Among the artists exhibiting are: Kelly Boehmer, Scott G. Brooks, Ray Caesar, Kate Clark, Timothy Cummings, Lori Field, Laurie Hogin, Mark Hosford, Jessica Joslin, Richard A. Kirk, Kris Kuksi, Laurie Lipton, Travis Louie, Elizabeth McGrath, Chris Mars, Christian Rex van Minnen, Kathie Olivas, Marion Peck, Judith Schaechter, Greg “Craola” Simkins, Heidi Taillefer, Martin Wittfooth, Thomas Woodruff, and Chet Zar. Many of the artists will be coming to Tallahassee for the opening.

  *

  What’s next for Carrie Ann Baade?

  I will be leaving the Deep South for a few months to go to Italy to attend a “visionary” workshop with Amanda Sage and Laurence Carauna. For the next year and a half, all my energy will go into preparing for a large traveling exhibition of my new art, which will feature works exploring good and bad government and other themes of that affect our current society. One such title is “Our Lady of Psychotic Optimism,” a little something for everyone who has been praying that things will get better for the past few years. It should be pretty exciting work.

  THE DINER ON THE EDGE OF HELL, by Ramsey Shehadeh

  Janikowski sat absolutely still, watching the dying penumbral day melt down the diner’s front window. He said: “Shut up, Petrie.”

  “I’m just saying I’ve heard she’s hot,” said Petrie. “I don’t think that makes me a bad person.” He screwed the lid off the sugar server and inverted it over his coffee. “I also hear she’s kind of a perfectionist. And a little neurotic.”

  Janikowski grunted, and scanned the barren landscape on the other side of the window, but there was no sign of her. Helen was never late.

  “Don’t get me wrong, I like neurotic perfectionists.” Petrie took a long swallow, studying Janikowski over the rim of his mug. “I bet you’re wondering why.”

  “No. Stop talking.”

  “Because there’s no way you’re going to be good enough for them, right? But they’ll have sex with you anyway, because they’re secretly terrified that no one will ever be good enough for them.”

  “You have no fucking idea what you’re talking about,” he said. “None.”

  Petrie shrugged and lifted a slice of pizza out of the box between them. “How much longer are we going to wait?”

  “As long as it takes.”

  “We’ve been here all day.”

  “We’ve been here for a little less than an hour.”

  “Well, it seems like all day.”

  “No argument here,” said Janikowski, shifting this gaze to Petrie and holding it there.

  Petrie laughed and sat back, chewing placidly, and looked around the diner. It was a spotless, perfect stereotype of itself: bright porcelain tiles, harsh fluorescent lights, a juke box, a pinball machine. A line of pennants hung just below the ceiling, points-down, like a colorful array of stalactites. Booths lined three of the walls in a sort of squared-off U, capped by the long Formica bar at the back of the diner. A demon in a kilt stood behind the bar, wiping down its glossy surface. His name was Harold.

  “Hey,” called Petrie, and pointed at his empty mug. Harold glanced up with two of his eyes, and nodded.

  There was a flash of color on the other side of the window, and a rift opened up in the molten sky. Janikowski leaned forward and watched something pour out of it—a long columnar thump of something, like a narrow waterfall—and explode into a roiling particulate cloud when it touched the ground. He squinted through the muck until the cloud resolved itself a swarm of creatures, tiny with distance, making its way toward the diner.

  “I thought we were waiting for a girl,” said Petrie.

  “We are.”

  “Then why am I looking at a horde of demons?” There was a tightness in Petrie’s voice that some people might have mistaken for fear.

  Janikowski stood up. “I don’t know.”

  “This is a setup.”

  “Maybe.” He took a step toward the door, looked back. “You coming?”

  “Hell yes I’m coming.” Petrie ducked under the table and came up with his cannon. It was long and smooth and tubular and taller than he was, made out of some kind of milk-white metal, with a muzzle the size of a rabbit hole and some sort of fiendishly complicated mechanism on the butt end. “This is finally getting interesting.”

