Take back what you said, little girl,
and while you’re at it, take yourself back, too.
I’m tired of sitting here waiting
wondering what you’re gonna do now,
so what you gonna do about it?

-- The White Stripes

                I remember when they killed Gwen Stacey.  Fan backlash as far as the eye could see.  Everyone knew they had to bring her back, but the problem was that at that point, Marvel had a good track record of keeping the people they killed in their graves.  Enter the Clone Saga and the loss of Marvel’s integrity. 

                And what’s the problem?  Well, without Gwen Stacey, Spider-Man could never love again.  It would be the beginning of the end for him.

                Hell, I still remember when I first met Emily, but I don’t like to talk about it.

                Wednesday is new comic book day, which made me glad it was Monday.  Monday’s a good day for comic shops because no one bothers to come in.  That assures that jerks like me, the assholes who keep justice in said shops can get a few minutes to catch up on the back issues.  Today is Green Lantern.  Tomorrow will be Walking Dead. And Wednesday – well, Wednesday is a completely different monster, isn’t it?

                I hear the bell ring.

                “You got Green Lantern forty-six?”  Dil says.

                “Fuck off, Dil,” I tell him.

                “Alright, Mitch.”  The bell rings again and Dil’s gone.

                The bell rings for a third time, and this time it’s Wayne.  He’s got a fist full of letters and a cheeseburger that smells vaguely like roadkill.  “You’ve got mail,” he says to me.  “Thought the boss told you not to wire your personal postage over here anymore.”

                He tosses the envelope to me.  The letterhead reads VERTIGO COMICS: a DC COMICS subsidiary.  “I’m trying to look like a professional here,” I say to him as I rip the envelope open.

                He snorts once.  “That’s right.  Everyone knows there’s never been a professional works in a comic shop.”

                I ignore him and unfold the letter.  There’s a lot of words there, but I only see one.  It’s all I need to see, and my heart drops for the hundredth time into my stomach.  The word is sorry.

                “Well,” I say to Wayne, “looks like the dickwads over at Vertigo aren’t any more interested in Chain Gang than anyone else.”  I crumple the letter and toss it toward the bin, missing it by a mile.

                “Looks like we’ve got an outstanding order here, Mitch.”  Wayne is sorting through the pull-and-drops.  Most of the envelopes are empty, but one, right in the middle, is bulging. 

                “What’s the name on it?”

                “Scott,” Wayne says, and the first person I think of is Scott Wilson, and it makes sense.  Scott Wilson will roll in with Previews every other Saturday and order a mother lode of books.  Books he can’t afford.  Then he waits for a month or two, when he knows we’ll be putting the books into general circulation to come back and order more shit.  I consider going to his house, kicking in his door, and doing to him whatever it is Wolverine does best when Wayne finishes his thought: “Em Scott.”

                And there goes the heart again.  I gravitate toward the new title rack, issues that will have to be moved over on Tuesday to make room for that week’s real new titles.

                “And speak of the devil,” Wayne says.

                I don’t exactly drop to the floor, but there’s definitely some Nick Fury shit going on as I crouch down, weave through the racks of comics, and push into the back room right as I hear the bell ring again.  Then I hear her voice, and that’s not far away from bells, either.

                “Hey, Wayne, I was out of town and missed more order.”  And that’s Em.

                I suppose you’ll be wanting some background on this particular bird, but hell if I want to be the one to give it to you.  Just let it be said that you’ve never met a girl like her, and when you do, you’ll never meet another.  I listen to Wayne and Em banter a bit about 100 Bullets and The Boys and what the hell Garth Ennis has been doing in his spare time and start to think I might get sick.  Then I hear something that sends me over the edge, and I think the best thing to do at that precise minute would be to slip my wrists with a box cutter.

                It’s only one sentence, but that’s all it takes.  Even Superman, the American superhero, the Man of Fucking Steel, Krypton’s last son, can be broken by one sentence.  That one that nearly does me in goes like this: “Is Mitch around?”

                To which Wayne elegantly responds: “He was here a second ago.  I guess he hauled ass.”

                “Oh,” I hear Em say, and I don’t think there’s ever been a sadder sound on this green earth.  “Well, if you see him, will you tell him –”

                “I sure will,” Wayne says.  He’s got about as much grace as The Hulk had when the Illuminati chucked him into a black hole.  The bell rings, and I imagine Emily leaving the store with her fat stack of comics.  I hang around in the back room for a minute, then I grab a box of reissues and some sleeves and carry them to the floor. 

                Wayne is eyeballing me, fidgeting with a copy of Previews when I come in.  I set the box on the counter and pull it open.

                “Em stopped in,” he says.

                “Oh yeah?”  I pull out a stack of comics and start sleeving them.

                “Why do you do that, Mitch?”  I know he doesn’t really care, but our good friend Wayne was blessed with the unabashed curiosity of a four-year-old, and he’ll ask just about any question, not quite caring what the answer is.

