Megan’s Journey Through the Labyrinth

She’d searched for Ford that day and met Benedikt instead; at the end of the afternoon they shook hands…

—It was nice meeting you—

…but it didn’t end as Megan had hoped, because the following week she met Benedikt again. She’d been on her way to a quiet, empty table at Café Nikotín. She’d held a small stack of post-cards: for Mom and Dad and for a whole gaggle of friends. One significant postcard was going to Chris: she loved him, but didn’t know if she wanted to go on with the relationship. A trip into the cockles of Europe, she’d thought, might have clarified something.

“Hi,” Ford had said smiling from his seat at a buffed aluminum table centered with the pole of a green umbrella. “Care to join us?”

“It is good to see you again,” Benedikt said.

“You’ve met?” Ford asked.

“Last weekend,” Benedikt offered.

“Then you should join us.” Ford smiled. “We’re old friends it seems.”

And later, midway through her white coffee, Ford had turned the course of their halting, polite small-talk. “Have you been to the Labyrinth?” he’d asked. “We were heading there in a bit.”

She’d never been to the old stone-work maze, but it stared up at her from the face of a postcard: it was as ancient as medieval bloodshed, and as dark as this city’s history of alchemists and syphilitic, absinthe-addled poets. Romantic and spooky: it was just the kind of place that might shadow her nightmares for any long stretch of future decades, but she liked Ford’s eyes and the way his skin made her think of buffed pecans, so when he’d asked if she wanted to come along, she’d said yes against every bone-deep desire to avoid that part of the city. But it couldn’t have been such a great risk—could it?—with Ford’s skin color, and Benedikt’s off-kilter jokes and the invitation to drink škóy with him and with Ford. Though she couldn’t fathom the depths of Benedikt’s uncanny glacial gaze, she’d considered the invitation, because it would be a chance to be with Ford, to watch the movement of his hands, and imagine them touching her. If the Labyrinth was in a dicey part of the city, neither of them seemed especially worried about going there.

“You know the story of the Labyrinth?” Ford had asked

“No.”

He’d shrugged. “It’s simple, really. Once you enter the Labyrinth, the only way back out is the way home.”

She’d scoffed the idea of stepping into that maze and stepping back out in Cincinnati.

But nothing was ever as simple as it seemed: reality and symbol were different things in this part of Europe.

The Labyrinth was ancient stone and mortar cemented in patterns that only a mason might have understood. Now, she picked her way—alone—through narrow, switchback corridors of stone-work walls and flagstone footpaths. Last week, Ford had told her it was best to walk through the Labyrinth with bare feet, but she’d kept her shoes on. She cringed through the memory of Benedikt stooping down and unstrapping his sandals. Though lean, there was something stocky in his manner, as if he spent his days at work, strangling bulls with his naked hands. His toes were blunt, rounded, and dusted with scant, bronze hairs. Ford, beside him, had kicked out of his shoes and pulled off his socks and for just an instant, she couldn’t tell them apart.

She was alone, now, following the path they’d taken—together—one weekend ago.

The walls of the Labyrinth were stone and mortar, but the square heart of the warren was heavy with grapevines and earwigs. Here, she saw last Saturday in her mind’s eye: Ford and Benedikt standing together and laughing at some small joke. Though they’d done their best to be nice and to include her, the Labyrinth—as Ford had said—showed her something else. And maybe the Labyrinth remembered her this evening, because it was showing her Benedikt’s gray gaze with shimmers of blue in it.

Benedikts’s eyes, last weekend, had been spooky and unreadable; she couldn’t find the personality at home in them. Now, some unnerving phantom of Benedikt held her attention with a subtle smile tugging the corners of his lips. A breeze fondled his ragamuffin hair and he raked it back with splayed, pale fingers. She flinched, glimpsing Ford at home inside of Benedikt’s eyes, staring out at her. Benedikt smiled and reached forward, touching her face with the warmth of his fingertips.

“Ford’s your boyfriend.” She felt the words spilling before she could bite them back. “And you followed me here to tell me that.”

Saddened understanding flared in Benedikt’s gaze. “I’m not here. I’m at home with Ford. But you’re here looking for something….”

“I’m not—” but she stopped.

“Home isn’t a place,” Benedikt said. “It’s the one right person who’ll miss you when you leave.”

“I don’t even know if I want to stay with Chris.”

Benedikt shrugged and touched her shoulder, softly. “I see how you look at Ford, but you can’t live in his eyes. You have no choice but to return to the one you sent that postcard to. You are not finished back there. An affair with Ford cannot make you happy, but Ford and I can be good memories for you, if you want us to be.”

She closed her eyes.

Benedikt leaned close and planted a kiss on her forehead. “It is nice that you came back to our Labyrinth, but now, you should leave. If you want company before you go, you can come to our apartment; we’re not so drunk yet. You know the way there and we’ll hear you at our buzzer.”

“I don’t want to intrude.”

“You won’t.” Benedikt smiled.

“Okay.” Megan blinked; Benedikt was gone.

As quietly as she came, she turned around and fumbled her way out of the silent, ancient maze.

All the way to Cincinnati, she thought, hesitating before stepping out of the Labyrinth completely. 

