By Janet Goldberg

“The plaque wasn’t in. You were sick. The weather’s too cold. I’m swamped at work.” He’d made many excuses, my husband, but now we were finally here, in the cramped office, a quaint, white-shuttered brick building with two oversized desks crammed with papers and coffee mugs. 

“What can we do for you?” a man sitting at one desk asked.

The woman at the other one was talking on the phone. Glancing over at us, she covered the receiver. “They’re mine, Charles,” then went back to her call.

The man gestured to the only two chairs in the room. He was hairless and pale, as if the only light that ever touched him came through a window. “Joan’ll will be right with you.”

I sat down beside his desk, my husband, Joan’s.

You’d think it’d be simpler.

But after the two-hour drive through the San Joaquin Valley and then getting lost in the cemetery—how were we to know you had to drive through Stockton Catholic to get to Stockton Rural–I could see the business of the dead was just as messy as the business of the living. And a funeral so late on a weekday seemed strange. But that was the only time the working relatives could make it. My husband and I were retired, so time didn’t really matter to us.

Looking out the window at the rolling green lawn, the trees, I thought it wasn’t half bad, the giant crosses and Mother Marys just as numerous here as in the Catholic cemetery, pretty in a museum sort of way. To boot, there were also swanky mausoleums far nicer than the real houses we saw on the drive through the San Joaquin Valley.

 “Now I don’t think that’s a good idea… I just wouldn’t say…” Joan kept rattling on while Charles shuffled papers as if there were a knack to it, and, getting antsy. I had the impulse to grab his hands, say, Give it up. Enough already. But I was old, and he wasn’t, so instead I said, “Are those mausoleums granite?”

His hands suddenly froze, and he looked up, as if I’d pressed a button.

 “Quite something, aren’t they? We don’t build them here though.” He handed me a brochure.

Simon & Sons. More Than a Lifetime. A Lifetime Investment.

“Like a starter home.” I chuckled and then glanced back at my husband again. Though hardly a small man, something about his back, his posture, the suit he wore, reminded me of a delinquent boy trapped at the principal’s desk, awaiting his sentence. 

“Granite, marble, bronze,” Charles boasted, airborne now fluttering like doves. “And you can bring in your own landscapers if you like.” 

“Must weigh a ton,” I said.

“26 to be exact, most of them. And they come two stories now for the relatives that just can’t get along.” The corners of his mouth lifted into a faint smile. 

I smiled back. “And you can get a mortgage on them?”

Elbows on the desk now, he leaned toward me and whispered, “Why not?” 

I pulled back a little, his breath smelling of coffee, of cigarettes. Was Charles flirting with me?

“For heaven’s sake…”  Joan was raising her voice now. She shifted her eyes toward me and rolled them. 

I sighed. Two years delayed, my husband and I just wanted to get it over with, Wanda—my husband’s niece—one of the more awful deaths. Necrotizing fasciitis, they called it, flesh-eating bacteria, all four limbs amputated, and then the doctor ringing us afterward. “My god, I’ve never seen anything like it! How’s she supposed to live?” as if all 60 pounds left of her were our fault.

I unfolded the brochure, inside a steepled stone house, a lovely wrought iron door gracing it.

 Proper ventilation ensures that there’s no smell.

 “Thanks for your patience, folks.” Joan, standing now, was shaking my husband’s hand. “Plaque’s already screwed into the Memory Wall. Right out there.” She pointed to a window. “With all the other ones. I’ll see that Oscar gets some chairs up. He’ll show you where the cremains go.” 

My husband and I got up and went out. I looked at my watch. It was still early.

”Let’s walk.”

At the first mausoleum we paused. DAVIES. Two granite columns framing the entry and pretty potted lemon trees on either side.

I couldn’t help myself, plucking a perfectly shaped specimen, putting it to my nose. Then I walked up the two steps to the door.

 Cool inside, pleasant, moisture free. A temperature for all seasons.

“What are you doing? What if someone sees you?” I could hear my husband behind me. He was always at me for touching things, breaking them. 

But star-shaped handles along the crypt walls were all I could see.

Coming down, I put the lemon back under its tree. Of all days, I hadn’t meant to upset my husband. But what could he do—Wanda, a grifter, a heroin addict who’d lost her children. I touched my husband’s shoulder. “That doctor shouldn’t have said those things to us. He had no right.” 

