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The Chamber Four Fiction Anthology

Outstanding Stories from the Web 2009/2010

Edited by Michael Beeman, Sean Clark, Eric Markowsky, Marcos Velasquez, and Nico Vreeland

Cover designed and illustrated by Mike Annear

Published by Chamber Four LLC

Cambridge, MA

2010

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visit chamberfour.com/anthology

for links to the magazines these stories appear in,

interviews with authors,

and more

Published by Chamber Four LLC, 2010

Smashwords Edition

Direct inquiries to:

info@chamberfour.com

“The Next Thing on Benefit,” by Castle Freeman, Jr. First published in The New England Review, Volume 31, Number 1, 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Castle Freeman, Jr. Republished by permission of the author.

All rights reserved by individual copyright holders. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted without prior written permission of the copyright owner. Chamber Four LLC is not authorized to grant permission for further uses of copyrighted selections republished in this ebook without permission of their owners. Permission must be obtained from the individual copyright owners as identified herein.

Published as an ebook in the United States of America.

ChamberFour.com

ISBN 978-0-9829327-0-4

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Liz Phair and the Most Perfect Sentence

by Andrea Uptmor

from Hot Metal Bridge

Eupcaccia

by Angie Lee

from Witness

Watchers

by Scott Cheshire

from AGNI

How to Assemble a Portal to Another World

by Alanna Peterson

from failbetter.com

Seven Little Stories About Sex

by Eric Freeze

from Boston Review

Men Alone

by Steve Almond

from Drunken Boat

For the Sake of the Children

by Sarah Salway

from Night Train

Semolinian Equinox

by Svetlana Lavochkina

from Eclectica Magazine

The Girl In The Glass

by Valerie O’Riordan

from PANK

Peacocks

by L.E. Miller

from Ascent

The Naturalists

by B.J. Hollars

from storySouth

The Affliction

by C. Dale Young

from Guernica

Bad Cheetah

by Andy Henion

from Word Riot

Nothings

by Aaron Block

from Alice Blue Review

Dragon

by Steve Frederick

from Night Train

On Castles

by Trevor J. Houser

from StoryQuarterly

Black Night Ranch

by Roy Giles

from Eclectica Magazine

The Eskimo Keeps Her Promise

by Emily Ruskovich

from Inkwell

Helping Hands

by David Peak

from PANK

The Next Thing on Benefit

by Castle Freeman, Jr.

from The New England Review

The Night Dentist

by Ron MacLean

from Drunken Boat

Pool

by Corey Campbell

from Anderbo.com

Everything is Breakable with a Big Enough Stone

by Taryn Bowe

from Boston Review

The Abjection

by Michael Mejia

from AGNI

American Subsidiary

by William Pierce

from Granta

About the authors

About the publisher

Introduction

This anthology took shape over the course of many discussions about the short fiction being published online. With an ever-expanding world of fiction on the Internet, we wanted an easy way to find the best stories. If only someone would compile the many great short stories appearing for free online, and make them available in a number of ebook formats so that we could read them wherever and however we wanted, on any device. As we kept talking, it became obvious that this was a job for Chamber Four.

In this collection, you’ll find traditional, Carver-esque stories alongside magical realist tales of teleportation. A chronicle of the social awakening of young mothers in a New York apartment building appears beside an existential horror story about a new bed. These stories take place in America, in Ukraine, in Africa, on a sheep ranch, in a nudist colony, and inside a poet's head as an extended daydream about Liz Phair. Some are traditional in form and some are dazzlingly experimental, some are long pieces that slowly pull you in and some are single-page punches to the solar plexus.

Some of these authors you’ve heard of, read about, and discussed with your friends; others you’ll be discovering for the first time and can be sure to see again. We found these stories in magazines with long histories and on sites that belong to the post-millennium eruption. There is no factor that unifies the pieces collected here beyond their availability online and that hard-to-define but unmistakable hallmark of quality. The stories we selected are as diverse as the Internet, as wide in scope as all literature, and each true to their shared subject: the attempt to reconcile our world to the struggles of the human soul.

The result is a collection of stories we have read and enjoyed since our website has been up and running, and we offer it freely to readers everywhere. This collection is not a definitive “Best of,” because, as much as we read, we couldn’t claim to have covered everything. Instead, think of The Chamber Four Fiction Anthology as a mixtape, a gift slipped into your hand in the hallway between classes by a friend who insists, “Trust me: You're gonna love this.” But you can skip freely between stories, reading in any order you choose, so maybe a mixtape is an outdated metaphor. Call it a CD, then, burnt on our desktop with tracks from all over the world of music. But a CD? Who’s going to know what that is in ten years? It's our playlist, then, our “cloud,” our whatever-will-come-next. These are the stories we have read and enjoyed and now press upon you, insisting that you read them.

Trust us: You're gonna love this.

―Michael Beeman, and the rest of Team C4

Liz Phair and the Most Perfect Sentence

by Andrea Uptmor

from Hot Metal Bridge

It always starts with me getting hit by a car. I am walking along the edge of the road, scuffing my sneaker on the curb. I am in a funk. My shoulders are slumping in a sort of what’s-the-purpose-of-anything posture. Maybe I got another rejection letter at the post office, or the grocery store declined my credit card. No, scratch thatI did get groceries. Yes, I am carrying them, and in fact, a pair of apples flies into the air upon the enormous impact, blocking out the sun in two distinct spots like a reverse domino. It is a very sunny day. When I hit the ground, I break something—an arm, an ankle—and I hear it crunch. The driver of the car gets out and runs to my crumpled body, pieces of blonde hair twisting behind her like prayer flags in the wind. She looks down at me.

