He was up early and well gone to his work on the farm, as always. She found the envelope on the kitchen table, propped up against the tomato sauce bottle that was already attracting flies in the burgeoning heat of the day. Well, that’s a bit romantic, she thought. Hadn’t picked that up in their limited conversations to date. She put the kettle on and added fresh tea leaves to the pot. They were both old-fashioned that way.
Sitting down at the Laminex table, she opened the envelope and began to read.
Kate (no Dear she noted)
Talking’s never been something I’ve had much use for and the only way I know what I think about anything is if I write it down.
Unless I’m mistaken, and I don’t think I am, you’d like this occasional weekend thing to become a permanent arrangement. I can see the sense in that but I want you to be clear about what that will mean for our future. Women say they want honesty in a man but in my experience they don’t really mean it. Now’s as good a time as any to find out if you’re different.
I don’t want to marry you but I do want to spend my life with you. Instead of getting rubber-stamped by the Government or the Church, we’ll have this contract and we’ll have each other’s word that we’ll stick to it. Without that, life together would be pointless. And, besides, nothing about me will ever change. There will be no negotiation.
I’ll work hard all the rest of my life to keep a roof over our heads and put food on the table. You will be responsible for the household. I’d prefer you didn’t work but if you do, the household mustn’t suffer. I want plain traditional food. You can eat whatever your like.
If you want children, that’s fine with me but you will raise them. I will never mistreat them but I will not coddle them, because the world will not when I’m gone. They will learn tasks appropriate to their age and take responsibility for their actions.
If you have visitors or relatives to our house I won’t be interested in talking to them. You and the children will be all the society I need except for necessary business arrangements.
We will continue to have sex as long as we both want it but I won’t be ‘making love to you’.
I will never say ‘I love you’. I have no idea what ‘love’ is except people say that there wasn’t much of it around in my house when I was growing up. I guess you can’t miss what you never had.
We will be faithful to each other. I know myself well enough to know that will be true for me for all time. If you are ever unfaithful to me, the contract is ended.
I will almost certainly not remember occasions such as birthdays and anniversaries and I will ignore all attempts to rope me into Xmas.
There won’t be any cuddling on the couch and watching TV and I won’t be interested in going anywhere to be entertained.
There won’t be any deep and meaningful conversations about books or what’s in the news.
You must be thinking, “Where are the good things about this contract?”
You will have financial security as long as you live. The farm produces well and is pretty much drought-proof. If I die before you I don’t expect you to keep the farm and the place will fetch a good price.
You will have children (if you want them) to love and nurture as you wish and they will grow up knowing how to be resourceful and resilient, putting them well ahead of the pack.
You will have a faithful and respectful partner that barely drinks, doesn’t smoke, is rarely ill and will stay strong for years to come.
You will live in a community that has kept its values and its connections tight and in that sense you’ll never be alone.
And we will sit on the back porch at dusk and look over our land and not have to say how much it means to us. We will know what we’ve done together and that’s enough peace for anyone.
So, if that’s a contract you can live with for the rest of your life and never reproach me or yourself for the choices you have freely made, let me know tonight.
She put down the letter, made herself a pot of tea, took it out to the back verandah and sat in her favorite cane chair, gazing at the landscape that could be hers forever.
As Kate sipped her tea, she mulled over what he’d written, let the landscape in to her mind until the horizon was clear and mapped out how she would provide her answer.
She returned to the kitchen, poured a second cup of tea, sat at the table and began to write. She didn’t bother with a salutation; who else would she be writing too?
I’ve heard people say that honesty can be a weapon. However, in your case I think you’re using it as insurance or, at the very least, assurance that I won’t try to change you.
Life doesn’t work like that. No matter how we isolate ourselves, the world will have its way and we have to deal with the consequences. Even for people like you who don’t follow the news, either the grapevine or the bank will tell them when there’s no longer a market for what they grow or what stock they raise; at least not at a price that they can live on.
You talk about the farm being drought-proof but you know such a thing has long gone and last year was the driest on record. In that sense, I’m not assured by your promise to keep a roof over our heads and provide well for me and any children we may have. To be blunt, that’s the sort of promise I’d expect from a townie, not a farmer.
Like you, I can take or leave marriage. It doesn’t seem to have made relationships any stronger or otherwise amongst people I’ve known. The fact that you want to spend the rest of your life with me fills me with peace and hope. But I won’t have a life without love from my partner and promising to be faithful entirely misses the point.
You know I don’t mean romance novel love or love that has to keep telling itself over and over again that it exists. That would scare me even more than what you’ve proposed. However, at the very least, I would expect you to look me in the eye and tell me you love me enough to want to spend the rest of your life with me and promise to let me know if that ever changes. (By the way, the sex doesn’t need to change – no complaints in that department.)
But here’s the real rub. We (as distinct from me alone) need to decide if we’re going to have children. And if we decide we will, you will be their father in all the important ways; comforting them, tending to their needs, teaching them patiently and defending them to the death. Don’t worry, I’m perfectly happy to take on the traditional mothering roles but I’m not going to let the cold distance of child-rearing that you inherited from your father and grandfather enter my bloodline.
How you are with others is fine with me. In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m not much different. Besides, think of the money we’ll save on presents. But we will talk, especially about the important things and we will talk about them at the time it’s needed, not when it’s too late.
I’m all for meaningful silences but when they end I want to know what they mean.
I want this life. Since the beginning I’ve felt I’m coming home when I come here and I feel lost when I’m not. I love you and I want to spend the rest of my life with you, provided you are prepared to accept what I’ve asked for in your ‘contract’ (that word is so wrong my first impulse was to take off, forever.) If that much is too much then it says a lot about our chances of survival.
I think you will because I believe you are the strongest and most honest man I have ever met and that you have finally met the woman that you need to survive what’s coming.
You can give me your answer, face to face, when I come next weekend.
Signed, guess who?
Flynn read the letter several times over, climbed on to the ancient TD-18 International Harvester tractor with its metal seat shined by three generations of ample backsides and drove out to do some ploughing. His plan was for the concentration on straight lines to bring him the peace to think clearly about what Kate had said. What wasn’t helping was the ‘love’ part.
His father had been a hard and harsh taskmaster and he found it difficult to recall any words of praise passing his lips. The most anyone could hope for was the odd grunting nod and a mumbled ‘Not bad’. His mother was only slightly better, with hugs disappearing by the time he went to school and a relentless ticking off of tasks when he came home.
He understood they were hard years when they were trying to get the land into the condition that it needed to be in for long-term sustainability and there was little time for anything peripheral. And as he grew older he imagined that they thought that leaving him the legacy of the farm was, in the end, the only love that counted.
Breast cancer (deliberately left untreated he discovered later) took his mother in her late forties and five years later he found his father dead from a heart attack while repairing fences on a boundary paddock. When he picked him up, he half expected to be told to bugger off and get back to his work. Flynn made the necessary arrangements and stood dutifully solemn at their funerals, accepting condolences, but felt nothing. One day they were alive, the next day they were dead. That’s how life worked.
On his first night alone, he went through some old photos and lingered over a picture of his Mum, clipped from the local paper, holding one of her prize cakes at the annual regional agricultural show. Mum’s recipes were a local legend and she kept them, written in immaculate copperplate script, in a re-purposed school exercise book, kept from her teaching days. He decided to keep it safe, without knowing why.
Women rarely entered his mind as he continued to develop the farm, with some occasional hired help. Those he had met at school seemed weak or unapproachable. After he left school, he would see them again in town, usually either flaunting what he imagined were country town fashionable clothes or pregnant or walking along with a tribe of whining kids trailing behind them.
A couple of girls had pursued him (or his property) and once he had found himself suddenly engaged to Cheryl Clarke, not that he could recall popping the question. The next thing he knew was that has being paraded around the district like a prize bull with a ring through his nose. He hibernated for weeks before that blew over.
Then one day, when he was collecting his mail from the post office, in strode a statuesque female stranger. The coat and slacks could only belong to a city type and her long red hair hung in waves down her back. Her face contained eyes and a fixed smile that spoke of openness while still conveying concealed steel.
