Massetto by Galoti Chimzi Enyinda, hot chocolate

I met them in a small town in the heart of Africa. I had been working in the town of Massetto for five years prior to meeting them, and during those years I had witnessed severe injustice and cruelty of which I too was complicit. Magnum, the company I worked for, was an international technology giant, who, like its counterparts in the town, derived much of its wealth from cobalt, an invaluable mineral dug up, along with some other coveted minerals, from the underbelly of the town. Besides Westerners like myself, companies here hired local hands, who did most of the dirtier work for very little pay. Worse, local workers who were deemed slacking were beaten brutally, and many died from their injuries. The companies involved were never held accountable for these ill treatments.

For a town that had such invaluable and highly sought-after minerals, one would have expected Massetto to be prosperous. But, like several mineral-rich places in the Democratic Republic of Congo, this town was plagued by tribulations rather than blessed with wealth. Militia groups of Rwandan and Congolese origins often used the small town as one of their battlegrounds, fighting, among other things, for the spoils of the mineral-rich country. The international companies busied themselves with fierce competitions for even larger shares of the mineral deposits within the regions, never considering the locals who slaved away for the material benefits of these countries, nor their environment which suffered more degradation each passing day thanks to the mining activities of these companies.

The politicians lobbied these companies for higher percentage cuts from mining proceeds, and when they got this, they used the money, not to develop the country, but to live lavishly themselves. Here in Massetto, the town's Mayor and his district officials received handsome payments monthly directly from the international companies, besides that gotten from the Congolese government. This town had the highest deposit of cobalt, and Chinese companies saw it as a place of utmost priority, and thus sought the continued cooperation of its politicians. They also offered military support to ward off the M23 and other rebel groups that disturbed the area. Magnum was the only American company based in this town, and we ensured we contributed our quota to the smooth running of mining operations here by never defaulting on our corporate taxes, even though we knew the government would use them for no good. However, we, like most others, maltreated our local workers, and neglected their health.

It was under these conditions that I met them. Mona, Masamba and Kendi were beggars who regularly witnessed the violence and injustices going on in their town, Massetto. I first met Mona, through whom I met Masamba and Kendi. I did some integrity tests on them to be sure I could entrust them with a plan I had hatched. And their being able to read and write made things even easier for me.

MONA

My father gave me this name, Mona, on the third day after I was born. It means ‘to see’, and, indeed, I have seen a lot. Our small town, Massetto, has experienced disaster three times since I was born. Not natural disasters. Human-made ones. Those caused by disputes over mining rights and the control of natural resources. My father lost his life having been caught between one of these conflicts, and mother died of a stroke a year later, leaving myself and my younger brother to the mercy of relatives who could barely fend for their own selves. I left my brother in the care of a granduncle and took to the streets, begging for alms.

MASAMBA

I lived with an uncle from my childhood up till when I was a teenager. According to him, my mother disappeared a few months after I was born, and my father, who was part of a rebel force, was killed in a clash with government security forces when I was two years old. My uncle was not the kindest of humans, and sometimes I hated him for what I thought was cruelty in the way he treated me. But he gave me food, clothes, and a roof over my head. Considering the impoverished state of Massetto’s masses, it took big sacrifices on his part to provide those. Sadly, he died at a mining site when a bridge collapsed on him and fellow miners. And then, for reasons I do not know, the house we had lived in was demolished by the government.

KENDI

As a toddler, I lived with an aunt who spoke little. She told me nothing about my parents, no matter how much I prodded. She enrolled me in an elementary school, and had me accompany a relative to work on his farm in the afternoons and on weekends. I grew tired of working under scorching heat and ran away from home at the age of twelve. That was thirty years ago. I've lived on the streets ever since.

NARRATOR

My plan for Massetto was simple, or so I thought. The Mayor and his cabinet were setting up a state-owned mining company (perhaps the royalties they got from the mining done on their land was no longer enough). I had made friends with some government officials and aides and thus got insider information that the officials planned to bypass certain regulatory processes and were making no plans for environmental preservation. The polluted state of Massetto's environment was pitiful. I wanted to do something about it, and I needed as much resources as I could get. What better source to get the funding from, I thought, than those who should be responsible for the environment?

I had previously solicited funds from the government through my company for environmental rehabilitation projects and gotten denied. Now my plan was to get the funding from them through stealth. Once my goal was achieved, I would of course have to get permits from the same government before embarking on any projects. In securing the permits, I would make it clear that whatever I intended to do would be in the government’s name. And why not, since I would be using their money anyway, albeit unknown to them?

The three beggars, Mona, Masamba and Kendi, were the missing pieces of my game plan. I had already assembled a small team of security specialists, cyber security experts, marketers and ex-labourers. Among these were some Congolese, a Chinese man and a few Americans like myself who felt disturbed by the deplorable environmental state of the town.

When the government-owned company began operations, all operational processes would be closely monitored by my insiders and we would strike at the perfect time: when the refined minerals were being transported to buyers. We would intercept transportation, seize these minerals and have them sold to black market dealers. If the first operation was successful, we would carry out even more from time to time.

