Spooky Scary Short Stories

I'm going to do something a little different today.
Our poll this month is to decide (among your write in nominations) what is the best horror novel/novella. I hope you take a moment to pop over there and give the poll your opinion.

However, a couple of you nominated short stories and I didn't take the nominations because I want to do something kind of special for short stories.

Short stories and horror are a particularly effective mix. The brevity lends itself to our human nature to be more afraid of what we don't see than what we do. Characters' flaws show through more intensely. And of course the author is less afraid to have a brutal twist or a terrible outcome. The conceits play out faster. Not that a novel has never scared me, but what consistently gets under my skin the most has always been shorter works.

So what I want to do is form a collection of really great horror shorts. I will keep editing this post to add more and more and more great horror short stories to the bottom of the post.

If you can't find your story online, just name it (and the anthology or book it's in if you know that information) and I'll put it at the bottom of the list. If you can find your story online, put the title and a URL and I will keep coming back here and adding more to the list periodically throughout the weekend.

One caveat: I am but a mere mortal human. I can't put up a thousand people's list of their best 30 scary short stories. So, much like our nomination process for polls, I am limiting each user to TWO stories.

And of course, if you have a few minutes....enjoy!

The Fall of the House of Usher E.A. Poe
The Pit and the Pendulum E.A. Poe
The Monkey's Paw W.W. Jacobs
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge A. Bierce
The Veldt R. Bradbury

CoE: Section 1

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Clearly I don’t shy from melodrama, right? I’m just getting started and the human race is already doomed.

But it really did happen that way.

Sean Mason didn’t mean to doom the human race. It wasn’t as if he woke up that morning thinking that dooming the human race would nicely round out the day. I'm pretty sure he woke up that morning thinking that he'd been a jerk to a friend who didn't want to sleep with him, and he ought to be better about that. Although it may have also involved a pair of Asian cheerleaders who were getting a D in his accounting class and would do anything to pass. But like most things that Sean touched, he began with pedestrian—perhaps even noble—intentions (not the cheerleader thing, but the other one), and just sort of fucked everything up on the way to executions.

Really, this is a story about Sean's fucked up executions. There were a lot of stories in the war, but Sean's was, in a way, the story. He lived at the epicenter of it all–often was the epicenter of it all. But also Sean and the war…they defined each other. They foraged each other. Sean wouldn’t have been the same without the war. The war certainly wouldn't have been the same without Sean.

Sorry. I don't mean to go to Cliché Town on the Cliché Express.

The story doesn’t begin with Sean condemning the human race to its own destruction. Well…I suppose it did begin there because that's where I began it, but that’s not really where it starts. I watch too many movies. Mr. Melodrama, that’s me. However, to really tell this story, we should back up. Because it really begins a year prior.

So let’s back up. Chunks of earth swirl inward to a single focal point, form into mountains, valleys, plateaus, ravines and other landscape features; a swell moves through the earth—a twenty-foot tall wave through the rock and soil converging to a central point; it shrinks inward toward a two-mile wide crater in the jungle floor; the wave lurches for a moment, and then spits out a cyan ball of crackling energy; foliage sprouts out of the scorched earth—twisted and black, flaming as giant green leaves burn into existence, flames repair the damage before winking out, and then the jungle is pristine with thick green foliage, bugs the size of tennis balls, brilliant multi-colored birds squawking, all bathed in an electric blue light that fades into darkness.

The ball hurls away from the surface of Earth, sails out into space and zips towards a massive warship, with a giant weapon barrel; slides perfectly into the impossibly huge proboscis, and is swallowed; a blue glow in the barrel fades to darkness.

Faster now: the sun slips behind the shadow of the Earth, sailing backward against its normal course, and the night deepens as it moves; near the planet a soft blanket of large ships undulates and writhes, occasionally a burst of light precedes the sudden reassembly and appearance of a new craft. Still faster: The Earth spins backwards faster and faster, undertakes its journey around the sun in reverse; round back to very nearly to the same point that it took off, almost a year before.

And here is where we stop our backwards motion through time, and begin to move through space.

A loosely assembled fleet of ships floats out beyond the fringe of the moon. Three large battleships shift along the perimeters, each oblong in shape and haphazardly blanketed with an eclectic blend of turrets of every size and shape sticking out like a porcupine.

One battleship at the center of the fleet, larger than all the others, also oblong, and white from bow to stern except for faded patches, dramatic scorch marks along the aft, and series of dark, identical cuts that run nearly the whole length of the ship in the lower portion.

The ship is the size of a city—even bigger than most cities, and the cuts are rectangular openings along several of the lower decks—openings into a massive hangar that runs the full length of the vessel. Each is thirty meters tall and three hundred meters wide, the launching point for thousands of smaller ships that berth inside: power-hog weapon platform destroyers more efficient to keep offline between battles, multi-person crew corvettes, and oversized bomber craft—but the vast majority, stretching literally kilometer after kilometer down the hanger, are rows upon rows of small, one-man fighters. Some are boxy, some sleek, some angular and pointed like stinging insects. Thousands upon thousands of them.

The tarmac is an explosion of motion and sound. People race in every direction. The actions of any one of them are sensible—they are going from ship to ship to check drive pattern integrity or inertial dampener compensation power, directing launching ships to avoid collisions, or talking to groups of pilots who then disburse to their crafts–but like a city street or a subway station–when viewed from a distance the tarmac feels like senseless anarchy, bodies hurling in every direction, each with utmost urgency.

Amidst this whirlwind of motion stands a solitary figure in a white flight suit. On his hip is a tiny white holster with a grey weapon so small it looks like it would barely fit in his hand. He almost defies description with the average-ness of his looks, he is neither tall nor short, fat nor skinny, not particularly handsome or homely, his nose is neither beak-like nor flat, his lips neither particularly thin nor thick, he has short brown hair and a tanned, light leather complexion that hints at an indistinct/distinct origin.

Perhaps his only feature of note is his eyes. Not the color, for the color is a heavy-flecked hazel that seems to reflect whatever color he is looking toward at the moment. His eyes are big and always on the move, gazing about. They are not large naturally but held wide. And it is not a nervous dart like some soldiers’ paranoid glances about, but a curious gaze of wonderment like a young child’s. As if he is seeing the world for the first time. He constantly looks round, taking it all in.

He holds in his hand a white helmet to his flight suit.

This is Sean Mason. And this is where our story really begins.


A reaction of negativity must best be discussed in terms of degrees. There's the negativity a child shows after their first encounter with lima beans, the face someone one makes when televised space shuttle launches is the only thing on television, there is the soul crushing horror that crosses a face when one sees an art installation made of paper mache, peat moss, and thin filaments of wire to create an exact replica of Pol Pot's scrotum, and then there is the look that Sean was giving his fighter. Disgust seeped from his features like bile oozing from a bloated liver. He couldn’t even look at it without his lip unconsciously curling into a sneer.

The offensive systems were sub standard. The defensive systems were sub-sub standard. Even the standard was sub standard, having been lowered after the designers lost track of which "sub" they were on when they talked about the sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub standard systems. As Sean waited for his security handprint to register, something bulky and metallic fell from the fuselage to the tarmac with a heavy, metallic crunch. Sean was fairly sure it was important.

Scrambling pilots buzzed about the hanger like a swarm of white insects, most of their uniforms undecorated and unadorned at this end of the hangar. The occasional mechanic in a red jumpsuit or tech in green threaded between the ships, checking out something or another, and every so often a pilot with adornments on their flight—rank insignia, commendations, or just mission stripes—would move through, looking like a neon sign in a shanty town.

“No!” someone yelled, their voice cracking. “Suicide is against my religion! I won’t go!”

Sean glanced across the tarmac. A pilot in all white struggled against two men in black (security force) cradling high powered rifles as they eased him into his cockpit with their feet. Sean couldn’t hear them, but their faces looked very similar to Sean’s Aunt Patty when she used to try to coax her cat out from under the bed and into the carrier to go to the vet. One security officer tenderly strapped the pilot in with a plastic smile while the other punched up the initial pre-flight sequence. Once the first officer had the man strapped in, he stroked his rifle like a pet. The bigger of the two security officers—one with a chest that Sean guessed might be an actual barrel—looked up at Sean, who stood motionless in front of his craft. Barrel’s eyes narrowed. Sean pointed at his hand and handprint, and Barrel turned back to what he was doing without a word or a nod.

Announcements came across the PA three and four times a minute. Most directed at some group or individual who was not Sean, but every few times it was a canned safety message. (“Don’t forget to check your instruments—space flight speeds make flying solely by visuals virtually impossible.” “Your artificial intelligence will reallocate your power systems by voice commands so you don’t need to use the fold out keyboard.” “Your seat cushion can be used as a floatation device. Of course, where you’re likely to crash, you will be floating just fine all on your own.”)

Behind the various announcements, a requiem played softly, echoing throughout the hangar. The dirge tunes of this particular requiem reminded Sean of teen-agers wailing about their prom dates cheating on them. Sean thought requiem before they had even launched was in poor taste. Rumor had it that Penelope, the woman in the morale office who was in charge of music, had herself a pretty raging drinking problem. The last time anyone had seen her without a lavender cosmopolitan sloshing about in her left hand, humans had held Earth.

