Having borrowed the lantern from Walt, Joe has tried, without success to scale the walls of the cavern they find themselves in, all while trying to ignore the whispers he hears from the dark. The walls are covered in silt and and slime and water; the climb is far too slippery. Not able to gain any traction, standing on a pile of rubble near Beatrice’s rear shovel’s elbow, he turns toward Walt below him, “I don’t think there’s any getting up these walls without rope…” he looks up into the endless darkness, “or something.” Walt stands and brushes his rear off. “Nope.”

Joe squats and holds the lantern so that it shines down on where Walt is standing and sees puddles of water all around the floor. “We’re way below the water table. This place could flood at any moment—or crash down around us.”

“There’s better places to be out thataway,” and Walt again points off into some dark corner of the cavern.

“Well, they’ll be looking for me, and I came from that way,” Joe says and points upward.

“Gimme ma’ lamp back. I’m goin’.”

Read the whole story so far: The Hunger Engine

Characters and Places: Beatrice, Joe Takanara, The Engine, Walt Whitman

There is panic in the tunnel. Construction workers have lowered chains and then themselves into the sinkhole looking for their new brother. Ceilings collapse, rubble slides down walls, but never have any of them witnessed the opening of a sinkhole; not at this depth. Most have ignored the orders of the higher-ups to wait for emergency teams and climbed down with lights and picks, to look for Joe. She watches… and smiles. The rubble piles like a maze and the shaft of the hole seems to split off in different directions, some laterally, some pushing further down, like some massive ant colony unveiled. One sandpig finds refuse and calls out for more light, but once illuminated, the light reveals only boards of rotted wood and bones… bones!—bones where there should be none. In one corner of an alcove of an offshoot of the main sinkhole, there sits a skull, half-smashed by a thirty pound chunk of granite. You will not find him, my little bees. He is mine now.

Read the whole story so far: The Hunger Engine

Characters and Places: Joe Takanara, New York City

“You. I know you,” Joe says to the visage that has appeared in the void.

Walt looks confused. “Can’t say the same, man.”

“You just said so. You said you told me so. And… and you gave me a—a—you said it was a map. You told me to carry it. I have it.” Joe digs into his back pocket and gets out his wallet. In it, he has folded and kept the poem along with a letter to the Brooklyn Bridge. He unfolds the poem and, shaking from nerves, hands it over to Walt. Walt looks at Joe, not puzzled but curious—no one has spoken to him in a long time. But he takes the letter after the pause and holds it up to the lantern and reads the poem. He nods approvingly, “Not bad, not bad.” He hands it back to Joe, “Nice one. That’s a good poem.”

Read the whole story so far: The Hunger Engine

Characters and Places: Joe Takanara, Walt Whitman

The depths of the chasms are many kinds of darkness in the inverted city—rippling symmetrically outwards like water ringlets on the surface of a puddle. There is a riddle in the stone and a rhyme in the steel. It curls the rags of its cape about itself and moves invisibly. And it stalks the rare humans who come into its grips. It likes to heckle them with the sound of pebbles dropped from great heights, banging and pinging off of who knows what until the sound just because darkness, too.

“H-Hello?”

It likes to caress his face.

“Anyone?”

It cozies up to him and whispers mean nothings in his ear.

“Anyone?”

It sings lightly, I know that you are alone, alone, alone. Like a child reciting rhymes.

Read the whole story so far: The Hunger Engine

Characters and Places: Beatrice, Joe Takanara, New York City, The Engine, Tunnel #3

The effect at first is simply one of nausea and Joe begins to regret his decision. Carlin, though, is ready for the reaction and after the two have continued to look out at the east side of lower Manhattan for ten minutes or so, Carlin says, “Don’t worry, man. Another ten minutes and the queasies will pass. And if you think you need to throw up, go ahead—no big deal.”

Joe shoots him an irritated look.

“Hell, barf off the roof! There’s nothin’ over there anyway.”

Joe shuffles down off the roof deck on to the tar-papered roof itself and makes his way to the edge that faces the East river. Sure enough, he leans over the foot high wall at the back of the roof and looks down nine stories. Behind the building is a weeded concrete lot, demarcated with chain link faces on either side that run from the building’s back corners directly into the river. Scattered around the lot are tires, the rusty metal remnants of a mattress, water-logged pieces of wood. Joe takes a deep breath and the air feels fresh. His eyes journey out across the empty lot and finally his gaze ends at the water’s edge where… the water is electric. Polygons of bright blue seem to rise from the bottom of the darkness of the East River, where they dance, and vanish only to be replaced by another school of sparks. The sparks in the river swarm and, in unison, spiral and dash back toward the other side of the river.

Read the whole story so far: The Hunger Engine

Characters and Places: Carlin Landingham, Joe Takanara

Beatrice turns and turns in the air above Joe. He holds his hardhat to his head and looks upward to a massive hole in the ceiling, though which, Beatrice, chained to a platform, chained to a crane, slowly descends. Like a massive pendulum, she shifts to and fro and spins on the axis of the crane’s cable. For a moment, Joe is worried. She has never been heft like this; it may unnerve her. But then, he remembers his wind-up machines, remembers that he is her soul, and that without him inside her, there is really nothing but parts and ratios. But he also worries about the physical damage that a fall could cause. He sees the cable snap, unwinding itself, as she begins to plummet, her two tons picking up enough velocity—even from only 30 feet—to slam into the ground, the platform shattering under her weight, her wheels bent outward from her engine and cab, and axels mangled, as though she’d broken all her limbs. He shakes his head to release himself from the fear. The fall wouldn’t damage her at all. She is too tough for that. Still, something was not sitting well with him; some feeling that they should not be here. That they were here too soon? As Beatrice pirouetted out from beneath the sun and sky Joe could not distract himself from how alien she seemed in this place. Wreckage and dirt and mud, yes; but darkness? Beatrice, the Beatrice of his mind, the Beatrice of the yellow dress—she was always in the Sun.

