Forever, in Pieces Read online

  “Kurt Fawver’s stories are nasty little shockers that dare to dream big. And he isn't afraid to follow those big and totally mad ideas through to their horrific conclusions. Yeah, Kurt is a little messed up, and Forever, in Pieces is a promising debut.”

  —Paul Tremblay, author of In the Mean Time and Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye

  “From the most far-flung reaches of space, time and imagination, Fawver presents a parade of original and startling visions.”

  —David Dunwoody, author of Unbound & Other Tales

  “A poignant and genuinely unnerving debut collection. Exquisite in every possible way. Kurt Fawver is a virtuoso of short-form literature, and Forever, in Pieces is his magnum opus.”

  —Adam Millard, author of Dead Line

  “Forever, in Pieces is aptly titled, for this book offers readers unnerving glimpses into our eternal fears, both staggeringly cosmic and painfully intimate. Kurt Fawver’s tales are gruesome and poignant. An impressive debut.”

  —Richard Gavin, author of At Fear’s Altar

  “With Forever, in Pieces, Kurt Fawver creates a collection perfectly balanced between beautiful and vicious, clever and dark. Like love stories for the dead, it calls to your soul to just keep turning pages.”

  —Jonathan Moon, author of Heinous and Hollow Mountain Dead

  “Kurt Fawver’s Forever, in Pieces is a searing and unapologetic exploration of futility. His very purpose in the tragically beautiful arrangement of his words is to prove that ‘On every level, we are not meant to overcome; we are meant to fall apart’—and his thoughtful, captivating stories illustrate this truth in an impeccably somber literary performance.”

  —Shawna L. Bernard, editor of Cellar Door and Ugly Babies

  Forever, in Pieces

  Copyright © 2013 Kurt Fawver

  First Edition December 2013

  Published by Villipede Publications

  Print ISBN: 978-0615903965

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or copied in any form or by any means, mechanical or electronic, without the express permission of the publisher and the author.

  Cover art © 2013 Matt Edginton, Madoosk Design

  Illustrations © 2013 Luke Spooner, Carrion House

  Ebook development by baXiadev

  “Gentium Book Basic” Font - Copyright © 2003-2008 by SIL International. All rights reserved.

  (http://www.sil.org/)

  “Leander” Font - Copyright © 2010 by Tension Type (Michael Tension). All rights reserved.

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  Previous Appearances:

  “Brief Repose Moments Before a Gruesome and Certain Death”

  Daily Frights 2012. Pill Hill Press. December 2011

  “Lessons”

  Daily Frights 2012. Pill Hill Press. December 2011

  “Should Old Acquaintance Be Forgot”

  Morpheus Tales #12. April 2011

  “For the Unhaunted”

  National Public Radio online—NPR.org. October 2010

  “Bolt”

  Zombie Nation: St. Pete. Zombie Nation Publishing. October 2010

  “Birth Day”

  Encounters #2. April 2010

  Parts of “The Waves from Afar” originally appeared as

  “Watching the Watchers”

  Zombie St. Pete. Silver Tongue Media. February, 2010.

  ◆

  baXiadev.com

  Villipede.com

  To Erin, who isn’t afraid to shine a light on my malformed soul.

  To my parents, who’ve lived long enough to see me become everything they dreamed of and everything they had nightmares about.

  And to Gatsby, just because.

