82
DRAIN ANGEL
ONE
Joy Erickson did not scream when the cherub-faced earwig crawled out of the shower drain. She pursed her lips, slipped into her bathrobe, and resolved to squash the poor thing with a shampoo bottle. She did not scream, though she wanted to.
The insect grew until it was the size of an infant. It raised one mildew-sheathed arm and let out a soft wail. The other arm was tangled in an impossible knot around the grill of the drain.
Joy dropped the shampoo bottle. She bent down and reached for the sad insect baby. She stroked its cherubic face, registering a purring vibration within its scaly belly. The dark slime that coated the creature blackened the shower tiles and seeped into Joy’s stroking hand and both of her feet. She suddenly felt lightheaded and nauseated, and also pity for the creature. Its insect mewling made her think of sick cows, but she realized that it was an angel, come to her from heaven. It had to be an angel.
She leaned against the shower wall and feared she would collapse. She wanted to scream for Bill, to have someone here beside her, but she couldn’t. She just couldn’t. A creature that screams like a cow, she thought, Bill and his anxiety could 83
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never face that. Joy swallowed her faintness and picked up the angel. How I found a curious husband, she thought. Her robe blossomed out across the shower tiles and the angel whimpered beneath the darkness of the cottony folds.
She walked through the master bathroom, the bedroom, and came into the hall, stopping at the top of the stairs.
“Bill, come here a moment. I want to show you something,”
she called. She would show him after all. Slippery as a perch, the angel squirmed in her grip. Downstairs, Bill muted the television.
“What was that, honey?” he said.
“I need to show you something,” Joy said.
“But the game’s on,” Bill said. “There’s three minutes left and if the Raiders win, they’re going to the playoffs. Do you know what this could mean for history?”
Joy rolled her eyes. She pulled an old quilt from the closet at the end of the hall and wrapped up the angel. “There you are,” she said, smiling down at its eyeless cricket face. “Is that better?”
“Can’t this wait?” Bill yelled.
“Go ahead, Bill,” she said.
Sound returned to the television. A commercial for a new pharmaceutical blared. She cradled the angel, glad that her pretty thing was wrapped up so warm and tight, forever free of the shower drain.
“We can’t keep it,” Bill said. He paced from one end of their room to the other. From the rip down the center of his Raiders jersey, Joy assumed history would not be made today.
“It’s an angel,” she said. “You can’t very well throw away an angel, can you?”
“God dammit, that thing is not an angel,” he said, fumbling through the top drawer of his nightstand. “Where are my pills? Oh, for chrissake, get that nasty thing out of our 84
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bed. How can you call it an angel? Where are my pills?”
“Lower your voice, Bill. It’s exhausted. You don’t know how hard it is to climb out of a shower drain and nearly lose an arm along the way. Your pills are downstairs.”
Bill hurried toward the bedroom door in a mad dash for the staircase. “I know that anything crawling out of any drain in this house deserves to be squashed and exterminated. I also know that you’re crazy if you believe it’s an angel. No, you’re crazy anyway, letting it sleep in our bed. What’s come over you?
Oh lord, I need my pills. Do you want one? They’ll help you think like a normal person for once.”
Joy stood at the top of the stairs, hands poised on her hips because she knew how that pose intimidated Bill. “Nothing can change my mind. It’s an angel and I’m taking care of it. If you don’t like how things are, you can sleep in the garage.”
Bill stood in the doorway and swore he wouldn’t come home until he’d gotten drunk and crashed into a busload of kids. “Goodbye, Bill,” Joy said. She knew this routine. “Be safe and don’t scratch the new car.” She recalled the lipstick stains recently appearing on his collars. “And if you do crash the car, at least wear a clean shirt. That way I won’t be scandalized.”
“Scandalized?” he said. “Scandalized? I’m living in a fucking freak show! My life is a nightmare.”
“You’re sterile.”
“What’s that?” Bill scoffed.
“It’s natural for me to want a child, and you’re sterile. I’ve found my own child now.”
“That thing’s been in our home for hardly an hour and do you see what it’s done to you? Oh, fuck it. You can keep the critter. Next week you’ll want a new puppy, and the week after—”
“Yes, Bill. I want a new puppy.”
He slammed the door. Joy thought this would be oh so funny in a doll’s house, but it was not funny now. But 85
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everything is fine, she thought, everything will work out in the end. Even failed marriages worked out in the end. What are door slams and car crashes? Anyway, good riddance to Bill.
What dreadful influence he would have on the angel! Without him, she was better off.
The guest bedroom would have to do. What other room in the house possibly possessed the right character to raise her angel? She laughed. Oh my, maybe you are getting a bit crazy, talking about your angel, she thought. In a sense, it did belong to her. It belonged to her and no one else. She found the angel, accepted the task of raising it, and thereby gained the right to call it her baby. Joy never considered herself religious in the church-going sense, but she felt positive that she would be rewarded for her sacrifices in raising this angel. She wanted to call her mother and inquire about raising infants, but the old woman might not understand the dynamics of this complex parental situation.
