Autor: Merriam A. Grain

No one else noticed. I and my colleagues were in the reserved seat for the press, making bets on who would take the gold home; looking at the contestants parading and taking stances. Failing or succeeding. The people cheered and waved flags. Blues and reds were the colours that danced the most on the first rows.

I was kin on the Rumanian. He was bigger than the favourite: some Chinese defector from the Mao regime. Now lifting weights for the stars and bars flag, instead of training with rice sacks. Or so I had been told by the blond on my left. A bonbon from France I’d for sure want to eat with my Caesar’s. All that meat in the right places. I could almost feel the wind his thick lashes made every time he blinked… Bummer, he is straight.

Yeah, right. I was kin on the Rumanian because my penis was the one thinking. The Chinese defector had more probabilities given his stats. He had won two golds as a young athlete before coming to the big ones. But the Rumanian looked big and dangerous.

I can see the black shorts and the white t-shirt slightly soiled with something that isn’t sweat neither the dirt from dusty benches. This is an American bear of black eyes and black hair. Someone whose ancestors flet the Nazi trials by pretending to be normal citizens… Betting on his name: Heydreich.

Most people do not remember individual smells. What they remember is the feeling. I might not be as good as a sommelier but I can distinguish a few. At home, my mother would ask me to investigate if the contents of some pot or jar had gone bad by using my nose. I’m quite good at knowing if meat has started rotting before it even smells to others.

This guy smelled. He had that off and slightly fungish… Ticklish feeling on the back of my nose of rotting meat. He did his stance, pushed up his weight and held the weight. One, two, ten seconds more of what they are supposed to. We (the Americans tough I’m technically Canadian) wave and stomp and cheer.

Next, it was the usual American. A bit red and a bit slightly too dark haired to be blond. The smell stuck to his soles like an unfed dog. When he stared at us, his eyes were white. Halle (my somehow Russian female version), commented the guy looked stoned. She wished it for the Russians to win a medal. I simply wished it was that way for the sake of our lives. The people watching seem to be about to pour over the rows of seats.

Here he comes. The ex Chinese. He is the worst of them all. His eyes are already white. He takes the powder and grabs the referee. His hands go to the lower of his pants. Up goes the guy like a dumbbell. The whole audience quiet. You could listen to an egg crack and sizzle in here. We watch how the athlete lifts the man. We listen to the crack of his back. Saliva oozes from the lifting dead. He lifts the dead human and cracks the skull with his knee. We should be running but we don’t. We are glued to our seats. Watching and waiting.

Across a lawn with a lining of Winterling and Mohn, lives my neighbour. I don’t really like her. We almost crossed paths going into town.

I can really see her mumbling to herself.  Her lace curtains allow me to see that she is waiting for Sackemeier, the neighbours down hill. My mother says she must be one of those… I guess I’m calling this afternoon. With luck they will come soon and drag her to the train. There, all the teachers from the black lagoon might stop rotting this country from the insides. 

I can’t see a damned thing. Ruben, the waiter, comes and asks if I want to drink an aperitif wine while he takes my hand and handles a wine glass. I allow myself to take it and try drinking it without spilling any. The waiter leaves with a funny dragging noise.

Then the first dish arrives and it smells like fish. It is tender and covered in small grains that seem to be glued to each other with a soft substance. It might be something like cream or cheese. My girlfriend convinced me of coming here to have dinner to convince me her ugly food is good enough to eat.

Maybe she is right. Up to now, things have been quite good. The darkness is a total assault and I can’t really make sense on how to use my cutlery. I just don’t seem to catch on these Brussel sprouts. Question, are these really Brussels? They could be anything else. And this is when my phone starts ringing. I was supposed to turn it off but I made clear to everyone around I’m really expecting this call from the lab. I mean, they don’t need me there since the DNA results won’t come out faster by me waiting by the lab. So I came to eat… Instead.

Nonetheless, the call comes and I answer it. The dim light coming from my phone shines for a moment over my plate… Nah. It can’t be. That something round is a Brussel. I focus on my call. It seems the DNA matches and the murderer is really the husband. I tell Celeste and she congratulates me by calling my name in her seductive voice: «April».

All right. This is bothering me. I have to look so I use the phone’s torch. This thing… Well this isn’t a Brussel sprout. I call Ruben, the blind waiter to tell him discreetly but still using my phone’s light:
—Ruben, there’s an eye in my soup! — I whisper worried.
To my surprise, he just takes the eye and tucks it in his empty left eye socket to leave the table limping. I don’t want to look around but I do. Everybody at the table is missing an eye. Some of them are missing chunks of flesh too. My scream resonates in my ears for a long, long time.

Round and round, down.
Orange heads, everywhere.
With swords en garde, they smile.
Scary eyes,
Empty nosed.
Dancing, dancing, prancing.
Those the kids, autumn feeds.
Silly ghosts,
Scholarships.
Candle souls behind the ghouls.
They jump, they hop.
A garden for pump kinder.
October tolls,
Frost is not.
Midnight snack,
Pumpkin pie.
Jack is king.
Hurray for pumpkin.

«It can’t be» «No, no, no, no» . Thought the werewolf Raymond. This was fundamentally wrong. This time travel was so horribly stuck he had to do something. Anything.

He was, again, reliving the exact moment his transformation had scared his girl… Now ex? How could he know if they were still an item, if he wasn’t able to move forward… or backwards! To brim the cup, the transformation had happened with him elbows immersed into the dish washing of Fridays. Fridays were his washing plates day. Ha hadn’t been able to use his time travel ability until he had fully transformed.

