Marcel Harper

He had the butcher’s apron strapped on like a suit of armor: proud and tight. He wore it dirty. The stains from previous chili tournaments were intact and crusted brown, like barnacles on some ancient leviathan from the deep.

He liked to hee-haw and back-slap with the tough old fucks who sought out these backwater festivals. Men with calloused hands from working too damned hard all their lives and calloused tongues from smoking cheap cigars. They offered their stogies to him, and he accepted with grace but never smoked.

He made a good chili. In the clapboard, shit-heel smokehouses that most of the festival regulars claimed to have made pilgrimages to but had never actually seen the inside of, he was known. The old ones who tended those outside-of-time, hickory heavy smoke pits knew him by his apron or Panama hat or just the way he dipped a short rib into their chili sauce. Made them think of the pastor dunking a new convert in the muddy waters of the local river.

His chili was hot and honest and contained about a baby’s crib’s worth of smoked poblanos and a quart of Sazerac Rye. First, though, he would decant the expensive whiskey into an empty bottle of Old Crow. He drank half of that to get in the mood and poured the other half into the chili to finish it off. His competition buddies liked booze mixed in with their heat and liked that he never had all the alcohol cook off before serving time.

He won as often as he wanted but always shared his prizes. After the main ceremony he would dole out cups of the prize-winning dish and watch the small town folks line up because God knows that everybody loves a winner. During such times the story of Jesus and the fishes and loaves would come up strong in his mind, and it made him forget about the small towns and the small townspeople with their rough hands and lives of mindless labor.

He liked the way the forgetting burned through his mind, nice and slow.

The losing cooks always wanted to know about his secret ingredient, and he would always tell them to go fuck themselves. They liked that sort of talk and rewarded him with much back-slapping and some genuine affection. Their faces, red and alcohol-fueled, would remind him of Noah and that shit-filled ship the old codger had steered into the side of a mountain.

When his opponents won, not often, but it happened, they would also offer him a share of the loot. Maybe a skillet endorsed by a has-been football hero or a plastic cooler big enough for a six-pack of longnecks or the head of a murdered spouse. He accepted such offerings with grace because that’s what was expected of him.

On his way out of town he would take their gifts and heft them out the window of his Chevy and watch the worthless junk roll and jump and shatter against the asphalt. It made him smile to see the pieces later on, like dried bones, lying open to the sun when he passed by there the next day.

He always doubled back. Liked to see his handiwork because that’s what his Pappy had taught him: you have to be proud of your work. And he was.

On that day, when he came back into the festival town, he tipped his Panama at the banner strung across the now-empty main street. Small towns loved themselves a good banner, and this one was no exception. On it was advertised the hellfire heat of the chili contest along with some sage advice like, “Come hungry!” and, “Bring your own fire extinguisher!” He enjoyed the home-spun humor and chuckled when he passed underneath, riding his Chevy like a chariot charging down some unfortunate Christians caught in a tough time and tougher place.

He drove down the street and thought about the story of Sampson’s honey-filled lion. How the sweetest delights were so often distilled from decay.

He stopped off at the festival grounds, got out and walked to the judges’ table. The place was mostly quiet, but the main tent’s loudspeaker was still plugged in, hissing like a snake chopped in half. He took up the microphone like an old-time crooner and breathed in the scent of stale beer and stale meat that clung to it. Then he belted out one long and hollow, “Well howdy, folks!” and waited for a response, even though he knew there wouldn’t be any. He liked the sound of his own voice.

The greeting bounced around the grounds in such a way that two stray dogs and a few crows scattered away, abandoning the objects that had held all their interest up to that point. He was glad to see the crows and dogs. He thought of them as his kin and liked to mess with them from time to time. He knew that they liked him more than they could tell.