She tip-toed into the master bedroom to check up on the sleeping angel. Swirling trails of black slime glistened all over the pillows and sheets. So my baby drools, she thought.
So what? All babies drool and poop in their diapers and cry at all hours so nevermind those things. It couldn’t get any worse than that, could it? She left the room and walked downstairs to her and Bill’s office, mentally calculating the cost of each baby item. She sat at the desk and moved the mouse around, pulling the computer out of sleep mode. A fantasy football window popped up and Joy clicked out of it. Bill had so many fetishes and obsessions. Couldn’t she be allowed just this one?
She opened a Google window and searched raising a baby and scrolled down until she clicked on what promised to be the most reliable guide for new mothers. As the page loaded, she opened two more Google windows, one to check her eBay account and the other to search for nursery ideas. Of course, 86
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she already had the entire nursery planned in her head.
Logging onto eBay, it pleased her to discover that a scale replica of the Twin Towers had topped seven hundred dollars. A painting of the same towers, signed by three firefighters, sold for triple that. A few years ago, nobody would have dared forecast such a healthy market for 9/11 memorabilia, but it made Joy a wealthy, independent woman. If demand increased any more, her income would surpass Bill’s at CashNet. Ha! To see the look on his face, she thought. Oh, that bastard. He’s intolerable sometimes, but I do love him. I really do. The problem lies—
Upstairs, the angel screamed.
TWO
Joy gasped. What had been done to the pillows on the guest bed? Cloth and goose feathers fluttered to the carpet in thin shreds. The pillows her deceased grandmother had sewn now laid in tatters, irreparable. Her heart skipped a beat when she discovered, in the midst of the textile chaos, her crying baby. “There there, sweet angel,” she said. “Mommy will make everything better.”
Joy scooped the black angel into her arms and rocked it back and forth. Unable to locate ears on the creature, she cooed into its face a
s she glanced around the room. Panda had probably destroyed the pillows. That damn cat was always getting into trouble. Joy resolved to lock the cat in the den.
With a baby around, a housecat could be trusted about as much as a ravenous lion.
The angel screamed in Joy’s arms as she left the guest room. She let go of it long enough to close the door. She walked into the master bedroom and nudged the door shut behind her. When she nestled her baby between the sheets, it stopped crying. Joy tried to wipe the tears from its face but the slick film that coated the angel smeared all over her hands.
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She entered the master bathroom, but when she found a dry towel, the black drool had already seeped through her pores.
She felt sick again. Even as the room tilted around her, every bone in her body ached to lie beside her angel. She wondered if its slime was unsanitary and instantly scolded herself for thinking such a dreadful thing. She’d have to keep the baby off the counters and kitchen table, but those were no places for a baby anyway.
The telephone rang.
It rang again and she ran to answer it. She grabbed the portable receiver and checked the caller ID. Bill was calling.
She let it ring two more times before answering. “What do you want,” she said, no longer nauseated but high on angel slime.
There was some shuffling on the other end of the line.
A woman moaned. Bill’s coital hoots and hollers joined the squealing. Beneath it all, Joy heard the creaks and groans of a bed frame.
She held the phone at arm’s distance. Her thumb hovered over the OFF button, but she failed to muster the courage to hang up for good. She racked her brain for something to say.
Bill had obviously turned on the speaker, so the other woman would hear anything she said. She wanted to tell him off, but feared the woman might come to the opinion that she was a desperate housewife who listened over the phone as her husband fucked other women.
She listened for another minute before slamming the phone on the hardwood floor. The phone cracked in two. The only words exchanged had been spoken—rather, shouted—by the anonymous woman. Fuck me, fuck me.
Joy kicked the broken phone beneath the bed and collapsed beside the angel. She buried her face in the pillows and sobbed.
The angel whined. Joy screamed into the pillow and thought of all the times she had lied to herself about Bill’s love for her.
After two failed marriages, she was still naïve. She’d made a fool of herself again. She screamed into the pillow and the 88
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angel screamed with her. She fumbled along the sheets until she touched the angel’s belly. It spit up bile that dribbled down her arm and soaked into the oily shadow the angel had left on the sheets.
She withdrew her arm and tucked it beneath her chin.
Warm pinpricks tingled all along her flesh. So much had gone so wrong. At least her angel was here. As the phone rang throughout the house, she chewed the meat between her thumb and index finger until her own blood mixed with the bile. She lapped at the fluids until she blacked out.
Bill called again a few hours later. Joy awoke to the phone still ringing. They talked this time. He was coming home. He would forgive her for the angel if she forgave him for the phone call. Joy failed to understand why she gave in to his offer, but she did and that was that. She preferred not to think about it.
She had a baby to care for.
THREE
As Bill fucked her, Joy imagined the woman he’d been with earlier. Her eyes half shut, she saw a redhead of medium height.
It must have been Susan, the secretary at CashNet, or a woman just like her. At last year’s corporate holiday party, Bill got drunk and openly hit on Susan. Joy had physically unlatched Bill from the secretary and driven home as he sulked in the passenger seat. She’d brushed that night away as the result of a bad reaction between alcohol and Bill’s anxiety meds. They never spoke about the incident, but now it dawned on Joy that what she witnessed that night held more import than she originally attributed to it.
