Mask

Shane met Jake on a stool at the Pines. Ritzy motel, rat hole bar. Rat hole because oddly it mainly catered to the people who circled around the ones who actually paid for the opportunity to stay in a room. Cabbies, porters, janitors, they came because they got a discount for working there, or were friends with the right person who was in the cases of Shane and Jake.

Shane patted Jake on the back as he sat down.

Jake was well into a deep glass, and from the smell something harsh. He flinched at the gesture. Shane frowned. "You OK man?"

Jake looked around, and seeing no one nearby, "I met, I met this fare, she's staying in room 205? I hit it off with her from the airport right away, or she was into slumming or something. It's going good, I'm flirting, she asks me to carry her bags up to her room right?"

He emptied his glass with a long draw. "So things are going good, like the second I get in the room she closes the door behind us and grabs my ass. One thing leads yadda, yadda..." He shuddered.

"She was on top, and I did that thing, drives women crazy, I reach up, pull her hair from the back..."

He shuddered, and tried to find more booze in his cup.

"Her face."

"Her face pulled back too."

Shane barked a laugh. "Jesus, I hope she sues that surgeon..." he began, and saw Jake's face.

"Wasn't a fucked up face lift, it was a mask. I, I pulled, and her face went tight and I could... I could see under it. She had scales. Like a fucking lizard."

He took Shane's glass, the latter unresponsive to his action.

"Her eyes, they just fucking lit up, like, like pale yellow fire. She threw me a-against the wall, and then, then she jumped - It's a big room, the Ambassador suite you know, she threw me all the way across bedroom - she jumped all the way over to me from the bed."

"And she's hissing, I'm thinking, 'I'm dead, I died, and I'm in hell and I just fucked a devil.' Then she smiled."

"'Who'd believe you?' she said, turned away, then said, 'I'd leave if I were you' without giving me another look. Didn't have to tell me twice."

Fractal

What drives us; we creators, we artists? To be first. To be at the forefront. To push beyond what already is and see nothing in our way. We lunge forward at the infinite last step towards the ribbon always just out of reach, pressing our faces against the boundary of knowledge and expression, breaking it, and seeing virgin land untouched by man. The untouched forest and field, the unreached peak, the victor of muscle of sinew; these pale in comparison to the limitless reaches of our minds.

However, this I do not know; why do all humans strive for such a thing? Why do we press on to be where none have gone before? It is not for contest or conquest; these are easily sated in other ways.

The first 100, part one

What is it that brings a reader into a work of fiction? I am curious and bored, so here are the first one hundred words of a few selected works.

I begin with what is often called the first great American novel, Moby Dick.

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago--never mind how long precisely--having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my

Oops, how dare someone write an entire novel in first person perspective; what arrogance to flaunt writing convention by doing so. However, the opening here shows the focus of the writing on the protagonist by describing the feelings of Ishmael as to why he wants to chase whales despite the dangers he already begins to enumerate.

"I want to see the world," he says. Thus the Hero's Journey is begun by a Call to Action from within, though more a call to avoid a lack of action.

Transposed

by Ryon Moody

The man sitting behind the desk pulled back on the rusty ball in the Newton's pendulum resting atop piles of old invoices and various other documents and let it go. The clicking of the rusty metal balls filled the empty air. "So," he said in a thick Russian accent, "you have requsite funds?"

I nodded and handed him a folder filled with bearer bonds. He yanked it out of my hands and flipped through it, his smile growing bigger as he perused each sheaf of paper in turn. "Is lot of money. You come by this legally?" He looked up at me and raised an eyebrow as the broad smile turned into frown.

"That's none of your business," I said, leaning back in the uncomfortable chair he'd sat me in, slowly rolling my cane back and forth across the thigh of my good leg, the one that could still feel. The other was a mass of dead nerve endings from a car accident a decade ago. Too long ago to still be a worthless piece of inert flesh that I had to drag with me everywhere I went.

His grin returned as quickly as it had vanished accompanied by a barking, window rattling laugh. "You are new to this," he said tossing the folder into pile on the desktop and, not looking to see where it landed, knocked over a coffee stained ceramic mug.

I returned his grin and thought about the other fifteen folders with an equal number or greater bearer bonds. Not that I'd be able to get at them but my twenty-year-old mistress would, and after putting up with a wrinkly old man heaving on top of her for the last five years, it seemed a fitting payout.

