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then Heems was back with a canvas bag for me with a shoulder strap on it and a long stick with a nail poking out the end. I got the idea that I was meant to police the grounds. So I started around the outside of the building, poking candy wrappers (there were a lot of candy wrappers for some reason). When I made my way around half the building, I came to a little alcove, and lying in the middle of it on the snow was Father Shaw—dead. He was leaking from somewhere onto the snow, and the snow had turned the color of Mountain Dew. His flesh was rotted and yellow. The second I saw him I started breathing through my mouth as to avoid smelling him. I thought to myself, “Do I have to clean this shit up all by myself?” Time skipped here, and I was tying a string around the plastic that covered his legs. I woke up.
    While eating breakfast, I realized why Father Shaw had appeared in this dream. I'd mentioned him to Lynn not two days earlier. We were at a wedding in South Jersey, staying in a place called the Seaview in Absecon. It's a really old hotel and golf resort. That's where the wedding reception was being held. Lynn had stayed there once for a conference she was participating in, and she told me that the hallways of the place reminded her of the hotel in The Shining .
    After the reception was over, we went and got our room, hung out for a while, and then headed downstairs to the bar to have a drink. On the way, we passed a room like a study, with wooden paneling and stuffed chairs and glassed bookcases with a plaque over the door on the outside that read “Shaw.” I immediately thought of Father Shaw and told Lynn about him. The memory of his face prompted me to recall that my father was in the hospital to have a cyst removed once when we were kids, and when he returned from his stay, I'd overheard him say to my mother that Shaw had been in there at the same time, dying of cancer. “All of his great solace in God went right out the window,” my father said. “Shaw wailed just as loud as the rest of the sinners.” At the moment he said this, he was eating a cracker with a sardine on it. He gulped down the cracker in one bite, licked his forefinger, his thumb, and then smiled, giving the advantage to either Heaven or Hell. I'm still not sure which.
    * * * *
    "The War Between Heaven and Hell Wallpaper” is a completely true story. I saw the wallpaper in my mind as I dozed off, I woke up and told Lynn, I tried to confabulate a story for it, I fell asleep and had a real dream, and then the next day I remembered something that had happened to me that might have initiated the chain of events. I have a feeling these kinds of incident/experience/thought trains happen to us frequently, but usually we are too distracted by life to notice the connections. The wallpaper vision was probably only a portal into this chain of events and dreams, which stretches way back to when I was a kid encountering the church and will more than likely move forward as my life progresses. It could be that our lives are woven from these long thematic threads and only at certain magical times like in the twilight between consciousness and sleep they are momentarily revealed to us. I don't really know enough about the concept of Interstitial to say how this story qualifies. What I do know is that I could feel when I was writing this piece that it was different in some fundamental way from other stories I'd written. The whole idea of it seemed kooky as hell, but it felt good to follow it, so I did.
    Jeffrey Ford
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The Beautiful Feast
    M. Rickert
    October evening, 1969. Golden leaves spiral down. Johnny tries to catch one. His fingers touch the whisper of leaf but close on air. It doesn't matter. He spins across the yard, dodging gold bullets. He's hit! He's hit! He falls to the ground, rolling in leaf, grass, sticks, and dirt. In the distance, a dog barks. The boy lies still, arms spread, legs at