Sweeter Words.

I am cooking Indomie in my father’s home when an old memory begins to meet me where I am. A chilly summer in June - can’t remember the year - and I’m met with a sweet-smelling scent. Jude has just sat beside me, smiling and staring at my face without words. She always smelt like something sweet, almost fruity. It made me sick during colder months, but I couldn’t help but breathe it in along with the sweat and sun. Her lips are stretched wide and her cheeks are polished in a dusty pink that I am so taken aback by, and it causes me to smile too.

“What’s the grinning for?”

She waves me off, twisting and turning restlessly in her seat.

“There’s about to be a storm, babe. Better button up.”

I wasn’t sure what she was referring to then, but that night long after we separated, I came to a realization.

+

It was that night that the winds began a conversation.

Even now years after I feel as though I was creeping into something outside of my understanding.
The trees did well to scare me. Billowing wanes that brushed against the roofs of houses and telephone poles, trying desperately to enter and ruin. They knew I was listening. 

The curtains shuddered up and down, sideways and out, helplessly swept up by the breeze, lined with droplets of rain.

The trees stopped and started, gaining surge when you least expected it. It lagged and then picked up, providing the winds with an instrument, a body.

The rain began and my stomach turned. I could see bullets of water through the window, the rush of thousands blurring each droplet into half/visible pelts, coming down onto leaves only to be swiped away by the wind.

The dance was familiar now. A private encounter with nature, the drag and whisper of curtains, the tree’s song, and the rain. The pattern created itself.

by Ennie Fakoya

Lucky

Bogart was sure this was the Sherwood Crime Family. They were known for making these sorts of statements. Then again, the Sherwoods now had an honest thing going with their frozen yogurt stands, and nobody had attached a felony to them in over nine years. Ah, but old habits die hard. Bogart’s mother, Tibbity (may she rest in peace), always told him that a wronged skunk never forgets. A raccoon, maybe, because eventually they’d want to get back to their trash, but a skunk? Nah, you ticked off a skunk and you were going to smell that odor around every corner for the rest of your life knowing that one day--

“Mr. Poppson,” a doctor called, looking around the room, “Is there a Mr. Poppson, here?”

She was young--maybe three or four. All the doctors were young these days, and if you got a squirrel as a doctor, it was even worse. The squirrels sent their kids to med school as soon as their tails were bushy enough. The last time he was at this hospital, a squirrel young enough to be his daughter was looking after him. That was when he nicked his ear in an arranged fight with a badger that went off script. That was small potatoes. This? This was--

“You want to tell me who did this to you,” the doctor asked as soon as they were in the examining room. It had that smell of bad medicine and good advice. No matter how many times Bogart wound up in a place like this, he never got used to that smell. Somehow, he managed to prop himself up on the table as the doctor sat down in a chair across from him. Her name tag read “Dr. Elizabeth Twigs” and he wondered whether or not she could be related to Barnaby Twigs, the bookie that wound up floating facedown in the pond a few months back.

“Barnaby was my uncle,” she said, reading his mind or catching his field of vision, “We hadn’t talked in awhile. The Twigs are not what you’d call a, uh, close family. Partly because I refuse to associate with known criminals.”

She scooted her little seat on its wheels so that she was only a few inches away from him and his soiled bandages. “And what about you, Mr. Poppson? Do you associate with known criminals?”

“What makes you so sure I’m not one?”

“Because according to your chart,” she gave it a quick scan even though it was clear she didn’t need to, “You’ve been in here over a dozen times in the past year. The criminals come in once and we never see them again. Either because they’re dead or because they took care of the person who put them here. What’s your story?”

“Do you need to know my story to help me?”

“No, but I’d like to--”

“I’d like you to stitch me up, Doc, so I can go find out who did this to me.”

She took a deep breath and rolled away from him. Blood was starting to pool at the tips of his bandages again. She pulled a few rolls from a drawer near her desk. Q-Tips and lollipops lined the top of the desk even though he’d never been given either.

“You new here,” he asked her, “I’ve never seen you until today.”

Dr. Twigs rolled back over to him and began undoing one of the bandages. He’d done his best, but he didn’t have much first aid at his apartment, so when he woke up in his bathtub covered in his own plasma, he’d had to make the best of a gory situation. That meant pulling himself out of the tub, slithering along the floor like a cobra until he could get to the hamper in his bedroom, pulling out a few already tattered garments ripping them up (rest in peace signed Eddie Bunny t-shirt), and cinching himself up as best he could.

As for the pain, well, he was used to pain. You’d think having somebody sneak into your place in the middle of the night, knock you out, and cut off your four feet would create an excruciating experience for any small mammal, but Bogart had seen and done things that made him virtually immune to feeling. Nowadays he cried at sad songs and enjoyed the taste of a well-done carrot cake, but other than that? Bupkis.

“Did they have to take all four,” Dr. Twigs asked, probably breaching some protocol of medical ethics, “Did they really hate you that much?”

Bogart shakes his head.

“This wasn’t hate, Doc,” he says, “This was opportunity. You know how much a rabbit’s foot goes for these days? I’m a walking target.”

Dr. Twigs removes the first bandage. Whoever cut off his back left paw did a bad job of it. Bogart is guessing they didn’t bring their own equipment. Chances are, when he gets back to his sad little apartment over near the babbling brook, he’ll find one of his kitchen knives lying around covered in his own fluids. That’ll be a nice little Easter Egg hunt for later.

“I hate seeing what’s happening to this forest,” Dr. Twigs says as she applies some new gauze to his wounds, “This used to be a nice place to live. A nice place to raise a family. The other day a duck came in here quacking up a storm, because her duckling got into some bad bread that somebody threw down by the clearing. The kid ended up being okay, but it was touch and go for awhile there. Why would somebody do something like that? Bad bread? That takes a sick mind. Don’t you think?”

She was more honest than most doctors. A lot of them acted like they were members of some kind of jury. Blank faces and unreadable demeanors as they prescribed you pills or ran a little string through you to hold you together. Pretty soon, he’d be so beaten up, there’d be no point. You couldn’t suggest that somebody off themselves, but a rabbit with no feet wasn’t getting very far in the world anyway.

“I think the forest has always been this way,” he said, his phantom limb starting to throb now that it was being tended to, “It just gets worse until the past seems better. If you talked to my mother, she would tell you that it was all sunshine and rainbows when she was growing up, and then it all went downriver. Me? I never thought my childhood was that bad, but now it feels like each day is worse than the last. I bet if you ask that duckling, he won’t say it’s too bad, but then again, I never chowed down on any rotten Wonder bread.”

Paw by paw she worked. When she was finished, she arranged for him to have some crutches, but she tried to talk him out of the painkillers. His tolerance meant he didn’t really need them, but she didn’t have to know that. Those would be worth more in the forest than his feet. He wasn’t going to turn down a few free meals provided by the good physician.

The expression on her face as she wrote out the script told him all he needed to know regarding how much she bought into the idea that he was going to use the two-week supply on himself. When she ripped it out of her pad and tucked it in his pocket, she commented that he should be dead already based on how much blood he lost.

“You’re lucky,” she said, her mind probably already coasting over to the next patient.

“Nah, Doc,” he said, “Not anymore.”

by Kevin B