Fiction Vortex - August 2014 Read online

  Danny wrenched herself out of his grasp, tearing the collar a little. She backed away, almost breaking and running, but stopped. Turned back. Met his eyes. She crossed her arms and planted her feet, though her lips still trembled slightly.

  "Something permanent," she said, and watched his eyes widen. She took a deep breath, let it out again, slowly. The glowing blue tracery had moved under his dusty suit sleeves, still working its way inward. Soon it would reach his heart.

  ~~~~~

  Long after Lancin had ceased to scream and struggle against the magic's grip, Danny stood and watched him. Her green eyes drilled into lifeless grey ones, searching for any hint of movement. The spell had winked out with the last of the deadly light, but its cheery yellow napkin was still clutched, permanently, in the smooth gray stone of Lancin's left hand.

  The sun dripped slowly down the sky, warming the shadows of Tower House as the city clock tolled the evening meal. She started at the sudden sound, blinking and then stretching out the kinks in her neck. The fire had died.

  She turned to go, the feathery feeling of earlier in the afternoon suddenly sweeping over her again. Danny smiled, ignoring the creaks and groans of the ancient staircase as she scrambled recklessly down and out into the light.

  ~~~~~

  ~~~~~

  Max Kalender is a freelance fiction writer and artist, straight from the wilds of urban Texas. She grew up with three younger brothers, and as such was steeped in sword-fights and action sequences from a young age. Years of absorbing stories in every form, from Pixar movies to picture books to classic lit and everything in between, further inspired her to create her own multidimensional story-worlds. In high school, she attended the Pixar/VanArts Story/Animation Masterclass, which only stoked her imaginative flames. Currently, she is pursuing a double Painting and Creative Writing Bachelor of Arts at Union University.

  (Back to Table of Contents)

  A Place Without Monuments and Endings

  by Elliott Langley; published August 12, 2014

  Winner of the Editor's Choice Award, August 2014

  I didn’t feed the cats.

  Out of all the horrible things I have experienced today, that is what I want to tell you the most. I guess it’s almost funny when you look at it: The world is going to hell, and I’m sorry for leaving your cats hungry. I swear there should be a law against a stomach left rumbling on Judgement Day.

  And the funniest part is that I am so damned sorry for not giving them food before I left your place this morning. I don’t know, I guess I was just in a rush to make the train or something, maybe thinking about picking up a sandwich on the way, where I was going to get my cup of tea before work. You know, the usual inane crap that goes around in my head. But babe, I’m British; you can forgive the necessity of tea in my morning ritual, right?

  That was only this morning, you know. It feels like months have come and gone since then. Everything felt as normal as anybody expected it to; the sun rose, the night ended, and nobody had any inkling as to what the day would bring.

  You were already long gone by the time I woke up, that horrible boss of yours dragging you in to work when there was no reason why you couldn’t spend another thirty minutes in bed with me. I can’t even remember leaving the flat. The bed is probably still unmade; the dishes are still in the sink caked in last night’s ravioli. I didn’t do any of the things you asked me to before you left. That note you left on the fridge, one of those little checklists of duties you leave me? Yeah, I didn’t do a single one.

  And now I’m telling you that I am sorry. I am sorry I didn’t clean your apartment before I left, I am sorry I didn’t say goodbye properly, and I am sorry I didn’t feed your bloody cats.

  There’s noise coming from outside, even over the music I’ve got playing. Revving engines, screaming, crashing sounds, the occasional wince of shattering glass. Every now and then I swear I can hear laughing in amongst it all, and for some reason that sends more fear through me than anything else has so far. The first time I heard it I looked out the window. I still wish I hadn’t.

  The TV is on, but I’ve turned the sound down. Every now and then I put the pen down and look over at the news coming in, letting my eyes drift over the headlines and feeling the knife in my gut sink a little further. "Panic rises as the UN remains silent,"was the last one I remember seeing.

  I’m at a loss for what to say about all this. In the movies they always have the lead actors spinning off deft descriptions of the apocalypse, as if they have a gland buried away under their skin that produces perfect little limericks. But to be honest, babe, I’m coming up short.

  I've been sitting at my desk in my little studio attic, my closetas you call it, for at least an hour now. It’s taken me this long just to start writing. I wanted to come up with some fantastic piece to tell you exactly what it feels like to be at the edge of the world and to stare down into the abyss; but to be honest, I would be lying if I said it felt like anything at all. Every now and then I feel a passing wave of hysteria lurking behind my eyes, threatening to spill out like an overturned milk bottle.

  You always were so clumsy. The amount of times you’ve spilled drinks in the apartment, it’s no wonder you keep asking me to clean up after you. If things were different I could find it in myself to feel annoyed at you for it, but right now all I can do is laugh.