“I know,” my husband said. 

I looked over at the building across the street, a hospital, each small square window like the other. 

“We’d better head back,” my husband said.

As we did, we saw some bodies about, the local relatives we hardly ever saw, the more normal ones, not out of their mind with booze or heroin. They liked eating Chinese food at Don Hong’s, chow mein or fried chicken with hot mustard sauce, and spare ribs, the Sweet and Salty Pepper Prawns, Wanda’s favorite. “Now don’t you touch them,” she’d holler when the waiter put them on the table. 

After greeting the four of them, my husband’s nephew and his three daughters. my husband and I went back to the car and pulled Wanda out. No one sat down. They all stood a few feet apart like desperados, like they didn’t know each other. 

The workman, a small, dark-haired man with a mustache, lifted off the lid of what looked like a stone post. 

Then my husband poured Wanda in with a whoosh. In the past the others we’d dumped didn’t whoosh so easy. There was more to them, and sometimes there were bone fragments.

My husband cleared his throat.

“Wanda was such a cute little girl, but then she got hit in the head and went wild.”

My husband had told me about this, about a man who broke into the house and raped her.  But no one was sure it really happened. 

“She loved cats. When she went homeless, we took one. Baby, 25 pounds of him. But he had IBD and heart disease. He had an escape beat that barely kept him alive.”

An escape beat? Why was he saying that? I didn’t expect the relatives to know what that was. But I remember the vet telling us how the cat’s heart juiced up in the wrong places, the electrical impulse that makes the heart beat often delayed. At the end, the poor animal couldn’t even walk, veins collapsed, poop bloody. But he ate and ate, and even at the vet’s office, when they were trying to put him down, he ate and he ate, the sedative injected, then the pentobarbitol, until finally his head slowly sank. But even then his heart kept beating, and when the vet injected him again, a loud growl came from his limp body. 

“Would anyone like to say anything?” my husband asked.

I looked over at the relatives, sniffling and dabbing their eyes. In life, they’d laughed at Wanda; death, though, had sobered them. 

Normally, post funeral, we’d all have driven out to Don Hong’s and sat in a curtained booth, the kind of set-up they had there—private, like being at a doctor’s office or hospital, the curtain constantly sliding open and closed as the dishes came and went. 

But it was late, and since we wanted to beat the Tule fog, a low, soupy grayness that blanketed the valley at dusk, making driving treacherous, we said out goodbyes at the cemetery, and after navigating through the rush-hour streets, we eventually ended up on the city’s edge, near the Delta. This was the last place Wanda had lived, in a tenement slated for demolition, a place of last resort. Over the years, Wanda had squatted in various ones, my favorite, dilapidated as it was, had a sprawling green courtyard of feral cats and a neon sign—The Pelican of Desire— that somehow lit up at night. 

My husband grabbed a large plastic garbage bag from the backseat and then started to open his door. “Want to stay? I can lock you in.”

I looked out my window. Just a Jack in the Box and some fenced off industrial buildings and people on the sidewalk huddled around shopping carts looking our way. I opened my door and got out. 

There was just a single wood door on the side of a building. 

Inside one bare bulb lit a long, steep set of steps. The place was so dimly lit we couldn’t even see where the steps ended.

“You sure?” my husband asked.

“I don’t see the sense in it.”

“Somebody’s got to clear her stuff out.”

“She would have sold anything of value.”

My husband started up. Behind him, I worried what would happen if the bulb sputtered out. Plus I could hear noises, people in rooms. 

“5A,” my husband said when we reached the landing.

Down the hallway was one door after another like a row of storage closets, the doorknobs tarnished, some doors splintered near the bottom, kicked in or kicked out. Who knows? No granite mausoleums, how the other half lived. 

“Here we are,” my husband said, sliding the key in.

Door open, the room reeked. I covered my nose. 

My husband flipped the switch, another bare bulb, and there was a muffled whine from beneath a pile of raggedy clothes; a dark bony head with droopy ears emerged. 

“Jesus,” I said, “I thought she got rid of it.”

“Careful. Wanda says it bites.”                                  .”

“Poor thing. Only one eye, like she said,” the missing one, a socket closed up in a squint. 

