Hymn

"We need a car."

Mark’s voice is mater of fact, not at all harried. Not at all like what you’re feeling. Still Mark is moving swiftly, the clacking hard soles of his shiny black shoes promising a swift break into a run as the mob behind you closes in.

“Yeah,” you agree, increasing your pace to move in stride with your roommate. “These shoes aren’t exactly made for escaping a mob of angry villagers.”

Behind you, you can feel the horde edging closer. You. You think you can smell kerosene and matches as torches light up. You think you can smell the manure stuck to rusted pitchforks. You have the urge to duck from the possible onslaught of malotov cocktails.
You round a corner and leap over a toy poodle as Mark quickly sidesteps the sleepy woman letting her dog shit on the sidewalk once more before she goes to bed. The woman hears the coming crowd too, and quickly gathers the dog into her arms before rushing into her apartment building.
Mark grasps your collar, pulling you into the alley-styled walkway lined with dumpsters and blue recycling bins from the program the city decided was more expensive than the environmental impact. You lean against the aging brick wall with your hands on your knees, arching your back in a moment of temporary reprieve. You open your mouth to speak and Mark silences you with a stern glare.

In the shadows of the alleyway, tucked out of sight from the pouring gaze of the streetlights, you let your eyes adjust, your pupils dilate.
The tuxes Mark picked out for the two of you are sleek and narrow. Vests versus cumberbunds. Pinstriped. And though both are mostly black with soft thin bands of white, in the dimness of the alley, you can tell your stripes are centered directly opposite Mark’s.
Details.

Your eyes follow Mark’s to the mouth of the alleyway as a gaggle of sharply dressed men and women rush past. The men, too, are decked out in formal wear, though nowhere near as suave as you and Mark. The women, sequined and red, glinting like mating fireflies in the lamplight.
You hear the rustle of a flint against metal and turn to the sparking flame as Mark ignites the Lucky Strike perched on his lips. He gives you a wink as you deny his offer to join him in a smoke, still trying to catch your breath. He begins angling toward the main street and you join his gait.

“Why are they chasing us anyway?” you ask, realizing for the first time you have no idea where you had been or why you were there.
“Why does anyone ever get pursued?”
This is not the time for Mark’s proverbial life lessons.
“I know,” he says. Mark says and smirks and you as you find your bearings on the sidewalk, craning your neck to try to make out the street sign on the corner. “But even a night at the opera can hold a lot of truths you need to learn.”

The opera?

Your eyebrows raise, and you peer over Mark’s shoulder at the trim, short man moving closer at a rapid pace, his cufflinks flashing as his arms swing at halftime with his legs.

“They’re back here!”

You spin on your heels at the short guy’s words, taking in the well-dressed horde beyond you pushing into a U-turn and closing in on you much faster than you would have imagined.

Mark. Mark tips his head to the short guy who’s slowed to a brisk walk as he moves within five feet from where you’re standing. Mark takes your hand unexpectedly and drags you out into the street, sidestepping the oncoming traffic before quickening his pace.

“We need a car,” he says again, still calm and collected. “Follow me.”

The two of you push down a side street, leaping over the Oak and Magnolia roots jarring and cracking the sidewalk. You listen to the growing rumble of panting and clacking high heels navigating the path behind you.

“They’re heading to the park!”

You blink suddenly as you see that they’re right. The houses beside you look familiar now as you move down the street toward the open pasture tucked into the center of Midtown. You wonder what Mark could have in mind as he leads you into the inline skaters and behind-the-tree blowjobs abounding in the after-dark park hours.

You quicken your stride, more comfortable in your step now that you have realized your familiarity with your surroundings. As you near the edge of the park, you set your eyes on the downward sloping bike path before feeling Mark’s grasp on your wrist tugging you away from the opening. He slows to a walk and places a hand on your chest, urging you to bring balance to your breathing.
There are more people on the street now and you notice a line of traffic slowing as sharply dressed valets exchange car keys for numbered cards and smiling men escort their dates toward a dinner that will no doubt buy them a quick lay for dessert.
Mark signals for you to stop, his left cheek tensing as he heads toward the entrance of the restaurant. Two of the attendants drive off to safely park the vehicles of new money patrons already grown too lazy to fight for the limited city parking available. The third is busy angling himself away from the thin glass doorway so, if the manager happens by, the burning cigarette resting between his middle and index fingers won’t turn into a pink slip.
Mark motions for you to move to the rear of the restaurant where the valets are pulling the vehicles into neatly packed rows. You turn to move, perking your ears toward the growing sound of footsteps closing in behind you as your eyes catch Mark’s hand reaching into the cabinet of unwatched keys.

