Sgraffito Vilem watches as an age-weathered man reads a Český newspaper; he thinks of a castle, a river and is locked—for a moment—in the fading memory of open-air opera. The train is crowded. The air stinks with humidity. Loket is far away, and he can’t see going back. The rain has stopped and tattered holes are ripped in the dark, southerly clouds. Sunlight spills onto pavement and onto cars, onto empty café-tables under sodden, red awnings. Sunlight glimmers in the aftermath of a collision at the intersection of Harrison and Wabash. There may be carnage on the gleaming pavement amid crumbs of glass and plastic, but the forward motion of the train is a mercy, leaving Vilem—now—with gaze full of sun-drops trapped in rain-beads streaked across the window at his left. The clatter of metal on rails keeps rigid time with his northbound transit, as someone’s phone chimes. Meet me next Friday, Caddis had said, with a muddle of promise and arousing, entreaty in the depths of his warm voice. We’ll go to the beach, and afterwards, I’ll brush the sand from your toes. We’ll drink Becherovka. I still have a bottle. Wearing nothing on that whole day but amatory provocation, sweat, and the scents of one another, they were no longer strangers, but before that— # —Vilem was a fly in amber—inert in the diaphanous glare of slanted April sunlight. With his hand on the rail, fingers clenched and white at the knuckles, he squinted up at the figure approaching with one hand on the rail, clenching with fingers as brown as oak leaves in winter, oak leaves blown across waves of trackless snow. “Are you okay?” The stranger, said, halted by Vilem’s stillness and maybe by the look on his face. “My name is Vilem,” he said, English suddenly skittish on his tongue: his hair—always an unruly mop—framed the stairwell in a sand-colored nimbus. “I’ve seen you. You’re here every weekend.” “You too.” The stranger smiled. “I like the smell of libraries. My name is Caddis.” “I like to go and find the old books, to touch them.” “You talk like a poet.” “I’m Czech.” “Ahoy, Vilem,” only he said it with perfect inflection. Ahoj Vilem: like any landlocked pirate in the murky cockles of Bohemia. He blushed. “Ahoj Caddis,” he said. “There are books from as far back as Czechoslovakia, but they are in English. I’m going to taste them with my fingers. Will you come with me?” # And hours afterward, they stood on the cusp of the lake, drinking beer and listening to the sounds of the city. Vilem could smell the tanneries to the south; to the unseen west the land was flat and featureless, an absence butted against the city that told Vilem everything he cared to forget—about the meat factories and abattoirs. It had taken months to wash that particular color from under his fingernails. “You never told me,” Vilem said, “How you learned Czech.” Caddis smiled, his expression obscured by violet twilight. “I’m a tattooist,” he said. “I work with maggots. I learned the craft in Prague: how to tend larvae, how to cure the marks once they’ve eaten the tracings drawn on flesh. I lived there for five years.” And after a moment—one beat of the heart, or maybe ten—Caddis threw back a swallow of beer. “When I was there, I met this guy, Petr. He showed me magic. He took off his shoes and his socks, and out of nowhere, these earwigs—hundreds of them—swarmed all over his feet.” He shuddered, overtly enthralled. “It scared me. I fell in love with him a little.” “Golems,” Vilem said. “A child’s trick.” “I saw golems…they didn’t look like earwigs.” “Golems can be any shape,” Vilem said, and then, after a pause. “What happened after that, after you saw his insects? What happened with Petr?” Caddis waved bitter dismissal into the dusty, purple twilight. “He met a photographer and went to Dubrovnik with her.” And Vilem closed his eyes. “I work with insects, too,” he said, almost smiling at Petr’s gaping absence. “Beetles. I etch buildings—I help. I whisper. The beetles do the etching.” “Have I seen your work?” “Some of it. Maybe. I helped to mark all four face of the DuSable Tower.” For a moment, silence, and then: “I’ve seen your work,” Caddis said. “It scares me. A little bit. Earwigs. Beetles. Things that look like that shouldn’t be so easy to kill.” Vilem felt the heat of a spark in the hollow of his throat, and the weight of a boulder like the urge to cry; it might have been wrong to do what he wanted, to place his fingers in the hollow of any unspoken invitation, and so Vilem clasped his beer bottle in both hands. He wore sandals and felt errant grains of beach grit biting into his soles and into the pads of his toes. “Caddis,” he said, quietly, and as if whispering to a beetle. “Is it okay if I like you enough to scare you?” “Like Petr did?” Vilem flinched. “I won’t go to Dubrovnik.” A nod, shadowed in the twilight. “Is it okay, Vilem, if I want to be scared?” “With golems?” “With beetles.” # And now the squish of ran-wet sandals is a dyslexic anagram of lakefront grit and the promise of beach-sand, brushed away. Later. Three stations remain before Vilem’s stop. Caddis will be there, and Vilem’s heart skips a beat and catches itself at the thought. In the distance, against a flare of sunlight, the DuSable Tower touches his gaze at an obscure, oblique angle. He cannot see the coat of dark stucco insect-scratched in patterns of wheat-sheaves, eagles, and emblems of some ancient fur trade, but he knows they are there for anyone—and especially Caddis—to see. End During my prolonged absence from Renderosity, I've written over a hundred short stories: some of which are slated for submission for professional publication (most have already received rejection letters and so they're being re-sent to other publications) and some will find their ways here; the story you've presumably just read is the back-story to another tale slated for professional publication; on a level, I could have chosen to submit it to an editor, but I also like the idea of posting it here, as something of a "hidden story" existing behind a completely different tale that will--hopefully--coax an editor into accepting it. We'll see, but in the meantime, here's a story in less than 1000 words and I hope you've enjoyed it. As always, thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting, and at some point soon (things are oddly hectic) I'll be well on the way to catching up with all I've missed.