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November 2008

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Our print division, Comet Press, is currently accepting submissions for horror, suspense, and dark crime novels and novellas. Visit www.cometpress.us for details.

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DEADLINES: AN ANTHOLOGY OF HORROR AND DARK FICTION, will be released in November of 2008! Visit www.cometpress.us

Frazzled
by J.R.

Keith has a face that gets him noticed, I'll say that much. Not freak show noticed. Just, well, noticed, I don't know; his face just looks too defined. Too stereotypically Eastern European, with a broad neck, strong nose, and hard knots of cheek bone that, for some reason, remind me of little islands in the South Pacific. Maybe because I used to enjoy island hopping all over them with my lips. God, I know, nothing more sexual than esoteric World War II military strategy. No wonder he loved me.

Well, still loves me.

I don't need to talk about myself, you'll get sick of me soon enough. More about him.

First thing you'd notice about him: his hair is like a choreographed fight scene.

And need it be said that his hair is black?

And what black it is. Rich and luxurious, you put your nose in his hair, close your eyes and inhale, and—I kid you not—you're on top of something quadrepal and wild, something that's bucking and roaring and gnashing, and you're riding this beast aside a lake in translucent nighttime, the full moon making a lambent mirror out of dark waters. Hot Topic kids think there so special because, unlike their bourgeoisie peers, they realize dark, somber hues can be beautiful. Grand epiphany, I know. But Keith's hair affirms their conceit to the nth degree and makes black the baseline standard against which all things of beauty must be judged.

So yeah, his hair is nice.

If he was around, and I was describing his hair in front of him, I'd say his hair makes "black the new black."

He'd like that.

He is a pretty fun guy.

Well, maybe not. He could just be playing "the part."

You know, "the part" of the bad boy. It was "the part" that first attracted me.

He had that whole rebel-who's-his-own cause bravado, that cavalier, toothy grin, with that melee of hair as his radio antennas to beam his confidence to anyone within range. A coquettish, pliable, bright but misunderstood waitress like myself is a half- filled glass, and some ego-beaming, interesting stranger is that last pitcher of fluid needed to finally fill her up.

But it wore on me. Goddamn, the whole shtick: the renegade, supposedly outside the norms and constrains of polite society: God, just thinking about him, in public with his leather jacket and his omnipresent sun glasses. A million such pictures line his MySpace account; teeth bared, hair in disarray, dark apparel in full effect (need to spot me in these pictures? I'm the person looking askance and ashamed for being with the tool wearing sunglasses in the mall or the deli or wherever the picture was taken).

But, it must be said, the more and more time I spent with him, the more I began to suspect it might not be an act. It might be a side effect of his affliction.

And I know the affliction is real: Boy, is it ever.

I found out about it the hard way. When I first found out about his…shall we say, "situation," we had only been dating about two months, and even that was on-and-off, so I didn't know too much about his personal habits. One night (forever known to me as THAT NIGHT), I remember dreaming of Marshmallow ("Marsha!"), my childhood bichon frise. In my dream, I distinctly remembered the "tap-tap-tap" of Marsha's uncut toenails against the unvarnished, smooth wood living room of my youth. "Tap-tap-tap"; even though Marsha was a little overweight (as all bichons should be) I loved how regal and dignified the tapping made Marsha sound.

Then I woke up, and saw some man-sized thing above me, tap-tap-tapping his hands and feet as he scurried, upside down, across my bedroom ceiling and out of my vision.

To be honest, I don't remember exactly what happened next. Maybe I screamed. More likely I gasped and sucked in so much air I had an oxygen overdose.

Whenever it was that he decided to notice my conniption fit—and, you know, the attendant galactic panic resulting from having one's entire sense of the world obliterated—he awoke from his instinctual bedtime crawling, lost his balance, and fell back to earth. Alarmingly, he started to panic. Feeling as I had just a teensy little bit more justifiable panic-induced leverage over him, I disregarded his worries and just started screaming.

He immediately tackled me, but even then, feeling his weight bulldozing over me, I could feel the softness in his embrace, in the way he wrapped his arms around me. I fell to the bed, decisively but comfortably.

