Filip Wiltgren

The commander of the 382nd penal battalion had a firm but genital hold on his men: he had them by the balls and didn’t need to squeeze very hard for everyone to jump, and Corporal Ashton was his favorite way to squeeze.

Ashton commanded a regiment, which, as a corporal, he shouldn’t. Ashton gave orders to captains, which he shouldn’t either. Ashton fired live rounds over the heads of the men to get them moving, but no one really cared. Ashton should have been the most hated man in the service, but he wasn’t.

Corporal Ashton was blessed.

Friendly fire never happened to Corporal Ashton. Close air support never landed on Corporal Ashton. The radio link to divisional artillery always worked for Corporal Ashton. Penal always gets the hairiest jobs but the 382nd had the lowest casualty rates in the division. When the commander wanted to squeeze, all he had to do was draft an order transferring corporal Ashton to another battalion and leave it conspicuously unsigned on his monitor. Whatever problem annoyed him disappeared immediately. Ashton was blessed. He was blessed right until the day he died.

I know, I was there. I had just punched out Rolinski and gotten a fifteen minute court martial and another six month stint in penal, which was fine by me since that was the reason I had punched out Rolinski in the first place. He didn’t mind; he’d done the same to me two months earlier and for the same reason. We were both in Ashton’s company. When the commander wanted to reward you, he put you in Ashton’s company.

I was on Ashton duty that day. Ashton always sat on the third chair at the third table from the door in the mess. He always took two scoops of powdered scrambled eggs with his left hand from a fresh tray. The chefs always put out a new tray when Ashton entered. Once a freshie had taken a scoop right before Ashton. We stomped that shit so badly he got a medical discharge. Ashton didn’t mind. The chef whipped up a fresh tray in four minutes flat and Ashton took two scoops with his left hand. Now the chow line emptied the moment Ashton walked into the mess.

Ashton duty wasn’t very demanding. You had to keep Ashton’s table clear. You had to make sure that there were exactly four pieces of toast on his plate at all times and that his glass was never empty and never more than half full. Ashton wasn’t fussy. The toast could be old and hard as long as there were four pieces of it.

I’d just placed another piece of toast on his plate as the mail call rolled by. You always got mail immediately, no matter where, since you could be dead the next hour, but printouts were reserved for death and disgrace. Ashton finished his meal before tearing the seal off his. He put it on the table. Then he smashed his arm over it and I only glimpsed the very beginning and very end. Seniority in line of duty, Congratulations Sergeant Ashton. Ashton turned pale. He didn’t move, and I didn’t say a thing, but rumor spreads.

That evening we were called out to this no-fire zone the PR-guys had set up. The engineers were widening a track so that the trucks could get through, and they’d taken some rounds from an indig village. Ashton’s company was to storm the village and remove the holdup.

The ground was full of shallow ditches going lengthwise between the road and the vill, and there were some trees but no bushes, so it’d be hell to run through, and we wouldn’t have any cover when we did it. Penal always got the hairy jobs.

But divisional artillery put down a light barrage in the fields on the other side of the vill to keep the indigs from doing a Houdini exit, and then Ashton stuck his head up and yelled, and we all started running, and the indigs must have been reloading or something because we ended up with eight kills and no vacancies in our rooster even though Morales’ suit seized up and Bauman fell into a sinkhole.

We felt pretty good, and some of the guys even joked about Ashton getting command of all the battalion now that he’d been promoted, but Ashton shut them down. When we got to base he didn’t take his suit off.

Now, you don’t just remove a guy’s suit. He had to unlock his faceplate and fastenings or the thing stayed on, and Ashton stood there like a statue painted in active camo while the tech was hovering over his shoulder. Then he removed his helm, flipped it into the air twice and slammed it down on the diagnosis board.

We all smiled and congratulated each other. Ashton was still blessed.

The next day he didn’t come for breakfast. Bauman was on Ashton duty, and he just stood outside Ashton’s quarters and waited and waited. Then Ashton showed up, and his face looked like a sheet someone had dipped in charcoal and painted lips on. He’d never looked tired before. But he got to the mess and scooped two scoops with his left hand and ate half a toast and drank enough water to fill a tub.

I looked at Rolinski, and he looked as shit scared as I felt.

