Exigencies

by Richard Thomas

  kevin catalano

  was born and raised in chittenango, new york, a small village that celebrates the birthplace of wizard of oz author l. frank baum. he is the author of the word made flesh, a collection of dark flash fiction. other stories have appeared in pank, booth, pear noir!, atticus review, gargoyle magazine, frigg, and many others. his stories have also been anthologized in press 53’s surreal south ’13 and in fiddleblack annuals #1 and #2. harass him at

  www.kevincatalano.com.

  THE

  ARMADILLO

  HEATHER FOSTER

  Ibought you a junkyard. You’ve said twice you want one. Texas is bigger, more lonesome than you thought. You show it nights, when we cut loose on back roads in the Chevy. We go at it so hard in the dusty bed, you shake out sand from my hair like stars, a glitter against the skin. Anything to connect, to constellate. Half of me did it because you wanted one. The other half? I thought of how much I could bury.

  An old man sold it to me. “I’m asking a grand. Wife’s got the cancer. Gotta let it go.” He was short for a man, and skinny, mid-sixties, but blue-eyed and handsome enough to make a habit out of getting his way.

  “Seven’s the best I can do.”

  “You can’t bullshit a bullshitter, lady. You got more than that somewhere.” He slid off the rickety barstool, smiling and squinting a little, moving to pull the door shut. “Damn sun. Eyes can’t take it.” There was a rip in the black faux leather seat and someone had duct taped it. He sat again and unzipped his fly. “Seven hundred, huh?”

  He threw in a blue VW van that won’t run. Something about the transmission. I used to think I’d drive a van like that if my name had been Summer, if I’d had redder hair. But I’m a Sadie, through and through. Girl’s choice, saddle-tough, sadistic even? Hell, it is what it is. My momma knew.

  I checked the dump out after I bought it. A half dozen cars, some busted tires, a backhoe shovel. The small pond in front’s full of scrap metal, nothing but turtles and algae living in it; maybe a cottonmouth when it warms up some.

  The back border is marked by a hill of garbage and unmatched shoes. An armadillo lives on one side in a corduroy couch. Did you know they smell bad? Faster than shit, too. On my seventh Thanksgiving, an armadillo ran across the yard and my big brother made me chase it. I was a fat kid, did I ever tell you that? Fat and slow. The critter was long gone before I tripped over the bottom step and rolled into wet grass, before my brother kicked me in the back with his work boot. When I caught my breath, I smelled the animal’s wet rot in the fog. It was scared of me, too.

  It was somewhere around Little Rock, fourteen hours in, when I knew. I stopped to let you pee and you looked surprised it was a woman that took you.

  “Ma’am?”

  Listen. Right then I was still thinking of the clean wet slap of aluminum bats.

  “Where you taking me?”

  Seventh grade. Toby Hatton with his hand down my best pair of panties—lilac satin bikinis, white bows on the sides. I got wet and it grossed him out.

  “What do you want with me?”

  We went walking up the road instead—me with a dead piece of vine, him with a ball bat—bashing the heads of roadkill.

  “Won’t you please turn me loose?”

  Your hair’s got a lot of blonde in it, but it didn’t show in the dark when I snatched you. I didn’t like the way you looked in the daylight. Too young. Eighteen, twenty maybe. You can’t fake a feeling like that. Not like I did in Macon. Fuck that.

  I told you to keep quiet, and you did, turning your back and pissing in the grass behind the truck. You were trying to use your manners to get out of a tough spot. I understood. You thought you could good-boy-voice me till I gave in. But it wasn’t that. I hope you know it wasn’t that that did it. It was—and I didn’t want to admit it till now—I was lonesome. Jesus! A girl like me, lonesome. But I was. For the first time, I’d picked one that didn’t remind me of him, at least not in the light, and I should have known but I thought maybe. Maybe just a few days, just to pass the time, and then I’d move on. So I let you climb in the cab with me and you puked bile onto the floorboard and blacked out.

  The first one I took was Jason. They say it’s harder when you know them, when you see expressions you shouldn’t ever see on a face you know like the crook of your own elbow. For me, it was different. Jason was easy. I knew exactly what kind of a son of a bitch he was. The farther I got from home, the less I liked it.