                I roll my eyes and think, just briefly, what the answer is.  I almost surprise myself when I realize that I just don’t know.  It’s not even that I don’t want to see her, part of me just can’t bring myself to do it.  “I couldn’t tell you, Wayne.”

                “Well,” he says, flipping through the DC section of Previews.  “You used to talk about how much you loved that girl, man.”

                “What of it?”

                “Seems to me if that were true, you’d put more effort into seeing her when she comes around.”  He stretches his arms, but his eyes don’t leave the Blackest Night breakdown on the glossy pages of Previews. 

                The corners of some Ben Templesmith comic catch the edging of the sleeve I’m trying to slide it into and tears the damn thing halfway down its length.  I toss the ruined sleeve aside.  “Yeah, maybe.”

                “So either you were lying then or you’ve got the weakest grasp of what it means to love someone that I’ve ever seen.  Which is it?”

                And there’s a fucking stumper.  I think this one over to myself, and when I find the answer, I don’t much like it myself.  I think back to Alan Moore’s magnum opus and fan-favorite, Watchmen, and I think of the love story there.  The problem is, Silk Specter and Nite Owl didn’t love each other.  That’s why they could never get into the sack until they’d gone out and roughed up their share of hooligans and baddies. 

                They used crime-fighting as a type of surrogate, a place-holder for romance, and just kind of played off one another.  I wonder, only briefly, what the surrogate was with me and Em, but I can’t find one.  So I tell Wayne: “Who can say?  I don’t like leaving shit like that up to mortals, so next time you see God, why don’t you bring it up with him?”  I almost cringe at that.  And for that small moment, at least, I can understand why things never worked out with Em.

                Wayne’s turn to roll his eyes.  “I’m sure I will,” he says to me.

                “Lemme know what he tells you,” I add on, the never-ending quest to get the last word.

                “Cos you know it matters, right?”  He asks, and I watch my last word flutter out into oblivion. 

                By now, I’ve finished sleeving the reissues and move on to sorting them and placing them into the stacks.  “How’s that?”

                “Cos if she loves you, you’re the asshole,” he says to me, still flipping through the copy of Previews.  “But if you love her, then everything is futile.  It doesn’t matter how many times you’re the hero.  It doesn’t matter what you do, what songs you sing, how many poems you write.  Cos every time, she still ain’t interested, and there’s no changing that.”

                Sometimes, I wanna stab Wayne in the fucking throat, but I suppose he’s the only friend I’ve got.  So, instead I say: “fuck poems.”

                He closes Previews.  “We all know about you and your poems.”

                “I’ve been known to write them, sure, a long time ago.  In college.”  That’s somewhat true.  An understatement, if anything.  Sitting at home on my hand-me-down desk are pages on pages of poems.  It’s what I do, and I can’t help that any more than I can help what size shoes fit me best.  I think of all the ones I could box up and wrap to give to Emily, and I wonder what kind of effect it would hold on her.  There are definitely a couple there meant for her, but she’ll never read them.  That’s a product of my design, not fate’s. 

                “What about that, huh?  A genuine poet fucking laureate of the comic shop.  I thought all you wrote were bad comic scripts.”  I hear the subtle laughter in his voice and it makes my skin crawl.

                “It would appear otherwise, yeah?”

                “You’ll charm my pants off if you let me read a few, y’know?”

                I slap the rest of the reissues down on the counter and walk toward the back room.  “Suck my cock, Wayne.”

                “I would,” he says, opening Previews again as if he hadn’t already read every word printed in it.  “But then I’d have no power over you.

                And I think, he’s at least partly right.  About Em, that is, not cock sucking.  She’s a different kind of animal, alright, made up of mixed signals and natural charm.  I couldn’t get to her if I tried, and my days of trying at all were long over with.  However messed up my ego and self-esteem are, I know it’s not that I’m not good enough for her.  The problem is, I could just never keep up with her. 

                There was a Green Lantern story arc – Hal Jordan, that is, none of this Guy-Gardner-Kyle-Rayner-John-Stewart bullshit – when Hal’s old flame, Carol, came back into his life, semi-possessed by an extra-terrestrial life form called the Star Sapphire.  This Star Sapphire fed off of Carol’s love for Hal, and, long story short, the two almost destroyed the universe.

                Sometimes, I think life with Em would be a lot like this.

                I grab another box of reissues and head back to the floor.  That’s when I see her, standing in front of the counter, leaning just slightly against it, legs slanted.  She still walks everywhere, that’s her gimmick.  And it dawns on me that that may be the reason she has such great legs.

                She turns and looks at me, and Wayne quits looking for whatever he’s looking for in the stacks.

                “Mitch,” she says, and my pulse stops.

                I set the reissues down on a shelf.  “Em.”  I’m a fucking Casanova with words. 

                “Gonna file more reissues?”  Wayne winks at me in a flutter of absurdity.

                Em looks across the stacks at him.  “Could you give us a minute, Wayne?”

