Countrycide: Stories

By L.A. Fields

Pack light, nothing heavier than a backpack, before you open the pages of L.A. Fields’s collection of stories. A never-ending journey awaits you along a Möbius strip that runs the circulatory system from flushed head to rapid heart, along asphalt lanes stinking of gasoline fumes and vulcanized rubber. Join Fields’s feral boys, captivating Peter Pans in flight from detestable home life, school life, everyday life. Along the way, you’ll pick up passengers, hitchhikers—runaways plotting wicked larks, stay-at-homes longing for a nudge, grown ups ready to be bent to a boy’s whims.

Pack light, only the essentials. Make sure to keep a few crumpled emergency bills in your pocket. Then open Countrycide and set out.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lethe Press
• Release date: Apr 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9781590214596

L.A. Fields

L.A. Fields is the author of The Disorder Series, published by Rebel Satori Press, along with the Lambda Literary Award finalist My Dear Watson, the collection Countrycide, and her newest book, Homo Superiors. Her work has been featured in Wilde Stories 2009, Best Gay Romance 2010 and the Bram Stoker Award-winning Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet. She has traveled the world but now lives in Texas.

Book preview

Countrycide

stories

L.A. Fields

Published by Lethe Press at Smashwords.com

Copyright © 2014 L.A. Fields.

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilm, and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Published in 2014 by Lethe Press, Inc.

118 Heritage Avenue • Maple Shade, NJ 08052-3018

www.lethepressbooks.com • [e-mail]

isbn: 978-1-59021-493-0 / 1-59021-493-5

e-isbn: 978-1-59021-459-6 / 1-59021-459-5

Credits for previous publication appear at end, which constitutes a continuation of this copyright page.

These stories are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover and interior design: Alex Jeffers.

Cover image: Garrett Matthew.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fields, L. A.

Short stories. Selections]

Countrycide : stories / L.A. Fields.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-59021-493-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

I. Title.

PS3606.I365C68 2014

813’.6--dc23

2013046976

advance praise for Countrycide

"In L.A. Fields’ Countrycide, what to the rest of America are warning sounds of fear and consternation—pederastic clergymen; disaffected high schoolers with gun collections; hitchhiking horndogs hunting for adventure—become full-bodied characters, tabloid buzzwords no more, but real. They populate a world with the shifting horizons of a vision; it’s a dreamscape reminiscent of the early work of George Saunders or the late work of James Purdy. We consult L.A. Fields as we might a breviary, a dispensary, a mirror, one in which one’s freak side can take the lineaments of a stranger or a lover."

—Kevin Killian, Lambda Literary Award-winning author 
of Shy and Impossible Princess

"L.A. Fields’ Countrycide is a startlingly beautiful and unsettling magical mystery tour of some of the alleys and bypasses first claimed by Jean Genet. Her characters are lean and mean, but also somehow startled by their own powers. Fields pushes boundaries effortlessly and artfully, and also locates a sort of crazy whimsy in ferocity and malice."

—Keith Banner, O. Henry Prize-winning-author 
of Next to Nothing and The Smallest People Alive

Table of Cotents

advance praise for Countrycide

Table of Cotents

The Funeral Director

Bad Sects

Bluff

Happiness

Countrycide

Big to Small

Summertime Blues

The Wanderer

Groom

Exit Signs

Like Ribbons

Lay-by

Burning Woman

The Gaze

Walls

About the Author

The Funeral Director

After attending his grandmother’s funeral at the age of seven, he had this weird fascination with all the morbid pomp of the mortuary services. He saw the funeral director, willowy and neat, secure in his poise no matter who wailed or screamed or hyperventilated, and there was a simultaneous service going on for a war hero in the next room, so we saw him handle some really heavy hysterics. The director had the look of an initiate in some wise, otherworldly club, and how should a child not admire that?

He had this one dream soon after that, where instead of staying by his mother’s side as he had been told to do, he wandered off during the funeral, into the back, where the seams of this operation could be seen. And the funeral director was there suddenly, just when he was needed, like a good butler in a bad movie. The funeral director let him into one of the coffins, stripped naked of course, to feel the satin all over his body. He was shut inside until the funeral director, with his uncanny sense of timing, threw open the lid to find…a stiff one. And the director touched him then, and that had been the entire point.

But as a boy, he was never close enough to the funeral home, that halfway house between life and death, to figure out what it was that really motivated his interest. His curiosity became a compulsion, and he skulked around all sorts of decadent places trying to find a way into the club of those who have seen it all, those who know. It did not even faze people to see a teenage boy walking wide-eyed through the graveyard; the kids these days, they are all into death. It was a shame, but not an emergency. In college, he even managed to make his parents proud by going into science and biology, going for a medical career. The dead stuff, it creeped them out until they saw him making it a socially acceptable profession. Doctor, lord! We all know doctors are weird, but that does not make them less admirable.

