Apex Magazine - June 2010 (Issue 13) by Apex Publications

Author:Apex Publications
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: apex magazine, apex publications, jeff carlson, matthew kressel, naomi libicki, holly hight, apex book company

Naomi Libicki grew up in Columbus, Ohio, and moved to Israel at age 16, where she still lives with her husband, son, garden, and approximately 2000 books. She makes a mean apple strudel.

The Thing in the Refrigerator That Could Stop Time

Matthew Kressel

Half a blink after the smoke from the cigarette smoldering in the ashtray had curled into a hoary question mark and froze in perpetual query as if to ask, “What next, Dick?” Dick turned his head ever so slowly toward the kitchen.

Molasses. That’s what it felt like. A honeybee drunk on tree nectar, too dumb to realize it was slowly fossilizing into amber history.

One foot on the floor now, and Dick did realize, slowly, like the drip-drip-drip of a leaking faucet, that he had to close the refrigerator door before the thing inside it stopped time altogether. His mostly barren living room, with only a beat-up couch and a flickering halogen lamp, should have been an easy traverse. But the twenty-three feet from his bedroom to the kitchen seemed longer than all the hundreds of thousands of miles Dick had driven in his big blue bus, ferrying sweaty, obese people to and from Atlantic City for bouts of all-night gambling.

Not all the people on his bus had been sweaty and/or obese, but as Dick’s other foot reached the floor, it was the only image that had time to reach his mind. That and men boasting of the great whoring to be had in “AC,” men who carefully re-slung their wedding bands onto ring fingers before leaving Dick’s bus in Jersey City, or New Brunswick, or Manhattan. And the complaints-complaints-complaints from nicotine-stained mouths of saggy-eyed, droopy-breasted, cellulite-layered women who hated everything about their lives, their co-workers, even AC itself, but apparently not enough to stop them climbing back onto Dick’s bus every week in the hope that this time they’d strike it rich and show everyone back home how right they were about everything all along. And the barely-out-of-diapers-and-questionably-of-drinking-age crowd. The too-drunk, too-loud semi-literate morons who thought because they were away from Mommy and Daddy they could imbibe the half quart of Jack Daniels before they got on Dick’s bus for the three-hour ride home, and then, after shouting in pre-school English how much the New York Yankees fucking rule over the New York Mets, puke freely all over Dick’s seats.

Our children, our future, Dick thought. But no time for distractions as time distilled around him. In the thickening moment, Dick reached the threshold to the living room and figured that if the thing in the refrigerator had learned how to open the door, then he was in some serious shit, because, he thought, the freezer hadn’t worked since June.

Peering through the yellow tunnel of his living room and into the kitchen, he watched it emerge—the smoky, not-quite-there finger—a brown out-of-focus sausage that reached out from the tiny opening and spilled a crack of refrigerator light onto the kitchen’s dark floor. Dick would have shivered if he had had the time.

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