Having collected her mail, she strode out again, unfolded herself into a dusty, dented hatchback and sped off. In the background he could hear fragments from the tongues wagging. ‘ … new schoolteacher … not married … bit of a tyrant in the schoolroom I’ve heard but the kids seem to like her … asked for wine in the pub the other day… drives like a maniac’. This woman had certainly entered Flynn’s mind and he was totally uncertain as to how to deal with that.
Up until then, he’d go into town for the mail and shop at random times, when the opportunity arose between jobs. Now he found himself on schedule to be there, coincidentally, when she came into the post office. She’d started nodding to him, as country people do, but with an odd, crooked smile on her face when she did it.
Kate made the first move. Instead of nodding, she asked him ‘I’ve heard that sometimes you take animals for agistment.’ After a moment, from the side of a barely opened mouth, he said ‘What did you have in mind?’
‘I have an ageing horse that I’d like to have close at hand.’
‘One horse?’
‘Sum total.’
‘Not sure my fences are high enough to contain a horse.’
‘Oh, her fence jumping days are over. Besides, you could ride her. If you wanted to.’
They pretended to haggle over an agistment fee and then Kate said, ‘I’ll bring her up at the weekend.’
And so it began.
And now here he was, sitting on his veranda, waiting for Kate, who was waiting for an answer.
Kate’s traveling car wreck pulled up at the veranda. She emerged, climbed the steps and sat in his Mum’s rocking chair and waited.
‘Not sure where to start’, he said.
She offered no help.
Silence.
‘I love you and want to spend the rest of my life with you’ he blurted, as if fearful that if he didn’t get it out quickly his words would be strangled at birth.
Silence.
Kate smiled but said nothing.
‘About kids’, he nervously continued, ‘I want to be able to leave the farm to a next generation. I’m just not sure I’d be much good at the raising bit. You might have to give me a few tips.’
Kate laughed and said ‘I can always work with a willing pupil’.
They watched a pair of kookaburras land in the giant redgum that dominated the front yard.
Kate’s voice softened and she said, ‘That’s settled then.’
Now the silence between them was easy.
Later, she said, ‘Thought I might make a cake tomorrow. What did you do with your Mum’s recipe book?’
Finn smiled and said ‘Think I might have put it somewhere in the bedroom. Want to help me find it?’
Doug Jacquier has lived in many places across Australia, including regional and remote communities, and has travelled extensively overseas. His poems and stories have been published in Australia, the US, the UK, Canada, New Zealand and India. He blogs at Six Crooked Highways
It’s wild, the things that come to you at night. Like memories almost forgotten and of no significance that bubble steadily, hidden in some forgotten pot. Only until you’re older do you realize the pot was a witches’ brew and you’re a frog at the bottom of the heating black cauldron.
It’s these memories that arise during the hot and clammy moments in between fever dreams, and even though I’m dealing with a flu that my wife gave me, unintentionally, on my birthday, I can’t help but become a little sentimental. I’m an accountant now, for a decent firm. It’s boring work but it pays the bills and provides good insurance. I have a king-sized bed and the acne that once plagued my face has long since been defeated.
As I stare in the darkened reflection of the turned off television in front of my bed, sweating the sickness out, shivering at the same time, answering birthday calls and texts, I can’t help but think, with a sudden clarity of the interlocking gears, how things really came to pass, or if it was a fever dream of a memory at all.
***
I don’t know if the story of Mr. Guthrie’s Familiar is true, but if you look on any message board and crackpot website, they will tell you it is. I don’t know what I believe. But I know some kids went missing and some grew up to be adults like me.
At sixteen, my dad told me to get a summer job, and while I wanted to play my Atari all day, he took the liberty to apply on my behalf to all the “help wanted” stores in our town. The only place to call me back was for a delivery boy at Comet Pizza, right at the end of Blueberry Street the town over. All I needed was a bike, which I had, and knowledge of the streets, which I also had.
On my first day, I rolled my bike up and was introduced to Bart, Clyde, and Lionel. Bart was the head delivery boy, which I didn’t know was a thing until that day. It’s really fascinating…I don’t think I had recalled any of their names until just now. Yes. That’s right. There were four of us. Each of us more pimple-faced and greasy-haired than the last.
Well, five. Sort of.
Her name was Maria, and at the time I thought she was the prettiest girl I’d ever seen. Assuming she had not been stricken by some divine intervention, I imagine she has grown to become very beautiful now. She was the bosses’ daughter, and, like me, had been given a summer job. She was the counter girl, responsible for being the face of Comet Pizza, the empire she would no doubt inherent. She also took the calls, and I looked forward to hearing customers call in for a delivery so I could hear her voice.
I spent a large part of that first day sitting around and eating pizza, which was considered a tremendous perk at the time. The orientation was minimal; turns out, the training to be a delivery boy meant being able to pedal fast. The three boys were on rotation, switching out every call. They told me stories. Bart once delivered pizza to a house and a naked woman answered the door. Lionel once delivered to the science-teacher who flunked him last year and, with a whisper, said that he made a point of licking each slice before handing it off. After about four hours of sitting in the back, reading magazines and failing to talk to Maria, I got the impression that I wasn’t going to be making any deliveries at all.
“Not yet,” said Bart, “there is a perfect house for you.”
“You mean, it’s close?” I asked, “I go to school a town over. I know this town well enough. And I’ve been studying a map for the past four hours.”
Clyde shook his head, “Just wait, padawan.”
I remember this clearly, too. I hadn’t seen The Phantom Menace yet, but I was going to next week with my cousin. I remember being slightly offended after the fact.
Finally, a call came in and Maria’s wonderful voice occupied the room. “One cheese pie for 451 Alberle Road.”
Then the boys lit up, and I knew it was my time to shine.
“That’s a good house,” said Lionel, his face buried in a magazine.
“You know where that is?” asked Bart.
I nodded.
“You been there before?” Bart furthered.
I shook my head.
“Why don’t one of us come with you?” Clyde said, suddenly standing. “Just in case you get lost.”
“It’s the perfect first house,” Lionel said, “it was my first house. I was fine.”
“And Greg chose that as my first house when I started too,” Bart said. Greg was the previous head delivery boy, who went off to college.
“I can do it,” I said, wanting to impress these guys.
They weren’t my friends, but I was used to not having many friends. I did, however, see a lot of commonalities between them and me. We were all physically misshapen in our own ways. Lionel was a little plump. Bart walked bowlegged. Clyde was tall and lanky. The way that the three of them interacted with Maria told me they don’t talk to girls “in the real world” very much, and the number of books and magazines and comic books littered about the backroom told me they spent a lot of their time in between pages.
“He’s fine,” said Bart. Then he turned to me, “You got this. Your first house. Then tomorrow you’ll come into the rotation with us and start making tips.”
“Sure,” I said, and received the pie from Maria, inhaled the fresh-baked aura, and put them in the warming container. My heart got a little fluttered.
She said, “Mr. Guthrie is kind of a weirdo. Just so you know. But if you can handle this one, the others will be easier. Trust me.” And she winked at me. I remember that very clearly. That wink.
Outside I got my bike out of its lock, fastened the container cradle onto the back of my bike, and latched the container so it fit snug. Clyde appeared next to me, curly hair pushed against the wind. The day had turned into swathes of tangerine and plum; twilight, but darkness by the time I’d get back.
“Hey,” he said, “I just want you to know that Mr. Guthrie is sort of strange.”
“That’s what Maria said,” I said, happy to bring up her name.
He shuffled on his feet, “Yeah, but I don’t think you understand. His house is kind of a rite-of-passage. When I started, they made me deliver to him too. And Greg made Bart do it too. He’s in community college now. Not that it matters.”
“What, is he, like, a pedophile or something?”
“You haven’t heard about Mr. Guthrie’s Familiar?”
I took my bike and started to round down the path, past the beaten-up cars of the pizza makers, the dumpsters, the pizza trailing savory vespers behind me. “C’mon man.”
“I’m not trying to scare you,” he said. “It’s just that if you get really weirded out, leave the pizzas on the porch. Knock if you feel like you have too. And then tail it out of there.”
I slanted my eyes. “Is this a trick? Tricking the new guy? Someone will have to pay for the pizza.”
“No,” Clyde said, twisting his face, “I’ll pay for it when you come back.”
