Issue #2 of Shock Totem is now out and available in finer bookstores all over America. You can also order it directly through Shock Totem’s website.

Here is the Table of Contents for issue #2 :

* To Be Titled: An editorial, by K. Allen Wood
* The Rat Burner, by Ricardo Bare
* Sole Survivor, by Kurt Newton
* The Spooky Stuff: A conversation with James Newman, by John Boden
* Sweepers, by Leslianne Wilder
* Rainbow Serpent, by Vincent Pendergast
* Strange Goods and Other Oddities (Reviews)
* Abominations: Hide the Sickness: An article by Mercedes M. Yardley
* Pretty Little Ghouls, by Cate Gardner
* Messages From Valerie Polichar, by Grá Linnaea & Sarah Dunn
* Return From Dust, by Nick Bronson
* Leave Me the Way I was Found, by Christian A. Dumais
* Upon My Return, by David Jack Bell
* Howling Through the Keyhole (Author Notes)

Those of you who’re interested, Leave Me the Way I was Found was originally meant to be in Cover Stories before the fine folks at Shock Totem bought it. It’s a short story I’m really, really proud of and I have enjoyed listening to those who’ve read it tell me how much it disturbed them.

I can’t wait to get a copy of the magazine to read the other stories.

This was originally meant to be for an anthology to be published next year. I had written other pieces for the anthology that explored horror movie and police drama cliches, and I thought it would be fun to apply the same thing to comic books. The word limit for the stories were 1000 words, and once I decided to do this story visually, the trick was trying to do this in less than 100 words, for the challenge of it.

If you read comic books, I think you’ll notice the little details (Kirby dots!) and recognize the story, one that’s been told a million times before.

This was originally meant to be for an anthology to be published next year. I had written other pieces for the anthology that explored horror movie and police drama cliches, and I thought it would be fun to apply the same thing to comic books. The word limit for the stories were 1000 words, and once I decided to do this story visually, the trick was trying to do this in less than 100 words, for the challenge of it.

If you read comic books, I think you’ll notice the little details (Kirby dots!) and recognize the story, one that’s been told a million times before.

This was originally meant to be for an anthology to be published next year. I had written other pieces for the anthology that explored horror movie and police drama cliches, and I thought it would be fun to apply the same thing to comic books. The word limit for the stories were 1000 words, and once I decided to do this story visually, the trick was trying to do this in less than 100 words, for the challenge of it.

If you read comic books, I think you’ll notice the little details (Kirby dots!) and recognize the story, one that’s been told a million times before.

This was originally meant to be for an anthology to be published next year. I had written other pieces for the anthology that explored horror movie and police drama cliches, and I thought it would be fun to apply the same thing to comic books. The word limit for the stories were 1000 words, and once I decided to do this story visually, the trick was trying to do this in less than 100 words, for the challenge of it.

If you read comic books, I think you’ll notice the little details (Kirby dots!) and recognize the story, one that’s been told a million times before.

This was originally meant to be for an anthology to be published next year. I had written other pieces for the anthology that explored horror movie and police drama cliches, and I thought it would be fun to apply the same thing to comic books. The word limit for the stories were 1000 words, and once I decided to do this story visually, the trick was trying to do this in less than 100 words, for the challenge of it.

If you read comic books, I think you’ll notice the little details (Kirby dots!) and recognize the story, one that’s been told a million times before.

Marianne and I were eating breakfast the morning after, just toast and orange juice. It was almost noon. We had about three hours of sleep between us. We weren’t tired though. We were outside in her backyard eating at the table by the pool.

Fall came like a ghost during the night. The trees were bare. Some of the leaves found their way into the pool and floated aimlessly from one wall to the next like empty boats. The sun was bashful above us, giggling and ducking behind the random cloud, leaving the echoes of shade. The breeze sharpened, played with Marianne’s hair and came to me. When I closed my eyes, I thought the wind was whispering something, like a secret from days past when the world was simple and gentle and smelled like sunflowers. There was a wind chime behind me.