And again, his forearms hair was growing, covering his arms and going up his chest and face. Kanie glanced his direction when he sneezed, one hair had found its way inside his nose. She let go of the pot she was putting in the fridge. The pot, an orange ceramic beauty, crashed against the floor. His nose grew and Kanie went running away through the front door…

The hair of his forearms grew, it soon covered his chest and face. The orange pot broke and Kanie ran away…

Something was horribly wrong with this time travel trip!

<<Following tradition, someone decorated a box with money inside, as a cake and took it with them to the court. It was nothing more than a traffic fine but the girl had been arrested before …

As usual, John was starting the first day of summer camp in his owm traditional way. A ghost story that he had spent the whole winter concocting while coordinating a whole team of aeronautical engineers on the metaphorical drawing board of the simulators.

Oh, I’m Suzzane Baskerville and I’ve never been married out of my own volition by the way, officer Snider. So, this was my fifth summer camp and John’s fourth as professional staff and as I was telling you… We were around the fire, listening to John’s…>>

The detective Snider lifted a brow. He already knew she was Suzanne Baskerville. This was one of those women who like telling you everything you don’t need to know and forget the most important stuff or don’t tell you the important stuff because «it is private». After telling you who suffered hemorroids and who was being cuckolded. He looked at her short sleeves and Bermuda’s with envy. The weather out there was of 37°C… In the station, he didn’t even want to imagine because of the broken A/C whilst his blue trousers would get themselves stuck to the chair with his sweat.

He nodded and smiled, waiting for the woman to get to the strange corpse they had found on the canoes’ cabin. A green mass of a melted person (it had the rests of a human face) . He had wanted to call the CDC the moment he entered the cabin, but his superior refused since the person who had found it seemed all right. No coughing, no fever, no vomit. In a words, Ji-Hoon Yoo didn’t seem to be infected with anything.

Rock Snider took a subrepticious look at his watch…He froze in the spot. His wrist was green… He tried to speak but found the inside of his throat felt like chocolate syrup inside the skin. He looked up to the woman and his damned round glasses, her round body that looked a little bit green now.

—I pass the doom judgement on the crime of not listening, young man

She reached the interrogation room and went out, leaving a trail of green slime behind her.

I didn’t believe in ghosts and ghost didn’t believe in me. Or at least it didn’t use to…. Until last week.

A month ago, I was taking a bath. It was one of those long, long baths with bubbles and salts and candles. So I was there, totally relaxing from a busy day with tons of reservations because of the Ghost and religions conference in the Blue Hall of the hotel I work at, when someone… Well, I’m not sure they’re people.

So, I was there, relaxing with eyes closed and the Schubert’s mass in g Benedictus, wondering if the black or the purple vibrator would be better than the other when… Was it a blue?, white? or maybe it is most accurate to say it was like a transparent blur that turned everything white and black at its other side?; passed through the door. It went directly to the mirror to eliminate some fraying from his persona. Ghosts are like this image we see in movies but all around them, they have like threads they go loosing around. It seems this happens every time a medium contacts them so they try not to come upon one. Oh, yes. It was looking at the mirror while cutting when it got paralysed and looked over its shoulder. It turned around quickly, it seemed it had seen something horrible! It started to babble and tremble to lastly turn around. It screamed when he saw me looking at them from the bathtub.

Afterwards we must have encountered each other in the kitchen, the laundry room or the same bathroom. Every single time, it would tremble, contorting its face and opening its mouth. It seems ghosts don’t have sliver but they emit steam. And so it kept on going as it was, until I asked over my half shaved beard of two days , to the fleeting blur I could see in the mirror:
—Do you believe in humans? — The ghost stopped, stiff. She —why did it take that long to notice it was a she?— turned around very slowly. If something, I felt I should have been the one scared shitlees but she looked so scared I couldn’t help but feel protective. I have an older sister who is way shorter than me.
—No… I… I didn’t—She wrapped up in a black shawl, resting her hands on her lap, over her green bodice dress.
—I see— It was all I could say while I observed how her persona frayed a little more around the edges.

The burning smell told her the Zodiac grinder had spelt its last moments. She watched the light of the ceiling sparkling to the power of a sudden electricity burst. Was this all? No! For disgraces come in three. Everybody knows that.

Just this morning she remembered the last night she had to grind teeth because her wife had taken the remaining powder for going to curse a new born. But she had felt to tired, she had gone to sleep. Her wife was still sleeping the hangover…

Now, she had no powder to fly and no food processor to grind. She peeked through the mouse hole that was their door. Meowrice, the cat, was licking his paws waiting for her to come out. And the human of the house was around, vacuuming! Who vacuums this early in the morning? Was her silent complaint.

She went to the pantry and searched. At least they still had some catnip. This was dangerous. Cats like to eat fairies. That’s why houses with cats never have «poltergeist problems». Marley went to the mouse hole and blowed some catnip outside. Meowrice blinked, jumped onto his four paws and smelled the catnip cautiously. Marley walked slowly. Her legs wanted to run like the devil but she knew the cat would chase anything that moved fast. She needed to be slow but swift. She scurried herself behind the beige fur of the cat and started climbing. A hand, a foot, hand, foot. Little by little.

Once up there, she held onto the intoxicated cat’s collar and whispered malignant: «Fur and claws, all to do my will. To the market in April street». Meowrice obeyed. He went to the cat door and passed through, went up the white fence and surrounded the house.

The whole block was behind when the dog came up barking. Poor Meowrice took it as a signal to scape. Which he did. Marley was flying hanging from the cat’s collar while she repeated to herself again and again: «Don’t grind your teeth. Don’t grind your teeth»