  * * * *

  Janikowski stepped out of the diner into the suffocating heat of the Penumbrum and stared across the expanse of cracked earth that separated him from the approaching demon cloud. There were hundreds of them, winged and unwinged, limbless and centipedinal, running and crawling and slithering and skittering. He frowned.

  “You notice something strange about that horde?” he said.

  Petrie was doing something complicated with the machinery of his weapon. He glanced up. “Yeah. They haven’t been blown into little demon bits yet.” He swung the cannon onto his shoulder. “But I’m getting ready to fix that.”

  “They’re all bunched up,” said Janikowski, distantly. But it was more than that—their various gnashings and writhings appeared to be directed inward, toward the center of the cloud.

  “Just means they’re easier to hit.” Petrie yanked back on a lever. There was a solid thunk of something very large falling into place.

  “No. It means that she’s in there, somewhere.”

  “Or that.” Petrie sighted down the barrel. “You might want to back up a little, Boss. This thing kicks.”

  Janikowski frowned. “So firing a rocket into the middle of that mess, where she is, isn’t an option. Christ, do you take stupid pills?”

  “If she’s really in there she’s dead already. Or wishes she was.”

  “I don’t think so. Let’s wait.”

  “Oh, you mean wait for that fucking army over there to get a little closer? I’m taking stupid pills?”

  “The reason we’re here—the only reason we’re here—is to bring her back to purgatory. Not scraps of her. Her.”

  “Why you’re here, maybe,” said Petrie, but he lowered the gun.

  They watched the cloud draw closer. It was a whirling dervish, fiery and particulate, and the sound of it began to filter through to them: a sustained, buzzing keen, a churning stew of rage and frustration.

  “They’re pissed,” said Petrie, smiling.

  “Ok, let’s peel them off,” said Janikowski, and unfurled his wings. They lit up like an ivory sunrise, blinding and antiseptic. “You go left.” He flapped once, twice, and then he was airborne, corkscrewing toward the horde. He opened his mouth and began to sing. In the distance, he heard Petrie doing the same. Their thick choral harmonies saturated the Penumbrum, instantly ubiquitous, infusing everything they touched with the awful, scabrous purity of heaven.

  The demons went mad. The buzzing rose instantly to a cacophonous, infernal scream that mingled, but did not mix, with the chilly perfection of the heavensong. The horde split in two, like frenzied ants bifurcating off an anthill: one half hurtling toward Janikowski, the other toward Petrie.

  What they left in their wake was a small bubble—a hamster ball, essentially, scaled up to human size, its contours defined by the globe of clarity it circumscribed, bright and untainted by the atmosphere of the Penumbrum. A few stragglers clung to its surface, clawing vainly at nothing, hissing at the tall woman in its center.

  Helen.

  She wore a shapeless grey gown, a red scarf that ran most of the way down her back, thick black combat boots. A small child with an unruly thatch of black hair strode by her side, holding her hand, occasionally breaking into a run to match her long, steady strides.

  “Ah, fuck me,” breathed Janikowski, and wheeled about and shot straight up, spiraling toward the indistinct roof of the Penumbrum. The demons came after him.

  He heard, dimly, the boom of Petrie’s howitzer going off, saw a geyser of dust and blood rise up in the distance, spreading like a mushroom cloud, and made a mental note to get himself one of those things. Because the situation was growing desperate. He could feel the heat of his pursuers’ rage, singeing the fringes of his wings. He risked a look back. The lead demon was a vaguely tick-shaped leviathan, with insectile legs the size and span of tree trunks jutting uselessly out of its swollen abdomen under an array of black buzzing wings, beating in hummingbird time. Boils rose and burst in waves across the surface of its black carapace, sending up a piston-chorus of blood geysers. The stench of dead souls and suffering blasted out of its mouth, like heat from an open furnace.

  A smaller demon drew level with him. It was nothing more than a random conflation of organs and orifices embedded in a skein of ligaments, all of them quivering like insects trapped in a spider’s web. A face rose to the surface of the skein and pressed against its netting, between a pair of beating hearts. “Hello angel,” it said. “An eternity of suffering awaits you.”

