Lies & Ugliness

by Brian Hodge

  Willard had noticed, too — in fact, he might even have been the first. They didn’t go out anymore, and a girlfriend of Terri’s was now picking her up for school instead. Maybe it was the same girlfriend she’d been crying to on the phone while locked in her room one night — I could hear her through the door — a friend who was trying to comfort her by the time I could sneak to another extension and lift the receiver very carefully so it wouldn’t make a click.

  “Of course you’re not fat,” Terri’s friend was saying. “And if that’s what he told you, well then he’s just an asshole.”

  She didn’t understand the problem any better than Terri did, nobody did, and in my sister’s sobs I could hear the sound of our entire family coming apart. It was only natural that she give up food, because the Husk Man had said she would need to start eating the lives of everyone around her.

  Terri may have stolen time, but I’d had a lot of it to come to the conclusion that the Husk Man was right. Had a lot of time to decide for myself what the Husk Man really was, and the key had been among the leftover Halloween decorations at school, and a friendly drawing of whom I’d come to know to be the Grim Reaper.

  He’s the only one you ever see of death, that tall spectre with the bone hands and the scythe and maybe a book with your name in it, who comes for everyone whose death arrives on schedule.

  But what of those few who were supposed to die but somehow managed to miss the appointment? Of course there should be someone for them, too — a lesser job, maybe, forced to clean up after the mistakes of others and make sure the books remained balanced, but vital just the same.

  And there was. I had met him, because I’d left no choice in the matter. I had compelled the Husk Man to arrive. And as November went on, sinking its roots into our marrow, I came to understand that his grim task was not without mercy.

  Terri was becoming a shell of herself, and so was I, and our parents weren’t looking any too good either.

  We were all looking pretty sick that damned autumn.

  The night before Thanksgiving I cried myself to sleep. Because it had started to snow, the first snowfall of the season, and I knew what that meant. The Husk Man had made this very clear.

  I had some time, at least; it hadn’t yet run out. I’d hung out in the family room while Mom and Dad watched the news, long enough so that I could learn from the weather report that it would continue to snow throughout the night and the next day and on into Thanksgiving evening. In some ways this was a gift. In other ways cruel beyond belief.

  We had the same big menu that we always enjoyed this day of the year. But this time I couldn’t stand the sight of Terri sitting at the dining table with her head propped on one hand — so dead inside, I guess, that she had to hold herself upright — staring listlessly toward her plate as she picked her turkey into white strings and mashed her candied yams into a paste and used her fork to scratch circles into her gravy. She wouldn’t even go through the motions with dessert at all, didn’t want Mom to set the pumpkin pie in front of her in the first place.

  And after we’d cleared the table I could hear the garbage disposal grinding up everything my sister hadn’t eaten, and I drifted toward a big bay window that looked out on the yard and the trees, the blanket of white that covered them and continued to thicken by the hour. The world was monochrome today. Just like my choices. My duty.

  Football on the TV, a fire in the fireplace — year after year, the results were always the same. Our parents couldn’t have stayed awake if you’d paid them. For a few moments I watched them sleep and knew that what I was doing, I was doing for them, to put a stop to the deterioration that was sure to happen if things continued as they had been. The Husk Man had been very clear on this.

  Then I went and knocked on Terri’s bedroom door.

  “Go away,” she called through the closed door.

  “You don’t even know what I want,” I called back.

  I heard footsteps — slow, not like the brisk attack pace that I’d grown used to — and she unlocked the door, then wandered back to her bed to collapse once more with an afghan and a magazine.

  “Which is…?” she said without looking at me. Some mopey-sounding CD was playing on her stereo.

  “You wanna go for a walk in the snow?”

  “Why would I even want to do that?” she said in her dead voice.

  “Because I’ll let you throw snowballs at me, and I won’t even tell,” I said. “But I’ll probably throw some back.”

  Terri raised her head. One corner of her mouth twitched with a miniscule smile, and then the other corner, and for a moment she looked almost shy as she glanced at me, and out her window, and down at the covers she’d buried herself in.

  “Yeah, sure,” she shrugged, and coughed out a little laugh as if she couldn’t belief what she’d just heard herself say. “Why not.”

