Kate Folk

It’s July, and we’re in a small town in Kentucky, shooting the independent cowboy/zombie film that my boyfriend, Jeff, is funding. Though he’s paying for the whole production, Jeff is content to erect tripods and make beer runs for the crew. The movie is called “Blood and Dirt,” and the script is awful: too ridiculous to be scary, too violent to be funny. Jeff says it’ll come together in post-production.

Because he made a fortune off a protein powder he invented in college, Jeff now gets to pursue his dream of being an artist. All he ever wanted was to be a “creative type,” as he calls it, and laments that he’s more of a “science guy.” He says this almost every day in some context. “I like it, but I’m more of a science guy,” he said yesterday when asked his opinion of a painting hanging in a coffee shop.

We’ve been here a week. At night we camp on a dirt field with the rest of the crew. Even at midnight, the temperature stays above ninety. Our bodies are sickening orbs of heat. We don’t touch inside the tent — a cramped, slippery thing, filled with tiny ants.

The adjacent park is occupied by a Civil War reenactment group. They wear real wool uniforms, suffering for verisimilitude. We suspect that they’re practicing for an upcoming event, since reenacting a single battle can’t take this long. When we ask them questions, they spout platitudes about God and country.

Last night we ate at Pizza Hut, all twenty of us. Only three people had cash so we split the bill on sixteen cards. We stayed in the parking lot for two hours smoking cigarettes and joints and drinking beer from the gas station. One by one, townspeople came out of their houses and stared.

Jeff feels self-conscious if I’m around while they’re filming, so I’m alone again today. The temperature hits 100 by eleven a.m. I wander down Main Street. A wave of nausea and I just make it to the diner bathroom before vomiting a gruel of Krispy Kreme and weak coffee. I’m either pregnant or sick from organisms lurking beneath the sneeze guard at the Pizza Hut buffet.

On my way out, an old man corners me behind a wood partition. His eyes are cloudy, like egg whites that have just started to cook. He breathes on me; his breath smells like apples softening in the sun.

“Your people pissed on my lawn,” he says.

I edge past him. I feel his runny eyes on me clear to the door.

Even the sparrows move in slow motion, their Chiclet hearts taxed by heat. I follow a trail of popcorn to the town square. Rusty water spasms from the fountain. I sit on a tree stump and am immediately approached by a small woman. She’s skinny, with bulbous joints, dull red hair and a jaw like a desiccated chicken wing.

“You’re all a bunch of grade-A assholes,” she says. “Skipping out on your tab like that.”

I tell her I don’t know what she’s talking about. I walk to the drug store where the crew buys energy bars and Gatorade and condoms. They say the local girls are almost too willing; no fun in it.

I linger in the air conditioning and buy a pregnancy test. The girl ringing me up looks at the name on my debit card. Then she looks at me. She chews her gum slowly. She blows a bubble that deflates suddenly, as if pricked. I have to reach over and pry my card from her hand.

I decide to go to the library. I move as fast as I can without running. The back of my flip flop is stepped on. The shoe comes off and I have to stop and retrieve it.

I’ve been stalked by a family. A middle-aged man. A plump woman with skin like yogurt with chunks of fruit in it. A teenage girl, blonde with a wide forehead, her eyes red from crying.

“Your friend had his way with my girl,” the man says. “She’s only seventeen.”

I shrug. “It’s none of my business,” I say.

“Will you give him this?” the girl says. She hands me an envelope. “Steve” is written across the front in girly, looping script.

Steve is a pudgy guy who wears stained t-shirts and scratches his ass on tree trunks. I laugh. “Steve?” I say. “Really?” The girl blushes and runs away.

Around six we spread a tarp over the hot dirt and eat KFC. Jeff shows me stills from the day’s shoot on his iPhone. The blood looks fake — too red, too thick, like the tomato paste my mom used to slather on meatloaf. “Looks good,” I say.

I tell Jeff about the townspeople, how I don’t feel safe alone in the town all day. He laughs and says I can’t let these backwater hicks intimidate me. I sip gravy from a Styrofoam cup like it’s strong tea.

I sneak out once Jeff’s asleep and go to the park bathroom to pee on the pregnancy test stick. A dash blurs into being; food-borne organisms after all. I vomit once for good measure, then stand on the concrete bib at the bathroom entrance, looking at the dark, uniform humps of soldiers’ tents, like sleeping elephants waiting trustfully for dawn.

The crew leaves early the next morning. I stay in the tent. The sun rises and I start to broil. I watch the tiny ants move in diagonals over the nylon membrane.

Pop, pop, go the guns of the fake Confederacy.

I step out of the tent, locate my plastic bag of toiletries, and set off for my morning bathroom visit. I ignore the townspeople who have encircled me. When I move, they follow, whining and clutching at the edges of my clothes.

