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Four Stories
By Eric Kong Angal

Here

He looks really good. Even he has to admit: I look really good. He doesn’t see or acknowledge himself this way often, but he’s doing it now. For the first time in years he stares at his side profile in the segmented concave mirror they’ve got in Men’s Warehouse that allows a customer to see himself made triplicate in a sort of trefoil exhibition. You’re not supposed to see yourself like this—there’s something almost grossly voyeuristic about it. To see your body this way is to become intimate with a perspective to which you should have no access. To see yourself this way, almost candidly but not quite, is to engage in an odious self-analysis, to induce in yourself not curiosity or satisfaction or horror but something else: so this is the vessel in which I inhabit. This is the mereological absolute of which I’m comprised.

But of course you look, and so does he: I’ve got really good hair, he thinks. He inspects the suit’s fit on him and tentatively and almost flirtatiously cocks his waist to look at his own back and ass and he can’t help but notice the slight V of his torso as his lats bulge out against the jacket’s restraints. It’s as if not even this beautiful and rich-smelling garment could contain him, could contain all of him, could know him. He is a witness to himself.

The salesman stands impassively with his hands interlocked and resting over his groin. His whole mien is a rehearsed comportment of professional affability. His smile is closed—no teeth are bared. He seems to exude a vague sort of avuncular approval. His posture is impeccable. He’s handsome but not too handsome and his haircut always looks fresh, and he smells nice. His eyes’ squint is one that was quite definitely absent before the customer had donned the suit—the squint is a vehicle for a sort of irisborne twinkling which is meant to convey extreme satisfaction at the customer’s apparent glow-up.

The customer performs his little choreographed inspection for about two minutes. It’s a charade enacted in complete silence. His bare feet twirling there on the gloss hardwood. Making faces at himself. Lifting his arms as high as they’ll go to see where the hem falls on his torso. Flexing. Walking one way to check the shape of his legs mid-stride and then walking back. A pensive hand on the chin to admire the Tag Heuer’s twinkle as it peeks from the lisp of a rounded cuff. Rolling out his neck against the constraints of his dress shirt’s collar. The whole time the salesman still stands there, just off to the side, smiling. It’s hella good, he says. The whole time they’re not really there at all. They’re both somewhere else. Well, here I am. Here I fuckin am, look, he’s arrived. He turns to the salesman.

I’ll take it.

Benjamin

She doesn’t see the dog until it’s not more than five feet in front of her. She slams on the brakes and pulls the steering wheel all the way to the right and she feels the weight come off the back tires as the Camry fishtails and suddenly the road spins before her and then she feels the concussive force of the jersey barrier as the vehicle is thrown into the median, followed immediately by the pneumatic bang of the airbag, which blinds her, and then the world spins. The car flips twice before hitting the guardrail and when it settles it’s upside down and suddenly everything grows rapidly dark before her eyes.

She awakens with a gasp. The sky is a pane of mottled gray. The air comes from her sharp and ragged and her every breath is painful. She looks to the passenger seat and finds it empty.

Clarence?

She glances around. The car’s stopped running although the keys are still in the ignition. The check engine light blinks a petulant amber. She sees the broken glass spread around the bitumen like a field of pellucid gravel, sees azure fluid running rivulets to a drainage ditch. She listens: the engine ticks and hums as it cools and is underscored by an atonal hiss which issues from beneath the car’s crumpled hood.

Clarence? Ah.

She gags at the cloying stench of the saccharine coolant. Her seatbelt sandwiches her between the airbag and the ceiling—she reaches with her free left arm to get at the buckle’s release and in doing so she feels her sternum pop and she winces. The buckle gives and she falls against the steering wheel. Her right arm is hurt. She can’t tell if it’s broken and she doesn’t want to check—she just knows she can’t do much with it. It’s like it almost responds to command, but can’t quite. Her heart beats very fast.

Clarence!

She crawls through the shattered driver’s side window. The world is silent save for the Camry’s moribund throes. She looks around. Her boyfriend is gone.

I’m right here.

Her head snaps up. Clarence is roadside. He’s turned away from her and is looking toward the trees, his head cocked to them as if obliging a whisper. Past him lies an unending surfeit of evergreen, tall and dense and uniform. The trees’ imbricated foliage harbors a cloistered dark, an interior world all its own. She glimpses a sliver of a shape moving in the gloam. It must be the dog, she thinks.

Clarence. God, Clarence.

When he turns to her she sees that he’s uninjured. He beckons to the trees.

I gotta go, he tells her. I gotta go get help.

Where are you going?

What? he says. He looks toward the trees. What?

Who are you talking to?

I gotta go, he tells her again. I’ll get help.

And then he turns from her and makes his way through the treeline.

She hears panting beside her and looks up. The dog smiles down at her. His collar says Benjamin.

Barfight

Lane’s face burns where he’s been hit. The clasp of the guy’s wristwatch caught him on the cheek and tore into his skin and when Lane brings his hands up to cover himself he can feel the sting of the cut and he feels the blood of it running down his face and down his chin and neck and dripping onto his hands and shirt. He’s drunk. The alcohol and the half-digested birria from dinner are septic on his breath.

