Exigencies Read online

  ADVANCE PRAISE

  “From the shadows that dwell in some of the most creative, and gifted minds around, emerges a collection of short stories that will skulk across the footplate of literature for many years to come. Exigencies is the cloak thrown over the world, to show us that in darkness we can still find beauty, and will forever serve as a keepsake to great writing.”

  —CRAIG WALLWORK, author of The Sound of Loneliness

  “Ah, do you feel it? That’s the spectrum of neo-noir passing over you. It’s wide, wider than you are It’s tall, taller than you are. And it’s got colors we haven’t exactly named yet. Its source is a book, the book you hold in your hands. Exigencies has it all. Some of it’s cold, some of it’s funny. Some of it’s strange, a lot of it’s possible. We’ve all heard of the type of man who ‘can get you things.’ Richard Thomas can get you things. And his specialty is short, scary stories. Just like the addict in the alley searches for voices he can trust, I listen when Richard Thomas says it’s a good story. ‘Here,’ he says, ‘you’re going to like this one…’ And I listen.”

  —JOSH MALLERMAN, author of Bird Box

  “These pages house some of the most exciting writers you’ve never heard of—yet. They make the mundane terrifying, the poignant macabre, the violent touching. The only thing you won’t find is the expected, because these stories will move the ground beneath your feet. Brace yourself.”

  —NIK KORPON, author of Stay God

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE REPRODUCED IN ANY FORM OR BY ANY ELECTRONIC OR MECHANICAL MEANS, INCLUDING INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL SYSTEMS, WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE PUBLISHER, EXCEPT IN THE CASE OF SHORT PASSAGES QUOTES IN REVIEWS.

  THE STORIES CONTAINED IN THIS ANTHOLOGY ARE WORKS OF FICTION. ALL INCIDENTS, SITUATIONS, INSTITUTIONS, GOVERNMENTS, AND PEOPLE ARE FICTIONAL AND ANY SIMILARITY TO CHARACTERS OR PERSONS LIVING OR DEAD IS STRICTLY COINCIDENTAL.

  PUBLISHED BY DARK HOUSE PRESS, AN IMPRINT OF CURBSIDE SPLENDOR PUBLISHING, INC., CHICAGO, ILLINOIS IN 2015.

  FIRST EDITION

  COPYRIGHT © 2015 BY RICHARD THOMAS

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2014959397

  ISBN 978-1940430492

  EDITED BY RICHARD THOMAS

  COVER ART BY DANIELE SERRA

  INTERIOR ILLUSTRATIONS BY LUKE SPOONER

  DESIGNED BY ALBAN FISCHER

  MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

  www.thedarkhousepress.com

  FOREWORD Chuck Wendig

  INTRODUCTION Richard Thomas

  WILDERNESS Letitia Trent

  MONSTER SEASON Joshua Blair

  CAT CALLS Rebecca Jones-Howe

  CEREMONY OF THE WHITE DOG Kevin Catalano

  THE ARMADILLO Heather Foster

  THE LAST MANUSCRIPT Usman T. Malik

  SINGLE LENS REFLECTION Jason Metz

  THE MOTHER Nathan M. Beauchamp

  EVERYTHING IN ITS PLACE Adam Peterson

  WHEN WE TASTE OF DEATH Damien Angelica Walters

  FIGURE EIGHT Brendan Detzner

  MY MOTHER'S CONDITION Faith Gardner

  FRAGILE MAGIC Alex Kane

  THE EYE LIARS Sarah Read

  SEARCHING FOR GLORIA W. P. Johnson

  AND ALL NIGHT LONG WE HAVE NOT STIRRED Barbara Duffey

  A DULL BOY David James Keaton

  BRUJERIA FOR BEGINNERS Marytza K. Rubio

  HEIRLOOM Kenneth W. Cain

  THE OWL AND THE CIGARETTE Amanda Gowin

  DESERT GHOSTS Mark Jaskowski

  BLOOD PRICE Axel Taiari

  FOREWORD

  Why do we do it to ourselves as readers?