  We bundled up, although I was more thorough about it than Terri, because she was at that age when it was really lame to look as though winter weather could get to you. Even though nobody would see her, maybe she just wanted to keep in practice.

  Out we went, and after a day inside a warm house, the cold air was a pleasant shock to our faces, and our cheeks grew speckled with the lazily drifting flakes. The air seemed to swim in front of us as the fresh snowfall crunched beneath our boots. Halfway to the woods, Terri stopped and tipped her face to the sky and breathed deeply, noisily through her nose, then her lips parted as she exhaled a satisfied plume of frost. She grinned at me, tip of her nose already gone like a cherry, and slugged my shoulder with her mitten.

  “Not such a bad idea, creep,” she said.

  Inside the woods our path wove slowly through the trees. The whisper of snow seemed more insistent here, feeling almost as if it were wrong to compete with it with our own voices, that we were only supposed to listen. But I wanted to talk with her, didn’t want to miss this chance, especially since she had more to say to me this afternoon than she’d had in weeks. Terri asked me about school, and how I was liking this one particular teacher she’d really liked, and if I minded taking the pills that the doctors had put me on early in the month.

  Deeper into the woods, she stopped abruptly and clutched my arm and held firm and pointed ahead of us at a brown rabbit struggling through the snow, every hop more deliberate than usual. Terri made a little sound high in her throat, and I wondered if this wasn’t a gift from the Husk Man, because I had everything I needed, with Terri too enraptured to notice when I slipped my wrist from her grasp and faded back a few steps to grab the big, heavy branch I’d left leaning against a nearby tree a few days before.

  “I’d forgotten how much I love moments like that,” she said, with her back still to me, and I whispered that I would never forget how much I loved her, then swung the clubbed end of the broken branch as hard as I could into the back of Terri’s head.

  The branch was fresh this fall, hadn’t had time to dry out, get lighter, turn brittle. It was very solid. She pitched forward into the snow without a sound while the bright knit hat she wore spun off to one side.

  I was crying again as I dragged her over to an older fallen tree and strained to prop her into the curved notch made by the trunk and a sturdy bough, so that it looked as though she’d merely sat down to enjoy the day. I retrieved her hat and set it in her lap, and watched the snowflakes catch in her hair, her eyebrows, and slowly melt away.

  I would want to do this before the end of the first snowfall of the year, the Husk Man had told me. No later than then. Why then, I’d wanted to know, and he told me that it was because everything had its season, and Terri’s was nearly over, and the snow would be a sign of that. It would be more than wrong to let her go past then; it would condemn her.

  Soon he arrived from somewhere even deeper in the forest, as whisper-quiet as the snow, drifting toward us among the soft, slow blizzard of flakes that seemed to never quite touch him. The Husk Man, with barely a glance to spare for me, settled before my sister and ext
ended his hand. After a few moments she seemed to rouse, blinking up at him, then took his hand as he, with the other, began to work at his cloak.

  Terri stood where I’d put her, looked at me without speaking, but her mouth was wet and slick. And she wept, tears like ice crystals on her cheeks, and on mine too. I lifted a gloved hand shoulder-high, to wave goodbye.

  His cloak was open by then, vast and all-encompassing. When she stepped inside, it folded around her but scarcely seemed any bigger. The Husk Man drew it closed, then began to drift away with her into the snow and the misty haze of its depth, and the ganglia of a billion bare branches.

  A few yards away he paused, still holding shut his cloak, and craned his neck to turn back and peer over his shoulder at me, the sharp angles of his face stern and severe. I had done as he’d asked — delivered Terri to him to undo my mistake of October — so he couldn’t be looking at me in rebuke. Perhaps it was to warn me to silence. Or to be sure not miss the appointment when my own time came, so that I would never have to see him again.

  I walked home then, alone and with frozen tears, comforted only by knowing that I’d done right. When I looked back I saw that the fresh snow had already begun to erase our first footprints, leaving no sign of our passage, that two had walked into the woods but only one had walked out.

  Wow, I thought. He planned for everything.