As the security computer buzzed away in its process of approving Sean’s handprint, he lifted the helmet in his left hand and looked at it. Masking tape cut across the front of the helmet above the face plate with the word “Wanker” written on it in black marker. Commander Witherspoon had assigned him his call sign after Sean’s first simulation performance report. Witherspoon said that the name just came to him when he thought about what Sean “must have been doing in there to get a score like this one.” Sean picked at the tape while he waited for his cockpit to open, eventually got a purchase on it, and peeled it off. Only smooth, white dura-plast remained. He ran his finger over the smooth spot where the tape used to be, buffing out some of the tape’s residual stick and chewed on his lower lip.

He could see himself reflected in the visor. The lights in the hangar were the sort one might find at a grocery store or hospital—brilliant and white, diffused so they seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere, and so unmercifully bright that they cowed all vestige of shadows into the furthest recesses, nooks, and crannies. The curved angle of the visor twisted him like a funhouse mirror. His frame looked skeletal, and the face that usually got him pegged for ten years younger, stretched like a ghoulish corpse and gazed back at him with sunken ovals.

Sean suddenly wondered what the stress of flight missions would do for his complexion. It probably wouldn’t be good, whatever it was. Or worse he would get wrinkles, and his hair would go white like in horror stories. Or he would get those stress pimples that liked to sit right on the border of lip and had no other purpose but to hurt like hell or huge pustule blemishes on his forehead like a teen-ager. The ones with massive whiteheads staring out from bloated red bumps. In any case, Sarah wouldn’t find him attractive. He’d probably worsened his chances of ever being with her by signing up, and it was because of space acne.

Though, of Sean's worsened chances with Sarah, he really had no doubt. She wasn’t likely to be impressed by him when he was blown into crystallized shards across Earth’s orbit.

“You know that’s what happens if you’re blown out of your ship, right?” Witherspoon asked in that hard Scottish accent. “Your body freezes into crystals and you shatter like glass, and then the little, tiny bits of you just float around in orbit for the rest of time. That’s right lad…the rest of tiiiiiiiime.”

Sean didn’t like Witherspoon very much.

He didn’t imagine Sarah was the type to cream herself at the sight of whatever was recovered of his body sitting in a small jar on a countertop—even if the jar wore a little leather jacket and copped crystallized attitude. Women could be superficial that way.

Sean looked at his pathetic craft, and shook his head, thinking of the way the situation had spiraled downward into what were sure to be the last few minutes of his life. If he had left well enough alone, he could be doing the Winter’s taxes right about now. He would have made a nice fat fee of ration-chits and credits and easily been able to hire a Sarah look-alike who was stripping to put herself through law school to come to his quarters, coat herself in coco-butter and shove her breasts in his face.

Sean doubted very seriously that his next few hours would compare. There was likely to be a lot more flame, a lot more crystallizing, and a lot less breast.

His chances were grim, but the war needed pilots. In modern space combat, fighters were critical. They were the bread and butter–the meat and potatoes. Sean knew this from the introductory video he saw his first day of training: “Your Death Dealing Space Fighter and You.”

"We need you pilots!" the announcer said."Small snub fighters almost always determine the outcome of space warfare, and you, could be the grain of rice that tips the balance. Or at least the grain of rice that slams their fuel and explosives-loaded fighter into something mildly important, making your death non-trivial. Or at least less trivial than being hit in the face with a Falingash orbital bombardment weapon."

Sean was pretty sure the narrator of the film was the same guy who did all those gory videos for driver’s education where they try to scare teenagers into not being maniacs by showing them footage slightly more graphic than most of them spent money to see the Friday before—his voice had that same melodramatic edge when talking about anything. “That’s why fighters are vital,” he’d said. “That is why you, as a new pilot to the Earth Defense Force, are so important. Only an actual, living person can pilot a fighter through extensive AI and signal jamming counter measures.”

"Fighters are critical for their ability to get into a larger ship’s shield bubble." Sean was sort of starting to fall asleep at this point, so he didn’t catch a lot of the details about how–something about energy ratios and frequency calibration.

"Once inside the shields, smaller ships can attack discreet targets like sensor clusters, heat exhaust ports, weapon systems, shield generation nodes, power distribution modules, bathroom skylights, smiley face balls on the end of antennas and other critical resources. Fighter superiority often determines the course of a battle, and that is why fighters are the most important ship in any fleet. They clear the way for delicate and vulnerable ships with unbelievable firepower to do the real work of kicking ass."

"That's why you are so important, beginning pilot. Well....not you specifically because you have absolutely no skill whatsoever. But pilots. You are the grunts of space warfare. No army can have too many. Even though your individual value is minuscule, your aggregate worth is incalculable. Now let's take you though a few of your fighter's basic functions..."

Sean lost consciousness right around then. He was actually the last one in the room still awake.

As "space grunts," pilots experienced the same spectrum of equipment and training that grunts had throughout the history of war. There would always be the elite corps, equipped with the most sophisticated and technologically advanced weaponry and equipment available, whether it be steel blades, repeating rifles, or the latest in body armor. In the conflict over Earth, such “equipment” went by the name of the GX-1200 Panther, the best fighter in the human fleet. Its energy generators cranked out a power output cap higher than a small destroyer. The photon shields could run at the equivalent of 25.5 meters of tritanium at full power with dovetailing shield screens, and a redundant ensconcing system. Twenty-five high-output lasers sliced anything in the Panther’s path like a Christmas ham. It was the only fighter with two plasma ejection units and an ion blaster for cap-ship assaults. Six computer operated swivel turrets gave hell to any pursuing craft. Five missile pods for configurable missile payloads to match a mission. Six S.P.A.M.M. missiles auto deployed as a counter-measure to sentient plasma. This was a fighter.

And just as there would always be the elite and equipped, there would also always be the guys like Sean. The guys with the weapons dug out of the armory from the last war. The guys with the guns notorious for how they jammed. The guys riding on horseback into battle against a Panzer division and the mission objective of "maybe you can slow them down a little." The guys bringing farm implements to fight The Knight of the Severed Peasant and his personal cavalry guard.

Sean’s particular bit of inferior equipment went by the sobriquet of the GT 03 Mosquito. American economy class auto makers cranked out Mosquitoes by the thousands. A Mosquito was not much more than a pre-war F-28 Firefly jet fighter made space worthy. The armor consisted of four layers of dura-sheet tritanum “foil” that most pilots used to keep their food from getting freezer burn. The shield system was a joke–no really, it was actually a joke: the guys that designed shields had been kidding around when they made the prototype, had a good laugh, and went to lunch; when they came back, still snickering, they found the prototype in full production. The main armament, a dual laser cannon, had a power output so notorious for its weakness that most pilots called it “The Ultimate Obliterator” out of that same charming sense of reverse irony that gets bald people called “curly” and seven foot tall men refered to as “Midg.” The ship’s only rear-facing swivel deterrent was manual control and basically amounted to a handgun glued to the aft roof. The Mosquito didn’t have a configurable missile pod, and only came with six darts missiles. When Sean had asked a tech where the S.P.A.M.M.’s deployed from, she’d laughed herself into a trip to the infirmary. Something about popping an embolism…

A pilot from Rose squadron, sealed inside a Panther, took mechanics two hours with a precision arc laser, a diamond bit drill, retro grappling hook, and the uber-jaws of life to get out. The same thing happened to someone in a Mosquito the next day, and they retrieved him after eight seconds of banging on a “bendy part” with a crescent wrench.

A positive chirp from the handprint security pad interrupted Sean’s thoughts. The hood hissed open. “Well, how do there, sir,” a Bill Paxton voice said (from one of his slimier roles). Sean could hear the gritting behind the fake cheer. “What can I do ya’ for, partner? You like this one? She’s a beaut, isn’t she. And I think she likes you too. Oh yeah…you and this girl were made for each other. Listen, it’s the end of the month, so I can go out on a limb today to help us make quota—just today you understand. What would it take to get you leave the lot in this baby right here….today…right now? I got the paperwork in the office. Let’s make it happen.”

Sean pressed his eyes closed, and the image of him shattering into infinite orbit that blazed on the backside of his eyelids actually soothed him a little. He swallowed, ignored the voice, and started to climb the ladder to the cockpit. His vision fuzzed a bit at the edges.

On the first, and what would be the last, day of flight training, Witherspoon had given the pilots a short, but intensely personal questionnaire. It asked deeply probing questions about sexuality, past relationships, favorite sitcom, preference of cheese, favorite feces throwing primate, and more. Sean answered honestly for about the first third. Then, as he went on, he started to get self conscious. He imagined Sarah reading it. Gouda and Baboons? she would think. What a loser. So Sean started adjusting his answers to try and be cool. Before he could go back and change the old, un-cool answers, Witherspoon told them they were done, and uploaded the info from their pads.

Later, Sean found out that the forms were the latest in cutting edge psych profiling, used to determine each individual pilots’ ideal match for their onboard computers’ artificial personalities. Most of the men got sultry females incapable of saying anything that wasn’t in some way a double entendre. Most women ended up with a deep male voice that sounded like a cross between Sean Connery and Patrick Stewart: “Baby, grab my stick and engage!” A few got a matter of fact sounding electronic voice that stated facts with utmost brevity. A couple got a wacky-sounding cartoon voice.

Sean got a used car salesman.