                He shrugs.  “My lunch, anyway.”  The bell rings and he’s gone, leaving me alone with Em, a box of reissues, and enough cold air to solve the global warming crisis.

                “Mitch,” she says, walking to me on those legs of hers, her hair bright and eyes brighter, and I wonder why things could never have turned out how I imagined, how they had always been in my dreams. 

                She asked me to kiss her once, and I’d wanted to.  But I told her, instead, that I was afraid the attention would go straight to her head.  She never asked again, never gave me the time of day.  But in my dreams, she’s sitting near my lap, she leans back, turns her head to glance at me.  I feel her hair brush against my neck, her chin arches forward, lips soft and dazzling in the summer light, and I’m pulled into them.

                Her lips are like velvet, I think, just as much as her skin is like silk, and that’s the part that drives me crazy.

                That kiss in my dreams is sweeter than any kiss I’ve ever had in reality.  This is where I begin to reconsider slitting my wrists.

                “Have you been avoiding me, Mitch?” 

                I shrug.

                “I can never get a straight answer out of you,” she says and flips through one of the stacks idly.

                “I always give you answers, if answers are what you want,” I say.  It isn’t true, but that’s all I can think of.

                “Then answer me, really.  Why are you avoiding me?”

                I shrug again and try not to look her in the eyes.  “Cos it’s easier to run, I suppose.”

                She scoffs.  “Easier than what?”

                “Than everything else.”

                “You’re some kind of asshole, you know that?” 

                I do know that, but exactly what kind, I’m not entirely sure.  She shakes her head, and I know that’s her giving up on the conversation.

                “What’d you come back for?”  I try to break the ice that’s starting to chill between us.

                “I forgot Green Lantern forty-six,” she says.

                “Right, Blackest Night.”  I shuffle to the stack and flip through it, looking for the issue.  “How’s the line going so far?”

                “So-so,” she replies.  “Have you written anything new yourself?”

                I think of the rejection letter from Vertigo and the stack of poems I have waiting for her, but I shake my head and lie.  “Nope.  Nothing.”

                “You were pretty good at it, you know,” she says, walking closer to me.  I look for the comic book faster.  “Why don’t you keep it up?”

                I laugh to myself.  “Same reason I don’t date.  I can’t get too far without hating myself.”

                This was almost true.  I don’t date because the only girls willing to give me the chance are the girls who’ve known me for the long-run, and of those, Em was the last and longest.  And the only time I hate myself after writing is when I read back through all those poems and think of someone else reading them, of knowing how I think and how I feel and all that other human business.

                Poetry, I read somewhere, is an abbreviation of a person’s soul, and I didn’t like what I saw in my own.  Especially in the ones about Em.  At long last, I find the issue she’s missing and pull it from the stack like a wonder of God, holding it in the air briefly like a talisman to the heavens before abruptly shoving it towards Em.  “Anything else?”

                She rolls her eyes and the air is suddenly electric.  She crosses her arms and starts shooting daggers are me from those staggering green eyes of hers, narrow and cold now, and I understand what a complete prick I am.  “Do you ever consider that a girl doesn’t come here to get comics, Mitch?”

                Here, I want to say what a silly thing, this is a comic shop!  But she cuts me off before I can even get to it.

                “That maybe a girl comes here to see you?”

                I feel my heart sink again.  At the rate it’s going, it might as well just stay down there.  It’s not clear if this is Emily being Emily and sending out one of her jaunty, half-serious mixed signals or if she’s truly calling me out.  I think back to her asking me to kiss her, I think about everything that I’d do if she asked me now, how perfectly I would handle it, how things could be different.  I wonder if things still have a chance to be different.  My hands close into fists and I feel my throat close as I realize there probably isn’t.

                “Why are you like this, Mitch?”  She’s getting into her righteous-preaching mode, and I think I’ve never been so much in love with her.  “Why do you push people away?  Why won’t you ever take the time to look around at all the people standing near you and figure out which ones matter and which ones are worth pursuing?”

                I think that I want to die, that a sudden brain hemorrhage would be better than this heartbeat thundering away in my throat, the blood rushing so fast through my skull that I can hear it echoing behind my eyes, my fingers shaking, my knees loose.  I understand I don’t like being in love at all.  I shrug and say the only thing that comes to mind.

                “Cos I’ve got too many comic books to read.”

                She glares at me again and I realize that my last shot of making things work with her is gone, that she’ll be making herself scarce now, buying her comics over the internet like she’s always threatened.  I lament this passing, my heart breaks, and I begin the slow process of rebuilding, but in a way, I’m glad the tension is gone and I can stop wondering.

                She turns, taking her time to leave the store, lingering back on her heels, her hair pulled behind her ears, head half-turned.  She sways like sails and grass and everything that’s beautiful in the wind.

                The bell rings and she disappears.

                The tiger crept out from between the Grapevine and some sleazy hotel, licking its chops and glancing from side to side.  The streets were empty and shades were drawn.  Ragged strands of Townes Van Zandt floated softly from the loose shutters on the window of the Grapevine.  The tiger waited in the middle of the street.