  By which I mean, why do we read this kind of work? Why open up the pages and pick the rotten meat from these strange bones—what is it about noir?

  I know why we do it as writers. We write the darkness onto the page because it’s clarifying. Detoxifying. The bleak, black stories we write—like the stories found in the pages ahead—are an act of us writer-types sucking out the snake poison and spitting it onto a window for the world to see.

  The question is, why do readers read this stuff? Why do they allow themselves to be immersed in all this nastiness? Why do they—or, we, really, since I’m a reader of this work, too—stand there admiring the spatter of expectorated poison on the glass? I mean, you read most stories, sure, you’re going to get conflict. You’re going to get a touch of darkness. A straight and simple line does not a good story make. But in most of those you get your happy endings, or at least endings that constitute the beloved-by-me Pyrrhic victories (oh how much we’ve had to sacrifice to win this day . . . ). But what follows on these pages is not that. What follows forth is some bleak, soul-cracking blackness. It’s not just fakey-fakey playtime darkness: the characters in the stories in this book are losers, failures, sometime-monsters, and they’re caught up in situations that’ll have your nether-hole closing up so tight it could snap a broomhandle.

  Is it rubber-necking? Is this the equivalent to us driving past a car accident and goggling out the window at the broken glass, the sheared metal, the bodies on the asphalt? Idle curiosity, the safety of our own cars, the ability to speed on when our eyes have had enough of the horror just over there?

  Or maybe it’s a kind of catharsis. Could be that reading tales of the truly dark is equivalent to writing it—a way to excise poison, to experience the tumult and tangle of the human spirit in a safe space before strangling it with a hemp rope and kicking its ass off the edge of the boat into the churning waters below.

  Certainly the world we live in is a dank, fucked-up circus. Watching the news for 45 seconds will crush the spirit of even the most stalwart viewer in ways the stories you’ll find in this anthology never would or could. (Because at least the stories in this anthology possess beauty, too. They are told with great care, the narrative given shape and grace, the darkness given form and face and motive. The news is just noise; the stories here are all signal.) Maybe reading these stories helps us give context to the news we see during the 24-hour cycle. Not just a litany of horrific events, but characters and stories—a sense not only of what, but of who and why.

  Hell, for all I know it’s because we’re all screwed up and we like reading about screwed up people. Maybe we’re all closeted monsters and want to dive into the dark and the dirt and get it all over us. The darkness within us calls to the darkness of these tales and this is just us rolling around in it like a dog.

  I have no damn idea.

  What I do know is that you’re about to take the deep dive.

  Sadness and scars.

  Back roads and broken noses.

  Sex, drugs, and dollhouses.

  The luckless and the lustful, the empty and the addicted, the lost, the never-wanna-be-founds, the dead and the dying and the wish-they-were-deads.

  (Hell, you’ll even find saurian matricide.)

  These writers have spat the poison on the window.

  Take a look.

  Lick the glass.

  —Chuck Wendig

  November 10, 2014

  In the forests of Pennsyltucky

  INTRODUCTION

  If you’re done licking the glass and want to skip ahead to the stories, by all means do that. But I wanted to take a moment to talk a little bit about these stories, the authors, and why I selected the fiction that I did.

  In 2014, Dark House Press published The New Black, which was my first anthology as an editor, essentially my “Best of Neo-Noir” from the past 5-10 years. These were all reprints, stories that I had discovered over the years, tales that stayed with me, scarred me—leaving an imprint on my mind, body, and soul. The minute I sent the book off to the printer, I knew that I wanted to do this again, but with all original fiction. 400
submissions, and a year later, Exigencies is what came of that desire.

