StaticMachine

Counting Heads

2012-02-05T12:45:00.001-08:00

The sun bounces off the fresh whitesnow. The cars lined up outside the apartment building look likeigloos; I attempt to liberate my CRV, steadily digging my way to thedriver's seat. The trees surrounding Pheasant Hill are dressed inblinding white, their branches hanging low, struggling to support theextra weight; some won't make it.

The children laugh and yell, ridingtheir plastic sleds down the slope of a snowbank left by the plow onthe far side of the parking lot. A chubby little white boy, probablyten; two Hispanic sisters, one of them probably eleven, the otherseven or eight; and the new kid, a thin black boy who looks closer totwelve.

I tell them to be careful. Theypromise me they will.

After brushing away the last bit ofsnow from my windshield, I get into the car and start the engine. Iplace my right hand on the headrest of the passenger seat, twistingmy body around for a clear view through the back window. I counttwo, three, four heads—no one under me.

I back up slowly, carefully, meanwhileforming a mental picture in which the chubby white boy, having lostcontrol of his sled, skids behind me. He slides directly into thepath of my car, his head behind the left wheel in the back. I watchthe tire roll over him, crushing his skull. I can feel the bonecrunching, the blood gushing. I see the other children look on inpanic, instantly traumatized by something no child should ever see.

Their lives flash before my eyes; Isee the two sisters in therapy as teenagers, still running from thetragic memory of their childhood friend's grisly death. Unable toescape her relentless depression, the older of the two takes her ownlife. Her younger sister, plagued by chronic anxiety anddebilitating panic attacks, drops out of high school and starts usingheroine. She dies of a drug overdose at age twenty-five, but thenewspaper doesn't have room in its obituaries column to commemorateanother dead hooker.

I see the other little boy at agefifty, hunched over in a padded room while drawing the same bloodyskull over and over in his sketchpad. The nurse comes in at fouro'clock to give him his meds, and as she puts the tiny orange pill onhis tongue she sees a single tear streak along his weathered browncheek.

Two, three, four heads—it's ok. Just going to class.

Monsters, Part II

2012-01-08T16:18:00.000-08:00

There was one thing about Larry that very few people knew. It was another part of his life, something he’d always kept hidden—even from those with whom he was the closest.

He’d tell his wife he was working late, supervising an inventory check or training employees for the nightshift, whatever. He was great with making excuses, so good that no one even knew what an efficient liar he was.

Larry never actually stayed at work after nine p.m.; on those nights his wife was left alone to take care of their son Tucker, Larry left work at sundown, got into his black pickup truck and drove into downtown Bansworth.

Driving through the city was unnerving, like touring a haunted house. The buildings were run down, many of the local businesses having gone under years ago. The streets were mostly empty, abandoned every evening by those who didn’t dare step out beneath the hollow glow of the flickering streetlamps. The streets were riddled with drug dealers and cheap hookers—if Larry had time, he’d stop for a quick fuck. But most nights he’d drive straight there, straight down to the darkest corner of the filthy slums. To the old, tarnished brick building that he’d purchased several years ago without his wife’s, or anyone else’s knowledge.

They called it “Bloodsport.”

***

It was a cold night in late December. Larry’s truck appeared at the mouth of Bloodsport’s unpaved parking lot around half passed ten. Several cars sat waiting in ominous silence.

Swinging his door open and pressing his shiny black shoes to the dirty gravel, Larry was suddenly assaulted by a cacophony of barking dogs.

He saw them all, blunt pitbull faces, bodies hard packed with muscle scratching frantically at the insides of car windows. Teeth bared, eyes blazing, their snarling mouths made Larry feel nervous, almost sick inside.

“Damn,” Larry heard a high-pitched male voice say. “Ain’t never seen dogs wig like this for no reason.”

Larry squinted through the darkness to look for the speaker, who was silhouetted in the dull glow of the full yellow moon.

“Aw, they got a reason,” a much deeper voice replied. “They get like this whenever that nigga come near.” Larry turned to see a gargantuan black man who was pointing a finger toward him.

“Julian,” Larry said, “Good to see you!”

“Pff, yeah,” the giant replied, casting a sideways glance. His friend looked downward with a snicker.

