Tag: SANTINOPRINZI’SPERCEPTIONS

The Shadow

Burning made me feel alive. Pain provided me with a passing, excruciating escape from the bombastic blissfulness of life. Everybody was happy, but nobody knew why. The faces strolling past me shone with hedonistic delight and perplexed enchantment. Vapors of gray smoke wafted around our heads, obscuring the hidden truth of the City, hiding the truth of us. Nobody knew what caused the happiness. Nobody knew what caused the pain. We roamed the deserted streets of the dark, looking for the cause, searching for the cure. We allowed the night to null our hearts together, following the eternal lights of the City to the inevitable end. They showed us the way to nowhere.

The tower across the water pulsed its precious lights constantly, casting the City in continuous illumination. The harbor bustled with movement, the darkened outlines of boats creeping inwards from the black ocean. The skyscrapers stabbed the sky; the opaque clouds choked the shining stars above. A chill mist permeated the air. A steamy fog lurked down every hollow alley and silent street. It was always dark in the City. The sun never stabbed its way through the stagnant gray clouds, and if it occasionally did, the light was fleeting and faint.

I was burning inside. Like the inexplicable happiness of pain, I couldn’t explain it. I had given up trying to understand my condition. I should be happy like everyone else. No one wore their dismay during the night. We wore our dismay during the day, when the lights hid the pain. I hadn’t always possessed the pain. I wandered the streets each night in search of the cure.

Something nefarious, growing, spreading, was gnawing at my heart. I searched for freedom and the cure, but neither existed in the City. They likely existed somewhere, hidden in a crevice, a dank alley, a defeated den, but the City was too great to ever have a chance at finding it.

The City was large and we were small. We looked, but we would never find it. We all were prisoners of the City, chained to our hopeless pursuit of the cure, chained to each other, chained to ourselves. We followed the blazing lights, but we were all lost. The way was illuminated with the false lights of the City, but our paths were dark. We were lost, searching the sea of suffering and uncertainty for something, anything to diminish the pain.

I followed the cold lights to a dimly lit bar on the west side of the City. The place was faintly lit. I liked the dim lights more than the bright ones. The bright ones made me feel anxious and exposed. People could see me too clearly in the bright lights. The place was buzzing with enigmatic exhilaration; there was something alive in here, but none us knew what it was. I waded through the surging crowd towards the bar. People noticed my passing. They could sense my sickness. They could feel the burning inside me; they could sense my suffering. People noticed me and parted in my path.

I saw a small shape creep out of the back door onto the balcony. I knew that shadow. I recognized that shy walk. I fought through the crowd, following the shadow. Everyone was raging in bizarre delight. Their incomprehensible faces showed their sickness, but I could tell none of them were as sick as me. Nobody knew me here, but they all noticed me. A few attempted to shake my sallow hand and strike up conversation as I passed. I did not want to get to know them. I wanted to find the shadow that I knew. The shadow would save me.

The shadow hid on the edge of the balcony, peering out at the blazing skyline of the city. The black bay sat completely still; the water reflected the scintillating stars of the heavens above and absorbed the hazy gaze of the veiled moon. I tried to swallow the stale air. The tumultuous din of the people inside grew fainter. There was no else on the balcony except us. They could feel my sickness and they avoided me. The shadow did not move.

I sat down next to her, unable to breathe. She did not notice me.

“I’m sick,” I told her, exhaling the words as I gulped down the perfume-permeated air around her.

“I know,” she replied, never breaking her gaze from the flickering skyline across the dead water.

I watched the shimmering skyline with her and it reminded of a distant time long ago before I was sick. We sat there for an eternity and watched the City burn slowly with lingering light. We loathed the City, but it was our City. It was all we knew. It was the only thing that remained of us. We didn’t touch, but we could imagine. We watched the lights dancing across the water and imagined. We remembered.

She did not say anything more. I could not say anything because I could not breathe in her suffocating shadow. Besides, I had nothing to say. I was sick and that was all.

I got up and left the balcony. As I exited the bustling bar everybody noticed my passing. She did not.

***

Conner is a twenty-one year old English major pursuing a career in writing and academia. He is currently a senior at Birmingham-Southern College planning to obtain an M.F.A. in Creative Writing and Ph.D. in English Literature. He has been published in 221 Magazine and The Copperfield Review in prose and Transcendent Zero Press’s Harbinger Asylum in poetry. Additionally, his novel was considered in the First Annual Young National Writers Contest at age sixteen.

Starter Problems

By Kitty Shields

         I am not making it to graduation on time, I thought, watching the fight outside escalate.

        A black woman with a colorful head wrap on, and a big bag filled with daily life, came into the shop and right up to me.

        “You better come outside and get your friend,” she said, gesturing at the scene just outside the window.