All around him, Sean heard honeysuckle voices crying “Oh hi, big boy. I’m so happy to see you again. You ready for a ride?” As Sean strapped himself into his seat his computer also greeted him. “Well, sure we can test drive her, partner. Why don’t we give her a spin and you see how she responds to you. We have a number of payment plans that could have you flying out of this hanger in just a few minutes. Today. Let’s make it happen. Carpe diem, right? Seize the day. That’s all about today, right? It’s not Carpe tomorroum…”

As the ship systems powered up, a small screen next to the primary heads up display lit up with a woman’s face. “Okay Lilly pilots,” she said, “remember your preflight checks.” They’d all been told about Gloria, the flight coordinator, whose job it was to relay all the orders of command to the various squads, but this was the first time Sean had actually seen her. She looked matronly, with a rounded face (despite rather tight food rationing) that framed a warm smile. Her eyes crinkled at the corners the way his mother’s used to when she made her “concerned” face about some damned fool decision Sean made.

Sean looked for a few minutes, running his hands over the many buttons and switches, trying to remember where the right one was, then finally finding what he was looking for, he flipped on the display monitor. A skeletal picture of his ship lit up with an innards display of each of his systems. A pale green outlined everything.

“Computer,” Sean said, interrupting the computer’s ongoing pitch, “give me a full diagnostic.”

“You got it, bud,” the computer said. “Listen, there’s this little tiny…it’s not even a thing really. It’s just that the aft inertial dampener is three percent off on calibration. But unless you plan on flying backwards at full speed, you won’t even notice. Plus the port side running lights are flickering. Other than that, this girl is primo cherry. And hey, are you going to let a little problem like running lights get you down? This baby’s got it where it counts, and that’s all that should matter. Oh and just between you and me…” the computer lowered its voice, “…this is about pussy right? This ride is a babe magnet. Mag-net. One look at this, and the chicks will be crawling all over you for a ride, if you know what I mean. You know what I mean right? Right? Right? Right?”

As the computer pitched on, the cockpit canopy began to slide closed above Sean’s head. When the last safety restraint clicked into place, the hydraulics automatically began to slide it shut with a gentle hum. Sean watched it moving inexorably downward with a growing sense of panic—like a cell door on that first night in a prison movie. It clicked home and hermetically sealed with a hiss, trapping him inside.

“All—” Sean’s voice cracked, jumping three or four octaves. He swallowed and tried again. “All systems go.”

“You’re clear to launch, Lilly squad.” Gloria said, saluting them. “And good luck.” The monitor with her face snapped off again.

Sean felt a shift as the launch pad where his craft berthed shifted across the floor to taxi him into launch position. All around him Mosquitoes blasted forth hurling out the hangar door and into space—the atmoshields shimmering briefly as the mass pushed through. Far in the distance, beyond the launching ships and other craft, a battle already raged. Sean saw the Earth as a golf ball sized backdrop against streaks of brilliant color and flashes of white and red.

“You are ready to launch,” a soft female voice informed Sean. “Please launch your fighter. You are ready to launch. Please launch your fighter…”

Sean took a moment, trying to remember where the thruster controls were—like a new driver looking for the parking break. He reached over to his left and stopped, reached back to his right, grabbed what he was pretty sure was the thrust controls, and then started to second guess himself.

“Please launch your fighters,” the voice said. Sean tried to ignore that it had gained an insistent edge. “You are ready to launch. Please launch your fighter…”

“Sorry,” Sean said pushing the thrust forward as gently as he could. He felt his stomach lurch as the fighter shot forward and out into space, accelerating to nearly 300 kps. Lilly squadron was already in a very lose V formation and counting off when Sean approached. He couldn’t manage to keep formation so he kept drifting forward and back, port and starboard.

“Lilly eight, standing by.”

“Lilly nine, standing by.”

Sean waited until twenty, and gave his own call. In some other squadrons, qualities like leadership, resourcefulness, and coolness under pressure could affect rank, but in rookie squads, numbers were assigned according to skill in simulations and exercises. Sean was ranked 20th in his squadron. Since each squadron had twenty fighters, Sean had the honor of carrying a title marking him as the worst pilot among them. The combat monkeys had even beat out Sean for the spots of Lilly seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen, and they were part of an experiment to see how long the Falingash would take to shoot down poorly trained monkeys.

But the really degrading thing was that Lilly squad tested as the worst squad in the fleet, not just below the seasoned squadrons, but actually testing worse than other rookie pilot squadrons. So Sean was basically the worst pilot in the entire human fleet.

And as humans were the newest star-faring race, with the least trained fleet, Sean Mason was arguably the worst pilot in the entire universe.

It was probably going to be a bad day. But at least it wasn't likely to be very long.

[© 2014  All Rights Reserved]

Next (coming soon)

C.o.E.: Act Zero

Wikimedia Commons

Act Zero  

From his vantage point, Sean Mason could see only the azure sphere of Earth and the largest of the cruisers blowing each other to pieces over it.  Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of smaller ships formed a fragmenting line trying to splinter the Falingash assault, pulverizing each other, but Sean was too far away to see any but the largest cruisers without instruments.  

From here, they looked almost peaceful—swimming languidly against an ocean of pinpricked blackness, pushing towards the green and blue sphere.  Though the Falingash cruiser floated in Earth’s shadow, the Human Flagship, Prism, swam through the sunlight of the coming dawn.  Its metal hull glinted and sparkled, a lancing display of scintillating colors, as the sunlight reflected and refracted off of its angular shape in a shiltron of iridescent shafts.

Even Earth seemed small from this distance, about the size of a dinner plate, dark midnight blue in the umbra but with razor slashes and blobs of deep grey.  A halo of light hung around the rim, streaming around the right edge.  It reminded Sean of watching a solar eclipse when he was much younger; in that moment when he could put the box away and look straight up as all the light in the world formed a ring around the moon.  Back then, Sean had thought it was like God winking, letting everyone know to stop taking everything so seriously.  

But that was back then.

Sean rocked back and forth in his cockpit seat, something between a compulsive rock and a spasm, his hands curled against his mouth as if he were warming them with his breath.  He held his fingers interlaced but spread apart, his wide eyes darted and shifted between various panels in his cockpit, Earth, the Falingash cruiser, the separate tips of his fingers each quivering, but his gaze fell mostly on the Prism swimming through the river of sunlight.

Only the noise of his disjointed breathing filled the cockpit. The absence of the normal chatter of the comm. system took on an eerie life of its own.  In the vacuum of the normal cacophony, the quiet bore into the soul. Without a breeze, a distant hum, or the chatter of some bug song, the cockpit was more silent than anywhere on Earth. It was a primordial silence, so deep Sean imagined that it actually absorbed sound. Even the sound of his breathing disappeared into its maw.  It was a roaring silence: the sound of no sound. It wailed a shattering keen of nothing, disintegrating all sound it touched within its vacuum. 

His hand occasionally reached for his instrument panel and then recoiled—as if the panel were white hot. He would sometimes run a hand along the sleek curve of his maneuvering stick, but always he returned to breathing into them.

He had just doomed the human race.

[© 2014  All Rights Reserved]

Next (coming soon)

Champions of (E)earth.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Champions of dirt Earth earth

by Chris Brecheen

Disclaimer 1 (An experiment in blogging a book)

Disclaimer 2 (Feedback welcome!)

Reminder: All Fiction labeled "by Chris Brecheen" is the exclusive property of Chris Brecheen. It is intended solely for the non-commercial use of visitors to Writing About Writing and may not be reproduced or retransmitted in any form or by any means without the express written permission of Chris Brecheen -- with the following single exception:users are permitted to print out a singe copy of the material for their private use. They may, however, under no circumstances whatsoever reproduce or retransmit any such copies in any form or by any means without the express written permission of Chris Brecheen.

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Table of Contents

Act Zero 

Act I
Section 1

Act II

Act III

Act IV

Act V

A Demon's Rubicon (Part 5) By Chris Brecheen

A Demon's Rubicon
by Chris Brecheen 

Part 1 
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

The angriest I’ve ever seen an instructor was my chemistry teacher, Mr. Chaidez. I’ve seen kids threaten the teachers, melt down, end up being dragged off by security, but I never saw a teacher get angry the way he did. Mr. Chaidez was a lanky guy easing into the final lap of his run towards retirement. He had crinkles around his eyes that stretched and multiplied whenever he laughed or got angry and a shock of black hair that was just starting to go grey when I showed up to learn stoichiometry as a junior. He had a 50ml plastic baster thing with a sad face drawn on one side and a smiling face on the other. He would hold it up one way or the other depending on people’s answers. He was always saying things like, “It’s so easy, it’s cheesy” about thirty seven step problems that would constipate Einstein. He would tell me I was a lazy bum every time I didn’t turn in homework, and often recommended I memorize the menu at Burger King.

I saw the sad face side of his baster a lot.

Mr. Chaidez also let people turn in labs late for half credit right up until the last day of class—a policy that he would change the year after I took his class. He gave ten points each for the title page and the conclusion page, which could be written up with no other work. That meant that on the last day of class I was able to turn in just the first and last page of some ten or eleven labs that I’d never done.  My name, date, and a title on one sheet and a sentence saying the result of the experiment on another and I could squeeze out a hundred or so extra points.

“What the fuck is this?” he shouted at me before I had even gotten back to my desk.

The classroom froze. Teachers didn’t drop the F bomb in class.