  I went inside the house, stomping my boots so I wouldn’t track a mess, and a little later my parents were awake and when they asked where Terri had gotten off to, I shrugged and said, “Oh, she just went for a ride with Willard, is all,” and they were happy to hear it, even if it was snowing.

  So I remained huddled shivering before the fireplace, trying to soak in as much warmth as I could to fight the chill that had burrowed so deep into me, and wondered if they realized how proud of me they should be for doing the right thing.

  It was the way they’d always raised us.

  An Autumnal Equinox Folly

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  NICK BOTTOM, erstwhile weaver

  THE “DOCTOR”

  TITANIA, Queen of Faerie

  OBERON, King of Faerie

  PUCK, aka ROBIN GOODFELLOW, faerie jester

  MUSTARDSEED and PEASEBLOSSOM, faeries

  ACT I

  In an Athenian office, upon a leather couch, in a time that never was, lies Nick Bottom, once a Weaver, for psychoanalytic cause.

  DOCTOR. Most perplexing, Bottom. These steadfast tendencies of yours to graze upon hay and clover must needs be given more due consideration than as mere misguided efforts at adding more dietary fiber. Quacks and charlatans, those physicians who so told you. Tell me — what of your insurance situation?

  BOTTOM.Sadly, I have none. Since developing my habits of gnawing the flax of the field instead of weaving it, of late have my union dues lapsed.

  DOCTOR.Well, there you go, then. Rare is the doctor born who would not make a hypocrite of Hypocrates, once the scent of money fills his nostrils. Do tell.

  BOTTOM.All began some months ago, when in the woods nearby I passed a night for which memory fails to account. Yet I cannot escape a sense of numerous mischiefs having been done to me, once separated from my friends. One among them, Peter Quince, he of Carpenters Local 151, comes forth with theories of alien abduction, but balderdash to that, I say. However thoroughly I check, no evidence of probing do I find. Bottom’s bunghole has been left just as it was.

  DOCTOR.Stay haste a moment, and consider circumstances. Lonely woodlands and the company of men of rural craft and simple brains? Already does a profile emerge. Were distilled spirits a part of this fateful evening’s preliminaries?

  BOTTOM.Mayhap a dram or two, in preamble. But if there exists one thing Nick Bottom can hold, that would be his liquor!

  DOCTOR.As well may be. But what of the friends of Bottom?

  BOTTOM.Surely you jest. Quince? Flute? Snout and Snug and Starveling? These good and true friends would you accuse of doing mischief upon me?

  DOCTOR.Mischief most venereal. Yes.

  BOTTOM.In truth, I cannot vouchsafe for what stirs their loins, but on this matter will I gladly give them the benefit of the doubt.

  DOCTOR.A theory, is all, which for now we will rule out. But stolen hours may not be so purloined as first believed, merely misplaced, and we, ignorant of their new station. My job it is, then, to recover these memories so repressed.

  BOTTOM.Such a miracle lies within the scope of brain-science?

  DOCTOR.It does so lie within mine, lamentable Bottom.

  BOTTOM.Then blow the fogs from this brain of mine. I am possessed of the queerest imaginings, and can make of them little sense, though they be not in the leastways unpleasant. Am I an ass dreaming he is a man who dreams he is an ass? O pitiable man, to be content with so lowly a form, but we cannot all butterflies be.

  DOCTOR.Spoken like a man halfway to cured already, and the path of the journey remaining is your choice. We may devote the coming weeks to hypnosis and frank discussion of those dreams, or … or … oh, mayhap this be not for you after all.

  BOTTOM.Or what? Tell me! I am in most desperate need of understanding!

  DOCTOR.Or we may leap straightaway to the drugs and see what will happen.

  BOTTOM.The drugs it shall be! Bring on a bountiful pharmacopeia and gladly will I take them all, if it means illumination of my skull. See this nose? This copious gullet? Let them be the avenues for my deliverance.

  As Doctor Goodfellow does then administer the powder white, look upon his Puckish grin, clandestine, filled with delight. And then unto himself says he:

  DOCTOR.Lord, what fools these mortals be … this one, most particularly.

  ACT 2

  In sun-dappled woodlands, over field and stream and tract, enter Bottom, full of vigor, with donkey’s head intact.