                Waterman rolled up in his jeep two blocks away.  He kept the engine running, secured the emergency brake, and then hopped out, grabbing a rifle he kept stored in the back seat.

                “Can y’geddit?”  Sam was behind Waterman, crouching down, squinting toward the animal.  Waterman lined up the shot.

                “Yup.”

                The tiger went down on two legs, stretching, a regal canvas amongst the drab wallpapers and dusty windows of Barstow.

                Waterman cocked the rifle.

                The tiger glanced down the street at where they stood.

                “Y’wonder how it got out here, Wats?”

                Waterman spat, keeping his aim.

                “Uhn… you can’t do that.”

                Waterman lowered the rifle and turned around.  Stan-From-the-Feed-Store was standing behind them, more weedy and sallow than he’d ever been, totting a sandwich sign that read animals are friends not food on one side and liberate zoos on the other.

                “G’dammit, Stan, this ain’t the time or the place,” Waterman said in a low growl.  He turned back and realigned the rifle, steadying the shot.  Satisfied, he pulled the trigger.

                “Neuugh!”  Stan-From-the-Feed-Store shouted, tiny tendrils of mucus flailing from his mouth.  He grabbed Waterman’s shoulder and pulled him backwards.  They both stumbled, taking a number of steps backward, reeling to stay afoot.  The rifle bucked upward and the bullet blasted into the atmosphere.

                Waterman pivoted around on one heel and pushed Stan-From-the-Feed-Store to the ground.  The backside of the sandwich sign snapped with a twiggy crunch as he hit the asphalt.  “You dumb sonuvabitch, whadder you trying to do?”

                “All animals have a right to live in peace and safety,” Stan-From-the-Feed-Store said, propping himself up on his elbows against the shattered remains of his sandwich sign.

                Then the men froze as they each had the sudden and violent realization that the blast from the rifle was likely quite loud and was almost certainly heard by the animal only two blocks ahead of them.  In near unison, they looked down the street in the direction of the tiger, who was looking back at them, licking its chops once more. 

                The tiger stepped toward them slowly, one foot after the other.

                “Get the jeep around, Sam,” Waterman, keeping his eyes on the approaching animal.

                Sam got the jeep around.  Waterman jumped in the passenger seat and Sam began to roll the vehicle backward.  The tiger continued walking towards them, a perfect visage of calm in the equally calm streets.

                The distance between the cat and the jeep got wider.  The distance between the cat and Stan-From-the-Feed-Store got smaller.

                The tiger, almost too quickly for Sam or Waterson to register, leapt onto Stan-From-the-Feed-Store, pressing the front of the sandwich board down onto his chest, snapping it in half to match the back portion.  It reared its head back, opened its deadly maw and chomped into the man’s neck.  Blood bubbled up from between the animal’s jaws as Stan-From-the-Feed-Store released a short, high-pitched whistle before winking out of existence.

                The jeep stopped about two blocks further in the distance.  Waterman climbed out, grabbed up the rifle, and aimed it carefully.

                “Can ya geddit?”

                Waterman looked through the sight, lining his aim up with the striped print on the tiger’s forehead.  “Yup.”

                “Wonder where it came from, Wats?”

                Waterman cocked the gun and spat out the side of his mouth.

                The air was filled with a tremendous blast.  A fraction of a moment later, blood was pumping out of the back of the tiger’s head.  With an absolute lack of splendor or majesty, the tiger fell limp onto the equally limp body of Stan-From-the-Feed-Store.

                “Nope.”

    “It’s quite a piece,” the white-haired clerk said from behind the chain-link fencing that crawled to the ceiling from the top of the service desk.  “And it’s only been here for a week or so, you’re a lucky man.”  He shifted behind counter and, as an afterthought, added, “If you take it, that is.”  The bared windows faced east, away from the setting sun, and the only light in the shop was coming from a weak table lamp.  Soft, gray smoke could be seen floating around the halo of light.

    Jack kept his eyes on the painting.  There was no frame, just the raw edges of the canvas.  Painted on the surface was a lonely room with a single, curtained window.  In the center, pressed against the gray wall, was an antique chest, all was accented with a soft, watery blur.  He turned it around, a few words were scribbled on the top left-hand corner in fading pencil.  Dreamcatcher; Oil on canvas.  August 94.

    The painting was hokey, but his mother’s birthday was coming up.  She loved antiques and misty paintings, and this one seemed like a nice compromise between the two.

    “Says here it was painted in ’94,” Jack said, glancing from the painting to the clerk, who brushed his stringy white hair behind his ear and leaned against the counter on one elbow.

    “I didn’t say it was finished a week ago, I said I got it a week ago.”

    Jack nodded, setting the painting back on the dresser he had lifted it from.  He reached behind his back and pulled out his wallet.  “How much do you want for it?”