  Introduction

  Prologue to a Phantasmagorical Tragedy

  The Waves from Afar

  For the Unhaunted

  With a Ribbon on Top

  Brief Repose Moments before a Gruesome and Certain Death

  The Binary Must Prevail: A Brief History

  One Unheard Message

  May Old Acquaintance Be Forgot

  Birth Day

  Critical Theory

  Four is Enough

  Take All Your Troubles

  Bolt

  Lessons

  Forever, in Pieces

  A Nuzzle, Inverted

  Crowning

  Rub-A-Dub-Dub

  About the Author

  About the Artist

  Illustration Gallery

  Extras

  Introduction

  I wrote my first short story when I was ten. It centered on a nameless peasant who was forced to climb a never-ending mountain in pursuit of some sort of monstrous, ultimate evil—an amorphous creature that had killed countless thousands of innocents and would kill countless thousands more if not stopped. The twist in my tale—which, at ten, I thought was pretty clever—was that the peasant couldn’t destroy the beast; it was impervious to all human intervention, all forms of conventional attack. My everyman hero had to engage the creature in battle for all eternity so that the rest of humanity might be spared its wrath. This lone peasant, a virtual nobody, had to fight forever, without the hope of ever winning, without the slightest recognition or reward, so that the rest of the world might live and prosper.

  Thematically, not much has changed in my writing in the twenty odd years since I scribbled that tale. Most of my stories still revolve around confrontation between utterly average people and the absolutely insurmountable. I suppose you could say it’s the bedrock of my writing: banality and ineffectuality in conflict with chaos and deepest darkness. We are a species eternally trying to rise above our fragility and our fallibility, to master an indifferent or outright hostile universe, and, most often, we fail in such attempts. On every level, we are not meant to overcome; we are meant to fall apart. And yet we struggle against the inevitable collapse of all things, and it is this struggle—an ever-flowing torrent of blood and sweat and tears of both joy and sorrow—that defines human existence as it sweeps us further into an ocean of limitless possibility that we quaintly term “the future.” My stories try to bottle that torrent, to provide a moment of foundational, cosmic conflict and an aesthetic feeling of simultaneous hopelessness and hopefulness for all our tomorrows, however terrifying or wondrous they may be.

  Along those same lines, most of the stories in this collection circle around the idea of “forever” or “eternity.” It can be a creepy idea, a thing that goes on without end. For, without an end, without a frame to encapsulate it and give it context, what meaning does a thing have? Does it ever change, or is it dead, a static monolith? And, worst of all, what price might we pay for a thing having no end? In the stories that follow, I’ve tried to interrogate ideas closely aligned with eternity—birth and children, religion and faith, love and longing, etc.—in an effort to more fully elaborate on what being “forever” might entail.

  Many of the stories that reside on the pages beyond might also be labeled horror. But don’t let that moniker fool you; horror need not entail simplistic, puerile tales of titillation (indeed, much horror is neither simplistic nor puerile). While there’s plenty of splatter and shadow in my stories, my explicit intent is neither to shock nor cause bouts of nausea. No, for the most part, the purpose of my fiction is to unsettle. I want my readers to come away from my stories with a chink in their preconceptions and a tremor in their beliefs. If you’re entertained by my work on a visceral level, I’m thrilled. But if my stories also force you to exercise your intellect—even just a little bit—then I’ve truly succeeded as a writer.

  All this said, I want to sincerely thank you for reading my stories. For, without a reader, a writer is nothing more than a faucet let run in an abandoned house, endlessly pouring hi
s or her soul down a rusted drainpipe. But you, gracious reader, by your very interest in digesting these words, you make it less likely that my writing will end up as cultural sewage. So, again, thank you for picking up this book.

  Without further ado, then, let me step aside, fade into the margins, and welcome you to my debut collection of short fiction, Forever, in Pieces. I hope you like it.

  Kurt Fawver

  Tampa, Florida | July 2013

  Prologue to a Phantasmagorical Tragedy

  Fifteen thousand years ago a man in a cave sat down with pen and paper, though neither had officially been invented yet, and began to write his autobiography, though written words had no meaning since they had not yet been scribbled out by the hand of humankind.

  The man was lonely, and had been so for as long as he could remember, which, it happened, was a span of fifteen thousand years.

  A strange thing about the man’s memory, though: it marked time in reverse. He recalled not the past, but the future. Yesterday was a blurry, indistinct thing to him, but tomorrow—tomorrow was crisp and certain.

  The man saw vast, as-yet unfolded sheets of time neatly pressed and stretched out before him. Fifteen thousand years of miracles and terrors fought for space behind his eyes.

