War of the Roses
an excerpt

Prologue:
The Beginning and The End and The Beginning and The End

This story begins, due to the nature of time, at its end.
Logically, a story that begins at the end must end at the beginning.
This story is a paradox, a contradiction in terms but not in action.
This story is an adventure, action, a contraction of reality and expansion of space.

Beginning: a softer word for the hollow left by an ending.

Beginning: now, in the present tense.
**
Chapter One:
All Bananananana’s ½ Of

Rule one: don’t enter convenience stores with anything resembling a weapon.

Cheapness sluices about The Penny Mart, from the brown crepe paper clinging to the sings in a misguided attempt at holiday spirit to the floor manager, who is sitting in a rusty folding chair eyeing his dreamlike shoppers over a discolored newspaper. The first morning light hovers in the air, reluctant to settle on the scuffed floor. Ted tosses up a bundle of bananas in one hand and squeezes them imperceptibly under the baleful eye of the manager, barely leaving the impression of his fingers on the smooth mottled skin. It doesn’t involve cooking and it isn’t rotten, meeting the two requirements of T. Mercher Fridge: Club Exclusive. He tosses them into his basket then shifts behind a tomato soup display to escape the man’s squinty line of sight.

Bowlegged and jingling, Ted clomps over to the clearance aisle and knocks several bottles of Tabasco sauce into his beige plastic basket. Dry beans. Jerky. His watch glares at him, green and accusing.

Ted paces the rest of the aisle scanning for quick fixes. He makes it to the cash register one dented box of Captain Crunch, a lot of Instant Ramen and several packages of raisins later. The floor manager doubles as the cashier and plunks the keys with a cigarette crunched between two yellowed fingers. The Monster Mash seeps from the speakers. Ted hurries out. The stench of tepid milk and secondhand smoke is quickly dissolved by the cool, damp air outside; empathizing with the lone rider, Ted saddles his twentieth-century horse and kicks off.

Rule two: don’t ride bicycles wearing vinyl pants.
Addendum: if your bicycle is wearing vinyl pants, 1) go back to bed or 2) coffee, black, immediately.
Addendum II: if you are the one wearing vinyl pants due to an office party bet, 1) quit your job or 2) wear boxers.

Or else they’ll chafe, Ted thinks dazedly. He bikes madly down the street. The pre-morning fog is peaceful and dimly suffocating; it smoothes Manhattan’s ragged skyline across the bay and dulls the loud paint of the Victorian houses that ice the least-touristed stretch of boardwalk, the boardwalk that Ted veers onto. It’s his favorite route, barren at such an astral hour, when all possible beachgoers are either padded in hotel bedding or picking apart stale croissants in the lobby. He shoots over the damp planks with his thin wheels and swings his eight-and-a-half-gallon hat (from the thrift shop behind the palm reader’s booth) to swish away the legion of seagulls laying siege on the plastic bus stop bench. Ted’s back barely touches the shiny face of the realtor on the bench ad when the bus hisses in. Tabasco bottles clank as the young man hefts his bike up the steps. He rolls it into the first seat and slides himself into the one across, clasping the back wheel with his boots to steady it.

“Morning, Mercher.” The bus driver passes back the ticket that the young man had given him and glances at the time scrolling above his head as he shifts the bus back into gear. “Sorry; we’re behind today.”
“Are you? Didn’t notice,” Ted says, short of breath. He is untying his grocery bag from the bicycle. The plastic comes away in his hands and he pulls a banana off the bunch inside. “The usual fare for cutting the scenic route?”
“What bribery is this?!” cackles Gabe, not taking his eyes off the road.
“Only the best!”
The bus is long and empty and decorated in the pale oranges and browns of the seventies. The old man behind the large, thing wheel is large and thing, too, in his seventies, driving with one long arm thrown over the back of the seat.
“Oho, don’t I know it,” he says.
Ted splits the banana down the center like ahot dog and trickles Tabasco sauce into the gap. He wraps it in the receipt and hands it to the bus driver with a grin. “You’re so corrupted, Gabe.”
Gabe matches Ted’s grin tooth for tooth, except for where he’s missing some. “Such a bad influence. How’s Jem doing?”
“Grandddad’s ticking away fine, but I was right to suspect this internship he landed me. It’s absolute hell, a curse,” he says, trying to get his hair to lay down. “I don’t know why I let myself take something from him.”
“It’s just in disguise. Give it some time to come out.”
“It doesn’t need a disguise. That’d be like the Grim Reaper deciding to go Goth.”
“Spend less time running your mouth and you won’t need this. It would just be the pier and the internship—which is just very well-disguised,” Gabe sighed. Ted snorted.
“Do you know what kind of costume it would take to disguise this alleged blessing? This kind of costume shop cannot be found where blessings come from.”
“Dunno about that, now. You’d be surprise what you can turn up with a good driver.” Gabe’s comment is half-lost in the shuddering of the bus as it rockets down a bystreet. Their eyes meet in the rearview mirror. Ted rolls his.
“I’m too tired to argue with that,” he concedes.

