I have stopped writing this a few times to check out the window, and last time I did, there was a figure standing at the end of the parking lot. He was looking at me, wearing the hat and long coat and…well, you already know. I can’t say I was surprised. In fact, I was expecting them to show up.
You see, when Marco and I were talking in his car the terror and the ache in my veins were blinding me to a few things. His fear was contagious. Marco talked about them as if they are indestructible, like they are ghosts with sharp teeth that can come for you and there’s nothing you can do, but he’s wrong. I killed one of them. I blasted it twice with a shotgun. Black blood poured out of its body onto the sand of that cursed beach and it died the way all living things die. You can fear a lion or a snake, but they are animals and you can kill both of them. When they die, so does your fear. I have a gun and I will kill as many of those things as I need to convince them to leave me alone. If they leave me alone, they’ll leave you and your mom alone. If they don’t get the message, I will put bullets in their damn heads until there are none left.
Now I’m going to print this out in the little office they have in the lobby and put it in my bag. I’ll also email it to myself and to your mom. The message will get out somehow even if something happens to me, but nothing will. Those things die like all living things die. They’ve been invading my nightmares but now I will be their worst nightmare. Watch this junkie become a hero, Angelica, watch your dad finally be strong enough, because I’m making my last stand. I did my last bit of dope, and once it’s gone, it’s gone for good. When I get back in this room I’m going to sit on that bed and wait for the thing outside to try and get inside. I have a little surprise for it. These fuckers will learn to stay out there beyond the reef or I’m going to turn them all into sushi.
See you soon, baby girl. I love you.
About the Author
Gabino Iglesias is a writer, editor, journalist, and book reviewer living in Austin, Texas. He is the author of COYOTE SONGS, ZERO SAINTS (both from Broken River Books), and GUTMOUTH (Eraserhead Press). He is the book reviews editor at PANK Magazine, the TV/film editor at Entropy Magazine, and a columnist for LitReactor and CLASH Media. His nonfiction has appeared in places like The New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the LA Times, El Nuevo Día, and other venues. The stuff that's made up has been published in places like Red Fez, Flash Fiction Offensive, Drunk Monkeys, Bizarro Central, Paragraph Line, Divergent Magazine, Cease, Cows, and many horror, crime, surrealist, and bizarro anthologies. When not writing or reading, he has worked as a dog whisperer, witty communications professor, and ballerina assassin. His reviews are published in places like NPR, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Criminal Element, The Rumpus, Heavy Feather Review, Atticus Review, Entropy, HorrorTalk, Necessary Fiction, Crimespree, and other print and online venues. He teaches at SNHU's MFA program. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.
Love is a Crematorium
by
Mercedes M. Yardley
Love is a Crematorium
Mercedes M. Yardley
It was Saturday morning and Kelly was mowing the lawn. The grass smelled good and his shirt was stuck to his scrawny body in a sweaty, happy way. He was tired. Good-work tired.
A beat-up green car pulled up and parked in the middle of the dirt road to his house. Joy got out, her blonde hair more disheveled than usual. She wore a HEART band tee and was holding her arm in a disturbingly careful way. Her mascara ran down her face, and her eye was red and puffy. It was going to be a glorious shiner.
She moved toward him and even her walk wasn’t quite right.
“Joy,” he said, and turned off the mower. He jogged over and she threw herself into his arms.
“I’m sweaty,” he said, because it was the automatic thing to say. He meant to say, “Whatever happened, we can handle it.” He meant to say, “I’ll kill your father this time, I really will.” He meant to say, “You’re safe here. I’ll never let something like this happen if you stay with me.” But “I’m sweaty” is what came out of his mouth.
“I can’t do it anymore, Kel. I can’t.” She pulled back and her brown eyes were angry and wild, so un-Joylike, and Kelly nearly took a step back, she looked so fierce.