  He remembered how to drive a car and search the internet for floral delivery. He remembered how to load a rifle and wire a bomb. He remembered the fall of Rome and the rise of Charlemagne, the majesty of Holst’s Planets and the horror of Hitchcock’s Psycho. He remembered the swell of black pustules in plague-stricken Europe, the grainy video of Neil Armstrong’s first step onto the moon, the gray clouds of uncertainty that swept out from the crumbling World Trade Center towers, and the smiling seas that greeted boatloads of veterans as they returned from the hellscapes of World War II. But, perhaps most importantly, he remembered everyone he ever loved dying.

  The man’s unborn wives and husbands, his children and friends—he remembered their cold bodies lying flat and static in holes and boxes, gone before they had ever arrived.

  And this is why he wrote: not to entertain with his remarkable adventure or to guide humanity’s development, but to forget that every happiness, every shred of warmth and communion, would eventually unravel and dissolve.

  Every day, the man filled another page with memories that hadn’t yet come to pass and every day he tried to hide his heart away inside the words. Within the words, the flow of time arrested; within the words, past and future exploded into an ever-present now. There, on paper, smiles never faded, kisses never grew stale, and graveyards remained forever meadows.

  Over months, over years, the man wrote, and his memories swam up to meet him. He starved through famine he’d starved through before and survived a bear attack he’d survived long ago. He scavenged and clawed his way through the wilderness in all the ways he already knew he would and, slowly, he penned the story he’d already written.

  Then, one day, he finished. He placed the final sheet under all the rest and waited, but the future past came rushing back into his soul, and it had only one sad chapter.

  So the man did what he always would. He picked up the book and began to read, because, he had no doubt, reading the present was far more comforting than remembering the future.

  [back to Table of Contents]

  The Waves from Afar

  There they stand, waist deep in the surf, staring at the horizon, letting the waves drag their failing flesh into the gentle roll of the gulf. My wife. My sons. They’re only three among the thousands. They can’t hear me. And if they do, they don’t respond. Whatever they see now, whatever holds them in rapture here, at the epicenter of the phenomenon, is more important than all the “I love yous” I can scream.

  I come here every day and watch them watching the flashes and the colors. I should drive back home. But I can’t. It’s too hard to say goodbye. I know they’re gone and that this is nothing more than a gloriously extended funeral. They’re unblinking, unthinking acolytes of the Tide now. I know that. But, still, there they are, eyes wide, wobbling in the ebb and flow as if they were actually alive and straining to maintain balance. I wish they would fall over. I want them to let go. But they won’t fall. They’ll stand in the same spot and stare until their legs snap and they’re swept out, away from me and closer to that beautiful, frightening panorama.

  What’s out there? What do they see that I can’t? What chain binds them to this liminal space between life and death, land and sea, being and memory? If only I knew, if only I could slide sideways just a fraction of an inch, just far enough to catch a glimpse of the view from their detached retinas, then maybe I could cut them free. Maybe somewhere beyond the waves is hope. Maybe that’s what holds them here in eternal fascination.

  There’s no way to tell from where I sit, hunched under an umbrella on the beachhead, kicking sand into the wind. I’m not alone here. Far from it. Husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, sons, daughters, friends and lovers of every variety: they all perch high on the pure, untainted sand and wait. Some listen to music. Some watch portable televisions and DVD players. Some have picnics. Some dance. Some shriek and weep. Some curse God and some laugh. It’s an odd sort of atmosphere, this mixture of revelry and apocalypse.

  Occasionally, grief consumes one of my fellow mourners and he or she runs moaning into the water—a suicidal decision. Contact only needs to last ninety seconds, and there is no known cure. Two or three days following contact, the loss and insane sorrow that once overwhelmed the runner fades, along with the rest of the world. Nothing remains but a stopped heart and unabashed awe. Eventually—sometimes minutes later, sometimes days afterward—the body rises, turns toward the gulf, and shambles back to join the congregation of the eternally fascinated.

