Oedipus Wrecks

NYC Midnight 2009 Short Story Challenge

Heat 5

Genre: Horror

Subject: Bus Stop

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OEDIPUS WRECKS

Passengers aboard a Greyhound bus traveling from Edmonton to Winnipeg fled a gruesome scene on Wednesday night as a fellow passenger violently attacked and killed another man. Witnesses claim the aggressor stabbed the victim multiple times before severing his head then brandishing it through a window at the horrified onlookers. Authorities have not released the names of those involved, but confirm that a full investigation is underway.

- Portage La Prairie Gazette 

"Why did you do it, Lye?"

"What do you think, Dr. Mitchell?"

Silence in the room except for the whirring of a ceiling fan. Dr. Mitchell leaning back in a chair, his carefully parted blonde hair unmoved by the overhead breeze, his long torso erect. Jason Lye leaning his wide frame across the table, one hand drawing invisible patterns on the polished surface, the chains connecting his handcuffs scraping together.

"Why did you do it, Lye?"

click. click. click. The fan's cord bouncing erratically.

"Can I have another cigarette? It all started with a cigarette, you know."

Dr. Mitchell removing a cigarette, standing, walking, opening a window, walking sitting, waiting.

"It started with a cigarette," Lye repeats, gesturing with his unlit sixth digit. "A cigarette and a story."

Alyssa Hammond's first customer at the Greyhound ticket counter in North Battleford arrived on her third day of work. A second coat of pink lipstick recently reapplied, she straightened her back as a wide-shouldered man appeared in the doorway.

"Good afternoon, sir," she smiled, glancing at the oversized clock on the wall. "How can I help you?"

"I'm headed down to Winnipeg—when's the next bus coming through?"

"Winnipeg?" she chirped.

"Yes, ma'am."

Alyssa pulled out the schedule, touching the page with a fleshy finger.

"There's a bus coming through from Edmonton in an hour and…" She looked from the oversized clock to the timetable and back again. "It leaves at 3:43."

"An hour and twenty-seven minutes," he grinned, pulling out a money-clip.

Alyssa blushed. The man paid for the ticket and walked outside. He sat on a bench, the silhouette of his thick torso tattooed on the clouded glass.

At 4 o'clock a bus pulled into the parking lot. Alyssa watched the man's shadow recede through the window, catching a glimpse of his broad back as he boarded the bus. She absently removed a tube of lipstick from her purse and traced her layered lips with the stick of colored wax.

"OK Lye, so why did you do it?"

"Do you have a light, Mitch?"

Dr. Mitchell pushing an invisible hair from his brow, reaching into his pocket, handing over a lighter with a lanky limb. Jason Lye smiling, nodding his head, lighting the cigarette.

"A cigarette and a story?"

"Hmm?"

"You said it started with a cigarette and a story."

"I did?" Lye mocks, smoke bleeding from his mouth.

"Go on, then."

Samantha Benet fell asleep as soon as the bus left Edmonton. She hadn't slept the previous night, instead watching for the broken headlight of Cody's truck.

The seat cushions were tattered, worn from years of fidgeting fingers and accidental spills, but as the bus pulled away from the station, Samantha could only think of sleep. She pulled her knees to her chest, buried the right side of her face against the window, and closed her eyes.

There was a man in the seat beside her when she awoke. His head lolled from side to side in a precarious doze, thick arms folded across his wide chest. Samantha turned back to the window. Ribbed fields of grain, interspersed with cattle pastures and the occasional farmhouse. Flat grasslands stretched into the distance, swaying below a clear summer sky. An afternoon thunderstorm flirted with the horizon.

"You've got fifteen minutes to go stretch out, folks," the bus driver called down the rows of seats after pulling into a rest stop. "Please be back here by 5:45."

Samantha arched her back and reached into the bag at her feet for a pack of cigarettes.

"Can I bum one of those?" The man beside her asked, his voice still gruff from sleep.

"Sure," she said without turning to face him.

They stepped off the bus into the early evening sun. A few passengers walked over to a lone diner, ambling stiffly across the otherwise empty parking lot.

"You need a light too?"

"Please."

Samantha pulled out a blue lighter. She tested it once then handed it to the man with her knuckles. His hands dwarfed the tiny device.

"Thanks," he nodded and wiped his brow. "I didn't think it got so muggy up here."

Samantha shrugged, glancing at the man without turning to face him. "What do you expect for July?"

"Not much, I guess." He exhaled deeply. "You heading down to Winnipeg?"

"That's the plan."

"Vacation?"

"More like relocation."

