The Wasteland
J.A. Crook

Everything stunk. The apartment had turned into a nest of beer and liquor bottles and open pizza boxes like mouths poised to vomit fetid bread and cans of energy drinks that had attracted ants and roaches into his fifth floor studio because even the mindless world of insects was aware that something was dying and it had to be taken apart. Flies woke him and he batted at them and cursed that they existed at all. Joe rolled over and rubbed his forehead and found himself ashed like a catholic on Lent but instead of being repentant before some god he was stained by the crumbs of dark blue tortilla chips that he had a special inclination toward and maybe he worshipped something else like a brand. He spit onto the carpet and stood up. He walked to the kitchen and browsed an empty refrigerator as if it would grow something right in front him. It didnt and he closed it. He dressed and went out the door.
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It was still three days until Sister Lucille would return to the church and Joe didnt know what to do. The second he left his apartment building, a big red plastic cup was shoved in his face and behind it was a black man with cataracts in his eyes and grey stubble around his chin and in that milky white of the man’s eyes was Joe standing like he was in the midst of heaven and he wanted to keep watching but the cup came closer and closer until the dream broke up and wasn’t anymore.

Got any change? the man said with such a weird emphasis on the descent of that center vowel that Joe almost didnt know what he was asking for. There was jingle of coins inside of the cup and it was shaken in front of Joe like some sort of voodoo rattle and Joe pulled his only coin from his pocket and shoved it into the cup with the hope that whatever curse was being cast would fall on someone else entirely. He pushed past the man and the man watched him go.
Joe went down the street and suited men and women passed like he was in some sort of tunnel made out of them. Flyers advertising strip clubs and escort services were strewn across the ground and it made for sinful chapbook of poor men’s daughters caught up in something not one of them seemed to understand. He saw it on their still faces and their uncertain smiles a sort of desperate callousness that confirmed they knew that no one was looking at their faces anyhow.

Cables ascended into the sky around Joe like the veins were being ripped out of the earth itself and they went to things that Joe didnt understand the purpose for, each part of a dark mechanism that made the city and kept it standing up. He thought if enough of those veins were severed that the whole thing would come down flat like a cardboard backdrop at an elementary school play. Horns honked around him like a disturbed pen of turkeys and they were such an element of the place, like concrete or metal or fluorescence, that Joe didnt pay attention to them anymore.

Coffee shops were tucked into corners and people sat in them alone staring out the window at the nothing in front of them with nowhere to go but down into the froth plume their barista had made for them in hope that they’d see something beautiful and near natural that day but it would bubble away or be drank up like the city drank away anything that was real or natural.
Businesses were offering loans with no credit checks and they were almost always the buildings with bars on the windows, suited up and armored like they knew someone would come at them with pieces of the pavement but Joe knew that tossed pavement through windows and cheap loans alike were both ways to make slaves and Joe kept his head down when he passed those businesses and he looked over his shoulder all the time to see if a whip would come at him.

Joe went into a sandwich shop with a name he’d seen in every medium that allowed words. He stood in line behind people just like him and he shuffle stepped forward. They each stared down at the screens of their cellphones bored with the process of lines and the grim progression went on, pause step stare pause step stare pause step stare like they were all hanging from hooks and being carried across a factory floor. When he reached the counter an employee stared at him like he wasn’t another person at all and immediately asked what kind of bread he wanted and Joe didnt know right away and he felt he was wasting time. He said the word blue because it was the first thing that came to his head and the boy behind the counter stared. Joe said white and the boy went to work.

Dressing? the boy asked.

All of it, Joe said.

You want every kind of dressing? That’s mustard, mayo, chipotle mayo, honey mustard, ranch, jalapeno mayo, spicy mustard, and thousand island. You want all of that?

Yeah.

The boy painted on the bread with ropes of colors. He was careful. He was excited making that sandwich because it was different than every sandwich he’d made before it. When he was done dressing the sandwich it was as pretty as a maypole and Joe smiled and said that he wanted turkey and no cheese and the boy was unhappy again. Joe shuffled forward. He paid. He stepped outside with his bag and went back down the street.

People went into and came out of alleys and terminals around him with the anxiety of hunted prairie dogs. The homeless lined any public space that didnt have a door and had a roof. Their ingenuity in crafting personal spaces was engineer’s work that they’d never see pay worthy of. Their faces each had a special sickness for other people but their mouths ran like hillpeople speaking tongues and words like money and children and feed and hungry and aint had none in weeks and help and help and help cast out toward people and God and no one was listening.

Joe heard, Sous les pavés, la plage?
What?

Got any change? the blind man said.

Joe stood there in front of him and that cup came toward his face. The tunnel moved all around him. Help help help. Pictures of indignant pretty girls flew in the wind. Stares shot around him like wind bullets with no accuracy. Joe handed the man his sandwich and he said, Have something beautiful.

About the Author:
J. A. Crook is an independent American horror and literary fiction author from Lubbock, TX. His inspirations include Ernest Hemingway and Carson McCullers. Contemporary inspirations include Stephen King, Cormac McCarthy, Raymond Carver, and Flannery O'Connor. He writes modern Southern Gothic with a focus on keen dialogue and aesthetic minimalism. 

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