    “How about seventy-five?  That sounds good.  A nice, even number.”  The man pushed himself up and walked to the register, pulling a rust-colored panel that blocked a small square cut into the fence.

    “It’s not that great of a painting,” Jack looked into his wallet.  He didn’t love his mother enough for seventy-five bones, especially not after his demotion at work.  “How about forty-five?”

    “Forty-five’s no good, my friend.  I will drop it to sixty-five, though, because it seems that you like it so much.”

    “Well, the software writing business hasn’t been too kind to me.  Make it fifty-five and you’ve got yourself a deal.”

    The old man nodded, and Jack slid the money through the gap in the fence the panel had freed and left with the painting in the back seat of his Plymouth. 

***

    At home, he set the painting on a recliner positioned next to his sofa and stood a few feet away to examine it again.  The light was darker in his small apartment, but he could breathe and see much better out of the spinning, smoky air of the pawn shop.  For a second, as he scratched the back of his head, he thought the blur had cleared up slightly, or even shifted just a nudge to the left.  Jack didn’t think about it for too long before he flopped down onto the sofa, feeling around for his television remote. 

    He groped the arm of the sofa, the remote’s usual roost, but there was nothing.  Jack scanned the surface of the sofa and found nothing but crumbs.  He slid his knees onto the floor, bending to look under his coffee table.  He found nothing; he stood up and started toward the kitchen.  Often times during any given program, his stomach would let out a low rumble and he’d venture to the kitchen, forgetting the remote was in his hand.  As he passed the recliner, he caught a slow movement in his peripheral vision and froze. 

    He slowly turned to the painting.  An itching spike had jumped in the back of his mind.  He wasn’t quite scared, but unnerved nonetheless.  He lived alone, and had no real friends except his mother.  There was nothing but the painting, but it wasn’t quite the same.  The images had cleaned up a bit, becoming sharper and slightly more defined.  The hazy brightness the painting held in the pawnshop had toned down, becoming shadier.

    Then his eyes found the chest.  It was tipped open and a black rectangle was peeking out.  He traced over the chest with his eyes, which hadn’t changed except for the small detail that it was open.  Then he examined the rectangle.  It was lined with smaller squares, white and red ghosts of words stood out from it.

    It was his television remote, though a less-defined version of it.  Jack started to turn, shrugging it off, when the misty blur shifted, bringing the image to focus just slightly more than it had been.  Then, the mist began shifting to the left, fluctuating in density as it passed across the chest, obscuring it and its content at points.  Jack couldn’t deny the fact that the image inside was actually moving.  Without thinking, he reached out, extending one finger to its surface, expecting to run his fingertip along the rough texture of the face of the painting. 

    Instead, he jumped as his finger grazed a wet surface.  A small ripple ran from where he had touched it and disappeared as it reached the barrier of the painting. 

    He suddenly remembered The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which a painter (was it Basil?  He couldn’t remember) painted the very soul of Dorian Gray onto the canvas.  There was also Stephen King’s Rose Madder, in which a woman could step into a painting to avoid her stalking and controlling ex-husband, and “The Road Virus Heads North,” about a painting of a mysterious murderer that follows the main character.

    But things like that don’t really happen.  Or do they?

    “Obviously they do,” he said to himself.

    The nervous spike had worked its way from the back of him mind to the tips of his toes, leaving his skin thick and his limbs shaking.  He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and shook one out, pulling it to his mouth and quickly lighting it.

    He glanced from the painting, with the patiently revolving mist encircling the mysterious chest, to the tip of his finger.  Though the surface was wet, but there was no residue on his fingertip, nor was there a smudge on the painting.  There was only the long-gone ripple.

    Jack took a deep breath.  Motivated more by curiosity than the weak, bastardized sensation he called courage, he held his arm out again, pushing it toward the painting.  This time, he planted his hand against it, and felt his palm graze the moisture.  Gently, he pushed down against it, and the fog inside the painting parted as his forearm entered the painting.  It wasn’t wetness that he felt, it was tingle of cold air. 

    His fingers melted into fuzzy, oily digits as they continued into the painting.  His wrist followed, growing brush strokes.  The tiny details of hair, wrinkles, and scars became smudged. He paused before continuing to push toward the chest.  A thin string of sweat fell from his brow and down his cheek as his hand brushed against the chest and felt the splintery wood against his fingers followed by the rusting brass that was the built-in lock.  His fingers slid over the edge of the chest’s mouth and found the remote.  He wrapped his fingers around the cold plastic and he pulled his arm outward.

    Jack watched as the painted version of his arm fed out into reality, until the fist clenching the remote slid out and a cascade of ripples was left behind to bloat themselves into extinction. 

    “Hot damn,” he whispered in an exhale as he turned the remote around in his hand, his eyes tracing it.  The shape was right, and all the buttons were there.  Still driven by curiosity, he turned mindlessly to the television and pointed the remote at the screen.  The thumb of his hand crept against the round power button and pressed down.

    Nothing.