It is Liz Phair.

Her face blocks the sun completely, and thus she is shrouded in a nimbus of holy yellow light like a William Blake revelation angel. Her beauty commands a profound silence over all of the elements. The wind stops, the traffic falls mute. Then Liz Phair says, “Oh fuck,” and the world begins to spin again. White bone is sticking out of my arm or ankle. A bus has run over the rest of my groceries, smearing peanut butter as if the pavement was toast. I am not in terrible pain. I watch her panic. I have never thought Liz Phair would be the kind of woman to wear a hoodie. It is faded green, softer than kittens.

She takes me to the hospital. She curses the whole way. She is Liz Phair. The radio is off when she helps me into the car, and at first I am surprised that she was not listening to something hip and indie when we encountered one another on the road, something Michael Penn-esque, not the album stuff but maybe a bootlegged acoustic show in a small venue, but as she pulls out in front of a truck and rolls down her window to call the driver a cum dumpster, I realize Liz Phair is like me. She does not listen to music in the car. She uses long drives to talk aloud to herself about the nature of all things. That is why she is so wise. My arm is beginning to throb, and I grip the seat. She curses again and accelerates. We are moving together through the summer streets in this silent car, zipping toward the Emergency Room, Liz Phair and me.

The doctor tells me he must re-fracture my arm with a large hammer-like device. Liz Phair curses. She has a fear of blood, and of bones sticking out of skin, but she has stayed by my side this entire time, pausing her steady stream of foul language only once, to ask me what my favorite book is. When she asked that, back in the car, her eyes darted down my body for just a second before returning to the road. I told her it’s Tolstoy’s A Confession and Other Religious Writings. She squinted at the road for a long time, like she was confused, before she finally said, “Mine too.”

At first I think she is being so attentive because she is worried about me pressing charges for getting run over, but as the doctor touches my arm and I cry out in pain, she grabs my unbroken hand and looks down at me, head eclipsing the examination light, face haloed by stainless steel and tiled ceiling, upper lip shaped like a rainbow, and I see the truth—Liz Phair has fallen in love with me today.

There are a lot of different first kisses. In one, I can imagine it happening right there, in the emergency room, at the same time my arm is re-fractured. Liz Phair touching her rainbow mouth to mine at the exact moment of the crunch, so my mind explodes in a fountain of dopamine and adrenaline and serotonin. But I also like thinking that it’s in a more quiet, private setting. Maybe she walks me to my door that first night, after bringing me home from the hospital. Maybe it’s not for a couple of weeks, after several tension-filled nights sitting side-by-side on my couch, watching Project Runway episodes, until finally she gets up the nerve to put her hand on my knee and I just go for it. Either way, no matter the circumstances, it is totally ideal, and afterwards she says, “You are the best kisser ever,” and it doesn’t sound corny at all.

Pretty soon I move into her house. We buy a yellow couch. We adopt two cats. We throw dinner parties and watch Top Chef and carve things into the tree in our backyard. Our beautiful oak, in our beautiful backyard, big as the ones in my childhood. We make love under that giant oak, and afterwards we smoke cigarettes like teenagers. Liz Phair loves my writing. She leaves insightful comments on my blog and asks me to read my stories to her at night. I read them in funny voices, and popcorn shoots out of her mouth when she laughs, shoulders shaking, her butterscotch hair slick from the bathtub. My parents love Liz Phair. They are proud of me for not bringing home another unemployed guitar player. Her parents are dead at this point, so I don’t have to worry about what they would think. But sometimes she tells me about them, how they were kind and good and even though I am fifteen years younger than Liz Phair, and a girl, and I only weigh 103 pounds, she swears they would have loved me because all they ever cared about was her happiness, and with me, she is content like a golden eagle who swooped around the skies for years before finding its one true mate. One time when she says that, she is holding our cat Johnny, and the moon sneaks in the window and wraps the both of them in a thick yellow fuzz of air. I write a poem about this fuzz of air, and I wrap her sandwich in it the next day.

Liz Phair and I like to go on long walks, and we like to drink beer in pubs. Her son joined the Peace Corps and got sent away to Zimbabwe, so we don’t have to deal with him much, and her ex-husband got remarried and then he surprised us all by also joining the Peace Corps. So it really is just the two of us, Liz Phair and me, taking long autumn walks along our neighborhood, hand-in-hand, my arm healed completely, bone tucked back inside. We crunch piles of ochre leaves with our sneakers and tell each other stories about our childhoods. Sometimes we pass some of my ex-girlfriends and they get this look of misery on their faces at seeing what they missed out on. Liz Phair tells me about car trips to the muggy Florida beaches while I describe strawberry cupcakes on my grandmother’s front porch, white wicker furniture and ice-cold lemonade. That reminds her that lemonade was her favorite childhood drink too, and she stops right in the middle of the sidewalk to stand on her tiptoes and kiss my forehead. When she leans back, I look at her. Puffs of fall breath burst out of her mouth. I see that Liz Phair really is bathed in a glow that is separate from any lighting source I can find in the physical world. Pre-winter trees scissor the sky behind her head—a purple sky, with a big orange sun. It is not a glow that I have ever seen anyone in before. I cannot think of a word to describe it, my first time ever.

At first it is just a rough patch, a few weeks sitting in front of the blinking cursor, but by Thanksgiving I have full-on writer’s block. I can only pace the hallway and peek in to Liz Phair’s guitar room to see what she is up to. It is always something genius. Everything that comes out of Liz Phair’s mouth is genius. She has a way with words, and a warbled voice that infuses her songs with a vulnerability that I can never seem to capture sitting at my desk in my room. All of my stories are gone. Sometimes I am able to hit a stride, just briefly, and the words flow out of me. But they puff into the air and down the hall, where they collide with Liz Phair’s new song like a 103-pound frame being taken down by a Mazda, and they fall, defeated, to the rug.