The guy comes forward again but he’s already tired. They’re both tired. They swing at each other. Both of them with right hands over the top. Neither punch connects. They wrestle. In the clinch they both struggle for wrist control and the other guy shoots for the takedown but he’s too slow and Lane buckles out of it. The other guy falls, vomits. People have gathered outside the bar to smoke cigarettes and comment idly on the commotion and someone yells at the bouncer to do something but he just shrugs and says if it’s on the sidewalk then it’s the city’s problem. One onlooker throws a handful of change at the two of them. Another says: this is fuckin pathetic.

You want to be movin your head!

Is someone filmin this?

…let’s go, c’mon, let’s leave…

…just a sec, just a sec, I wanna see what happens…

Lane waits for the other guy to get back up before he comes forward and then he throws a low kick at the guy’s knee but he misses completely and almost trips over himself. The other guy punches Lane in the back of the head but there’s no power there. Then Lane comes back with a left hook but it’s sluggish and he misses again. It feels like he’s punching in a dream. He doesn’t really understand how to punch properly and because of this he punches almost exclusively with his dominant hand and therefore experiences an asymmetrical exhaustion: his right arm is far more fatigued than his left, and when he does swing with his left it’s only after switching stances so the arm can wind up from the rear. The other guy throws another right hand and his fist glances off Lane’s forearm—Lane’s got the cross guard up like Foreman, but it’s all coincidental. They both square up again and pant, hunched into themselves.

Truce?

I don’t remember what we were even fighting over.

Truce?

Fuck it. Okay.

Everyday

She rolls her eyes back into her skull to prevent a sneeze. He keeps going:

…when you was three it was for the Glendenning Company. They were the heavy equipment operators up in Fairbanks. I was part of the local three-o-two back then. They had us excavating for the Eielson Air Force Base annex. We were workin on re-flooring some old hangars and that was a pain in the ass because they’d already run the plumbing and they didn’t want no heavy equipment in there at all, not even a skid steer. So we was usin a jackhammer to get up all the old cement, and then we were diggin through the silt and the hard pack to pour the concrete, and the pours had to be quick because it was so cold out there. Then after that we did the runways. For the most part that wasn’t so bad, except I remember one time we saw a massive grizzly, giant fucker. He came out the woods from the east and walked a straight line through a fresh pour after we’d just about wrapped up for the day and everyone pretended we hadn’t seen him and we left the pour like that, as if maybe what we’d seen had been out a dream or somethin. Sure enough the next day we show up and it turns out it really happened—not just that, but the big guy had rolled around in it, too—and so we had to break up all that fresh concrete. After that the foreman had one of us stay out there in shifts with a Mossberg thirty aught six to keep all the wildlife away.

Anyway. Bout a year later is when we came down here. I had to stay in Washington or Idaho if I wanted the pension. Maybe that was the mistake. Youda been better off in the country and not in this fuckin shithole city. I shoulda just said fuck the pension and got outta here altogether. But your mother wasn’t happy in Alaska and we thought maybe down here it’d be different, that it’d be good for her to be closer to civilization. That was when you was—five, I think. I came down here and stayed with the three-o-two and got my boiler license workin over at the McLeigh-Barsson building as an operating engineer. That building was older’n shit and I learned a lot there. This was back when you did all the work yourself, you never called anyone out to do work for you. I learned how to take apart and put together just about everything: compressors, motors, pumps, all that. Then I got my steam engineer license and by that point the city gave me an offer to be a steam generator pressure vessel inspector and that was too good to pass up, and I had to leave the three-o-two. That was when you was ten.

Those were the good years, or at least I thought so. But I was drawn up by my work. It was all I had time for. That’s how I am, I live to work, but it don’t make everythin right. I was workin doubles every other day to keep a roof over us, and by the time your mother left I didn’t know how to handle all this. I never did, but her leavin made it worse. So I’m sorry if I wasn’t so good back then. If I was angry or whatever, and—I dunno. I just want you to know that I always loved you and that nunna that shit was your fault. That shoulda stayed between your mother and I. I think that’s part of what fucked you up so bad, I mean, I don’t want to speak for you, but y’know what I mean.

I can only tell you what I felt. You were my whole life—I did everythin for you. I wish I knew how to say that to you better. I don’t know if you believe me when I say it or maybe you think I don’t mean it, but I do. And I’m sorry I ain’t never been there for you. That’s all gonna change now. We’re gonna get you out of here and get you checked into a good institution and you can get it all out of your system there. And then after that I’ll be with you every day. I won’t ever let you get like this again. Okay? I’m here now. I mean it this time. I’m here, now, for you, whatever you need.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Eric Angal was born and raised in Seattle, and he still lives there and works there. His work is published or forthcoming by Nut Hole Publishing, Don’t Submit!, and The Argyle Literary Magazine. His short story collection Defiler is available for purchase through Nut Hole Publishing. He can be found on Twitter: @MrZoris, and on Substack: @erickangal