Mercy

Dana was standing near the theater when he pulled up in his red BMW to ask for directions. He looked about her age, perhaps eighteen or nineteen, blond hair, golden tan, leading-role actor face, expensive-looking shirt. His overwhelming attractiveness made her instantly wary. Guys who looked like him didn't smile like that at girls with lank dishwater-blond hair, unremarkable faces, and dumpy bodies hidden under shapeless thrift-shop sweaters. They certainly didn't ask them out to the movies.

He introduced himself as John – no last name – just John.

Perhaps she could go with him, but head home right after in case this was a cruel prank or he was trying to recruit her for some crazy cult. Her friends didn't share her taste in movies, and it would be nice to have someone to go with for once, particularly someone so attractive. But she hesitated before getting into his car. She knew it wasn't a smart thing to do, so she scanned the vehicle's interior for signs, her gaze falling upon the photo of a beagle snuggled up to a kitten that sat on the dashboard.

"Your pets?" she asked.

"Yes."

She jumped into his vehicle and then cursed her naiveté as the door shut with an ominous click, trapping her in an enclosed space with a stranger. She rolled down the window to provide an escape hatch.

"The movie doesn't start until seven," she said.

"Is there somewhere we can hang out for a couple of hours?" he asked, flashing his perfect teeth at her.

Perhaps he was just looking for easy sex and assumed that a homely girl would be a quick and easy lay, she told herself to crush her pathetic hopefulness.

"We could go to the lake," she said. "It's only a couple of miles from here."

The lake was actually just a large pond surrounded by a few dilapidated cabins and farmhouses, pretty in a rough sort of way. As they made their way down to the surrounding grass, John looked up at the trees as though amazed by them, stopping to stroke the rough bark of a willow.

While he gazed at the tree, she examined his face, searching for the imperfections that make faces interesting, but his skin told no stories. Everything was symmetrical and immaculate.

After they settled on the grass, he asked about her favorite movies and she described the cheesy sci-fi epics and thrillers she loved.

"So, you like movies where everyone dies?"

"It's funny, because in real life, I can't stand it when anyone is sad. I think movies are my way of facing the darkness in a safe place."

He gazed at the murky pond, frowning. She willed her foot not to twitch. He was so calm and still.

"Are you nervous?" he asked.

She bit her lip. "A little."

"Why?"

"Because I like you."

Her treacherous mouth had released the words before she could stop it, and she wasn't even sure why she liked him. She didn't really know him at all.

"I like you, too," he said, but he wasn't smiling and she couldn't read him. She'd seen attraction on boys' faces a few times in her life, a dilation of the pupils, a quickening of the breath. John showed neither of these signs. Maybe he was gay and wanted a woman to hang around with for cover so that he could stay in the closet. She looked at her watch to escape the awkwardness.

"We should head back."

They rose from the grass. On the way to John's vehicle, Dana spotted something peering through the grimy window of a broken-down barn.

"There's a chicken in there," she said, scanning the surrounding buildings. The place was obviously abandoned. "I need to rescue it."

"Don't you eat chickens?" he asked.

"I'm a vegan. I don't eat anything from animals." she replied as she sought a way into the barn. The only entrance she found was an old gate secured with a rusted padlock.

"Why?"

"Just because you're smarter than something, doesn't give you the right to exploit it. And I'm not even sure we're smarter than them, at least not in the ways that count. I need to break this window."

"I'll do it," he said, unzipping his sweatshirt and wrapping it around his fist. He struck one of the panes with a quick, sharp jab, then watched with evident fascination as Dana coaxed the weak, scrawny bird toward the opening and lifted the little body into her arms.

"My aunt runs an animal sanctuary," she said. "I can bring the chicken to her tomorrow morning."

"Sanctuary," he repeated thoughtfully, as though tasting the word.

"I'm sorry," she said with a pang of regret. "I can't do the movie, now. I have to get food for her."

