Whiteout
Kelsey had been ready to end things with Travis, but he surprised her by renting a cozy cabin for Valentine’s Day. Dumb as bricks, but sweet as pie, he deserved a shot at recapturing their spark.
Flurries bedazzled the scenic drive up, and despite poor reception, they managed to find the snow-crusted cabin and beat the nasty forecast. But Kelsey cringed at ribbons of gold honeycomb stretched from the porch ceiling, against the doorframe. “When’s the last time anyone’s been here?”
“It’s okay, babe. It’s winter. They’re dead.” Before she could stop him, Travis ripped the hive from the wall and lifted it like a trophy. A swarm of brown bees emerged, zigzagging through the air. Travis shouted, dropped the hive, and swatted. More bees stirred from hibernation.
They raced to the car. Red welts bloomed on Travis’s handsome face. His breathing grew labored. Snow fell harder.
Kelsey took the wheel and zoomed down the slick forest road.
“I’ll be OK,” Travis insisted.
“You’re having an allergic reaction. We’re going to a hospital.”
Travis wheezed and reached with weak fingers, but Kelsey focused on the road, white-knuckled, heart pounding. The blizzard whorled as they reached the interstate.
Travis’s breaths hissed. One eye swelled shut. He rasped, “Love you.”
The car fishtailed, but Kelsey kept control. She finally got a signal, twenty minutes from the nearest emergency room. Keep going, she thought. I’ll get there faster than an ambulance in these conditions.
The road hazed, ghostly and blank. She reduced speed as wind whipped the car. Twenty minutes became twenty-five, then thirty. She tried 911, but the call dropped. The map errored out. The horizon vanished into swirling white. Visibility surrendered to absolute zero. Travis’s good eye glazed.
“Stay with me.” She skidded past the blinking hazards of stranded cars.
She flashed back to their first date. He’d worn a tie to impress her. Told her she was smart. Since then, she’d said too many times that he wasn’t smart—he doomscrolled, invested in pyramid schemes—disturbed a fucking beehive!
But Travis was sweeter than honey. He sobbed when her cat died. Drove his grandma to church on Sundays. Clutched Kelsey’s hand during scary movies. Delighted her with special dinners and charming getaways.
Tears blurred Kelsey’s vision. The wipers swatted globs of unending snow. She could no longer hear his breaths but didn’t dare take her eyes off the foggy nothingness.
Vertigo soured her stomach.
Her ears rang to the rhythm of swishing wipers.
She didn’t care about the spark anymore.
She just wanted to see beyond the endless white.
They slid off road and crunched into a snowbank. A sparkling blanket pressed against the windshield. Wheels spun uselessly.
Travis lay breathless, disfigured and alien. His mouth gaped. His eye rolled back in the socket. From the collar of his shirt, a fat queen bee crawled. Antennae twitching. Wings flickering. Stinger sliding from her swollen abdomen.
The queen scrambled in circles. Desperately alone. Directionless.
Kelsey’s heart shuddered. Her vision frosted over.
Kevin M. Folliard hails from the western suburbs of Chicago, IL. He enjoys his day job in academia and membership in the La Grange Writers Group. You can find more of his horror writing in his anthology The Misery King’s Country and by visiting www.KevinFolliard.com.
And in the End
Ryan’s first real job was bussing tables for the lunchtime shift at Denny’s the summer of 1977, before his senior year of high school. The shift manager was a woman named Alice. In her late thirties, Alice appeared quite old to teenaged Ryan, but he liked her because she wasn’t bossy and had a remarkable talent for making dirty jokes seem funnier than they really were.
One morning in August, Ryan clocked in a few minutes early and got himself a cup of coffee. He was standing next to the urn thinking about a second cup when Alice arrived, pale and red-eyed. She looked like someone had just died, and it turned out someone had just died, because she announced, “Elvis is dead” in a throbbing voice and began to sob. A mascara-tinted tear trickled down one cheek.
Ryan had to turn away quickly so she wouldn’t see he was trying not to laugh, not because he thought Elvis dying was funny—he didn’t—but because it was the first time he had seen someone emotionally affected by the life (or death) of a celebrity, and it just struck him as absurd. He wouldn’t realize until years later that what to him was the unsurprising demise of a washed-up, overweight lounge singer was to Alice the downfall of a hero, a crushing blow to her adolescent fantasies, forever tainting memories of high school dances, her first kiss, and visions of what life could be. It was a bereavement he would finally share the night he sat bug-eyed, frozen in front of the TV that was saying John Lennon was dead.
R.K. West is a former travel blogger who sold everything, spent two years on the road, and now lives next to the mighty Columbia River.
Up in the Gallery
Translation by Ian Johnston
This was originally published in 1919.
