Archive for September, 2009

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THE THREE DAY ALL YOU CAN EAT ITALIAN FEAST: By Michael Pelc

Saturday, September 26th, 2009

You would think, what with Justice Springs being such a small town and all, that someone would have noticed something out of the ordinary about the Three Day All You Can Eat Italian Feast that took place every Wednesday night out at Turk’s Diner.

For one thing, there were the cars, the ones in the parking lot.  Black.  All of them.  Not a gray.  Not a red.  Not even a dark blue or a deep forest green.  Just plain black, every single one of them.  And they didn’t come from around here, either.  Not judging by their license plates, they didn’t.

And then there was the hour of it all.  Midnight.  Not at all a respectable time for a hard-working, God-fearing, Christian to be setting down to dinner.  Why even in the big cities, where the fancy folk lived, there wasn’t anybody who took to eating any later than seven.  Maybe eight at the latest.  But certainly not midnight.  Never midnight.

So you would think, what with all those out-of-state black cars showing up in the middle of the night to eat dinner, that somebody in Justice Springs would have gotten at least a little bit suspicious.  And maybe they’d even have gone so far as to say something about the suspicions they were having, if only just to make idle chat while getting a wash and set at Fanny’s Beauty Shoppe, or at lunch break over at the carpet mill on a day when the Braves had lost and nobody wanted to talk baseball any more.  Not that any of those sorts of things would have done Francesca DiGiovanni any good, even if they had happened, on account of how Francesca wasn’t from around these parts anyways.

You see, Francesca was from Jersey, just outside of Atlantic City.  Not that it was her fault, you understand.  It’s just that that’s where her parents were from.  Neither was it her fault that she was Italian.  For that could be said to be her parents’ fault, as well.  Now the three hundred pounds, however, well quite simply there was no getting around it (both literally and figuratively).  That was Francesca’s fault.  You see, the girl loved to eat.

And so it was quite natural really, that when Nicky Policastro asked her out on a date, and that date included dinner, Francesca didn’t hesitate to say yes, even if dinner wouldn’t be until midnight.  Besides, she figured she could work her way around it.  Eat a bigger lunch than usual.  Stuff a couple bags of Fritos into her purse, just to tide her over between feedings.  Maybe chew some gum.  That sort of thing.

When Nicky parked the shiny black Cadillac in back of Turk’s Diner, Francesca was relieved to see that it was only a little after ten.  “Aren’t we early?” she asked.

“No, I think we’re just about on time,” he said, checking his watch.  He walked around to the passenger side and opened the door for Francesca.  “Besides, there’s someone I’d like you to meet.  My dad.”

Francesca’s heart fluttered with excitement as she got out of the car.  “Your dad?”

“Yep, Mr. Turk Policastro.”

“You mean, like in Turk’s Diner?”

“The one and only.  What do you say, you want to come in and meet him?  I know he’s looking forward to meeting you.”  Nicky held open the door that led into the kitchen and guided Francesca inside the diner.

“You told him about me?”

“How could I not?  After all, you’re the Italian.”

“Huh?”

“The Italian,” Nicky repeated.  “Like in the recipe.  You know, for the Three Day All You Can Eat Italian Feast.”

©2009 Michael Pelc

Michael Pelc lives in Florida with his wife and the obligatory black cat.  His stories have appeared in various places on the web, such as MicroHorror, A Twist of Noir, and Crimson Highway.

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UNDER THE MOON: By Magen Toole

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009

When I was ten-years-old, I dreamt I was a wolf. In my eyes I ran the miles of thicket behind my mother’s house, down the uneven porch steps, through the back gate and into the brush, for years and years. I traveled, down forest paths by dying firefly light and the winding of river beds, along the jagged western cliffs with weathered faces and open mouths. I went to where I could not be found, to crawl inside the bony ribcages of trees and hide under their weeping boughs, until crying so loudly they blocked out the sun above me with their arms. I cried with them.

