“Are those…” Yes. They were. No doubt. Those were stars. A dusty scattering like a setting scene in Star Trek, shifting slowly, rotating to the right. New stars came into view. I sucked in a breath to tell Charon she needed to explain this when a new, brighter light illuminated the left side of the circle. It grew. A dime sized light hove into view, blue, white, bright as could be. The onion-skin returned to white, blocking the view. “Wait –”

Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Unpublished Books

Albert, The Last

PART 1

Chapter One

Every good person I’ve met was a dog. I’d probably like you better if you were one.

— Joana Gavriolidis, my ex-girlfriend.

It was near midnight after a very shitty day and I was recuperating on the side of the road up Mount Wilson, sitting in the camping chair I kept in the trunk for times like these, smoking weed. I was full, at least, having eaten most of the pizza that helped ruin my day, and was getting nearly as high as I needed to be to face maybe going back to my apartment.

I lifted my vape, pulled the mist into my lungs, waited for the THC to enhance the already crinkly edges of my perceptions. I relaxed, almost smiled, but then flashed on the dog. My buzz broke, leaving me stoned and feeling horrible. “Fuck me…”

The dog. Yeah.

A complete accident. Seriously not my fault. The dog was… I’d pulled up at Michelangelo’s to pick up the stupid pizza but they hadn’t even cooked it yet. Customer was nagging the whole time I waited, so when I finally got the pie I drove like hell so she wouldn’t drop my rating. I’m in the curvy hill streets above Silver Lake and… bump. A yelp. Felt literally sick because I knew. Stopped and got out, but… too late. 

The poor thing took a few minutes to die. I cradled its head and whispered to it about how it was going to be okay even though it wasn’t. The customer cancelled her order just as the little dog gave a final pant and shudder. Goodbye five stars and I was on the hook for $19.43. 

The owner came out right after the dog died. I was standing over it, looking around helplessly. “Is this your dog?” I couldn’t even look at him.

He sighed and nodded. “Yeah, that’s Tiger.” He was philosophical. “My husband loved that dog.” Tiger was sprawled out on the side of the road between us, his tongue loose on the dirt and his eyes open. “I never did, but when he died, I kept it…” The guy shrugged, then he shook his head and laughed. It was wry.

I helped him inter Tiger in a black plastic yard-waste bag and offered to take the body to the animal shelter to get it cremated. 

The man said no. “I’ll bury him in the yard. That way I can keep him close.” He shrugged again and took the bag. “I hated the barking and the mess, but… he…” he let out a ragged breath and swiped at his cheek with the back of his hand. He cleared his throat and looked me in the eye. “When you love someone don’t let the small issues win. You’ll regret it when they’re gone.” Then he nodded, hefted Tiger’s bag, and walked back across the street.

What he said hit me hard. I had issues with everybody, but there wasn’t anybody where the irritation hid deep feelings. Not friends. Not family. My roommates, Alondra and Antonio, were my closest connections in Los Angeles but just that morning they dumped me while my coffee dripped through the filter. “We’re a couple now, man,” Antonio told me. Alondra nodded. “We want the apartment for ourselves, so we were hoping you might be able to, you know, find somewhere else, right?”

They put our band, The Urge, on hiatus, too, formed a side project without me – one that didn’t even have a bass player.

As I said, a shitty day. 

After I left Tiger’s dad, I drove up to Mount Wilson. I like it up there. I first visited with my mom on a road-trip when I was eight. She was a physics professor at Cal and when she learned I was curious about astronomy, she was thrilled. A telescope, a star-chart, and several books on space for young people appeared in my room and I was suddenly enrolled in an after-school science program. The observatory tour began three weeks later, but by that time my interest in astronomy lay crushed under a heaping pile of encouragement. She died when I was a sophomore in college. 

She wasn’t the easiest mom, but I miss her and I felt closer to her at Mount Wilson than anywhere else. I have this vivid frozen-moment-memory of eating a hot-dog, sitting next to her at a picnic table overlooking a cliff with Los Angeles below. I was throwing pebbles over the side trying to start a landslide that would bury the city. She asked me what I was doing. I told her. 