First it is Old Style tall boys, sitting with Liz Phair in a pub or at our kitchen table. I help myself to the complimentary champagne backstage at her concerts. I pour Bloody Marys into my coffee thermos. Sometimes when I get tipsy I can squeeze out a poem or two, which I scribble on sticky notes and stuff in my pocket. Most of the time I forget they are there, and when Liz Phair does my laundry, they come out illegible, little yellow clouds that fall apart in my hands. These are the good days. It is December now, and the city we live in is covered in a thin layer of ice. It buckles under my feet and the cracks race along the surface. I have not gotten published in months and honestly, if Liz Phair wasn’t my life partner, I wouldn’t have any money at all. At first it is easy to wash this thought away with a tall, foamy stein of Newcastle. Soon, though, the image of me as the red-carpet sideline, the K-Fed to her Britney, has penetrated my brain, filled the empty pockets and spread its plaque to even my most basic mental formations about the small things in life. I yell at the weatherman on television for being an incompetent forecaster of truth. When he doesn’t respond I holler at the cat for doing cat-like things. I find myself rinsing this emotional plaque more often until the steins become 32 oz. plastic Slurpee cups, thermoses of vodka, and finally, my lips wrapped around the neck of a bottle of cough syrup.

On New Year’s Eve, Liz Phair buys me a car. We are supposed to head out to go to this party, and I have been drinking wine while she got ready. I should feel happy about this car. It is a Prius, and I have always wanted a Prius. And I am full of wine. But I don’t have the money to buy Liz Phair a car, and the book I should have written by now is still a scattered Word document with lots of misspellings. Also, she is so much prettier than I am. I have realized this lately, when we brush our teeth side-by-side in the mornings. She has blue eyes, and firm calves, and her teeth are perfect rectangles. I want to thank her for the car, but something inside of me is triggered. Liz Phair with her perfect songs and her perfect skin and her Toyota Prius. I say she shouldn’t spend her money so frivolously—no, I use the word sluttily—even though that’s not an adverb, I make it so. I show her who is the writer here. She is hurt. I can see it in her eyes. Her blue eyes fill with tears. I take the keys and drive off, swerving down the highway with a bottle of Merlot in between my legs and nothing on the radio. When I call from jail, she answers the phone on the fourth ring. She picks me up and I ride in the front seat, silently, thinking about how the first time I got in this car, my bone was sticking out of my arm, but this time—stars smearing past the windows, her pronounced jaw clenched—this time, it hurts so much more.

That spring she is recording a new album. It is genius. When she is home, she sits in the sunroom with her guitar and whispers lyrics as she strums. She starts spending more and more time in the recording studio. I drink beer in bed and re-read Tolstoy’s dream where he is lying on a pillar, looking up into the infinity above and shaking in fear of the abyss below. “Why do I live?” he writes. “What is the purpose of it?”

“I don’t know,” I tell the paperback in my hands. “I used to think the purpose was writing, and then I was positive it was Liz Phair, and now I think I don’t know anything, nothing at all.”

A month later her handsome producing partner picks her up at night and she rides away with him in his car to the studio. I catch a glimpse of her through the bedroom window. She is laughing inside his car. They are listening to terrible music, Coldplay even, and as they drive away Chris Martin’s cocky vocals hop through the yard and smack me in the face. I pass out and dream of yellow couches being shredded by Prius-sized cheese graters. When I wake up in the morning, sunlight pushes in the window and hits the crushed beer cans like broken glass. It’s my worst nightmare: Liz Phair did not come home last night.

I look at her side of the bed. I sniff her pillow. It smells like Liz Phair when she has not showered in a day. The smell is my favorite. It tickles up my nose and pours back down out my eyes. I let it happen. I realize it’s strange how I have not cried in all these months. I did not even cry when my bone was sticking out of my arm. Not when Johnny had to be put to sleep because he swallowed a bottle of Liz Phair’s expensive cologne, not when Shirley MacLaine died in that movie. I always felt strong and brave. But why? I sit up, sniffling. I realize something. The words, like, hit me in the face. I grab the closest piece of paper—a 7-11 receipt—and I scribble them down. I use Liz Phair’s Cover Girl Outlast eyeliner. The paper surrenders in my hands, wilts against the power of my masterpiece.

I have done it. I have written The Most Perfect Sentence.

Outside, at this moment, the clouds submit to sun and the yellow beams of it course through the windowpane, highlighting everything in the room—our bed, pillows, stacks of records—but mostly the sacred seven words I hold in my hands.

I read the sentence out loud, slowly at first. The particles in the sunbeams dance like glitter. I read it again. My tongue and lips unite in a way that is most perfect, almost as holy as a Liz Phair kiss. I have perfected language, and I am not even drunk. There is only one thing to do. I fold the receipt and tiptoe out to the driveway. I leave it on Liz Phair’s car, tucked under the wiper.

She does not come home for four days.

It does not rain. The sentence performs sit-ups under the pressure of the wind and the wipers but does not move. April 6, 7, 8, 9. Those are the days she is gone.

