by Ellen Datlow
Warm … He had kissed her once—it was one of the things she couldn’t forget—when she had been a little girl and he had been as big as the night. His eyes had burned with the wild rigor of his hunt, the world’s dark he’d held in his iron hands. The kiss had tasted of salt, a warm thing. Long ago, and she still remembered.
She took off the boy’s jacket in the hallway. Her shoes and his small rubber boots made muddy stains on the thin carpet runner. Her knees were so stiff now that she couldn’t bend down; she had the boy stand up on the wooden bench against the wall, so she could work the jacket’s zipper and snaps.
“Where’s my mother?” Coming in to the house’s warmth from the cold street had made his nose run again. He sniffed wetly.
“She’ll be here in a minute.” She pushed the open jacket back from the boy’s shoulders. “Let’s get all ready for her, and then we can have that cake.”
The boy had just a T-shirt on underneath the jacket, and it was torn and dirty, with a yellow stain over some cartoon character’s face. The boy’s unwashed smell blossomed in the close hallway air, a smell of forgotten laundry and milk gone off. She wanted that to make her feel better. The boy’s mother was a bad mother. Not like that other boy’s mother, the one three or four times ago. She remembered standing by the greasy fire in the backyard, turning that boy’s clothing over in her hands, all of it clean-smelling, freshly washed. Inside the collar of the boy’s shirt, and in the waistband of the corduroy trousers, little initials had been hand-stitched, his initials. That was what she’d do if she’d had a child of her own; she would love him that much. Not like this poor ragged thing. Nobody loved this little boy, not really, and that made it all right. She’d told herself that before.
“What’s that?” He looked up toward the hallway’s ceiling.
She pulled his T-shirt up, exposing his pink round belly. His hair stood up—it was dirty, too—when she pulled the shirt off over his head.
“Nothing.” She smoothed his hair down with her palm. “It’s nothing.” She didn’t know if she’d heard anything or not. She’d heard all the house’s sounds for so long—they were all her father—that they were the same as silence to her. Or a great roaring hurricane that battered her into a corner, her arms over her head to try to protect herself. It was the same.
She dropped the T-shirt on top of the rubber boots, then unbuttoned the boy’s trousers and pulled them down. Dirty grey underwear, the elastic sagging loose. The little boys things (little… not like…) made the shape of a tiny fist inside the stained cotton. (Great roaring hurricane) (Arms over her head) She slipped the underpants down.
The boy wiggled. He rubbed his mouth and nose with the back of his hand, smearing the shiny snot around. “What’re you doing?”
“Oh, you’re so cold.” She looked into his dull eyes, away from the little naked parts. “You’re freezing. Wouldn’t a nice hot bath … wouldn’t that be nice? Yes. Then you’d be all toasty warm, and I’d wrap you up in a great big fluffy towel. That’d be lovely. You don’t want to catch cold, do you?”
He sniffled. “Cake.”
“Then you’d have your cake. All you want.”
His face screwed up red and ugly. “No. I want it now!” His shout bounced against the walls. The underpants were a grey rag around his ankles, and his hand a fist now, squeezing against the corner of his mouth.
She slapped him. There was no one to see them. The boy’s eyes went round, and he made a gulping, swallowing noise inside his throat. But he stopped crying. The fist around her heart tightened, because she knew this was something he was already used to.
“Come on.” She could hear her own voice, tight and angry, the way her father’s had been when it still had words. She tugged the underpants away from the boy’s feet. “Stop being stupid.”
She led him, his hand locked inside hers, up the stairs. Suddenly, halfway up, he started tugging, trying to pull his hand away.
“Stop it!” She knelt down and grabbed his bare shoulders, clenching them tight. “Stop it!” She shook him, so that his head snapped back and forth.
His face was wet with tears, and his eyes looked up. He cringed away from something up there, rather than from her. Between her own panting breaths, she heard her father moving around.
“It’s nothing!” Her voice screamed raw from her throat. “Don’t be stupid!”