"Well, this is a delicate operation, as you are aware," he said, snatching up the folder, and turning, tossing it into a drawer marked with incomprehensible Cyrillic characters in a rusty, olive-drab file cabinet behind him. "Come," he said standing and knocking still more papers off the desk, "I will introduce you to Sergei." He patted me on my shoulder as he shut the door with a fractured window behind us. The ceiling of the hallway sagged with rot and mildew, and the stained concrete walls were cracked. A rat scurried underfoot as we turned a corner, stopping to chitter at us for a moment then going on its way beneath a rotted staircase. I held a hankerchief to my nose as the smell of dessication and standing water grew stronger.

"I must warn you," he said as he led me down the staircase, my hand holding his meaty shoulder for balance. "Sergei does not meet with many people. Please, ignore his rudeness."

A large, bulging metal port hole barely higher than my head awaited us at the base of the rickety stairs. Crammed into a space obviously designed for a much thinner door, it barely swung a foot before it struck the laast step of the staircase. Ivan struggled to fit himself between the wall and the thick plate of the door. I ducked under the low frame and followed him.

This new area, to me at least as Ivan seemed to have no trouble traversing the blackness, was unlit; the clack of my dress shoes on the metal grating echoed off far surfaces and I nearly lost my balance as the end of my cane slipped into one of the holes. The lights came on. I squinted as my vision adjusted to the sudden brilliance, and it returned to show me Ivan standing next to a gaunt man with a week's worth of stubble wearing a oiled-stained labcoat. He stared at me with his arms crossed and said nothing. Ivan patted him on the back hard, knocking him forward and not doing his temperment any favors as the thin man reaimed his glower from me to his boistrous compatriot.

"Sergei is best student of Moscow University," Ivan said, not looking to see his friends glare. "He is best mind in world for quantum mechanics. This transposition machine, everything you see, built with his own two hands. He won't let anyone else touch it. Brilliant mind." He talks with fourishes of his hands and body, looking for all the world like a fat ballet dancer in a cheap, brown suit.

"But university not pay very well. So he comes to me, his close friend, while I am in business school. I tell him, 'Sergei, you have a creation that could help change the world.' He tells me, 'Ivan, I just want to live in a big house instead of loft above foul smelling butcher shop.' I tell him, 'Alright, tell me how we can use your ideas." He smiles and clapped his hands together.

"Must we go through this with every client?" Sergei said, crossing his arms. "It is embarrassing."

"Shush," Ivan said glancing at Segei, then turning back to me, "He is modest. It is important for you, the client, to realize the skill and genius that is before you in this room. Otherwise, how could you possibly believe us when we tell you that you will be removed from this time and returned to a better one?"

"It's becoming more difficult the longer you go on," I said. "Perhaps the man who understands it should tell me about it."

Sergei actually cracked a smile for the briefest moment. "It is simple," he said. "We induce the quantum state of your mind to replace the state of your mind from a previous time."

"That is all then," Ivan said, his forehead wrinkling above narrowed eyes. "If you are more concerned with haste, then we shall begin."

They led me across the metal grating to a small chamber, a bathysphere-like bulging sphere dangling from the ceiling of the room by way of thick, musclar metal cables encircled with a multitudes of colored wires. Ivan patted me hard on the back once more. I turned to him and smiled, taking his hand and gripping it with both of mine until his knuckles turned white and his face blanched.

"Don't do that," I said.

He nodded with a brisk downward jerk of his chin, and I returned his hand to him. "Are you ready?" he said.

"Yes."

"Then you will need to remove your clothing for the procedure," Ivan said rubbing his swelling hand.

"Please, Mr. Jameson, this way," Sergei said, finally deigning to speak to me. "We have a small area for you to undress in near the chamber. You will of course need to remove your watch as well." He gestured towards a standing curtain divider nearby as he pretended not to notice my platinum Rolex.

I nodded and ignored his hungry look. If all went well, it wouldn't matter if he stole my watch, and if things went wrong... well, I would still be beyond caring. Behind the curtain was a metal folding chair, a robe draped over the divider, and nothing else. With a shrug, I undressed and laid everything on the chair. Covering myself with the robe despite having to balance on my one good leg while, I returned to my new-found friends. Sergei ignored me, his eyes focused on a small, cracked iPad. His face flickered from the light of the screen as his fingers swished this way and that.

