FICTION WRITING
What follows is a small selection of short stories and experts I’ve written under my pen name, Jesse Koehler. Much of my short fiction is speculative, supernatural, and decidedly gothic—likely a result of my longstanding fascination with twisted minds like H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King. As some of my work is sent out for publication, the works included here may be swapped out or removed from time to time.
The stories below are, for all intents and purposes, entirely fictional. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out.
The Killing Floor
Short Story | 2,200 words | 9 Minutes
THE KILLING FLOOR
By Jesse Koehler
Why should I see God in the threads of a scarf?
This thought finds him, as it often has in recent months, in the deafening half-silence just after closing time. It no longer occurs to him to wonder why; the thought is a part of him now, a resident of the quiet places in his mind that only speak up after dark. And it is long after dark. The bar is closed and cleaned, the drawer is counted and recounted. Midnight has come and gone with the patrons.
The witching hour, he thinks idly. He does not believe in magic—does not believe in much at all, really—but he does believe you can see God in the threads of a scarf, if you look at it just right.
“Have a good night,” says a feminine voice.
He looks up in time to see Casey wave goodbye as she crosses the killing floor. That’s what they call it—what the servers call it, at least. The central barroom is a grease-stained slab of concrete, crowded with high-tops and barstools, and it has more than earned its name. It remains, indisputably, the best place in town for a young waitress to ‘make a killing’ at cocktail hour. Come Friday night, it was always plain to see why this was the most populated bar in the city, though you’d never know it after hours, when the lights went up and the music died.
He raises his hand—the one which is not holding a filthy dish towel—and Casey smiles her first and last genuine smile of the night. She’s certainly made a killing this evening. She is wearing her mousy hair in pigtails: her secret weapon, she insists, to guaranteed thirty-percents. She smiles, and then she is gone, the last waitress of the night. He watches her go, and then he is alone with his thoughts on the floor.
He’d heard once from an older bartender that the so-called ‘killing floor’ had been originally built as a slaughterhouse. There was no telling now whether that was actually true, but the facility was certainly old enough. The cobblestones in the walls here had been standing when most of the inner city was young. Pig’s blood or not, a certain kind of killing still happened here, every night and weekend, under the bright lights that elevate the barroom to a stage.
From his place behind the bar, he’d once seen a waitress’s rent paid in a single shift—nothing to sneeze at, here in the city. This he has seen once and only once, but the promise of it—the possibility of the thing—is enough to keep them here.
What he has seen more is the state of the promise broken. He has seen tears withheld and teeth clenched, the weariness of smiles that no longer touch the eyes. But most of all, he has seen anger: anger for every shift that doesn’t break a hundred dollars, anger for every less-than-perfect interaction, anger for every double shift and every late night.
This is the nature of the killing floor. This is where faces don’t crack and smiles don’t falter. This is the mine and they are its prospectors, drawn continually back for the promise of gold.
From across the floor and down a meager half-flight of stairs, he hears the front door creak as the remainder of the kitchen staff say their goodbyes. The kitchen is a small, wide room, most often occupied by mostly the same people, separated from the rest of the restaurant only by a stretch of crowded countertops. He has heard snippets of the kitchen’s conversation tonight in passing, as he often does. It has become a sort of pastime for him, little time as there actually is to spare.
He has overheard good news this evening: Benjamin, a tall and lanky twenty-something whose hands will likely smell of the seafood he shells until the day he dies, has heard back from another opportunity. He’ll be moving to the coast in three weeks. He is, at last, moving on to bigger and better things, and his coworkers could not be happier for him. It has been the chatter of the kitchen tonight, a happy undercurrent to the usual chorus of “runner” and “order up.”
As Ben says his goodbyes by the door, there is a peculiar look in his eye: a blend of excitement and sorrow uncharacteristic of his prematurely grizzled face. His shifts are numbered and he knows it, but his friends know it all the better. They will miss him more than any of them would say, but they would not hold him back for all the world. They hug him and they wish him the best of luck.
The bartender watches this exchange in silence. He does not believe in luck, but he believes you can hear God in the entropic chatter of a busy kitchen, if you listen hard enough. He hears it in the jokes they share and the shanty-like choruses they raise during the occasional lunch rush. Only last week, he has heard it most clearly in they way they look out for their own.
Melvin, the stocky dishwasher who speaks little and smiles less, came in late that day. They were all present when the tears fell, when he finally shared that his sole companion—yes, the eight-year-old border collie they had all met just last month—had been struck and killed by a car that morning. The only thing more surreal than the sight of the broad man sobbing into his apron was the way they all gathered around him. They offered him the day off, but in the end, Melvin chose to stay through the shift. For the time being, at least, the kitchen was home.
