Alien
Virus
Love
Disaster
Stories
by
Abbey Mei Otis
Small Beer Press
Easthampton, MA
This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are either fictitious or used fictitiously.
Alien Virus Love Disaster: Stories copyright © 2018 by Abbey Mei Otis. All rights reserved. Page 239 is an extension of the copyright page.
Small Beer Press
150 Pleasant Street #306
Easthampton, MA 01027
smallbeerpress.com
weightlessbooks.com
[email protected]
Distributed to the trade by Consortium.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Otis, Abbey Mei, 1989- author.
Title: Alien virus love disaster : stories / Abbey Mei Otis.
Description: First edition. | Easthampton, MA : Small Beer Press, [2018]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017047745 (print) | LCCN 2017048481 (ebook) | ISBN
9781618731500 | ISBN 9781618731494 (alk. paper)
Classification: LCC PS3615.T55 (ebook) | LCC PS3615.T55 A6 2018 (print) | DDC
813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017047745
First edition 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Print edition set in Bembo 12 pt.
Print edition printed on 50# Natures Natural 30% PCR recycled paper by the Maple Press in York, PA.
Cover art copyright © 2018 by Te Chao (te-chao.com). All rights reserved.
To the teachers,
all of you,
& especially mine.
Alien Virus Love Disaster
What happens first is people in hospital masks come banging on our doors before it’s even light out. They herd us out of our houses and down the block to what used to be the football field of Paige Clifton Senior High School. They make us strip and pile our clothes on the bleachers. It’s August but the mist hasn’t burned off the morning yet and we shiver. Especially Mrs. Todd shivers, who’s eighty-two. There’s like two hundred of us, everybody who lives on James Row plus 12th Street plus whoever they could prod out of the Amorcito apartments. Megaphones all over blaring state of emergency, please proceed in an orderly manner, this is a matter of public safety.
They push us naked into the field.
Near me are the Naylors who never come out of their corner house, the Sherman sisters I’ve known all my life, Trini with her baby who always cries but is dead quiet now. People hunch like peeled shrimp with giant scared eyes. “Man, what is this bullshit?” asks Dean, my little brother, he’s twelve and I should smack him for that kind of language but that’s when they turn the fire hoses on us.
Everyone lifted off their feet, everyone hurled into everyone else. Legs hair ribs nails. Mrs. Todd folds in half. Dean goes facedown so hard his nose snaps on the mud. I want to scream but I think if I opened my mouth I’d be filled with water, windsock-in-a-hurricane style. Somebody’s wet foot tangles with my shin and I smack down into the wet earth. Mouthful of torn-up grass and grit and slime. I roll over. Lying on my back I can see past the wreck of water and bodies. Way above us the sun’s coming up. The rising spume fills the sky with rainbows. On a normal day I’d be awake by now. I’d be about to take a shower.
People stumble down next to me, over me. The hoses blast away everything, dirt, skin, memory. I’m starting to disintegrate just like the earth. My brain is going to mingle with the soup. Bye Trini, bye baby, bye Dean, you were so right, what is this bullshit? I for sure don’t know.
The hoses go off.
Your clothing will be incinerated, the megaphone says. You can fill out a form for compensation from the Office of Toxin Containment. You’ll get an information packet detailing Follow-Up Action in seven to ten business days.
We’re all shaky trying to get out of the muck. People pull on each other to stand and slip and drag someone else down with them. Everybody’s got a painted camo warrior face and some of us have red streaks where our noses bled or our skin flayed away. Someone is like, “Well, guess we better get cleaned up,” and someone else has the balls to laugh.
Where Dean and I live is the downstairs left side of a fourplex with linoleum floors even in the bedroom. They call it a fourplex but really it’s five because they put some plywood around the water heater in the basement and rented the extra space out to an immigrant family. The only window they have down there is the hole in our kitchen floor where sometimes I peek through and see them all clustered around a hot plate. What’s in front is weeds and the spot where Mrs. Todd couldn’t get any squash to grow and a Jobs With Justice sign some little guy came by and stuck in the yard five years ago. What’s in back is kind of a deck but the boards are sagging in the middle so it’s shaped like a U. You might think there’s more weeds under the deck but wrong: just concrete. And beyond the concrete there’s some chain link and beyond the chain link there’s this enormous dirt field and way out in the middle of the dirt is the low-down gray building everybody calls the Magic Factory.
Why it’s called that is because that place puts on better shows than Fourth of July, I’m serious. Fourth of July only might be better because you always know when it’s coming: right after the third, duh. Magic Factory shows are always a surprise but once it gets going somebody will yell and then everybody comes out to watch. The Sherman sisters have a whole set up with folding chairs but mostly people just stand in their backyards or press faces to the chain link or climb it if they’ve got tiny feet. (You can’t climb all the way over because of the razor wire.) Back when Mom lived with us and Benning was sniffing after her, he’d lift me or Dean up on his shoulders so we could see better. The best thing was when someone was doing a cookout the same night as a Magic Factory show. Like you’re chomping down, boiling hotdog juice squirting into your mouth, and then you look over and there’s glitter pouring out of the smokestacks on top of the building. I say glitter but every time is different. Sometimes big spreads of color that hover over the roof pulsing like heartbeats. Or sometimes just rivers of stars gushing up and up and spreading across the night and then falling. You clamp your hotdog in your mouth and stretch out your arms but just when the stars are about to land on your wrists they disappear, they always disappear.