"One last time, are you sure about this?" Ivan said putting his hand on my shoulder.

"Yes," I said.

"Good," he said, and jammed a needle into my neck.

~~~~

"Brian?" My sister, who had been dead for ten years and sixty-five when she did so, looked down at me. I felt grass on my neck and could smell the silage from the farms that had surrounded the small town in Northwest Ohio in which I'd been born and spent the first twenty years of my life. Angie's pigtails brushed my face and I batted them away.

"He's fine, he just got hit in the head with a frisbee," Brad said. My eyes opened wider. Though the Russians might have been able to find out about my sister, I felt certain they wouldn't have found out about my childhood friend Bradley. He had died--

"What year is it?" I asked, then felt my throat with surprise at my juvenille voice. Instead of the jowls and wringkles of an old man, there was taunt skin. I sat up quickly. Brad and Angie were crouched in the tall grass beside me, Brad in overalls and bare chested, Angie in summer shorts and a with most of the buttons undone which I know Mom would have killed her for wearing that way if Mom had ever seen it.

It had been (or was) the day after my... thirteenth birthday? Yes, definitely, if Angie had started wearing her shirt like that around Brad. She was a year older than me, but only six months older than Brad. I had been riding my bike down the side of the resevoir after Angie had dared Brad and I, and I had wiped out hard, flipping through the air after hitting a large rock hidden by the thick, green grass.

"1996 dumbass," Angie said as she poked my face with a long blade of grass. "You don't have nothing to get hurt up there, quit pretending."

"Up yours," I said swatting it away. I tried to remember when Brad had died, and how.

"That was frigging hilarious man, like, wham, you were flipping and shit," Brad said, brushing off his knees as he stood up. I got to my feet dusting off my baggy jean shorts. He was taller than me by a good inch or two, which was funny to me because when I'd gotten measured for my last suit I'd been six feet even and the last mark in the treehouse we all played in with his name on it was a good three inches shy of my adult chin.

Angie cocked her head to one side and looked at me, though keeping Brad in her line of sight. Her brown pigtails swayed ever so slightly in the breeze. "Brian? You OK?" She frowned a little.

"I'm fine," I said. I rubbed my eyes clear. I hadn't seen her for six years when I got the phone call that she had died in her sleep. Her grandson had called my office and told my secretary "to tell the old bastard that his sister was dead", then hung up before she could transfer the call to my phone. I probably wouldn't have answered it anyhow.

"Too bad," she said. She took Brad's arm and pulled him down the hill towards our home. Our house lay a few hundred yards from the resevoir, in the middle of a swaying, emerald corn field. I saw my Mother waiting on the porch for us, and could just barely hear her calling. Angie always did have good ears. Then again, Brad always took suppers at our house if he could.

How had he died?

He tripped a little running down the hill with my sister, laughing as he ran, his blonde hair a waving mess of greasy tangles. What my sister had ever seen in Brad was unfathomable; maybe it was just that he was there, reasonably handsome and a friend. As they reached the bottom of the slope, she pulled away from Brad and tugged her shirt down over her belly.

I was hungry, and picked up my pace. I knew Mom was cooking something good.

Would be cooking something good.

It was leftovers from my birthday supper yesterday, chicken pot pie, and the remains of a store-bought sheetcake. I knew before I got to the door of the house. There was something else I was trying to remember as well, something Ivan had warned me about. I shook my head and concetrated as I sat down at the round pine dinner table in the kitchen of our family's ranch house. My father had built the table before I'd been born, and it bore the scratches and dents of hundreds of meals. Brad and Angie were sitting opposite each other and pretending to study the food in the center of the table.

Dad sat down with a thump and began eating which signaled to the rest of us to dig in, but Mom my Mother clicked her tongue and cleared her throat. He stopped, removed his black-formerly-green John Deere ballcap and resumed. Angie and Brad shared a smirk.

I sat and ate quietly. Something was nagging at me, something I had forgotten to do. Something about Brad. Him and Angie kicked at each other under the table. I watched him eat, and I noticed the bruise on his upper arm. I guess he'd gotten it today or yesterday because it was a fresh one. Probably today going down the hill, but it was a funny thing for that since it went all the way around his bicep like somebody had grabbed him real hard.

