Black Treacle Magazine (February 2013, Issue 1) (5 page)

Bristling with
fear, he began to place each foot above the next with infinite
slowness. There was no refuge between him and the tunnel
entrance--and the lizard would be upon him with blinding speed the
instant it decided to move. He crawled up, step by noiseless,
hair-raising step. A patch of darkness above him seemed more
palpably opaque--the lizard’s mate, or the shelter he was seeking?
And then the lizard slid toward him in one fluid movement.

In a panic he
leapt upward in an enormous bound. He felt a breath of outrushing
air as its jaws snapped shut behind him. He jumped again; the dark
object loomed invitingly close--not a lizard, but sticks and leafy
debris wedged across the tunnel. Still too far. The pack, the
stupid pack; why hadn’t he dropped it? Hastily he detached the
pack; as he was about to rid himself of it, the lizard clamped down
on a trailing leg. He flung the pack at the lizard, and made one
last despairing leap, feeling his leg snap, excruciatingly, from
its socket. The still-twitching leg clutched in its mouth, the
lizard swung to pursue the falling pack containing all of his
provisions, and skittered away down the tunnel, leaving him to drag
himself onto the bridge of twigs, shaking with fear and pain.

He gave
himself only a few minutes to rest; the lizard might return, and
the loss of his food made it critical to waste no time on the
journey. He knew that he now lacked the strength to begin
anew--again. The only way out was up.

Hours, days:
he had no idea of how long he kept on placing one foot just a bit
further along, then heaving himself upward. He saw only utter
blackness above. In measureless night he followed an unknown
muse.

He was
climbing mindlessly as an automaton when his head encountered an
obstacle. The entire tunnel was blocked by a rigid grid whose
interstices were firmly packed with organic matter and jagged
stones. He found no opening, no exit. As he clung upside down,
hopelessly awaiting a futile death, he thought he saw the stars
coming out. Then he realized they were pinpoints of sunlight.

Dawn was
breaking on the other side of the obstruction. He crept along its
rim until he found a thin crevice. It took a desperate effort, but
he finally dragged himself through the narrow slit, thanking the
invisible stars that he had starved throughout most of the journey.
He rose up and was standing in a cul-de-sac at the end of a
gravel-strewn valley, pocked with hummocks of dead leaves and
twigs, whose straight walls receded into an unguessable distance.
There was still a short climb above him, and he could not see what
lay beyond the lip overhanging the valley, but the warm sun shone
on him and allowed him to see a few small creatures that he seized
and ate quickly. With renewed vigor, he scrambled up the escarpment
and over its protruding rim.

He crouched,
panting, on a canted plain of overlapping boulder-strewn, regular,
shallow mesas that stretched in all directions to the horizon. From
atop one of the isolated promontories, he saw another being moving,
with an enticingly familiar stride, toward the shade of a
projecting tower.

He moved
toward the same shadow. She--O, he was certain of her
gender!--turned to face him. All his weariness and hunger and what
he had not known was loneliness forgotten, he felt a surge of lust
rise in a hot red gush. Quickly he extruded the ductile filaments
necessary to weave a simple web anchored between the tower and the
surrounding plain, with a triangle of tight strands near one edge.
He thrust into it, rocking back and forth until the moment of his
release, then dipped his pedipalps into the suspended droplet of
sperm.

As he began to
circle her and close in, she watched him obliquely, but made no
move to assault him--or resist. Dizzy with pheromones, palps wet
with freshly emitted semen, he climbed willingly into her embrace.
Trembling, he crouched to fertilize her. As his palps entered her,
she bowed her head. He finished his task with exquisite relief--and
her mandibles closed. A spurt of circulatory fluids jetted out from
his severed neck, splashing on the broken ground.

* * *

All winter a
fibrous sac hung in the lee of the tower, tirelessly clinging in
the teeth of the bitterest gusts, periodically buried in drifts of
ice-crusted snow, patiently waiting through long nights fitfully
lit by the endlessly circling stars. Discrete spheres seemed to
move within its bulge. After the vernal equinox, as the sac grew
tattered and the scent of honeysuckle wafted into the rarefied
heights, the infant spiderlings emerged; tender, translucent
buttons of need and desire. They flung their unreeling gossamer
threads to catch the wind and were swept like little lost balloons
over the edge into space, tiny souls falling into the unknown
world.

