Bespoke

Bespoke
by
Bobby Derie

The Walmart was dying. The manager stalked rows filled with merchandise, but nearly empty of customers and employees, and I followed in her wake. Except for the lack of customers, it seemed identical to nearly every other Walmart I had ever been in. Without a word, we went through the swinging doors to the employee’s areas, then up to her office—a bare space lit mainly by the banks of CCTV monitors, the ghostlight flickering off pictures of her husband and children.

She pointed at one bright square, where a woman was sizing up her child for a pair of jeans.

“Watch her. She’s going to buy them,” the manager said, baring her teeth. “But she won’t let him wear them like that.”

I left as she was in checkout. There should have been more of me to do a proper tail job, but I figured I could handle a suburban housewife. She stopped to discuss something with the greeter, an older gentleman that held the position with the dignity and knowledge of a town crier.

The Walmart wasn’t on the edge of town, but away from the town center set back a piece from the main road, fronted by a couple acres of parking lot—again, not uncommon. Cheap property, old farmland maybe, bought up and bulldozed, then the asphalt trucks came in. The mother surprised me when she didn’t go for the handful of cars in the lot, but with bag and child in either hand set off on foot to the corner of the parking lot. Walmart hadn’t installed sidewalks, but some enterprising troop of Eagle Scouts had built a plank nature walk connecting the parking lot through some rather ragged second-growth woods and over a dry creek.

I kept my distance, letting her slip in and out of sight around corners. The trees grew thicker, older, and a bit greener as the trail wore on, and when it emerged I found myself at the edge of the business district. It must have been a mile and a half by that route, a mile as the crow flies. Red-brick shopfronts like any number of old American towns had, laid out on a grid of narrow streets. I saw her disappear into a tailors, and made myself busy window-shopping the Radio Shack across the street, to watch her in the reflection.

The tailor was measuring the boy while his assistant took notes. She’d just bought brand new pants at a Walmart, but she was having them tailored. From the look of the tailor’s shop, the custom low-slung bellbottoms modeled in the window with the curlicue decoration threaded into the thighs, I don’t think she’s the only one. I didn’t know what to make of that, but I’d seen what I had come to see, and set off exploring before mother and kid twigged they were being followed.

The business district was busy, mainly with foot traffic, busier than you see these things most days. Most town squares of my experience were half boarded up, the shopfronts closed, sometimes smashed, often given way to low-rent properties—pawn shops, thrift stores, Western Unions, the seedier bookstores full of mouldering paperback romance novels you could buy by the pound, little ethnic groceries with queer smells, junk shops that passed off kitsch as “antiques”…and those were here too, but in between them were the businesses of a lively community. I passed three separate music stores, one specializing in old and used vinyl, another in musical instruments, and a third in amps and associated gear, a lot of it custom made. A butcher and a cobbler split a corner—an actual cobbler, not just a hole-in-the-wall shoe repair place. A kid was dropping off a pair of brand-new Reeboks, fresh from the box, asking for leather patches sewn into the heels and leather laces.

That twigged something in my head, so I stopped at the open square to surreptitiously rubberneck the crowd. The memorials to old wars had been carved out of boulders that had been left behind by the great glaciers, and so were arranged somewhat haphazardly—but that also gave me a good excuse to wander a bit and eyeball the moving mass of people. It was a good, middle America mix of young and old, white and black, Asian and Latino. Some were obviously better off than others, though it took me a while to twig as to why—it was the clothes. Not everyone in the town was what you’d call a fashion plate, but none of their clothes was straight-from-the-rack either. They all fit too well, and most had some cut or decoration that looked custom.

The only difference was the material. The one guy I tagged as homeless was wearing a clean suitcoat over jeans and a t-shirt, and they all fit him, but they were cheap low-threadcount stuff like you might get at a wholesale warehouse that was worn thin and stitched up, even patched in places—he couldn’t have afforded a tailor, so he must have done it himself. On the other end of the spectrum was good quality stuff, silk and leather that must have been imported. Even the jewelry looked custom; there were no plain wedding bands in sight, and the necklaces and earrings seemed to prefer the hand-made look, irregular chunks of amber, onyx, and lapis lazuli on dinted silver and copper. It reminded me of Native American jewelry, and I wondered if there was a tribe or reservation nearby that crafted the stuff.

