- Andy
Andy had to go pick Elizabeth up from school halfway through the day, turning off the 2:00 weepie on the new plasma and letting the dog kvetch in its way. The dog wanted to go for a car ride. A ‘c-a-r-r-i-d-e’ as his June Bug had recently gotten the damn kids chanting as well, now, whenever they were going somewhere, though they were fooling no one, least of all Buster. Hoisting the little fellow (that goddamn d-o-g) humanely aside with his foot as it tried to proactively pin the loafers in the corner of the nook next to the screen door, hungry for attention, Andy exited the Deck House he’d handbuilt over the eleven preceding summers, damn near in condemnable shape already as it was, and proceeded to take the weatherworn red Honda to go get little Lizzy.
I am Andy, he said to himself, driving past the scenic lookout. I am a gentle creature. Deep breaths, he reminded himself out loud. The man on the radio spoke about the Grand Opening of The Celebrity Gap. Andy breathed deeply into his diaphragm and held it there, one breath then another, and so forth, a little dizzy, ignoring the man on the radio, until he was parked in the Joyce Nübklinker School for Gifted Girls lot, not a lick less nervous for all the yogic breathing nonsense, nor a smidgen removed from a particularly nasty case of what June Bug would no doubt have called the ‘grumpies.’
Fuck breathing.
He popped some Pepto B chewables sitting loose in the cup holder and decamped for the front office with one of his shoes untied, sockless in his indigo bathrobe, tiny French swimming trunks underneath.
- Elizabeth
All he knew was that something had happened between Elizabeth and the Chemistry Teacher, another altercation of some kind. Frankly, Andy couldn’t blame the kid. He’d met Mr. Ivor at parent-teacher interview night, the only one he’d ever yet had to attend, being as he had been in the shithouse that week as far as June Bug was concerned, no excuses this time. Andy didn’t have to talk to the guy more than five seconds before he wanted to sock Mr. Ivor one himself.
Walking back out to the car twenty minutes later, and still straining to locate himself with his nervous system, Andy looked down at his daughter, suddenly realizing that she was clutching a number of his deathly fingers with her pudgy fist. Though little Liz clearly had been crying – most of her face splotched red like a rash with the evidence – at this particular moment she was looking like she might kinda be … no, in fact she was indeed actually laughing, now, even her eyes joining in.
– What is it kiddo? What’s so funny, hunh?
– Oh, Andy …
– Call me daddy, please, sweetheart.
– I am so proud of you, daddy. You were so wonderful in there. I tell you Andy … if you were forty years younger … (!) … when you called him Strangefinger I nearly pissed my Strawberry Shortcakes.
Shocked at not having been chastened, as would be customary, for her full-frontal effrontery, Elizabeth spun around to see her father standing motionless a few paces behind where she’d inadvertently left him at ‘wonderful in there.’ Little Lizzy could see that he was muttering to himself.
–Wo, daddy! she exclaimed, ahead of herself. Then: what’s that you’re saying, daddy?
She ran back to him, nearly tripping up on those ballerina slippers she never took off, having no way of knowing that her words had stopped him cold as a petrified redwood not because of their brazen invocation of some seriously insidious taboo shit. After all it was typical of the girl, wasn’t it? She was kind of bratty, only performing like this in public places with nosy strangers around to stare disapprovingly. It never surprised Andy who once read a book by Doctor Spock. Children crave attention and will do pretty much anything to go about getting it. That’s about the size of it. A couple more synapses fired back up like the old oil tank at the old family farm. Thinking about the place made Andy want to go back there and have an Orangeade watching it burn to moldering toothpicks.
– You’re a real pisscutter, daddy. What’s gotten into you? approaching closer. Hey! DADDY! Elizabeth shook her father’s sleeve in a frustration of inarticulable need. Inarticulable even if the little whippersnapper is a genius, some science and dance protégé of the highest supposed order, squealing in high-pitched multi-climaxes of divine right.