Pushing his face to mine, I could see an inchoate misting in his eyes, an amorphous but fulgent cloud, a bizarre sort of cataracts— I later learned that this was his version of crying.

"I can explain…You will never… in a million years. I know, I know you're scared and you're frightened, and, and you think this is a dream or something, but…." So he tried to explain...

To this day I still don't know what he is. A ghoul? The word's connotations are too malevolent to be accurate.

But he was bitten by something, along time ago, by something small and wicked. He told me that he remembers, as a little boy, waking up with something bipedal and impish on his nightstand, darting from spot to spot like "one of those laser pens."

When he saw its face, he said it was "a shoal of fish."

I don't even want to know what that means, but I pray it's a metaphor.

His parents knew, he explained: They had arranged for it. All they told him was that it was his birthright. He was the last of a line that had something significant stirring within them. Everybody has a yearning for something greater than themselves. His parents (who, to this day, I've never met) promised him not to worry, that one day he would find his purpose, that one day it would all make sense.

That's what he told me, anyways, and I do believe him. Crazy, I know, but I do.

"And most important," he exclaimed, knowing our relationship hinged upon my acceptance of this fact: "It's not communicable."

"Bullshit." Even though he seemed outwardly healthy, I pictured myself as a leprous, deforming rot, my body separating and suppurating as his "gift" spread within me.

"I promise. You just need to trust me."

I smacked him, just for withholding this from me. At the time, I didn't care about his excuses—"you would never believe me," "you would leave me," "it'd be impossible to understand"— he should have just spared me the hassle and never talked to me that day in the restaurant. I figured that self-inflicted loneliness should be part of his "gift's" package deal.

But I came around. To be honest, to this day, there has been no physical change within me. Doctor's physicals, all A-ok. As far as I know, he was telling the truth.

What was I to do? Leave him, right then and there? For something he had no control over, for being unique and beyond me? Sure, crawling on walls was, of course, aesthetically repugnant, but that was just peripheral. His uniqueness had other advantages. It gave him a healthy dose of life, of experience, of something beyond the modern superficial trappings of our blighted, bored twenty-something generation.

Our relationship continued.

It was more than crawling on walls. Knowing his secret, he showed me all he could do. He had strength. It's par for the course to say "as strong as fifty men," but he was as strong as X amount of men: strong enough to handle his sloppy words in a bar, my sloppy words, and all his friend's sloppy words. He could smell and hear and sense things I couldn't. I could breathe in his intense pheromones—concentrated at the base of his skull, it seemed—and see into this fantastic world (his world, perhaps), and become a tiny little bug in an alabaster orchid, where I could find succor in the nectar of elephantine, iridescent flowers. It was a free, all access pass to a twilight world of bucolic serenity and unfathomable possibilities.

He opened up to me. He guaranteed me that everything he had told me about himself--where he had been born, his life before the "incident"--was all true. I became aware of the benefits of his strength and the extent of his capabilities in fulfilling my burgeoning sexual rapaciousness. I had always been a little bit prudish (we bookwork types sometimes are, or at least are enjoined to be by society) by he broke down that barrier.

Initially.

Everything was fine initially.

Everything is always initially.

The lusting infatuation never fully evolved into the calm, cool depths of tender association. As his ego grew, so did his shame and fear. He played up his bad boy image to his friends (who, of course, were none-the-wiser), all the while wink-winking at me, as if to say "if they only knew the half of it."

I admit, I vacillated between delight at his physical dexterity and irritation at his outward shtick, his devil-may-care fakery.

Something quick about his diet. Immense power requires, shall we say, an unusual diet, and while he could make do with everyday prole food, it was meat—the rawer and bloodier the better—that supplied him with the fuel he needed. He didn't drink blood directly or anything, but he told me meat provided all the liquids he needed ("I'm just like a koala bear with his eucalyptus leaves," he would chirp). And as he devoured meat and his strength increased, so did his desire to perform, both sexually and otherwise. My initial pleasure with his sexual capacities soon pained me emotionally, because I began to see the strain he put himself under to attain this performance. Suffice to say, since his sustenance depends on blood—both for food and as a prerequisite for an instrumental part of his anatomy—when blood is in short supply his performance anxiety becomes palpable. As does his inevitable disappointment. I told him it was alright, that I understood, that his body was dealing with something alien and incomprehensible, but it was no use. The visual paradox of seeing this physically bestial specimen trying to hold back tears (or his variant of them) over something his strength was powerless against will always be on the cusp of my visual memory, something bobbing above the surface no matter how hard I try to submerge it.

