The Third Jump of Frankie Buffalo, by Thomas Pluck

Frank drove the half-ton as fast as he dared up the rutted, snowy road. His breath plumed like a big shot’s cigar in the frozen air. So cold that they had shoved their booted feet into the campfires to keep toes from freezing solid and snapping off. Only thing colder than winter in Chosin was the fear deep in his gut. The two supply trucks sent before him hadn’t made it to the front. Artillery or ambush, no one knew. Frank held it in second gear and swerved around a bend. A moving target’s a hard target. A hard turn came up quick, one foot on the brake and one on the gas…

A horn blast broke Frank out of the reverie.

This wasn’t Korea. He was in a different truck, on a different run.

Nerves.

He didn’t wake up shivering anymore, but in a truck job, Chosin always came back to him.

He was stuck behind a stubby oil truck and a black new BMW at a railroad crossing. The traffic for the car wash and the flashing light ahead always made this a bottleneck, but it was the best way to get where he had to be. The tanker had stopped at the tracks, and the morning commuters were getting antsy.

Frank checked his Timex. Fifteen minutes, plenty of time to get the Mack cement mixer to Rifle Camp Road and hit the power pole. More than enough time to cut the fuel line and spill some diesel, shut down the intersection and keep Paterson’s finest occupied, waiting for the HazMat crew.

Honk.

It was the guy in the black BMW, one car ahead.

“He’s gotta stop,” Frank said to himself. “Law requires it.”

It was his job to know. The CDL in his wallet wasn’t in his name, and his no-work job at the port rarely got him behind the wheel anymore, but he knew all the rules and could drive anything over 10,000 GVW like nobody’s business. It was a safe job. Just another driver heading to the quarry who made the turn too tight. If he got cited it wasn’t even in his name, but the memories of the Frozen Chosin tickled in his gut.

Young Frank had never made it to the front. He could’ve made that turn, nothing for a fearless driver who’d cut his teeth bootlegging for Longy Zwillman, the Jewish giant who ran Newark. The cold inside moved his hands for him. The belly-cold had jerked the steering wheel, made him dive out the door with his rifle. All Frank could do was watch the half-ton spill its load of ammo and survival K-rations as it tumbled down the jagged stone cliffside. He connected with a new unit and told himself the two drivers before him had probably done the same thing.

Honk honk. This time it was the lady in the minivan behind him. Striped uniform, probably a waitress at some diner.

The tanker didn’t need to wait this long. Just pause, really. The fading paint on the back of the stubby little tanker read Hansen Fuel Oil, the kind a small business uses to fill up home tanks. It rumbled forward, then stalled out. Right on the tracks.

Now Frank got antsy, too.

The boys would hit the Loomis armored car in twenty minutes. All pros, longshoremen in name only. They’d stolen the cement mixer off a job site that had lost funding and sat dormant for months. They laughed when he signed on for the job. Old Frankie Buffalo wants in? When he could be collecting his pension?

The pension wasn’t enough. The job was barely enough. The medical plan’s pure gold but Dottie’s cancer cost platinum and diamonds, gutted his stake after putting their three kids through college. Now his grandchildren were near college age, and his kids had married for love, not money. For money there was always Poppy Frank.

To show the boys he could still motor, he got in a little yard hustler and spun it in donuts around their fancy German cars, parking it with a controlled skid. They kept their mouths shut after that.

Still plenty of time. All he had to do was get past the tanker. He checked the mirrors. The minivan was right on his ass. He cut the wheel hard left and eased forward. If the BMW gave him an inch he could squeeze by. He tapped the horn.

The BMW driver gave him the Jersey salute.

A decade ago he would have taken the breaker bar from under the seat and shattered this cafone’s windshield. Maybe taken the little snubbie he used to keep under the dash and rapped the guy on the head.

But he wasn’t what he once was.

The merciless Chosin winter had made his feet dead as bricks if the temperature dropped below fifty, like this morning. He could put on some speed when he wanted, but it looked funny.

Frankie’s gonna shuffle off to Buffalo, the dock boss had said. And it stuck, like those names always do.

Two guys got out of the tanker. Olive skin, clean-shaven. First thing he thought was trouble, then chided himself, remembering his grandfather telling him how the country hated Italians before he was born, because some were anarchists. They even lynched eleven Italians in New Orleans, after a Black Hand hitter whacked the police chief. So he didn’t like to judge. Even though he was Italian, and a crook.

Frank honked again.

The Beemer driver pointed at the tanker with his Starbuck’s cup. “Hello? I can’t go anywhere.”

Frank inched forward. The BMW disappeared under his hood, but he knew these Mack Granites like he’d known his wife Dottie’s body.

“You scratch my paint, I’m gonna—”

The lights of the railroad crossing blinked red. Train coming.

The BMW driver swore, then the car jerked back and forth, making no headway. He had pulled too close to the tanker in front of him, and now he was paying for it. Other drivers piled out of their cars.

They were running.

The Frozen Chosin cold spread through Frank’s belly. Run, it said. That thing’s gonna go off like a five hundred pound bomb.

Across the tracks at the car wash, Latino women stopped drying cars and stared.

Frank set the air brakes and got ready to shuffle. He jerked the door handle. Sorry boys, you’re on your own. They’d probably get cornered and mowed down before they made it five blocks with the money. There was no getting away from a betrayal like that. Frank would just wait for the hitter to come plug him in the head while he was home alone in the recliner, watching Wheeler Dealers.

The cold made a fist in his gut.

Then he saw the drivers, even the BMW jerk, shouldering the rear of the tanker. Like they could move it! If it’s got a full tank, good luck with that.

Then the diner woman pitched in.

Frank jabbed the horn. “Lemme push him,” he hollered. They used these trucks like tugboats in the yard all the time.

“You can’t get around the cars,” one shouted back.

Frank put the Mack in low gear. The cement mixer was spinning on an empty barrel, just for show. With no load, he could push the tanker and the car in front of him, no problem.

Frank the hero, not Frankie Buffalo. The woman in the diner uniform smiled and waved him on. She had a smile that took over her face, like Dottie had.

He eased the pedal down and they moved out of his way.

The BMW driver grimaced as Frank crunched his bumper and mashed the front end into the oil truck. For a second they all gasped, then the brake pins popped and the strange little train of tanker, crushed Beemer, and cement mixer began to inch forward.

The striped railroad gates slammed down on top of the tanker. Just a few more feet…

One of the oil men reached inside the cab and came out with something small and black, like the grease guns Frankie had seen at Chosin. It sounded the same, as a burst tore through the work shirts and the gal’s diner uniform and the BMW guy’s fancy suit.

The train horn drowned out their screams.

Frank ducked and the windshield blew out. Rounds peppered the cab and pocked the seat. What the hell were they doing? Nobody robs trains anymore. This was a commuter train, the double-decker diesel to Secaucus Junction. No freight worth a hijack.

They weren’t stealing. They were killing. Like the anarchists that Frank’s grandfather had told him about. Like the psychos who’d brought the Towers down.

Chosin ice gripped his bowels. Held off by the warmth that the diner girl’s face put in his heart. He’d seen the Towers built floor by floor, and like everyone else at the port that day, had watched helplessly from across the water as they crumbled into cigarette ash.

Nowhere to run, Frankie. Gonna shuffle off to Buffalo?

His feet were numb, but he would die standing on them.

No rifle. Not even the old snubbie. Just a breaker bar, two and a half feet of rusted iron. Blunt as a screwdriver, but sharp enough. He’d seen fights with them on the docks. Ugly ones.

He mashed the pedal to the floor with his elbow. The Mack ground its gears and shuddered. Two more bursts rattled through the engine compartment. Frank curled into himself, the cold moving his body for him again.

Steam hissed from a cut hose with the sweet stink of coolant, but the Mack kept nudging the tanker forward. The Mack’s front end rocked as it rolled over the tracks. Halfway there.

Between the short, imperative blasts of the train horn came shouting, then the clank of a boot on the step by the driver side door. He gripped the breaker bar like a short spear, waiting for a head to pop up.

Four fingers gripped the door. Then the black barrel of the gun, wisping smoke.

Frank stabbed for the root of the middle finger and shouted words his nonno reserved for the anarchisti. Frank rose up for another thrust, but the gunner fell back onto the tracks, blood sprinkling from his hand like a pinhole leak in a garden hose. The train bore down on them skyscraper huge and swallowed the gunman, its brakes in full scream.

Frank jerked the door handle and tumbled out as the world spun and flickered like an old home movie.. The detached barrel of the cement mixer rolled toward the car wash. The rest of the Mack truck was dragged along by the train like a Tonka toy.

The brakes hissed as the train screeched to a crawl. Commuters gawped out the windows. The washers peeked from behind cars.

Frank curled up in the weeds clutching the breaker bar, like he had cradled his rifle in the Korean winter.

The tanker had rolled ahead and butted into a wooden utility pole. Still close enough to the train to destroy it. The other oil man had the door open, bent over something.

Frank used the breaker bar as a cane and shoved himself to one knee. The killer swore to himself and jabbed at a little box behind the truck seat. Frank clubbed him in the knee, then brought the iron bar down until he lost his breath and the car washers covered their faces.

