Grinning Cracks Read online

  Grinning Cracks

  Stories and Poems 1995-2015

  revised and updated second edition

  K.W. Taylor

  DEDICATION

  For V.B., because I always wanted to follow in your footsteps.

  Second edition copyright © 2015 Dioscuri Books. All rights reserved.

  Previous edition © 2013.

  “Arcus Senilis” originally appeared in Scribal Tales Magazine, April 2011. “Choleric” originally appeared in Quarterlife Quarterly, Summer 2011 “Iannic-ann-ôd” originally appeared in Darkfire Fiction, January 2012. “The Lovers” originally appeared in Daily Love, December 2011. “Of Shreds and Patches” originally appeared in Bending Spoons, November 2010. “Phlegmatic” originally appeared in Diverse Voices Quarterly, January 2011. “Regression” originally appeared in Golden Visions Magazine, July 2010. “The Storytellers” originally appeared in Flash Fiction World, October 2013..

  ISBN-13: 978-1475211931

  Also by K.W. Taylor

  THE RED EYE SERIES

  The Red Eye, Alliteration Ink, 2014

  The House on Concordia Drive, Alliteration Ink, 2014

  STANDALONE SHORT FICTION

  “Method Writing,” Dioscuri Books, 2015

  We Shadows Have Offended, Etopia Press, 2011

  ANTHOLOGY APPEARANCES

  The Grotesquerie, Mocha Memoirs Press, 2014

  Sidekicks!, Alliteration Ink, 2013

  100 Worlds, Dreamscape Press, 2013

  Touched by Darkness, Etopia Press, 2012

  Once Bitten, Never Die, Wicked East Press, 2011

  CONTENTS

  abaddon

  The ankou

  The Apple Box

  Arcus Senilis

  bugul noz

  blackout

  CHOLERIC

  christmas wrapping

  Part I: Boxing Day

  Part II: New Year’s Eve

  Part III: Epiphany

  Colleagues

  dahut and the destruction of ys

  EDEN

  encounter

  Floater

  gradlon

  Iannic-ann-ôd

  Il Necromanticismo

  the korrigan

  Les lavandières

  The Lovers

  MARCUS

  melancholic

  the morgen

  MOVING

  Of Shreds and Patches

  ORNITHOLOGY

  PHLEGMATIC

  Pseudanor

  rabbit rabbit

  REGRESSION

  sanguine

  The Storytellers

  Trichotomy

  wholesale

  Yan-gant-y-tan

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  abaddon

  Potato wasn’t the girl’s mother, not really. Not in all the ways that mattered to the child who, through hearing it attached to her actions so incessantly, thought her own name was “Fail.” The girl may have sprung forth from the woman’s biology, but that was where the nurturing ended. Fail instead thought of her merely as “Potato,” as that was an unpleasant sight on her dinner plate, and just as beige and oblong as her female parent. Both the tuber and the woman were crunchy and bitter one second and mushy and overcooked the next. It was a mean-spirited appellation that in adulthood the girl might come to be embarrassed by, but as a preschooler, she simply had an instinctive knowledge that a person this cruel did not deserve any sobriquet based on the word “mother.”

  On the night Fail discovered the Abyss, she was being yelled at for an offense. This was not unusual, but merely by being commonplace, the terror Potato’s rage inspired in Fail was not reduced. This particular evening, there were vegetables left uneaten, and so of course there was a spanking. As her bottom was being paddled pink, Fail had dared to screech out a word unbecoming of polite company. This resulted in more trouble than even the original dietary neglect. She’d been sent to bed with no dessert and was now being glared at.

  Potato’s jaw was set at an angle such that the woman’s crooked bottom teeth jutted out into a diagonal grimace. There was a dark chasm visible between the rows of yellowed calcium. “Do you even know what that means?” Potato demanded.

  Fail didn’t know what the offending term meant, not really, but she huddled under the blankets until only her eyes showed and nodded, fast and hard.

  “Where did you hear it?” Potato growled.

  “School,” Fail said in a muffled whimper. “The mean boys say it at school.”