        Bill was in the guy’s face, nearly touching chest to chest as they practiced their best Tarzan impressions on each other. Bill’s opponent had a solid fifty pounds and maybe two inches on him, but I wasn’t worried about it. Bill could handle himself in a fight. Plus, I was tired of apologizing for his temper. And I was hungover.

        “Honestly,” I said, “I can’t talk him down once he starts. Maybe he’ll listen to you.”

        The woman’s eyes widened. She hadn’t been expecting that answer, or for me to shove the responsibility off on her. Shoving responsibility off—one of the things I learned in college.

        “He’s got a bottle,” she said, gesturing again. “You’re lucky he doesn’t have a gun.”

        Bill’s opponent hadn’t had the bottle when I’d gotten out of the car.

        Traffic, man, it drives everyone fucking crazy. That’s what had started the whole mess.

        Bill had picked me up this morning because the starter on my hand-me-down minivan was acting up again. He took me to grab my paycheck, and I promised him a cheesesteak in return. I was really grateful for the ride. Because I was hungover, I also needed the cheesesteak. Badly.  

        Anyway, we were half a block away from our favorite neighborhood hoagie shop when the driver in front of us stopped dead in the middle of the street. Bill leaned out the window and cursed at the driver. Obviously, that didn’t make things better. It certainly didn’t make the dead car magically start.

        A guy leaned out of the passenger seat window and started flipping us off and swearing in Spanish. Not a surprise in this neighborhood. I would have done the same thing. Hell, my grandmother would have done the same thing. Cause that’s what you did in Philly. So would Bill, if the positions were switched. That didn’t stop Bill from leaning out his window to return the favor. And Bill’s Spanish was pretty good. To be fair, there were four cars behind us waiting, too. The douchebag and his girlfriend, who was the driver, were holding up traffic.

        A fight was inevitable at that point. Before the chest banging and clenched fists could start, I told Bill I was going to walk to grab our sandwiches. He nodded mid “pinche idiota” and continued on with the back and forth. I hopped out of the car and walked the fifty feet to the sandwich shop as the shouting escalated in volume. I glanced into the car as I passed and saw the girlfriend frantically trying to restart the car. Starter problems—seems like we all have them.

        By the time I ordered, the girlfriend had managed to turn the engine over. She immediately pulled off to the curb and got out her phone. I saw her hit her boyfriend, the Spanish curser, on the shoulder a few times while she dialed for help. Bill pulled over too, at the opposite corner right outside the shop window. The waiting cars zoomed by, but by some unspoken macho agreement, both Bill and the Spanish curser exited their vehicles to meet in the middle of the sidewalk and resume their screaming match. It was a hot mix of English and Spanish, and I’m sure Bill’s language teacher would have been horrified by it. I was kind of impressed.  

        As the fight raged, I saw the girlfriend in the driver’s seat talking rapidly into her phone, gesturing at the dashboard like the person on the other end could see it. About the time the black lady came in asking me to intervene, the girlfriend hung up and got out of the car.

        The black lady abandoned me in the shop. Obviously, she thought I was a lost cause, not untrue really, and went back outside to the bus stop to enlist someone else. She convinced an older gentleman with a wool cap on and a weary-worn middle-aged man to approach the combatants. ‘Combatants’ may be a strong word. No one had thrown a punch yet. The Spanish curser held an empty bottle of Jack in his hand. Nothing like getting a good buzz on before eleven a.m., I guess. He waved it around a lot, but, like Bill, I knew that if he hadn’t used it yet, he wasn’t going to. Besides, Bill wasn’t backing down.

        I wasn’t sure if that was stupidity or youthful recklessness on Bill’s part. I was pretty sure he was going to die at some point from this kind of behavior. He fought at every party, every bar we went to. It was compulsive. Really, I wondered what he was battling, but we didn’t talk about that stuff.

        Maybe it was the fact that he was pretty ordinary—the plight of a suburban white kid with no talents or problems to separate him from the rest. Hell, he didn’t even have any good manias to make him interesting. I liked him because of that, of course, but then most of my family was batshit crazy. Between my bipolar mother who only took pills when the moon was high, my closet alcoholic father who only drank flavored vodka, and my seven siblings, finding normal was like finding a unicorn.

        It must be tough to be normal, I thought. The only thing Bill had going for him was the band. And only drumming seemed to keep him level. We needed to have band practice more.

        “Two cheesesteaks are up,” the guy behind the counter said.

        I walked over and grabbed the two sandwiches and a bottle of soda, paid, and went back to the window.

        The bottle of Jack was on the curb now, unbroken, and the bus stop people plus the girlfriend were trying to herd the opponents away from each other. Bill was standing near the corner, stone solid, ignoring the older gentleman who was trying to talk him down. He’d stopped shouting. Now he just watched the Spanish curser who circled clumsily around, trying to find a way back to him through the crowd. Bill never punched first. Again, no idea why. If he wanted a fight so badly, why didn’t he just go in fists a-blazing and be done with it?