The bartender remembers this as he watches Benjamin leave for the night. A part of him believes—would like to believe, at least—that you can see God in loss, too, but it doesn’t seem to get any easier with time.
This time last year, his aunt was on her deathbed. The chemotherapy had run its course and done its damage on her withering body, and in her last weeks he could only think of how old she looked—how painfully, terribly old. In truth, she had hardly breached her fifties, and her side of the family had been known to live longer than most—at least, according to his mother, who was her sister.
He visited his aunt more and more often as the end approached. He watched as the cancer ate her away and the treatments drained her life; he saw the lines in her pale face grow deeper with each passing week.
He found that some guilty part of him actually felt relieved to learn that they had decided to pull the plug on her treatments, and was more relieved still to find that he was not the only one. The unanimous opinion of doctors and family alike seemed to be that it was better to simply let the cancer have her than to kill her themselves in their attempts to slow it. All there was left to do was keep her comfortable and wait. The waiting was the hard part.
It was during his very last visit with her that she uttered those strangely insightful words that would haunt him for many months to come. He remembers this conversation most vividly of all.
She was telling him about a day she’d had out on the town with his mother: a trip which they both knew, but neither would say, was certainly her last. She’d had a sudden surge of energy in the past few days—a ‘last gasp’ as the doctors sometimes called it—and had been able to actually rise from her bed for the first time in weeks. She’d gotten just a mote of her strength back, but it was enough to walk on her own two feet, and by God, that was enough. She wouldn’t waste it, no matter what the nurses said.
Her sister had taken her downtown, to the city flea market, where booths brimming with produce and products of all kinds were set up and torn down every weekend. They’d been going together since they were girls, and it seemed the only reasonable place to spend one last good day.
As she described it to him, there in the hospital room, a gleam came over her hazy eyes, and her pale lips stretched into a brilliant smile that actually made her look like herself again. Her bald, spotty head lolled dreamily as she remembered the sunshine, the sounds, the smells. It had been the most perfect day that she’d had in years. But all that, she said, was not what she’d really wanted to tell him about.
“No?” he’d asked politely.
“No…” she said. Her eyes suddenly took on a perplexed, almost vacant look.
For a moment, he thought she would not speak again. It had grown harder for her to hold full conversations as of late. But then she did speak, and what he heard from her lips only served to confuse him more.
“I had what you might call a… well…” her voice fell off and those hazy eyes shifted to the right and left, as if to confirm that they were alone in the room. “A religious experience,” she whispered.
He listened with polite interest as she described it to him. There’d been a new booth out on the street that day, laden with rows upon rows of colorful, handmade scarves, flitting gently in the city wind. They were each brilliant, each dazzling and unique in their own way, and yet there was one which stood out from all the rest.
“It was just so… beautiful,” she said. “Beautiful enough to make me forget all my aches, all my troubles, just for a moment. When I held it in my hands, it actually brought tears to my eyes. Real tears, when my eyes have been dry all these past few months. It just didn’t make sense to me.”
He asked her what she meant. It seemed like the right thing to ask.
“Well, I’ve never been much of a materialist…” she said. “Why, after all the prayers and vigils… after all the visits from the pastor and all the tiny miracles… Why should I see God in the threads of a scarf?”
Her pale, watery eyes regarded him plainly. She seemed to be hoping for an actual answer. He told her that he didn’t know, and she smiled a weary smile. She was happy enough just to have told someone; happy enough to have simply held that scarf before she went away. And he was happy just to hear her talk, just to have her company for a little while longer.
He hadn’t known how to answer her on that long day last summer. Tonight, as he remembers it, as he stands alone on the killing floor, he still isn’t sure he knows. Why, of all things, should she have seen God in the threads of a scarf?
But then again, why not? Hasn’t he seen God in the way the light sometimes catches in the corner of a bar glass? Hadn’t God made the fibers woven into the threads, the grains of sand that formed the glass?
This is the truth, he thinks, feeling that something profound, something of colossal importance, dances just on the tip of his tongue, at the back of his mind, in the periphery of his vision. This is the truth. But even now, he knows this is a fleeting thought; the kind of thought which will have lost all meaning, should it come to him again by daylight. He understands and accepts this, but even as the thought slips away, he makes one more grasp at it.
What is the truth?
The truth, he thinks, is you can see God in the threads of a scarf. The truth, he thinks, is that miracles happen every day, but you only find the miracles you look for. He believes in a god of big things, yes. But more than that, he believes in a god of small things: of simple beauty, happy accidents, second chances. He has seen that god in the smile of the friend who reaches for the check first, in the way the kitchen staff embrace one another in their wins and losses alike.
That god can be seen anywhere, he decides, maybe even on the killing floor. Maybe it’s only the masks we wear that blind us. He doesn’t believe in much, but here under the lights, in the silence, it’s somehow easy to believe in all of these things.
