Mrs.

 When she heard the doorbell chime she

knew. She saw ribbons and gold buttons

and heard them say he died a hero.

They stood, flanked by plantation pillars.

Her eyes were perpetually glossy

and they stared into the past and future.

Surface tension kept them reflective,

as she sat dust-coated in lace filtered light.

So sad was she...the kind of misery

that makes one desperate for more sadness

as if it was a drug. She listened to the most

mournful songs, danced with death.

She hired the local painter, who quietly

watched her as he captured her grief

on canvas. She was statuesque, a glacier,

mouth faintly twitching and skin translucent.

He felt his brush sliding methodically.

As the paint grew thick she faded

while posing on crimson velvet. Her soul

leaked out, her breath a frigid breeze.

The artist knew that it was his best work,

and the most dangerous. For all who gazed

upon the woman in the painting were sucked

down and drowned in the abyss of her eyes.

The Last Minutes of the Zephyr...and Me

Shuddering.

Jarring.

I wake to the muffled concussions.

Why aren't there red lights flashing? Why isn't the alarm blaring?

I sit up and realize where I am. I'm still on the bridge. It all starts to come back.

Another muffled thud shakes the entire ship. This is not good. I really need my suit.

I had silenced the alarms after the first missile had hit. The klaxon of bells and shrill whines disabled me from thinking clearly.

Another shuddering wave ripples through the ship as I stand.

I sprint down the main shaft.

Thoom! The gravity goes out and I sail up and forward through the hatch I had aimed to hop through. I curl and slam my back into the top of the hatch, spinning wildly downward and forward.

My hands slap the gridded metal flooring of the passageway as I try to catch hold of it. I spin up and back from my efforts.

I lift my arms back and reach above and behind my head to protect it and see if I can gain purchase on something else.

Another ripple sends shockwaves flowing through the hull.

I grab hold of the top of the next hatchway and jerk down hard, propelling myself down the corridor.

One, two, three hatches to the right. I swing out my arm and grab hold of the lever for the open hatchway, swinging around and through.

Metal squeals around me as another shock envelops the ship.

There. On the left. I punch out the safety glass and slam my right palm onto the release button.

My suit bursts forth from its container as it expands into the null-G. I deftly slip my feet into the booties and quickly maneuver my arms into the sleeves.

Boom!

I zip the suit front quickly and snatch my helmet from its resting place.

Boom! Boom!

Two this time? DAMN! I have got to get to the gunnery!

I jam the helmet down over my head and slap the tabs into place with my gloved hands.

TSSSssssss. Oxygen and pressure flow into my suit as I turn and kick off gently from the wall toward the next hatch.

Tak Tak Tak. BOOM! Hybrid gunfire sprays can be heard as the next concussion rocks the vessel.

I grab the walls and thrust myself through the next hatchway flying straight for the lower half of the ship. Hands out I slap the sides of each passing hatchway to gain more momentum.

THooooom! The walls around me erupt in shattering, splintering metal and flame.

As I sail through the air the ship splits around me. I can hear the squeal of tearing metal and then it fades to silence as I watch.

The ship brakes apart and the pieces seem to float outward and away from me.

I watch. Dazed. Floating away. My ragged breathing the only sound.

Metal fragments sparkle like snowflakes as they catch the light, spiraling out into the universe.

Ship equipment spills out into the vacuum, each on its own path into oblivion.

I hear the soft sigh of air escaping my suit and then feel a searing pain in my calf.

I can only stare as I slowly tumble out into the universe.

The blackness seems to become more black.

The vacuum of space seems to have reached me at last.

The cold.

Black.

Nothing.

A Debt Settled

I glanced about the smoky room and stopped on the figure I came seeking. He was hunched over a wooden table with several others around him, playing a game of cards.

He was bedraggled like his companions. All I could see of him was his top hat and his worn and faded black overcoat as he looked down. He had a bottle of whiskey next to him with the top off, a small shot glass with the remnants of the last sip turning the bottom amber. Next to this was a tin cigarette tray full of ashes and remnants of rolling papers.

He tilted his head up from his cards laying them out on the scratched and worn tabletop and lifted his smoking cigarette from the tray. He looked directly at me. His sallow cheeks bearing salt and pepper whiskers. His greasy black hair hanging limp from under the tattered brim of his hat.

My eyes locked with his cold gray stare as he slowly placed the bent cigarette in the corner of his mouth, the other side curling up slightly into a smirk. His bushy eyebrows lifting slightly as a spark lit his gaze.

For how long we stared at each other I do not know. Time seemed to have slowed immeasurably. His hand slid slowly as if through smoky water to the table and fell there. Smoke from his cigarette plumed upward from his lips, obscuring his face slightly but not lessening the gleam in his blue gray eyes as we remained. Locked in a moment of time.