  It was easy enough finding the Jasons—crooked grin, a little skinny, and some darkness in the eyes—the kind of boy who takes pieces of girls and never gives them back. The kind of boy who isn’t big enough to make you do what he wants with just his body, so he learns all the tricks. The older boy who pretends to be your age—you just thought he had a mean daddy—until you’re gagging on his cock and he’s laughing, telling you the truth as he comes in your throat. The kind of boy—and you know this is pathetic—you’d have gotten naked with again if he’d let you.

  But a doppelganger isn’t good enough. They can’t just favor him. They have to become him. So I fuck with them, push their buttons, piss them off, and the switch flips. And then they can tell me no, and I can do what I want with their bodies.

  Around the Oklahoma line, you came to.

  “You got sick back there,” I said, watching the road.

  “Where are we going?”

  “You got all stirred up. Try to keep your nerves about you if you can.”

  “Who are you?”

  “You ask too many goddamn questions. You need to eat something.” I passed you the bag of chips and the water thermos. You took them.

  For a while, you stared out the window with your forehead pressed to the glass. When I turned off the CB, you whimpered, “I’m Kent! I’m an only child. They’ll be looking for me.”

  My backhand knocked you out for 30 miles.

  There was a rabbit, half a deer, and an armadillo. Guess which skull I smashed.

  Halfway across Texas. I-40. Dust dry heat. Dusk. We made camp in the truck for the night at a KOA under the stars. You ate the chips.

  “So who are you?” You wiped the powdered cheese on your pants leg.

  “What a waste. I always lick it off when I eat them.”

  “I don’t like it by itself.”

  “My name’s Sadie.” I passed you the thermos. Air whistled through the spout as you drank.

  “Well just what are we doing out here? Are we running from somebody? Do you need money or something?”

  Not the one you think. Trick question.

  “Kent?”

  “Yeah?”

  “If you could have anything in the world, Kent, what would it be?”

  “Listen, I just wanna go home! I’ve got a whole life back there. I’ve got . . . I’m an only child. They will have noticed it by now. That I’m missing.” You were rubbing your cuffed wrist raw on the steel.

  “What would it be? Shut up about home. Pick something real.”

  In third grade, I wrote a report on armadillos. When they come to a body of water, they have two choices: walk across the bottom and hope they make it, or inflate their intestines and swim across.

  As if remembering being told once to cooperate with a hijacker, you settled down. “I guess a junkyard, then. See the weird stuff people toss.”

  “You’ve never been told no, have you Kent? I bet you never heard no in all your life.”

  The next day, we got an early start. I wanted to make it to Sedona before sunset, show you a saguaro the size of a grown man, the rocks you’d swear were painted.

  It was almost like you’d forgotten about home, until we ran out of food in the truck and I had to press a .38 to your back in the drive-thru to keep you from squawking out the truth like a stolen parrot.

  I drove hungry till I found a spot we could park and eat. I holstered the gun. “I hope you know I wouldn’t have done that if I’d thought you could keep a secret,” I said, taking a fat bite of burger.r />
  “I’m still not sure what the secret is.”

  “Kent, you ever had a girl get a hold of you so good, you’d do anything for her, even if it hurt you real bad?”

  “You ain’t gotta hurt me like he hurt you, Sadie. Whoever it was. If that’s what you’re thinkin’.”

  I slapped the horn, “Answer! The goddamn question! I don’t need a fuckin’ shrink.”

  You kept quiet then, for a long time, just wiping the burger’s mustard off your lip with the back of your hand, then licking it. “Naw,” you said, staring into the rippling horizon of rocks and hot dust, “I don’t guess I ever felt that way about a girl yet.”

  The scene in the truck pushed us back a day. We never made it out of Texas. That night, under the stars again, but this time in an empty field half a mile off-road, a few tumbleweeds rolling past. You said you’d only seen them in the movies.

  “Kent, I wish you’d lived your whole life alone in the desert. I wish you never had to know about pain.” We sat in the cab this time, till you fell asleep and I followed, lulled by the truck’s Tejano static.