Eventually my stomach rumbled and I wandered off the square to the McDonald’s.

“Do you have a reservation?”

The maître d’ –he could be nothing else—was wearing something that in a past life had been a Mickey Dee’s uniform. Some clever, loving soul had taken the basic color scheme and cut and remade it into something like a tuxedo, complete with a dark maroon tie set with a double-arches pin of sandcast brass.

“Sort of. The owner is expecting me.”

The suit smiled and guided me to a table in the back. There were families in Sunday best seated at wooden tables and leather-cushioned booths, the floor felt like real tile, a bit uneven under the feet, and the tables were lit by small blown-glass candlelamps shaped etched with Ronald McDonald’s smiling face, and the walls were decorated with tastefully-painted renditions of Hamburglar, Grimace, Mayor McCheese and the Fry Guys in a McDonaldland I dimly remembered from ancient commercials. The silverware—not real silver, I noted thankfully—looked like it had been inspired by the souvenir utensils McD’s had put out for kids twenty or thirty years back. When the maître d’ handed me the wine and beer list, I thought Ray Kroc would have shit himself.

The owner slid in next to me. He wasn’t a local. You could tell because his suitcoat didn’t really fit as well as it should, and he was wearing a typical McDonald corporate polo. He was sweaty, red-faced, and probably less than a year from his next heart attack.

A server came up and we each ordered a local craft beer. He ordered his usual, I ordered a Big Mac and fries. It almost didn’t surprise me when she asked how I wanted the burger cooked, and didn’t blink when I said rare.

“Not what you were expecting.” The owner said.

“No,” I admitted. “Does corporate know about this?”

The owner winced. “Not in so many words.”

“So what’s the deal? Why all this?”

“Because this is what they want. This is what sells. As to why…you’ve had a look around, yes? What did you see?”

“Nobody goes to the big stores, except for raw materials. They go to Walmart and it’s like they’re at Home Depot, picturing what the two-by-fours are going to be. A lot of little shops. A lot of customization—the clothing, the jewelry. Now the food.”

The owner shook his head. “You haven’t seen a tenth of it. The book stores—there’s a bindery in town, and two printers. People buy a used book, and then have it rebound. If they really like it, they’ll have it reset and reprinted too, by hand if they can afford it. Every car on the street has been customized at least a little, every business has its own stationary, the butcher does individual orders. Carpentry is a big business here, and automotive work, and there are hobby shops where they’ll just rent you the tools and let you do it yourself. Hell, nobody buys regular cigarettes here—there’s an actual tobacconist that mixes stuff up for you, has girls hand-roll cigarettes and cigars.”

“So you adapted.” I said. The server returned with a pair of ceramic plates and glass bottles. My fries looked like they’d just been cut from the potato a couple minutes ago; the BigMac must have weighed half a pound and was leaking blood into a roll straight from the local bakery.

We ate in silence, and the owner signaled for another round.

“How do they afford this?” I asked. “I mean, industrialization, standardization, centralized distribution—that stuff lowers prices, makes life affordable. Nobody can afford to have everything just the way they want it.”

“A lot of them accept credit,” the owner said. “The little shopkeepers, I mean. People square up accounts that way, trade tit-for-tat. Most people can’t afford it even then of course, so they go without, or do what they can on their own. You’d be amazed, but almost nobody here owns a TV, and the newspaper is just a little classified section. They prefer the internet, custom news and media, free if they can get it. Others…well, people do what they can. If they have to buy off-the-rack, they’ll make it their own somehow. Results aren’t always pretty, but they’re unique, and that’s part of what gets everybody going. There’s also, I dunno. Community spirit.”