I took my bike to the road, waited for a car to pass by. The street was lined with thick elms. They looked like talons pointing towards the sky. Clyde followed me.
“What’s the deal?” I snapped.
“Look,” he said, picking up his hat and rustling his greasy hair before popping it back on. “It’s just an urban myth. But I don’t think it is.”
Another car drove past. This was typically a busy street. If I had been alone, I would have weaved my bike past the cars and taken off-beaten paths. I sometimes rode my bike in this town after school, so I knew the avenues well enough. I could feel Mr. Guthrie’s address like a beacon at the far end of the forest, nestled in the cul-de-sac that I could see in my mind’s eye. But I didn’t want my new coworkers to think I was reckless.
“What is it then? The myth?” I said. “What’s the deal with his Familiar?”
Clyde chuckled, but it was a nervous chuckle. I would not realize until thirty years later how difficult this was for him. “The story goes that Mr. Guthrie used to be a really nice guy. He was a teacher, or a social worker, or something. A wife. Couple of kids. Then one day he must have accidentally purchased an antique or read something backwards or something because something entered his house and never came out. Something horrible. Like a mega-demon or something.”
“A mega-demon?” I said. “You’re making me late, you know.”
Clyde shivered. Another car zoomed past. He continued: “It was around that time that Mr. Guthrie lost his job. Started talking about a voice in his noggin. Said that voices need to feed and in exchange it would give him eternal life. Then his wife and kids disappeared.”
“No wonder. He went bonkers. She probably took the kids.” I looked down the road and found myself at the end of the collection of traffic. I kicked off my bike but Clyde grabbed me by the shoulders, which I remember even then being peeved about, even though he was, by some delivery boy hierarchy, my superior.
“They say that whatever may or may not have happened, Mr. Guthrie entered into a sort of relationship with this force. But it wasn’t an even trade off. And now the mega-demon is practically keeping the man hostage, says that if it doesn’t feed, it’ll feed on him.”
“C’mon,” I said, but Clyde pulled tighter.
“He calls the shop every couple of weeks. Orders the same thing. A small cheese pie, with instructions to deliver personally. You know why he does that? Because delivery boys have a high turnover rate. And no one would miss us. Like Randall Fleck, that missing kid from the 80’s? Yeah, he worked here for three days. Or what about Bobby Finch, you know, the same last name that’s above the hardware store? That’s his older brother. I’m telling you, Harold, just leave it on the porch.”
“Okay,” I said, realizing now that Clyde actually believed this. “How do you know all this?”
“You’ll find that most towns have a myth or two.”
“And you’ve done it, and Bart and Lionel,” I said, “I’ll be fine. I can outrun an old man.”
“I did,” Clyde said, and his eyes began to blossom, which, to this day, makes me uncomfortable whenever anyone does that. “And I saw…I saw something in the window…and…and I just stayed too long. Look. I can’t stop you, because I think I’m crazy too, but if you go, just leave it on the porch. If you come back and tell everyone you did it, I’ll back you up. I’ll tell them I tried to talk you out of it, but you were adamant.”
I actually didn’t know what the word adamant meant at the time, but that didn’t stop me from pulling onto the road while Clyde kept yelling at me to just put it on the porch! I did my best to ignore his warnings, because I was too old to believe in that kind of stuff. It was this arrogance that armored me to Bart and Lionel’s challenge, this silly delivery boy rite-of-passage. But I so wanted them to like me, even though they hardly paid any attention to me. And I wanted Maria to know that I had done it. I could not imagine what would happen after the fact, but I wanted her to know.
Yet Clyde’s fear was so genuine. I turned corners and made sharp turns down bike lanes, but I could not help to feel as if I were slipping slowly into a quick sand of dread, especially knowing that Randall Fleck and Bobby Finch had possibly ridden these very paths, with the same kind of pie, made perhaps by the same pizza Mr. Comet Pizza himself. Because I knew those names. Everyone knew those names. I don’t recall Bobby Finch much, but his name sounded familiar because when Randall Fleck disappeared, they compared his absence to Bobby’s. I was too young then, as I was at this moment of delivery, to really appreciate the pattern of how close I was to this cycle, this myth. My parents had taken me to the school at night and all the kids played in the surreal version of the playground that we played at just this morning while the cops delivered their notes. That was before we grew up. That was before I developed my pimples and my long nose and my greasy hair.
I turned onto Aberle Road, and I recall very clearly being relieved to find the neighborhood exactly as boring as all neighborhoods should be, so unlike Clyde’s tale. No ghosts, no hockey-masked men. Not even those pedophile vans. I took my bike down the street, looking up at the ocean of stars above, a view that doesn’t really exist anymore. Then I came to 451 and for a second I thought the guys were playing a joke on me.
The stupid run down house looked as if it had been set aflame and reduced to a charcoaled version of itself. The grass had turned into crisp, nettle-esque blades. The car had not been moved in ages, surrounded by the reclaimed nature. The house sulked, the eaves of the single rancher like heavy, weary eye brows on windows so dusty as to be one-way, even in darkness. I actually rationalized that there was no way a married couple with two kids could fit comfortably in a house like that, so point against Clyde’s validity. Still, there was something foreboding about the house, as it stood like an animated corpse, washed up and chewed on like a sperm whale that had lost a fight with a giant squid. Something had happened here. One time my uncle’s house had gone into foreclosure and when we came back it looked like Mr. Guthrie’s. So maybe that was it.
Or perhaps it would have been, except for the faint flicker of a lightbulb that swung at the far end of the house, a pendulum akin to an uvula.
I parked my bike at the edge of the property. It felt rude to drive it across the lawn, not that I had any opportunities to do so. I put my hands in the container, felt the warmth from the pizza box. I looked around at the other houses. They seemed perfectly fine. Sleeping.
I remembered the operations. Knock on the door, wait a little bit, knock again, receive the cash, count it, make change, wait for the tip. The entire exchange should take no longer than it would take to reach the house.
To reach the house.
Maria said if I could do this, I could do anything.
With the pizza balanced on my forklift spread out hands, I advanced through the thicket of overgrowth, over the uneven cobblestones, the tangle of weeds, the smell of rotting vegetables. I was certain that I could see the bent spokes of an abandoned bike, but it was an old model, so it must have been there for a long time. It was hard to think that kids once played on this lawn.
The porch was no more than a dais, unwalled, no handrail. It was like walking into the maw of a beast, or onto an altar. My footsteps echoed in the empty street. There was a spot that reminded me of Clyde’s advice. A perfect square that I could drop the pie on and run. I could be back on my bike now. But I would know that if I left, then I would have returned to Comet Pizza a liar. I did not want to have a secret with Clyde, one that would eventually reveal that I had failed the rite.
Balancing the pizza on my hip, I repositioned and rapped on the screen door. There was no doorbell. I waited, leaned to see if I could see inside. I knocked again. A silhouette passed in front of the bulb. The sound of unlatching several bolts, each metal unlocking sending a shiver down the frame of the rickety door. The door opened and Mr. Guthrie appeared.
I remember him not looking particularly abrasive. Not fowl like, as Clyde had made him seem. He had not a lost eye nor a crooked nose nor an ugly scar. He looked more like a frail scarecrow, a farmer from that famous painting. Lips receded with age, hollows of his eyes from gravity’s curse. Liver spots that could be countries on a map. Mr. Guthrie was just a lonely old man. Simple as that.
“Pizza delivery,” I said, trying to sound cheery. In hindsight I realize how stupidly ingenuine I must have sounded. I repeated the order: “One small cheese pie.”
Mr. Guthrie nodded. He grunted and pushed open the screen door with a skeletal hand and then it was just the two of us, himself in the threshold, a black infinity behind him, me with the jungle of his unkempt lawn behind me.
“One small cheese pie for Mr. Guthrie?” I said, repositioning myself so that I held the box before me, like a token.
Mr. Guthrie licked his lips to wet them before speaking. His voice sounded unused, out of tune, as if the internal wiring was rusty. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a money clip. Yellow, cracked thumbnails sifted through the bills. A light flickered behind him, right over his shoulder, at the edge of the darkness. With shaking hands, he offered what I had hoped was the correct amount on the first try, and it was at this precise moment, yes, I remember, that I felt that our interaction had become a group, that it was not just the two of us, that someone had joined. I felt like I was being watched, and a thought flashed within the undercurrent of my psyche that this was still one big joke by the delivery boys. Hazing and all that. That they would pop out of the brush with monster masks.