  I haven’t seen any newcomers today, though. Surprising. I wish I had. It forces me to think about someone else. Another situation. Another set of ruined lives. Not Cara’s. Not Nick or Sammy’s. Not my own.

  Sitting here for over a week has been hell. I’ve been replaying everything in my mind on a continuous loop. The memories refuse placation. Sleep doesn’t help; booze is useless; I even smoked a joint a couple nights ago, but all it did was make me paranoid that those husks in the water might actually still retain a spark of their former selves. No matter what I do, the bittersweet images won’t stop kneading my thoughts. They won’t be satisfied until I’m scrambling toward my family, pushing away the beach guards, and soaking in death like so many others who could no longer carry the burden of being left alone on dry land.

  See, all my time spent darkly meditating has made me realize how I could’ve prevented this, how I could have saved my family from the Tide.

  I just had to plead my case for a vacation to London. That’s where I wanted to go. But I remained silent and was carried away by the familial flow.

  For a month before we finalized our travel plans, Cara and the boys were in thrall to the news about the gulf—how beachgoers in Clearwater had begun noticing brightly-hued swirls of color in the water, how the CDC and EPA had closed and quarantined the shore from Panama City to Naples, how all the sealife had mysteriously vanished from the coast. It was ominous. It was mundane. It was like the first fifteen minutes of a surprisingly inspired horror movie. People stayed far away, in fear of toxins and pollution, disease and dessication.

  Soon, however, the lightshows began and droves of vacationers poured back in.

  The lightshows are, simply put, glowing water. The waves on the western coast of Florida, from Panama City to Naples, glow at night. That was the thing that brought vanloads of sightseers, tens of thousands of giggling children and their parents, and innumerable journalists and scientists to the area. Incredibly, undeniably, the tides burst with billions of tiny flashes—an undulating field of Christmas lights.

  The effect was gradual—only a vaguely noticeable shimmer at first—but, over the course of the few weeks that the beaches were closed, the glittering points grew in number and intensity, until e
ven the sky above the gulf was a shifting rainbow of cold chromaticity.

  I have to tell you, I’ve never really cared for the beach. I hate the water, and irradiating my body in the noonday sun is not my idea of fun. But even I couldn’t deny that the lure of luminescent water—unexplainable luminescent water at that—was too tempting. The boys’ excitement and Cara’s mischievous grin were infectious. They wanted to witness a spectacle. Secretly, so did I. The sight of the glimmering, prismatic waves was supposed to be eerie; it was supposed to be breathtaking; it was supposed to be safe.

  Following two uncharacteristically short weeks of study and analyzation, the EPA and the CDC reopened the Floridian gulf shores. They declared that, although there was no concrete answer as to why the phenomenon was occurring, there were also no harmful substances in the water; everyone, from the doe-eyed toddler to the arthritic grandmother, was cleared to splash about in the rich spectrum which permeated the sea from surface to floor. People scurried to secure hotel rooms and plane tickets, all in an effort to be among the first to take the plunge into preternatural waters.

  We were some of those people. Clearwater Beach, where the colors were reportedly brightest and most vibrant, was our vacation destination. Only ten short days ago—exactly one week after the beaches were reopened—we packed up the car and set off toward the southern sun.

  I drove throughout the day and into the lonely witching hours of the night. Cara read. Cara slept. The boys hit each other and played Nintendo DS. When we finally arrived, it seemed that Clearwater, with its cool white beaches, was the new axis of miracles. Because I watched too much Travel Channel programming, I knew that it had always been a mecca for tourists seeking a relaxing ocean getaway, but the colored, illumined waves were the stuff of dreams and wonder; they appealed to a much broader swath of the public than mere beachcombers. As a result, psychics and UFO buffs littered the sidewalks, hawking services, wares, and fringe theories. New Age adherents wandered the streets searching for vibrations and vortexes. Curbside prophets bellowed damnation from atop benches and homemade pulpits. Amateur and professional photographers struggling to frame the kinetic socioscape meandered through the masses with lenses held aloft. And everywhere, truly everywhere, were jostling families.