I don’t think they’ll follow me into the bathroom, but they do. I go into a stall. They sit on the floor, light cigarettes and talk about kids, work, the weather. They could stay there all day. I unbolt the stall door and try to run past but they grab me and pin me to the wall. I start screaming. They touch my face, my hair, stick their fingers in my pockets.

“Leave the lady alone,” a voice booms. I feel wool scratch my cheek as his arm coils around my shoulders.

General Lee takes me to his tent. It’s spacious, the middle held up by poles. There’s a sleeping pallet, a table, a sepia-toned map. He lets me lie on his pallet. He lights his pipe.

I ask where he’s from.

“The great state of Virginia,” Lee says.

“How long have you been doing the reenactment thing?”

“If you’re asking how long this terrible war has lasted — why, it’s seemed lifetimes already.”

“I’m scared to go out there,” I say.

“I cannot trust a man to control others who cannot control himself,” Lee says. “You can stay here the rest of the day if you like.”

He hands me a Bible, then sits at his desk and writes letters for several hours.

At four, Jeff texts me. “I can’t thank you enough,” I tell Lee.

Lee stands and bows. “I tremble for my country when I hear of confidence expressed in me,” he says. “I know too well my weakness, that our only hope is in God.”

“Well, whatever,” I say. “Thanks again.”

I don’t tell Jeff about General Lee. They’re doing the sluicing scene tomorrow, so everyone’s excited.

“God, it’s so great to be around these creative types,” Jeff says. “I finally feel like I’m really living, you know?”

The men are burning through the town’s teenage girl population. The two women on the crew are having affairs with local married men. Angry citizens ring the dirt field the next morning. They hiss and spit at us as we break their ranks.

“Fucking rednecks,” Jeff says, and spits back.

I don’t bother going into town. I walk straight to General Lee’s tent.

His beard is real. I pull it gently, and he laughs.

His trousers are tricky to undo. No zippers, and the buttons are tight. We do it missionary, silent and with most of our clothes on.

After, I ask if he’s married.

“It is good that war is so horrible, or we might grow to like it,” he says.

I stay in the tent while General Lee goes to make a speech to his troops. The gun noises are so familiar, I don’t notice when the real gun goes off. But then, sirens. I walk with the soldiers toward the field.

The sheriff has a man handcuffed face-down on the ground. Jeff stands twenty feet away. His mouth hangs open as he stares at the bloodstained dirt. Real blood, so dark it’s almost black. It must be hitting him now, how fake the movie blood looks.

General Lee stands next to me. “What a cruel thing war is, to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors,” he says.

The reenactment packs up and leaves the next morning. The park is littered with pipe filters and spent packets of jock itch powder.

Steve’s left lung was punctured, but he’ll live. Filming lasts another two days. Now Jeff brings me along on the shoots. I sit in the dirt under a makeshift cardboard awning and imagine that I’m pregnant. Jeff will raise General Lee’s son as his own. He will never know. I will never trawl Civil War reenactment groups on Facebook, only to discover that my son’s father manages a Budget Rent a Car and listens to Creed.

Jeff hands me a twenty and tells me to buy a 30 pack of Miller High Life at the gas station half a mile down the highway. I nod and start walking, because life is a series of small battles, only some of which are worth fighting.

KATE FOLK is from Iowa and now lives in San Francisco where she works as an English teacher. Her fiction has been published in PANK, Necessary Fiction, Neon, and Bartleby Snopes, among other journals. She enjoys the company of cats.

Robert Buswell

In the alcove we spoke in whispers, as if afraid to wake some long-departed saint. But the saints, rotten and stinking in their crypts, were so unlikely to awaken that our whispers could only be attributed to superstition, a superstition which galled Courtney.

“We’re way too old to believe such stupid shit,” she whispered. She gesticulated angrily with graceful hands, hands which I longed to touch, to hold.

“Then stop whispering,” I replied quietly, but loudly enough to anger her further.

“Fine,” she said. She glanced through latticed window at the graveyard, perhaps expecting some saint, roused to anger at her presumptiveness, to rise, loose meat scraping off on headstone edges, and cast a withering curse on her.

“Okay, back to the war.” I shifted against the stack of useless books. “How are we going to start this?”

Courtney and I had been planning this war for a while. We had chosen sides and shuffled troops; she placed most of hers in Europe and the Americas, while mine occupied mainly Indonesia, Africa, and the Middle East. I continued to question my strategy even though it was far too late to shift tactics.

“I want nuclear early,” she said.

I hesitated. “I know we haven’t talked about it much, but I’d rather not go nuclear until we get some good ground action.”

Courtney laughed, a laugh flush with derision only a fifteen year old can muster. “Ground action? Even the most backward civilization has armed drones now. There’s no hand-to-hand anymore.”