  ~~~~~

  It’s almost dusk outside, a deep brooding orange. It makes me want to crack open a beer and take it to the balcony, to watch as the world falls apart. I wish you were with me.

  The newsreaders are mouthing at me that there have been Monument sightings over San Francisco and Boston. There’s a fuzzy, low-definition photo they keep showing us, a grey pixelated shape poking through the clouds. It could be anything, a still from some low-budget film, and yet it’s sticking acupuncture pins in my nervous system. I wonder if you are seeing the same thing as I am, wherever you are. Maybe you are staring at a screen somewhere, seeing the same hazy shot being broadcast throughout the States.

  I don’t know.

  I don’t want to watch the news, but I know in some way I am obliged to. Really, I have to, it would be nothing short of irresponsible to ignore what is going on. It would be like turning your back when God showed up on the day of the Second Coming and saying, “Nah, I’m busy pal. Can you come back later?”

  Part of me is wondering why I am not out there looking for you, joining the crowds tearing through the streets of America, of the world, looking for whatever or whoever it is they have lost. I always found it funny when you would say “America and the rest of the world,” as if there was a divide between the two. And I suppose there is, continentally speaking. Doesn’t mean a thing now though; we’re all going down.

  ~~~~~

  I don’t know when we started calling them Monuments. The phrase just got bandied about somewhere in the madness of today. I reckon it would be a trending topic on Twitter by now — hashtag-we-are-all-screwed-big-time — if the Internet hadn’t gone down an hour or so ago. It’s funny, life without the Internet again; it’s like we’ve regressed back into how life was in nineteen-ninety-eight. No MP3s, no downloads, no social media. I keep going to turn on my laptop like it’s a compulsive tick. We’re completely reliant on television again, and I bet even that won’t last much longer.

  There are a couple new photos coming up, a little clearer than the first. They all show the same thing, shots of ridiculous great monstrosities hanging above the photographer like the underside of a great boot about to stamp down on us. The Monuments are so damn big I can’t even really grasp what I’m seeing. The clearest image is from quite a distance away; the perspective gives a decent view of the thing. It’s like an enormous hammer held above the city, hovering in the clouds, about to fall and smash it to pieces.

  Are you seeing this, honey? Of course you are, they’re everywhere. This is how it ends. I don’t know where you are, but I know you’re seeing the same thing. If you’re seeing anythin
g at all.

  The point is, I didn’t feed your cats like you asked me to, and now there will never be a time when they aren’t hungry. They will die without food in their bellies when the end comes, and that is my fault. I suppose I could run out the door and across town back to your place and give them a pouch or two, though why stop there? Why not give them five? Give them a gourmet blowout on the end of days.

  I keep thinking about the bottle of Jack Daniels I have under the sink, the one I slid behind the pipes and never told you about. I could just drink myself stupid like I used to in the old days and sleep through the whole bloody affair. Yeah, that’s what I do. I run away when things go wrong, just like I ran from you when everything fell apart between us. I know you still blame me. I know I sure as hell do. You know, babe, the world may be ending around us, but that doesn’t even come close to what it was like losing you.