The man bobbed his head as if he understood. He leaned his wide frame against a concrete wall, shifting his weight to one foot and bending the other. The drooping sun slanted onto his face, his skin glistened with perspiration. The man shielded his brow from the glare with one hand and looked back to Samantha.

"And that?" He asked, gesturing at her cheek with the cigarette.

Samantha reached up to her face, tenderly touching the rust colored bruise that stretched around her right eye. She looked at the man directly. His brow was creased and his eyes narrowed with concern.

"Haven't you ever heard of minding your own business?"

"Haven't you heard of the kindness of strangers?"

"Actually, no."

"Well, I'm sorry to hear that," he said, holding in a plume of smoke. "And I'm sorry about your old man," he added, exhaling slowly.

Samantha tossed her half-finished cigarette to the ground. "My boyfriend, actually."

Again, the man nodded as if he understood. "He's a bad man. Men are evil, you know."

"Oh really? How reassuring," she smirked. "So what does that make you? The devil?"

The man paused, considering the question. "No," he finally replied.

"No, what?" Samantha scoffed.

"I'm a guardian angel."

Samantha rolled her eyes. "Whatever, man."

"What's the story then, Lye?"

Jason Lye resting his muscled arm across the table, flicking the filter of his cigarette, watching the spray of ash.

"Lye?"

"I'm getting there, doc. Don't worry."

Back on the bus, Samantha nestled into the window. She watched the man finish his cigarette and stretch out his legs. He was handsome—tall and thick, with a long, narrow nose and a mess of auburn hair. His posture held none of the assertiveness she so feared in Cody.

"Do you need another one, Lye?"

Jason Lye staring out the open window. The fan churning the humidity from outside. Dr. Mitchell waiting. Jason Lye's dark eyes searching, a question poised on his tongue.

"What do you want to ask, Lye?"

Silence.

"Did I ever tell you that my old man used to beat up my mom?"

"No, Jason, you haven't told me that." Dr. Mitchell says, leaning forward.

"Well he did. Used to beat the shit out of her when he was drunk—a standard story, I guess."

"It isn't uncommon, but that doesn't make it acceptable," Dr. Mitchell says soothingly. "Did you ever try to protect her, Jason? Confront him about it?"

Jason Lye smiling, nodding, looking up at the sky through the window. "Yes."

The man returned to the seat beside Samantha without a word, gently setting his large frame down.

"Are you hungry?" She asked conciliatorily, offering a package of pretzels from the bag at her feet.

"I am, actually. Thank you."

Samantha watched as he fished through the bag, selecting only the unbroken pieces. A smile flickered on her lips. "You sure are picky."

"My mother used to say that," he half-whispered.

The driver turned on the engine as a lone figure raced across the pavement toward the bus. Samantha's eyes swelled with panic as a man mounted the stairs.

"What's the matter?"

A man with a ponytail boarded the bus carrying a Styrofoam coffee cup. He did not look at Samantha as she slumped into the seat.

"What's the matter?"

"Nothing…I just thought I recognized him," she sighed.

"Why did you do it, Lye?"

Two men walked up to the Greyhound ticket counter, as Alyssa was packing up to leave. She recognized the shorter of the two as Sheriff Tinley, but didn't know the lean, well-groomed man beside him.

"Evening, miss," the sheriff greeted her with a stiff nod. "Have you had anyone come through here today?"

"Just one—my first customer, actually."

"What did he look like?"

"Big guy. He was headed down to Winnipeg."

"When was that?"

"A few hours ago." Alyssa looked at the oversized clock. It read 8 o'clock. "He left at 3:43."

"How many stops does it make?" The unfamiliar man asked, brushing a lock of blonde hair from his brow.

"Oh gee, sir, I'm afraid I don't know, but they're supposed to arrive in the morning."

"When?"

"It's a fifteen, sixteen hour trip…so…" Alyssa glanced at the clock helplessly.

The two men looked at each other. "Best make sure there's a welcome committee when he arrives," Sheriff Tinley said. "There's a pay phone outside."

Without a word, the slim man walked out into the night. Alyssa stared after him, her hands suspended as if holding someone back. "What's happening, Sheriff? Who is that?"

"Some doctor for mental patients. One of his kooks broke out and he's been trying to hunt him down for days."

"There must be a mistake, then. The man who bought the ticket didn't look crazy to me—he was very polite actually."

"You can't always tell with people like that. Judging from the look on the doctor's face, you just described the man he's after."

"Are you sure he was crazy?"

