A Flesh Anew

Contributor: Drew Hays
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It started like the common cold. Jeremy Ashell sneezed mucoidal yellow gristle and rubbed his nose tender with brown tissues from the schools bathroom. When he got home, he coughed his way into his living room, standing up, holding a plastic electronic guitar as Aerosmith blared from the speakers. He was 9, and had no prior history of seizures, but thats what his parents thought he was having as he screamed and shook while they held him, pinned and flailing within his space, to the linoleum. In the panic, they didn't pay much mind to the slackness of his skin, or the heat he failed to give off at all.
They bound his wriggling, panicky form to the bucket seat of their rheumy van and took him to St. Martys. The nurses were frightened, and two EMTs with tense forearms hoisted his kicking legs and bucking head onto a gurney where he groaned and bit at his cloth facemask. The Doctors hurriedly spoke of blood tests, and pretty much everyone thought it was rabies from the get-go. He was such a biter, one remarked, that nobody thought to take his temperature until after he was tranquilized.
Noting the absence of a heartbeat after a shocking read on his temp, the staff at St. Martys assumed they had ended Jeremys life, and apologized profusely to the parents, who were now in a state of emotional and physical drainage. Phil Ashell had been bitten.
When he got home, Phil poured a foaming splash of Hydrogen Peroxide on the gouge in the space between his thumb and index finger. Threads of red ran like jellyfish tentacles off of his forearm and into the sink. The wound was not quite bleeding, but had a wet sheen to it, and contracted lightly with his slowing pulse. He looked in the mirror and shook his head while wrapping a strip of gauze in a tight sleeve on his thumb. The horror and shock of his sons death were not yet upon him, as the horror and shock of his son biting him with salivary lips and teeth and savage eyes still flared ubiquitously in his memory, and he could only shake his head and turn out the light as he muttered about his luck and life. He stood in the hallway and looked out the window, hoping to see his wife pull in from the hospital so he could comfort her, and be comforted in kind.
He needed a drink. As he walked to his office his knees cracked aloud like billiards and pain shot through his thighs. Spasms took his quadriceps for a moment and he stood panting in the hallway for a moment before straightening with an ache and made it to the office, where he sat down and poured some gin he kept in a sandblasted bottle under his desk. Pain slithered sharply and angularly through very perceivable regions of his brain, though the more familiar vague glower of a conventional headache was present as well. He looked down at the wound, and saw a wet red circle. The bandage was quickly loosening and bloating with blood that seemed remarkably thin, almost less substantial than water. And then he stopped looking.
His eyes pinkened and reddened and ran soaking with crimson as the heart beating in his chest gave stronger and stronger beats, each farther apart until it imploded and froze. His blood turned to sludge in his veins as dying platelets made a stew of his circulatory system, and his limbs contorted and stiffened as nerves went haywire and muscles locked up. He stumbled towards the bookshelf and fell against it, as the cage of his muscles constricting his frame quivered and jerked. His jaw slackened, his eyes rolled lazily, and his legs began to shuffle. He chewed thoughtlessly on his own lip, which tore away loosely, and staggered out of his office.
The rumble of the garage door buzzed the house, and the shadows of the furniture stretched and shifted as the headlights of an SUV shone inside, and Tina Ashell pulled into the driveway. She grabbed the corn chips she had picked up on the way home and walked inside the house. Phil was holding half of Fritz by the tail. She screamed, and the sound was inhuman.


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I am a counselor from the United States. I like to write, and I'm working on getting the punch back in my words.
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Letters

Contributor: E.S. Wynn
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Creak of tin as hinges bend against dust, against age. Silvered paint flakes, splinters, catches golden, attic light. Fragile crackle of faded paper, old hands trace folds, smooth them. Dear Robert, the letter reads.

I hope you are doing well. I'm eight. My name is also Robert.

I smile, no mention of a date, but I know when it was written. I know why, who's idea it was, how silly it seemed at the time, how necessary it became as I aged.

