This is the final chapter of an ongoing serial. If you’re looking for chapter one, click here.

Crickets
by J. Kyle Turner

Fifth Movement - Seven Years Later

I spot Emily as soon as she walks into the restaurant, so I wave to spare her the trouble of asking the hostess. She waves back with a smile and walks over to the table, where the server meets her with a drinks menu and talks her through the white wine section. She orders a pinot grigio to match mine and the server disappears into the kitchen to fetch it.

“So did you just come from work?” I ask.

“Last show of the season,” she says. “Sorry I’m a little late, had to make an appearance at the after party.”

“Anything I’ve heard of?”

“You’ll laugh.”

“I won’t laugh,” I promise.

She wrinkles her nose. “Albany Symphony presents Shrek Forever After.”

She’s right; I do laugh. But so does she. Anyone who makes a career of this kind of thing inevitably ends up playing a few crowd pleasers. One good franchise weekend might pay for a month of Mozart.

The server shows up with her drink and a basket of focaccia bread, and we toast before digging in. “To finally making it big,” I say, tilting my glass toward hers.

“And the sooner, the better,” she answers with a clink. “Speaking of, how are things with you? Still working at the Davidson Theatre?”

“For now,” I say. “But the program director’s nephew just finished at OSU, so I think my days are numbered.”

“Ouch.”

“It’s fine,” I say with a shrug. “Probably about time I moved on. That’s actually why I came up. There was a conference in Ithaca last week, and I thought it would be good to rub a few elbows, try to get my name out there.”

“Ithaca isn’t far,” she says. “From Albany, I mean.”

“Not too far,” I agree.

We talk all the way through dinner. I catch her up on life in Ohio, my mom’s new apartment, a few of our old haunts. She gives me the dirt on the Albany Symphony, and I dutifully take her side in every squabble. It’s remarkable how easily we fall back into it after years of one-off messages and birthday texts.

“I was kind of surprised when your name popped up on my phone,” she says.

“I figured it was a good chance to catch up. I’m glad you were free.”

“Oh, I’m free most nights,” she says. “I don’t really have anything serious going on, outside of work.”

“Same here,” I say. “Nothing serious, I mean.”

Dinner ends way too quickly, so we wander around for a bit to find somewhere else to sit and talk. Emily has a few favorite places in town, but they’re all closed by now, so we end up walking for half an hour in the spring weather.

“I thought New York never slept.”

“That’s New York City,” she explains. “Albany goes to sleep at ten.”

“Want to look something up? Try a new place?”

“Sure.”

We meet in the parking lot of a honky tonk bar just north of Washington Park. We grin at each other as we walk in, mostly to say sure, okay, nobody’s first choice, but we can pretend for a night. I hold the door for her and mime tipping my hat to the bartender as we walk in, and she hits me on the shoulder to tell me to stop.

There’s a bluegrass band up on stage at the back of the bar, so we grab a booth by the window where it’s a little quieter. We order a pair of beers and lean toward each other over the table to talk.

“Fiddle player’s pretty good,” I half-shout.

“Not bad,” she agrees.

The set ends with a decent cover of Tom Dooley, which is forty percent of what I know about bluegrass. The lead singer announces a fifteen minute break, and the bar returns to what I assume is the normal, steady hum of conversation. I can hear people at the nearest table if I strain to listen, but just barely. The tall booths and low lighting make it seem like we’re the only two people in our little corner of the bar.

“Can I ask you something weird?”

“Sure,” I say.

“Was any of it real?”

I know what she means, of course. I take a sip of my beer, not because I’m nervous about answering, but because I want to be as honest as I can, and old memories take a while to dredge up.

“I only went back to his campsite once,” I begin, a little unsteadily. “It was the first Thursday after graduation, just after dark. I wanted to apologize, I think. Or thank him. Or both. I don’t really know.”

“What did he say?”

“He wasn’t there. I’ve walked that path a hundred times, mostly in the dark. I could walk it blindfolded, point to the exact spot where his truck used to be, but it was gone. The whole campsite, everything. It wasn’t like he disappeared. It was like no one ever lived there in the first place.”

“Oh.”

“But to answer your question, yes. I think he was real, and I think it probably would’ve worked out the way you thought if we’d gone through with it.”

Even in the half darkness, I can see the look of hurt that crosses her face. This is the real reason I dialed her number, why I drove all the way to Albany in the dark. She hides her expression by taking a sip of her own beer, then setting the bottle down a little too hard on the table. We sit quietly while she tilts the bottle back and forth with her thumb and index finger.

Finally, she asks. “So why didn’t we?”

It isn’t hard to answer her. Especially since I’ve already decided to be honest.

“Because I was scared,” I say. “In that moment, thinking about Fours dragging my fingers over the strings until they bled, it just terrified me. I was scared of doing something wrong, of finding my mom dead in the trailer if I broke some rule we didn’t know, of a million different things. But mostly,” I pause here, because this is the hard part, “because I was in love with you, and ashamed of myself, and Fours wasn’t going to solve either of those things for me, no matter how good he made me at the violin.”

She tears up at this, and it’s a wretched feeling to know that I’ve piled one hurt on top of another. But I have to hope that this is the kind of hurt that heals, the kind that draws the poison out.

“I’m sorry I pressured you into it,” she says.

“I’m sorry I chickened out.”

“Guess we were doomed from the start.”

I shrug. “I’ve been doomed before. I’ve survived it every time so far.”

We settle our tab and head for the door. It’s already late, but I know that if the night ends here, with us driving separate cars in opposite directions, it’ll be another seven years before we talk again, so I suggest a walk in the park to clear off my buzz. Emily nods in silent assent. Before we cross the street, I stop by my car and pull my violin case out of the trunk.

“Bring yours, too,” I say. “I want to show you something.”

She looks doubtful, but we stop by her car anyway and she digs her violin case out of the backseat.

On the way into the park, we pass a sign that says the park closed two hours ago, but we ignore it and head toward the bridge. Crickets sing to us from the far banks as we cross, and a cool breeze sets the trees rustling, swaying in the dark. I find a bench on the other side of the water and take a seat. Emily stands a few feet off as I pull out my violin and set the bow across the neck. I don’t know what I’m waiting for yet, but I know that I’ll recognize it when I hear it.

The breeze fades. A cloud passes in front of the moon. The whole city is blessedly, miraculously quiet. In the midst of that vast silence, I hear a lone cricket chirp the first half of a question. Three little quarter notes in the darkness, like the beginning of a waltz.

I answer with three notes of my own, counting the beats. The cricket chirps again before I finish, and I realize we’re playing a five-step waltz rather than the traditional three, so I adjust. This time, when the cricket chirps, I answer with four eighth notes: one, two, three, four-and-five-and, one, two, three, four-and-five-and…

The wind picks up again, and the rest of the night rushes in to join the song: a crescendo of rustling leaves, the rolling timpani of a distant train, the trills and flourishes of mockingbirds and whip-poor-wills. It’s only a shadow of that first night, when we played Verklärte Nacht in the woods and the moon sank lower in the sky just to hear us better—but it’s close.

After half a minute of playing, I lose the thread. My impromptu orchestra wanders in twenty different directions until I’m no longer playing with the night, but against it. I hold one final note, then let my violin fall to rest in my lap.

Emily’s standing there with her arms folded across her stomach when I finish. It’s too dark to see the look on her face, and I don’t think she wants me to.

“Sorry,” I say. “I just… figured I owed you a little magic.”

She takes a deep breath. It’s a long time before she says anything.

“How does it end?”

“What?” This isn’t the question I was expecting.

Emily sits down next to me on the bench and lifts the buckles on her violin case. I watch as she pulls out her violin and rests her chin against the chin rest. Her posture is still flawless, her arm perfectly motionless, perfectly relaxed. She could be a statue, if not for the tears running down her cheeks.

“How does the song end, Jake?”

“I don’t know,” I say honestly. “However we want it to, I guess.”

She nods and closes her eyes, and I do the same. A few seconds later we hear it, a thin sound that rises like moonlight over the trees. I wait for her to take the lead. She does so a moment later with a long, slow pull that cuts through the empty night. It sounds like hope, and heartbreak, and seven years of hard waiting.

We play. We play until our fingers go numb, until the trees lean in and the clouds fall still in their circuits, and even the crickets stop to listen.

THE END

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This is chapter four of an ongoing serial. If you’re looking for chapter one, click here.

Crickets
by J. Kyle Turner

Fourth Movement

It doesn’t take long to tell the whole story, though I have to start all the way at the beginning.

“It was freshman year,” I say. “My dad had just died, and we were pretty much broke after the hospital bills, so we had to sell our house and move in here. I somehow got it into my head that I had to be strong now that Dad was gone, so if I ever felt like I was about to cry, I went into the woods to be alone.”

I’ve never told anyone this before, but instead of looking pitifully at me, Emily is just nodding, like yeah, she can understand that.

“One night, I heard someone playing the violin. I thought it might be someone from school, or—I don’t know what I thought, actually. I just knew I had to find whoever was playing. The woods back there aren’t real woods. There used to be dirt roads and stuff for construction vehicles, so there are little trails that haven’t grown all the way over yet. I picked one that seemed like it went in the right direction and a few minutes later I found Fours’ campsite.”

“Fours? Like the number?”

I shrug. “That’s his name.”

“Weird,” she says. “And he taught you to play the violin?”

“He asked if I had anything to eat, and I said no. I went back a couple times, but he wasn’t always there. I think the first thing I brought him was a granola bar. He played a song and then asked me to copy him. I’d never been able to learn by ear before, but I got close on the first try, and he said I could try again next week.”

“And it’s always Thursday?” She’s leaning forward now, hanging on every word.

“I didn’t pay attention at first, but yeah, I guess so. Thursday works for my schedule because I don’t have work and my mom isn’t here.”

Emily sits back, satisfied. “I should have known,” she says. “You’re way too good at the violin.”

“You’re better than I am,” I point out.

“I started playing when I was four. My parents were intense about it, and it made me really competitive. I’ve only ever known one person who was better than me, and you could be her ghost.”

The Prokofiev sonata, I realize. She picked it because she used to play it with her friend, and I just happened to pick the same song. That’s why we were able to play so well together.

“I guess so. It doesn’t technically prove anything.”

“True,” she says. “But the way I see it, there are three options. Option one, you met a Norwegian fairy in the woods behind your house and traded leftovers for magic violin powers. Option two, you met an elderly homeless virtuoso violinist in the woods behind your house and traded leftovers for magical violin powers. Options one and two are both crazy.”

“What’s the third option?”

“You’re full of shit and you’re just trying to lure me into the woods.”

Mom comes in right at the worst possible time, because this is a thing that moms do. “He better not be,” she says with a sharp glare.

Emily flashes a mysterious smile that I can’t interpret and will probably never forget. But we can’t really talk about Fours any more now that Mom is here, which puts an end to the conversation for now.

***

Emily presses me for details at school, but I’ve already told most of the story and don’t have much else to add. I try my best to dig up anything I might have forgotten. It’s thrilling to know that she’s obsessed with something I told her, that she’s thinking about me when I’m not around.

And I can tell she’s still thinking about it because I see little signs every now and then. In her notebook, she circles the 4/4 time signature on a piece of music and writes “Fours?” next to it in blue colored pencil. She checks out weird books from the library and gets defensive when I ask her about them.

“It’s better than looking it up on the internet,” she argues. “Every website just quotes the same two paragraphs from every other website.”

A week later, she brings a map to school—an honest-to-god printed map, like you get from a gas station—and asks me to point to Fours’ campsite. I do so.

“Aha!”

The reason for this outburst is that the road behind his campsite runs north-south, which means that he’s technically on a north facing overlook, which I could’ve told her. I tell her that a road isn’t the same thing as a waterfall, but she points out that lo mein isn’t the same thing as mutton, as if that proves her point and not mine.

We talk about other things, of course. The Halvorsen symphony isn’t incredibly challenging, but it is long, and practice runs late pretty much every day. It’s surprising to me how unmotivated some of the second violins are, and Emily says the same thing about her section, but maybe this is just what normal looks like when you’re as addicted as we are.

After practice, Emily gives me a ride home and waves to my mom from the driveway as I grab my backpack and violin case from the backseat. It strikes me that she wouldn’t spend this much time with me if she didn’t like me, but I can never work up the courage to say anything during the ride home, and by the time we turn into my shitty trailer park, I’ve talked myself out of it again.