Sheriff Tinley glanced around the empty room and leaned close to Alyssa. "Apparently he got institutionalized after he killed his own brother. Something about mistaking him with his father—can't tell one man from another or something."

"Last cigarette?"

"Last cigarette."

Samantha's eyelids flickered close as it grew dark outside. She didn't notice that the man beside her had gone to the back of the bus until a piercing scream filled the air. Samantha turned to see what had happened, but a rush of people suddenly stood from their seats and began pouring into the aisle.

"Pull over! Pull over!" Someone yelled. "He's got a knife!"

More screaming and scrambling. Samantha pushed forward as the bus stopped on the side of the freeway. Passengers grabbed at one another and the screaming continued—shrill and panicked.

Once outside, Samantha looked for her seat companion. Two men clamored to hold the folding door closed and an older woman passed out on the ground.

"What's happening?" Another woman pleaded. "Who has a knife?"

"I don't know!" Samantha responded, surveying the terrified crowd.

The driver had thrown his body against the folding door along with the two men. A teenage girl, not much younger than Samantha, looked around in helpless confusion. Another woman fanned her collapsed companion, screaming for help at no one in particular. A man held a crying boy in his arms.

"I don't know what happened! He was just sleeping and then that big guy came up with the knife. And the blood!"

"Who did? What man?" Demanded one of the men blockading the door.

"The big guy sitting up front. He just came and stabbed him, and…"

A muffled sound echoed from the bus, as if someone were beating a bag of flour with a baseball bat. No voices could be heard.

"What's happening?" The teenage girl asked. "Are we going to die?"

A broad figure slowly stood up in the back window, a misshapen lump in his hands. For a moment Samantha thought she saw Cody's lifeless face staring at her through the glass.

"You're safe now, mom," the man yelled through the glass, reaching toward Samantha.

"Why did you do it, Lye? What happened on that bus?"

Jason Lye touching his lips with a finger, closing his eyes. The fan pulsing through the damp air. In the distance, the dull rumble of a mid-summer thunderstorm.

"I killed my old man."

The Unrecognized Zombie-ness of Blindness

Jose Saramago's best-known novel Blindness—also his most dumbed-down, if you ask me—poses a single, chilling question: what if an entire city abruptly and inexplicably goes blind? Though the story reverts to allegorical coddling on par with Heart of Darkness (metaphor! juxtaposition! OMG, I get it!), Saramago's linguistic dexterity makes the book a begrudgingly good read.

While he spoon-feeds Gerber-approved symbolism and satire, the Nobel Prize-winner's disregard for basic punctuation and grammar means that you rarely know which character is talking or thinking at any given time. Sure, page-long sentences and quotation-less dialogue may sound exhausting, but the technique is actually one of the most effectively disorienting characteristics of the book—begging the question of how and why anyone would try to translate it into a movie.

That Fernando Meirelles—the man behind feel-good =flicks like City of God and The Constant Gardener—eventually convinced Senhor Saramago to sell him the film rights is most likely a testament to the Brazilian director's decade of persistent badgering more so than the author's confidence in the novel's cinema-translatability. But, sure enough, the movie was made, and just as surely it failed to engage audiences during its blink-and-you-missed-it release.

Contagion, containment, violence, and total social breakdown—these are the touchstones I relish in the films of George A. Romero and his undead-obsessed brethren, but which end up feeling preachy and contrived in Meirelles' otherwise adept hands. In the absence of Saramago's literary fluency, Blindnessthemovie ends up feeling like a zombie movie without the gross-out benefit of actual zombies.

Now, I'm not one to snob all over every book-to-movie adaptation, so here's why it's actually worth seeing (no pun intended). The angelic quality of the doctor's wife (played by Julienne Moorein a pseudo-Children of Men repeat) is visually amplified by her wardrobe, hair color, and ethereal glow. Furthermore, the "white blindness" itself is hauntingly mimicked by washed-out lighting and admittedly gorgeous camerawork. And, of course, the contemporary setting makes the story more resonant than the nondescript location and era of the book. That these "pros" hinge on the paradoxically visual nature of the movie, only emphasizes the blatant misunderstanding of the story itself—but, hey, we're trying to be positive here.

If hypothetical horror is you're thing, then you'd be better off just reading Saramago's similarly fantastical but much more entertaining The Stone Raft, in which the Iberian Peninsula suddenly drifts off into the Atlantic Ocean, or The History of the Siege of Lisbon, which explores the consequences of altering a single word in a history book.

