noam hessler – the severance lesson

Jonny: Clint Eastwood.

Jonny Braun is six-foot three and he has a small mark on his chin from when he was sledding with his friends in middle school. He went face-first into a chain-link fence. His first concussion, his last. Jonny has this cousin, Cindy Winchester. They both live in the town of Severance, Ohio, west of Columbus. He’s always been sweet to her. Cindy’s gotten into some trouble lately. That’s what this story’s about, the trouble.

       The trouble is that Cindy has this boyfriend, Michael. Jonny doesn’t like Michael — we’re all going to talk about that in a moment. And Michael’s really done it this time. He has had (this is what Cindy said to Jonny) sex with Cindy’s mom. Michael Alighieri has a high forehead, greasy hair and dark eyes. Cindy keeps her hair in a high ponytail, and wears band t-shirts. Jonny is with Michael at the moment, sorting out the trouble.

       Jonny was just telling that story, the story about sledding, to some friends of his at the graduation party, June, down by the baseball diamond at the high school. Another friend chimed in with a story about his sophomore year car crash — the black ice, the highway, a black eye from the steering wheel and a busted in passenger door, like Mike Tyson had tried to kick his way inside. Another friend talked about how his dad had lost a friend that way, back in the 70’s. They got quiet, then Jonny raised his head, his hair cropped short, his cleft-scar showing, and got them joking again. They were all so happy to be young and alive. This is a fond, happy moment for Jonny. Now tonight there were no stars in the sky. Every star has just blinked out, though Jonny hasn’t noticed. He is beating Michael Alighieri to death.

       It is the August of 2015, and Michael’s baby-pale forehead has this way of macking on the sidewalk by Rick’s, on the square of sidewalk where a little dog’s paws had passed through the wet concrete, where a maple leaf had fallen during that season where the trees did a striptease for God. The leaf had left an imprint that Jonny Braun used to step on for good luck every day as he passed through the downtown on his way from his house to the high school in freshman and sophomore year, before he had a car. Jonny is interested in this macking — the tap of it, the slime of it. He is not usually a man that appreciates intimacy, and the sound of Michael crumpling and bleeding apart makes him feel like shit, but each time Mike’s stupid head rains down you really have to feel like popping him one with your scuffed jordans just a couple more times, like playing with one of those inflatable boxing dummies, like sex. Jonny brings the foot down again and again, and half-way through he begins to smile. 

       As he does this, the Friday night Magic: the Gathering tournament in Rick’s is filing out. Men with greasy ponytails in well-kept shirts, scrawny high school freshmen in graphic tees, stained with I-know-what, a few scruffy fathers, perfect replicas of their small, dark-eyed sons, all of this passes Jonny hitting Michael, kicking Michael, passes the sputterings of Mike’s breath in the atmosphere. No one seems to pay it any mind. They even make eye contact with Jonny — not minding, awkwardly or in a friendly manner. What a great fucking night, huh man? It feels bad, yes, to be watched, but just keep doing it. No one’s gonna stop you. Mike did a bad, bad thing — he fucked Cindy’s mom — and now you got to give him a piece of his mind on the sole of your shoe.

       Jonny is really into the Clint Eastwood movie American Sniper in senior year and Michael has been a mass shooter fanboy for a couple years now, so they’ve never really gotten along. Adam Lanza tee-shirt at junior prom, that smug piece of shit, where the fuck do you even buy that? Jonny doesn’t get how anyone could love a killer, someone who preyed on the weak, and he prays to God every night for more good men and more good Clint Eastwood movies. He had failed senior year math, graduated with a 3.1 GPA off the buoy of his performance in English — Jonny would sit on the bleachers of the baseball field outside Wichita County Consolidated High School and rub his feet into the scuffs on the painted metal. In between innings he’d chat with those friends he had there that weren’t busy playing (he’d been on varsity until senior year, he’d quit) for the Severance Sandfighters, WCCHS’s baseball team. When it was an away game Jonny would pick up his pickup and drive out to see it, and if his friends didn’t too, he’d sit in the bleachers and read Mishima; the last one he’d read before beating Michael to death was Spring Snow.  His big sister Hanna lived in Boston now, shacked up with her college boyfriend Richard Oyami, a painter, and for Jonny’s birthday he’d convinced Jonny to put down the Cormac McCarthy (his favorite, after a flirtation with Austen in sophomore year) and the Hemingway and pick up a muscular poet, one Oyami thought fit Jonny better. Richard and Hanna were always mailing Jonny and his family books and Richard’s compact tight-wound oil paintings and excerpts from a book of haiku Hanna was writing. They’d missed Jonny’s graduation to attend Richard’s uncle’s wedding in Kobe, which had stung, but he loves his sister more than anything but his cousin Cindy.

