Black Denim Lit #7: A Suitable Poison

By Black Denim Lit

The August, 2014 issue edited by Christopher T Garry features 140 pages of never before seen stories from eight new authors, creating narratives that are variously dark, cynical, inspiring, violent and longing. Black Denim Lit is a monthly journal of fiction available on the web and eReaders.

"Armed" by Robert Stiles (Sal Noman recieves an arm in the mail.); "Blood Melody" by Tiffany Michelle Brown (Layla is slowly starving in the ocean); "Fluttering in the Remains" by Rhoads Brazos (Manny and his son Theo take over a junkyard and find it inhabited); "The Imperfect Patsy" by John Dromey (Lewis Poindexter finds his work shifting from detecting to killing); "The Quickening" by Kate Morrow (Four friends are bloodbound in dystopia); "The Job" by Scott Blankenship (An assassin makes a change in his routine); "The Helmet" by Sean Monaghan (Salvage experts have a go outrunning ... the government?); "A Suitable Poison" by Linda Boroff (Berta sets off the culture of a magazine publishing firm with its grueling schedule and office politics with wry regard for youth, relationships and power.)

This draws from fantasy, crime, science fiction and drama. Such genre variety is brought together under the common thread of rich characterization. In all the stories this month, these are human beings at odds. Whether they face a gun, a monster, a co-worker or the vastness of space, each of these players respond from a very deep place of truth. And regardless of which genre can be applied, the authors have surprises in store.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Black Denim Lit
• Release date: Sep 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310578991

Black Denim Lit

Black Denim Lit welcomes thoughtful writers, new and established for online and print literary journal (monthly / twice-annually). Rolling monthly deadline, all year.They are looking for fiction up to 7,500 words that has unique, lasting artistic merit and will offer token payment. They consider novelettes up to 17,500 words on a case by case basis, and some genre work. They offer writer-focused, personal feedback and fast response.Why "Black Denim"...? It's understated and unpretentious, typifying the tone of style that appeals: grounded, approachable and unassuming. Their tastes consider that "lasting artistic merit" can emerge from almost anywhere.Black Denim Lit (Fiction: $token, G/F/S/O). http://dtrp.me/m_14164.aspxEnjoy.Sincerely,The EditorsBlack Denim Literature Magazine

Book preview

Black Denim Lit #7

Dark Fantasy. Science Fiction.

And other oddness.

A short story collection edited by

Christopher T Garry

Compilation Copyright

© 2014 Black Denim Press, LLC

Published by Black Denim Press, LLC at Smashwords

[e-mail]

INTRODUCTION

With our seventh book, we’re bringing the largest selection ever and drawing from fantasy, crime, science fiction and drama. Such genre variety is brought together under the common thread of rich characterization. In all the works this month, these are human beings at odds. Whether they face a gun, a monster, a co-worker or the vastness of space, each of these players respond from a very deep place of truth. And regardless of which genre can be applied, the authors have surprises in store.

In Armed, by Robert Stiles, Sal navigates a post-war life with a brain injury that affects his humor and perhaps more than that. Better suited now as a librarian, he endures people with as much grace and exactitude as he can muster, but it may not be enough.

Tiffany Michelle Brown gives us Blood Melody, a new take on an old tale of the sea that has haunted sailors for thousands of years. Looking towards the expanse of an ocean shore, Layla feels the tear between home and frontier.

In Rhoads Brazos’ work, Fluttering in the Remains, Manny takes over his father’s salvage yard and discovers patterns in the inexplicable miles of waste.

The Imperfect Patsy, by John Dromey, gives us a detective, Lewis Poindexter, who should know better, but is reminded that PI work is just as much about people as it is about the information they keep from each other.

In Kate Morrow’s The Quickening, young Sophie is bound in complete empathy to just a few others in the world. Manifesting first by sharing an unheard melody, the depths of these connections can either be explored or exploited.

Scott Blankenship takes a serious look at what options are available an aging hitman, in The Job, and gives a fresh view on the alternative to what otherwise might be just a desk job.

