Screaming in Tongues

By Jacob Strunk

"Undefinable and mysterious… Violence threads like blood through these stories."
– Joan Connor; author, History Lessons, We Who Live Apart

Pigs soundtrack a boy's first dance with death on a desolate farm. Bumps in the night bring solace to a young widow looking to start over. A remote worker faces the grim reality of nine-to-five in the office. In his first collection, Strunk paints vivid portraits of characters in crisis, riding the genre line tight enough that you might not know which side you're on: sex and the tarot, childhood lessons and middle-aged rebirth, even a grisly glimpse at the end of the world from the top of the Hollywood Hills. Against the backdrop of small towns and big cities alike, the horrors – and victories – in these stories are undeniably human.

 

"Clean and sharp… [It's] Tarantino with the blood and anger, David Lynch with the throbbing psychosis, and Oscar Wilde with the mayhem and humanism."
– Richard Horan; author, Goose Music, Seeds

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alien Buddha Press
• Release date: May 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223083658

Book preview

screaming in tongues

stories by jacob strunk

Alien Buddha Press 2023

ISBN: 9798392960538

CONTENTS

Someday We Will See Each Other for the Last Time

Bats

Asshole

Judgement

She Screams

Fireglass

Team Meeting

Down in the Park

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Someday We Will See Each Other for the Last Time previously appeared in Flash Fiction Magazine. Bats appeared in The Feral Pages. Judgement appeared in Coffin Bell. She Screams appeared in the anthology Vintage Love Stories. Fireglass appeared in Toasted Cheese Literary Journal and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in fiction. Team Meeting appeared in The Chamber Magazine. Down in the Park appeared in Five on the Fifth.

Someday We Will See Each Other for the Last Time

The thing about being haunted is that you get used to it. The bumps in the night. The creaking floors. Shadows bending at the edge of your vision. Here, at the tail end of a wine bender, alone and listening to the wind, plodding about her one bedroom apartment, she almost expects a dark figure to step through the hallway behind her reflection in the mirror. Hearing the ancient furnace kick on two floors beneath her, she waits for a whispered voice to sneak in from the stairwell. Her cell phone turned off and face down on her night stand, she watches the radiator in anticipation of the rhythmic pings that must be a message. Some communication. Something meant for her.

It’s the end of her third semester at Massachusetts State College, more than halfway through her graduate studies in the state’s scrappiest MBA. The streets outside are deserted, desolate. It’s the last week of December, that urban campus no man’s land between Christmas and New Year’s, and she might be the only student left in town. Her forehead pressed to the cold glass of the window, she wishes she had cigarettes. Listening to the radiator hiss and groan, she’s glad the city empties out for the holidays. Let the kids go home. She has nothing in common with them. Thirty, single, out of cigarettes. Home for the holidays, yes, because this is her home: three rooms off the second floor landing, a sealed fireplace, 150 years of draft running under all the doors, around all the windows, whistling in the three-story chimney. A fresh start. A used futon in the living room. Her laptop on the battered coffee table. Second hand dishes in the kitchen sink. A mattress and box spring in the bedroom. Books. Ashtrays. Her new home. Around her, the remainder of the empty building sleeps.

Still she is haunted.

The house in Nashua was home, too, once. When the agent first showed it to them, she’d joked about the cemetery across the street, about ghosts in the attic, about skeletons in the converted barn. The oldest house on the block, it spoke to them each night, whispered secrets in the language of old wood and square nails, breathed through fresh paint each day a promise. Young, in love, they picked out a farmhouse sink for the kitchen. They ripped up grungy linoleum from the ‘60s, tilled the cramped back yard for a garden. Full of life, they moved the clawfoot tub to the front porch, filled it with plants, fucked in their new shower. On their new gas range they made clam sauce, laughing, and because it was late summer they ate on the front porch, sipped cold wine. Cleaning out the barn, she gave him a blowjob in the loft. Calling her to the dining room, he spread out the photos he’d found in the basement. They walked from room to room, holding up the photos and matching the backgrounds. Posing, laughing, they slipped into the past. Touching hands, tracing black and white faces from decades earlier, they brought the dead back to life.

The thing about cancer is that it is hungry, always. First to St. Joseph, then Lowell Medical Center. Tests. Blood. She’d squeeze his hand. She’d lean in close, her lips touching the sensitive skin of his ear, tell him this would be okay. Turning up Wilco in the car, singing along to Dire Straits, she drove countless round trips as he dozed in the passenger seat. Then it was Boston, Dana-Farber, the best oncologists in the country, she told him. Machines that sang, that screamed. Lines and fluids. Prognoses. Experiments. Hail Mary long shots. She stayed close, squeezed his hand, sang and screamed. She pressed her forehead to his, cold, and breathed her breath into him. And when he came home, propped up in a rented hospital bed where once they’d placed an antique loveseat, she tried to laugh and smile and cook and dance, all of it