Mr. Guthrie handed me the bills. The cash was warm and damp. There were two twenties in there, which was more than enough for the pie. This money made my heart drop. I didn’t have the balance to hold both the pizza and make change, and I didn’t want to be there any longer than I had to. A second light had gone on behind him, two tiny lights as if at the end of a tunnel. A breeze swept by, moving the bent wheel of a broken bike that had become entombed by Mr. Guthrie’s unkempt lawn. Above the rancid odor of rotting vegetables, the smell of something copper carried with it. I got the sudden feeling of being on the precipice of some great void that had swept me, and my legs had a difficult time remaining steady. It felt as if the shoddy cement cube of a porch was miles above the lawn, that I was, like, standing at the edge of a cliff or something.
Mr. Guthrie stared at me, unblinking, as I tried to make change.
“Keep it,” he said, “the change.”
“Thank you,” I said, and I felt something stir behind him, responding to my voice.
When I looked behind his bony shoulder I could make a faint outline of something. Something. That was it. It was human but it wasn’t. It was more like a painting, like something that was turned into human form, like a marble sculpture. The faraway lights turned into tiny jewels. I got the impression of it raising its eyebrows, for some reason. I tried handing Mr. Guthrie the pizza but he did not budge.
“Would you like me to leave it on the porch?” I said, gesturing to a spot, thinking about Clyde.
No! something croaked, but it was underneath the passing tide of a car.
Mr. Guthrie said, “No. Please.”
“Okay,” I said, and pushed it a little further into his trembling hands. The hands receded. In the corner of my eye something black zipped around the corner. Like a black stray or something. “It’s yours.”
“I’m an old man,” said Mr. Guthrie, his voice craggy. There was a certain surreal quality about him, as if space warped within the aura of his presence, or that whatever lay behind his back knew that it was only a flesh wall between itself and the outside. He continued, his jaw dropping slightly out of sync with his words. “I’m an old man. Can you help an old man? Please.”
I didn’t say anything. Clyde said to just put it on the porch, and I already had the cash.
“Could you help an old man and come inside and put it on my kitchen table?” Said Mr. Guthrie, his wiry frame twisting slightly, the creases of his splotchy, greasy shirt forming an obscure Rorschach simulacrum.
“Excuse me?”
“Please, I’m an old man. I can hardly lift the box,” he said, the rustle in the wind sounded like come inside and then he said, his voice deeper, more coming from within his frail frame than from just his mouth. “Please.”
A windchime somewhere startled me. I felt something move in accordance with my sudden movement, and jumped to action. Another whistle said come inside again. I think.
“Others have done it,” Mr. Guthrie said, “other young boys.”
I don’t remember exactly when I dropped the pizza box in the corner of the porch, but I do remember, in hindsight, being unsettled. That the world had suddenly become very unsafe, not for greasy losers like me. There was a figure behind Mr. Guthrie, something vague and shapeless, too far for me to see, too enveloped in the blackness of the house. The pungent smell of garlic breath seeped from the cracks in the sheeting, from the black void behind Mr. Guthrie. When I put the boxes in the corner and stood, I saw, maybe, I don’t know. I saw Mr. Guthrie floating several inches off the lip of his front door, his dirty loafers dipping slightly to give the impression of a ballerina on their toes.
There was a loud noise, a honking of a car or some strong gust of wind, and I left Mr. Guthrie on the porch, walking backwards at first, tripping over the step and into the thicket, grabbing onto the overgrown bike and cutting my hands as I ran across his lawn and hopped onto my own bike. Before kicking off I looked over my shoulder and saw that lone bulb, moving like a pendulum with such force as to be resistant to all logic of gravity. It was swinging like a kid that tries to circulate a swing set with the force of their momentum. On the downswing of the light Mr. Guthrie’s lanky figure appeared underneath it, shoulders hunched, arms as if guarding from something.
“I’m sorry!” Mr. Guthrie yelled, but I was already speedily away so I couldn’t be sure if it was for me or not.
I had no idea how out of sorts I was until I returned to the Comet Pizza. Grass stains over my knees, my new Comet Pizza shirt had been chewed by the reclaimed bike on his lawn. I must have scratched my cheek to, for a small curtain of blood now lined down my chin. I parked my bike, walked into the warm glow of the Comet Pizza.
The others looked up from their magazines. Clyde seemed visibly relaxed. Maria noticed my cut and she offered me a rag, and I hoped that interaction meant more to both of us.
“How was it?” Said Lionel, counting his tips, not really looking at me.
“You looked like you got chewed on and spit out,” Bart said.
“Yeah,” I said, and sat down. Someone brought me a slice of pizza.
Clyde leaned over and whispered, “Did you leave it on the porch?”
I nodded, my mouth chewing the pepperoni and mushroom. “He left a nice tip.”
“He always does,” Bart said, shaking his head.
“He’ll call again in a couple of weeks?” I asked, wiping my mouth.
Lionel nodded. “Yeah. Listen, I know Clyde tried talking you out of it. Glad that you went through. In the future though, just leave it on the porch and don’t stay for chit-chat.”
“Guy’s got nothing to say anyway,” said Bart.
On the way out the four of us said goodbye to Maria and went back to our bikes. I noticed a strange, almost black tar smudged on my seat, and Lionel pointed out that a similar smear was on my lower back too.
“Take a shower, new guy, and see you tomorrow,” he said.
Before leaving, Clyde approached me again. “Hey,” he said, “did you really leave it on the porch like I asked?”
I nodded. “But not originally though.”
This seemed to shake Clyde, who fell silent. “So, you met him. Did you…see it?”
“It?”
“Mr. Guthrie’s Familiar. What did it look like?”
I shook my head. I wasn’t trying to be coy but it was true. I could quite place what I had seen on Mr. Guthrie’s porch, could not prove exactly if I had seen anything at all. I shook my head and said, “Next time I’m really just going to leave it on the porch. Anyway thanks, Clyde, for the advice.”
“Yeah, sure,” he smiled, seemingly pleased to be validated. It was a feeling that I yearned for too. I felt his eyes trail me as I kicked my bike into gear to follow the others down the road, and then soon it was the four of us riding home, each together, before going our separate ways until tomorrow.
I don’t really remember Mr. Guthrie calling Comet Pizza much that summer, or at all. I hardly remember the rest of that summer, much in the way that all summers blend when you’re young. I didn’t lose my virginity, hardly had a summer fling. I don’t really remember hanging out with Bart, Lionel, or Clyde much outside of the shop, and Maria and I’s only real interaction was when she handed me a pizza for delivery. It was only a dumb summer job, one that consisted of a bunch of teenagers who hardly knew themselves, buried themselves in magazines and yo-yos and the occasional cigarette to look cool. Mr. Guthrie himself was discovered half a year later in his house, his body reportedly looking like a dropped napkin in the middle of the floor, discovered after the neighbors complained of the rotting smell that had begun to invade the cul-de-sac.
It’s funny how memories like this pop up in the middle of fever dreams, blossoming like stubborn flowers in the snow. Those two kids, Bobby Finch and Randall Fleck, were the only ones that had disappeared from town, so hardly any excuse to fuel the urban legend. But there were no calls. I guess I was the last. I don’t know if Mr. Guthrie’s familiar was real, but the memory feels on the precipice of reality, like how when you’re young you climb because you don’t realize how high you are, or the consequences of falling, and when you think back all you can remember is not how high you were, but how close to the edge you were. Mr. Guthrie was like that, for me, so inconsequential as to be buried in my mind, yet so significant for reasons that I can not as of yet determine.
Glenn Dungan is currently based in Brooklyn, NYC. He exists within a Venn-diagram of urban design, sociology, and good stories. When not obsessing about one of those three, he can be found at a park drinking black coffee and listening to podcasts about murder.
It was the first real warm Sunday in April. The Boy thought fish might rise and bite today. The crick was cold and the fish would never bite till the first warm day in April. The preacher had warned about fishing on the Sabbath, but the Boy couldn’t get away from his chores any other day. He sometimes couldn’t even make time on a Sunday. He chuckled about the preacher, and about the image of an ox in a ditch. He wondered if an ox could pull a plow like a mule did.
