New things. New, mostly. New computer, new job. New home, new state–sort of. Actually, it’s a return to an old state, a place we called home before, my son and I, in the balmy humid forested South. It’s the transition that feels new, while everything else is utterly familiar and homey, comfortable and safe–as safe as one can be in the world, anyway. We left behind many things, including many beloved objects I’d collected over the years, and one enormous living breathing object that apparently collected me and then discarded me–or us, rather–which is ultimately for the best (the very best), because we feel like the air is air now, and it is so much easier to breathe in this semi-new place that my 9 year old and I have–after only three weeks of being here–decided to take up running.
Jogging. Yes. I don’t think we’ve ever had so much fun together. At first I thought I’d hate it, and I’m not sure why, but it was so utterly liberating to run, and not feel like something was chasing me, and not feel pressured towards a finish line or any specific goal, just to succeed between point A and B and at the end to exchange exhausted panting looks with my son, as we laughed almost deliriously that we did it and it didn’t kill us and we wanted to do it again. Why did I think I wouldn’t like it?
I’ve been thinking about writing like it’s a dark secret fetish. Nearly every waking moment I’m thinking of things to write. I’m thinking about stories I started long ago and have yet to finish. I wrote a couple of short stories that I, for the hell of it, submitted to a few places. And I got the two awesomest rejections, as they were the first–I think–non-form-letter rejections I’ve ever received. One was so candid–not at all brutal, but probably brusque–that I want to post it here along with the story. So, without further adieu–otherwise I’ll ramble pointlessly about Southern life versus Western life–here is the rejection and then my response and then the story. Enjoy . . . or not. . .?
Warning: This is utterly an ADULT-read.
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Dear Tanisha Mykia:
Thank you for submitting your story “Control of the Soul” to Acidic Fiction. Unfortunately, it doesn’t fit what I’m looking for right now. I listed my reasons at the end of this email.
I won’t consider this story again, but feel free to submit a different story in the future.
Regards,
Steven x Davis
Editor-in-chief, Acidic Fiction
Reasons:
I think this story is sort of held back by its protagonist, who is interpreting all of the events for the reader. It’s only interesting to know a character’s every thought if that character is worth paying attention to, and this one seems a little self-obsessed to me. The story itself has potential, but it needs a little less intrusion from the narrator. -SxD
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My response follows:
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Wow! Thanks alot for the feedback, Steven, never received that kind of attention on a submission before! Useful and thoughtful stuff I will take into consideration.
Best,
Tanisha Mykia
3/30/2015 8:56:44 PM
=========================And here’s the story, which has found its home on this blog. . . .
Science Fiction, Horror
2529 Words
CONTROL OF THE SOUL
by Tanisha Mykia
https://lipsonthewhistle.wordpress.com
3D Electric power lines over sunrise
He sleeps when I wake. I wake when he sleeps. It has been this way since the experiment was deemed a success.
We’re twins. Not identical or fraternal. Spiritual. Psycho-spiritual. And when he wakes, I do strange things, terrible things. Things I’d never ever do. Things I’d normally have control over. I’d have better judgment.
When he wakes I am not myself. I am only truly myself for the few moments of waking-sleep during which we’re both awake. These instances are, increasingly of late, very brief and random.
I do not refer to sleeping as the kind one does in bed. I refer to when the soul sleeps, when it is dormant while the mind is awake. In this state, the body does what it would do instinctively. Morals and lifelong characteristics play no part in decisions; only base, thoughtless, unapologetic notions, which cannot be extinguished by guilt or even the threat of losing something dear.
No. Things become frightfully automatic, and you act on impulse, and you know it for what it is: Deplorable, disgusting, humiliating, and damning. You know it, and can’t stop it.
He, my soul-twin–as we are known to each other and the military staff, scientists mainly, whom, stealthily and aggressively, monitor our behavior and lifestyle–he experiences the same daily atrocities and horrors I do. He, too, performs an emotional acrobatic sideshow throughout his daily routine, in which our captors are justifiably entertained and some milestone in scientific technology is reached wherein we guinea pigs turn our wheel round and round as if powering some sinister device.
Ever since the experiment, we have not been ourselves. We have been cruel, and we have been unacceptable human beings. If there is a god, we are most assuredly on his shitlist, and hellbound, for causing the anguish and disappointment, shock and terror, that we have ritually caused everyone in our lives–and those not–as the result of this psycho-spiritual study in enhancement and depravity gone terribly, terribly wrong.
Or, right, depending on the intentions of our captors.
They’d have us believe we weren’t being held “captive”: We lived in our homes, the same homes prior to the experiment; we drove our cars, went to work, shopped for food, surfed the Internet. It seemed we were at liberty to do so. But–and here is where our lives were impersonal, and we were fully aware–we were wired. Not bugged. I say wired deliberately. Wi-fi is probably the most intelligible comparison. We are instruments now, they say, digital instruments, tuned to receive certain frequencies that, when heard, our minds interpret them as causational stimuli–as commands–and we act accordingly.