Frank saw what was behind the seat and dropped the bloody crowbar. Wires ran from a lockbox chained to the seat frame, out the door to the oil tank, which surely held something more volatile than heating oil.

Their backup plan.

Frank pulled himself into the cab and turned the ignition. Backed away from the pole and swerved, tires hopping, using the tank’s heavy load as ballast for the turn. Like he was running with Longy Zwillman again.

He would make it to the quarry on Rifle Camp Road in time. He had to.

The boys hitting the Loomis truck would get more distraction than they would ever need.

And Frankie Buffalo would jump one last time.

Ruby Behemoth, by Court Merrigan

an excerpt

Ruby Hix stood outside the gates of the Women’s Penitentiary in Chowchilla, California. Looked up and down the dusty highway for Ivy but Ivy was not there.

She waited an hour outside the gates, as long as the guards would let her, then walked down to the bus stop. Caught the 9303 bus down to Fresno. Fresno hadn’t changed much in these seven years and six months. Eleven city blocks to Gallo Union Pawn Shop, blinking back all the light and life and noise of the hot summer streets. A dull gnawing in her lower belly reminded her she needed tampons, pronto. She stepped into the sudden cool darkness of the shop and walked down an aisle of pawned leather jackets breathing in the scent of thwarted men. A couple other patrons noticed her two hundred and twenty ropy pounds of coiled energy and decided to look elsewhere.

“I help you?” the clerk asked, keeping his hands out of sight.

“That sap there,” Ruby said, throwing the grip bag up on the counter. “It work?”

The clerk slid open the glass, removed the squat extendable baton from the shelf, the kind cops keep strapped to their gun belts. “You tell me,” he said, and handed it across the counter.

Ruby hefted the sap in her hand. The balance felt right. Snapped her wrist and the baton snicked out to full length with a soft hiss, metal gleaming dull in the light. She took a few experimental swings, cutting the air with a stroke born of the mystery of speed. Another swing, another. She knew just what these cuts could do to soft flesh and brittle bone.

Then she tapped the tip against the heel of her palm. The shaft collapsed inside the handle. She rolled it over in her palm. Someone had scritched “PRATHER” in the leather cover on the handle.

“Who’s Prather?” she asked.

“You serious?”

“I could be.”

The clerk cocked his head. “You’re Ruby Hix, ain’t you?”

Ruby shrugged.

“Linda talks about you. Linda Patrecho. Said you helped her out with the Featherwoods.”

“I did what I said I would.”

“Yeah. She told me that, too.”

“How much for the sap?”

The clerk shook his head. “For you? Free. Linda Patrecho’s my cousin.”

The word “free” washed over Ruby like a benediction. Seven years and six months she worked every shitty trusty job they’d give her back in Chowchilla, swabbing toilets, washing dishes, pressing laundry. Came away with a grand total of $477.18.

“Thank you,” Ruby said.

“De nada.” Linda Patrecho’s cousin leaned over the counter, voice gone conspiratorial. “Listen,” he said. “There’s work. If you want it.”

“No,” Ruby says. “No more work.”

“Linda said you wanted to go straight. Won’t last, you know.” The clerk straightened behind the counter, nudged the sap across the counter. “You sure as hell won’t get much done with this stick.”

“You might be surprised,” Ruby said.

***

Ruby walked five blocks down to the Ralph’s. She stood in the cereal aisle a long time. The last time she’d been here in this Ralph’s it was with Ivy, and the store manager had to call out security and a check-out boy with a broom to clean up their mess at the tail end of Ruby’s attempt to coax her big sister down off a two-week bender.

“They’re going to call the cops,” Ruby said desperately, picking herself up from a pile of Honey Nut Cheerios boxes.

“I hope they do!” Ivy screamed. “I hope they fucking cart you away!”

Ruby held out a hand. “Just come on,” she said. “I know you don’t mean that. Come with me. I’m going to help you.”

Ivy’s eyes were so dilated Ruby could see the back of her skull. She was shivering and her T-shirt was dirty. She skittered backward when Ruby grabbed for her wrist.

“You can’t help me,” Ivy said. “You can’t do shit for me.” Turned and galloped for the exit.

“Fuck you too, then!” Ruby shouted at her sister’s retreating back.

Then a sprinting security guard tackled Ruby and by the time she got untangled from his beefy grip and nacho breath Ivy was long gone.

Ruby searched for Ivy for three December days smack in the middle of Fresno’s most frigid cold snap in fifty years, living on Butterfingers and battery-acid gas-station coffee, sleeping in the puke-yellow ‘79 Datsun she hadn’t insured in over a year that featured four bald tires and one working heater vent, haunting Fresno’s back alleys with a sap in her hand.

She didn’t find Ivy. Instead she got harassed by some suit downtown. The suit got a few less teeth and a squashed nut sack, Ruby got arrested, the suit got a lawyer, and Ruby got seven-to-nine. The next time she saw Ivy it was through prison plexiglass, too late for tears.

Ache in her lower belly worsening, Ruby strode the fluorescent aisles of Ralph’s in a daze at the abundance. About seven hundred items to crave . A bag of marshmallows, a five-pound sack of hot dogs, toffee ice cream bars, a pair of leather work boots especially caught her eye. But all she put in her in basket was a pack of off-brand unscented tampons, a jar of dill pickles and a bottle of barbecue sauce. These last two she’d craved endlessly back in Chowchilla. At the check-out she menaced the cashier with a hard stare,. In prison they’d short you on taters and beans if you didn’t keep a careful watch. She’d once seen a trusty cook take a fork in the cheek over a scanty ladle of beans.

Ruby headed straight to the ladies room with her purchases and did her best to get comfortable on her first enclosed privy in seven years and six months. Grunted with pleasure at this first red-tinged piss in the free world, then fumbled around with the slick tampon. Surpassing strange to slip it inside herself. Been a long while. In prison they only issued pads, the thin kind with no adhesive wings, and then only half a dozen at a go. Ruby bled pretty heavily and rationing out those half dozen little pads out was an impossibility. So she’d have to buy extra at the commissary, cursing every dollar they ticked off her meager account. So she sat a moment longer on the toilet, looking at the little string dangling between her big thighs. Felt a whole lot like freedom.

Thirty-one years old and so far life had pinballed Ruby Hix from one institution to the next trailer park. She took her time.

On the way out, Ruby passed by the Play Center. A gaggle of kids surrounded a chubby boy cowering on a Garfield tea cup.

“Fatty McBlatty! Fatty McBlatty!” the kids chanted at the chubby boy, his lip atremble, near tears.

Ruby Hix remembered her own nickname. She shoved the bullies aside, sent them crying for their mommies.

“You all right?” she asked the chubby boy.

The boy looked up and down her bulk. Pulled a face. “Leave me alone, fatso,” he said. Slipped off the Garfield teacup and ran away.

***

In Chowchilla Ruby volunteered for every work detail they had, eventually working her way up to trusty status and the floor-waxing crew. To spend a dime felt like robbing the future so she went without everything she could. A pillow was seven bucks at the commissary (85 hours of labor). An extra blanket, eleven (157 hours). The ticket lady at the Greyhound station had to pry the eighty-three dollars (1185 hours) for a ticket to Barstow out of her palm.

In the waiting room Ruby ran a thick stream of barbecue sauce over a dill pickle, slippery in her fingers. More delicious than she could have believed, starbursts of flavor a supernova on her tongue. She ate half a dozen pickles, barely breathing, then licked her fingers clean. All the while hoping, somehow, that Ivy would show. Ivy did not show. On the TV Bruce Jenner was calling himself “Caitlyn” and the host kept asking why.

“Why the fuck not?” Ruby said out loud. Her fellow passengers looked away.

She went to the bathroom and locked the door and stood in front of the mirror, practicing with the sap. The trick was to get it out of your pocket and extended in one fluid motion, ready to strike. Fifty or so practice flicks in, she started to get the old feel back.

The bus departed Fresno at 10:10PM. Wedged into a seat two sizes too small for her frame, Ruby was plenty glad to pass the lion’s share of California in the dark. Fuck this state and the seven years and six months it’d stolen from her. She sat in the aisle seat, ignoring the window, dipping dill pickles in barbecue sauce. After a time the motion of the bus swayed her to sleep. She dreamed of Ivy and pickle juice swimming pools.

When she woke it was dawn in Barstow and her mouth tasted of salt. Someone had stolen her pickle jar. She filed out of the bus with the other passengers and in the terminal scanned the crowd with no actual hope and Ivy was not there.

She strapped her black sling bag over a shoulder and headed out of the station, ignoring the cabbies. Like she’d spend that kind of dough on a cab, for Chrissakes. All she bought was a bottle of Mountain Dew to wash the salt taste out of her mouth. It was just past nine AM but already sweltering here in the desert.

In the library at Chowchilla Ruby had memorized a map of Barstow. The return address on Ivy’s last letter read #32 at the Coach Lamp Trailer Court and Ruby knew just how to get there. She walked at an unhurried pace. In that last letter Ivy mentioned working steady. Middle of the day like this, maybe nobody would be home. Maybe Ivy occupied a position of some importance somewhere. Maybe that’s why she hadn’t been there at the prison gates, or up for a visit the whole last five years of Ruby’s spit.