It isn’t long before this frustration bleeds over into other parts of my life. I start to hate my job at the hardware store. I’ve been working myself ragged for years, and I still don’t have enough money for college or a car or anything. It’s like no matter what I do, I can never make any real progress.

One day, while I’m stocking shelves, I realize that my hands have spent more time holding plastic than anything else: walkie talkies, barcode scanners, credit cards, box cutters, shopping baskets, door handles, nametags, spray bottles, stretch wrap, polyester work shirts, the wringer handle of a yellow mop bucket. Somebody once told me that human fingers can feel changes in texture as small as a thousandth of an inch, and I hate the way that touching plastic doesn’t feel like touching anything at all.

A few weeks before the winter concert, Emily passes me a note after class. Finally, I think, because there are only two things this note can be. Best case, it’s a love letter, which is an undeserved win but one I’m not too proud to take. Worst case, it’s the other kind of letter, the one where she knows I like her but wants to stay friends. I wait until I’m alone before I open it, ready for whichever path fate has chosen for me.

Instead, it’s a single sentence written in the margin of a torn-off piece of notebook paper:

Fors is the Old Norse word for a waterfall!

Followed by a smiley face.

I crumple the note in my hand. I wonder if this is what it feels like to run out of oxygen, to drown with your fingertips still above the surface of the water.

***

“I want to meet him.”

I’ve seen this coming, of course. Part of it is Emily’s natural tendency toward obsession, but we also have the winter concert coming up, and the spring semester is right around the corner. By January, we’ll be thinking about competition schedules and music school auditions, and if I’m not nervous about the former, I’m already losing sleep over the latter.

I do my best to lay out the counterargument. I can’t convince Emily—or even myself—that Fours isn’t a Fossegrim, but I do have one last card to play. I tell her about the night before we first played together and Fours’ warning about breaking the rules. I tell her about Hector’s funeral, and three days of missed school, and how I only have one parent left to lose.

“We should be fine as long as we stick to the rules,” she says, but even she looks doubtful, like she’s saying this to convince herself.

“And if we miss something?” I say. “Who gets punished for it?”

But it’s no use. I can’t talk her out of it, and if I’m being honest, I saw that coming too.

Emily shows up on the first Thursday night in December, after Thanksgiving break but a full week before the winter concert. Mom is at work, but at this point she’s halfway to thinking of Emily as a daughter-in-law, so I don’t have to worry about the neighbors ratting us out. She’s wearing a heavy down coat and holding a styrofoam takeout container, which I can smell before I even open the door.

“What is that?”

“Goat Sukha,” she says, wrinkling her nose. “Indian restaurant on Third Street. Closest thing I could get.”

Even though I haven’t visited Fours in months, I still remember the trail to his campsite. For all her determination, I can tell that Emily is nervous. We crunch our way through dried leaves and deadfall, and I can’t shake the feeling that we’re announcing our presence in enemy territory. The noise we’re making, the smell of Indian takeout, the gleaming black violin case: none of these things belong in the woods.

Before long, I see the light from Fours’ campsite up ahead. I want to slow down, but Emily is only moving faster and I have to speed up to stay even with her. We practically burst into Fours’ camp, then fall still. The sudden absence of sound leaves my ears ringing in the cold.

“Evening,” Fours says without turning.

“Hey, Fours,” I say, taking the lead. No way forward but through. “I brought a friend. This is Emily.”

He turns to wave, but his eyes settle on the takeout container. “You brought something to eat?”

“It’s from both of us,” Emily says, stepping forward. She walks all the way to the tailgate and sets the styrofoam container near him, just barely within arm’s reach. Then she fishes a little cellophane package out of her pocket with a fork and napkin inside. She sets this on top of the styrofoam and steps backward until she’s standing beside me.

“Smells good,” Fours says.

“It’s mutton,” Emily says.

But Fours just nods and picks up the fork. A little cloud of steam escapes as he lifts the styrofoam lid. The smell is overwhelming, even ten feet away.

“What now?” Emily whispers to me.

“He doesn’t talk while he eats,” I explain. “Just let him finish.”

So we stand there and shiver in the cold while Fours eats his dinner. Certain details stick out to me, things I’ve noticed but never thought about, things I can’t ignore after two months of Emily’s newfound obsession with Scandinavian folklore. He looks like a troll to me now, with his hunched shoulders and too-long arms, and I can’t believe I’ve never noticed it before. There’s an expression in his eyes that goes past hunger and savor, a hint of something inhuman and insatiable.

He finishes his food, then reaches for the napkin and wipes his lips. “Welcome, Jake and Emily,” he says. Beside me, I feel Emily relax a bit, and I realize that she had been expecting some kind of test.

I start to reach for my violin case, because this is what I always do after Fours eats, but Emily stops me. “You have an interesting name,” she said. “Fours.”

I know her well enough to know she’s being weird, and after a moment I realize that she’s trying not to phrase this as a question. Fours smiles at her like he’s in on the game. Then he leans over and taps his finger on the back of his truck. Behind the gas cap, time and weather have peeled away the “X” of an old 4x4 logo, leaving a pair of oddly-spaced 4s as a namesake.

“Fours,” he says.

“You can’t even see the X anymore,” Emily says. “You must have been living out here for a while.”

This, I realize, is another not-question, which Fours responds to with another not-answer.

“Long enough.”

Emily frowns. She’s wasted a chance at something, but I can’t guess what it is. I can’t tell whether to be afraid for her or jealous of her. Even though Fours has outsmarted her, she’s playing his game at a level I doubt I can match. She knows this world better than I do, almost instinctively.

But even she has to admit defeat, so she asks the real question, the only question she came here to ask. “Will you teach us to play the violin?”

“I will,” Fours answers. “Play me a song first.”

“That isn’t supposed to be part of the deal.”

“What do you know about deals?” Fours asks, and the pit of my stomach goes cold and heavy. There was a hint of reprimand in that, of anger. I’ve never heard Fours sound angry. Not once in three years.

Emily closes her mouth. She knows she’s crossed a line, and she knows better than I do what the stakes are. She turns to me and whispers. “Do you know Verklärte Nacht?”

“I know some,” I say. It’s a beautiful piece of music, though you need more than two violins to play it properly. I ignore the fact that it’s based on a poem about two lovers meeting in the woods.

“Follow my lead,” Emily says. She pulls her violin from her case, and I follow suit. She raises her bow like she’s about to begin playing. I copy her pose, ready to play as soon as she does, but she just keeps standing there.

“Something wrong?” Fours asks.

Emily answers for the both of us. “We’re waiting for the cello.”

The old man’s face blazes with a sudden smile that matches his own campfire for heat. His eyes are wide with a joy so sharp that it looks like malice. “Good!” he shouts to the wind. “So you do know the song!”

My hands start to shake with the cold, but just as I’m about to lose my nerve, I hear it. A low wind pressing its way through the trees like two mournful half notes, one after the other.

We play. And as we play, Fours waves his hands like he’s conducting a full orchestra. Those hands pull the music from me, from Emily, from the sky itself. Leaves rustle. Trees creak. Owls call to one another in the night. The music comes from somewhere behind me, passes over me, and continues out of my sight and hearing. I can’t turn to look at Emily, can’t do or think of anything else but the music.

I have never played this well, and I know that I will never play this well again.

The song ends, and Emily and I both collapse to the dirt. The cold, forgotten until now, steals its way back into my chest. My fingers ache with it. No matter what I do, I can’t seem to take a full breath.

Fours hops off the tailgate and walks over to us. “Give me your hands.”

Emily raises her hand without hesitation, but all I can think of is Fours dragging my hands over the strings until they bleed, just like in the story. I stand up and shove my hands in my pockets.

“I want to leave,” I say suddenly.

Emily is still crouched in the dirt, left hand raised toward Fours. “Not yet,” she hisses.

I look back and forth between the two of them. I can’t find anything soft in either expression. Merciless, that’s how they look. A blizzard in one face, and a summer storm in the other.

“The food came from both of you,” Fours reminds her. “It has to be both of you, or neither.”

“Jake.”

But it’s no use.

Instead of answering her, I turn and run. Fours laughs again, loud and long. A few seconds later, I hear Emily crashing through the woods behind me, but I can’t seem to slow down to let her catch up. We run until we hit my back porch and I almost break the back door down trying to get it open. Emily finds me on the floor and kneels down to hug me, and she’s saying that she’s sorry, she’s sorry, but she doesn’t understand, she doesn’t understand.

***

After that night, we don’t play together for another seven years.

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This is chapter three of an ongoing serial. If you’re looking for chapter one, click here.

Crickets
by J. Kyle Turner

Third Movement

I understand the words my mom is saying, but they don’t make any sense. The image that keeps playing in my head is of Hector nodding to me as I clock in for the day, or signing time sheets at the end of the week, or passing out twenty dollar gift cards to all the guys at Christmas. I hadn’t realized until this moment just how much he served as a pillar in my life.

Sturdy. Dependable. Boring, even. Right up until the pillar falls.

Hector’s funeral is on a Sunday, and we have to close down the store because pretty much everyone from work turns up. I feel guilty being there, but it would have been cowardly to stay home. I can’t shake the idea that Hector’s death is no coincidence.

Fours said there would be a price for breaking the rules, and that I wasn’t allowed to know what it was. Mom said the call came in on Friday evening, about twenty four hours after I met Fours for our usual lesson. I could probably get the exact time of the 911 call if I wanted it, but I don’t. I’m smart enough to allow myself at least a sliver of doubt.

Even so, I end up missing three days of school. Mom’s pretty understanding on the first day. She lets me sleep in and makes pancakes to cheer me up, which doesn’t work because I’m not actually depressed. What I am is afraid. Afraid that it could have happened to someone else, someone I care about more than a sixty year old coworker. Someone I can’t afford to lose.

Mom’s patience runs out on Wednesday morning, but I don’t care, and she’s too tired from work the night before to make sure I wake up in time for the bus. I make it up to her by cooking her favorite breakfast—cheese omelettes and coffee—but it doesn’t work on her any better than the pancakes worked on me.

“I’ll drive you to school,” she says as soon as the plates are clean. “Better late than sorry. Do you need a note?”

“I’ll go tomorrow,” I say. “Promise.”

“Jake.”

“I just need some time to think. I’ll do my homework today and get the house cleaned up. Just one more day. Please.”

She frowns, but I can tell she’s going to fold. Luck is on my side for two reasons. First, she has no idea how close Hector and I were, which means she doesn’t know how close we weren’t. Second, I’m actually being honest here. I really do just need some time to think.

“Tomorrow,” she agrees. “I’ll drive you.”

“I can take the bus.”

“I’ll drive you anyway.”

I make good on my promise to clean up, which gives me something to do until Mom leaves for work around noon. It also keeps my hands busy while my mind churns over the impossible question. Could Fours have had something to do with Hector’s death? I believe it, but even if it’s true, I can’t find an answer to the obvious next question.

How?

I know—have always known—that there’s something weird about Fours. He’s inhumanly good at the violin, and the first time I think that word, inhuman, I realize how well it fits him. I can’t point to a single detail that gives the game away. It’s all of it, together: his clothes, his truck, his campsite in the woods, the trail that always has just enough moonlight to see by. He lives like a character on a set, like one of those movies where everything happens in one room and the weather outside never changes.

The other detail that comes to mind is that I’ve never, ever told anyone about Fours. Not my mom, none of my friends at school. I could rationalize it, pretend that I just wanted to avoid questions, but this isn’t true. The real reason is that I’ve always quietly believed Fours existed just for me. That he would disappear if anyone else knew about him.

Sometime around six o’clock, my phone rings. I don’t recognize the number, but the display says it’s a New York area code, and most spam callers spoof your local area code if they can. In any case, I need a break from my own thoughts, even if it’s just to handle a wrong number. I answer the phone.

“Hello?”

“Is this Jake?” It’s a girl’s voice, but I don’t know who it belongs to.

“Yeah,” I say. “Who’s this?”

“Emily. From class?”

There’s a disorienting moment where I pull my phone away from my ear and just stare at it. The day is already holding too many impossible things. There isn’t any room for this one.

“Jake? Are you there?”

“I’m here,” I say. “What’s wrong?”

“Ms. Landy gave me your number. I guess we did okay on our audition, so she made us section leaders. Congrats, by the way. Are you… do you have a minute to talk?”

