Strike

By Andy Bailey

“We’ll give you twenty-four hours to think about it,” Mom said as she handed me the sheet of demands. Her skin was dark, having absorbed three weeks worth of thick July sunlight, and she looked five years younger. She walked back across the yard and began fiddling with the awning of the pup tent. Dad lay on the overgrown grass, tongue running across his mustache as he dragged a paintbrush over a new sign. He saw me looking, gave a cocky smirk, and held it up: PARENTS LOCAL #0001 ON STRIKE!

It was their third week on strike and life in the house had gotten rough. Dirty clothes piled up in the hallways and an obnoxious smell emanated from the dishwasher. The eighty dollars a week Aunt Lynn gave Emmie and me for food limited our grocery shopping to the 7-11, and the consistent meals of chiquitos, taquitos, and burritos left us bloated and half-nauseous. Mom and Dad had taken the keys to the car, leaving us to bike or walk our way across town on the few nights we wanted to hang out with friends; we couldn’t invite anyone over, not after the two-person human chain they had formed to block the front door had sufficiently weirded out my friend Chuck enough to keep him from coming back. They had even managed to scare away Grandma, yelling “Scab! Scab!” when she tried to walk up the front path with a few plates of fried chicken.

The mood inside the house almost matched the smell. I blamed Emmie for pushing Mom too far with the constant whining about the mushy avocados in her homemade Cobb salads or the complaints when Mom bought honeysuckle-scented shampoo instead of summer peach. She accused me, correctly, of not helping matters when I allowed the grass to grow to an untamable length after Dad’s repeated requests to cut it. This all came after the Orlando vacation we had to end early after my verbal harassment of Mickey and Goofy got us kicked out of Disney World. In retrospect, the morning we awoke to find them marching across the lawn, brandishing signs that read UNGRATEFUL CHILDREN = HATEFUL CHILDREN and NO RESPECT, NO PARENTS/KNOW RESPECT, KNOW PARENTS was much more surprising than it should have been. It took us until that night to realize it wasn’t a joke.

I read their demands, scribbled on the back of a Publisher’s Clearinghouse envelope and signed by both of them. Two car uses per day with a maximum of ten per week. Set allowance at one dollar per year of age per week with an optional good behavior clause at ten percent a year. Chore negligence resulting in an immediate twenty-five percent allowance reduction. Zero tolerance whining policy. I crumpled up the envelope and tossed it into the overflowing trash basket.

That night, after Emmie returned from the Goodwill store, we discussed it. “That means I’d only get thirteen dollars a week!” she said, digging into her bare arm with her fingernails. “That’s not even enough to go to a movie.”

“Yeah, and I’d only get seventeen.” Couldn’t fill a car up with gas, if I’d had one. “Listen, though. They have to start teaching again in early August. No way they can stay outside then. They can’t work without showers or computers or a comfortable bed.”

She threw me a desperate look. Her lime green eyes peeked out from behind her puffy cheeks. “Two more weeks?” she asked, biting the inside of her lip.

I nodded as I looked onto the lawn. A solitary light shone in their tent, casting an orange halo onto the driveway within which their blurry silhouettes danced. I could hear their laughter from inside. Two more weeks, I thought. Two more weeks.

# # #

Andy Bailey is an English teacher in Los Angeles and has had work published in Pindeldyboz, Raleigh Quarterly, and Buffalo Carp, among others.

Faith

by Gerald Rivard 

The bomb must have gone off after all, because Rajiv al Fazir came to consciousness in a martyr’s heaven.

He was nestled inside a cocoon of moving flesh.  He could feel the warm touch of soft skin everywhere on his naked body.  Hands and fingers caressed, lips and tongues probed, long hair and a tapestry of breasts draped and dangled.  The room seemed to spin, though there were no walls or ceiling.  Distant stars floated through the dark sky, providing a dim ambient light, and the voices of the virgins as they lauded his courage seemed to swim in circles all around him.  He could not have begun to count the number of hands or lips ministering to his body or the number of voices singing his praises.

“Rajiv, you are my hero,” said one virgin as she kissed along his chest.

“You are so brave and so strong,” said another as she stroked his thigh.

An olive-skinned virgin with the striking green eyes of a Persian cat kissed him on his mouth, her tongue brushing his lips. “We are your reward, Rajiv,” she said as she pressed her face against his left cheek.

A dark-haired virgin brought her face to his right cheek at the same time and whispered in his ear. “You gave your life for Allah,” she said. “And so Allah has given us to you.”

He felt himself being enveloped, then, as another of the virgins straddled him. He ran his hands from her thighs to her waist, then slowly up toward her shoulders as she moved against him. He pulled her toward him, and the other women moved out of their way. A short time later, the girl climbed off of him as another virgin took her place. One after another, the virgins shed their purity to him while others, virgin or not, found untended areas of his body to worship.

