Dark Train Passing

The town was built because we anticipated the train, but as its odd-angled edges, blacker than all the sin in hell, forced their way over the unfamiliar tracks, all of us except our young men fled into our homes.

We did not see a hint of its smoke last month, as the months-long blizzard slowed, and the flat ground beyond our noses emerged from the white fog to reveal a landscape blanketed, swamped, immersed in the refuse of a frozen cloud.

We did see the shadow of the drunk prophet, which was as good as seeing the shadow of the smoke of the train’s seething engine. He came to us as a dark hulk of a pile of skins, creatures shot and stripped in his Westward progress, their limp flanks steaming at his shoulders.

The human shape within did not unfold to us for quite some time. We watched him from noon, staggering through the fields, seeming to sway without drawing nearer. Then, as dusk fell over the glowing land in the mid-afternoon, he was upon us.

“Pray the sun don’t come out,” he told us through jagged, sunworn lips which seemed about to fall off. He stood in the street, knee-deep in snow, swaying the same as when he walked to us from the horizon. His crooked jaw continued moving in a slow rotation after he finished speaking.

“You don’t look like a man to say much about prayer,” we replied.

He sneered, then said, “You might be right. Anyway, the sun will come, pray or not, and I hope to be drunk when it does.”

With that, he trudged on toward the saloon, seeming to know exactly where it was, despite the fact that the sign had been whitewashed in the blizzard. He spotted it like a buzzard spots a carcass before it even dies.

We watched him go. The proprietor of the saloon followed him in, ready to sell, beginning a weeklong transaction begun which would bring a small fortune into our town, right before we lost our sons.

“Train’s coming thisaway,” he said, throwing a satchel of money onto the bar, “reckon this’ll keep me drinking until then?”

“Track’s been built a hundred miles south,” said the bartender, taking the satchel in his hand and peering in, wide-eyed, at its contents, “but I reckon this’ll keep you drinking until hell freezes over.”

“Looks like hell already did,” the prophet replied, throwing his thumb over his shoulder, gesturing toward the town outside.

He took his first drink on Wednesday, and by Friday we were all drinking on the fruits of his satchel. The money was enough for him to buy the whole town, which in a way was what he did.

As we fell drunk, he began a warning, which sounded to our drink-fuzzed ears like a rhapsody, “when the sun comes with its warmth, when the snow falls from your streets, there will be a set of tracks waiting for the train, and when the train comes, the town will be a town of old men.”

One of our young men, under the influence of the prophet’s gifts, brought a guitar and began playing a stark tune, and the prophet sang an ode to the train which would come.

The proprietor leaned on the bar, watching, worried. The words of the song danced through the saloon, twisting in the air, growing, echoing, turning the horrific image of the locomotive into a romantic notion, and the young men joined the song, and it expanded and repeated until its nightmarish words resounded throughout the town.

By noon the next Tuesday, the sun crackled through the winter atmosphere, and the snow turned to water and fled the town, and a rusted pair of metal tracks emerged along the street, and their genesis lay beyond the view of our eyes, way out east, far past the horizon where they converged. The snow remained to our West, obscuring their destination.

Wednesday morning. A distant clatter. The steady chug-chug of the furnace fires. The metallic twist of the wheels. The pillar of smoke and fire from the engine. The train roared our way from the East at a blistering speed, sprinting across the prairie, its dark pounding form closer and closer. Its searing coal heart thumping, grinding, raging our way. Then it was upon us. The mothers fled. The fathers with their rifles waited behind shuttered windows. Children under beds.

There was a rush to the street from the saloon, where the boots of our young men trampled into mud the last traces of the blizzard. We knew this because we heard their slurred, boisterous chatter from behind our doors, saw their shadows flit across the strips of sunlight on our floors, heard the slosh of steps and then, when we fathers could bear it no longer, we burst into the street.

Our doors flew open and we charged out to follow our young men, but the only sure trace of them lay in the swirled, blended sludge between the saloon doors and the middle of the street. The train was gone, along with its tracks, along with the prophet, along with our sons, along with the sunshine.

Then it started to snow again, and, under the cover of icy black clouds, a cold wind rushed in, and the town began to die.

Story by Ian North

Volcano Springs

The old prognosticators do what they always do. They ache and talk about what it means.

Lazarus McGinty starts off about his knee, The sucker feels like it’s gonna blow, the man says, like it’s on fire.

Elijah Blart replies, and my elbow’s flatfooting to some tune I cain’t hear.