I didn’t follow, and raised an eyebrow. The owner took a swig, looked thoughtful, then waved the server over. He asked her to prepare me a happy meal to-go, then when she left he tried to explain.

“Every one of the people I originally hired are still working here. It’s not a matter of looking for broke kids in need of a part-time job, the people that applied when I opened up shop are the ones that decided they wanted to work here. So they made this the kind of place they wanted to work. The manager I first had here, he wasn’t a local—drove him nuts. They started customizing orders, trying to make things better. Made deals with locals, started replacing the furniture. All this and the locals would barely come in here; they’d come to set down at a restaurant, like they’d never heard of fast food, and most of them couldn’t stand the food. After a couple months business picked up, but it turned out that the employees had made a deal with some local businesses for beef and veggies and cheese. So eventually he left, and I promoted the assistant manager—a local—and just let him do what he wants with the place. Costs more than you’d think, but it’s in the black on a monthly basis.”

The server returned with my Happy Meal and the check. The bright cardboard box seemed hideously normal in the surroundings, but I peaked inside while the owner signed off on the bill. The food had been individually wrapped with the precision and care normally given to origami. I carefully folded the box back up, wondering what I would tell the manager at Walmart.

It was the first time I left a tip at a McDonalds.

###

Office Talk

Office Talk
by
Bobby Derie

Mal mashed his lips together, tasted lipstick, looked in the mirror. They looked better in black.

“There was this woman sunbathing in the park, you know? Huge breasts, like just a hint of sag, pale and freckled like they’d been kept in all winter. Then this little girl goes up to her and asks if her nipples get sunburned.”

Marsha was in trousers today, the ceremonial penis sheath of middle management banging with every step. The rest of the girls in the office were giving her shit about it, told her she should have practiced with a sock first.

“…my daughter asked me if it hurt when he did it and I said ‘yes, sometimes, but it also feels so good, and one day you’ll know what that’s like too…”

Sam was trying to look butch today, all square shoulders and power skirt, but her girlfriend had painted her nails pink and the kids had painted her eyelashes on.

“So I told Jhima, look: we can split the house and the car and the 401(k) but the cat is mine. I don’t care who bought it, I was the one that always took care of the damn thing.”

Gib did the herding duties, getting everyone into the conference room. Powdered donuts sat uneaten on a slab of something that might have passed for wood, if you’d never seen an actual tree, and which passed for a conference table if you didn’t squint at it too much.

“So I couldn’t just give him the book, but I tucked it into the bookshelf, and a week later I see that he didn’t quite put it back right and suddenly there’s a run on the medical gloves and saran wrap…I tell you, his boyfriend is so cute, blushes every time he comes over.”

John slipped out of his heels once safely seated. They really made his ass stand out with the skirt but his calves were killing him. He ran a hand down to his heel, just to make sure he didn’t have a run in his hose.

“…no place for sexual harassment in the workplace. If you feel that you have been discriminated against in any way, you can report it to me or to our company safety officer…”

It was Gemma’s transition day, and Gib and Marsha had brought out a cake. Mal thought her—his binder looked a little tight, but then Gemma had been a c-cup before. He wished he’d be there at night when she took it off, but she probably only thought of him as an office friend.

“…also successfully bringing in project 1301 forty-five percent under budget. So everyone I’d like you to congratulate Sam, your new technical lead!”

Marsha had to take her husband to the hospital, so she passed the sheath off to John for the day so he could act as her deputy.

“Maybe you’d like to get a drink after work? I know a place…”

Gib policed up the remainder of the cake. The breasts and penis were gone but she wrapped up a square with a frosting navel on top to take home with her.

“Only if you tell me where you bought that lipstick.”

###

Tulpa

Tulpa
by
Bobby Derie

A life lived apart. Drowned in scripture, the language of the chosen people. Days spent, empty of mind. Fallen into mysticism, the wonders and glories behind the eyes. They made of him a false idol, a vessel for His miracles. Perhaps he came to believe it.

