Bones are Made to be Broken Read online

  “Bones Are Made To Be Broken is a dark carnival of rigorous intelligence and compassion, the title novella alone of which is well worth the price of admission. But there’s not a weak sister in this generous bunch. These stories hurt the way only tough-minded character-driven stories can—the human element is never missing. Anderson writes with a sure, steady hand, and I’ll be watching him closely from now on in.” – Jack Ketchum, author of The Girl Next Door and The Secret Life of Souls

  “Paul Michael Anderson writes like no other writer in dark fiction. His premises, plots, and story structure are unique. Every story in Bones Are Made To Be Broken follows this pattern, and are intriguing and very good. Simply, he writes a Paul Michael Anderson story—the highest compliment any serious writer can hope to achieve. Highly recommended.” – Gene O’Neill, author of The Cal Wild Chronicles

  “In Bones Are Made To Be Broken the characters suffer and yearn as their beautifully wrought worlds shatter. Both universal and achingly personal, Anderson’s stories are moody, compelling, and drowning in wonder.” – Erinn L. Kemper, author of The Patrons

  “What a pleasure to read these fresh and darksome tales! Anderson’s style is tensely exciting. His stories are never quite what you think they are going to be about and his endings resonate with fear. He gives us new horizons in horror that are futuristic and psychical. It’s hard to pick a favorite, but “Baby Grows a Conscience” is simply brilliant! You’ll have to read them all. This collection is a treasure for any horror or dark SF fan’s library.” – Marge Simon, Bram Stoker Award winning author of Vectors: A Week in the Death of a Planet

  “Bones Are Made To Be Broken is a deftly told, beautifully written collection of horror and humanity. It’s obvious to me that Paul Michael Anderson has stared down the barrel of pain and come back to share these broken tales with us. This is a must-read collection.” – Mercedes M. Yardley, author of the Bram Stoker Award winning Little Dead Red

  “If your mantra is Bones Are Made To Be Broken, then you can expect suffering and guilt, death and destruction, dark destinies with little hope of survival. But in this powerful collection by Paul Michael Anderson there is also beauty and nostalgia, love and fulfillment, justice and heart. Nothing worth having ever comes easy, as these gothic narratives show us, in all of their horrifying glory.” – Richard Thomas, author of Breaker and Tribulations

  Bones Are Made To Be Broken challenges the mind and punches the gut.” – Craig DiLouie, author of Suffer the Children

  “With notes of classic King, Anderson’s Bones Are Made To Be Broken is filled with stories of the terrible things we see when we close our eyes. Anderson has a talent for rendering nightmares into words, and what he’s collected here are stories that creep inside and make a nest of your innards.” – Kristi DeMeester, author of Beneath

  “Intense and emotionally crippling, Anderson’s stories are not for the faint of heart.” – Stephanie M. Wytovich, author of The Eighth

  “Bones Are Made To Be Broken delivers chills, heartbreak, nail-biting suspense and horror. Paul Michael Anderson gives us a truly superb collection of deeply unnerving short stories.” – Jonathan Maberry, NY Times bestselling author of Patient Zero and Whistling Past the Graveyard