Elizabeth, even had she not been sounding the high alarms, would never have been able to hear her father muttering: I am Andy. I am a soldier for me. I am Andy. I am a soldier for me. I am a gentle creature.
- Bug Bug
When he opened the back door of the Honda to throw Elizabeth’s Yo-Yo Ma knapsack in with the fast food wrappers and old newspapers, Andy did not expect to see the teenager in there with that strange anorexic girlfriend of his. Wazzername.
– Jesus, kid. What the … how did you …(?)…
– Dad. You OK?
– I …
– You are giving us that lift, remember? said the wazzername coldly, not even bothering to lift her eyes from her BlackBerry.
– Bug Bug! said Elizabeth, seeing her fraternal counterpart, running up and trying to wrap arms around his scrawny shoulders through the open window like a midget vaudevillean.
The foursome (actually a fivesome – somehow the dog had gotten in despite the Deck House chastening) drove for boysenberry Ice Cream. Andy could not remember who had requested the Ice Cream but was sure that some sort of instant consensus had been reached. He was right now now fully committed to remembering where each of the nearby Ice Cream parlors was located, the distance between himself and the various establishments, the relative quality of each menu, the basic equation. Normally he would have had the daughter figure it all out with her wireless connection and Texas Instruments, but she appeared to be in no mood to shut up at that particular moment. It struck Andy now that she probably had the opportunity to sneak a couple cups of coffee whilst waiting outside the principle’s office in her cone of silence. June Bug had told him: no more coffee for the kid. Andy forgets.
– Ethics are instant-to-instant and microscopic.
It was June Bug’s own money that she accused him of stashing in his sock drawer. June Bug forgets too.
– Neurosis is a dysfunction of the active faculty of forgetting, says the kid, as though possessed of some kind of daddy radar. Redeyed Bug Bug looking stoned and bugeyed and his saucy wazzername in the backseat making dirty needle tattoos. Dirty needle piercings. Or was the rearview tricking him, he wondered over his shoulder, edging in vain toward the blindspot revelation that wouldn’t comply, his vision presently growing blurry.
It was not the rearview. He was certain.
Couldn’t quite see. Keep your eyes on the road, Andy.
“Or was the rearview tricking him, he wondered over his shoulder, edging in vain toward the blindspot revelation that wouldn’t comply…” Illustration by Sebyth.
- June Bug
Andy was telling himself he was a soldier for himself. He was doing it over and over, a gentle creature. Preoccupied as he was, it was of course Elizabeth who first noticed that they were being followed by his wife or whatever she was now. It was, of course, June Bug and the notorious newsman, her new beau, who brought along with him a documentary camera crew and some busybody libertines with clipboards. It was a large van. Andy, alerted to its presence, noted the largeness of the van, cataloguing its human cargo, fingering the abacus of his instincts, palms growing sweaty on the wheel, the vehicle in high gear. Andy heard police helicopters.
– Oh Daddy, said Elizabeth, disappointed. The teenagers pierced each others’ noses, to all appearances indifferent.
- Euphrates
Andy did not know how he escaped his pursuers, only that he had been forced to jettison his two children and the dog at Hannigan’s Ice Cream Parlor to fend for themselves. He realized as he did it that it had finally come to him sacrificing his children to his wife and her hangers-on in the State Legislature. Bug Bug’s solemn girlfriend was still in the back of the Honda, not being of any value as a potential sacrifice to June Bug. The girl was attending to the bullet wounds sustained by the hitchhiker Andy could not remember picking up. The girl referred to him as their ‘first hostage,’ and the pathetic state of the fellow clearly brought out her mothering side. Andy himself had been grazed by a bullet, though he was not yet aware that this was the case.
He parked the car and the dead man in the shop at the girl’s parents’ rural getaway, where he discovered amongst the half-disassembled detritus with which her father casually tinkered, that the maudlin young vixen who thrilled in crudely tattooing squiggly skater death’s-heads on his son’s biceps with a dirty needle went by the name of Euphrades. Andy entreated Euphrades to assist him in emptying the bullet-riddled car of its more dangerous glass shards and to help cover up the conspicuous blood stains from the dead hitchhiker or whatever he was who was now resting in a horse trough in the corner with his blue tongue hanging out.