“Okay,” I say, drowning. “Yeah, I’m free.”

“Okay, good. Which, um, house is yours?”

The first thing I feel is a flash of bitter shame as I hear her substitute the word trailer for house, which is fine when my mom and I do it, but never sits right in anyone else’s mouth. But this is nothing compared to the sudden realization that follows. Because if she’s deciding between those two words, she must be looking at my trailer/house, which means she’s probably wandering around outside.

Stupidly, I wander over to the window to look for her, but the blinds are all the way up, and she spots me as soon as I mark out the unfamiliar car in the lot.

“Never mind,” she says on the phone. “I see you.”

Then she hangs up.

I’ll say this for panic, it clears your head of everything but itself. Guilt, apprehension, shame, my own middle name—gone, all gone. Instead of doing anything useful, I just stand there and stare at the door while the universe narrows to a single point twenty seconds in the future when Emily will, presumably, knock.

She knocks.

My phone is still in my hand, but my brain can only handle one thing at a time, so before I walk over to answer the door, I click the Add Contact button and type in Emily.

Last name? Violin. Why not?

I answer the door.

The nose stud is back today. It’s the first thing I notice. She’s also wearing a dark blue sweater, even though it isn’t cold yet. Maybe she’s one of those people who dresses for the calendar instead of the weather, or maybe she’s still thinking in New York time. Is it cold there in September? Probably cold enough.

“Come in,” I say, completely on auto-pilot now, too confused to say or do anything that makes any sense.

“Thanks.”

Emily walks in and I let the door hang open by an inch because this seems less creepy somehow. Instead of gesturing to the couch, I walk over to the kitchen and grab two glasses, which I fill with stale Coke from the fridge. Then we sit down.

“Sorry for the other day,” Emily says. “It was kind of a rough week for me, and I just wanted to be done with it.”

“It’s fine,” I say. Then, realizing this isn’t good enough, “I’m sorry, too. I probably should’ve been nicer to the new kid on her first day.”

She smiles at this, and we defuse the tension by sipping our drinks.

“So why’d you come over?” I ask. Out of the hundred and fifty questions I’ve come up with in the last thirty seconds, this one seems like the most important.

“To check on you, I guess.”

“But we aren’t friends.”

This makes her grin again, but she can’t disagree. “No, we aren’t friends. But I had a friend a long time ago, before I moved, and I said some pretty fucked up things to her that I never really got a chance to apologize for. So now I drive around town and check up on boys from school that I don’t even like.”

“You have a car?” I ask, even though I’ve already seen it.

“Yeah.”

“Nice.”

We take another sip of Coke.

“Listen,” I start, “it’s cool that you came by-”

“Ms. Landy said your mom called and told her someone had died. A friend of the family, or something like that.”

“Hector Rosales,” I say. “He owned the hardware store where I worked.”

“Were you close?”

“Not really, but I feel like it was my fault.”

I realize this sounds insane as soon as I say it, but it doesn’t take long to come up with an explanation. “He had a stroke while he was closing up the store. I usually close on Friday nights, but I asked for the day off so I could focus on the audition, so I wasn’t there when he fell. Mom said it was a couple hours before anyone found him and called 911.”

This isn’t the exact truth, because I haven’t worked Fridays since school started back up, but the guilt rings true enough.

“Bargaining,” Emily says. “It happens to people sometimes when they lose somebody. You obsess over the things you didn’t do, the rules you didn’t follow. Your brain is trying to protect you by telling you that you have more control than you do. You accept responsibility for this death if it means you can prevent the next one.”

“I guess so,” I say, unconvinced—and more than a little unnerved. I get that she’s trying to make me feel better, but her talk of bargains and rules hits too close to the truth for my liking. “How do you know so much about this stuff?”

“Like I said, I had a friend.”

“Oh.”

After a line like that, there’s nowhere for the conversation to go but up, so we talk about class for a bit. Emily says that Ms. Landy’s already chosen a piece for the winter concert, so we listen to the first few minutes together on her phone. It’s Johan Halvorsen’s Symphony no. 2, and it reminds me of old European movies where villagers chase each other through the woods.

This leads to a long conversation about a movie that neither of us can remember, though we can both hum the same two minutes of the score. I knock over my glass while pretending to conduct, and she soaks the cuff of her sweater helping me clean up the mess. We talk about school, and summer jobs, and her hometown in New York, and a hundred other things.

She gets up to leave around eight o’clock and I walk her to the door. “Before you go,” I say, pulling my phone out of my pocket. “What’s your last name?’

I hand over my phone so she can type it in and she laughs when she sees that I already have her as Emily Violin. Her eyebrows scrunch together while she types in her name and I suddenly realize that I’ve been alone with a girl in my house for the last two hours, and she’s holding something of mine, and the clicking sound as her thumbs hit the keys feel like static on the back of my neck.

***

The storm breaks on Saturday when word gets around that a girl came over while my mom was at work. The lecture starts somewhere around seven in the morning and doesn’t stop until dinner is on the table. We both go hoarse from arguing all day, so we order pizza and rot in front of the TV for the rest of the night.

The next day, Emily calls to ask if she can come over. Mom looks like she’s about to either yell or cry, but since she may as well meet the girl who’s having my kid or giving me STDs or both, she relents. Emily charms her, of course, and Sunday becomes a regular thing.

“Are you two dating?” Mom asks me one night.

I can’t help but laugh. “Two weeks ago you called her a slut.”

“Don’t use that word,” Mom snaps. “Besides, that was different. I didn’t know she was nice.”

Truth be told, this isn’t an unwelcome fantasy, but I can’t imagine it ever happening. Emily’s already made dozens of friends at school, so she’s never alone, and I can’t ask her out in front of my mom. I don’t have a car, I can’t afford to spend what little I make at work, and she already knows that I live in a trailer. You can only put so many nails in a coffin.

“No, we’re not dating,” I say, and Mom leaves it at that.

Between school, orchestra practice, part-time shifts at work, and Emily, I manage to go a whole month without thinking about Fours. Even weirder, it’s Emily who brings it up, completely by accident.

“Have you ever heard of the Fossegrim?”

“What?”

Mom is out on the front porch trying to figure out where to hang a basket of mums she picked up this morning. Emily and I are done practicing for the day, so the windows are open to let in the cool October air.

“It’s some kind of Norwegian monster,” she says. “Or fairy. Hard to tell. Johan Halvorsen composed a song about one.”

“What does it do?”

“It’s supposed to be really good at the violin. Like, scary good.” She holds up a phone, is quoting directly from Wikipedia now: “Fossegrim is said to be willing to teach away his skills in exchange for a food offering made on a Thursday evening and in secrecy. A white he-goat thrown with head turned away into a waterfall that flows northwards, or smoked mutton. If the offering is satisfactory, he will take the pupil’s right hand and draw the fingers along the strings until they all bleed, after which he will be able to play so well that the trees shall dance and torrents in their fall stand still.”

My hands go cold. I get up to shut the window, then sit back down. It’s a long time before I can manage more than a whisper.

“I’ve never heard of it,” I say. “But I think one lives in the woods behind my house.”

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This is chapter two of an ongoing serial. If you’re looking for chapter one, click here.

Crickets
by J. Kyle Turner

Second Movement

“You don’t mind playing a duet, do you?”

“Actually, Ms. Landy, I feel like I have a lot riding on this, and I’m sure Emily is great and everything, but I’d rather just sink or swim on my own merits and not worry about bombing a really important audition by playing with someone I’ve never met, you know?”

Is what I should have said.

But if I’ve learned anything from three years in Ms. Landy’s orchestra class, it’s that fifty percent of your grade boils down to “plays well with others,” and you could probably round that to ninety percent for the section leaders. This conversation alone probably counts as much as the actual performance.

So I cave.

“Sure, that sounds fun. I’ll talk to her about it this week.”

That second part also ends up being a lie, but there isn’t much I can do about it. Emily heads straight for the door after class and turns the corner before I can catch up with her, which is probably for the best because I’m still too rattled to not say anything stupid. We don’t have any other classes together, and I don’t see her at the bus stop, so Monday passes without a word between us.

I spend the whole night thinking over what I’m going to say and show up to school the next day in a better mood, but Emily isn’t in class and I don’t know anybody who has her number. I consider switching to a different song, but that would only give me two and a half days to find new sheet music and an isolated track to practice with. I could probably learn a new piece in that amount of time if I didn’t think about anything else, but I’m good at the Prokofiev sonata. Even Fours thinks so.

More importantly, I can imagine the look on Ms. Landy’s face when I tell her that the new girl is on her own. I don’t like the thought of all that disappointment landing on me.

Wednesday comes and goes with no sign of Emily, so that’s another day wasted. It’s a lucky thing I don’t work on Wednesday nights, because if I had to unwrap any pallets I’d probably lose my thumb to a box cutter and end the night with Hector driving me to the hospital. Instead, I pick up a box of microwave burritos on the way home and don’t do anything but eat or play violin until eleven thirty.

I play the isolated track at half speed, double speed, everything in between. I start at random timestamps until I’m confident that I can pick up the tune within two beats of any measure. I practice until I start hearing it without anything playing, like my brain can’t imagine a silent moment without that music in it.

On Thursday, I show up to school with a plan.

By now I know how things are going to go. I know I won’t see Emily until the audition on Friday, so I don’t even waste time looking for her. After school lets out, I get off at the wrong bus stop so I can hit the grocery store on the way home.

I have a hundred bucks in cash from my last paycheck, and I fill the shopping cart with as much cheap food as I can find: canned tuna, peanut butter, instant oatmeal, trail mix, fruit cups, cereal. The register flashes $99.73 at me, and I drop the change into a little plastic donation jar and push the cart out through the automatic doors.

This would be easier if I had a car, but since I don’t, I have to push the shopping cart for almost two miles on the sidewalk before I get back to our trailer. I stash the shopping cart behind a tree just past the fence, then run in to drop off my backpack and fill a water bottle before heading back out.

The path to Fours’ camp is clear enough to walk, but the cart rattles so hard that I think it’s going to come apart in my hands. Eventually I give up and just carry the cart for the last hundred yards. It’s almost sunset by the time I see Fours’ truck. My arms hurt, I’m covered in sweat, my water bottle is already empty, and I realize way too late that I forgot to bring any food for myself.

“You planning a siege or something?” Fours asks when he sees the shopping cart. He’s grinning ear to ear, in case I have any doubts about how ridiculous I look.

“It’s for you,” I manage. “I have an audition tomorrow, and I need to be ready for it.”

The grin disappears. “You’re asking me to break the rules.”

“Yes,” I say without hesitating.

“It’ll cost you.”

I look down at the heap of food in the shopping cart. I don’t have any cash on me. I didn’t expect to need any. Fours has only ever asked for food.

“How much?”

Fours shakes his head. “Can’t tell you that,” he says, as serious as I’ve ever seen him. “Part of breaking the rules is you’re not allowed to know how much it costs.”

“That’s fine with me,” I say, and I mean every word.

Then Fours does something I haven’t seen him do since the first night I heard him playing in the woods three years ago. He hops off the tailgate and walks around to the passenger side cab to open the door. The door creaks like it’s being torn off but stays attached to the skeleton of rust holding the truck together. Fours digs around the floorboard for a minute, then walks back to the tailgate with a violin case in his left hand.

“Okay, kid. What are we playing?”

***

Emily shows up to class on Friday, of course. At this point I don’t even know if she knows we’re playing together, so I walk straight over to her before the bell rings to introduce myself and figure out what we’re doing.

“I’m Jake,” I say.

“Emily,” says Emily. She doesn’t have her nose stud in today, no jewelry of any kind except for a silver ring on her right index finger. She’s wearing a black dress with a gray, long-sleeved shirt underneath it, like she’s the sad friend on a kids show or something.

“I guess we picked the same song, so Ms. Landy wants us to audition together.”

“Oh,” she says. “I guess that’s fine.”

“Is it? Glad you fucking think so, because I’ve been killing myself to make sure that I can nail this. But hey, no stress, right? No need to practice or anything. Not when you can show up on the last day and let someone carry you through the audition.”

Is what I manage not to say.

“Where were you anyway?” I ask instead. Neutral. Polite. Merely curious.

“Mental day.”

“Three of them?”

“You have a problem?” She sounds pissed now, which is honestly a relief. I’m at that point where I want to be angry, and it’s hard to stay mad at a plank of wood.