He has seen God in the threads of a scarf. But most of all, he has seen God in the faces behind the masks—the faces of those people underneath, unafraid to be who they are, when they finally step down from the floor.
He shuts the lights as he steps out.
JESSE KOEHLER
JUNE 2022
A THOUSAND FACES
Short Story | 5,700 words | 24 Minutes
A THOUSAND FACES
By Jesse Koehler
Oliver Drake was the richest son of a whore the city had ever seen. Widely held as this sentiment was, the individuals who understood its literal nature were relatively few—few enough, in fact, to fit comfortably into the cab of a luxury sedan. The night of the accident was just such an occasion.
Aside from Oliver himself, none of tonight’s well-dressed passengers had ever actually met his mother. The woman had been kept well out of the spotlight since the early days of his father’s second campaign, and she had died shortly thereafter. Bad publicity all around, really. They’d all agreed it was a terrible shame, and subsequently moved on.
Those days were long in the past now. Oliver Drake had done well to follow in his father’s Canaanite footsteps. The legacy of an ill-gotten prostitute’s child was gone like the last of the tabletop radios his father had been so fond of. Tonight, they were celebrating, the car radio was blaring, and Ben E. King was singing “darling, darling, stand by me.”
“Ollie, sit up straight,” said a woman in red. “You’re going to spill on the leather.”
“Leather’s cheap,” Oliver laughed. Champagne was far from the strongest thing in his system tonight. He had half a mind to tell Emily he loved her right then, but he was not quite drunk enough.
“To reelection,” said Eddie, leaning in with his glass. “And to many more.”
They all cheered their approval, and their glasses met between the facing seats with a sound like silver bells. There were spills, then, but not of the drunken kind that Emily had feared. A sudden bump in the road startled all of them.
Oliver downed his drink at once—terrible champagne, anyway—and leaned forward to the sliding window that separated their cabin from the driver’s seat. He slid it open with a jerk. “Carson, what the hell was that?”
“I’m sorry sir, the rain is getting worse and I—”
“What do I pay you to do, Carson?”
The driver swallowed. “Drive, sir.”
“Then keep your eyes on the god-damned road.”
The door slid shut with a thunk, and the driver was alone in the dark again. Bobby Carson wiped his brow with a wrist that seemed thinner every day. He felt feverish, but the estate was nearly an hour up the road. Worst of all, he was beginning to suspect he was seeing things.
The rain was growing into heavy droplets, and the trails they made along the windshield cast strange shadows across his haggard face. For a moment, the smooth tones of Ben King’s voice cut out, returned, and finally sputtered out altogether, replaced by the shrill growl of radio static. Mister Drake wouldn’t be happy about that, but Bobby could do little to fix it now. The road ahead was winding and utterly dark. And between the looming trees, the old driver thought he saw that curious shape again—something like an angel—but it was gone before he could blink.
His grip on the steering wheel tightened. “I must be losing my mind.”
A sudden knock rattled the window, and the driver jumped in his seat. He tried to steady himself as the window slid open.
“Damn it, Carson! What did I tell you about—”
But the driver heard none of the words that followed. From the darkness around the bend emerged the bulky shape of a fallen tree—too close now, far too close—sprawled like a dead soldier across the pavement.
The driver slammed the brakes.
Swerved.
Blacked out.
As the car overturned, Oliver Drake found himself weightless in the cabin, feeling like the last cigarette in a tumbling box. He had time to see the faces of his companions, frozen in shock and terror; time to wonder at the way the golden sheen of the champagne glimmered in the air. Last of all, he had time to glimpse through the window. He did not see a fallen tree. What he saw was a monstrous mass of wings, spreading to blot out the horizon.
* * *
There was nothing in the void. No detectable source of light, and yet he could see his hands before him, dim and unshadowed. No ground to stand on, and yet he stood. He took a tentative step, lurching as his foot found purchase on empty, depthless space. He closed his eyes again, fighting back the sickness that threatened to climb his throat.
“Jesus… Hello? Can anyone hear me?”
He rubbed his eyes. When he opened them again, he was no longer alone. A winged figure stood before him now, its towering form wreathed in black robes. Only the face beneath its hood was too dark to discern.
He moved to step backward—and found that his feet could no longer move. At once, an image flashed across his teetering mind: a moth in a spiderweb.
The creature advanced slowly, its wings spreading outward, vast and skeletal. A single arm reached out, as if to pluck his beating heart from his chest.
All at once, a flood of deafening voices rose in his ears, echoing from the furthest reaches of the void. On some animal level, he understood that these voices were the creature; a being for whom this godless place might be home—or at least a kind of unfurnished office space.
Oliver Drake, the voices droned. The time allotted to you has been squandered. Another realm awaits.
The politician’s heart had climbed into his throat. “Are-are you…?”