As they stepped out of the shop into the harsh sunlight, Andy became aware of the bullet burn on his neck and became somewhat delirious. Images flooded his mind. Images of the mangled bodies stowed beneath the Deck House. The eleven years worth of bodies, the length of his divorce. The length of his project. Images of the dead principle, Mr. Ivor the Chemistry Teacher’s head breaking apart with the last blow, Elizabeth waiting in the hall where he had had the sense, though on autopilot as he was just then, to lead her to await his return before revisiting the office himself to resettle their hash for good.
Stumbling around outside the shop in this delirium he set off an animal trap with his pantleg and did a funny jig of incomprehension before falling unconscious to the earth. He came to, gauzed and numb, in a most pleasant solarium with Euphrades attending to the minor wound on his neck. Leaning over him she exposed a lingering flash of her most supple and enticing breast. She has a silver salamander on the chain around her neck. Andy reminded himself that he was a soldier for himself, a gentle creature. He allowed it as the girl began slowly massaging his manhood until he was as stiff as a shower rod to the touch. She giggled nervously, then, and unleashed his purpling member as though shocked to find it suddenly there in her skeletal hand – as though her encountering it in the first had been but an act of nervous automatism – and retreated to the kitchen where she explained that she had made them Virgin Daiquiris in a blender with some fruit juice and her father’s hidden stash of crushed ice.
– Tell me Andy, pleaded the frail teenager handing him his drink, why am I so drawn to you? Why do I use your son to get close to you?
Andy paused thoughtfully before he spoke:
– I am a soldier in a deep forbidding jungle, he began. But I am a gentle creature. My wife doesn’t understand me. June Bug. She is in her defiance, you understand. She won’t listen to herself, has no perineum, won’t open up. It is true that I am difficult. I warned her of that on the carousel on our first date. I bought her The Dead Zone by Stephen King. She regurgitated a corn dog on my khakis and you can’t get that out of khaki. Like when you fart but there’s some shit. You just cannot get that out of khaki. I can’t. And my wife – June Bug – she just doesn’t understand. I knew it was over. She quit doing the laundry. Took up with a kindly priest, subsequently defrocked. We did a couple’s group in Florence but only she spoke Italian and I could tell everybody was laughing at me. I made a great big stink and had to hide at the American Embassy in Rome. I have done many things of which I am not proud. I don’t want to bring you into this Euphrades. You deserve to soar like a pterodactyl, flying with those disturbing fingers curled up beneath you. You really should try to eat some food. Look at you, Euphrades, nothing but skin and bone. You are very special to me and I am dangerous. This is what draws us like moths, you know. We are drawn to something unspoken, sublime as the gaping heavens, capable of explosive fission.
– Oh Andy, said the girl, swooning.
They made love in a fortress of frilly pink pillows, he holding her like a precious pocket watch inherited from a favorite uncle. As he mounted the teenager, youth returned to Andy like a pestilence. Euphrades was truly pliant, if a little circumspect, as her too-eager humping gave way to an arousing lifelessness. She got up and disappeared to the bathroom. Having quickly pulled the French swimming trunks over his exposed shame, Andy flung the bathrobe like an indigo prayer shawl over his paunchy frame and spoke to his beloved, whom he could no longer see, over the sound of running bathwater.
– To me you are a reassurance of Spring in deepest Winter as with an old Chinese haiku read against the gray light of a yielding glacier. You are the very brail of my newfound touch. I touch you to awaken the most sacred languages of our forefathers, imprinted there upon the snowwhite of you with the magma of our earth’s core as it pulses with hunger for what you conceal …
Andy thought he heard Euphrades say that that was nice and call him dear. The bathwater made it hard to hear.
Andy continued in his romantic musing:
– June Bug, bless her litigious heart, never understood. She was not a soldier for herself. She was mean for no reason …
The bathwater stopped running. Just then a man came out of the bathroom covered in blood. It was Andy. Andy looked confused.