And they sit on the porch and look across the town. In late fall, heat waves drift across the street, cutting everything into a mosaic.

Some storm brewin somewhere, says Lazarus.

Yessir, replies Elijah.

The earth shifts a little under them. A fart squeaks out from under Elijah. He cackles, Sounds like it’s done been brewed.

Lazarus, who does not smell nor hear nor see much, does not laugh.

Some time passes. Lazarus sees his knee explode. Well I reckon it weren’t doin me no good nohow.

Elijah’s arm falls off at the elbow. yessiree, I reckon the weather’s bout to do somethin wild, he concludes.

The ground shifts underneath them again, then cracks open. Fire spits up from the depths. Molten rock bubbles and advances.

Time does not allow them further comment. The old men watch a volcano rise from the earth, and they feel wonder as their pain takes its meaning, then consumes them.

Story by Ian North

Jonah’s Dog

You are dry and your skin feels like parchment against this wind that blows hot against your left shoulder. You have been walking for days and this neverending breeze, comfortingly warm at first, has been taking all your moisture away. What is the term for when the sweat dries as it is formed? Perhaps wicking or just evaporation. You are unable to concentrate enough to remember.

You are travelling on foot, rhythmically stepping in time to old songs in your head, hymns and drinking songs blending into one another. You carry a canvas duffel bag and wear the faded black clothes still smelling of the tobacco that ran out three nights ago. There is a dog that is always somewhere on the periphery of sight. He has been eating the food scraps you leave, but you do not trust each other enough to get close.

You are following the telegraph poles. There is no road, just smoother dirt, and no trees. Rocks large and small stand all around, oblivious to the desert wind. Patches of low, tangled scrub stretch everywhere. You think the telegraph poles might be ash, from the mountains you came from, each made from a whole tree.

The dog begins to bark from somewhere up ahead, and the noise furrows your brow. It is not yet noon and your neck feels like deer pelts, curing. The telegraph poles seem to dip and vanish in the distance, from about where the sound drifts to you. In under an hour, you reach the dog, and he stops barking.

You are standing at the edge of an abrupt break in the desert; a canyon. The telegraph wires stretch directly down, dipping onto a roof amongst stores and homesteads. This town, your destination, nestles tightly between the cliffs. You zigzag down the rugged path, and the dog does not follow, preferring to hunt for lizards and scavenge away from people.

When you reach the canyon bed, you step onto soil and see that the land down here is good. A shame, you think. You walk amongst the buildings ignoring the stares as wives pause from sweeping their porches and children break away from games. You walk until you reach the gate of the largest building. You do not have to wait or knock as the mayor steps out swiftly.

“Weell, this must be im-por-tant in-deed.” He scans the crowd that has been forming behind you. His voice is like an unoiled hinge. “It takes three days by horse and you seem to have per-am-bu-lated alone.” You let his statement sit in the air for a beat or two before you answer, softly, with the only message you have been given.
“In twelve hours, this town will be destroyed.” A flicker of annoyance crumples his forehead as he thinks of a response, but you turn away to face the townspeople. With your voice raised so each word reverberates from the cliffs, you repeat yourself.
“In TWELVE HOURS your TOWN will be DESTROYED.”

Now that you face them, they see your dusty clothes for what they are. They notice the pale presence of your once-white preacher-collar. You walk back through the town, silent as the crowd jostles and questions and accuses. You climb the jagged path and, at the top, you sit on a smooth rock, watching the town, waiting to see the people follow you out. Below, your shadow stretches unnaturally large.

Your message is heavy, as messages go, and all afternoon and into the evening, you hear fragments of worried arguments and scorning laughter. It seems only a handful understood the fervour in your voice. Three families and an elderly couple started down the track, following the wires to the next town. Then the blacksmith with all the tools his cart could hold, after that four children, dirty and some bearing bruises. The townspeople that reached the top had asked questions, and you answered with what you knew. Most of them had seen the look in your eyes and known enough.

The stars come out in the cloudless sky and the moon rises, waning. The time has almost come. The desert wind fades to cool stillness. Without moving your head, you see the dog is nearby, sitting and watching. The taverns are filled to the balconies with people pretending it is just another day. Lanterns and fires sparkle defiantly in the street. A figure about the size and shape of the mayor steps away from the festivity and seems to look at you and raise something shiny; a glass, perhaps. You can feel his unheard curses amidst the shouting and the songs.