    Jack pressed it again and there was no result.  He looked at the remote, trying to spot a flaw he hadn’t noticed before, and his eyes fell onto the cover to the battery slot, and slowly pressed it open.  Of course, he thought as he looked into the empty, spring-lined bed.  No batteries.  He replaced the cover and tossed the remote onto his coffee table and went to his kitchen.

    Excitement always made Jack thirsty, and alcohol always eliminated the excitement.  What he was feeling was more of a fusion between anxiety and a curious awe, but he hoped the drink would achieve the same effect and calm him down.  Jack used to drink wine when his job was a bit more stable, but with the demotion, he had to downgrade to domestic beer after discovering he had no taste for the cheaper label wines.  He grabbed a can from his refrigerator and went back to the miraculous painting leaning up on his old, deteriorating recliner and gave it a look-down as he popped the tab and took a swig from the can.

    The chest was closed again and the fog had thickened to give the painting its surreal blur.  His mind seemed to swirl in his head like the mist had in the picture, trying to wrap around the painting, to understand it.  His neck straightened as his mind hatched an idea, and he smirked with a loud gulp as he swallowed his drink.

    His eyelids drooped down and he concentrated on the single thing he wanted his entire childhood.  He remembered asking, even begging his mother for it, but she always told him either she couldn’t afford it or he didn’t have enough responsibility.  He concentrated on the white, furry body with its silent eyes and wiggling nose.  The pet took a clear, solid form in his mind, and he let his eyes pop open just in time to see the lid of the chest creep into place.

    It was empty at first, but after only a few seconds, the small head of a full-grown rabbit popped above the mouth-line of the chest inside.   The fog reduced to a thin mist once more and kicked into motion.  With a slight hesitation, Jack repeated the experiment from the remote incident.  He reached one arm into the painting and watched as his actual arm became his painted arm.  The near certainty that he would feel the soft fur of the rabbit sped his hand into the chest and to the white head with its ears pressed against its back.  He curved his hand underneath it and tried to scoop it up into his palm, but it was too big. 

    Without thinking, he pushed his second arm in and stood with his arms inside the painting to his elbows, reaching into the chest and positioning his arms until he had the rodent in his grasp.  He gripped it carefully and began to pull it out.  The ripples started working their way outwards as the rabbit’s head broke through its surface and into Jack’s world.  The rabbit opened its mouth, stretching its jaw in a long yawn and lay still in Jack’s hands.  He set it down on his coffee table and stroked its back softly with the back of his index finger. 

    Jack glanced at the painting again.  The chest had closed, and the misty blur had returned.

***

    Jack moved the television set from his living room and put it on his bed, setting the painting on the small table that served as his entertainment center.  He positioned the ancient recliner directly in front of it, where he now sat, staring into the painting.

    He had reached in several times, since pulling the rabbit out.  He brought a variety of items from the painting to test its limits; a cage for Oscar, the new rabbit, an acoustic guitar, and a television (which he nearly fell in trying to get, using all the strength of his arms and back).  He tried a bicycle, but couldn’t manage to work it out.  It fell from his hands and into the mist and was gone when the painting resolidified.  Now, he sat with his head leaning on his open hand, considering what to pull out next. 

    He shot a pleased glance at Oscar, who lay in his cage as he had lain in Jack’s hands, deep black eyes staring up at Jack.  Its nose wiggled slightly, but there was no other movement.  Jack thought for a long time about what his life was truly missing.  He had his apartment and his Plymouth, his gaming system and all the games that could never hold his attention for long, in addition to the new assets provided by the painting.

    But no friends except Mom.  He tried to remember back to the last date he had (7th grade), or even the last friend he had (high school).  The last time he had sex was on the night of his high school graduation, when he told his mother he was going to party with his friends at the chosen Grad Night location, and wound up parked behind a closed supermarket with Suzy McQueen in his backseat instead.  But now he was out of college and working the same dead-end job he swore he’d never fall into, stuck with a bunch of faded memories.  He couldn’t even remember that last time he jacked off, let alone the last time he wanted to.

    And his mind was set.

    He tried to remember Suzy.  She got around a bit too much and he remembered how scared he was that he might have caught something.  Jack shook his head and set those memories aside.  That wasn’t what he wanted.  He closed his eyes, trying to remember how she looked. 

    She was blonde, he remembered that much, but the rest was a blank.  Jack shifted gears and began to concentrate instead on the idea of blonde.  When he opened his eyes, the chest had also opened again.  Staring at him from the hollow open of the chest was a pale face folded in blonde hair.  The standard pretty blonde, he thought, continuing along that line.  He examined the slim shape of her head; her eyes were bluer than both the afternoon sky and the ocean in that idealistic way that’s only possible in poetry, movies, and paintings.    

    Jack drew his breath, suddenly a bit uncertain.  He recalled reading about the attempts to clone sheep or mice.  They always lived for a day or two, but were never quite there, and died soon after.  He supposed this wasn’t much different as he looked at Oscar.

