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October 2008
An Invitation to Dine
In the darkness and cold of his bedroom the shadows dared to wear their true faces. Hunkered beasts standing their silent vigil from the corners. Depthless hollows where the moon couldn’t touch. Their eyes black and hooded, the fog of their breath pressing into his sheets.
Grim totems of Jacob’s sleepless hours: the house slumbering on its foundation, voiceless except for the grandfather clock in the hallway ticking its mindless countdown of years. The turgid heartbeat of some hollow giant. Click of their heater roiling to life but he couldn’t feel the proof of it.
No, the cold of the shadows leaching into his skin, sapping warmth until his marrow ached. Jacob shivering under sweat-soaked sheets, clamping his teeth together so they wouldn’t chatter. His body knotting tighter until his knees dug into his skinny chest and he could feel each thin lungful ballooning his ribcage.
The moon combing silver highlights into his hair and the waiting still of the night. A small boy trapping heat against his impotent heart. The fan pummeling air heedless of the chill and he wished he could just switch it off but he didn’t dare get up. Didn’t dare move. Afraid an errant twitch might startle the monsters into action. His terror swelling like a living creature inside of him, a virus gnawing into every pore until there was nothing else.
He waited. A shrink-wrapped fetus clinging to the slim comfort of his covers, lying with his eyes clenched shut willing himself to sleep please God sleep but sleep wasn’t coming. Oh no. Not this long night.
Not with the tall stranger watching him from the foot of the bed.
Too Much Caffeine
This is Tabitha at her lowest ebb. Slumped over in the booth with the table as her prop and her sometimes pillow. Her eyes are peeled red blisters itching under a wilting porch of lashes. Pupils round and empty and burnt out like the ashtray staring up from the table.
She’s sitting in this greasepit diner, the kind you see all the time in the movies, with all the time in the world to kill and nothing to do but stare back at the ashtray. It’s one of those cheap plastic numbers with notches in the rim. Glittering keenly in the still-waking light. Too clean for a joint like this, she thinks. No butts no film of ashes. Someone must have pawed a rag through it recently. She can see her reflection fisheyed in the black plastic bottom: cheeks ballooned and cratered by the gray scars of former stubbings.
I look about like I feel, she thinks. Horrible.
She lights a Marlboro from a crumpled pack and pokes it into one of the notches. Watches ashes form in the ashtray’s belly. Smoke peeling off and snaking toward the ceiling. She takes a drag and the tension settles out of her shoulders. Ah, nicotine, my second-best friend.
She runs her tongue over her teeth. Thinking about picket fences, ocean-front property. The death of the American dream. Her teeth are like tin cans – hollow, cheap, fragile. Lips so dry they stick together when she closes her mouth. Chapped skin gluing tight.
This sucks, she thinks.
Stories and art by Cory Chandler. He is a senior staff writer for the Office of Communications & Marketing and graduate of Texas Tech's College of Mass Communications. Contact Cory Chandler at (806) 742-2136 or cory.chandler@ttu.edu.