I am the one who stalks the streets of Egypt, whose sign is the bloodied doorway. I am the taker. The escort. The final plague.
Drake shook his head, willing the dream to dissipate. “You don’t understand—I’m still alive, you see.”
I am sent by the Ancient One himself. Do you doubt my words, small being?
He had no time to respond—in a moment, his senses were flooded with images from somewhere very far away:
A dark road and the smell of rain on asphalt. A black Cadillac, overturned and bent like a tin can. Shattered glass, broken limbs…
And himself.
Drake’s own body lay sprawled across the pavement in a puddle of blood and bile. His eyes were wide open, rimmed with blood, staring off into some interminable distance. His neck was twisted, swollen and split like an overcooked sausage.
His stomach lurched and he doubled over, retching at the sight of his own broken body. He straightened as the image faded, wiping spittle from his mouth. “I guess I believe you.”
The creature said nothing.
Weakly, the politician plastered a trademark smile across his face. “So you’re him, huh? Old Harry himself?”
I am called the Angel of Death, the voices thundered. And you, Oliver Drake, are a dead man.
The creature moved its hard like a puppeteer; the politician felt his body lift.
“Wait—WAIT!”
Come. Another realm awaits.
“Wait, listen—there are people who depend on me! You kill me, you kill them!”
At once, his body froze, still suspended, as if by hidden cables.
“You can’t,” Drake panted. “People still need me.”
Yours is a legacy of squander, said the creature. Your absence will bring balance to this world. These creatures mean nothing to you.
“Then why don’t we let them decide? Let’s see what the people want.”
The creature stood in silence.
Drake’s mouth, dry as it was, continued to move on its own. “Give me a day—just one day. I’ll prove it.” His heartbeat pulsed in his throat.
Wordless, the creature began to move. An arm disappeared into its robes, reemerged with something clutched in its fist. As the claws parted, a glinting object tumbled from its palm and caught itself on a long, silvery chain.
The Ancient One said this may happen, said the creature. A shape like a silver dollar spun on the end of the chain, a tiny moon shifting through its phases. You will find three witnesses to prove your necessity. The amulet will reveal the truth of these matters.
The creature drew closer. Drake did not attempt to run. He held his breath, feeling icicles run the length of his spine as the thing’s cold hands looped the chain around his neck. Even at this distance, its hooded face was interminable blackness, radiating a strange, living heat.
Fulfill the terms of our agreement. You have twenty-four hours.
“I will,” Drake tried to say, but his breath had already left him. A buzzing sound rose in his ears, in his mind, drowning out all else in the void’s endless reaches. His eyes became tunnels, which became pinpoints, which became shadow.
There in the darkness, his senses failed him.
* * *
White curtains pulled back with a raking sound, and the room was at once flooded with light.
Drake groaned. The smell of this place was not the scent of brewing coffee he usually woke to—it was one of cotton swabs, bandages, and isopropyl alcohol. He opened his eyes to see a young woman in scrubs by the window, unbothered by the blinding wash of light.
“Look who’s awake,” she said without enthusiasm. “How are we feeling, Mister Drake?”
“Fine,” he lied. “Weird dreams.”
She glanced at a clipboard in the crook of her arm. “You remember what happened?”
“Wish I didn’t. Car wreck?”
“One of the worst we’ve seen. And yet, not a scratch on you.” She glanced him up and down, as if he were not covered in cheap linens up to his chest. “Boy, if you didn’t believe in miracles before.”
“And the others?”
She set her jaw, thinking. “Alive,” she said finally. “Banged up, but mostly in one piece. Your driver, though—”
“How soon can I leave?”
She rolled her eyes almost imperceptibly before consulting a slim watch on her wrist. “We can have you out within the hour. Your butler had a new suit sent in for you, by the way.”
She gestured to the bedside chair, where a heap of shredded clothing sat in a clear, plastic bag. Drake could only stare at it, frowning at the frayed edges and road grit.
“You alright?” she asked. “It’s only a suit.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “Only a suit.”
A part of him had hoped for something salvageable among the remnants of his favorite suit. The mirror in his bedroom confirmed the contrary. He stood looking at a man in rags, unhappy from his unkempt hair down to the torn hems of his slacks. The linen of his shirt was caked with dirt and tacky wine stains. The fine fabric of the jacket hung in strips that bore closer resemblance to an authentic Jolly Roger than a tuxedo.
He sighed, hearing the echo in his head: only a suit.
He’d begun to wrestle the jacket from his shoulders when something metallic clattered to the hardwood floor. He stepped backward, staring down at it—a silvery shape not unlike his mother’s old Saint Benedict medallion. He crouched, lifted it gingerly by its chain like something alive. It looked… familiar.