MONA

There was an American who had suddenly developed a dutiful interest in giving me money almost everyday. One day he introduced himself to me as Mr. White, and told me he had plans to fix the polluted Massetto environment. He said I had qualities, such as honesty and resilience, which he believed would prove quite helpful if I accepted to take a part in his mission— sabotaging the greedy politicians who were constantly seeking out new ways to impoverish the townspeople while fattening their own wallets. I agreed to join him, and he asked me to introduce him to any like-minded fellows I knew...

MASAMBA

Following the death of my uncle and the demolition of our house, I took to the streets, doing menial jobs, and sometimes begging for alms when I found nothing else profitable to do. It was on the said streets that I met Mona.

I was retiring for the night in my little tent when a woman about my age walked up and asked to spend the night in my tent, seeing as it was threatening to rain and her own tent had been destroyed beyond repair by the elements the previous night. I agreed to let her in after warning her sternly that I would find and harm her if I woke up the next day to find anything missing from my tent.

That night, we talked a lot about our personal experiences in Massetto and about the world beyond our town. She fell asleep at some point during our long discussion and somehow I went to bed myself without the fear of waking up to find anything missing. When I woke up the next morning, she had tidied the tent as best as she could and then, after thanking me profusely for my kindness, offered to share her small loaf of bread with me. I jokingly asked her whether she was trying to be my wife.

‘Itakuwa heshima,’ (Swahili: ‘It would be an honour.’) she said with a light laugh.

We met many times after that, and on one of those occasions, she told me she knew a man who was capable of solving the problem of environmental pollution in our town which seemed to us to be the cause of various illnesses as well as a lack of quality drinking water in the town. I followed her to the man, and on the way, we met and took along another acquaintance...

KENDI

My aunt made no attempt (at least none that I know of) to look for me after I absconded. I lacked the physical strength for certain tedious jobs, so I would go from place to place, offering to help people clear grass or sweep their surroundings for a fee. On days when I found no single person who needed my service, I would simply sit on the streets begging. At first I lived in an abandoned building which had no roof. The building was thus of no use to me during heavy rain or intense sunshine. After a while, I totally forgot about the building and stuck to finding shelters to sleep with my few belongings.

One day, I was very hungry, and had no means of procuring food. I had gone to beg the woman from whose store I regularly purchased my daily bread, often on credit, but found her store closed for the day. I was wandering about, wondering if I was finally going to be killed by hunger, when I saw a man eating boiled cassava by the roadside. I approached him and stated my predicament, begging for some of the cassava. He laughed and told me he was also a beggar but would share his meal with me. He told me his name, which was Masamba, and asked for mine. We became friends after that and would often help each other out when there was a need. Then one day I met him on the road with a lady whom he introduced to me as Mona. He told me he met her some weeks after meeting me and said she was taking him to a white man who claimed to have solutions to the environmental problems of our small town. They bid me to come along and I obliged...

MR. WHITE

The three of them were visibly skeptical when I told them my plans. Of course, they really welcomed a solution, any solution, to their town's problems, but they saw easily the risks involved in this venture. We were up against the government, and if anything went wrong, they, in particular, would be done for. I and the other foreigners had privileges that could protect us if we got in any trouble–even if we were in the wrong, and so it was the locals who were in the greatest danger. However, they did not turn back.

I thought I had made sufficient contingency plans, but there were still some surprises encountered in the course of the mission. First, after carrying out viability surveys on the concession issued to the company (by the owners of the company, the government), the surveyors decided that the first operation wasn't worth going ahead with. This caused my inside- team to relax a little, only to be thrown off balance when the surveyors suddenly made a U-turn and recommended that the operation be carried out.

Next, a faction of the rebel forces, M23, intercepted the transportation of mined ore, nearly subduing the government's security forces, of which Masamba was part. The company's convoy, however, escaped, and, in fact, the attack proved advantageous to us, as Masamba witnessed first hand how his fellow security agents fought, and thus devised ways to disarm them. However, this was eventually not necessarily, for although we could not find a perfect way to achieve our aim in the first mining operation, our chance came during the second.

Kendi was with the local underpaid miners who worked in the fields, helping to extract valuable ore for processing. Masamba was still with the security forces, and was tasked by the company to guard a dummy convoy meant to throw potential attackers off balance in the next operation, which involved gold mining; the government was taking extra precautions on this one, following the incident involving the last, and especially since it involved gold, a more valuable mineral than copper, which was mined the last time. However, the team of seven men I had assembled, besides Mona, Masamba and Kendi, were able to find loopholes in the government's arrangement. Neither the dummy convoy nor the real one suffered any attacks, but the real convoy made a stop for a security check on the way to deposit the gold at the refinery. After the check, they continued their journey with gold-polished stones, rather than the real minerals.