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Roast

Detective Michael Mason

So I’m waiting in line at the supermarket at three in the morning. It’s that time when they don’t want to actually pay people to man the store so they only got those self-checkout things open. And at three am, no matter how few people there are in the store stocking up on microwave dinners and pints of ice cream, no matter how few people there are in the store, there’s always a long fucking line at those self-checkouts. Because everyone is too goddamn lazy to go to them during the day when they got clerks in green smocks staring off into space as they bag your groceries. Everyone is too goddamn lazy to use these things unless they have to so no one knows how to fucking use them when they have to.
And the whole time I’m waiting in line, the whole time I’m waiting and wiping my hand on my pants to get the sticky from the dripping pint of pistachio ice cream I’m holding, the whole entire time I’m looking at these people. I’m wondering if any of them are my perp. If that lady with the family-sized pack of Twinkies is loading up little kids from the soccer game and jack-knifing their teeth out. If that weasel-y looking guy, the guy with the greasy black hair that’s thinning so much the comb over looks more like a street map on his scalp, the guy with the wiry facial hair that can’t really decide on a growth pattern, the only employee here this late at night, if he decided his power as the security for the graveyard shift was going unnoticed and decided to take it out on all the kids he could lure with pistachio ice cream. The ice cream that’s coating my hands.
And this guy is nodding at me like the badge clipped to my waste and the bubblegum machine tin star he’s got pinned to his green smock, like the two of them bond the two of us in some sort of camaraderie.
And that lady at the front of the line still can’t figure out how to bag her Twinkies. Where the hell to swipe her credit card.

My phone rings and I know it’s my wife wondering what time I’m going to get home. Except it’s not my wife. It’s Miles down at the station. It’s Miles telling me he knows I just got off shift but I may want to come back in. Telling me there’s something at the campgrounds off the Four-oh-Eight I might be interested in seeing.

A Good Samaritan would put the ice cream back in the cooler. A good customer would do that. I toss the pint on top of the store brand soda display and head toward the automatic doors.
I wonder if Twinkie lady could figure out a fucking door handle if the motion sensor didn’t alakazaam her out of the store in a whir of radiation.
I wonder if my bitch ass child-molesting murderer works cleaning detail here in his spare time. If he’ll have to wipe up crusty green ice cream from stacks of strawberry and orange flavored pop.

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Catfish

Sometimes I see catfish. I walk out of my bedroom and they’re there, swimming through the hallway, ducking around the stacks of books I always meant to read like the stacks are a living, breathing reef of coral. Like catfish like salt water or coral thrives on the pollution of man-made lakes. Coral isn’t really a freshwater thing, but then catfish aren’t indigenous to my hallway. At least I know the books are breathing. Are alive.
The catfish themselves are like dinosaurs. Catfish have skin like a lizard. A milky grey-brown. Smooth with muscle definition and whiskers that don’t look a thing like my cat’s. That don’t twitch and snarl from her couch cushion perch as she watches them, the catfish, too, wondering how the hell they got here but not interested enough to ask them.

They say horses see dinosaurs out of the corners of their eyes. That’s what my riding instructor told me when I was 8-years-old at that summer camp for poor rural kids. She said that horses are so old it’s embedded in their DNA, these visions of giant lizards, of featherless birds. That their minds and their eyes team up to play tricks on them to spook them into throwing their riders.
Maybe cats can see catfish. Maybe I’m a cat. My boyfriend says I smell like one.

These catfish, they swim right by all the Freud and the Nietzsche and The Little Engine That Could. They move past all that with their tails swishing currents of molecules, with their fore-fins not even rustling the pages. These catfish, they – all four of them – congregate around a notebook of poetry you wrote specifically for me when we was a word you and I were still a part of.

Catfish don’t have whiskers, they have “barbels.” That’s what the internet tells me. The internet tells me that there are three thousand and twenty-three different species of catfish and that some of them can live in saltwater.
The internet is man-made though. All the content of it is. So the internet could be as wrong as all the forevers in all the poems the catfish are crowding around. Could be as misinformed as riding instructors.
But maybe my living room is really saltwater. Maybe my books really all are coral. Living and breathing and sharp and cutting.

Chronology does not matter when picking through poems from old lovers, when trying to figure out what the catfish would like to hear. Lovers’ poetry is funny that way. When it’s in a notebook addressed to the lovee, it brings forth only a very specific period of time. It’s the blueprint of very specific sets of synapses.
It’s the words I’m sure you wrote after you gave me this notebook that would be much more interesting to hear for the fish. Much more heartfelt despite all the time playing martyrs. But the catfish don’t know that. The little brains inside their skulls – those boney skulls that make them catfish – they can’t comprehend that all these words have since soured and rotted and begged for the compost.

"Catfish" is available as a bonus
short story in Roast.

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