The ghost of Liz Phair is everywhere in the house. I hear her music in my head, I think I hear her footprints on the hallway floor. At night I wonder if I can hear her breathing. I dial her cell phone seven times a day. The first time she answers she tells me not to call back, that she needs time to think about all sorts of things, like the purpose of life and her new album. Other times she does not answer the phone. I take out all the beer cans and the wine bottles and I put them in the trash out back. I do Liz Phair’s laundry, pressing her soft green hoodie to my nose. I paint the living room a cool lavender. I write poems about all of this, which I print and stack neatly in binders. I put them in manila envelopes and send them away to magazines. I think about praying. On the fifth day, I walk to the grocery store and put apples in my basket.

While I am at the store, Liz Phair finally comes home. Her handsome producing partner drops her off. I begin to walk back along the leaf-lined street. I think at this point it’s helpful to imagine this scene from an aerial view, with the streets stretching out like an arcade game and me and Liz Phair are like Pac-Men, little dots moving along the lines. We do not see one another, but as we move closer, our bodies begin to pick up signals the other’s give off; our auras are magnetic, they are pulling us together and we do not even know it. My stomach growls a bit, her palms feel tingly.

She notices the white slip of paper on her car. She picks it up and unfolds it. Her eyes move back and forth over the words—once, twice, then four times. The sunlight catches the tear that begins to form in her eyes. She turns to the east and begins running. She can feel my energy vibrating from the store down the street. She follows that. The two Pac-Men move along the sidewalks, getting closer and closer. A sudden breeze quivers the trees. She grabs a skateboard from a neighbor’s yard and skates down the middle of the road, knees bent, arms to the sides. Her hood slips over her eyes and for a brief moment, the neighbors marvel at Liz Phair, skateboarding down the middle of their street, looking just like the cover of her first album.

It ends with me getting hit by Liz Phair on a skateboard. I fall, and the two apples fly into the sky upon impact. She looks down at me and curses. I stand up. She is Liz Phair. She is four inches shorter than I am, but standing on the skateboard, we are almost even. She looks me in the eyes. A leaf falls from the tree and skitters the side of my cheek, drifts to the ground. I catch my reflection in a car window and notice for the first time that I too have a glow about me, all around my face.

Eupcaccia*

by Angie Lee

from Witness

_________

*From Kobo Abe's The Ark Sakura, trans. Juliet Winters Carpenter (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 7-8. “[On this] Island (the insect’s native habitat), eupcaccia is the word for “clock.” Half an inch long, the insect is of the order Coleoptera, and has a stubby black body lined with vertical brown stripes. Its only other distinguishing feature is its lack of legs, those appendages having atrophied because the insect has no need to crawl about in search of food. It thrives on a peculiar diet—its own feces. The idea of ingesting one’s own waste products for nourishment sounds about as ill-advised as trying to start a fire from ashes; the explanation lies, it seems, in the insect’s extremely slow rate of consumption, which allows plenty of time for the replenishment of nutrients by bacterial action. Using its round abdomen as a fulcrum, the eupcaccia pushes itself around counterclockwise with its long, sturdy antennae, eating as it eliminates. As a result, the excrement always lies in a perfect half-circle. It begins ingesting at dawn and ceases at sunset, then sleeps till morning. Since its head always points in the direction of the sun, it also functions as a timepiece.”

_________

The row of mailboxes in front of Tewa Trailer Park in Tesuque, New Mexico, reads from left to right: W.C., Mr. & Mrs. Chicken, Joy Vanderloo, T. J. Apodaca, Santi Chun-Mogul, the Orcistas, Esquibels, Benscooters, Justice, and E. Eagle. An “E-normous” and wholly intact spiderweb extends from the plastic lip of W.C.’s receptacle and connects to the corner of a cinder block several feet away. Shoved inside the cinder block’s cool arches are the spider’s previous attempts to conquer the distance, balled-up practice sessions of dry, white discharge. At least a million fire ants roam the park, slinging gravel, dead ants, and food. The surrounding yellowed soil is stained with miles of their invisible language. Sagebrush, chamisa, and other brittle-stemmed shrubs bend upon contact and perfume the air, but otherwise the flora shows no signs of change from season to season. Only E. Eagle’s mailbox, swaybacked and half ajar, gives an indication of the passage of time. The mail carrier stacks E.’s weekly magazine, sheathed in black plastic, on top of his box, and since E. Eagle collects his mail but once a month the pile-up is a good indication how far into the month it is. On the Chickens’ mailbox, the letters “+Mal” have been scribbled on the face in a harried stroke, as though something special would fail to be delivered if written any slower. The Chickens’ box, as well as the Benscooters’, is missing the red flag for outgoing mail.

Beyond the Chickens’ trailer park is an empty lot that marks the beginning of what locals call “Auto Row,” where what started several years ago as one store selling leather conditioner and piñon-scented car freshener gradually turned into an entire community of auto repair and auto parts/junk shops. By order of his mom, the neighborhood is off limits for Malchicken, even though she secretly lusts after all of it—the whole eight blocks from Roget’s to Sven’s—for she knows every man there is wearing a jumpsuit. Each shop along the Row has a different animal mascot, and a fierce competition takes place thirty feet above ground, in neon. Roget’s badger wears a black beret, and he’s smoking an unattached mouse’s tail in one hand and strangle-holding Marson’s little mouse head in the other. Every time the badger pumps his biceps, the mouse’s bent whiskers light up in sequence. Malchicken’s dad used to say the proximity to Auto Row was a good thing, and that the lights were there to make ordinary days seem like holidays. His mom used to argue that it was so bright she could see the screws coming down on the lid of her coffin.

The buzzing from Roget’s neon sign stings the back of Mal’s head, just underneath the wide cup of his skull. A similar tone comes out of the television speaker when Malchicken’s mother shuts off the DVD player but forgets to power down the TV. The screen turns gray, and the letters DVD appear in mainframe-green, matching hue to tone. Malchicken doesn’t have to be in the room to know it’s on. The two sounds together make his skin feel like it’s being pulled off in sheets.

