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A collection of tales from Auraria’s dark past

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Don’t turn around.

When you hear her giggle, don’t so much as tilt your head in her direction. Even when the sound slithers closer and closer to your ear, making your muscles stiffen and your pupils dilate until your eyes are as black as hers, don’t move.

Even when your pulse screams inside your veins, blood sprinting to your limbs, readying you to fight or flee; even when your throat constricts and your tongue feels thick and tacky inside the dry cavity of your mouth, keep still.

Close your eyes. Hard. Fight every amplified instinct in your body and let her circle around you.

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It’s a game, you see. Just wait. Wait until she starts her rhyme, then run.

There was a little girl,And she had a little curlRight in the middle of her forehead.

Run hard. Through the corridor. Down the spiral staircase.

When she was good,She was very, very good;

Get out of the building before she finishes that last line.

But when she was bad…

Grab hold of the door handle.

…she was horrid.

She’s caught you.

AnatomyHaven

The Devil of Ninth Street

A Glimpse from the Parapet

Tapped

Counting Matches

3

7

13

19

25

Tivoli

Student SuccessBuilding

St. Cajetan's

Ninth Street Park

Lawrence Street Mall

St. Francis Way

Arts

Plaza

P.E.

King

Library

West

Central

Illustration by Kira Wolfson

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HavenStory by F. SerranoIllustration by Brianna Thorsen

Haven’s case is still open. The police are calling it “death under suspicious circumstance.” Whatever that means. I think it means that the police don’t

have a clue about what happened to Haven. No one seems to know. We’d all heard the weird rumors on campus about the new Student Success Building. The youth choir nearly lost in a sinkhole during the groundbreaking ceremony. No big deal. Then the sightings of mysterious, first-world apparitions at the skeletal construction site. Numerous sightings. And we thought, okay, jocks sneaking smokes. The building went up, and the rumors persisted, more imaginative than their predecessors. Guys lost work hours, workdays, fingers, toes, and even an eye. The crew whispered of black shadows pushing tilted ladders, tipping laden buckets, and dangling tangled wires across their paths. My personal favorite was the report of the haunted war drums sounding through the half-finished, late-night corridors. Bum, bum, bumm. Bum, bum, bumm. Bum, bum, bumm. Again, lots of reports. And we figured, okay, music majors or drama kids. They heard melodies everywhere, and they were known for pulling shit like that. Creative artists and all. But not a single recording. Ninety-two percent of students carrying a smartphone, ever at the ready, and not a single note captured. That’s suspect. We thought that the rumors were just that: rumors. Perhaps, all that legal weed manifesting itself on campus. Or maybe some kind of sophomoric prank. Either way, cynical suspicion and a healthy doubt colored our discussions of the matter. So when Haven started acting weird...we thought, yeah right. Here we go again. She was pulling our leg. She had been known to do that. Pull a leg or two. She saw something. Allegedly. A woman, sobbing inconsolably, curled in a ball just outside the new haunted digs. She said the woman vanished when she went to touch her. I wanted to laugh out loud. I couldn’t believe she’d try