  This was a very hard book to put together. I rejected many talented authors, and many fantastic stories. Why? A couple reasons. Neo-noir (which just means “new-black”) is a distinct voice, one that in my head may sound very different than what’s in yours. Like art, or pornography, you know it when you see it, right? There were stories that were noir, but not neo. There were stories that were too classically rooted in fantasy, science fiction, or horror. There were stories that unfortunately were submitted after very similar ones had already been accepted. (If you wrote a story about cameras, you were out of luck—I took TWO as it stands.) I rejected science fiction that was too hard, and horror that wasn’t horrific enough. Anything that felt too familiar, or too formulaic—it also got a pass. Anything that was too far in the past (and therefore, not new)—pass. There were some amazing stories that pained me to say no. But they just didn’t fit. It’s all so subjective, but I can honestly say that each and every story that made it into Exigencies did something for me, resonated in a powerful way—had something unique to teach me, or confess.

  As I read through this anthology over the last couple of weeks, taking notes, making edits, putting the stories in order, meditating on the art that should accompany each tale, I was thrilled to see that they all held up, they all still gave me a thrill. There are stories in here that lean towards fantasy, science fiction, horror, Southern gothic, magical realism, transgressive, the grotesque—you name it, but all with that neo-noir flair, that literary bent. In the year since I accepted these stories, I’ve seen many of the authors in this group go on to sign with agents, to publish books, to place stories in elite magazines, and it always makes me proud. This anthology is one small way for me to say, “Look world—this is the next wave, this is the evolution of neo-noir, this is the new flesh.” Long live the new flesh.

  I hope you enjoy reading this anthology as much as I enjoyed putting it together. Hopefully, if I do my job right, and we find “our people” out there in the world, there will be more anthologies like this from Dark House Press. Come along for the ride. It might get a little bumpy, you may want to look away—but don’t. Because right there, in that pulsing abyss, that endless yawning void—there is a tiny light shining, and it’s trying to communicate, signaling something, beckoning us closer. Who knows what it might reveal?

  —Richard Thomas

  November 14, 2014

  Chicago, Illinois

  richard thomas

  chuck wendig is a novelist, screenwriter and game designer. he’s the author of many published novels, including but not limited to: blackbirds, the blue blazes, and the ya heartland series. he is co-writer of the short film pandemic and the emmy-nominated digital narrative collapsus. wendig has contributed over two million words to the game industry.

  richard thomas is the author of six books—disintegration and the breaker (random house alibi), transubstantiate, herniated roots, staring into the abyss and the soul standard (dzanc books). his over 100 stories in print include cemetery dance, pank, gargoyle, weird fiction review, midwestern gothic, arcadia, qualia nous, chiral mad 2, and shivers vi. he is also the editor of three anthologies: the new black (dark house press), the lineup: 25 provocative women writers (black lawrence press) and burnt tongues (medallion press, with chuck palahniuk and dennis widmyer).

  in his spare time he writes for litreactor and is editor-in-chief at dark house press. for more information visit www.whatdoesnotkillme.com or contact paula munier at talcott notch.

  EXIGENCIES

  WILDERNESS

  LETITIA TRENT

  The airport was small, squat like a compound, its walls interrupted in regular intervals by tall, shaded windows. When Krista looked out the windows, the sky seemed slate-gray and heavy, but when the front doors opened, she remembered that it was really blue and cloudless outside.

  She was early for her flight back to New Haven. She liked to arrive at the very earliest time the flight website recommended. She was prepared to wait, liked it even. It was calming to have nothing to do and nowhere she had to be. She had brought a book about the history of wilderness and America, something left over from college that she had never read. She liked the cover, a picture of a Pilgrim family, small and sickly, their clothes black and heavy on their bony bodies, facing an expanse of trees so tall and green you could see nothing beyond them. She underlined phrases in the book out of old college habit: Wilderness remained a place of evil and spiritual catharsis. Any place in which a person feels stripped, lost, or perplexed, might be called a wilderness.

  She shared a red, plush armrest with a large woman who had almost incandescent, butter-blonde hair. Her skin was so tan that it reminded Krista of a stain. Coffee on blonde wood.

  The blonde had apparently just come from a trip to Maine. She told an older woman next to her—an even larger woman with tight pin-curls and wire-rimmed glasses, wearing those boxy, pleated shorts that middle-aged women often wear on holidays—about her trip. The blonde had stayed in the cutest hotel. Her entire room had been done up all nautical. The other woman nodded in agreement with everything the blonde said, as if she had had an identical experience.