While my husband started bagging all the clothes, my eyes landed on a rolled up bag of chow in the corner. I emptied some on the floor, and the dog, all four stubby legs, freed himself and gobbled it up. 

“Wally’s his name.” A voice came from the doorway. 

My husband and I both turned.

The man lit a cigarette. “I guess Wanda’s not coming back.”

“She’s dead,” my husband said. 

He took the cigarette out of his mouth. “Ain’t that too bad.” He blew smoke through his nose. “Hell on wheels. Wouldn’t do a damn thing you told her. Had a mind of her own.”

“Most women do,” I said. 

He put his cigarette back in his mouth. “You taking the dog? Nasty little thing. Shitting all over the place.”

 “Can you blame him?” I said.

Pulling his chin back at little, he chuckled. “Yor’re the aunt, I supposed. Wanda told me about you.” He turned and left.

I shut the door. “That the one who beat her up?”

***

It seemed the people on the sidewalk had moved themselves closer. I quickly put Wally in the backseat. As I got in the front, one woman, pushing her cart, pressed her face to my window as my husband pulled away from the curb,

“Did you see that?” I asked.

My husband looked in his rearview mirror.

“She didn’t even seem human.”

My husband cracked the back window. “He don’t seem like such a bad dog looking out the window the way he does.”

“Probably never been to a vet.”

“Somebody took that eye out.”

“Didn’t even bite me carrying him down.”

“Knows he’s going to a better place.”

We drove past boarded up shops and a Jack in the Box with a long line of cars at the Drive-Thru. We’d been lucky, the Tule fog holding off, visibility still good, the sky a darkening blue. But that burnt peat smell was in the air as we neared the Delta, the green and burgundy reeds alongside it. 

Up ahead I could see flags waving, printed on them, Discovery Bay, a giant subdivision of look-alike houses squeezed around the Delta. I turned around and looked at the dog again. “Should we change his name?”

Slowing, my husband put on his signal and then turned. “We should gas up here.”

“Maybe eat too.”

“Or just get home.” He got out and unscrewed the gas cap.

I got out too and went around to my husband. 

Wally didn’t make a sound, just sitting there, looking out the window through his one good eye.  

“Now get a load of that,” my husband said.  

At first I thought he’d meant the line of palm trees across the street fronting the sound wall. But then I realized it was the dark cloud undulating across the sky, starlings, hundreds of them, landing in the fronds, then taking off again, in everchanging patterns.

“So beautiful,” I said.

“It’s what they do,” my husband said before I could ask why.

Janet Goldberg’s novel The Proprietor’s Song was released by Regal House in 2023, and her story collection Like Human is due out Fall 2025 from the University of Wisconsin’s Cornerstone Press. She serves as the fiction editor for Deep Wild, a journal devoted to wilderness experiences.

By Adara King

Hop, two, three. Hop, two, three. Hop, two, three seconds of air time. He soared, he flew, he sailed over the sun-baked field. Wind whipped past, roaring and cheering him on as sweet-smelling grasses bowed to clear his path. Bound up, land, tense, leap. Where he was heading, none could say, but he cut a fine figure in the journey. From the outside looking in, he appeared to be the happiest and most carefree individual who ever tamed the earth with his tread. But inside? Inside?

You have never met anyone before nor shall you meet anyone again who felt as stuck as that young hopper did on that stunning summer’s day.

He was weary of the same old routine; his hop, two, three no longer sent his heart sailing with euphoria. Angel soft fur, tall perceptive ears, four powerful limbs, and speed like an avalanche: all these things that brought him such pride in his youth now cowed his little head in the deepest humiliation. The cry of the wind was poison to his ears, and the motion of grasses sent shivers of fury undulating through his soul. He hated it all. It had to end.

But how?

These were the thoughts that crowded his mind to such a degree of over-saturation that the usual sureness of his stride decided, at that moment, to fail. “Gah!!” A sharp and sudden cry was torn from his throat as his momentum stripped his body of its balance. He was falling. Him. Well, this was different. The hopper had just enough time to ponder the feeling of time-packed dirt colliding with one’s head before he experienced the sensation for himself. It wasn’t pleasant.