END

F.J. Bergmann
writes poetry and
speculative fiction, often simultaneously, appearing
in 
Asimov's
, 
Eschatology
,
Shock Totem
,
Strange Horizons
,
Weird Tales
,
 and a bunch of literary
journals that should have known better. She is the winner
of the 2012
Rannu Fund Speculative
Literature Award for Poetry
. Her most
recent chapbook is 
Out of the
Black Fores
t
 (Centennial Press, 2012). The editor of
Star*Line
,
the journal of the Science Fiction Poetry
Association
, and poetry editor
of 
Mobius: The Journal of Social
Change
,
 she
frequents Wisconsin.(
Website:
http://fibitz.com
)

Jeff Barr

Abraham
whistled home at dusk. Crickets sang in the brush, sagebrush sang
in his breath. It was a mile from the grid road, where the
school-bus dropped him, to the trailer he shared with his
father.

His lunch pail
banged his thigh with each step, heavy with collected stones and
the carcass of the prairie falcon he had found in the schoolyard.
It was past decomposition, the delicate bones exposed in a dusty
framework seen through a nest of crumbling feathers.

He passed the
rusting hulk of the Deere combine, glorious apple-green and gold
now oxidized to blood-red, its scabrous surface inscribed with
witch-sigils and Old Babylonian arithmeticals. His father believed
in witches, and golems, wendigoes and capricious smirking gremlins
that could bite through tractor tires in the dead of night.

In town they
laughed; but they didn’t laugh at the money his farm brought in.
Paid respect is better n’ earned respect, boy
, his father
told him.
Cause it don’t matter if you lose it. You can buy back
paid respect. Once you lose earned respect, you ain’t never getting
that back
.

Something
barely glimpsed moved in the tall grass to the right of the path,
but Abraham didn’t look. It was better not to, usually—anything
that made that much noise
wanted
to be seen. No sense in
giving himself nightmares; the thing was likely harmless--so long
as you didn’t give it space in your mind. The movement tracked him,
with the stealthy crackling of the Caragana bushes that lined the
final approach through the field to the trailer. Abraham kept his
eyes on the lone light-post standing sentinel in the yard. Its
glowing nimbus held a swarm of flies, giant bluebottles and
green-backs throwing back the light in dizzy flashes. Their buzzing
informed the night, louder even than the hum of the halogen bulb
and the distant susurrus of traffic from the highway.

Sea-blue
shadows of the television swam in the windows of the house. Jacob
had been running the TV twenty-four hours a day since the accident;
some days the old man didn’t even put on his work clothes, much
less leave the farmhouse.

In town,
between the snickers and the sideways glances, the men idling in
the restaurants and at the hardware commented on Jacob’s absence.
Not that he cronied with them; he referred to them, with venomous
contempt, as
coffee boilers
. When they asked, in their
cunning, smirking manner, if the old man had
fell down the
terlet or sumthin’
, Abraham ignored them and their laughter.
Better not to say anything, no matter how the words burned to come
out; people listened hard in small towns.

When he
entered the house, the roar of the television fell to a hush. He
could hear the rasping breath of his father. The mud room smelled
of ancient boots and raincoats, the house itself rank with stale
cigarette smoke and the stink of blood.

“I heard
people talking about you in town again,” Abraham said. “Bill
Carmichael even asked me when you’re going to stop into the
dealership and go over your account. I-”

“You didn’t
talk to him, did you? Tole you once, tole you a hundred times, when
them high-noses talk, you just keep right on carrying on.”

“I didn’t say
nothing,” Abraham scowled in the mud-room mirror. “I mean, I didn’t
say anything. But they was… they were looking at me awful close.
Maybe you ought to go in and show your face. At least talk to
Carmichael.” Abraham made himself a sandwich. Three pieces of
bread, six or seven hunks of cheese from their own dairy, ragged
slices of deer sausage from last October’s hunt, stacked up like
birch blocks in a kid’s toy tower. He ran it in the microwave for
thirty seconds. Then mustard, the obscenely bright French’s kind
that his father said tasted like a salt lick.