“You know what I mean. Ground action. Like disabling the satellites and letting them go at it.”

She stared at me, a look of concern surprising in its sincerity. “Drew, are you sure that’s wise? I have half a billion more than you do. That’s a pretty big advantage without technological weapons.”

“Maybe you’re right, but I’d still rather not go nuclear until we have to.”

She frowned. “Two nukes early and then no more until the end.”

I paused. It was a fair offer, considering how big the war would be. “Fine, but no more than 100 kilotons each.”

“Okay,” she said. “And I want chemical.”

“You already have radiological. That only leaves me with biological.”

“But you’re a year older than me,” she said, nudging my boot with her toes. “You agreed to a handicap.”

“I already have the smaller side.”

“And?”

We fell silent. I looked away first, out to the graves. The saints still slept, as unaware of their complicity, indeed their responsibility, in our endeavor as kittens on sunlit flagstones.

“You ready?” Courtney touched my arm as she spoke, a loaded touch with no discernable intention.

I turned back to her. “But what about us?”

“Us?”

“Yeah, us. What about afterwards?”

I could not interpret her expression. “We part.”

“I know, but what about later? Will I ever see you again?”

“You know the answer to that.” She selected a book and flipped through, stopping at pictures. The saints glared out in all their impotent glory from the dust-edged pages.

“But you could change your mind, you know.” I hated the sound of my voice. “We don’t have to stay apart forever. It’s just a little war.”

“No, it’s a world war,” she said. She tilted her head, hair falling off one bare shoulder like some saint herself, watching me. “Tell you what. If you win, I’ll change my mind.”

“No. What we have isn’t real if it depends on the outcome of a war.” My voice was rising. Were the saints shifting at the sound?

She dropped the book and stood up, her barrettes brushing the alcove roof. “You know why I can’t!” she shouted.

“But you know why you can,” I said softly, staring at the ancient stone floor. I could almost feel her indecisiveness, hated baggage which haloed her in pale colors.

“Let’s go,” she said, walking down the stairs into the sanctuary. I followed, my longing an obscenely dripping stigmata.

In the sanctuary, stained glass saints watching in consternation, we pitted our forces in silence. Courtney had two billion Christians to my 1.5 billion Muslims, but I fought with the determination only wounded pride can proffer and it was a very close battle indeed. Millions died, many hers, leaving us somewhat evenly matched after two hours. She called for full nuclear then but I resisted, saying that we had not yet exhausted conventional arms.

Another hour’s passage left me with few options. When she again demanded nuclear, I conceded. Of course it was over then. We sat back on thick wooden pews and watched the world end for hundreds of millions more. I glanced out into the graveyard through the open doors and saw earth cracking.

“Courtney, look!”

She turned. The saints, angry features all, were rising. Headstones splintered, disintegrating from violent upheavals beneath them. There was no loose meat to scrape off, only raw power and indignation. “Run!” she shouted. We ran.

By the time we reached the strip mall where we’d parked she had decided the rising was only a trick of light, the light of faraway mushrooms casting their eerie afterglows down into the graveyard.

“The dead don’t rise,” she said. “Not even saints.”

“Yeah.” I couldn’t think of a wittier response. Staring blankly at a storefront displaying Saints merchandise, I tried to conjure words to keep us together.

“We have to go,” she said suddenly, a warning edge to her voice.

I saw silver streak the sky in my peripheral vision and reached for her hand. As a malignant sun blossomed nearly overhead I looked down to see that even at the end she pulled away.

We flickered ahead.

The saints, pacified, lay down to sleep once more.

ROBERT BUSWELL is a fictional construction worker who lives in a mobile home in the American South with his common-law wife and eight children. He enjoys chewing tobacco, riding all-terrain vehicles, wearing overalls, transporting loaded handguns, attending religious services, consuming alcoholic beverages, and voting. He is currently working with two fingers at a Smith Corona on an autobiographical novel, which documents his rise from poverty to slightly less poverty.

by Eirik Gumeny



The office was quiet, dark, lit only by the soft glow of a few auxiliary lights and the reflection of the moonlight off the snow outside. Most of the staff had left within minutes of the governor making his declaration of a State of Emergency – to pick up necessities, to get home to family, to try and beat traffic. Satish and Deepen, model employees that they were, remained behind with a handful of others to try and put a dent in the department’s ever increasing workload.

Six weeks later they were still there, hard at work, gnawing on what was left of the severed leg of their coworker James. The rest of James, and the carcass of his wife, Pamela, the receptionist, lay picked clean at their feet.

Cleveland, another coworker, rushed over to them, as quickly as his bad leg would allow, visibly dismayed.

“Out,” he growled. “Out!”