Written by: J.C. Howell
Photograph by: Victoria Ostrzenski

The Dictator's Lemonade

The Dictator was exiled to a small island in the Pacific, somewhere between Hawaii and Australia. The parallels to a famous, short, French dictator were obvious. But The Dictator, Our Dictator, stopped reading that biography around the halfway point.

“Why’d you stop reading?” I asked him under a blistering South Pacific sun.

I was writing a magazine article - a human interest piece commissioned by a now-defunct periodical - designed, I guess, to humanize him, my editor thinking, surely, exile must have done him some good.

“He’d just won a great victory,” he told me. He took a drink of lemonade. He smoothed his beautiful hair with one, heavily-jeweled hand. “It was very well done. He did very, very well. And you know what? I’d learned all I needed to know about him.”

“I have a gift,” he continued. “I know people. I really do. And I knew when I read of his victory, his great victory, very well-earned, I knew it then, I knew…”

He trails off as a very beautiful woman, very tall, exceptionally tan, approaches and puts her hand on his shoulder.

“I found your sock,” she says in a heavy, foreign accent. “I didn’t think I would find it, but then I looked again and...wow! There it was.”

“Wow!” he says.

The Dictator shifts his focus to me. “Did you hear that? She found my sock!”

“Fantastic,” I say.

“I thought it might be lost,” the woman says to me. “But then I found it. Later. At a different time.”

“That’s very good,” he says. “Very, very good.”

He pats her backside and she slinks off down steps behind the infinity pool, so that it appears she’s disappeared into the ocean.

The Dictator and I sit on the back porch with the ocean and a sweating carafe of lemonade as our only distractions. The house is all open white doors that hope to corral what’s left of the breeze after the heavy humid air shakes it down. There’s a television the size of a wall playing old Scooby Doo cartoons in the living room, and through our conversation the bizarre patois of slobbering Scooby bookends any silence found in our conversation.

The Dictator has had work done on his hair, his face, his hands, but peculiarly not his body. His paunch is a personal TV dinner tray under his button up white shirt. The shirt is too small and has somehow collected crumbs, though we haven’t eaten anything since sitting down. He’s wearing white linen pants. His tan is fluorescent even under an afternoon sun. He once joked, with his counterpart of some vaguely European, nuclear-powered dynasty, that, “If they turn the lights out on me I’d glow like a fucking night light,” and even now, years later, when you look at him you believe it.

“That’s what they don’t understand,” he says unprompted. “That’s the thing about guys like me!”

I wait for him to supply some context to his outburst, but he waits for me to respond. He does this all the time. It’s like he’s been interrupted by silence and he holds it against you, and more importantly, he wants you to know that he holds it against you. In conversation with The Dictator, you are responsible for the uncouth interjections of silence, so get used to it.

“How has your life changed since you’ve been exiled?” I ask him.

“Oh, I love it,” he says. “Look around. I’ve done very, very well here. Did you see that woman earlier?”

“You know I did.”

“That woman,” he leans in to whisper, “that woman is a treasure. I found her here. She was buried in the holds of an old Spanish galleon, The Conquistador, that’s wrecked a few miles that way.”

He points towards the open ocean but locks his eyes on mine.

“Under lock and key,” he continues. “17th century. Hundreds...hundreds of years she’s been there waiting for a guy like me to dig her up. Centuries. I went down there myself. My good friend, Billy, the director - you’ve heard of him - he has a submersible. A submarine. It has claws, and I went down there myself. And I tell you what, pal, I saw her down there shining like a billion Spanish coins, and that’s what she does...she lights up my life.”

He leans back and takes another sip of lemonade. I know he’s joking but his eyes don’t seem to agree. It strikes me, seriously for the first time in years, that perhaps he’s had a break from reality. In the beginning, of course, it was easy to think that way. He made it easy. It was his greatest trick. The Devil and The Dictator...

“The finest trick of the devil,” he says to me, somehow (no... surely not) reading my mind, “is to persuade you that he does not exist.”

The Dictator sits back in his chair, satisfied. “Shakespeare.”

I grin. “I think it was Charles Baudelaire,” I say. “French. Nineteenth Century. He was a poet.”

“Listen, Charles…?”

“Baudelaire,” I say.

“Right,” he says. “He might have said it. Technically, he might have said it. But it was Shakespeare that came up with it. Will Shakespeare. Greatest writer the world has ever known. Smart guy. Very, very smart guy.”

In certain circles, particularly circles of The Revolution, there once floated tales of arguments and consequences; a word cloud of disappearance, strangulation, poison, torture - all orbiting The Dictator, sucked in by that gravity of Power.

I keep my mouth shut about Baudelaire and Shakespeare.

“You see those boats out there?” he asks me, pointing towards anchored yachts not far off the coast of his island. “I’ll let you in on a secret.”

He leans in and whispers, “One day. Soon. Someday soon. Very soon. Those boats are going to take me back home. Back to my people. Back to where I belong. And when I get there, I’m going to do very, very well. Because they love me. They really do. It’s easy to see.”

“This,” he gestures to everything - the lemonade, the house, the ocean - “It’s rigged. Really. They know it, you know it, I know it. Everyone knows it.”