You listen now and a noise like a steady wind begins to drown the sounds of revelry. The noise rises, but the bushes do not move and the dust is not stirred. The sound gets louder. This is how the message is fulfilled, how the words that were spoken are made real. The sound is coming from one end of the canyon. It does not stop getting louder. You do not feel any great emotion as the dark water begins its work of destruction, its cleansing.

You and the dog watch as the fires are extinguished and a dark shadow takes their place. The fast-flowing river does not reflect a single star. The roaring of the flood is the only sound. You feel no pity and no hatred. You are Jonah. You are Noah. At first light you will leave.

Story by Chris Knight

The Weatherman Wakes

The first morning, Samuel woke up on the barroom floor. He couldn’t remember how many drinks he had, but he felt pretty good for a man waking up on a barroom floor. Just a little sore in the neck.

His Ford waited for him in a parking lot where grass was seeping up through the concrete. Despite waking up on a barroom floor, the brightness of the sun did not hurt his eyes, nor did our friendly greetings make his head ache.

He got into the vehicle, drove out, and thought that was that.

“Sunny skies ahead,” he said to himself in his weatherman voice, “no chance of rain.”

When he started feeling tired, he found himself a motel in a small town and got a room.

“Welcome back,” the young woman said as she reached for his key.

“Back?”

“Mmmhmm. Room 301.”

She handed him a key, and he headed out.

The next morning, he woke up, looked through the blinds out the window, and saw the bar where he had woken up the morning before. In the grass-peppered parking lot to the side sat his car. He gathered his things, shook his head, and walked over to the office.

“Checking out?” asked a pale, forty-something woman from behind the desk.

“Sure.”

“Where you headed?”

“San Fransisco. New job.”

“Whaddya do?”

“Weatherman.”

“hm.”

He drove faster that day, pushing the pedal to the floor and earning himself two speeding tickets. He was to be well paid when he made it to San Francisco, so the tickets only bothered him because they slowed him down.

He did not stop when he felt tired, but pushed on across the desert, on the small, straight roads that stretch across the vacant parts of this land. Finally, long after the sun set, when he could no longer keep the car on the road, he pulled over. Without even leaning his seat back, he placed his head against the headrest and dozed.

As the heads of sleeping men do, his rolled to the side, then forward, and when his neck started to hurt, he awoke with a start.

An old woman in a pillbox hat clucked and shook her head in the pew across from him. A preacher stood at the front of the chapel, reading from the book of Isaiah. Samuel looked down to see that he was wearing a suit. A few other churchgoers glanced over to see that he had woken up.

Samuel waited it out. He even shook the preacher’s hand and told Mrs. McLarty to have a great week and inquired about her husband, who was sick. How did I know that? He thought.

“Oh he’s got good days and bad days. Thank you for asking, Samuel.”

Three buildings down, he saw his car sitting next to the bar. He waved at Earl and said hi. He went in for a quick drink, then got into his car and drove out. He woke up the next morning in a stable, sleeping near some of Earl’s horses, who didn’t seem to mind the company.

Not knowing where he was in relation to the town, he simply walked out of the stable into a field of grass.

The way things are going, he thought, there’s only one place I can end up.

Late in the afternoon, he staggered into town to find his car parked next to the bar. He knew all of us by name now, and greeted whoever he saw, asking things about our lives and relatives. He got into his car and drove away, and was back the next day and the next and the next and the next until winter had fallen upon us with its deep chill.

Each day awoke in a different place knowing more and more about the town. When he knew everything about all of us, he began waking up with knowledge about our past, and he’d sit at the diner some mornings before driving away and tell us things about our history which we didn’t know.

It wasn’t until an icy day in mid-January that his car got covered in snow and he did not try to leave. He shivered when he stepped out of the grocery store that morning, and went back inside. He bought some granola bars and had them for breakfast.

That evening, he found his way to the bar, finally resigned to the fact that he would not get out of town. He ordered a whiskey neat, make that a double, please, and sat down across from Earl.

“I’m staying,” he told Earl.

Earl chuckled.

“This town need a weatherman? I know what’s coming,” Samuel said.

“Ain’t got a TV station for a hundred miles,” Earl told him.

“Don’t matter. I can tell you what’s coming and you can spread the word.”

That morning, Samuel had woken up with the final piece of information about the town: how it would end, and when. Taking a sip from his drink, he looked straight at Earl and gave him the weather.