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something so lame. I dismissed it. We all dismissed it. Then it was an eyelash. She kept saying an eyelash was bothering her. She started pulling them out in little bunches. I admired the commitment to her ruse. I was curious to see how far she’d take it. Smirking, I told her to see an eye doctor. She refused. She said it was a shadow from the SSB, following her. I laughed out loud. Then it was the nightmares. She said that she was having a recurring nightmare. She called it her, “haunted memory.” It was the same every night and she’d describe it in excruciating detail over and over to anyone who’d listen. She’d wake to find herself on a beautiful stretch of plain. A small, gurgling river wound slowly nearby. The mountains, usually distant, were nestled in the morning light, near at hand. The air was crisp and clean, distant birdsong carried on the hard morning breeze, and the sky was a pale blue masterpiece. A pre-civilization paradise. Then the darkness would come, like a dismal oil poured over the idyllic scene. The pale blue sky would slowly burn to black. The prairie would smolder and the steady pounding of war drums would rise on the wind. So she’d run. Toward the river she’d run. And that demonic fire burned. It burned faster than she could run, and the prairie piled beneath her weary feet, like a thin skin sloughing off of a battered skull. The sky filled with thick, black smoke and her ears filled with the cacophony of the drums and war chants slowly gaining. The river forever receding. And then came the screams. Her sleep was disturbed; everyone in the house knew it. We talked about it. We saw it. She whimpered in her sleep, like a frightened dog. Her feet would pump the invisible ground in terrified flight. Her hands would claw and tear at her neck and the imagined black cloud slowly filling her lungs. Her face would screw tight with a painful anxiety as she fled her unseen pursuer. She’d wake up screaming, drenched in sweat, her sheets a tangled mess, mumbling incoherently about burning the sticks. Burn the sticks. Burn the sticks. We’ve got to burn the sticks. We’ve got to burn them now... It was disturbing to say the least. Terrifying about covers it. The first time I saw her post-nightmare ranting, I finally knew that something was terribly wrong, that something had to be done. We all tried convincing her to talk to someone on campus, an advisor, a doctor, a shrink. She recoiled at the suggestion. She said she’d work it out, that she had an idea. Someone must have eventually said something to one of the faculty, or maybe her parents. Haven was asked to see an advisor, then the dean, and then a doctor. She was prescribed an anti-anxiety medication, a sleep aid, and a relaxed schedule. It seemed to work. The nightmares and screaming stopped, her battered eyelashes started to grow back, and peace and quiet returned to our house. But something was still off. There was a dark fear and suspicion in Haven’s red-rimmed, bloodshot eyes. A startled, weary jumpiness that

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accompanied her every movement. A something primal yet pitiful. A something disturbed that wasn’t there before. She was just hiding it, or trying to. She started obsessing over light. The lights always had to be on. She filled her room with lamps and candles and glow-sticks. She carried two mini-flashlights, hanging from carabiners, on both hips. On more than one occasion I saw her scurrying from one orange globe of streetlight to the next as she made her way along campus, pinwheeling as she walked, trembling with fear, obsessively seeking her invisible tormenter in those long shadows of autumn. It was sad, and frightening. She was literally afraid of her own shadow. Or rather, she was afraid of some sinister shadow that she’d picked up on that cursed and broken ground. It went on like that for a while. The running, and the flashlights, and the weirdness. Right up to the night of the fire. Most students know nothing about Haven’s fire. It’s been discreetly dismissed. Swept under the proverbial rug. There was no timely campus wide alert. No mention of it in the weekly announcement. No panel formed to discuss student safety. Nothing. Nada. It was just an unfortunate mishap, involving one unlucky student, at an accident prone work site. Nothing more to report, thank you very much. The truth is, no one wants to talk about what really happened to Haven. Or the others who have seen things. Or the sticks. No one wants to talk about those nefarious shadows, and those sinister drums, and the charred and reeking remains of a basement classroom in the new Student Success Building. And we definitely don’t want to talk about the recent screams shattering the formerly peaceful night, or the sickly sweat staining my own worried and twisted bedsheets, or the brief flashes of sinister shadow glimpsed out of the corner of my eye. Please, let’s not talk about that. Anything but that.

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Sarah Parker was summoned to Denver in 1864, traversing the plains from Leavenworth in a rollicking stagecoach, she and the driver terrified of the

Arapaho and Cheyenne marauders said to be laying waste to the stage lines. She was greeted by her husband Will on a dusty July day at her newly-built brick manor – today called the Mullen House, standing at the northeast end of the Auraria Campus’s Ninth Street Historic Park, a grassy remove within sight of the howling bedlam of Colfax Avenue. The facing rows of 19th century houses once were home to young Denver’s well-to-do, in an era when the wealthy lived not in cavernous palaces of drywall and vinyl, but tidy Victorians of brick and carved wood. Today the shaded old homes house various university offices, populated by aging administrators alongside army-jacketed honors students, all lucky for their squeaky floors and arched windows amid an otherwise brutalist campus. Plaques in front of each house describe their provenance; the changing of hands through the decades between a litany of millers, bankers, doctors, all halting with the massive eminent domain land-grab that subsumed the now-vanished neighborhoods. Unique is the history of the Mullen House, a plain two-story home at the northeast end of the park, purple as an old bruise, tucked behind the Mercantile and its busy coffee shop. The plaque erroneously notes that “very little is known about the origin of the house,” and says the house was built in 1873. Auraria officials left off the house’s tortured first nine years. The house replaced an earlier log structure destroyed after the Cherry Creek deluge of May 1864 demolished much of the city growing along its banks. Little Denver, dusty and dwindling supply depot for a gold rush put on hold by the Civil War, nearly swept away in a night, rebuilt itself in stone. The Mullen House was built at the direction of Colonel William

