issue 1may.2013

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issue 1

design:evan schlomann

may.2013

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Ritual

Ghost Town Without You

The Real Thing

Girls on the Subway

Coyotes

Remains

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10

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No, no, I didn’t kill them- for the same

reason I don’t kill foreigners: where’s the

satisfaction if they scream in a language

you don’t understand? The stories are usually

much more banal. Like, for example, an Alpaca

I recently mounted. Standard s t u f f r e a l l y. I wa s on

a h i ke i n t he Ande s moun t a i n s w i t h a l o c a l g u i de n amed

Ua tu whom I h ad h i r ed w i t h my l a s t t h r ee do l l a r s . The

p r i c e s eemed r e a sonab l e and he , t h rough b roken Eng l i s h

and a s e r i e s o f h and gestures, said something about it

buying a year’s worth of medication for his 12 polio

stricken children or some such thing. I wasn’t really

paying attention. Anyway, as we crested a particularly

Did I kill all of them?

buying a

stricken c

b y c o f f i n h u n t e r

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grueling mountain, we were set upon by a vicious alpha male

Alpaca. Sensing fear, the Alpaca fixed Uatu in it’s hypnotic

gaze. Uatu immediately went insane and jumped of f a c l i f f l e a v i n g

m e t o f a c e t h e v i c i o u s b e a s t a l o n e . We l o c k e d e ye s a n d e n g a g e d i n p s y c h i c w a r f a r e o n t h e a s t r a l p lane for for ty days and for ty nights, at the end of w h i c h I e m e r g e d v i c t o r i o u s . T h e g r e a t b e a s t f i n a l l y f e l l ,

k i c k i n g u p a c l o u d o f l o o s e s n o w . I s t r e t c h e d m y b a c k , b r u s h e d

t h e s n o w o f f m y s h o u l d e r s , a n d t o r e h i s s t i l l b e a t i n g h e a r t f r om

his chest and devoured it raw under the full moon (as is

customary). When dawn finally came, I scraped the forty days

worth of beard growth from my face with a sharpened piece of

flint, hefted the carcass of the once mighty animal over my

right shoulder, and began the arduous descent down the

8,000 foot mountain. Half way down, I recovered the shattered

body of Uatu- it was a long way back to New York on foot and

I would need him for food. Besides, I had given him my last

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three dollars and felt he still owed me. The

trip back

was fraught with peril: hostile natives, chu

pacabras ,

and cor r upt border agents in ever y nat ion . Somewhere in

southern Texas a Skunk Ape sto le the few remain ing p ieces of

Uatu jer ky f rom my makesh i f t camps i te whi le I s lept . I can on ly

hope the fou l smel l ing beast got ind igest ion , as Uatu ’s food

va lue turned out to be as useless as his value as a

guide. Without food, the days began to blur.

At

some point I encountered the dreaded Genoskw

a,

but that is a tale for another day. Eventual

ly

I made it back to my secluded upstate New

York home, cleared the vines and saplings

from my front door, and set about the task

of preserving what was left of the mighty

Alpaca I had carried so long and far. So

that’s the story of the Alpaca- all of it

true. Many of the other animals on my

walls have similar stories, but if

you’ve heard one, you’ve heard

them all.

I recently filed a small claims

lawsuit against Uatu’s family to

try and recover my three dollars,

but international lawsuits can be

very time consuming and costly...

set a

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ceiling. We rider whatever wonder observer

suspends the

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ceiling. We rider whatever wonder observer

suspends the

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We fall against the ceiling. We ride a rotating earth before a purple symbols again always.

The snow crashes whatever wondering observer suspends the on the globelike half-time

drum hits. No. animal carrier. The Unspecified adult. Like a drum kit before sex, we

invented dashes opposite ass sphere. I separate everything. Before everything like the fall

inside the glass pain crashes on the moonroof like a stop.

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A rota

ting e

arth

ices

before

a purp

le. W

e fall

agai

nst th

e

ceili

ng. W

e rid

er w

hatev

er w

onder ob

serv

er su

spen

ds the

sym

bols ag

ain al

ways h

alf-ti

me d

rum

hits. N

o. anim

al

carr

ier. C

onceali

ng def

eate

d on the g

lobe l

ike b

efore

sex,

we

inve

nted das

hes opposit

e unsp

cified

adult.