  BOTTOM.Oh blessed earth ‘neath my feet, never have you seemed so bountiful or by boundary unrestrained! Blessed sky, never so blue, nor air so sweet for lungs that hunger! Never, but for that lone splendored night lost to me and now recollected. I would not thought such happiness could e’er be known at all, much less forgot. So hear me now, sylvan sanctuary! This day does my life begin anew, and at my proclamation let heaven and earth rejoice, for at last am I the creature I was meant to be!

  MUSTRD.What braying is this, that so shatters the calm of afternoon?

  PEASE.The voice is familiar in its swaggering boom. But my mind plays tricks upon itself, this cannot be —

  BOTTOM.What? Who comes? Be met! Be greeted! Be embraced and nuzzled by one who feels only love for all creation!

  PEASE.It is! Nick Bottom, with his head changed yet again! Truly, his flesh and bone must be of the unstablest sort.

  MUSTRD.And he, with his barnyard face, unstabled. A wonder it is that farmers have given him no chase, to drive him back to some pasture at the end of a stick.

  BOTTOM.Tell me, who comes? Ah — can it be? Mustardseed? Peaseblossom? My old attendants, appointed by the Faerie Queen herself!

  MUSTRD.In but two winks we may find ourselves away, very far from this spectacle. Shall we?

  PEASE.No, no, the antics of this prancing half-breed may prove amusing. In truth, I liked the fellow well enough, I did. True, what Queen Titania saw in him to so ensnare her heart I could never fathom, but it’s plain enough that even in Faerie are the Royals not like the rest of us. Old Bottom’s ears are no less ludicrous than those blooming from the head of the Prince of Wales, and his taste in married women more commendable.

  BOTTOM.Will this most splendid day never cease bestowing its favor upon me? My old friends, notice you any difference? I am myself again! Have you never seen a handsomer creature, or one as happy?

  MUSTRD.You are a rare sight in most ways imaginable and, I would venture, many that are not.

  BOTTOM.Fate is as was meant to be, this I now know. If ever I chewed at one morsel of doubt, then that crumb was spat away the instant I saw the two of you here to give me wel
come.

  MUSTRD.Methinks no doubt, whether crumb or cud, could be chewed well enough to uproot whatever notions would sprout in a head as silly as that. Are not asses famed above all for their stubbornness?

  BOTTOM.And for their swift kicks. Is it an invitation you extend?

  PEASE.No, no, desist and cease you both. These traits you describe are those of lowly mules, far below so robust and noble a hybrid as yourself, good Bottom.

  BOTTOM.Splendid, then! Which of you shall I dispatch unto the Queen, to bear the news of my return, and which shall remain at my side?

  MUSTRD.You, dispatch us? By whose authority is given you the right to dispatch Peaseblossom or myself even two hops on your preposterous behalf?

  BOTTOM.Why, by Queen Titania herself, whose love for me has long enough been denied its proper consummation.

  PEASE.He is correct, Mustardseed. The Queen charged us, with Moth and Cobweb, to tend his needs, and that charge was never lifted. Truly, you must admit, his needs be many. Hie you off to Faerie, then, and leave me to bask in the clover-flecked smile of our lord.

  In sprinkle of dust and sparkle of light, exit Mustardseed, page right.

  BOTTOM.He is a most petulant little sprite. Still, this is too fine a day for even that to give me the frets. But tell — what news of my beloved Titania? A married woman she may be, yet that Midsummer night she did dote upon me with a passion, and now I fear that in my prolonged absence she may have done herself an illness out of mourning. Well, look upon me — none could blame her.

  PEASE.Considerate Bottom. She has in most ways managed to carry on.

  BOTTOM.Miracle! What courage she must possess!

  PEASE.Still and all, there be rumblings of discontent from the royal chambers, and if it be not my place to share news of them, then hang me for a traitor, but I always did love the Queen best. King Oberon has in him more than a bit of Machiavelli, and I believe Titania tires of this as surely as she does the rest.

  BOTTOM.There’s more?

  PEASE.More indeed — or less, depending. King of Faeries he may be, but Oberon is still a man of tiny peckerage.