Unfortunately, Ms. Landy walks in just as I think of something vicious to say, so I miss my chance to make things worse. I get up to move, but someone else has taken my usual seat and is still talking to her friend when class starts, so I sit back down. I can feel Emily’s frustration wavering in the air between us, and I hope she can feel mine.

“Right,” Ms. Landy says from behind the podium. “Auditions today. Who wants to go first?”

Emily’s hand shoots up before I can react, because of course it does.

“Wonderful,” Ms. Landy says. “Jake, Emily, whenever you’re ready.”

“Thanks for the heads up,” I whisper as we’re walking up to the front of the class.

“Whatever,” she whispers back. “Let’s just get this over with.”

We take our places, and Emily plays a long note on the A string so I can tune. I match it, so she moves on to the others, but we must have been close already because the whole process only takes a few seconds. She nods once to Ms. Landy, who beams at both of us like a proud parent. Then she turns to look at me. I signal that I’m ready to start, so she lifts her bow and starts to play.

People who don’t play an instrument have a hard time judging talent. They can judge whether or not they like a song, but beyond that they can’t really appreciate anything other than speed. If you’ve spent time on both sides of the strings, it’s much easier to tell how good someone is. They stumble over a difficult technique that you’ve mastered, and right away you know that you’re better than them. Or they breeze past something that you haven’t tackled yet, and you immediately appreciate how much time and effort they’ve put in.

Two measures in, and I can already tell that Emily is better than me. Her posture, her timing, the confidence in her tone, the microscopic shifts in the way she tilts her bow. I’m so caught off guard by it that I almost forget to come in on the fifth measure, but my hands remember the song better than I do and they don’t fail me here.

That fifth measure is the trickiest part of the song because the second violin—mine—comes in at an off tempo, like it’s warming up at a different cadence before it fully joins the first violin. But we play our parts perfectly, dancing around each other like we’ve been playing together for years.

It’s a good thing my hands remember the song so well, because I can’t stop staring at Emily as she plays. Part of it is needing to read her body language, to guess whether or not she’s going to speed up or slow down so that I know to match her.

But she’s also just good. She plays almost as well as Fours, and Fours could kill an angel if he wanted to.

We suddenly run out of music, and I realize that the first movement is over. Technically, this is all we need for the audition, but now that I’m past it, I want more. I want to prove how good I am, and I want to see how good she is.

As the class starts in with half-hearted applause, she looks at me, bow hovering an inch from the violin’s neck. There’s just a hint of a question there, and we both know that the answer is yes.

I nod, and we immediately launch into the second movement, which starts with four blaring eighth notes designed to snap necks. The class stops applauding. They don’t really have any other choice. I carry the momentum with three quick repeated phrases before handing the melody back to her, which she picks up perfectly before repeating my part and leading us back into another whipsaw of eighth notes.

Nobody moves to stop us. Nobody could even if they wanted to.

The second movement ends as quickly as the first, and we both sense that finishing the song would wear out our welcome, so we stand up and take our bows. The applause is thunderous this time. I can’t tell whether Ms. Landy is laughing or crying or both.

And why shouldn’t she be emotional? It’s only the first audition, and she’s already found her two section leaders.

***

I stay up late to catch my mom when she gets home because I want to share the good news. It isn’t official until Ms. Landy posts the results on Monday, but no one else sounded half as good as we did, and volunteering to play a duet had to count for something.

Mom pulls into the driveway just before midnight and finishes two cigarettes before she trudges up the wooden steps and fumbles with the lock. She’s surprised to see me, even though I usually wait up on Friday nights.

“Hey, Jakey,” she says as she sets her keys and wallet on the side table.

“Hey, Mom. Rough day?”

She nods vaguely and sinks into the plastic chair on her side of the table. She pulls out a third cigarette, which is unprecedented, especially since there’s no smoking whatsoever in the house. I should see this as a bad sign, but I’m still brimming with good news and can’t wait any longer.

“I had my audition today. It went really well. I think I might get section leader this year.”

“Oh, sweetie. That’s wonderful. This is the song you’ve been practicing?”

“Yeah, the Prokofiev sonata.”

“Good. I’m proud of you.” She smiles, but I can tell that it doesn’t put a dent in the bad mood she walked in with. And there’s still that third cigarette.

“What’s up, Mom?”

She drops the half-finished cigarette into an old cup of water and sits up a little straighter. “Got some bad news for you, Jakey.”

“Okay?”

“We had an older gentleman come into the ER today. Hemorrhagic stroke. We got him onto the table right away, but he was alone when it happened, and it was a while before anyone called the paramedics. I don’t know how close you were, but you’ve mentioned his name a couple times, so I thought I should let you know.”

My first thought is Fours, but I’ve never mentioned him to Mom, and there’s no way anyone would find him in time to call an ambulance. If Fours died, I’d probably be the one to find him at his campsite, already cold.

“Who?”

“Hector Rosales,” she says. “I think he owned the hardware store.”

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Author’s Note: Throughout this story, I mention several pieces of music the reader may not be familiar with. Where appropriate, I’ll add links to a performance. These aren’t necessary to understand the story, but I’ve included them for readers who want to listen to what the characters are playing.

Crickets
by J. Kyle Turner

First Movement

Fours is sitting where he always is, legs swinging from the tailgate of his pickup truck, which—to my knowledge—has never vacated its perch overlooking the northbound lane of County Road 34. At this point, you’d need a crane to move it. The tires are a study in dry rot. The axle would split in two if you tied a string to it.

The truck’s owner doesn’t look much better. Old and thin, Fours is more rangy than muscular, with too-long arms and a paunch that untucks the hem of his shirt every time he reaches for something. You couldn’t tailor a suit to fit him, and I doubt anyone’s ever tried.

“Evening,” he says as I walk up, which is true. It’s the first Thursday night of summer break. Three months until the start of senior year, which feels more and more like a deadline, like time is slowing down and speeding up all at once.

“Evening,” I say, hopping onto the tailgate and nestling the violin case between us. Atop this meager table, I lay out an offering of cold sandwiches and a Ziploc bag with three chocolate chip cookies. He eyes it all, greedy, then nods and reaches for a sandwich. One of Fours’ many unwritten rules is that he doesn’t talk while he eats, so I sit quietly until he brushes the crumbs off his jeans.

“What are we working on tonight?” he asks.

“Rieding,” I say. “The B minor concerto, first movement.”

“Kid stuff,” he says. “You should play Bach.”

“I’m not good enough for Bach,” I say, but he shrugs this off.

“No one’s good enough for Bach,” he says. “But okay. Show me where you’re at.”

I pull out my violin and cradle it between my chin and collarbone. The harsh light of Fours’ camp lantern blares against the varnish, so I turn half an inch and stare off into the woods at an audience hiding somewhere in the trees.

I play atrociously, like I always do, like I’ve never played the violin before. Part of the trouble is that I can only play fast or slow but can never manage both in the same song. Either I dance over the eighth notes and rush the legatos, or I get a perfect tone from the long pulls and trip over the accents. Worst of all, I get nervous at the thought of my own imaginary audience. I rush through the end of the piece and end up limping over the finish line, grateful to be done.

“Not bad,” he says. “Hand her over.”

I pass Fours the violin, and you can almost see the trees lean in to listen. The bugs stop chirping. The underbrush falls quiet. Birds leave their nests and gather on branches at the edge of Fours’ campsite.

He plays, and it’s like rain falling on dry earth. Every note lands exactly where it’s supposed to, resolute and inevitable, but with a few pauses here and there to leave you twisting with the music. The first movement ends and he continues on to the second and third. Halfway through I notice him humming his own counter melody, adding the piano parts back in so that the violin has something to lean against. I don’t even think he knows he’s doing it.

The piece ends, and the night rushes to fill the silence with a breeze that ripples through the trees like scattered applause. Fours hands me the violin.

“You’re up.”

That’s the thing about Fours. He doesn’t actually teach you anything. He doesn’t correct your posture or your hand position, doesn’t show you the proper way to hold a bow. He just makes you believe in magic and then asks you to prove it.

I do better on the second attempt, which isn’t always true in orchestra. I usually choke up in front of other people, repeating all the mistakes I made on the first try and adding in a few new ones for good measure, getting worse and worse the longer I play. Out here in the woods, I can relax a little. I can coast in the wake of someone else’s talent without comparing it to my own.

“Better,” Fours says when I finish. It’s a threadbare compliment, but I beam anyway.

“I’m also working on a few other things,” I say, trying to twist the rules a little. “We could play Bach, if you want. Anything.”

But Fours is already shaking his head. “One meal, one song,” he says, like it’s something older than the written word, like he’s explaining how the sun comes up.

Disappointed, I pack up my violin and wish Fours a pleasant evening. I trudge home through the woods, shedding little motes of magic and starlight onto the path until the world reasserts itself, heavy and obtrusive. Brambles snag against my jeans. The violin case thunks into my knees as I walk. Dirt gets into my shoes. The moon is too dull to be useful to anybody.

The house is dark when I get home because it’s my job to turn on the front porch light and I always forget. I jump in through my bedroom window and walk to the front door to flick on the light. Then I make myself dinner, followed by half an hour of violin practice.

Sometime around midnight, I hear my mom’s car crunch into the driveway and idle for a few minutes while she finishes a cigarette. In the morning, I’ll hear another story about how I should never ride on a motorcycle, how the guy came into the ER with a pound of gravel in his kneecaps, how his wife just kept crying and crying when she saw him, and I’ll cram spoonfuls of cereal into my mouth and chew until I can’t hear her talk.

***

I get my usual summer job at the hardware store. I don’t even fill out an application this year, I just walk in on the first Saturday in June and punch my time card, and Hector nods at me as I clip on my nametag and start stocking shelves. Hector is fifty or sixty years old, quiet and imperturbable. I feel a burst of pride whenever we communicate like this, without speaking.

I start my work week on Friday morning and usually manage a few hours of overtime by Tuesday afternoon. The work is both easy and satisfying, which worries me because some of the other guys here are forty years old and working the same job as me for an extra two bucks an hour, and I keep thinking how easy it would be to accidentally spend your entire life unpacking little boxes of screws.

There are only about six hundred paychecks between being seventeen and being forty, which used to sound like a lot.

My mom works the evening shift at the hospital from Tuesday to Friday, so we barely cross paths during the week. Mostly, this means I can play without bothering anybody as long as I keep the windows closed, which I do anyway because June is murder in Ohio. The heat sinks into you here, dulls your sense of time. I find that I can only count the hours after they’ve passed.

By the time Thursday evening rolls around, I feel human enough to play music again, so I walk past the chain link fence at the edge of the woods and follow the trail to Fours’ campsite. When I get sick of Rieding, we move on to Küchler and Seitz. Aside from being the best violin player I’ve ever heard, Fours’ knowledge of concerto music is comprehensive. Even when I bring sheet music, he plays without so much as glancing at it.

“How did you learn all this stuff?” I ask.

The question isn’t off-limits, but it’s close. Fours doesn’t like to talk about the past, but if you’re fine with a vague answer, you can pick up hints every now and then.

“The trick is to pick a worthy obsession,” he says. “Humans are addicts by nature. Just look at all the great composers. Vivaldi didn’t write five hundred concertos because he liked music.”

I chew on this for a minute. “So you’re addicted to the violin?”

He raises an eyebrow. “Aren’t you?”

Toward the end of July, Fours convinces me to try Bach’s Partita no. 2, and he sweetens the deal by counting Chinese leftovers as two separate meals. He plays along with his own joke by unwrapping a fortune cookie after the lo mein but before digging into the pork fried rice. He reads the fortunes out loud and directs me through the tempo changes in the first movement by waving his fork.

When I finish, he wipes the grease onto his jeans and plays all five movements—all the way to the Chaconne—without missing a note. Then he hands the violin back to me and nods patiently while I butcher the first two minutes of the Allemande again.

“How long did it take you to get so good?” I ask, deflated.

“Years and years,” he answers, which could mean anywhere from four years to four hundred.

“Will I ever be that good?”

He shrugs. “Up to you. But I wouldn’t rule it out.”

Meanwhile, summer flows along.

***

Orchestra tryouts happen on the first three Fridays in September, which is better because you don’t have to risk everything on a single performance. Our teacher, Ms. Landy, is a reformed perfectionist. There’s a picture on her desk from when she was a soloist in the Columbus Symphony, but she drops hints about it being a dark time in her life, and she runs a “stress free” classroom like she’s an alcoholic knocking drinks out of her own hand.