Story by Ian North

Founded by Blood

I cough when I pass the graveyard. My throat tightens up and I feel cold and wet. Most towns have a grave yard, maybe by the church or tucked out of the way. But our town is a graveyard with people walking around like guilty ghosts. You see our town is founded by blood.

This blood guilt falls most full on Lenny Fookes. I met him as a boy, going to his store to look at his candy. And it was his candy, for he ran his store like some king or duke who had stolen away the kingdom. All in the store was his and when we came, we cowered under the spirit of this man who condescended to us by his mere presence. We respected him and hated him and fell guilty by his mere presence. The only thing that seemed to bring him down to us was his miserable cough.

Lenny’s father had been one of the first men to come to this land. His father was a wild man, but not terribly clever. Lenny’s father owned almost all of the land in these parts and like a bent nail refused to sell off a single piece. He hunted and trapped and scratched by on a meager, but honest living. Lenny’s mother was a pale and proud women; a daughter of some eastern banker. She always called Lenny, by his proper name, Leonard. She expected more from life than anyone could ever give. She wanted Lenny to be educated, but her husband thought this was a waste of time. She hated him for this, but he knew nothing.

One night misty and cold, the old man took Lenny out to check the traps, but never came back.

“Boy – quit lagging behind!”

“I aint’ Pa!”

As they walked, the silence fell over them. The ground was wet and the air was cold.

“Pa, next year you think I could go to school?”

“What do you want to go fool’in with that fo’? School never done nobody good. You just come back think’in you know sumthing, but get lost on the way to the john.”

“But, Mother said that if we sold some land…”

“Shut-up! What do yer mother know? She’s just a stupid spoiled heifer. Don’t go listening to her fool ideas.”

And as they walked, the silence went on.

“Here, make yourself useful. I’m gonna climb down this ravine and check them traps,” Pa said as he handed Lenny the gun. “Don’t let ‘er touch the ground. It’be just like yer stupid mother’s child to drop that gun.”

And according to Lenny, when Pa handed over the gun it went off. And the blast killed the old man. It was all a big accident. Of course none of this came out right away, because the body wasn’t found for a couple of days. Lenny stayed out in the woods wandering around in the belly of his guilt. Everyone says that it rained the whole time. Lenny was out in the cold rain for nearly three days. When he was found, the blood had soaked through with the rain and left his shirt a pale pink. This is when he started to cough.
It wasn’t until the body was found that questions were raised. They took Lenny in, but the details never matched up with his story. And it seemed like the longer they questioned him the more he coughed. Everyone talked about how guilty Lenny seemed; but slowly, one by one, nobody talked about it. If anyone brought it up, only a guilty silence hung over the group. Soon no one brought it up.

Lenny never got over his cough, but at the end of the year he went away to school. Most people sort of forgot about the whole ordeal. It was while Lenny was at school, that the town really grew. Most everything was built during this time except for the saloon which was already here. Everyone seemed to be doing well.

But in four years Lenny came back and opened up his drug store. When people went to say hello he glowered at them from his corner. He acted triumphant as if he had beaten us in battle. He acted better than us.

Once, someone asked him about his father.

“What do you care? Your folks are living on my old man’s land.” he coughed out.

And we were silenced by this. You see in the years following the old man’s death Lenny’s mother had sold off nearly all of the land. And the entire town knew that Lenny was as guilty as hell, but we had bought a piece of his guilt when we bought our land. So now we go to his store and buy our medicines, listening to him cough. We tolerate the condescension and share in the guilt because we know that we are as low down and dirty as everyone else in this God forsaken town.

When Lenny Fookes died they buried him next to his ma and pa. It’s a wonder that anyone came to the funeral because it rained the whole day, but curiosity and death always draw a crowd. Thirteen people got sick afterwards. I suppose that when the grave finally swallowed Lenny he got some peace from all his coughing. But even now when you go down to the graveyard you can feel the dampness. The temperature drops and your hair stands on end. As you walk you can hear what sounds like coughing. And if you linger the mists will wrap around your throat and the guilt will rise to choke you out of the land of the living…

Story by Joseph Kotulski

Coyote Bone Bicycles

At the edge of town, there is a pile of bicycles.  Some are racers – some are cruisers, all discarded.  Some are black and some are white and some are green.  But one thing they all have in common.  They were made out of the bones of coyotes and oak wood.

Thunk-Thunk. Thunk-Clunk.   

A woman rides one of these beauties over the freight train tracks.

