Featuring:
- “Dinner with Kate” by Art Foster
- “Campesino’s” by Jack Morgan
- “The Grave of the World” by Ryan I. Vergara
- “The Bat King” by Igor Desyatnikov
Dinner with Kate
A Short Story by Art Foster
“You’re home early,” I said as Kate rested her black laptop bag in its usual spot on the rocker beside the fireplace. It was the only thing she dared put on it because she didn’t want to risk ruining the hundred-year-old chair that once belonged to her great-grandmother.
“My meeting was canceled.”
“Good, ’cause you’re just in time,” I said, as I drizzled honey in the pan with melted butter and sautéed garlic. Honey garlic glaze over roasted chicken was her favorite dish that I was able to make. “Dinner’s done a little earlier than expected.”
“Let’s sit at the table tonight,” she said as she retrieved two plates from the cupboard, placed them on the counter next to the stove, and kissed me on the cheek.
We had grown accustomed to eating in front of the TV. She would sit in her overstuffed chair and eat while watching Golden Girls, or Frasier re-runs while I stood at the kitchen counter and consumed my meal. The dining table was littered with junk mail and craft projects when we didn’t have company.
She cleared the table and lit a couple of long-stem candles while I filled plates and positioned them on placemats. I poured two glasses of white and dimmed the lights so the candles could cast their glimmer. “Is there something I’m missing?” I asked. “I didn’t forget our anniversary, did I?”
“No, she smiled. I just want to talk to you. We spend so much time together and never really talk anymore.” The glow of the candles caressed her dark hair and highlighted the soft features of her face. Her smile lines and crow’s feet melted away and she looked 30 years younger in that magical light. We talked.
We talked about everything. About how I had awkwardly asked her to prom. About having kids too early. About how they completely changed our lives. About our first apartment, and every house since. About dogs that we loved, and friends that we had had. About the good years. About the bad years. And, about how given the chance, we would do it exactly the same way all over again. “I’m so lucky to have you,” I said, as I reached out to hold her hands. A tiny teardrop welled in the corner of her eye until it looked as if it couldn’t hold on any longer.
“It’s your birthday,” she said as I grasped her hands in mine.
“What? It’s not my birthday.”
“My password. My password is your birthday. If anything should ever happen to me, there is a folder on my laptop that you will need. It has instructions on how to pay all the bills, car insurance, life insurance, medical information, wills, and so forth.”
“Why are you telling me this? Are you okay? Is something wrong?”
There was a knock at the door. Kate tightened her grip on my hands,” I love you so very much. Never forget that.”
“I love you too,” I said, releasing my grasp as I rose to answer the door. I looked back at her and smiled just before opening the door. She smiled back at me. Her eyes sparkled in the candlelight.
“Bob, to what do we owe this pleasure?” I said, motioning for him to come in. He walked to the center of the living room and turned toward me, his hands clutched at themselves.
“What’s up, Bob? Do you need to speak to Kate? Is everything all right at the office?”
“Mr. Franklin, Mr. Daniel Franklin,” I heard my name, but it wasn’t Bob’s voice. “Mr. Franklin,” the voice boomed again. I realized someone had walked in with Bob. It was a police officer, dressed all in blue, his hat in his hand.
“It’s your wife, Katherine.” The officer said.
“What about her, what do you want with my wife?” I said and looked over my shoulder at Kate sitting in the candlelight, her hands still on the table where I had just let go of them. “Honey, there’s an officer here to see you.”
“I’m so sorry,” she mouthed to me with tears running down her face.
“Sir,” The officer replied. “There was a shooting at her office.”
“She didn’t tell me anything about that, I’m sure she would have said something if that had happened.”
“Sir, she was…”
“Don’t you say it, she isn’t capable of doing something like that. We don’t even own a gun.” The officer’s face twisted into a question mark of confusion. He looked at Bob with wide eyes.
“Dan,” Bob said. “Katherine was shot.” I shook my head in defiance. “She’s dead.” I looked back at the table where I had just left her. The table was dark and cluttered. The rocker next to the fireplace was empty.
Campesino’s
A Short Story by Jack Morgan
The parking lot at Campesinos is empty when we turn in for my tenth birthday dinner. For birthdays, Sam and I get to pick where we eat. This is Mom’s favorite place, so I picked here even though it’s Dad’s favorite place, too. Sam picked McDonald’s for her sixth birthday, but I always picked McDonald’s when I was a little kid, so I can’t be too mad at her.
