I've been busy finishing my novella THE LONGEST DAY which will see some kind of release in January and looking back on a year in which I have lots to be thankful, not least of all for everyone who's followed my work on here. I do have one more story to close out the year, which has nothing to do with cavemen and their epistemology.

*

“No, nothing like that. Not a doctor of any type. This ain't medicine because we ain't licensed to practice that. What I can do though is promise that when you go through the machine you will not hurt anymore.”

“That's a pretty bold claim.”

“Well doctors will tell you, we can't cure your problem but you can take these pills for the rest of your life. This is a one shot thing. We don't make no money off this. We don't even advertise it because it would probably get us assassinated. They'd come and take the machine, probably take it apart and never get it back together. They couldn't understand it. It's something the bossman came up with hisself.”

He saw her hesitation. She took a soft step back but her knees bent slightly, ready to pivot and flee if the next thing that came out his mouth was the least bit strange. Very well he thought, we will see if she's a scared-cat. 

He picked up a pen with a pink troll doll duct taped to the end and began thumbing through papers on his desk, then replaced the troll doll ball point with another pen that was already lodged behind his ear. Troll doll went back behind the ear, the toy bobbing at eye level in a way that had to have been annoying.

“Always have one on deck.”

She startled herself laughing. He smiled then went back to his paperwork as if they had expressly agreed that she would mull things over a moment. She went over to a sad pasteboard table with a muddy keurig and a more ancient drip coffee maker with a dedicated spigot for hot water. There was a carton of individual earl grey packets but water had spilled at some point, not recently, and stained the bottoms of the packets brown. 

There were three foil packets of hot cocoa and she took two, dumped one packet of chocolate in a styrofoam cup then shook out extra dehydrated marshmallows from the other. The water from the spigot was tepid and the powder clumped. She didn't intend on drinking it really but was going through some waiting room motions while she weighed how absurd this was. 

Beth said the place was a little odd but not to judge it from the outside. When Anna told her that her arm has become progressively more inflamed and painful since her car wreck Beth cut her off mid-sentence and said Dak Ford Collision and Trauma. She had a fanatical look in her eyes that was very unlike her usual demeanor. She was not one of those people taken in by charlatans or obsessed with her health, always looking for an organic cause of problems with major unaddressed psychiatric dimensions. She never mentioned illness or pain, or her body for that matter. She didn't eat a lot but had no neuroticism about food. Never boring about a single other thing in her life, Beth was a horrible bore about food because she was indifferent to it.

Anna thought it made her beautiful in an unapproachable way, which matched the rest of her lifestyle, traveling the world and having one fantastic adventure after another. Always prone to embellish interesting personalities, Anna came to think of Beth as having an ethereal mystique. That image changed forever when she broke down crying to Anna about the nightmare of her chronic, sometimes daily migraines. She could not believe she had endured such pain in stoic silence, day in and day out. It had been eight weeks, though. No migraines in eight weeks. The longest stretch in her adult life. 

From the corner desk, facing away from her, Ford of Dak Ford spoke without looking up from his paperwork. 

“17 years of horrible back pain after truck hit me head on coming the other way. Bottle of painkillers a day. The Machine saved my life.”

There were pens behind both ears now. This one had a Garfield topper. He had quite a collection. Grateful Dead bear. Chicago Bulls logo. Not all licensed merchandise either. There was a realistic plastic praying mantis taped down that was not originally meant to be a pencil topper and a miniature AK-47, another one so large the pen leaned out of the jar and was liable to fall if any more pens were removed: a photo image of a Border Collie captioned “Border Collies” in curlecue font.

He noticed her staring and glanced an implied, Y’need something?

“Just admiring your collection.” She said, though he hadn't asked anything directly. 

“That's Timothy’s mess. I swear if he could leave his doll babies alone and file some of this stuff I wouldn't be here until 9 at night.” He twisted his mouth, having said more than he wanted in front of a customer. “Can't get rid of him because, you know, bossman…,” he trailed off and looked back at his papers.

The way he was crossing things out and going back and forth between a dozen leaves on the desk, going down the pages very slowly and carefully, made her think he wasn't really doing anything at all but pretending to be busy.

She made up her mind. Either Beth was right, had cracked up, or was playing the world’s most bizarre prank on her.

“Ok crank up the machine. I guess I’d like to see it, make sure you're not going to squeeze me in a machine press or something.”

He frowned as if this were a joke in inexcusably poor taste.