“Wait’ll you see dis bitch I got, everybody gonn’ be real happy to see her,” The giant said, a sadistic smile taking his face. “Seen ‘er rip through the neighbor’s chocolate lab today like it was a fuckin’ Tootsie Roll.”

Julian’s face cloaked with shadows, covered in scars and blackened deeper by tattoos, was horrifying to behold as he spoke with depraved enthusiasm about the brutality he’d created.

Other men began to emerge from their cars and gather into small circles across the parking lot. Dogs at their feet, led by long silver chains, some would chat while others were led inside, the first to hit the lineup for the evening's games.

Hours later they each returned to the parking lot, got into their cars and drove home.

Only a handful of them brought dogs.

***

Katherine recited this story to Larry in disturbingly vivid detail.
"I know everything about you, sweetie," she said. "I reckon I even know what it was you were doing, inside that old brick building of yours," Katherine said with a horrible smile. "I'm going to make you feel right at home."

Click here for Part I

On the Ferris Wheel

2011-12-12T13:20:00.000-08:00

So it’s two weeks before Christmas and I’m standing in the middle of this abandoned fairground. I have no idea what time it is but there’s no sun in the sky, so the only light comes from the eerie flashing carnival attractions that are turned on for God knows what reason. I look around frantically, clueless as to how I got here—the last thing I can remember is falling asleep in a drunken stupor on my grandma’s living room floor, tired from the dull antics of another holiday get-together with the fam.

There’s games, rides, food stands up and running, lights flashing in a vivid array of colors and I’m feeling epileptic. The only thing missing is the people; no workers, even. Just lights, the smell of fried food and the discomforting sound of jovial clown music. I wanted to piss my pants.

I couldn’t make heads or tails of which way was the way out. So I start walking toward the ferris wheel, don’t ask me why. It just sort of drew me in, the way it towered up so high above everything else.

As I get a little closer I see the outline of a man. I think, shit, ok—this guy is either going to help me or kill me. I keep walking toward the ferris wheel, toward the ominous silhouette about a hundred feet away. The guy’s just standing there, back facing me, frozen like a statue looking up at the ride as it creaks its way through each rotation.

“Excuse me?” I call out to him. No response—I figure maybe he couldn’t hear me over all the noise. “Hello?” I say a little louder as I continue walking toward him.

“Hello, hello!” he turns around and bug eyes me with a creepy smile. “I’m so glad you could make it!”

He reaches out to shake my hand—tells me his name is Fin. Guy looks about twenty-three. I figure he must be unemployed, maybe even homeless by the look of his tattered brown jacket and crusty, dirt-caked skin. I accept the handshake as a gesture of politeness, still wondering whether or not I’m about to be murdered.

“Will you ride the ferris wheel with me now?” he asks in a manic, hurried tone of voice. “Jessica never wants to play games with me!”

I start to tense up as I realize this dude is bonkers fucking mad. He goes on to tell me all about his fiancé, who I’m going to say may or may not actually exist.

“Our relationship, it’s my personal hell,” he tells me, still grinning like an idiot, and he just keeps going on and on telling me how crappy his stupid life is. “But now you’re here!” he says excitedly, “and this place, the fair! This is my heaven! Oh, we’re going to have so much fun!”

“I was actually hoping you could help me find a way out of here?” I say, trying to interject before he goes off on another wild tangent. But he’s oblivious; he just keeps jib-jabbering, occasionally clapping his hands and jumping up and down with excitement.

So I figure what the hell? Even if I could find a way out of here, I’ve got no wallet, no money, no way of getting home. This weirdo had to have a car, or a couple bucks to catch a cab or something. I’ll go on the ferris wheel with him and then we can leave.

So we climb up into one of the little cars and latch the door closed, real quick-like since there’s no one to stop the ride for us. This guy Fin is bouncing on the plastic seat, still clapping his hands like a little kid.

And we’re going, up and up and up and up.

“Woo hoo!” Fin yells as we approach the top of the arc, raising his hands up in the air the way people do on roller coasters. That’s when it happened.

Creak.

The ride comes to an abrupt halt, and we’re stopped at the top of the ferris wheel. I look down, frantically searching for whoever must’ve pulled the switch.

“This is so great, this is so great, this is so much fun! I’ve never been stopped up at the very top before,” Fin is saying, and I realize I’m getting a headache from his high-pitched voice that never fucking stops.