Later, satisfied, he lay entangled with them all. Gradually their breathing quieted and movement of flesh against flesh became almost imperceptible, until the silence and stillness was benign enough to be broken.

“Did you know Yasin Khumar?” asked the cat-eyed woman at his side as she stroked his cheek with her finger.

“Yasin? He is here?”

“Yes,” the dark-haired one said, kissing his upper thigh.  “He is a brave jihadist, just like you. All brave jihadists are here.”

He had trained with Yasin at a camp in the Sudan. After the training, Rajiv was sent to the United States to await his assignment. He never saw Yasin, or any of his jihad brothers, again. He had hoped to see their names in the newspapers, to learn how they had died, to understand how his own death would fit into Allah’s great plan. But in all his time of waiting, he had learned nothing.

“Did you know him well?” she asked, her eyes shining in the darkness, her breasts pressed cozily into his arm.

Rajiv said nothing, just stared up at the stars. The women took his cue and remained quiet as well, gently caressing and kissing his body. Their touch was just as erotic as it had been before, but now that he was satisfied, its intensity was no longer sufficient to overshadow his own thoughts.

He had expected to hear the explosion in the instant before it blew through him. He had expected to feel his body being torn apart, just for a brief flicker of time before his death. But when he shouted “Allah Akbar!” and pressed the button, nothing seemed to happen. The last thing he remembered was wondering why the bomb didn’t explode.

But it had gone off, because he was here. Perhaps Allah had spared him the pain of being torn to pieces. Perhaps it was enough that he demonstrated the will to suffer for his faith, so that Allah had brought him straight to heaven before the explosion.

It was Rajiv who broke the silence. “Take me to Yasin,” he said. He sat up, but the room with no walls or ceiling seemed to spin again. The cat-eyed woman who was no longer a virgin gently eased him back down, with help from at least three other hands behind him.

“In time,” she said. “There will be time for everything.” The pulse of the room slowed and its movement stilled until all was calm again.

“Sleep now,” she said as she kissed him again. “There are more rewards for you, and all the time you will need.”

* * *

Rajiv woke up alone in his bed; the women were gone. He wondered why there was a bed, but no walls or ceiling, and no floor that he could see, but before he could give it much thought, the prophet Mohammad appeared in a flash of white light and smoke.

Awestruck, Rajiv scrambled from the bed and dropped to his knees. It turned out that there was a floor, or at least a carpet. He put his face to it and waited for the prophet to speak.

Mohammad’s voice was soft, but clear and commanding. “Yasin speaks highly of you, Rajiv,” he said. “I understand you would like to see him.”

“Yes,” Rajiv answered, “I would very much like to see Yasin. And Khalif, too, and Mahmud. Did they fulfill their assignments for Allah? Are they here?”

“You may see whomever you wish, if they are here. I will arrange for you to see your friends, all of them. But first, I have been asked to let you know that Allah is very pleased with your performance.”

At the thought of having pleased Allah, Rajiv was filled up with a joy that seemed much too big for his heart to hold. Tears flooded his eyes, and he began to sob so heavily he could barely breathe.

Mohammad reached out to Rajiv then, and being comforted by the prophet did not diminish his tears. They flowed more freely, washing away all of his fear, all of his doubt, all of his sin.

Afterwards, when he had been cleansed, Rajiv asked about his brothers in jihad, and learned from the prophet all that he wished to know. Khalif al Rawi blew up a bus in Chicago, killing forty-one infidels. Mahmud Jalil and Mohammad Sayf Mashhadami simultaneously set off bombs in New York subway cars, derailing the train and killing over three hundred infidels between them.  And Latif Hassan crashed a plane into a nuclear power station, killing dozens immediately and thousands over time.

Rajiv also learned that his own bomb, which at first he thought had failed to explode, was responsible for the deaths of eighty-seven. He was but a small cog in Allah’s wheel, but that wheel was turning according to the plan, crushing the infidels and preparing the world for Islam.

Heaven was surely a wonderful, wonderful place.

* * *

Special Agent Wendell Grimes of Homeland Security reviewed the files on the three would-be terrorists who had arrived that morning. Their names had been obtained through Rajiv al Fazir, who had since been sent to Israel for final interrogation and disposal.  The files bore the Operation Blind Faith insignia, a scarf-drawn face with a turban pulled over its eyes.

All three of these men—Khalif al Rawi, Latif Hassan, and Mahmud Jalil—had been contacted by undercover field agents and given false suicide bombing assignments. And like Rajiv al Fazir and others before them, they had been given a non-explosive compound fabricated to look like C4 and loaded with a powerful and fast-acting tranquilizer. The carefully chosen locations had been sealed from public access once the subject had entered and filled with agents in plain clothes who provided the expected screams, convincing the bombers that they had successfully completed their missions.