Stuff People Like #1,287: Bloggers-as-Authors

Though periodicals and religious podiums are the traditional arenas for expressive opinions, the blogosphere has ushered in a new era of unwanted self-promotion. The blogger-turned-author remains a coveted aspiration among many writers, but the success of this endeavor turns out to be more about niche novelty than writerly quality. Frank Warren, the voyeuristic genius behind PostSecret, has now published four volumes of anonymously submitted confessions, while Stuff White People Like's Christian Lander reportedly received a six-figure sum for the rights to turn his urban anthropology experiment into a book. Though the latter has aroused equal-parts hostility and humor, the bound edition of Lander's observations — which features one of those intentionally quirky covers found at overstocked Urban Outfitters stores — will be available for purchase on July 1st. It now remains to be seen if people will pay for a product they can view online for free.

NYC Midnight: Challenge 4

This is the winning story in the 2008 NYC Midnight Flash Fiction Contest. Over the course of four rounds--in which participants were given a genre, location, and object on which to base a 1,000 word story in under 48 hours--400 entrants were whittled down to a final 40. I won both the final round and most points overall with this piece.

Genre: Romance

Location: A Laundromat

Object: A Hammer

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STILL LIFE WITH BLUE DRESS

I live in the fluffy intoxication of detergent and dry cleaning—behind the washing machines and dryers, the rows of sallow plastic chairs and muted TV, hidden behind the rotating racks of pressed, plastic dry cleaning. I know the world only through the stains of its clothes.

My mother sits at the front of the shop near the do-it-yourself washers. She is talkative and warm, always offering advice in a chirping trill as her jeweled old fingers click against the counter along with the rhythm of the machines. Most of the customers are women. I recognize them from their voices and I know them through their garments.

It is a women's world that I cannot see, but I hear and smell and imagine it from my humming cocoon. The dresses are my only window. I clean and mend each one with care. I examine the designs, labels, and fabrics, comparing them to what I have read in the style pages of The New York Times and Vogue. I picture the bodies that live inside each gown.

Fuchsia satin with a blue band at the waist. She is voluptuous and maternal. Dark hair and skin with a chestnut undertone. She listens to Bizet in the shower and reads Harlequin novels.

Vintage Dior in cream yellow. Tailored at the knees and strapless. A faint bleaching at the armpits. She wants to wear it on Saturday because she hopes her boyfriend will propose over dinner.

Floor-length chiffon. Layers of beige paneling like an ethereal skyscraper. She is ambitious and vain. Freckled shoulders from years of riding horses, a passion she abandoned in college.

"Dusty," my mother calls, as I absently stroke the gauze-like chiffon. "He can get anything out," she says to someone. "Dustin!"

"Yes?" I move beneath the canopy of dry cleaning. The racks envelop my face and body, but I want to hear the woman's voice.

"I've got a wine stain on silk here. Can you get it out by tomorrow?"

I cannot resist silk—the cool whisper of its surface, the tautness of the threads, the thought of it grazing against smooth skin. I wait for the woman to say something. I want to know if she too is silk. She is silent.

"Of course." My deep voice is muffled through the racks.

"Fabulous!" my mother exults. "Come tomorrow at four. It'll be like brand new."

I retreat through the racks into the dry cleaning area. The oversized machines rumble. I hear my mother brushing through the forest behind me.

"Here's the dress." She emerges through the racks, one hand protecting the caramel wig poised on her head. "I told her to come back tomorrow at four—plenty of time."

I take the dress from her leathery hand and smile. It is beautiful.

"Thanks, sweetheart." She disappears through the curtain of hanging bags. The clicking of lavishly jeweled fingers resumes a moment later.

I put the dress on a hanger and examine it. The deep blue silk ripples from the bodice to the lip, flawless but for a splash of wine bleeding off the hem. I examine the seam and see that the thread has absorbed the color too. A strand of hair glints under the fluorescent light, a single blond thread caught in the zipper's symmetrical teeth. I pull the hair out and throw it away.

Hanging from a hook in the concrete wall, the gown is like a suspended waterfall. She is liquid lust. A tall blonde model. She walks with grace, certain of her allure but not arrogant because of it. She has many lovers. Her laugh is a coquettish twinkle. She was born in the Midwest, but she left behind the rural lilt and lifestyle when she moved to New York. I close my eyes and picture her languid form within the gown.

I place the dress over a steaming pot to loosen the fibers. I massage it gently. I am sensitive to the cries of each thread. The mark slowly fades beneath my vigorous touch, leaving only a damp patch. I sigh with pleasure and hang it to dry.

