Excerpt from Michael J Seidlinger's Spooky Novel 'Falter Kingdom'

BY MICHAEL J SEIDLINGER

This is an except from  "Falter Kingdom."

I read somewhere that symptoms shouldn’t start until nightfall. I call bullshit on that because it’s one p.m. and I’m hungry and locked in my room. The doorknob won’t turn and, yes, it’s unlocked.

It’s messing with me and getting stronger and bolder and meaner every day. I send everything above as a text message to Becca, who immediately replies with this exclamation point, three of them actually, and then:

“I heard! That’s like such bullshit!”

Duh. I text back, “I’m home with it.”

“Are you okay?”

“See previous message.”

“Wait, like, you’re stuck in your room?”

“Yeah,” and I add, “It’s cold in here.”

Becca texts back, “We need you to meet someone today.”

“Ditch school and help me. I’m clueless with this shit.”

It’s true. I can’t believe it, but yeah, I really do need Becca’s help. But everything I just said feels so fake, and wrong, and nothing at all sincere. But it’s there, so that’s something.

“I’ll leave at lunch period.”

Good. I want to text back, “I’ll be stuck in a room haunted by some demon, waiting for you,” but instead I text, “Thanks.” And again with the “Love you.”

We both text the same two words to each other.

It feels as strange as ever.

But Becca doesn’t ask about the party the other night. She doesn’t even act suspicious. Maybe she’s caught wind of the Nikki thing but she won’t say anything about it. I think it has a lot to do with how she’s reacted to what’s been happening. For being someone so close to me, she shouldn’t have done that, keeping her distance and stuff. But then she’s also skipping school and she never skips school, so . . .

I’m confused. What else is new?

I know you’re there, yeah.

I can sense it nearby, but it’s weird because I can’t get a make on where it’s standing. It feels like it’s everywhere around me. But it’s also not doing anything. It just wants to keep me here, in this room.

Like if I left the room I’d do something stupid.

I look up from my phone and shout, “Are you protecting me or some shit?”

I hear a creaking coming from the floorboards, kind of like how the floorboards creak when I shift my weight from one leg to the other. A low creak, and then there’s nothing.

I get a text from Brad. I don’t read it.

It’s probably just a bunch of “Bro, you got suspended?! That’s fucking wild! You the man!” kind of stuff.

I try the door, still not budging.

I sit on my bed, laptop open, and I start scrolling through blog posts and other stuff. Just wasting time.

Blaire texts me, “Halverson’s a douche.”

I text back, “Yup. Douching it up.”

Blaire replies, “You’ll be okay.”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Talked to Becca. She’s on her way.”

I read that text again and again. Something about it . . . how it makes me picture everyone I know soaking in the drama that’s probably happening, and they’re all running around, exaggerating their concern, so that they also get some attention. That’s probably happening. And then I think of Nikki, picture her sitting at a table in the cafeteria, watching as Becca and Blaire make a scene. Everyone knows what’s going on.

And here I am, freezing and stuck in my room.

I get a call. When I look, it’s a number I don’t recognize.

Well then, ignore.

But the number keeps calling. I put my phone on silent. I go online and focus on something else.

This is all getting so overwhelming.

Becca messages me online, telling me that I’m not answering her texts.

“Yeah, getting overwhelmed by things.”

“Gotcha,” she types, “on my way. Father James is cutting us like a huge break. I think he’s going to be the one that sees you.”

“Great,” and then I add, “Yeah, that’s really great.”

Becca asks, “Still locked in?”

“Yup,” I type back. Then I add, “Might have to leave via the window.”

“That’s like so fucked up,” she says.

“It is, yeah. I don’t understand what’s going on.”

“But we do know what’s going on though.”

I try to make sense of it, put it in words that would make sense to her: “No, I know, I mean . . . well, it’s just like everything people said about being haunted but it’s also very different.”

Becca doesn’t type anything.

“Let me try to explain.” But the explanation doesn’t come. I type out something that doesn’t make sense so I delete it. I’m at a loss. Then I ask, “Who’s driving you?”

Her reply: “Jon-Jon.”

I should have known. I mean, it’s not a bad thing, I guess.

I type back, “Cool.”

She knows me well enough to know that when I reply “Cool” it means the opposite of cool. She knows my mannerisms but she doesn’t know how I’m really feeling. And that’s what makes me think of Nikki as the real reason I’m going to keep doing this. I’ll break up with Becca when this is all over and Nikki and I are together.

