The Year's Best Horror Stories 21

DEFINING THE COMMONPLACE SLIVER by Wayne Allen Sallee

We all lead commonplace lives, he had said in a time that seemed so long ago that he might have actually only written it down. He was a writer, but he had bills, and rent, and health insurance. Things he once had to think about the same way he thought about his writing. Feeling on top of things until the sensation was so good that it only made some perverse sense that things come crashing down.

Commonplace vignettes written down in commonplace books with whatever ink pen might be handy right then and there. He had been talking to a waitress in a diner on Montrose, a dark-haired woman whose eyes spoke of their own secrets, who simply wanted to know what the hell a Belmont-Cragin cop was doing writing stories in a notebook. Maybe I’m writing out possible health violations, he smiled. Maybe you’re writing about me, she said back. If he thought hard enough, he could recall how her nostrils flared, how her chin tilted up. Then every image in his mind toppled into the next like apologies on the tip of an epileptic’s tongue.

My name is Dave Slenium, he whispered/narrated in his mind because he knew he would never live to write his last tale. It would be a short one. He was not expected to last out the night. Or so he thought he had heard. Maybe he had whispered it himself, in a kind of prayer. And I was a writer who believed in what I was doing. It was important to me that I told people what my life was like, who I encountered, why they did what they did. It was too difficult to narrate and sad, as well.

He wrote stories with few slivers of hope because that is all he saw every day. Eyes, set into faces barely two decades old that were either pissed off, pissed on, or simply drawn out and tired. He was writer, but he was a cop first. He had been a cop longer, for ten of his thirty-three years. He had only been writing, and for contributor copies at that, for less than two. But he was getting better at his writing, defining the slivers in ways unique to his point of view. Had been getting better with his writing, rather. Before he’d been shot.

He reflected on his first sales—really, for the most part, acceptances—in the minutes he lay on the floor of the Eddy Street garage waiting for another squad to respond to shots fired. Neither he nor his partner, Tim Hauser, had an opportunity to call in an officer-down. They had responded to the 10-1, a domestic disturbance, twenty minutes before their shift ended. Domestic disturbances were worse than picking up a D & D, because even a stewbum swinging a gun couldn’t be expected to shoot straight.

Family holidays were the worst, and this time it was a Mother’s Day fight.

Hauser called it in as a 10-1 Edward after they found the perpetrator gone by the time their squad rolled down the street of the three-flats. The perpetrator was a disassociated schizophrenic, one Howard Shehostak, who had been on holiday release from County to visit his grandmother, Josephine. She had called the Belmont-Cragin district house after he began threatening her with a cake knife. Hauser and Slenium were on their way back to the squad when they heard the scraping coming from the vacant garage on the corner of Eddy and Wolcott.

Slenium went down first with a knife gouge in the armpit. His partner was stabbed in his left eye. Both were then shot a total of five times with Tim Hauser’s police-issued revolver.

And now Slenium thought about what he had written, the stories over coffee that relieved his stress better than any six-pack of beer or endless shot glass of bourbon. Write what you know, a New York editor had told him once. His early stories were the clichés every editor dreads, he learned that quickly enough. The girl in the tavern who isn’t what she seems, that kind of thing.

But he’d added a twist borne of his career as a cop that made a “Cat From Hell” story become the “Pit Bull From Hell” story. Still a horrid tale, with the owners getting their just rewards after the cops can’t shut down their operation, but with fresh characters in an all-too-real setting. His only professional sale was to a crime anthology. “Incident in the Van Buren Corridor” was about a druggie on PCP and a rookie cop.

Slenium wondered if there would be any posthumous pro sales. The right side of his face had gone numb, and he figured he had about two pints of his blood mixed with the oil on the garage floor. When he held his breath, he could hear nothing coming from his partner’s gaping mouth. He knew he’d been hit in the chest several times.

He measured out his remaining life in eight minute rumblings, a product of the subway line running beneath Milwaukee. He wished he could smell the heady mix of piss and rain water the train’s passing brought. All he smelled was death.

And all he saw, all at once, was stories he would never write. Ideas he had yet to have. The first one was simple: an elderly woman staring out the window after hearing shots in her garage, afraid to move toward the phone to call the police. Scene shift to a cement floor stained with copper tears.

The thoughts became clearer as he lost more of his life. It made sense to him. Writing about what you know is the hardest sacrifice. Giving up all your worst fears and secret concerns. He couldn’t recall the last thing he had written in his commonplace notebook. When he coughed, it tasted like he was licking a battery.

And the images went through a red gauze and touched him with comforting, soothing caresses. The lady in red is dancing with comforting, soothing caresses. “The lady in red is dancing with me,” song lyrics that became the dirge of an infantryman, spastic in machine gun fire in the Gulf War. “The devil with the blue dress on” was Lake Michigan and the scene of a drowning.

He would have written stories about real life, paring down his soul, allowing his veins to bleed onto the lines of his notebook. Tapping out his pulse with a coffee spoon. He would write about the retarded girl who got pregnant and gave her babies to a neighbor, who in turn sold them to a certain man who ran a certain strip joint in a western suburb. He encouraged the retarded girl to get pregnant again, eventually doing the job himself. He’d write about the waitress, and maybe call her Lisa, or Lilah. Words clicked against each other. A Leland Street hooker called herself Shelby, shortened from her given name Michelle Beatrice. Another writer he admired became Willy Sid, a small-time hustler. And in a burst of wonder, he thought of his boyhood dreams of Betty Page, good girl model of the 50’s. Of how her fame might be construed to her resemblance to the infamous Black Dahlia, murdered in Los Angeles in 1947. And what a story it would be if a young punk, hip to both legends, decided that, if he found the right gold coast hooker, well, his Rogers Park girlfriend might become the next super-model of the nineties. Maybe pattern her after the waitress at the diner, give her a mysterious name like Lisa Sestina.

The words became ideas that were more fantastical than he had ever thought he could create. A girl in the subway carried around a box, its contents were the shadows of fingers from beneath spinning plates. A man with no fingers waited in the begging room for a bastardized phone to shudder. A man was thrown off a bridge and it sounded like skeleton keys being dropped down a vacant stairwell.

The Fremont hotel is saved the indignity of being demolished because a local historian torches the place the night before the wrecking crew moves in. The rags that were ignited were being worn at the time by a toothless bum named Blackstone Shatner, who drank his Wild Irish Rose from a detergent measuring cup. So many wonderful tales. He knew how to give of himself. How to define the slivers with his own last breaths.

But he would not allow himself to smile at the rush of a dream realized, at least in some small way. When the next squad car showed, his blood had pooled against the far wall of the garage. It had started to dry up.

In memory of Ray Rexer: 1953-1991