I still have nightmares about it to this day, being hunched over in that small space, wet from my own urine and shaking at the sound of creaking floorboards. Christ knows how long they used to lock us in there, but it was a damn sight safer than being out in the open. I still have those scars to bear. They only let us out to clean and do the jobs they didn’t want to—God forbid if the work wasn’t up to scratch.
When they found us locked in the cupboard, I was only ten years old. I was almost starved to death—filthy and terrified. It was the neighbors that got the police onto them, just a few years too late.
Our so-called mother and father were sent from hell; I know that now. They’ll rot in prison, hopefully. I also know that being fed scraps underneath the door and being brought out for random beatings isn’t the usual childhood. To this day, I still walk with a hunch and wince at the sound of a squeaking floorboard. I wanted to get carpets put through the house, but Jacqui wouldn’t let me, even though she knows what I’ve been through.
Jed’s right. He’s the only one I really trust. The only one I can rely on to be there.
“I’m going to tell you this for your own good, Pauly,” he says. His face is suddenly creased with seriousness.
“Go on,” I encourage.
“I fucked her, too.”
The words don’t make sense at first, as if not in the correct sequence. The room is already starting to feel slightly off kilt, and everything seems a little less sharp.
“Oh, perhaps a handful of times. She’s an animal, Pauly. I’ll give you that.”
The room begins to slowly rotate. I feel disoriented—present, but not, as if out of my own body. I close my eyes to stop the spinning and take in some deep breaths. Finally, I’m coming back, and I land with a thud.
“And I have to wonder how many dicks she’s wrapped her hands around tonight.”
I can feel the rage consuming me. My body is shaking, blood pounding in my ear. My grip around the glass tightens, and some of the liquid splashes over the rim.
He’s smirking. Is he enjoying this?
Even as I bring the glass into his cheek, his face is twisted in a sneer, just like Father’s used to be. The glass shatters, sending shards to the floor, but some of it embeds in his skin, creating a stream of fresh crimson. His taunting smile fades, and almost immediately, I’m reeling backwards as his right fist connects with my cheekbone. My vision is filled with bright white, and there’s a loud ringing in my ear.
“How could you? I trusted you!” I scream, spittle spraying ahead. I reach for the marble bookend and bring it onto his nose. The pain in my head is off the charts, and my ears are still ringing, but I’m filled with uncontrollable fury as I continue to smash the paperweight into his face.
I don’t see the sucker punch coming, and the wind is immediately knocked out of me. I flail out for him, but he gets me again in the stomach, and a tiny bit of vomit spits out onto the floor beneath. His hands are around my throat now and squeezing tightly. Gasping desperately for air, I kick out redundantly. The pressure in my chest and my head is building, but I can't get any air in. Suddenly, I’m back in my old home, Father's arm around my neck. He's scolding me for not taking the trash out and taking too long to clean the toilet. I can smell the alcohol on his breath and feel the stubble against my cheek. Christ, my esophagus feels as though it might snap—I can't get any air. Everything is beginning to fade, darkness drawing in. I’m back in the cupboard again, and I can almost taste the mustiness. Let it end, please.
Finally, he lets go. “I had to tell you, Paul. You need to know these things.”
Doubled over, I begin to gasp in mouthfuls of air as I stagger towards the kitchen.
“That’s it! Run! You never face up to anything—that’s the problem. That’s why she walks all over you in those big porno heels!” Jed shouts.
But I have no intention of leaving this. I’m raging, adrenaline flowing, and mind exploding with thoughts of hate and revenge. I reach towards the knife block and pull out the one I know to be the sharpest.
“Oh, shit. He’s got a knife, everyone. Pauly’s balls have finally dropped!”
The war cry is strange and garbled as I bring the knife across his face. He puts a hand to his cheek and studies the blood that is rolling to the floor. I go at him again, in the chest, and this time, it induces a satisfying shriek. Again—this time in the leg. He’s not even putting up a fight anymore. I’m disconnected from pain now, and the squelching sounds don’t seem real. He falls to his knees, hands stretched towards me, tears rolling down his cheeks.
Shit! What have I done?
“Jed!” I scream.
My best friend, the one who has stayed loyal through it all. “I’m so sorry!”
I collapse to the floor in a heap and reach for my friend, squirming in the blood that bonds us.
“Paul!”
The voice seems distant and distorted.
Slowly, I open my eyes. My head is pounding and full of thick fog. I try to move, but my body sings out in pain.
“Paul, it’s okay—the ambulance is coming.” Jacqui’s face is moist with tears as she holds my bloody hand into her lap. “What have you done to yourself?”
I look down to find my grey shirt is saturated with blood. “Where’s Jed?” I sputter.
She looks at me, eyes wide with fear, and says nothing.
“Where’s Jed,” I utter again.
“It’s okay. I’m still here,” he replies. “Her tears, Paul—it’s just guilt—you know that. Don’t let her fool you.”
“I know. It’s you and me, Jed; I can see that now. You’re the only one I can trust.”
“You haven’t been taking your tablets,” Jacqui says. “You’ve had an episode, Paul.”
“I can smell them on her; those other men,” Jed rasps. “I can smell their sweat and their cum. They were probably laughing at you while they were doing it.”
“Remember, Paul. You told me about Jed. How you made him up to get through those days locked in the darkness.”