He went to the barn to retrieve his pole and tackle, and the Hills Brothers coffee can filled with black worms, brown leaves, and black dirt.. The boy wished he had sifted the rafts of the branches for pennywinkles but he hadn’t had time. He also wished he had some catalpa worms or drone bee larvae, but he supposed he would have to make do with what he had.
The cane rested on the seal over the barn door. Some kept their cane pole leaning in a corner, but the Boy knew better. They were best lain flat so as not to warp. He had put up a strong and supple one last summer to cure, and it was ready now, the color of clover honey and almost 10 feet long.
The boy crossed the terraced field and made his way down to the waters.
The boy knew that the crick widened as it flowed, and the eddied pools that waited half a mile away held bream (brim,) blue on the back and red on the belly. He could taste them as surely as he thought of them. He could taste the flour, and the pepper, and the lard, and the corn dodgers the Mother spooned into the crackling grease.
The maternal Uncle taught the boy where and how to fish. And although he didn’t mind fishing alone, he missed the Uncle. The Uncle passed last spring. The Boy could still hear the Uncle cough and still see the bloody sputum on the white handkerchief he kept in the bib of his Duck Head overalls. The Boy didn’t mind fishing alone, but he missed the Uncle, even though he was glad he had finally stopped coughing.
The Boy’s Father didn’t fish and he didn’t cough, but he had died anyway, just 3 months ago. He didn’t suffer like the Uncle. “Time and chance,” the Boy thought. He was eating his tomato soup and cornbread and just fell from his chair, dead before he hit the plank floor. The doctor called it a widow maker, a heart failure, the same doctor who couldn’t even stop a cough. Sometimes the boy thought physicians and preachers were just guessing.
But the Uncle had taught the Boy to fish and the Father had taught the boy to be small, silent … invisible, cause you he was less likely to beat what he didn’t notice. And now they both were gone and the Boy had learned all his lessons well.
The Boy extended the cane and dipped the struggling worm in the eddy. He employed neither bobber nor weight, but used the cane’s tip to move the bait up and down and ease it closer to the opposing bank. The line swirled and then went taut. The Boy set the hook and eased the struggling fish out of the water and worked the cane under his right arm and slid his catch back to his waiting hands.
The Boy gently removed the barbed hook and marveled at the colors he saw, every slant of light a revelation. Then he slid the now-subdued fish back into the stream. Though he didn’t know why, the Uncle had always freed the first, and the Boy knew he would always do the same. Then the boy began to cry as he had not done since he learned to be small, silent, and invisible, and the tears flowed like the waters of that mountain stream.
Alan Caldwell is a veteran teacher and a new author. He has recently been published in Southern Gothic Creations, Deepsouth Magazine, The Backwoodsman Magazine, and oc87 Recovery Diaries.
The time was approaching and Rodolfo was preparing to start the session. Nervousness invaded his body and it was not for less, because it was the first time that he tried something similar. He prepared the table where he was going to arrange to place his board and the various artifacts that he had to use. Sweat was running down his forehead and he was trying to hide it quickly so as not to show signs of inexperience.
“Hello there? Do you hear me?” Rodolfo asked with a slight tremor in his voice.
He looked at his board uneasily, trying to remember every step he had to take. Regrets invaded his head and the desire to leave grew stronger, but he was not going to give up so easily.
“If you are listening to this, please give a signal.”
For long minutes not the slightest sound was emitted and Rodolfo crossed his fingers, clinging to the hope of being able to connect with someone. Silence roamed the room and tension was in the air. Rodolfo felt as if he were walking through a gloomy cemetery, alone and at night, looking for some merciful soul to help him find his way out. However, the pessimism increased with each movement of the clock’s hands.
“What are their names?” Rodolfo said, almost shouting “Is there someone? Please give a sign” despair showed in his actions. “Well, I think I’ll say goodbye.”
With a great sadness on top of him, Rodolfo was preparing to end the session that he had prepared with so much effort; until suddenly a slight murmur began to be heard from afar, which shook him considerably. His heart began to pound and his pupils dilated at the sudden manifestation.
“Hello, Professor Rodolfo,” says a student suddenly. “I’m George, I am a freshman student, nice to meet you”
“Hi, professor! Sorry, my microphone was not working. My name is Cristian.”
Rodolfo began to explode with joy at the presentations of his new students. His eyes narrowed and the daisies were easily seen by the huge smile that was drawn on his face. For an instant, he thought that all the lessons his eldest daughter had given him to learn how to use the computer had been in vain. Rodolfo gleefully picked up his notebooks to begin his class and put aside his trusty board that was full of instructions of how to turn on the camera and microphone, so that he could have a successful first online class.
Fernanda Poblete González is a chilean senior English Literature- Creative writing student with a minor in History and Religion at Lindenwood University. Some of her writing has been published in the Arrow Literary Journal and the Academic Heart and Mind.
I’d heard that on your wedding day, the mind of the groom is simultaneously a thousand places and nowhere at once. That always made sense to me—I’d seen most of my friends crack from cold feet. Toby, one of my old co-workers, had three shots of tequila before his wedding started, and kept a flask on tap just in case. At his wedding, my old roommate Nick wore a smile so plastered and fake he looked like he was auditioning for the Joker in the next Batman flick. A sizable mound of sweat formed on his forehead before his longtime girlfriend Nancy appeared down the aisle and he brushed it off any time he could.
My turn was today.
There were a few relatives I recognized here and there in the sanctuary, some I hadn’t seen since I was a teenager. Aunt Sharon, Cousin Joe, and…
“Oh no,” I said to Seth, my lanky best man and one of my oldest friends.
Sitting in the last row by himself, wearing a faded polo shirt and sporting his latest arm cast, torn jeans, misshapen crutches—it was Uncle Alan.
I walked up the aisle, past all the beaming faces watching me, and gazed toward the narthex and the wedding gifts piling up. Standing apart from the rest of the gifts, I could see the ugly face and hollowed out-eyes…
Uncle Alan had brought The Devil Chair to my wedding.
I reversed course and went through one of the high doors near the baptismal font, back to the men’s changing room and took a swig of the bourbon from Seth’s flask, followed by another.
“Whoa, slow down there, chief!” Seth said. “I know you’re a light weight!” I shook my head in concert with the spinning of the room.
“No, you don’t get it,” I said. “My Uncle Alan is here.”
“Is that the crazy-looking guy who looks like he staggered in from the bar?” Seth asked. I nodded.
“Is he gonna cause a scene or something? Because we can toss him out quietly, Ben. Just give us the word; it’s your day,” Seth said.
“No, it’s okay,” I said, grabbing a water bottle off the table behind me and drinking a few gulps. I sighed a deep breath, thinking of Abby—her wavy strawberry blonde hair and her usual, ever-present smile. I hadn’t seen the latter for a while.
“Will Abby be cool with him being here? You guys are good, right?” Seth asked, and I paused for a moment, but knew I couldn’t lie to Seth if I tried. I’d known him too long.
“It’s been tense the last few days, just with her family in town and getting everything right,” I said. Abby had been a champ, but things were getting a little awkward between us. It had started when her little cousin Frankie had peed all over her dress, which had to be cleaned in an instant. The ruckus that ensued was considerable. Then her grandparents were unable to catch their flight, and Seth taught them how to use Zoom to watch the ceremony from home.
I knew well enough to roll with the punches, but the stress was getting to me as well. Abby wanted to change the rice to bubbles—voila, we had bubbles. She wanted to change the table setting from elegant to floral—the fellas and I went to a number of florists to ensure we had enough roses and white lilies to fill up the reception hall. Every day that went by Abby seemed more distant. My only hope was that nothing else would go wrong and piss her off even more.
“It’s okay, man, we’re almost there,” Seth said. “But what’s with your uncle?” We sat down on the sofa they had placed near the mirrors.
“How much time do we have?” I asked. Seth checked his watch.
“About a half hour. No rush man, whatever you want to do,” Seth said. I nodded.
“Okay, fair enough. I’ll try and make this quick,” I replied.