  The next morning, we woke up with our sides pressed together, and I told you things about Jason. I put my hand high up on your leg. “No!” you screamed out twice, backing against the door, “Don’t touch me!”

  I slid across the slick bench to my side of the cab.

  “Listen,” you said, a little afraid of us both, “I’m real sorry about what that boy did to you, but you’re sick, lady. You need some help.” I didn’t move. “You can’t just go around snatching people up, driving them into the desert and shit. I mean shit!” It was happening, the thing I’d hoped would happen when I’d snatched you back in Little Rock. But this time, I was wishing like hell it would stop.

  “Did you know every star has a story?” my daddy said, setting up the telescope in the cul-de-sac, “Every star has a name.” I was six, barefoot on the asphalt in a white cotton gown, and I could see my breath. Our flashlight was covered in red tissue paper to protect our night vision. Bright light is hell on a stargazer.

  This is the story of how we met. I tell it to you every night, like you really could remember. But it’s a ritual, see. I’m a planner.

  In the junkyard, we lie on the couch and get used to the smell.

  I take your hand in mine and direct it. Two days—three tops—till your skin’s too raw to take my touch. For now, the fires of stars are in your eyes. I’m heaven-bound. There’s a harvest moon tonight. The kind of light that makes a dead man glow.

  heather foster

  lives and writes on a corn and soybean farm in west tennessee. she has been a guest blogger for superstition review and kindly questioned for the curiouser & curiouser interview series. her poems and stories have appeared in third coast, tampa review, monkeybicycle, iron horse literary review, pank, rhino poetry, and mead: the magazine of literature & libations. sometimes she reads scary stories in

  bed and sleeps with the lights on.

  THE LAST

  MANUSCRIPT

  USMAN T. MALIK

  “I want to live in Pakistan because I love this bit of earth, dust from which, incidentally, has lodged itself permanently in my lungs…but the fact is, Uncle, that we have so distorted our faces that they have become unrecognizable, even to us.”

  —Letters to Uncle Sam, saadat hasan manto (1912-1955)

  Last night I dreamed I went to Heera Mandi again.

  Past Taxali Gate I walked, one shambling step after the other, swathed in a mist that was not entirely dream, and in the way of dreams, I knew it was one. Slender, silent girls wrapped in black shrouds lay on biers and charpoys like cheap cigars on display in a tobacco shop. Their eyes were bruised and swollen, their lips tumorous. One winked a mismatched eye at me and flicked her tongue. “Want some maal, sahib?”

  Once upon a time hurried by—before I had time to catch it, I had stopped. There were five of us—smoking pot, drifting from one rickshaw to another, whispering about a ride to the whoremarket, and one of the drivers had responded. Through orange lips shaded by a thick paan-colored mustache, betel juice trickling into the corner of his mouth, he murmured, “Eid night, sahib. Too many policemen rounding up the girls. Cost you an extra hundred.”

  (And in the dream, I saw a bile-green rickshaw slumped over a fruit vendor’s cart, broken splinters of wood poking out of the metallic hulk like embalmed fingers.)

  Driving past the Shahi Mosque, in the courtyard of which echoes of isha azan had not yet died, Haider leaned out of the rickshaw. He hawked up a fat globule of phlegm and spat it across an admirable distance onto the neck of a traffic constable. We shrieked with laughter as the man in blue jumped violently and lost his hat, rubbed his neck and stared at the green mess smeared across his palm.

  Circular Road became Fort Road. Past the Gate onto night-splashed streets that meandered into themselves till they became dusty ghosts shimmering with concrete and pimp spit.

  The pimp looked at us, scratching the bleeding mole on his cheek, fingered it, and beckoned.

  Up we went single-file behind him, clattering on wooden steps that wound behind a house with darkened windows. They slipped in one at a time, ugly little things with syphilis and venereum, so said Haider with a dusky laugh, his eyes glittering at us. Miraj and Nandoo and Rajoo and I shook our heads. “Got some that don’t look like stepped dogshit?” asked Haider. When another woman came in wearing painted cheeks and a riveled ear chewed by a past patron, Miraj stumbled to the beaded curtain, thrust his face through and vomited, a stream of thick liquid with Phajja’s special goat trotters swimming out in an inky waterfall.