She jerked at his arm, but he wouldn’t move; he cowered into the angle of the stairs. He howled when she slapped him, then cried openmouthed as she kept on hitting him, the marks of her hand jumping up red on his shoulder blades and ribs.
She stopped, straightening up and gasping to catch her breath. The naked little boy curled at her feet, his legs drawn up, face hidden in the crook of his arm. The blood rushing in her head roared, the sound of a battering wind. The saliva under her tongue tasted thick with salt.
For a moment she thought he was still crying, little soft animal sounds, then she knew it was coming from up above. From her father’s room. She stood for a moment, head tilted back, looking up toward the sounds. Her hair had come loose from its knot, and hung down the side of her face and along her back.
“Come on …” She kept her voice softer. She reached down and took the boy’s hand. But he wouldn’t stand up. He hung limp, sniffling and shaking his head.
She had to pick him up. She cradled him in her arms—he didn’t feel heavy at all—and carried him the rest of the way up the stairs.
Her father was a huddled shape under the blankets. He’d heard them coming, and had gotten back into the bed before she’d opened the door.
She knew that was what he’d done. A long time ago, when he’d first become this way—when she’d first made herself realize that he was old—she had tried tying him to the bed, knotting a soft cord around his bone-thin ankle and then to one of the heavy carved lion’s paws underneath. But he’d fretted and tugged so at the cord, picking at the knot with his yellow fingernails until they’d cracked and bled, and the ankle’s skin had chafed raw. She’d untied him, and taken to nailing his door shut, the nails bent so she just had to turn them to go in and out. At night, she had lain awake in her room and listened to him scratching at the inside of his door.
Then that had stopped. He’d learned that she was taking care of him. The scratching had stopped, and she’d even left the nails turned back, and he didn’t try to get out.
She sat the little boy at the edge of the bed. The boy was silent now, sucking his thumb, his face smeared wet with tears.
“Daddy?” She pulled the blanket down a few inches, exposing the brown-spotted pink of his skull, the few strands of hair, tarnished silver.
“Daddy—I brought somebody to see you.”
In the nest of the blanket and sour-smelling sheets, her father’s head turned. His yellow-tinged eyes looked up at her. His face was parchment that had been crumpled into a ball and then smoothed out again. Parchment so thin that the bone and the shape of his teeth—the ones he had left, in back—could be seen through it.
“Look.” She tugged, lifted the little boy farther up onto the bed. So her father could see.
The eyes under the dark hood of the blanket shifted, darting a sudden eager gaze from her face to the pink softness of the little boy.
“Come here.” She spoke to the boy now. His legs and bottom slid on the blanket as she pulled him, her hands under his arms, until he sat on the middle of the bed, against the lanky, muffled shape of her father. “See, there’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s just nice and warm.”
The shape under the blanket moved, crawling a few inches up to the turned-back edge.
The boy was broken, he had been this way a long time, it was why she’d picked him out and he’d come with her. Nobody loved him, not really, and that made it all right. He didn’t fight as she laid him down, his head on the crumpled pillow, face close to her father’s.
A thing of twigs and paper, her father’s hand, slid from beneath the blanket. It cupped the back o
f the boy’s head, tightening and drawing the boy close, as though for a kiss.
The boy struggled then, a sudden fluttering panic. His small hands pushed against her father’s shoulders, and he cried, a whimpering noise that made her father’s face darken with his wordless anger. That made her father strong, and he reared up from the bed, his mouth stretching open, tendons of clouded spit thinning to string. He wrapped his arms around the little boy, his grey flesh squeezing the pink bundle tight.
The boy’s whimpering became the sound of his gasping breath. Her father pressed his open mouth against the side of the boy’s neck. The jaws under the translucent skin worked, wetting the boy’s throat with white- specked saliva.