The moon was my halo, my eyes sharp and teeth like white daggers in its full blush. It held my secrets and my face. I was no longer a child and I would never be a woman, even when my breasts swelled in the following summer and I first felt the flush of adolescence between my thighs. Boys would never look at me like a cheap distraction, with their knobby bodies and hungry hands. My father would never look at me.

As the wolf, sheep and white rabbits lay down with me. They bowed their heads before me as my supper and I knew no fear. The sparrows picked clean the seeds and insects from my fur. Their beaks pulled out the stitches that held my human skin together, sewn in pieces of my mother’s smile, my grandmother’s eyes, and the bruises on my elbows and knees. These things were forgotten, shed like a winter’s coat with the purple outline of my father’s rough palm across my cheek. The forest held me as I slept and made me forget them. As my father had forgotten me, my face and my eyes, when he closed the door to my mother’s house and never returned. 

When I see my father again I’m twenty-four-years-old. I wear heels and a short yellow sundress that looks like summer, and find my father in a phone book, like a ghost or a memory that shouldn’t be. Ghosts shouldn’t have names in phone books, but I follow the trail he leaves behind him to a bar on the edge of town. My father stinks of cigarettes and cheap whiskey and old sweat. He stinks like this bar stinks, looking at me under the flicker of blue neon signage, and smiles, greasy, all teeth. He doesn’t know me anymore.

“You’re a pretty girl,” my father says. His eyes squint when he looks at my hips instead of my face, and he licks the corner of his mouth with the tip of his tongue. It’s a nervous habit. “I can show you a good time, you know.”

When he touches my arm and asks me to come home with him, I only smile. He doesn’t recognize my mother’s mouth on me. I’m glad.

Home is a trailer down a bumpy road in a dusty red pick-up truck. It is the same truck I was laying in the first time my father was inside of me, in the thicket down the road from my mother’s house. Time doesn’t change him. His trailer is small, tired and beige, filled with cheap wooden furniture and old photographs on bookshelves. There are no pictures of me.

My father takes off his jacket and takes me to the bedroom. He puts his hands on my waist and squeezes the bones under my dress, licking his lips again. He isn’t nervous.

“You don’t remember me, do you?” I ask when he tries to put his hand beneath my skirt. I feel sick, my limbs heavy, thin and useless. I hate him for it.

My father is almost laughing. “Does it matter, baby?” he asks. “I know a lot of girls.”

From across the room I see the swollen white moon in slits of light through the bedroom curtains. I can smell and taste his blood through his skin. He tries to kiss me, which he never did before, and stops when he sees me beginning to change.

My fingers extend, followed by my toes, the bones in my arms and legs lengthening under my skin, which gives in the rip-tatter-pop of fresh stitches. The shaggy gray pelt grows into place as my mouth stretches into a muzzle, my teeth growing and vision sharpening. I drop to all fours, my skeleton contorting to fit the shape of the wolf’s body, ligaments tearing, snapping, realigning, and making me more than what I was. I’m no longer my father’s daughter. I’m something else entirely.

He runs and I give chase, out the front door, down the ramshackle wooden steps and dirt driveway. The clearing around the trailer gives way to a sparse patch of forest, the earth soft and cool beneath my feet. Into the thicket I find him, following the scent of his blood and sweat and fear, sticky-sweet and hot in my snout and on my tongue. He’s pathetic, now as he has ever been, towering above my head and in my dreams in his sickness.

I move between the trees. The moon is my cover, to hide my face and keep my secrets in silhouette on the forest floor. Its light cuts through the brush and swallows us whole. He doesn’t see me coming. When I find him, crouched, panting like a frightened rabbit against a tree trunk, I open my jaw. I snare his throat between my teeth, hearing the sick twist-crunch of bone and sinew as I tear it out. He doesn’t scream. There is no time, only his blood in my mouth and on my fur and the moon above my head.

What my father takes from me dies with him, and for it I’m free.

–

©2009 Magen Toole

 
Magen Toole is a student and odd-jobber from Fort Worth, Texas. Her work has appeared in Every Day Fiction, MicroHorror and The Battered Suitcase. She can be found online at http://magentoole.wordpress.com/

Posted in Magen Toole | 8 Comments »

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