“I’ll kill him if he touches me again, I swear I will.” She bared her teeth, and suddenly she was all fireballs and fury and deep, poisoned seas. “I’ll chop off his hands. Then I’ll chop off his head. I’ll stab him in his creepy staring eyes, so help me!”
Kelly pulled her close again, holding her while she sobbed and raged and wailed. He felt her soul grind to dust in his arms. Felt her lose the strength that anger and terror gave her.
“I love you,” he whispered into her hair after she had become quiet. His shirt was doused with sweat and tears and probably tasted like a salt lick. He wanted to run his tongue down it to be sure, but instead merely dipped his head and sucked on his shirt collar.
“You’re the only one who does, Kel. The only one in the whole world.”
She raised her face to look at him, and he studied her cheekbones, her bruised eye, the way her lip had been busted open. Again. He looked at her injured arm, looked away, took a deep breath and reached for it, but she cradled it closer.
“Remember going roller skating as kids?” he asked.
Joy blinked.
“What?”
“You were always Hell on wheels. Busted your face up something awful. I’d see you like this all of the time.”
She tried to smile, and Kel felt curiously close to crying.
“A portent of things to come, huh?” she asked.
“Maybe.”
“If I remember right, you were always trying to put me together then, too.”
Kelly smiled. It was a goofy smile, full of teeth and something dark he was trying to hold back.
“It’s my job. Always was. Always will be.”
He kept his tone light, but Something Serious ran underneath it, and it was this Something Serious that Joy latched on to.
She took his hand in hers and studied the length of his fingers, the squareness. These were hands that had never hit a woman, never hurt a child. Quite the opposite. These were hands who had washed away dirt and picked out baseball bat slivers from her young fingers. Hands that staunched blood and applied bandages. These were healer’s hands.
Joy held Kelly’s hand up to her cheek, over her eye. He ran his fingers gently down the bruises and imagined blood vessels knitting themselves back together, swelling, receding. He wished the pain to disappear, but when his fingers left her face, she winced and her tight lips told him she was still hurting.
“I always expect you to have magic in you, Kel,” she said, and he grinned that goofy grin again, but he felt that his eyes had gone primal and a little bit dangerous.
“What’s goin’ on, Joy? You have something real big on your mind.”
She dropped his hands and stepped back as if she needed to give him some distance, some formality. It was almost like a business proposition. He somehow felt undressed, like he should be standing there in a church suit with a leather briefcase, his shoes polished nicely.
She squeezed her eyes shut.
“I’m leaving. I have to leave. He was going to kill me this time, I know it.”
“Joy—”
“I know it,” she said, and opened her eyes. He saw everything then, and soon he was nodding his head.
“Okay. Okay. So what are you going to do?”
She looked over her shoulder at the car.
“I have a bag. I have a little bit of money. And I have his car. I thought I’d just drive until I couldn’t drive any more, then sell it. After that, I’ll walk. I’ll…I dunno. I’ll sleep in ditches. Find a city, get a job. I don’t know,” she said again when he looked at her, “but I can’t stay anymore, Kel.”
“Did he break your arm?”
She shook her head.
“I don’t think so. It’s just awful sore. But I can’t go back
.”
“You could stay with me and my parents.”
She stood on her tiptoes and kissed his cheek.
“Sweet Kelly. You know I can’t.”
“They just don’t know you like I know you. If you stayed, they’d get that chance. I could talk ‘em around, you know I could.”
Give them enough time and they could see past the donated hand-me-downs and the dilapidated trailer, Kelly was sure of it. Joy was so much more than Buck’s daughter, and his parents would realize it. But seeing the way Joy babied that arm, he knew time wasn’t theirs to spend. Her dad was mean at the best of times, but the fear in her eyes was stark. Kelly’s stomach felt like he had eaten something sharp, something pointy with spines. The edge of a newly hewn axe, or the point of one of Buck’s knives.
“He’d come looking for me, and I don’t want you to get hurt. You or your family.”
“He doesn’t scare me,” Kelly said automatically, but they both knew it wasn’t true.
