Postscripts to Darkness

The car came before the night. It drove too fast along the dirt road, spitting gravel when it took the bend before Miller’s house. Miller watched from the porch and hefted his hunting rifle onto his lap.

The car slowed some once off the road, wobbling over the potholes that Miller’s pickup crossed every day without so much as a shudder. It crunched to a stop and the driver’s window came down.

“You Quentin Miller?”

Miller nodded. He was careful to nod very slowly and not move any other part of his body. Even his hand sat still on the rifle stock.

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“Under the heat there’s a coldness, and even the coldness can’t be pinned down… His fleeting pleasures and undeniable pain aren’t so much depthless as unfathomable.”

—Robert Christgau on George Jones in Growing Up All Wrong

“Take the goddamn gun out of your mouth and give me a Juicy Fruit.”

Sophie leans back her head with the barrel on her tongue and the sea wind whipping through the trees, through the car window into her bobbing blond hair. The road rolls on before them through the Georgia pines, and the headlights play across it like stones they’re skipping.

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One way to avoid the peculiar salesgirl is to never shop at the North Vernon Skin-Mart in the first place. Avoid the store proper. Avoid the entire dingy, crumbling outlet mall if you can. Avoid the walls festooned with unimaginative graffiti scrawled by white trash pseudo-gangstas. Avoid the fractured pavement of the parking lot, overgrown with weeds sprouting in-between the cracks and littered with beer cans and condoms. Avoid, even, the Rustbelt town (just a few miles up I-65) itself. You won’t miss much. It’s less a town, really, than the fossil of one. Avoid it, and you’ll be safe.

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The decapitated snowman stood by the front of the dorm. Its head lay at its feet. She remembered a random comment a student had yelled the night before, during the party: the end of the world is now.

Emma tied the scarf around her neck and trudged towards the dining hall. It was almost empty. The majority of students had already left. The remaining ones were busy hauling their dirty laundry off campus for their mothers to wash during the winter break. Emma had planned to spend Christmas break with Colin, in Los Angeles. But they’d broken up before finals.

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In the summer of 2009, I was invited by Jeff Harrison, the editor of Autumnplay!, to write a short Halloween-themed story for them. The kicker was that it had to be around 1000 words. I don’t write many short stories, and I certainly don’t write “short” short stories when I do. Still, I’d done one for them the previous fall, too, and was very pleased with the result, and also with the experience of working with Autumnplay!, so I agreed immediately. I wanted to write a ghost story that explored the dual notion of ghosts as actual supernatural entities, but simultaneously as expressions of loss and regret. Ideally the story can be read both ways. In “Ghosts,”  the reader is invited to decide for himself or herself if Robert, the older brother, is actually seeing the ghost of his gay-bashed younger brother, Scott, or if the presence of Scott’s “ghost” is merely Robert’s guilt about not having been there for his brother. On another level, “Ghosts” is a story about brothers, and the complexity of fraternal relations in general. I’m often asked if I have an opinion on whether or not Robert is really seeing his brother’s ghost. Of course I have an opinion, but I tend to keep it to myself and let the readers make up their own minds. –Michael Rowe

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