Tyler is a journalist from Scranton, Pennsylvania, who holds a Bachelor’s of Arts in English from Penn State University, and is trying to rekindle that creative fire news writing beat out of him.

The Worst Sound

There’s an unforgettable sound that precedes death—recognizable as the scratchy gasp from a grandparent or pained whine from a family pet seconds before they leave our world for the next.

As a boy I had grown tired of death. Even then, at such a young age as I was, grief gave way to anger at the loss of a life I adored. Once I stared at a faux candlestick behind my mother’s patterned curtains. Through them the light appeared muffled, dim. When finally I unplugged the plastic flame, it slowly faded into nothingness like the dog’s eyes when he arched his back, kicked out his feet, and howled one last time earlier that night.

It was a sad episode for my family, but I imagine it must be sadder for he who caused it. That’s why I decided to meet him: Death; ask why he would turn off someone’s lights when people loved them; and why he would make them make such a terrible sound.

I had it in my mind to wait under my grandmother’s bed each night after she grew sick and forgetful, and came to live in our spare room.

The cold room.

I wasn’t supposed to be in there, I was warned, but I had some words for this fellow hurting me, hurting everyone, everywhere in the world.

When late one night he cracked her door and silently glided through, I slithered from beneath the bed. He stopped and stared (probably), I wasn’t sure since he was faceless.

He heaved a sharp finger at me, “You… think it… fun?” the voice sloughed from somewhere beneath that black hood.

I froze, unable to remember the speech I had prepared to skewer him with.

“Why?” was all I managed.

He stood unmoving for what seemed like minutes. I was unsure if he heard me, or even understood with how he turned his gaping black hole sideways when I spoke, as if pushing an ear he didn’t have toward me to better understand. It was what my dad did when he practiced French with his drinking friends.

“You… don’t understand. Cannot.”

His arm waved toward my grandmother with a rattle of bones and he floated away. His lanky shoulders drooped.

And she didn’t gasp when she died.

She chimed.

What an odd sound. It sounded exactly like the wind chimes that hovered above our English Ivy on the porch.

Death did me a favor.

Although all the years after, and still, I remember my grandmother’s death, and that hazy interaction with Death, whenever I pass a house and the wind stirs the chimes.

J. Motoki is a nomadic librarian who writes in the stacks, snubs patrons, and whispers uncomfortable things from the shadows. Her work have been published in Nowhere.Ink, Rune Bear, and Coffin Bell. You can read more of her work at www.jumotki.com.

Daily Tally

Closing shift. I’m not feeling myself tonight. My sweaty hand clutches a brass tally counter, a relic from the card catalogue days, and the click, click, clicking sets my teeth on edge. (Internet Search: What is fever of the hands?) Thirty minutes until closing and patrons still swarm through the doors.

All these people returning books at night, tossing them down the book drop, one by one. Flutter of page wings. All these people stamping up the stairs to gawk at the domed glass ceiling, stars trapped in foggy reflection. Look at their necks, slender tendons on sticks, look how vulnerable. Remember when we thought turkeys stare skyward and drown in rain?

You ask: will these glass walls last the end times?

Asking the real questions.

My desk in the corner reads REFERENCE. An invitation to stupid inquiry.  If you ask for restroom directions, I’ll point you down the only hall and watch you come back, confused. Internet trouble? Clicking the red X will NOT expand new tabs. ILLs take a minimum of five to ten business days, I’m sorry you need this specific book for your research paper that’s due tomorrow. No, I don’t know why you forgot to breathe the other day, ask your general practitioner. Better yet, say nothing until the time comes when you forget again, until you start to inhale again. Trigger lung collapse, your face bruised and crumpling like old fruit.

After break, an elderly lady smiles knowingly as I rub my bloated stomach. Boy or girl?

It is, in fact, pies.

Little boy: Coffin bells, how do they ring if there’s no one around to ring them?