We park on the side because we’re pulling the trailer that holds all of Dad’s lawnmowers and tools. He keeps the trailer attached to the truck all the time. He says it’s good for business because it has his name on the side. He keeps it dirty to make it look like he has a lot of customers, which is true.
I like Campesinos because I can make my food as hot as I want with the sauces they have on the table. Sam likes it too because the tortillas are always warm. Dad likes it because it’s not spicy. Mom loves it. I don’t know why. She just loves it.
Sam and Dad sit on one side of the booth, and Mom and I sit on the other side. Dad chooses the food and drinks for all four of us. He orders three plates of food for the table, extra flour tortillas, and white rice. He orders beef enchiladas, chili rellenos, and a chicken burrito, all without jalapenos. He says it’s because Sam doesn’t like spicy food, but Sam only eats the tortillas and rice anyway. I think about asking for a root beer or even a root beer float since it’s my birthday, but I don’t.
Sam sits on Dad’s leg, and he bounces her while we wait for the drinks. She doesn’t like sitting on Dad’s leg like a little baby, but she puts up with it. When the drinks come, Dad gets a Dr. Pepper, and the rest of us get ice water. When the woman walks away, Dad lets Sam have a sip of his Dr. Pepper, but Mom and I can’t have any. It’s risky to pass the drink across the table.
When the food comes, Sam slides off Dad’s leg onto the seat and moves over against the wall. Dad puts rice, two tortillas, and one bite of beef enchilada on Sam’s plate. He’s careful not to touch the rice or the tortilla with the enchilada.
I ask, “Why does Sam get a bite of enchilada when she won’t eat it?”
Dad says, “One day, Samantha will grow up and eat grown-up food.”
Sam says, “I’m never gonna grow up,” and Dad says, “You bet you will.”
Mom cuts the burrito in half. She and I split the plate of rellenos and half of the burrito. Mom picks the small half of the burrito for us to share, but I don’t mind. The halves are pretty even, and mom’s just like that. She and I add spoons and spoons of hot sauce from the jars in the middle of the table. We all eat and don’t talk much. Dad eats the enchiladas and half of the burrito. Sam eats all of her tortillas and rice. She asks Dad for more tortillas, but they are all gone. Dad asks the woman for more tortillas, and she brings a new basket. Sam always gets what she wants.
Another family walks into Campesinos, and I know who they are. The man used to work for Dad, and the daughter is in my class. Her name is Thelmita. They don’t see us until after the woman shows them where to sit. I wave at Thelmita, and she looks at me and then at the empty place on the table in front of her. When I wave, Dad looks over and sees who it is. Thelmita says something to her father, and he looks at us. Dad and Thelmita’s father do not like each other, and they both have mean looks on their faces.
“Trash. I gave him a job, and he stole gasoline.” Mom stares at her plate, and Dad stares at Thelmita’s father, and Thelmita’s father stares back at him.
I say, “I liked it when she slept over at our house.” Mom never let anyone else stay over, before or after.
Dad says, “She was real sweet, but she said things weren’t true, and her dad’s a snake in the grass.” Which is funny because Dad cuts grass for his business. Thelmita’s father says something to Thelmita’s mother and then stands and walks fast out of Campesinos. The woman brings them three orange Jarritos in bottles and a basket of chips. Thelmita doesn’t eat any chips or drink any of her Jarrito.
We finish our food, and the woman asks Dad if we want dessert. Dad says no and says he’s ready to pay. Nobody says anything until the woman comes back. She puts a piece of paper on the table in front of Dad and a small plate in front of Mom. The plate has one dessert cut into four pieces and four small forks. It’s the jiggly Mexican dessert with sweet sauce on top. We get rellenos and enchiladas and burritos all the time, but we don’t get dessert so much, so I can’t remember the names.
She says, “This is on the house.”
Mom says, “Thank you.”
Dad takes money that is folded in half out of his pocket. His money always smells like grass. He counts some bills out and puts them on top of the piece of paper. The woman says thank you and takes the slip of paper and the money. When she walks away, Thelmita’s father walks back in through the front door and right up to the table. He’s wearing a brown jacket that is unzipped. He has his hands in the pockets of the jacket. Mom slides over closer to me. I think maybe she is making space for Thelmita’s father to sit down, but he does not sit down. He leans over Dad and whispers something in his ear, then backs up from the table.
Dad looks at Mom and then at the table where Thelmita and her mother are.
Thelmita’s father says, “Vamos.” He’s the quiet kind of angry.