Satish turned slowly toward Cleveland, a flap of skin hanging from his mouth, James’ calf in his hands, and asked, “Whuh?”

“Peo-ple,” replied Cleveland, pointing his scabbed and handless stump toward the window.

“Peo-ple?” scoffed Deepen, dropping James’ thigh onto his desk and turning to face his behanded colleague.

“Yeh,” said Cleveland, gravely. “Out.”

“Out?” replied Deepen even more skeptically, the brow above his one eye raised. “Out sigh?”

“Yeh! Peo-ple out fakking sigh!”

Cleveland was practically hopping in place, his torn, bloodied clothing fluttering as he bounced, his stump quivering with urgency and once again aimed at the window.

Deepen looked at Satish. Satish shrugged. Cleveland’s exposed kneecap began to slide down his shin.

Deepen shook his head and trudged out of James’ cubicle.

“Urk,” said Cleveland, tapping his stump against the smudged and spattered glass. “Peo-ple.”

Satish and Deepen stepped up to the window and looked down from their fourth floor perch, following Cleveland’s rapidly decaying appendage to the source of his discontent.

A man. A living, breathing, man. Knee deep in snow, bathed in blue moonlight, and carrying a baseball bat.

Satish and Deepen exchanged glances.

“Fakking peo-ple!” exclaimed Cleveland. “Out!”

“Cahm,” said Deepen. “Cahm. One peo-ple. Nuh portant.”

“Bat!” said Cleveland.

“One peo-ple,” repeated Deepen, raising a single skeletal finger in front of his face. “Us three. Us more.” He gestured to the far sides of the office, across piles of overturned desks and collapsed cubicles, over the bile stains and half-eaten organs and bare, broken bones, to the twitching cadavers eating old friends and the shambling corpses gathering at the windows.

“Us more.”

“Us more,” echoed Cleveland, his torn, clotted mouth forcing its way into a smile.

Deepen turned toward the window once again, his good eye focusing on the young man outside, his hunger growing.

“One peo-ple more peo-ple!” shouted Satish suddenly. “More!”

Deepen turned and slapped him across the face. Satish lost his jaw in the process.

“Cahm. Fak. Dow,” said Deepen, grabbing Satish by his exposed collarbones. “Juh. One. One peo-ple.”

“Unff peeeperle morrr peeeeperle,” repeated Satish weakly, rapidly expanding and collapsing his chest cavity, the muscle memory of a panic attack. “Allwahaysth morrr.”

“Nuh. One.”

“Nuh one,” said Cleveland quietly, disbelievingly, staring out the window.

Deepen turned toward him.

“Nuh one,” repeated Cleveland. “More. More!”

From the window the trio of reanimated corpses could see five more living, breathing, weapon-carrying people meandering along the street below.

“El, fak,” said Deepen.

The ding of the hallway elevator echoed into the silent office.

“Uh?” remarked Cleveland.

“Nurring,” replied Deepen weakly, “juh –”

The lights came on, bathing the entire office in an awful fluorescence. The three deceased coworkers huddled together, looking around the bloodstained, entrail-strewn office. Their undead colleagues did the same, slowly shuffling toward them.

Then they heard it.

“Hello?”

“Shih,” sputtered Cleveland, stepping back and pressing himself against the nearest desk. Satish put himself behind Deepen, clutching at his shoulders.

“Is there anybody in here?”

Satish’s remaining fingers tightened around Deepen’s shoulders. One of Deepen’s arms came off in the process.

“Vraapth,” said Satish. “Vraapth vraapth vraaapthing vraapth.”

“Shih!” shouted Cleveland, pounding a fist and a stump against the window. “Shih!”

He pressed his forehead against the glass. There were dozens of men and women now, all unmutilated and breathing oxygen and carrying axes and frying pans and shotguns.

“Nuh,” he muttered, an eye sliding forward slightly. “Nuuuuh…”

“Hello?”

The voice was getting closer.

“I can hear you. I know you’re in here.”

Satish shrank back, leaning against the window.

“You fucking monsters.”

The elevator dinged again.

“Fak,” said Cleveland, turning toward the sound. The rest of the reanimated office workers, gathered near now, did the same.

“Uh uth doooo?” asked Satish. “Uh?!”

Deepen simply smiled, his lips cracking and his bloodied teeth bared.

“Us eat peo-ple brains,” snarled Deepen, narrowing his one working eye.

He stepped forward, grabbing a letter opener from the nearest desk with his good arm.

“Brains,” repeated Cleveland, stepping beside Deepen, their coworkers lumbering behind them.

“Braaaaaaiiiinnsssss.”






EIRIK GUMENY was a boxing kangaroo who died, tragically and violently, in the ring in 1923, fighting Teddy Roosevelt and a time-traveling Muhammad Ali. Find out more at egumeny.blogspot.com.