“This is pathetic,” he screamed, standing with my labs clutched in his hand. “Brecheen, this is like going to take a shit and only farting. I can’t even believe you would waste my fucking time with this.”

I didn’t have anything to say. I just sat down and hoped it would end soon. The whole class shifted between sympathetic stares and nervous titters. Eyes were either glued on me, watching Mr. Chaidez in horror, or deliberately avoiding us both.

I lost track of the rant, but it went on for a couple of minutes. My integrity as a student and a human was questioned and there were lots of rhetorical demands that I explain myself. Finally I heard his voice pitch up and he stared at me expectantly.

“Well?” he asked.

I shrugged. “I dunno, I figured I’d get a few points. Try to pass. I don’t really want to be here next year.”

Chaidez didn’t soften, but he was clearly done talking. He stamped back to his desk with my labs and began to record them while he seethed. Occasionally his eyes flicked up to glare at me.

Then he started laughing. It was sudden, jerking, and sounded more like successive barking. He laughed and shook his head and his eyes slowly slid up to meet mine. “You just passed the class because of this…crap,” he said, holding up my labs. "I can't even believe how pathetic you are. Enjoy."

He just shook his head and laughed again. That was the last thing he ever said directly to me.

If there was a reason I walked out of high school without a sense that I had accomplished anything worth accomplishing, it was probably because of moments like those. Moments where I learned that it was absolutely possible to pass and fail at the same time.


I was never a saint. Moments where I stood up to bullies (when I did) were flecks of glitter in the grime-covered filth of my childhood. The rest was a cacophony of moral ambiguity and rationalized mischief bordering on the felonious–and sometimes crossing that border without pause.

Not only did I not always defend Jason, but sometimes I was the one putting my hand on my hip and mocking his voice: “I don’t appreciate that.” Sometimes I was the one snapping his headgear in a hotel on our band tour because he’d had the temerity to launch himself at me when I wouldn’t stop making fun of him to Chris G and Tim. Sometimes I led the charge on a round of fat jokes because at least they weren’t making fun of me. At least they weren’t making fun of me.

My loyalty had an elasticity that I hated, and each time alone with Jason, laughing until I couldn’t see straight about the vaginal hygiene of Cindy Portman or the absurdity of doing taekwondo forms to fight gang bangers. In those moments between the ticks when I realized Jason wasn’t just a friend of proximity, I would promise myself not to let him down again.

But I would. I always would.

Life doesn’t hand you too many wins. It’s greedy with them—stingy. It makes you work. They’re mixed in with character-building defeats, and frustrating stalemates. These stories were all moments where childhood flaked away like skin sloughing off after a sunburn, peeled by persistent greedy fingers as lips curl into a wince and eyes glitter with each discovery of a new patch. It hurts, but you just can’t stop.

Sometimes they were a crucible in which I became a better person than I was. Lined end to end like some Toastmaster speech, they paint a picture I can never deserve. In truth, they went off like flash grenades against the murky twilight of my childhood. In truth I failed almost every chance I got.

I stole—not just shoplifting, but anything that wasn’t nailed down. I stole from my parents, siphoning off a five here, a ten there, laundry quarters by the fistfuls, crawling into their room on hands and knees in the deep of night to rifle through their clothing while they slept—always meeting their accusations with wounded indignation. I stole from my friends as well. I ended one friendship by intercepting James’s mail and stealing his father’s adult magazines, and another by trying to break into J.P.’s house and take a BB gun. The only friends that stuck with me didn’t seem to care that their possessions would occasionally wind up in my room.

I snuck out at night and regularly committed what would probably be considered felony trespassing. Once I drove a caterpillar bulldozer that had had the keys left in it around a construction site until a weary graveyard security guard noticed me and a wild chase over the trenches and ridges of the construction site ensued. I broke into buildings, shattered fragile things I found there. Sometimes I broke into into empty homes, and once into a home that wasn’t empty at all.

I lit fires. Everywhere I could. I liked to watch things burn and change as the licks of orange and blue consumed them. I liked to destroy and feel the power of controlling the destruction. The brown chaparral of Calabasas would catch like tissue paper and become a high stakes game in seconds. I liked taking that risk. In that moment right before I started to panic, right when I wasn’t sure if I was going to get it under control this time, I felt risk and danger and control and out of control all at the same time.

The moments that calmed me were not the years of therapy I ended up in or some undefinable gradual transition. I remember them clearly, distinctly like pops of lucidity in the long twilight of a dream.

My junior crime spree ebbed when I came home in the arms of two police officers. I had shut off the power to a home and then gotten pinned behind a bush by a barking dog. I got out, but the owner had called the police who passed me half-way down the hill, where I moseyed along and tried to play it extra cool. I was good, but I wasn’t act-casual-at-three-in-the-morning-despite-being-thirteen good.


One, with a cliche mustache (which I’ve recently discovered is so cliche it’s called a copstache) mocked me for my tears and laughed heartily at the suggestion that there was no need to mention the whole affair to my parents. and the other told the first to give me a break. I was too young to care about much beyond how much trouble I was in, but I remember my mom’s face when she opened the door to their insistent knocks. She wasn’t angry. She wasn’t upset. (Those came later.) She was just so damned disappointed.

It’s not as if would never disappoint her again. I eloped. I came home Muslim and prayed for her atheist soul. I failed class after class in high school. I dropped out of college right before finals (upon receiving the news that she and my step-dad were divorcing, I simply shut down). That night in the arms of two police officers was far from the last horrible thing I did. It wasn’t even the last time I snuck out in the middle of the night. But it was the night I stopped feeling like I was out of control, even to myself. It was the last night I broke into buildings. It was the last night I randomly destroyed property. I stopped sneaking out two or three times a week. I stopped stealing just to see if I could. I never wanted to see my mother so chagrined again. I never again wanted to let her down so much.

I stopped lighting fires when I was fourteen. In Canyon Country, a blistering hot summer in August doesn’t just get up into triple digits, but can sometimes go over 110. My parent's first house had a little swamp cooler that tried its best, but there was no escaping the worst of the heat. I did anything I could to keep my mind off the fact that I was melting.

I had recently watched some movie where someone lit a trail of gasoline and the fire had lazily filled out the drawn symbol. So I decided to light up a gas line of my own because that looked pretty fucking awesome to see the blue slowly envelop the design.

My first experiment took place in the blazing hot garage of our little house. At somewhere upwards of 120 degrees, the smell of paint and turpentine cloyed at my nose. I decided my first experiment would be a line up the length of the garage that ended in a little splotch. I popped open the bright red gas can’s yellow top and drizzled out a line that ended in a splotch.

However, by the time I had finished up the splotchy part at the end, the line had already evaporated. Not wanting my awesome fire trail to be muted by failing to use enough—and noting that the show I’d watched had a gas line that was almost a standing puddle—I re-covered my lines, this time pouring liberally to make sure the line wouldn’t evaporate. Sloshing gas dribbled out over my hands and the gas can, but I wiped them down the legs of my thighs. I set the gas can down a few feet from the splotch and pulled out the strike anywhere match.

I knelt down a few centimeters from where the gas line started and dragged the match along the cement floor. It burst into a flame that just kept growing into a fireball.

Of course, now I know. How stupid the whole thing was. How dangerous it was. How the enclosed space and the other chemicals were working against me. How fumes are flammable. How wiping gasoline on my clothes before lighting a match was ridiculously foolhardy.

And how there’s nothing slow and meandering about gas igniting in real life.

I remember there was an orange flash across my retinas, a low WHUMP, and an instant smell of burning hair. Nothing “caught” fire. It was just that suddenly everything in the garage was burning. My hands, my jeans, one of the shelves with turpentine and paint on it, the cement floor in a pattern roughly like the one I’d drawn. But perhaps more alarming than all these things was that the fireball had jumped right back to the plastic gas can I’d left open, and it was burning around the edges of its bright yellow syphon.

To say that I panicked would be inaccurate. If anything my mind took hold of the moment with a strange sort of clarity. I was incredibly naive, foolishly worried more about getting into trouble than my own safety, and my decisions were abysmal, but I was calm, collected.

I walked quickly into the bathroom adjacent to the garage rubbing my hands along my thighs as I did so to put out the fires burning there. I could feel my skin reacting to the heat, starting to burn, but I gritted through the pain and kept moving quickly but deliberately.  I pulled a towel into the sink and turned the water on full blast. I rinsed my hands and patted off the last licking flames on my thighs. I filled my mouth before I left.  I walked back into the blaze of the garage to find that the cement had burned itself out and only the gas can and shelf were crackling away.

Between a mouth full of water and the wet towel, I got the fire out. First the gas can, and then the shelf. The calm clarity didn’t end with the fire being out, and I methodically set about removing evidence of what had happened. In the next few minutes I checked myself for anything worse than first degree burns, threw out the jeans I was wearing (wrapping them in a double layer of trash bags), and started to clean up the scorch mark. All with mechanical lack of emotion. It was only after the biggest of the blackened streaks had been removed that I realized how stupid I’d been not to just run and call for help.

I had walked back towards a burning gas can with nothing but a wet towel. I had stood over burning gasoline with a mouth full of water. There was no good reason I shouldn’t have come out of it horribly burned or worse. Instead a patch of slight numbness on my left leg is my only physical reminder.