Dad stands and walks out. Thelmita’s father walks out behind him, and through the windows, I see them walk to the side where Dad’s truck and trailer are. They keep going until they’re out of sight on the other side of the trailer.
Sam asks for some of the dessert, and Mom moves the plate in front of her. Sam eats two bites fast with her fingers. I use one of the little forks and eat one bite. Then I put down the dirty fork, pick up a clean fork, and use it to put the last bite in my mouth. I feel the cool dessert on my tongue and taste the sweet sauce, and then there is a loud bang from where Dad and Thelmita’s father are. Mom breathes in fast through her nose and looks straight ahead at where Dad had been sitting. Then she looks at Thelmita’s mother, who is looking at her.
There is another bang, and Mom and Thelmita’s mother both sit up straight and then look at the window by where Dad and Thelmita’s father are. Thelmita’s mother runs out the door and around the side. Mom gets me, Sam, and Thelmita and makes us go into the kitchen, where loud music is playing, and then into an office the woman shows her. Mom tells us to stay there and starts to leave the office, but the woman says she should stay, so she does. We sit in plastic chairs. Nobody says anything, and we can’t hear anything but the music from the kitchen.
A little while later, Mom, Sam, and I leave and go home in a car that a policewoman drives. When we leave, Thelmita stays in the office with the woman who brought us the food.
A few days later, Mom asks me to sit in the living room with Sam and watch TV. It’s a dumb cartoon that Sam likes, but I don’t mind. Mom goes into our room and then comes out with a suitcase and says we’re leaving. We walk to the truck. It’s parked on the street with the trailer attached. Mom puts the suitcase in the back seat of the truck. Our bikes and another suitcase are alread in the bed of the truck. Sam sits in the front seat, and I sit in the back seat behind her. Mom drives us to a neighborhood where the houses are not nice. She stops in front of one of the houses and tells us to stay in the truck. The house has a very nice yard, with flowers on both sides of the stairs and more plants on the porch.
I hear Mom doing something with the trailer. Then she gets back in the truck, and we drive off without the trailer. We drive around town for a while, but we don’t stop anywhere. Mom drives slow past our school and the house where we lived when I was little. She drives past the beauty shop where she used to work.
When we go out onto the highway and start going fast, Sam rolls down her window and sticks out her hand. It’s fun to go fast, but the wind comes in Sam’s window and pushes against my face so hard my eyes get watery, and I can barely see.
The Grave of the World
A Poem by Ryan I. Vergara
Before horizon’s brassy march
Men scurry, cautiously unfamiliar with one another,
And children bury novelty for a pragmatic page.
Withal, dogs baying, begging Selene’s return,
And lowing rises, beholden to pasture.
Speckled amid concrete weeds
Littered flares hiding a wild-eyed veneer.
Their chromatic spell discarded beneath mannered tutelage;
Privily they veil – an enemy dissonant –
With their specious creed of contentment.
Tender youth compelled to fastidiously burrow,
Abscond confidence without contrition,
Folded away in trembling crypt.
Benighted by gospel, they offer confession
Withholding sincerity for refuge sake.
Avowals return to their owners, minced in frame,
Eroded promptly by twice-callous angel,
Bereft of guile, so cursory in folly.
From traces of assured pretense
Is meted a deceptive grin, the crowning blow.
To sin is given tattered affection
Deformed subject of delinquent prostitution
By treacherous neighbor, a purported ally.
Faith sealed away in a righteous tomb
Unmarked for fear of a marring hand.
Pounded furiously within its chambers,
Cherished hopes churned as fragments
Stuck between flesh and soul.
All they are trapped and torn apart,
In the grave of the world: man’s beating heart.
The Bat King
A Short Story by Igor Desyatnikov
Some local boys found the cave in late August. They were hiking in the Monongahela forest when a cauldron of bats rustled up seemingly from under their feet and zoomed up into the twilight. At least that’s what they told us.
One of the boys had scratches all over his right arm, and his parents took him to the hospital the following day to have it checked out for rabies. It was just some scratches from when he stumbled and steadied himself on a large rock in his path. That same rock concealed the entrance into the cave.
One of the doctors at the Pocahontas Memorial hospital where the boy was taken to is a childhood friend of Joseph Blumenthal, a colleague of mine here at the Conservation Management Institute at Virginia Tech. He was the one who alerted us to this cave.
The news caused a lot of excitement in our small world of bat research. The networks of bat caves in Virginia are very well known and explored, but no one has ever seen, heard of, much less explored this particular cave. For all I know, some mysterious force had formed it for its amusement. To see what we’ll do.