A bead of sweat formed and slipped slowly down the side of his face, becoming lost in the grizzled whiskers of his unkempt beard.

Two peals of thunder cracked through the dense air.

He stood with his right arm bent at the elbow, a gleaming metal gun in his ruddy brown hand. The barrel smoked in synchronicity with his cigarette.

His gray eyes widened ever so slightly as a deep red blossomed forth from his chest, coloring his sweat-stained shirt.

I looked down to see my gun falling from my hand and a crimson flow from my ribs down my side and to my pant legs.

I looked up, surprise on my face and saw his smirk once again. That sly curling of the corner of his mouth.

We both fell slowly to our knees, our gaze never wavering.

A fuzziness came about the edges of my vision then.

He fell forward, his arm reaching out aimlessly trying to catch on to something, the edge of the table, a chair, anything, but it moved too slowly. His finger too slack.

The room tipped before me. I felt my head thud onto the worn and dirtied floorboards.

Feet moved about me as I lay on my side and the darkness came from the edges of my vision. Marching inward. Closing me off from the world.

My mind found a few words then, before I was gone.

A life for a life.

Just.

Fair.

A debt finally settled.

Pete's Story. If you haven't read the first part, read that first.

The man's head whipped around. Jane struggled to see what Pete was doing. She could just see his face, his eyes wide with fear.

"And just what are you going to do about it, retard?" He pushed Jane's shoulders into the floor as he stood up. Jane saw Pete's eyes widen further as he began to shiver violently.

"I'm going to beat your idiot face in." The man growled as he started toward Pete. The man was half way through his last stride, pulling back his hand, and balling it into a fist when Pete yelled.

"NO!" Pete shouted as he tucked his face into his knees and hugged them tighter to his body, and the man was upon him. The sickening sound of fists on flesh was horrible. Jane watched in awe as the man delivered several vicious blows to Pete's head and shoulders.

Suddenly Pete's assailant was violently flung across the room as if he weighed nothing. The intruder smashed through the wall and stopped when he shattered the mirror over the bathroom sink. He slumped to the ground in a pile, clearly unconscious.

Jane sat up shaking and slowly tried to regain control of herself, adrenaline still pumping in her veins. The stranger lay face down on the cold tile of the bathroom floor. She spent a moment sitting on the floor trying to comprehend what had happened. Pete hadn't touched the man, rather than lash out he had tried to curl into a ball and hide in himself. But somehow the man had been flung across the room like the toy of an angry child.

Pete's Story

"That man thinks you're pretty, miss Jane."

She was used to being told she was attractive, but this indirect method struck her as odd. Jane was a young black woman, recently out of graduate school, and had never had trouble meeting guys. She looked at the large youth in puzzlement.

"How do you know that, Pete?"

"I can hear it."

"What? What do you mean you can hear it?"

"I can hear it!"

Asking for a better explanation from an eighteen year old with the mental capacity of an eight year old rarely yielded clear answers. Jane regarded the six foot seven adolescent as he sat across from her in the more than half empty cafe before proceeding. Pete looked more like a lineman for a professional football team than he did a teenage boy with a mental disability, large and well muscled underneath a small amount of the baby fat some teens carry into adulthood. His brown hair was just long enough to fall in his brown eyes. When he leaned over to take a bite of his muffin you could see the lines of a farmers tan at the base of his neck.

"What do you hear?"

"I hear his brain."

"You can't hear someone's brain." She scoffed.

This was a bad idea. Pete began to get angry at the sound of Jane's derision. His protests immediately drew the attention of other patrons.

"Okay! Okay! What can you hear from my brain?"

"You think I'm lying, but I'm not!"

People were beginning to stare. Jane needed to calm him down. She had only been working with Pete Jacobs for three weeks and hadn't yet had to face him in a state of agitation.

"Okay, Pete, I believe you. But can you show me again? Can you listen to my brain again?"

"Sure." he said, calming down a bit.

Jane immediately thought of something completely unrelated to anything in the cafe or the conversation they'd been having.

"Oh!" Pete said, excitedly, "I want nachos!"

Jane gave him a look of incredulity. She had been thinking of nachos, believing there was no way he could guess that.

"Miss Jane, are we going to get nachos for dinner?"

She was still not sure what to think.

"Yeah. Yeah, we can go get nachos."

On the drive from the cafe to the taquería Jane continued to test Pete's mind reading.

"Cheese cake. A fast car, it's red. An old lady, your mom, she's dead now. That's sad. June 18th, it's your birthday. A giraffe." He was never wrong. As soon as she jumped from one thought to another he could say what it was.