We got called out again that day. Two in a row was bad but not unheard of, especially not for penal. We were to take a wooded hill with some sort of indig temple on it, so there’d be no artillery and no close air support, and we weren’t to shoot at or into the temple at all costs. Cultural liaison mission it was called.

So we went up the hill while indigs with heavy weapons did things to stop us. A 90 mm shell took Morales’ head off, and actual blood actually spurted. The battlefield recording became a viral hit, and the commander was not pleased. We got back to base, and Ashton removed his helmet and flipped it.

He missed.

The helmet clattered to the floor. Ashton stood there, hands out, while everyone held their breaths. Then Ashton walked off, suit and all, to his quarters. I looked at Rolinski, and I bet he was thinking how stupid he’d been to punch me out, for I was thinking the same thing about him.

Ashton didn’t show up for mess call, and then he didn’t show for roll call. Then the call came in that intel had found an indig weapons factory buried in a hillside eighty klicks into the wilds and the 382nd was called out for the third time.

We went out without Ashton. Everything went wrong.

H company got ambushed and lost twenty guys in the first five minutes. G company was sent to relieve them and got chewed up. Then Ashton’s company was ordered to relieve them, and we moved up, but the close air support overshot the valley and wiped out most of first platoon. When we finally knocked out the indigs, the 382nd had thirty percent casualties.

When we got back to base, the door to Ashton’s quarters had been breached. An MP was bagging Ashton’s personals and a piece of rope hung from the crossbeam. Ashton was gone, the morale was gone, and the commander started putting guys before the firing squad.

The 382nd was no longer blessed and nobody punched anybody out to stay in it.

At age ten, FILIP WILTGREN realized that he wanted to be a writer. His magnum opus, “Ragnar as a policeman,” was produced a few days later, rapidly followed by its sequels, “Ragnar goes underwater” and “Ragnar in space.” He then made the mistake of comparing Ragnar to Frodo & Co. and spent the next thirty years in mortal terror of actually writing until realizing that he would die no matter what, so he might as well let his creativity roam before it happened.

Kyle Amato

George usually stared out the kitchen window each morning, before his brain started working. He usually held his coffee and watched the sun rise over his neighbor’s house. It was calming.

Unfortunately for George’s routine, something unexpected blocked the sun. As his brain was still powering on, it took him a moment to realize this was peculiar. “Hmm,” he muttered to himself. “Hmm.”

His wife Lucy came into the kitchen yawning. She poured herself some coffee and joined George at the window. “Good morning, dear,” she said.

“Good morning. Say, Lucy?”

“Yes, dear?”

“Have we always had a massive stone obelisk in our backyard?”

The obelisk stood at least twenty feet tall and seemed darker than midnight. Its pyramidal top disappeared into the highest branches of their neighbor’s oak tree. The rising sun revealed words etched in the stone, but George could not tell if they made sense, or if they were even English.

“Oh, I had it installed last night, just as the last star of the Aeron Nebula took its final breath and blinked out of existence, as we all must do when our time comes,” said Lucy. “The girls at the club have all got one now, and who am I to buck trends? Isn’t it beautiful?”

George put on his slippers and walked outside. The obelisk looked even taller and menacing from their backyard. It was doing a remarkable job of blocking out the sun. It seemed to be absorbing any light that touched it, like a black hole. The symbols were brightening.

“Why does it sound like it’s breathing?” asked George.

“Because it is, silly!” Lucy pulled George’s arm to her chest and laughed. “But it’s not breathing air like you and me, oh no. It’s breathing something much less knowable. Something deep within all of us, though we may never truly know what it is, or what we have lost. At least, that’s what Diana told me at brunch yesterday.”

“I see,” said George. His coffee was cold now. “How much does something like this cost?”

“Certainly not money,” said Lucy.

“That’s good to hear,” said George. “I’m going to take a shower. Holler if it does anything.”

“Of course, dear.” Lucy sat, legs crossed, beneath the obelisk and stared. She had sewn the symbols into her pink bathrobe days earlier in anticipation. Now they were beginning to glow as well.

The shower’s water pressure never failed to disappoint George. Water dripped pathetically from the spout, and he had to press himself against the chilly tiled wall if he ever wanted to be clean.

George wondered what his friends would say about the obelisk. How would this affect his barbeques? Would anything cook in proximity to that chilly pillar of darkness? Was their obelisk as nice as Lucy’s friends’ obelisks?

