“Hey,” Daniel said. He had just come out of the kitchen. “You sure were out for a long time.”

“Some kind of dream,” he said. “I can’t remember, but …”

Crash was trying to process all the bits of image and picture and face, sparks from a twitching live wire. The general commotion of the guys collecting their stuff and heading out, splitting up and meeting up, all prearranged and flawlessly perfected, little sidesteps to keep the man guessing. Crash fell into the routine and it was good, doing something calmed the jittery confusion in his head. And then there was a flow, and he hardly noticed time going by at all. They had cleared the bushes twice already and Crash had just sent Mike back to pick up some more product. No cops in sight so they were feeling pretty loose, just smoking cigarettes and talking with some dudes over by the benches, when this little white girl appeared out of nowhere. She was young, blond, a sort of hippie in flared, patched-up jeans. She didn’t seem uptight about being in the ghetto, and the guys were all lighting on her. Pachuco even cranked his portable cassette player to increase the vibe and maybe get her to dance, but slim hips only had eyes for Crash. The way she looked at him. Somehow, the promise of an eternal fuck. The music went from Hendrix to Cream, from Cream to the Rolling Stones, as Pachuco searched the tape for the proper soundtrack for the white girl. How was it Santana all of a sudden, doing “Samba Pa Ti”? The lilting congas and that crooning guitar. Her tongue twirling redly around that Charms Blow Pop.

“I have an offer to make you,” she said, opening her purse. A beaded thing. Crash peeked inside. Saw the weed all glittery sparkling.

Now Crash was open to this …

D

EAN

H

ASPIEL

is an Emmy Award winner and Eisner Award nominee. He created

BILLY DOGMA

, illustrated for HBO’s

Bored to Death

, received a residency at Yaddo, and was a master artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Haspiel has written and drawn many superhero and semi-autobiographical comix, including collaborations with Harvey Pekar, Jonathan Ames, Inverna Lockpez, and Jonathan Lethem. He also curates and creates for TripCity.net.

M

AGGIE

E

STEP

is the author of seven books. Her work has been translated into four languages, optioned for film, and frequently stolen from libraries. She lives in Hudson, New York.

zombie hookers of hudson

by maggie estep

One morning, his head looked too small and I asked him to move out.

Why? He stared at me.

“It’s just not working,” I said. I didn’t mention that his head suddenly appeared small. You can’t say that to someone. It’s not right. “I’m not happy,” I said.

Martin’s eyes drooped and then he shrugged.

He’d only been living with me three weeks.

He packed up his stuff and, just like that, he was gone.

We’d started as strangers, we were ending that way.

Then it was just me and Alexander Vinokourov, my one-eared pit bull, Vino to his friends.

I sat on the floor with Alexander Vinokourov in my lap, his head wedged under my arm. His head is too large for his body, but I like that. Imperfections in dogs are beautiful; in humans they’re a fault line that you want to put a jackhammer in.

I sat like that, numb and quiet, for about thirty minutes. I was like a cow needing to be squeezed for reassurance before going into one of the humane slaughter chutes designed by the admirable Temple Grandin. Vino was my sixty-eight-pound squeezing machine. Except I wasn’t heading to slaughter. At least not that I was aware of.

I stared at the empty drawers where Martin’s stuff had been. I thought about his last words to me.

“I really liked you, Zoey.”

“I liked you too, Martin,” I had said. This was perfectly true. I did like him. I just didn’t like his head.

Eventually, I made Alexander Vinokourov get off my lap so I could stand up. I opened the drawer where I keep my socks and underwear. I pulled out the powder-blue plastic wallet with Wyoming emblazoned on its side.

There’d been a time when I thought Alexander Vinokourov and I might move to Wyoming. I’ve had ideas about moving to many places and have in fact moved to most of them. Lately, though, I just keep drifting around a hundred-mile radius of upstate New York. It’s pretty here and the people aren’t all morons. My rent is cheap and I can get by doing odd jobs.

I put the blue plastic wallet in the back pocket of my jeans, attached Vino’s leash to his collar, and out we went.

It was hot outside and, even though it was close to dusk, the sun was a burning gold coin.

Vino and I walked up to the top of State Street where crumbling buildings rested their crooked frames against newly renovated ones.

The guy with hooks for arms was sitting on his porch and called out: “Beautiful dog!”

I said, “Thank you,” like I had made Alexander Vinokourov myself.

We reached the periphery of the cemetery, where the sign reads, Cemetery closed during hours of darkness.

We walked in through the oldest section, where half the tombstones have toppled and time has rubbed off the dead people’s names. We crossed to the far side, past the war veteran’s area where there’d been a big kerfuffle when vandals had started stealing all the flags off the graves. Video surveillance had been set up to catch the perpetrators in the act and had caught … woodchucks. They were stealing the flags and taking them to their woodchuck holes. They liked the taste of the cured wood the flags were attached to.

Vino and I walked to our favorite spot, a wooded, quiet area lying between the cemetery and the new artificial sweetener factory, the building which had caused nearly as big a kerfuffle as the flag-stealing woodchucks.

But something was wrong. An excavator had been here and dug up a huge swath of earth, maybe half an acre, and there was now a gaping maw where Vino’s favorite grassy knoll had been.

We went to stand at the edge of this big mouth in the earth. I saw pieces of broken-up wooden boxes strewn around in the dirt below.

I didn’t like it. Didn’t like the artificial sweetener factory, didn’t like that Vino’s favorite grassy knoll had been dug up for reasons I wasn’t sure about—but probably had to do with the sweetener factory.

I didn’t like much of anything that day.

I took the Wyoming wallet out of my back pocket, sat at the edge of the hole in the ground, dangled my legs over, and, as Vino flopped down and started panting, I took my small stash of weed out of the wallet and rolled a joint. This was excellent weed. Had a tense, earthy smell, almost exactly like the big dirt hole I was staring at.

I lit the joint then coughed. Alexander Vinokourov’s head swiveled toward me, making sure I wasn’t dying. I’m never sure if his concern for my well being is entirely altruistic. If I die, he’ll have to go back to scavenging from garbage cans and escaping thugs trying to trap him and turn him into a fighting dog.

I took another hit and coughed again, but this time Vino merely flicked his ear, listening for sounds of serious distress before bothering to turn his entire head.

My own head was taking a beating from the inside out, the weed making me feel like I’d had an involuntary hemispherectomy, the two sides of my brain operating independently of each other which, I was pretty sure, would lead to something unusual and very possibly unpleasant.