The moment this thought occurs to me however, Fin becomes silent. Somehow this is even more discomforting.

“Do you have a paperclip?” he asks me in a monotone, panicked voice, and I’m like,

“Uhh, what?”

“A paperclip!” he says, “I neeed a fucking paperclip,” and he’s starting to shake a little.

So at this point I’m thoroughly terrified, life flashing before my eyes and I’m saying my final prayers to sweet baby Jesus Christ.

“Paperclip, paperclip, paperclip,” he’s repeating, and his voice has shifted to this low-pitched moan that comes across as a sort of sobbing.

“No,” I say, “I don’t have a paperclip,” and I’m racking my brain trying to think of a way to calm him down.

“If we don’t get a paperclip we’re going to die up here.” He turns to me, eyes sinking into mine. His lips curl into a terrible smile, eyes phased into nothing. He stares both at me and through me, dazed in his own little world. I feel the adrenaline coursing through me, my heart pounding in my chest like it’s too scared, like it wants to get out.

Click, swing, whoosh and down he goes. It was so easy—I just pushed him through the door and watched him fall.

Moments later I open my eyes and I’m on the concrete, bleeding everywhere. The ferris wheel looms over me with its flashing green and blue and yellow lights, but the ride is at a standstill. An ambulance is parked several feet away, casting its own red flash over everything. There’s some medics hunched over me, and we’re surrounded by a whole crowd of people shocked and bewildered by this scene of chaos.

There’s so much noise, and the voices of the people are muddled in an unintelligible whirlpool of conversation. I can just barely see, and if I strain a bit I can make out some of what they’re saying.

“Guy just took a leap,” says a twangy southern voice that stands out from the rest. “He start’d yellin’ something, sounded like ‘paperclip. Next thing y’know he’s falling!”

Everything was fuzzy. As they put me on a stretcher and loaded me into the back of the ambulance, I realized I had more than a couple of broken bones. Probably a concussion.

I thought that when I got better they would send me home. But even when the wounds were healed, when my head stopped hurting, when the bones were back in place, they said I had to stay here at the hospital.

I’ve told them that it’s all right, that I’m ok. I know there’s nothing wrong with me but they keep telling me that I’m a danger to myself, that I need to be watched. They say it’s for my own good. I just hope that my family, my wife and our twelve kids and the new golden retriever puppy, are all getting by all right without me. I don’t think anyone told them what happened to me, because they haven’t ever come to visit.

Sometimes I do get one visitor—a beautiful girl named Jessica, with long brown hair, who always wears these very pretty dresses. She sits at the edge of my bed and sometimes reads me stories. Other times she will sit and look at me, and I will look back at her, and if we continue staring into each other’s eyes for too long she’ll start to cry.

I ask her why she’s crying, and she’ll just wrap her arms around me, pull me close and press her face into my chest for a long time.

Sometimes I get the feeling she knows something that I don’t.

A Letter to Mankind

2011-12-12T13:18:00.001-08:00

Dear Mankind,

It has recently come to my attention that most of you don’t really care where your food comes from or what it actually is. I’ve found that all too often, you are not concerned with these types of issues. You seem to abandon such natural questions primarily out of the very rational fear that if you knew what you were eating, you wouldn’t want to eat it.

Believe it or not, I am greatly relieved to have come upon this revelation! You see, for some time I have been considering the prospect of a dinner party to be held in the very dining room of my humble residence. I was initially concerned that my hospitality may be inadequate, as I am unable to ensure the food quality and standards of sanitation that I would have assumed, mistakenly of course, that you held as non-negotiable. But all things considered, I do believe that I would be determined a most gracious host; it seems that it is fully within my capabilities to accommodate your needs!

Indeed, I promise I will not neglect to keep your eyes averted from the kitchen; I will refrain from disclosing the methods and frequency (or lack thereof) with which I remove the microscopic germs and bacteria from the surfaces on which your food is prepared.

I promise I will not disclose to you the truth about what you are fed. I will do a thorough job of keeping you fully oblivious as to what your meal contains, by what means and from where the ingredients were acquired, and the subsequent effects it may have on your health and wellness; this I guarantee!