The scenery revealed itself in pieces, as I became more awake. It felt like I was watching a painting come alive. I imagined myself staring over a painter’s shoulder and he was highlighting the scene with the new colors he created during the night. He said he named his infant colors with the names of former lovers. He splashed Isabella on the trees to my left and he gave the yard a hint of Penelope. He said he wouldn’t reveal Tiffany and Zuella until sunset. He stretched out his mustache and asked, “Do you see it?” I said that I didn’t and he huffed.

Marianne saw me frowning, but she kept eating her toast in silence. She looked like a gypsy, pretty and mystical, especially the way her hair floated around her, like she belonged with elves. I’m sure I looked like a bum. I didn’t bring a change of clothes and my shirt was wrinkled.

“I’m dying,” I said.

She smiled, as if to say, that’s nice.

“I’m serious.”

“I know you are.” She said it solemnly; her grin said otherwise.

“Last night,” I said, “it was nice.”

She nodded. “You were talking in your sleep.”

“Really?” I finished chewing. “What did I say?”

“Mostly mumbles.”

“Oh.”

She brought her glass of orange juice to her mouth and paused. “You still miss her.” As she sipped, she didn’t blink.

I looked down at my toast. A part of my dream came back to me. The visual was fuzzy, but the feeling was tangible. I closed my eyes and pretended that it was a long time ago, long enough that my mind wouldn’t know whether to process it as a memory or a dream. It would still be real, I knew that, it just wouldn’t feel real.

Marianne said something.

“What’s that?”

She said, “The pool. The leaves are moving funny.”

I looked over at the pool. It wasn’t until I stood up that I realized they weren’t leaves at all, but frogs. There were a few dozen of them, no bigger than my thumb. They were jerking their tiny arms and legs, sliding around the pool like tossed pennies.

“They must’ve wandered over from the swamp last night.” Marianne jumped from her chair with urgency. She opened the plastic manhole above the skimmer and glared. She ran over to the corner of the house and turned off the pump.

When the pump receded, a dark cloud of frogs poured out of the skimmer into the pool. The frogs slowly dispersed in their newfound ocean. Now there were about a couple hundred of them. They looked like green chubby babies. I never saw anything quite like that before; it was strangely adorable.

“Do you have a–” I started, but Marianne was already on it, scooping the frogs up with a net. She’d get as many as possible before walking to the back fence to drop them off at the edge of the swamp. It was such meticulous process; there were simply so many of them. She did it so carefully too, so thoughtfully, even though it was obvious that to touch one would repulse her; and yet, she was compelled to save them, despite herself. I watched her. Her nose was shriveled, her mouth closed tight, but her eyes were sympathetic and loving.

I found a white bucket by the lawn chairs and used it to catch as many frogs as I could. Most of the frogs reacted to my bucket by diving deeper into the water, too deep for my arms to reach. The ones I did catch were the floating couples that were too in love to notice me. The frogs were stubborn. They jumped and dove and squirmed and twisted; our slippery little children rebelled against us as best they could.

After nearly an hour, she said, “I think that’s it.”

“Looks like.”

We kept orbiting the pool to be sure. Marianne beamed with content, as if liberating the frogs had some kind of meditative quality that I overlooked. I thought about the frogs, jumping their baby jumps back to their home with their smiles that only other frogs know, with no understanding of why my friend and I had saved them. Did they even know they were being rescued or was it simply another part of their journey?

“That’s what we want, isn’t it?” I asked.

“What?”

“That.” I tried to laugh but it didn’t come out right. I walked to the edge of the pool and dropped to my hands and knees. I bowed and put my face into the water. It was cold. When I rose, the water drifted down my face and strolled down to my shirt.

She put her hand on my shoulder and slid her other hand across my cheek.

“I’m fine,” I said.

I pulled back, she moved forward.  “Don’t,” she said. “Now close your eyes.”

I shut my eyes. “It’s just water,” I said.

“It’s not the water I’m worried about,” she whispered. I felt her thumbs moving under my eyes. She pressed lightly. “Keep them closed–”

“I–”

“–and be quiet.”