       She is laying on the couch at Jonny’s house, more sick than anyone had ever been sick, and she’s promised Jonny that she’d come beat Michael’s ass with him once she feels better, and his shoe comes down on Michael’s head again. It is ten PM and Rick is closing up the storefront and pretending not to watch him turning Mike’s head into creamed corn. Jonny couldn’t tell you why he’d worn the shoes he did going out the door, this hadn’t been his intention. He was supposed to wear others.
       Cindy had been asleep, she’d told him, and woke to hearing Michael and her mother through the thin wall between her bedroom and the second-floor bathroom. She lay breathing or not breathing until Michael filed out of the bathroom and past her room — he’d left without getting his bag. Jonny has Michael’s blood on his upper lip now; the jugular’s a fucking pressure cooker, man. He brings the sneaker down again, working the neck, chiropractor. Cindy crying on the couch blowing her nose on his camo tee-shirt. Kick him faster, Jonny.

       And he did! Jonny keeps kicking him while Rick runs a cloth along the tables in the game store. This is not a necessary thing, but allows him to watch Jonny’s meticulous work. If I didn’t know better myself I’d have thought he was divinely inspired, too. Michael had come straight from Cindy’s house, a fifteen minute walk, to Rick’s games to play Magic; Jonny had paced outside for two hours waiting for him while he played, visible through the glass display of the storefront. Mike won every game, and he came out with an ear-to-ear grin, like he wanted to devour Jonny. A grin of aggression that justified all that came next. “I won,” he said, almost spitting, “with your aunt’s fucking deck. I left mine at Cindy’s. How’s that for an underdog story? I feel like Eddie Ray Routh when—” and with that Michael Alighieri started having his head crushed against a curb repeatedly for fucking his girlfriend’s mom.

       Jonny doesn’t like poetry usually, but when he likes them, they are William Blake’s. Poems about gardens and rusted gates and bright and beautiful lights. About God. you could be a prophet Jonny.
       Do us all a favor. When you’re finished, when Michael’s pumpkin guts and soggy cardboard, forget about the police or the action-hero-grace you’ll say over his body or about Cindy or about the good men or the guilty. Nobody’s going to catch you. They had their chance and listen — hear that? No police sirens. Step back in time a moment — watch the pleasant lines of people file buy. It’s too late for consequences. Forget that Michael was salutatorian and had a full-ride scholarship to RIT. You’re going to the University of Ohio next month, you’ll drive home every weekend, that’s enough. Remember those two trees, by the baseball diamond? You’re nodding your head, of course you do. Oaks. kick your sneakers off and put on the workboots you left in the passenger seat of your Chevy. Sit under those trees and look up. There’s a storm coming. Smell it before you really process what you saw, what you’ve seen tonight. It’s time to finally start reading The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea. Let the rain wash everything away, like ink on cheap paper, like Michael oxidizing on your upper lip. There’s fewer stars in the sky than usual tonight — there’s none at all. But don’t fret about that. Your life is yours.

       (Black hands travel through the story. They pause, every now and then, on someone that seems important. And these figures are snatched up and spirited away to a place belowground, where bones lay evergrowing, where worms ramble across the veins of God.)


Janice:  Atarka’s Command.

I’ll admit that I didn’t feel all that broken up about the whole thing, that’s, yes, that’s to say that I really felt nothing when I found out Jonny had killed Michael that night. You’re nodding, okay. Great. Can you adjust the overhead lights? They’re shining in my eyes, I can’t get comfortable. When we’re done, you said that you’d been there, that you had the video of what happened. I’d like to see it.