How to capture a thing in a word? Not just the shape and the sound but the spirit, the idea, the concept, the breath all together. Hands used to paper worked in clay, etching letters into the head. Stood back to observe his creation.  A crude attempt at something beyond artistry. So poor it mocked His creation. Then it moved.

The clay cracked. The breath was in it, and came out in a terrible cry. Such unbidden pain, his heart broke at the sound. His hand and voice was moved by mercy as well as shame.

It struggled as it was unmade.

*

Gasped, short of breath, ruddy faced, he let his robe drop. The final ingredient caught in the vessel he had prepared, the last dribble sticky between his fingers. Deposited in the warm flesh, torn from the virgin mare. Now his labors were truly begun.

Forty days and long nights of fearful vigil. Every day he had scanned the words until they impressed themselves on his very soul. He dared not see the sacred mystery, but he could see the signs, the way the sac of flesh grew. Unseen, he loved it, and felt the stirring pride at what his art had wrought, as a prima gravida would look upon her own swollen form.

When the time was come, he took up the knife.

It slid, transparent and lusterless, from the cage of flesh, so small he could cup it in his hand. An empty thing, clear as fine glass. He brought forth the bladder and saw the color come to its flesh as the blood flowed. He watched with worry at the features he could discern in it, the shape of its brow and limbs, the gash of a mouth.

The book said it would take another forty weeks, but he could not stand what it would become. So he placed it in a jar of strong wine, beside the others, before it could know him. Reflected on his mistakes, every little variation of the formula. Then took himself in hand to try again.

*

There was a craft to surgery, the cutting and sewing of flesh. The schools valued keen eyes, long nimble fingers, a steady hand. He worked in flesh, patient but hurried, before the rot set in. Buoyed by the single idea, like a new river diverted into an old channel.

Frog legs twitched under galvanic currents; he had seen more daring and macabre experiments with criminals and hanged men. Old white beards nodded as heads spasmed and eyes fluttered, ignored the scorching sizzle and smell of burnt pork, brine, and ozone.

Then came the reagents. The lightning. The flicker of eyelids he had sewn on himself, the pale yellow orbs focusing in the light.

The joy was fleeting. The blood and screams lasted much longer. He saw himself in the spiderweb cracks of the broken mirror, felt those dark words as he stood over her broken body. Of all the things he had given to it, those words were not among them, were they?

Her body was laid out on the table, the damage repaired as best his skill could mend; silk stitches for his darling, a fine line of them just below the scalp, running to the collarbone, the contacts there. It thundered out, the air greasy. So he waited, in the dark, with the pistol. They were bound together in that, he knew. Neither could escape it, ‘til one or both were dead.

* 

She waited for him, Soror Diana. The chamber was edged in silver, the metal and color of the moon. Its sigils were painted and carved on the walls, the circles drawn to contain and concentrate those radiations, and a single shaft of pure moonlight illuminated the altar of conception. Under his gaze she parted her legs, and then under his direction reached down to part herself and let that light penetrate to her most lightless depth.

Then he dropped his robe and approached the altar.

He knew she was receptive to his will, a hollow actor for this proceedings. The power rose along his spine, chakras vibrating as he concentrated, ignoring the dull slap of sweaty flesh, holding the thought before him as he strove onwards towards the moment of release. To direct that fountaining of power to his purpose.

In the aftermath, he lit a cigarette with a shaking hand. He had known them since puberty, the magical children that came from his emission. Creative energy misspent, diverted by his onanism, yet not lost, never lost. Now he knew he would harness such a thing made flesh, a monstrous hybrid with terrible powers. The fitting antichrist...and heir.

*

“Every thought has a shape.” The dying man mumbled.

The fire in the cave only took the edge off the cold, and he looked out at the storm. If it broke by morning, they could escape. He looked down at his charge, the tattered orange and red robes, the head still shaven, but his ribs flexed as he breathed, and there was a gurgle behind his voice.

