Strange Pulp 1: Right of Way

Welcome to the debut issue of Strange Pulp, an irregular publication of weird fiction!

I’m planning to do one or two of these a month for the next little while. Each issue will feature one story—mostly by me, sometimes by other people. (If you’re a writer with something to submit, get in touch.) For now it’s going to be part of Strange Times, but if there’s interest I may eventually spin it off into its own thing. This issue is free—future issues probably will be too—so go ahead and share it with anyone who likes spooky tales. If you like the story and want to throw me a few bucks for it, back me on Patreon or venmo me @ouijum.

The full story is below. Don’t like reading on your phone? Neither do I! Download the whole story in PDF or in ePub, both of which feature a very snazzy cover. Enjoy!

The village of Deepkill had only one good driver. His name was Morris Shurs. In a 1996 Ford F-150 whose yellow paint had faded to the color of brittle straw, Morris drifted along the roads of Beverwijk County, following the speed limit with his hands at ten and two. On state roads where sex-addled teenagers topped eighty miles per hour, Morris stayed glued to fifty-five. When another driver surged into his rear view mirror, scowling with impatience, Morris smiled. He lifted his foot off the accelerator, savoring the way the impatient strained against his understanding of the law.

The roads of Beverwijk were inconsistent and strange. Morris knew their quirks. He was not intimidated by the roundabout on the edge of the village. He remembered that Peony and Norton was a three-way stop, even though the stop sign on Peony had been swallowed by kudzu, and he never failed to observe it, stepping on his brake until his truck shuddered to the fullest possible halt. He used his turn signals in parking lots, always checked his blind spots, always confirmed before he started driving that his mirrors were as he’d left them. He’d had the stereo removed when he bought the truck, allowing him to drive in perfect, focused silence. He held himself to the highest possible standard and was dismayed when others failed to do the same. Dismayed but not surprised. The way Deepkill had changed lately, it was no shock that simple arts like good driving had fallen out of style.

And when they crossed him, well.

That’s what the curses were for.

There was anger inside of Morris Shurs. For many years he had vented it freely. When he was honked at or tailgated or cut off, he would blow his horn and bellow curses with enough sloppy rage to streak the inside of his windshield with spit. He would pray for horrible things—

“I hope your dick gets caught in your zipper!”

“I hope you shit yourself at work!”

“You ugly bastard, I hope you get lung cancer.”

“I hope your car catches fire, you fink!”

Deb hated when he yelled. She had married Morris thinking he was a gentle man. When he finished a tirade and turned his red face toward her, showing the same breathless pride that he did after sex, she’d be at the far end of the bench seat, pressed against the door, staring at her shoes. The silences that followed these outbursts were poisonous.

When Deb left, Morris swore off anger forever. Now he drove with a sense of peace, a certainty that on the roads of Beverwijk, no one knew better than him. Anger was for the idiots in his rear view mirror: the novice drivers abusing their parents’ cars; the speed nuts running one red light just to reach the next one quicker; the tourists so impatient for their weekend in the country that they risked death to get there thirty seconds faster. When these people interfered with Morris, the same old anger flashed across his brain, but now he swallowed it. Scaled it back. Turned his hideous fantasies into jokes. Minor sentences for minor crimes. After any incident, once his heart stopped hammering, he considered the infraction and breathed deeply until he had a punishment to fit the crime.

“I hope every day for the next three weeks, you have a little bit of trouble finding your keys.”

“I hope everything you eat today is slightly under seasoned.”

“I hope every pair of jeans you own gets a hole in the crotch at the exact same time.”

“I hope tonight you can’t find anything good to watch on TV.”

He delivered his sentences with the calm of a born judge. And then he laughed, imagining his victims in the throes of these little inconveniences, suddenly miserable without knowing why. Deb, he was certain, would have found them funny too.

Morris Shurs was 48-years-old. He had thick curls, the texture of a walnut, now more gray than brown. Aside from four years at SUNY-New Paltz, he had never lived outside of Beverwijk County, which he considered, with some justification, the most beautiful in New York state. His high school friends had all died or moved away. There were no women in his life. He had no interest in the humiliating work that would be required to meet anyone new.