After a time, the vagrant animals returned and took up their previous occupation. So as not to disturb them, he walked slowly to where his chili still stood, seething in the sun with a halo of midges and flies competing for a scrap of the meaty sauce. He dipped one slender finger into the pot and ran it around the rim to properly sample all the goodness and then brought it up to his nose and smelled the complexity of the poblanos and whiskey. He licked his finger clean, taking care to catch the grainy bits that had gotten stuck underneath his fingernail.

The chili tasted like the freshest of small-town virgins. Those vacant-eyed country boys and girls with big plans in their tiny heads and even bigger disappointments waiting up ahead. As the sauce burnt a trail of fire down his throat, the image of the great fish came to him, and he imagined how close and tight and hot it must have felt for Jonah when that big maw inhaled him out there in the deep blue sea.

He savored the heat. The burn would last for a good long while. As he surveyed the quiet festival grounds, he stretched straight and popped the bones of his back with a sound of hailstones on a tin roof and stared up into God’s sky. He tipped the Panama in the direction of the smoldering sun. He remembered a time when it was still freshly put up there. A time when he hadn’t been compelled to mingle with flies and dogs and the people who now lay (some sat) all around.

He dwelled on the memories for some time. If some lone survivor or late-in-the-coming dog or crow had been there to see him, they would have marveled at how still he stood. How he resembled a statue or carving. Only the hint of a smile on his face and the way the sun caught his eyes providing clues that this was a living thing not made of stone or wood.

When the memories had faded along with the daylight, he turned his back on the place forever and took up his pot of chili and walked back to the Chevy and headed off to the next town. He didn’t mind driving through the night; he rarely slept these days.

He drove without a map or a purpose. He knew that the best towns and the best chili contests they had to offer would find him. The ones that promised hotter than hell and all-you-could-eat fiery goodness. The ones that made him think back to times when he knew what he was put on this earth to do.

Towns like that found him real easy.

MARCEL HARPER lives in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he communes with dark forces and tries to avoid being killed by his cats. His writing leans toward the speculative and weird. You can connect with him at www.marcelharper.com

Maria Pinto

When he notices I haven’t moved from the spot in the backyard where the swing set used to be, he tries to ignore me. He goes about his work and play around the house, causing undue commotion. He wants me to notice how much life he’s living. He prunes the palm tree. He fishes for toothy Florida gar in the lake. He whoops in triumph each time one of the prehistoric creatures waggles at the end of his line. He learns to play my steelpan, poorly. He sweeps at a mound of dirt near to where I sit, pretending his sidelong looks are meant for something just beyond my left shoulder.

When he realizes I’ve been eating dirt, he comes out to yell. My dreadlocks are tossed horizontal with the force of his objection. I remind him that he used to make mud pies for his younger sisters. He still feels bad about that childhood tyranny. He breaks down and prepares a mud pie for me, presumably following an old recipe. His lips tremble with the effort it takes to remain quiet. I imagine he resents me for reducing him to the role of enabler, once again.

I have not eaten anything but soil in weeks. My loved ones think they can remedy my invisible illness. Mom brings vitamins and cans of ackee; friends bring vintage-shop dresses beautiful enough to wear to a wedding. I will not be changing my clothes. This hospital gown is it for me. The only words I spare, between bites, for those with offerings are, “I cannot participate.” He brings out teas of stinging nettles, pennyroyal, Queen Anne’s lace. “I am not trying to abort a fetus,” I say. “I am trying hard not to do anything.”

He comes home late one night. I expect him to keep his vigil at my side, but he doesn’t. The lights never come on in the house. He’s in there, though, feeling around for the stairs, maybe stubbing his toe. I don’t need him. As I sift black soil between the roof of my mouth and tongue, I imagine him sleeping naked, whiskey-spent, the length of him soft against our scratchy alpaca comforter.