Becca types back, “We’re heading out now. Be there soon, like ten minutes.”

“Okay,” I reply.

I lean back in bed, laptop on my stomach, hands in my pockets to keep them sort of warm.

I wait—wait for something to happen.

I look at my phone next to me; the screen’s lit up, people reacting. People are always reacting.

If anyone’s confused by this, just think of how confusing it is for me. I’m full of mixed emotions. I want it gone but I also know that none of the attention would be there if it weren’t for the demon.

I think, “You are the reason I’ll be remembered.”

I expect something to happen, but nothing does.

I stare at the screen, watching the social media feed scroll with the latest from hundreds of people I follow.

Nothing happens.

I start to count each breath I see.

Then there’s the sound of someone messaging me.

I blink, realizing I hadn’t blinked in a good minute. Hands out of the pockets, I lean forward and read the message.

“They are outside.”

I look at the name of the sender but the name is mine. It’s my name.

I don’t know what to say, so I say, “Thanks.”

“The door is open.”

I read the message and then look at the door, wander over and give the doorknob a tap, then a slight jostle.

It’s open.

I look over at the laptop, breathing out a sigh that I see as a little plume, a cloud in front of my face.

When I look back the sender appears as “offline.”

I don’t have time to react though because whatever that was, it was right. They are outside. Jon-Jon’s car parked behind mine, Becca looking up at my bedroom window, waving.

I look at the phone and see a few missed calls.

Oh yeah, it’s on silent.

I switch the ringer back on, notice over two dozen missed calls and more than a handful of text messages. I run downstairs, taking along my laptop and the power cord too, because, well, I’ve learned my lesson.

At the front door, I shove the laptop in my book bag and I leave the house without looking. I don’t get a real chance to think about what happened until I’m sitting in one of the back pews of the church, waiting to be seen.

I put all the pieces together. And then it sort of makes sense, but not really. I was messaging myself?

Was that you?

RELATED: Interview with Michael J. Seidlinger on Gifs, Gender & the Apocalypse

---

Michael J. Seidlinger is an Asian American author of a number of novels including The Fun We’ve Had and The Strangest. He serves as director of publicity at Dzanc Books, book reviews editor at Electric Literature, and publisher in chief of Civil Coping Mechanisms, an indie press specializing in innovative fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he never sleeps and is forever searching for the next best cup of coffee. You can find him online at michaeljseidlinger.com, on Facebook, and on Twitter (@mjseidlinger).

7 Books You Should Read If You Want to Be Human

BY JOANNA C. VALENTE

1. Between Life and Death - Yoram Kaniuk (Restless Books, 2007/2016)

Excerpt from Lit Hub:

"Near the house, right across from the calm hidden beauty where I searched for a gutter to play me the lullabies of my childhood, a little bit of sea is still open. Moshe my father would swim in it every day at exactly five in the afternoon, after most of the swimmers had already gone home, because he loved having the sea all to himself. In the spring and fall, the sea was sparkling and smooth and soft, and sometimes in the morning, on the way to school, we’d walk barefoot in the sand along the shore, and under the hewn-limestone wall, we’d take off our shoes, hang them by the laces on our shoulder, put our schoolbags on our heads like the Arab women who carry ewers of water and bundles of wood to the ovens, and we’d walk in the shallows lined with seashells, some were broken and cut our little feet, until we came to the sand dune across from the Model School."

2. The Missing Museum - Amy King (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2016)

From TS' site:

"AND THEN WE SAW THE DAUGHTER OF THE MINOTAUR

Poet, comma. It is thus the delay,
which is also a beginning. That we can link eyes
across her time-space continuum is another hyena.
The female elongates, bares fangs, and a trash
compactor recycles. Hyena gives
in the recycling fashion. Phoenix, no more false
flight from holes; now balloons eating decay.
Hunger denuded us, too. But will you give
up your death for me? With surgery, I outright hollow
the monster to breathe across windows. I don her hollow
whole. She writes back in the pauses of haze.
Her and her tragic magic. We are all cross-dressing
in tiny wings with the machines of bones to go on."