Ruby’s feet soon ached on the uneven cement and in the oven of desert heat and she paused to rest in what meager shade the Barstow streets offered. That Shawshank Redemption bullshit was even more bullshit than she’d thought back in Chowchilla. The world hadn’t gone and gotten itself in a big damn hurry. To Ruby it seemed more like everything moved in a gel of slow motion, clear and bright and wondrous, a passing red-and-white Budweiser truck, a little girl on a pink-frilled bike, glazed donuts sweating in a bakery window.

Midday had come and gone by the time Ruby arrived at the Coach Lamp Trailer Court. One of those rural ghettos the news shows ignore, pay-by-the-week trailers, some with the siding ripped away in patches to expose rows of pink insulation, others with plywood nailed over windows, yet others with tires on the roof.. Ruby walked down the hot gravel lanes to #32. A brown-and-white striped singlewide, no car out front, no name on the mailbox, railroad ties reeking of creosote stacked up to the door to form a stairway. A half- collapsed knee-high white plastic fence shielded a patch of dead grass with a hose coiled up in it. She turned on a tap and let the hot water ran out of the hose before slaking her thirst with long gulps, splattering the dust on her boots. Then someone swung the door open. Ruby dropped the hose.

Not Ivy. A little boy.

***

The little boy had dark olive skin and straw-black hair and a snotty nose and a pair of iridescent violet eyes, blinking at her. Ruby had to look deep to believe those eyes were real. They were. Otherworldly, but real. The boy also had Ivy’s hooked nose and bangs that curled a notch above his eyebrows, just so. It required no imagination, none, to know whose child this was.

“Aunt Ruby?” he said, ending any more suspense on the point.

Ruby dropped to one knee to get down to the little boy’s level and also so she wouldn’t lose her balance. “I’m Ruby,” she said, not quite able to append the title of “aunt” to herself.

The boy responded by throwing his arms around her neck, snotty nose pressed against her cheek. The first human being to touch her in affection in seven years and six months and Ruby enveloped the child in her hefty arms and squeezed just as long as the boy would let her.

“You got a name, big guy?” Ruby asked, relinquishing her grip but hanging onto the boy’s shoulders.

“I’m Leo,” the boy said, voice cracking with tiny earnestness.

“Leo the lion, huh?”

Leo’s face brightened with pure pleasure. “Mama says the same thing.”

“I bet she does,” she said. When they were girls, Ivy had toted that stuffed lion doll across half the country. Yellow-maned and snaggle-toothed. Named Leo. Leo the lion. “So is your mama home?”

Before the boy could answer footsteps clattered from the back to answer for him. Ruby stood, runnels of sweat running down the small of her back. Ivy, all right, but shrunk down to an altogether different person. Once upon a time, schoolgirl days, Ivy had been full-figured. A little pudgy, even. Now she was a waif. Wrists like twigs. Hair so thin you could see her ears through the strands. Peachy arm hair blossomed on her forearms and her collarbones beneath a cheap T-shirt looked about to bust through her skin. Perched in the doorway like dandelion fuzz.

Look at the Hix girls. Come to bad ends, the both of them. Just like Mrs. Custer back at Little Lake Agnes School predicted.

But fuck Mrs. Custer. Ruby dropped her grip bag and wrapped her arms around her big sister’s neck.

“Heya, Banana Bean,” she said.

*** Ivy turned on Leo’s cartoons and while the boy sat on the floor clutching a stained pillow the two sisters stood in the kitchen and talked.

“Why didn’t you tell me about him?” Ruby asked.

“I don’t know!” Ivy said. “I don’t know. How you are, I guess. You worry. I didn’t want you to worry.”

“When did this happen? How old is he?”

“Seven. Well, six and a half.”

“So that’s why you didn’t come to see me the last half of my spit.”

“It was bad, Moon Pie. You don’t understand.”

Strange, so strange to hear that pet name again. “You don’t suppose I maybe would’ve like to see him?” Ruby said softly.

Ivy shook her head. “I know that. It ain’t about that.”

“What’s it about, then?”

“You know how it is when you go up there, all them forms you got to fill out. Background check and all. I was worried if I showed up there, they’d. . .take him.”

“As bad as that, huh?”

“It was. For a while.”

“Jesus. What have you been doing since I been gone? Is that why you’re living in fucking Barstow?”

Ivy shook her head. “It’s better than it was.”

“But you still couldn’t come up to see me?”

“By then Brett didn’t want me to. He says he won’t go within a hundred miles of a prison if he can help it and he sure wasn’t going to drive me to one.”

“Tell me this Brett is Leo’s father.”

Ivy looked away. “No. I can’t tell you that.”

“Then I don’t see what say he gets a say in where you go and don’t go.”

“This is his house, Moon Pie. His car. He took us in, me and Leo both. We had to have somewhere to go.”

Ruby looked around the shabby trailer. “Looks like he’s a real prince.”

“Oh, Ruby. You should’ve seen him up there. Singing.”

“Singing.”

“He was a real rock n’ roll singer, Moon Pie. Had a band and toured and everything.”

“Made a real mint at it, I can see.”

“Not everything’s about money, you know.”

“Aren’t rock stars supposed to die young?”

“Ah, Christ, Moon Pie.” She giggled. “You haven’t changed a damn bit.”

“Were you expecting me to?”

“No.”

“All right then. So what happened to you working steady? Like you said in your letter?”

Ivy shrugged. “I was. At the Family Dollar. Now I’m not.”

“This just gets better and better. Let me guess. Your rock star didn’t like you working?”

Ivy shook her head. “No.”

“I knew it. They’re all the same, these assholes. Everywhere you go, they’re all the same.”

“Brett says to in order to get a paycheck you got to let them track you. Social security number and address and all? Even computers and drones, Brett says.”

“So? It’s a job. They got to know something about you.”

“Brett don’t want no one tracking him. He worries about it all the time.” Ivy nibbled her fingers. “He don’t even like me leaving the house.”

“Shit.”

“You should’ve seen the fit he pitched when I even wrote you the one letter telling you we were here in Barstow.”

“Who’s this asshole think he is? CIA?” She looked over at Leo at his cartoons. “So he’s not a rock star anymore?”

“Not really.”

“What’s he do then?”

“Oh, you know. This and that. For people he met on the road, you know.”

“On the road.”

“You know. When he was touring.”

“Right. Fucking drugs, isn’t it. Ivy? Jesus Christ. Don’t tell me he’s running fucking guns.”

“No!”

“Then it’s drugs. He runs drugs.”

“He doesn’t sell them, Moon Pie. He’s just a courier. Back and forth. That’s why we live here. All the interstates. He keeps it to small-time stuff, you know? Keeps us in bread.”

“So what’s his plan? Keep you locked up forever so he can be a piss-ant in the middle of nowhere for the cartels?”

“Not the cartels.”

“Who then?”

“Russians.”

“Boy, Ivy, this story just never stops getting better, does it?”

“I had to go somewhere, Moon Pie. So this is where I went. Anyway, he worries about us.”

“Yeah. I bet. I just bet he’s got you and little Leo’s best interests right at the tippy top of his mind.” Ruby looked out at Leo, sitting cross-legged about three feet from the TV. “So what happened to Leo’s real daddy?”

“Gone.”

“For good?”

“I see him every now and again. I never know when.”

“So after Leo’s daddy took off you you took up with this asshole here.”

“Among others.” Ivy tugged a Red Apple out of the pack, blew a hard wreath of smoke around her face.

“You shouldn’t smoke around him, you know.” Ruby juts a chin toward Leo at the TV.

“You’re right, you’re right.” Ivy stabbed out the smoke after one long last drag. “What’d you want me to do, Ruby? Leave California?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You know what I mean. I couldn’t leave you behind.”

“Don’t throw that in my face! Don’t.”

“I’m not throwing it. I’m telling you what’s true. I’m telling you why I ended up here. In this shithole. With this asshole.”

Ruby put her hands on her hips. Felt it all flowing out of her.

“Ah, hell, Banana Bean,” she said. “You’re right. I’m sorry. It is so good to see you.”

“I’m just doing what I have to, Ruby.”

“I know.”

“You know how they are.”

“Yeah. I know exactly how they are. I also know you don’t have to do nothing. Not from now on. And I tell you what. I’m going to get you out of here. Away from this asshole. Out of this shithole.”

She hugged her waifish and cigarette-reeking sister, feeling every bone all down Ivy’s back. So delicate she looked built of fish bones.

“Hey,” Ruby said, “at least you stuck with him, huh? More than we can say for mama.”

They released each other. Ivy’s eyes were wet and she wiped at her cheeks. “Do you ever think about her, Moon Pie?” she asked.

“Mama?”

“Yeah.”

Ruby snorted. “You think she ever thinks about us?”

“I like to think so.”

“Why? So you can slap her face if she ever showed it around here?”

“Ruby!”

“I mean it. She never gave a fuck about us, Banana Bean.”

“You don’t know that.”

“How do I not know that? She was out the door five minutes after they snipped my umbilical cord.”

“That’s just what Daddy used to say.”

“Yeah, well, Daddy was there, wasn’t he? Why are we talking about Mama, Banana Bean?”