        I wondered why the Spanish curser hadn’t thrown either. Then I saw the bags under his eyes and the greenish tint of his skin. He was either hungover as fuck, like me, drunk still, or sick. Either way, he was probably not feeling as confident as he wanted. Plus, Bill’s fearlessness was obviously throwing him off. It was a little funny to watch.

        I wondered if I should head outside. Instead, I opened my soda and took a sip. It was delicious. If I went out and helped end this now, I would get to graduation on time. I had mixed feelings on the subject.

        Bill wasn’t walking in the ceremony today. He’d completed college. He could walk, he just wasn’t. When I’d asked him why, he’d said, “Fuck that shit, you know, man?” When I told him I was walking, he said, “I’m really proud of you, bro,” and gave me a fist bump. Bill was a complicated guy.

        I knew I should walk. My parents had paid like a million dollars for me to get my shiny piece of paper. Plus, I’d dragged myself out of bed. I was awake now even if I was hungover. I had sugar in my system. I was about to have an awesome cheesesteak, and I had brushed my hair like I promised my dad I would. I should walk—

        —but starter problems.

        I burst out laughing. In his clumsy, half-drunken circling, the Spanish curser had been concentrating so hard on mean-mugging Bill that he hadn’t watched where he was going and tripped on the curb. He tried to play it off, but no one was fooled. Bill shook his head and walked back to the car. The bus stop patrol went back to the corner, and a tow truck arrived. The fight was officially over.

        The poor Spanish curser was left alone at the curb, looking like a moron. I felt a little bad for him, but was more concerned with the fact that I was now back to making it to graduation on time. Well, maybe it would be good to have some closure to college or whatever. Maybe I would feel like the past four years was worth something when they handed me that piece of paper. Probably not, but there was always hope.

        I just had no idea what I was going to do after walking across that temporary stage today. I sighed and checked the time. There was no avoiding it now. I was going to make it to graduation on time.

        With cheesesteaks in hand, I walked outside and slid into the passenger side of the car.

        “Dude, did you see that guy trip on the curb?” Bill asked as I handed him his sandwich.

        I laughed again. “That was the best part.”

        Bill looked refreshed after his fight. I wish I felt that good.

        “Come on, though, I got to get to the ceremony,” I said.

        “Right, right,” Bill said. “You nervous?”

        “No, man,” I lied. “Just want to get it done.”

        Bill nodded and opened his soda, taking a sip as the smell of the fried onions filled the car. “Well,” he said. “Just don’t trip on a step and you’ll be fine.”

        If only it were that easy, I thought.

        “Actually,” Bill said, “that would be a great way to end things. I mean, you’re going to start at the bottom again anyway. Might as well get it over with.”

        “That was almost a deep thought,” I said.

        Bill grinned and shrugged. “I almost learned to think deep in college.”

        We both laughed.

***

Kitty Shields lives in Philadelphia, where she writes to try and overcome the fact that she was born a middle child with large feet and freckles. She graduated from Arcadia University with an MFA in Creative Writing in 2015. She has been published in After Happy Hour Review, Furious Gazelle, and Dark Fire Fiction. You can find her at kittyshields.com or @kittyshields on Instagram.

Set in Place

He awoke slowly, as if he had somehow been placed under a curse, and so had slept for a hundred years. The last thing he remembered – he wheeled around; was Angelo still behind him with his piece?

“Would you stand still? How can I put these in if you won’t stand still?”

Who would have thought he’d long for Angelo and his piece? He stared at the face in the mirror and burst into tears.

“Would you like me to give you something to cry about?” the woman demanded. “Hold still.”

“Take them out,” he told her between gasps, but it wasn’t his own voice speaking. It was the voice of the child he saw standing in the mirror, and he looked down and saw that he was that child, balanced on a chair with that child’s mother behind him as she gathered his dark curls into two ponytails and tied them with red gingham bows to match the red gingham short set he had on.

“You look so cute!” the mother said, smiling, and she picked him up and placed him on the floor.  “Why don’t you go out and see if Jeffrey will play?”

He wasn’t even big enough to see himself in the mirror, once he was on the floor. He glanced down at the sturdy, tanned legs that were supposed to be his, and the tiny feet encased in red leather sandals. His nonna had been right – curses were real. Angelo hadn’t shot him with the piece. He hadn’t died in Joey Lupo’s car, being driven to Red Hook, where they were going to throw his body into the Gowanus Canal. He’d been consigned to some sort of hell, the same Hell his nonna and Father St Onge had always warned him about. Only Hell wasn’t flames and physical agony. Hell was being in a body that wasn’t yours, wearing a red gingham short set with bows in your hair.

