes in the orange light as she raises it to her lips. On the table is a plate of oysters, her second.

It was only by chance that I saw her. I came out of the kitchen for a club soda and there she was, stunning as a coral reef.

From behind a vase of forsythia I watched her lift each shivering oyster from its icy bed and even then I could feel the undertow, could see the water rising. There was nothing I could do but flip my apron to the clean side and head straight for her table.

Striking up a conversation was easy enough. There were the oysters, all twelve of which I had pried open, not to mention the mixed greens I had tossed for her, the focaccia I had made. Everything she put in her mouth had first been in my hands.

And so I asked how she liked the oysters and told her they were Quilcenes, fresh from Tomales Bay, and then I mentioned the Olympias I was getting in and had she ever tried them. She had the most provocative lips I’d ever seen. She smiled a lot and nodded here and there, and if she thought my presence in the dining room was odd (and it was) she didn’t let on; maybe she was flirting too. In any case she came back for my bivalves every Friday afternoon. The waiters, who caught on quickly, would let me know the minute she arrived, and each time I saw her, backlit in that window, my stomach would start to do flip flops. Sometimes I had trouble with her oysters because my hands would be shaking so much. I must have opened over a hundred of them before I finally got the nerve to ask her out.

**

Jean Ryan is a native Vermonter who lives in Napa, California. Her stories and essays have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies. Nominated several times for a Pushcart Prize, she has also published a novel, Lost Sister. Her debut collection of short stories, Survival Skills, was published in 2013 by Ashland Creek Press and was short-listed for a Lambda Literary Award. She has recently finished a second collection of stories, Savages, which she hopes to publish soon.

**

Image: Flickr / Ray Sadler

Books and authors mentioned in this episode:

 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: Frankenstein

Carlo Collodi: Pinocchio

George Haven Putnam: The Little Gingerbread Man

Denis Johnson: Tree of Smoke / Jesus’ Son /The Laughing Monsters

William Faulkner: As I Lay Dying / The Sound and the Fury / Absalom, Absalom!

Flannery O’Connor: The Complete Stories / Wise Blood / The Violent Bear It Away

Excerpt from “Book Boy” – read full story at Unsung Stories:

I am a boy. I was Doc’s boy. I started in his mind. Then he took me out piece by piece.

The top of my head is a silvery funnel. And through it I gulp all the words on the page. The gears in my skull blend the pages together. I was made to make books out of books.

Doc read my books for his friends and his pleasure. His parties were known for their wit, charm and glamour. Before one party he entered my cellar, and caressed me, and touched me and polished my pate.

‘But your face…’ And there were ghosts in his voice. ‘The parties, my boy, you cannot attend.’

Twenty-odd came calling for my first confection. Doc sat them down, set them drinks and began.

‘The Biggest Sleep in CivilWarLand, by Raymond Saunders,’ he said, and they laugh laugh laughed.

Doc took my words and wore them like dresses, flashing each one to the ears of his friends. They billowed and swayed and fluttered and sank. And when they were finished, there was not a sound.

His friends broke out into raucous applause, bellowing, thundering claps and bright laughter. They said it was genius. They said it was grand. They asked how he did it. He sidestepped the question.

After they left, he dashed to my cellar, and kissed me and hugged me, all full of sick joy.

‘You’re brilliant!’ he said, so happy, so true. ‘You’re the best book boy any Doc could have.’

**

Zack Graham’s stories have appeared in or are forthcoming in Seven Scribes, The Cobalt Review, Unsung Stories, Junto Magazine and elsewhere. He’s at work on a collection of short fiction and a novel.

**

Image: Flickr / Chris JL