  ~~~~~

  Monuments sighted over Dubai, London, Berlin, Honk Kong, Quebec, the Sahara Desert. This stuff is getting real now. They’re showing us actual footage, handheld shots filmed on camera phones and tablets. Awful, impossible grey things poking their heads out through the clouds like curious animals roused from sleep. I wonder if anyone’s figured out why it's overcast in so many of these cities today. Maybe it was written in the Bible somewhere that Judgement Day had to be as thoroughly depressing as possible.

  Well, you succeeded in one thing, God; you’ve got me smoking again. There goes thirteen years of recovered lungs and lowered blood pressure, improved fertility and fresh breath. You know, babe, cigarettes may be one of the largest causes of death in the world, but damn they feel good.

  I’m rambling, aren’t I? You always said I liked the sound of my own voice. Truth is, I like words. I like the way they roll off the tongue and the way the muscles in my face feel as they curve around different phrases. I know you could never understand why I kept writing even after I landed the job at the publishing house, why I didn’t just give up and focus on the dream job now that I finally had it, but — I know I’m a failed novelist, but that still makes me a wordslinger and I fully intend to draw my shooter one last time.

  In my mind you’re cringing at that last sentence.

  I just took a look outside, a breath of fresh air. The sunset’s gone now, and the clouds are rolling in. The sun might have disappeared, leaving us all to our ultimate fate, whatever that might entail. Nothing pleasant, I imagine.

  ~~~~~

  Images of Monuments are flashing over the TV screen. I wonder how long it will be until one pops through the clouds here and looks down at us with ambivalence. I never imagined an alien invasion would be so bloody formal. There hasn’t been a single death threat, an issue of domination, a message of occupation, nothing. There’s no real indication anyone is even piloting the things. What I wouldn’t do for a giant squid to flash up on the screen and tell me it wants my property.

  If that happened I’d probably just offer it a cigarette and maybe a Jack before it tears through my apartment or reduces me to cinders. Assuming that is what’s going to happen. That way, at least whatever or whoever comes after us can’t accuse me of inhospitality.

  ~~~~~

  Hard to believe life seemed normal twelve hours ago. The first broadcast came just after one o’clock, just as I was finishing my lunch in the office. They tried to brush it off as weather anomalies and strange meteorological activity. Then mysterious objects entered the atmosphere, UFOs in the sky, panic erupting. You know all this, babe; you’ve seen it, wherever you are. Hell, maybe you’re even writing a letter like this one as I speak. Maybe you’re telling me about the horrible things you’ve seen.

  Who am I kidding? You never wrote a single word for pleasure in your whole adult life. About the closest you came was on our first anniversary, when you wrote that little lick of love in my card, rhyming couplets and all. I never told you then just how much that meant to me, to see something come from your heart and soul and not processed from your cerebral interstices. That you had tapped into something pure and untouched and given a piece of it to me in the form of the most, frankly, terrible and derivative prose ever committed to paper.

  You won’t believe me, but that was the single most beautiful piece of writing I ever read. Because it was probably the most honest thing I have ever heard come from you.

  ~~~~~

  Monuments sighted off the coast of Greece. They’re taking place over the Arctic too. It’s not just populated areas, they’re saying. The Atlantic Ocean, even the Australian Outback is getting the Monument treatment. Whatever they are doing, you can’t say they aren’t being thorough about it. You and your analysts would probably applaud them for their strategic implementation.

  The point of the writer is to make people believe in lies. Every line of fiction, no matter how autobiographical, is a lie. None of it has ever happened. I’m not writing this down to make anyone believe this ever happened. And no, I don’t possess the hubris to think that I can take the role of some poet laureate for the End of Days. But if something survives this, and I hope to God it does, then at least there will be the single account of one particularly neurotic, defensive, romantic individual to refer to.

  I keep looking out the window and wondering when I’m going to see it coming through the clouds. A little while back I walked onto the balcony with a peppermint tea and watched the crowds below as they rushed to flee the city, cars jammed together, flocks of people sprinting around aimlessly, sheer and utter panic. At one point I saw another man from the apartment building across the road doing the same thing as me. He was an old boy smoking on a joint and laughing as the world went mad, and then he noticed me and gave me a tip of the hat. For a minute I thought the hitching feeling in my chest was me catching a dose of his giggles, until I realised it was the sound of my own silent sobbing.