We l

ike a

drum

kit.

Every

thin

g lik

e the a

gain

alway

s spher

e I se

parat

e eve

ryth

ing.

Before

full g

lass.

Moonro

of lik

e rain

crash

es on th

e empty

space

insid

e lik

e the e

mpty

spac

e insid

e full g

lass.

Like the empty space before everything separate again always inside

a full glass he moonroof like the rain crashes stop-time drums.

dru

m h

its. No

. an

ima

l ca

rrier. C

on

ce

ali

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Jeff r e y Paggi

I NEVER THOUGHT that my love of comic books would help me in the “real world.” I always fig-ured the real world would take algebra equations and the peri-odic table of elements. That’s what my mom would tell me. That’s what Mr. Clyde would say too, and he reads more comic books than I do! I guess I nev-er thought the real world could be anything like a comic book, and that’s what I liked about them. A year ago, on Halloween, that all changed. Ayla told me that if I wrote the last year’s

story she would draw it. Ayla and I have tried to make com-ic books before, but we never finished them. Maybe this will be different. This time we have a real story to tell. A true story, though no one who reads it will

ever believe that.

It started, like I said, last year

on October 25th. I was an eighth grader

at Fir Falls Middle School, and it was the first year I decided that I was too old for trick-or-treating. Halloween was always

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my favorite holiday, and this was probably due to the fact that trick-or-treating was so much fun. The previous year I had dressed up as Jimi Hendrix. I used my mom’s old hippy clothes, and made a cardboard version of Jimi’s Stratocaster. That year, we decided to use pillow cases to hold our candy in-stead of orange plastic pump-kins. We told each other it was because they could hold more candy, but it was really because you could always tell who the older kids were, even in costume, because they used pillow cases. We stayed out past curfew, egged our teach-er’s house, and outran the police by cutting through the section of woods that sepa-rated the village from the highway, where the water tow-er was, the section we called “The Trails.”

One other reason I am proba-bly so in love with Halloween is because it is my birthday.

I woke up that morning, and showered. When I was fin-ished, I opened the medi-cine cabinet and took out the Gillette razor and shav-ing cream that Mom had given me the night before. It was time I learned how to shave, she said. I didn’t really have enough facial hair to necessi-tate it, and I didn’t see how it could be that difficult to do anyway, but Mom always gets upset about how I’m going to learn to do manly things, since my Dad hasn’t been around since I was five. I shot some shaving cream out onto my hand, and rubbed it onto my face. So this is what a man looks like, I thought, as I stared at my foam beard in the mirror. I turned on hot water and

went through the motions, rub-bing the razor against my face methodically, removing all of the foam along with my non-ex-istent facial hair. Downstairs, my mom had cooked a huge break-fast for me: pancakes, scram-bled eggs, bacon, and plenty of orange juice.

Mom looked real tired, and I noticed she didn’t have a pot of coffee on.

“I need to go grocery shopping after work, so I won’t see you before you go to the Haunted Mansion.” Ayla and I were ac-tors at the Haunted Mansion, in the Zombie Room. It runs every night for the two weeks before Halloween, and of course, Hal-loween is the biggest—and last—night of the year you can go. When we were younger, we would go every year before trick or treating. It was always really scary, and it was fun to have a chance to scare younger kids.

“Sounds good,” I said. Mom was easily scared, so I decided not to ask her if she was going to come and see us. It’s not that I even wanted her too, really, it just seems like the kind of thing that Moms are supposed to do, you know? I ate the rest of my breakfast as Mom read the paper. Then I got my coat and bag, and my Mom gave me a kiss, and a well-wrapped present.

“Happy birthday, James. Open this after school. Your fa-ther wishes he could be here. He’d be so proud of you, sweet-heart,” she said.

“I know, Mom. It’s okay,” I said, taking the book-sized present from her, and putting it into my camouflage knapsack. “Love you!”

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“Love you too possum. Good-bye.” I hated when she called me that. I hugged her as tight as I could, and then bolted out the door to run to school.