Ivy smiled. “Maybe she really was a secret agent.”

Ivy used to make up stories to tell Ruby about Mama, back in that house in Wyoming. That she was a secret agent dueling with Chinese, or an adventurer hacking her way on a secret mission through a distant dark jungle, or a cowgirl riding a lonesome range. All the stories with the same origin and ending: Mama had no choice but to go, to save their lives, to keep them safe, to fulfill a grand destiny.

“I got to hit the head,” Ruby said, and pushed past Ivy.

In the bathroom Ruby inserted a fresh tampon, counted how many she had left. Not enough. Then she stuck her face in the crook of her elbow, to stifle the sobs at this squalid homecoming.

***

Ruby sat cross-legged on the floor watching Scooby-Doo with Leo curled up on her lap when the screen door slammed and Leo flinched and Ruby could feel his whole little body tense up.

“Ivy!” yelled the man who stumbled through the doorway. “Ivy!”

Brett stumbled in the door in a stained black leather jacket and floppy hair and a miasma of beer. He toted a sixer of Mickey’s looped around one finger and a battered guitar case. He set both on the counter and cracked himself a beer, narrowed eyes hard on Ruby. Ivy sidled up next to him, fawning-like. Made Ruby want to puke, the way her sister minced up to him like he was some kind of conquering hero when it looked to Ruby like he hadn’t conquered anything more than a few innocent cans of beer.

Same old story. Ivy drew herself to men such as this like a a bad habit. Daddy issues.

Ruby gently slid Leo off her lap and stood. She thought Leo would stay with Scooby-Doo but he followed her instead. Brett wrapped an arm around Ivy and ignored them.

“I’m about to hit it big-time, baby,” he said to Ivy.

“Oh?” Ivy said.

“That’s right.” He drummed his fingers on the old guitar case. “You got no idea, baby.”

“That’s good, honey. That’s real good.”

“You goddamn right it is.” He turned and gave Ruby the old once-over, not all that different from the one the toughs liked to put on back in the yard at Chowchilla. “This the jailbird little sister, huh?”

“This is Ruby,” Ivy said.

“Hi, Brett,” Ruby said, and stuck out a hand.

Brett considered her hand. Took a long pull of Mickey’s, set the can down, and then took Ruby’s hand.

“Be damned, girl,” he said. “You sure you been in lockup and not in the fitness protection program?”

“Brett!” Ivy said.

“What?” Brett said, and slugged more beer. “I’m just saying.”

Ruby didn’t say anything. Leo clung to her substantial leg.

“Leo, honey,” Ivy said. “Go back to your cartoons, huh?”

“But, moooom. . .”

“Just do it, sugar. Please.”

Leo reluctantly tore himself away from his aunt and back to the cartoons. Brett planted himself on a stool. Polished off the Mickey’s. Ivy unringed him another and he popped the tab. Pushed the remainders towards Ruby.

“Beer?” he asked.

“No thanks,” Ruby said.

“Why not? Better than that hooch they got up in the clink.”

“I didn’t drink there, either.”

“Suit yourself. I don’t trust a man who won’t have a drink with me but I guess in your case I’ll make an exception.”

“Jesus Christ, Brett,” Ivy said, pushing away from him.

“What? What? I’m just fucking with her. She’s used to that, ain’t you? Ruby? Ain’t you? Up where you came from they fuck with you all the time, don’t they?”

“Sure.”

“Course, that ain’t all you fuck with, is it.”

“Brett, would you watch your mouth?” Ivy said. “Leo’s right there.”

“Don’t push me, woman,” Brett said. “I got a hundred places I could go.” But as he talked he kept a steady drunken eye on Ruby. “I heard,” he said, “that you all are a bunch of rug munchers up there. Bet it was one a hell of a scene, huh? All you rug munchers up there. Just going at it.” He stuck out his tongue and flicked the naked air to a sloppy flapping sound. “That true? Ruby? That true? You a rug muncher, Ruby?”

“No,” Ruby said.

“Well, you’ll have to pardon me. Ivy here’s never much talked about you. I guess that’s understandable enough.”

“Brett. . .” Ivy said again.

Brett ignored her. “How long were you upstate, little sister?”

“Seven years,” Ruby said. “Seven years and six months.”

“Long stretch. Out on parole?”

“No. I wouldn’t take none of that. I did my full spit. That way I owe 'em nothing.”

“I’d say that was smart except for the fact that you ended up there in the first place.” He tapped the briefcase on the counter with the flat of his hand. “Me, I ain’t been caught at nothing. Ain’t planning on it, neither.” He staggered a little on his stool, caught himself from falling over.

“Good for you.”

“Yeah. Good for me. Well, at least you ain’t one of them bull dykes. One less character defect you got. I suspect you got several you’re not telling me about, though. Hell, if I’d have known my sweet Ivy here had a jailbird for a sister, I might never have took up with her in the first place.” He wrapped an arm back around Ivy. “Man like me can’t afford to keep company with someone who’ll rat on anyone to keep from going back inside.”

“I ain’t a rat,” Ruby said.

“Not yet you’re not. But I know you ex-cons will do just about anything from having to pull another stretch. Wait until they pull you over for a busted headlight and start asking you hard questions and talking about sending you back to the cage with the rug munchers and you just think to yourself, what, what, what can I give them.” Brett swigged hard on his beer. “What or who.”

“I’m free. I ain’t got to beg to no one.”

“Sure you are. Bet you were telling yourself right up until they threw you in the back of the police cruiser last time, too, huh?” He squeezed Ivy tighter to his side. “Like I say, the way I see it, the trouble ain’t what you did. It’s that you got caught for it.”

“I got caught because the man I did it to couldn’t walk away from it,” Ruby said.

“Whatever, little sister.” Brett looked back at Ivy. “She can stay one night. That’s it. One night. Then jailbird here hits the fucking bricks. I ain’t having no ex-con hanging around this place.”

“All right, sugar,” Ivy said. “All right.”

“I want her to say longer!” came a squeaky and quavering voice.

No one had noticed how little Leo had sneaked away from Scooby-Doo and back into the adult conversation. But now there he stood, plaintive in his goldfish footie jammies.

“Shut up, shithead,” Brett said. “You’re lucky I don’t toss your ass out with her.”

“Don’t talk to that boy thataway,” Ruby said. She could feel the sap in her pocket hard against her thigh.

“Don’t say nothing, jailbird,” Brett said, tone amiable. “You ain’t got a goddamn word to say about anything I say. Not in my house. Not now or ever.” He swiveled on his stool. “Where were you planning on housing the jailbird, honey?”

“I was going to give her Leo’s room,” Ivy said.

“They can share. I don’t need shithead there crawling up in my bed again, kicking me in the nuts.”

“Fine by me,” Ruby said.

“Good. Now why don’t you get on back to the back before I start slapping some sense into people around here. Both of yous.”

Ruby started to say something but stopped when she saw Ivy’s pleading face. So instead she held Leo’s hand back to Leo’s room. In a singlewide trailer this was not a long walk but it still took all her effort not to squeeze Leo’s hand so hard she hurt the boy.

Leo’s room was close and dark, the more comforting for the fact. Seven years and six months she’d passed in close, dark places. A few more hours wouldn’t hurt. Creaky walls sadly hung with a poster of Ichiro Suzuki and a lion, the kind of creased posters that come out of cereal boxes. These covered most but not all of the holes. For Leo’s bed, a mattress on the floor and for his chest of drawers, a stack of laundry baskets. There were burns in the carpets and aluminum foil hung over on the window. Ruby remembered that trick well enough, the way to keep out the light when you didn’t want to face the day. She knew everything about this room. She’d done all her growing up in places just like it.

Little Leo sat cross-legged on the mattress on the floor and smiled up at her. Ruby set her sling bag down and sat beside him, mattress sagging badly with her weight. She put an arm around the boy who snuggled his tiny frame and mammal heat into her.

“Aunt Ruby,” he said, “do you know any songs?”

“Sure I do,” Ruby said.

“Will you sing them to me?”

From the front of the trailer Ruby could hear Brett and Ivy arguing. Leo seemed unfazed. Ruby supposed it wasn’t anything like his first time.

“You bet. That what your mama does at nights? Sing you songs?”

“Sometimes.”

“Well, now. I’ll sing to you. Your Aunt Ruby will sing to you.”

Ruby sang the songs she knew, surprised that “Mama Tried” and “Rainy Day Woman” and “Pancho and Lefty” leapt up from her memory. She could smell Daddy’s whiskey breath with the rhymes, feel his scratchy whiskers on her cheek.

When Leo fell asleep, she laid down next to him on the narrow mattress. A lamp sat on the thin carpet beside the mattress and she flicked it on on and off, on and off. In Chowchilla there were no light switches. It went dark when they said so, light when they said so. Ruby kept on playing with the lamp till the bulb burned out with a soft sizzle.

***

Some time later crashing and screams jarred Ruby from sleep. At first she didn’t know she was in Leo’s room. She didn’t know she was in the trailer. She didn’t know she was in Barstow. She thought she was back in Chowchilla, some guard down the corridor welcoming a new fish to life in prison with some beating and raping. She didn’t move, she didn’t sit up. Number one rule in Chowchilla, never attract attention to yourself. Even when one of those guards came to visit your cell, you never moved. You never said a damn word.