“You makin’
one of those goshawful sandwiches?” His father rustled in the other
room. “Jesus-please-us, but if that don’t smell bad. Make ya fat,
that stuff.”

He wasn’t
helping himself, Abraham thought, being cooped up here in the heat
of the house all day, ever since the accident that had taken his
wife. Jacob refused to turn on the air, saying the recycled air
bothered his sinuses. Abraham knew the old man just liked the heat,
always had.

Abraham
stepped into the living-room, taking a huge bite of his sandwich,
absentmindedly kicking the tiny corpse of a barn swallow out of the
way. Tiredness smoked from the old man in thick psychic waves.
Never cleaning up, even though they knew how careful they had to
be, in this day and age. Who knew when a neighbour would stop by? A
salesman, even.
Anyone
.

“Dad, you
ain’t cleaned up your mess. You know better. ” His father’s rheumy
eyes twitched. The corpses of falcons, rooks and hawks lay on the
tacky carpet, drying blood stippled on the walls and the bright
window of the television.

Abraham
examined the remains of a tabby barn-cat. Eviscerated, but none too
cleanly. Ragged clumps of fur floated like milkweed, dancing in the
humid air. Strange; he should have seen something, anything from a
kill like that; but the weather today had been the same sullen
thick heat it had been last week. He tossed the carcass to the
floor. “Dad, you better-”

“I better
what?” Jacob spat, rising from the chair so quickly it squealed
like a frightened animal. He rounded on the boy, John Deere cat
askew on his head. Spikes of greasy hair stuck out like escaped
straw from a scarecrow’s burlap skull. “Suppose you think you’re
the man around here, now?” He poked Abraham in the chest with one
long bony finger. The nail was yellow and ragged, and snagged on
Abraham’s flannel shirt. “Look like you’re on your way to the
goddamn dancehall in them clothes, anyway.”

“You look like
you’re on your way to a casket.”

Jacob’s hand,
hard and quick as a willow switch, splatted into the side of
Abraham’s face. The old man panted, eyes rolling like a calf in a
thunderstorm.

“Sit down, old
man,” Abraham said. His face bore an angry red mark; but his eyes
were clear and steady, pinned to the old man’s. “Sit down and
settle yourself. I’ll get your dinner.”

“I don’t need
to be taken care of, you little pu-” This time, Jacob’s slap met
the flesh of Abraham’s own right hand; they appeared almost the
same size in the flickering TV light.

“I said sit.
Now.”

For a wonder,
Jacob did.

He shifted
under Abraham’s gaze. “No rain today.” He looked reproachfully at
the cat’s body. “Hell of a thing.”

“We’ll work it
out. We always do.”

“Well boy,
with your mother gone, I got just the thing, right here. Not like I
need it no more, and-”

Abraham threw
down his napkin, jaw muscle working as he chewed. “Don’t you even
talk about it. Don’t you even.” He walked to the kitchen to clatter
the pots and pans, and Abraham stared after him.

After the
house was cleaned up, supper eaten, coffee drunk, and the evening’s
work complete, they slept. Abraham dreamed of the sun turned to
blood in a sky the color of ash and bone. He slept heavy, as usual,
in the light of a bloated yellow moon.

Sometime in
the night, Jacob crept forth, crossing to the barn.

* * *

Saturday
morning on the farm started at five AM. Abraham was surprised to
see Jacob already up, work clothes on, his John Deere cap tilted
jauntily back on his brow.

“Morning,”
Jacob grunted. “Breakfast’s cooked, on the table. I ate, gonna get
my coffee saucered and blowed and take it out on the porch. Come on
out when you’re ready.”

Abraham ate
quickly, brow furrowed. The food was good; better than he could fix
for himself. Even the coffee tasted better. When he limped outside,
Jacob was standing, limned in the dawn-rose.

Jacob turned
as Abraham thumped down the steps. “What took you so long? Gonna be
a fine day, I can smell it.” He upended his coffee in the bushes
and set the cup on the porch railing. “Pitter-patter, let’s get at
‘er.”