Unmatchable agony rocketed through his skull with a ferocity so viscous that a sweltering inferno would find itself jealous of the intensity. Dying. He was dying. Perhaps death would ease the fire of existence and quench his senseless yearning for a lot other than his own? With this notion churning in the fringes of his dwindling awareness, he noticed the gathering darkness and embraced the ensuing lapse into night.

Instantly, the pressures of life faded, trickling like grains of sand through half-clenched fingers. Grain by grain, the warm kiss of sunlight slipped away, taking with it all worldly sensation. Sweet grasses lost their scents, the soft breeze ruffling the hopper’s fur stilled, and the orchestra of nature woven throughout the subconsciousness of life played its final refrain and faded into silent obscurity. Nothing remained. It was quiet. Did he like this? Was it pleasant? Was this peace, or was it just empty?

“I do not think this is what I desired.”

Were the words spoken, were they thought, or were they just… “were”? None existed there beside him to say, but the words succeeded in stirring something out of the infinite void. Ripples of thought and possibility pulsated a gentle rhythm of push and pull. The tugging churned and shook the inky darkness until it began to swirl a swishing beat and whisper words of its own.

“Then what do you desire?” The nothings burbled, lilting with undiscernible emotions. “Speak. Tell.”

The hopper knew not what drove his tongue or whether his tongue was driven at all when he replied. “Something else. Anything else. Oh, to trade my silken coat for a cloak of petals or a crown of antlers! I’d give up my feet for fins or wings on which to soar with sparrows. I’d willingly carve my flesh into scales or sculpt my nose into a bill. Just no more of this. No more of me.”

The darkness lapped at his form, returning glimmers of sensations where it spilled, cold and damp. The hopper shivered as the voice giggled. “You are dissatisfied. Do not worry. We will fill your heart again.”

Before the hopper could reply, blinding light tore through the vacuum, dousing every inch of awareness with overstimulation. His lips parted as he cried out, an unholy screech that pierced the heavens with its trill. Startling himself, he froze mid-cry. That sound… was not his. Was it? His eyes traveled down his figure, and he gasped.

Thick, glossy feathers gleamed under the late summer sun, twitching with delicate power in the breeze. A wild elation tore a wail of joy from his lips–his beak–as he spun. A quick glance at the world revealed a puddle nearby. He required a few moments of experimentation to find the proper technique, but before long, the hopper skipped on two legs toward the watery mirror. As his face appeared in the water, he couldn’t help but laugh.

“I’m beautiful!” He crowed, bouncing about in jubilation. His black garment of feathers looked dashing in the sunlight, and his beak protruded proudly and vivid as an orange. Finally, he was a sight to behold. Without a thought, he flung his new wings wide and took off like a missile for the clouds. Such freedom. Such excitement. Such life!

He cackled as he twirled about performing a one-man dance with the heavens. Clouds trailed in his wake as he moved, forcing the very air to still with reverence. He was the artist and the muse made one by magic, and he was never going back.

CAAAAAAAAAAAAAAW!!!

A wretched wail shook the sky with a vengeance, rattling the hopper’s skull like a bag of marbles. Before he could react, the shadow of a hawk blocked out the sun. The skies were home to freedom, yes; but they were also home to death. The hopper never stood a chance.

As his body was crushed into the dirt for the second time, stripped from the sky by a fearsome opponent, he wept for the air he barely got to taste and the mud he had now tasted too much of.

“Welcome back.” The nothings crooned, swishing about the hopper with more energy than before. “Have your desires been satiated? Has satisfaction kissed your heart?”

“Far from it.” The hopper growled. “I asked for new, and you gave me death. I have experienced enough loss for a lifetime. Send me back to the air.”

The darkness tutted, clicking what sounded like a tongue in scathing disappointment. “To die once more? The hawks shall give way to falcons, and falcons to eagles. You were not made to paint the sky with birdsong.”

“Fine,” the hopper said. “Then send me elsewhere. Perhaps near the ground? Such terrain I have spent my days subduing.”

Without a word, the night parted and daylight shone once more. The hopper squinted through the fading glow of twilight and brightened. He sat atop a grand knoll of fresh green grasses laughing in the wind. A view of all he held dear spread before him like a map: a small clearing, a twisted brook, and a nodding forest canopy full of a thousand wonders. He sighed with contentment. How beautiful this land was! How had he forgotten? The longer he stared, the stronger his desire to frolic became. When he could bear the strain no longer, he flung himself forth and… nodded.