Perhaps your steak is real steak; perhaps it is not! Perhaps the meat contains, in some unknown capacity, the scabs and puss of infected wounds that may or may not have covered the body of the slaughtered cow; or perhaps the meat is clean! Perhaps there will be, at some undisclosed location on the surface of your dinner plate, the feces of rodents that occupy the nooks and crannies of my kitchen; or perhaps my home is pest-free!

You see? I can keep secrets just as well as the industry to which you provide your patronage in exchange for nourishment.

Dinner will be served at seven o’clock sharp. See you there!

Sincerely,

Chris Trubac

Monsters, Part I

2011-12-04T12:38:00.000-08:00

The room was dominated by the commanding presence of shadows, darkness torn only by the soft glimmer of fluttering candlelight. The walls and floor were cold concrete, the ceiling only wooden beams and rusty pipes. Along the far wall was a staircase leading out of the cellar and up into the kitchen. Katherine came slowly down the stairs, her leather boots click-clacking on every step. Dragging her skeletal white hand along the railing, she descended into the dungeon.

Against the wall opposite the stairs was a small cage manufactured for use by pet owners. It was six sides of silver wire, no more than four by six feet. Inside the cage was a middle-aged man, stripped naked and curled up in the fetal position with his face in his hands. His pale skin was overrun with thick, dark hair. He was very thin and sickly looking, suggesting severe malnourishment.

“How’s my sweet baby boy today?” Katherine called jubilantly, stepping down from the staircase. Draped in smooth black fabric that hung limp from her bony figure, Katherine was five feet and eight inches of silk and shadow. The man in the cage, whose name was Larry Blair, opened his mouth to speak.

“Ah, ah ahh,” Katherine called out in an affectionate, maternal tone as Larry yelped in pain, “you mustn’t speak with your new shock collar, Larry-berry. It’s for your own good!” Her face, terrifying to behold with its huge buggy eyes and sharp little teeth, smiled lovingly at her pet while approaching the cage with a plastic bowl of dry dog food. “Here! Mommy brought supper!”

She slid a tiny silver key into the metal padlock that kept the door of Larry’s cage shut tight whenever she was away. Larry was motionless as Katherine pulled the door open. He didn’t bother looking up as she set the bowl in front of him.

“What’s the matter?” Katherine asked in a mockingly sympathetic tone. She loved feigning ignorance to the torturous conditions in which Larry was kept, pretending she had no idea what the man was missing back in the real world. The truth was, Katherine knew everything about Larry. Not just who he was and where he lived, or what his job was, or his son’s name. Katherine knew what kind of car Larry drove- a black hummer he’d named “Betsy,” after the girl he’d lost his virginity to in high school. She knew that Larry had started his career in the grocery business fresh out of school, working his way up from the entry-level and taking long hours in the meat department, where he did the grunt-work no one else wanted. She knew the type of medication Larry took for high blood pressure, and the name of the doctor who prescribed it. She knew his favorite types of music. She knew his favorite television show. She knew his favorite cereal and his favorite brand of deli meat and his favorite toilet to shit in, his habits, his turn-ons, his vices. His secrets.

“I’m worried about you, Larry,” Katherine said, her voice thick with sarcasm. “You’re so thin. I don’t understand why you won’t eat!” Larry wanted to respond, wanted to scream at her, I’m not a fucking dog, you cunt. But he was powerless to speak, his voice muted by the imminent pain of the shock collar. “A nice young man at Petsmart told me this was the best dog food on the shelves- I paid a lot of money for this stuff! You’d better eat it if you want to have any strength left for your big fight tomorrow.”

Katherine smiled maliciously. She’d mentioned this “fight” several times before, but Larry still had no idea what it was all about. He never was too bright.

Click here for Part II

Memory of a Ghost

2011-11-23T12:27:00.001-08:00

A few nights ago, I woke up at 3:24 AM to the sound of a hideously loud, haunting squeal. It was chilling, and as I peered through the darkness of my one room apartment, I was lost for any explanation as to what it could have been. It sounded like crying, or moaning, or screaming, but it had a certain mechanical quality to it. It could have been someone turning the handles to run the shower water, except no shower water was running, and the only other occupant of the apartment, my girlfriend Samantha, was in bed next to me. Feeling rather perturbed and not actually wanting to worry about what the sound was, I tried to put it out of my mind, roll over and go back to sleep.

