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A ball and chain, she remembered Roy said about Jason. Mike wasn’t going to call. Jim was just saying that. And she’d be somewhere in Omaha, maybe with a waitress job or something. And pretty soon school would roll around and she’d have to worry about school clothes and getting him enrolled in a new school and everything. While somebody else would be living with Mike in his Denver condo, and Jet Skiing, whatever that was, and using Mike’s American Express to buy new clothes and stuff.

She said, “You know if there’s a river around here somewhere?”

“A river?” Jim said.

“Yes,” she said. “A river.”

Next morning at seven A.M. she knocked on the door. A sleepy pajamaed Jim opened it. “Hey,” he said. “How’s it goin’?” He sounded a little leery of seeing her. He’d obviously hoped they’d put the Denver matter to rest last night.

“Guess what?” she said.

“What?”

“I said I was sort of Jason’s stepmother? Well, actually, I’m his aunt. My sister lives about ten miles from here and has troubles with depression. She wanted me to take him for a while but she stopped by the room here real early this morning and picked him up. Said she was feeling a lot better.”

Mike could be seen over Jim’s shoulder now. He said, excited, “So you don’t have the kid anymore?”

“Free, white and twenty-one,” she said.

“You’re going to Denver!” he said.

Jim said, “I’m going to get some breakfast down the road. I’ll be back in an hour or so.”

He got dressed quick and left.

They did it their first time right in Mike’s mussed bed. Only once or twice did she think of the kid, and how she’d smothered him in the room. She hadn’t had any trouble finding the river. She had to give it to Roy. The ball-and-chain business. She had liked the kid but he really was a ball and chain.

A few hours later, they left for Denver. That night, they had spare ribs for supper at a roadside place. They drank a lot of wine, or vino, as Jim kept calling it, and Mike as a joke licked some of the rib sauce off her fingers. She was scared about later, when she went to sleep. Maybe she’d have nightmares about the kid. But she snuggled up to Mike real good and after they made love, they lay in the darkness sharing his cigarette and talking about Denver and she ended up not having any dreams at all.

Al Sarrantonio

THE ROPY THING

Joe R. Lansdale, Hisownself here. Writing about Al Sarrantonio. He was too modest to do it, so someone had to do it, and I’ve read just about everything he’s written and have known him for years and love his short fiction.

When I was learning to write, one of the writers I was most impressed with and wanted to emulate was Al Sarrantonio. Here was a guy who had a unique point of view. He was always his own man, but he reminded me a bit of the best of Bradbury, had that same poetic echo. He reminded me a bit of an unsung short story writer, Kit Reed. Had that same sort of inexplicable subtext that spoke to your most inner self but wasn’t something you could define in words.

That’s what Al’s done here. He’s written another of his beautiful little fables via horror fiction. It has that special thing that makes a good story more than a story. It has echo beyond the words.

—J.R.L. (Hisownself)

The ropy thing got most of the neighborhood while Suzie and Jerry were watching Saturday morning cartoons on TV. Then the cable went out and Jerry’s dad put on the radio but then that went out too. By then Suzie and Jerry were watching the ropy thing from the big picture window in Jerry’s living room. The ropy thing was very fast, and sometimes they saw only its tip stretched high and straight, or formed into a loop, or snaking over a house or between trees or moving over cars. It hesitated, then shot into the moving van in front of Suzie’s house across the street, pulling a fat uniformed mover out, coiling around him head to toe like a mummy and then yanking him down into the ground. It pulled Suzie’s mom into the ground too, catching her as she tried to run back into the house from where she had been directing the movers from