Mrs. Patterson says that I have to write you a letter. You're fifty eight years old now. I bet you look like Grandpa Irwin. Does he still have a swimming pool you can swim in?

“In heaven, maybe, if that's the way of things.” I whisper. “Grandpa Irwin died over forty years ago.”

I bet you have a flying car. I wish Dad had a flying car. We could go zooming in the clouds. We could fly to see Grandma Ethel and Aunt Ruth in Florida if we had a flying car!

I look out the window, eyes finding the sleek, pill-shaped box I call a car. Its usually vibrant ePaint soaks light with a dark, dull gray while the cells recharge in the afternoon sun. Automatic, fast, elegant, but not a flying car.

Or maybe you have a rocket pack. I'd like a rocket pack.

I look at the car again. It's a classic now, one of the older C23s from before the last major police action in the east. One of the few still left, now that the entanglement grid has replaced the old SmartWay road system. I haven't seen a rocket in decades. Orbital shuttles and 'breakers run under their own power now. Even model rockets have gone out of style.

Do you still have dogs and cats in the future? I want a puppy but dad says no.

I smile again as I remember. Dad managed to hold off the puppy until I was in sixth grade, but it was mom who finally brought home Spot. I still remember that face. Bull-terrier mix, beautiful brown-tan swirled fur mixing with white. I grew up with that dog, took him with me to college, had to take the pet deposit out of my student loan to keep him. If it wasn't for him, I probably never would have met Karen at the dog park. Never would have met Bruce. For fourteen years, Spot altered the course of my life, and when he finally passed, I couldn't imagine life without him.

I think writing you a letter would be cool if you could write me a letter back. It seems dumb that you can't. Mrs. Patterson says that time travel will always be impossible, even for letters.

That was the thinking then. Just like today, we thought we had it all figured out. I remember being fifteen, seeing the announcement of an accepted, grand “theory of everything.” Five years after that, large-scale, machine-assisted research at the Sagan Institute rewrote practically everything we knew about the universe. Now it's possible to manipulate time in ways that seemed like fantasy back then. Rules for past-time interaction are strict, but a few words of comfort or a vague letter rarely requires anything more than autonetwork approval these days.

Well, that's all I can think of to ask you.


Sincerely, Robert Era.

I blink, and the software in the modified lens of my eye comes alive with the colors and displays of the OverNet, interfaces at the speed of thought and pens the words of my mind onto a ready document already aimed for a family fax machine fifty years in the past. The letter my mind writes comes immediate, short, soft, vague.

Thank you for the letter, Robert. The letter says. No flying cars yet, but the puppy was worth the wait.


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E.S. Wynn is the author of over thirty books
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TITLE

Contributor:Eric Boyd
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Enter text here.