Recently, Marson’s Lube and Oil has installed a new neon sign in which his French mouse, donning an apron and smoking a thin cigarette, is clubbing poor Roget’s badger with a rolling pin. The fall of the badger in lights is beautiful to watch—a crumbling arc of green and brown dotted with droplets of blood—but the real treat is watching the three doughnut-shaped puffs of dirt rise as the body collapses on the ground. Malchicken has heard that Marson originally wanted the badger to fester into little shapes that curled into croissants, but the sign company said it was too difficult. Though Malchicken loves the new sign, he’s harboring the hope Roget will fight back with something better, if not a little quieter.

Using the same kind of rolling pin as the mouse, Mal has created in the kitchen a miniature city made of puff-pastry cylinders. As heat penetrates the structures, the layers of dough will rise to towering heights with anally plumb walls, barring any shortcomings in craftsmanship. The Chickens’ oven does not have a light and as the pastry swells, the glass steams over, preventing even the faintest glimpse of how the construction is going inside. On the bottom of the window is etched the word PERMA-VIEW, and the glass is cracked from top to bottom which produces a fragment the shape of New Hampshire. Or Vermont. Mal can’t quite remember the ditty he learned from Lernie the Online E-tutor at school about how to tell the two states apart. Which one points up and which one points down. Sealed tight inside the turrets of puff pastry, Malchicken has installed a savory stew made of chicken and beans. It’s wet-battered and egg-glazed so the surface will finish on the rich side of amber, the girlie side of brown. Though he’s added a few cherries for color, he knows at the end of the line the stuff is going to come out brown. The bowel end of the line. The brown end. Auto-chromatically. Brown, brown, brown. And now he’s got the mini camera to prove it. It’s regal, it’s pizzazz, the way it works, and real spirit-fueling.

At the sound of a hiss in the oven, Malchicken begins to fret. He knows the sound is telling him that liquid inside the pastry is drilling its way outward and falling to a carbonized hell. It’s a sign of shoddy workmanship. Working with previously frozen chicken parts and dried beans, it’s hard to control the moisture. The hissing may also be a wicked ploy taunting Mal to open up the oven door—do it do it do it—a reckless action that will release the heat trapped inside and end in disaster. It’s a bread-knife-to-the-sternum type of experience, the hissing, the wanting to know, the splintery edge of sawed bone. His best bet is to leave the kitchen and let the baking run its course, to retreat to his room’s darkness, disturbed only by a lukewarm moon. Setting the egg timer, which sounds out each painful second, on the sill, Mal pulls open the curtains, spraying beads of condensation diagonally across the glass. Mal takes a shy finger to the window, outlining shapes and cross-hatching them in with fat little squiggles. Freshly moistened dust tickles his nose. The bleating of the egg is steady.

Malchicken takes his head to the pillow, unbuckling his pants as he reclines. By the side of his bed there’s a wire he can pull which causes a mobile hanging above his head to spin. His body is a doughy exaggeration of an obese child. Born without the well-sectioned Chicken neck, Mal’s head-to-torso slope makes him a true pyramid-shaped American, according to FDA standards. Golden brown hair from his long pin head graces the tops of his shoulders where the tips bounce with princely charm. His wads of fat are segmented and move independent of each other, colliding to form peaks and valleys. The color of his skin is that of un-fired porcelain with undertones of scarlet and lavender. Next to his skin the threadbare fabric of his underwear appears velvety, sophisticated, and magical in hue.

With a yawn, Mal rolls over and pulls out from under the bed a jimmy-rigged little VCR and B/W monitor. The two are connected to each other via a fat black cable that he fondles awkwardly. The video he’s about to watch is a Malchicken masterpiece. It was shot using a mini self-leveling camera now tucked away inside a flannel pouch he keeps on his nightstand. The camera’s original use—fastened to a metal skid and attached to 200 feet of cable through which was pushed twelve gallons of water per minute from the back of a Santa Fe County sewer truck—was to go headfirst into clogged sewer systems and record the journey into darkness. Mal considers sending the camera into the kitchen to peer into the oven and laughs. He would be single-handedly responsible for improving the camera’s worldview. It’s perspective. From poop to pastries. He cups his head between his hands and sets the video to Play. Seconds pass before an image comes into focus.

* * * *

The Chickens’ septic system had always been a “ball breaker,” and the way it “worked” had all three of them practicing the ancient art of inhalation and retention before crossing the threshold. Even without the contributions of Mr. Chicken over the last few years, the tank “kept its own way of thinking,” and Mrs. Chicken tried everything (short of liquefying the load before sending it down, and Malchicken had to threaten her with a kitchen knife before she conceded to let go of the blender) to keep the flow moving. She learned how to tighten up a loose-lipped plunger, and the importance of a flexible rod. Again and again she replaced the water-stained poster behind the seat showing two hands clasped in prayer and the words “Easy Does It” written underneath. Yet still the rebellious commode had difficulties swallowing, and a string of plumbers started coming up the aluminum steps of the Chicken trailer, until one by one they started to stay—later and later—until they showed up at breakfast taking their coffee black and their toast dry, their rolls having been slickly buttered all night.