What?

He tried again.

Nod.

Oh dear.

He had no limbs with which to play, no ears with which to hear, and no nose with which to smell. He was rooted, as it were, to the very spot on which he stood. He struggled in vain to free himself but only managed to wrench a petal or two from his head. He was stuck. Lacking tears with which to sob, he allowed thick trails of nectar to pour down his petals and drip in sugary piles in the dust below.

Hopelessness had just taken root in his being when darkness struck again, this time found in the belly of a deer. Down, down, down he fell back into the nothings with a great groan of relief.

“Why?” He wailed, flailing about as if to punish the substance around him for its games. “Why must you torture me so? You have the power to make me happy. Just do it! Put me where I belong. Put me where I can be satisfied.”

“And where might that be?” The nothings replied. “Where can you go? Who can you be that is any more you than you?”

The hopper’s head wished to ponder this, but his heart ruled his tongue. “Anything. Try anything. I do not want your lessons and lies. Just make me something else. I beg of you, anything else!”

The nothings sighed: a hollow, mournful sound. “Very well.” They replied. “We shall grant your wish.”

The darkness parted, but the hopper was ready for the light this time. He closed his eyes against the world, taking a moment to sense the extent of his final form. He felt the rocks and pebbles of the earth on every inch of his being, but the stones didn’t bite his flesh. Rather, he felt strong against them, protected.

His eyes slipped open and he could see. He could see it all. His fur had turned hard and slick, blinking as individual scales in the dwindling rays of sunlight. Though the day was departing, the hopper’s vision was unimpaired. The lingering warmth of sunlight emanated from the ground, glowing a fine color in his eyes. Small creatures darted to and fro, each one a clear spot of their own. He grinned, sharp fangs bumping against his forked tongue. He felt powerful. He felt beautiful.

Movement.

The hopper froze, a colorful blur in the corner of his eyes forcing him to pause. Something–no–someone was hiding in the grasses. “I may asss well sssay hello,” he said, writhing back and forth until motion was achieved. He glided forth, scales hissing against blades of grass. No thoughts populated his brain except the anticipation of celebrating his new form with another. There! 

He saw her. Tender rolls of flesh poured over her poised hind legs, a cotton ball of a tail twitching behind her. Raising a paw, she swiped at grains of dirt that clung to her tall ears and tiny nose. She was gorgeous. She was preciouss. She was deliciousss.

Hisssssssssss.

Her shriek reverberated through the night, shattering the hopper’s soul with the horror of what he was, what he had become. He couldn’t help it, not for any manner of self-restraint or pleading. His new form was a flesh-eater. That was its nature.

He rammed his skull into the ground over and over and over to rid it of the memory.

That horrible memory!

The memory of the crunch. 

“Void, please. I was wrong. I was wrong. Take it back. Take it all!” He screamed, wringing his vocal cords raw from the torment of accountability. He whacked his head and shook his tail, but no sound came, and no darkness closed his eyes. His sobs were hollow with mourning and exhaustion by the time he collapsed, fully spent. “I am satisfied,” he murmured as his consciousness slipped away. “I am satisfied with who I was. It was enough. I was enough.” The world faded to black and the hopper breathed his last.

Adara King is a college sophomore studying Creative Writing and Illustration at the University of Central Arkansas. She works primarily in fiction, but she has a deep fascination of mythology and folklore. Her writing reflects her deep love of family, introspection, spreading joy, and honoring God. One day, she hopes to work as an illustrator, commission artist, and children’s book author.

By Charles F. Quaas

When David Henly arrived for his shift at the pub, he felt as if the place were ready to explode. He felt it in the air. He felt it in the snow. He felt it well before he stood before the door. Before crossing at the corner of Nevada and Park Avenue, David watched three men who the minute before seemed the best of friends engage in a brutal series of blows. They fought like animals, punching, kicking, even biting one another till a man called to them from the steps of the pub. 

“Y’all quit yur wrestlin and git in here. It’s time for the toast!”

Toast? David thought, clutching the handles of his bicycle tightly. The sight of blood, any blood, always left him queasy and the men who fought bled plenty in the snow. So much in fact David wondered how on earth they managed to get back on their feet. Without so much as a whimper they followed the one who called back into the pub, and it was some time before David realized he was standing alone in the snow. 

