Originally published in Sycamore Review Summer/Fall 2019

It was easy for Marina to spot the future people who came to kill her baby. Most were so disoriented by their trip across time they would dart their heads like lost dogs, looking for anything familiar and finding nothing. Some were overtaken by coughing fits brought on by air that did not agree with their future lungs. Some just cried, great wails of fright and want not unlike her baby’s but so much more disturbing for possessing the depth of adulthood. These cues gave Marina more than enough time to identify the future people and lose herself in a crowd, for she was in the city now and there was always a crowd nearby. She adored crowds. The future people were large of face and frame, so even the more disciplined ones who resisted the impulse to cough or cry were betrayed by their size. 

That is why Marina did not worry all that much when she ventured out in the morning to drop off her piecework from the night before and pick up the day’s load from the dress factory, with her baby clasped close to her breast in a sling, babbling and pointing with rapturous wonder at the streetcars as they clanged up and down the high street. She was sure any danger from the future people would make itself known to her with ample time to react and escape. Marina often wondered why they bothered to hide themselves at all. She wondered this much more often than she wondered how the future people came to her from the future, or why they were so intent on murdering her baby yet so helpless at the task. These realities of her new life had been established long ago and were not, in her opinion, worth pondering.

Marina was not surprised the morning she returned from the factory, her satchel full of piecework and her baby working a sore spot into her clavicle with the top of his head, when she heard a clamor coming from the other side of the front door of her tiny fourth-floor flat. She paused with her key inserted in the lock and waited for the the noise to play itself out. It sounded like a person who’d been shoved down a flight of stairs, the din of a clumsy flailing of limbs trying in vain to break a fall, oofs and ows and other exclamations of shock and pain. Then a low moan. They’ve come here now, Marina thought. Before this moment the future people had only come after her in the street, or in her father’s barn before she fled the countryside a few months ago, but never directly in her home. A new thing, she thought. What a marvel new things were! 

Originally published in Newtown Literary Journal Issue 10 (Spring/Summer 2017).

The solider holds his hand out to shake even though he’s handcuffed to a table. The guard behind him grabs his rifle tighter and leans in.

“I’m just showin him I would if I could,” the soldier says. His voice is high-pitched. His words halt at their conclusions as if he is being choked. The guard backs off an inch.

The handcuffed solider does not have the look of someone who would have caved in someone’s skull in with a wrench. I wouldn’t believe he could do it if I hadn’t seen the grainy video footage of him raising a pipe cleaner arm over Dr. Marshall’s head, the bony thing shaking from the effort, before bringing it down on his head. That same arm now pokes out of the sleeve of an orange jumpsuit with plenty of room to spare. His hair is a pale rust color, the kind you used to see on the heads of kids who’d spent the whole summer in a chlorine-saturated pool, chopped into a crewcut grown uneven for lack of maintenance. Glaring pores dot a nose that comes to a sharp point and holds up gold-framed glasses with lenses as thick as a slice of bread.

I tell the soldier I just want to talk.

“Talk about what?” he says. “They’re gonna throw me to the outside. Nothin you or me or nobody else can do about it.”

“Maybe there is something we can do about it,” I tell him. I say this because it seems to rude to say, You’re right, you’re as good as dead, even to a murderer. He shrugs.

“File says you were born in Queens. The tower must be practically in your backyard. Where’d you grow up?”

“So you know Queens,” the soldier grunts.

“Not really, to be honest. I used to know this neighborhood alright, but…”

“No point in me answering, then.”

I shuffle the papers in his file and clear my throat.

“I don’t get why people wanna know,” the soldier says.

“Know what?” I ask.

He yawns.

The soldier responds to all of my questions with a grunt or a smirk, if he responds at all. Do you know how close Dr. Marshall was to finding a cure? warrants the same reaction as The food down here okay?

When I get up to leave, the guard directs the soldier back to his holding cell with the point of his rifle. The cell is a caged-in area the size of a parking space. I know this because the holding area used to be the tower’s garage, the yellow lines outlining the path for the bars extending from floor to ceiling. Every single parking space has been repurposed this way. I used to be jealous of the rich tenants who parked down here because I had to fight my way into curbside spots every other day to stay ahead of the alternate side rules. Not a car in sight now. The first flood carried most of them away. The army removed the rest when they took over.

The soldier is the only prisoner at the moment. The whole row of cages rattles when the guard slams his cell shut. A prison cell shouldn’t rattle. I’d be worried if I thought he cared enough to escape.

Continue reading The Poor Entrance →

You have to see thing. I can’t believe I never made you watch it. It’s so stupid. I have this tape from when I was a kid and oh my god. You just have to see it.

This kid was in my class in elementary school. Every year kindergarten through fifth grade. Had this weird lisp that never went away. You know some kids can’t talk quite right yet when they first start school but they figure it out as they get older? This kid couldn’t. It just stuck on him.

We’d play Hot Wheels or whatever on the playground when we were little but he kept wanting to do it as we got older way beyond when we shoulda been playing with Hot Wheels. All the other kids started making fun of the way he talks. Like to his face. I don’t think they woulda done it if he was just a little off anyways but since he was it was like fair game. So I don’t wanna really hang out with him too much anymore. I mean I was nice enough to him. Didn’t really make fun of him or nothing like that. We lived on the same street so we had to ride the bus together and we’d walk home when we got dropped off. Not together. More like side by side.

He was too much like a little kid still and it bugged me. He was the youngest of six which I bet is rough in its own way but I was a kid and I didn’t care about that at the time. I just didn’t wanna hang out with this weird little guy anymore and he didn’t seem to get it.

