Lights!
Wheels!
Wipers!
Curtain!
This week, a marvel of machines and carbureted choreography awaits you.
Kay Vaindal (they/she) is a coastal ecologist and weird fiction writer. Her work has appeared in Seize the Press, Dark Matter, and anthologies including This World Belongs to Us and Death’s Other Kingdom: Horror Tales of WWI. Find them here.
John Sowder (he/him) is an illustrator from Kentucky whose work can be seen in the comic book series HALLOWEEN MAN, as well as the recent anthology collection CRIMINOLLY PRESENTS GARBOLOGY. John’s pen and ink artwork has been selected to be part of a contest associated with THE MAGIC OF HORROR FILM FESTIVAL that will be held in Wakefield, Virginia on October 5th. Follow him here: Instagram
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Jared Chapel’s The First Car Ballet
By Kay Vaindal
The setting, I tell the choreographer, is the Great Swamp, near where my squadron crash-landed shortly after armistice. We didn’t know about armistice yet though. No one told us—how could they, so high above us in their airships?—so we kept collecting stinking mushrooms and hunkering in sawgrass that would cut our faces raw until all the victory songs were written, and the bodies were buried, and I have a grave way out in Tilmarin with my name on it, actually, if you want to go see it, you know, for inspiration.
The choreographer nods and writes this down. She’s very accommodating.
I describe to her the taste of the mushrooms—chewy, gamey, like strips of salted meat that weren’t quite jerky—and the giant ‘turkeys’ with their serrated beaks and how they’d hunt us, and how the ‘frogs’ would sing their loudest when the engines of the airships bellowed overhead. Durban and I would squint up into the sun and try to make out their banners. If they were Allies, we’d scream until our throats were raw and wave our arms, and they were always Allies, because it was after armistice.
The choreographer goes over her notes. “I just want to clarify one thing, sir,” she says.
“Certainly,” I say. When she calls me sir, I adjust the tie around my neck. I’m still getting used to the war hero treatment.
“You want the dancers to be—cars?” says the choreographer.
“Well, yes,” I say. “Obviously. That’s the whole point.”
“I just wonder—”
“Land cars,” I tell her. “With tires, engines. All of that.”
“Right,” says the choreographer, making another note. I’d love to see what she’s writing, but I’ve never been a great reader, and her handwriting is full of loops and curls that remind me of the hairy vines that climbed trees in the Great Swamp.
After I meet with the choreographer, I go to Durban’s apartment for drinks. The three of us still hang out, him and me and Chickoree’s ghost, who sits at the end of the table, because the Great Swamp, it turns out, doesn’t let a man ever really die. Durban’s been keeping a real low profile since the rescue. He doesn’t have a job. He doesn’t have hobbies. I don’t think he’s adjusted back into society at all. When the late-night talk show hosts ask about him, I say he’s just a private person, likes his solitude. But he was never that way before. Durban used to be like a cat with its tail up in the air. In the Swamp, even, he’d be parading around with his drawers down, saying which of you motherfuckers is thirsty. We all had fun in the Swamp. That’s why I insisted on going the ballet route, even when the Fund for Post-War Arts was pushing me toward screenplay. I don’t want to make it too clear that Chickoree and Durban and I fucked like squirrels in that Swamp, but it’s an important part of the survival story. We wouldn’t have made it out if we weren’t fucking like squirrels, I think.
Chickoree downs his Miller High Life and the liquid all settles in a puddle on his chair, since he has no corporeal form. “Fuck,” he says. “Sorry, Durb. I’ll clean that up.”
“It’s alright, Chick,” says Durban, staring empty-eyed at the table.
“I met with the choreographer today,” I tell them.
“Oh, yeah?” says Chickoree.
“You still doing that?” says Durban.
“It’ll be the world’s first car ballet.”
“What’s it about?” one of them asks. I think it’s Chickoree, on account of the hollow ethereal tone to his voice, but Durban sounds that way lately, too.
