War in Peace - Matt Rowan

Larry was standing in a way that made it look like he was hanging from the wall. He was wearing a sport coat and the coat almost seemed to be tacked to the wall, holding him up.

But it wasn’t tacked on. There was no reason Larry should have been hanging in that way. No reason the coat should have been pulled back. It was eerie. Supernatural forces were afoot again, Stacy knew.

Larry might also have been dead. Stacy didn’t know him well enough to know if he was alive or dead. She’d never been in a situation like this before. Larry had been seeming increasingly upset in the days prior to her finding him like this.

He’d been carrying around that book, War in Peace by an unknown author.

Larry was always mumbling to himself, “There’s a terrible war taking place in peace right now. Terrible, horrible. You won’t escape it.”

All of which being said, had made Stacy terminally intrigued. She’d stopped having any concern for other responsibilities. She only wanted to know more about Larry’s book. Really, though, she’d given up on living a normal life. Quit her annoying secretarial job, which had been fun to quit, actually. She broke up with her boyfriend, Axel, of three years, who took it well enough, screaming in their bedroom alone for about an hour before gathering his things. She let him keep her cat.

She just wanted more information about War in Peace and she expected that she might be able to learn more if she just hounded Larry enough. She’d always been good at getting books but for some reason, she couldn’t find this one anywhere.

She even checked on Amazon.com, a deeply loathsome act in her opinion. No dice, though. No one had ever heard of the book, and they all kept trying to direct her to War and Peace by Tolstoy, which she’d already read a couple of times. She didn’t think War and Peace held any of the answers she was looking for, unlike War in Peace – which she was beginning to believe held the key to unlocking the horrors of the cosmos.

She had no reason to believe this. She came to the decision while staring into her morning cup of black coffee and feeling it was putting her into a trance, a trance that revealed that War in Peace meant only horrors of a cosmic design.

She’d plunged the knife in Larry’s chest just to be sure he was dead, even though he was probably already dead. His corpse coughed up dust.

She opened the book and was immediately transported to a dark, gravel-filled path. Trees encroached on both sides like imposing physical specimens that meant her harm, bodyguards of going off the path before her, she surmised. They’d grown so close together that she couldn’t have squeezed between them if she’d wanted to.

But she wanted to follow the path ahead of her.

She found that it led to a table. On the table was a mug of black coffee. She stared into it, and it stared right back into her.

The two became one. She was more coffee than human by that point, and the coffee was more human than coffee. It was just the sort of inexplicable near-contradiction that she felt she’d searched for her whole life. 

The coffee had also been scalding so she let out a scream that rattled the trees and made them sound like dry bones rubbing together.

She was transported back to Larry’s apartment. She held War in Peace and smiled.

Several policemen stood in the doorway, mouths opened wide. They’d witnessed her sudden reappearance. They trained their guns on her,  fired, before she could even laugh.

She nodded in their direction, turning them all into trees. Their bones sounded like dry wood rubbing together. They were immediately set alight, and their screams slowly but visibly turned to smoke, as they then fell to the floor in an indistinguishable pile of ash.

Stacy sipped her coffee. Hmm, not bitter enough, she thought.

 She stooped over and sprinkled a pinch of the still-warm embers in her drink.

***

Matt Rowan lives in Los Angeles. He edits Untoward and is author of the collections, Big Venerable, Why God Why, and How the Moon Works (Cobalt Press, 2021). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in All Existing, Maudlin House, TRNSFR,  Barrelhouse, Neutral Spaces, Moon City Review, HAD and Necessary Fiction, among others.