“You’re in therapy? Together? You’ve been together how long?”
“Our relationship has been fast, yes. It’s been very intense. But it feels right.” His eyes shine with certainty as he picks up — I shudder with gratitude — his very own travel mug.
He drinks the tea down in a long, glorious slurp.
“Does she know about me?” Shaila asks.
“She does not.”
She should be relieved but instead she looks hurt.
“But she’ll stay with me if they put me away. She’s promised.” That’s when he peers into the mug. “Holy shit,” he says. He gasps and gags.
Shaila watches him. She doesn’t know.
“You put something in here,” he says. “What did you do?” He bends over and tries to vomit but can’t.
“What are you talking about?”
“You did this!” He lunges at her now, grabs her by the throat. I leap from the fridge, shrieking. Shaila lifts a boot and kicks him in the chest. He falls to the ground.
I run at him. I will tear him apart. He looks down, sees me, and squeals. He leaps onto the couch and scurries behind Shaila, who is holding her throat, gagging for air. “Run,” she croaks. And I do.
I am nowhere now. And everywhere. Isn’t that the rodent’s way?
“Look,” she says, her voice hoarse. I can no longer see her. “Give me your mug. I’ll drink it myself. There’s nothing in there.” I know the sound of Shaila sipping. That’s how well I know her. I hear that sound.
“Shaila,” Henry says. Rats know the rasp of death. We know it in our bones.
I step out of my hiding place and watch Henry, who looks so very sorry now.
“Shaila,” he says again, and collapses to the floor. Shaila gapes at him, picks up the travel mug, and drops it like it’s scalded her.
When she sees me, she knows. “You. What did you do?” Her eyes grow wide.
I must hurry now. I run to the fridge, leap to the top, not even noticing the height, and I push the bag of strychnine to its edge.
She looks at it, looks at me, then holds her throat. “Oh god,” she says. She runs from the house.
“Wait!” I run out after her.
The ambulance finds Shaila rolled into a ball on the sidewalk. She’s managed to stumble half a block before falling to her knees. They load her onto a stretcher. They do not see me. “Lothlorien,” she gasps as they lift her aboard. But I’m too slow. The ambulance doors slam shut, and I have to let her go. It’s for the best, I think. A hospital is no place for a rat.
Eventually, they find Henry, dead on the floor of the in-law. A quiet graduate student, clothes in his closet, a typically bare fridge, an unfinished thesis, a clear suicide. Both houses are empty now. Even the mice are gone. Shaila will know to find me here, and so I wait among my hardwood floors, my Spanish tiles, my granite countertops.
But a rat needs a home. My homing instinct is strong, though I won’t go back to my family. Mine didn’t even bother naming me. I was standard issue Rattus norvegicus until the day I met Shaila. I left home because my family lived high up in the rafters of the church and I, with my vertigo, couldn’t move or think or breathe up there. It’s a wonder I managed to leave at all. It was my sister who led me, eyes closed, mouth clamped around her tail, from our rafter down a drainage pipe and onto safe ground. On the ground, I felt like myself, for maybe the first time. On the ground, I could move, I could run, I could leave.
Why do people leave the homes they know? Sometimes, simply to live.
Shaila is my home now. Without her, I am a refugee. Four hundred beats a minute, and I count every one. In the main house, I find a hole so dark and tight a human wouldn’t know it existed. It is my own penitential cave, in which I wait for her, in which I repeat to myself the only thought possible: She is alive. It was only a sip. Shaila will be back for me soon.
Every Man and Every Woman Is a Star
by Nick Mamatas
Ho Chi Minh Park
My stalkers come in two flavors — communists and occultists. The former, despite the millions dead at their feet, are gormless fetishists. The latter, though theurgy is nothing but applied dishonesty, they are the dangerous ones. I know; in my time I was both a revolutionary socialist and a ritual magician. Then, after my mentor was murdered, I had to kill a few people, my own father included, in self-defense. I went to prison. I had some time to think. Some crackpot wrote a true crime book about me, entitled, Love Is the Law: Patricide, Power, and Perversion on Long Island. It was a best seller for a season, and well-creased mass market paperbacks can still be found in Moe’s, Pegasus, and the shadier sort of used bookstores beloved by the creeps who like to follow me around. There used to be some fan websites about me, on Geocities and Angelfire, with black backgrounds and fonts that dripped red. But I got old, moved to California, had a kid, and started a new life. Now only the hard-core remain.
I’ve found that the best defense is a good offense. I teach yoga, in the park. The aging Reds of Berkeley still call it Ho Chi Minh Park, but the occultists, who are middle-class squares and generally out-of-towners as well, know it as Willard. I lead a group through four basic asanas as described in “Liber E vel Exercitiorum.” If you threw a stick in this town and managed to miss a frozen yogurt shop, you’d hit a yoga studio, and one staffed by young lithe blondes with serious ponytails and welcoming smiles. There are only three reasons to come to my class instead — that it’s free, and it’s me, are the exoteric reasons.
One of my students attends faithfully, for the esoteric reason. She sweats, she grinds her teeth, every morning. Tense every muscle and be still. She gets off on that. When I finally asked her for her name — Lindsey — she nearly orgasmed on the spot, her white-girl dreadlocks shivering, thanks to the sheer attention I paid her.
It was just me and her the morning of the Hayward quake. Even the big redwoods in the northeast corner of the park started to sway, and the chain-link fences of the nearby tennis courts sang. Lindsey opened her eyes, let an undisciplined gasp escape. I glared at her. Stay still. A car roared up Hillegass Avenue, swaying more wildly than it needed to; the driver honked the horn as a telephone wire snapped and whipped the asphalt. The lawn chairs we used for our first asana, The God, tipped over as well.
“How long...?” Lindsey asked through gritted teeth. I found myself focusing on my Muladhara chakra, and imagined my coccyx sinking into the earth, a bone drill in black dirt. Lindsey couldn’t hold her posture anymore and fell over. A moment later, the quake subsided. Nothing but the sound of flapping wings, and then the creak and roar of falling branches, of people opening doors and shouting into the streets, and of sirens. The air smelled like ozone and sweat.
“Next position is—” I started to say, but a male-seeming groan stopped me. I didn’t turn my head, but Lindsey could see him.
“That guy was behind a tree...” she said. In Berkeley, in general, it is not at all unusual for some mentally marginal individual to spend all day hanging out in a copse of trees, but I already knew who he was. “We have to help him.”
“Is that our will?” I asked Lindsey. “Or just your will? Or is it his will that you end our session prematurely?”
“I also need to walk it off,” she replied, gingerly picking herself up.
“I do need help!” Heinrich said, a pile on the ground, pinned under a heavy-seeming branch. “I think my leg is broken!”