She is surveying the scene.  Roaming with the spirits unaware.  Back in the empty town.  There is no one here.  There hasn’t been anyone for years.  Returning.  For what?  Where do I go now?  Which streets hold the memory of that boy I was going to marry?  And the children I used to teach? 

Memory sets upon the buildings and streets like dust. 

She pedals faster to stir up the dust with the wind. 

To stir up a cloud over memory for a moment. 

The town bar doors swing open with the wind as she passes, and she sees within a group of stragglers and strangers with horrible faces.  There are little ones with hungry bodies.  Men with cuts.  Women with bruises.  There is no speech.  Their sense of motion is weirdly minimal.  It is unclear if they are alive or dead.  Do they simply have nothing to do and are like this all the time?  Or has something just happened out of the ordinary to make them so sober and lifeless?  Or has the memory of one sudden tragedy left them in an ongoing state of paralyzed remembrance?

She stops past the bar, and, dismounting the bike, turns to go in.  The bartender is tough with age and loss, and stares with an expression of love or anger at her as she approaches.  Something in her stomach spins rapidly as he looks into her.  She scans the room quickly to find families, a wide assortment of people, sitting and staring some at each other, some at her, some out the window, and some down at their bourbon – children on the floor playing with things.  The slow pace of time suddenly rushes into dread as she recognizes these people.  They are all hers.  All of them were hers.  The children to whom she would have given birth if the accident had not happened.  The children in her classroom every day before the accident.  The babies of the children.  Her mother and father there.  And her younger sisters.  The accident.

The bartender gestures with his hand for her to take a seat.  Instead of sitting, she takes his hand, climbs up on the counter, pulls him up, and begins to dance lazily to the rhythm of the door swinging back and forth and the melody whittled by the wind.  Eyelids slowly lift with eyebrows.  The flesh and hair and eyeballs and clothes of the people begin to flicker in her vision.  Patches of color dissolve and disappear.  The familiar fades. 

As she pedals again, the mirror on her handlebars catches her eye, and she looks at herself with the main street shapes in the background.  She surveys herself.  Her face is the same as the people she just left behind.  Alive or dead?  She grabs at the mirror and pounds it once with a fist.  She loses some balance and then regains it.  The mirror has swiveled around but does not budge.

She keeps riding till she comes to the opposite edge of town, and merges onto a wider road.  The billboards beguile her with smiling offers.  Walmart.  Insurance.  Casino.  The trees wave easily in the sun, proud and green.  For miles, there are no other vehicles on the road.  The sky is dyed blue.

As the blue darkens, her pedaling slows.  Suddenly, she presses the brakes, gets off her bicycle, and walks through the grass on the roadside.  On impulse, she lies down in the damp grass.  As she falls asleep, she hears a voice begin to sing.  The sound of the voice is filled with grief and understanding and hope, and she stirs gently, dreams filled with restless love.

Story by Jonathan Kotulski

A Greater Love

Anthony could put them back faster than any of us, and most days he did.

He had a charm that took us all in, and he told endless stories which were all false and filled with inconsistencies, but nonetheless had us enthralled. Though he came to us later on in life from a town he never spoke of, he was pretty much the only eloquent man in the town, and we sort of adopted him as a spokesperson when something needed to be said.

When our sheriff got drunk and killed a boy of 12, Anthony went in to talk to him. No one knows what he said, but they walked out with their arms over one another’s shoulders, laughing. The next day, the sheriff hanged himself, and that was the end of it.

When the lady in white strolled through the wall of the saloon, with pure white eyes blazing at us, hollow and enraged, we sort of expected Anthony to do the talking. Turns out, she was the first and last thing to leave him speechless. He dropped his drink on the floor when he saw her, and it shattered and the glass flew through her, but nothing broke.

She shook her head sadly, hovered for a minute, and left through the opposite wall. He watched her go, and when she had gone for a long while, he lined them up and put them back until he was on the floor, where he slept for two days before waking up and drinking more.

The second woman was a dark form, and she entered seven months later. Pure rage. She came in the same place, but not in the same sad, spent way. This one was on a warpath. She flashed from one table to another, knocking drinks and cards and chairs and men in every direction. When she made it to Anthony where he sat at the bar, she stood nose to nose with him, yellow smoke shooting from her nostrils.

“You don’t scare me,” he told her, flat and convincingly unimpressed.

“Ain’t no one in here ain’t skeered bu’choo,” she howled, in twelve different voices at once.

