Chris Rogers, Author

Poe's Grave by Stacey Keith

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Feeling like a hungry wolverine, a pathetic voyeur, a man who grinds through Internet porn sites all night because he doesn’t have the nuts to troll for real meat in the chat rooms, you coward, Marty white-knuckled the handle on his briefcase. “My God.”

Kitchfield was married. And it sure wasn’t to the Bobsy Twins there. Marty had seen the wife himself, arguing with Evan at the corner deli. The Korean guy who owned the place kept barking at her to shut up or order. A month later, Marty stood beside her in the elevator, eyeing her cleavage and gulping her perfume. Pouty lips. Sweet can. Drunk, and it wasn’t even lunch yet. “You wanna piece of me?” she’d roared. “I can read your thoughts, you freak! They’re that obvious!”

With the affronted dignity of a drinker, the wife ratcheted up her shoulder bag, tensing for the ping of the elevator. When the doors swept open, she marched off, leaving Marty small and alone. Middle-aged. Dismissed.

And now her revolting snot of a husband was a published author. With a book tour, no less. The one thing Marty could secretly lord over him was gone, out-of-print, like Marty’s own book. He could make out Evan’s sports car idling at a red light, the vanity plate reading “Author”. Pain stabbed him like an ice pick. Clutching his middle, he dragged toward the bus stop, wishing for the thousandth time his DUI skirmish with Kitchfield’s car hadn’t gotten his license revoked. Wishing his boss wasn’t half his age and a needle-nosed prick. Wishing—oh, Jesus, the pain—that anyone ever in the history of civilization had read his book. Loved his book. Sent him impassioned pleas on scented paper to write another.

But that was eighteen years ago. Marty leaned, panting, against a wall. The word “pussy”, rendered in fuschia, glared on the bricks above his head. Well, he was a pussy. A pussy because after the first reviews rolled in (“atrocious”, “a joke”, “a bathroom read, at best”), Marty tucked tail, took a crappy bookkeeping job, and married his fat lazy wife for no better reason than she put out when he wanted her to. But she’d borne him a child—the daughter he loved, Yvette. The song in his heart. These days, of course, Yvette was lank and moody and full of teenage insouciance. She rarely called him Daddy anymore.

Marty scratched around in his pocket for the antacids before remembering they were gone. Then he scrounged for change. Nothing. A bus token. The pain gnawed at him like a cancer. It probably was cancer. Marty clutched his chest. Even his heart hurt. He felt sure he was dying.

And who would care? People criss-crossed back and forth, eyes averted. Heaving himself off the wall, Marty trudged again up Greene Street. He could drop dead on the sidewalk and the same assholes he worked for would, with vague repugnance, step over his lifeless body. He would melt there like a child’s ice cream. Only the ice cream would have elicited real tears.

Desperate to prove himself wrong, Marty searched the faces that passed him. Hunted for a flicker of compassion. A gleam of recognition. Any sign of like-mindedness. The sidewalk hummed with the percussion of commuting feet: the solid thump of men’s loafers. The prissy click of women’s heels. The tramp of workmen’s boots. But no one met his eye. Each person lay entombed in his own dark secrets. Buried in flesh walls. Marty knew then that his fear was true.

He didn’t exist.

A cry of rage and anguish gurgled in his throat, choked down by an equally morbid paranoia, not of people’s indifference, but of their laughter. The sun beat on his bald head like an angry Aztec god. Closer now, the bus stop’s three Plexiglas walls were dull with grime. Marty lurched toward them, a Quasimodo in brown gabardine, briefcase banging his knees. Without even glancing at him, an old black woman fanned herself with a church program, saying, “Sweet Jesus, I sure do wish the bus would come!”

He sat. Gasped for breath. Grateful almost to the point of tears for the privilege of shade. Patting his pocket for antacids, he came up empty. Christ, would the pain never stop? Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the old black woman rocking and fanning, rocking and fanning. Next to her sat a young mother and her baby. A scowling Puerto Rican paced in front of them. He had enough grease in his hair to make him the envy of every Waffle House south of the Mason-Dixon. And just beyond the Puerto Rican loomed an advertising poster, embedded in Plexiglas. Marty gave a snort of surprise.

Kitchfield’s face.

Kitchfield’s book.

He stared. Belosi’s Brain said the words on the cover. Marty felt himself go light-headed, as though he’d been huffing paint fumes. From the street, car horns blatted. Marty didn’t blink. Kitchfield’s fleshy lips, the windblown hair, his whole intolerable smugness jeered at Marty from the poster. He felt like a syphilitic gnome beholding the young godling who has come to slay him.

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