The Mayor and his cabinet were furious when they realised the scam, and immediately launched an inquiry. Somehow, I had alibis concocted for everyone on my team involved, and when the matter had died down, we resold the gold in the black market through a team of negotiators led by Mona, whom I had painstakingly trained for such business.

MONA

Masamba and Kendi were with me when we successfully sold the gold off to black market buyers. The cash was raw, and they asked whether we were going to share the money. I had to remind them of the purpose of our mission, and yet, Kendi argued that the white man could not be trusted and was only using us. Deep down, I wanted the money too; there was a whole lot of good I could do for myself with all those dollars...

MASAMBA

Kendi and I accompanied Mona, a Chinese agent, and two Americans, to negotiate a deal for the gold with the black market buyers, posing as security to ensure negotiations went smoothly. On our way back, the three of us sat with the Chinese agent inside the back of the van, the raw cash in our midst, while the two Americans used the driver’s and passenger’s seats. When the Chinese man dozed off, I and Kendi spoke to Mona in Swahili about taking some of the money for ourselves. We spoke in whispers to avoid any chances of being overhead by those at the front, although there was a partition between us and them. When Mona argued against us taking some of the money for ourselves, I thought seriously about sabotaging the entire mission and absconding with the money. As if knowing my thoughts, Kendi put a hand on my shoulder and whispered something...

KENDI
‘For the greater good, of which we will still be partakers.’

I said the words to Masamba during an argument between both of us and Mona that was now becoming tense. At first, I wanted a part of the money too; I had dreams of getting married, having children and sending them to schools abroad. But then I reasoned that if the white man was indeed being honest with us, and if we could gain his trust, we might indeed find more ways to make money without betraying him. For one thing, he had already taken us off the streets andrefined us, unlike the gold we had just sold off. It was now left to us to show whether we wanted to remain in his good books or not. Mona seemed eager to remain in his good books. I wanted the same, and that statement to Masamba was enough to have us all on the same page again.

MR WHITE

Unknown to the three, the Chinese who was seated in the van with them was a polyglot who understood English, Swahili and some other local languages. When they had their conversation about taking some of the money from our operation, he had only pretended to be sleeping and had overheard all they said despite their lowered voices. He relayed everything to me to make my judgement.

When we got the money, I established a private non-profit company in Massetto to carry out my objective of environmental reforms after fulfilling necessary governmental protocols. It's been two years since, and with extra help from local and international sponsors, the town has begun to look better.

I also established an agricultural company in another town in Congo with the savings I had garnered before quitting my job at Magnum. Employed and well-paid in this company are Mona, Masamba and Kendi, besides other individuals whose loyalty helped that mission.

Galoti Enyinda is a creative storyteller, scriptwriter and poet. He is also a marketing and media graduate of the Communication and Language Arts department of the University of Ibadan, Nigeria.

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Decaffeinated bySteve Gerson,aAnything caffeinated

Decaffeinated

I'm jittery and depressed. I'm yearning and desperate. It's like waking up, wanting coffee, and finding the pantry bare. You're gone.

My head hurts. My vision is clouded. My heart is as broken as dropped coffee mugs in a Starbucks busy with anxious baristas.

Yesterday I had hoped that we could make it work.

"Really babe, I can change," I pleaded, knowing my words were empty.

You looked at me with the annoyance I deserved.

"Come on, please. We've been great together, sometimes. Remember that time when . . ." but I couldn't come up with an example.

You looked at me with annoyance, again.

"Ok, I get it. I know I've failed more than the '69 Mets," a stupid baseball reference that I knew you wouldn't understand or value, even as I said it. "Bad example. My poor attempt at humor," I giggled, though my laugh came out more like the hiss of an espresso machine spewing steam.

"What part of this is funny," she shouted. "We're on the edge, John. Don't you get that! I'm tearing apart. There's a hole ripped in my sky. We're burnt coffee grounds at the bottom of a pot. Focus, John."

"Yes," I said, as my smartphone buzzed in my pocket. I stole a glance to see who had messaged.

You left the next morning.

Sure I'd been remiss, but it wasn't just my fault. I know with a third chance I could improve. What I needed was high-voltage, cold brew to get my life back on track, that's all. Instead, life kept giving me watered down decaf

about the author

 

Steve Gerson writes poetry and flash about life's dissonance. He has published in many journals plus his 11 chapbooks: Once Planed Straight; Viral; And the Land Dreams Darkly; The 13th Floor; What Is Isn’t; There Is a Season; Have Not; Who Am I Today; Dystopia; Grim; and Through Shadows 

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WITNESS by Rob Molan, bitter lemon

Why am I being forced to do this? It happened over a year ago and my recollections are fading. They’re better left buried.

I arrive at the forbidding stone building and enter its maw through the swing doors, and an attendant comes over.

‘Can I help you, madam?’ he asks impassively.

‘I’ve been summoned to give evidence.’

‘Take the stairs or the lift to the second floor and follow the sign to the witness room.’

A group of dodgy looking characters are standing by the lift so I take the stairs although my knees are not up to it. I’m knackered by the time I arrive at the room and am greeted by nervous looks from the other unfortunates waiting for their grilling.