“Oh god, no…”
Slowly, he looped it around his neck. It felt like a noose. The mirror showed the silvery amulet resting comfortably on the tattered fabric of his shirt. Over his shoulder, a looming shadow blotted out the lamplight—he spun.
The bedroom was empty.
* * *
Drake wasn’t sure how much time he had left—only that he’d wasted a good deal of it in a stupor. It was already past noon, and he could feel each second like a pulse in his ears. As he stepped outside, his mind turned over a plan.
It was nearly two o’clock by the time he arrived at the door he was looking for. Room 217 in the trauma ward was currently assigned to one Edward Burke—Eddie, to his friends. Drake took a deep breath, wrestling his trademark grin onto his face. He pushed the door open.
Eddie looked up from his bandages, briefly returning the smile before some bodily ache caused him to wince. “Hey there, big man. Dig up a family heirloom?”
Oliver paused, remembering the object that hung from his neck. He tucked it into his collar, still stiff from the cleaners. “Pfft. Heirloom?” he laughed. “The only thing dad ever left me is in the garbage now.”
“Ah, the crash get your good suit? Well, your old man had taste, but nothing lasts forever.”
“I guess not,” he agreed.
The clock ticked.
“We’ve been friends for a while now, yeah?”
Eddie nodded. “Sure. Four years, maybe?”
“Seven, actually. But what I mean is, you know me. What do you think of me, my work? Honest thoughts.”
Eddie exhaled slowly. “What can I say,” he began. “I’ve never seen a man so devoted to his cause. The friends that you’ve made—”
But Drake lost the last part of it. He clutched at his chest, where a sudden, searing pain shot out from his sternum—the place where the amulet touched his skin. A disorienting ring moved deep in his ears, in his mind. He clenched his teeth.
“—Say pal, you alright?”
“Yeah,” he lied. “It’s nothing. You were saying something about friends?”
Eddie shrugged. “Friends in every corner. Everyone I know says…”
—That ringing sensation again. Eddie’s voice began to drift, drone, drown. Another voice, identical and somehow distinct, rose to take its place, blurring into and over the other:
Friends? As if you’ve ever had a friend in your life.
Oliver blinked, feeling dizzy as his mind tried to hold two voices at once. “But… you and I are close, aren’t we? You trust me?”
“Well, sure I do.”
Not half as far as I could throw your ass.
Drake’s head began to ache. “What about Emily? Do you think I have a chance with her?”
“Absolutely.”
Frankly, I think she’d rather shag the broad side of a—
“You feeling alright, Ollie?”
Drake looked up. “What?”
“You look a little pale.”
“Yeah,” Oliver muttered. Remembering his feet, he rose slowly from the chair with legs that felt far away. “I think I just need some air.”
* * *
Four o’clock struck when Oliver entered the hospital for a second time. He could’ve had flowers brought in, but something about that hadn’t felt right. In spite of the ticking clock in his head, in his very pulse, he’d stepped out to purchase a dozen of the finest red roses ever cut from a bush—even picked out a vase to go with it. Standing at the door with this arrangement under one arm, he knocked.
From inside, a small, sweet voice returned. “Come in.”
No hesitation preempted the clunk of the heavy doorknob this time. He stepped into the room, his classic grin shrinking into something sheepish. “Hey, Emily.”
Her face was bandaged, but still achingly beautiful—an escaped lock of hair fell gently over one brow. “Ollie, how sweet of you to visit. I wish I could've worn something more proper.”
Briefly, Oliver noted the sling that held her left arm tucked tightly against a pale hospital gown. The cheap fabric eclipsed none of her natural beauty.
“Nonsense,” he said. “I just…” But then something stripped the words from his tongue: a distant ringing accompanied by a dull, searing pain. A voice—both familiar and alien—began to fill his mind.
You just couldn't stay away, could you?
You couldn't give me one god-damned day.
He cleared his throat. “I wanted to check on you.” Then, remembering the prop in his hand—anything to drown out that dreadful voice—he raised the vase of roses. “These are for you.” The water inside trembled lightly in his hands.
“Thoughtful,” she said, smiling her sweet smile.
He tried to smile back, but that voice—
Flowers?
How about a compensation check, you creep?
“Emily, there's something I wanted to ask you,” he choked.
“Yes?”
This again? How long do I have to fight you off?
Take a hint, you sorry piece of—
There came a sudden crash as the vase slipped—a thousand glistening shards splintered as its contents flooded the floor.
“Oliver? Hello?”
Oliver blinked at his empty hands, registering a dozen misshapen roses spilled out at his feet.
A door opened behind him, and a deathly pale-faced nurse leaned in from the doorframe. “Everything alright in here?” Her eyes darted, registering the spill, the occupants, their faces. “I’ll get a broom,” she said, and was gone.