***
Uncle Alan lived in the Grotto, in a small alcove of a suburb with his wife, my Aunt Cindy, and their plump orange tabby cat, Mayhew. Uncle Alan was still hearty and hale back then, 6’1, and still had his college linebacker frame intact. As an adult I was finding the thin line of connection with my relatives reaching its breaking point, but Uncle Alan was still welcome. I’d see him a couple times a year and I had brought Abby the last few times. By then he was living out of a much smaller house, and Cindy was not around anymore.
I’ll back up further.
Uncle Alan owned a small grocery store, you know the one on 7th, Alan’s Eateries? It was doing just fine financially until about 2011, when the loans he took from the bank dried up and the loyalty from his true-blue customers wavered. When he called me over and pleaded with me to float him a few grand, I was happy to help.
“Ben, you’re a better nephew than I deserve, thank you so much!” he said over the phone.
That evening, Uncle Alan and Aunt Cindy led Abby and I outside from their modest brick-and-mortar house to the back yard and proceeded to start a bonfire. We were a few beers deep when Uncle Alan brought up the Chair.
“Ben, you need to know, and it’s way overdue I told you about this…well, this Chair in the family. It’s dangerous.”
“Why, because the seat is broken?” I asked, laughing, and faced my uncle, who was not. He looked dead serious.
“No one’s sat in it before, actually,” he said. “It’s…”
“Honey, don’t you dare!” Aunt Cindy said, and shot a look at him that would quiet another man, but Uncle Alan kept going.
“If it was anyone else, I’d just laugh it off, but Ben and Abby deserve to know,” he said. “There’s…”
“It’s okay, I don’t need to know whatever you guys are talking about,” I said, just to keep the peace. Abby gave a polite giggle, as if to change the subject.
“See? Just let it go,” Aunt Cindy said, and Uncle Alan did. However, the remainder of the evening carried an awkward weight to every exchange and conversation. It seemed we were all thinking about this chair. I know I was.
As soon as we started the drive home, Abby and I looked at each other for a moment, smiling.
“Out with it,” I said.
“Do you think your uncle is okay? I mean, why would he get all serious about a chair, Ben? I mean, it’s a chair! You know, like…a chair!” Abby said. I joined her contagious laughter, and that was that. I didn’t think about it again for almost a year.
Then, the following November, Mayhew was found dead in the driveway from a fight with a raccoon. Aunt Cindy was inconsolable for weeks.
The loans dried up again the next fall season; Alan’s Eateries went under right during the holiday rush. In response, Uncle Alan went on an epic bender and spent the remaining funds on whiskey and beer until Aunt Cindy filed for divorce.
Abby and I helped the closing process on New Year’s Eve; Aunt Cindy had left for Miami only the day before.
“She knew this was coming, but tried to ignore it,” Uncle Alan told me the next day in the backyard. “Whatever. She ain’t gonna stop me now, so might as well show you the damned thing.” He fumbled around in the garage for a few minutes, and after a few moments, I heard a loud scream. Uncle Alan had tripped over a patch of black ice and wound up on his cutter board, slicing a considerable hunk of flesh off his arm.
The doctors convened a day later and announced to me that some of the nerves in Alan’s left arm were shot. I found him in the hospital, laughing like an exhausted maniac in his bed.
“Uncle Alan, please stop,” I said. “We’ll get you through this.”
Uncle Alan nodded then shrugged his shoulders.
“Okay,” he sighed. “Well, since I can’t show it to you right now, I’ll tell you about the damned Chair. Just hear me out,” he said. I saw a few nurses outside, and was half-tempted to go get them right then—but instead, I listened.
***
“As you know, Aunt Ellie is tough-as-nails, and she had a solid relationship with your great-grandfather, Irving. I know you never met him, but he was a reserved man and raised his kids the best he knew how. He only had two kids—Ellie, and of course my mom Sharon. But Ellie’s the tougher of the two,” Uncle Alan said.
“At this time Ellie was sharing an apartment with her old high school friend Debra, and after about a year of living together, Ellie was nearly up on the lease with Debra, and good riddance, she’d keep on saying.
“She inherited the Chair that spring from Grandpa Irving when she was named in his Will. The Will read that of all his offspring and blood relatives, there was something special about her. Ellie had enough goodness in her to spout out the demons in the Chair, was how he put it.” Uncle Alan paused and took a deep breath.
“It must be destroyed Ben,” he said. A few moments of silence passed, then he kept going.
“It’s an ugly Chair, always has been. You need to see it. I have it on my phone,” Uncle Alan said, handed it to me and I saw. The Chair looked tall and sturdy, black lacquer fading, the legs spindled out like spider legs, the worn seat threatening to cave in. The back support only featured a rectangular block at the top and in the middle, a carved-out etching. I zoomed in on the photo. There were four curvy swoops that resembled hair, and what was undoubtedly a face in the center. Three teeth (two sharp, the middle dull) and then, in the dead center sat what looked like hollowed-out eyes.
It seemed impossible, but they looked angry.
I took this in for a moment and handed Uncle Alan’s phone back to him. He tossed it on his bedside table and continued.
“Out of respect, Ellie decided to place the Chair in her room, near the door. Less than a week later, Debra and her current boyfriend, Phil, mechanic assistant at Albert’s Auto up the road, went straight to Ellie’s room, because, as Debra had told Ellie, she preferred her bed. Phil was walking to Debra on the bed, removing his shirt, and didn’t notice the one of spindly legs of the Chair until his own leg connected with it.
“Ellie doesn’t know how this happened, or maybe she didn’t want to say it out loud, but one of the metal beams from her bed frame was jutting out like a lance, and Phil’s head connected right with it. Ellie said she was real glad she didn’t hear the clang. Phil didn’t die, though.
“No, he wound up with a month-long coma, waking up with permanent brain damage, and died five years later in a car accident. You know, ice in the road. By that time, Debra had settled down with him.
“Anyway, Ellie returned home from work in time to see the ambulance leave, but didn’t know Phil and Debra were in it. She went to her room and screamed when she saw the mess–the spattering of blood on the bed and the metal bar, but not on the Chair. It stood by itself, looking innocent in all this somehow. She didn’t believe Irving’s letter and warnings to her, not really, but she grabbed the Chair, dragging it on the floor, where it bumped against Ellie’s Bible. The Chair moved a bit, like it was avoiding it.
“Curious, Ellie picked up her Bible, and placed it on the Chair. A short wailing noise loud enough to carry across the neighborhood emerged from the Chair, but otherwise nothing happened. Ellie brought it outside to her back yard.
“She went into the shed and pulled out a hack saw, something she’d never used, but had seen Phil use a hundred times. She made quick work of it, tipping the Chair on its side like an injured animal and began sawing one of the legs, back and forth, back and forth.
“Minutes went by, and she checked the saw’s teeth, which were razor-sharp. Nonetheless, Ellie kept sawing. Sawing through the tears that came, sawing until her hands bled. The metal teeth were leveled off and flattened out by the wood—the saw didn’t make a lick of difference. The Chair remained intact, like it was brand new, not a dent or a scratch on it.
“The next day, Ellie took the Chair to the local dump, and had the manager, an old family friend named Roy, see to it that the chair was placed into the crusher machine. She persuaded him to include the Chair in the next crush.
“Ellie placed the Chair into a hollowed-out pickup truck. Roy operated a large magnet, which hovered over the truck like a small UFO. It latched onto the roof, and carried it to a small rectangular area as big as a parking spot, where it dropped the truck from about ten feet.
“The damned Chair remained on its side. There was no bounce.
“The large metal walls on each side of the cabin slowly moved their way in, and Ellie stood on a stray tire to get a better view of the wreckage. Every inch of the metal folded under the pressure of the walls. Just a little bit more…
“Roy began fumbling with the switch. Ellie heard the motors whir to life on and off again, and again—then nothing as the power seemed to cry out as it died.
“Ellie jumped down from the tire and ran to the flatbed.
“Stuck perfectly in place between the crusher’s walls was the Chair, of course. Roy blamed the controls for being wonky, and Ellie didn’t contradict him as she grabbed the Chair and left before it could do any further damage.
“Over the years, Ellie tried to destroy it a few other times with the same result, but at some point, she just gave up and kept it in her garage, where it could do the least damage. That was, until it was passed to me,” Uncle Alan finished.
