Petrichor Machine

An excerpt from the short story, Not Quite North Carolina, by Saytchyn Maddux-Creech:

He found the pastel girl huddled in the phone booth one morning. She slept with her wadded-up sweater between her head and the empty phone book cover. At first glance, he thought she was sucking her thumb.

“If you have a good reason for running away,” he said, startling the girl awake, “places do exist that you can go to.”

She rubbed sleep from her eyes and pulled herself to her feet, shuffling out of the booth. She stood no taller than his shoulder. Her skin was the color of parchment paper, her hair pale yellow.

“This isn’t one of them,” he said. As soon as he put this girl into a car with a children’s services worker, he’d hike to the top of the little mountain behind the cabins. The morning temperatures had finally warmed. And hiking was non-secular, guilt-free.

The smile she aimed at his house across the road spoke of alternative plans. “I’m home,” she said and started across the road without looking either way. Cars didn’t pass often, but half those that did sped around the forested curves with gleeful abandon.  He looked both ways and followed her. Her long hair flowed behind her, glistening in the sun.

“Did you live here once?” he called, but he was humoring her. He’d only owned the property for five weeks, but he knew the previous two owners. No children had lived there for decades, though what a terrific place to be a child, running through the woods, swimming in the river, exploring the mossy cabins no one rented anymore. That had been his plan, to feel like a joyful kid that summer. Maybe the book would sell well enough that he’d never have to write again, never have to choose what to write based on a midlife resurgence of his adolescent fear of an angry deity, but the distraction of this girl relieved his anxiety, and helping her would certainly count as a good deed. He jogged up the stone steps leading to the wraparound porch, passed her, got between her and the door leading into his mudroom. “You have to show ID to get in there.”

She patted herself down as if searching her pockets, shook her head, and pushed past him.

She was through the mudroom in a flash of pallor, had disappeared around another corner when he made it into the hall. From the kitchen, she might have taken any of three doors. He was about to choose the door into his empty living room when a thump from above sent him running into the hall and up the stairs, each with its own unique creak, each worn with the memories of many thousands of footfalls.

She stood in the guest bedroom holding the closet door open. Halloween decorations he’d lost the drive to put up filled half the room. It was only July, but he’d been planning Halloween since he’d first considered the place in May, had collected lots of eerie lights and animated devils to create rental cabins and a country store from hell. It seemed pointless at best now. It could even be asking for it.

“This has been interesting and vaguely entertaining,” he said. “But I think we should find another place for you to be weird now.”

“Where is it?” she asked.

“I think you’ve got the wrong house. And I think you might need to be in detox.” Maybe this was the first of many jokes his agent or publishers planned to play on him now that his off-the-wall book about the spirits of dead witches had made them all so blithely rich. But he couldn’t discount that she might be for real; this could be a test from a power higher than his publishing house.

She faced him with tears trickling down her cheeks.

“Okay. Let’s go downstairs and call someone who can help you.” Probably not children’s services, though. Ironically, her tears made her look older.

“Maybe it’s in the hall.” She glided toward him as if rolling on a dolly, though her feet did move.

He surprised himself by whispering. “What are you looking for?” He resisted an urge to touch her shoulder to test her reality.

“In North Carolina,” she said, “your house has a third floor.”

Read the rest of Not Quite North Carolina in Issue 2 of Petrichor Machine, coming in May 2012.

An excerpt from the short story, Treedaddy, by Travis DuBose:

My father-in-law had decided to turn himself into a tree. This happened before I ever met my wife, so I met him when he was well into the change. She was in college, I think, or just about to leave for it when he sat her down in their living room with all its tea cozies. Her mother, whose eyes were always watery, was crying in earnest. Her father informed my future wife that over the next decade or so he would become increasingly tree-like until he would require planting. A greenhouse addition would be built at the rear of their split-level. He was mum on the how of the whole thing and wouldn’t even acknowledge the question of why. Of course she didn’t believe him, thinking that her serious old dad had found a sense of humor in his early retirement. When she hugged him good-bye, his skin felt like old callous.

She was long past believing by the time I met her seven or so years later. He was more or less able to walk by shifting from one great stumpy leg to the other and flexing slightly, but the noise it made rattled the china in its cabinet. He spent most of his time standing still in the greenhouse, accessed through a pair of glass doors that made a great whooshing sound when pushed through. The strain was obvious when he bent his arm to shake my hand with his twiggy fingers. “A pleasure,” he said in his papery rasp. “Likewise,” I said in a voice that, given the circumstances, was far too high up in the register. Her mother gave me a trembling hug—we had already met once before, when she came for a visit—and invited me to sit in a voice equally tremulous. I waited a beat for him to sit before realizing he couldn’t. There was uneasy silence as my future mother-in-law stepped in the great depressions of his footprints to retrieve coffee and cakes from the kitchen. This left he and I to size one another up as my wife (girlfriend then) sauntered around the room looking at the latest photos from the extended family. It seemed his feet were tendrilizing, toes stretching out to become roots. There was a  terrycloth towel sewn around his waist to hide his wooden genitals. Her mother returned from the kitchen bearing a platter of tiny cakes and cups of coffee. Mercifully, she and my wife broke the silence in conversation about the lives of various cousins.

They seemed unable to acknowledge his condition, and I could think of nothing else. She had prepared me on the way over, saying that her father had a condition that turned his skin hard and made it difficult to move. She claimed she was unsure what the disease was called until I finally wrenched it out of her that he had made himself into a tree. Of course I was disinclined to believe, but the way she said it—the dejection and simmering fury—checked my doubt. And then I was sitting in front of him and had so many questions. I wanted to ask what species of tree he was, since he’d yet to put out leaves. His arms were stretching out of his shoulders, and their natural resting point seemed slightly higher than normal, as if they were lifting up slowly to become great branches. (This is what eventually happened.) I especially wanted to ask if he expected to remain conscious as himself for the duration of his life as a tree or if he would, in effect, die as his organs became fibrous and could no longer support a brain turned to wood. I’d read a science fiction novel as a teenager where something similar had happened. Fear of mortality was behind that man’s scheme, and I suspected it was behind this one too. These questions were too personal, especially for a man who had never been tender. So I cut through a long silence by asking, “So, sir: what are your hobbies?”