“It is not a reflection of us; that is the first mistake. We look for the shadow on the cave, turning out back to the light.”

I scooted closer, trying to catch his words, feeding another scroll into the fire. The cave was littered with them, an old cache that had attracted them both.

“I thought I gave it form, but I only revealed what was there. It knew me from the first,” he coughed, a phlegmy, protracted affair that ended with bloody bubbles. “It was not until later I learned how far it had wandered. I had rejoiced as it grew, thought it was…part of me. Then I felt the knife on the rope, saw it turn its face from me to hide the bloody lips, heard the wails in the village, smelt the fire…and I could not recall its face…”

He shushed him to silence, and fed the fire. The night and the storm was long; his sleep fitful.

“I know you now. I see the chain of karma that binds us…back to the beginning. There the crime, repeated, over and over, lifetimes of suffering. Perhaps next time,” he sighed. “We will get it right."

###

Paid For

Paid For
by
Bobby Derie

The pilgrim followed a trail marked these last few miles by the corpses of bad men, whose waiting shades fell in among her ghostly train as she passed them by.

The gunman waited for her, in the shade of a hanging tree. His hammers had fallen on empty chambers, so he had sat to rest there for a spell, and let evil come to him.

Her spurs jangled as she dismounted, kicked up dust as she led her horse over to look down into the grave. "Quite a tally."

"Sins paid for," he said, lying in the open coffin he'd carved from the living wood at the root of the tree.

"Enough of that now. Up. There's work to be done and miles to go."

There were silver dollars worked into the band of her hat, and her sweat kissed all the right places; there was a fat-bladed knife hanging down from the braided leather holding up her britches, and a knuckleknife tucked behind the flat metal buckle, but she wore no pistol at her belt.

He rose to a sit, and looked about at her horse, a cream-colored palomino whose scarred flanks spoke of more thieves than honest sale and a Spanish saddle over an Indian blanket. His grey eyes would not meet those haints clustered thickest about that beast, but wandered on to the line of dead coming up behind, and he could name the bullet that had put for each of those.

The pilgrim offered a hand, and he took it.

They went on toward sunset, she not offering to share the horse and he not in mind to argue walking beside, as the ghosts took pace behind. She took her route by the first evening stars, before the sun had even set, and led them on to a cleft between two great rocks, and then into a deeper shadow. They passed through a winding canyon and along a creek where slow, clear waters burbled over rainbow-striped pebbles worn small and smooth as marbles, where tiny black things shot and swam and dodged in their own little world. The might have passed an hour and an age in that place, 'til the canyon walls widened and they came out to the night country.

It began to rain.

Water filled footstep and hoofstep as they went on, tangled hair and mane, and the gunslinger raised his face to the sky and let it run off the dust of trail and grave. He opened his mouth, but the drops were salty on his tongue, and he spat it out. He looked a question.

"The Vale of Tears," she answered, still staring at the distant stars, and the long shadows of the mountains against the blackness of the night. "Every drop that's ever been shed for you, and for me, and for them."

"Ain't no one as would weep for me, living or dead."

He thought the pilgrim had nothing to say to that, but in a while she said.

"There's those as weep for everyone."

And they left that matter be.

At length the sage and brush died away, and the long lonely cacti grew fewer, so all there were of growing things were small pale things that flowered brightly in the purple night, and the scraggly reptiles that fled the cold.

Her voice was strange and clear in the still night, with no moon and no wind but only the impossibly bright stars in a midnight blackness that seemed to wrap and surround them all, and any three steps from the trail might take them over the edge of the world into the well of the infinite.

"You said when we met that you had sins to pay for."

He said nothing, but looked at her. The pilgrim had eyes only for the trail, and cut a profile against the Great Bear.

"To whom?"

"God, I reckon."

"Our accountant, who art in heaven?"

"Ain't no reason to blaspheme. Got to be somebody keeps track. Makes all things square."