But he was not going into the save-you side of medicine. He wanted the other side, the aftermath; the medical examiner, the cadaver supplier, the funeral director. And for a while as funeral director he wondered what he was missing. Where was the terrible truth the bodies should murmur to him? Where was the knowledge that he must guard from the others, from the living, because they are not brave enough to know? It took him years to figure it out, bad years, depressing years. He thought that all his work, his whole life’s goal, had been for the delusion of a child who saw nothing and thought it was something, who imagined a passion that was not real.

But then something happened.

This kid, in the home because his older sister had been murdered, followed him into the display room where they keep all the coffins. He knew he was being followed, and so led the boy straight here, thrilling in his heart for the first time since his own childhood, and not understanding why yet, but alert and ready. One large coffin in the middle of the room (mahogany, so polished you can see yourself in it, which unnerves a lot of the customers, let us tell you) is propped open with a prie-dieu set before it. We walk up to the head of the coffin, looking at the stitching of an angel on the inside of the lid, a design that would be forever sideways for the person spending an eternity in this box, but no one pretends such a thing is really for the deceased. None of things we do are for the dead, that is part of why this was such a disappointment for us. Funerals are for the selfish, grieving living.

The boy is small, so he steps up on the kneeler just as easy and irreverent as you please, just to get a good look inside the box, which makes us smile. We take the boy’s hand and place it on the bottom of the coffin so that he may feel how cool and plush it is, distracting him while we touch the boy, rubbing that warm little knot of flesh he has not learned to use yet. The boy is not afraid, or disgusted, or even wary, which means his idiot parents must have never told him about stranger danger. Or else, perhaps, he understands this just as well as we do.

The boy only continues to stroke the coffin, and so we stroke the boy. It is a wonderful, synchronized moment, so pure, so innocent, so mutual. And it is ruined when the boy’s mother comes rushing in.

There you are, she moans, miserable at the funeral of her daughter, but so relieved to have found her son. Losing him is probably good for her, probably puts the death of one child in perspective to the continued life of the other. She will refocus now, she will carry on. We have done her a favor.

Jeffrey! she shouts, her eyes soggy with hours and hours of tears. The boy’s face, Jeffrey’s face, is as dry as a desert. He is too young to even know what he has lost. How young does that make him? We do not know exactly; it is hard to tell.

How could you leave Mommy like that? I need you today, I told you that. Then she notices us, and we must speak up before she comes to all the right conclusions.

We were just showing Jeffrey that the casket isn’t a scary place, we say in that soothing voice we practiced. It is very peaceful here.

The mother nods, crying more now, hoping her daughter is in a peaceful place.

Thank you for watching him, she says thickly.

Of course, we stage whisper. I’m so sorry for your loss. We say it all the time, but it is the only thing to say. We escort this lady and her son back to their funeral. The boy takes a long look at us on his way up the aisle, and darts glances for the rest of the service. He is a beautiful boy, sandy blond hair falling over his eyes, cheeks still fat with childhood, his little suit adorably too large. We smile our sad, appropriate little funeral smile every time he turns. We smile, because at last we have understood: he is what we want.

Do the Right Thing

You just don’t expect a mortician to be funny, but one day after the crowd dispersed from the funeral of a man who was to be buried with his violin, the funeral director turned to Father Stephen and said, I suppose that’s so he can compose while he decomposes.

John, the funeral director, had said this behind his hand, before proffering it to Father Stephen on the very first day they met. John had thinly plastered inky hair, and a slim mustache that he kept very carefully groomed. He was odd-looking in truth, an Ichabod Crane, rather sunken and skeletal like the bodies he tended. But he seemed to accept himself, to move comfortably in his skin.

It’s well that you like my sense of humor, John said as Stephen chuckled foolishly at his quip. We’re bound to see quite a bit of each other. You serve an elderly populace, Father. Not so much a flock of sheep, but birds, hmm? Snowbirds. He waited a moment and then explained himself. Winter tourists who settle here once they retire.

John was right about that. There were always a lot of funerals come summer. The heat and humidity collaborated to snuff out any wavering flames, and maybe a young congregation wouldn’t take such a hit, but Father Stephen did his preaching in a South Florida retirement community, and they were not hale enough to withstand the weather’s assault. Half the time a soul would pass on and Father Stephen would find himself mourning a perfect stranger, recycling the same old comforts, giving the promise of an afterlife without having the slightest idea of whether the deceased was worthy. Oh well: God would sort them out.

A grandmother died in June. Stephen was horribly unhappy to have to watch her grandchildren snivel unhappily, their tiny faces red and puffed. Father Stephen, unmarried and childless for all his thirty-odd years, didn’t know what to do for them. It was John who had a talent there. He crouched down with all his long bones so that he would be at their level, put his spider of a hand on their shoulder, and asked them questions about their nana.

Did she like flowers? They nodded. Look at all these flowers, he said, pointing to his main table, a rich, round mahogany thing which always has a