Underclassmen get rotated between sections depending on the piece, but seniors typically stick with their section for an entire semester. First violins handle the higher melodies, and if the piece needs a soloist, Ms. Landy pulls from that group first. Second violins play harmonies in the lower ranges and usually have more of a supporting role, but she tries to pick pieces that challenge both sections, and good violinists need to understand both sides of the music anyway.

Given my nerves, I don’t trust myself not to choke during a solo, but I’ve also had three years to figure out my strengths. What I want—what I need, if I’m going to have any chance at a scholarship—is section leader for second violins. Section leaders work directly with the conductor to figure out what’s needed from their section, and you need a pretty good ear to manage it.

The first two auditions are group performances, but since Ms. Landy picks two of our big pieces from last year, I do well enough. For the final audition, I choose the second violin part from the first movement of Prokofiev’s Sonata for Two Violins.

“Oh, good,” Ms. Landy says when I hand her the sheet music. “Emily found a partner.”

I reach for a face but come up empty. The name doesn’t mean anything to me.

“Who?”

“Your new classmate. She picked the same piece, but she wanted the first violin, and now you want the second.”

She nods to a girl sitting off in the corner. Short, with dark hair and one of those nose studs that look cute until you think about cleaning them. She’s reading a book, but the fingers of her left hand are covering the title, and she looks up at me just as I realize I’m staring.

I turn back to Ms. Landy. “I haven’t met her. She picked the same piece? Kind of a weird choice,” I say, and I’m not just making excuses. Prokofiev’s sonata is kind of unique in that the second violin part is much more interesting than the first. It’s almost written to let the second player show off.

“Must be fate,” Ms. Landy says with a smile. “You don’t mind playing a duet, do you?”

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Short, simple, and effective. This one hurt to read (but also made me cackle (but also hurt to read)).

The Drive by

This one reads more like an excerpt from a larger work, but it stands out for doing a few difficult things well. The overlapping narrators kept me guessing on who to root for, and the jagged time breaks added to the tension without being overly confusing. Interesting piece!

The Verhoeven Sci-Fi Trilogy by

This Is a Newsletter!

The Watchlist: The Verhoeven Sci-Fi Trilogy

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2 months ago · 22 likes · 18 comments · Sam Colt

Finally, this was my favorite essay of the month. I’ve mentioned RoboCop on the blog before, but only in passing. Sam’s analysis of Verhoeven’s SF trilogy is dead on, and it serves as a reminder for just how prescient some the early heads in science fiction really were.

Unfortunately, a small but influential minority of sociopaths decided to interpret these “warnings” as “business models.” But at least Philip K. Dick can rest easy knowing that he called AI delusions early!

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This one’s a bit outside my usual milieu, but I’m going to skip the preface on this one and let it speak for itself. If anyone knows what genre this is, let me know in the comments, because I’ve had a hell of a time classifying it.

Super
by J. Kyle Turner

At six foot six, the building superintendent shrinks the doorway by virtue of standing in it. He’s built like a hippopotamus, with wide shoulders and a wider gut. The denim hatchweave of his boilersuit strains against muscle and fat, and the veins in his forearms are thick as pipelines. No way is light from the hallway getting in past this bastard.

In his left hand, a black flashlight brims with raw sunlight from the ground level, sixty floors above. Its beam is narrow and focused, just how he likes it. On slow days he carries a flamethrower instead, which isn’t as good. Things this far down have felt heat more often than they’ve seen the sun.

In his right hand, he’s got the broom. Its polished handle is alder, twice-blessed and engraved with ancient runes. There’s a battery pack along the shaft with enough juice to jump start a Humvee. Its flared end has more bristles than you can count: bristles on bristles, all the way down to the microscopic. It exorcises as it sweeps. Banishes as it brushes. Tapping it against the ceiling has been known to kill upstairs neighbors in their beds.

In this line of work, there is no such thing as overkill.

He steps into the room. “Someone called about a spider?”

“In the bedroom,” comes the trembling hiss from the far corner. It’s pitch dark in here, but the super doesn’t dare shine the light. Calderids live on these levels, and they’re sensitive to just about everything until their first molt. Supers have been known to kill kids on accident by flicking a switch.

“How many?” he asks.

“Just one,” says the tenant. “It’s really big, though.”

The super smiles. In his thick gorilla skull, there are floor plans by the hundreds. He tromps off in the direction of the bedroom.

“Stay put,” he says to the corner as he passes. “Be done in just a minute.”

And then it’s just business.

Back in the maintenance office, the super emerges from the chrysalis of his suit. Underneath it is sweat and tattooed skin and the kind of scar tissue you can see in the dark, but nobody bats an eye. This is simply his resume, his list of qualifications on display. They knew what they were hiring when they met him. If he’d been less than this, someone else would’ve gotten the job. He tosses the suit into the corner and reaches for his time card.

“Not so fast,” says the shift supervisor, a mean-eyed drill sergeant by the name of Sheri. “You got a call a minute ago.”

“Christ, Sheri. I just got outta the suit.”

“You won’t need it,” she says. “Third floor job, nice and easy.” She grins at him, and the expression is somewhere between flirty and malicious.

A previous head injury keeps the super from rolling his eyes, but he gives it his best effort. “What, did their hot water go out?”

“Close. Toilet won’t flush.”

The super slides his time card back into the slot and reaches for his tools. “You know, we really oughta unionize.”

“We did unionize.”

“Somebody oughta tell the landlord, then.”

Sheri looks over her desk, past the receptionist, and out across the lobby to the black door marked ‘OFFICE,’ where smoke is currently billowing like fog out of the keyhole. “Who’s gonna tell him? You?”

“Why not me?”

“Don’t do that to me, sweetheart. I don’t wanna hire your replacement.”

The super grabs an auger from the mop room and tugs on a pair of rubber gloves on his way out the door. The third floor is just two floors down, but the service elevator won’t take him there. The top five floors have their own staircase, cut off from the rest of the building. They also have their own plumbing, their own hot water system, their own ventilation, even their own building codes.

But most of all, what the top five floors in any apartment have is money.

They come down here to get away from the pristine noise of the upper city, to walk on the wild side, to slum it up for a weekend. They meet call girls down here, where no one among the upper crust would ever think to look. They come here on vacation, these slick bastards with their tan skin and filtered cigarettes, and they piss away a fortune every month fortune to do it.

But that’s not why the super hates working the top five. At least, it’s not the only reason.

The super hates working the top five because he is, above all else, a specialist. And he gets paid a very specialized salary for risking life and limb in the pursuit of a very specialized career. But when he does janitor work, he gets paid like a janitor. And at five o’clock on a Friday, no less.

He knocks on the door. A man answers.

“You here about the toilet?”

The super lifts the auger.

“Fantastic,” says the guy. “I need to piss.”

The super steps over the threshold, and right away the room is so clean he almost needs to cough. His eyes go blurry as he adjusts to the extra oxygen in the air.

“You all right?” asks the guy.

“Super,” says the super.

The guy is wearing a towel and nothing else, and on his way to the bathroom, the super sees why. The girl might be fifteen or sixteen, pale as a corpse but pretty in spite of it. She’s stretched out on the bed like a cat, but when she sees the super, she tenses up. In that one moment, the super knows her story—born not far from here, in a sublevel just like this one, and the only way she sees the sun is when she’s riding around town with a guy like this, and maybe, just maybe, it won’t be this way forever, but for now it has to be, because that’s how they made the world, all those people she’s never known—and she knows that the super knows, and she hates him for it. She’s got the duvet pulled up to her shoulders, but she pulls it even higher before she rolls over to face the far wall. The super ignores her and gets to work.

“Just about quittin’ time, huh?” says the guy.

He’s leaning against the door jamb of the bathroom, watching the super work. His bare feet are sweaty and covered in carpet lint. The towel is so close to falling that it’s offensive.

“Just about.”

“Any plans this weekend?”

The super turns on the auger. At the far end, the cable snakes out into the pipes, plowing through excrement and wadded tissues and used condoms with cold fury. “No.”

The guy stretches, and the towel exposes another inch of stomach muscle. He yawns. “I’m thinking of taking the girl to see a movie.” He jerks his head in the direction of the bedroom. “You know anything good out?”

Down in the pipes, the auger slams into a blockage and starts twisting it around like a dog worrying a slab of meat. “Couldn’t tell ya,” says the super.

And suddenly the guy notices how terse the super is being, and you can tell he’s playing back the conversation, to see if he’s being made fool of. He rolls his shoulders once, twice. Considers whether or not he should get indignant about it. Cause a scene in front of his girl. Show the help who’s boss.

But when he opens his mouth to say something, there’s a sound like a weight dropping into a shallow bowl, and the water rushes through the pipes.

The super stands up, auger dripping cloudy water all over the floor. He’s so tall his head almost brushes the ceiling. He’s just as wide as the door, with a bull neck and knotted forearms. And the guy gets a dose of something cold from way back in the primal part of his brain, and he slumps his shoulders and leans back against the door frame…

…and smiles, suddenly nervous. “Great!” he says, and lets the super through.

Out in the bedroom, the girl is pretending to be asleep. The guy clutches his towel with a white-knuckled fist on the way to the door. Beneath it, he’s shriveled like a handful of prunes. They get to the door and the guy pauses to take a good look at the name tag on the suit. “Thanks again... Larry.”

The super pauses in the hallway, his hand still on the door frame. “Larry’s dead, pal,” he says over his shoulder. “We reuse the suits.”

A week later. Quitting time. And what a week it’s been.

Monday had him down in the trash chute with a construction grade jackhammer, chipping away at the detritus of half a dozen underworld species in the dark: plastic bottles and wadded up newspapers; glass pipes and steel syringes; the flaking exoskeleton of a Calderid junkie; chitinous skin and discarded bones; filth. All of it fused together, sulfurous, warm to the touch even as it decayed.

Tuesday through Thursday, he served eviction notices down in the Black. Tenants that far down had a tenuous grasp on leasing agreements, but they all respected one rule: if you could stick the paper to the door, they cleared out without another word. Emphasis on if. The super started on the 200^th floor and worked his way down. By the time he got to 250, there was less skin on him than there were scars and bruises.

And Friday? Don’t even get him started on Friday.

When the super goes to punch his time card for the week, his hands shake so bad that almost misses the slot. His jaw is all but splintered, his arms cut to ribbons. For a moment, he’s not sure if he can make it down the stairs to his apartment, but he’s sure as hell not sleeping in the lobby, so he fights through it.

With Sheri gone (sick day, flu) the super’s got to hand in all the time cards for the maintenance crew. He stumbles to the door marked OFFICE, which swings open beneath the weight of his knock. Thick, black smoke pours out of the room as the super steps in.

In the corner, the landlord is lying pupate in the sun. Interlocking granite scales lay open, exposing its molten innards. The landlord is something the super has never seen before, not even below the 300^th level, and this alone keeps him wary. Six white eyes stare fixedly at the ceiling while the super crosses the room to the massive desk. Asleep, or something like it. It’s been this way for weeks.

The super tosses the time cards onto the desk and turns to leave. Out of the corner of his eye, he notices two things.

The first, a stack of employee insurance claims in one corner of the desk. Innocuous. Boring, even. Notable only in the sense that one folder is thicker than the rest put together.

His, of course.

The second pile is a stack of resumes with photos attached. The super flips through them with his free hand. Some of them even have the same scars he does.

Wordless, the super leaves the office. The door swings closed behind him. On the floor, there’s a stack of time cards, crumpled, almost unrecognizable in the dark.

Slide thirty years back and the super is just a kid in a one-room with his mom, eking out playground space between the narrow corridors of an apartment building built a hundred meters below sunlight. He goes to school via subway, mail orders his comic books with quarters taped to the forms. In his sock drawer, he’s got enough action figures to qualify as a franchise. No boy scouts here; we’re talking lava demons that chew rocks and spit black mortar. His favorite comes with its own wall to crash through, and you can hear the plastic clattering on the floor from across the hall. To him, laser vision seems fun, but dangerous. The notion of flight is as foreign as the moon.

When his mom tucks him in at night, you can tell that she’s exhausted, but since when does an eight-year-old notice? She asks him if he needs a night light, but he tells her that he’s never been afraid of the dark and he means it. She looks down at him, and she can’t help but worry about how thin he is. But when he brushes his teeth, he flexes his muscles in the mirror, and you can almost see something, just there, on the bicep...