Oliver watched her go. “Emily, I—”
Something in her eyes stopped him. She was startled, but there was something else there, too. Anger and... fear?
“What’s wrong with you?”
No mysterious voice this time. He’d seen her lips move.
He swallowed. “I think I might be dead.”
She seemed not to hear him. “Was there something you wanted to say to me?”
Oliver looked at the floor. From a puddle distorted with glass, his own tired face stared back at him. “No.”
* * *
There was a third and final knock that day, flat in comparison to its predecessors. No answer came. He pushed the door open anyway.
“Walter? You awake?”
A groan came back. “Not like I've got a choice. These pills do nothing for me.”
Oliver wandered in, feeling aimless, noting the way the shadows gathered in the lines of Walter’s face as the sunlight dimmed in the window. His head was wrapped in bandages, and a thick neck brace propped his chin up at an unlikely angle.
He made his way to the bedside table, clutching his peace offering close to his chest—He was determined not to lose his grip this time. He set the frame down, examining his work. In black and white, his own trademark grin leered back at him. His younger self was tucked under the arm of a taller, spryer Walter.
“You remember this one?” he mused. “That was right after Dad died.”
Present-day Walter, stiff in his neck brace, made no move to look at it.
There was an open chair beside the bed. Oliver took it, easing into the seat like hot water. “I never really thanked you, you know. You were like a second father to me.”
“Ah,” Walter rasped. “I suppose I was. I knew you'd outgrow me. Big shoes and all that.”
A long moment passed in silence, marked only by the distant clamber of footsteps and rustling papers. Oliver took a deep breath, steeling himself for the pain. “Walter.”
Only now did the old man’s eyes turn to look at him. They looked so distant, so terribly tired.
“I know we’re not as close as we were, but you’ve known me longer than anyone. You’ve seen me grow, watched me move up in the world. I need to know… What do you see in me?”
The old man’s face was hardened and lined like old wood, but a smile creaked across it nonetheless. His eyes, however—those deep-set eyes stayed the same.
Oliver heard the ringing before he felt the burning, before he’d even heard the first words fall from Walter’s mouth.
“What can I say, Ollie. Looking at you now, it’s like… Well, like seeing my own son all grown up.”
—like seeing my greatest failure looking back at me.
The ringing drew closer, sharper; the heat intensified. Oliver set his teeth.
“I see brilliance, success, promise…”
—Arrogance. Squander. Wasted potential.
“If your father could see you today…”
—Your father despised you. And who’d have thought?
You’re just like him.”
The squeal of wooden chair legs on linoleum brought Oliver back to himself. He’d hardly realized he’d stood. That was fine—he’d heard more than enough.
At once, the cheap grin fell from the old man’s face. “Oliver? Where are you going?”
“The bridge.”
The heavy door clicked shut behind him.
* * *
Drake couldn’t remember the last time he’d been out on the street without an entourage—after what happened to Kennedy, going anywhere without security seemed like suicide. Tonight, however, that sentiment had lost much of its weight.
The air was cold and uncharacteristically dry after the storm of the previous night. The setting sun cut a severe red streak across the skyline, where a bitter wind poured like arterial spray. It whipped the hem of his jacket from his body, and he pulled it closed again as he walked.
“Wait!” A woman’s voice.
He turned to see her approaching, her arms waving frantically—another parking-lot lunatic. He walked faster, not wanting to be touched.
“Oliver Drake! “Please, I’m a widow—I know you can help me!” But she was already behind him.
Only then did that familiar heat begin to spread out from his chest; a dull ring rose in his ears. He turned to look at her, feeling the sting in his eyes as outside thoughts—her thoughts—circled him like vultures.
“Please,” she uttered. “It's my—”
“Your son’s hospital bills,” he finished.
The woman’s mouth fell open. How did you—
“I just know.”
He answered none of her questions. When it was finished, he left the parking lot alone, folding his wallet—thinner now than before—and felt the bite of the wind on his face where it touched the trail of a tear.
He put his hand to his cheek, stared hard at the droplet on his fingertip like something alien. All the while, his own words looped in his mind like a skipping record:
I think I might be dead.
Could a dead man walk the pavement of a city he’d once owned?
The next block answered his question—He passed dozens of dead men every day. Here at the far end of Fifth Street, they stared out at him from the alleyways where they crowded, some of them sneering, some seeming to see nothing at all. Drake shrank into his coat as he passed, more from shame than fear. The new suit felt suddenly dirty.
One of the city’s derelict dead glanced up from where he shivered against the gray-white concrete of what might’ve once been a bank, then looked away again. His teeth were visibly chattering—the wind made a tunnel down this avenue that was hard to escape. Drake stopped, listening to the sound of distant ringing, feeling the cold give way to familiar heat.
The man looked up. “I’ll move—” he began to say.