	My name is Janice Winchester. I’m Cindy’s mother, Jonny Braun is my niece. Michael Alighieri was around the house a lot, he was my daughter’s boyfriend after all, but he was really a friend that I had met on a web forum. That’s how I thought of him. The web forum is, look, I’ll speak frankly— it is for sharing videos of death. I like this sort of thing. Michael liked this sort of thing. It’s why he followed me around, why my daughter wasn’t any good for him. People like me and like Michael are special. We feel things in a grand and important manner that other people, people like you, like my husband, would not understand.

	Alright, two questions. I’ll answer the question about how to play Magic: The Gathering first, and then I’ll answer the question about the videos second. I assume these had to do with how Michael died.

       Magic: The Gathering is a card game that I started playing when I was a teenager, that I still play today. Many other people play it, we’re sort of all around. You know, a secret army, like terracotta soldiers, or the Skrull from the Fantastic Four— they’re, yes, ugly green things that look like people, but aren’t people. That’s the short of it. You don’t really seem like a fandom guy, but who knows, I’ve been surprised before. It’s really a good time to be a nerd I think. When you play Magic, you sit down, and you play against your opponent, and you're each trying to beat each other. You start with twenty life-points each game, and the number can go up and down. When you take damage, your life-point total goes down, and once it’s at zero, well, you’re through. It’s over, and the other player wins. You bring a deck of cards, your own deck, and it’s like your baby. You hand-pick everything, so that you have an advantage. You draw a card each turn, and you use a resource called ‘mana’ to cast your spells.

	To get your mana, you need to play land cards. You can flip these on their sides, like dead fish, to generate mana. They unflip later, when your turn comes around, after your opponent has gone, back to normal. The mana you use to play spells called “instants” and “sorceries” — there are technical terms, don’t worry about them — and these can do all sorts of things. They are lighting strikes, and shields, and they mutate your creatures and make them big and dangerous, and they can hurt people, or heal you, or keep yourself safe or hurt the things the other player loves. Like I said, they are versatile.

       Ooh! And then, there are creatures. These can be spiders or dragons or warriors or atogs — an atog is like a robot goblin, you’d love atogs — or angels or all manner of other things. You play them by spending mana, like the other spells, and these creatures can attack your enemies and defend you. To do this, unless they’re a special kind of creature with a property called vigilance, which makes it never rest and never expend itself, they must also be flipped on their sides, as the lands are when you get your mana from them.

       And from there play is simple. You draw your cards, you choose when to play them, if you can play them, of course — like poker with knives, blackjack with chainsaws. Michael and I talked about the game a lot, mostly online. We never talked face-to-face, really. Just “Hi Janice” “Hi Michael you and Cindy going out to the movies” “No Janice we’re just going to hang out in Cindy’s room and listen to music” “Like you always do haha” that last comment to remind him that there was more to life than Cindy. I suppose the other parents might have asked me if I was worried my daughter and Michael were fucking. That kind of thing never bothered me, honest, and moreover I knew Cindy would never want that. She was deficient that way. Never got how people could not like sex. They make new Magic: the Gathering cards every year, but Michael likes the old ones. I like the new ones.

       I’m sorry, should I not make myself laugh? Is that wrong, in an interview?

       My favorite card that’s come out recently is called Atarka’s Command. It’s one of those spells, the instants I told you about earlier. You can play it whenever you want — some other spells you can’t do, you must follow procedure with. It costs almost no mana at all to pay, and it has three effects, and then you choose which effect you want it to have: one effect hurts people; one effect creates new life, plays new lands; one makes all your creatures stronger, makes it so that they can rip things out of the sky. I like it for how it is a powerful card and also how it makes those players that are already worse than me even more nervous. Because you can only pick two of its effects, its unpredictable — you can use it for anything and that is the most frightening thing about it. And on the card, just above the little words that say how the card can hurt, is a painting of a dragon, with horns like a moose, with a mouth full of fire.