He leans back in his chair, and takes a long drink of his lemonade. “Jesus, fuck.”

After I leave his island, but before this story goes to print, The Dictator is found dead in his bath. The official causes are au naturel, but the country whispers, “Poison,” and then, even softer, “Lemonade? Really?”

Written by: Logan Theissen

Photo by: Victoria Ostrzenski

The Blue

“You sure you want to do this? I can wait,” Jack glances over at her, and the hunger in his brown eyes betrays him.

“I’ll be fine,” Natalie swallows bile rising in her throat and throws a half-hearted smile at her younger brother.

But Jack isn’t even looking for the tell-tale signs he has always been so careful to accommodate. His desire surpasses her comfort, and Natalie closes her eyes tight and counts to ten. She’ll have to get to “fine” pretty soon.

Natalie curls her tremoring hand into a thumb down before kicking her legs out and plunging backward into the water. It is the only way she can go in: without looking.

Once she is in the water, her anxiety subsides. The sea is warm, a crisp, sheer blue that wraps around her like Jack’s baby blanket. There is nothing scary down here. It looks darker from the surface, like something could be hiding, waiting.

It is easy to imagine Cthulhu lurking when you’re standing on the boat. In reality, the monster would be as out-of-place in the sea as a grizzly bear at a tea party.

Natalie kicks her legs, propelling herself forward. She glides through the water like she should be down here, like this is her world. Jack darts next to her, his slim body a dark streak against the blue. His hand forms a circle.

Okay?

Natalie returns the signal, her circle smaller, somehow dainty in the black neoprene gloves.

Okay.

Jack takes the lead down to the Coin.

He discovered the Coin on an ill-advised solo dive two weeks ago. When he returned, he dropped the GoPro on Natalie’s stomach, savasana interrupted with a startled belch of air.

‘You have to see this,’ Jack said. They watched the video together, hunched over the miniature screen. Natalie’s back had begun to ache by the time the Coin appeared.

At first, it was a faint light, a glowing pinprick in the distance. As Jack got closer, the video revealed a narrow circular passage in the gray rock wall, the water illuminated so it shone a brilliant blue in the dark.

‘You have to come with me. We have to see where it goes,’ Jack had said. And Natalie had simply nodded, not sure to what she had agreed.

As they dive deeper, the water shifts to a thick, sapphire blue. Jack’s headlamp cuts on ahead of her. Natalie clicks hers on as well, startling a nearby school of fish that glint silver in their exit.

Jack called it the Coin because he said it was more metallic in person, and because he felt lucky finding it. Like it was a penny, heads-up. Natalie asked him why he didn’t call it the Penny, and he rolled his eyes and said it wasn’t orange.

Natalie sees the glow ahead of her and understands what her brother meant. It is still that brilliant blue color, but shot through with an earthy shimmer, like looking at the inside of a geode.

They hover in front of it, and the circle exceeds their shared width. If they spread their arms out as wide as possible, the Coin would still eclipse them. It has grown since her brother was down here. In Jack’s video, they would have had to swim one following the other. Now they can swim side-by-side.

Or they could have, if Jack had not already gone into it.

Natalie follows him, but he is moving too fast. She is closing the distance, but she will not be able to catch up and swim next to him — at least, not without overexerting herself and using too much oxygen.

Jack’s body arches back and he pauses, floating in a kind of bent crouch. Natalie swims closer and his eyes grow wide, terrified. She shakes her head, confused.

His hand goes flat, the fingers spread wide. In a slow, stiff arc, Jack moves it back and forth.

Something is wrong.

Natalie reaches out, her grip tightening around Jack’s wrist. She pivots as an electric current pulses into her. Her body contorts and Natalie shivers with that pins-and-needles sensation, like she has gone numb and feeling has just returned to her body.

Next to her, Jack remains limp. His eyes dart in fear, long eyelashes fluttering. He floats, tethered only by Natalie’s hand. She drags him behind her, pulling the two of them back through the passage in long, labored strokes.

Her left arm feels like it will seize and give out, but the rest of her body quits before it gets the chance. Natalie’s vision comes to a point as the blue fades and the world shifts to a white, cotton ball haze.

*****

Something bubbles near the shore. Lii’s sharp face snaps to attention. Her icy eyes sweep over the surface of the cove until she spots the shapes in the gray.

Two figures stand near the rocky point. They wear tight, oily black clothes and turn in drowsy circles, gauging their surroundings with muffled shouts. Wrangling tubes and canisters, the two figures look bulky against the smooth surface of the lake.

The smaller one points at the forested hills on the other side of the cove. Lii can tell from the noises that they are confused, frantic. They grow louder when they remove their masks, their screams echoing. They are sharp and painful, like the bloody bellows of wounded game.

Lii has never seen interlopers emerge from the portal before, but she is ready. She scans the horizon and turns, eying the forest close to her section of shoreline. Birds caw in the dense trees and she is still safe. The beast has not yet heard the interlopers’ call, but soon it will. And it will answer in death.

She picks up her spear and marches forward.

Written by: Erin Justice
Photo by: Victoria Ostrzenski