Bill and Susan must have taken a motel room or borrowed the loft of a recent grad eager to please the company vets in 89
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order to move up the corporate ladder.
Joy hardly felt it when Bill came. She didn’t care. She had only consented to his sexual pass because after fucking, Bill grew pacified and childlike. After make-up sex, he always apologized for his mistakes. Sometimes he even sobbed into her chest. He was a sorry bastard and this was how Joy drove that fact into his heart.
Bill offered no apology this time. “Again,” he said, squeezing her arms too hard.
The angel cooed in the makeshift pile of bedding Joy had set up in the corner of the room. She felt a pang of guilt for forgetting her baby during sex. A mother should remain constantly aware of her newborn, she thought. There could be no time for personal relations or pleasures.
“I’m too tired,” she said. “I need to check on the child.”
Bill huffed and rolled off of her. He lit a cigarette and said, “What’s its name?”
“Don’t smoke around the baby,” she said.
“What’s its name?”
Joy twisted around to face away from Bill. Had she been so oblivious and self-absorbed that she forgot to name the angel?
The angel cooed and gurgled.
Joy leapt out of bed and ran to it. She scooped it in her arms and rocked it back and forth. “There there,” she said.
“Mommy’s here now. We’ll find a name for you.”
“Call it Satan,” Bill yelled, propped up in bed. “Call it what it is.”
The angel screamed in Joy’s arms. It vomited onto her bare chest. The bile streamed down her breasts, across her belly, and slid down her legs. It oozed into her skin and ran between her toes, dripping on the hardwood floor. Joy’s shoulders tightened as the baby shrieked so loud the windowpanes shook.
The angel trembled and went limp in her arms. It croaked like a toad. It drooled. It clutched Joy’s wrist between its tiny 90
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hands and whimpered like a dying dog. Joy stepped into the bathroom as Bill shouted Satan, Satan.
The moon shone through the bathroom windows and cast half the angel in pale light. The angel puked again. It howled and shrank into the cradle formed by Joy’s arms. Bill shouted Satan, Satan.
Joy sat on the edge of the bathtub. Bill made her feel like dying. She wanted to kill herself for being such a terrible mother. She lowered her face to the angel’s and thought of all the names she’d seen while browsing baby name books in the mall. Dean, James, Scooter . . . they were all so inadequate.
The baby’s head fell off, interrupting her ruminations. It fell on the floor and cracked in two. An apple-shaped sponge that must have been the angel’s brain quivered between the halves of its skull. Joy lost her balance and fell backwards into the tub, still clutching the oily body to her chest.
A fountain of black ooze spewed from its neck stump, quickly filling the bathtub until the slosh flowed over the edge and crept across the bathroom floor. Joy sank up to her neck in slime. She released the angel’s body to resist the force pulling her down.
Bill turned on the bathroom light and cried, “Holy shit!”
But it was too late. His legs slipped out from under him and he landed on his back. He flopped and wallowed in the shit, screaming Satan, Satan.
Joy finally pulled herself out of the bathtub and slid across the floor. She scooped up the baby’s brain and shuffled out of the bedroom as Bill continued to shout on the floor.
She took the stairs two at a time until she got to the entryway. As she did whenever Bill got mad and they argued, she went into their office to the left of the entry. She locked the door behind her and held the angel’s brain in her lap. She’d had no time to throw on clothes, but her bathrobe hung on the back of the swivel chair. She set the brain on the d
esk and put on the robe. It wasn’t much help. Coated from her neck to her 91
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toes in tar-like sludge, the robe clung to every inch of her. As the slime soaked into her skin, the robe clung like epidermal flesh. She moved two small bookcases in front of the door for reinforcement. When she turned around, the brain had already doubled in size. Boils swelled up all over the brain, then tiny arms and legs sprouted to form a lion’s mane of limbs. Eyes—
emerald green eyes—blinked open on the tip of each arm and leg. In the center of the limbs, right on the brain’s belly, yawned a mouth of chiseled yellow teeth.
Joy realized her baby was not dead, just growing.
And she thought of a name. She wasn’t sure where it came from. Maybe from all of the black filth she had taken in.
Certainly not from one of those books. It had come to her as if from a cathode ray sent by the angel itself. She smiled and started to cry. She scooped the tentacled brain into her arms and said, “I will name you Abel.”
FOUR
Joy huddled beneath the desk as Bill pounded on the office door. He threatened to kill the angel and burn down the house.
The angel sat on one of the bookshelves propped against the door. As its limbs smacked and rubbed against the door, its eyes remained fixed on Joy.
Abel’s metamorphosis continued. He grew lobster claws and wings coated in obsidian fish scales. A long, needle-spiked tongue hung out of his mouth. Joy didn’t want to interfere with her baby’s natural growth cycle. Otherwise, she would have held him in her arms. At least Bill’s ruckus didn’t frighten him. The door wavered in its frame. It wouldn’t hold out much longer. It seemed paper-thin. Joy sobbed into her hands as she considered what Bill would do when he busted down the door.
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