"What do they eat?"

"Grains, seeds, stuff like that."

"I have sunflower seeds at home. I live nearby."

"That would be awesome!"

This guy is dangerous, she thought. I could fall in love with him.

She'd expected something fancy and intimidating, so she was surprised when he pulled up in front of a decrepit little cottage with flaking paint surrounded by a neglected, overgrown garden. They walked along the broken cobblestones, the yellowing tendrils of wild plants snaking around their ankles. Nothing about John matched up, but she was happy that he lived in a place like this. She could imagine sitting with a second-hand book in the wild chaos of a garden where each plant was allowed to do whatever it wanted. Perhaps she and John weren't so different as she had initially thought.

He opened the door to a dark hallway, and she followed him until it gave way to a room that didn't make sense. Was this a meth lab? The place was full of scientific equipment arrayed on long, shiny, stainless steel counters, so at odds with the rustic exterior of the cottage. Then she spotted the shackles bolted to the gleaming metal table in the center of the room and a scream froze in her throat.

She turned to see John advancing on her. He was holding a long, slender metal object that had to be some sort of weapon, and her last thought was regret that she would die so absurdly, killed by a mad scientist while holding a starving chicken.

There was a flash, and everything went black.

                                                                                            ***

797097 was back on the ship, reporting to his superior officer.

"The meat is no good."

"Full dissection? You conducted all the tests?"

"Yes," he lied. "Very toxic. No usable parts."

"We'll need to find another source, then."

                                                                                            ***

Dana woke by the lake with no memory of how she'd come to be there. She'd been in front of the theater and now she lay on the grass with a scrawny chicken nuzzling her open palm. Had she hit her head? She didn't have a headache. Perhaps she'd fainted. She should go to a clinic and get checked out, but first she would take care of the pitiful animal at her side. For some reason she couldn't fathom, she wanted to name it John.

Written by: Jennifer Copley

Photograph by: Phillip Wolt

The Ballad of Maria

There before us is Mexico. It is dry and clean, framed by the hard edges of the car windows. There is a kind of architectural brilliance to this sterile landscape, to it’s lack of mess. So, I ask, “What am I doing here? What is there to say of Mexico?” I am offered no answers, so I’ll make my own.

My answer is Maria, dying of cancer. She is being removed from this world, systematically at times. We are desperate, and because we saw it in a movie and because we are American we believe in the ability of the road to heal.

The road heals, cancer kills, and Mexico sucks; I hold these truths to be self-evident. Thou shalt not cross the border into this fucking hellsuck of a desert that swallows souls.

I’m driving a white 89’ VW Cabriolet with the top up. I’m not a car guy and the only reason I know this particular model is because Jorge at the car rental place kept repeating “Cabriolet” over and over again as his selling point. Maria tried to dust off her Spanish but Jorge kept saying “Cabriolet” and finally I said, “Fuck, fine,” and Jorge smiled and walked to the back to get the keys.

And so now I’m driving a fucking “Cabriolet.”

Maria says, “You’re so angry. Please, be calm.”

Of course I’m angry. Why aren’t you angry? You should be fucking angry, too. Instead, she smokes a joint. She leans her head back against the seat and blows the smoke out of the open window and into the Mexican desert and then she offers the joint to me. I decline because I don’t smoke anymore. Since she was diagnosed, I can’t risk losing control of my emotions. I have to stay on point, so for her I decline the joint. I have to pilot the Cabriolet.