“It’s okay, baby,” she said, and kissed him. She tasted of blood and Orange Crush Chapstick.
They’d only kissed a few times, out where nobody could see. The kisses were deep and they were funny and sometimes they laughed and a time or two Joy had cried. But the kiss this time was saying something deeper. It was a Last Kiss. That’s what Kelly was afraid of.
“Got any money?” she asked him. Her lips were still so close to his that he felt them move. She didn’t want to pull away, to have that distance between them. He didn’t either. He blinked and felt his lashes flutter against her cheek.
“Some.”
“Come with me,” she said, and burrowed her face into his neck. She pushed her body as close to his as she could get it, and his arms went around her automatically.
This is how it’s supposed to be, he thought, and the grasses and dust around him nodded yes, yes, this is exactly how it is supposed to be.
“Joy, I—”
“Please don’t tell me no. I don’t know if I can do this without you. I need you to be with me.”
His heart hurt. In the best of ways. In the worst. Her hair smelled like sweat and lavender and something else that tugged at the very base of him. He put his hand to her scalp and pulled it away. His fingers were red and sticky.
“What did he do to you?”
He almost didn’t recognize his voice. It was a dark thing, roiling and full of teeth. It hurt as it came out of his mouth, and he had to bite it back.
Joy’s fingers fluttered to the wound in the back of her head, hovered, and then moved away. She tried to step back but Kelly held her closer, rested his chin on her head, careful not to hurt her. Her body was fragile, made of spun sugar and spider webs. There was only so much pain the human body and mind were meant to take, and then everything exploded into showers of shadows and powder.
“When are you going?” he asked. His voice was gentle this time. It was just right.
“Right now.”
“Let me throw together a bag.”
She pulled back and looked at him. Her eyes were huge and full of hope and pain and wariness and disbelief. Kelly remembered the first time they had held a rabbit from the fields. It was tiny and furry and dying, an accident from a lawn mower, if he remembered right. Her eyes had looked that same way. There was magic in the world, but also death and horror. He knew he was making the right decision, then. Knew it was what needed to be done. He couldn’t send this broken little bunny out into the world to die alone. He needed to be there with her to soothe the wounds, to keep the monsters away. He needed her to do the same thing for him.
“I’ll never leave you, bunny,” he told her.
She blinked rapidly in the sun, her smile crooked and a little unsure.
“What’s with the new name all of a sudden?”
He shrugged, kissed her forehead.
“It fits you.”
He packed a duffel in only a few minutes. What does a teenage boy really need, after all? He took his wallet, thought about it, and took the envelope of grocery money from the kitchen cupboard.
Mom and Dad.
His handwriting was fast, hard, gangly, like the rest of him. He wrote quickly, a born lefty, dragging his hand through the ink before it had a chance to dry.
Joy needs me. I promise to call.
He pondered over it, whether to say it or not, but then he thought of his mother reading the letter.
Love you, he scrawled, and stuck the note to the fridge with a magnet.
Joy was sitting cross-legged on the hood of the car. Her eyes were closed, and whether she was sleeping or praying, Kelly couldn’t say. Seemed that both did the same amount of good, far as he could tell.
“Ready?” he asked her.
She opened her eyes and stared at him for a long time. He wondered what she saw. A boy in a sweaty shirt holding a duffel bag and a couple cans of Squirt. This was who she was going to depend on. He looked down at himself and frowned.
“Guess I should’ve taken a shower. I didn’t even put the mower away. Sorry, Joy. I just thought, what if your dad is comin’? I was just thinking of being quick, not really of anything else. Maybe—”
Joy slid off the hood. She stood on tiptoe, bumped noses with Kelly almost playfully, and then she kissed him again.
Not a Last Kiss¸ he thought hazily. A First Kiss. The First of their adventures together. This is the beginning of everything.
“I love you, Kelly Stands,” Joy said. “From the bottom of my heart, I do.”