He taught algebra in a dusty classroom on the first floor of Alice Roosevelt Middle School. His students were a stinking gaggle of seventh graders who took pride in their inability to learn. They laughed at Mr. Shurs for his shameless love of numbers, for the way his clothes seemed four sizes too big. (After his divorce Morris had lost quite a lot of weight. Although he was now almost gaunt, he simply pulled his belts tighter. He had never considered replacing his old clothes.) They considered him harmless, forgettable. They would have been nearly as shocked as Morris himself when the curses began to come true.

It was Wednesday in Deepkill, the quietest day of the week, when the village was free of tourists, free to be itself. It had rained overnight, a passing storm that transformed the sky into a lint rag low enough to scrape the spire of Saint Joe’s. Morris drove with particular care, knowing the roads are most dangerous after a short rain. He was heading down Hosta, about to cross Post Road and enter the parking lot at Alice Roosevelt, when the white Nissan got in his way.

She was approaching the intersection on Post. Her light was red. Morris had right of way. But after coming to a stop, she pulled out ahead of him—fully ignoring the sign that said, “No Turn on Red.”

To avoid hitting the Nissan, Morris was forced to stop in the crosswalk. His light turned yellow, then red. Children and parents had to walk into the street to skirt his truck’s front bumper. A mother gave him a dirty look. The muscles in Morris’ low back seized. Nasty thoughts flooded his brain, but he kept them dammed. He forced himself to breathe. When the light changed and he was at last able to pull into the parking lot, he settled on an appropriate curse.

“I hope you drop your phone. I hope it slips out of your hand while you’re putting it in your purse. I don’t want it to break. But I want you to be scared.”

That was supposed to be the end of it. A curse placed; a crime forgotten. But when Morris was locking his truck he heard the unmistakable crack of a cell phone falling to the pavement. He turned and saw the driver of the white Nissan—a third grade teacher whom he hadn’t met and didn’t care to—slap her palm against the window of her car.

“Shit!” she said. Morris scowled. A middle school parking lot was no place for that kind of language. He was the only person watching as she picked up her phone. She smiled at him, waving it to show that the screen was intact. He couldn’t understand why she thought he’d be interested.

“Very lucky,” he said.

“I should be more careful.”

“You should.”

Her smile died. He turned away. He spent the morning with an odd taste in his mouth, the crack of the phone echoing in his ears.

Twenty-four students squeezed into Morris’ airless classroom. Their breath fogged the windows. Their distended bodies slumped across desks and spilled into the aisles. They stank. But as Morris’ green marker squeaked across the board, he could not smell them. His mind was back in the parking lot.

He asked himself: did I do it?

It’s not possible.

Of course it’s not possible.

But I felt something. A little kick, a charge in my spine. Had to be my imagination. Or a pinched nerve, a slipped disk. There’s no way, but…

The solution to his problem was even more obvious than the one he was scrawling on the white board.

He would have to try again.

His next chance came sooner than expected. This time, he didn’t even have to get into his car. He was in the cafeteria, chewing a floppy turkey sandwich, staring blankly at the students who shared his table. In a room throbbing with laughter, his kids were silent. This was always the case. Something about him kept children from wanting to talk. He didn’t mind. Quiet did them good.

“Can I get a bag of chips?”

The girl who said it was named Astrid. She wasn’t in his class but he’d heard her name once and it had stuck in his mind because of her habit of wearing gigantic knit sweaters—her mother’s, he assumed—no matter the weather. Today’s was a fuzzy brown cardigan whose sleeves were stained orange from the grease on her plate.

Morris nodded. Astrid pushed back from the table. She hadn’t gone ten feet when the boy who sat next to her—for Alice Roosevelt insisted on boy/girl/boy/girl—spat a wad of phlegm into her carton of chocolate milk. He leaned and crossed his arms in satisfaction.

Rage shot through Morris. His fingers tingled and sweat formed on his palms. A little knot of pain formed at the base of his spine. He smacked his hand on the table. The children, for the first time that day, looked his way.

“What did you do?” he shouted—you had to shout in that cafeteria.

“Who? Me?”

The kid smiled wide enough that Morris could see the rubber bands on his braces. Cole Kemper. Came up from Brooklyn during the pandemic and immediately established himself as one of the dominant personalities of his grade. The children found his smile charming. It reminded Morris of an open sore.

“Get Astrid another chocolate milk,” said Morris.

“What for?”