A cocktail of LSD, sodium thiopental, and MDMA had been administered to Mahmud Jalil, and the prostitutes were in position for his awakening in Heaven Room 3.

The other two, Khalif al Rawi and Latif Hassan, had already awakened, and Special Agent Jacob Weinberg, decked out in his flowing robes, was having a conversation with al Rawi in Heaven Room 1. Grimes pushed a button to listen in.

“What about Mullah bin Majid?” al Rawi asked in Arabic. Grimes wrote the name on a pad as Weinberg, posing as Mohammad, informed al Rawi of bin Majid’s success in destroying the Woodrow Wilson Bridge over the Potomac, killing over three hundred including many Washington officials. Grimes chuckled to himself, knowing that Weinberg had blamed heavy traffic on that very bridge for his own lateness that morning.

Enemies speak so much more freely when they believe they are among friends.

* * *

Gerald Rivard began writing before Kindergarten, and his strange tales entertained his classmates throughout most of his school years.  After a long hiatus, he is back in the swivel chair, crafting short stories at a pace he considers far too slow as he prepares for his first novel.  You can learn more about him and his writing at www.geraldrivard.com.

Hippie Market
by Tom Mahony

The hippie market is next door to my office. I buy a sandwich there almost every day. There’s no other place nearby to get food, and I’m too lazy to make my own lunch. The deli at the market is excellent. The people are friendly, and though they prepare the sandwiches with a plodding slowness characteristic of devout stoners, they also maintain a stoner’s freakish attention to culinary detail. The tomato slices are works of art.

There’s only one problem: the granola woman who works the register is always inviting me to one rally or another. She’s really into rallies. She’s really pumped up on “causes.” I’m neither for nor against her causes. I just want to pay for my sandwich.

Today I stand in line behind several people. Today I will ask her to please refrain from soliciting me for future political rallies.

The line moves forward. I’m up next. I don’t want to alienate this woman—she seems nice enough, and sincere in her beliefs—but I have to say something, as the situation has become untenable. I dread purchasing my daily sandwich. But I must be careful in my technique. If things go wrong, I’ll have to face an even more awkward exchange on future sandwich runs.

I reach the register, preparing for the confrontation. But she doesn’t invite me to a rally. She seems subdued, just mutters a greeting and rings up my purchase. I wonder what happened. Has someone else complained about her pamphleteering? Has she become cynical and apathetic overnight?

“Everything okay?” I ask.

She shrugs. “I got laid off today. They’re cutting back on staff.”

I’m struck by the news. I feel bad for her, and tell her so. Though I can’t deny a certain relief, I regret my past irritation with her. She’s a thoroughly decent person. I almost feel nostalgic for her proselytizing.

“I hear they’re looking to hire a receptionist next door,” she says. “You work there, right?”

I hesitate. We are in fact hiring. “I’m not sure.”

“Not sure that you work there?”

“That we’re hiring.”

“There’s a big sign on the window advertising the position. I saw your name listed as the contact. I recognize it from your debit card.”

“Oh. Right.”

“What do you think? Do I have a chance at the job? I could really use the money.”

I clear my throat. “What are your skills?”

“I can do it all. I was a receptionist for five years before I started here.”

This is getting bad. “It’s dull work.”

She points at the cash register. “You think this is exciting?”

I start to panic. My mind races. I can’t think straight.

“We get along, right?” she says. “Other customers are so rude when I talk politics. You always seem interested, like we’re on the same wavelength.”

Same wavelength? I should’ve spoken up long ago, as apparently every other customer has. At least this woman is firm in her beliefs. I’m always weaseling out of confrontation and stand-taking. Who’s the kook here?

I have to come clean. I could not possibly work with her. Avoidance and apathy have cost me dearly throughout life. I either take a stand now or I never will.

The line stacks up behind me. I glance at the irritated faces. Everyone’s watching me. They know the score. One by one they’ve made peace with the woman by politely telling her to shut up. I envy them. As they glare at me, I can read the look on their faces: what kind of man are you?

What kind of man, indeed.

I turn back to the woman. “When can you start?”

* * *

Tom Mahony is a biological consultant in California with an M.S. degree from Humboldt State University. His fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in dozens of online and print publications, including Surfer Magazine, Flashquake, The Rose & Thorn, Pindeldyboz, In Posse Review, Boston Literary Magazine, 34^th Parallel, Diddledog, Foliate Oak, and Decomp. His short fiction collection, Slow Entropy, was published by Thumbscrews Press in 2009. He is looking for a publisher for several novels. Visit him at www.tommahony.net.

“Hippie Market” originally appeared in Bartleby Snopes and in Slow Entropy.

Stock image credit: Pioi

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