  Now Potato was too close, fleshy white things flapping, the skin prickly and freckled like goose bumps. Her breath—sour and sweet at the same time, like grape juice left out too long—wafted all over Fail’s little heart-shaped face in a too-warm, sickening breeze. Potato sat down on the edge of Fail’s bed. Fail could see her own reflection in her glasses: tiny on the top and big on the bottom, with a thin line running through the two halves of the lenses. The bifocal line rendered Potato’s own eyes freakishly disjointed, as if reflected in warped funhouse mirrors. “And how, exactly, do these mean boys define it, hmm?”

  Define? What did that mean? Fail felt her hands get all clammy. Her stuffed cat Shelly was clenched between armpit and ribcage, and she squeezed the fluffy cloth pet even harder, closer under the blankets. It wasn’t the same as a real cat, wasn’t warm and protective, hissing and biting at strangers in Fail’s defense, but at least Fail could scrunch and squash it to herself without hurting it. “I, um, it means...going to the bathroom?” Fail pulled the blanket back over her mouth as soon as the words were out.

  Potato’s eyes rolled up to the ceiling and then back at Fail. “No, it doesn’t,” she spat out. “It’s a lot worse than that.” She glared at the tiny girl. “You don’t know,” Potato accused her. “You don’t know what it’s like.” She leaned in closer to Fail. “It’s all rape!” she whispered darkly.

  This was a word Fail had heard Potato say many times in her short life, but Potato never bothered to explain what it meant. Fail only knew it was the worst thing ever, and that boys did it and wanted to do it all the time.

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Rape!” Potato repeated, cutting off Fail’s small voice. “So you think getting spanked is like that, huh? Well, fine!”

  Before Fail could object, Potato had taken hold of one of her arms and dragged her from the bed. The girl screamed, and for the first time in months, she called out to any last shred of nurturing Potato might still have in her. “Mommy! I’m sorry, Mommy!”

  “I’m not your mommy anymore,” Potato said. Her back was to Fail now, and she crouched down close to the baseboards. Potato knocked once on the ancient plaster wall, and Fail heard something—not her mother—knock back in reply.

  The second knock didn’t come from within the bedroom. It came from the other side, the inside, of the wall.

  “It’s time you learned what happens to little girls who swear and lie.” Potato turned and took one last long look at Fail. “Disappointment,” the woman said. She let out a strangled laugh that was almost a cough. “When your grandmother was a little girl, they used to lock up disappointments in the attic and let them die.”

  Fail’s forehead screwed up and her eyes widened. “What?!” she demanded. “Mommy, no!” Every time Fail repeated the maternal appellation, a pang stabbed at the child’s heart. “Mommy” shouldn’t do this, she knew. Potato would not, could not, be reached on that level of pure, supportive, unconditional love.

  And indeed it was too late for appeals anyway. Potato was gone now, the portal between worlds that divided Fail’s bedroom from the rest of the dwelling (the shabby domain of adults that Fail was rarely privy to) slammed shut and locked behind the woman. Fail started to crawl back to her bed but stopped as something strange
caught her eye.

  In the corner of the room, down where Potato had been knocking, there was something new, something Fail had never seen before. The white-primed walls had always been blank and bare, but now...

  Fail pulled her stuffed cat from the death-grip she’d been clutching it in and held it out at arm’s length. “Is that a door, Shelly?”

  Shelly, being made of fiberfill-stuffed pink felt, did not reply. Even if she could have, her eyes were made of pupil-less faux pearl buttons; there was no way she could have seen the door, much less confirmed its existence to Fail.

  But Fail saw it and inched closer. It wasn’t quite mouse size, but wasn’t grownup size, either. It was perhaps sixteen small hands high and half as wide, the top rounded instead of level, like doors of woodland creatures’ homes in storybooks. “Is there a hobbit in there, Shelly?” Fail wondered.

  Once again, Shelly was not equipped to answer, and so Fail was left to decide whether to approach or open the door without knowing what lay beyond it. She was just starting to reach out one trembling hand to the knob when the knocking sounded again, this time clearly on the other side of the door.

  “Someone’s in the walls,” Fail whispered to the stuffed cat. When the knocking came again, Fail’s heart started beating faster, keeping in time with the rapping. She took a last look at the larger door in the room and, not hearing Potato’s footsteps, reached again for the knob. It was made of glass, cut into the shape of a rosebud, and the sculpted petals and leaves dug into Fail’s palm as she turned it.