He didn’t know what else to do, so he walked out of the small bedroom and followed the long hall, down the stairs to the living room. There was a baby in a cot in the center of the room on a braided rug, and he glanced at it. He felt nothing, looking at it. He supposed it was a pretty baby, with pink skin and white-blonde curls, but he’d cared little about kids before and he didn’t think he would care about them now.

He opened the screen door. It was hot, hotter than it had any right to be for Brooklyn, and yet this was obviously not Brooklyn. He was in a postage-stamp sized yard, the kind they had in the back on President Street, with a fence and a gate. The yard faced an alley, and there were houses all around it, attached to one another, sort of like the ones in Bay Ridge, but without the red-tiled roofs. These places were cheap, cheaply-made and cheaply-kept. He heard a lawn mower somewhere, and kids yelling, and traffic; the brakes of a city bus.

A boy came to the gate, dressed in seersucker shorts and a white shirt.

“You wanna go to the creek?” the boy asked, swinging the gate back and forth.

He could barely understand what the kid was saying.  Nobody talked like this in Brooklyn, unless it was in the movies.

“No,” he said.  He wanted to hide.  Maybe if he hid somewhere, all of this, the strange houses, the cracker boy, the red gingham short set and the ponytails, maybe it would all go away if he gave it time.

“Aw, c’mon,” the boy said.  “You ain’t got nothin’ else to do.  I seen a frog.”

He thought, who the fuck cares?  “You talk funny,” he said.

The boy laughed.  “So do you.  My momma calls you that little Yankee child.”

He thought he’d sit down, but the stoop was too hot. “Okay,” he said. At least the creek would be cool.  He left the yard and walked with the boy down the sidewalk, the sun burning the back of his neck.  He could feel sweat running down his shoulder blades. He glanced at the boy, who seemed older, and taller, than he. The boy’s blond hair curled at the nape of his neck, and a trickle of sweat beaded on his upper lip.  It reminded him of Angelo, the way Angelo would sweat in the car as they sat in front of Joey’s house, the way Angelo’s sweat dripped on him as the fan in the motel room whirred uselessly.

Where the hell was this creek? His new legs were useless, short and stubby, and he didn’t really want to think about the other, newer parts of him that were useless too. “What’s your name?” he said, kicking a rock with his toe.

“We playin’ a game?” the boy asked.  “Mighty Mouse. And when we get to the creek, I’ll save you.”

“Don’t do me any favors, kid,” he said. “I can rescue myself.”

The boy laughed again. “You’re some crazy kid, you know that?”

He shrugged. They crossed a street and then the sidewalk began to curve down a slight incline. He saw the trees and the vacant lot at the end of the rows of houses, and then there was the creek disappearing under the intersection in a culvert. There were playing fields on the other side of the street, but he followed the boy into the vacant lot, dodging shopping carts and broken Coke bottles.

“Gimme your hand, Jilly,” the boy said, holding his hand out.  “I’ll make sure you don’t fall.”

He opened his mouth and then shut it. Maybe this world was real and maybe it wasn’t. But somehow he didn’t want to find out what would happen if he told the kid to go fuck himself. He took the boy’s hand, and surprisingly it was dry and warm and smelling of talcum powder, and he followed slowly down the scrubby hill to the creek, which was full of junk. He sat down on the cool ground and took the red sandals off.

“My name isn’t Jilly,” he told the boy. He slid into the water, which was running fast and cool.  He glanced around. The only frogs this kid had seen were in his imagination.

“Then my name ain’t Jeffrey,” the boy joked.

Jeffrey, he thought. That figured. He was trying to think of the word that described this – this cazzo – he couldn’t even think of the word in English – standing in a creek wearing red gingham with an eight-year-old finocchio who didn’t even know what he was.

“My name,” he announced, “is Enzo,” and then he remembered the word: surreal.

Life – his life – which had veered from normal to exciting to dangerous much too fast – had simply, in its end, become surreal.

***

Leslie E Owen grew up in Connecticut and spent most summers in Maine.  She graduated from the University of Arizona with a BA in Creative Writing and English Lit in 1980, moving to New York in 1981 to begin her thirty-four-year career in publishing.  She has been an acquisitions editor, international publishing representative, film scout, and freelance writer for the publishing trade.  Currently she runs a small literary agency and teaches exceptional education students in Florida.  She has been published by Tradewind Books, Crocodile Books, Jewish Monthly, Zoetrope, Publishers Weekly, the SCBWI Newsletter, and The Horn Book.  Most recently, she’s been writing about Star Trek, and she has appeared on the live radio show Tribbles and Trilobites, New York Cine Radio.  She is currently finishing a literary novel, The Mortal Part.