       I have a kinship with that. Sometimes I’ll sit alone in my office and watch videos of people dying, and I’ll masturbate. I used to message Michael online, while I did that, not about sexual things, although sometimes he would take it there. Just about the faces people make when they die or about how lonely high school can be or about bands from the 90’s, there were awesome bands back then. But now Michael is dead and so I’ll masturbate and imagine turning myself into a dragon. And I’ll just float, a few feet above my body. It’s been three days since he’s been dead and I’ve done it three days in a row. Last night I thought it had really worked, that I woke up and I was ten feet too big for my bed and full of embers, but it was just a dream. I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I’d go into greater detail about my transformation but I fear the description would be far too indulgent.

       I mostly watch the videos I’m interested in on publicly available websites. You can have a reddit account or just click a link and find them easily. Sometimes certain aficionados, members of the club so to speak, will send me videos that I really ought to see through file-sharing sites, the kind people use to pirate movies. You don’t need anything special to do it, that’s the funny thing.

       You know, I don’t want to comment on our interview, or on our interrogation, but you seem to be uncomfortable. Well, there’s nothing to be uncomfortable about; it’s just how things are. You seem angry that there are things in the world, bad things, that you cannot control. More people should give up that approach, should go the way they’re chosen. It’s like Magic; in the abstract, you’re killing someone, the whole affair with the cards and the dragons, the atogs, is a life-or-death struggle. But it’s just a game. You play the cards you're dealt, as well as you can.

       I mean, this was the thing about the videos. I started looking for them after a trip I took to Rome — Cindy was ten, Rachel was four— I have a second daughter, too, you know. You’ll notice Cindy doesn’t talk about her at all,if you talk with her. It’s because I prefer Rachel. Besides that Cindy and my husband do not understand me but they did understand me back then, I think. I am hard to understand for most people. When I found out that there was someone else on the web forum I watched videos on who lived in Severance I was ecstatic. That didn’t change when it happened to be Michael.

       Anyways during the trip to Rome, coming out of the airport, I saw a man get crushed to death by a Vespa. He folded in half, like when you put in the filling in a sandwich wrong, and it kind of crawls out, kind of doesn’t, leaks something, sits still. It was all so slow, and what I remember most strongly was that despite there being a crowd — mostly tourists, I think, some locals too — there was only one guy trying to help him up. He wore a red shirt, a football jersey, and he had a full beard and thick short hair and he was large but not muscular. His eyes were sunken into his face, maybe from stress, and his ears stuck up at a funny angle. Like he was listening for me. For several years I kept looking for men like him online or when picking up Cindy from middle school. This was the first time I ever started thinking of affairs, though this new thought didn’t bother me much. I chatted with men online, sometimes. It was generally unsatisfying. I kept feeling like I was trying to do something and these, these fake affairs, they were all distractions from that. And so I began trying to remember the man as well as I could, and the Vespa accident as well, and eventually I realized what I really wanted to love was the way that smooth, red-painted metal had crushed the tourist, his white shirt sagging, the blood in his mouth, the headlight over his temple like a new, enormous eye. The red-shirted-man tugging on the dying-man’s arm. I wanted to love that! 

       I began googling videos of Vespa accidents, watching them on loop while I worked, or when I couldn’t sleep. And then I watched other sorts of videos. Again I do not want to be self-indulgent.

       It’s not a crime. I do not understand why you would ask your question like that. I don’t feel bad about it, and I resent that you’d make me feel bad. There is a certain kind of person who has next to no tolerance for the exceptional, the special, the different. These people, I use the term loosely, will not last! It is a good time to be special. We live in a more understanding world. The cards have been laid out in the sky and the cards say things are right.

	And so what if I like what I like and so what if he turns eighteen in September. This has nothing to do with your questions or with why he’s dead. It is grotesque to insist otherwise. You’re going to step up from the table and let me go away. One smooth motion. And I’ll go my way and you’ll go yours and you’ll send me that video, then, only then, you’ll never see me again.

       (And at this point, certain things about the world change through the machinations of a being, perhaps the teller and interviewer of the prior tale, the interviewer and teller of the subsequent; it is as if the moon was plucked from the sky and the land was plunged into endless darkness. And, in this new state of the world, things short to life like a radio station coming into range, and the story begins from the same point of time as it had before.)