“That may be true, my dear,” he said, tilting his hat to the side, “but these men would be scared if you came crawling in as a rat or an ant. These,” he said, gesturing at our trembling presence, “are not bold men. And even if I was as scared as you were when I killed you, I would not apologize.”

The ghost flew into a rage. She whirled around the room, her features momentarily emerging in red from the deep shadow as she drove table legs into men’s throats, cards through their hearts, and coins through their eyes. He threw another one back while she did, placed it on the bar, and sighed.

“It’s a shame,” he said as she impaled one of us on the saloon doors, “that you can’t direct that energy into something useful. You’re nothing but a waste of fury.”

She flashed from view and reappeared at his stool, five time larger, with flashes of red sparking from her edges.

“You got something to say?”

She didn’t. It was clear she couldn’t touch him. Instead, she grew and grew until her darkness filled the room, suffocating the twelve of us who had survived the first rampage. As we gasped and fought to no avail, he raised his glass and told her to go to hell.

“No woman lived ‘nywheres near you that din’t git a free pass to heaven,” she told him.

“Glad to hear I redeemed you,” he joked. We didn’t find it all that funny considering we were almost dead.

She raged and expanded and burned and we felt her fire consuming what was left of our skin, and then she was gone in a burst, and he was left alone with his drink.

Shaking his head, he looked out over our charred corpses, and began to sing the sad song of the love that destroyed every woman and man who ever got near him.

Story by Ian North

Looney and the Naked Trees

When he was still a child, Looney was given his name by a nameless seaman who passed through town. The sailor heard his strange cry and after listening carefully, declared the sound Looney, meaning “loon-like,” and then the stranger was off again toward the West coast.

We all felt that the characterization was apt for the child as well as the sound, and the levity of it suited us. Looney was mostly our fault.  When his parents died, none of us took the child in, leaving him to develop as an animal would.

He ran around naked most of the time in the woods out past McGarty’s fields. Something ought to have been done, perhaps, but to punish the boy would be to punish a problem of our own making.  So, ill at ease with our culpability, we let him roam.

McGarty caught Looney in the fields one morning, leaning in to hear the gossip passing between McGarty and a neighbor who happened by.  We assume, although no one is sure, that this is how he learned to speak. 

About sixteen years had passed since the death of his parents when Looney got sociable all of a sudden.  We recognized his father’s duds when he appeared clothed for the first time, wandering across the road without direction, trying to join the swell of people that milled around during that time.

He kept at it for about two minutes, then disappeared down an alleyway.  He was back the next day, milling around, and after two weeks, he stayed among us for the better part of the day before retreating to his primal state.

Then one day, he broke from the throng, climbed to the roof of the saloon, and spoke:

“The naked trees have given me food, and I see through this town.”

Then, seemingly startled by something on a neighboring roof, which none of us could see, he scrambled to the street and fled.

He took to climbing like this, once a day, and speaking odd things to us until some unseen terror threatened him and he fled.  He claimed that our beards connected to strings that played like guitars when we slept.  He said that our wives stitched together five-legged serpents at home when we were in the saloon.  He fiercely denounced the way we painted ourselves white and floated around, although none of us had done any such thing.

Whether he was a prophet or a madman was a subject of much debate.  No one could figure any sort of explanation for the things he said.  Then McGarty mentioned something that gave us all pause.

“That thar yung ‘un been eatin mushrooms off dead trees. He done snatched all a em off one a mine.”

No one had eaten mushrooms from the woods before, so we had no idea what effects they might have on a young mind.  We discussed this at great length, and came to no conclusions.  Did the mushrooms possess some magic? Were they intoxicating?  Were they evil?  Even if we knew that the mushrooms caused the speeches, how would we know what they meant, if they meant anything?

It was finally settled that Ed, who was known for doing just about anything that any of us suggested, would find a tree with some mushrooms and partake. 

We all accompanied him to the tree at McGarty’s place, and found a clump of mushroom at the base that Looney had missed.  It was the size of a marble.  Ed rolled it around in his hand, then, with a final lucid look at his friends, he threw it to the back of his throat and swallowed.

“Nuthin.”

Then suddenly, a kind of terror swept over him. His fingers locked up and his eyes spun around, searching for something.  Without warning, he leapt from us and ran back toward town.

We followed him as well as we could, but he got a lead on us, and by the time we caught up with him, he was standing on a rooftop across from Looney, screaming competing prophecies.

“Your maidens carry the dust of the Western plains upon the soles of their feet!” cried Ed.