They can make you horny, for Christ’s sake, fucking violently aroused such that upon no goad, no enticement, no rhyme or reason, we need to fuck. Sorely. We would, my soul-twin and I had discussed in our ephemeral waking moments, feel compelled to even rape.
He confessed to me that he did ritually. If I have, my mind has graciously laid the memory to waste.
Only one of us can be awake at a time. The more powerful one between us can stay awake longer. Imagine what this means. We battle each other, desiring to fight to the spiritual “death” so that one of us might win and keep control of his actions that day–or night, in which it seemed our lack of control was amplified by moonlight, like ghouls, like werewolves, or vampires.
If you can imagine this, then you can understand how my soul-twin and I became enemies, although it will always remain unspoken. We merely know: Daily, there will be a battle of wills, of who can stay one’s self–of who maintains control over the spiritual lamp, so to speak, that lights the way through the darkness of our new psychosis.
I never meant to kill anyone. Jesus Christ. I never meant to be running now, a fugitive from our captors who could–and would–pursue me indefinitely. I never meant to be torn apart from my spiritual twin, whom still, as did I, battled for dominance over our shared soul. And as I run presently, my hands clenched white knots around my car’s steering wheel, I battle him. I lapse between a surreal auto-pilot mode–where everything is automatic, conversations, driving, working–to hyperactively aware, jumping at sudden movements, checking mirrors to see my face, to see that I am in my own skin, rather than his, and trying to find some new place to hide.
It is night, and he is on my trail, and the headlights and brake-lights are bleary and hazy, too bright but beneficial. I turn up the stereo. Fuck you, you bastard, you won’t win. Not again.
“It’s me!” I growl, maybe laughing, “it’s mine, you hear me, dickhead? It’s my soul!”
I veer left onto a street whose sign I deliberately do not read. He would know my whereabouts, otherwise.
The scientists–the fucking government–had to know one of us, or both, would commit murder. They had to know. They set the whole thing up. This thought haunts me as I decide–keeping the thought dim as I can–to find a hotel. I check the clock on the stereo. It’s three hours fast; I don’t remember why. 5:21AM, it says. I pull into an Executive Inn and decide, since I’m wearing a suit and have a suitcase, I might as well stay here.
As I check in, I find the receptionist delectable. Her skirt is short and tight, utterly lewd with suggestions that do not match her fawning little eyes. Her hips sway like she walks a runway while she takes my credit card, selects a card key from a cabinet, and, as an executive complimentary, hands me a warm cookie in a little brown sack.
“It’s chocolate chip,” she says cheerfully. “Everyone says their gooey and yummy.”
Yummy; how old was she? Her high school girl eyes linger on me and I know she’s attracted. I eat the cookie–and it is gooey–as she tells me my room is 422 and then asks if I need anything else.
I say, “Is there a safe in the room?” Unbidden, totally unbidden. They aren’t my words, I realize in a panic. I lift my suitcase and add, “For this.” This? What’s inside it? I don’t care–I cannot. He’s in control. I’ve lost. Distantly, I know this.
She says yes, there is a safe in every room, and slips my card to me. Her fingers brush mine deliberately and I clasp them between mine tenderly and hold her eyes with mine. Her berry-painted mouth smiles and my cock awakens and she repeats, somewhat blushed, “You’ll be in room 422. That’s on the fourth floor.”
I acknowledge it, unwilling to dispel the spell between us.
“Sure you don’t need anything else?” Her little shake of the head while she speaks is slightly condescending but very alluring. Her hair is blonde, a very television sort of blonde head to toe, hired, obviously, for looks in a mid-priced shitty motel. Her shoes are cheap, which annoys me, but her legs are longer in their heels and finely shaped, and her cleavage is hoisted to the brim of her white blouse. I can see her nipples through the material because her bra is inappropriate and yet so very appropriate at once.
In the back of my mind I fetch for images of my wife–married seven years, my beloved, best friend, mother of our two children. I can’t find her face, don’t want to, don’t remember her name.
I ask her to escort me to my room because I’m very lonely and shaken up from the road trip. I smile like a little boy and she devours this. She walks in front of me. She seems to deliberately take the stairs rather than the elevator, and I can see up her skirt, although it’s shadowy. The backs of her thighs are smooth, the gap between them wide enough that I could have slid my hand in there and cupped her.
In the room I fuck her wildly, four times, a creature–a monster–led purely by impulse and instinct. I take photos of her naked with my phone. I am strangely dizzy, my stomach fluttery and veins beating loudly near my ears. I ask her to leave.
I take a shower. I put the suitcase in the safe. I am powerless afterward to do anything but lie in bed watching Forensic Files, which is a marathon apparently. I fall asleep with the television on.
I wake refreshed, near the noon hour. Fear returns to me, heavy on my chest and prickling my neck, and I forget to brush my teeth or check if I’ve left anything. Just get the fuck out. Run, go, drive. They are chasing me. My soul-twin is trying to win. He wants control of the soul. I stumble and scramble onward.
Driving, miles from the Executive Inn by now, I remember the suitcase I put in the safe. Dammit! They’d wanted me to leave it–to deliver it–and like the perfect marionette, I’d done exactly what they wanted! I would never know what it contained now. It wouldn’t be the first time.