  ~~~~~

  April is the month where everything gets better. The long-forgotten memory of the sun becomes something less imagined. There is the hint of warmth in the air, buds on the trees, squirrels in the park. Things seem better.

  It’s an injustice that the world had to end on such a fine day. We barely said goodbye this morning. I don’t think I even kissed you. I was too conscious of my atrocious breath to even give you a quick peck on the lips. Now I will never be able to do that again.

  I wish I knew where you were, babe. I wish I could find you. I keep ringing your phone and getting the no-dial signal. I guess the network’s down, just like the Web. Or maybe you’re ignoring me. You were always so good at doing that, all those weeks after Maria when you wouldn’t return my calls...

  Sorry, I shouldn’t have mentioned her. I have a good mind to cross that last sentence out, but I just can’t.

  I did come looking for you, you know, after the first broadcast. Took me half the afternoon to get across town, what with everyone going crazy. I tried calling your work; hell, I even tried to get through to your moron of a boss. I will never, ever understand what possessed you take a job with that firm. That was the day you stopped being my girl. You transformed into some kind of financial advisor android. Who knows, perhaps the aliens kidnapped and cloned you. Maybe you’re even up there now, leading the fleets like some kind of mad banshee queen.

  Yeah, I’d like to see that.

  You weren’t at your apartment. I knocked and knocked and you didn’t answer. The worst thing was that I could hear Klaus and Emma raking their nails against the door, trying to get through. If you had left me a damn key like you said you were going to I could have gone in and fed them. How’s that for irony? The one thing you ask me to do and I can’t do it because you don’t trust me enough.

  I waited for over an hour, sat crumpled against the door with the sound of your cats howling on the other side of the wood, hoping I’d look up and you would be there. A couple of people passed me by, asked me what the hell I was doing and I just looked up at them and asked if they had anything better to do.

  I should have just kicked the door dow
n. For all I know, you could be in there now, holed up and waiting for the storm to pass. You could have been in there while I was knocking, sitting against the other side of the door with only the wood between us. Keeping quiet, afraid of who or what was out there.

  Yeah, like the aliens would knock. They didn’t knock when they opened up the sky and barged through.

  ~~~~~

  I don’t know when I decided to go home to my flat. I don’t know why I thought you would be here, why I thought you’d come to my little closet and wait for me to show up. It took a monumental effort — note the pun, darling — to lift myself up from that carpet and come back here. It was all I had, all I had to cling on to, that you might be at my place instead of yours. By then the subways were out of action. I had to walk the whole way across town to my squalid little neighbourhood.

  You should have seen it, babe. You don’t realise how fragile our little world is, how thin the threads are that hold up our capitalist nation. You show people a few pixelated images of fuzzy shapes hovering above the world and they see it as an excuse to revert into cavemen. There were people fighting in the street for no reason that I could see, and it wasn’t a Hollywood brawl with clean punches and smacking sound effects. No, this was bloody, brutal animal savagery, men and women snorting and grunting like pigs as they lay into each other. Men who were still in their suits and ties from work looting from stores, flatscreen TVs tucked under an arm like an art portfolio. I had to stop myself from shouting "What the hell do you need that for?"

  It’s amazing how quickly the world can deteriorate. I had to keep my eyes down as I pushed through the streets, afraid to make eye contact with anyone. All of a sudden it was like being back in England; it was not that different from being in a nightclub at two in the morning.

  At one point I made eye contact with a girl, maybe seventeen years old, looked like a college student. She wore big oval glasses and a straw hat with a daisy tucked into the side. She was walking in the other direction, her eyes red with tears and wide with fear and exhaustion, worming through the crowds to get to wherever she was going. And bang, all of a sudden I’ve been pushed into her and I’ve nearly knocked her over. And do you know what, she looked up at me like I was about to rape her, her skin white and eyes frozen in terror.