Drake stopped him. Wordlessly, he removed his coat, then knelt to drape it over the man’s shoulders. Not a very effective blanket, for its price tag.
“I don’t know what to say,” muttered the man on the pavement.
“Sell this when you’re done with it,” Drake said. “Buy something warmer.”
He stood, feeling strangely exposed to the eyes of those who surveyed him from the shadows. There was a looming shape behind them he pretended not to see—something with wings.
The man on the ground said, “What about you?”
Drake shook his head. “I won’t need it.” He put his head down and continued on, moving up Fifth Street against the cold, onward toward the city’s only memorable landmark. In the distance, the Stirling Bridge glimmered against a darkening sky.
* * *
The air over the water was no kinder, and from here, the sun’s red glow took on new dimension against a crowded skyline of aging buildings and crumbling smokestacks. The sidewalk thinned near its apex, bordered on one side by heavy, oxidizing cable, and on the other, by a steady stream of rush-hour traffic. The result was a claustrophobic sense of inevitability, of corralling toward the precipice.
Drake heard the ringing for the last time that night before seeing its source. Up ahead, only a thin shape atop the vast cable where he stood, a lone figure stared out from the ledge, eyes glazed in contemplation of the dark waters that churned a hundred feet below. Drake didn’t have to get close to see that he was only a boy—likely not even voting age.
The boy didn’t see him approach. He flinched when the politician took his hand, but Drake held him firm—He didn’t lose his footing. “I have to do this,” he said, scarcely audible over the wind.
Drake took in the look of those wide, weary eyes, listened to the silent thoughts the angel’s cruel gift revealed to him. Finally, he said: “Why don’t you come down and tell me about it first?”
The boy was not unlike himself, he realized. Even more obvious was the fact that he had no idea who Drake was—and that was a blessing. For the endless minutes of their conversation, the two figures were silhouettes against an angry red sky, voices drowned out by the traffic and an endless autumn gale. The boy said things no child should understand; Drake responded with things he could not have possibly known.
“You’re not your father,” said the politician. “It doesn’t matter what he thinks of you. It doesn’t matter what anyone thinks.”
Then the boy, wiping his eyes: “But what if I end up just like him?”
“You won’t,” Drake said. “Not after tonight.”
It didn’t take long to flag down a taxi amid the traffic, especially not with several large bills in hand. He passed the fistful of cash to the driver, gave instructions to take the boy as far as he needed to go. As car horns blared and vehicles swerved around the halted taxi, the politician exacted a promise from the boy before closing the door. The boy agreed, and Drake watched from the sidewalk as the cab pulled away and its taillights disappeared over the crest of the bridge.
Only then did he finally mount the railing himself.
The light was gone from the horizon now, but the bitter wind remained, flattening the fabric of his button-up against his body, stealing away a piece of his life with every buffet. The view from the ledge was dizzying—the drop looked more like a thousand feet than the hundred or so he knew it to be. The black waters lifted and churned, seeming to reach up for him, beckoning with voices of their own.
Your absence will bring balance to this world
You, Oliver Drake, are a dead man
Still staring out from the ledge, Oliver reached into the unbuttoned collar of his shirt and closed his fist around the surface of the amulet—still icy cold in spite of the heat it had produced. He jerked it from his neck, feeling the satisfying snap of the chainlink. He watched it dangle from his fist, its silver-dollar face turning, widening and flattening, like the cycles of the moon in microcosm.
For a moment, he thought he saw faces staring out at him from the blurred shape of that spinning pendant. His grip tightened until he thought he might see blood trickle down its chain. Then he clenched his teeth, reeled back, and threw it as far as he could. The talisman caught the light in its arc, glinting momentarily before disappearing into the river below.
He willed himself to follow it—got so far as to lift a single, polished shoe from the ledge—but his body would not obey. He collapsed down to the pavement, his back against the cold steel of the railing. Suddenly, he wished for his mother—a woman whose face he could not remember. The only image he could conjure was the granite face of his father, brows furrowed in eternal disapproval.
Coward.
The amulet was gone now, as was dear old dad. But that voice still circled, lighting on him like a bird of prey:
You’re a coward like your prostitute mother.
He put his head in his hands and began to sob.
* * *
When he finally opened his eyes, it was dark again. Twenty-four hours had passed; the world had dropped away like a curtain backdrop. He was in the void again.
Oliver climbed to his feet, trying not to think about the way his fingers spread over nothing to support him. This place felt colder than he remembered, but he could still move his arms and legs. That was something.
He was unsurprised to see he was not alone. A stone’s toss from where he stood—though distance was hard to measure here—a robed figure waited in silence, wings spread wide. Drake closed the distance between them in a few strides and stopped before it, standing straight like Walter had taught him, many years ago. He looked up into the angel’s cowl expectantly, searching the shadows there for any sign of a face. He found nothing.