The wind picked up and I heard the trees moving with it. It was like a long content sigh. Dried leaves scratched against the concrete. I could hear everything but her. It was like she no longer existed. I was concentrating harder when I felt her lips touch my forehead. The kiss was so soft I almost doubted it. She leaned my head back more. Her lips came down on my eyelids, the left followed leisurely by the right. These kisses were stronger but still gentle. I almost spoke. She seemed to sense this; a finger covered my lips. She lifted her finger and our lips touched. I didn’t move a muscle. I let her lips overcome my own, at first softly, then forcefully. Her breath was hot in my mouth. When she finally pulled back, I realized I wasn’t breathing. I heard her say, “Open them now.”

When I did open my eyes, it took a few seconds to adjust. I looked up at her. The sun was behind her head. She looked like a giant. In the sky behind her, Renee was blending with Natalie and turning into something new. I exhaled.

She leaned over and said, “When you breathe like that, you sound like the trees.”

- “Exodus” is a story from the book Empty Rooms Lonely Countries by Christian A. Dumais.

Like the story? Buy the book.

As far as I know, the house on Geneva Street is still there. Whether it still stands or not is irrelevant, because it still exists in my dreams, looking down at me as I approach with its dark windows, its archway frowning, its foundation absorbing my shadow.

My father used to live in it when he was a child. My aunt – my father’s sister – lived in the house when I was young. There are a lot of memories with the house. My memory blurs with my father’s. He’ll tell a story about something he did at the house when he was a child and I’ll think, that was me, wasn’t it? It was me who left pennies on the railroad that ran behind the house. It was me who rode the bicycle down the hill towards the railroad and hurt myself. It was me who woke when a train passed at midnight and wondered if a drifter would crawl through my open window.

The building next to the house is where the first carousels were built. Sometimes, when I played in the backyard, I could hear the music that the horses marched to in circles. The music made the winter air ambiguous and the summer air dreamlike. There was a little rose garden behind the house where I’m convinced I saw my first fairy, a girl with large orange Monarch wings, and she was collecting fallen rose petals to put in her book.

There was a lot of magic at the house on Geneva Street. It was something I could easily identify with. My hearing impairment allowed me to see life at a distance and magic sort of bloomed in the void in between. I was young enough to know that magic was good, but not old enough to understand there was such a thing as the bad kind of magic. I just knew that the house was a good house with a few bad corners. The corners were fuzzy and vague and intangible, and if you weren’t paying attention, you could get lost in them.

I remember my aunt cooking in the kitchen and telling me about a ghost that she once saw there. It was wandering in the living room at the front of the house. I avoided the living room for a while after that, but eventually my curiosity got the better of me. I really wanted to see a ghost. I thought of ghosts as imaginary friends that people could see. I wanted to talk to one. Maybe it would want to play with me.

There was one place in the house I didn’t like. When you went downstairs into the basement, there was a parlor if you turned left. It used to be a kitchen when my father was little, but my aunt had turned it into a salon. There was a large barber chair that would rise if you pushed down on the handle. Before the parlor, to the left of the doorway, between the stairway and the parlor wall, was a little closet. The doorway to the closet wasn’t exactly even, as if it were carved out, and instead of a door, there was a red curtain. The closet was tiny and there was usually only a broom and a mop in it. It looked like a room that shouldn’t be there, like a weed pushing its way out of a crack in the asphalt.

The first time I noticed the closet, I was exiting the parlor to go upstairs. My eyes caught something red and when I turned, I saw the curtain shifting suddenly, as if someone or something had closed it quickly. I stood there a minute just staring at that curtain. It looked like the kind of curtain you saw at a movie theater or a stage play. I thought to open the curtain but I ran upstairs instead.

My first dream with the closet started like the last memory, only when I looked at the curtain, there was a mime with his head sticking out of the curtain. His face was a perfect white and his eyes were huge and yellow. I could only see his right hand, also white, which held the curtain. He brought a long pale finger to his black lips, signaling me to be quiet. Then he brought the same finger forward and beckoned me to come. The finger moved back and forth mechanically, as if he were scratching the chin of some invisible creature.