His expression didn’t change—to be sure, a difficult thing by then—and his mouth hardly moved, but his normally gruff voice grew winsome: “Drinking. Growing. You?”

I’ve never understood the concept of hobbies; they seem like far too much work where the only reward is being able to tell people that you have a hobby: “I build model rockets in my spare time” to which the stranger must reply, “Ah, interesting.” Then he introduces his wife by saying, “Honey, this is Terry. He builds rockets.” To which, invariably, she says, “Oh, how interesting.”

I told him that I liked to watch movies and he grunted acknowledgement.

Read the rest of Treedaddy in Issue 2 of Petrichor Machine, coming in May 2012.

An excerpt from the short story, Sailing, by Jacob Oet:

I am back at the dock for my lunch. I have a locker outside the fishing and boating shop. I find I cannot remember the combination. It slipped out of my mind and into the Pacific. I know, with a sinking feeling, that I will never get it back. I won’t eat, then. I walk down the dock, feeling empty, like a washed up shell. So this is how it feels to be my body, rather than living as something inside it. The old man is sitting on the icebox, picking the eyes out of a fish-head with a splinter of wood. I sit on the bench and watch the man working. Hungry, I try again to remember the locker combination, but it won’t come. I am always either on the inside looking out, or on the outside looking in. I crane my neck to look through the store window, where a blond man unwraps a sandwich.

Once the Pacific takes something, it will not give it back. Anytime I capsize or dip an ankle or hand into the water, the ocean takes a part of me. On the first day of summer I slipped while on the boat and fell in. When I got back to the dock, I remembered my father had asked me to complete an errand, but I found I could not remember exactly what it was. Sometimes I go into the water feeling big and powerful, and I come out small and cold. There are the physical things too that I can never get back. The Pacific is hungry. For this reason I have stopped taking my lunch onto the boat. Several years ago, every day for a week, after my uncle first let me sail on my own, I took my lunch with me, and capsized each day. My uncle, who owned a small fishing boat and made money taking vacationers on private trips, died of a heart attack last year. It happened while he was with a young couple from LA. The couple went to my father the next day, who they had found by asking around on the dock, and demanded a refund. My father said nothing and slammed the door in their faces. We never heard from them again.

I sit on the bench, thinking. The Pacific is so big. I am only just a body, and sometimes less. Yet I feel the Pacific has lost itself to me as well, because I have become like it. Or it has worn me down, as it has stones on the shore. Although on the surface I have a flat nose and red hair, inside I am like the ocean. Inside, I have no defining features, and yet am infinitely deep. People and things sink in me, to where I cannot reach them. When I speak, my words are islands that drift out of sight.

I was six when my uncle took me sailing on the boat he would later give me. I remember how strange I felt as soon as the boat left shore. I still belonged to the earth, then. I don’t know when I stopped being able to speak. That’s another thing the Pacific has taken from me.

My stomach rumbles. The old man tips his head back and pushes the fish-head into his mouth, chewing only a little before swallowing. He lies down and stretches out over the blankets, throwing his arms behind his head. He joins his hands together and kicks his feet, as if swimming on his back. He is thin. His face, behind all the dirt, is round and boyish. Maybe he still remembers his name.

When I get home, it is five o’clock. I hear my father yelling, “Why are you back so early? Fall in or something? Lose your lunch?” I want to scream. I walk to the kitchen where he is sitting. I don’t say hi. “Richard, I’m talking to you, or have you decided now to be deaf as well as mute?” He will mock me if I tell him the truth.

“Sorry,” I force words out of my mouth, “I forgot to pack lunch.” I take a plum and a loaf of bread from the refrigerator, and pour myself a glass of milk, thinking of the old man. We have so much food, and he has just enough to live like a dog, taking any scraps he can get. We have dinner at nine. My mother tells us what happened to the grocer’s cousin. Neither my father nor I say another word for the rest of the evening.

The next day, I pack two peaches, a bagel, and a granola bar. No one gets on the shuttle after me. The old man is sleeping on the dock. His hair is greasy and white, and shines like the sun on the shore. I walk, holding the lunch bag, to where he is lying. I kick over the icebox. I pick up a pebble and drop it on his head. My uncle said all homeless are animals. Then why bring food? Something in me, I don’t know. When the old man still doesn’t wake up, I get on my knees and lean over him. I lift the blankets. He is breathing. I lay my head on his chest and listen to his heartbeat. I look at his face and see his eyes are now wide open. He is like a gazelle caught by a lion. He looks at the icebox, kicked open on its side, fish-heads spilling out. I straighten and look to see if anyone is watching. I empty my paper bag onto his chest. One peach rolls off and his hand darts out to grab it. He is repulsive. I pick the other peach off his shirt and take a bite. He watches me expectantly. I eat and don’t say anything. I break the granola bar in half, setting one half beside his hand that is still gripping the fruit. I finish the other half. Disgusted with myself, I cannot look at him. I stand and walk to the tether. The sun is high now, small. I get in the boat, and when I am far enough out I let myself look back. I cannot see the man’s face clearly, but I can see he is eating the food I brought. He fades out of sight, and once again, I feel strong. Everything is right. I am the boat, following the sun up the coast.

Read the rest of Sailing in Issue 2 of Petrichor Machine, coming in May 2012.