Brian Eckert

Bjornson sat at the folding metal table on an office chair that he’d wheeled over from his desk. He smoothed his white smock, picked up the fork, and took an exploratory poke at the beef medallions.

His assistant, Kyle, stood by nervously, waiting for Bjornson to take the first bite.

The team was tasked with creating a frozen beef medallion dinner with mashed potatoes, mixed vegetables, and gravy that came in at under 300 calories and less than 30 net carbohydrates, but no more than 500 mg of sodium.

“It cannot be done,” said Kyle upon learning about the orders, which came from Bayersanto-Dupont-Tyson Foods Co.

But Bjornson was confident and steadfast.

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I like your tattoo
It makes me look just like you.
We could be friends if we weren’t so similar;
My authenticity can’t survive you.
Actually, it can’t survive anything.
Nothing can.
Survive anything. What a strange idea: To remain.

Forever.

Don’t kid yourself, boy. You couldn’t handle it. Old things make you uncomfortable. A million of em just like you. Crippled midgets hungry for revolution. Thinkin America is just a fart on a string.

Nothing good can come of this.

Have you ever smelled human flesh burning? That’s the scent of Empire, boy. A tin of spearmint snuff. Makes the eyes water.

Paranoid? I prefer “thorough”. It’s what keeps a man…a family…a country…together, safe, strong. That’s the problem with people like you, boy. You expect some neat ending. A precise explanation of what it means to drag a dead, naked gook through the mud. You’re obvious—boring, even. Your want for things to change masks that.

Just wait 30 years. By then, you’ll be just like me, knowing that there’s no such thing as starting over.

Cynical? I’m just tired, is all. A cynic couldn’t think of something like this:

There is a Presence Heaven can’t touch. Deeper than Night. Softer than Silence. Closer than you ever thought possible. Never to be seen again.

Not that you noticed.

Yashimoro rounded the corner of the beach and saw a massive sperm whale washed up on shore.

He approached the beast cautiously, taking a circuitous path up the beach and toward the head, which was the size of the city bus that Yashimoro took into town for the market. There was movement in the whale’s dinner-plate sized eye. The whale was alive.

He had never smelled anything like the whale’s fermented rotten fish breath, not even from the piles of rotting whale parts at the processing plant. Whale smelled as bad alive as it did dead, Yashimoro could confirm.

A living whale of this size was worth a small fortune. Soon the fishermen would find out and arrive to claim it. But Yashimoro did not want them to get the whale. He didn’t know what he could do to stop them, but he would think of something.

Yashimoro lived atop the cliff in a one-bedroom house that his father left to him. He had no children of his own. He hadn’t been able to find a wife because of his deformity. He was born with an oversized head and one eye. Doctors gave him a glass eye as a kid but he lost it and could not afford a replacement as an adult. The empty eye did not bother him. Just the others, who laughed and called him “Nagasaki Boy.”

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