The rest of the ride is silent—verbally, at least. The windows rattle as Gabe vigorously spins through the streets of Belmont Prior; the inescapable Monster Mash echoes, tinny, from the bus speakers. Ted tries to stay upright on the seat, but the cracked vinyl of the cushion does not get along with the vinyl of his faux-leather cowboy pants and sends it on its way. He slips down as the bus warbles along.

Not even the lighthouse historians know why the city and the shore community that hugs it share the name Belmont. Maybe at one point there were mountains surrounding the city, but if so the wind scraped them down to dunes scrubbed with small bushes and small birds and small beach trailers filled with small families traipsing out of the urban sprawl to escape the expanse of the city for the weekend. It was if somebody had loaded a picturesque town on to Photoshop, clicked its corner and dragged diagonally, resizing it to a quaint scale for a kitschy vacation brochure with oversized, badly-punctuated Comic Sans MS font in jarring colors. It was called Belmont Prior, or simply the Prior, because it was once a religious refuge to the earliest New England settlers. Now it serves as a liaison between Belmont City life and the Pine Barrens. Ted often suspects that it was called the Prior because it was there before anything else and that was true, too; the Prior existed long before people could conceive buildings like towers of rock. The wind would erode the skyscrapers as well one day, delicately licking their flanks with the suble attrition of white sand.
The Prior will outlast them all, Ted thinks smugly. His thoughts escape him; he lets them scuttle off sideways and absently watches the quiet beachside disappear through his reflection in the glass window as they rattle inland towards the city. The black frame of his square glasses and the shadow of the beaked nose they rest on obscure the view. He rubs a thick eyebrow and switches to glancing sidelong over his shoulder at the growing buildings. Behind him the sun emerges from the water, staining the sky and the gentle undulations beneath a weak pink. The ocean shimmers and disappears under the sun as the light intensifies. Ted squints and looks back to the front of the bus, blinking the specks of sun out of his eyes. The buildings gradually rise up off the street as they reach the outskirts of the city.

Belmont is a nice city, as far as that word can be applied to the species, a brick’s throw away from Manhattan with a moderately low crime rate and a high income thanks to the blossoming tourist industry. In addition to classier hotels and restaurants than the ones actually on the beach, the city boasts the nation’s largest wax museum. One day before work Ted and a friend skipped the six dollar fee and slipped in with a chaotic tour group from Japan. Oliver stood immobile next to Al Roker in the Famous Weathermen exhibit and was photographed a dozen times by excited old ladies. He radiates weathermanship, Ted scoffed, and he did: what with the impeccable dress shirts and the quirky eyebrows and the large fingers that looked as if they should be nudging cold fronts into Newark. Oliver had nicked Ted’s cigarettes earlier even though he didn’t smoke. Ted was confused, so he ignored it. Ol calmly plucked a cigarette out and lit it when a soccer mom was lining up a shot of him with Al. Ted was a little less subtle and opted for maniacal laughter whenever someone leaned in to examine Marie Antoinette’s tête in the Reign of Terror Room. They were kicked out, hard. Oliver shoved six bucks in a Salvation Army tripod on the way back to work.

Fortunately for the remnants of Ted’s sanity, off-season was beginning; the only people traveling to the Prior were those who lived in Belmont and wanted to slip away for a day. His swollen little town was easing back into its normal shape.

The vehicle groans into the next station, where a sleepy young family under the bus stop bubble rubs their eyes and the lone passenger cum lone ranger bumps his ride down the steps and gives the driver a wave. One of the girls is wearing a tiara and bent wings. The boy has on cow-patterned trousers and what looks suspiciously like a loaded holster. Ted can’t help it.
“Howdy, podna,” he says unwisely, tipping his own hat. The boy’s parents stare and usher their kids quickly onto the bus as soon is the bike is out of their way.
“Fine, then,” Ted says only half jokingly as they go, “may the curse of Buffalo Bill rain down on your heads!” He walks his bike up onto the sidewalk. A bus window opens behind him.
“Dude, it doesn’t rain in the desert. I mean, duh,” a small voice squeaks, out doing the bus’s brakes. The tires hiss away on the wet pavement before Ted can reply.
“And a very merry Halloween to you, too,” he says anyway.
**
Chapter Two:
An Interlude in Red

The knife slides into her abdomen. The man leans in, slamming her stiffened body against the concrete wall. There is the confusing stench of epoxy glue and coffee and leftover tacos and blood. She can’t register the words he is scraping in her ear. Sensation rattles from her legs like death and there is no choice but to lean against her attacker, pulse throbbing at every contact point. His thumb is in the hollow of her neck. He’s twisting the knife. She can’t breathe. The man presses in further. Her ribcage struggles against his, his bones sharp in her chest. A rational part of her mind speaks through the fog and tells her that it would be easier just to stop breathing, but she can’t do anything else. She can’t do anything but choke and heave. The room was dark, but it seems to be getting lighter in dizzying bursts. She feels like she’s losing control from the bottom up as her arms grow cold and leaden. Heart convulsing with the strain of last-chance adrenaline, she lunges for the work bench and thrusts a screwdriver deep into the man’s leg. He staggers back, cursing. She falls into a warm wetness sand darkness pounds down.