B.R. Yeager - Negative Space

Praise for B.R. Yeager & Negative Space

Like smoke off a collision between Dennis Coopers George Miles Cycle and Beyond The Black Rainbow, absorbing the energy of mind control, reincarnation, parallel universes, altered states, school shootings, obsession, suicidal ideation, and so much else, B.R. Yeagers multi-valent voicing of drugged up, occult youth reveals fresh tunnels into the gray space between the body and the spirit, the living and the dead, providing a well-aimed shot in the arm for the world of conceptual contemporary horror.

Blake Butler, author of Three Hundred Million

Ever wonder where teenage children go at night? Perhaps its best not knowing the answer. Theres something amiss in Kinsfield, a drab, boring city much like your own, except for the teenage suicide epidemic, stagnant, ineffectual parents, cultish behavior that borders on psychosis, and strings, strings everywhere. B.R. Yeagers Negative Space is a hypnotic collage of message boards, memes, and ruined bodies twisting at the end of a rope. Most modern novels have lost all concept of magic. B.R. Yeagers Negative Space is a stunning refutation of the quotidian.

James Nulick, author of Haunted Girlfriend & Valencia

Copyright 2020 by B.R. Yeager

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval without permission in writing from the author.

ISBN-13: 978-173356-945-3

ISBN-10: 1-733-56945-6

Cover design by Matthew Revert

www.apocalypse-party.com

First Edition

Printed in the USA

For Jamie, wherever you are

The key question is, no matter how much you absorb of another person, can you have absorbed so much of them that when that primary brain perishes, you can feel that that person did not totally perish from the earth? In the wake of a human beings death, what survives is a set of afterglows, some brighter and some dimmer, in the collective brains of those who were dearest to them. Though the primary brain has been eclipsed, there is, in those who remain, a collective corona that still glows.

Douglas Hofstadter

Whatever the outcome of this madness you call a fair trial or Christian justice, you can know this: in my minds eye my thoughts light fires in your cities.

Charles Manson

AHMIR

It was the way he just threw his body away. How hed carve up his torso and arms with a box cutter, or go days without sleep, replacing whole meals with pills and cigarettes. Everyone knew Tyler was going to die young.

JILL

I met him in the hospital. Third floor at Sisters of Hope. Mom put me there because she thought I was going to hurt myself. I get it. I dont blame her.

A staff woman called me into morning group. The room was grey and blank like the rest of the ward, except a couple posters: photos of sunsets or mountain ranges and something like Every Tomorrow Is A New Today printed in fancy, curling letters. There was a circle of chairs, filled by sad-faced, fucked-for-life women and men. Everyone already so much older and doomed than I was, apart from a boy. He was fading pink hair and plump lips and severe green eyes. Forearms all wrapped in bandages, with muddy remnants of older scars crawling above them.

The only free chair was between a chronic scratcher and an obese bald man with a Hitler mustache, sedate yellow eyes and a strand of drool forever hanging off his bottom lip. A nurse sat directly across from me. Muscular and tan. The skin around his right eye all black and purple. He looked me up and down and flashed some teeth. Whats good?

No one responded.

Okay. Most of you know each other, but we have a couple new faces, so go around, introduce yourself, tell us a little something and you know the deal.

Silence. A fart.

The nurse kept staring me down with that fucked up smirk. Alright. He let his clipboard fall to the floor. My. Name. Is. Todd. I. Like. To. Work. On. Cars. Duh duh duh.

The pink-haired boy raised a bandaged hand.

Yes, Tyler?

But you really like the girls who come through here. Right?

Todd kept smiling, but his face melted a little. Dont start this again.

Its the best thing about this shitty gig. Am I right?

Alright. Todd got up, walked to the doorway and waved his hand through the threshold.

Hey. The boy was looking at me now. Eyes wet and shaking. You cant sleep here.

What? I said.

Dont go to sleep.

I looked away.

Two stocky nurses pushed through the doorway. Todd pointed out the boy and they pulled his slight frame from the chair and out of the room. He didnt put up a fight.

Todd returned to his seat, picked the clipboard off the floor and crossed his legs. Lets try that again.

LU

I remember the box cutter he played with. Bright orange with black tape around the grip. Watching him in the lunchroom, slicing off dead skin from around his fingernails. Flipped my insides brackish and blue.

I only knew him because of her.

AHMIR

When we were little he told me about the Mica Witch. Said she lived by the old mica mines up in the hills, past the Highlands. When we were 11, we rallied the courage to hike up there and check it out. The trees formed a tunnel, with patches of sun breaking through and lighting up the iridescent flakes on the grass and weeds.

Up there, he whispered. He pointed to an old rundown cabin. The windows broken, front door knocked off its hinges, and black burn marks streaked across its side. Tyler said that it wasnt the Mica Witchs real home, but the place she trapped folks to eat and make tools out of. He called it her trap house. He said her real home was up further.

The ground changed from grass and soil to brown rock, opening into a mammoth hole. The cave walls glistened in the dull light. Tyler grabbed my arm and began pulling me inside. Lets go.

I cant, I whined

Dont be a rag. Lets go see her.

I pulled away and locked my arms around my stomach and shook my head.

Whatever. He stepped through the caves mouth and into the abyss. I started to cry.

It probably wasnt even five minutes. Noise echoed out from deep within the cave. Stones clattering. Nasal grunts and heavy breathing. And then Tyler ran out from the dark. Go. Go, go, go. We ran until we could see houses again.

He told me he saw her. Perched over a lantern and an array of shimmering stones. Humming to herself. Her hands wet with red, dancing in the deep orange light. The way he described her, I could see her in my mind. Weeks later I was still seeing her in my dreams. It wasnt until I broke down in class, weeping crazy after five days of no sleep, that he finally admitted hed made the whole thing up.

JILL

I kept myself awake all night. The raw bedsprings and reek of bleach made it easy. The sun edged over the horizon, dying the whole sky blood and milk, and I almost felt safe. At 8:00, a round nurse peeked through the door frame and said it was time for morning group.

A young woman named Kim sat in Todds place. She told the group that Todd was out sick. Her voice was like a babys.

I sat down next to Tyler. He wouldnt look at me.

Kim led an exercise about positive and negative methods of coping. She went around the circle, asking each of us to share one way we cope with our illness. Then shed repeat what we had said back to us and ask whether we thought it was a