I smile thinly into my glass of wine and shrug. “Haven’t decided yet,” I say. “Has to be something on my experiences in the war, since it’s funded by the FPWA.”
“Oh, yeah,” says Durban. “Them. You know, they asked me to write a book.”
“Well, you’re a good writer. You should.”
Chickoree agrees. “You definitely should! You know, if they knew I was alive—”
“Enough of that,” says Durban. “You’re not.”
Chickoree sags, and I sag a little, too. No one sees Chick but us. The gas from the lowlands, we think, and all the time spent carrying his corpse back up the great mountain to civilization above the clouds, allows us to see him in the in-between.
“Have you looked into the necromancer?” asks Chickoree.
“I will,” says Durban.
I stare at Durban, eyebrow quirked so to say, is everything alright, Durb? and he gives me a look that confirms, no, everything is not alright, things are worse than usual in the world of Durban, but don’t you dare ask about it, and that last bit at least is like the Durban I remember.
We drink in silence, and the puddle under Chickoree grows.
At the end of the night, Durban walks me out to my car. “I’m losing my fucking mind,” he says, which is remarkably candid on recent-Durban standards.
“There’s a guy at the VA who—”
“Don’t start about the fucking VA,” says Durban. “It’s Chick. He’s driving me crazy. I need you to take the body for a while.”
“Durban,” I say, and I put both hands on his shoulders. He’s shorter than me. I feel like he never used to be. “You know I can’t take the body right now, buddy. I’m planning the world’s first car ballet.”
“Please, man.” He makes his eyes so big and wet that I imagine we’re watching from the sawgrass, weak and pale, while a pack of giant turkeys rip into Chickoree’s still-writhing form, pulling his small intestine from his abdomen like a dove extracts a worm from wet soil.
“How about this?” I offer, and I pat him on the shoulders like I might’ve back then. “I’ll go and see that necromancer for you, yeah? I’ve got a free hour in the morning. Once Chick’s back alive, he’s not your problem anymore.”
Durban, wet-eyed, kisses me desperately goodbye.
I take an air-taxi home and eat a salad with my hands, chewing on lettuce like it’s mushroom jerky, pausing only to lick dressing from my fingers. Then I fall asleep below my spinning ceiling fan, which looks a bit like the prop of an airship, and I imagine I’m in the cockpit again, and Durban’s screaming about something on the hull, and we’re losing altitude, falling into the low dips of this planet where too much oxygen pools like fog in valleys back on earth. When we first drank the water from the Great Swamp, parched to the point of drink-and-die-of-parasites or don’t-drink-and-die-of-dehydration, I remember it tasted almost like stale bread. I got used to that after the first six months, and when I finally got home and tried the tap, I tasted stale bread again. I haven’t gotten used to it, this time.
In the morning, I shower. I brush my hair—I’m growing it out. I want to be able to have it one long braid by the time we have our first dress rehearsal of the world’s first car ballet, which I’m sure will drum up some media attention. I go into the kitchen and press a bagel down in the toaster and then I smell it: rot. I poke my head in the guest bedroom and find Durban, asleep on his side next to Chickoree’s corpse, which is blackened and somewhat-preserved by the mud we coated it in years ago, Saran wrapped to keep our furniture clean.
I knock loudly on the open door.
Durban bolts upright. Even just out of sleep he has the decency to look sheepish about all this, pinkness to his face, curly hair ruffled with sleep. This cherubic expression is intentional, I’m sure. He knows I can’t be mad at him in this state.
“I had to,” he says. “I’m losing my fucking mind.”
“How’d you get him here?”
“He fits in my gym bag now,” says Durban.
“Where is he?”
“Your building’s tall. He likes roofs, doesn’t he?”
I look past him, out the window. My apartment’s in the cloud layer. The views aren’t as good as the apartments below, which can see clear to the bases of the buildings, growing like steel hair out of the sandy scalp of this planet, or the ones above, who witness the crests and troughs of an ocean of clouds.