I turn the stereo way, way up again to keep myself–my soul–awake. I listen to music on my phone’s player, not to the radio, whose songs and talk shows and commercials seem determined to remind me that they know me, my every flaw, every sin, and everything I’ve done. They know I’ve cheated on my wife. They know I’ve killed.
They know I killed her.
I drive.
Hunger wages war in my stomach but I don’t where I am–a neverending stretch of highway, evidently, with nothing but desert on either side and deep forest beyond that. There is no suitable place, to my dismay, for another twenty miles.
There’s a diner alongside a gas station. I don’t need gas. Electric car. When the attendants see it they have no idea what it is. They marvel that it looks like a spacepod, a time machine. A VW Bug on PCP one of them says, slack-jawed. I realize sharply then that I am way out of Californian boundaries, I must be, and I relax somewhat. Maybe they can’t find me this far. Maybe I’m too far from their radar–from whatever it was radiated the frequencies that so often damned my soul-twin and I. I know this thought is absurd. Even now I am uncertain of whether or not I am in control. I look in the mirror in the diner’s men’s bathroom. It is me: Jet black hair, jet black suit, cream-pale skin, and bewildered eyes–no matter that I splash them with cold then hot water. There are peculiar tiny brown flecks on my white shirt, like I hadn’t been careful eating whatever I’d had last. I think of the gooey cookie.
While I wait for my pancakes, eggs, and sausage I check my phone for messages. There are countless emails, instant messages, texts, Facebook and Twitter alerts.
Who is this person with such rich social media popularity? Not me.
I thumb through recent photos and am stunned by the particularly edible ones of a naked blonde sprawled over a bed. A hotel bed. Many photos of her, at least fifty. The last ten or so displayed her dead, half hanging off the bed, face up, her throat cleanly sliced amid so much blood.
Who is she?
I close it when my food arrives. The waitress is cute–no, not just cute, sexy, fucking porno hot. My cock swells hotly when she leans down to set my plate before me and her uniform is unable to contain the bulk of her tits.
I acknowledge this with a sly wink.
Her face is strangely serious, inexplicably urgent. She says, “It’s a trap, Abel. They’re waiting outside. The whole place’s surrounded, been wired.”
And suddenly I recognize her. We’ve fucked before. I remember her facial expression as she came and I remember the pattern on the hotel ceiling as I laid beneath her, cream-tiled and drab and plain.
“Cain’s in control,” she continues under her breath. She casts a cautious glance around the diner. Few patrons occupy its quaintly appointed stools and chairs–a countable few, filling the place with the low hum of conversation.
Impatient, half because I am hungry and I smell my food in front of me and food all around me, and half because she is talking so lowly I can scarcely hear, I sigh and let my knuckles rap the table. Her name suddenly occurs to me. “Miranda?” I say, staring at her breasts.
“Yeah. Abel, is it you now?”
I nod and my hands form uncontrollable fists on either side of my steaming food. “How do you know he led me here?” I whisper fiercely.
“He was here, trying to program everybody to receive you the way he wanted them to.”
And now I fully remember her. She is one of us; that is, she is an experiment, too.
“I left soon as I saw him. Took my lunch hour and high-tailed it the fuck out of here in my truck.” She had somewhat the bumpkin accent and she was plump. The way I liked them.
I abruptly realize I am in New Mexico. Lordtown, or somewhere near it.
“Why the fuck did you come? Don’t you know about the base here, hon?”
I say “Fuck” four or five times, and some patrons look over. They return to their meals and conversations at Miranda’s politely embarrassed smile.
“No. He deliberately kept me from knowing it!” I hiss, hands at my temples.
She shakes her head in a sympathetic way. “We ain’t supposed to kill, Abel. . . .”
“I know! I didn’t mean to!”
“But you did.”
“What do I do?”
“Surrender. Easier that way.” The bells over the glass doors jingle as a group of men in sinister identical suits, all of them dark, enter the diner. “I’m sorry, Abel,” she whispers, and brushes the top of my hand with her fingertips. She returns to her job as if she didn’t know me, for which I couldn’t blame her.
I look at the men, helpless, but not resigned. I immediately say, “Cain made me do it. I swear it. I never meant to hurt Serene. I loved her!”
They close around me, a wall knitted of suits and cop sunglasses and stoic unforgiving mouths.
One of them says, “You’ll return to the base at Fort Day, Mr. Abel. You’ll go nicely.”
“I’ll return,” I accede without hesitation. “I’ll go nicely.” Meanwhile, inside, I am screaming, roaring, weeping protest.
I stand up in my little booth, glance without emotion at my untouched food. I follow them. My car is left behind, a token for the crowd. As we drive away in an SUV, I observe the crowd gathering outside, bumpkin and nosy and enthralled. I catch a glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror. It is me. I am in invisible cuffs and subservient now, and there is no sign of my soul-twin who is surely laughing now, revelling that he’d thought to spring a trap while all I’d thought of was my escape.
***
lipsonthewhistle 