- Matt Damon
The bathwater was maroon and Euphrades was not responding to his hostile caresses. Panic!
Andy ran to the barn. He stole an Arabian colt and fine English saddle. He stole some fine leather straps from Argentina. Almost weeping, he rode towards town, leaping the white picket fences, the bloody bandage now dangling from his injured neck.
There was a major fracas in the center of the small New Mexican city in which Andy and the colt presently found themselves.
He approached the milling crowds astride the handsome beast, thirsty for water and whatever contact high he might find amidst his people.
The largest mass of gawkers seemed to be gathering outside a large anachronistic building that looked something like an old Western saloon. The building had a vaguely irreligious quality to it. Stepping off his horse, Andy slowly approached the teaming mob, which quickly parted for him, a commotion now rising up above the general din.
– It’s that Andy character, he heard somebody say.
An old lady with rickets swatted at him with a half-deployed umbrella.
– Some nerve, showing up for the Grand Opening.
– And in broad daylight, too.
Somebody was alerting the police on their mobile. Andy didn’t care. He could not take his eyes off the huge banner which awed him. It was not, in fact, a banner, he noticed, but rather a giant mayoral sash, Crown Royal purple, that wrapped around the entire building.
CELEBRITY GAP – GRAND OPENING read the sash.
In the display case windows were large portraits of celebrities wearing Gap clothing. Julia Roberts was sneaking a cigarette down in the arroyo. She was sporting some fetching Banana Republic number. The Olsen Twins in a provocative Adam and Eve tableau. Truman Capote in a smart sweater vest. The biggest portrait of all featured Matt Damon in aviator goggles, his jowly face comically stretched back by G-Force.
As a cavalcade of police cars arrived upon the scene, Andy entered the commercial palace, tears in his eyes. At first the lights from the documentary film crew blinded him, but slowly the scene integrated before him. In the center of the room, amidst the rows of sensible and inexpensive clothing hung or neatly folded by collegiate failures, sat his darling little Lizzy with a half-eaten waffle cone, the genius, on Matt Damon’s lap like he were Santa Clause, June Bug and the new beau next to them, beaming before the cameras, the son pouting alone way over by the cash, a primarily Hispanic film crew.
– Oh Daddy, said Elizabeth, as though embarrassed to be caught in this awkward moment of celebrity worship. I would have seen it on TV anyway, thought Andy. Eventually. Some genius she is.
Andy wanted to strike somebody but held it in. He held it in his perineum.
There followed a silence which seemed to last an eternity. Finally Matt Damon spoke, breaking the ice:
– I cannot say you surprise us Andy, began the beatific movie star. I suppose we knew deep down that you had to make an appearance. I must say you have held us all in suspense, wondering what you might think of next you crazy bugger you. But I am drawn to you Andy. We are drawn to you. We are all drawn to you. Your story has captivated millions. The world hungers after you. Andy. Our earth’s very core pulses with hunger for you. For what you conceal. The … project. Look at your wife. See how she blushes so sincerely to see you here this moment. She loves you Andy, your June Bug. Sure she does. She can’t hide it, Andy, and hiding is what she does. See how she loves you. See?
Andy stood weeping as his one true love approached him, also weeping, a humbleness about her. They embraced.
– That’s it Andy, that’s it, said Matt Damon, much satisfaction writ upon his brow. The cameras circling, ever closer, the resurrected couple. The first canister of tear gas spiralling through the saloon door.
Jason Philip Wierzba is a writer and occasional musician from the Canadian prairie. He has a Master’s Degree in Film Studies from Carleton University. His previous story “Priority: Murder Kill” was published in Postscripts to Darkness Volume 3 and ten of his poems have been published online by Ditch. He is currently working frontline with the homeless in Calgary.
This story is accompanied by an extensive interview conducted by Sean Moreland which you can read here.
Sebyth exists. Probably. @Sebyth.
Postscripts to Darkness 