Then she felt Leo’s warm breath on her cheek, his animal warmth against her ribs, Ichiro Suzuki with his bat looking down on them like a wise old god. It all came back to her. Down the hall echoed shattering glass and Ivy screaming. Leo went on slumbering. None of this bothered him a bit. She thought about that a minute, how a boy of his age could sleep through such a ruckus.

Then she cast aside the lingering prison paralysis, snicked out the Prather to full length and barreled down the hall. Sap in hand just like the old days.

The overhead light above the kitchen counter swung on a crazy arc, casting jumping shadows. Brett loomed over Ivy crumpled and covering her face like she knew what was coming. Brett’s fists were clenched and he looked like he sure did, too.

He never got the chance. No, not this time. Ruby swung that sap faster than the bouncing shadows. A crack against Brett’s temple and the man keeled over like a stack of wet lumber, head crunching against the countertop corner and flopping onto a spaghetti sauce stain on the linoleum. The guitar case toppled off the other side of the counter.

Ivy looked out from behind her elbows and up at her little sister, holding out a hand. While she let Ruby help her to her feet Brett quit flopping around, blood pooling over the spaghetti stain, eyes flipped open and rolled back to their whites. The two sisters stood over him till he finally went still.

“Did you. . . ?” Ivy said. “Is he. . . ?”

Ruby knelt by the man though she already knew. Felt for a pulse anyway.

“He’s gone,” she said.

“Ah Christ, Ruby!” Ivy said. “What have you done?”

“You a big goddamn favor, is what,” Ruby said.

Ivy laced her fingers at the back of her head and walked to the front window hung with a Minnesota Vikings blanket for a curtain. Ruby followed her. Noticed she was still gripping the Prather when she reached for her sister so she tried to slip it into her pocket and this was when she noticed that Brett’s guitar case had popped open. There was no guitar inside.

“I knew this was going to happen some day, I just knew it,” Ivy said, still circling the room, ignoring her sister. “This or something goddamn like it.”

“Ivy.”

“I just didn’t think it would be . . . Oh Christ.”

“Ivy.”

“Now what are we going to do?”

“Ivy!”

Ivy turned and the “What?!!?” died on her lips. Instead she said, “Is that?”

“Don’t touch it,” Ruby said.

A dozen identical white bundles wrapped in light blue plastic spilled out of the guitar case onto the floor.

“Oh my God,” Ivy said.

“You said he was small time,” Ruby said.

“He was!” Ivy said.

“This ain’t small-time. This is the kind of shit people come looking for.”

The two sisters stood over the scene, the dead man, the narcotics, the trailer.

“Russians, you said?” Ruby said.

Ivy nodded.

“We got to leave it. Leave it alone and get out of here. Hope to hell they won’t care about us.”

“Sure, sure. Moon Pie, what do you. . . what do you think this is all worth?”

“Don’t go getting any stupid ideas, Banana Bean. Because it’s worth enough for them to come after it. And whatever that number is, it ain’t worth your life. Leo’s life.”

“No,” Ivy said. “No, of course not.”

“We got to think this through. We got to do this right. And if you touch that stuff even once, they’ll never stop coming after us.”

As if on cue the phone in Brett’s pocket went off. The dial tone was “Bulls on Parade,” Rage Against The Machine.

“See what I mean?” Ruby said. “We ain’t got much time.”

“You think they’ll let us go?”

“Not if we’re here when they get here. So we best not be.”

“All right,” Ivy said softly. Looked over Brett again. “Funny, you know. I was just sort of getting to like it here.” She walked around the counter to the kitchen and kicked Brett’s unlaced black boot. “Dickhead,” she said. “I can’t believe you did it again, Moon Pie. Instead of me. Again.”

Ruby put an arm around her sister’s shoulders. “How about you make it so there’s no more ‘again’ for either of us. Ever.” She turned for the back room, cataloguing everywhere she’d been in the trailer. “You got any money?”

Ivy shook her head. “Fifty bucks, maybe. A hundred. You?”

“Three hundred and seventy-seven bucks and eighty cents. Which ain’t going to get us very far down the road.”

“I know where we can get some money.”

“Where?”

“You ain’t going to like it.”

“Where, Ivy?”

Ivy heaved a deep sigh. “The ’End.”

“What?”

“Back in the ’End, Moon Pie.”

“Fucking Wyoming? Are you shitting me?”

“Shhh, shhh,” Ivy said, jutting a chin at the backroom. The sisters listened, but no sound came from Leo’s room. “I’m serious, Moon Pie. I got five grand stashed back there.”

“You’re going to have to explain that to me.”

“I went with Brett on one of his runs. Out to Chicago and back.”

“You went with that sack of shit one of his drug runs?”

Ivy shrugged. “We were smoking a lot of crank.”

“We.”

“I quit now, Moon Pie. Anyway, that’s how I know he works for the Russians.”

“Worked. And all that means is that they know who you are, too.”

“Yeah. God, that’s right.”

“Go on. You were saying something about five grand.”

“Well, on that trip, I told Brett I wanted to stop back home. Haven’t been there in years, I said. He always did get a kick out of me being from Wyoming. What the hell, he said, and drove us there.” She looked at his twisted ankles there on the cheap linoleum. “I could talk him into most anything once he started toking up. He wasn’t all that bad a guy sometimes, you know.”

“Whatever. So you actually went back to the house?”

“Yes we did. Drove right up Burma Road. It’s abandoned now, Moon Pie. No one lives there. The way the place was falling apart, probably no one’s been living there for years. Brett went out back to piss and roll us up a joint, you know out back by the shed?”

“Uh-huh. This is a great story, Banana Bean, but would you come to the point?”

“I’m getting there! I always thought a day like this would come, you know. But what the hell was I supposed to do, try to hide money in this shithole? So I took a cashbox from the car, and hid it in the house.”

“Seriously?”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time. And it seems like one hell of a good one right now. I walked right in the house and upstairs and back in that crawl space off our old bedroom. The third rafter. You remember, the one I carved a heart in?”

“I remember.”

“I hid it back there. Insurance policy, I figured. Figured someday I might need it.” She put her arms on Ruby’s shoulders. “Today’s that day, Moon Pie.”

“Sure looks like it,” Ruby said. “And Brett never noticed.”

“Oh, he noticed. I convinced him later that someone had stole it out of the car at some gas station back in Iowa. Christ, he was pissed.”

“How much, again?”

“Five grand. Maybe more. Maybe seven.” She rubbed her nose. “Funny thing, you know. That cash box? Kind of reminded me of the one in Mrs. Custer’s office.”

“Ha. No shit.”

“Fuck em, right, little sister?”

“That’s right,” Ruby said. “Fuck em.”

Blood Daughter, by Matthew Lyons

Stan blows up his old life with a few Facebook messages and a few cellphone photos, and after the divorce is over and he's bled dry as corn husks, he packs up his few remaining belongings in his shitty little fifth-hand Kia (the only car on Craigslist he could afford) and moves to North Garth to start rebuilding. He gets an apartment (studio), and a job (washing dishes), a new(ish) pair of sneakers and a rat in a glass case he names Salzer, after the famous German poet. He spends his first few months looking back, crying in the dark, calling his old house from grocery store parking lot payphones and hoping that Melinda doesn't pick up because they both know she's not going to let him talk to Cassie. Stan misses his daughter more than he misses the rest of his stupid old life and he tells himself that maybe that's ordinary.

Whenever his little girl answers, he never tells her it's him calling, just whispers all his secrets to her in alphabetical order and hopes she understands. When he runs out of those, he starts telling her his memories. When he was six, his dad shot himself in the garage with the Browning he brought back from Vietnam and ever since then Stan's had nightmares about red paper fans pressed against cracked window-glass. He stomped crayfish to paste by the creekside when he was a teenager. He married too young and tried to fix a broken thing with a baby. He tells her that despite all his sins she's beautiful and she's perfect and she's all he ever wanted and that's when Melinda yanks the phone away from their daughter and screeches PERVERT!! down the line at him and then it clicks dead in his ear. The next time he tries to call, a mechanical woman tells him that number's been disconnected. He screams and smashes the receiver against the base until it comes apart in his hand and the grocery security guards have to come and drag him away off the store property.

Back home, broken and battered and hammered out of shape, he drags himself into the bathroom and scoops a handful of scummy hair from the shower drain with bloody fingers, cradles it in his palms, coos nursery rhymes to it. It's a good start. But he'll need more.

Eventually he notices there's a new waitress at the diner: her name is Alexandra and she has a green and black tattoo of a snake stretching from her right wrist all the way to the line of her jaw and she laughs at his lame dad jokes and smokes too many menthol cigarettes and carries around a five year AA token like some people carry around crucifixes. She asks him about his bandages and he makes some stupid quip, hoping she gets the message. They start to have sex a few times a week, always at her place and only ever when her boyfriend isn't home. She watches him get high sometimes and never asks why he never invites her over to his apartment.