  There was a complaining screech of hinges, and then a black cavern as dark and desolate as Potato’s maw of a mouth. “Hello?” Fail called. Cold bare feet poked into the darkness and took tentative steps forward. As the door swung shut behind her, Fail suddenly wished she’d thought to get the flashlight from her nightstand.

  She needn’t have feared, however. Soon enough, a match sprang to life with a snickety scratch. The golden pinpoint of light flickered and danced to reveal the face of another child, this one a boy. His cheeks were soot-smudged, and he appeared to be a few years older than Fail. A coarse-cut brush of dark hair capped his head, ending in messily-chopped spikes along the tips of generous ears he hadn’t quite grown into. The rest of his features were just as awkward, all nose and chin and forehead with a too-small mouth and near-invisible eyebrows. Fail, herself wearing flannel pajamas with short pants, the whole ensemble rainbow-striped, saw that the boy was clad in what looked almost like a rough brown sack, holes haphazardly cut for legs and arms and head. The boy blinked at the sight of Fail and drew back a little in surprise.

  “Oh, I thought it would be your mum,” he remarked. “Huh.” He seemed confused but quickly shrugged it off. “Ah, well. This way, then!”

  He began trundling off into the darkness but Fail didn’t follow. “Who are you?” she demanded. “Where are we going?”

  “You’re off to get turned to bones, miss!” the boy replied. “Mister Head is expecting you.”

  Bones? Fail clutched tighter at her cat, only to shriek out in surprise as Shelly squirmed out of the girl’s arms and leapt to the floor.

  “What’s that, miss?” The boy hurried back to Fail’s side. Shelly—orange now, striped with white and decidedly no longer made of felt—wound her way around the boy’s legs and nuzzled at one dirty knee. “Well, hello, there!” He plucked the cat from the floor and cradled her in one hand. Impossibly, his match still burned, the stick having grown no shorter in the whole time he’d had it lit. “I believe this is yours?” he asked, proffering the cat to Fail.

  Fail blinked at the squirming cat and took it from the boy. “She wasn’t real before!” Fail observed, gently stroking fur that all-too-recently was mere fabric.

  The boy half-turned to Fail and gave her a little shrug. “That sort of thing happens here.” He resumed walking. “Come on, quickly now!”

  “I don’t want to be bones,” Fail said. “And I don’t want to go with you. Who are you?”

  “Amyl,” the boy replied. He stopped and whirled around again. “I don’t think that’s my proper name,” he admitted, squinting off into the distance. “But then I don’t think they meant for you to call yourself ‘Fail,’ either.” He chuckled. “That’s not very nice, after all.”

  Potato’s not very nice, Fail thought. “How d’you know who I am?”

  Amyl shook his head. “We’re going to be right late if you don’t quit asking questions.”

  Reluctantly, Fail followed the boy along. As they proceeded, the passage grew brighter until finally Amyl shook out his match and dropped it to the ground. “Ah, here we go,” he announced. He sprinted ahead a few feet, disappearing from Fail’s view, and then returned with a wooden club sporting a massive flame along its top end. “Torch’s a bit better at showin’ us where we are, eh?”

  A thought occurred to Fail. “We’re not still in my house, are we?”

  “There you go with more questions!” Amyl stomped his foot. “Look, ain’t no answers to most of what you’re askin’, so just stop already, yeah?” He pouted. “I didn’t get no answers when I came here, so I don’t see why you’d get to.”

  Fail snuggled Shelly closer to her. The cat let out a weak mew of protest but didn’t try to squirm from the girl’s grip. “Sorry.”

  Amyl’s face softened. “No, I’m sorry,” he said, his tone gentler. “All’s I know is they call this the Abyss.” He pronounced it with the emphasis on the first syllable.

  Fail frowned. “When we used to go, we’d talk to a nice lady at the church,” she said, screwing up her face in concentration. “She wore a funny black towel on her head and said she was the...abscess?”

  Amyl laughed. “Abbess,” Amyl corrected. “And that’s something else altogether.” His laughter grew more gleeful. “God, but they’ve not educated you, have they?” Suddenly he stopped laughing, a light seeming to go on behind his eyes. “Oh, but that’s why you’re here after all, innit? Bad words and bad deeds.” He grinned. “Off to the bone pile with you, then!”