“Don’t be ridiculous Albert, that’s impossible.” She meant well.

I ate the pizza, listened to the nothing sounds of night, smoked weed and stared over the same cliff, wanting more than ever to bury the city but knowing I couldn’t. Don’t be ridiculous, Albert. Another hit. Wondered if Antonio and Alondra would be more worried or relieved if I didn’t come home. Wondered how many days it would take them to notice I wasn’t there. I kicked a rock over the side.

Something moved on the road behind me.

I shook off the surge of fear and turned. Not a person. First glance had me thinking coyote, but it was built wrong – too tall, a little too bulky. Its coat was short, so dense it reflected moonlight. The head was square, a bit like a pit, but… not. 

It walked up the access road from the Observatory gate, moving slowly, neither scared nor diffident, but not like it was bent on doing evil, either. 

“Hey pup,” my voice quavered, shaky and unsure. I cleared my throat. “Hey.”

The dog slowed, looked at me, its head cocked.

“What’re you doing up here?”

It was strange. The dog bobbed its head, leaving its shoulders still. The overall effect was much like a shrug.

Closer, I could see the dog had dark and light patches and erect ears that rose off a disturbingly large and round head. I was not a dog expert, but that head seemed… big. 

We watched each other until it arrived next to my chair and hovered over the box with the pizza bones. It looked at me, then at the pizza, then back at me.

“You want that?”

The dog nodded. 

“Did you just nod at me.”

It nodded again.

“And you want the pizza?”

Another nod.

I tested it. “Not the box?” 

This time the dog shook its head side to side.

“You understand me?”

Another nod. The dog looked pointedly back at the pizza and slowly back at me.

I was clearly higher than I’d led myself to believe. “It’s yours.” 

The dog ate just below my hand on the arm of my chair. The temptation to touch it overwhelmed me — something about watching Tiger die and then having this beast amble up to eat my pizza felt connected, meaningful. I wanted to embrace it, the meaning, life, all of it. I lowered my fingers onto the fur at the nape of the dog’s neck. The dog froze. “Sorry.” I pulled my hand back and it resumed eating.

When it finished the pizza, it picked up the box with its mouth and carried it purposefully to the trunk of my car where it laid the box gently on top of the other trash I kept back there before returning to sit on the ground next to me. “Thanks…” I said, not sure whether that was the appropriate thing to say. I replayed the dog’s journey in my mind, then craned my neck to see if the box was, in fact, in my trunk.

It was. “You did that, right? Put the box in my trunk?”

The dog looked up at me. I’m not great at dog expressions, but I’m pretty sure the look was baleful. 

We sat there next to each other for a while. The dog seemed content looking out at the sprawl of lights in the distance, so I tried not to bother it. I pretended to look out, too, but instead I examined the dog. Its head really was large – disproportionate to its body. Like a mastiff’s head on a golden lab. 

Eventually, the silence and the weirdness got to me. I cleared my throat by way of getting the dog’s attention. When it turned, I asked: “What’re you doing here, anyways? Where are your people?”

It gestured absently over its left shoulder with its muzzle, then returned to staring out over the expanse of suburban blight, lit bright and looking beautiful at night. “It’s ugly in the daylight,” I told the dog so it wouldn’t get the wrong idea about Los Angeles. “Nothing but strip malls, trash, and shitty people.” 

The dog made a noise in response, a whine/growl that sounded oddly like a question, like a word. “Really?”

“Yeah,” I humored the illusion. “It really is.” Then: “Aren’t your people going to wonder where you are?”

“I know exactly where he is.”

A woman stood twenty feet from us on the road to the observatory gate. The dog trotted over to her. She put her hand on its back and it leaned in against her thigh. She was tiny, old to the point of ancient, and I thought the dog might push her over. Even from twenty feet away, I could see the wrinkles on her face that spread like webs from her eyes and mouth. Her earlobes drooped nearly to her shoulders, weighted with heavy wooden hoops. Her hair was short, white, and wispy.

“Uh…” I’d never been good with sudden strangers. I stood. “Hi.”

“Hello.” 