“I guess you win,” he said. “Deal’s a deal.”
Slowly, a voice began to rasp out from the hood, joined one at a time by others from all directions:
Oliver Drake. You have fulfilled the terms of our agreement.
Drake blinked. “What?”
Your presence in this realm is yet warranted.
The thing’s hand disappeared into its robe and drew out a silvery shape on a chain—the amulet, still glistening with the polluted water of the river.
“But my three witnesses…?”
The silver-dollar pendant began to spin on its own, turning faster until it was only a blurred sphere with the hazy outline of a woman’s head. A neon glow spilled out from it—the same pale yellow that adorned a thousand doorways on a thousand city bars—and in that strangely familiar light, the face of Lady Liberty morphed into something else.
Slowly, the face of the widow in the parking lot came into focus, the lines of her face as distinct as any photograph. A rotation swept it away and another replaced it: the grizzled visage of the man from the Fifth Street bank stared out. Finally, the man’s face shifted into that of a boy, not unlike the brooding child Oliver Drake had once been. It was the boy from the bridge, eyes still gleaming with tears. The pendant cycled through these images in turn, their faces dancing and shifting in the glow like a flickering picture show.
Drake looked away. “I understand, but… no. It’s not enough. Three isn’t enough.”
There are many more like them.
That much was true. How many of the city’s walking dead had he passed in his Cadillac each night, how many of them widows? How many of them children with fathers like his? Drake lifted his head, looking up into the empty place where the angel’s face should have been. “Alright,” he said. “Then when next we meet, that amulet will show you a thousand faces.”
The creature turned, disinterested, immense wings folding low against its back as it receded into the dark.
Go now, the voices echoed. Another realm awaits.
* * *
When Bobby Carson awoke in a hospital bed, the first thought to cross his mind was one of relief—He was alive, if only barely. The second was fear, rivaled only to the terror he’d felt on that rainy night, nearly a week ago: How the hell am I supposed to pay for this?
He squinted against the white light of a new morning as it poured through the blinds. He tried to raise an arm to shield his eyes, only to find it was covered in a cast—the other was cradled in a sling. There were bandages across his chest, and he didn’t even want to know what his lower half looked like beneath the linens. But for now, his labored breaths were coming steady, and the pain was only a dull ache. For now, he was alive, and that was better luck than he was used to.
His eyes adjusted slowly. The walls were a sterile shade of white, and a muffled radio was playing somewhere down the hall. He couldn’t quite make out the song, but it was something stiff and lifeless—something that felt a little too at home in a hospital. Bobby wished someone would turn it off.
A heavy door creaked on its hinges as a nurse entered, skimming an overstuffed clipboard with vague contempt. When she saw him, her eyes brightened. She moved to the bed and began to check the array of tubes protruding from his body.
“Thank god you’re awake—Doctor Edson will want to see you. You’ll be happy to know your procedures were successful, so far as we can tell. We should have you put back together in no time.”
Bobby’s stomach felt like it would sink through the bed and land on the linoleum floor. “What kind of procedures?”
“The kind you’re in no shape to hear the messy details of,” she said, examining the IV plugged into his arm.
“You misunderstand me, miss—Ow, warn me first, would ya?—It’s just that I’ve got nothing to pay you with.”
“Oh, you won’t need to worry about personal costs for now.”
“Please listen,” Bobby explained. “I mean I’ve got no insurance, and I can’t miss another payment on my flat.”
She put a hand on his shoulder, gently, as if he might shatter. “Mister Carson. There are simply no outstanding bills to pay.”
Bobby resisted the urge to scratch his head—he suspected his arms would not cooperate. “How’s that possible?”
She sighed through a weary smile. “Your boss has opted to cover your charges in full. A development that I—” She stuck him with a new IV— “was not supposed to share with you. Now please, Mister Carson. Sit back and try not to get me in trouble. He’ll be here any minute.”
“Mister Drake is coming here?”
She nodded. “Same time every day.”
Bobby Carson blinked, half expecting to wake up all over again.
At that moment, a gentle knock rapped the door, and the old hinges protested as it opened.
It took him a moment to recognize the man who stood in the doorway. It was Oliver Drake alright, but there was a different sort of look in his eye—older, somehow. Drake smiled when he saw his driver awake, but not with the trademark grin from the billboards; this was something entirely new.
No words passed between them, not yet. But from somewhere down the hallway, the radio had begun to play a familiar bass line. As Oliver Drake stepped into the hospital room, Ben King began to sing “Stand By Me.”
JESSE KOEHLER
NOVEMBER 2024
Uh-oh, I found a…
Typo? Plot hole? Formatting error? Please don’t hesitate to let me know with the form on my Contact page. I appreciate your sharp eyes!