We crawled all over our discovery like an army of ants savoring a piece of stale bread dropped on the ground by a passerby. It was both fascinating and strange. The odd thing about this cave is that we’ve seen bats come out of it at dusk at least once every few days, but there were no signs of bats’ presence in the cave itself.
The cave extended deep under the ground, and it would take months if not years to explore it fully, but in the immediate area within good three hundred feet of the entrance, there was no trace of bat droppings, scratches, or any organic matter left from their feedings.
We did make one disturbing discovery, though. Specifically, it was Jan Visser who saw it first.
Jan was a well-respected chiropterologist from Wageningen University in the Netherlands. He flew down a few weeks ago, shortly after the cave was discovered. I often wondered if Jan had a life outside bats. At forty-six, he’s never been married and spent his entire career in academia, where he was a prolific publisher on all matters of chiropterology. In fact, Jan was one of the world’s leading specialists in bat communications. Since he came to Virginia, he must have spent at least fifteen hours a day inside and outside the cave.
He called me one early morning last week. It was barely seven-thirty, and I was having a rendezvous with my black coffee when my phone buzzed. “You gotta come and see this as soon as you can,” Jan said. Judging by the excitement in his voice, one would think he stumbled upon a pair of unicorns mating.
I was by the cave entrance within an hour. I saw Jan’s signature fedora hat through the trees well before I reached the cave. As soon as Jan saw me, he jumped off the rock by the entrance, grabbed me by the arm, and said, “Let’s go.” Once we were inside, he turned on his headlamp, and I followed him through a maze of stalactites. He stopped about four hundred feet in, took out another powerful flashlight, and pointed it to the wall on our left.
That’s when I saw it, the image on the wall of the cave. It was grotesque and mesmerizing at the same time: a giant ten-foot-tall bat with ruby red eyes surrounded by a few dozen normal-sized bats. There was some indiscernible dark object at its feet. The whole scene looked like some kind of a creepy ritual. Jan took off his fedora hat and crossed himself. I was taken aback by the gesture, as I didn’t expect him to be religious. He just looked at me with a blank stare and shrugged.
No one knew what to make of the image. It looked ancient and had the aura of Lascaux cave paintings about it. The cave must have been occupied by its winged inhabitants for a long time.
Jan redoubled his efforts to find the places inside the cave where the little winged creatures lived. He decided to switch his schedule and conduct his probe at night. This was unusual and not without risks. Though I am not superstitious, there is something spooky about being surrounded by bats in a pitch-dark place in the middle of the night.
For a few days, the nights spent inside and around the cave were as fruitless as the days. Jan lamented this with increased frustration. However, two days ago, this past Sunday, he called me at two in the morning. I was still half asleep when I heard his delirious voice in my earpiece. At first, I couldn’t understand a single word, but his whispers became louder and more insistent.
“It’s here, right in front of me,” he kept repeating.
“What is?” I asked, fully alert now.
“The giant bat. It’s real. It’s staring right at me.”
“Are you sure you are not seeing things?”
“I am sure. It’s so strange. The creature is good thirty feet from me, but I feel like it’s pulling at my conscience through the air.”
“I am not sure what you think you are seeing, but you should try and get out of the cave.”
“I tried to leave, but my legs feel frozen as if I am hypnotized. There are also a few dozen bats flying over my head in a circle. It’s creepy.”
I felt the hair on the back of my neck rise as his whispers became more feverish. “I’ll alert the others, and we’ll come to get you,” I said.
“Something is happening,” Jan shrieked. “The rock, the rock by the entrance!”
I heard screeching noises in the background, and the call got cut off.
It was pitch black in the cave when we entered. “Jan!” I shouted to no avail. We kept going deeper into the cave, reaching the place where we saw the image of the king bat the previous week.
Jan was standing in the middle of the opening facing the wall, seemingly in a trance. His hands were raised above his head. His lips were silently moving. For a moment, I thought I heard some barely audible high-pitched chirps coming out of his mouth, the kind that he has spent all his life studying. Three dozen bats hovered above him in a perfect circle. As we approached him, the light from our headlamps must have played tricks on us and made him look much taller than I remembered him. In fact, he looked much taller than any human being should.
When our flashlights lit up that part of the cave, he opened his eyes and looked in our direction. His eyes were bloodshot, the color of rubies. “Stay back! You’ll disturb my cauldron,” he shouted. I saw a dark object at Jan’s feet as we came closer. It was his fedora hat.
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