  Krista watched the airport attendants and one airport policeman patrol the area. They sometimes stepped into the waiting room and observed the crowd with what appeared to be either worry or constipation (they pressed their lips together, their hands on their hips, and blew the air from their mouths as if making silent raspberries). They had a vague air of agitation. She watched them carefully for signs of what might be wrong, but they revealed nothing in their pacing. Nobody else seemed to notice.

  On Krista’s left, opposite the blonde, was a family, a mother and two children separated from her by one seat. The mother was thin and loud and wore shorts with many utilitarian pockets and a simple tank shirt without a bra. She seemed infinitely capable, as if she ran her own business or perhaps even managed some kind of sports team. Krista admired thin, efficient women like this, women who wore comfortable, rubber-soled sandals and clothing with enough functional pockets. The woman and her children all spoke on their individual cell phones, all telling somebody variations on the news that they would arrive soon, that it was only thirty minutes until boarding.

  An announcement crackled over the loudspeakers, the sound delivered in one chunk of indiscernible static.

  Krista looked around the room, hoping for the scraps of somebody else’s conversation to explain what had just been said.

  Plane’s delayed for an hour, the blonde said to her husband, who had also missed it. Storms down in Boston.

  A general grumble rose. People shifted in their seats and took out their recently stowed cell phones. The blonde woman called her husband’s name, which Krista immediately forgot.

  Phone me up a pizza, she told him. I won’t eat that shit from the vending machine.

  As it grew darker in the waiting room, Krista struggled to make out the print of her book. The primary row of fluorescent lights hadn’t been turned on, but nobody else had complained about the dark yet. She wouldn’t be the first. She read until she had to squint in the darkness at the small, cramped words.

  As she tried to concentrate on the increasingly turgid prose of her book (pages and pages about national forests, conservationists, things that Krista wasn’t particularly interested in, though she knew that she should be), the blonde woman spoke energetically about her two dachshunds, Buckeye and Alexis. They liked to eat the carpet, she said, so she had soaked the edges of the carpet in Tabasco sauce, which was, incidentally, the same color as the carpet. The pin-curled woman asked how they managed to walk on the carpet if it was soaked with Tabasco sauce. The blonde shrugged, as if this were a mystery to her as well, though a boring one that she had no interest in pursuing.

  Krista gave up on her book.

  The mother and her children slept on the carpet below their chairs, their bookbags slung up on the seats above them, the fa
bric of their bulky Plymouth Rock sweatshirts bunched under their heads as pillows.

  Krista wished that she could step outside and occupy herself with a cell phone, as many others did, but she didn’t have a cell phone (she had canceled it when she’d left her job) and had nobody to call. Nobody was waiting to meet her in New Haven, and nobody was worried that her flight was late. She stood up and let the cheese cracker crumbs gathered in the folds of her t-shirt fall to the carpet.

  Krista stood in the fluorescent lights of the bathroom, listening for shuffling feet, a toilet paper roll spinning. She was alone. Her stall door wouldn’t shut completely (how did doors come unlined from their frames? She didn’t understand what would cause it, other than a fundamental shifting of the floor), so she kept one hand on the door as she pulled down her underwear. A bumper sticker on the inside of the door said Republicans for Voldemort. She had never seen a Harry Potter movie or read one of the books, but she vaguely knew who Voldemort was. She was in on the joke.

  She put her hand on the sticker and tried to keep the door closed as she eased her jeans and underwear down. It was just as she’d thought—in the middle of the bone-colored strip of fabric, a slight red stain. She peeked out her door into the empty bathroom: no machines.

  Krista stuffed a ball of toilet paper between her legs and pulled her pants back up, letting the door open slightly, as she needed both hands. As she did this, just as the door swung open and she saw a middle-aged woman in the bathroom mirror carefully applying liquid eyeliner, the bathroom lights cut out. Nothing hummed or whirred and she could hear people in the hallway shuffling and speaking.