The Devil of Ninth StreetStory by David GilbertIllustration by Meg Duffy

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Parker, tall and lean, son of a Philadelphia meatpacker. Will commanded the Second Colorado Cavalry, a regiment of aging men gathered from the ranks of Denver’s able-bodied; miners and barbers and mailmen not two years out from routing a Confederate invasion force in New Mexico. Sarah arrived as the city prepared for full-scale war on the Cheyenne and Arapaho nations. Sarah, chest and eyes sunken from a childhood of malnutrition in Ireland, stayed cloistered, fearful of the jittery desert town where talk was of stagecoaches burned, of their occupants robbed and mutilated, of the coming of a great Indian alliance with the mighty Lakota, of an ever-encroaching barbarian siege. By autumn the stories had slowed, the Indians forced onto distant prairie wastes far to the southeast. Still the appetites of Denver’s boosters thirsted for decisive glory over fragile diplomacy, and Will rode out with Chivington at the head of a column of 700 men, marching over crisp November clay toward the families on the Big Sandy. He returned in early December, ahead of the miners and barbers and mailmen of Denver, bayonets strung with scalps, saddlehorns draped with severed limbs, a packsaddle crowned with a scowling head, withered like a dried apple. Sarah remained in her room, curled beneath a quilt; she was not at the Denver Grand to see her husband on stage – the audience hooting with glee – holding the reins of two shivering children who had seen their parents’ heads caved in with rifle butts. She winced at the clomping of his boots on the stairs, lay motionless and curled against his touch. She told him he’d “caught a demon” on the prairie, that Will was gone and that she was alone. Will spent most nights away, never paying for a drink, though occasionally asking for change for “one of these,” tossing a dried ear or finger on the bar. Sarah felt no less alone when she became pregnant, telling Will she carried a devil’s child. In the summer of 1865 – the telegraph poles of the Platte road now replaced after a winter of sieges that saw the burning of every stage station from Denver to Leavenworth – Sarah gave birth in the parlor. Tiny Caleb squealed on the floor; the pursed second face on the back of his head made no sound. Will, heart thudding, cut and tied the cord while his wife scurried into the corner of the room. While Caleb’s face contorted in the futile misery of newborns, the malformed second face grimaced and relaxed several times, ending in a slack-lipped drool. The air thick with sobs of different octaves, Will scooted on his knees toward his panting wife huddled in the corner, gently holding their swaddled son toward her. Sarah, thin chest heaving, too frozen to resist, tacitly accepted her son onto her lap. Sarah locked eyes with Will, she pleading and panicked, he gibbering for a word. Will found his voice: “I think they’re hungry.”

