blindness and cancer were true risks, after all—it gladdened her that he enjoyed the program.
The microwave beeped. She removed the bowl from the microwave and a spoon from the silverware drawer. She set the macaroni and cheese on the floor beside Abel. As he splattered black slime across the two-dimensional images of silent, 102
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unfeeling camels, it occurred to Joy that this was the first real meal she had ever prepared for her son. I must be the worst mother on earth, she thought.
Abel reached a hand into the bowl and showered his umbrella head with the orange, artificially flavored noodles.
A sticky white fluid squirted from the umbrella ends and the noodles disintegrated into the child’s wiry head. What an individual eater, Joy thought. What fortune to be blessed with such a unique son.
They spent the rest of the day sitting on the floor, watching the camel people do nothing and mashing noodles and cheese powder into their skulls.
EIGHT
All the next morning, after she dropped Abel off for his second day of school, Joy moped around the house, incapable of fulfilling eBay orders or even folding the laundry she’d started yesterday. In such a short time, her attachment to Abel had swelled to encompass everything. Their bond shrouded every aspect of Joy. On one hand, she loved being a mother. It meant more to her than anything this world could offer. She resisted the nagging sense that she was trapped. Since she could remember, Joy had suffered from a peculiar claustrophobia concerning people. Her readiness to embrace love always went too far. The closer she got to a person, the more strangled she felt until it reached a breaking point, and she fled. With Bill, she managed to overcome her skittishness for the first time, not because of any outstanding qualities she perceived in him, but out of stubbornness and hard work. As with anyone trying to improve themselves, the right self-help books aided Joy’s actualization of desired personal growth.
Now the claustrophobia returned in full force.
She realized that if motherhood wasn’t enough to murder 103
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this feeling once and for all, nothing could save her. I’m selfish, she thought. I’m selfish and unfit to be a mother. Joy fought to repress these judgments as she tuned out to the stop-motion camel cartoon, which she made sure to Tivo this time. She left the house at a quarter ‘til noon, two hours before she expected Abel to leave class.
She parked in front of the school, taking a space in the row closest to the main office. Although she knew school policies required all visitors to check in, she didn’t see how taking a quick gander around would hurt anyone.
The brick halls appeared drab and worn in the pale October sun. They offered no sign that children in classrooms racked their brains to hold in all the wisdom of textbooks, no sign of laughter or life. Joy turned a corner, giddy about the possibility of being caught without a visitor’s pass.
What she saw made her knees weak. She had to scream to keep from falling down. Child-sized cocoons lined both sides of the hallway, leading straight to the cafeteria. She forced herself to approach them, to figure out what was really going on. Closer up, she saw that each cocoon contained an adult or child. They were dormant beneath the clear, dark layer of phlegm. She reached out to touch a cocoon encasing a little girl and found the texture identical to Abel’s slime. Her skin absorbed it and everything became clear to hear. This was an art project. Bearing the mark of Abel, it was obviously his art project.
A torrent of happiness and terror swelled in her chest, quickening her heartbeat to an intolerable speed. She fled the hallway, hurried to the car, and wept against the steering wheel.
A few minutes before three, the insect angel marched out of the desolate school. Joy did not mention the art project.
Abel may have intended it to be a surprise. She hoped he would invite her to see it whenever it was complete. And she no longer felt smothered, which meant Abel could not be the 104
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object smothering her. As long as he sat beside her, she basked in motherly love.
As soon as she turned onto their street, the black car that had posted up in front of the house the previous day appeared behind them. “How about some ice cream?” Joy said.
She jerked the steering wheel hard to the left, nearly clipping the mailman as he marched across the street. Joy apologized to his blue-suited figure in the side view mirror. Envelopes and packages scattered around him. A sheaf of junk mail floated away on the gutter’s current.
And the black car followed.
They finally found a place to park in the cramped lot of the ice cream shop, but the black car had beaten them there. Joy did not know how this was possible. The plan to take Abel out for ice cream had been spontaneous. Unless they had implanted a tracking device inside the car or—God forbid—on Abel, how could they know? Joy looked over at Abel. His head spun silently.
She toyed with other, less sinister reasons that might result in the followers ending up at the same ice cream joint. True, it was nearby. October was actually a popular ice cream month, when people reminisced about the loss of another summer, finally laying it to rest in a cold, pre-winter scoop of their favorite childhood flavor. Yes, everybody ate ice cream in October. Even creeps who stalked single mothers and demanded they give up the most precious thing on earth, their only child.
If she and Abel went into the shop, they would be in a public place, surrounded by happy people. That counted for something. That meant they were safe. She might even catch sight of the followers. Then she could hand their identities over to the police. Everyone in the world would stand behind Joy and Abel, innocent mother and son. If they walked into the ice cream shop, all their troubles of the last twenty-four hours 105
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might end forever. The dead husband troubles would remain, but nobody believed the testaments of stalking creeps. Joy could blame the death on them. They were criminals, after all.