“Your dog ate some pizza….” 

She smiled at me. It was a sly smile, amused. It made me self-conscious.  “He’s not my dog.” 

“Oh.” I fought the compulsion to babble. “What… what’re you doing up here?” She was dressed strangely, a shawl over a dress made from a single piece of off-white fabric embroidered with a complicated geometric design. 

Instead of answering my question, she stared at me expectantly. I gestured to my chair. “Would you like to sit down?” 

“Thank you, no.” She spoke like a poorly dubbed movie, her mouth movements unmatched to the sounds she made. I was high, for sure, but I couldn’t imagine being that high. She held out her hand. “Come with me.” 

All my alarms rang and I edged closer to my car. “Why?”

“I have something I’d like to show you.”

“You don’t even know me. I could be an axe murderer or something.”

She scanned my Toyota Yaris, then eyed me appraisingly. “That seems unlikely.”

“Yeah…” I smiled, looked back at my car. “It’s cool, though. I’m fine here and I should be going anyway. Enjoy your night.” I made a production of folding up my chair.

“But I have something to show you.” She smiled broadly. “You should come.” She was missing several teeth. “It’s something grand.”

“I’d rather not…” I gestured around me. “I mean, my car and…”

She shrugged like she thought I was being stupidly disappointing. “Okay.” She turned abruptly and walked back the way she came. The dog stayed, perfectly still. I wasn’t even sure it was breathing.

“Go on,” I waved at it. “She’s going.” The dog was a statue. “Are you…”

It suddenly shifted its weight like it had woken from an unexpected nap and heaved a big breath before making another noise, something between a growl and whine that sounded eerily like, “Come with us.”

 “Seervihrooz,” the old woman called from the Observatory gate. The dog gave me a last look of unequivocal disappointment and loped after her.

This cannot be real. I stood there like an idiot, one hand on my camping chair, clutching my vape like a talisman in the other and watched them go. I didn’t feel high at all, anymore. It was all so weird. What does she want to show me?

They were almost to the Observatory parking lot when I caught up to her. “Wait! What do you want to show me?”

She smiled knowingly, barely slowing. “Something grand, I told you.” Up close she looked frail. When we’d been talking feet apart in the dark, I imbued her with a power and majesty which she clearly did not hold. We walked together, her, me, and the dog, following the road to the parking lot. Her smile faded as we walked, replaced with a grumpy scowl. 

The silence and scowling made me nervous. “What’s your dog’s name?”

“He’s not my dog, I told you, but his name is Cerberus.”

“Like the guardian dog of the underworld?”

Her face lit up and she smiled again. “Yes! It’s my personal joke.”

“I don’t get it.” I slowed just a little, allowing some space between us. “What’s the joke?”

“I’m Charon.” 

“The ferryman?” 

“Yes.” She nodded, again smiling excitedly. 

I was oddly pleased by her encouragement, but I’ve always been a sucker for the approval of cranky, inaccessible older women. “But Cerberus belonged to Hades…”

She laughed, then slowed to a stop. “That’s why I say he’s not my dog!” 

“When did they build that?” A new and oddly-shaped building stood at the far end of the lot. It was dark, blacker than the surrounding sky and shaped a bit like one of the onion domes on the Ukrainian Orthodox church near where I lived. I flashed on Antonio and Alondra that morning. They’d tried to be nice about it, but I could tell they’d wanted me gone for a while. I felt a little sick thinking about it. “What is it?”

Cerberus ran to it, his tail wagging. When he got right up next to it, he seemed to disappear, an odd visual effect caused by the darkness of the onion and the diffuse light of the surrounding night.

No. The dog was gone. “Where’d he go?”

“Inside,” the old woman walked to the onion and I followed a few steps behind. It was deceptively sized – seeming at moments to be much larger than it first appeared and then, the next moment, smaller. 

“Where’s Cerberus?” I asked again. The outside of the onion was smooth, metallic maybe. “What is this?”

She gestured briefly with her hand. “Ekphora.” Her lips matched the word for the first time. 

“Ekphora? What is it?”