I pull Durban out of bed and bring him to my room. You shouldn’t sleep beside it, I remind him. Even with the Saran wrap, it off-gasses all sorts of nasty compounds. Durban sits on his knees on my bed and looks at me with his big wet eyes again, and so I press my mouth to his, and our mouths are cold wet places, contrasts to our lips all chapped from the heat circulating through my building, and the lube is cold, and when I push myself into him, he presses back like he wants to unzip me and close himself inside my skin. When we’re done, he puts his head on my shoulder and I try to get out of him what’s wrong, without asking what’s wrong, because that would annoy him.
That’s when we notice Chickoree floating in the doorway.
Durban leaps to his feet, swearing, grabbing my lamp off the bedside table so it comes uprooted from the outlet. “This is what I mean!” he shouts. “This is what I’m fucking talking about! He’s just—there! Always! All the time! Just watching!”
“Well, it’s not like I can join in,” says Chickoree, unbothered.
“We’re going to the necromancer this morning,” I say.
“Excellent!” says Chickoree. “It’s been a long while since you’ve taken me out and about in the daytime. You’ve both been neglecting me, don’t you think? Keep the bag open a smidge this time, will you, Durb? I couldn’t get out on the way here.”
On the monorail zipping above sunrise-painted clouds, Durban tells me he misses the swamp. He misses the threat of the turkeys, he says, of death looming over us like a vending machine claw. He misses the feeling of his heart beating, and he misses gathering mushrooms, and hunting for food, and sleeping on the cold dirt with the snakes slithering up and over our bodies. He misses the sound of the wind on the torn canvas of our destroyed airship, and the way the frogs would sing louder when Allied formations went overhead, and that we didn’t have to hide ourselves, and the swamp never judged us. The moss-covered ground, he says, awakened some ancient longing in him for a place with microbes and plants and bugs that his ancestors evolved alongside for millennia before the Dispersal, the Awakening, and now we’re here in this sterile land away from our history, and for what? For the promise of the future? For the Eternity of Humanity? Humanity was never meant to be eternal, says Durban. Humanity was never meant to be anything but earth. Up here, he says, he feels as dead as Chickoree.
I respond with a good-natured laugh, because we’re in a public setting, and soon I’ll be putting out marketing material for the world’s first car ballet. People are already off-put enough by the stinking black liquid leaking out of our tightly-zipped duffle bag, and heaven forbid anyone recognizes me.
Durban glares at me.
I don’t pay him any mind. He may have changed in a lot of ways, but even before the Swamp, Durban was moody.
In the waiting room at the Necromancer’s office, which looks like it used to be a Quest Diagnostics, it’s just us and a loudspeaker. “You didn’t mean all that,” I say.
“Of course not,” he says. He smiles at me. It’s very convincing.
“We couldn’t survive long-term in the swamp. You remember the fires.”
“I do,” he says, hands folded in his lap.
“It’s too much oxygen.”
“I had a goldfish in a bowl with rainbow rocks and a red castle.”
“Durban.”
“I saw the fish in the channels in the Swamp. You saw them. They schooled and darted. What fish wants rainbow rocks and a castle?”
“Michael.”
“It died. It died in the bowl. Did my goldfish miss—?”
“Mr. Chapel!” shouts the speaker in the ceiling.
We both jump to our feet.
A door off to the side of the waiting room creaks open and there stands the necromancer, a woman in all black. She wears a pair of genuine giant turkey beaks on a fine gold chain, their serrated edges catching on her shirt, and a headpiece featuring deer antlers imported from earth, and I worry that this entire get-up is going to reinforce Durban’s breakdown that much more. “Good morning,” I say.
“Where’s the body?” she says.