  “Nice pancreas,” said Janikowski, and yawed left, catching the web of the demon’s body up in the tips of his wings, then beat down hard. The demon exploded, sending a shower of organs down into the maw of the giant behind him.

  Which was satisfying, but stupid, because it slowed him down. More of them were catching up now—he saw them out of the corner of his eye, flanking him, drawing steadily closer: a pincer, closing slowly. He was out of breath, and his whole body burned with the exertion of flight, and he longed desperately to stop singing. But he couldn’t. The heavensong was the only reason his pursuers hadn’t noticed the rapidly-approaching horizon. Almost there, now.

  A swarm of embodied screams darted in and latched onto his calf and began to feed. He beat down the cry that was trying to muscle its way into his song. Almost there.

  A goat-demon with a pincushion of tiny horns on its crown drew abreast, and tore off its head, and hurled it at him. He felt it pierce his side, just below the wing, and stick there. Presently it began to chew. Janikowski risked a glance down. The head smiled up at him around a mouthful of flesh, and winked.

  Almost there.

  An array of contortionist hermaphrodites, covered in a thick carpet of sex organs, rose around him in a ring, each copulating helplessly with itself in backbreaking and unsavory ways, spinning closer with each revolution.

  There.

  He punched through the roof of the penumbrum, and felt the familiar queasy sucking sensation, and saw the dark muck he’d been flying through become, instantly, the empty blackness of the stitching that held the planes together. He couldn’t see the demons, but he heard their screams falter as they realized what they’d done.

  And then he was through, into heaven.

  The light of heaven isn’t light, exactly—it’s a radioactive bludgeoning of purity; a bright, punishing ubiquity. It doesn’t illuminate so much as incinerate: burning away darkness, and shadow, and ambiguity. It’s a kind of fire. A kind that demons are not built to withstand.

  They came through with him, the whole horde of them. The smaller, more vulnerable ones simply exploded, or shriveled up into desiccated strips of tissue, and fell. The larger, hardier ones screamed, and wheeled, and rushed back downward.

  But it was too late. The border guards were waiting.

  The angels who watch the borders of heaven are all of a certain type: teutonic and shirtless, with gleaming wings, hard abdomens, white teeth. Standard angels: PR angels. They are also savage beyond description.

  They descended in regimented rows, their wings beating in time, identical, beatific smiles fixed on their identical faces, singing as they came, their voices ringing out in lovely, devastating peals. They fell upon the demons and began to tear them calmly, methodically apart. The melee soon faded into a diffuse cloud of blood and screams.

  Janikowski alighted on a rocky protuberance and took stock of the damage. Most of his calf had been stripped of skin. His right side was pierced and torn, and still had little bits of horn embedded in it. Many of the feathers on the underside of his wings were burned away.

  An angel landed silently beside him. He had blond hair and blue piercing eyes. “You are injured, brother,” he said, smiling.

  Janikowski shrugged. “It’ll heal.”

  “Demon injuries,” said the angel, “never fully heal. Perhaps you should consult Father.”

  “Perhaps you should mind your own fucking business.”

  The angel’s smile widened. “Know, heretic, that you are tolerated only because Father has not yet seen fit to disown you. When his forbearance wanes, you will find your brothers far less forgiving of your eccentricities.”

  “You’re not my brother, psychopath,” said Janikowski. He stood up and beat his wings and rose haltingly into the air, grimacing at the pain, then turned and dove downwards, past the massacre, toward the border, and punched back into the Penumbrum.

  * * * *

  Helen was studying a menu when Janikowski stepped back into the diner. The child was folded into the corner beside her, his big brown eyes just visible over the formica surface of the table. Petrie sat across from them both, leering.

  Janikowski slid in beside Petrie, and said: “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

  “Language,” said Helen, inclining her head toward the child.

  “You weren’t supposed to bring anyone out.”

  “I hadn’t intended to.”

  “You’re never supposed to bring anyone out.”