The Victorian paradox; that pall riddle. I search the question, our interests piqued. See, the string is tied to the deceased’s finger―if they wake, they ring the bells. Little boy, hands over his mouth, the world’s biggest secret revealed only to him, he is going to laugh or scream.

Attention guests: the library will be closing in—

Down the hall these turkeys go, and I hear a woman cluck to her friend: it was so strange, like I forgot to know how to breathe.   

A former professor of art history who has lived many years in several countries, Julia Ballerini is now settled in Manhattan where she is devoted full time to writing fiction. Several of her stories have been published in print and online.

Painless

         The dog was licking her face. A furry black dog. It was dark. How long had she been lying on the pavement? It had been daylight when she fell. That she remembers. She crawled over cobblestones and gravel, the dog ahead, barking. That she remembers. Then whiteness. Space of no memories. Ambulence. Her mother bending over her. Can you hear me, hear me, hear me!

         Was it the next day that someone brought her two orange fish in a round bowl? She remembers them swimming in and out of her mind’s whiteness as she lay cranked to a tilt on a bed as white as her mind. Watery black eyes stared, slithery mouths gulped open. Did she scream? The orange fish were soon disappeared.

≈

         Her mother was folding clothes into a suitcase, a suitcase that smelled of newness. She was fourteen and being packed away to boarding school, disappeared like the gulping goldfish. It was then, seven years after the fall, that her mother, smoothing a new blue sweater into a new brown valise––it was then that her mother said, stop crying, you’re lucky to be alive, you almost died in that accident.

≈

         Now she watches her own child scrambling up a slide in the playground holding tight its silvery edges. She has a startling memory of having not having held on to the rusty rails of that long-ago fire escape, of having leaned into the fall, of having given herself up to it. Not because of a will to die, but because of an absence of a will to live.

         She closes her eyes trying to conjur a memory of pain. The pain immediately after the fall or the pain that must have sliced its way through the drugs in the hospital. Nothing. Her breath comes in and out of her lungs, her belly expands and subsides, but she can’t remember the pain, only the horror of the staring, gulping fish.

         Back home from the playground, her little girl tucked safely in bed, she goes to the computer. She types: memory and pain. Site after site is about the short-term memory of pain, not the long-term forgetting of it. The newsletter of the International Association for the Study of Pain is no help.

         Yet the search has its rewards. She learns about nerves that carry pain signals to the spinal cord and brain to excite the cells that make memories of pain––a cellular excitation that produces an hightened reactivity to pain that can last for months. Her cells must have been revved up, excited, sensitive to a pain she can no longer recall.

         “Excite” a technical term. Yes, but she pictures a nervy little creature bringing a message of pain to a nebbish looking cell.

         “Yo man, belly just sliced open like a sausage. Blood spurting everywhere. What a scene! Hurts like hell.”

         “Wow! Cool. Tell me more. Hold on, lemmy grab a pencil and paper.”

         She learns about molecules called ERKs­––extracellular signal-related kinases––that can change the memory of cells in the spinal cord and brain. Molecular psycotherapy! She reads up on the marine snail Aplysia that is very attractive to neurobiologists because of large brain cells that are up to one millimeter in diameter. One millimeter! What is the size of a human brain cell? She hasn’t a clue. She logs out, shuts down her computer.

         She calls her friend Richard whose store of knowledge is phenomenal and who was once married to a doctor. “Memory is not intended to be an archive,” he tells her. “We have an automatic extinguishing mechanism that remembers having the pain but not the pain itself. Otherwise we could not go on.” That makes sense. Except for certain phobias and an intense dislike of oatmeal Richard usually makes sense.

         It is reassuring to know that, even if her brain cells turn out to be smaller than those of a mollusk, her pain extinguishing mechanism is working in full force.

         Tomorrow she and her daughter will make up a story about a brainy snail named Aplysia. A snail who feels no pain. A joyous snail with a will to live.