“Now, Cole. Or I’m getting Ms. Bragg.”

Cole looked around, expecting the other students to applaud him. But chilled by the name of the principal, they stared sullenly at their trays. Cole got up. He didn’t quit smirking.

Morris’ fingers snapped like a bull whip at the soiled carton of chocolate milk.

“Take it with you,” he said.

Cole picked it up. He shoved his chair against the table as hard as he could—it wasn’t very hard—and strutted away. Pain poured into the gaps between Morris’ vertebrae, sludgy like setting concrete.

Astrid sat back down, tore open a bag of barbecue chips, and looked confused.

“Where’s my chocolate milk?” she said.

“Cole’s getting you another one.”

“Why?”

Morris didn’t answer. His eyes were locked on Cole, who’d stopped halfway to the trash can to talk to some friends at table three. They were laughing hard.

Little shit, thought Morris. Wouldn’t it be nice if he had an accident? If he tripped on his friend’s chair, hit his head on the table, broke his neck? Wouldn’t that be fair?

Too big, he answered.

But you have to do something.

Sure. Sure, I do.

He took three deep breaths and spoke out loud. He didn’t bother whispering—the din was such that no one heard him deliver his curse.

“I hope you drink it,” he said.

And Cole did.

In the middle of a sentence, he raised the carton to his lips. The knot of green phlegm tumbled down his throat like a rancid oyster. When he was finished, the carton slipped from his fingers. His nearest friend asked him something. Cole did not respond. He pawed at his neck, trying to massage the filth up and out of his throat. When that didn’t work, there was only one other way.

Cole bolted to a squat gray trashcan that was piled with half-chewed sandwiches and pulpy pizza crust. He squeezed the lip of the can and vomited so forcefully that every muscle in his lean young body seized. The smell carried across the room. The conversation in the cafeteria stopped. Everyone watched as Cole lost his lunch.

Morris exhaled. The pain in his back was gone. In its place was something exquisite. A lightness, a feeling of freedom he hadn’t known since he was a child.

Morris floated through the afternoon. When the bell rang, he was the first out of the room. As he drove home, he felt an uncharacteristic urge to speed. He fought it back, glancing constantly at the speedometer to make sure it never crept past the limit. But when he reached his house, he ran.

It was a three bedroom ranch on Bower Lane. When his kids were young it had felt cramped, but they were gone now and Deb was too, and whenever Morris stepped inside, the silence was a weight around his neck. Normally he fought it off with old music played so loud it nearly hurt his ears, but today he didn’t even notice how quiet it was as he stepped through the kitchen and yanked open the freezer. Morris was not a drinking man, but he kept a bottle of vodka to make martinis while watching James Bond movies. He filled a juice glass with the stuff, which was so cold it oozed like syrup, and carried it into the living room. He plunked himself onto the old plaid couch. Dust erupted into the air.

“I can do things,” he said. “Things no one else can do. I can do whatever I want.”

He repeated words to this effect several times, then drained half the vodka and spent a while staring at the fingerprints he’d left in the frost.

“So what the hell do I do now?”

He did what anyone would do. He got drunk, masturbated twice, and fell asleep on the couch.

Morris woke with a thudding headache and an exquisite sense of calm. With his eyes still closed, he remembered the day after his college graduation, when his older brother had interrupted his hangover fugue to announce they were going to San Francisco. Morris threw a backpack full of dirty clothes into the bed of his gleaming new F-150 and they drove west. For a week they followed the sun. It was the only time in his life Morris had known exactly what he needed to do and where he needed to be.

Beside the couch he found a legal pad on which he’d scrawled a manifesto in handwriting shaky with vodka and anticipation.

“The time for minor curses has PASSED.”

(He’d underlined “Passed” three times.)

“No more jokes! I have real power and I have shit to do. This is more than traffic. More than keeping the rat finks at Alice Roosevelt in line. This is my chance to remake the fucking world. Make the roads safe. Force people to behave themselves. Curse anybody who gets in my way.

“Beverwijk, New York, America, the world.

“Morris Shurs will save you from yourself.

“He will be your god.

“All he has to do is hope.”

Morris walked to the kitchen. He tore the strange little document into pieces the size of his thumb. He stuffed them down the drain, ran water over them, and flicked on the garbage disposal. Its grinding sliced through the base of his skull. Only when he’d turned it off did he allow himself to breathe.