Glancing at the blotches of red as he latched his bike to the gate David wondered if he were in the right place. Spits, the only pub on Spin Street, had strict rules about fighting and the like. The first time got you thrown out. The second you were banned for life. As an employee he should’ve stopped the fight when it started, and he did see it start, but then again David was never one to get himself into trouble. 

Better to the look the other way David always told people who asked whether their friends had had too much to drink look the other way and you’ll have a good day. 

Besides, he surmised, if anyone got into it at the pub Harry Henshey always took care of it. He’d straighten them out easy peasy. A burly man the other side of thirty Harry was as regular an employee as Spits ever had. Not counting David of course. Aside from the owner and his Hee’s, as people were apt to call Henly and Henshey, no one worked more than five days a week. 

That’s just how things were at Spits. Although listed as one of the ‘TOP 25 PLACES IN COLROADO YOU WANT TO SEE IN 2014’ in an online magazine the pub saw few customers outside the regular crowd. No one knew exactly why the pub was so hard to find only that if you asked for directions to Spits, you’d probably end up on the wrong side of the street. It was the kind of place where you weren’t welcome if people didn’t know your name and David suspected the regulars worked hard to keep it that way. 

And it was for that very reason David Henly thought he must be dreaming for when he came out of the pub’s storeroom, he found fifty men crowded about the bar. They were people who’d never be seen together in public. Bankers and lawyers and men with yellow teeth eager for another drink. Respectable men in their Sunday best mingled with obreros fresh off the street. They drank together. They laughed together. A few even danced together, their legs swaying to a most ungodly tune. Beer, wine, and whiskey sloshed across the floor and as he stood in a puddle of rum David calculated how long it’d take him to clean up the place. 

The answer was too damn long. It was his job after all, being on closing shift, a shift he and his coworkers drew lots to take. It was the only way the manager thought fair and as he watched one man toss another across a table David cursed his rotten luck. 

Gods help me he thought, grabbing a rag to try and do what he could about the mess. The manager was nowhere in sight and unfortunately for David the only other employee was a man he utterly despised. A man, David realized, who seemed quite pissed.  

“About time you got here,” the man shouted, eyes flashing, struggling to make himself heard. David ignored his accusing tone and poured himself a drink, careful not to take from more exquisite bottles.

“Traffic was bad,” he said after taking a hefty swig. Pouring himself another glass, David and the other man watched an older fellow clamber atop a table. Those closest to him laughed as the man looked as if he might fall. He swayed this way and that, ponytail flapping back and forth, till at last he found his footing. With a wave of his glass the musicians in the corner ceased their tune.

“Friends,” the man bellowed, hoisting up his glass, “welcome!” 

The crowd did the same, roaring its approval. At this time Harry Henshey appeared from somewhere, as he often did, and with his appearance the other employee slipped away like a spring freeze. 

Good riddance David thought, glad in a way that it was just him and Harry. The other man only worked once a week and couldn’t be counted to keep a bag of grapes let alone manage the place. Harry on the other hand once caught a bullet between his teeth. Or so the story went. The man worked the oil fields round Odessa in his youth and often complimented David for being made of sterner stuff. 

“Kids these days don’t know shit,” Harry’d often say as they closed up shop, “they don’t know shit and they ain’t worth shit. But you David,” Harry being the only other employee who called him David and not Big D, “you’re at last worth a shit.”  

The man had a way with words, that much was for sure. He still went back to Texas from time to time, usually when he needed good money, and the place just wasn’t the same with him gone. 

“Some crowd,” Harry growled as the man on the table said a joke which made the whole pub laugh. 

“You know what this is about?” David asked as he counted the register. Most of it was small bills, tens and fives, and as he counted them out David realized there weren’t any ones. 

“It’s a wake. I think.”

“You think?” David asked to which Harry could only shrug. 

Whatever it was the old man gave his toast and the crowd a hearty shout. They drank as one and despite the rush which followed David thought it a charming scene. Soon the register held plenty of ones and for David time passed quickly. Eventually Harry disappeared into the crowd leaving David in the company of a pair of old geezers with crooked teeth. 

“Clarence Wetherbey,” said the older of the two. He offered a hand to David who shook it if only to be polite. The other fellow did the same though when David took his hand, he felt surprising strength in it. 