His stomach did flipflops and leaps and he found it strangely hard to talk.
“I love you, too.”
He did. And she did. The way she blushed and wrapped the fingers of her good hand into his shirt sleeve told him all he needed to know and more.
He tossed his duffel bag into the backseat of the car.
“Mind driving, Kel? My head hurts something fierce.”
He opened the door to the passenger seat and helped her in.
“Here,” he said, and pulled a bottle of aspirin out of his pocket. “Got something for your head.”
“Thank you, baby.”
She swallowed it dry while Kelly walked around, hopped in the driver’s seat, and started the car.
“You’re sure about this?” he asked her.
“Absolutely.”
“Then let’s go.”
She leaned her head against the window. She slipped her hand into his.
A few hours and they were outside the state line of Alabama.
#
They drove until the car ran out of gas. It was a good five hours of driving. They filled it up two more times before they decided that was far enough.
“It’s time to ditch it,” Joy said. Her eyes were red and her face was white from exhaustion, but she still looked happier than Kelly had ever seen her.
“All right.”
Kelly had wondered how they’d sell the car, but it was easy. Joy took a deep breath and wandered up to a pair of long legs sticking up from under a truck in a driveway. She bent down, and the legs slid out and turned into a young man, who unfolded himself and stood up.
Kelly watched Joy put her hands in her pockets, tilting her face up to see the stranger. She squinted in the sun and something in Kelly wanted to stand between them, to look the other man in the face and see what exactly his intentions were. Something else wanted to duck quietly into the background. Kelly felt himself actually bunch up in the passenger seat of the car, getting smaller and smaller before he forced himself to stop, to stretch out.
Joy pointed at the car and the man followed her gaze. Kelly waved awkwardly, put his hand down. Joy stood on tiptoe as if she was whispering in his ear, and Kelly didn’t like the way his stomach tightened when the man bent close to listen.
The man straightened. Nodded. Reached in his back pocket for his wallet. He handed folded money to Joy, and then laughed when she hugged him with her good arm. He put his hand on top of her head like it had always gone there, like he h
ad been teasing her about being short all of her life. They looked like old friends.
She could have just as easily been born here, Kelly thought. He could have been me.
The thought of this man, this stranger, being her parallel-world Kelly made him get out of the car. He ambled over a bit too casually.
“Hey,” he said, and didn’t like the sound of his voice, the note of question and concern and danger and warning wrapped up inside of it. Uncertainty and chainsaws. High fives and electric fences.
The man nodded back, his grin wide and easy, and Kelly almost hated him more. All was right with his world. This was a man who knew where he was going to sleep that night, who didn’t have to worry about Joy’s fitful cries as she dreamed, who didn’t have the responsibility of being the last one awake, watching to keep them safe.
“Joshua here will take it,” Joy said simply, and that was that. It was over for her. Car discarded. Item checked off her list. Joshua swooped in to save the day.
“You’ll want to paint it or…whatever, pretty soon,” she told Joshua, and he nodded again.
“Gotcha,” he said, and Kelly looked down at his feet. They were large and his sneakers were still stained from mowing the grass. How long would these shoes last? Suddenly the weight of what they were doing hit him, crushed his chest in a way that nearly made him gasp.
Joshua studied him, seeming to really see him for the first time.
Joy slid her hand into Kelly’s, almost timidly, and his fingers curled automatically around hers. She was shaking, and he noticed that her bright smile was tight around the corners, her eyes a little bit too wide.
“Right. Thanks, Joshua,” he said, and then he was walking down the long dirt driveway with Joy at his side, their legs swishing through the grasses.
“We’re going to be okay, bunny,” he said, and as soon as he heard the words, he knew he believed them. He squeezed her hand and she squeezed back. He made a face and soon she was laughing up at him, her nose scrunched in the way that told him she was truly happy, not worried about passing her English test or hiding her shiner or wondering whether or not bones would break this time.
Lullabies For Suffering: Tales of Addiction Horror Page 23