When I got to the sidewalk, I turned around to look at the house, and I saw my Mom waving through the window. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I had never heard my mother say the word “goodbye” to me. What I mean is, she always gave me kisses and hugs, but she would always use words like “see you later,” or “until tonight.”

I looked at my watch. Seven-thirty. Not enough time to meet up with Ayla and walk with her. I put on my earphones, and pressed play on my iPod. “I Walked With A Zombie,” the first song on my Halloween mix, came on, and I began my walk across town. Fir Falls is a village in the middle of Evergreen Hills, and there is a bridge on Main street that crosses over the falls, an impressive feature of

Fur Creek. As I crossed the Main Street bridge, I noticed a man with ghost-white hair on the opposite corner staring at me. He was unnervingly tall and thin, and dressed like a rock star: black jeans, shiny black shoes, a white turtleneck, and a black leather jacket. I got a chill, and sprinted a bit to put some distance between the old guy and me. After a block, I turned around and looked but he was nowhere to be seen. It reminded me of the latest issue of Kid Cosmos, when John Star (the Kid’s secret identity) was on his way to the library to research meteor showers. There had been one recently, and he suspected it was re-sponsible for the fact that he had also recently lost some of

his powers, and gained oth-ers. Anyway, on his way to the library, he notices a stranger staring at him, and when he looks again he can’t see him. The stranger turns out to be Barry Nebules, who had been the very first Kid Cosmos ever. When I say that what happened “reminded” me of Kid Cosmos, I don’t mean that I thought the coincidence had any kind of real significance,

just that it made me think of it. I never really thought anything had real significance back then. Now that I think about the state of mind I had before that night, I was always asleep. Like my whole life had been a dream, a dream from which I was about to wake up.

School was largely uneventful. After homeroom, on my way to Chemistry, Max Schrek and his usual band of deranged goons heckled me as I walked down the hall.

“Where’s your cape, Super-nerd?” The superhero insults were always laughable, not be-cause of how funny they were, but because of how uninspired they were. We comic book fans are a witty bunch, always the first to poke fun at our own obsession. “Supernerd” is just bland. I prefer more complex burns, and imagined a riposte.

“Hey, Max. I lost my cape. Where’s your ability to read?”

Only that’s not what I actu-ally said, which was a mut-tered, under-the-breath, “Shut up, jerk.” Max’s face turned bright red, but luckily, Prin-cipal Leary turned the corner at that very instant.

“Shouldn’t you be in class

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boys?” he asked, and I let out a sigh of relief.

“On my way sir,” I said. Safe from the rogues gallery. For now.

I wouldn’t get a chance to see Ayla until Mr. Clyde’s A.P. English class, which was the last of the day, so I spent most of my classes, and all of lunch, creating characters for a comic idea we had called

The Ionic Insiders. It’s about

a brother and sister who dis-

cover that they can shift into plasma form. When they’re in plasma form, they are gas-eous. This has its advantag-es: for instance, bullets can pass through them, they can fly, and they can slip through small cracks.

I managed to avoid Max for the rest of the day, until I was leaving Global Studies, on my way to English, I heard them around the corner of the hallway, guffawing like a pack of baboons. I tried to think of an alternate route to the English class quickly, but the North Wing of the school had been closed all year for renovations. I waited a few minutes to see if I could hear them leave, but no such luck. I bit my lips, crossed my fingers, and bolted around the corner, almost running.

Max spotted me instantly.

“Where do you think you’re going, Captain Fartknocker?” he said, and ran up behind me. He grabbed my back pack, and lifted me off of my feet by it. The straps dug into my

armpits, and they hurt bad. He swung me back and forth as his buddies whooped their support.

“Put him down, Max,” said Ayla, who had suddenly ap-peared. I know that Ayla always means well, and truth be told, she has saved me from certain doom on numerous occasions, but she doesn’t realize that being saved by a girl really doesn’t help a thirteen-year-old dude gain respect from his peers.

Max dropped me, and I crum-pled to the floor.

“Well, well. Look who it is. Little Miss Nerd Queen. What’s the matter? Did the Power Rangers marathon end?” Max’s buddies applauded this idiotic insult, and I scam-pered to my feet to put some distance between myself and the crew of bullies.

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