For Malchicken, it was bad enough to hear the snide comments making the rounds—from plumber to car mechanic to casino dog—that the jobs at the Chicken trailer paid double time because there was more than one hole to plunge. It was crazy enough to notice how the shirt his mother wore in the mornings had an embroidered name on it that was not similar to the embroidered name affixed to the jumpsuit the stranger in the house was wearing, not similar as in not like Richard is to Dick or Jonathan to John. It was creepy enough to see the same stranger clang knife to fork as his mother offered to pack him a lunch, placing two fruit rolls, a soda, a de-crusted sandwich, and an oversized piece of dessert into a used paper bag that was so soft and worn it made no noise as she opened it up. She would pause, one hand holding the bag while the other yanked open drawers, to find a little something, a knife, a bottle opener, a wooden spoon, anything with some kind of durable value, in the hopes that the plumber would have the conscience to return it, along with himself, later that evening. It was depressing enough to watch his mother take the green keno pencil she’s saved all these years from the Chickens’ honeymoon in Vegas, its point a massive halberd in her hand, and cross off the listings for plumbers, carving ruts through poultry, printing, qigong and whatever else followed the letters P-L in the big yellow book. But no. What really battered Malchicken’s drummettes, what really dusted his marbles, was that his mother didn’t think the self-leveling camera was worth paying for.

Sure she’d open up the coffers for the extra pressure, the repeat thrusts and sleek flow-through mechanisms, but when they asked if she wanted to capture the underground tunnel on videotape she told them she had seen enough crap. “What’s to see anyway?” she’d ask. “Just get that can moving.” Unlike Mal, she didn’t care to see if what was coming in was going out.

One evening while his mother had gone to her room to freshen up, Mal asked a sour-mouthed plumber whether he had ever used one of the little sewer cameras. Without answering he demanded, with short tommy-gun exhalations, to know who told him to ask. When Mal didn’t say anything the plumber grabbed Mal by the back of his neck and demanded to know where Pop Chicken was.

“I know about these things, and whoa, just tell me if I’m gonna have to get my fists ready.”

“?”

“Whoa. Watch me.”

“...” Mal shook his head.

“If your old man comes through that door tonight, watch me if I don’t knock him flat.”

“...”

“I’m not going to play no tool.”

“He’s not,” Mal muttered, squirming.

“If he does tonight, I’ll do him.”

“Not coming.”

“Dead flat. You hear?”

“...” Mal shrugged.

“Whump.”

“...”

“Wham.” The plumber placed a fist softly on Malchicken’s chin.

“...”

“Too-nite.” The plumber repeated, angling his head repeatedly toward the bedroom. He let go of Mal’s neck and moved his hands until they held him by the sides, and with his giant palms he pushed the tips of Mal’s shoulders inwards. There was a hint of a massage. So slight, Mal had to unclench his stomach in order to discern whether it was real. The plumber kept rubbing and said, “I know about those cameras. Oh...I know. Let me tell you what happened last time I had a run in with an angry husband. It wasn’t...heh, heh, surprise, surprise...” and now a wry chuckle passed through his lips, “due to any mis-plunging of my own.... No... It was only that I was doing my job too well.”

“...”

“See, I had gotten a house call, and I show up with my high-tech video thee-ruster ready to visualate the stubborn blockage. Here I was showing my customer the clarity and detail of the flexy-cam thee-ruster as we’re going down his pipe. It’s a beauty! But, a few feet into it, just as we get a rhythm going, WHUMP, the camera stops.”

“Clarity and detail,” Malchicken repeated.

“We look into the monitor, right, and it was awful clear what it was. Clear as day, and I swear to you the bastard looked yellow, and I know how the picture here’s only black and white but there it was...yellow.”

“Yellow.”

“Sure as heck that bastard was clogging the pipe, along with a shitload of hair, and not far from it was the little foil package it came in. Came in.... Ha ha. It was a...you know...” the plumber snarled, using a gesture with two fingers to encircle his groin. “One of them lubed pups. Rib-bed.”

The plumber finished the pantomime and his hands went back to Mal’s neck. Mal felt seasick and embarrassed and he started giggling, as if a skit intended as slapstick had knocked an old lady down and she was writhing in pain.

“You get my joke, do you?” The plumber laughed. “It was a clear I.D. And from the look on my customer’s face, whoa, I could tell right away the ’lil bastard had not been a mutual purchase in this household, meaning husband and wife had not selected that piece of family planning together.”

“...” Malchicken swallowed hard.

“He stared at me and said ‘motherfucker.’ I tried nosing the blockage some more. The bastard wasn’t budging. He said to me ‘Motherfucker that fucking motherfucker.’ I said it sure looked like one. Yup. He said ‘Motherfucker it’s...I...I don’t...I don’t...no, not me. No, no, no, no, no. One does not make an ass out of me. Motherfucking cocksucker.’ I kept my nodding. So then the guy calls up his wife who was in a meeting so he leaves her this sweet little message about how there had been an emergency and could she come home at once. After that he hung up and started whacking himself with the phone. Like this. In the head. Blap. Then he got tired of that and hurled it into the bathtub. The batteries went flying everywhere and he went and pitched them one by one into the bedroom.”

“...”

“Motherfucker comes back to the bathroom and takes me by the neck. Here, like this,” the plumber said, swinging Mal around and locking one arm around his neck. “And he screams, ‘Bitch! You’re dead bitch! Dead, you hear? Bitch, you’re dead!’”

Mal gagged and tried to pull away from the plumber’s chest.