“Pigs escape from your daughter’s lungs when they sing,” replied Looney.

They went back and forth like this for some time, then looked simultaneously at the same spot in the air between them.  Looney scrambled from his perch, and Ed fell from his and died.

We heartily agreed that the experiment had been a failure, and held a wake for poor Ed that weekend.  In the house of mourning, Ed’s wife refused to speak with any of us. We understood and kept our distance, chewing on the food that she had prepared.  We weren’t aware that she had collected some mushrooms and mixed them in to our meal so that all of us might share in the affliction that did Ed in.

One of the last things we remembered before the end, after the meal took effect and we started seeing the things which Ed and Looney had warned us about, was that someone had knocked over Ed’s coffin, and the body lay sprawled and stiff among us.  As we slipped into the visions which would claim our lives, we saw Looney suddenly standing by the body, enraged. 

Then, under the spell of God-knows-what, as we all careened toward our own fates, he began to sing like a bird about how to deal with the burial, but it was too late by then. We would all be gone by sunset.

Story by Ian North

The Preacher on Saturday Night

The preacher came to us from two towns over.  All we heard tell about the place was that it rained all the time, nonstop, in buckets.

He snuck in to our streets one night, and the rains followed him. He locked himself up in the church downtown and wore a prim, dark suit. That’s why we christened him the Preacher, although we never heard him preach from that first night until the water overwhelmed us.

The hiss of electric clouds moved across the fields all the next day.  A slow, grinding drizzle followed after that.

The Preacher hid out most of the time, running to the grocer’s for food without a word to anybody.  He bought mostly green beans and whiskey.

A poker player saw him run past the doors one morning. “There go the preacher,” he said, “how come he thinks he can stay in our church n’ not pay rent?”

A murmur of agreement passed around the room.  If there’s one thing men enjoy in a town with dead air and not much to do, it’s unrest.  The rain had cast an oppressive mood over all of us, and we were itching for a cause to shake it.

Our unrest grew until, two days later, when the Preacher went out for food, we all leapt up and flooded out to meet him.

“Hey preach,” we all said.

“Preach?”

“Yeah.  You been stayin in our church.  You gotta earn your keep if you’re gonna stay in our church.”

“I ain’t no preacher.”

“You are now.  If we come by on Sunday and you ain’t preaching, you gonna get throwed out.”

The Preacher, upon hearing this, turned red as a beet and retreated back to the chapel.

The rain fell harder that night than we had ever seen. Then, on the Wednesday before our new parson was to preach, a woman came to town.  We all took notice of that.

She rode a horse all alone.  She dressed simply, but she was a perfect shape, and we all fell in love before we even got to know her.  She burst into the saloon and every eye turned, except Ed’s left, which never moved because it was made of wood.

“Is John here?”

Four men name John raised their hands.

Apparently, they weren’t the Johns she was looking for. She shook her head and left, and there, on the steps between her horse and the doors, she froze.  The Preacher stood out in the street staring at her.

“How did you find me?” he asked.

“I was on my way out.  Stopping in every town.”

He looked at her for a while, both just standing there, and she moved to him. He pulled out his gun and pointed it at her.  She stopped again.

“Get out of town.  Go back to the parson. You’ve brought nothing but rain to me.”

We had all suddenly noticed the rain because of its effect on this woman’s dress, which was now holding her just as close as we wanted to.

“He don’t love me.  Never did.  I left him.  You’re all I got.”

“It’ll get worse,” the preacher said, which was true.  We figured it would get worse either way, so she may as well stay, but we didn’t say a word.

There was a long pause as they looked at one another, searching for finality.

“Well? You gonna git now or in a box?” the preacher asked her, and we all gasped.  She didn’t reply, so he shot her between the eyes.

“What the hell was that?” We demanded. Such beauty rarely found cause to come among us, and we were aghast at the waste of woman.

He spit and looked around.  Then, “she was the wife of a real preacher when I loved her.  Had the power to pray rain from the skies and throw it on my head. And that’s what he did.”

Lightning jumped over us and struck a tree at the edge of town.

“You ought to bury her,” we said.

“I ain’t laying a hand on her.”

He turned and sloshed back to the church, and then the rain really started to get going. Two of us went to the girl and dragged the body to the undertaker’s.

By Saturday, a mass of water of Biblical proportions was moving our way from the mountains.  We didn’t know about it, and we wouldn’t until it killed us, so we sat drinking, speculating in hushed tones about the content of the next morning’s sermon.  After what we had seen, we couldn’t wait.