So there I lay, in bed with my eyes shut tight, waiting for slumber to take me away. It was then that I once more heard a similar noise, but quieter, more muffled, and this time it was accompanied by a soft moan. I shut my eyes tighter, trying to block out the sound. It had to be the people next door. If I could just fall asleep, I wouldn't have to worry anymore about what it was.

A cold chill made its way down my body, and I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I opened my eyes to see that the white wall I faced was reflecting a pale blue glow. Quickly, I twisted myself around to see what it was. To my own shock and amazement, a fully formed body of a man was standing next to the bed, fully clothed in the uniform of a prisoner. His hands were shackled together, and he dragged a ball and chain tremulously from his right ankle. His entire body was oddly translucent, even his clothes, and he was glowing with that same eerie blue that I’d seen reflecting off the walls of the room.

I sat there in bed, paralyzed with fear. I stared deeply into the eyes of the ghost, who moaned miserably while appearing to try to break his chains. He never muttered a single audible sentence, or even so much as a word. All the while this was happening, Samantha never woke or stirred for even a moment. Then the ghost disappeared as quickly as he had come, fading away slowly, moaning without cease. His form dissipated, becoming more and more dull, the glow diminishing, until he could no longer be seen or heard.

This was the point where I began wondering what I was really messing with. I have always been so fascinated by the realm of the dead, but when I made the decision to start trying to interfere and communicate with them, it hadn't ever really hit me what I was getting myself into. Now, however, I think I'm beginning to get some idea. I sat up for a few hours that night, lost in thought and reading things about ghosts and spiritual encounters. It took some time before I finally stopped feeling too terrified to go back to sleep.

The next morning I awoke and went about my daily routine. I got out of bed, climbing over Samantha who was still sound asleep. I used the bathroom, and then went into the kitchen for a bowl of cereal. When I sat down at the table to eat, I noticed there was a post-it-note stuck to the wall that I couldn't remember ever seeing before. The handwriting was unrecognizable, scrawled down in a messy cursive scribble. The ink was a vivid red color, and I leaned in close to read what it said:

You’ll die too, exorcist.

Killing Perfection

2011-11-20T08:16:00.001-08:00

It is daybreak. A great white shark glides tranquilly through the waters off the coast of Southern California. Her fusiform body cuts through the Pacific like a shining silver blade, streaked with glimmers of sunlight that dance jubilantly through the ocean waves.

A tyrant in this hidden realm, thriving unopposed at the highest level of her kingdom, her ways are immaculate. No other creature of such vast proportions can rival the grace with which she propels her two-ton body along the ocean floor in search of prey. To watch the white shark swim is both serenely peaceful and entirely horrifying; paradox epitomized by the steady hand of nature.

Her eyes, characterized by cold and lifeless beady black pupils, do nothing to suggest the intellect with which she decides her every move. Onlookers might be so naïve as to reason that her rows upon rows of jagged white teeth are controlled by nothing more than firing neuron synapses. Many people still believe that sharks are mere death machines, mindless killers running on instinctive blood lust alone. But looks can be deceiving.

She is completely aware of her surroundings at all times. Each of her senses is keenly acute to detect whatever living things might dwell in her presence. She hears an injured fish that splashes about in the desperation of its final moments, smells the blood leaking from its wounds, feels its quickened heartbeat in the form of electromagnetic waves. But she has no interest in such small game; her lateral line, a row of fine-tuned pressure detectors running down each side of her body, has told her to look up.

Approximately fifty feet above, she sees two long dark bodies quickly propelling themselves through the water with flipper-like appendages. They are shadows, barely visible against the blinding glare of the sun. Despite this limited visibility, she knows exactly what she’s looking at; she has searched all morning.

Like a flash of lightning, she executes her ascent. Her tail sweeps in quick and fluid motion. Her contour shape barrels through the water like a torpedo. Schools of fish, her royal subjects, scatter in every direction as she thoughtlessly darts in-between them on her way to the surface.

Two sea lions joyfully bask in the sun during a morning swim. Their brown fur, soaked with water, clings to their bodies as they carelessly splash about in the waves. They are oblivious to their impending doom, which comes in the form of a quickly growing silhouette beneath them. For a split second, there is a circle of teeth visible below the sea foam, a great mass of pearly daggers jutting out from wide, reddish colored gums. Then, impact.

