Monsters

by Karen Brennan

  He hated the food. He hated the party. Not that I blame him. All those people? What does one find to say beyond the initial blah blah blahs?

  Mac wanted to go home instantly, which was irritating.

  No shame in his game. We had to hop to or else.

  He was always that way.

  You’re the one who likes to schmooze.

  Not as much any more.

  They looked ahead at the palm tree rustling over the pool. Tom thought, This should really be the life. If only it were. In the pool water, oval reflections of branch and sky. What could be more glorious when the rest of the world was freezing?

  Behind a mound of oleander, Maryann allowed herself to be seen, her dome glistening, floating almost.

  There you are!

  Now, finally, you are joyful, remarked Diane.

  Is that a problem?

  Not at all—it’s nice. Who’s going to make the eggs, me or you?

  The screen door scraped open and Mac appeared with a platter. Deviled eggs. I made them last night at three in the morning.

  Diane widened her eyes. The fruits of insomnia?

  If you can call it that.

  The eggs had been arranged on an oval platter, in rows. Little white boats overfilled with yellow mush.

  Nice, said Tom, who’d risen to consort with Maryann.

  It is nice, said Diane, popping one into her mouth. Thanks.

  De nada, Señora, said Mac who had been taking advanced Spanish. He was the type of dying person who wanted to travel the world, hang out at cafes with beautiful Spanish girls before he kicked the bucket. When he wasn’t playing the cancer card, there was something courtly and adventuresome about him. Though he tried too hard to be droll, in Diane’s opinion.

  Tom was feeding Maryann a sprig of bok choy. She came right up to his hand, her reptilian mouth agape. Diane had eaten two eggs, he noted. She could never seem to stop consuming, though she wasn’t very fat. Mac set his egg platter on the pool decking and stuck a bare foot in the water.

  High in a tree some kind of large bird was making a racket and they all looked up. One efficient flap of the wings and it clattered away with a screaming bunch of feathers in its mouth.

  The grim reaper, noted Diane.

  Actually, that was a peregrine falcon, Mac informed them. They feed on small-to-medium sized birds and winter in the milder climates. Probably came down from the Rockies—they have a huge wingspan—

  Oh be quiet Mac, said Diane, sharper than she intended. You sound like a Wikipedia entry.

  Mac emitted a patient sigh.

  The eggs were good, despite their slovenly presentation. Diane praised them to make up for her meanness.

  Have another, Mac said. He’d propped a skinny left leg on the deck, the right one still splashing around, making blue circles in the pool. In the laconic wake of Mary Ann, Tom disappeared into a clump of bamboo and emerged seconds later, smiling, shaking his head.

  What? Diane shaded her eyes with a hand.

  But Tom declined to respond.

  Through her fingers she spotted a monstrous thing swooping down, the falcon who’d returned and decided to settle on the far wall and take in the human spectacle. For a few breathtaking minutes, it sat there, stock still, as if for a portrait.

  Later, they decided that the bird had possessed an artificial quality, like a plaster yard ornament purchased at The Home Depot, the feathers of its wings precisely, unconvincingly delineated, factory-made—as if it might shatter if it fell from the ledge.

  PETE, WASTE LAB TECHNICIAN

  Sometimes when late at night I think I see someone out of the corner of my eye, it is really only one of those roving shadows. They rove up on a wall or behind me when I am pushing an empty gurney into the Waste Lab. I do not know why it is called the Waste Lab.

  I am really not afraid of anything.

  When I was small, for a short time, buttons frightened me.

  The gurneys have a peculiar smell, hard to describe.

  I am not really sure what I should tell you about myself. The roving shadows are what come to mind because they are really so startling and mysterious, but there is also a cafeteria which at night is inhabited by a number of talkative zombies. They call themselves the Undead (predictably). And they jabber. Blah blah. They do not eat much, mainly the candy bars and juice boxes. I have discovered that they don’t like meat, which seems strange to me.