Here, we learn what Maria looks like. My description would be different if the desert and the cancer hadn’t stolen all of my romantic impulses, but they did, and now I am committed to realism. Maria is wearing a white dress with no bra; it’s a perfect dress to wear in a desert. She is twenty-two years old, half-Mexican from her father’s side, with dark skin that seems as if it was made to be in the sun. She had brown hair until she lost all of it, and at that time she wore a blue headscarf that had a little pink chicken on one corner. For reasons unknown even to her, she loves chickens. Now that she has stopped treatment her hair has grown back, but she still wears the scarf. Underneath, she sports a pixie-cut and her hair is a lighter shade of brown. When she got sick she fell off the edge, emotionally, I mean. I was of no assistance to her at that time and we went three weeks without seeing each other or talking. Before she got sick, I hadn’t been away from her for more than twenty-four hours since middle school. Eventually, she walked through the door back into the light, I suppose, and she was pretty much like she was before, except she no longer smiled with teeth. All her smiles were tight-lipped from that point on and it was a real shame. She had a great smile.

If you can’t tell that I love her, then I haven’t done a good job describing her.

She smokes more of the joint and keeps her head tilted toward the window so I can only see half of her face. She’s wearing sunglasses. The sun hangs above us in a blue sky buttressed by billowy, white cumulonimbus clouds. The red clay and dirt of the desert run beneath us. Mesquite trees, bent grotesquely by the wind, look like frail, hunkered witches and pockmark the land around our small highway.

I asked Maria where she wanted to go and she said, “I want to drive into the sun,” so we’re heading West. I’m hoping when we get there it swallows us up, both of us, and we won’t have to worry about Mexico or cancer ever again. But before we make it to the sun, we pass a small restaurant on the side of the highway, the first of its kind that we’ve seen, and Maria has the munchies so she instructs me to pull over. Once at a stop, she gets out the car and stretches and looks around and I wonder if she’s counting the times she’ll partake in normal, regular things. I know that I’m counting. There is a finite number of times that she’ll get out of a car after a long ride and stretch and look around at new environment. Does this make her moments more special? Yes. Should it? I don’t know.

The restaurant is actually more of a cantina and there are chickens. Because the universe makes no sense, Maria has cancer and will die before twenty-three, but at least there are chickens. She is pleased. We sit at one of the few tables and a teenage girl in jean shorts, sneakers, and a baby blue t-shirt greets us. There is a sign in English that says “Fresh eggs” on the gate of a wood fence behind us. The teenage girl’s name is Violet and when Maria tells her that her name is beautiful the girl grins and says in broken English that she’s the only person that she’s ever known named Violet. Maria replies that she’s never met a Violet either, and then asks me. I knew a Violet in third grade. “Nope,” I reply. “Never.”

We order pastor tacos with diced onions, peppers, and pineapple bits. They will be served on fresh corn tortillas. Maria is humming a tune and I know what it is before she says, “Do you remember my song?” I recognize it because I wrote it. It’s called “The Ballad of Maria,” and I wrote and played it for her in college. It’s a waltz with twelve verses and even though it’s insanely over the top, she loves it, and therefore so do I.

The tacos will arrive and they’ll be delicious. Night will come as well, and we won’t drive into the sun and disappear, not today. Instead we’ll stay at the cantina and drink tequila with Violet’s father who will have a guitar and I will play “The Ballad of Maria,” and when it’s over everyone will clap except for her. No, Maria will just smile at me, with teeth.

We’ll stay in Mexico until her penultimate month, where she’ll smoke weed and I’ll count the things she does as she does them for the last time; the last time Maria swims in the ocean, the last time Maria drinks a beer, the last time Maria showers in a Mexican motel room. Before it’s too late, we’ll go home. Her sister will sit next to me at the funeral and we’ll hold hands as we watch the progression of Maria’s life through a series of pictures being projected on the back wall of the church. You know the kind of pictures I’m referring to, so I don’t feel the need to explain.

She’ll select a Beatles song, “Happiness Is A Warm Gun,” to be played during the slideshow and toward the end, there for everyone to see, will be the picture I took of our Mexican cantina. Here’s the last time Maria smiled with teeth. Here’s the last time she hung out with chickens. Here’s the last time someone played her song, the one she used to hum, the Ballad of Maria.


Written by: Logan Theissen
Photograph by: Emily Blincoe