She got out of the car and walked around to the passenger side. She opened the door for Abel, leaned over to unbuckle his seatbelt, and one day passed into the next.
NINE
“You better not have any homework due today,” Joy said, turning into the pickup loop in front of the school office. “A good impression is key to lasting success. Oh, nevermind. It’s my fault for letting you watch all that television. Have a good day, sweetie. I’ll see you after class.” She kissed Abel’s umbrella and he hopped out of the car.
It was eight in the morning and silent. Cars filled the parking lot. Everywhere she looked, an emptiness confronted her. She sighed. Despite the warm autumn air, the chills crept over her. They draped a pall over the talk show radio crackling through the speakers and made the sunlight depressing. Joy squeezed the steering wheel and overcame the impulse to start smoking again. She resisted and turned the radio louder. She could not allow six years to go down the drain that fast. A radio host said something funny and laughed. Joy missed the remark but laughed anyway. Another person laughed and made a witticism that she failed to understand. She found humor in none of it. None of it made sense. Anyway, she laughed.
That was common and universal enough that despite all the nightmare dread of facing an empty house, where loneliness and self-loathing lurked behind every door, she could partake in the laughter. Otherwise, the anxiety of waiting for three o’clock to arrive was pure misery.
She stopped laughing when she pulled into the driveway.
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TEN
Two dark-suited figures burst out of the house as Joy sat in her car in the driveway. They ran across the front lawn, jumped into the Lincoln Town Car parked in front of the house, and sped off. Joy wasn’t so sure, but the men looked awfully like Camel Joe, or the stop-motion camels from the cartoon. She brushed this off as a displacement of her cigarette craving and killed the engine. She got out of the car.
The front door hung wi
de open. Everything seemed to be in proper order, so Joy searched harder. Nobody broke into a house and left things untouched. She knew what dark intentions aroused home invasion. These men wanted money, jewels, and God knew what else. “Thieves,” she screamed. “Thieves!” She stormed from the entryway to the office, the kitchen to the living room. She returned to the entryway and dashed up the stairs, yelling all the while. “Thieves! Outlaws! Invaders!”
Joy regretted her reluctance to ever activate the home security system. Bill always insisted— She halted at the top of the staircase. The corpses no longer hung from the banister.
She stumbled into the master bedroom. Gray light poured in from the windows on the far wall, illuminating the dust that floated between the glass panes and the bed propped against the adjacent wall.
Bill’s hands and feet were nailed to the mattress. He was the spitting image of a blue collar savior, except for his head.
The men who broke in must have taken that with them. They’d severed Bill’s head and shoved two cat paws into his neck. The paws jutted out like furry antennas.
In a lightning instant of recognition, Joy ran out of the room and down the stairs as fast as she could. The toe of her left shoe caught on one of the middle steps and she tumbled the rest of the way down. Her head slammed against the entryway floor. She got up and ran out the door, pulling the keys from her pocket. The front door stood ajar behind her, but that no 107
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longer mattered. She knew in her heart that the men in dark suits already scoured every classroom of the school, searching for Abel.
ELEVEN
Without understanding how or why, Joy found herself outside the cafeteria’s double doors. She failed to remember the drive here. Abel had expressed so much enthusiasm for eating at school. Maybe that explained why she came to the cafeteria, which stood on the far edge of the school, away from the office, classrooms, and twisted hallways. Perhaps it had something to do with his special, secret cocoon project and how the bodies led right up to the cafeteria.
She pushed through the doors and entered the building.
The air in the room hung thick and sticky. She held a hand over her mouth until she learned to take shallower breaths so the air would not stick in her lungs.
In the center of the cafeteria, between the long bench rows, two human-headed earwigs writhed on the floor.
Children sat on the benches, unmoving and rigid. Black slime smothered their faces and clothes.
The earwigs howled. They paid no attention to Joy as they fucked. Their legs fell off and turned to dust. Their ribs liquefied into swamp-colored tar that reeked of gasoline. Joy turned her gaze to the stage at the far end of the cafeteria. Abel stood center stage. He raised his tentacles to the ceiling, umbrella spinning, and chanted nonsense.
Joy ran across the room, maneuvering around the earwigs.
She pulled herself onto the stage and took her son in her arms.
He pushed her away and ceased talking gibberish long enough to say, “No, mommy.”
Joy stiffened. He called me mommy, she thought. This little miracle crippled her. So much happiness swelled through 108
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her that even as her son approached the human-headed earwigs tonguing in the midst of coitus, she believed everything must be okay. Abel is an intelligent child, she thought. He will do what is good and safe.
The insect angel stopped a foot away from the earwigs. He fell to his knees. His tentacles quivered and snorted tar and leg dust through their many eyes. When the powder and liquid diminished, Abel sprawled on his back and convulsed.