  Haider looked at us and winked. “He’s never licked cunt, the bastard motherfucker,” he said and moved into the shadows with one of the twitching girls.

  My wife and I went to Pakistan in early 2012. Our two-and-a-half-year old yelled through most of the 24-hour flight from New York to Lahore, while a green-clad PIA flight attendant gnawed at her lips and fluttered between the aisles, murmuring meaningless niceties.

  It was spring and Lahore was bipolar, swinging between soft shadowy mornings and hot angry afternoons. Papa and Mama picked us up at the airport. Mama burst into tears. She dabbed her eyes with the hem of her chador, while Papa crooned at Salloo and kissed the nape of his neck again and again. Salloo grinned happily at the sight of so many women wearing shalwar kameez and dopatta, a uniform he associated with his doting aunt, my sister, back home in Florida.

  “Dada eats paratha and Dado eats mithai. Tell me, little Salloo, do you want ras malai?” sang Mama all the way home, and Salloo giggled till he became bright red, the color of my old alma mater’s brick facade.

  “Papa, who’s Aitchison College’s principal now?” I said.

  He shrugged. “I know that British apple-polisher’s been kicked out. I didn’t follow up after.” He absently tapped the abridged Verses from Rumi poking out from his breast pocket. Papa had fallen in love with Rumi after retirement from Pakistan International Airlines. Mama told me he had memorized hundreds of Maulana’s couplets; that he murmured them daily as he walked around the neighborhood. She thought it was a newly discovered spiritual thing. I thought Papa was growing old and wary of death.

  I glanced around to make sure Mama was not listening. She was kissing Salloo’s nose. “Did they really find the principal running naked after a gori in the college grounds?”

  Papa laughed. “No. That was a rumor. I do believe that particular gentleman was General Yayha Khan before the formation of Bangladesh. He was gently escorted by two soldiers back into his quarters, while the naked lady stayed hidden patiently behind a tall bush.”

  We laughed together, and in the rearview mirror I saw Hina press her lips and glance out the window, her eyes someplace thousands of miles away.

  That night, for the first time in years, under the hum hum hum of a jittering UPS-connected fan, I slept like a baby. Chronic neck pain forgotten, head sunk deep into the contoured memory foam pillow, I sl
ept with my hand kept carefully on my side of the bed, and dreamed.

  In my dream I was shimmering, a waterfall of atoms and empty space, falling with the spinning earth into an ungauged black hole. One of the girls on the leaning biers stroked my hand, ghost to ghost, as I walked past. I turned and the biers were empty and the girls were gone. Heera Mandi was haunted by their absence and I knew this was not the Mandi of my youth. The shop with the fake-wood guitars and the rababs and violins was gone, as was the Sarangi Man with his twenty-six strings strumming in a halo of music that shook the plaques and arteries of this ghetto of faded courtesans.

  Dead culture, faded courtesans, their blood laden with exiled royalty and slaughtered princes; these streets moved beneath my feet and I moved with them to the tune of a prostitute mother humming to the prostitute babe on her dark-nippled breast.

  Once I had tried to suck one of these breasts as the pimp lay wrapped in his sentinel chador a few feet away on a blanket, eyeing us with satisfaction. It was a wintry night in Heera Mandi and the woman unzipping my jeans shivered, gently pulled away, and said, “Sahib, my baby still drinks my milk.” And at the same time we were undressing each other, not making love but negotiating the youthful memory of my initiation.

  Afterward I asked the prostitute who was a mother, “Will you stay here forever?”

  She shook her head and pointed a steady finger past the pimp’s silhouette at the curtained window. “Tibbi Gali. That’s where I will go. Do you know Tibbi Gali?”

  “No.”

  She laughed. In the dark I smelled her breath and it was fruity, not unpleasant. She’d let me kiss her lips unparted only. “Well, you’re a rich boy, sahib. I saw you come in a car. You might see me there one day. This room, this place is for when I am twenty-three. Which is now. Wait till I’m thirty-three. Tibbi Gali is for the older whores with dangling breasts and stretched stomachs. One day you will find me there. I’ll be cheaper then. You want to wait till I’m cheap, sahib?”