Cindy: Pete Wentz.

My name? Cynthia Winchester. Cindy.

	I’m not going to answer that question. You know who I am, and I think whoever’s going to hear about this interview will know who I am, too. I can’t place any of it, why it’s the case. But I know it’s true. What I am going to do instead is describe to you the room in which we are conducting this interview, in its exactness.

	We are in a room in the basement of city hall. City hall is tall and concrete. On the third floor is an auditorium where plays are performed, on the second floor is a large, open space where the polling centers are in november. The ceilings are high. My aunt used to take me to vote when I was little. She said it would make me civically minded, in the same way that the music we listened to in the car — Johnny Cash, The Doors  — would make me less angry. It made her less angry; she works at the post office, which is a block from city hall, and she goes to work early on her bad days so she can sit in the car and listen to Spanish Caravan and smoke out the window. It makes her less angry. Me, I’m not so sure. I like angry music because it makes me feel more angry. Or sad music for similar reasons. I’ve been listening to Welcome to the Black Parade all night and all day since Michael and I broke up. The song Teenagers especially. It just felt right. She should’ve brought Jonny.

       The second floor is done up with beige, fake-wood linoleum. The staircase to the auditorium is also linoleum, the auditorium is carpeted red. The room we are in right now is tiled, the tiles are blue or gray. I can hear a printer in the other room. Someone is scanning papers. It smells in here like rotten eggs and like the night that Michael and I broke up. There was this sour smell, like sweat, or like the jack ‘o lanterns dad used to carve when they got all dry and craggly with mold and with the November rain. Rains in November here dry things out. I don’t think you would know that, you’re just in town for tonight, I think.

	There’s a folding table, two plush armchairs that are red, the color of the auditorium carpet when the lights go down. I am comfortable. The lights in here are bright and white but they are not too bright for my eyes. You are wearing dark sunglasses. You are shifting in your chair across from me, and your elbows are on the table, but I think you are comfortable too, that this shifting implies no mental state, but rather something about how your body works that is different than how mine does. I want to be respectful here, so I would like to name you. Is that alright?

	O.K. Thanks, I know that I am making this interview very difficult, and I appreciate that you let me ask questions. It makes me feel safe. I have been describing the room because I’d much rather talk about our room, this strange interview, than about my life or about Michael.

	You are Satan. You are the Devil, and you are interviewing me in this room so that you can tempt me and take my soul. I am not going to pretend I know how I got here, or what time it is. I’m glad we could clear this up.

	My family? Dad cries in the car a lot. Sometimes he’ll see me sitting in the kitchen studying for a physics test and he’ll start crying and then he’ll tell me “You look just like your grandmother” or “I just can’t believe you’re so big, that you’re going to graduate next year” and his head is always hung a little funny and I know he’s lying. He’s crying because Mom stopped loving him and he doesn’t really know why. She stopped loving him when I was fourteen. He was eating breakfast in the morning — a banana and a lemon poppyseed muffin — and he and Mom had been yelling the whole night before. I had kept wanting to come down the stairs and hug them, because I could hear it, but I got scared, so I didn’t. I think he threatened something really bad because he was eating breakfast at an angle, like there was a noose hanging from the ceiling, and he was in it. His neck is the most expressive part of his body — how it tenses, or how it stoops every day now. He eats oatmeal and fruit for breakfast, or he eats a muffin or toaster waffles when we have them in the house. Mom makes bacon and eggs for breakfast, and he eats that sometimes, but she gets up pretty late these days and he’s usually out of the house. He is a mailman, and he doesn’t talk to my aunt at all — if I was him I would hate myself for that, sorry. He has a beard, and hair he has cut like he’s in the army still.

	I have a little sister named Rachel. She’s eleven right now, and she borrows my clothes a lot. She’s close to Mom — Mom is very kind to her, and that is something that makes me happy. I worry that one day that will change, and that when this happens I will be out of the house, and something bad will happen. I hope that by high school Rachel will have some kind of phone so I can call her every day if she needs me to, and so she can tell me how Mom and how Dad are doing. Or I’ll stay in Severance forever, until she leaves. I’d take her to college with me, if I could. We could have bunk beds.