“Abel!” Joy said. She jumped offstage.
The earwigs spurted something like putty out of their mouths. As if appalled by the horror of copulation, they rolled off of each other and died.
Joy’s footsteps echoed in the cafeteria. She fell on the floor and gathered Abel’s tentacled body to her chest. “Abel,” she said.The cafeteria doors creaked open. The dark-suited men stood in the doorway. As they stepped into the room, Joy squinted through the haze and saw that she had not been wrong. They were camel people, identical to the ones in the stop-motion cartoon. She said to herself that such things did not exist beyond nightmares, but they stood there all the same.
The fact was that camel people did exist, and they wanted her child.
The camel men paced across the room in jerky spasms, moving like puppets. Both of them held a glowing book in their hands. Joy shook Abel to wake him. He remained unconscious.
Ten feet away, the camel people stopped, opened their mouths, and spit globs of silky phlegm. Their spit overshot Joy and Abel. It splattered across the face of a dead earwig.
The earwig’s skull cracked in two, emitting a flurry of bats made of cheese. The camel people did not spit a second time.
They seemed as mesmerized as Joy by the bats.
The bats scattered. Each of them homed in on a particular child and squeezed between the lips of that child, disappearing 109
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into their adolescent mouths. Instantly, young unfeeling eyes flickered alert at every table. Without bothering to wipe the slime from their faces, the children linked arms in a circle around Abel and Joy.
The camel men exchanged a glance and grunted. They spoke in unison. “Miss Erickson, the angel is a betrayer of God.
Hand him over and let Heaven have the final word.”
Joy pulled Abel closer. She could only see the faces of the camel men because the children blocked her view of the rest of them. “Get out of here, you freaks,” she said. “I will not give you my son. You are not messengers from God. You are murderers, thieves, home invaders.”
“Give us the child,” they said.
“Demons, get out!”
“The angel will betray you,” they said.
“You liars,” Joy said, “you crazy animals.” She wept and shrieked. She could take no more lunacy from these camel people.
“We will be seeing you,” they said, and walked out of the cafeteria.
The children held hands and fixed their eyes on Joy until Abel’s umbrella started twirling again. They broke their circle to allow the mother and insect angel to pass out of it. Horrifying as she found them, Joy felt indebted to these children. Without their protection, who could say what the camel people might have done?
The children walked in single-file rows to the left and right of Joy and Abel. The two in the lead pushed open the cafeteria doors and ushered the other children to form their circle again.
In this way, they entered the labyrinthine halls of the school.
It was dark now. Children and adults laid cocooned all down the hallway. All of these dead or comatose people were headless. They had not been headless before Joy held a hand over her mouth, understanding what Abel meant when he 110
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said he ate the school. This had been no special art project.
Certainly child protective services would want a word with her.
What kind of home life stirred such monstrous urges?
They turned left at a forked hall and the main office came into view, just fifty yards ahead.
The office door opened. The camel people tiptoed into the hallway, blocking the path. One of them held Bill’s head in its paws. “Give us the child,” the camels said.
The camel holding the head crouched into bowling stance and swung its arm back and forth, then released the head. Bill’s head—a mutilated grin frozen on his face—rolled toward the circle of children. It bowled over a child in the front, breaking his legs before passing between Joy and Abel, narrowly missing them. The head slammed into a child in the back, crushed her legs, and tumbled down a hallway.
Except for the two children with broken legs, all of the others giggled. Without any warning, they cried out, “Crawl inside the devils!”
The children chased after the camel people, who turned and puppet-hopped past the front office. J
oy took Abel by a tentacle.
They followed after the children. Whatever their purpose, the children frightened the camels.
When the camel people disappeared over a brick wal , the children returned and huddled around her. They followed Joy to her car and piled into the back seat one after another like clowns.
They drove home.
TWELVE
The front door was shut now. Someone had been there.
Someone had closed the door. The children in front of the circle pushed it open. Despite her protests, the children behind Joy pushed her and Abel into the house. They locked the door and dispersed, turning on lights in every room. Some of them 111
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ran upstairs. Other children ran into rooms on the first floor.
Everywhere, Joy heard doors creak open and bang shut.
Abel scuttled out of the entryway, toward the living room.
Joy reached for him. He slipped out of her grasp. She followed, halting in her tracks when she saw the camel men. They stood side by side outside the back door. They smashed their noses against the glass and breathed heavy enough to obscure their faces in clouds of moisture. She backed against the pantry door.Abel turned the television on. He switched to the show about the camels in the white room and plopped down on the floor. The camels opened their golden Bibles and opened their jaws. Although they spoke in unison, they read from different sections. The discord between their words and their voices entranced the insect angel. Joy feared he was being brainwashed, but her faith in Abel gave her the strength to believe that no television show could ever brainwash him, no matter what tactics were used by the media conglomerates behind the show.
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