Then I started to shake and the tears leapt into my eyes like white fire. I heard someone moaning and realized it was me.

That ended my fascination with fire. Whatever had happened in that garage, it was enough. I don’t know if I had won or lost—arguably neither; arguably both. It’s strange how many moments of such salient transition had that sort of ambiguity about them. I definitely found the limit of control and loss of control. Whatever itch I was trying to scratch, I had scratched it. My firebug days were over and except for a few camp fires and the like, I’ve never really lit one since.


My marriage really ended a month before I started slamming books and DVD’s into banker boxes with as much righteous indignation as I could muster. I decided I wasn’t going to live in a 900 square foot apartment “as just friends” in early December of 2005, but it was a cool night in November when it really ended. A few wayward crickets were singing, and an uncharacteristic calm gripped Oakland. We were coming home from a movie and having “big talks.” I was struggling to keep my marriage from falling apart, and my wife had developed an air of inevitable serenity about her.

“I will stay with you into the foreseeable future,” she said. “I’m just not foreseeing very far these days.”

Perhaps it would be more fair to say that my marriage ended in the months leading up to that night. The damage was done, the tumor inoperable; the injuries too extensive. The cool night in November was simply the opening act of our Kabuki theater where I struggled for a month like a fly in a web to keep everything from falling apart.

I had recently returned to college, and fall semester was a doozy. Sixteen units of algebra, spanish, English, and history as well as a tutoring job. Dishes piled up in the sink and the house fell into disarray while I struggled with papers, homework, reading and a part time work schedule. At first it was “I support you.” Then it was, “This won’t last forever.” By the end it was just a long sigh.

We were poly. It would be easy to blame being poly for why we broke up, but I have since been poly with a decade of success. It was much more complicated than that, yet it played a part. She was dating a guy named Mike. I was dating a woman named Lydia. Jealousy was like everything else: a force she denied exerted any gravitational pull on her at all—and resented the very sight of within me—until she broke down and admitted it was eating her alive, only to then deny that it was a real problem the next day when it threatened to validate some concern or another that she was moving awfully quickly with Mike.

On that November before a trip to Costco I asked her if anything was wrong and she got angry. “Do you think I wouldn’t tell you if something was wrong?” she said. “I need you to trust me. I can’t live under this suspicion.”

But something was wrong. As we left the check out line with a fresh supply of pot pies and microwavable taquitos, she paused. “So… I have a question,” she said.

By the time we pulled up to the curb outside our apartment, she was of the opinion that we could stay married for tax purposes if I wanted.

“So I was right?” I said.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“That guilt trip about not trusting you. About how you’re just fine and my suspicion is unfounded. Christ you even got mad at me. What was that about?”

“Can we just drop it?”

I look back now across the gulf of more years than I was married and I know there were tender moments. I know I played my part. I know there were two sides. There are always two sides. But all I can remember is being told over and over again that nothing was wrong but then being right. My concerns repeatedly dismissed, sometimes with righteous indignation until she would break an awkward silence by confirming my suspicions. The memory of that duplicity (intended or unconscious) dominates my perception of the end of my marriage. It grows like gnarled vines over good times, my culpability, and reality alike. It chokes out the light and nothing can survive underneath its absolute canopy but the fetid mushrooms of my resentments.

I remember the way her eyes would roll and she would mock me. She would tell me my insecurity was making me unattractive. Then a few minutes later, “So…I have a question.”

That night, I had my own question.

“Is there anything I could do that might possibly save our marriage?” I asked that cool November night. It was thick and quiet. The moment was pregnant. She looked at me over a box of Costco provisions and licked her lips. A gentle breeze played with my hair and rustled the trees above our heads.

“I dunno. You could drop out of school and break up with Lydia, but let me go on seeing Mike.”

Only the crickets' song cut the still air. The freeway, a few miles from our apartment, sounded like the ocean from a distance–a soft hum, unnoticeable until everything else was absolutely silent.

My marriage ended. I tried to hold on, but like father and step-father she didn’t find me worth sticking around for. I couldn’t fix it, no matter how hard I tried. For a month, she acted out the role of a person who cared that her marriage was imploding, but she wasn’t very convincing, and nothing I did really mattered. In the end I stop trying. I stopped trying to avoid fights and instead jumped towards them. I let my anger consume me, I let it make me cold, and it settled low in my stomach, in an icy ball. I wrote nasty entries on Live Journal and hoped her friends would tell her about them. In the end I slammed books and DVD’s into boxes. She got the car, and I took everything else. I took things I didn’t even need. I was petty. Being petty felt good.

I did not like me very much during that time.

I stood up for myself. I stopped trying to make a relationship work that only I cared about. I stopped campaigning to be worthy of the office of her husband. I went right on studying algebra and English and Spanish and history. I went right on dating Lydia. Like the end of some Lifetime movie of the week (just with genders reversed), I would not let myself be a doormat. Despite the fact that I left a few days from finals—in a chilling echo of my parents own divorce and my first failed attempt at college—I sucked it up, nailed my finals and papers, and got straight A’s. I didn’t let the worst event of my life rattle my resolve. I was more than just a person not worth sticking around for. And for once I didn’t just stand up when someone else was in trouble. When someone will stand up for others but not themselves, it is the latter that feels heroic.

I was very proud of me.

It is absolutely possible to pass and fail at the same time. And not just Mr. Chaidez’s chemistry class.

[© 2014  All Rights Reserved]

A Demon's Rubicon by Chris Brecheen (Part 4)

A few things have changed in 30 years.
For example, where the hell is this??

A Demon's Rubicon
by Chris Brecheen 

Part 1 
Part 2
Part 3

I had something of a station of honor growing up in Calabasas.

Okay, I might have to put “honor” in scare quotes. But then, to be perfectly honest, I would just erase them again.

I was something of a leader among my friends. We cruised around in pairs and groups and some days even gangs with our Town and Country T-shirts, capri shorts, and our palpable attitudes. We felt like kings when we managed to order fries from the local country club without being asked if we were members, played guns in the park despite the peevish moues of adults jogging past us, or shoplifted a Hustler from the newsstand while the security guard was harassing the patron who “just seemed a little 'urban' for Calabasas.” We rode bikes and skateboards to the edges of our empire and used pilfered laundry money to play video games at bowling alleys and mall arcades.

Being a leader of a group is not like the movies though. No one swears fealty, defers to your wisdom, or even hesitates to argue with you for three days running about whether or not Goonies could "actually happen." You don’t have adult values of loyalty or camaraderie. You don’t decide it’s time to go into the sewers and fight the killer clown and everyone clamps their grimy palms over your closed fist with solemn determination. You get into fist fights because “the person who came up with the ‘fart’ lyrics to ‘Shout’ should be the one who gets to sing it for the tape recorder", you tease one member one day and another the next, you argue about whether Stacey or Jennifer were getting better tits, you scream expletives across the lake at each other, prompting incensed homeowners to send the cops out to talk to you…again, and you keep wondering why all the adults around you call you “the mastermind” and your friends “flunkies.”

Being a leader is more like a slow, dawning awareness that unless you are there, Eric and Eugene won’t hang out with Jason and Travis or that Dusty can’t really stand Aaron or that Brandon is so mad that you’re up watching Fright Night with Adam because he was Adam’s best friend first. And then one day, ten or fifteen years later, you look back and realize that their eyes would flash worry and fear, but they would still sort of do anything you suggested—even running around inside the Lockheed grounds dodging the mechanical eyes of rotating security cameras, grabbing Bangles tapes out of an unlocked car, or “exploring” someone’s apartment when you found a kicked in door.

I was never a popular kid. Likable, perhaps. On the cusp of acceptance. Cute, though never cute enough it seemed to get the affections I sought. Athletic, though too small to be a serious contender for any sport. Smart, but never smart enough to know in which crowds to care about school and which to show off how little I cared. I tended to get into trouble, but not so much I was a “bad boy.”

I would love to tell you I was above all those facile popularity games. That I lived life by my own rules—a maverick even in my youth. I would be lying, though. I was keenly aware of my failings and how they were keeping me back from greatness. I was unpopular and never quite able to break into the cliques that really held sway over the social landscape of A. E. Wright Middle School in the mid 80’s.

My problem was that I collected strange friends the way some people collect salt and pepper shakers, pewter dragons, or matchbooks from every bar they’ve ever visited. My own collection was kids who didn't fit in, who were too awesome to have to eat lunch alone every day. We fell inexorably into each other’s orbits attracted by our mutual outcast status. My friends were the too poor, the too short, the too fat, the too hyper, the too remedial, the too delinquent, and the too Asian. We were the cliche motley crew of outcast misfits.

And where would the outcasts be without their bully?

Bullying…it didn’t mean quite the same thing when I was growing up as it does today. Today the word has been overused and the bullying itself under examined.

When the word is being diluted it refers to every form of fundamental human censure--we keep the other members of the tribe in line by teasing--sometimes harshy--and it's one of the reasons we don't pick our nose and eat the boogers at the bus stop or skip showering for weeks running and why over-politeness meant a generation of people used their cell phones in the theater until it finally became okay to shame them.