Despite the impossibility of the situation, I made my way towards the curtain. The crime of any dream is its ability to make you do the things you know you shouldn’t do. With every step I made toward the curtain, his smile grew more and more, his lips stretching to impossible lengths, wrinkles folding over one another upon his cheeks. And when I made it to the curtain, I looked up at the mime. He was taller than I thought. He opened the curtain. The small closet was not there, instead there was only darkness. This didn’t bother me though. Instead, what began as a tickle in my brain and expanded into panic was my inability to see the mime’s body. I took a step back. The mime’s smile faltered, an involuntary gesture that made his face turn ghastly. His eyes turned to slits and darkened. His hand reaching out for me was the last thing I saw before waking.

I took the dream personally in the way that only children can. I never trusted the closet after that. Though I kept refusing to acknowledge it, I still felt myself drawn to it, like my tongue gravitates to a loose tooth. Whenever I passed it, my eyes would be fixed on the curtain. And while I was curious enough to approach the closet, there wasn’t enough courage in the world for me to open the curtain.

The closet was the first thing I can clearly remember hating.

I’m thousands of miles away from Geneva Street today, a continent and an ocean separates me from it, and yet, I’m only a step away from its shadow when I’m sleeping. In my all-too-frequent dreams, I’m wandering in the house on Geneva Street. Ghosts are floating all around me. The ghosts are harmless. We laugh together sometimes. I walk into the kitchen. I look to the door which leads to the basement. The ghosts tell me not to, but I never listen. I open the door and descend the small set of steps. If I go straight, I can walk out a door to the backyard where there’s sunshine and horses dancing in circles to music and fairies flirting with roses. I turn left instead, to the basement, and of course, the closet. Once I’m there, I pull back the curtain, because in my dreams curiosity is the same as courage. The closet is now replaced by another set of stairs leading downward into darkness. I follow the steps. It gets darker and darker.

The darkness gets thicker the farther I go. The absence of light becomes suffocating. The stairway feels endless. The air is hot. Eventually, there’s a light far below. The presence of light is the invitation for the noise to begin; scratching sounds usually followed by shrieks. I keep moving even though I know what’s going to happen next. When I reach the light, the source of the sounds will be revealed. I’ve seen this creature hundreds of times by now, and it hasn’t gotten any easier with time. Once I’m standing in front of it, the creature moves with the stealthy precision of an eel. The creature grins and opens its mouth as it moves closer. I can hear its breathing and when its blinks, the sound of its eyelids sliding across its yellow eyes suggest something juicy.

There are slight variations to this scene. Sometimes the creature isn’t in the light; instead it descends the stairs behind me. Sometimes, the creature isn’t there at all. In its place is a cardboard box of all the things I’ve lost in my life. Socks. Toys. Books. Odds and ends. I go through the box carefully. Each item I discover brings me closer and closer to the present. Finally, when the box is empty and all of my things sit on the floor, the creature is standing next to me – only he is in the shape of a man. He is the mime, but without his makeup. His skin is black as diesel. His eyes are still yellow above that same horrible grin. He has a long tail that taps the walls behind him. He picks up a watch or a tie or a lost memory that smells of alcohol. He sniffs it heavily, his yellow eyes rolling up in his head, before turning away and gesturing me to follow.

There’s this room in the distance. An open doorway with a light inside that flickers and moves back and forth, casting shadows that twitch and stretch all around me. There is someone in there. I can hear crying. Sometimes I don’t move, sometimes I take a few steps forward. If I get close enough to the room, the mime will stop and look at me with an expression bordering on pity, his grin nowhere to be found. Sometimes I think that if I enter the room, the dreams will finally end, and other times I think that if I enter the room, I’ll discover another set of stairs descending into more darkness.
There were birthday parties at the house on Geneva Street, slumber parties, games of Hide and Seek that went on forever, adventures at the railroad track, cloud gazing…but all these memories of sunshine and laughter are overshadowed by that closet in the basement and the creature that lives inside of it. My mind has transformed these beautiful memories into some kind of dark mythology.

