One More Number

By Craig Rodgers

Death of Print is proud to bring you One More Number, a collection of six surreal, undefinable stories from Craig Rodgers. There is a magic in these stories, and also a haunting. Each one is its own world. Each one makes total sense even when it makes no sense. He may not be a household name, but no one writes like Craig Rodgers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Death of Print
• Release date: Oct 31, 2021
• ISBN: 9781087990934

Book preview

One More Number

Craig Rodgers

Death of Print

The stories in One More Number are fiction. Copyright ©2021 Craig Rodgers.

Cover design by Alan Good and Craig Rodgers. Self-portrait with Death playing the fiddle by Arnold Böcklin. Proofreading and book design by Alan Good. Published by Death of Print.

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Ebook ISBN: 9781087990934

The Trumpet Man was first published in Not One of Us #59, April 2018. He Is in a Clearing If You Can Find It was first published in HAD, September 2020. Our Featured Performer was first published in Chicago Literati in 2017 or 2018 and republished in Moonchild Magazine in 2019.

The font used for the main text is STIXGeneral. The old-time movie font is Good Bad Man, designed by Chank Diesel. Musical Symbol Silhouette created by Piotr Siedlecki.

The Trumpet Man

Mabel’s Piano Bar

He Is in a Clearing If You Can Find It

Going Home Again

King Bronislav

Our Featured Performer

The Trumpet Man

1

In the end Silas takes nothing. He stares at the box they give him and the years of detritus accumulated on his desk, papers and baubles and photos of memories not worth remembering, and he leaves it all. They tell him to clean out his desk, to take his things and go, but as he stands looking at the gathered decorations of his pocket universe these items become unrecognizable— evidences of someone else’s life.

Faces linger in the doorway, refugees from another department come to fill a moment with the detached humiliation of a stranger. They talk in whispers and ogle without shame. A phone ringing somewhere pulls them away from the spectacle. Someone from Human Resources comes by to speak with Silas but he has already gone.

Each light is green. They start red and they change or they’re fixed on go as Silas is propelled onward unobstructed through beckoning streets, away from one world and nearer another, a destination conceived but unknown, the idea of a place. Unformed, all potential.

Children play in snow still falling. They turn their faces up and blink back ice tears. They laugh in the cold, every breath a cloud. A man scrapes snow from a windshield. Shopkeepers shovel sidewalks. Silas drives between their worlds as a song plays on the radio. He sings along with the parts he knows.

#

He comes in to buy a drink but instead he orders coffee. The server asks him what kind and he doesn’t know. Coffee.

A man eats from a plate, not his, something left behind by a diner now gone. Fine tailored suit, fabric dark, loose. The man laughs at a story he himself tells as a waitress nods along. Bread soaks up grease and he talks as he chews.

The coffee arrives and Silas sips. It’s black and it’s bitter. He looks for sugar but there is none. Silas drinks the coffee black. The waitress laughs and she nods and the man in the fine suit lets her slip away from his charms.

Drink orders replace food orders as the day crowd creeps away, supplanted by something else; youths with faces pink from cold come in for drink or just to warm, drinkers there for no reason but that, unbound revelers flinging shouts across the gathered forms of strangers to some other hidden face on the room’s far side, narrow-eyed wanderers observing the world in silence, all manner of person. Citizens now freed from day.

A raised dais occupies one wall. A place for musical instruments but there are none here. Cords connect to nothing, snake off to nowhere. A single stand sits empty of microphone. A bartender with a wild mustache points at that place and speaks with a woman, the bar owner, someone quiet who waits and nods and doesn’t speak, only listens, the bartender’s words making their way to her but falling short of Silas, who bends across the bar but catches not enough to understand. The owner turns. She stares.

Can I get a drink? asks Silas.

The owner leans and she speaks to the bartender and he nods and she turns and moves through a door behind the bar. Silas selects something from a line of names on a chalkboard. The drink arrives and he sips and it is iced and then warm and sweet. He sips again.

There is music, a song growing out of the electric hiss of countless bodies talking at once, a speaker someplace swelling with the noise it contains until a tune can be heard above that human chorus. A man moves through the gathered revelers. He wears a dark sweater, he carries a case. Stubble lines skull, shaved days ago, a week ago. He orders a drink with no