But at the same time every social ostracization technique has fallen under the umbrella of bullying, the actual bullying has gotten much, much worse. It is no longer always one troubled youth picking on someone smaller, but is often a horrible group thing that looks socially like hyenas picking off the weak. It happens online where it can be pervasive and constant and basically inescapable even in class or at home and kids have trouble getting parents to fully understand or help. Parents don’t like the word (partially because of it's linguistic dilution) and don’t hold their bullies as accountable as they should, nor do victims want to be seen as weak.

In my day a bully was almost purely a single, physical presence. They were big, but you could usually avoid them when you heard the French horn music. And when you were at school or home, you were safe. And dealing with them was, to some degree in the 80’s, still considered to be a rite of passage. It’s probably fair to say that today’s trouble getting bullying acknowledged as a major social issue by adults may largely be due to what bullying meant thirty years ago.

I don’t want to give you the impression that I enjoyed myself, though. It was balls.

Once every month or so he found one of us and gave us a black eye or nose bleed for our trouble. I remember his fists felt like a brick wall slamming into my face. Once he punched me in the stomach and I fell back and over into the street, gasping for several seconds to try to pull in air that simply wouldn’t come.  He stabbed a switchblade into our soccer ball--a Christmas present I'd been given after three years of playing league.  He chased us down whenever he found us.  One Halloween he waylaid me for my candy, chasing me down on my way to Brandon’s house, but I only had three doors worth of loot. “You’re lucky!” he said, jamming a tiny little Twix bar into his mouth. He shoved me to the ground and shoved me back down each time I tried to get up. It was probably only three or four times, but it felt like I was down there looking up at him eating my candy for hours.

I wasn't able to stop him. I shot up during puberty to a towering 168cm (5’6”), but before the real throes of puberty, I was really short. He was three years older than me and starting to fill out. What could a barely pubescent short kid 6th grader do against a bully from High School who carried a switch blade?

One day he had one of those sticky hand things that became popular in the mid eighties. Back then trends were born and died by what could be pulled out of a capsule vending machine for a quarter. It was made of stretchy goop in the shape of a hand, but was really sticky so it could be used to stick stuff from far away like a frog’s tongue.

As bad as sticky hands were,
Goop was worse.

His was blue. A deep cerulean with iridescent sparkles.

No sooner had we seen him that day than he snapped his blue sticky hand around my neck, cackling.  I grabbed it and we struggled, but he managed to get it back, rewarding me for my impertinent resistance with a fat lugi of citrus scented spit across my cheek.  I wiped the snot from my face while he turned his blue hand sticky thing upon my friend James.

James was fat—the fattest kid in our school—and stuttered profusely.  He would stammer through the simplest things—a T or a C paralyzing him in front of the whole class while he tried to answer a simple vocabulary question. He lived with a brother and his grandmother—and every time his mother or father would come and visit, it was painfully obvious that neither of them had their shit together enough to be his parent.

Everyone treated James like he was dying of cancer when he tried to talk in class, looking around with gobs of mustered faux sympathy, as he gripped the side of the desk and tried to spit out a few words. But their icy concern melted like summer thaw when adults weren’t around. The nice one’s mocked him behind his back. (“Sure, I’ll have another ch-ch-ch-ch-cheeseburger.”)

Those were the nice ones.

We were pretty much doomed to be fast friends. He fit right into our dysfunctional little cadre. I got to see everything the rest of the world was too fucking superficial to appreciate. James was one of the brightest people I've ever known, had read every book I ever did and more, loved astronomy, and when we played, he could go whole afternoons without a stutter. He would stand up to me when he had a moral problem with what I was doing—one of the only in our group that would—even if that only meant threatening to tell his grandma.

James just stood there while the bully snapped out his little blue sticky hand and smacked him with it repeatedly, laughing the whole time.

“Stop,” he cried. “Stop!” His voice became increasingly shrill. “St- St- St-“

Flat soccer balls...Empty bags of candy...Sitting gasping for breath in the street in front of the gas station...Fists like bricks flying into my face...His smug face mocking my pain…

But what did it was James. Holding his hand up to try and stop getting snapped with that blue sticky hand and unable to even get out the word stop as his assailant had switched to an X pattern for maximum effect. “St- St- Stop!” James shrieked.

And that did it. It was like snapping awake from a dream.

“FUCK YOU!” I screamed leaping bodily as hard as I could. (I later heard was audible across the complex by another set of friends.) He fell backwards onto asphalt with a crunchy skid.  I was fortunate enough to fall on top him.  My hands shot out to everything I could find.  I don’t even think I had time to ball them into ineffectual fists. I just slung them out randomly contacting anywhere I could get to.

I knew he was going for the knife when he reached into his pocket. I remembered how easily slid it into my soccer ball and the puff the ball had made as the life drained out of it.

Would I die here in the condo’s carport, my blood running down the white rivulet strip in the middle to the storm drain?  Would I come home stabbed and have to explain to my pacifist parents that I’d nearly been killed in a fight from which I could—and probably should—have “walked away”?

The thing that was pounding in my head though, was that I wasn’t going to let him win. Not this time. It was going to end one way or another. If he killed me, he killed me, but I was NOT going to let him keep hurting my friends. My hands found his throat and curled around it.

The next few seconds dragged out forever.

Thirty years later, I can still remember every second in petrified eternities. It has inexorable feel. He moved in slow motion. I moved in slow motion. I could smell the tar and dirt of the asphalt beneath us and feel the crisp snap of November air on my face. I even remember hearing birds chortling, oblivious to the struggle below them. He had a thin mustache of fine hair coming in above a lip curled to reveal one brown incisor among a row full of yellowed teeth. His eyes were wide with surprise and hate. He popped the handle, and the metal exploded in a dazzling glitter as the bright morning sun bounced off the ejecting blade.

This was it. I was going to die.

My only thought was that if I gave up, I would be running from him forever. I wasn't going to let that happen. I couldn't let that happen. My hands tightened, and I squeezed his neck tighter than I’d ever squeezed anything.  I felt my face contorting into a grisly grimace. And I saw his eyes swim.

I don’t know what I really saw.  Maybe he was blacking out a little, though I can’t imagine my weak hands doing that much damage so quickly.  Maybe he realized that he was probably going to have to actually use that knife instead of cowing me just with the threat of it. Whatever it was, his eyes kind of rolled back a little. And when they refocused on me, he threw the knife to the side and croaked. “Okay…you win.”

And just like that, it was over.

I stood up and brushed the asphalt bits off my jeans. James and I walked to the bus stop like nothing had happened and were joking about throwing Mogwai across time zones as “Gremlin Grenades” by the time we reached school. I never worried that the bully would come stab me.  Maybe I should have, but I didn’t.

Shortly after the carport, Eugene said he’d gotten tripped and held down. The next time I saw the bully, I started to follow him. I don’t know what I would have done, but it didn’t matter. He turned a corner and was gone when I caught up. We never had to deal with him again. Some new group of kids likely were much easier prey.

It wouldn't be the last time I stood up for my friends.

In high school, my best friend was named Jason. Jason was a little overweight. Jason was a little awkward. But Jason’s biggest crime in the merciless halls of Canyon High was that he was a little effeminate. He played the flute in band, liked to put his hand on his hip, and had a C-3PO prissiness thing going on, and had an unfortunate habit of telling people he “didn’t appreciate the fact that” they were doing whatever it was he was objecting to. While I was pretty good at slipping under the radar of the worst teasing, Jason never seemed to get the knack of it. 

“Hey fag,” they’d say. “Hope you blow cock better than you blow that flute.” “Hey Jason, when’s the operation to get your vagina?” “I’d let you suck my dick, homo, but I’m too afraid you’d eat it.” "'I don't appreciate the fact that' you're such a fairy."

I couldn’t fight Jason’s battles for him. I was sixteen. I had my own problems, and if you want to get down to the human fallibility of it all, I was more interested in getting a blow job from the girl in English and passing Algebra. A few “knock it off”s here and there were as much as I stuck my neck out while it was happening.

I could have been a better friend. I should have been. Jason was one of the whip smartest people I'd ever met, and we shared an almost perfect overlap of geeky interests. We blew through years worth of lazy afternoons playing video games and talking about movies. We shared books with steamy parts our parents didn't know we were reading after bedtime.

But more than once I cornered one of the worst offenders alone at lunch or at a fast food restaurant after school.

“Tone it down on Jason,” I’d say.

They’d give me a look. It was the teen-rebelion look. The no-one-tells-me-what-to-do look. Eyebrows high, lips flat, and head tilted back. I was still barely pushing five feet, and despite being known as the guy who smacked another kid with a metal lunchbox in junior high, I hardly had a reputation as a badass. 

But they would tone it down.

All but Brian. 

Brian was on the baseball team, if my memory serves, and he towered over me easily by over half a meter. He was thick and muscular and wore a scowl and a Dodgers cap wherever he went. I think they were psychically linked because his scowl deepened whenever a teacher told him to take off his cap. It was our Sophomore year, and Brian was taking a particular glee in making fun of Jason.

I caught him at his locker one day as lunch was ending.

“Brian, lay off Jason.” I said. 

“Whatever,” Brian said.

“I’m serious,” I said. "Ease off."

He slammed his locker. He took a step towards me towering over me and looking down into my eyes. The height difference alone was comical, but he probably also outweighed me by a fifty kilos. His hands like two ham hocks, each with five thick penis fingers jutting out. “Or you’ll what?”