    Outside, the sun was peeking over the neighboring apartment building.  He sighed heavily and wiped his forehead.  “What am I waiting for?” He asked himself with a subtle tremble in his voice.

    This time, he placed both hands on the surface of the painting, feeling the numbing cold from the room inside as they sank slowly into it, becoming slightly abstracted and the brush-strokes once again trailed across his skin.  His hands touched the top of the blonde head and ran downward, unsure of how to get it out of the chest. 

    He positioned his hands on either side of the neck, right below the edge of the jaw, and pulled the head towards himself.  The chest fell onto its face, the lid bouncing on the back of the scalp.

    What’s she wearing, he paused.  That’s right, a bikini.  He supposed respect wasn’t an issue.  “Why the hell not,” he shrugged, dragging the head closer, moving his arms in about half way to his shoulders, pulling with all the strength he had.  A thin, bikini-clad body slid easily out of the chest and across the painted wooden floor after the chest had fallen.  Jack laid her head down carefully on her face, repositioning himself in front of the painting.

    He tucked his hands under the arms of the painted girl and continued to drag her out.  The head penetrated the barrier of the painting and he watched as each finely stroked strand of hair became real as it passed through the strange surface of the picture. 

    The whole head was out now, hanging awkwardly as Jack moved to the side of the painting, now pulling on one of the girl’s arms.  The torso followed, and was concluded with the long legs and feet, leaving a chorus of ripples.  Jack grabbed the girl up in his arms and laid her down across his sofa. 

    Her eyes were closed.  For just a moment, she was utterly still.  Then, her body jerked and her mouth dropped open, gaping like that of a person who nearly drowned.  Her jaw shot rigidly downward as her lungs expanded and her legs gave a short, violent spasm.  Finally, she relaxed and her chest started the rhythmic rise-and-drop signature of breathing and her eyes slid open.  Though they were a bright, striking blue, they were distant and vague. 

***

    A few hours passed after Jack pulled the girl out of the painting.  The chest had closed and made itself right again, returning to the original image he had purchased.  The girl lay across the sofa, unmoving except for her breathing.

    Jack had slapped her in an attempt to stir her, the result was nothing.  He got the same result when he pinched her, trying to get her to speak.  At one point of peaked desperation, Jack lit a cigarette and took two drags before pressing it down into her chest, at the swell of her breast.  He breathed in the singed flesh and pulled the cigarette away, leaving a red, ash-lined circle, but she didn’t even flinch.

    The day came by slowly and Jack didn’t bother calling in sick for work, he just sat on his coffee table staring at the girl on his sofa, the one wearing the bikini, which was blue to match her eyes.  He watched her eyes intently, waiting for even the slightest movement, but there was none.  “She’s like a corpse,” he muttered to himself as he eyed her and lit another cigarette.  “She’s like a breathing corpse.”

    After realizing that she’d never move or change, no matter how long he waited, he went to thinking about what he could possibly do with her.  She was a living doll.  Having sex with her would be the same as getting it on with a fresh corpse, which didn’t exactly float Jack’s proverbial boat.

    Jack ended up sitting in his recliner instead, staring at the painting.  His eyes were wide and deep, worried lines had already set in to ensnare his eyes like old vines on the side of a dying house.  The image was stationary, showing him its original, unshifting image, but the painting wasn’t what he was thinking about.  Jack knew that behind him, the blonde girl was spread across his sofa, her body was breathing, but her eyes were unblinkingly dead.  Those eyes seemed to be burnt into his mind.  No matter where he went in the house, he couldn’t escape them.

***

    He tried strumming the guitar to get his mind off the girl, but got only a tuneless, muted hum, each string equally bland.  The television, when plugged in and turned on, only displayed a shifting myriad of colors.  Jack realized Oscar was the same as everything else.  More importantly, the rabbit was the same as the girl; breathing on the outside, sure, but dead on the inside.  He cut off one of the rabbit’s ears with a pair of poultry shears to make sure, and, as he expected, there was no response. 

    “I can’t get away from them.  The eyes follow me, they follow…”  He glanced at Oscar again, and was suddenly infuriated not just at the girl, but at the rabbit and the painting, and somewhere inside the confines of his mind, he was angry with himself.  He grabbed the rabbit up in his hands as he felt hot tears blaze down his cheeks, cigarette in mouth, as he tried to force the small creature down the drain of his kitchen sink to be pulverized by the garbage disposal he installed the year before. 

    The device wouldn’t take the rabbit, but it did the trick; the animal’s face was shredded off and its neck broke when the blade jammed.  The sad body was motionless in the sink still; its blood lingered on Jack’s fingers as he lit another cigarette, finishing the pack.

    He couldn’t keep her, he knew that much.  She couldn’t stay.  Jack stood up, the cigarette extending from between his pursed lips.  He walked around the sofa, wrapped his hands around the girl’s ankles and pulled her off.  She hit the floor with a hollow thud and Jack began to drag her to his kitchen.  There was no other choice; she had no mind and no identity, so he could drop her off somewhere.  According to the world, she didn’t exist.  His heart’s usual rhythm of pit pat (pause), pit pat (pause) had shifted into pit pat pit, pit pat pit (pause) as he produced a greasy serrated steak knife from the sink. There was a tool kit under his bed with a hack saw and a pipe saw.  But the knife would do for now.