	I don’t know my mother at all. The thing about Mom is that she’s still really funny, even though she’s on the computer in the family office all the time now, and sometimes the jokes are weird and make me uncomfortable. Sometimes she makes jokes about dad that are sexual and they make me feel ill, and I will try, then, to make her stop. I am not an open person and I am not going to have sex before I am married. I think I’m more religious than both of my parents. That seems like it upset you — sorry, I didn’t mean to do that. You might be the Devil, but you seem like a nice man. You are very pale and your hair is stuffy. You haven’t showered today.

	Can I ask another question? Okay, yes. Thank you again for being so generous, I’m sorry this is a strange interview. I am trying to be normal and I am worried that I am weird all the time, even to you. My question, yes, it was this: do they have planes in Hell? Do you have to fly up here, to where we are? Or do you have a little car? In this book series I read as a kid there was a worm named Lowly Worm and he drove around in a little apple car, his big wormhead sticking out the window. You are just like him, to me.

	They’re called the Busytown books. Thank you for reminding me. I had a feeling you would know, because you’re the Devil and you have the time to read whatever you want, because you are all-powerful.

	I didn’t expect Michael and my mom would have sex, that Mom would do what she did. Jonny told me today that I should’ve expected it of Michael and that made me upset with him, because Michael was always very sweet to me, I felt, and because Jonny was blaming me when and that made me cry even harder than I was before. He felt bad about making me cry — I know he felt bad about it because he touched my lower back in an awkward way, as if to say “I’m sorry,” which he’s really bad at saying. Always has been. Jonny doesn’t know how to apologize to anyone. But he touched my lower back to say it, and he let me lie on the couch in his living room, cry face-down into the black leather.

	I couldn’t help liking Michael. He was cute, and he liked the music I liked. Would let me turn it up really loud in the car when I drove him to school. The thing that got me was the more I dated him the more quiet he got. He stopped wearing those awful t-shirts — I don’t know where he got them from. Online, I guess. And he finally listened to Revolver and he told me he liked it, though he didn’t like it as much as the Fall Out Boy albums I would put on when I drove him to school, I felt like a good influence. It’s just— sorry. I am not going to get emotional during our interview. The night before, before he had sex with my mother, he’d unbuttoned his pants and I’d seen him naked for the first time, and I just— I couldn’t do it. It wasn’t right. I am a religious person and that wounded him. He felt like I had rejected him, that I hated him.

	I don’t want him to die. And, Mr Devil, if I might speak frankly— I hate that you asked me that question. I do not hate you, but I hate that awful question and I hate the idea of him dying. There is nothing fun about it, nothing pleasurable and light, everything about that idea is so palpably wrong; I do not appreciate your pretense of virtue here, and I do not like your idea of play. I understand that you want him, that you want to take him home with you, and soon, but Michael’s gonna live a long, long life.

	If there’s a beach in Hell I would— I would visit him. I will visit him, if that is where he wants to be. I will be very old, and he will be very old, because Michael is going to live a long life and if there is a Hell for him it’ll be that, the slow putting of one foot in front of another, of holding breath and removing breath from the lungs. But he will learn to live with it. But if Hell does not have a beach I would not visit him. I would like it very much if sinners are all punished somewhere cold and beautiful, and dry, and not somewhere like this room where we conduct our interview. I think I’m giving you the wrong answers to your interview, and I am asking questions, which is again very rude, so I want to say: I’m sorry for making your job so hard. I think I made a mistake early in the interview. Lowly Worm, I think you are uncomfortable, that you do not like, me, or you do not like what I say. I’m sorry! But I cannot help who I am, just like you cannot help who you are, and again, I think I am being very civil, here.