  Bones are made

  to be broken

  A fiction collection by

  Paul Michael Anderson

  Written backwards

  An imprint of dark regions press

  BONES ARE MADE TO BE BROKEN © 2016 by Written Backwards, an imprint of

  Dark Regions Press, LLC

  Cover artwork and illustrations by Pat R. Steiner

  Cover design, editing, and interior design by Michael Bailey

  Foreword © 2016 by Damien Angelica Walters

  Individual works © 2016 by Paul Michael Anderson, unless stated below

  “Crawling Back to You” first appeared in Savage Beasts (ed. Anthony Rivera & Sharon Lawson) by Grey Matter Press, Copyright © 2015; “Baby Grows a Conscience” first appeared in Nectrocit Tissue: Issue 14, Copyright © 2011; “Survivor’s Debt” first appeared in One Night Stands by Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing, Copyright © 2013; “A Nice Town with Very Clean Streets” first appeared in Fear the Abyss (ed. Eric Beebe) by Post Mortem Press, Copyright © 2012; “The Doorway Man” first appeared Into the Darkness: An Anthology, Volume 1 (ed. C. Dennis Moore & David G. Barnett), by Necro Publications, Copyright © 2014; “Love Song for the Rejected” first appeared in The New Bedlam Project: Volume 3, Issue 1, Copyright © 2011; “The Universe is Dying” first appeared in You, Human (ed. Michael Bailey) by Dark Regions Press, Copyright © 2016; “Surviving the River Styx” first appeared in Means to an End (ed. Eric Beebe) by Post Mortem Press, Copyright © 2011; “The Agonizing Guilt of Relief” first appeared in Chiral Mad 3 (ed. Michael Bailey) by Written Backwards, an imprint of Dark Regions Press, Copyright © 2016; “To Touch the Dead” first appeared in Death’s Realm (ed. Anthony Rivera & Sharon Lawson); by Grey Matter Press, Copyright © 2015; “In the Nothing-Space, I Am What You Made Me” first appeared in Qualia Nous (ed. Michael Bailey) by Written Backwards, Copyright © 2014; “All That You Leave Behind” first appeared in Lost Signals (ed. Max Booth III & Lori Michelle) by Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing, Copyright © 2016

  The epigraph for “Bones Are Made to be Broken” on pg. 269 comes from “Everything That Hurts” by Justin Courtney Pierre. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. Also, with much gratitude to Mr. Pierre.

  No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, elec-tronic or mechanical, including photocopying, scanning, recording, broadcast or live per-formance, or duplication by any information storage or retrieval system without permission, except for the inclusion of brief quotations with attribution in a review or report. Requests for reproductions or related information should be addressed to [email protected].

  The stories and poems within this collection are works of fiction. All characters, products, corporations, institutions, and/or entities of any kind in this book are either products of the author’s twisted imagination or, if real, used fictitiously without intent to describe actual characteristics.

  Written Backwards / Dark Regions Press, LLC

  nettirw.com / darkregions.com

  First Trade eBook Edition

  ISBN: 978-1-62641-209-5

  To Heidi.

  For everything.

  Contents

  FOREWORD

  INTRODUCTION

  CRAWLING BACK TO YOU

  SURVIVOR’S DEBT

  BABY GROWS A CONSCIENCE

  A NICE TOWN WITH VERY CLEAN STREETS

  THE DOORWAY MAN

  LOVE SONG FOR THE REJECTED

  THE UNIVERSE IS DYING

  SURVIVING THE RIVER STYX

  THE AGONIZING GUILT OF RELIEF

  (LAST DAYS OF A READY-MADE VICTIM)

  REFLECTING THE HEART’S DESIRE

  TO TOUCH THE DEAD

  IN THE NOTHING-SPACE, I AM

  WHAT YOU MADE ME

  BONES ARE MADE TO BE BROKEN

  ALL THAT YOU LEAVE BEHIND

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Foreword

  I met Paul Michael Anderson via Facebook several years ago. At this point, I’m not sure if I sent the friend request or if he did, but I know we had many mutual friends and would often comment on the same posts. Then, sometime in early 2014, I posted a snippet of a story I was working on. Paul commented, hinting that I should send it to Jamais Vu, a magazine he was editing at that time. When the story was done, I did, he purchased the story, and “The Floating Girls: A Documentary” ultimately garnered a Bram Stoker Award nomination.

  A few mon
ths after that, one of us asked the other to beta read a story. I’m pretty sure it was me, but I could be wrong. Since then, we’ve beta read for each other many times. For the record, I’m not an overly nice beta reader. I’m not mean, but I’m blunt, which is something I’m very open about the first time someone asks me to read and comment on their work. It’s not that I try to be harsh, but I prefer simple declarative statements instead of sandwiching them between rose petals.