  Strictly speaking, I am not in charge of the Waste Lab. If you care to know what the Waste Lab looks like there are three boxy windows up very high which require a device with a hook for opening, beneath which there are the walls with all the gurneys pushed up against them. That leaves a space in the middle of the room which I enjoy traversing. The floor is golden, as is the entire floor of this building.

  Have I mentioned that those gurneys really stink?

  It is odd that through the Waste Lab windows which are up very high the view is always the same—night or day, it is as if a sheet of white paper occupies the space outside each window so that one has the impression of glowing blankness, of there being no world at all on the other side of the windows of this building much less the world of Why Not, Arizona, with its perfectly restored vintage fire engine, adult movie theater and my mother’s Gift Shoppe, to name three things cherished by me.

  You might deduce that zombies have something to do with the roving shadows. But even zombies cannot be in two places at once. The zombies, as previously stated, are in the cafeteria—all twenty, I counted—and here right outside the waste lab are the usual crop of shadows doing their usual roving up and down the walls and stretching and shrinking along the golden floors as is their wont and occasionally folding into little envelope-sized packages or splitting in twos and veering off in different directions and snaking down opposite corridors.

  Perhaps meat reminds the zombies of their own lost and mostly forgotten bodies. Their own disintegrating bodies which are kept at the Why Not Wondrous Peace and Light Haven which is also a dog and cat burial ground.

  I prefer the words “burial grounds” to the word “cemetery.”

  One of the zombies, coincidentally, is called Pete also. He usually sits alone at one of the orange tables next to the kitchen door over by the window. In the cafeteria, the windows are filled with heavy black rectangles at this time of day. Once in a while one of the roving shadows streaks across and if you didn’t know better you would think it was a tree.

  More than once I have attempted to approach Pete for conversation. Of all the chattering zombies he is the quietest, but still he jabbers quietly to himself. They cannot help their jabbering, it is some kind of condition, probably, that they have to put up with as zombies.

  Other than the gurneys there are large plastic barrels in the Waste Lab, which they say are filled with eyes. Hard to believe, and I never checked. Though most things do not frighten me, I would not like to look into a barrel of eyes. Don’t ask me why.

  Pete jabbers mostly about physics. E equals em-cee squared type-of-thing. Archimedes’ experiments with buoyancy; Isaac Newton and his various theories of gravity and planetary orbiting. Pete, I said to him once, do you think the elliptical orbiting of ideas is a replica of the elliptical orbiting of the planets? In other words, I said, still arguing with Pete, who was gazing into one of the thick black rectangles that occupy the cafeteria window frames and moving his lips very slowly, not chewing his Starburst but jabbering, could it be that we are ourselves replica universes and that, for example, Why Not, Arizona, is a replica of the Milky Way so that, in conclusion, might we say that each of us is a replica of the Why Not, Arizona, and vice versa? Sometimes I blow my own mind.

  The other zombies sit in clumps along the side wall away from the windows and near the machines. I have never seen an animal—dog or cat—zombie and I hope I do not.

  My mother, who is no longer alive, did once own a business called The Gift Shoppe which is also no longer alive, so to speak, having been appropriated by a
company whose team of grinning sales people are always dressed in orange jackets. I have no idea what kind of business is conducted there. In my mother’s day, gifts were sold. Now, who knows?

  The waste room has fat white hoses coiled against the ceiling. Strange but true. I have often been tempted to ask Mr. M_____ the purpose of the hoses and why, of all places, they reside on the ceiling of the waste lab, but Mr. M_____ never seems inclined to converse. I only ever meet him when he is leaving the building and I am entering it and at these times he averts his eyes and hustles himself into a white Chevrolet.