However, everything Brian was trying to exploit within me had had the life choked out of it on the asphalt of the Oak Park Condominiums in Calabasas. For better or worse, the reason I would fight off muggers as an adult—even three and four at a time—chase a home invader down the street, and risk having my lights punched out to mess with a creep who wasn’t leaving a woman alone had everything to do with that moment--that one moment--when I chose to squeeze tighter instead of give into fear. He wasn't going to intimidate me.

“I’ll pick a fight with you,” I said. I was looking almost straight up to meet his eyes, and practically smiling. My heart was banging away in my chest and my throat and my temples, but I didn't back down.

Brian’s penis fingers curled into a wrecking ball of a fist.  (Here it comes!) “I’ll kick your fucking ass, Brecheen,” he said.



“Yeah,” I said. “I imagine you will. And then you’ll get suspended for fighting."

Brian snorted. He was unimpressed.

"And you’ll probably miss your next game.”

 

That got his attention.



"And when you get back, we’re going to have this conversation again. And again. And we’ll keep having it until you end up at Bowman.” [Bowman was the district’s continuance school for delinquent students.] "I don't think they have a baseball team at Bowman."

He realized what I was threatening to do. There was a long, long pause. His hand unclenched.

“I’m not going to be his fucking friend,” Brian said.

"He would never be yours anyway." I said. "Just back off a little."

There’s a follow up to this. One of those things that sort of never happens until the day it does. I ended up with Brian in an English class my senior year and the teacher had us all write something complimentary about each other anonymously. The activity hadn’t been structured very well and most of the kids were using the opportunity to deliver back handed compliments. “You aren’t as stupid as you look.” “You smell better than you did at Sierra Vista.”

Mine were the usual blend of smoopy stuff you get from that sort of thing, but I remember finding one I always thought (hoped?) was Brian: 

“I hope some day I have a friend as good as you."

[© 2014 All Rights Reserved]

Part 5

A Demon's Rubicon By Chris Brecheen(Part 3)

One seriously fucking kick-ass game.

A Demon's Rubicon (Part 3)
By Chris Brecheen

Return to Part 1
Return to Part 2

Mother would not forever stay my immaculate protector. Life is like that. The inevitable moment where every child realizes their parents are all too human was still out there and I was not to escape our rendezvous.

Our culture has a phrase that I particularly can't abide by: "Lost innocence."

Innocence is not lost. You don't play soldiers with your friends on the last day of school (summer stretched out ahead of you like a boundless promise) set up intricate camouflaged forts, finally make a daring raid (after boredom sets in from building defenses), do a spectacular and dramatic death roll when you are gunned down by Matt Defronzo's unseen machine gun nest, and later discover that, like your keys, your innocence must have slipped out of your pocket somewhere along the banks of the creek.

Innocence is taken.

Perhaps by slender, feminine hands unaware of the effect they're having. Perhaps by gentle, liver-spotted hands that think that they are doing you a favor. Perhaps by the bone fingers of figure in a dark robe holding a scythe. And perhaps even by thick, calloused hands better suited to ripping potatoes from the ground. But regardless, innocence is yanked from tiny hands that try futilely to hold on. 

"Mom," I asked at eight. "Is it really you? Do you drop the presents after I go to bed, and then eat the cookies yourself?"

Mom nodded soberly, her lips pressed together so tightly they were white.

Wait. What?  I was right? I was just throwing spaghetti at the wall. Two hours before I had been talking about how much better trains would be if they could fly and Tyrannosaurus Rexes with wings. How could she do that to me? I was only eight. She was supposed to say, "Why that's the silliest thing I've ever heard!" until I was......at least ten. Worst of all, this revelation led to a total cascade failure of pleasant fictions. Within minutes the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy joined Santa behind the chemical shed of my imagination, soberly facing down the steely-eyed firing squad of harsh truth as they passed one of The Easter Bunny's cigarettes between them for one last long drag each.

"Well boys," The Tooth Fairy said, "It's been an honor."

They declined the blindfolds. They had more dignity than that.

There was a lot that wasn't awesome about my life when I was eight. My parents were in graduate school and couldn't afford much more than Iowa City's version of a ghetto. Our slumlord's unwillingness to fix the air conditioner was giving me heat rash. My second grade teacher Mrs. Blanchard thought I was a ringleader of troublemakers and that the solution was to keep me in a cardboard box called "The Timeout Box" permanently. Everyone who was not my mother wanted to get me on this new drug called Ritalin. And my step-dad kept taking my mom into her room and locking the door--it was like they didn't want me to know what was going on in there or something. Sometimes she would even cry out, but I couldn't get in there to stop him from hurting her.

These things pale in comparison to the day that Santa died. Innocence wasn't lost that day. It was torn from my hands as I screamed "Noooooooo!"like a character in a bad movie.

Sometimes innocence isn't taken by one set of hands but by uncountable invisible multitudes.  Each takes only the tiniest bit--barely enough to notice--but the end result is the same. I never saw whose hands went to work between the Halloween of my tenth and eleventh birthday. It was just as if that innocence had evaporated. But in the span of one year, it was gone.

When I was ten I marched my cat costume through the Halloween parade.  I held my head high, and may have even tilted my chin upward the tiniest bit, so I could gaze ever-so-slightly down my nose at all the non-cats out there. I stood triumphantly in the contest ring, not understanding that I would never win.  I didn’t know that it was old and un-fancy costume--twenty dollars of material to make some ears and a tail. I didn't know it wasn't much more than last year's black clothes.  I didn't know it didn’t fit quite right.

That night I ran with my friend Josh through the streets of his neighborhood, gathering a dragon's hoard of candy, which would be systematically consumed in fewer than half a dozen sittings (to the horror of my parents).  We laughed, and sometimes even literally whooped, as we dashed from one house to the next, each interlude of street a gleeful new race to the next oasis of spoils. I had no idea I was wearing the ratty costume of "a poor kid."

The next year I knew.

We moved to Calabasas, an opulent neighborhood east of the San Fernando Valley.  Of course Calabasasans (that's totally what they're called) always say that it’s the people in Thousand Oaks that are really stuck up, and Thousand Oakers like to point at Agoura Hills. I believe in Agoura Hills they feel they are down to earth and it is the people in Oak Park who are really snobs.

There's probably some metaphor about humanity to be found there....or something.

Pretty much once you moved east of Woodland Hills, it started to smell like money.  My parents had come for the school system—having moved as fast as they could out of our Canoga Park apartment after my friend Jonathan gleefully recounted the tale of how we watched a man get beat up in the park. My mother could ignore the tiny little baggies I ran past in the alley behind our apartments, the syringes crunching under my sneakers while I played Commando Warriors, or the men who stood very close together and exchanged small brown bags for finger-thick rolls of cash in the park across the street where I played every day, but this was just too much.

"And there was this one hit where the blood went flying through the air and the guy totally screamed!" Jonathan recounted, eyes wide and gleaming.

"Mom," I asked, not at all sharing Jonathan's enthusiasm. "Do you think he died?" I couldn't eat that night, and I kept asking about the fate of the stranger who I'd watched get pummeled.

I wouldn't understand until much later how intimately connected this recount was with the fact that I spent the next weekend bored out of my mind while my parents looked at apartments in a new neighborhood. And so the Canoga Park chapter of my life closed, and we moved to Calabasas, but we were not made of Calabasas money. We lived in a run of condominiums, that (literally) looked up the hill upon multi-million dollar homes.  We were…poor.

We weren't really poor, you understand. Actually, we were doing quite well. We had a personal computer back in the eighties, I had private trumpet lessons, and I never had to skip out on a field trip--no matter how spendy they became. I had grandparents that took me shopping for school clothes every year, and each Christmas I made out like a bandit. 

What was actually happening is that I was learning one of the most fundamental lessons of socioeconomics right there in middle school. That it doesn't matter how much you make absolutely, but only relatively.  If we were making that our Calabasas money in a trailer park in Kansas, we would have been the trailer with the swanky bling light strings, the three cars parked in the carport, the herb garden on the porch, and the vertical blinds.

However, one’s sense of poverty or wealth is entirely relative.  In Calabasas, I was the one living on the other side of the tracks--or in our case a man-made, landscape-engineered brook that wound through the community.  Though it was the nicest place we'd ever lived in, we had an entire bedroom we didn't need, and in almost any other place on Earth these condos would be outrageously swank, in Calabasas, we were the have-nots.

The other kids had far more money to spend on costumes or stay at home mothers eager to flex their crafting muscles and sew up intricate outfits for their kids.  Their unique and detailed costumes could never be matched for 29.95 plus tax. I could tell my costume was a rag.  I could see the difference. I decided I didn’t want to march in the parade. I watched the contest from a distance and witnessed a perfectly detailed home-made bottle of aspirin--her legs jutting from the bottom, arms from the side, and her head poking out of the neck complete with a perfectly rendered child proof cap affixed to her head with a puffy thing that looked exactly like the little ball of cotton.

That night, as I slogged through the neighborhood with my friend Brandon—a friend so tall and lanky that we looked like a comedy team when he stood next to me; 4'10 and already stocky—I wondered what the affluent people handing us full-sized candy bars off of tastefully arranged platters were thinking about my cheap costume. I begged Brandon to trick or treat in my condominium complex. I told him that it was because the doors were closer together and we could get ten times as much candy that way, but really I just wanted to get out from under the gaze of the people in their dazzling costumes who came to the carved oaken doors that we pounded on, and looked at me like I was some strange bug that was not indigenous to the region.