Meanwhile, the construction crews tunnel, ever downward.

One day, she thinks she’ll save up enough to move into one of the domes. Get something small—smaller than this, even—and keep a window box by the sink. She could grow herbs in it, or flowers, or grass, or anything. Just something to catch the sunlight and show her something green. At this point, she’d be happy to see mold.

When her son closes his eyes, she kisses his forehead and crosses the room to her bed against the wall. She slides out of her dress for the night and tosses it on the foot of her bed.

And when her breathing starts to slow, you can almost see something, just there, on the lung...

Thirty years forward—in the now part of the story—the super kills time in front of his television. Beer bottles lie like casualties on the floor. A thin haze of something red obscures his vision. There are words for this level of self-destruction, but the super doesn’t know them. He takes a drink.

The bulbs in his room are always on, pounding ultraviolets and vitamins into his pores. There’s a mask on the wall for when he sleeps, but he doesn’t use it anymore. He’s used to the light. In the corner, his air filter chugs on mightily. It’s the best he can afford, but even so, he spits up black phlegm when he coughs.

The trade magazines all talk about supers who make eight, ten, twenty times as much as he does. They offer night courses on words of power, weekly seminars on tackling elder wyrms and lesser dragons. Brooms and dustpans that kill magma spiders in their eggs without even stepping off the lift. Certified Bad Dude Kits with a money-back satisfaction guarantee. Just send check or money order to this address. No credit cards accepted.

And sometimes he thinks about what it would be like. A new broom, a new suit. Maybe a lightning wrench or two just for the hell of it—the kind of ordinance that causes rolling blackouts when you plug it in. He’d get a place in the lower levels and battle demons in the boiler rooms. The air wouldn’t be any better down there, but he could afford better filters, maybe. Better bulbs. Better channels. A better life.

But what it comes down to, in the end, is time. Time, money, and a stack of resumes on a hardwood desk.

Far below, the earth rumbles something indistinct. The bulbs hum an answer as the super falls asleep.

In the morning, he wakes up with the kind of headache you measure in liquid volume. Liters of pain—gallons of it—slosh behind his eyelids as he stumbles into his kitchen. His gums are so loose they bleed when he eats his breakfast. His knees feel like someone stapled them together, and his shoulders pop as he worms his way into the suit. He needs medicine. Better yet, he needs a vacation. But he knows he can’t afford either, so he gets to work.

The lift keys hang in the office on the first floor, bronze and brass and rusted iron, mismatched against the cardboard backing. Next to the key cabinet, there’s a stack of work orders for the day. His vision blurs, focuses on one marked ‘42.’ Geothermals have been acting up on the whole level, boiling tap water in the pipes. Wouldn’t be a problem if the landlord would invest in some fucking ceramics already, but the super’s a cheaper alternative and he knows it.

And suddenly there’s blood boiling up his spinal column and into his hypothalamus, swelling it to the size of a grape. One heavy fist slams into the keys, and they scatter to the ground. Chest heaving, he stands over them. The veins in his neck are pumping magma. The tendons in his jaw might be tectonics, the noise they’re making.

“Something wrong?” The receptionist is standing next to the coffee maker. She looks worried.

The super turns to look at her. Human, but with the kind of all-over tan you never see anymore. Part-time worker, top-fiver for sure. The super spits black phlegm onto the carpet. “Anybody late on rent?”

The tan face pales. “Just a few on 317, but...”

The super grabs the key before she finishes. He pauses at the door of the lift. “When I come back,” he says over his shoulder, “tell the boss I’m looking for a raise.”

The lift door slams closed and he punches the button marked ‘317.’ Beside the rows of buttons there’s a scrap of paper, the top of which reads ‘--rranty’ in faded letters. The bottom corner mentions a date that might have been on his grandfather’s tombstone. As far as the super can tell, it’s the only original part of the machine. The rest is just spit and chicken wire, with protective wards etched into the flat surfaces via blowtorch.

And yet, it creaks slowly downward.

Floor 317 smells like brimstone set out to curdle in the swamp. There’s no music down here, no conversation. Just the steady rumble of the earth grinding against the sheath that encases the building. At one end of the hall stands the super—feet set, shoulders wide. At the other end of the hallway, a door.

The super walks the length of the hallway, his pain receptors in open rebellion. He reaches the door and knocks. It opens, just a crack. A serpentine eye the size of a grapefruit looks him up and down.

“Rent’s due.”

A clear eyelid flicks horizontal over the eye. “You’re not the landlord.” The door closes.

Something like adrenaline lifts the super’s foot and sends it crashing through the door. He steps into the room. Already the equipment at his side is buzzing with anticipation. “No,” he says. “Just the super.”

And then it’s just business.

The beam on his flashlight throttles wide, bathing the room in sunlight. This tenant has guests, half a dozen things the super doesn’t even have names for. Must’ve come in through the sublevels, which means it’s illegal for them to even be on the premises. Hell, as far as he knows, the tenant’s probably subletting the lot of them.

Most of them go up in smoke in the first second. The tenant shrieks, covering his saurian face with a scaled arm. Tables clatter. Someone sends a scorpion tail toward the super’s face, and a casual flick of the broom sends it sailing over his shoulder. Horns glint in the darkness, and he’s pushed against the wall, his arm pinned to his side. The flashlight drops to the floor, spinning wildly.

The super curses, and swings with the broom.

In a closed space like this, the force multiplier on this thing is exponential. Horns go flying into the air, flinging ribbons of gore that sizzle against the walls. His boilersuit is ripped now, but he barely notices the heat creeping into his flesh, cauterizing his cuts. Everything is snarling and snapping and ripping and tearing and spitting acid and flame and Hell itself knows what else, all the time and in every direction, and if the super’s heart beats any faster, he knows it’ll burst through his fucking chest, but it doesn’t matter right now because he’s alive and everything else is dead, and he’s king here, and it’s all heads off but his.

And the room is quiet.

The tenant is cowering under the remnants of a television stand. The super kicks the charred pile aside with a booted foot.

“Rent’s due,” he says, and the tenant nods once. Then he stumbles out the door and back into the lift.

Back on the service elevator, the super’s neck starts to itch. He traces the bare skin with his finger to where the lymph nodes have swollen to the size of golf balls. Within the puckering flesh, he thinks he can feel the scratch that did him in, delivering the poison to his veins. The numbers on the display read 127... 124... 121... and he knows he won’t make it to the top.

His legs give out, and he settles onto the floor of the lift. He checks the battery panel on the flashlight’s side, and there’s just enough sunlight left for something like a cloudy day. He thinks about the last time he saw clouds, and realizes that he can’t remember what they look like, not even in pictures. With a shaking hand, he flicks the flashlight on, and dies with the sunlight on his face.

A hundred floors above, six white eyes flicker open and flare to life.

The sun is gone now—the landlord can only stand its light during a molting trance. Even now it shudders at the thought of those hideous rays, its thick granite plates retracting to cover its exposed vitals.

Another week, maybe two, and the cysts will begin to form along its spine, ready to encase the critical parts of its nervous system during the next molt. And then it’s down into the Black for another dozen years, shifting and squirming in the heat while its body forges itself anew. Its broodmates have already begun their cycles, but the landlord is in no hurry. Its extra time in the sun will save it a year in the fires. Only a hatchling rushes such unpleasant necessities.

With its outer shell reformed, the landlord shifts into place behind its desk. Arrayed in front of it are two stacks of papers. The first, an army of new superintendents: the ones who will carve the way down into the pits. Their scars are numerous and vile, their expressions grim. They’ll protect its softened outer shell during the early stages of the molt, and it will make special dispensations for them in return upon its rebirth.

And in the second stack, the general who will lead them, his mettle already proven.

The landlord leans back in its chair, content for the moment. The trade magazines talk about landlords who make eight, ten, twenty times as much as it does. They offer online courses in expansion strategies and maximizing profit margins. Weekend conferences that promise a three-fold return on your investments every quarter. Just send check or money order to this address. No credit cards accepted.

Sometimes the landlord thinks about what it would be like—the pursuit of profit, that mad subservience to the bottom dollar. It is, after all, a creature of relentless determination and considers itself well-suited to the work. But for now, it’s content to manage what it has and lay its own plans for the future.

Out in the lobby, the service elevator dings as it reaches the top.

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The Flood

The plague crept into the village in the midwinter dark. It kindled a bonfire in every chest. Warmed the weak and weary in its own fierce way.

The ground had already frozen when the first victims fell. We carried the dead into the hills, wagons steaming in a miasma of unspent fever. We sprinkled dirt over the snowbanks, said good Christian prayers to quiet the dead and comfort the living.

Then spring came. Rain cracked the frozen surface of the lake. Snow melted in rivers. Our dead came back to us, a bleak flood of everything we never buried.

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Here are my current/upcoming projects for the next couple months.

March 16th - Regularly scheduled Micro Monday post. This one’s called The Flood, and I’m really pleased with it.

March 27th - A speculative short story called Super. Honestly not sure how to classify this one. Blue-collar horror? Broompunk fantasy? I’ll let the reader decide.

March 30th - Too Many Mondays. This is a tradition where I devote the fifth Monday in a given month to sharing work from other writers I enjoy. I only have two stories in my folder so far for March, so send me your recommendations!

April 3rd - Chapter one of a new serial called Crickets. It’s my take on the Fossegrim story, though I’d say it’s more magical realism than modern fairy tale.

April 10th - Crickets, Chapter 2.

April 17th - Crickets, Chapter 3.

April 24th - Crickets, Chapter 4.

May - Hiatus.

All other waking moments - Second draft of The Hope and the Ruin, which I hope to have done before I go on vacation in May. This is a sequel to my debut fantasy novel, Company of Ghosts, so if you haven’t checked that one out, please do so!

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The Train

Edgar had just crossed into Wyoming when he heard it: a sharp cry, followed by two rapid thumps as the locomotive’s pilot collided with something and feathered it away from the tracks. The jolt followed the couplers into the first boxcar, which registered a faint echo of the impact before the sound disappeared completely beneath the steady hum of the engine.

There were pronghorn goats in Wyoming, Edgar reminded himself. They could make a sound like that. Sheep, too, now that he thought of it. Moose, even.

Ahead of him, the headlights cut a narrow swath of light through the night-shrouded prairie. Dark mountains buckled the horizon. It would be hours before Laramie glowed like a fistful of scattered coals in the plains below.

Plenty of time to decide what that noise was. Plenty of time to convince himself it couldn’t have been anything else.

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I made a deal with myself at the beginning of the year that I wasn’t going to miss any writing deadlines, and I’ve been good so far. But the last Friday of the month is when I usually post flash fiction, and I don’t have a flash fiction piece for you.

I have something that could be flash fiction, if I felt like cutting until I hit bone. It could also be a novella, if I felt like giving it room to grow. It could be a lot of things, and I’ve devoted a decent chunk of mental energy this week trying to figure out what it should be.

After lots of deliberation, I’ve decided to release it as a serial, with a chapter set to release each Friday in April. I’ve never done serialized fiction before, but there are a few natural breaks in this story, and I think it would work well in this format. I want to give it a little more time to rest (and give myself time to edit, organize, and schedule posts), but I also kind of want to keep my promise about deadlines and posting when I say I will, which is today.

So here’s a sneak preview of Crickets.

First Movement

Fours is sitting where he always is, legs swinging from the tailgate of his pickup truck, which—to my knowledge—has never vacated its perch overlooking the northbound lane of CR 34. At this point, you’d need a crane to move it. The tires are a study in dry rot. The axle would split in two if you tied a string to it.

The truck’s owner doesn’t look much better. Old and thin, Fours is more rangy than muscular, with too-long arms and a paunch that untucks the hem of his shirt every time he reaches for something. You couldn’t tailor a suit to fit him, and I doubt anyone’s ever tried to.

“Evening,” he says as I walk up, which is true. It’s the first Thursday night of summer break. Three months until the start of senior year, which feels more and more like a deadline, like time is slowing down and speeding up all at once.

“Evening,” I say, hopping onto the tailgate and nestling the violin case between us. Atop this meager table, I lay out an offering of cold sandwiches and a Ziploc bag with three chocolate chip cookies. He eyes it all, greedy, then nods and reaches for a sandwich. One of Fours’ many unwritten rules is that he doesn’t talk while he eats, so I sit quietly until he brushes the crumbs off his jeans.