“So, what brings you to our little gathering,” Clarence asked, blue eyes lurking behind the rim of his glass. Unlike his companion with the striking purple suit and emerald cufflinks the man dressed plainly. Too plainly it seemed. 

“I work here.” 

“Do ya now,” Clarence gasped, “that’s a fine thing ain’t it. Always wanted to work in a pub I did. Ever since I was little.”

“You said you wanted to join the merchant marines,” the other man muttered, a comment which made Clarence grin as he set his glass upon the bar. 

“I did, yes. Once upon a time I wanted to be a marine. Imagine that. Me. A marine!”

The old man laughed and clapped his hands together. He looked first to David, then his friend, then laughed again. He was a crooked man, that much David could tell, a man used to searching for the right side of the tracks. The other man shook his head and introduced himself to David as one Mathew Eversbey. 

“If you couldn’t tell we aren’t from around here. A lovely place you got though,” Mr. Eversbey looked round the pub as he said this, “a lovely place.” 

And yet Spits was so much more. She was an icon, a beacon for the lost souls of Spin Street. Souls David knew personally. Like the professors at Briggs University and what seemed like half the artists in Colorado Springs David Henly found something comforting in Spits. In its sagging walls. In its old color TV’s and broken pinball machines. The place was as much a home to David as it was any orphan on the street. 

By now the music began again and those gathered before the bar broke up into smaller parties. Harry walked between the tables, stopping occasionally, and everywhere he went the men laughed. Now that the place was a bit more orderly David saw a few of the regulars in their usual places. A couple noticed him staring and raised their glasses in greeting. David would’ve done the same if he could, but he soon realized Mr. Eversbey hadn’t stopped talking. 

“Yes. A lovely place. I’ve never seen one like it. Have we seen a place like this Clarence?” 

“What?”

Mr. Eversbey gave David a knowing look, as if apologizing for his friend’s hard of hearing. 

“I said have we been to a place like this.”

“No. No. We haven’t,” Clarence howled, his voice cracking like an old tree branch, “you don’t travel much in the marines.” 

“Yeah, I guess,” David knew nothing about the marines aside from the commercials he saw on TV, “So… where’re y’all from?” 

“Oh, lots of places,” claimed Mr. Eversbey, with the eagerness of a drunk man half his age, “England. Poland. Jerusalem. Montesellum. Arkansas. Kansas. Texas. South America. We’ve been all over.”

“About the only place we haven’t been is the moon,” Clarence muttered over another glass of whiskey. 

“That be true,” Mr. Eversbey agreed, “be true indeed. Though for all the places we’ve been they ain’t half as many as Old Mr. Potts went to.” 

At the mention of Mr. Potts both men raised a glass and despite having never known the man David felt the need to do the same. 

“So, uh, Mr. Potts,” David began to say after they’d all had a drink, unsure it polite to inquire about a man he hardly knew, “he knew all of you?”

“Of course,” Mr. Eversbey said, offended it seemed, by the question, “why else would we have gathered here today if not for dear Mr. Potts?”

“A good man he was,” Clarence muttered over another glass of whiskey, “you won’t find a man like that today.”

“Here here,” called someone from a nearby table. David looked to see who’d chimed in and found four faces staring back at him. They were an odd lot, two blacks and a Mexican, with the fourth a face David simply couldn’t tell. Evidently, he was the one who’d spoken for the man raised his glass and said loudly, “to Mr. Potts!”

“To Mr. Potts!”

The toast was followed by a moment of silence during which David looked for a shrine to the man. A picture even. But there was none. Only a crowd of strangers and strange men. While Clarence and Mr. Eversbey engaged in a private conversation David took the chance to tidy up a bit. Unfortunately for every glass he wiped clean two more took its place. And for every two came another three. 

This continued till David gave up entirely. By then Clarence wanted another drink. After filling his glass David poured another for himself and listened to the conversation taking place between Mr. Eversbey and another man. 

“No no no!” Mr. Eversbey exclaimed, angry enough to shake his fists, “that is not what happened?”

“You weren’t there,” the other man said, a remark which only further enraged Mr. Eversbey. 

“Mr. Potts told me himself what happened and would you go so far as to call Mr. Potts a liar!”