Durban holds up his dripping, tightly-zipped gym bag, and she looks at it for a long time. Then, she nods. She waves us back into a room like a little doctor’s office, and she unpeels the Saran wrap from Chickoree’s corpse layer by layer. The necromancer is professional; she doesn’t pinch her nose, and at the sight of Chickoree’s eyeless sockets—the turkeys gobbled those first—and gaping abdominal cavity, she doesn’t even blink. It’s been five months since we pulled Chickoree’s body from the mud and made our great trek up to Civilization. Most of his decay happened while we traversed the low jungles: the higher we got, the slower he rot. At night when we’d stop to hunker down away from the turkeys, we’d pack mud into his mouth and ears, and the holes where his eyes were, and the half-melted opening where his guts once were. He’d watch us do this from nearby, hands on his hips, and suggest we pack some into his anus, too, just in case.
I have long imagined that in the world’s first car ballet, Durban and I might be a pair of tow trucks in these scenes, dragging a destroyed sedan up a long, long ramp. I told the choreographer as much yesterday. She wrote something down, so I suspect she’ll be incorporating that idea.
“Can you fix him?” asks Durban.
The necromancer frowns. She touches Chickoree’s blackened skin, and puts her fingers in his eye-holes. “It will be expensive,” she decides.
“Oof,” says Chickoree, materializing across the room. He rubs and rubs at his eyes. “Here’s the real test of friendship.”
“We can cover it,” I tell her.
“It will take many weeks,” she says.
“That’s okay.”
“I require a 25% deposit, plus tax, up front,” she says.
“The body stays with you?” Durban asks.
“It must,” she says.
He exhales.
The 25% deposit nearly empties my bank account. Durban watches me add the 22% tip to that, which the tablet strongly suggests I do, and he does something between an eyeroll and a side-eye. “You can’t afford this,” he hisses in my ear.
“We have credit cards,” I say.
As we walk out, my phone rings. The choreographer’s name flashes on the screen. I answer it, and she tells me she’s hired several excellent drivers, and she wants to show me a run-through of a few ideas for some scenes. I’m impressed by the speed and decisiveness of her actions, and I tell her as much. Were you a military woman? The choreographer only laughs, which doesn’t answer my question one way or another.
“Durban,” I say, clapping him on the shoulder. He seems even shorter than he did yesterday. “How’d you like to see a sneak-peek of the world’s first car ballet?”
Durban is content to do anything now, as long as it involves leaving Chickoree’s body behind. On the monorail ride across town, he wipes his hands repeatedly on his pants. The walk from the station to the choreographer’s studio is along a series of high, metal rope bridges perched above and within the clouds. They swing in the wind, and sculptures on massive columns sprout hundreds of feet up from the mountain below us. Durban, who has to my knowledge never stepped foot in the arts district, takes particular interest in a sculpture of a willow tree.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” I put an arm across his shoulders.
He shrugs me off. “Has the sculptor ever even seen a tree?” he says. Then he points out the way the arms hang too low, and the branches cleave off from each other too much, and how uncanny it is for the leaves of a willow to be still and silent in wind like this.
Sour again, then. I let him stay paces behind me, stewing.
“Don’t jump,” I call back.
“Fine,” he says.
The choreographer is surprised to see another person with me. She recognizes Durban from the news, and is as charmed by him as I was when I first met him, almost a decade ago now, before I fully understood the pits and caverns of his personality. Durban smiles; the choreographer does everything not to swoon. This disgusts me. I assumed the choreographer was a lesbian. When I smile, the choreographer should swoon just as much, if not more. I’m the one who saved one-and-one-half men plus myself from the snake-like grip of the Great Swamp, after all, once Durban decided he wanted to stay.
“If you’d both just take a seat,” says the choreographer. “We know the FPWA wants this to come out before the hype dies down, so the drivers and I worked all night to come up with this. It’s the emotional climax, so to speak. The scene where Max Chickoree dies. You both—ahem—are familiar with that, I’m sure.”
“I’d like to see it live,” I say.
“What?” says the choreographer.
“I don’t want to see a video. I want to see it live. It’s a ballet. It’s not a movie.”