“What are we working on tonight?” he asks.

“Rieding,” I say. “The B minor concerto, first movement.”

“Kid stuff,” he says. “You should play Bach.”

“I’m not good enough for Bach,” I say, but he shrugs this off.

“No one’s good enough for Bach,” he says. “But okay. Show me where you’re at.”

I pull out my violin and cradle it between my chin and collarbone. The harsh light of Fours’ camp lantern blares against the varnish, so I turn half an inch and stare off into the woods at an audience hiding somewhere in the trees.

I play atrociously, like I always do, like I’ve never played the violin before. Part of the trouble is that I can only play fast or slow but can never manage both in the same song. Either I dance over the eighth notes and rush the legatos, or I get a perfect tone from the long pulls and trip over the accents. Worst of all, I get nervous at the thought of my own imaginary audience. I rush through the end of the piece and end up limping over the finish line, grateful to be done.

“Not bad,” he says. “Hand her over.”

I pass Fours the violin, and you can almost see the trees lean in to listen. The bugs stop chirping. The underbrush falls quiet. Birds leave their nests and gather on branches at the edge of Fours’ campsite.

He plays, and it’s like the sky opening up, like rain falling on dry earth. Every note lands exactly where it’s supposed to, resolute and inevitable, but with a few pauses here and there to leave you twisting with the music. The first movement ends and he continues on to the second and third. Halfway through I notice him humming his own counter melody, adding the piano parts back in so that the violin has something to dance over. I don’t even think he knows he’s doing it.

The piece ends, and the night rushes to fill the silence with a breeze that ripples through the trees like scattered applause. Fours hands me the violin.

“You’re up.”

That’s the thing about Fours. He doesn’t actually teach you anything. He doesn’t correct your posture or your hand position, doesn’t show you the proper way to hold a bow. He just makes you believe in magic and then asks you to prove it.

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This one originally appeared in Erica Drayton’s MicroZine as a response to the image prompt below, but I never posted it to my own site, so it’ll be new for most of you. Enjoy!

The Breakup

“Together or separate?”

“Together,” he lied.

She smiled, and didn’t that just twist the knife? He’d told himself that he was doing this for her: the date, the park, the ice cream shop. But honestly? He’d been stalling, working up his courage.

“So what did you want to talk about?”

“I think we should break up.”

She nodded. “I think so too.”

“You do?”

She licked her ice cream: chocolate, with rainbow sprinkles. “We go to school in different states. And... I met someone.”

“Who?”

“Does it matter?”

He wants to say no. His ice cream, melting, reaches his wrist.

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It’s fair to say that I loathed the first draft. I’d gone so far off the outline by the end of it that I didn’t even know what I was writing anymore. The characters were flat, the writing was atrocious, and the plot was completely unsalvageable. I knew I still had a story worth telling, but the baby-to-bathwater ratio in the first draft was virtually all denominator.

So I threw it out.

When I tell most people this, they tend to fixate on the act of destruction (“You just deleted everything and started over?”). For me, it was much closer to an act of faith. I trusted myself to rediscover those plot points that were inevitable, rather than merely convenient. If I forgot characters or scenes from the first draft, fine. They were, by definition, not memorable—and therefore not worth including.

I’ll admit that this is a pretty extreme way to approach rewrites, but fortune favored my boldness with a workable second draft, and it eventually grew into a novel that I’m fiercely proud to have written.

The Art of Bonsai

The reason I’m bringing up second drafts is because I just started another one (God help me). I finished the first draft of The Hope and the Ruin near the beginning of December, and I reread it for the first time last week. There are, of course, lots of changes to be made, but I’m mostly pleased with how it turned out.

At this stage, I’m not really shooting for a final version. My main focus is to discover the central theme of the book and rework the major plot points with that in mind. My go-to analogy for this process is the bonsai tree:

Beginning with the central trunk (theme), I work my way outward to the major branches (character arcs), encouraging growth where the branches are already growing in the correct direction, or else pruning those branches that weigh the tree down without adding to its beauty—all while remaining within the confines of my target word count.

As an example, my intended theme for Company of Ghosts was something like this:

“Find a way to reconcile your past, or else be haunted by it.”

The three main characters (Jalina, Andza, and Rahad) must have an answer to this by the end of the book, and their answers should reflect what they learned on their respective journeys. If a character arc didn’t serve this central theme, it changed. (In Jalina and Andza’s cases, I got pretty close to this in the early attempts, but Rahad needed more work.)

Secondary characters also had to serve the theme to a lesser extent. Ferrec, Jurald, Kyrede, Sethric, and Reia all had their own answers to this question, and each person that Jalina encountered shaped her own answer in some way.

Finally, the tertiary elements of the story (what many people refer to as the genre tropes) had to justify their place on the page. Magic Is Evil served this theme, so it became a crucial part of the setting. Only the Chosen May Wield might be a fun fantasy trope, but it didn’t serve this particular story, so it got the axe.

Now that I’ve read The Hope and the Ruin with fresh eyes, I have a good idea of what the theme of book two will be. Three of the primary characters are close and only need a few changes here and there. The fourth primary character is a problem child at the moment, but I have a few ideas about how to get her back on track.

Book Club… Blues?

Sunday was another milestone for me because someone in my book club suggested reading my book for February and the rest of the group agreed.

I usually show up to book club with the same energy that wrestling fans bring to Monday Night Raw. I’m there to see a fight, and if I can hand someone a steel chair, all the better.

To that end, I made it very clear at the beginning of the meeting that I wasn’t going to take offense at any criticism, and I definitely wasn’t going to settle any arguments (because we all know that the best moments happen when the ref isn’t looking).

It actually went pretty well! People called out things they didn’t like or didn’t understand, and someone else usually rushed to the book’s defense. I don’t think I spoke at all for the first hour and a half. Several people came prepared with notes, and it was a surreal pleasure to hear someone bring up an exact quote or flip to page 237 to settle an argument.

But my favorite moment of the meeting happened at the very beginning, where I thanked my friends for reading my book. I pointed out that in the grand scale of favors, reading your friend’s book cost more time and money than driving your friend to the airport.

“Yeah, but it’s also more fun than driving your friend to the airport.”
— my friend Jimmy

I wonder if he’ll give me a blurb for book two.

Buy Company of Ghosts

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Practical Magic

What you need to remember is that Victor knew real, actual magic.

When he pulled a rabbit out of a hat, he didn’t bother with secret compartments. He summoned one from the aether, good and proper. Kids who walked into his vanishing cabinet disappeared forever. When he cut someone in half on stage, they stayed cut in half.

Handcuffs couldn’t hold him. Snipers covered exits he didn’t use. Evidence disappeared seconds after they bagged it.

When they finally executed him (injection, firing squad, hanging, firing squad again) they buried him in a lead casket and filled the grave with concrete.

And for his final trick…

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Winter finally showed up this month, so I’ve been stuck indoors more than I like. I’ve only braved the cold once or twice for short walks around the neighborhood, which got me thinking about strolls, and detours, and shortcuts, which eventually led to this story.

It probably works as a metaphor for something, but I generally hate pure allegory, so don’t feel pressured to look for deeper meaning anywhere. Much better to take the paths as the come, to meander as you see fit.

Enjoy!

The Shortcut

The first time Jake took the Shortcut, he went missing for seven hours.

It happened on a Wednesday afternoon. His school bus normally stopped at the Elm Street intersection, right across from Mr. Nelson’s house, but with so much ice on the roads it had to let the kids off at the bottom of the hill by the playground. From there, Jake would normally cut across the field to Pine Street and hop the fence into his backyard, but for some reason he felt like taking the long way around: Oak, to Chestnut, to Aspen, and so on.

The running joke was that the streets in his neighborhood were named after the trees the developers had cleared, but Jake’s 7th grade biology teacher had taught them better. Aspens didn’t grow at this elevation, for one thing, and the American chestnut was critically endangered. Even if it grew here, you couldn’t get a permit to chop one down, let alone a whole row of them.

But as he walked, Jake imagined what it would be like to visit that other world, to take shelter from the freezing wind beneath those impossible trees.

He stepped forward. Instead of asphalt, his tennis shoe sunk into soft, forgiving earth, a crisp layer of dried leaves over the loamy soil of the forest. He looked around. Trees stood where houses should have been, brilliant with lichen. Ferns and shrubs crowded the forest floor. The air, which should have been brittle with cold, carried the sweet, damp scent of rot.

If this had happened to him at any other age, Jake might not have made it home. Any younger and he’d have been lost to the enchantment of the place; any older and he’d have despaired at the impossibility of it. Fortunately for Jake, twelve years old is the correct, agreed-upon age to find yourself suddenly transported into another world.

Even so, it took him hours to find his way out. The officer who came by to take his statement asked—very gently—where he had gone after school. Jake didn’t have a name for the place, didn’t know it as the Shortcut yet, so he just said he got lost in the woods.

The adults in the room traded looks. His mother started to cry. His father held her, face grim. The police officer wrote down Jake’s answer without believing it. There weren’t any woods for fifty miles in any direction.

***

Jake kept on using the Shortcut through the rest of middle school and into high school. He wrote down the rules as he learned them and kept them in a notebook beneath his bed so he wouldn’t forget.

The first thing he learned was how to cross from one world to the other. The trick was to treat the place you were standing as the real world and imagine the other place as a kind of daydream. On Elm Street, that meant thinking about elm trees. In the Shortcut, it meant convincing yourself that the forest was real, that the little neighborhood of khaki houses and green lawns and gleaming cars was a funny joke. In order to cross, you had to admit that the other world was impossible and then step into it anyway.

He also learned to bring food and water with him when he used the Shortcut. There were no grocery stores or vending machines, obviously, but there were also no fruit trees, no berries, no mushrooms. If you wanted something to eat, you had to bring it with you.

Finally, he learned that you could only use the Shortcut if you were on your way somewhere. You couldn’t just sit in the park and think yourself to the other side, and you certainly couldn’t stay forever. The other place didn’t offer sanctuary—only safe passage. A detour. A shortcut.

***

Halfway through 10th grade, Jake did something stupid and fell in love with a girl who was already in love with somebody else. He knew this to be a mistake but couldn’t help himself. Aside from the usual excuses of adolescent hormones and youthful optimism, he’d spent years believing in the impossible and didn’t want to admit that love might work any differently.

So he wrote the girl a letter.

Two weeks later, Jake found himself on the losing end of a fistfight. The girl’s boyfriend—11th grade, Junior Varsity and built like it—hammered him with jabs until Jake fell to the ground. More embarrassed than hurt, but still plenty hurt.

The older boy looked down at him, adrenaline already ebbing into guilt. He bent to help Jake off the ground, but Jake pushed his hands away, already turning, reflexively, toward the other place.

Jake staggered up off the forest floor, brushed his hands against his jeans. Two steps away, the other boy stood with his mouth open.

“Where are we?” the boy asked.

If he’d been afraid, Jake might have taken pity on him, but he couldn’t forgive the sense of wonder in the older boy’s voice. This was his place, his alone. Bad enough to suffer the first injury without this added insult. He felt a sudden, overwhelming desire to make the other boy suffer, to punish him for this second, unforgivable sin.

And then, almost immediately, realized how he could do it.

“See for yourself,” Jake said. Then he stepped backward, out of the Shortcut and into the hallway.

Alone.

***

Police came by the school the next day. Posters went up around the neighborhood. There was a story in the newspaper, a special report on TV, a candlelight vigil.

All the while, Jake tried to find his way back into the Shortcut. He packed food, water, first aid kits, flashlights, everything he would need for a proper search. But the gate wouldn’t open for him. He couldn’t reach the mental state that undid the lock, couldn’t convince himself the Shortcut wasn’t real when a real person was starving to death somewhere inside.

More than this, he felt trapped. He recognized the days before the fight as a long, continuous journey from childhood to adulthood, a road with crossings and waypoints and occasional shortcuts. Choosing to kill someone had frozen him in one place, no longer on the way to anything. He was too old for his age now; he was as old as he would ever be.

***

Time passed. People grieved, accepted, forgot. Jake went to college out of state, got married, found work, had kids. He found ways to live with the guilt, to build layers of himself around it until no one could see through to the center.