  When I beta read my favorite story in this collection, “The Agonizing Guilt of Relief (Last Days of a Ready-Made Victim),” I was very honest with my criticism of the framing story, something Paul later jettisoned. I might have nodded a few times after I read the final version, not in arrogance, but in a “I knew this story was here all along” way. The framing story wasn’t bad in and of itself, but I felt it diluted the emotional impact of the story as a whole.

  “The Agonizing Guilt…” deals with a theme you’ve probably read many times—child abuse—but the perspective is not what you’d expect. It’s often unbearable and yet incredibly honest. It’s a powerful piece, one that I hope breaks your heart as it did mine. And I think it perfectly encapsulates the sort of story that Paul writes. Don’t get me wrong. He stands firm in the playground of the monstrous in much of his work. Here you’ll find ghosts, strange government agencies, Lovecraftian beasts, and even vampires—not to worry; there isn’t a sparkle to be found—but in truth, his stories are never about the monsters. They’re about the characters, the men, women, and children who are tangled up in the monster’s story and desperately searching for a way out. Most of the time, escape comes in ways they neither expected nor wanted. Sometimes there is no escape. Sometimes the monsters they face are what the characters keep hidden inside—their thoughts, their hopes, their dreams turned nightmares.

  And sometimes they discover that they are the monsters. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but an inescapable truth. Humans can be far more monstrous than the beasts lingering in the shadows. We’re complicated animals who often hurt each other and ourselves along the way, and that’s Paul’s strength as a storyteller. He isn’t afraid to show the ugliness our smiles can disguise. He isn’t afraid to first break, then shatter, his characters. He isn’t afraid to make you vacillate between caring and loathing.

  While reading the title novella, I alternately wanted to hug Karen, the main character, and shake her by the shoulders until she snapped out of her disastrous mindset. The story is, at its core, about the fear of being a good parent when circumstances are falling apart. How easy it is to dwell in sorrow and pain and not see what’s happening around you, and then, once you finally open your eyes, how ignoring it is often the easiest, least painful thing to do. I’d wager just about everyone is guilty of that from time to time. It’s the understanding we, as readers, bring to the table that makes the story resonate, even if the fiction renders it more palatable.

  Authors bring pieces of themselves to that table in every story they write. They can be subtle or they can provide the backbone, but unless you know an author well, you probably won’t even notice. In addition to writing, Paul is also a teacher. This gives him a keen insight into children and their complexities and how they cope with things such as grief and loss, something that’s often hard for adults to realistically portray. He paints the children in his work as children, not simply miniature adults with juvenile dialogue, and that’s no small feat, pun possibly intended.

  Paul is a parent as well, and the final story of this collection, “All That You Leave Behind,” is a poignant study in parental grief and the power of What if? It’s a difficult story to read, one that makes you pause when you finish, a knot in your chest, wishing you could change things for the characters. It’s the perfect closing for a strong collection and the perfect sentiment for an ending.

  I’m fond of searching for the story inside a story, whether it’s intentional on the author’s part or not. I’ll admit that I’ve done the same with Paul’s. Vampires have teeth and leave destruction in their wake; so, too, do abusive partners. The world on the other side of a piece of glass is the world we wish we could see, the world we wish we could live in. An angry ghost might represent a secret wish to exact revenge on someone who’s committed a great wrong to you or someone you care about. The sound of a baby crying or the phantom smell of talcum powder gives a sense of what we might have if we made different choices, or if different choices were made for us.

  Stories within stories. Worlds within worlds. Like life. Like us. We all have our secret selves, the faces we don’t show to anyone, not even the people who know us best. Paul cuts through the shadows and shows us what his characters don’t want people to see. What’s underneath the mask is often hard to take because it touches a truth within us we wish we didn’t recognize.

  His work might make the hairs on the nape of your neck rise or he might put a catch in your throat, but when you finish reading it won’t be the monsters that you recall. You’ll remember the characters and their struggles to retain their humanity and their hearts, something all good fiction should do.