Another cry broke out, tearing at her ears. She wanted to cover them with her hands and run from the room. And keep running, into all the dark streets around the house. Never stopping, until her breath was fire that burned away her heart. The cry was her father’s; it sobbed with rage and frustration, a thing bigger than hunger, desire, bigger than the battering wind that shouted her name. He rolled his face away from the boy’s wet neck, the ancient face like a child’s now, mouth curved in an upside-down U, tongue thrusting against the toothless gums in front. His tears broke, wetting the ravines of his face.
He couldn’t do it, he couldn’t feed himself. She knew, it had been that way the last time, and before. But every time, hope made her forget, at least enough to try the old way. The way it had been years ago.
She couldn’t bear the sound of her father’s crying, and the little boy’s fearful whimper. She knew how to stop it. On the table beside the bed was the knife she’d brought up from the kitchen—that had also been a long time ago—and had left there. Her hand reached out and curled around the smooth-worn wood. Her thumb slid across the sharp metal edge.
She brought her lips to the boy’s ear, whispering to him. “Don’t be afraid, it’s all right…” The boy squirmed away from her, but she caught him fast, hugging his unclothed body against her breast. “It’s all right, it’s all right…” He saw the knife blade, and started to cry out. But she already had its point at his pink throat, and the cry leaked red, a drop, then a smearing line as the metal sank and cut.
The red bloomed on the sheets, the grey flooded to shiny wet. The boy’s small hands beat against her, then fluttered, trembled, fell back, fists opening to stained flowers.
He didn’t fight her now, he was a limp form in her embrace, but suddenly he weighed so much and her hands slipped on the soft skin that had been pink before and now shone darker and brighter. She gripped the boy tighter, her fingers parallel to his ribs, and lifted him. She brought the bubbling mouth, the red one that she had pulled the knife from, up to her father’s parted lips.
The blood spilled over her father’s gums and trickled out the corners of his mouth. The tendons in his neck stretched and tightened, as though they might tear his paper flesh. His throat worked, trying to swallow, but nothing happened. His eyes opened wider, spiderwebs of red traced around the yellow. He whimpered, the anger turning to fear. Trapped in the thing of sticks his body had become, he scrabbled his spotted hands at her face, reaching past the boy between them.
She knew what had to be done. The same as she’d done before. Her father’s bent, ragged nails scraped across her cheek as she turned away from him. She nuzzled her face down close to the little boy’s neck. She closed her eyes so there was only the wet and heat pulsing against her lips. She opened her mouth and drank, her tongue weighted with the dancing, coiling salt.
She didn’t swallow, though her mouth had become full. Her breath halted, she raised her face from the boy’s neck and the wound surging less with every shared motion of their hearts. A trickle of the warmth caught in her mouth leaked to her chin.
A baby bird in its nest … a naked thing of skin and fragile bone … She had found one once, on the sidewalk in front of the house, a tiny creature fallen from one of the branches above. Even as she had reached down, the tip of her finger an inch away from the wobbling, blue-veined head, the beak had opened, demanding to be fed …
The creature’s hunger had frightened her, and she’d kicked it out into the gutter, where she wouldn’t have to see it anymore. That had been a baby bird.
This was her father. She kept her eyes closed as she brought herself down to him, but she could still see the mouth opening wide, the pink gums, the tongue in its socket of bubbled spit. She lowered her face to his, and let the lips seal upon her own. She opened her mouth, and let the warmth uncoil, an infinitely soft creature moving over her own tongue, falling into his hunger.
The little boy’s blood welled in her father’s mouth. For a moment it was in both their mouths, a wet place shared by their tongues, his breath turning with hers. She felt the trembling, a shiver against the hinges of her jaw as his throat clenched, trying to swallow. She had to help even more, it had been this way the last time as well; she pressed her lips harder against her father’s mouth, as her tongue rolled against the narrow arch of her teeth. The warmth in their mouths broke and pushed past the knot in her father’s throat. He managed to swallow, and she felt the last of the blood flow out of her mouth, into his and then gone.
She fed him twice more, each mouthful easier. Between them, the little boy lay still, beautiful in his quiet.