When his daughter was old enough to go to school, Jake found a remote job that let him work irregular hours so long as they added up to forty every week. He spent his lunch break in the pickup line at the elementary school. He tapped his thumb against the steering wheel, changed the radio station without ever listening to the music, rolled the windows down to catch the fresh air, rolled them back up to block out the fumes.

He hated the feeling of being stuck between the cars, unable to move. Couldn’t bear the thought of his kids walking home from school.

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Marooned

What nobody knew—what nobody could have guessed—is that Jimmy wanted to be shipwrecked.

The fuel gauge had been close to full when he’d hopped over the rail. By the time it emptied, his rescuers would be a thousand miles off course, choppers weaving a careful net over the wrong square of ocean.

In the meantime, Jimmy pulled his life raft off the beach and covered it with branches. Then he cracked open a can of tuna and washed it down with warm beer. At his feet, tide pools bloomed like a garden of pink orchids beneath the sunset.

There were worse things than dying alone.

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Way back in July 2024, I went to a writing conference where someone suggested posting on Substack. I’d never been a very good (or even consistent) blogger, but I liked the idea of a social media platform centered around long-form writing. I clicked around the site, scrolled through a few tutorials, and signed up. Ten days later, I published my first short story on the platform.

One of the big decisions when starting a Substack is deciding what to put behind a paywall. I assumed (correctly!) that this blog would never really rake in a significant amount of dough, and it seemed counterproductive to ask people to read my stories only to hide half of them in a Members Only section.

On the other hand, Substack isn’t doing this for free, and I strongly suspected that a 100% free blog would be viewed less favorably by the algorithms. I needed something to lure in paid subscribers. But what?

I eventually decided to set up paid subscriptions and pledge the proceeds to charity. From my About page (which I’m certain no one has ever read):

If you do decide to subscribe, here’s a short breakdown of where your subscription goes.

- A portion goes to Substack, because that’s how they make money

- A smaller portion goes toward maintaining the site, whether that’s registering domain names, hiring web designers, or paying graphic designers to generate assets

The rest goes to non-profit charities to promote literacy

2024 came and went. I published 24 posts and ended the year with 17 free subscribers. The textbook definition of a flop, but I was still committed.

The First Subscribers

In 2025, I slowed down the posting schedule and started to devote a little more time to promoting my fantasy novel, Company of Ghosts. I participated in a few submissions calls, got more active on Notes, and made a few friends. Total subscriptions crept steadily upward, and I landed my first paid subscribers, to whom I am eternally grateful.

As a result, I’m pleased to announce that I made $250 in subscription revenue last year. After Substack’s cut and Stripe’s processing fees, that leaves $216.55 for my chosen charity, Reading is Fundamental.

According to their donation page, this is enough to get books into the hands of 54 children across the country. By way of comparison, I published 46 posts last year, which means that every time I sat down to write a post, I was—in effect—buying a book for a kid.

This is my new North Star. Those other lights in the night sky? Pure decoration, at best.

But Wait, There’s More!

The cynical readers stopped to scratch their heads a few paragraphs ago, and we should take a moment to address their concerns.

After all, wouldn’t it make more sense for my subscribers to just donate their subscriptions directly? It would cut out two middlemen, which means that more kids would get books, and they’d still be able to read the exact same posts.

Well, I had the same thought myself, which is why I decided to match my subscribers’ donations and give $216.55 to a local charity.

Technically, this means that I lost money on Substack last year, but it’s hard to see it that way. These kids live in my neighborhood. They walk on the same sidewalks as I do. They will—someday, I hope—wander through the same bookstores, driven by a lifelong love of reading. A love that started, as mine did, in childhood.

A writer without readers is nothing. By supporting me, you’ve made sure that I’ll be surrounded by readers for years to come.

Other News

The Hope and the Ruin is well underway. My first reread starts in February, and I’ve committed to finishing the first major rewrite by the end of April, so we’ll see how much I get done. In the meantime, I’m enjoying the unseasonably warm weather and trying to stay sane.

That’s all for this week! See you on Monday for your regularly scheduled microfiction.

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Today’s story is inspired by any one of the countless pit stops on countless road trips I’ve taken through the years. I’ve found that there are two ways to approach these.

The first (and worst) is to count them as lost time. Glance at the clock when you walk in, check it again when you walk out, and mentally add 47 minutes to the arbitrary ETA you staked your pride against when you set out. Instead of “chocolate shake,” think “twelve minutes.” Tap your foot while you wait for the check. Et cetera.

The better way, if you can pull it off, is to remind yourself that the pauses are part of the journey—not distractions from it. The road will be there when you get back, and it’ll be just as long as you left it, so you may as well enjoy a decent cup of coffee while you can get it.

Crossroads

Marge’s diner had two regulars, though she never learned their names.

Traveler-Headed-West was usually twenty, thirty at most. He ordered from the Specials menu and always treated himself to a slice of pie. Traveler-Headed-East was older, quieter, fed up with her own broken heart. She sipped black coffee and stared out the window: wondering, wondering.

Every now and then, they met in the parking lot and got to talking. Marge saw this as a personal victory and celebrated by pouring free coffee for everybody. It pleased her to put some good into the world, to be in charge of a place where good things could still happen.

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Here are a few stories that turned my head in December.

Red Creek Boy by

Kindling

Red Creek Boy - Index

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6 months ago · 11 likes · Shaina Read

Red Creek Boy is a new serial from Shaina Read, and holy hell does it check a lot of boxes for me. Creepy rituals in the woods? Supernatural killers? Small town horror with a dash of police procedural?

Be still, my bloody heart.

Chapters One through Six are up on the index page, so you can follow along from week to week or wait until April to binge them all at once.

You Cannot Spell Paradise Without Lies by

Realms.

You Cannot Spell Paradise Without Lies

Reader Question: What’s the worst job you ever had…

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3 years ago · 9 likes · 2 comments · Zachary Roush

This one was posted way back in January 2023, but I didn’t hear about it until it got a Runner-Up nod from the Lunar Awards, so it was new to me in December. Dystopian, alien, surreal. This line alone is worth the price of admission:

“There are dogs patrolling here, eye stalks turning at every sound.”

I AM TRYING TO TELL YOU A DREAM by

They don't all have to be good

I AM TRYING TO TELL YOU A DREAM

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5 months ago · 19 likes · 22 comments · Ian Patterson

This one is a vignette, rather than a full story, but it grabbed my interest. For a guy who “doesn’t write horror,” Ian nailed it with this one. The voice is superb, the descriptions are killer. Allegedly, this is meant to be part of a larger tale, and I’m excited to see what else he has planned for it.

(Obligatory link to Ian’s award-winning book, which I also enjoyed!)

The Last Useful Man by and

The Metropolitan Review

The Last Useful Man

About halfway through Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, Tom Cruise goes for a run on a treadmill. The treadmill is on the USS Ohio, a submarine manned exclusively by implausibly attractive people. One of those people is not who they seem: a cultist, radicalized by the Entity, the f…

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5 months ago · 1532 likes · 82 comments · Aled Maclean-Jones and The Metropolitan Review

Finally, this was my favorite essay of the month. The tagline might fool you into thinking this is a movie review, but it’s actually a very salient analysis of the uses of technology. When is technology a crutch, and when is it an extension of human expertise? Read and find out.

It’s also very accessibly written, even if you’re like me and haven’t seen Tom Cruise in a starring role since your dad showed you the original Top Gun on VHS.

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There’s a prevailing sentiment that there’s such a thing as Too Much Christmas, which is absolutely true—for people who celebrate it the wrong way. I believe, wholeheartedly, that we live in a world with Too Much Commercialism, Too Much Waste, Too Much Greed, and Too Much Canned Pop Music.

But what do any of those things have to do with Christmas?

When Ebenezer Scrooge vowed in A Christmas Carol to “honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year,” he wasn’t talking about jamming Mariah Carey tracks in September or buying cheap plastic shit for your cousin’s kids to throw away. He was talking about the basic human concepts of Charity, Generosity, and Kindness for your “fellow passengers to the grave” (one of my favorite lines in any book, ever).

Too much Christmas? Humbug. It gets cold and dark in November. Let’s put up some lights and bake each other cookies.

Read a Book, Feed a Neighbor

Speaking of charity, the numbers have started to roll in for last month’s food bank drive. For those who missed the post, a group of authors banded together and pledged their November royalties to their local food banks. We had a total of 13 participating authors across 7 states, and I’m deeply grateful to everyone who chipped in to help.

For most of us, November was a slow month, so book sales either held steady or dipped slightly compared to previous months. Most of the authors rounded up their donations, which puts us at an estimated $877, with a few folks still waiting for our sales reports to come in. I’m guessing we cleared the $1,000 mark, but probably not by much.

While that definitely isn’t quit-your-job money, even small gifts at a crucial time can go a long way. My local food bank says that it can provide two meals for every dollar donated, which puts us at about 2,000 meals (rounding up because a lot of the donations landed on Giving Tuesday). Doing some rough napkin math, that’s three meals a day for a family of four for… 166 days.

If you don’t believe that has an impact, walk up to a family of four and offer to buy their groceries for the next five months. (Warning: People will think you’re weird for doing this. But they’ll also probably thank you.)

Book Two Announcement

Last week, I announced that I’d finished the first draft of book two, tentatively titled The Hope and the Ruin. This book picks up a few years after Company of Ghosts with a mostly-new cast of characters as they attempt to build a settlement in the ruins of their abandoned homeland.

As you might expect, it goes very, very well (until it doesn’t).

Where the first book dealt with altered historical records in the immediate aftermath of a low-magic fantasy civil war, this book zooms out a lot further, delving into the cataclysm that sent the Kerrans across the ocean in the first place and their attempts to reconcile the sins of their collective past.

I decided early on that each book was going to serve as a primary, in-world source for an important chapter in this world’s history. I think it’s a cool approach, and it gives me a lot of flexibility to make changes between books, but it does come with some drawbacks.

Book two has much darker tones than the first, to the extent that it might alienate some readers who enjoyed the first book. It’s also written as a third-person account rather than a first-person memoir, and has very little overlap with the events of the first book.

I’m pretty sure any one of these points would earn a veto from an agent or a publisher, but as a self-pubbed author, I don’t have to ask anyone’s permission. I can do what I want, and this is how I want to write book two.

Upcoming Milestones

I thought I’d post a quick overview of my writing process and some milestones for next year. I’m never going to be a prolific author, but at the very least, I can try to set reasonable expectations and meet my own deadlines.

December-January: Two month break so I can reread the story with fresh eyes. Stephen King says to take two months off after the first draft, and I don’t argue with the King.
February-April: First reread and an initial pass to tweak major character arcs and sew up plot holes. At this stage, I’m mostly trying to make sure that the plot and characters coalesce around a central theme.
May: Another month off. I usually take a hiatus from posting around this time as well.
June-July: A third draft, where I focus more on language, voice, and tone. This is the draft I’ll deliver to some beta readers for feedback.

After this, the timeline starts to depend on others’ availability, and I don’t have as much say in the schedule. I’m still aiming for a Summer 2027 release date, but I’ll post here if there are any changes.

Finally, Some Personal News

I started playing the harp about two years ago (at the ripe old age of 36). I don’t talk about it much on my writing blog because I approach writing and playing music very differently. When I write, my goal is to impress. The audience’s reaction is essential to the process.

Music, on the other hand, is my safe space. I don’t want to think about posting schedules or subscriber counts or what the audience wants. I just want to play songs that I enjoy.

Most of the time, that’s traditional Irish music. I got a Turlough O’Carolan songbook for my birthday, which I’ve been working through little by little. Irish music is typically written in G or D major (or their relative minors), which means I tune the harp to C major. When I play a song in G, I flip the levers up on all the F strings. When I play a song in D, I also flip the levers up on all the C strings.

Since I only have access to naturals and sharps, I can’t play music in any key that requires a flat note. F major is out of luck, and you can forget about E-flat major.

But! One of the cool things about being a musician is that you meet other musicians, and sometimes those other musicians will let you borrow instruments. This happened a few weeks ago, when my friends dropped off a 36-string harp for me to play with.

I’ve already tuned it down to E-flat major, which opens up a huge number of keys that were impossible on my old harp. Notably: B-flat major, C minor, D minor, E-flat major, F major, and G minor (also A-flat Lydian, which has never been used in the history of music).

Unless you’re a music theory nerd, this was probably really boring to read, but it’s exciting news for some people!

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