So anyway. His dad puts in his 30 and the family moves off to one of the Carolinas the  summer before sixth grade. I didn’t think of this kid for a minute after he left. And then one day I get home from school and my mom says I got a package. I’m not expecting nothing and you know when you’re a kid getting a package in the mail is like the greatest thrill in the world. It was one of those manila envelopes with the bubble wrap inside. I open this thing up and it’s a VHS tape. No label on it or nothing.

I pop it in the VCR and oh my god. I almost died. It’s a home video of this kid. He grew a little since I last seen him but only a little. But he’s trying so hard to be a teenager. So god damn hard. He’s wearing what woulda been the hot fashion back then. An Agassi shirt and Bugle Boy jean shorts and a paid of gleaming white Reebok Pumps. Kid’s got a chain too. White gold it looks like. I would bet a million dollars he’s drenched in Drakkar Noir too. His hair’s moussed to death or at least what I can see of it because the camera’s on a tripod or something and the way the shot is angled it cuts off the top of his head. He’s sitting on his bed with one leg up and one hanging off the bed like he’s a camp counselor about to give me some real serious talk.

He starts talking to me. What’s up man. Haven’t seen you in a while. His voice is a little deeper than the year before but just barely and he’s trying to make up for it by talking as low as he can. He sounds like a cartoon and with the lisp on top of it the way he talks is almost upsetting. He tells me Carolina’s a little hotter than Queens but he’s used to it already. There’s no palm trees. I thought there were palm trees he says and he does this theatrical shrug that kills me just to think about it.

He’s showing me his new room. The new Super Nintendo games he got. A crossbow he begged to get for his birthday. The poster of a girl in a bikini washing a Lamborghini on his wall. And he’s talking about it all like he’s a god damn millionaire who’s made it to the top. He actually says Yeah life’s pretty good and clasps his arms behind his head. Except with the lisp it comes out life’th pretty good.

Then he starts talking about his new junior high and he’s trying to play like he’s a big man there too. Tells me he has a girlfriend named Tina. She’th awethome. Totally hot too. And I think to myself oh man no why are you saying that. I know you’re lying about having a girlfriend. Why are you doing this no please stop.

He’s been looking straight at the camera the whole time so it’s weird when he looks away all of a sudden. Darts his head like he heard a noise.

Thome of the kidth at thchool can be jerkth he says. But what can you do. It ith what it ith. And there’s a super long pause and he looks around the room. Like what he needs to say next is written somewhere but he can’t find it.

Then asks me to write him back but he stops himself mid-sentence. I mean tape. Video. Thend a tape. Tape yourthelf. And I swear to god he smacks himself in the head. He says Thupid in this squeaky cracking voice and he gets up off the bed and you see him turn off the camera and that’s it.

My mom thought this was the sweetest thing that he wanted to keep in touch and told me I should send him a tape too. She nagged me about it for months and I kept telling her I’d do it until she forgot or figured out there was no way in hell I was gonna do that.

Every time a friend came to my house for years I made them watch that tape. If they knew the kid it was funny. If they didn’t know him it was even funnier. The desperate sweaty try-hard-ness of the whole thing. Me and my friends would quote it to each other. If someone fucked up we’d say thupid just the way he did.

Freshman year of college we’d watch this thing in my dorm room every Friday night before we went out. I did a shot-for-shot remake of it for an intro to filmmaking class even though it confused the shit out of the professor. I’ve showed it at every party I ever had at every place I’ve ever lived. Like it’s three am and things are winding down I pop the tape in as a treat to everyone who stuck around that long. Sometimes somebody would be like oh no this fucking thing again and I’d be like yes this fucking thing again.

The tape made me laugh even harder as the years went by. If I had a shitty day at work I’d come home and pop the tape in. I still have a VCR just so I can watch it. The clothes the kid wore were so in that moment. Like if he taped it a week later he’d have been wearing something completely different. He looks so trapped in that time. He looks so trapped.

The tape used to be the litmus test for every girl I went out with. Like if they didn’t think it was funny then things probably weren’t going to work out. I was dating this one girl for like two months before I showed it to her and I thought we got along well enough but she didn’t think it was even a little funny. She said I was laughing at this poor kid and I was being too cruel. I told her I’m not laughing at him. I’m not laughing at whoever this person is now. I’m laughing 20 years later at a dumb kid doing something dumb. And this girl said But he’s still here. And I don’t know if she meant the kid is out there somewhere or she meant he was there on the TV screen. Anyway it didn’t work out between us. Probably dodged a bullet.

I thought about putting it on YouTube. I bet it’d get a million views. I know it would. But people would share it for a couple of days and it’d be forgotten. Who remembers what people were sharing last week let alone last year? This way it’s mine. I’m the gatekeeper. I decide who gets to see it. You come to my house and you watch or you don’t get to watch it.

If random people watched the video they would laugh at him. I’m not laughing at him. I’m laughing at this one moment caught on tape. The other day I tripped walking up the subway stairs and dropped an ice coffee all over the place. This guy walking in the other direction laughed and I was mad for a moment but then I thought shit if I saw myself at that split second I probably would have laughed too. That guy might still be laughing now and there ain’t shit I can do about it. So let him laugh.

This kid is probably fine now. He’s probably doing better than me. I got a crappy apartment and a job I can’t stand and meanwhile for all I know he’s a CEO with a penthouse and a hot wife named Tina. Got a speech therapist and got rid of that lisp. Everything’s great for him now. Better than things are for me. I bet.

But you gotta see this thing. It’s real. I mean it’s really something.