“I don’t want to remake the world,” he said, and he was pretty sure he meant it. “I’m a little guy. I’ve always been a little guy. I don’t want to be a god.”

He ran a scalding hot shower and stood under it until his skin shone red. Eyes closed, water sloshing down his face, he wondered what he would do with his power.

The world was out of the question.

It was absolutely ridiculous. He’d hardly ever left New York state.

But he knew Deepkill inside and out. He knew that it was changing and he knew who to blame. People like Cole Kemper’s parents had been coming up forever, of course—to boat in the summer and gawk at foliage in the fall—but when Covid hit they got it in their heads that villages like Deepkill might be a nice place to live. New arrivals had started as a trickle, then a flood, perverting things until Main was as crowded and expensive as anywhere in Brooklyn. Annie’s diner was gone. Same with Red Rudy’s bar. Dalius hardware had closed after 78 years and been replaced by a plant store that sold plastic-looking succulents for $25 a pop. Everything was cute and useless and wrong.

Maybe Morris could help. Nothing he could do to bring back the old village—it’s not like Mike Dalius was going to quit Arizona and come back to sell leaf blowers—but he could punish the people who’d spoiled it. Nothing serious, nothing criminal. Just little curses placed very carefully to make sure that the people who’d murdered Deepkill took no satisfaction from the corpse.

By the time he got out of the shower, he was almost ready to begin.

First he needed to know if his power had limits.

Further tests were required.

The gymnasium at Alice Roosevelt stank of stale popcorn and pubescent armpit. The windows fogged over and the bleachers sagged beneath the weight of bodies. The villagers had turned out. Not the newcomers, not the Brooklynites. The real people of Deepkill. And they were hungry for blood.

In a place where weeknights offered few distractions, the girl’s basketball team attracted cult-like interest. Three time state champions in the early 2000s, the Rough Riders had started the season in an uncharacteristic losing streak. Petitions had circulated demanding Coach Wagner pay the price for the team’s failure. So far, Principal Bragg had resisted. Another loss, however, and the school board might force her hand.

Morris would not let that happen. He had no love for Coach Wagner—a thick-necked fool who considered crossfit an acceptable substitute for a personality—and sports besides ice hockey meant nothing to him. But he needed to test his abilities. It was one thing to make a woman drop her phone, to compel a dimwit to drink filth. But if he could manipulate the bounce of a basketball—if he could change physics!—anything was within reach.

By seven o’clock, his lingering hangover and the strain of holding back his power had his lumbar feeling like a swollen dam. At last, the whistle blew. The ball dropped to a girl wearing Roosevelt green. She took two steps, found her path blocked, and fired a hopeful shot from the top of the key.

“I hope it goes in,” whispered Morris.

It did. The crowd erupted. The pain switched off. The greatest night of Morris Shurs’ life had begun.

In the first half, he held himself back. He nudged a few Rough Rider shots in; he held a few of their opponents’ out. Every time, the ball fell the way he wanted. Morris expected the effort to tire him, but with each successful curse, his head felt clearer, his body lighter. He smiled bigger than he had in years. The crowd smiled with him. After helping the Rough Riders sink a particularly ill-advised three point shot, he clapped the shoulder of the man beside him and shouted over the roar—

“If I were a gambling man, oh my. If I were a gambling man!”

When the buzzer blew and the crowd trudged down the steps for sodas and candy bars, the Rough Riders were ahead by five and the gymnasium dripped with joy.

“I don’t get it,” said a woman as she squeezed past Morris. “Their footwork’s for shit, they can’t handle the fucking ball, but they’re still scoring.”

“If they win,” said her husband, “who cares?”

Alone on the bleacher’s top row, Morris slumped against the back wall. His face was hot. His hands were cool. He pressed his knuckles against his cheeks and considered how wonderful it was to be alive.

In the second half, Morris cut loose. No shot passed without a curse flying one way or the other.

“I hope you score.”

“I hope you miss.”

“I hope you score.”

“I hope you miss.”

“I hope you score.”

“I hope you miss.”

