Aleppo, Syria (AP) — Prior to joining the Tawheed Brigade in opposition to the Syrian government, Anwar Addat was a computer technician who never gave much thought to politics or religion. That was before a barrel bomb delivered by a government helicopter ignited a fire that killed his wife and two children. These days he goes nowhere without his AK-47 and body armor, and looks every bit the insurgent warrior he has reluctantly become.
The train arrived on time. In all the years that I’ve had to take trains, I don’t think a damned one of them were less than a half hour late. I take this to be a good omen as I board, maneuvering my luggage through the tightly packed crowd. Winter always makes people odd and this one was particularly cold. After pushing and pulling and dodging my way past families, brooding young men and confused old women, I find my seat. A window seat, another good sign. As the train begins crawling away from the platform, I notice that the seat beside me is still empty. This trip is getting better and better, I think to myself just as a large man ambles down the walkway, turning his craggy misshapen head left and right and looking for a place to land himself. Then he sees me. “Well, hello there, fella. Looks like we’ll be riding this one together. Name’s Jim. Yours?” he mumbles out in some indistinguishable southern accent. A twang cultivated by gut-rot moonshine and the searing warmth of ignorance.
That morning, a May Saturday, when Fernando “Fred” Norstrand first put on the police uniform, solid blue deep as a line of defense, bright buttons shining gold-like running down the front straight as ideas cemented in his mind, his wife stood in the bathroom doorway in open admiration of the new spectacle. He had only recently taken off a Navy uniform, discharged from service because of injury. They loved each other that morning with a new and silent abandon, their baby son still asleep, the day already lopsided in their favor, and the man of the house about to start a new job. He had been appointed as a special policeman of the town, assigned to the lone local theater to keep the kids in line, Saturday being the toughest start of all; popcorn, noise, kids away from parental control, let loose from their homes, very different from the few homes he’d visited during Pacific duty and the home he had grown up in.
Ellie awakens from a bad dream. While the gentle pre-dawn shadows fill her bedroom and strive toward a sense of pastel, she attempts to examine the details of her nightmare, but has only partial success. The only thing Ellie can recall for certain is being lost inside a terrible fog composed of tedious sounds and loneliness; a fog in which just being had been the worst thing possible.
I was fishing off the bridge over the Ipswich River, a few hundred yards from the Topsfield Fairgrounds. This was a day nothing was supposed to happen, but you know what they say about that stuff… it usually does, like Mike Murphy’s Law or Charlie Poulin’s Law or whatever they call it. Yet enough had occurred already in the last twenty-four hours and the odds were in my favor, or so they said.
Continue reading “Decisions on the Ipswich River by Tom Sheehan”
He sits at Anna’s bedside, unnoticed, working a crossword puzzle. Sometimes reading. Sometimes just waiting. Watching. Counting breaths until it’s time for him to do his job. Anna knows He’s here. She’s been expecting him.
Even though she cannot speak, I can hear her words to him, “I’ve been waiting for you,” Anna says. Her eyes are closed but she sees him. “Why are you taking so long? I’ve been ready for a while now.”
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The next morning I arrive at Judge Fong’s office at 7:30 am as ordered. I’m suffering a headache hangover. I’m mildly irritated to see the Judge’s Clerk beaming with excitement. “What’s up Bob? You look remarkably bright this morning.”
Robert “Bob” Mitchell gives me a classic shit-eating grin. “Tecumseh, your ass is grass. The Judge’s mad as hell at you for letting your client get killed. What the hell was that all about? That’s all everybody’s talking about is the Mayhew mess. The word is he was practicing voodoo–”
There’s a wrinkle of land in Stone County, an isolated pocket valley so remote you can hardly find the sky. My wife Sarah and I were happy there. A nearly feral cat lived there too, a scruffy calico that hung around to avoid coyotes. Sarah called her Josie. That cat was neurotic, delusional, paranoid and pathologically afraid of me though I never gave her cause. For three years all I ever saw was a flash of motion or the tip of her tail disappearing around a corner. The exception was anytime my wife ventured outside. Josie would glare death at me and sidle by on stiff legs, back arched and tail fluffed, to get to Sarah’s lap. I didn’t resent it. Sarah could talk tadpoles from a puddle, chant clouds from the sky, charm ticks from a mule’s hide. She surely charmed that cat, and the cat was good for Sarah. I’d leave them to practice their healing magics on each other and go find something useful to do.
Continue reading “Chasing Josie’s Ghost by Domenic diCiacca”
Michael the orderly, before it had all come down to the most private of acts, remembered his wondering if Marty and Valerie, in their lives beforehand, before the catastrophic crashes, before cement and machines and phone poles adjusted to flames around the piles of their motorcycles, he was a bull in bed, she was the puma come down to drink. Images loomed early on, lively, kicking images on how they must have cut a path to the heart of their appetites, their excitements, from what he heard up and down the entire east coast. Even pinned now to lives in rolling chairs, they evoked a fierce amount of energy, fire and brimstone, taste and distaste. Even then he thought the world of them, wanted to be god on the hill for them, Thor or Odin or a damned good magician with a damned good wand. Hell, he had the black skin; all he needed was the black hat with a few secret compartments.
On the bus ride home from my summer job, I couldn’t get the bank teller’s face out of my mind. The line had been long, but I’d stood there waiting on it anyway because I was out of spending money. Having nothing to read, I watched the tellers absently, but the dark-haired, dark-eyed woman at the first window seemed familiar, so after a minute I looked only at her. She seemed unsure of herself as she nervously counted money, and she only glanced at a customer for more than a second at a time. Even when it was my turn, I watched her from the next window, pretending not to. She peeked at me once, maybe sensing that I was staring, but didn’t look over again. There was a defeated slope to her shoulders, and sometimes she blinked rapidly for a moment, as though she were suddenly preoccupied.
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