A young, sweet-faced woman approaches me.

‘I’m one of the volunteers here. Have you any queries about today?’

 ‘Do I need a legal representative?’

‘No. You’re not on trial,’ she reassures me.

Maybe, but it feels like it.

‘Help yourself to tea or coffee.’

I can’t stomach anything and retreat to a corner where I can sit alone.

Those lawyers are going to drag me back to that night, starting with the sound of breaking glass which aroused me.

‘Who’s there?’ I asked softly as I crept down the hallway.

The lounge door was half-open as I peeked inside and saw the silhouette of a man lifting a fine china plate from my cabinet. He spun round, dropped the piece and ran in my direction.  

Out of my way,’ he shouted, roughly pushing me aside. I can still smell his fetid breath but his face remains a blank.

The police were kind when they came and told me his fingerprints were all over the place. But I’ve been too nervous to leave the house since then and have had CCTV installed, and I cancelled my holiday in Devon and lost the deposit.

Other witnesses are called to the courtroom one by one and leave with anxiety etched on their faces. I wish I could give evidence from behind a screen, then I wouldn’t have to see his face.

I’m shaking like a leaf and don’t know whether I can keep it together on the stand. I look inside my handbag for some tissues and panic when I can’t find any. I hate being labelled as a bloody witness. I’m the victim here.

A female attendant comes into the room.

‘Sandra Tait,’ she calls.

‘Here.’

‘You are stood down.’

I can’t believe I’m hearing this.

‘Why?’

‘The accused has changed his plea to guilty.’

I could scream. He was always going to be convicted by the forensic evidence against him. Why did I have to spend the last six months living in dread of coming to court to get him sent down? Despite this last-minute reprieve, I’ll still be crying myself to sleep tonight with the light left on.

about the author

Rob lives in Edinburgh started writing short stories during lockdown. To date, he's had several tales published by Cafe Lit and others in various anthologies. He likes to experiment with different genres and styles of writing.

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Firing Line by Firing Line, byPeter Lingard,a swift half

 

Firing Line

 

Jack lightly elbowed me in the ribs as he took the next stool at the bar. His dog settled on the floor between us. ‘How’s it hangin?’

‘Ugh. You?’

‘Same. It’s bloody criminal the way women are turning guys down these days.’

‘What? Where did that come from?’

‘You know. Who needs a man and all that independence shit.’ ‘I was gonna say I hadn’t noticed, but when I thought about it, women have been scarce lately. ‘That’s why I came in here,’ he continued. ‘This place used to be busy with skirt.’

I nodded. ‘Used ta be. I just come in for a beer, or two these days. Everyone’s hooking up on The Net now. I had to get Sally to write a profile for me. I’d been using my writing bio but she said it was far too pedestrian.’

‘How’s she doing, your Sal?’

‘She’s good. Got a good job. Making shitloads of money.’

‘Good for her. She seeing anyone?’

‘Nah. Reckons she doesn’t have the time.’

‘See what I mean? Maybe I should ask her. She wouldn’t need time to get ta know me.’

‘She’s my sister, Jack.’

‘You puttin’ her off limits, Dave?’

‘Sounds a bit harsh when you put it like that but, seeing as how well I know you, yeah.’

‘You’re shittin’ me!’

‘Jack, let’s face it, you treat women like shit.’

‘Says who? Oh, look, there’s Connie. Now she is what I came in here looking for.’

‘To answer your question, me, yer mum, my mum, Denise, Rachel, probably others.’

‘What? Oh. Since when?’

‘Since forever. Yer mum reckons you’re just like your old man. You treat me an’ Rufus well, but that’s it.’

Rufus, who had been lying on the floor between us, stood at the mention of his name.

‘Sit, boy.’ Jack said. The dog did as told. ‘Rufus! How does he come into it?’

The dog stood again, confusion in his eyes.

‘Hey guys,’ said Connie as she sat on the stool next to me. How’s it hangin’?’

‘Magnificently,’ we said, almost in unison.

‘How you doin’ Con,’ I asked.

‘I’m good. You?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Hey, I’m sat here too ya know. Don’t you have an ’ello for me?’

‘I included you in the question about how it’s hangin’ and you answered. What more do ya want, Jack?’

‘Now you ask, I do have a question for ya.’

Connie smiled tentatively, seemingly regretting her question and warning herself to be careful. ‘Oh yeah. Shoot.’

‘Have I ever treated you badly? Dave, here, says I treat women badly.’

‘Well, I’ve never let you close enough to treat me badly, but, yeah, you do. Ask Denise or Rachel.’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘Ask Sam as well, while you’re at it.’

‘This is unbelievable! What did I do to any of them?’

I leaned back, out of the line of expected fire.

‘That, Jack, is the whole problem right there. You have no idea.’

‘So, tell me. What do I ’ave ta do?’

‘Stop taking us for granted, for one. Wise up to your emotional connection, the intimacy.’