But you would never know this with him out in public. Bravado this, bravado that. There was definitely an inverse relationship between his private worries and his public showmanship. Call me an emotional vampire, but I began to appreciate the sadness and sensitivity his syndrome evoked in him— it was at least genuine.

My fondest memories with him are still the plaintive, existential noodling sessions brought about by our late-night musings, where we would ping-pong our worries, insecurities, thoughts and fears off each other. What caused his condition? What is his purpose? How will he know when his purpose is shown to him? Will he recognize it? Does everyone have a purpose? Is he a higher power? Is he godly? Are ancient stories of vampires or ghouls or werewolves based off people like him? How many people like him are there?

One night, sitting over a black pier, I remember him wishing—wishing above all else—to see something monstrous make its way out the black depths of the stolid lake. I don't know why, but seeing this transcendental specimen wishing for evidence of something greater than himself really touched me.

But I know what you're thinking. I'm a bad person.

Because he still loves me. And although part of me still loves him, I'm not with him right now.

I'm supposed to be, but I'm not.

He knows I'm not at home. Earlier tonight, I left his food on the table (a particularly detestable collection of cow and pig innards) and left. I didn't leave a note; maybe he deserves one, but realistically, he can track me down. He can sense things. A note would be patronizing to the both of us.

Here I am, sitting across from Vinny, an old high school friend of mine I ran into at the mall awhile ago and promised I'd catch up with. He knows nothing about my life, about my love, about my situation, but I can see the benign sexual intent in his eyes, in the way he makes and fetches me coffee, in the way he fluffs his couch's pillows for me, in his wide-eyed pantomime of interest in all our shared high school nostalgia. I don't know if I will sleep with him, but an emotional affair is a distinct possibility.

I envy Vinny's everyman humbleness. Poor Vinny (or maybe lucky Vinny) has no idea what I'm thinking now; he's probably thinking that, with my decorous smile, I might be interested in him. I can tell by the quickening pace of his speech, he's just trying to get to the good stuff: his machine of good will powered by a core of sexual desire.

I know this, yet still I remain. People aren't easily categorized lab specimens. We have depth, complexities, and hopelessly contradictory impulses. I don't know why I'm here, but what I'm doing doesn't feel wrong. It doesn't feel wrong at all.

I hear a door slam in the driveway outside.

I want to say "expecting someone?" but there's no point. I know who it is.

I am planning this out in my head, planning out how this would sound to Vinny.

I wish I could twist my brain into believing that what I'm really seeking from Vinny is solace, that I really planned on coming here to spill my guts to him about everything in the hopes of attaining a better understanding of my love for Keith.

But I know that's not the case.

I know in the conveniently bifurcated world of good and bad that sustains and informs the modern world what I am doing is "bad," but while I recognize it in the abstract, I don't feel it now. This is something I need.

Vinny looks out the window to see who it is. He turns to me, not looking particularly stunned, just blankly stumped, his lip dumbly unfurled, awaiting the next step, in the process of segueing between the familiar and the unknown.

I rise to the window, and, in the process, brush next to Vinny.

I wonder if Keith saw that.

Through the window, I see the melancholic, winter gaze in Keith's eyes, fresh, fuzzy and wet like dripping television static. His closed, terse lips are bulging around his gums as if he is chewing on a bear trap. A distinct internal pressure is being exerted on his lips. I picture opening his mouth and seeing the teeth of an anglerfish.

I wonder what world I'd be transported to if I smelled his hair now.

I know this isn't the change his parents told him about, but I'd love to think it is, that I could be his trigger.

I wonder how long he'll wait outside.

His side car door is open.

The passenger seat is ripped to shreds.