For all her manners, Mom finished first despite having a good sized portion on her plate, and began clearign the table without a word, occasionally glancing at Brad. He was unaware of her watching him for he was fixated on Angie. She had a routine with the chicken pot pie, first digging the filling out from under the crust, scooping under the crust with her fork, retrieving every little bit of carrots and chicken and corn; then eating the glistening yellow crust itself, the buttery shell flaky and glistening with egg glaze [?]. Brad tried to copy her method, but only managed to mangle his beyond recognition.

I simply dug in, eating without abandon, scraping my plate clean. "Brian Jameson," my said putting her hands on her hips. I stopped licking the plate for a second.

"What?" I said.

"You know what," she said. Angie laughed.

"You did too," I said, flicking some food at her, and Brad for good measure.

I needed to remember when Brad died. Why did I think he was going to die? Ivan had warned me about the transposition occasionally failing to fully take. I'd have memory loss, or more accurately, memory loss regarding my transposed waves.

Who was Ivan? What were transposed waves?

I was on the floor of the kitchen, my parents standing over me.

"Geez, he passed out again?" Angie said, resting her chin on her hands.

"Again? When were you planning on telling me this young lady?" Mom said. She had her hand on my forehead.

"I'm OK mom, let me up," I said climbing to my feet.

Is it fiction?

They're made of meat.

It breaks every rule I've learned in my short fiction class so far. My teacher probably wouldn't even call it fiction since it's just dialog with no attribution between what the reader has to assume is two people.

So what? What is the purpose of fiction? To bring forth emotion? To enlighten? To merely entertain?

I Got a Car To Sell You

By Ryon Moody

Toby walked down the stairs, tripped on the bottom step, and broke the heel of his last pair of "real" cowboy boots. "Shit," he said as he stumbled out to the waiting furniture truck, down a shoe. He hopped on one foot as the noon-day sun beating down on him and the pavement and flopped down on the rust-eaten running board to survey the damage. The well-worn heel had snapped clean off from the tan boot, and he spit out some unfinished gum in disgust.

"Dammit," he said.

Stacy had given him these, at least he thought it'd been Stacy. The blur of selling ten cars a day and running on a bump for breakfast and lunch back then kind of made things fuzzy. He turned the ostrich-skin boots over in his hand and saw the name "Stace" and a heart cut in the arch.

"Solves that mystery," he said to himself.

"What's that gabacho?" Ricky was waiting in the passenger seat, a Spanish romance novel perched on his ample belly.

"Busted my boot," Toby said, tossing the broken shoe behind the bench seat.

"So what you want me to do Chips?" Ricky said. "Give you a hug?"

"Let's go," Toby said, scowling as he slammed the door.

He started up and drove the truck out from in front of the ratty apartment building with a squeal of rubber and bumped over a curb that had been run over by a thousand trucks. They joined the flow of trucks heading South towards Nogales. Ricky said nothing as they sped along the highway, the chairs in the back of the truck softly rattling.

"Hey," Toby said after thirty minutes of silence from the both of them, "you ask your brother about that loan?"

"Nah," Ricky said. "You got no collateral so why bother?"

"I figured."

"You really want to open a furniture store? After driving for all these years?"

Toby said nothing. Ricky shrugged and turned back to his book. Toby thought about getting up in the morning and, instead of going out and trying to start some shit-box panel truck just to jump on the road and dodge traffic for hours on end, starting up a lathe and carefully turning a piece of wood into a graceful table leg.

The road beneath the truck was a clean-cut saw on wood, vibrating his hands on the steering wheel.

Bottle

by Ryon Moody

So what is a stand-up guy like myself doing in a holding cell, politely avoiding the come-hither looks from a large bearded guy wearing oil-stained overalls and probably three day old underwear; sitting on a greasy wooden bench varnished the last time somebody threw up and just kinda wiped it down. Sitting and hoping my brother Blake comes through with the five bills for my bail?

I guess even if I don't want to think about it, it comes down to my car. 1983 Z28 Camaro. My baby. No, not you dude. I ain't calling you baby.

Yeah. It's a beauty. This one time I pulled up to a bus stop, like near a trailer park, so you know the girls there are all over a dude in a Camaro right? Anyhow, I roll up and there are these high school girls sitting there, and I know they're digging me because their pointing and laughing at the dork next to me in his beemer.

I rev the engine, push it up over five grand, then drop it into gear and took off. Left like a quarter mile of rubber. That was so frigging sweet.