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BY AUGUST HEAVY freight wagons again trundled past the house, bringing loads of teapots, lantern oil, great cogs bound for distant stamp mills. Sarah watched the drovers whipping oxen from her upstairs window, rocking gently on her down-stuffed mattress, nursing Caleb – the other face, it turned out, did not eat, though sometimes it would feebly gum at her fingers while she supported her son’s head at her breast. Will had been called to Washington to testify before a Congressional inquiry – a soldier said he’d seen Will stroll along a ditch, solemnly firing his pistol into the faces of children while their mothers screeched for mercy. Neighbors knocked on the door, but Sarah did not greet them; by night she retrieved loaves of bread from the stoop. Caleb grew healthy; he toddled through the grama grass behind the house, groping for grasshoppers. Sarah smiled at his chubby limbs, his cushioned bottom bouncing on the ground with each clumsy fall. The second face, sometimes pinched and tight, sometimes drooped and drooling, sometimes smacked its lips and lolled its sightless eyes. Little ever came of the inquiries – Will retained his rank, drilled soldiers at Camp Weld, came home and bounced his son on his knee. The second face burbled up little burps and grunts with each bounce. 1865 had brought locusts, ’66 drought. In ’67, Sarah fell asleep in the parlor, and Caleb toddled out the door and into the street. When Sarah awoke and stumbled through the muddy ruts calling his name, she found Caleb struggling under the weight of two boys, jamming twigs between the second face’s winced lips. By evening a crowd huddled around the windows of the house, straining for glimpses of Caleb. Will shooed them away, leaning on his shotgun as casually as a gravedigger leaning on a shovel. Caleb informed his parents that the other face’s name was Geegaw. Eventually Sarah stopped responding when Caleb cried late at night – exhausting himself yelling “Geegaw, no!” When sympathy or exasperation drew her to his bed, she would find Caleb’s hands clamped firmly over the face’s mouth. More of Will’s paycheck went to whiskey; the inquiries had dried up the free drinks. Caleb spent most days crying and scratching at his mother’s locked bedroom door, though she pulled him inside when Will brought drunks around, to whom he’d promised a gander at “the Devil of Ninth Street” in exchange for a bottle of liquor. The first steam locomotive arrived in Denver in 1870. No longer a distant outpost separated from white society by hundreds of miles of enemy territory, Denver suddenly teemed with new life and consumer goods. The last free Indians in the region had been imprisoned or slaughtered, and mighty smelter smokestacks roiled with soot from great furnaces. A man offered Will five thousand dollars to send Caleb on tour with an eastern circus. Sarah held them both back with a kitchen knife, Caleb clutching her dress.

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Will accepted a temporary assignment in Kansas, and Caleb and Sarah remained voluntary captives of the house, speaking only occasionally with delivery boys. Sarah lay under her quilt, listening to Caleb mumble gibberish to Geegaw. Caleb said Geegaw told stories about his father, and of babies cut from wombs, of bodies writhing with maggots in the silent prairie sun. For Christmas 1872, Caleb received the two shaving mirrors for which he had pleaded. In his room he placed one on the windowsill, one on a small table, and made inching tweaks to their alignment until, with his parents looking silently on, he gingerly sat on the bed and for the first time stared at Geegaw. Caleb sat transfixed, and in the silence Geegaw’s crooked mouth curled into a broad grin. The lolling eyes seemed to peer back, almost lovingly, at Caleb’s. The boy whimpered and placed his hands over Geegaw’s face, which puckered its lips as if to kiss Caleb’s palms. Will was discharged from the Army the following spring. The family, it is said, sold the house to John Mullen, and moved to a gold camp in the San Juans. The Parkers are listed in the Hinsdale County directory of 1875 as a family of three, but in the census of 1880 as a couple with no children.

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Sheriff Franklin wiped his brow as he paced toward the parish of St. Cajetan’s. He paused the moment he saw the church; from the central

parapet of the newly built chapel the body hung by its neck, its head a concave, bloody ruin. The corpse bobbed against the stained glass leaving crimson stains on the adobe surround, the lapping of the warm breeze accompanied by the dull thud of the dead. The sheriff ran his hand across his beard and stared upwards at the crucifix to which the rope was tied. He was climbing the church steps when Father Newell emerged from the church. “Thank the Lord you’re here.” “Welcome to Denver, Father,” the sheriff said, removing his hat. Franklin looked up at the dangling carcass and the pool of blood collecting below. He nodded and stepped past the priest into the building, surveying the shadowy interior; a trail of blood smeared from the center of the concrete floor towards a door in the rear. “Where’s that lead?” “Up to the roof, Sheriff.” Franklin knelt by the crimson stain and peered into the darkness. He went and checked the door to find only a staircase beyond. “What time d’you get here?” “No more than an hour ago.” The sheriff wandered through the shadows, occasionally pausing to examine some detail. When he reached the altar he ran his hand over the soft linen cloth that adorned it. He brushed over the ornaments, caressing the delicate metallurgy. Suddenly, he pulled his hand away and looked at his fingers; a viscous red oozed down his finger towards his wedding ring. He

A Glimpse from the ParapetStory by Matthew SweetenhamIllustration by Ben Patterson

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picked up the brass crucifix from which the blood came and studied the base; a small fragment of skull was drying on the corner. “Our victim found God, it seems.” The priest stiffened seeing the crucifix in the sheriff’s hands. “God found him, Sheriff; God finds us all.” The sheriff studied the cross. “Who’s got keys to the chapel?” “We don’t like to lock the doors to the church, Sheriff.” Franklin nodded and trod back to the door, back into the warm Colorado air. He stared at the ever-growing city from the top of the steps and stuffed a cigar into his mouth. Father Newell appeared behind him. “It’s a thing to behold, isn’t it?” “It’s something. Hell if I know what.” The sheriff glanced back up at the feet suspended above him and puffed his tobacco, the smoke dancing upwards over and around the body.