My mother is sick in the morning. She cannot work. I am afraid of working in the front of the shop, afraid of seeing a world I prefer to imagine from my back room sanctuary. It is Tuesday so business is mercifully slow. At three o'clock I take a ladder, hammer, and nails to mend the sign outside, as my mother had requested weeks earlier. A woman walks past me and through the door. She stands at the cash register and takes a red candy out of the crystal dish my mother keeps on the counter.

I watch her through the glass. She has a hooked nose and rounded shoulders. She holds a black bag with Barneys emblazoned in stark white letters. I try to imagine the garment she has brought to be washed. As I picture a series of plain floral blouses, she begins to walk toward the back.

"Can I help you?" I rush through the door, my eyes downcast and my hands fidgeting with my t-shirt.

"I'm here for a dress I dropped off yesterday. I'm a little early." She smiles sheepishly beneath strands of long brown hair. "It had a wine stain on it—silk."

My vision momentarily clouds. I feel a pinch at the corners of my eyes.

"We don't have it," I sputter.

"But yesterday…"

"My mother is sick today. Come back tomorrow. " The force of my own words is startling.

She hesitates for a moment but then backs away from the counter, a look of discomfort in her eyes. She hurries out onto the street with one backward glance—a mixture of confusion and concern. I wait until she is out of sight then lock the door and rush into the back.

I exhale forcefully as I pass through the familiar forest, pushing toward my secluded refuge. I feel lost. The machines purr their incessant rhythm. I reach for the gown, clutching the blue silk to my face. I stroke the dress, my nostrils filling with the perfume of the room, my eyes tightly shut. I concentrate, gripping the fabric, forcing my eyelids into my cheeks, but she is gone.

The Internet: Genesis 2.0

The origin of the Internet is no longer about its immediate genesis. The fact that Tim Berners-Lee implemented the first ever communication between an http client and server on December 25, 1990, is no longer interesting. Instead the Web's development has gone the way of most revolutionary phenomena: if reexamined the right way (whether backwards, after drinking a magical concoction, or by substituting every third letter with "e") it eventually seems like a prophesied inevitability.

Alex Wright's recent New York Times article "The Web that Time Forgot" is not exactly prophetic, but it does contextualize the inter-web as a preexisting concept. Wright investigates the case of Paul Otlet, the oft-overlooked founder of Information Science whose concepts for a vast interlinked web of documents, files, and images prefigures the Internet by about 50 years. Among other innovative ideas, Otlet's index card-based system anticipated hyperlinking, a feature that infinitely expands the information in a given text.

And yet, Wright's analysis is just one of several projected genealogies that reconstructs this evolution. In fact, The New York Times ran a similar piece called "Borges and the Foreseeable Future" just six months earlier. In this article, Noam Cohen argued that the Argentine author's stories also presaged Web 2.0. It's a provocative assertion, but Cohen's examples have a forced quality that evokes the single-minded perspective of a Nostradamus enthusiast more so than a discerning journalist (which he typically is).

Tlön, Uqbar, and Wikipedia

Despite a lingering affinity for the printed word, paper pages are sadly going the way of the Papyrusosaurus. To avoid total extinction, however, that tome of trivia, The Encyclopaedia Britannica, will remodel itself upon the very thing that sucked the musty life from its yellowed pages. Wikipedia, the credibility-challenged, community-composed encyclopedia, may have been poo-pooed by journalists and purists since its inception, but there's no denying its popularity. The EB has therefore announced that it will turn its website into "a community for scholars, experts, and lay contributors," a setup that would mimic Wikipedia's orgy of digital information. Albeit with certain stipulations for sophistication. Though the website opens its virtual doors, academic elitists need not fear — the actual leather-bound volumes will remain untainted by the much-maligned "lay contributor."

Students of epistemology and/or navel-gazing may recognize this philosophical quandary. After all, one of Jorge Luis Borges' most famous stories, Tlön, Uqbar, and Orbis Tertius, breaks down these same precepts of intellectual authority with dismissive glee. In the Argentine writer's slim satire, a secret society conspires to create a nonexistent world and thereby bring it into existence via popular misperception. Naturally, they go about doing so by publishing selected chapters about this fictitious universe within a common encyclopedia. As belief in this imaginary world becomes more widespread, Earth itself begins to change, and, thanks to the Berkelian principle of causality, nearly transforms into an alternative reality by the story's end.


Returning, then, to the question of empirical existentialism we must ask ourselves: Was self-proclaimed environmental messiah and former-Vice President Al Gore always "a blood drinking semi-reptilian douche bag," or did he only become one after his Wikipedia page described him as such?

Genesis 1:0