  – DAW, August 2016

  Introduction

  where you find yourself

  when you’re nowhere

  in the fall of 2010—on my wife’s birthday, actually—my wife and I discovered she was pregnant.

  It’d been a rough year, a year where we discovered the ground we’d been standing on had turned marshy underfoot without us looking, threatening to pull us under with a single wrong step. That spring, as compensation for the gross cutting to Pennsylvania’s education budget by then-governor Tom Corbett, my district had furloughed me along with 50 other teachers. To save as much of my unemployment as we could while I hunted for another job, we moved into my mother-in-law’s basement. It was a finished basement, an apartment with its own entrance, but the truth surrounded us: we were twenty-seven years old, married, and barely after beginning our adult lives, we were living in my mother-in-law’s basement. I was an unemployed teacher and my wife worked in a women’s clothing store.

  So, for her birthday and as a means to take a break from all the stress, we went hiking through McConnell’s Mill, a state park north of Pittsburgh. It’d been a good day; pausing on a bench before the end of the trail, my wife chided me into carving PAUL LOVES HEIDI into the planks, blending in with the intaglio of graffiti from other lovers.

  And then, on the way home, she asked to stop at the supermarket. She needed to pick something up, she said.

  It’s at this point, when telling this story to others, I offer a humorous slant, but I’ve never found anything that happened particularly humorous; jaggedly funny, I guess, but nothing to guffaw over.

  It was in the store I discovered what we hunted for: a home pregnancy test. Heidi had suspected, had kept quiet, and we ended up picking a cheap-o one, the kind that, if you get two pirates and a parrot, you’re not pregnant, but if the moon is full, Mercury is in retrograde, and you get three penguins, you got a bun in the oven, hon. I think now it was because we just couldn’t believe it. Not this. Not at the worst possible time. Buying the cheap-o one was us going, isn’t this funny? Have you heard anything so ridiculous?

  We cashed out, me feeling like a fourteen-year-old buying his first set of rubbers, convinced the cashier was judging us as we bought our single purchase. I want to say we were laughing, that semi-hysteric bubbling laugh you make when you find yourself close to some social or personal precipice, but my writer’s brain might be adding that in. Giving the scene color, they call it.

  When we got home, and she took the test, she gave it one look and told me, “Go get another one.”

  The drive to a nearby Rite-Aid, only five minutes if going slow, took forever. I remember every instant of it, although not in a fact-ual, reporter-y kind of way. I know the radio was on, for example, but not what song played. Everything had turned down, become starker; the lines sharper, making the streetlamps brighter, the shadows between darker, the thrum of my poo
r old Sunfire louder. I wasn’t cold; I was cool, inside and out. I thought nothing. Not of possibilities, not of fears, not of what-ifs. It was as close to being on automatic as one can be. You read that in fiction sometimes—“so-and-so worked on automatic.” I’d read this time and time again, never really understanding it until that night. That moment when you realized just how much your brain never shuts up, until it finally does, and the silence is something so complete you never really knew what silence was before. Even that hum in your ear, when your hearing is trying to pick up any sound, is gone. That instant where you’re stuck between breaths.

  Why am I telling you this?

  Because six years ago, I was in an instant between breaths. That pause between action and reaction. The stories you’re about to read (with thanks) hinge on that idea.

  When sifting through the stories I’ve written—selecting, rejecting, wondering how this-a-one or that-a-one ever sold—it’s the thing that jumps out. At me, anyway. You never know who you are until something comes along and really fucks up your day, shows you what you were, and then shoves you into what you become.

  But that’s only part of it.

  The other part was how alone we felt. Without careers, without a home, without our fucking lives in order, we were going to be parents, titles we never intended to take upon ourselves. Sure, people were around us, nattering—my mother, her mother, her brother and sister, doctors--but it was all noise in an echo chamber. It all sounded like conversations you have when suffering from a really high fever. We were cut off, cast aside by the boogying of a life that didn’t give much of a fuck what we were doing.