The boy’s throat had paled, and she had to draw deep for more. The sheets were cold against her hands as she pushed herself away from him.
Her father was still hungry, but stronger now. His face rose to meet hers, and the force of his kiss pressed against her open lips.
The blood uncoiled in that dark space again, and something else. She felt his tongue thrust forward to touch hers, a warm thing cradled in warmth and the sliding wet. Her throat clenched now. She couldn’t breathe, and the smell of his sweat and hunger pressed in the tight space behind her eyes.
His hands had grown strong now, too. The weak flutter had died, the palms reddening as the little boy had become white and empty. One of her father’s hands tugged her blouse loose from the waistband of her skirt, and she felt the thing of bone and yellowed paper smear the sheet’s wet on her skin. Her father’s hand stroked across her ribs and fastened on her breast, a red print on the white cotton bra. He squeezed and it hurt, her breath was inside his hand and blood and the taste of his mouth, the dark swallowing that pulled her into him, beat a pulsing fist inside her forehead.
She pushed both her hands against him, but he was big now and she was a little girl again, she was that pale unmoving thing rocking in his arms, playing at being dead. She was already falling, she could raise her knees in the dark wet embrace of the bed, she could wrap herself around the little blind thing at the center of her breasts, that just breathed and stayed quiet, and that even he couldn’t touch, had never been able to touch … the little boy was there, his angel face bright and singing, her ears deafened, battered by that song that light that falling upward into clouds of glory where her mother in Sunday robes reached for her, her mother smiling though she had no face she couldn’t remember her mother’s face—
She shoved against her father, hard enough to break away from him, his ragged fingernails drawing three red lines that stung and wept under her bra. She fell backward off the bed, her elbow hard against the floor, sending numb electricity to her wrist.
Another shape slid from the edge of the bed and sprawled over her lap. The little boy, naked and red wet, made a soft, flopping doll. She pushed it away from herself and scrambled to her feet.
The bed shone. From its dark center, the depth of the blanket’s hood, her father looked out at her.
She found the doorknob in her hands behind her back. Her blouse clung to her ribs, and had started to turn cold in the room’s shuttered air. The door scraped her spine as she stepped backward into the hallway. Then she turned and ran for the bathroom at the far end, an old sour taste swelling in her throat.
In the dark, between the streetlights’ blue islands, she could feel the leave
s under her feet. They slid away, damp things, silent; she had to walk carefully to keep from falling.
There was work to be done back at the house. She’d do it later. She would have to change the sheets, as she always did afterward, and wash the stained ones. She used the old claw-footed bathtub, kneeling by its side, the smell of soap and bleach stinging her nose, her fingers working in the pink water. He let her come in and make the bed, and never tried to say anything to her, just watching her with his blank and wordless eyes, his hungers, all of them, over for a while.
And there were the other jobs to be done, the messier ones. Getting rid of things. She’d have to take the car, the old Plymouth with the rusting fenders, out of the garage. And drive to that far place she knew, where these things were never found. She would come back as the sun was rising, and there would be mud on the hem of her skirt. She’d be tired, and ready to sleep.
She could do all that later. She’d been brave and strong, and had already done the hardest jobs; she could allow herself this small indulgence.
The cold night wrapped around her. She pressed her chin down into the knot of the scarf she’d tied over her hair. The collar of her coat had patches where the fur had worn away. The coat had been her mother’s, and had been old the first time she’d worn it. A scent of powder, lavender and tea roses, still clung to the heavy cloth.
At the end of the block ahead of her, the Presbyterian church hid the stars at the bottom of the sky. She could see the big stained-glass window, Jesus with one hand on his staff and the other cupped to the muzzle of a lamb, even though there were no lights on in the church itself. The light spilling over the sidewalk came from the meeting room in the basement.
She went down the bare concrete steps, hand gripping the iron rail. And into the light and warmth, the collective sense of people in a room, their soft breathing, the damp-wool smell of their winter coats.
