The first failure, Antun

The messenger was given an address by way of pushed note under his wooden door.

The messenger had been dreaming of owls and capes. In his dream he saw a revolver go off inside the owl’s cape. The revolver made a coughing sound and the wounded owl opened his mouth and made a sound like paper being pushed across a floor.

The messenger woke, blew out the candle on his nightstand, and saw a white pamphlet inside a large sheet of brown paper on the floor.

The person outside the door had a dream the night before too. It was of rainbow colored blobs falling from a pea-green sky.

Antun was the messenger’s name. Two pastel blue-colored triangles were stuck on his face.

The message read:

Enclosed pamphlet, please find necessary information to relay to seamstress — Yours Truly.

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Twenty-two year old Virgil sits with Anette, the second girl he’s ever been with, at a table in the back corner of her favorite sushi restaurant, the one he hates. It’s a busy place, and a line for the unisex bathroom starts to form right next to their table as soon as they pick up their menus. The people in line have nothing to do but look at them and look away, sheep-faced, as though they’re ashamed of having to pee or whatever it is they’ve lined up to do. Anette usually has to go a lot, every twenty minutes or so, and she wants to be right there when the last person goes in. Strategic. He used to think he liked girls who could drink hard, but that was back when girls didn’t want to sleep with him, and he hadn’t even thought about the mess. All the pissed jeans and late-night puke, thick and stinking of rust, not to mention morning puke, toxic leftovers that simmered at the bottom of an empty stomach and rose up watery and fluorescent, like mercury. When she started coming around, he thought pretending not to mind her messes could be his way of expressing intimacy, since they weren’t really talking to each other yet. But after a few months, he started to wonder how intimate he wanted them to be.

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I counted telephone poles sticking up from the ground and the seconds in between them. The old highway cut straight through the sand, and it seemed the road would go on forever. No curves. No hills. Just poles.

I’m not sure when she changed. After kids, I suppose. She didn’t smile very often, joked even less. I looked over to watch her drive. Not even a blink. Just a stare, dry like the desert, untouchable like a cactus. I wanted to say something, but I knew she only wanted to drive, to hide behind the wheel, an excuse to concentrate, a reason to focus on something other than me. Maybe I had changed, too. I went back to the poles.

She once asked me to keep her young. “There’s not much I can do about aging,” I said. So she asked me to keep her youthful. “That, I can try.” But the truth is, she’s the one who kept me youthful.

I remember days in the park, the grocery, the doctor’s office, it didn’t matter where, everyone we saw was someone else. We spent hours inventing stories about people, who they really were, what their lives were like. She got the idea from a Simon and Garfunkel song. “See that woman over there,” she said in the checkout line. “She’s having an affair with her tango instructor. Her husband knows it, too. But he’s sleeping with his secretary.” She looked at me, and waited to see what I would say.

“Do you think they know?” I asked.

“Know what?”

“Do you think they know that her tango instructor is married to his secretary?”

She kissed me, right there in the checkout line, for a long time. And that’s how it started. That’s how everyone we saw became someone else.

I tired of the poles and wanted to turn on the radio, but I figured no stations were in reach. I also figured she would turn it off if I found one. I wanted to talk or break something.

I must have dozed off because I don’t remember stopping. I woke to an empty car, still running, her door open. I jumped out, looked around, and found her standing in the sand some ways away. I walked to where she was but let her speak first. She stood in front of a cactus, prickly in bloom.

“They’re spies,” she said.

I waited.

“They’re spies from another planet, sent here to watch us. See those flowers,” she said. “Those flowers aren’t really flowers.”

It was my turn. “No, they’re not. They’re communication devices used to send information back to their home planet. Information they gather throughout the year.”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s what they are. Communication devices.”

I wanted to ask where she had gone.

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Foster Trecost began writing in Italy and continues today from Philadelphia. Paying jobs have him occasionally working within various aspects of corporate tax, with Europe filling the gaps in between. His stories have appeared or will appear in elimae, Pequin, Metazen, decomP, and LitSnack, among other places.

Gupta was in the file room. It was a Tuesday. He said, “That’s it. I’m done making copies. I’m never going to make another copy again in my life, Gupta.” He called everyone Gupta. But himself especially. Gupta was A number 1 Gupta, and the rest followed, as when he wanted an omelet and set out in his loafers, treading the sidewalks of town for a good breakfast shop, and there weren’t any breakfast shops but only car dealerships and donut nooks and pizza delivery stations. It was that kind of town. But there was a supermercado, into which he ducked for eggs and peppers, but they didn’t have anything but white sticks of cheese, so he settled for that. Probably the best thing Gupta was good at — besides throwing horseshoes like he was ringing a tree — was settling for what immediately lay before him, as on his sixteenth birthday when it was an open road, and his seventeenth, a girl named Mabel with orange-Crush curls and on his thirtieth, a toilet that needed brushing out. Gupta almost never brushed anything but his hair, which he did because there wasn’t any alternative if he was going to leave the house, and Gupta left the house oftener than anyone. Gupta left the house just to leave the house. He would go to the park and take his shoes off, and try to stand straighter than any man, to stand so straight that all the cricks in his vertebrae ironed out. Gupta had a desk job, which despite his ergonomically-friendly chair, caused him such lamentable compression that when he got home he flung himself from the house again. “I am alive, goddamn it!” he would say to himself, “there must be a reason for it.” And he would walk the streets of town, which could have been any town, except that it was duller,  more faded-curtains at the edges, more doddering with old folks, who, God bless them, smell. Like cooked cabbage and old sweaters and beans because they can’t eat anything crisper than wilted lettuce, which they cook in bacon grease when the temperature drops below 90 degrees. “Ick,” Gupta would say when the wind wafted from his neighbors like a diner that sold Mr. Pibb and hamburger steaks. Gupta was an elitist. Quite by accident, or of his own accord, because his mother raised him to eat what was put before him, which he managed to do in life but not in meat.  Gupta had this theory, which he could tell was coming true, that if you watched what you took into yourself, the world came too. Like if you looked far enough into a honeycomb of okra, you could see Io, the third of Galileo’s four Jupiter moons, who, from the lava lake center of herself, glowed.

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Amy Wright is the author of two chapbooks, There Are No New Ways To Kill A Man, and Farm. Her work also appears in a number of journals including American Letters & Commentary, Quarterly West, and Ribot 6. She is the Prose Editor of Zone 3 magazine and Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Austin Peay State University.

They point me to the black boy sitting dead on the porch swing with a post up his shirt and they tell me to sit down beside him. “He is your brother,” they say. “You will surely miss him.”

I stare them in their eyes, craning my neck, which makes my too-small suit cling to me all over, and the blazing blinding sun is a half-circle under the raised rim of my hat, and as I ball my fists I feel my cuffs creep slowly up my arms. He stinks. He is a nigger. I will not sit beside that body. I tell them, fairly shouting, “HE IS NOT MY BROTHER.”

I will not sit beside that body.

The camera man arranges lights outside the frame of his picture. He lights a lamp and hangs it up above the swing. He lights and hangs another. I don’t know why he bothers. The body will be a shadow in the print — it will be a silhouette. No matter how he lights the body it will look the same.

Mama kneels to meet my eyes. She fusses with my too-small coat. She says, “Don’t you speak that way of him. You were raised together from the crib. We bought him the day you were born, we bought him so that you might have a friend. He played your games with you, and he joined you in your studies. He was with you every day, in everything, and he slept in the same room, in his own bed beside your bed.” She smooths my cotton collared shirt and pulls a loose thread from beside the topmost button. “Do not tell me that you have no brother.”

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