‘Oh, give me a fucking break.’ I moved my stool further back. ‘You wanna turn me into a woman?’

‘No, Jack. I want you to stay a man, but one with some emotional response.’

‘I’m a fun guy, aren’t I?’

‘Fun isn’t everything, Jack. And that’s it. I didn’t come in here for a debate.’

She turned to me. ‘You can bring your stool back to the bar now, Dave.  The war of the sexes is temporarily over.’ Once I was back in place, she put a hand on my knee. ‘It’s you I came here for. I know I blew you off last Tuesday, but I’d had a bad day at work. Today’s a good day and you could make it better. So, we on? We could leave this place and go somewhere else for a drink, if you like.’

I turned to Jack. ‘Sorry, mate. Later.’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t soddin’ believe it!’

 

 

About the author 

 

eter Lingard, p born a Brit, served in the Royal Marines, was an accountant, a barman and a farm worker. He once lived in the US where he owned a freight forwarding business. An Aussie now because the sun frequently shines and the natives communicate in English 

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Sturday Sample:THE HIGHWAY THAT LEADS BEYOND THE WORLDby James Ulmer. beer

The Far Hill

 

 

 

 

“There are people in the room at night,” he said.

            It was broad daylight, visiting hours, a white, disinfected sunlight streaming in through the unshaded hospital windows.  I could hear the murmur of three p.m. traffic from the city street below, the wheezing of air brakes as the buses made their stops and starts.  He was sitting up in bed, two tubes jammed up his nose for oxygen, another one sending a drip into his arm.  The full head of hair, steel-gray well into his seventies, had turned a snowy, otherworldly white.

 

      “What people?” I asked.  “You mean doctors, a nurse coming in?”

He shook his head and pointed, and my eye traveled involuntarily across the room.

      “They stand against the wall,” he said.  “All I can see is their shadows.  A tall thin man, a heavy-set woman, and a little boy.  They’re here all night, watching me.”

      My mother and older brother hadn’t arrived yet.  He was telling me this because I was the only one in the family who was likely to believe him, who wouldn’t assume that he was in the early stages of dementia.

      “What do they want?” I asked him.  He stared at me, the tubes in his nose distorting his features.  “Who are they?” I persisted.

      At first, I thought he wasn’t going to respond, but then he glanced around nervously at the cream-colored walls blank as movie screens, lowered his voice, and spoke. 

      “I think they’re people who died in this room.  A tall thin man,” he repeated, as if he were seeing them, “a heavy-set woman, and a little boy.  This is a goddamn hospital room,” he added.  “Do you realize how many people have died in this place?”

      “You’re not going to die, Dad,” I assured him.

      He looked at me doubtfully.  He was eighty-eight, and his lungs, battered by seventy years or more of cigarette smoke, were beginning to shut down.  The truth is, I believed what he was telling me.  He had one foot in the other world already.

      My mother and brother swept in, dispelling the shadows and ending abruptly one of the most interesting conversations I’d ever had with my father.  I tried to tell my mother what he’d said, but she waved me away and wouldn’t hear it.  She busied herself with punching my father’s pillows into shape, and soon the usual round of family stories, told so often I could’ve recited them by heart, crowded out every other topic. 

Two days later, my father was released from the hospital, and he lived for another seven months after that.  He seemed to recover completely, and then, very suddenly he was gone.  In the interim, I could never again get him to talk about the shadows on the wall.  That brief exchange in the hospital room was all we ever got.

 

 

My sister arranged a memorial service in the eighth-floor lobby of the high-rise in Clearwater where he’d lived for the last six years of his life.  She hired a bartender, put out some hors d’oeuvres, and set up a projector on a table along one wall that flashed pictures of my father on a screen.  I watched the succession of photographs, his face aging slowly as black and white gave way to color shots, and wondered which shifting, disappearing incarnation was most truly him.  But then I recalled the story that had always told me who he was.  It was autumn, 1945.  He stepped off the bus on a corner two blocks from his house, still in uniform, gone three years in the war.  His mother walked past but stopped when she saw him, though she hardly recognized him at first.  Oh, it’s you, she said.  Then, The key’s under the front mat, she told him and hurried off to her card game, leaving him standing there, the fall sunlight drifting through the trees, his sea bag at his feet. 

      An hour into the service, the elevator doors parted, and a sailor in dress whites marched solemnly into our gathering.  He was escorted by a Marine in a high-collared blue jacket with brass buttons and a red stripe running the length of each creased trouser leg.  The room went silent at once.  They’d brought a CD player, and they stood saluting as the speakers played Taps.  The light froze, and the afternoon itself seemed to come to attention.  Then, between them, they folded a flag with their white-gloved hands to a neat, crisp triangle and presented it to my weeping mother, the stars facing up. 