  I don’t know how helpful this has been. I am who I am. The zombies come and go; they can be relied on to clean up after themselves—candy wrappers in the trash, chairs carefully replaced on top of tables. The roving shadows continue to mystify with their irrational movement, but I am accustomed to The Mysterious, it does not frighten me. I recently remarked to Pete that we are all enshrouded by mystery and walk around in its fog. Who is Mr. M____ exactly and where does the white Chevrolet take him? What product is so important that six orange-jacketed sales people must overtake a nice Gift Shoppe? What about those hoses in the waste lab? The smell of the gurneys? The zombies and their dislike of meat? All mysteries that, as far as I can tell, will never be satisfactorily revealed.

  OUR WAY TO THE HIGHWAY

  whose surface is covered with sparkling stones in the sunlight but after dark is dog-colored (old, brown), up ahead a very slight shimmer, just the road’s flatness (mirage), invisible in the evening, just empty black space (invisibility squared) since there are no lights unless there is a moon with a moon the road going & going on, about four or five miles or billboards you’ll have to exit & once at the exit you will come to a stop light near a CVS & across from a Burger King which are our only reliable landmarks these days (think about it) along with the pancake place whose name I can’t remember offhand though it seems to me the logo is gold-colored (gold syrup cascading down a stack of pancakes??)

  take a right and continue up the road which is two-laned, pole-flanked (haze-filled) you will notice a shop that has a life-sized horse out in front with a real saddle made of leather which sometimes constitutes a photo-op for parents traveling with little children who are boosted onto the saddle & made to pose for photographs & often these little children get very frightened because the horse is so gigantic & in the photographs they (kids) are often screaming but the parents are very passionately intent on capturing this moment in time when the child is a certain small size having been boosted onto a frighteningly large horse a moment that is visualized in the album along with other memorable moments sometimes involving tears sometimes not

  you will also pass a sort of shallow ditch along the side of the road (on the right) where once a group of college kids turned over their car & one of them died it was the night of graduation & it was a tragic event for the whole town & so the ditch has never been filled up (in) (erased) but left to be there just the way it is with a few roadside crosses flowers painted around which are visible on the far side of the ditch the crosses commemorating the lives of those college kids who in real life were not all that memorable or even kind one once tortured a teenaged boy who happened to have a slight handicap & another date-raped a girl traumatized her for life but they are all dead now one wants to say thank goodness but out of respect for their parents we’ll say rest in peace & also keep going it’s never a good idea to stop at a roadside grave even one with a nice cross & flowers keep going & you will come to a hill there is nothing to do (?) but go up it and you may have to shift gears since it is very steep but you want to make good time (otherwise you would have chosen the scenic route) so you keep going possibly you’re already downshifting

  & it’s also a good idea to turn down your radio which is a distraction on a hill of this nature very uncommonly steep (inclining) & so you will keep plowing on up it & downshifting if need be to second & even first gear & creeping along it may strike you as ironic that the neighbor cows are lumbering out of their grazing fields & are jogging alongside your car & passing your car as if they were racing you some of them circling back to give you superior looks then waddling ahead again they always do this which will give you some idea of how steep the hill is it’s a wonder the cows don’t slide down backwards they are such clumsy creatures there is a story possibly apocryphal about those cows swarming a vw bug one time & the poor passengers were literally trampled to death & the car was battered beyond recognition it looked more like a blown up daycare center than a car

  speaking of which if you get through the cows there is the daycare center up ahead & to your left a cute sign swinging on hinges makes this slightly annoying sound (glitch glitch) but still the kids are so adorable no one gets too angry except this one poor man (long ago) who suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder & the sound of the sign creaking on hinges was more than he could bear so he quietly stole into the daycare center & captured one of the teachers & the most adorable of the children & forced them to commit unspeakable acts on his person until someone took the sign down but this was temporary & as soon as the man was carted off to the lunatic asylum for the criminally insane the sign was rehung & now you will see it up ahead where it casts a very nice, swaying shadow on the asphalt over which it swings in a desultory summer-day kind of attitude if a sign can be said to have attitude but pass the sign it need not concern you overmuch the children are all safe these days