Or sometimes you’ll be picking corn out of your teeth and suddenly the air is full of sound. Like music but no tune and no words so maybe not like music. Always it’s way too loud to talk over and it kind of hurts your ears, but also it kind of hurts your heart in a way I think everybody secretly enjoys. Like the most beautiful animal in the world is trapped in a cage somewhere inside there. And we are the ones who have to listen to it, and we are the ones who get to listen to it.
The day after they hose us down there’s a bunch of caution tape wrapped around the Magic Factory. And down on Marion Street there’s a big padlock on the gate that leads into the dirt field. The sign that said Property of the Federal Government, No Trespassing is gone and now there’s just one that says Decommissioned. I’m going to be honest there’s definitely no geniuses living on this block, but you don’t need to be a genius to figure out everyone who got hosed lives in a house that backs up against the Factory. I think probably you could even be a little, I know I’m not supposed to use this word but, retarded, and still make something of that.
What happens next is an email comes with a list of drug prescriptions and a pharmacy voucher for fifty bucks. Consumers in the listed neighborhoo
ds may have come into contact with dispersed agents (see notification 103C). The following regimen is recommended, however has not been endorsed by the FDA.
At the drug store the pills come to sixty-four forty so I start counting out change.
“You got a day off for these?” The drug-store lady taps a bottle.
“What’s that?”
“This one’s gonna keep you at home for a day. How come everybody’s asking for these? Tell you what I don’t envy none of you one bit.”
“Like what do you mean?”
“You got a question you call the number. Number’s on the receipt.”
“What—”
“Sweetheart there’s a long line behind you.” She points and it’s true. Old man and lady and a woman with a baby on each hip and everybody’s clutching their printed-out voucher.
So I’m walking out past them and I get this idea to be like, “Oh I think I remember you from somewhere? You were the one all muddy and screaming? Maybe you remember me, I was all muddy and screaming too?” But nobody laughs.
Little brother is on the sofa when I get back to the apartment.
“Oh Dean I know you did not get sent home the first day of school.”
He rolls his eyes because obviously. “Mrs. Shipley lied. Mrs. Shipley said I was in the hall after bell but she saw me coming and she shut the door early. She slammed it in my face. Why does she hate me so bad?”
“You need to quit the excuses and start the explainings. Like now.”
“What she said was I was banging on the door threatening her. Like yeah Mrs. Shipley you think I care about your dumbass study hall? Like shit. She hates me.”
“I’m serious if you swear one more time . . . She doesn’t hate you. You’re making trouble for yourself.”
Instead of listening he gathers his limbs together in a gangly bouquet. He digs at the sole of his bare foot, peels off a big nugget of callus and flicks it onto the rug.
“Omigod Dean gross pick it up pick it up!” I smack his head with the bag of pills and he skitters into the bathroom.
Now I’m alone. The room is still. The basement family isn’t rustling around. Late afternoon sun turns everything gold, even the dead skin crumbs on the floor. I line up the pill bottles on the table. They all have long names full of Xs and Zs, and I know that’s how you trust something’s authorized scientific but it still makes me kind of nervous. The labels say something about don’t take on an empty stomach so I put two patties in the microwave. “Dean? Come out here. You got to take some of these.” He doesn’t answer so I count out pills for myself, line them up in my hand. Little blue moons, pink circles, orange-and-white ovals. One deep breath then they all go down together. I wash them down with red juice out of the bottle, so sweet I kind of stop being able to breathe for a moment.
“Dean? Seriously come here.”
The bathroom door stays closed.
There’s too much to do in the mornings. There’s do we still have enough minutes on the prepaid, is there enough money left in checking, where’s the credit card, the other credit card, does Dean have his bus pass, backpack, shoes, homework. There’s has anyone messaged for a nail appointment, because don’t laugh but I’m still hoping this small-business thing will take off. I can do all these things at once, I’m a multitasker like that, but it’s a dance, if I get messed up I can’t start again.
What happens this morning is, right in the middle of counting out a dollar for Dean: pain. No-joke pain. Like someone tangled their hand deep in my guts and yanked. I shriek in Dean’s face and his hand that was held out for a nickel instead gets a big gob of my spit.
“The hell, big sister?” But I can’t do anything except double over and make noises like someone’s pulling saws out of my throat. There’s a fat python clenched around my insides. There’s a cat hanging by its claws from between my legs. I shriek and shudder again and see Dean staring at me, mouth open, still cupping my spit in his palm.
“Noma—are you—?”
He looks younger when he’s afraid. There’s a seeping warmth in my underwear and I’m pretty sure I don’t want his help on this one.
“It’s okay. Get out of the way.”
Somehow I get into the bathroom and pull my jeans down and wow is my underwear a mess. Rust and pink and bright red jelly down my legs. All I can do is collapse on the toilet and hunch over my knees. The pain rolls through in spurts and I bite the heel of my hand so Dean won’t hear me yell. Spit slicks down my wrist.