“And he kept going on, like this, saying, ‘You’re so dead! Bitch!’ And so I...” The plumber released the pressure around Mal’s neck, and reversed the set-up by grabbing Mal’s arm so that it went around the plumber’s own neck. “Here, pretend you’re him and you’re strangling me. Come on, harder. Pull.” His fingers prodded at Mal’s arm to get him to tighten his grip. “Come on, harder...yeah, harder. So he’s trying to kill me, right? So then I had to do this....” In one move the plumber twisted around and spun out from the headlock into a position where he had maneuvered Mal’s arm behind Mal’s back and bent his own knee up Malchicken’s crotch. “To save my life,” the plumber said, breathlessly. He grumbled about how doing that move against the husband, who was much larger than him, tore his knee a little. He wiggled the hurt leg, shook his head, and then he farted.

The following morning, under a one-ply cover, Malchicken discovered the plumber’s discarded pond of man-flow in the bathroom trash. It was ripe, yellow and cautiously seeping.

When the Chickens’ toilet finally ceased all activity, not even a limp bloop or a minor glug, Mrs. Chicken grabbed her keno pencil and skipped to the end of the plumbers’ section. The minute Harold Zamcochyan’s boots struck across the living room floor, Mal started perspiring with excitement. This guy wasn’t going to fart around, literally. He didn’t blink at the sight of the water damage stains on the floor, and didn’t recoil when his steel-toed boot took a dip near the base of the toilet. Most importantly, he told the puffy-faced and flirtatious Mrs. Chicken that he was going to send in the camera or else he wasn’t taking the job. She chewed on her sleeve and considered her options. “Will it take long?” she finally asked. Malchicken stood behind her and peered at the plumber through the long “O” of his tightly curled hands. The plumber’s jumpsuit was embroidered with the name “Hobie.”

Before setting his knees down to work, Hobie moved aside the purple gingham toilet paper cozy and tugged at his pants several times, hooking his fingers deep into the belt loops. But, as head went to hole, the denim slipped and the curved tip of his vertical crack popped up and said yes’m. It was, to Mal, an impenetrable, onerous pit—and here he had to snigger—a pit probably a lot like the one the man was himself facing head on.

Without turning around, the man muttered something indiscernible; his breath rippled over the surface of the bowl like a scrunched up sheet of plastic food wrap. Mal watched the darkened wet patch on the knee of the man’s pant leg spread upwards to his thighs and across towards his ankles at the same chilling rate. One of the plastic caps intended to cover the toilet’s unsightly bolts had been knocked off and now floated toward him. Inside, there was something colorful resembling chewed peas and carrots, with dried clumps of hairy matter. It tried to dock on his shoe so Mal shuffled over to let it pass into the hallway. The water level was high enough to carry it over the threshold, and up and over it went. The sewer man again barked something, and moved aside invasive clumps of clotted toilet paper with the back of his hand while he prepared the cable. He had hairless, dimpled skin on his back, and—hunched over as he was—a scruff of neck-meat so large Mal thought that if at that very moment the Tsunami was to come into the Chicken trailer, without a doubt Mal would need both hands to grab hold of Hobie.

Three hours later—having sent in the camera, viewed footage of dense video grain, retracted the cable, and shook it near his ear several times—the plumber got off his knees and sent out a request for the two Chickens to come into the room. He spat into the bowl, sending a sheet of honey-like liquid over the edge. A dry spider scaled the edge of the crumpled toilet paper cozy and dodged in and out of sight. Mal (who had never left) poked his head into the hallway and called for his mother. She came, nearly tripping over the cheap gold molding missing a cheap gold screw, one hand lifting a sweaty lock of hair from her cheek and the other holding the prodigal plastic cap. Hobie glanced from one Chicken to the other, panning for a visual clue that would explain what was wrong with their pipe.

The Chickens looked at each other and then back at him. Malchicken leaned into the monitor and examined his reflection. Mrs. Chicken whispered “Problem?” and handed him the plastic cap. The sewer man turned his gaze into the hole and said very slowly and very loudly, as if addressing non-English speakers. “What...all did you throw down there?” In his voice was the hope that one of the Chickens would fess up to jettisoning a weird exotic baby animal or a portion of unfinished potato salad, but no go. Mrs. Chicken looked to her son for a response. Mal was busy wondering if shaking his head would be a bad answer or a good one. The plumber growled with impatience. Mrs. Chicken started to nod and then changed it to a no, and then nodded.

“Honest injun. No. Nope. Nothing. It’s just...just...well. That’s it. Just us. Down there.”

“Well,” the plumber said without conviction. “I am blasting water like the dickens through there and can’t move this thing a friggin’ inch.” He wagged the cable at them.

“Broken?” asked Mal, reaching for the camera.

“This here video camera attached here is supposed to light up and show what’s going on down there. These guys here are LED lights.”

“...”

“Look at it here, they’re on.”

“On.”

“I send it down, and they don’t work.”

“Here?” asked Mal, tracing a circle around the lights and watching the reaction on the monitor.

“It’s totally black once you get down in there.”

“Down in there,” Mal said convincingly.

“Without the lights I just can’t see what the devil is in your pipes.”

“See...See?” Mrs. Chicken muttered, throwing her arms up. “I just don’t know what there is to really look at.”

“And there’s nothing that’s moving it. I keep hitting it, HARD.”

“Hard.”

“Three hundred pounds of torque on this skid.”

“Hard,” Mal repeated, spinning the camera.

“Penetrating nozzle with thruster jets.”

“Thruster jets.”

“And two thousand pounds of water per square inch and I can’t move your matter?”

“Moof.”

“Christ, you’re an annoying kid.”

“Moof.”

“...”

“If you really need to see...”

“...”

“I’ve got a flashlight in the kitchen,” Mrs. Chicken said.

“Swell.”

“How about some coffee?” she asked, tucking the sweaty lock behind her ear.

The plumber grunted. “Great. That should really teach this toilet a lesson.”