THE SUN WAS fading beyond the mountains by the time the morbid scene was cleared. All that remained were the bloody stains around the window above and an officer still mopping up the pool on the steps where the carcass had dripped. The body lay covered on a gurney near the street while the deputies finished noting down what little evidence remained. Franklin stubbed out a cigar and rose from his post on the steps where he’d sat watching the city. He walked into the church to find the priest kneeling before the altar praying. The sheriff coughed conspicuously. “Not much else for us today.” “What have you learned about him?” Father Newell pointed towards the roof. “Kid was a newcomer from the Midwest, no name yet,” the sheriff said, “seen stumbling this way from the Bullhorn Tavern last night.” “No good ever comes of such sins.” The sheriff smirked at the priest and shook his head. “Tell that to the girls, Father.” Franklin turned and left. Father Newell followed the man out and gazed at the aging policeman as he headed north towards the river. The day had cooled considerably since dark and he’d rolled down his sleeves. By the time Franklin reached the Bullhorn all trace of sunlight had left the sky and the bright warmth of the bar proved a welcome respite to the plummeting cold outside. He slumped into a stool at the end of the bar and rubbed his eyes. The bartender stepped along the bar and poured him a drink. “You were here last night?” the sheriff asked. The bartender nodded. “You see a feller, twenty-three or twenty-four, brown hair, short beard?” “I see lots of people like that.”

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The sheriff threw back his drink and motioned to the bartender to pour another. “This one’s had his head bashed in and spent the day rotting while he hung from the side of a church.” The bartender poured and leaned against the bar. “Anyone in here causin’ trouble last night, wearing a red shirt and denim?” The sheriff motioned to the ceiling. The bartender placed the bottle back on the shelf. “He seemed like a nice boy, the pious type that lost his way. But he’d drank too much, just screaming for a woman, you know?” “So you showed him upstairs?” The bartender wiped his mouth with his cuff. “He didn’t exactly take. Spent fifteen minutes and came down cursing and yellin’.” The sheriff drank the whiskey and stood. He walked to the back of the room and pulled back a curtain, behind which a door hid. Franklin stepped through the door and up the stairs beyond towards the warm glow above. Fresh wallpaper prettied the walls of the brothel and floral scents overwhelmed the tangerine-lit hall. One of the girls emerged from a bedroom upon hearing the sheriff, but on seeing him her forced smile relaxed into anxiety. “Who took care of a man yesterday, red flannel, denim, didn’t have too hot of a time?” The girl tapped on a door across the hall, it cracked open and another woman peered out of darkness into the bright of the hall, concealing a bruise around her eye in the shadows. “Lili, he’s here about that gentleman.” The girl shut her eyes and opened the door. Franklin stepped into the simple boudoir. The room smelled different from the hall outside, a smoky musk of cedar drifted through the pallid light within. “You know what happened then,” the sheriff said. The girl nodded as she sat on the bed. “Everyone’s talking about it.” He sat next to her and put his hand on hers. They locked eyes. “It’s okay.” Lili nodded. “He…came in. He was real nervous, said he’d never done anything like this before. He was just…in this way? Crazed, like he was possessed or something, dressed up like some cowboy. We sort of started, you know? Then he got real angry, just throwing things and cursing.” Franklin touched the skin around Lili’s blackened eye. “He didn’t seem like he was bad or nothin’, just mixed up wrong.” “What time did he leave?” “Eleven, I think.”