She stepped to the edge of the onion and turned to face me. “Come inside,” then stepped backwards. The onion skin melted around her before reforming again as smooth and black as it had been before. Moments later, her hand slid back through and beckoned me with a playful flick of the wrist.

“Fuck me,” I whispered. I reached out to touch the onion, carefully avoiding the old woman’s hand which stuck out like a barnacle’s flagellum. The exterior felt cold and, initially, hard, but when I pushed it gave like stiff Jell-O.  

The old woman’s head broke through the surface, the black skin separating cleanly and retreating to re-pool around her shoulders. “Are you coming?”

“Seriously. What is this thing?”

“I told you, I’m Charon. This is my ferry.”

Charon. Ekphora. Ferry. Cerberus. Pieces rearranged themselves in my mind. Panic descended. I turned, casting a wild-eyed glance back to where I left the car and chair. I couldn’t see them. They were obscured by trees. I clapped a hand to my chest to make sure I was still breathing. I couldn’t tell. I felt real, like my body, but I didn’t know. “I’m not dead.” I bit my cheek hard. It hurt. I tasted blood. “I’m not…”

Charon looked sad. She pursed her lips and nodded solemnly. “Yes, of course you are.”

My last moments… when were they? Tiger. I’d driven up. The pizza. Sitting. What had… When had I… 

Charon made a bubbling sound, then erupted in guffaws. 

“That was a joke!? Not fucking funny…” but objectively I could already see how it kind-of was. “Fine.” She was still laughing. “What do you mean it’s your ferry?” 

She held up a finger through the onion skin and bobbed her head. “Sorry.” She cleared her throat, still chuckling. “What’s your name?” 

“You don’t know? You found me. You just…”

“How would I know your name?”

“I just figured…”

 She sighed and stepped back fully outside the onion, close to me. “Ekphora told me a Chosen Person was here and you were the only one around.” She looked at me, waiting. “Your name?”

“Oh… Albert.” Then: “Pardo-Levy. Albert Pardo-Levy.”

She cocked her head. “Two last names?”

“Yeah… my mom’s and my dad’s.” I wanted to explain how my mom’s last name, Parker-Do, had been contracted into Pardo for me, but I didn’t think she would care.

She sniffed. “I suppose it’s good to have a spare. You never know when you might need it.” 

“Are you like… the real Charon?”

She looked at me. The same rank disappointment from earlier because I was irretrievably dumb. “No, Albert Pardo-Levy. There was no Charon. Gods and wraiths don’t exist. There is no Hades. Death is death. My given name is Tharitai, but I’ve become what I do, so you should call me Charon.”

“Where do you take them? The people you ferry? Who do you take? Why me?”

She wasn’t wearing a watch, but if she were, she would have looked at it exasperatedly. “I take them to The Town where The Chosen people are taken. You are a Chosen Person, so I am here to take you there.”

“Why am I chosen?”

She rolled her eyes. “Ekphora said you were Chosen and now you know as much as me.”

“Where is The Town?”

“Twenty days travel from here.”

I examined the Onion. Ekphora. “In that?”

“Yes.” Like I was simple. “The Town is elsewhere, Albert. It is very far away.”

My mind fogged with imagery from science-fiction movies. “That’s a spaceship, isn’t it?”

Charon shrugged and made a move to step backwards into Ekphora. “I know nothing of space, Albert, I just ferry people.”

I couldn’t tell if she was being intentionally unhelpful or was actually ignorant. There was something prosaic about her despite her age, spaceship, and mystery. “What happens if I don’t go?”

“Then you go back to your life and your car and your chair.”

“How long would I be gone for?”

“It is a one-way trip.”

“Why does your mouth move differently than the words you say?”

“Ekphora is translating for us. I am speaking my language which you would not know.”

“Is it an Earth language? Are you from Earth?”

“Of course I’m from Earth. Where else would I be from?”

“I don’t know… the ship and… where on Earth?”

“Are you coming or not?”

I looked back towards my car, then down at Los Angeles. I couldn’t see it, being too far from the edge, but I knew what waited for me down there. My dad in Berkeley. We hadn’t talked much since mom died. Money changed hands – pretty much unidirectionally – and that was by mutual agreement.  Mom. She’d be proud of me for being chosen, even if we didn’t know what for. I smiled at the irony. “Cerberus is coming?” I liked the dog.

