The Void is Ever Eager

by Jeff Somers

I sat in the dark and listened for Ellie, keeping perfectly still. It seemed very important, suddenly, that I stay perfectly still. No twitch, no shifting of weight—just the maintenance of equilibrium in the dark, quiet room. I had never sat in the overstuffed chair we kept in the corner. I’d seen people sit in it at parties, but always I’d had a vague sense of discomfort about the chair. Sometimes the shape of things tells you something about them, and this chair had just never looked comfortable, and time is precious, I didn’t want to waste it on an uncomfortable experience. Besides, it was out of the way in the room: You couldn’t see the television, or reach anything of us. Sitting in it, you were an island.

In the dark, as my eyes adjusted, the room took on a familiar layout with unfamiliar textures. Everything smooth, rubbed off.

In the light the room had warmth, because Ellie knew what she was doing when it came to decorating. She chose fabrics well, understanding that how something felt to you was just as important as how it looked. In the dark, though, all the lines and pills and deep furrows were lost: Everything was made of dark metal, cold and smooth.

Parts of me were going numb, but I didn’t want to move. I didn’t want to get river muck on the chair.

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Three months before, almost to the day, I’d been at a party in the same room, just about everyone that my wife and I knew gathered into one house and given finger foods and alcohol. We liked things casual, and insisted that anyone who wished could bring someone along, no need to call, no need to clear it with the hosts. We liked crowded parties, lots of noise, spilled drinks, people meeting new people. We didn’t want ten people standing around politely, smiling until their faces cracked.

When people brought friends things got looser and more casual. So, I didn’t know a lot of the people attending my own party, but that wasn’t unusual.

I’d met her, Veronica Sawl, in this very room.

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This story was published in From the Asylum in July 2006.

No Stranger to Frustration

by Jeff Somers

IT WAS the fourth of July again, and the Indians next door were playing music at top volume in their yard. Mister Carrol thought it sounded like a lot of cats being killed, slowly. He stood on the roof looking out across the city, across the river to the other city, smoking a cigarette and feeling the warm roof under his bare feet. The air was still but not oppressive, hanging but not pushing, clear and thin. He took a deep drag on his cigarette and contributed his own minor pollution to the atmosphere.

He glanced down at the backyard. It was overgrown with trees and weeds and rusting metal, completely untended and as wild as yards got in the city. It was a small, dark jungle, surrounded by neat and careful yards, yards with gardens, yards with tended lawns.

Mister Carrol sighed, flicking his cigarette into the night. He just hadn’t had the energy to deal with the yard recently.

He put his hands in his pockets, nodded to himself, and stepped off the roof.

The Indians next door, drunk on cheap domestic beer, heard something big and heavy crash through the trees and hit one of the rusting old bicycles in their neighbor’s yard, but the music drowned most of the noise out, and none of them heard the soft laughter that persisted for a few minutes after. They discussed the crash and finally one man got up and padded, none too steadily, over to the fence.

He returned a moment later, shaking his head, and retrieved his beer. “That man is crazy,” he said to the other men. “He is lying in his backyard, laughing to himself.”

They nodded, sagely.

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