	I fell asleep this afternoon, on the couch, after I’d cried myself out. And I had a dream. Pete Wentz was there, from Fall Out Boy, and Gerard Way was there, from My Chemical Romance, and there were three angels, and Jonny, and the angels had their heads— their heads up, sorry, like dogs. And they had snouts like crocodiles, and Jonny was stamping out a fire on the ground, which felt very strange to me, even in the dream, because Jonny is not a smoker. And Michael wasn’t there, and Pete and Gerard and the angels and I were all having a birthday party, and the angels were all saying “You look just like your grandmother” and “I just can’t believe that you’re going to graduate next year” and then nodding, all as one big thing, like angels do. Pete and Gerard were cutting the cake and there was always a new slice that they’d cut and then the cake was there, whole, so you could keep cutting it. And Jonny was there and had brought his fire, had intruded on my birthday party with his fire, his putting-out of his fire, the fire he had brought. I asked Jonny if my mom and dad would be coming too and he said “This could be a great painting, or a great book, no? They could call the book Cindy’s Eighteenth Birthday Party,” and this was his answer and it made me think, no, my parents would not be coming. You were not there, but I hadn’t met you yet. Maybe later I will put you in a chair at my birthday party. I didn’t ask Jonny about Michael because I knew that would make him mad, and then there were elephants, all over, a whole herd of them, and I could see them out of every angle of my eye, like demons, or like dragons. And then I woke up, and I knew what I had to do.

	And that will be the last question of the interview: “What was your dream about, Cindy?” Because, sorry again, sorry for being so all over the place tonight — I have to go. There’s something I need to do. And you can come with, if you want, you can ride shotgun like Michael used to or like my dog does, sometimes. But, Mr Devil, Lowly Worm, I would appreciate it if you did not stop what I am going to do. It is not your way, but that’s okay. My body works in a way that your’s does not.

       Everything is spinning out now. Allow me a moment to recompose myself.


Mike: The Devil.

When he found out about how Cindy’s mother, Janice Winchester, had treated Jonny Braun when he was young, Michael Alighieri became particularly cruel to him. This had been in freshman year of high school, and the treatment had endured throughout Jonny’s youth. Janice had made strange comments about him, asked to bathe him one too many times, told him how big he had grown when he was ten years old. Jonny’s father doesn’t like it — he didn’t talk to Janice no more, his wife cut her out of the photos on the pinboard in the beige linoleum kitchen. This strange and new isolation from Cindy, the need to choose her after seeing her four times a day for eleven years, might have been what made him love her. It’s tempting to imagine that this strangeness, the dark spot around his aunt his parents had asked him to make, the memories or lack thereof, was what had made Jonny such a rigorous athlete, or that is was what had made him so unpretentiously bookish, had gotten him writing little romance stories in his free time. None of that was true of course. Jonny was just the way he was — there’s no point in psychologizing him. But when Cindy had told him all this, the night he slept over on her floor because she wasn’t sure about having him in the bed, he’d looked over her posters — Duran Duran, Fall Out Boy — and became filled with a new type of poison. Michael was a hypochondriac and he liked being sick. It gave him ideas.

       Jonny was pacing outside of Rick’s games, or standing on the square of concrete with the impressed, ambered leaf and the little dog paws. He was imagining the lines he’d say to his friends on the baseball team after he whooped Michael Alighieri: “Looks like Magic Man went the way of the Wicked witch, of the east.” “I didn’t have a choice; I had to let the tiger talk.” “You fuck my cousin’s mom and I fuck your whole life up into the graveyard.” The lines kept coming out verbose.

       Michael’s usual deck was a wooly spider deck, the one that had won the 1996 Pro Tour and consisted almost entirely of bullshit — fiddly little low damage creatures that were hardly worth playing, and weren’t worth playing, and weren’t worth the cardstock thy were printed on in resale. The deck had cost Michael five bucks to put together, he lost every time he played with it, and that was heaven for him. This new deck was different;  it loomed over Michael. It was all dragons, the new set of cards that quarter being all dragons and huns and almost-Buddhist monks, and it was the first time Mike had ever played a deck that he could’ve brought to a tournament without being kicked out for out-of-date cards. It played like a fever; he wasn’t quite sure of the right combos, so he just played it like his wooly spider deck — put out fat, pugnacious creatures to block, then burn away the competition with damage spell after damage spell. Michael hated being in control, but he wanted to pick and choose the terms of his lack. He was humming that song from The Money Store; “Tongue thought pupil of your eye sickness moves you can't deny.” What could be better than that.
       Jonny wanted what — to kill him? To hit him really hard? The pacing was hilarious; so localized, so pathetic. There goes He-Man! He-Man who cries himself to sleep, He-Man writing love poems in his journal! Hey Jonny! (Tap on the glass, would you? Really get him riled up for Michael, since he can’t get up from the folding table where he plays against the man with the ponytail, with the acne, with the scar across his stomach from that accident in college — he’s doing pretty good with that blue-black-green reanimator deck) Pace faster! The pacing keeps me playing good!