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The sheriff fetched a bottle of gin from a table near the bed, pulled the cork and sniffed the contents before taking a drink. Lili studied him as he swigged a second time. “It’s been a long while since I seen you, John.” He wiped his mouth and eased the cork back into the bottle. “Something changed, but I don’t know what. Maybe I’m just gettin’ older, but the past doesn’t seem like it was real no more. None of it does.” Lili slid her arm around his waist. “I never thought I’d see it like this again,” John said. “I thought those days were gone; bodies hung like they got stuck on their trip to Hell.” The sheriff turned and put his arms around the girl. “None of it makes any sense to me, not now.” He fell silent while she gazed up at him and reached her lips to his.

THE SHERIFF STEPPED into the street and wiped sticky lipstick from his neck. In the distance the bustle of the theater district, the rumble of cars, and the cries of a hundred distant drunks echoed through the night. He looked at the silhouette of the church in the distance, superimposed upon the horizon with the ominous promise of redemption, and set off towards it. When he reached the church he pounded on the locked door. From inside there was a shuffling; a moment later it cracked open. “Sheriff?” “I thought the door’d be open.” Father Newell opened the door wide. “After all of this?” Franklin stepped into the now candlelit building and walked back to where the trail of blood had started. He looked all around him. “You are back late, Sheriff.” He stared at the confessional. “I’ve just been thinking, why would a man come here from a brothel?” The sheriff strode to the confessional and opened the door. The priest hurried across the floor behind. Franklin peered inside the wooden chamber and slumped down into the seat, the alcohol getting the best of him for a moment. He started laughing. “Bless me Father, for I have sinned!” The priest stared deep into Franklin’s face, a half smile upon his lips. “Isn’t that how you start?” “Do you have something to confess?” “I retraced that boy’s night last night, step by step I’m thinking, and here I am sitting here talking to you.” Icy realization stiffened inside the sheriff’s chest. “Where did you…?” The priest rose up, unholy, and hammered the silver crucifix into the sheriff’s skull, eyes burning with hellish fury; mouth wide, teeth bared, drooling.

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Franklin’s body slumped to the floor, chunks of grey matter and skull sliding down the confessional wall. “For the good of the flock.”

THE NEXT MORNING the sheriff’s body dangled from a rope, a red mosaic of drippings below, his black eyes terrified of the world they no longer saw. It was in all the papers. The police searched for years for Father Newell, but found no trace. A spate of similar killings occurred quietly across the country in the years that followed, but no connections were ever found. Ever since, in the early mornings, Auraria’s superstitious claimed to hear a quiet thudding against the old church of St. Cajetan’s. Others said it was just the trees.

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Anton leans against the old wood and stares across the bar. The beer tap sits there, just like his brother said it would. Cobwebs drift from the peak of the

handle and float down to the sink below, pulsating in the calm air. Anton drums his fingers, looks left and right. The basement is empty, of course. He broke into the place. The air hums with the silence of loneliness; his heart beats with the excitement of trespassing. He walks to the closet and turns down the lights, just like his brother said. The sun set hours ago and everything goes black. His eyes adjust and he leans against the bar again, trying to remember just what to do next. What had his brother said? To put your mouth on the faucet and think of the paper you want to write? That couldn’t be right. It’s too easy, too ridiculous. He sits down on the window ledge, takes out his homework. He doesn’t need to cheat. He can write this paper. What is fifteen pages on medie-val Catholicism anyway? It’s easy. Time slips from him. When he looks at his watch, it’s been twenty minutes and the page is clean white. He walks around the bar, making sure he’s alone. That no one is about to see the pathetic thing he’s going to do. And of course he is alone; he put the boards covering the stairwell back in place, so no one would know how he got down. So he’d hear the wood scrape against concrete if anyone wanted to follow him. He seals his lips around the metal tap. It’s cold, and he tries not to think about what kind of things have been living in there for the past twenty years, thirty years, however many years since this place has been a speakeasy or brewery or whatever it used to be before it was a boarded-off college campus basement.