“It’s decaf,” Mrs. Chicken whispered, placing a proud hand on her hip.

“Christ.”

“...”

“Is that a yes?”

“Lady, what did you throw down there?”

“I told you. Nothing. It’s just us. And besides, I don’t know what there is to see, really.”

“Shit.” The plumber replied, unscrewing and tossing the LED self-leveling camera into the corner.

* * * *

Mal’s video begins with a ridge of soft bumps that form the letter M. The camera then backs up until it’s obvious there are teeth on both sides and the hot presence of a tongue. Retreating further, it passes lips and emerges into broad daylight to move up the greasy length of a nose. The lens tickles the tips of eyelashes and stares down an unflinching eyeball. Then Malchicken’s whole face appears, alongside its reflection in a mirror; chin-to-chin, there’s a tantalizing view up all four nostrils. His face goes through surprise, happiness, anger, confusion, frustration, and contemplation. Look—here’s his mother, a slanted doorway, and a hand goes up to block her face. Out in the living room, there’s a matchstick swizzled in candle wax and a partial fingerprint marring a photograph of a large crowd cheering a car race. The velvet backing the photograph is the darkest black there is. Suddenly there’s a hot flash of fluorescence, followed by an examination of the faceplate of the light switch, its screw heads perfectly vertical. Droplets of moisture define a half-destroyed spider’s web, shown with the light on and then off. On. Off. On. A painful minute focused on the spider’s leg, jerky, electric, disco.

A close-up of something sways like a worm, and when the camera pulls back it’s a loose thread from the elastic cuff of Mrs. Chicken’s shirt. The tulip pattern on the fabric. Suddenly the camera is jerked as if hit by something hard; it’s Mrs. Chicken’s rings as her hand wraps over the camera’s head. Mal’s hand peels hers away. The camera tumbles to the ground.

The latch of the bathroom door going in and out looks like a darting fish. The cheap gold molding still looks cheap in black and white. Inside the bathroom, there are mineral deposits clinging to the showerhead, the bleached corner of the bathtub where the soap lives and slowly decays, dark patches of grout between linoleum squares from spilt iodine or hair dye. There’s a tangled wad of hair near the corner of the tub where the caulking is riddled with spots of mold. Up near the lunar surface of the ceiling, there’s a vertiginous moment where the self-leveling camera wheels around violently, followed by a millisecond flash of Malchicken’s face, off balance.

A crack running along the bottom of a picture frame merges into the etched image of a perfume bottle and its pebbled aromatizer. Below is the scribble of the artist’s signature, and then a high-contrast shot of the angle between the back of the frame and the nail holding it to the wall. From there, the camera moves to the toilet paper cozy and peers through the veil of its lace waistband to the bathroom window and the stippled Tesuque sky framed inside. An image of the sink draining (stopper missing) precedes a stunningly abstract view of the raw, threaded end of the faucet and the good twenty seconds or so it takes to form a drop of water and release it. Form and release. Form. Release. Form. Release.

There’s a teasing of dust from the medicine cabinet’s hinges as it opens. A survey of the cabinet shelves ends in the corners where the vinyl shelf-liners bunch up and no longer stick to anything. The mercury in a thermometer reads well below 98. A quick zoom shows a tube of toothpaste called NUMSALVE, its lower half curled like a snail and its cap dinged with tooth marks. The paste, on camera, sparkles. A length of beaded chain leads to a bathtub plug and here, the camera stares up into the rush of oncoming water. The lens collides with pieces of grout before showing the H handle turned on its side. A puffy scrubbing sponge with its rope leash. A string of bubbles floating off screen. Long, tedious shots of skin, hairy and hairless, a forearm. An inventory of freckles near the navel, ten little toes refracted under water. A piece of sock lint escaping. The camera traverses hilly terrain, glides down a soft inner thigh, and exposes the poetry of pubic hairs roiling with the tide. Underwater, the self-leveling head spins, pushes against flesh, and dives bravely. There’s something overhead, like a blimp, casting a long shadow. Fingers, two of them, pointing up, pointing down. There’s several seconds of turbulence, a fractal burst of light, and then total darkness.

Watchers

by Scott Cheshire

from AGNI

I’ve seen the Racetrack Playa for eleven years in Januarys when the desert air and ground are still forgiving. My first year here was spent with the faces one finds in clouds, with the old men, running men, the dancing men one sees in the gnarled and raised roots of arrow weed, in the arms-in-the-air surrender of the Joshua tree, in the ever-changing weathered walls of towering rock and mud. In time, they all move and fall.

My second year here on the playa, I met two others—Raymond and Sport, a gay couple, Australian. They were wandering the Americas on foot and riding the occasional Greyhound. I happened by them in my Honda as they hitched their thumbs from the roadside. We drove some, and then sat facing the sun for two days. We didn’t speak much, our eyes scanning the flat ground beneath us. Some, like Ray and Sport, leave the playa and never come back. Others return for two years, three years. And some just keep on coming.

For instance, I met Thom Storme some ten years ago while staying in a near-dead Pocono resort in Pennsylvania. The kind of place crawling with menthol-breathing Keno addicts by 10 a.m. Thom was the outdoor events coordinator, and we became friendly while snowshoeing across a frozen mountain lake. That long ago morning, Thom taught me how to walk on water. And I told him about the flat world of Death Valley’s Racetrack Playa.

That next January, my third year on the playa, Thom sat beside me as we watched the desert sky beyond us touch the far away ground. Soon enough, we were five on the playa, then ten. Some years, fifteen, never more than fifteen I think. In teepees and tents, herding by the fire, some of us with little more than sunglasses and a sleeping bag.

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