Someone had shown me a page on the internet where writers could have their stories analyzed, seeing whose work their piece was similar to. Normally, I only went on the computer to find apartment listings, harmonicas, and pornography. This writing page seemed interesting, though. The idea of a computer telling someone who they were like, sounded like, wrote like, was funny. It was funny in a sad way, because it was probably true. Everyone sounds like everyone, now; nobody is nobody anymore. Who would I be like? Who was I? Who was Fredrick Anderson?
I looked over a few older stories, and none of them seemed good enough. I wanted my best work to be analyzed! If I put some piece of shit I wrote while I was half-drunk… No. That wouldn’t be right. Maybe It would say I sounded like Kerouac? Hemingway or Joyce? Were my sentences short? Were they long, drawn out sentences with bullshit similes; the tallest sunflowers, bending against an unforgiving, dying sun? What did I write? Why? Who knows. Who cares. I did. No idea why.
Questions are stupid. Don’t ask, I thought. Just go.
GO.
I didn’t mind sending my stories to magazines, editors, friends, my girl. As long as a piece was ready, I didn’t care who saw it. People are forgiving because they are stupid. Nobody reads things. When they do, they think it’s good, because they have nothing to compare it to. But still, everyone I had ever shown a story to said I was a genius. I agreed. “Someday,” someone had once told me, “the name ‘Fredrick Anderson’ will be known. You’ll be known!” It felt good to hear that. It felt very good to have a secret like that. Nobody in the world could take that away from me. I had always been writing.
My girl, Lucy, and I had spent months sending letters to one another while I was in jail. Before that, there were movie scripts. Song lyrics. Poems and prose. Rants. Banter. Crap.
I had always written. Always. It was easy! All I had to do was sit around and steal people’s memories. I overheard conversations on payphones, buses, grocery store lines; I overheard entire lives. There is no boring. I spent hours and days thinking about other people’s moments, turning it into something of my own.
I stared at the computer screen. Who would I be like? My eyes hurt. I tried calling a friend. They didn’t pick up. I needed something to help. Forcing myself to write was never easy. I needed something to help me. There was a bottle of Jameson in my freezer. I put some honey on the rim of my glass and poured the whiskey in, mixed with water. It tasted good, but it didn’t do anything. It didn’t help. I just fell asleep.
“Are you awake? Fredrick? Hello?”
“What?” I put the telephone up to my ear.
“Were you sleeping?” Lucy asked.
I didn’t even remember picking up the phone. It was 2AM.
“Yeah, I’m up. I’m awake. Are you okay?”
“Why wouldn’t I be? I just can’t sleep.”
“Oh. I was trying to do a story.”
“Ah, being brilliant as always. Anything good?”
“I don’t even think I wrote anything. I had a couple drinks and fell asleep."
“NyQuil and whiskey again?"
“No NyQuil. That was just when I had that cough last week. It’s better to be proactive, I think.”
“Uh huh, sure. I’ve heard that before.”
“Why can’t you sleep?”
“I’m just not tired. I’ve been playing with the cat for a while. He’s funny."
“The funniest.”
“Do you want to go? You sound tired?”
“I’m fine. Did you hear about those old engineers in Japan?”
“No, what about them?” Lucy asked.
“It’s awful, but sort of beautiful, I guess. With that nuclear reactor cleanup shit, a few engineers have gotten radiation poisoning, and they’ll probably die. At least they’ll get cancer. These are younger people, going into these reactors and trying to fix everything that fucked up with that. I forget how many of them there are, but they’re getting sick. They’re dying.
“But now there’s a group of about three hundred retired engineers, all over sixty, who are volunteering to go into these reactors. These aren’t random people, they worked in reactors or whatever. They’d know what they were doing, and they’re willing to die. They don’t want to see anyone getting poisoned when they don’t have to. It’s sort of wonderful."
“I guess I should be moved by that," Lucy said. "I don’t like thinking about that kind of stuff, though. It makes me cry."
“Yeah. It’s pretty selfless though. You wouldn’t see that in America.”
“No, probably not.”
“Fuck, those guys that helped clean up on September Eleventh can’t even get healthcare.”
“I know. On TV I just saw a dentist commercial where they were doing a promotion to have a free X-ray. They should just say ‘free radiation!’ while they’re at it.”
“Idiots…”

I talked on the phone for a while longer before saying goodnight. Then I used the bathroom, ate a slice of bread, and went back to the computer.
I started typing.

'Someone had shown me a page on the internet where writers could have their stories analyzed, seeing whose work their piece was similar to…'

When I was finished, I turned on my internet, which was still dialup, and waited about ten minutes to open the writing analysis page. I put my story into the page and hit ‘enter.’ I waited almost five more minutes. My internet was very slow. I waited. Who did I write like? Who was I, now?

YOU WRITE LIKE:
ERIC BOYD

“Who in the Hell is that?” I said out loud.
I laughed. It couldn’t say a writer I had at least heard of? I had no idea.


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Eric Boyd was born on October 16th, at 3:33AM, 1988 in North Carolina. He briefly studied a the Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa. Eric currently lives in Homestead, Pennsylvania. His cat's name is Oscar.
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