“No,” the man growled, “but like I said I was there!” 

At this point it seemed the men might come to blows. But David knew better. Three years’ work in the pub taught him to judge these kinds of things and sure enough the men remained in their seats, albeit glaring at one another over Clarence’s drinks. 

Clarence for his part seemed not to notice their animosity. Instead, after finishing the second of three drinks, asked David if he’d heard of a place called Waylen County. 

“No,” David replied, “can’t say I have.” 

The answer did not discourage Clarence. Not in the slightest. “I didn’t expect you to. That’s where Mr. Potts was born you see. They don’t call it that no more. Now they call it uh…” Clarence looked off in the distance, as if trying to remember, but as David suspected he could not. Instead, Clarence turned to Mr. Eversbey and asked, “what they call that place Old Potts came from?”

“Waylen County.”

“I know that. But what do they call it now?”

Now it was Mr. Eversbey’s turn to think. He sat on his stool for some time, thinking as thinking men do, till at last he grumbled, “the hell if I know. Hey Lawrence,” Mr. Eversbey shouted to a man seated some distance away, “where they call the place Old Mr. Potts from?” 

A man seated by the pinball machines gave it some thought, “Cope County, I think.” 

David mouthed the words, Cope County silently. Having never heard a more ridiculous name for a place in his life he said nothing as Clarence went on to explain. 

“Yeah yeah. That’s the place. Potts from Cope County. The man was a legend that he was. A gunslinger if you can imagine the sort.” 

“I don’t think I can,” David said, careful not to sound offensive. Gunslinging just wasn’t a profession to be had in 2014. If Mr. Wetherby realized what David had said he didn’t correct him. Rather, the man seemed incapable of hearing anything but what he himself was saying. 

“Yes. Mr. Potts from Waylen County. He was a good man Mr. Potts. Had a wife and three kids.”

“Four kids,” said another man from down the bar. 

“What’cha say,” Mr. Wetherby hollered to which the man replied, “he had four kids. Not three.”

“When the hell he have a fourth kid?” 

“Hell if I know,” the man replied, “only know that he had a fourth. It was a mulatto or something.” 

“What’s a mulatto?” Clarence asked.

“Means the kid is mixed,” said a man in a black suit. He said this matter-of-factly though after seeing the look on David’s face was quick to add, “don’t mean the kid is bad. Just means he’s mixed.” 

“Yeah but Mr. Potts wasn’t mixed,” Clarence said, “ain’t no way a man that pale was mixed.”

“Pale?” David thought, not realizing he’d voiced such thoughts aloud. 

“Yessir Old Potts was pale. Didn’t matter if he spent all day in the sun, he’d show up to church on Sunday paler than an old silver spoon.”

“He never went to church,” Clarence muttered, “none of us did.”

“What?”

“I said he never went to church,” Clarence said, forcefully, “sure he donated a lot, but he never went to church. He’d just send that boy William in his stead. You’d could hardly them the two apart you could.” 

“I knew him to be a sworn Presbyterian,” Mr. Eversbey replied, “and all the Presbyterian’s I know go to church whenever and wherever they can.” 

“Well Mr. Potts didn’t go,” Clarence said, “ain’t no business for a vampire to go.”

“I’m sorry,” David began, the words catching in his throat, “did you say…” but his words were lost in the flurry of yet another exchange. 

“He wasn’t no Presbyterian.”

“He was a Baptist.”

“A Catholic!”

“I ain’t never known no Catholics.”

“Well, it’s what he was.”

“I thought he was a farmer?”  

“The man been alive six hundred years and the best he did was run a farm?”

“I ain’t sayin that’s what he did all I’m saying is he owned a farm!” 

It was Clarence who made that last remark. He and the others crowded about the bar, their cloaks and clothes swaying in a most unnatural cold. Some flashed their teeth; others magic only God knows. 

As for David, the poor boy was overcome with fright. He ran out the back, down the street, and didn’t stop running till he was well past the other end of Spin Street. 

As for the vampires, they didn’t even feel David go. They were too busy arguing amongst themselves as to what it was their good friend Mr. Potts did and why exactly they should remember him. 

Charles Franklin Quaas is a graduate student currently attending the University of Central Arkansas MFA Creative Writing program. His work will be published forthwith in The American Book Review.