  except for the adorable one who was violated by the poor obsessive-compulsive man who didn’t know any better & that child is now a grown-up living in the back of the daycare center with his cat which is really a small puma disguised as a cat & which would just as soon tear out your heart as bare its fangs at you & actually it does neither because you will keep going & not entangle yourself where you clearly don’t belong with either the poor adorable violated boy turned adult nor with his puma/cat who sometimes prowls about the grounds of the daycare center & injures the children but this is something you really don’t need to know as you are climbing the hill there are black-eyed Susans there are jack-in-the-pulpits you don’t need to know about the various accidents of every living thing after all the world is violent & also peaceful there are pine trees in the distance a stand of pines there are two blackbirds on a telephone wire but these are generally unreliable landmarks

  keep climbing (huff puff) & then finally at the top you will come to a busy intersection just when you were expecting wilderness on the northwest corner is a pizza place with some letters missing from the sign so that it says IZ & on the southwest is a gas station with two dangerous looking scarred & hooded men next to the gas dispensers wielding guns & on the northeast corner is among other things a shop that sells notions like buttons & once someone asked if they sold savory or unsavory notions which I thought very funny (ha) but there is no one there at the moment it is very quiet & dead-looking the notion shop is without any notion at all it seems (another joke) & so you must not pay any attention at all to the group of lepers that are chatting on the porch of the notion shop because they are essentially harmless (really it is not contagious) though it may give you pause that one of the lepers ate his own daughter (in infancy—his eyesight was compromised by the disease) but no more need be said about that essentially sad tale & no one’s fault really though not long after the mother hung herself from a tree branch so inexpertly that she failed to die & lives now with her head permanently off-kilter & her neck at such an odd angle that in order to see anything straight-on she has to place herself in a vise & get her leper husband to turn a knob

  & on the southwest is nothing at all it is as blank as any blank they ask you to fill on a test that will determine if you will be going forward or staying where you were—exactly where you were or had been or will be, you beautiful traveling thing, you cog, you wheel, you worm, you mosquito, who knows where you will wind up

  STILL LIFE

  A man told me there was nothing he would rather keep noticing—and he pointed to the spac
es between palm fronds, chinks of turquoise and a few clouds. Just now, into this recollection, wanders an egg on a green dish.

  L

  I saw L today looking a little beleaguered and I said, How’re you doing, L? and he said, Hanging in there and I thought, Wait, maybe L’s look has to do with illness. I hadn’t seen L in a while. Previously he had been rather cheerful in demeanor, always smiling. Now it seemed there was something not right with his mouth, as if part of it were paralyzed and/or he was in pain from his jaw or neck. Perhaps L had been to the dentist is all, I thought, but then why did he say Hanging in there as if I’d know he’d been to the dentist? I hadn’t seen L in months, why would I keep track of his dental appointments? No, a person would only say Hanging in there with that world-weary inflection, in combination with a heavy sigh, all the while avoiding eye contact and seeming annoyed—who wouldn’t be?—if he had some chronic bad condition that everyone knew about, except me. I wanted to say, I’m sorry, I had no idea, but what if I were wrong and it was the dentist after all? On the other hand, L was an older gay man and so immediately and in retrospect I thought AIDS. But why stereotype, it could have just as easily been cancer and really what I should have said was, What’s going on? A polite, logical follow-up to the Hanging in there, but then L would have had to explain something perhaps painful to someone he did not know that well, I concluded, concluding also that I had probably done the right thing, inadequate though it may have been. For we were not friends, L & I. In fact, I always have to remind myself of his name—L, as opposed to R. I considered these matters on the drive home, the sky a high bright blue, the breezes jostling a few palm leaves and making them shine. When I slowed at a stop sign, there came a noise of birds so strident and clamorous and terrifyingly close that I had to check my backseat to make sure they had not gotten into the car.