3. A Child of Storm - Michael J. Wilson (Stalking Horse Press, 2016)

Sensitive Skin Magazine published four poems from the collection:

"Edwin Davis & The Electric Chair

Brown came with a crate.
The kind milk bottles condense in.

He sat it down. In the center of the room.
I had spent the day clearing cobwebs, a rug.

I used parts of the crate to make the chair.

Stringing the wires, using the Edison diagram
The Brown instructions.

I shot 1000 volts through Kemmler
then again until he burst to flame.

The skin around the metal became leather.
        They would have done better using an axe.

I shot volts into a woman. Into the man who shot McKinley.

I got to meet J.P. Morgan. Twice.

           Every time –

The smell –"

4. Reconnaisance - Carl Phillips (FSG, 2015)

ead an interview with Phillips at NPR:

"I have, from the start, been writing about the body and power. And maybe more specifically, the gay male body, and power in intimate relationships, but I feel as if there's a lot of overlap with society's views of how different bodies are treated. So to that extent, I think there's always a kind of political resonance to the personal, and then vice versa."

5. Shadowbahn - Steve Erickson (Blue Rider Press/Penguin, 2017)

It's exactly what we need right now - a book set in a tragic political landscape along to a playlist to give song to the time we live in now - one of strange turmoil and uncertainty. All of the characters are on a journey of self-discovery, and the reimagined Twin Towers represent this. It's definitely a book to pick up once it's released this February.

6. The King of Good Intentions II - John Andrew Fredrick (Rare Bird Books, 2015)

 Read an interview with Fredrick at LARB:

"I think the books are failures too. Brilliant failures, of course. And again I don’t mean brilliant in the look-at-me sort of way, but brilliant in the sense that parts of them (and I hope the preponderance of them) truly shine. As comedy. And very very human and humanist. Isn’t that enough? Yes, I revised the first King five times. The hardest work I have ever done. Much harder than writing a dissertation on Ford Madox Ford and Virginia Woolf. I just got sick of looking at The King II, I revised it so much. I’m a Jamesian and a Joycean. I could revise all day — trying to lift the prose into poetry, trying to make the jokes zanier and tighter. There’s nothing wrong with failing. Failing is an energy. And in a way, paradoxically, the books are not failures and I am being very disingenuous about the records. You shouldn’t trust me; I’m an unreliable narrator in real life, too."

7. Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity - Edited by Fox Frazier Foley & Erin Elizabeth Smith (Sundress Publications, 2016)

Read an interview with both editors over at VIDA about how the anthology came to be. Foley stated:

"My feeling about this are complicated, and kind of conflicted. I think of poetry in the same way that I think of prayer. I’m a religious person, so to me, prayers are actually a significant factor in seeking any type of progress, including political or social progress. Prayer and poetry, to me, are both ways of centering your consciousness, and raising both your focus and your energy. They are both, on some level, ways of howling down the parts of the Universe that we don’t entirely understand (I mean, we might name them, or tell stories about them—but I think all religious apparatus is really just a way of making somewhat intelligible to us the forces that are beyond our rational comprehension) to please come to our aid in helping us fix this situation. Prayer and poetry both bring people together, too—one person’s words can forge connections among many people, so that ultimately both a poem and a prayer can result in focusing the energy and consciousness of larger groups, in a way that creates a feeling of solidarity. To me, all of that is integral to political and social progress. I understand that not everyone sees it that way, but speaking for myself and my own lived experiences, that’s how I understand it."

 CA Conrad's poem in the collection is amazing; excerpt from “act like a polka dot on minnie mouse’s skirt:”

"i am not a

family friendly

faggot i tell

your children

about war

about their tedious future careers

all the taxes bankrolling a

racist tyrannical military."

---

Joanna C. Valente is a human who lives in Brooklyn, New York. She is the author of Sirs & Madams (Aldrich Press, 2014), The Gods Are Dead (Deadly Chaps Press, 2015), Marys of the Sea (forthcoming 2016, ELJ Publications) & Xenos (forthcoming 2017, Agape Editions). She received her MFA in writing at Sarah Lawrence College. She is also the founder of Yes, Poetry, as well as the managing editor for Luna Luna Magazine. Some of her writing has appeared in Prelude, The Atlas Review, The Huffington Post, Columbia Journal, and elsewhere. She has lead workshops at Brooklyn Poets. joannavalente.com / Twitter: @joannasaid / IG: joannacvalente