She stopped then, and the gunslinger wondered and gripped his pistol. Yet she only dismounted with a jingle of spurs; the trail had gone to a narrow path, on one side an abyss blacker than the night, on the other a cliff worn smooth as river rock. She took out an old horn lantern, and lit the fire. She handed him the glowing horn.

"You think you're square, now?"

He did not look back at those that followed.

"Maybe," she said. "It ain't about paying back. Maybe it's about earning your way forward."

She took the horse in hand, and waited. The gunslinger took the lantern and led the way forward.

It was a colder night than any he'd spent in his makeshift grave; darker than any night when he had lain awake and await with cold steel in his hand and murder in his heart, and the stars covered their eyes so he had only the trail before him, the pilgrim following him with her horse, and all them as followed her for their own reasons. And by that flickering horn he picked out the trail, one foot at a time, and puzzled at the forks, and laid a hand on his pistol when some of the rocks looked strange to his eyes. Once there came a ribbon of darkness slithering across the path, and he raised the horn to break its back but halted when he saw those amber eyes meet his own. So the rattler smiled and carried on its way, and he went on his own.

When the trail petered out to a game trail, the gunslinger felt as though he had come out from a cavern under the open sky once again. There were seven cities on seven hills under seven dawning suns, and between them green valleys brown with buffalo and deer, and the smells of mesquite, bacon, corn, and bear fat came on him on the wind. Yet before that place there were six pale things in dark clothes, standing on the edge of night with their backs to that warm place. Some of them he might have recognized, and others were new to him, but there was a listlessness to them he knew well, the calm before burning barn, or jumping on the moving train, or the battle that was simply murder by another name.

She came up beside him, and wouldn't let him catch her eyes.

"I reckon you folks get a move on. I got business here." The gunfighter said, fingering his irons. The pilgrim took the horn from him, and mounted her palomino. She watched him walk toward the line of shadows between him and the light.

The shade of a woman took up beside her, cradling a dead infant to her breast. "Does he have to do this?"

"It's what he needs." The pilgrim said. "What they need to. Wait for the thunder, sister. Then be prepared to move."

###

Tolkien's Ashtray

Tolkien’s Ashtray
by
Bobby Derie

It was a drinking goblet of milled steel, spotted with brown from age, the kind of thing a grandkid might make at shop class. The inside smelt of ashes and tobacco, a tarry residue that clung to the inside of the cup, cracked and crumbled a bit at the edges. Around the outer rim was engraved that terrible spell.

He paid the man what he asked for, and took his prize home.

It was a two-bedroom house, with the second given over entirely to the library, walls hidden by shelves of dark wood filled to bursting gave it a smaller, intimate feel. The trilogy and attendant works, in various editions, held the central portion, but the rest were filled with adaptations, analysis, commentary, volumes of letters, and ephemera; glossaries and dictionaries and investigations for the languages and names, and even foreign translations. Few universities had quite as extensive a collection on the subject as this one. Some were quite scarce, but his needs were modest, and many things could be had with dedication and money.

He set the goblet on a shelf, fetched out the book of letters, and re-read the few sentences which were the only mention of it.

The script was in the strange arabesques of tengwar. The gift of a devoted fan, crafted and given without thought to how poorly the man would receive it, or perhaps the conception of it. In a certain light, it was a gift in poor taste. Simple and forthright, but so crude an effort, so far from the original conception as to be almost a mockery of it. In the darkness he traced the letters. The “terrible words.” The writer had never drunk from it, he had written, but emptied his pipe into it.

He contemplated it, the small steel thread in the tapestry of the whole thing—the languages, the stories and books, his life as a soldier, a scholar, a husband… The writer had never been exactly a mystic in any regard, but he had such consideration for languages, poured so much of himself into the thing. How must it have been, to open the box it came in, and see such a stunted effort, to make physical in some weird aspect that most terrible idea, the words escaped from the page, caught and frozen in steel. For the spell must have been terrible for the writer, it must have held some power, expressed some vast darkness to have taken the place that it did, to have such an effect on him.

Now it was his. He smiled. His precious.

###