Some nights when I wake up, I can’t tell where I am or when it is. I feel like I’ve been here before for something that hasn’t happened yet. If I pull it apart and decipher the details, it fades away in its own absurdity. Other nights, in that brief clarity between wake and sleep, it feels like it’s not a mystery at all; I just need to avoid the basement and walk outside into the sunlight instead. Perhaps the fairy will be waiting for me. Maybe she and I will have a laugh about all of this and ride the carousel until the dizziness and laughter wakes me up.

There was this woman from a few years back. I met her at this party. To be honest, I wasn’t sure how I got there. The house was massive. The people were all nice, but strangers. At one point, I went to find a bathroom. Each door I opened revealed a bedroom. Eventually, I came across a reading room. She was all alone, standing there like she was waiting for me, with an open book in her hand. She said she needed to get away from all those people, and before we knew it, we had spent the whole evening talking to one another. When we finally left the house, we learned that the party had ended hours before.

Months later, I ended up telling her about the dreams. I didn’t have a choice. It was dark and I could feel her next to me in bed. Her hand was stroking my face. My heart was still beating too fast. My throat still aching from the scream I carried with me when I woke. When I was done telling her about Geneva Street, I asked her what she thought it meant.

She didn’t say a word.

I wanted to tell her that I was afraid, that I was tired of being afraid of memories. I also wanted to tell her that I loved her even though I knew it wouldn’t be enough for us, that we were over before we even started. I had this brief image of one day opening the box and seeing her in there, and my eyes were overwhelmed with tears. I wanted to tell her so many things, but the water in my eyes made me feel stupid and weak, and the way she pushed closer and held me so tightly, like she was keeping me from falling, somehow had me feeling lonelier than I’ve ever felt. I thought to myself, I am here, but I am not here.

It was quiet for a few minutes. Her fingers traced the path of one of my tears to its end. I could feel her mouth trying to say something, but instead she let out a heavy sigh. She kissed my forehead again and again. This was when I realized she was crying too. I felt her feet touching mine, only it felt more like a hand.

Finally, she said, “Your life would’ve been so much simpler if you hadn’t found me in that room.”

- “Geneva Street” is a story from the book Empty Rooms Lonely Countries by Christian A. Dumais.

Above artwork created by N. Pendleton.

Like the story? Buy the book.

Want to hear a previous draft of “Geneva Street”?

Read the commentary for “Geneva Street” here

This concludes

This was in September.

I was playing the part of a successful writer, living in an obscure apartment in New Jersey, writing endlessly, waiting for all the words to die. She was playing the part of a brilliant artist, living in a skinny house in Georgetown, working passionately, waiting for her canvases to catch on fire. We were meeting because at this moment in the chronology it required that we meet and offer one another soundless inspiration; we were to be reciprocating muses. The set was a bar where the music was too loud and the beer was watered-down and cheap. We sipped our beers through our masks, read our lines through the eyeholes, and waited for the director, the one who disappeared behind the bar after he turned the camera on, to return and finally end this scene.

We played the scene so well, with such a precise grasp of our parts, that when it was eventually over hours later, my life seemed weak, as if it were suddenly running on fumes.

My memory provides her with no name; just another phantom that eventually becomes another obscure character for me to take advantage of in the middle of an abandoned night. As I write of her now, I see her like a drowned girl with pale, slender hands and eyes open, blackened abyss.

She spoke through the music about her life and about the other characters that impose upon her. Her stories seemed important to her and it showed from the way her red lips curved around the names of her past lovers, and the way her eyes paused at her memories. As she spoke, one heavy word upon another, I could feel the pull of her gravity, pulling me into her Drama.

I tried to listen, I really did, but the thought of becoming a part in someone else’s Drama made me feel a little nauseous. I wondered:

Is this what I truly seek? And if so, is this how I enter relationships?

Is it I who seeks the Dramas and not the Dramas seeking me?

Or am I Drama?

I kept drinking, which has been my convenient therapy for too many years.