    He started at the ankles.  It wasn’t difficult getting to the bone.  The skin around the ankle was thin, weak, and relatively free of meat.  The first rush of dark blood made Jack’s throat back up and he vomited violently, feeling the mixture of bile and cheap alcohol splash from the linoleum tile and onto his socked feet.  He let himself dry-heave for a moment afterward until his stomach and intestines locked up.  The blood continued out of the artery, but it had already gotten as much out of Jack as it could.  After the skin was out of the way, he worked on the bone until the blade started to run dull.  At that point, he grabbed the tool kit from his bedroom and a handful of trash bags from a small utility closet.

***

    Officer Wilde watched from his squad car as a man wearing a tidy business suit hauled several black trash bags from the trunk of his Plymouth to a flat spot between two small hills of garbage.  “Think we should check it out, Dean?”  He asked his partner.

    “Sure,” Dean replied.  No one ever dumped in the lot without proper permits, but the night had been slow.

    They pushed their doors open and approached the man as he was heading back to his car for the last bag.

    “Gotta permit, sir?”  Wilde asked, stroking the but of his night stick with an eager thumb.

    “Sure do,” the man replied as he pulled the bag out of his car with one hand.  He walked to the two officers, digging into his pocket.  He pulled out the small ticket the office clerk had sold him and handed it Wilde, who promptly examined it as Dean examined the man.  The fellow seemed to be in shape, except for the fact that he was wearing a suit in a dump.  Now that he was up close, he saw that the suit wasn’t as tidy as he had thought it was.  The shirt was loose of his waistband, one of the coat’s arm lines had been torn, and his belt missed several loops.  His eyes, also, seemed a bit more aged than the rest of him and stressed beyond imagination.

    “Looks like you’ve had a hard day at work,” Dean said.

    “Yeah,” the man said casually, twirling the garbage bag in one hand, “The software business ain’t what it used to be, that’s for sure.”  Dean just nodded in reply.

    “Everything looks in order,” Wilde began, holding a heavy sigh in his throat.

    “Mind if we look in the bag, sir?”

    “Not at all,” he held the bag open for them.  Inside was the usual trash, crumpled paper, discarded segments of food, old wrappers, and a broken toaster.  “The dumpsters at my apartment complex are loaded.”  The man smiled, closed the bag.  Both Dean and Wilde were left off disappointed and let the man carry on.

***

    Jack paced in front of the painting and his overturned coffee table.  Those cops saw me, he repeated time after time in his mind.  They’re suspicious; they think I’ve done something horrible.  He walked to his kitchen and eyeballed it quickly.  A thick layer of blood had spread across the tiled floor and absorbed his knife and two saws.  “One look in there and they’ll take me away, right up the pickle-barrel.”

    He walked back into his living room and passed a mad glare at the painting, but he still saw the blonde girl’s eyes lingering above the chest. 

    “See what you’ve done?”  He yelled.  “It won’t be long before I hear sirens, and then they’ll be here.  Then they’ll be here…”  Jack’s face lightened a bit as he looked at the painting once more.  He realized that the whole time he had been taking things out of the painting, but hadn’t tried putting anything in. 

    “They’ll be here, and they’ll think I’m gone,” he pressed, “but I’ll be right here, right under their fat noses.”  He walked to the painting and pushed the recliner to the side.  The blurry mist inside had began to revolve again, and Jack pressed his hands against the face of the painting, not pausing as he had before.  He pushed his arms inside, and then slipped his head in. 

    His elbows slid onto the floor as he looked around the painted universe.  Everything was beautifully surreal; the floor, the chest, and the blue sky outside the window.  The brushstrokes were gone inside the painting, but the soft mist was swirling in the air, giving everything an eerie shine and a dream-like blur.  He pushed off the ground with his forearms and pulled his legs in, one knee at a time. 

    Jack was then lying across the hardwood floor, feeling the cold air bite at his skin. He turned himself around onto his back and rubbed his arms for warmth.  There was no ceiling, just a endless blue sky.  He sat up, looking at the chest, and leaned forward a bit to tip it open with his finger tip.  It was empty.

    He closed his eyes and let the chest’s lid fall, and concentrated on bottle of wine.  When he opened his eyes, the chest was still closed.  Jack crawled to his feet and opened it, but he was greeted by blank emptiness.  He let out a deep breath and turned around, expecting to see a window cut into the air, a window into his apartment, but there was nothing.  His eyes jumped from side to side then from his toes to the azure heavens, looking for the hole he had crawled through, but there was nothing.

    Nothing except the wood floor and the wall that held the single curtained window next to the chest.  Everything else around it was just the same deep, blue sky.