If some frail tubercular lady circus rider were to be driven in circles around and around the arena for months and months without interruption in front of a tireless public on a swaying horse by a merciless whip-wielding master of ceremonies, spinning on the horse, throwing kisses and swaying at the waist, and if this performance, amid the incessant roar of the orchestra and the ventilators, were to continue into the ever-expanding, gray future, accompanied by applause, which died down and then swelled up again, from hands which were really steam hammers, perhaps then a young visitor to the gallery might rush down the long stair case through all the levels, burst into the ring, and cry “Stop!” through the fanfares of the constantly adjusting orchestra.
But since things are not like that—since a beautiful woman, in white and red, flies in through curtains which proud men in livery open in front of her, since the director, devotedly seeking her eyes, breathes in her direction, behaving like an animal, and, as a precaution, lifts her up on the dapple-gray horse, as if she were his grand daughter, the one he loved more than anything else, as she starts a dangerous journey, but he cannot decide to give the signal with his whip and finally, controlling himself, gives it a crack, runs right beside the horse with his mouth open, follows the rider’s leaps with a sharp gaze, hardly capable of comprehending her skill, tries to warn her by calling out in English, furiously castigating the grooms holding hoops, telling them to pay the most scrupulous attention, and begs the orchestra, with upraised arms, to be quiet before the great jump, finally lifts the small woman down from the trembling horse, kisses her on both cheeks, considers no public tribute adequate, while she herself, leaning on him, high on the tips of her toes, with dust swirling around her, arms outstretched and head thrown back, wants to share her luck with the entire circus—since this is how things are, the visitor to the gallery puts his face on the railing and, sinking into the final march as if into a difficult dream, weeps, without realizing it.
Franz Kafka (1883 – 1924) was a German-language Jewish Czech writer and novelist born in Prague. Widely regarded as a major figure of 20th-century literature, his work typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surreal predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. The term Kafkaesque has entered the lexicon to describe situations like those depicted in his writings. His best-known works include the novella The Metamorphosis (1915) and the novels The Trial (1924) and The Castle (1926). His work has widely influenced artists, philosophers, composers, filmmakers, literary historians, religious scholars, cultural theorists.
Worse Than a Baby’s Cry
It comes again, this time right in our ears. He caught the snake the other day but made me pinky promise not to tell. He never showed me the frog though. Its back leg now halfway down the snake’s throat. And he never showed our mother much of anything; he knew the answer was always no. There was something about my brother she never could get the hang of.
That’s just how it is. She doesn’t waste any time thinking about it, she just picks up the glass tank and walks straight to the front door. The tank goes on its side, spilling out the frog so the dark dewed grass can safely take it. I stand with my brother, heavy in the doorway. The same doorway that will hold only my brother a few years later, when my mother leaves, taking just me, assuring all of us that a boy needs his father.
It’s almost quiet now. Crickets softly chant, as if they know better. My mother kneels in the darkness beside the tank. The snake doesn’t hurry. It slowly creeps out and coils itself beside her. Like it was hers to keep all along.
Colleen Albano is based in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, where she works in educational assessment. She holds an MA in TESOL and has taught writing to English-language learners at a local community college. She spends too much time sewing and serenading her cat, Otto.
Doctor Chevalier's Lie
This was originally published in 1893.
The quick report of a pistol rang through the quiet autumn night. It was no unusual sound in the unsavory quarter where Dr. Chevalier had his office. Screams commonly went with it. This time there had been none.
Midnight had already rung in the old cathedral tower.
The doctor closed the book over which he had lingered so late, and awaited the summons that was almost sure to come.
As he entered the house to which he had been called he could not but note the ghastly sameness of detail that accompanied these oft-recurring events. The same scurrying; the same groups of tawdry, frightened women bending over banisters--hysterical, some of them; morbidly curious, others; and not a few shedding womanly tears; with a dead girl stretched somewhere, as this one was.
And yet it was not the same. Certainly she was dead: there was the hole in the temple where she had sent the bullet through. Yet it was different. Other such faces had been unfamiliar to him, except so far as they bore the common stamp of death. This one was not.
Like a flash he saw it again amid other surroundings. The time was little more than a year ago. The place, a homely cabin down in Arkansas, in which he and a friend had found shelter and hospitality during a hunting expedition. There were others beside. A little sister or two; a father and mother--coarse, and bent with toil, but proud as archangels of their handsome girl, who was too clever to stay in an Arkansas cabin, and who was going away to seek her fortune in the big city.
"The girl is dead," said Doctor Chevalier. "I knew her well, and charge myself with her remains and decent burial." The following day he wrote a letter. One, doubtless, to carry sorrow, but no shame to the cabin down there in the forest.
It told that the girl had sickened and died. A lock of hair was sent and other trifles with it. Tender last words were even invented.
Of course it was noised about that Doctor Chevalier had cared for the remains of a woman of doubtful repute. Shoulders were shrugged. Society thought of cutting him. Society did not, for some reason or other, so the affair blew over.
Kate Chopin (1850-1904) was an American author of short stories and novels, best known today for her 1899 novel The Awakening. Her works were often criticized as controversial or immoral, and she did not have financial success with her writing, but after her death she was recognized as a leading writer of her time.
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