To this day I hate Halloween. I hate looking for a costume. I hate that sense that I don't belong. I hate the feeling that my costume is being judged.

My family moved away from Calabasas during my last year of middle school. I worked hard to hate them for uprooting me from an established clique at a time of social awkwardness, mostly because I didn't have a lot of other really good reasons to hate them, but I was at the age where I had to come up with something.

When it comes to unforgivable childhood trauma, you have to work with what you've got.

Honestly though, I think they saved me a lot of grief. The real stratification was about to start. Calabasas is the kind of community that to this day could be the setting of The Outsiders (and I wasn't a particularly good greaser). Many hard lessons were coming down that pipe, and my awareness of my crummy costume was only the first of them.  I was only just starting to notice how many mom smiles froze solid or went saccharine when I mentioned that I lived "in the condos down on Park Grenada"--usually right before that friend and I stopped hanging out. I remember girls, so excited I had asked them out that their voices trembled, telling me they would call me right back with an answer. Hours later the phone would finally ring and a completely austere voice would inform me of a newfound sense that things would never work. On the hills of Calabasas was the kind of wealth most only see in movies.  The “stay-away-from-my-daughter” kind of wealth, or the“they-aren’t-like-us” kind of wealth.

My parents whisked me away before the worst of it, but I had a bad taste before I left. A taste I would never forget.

I remember the exact moment my mother became a human being. Before that she was simply Mom--a celestial being free of humanity who existed only for me. When she slapped me at the top of the stairs, a little too close to the edge, and my young body went tumbling down with staccato thuds, it was not because of any mistake she had made. Moms couldn’t make mistakes. 

But my awareness of my mother’s fallibility crashed upon me suddenly.  I’ve read about so many who look back and realize they weren’t sure when they stopped seeing their parents this way--they weren’t sure when or how it had happened.  But I can remember the exact moment.

The game was called Dark Castle, and it was the cutting edge of 1986 Macintosh technology.  

In a world of Nintendo’s barely-better-than-Atari amorphous blobs that shot other amorphous blobs with little squares or triangles, Dark Castle was as good as it got.  Duncan looked like a person. You could tell the difference between the rats and the bats. And the Dark Knight really did look bored as he flicked empty chalices at you (until you got to his level, he pulled out his sword, and the shit got real). There were no blips and blops as sound effects.  When Duncan threw rocks at the rats, they squeaked, and he distinctly said “Yeah!” when he picked up an elixir, or a bag of rocks. Far from the electronic pings of midi files, the squish noise when the got hit with a rock sounded like a stick of butter falling onto linoleum.

I wanted Dark Castle.  I wanted it bad.  

I struck a deal with my mom. Well, technically, my mom struck a deal with me.  “Get your math grade to a B," she said, "and I’ll buy you that game."

“Promise?” I asked.

"I promise," she said.

Math and I have always had a rocky relationship (even long before, and long after Mrs. Franklin became giddy at my failure).  When we finally parted ways at thirty-five, after an oral report on fractals for my Math For Liberal Arts class, we agreed that we were better as friends.  Distant friends. No need to call...really.

Math sent me a friend request on Facebook, but I ignored it.

My mom was not above using rank bribery on a thirteen year old to motivate him. While I enjoyed the stacks of books we were given to read in my English class and could be pressed to do my Humanities homework with only typical teen-age resistance (and I even found science interesting enough to stay pretty engaged), math homework was a particular kind of torture. Each night was an excruciating battle royale between the will of a teen-ager with crippling A.D.D. and a passionately anti-Ritalin mother.

Despite her best efforts, thirteen year olds are increasingly difficult for working parents to truly dominate. I couldn't really be grounded if they weren't home to know that I was watching TV or at Eugene and Eric's house. So nothing really managed to get through to me about the importance of math. I failed out of the high math class within one semester, and I was well on my way to failing out of the regular math too.  If I didn’t pull out of my tailspin I would be, in my mother’s words “sitting in high school remedial math with the guys who take shop.”

Shop sounded kind of cool, actually—power tools made fun noises, and they could probably teach me how to wear leather and lurk behind the D building in a way that girls would be unable to resist. But no power tool could make a realistic sounding “yeah” when it picked up an elixir the way Duncan could. I came home each night thinking of Dark Castle as I did my math homework. I even showed my work, despite the fact that I could just see what the answer was, and this was obviously oppression of the highest order. For ten weeks, I honestly tried.

It was, perhaps, my worst report card ever.  Well at least until my freshman year of high school when I actually started failing classes. But until that moment, I had never gotten a D.

Social studies, science, and history had all fallen due to my allergy to homework. I had been able to cruise through elementary school without really doing homework, and in middle school my bad habit chickens were coming home to do their cliche roosting. Social studies=C. Science=D.  I was even getting a C in English--a subject I never got less than an A in before or since. But shining like a beacon in the middle of the report card was my B- in math. 

I had done it. I had earned my game.  

“I’m not buying you that game,” my mother said when I showed her my report card, handing it to her at the dining room table, unsure whether I should be ashamed or triumphant.  “Look at this--it's terrible!”

“You said you’d buy it if I got my math grade up.” I said. “I got it up.”

“The rest went down.”

"P.E. didn't!" I argued.  Thirteen year olds have a poor grasp of when it's a good idea to be semantic.

“You have to keep things at a B level, Chris.  One C is okay, but D’s are unacceptable and this is barely a C average.”

“A C average was never part of the deal!” I said.

“I shouldn't have had to say it was,” she said. "It was assumed."

“You can’t do that,” I said, lip quivering.  “You promised!”

And then she said it.  The words that shattered my world: “I don’t care what I promised.”

Betrayed!

We see our parents as perfect, flawless, incapable of error.  They stroll about--when they’re not on Earth attending to us--with the gods. Mother was not one of the roles this woman fulfilled as part of a diverse adult life--it was all she was. Even as testosterone hits my bloodstreams and I begin to rebel, I had the strangest sense that I was committing sacrilege--that I was some sort of fallen angels at war with perfection; not because she was flawed, but because I was.  That a mother could be mercurial, fallible, maybe even capricious (like humans tend to be) is something that hadn’t really dawned on me.  But with those words, light broke over the eastern sky.  

My mother had broken her word.  

I pouted.  Glory but I pouted.  I pouted the week away and went into the weekend. It was a thing of legend.  A.D.D. has always made it hard for me to hold grudges.  I get distracted about them just like I do about everything else.  But not that week.  That weekend I was Hercules of attitude.  That weekend I remembered to brood like I never had before. I could not be broken by my favorite meals or my favorite shows or an offer to go to see a movie.  I scowled.  I glared.  I tromped.  And by Sunday night, my mother had had enough of me.

“Fine, I’ll get you your damned game,” she said.  “Is that what you want?”

“Yes,” I said, ignoring the protocols of a guilt trip.

It was her turn to smolder and brood as we drove down the hill to the computer store in the village, but I didn’t care.  She went in after checking the name of the game with me, and I waited in the car, humming.  She threw the game at me when she came back to the car.  “I hope you’re happy.”

I was.

I looked at the game in its shiny box.  A laminated cover with an outside shot of the Dark Castle on it. My lips lifted at the edge.  Duncan could learn to throw fireballs instead of rocks if he could get to Merlin.  My finger traced the edges of the cardboard and I read the back of the box over and over again.

“You really just care about that game, don’t you?” She spat. "Not anything else. Not your grades. Not school. Not your future. Just that stupid game."

“I earned it.” I said.

“No you really didn’t.” she said.  

"Yes I really did," I said, frustration building. 

“Your grades were terrible," she said. "You don't deserve it."

I said something after that that was uncharacteristic for a 13 year old.  It was wise in its own way, and years later mother and I both agreed that it communicated more than I’d ever intended at the time.  “I do deserve it.  Ground me off of the computer for my grades,” I yelled across the car at her. “But you keep your promise! You promised, Mom!”

A tear had slipped out from my the corner of my left eye. I had never been so righteously angry in my life. I'm not even sure I knew what that meant.  "You promised," I repeated.

My mom looked like she’d been struck.  Twenty years later I wonder if she didn’t realize that the illusion had been shattered.  Or maybe for the first time she saw me as a person as well.  Not as a child, a responsibility, a burden--no matter how welcome--but as a small human being with feelings that could be hurt and trust that could be betrayed.

“Okay,” she said. “You’re grounded.”

I nodded, sniffing up the snot from my nose.  Fair was fair.  “Can I play it on Saturdays?” I asked.  (This was often a grounding exception in our household.)

“Saturdays,” she said.   “But that’s it until you have a C average.”

I turned back to the sleek, laminated box and smiled.  Saturday was six days away, but I could wait.  I was sure I’d sneak some time in before then, anyway. Kent didn't get home until six on Tuesday, and mom never got home before seven or eight.  I ran my fingers over the glossy cover.  It was about as close a thing to a victory as a 13 year-old has. 

And yet I paid a heavy price. I would never see my mom in that celestial light again. After that she was a wonderful woman: a fighter, an activist, a wife, a mother, a full time bank vice-president who worked a second shift, a better parent than I gave her credit for at the time. But after that day...always human.

[© 2013  All Rights Reserved]

Continue to Part 4