***
He turned to face me.
“Everyone in this family, Ben, has had it. It’s our curse, and continues to be,” he said.
I stayed silent.
“Here—let me show you this,” Uncle Alan said. He passed me a brittle slip of browned paper with faded ink.
“This is how the Chair actually came to be,” he said. “It’s a letter written by your great-grandpa Irving. He was only nine years old when he first saw it—and what happened is in there—please just read it, Ben. As soon as you can.” I looked over the paper once I arrived home and didn’t stop reading it until I was finished.
***
Dear Eleanor,
I hope to clear up what I’ve tried to explain for years to you. Please read what I’ve been through.
When I was all of nine, I was walking home from school one day and the wind was like knives in the air, stabbing me with ice!
The walk home from school was miles long, and my knapsack felt like bricks on my back. I saw the house that was easiest to notice, the one back a ways through a cluster of woods. A long driveway stuck out that hid the home from the rest of the world.
My toes had become numb, and I knew my face would look red and puffy.
I walked up to the door and rapped on it a few times. There was a pounding sound from inside that grew louder with every step, until the door swung open, and there stood a woman I didn’t wish to see. Her hair looked to be dried out with bark and mud, and her doughy skin reeked of rotting fish.
“Yes?” she asked, and her voice was surprisingly sweet.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” I said. “My name is Irving and I just need a moment of warmth, I’m freezing. It’s cold as the North Pole out here!” I wanted to say more, but didn’t get a chance; she plucked me out of the air and tossed me inside before slamming the door shut.
I took in my surroundings for a moment. All I could see were dim shades of brown and red; the walls were draped with those colors. I could hear young children laughing, probably five or so years old by the sound.
“Did you want to join the children? I’m sure they’d love to have some guests,” the woman said. I considered this, but only for a moment.
“No thank you,” I said, hiding my growing fear with the polite manners I knew from home.
Home seemed far away.
“Are you sure? I could bring you some hot cocoa! The kiddies love that stuff!” she said.
Though my fingers and toes were still numb, I wanted nothing more than to leave. The open space had shrunk in an instant, and I ran down the narrow main hallway. The woman didn’t give chase or say anything, didn’t react in any way.
The hallway seemed to go on forever, but I ran down it, through the kitchen, and burst out into the backyard, or something like it.
It was a small clearing surrounded by giant trees; little crosses that I figured were graves stood in the center.
Then I saw the garage.
There was a weathered garage door in front, one without a lock. I turned the nearly-frozen knob and was glad to find the inside a bit warmer, and empty.
There was another door in the back which was some kind of extra storage shed, bare empty, save one item, smack dab in the center; a small wooden chair that clashed with everything else.
Through the garage and kitchen window, I could see the woman, and she saw me.
“NO! Don’t you dare move that chair! Stay away from it!” the woman yelled, but there was no sweetness in her voice anymore. She sounded terrified. I still kept my wits as much as I could.
“Just let me go!” I yelled. “I wanna go home!”
“We was trying to get you safe! No matter! Just stay away from that chair, don’t tell me you sat on it now!” she said.
“So what if I did!” I said, and kicked it. What good was worrying about an ugly little chair? To my surprise, the leg, ready to crumble, was stronger than steel, and stood firm from my foot. I stubbed my toe, hard!
“NO!” she yelled. Her scream startled me, and I fell off balance at once, tripping and kicking my legs to keep upright. “You touched that thing! You take it with you, and you gotta leave now!” she cried. The children, still hidden, had resumed their giggling.
Though the Chair was light as a feather. I took and went down the driveway to the road, where I tossed it into a small snowbank. The chair toppled back down to the road, but I didn’t care, I was walking away.
All at once the world shook in a sonic boom.
I nearly jumped out of my freezing skin and turned around. In front of me on the road sat a Chevy pickup truck, at least a year old, maybe a ’27, and it laid on its side. The engine, what was left of it, looked like a glob of some kind, a mass of smoke pouring from the exhaust. My eyes were too busy looking at all the blood. The front glass window, dusty with snow, now appeared black cherry. A long smear that began in the driver seat slid to the left, the head a paint brush, growing darker with every inch, until the crimson smear was as dark as the night sky. That’s where I saw the man’s head. It didn’t move.
The whole front end was misshapen by what looked like a cluster of anvils. Despite the fog of my nervous memory, I saw what caused the accident, clear as day; I just didn’t believe it.
The police arrived a while later. Their questioning took a while, but my mind was only busy with one thing, anyways.
When school was released for the holidays, I snuck down the road to the house that I remembered.
The Chair remained as it was, like some invisible fortress had protected it this whole time, and I grabbed it and huffed it back toward the house.
I didn’t bother knocking that time, and tossed the Chair to the side of the porch, next to a wooden rocking swing, and left in a hurry. That was all I needed to do. It wasn’t until the New Year that I received the news, after father picked up the local paper and glanced upon the headline, repeating it to us.
There was an enormous fire on New Year’s, one that claimed the lives of everyone inside the mystery house. The woman, whose name I never read, her five children, and husband, sick from polio—all of them died. I was to learn later that the entire property was engulfed in flame, and not many items survived; in fact, only one. I didn’t have to guess at what it was.
The Chair was gone from my memory until June, when the sun’s rise meant warm weather and chores that built up a heavy sweat.
I was tending to the garden out back when I saw Pa with it. He was talking to Fire Chief Williams, half of his face disfigured from something I hadn’t heard about, but then, didn’t need to (though I learned later it was from an explosion uptown). The Chair sat in his pickup still as brand-new looking as ever.
About a mile back from the property was an old well, boxed off from the public due to Mrs. Heckam’s tumble last winter that wound up bringing her round to the wheelchair. Using Pa’s toolbox, I snuck out into the shed and grabbed a few things—crowbars, screws, and whatnot—plus the Chair, which had been sitting near the back porch.
The Chair was even lighter than I remembered it. I ran with it to the well, and jimmied the latch with ease, thinking I was not the only one who had done this. With almost no effort, I threw the cursed thing down, hearing it splash, then silence. I waited a moment, expecting something terrible to happen, but nothing did. I locked the cover back up, and ran back home.
Pa was furious. He asked where the Chair was, and I lied and said I burned it, and he didn’t believe me. I wound up bruised and purple—but the Chair was gone, which was a fine trade-off to me.
It thought it’d come back anyways. This time it didn’t. Pa wound up catching a bout of pneumonia and passed before I was done with high school. Ma went off to live in warmer climates by then, down to the Florida Keys. I went to school up in Boston and found your beautiful mother Renee there along with my degree. I was probably as old as my father was, 38, when I saw it again.
We were selling the old homestead off, and your grandmother wanted nothing to do with it. What was left of the rickety foundation was little more than rubble, but your mother and I cleaned it up anyways. While we were finishing up, I heard a bulldozer from Mrs. Heckam’s old property. Your mother and I walked through the woods to the clearing, and turns out we were right. Seeing the dozer heading toward the well, I tried to warn the operator, but was too late. The dozer broke through the rotted brick and hit something hard with a deafening clang.
I tried to convince myself it was anything other than the Chair, but knew better. The dozer toppled over in on itself like a bagpipe and your mother screamed. The man operating the dozer was able to jump out in time, before the metal collapsed and the dozer imploded.
The next day, after the debris was cleared, I saw it again. The Chair sat perfectly intact at the bottom of the well’s ruins, mint condition as always.
That night, not being able to sleep, I told your mother the truth.
“I swear, that’s the damnedest thing I ever heard! Evil chair. And what are its powers?” she asked, annoyed. I stayed silent.
“Exactly. Did you ever think that this was all coincidence?” she asked. I told her everything—the flattened truck, the explosion, the house where I found it, and as I went on I could see in her eyes she knew I wasn’t lying. After I was done she helped me down into the well and grab the damned thing. I heaved it back into the pickup and brought it home with us, sight unseen.
“Why don’t you just set it ablaze?” she asked me as we arrived home.
“Fire won’t do it. It probably likes the flames,” I responded.
As far as I could tell, the Chair was always safe and secure when it was under my provision, even if that meant being down in the well. I couldn’t trust anyone with it, until I came across a relative who I knew could handle it.