A low hum reverberated through George’s ears, like he had stood too close to the speakers at a concert When he turned off the water, he could still hear it. Curious.

The noise had not left him even after he had shaved and gotten dressed. Q-tips did nothing. He looked out the window and saw only the black obelisk.

“Oh, right.” He was embarrassed to think it had taken him this long to consider the obelisk as a culprit. It was almost definitely causing this infernal buzzing.

George stepped into his backyard and found Lucy where he had left her, albeit hovering six inches off the ground. The belt of her bathrobe barely touched the grass.

“Lucy?”

Lucy turned her head, a frozen smile on her face. Had she been wearing that much black eyeliner when they woke up?

“Oh, hello, George! Off to work?” Her bathrobe was an incandescent blue. The symbols on the obelisk shone like searchlights, projecting themselves on the side of their house. They were definitely not English. Egyptian hieroglyphs, perhaps? Or something older? George could not be sure.

“I was going to pick up Chinese food on the way home. Does that sound good?” George could have sworn something sat beside his wife, but when he blinked the monstrous outline disappeared.

“It sounds wonderful, but I’m not going to need food after this, George. You should treat yourself! I’ll see you on the next level of existence!” Lucy rose higher and higher as she spoke. She would reach the top of the obelisk soon.

George stood at the gate, debating whether or not he wanted to stick around and see what would happen. He decided against it, as he was going to miss his bus at this rate.

KYLE AMATO is a fiction writer attending Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY. His work has been featured in Skidmore’s Folio Literary Magazine. He did not cry at the end of Toy Story 3.

Ashley Hutson

Since I’ve gotten sick, Pete has started talking to me via stuffed animal. A menagerie left over from my childhood sits on our bed, a collection of elaborate fictions I never gave up. The oldest is Toby Benson, a sleazy German shepherd whose police dog experience turned into a real cocaine problem. He teaches Krav Maga classes. He is able to do this, he tells me, because he has lethal beanbag paws. He allows people to join for “friend prices,” which always start at two hundred forty dollars.

Toby is married to Jack McPherson, a small bear Pete’s mom gave him for Valentine’s Day a few years ago. Drunk Irish, Pete says. Loves to jig. Thinks Obama is spelled O’Bama. Big liberal.

“Liberal? How do you know?” I asked Pete once.

“Come on,” Pete said. “It’s a bear and dog love story. Think of their civil rights.”

When we have company over, we shut the bedroom door. Stuffed animals on an adult bed are hard to explain. People have either too little or too much imagination.

We used to have people drop in pretty regularly. But more and more I find myself not answering the door. This afternoon we were sitting on the couch when someone knocked. Pete and I remained very still and waited for them to go away. We both knew it wasn’t happening.

I turn to Pete after the knocking stopped. “Let’s visit the animals,” I say.

“Don’t you want to go out?” Pete says. “See the sights?”

“Nah,” I say. “I’d rather be among friends.”

“You got it.”

He leads me into the bedroom and shows me Calliope Sam who farts uncontrollably and talks like Johnny Cash. Sam’s face is frozen in a perpetual neigh. He tells me that he misses the carousel life, but he sure as hell does not miss being impaled on a striped pole.

Then Calliope Sam puts his front hooves on my leg and looks up at me.

“Hey, darlin’,” he whinnies. “I’m so happy I came to live with you.”

He seems to choke up for a minute. It gets quiet. I pet his mane and tell him to not be sad. I’m pretty happy he unimpaled his ass and came here, too.

He gives me a weak neigh and we both titter awkwardly.

It goes quiet again.

I look Pete in the eyes. “Does this make us weird?” I ask.

“Um, yeah,” he says.

“Will you keep on doing this, you know, after it’s over?” I say.

He picks up Prospector Jones. The prairie dog and retired gold miner jumps up to sit on my shoulder. He clears his throat, and declares in a strong, whistling voice, “Whoa, there, pardner. Don’t dig that hole too soon.”

ASHLEY HUTSON has work published or forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, theNewerYork, The Heavy Contortionists, The Lascaux Review, and others. She was also named the short fiction finalist for the Orlando Prize in 2014. She lives in Sharpsburg, MD. Find her on the web at www.aahutson.com.