She reached out to squeeze my arm. “Of course.”

“Will I need anything?”

“You’ll have what you need.” 

She stepped backwards and disappeared inside, leaving only her outstretched hand. Cerberus poked his head through, smiling at me. He looked very happy. He growl/whined, “Come, Albert.”

Fuck it. I took Charon’s hand, closed my eyes, and stepped through the onion-skin.

Chapter Two

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

— Richard Dawkins. Used as My Senior Quote in the Fusion Academy Yearbook 

The skin of the onion felt like a thin sheen of water, slightly warmer than the ambient air outside and slightly colder than the ambient air of the interior. I hadn’t thought through my expectations – maybe something Tardis-like, alien and mechanical – but that wasn’t what I saw when I opened my eyes. I was in a foyer of some sort. The exterior wall I’d walked through wrapped around behind me and met walls on either side that turned the room into a pie-slice funnel with a hallway at the pointy end. A low bench, topped with a brilliantly complicated woolen throw, and a shoe organizer with a pair of worn slippers, two pairs of small boots, and four individual dog-booties stood against one wall. On hooks above the shoes were a series of shawls, cloaks, and raincoats all sized appropriately for Charon except for one which was clearly designed for Cerberus. 

The place felt like a contemporary condo decorated by a Greek grandmother. Wood-grain floors, white walls, decorated with colorful woven rugs, tapestries, and throws. I had spent a miserable month staying with my ex’s family in their suburban Athens McMansion towards the tail end of our relationship. It was awful, but a rare highlight was Eleni, Joana’s bitter, angry yiayia who loved nothing and no-one aside from her cat, her black dresses, and her enormous loom. I liked Eleni, and this place reminded me of her suite in that house in Athens.

“Shoes, please.” Charon pointed at my feet. She didn’t wait for me to comply before walking briskly down the hallway, leaving me and Cerberus behind.

Cerberus smiled up at me. “Glad you came,” he growled. Then he licked my hand. It was a small act of kindness, but it made me want to cry. 

I had to clear my throat before I could say, “Thanks, buddy.” I lowered my hand onto his head. He brought his neck up to meet me and accepted a soft stroke before angling his head more so I could scratch his ear. 

When I sat down on the bench to take off my shoes, I asked the dog, “You really talk?”

“Yes,” Cerberus replied, seeming surprised that I’d ever ask such a thing.

“So this is all for real?” 

 “Real.” It was so clear I felt stupid for asking if he was talking. 

My socks were dirty. One had holes. When I removed each shoe, Cerberus picked it up and placed it gently on the rack. “Thanks.” The floor was cold, especially where my skin came into direct contact. “Sorry about my socks.”

Cerberus looked down at my feet and then up at me, smiling. 

“I guess you don’t care, do you.”

He shook his head. “No.” 

Together, we walked down the hallway to find Charon.

The yiayia’s condo vibe was consistent. The onion was larger than I expected, the ceiling rising in a perfect contour of the onion-dome. The walls were covered in fanciful murals depicting dolphins and rams, in a style and colors that looked remarkably like Minoan frescoes. They incorporated the doors on both sides of the hall, their frames painted to match the landscape of the mural they interrupted as if they were cave entrances to underwater and underground worlds. On each door was a painting of a dog, similar to Cerberus but not, each sitting, smiling, it’s eyes bright and ears upright. “Wow. Did she paint these?”

Cerberus flicked an ear.

The hallway opened into a living room. The far wall reflected the far outside curve of the onion shell and the murals from the hallway continued. There was a school of fish on the hull-wall, bleeding onto both the ceiling and the floor, creating an overwhelming sense that I’d walked into a fishbowl. On the far wall, three women washed clothes in a stream. The room had a sitting area with a couch, two captain’s chairs and an end table set up in a conversation pit. A small dining table melded to the curve of the outer wall and a small galley lay separated behind an island. 

Charon stood, leaning against the island, watching me.