It is sometimes best not to remain paused on such details; it is slow death, with the mind bleeding ideas into the reservoir of mental darkness. But I am fueled by this mental torment; it is usually through these twisted paths that I discover the smaller gems, the most important of revelations. Like a warrior standing upon a pile of corpses, discovering the virtue of life, I move steadily among the beasts and ghouls, learning the art of their inert language and the aptitude of nourishing the fear.

I pushed the thoughts away for the time being and maintained an indifferent focus on the conversation. I succumbed to the loneliness inside of me; the piece that seems to be inside all of us these days. The piece that I see in the faces all around me, eating silently at restaurants, staring up at the rainy skies, and turning away from their own reflections.

I admit my loneliness with ease, only it feels wrong, as if I am part of a horrendous fad. We have become a society of lonely actors dancing out of step to the music of follies.

I admire the person that sits upon that mountain all alone, with the fresh air being all the company he ever needs; it is something I can never be. Contentment, to me, is found in the same place where I get most of my turbulence: around people.

The masquerade ended before dawn. At this point, the words were harder to conjure up and I could feel a dream or two pushing their way out from behind my eyes. I remember walking away from her, after a kiss in a forgotten corner, thinking to never call the phone number she placed into my pocket. I believe she knew I wouldn’t.

Not because I was mean, but because I was selfish.

And because it was my part.

“Want another beer, Christian?”

“Sure.”

The Friday before Halloween, I find myself ridiculously drunk all over again. I realize this too late, as usual, so I am forced to stick it out. And while I wait, I figure I’ll get myself another drink…if Jenny ever decides to actually bring me one.

I am once again in DC, inside the same bar where I was last September. We are all here, meeting other actors and seeking the sort of generic redemption you get by being sucked off in the bathroom.

Halloween is this Sunday, but the dead were seen rising as early as this morning, clawing their way through the dirt of their lives in search of that second chance. I watched the people in the stores, trying on different faces and posing before the mirror, observing themselves carefully, and when they pulled the mask away, they seemed disappointed, as if the face underneath was to have changed in the process.

We know now that the mask is no longer adequate, that we need the life that comes with it. We want the experience of foreign pain and heavy duality; we want to explore the undiscovered countries in psychology. And why not? Because in our new lives, there will be misery and there will be blood, only it will be diffracted, and we will be able to step away from all of it when it becomes too much to bear.

For the weary freak, take off the mask and walk away; for the jaded lover, wait for the other to fall asleep; and for the introverted geek, change your handle or turn off the computer.

The initiative is simple: flee everything.

Even if it means yourself.

And in the process of understanding all of this new bullshit, we have done the impossible, like always.

We have corrupted a holiday as innocent as Halloween and turned it into something perverted and sad. Even the children don’t treat it with the enthusiasm as we did at their age. Once again our generation seems to be one small step ahead of a new generation without any sense of hope or faith. They no longer waste that precious second of screaming “Trick or treat” before getting their candy, and half of them don’t even bother with the costumes. As if they already recognize the absurdity of the day and can no longer appreciate the magic.

The Holidays as we knew them are all dead.

We started with Christmas and then moved onto the lesser ones. It took many years, but we finally managed to do it. Every year we extracted a little more of the charm and replaced it with superficiality, until finally days like Halloween or Christmas are as emotionally and spiritually hollow as a carved pumpkin. God has no place at Christmas; he is the irritating great-great grandfather who sits at the end of the dinner table, drunk and drooling: the kids all hate him and the parents just want him dead already.

The schisms have already begun to show and the new gods are waking…and they may be a little green, yes, perhaps even a bit reckless, but they are all you have.

And speaking of God, he is here, somewhere near the end of the bar. He was cut off about an hour ago for being too loud and for doing lewd things with his white beard. God sighs and creates a cold mug of beer for himself.

You cannot cut off God. It is unholy and usually leads to bad things…

Just ask the Egyptians and their first-borns.

Jenny is here with me, somewhere beyond the music and darkness, dancing with her eyes closed and a cigarette hanging from her lips. She remains in the distance, which makes sense. I can’t seem to read her tonight: she is living among contradictions and obscure dreams.

Not unlike me, searching contradictorily for both true love and empty fucks.