“Well, certainly, but—”
“I’d like to see it live, too,” says Durban.
“Well, alright, I suppose we can arrange to—” The choreographer tugs at the rim of her little black turtleneck, and makes a sound like ha. “Yes, yes, we can do that. Come along with me, will you?”
We get into her sky-cab, and she takes us far above the buildings. She wrinkles her nose a little because I’m sure we’ve both got some of Chickoree’s black death goo on our clothes. The necromancer, Durban and I both know somewhere in our swamp-addled brains, is a scam. She’ll wrap the rotten pile that was once Chickoree in tea leaves and fragrant herbs and chant at it, and she’ll call us after two weeks and say, “I’m sorry. I tried everything I could.” She’s a babysitter for our guilt, and once the call comes, whether we have the corpse or not, the ghost will be back to watch us live and work and fuck.
The choreographer makes a few phone calls on the way, and she makes sure to start each one with, “Just so you know, Jared Chapel and Michael Durban are both in the car with me right now.” Then, she takes us to a low part of town, where the air tastes like high-oxygen and diesel fuel, and Durban’s shoulders seem a little less tense. We cross wide, solid sky bridges toward a structure like a football stadium, egg-shaped. I hear engines revving inside.
The choreographer leads us up a long spiral staircase, to a catwalk perched high above the dirt circle arena. From here, the world is all white seats and brown dirt. She asks us if we’re ready, and we nod. The choreographer blows into a whistle around her neck. Music swells from somewhere unseen. Three loud, red Ferraris come tearing into the brown. When their engines blast, the music gets louder to compensate. When their engines get quiet, the music follows. The cars bob slowly along the dirt, weaving in and out of each other.
The music changes. Major notes give way to foreboding minors, but the three red cars don’t seem to notice. From dirt circle right, a boom truck creeps into view. The cars continue to weave. Two more boom trucks flank the first.
Violins come tearing into the melody, and a Ferrari blares its horn. Two of them hurtle backwards as if pushed, but the third remains in the center of the dirt circle, stranded. It spins its tires but it gets no purchase, well and stuck in the mud. The boom trucks swoop forward like vultures and bash its windshield in with their long hooked arms. They smash it again and again, and it’s all too loud for any other sound to cut into, too much shattering glass and banging, music succumbing to the noise of brutal, metal carnage. Hooks reach under the carriage of the car and flip it, and then dip down to yank off heat shields, and transmissions, and vital bits of engine that they bob back up to present to the catwalk, before smashing down again to grab more cables and wires and entrails.
All the while, the two remaining Ferraris hunker behind a twisted metal tree.
The turkeys recede. The music floats back in, woodwinds first, then a low, mournful horn.
Chickoree’s engine still sputters. The Ferraris don’t go to him for three or four minutes, until after it finally gasps and dies, alone in the center of the dirt circle below.
Men in black run out from stage right to hastily attach plows to the front of the remaining Ferraris. This, I notice, is a slow and clunky process, and I will certainly suggest to the choreographer that they tighten that bit up, and perhaps add hitches to the backs of the Ferraris while they’re at it, for the ramp scene. I’ll also suggest they take a close look at the metal tree, to ensure it satisfies Durban’s requirements for what a tree ought to be: mobile leaves, etc. As the Ferraris plow mud on to their fallen comrade, to hide his scent from the boom trucks that will surely return when night falls, I turn to the choreographer to remark on all this.
Instead I find Durban openly sobbing, hand clutched to his chest.
I start to say something to him—Durb, or hey, or you okay man—but before I can, he grabs me and pulls himself into my neck, and to my neck he says, I get it. It’s beautiful, he says. Even if it isn’t green.
Below us, a dark smudge in the white chairs, Chickoree sits and smokes a cigarette. He doesn’t watch the cars plow mud. Instead, he tries to blow rings, and amorphous blobs of smoke spiral up to the ceiling. They smell like lavender.
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