Suddenly Pete fell silent.

"That man who likes you is following us." He said as he looked out the passenger window of Jane's blue Corolla. The image of the man's face surfaced in her mind.

"Yes, that man."

"Perhaps it's just a coincidence, Pete." Jane said it mostly to calm herself.

"No. He wants to...he's thinking bad thoughts."

Jane's skin went clammy. She was, at this point, completely convinced that Pete could read minds. She wondered if she should ask Pete what kinds of thoughts.

"I said! Bad thoughts! He wants to hurt you! He wants you to cry! He wants..." Pete began to cry into his massive hands. What he was saying now had put her into a cold sweat and she could feel the vinyl of the steering wheel become slippery beneath her hands. She wasn't sure what to do.

Pete was weeping heavily into his hands, occasionally mumbling to himself, as he filled nearly the entire passenger side of Jane's two door Corolla. She began to consider her options. Try to escape this creep through side streets and traffic? Pull over in a crowded public place?

"Don't go home." It was the first coherent thing Pete had said in the five minutes since his crying had started. "He wants you to go home, don't go home Miss Jane."

"Ok, Pete. How bout we just go get those nachos?"

The nachos seemed to distract Pete rather well. He was calm all the way through the meal, and appeared to have forgotten all about the man from the cafe. Pete's return to normal behavior helped Jane to relax as well.

"Pete, can you hear that man's thoughts still?" She wanted to be sure they were safe.

"Which man?"

That was enough for Jane. After the meal Jane drove back to her apartment in the Sunset district of San Francisco, where she would wait with Pete for his parents to arrive. Jane said nothing of Pete's apparent mind reading abilities to his parents, but simply agreed to pick him up the next day at the normal time.

"What are we going to do today, Miss Jane?" But before she could answer he shouted, "OH! I love the zoo!" Jane thought that there was no way his parents could have not noticed how often Pete knew what you were going to say before you said it.

"Remind me not to play guessing games with you."

"But I always win those games!"

Jane couldn't help but laugh at that as she started her car towards the zoo. Unfortunately, their visit was cut short when the weather changed for the worse. Jane had begun ushering Pete toward the exit as soon as rain had started to fall, and was glad for that when the moment they were inside her car it began to come down in sheets.

"Don't worry, Pete. We'll just go to my apartment and play some games."

On the way there they stopped at Pete's request to get some ice cream. The rain had let up to a steady drizzle by the time they got to Jane's home and they rushed from the car up the stairs to the entry. Jane opened the door and let Pete in, hurrying in after him. As she closed and locked the door she felt the hair on her neck stand on end.

Suddenly Pete cried out in fear. Jane spun to see a man only slightly taller than her self, clothed in a black hooded sweatshirt and jeans, hit Pete over the head with the lamp that was usually on the small table next to her entryway. The body of the porcelain lamp shattered on Pete's large head and he crumpled to the ground. Jane screamed at the sight and looked up at the approaching stranger. She recognized his face from the day before. It was the same middle aged white man that Pete had pointed out at the cafe.

Panic stole her voice away as her assailant grabbed her roughly by her shirt and flung her to the ground in the hallway. Jane began to cry as she tried to get up and run to the bathroom, the only room with a lock on the door. By the time she had rolled over and gotten to her knees she felt the strangers hands grabbing her hair and the back of her shirt. He threw her again, this time onto the floor of the living room. The sudden violence of it all left Jane stunned. She felt cold, and could only watch in fear as the stocky, unshaven man advanced, a horrible look of excitement in his blue eyes.

Jane could hear her own short, fast breathing and the thudding of the mans work boots as he strode toward her. Whatever fear or shock had held her in place had let go and Jane sat up and tried to scramble backwards on all fours. The man quickly lunged forward, grabbing her ankle and pulling her back to the middle of the living room.

"Stupid nigger cunt." He spat the words and slapped Jane hard across the face.

Jane's hands covered her stinging face as she began to cry harder. She felt the man pin her legs beneath his own and tear open her shirt. When she tried to fight him off he pushed her hands away and slapped her again.

"You be a good slut and don't try that again." His voice was like broken glass and his breath smelled like cigarette smoke masked by mint chewing gum. "Or else I'll punch your fucking teeth down your nigger throat."

"You don't say bad things to her!" It was Pete. He was holding his knees, huddling as much as such a large person could, still in the entryway.

Just getting set up.

This will be where I post stories that I'm currently working on. Maybe some poetry. Please, feel free to lend a hand with editing and story problems. Also, feel free to link to your own blog if you have stories you're working on that you'd like some feedback or editing on.

Lates,

Ben