       He had half a mind to call Janice’s landline on his flip phone, ask her to bring the wooly spider deck over, if only so he could look at the spider — its white hair overcoat as straight as flax, its four doe-black eyes. Maybe they’d let him play his last game with the spider. He was truly chosen, special, tonight. He’d win.
       During the last game, a car pulled up: Michael had a way with manifestations. Familiar, too — wait, pause a second, will you? Look at the table in front of you. Black-red burn deck; hold the line, pace faster Jonny! Cindy’s supposed to be sick in bed, sick like you made her, made her feel like you, a sick and squirming thing bones too big for his body, you sick fuck. That can’t be her. That’s not Cindy getting out of her car, now — just a body double, a crisis actor (though you don’t really believe in those — it makes the whole thing so much more boring — believe in them now) — her car’s driven here on its own. Big fat docile thing, like a beetle, snorting black clouds of exhaust only fit for a gated community. Jonny paused. Flip your cards, attack. You’ve got lethal damage, attack with everything — sure you’ve got four health protecting you from oblivion, but he’s got three and can only block seven of the ten damage you’ve sent barreling his way. His lands are all spent — he can’t oppose you with any tricky spells, mull it over one more moment, look out the window for encouragement:

       This isn’t right at all, huh. Cindy stands on the dog paws, Jonny on the concrete fossil of the leaf. She's not sick — she’s blushing in the light of the display. They kiss. You attack without looking back at the table. This isn’t right at all.

       And it’s not right for Michael Alighieri. He miscalculated — he didn’t send ten damage to his opponent, he sent nine. Must’ve mixed up two of the creatures, see: this dragon, the one Mike attacked with, looks just like the one Mike played five minutes ago, that his opponent killed with a bolt of lighting. Only, there’s the rub, the one Mike still has does one less damage than the other. That’s the problem with strange dragons, with playing sick. You end up in strange places, you mess up. His opponent’s at one, and Michael’s at four. That dooms him. His opponent attacks with everything, as Mike did, and this time it works. Michael throws up a feeble counter-spell and scoops his cards in his hands. When he looks out through the display class, past copies of Settlers of Catan, Jonny and Cindy are gone, the truck idling.

       It’s a bad night at Rick’s games in Severance, Ohio. See that? There’s fewer stars in the sky than usual. They’re all gone! Where’d they go Michael? Do you miss them? Blinked out of the sky. It’s the kind of night where no one cares what’s happening, except for you, Mike, yeah, that’s the way it is, isn’t it? You’re an emotional guy. That’s why Cindy liked you, you realize that, you must, right? You should call her on the flip phone, freak her out one last time. Go to your bedroom, listen to Pretty Little Hate Machine, play cowboys and school shooters across the constellation stickers on your ceiling. You’ll never take them down.

       If you ask Cindy for a ride home, she’ll give you one. You’re a sweet kid. She’s not going to talk to you after this, but she’ll give you the trip in the backseat, listening to her and Jonny fight over what to play on the radio. Johnny Cash or Gerard Way. But stop thinking about Gerard Way: focus on the RIT dorm room, on the engineering projects you’ll do and the whooping you’re going to get from your dad when Jonny’s father calls, remember that Jonny’s going to be here every weekend and you will not. Feel the storm rumbling in your acid-reflux stomach and don’t look up.


NOAM HESSLER is a New England poet. Their work has been featured in Apocalypse Confidential, BRUISER, and Misery Tourism, among others. Their first poetry collection, Officeparks, will be available for purchase from Farthest Heaven Press. They can be contacted at their Twitter account @poetryaccnt1518.


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