TappedStory by Devin StrauchIllustration by Robert Shea

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He puts his hand on the lever. But he removes his lips, raises his head back up. He pulls the lever, testing it. Nothing. Of course. His brother, he’d been messing with him again. How would he even know about this place? It’s not like his brother ever needed help passing classes. His brother passed classes as easy as Anton drinks fifths of vodka. Anton puts his palm against the tap, pulls the lever again, thinking in the back of his mind, I want to write about medieval Catholicism. Cold air pulls his skin tight against the metal. He tries to release the lever, but his arms are stuck. And then Anton feels what his brother said he would: something leaves him. Like a string unraveling from his palm, going up into that beer tap. Like a magician hid thread in his skin and was now retrieving it, taking it back. He puts one foot against the bar and pushes hard. He breaks away from the tap and stares at his hand. Anton tries to open the cabinets beneath the tap, but they are locked. He wants to find what caused air to pull back into the tap. He tries the cabinets next to the ones under the tap. And then the cabinets behind him. All are locked, except one. Inside are bottles of wine, covered in dust. He closes the cabinet door and goes back to the window ledge. This time, it comes to him. Brilliance. Paragraphs flow, and he writes pages that are going to get him recognized for the genius he is. Two pages, three pages. He writes with elaborate paragraph structure and perfect logical reason-ing. Four pages, five pages. But by page ten, he can’t think of another word. And then his mind floods with thoughts of eternal glory, of endless praise. Of dying in obscurity, of failing. Of not living up to his father. Of staying in the shadow of his brother. He walks back to the tap, curious. It’s a coincidence, right? That he kind of did what his brother said to do to get a perfect paper, and then he kind of almost wrote the perfect paper? Maybe Anton’s brother was messing with him, but Anton puts his mouth on the faucet and pulls the lever. He feels that thread unravel again, but this time it comes from his chest and rises through his mouth.

THE NEXT TIME, he doesn’t dance with the bar. He walks right up and kisses the tap and pulls the lever, thinking, I want to write about Shakespeare’s role in the invention of Humanity. He does it longer this time, just to prove that it’s do-ing nothing, that it’s a placebo. And when he can move his hand and walk away freely and sit down and write the entire paper without even looking up, without even stopping, he’s sure that this is just his spot, this is his place, that he can get in the zone here and not be interrupted. But when he leaves, running up the stairs, his legs give out under him. Down he goes, falling backward and cutting his elbows and tumbling and opening his shins. His jaw slams on the concrete, puffing up dust that crusts in his nostrils.

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Maybe he shouldn’t have run, but he had to turn the lights off, and no one with any sort of imagination can walk up basement stairs in the dark with-out resorting to a run after the first step. But most people’s legs wouldn’t give out, either.

ANTON SITS IN history class and closes his eyes. He watches his blood cells flash and flutter and turn into ghosts, clouds, and gods. The test is on the years after medieval Catholicism. He studied for this weeks ago, but now when he tries to remember, the words simmer in his head and fade away into nothing. There’s the tick-tock of the wall clock and the wet rubber squeak of chewing gum that he can’t ignore. He’s about to get up and leave, just accept the fact that he can’t write anything. But he finds refuge in his fingernail. He puts his hand on the desk and wiggles the nail with his fingers. It’s a little loose and gives a satisfying wobble. It hurts only a bit, so he does it again, curious. This time it moves more and now he’s got Molly’s attention. She’s the redhead that sits next to him, and she can’t take her eyes off him. Hasn’t been able to since the start of the semester, really. She thinks he has cancer, but she is scared to ask; you can’t just ask a person that. But he shaved his head last week, and if she had to say how many pounds he’s lost since the beginning of the term, she’d be wrong. He lifts the fingernail a little bit and it rises from the bed, like a trap door opening into a basement. He holds his breath and lifts it again. It comes clean off. He flinches with pain and stares at the skin underneath, fresh pink like a baby and throbbing at the air. He holds the nail up, looking at it. He catches Molly’s eyes and smiles. He doesn’t know though, that his gums; they’ve been bleeding all class. Molly gags and leaves the room.

ANTON BREAKS INTO the basement. He opens a bottle of wine and smiles, looking at his transcripts. His mouth is all gums now, since his teeth started fall-ing out after the fifth visit to the tap. He’s lost so much weight that his clothes hang loose. And the bandages on his chin are turning green above the deep red wound that still hasn’t healed. It’s over now, though. Applications for grad school have been sent out, thanks to the beer tap. The magic that he hasn’t even questioned. Just taken advantage of. He drinks the last bit of wine and rolls the bottle along the ground. It clatters against the others. He’s feeling sentimental. It’s been two years since his brother died. Anton’s never really thought about it. It was just a thing that happened. A thing that distracted him from class. A thing he dealt with and then moved on. But he can see the similarities now. He can feel his brother here.