 “This is nice.” It didn’t feel like enough. “Did you paint all those?”

She looked at the walls. “Yes.” She walked around the island into the galley.

At loose ends, I ran my hand along the back of the chair next to me. The material was soft, resilient to the touch, and cool. It didn’t feel like anything I’d ever touched before. Alien.

My perceptions shifted fast, leaving me physically disoriented. This is fucking unreal. The comfortable interior, the kitchen, the old woman, the dog, the onion itself, the entire experience was suddenly no longer amusing or confusing or interesting. It was awful, simple and terrifying. Alien. 

The dog was alien. Everything was alien. I floundered, casting my eyes around the room searching for something purely normal, connected to daily experience, but found nothing. Everywhere things shared DNA with normal but were at best parallel evolution – captain’s chairs with alien fabric, murals straight out of a Sir Arthur Evans reconstruction of Minoan frescoes. Woven rugs and tapestries decorating the bulkheads of a UFO. The shoes and jackets. The talking dog. 

I clutched the chair back to steady myself but the xenotic nature of the material made things worse. I pulled my hand away too quickly, backed away. I stumbled, nearly landed on Cerberus. “Sorry…” My voice was thick. I felt sick. “I can’t.” It was a whine. “I have to go.”

I lurched up the hallway to the foyer and grabbed my shoes, my other arm extended to push through the onion skin. It didn’t give. My elbow locked and the shudder of impact reverberated up into my shoulder, leaving me ringing with pain.

“Auughh!” My eyes teared, frustration and pain. I closed them, hit the wall with my shoes. “Let me out!” 

Cerberus nuzzled my free hand. 

“Let me out. Now. Please.”

“He can’t,” Charon called from the living room. “Neither can I.”

 “Open this fucking thing. Right. Now.” I slammed my fist against the onionskin. It was hard as steel, completely rigid. The shock of the blow had nowhere to travel but up my arm. “Gah!”

Charon appeared, drying her hands on her dress. “You’re being very loud.” 

“Lady, you need to open this thing up right now. I don’t want to go with you. I don’t want to be Chosen. I want to go back to my shitty little life so…” I waved at the wall. Cerberus’s head moved to follow my hand. “Open.” I tapped the hull between each word. “The. Door.”

She shrugged and made a gesture like she’d erased an invisible whiteboard. “Take a look. If you still want to go, I’ll see if I can let you out.”

The light changed behind me. My stomach churned. I was suddenly afraid to turn around. “What did you just do?”

“Look.”

I did. A circle of the skin behind me had turned black. Not black. There were… no. I squinted, stepped closer, shielded my eyes against the light in the room to see better. 

“Are those…” Yes. They were. No doubt. Those were stars. A dusty scattering like a setting scene in Star Trek, shifting slowly, rotating to the right. New stars came into view. I sucked in a breath to tell Charon she needed to explain this when a new, brighter light illuminated the left side of the circle. It grew. A dime sized light hove into view, blue, white, bright as could be. The onion-skin returned to white, blocking the view. “Wait –”

“It was going to get too bright for comfort very quickly.” She scratched her cheek. “Shall I open the door for you? I’ll have to seal off the entryway, I suppose. Cerberus, could you grab the shoes? I think I can move the furniture but,” she crooked a finger at me, “if you’d help it would be much easier.”

“We left.”

She nodded slowly, again like I was simple. “You’re very thick. Yes. I told you.”

I was dizzy, disoriented in a way I’d never been. My internal compass was normally infallible, but for the first time in my life I had no sense of where I was. None. I was falling in darkness and I wanted to vomit. I breathed. In. Out. Again. It did not help. 

Charon held out her hand. “Come. I have baba ghanoush.”

Author Biography

I live in Los Angeles, California, but grew up in Seattle. I earned my BA in History with a minor in Religion, and my Masters in Education from Seattle University. When not writing, I teach high school in South Los Angeles as well as courses in YA and sci-fi novel-writing through Writers’ Workshop. I am previously published — the author of the well-reviewed, inventive sci fi young adult novel, STRANGE DAYS (Putnam BYR, 12/18).