Jenny approaches: “Beer?”

“Sure…again.”

“I’ll be right back.”

And Jenny plays with my head again, disappearing, never to return with a beer for me. What did I do to warrant such cruelty? Jenny leaves me with her friend, Anne, who wants to be left alone with me as much as she wants to be left alone dressed like an altar boy with a drunk priest. “Oedipus never had it this bad. Shit, he was sober and look what happened to him…”

Anne looks at me with a vacant expression. “What are you saying?”

My mouth suddenly feels dry. “Nothing.”

“You’re really weird.”

I do not know how to respond to that anymore. I used to laugh at the expression, but now I hear it so often that it is beginning to scrape at me, bullying me to become insecure. What exactly is it about me that compels everyone to say that to me?

I decide to get a beer myself.

On the way, I accidentally make eye contact with God. I decide to steer clear of him, but as the bartender hands me my beer, God is suddenly right next to me. “I’ll pay for this one,” he says.

He slouches over a bit on his stool and tells me that out of all of his inventions, his favorite is blueberries. “Delicious, absolutely delicious.” He owns a boyish charm that I normally would find appealing, but with God, it comes across like another mask. God catches my thoughts: “You think that this is a mask?”

“Yes,” I tell him. “I think that it’s a mask, just like the one I’m wearing.”

“Hmm, well, it’s Halloween, after all.” He smiles weakly.

“The day we all get to be someone else.”

God pauses. “Most of us anyway.”

I decide to change the subject because I am not in the mood to listen to God’s problems. I remember a fortune I received once from a fortune cookie, something about God giving me a face and I make another. I ask God what it meant.

He finishes his beer and widens his eyes, jerking back his head, as if he were feigning surprise. “I’m not too sure what that means.” And then he creates another beer for the both of us. “But you don’t really care what I think.” He turns away and his voice weakens. “Nobody does…”

“I don’t think I’m the person you should be talking to.” I pick up my fresh beer. “Thanks for the beer though.”

I see Jenny across the way and I step towards her when the hand of God touches my shoulder.

I turn to a face that is like every face I have ever seen, a face that is scarred with the burden of loneliness, with eyes that should be worlds in themselves, only they have settled on being sad provinces instead. And this was no mask. And he said, “I’m in my final days, Christian.”

I think of something polite to say, something positive, but I know that would only be another mask. I look into his eyes and I say, “Aren’t we all?”

Jenny tells me she is going to stay after closing, leaving me to fend for myself in a city I hardly know. She gives me the key to her house and tells me she needs some time alone, but I don’t quite believe her. Earlier, after I walked Anne to her car, I returned to the bar I see Jenny making out with God on the dance floor.

I suppose I have seen worst things in my life. Once, in a bar in Pittsburgh, I was convinced that I was gang raped by a bunch of little leprechauns. So, seeing Jenny locking tongues with God seemed pretty tame by comparison. And besides, it really wasn’t Jenny, but Jenny wearing a mask, and it really wasn’t God, but God wearing a mask…just two more actors playing their parts. It all seems oddly appropriate in a biblical sense.

Whatever it was, whatever it meant, it would give me plenty to think about on the way home.

I make it back to Jenny’s house inside one of those blurs that is disturbing upon reflection the next day, in time to pass out on her couch. I do remember talking to the taxi driver about something important and I remember looking out the window at the city, glowing in orange light, with people in masks fading away into the shadows. There were drunks dancing all around with wide steps and swaying heads, and there were tiny gremlins surrounding all of them, waiting for one to pass out.

I don’t know which one of me had these thoughts and these memories, I don’t know which one of me opened the door for Jenny when she finally came home, or which one of me woke up the following morning; I can’t seem to keep track of me anymore.

And with all of this in mind, for the next forty-eight hours or so, I know that we can afford to lose everything, if that is what we truly want; we can wear as many masks and be as many people as we possibly want to be.

But come Monday, when Halloween has passed, what excuse will we have then?

You have been reading “Masks”, written by Christian A. Dumais in November of 1999.

Commentary to come.