Sean Monaghan returns to our pages again with The Helmet, in which Baz pilots a salvage mission in near-space to work off some debt. However, his boss, Lilly, is ambitious and not altogether forthcoming.

And Linda Boroff’s story, A Suitable Poison, gives us Roberta, who sets off the culture of a magazine publishing firm with its grueling schedule and office organizational dynamics with wry regard for youth, relationships and power.

Enjoy,

— Christopher T Garry, Renton, Washington. (August 1st, 2014)

ARMED by Robert Stiles

No one asks Sal Noman about the arm.

He would tell them he found it laying on his front stoop the morning of his yearly Personal Performance Review. On his way to work that day, he’d nearly tripped over the triangular bulkiness of the package. Written on the sand-colored postal paper, in all capital letters, had been his name and address. The return postage had indicated a place named Solutions, Inc. in Plainview Texas. With both hands, he had lifted the neatly wrapped parcel off the rotten welcome-mat and carried it inside, where after retrieving a pair of scissors from his desk, he’d cut open the box and instantly recognized that the fake arm curled inside was intended to replace the right limb of an above-elbow amputee.

Lifting the prosthesis from the box, Sal searched for an invoice, casting surprising refractions around the living room’s sharp-shadowed surfaces as the dawn’s early light gleamed off the stainless-steel, rubber-lined pincers. The box held only the arm and its accusatory aura of disfigurement — something both freakish and banal; an impression perhaps conjured by the clinical indelicacy of the arm’s white Velcro strap and the mismatched, drab skin-hues of the shoulder-cuff’s rigid, plastic hardness and forearm’s stocking-like spandex wrap. He knew he would have to wait a day to correct the mistake; post-offices closed earlier than the end of his workday, and his lunch break was too brief to spend on the errand. Thus he dutifully repackaged the prosthesis and headed to work, leaving the arm at home for the time being.

• • •

Because he’d been a Guardsman in Iraq, people often assumed that the arm had something to do with his time in Baghdad. But Sal had sustained a different type of combat injury.

It happened on the day that he saw the man’s face lying on the road. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and the weather was less than scorching. He was cleaning up after a car-bomb, because that’s what guardsmen did. He figured the skin was that of the driver. It matched the license, and he noticed that the indicated age was twenty-one years old, younger than himself. The given birthday made the driver a Virgo. His home address was three blocks away.

Not like mine, thought Sal.

But Sal and the other Guardsmen knew that the info on the ID was untrustworthy — only the picture would be genuine.

The freak of a blast had peeled off the young man’s face and tossed it aside. It had landed about twenty feet away — Sunny-side up, the sergeant said. It was squinting up at the sky and seemed to have missed a few spots shaving that morning.

Sal snapped a picture to show back home.

One of the other Guardsmen took out his piece and relieved himself, writing his name, baptizing the mug with urine before shoveling it into a garbage bag and tossing it into a truck bound for the hospital incinerator.

That’s when the bomb beneath a nearby dog carcass exploded, searing Sal’s mind with white light.

• • •

He woke weeks later in a hospital ward, his body intact, but suffering from a severe head trauma. During the months of therapy, he met men with similar injuries ... men who had problems with their memory, speech, taste, smell, hearing, seeing, touch, feeling. Either that, or they suffered from dizziness, depression, hallucinations, paranoia, new and bizarre phobias, impotence or increased libido. Obsessive-compulsive disorders, anxiety, rage, mania, nightmares, insomnia, lethargy, twitching, trembling and shaking, strange food cravings and weird foreign or unidentifiable accents, idioms or languages when speaking.

Sal had lost the ability to laugh. The physical means remained intact; that is the neurological/musculoskeletal impulse and activity that is engaged whenever something funny has been recognized was still functioning for Sal, but the understanding was no longer whole. It had been wasted by remote controlled detonation.

• • •

Once home he got a job cataloging video for the digital library of a 24-hour television broadcast organization called News Event International. His condition was not a liability.