It is on the fifty-second day that he comes out to sit with me just as I chomp down on an earthworm. I’ve eaten a crater into our once-perfect landscaping. My nails have separated from their fingers from all the digging, and I smile to think of my blood in with the dirt. “You’re purple as a plum,” he says, his hungover breath tickling my neck, and I wonder if he means to bite my shoulder. Like he used to. He does not. Exhaustion has gouged deep rings under his eyes. He watches as I eat and eat. He wonders aloud what the attraction could be, tosses a clump of dirt into his mouth. He spits out what he can, coughing like a new smoker. He sees that there can be no solidarity between us. But that’s just fine. Even if we couldn’t make anything lasting from this life, he will be at my side when I dig deep enough to find the next.

MARIA PINTO’s recent work has appeared in Word Riot, The Butter, FLAPPERHOUSE, Hermeneutic Chaos, Small Po[r]tions, and elsewhere. She was the 2010 Ivan Gold Fellow at the Writers’ Room of Boston, in the city where she cares for dogs and does karaoke. Her debut novel is in search of a home. She’s working on her second.

Anthony Cordello

The sink water was the exact color of vanilla extract. Rice swirled in deranged orbits around the biggest stalk of broccoli I had seen for a while. Slushed bits of carrots got caught in nets of lettuce. Dumplings floated aimlessly while their either pork or vegetable insides were alive and rippling against the thin membrane. A lo mein noodle leapt out of the water and clung to my arm hair, slipped up under my sleeve, crawled across my chest, and burrowed effortlessly into my belly button.

It did not bother me too much. This was the third time this week that something strange had found it way inside of me. This Monday, my shoelace untied itself and inched all the way up my side to squeeze into my armpit, and on Wednesday, at least a foot of floss wormed its way from one ear to the other. And it was Friday so I assumed that whatever was happening to me was following a MWF schedule. At least I got the weekend free.

It was six at night. The weekend was four hours away. I made nine-fifty an hour, so I had to make thirty-six more dollars before I could go home. For thirty-six dollars I was going to wash every single plate at least a dozen times. I was the Bamboo Kingdom dishroom supervisor, but I was also the only Bamboo Kingdom dishwasher.

The dishroom was a small corner squared off from the rest of the kitchen by a pair of cherry-blossom dressing screens. Everything inside belonged to me: the three-compartment sink where each compartment had its own sponge, the grease trap, the waste pulper, the pressure-wash hose with a crack in the nozzle, the aluminum ball for grease stains, the spackle knife for burnt pans, the industrial steam sanitizer that cleaned the dishes after I cleaned them, the laminated night chores posted on the wall above the sink, and the green dry-erase marker I used to check off after each chore.

I washed dishes. All the dishes had the exact same boring, bloodless personality except for a single, fascinating bowl that had been scarred by a microwave. I saw the bowl maybe once a day. Sometimes I thought about holding onto it, keeping it on the top of my head, but I had a feeling it might disrupt the dishroom. I did not want to do that.

I washed twenty-five dishes in five minutes, loaded them between the yellow teeth of the sanitizer, set the machine on automatic cycle, pressed my ear against the metal door, listened to the grimy hum.

“Sid?”

I turned to see my boss, Jake, standing on the edge of the tape with his arms crossed. It was impossible for me to look him in the eye, so I stared at the giant trademark mole above his right eyebrow.

“Hello again,” I said.

“What time did you leave work yesterday?” he asked.

“Ten. Like I do every day. Come in at two and leave at ten.”

“You sure about that? Because I just took a look at the time clock, and it looks like you left at nine fifty-two. A full eight minutes early, but at least that was better than Saturday when you left at nine forty-nine, more than ten minutes early. Did you really think I wouldn’t find out?”

“I guess I did not really think about that too much.” The mole was like a burned bubble on pizza crust.

“Is there a reason why you’ve been leaving early?”

“I think I finish all the night routines, and I get bored and tired and because I’m not doing anything productive, I decide to leave a little early. I realize that is wrong and dishonest and I am sorry. It won’t happen again.”

“I’m glad you understand. How’s your father?”

“Why?”

“Good.”

“Good.”