Stan starts to plan. Stan invests in a full set of antique dental tools off eBay. Stan takes showers that last for hours, pulling out the thin hairs circling his chest and his belly and his ever-expanding bald spot and letting them collect in the drain until they just about stop up the tub before he pulls them out and adds them. Stan buys weed and sometimes coke from the other dishwasher at the diner, another down-on-his-luck case who looks like a Chad but insists everyone call him Pablo. Stan has wet dreams about his ex-wife sometimes and always calls Alexandra to apologize after. Stan starts to buy anesthetic from one of Pablo's other customers, some asshole veterinarian who can't handle his shit. Stan doesn't go in the kitchen anymore because that's her room and she needs her privacy.

Salzer's been dead under a pathetic pile of shredded paper bedding for weeks before Stan notices, and when he finally does, he just throws the whole terrarium out into the alley where it shatters and startles a homeless man so badly he never comes back around. This city is dying anyway. Stan doesn't see the poor bastard beat his retreat down and away and it's just as well because Stan wouldn't care if he did.

His apartment starts to smell like rot so he spends his whole paycheck at the Yankee Candle one Friday and congratulates himself for his ingenuity. He walls off the kitchen with broken-down boxes and cheap duct tape that doesn't tear right but gets the job done. He sings while he puts it up, The Itsy-Bitsy Spider and London Bridge and Mary Had A Little Lamb and more. He tells himself she likes it but there'll be no way to tell until he's finished and that's not going to be for a while because he has to go slowly and carefully otherwise everything's going to get fucked up and he can't let that happen.

This is too important. She's too important.

One night, laying in bed, he tells Alexandra a little bit about himself, and in return, she tells him she thinks he's the loneliest person she's ever met. She tells him about her son who lives with her parents in Spokane and then he leaves because he can't handle that shit, and the next day at work she acts like nothing's wrong but he can see by the puffy glow around her eyes that she's been crying. He doesn't ask about it and she doesn't share. She doesn't answer his calls for the rest of the week either, but he's okay with that. He's got plenty of work at home to keep him occupied without having to worry about her feelings on top of all of it. He's got to focus.

Things are moving faster, now.

The next Saturday, he waits up and does lines of blow until well after midnight and then breaks into a local funeral home because those shitty Labrador painkillers he has at home aren't doing the job. He stumbles through the dark, upending chairs and caskets on his way through to the prep room and uses a screwdriver to snap the padlock off the supply locker: inside are racks of tools and rows of brown bottles with labels he only understands a little. These'll probably work. With one arm, he sweeps a whole shelf into his duffel bag for later and when a voice behind him asks

Who the hell are you? What are you doing in here?

he grabs one of the many-angled implements from the cabinet and opens the man's face with it. The sound is like a claw hammer against a steak and Stan leaves him there, crumpled on the floor in a creeping pool of his own blood.

In the bathroom of his apartment, Stan loads a pair of syringes with a mixture from the bottles and sets them on the edge of the sink while he works up the nerve. The first time he really does it, he starts small. A needle prick in the tips of his first two fingers, then he goes out to his car for the pliers while the itchy numb takes hold. He lays out paper towels all around the sink, gets a good hold, grits his teeth and yanks out one fingernail, then another. They come out with a wet sucking thwick and even through the warm embalming drug haze, the pain is exquisite, a fuzzy screaming wave that turns his whole hand into a burning, open nerve. There's not as much blood as he expected, though. He runs a cold tap over his bare fingers until it feels okay again, then he takes his ripped-free nails out to the kitchen to add.

Over the course of the next week he does the other eight, and then all ten toes, and then uses the antique bag of tools from the internet to start in on his mouth. He brings it all to the kitchen, taking his time to make sure each piece fits just so. It's only when the gaps in his smile grow wide enough to pass the neck of a bottle through that the weird, awful people at the diner start to notice. Are you okay? they ask. Do you need to talk to someone, Stan? He shrugs them all off. He's doing just fine. Every day he comes to work missing bigger clumps of hair and one time he lets slip to Pablo that he's been spending a lot of time digging for materials at the city dump. Barbed wire and medical waste. When Pablo asks him to explain a little bit more, Stan slaps him in the crotch and pretends he doesn't speak English. Pablo never talks to him again, not even when Stan comes in the next week missing the last three fingers off his left hand.

The blood seeps through the cheap vinyl off-brand bandages and gets everywhere, pattering spots on bowls and countertops and fresh napkins, but Stan insists this isn't a problem. It's no problem. He'll clean it all again, he'll scrub twice as hard. The manager sends him home and says not to come back until he's doing better. Stan asks what that means just in time to get the door shut in his face. On the way back through the parking lot, he puts a fist through the driver's side window of the manager's crappy old Buick. He stands there bleeding from both hands for a while before the idea comes to him and he starts scooping up handfuls of sea-green pebbles.

She needs eyes to see, after all.

And she always liked green. It was her favorite color.

Or was it purple?

He fills his pockets with safety glass, sure he'll find the right two somewhere in there. He's so close, now.

Back at home, Stan does all the coke he has left and it makes his brain feel like a trashcan that's on fire but if he pays attention he might be able to finish her tonight and that would make it worth all the shit and the hurt and the pain and the misery so he decides to do that: okay let's focus so we can do this come on let's fucking go. He lets himself into the kitchen through the cardboard door and goes to work, spilling his pockets all over the Formica countertop so he can find the right ones.

She waits for him at the table, hideous and cruel and nearly perfect, wrought from clumps of mottled, sticky hair and fresh stripes of leg-skin and mangled lumps of cartilage and broken bone, lashed together with tape and tight loops of wire and twine, her shape ruined humanoid, the proportions all warped and wrong. She smiles at him with his own torn-out teeth—they sit in her misshapen head glistening pearl red, arranged in as neat a row as Stan could fix them. She nods at him and he goes to work sifting through the jagged pile. The edges bite and slice into the pads of his remaining fingers, rendering the shards slick and hard to keep a hold of, but he keeps at it until he finds two that he thinks will work. He leans in and whispers to her, telling her about their angles, and when her smile spreads, he knows he made the right choice.

Stan steps in close and uses one butterflied thumb to make two little divots in her head so he can put the eyes where they need to go, but before he can place them, there's a knock at the front door.

Stannie? Alexandra calls from the other side. Stannie, are you in there? I just want to talk, please. She must have followed him home. Stannie, I'm worried about you. Nosy. She's always been nosy.

Ignore her, the creation hisses.

But Stan hesitates, stuck between the only two people left in his pathetic excuse for a life.

Open the door, Alexandra pleads. Please, Stan. I just want to help.

Give me my fucking eyes, his new child snarls.

Tears pour down Stan's face and he jams the glass into his replacement girl's makeshift skull and she shivers with pleasure, rising from her seat to meet him where he stands. Outside on the welcome mat, Alexandra's stamping her feet in frustration and calling his name, her voice swollen with sobs, but he can't hear her, now. His wretched abomination wraps him in her damp, ghastly embrace and when she squeezes it's like being devoured by knives—she shreds him apart and absorbs him, uses his parts to fortify her own, a doll of hair and meat and blood and metal. She blooms and overlaps herself, feels her father pulped inside the limits of her heinous body. She turns and tears down the fake wall, lurching toward the front of her prison, then crashes through the cheap pressboard door and onto the weeping woman she finds there, consuming her whole, the hair and steel coiling and thrashing her to red ribbons. The world beyond smells like fear, and hate, and blood, and she will devour it all, in her brutal, malignant perfection.

She opens her stolen mouth and crows to the heavens above, born to unmake the world in her image, and the gods she mocks there watch and weep and turn away to hide in their barrows. Deep inside her, as he’s pulled apart and digested to slurry, Stan’s last thought is of the family that left him, the world that forsook him, and in the moments before he truly becomes another part of his girl’s terrible entirety, he weeps with joy.

The end has finally come.

Leave the World a Better Place, by Tom Barlow

The first one went better than she could have expected. The right rifle, a .260 Remington with a Zeiss Conquest scope, which she had demanded when they divvied up her father's estate years before because she knew it had the least recoil. A comfortable place to sprawl on the floor of her van. The sun down, the parking lot of the Walmart nicely lit by halogen spotlights, her van parked in the dark beyond. A six-pack of hard lemonade in the cooler at her elbow.

Katie waited an hour for a deserving target, watching through the hole she'd bored for the scope in the back door of the van. He turned out to be a young, heavy-set man with thick black hair, most of his face obscured by the bushy beard extending well up onto his cheeks and a Red Sox baseball cap pulled down to rest on the top of his glasses. He caught her attention by scanning the parking area before reaching down between his seats, coming up with a handicapped parking pass, and clipping it onto his rear-view mirror as he pulled into a handicap spot.

She removed the plug from the lower of the two holes, the one for the barrel. Through the top opening, she located the driver's door of the car in her scope. The young man opened the door, jumped to his feet effortlessly, and shoved it shut with his hip as he took his first long strides towards the store.

She squeezed the trigger. When the rifle fired, the clap left her ears ringing. "Wear your ear protection, moron," she reminded herself, irritated.

She put the caps back in the holes in the hatch door and raised up to look through the rear window. The man lay face-down on the asphalt, blood splattered beneath him in a long arc reaching an abandoned electric cart near the curb. An elderly couple who had just exited the store had dropped to the ground with their arms over their heads. An SUV swerved around the body to grab a parking spot near the door.