Five days a week, eight hours a shift, he sat before a viewing machine, attending to an incoming stream of moving images that had been gathered from around the world for potential use in upcoming and/or future N.E.I. news packages.

There were car chases, riots, disgraced politicians, radiant celebrities, serial killers, sensational criminal trials, starving children, fires, floods, earthquakes and tsunamis — any visually arresting raw material of Armageddon’s narrative. Additionally, there were mundane scenes: empty streets, unexceptional people leaving nondescript buildings, various reporters rehearsing their lines, wind-blown fields of wheat, a bridge at sunset, a chained bicycle, a man in a cafe drinking coffee ... and many other unremarkable scenes without immediately identifiable news-value.

It all passed beneath his humor-absent gaze before being added to an ever-expanding database — one which could be searched according to the specific terms assigned to the material once it had been processed by employees like Sal. If an N.E.I. producer needed footage of a certain world leader, it could be retrieved by through a search field by said name — just as material for an exposé about the dangers of second-hand tobacco smoke could be retrieved by entering the term: smoking into the database.

Or for a piece on The Joys of Pet Ownership: the terms Cats and/or Dogs.

Or for stories on Global Warming: Icebergs Desert Sunshine.

For Obesity: Eating Exercising Obese People, etc.

The task for catalogers, like Sal, was to anticipate the terms appropriate for the particular material being cataloged; a tricky business, considering that absolute categories were impossible. Descriptions of images were constantly being updated and revised for accuracy, and often expanded or limited according to changes in world events and general perceptions of these events. New rubrics were always being created to replace outdated classifications.

Over time, the accumulation of each revision or addition of newly assigned search criteria to an often-used clip would seem to indicate a type of semantic natural selection. The process expressed how N.E.I. defined and presented as World Events and defined the creation of its product, World Events. This in turn, influenced the selection of the very terms used to describe the captured and contained footage of the world events.

Thus, raw video was recorded ‘out in the world’ but passed before the eyes of the catalog staff, like Sal, so that it could be categorized, selected, edited and made suitable for broadcast to N.E.I.’s worldwide viewers.

• • •

One day, during a shift when he had some time to kill, Sal entered the term: ‘God’ as a search parameter. The results yielded countless scenes of religious rallies and/or protests, interior and exterior shots of churches, mosques and synagogues, religious services, people in various attitudes of prayer, well-known religious-themed paintings, interviews with clergy, imams, nuns, rabbis, cult leaders, gurus, yoga instructors, etc.

Sal absently scrolled through the results, not really looking for anything in particular, until he spotted a blurry thumb-nailed still-shot that had been assigned the terms: ‘chair’ ‘forest’ ‘god’ ‘winter’ ‘morning’. Clicking open the file revealed shaky footage of a three-legged, broken-backed common-looking wooden chair of artless craft leaning against a pine trunk. Upon the rough, sun-parched wood-grains of the chair’s surfaces, a faint bleached-blue coat of turquoise paint could be seen in faded, flaking traces.

No one appeared in the short clip, but when listening through headphones, Sal detected the sounds of a group of men speaking calm and casual and seemingly familiar to one another off-camera, in a language that sounded very much like German ... But, it also sounded very much unlike German and more like something else ... Something in a dialect both familiar and unrecognizable ... something like the weird words voiced by some stranger approaching in a dream ... or like the nonsensical speech heard spoken in sleep.

As he replayed the clip, Sal had checked the catalog record to see who’d been responsible for assigning the term ‘god’ to the file’s otherwise consistent list of search terms. He didn’t recognize the indicated name as belonging to any of his co-workers. He searched N.E.I.’s Personnel Directory, but discovered that whoever the person was had apparently left the company. No information was forthcoming.

With a clear conscience, he was poised to delete the inaccuracy ... Inexplicably and with the slightest of right hand-motion, he clicked the printer icon to print out a full-color hard-copy of the abandoned piece of discarded furniture. He