He showed up at ten that night in the saloon carrying a guitar, took two shots of whiskey, then addressed us.

“You called me a preacher,” he started.  We all nodded.

“But I ain’t a preacher.  I’m a musician, and my music don’t even belong in the Church.  It don’t belong on a Sunday morning. It belongs here, on a Saturday night, with a few drinks in me.”

With that, he moved to a stool and began to play, slow, sad, and red as a beet, with eyes closed in prayer. He was getting ready to say something any one of us lowlifes would have said, given the chance to talk to God.

While he picked at the song, the wall of water moved toward us at full speed. We heard it rip up Ed’s barn, rush over plains and trees. We couldn’t run, couldn’t register where the noise was coming from, so we just sat there, waiting for it to rush over us.

The last words we heard before the end were the Preacher’s plea for a kingdom of his own.

Story by Ian North

The Reverend’s Contraption

He stood on a hill overlooking the city like it was Nineveh. The old prune had come to the limit of his reason, and was wobbling at the edge of something beyond it.

He had been our only scientist, had used magnets to direct the actions of mice and lizards, had reflected light in a manner that melted rocks and briefly set Anderson’s field on fire.  He had books full of math, and had figured his way right to the fiery core of our round world.

That day, before his disappearance, he hovered strangely in the alleyways, muttering that he couldn’t get to the bottom of it.  He couldn’t get past his head, couldn’t get past his time, couldn’t see things wrap around to their fulness.

He then went missing and reappeared on the hill at the West end of town, silhouetted against a setting sun.  His hair, scraggly and brittle, shuddered in a breeze that died quickly, leaving an odd stillness in the air.

Then, quick as the sun goes down, he walked away into the big nothing of the prairie.

Years later, when he showed up at the tavern in a cloak cut from buffalo hide and a cross made out of the stems of wildflowers woven tightly together, we had almost forgotten who he was.

“The professor’s back,” Ed called from behind his beer.

“Ain’t the professor no more,” the old man said.

“Yeah?” said Ed again, like he was gonna laugh.

“That right,” the old man said, “I’m the reverend now.  Maybe a prophet too if that be His will.”

“Whose will?”

“HE WHOSE WORDS I HAVE COME TO DELIVER.”

The old man seemed to triple in size and have glory bulging from every vein when he said that, and Ed dropped into a real quiet state and tried to maintain a smirk without much success.  It didn’t matter either way because we were all looking at The Reverend now, waiting for whatever might happen next.

He huffed a little looked around and, realizing that the words he was to deliver hadn’t quite come to him yet, he left the way he came in.

He was among us again, but he had taken residence in the church steeple.  Since our last preacher had just left the ministry, so to speak, and we didn’t have much use for the building since we were so busy with our crops and businesses and whatnot anyway, no one bothered him.

Well he came to the tavern again, and the proprietor, who realized that he wasn’t going to drink, sort of turned away and acted real busy. He marched in, arms wiggling like he had some kind of power in them.

“You got them words yet?” Ed asked again.

“He who sent me has the words written, but they must be borne out in the natural world, and it is this he has sent me for.  He has sent me to wrap his words in song and science. Ready your ears.”

He left again, and we expected another long stretch of weird silence, but he returned almost immediately, pulling a rope which we could not see the end of.

He walked across the floor, and as he did, we started to hear a clatter from the street like a swarm of insects mingled with the clang of old cymbals and the rhytmic chugachugachug of an engine.

When it came in through the door, we felt as if we had seen God, and He was quite a bit more complex than our preachers had led us to believe.

The contraption had all manner of bolts and valves and moving parts jittering and hissing and clanking.  Two large circles rotated at the top of it, barely slipping under the top frame of the door.  At the center, surrounded by steel and wires, rested a harp like a cherub’s.

Claws like the legs of a spider twitched across the strings, waiting for something to happen, full of an unspent, sparking energy that matched the rhythm of the rotating circles up top.

Then in an instant the revered awakened it, pulling a horseshoe from his pocket and throwing it between the rings.  It flew in an arc, twisting, until it reached the machine. Tentacles that seemed to be made of lighting grabbed the metal and held it in midair, and the claws went to work on the strings.

Over the electric clatter, the reverend launched into a prophesy, which he sang in uneasy notes, which stabbed through our ears and rattled around in our heads until we all died, which did not come too long after.

Story by Ian North