Katie wrapped the rifle up in the quilt, crawled awkwardly between the seats to the front of her van and pulled away from the scene, slowly, cautiously. Her heart was beating a drum roll, and the air inside the van tasted of gunpowder.

***

She finished the six-pack before she could fall asleep that evening. Her bladder woke her long before she'd rested enough though, and after the trip to the bathroom she accepted that further sleep was not possible.

She made a pot of coffee, took her blood pressure, cholesterol and pain meds, choked down a large tablespoon of peanut butter for protein, and turned on the television for some company. Deborah had always watched the news in the morning, and Katie found it a habit she didn't want to break.

A young black reporter in a sports coat too heavy for the humid summer weather stood at the edge of the Walmart parking lot, breathlessly laying out the timing and sequence of events. The actual crime scene seemed overwhelmed by the comings and goings of police, fire, Homeland Security, news cameramen, city officials, and finally, the FBI. It looked to her like a couple of acres of parking had been cordoned off with yellow tape which sagged between light poles and billowed in the breeze. Nothing he said suggested she had been seen.

Katie examined her emotions as the reporter conjectured about the origin of the fatal bullet. Guilt? Very little. The man had been able-bodied, taking up a handicap space, the kind of selfish prick that had forced her mom to walk from remote parking even when her emphysema was at its worst. Excitement? That seemed to have dissipated quickly the previous evening. Satisfaction? More like an itch that had been thoroughly scratched but would most likely return as she continued on with the plan. Pain? Still there, mostly in her ribs. She took another Percocet, wondering when her oncologist would permit her to move up to harder drugs. He seemed to be holding that out as a reward for applying for hospice.

***

She didn't try to pull herself together until after lunch, in preparation for her appointment with her shrink, Eric. The mirror disappointed again. She had hair once more, but it had grown back coarse, like corn shocks after a month in the Thanksgiving display she used to hang on the front door of the urban two-story she and Deborah had shared. Her skin, once creamy, was growing increasingly transparent, so that late in the day she could track the network of veins and arteries underneath. Even the blue in her eyes seemed muddied. The only part she found pleasing was her cheekbones, much sharper after the weight loss, high enough that she looked faintly Native American.

She picked the cheeriest blouse in her closet, a polyester thant felt like silk in her hands, a fuchsia and sky-blue pattern. It momentarily improved her mood, but the adult diaper she donned brought her back down.

***

"Tell me about your week," Eric said, seated beside her on his long leather couch.

Katie fixed her gaze on the fat white candle he always lit at the start of their sessions, leaned back in the couch and threw one arm on top to take pressure off her ribs. "I'm trying to do what you said–work on acceptance. Still not sleeping worth a damn. I haven't seen Deborah or Glory Beth for a month."

"How do you feel about your daughter now? Last time, you were furious about the things she said to the judge."

"I keep reminding myself she's only 15. That helps."

"You were also angry at your partner. Have you come to terms with her behavior too?"

Katie thought the word 'terms' gave her a great deal of latitude. "I'm working on that."

"Hmm," he said. "Are you still working?" He wrote something, but kept the folder tilted away from her so she couldn't see it. She figured it was something like "Agitated, fatigued."

"I had three days of temp work at a call center downtown. They didn't want me back. Evidently, I don't have a warm voice."

"How do you feel about working menial jobs? With your background in management?"

She rubbed both eyes with a pinch of her right hand. "Acceptance, right? Nobody hires cancer patients. I understand that. So I work on appreciating whatever comes along. It beats sitting at home waiting to die."

Eric wrote some more. "You've had a great deal to accept recently," he said. "Anger is normal. It might show up in ways you don't expect. Try to identify those impulses that derive from that anger and stop yourself from acting on them. In times of personal crisis, misplaced anger can drive a wedge between you and your loved ones."

Katie held back from saying the first thing that came to mind; it was already too late.

***

Deborah had made her a cup of chai the afternoon of the emancipation hearing a month earlier, after their daughter Glory Beth had been finally pried away from them by Deborah's born-again bitch sister Elaine and her brother-in-law Stuart.

"You're going to stroke out if you don't watch it," Deb said, stroking Katie's neck lightly. The fingers felt like steel wool.

Katie had expected to come away from the hearing in tears, not with the seed of anger that now burned within her. But their daughter had adopted a pernicious attitude over the past two years thanks to the harping of Elaine about the ungodly relationship between Katie and Deborah. It had surfaced again that morning when Glory Beth's testimony dwelt on Deborah's licentious lifestyle. And the judge had forbidden them from even approaching their daughter for the time being, so she couldn't challenge Glory Beth's behavior.

"I told you Elaine was going to bring up that article," Katie said bitterly. She was unsure what angered her more; Deborah's repeated infidelity or the fact she had blogged it, claiming that her sexual freedom was an important example to set for their daughter, encouraging her to transcend the repressive mores of her parents' generation.

"The judge was a troglodyte," Deb replied. "Sometimes you just have to make a stand, even if it causes you pain in the short run." When she tried to put her arm around Katie she slapped it away.

"I can't stand to have this argument ever again. I'm moving out."

"We've been together almost twenty years. You can't just throw that away."

"As far as I can tell, you throw it away every time you walk out of here to meet your lovers."

***

Katie still read the newspaper, curious about the future despite her prognosis. Daily delivery was one of the first things she'd arranged when she moved into the tiny efficiency apartment in a neighborhood quickly on its way to becoming a barrio for immigrants from Central America. She circled an article in the Metro section about a Tom Abalo, a forty-year-old brick mason who had just been arrested for driving drunk for the tenth time. This time he'd clipped a boy on a bicycle who ended up losing a leg. Appallingly, Abalo was free on bail, even though he'd been forbidden from driving since his fourth conviction.

He still had a land line, so she was able to bring up his address from the White Pages. Googling his name provided a photo of him with a couple of proud homeowners posed in front of their new brick patio.

Luckily, her beat up van, which she and Deb had kept only because it was handy for hauling Deb's pottery to weekend shows, did not look out of place in Abalo's neighborhood, where virtually every driveway sported a panel van advertising a construction or repair service. She parked down the street where she had a clear view of his house from the floor of the van. The sun had set, and despite the heat, she was cold at her core, so she snuggled into the sleeping bag they had bought for the women's retreat where Deb's infidelity had found its first legs.

She put a stick of gum in her mouth and waited; although she had zero appetite, the chewing gave her the illusion of eating, and she was content with illusion at the moment. With all the opiates, food lost velocity in her colon and could be coaxed into passing through with only the greatest difficulty.

While there were no streetlights in this development, many of the houses had gas lights shining on their sidewalks, and the soft glow gave just enough illumination to frame anyone coming out of a house. She waited, and waited, until at just after 10:00 p.m. when Abalo walked out of his house, jumped in the truck in the driveway, and backed out. Katie started the van. When the truck passed her, she followed from a distance. As she expected, he drove less than a mile to a bar in a strip mall on Westerville Road, Jack's Lounge.

She figured he was there for quite a spell, so she took the opportunity to hit the McDonald's down the road to change diapers and was back on post, parked in the lot of a closed window repair shop across the road, when he came out of the bar at 1:00 a.m. He was in the company of two other drunks, but fortunately they peeled off, got in another pickup and left before Abalo, walking unsteadily, reached his. The shot was a piece of cake, although the sound echoed for a couple of seconds from the glass storefronts of the strip mall.

She wove her way home via back roads to avoid any traffic cams and arrived by 1:30 a.m. Her ribs were aching brutally thanks to the hours spent on the hard floor of the van, but the sense of retribution made the pain endurable.

***

She had fallen into a restless sleep on her futon late that morning when the doorbell rang. She'd told no one except her ex-boss Bev Crosley where she was living, so she was expecting her when she opened the door. Only at the last moment did she think to wonder if it could be a cop, a bit of obliviousness that surprised her.

However, it was neither. Instead, there stood Deborah holding a fruit bouquet of chocolate-dipped prunes. There was no contrition on the woman's face, but Katie couldn't remember ever seeing her ex-wife contrite. Or embarrassed, for that matter. She wore the faint smile she always did, like she saw something everyone else didn't.

She stepped aside so Deb could enter. She'd forgotten already how much taller her ex was than her, willowy, all the way to hair which moved like sea grass in the lightest of breezes. She had always loved running her fingers through Deb's hair.

Deb placed the bouquet on the counter that divided the living room from the kitchen. "These still work on your constipation?"

"There's such a thing as knowing one another too well," Katie said, taking a seat on one of her bar stools. "What are you doing here? And how did you find me?"

Deb took a seat on the other bar stool, so that their knees almost touched. Katie scooted back.

"I called Bev. She's worried about you, and so am I. I'm hoping to convince you to move back home. It's like a house full of ghosts back there, and I miss you like crazy."

"Too late," Katie said. "I've moved on. You should too."

"Moved on to what? An apartment the size of a closet? More painkillers? Kid, we've been through too much together to watch you die alone. To hell with Glory Beth; give her another month with the God Squad and she'll come begging us to let her return."