I wrench my brain away from panic and try to get my breath to slow down. Blue light filters down from the high-up window. There’s the plink plink of the sink leaking and the sigh of the toilet tank and no other sounds. It smells like how I imagine a cave smells. I lay my forehead on my knees and peer between my legs. The cramps turn everything blurry like Vaseline smeared on a camera lens. Every task I was trying to finish falls away. Nothing to do except inhale, exhale, and watch the blood fall out of me in ropes.
When Dean inches open the bathroom door and peeks around I’m in a numb ball on the tile, pants still around my ankles. He puts his hands in my armpits and lifts me like a child.
“Dean? You missed school?”
He doesn’t say anything. He gets a washcloth and runs the water until it warms. He gathers up my ruined clothes and carries them away.
I sit in the tub until I stop shaking. Then I tell Dean to go get the bottles on the table. He still doesn’t speak.
“Just pour them in the toilet.”
He doesn’t ask why. The toilet bowl is scattered with pastel constellations. I think about how such tiny things can have such long names. I think about the constellations that rose out of the Magic Factory. I think about the spray from the fire hoses that made bruises on our bodies and rainbows on the sky. I push the lever and the toilet glugs and everything disappears.
“Like hell I took them.”
Trini and Trini’s cousin and Georgia Sherman and I sit on Georgia’s front porch, and I’m working on Trini’s cousin’s nail beds. Trini’s joggling her baby on her knee and explaining why she didn’t take her pills. “He’s still nursing, you know? Like I’m all about natural weaning. And I don’t ingest nothing unless my doctor says. And you know my doctor hasn’t called me back in a year, so.” She clicks her tongue and shrugs.
I’m thinking come on Trini, you were feeding that baby chicken poppers before he had teeth. But I like that she’s with me on the pill thing so I just keep pushing her cousin’s cuticles.
“Well I took them.” Georgia says it in her I’m-old-and-I-don’t-have-time-for-this voice. “Just to be on the safe side. They still won’t even say what happened to us. I think I’m having a reaction, though. I got this spot.” She pulls up her shirt. Above her hip there’s a red bump wide as a quarter. Trini is going “Uh, yeah, what’d I tell you?” but then she looks and goes “Oh. But I—I got one like that.”
Hers is on the small of her back, to the right of her spine. “That is so weird, you know?”
I stop in the middle of applying a base coat and ask can I touch them. The bumps feel hard and round like everybody’s got ping-pong balls buried inside them. Trini giggles. “Dang Noma your fingers are ticklish.”
Then I lift up my shirt and show them the three bumps on my stomach and Trini stops giggling. “Oh what. Oh what the. Oh wow.”
Trini’s cousin is from the coast and she’s looking at us like she doesn’t even want to know what’s going on in this neighborhood. I reach out to finish putting on her enamel and she hesitates before giving me her hand.
The sun is going down and painting the sky so pretty someone should put it in a museum. I make each of that cousin’s nails disappear under three strokes of Copper Wildfire. Nobody gets up to go into the backyard. Nobody looks for magic shows anymore. We never said anything about it to each other but we all just know.
So like you expect a lot of things to be hard in life. Like there will always be bills and always landlords and your mom’s always gonna be running off with creepy boyfriends and fake friends are always gonna be stabbing you in the back. Like even when you get fired from the nail salon where you’ve worked for two years and you weren’t even ever late except that one time, even that isn’t too surprising. But having weird bumps sprouting up all over your body, and now there’s way more and they’re growing bigger—that’s the kind of thing you just don’t really plan for.
At this point I have nine and Dean has fourteen. I don’t know how many other people have because it would be weird to go around counting but I’m sure it’s a bunch. Hardly anybody sits outside on James Row anymore. Dean’s quit making up excuses for skipping school. I’m supposed to be mad about that but it’s like the mad part of me has shriveled up and blown away. Instead this afternoon I’m like let’s treat ourselves, why not. We walk down to the carry-out by the highway and get shrimp fried rice and wings and crazy fries and we don’t even wait to get back to the house to start eating. We shovel orange rice into our mouths with our hands.
Dean wipes his fingers on his shirt and rubs the lump swelling on his neck. Then he drops his hands to his sides and stares out at the eighteen-wheelers charging down the highway. “Nothing like this has ever happened before.”
His voice is so empty that I swallow a whole shrimp without chewing at all. I keep coughing for longer than I need to because I’m trying to figure out what to say back.
“Hey. You don’t know that. Maybe there’s some fancy doctor somewhere and all he does is study this. Maybe we find him and he fixes us.”
Dean doesn’t look away from the highway. “Seriously, big sister? You think I got lumps on my brain?”
“You shut up. I was just trying to think positive or something. I don’t know.”
We finish the fried rice without speaking. We start on the crazy fries. So many cars fly by. I wonder what would they think if they slowed down to look at us. If they saw what was under our clothes.
“Naw,” Dean goes, “This is something new. We got to start thinking totally different about this.”
Alien Virus Love Disaster Page 1