      I spent the remainder of that afternoon talking to some of the people who lived in the building – blue-haired ladies smelling of powder and their gallant, ageing spouses in bowties and seersucker sport coats.  Their stories, spoken laconically as the honey-colored Florida sun slanted in and splashed on the rug, gave me a sense of what my father’s time there had been like.  For the last few months of his life, he’d taken to patrolling the perimeter of the building, an eighty-nine-year-old man in a wheelchair with a cane laid across his knees, an oxygen tank hooked to the back of his chair, and the mask he preferred not to wear hanging by a strap from his grizzled chin.  He wore the Greek fisherman’s cap we’d bought for him on the sponge docks at Tarpon Springs a few towns over.  I could see him clearly, wheeling his chair under the shadows of palm fronds, heat rising in waves above the flowering oleander.  He reminded me of some intrepid soul stationed alone on a jungle island to watch the skies for planes, back in the war again, the enemy closing in.

     

 

About six weeks later, on a warm day in the middle of October, I was crossing a parking lot on campus, walking back from the mailroom to the old brick building that housed English and math, when I stopped suddenly in mid-stride.  Backing up, I waved a hand awkwardly in front of my face, trying to brush away the black spider that hung from an invisible thread in front of my right eye, stubborn, moving as I did.  Thinking that the creature must’ve attached itself to my glasses, I took them off and looked.  Nothing.  But still a small dark space, no larger than the point of a dull pencil in the bright October sunlight, blotted out a fragment of the afternoon, shifting its position continually as my eye glanced around at the parked cars and distracted students hurrying for class.  Minutes later, standing before the mirror under the fluorescent lights in the nearest restroom, I could see nothing unusual about the eye, but when I flushed it with cold tap water, my visitor remained, floating darkly through my field of vision.

      The following day in my office, I kept turning to my right thinking someone was standing next to me.  But each time, the room was empty.  On one occasion, I swung around and began to speak – “May I help you?”  To my bewilderment, I was confronted only by the books lining my wall, each worn spine sealing its whispering voices.  I was frightened, but not at the prospect of some otherworldly visitation.  The threat of blindness terrified me.  I saw myself, arms extended, feeling my way through rooms I couldn’t see, stumbling forward in absolute darkness like some sightless creature in an underground cave.       

Late that afternoon on the drive home, I kept seeing a blurred shape, man-sized, undefined, moving beyond the right passenger window, as if a figure was running full out on the shoulder of the road keeping pace with the car, appearing and disappearing.  The figure slowed when I did, sped up when I hit the gas.  I told myself it was only a flash of sunlight on the window, something my peripheral vision hadn’t processed correctly.  When I pulled into the darkened garage, the figure pursuing me was gone.  Only silence and the dusky space around me, the wall with its rack of brooms and rakes.  Relieved, I turned off the engine, dismissed my own suspicion and went inside.

       But that night, I smelled cigarette smoke in the house.

      “Dad?” I asked tentatively.  “Is that you?”   

      Silence.  Only the faint sound of the refrigerator humming in the kitchen.

      “If that’s you, make a sound.”

No response.  But the scent thickened, rich and cutting, like blue smoke curling from the end of his Marlboro.  That was the first time I suspected that my father was in the house.  He’d found the place where I lived though he’d never visited.  Now he walked the narrow, dimly lit hall and low-ceilinged spaces of the three-bedroom rented bungalow waiting for his moment to speak. 

In the weeks that followed, a blank space trailed through my view of the world, a crack in

the smooth surface of reality where something that was usually hidden began to break through.  At first, it was merely a game I played, but as time went on, the game became real.  When I was home in the evening, I was never alone.  A pale shape, glimpsed at the edge of my vision, moved over the walls, absent when I turned to face it.  What does he want?  I wracked my brain for an answer.  The rooms began to feel crowded, and I took to sitting on the back patio in the cool October evenings, watching the stars sprinkled like salt above the tops of the eighty-foot pines.

But I wasn’t alone there either.  On my far right, when I looked away, a figure slipped silently between the trees.

 

 

In the last few months of his life, my father had started carrying a worn blue notebook around with him, something none of us had ever seen before.  When family visited, he’d wheel his chair to the edge of the group, open the notebook and begin reading silently to himself.

      “What have you got there, Dad?” I asked him.

      “My journal from the war.”

      My sister and I exchanged a surprised look.

      “Really?”

      We had no idea he’d kept a record.  Clearly, there was something he wanted to tell us, but when we asked him to read it aloud, the book contained only dates and the names of the places

he’d been: Guam, the Solomon Islands, shore leave in Australia, Okinawa.  His account described nothing of what he’d done there or what he’d seen or felt. 

After he died, I found some black and white photographs in a drawer in his office, a

dozen or so, that told me more.  They were pictures of dead Japanese soldiers, the blood black on them, an arm or a leg blown off, their bodies bloated and swelling nightmarishly in the tropical heat.  Shuffling through those images, I could feel the sun on my neck and hear the flies’ angry buzzing.  In one sun-faded shot, a head still wearing its helmet had been spiked on the limb of a blasted tree, rags of flesh hanging from the neck.  Small wonder then, that for three years after my father returned home from the war, he needed a shot of whiskey to get out of bed in the morning.  He’d sit on the edge of the mattress, arms crossed over his chest, and shake until the liquor warmed him.  Deep in the night, he’d call out in his sleep and flail around so violently that he’d once broken two of my mother’s ribs.  That was the reason that they’d always slept in separate beds for the next thirty years or so of their marriage.