"It's not that, and you know it," Katie said, shoving the bouquet further away; the smell was nauseating her. "I only stayed with you for the last two years for Glory Beth's sake. Since you starting cheating."

"I told you right up front what I was doing, as you'll remember. I thought maybe now, when you're close to, you know, you'd see how silly it is to let other people stand in the way of living life on your terms. But I'll tell you what; you come back, I'll remain faithful. If that's what it takes."

"Which will make me just what you despise, right? The person who takes away your freedom? No thanks."

"So what are you going to do?" Deb's cheeks were flushed, a sign Katie had long recognized as a precursor to an angry outburst. "Hole up here until you die? For Christ's sake, there's not even anyone to find the body. You could lay here until you rot before someone knows you've passed."

"I'm working on a project," Katie said. "Believe me, there will be plenty of people know when I die."

"I don't like the sound of that."

"Meditate on this. I don't want you. I don't need you. Go and sleep with anybody you want. Be free." She waved her hand toward the door.

Deb stood, frowned, shook her head. "You poor girl. Don't be afraid to call me when you need me. And you will." She left without a backward glance.

***

On the news that evening the murder was the lead story; given the history of the victim, there was a hint of schadenfreude in the reporter's voice. Fortunately, there was still no mention of a witness, although the reporter conjectured that the shots might have come from a van or SUV. They did suggest a possible link with the Walmart shooting.

She had expected a race between her mortality and discovery, so she wasn't all that worried that they might have pieced together a bit of the plan. The day of her death was still in her control.

The next morning, though, she woke exhausted, only then realizing she had forgotten to eat the day before. With disgust, she ate a few of the prunes from the bouquet and rinsed them down with a bottle of Ensure. It was mid-afternoon before she had the energy to browse for her next victim.

It didn't take long. Scott Van Driesen, once a wide receiver for the local university, had been caught eleven years earlier raping a coed at knife point. Since his release from prison two months before, two women had been raped by a man matching his description and method. However, the Columbus Dispatch reported that the woman Van Driesen was living with, Polly Bender, who had been one of his guards in prison, insisted he'd been home with her both nights. Caught by the photographer, Van Driesen had given the most appallingly smug smile when asked if he did it.

***

Bender had a house in the country twenty miles west of Columbus, which magnified the difficulty. Katie assumed the sheriff's department was going to keep an eye on him, although she doubted they had the manpower to watch him around the clock. The night was once again going to be her friend.

She studied the layout on Google Earth. The house was surrounded by cornfields, the nearest neighbor a quarter-mile away. There was a lane a hundred yards to the west of the house to allow tractor access to the corn fields. Since the August heat had baked the ground dry, she presumed she could park there.

She had never made a Molotov cocktail before, but she remembered the olive oil vases that had been Deb's obsession for a while, until she discovered they were too brittle. Waiting until Deb was at work, she returned to the two-story long enough to snatch one that would hold a quart of gasoline. It was shaped like an acorn squash, easy for her to throw.

The lane through the corn was indeed bone dry; she was able to back well away from the road at 3:00 a.m. the next morning. She made her way on foot down a row of corn toward the house, the rifle over her shoulder, the gas bomb in her left hand. She nicked her earlobe on a corn leaf and it began to drip blood, but the pain disappeared into that of her ribs.

She stopped at the border between corn and lawn, laid the rifle down, and pulled out the lighter she'd brought from home, the one she used to fire up the medical marijuana that had proven so useless. She played out the steps in her mind, took a deep breath and walked quickly to the house. There she lit the fuse and, with all her remaining strength, threw it through the picture window of the living room.

As flames lit the interior of the house, she dashed back to the corn, dropped to the ground, picked up the rifle and sighted on the front door.

She was almost too slow when the two of them exited instead through the kitchen door on her side of the building. She quickly sighted on Van Driesen as he turned on the outside faucet and fumbled with the hose curled at his foot. She aimed for his back, but hit him in the head instead.

To her surprise, Bender, an older, obese woman, didn't run; instead, unthinkably, she ran in Katie's direction, shrieking. She waited as long as she could for the woman to come to her senses before dropping her with a shot to the chest only ten yards from her sniper's nest.

The fire department responded so rapidly she had to wait for them to pass by before pulling her car out of the corn and speeding away.

***

Every time she started to drift into sleep, Van Driesen's face, at the moment of impact, came back to her. She had thought her heart adamantine, but apparently she had a bit of work yet to do to purge herself of sentiment. And she felt repentant about Bender. The woman had been a liar and a fool but didn't deserve to die for such scum.

To her surprise, the sheriff of Sheridan County was quite open on TV that morning about what the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation had found on the scene. They had recovered a shoe print from where she had approached the house, a tire print from where she parked, and a blood sample from the corn leaf on which she had cut her ear. Luckily, she was sure her DNA was not in any police database. They had matched the bullets in all three killings, though, and the television people were barely able to disguise their delight at having a serial killer to draw viewership. Even more so as the BCI had concluded from the footprint that the perp was a woman.

Katie walked into the bedroom and grabbed her father's Glock, tucked it into her waistband.

***

"Tell me about Glory Beth," Eric had asked during her first visit six months earlier.

"She's precocious," Katie said. "She should be, given the amount we spent on sperm."

"And your partner? Is she smart too?"

"Very much so. It's gotten so sometimes I have trouble following their conversations."

"That must be annoying, since you were the birth mother."

"I guess so. Sometimes I get the sense that Glory Beth sees Deborah as her mother, or maybe her father, or both, while I'm something else. I can't put my finger on what. A wicked aunt, maybe?"

"From what you've told me about your partner, she sounds like a person who makes people earn her respect."

"Oh, that's true. She can be downright rude to people. But not to Glory Beth. She can do no wrong in Deb's eyes."

"But not in yours."

"I can tell the girl is going to break my heart. I just don't know how."

"Did you ever consider that your ambivalent feelings about your daughter might be in part transference of your feelings about Deb?"

Katie had sat quietly mulling this over for several minutes, until the silence grew too oppressive. "How much am I paying you for this bullshit?"

***

She had intended to complete the plot in the morning, before the lawyers trickled off to court, but her ribs kept her up late, until she took an extra couple of Percocet. They left her drowsy until 11 a.m., and by the time she showered, dressed, and wrote out her confession, it was early afternoon.

The traffic was one thing she was not going to miss, she thought as she fought her way downtown. Luckily, the parking garage across from the firm where Deb worked had several open handicapped slots on the ground floor. Ironically, it had been Deb who convinced her to get a script for a handicapped mirror hanger.

She laid the rifle on the passenger seat, where the police were sure to find it, and used her phone to email her confession to them. She adjusted the Glock in the small of her back.

As she rode the elevator to the fourth floor of the building across the street, she realized that the outfit she was wearing, the mint-green taffeta blouse, the tailored slacks, the melon blazer, the Blahnik flats, had been bought for her by Deb. That was a mistake, but she was too far into it to return home and change.

She had never cared for the firm's receptionist, Astana Poole, a woman who had a way of looking at her that she found demeaning, unsure it if was personal or simply a strategy to put clients in their proper place, subordinate to their attorneys. Therefore, she wasn't afraid to pull the pistol as she walked up to her. The waiting area was otherwise unoccupied.

"What in the world?" Poole said, finger poised above her phone.

"Before you call 9-1-1, call Deb. Tell her I'm waiting for her. Don't tell her any more than that."

Poole, hands shaking, pressed Deborah's extension. Katie couldn't hear her answer, since Poole was wearing a headset, but was content that the woman did just as she instructed.

"Now call the cops."

Poole, puzzlement on her face, punched the number. When the police answered, she identified herself, gave the address, and said, "We have a woman in the lobby named Katie Frank holding me at gunpoint. I think she means to kill Deborah Kline, one of our attorneys."

When Poole began nodding, and Katie said, "That's enough. Hang up."

She did so. "Please don't kill me."

"You do what I tell you, you'll walk away from this. Understand?"

Poole nodded. Katie could smell the odor of urine wafting across the room, and was pretty sure her diaper was dry.

Just then, Deb came around the corner, saw the setup, and stopped. "What the hell are you doing?"

"You and I have some unfinished business." She swung the gun around to point at her ex.

"What? You're going to kill me now? Are you really that angry?"

"You cost me my daughter. Shouldn't I be?"

Deb wrapped her arms across her chest. "Elaine took Glory Beth from us. You know that."

Katie's arm was trembling. "But you provided the ammunition. It's you that deserves the punishment."

"So that's why you're going to kill me. To punish me for losing Glory Beth."

"Who said I was going to kill you? I've done far worse. I hope you enjoy going through the rest of your life known as the wife of a serial killer."

Deb was silent for a long moment. "It was you? That shot those people? That was your project?"

Katie heard Poole gasp. In the distance, she could also hear a siren. "The guidance counselor in my high school asked me once what I was going to do to leave the world a better place. I figure I've done my bit."

"I never knew you had such cruelty in you," Deb said. Katie could see the tears coursing down her cheeks.

"Cruel? You haven't seen anything yet. When you think of me, I don't want you dredging up sweet memories, so here's my last gift. I want you to remember me just like this."

And with that, she raised the gun to her temple and fired.