Right, right, last night. Heh. So my brother Blake called me up. Woke me up the fucker, before noon even.

"Jay Oh Bee," he shouted into my ear. He calls me Jay because that's my name, and adds the "Oh Bee" because I ain't had one since I got on disability. He's a dick but he's usually holding so whatever.

"What's up brother?" I mumbled as I looked over to the other side of the bed. Guess that threesome with Gillian and Pamela, the Anderson sisters, had been a dream.

"Your unemployment." Like I said, a dick.

"What you wake me up for man?" I said.

"Party over hee-ahh! Tonight, my place. Dave got some old shitty movies and I got two cases to kill. Gonna make a Hamburger Hill behind the sofa."

So the day goes by. Go back to sleep, get up around one, get started on my pre-game by four, and over to Blake's by eleven. He said ten, but fuck him, he woke me up too early. We got going on the beer and the movies.

Somewhere in the middle of some kung-fu flick, I heard some peeling out and a screaming engine. I was curious, and a little bored with the whole shitty movie thing, so I got up and stumbled to the balcony where Dave was smoking a bowl.

We both see these headlights come tear-ass down the street and squeal around the corner down the steet from Blake's place. Now this was gonna get good we knew because the cops know people fly down this side street. Sure enough, there was one sitting just across from the apartment building. So the car comes flying down the street, and two things happen. The cop flicks his lights and the dude in the car tries to slow down. Problem was, he couldn't as fast as he was going and keep on the road.

He slammed right into my car.

I'm speechless. Dave's over there doing the mouth cover thing and saying "oh shit" over and over again. The cop has gotten out; he's walking over. The dude is out of his car, trying to make some excuse, and I'm standing there with a beer in my hand.

I forgot about everything, just saw that dude looking at my car, its crumpled bumper, the insurance deductable I couldn't cover floating before my eyes. I wind up, drunk logic taking its course, and as Dave is reaching to stop me I flung the bottle as hard as I could.

It arced through the air slowly because of booze time and, seeing the way it was moving, my realizing I'd over-thrown it. The cop was in mid stride, thumbs casually in his Sam Brown belt in that cop way, and happened to be looking up just at that moment to see if any witnesses might have seen what happened to corroborate his account. Which meant the nearly-full bottle caught him right smack in the face.

He went down like a sack of cement just as his partner happened to get out of the car. I didn't hink they wasted two dudes on one speed trap, but there you go. He wasn't too happy about it, since the dude who'd hit my car realized he was scot free the moment the cop hit the ground and jumped in his car and ran off. The second cop started screaming at us, and Dave, the eternal asshole, just about threw me off the balcony. Still owe that prick a punch in the face for fucking holding me on the floor until the cop got upstairs.

So here I am. Stuck in jail. That's my story, and I hope I never see that car again.

Grandfather's travails

On an unknown-to-me day during World War II, on some unnamed island in the Pacific, my grandfather, a member of the USMC, had gotten into trouble once again. Whether it was for using an unexploded Japanese bomb to make a swimming pool and blowing out the windows of the officers mess or something else I don't know. All I know is my Grandfather Moody, my father's side, was on some tropical island that is probably a resort now was tasked with carrying part of the M2 squad machine gun.

Now, the M2 was a heavy fucking piece of equipment. I know, I've held part of a modern, lighter version version in my lap, and after just a few minutes of it simply sitting there it seemed like the weight was crushing my balls. Whether my grandfather had the receiver or the barrel, who knows, maybe he was carrying the whole damn thing between him and another guy since that's how I remember my father telling me this story.

Perhaps he'd pissed someone off more than my father was aware since a standard sniper tactic is to shoot whomever is carrying a platoon's heavy machine gun. Regardless him and the other guy were getting farther and farther behind their platoon. Islands in the South Pacific are volcanic, with hillocks and jutting geology and rises and valleys and a general disdain for flatness.

So my grandfather and the other man came over a rise with their load, and the entire platoon had been wiped out in an ambush. Whether this means to a man, or reduced to numerous men who were at that point retreating, I don't know. All I know is, my grandfather's penchant for finding whatever mischief he could get into at any time he wasn't tasked with direct combat most likely saved his life, and my father's, and therefor mine.