Gargantuan jaws spread wide to catch her meal, she breaches the surface of the water. Her entire body, an astonishing thirteen feet in length, leaves the ocean, as hundreds of teeth sink into the sea lion’s soft, blubbery flesh.

Nothing can survive the bone-crushing force of her jaws; the sea lion is dead within seconds, the shark’s impromptu attack over almost as quickly as it began.

The shark drags the mangled sea lion back to the depths near the ocean floor, where she can enjoy her meal in peace.

Hundreds of miles away, off the coast of Beijing, China, salty drops of water fall from the body of another great white shark as fishermen struggle to pull her from the ocean by a sturdy monofilament fishing line. She is helpless for the first time.

Death fills her nostrils as she lands on board the commercial fishing boat with a loud slap. Stripped from her natural element and utterly incapable of self-defense, she lies motionless on a deck stained with the blood of a thousand others to writhe in the miserable agony of suffocation.

Among quick shouts and the hurried shuffle of wet boots, three middle-aged Chinese men surround the motionless shark. Her beady eyes stare into them, following their movements.

One of the men, big and muscular with wild eyes and poor posture, makes a remark about the shark’s gargantuan size. His friends laugh raucously.

Another one, much smaller and slightly balding, produces a long blade stained by rust and crimson. He approaches the shark with it, kneels down next to her, and begins cutting through the cartilage connecting the shark’s back and dorsal fin.

The men casually converse with one another as they carve into her. She feels searing pain as blood spills over the sides of her body, and a second dagger slices through her left pectoral fin. One of the three fishermen finishes telling a joke, and they all laugh again.

She watches as her severed fins are carelessly thrown into a pile with countless others, an immense mass of bleeding flesh that is the bounty of a days work. She burns for oxygen as the third man holds her tail, working to cut away the last two fins.

When it’s all over, they look down into her eyes, and they laugh a final time. Finless and bleeding, the crippled shark is useless now.

Still in the middle of a long day of finning, the fishermen need plenty of room on their vessel to collect more shark fins. So they work together to push the shark’s mutilated body over the side of the boat and back into the ocean, where she will never swim again.

Mom's Psychosis

2011-11-19T20:55:00.000-08:00

Just admit it: you killed her.

It was a rough day at work; you lost another account, and you could not shake the paranoid feeling that there were new executives at the corporate office who were trying to weed you out of the company. You heard the hushed voices and nervous whispers whenever you would walk passed the congregation by the vending machines. You couldn’t tell what they were saying, but you were sure it was about you.

You still hadn’t received the raise you’d been asking for, the raise that had been promised to you; Eugene said, in February, that you would see an increase on commissions by the end of April. That was nine months ago, and still nothing. Now Christmas was coming and your bank account was looking tighter than ever.

You came home from work to find that the house was still a mess; the sink was full of dishes and no one vacuumed the carpet like you had asked them to. The kids were bouncing off the walls. You told them to settle down. They continued yelling and laughing and running through the house, as if you were invisible.

You felt, in that moment, as if you had no name; as if you had no face; as if you were powerless. You felt like a ghost, like no one could see you and there was nothing you could do to change it, and you wanted nothing more in that infuriatingly vulnerable moment, that one unbearably maddening, soul-crushing moment, than to know that you did still exist.

Admit it: you locked Allie and Cooper in the basement. They were terrified of the darkness. From the bathroom, you heard them pounding on the door with all their might, pleading with you, please, please, please let us out. You ignored their cries of desperation and started running the bathwater.

You picked up Madison, your youngest, and set her in the tub. As the water kept rising higher and higher, you sat for a moment and looked down at your child. You gazed longingly into her crystal-clear blue eyes, wide eyes that knew no evil as they stared back at you innocently, helplessly, obliviously. Your heart broke, and you knew what you had to do.

You pushed her head under the water. You couldn’t believe how easy it was; there was no resistance. She never fought you, never tried to push her head back up for another breath. The two of you were motionless, and the screams coming from the other side of the basement door had altogether stopped. Now there was nothing but total stillness, peace and quiet, sublime tranquility; the stuff your dreams are made of.

You sat there on the edge of the tub for a minute or so, holding Madison’s two-year-old face under the surface of the water, until you were sure she was dead.