Every time, his wish came true. For eighteen impossible minutes, the enemy did not sink a basket. The Rough Riders scored every time they had the ball. As the final minutes ticked down, the crowd entered a state of ecstasy. Their applause was constant, their screams incoherent, like the entire village was approaching a delirious shared orgasm. The Rough Riders began taking longer between shots, feeling guilty about the misery on the other team’s faces. Coach Wagner, stalking along the sideline with a clipboard clutched beneath white knuckles, had no interest in mercy.

“Don’t let up!” he shouted. “You’ve got ‘em by the throat—now squeeze!”

The final buzzer screamed. The numbers on the scoreboard, as red as burned flesh, read 60-22. The bleachers shook with the pleasure of the crowd. No one in the building was happier than Morris Shurs. He wrapped his arms around his neighbor.

“That was exceptional!” he shouted. “Not just exceptional…divine!”

The parking lot was a quagmire. Morris didn’t mind. He sat in the truck with the engine off, cold air streaming across his body, scrubbing away the funk of the gym. He let the rest of the crowd leave before him. Their tail lights glowed dimly in the fog. Soon the parking lot was empty, save for a monstrous yellow SUV that Morris recognized as belonging to Coach Wagner. Certain no one could hear him, Morris spoke out loud.

“Fuck Deepkill,” he said, relishing the delicious naughtiness of cursing on school grounds. “Fuck Beverwijk, fuck New York. Fuck being small. If I can rig a middle school basketball game, I’m already a god.”

With those happy words lingering in the air like cigarette smoke, Morris turned his key. The engine roared to life. He was going to change the world...somehow. The specifics could wait until tomorrow. For now, he dreamed. He flipped on his turn signal and eased toward the exit at a precise five miles an hour. Even with his mind elsewhere, Morris drove very well. Across the parking lot, the ice blue lights on Wagner’s SUV cut diamonds into the fog.

There were two ways out of the Roosevelt parking lot. Morris took one. Wagner the other.

Morris drove carefully. Wagner did not.

Morris was just pulling onto Post when his vision was obliterated by cold light. His fingers groped for the lever that controlled his high beams. He flicked it over and over, a hopeless SOS.

Coach Wagner did not dim his brights.

Morris didn’t realize how fast Wagner was going.

Until the SUV was nearly on top of him, he couldn’t see that it had drifted halfway into his own lane.

There was no time to swear, no time to smash his fist against the horn. Morris couldn’t do anything but whip his wheel to the right, slamming his truck over the curb and into the ditch. Concrete shrieked against metal. The seatbelt bit the flesh of Morris’ neck. He skidded forward, mud splattering through his open window into his mouth, finally coming to rest a few feet from a storm drain that yawned like a doorway to hell.

Morris smashed his palms against his steering wheel. His back felt like someone had pounded a four inch nail into the base of his spine.

“Fucker!” he shouted. “You stupid, inconsiderate fucker!”

He heard a faint screaming that at first he thought was coming from inside his skull, but no. It was Coach Wagner’s horn.

That SOB ran me off the road, thought Morris, and now he’s honking at me.

He slapped open his seatbelt and stumbled out of the cab. Wagner’s SUV had vanished into the fog. The horn had stopped. Morris shook his fist and screamed as loud as he could. Bloody fantasies swarmed across his brain. For the first time since Deb left him, he did not bother to hold them back.

“I hope your head bursts,” he shouted. “You hear that, you bastard? I hope your fucking head explodes!”

There was a sound, a small sound, like someone popping bubble wrap in the next room.

Next came metal thudding against something heavy.

Then the renewed wailing of the horn.

Morris stood there for a moment, hand working the back of his neck, mouth bobbing uselessly, wanting this to be something other than real. But the horn kept wailing and finally Morris reached for the only words that seemed to make sense.

“Oh god,” he said. “Oh sweet god.”

He staggered into the fog, walking on the yellow line. Cold sweat dripped down his fingers. His neck hurt where the seatbelt had cut into it. His back felt fine.

“Coach?” he said. “Y’allright, coach?”

No answer but the horn.

Morris stepped off the road and walked on the curb, balancing on the concrete with the precision of a child. Finally, he got close enough to see Wagner’s SUV resting on its side about fifteen feet off the road. It had smashed into a telephone pole, toppled over, and skidded across the manicured grass of someone’s front yard. The telephone pole dangled like a snapped limb. The mud kicked up by the sliding SUV smelled like an open grave. The horn howled on.