  “I saw an opportunity.” She fired up a cigarette and blew out a plume of smoke. “His name’s Jose. He’s eight.”

  “There are rules we can’t break.”

  “No there aren’t. There are only rules we haven’t broken yet. And now there’s one less of those.” She turned back to the menu. “Are the eggs any good?”

  “Everything’s good,” said Janikowski. “What do you plan to do with him?”

  “Are you Helen of Troy Helen?” said Petrie, suddenly.

  Helen turned the menu over, and pointed the tip of her cigarette at Petrie. “This guy’s been gawking at me since we walked in,” she said. “Can you get him to stop?”

  “I’m admiring,” said Petrie. “And no, he can’t. Why would you want him to?”

  Helen snorted, and then her eyes caught. “Hey. Hash browns.”

  Harold came up with a tray of coffee cups. The child let out a little cry, and buried himself in Helen’s robes.

  “No, no,” she said, stroking his head. “He’s ok, Honey.” She looked at Harold. “He just came out of hell,” she said, apologetically.

  Harold nodded, and did something crawly with his mandibles that was—Janikowski had come to understand—roughly equivalent to a smile.

  As demons went, Harold was relatively unhorrific. He had hooves, and far too many eyes, and the sounds he made were distressingly insectile—but he also had two arms and two legs and one head, and reeked of neither hatred nor putrescence. He smelled, not unpleasantly, like a bowl of recently extinguished matches.

  The boy was crying now—a low, sustained sobbing. Harold focused all of his eyes on him, then walked away.

  “So what now?” said Janikowski, to no one in particular.

  “Now,” said Helen, “we eat. And then we take Jose to heaven.”

  Petrie snorted. Helen looked at him, and then at Janikowski. “What?”

  “You can’t bring that kid into heaven.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’s been in hell.”

  “I got to him before they did. I mean the second he dropped in from purgatory. I was waiting.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I’m telling you, they didn’t lay a finger on him.”

  “It doesn’t matter. They’ll smell it on him. They’ll see it in his eyes. They’ll know.”

  “Who’ll know?”

  “The fucking seraphim,” sneered Petrie.

  “Language,” said Helen. “Why would the seraphim care?”

  “You don’t understand,” said Janikowski. “There are rules. Any mortals who cross the border into hell are anathema. Even if they’re untouched. Even if they’re wholly innocent.”

  “Well, I’m sure they’ll make an exception in this case. He’s just a boy.”

  “The seraphim don’t do exceptions,” said Petrie.

  Janikowski nodded. “They don’t understand the concept. They’ll tear him to pieces. They won’t even think about it.”

  Harold returned, carrying a tray with a bottle of Grape Nehi in its center. He stopped several feet away, picked up the bottle, leaned over, and placed it on the table’s edge. He produced a coloring book from his kilt pocket, along with a little pack of crayons, and slid them onto the table, beside the bottle. Then he turned and walked away.

  After a moment, the boy peeked around Helen’s side. His eyes fixed on the Nehi. Helen slid it toward him.

  “Just dump him in purgatory,” said Petrie. “Someone’ll pick him up.”

  “He’s not safe there. He needs someone to take care of him.”

  “Yeah,” said Petrie, nodding solemnly “Hey, you want to get a drink later?”

  “Can you guys watch him for a while?” she said, looking at Janikowski.

  “No.”

  “Just until I figure something out.”

  “No.”

  “What kind of angels are you? This kid’s a complete innocent.”

  “Then why’d he wind up in hell?” said Petrie.

  “Who knows? Maybe someone was using him to run drugs. Maybe he shoplifted a candybar.” She shrugged. “Or maybe he just got poached.”

  The boy leaned across and grabbed the coloring book, flipped it open to a farm scene: a line of chicks in the foreground, a cow and a barn and a bale of hay in the background. He picked through the box, and pulled out a yellow crayon.

  “Please. Just for a while,” said Helen. There was an uncharacteristic note of pleading in her voice.

  Janikowski shook his head. “You don’t understand. It’s not that we won’t. It’s that we can’t.”

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11