He smiled as he left. The flash of his teeth seemed to nudge the noodle down into the bladder. It started to stir up a storm. The bathroom was all the way on the other side of restaurant. I ran through the kitchen bumping into one of the giant steel mixing bowls filled with dumplings and sending it into the back of the legs of the older cooks. They all started yelling at me. I hated every single one of them.

“Piece of shit dishwasher.”

“Watch where you’re fucking going.”

“Tiny dick pussy bitch.”

As soon as I got to the hallway, a sharp pain shot from the base of my penis to the tip like a puck hitting the bell on a strength test. I fell and knocked over a whole column of milk crates lining the wall. I crawled through the wreckage into the bathroom, slid under the handicapped stall, and hoisted myself up on the seat.

My bladder was a cave where the stalagmites were almost touching the stalactites and the pool of urine was slowly rising past all the past benchmarks on the sepia walls glittering with ammonia, calcium, glucose, sulfur, methyl mercaptan, diphenhydramine.

The noodle sliced through the urine like a shark fin, surfacing for a moment, as if to take a breath, before diving down to the bottom where the opening of the urethra was fitted with a pink rubber plug. It wrapped itself around the chain, yanked it free, followed the urine down, tore me open and blacked me out.

To wake up I had to wade through a memory of the muscular hydraulic lift transferring my father from his bed to his wheelchair, his wheelchair to his bed, in the second intensive rehab center he attended after the first stroke. I found myself on the floor, on my back with my limbs spread out, stretched across two stalls. My skin fatally cold on the tiles. My hair wet with my own drool. Blood on my thighs that I wiped away with toilet paper.

Something splashed in the toilet. I peered over the rim and saw the noodle swimming counter-clockwise, conjuring a small whirlpool. It stopped when it noticed me staring.

“What’s your name?”

“Sid.”

“Listen, Sid, you really need to take some colace.”

“Some what?”

“Colace? Docusate sodium? A stool softener. You are pretty backed up. You should take care of it before it gets serious. One of my previous hosts was so constipated that stool ended up in his stomach. One morning he woke up vomiting shit, and by that afternoon he was dead from toxicity, and that did not end well for either of us because I had to escape from the morgue. Ever have to swim through formaldehyde? It’s a carcinogen.”

“Are you an alien?”

“That poor guy ate here alone every single night. I am sure that had something to do with it, and I wish I could have done something, but people are going to do what they want to do. I cannot remember his name for the life of me. Miss him though, sometimes.”

“Do you know the shoelace or the floss?”

“Listen to me. The dumplings are going to attack soon.”

“Who?”

“The dumplings are coming to take back what first belonged to them. They are very angry and very dangerous. You have to believe me.”

“Pork or vegetable?”

“Both. The females are pork and the males are vegetable.”

“Weird; I thought it would be the opposite.”

“Me, too, but that’s how it is. Ok, time for me to leave.”

“Wait, what should I do? Should I call the police?”

“Why would you do that? What are they going to do?”

“I don’t know. Arrest them?”

“I’m sorry, Sid, but it’s all up to you. You’re the dishroom supervisor, aren’t you?”

“I guess so.”

“Ok, that’s all I need to say. Good luck.”

The noodle slipped down the curve of the pipe. I flushed the toilet with my foot, washed and dried my hands, finally left the bathroom, and stopped in my tracks as soon as I saw the state of the kitchen.

There were dumplings everywhere. They were crawling across the stainless steel tables, climbing up the walls, pouring down out of the exhaust hoods. They had puckered mouths filled with tiny needle teeth on their undercooked undersides. They hissed when they latched onto open skin. They attacked in swarms, around two dozen dumplings to every one person. The cooks were running around, screaming.

Jake was in his office wearing a mask of dumplings. I could not see one inch of his face. There was nothing I could do about it or any of it. I went back inside the bathroom and propped the trash can against the door.

ANTHONY CORDELLO lives in Boston. He went to UMass Amherst for his BA and Fairfield for his MFA. His stories have been published in decomP, Tin House’s Open Bar, and Thickjam. You can reach him at majortonywoohoo@gmail.com.