“One, there's no ‘firing it up.’ I mean we call it The Machine but it doesn’t work like that. Not much required of you, though, we don't need to draw blood or anything. Two, Of course you can see it. You'll see it, like everybody does and go ‘What the crap, this is The Machine? These guys are either nuts or just phonies.’ Yeah just know everyone does that ok. Then you go ahead and try it because you came this far and maybe you are certain it's a practical joke but you’re desperate,” he lowered his bifocals for punctuation, “desperate to get rid of that pain you have.”

“I promise to keep an open mind. I guess worst case scenario I'm out $200 and I have to put Beth in the nuthouse.”

“Get a free oil change too. Otherwise you might not come back. It just takes one go with The Machine.”

He opened a door between piles of boxes crammed in the back of the office. He had to move a stack from in front of the chipped white door. Goddamn Timothy, she heard him mutter under his breath.

He was so spry when he moved, crisply bending over and grabbing up two boxes crammed with reams of files, hopping over a shop vac hose stretched over the floor and depositing his boxes one handed. His movement was so discordant with the skinny legs in pleated khakis and gut spilling over his belt buckle. His greying mustache and lined face put him older than she would have thought but his eyes twinkled agelessly.

She felt weirdly not in possession of her body at this point, that even if some clear sign showed she was being lured into a serial killer's dungeon she would have put one foot in front of the other. There was hardly anything in the room, but it still felt cramped. Most of the space was taken up by a filing cabinet with two copper wires bolted to the top. The wires went through some kind of shielded box and larger gauge wires ran out the other side and coiled around a flask which contained what looked like pale yellow broth.

“Sonofabitch! Excuse my language but goddamn Timothy, you got but one thing to do but empty that flask. Excuse me a minute.”

He put on heavy gloves and lifted the flask off the coils, his hands ginger but steady. It must have had 5 gallons in it but he held it like a daiquiri, away from his body and head, and exited the room. She was unsure the flask would pass but he took it through the door with hardly an inch on either side. 

He came back with an identical clean flask, drug a step stool over with his foot, settled it in on the coils.

“Yeah I know it looks like a joke. I don't understand it. I can't understand, and he hates explaining it. Doesn’t want to be mixed up with all that new age stuff, crystals and vibrations. I'll never call another person a genius since knowing the boss man you know.”

He descended the stool to retrieve an opaque brown drug, then climbed back up to decant a clear solution into the flask. Anna was mesmerized by how the liquid swirled around the flask, heavy and fluid and leaving no streaks a long the glass, moving like mercury but transparent.

“It's hard to say how but once you do The Machine it’ll make a lot of sense to you.”

“Sure.” she said flatly. He seemed to be waiting for some more enthusiastic consent so she held her hands out slightly and nodded her head impatiently.

“Of course. We’ll get started.” He turned a knob on the shielded box and a green light flicked on. He jiggled, then yanked the middle drawer of the filing cabinet.

She tipped her head up to look and saw it was empty, and came a step closer to confirm.

“You scream in there. No, I'm not joking, they always ask. Just scream like you've always wanted to scream, and that's just to get started. Then The Machine will take over and you won't have to do anything.”

She stared at him stupidly, trying to summon the appropriate response, which was to laugh and walk away, a story for a dinner party much later in the future about how embarrassingly close she came to getting suckered by a miracle cure peddler. She didn't do anything, though. 

Ford said, “Of course I'll leave you alone for that part because uh, you really gotta cut loose to get it started. Sometimes people are shy and need some coaching but I don't think that's you.”

He turned so smartly his key ring slapped his thigh and he was gone through the door leaving her on the lime green tile with the naked yellow lights and shittily improvised film flam machine. She waited for the sickening turn of a lock but there was none. A minute or so standing there she began to feel more like herself again and terrified at how she had frozen and followed the man to the strange room.

When she walked past the open filing cabinet to leave though an impulse grabbed her. She put up a middle finger and fanned it all around the room, to cover any that might be covered by a camera, grabbed the cabinet drawer, and bellowed into it so hard she felt it rise from the bottom of her feet and pass through her body. Her hands were locked fast to the sides of the cabinet, and the screaming kept pouring out of her. It felt like it was being sucked out of her, in such force and volume that it began to seek alternate routes of escape through her ears and nostrils and even eyes. She burned all over, like a sunburn or like she had been scoured all away, and the grey inside of the drawer that filled her visual field turned white as if washed out by bleach until it was all white then it all went black.