  Fail still didn’t like the sound of that. She turned backward and sought out the doorway through which she’d come only minutes before. There was nothing behind her but total, empty blackness.

  But ahead, there soon appeared another door, this one much larger but the same shape as the one in her bedroom. Amyl reached up on tiptoe and pulled back a huge ring, its iron hinges creaking in protest. Once the ring was parallel to the floor, Amyl let it go with a tremendous bang.

  A clang and clatter of gears and levers, and the door rolled away from the wall. Light—oh, so much glorious light!—streamed in from the other side, and Fail shielded her eyes against Shelly’s furry neck. She blinked hard and then looked back up again. It wasn’t blazing rays of sunshine as she’d thought, but rather a hallway lit with rectangular panels set into the ceiling. “Those are like the lights at school,” Fail blurted out.

  “This ain’t no school, that’s for sure,” Amyl informed her. There was a stand full of discarded umbrellas in a corner near the door, an empty ribcage coiled around it like a ring. Amyl chucked his torch into the umbrella stand, flame size down. Immediately, there was a loud hiss, and the stand began to choke out great billows of black smoke.

  Fail scurried up to Amyl’s side and tried to get him to notice the smoke now thickening through the hallway, but he was too focused on where he was going. “But the fire—”

  “We got places to be,” Amyl said, cutting her off. Suddenly, he grinned. “Here we are.”

  They’d circled around to another corridor without Fail quite noticing. This hall finished in a dead end. There were piles of bleached skulls in the farthest corners of the hall. A four-foot tall cylinder of dull metal stood at the end of the hall. Atop the cylinder rested a glass jar with something murky floating inside.

  Fail’s eyes grew big as the cylinder rose to an even greater height, spider-like legs telescoping out of the base. As it moved, the liquid sloshed a bit, but the glass jar n
ever moved. The top was sealed with a white, waxy substance.

  “Am? Is that you?” came a tinny voice from somewhere near the front of the cylinder. There was no visible speaker or mouth anywhere; the sound didn’t seem to have an obvious source, and yet it came out, clear as day.

  “Aye, ya right bastard,” Amyl replied. “How’s it goin’, Zen?”

  “Adequately.”

  Fail frowned at the thing. “Is there a man inside there?” she asked.

  “I am the man inside there,” the cylinder replied. “My name is Zen, young miss, and I’m the latest in life-extension technology, an honorarium of the former Mister Zebediah Endwin, late of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and merged with the Zendeflex 3000, product of Abyss Level One.” There was a hint of pride in the voice, which had the volume and timbre of a grown man but obviously none of the physical appearance of one.

  Fail gave Amyl a sidelong glance. “Huh?”

  “He’s a bleedin’ robot,” Amyl simplified.

  “I am not!” Zen said. “I am part biological! The term you look for, Amyl, is ‘cyborg.’”

  Amyl glared in the direction of the glass jar. “She’s four, Zen. She’s not an engineer. She barely understands ‘robot,’ let alone ‘cyborg.’”

  “I know what a robot is!” Fail grumped. “It’s a computer that talks.”

  Zen’s machinery made a noise that sounded like air escaping a bellows. “Close enough, one supposes,” he said. “Well, well, well, Am, if you’re escorting a child around here, that can only mean one thing!”

  “Mister Head,” Amyl said with a slow nod. He gave Fail a grim smile. “Sorry, little one, that’s just the way it’s got to be.”

  “Robot man, I don’t want to be bones!” Fail cried. As if in agreement, Shelly sang out a plaintive meow.

  “Oh, bones, bones, bones. Who cares about being bones!” Zen’s metal spider legs skittered forward, the front two lifting up and gesturing. Scissor-like lengths of silver split off from one another, giving the effect of two-fingered hands at the ends of the legs. “I got no bones to weigh me down, to make me laugh or make me frown!” Zen sang. “Bones and bodies, flesh and blood, it’s all so overrated.” The top of the cylinder canted forward and the jar sloshed closer to Fail. “You hardly appear to have any bones at all anyway, so why should you care if they go to Mister Head, hmm?”