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Can see him, too. Because this is how he went, wasn’t it? Drunk and alone and hanging by a belt in this closet in the boarded-off basement of a college campus? Maybe his eyes are tricking him, but he watches his brother sway in that closet now. The brother’s face looks younger than Anton remembered. He’d look alive if it wasn’t for the smell. Goddamn. How had Anton never noticed it before? Anton walks up to his dead brother and puts his hand on his chest. It’s warm. But calm, empty. “Why’d you do it?” Anton asks. And when Anton only gets silence, he knows what to do. So he puts his mouth on the faucet and thinks, I want reasons not to kill myself. He feels the thread unravel from his chest, but when he sits down to write, nothing comes. Anton takes his belt off and knows this is the best trick his dead brother ever pulled.

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It begins with a book of matches. You find it in your backpack or purse, the snuggest pocket of your jeans, maybe the gritty seam of your calculus text-

book. You don’t have even a sliver of an idea how it got there, how any fingers could have wormed into your belongings without you knowing it. The match-book looks like it’s made of leather. The words ‘The Rattlesnake Club’ scroll over it, stamped in gold. It feels warm in your hand, as if it were recently tucked into someone else’s. If your boozy aunt was single in the ’80s, you might have heard of The Rattlesnake Club. She might have told you about how the Tivoli was a mall back then, and how easy it was to shoplift cloisonné earrings from the jewelry store where the clerk chomped gum and read back issues of Seventeen maga-zine. That same aunt may have described the one and only time a man took her on a date to The Rattlesnake Club, how she wore a blue dress with big shoulder pads, how she spent the meal distracted by the bright copper brewery kettles, their surface warping her reflection into something wrinkled and wizened, into something not entirely different from who she is now, almost thirty years later. This was before the days of warm lava cake, so for desert your aunt ordered two weensy scoops of chocolate mousse, and when she brought the spoon to her mouth she saw a man in a powder white suit watching her from the bar. He had the kind of face that can’t be described any easier than it can be forgot. He lit a match and ignited his cigarette, thin blue smoke veiling the air. The mousse in your aunt’s mouth went runny with the flavor of ashes. She hid her mouth behind a napkin and spat it out. Even today, she complains that all chocolate tastes of ashes. And maybe later, on some night when your boozy aunt was particu-larly boozy, she told you the truth about the clerk who chomped gum and read Seventeen. How one day when she reached for the keys to her VW Rabbit, a

Counting MatchesStory by Leslee Rene WrightIllustration by Ben Tarver

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matchbook tumbled from her purse. The Rattlesnake Club. Fifteen matches were burnt, five unburnt, their heads still pink and smooth. The clerk died five days later, never waking from her dream of a man in a powder white suit, his hands smooth with flesh-colored scales, his breath filthy with the smell of ash. All you can do now is count the matches. Others have done it before you, sometimes counting as many as a dozen match heads unburnt, but never knowing what they have a dozen of—days, weeks, or months. One man’s four unburnt matches lasted four years, so long that he nearly forgot to keep counting. The moment the light turned red and rubber shrieked on asphalt, he remembered; and then, abruptly, he remembered no more. One girl had fifteen whole matches, and they lasted her fifteen whole minutes. Each minute was like a single scale, a fleck of glitter that she gladly shed as she took in the expanse of the sky. So blue over St. Cajetan’s. Bluer still above the wires of the light rail. The last thing she saw was the train doors glide open, the lean legs of a powder white suit, then the close-up of cement, stained with a ground-out cigarette. Keep counting. Wait for days to turn to weeks, then hope that weeks will turn to months. Eventually, your favorite sweater will smell of old ashes. A scale will work its way under your fingernail or catch at the back of your throat, scratch-ing until you wheeze and cough it up, gibbering for air. When it crumbles to powder in your fingers, close your eyes and picture what you love most. Until now you didn’t think that the last time you saw what you most love would be the very last time, but it was. Is.

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