She turned around and felt the ice in her belly. In and out, the wet pucker sound of her skin being punctured repeatedly. She felt a warm wet trickle gather at her waistband. She grabbed the face in front of her and her vision flickered back as if overhead lights were shuddering on. It wasn't Ford looking at her, twisting the metal as if seeking out her uterus, exploring to specifically hurt her there. It was a face she had only seen twice in her life, once at the counter of the Hertz rental desk then later in a parking garage, a mousy pockmarked face that had appeared inches from hers before he stabbed her sixteen times, leering only briefly before she went out of consciousness. He was closer now than he had ever been then and his teeth were stinking in her nostrils as he pulled her head closer to his so his right eye stared through hers, and the pain lanced through her over and over in beating waves.

She woke on a couch in a tiny furnished apartment. She clutched at her belly, at her face, all over slapping herself to ensure over and over she was intact. Early morning sun poured in a high narrow window into the neat, basically furnished apartment. The dazed moment passed and everything from the body shop came rushing back in on her and her panic returned. She jumped on the bed to look out at the inside of a cyclone fence crowned with razor wire and a lot where rows of vehicles in various stages of repair were staggered.

The door opened softly and Beth was standing in the apartment.

“I'm so sorry, they asked me to come get you. I mean The Machine was intense for me but nothing like... Ford was very worried but the bossman assured him you were fine, just that your trauma was off the chart and you'd need to rest the night. I guess it's happened before.”

“The bossman? Who the fuck are you?”

Beth laughed, a little embarrassed at her slip and clasped her hands together. 

“You’re feeling better already. I'll give you a ride home.”

“Bossman thinks you're special, you know. I'm sorry, it's just such a habit now. He even hates to be called that. It's all Ford’s idea. Timothy, that’s his name. The inventor.”

“I don't want him to think I'm special. I don't know what the fuck happened back there-”

Beth's hand shot over her lower abdomen. She kept it there with her full attention on the road. 

“Does it hurt?”

It didn't. Any other time she was under this stress her belly would be on fire and she would be trying to find a bathroom before her bowels purged. She really noticed how she felt for the first time since waking, which was absolutely fine. She was not just fine, she felt so well in her body that she almost felt as if she were not in it at all, but in some duplicate of her body that had every ill memory of pain purged from it.

She barely overcame her wonder at this weird change to notice that Beth was driving very fast now and fully testing her luxury SUV’s handling in a part of town she was unfamiliar with. Mostly empty, with a few houses, the kind with broken down cars out front. Her hand was still over Anna’s womb. 

“Usually you would go sleep on it and come back and talk through it and tell us what you think and suspect and demand to know what the gimmick or prank is, unable to believe that this crazy thing worked. It’s easier just to show you though.”

Beth unbuckled her seat belt then snapped the button on Anna’s and it automatically retracted behind her seat while a warning flashed on the panel that the passenger was unrestrained. Beth had her foot all the way on the gas now and Anna strangled in horror as they barreled down the cul de sac toward a cinder block building.

The collision was the loudest thing she had ever heard. Metal folding like an accordion, airbags exploding only to be collapsed by the dash pushing inward and glass shattering into a million cubes from the windows as the windshield instantly became an opaque mesh. She felt nothing, even as darkness closed. Lucid seconds passed to convince her the blackness was not consciousness falling away from her.

The darkness cleared a bit as heavy blows landed outward against the windshield which was pulled away in one webbed piece as rubble shifted to let a shaft of sunlight pierce the smoke and dust. Beth boosted herself out of the windshield then cleared some things on Anna’s side.

Anna was looking at her own unshaking, unscathed arms when Beth reached her own hand out to her and helped her climb through the windshield. They walked away from the leaking damage into an overgrown lot behind the empty building. She felt a kiss of weightlessness and the gravel barely crunching beneath her feet but otherwise physically unrattled by those last few violent seconds between the car and the wall.

Insects shrieked in the tall grass, mice scuffled, a hawk fluttered down to a utility pole and scanned the field. The sound overwhelmed Anna, as if all the life displaced by the sprawl around them had crowded into this one patch. Beth put her hand in hers and slid her arm around so the bellies of their forearms pressed together.

She walked her to a small pond choked by cattails except for a muddy bank muddled with tracks. The edge of the water was teeming with frogs, some small as her thumb and others larger than her pond, climbing over each other and lining up along an invisible meniscus to shriek and croak at them. Anna took a step forward and they leapt back then reformed their line as if trying to keep her at bay.

She heard her own laughter before she knew she was laughing and the laugh came as if pulled by gentle traction from a vacuum surrounding her and the laughter smothered the furious chorus of little green gods who impotently cursed her for having escaped all mortal pain.