Lost Signals by Josh Malerman, Damien Angelica Walters, Matthew M. Bartlett, David James Keaton, Tony Burgess, T.E. Grau Page A
Authors: Josh Malerman, Damien Angelica Walters, Matthew M. Bartlett, David James Keaton, Tony Burgess, T.E. Grau
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stares at you for 13 . . . 14 . . . 15 seconds. Then he points to the door behind the beer.
“Hurry up.”
Unfuckingbelievable. You guess he’s seen stranger things than this.
Inside the bathroom, you’re assaulted by a stench worse than any outhouse, and you walk over to the toilet and cautiously lift the lid. The water is clear as a mountain spring, and you carefully lower your hand until the fly’s head just breaks the surface. You think about the part of the buddy-cop movie right around the second act where the drunk partner has to get revived by the more wise-cracking partner, so he shoves his face in the bowl. You’re much more gentle than that.
And it works. The fly starts to activate, cranking its legs over its head to clean itself off. You smile. It looks like it’s playing a tiny air guitar. No, it would need thumbs to do that.
“Ears burning ?” the clerk asks you on your way out.
You smile. They’ve been burning for years. Once, you read a story about a mythical creature that ate nothing but ears, left behind the rest of the animal, just snacked on them like potato chips, leaving a trail of stone-deaf barnyard beasts all through the Dirty South.
Sometimes, you envied them.
Back in the car, you wonder how many people would believe you’re actually worried about this fly. You’ve never taken care of cats very well. And plants ? Forget about it. But this feels like everyone’s fly now. You feel the weight of new responsibility. You try to imagine yourself in the waiting room at the veterinarian with your fly. You’d be the only person who a kid with a sick hermit crab could feel good laughing at. You watch it perched on the radio knob, cleaning its wings, and you stab the gas pedal over and over, keeping the car in neutral, smell of hot metal in your nostrils.
You realize you’ve spent more time worrying about this fly than you worried about all of your ex-girlfriends combined. Even when that one had to get her appendix out. You mess with your stereo.
Equalizer, you think. That’s a good word.
Suddenly you understand something. It just seems like you care about the fly more than her, but if you were to line them all up against the wall and put a little pencil mark over their heads, you’d find that actually your feelings about the fly and her are precisely the same. And it’s not that you think more of a fly really, it’s just that, the more you find out about human beings, and the more you listen to their voices when they don’t think anyone is around who can hear, the less you think of them.
***
00:01:58:19—“Your Gears Are Burning.”
One time you told her you were going to invent a phone that, instead of ringing, released a swarm of bees. You said it would guarantee she would answer the thing every time you needed her to. She didn’t understand what the hell you were talking about. You think she thought you were talking about some special ringtone, and you said, “Okay, listen, how about just three small bees, just enough of a scare to buzz around your ears and make you swat the air in a panic every single time I called you ?” She had no answer to that. Later, your uncle invented something that played cupid with telephone numbers and license plates, but you don’t tell too many people that story, unless they’ve had as much to drink as him.
You walk out of the bathroom, and you see she was reading that same magazine again, the one with the prescription label with your ex-girlfriend’s name on it. You told her once how this old girlfriend used to snort painkillers off those very same pages, which seems like a worse addiction than drinking, but it didn’t really feel like it at the time. You’d think that alone would make her not want to read the thing, but she folds a page over to remember her place. You used to try to get a letter published in one of her magazines so she’d stumble across your name and accidentally listen to you.
Wait, did you say
“Hurry up.”
Unfuckingbelievable. You guess he’s seen stranger things than this.
Inside the bathroom, you’re assaulted by a stench worse than any outhouse, and you walk over to the toilet and cautiously lift the lid. The water is clear as a mountain spring, and you carefully lower your hand until the fly’s head just breaks the surface. You think about the part of the buddy-cop movie right around the second act where the drunk partner has to get revived by the more wise-cracking partner, so he shoves his face in the bowl. You’re much more gentle than that.
And it works. The fly starts to activate, cranking its legs over its head to clean itself off. You smile. It looks like it’s playing a tiny air guitar. No, it would need thumbs to do that.
“Ears burning ?” the clerk asks you on your way out.
You smile. They’ve been burning for years. Once, you read a story about a mythical creature that ate nothing but ears, left behind the rest of the animal, just snacked on them like potato chips, leaving a trail of stone-deaf barnyard beasts all through the Dirty South.
Sometimes, you envied them.
Back in the car, you wonder how many people would believe you’re actually worried about this fly. You’ve never taken care of cats very well. And plants ? Forget about it. But this feels like everyone’s fly now. You feel the weight of new responsibility. You try to imagine yourself in the waiting room at the veterinarian with your fly. You’d be the only person who a kid with a sick hermit crab could feel good laughing at. You watch it perched on the radio knob, cleaning its wings, and you stab the gas pedal over and over, keeping the car in neutral, smell of hot metal in your nostrils.
You realize you’ve spent more time worrying about this fly than you worried about all of your ex-girlfriends combined. Even when that one had to get her appendix out. You mess with your stereo.
Equalizer, you think. That’s a good word.
Suddenly you understand something. It just seems like you care about the fly more than her, but if you were to line them all up against the wall and put a little pencil mark over their heads, you’d find that actually your feelings about the fly and her are precisely the same. And it’s not that you think more of a fly really, it’s just that, the more you find out about human beings, and the more you listen to their voices when they don’t think anyone is around who can hear, the less you think of them.
***
00:01:58:19—“Your Gears Are Burning.”
One time you told her you were going to invent a phone that, instead of ringing, released a swarm of bees. You said it would guarantee she would answer the thing every time you needed her to. She didn’t understand what the hell you were talking about. You think she thought you were talking about some special ringtone, and you said, “Okay, listen, how about just three small bees, just enough of a scare to buzz around your ears and make you swat the air in a panic every single time I called you ?” She had no answer to that. Later, your uncle invented something that played cupid with telephone numbers and license plates, but you don’t tell too many people that story, unless they’ve had as much to drink as him.
You walk out of the bathroom, and you see she was reading that same magazine again, the one with the prescription label with your ex-girlfriend’s name on it. You told her once how this old girlfriend used to snort painkillers off those very same pages, which seems like a worse addiction than drinking, but it didn’t really feel like it at the time. You’d think that alone would make her not want to read the thing, but she folds a page over to remember her place. You used to try to get a letter published in one of her magazines so she’d stumble across your name and accidentally listen to you.
Wait, did you say
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