To his left, one hundred yards away, through lose rock, setting cement, and stabbing throngs of steel rhubarb, there was the end to the tunnel: a jagged rock-face covered in scaffolding and dampness. Here and there small white streams run down the face of the wall where one or another sandpig is water-blasting toward the goal. Sitting idle (for the moment) before the rock-face, lay a massive tunnel boring machine that the workers affectionately called “The mole.” To his right, the tunnel stretches away, here and there punctuated by brilliant tungsten floodlights and the long shadows of men walking, working. The tunnel runs so far north of the Bronx that it gradually fades into a small black circle where Joe can see no more. As soon as Beatrice is down, he will drive her toward the rock face to assist in cleaning out leftover rubble, and in some cases, collapsed portions of the ceiling of the tunnel. Once cleared, those piles will be replaced by scaffolding and more massive machines to repair and reenforce the ceiling of this new and most crucial artery. Without Tunnel #3, not enough water will feed into New York City, and she will wilt of thirst. Dig, little men.

Read the whole story so far: The Hunger Engine

Characters and Places: Beatrice, Joe Takanara, Tunnel #3

To have dragged him from one country to another; it is a debt to him she feels she can never pay back. Surely, his peculiarities arise from the shock of turning his homeland into a distant and mythological place; a quiet and meditative culture exchanged for the brutish and loud New York City. Poor, sweet, Josephu, she often thinks. She of course meant poverty of spirit, but she also knew that if they could have more money then she might better protect him from the brutality of the city. But then he was never materially poor, not really. If he was poor he did not seem to recognize it. Every cardboard box was a fortress or the potential for a construction. Every paper towel tube was a rocket or a bullhorn. Every piece of bent wire found on the sidewalk was a sigil, a message, an antenna or a figurine. She bought him toys and while he seemed so grateful for the gifts, they most often sat unused in the corner of the living room. Perhaps the one exception was a large electric buzzer that had come with a board game. The game itself was discarded (too simple), but Joe would sometimes sit in front of the TV, some game show occupying the screen, and press his electric buzzer along with the show, speaking answers before the contestants when he could.

Read the whole story so far: The Hunger Engine

Characters and Places: Haruko Takanara, Joe Takanara

Jodie’s apartment possessed massive windows that looked out over the East River and Manhattan beyond, and there was a small rooftop deck as well. By the late night, Joe had made his way out on to the deck, and, leaning on the rails, had settled on revery (as usual) of the tasks that had built the skyline that he settled his gaze on. Joe, construction worker, knew that where others saw majesty, he spied a graveyard—not that his vision changed the skyline, but rather that he always felt he understood the cost of such monuments better than most. They saw bright lights and monoliths that championed the human spirit. In terms of the human spirit and its accomplishments, he was in agreement with most. He had no intention to lord his awareness over anyone either, but he did beg for fellowship in the darker regard.

Without warning, Carlin slaps Joe’s backside, laughs and holds a drink out to Joe. Joe turns to Carlin with some amount of irritation, but the drink reminds him that Carlin is one of his oldest friends, and no impostor. Carlin says, “I never thought I would see you out like this, man!”

Read the whole story so far: The Hunger Engine

Characters and Places: Carlin Landingham, Joe Takanara

As the sun dies, the lake down the hill—the cliff, really—behind his parent’s house, is normally crystal calm. Normally the water is still enough to mirror the moon quite meticulously, but tonight there is enough wind to breed white caps. And the caps, they shine out in the moonlight of a shy half face. That same wind makes the tree branches clack and the trees themselves rise up in a chorus that is both a hollow moan and a whisper that calls all across the little, dark valley he surveys.

He seats himself in wrought-iron chair and contemplates the darkness of the other side of the valley, across the lake, where nary a single light breaks the darkness of the forest army braving the unusual winds. Orion the hunter lay flat on his back in the heavens, his bow pointed westward toward the departed sun, while Gene wonders what this solstice has brought. He arrived here from a party with candlelight, Yule decorations, a warm fireplace, a potluck dinner, old friends and friends of friends not present; the past a frequent topic of conversation. Now it is quiet with the exception of the wind and some wind chimes in delicate harmony without a song.

It is 2012, and some had laid claim to the idea that this solstice would be the last; the world ended in some unnamed catastrophe. But that had not come to pass, and now the days would begin to grow longer again. In the dark, in the cold calm, he feels that the past is nothing to dwell upon, that the sun that oversaw it all was gone now. What’s next? he thinks, and the chimes accentuate the question with a well-timed trill.

Read the whole story so far: A Kind of Acquiescence

Characters and Places: Gene Copeland

The subway car is rattling along. It is lurching and throwing itself in every direction. Joe is standing inside of it, bouncing around in its long steel bowel. Joe listens to the encouraging voice, and the sound of the brook and nothing else happens. He gets off the train at Mt. Eden Ave. in the Bronx and walks four block to where a C.E.D. office is located; a mobile trailer amongst a lot of construction machines. He turns the CD player off and heads into the mobile headquarters to find his manager. Inside is rough carpeting and a desk with a receptionist (Anne) and stacks and stacks and stacks of forms in various trays and boxes. From further back in the mobile unit comes the cry of a man named Dave—“Joe! Come on back here. I got somethin’ good for ya’.”

Read the whole story so far: The Hunger Engine

Characters and Places: Joe Takanara, Tunnel #3