      There was one additional photo, different from the others, at the very bottom of the

drawer.  An island girl with straight black hair and dark eyes smiled at the camera.  She was bare breasted, maybe seventeen, a length of flowered batik wrapped in a sarong around her hips.  She reminded me of a Gauguin I’d seen at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on a school trip when I was a kid.  On the back of the photo were two words in faded ink written in my father’s hand: The Philippines.

     

     

It was nearly the end of October, two weeks into the shadowy game of hide and seek I was playing with my father, the days mellow, the nights cool, with that brief, startling clarity in the air that comes when the harvest is in.  The quiet Southern town with its steeples and dilapidated courthouse was turning slowly toward winter. 

      On one of those clear nights, I had a dream.   I was crouching in the corner of a steel box on the sea, the smell of gasoline thick in the air, a motor chugging noisily somewhere behind me.  The box lifted and fell with the tide as we approached land.  Then the front of the box fell forward into the sea with a crash I could hear over the racket of the engine, and I saw an island, a line of white sand in the distance bordered by tall wind-bent palms.  I was in the sea then, the taste of salt in my mouth, holding a rifle above my head with both hands, the sun burning down behind me as I struggled toward shore.  My shadow wavered in front of me on the water, and I saw that I had a helmet on – then I felt its weight on my head, the strap tight under my chin.  Glancing around, I saw hundreds of us wading through the tide, struggling like crabs, pincers raised, to reach land. I stumbled up on the beach and began digging in, frantically throwing sand up in front of me for cover.  I knew I didn’t have much time.  Face-down on the beach, I kept an eye on the jungle.  I watched as a figure flitted through the shadows, moving as my eye did. 

Suddenly, the figure ran out into the light – a sailor in white pants, a tee shirt, his Dixie

Cup hat worn four-blocked, a dark, sweat-stained scarf tied around his neck.  He fell on his knees in the sand beside me and glanced back nervously into the brush. The sun flared behind him; it turned his face into a featureless silhouette.  Planes of light flashed out around his head like the spokes of a wheel.  He bent lower to speak, and then I found myself looking into the face of my father, forty years younger than I am now.  Astonished, I studied his profile as he turned to

stare off into the brush. 

      He touched me lightly on one shoulder.

      Stay down, he said.  They’re coming over the far hill.  Keep your head down!

      He glanced at me once, holding my gaze for an instant to make certain that I understood.  When I awoke, I remembered the dream down to the smallest detail, the sand in my mouth and the heat on my neck. 

A norther blew into town the next day. The temperature dropped by forty degrees and gave us our first taste of the coming winter.  All over the gray, deserted neighborhoods only the wind traveled the streets, stripping trees, scattering the flame-colored, hand-shaped leaves, and throwing itself against the cold glass windows.  The weather held us captive in our houses; up and down the block, a thin line of smoke rose from the chimney of each brick ranch. 

Late one afternoon, as the columns of blue pine shadows lengthened across the lawn, I was walking down the hallway that ran the length of the house.  The furnace fired on, bringing a rumble of flame and the promise of welcome heat.  I was distracted, thinking about something that had happened at work that day, a meeting that had gone unexpectedly right, when my

attention was diverted by motion at the end of the hall. 

I froze.  A shape, low to the ground, shifted over the wall and disappeared into the

bedroom.

“Who’s there?’ I called out.

Silence.  The atmosphere in the hall and cluster of surrounding rooms had gone

heavy.  I forced myself down to the open bedroom doorway and stepped inside.  A cold, clear

light flooded the space.  The room was empty. 

As I stood there, confused, looking for some explanation, a truck rumbled past on the road outside.  Sunlight flashed on its windows and traveled briefly across one wall.  That’s it, I

told myself.  I’d seen the reflection of a passing car.  It had not been, as I’d thought at first, the

shadow of small boy.  A wave of relief washed over me.

      But then I began to see that same form in the corner of my eye whenever I was in the

house.  Something new was watching me, circling, probing for weakness, for some point of

access, and with each pass coming nearer, revealing more of what it was.  My father’s words in the hospital room came back to me with a new force – a tall thin man, a heavy-set woman and a little boy.  I understood at last; this was what he’d come to warn me about.  They were coming over the far hill.

      One evening, an hour after the light had gone down, I was putting away some dishes in the kitchen, listening to the rain tap the windows, when I heard footsteps running down the hall –bare feet, close, the sound distinctive, unmistakable.  Heart racing, I stepped around the corner and looked down the hall.  Empty.  I knew there was no one in the house but me, and yet I also knew what I’d heard.  Taking a breath to steady myself, then another, I moved slowly down the shotgun hall toward the bedroom, the last door on the right.  I could hear sleet ticking at the windows of the rooms I passed like the second hands of dozens of clocks and pocket watches.  Reaching the bedroom, I pushed open the door, took a step inside, and stopped.