Morris circled the SUV. He flicked on his phone’s flashlight and raised it at the windshield. The glass was tinted—only assholes have tinted glass, thought Morris—but enough had broken for him to see inside.

Wagner’s body twisted around the steering wheel. The deflated airbag draped across the stump of his neck like a used condom. Every inch of premium white leather was streaked with blood, bone and brain. His head was simply gone.

The house’s front door swung open. Light swept across the ruined lawn. Morris knew that only a fink flees the site of an accident, but that didn’t stop him from disappearing back into the fog.

When he got home, Morris emptied the vodka down the sink. He woke with a pain in his back so severe that he couldn’t move without yelping in pain. He spent the weekend in bed, rising only to use the toilet and, when he got hungry, shovel fistfuls of dry cereal into his mouth. Between bites, he laughed at himself. He’d reached for something big—him, insignificant little Morris Shurs—and a man had died.

Granted, he wasn’t a very nice man. Occasional conversations in the teacher’s lounge had shown that Wagner was as dull as a person can be. He was a lousy basketball coach—the Rough Riders’ record proved that—and a reckless driver. Driving in other people’s lanes and then honking at them! For god’s sake, if Morris hadn’t killed him he probably would have killed himself. He might have killed other people, too. A child, maybe! Driving like that near a school—anything could happen. It wasn’t a stretch to say that Morris had done the world a favor, that he’d used his power brilliantly, that he had every right to—

No.

Morris would not abandon his curses. They were the only thing that eased the screaming in his spine, and the calm that came with them was too exquisite to let go. But he would forget about playing god. Even policing the roads of Beverwijk County was too much for him. He was a murderer—the worst scum on earth. If someone else chose to drive over the speed limit, who was he to judge?

By Monday morning the ache in his back had spread to his hips, his pelvis, his abdomen. His neck was slick with sweat; his eyes could barely focus. He forced himself to his feet an inch at a time. Every part of him wanted to flop back onto his comforter, for even dreams of Wagner’s headless corpse were preferable to the agony that came with every movement of his torso, but they were having a memorial for the coach at Alice Roosevelt that morning and it was essential Morris show his face. So he brushed his teeth and poured coffee and tried to pretend any of it made him feel closer to well.

The windows of his truck had been down all weekend. There was dew on the pale red upholstery and soggy yellow leaves smeared across the floor. Getting into the cab was a trial, but once he settled onto the seat the pain in his back backed off a touch. As Morris felt the familiar presence of the gear shift in his palm, his heart rate slowed. For the first time in days, he could really breathe.

As the key turned in the ignition, an idea erupted inside Morris’ brain, an idea so simple he was ashamed not to have thought of it before.

He could help people.

He remembered the rapture that had filled the gymnasium. That was his doing. His neighbors had trudged into that gym with misery in their hearts. He had scrubbed it clean. He could do that again. Not in the gymnasium, but in the world. One thousand nudges, just as he’d given the basketball, to improve the lives of the people he’d grown up with. He couldn’t save Deepkill. But he could make it smile.

He’d start today. He’d park himself in the front row of the bleachers and lock eyes with Wagner’s widow and he would say, “I hope you feel better.” And the pain in his back would vanish and the weight on her heart would lift and, little by little, he would atone.

Happy thoughts and cool air lifted Morris’ spirits. He cruised down Norton with his hands loose at ten and two, hewing to the speed limit with no trouble at all. He knew every speed bump in this village, every pothole, every street sign. He knew the people just as well, nearly, what parts of them needed to be made whole.

He was almost smiling when he pulled into the next intersection.

He was not watching carefully enough.

For although Morris knew that there was a stop sign hidden behind the wall of kudzu on Peony Street, the man driving the horse trailer did not. At fifty-eight miles per hour—twenty-three faster than the posted speed limit—he smashed into the yellow F-150. The panel on Morris’ door splintered. A shard of plastic as wide as a man’s hand sliced through his abdomen, through his lung and into his heart.

The truck spun through the intersection. For a time it was on two wheels, threatening to flip, but then its momentum ran out and it crashed back down. Inside the cab, Morris’ left hand made a feeble attempt to tear the shard from his abdomen. Everything was slick with blood. He was too close to death to find the strength.

“I hope,” said Morris. “I hope…”

But his words meant nothing anymore.