We kept it in our crawl space in the basement for years. Your mother said that one year she placed her box with her Christmas village of Bethlehem next to it, and the next day saw that the Chair had moved to the other side of the basement. Other than that, nothing much happened, for which I was thankful.
After your mother passed from a heart attack last February, I began to worry again, thinking of the Chair the whole time. I began to worry daily about what to do with it, who to give it to, and it hurt that I always knew it would have to be you, Eleanor. You’re one of the best, most decent souls I know, and this will be a heavy burden, but please. Please try and destroy it.
In my Will I bequeathed the house and everything in it. The crawl space houses the recliner of Satan himself, unbreakable and capable of destroying everything it touches. If you do not believe me, throw the cursed thing into a fire, it’s the safest way to prove I’m right. I pray someday you will destroy it and return it to Hell.
Yours,
Irving/dad
***
I saw Uncle Alan the next day.
“How did Great-grandpa Irving die?” I asked.
“Heart attack, not long after he updated his Will with the Chair. He passed at 44, and the Chair went to Ellie. A few years ago, she passed it to me,” Uncle Alan said. “She’s still kicking, though.”
“Wait—has anyone actually ever sat in the Chair?” I asked, and Uncle Alan shook his head.
“Not that I know of. Would you ever want to? I’d do a lot of terrible things to myself before I did that.” He leaned forward to me. “Listen, Ben—it has to be you, and it has to be soon, before it hurts someone else,” Uncle Alan said.
I left the hospital without another word, more determined than ever to marry Abby, damn the consequences.
***
“Which brings us to today,” I told Seth, who nodded, his eyes wide. I checked my watch. Twelve minutes left. I sighed a deep breath and headed out the back door of the changing room.
A small dirt trail had been strewn together out of nature and through well-trodden tracks to the small lake behind the church, calming and peaceful. I saw a number of fisherman out there, enjoying the late summer sun, casting their lines, sipping their beers. There were grunts to match the cicadas’ volume, but otherwise not a sound. That serenity got me thinking.
There were ten minutes left until the ceremony.
I ran back inside sanctuary, cutting through the masses to the narthex and the table filled with wedding gifts—all were wrapped, save one. I grabbed it and went toward the door.
Great-grandpa Irving was right; this awful thing was light as a feather.
“So… having a sit? Gonna go fishing? Ok, look, I know we were all joking about the booze and stuff, but have another sip or something before Abby kills you!” Seth said. We’d reached the lake and were walking on the dock now. I wished I knew how deep the water was.
“Are you listening, Ben? Snap out of it!” Seth said, worried as I’d ever seen him. It made me realize how ridiculous I looked, and how close I was to ruining my tux. Sighing, I placed the Chair down and sat on it. It was more comfortable than I expected, like sitting on plush velvet.
Immediately an uncomfortable heat rose up inside me—and I saw things clear in my mind. There was blood—buckets of it, spilled out over a living room floor—the floor of the new house that Abby and I had just moved into a few months ago. The wooden panels were drenched in it. I couldn’t see whose blood it was.
A flash, and I now saw a gravestone under a cloudy sky. It was Uncle Alan’s grave, next to Aunt Eloise. Next to Great-grandpa Irving. The space next to Uncle Alan’s…
There was no time to think. Now I saw Abby, sleepy-eyed and beautiful in our bed, waking up next to—Seth. They seemed content there, not a care in the world.
That did it.
I screamed until my throat burned raw and pulled myself from the Chair. The visions stopped. I’d never been so exhausted; my whole body was covered in sweat.
“Dude! Come on, man! You look…” Seth said, and all I saw was fear and a mild panic, no evidence of anything approaching what I just saw.
The bourbon flask was still in my breast pocket. I opened it, took another swig, and poured what was left of it all over the Chair.
“Seriously? That was pricey! What’s gotten into you?” Seth asked. I stayed silent as I grabbed my lucky lighter and set a nearby tree branch alight.
“Are you doing what I think you’re doing? Have you lost your mind?” Seth asked. I didn’t answer, and tossed the lit branch on the Chair without another thought.
As if the branch had been doused with liquid hydrogen, the embers died off in a flash. Seth didn’t notice this; he’d devolved into panic mode.
“Think about how crazy you look!” Seth said. “Just what…” he looked at his watch.
“Holy crap, Ben!” he cried. “You have like a minute!”
“Wait,” I said. “What’d you just say?”
“You’re officially late, that’s what! This is not gonna be on me!” Seth said. He grabbed my arm and yanked me with him, but I pulled back.
“WAIT!” I yelled. “You said ‘holy crap’.”
“Yeah, so?” Seth asked.
Holy.
I grabbed the Chair again and, reeking of sweat and expensive bourbon, we made our way into the sanctuary. Mrs. Hale, the organist near the back door, gave me the stink eye upon our entrance, but I didn’t care.
I looked past all the other faces, most confused at my disheveled appearance, to Abby, who wore a polite smile on her face.
My head was still spinning, but I was going to marry Abby today.
I took a deep breath, closed my eyes for a moment, and looked beyond Pastor Carl, who seemed as confused as anyone, toward the altar right behind him.
“Dude, keep it together…” Seth began, but I cut him off by swinging the Chair around, all of it. By itself, the Chair moved. It shot out of my hands like a polarized magnet away from the altar, and sped through the air toward the back door, which was hit with a loud clang that reverberated throughout the sanctuary.
“COME ON!” I yelled to Seth, and he joined me as we both grabbed the legs of the Chair, burning hot, but the two of us pulled it from the door.
Maybe it was getting weaker, I don’t know.
At this point half of those in attendance had pulled out their phones to video this, while others were running away. Abby stayed where she was, an eyebrow raised in confusion.
I pulled The Chair harder, heaving all my weight, and the resistance grew stronger with every foot. Seth was losing his grip, and so was I. Our hands might as well have been burning; the Chair was piping hot.
A jolt, and my arms flung forward, nearly popping out of their sockets.
“SORRY!” Seth yelled from behind me. The Chair moved like a shot back to the door, and my whole body ached from the struggle. I felt if I held on, I’d crash right into the door at fifty miles an hour. Most of the witnesses were running out of the sanctuary by now, another victory for the Chair.
My fingers loosened and I felt another jolt, this one toward me. I turned my head and saw Abby, red-faced and beautiful, both hands tight around the leg Seth had been grabbing. She was more determined than shocked by what was happening.
“Where to?” she asked.
“Up to the altar!” I said, surprised at how weak my voice had become. We pulled and pulled. Abby had kicked off her shoes and was digging into the carpet as I was. It appeared to be working. We made our way toward the altar.
Just a few feet shy of it, the Chair pulled away again with another jolt of energy.
“NO!” I yelled, and trudged all my body weight toward the center of the altar, Abby right in line with me.
The legs made contact with the wooden floor of the altar and fell off first, knocking the floor with loud thunks. They sounded like bowling balls dropped from ten feet.
The seat came next, with a thunderous thud that shook the stained glass windows around us, followed by the back seat and that ugly face with the hollowed eyes. They fell at once, nearly in unison.
I looked at Abby, and down at our hands, still throbbing red from the heat.
I wrapped my right hand with my tie and grabbed the seat of the Chair but screamed, dropping it again—only this time it landed right on the altar steps.
The parts all began to disintegrate, and fast too, a time lapse of decay in seconds, until the Chair was nothing but an ashy pile of wood— and even that decomposed with startling speed. Within seconds, nothing was left.
There was a moment of silence, and then we were both laughing. Abby’s ever-present smile was back.
“All good now?” she asked. I nodded.
Uncle Alan was the only witness left in the pews. He stood up and hobbled to the altar where the Chair had been moments before, then moved the toe of his sneaker around the carpet, like he was testing the water temperature at a pool—but not a trace of it remained, not a particle. He looked up at the wide ceiling, and back down at us in the aisle. Up again to the heavens, and back down to us.
“Well, what do ya know?” he said, laughing. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
Sean Gallagher received a BA in English from Hope College in 2004. He has self-published two books on Amazon, and has had works published by Adelaide Literary Magazine and CafeLit Magazine. He lives in Mesa, Arizona.