      The window was a gray square against the deeper darkness of the room, and to my

alarm, a shape was outlined against the gray.  A chair had been moved in front of the window.  As I watched, that shape grew more defined, until a boy sat there, gaunt and motionless, his back to me, the white-blond hair cropped close to his skull.  A little light leaked in from the open doorway, and I saw, briefly, two shadows moving across the wall in front of him.  For an instant I made out a heavy face, the flesh hanging, dark eyes staring back at me.  Then the face drew back into shadow, into smoke.

      My eyes swung back to the child.  Had he seen what I’d seen?  Something in the slant of his back, a sense of alert expectation, told me that he had.  I did not want that boy to turn around.  And then he did.  He turned glaring at me over one shoulder, his eyes black and empty in the

darkened room.

      “They’re coming,” he lisped, and a terrible joy broke out across his face.  “The others –

they’re already here!”

      Keeping my eyes on that lurid grin, terrified that the boy would climb out of the chair and come at me with that wild hilarity on his face, I backed slowly out of the room and closed the door.  I grabbed a chair from the dining room table and wedged it against the door.  Then I leaned a hand against the wall to steady myself, to make the long hallway stop spinning, careening away.  As soon as I was certain I could stay on my feet, I moved quickly around the darkened house, turning on lights.

      I didn’t sleep that night.  I positioned a chair at the far end of the hall and kept my eyes fixed on the closed bedroom door.  At one point, deep in the night, I saw the door swing out and the boy come rushing toward me down the length of the hall, his arms extended, hands reaching for me.  I jumped to my feet, the chair clattered to the floor, and then I saw the hall empty and

the door at the far end tightly closed, the extra chair still angled securely in place.

 

 

In the morning, I left for Houston to keep the eye appointment I’d made a few weeks earlier.  The lonely two-lane stretches of Highway 59, snaking through half-deserted towns, past

weathered barns standing in the empty fields, seemed devoid of life on that six-hour journey.  No

shadowy, half-glimpsed figures accompanied me on that drive, but I couldn’t shake the notion

that I was being watched, my movements tracked from a distance, as if the line of trees at the far

edge of every pasture concealed a hostile presence.  I was suffering from the night I’d endured, having trouble keeping my eyes open on the rolling, monotonous stretches of east Texas prairie. 

At one point, I woke with a start to find myself on a grassy decline on the side of the road, the

motor idling.  Miraculously unhurt, I got out of the car and walked around to wake myself up. 

The shadow of a cloud flowed swiftly toward me across the field, changing shape as it came.  I

climbed behind the wheel, backed out onto the blacktop highway, and drove quickly on.

And I was lucky in another way.  The doctors in Houston were able to fix what was

wrong with my eye.  The crack in the world was sealed.  After a few days recovering in a Galleria hotel, I made my way back to my dark house in the pines.

      I entered tentatively, leaving my suitcase at the door, and slowly walked through the rooms.  The house was empty: I could feel it as soon as I’d stepped in.  But I needed to make sure.  At last, I came to the bedroom, to the door that had remained closed in my absence.  I paused, gathering myself, then set the chair aside, pulled the door open, and walked in. 

      Winter sunlight lay in bright stripes on the floor.  The chair the boy had occupied was back in its usual position to the right of the bed, the seat piled high with books.  For three days I saw nothing further in the house, no unexplained shadows, no figures at the borders of my vision who, when I turned were not there.  The smell of cigarette smoke that had drifted through the rooms for weeks was gone as well, and I understood that my father, having delivered his warning, had moved on. 

But I knew I couldn’t stay in that place.  Those dying Southern towns are too quiet, and it’s too easy for the dead to find us there among the deserted brick storefronts, the decaying graveyards, the trees trailing their dusty rags of Spanish moss.  On the morning of the fourth day, as I stepped into the bedroom, coffee mug in hand, thinking only of the day’s appointments, the light darkened suddenly, as if someone had thrown a switch.  It may have only been the sun dropping behind a cloud, but at the time I didn’t think so.  I backed out of the room and closed

the door behind me. 

That same day, I resigned my position, packed the car, and left town for good.

Find your copy here 

about the author 

James Ulmer is the author of two previous collections of ghost stories, The Secret Life and The Fire Doll (winner of the 2017 George Garrett Fiction Prize).  He is a graduate of the University of Houston Writing Program, a former Hoyns Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Virginia, and the former Writer-in-Residence at Houston Baptist University.  Ulmer’s fiction and poetry have appeared in a number of journals including The New Yorker, Poetry, The Saturday Evening Post, The Missouri Review, The North American Review, and elsewhere.  Ulmer is currently Professor of English at Southern Arkansas University.  He and his wife, writer Robin Kozak, live in haunted St. Augustine, Florida.