“She’s full of lies, Paul. They’re all against you: everyone,” Jed hisses.
I no longer feel so alone. I’m glad he’s back.
“Don’t worry, Paul. She won’t get away with it. If we make it through, I’ll sort her for you,” he smirks. “I’ll cut her up good.”
The Coffin
Victoria Dalpe
It shouldn’t have been empty.
It hadn’t been empty.
She sat up with a gasp, clawing at her bed sheets. It was 3:30 according to the alarm clock near her head. Diffuse orange light spilled in from the streetlights. Silent. The whole world still asleep, except her.
The dream skittered away fast, leaving only its ghost pressing on her mind. Dark things, things long buried, dry and scratching things. And the staccato beep of a heart monitor before flat lining.
David slumbered on, undisturbed, and for the hundredth time she envied his ability to sleep through anything. Even on this night, this terrible night, his face was smooth and unlined, not a care in the world. In the hospital he had been like that. Death surrounded them, choked like a noose, and he slumbered away, propped up in a chair. How many sleepless nights did she stare at him while he slept and she kept watch.
Ever since the funeral, she battled for sound sleep. Most nights, she lay awake next to David’s snoring frame. The funeral was a year ago today, and he hadn’t even remembered.
Funerals. Coffins. She shuddered, reliving their day today in all its maddening detail.
It was Street Sweep Day: a miserable Brooklyn bi-weekly event that consisted of having to move the car from its coveted near-the-apartment-spot, forcing them out hunting for spaces on distant streets like a starving shark. David acting as runner, face against glass, scanning for vacancies, while she drove, squeezing the steering wheel, hungry for parking.
“There! There!”
“This street? Are you sure? This area is pretty shitty, I don’t want my car broke
n into.”
“God, Helene, it’ll be like two hours max.”
He hopped out to direct her around a hollowed-out shell of a sofa, no doubt overflowing with generations of bed bugs. She gagged at the thought, all the while judging the type of people who leave their garbage on the street in front of their homes, like animals. It’s a simple call to get a couch picked up. Don’t you want to live someplace nice? Why can’t you take care of your neighborhood? Why must we all suffer for your laziness? Her mind flashed to the manicured suburban lawns of her youth and felt the fresh twist of white guilt in her gut.
She cut the wheel and eased in when all of the sudden, CRACK.
“David what the hell!?” She hollered, but he wasn’t looking at her; he was looking behind the car, at what she hit. His face unreadable and suddenly pale.
Please don’t be an animal, or a child, she prayed. She got out and there it was.
A coffin. Dusty, earth covered, the fabric lining yellowed and tattered. The lid open. Empty.
Her mouth was suddenly so dry, it felt filled with cotton wool. She looked to David, his expression a mirror of her own. Helene was suddenly aware of how hot it was, how sunny. She shielded her eyes, staring into the gaping maw of the coffin. Her brain was unable to come up with a reason for its presence.
“We have to call the police. Right?” She was absently rubbing her sweaty hands along her pant legs. Her mind raced in a million directions: someone dug this up and dumped it here. But why? Who did it? Who was in it? Where is the body now?
“If we call the cops we have to stick around. This is my lunch hour, Hel. One of us needs to keep their job. I know it sounds nuts, but how about we just move the car and act like we never saw it? Someone will notice it. Doesn’t have to be us.”
Someone will notice it. How many others had said the same thing that day she wondered? She stared the length of the street one way, then the other. It was a block of brownstones. Someone was eventually going to see it. Maybe someone already had. She squinted down the road, finding it unnerving that she couldn’t recall a single car passing in the time they’d been standing out there. A loud caw caught her attention, and she looked up. There was a big blackbird on the phone line, heavy enough for the line to droop. Its feathers gleamed iridescent in the noontime sun like a puddle of oil. It looked down at them as she looked up, and like the street, the creature was oddly still. Its head didn’t swivel; instead, it watched her, still as a statue. She shivered in the heat and turned away. When she glanced up a moment later, the bird was gone.
She wanted to get as far away from the street and the coffin as possible. Surely someone who lived on the street would call the authorities. But then again, wasn’t it as likely someone on this street had the body that used to occupy the coffin? How often do we assume someone else will do the right thing?
She knew she could wait. She could call, and she could sit in her air-conditioned car and wait for the cops. David could go back to work, and then they would have an interesting story to share over dinner. For once.
But, in the end she didn’t, they didn’t, though she couldn’t recall how he got her to leave and tell no one. Cowardice, no doubt. Helene’s fear of being a white woman in a rough neighborhood. Helene’s fear of being left alone with a coffin, even an empty one. One of those reasons, perhaps all of them. It wasn’t hard to get her to go; David was not that persuasive. More annoying than persuasive. He bitched and whined her out of it. He appealed to her laziness.
Now the regret settled into the vacancy in her chest. A vacant hole, like an empty coffin.
There was a dead body out there, out of its grave. A year ago, today, her father died. She couldn’t shake the eerie feeling the two events happening on the same date gave her. She didn’t much believe in coincidence, and she wasn’t a very superstitious person. But the coffin, empty and old, baking in the sun next to a rotten couch on a city street…it was wrong.
Helene gave up on sleep, thoughts of coffins and death pecking at her. She couldn’t bear to be near David, snoring and sweaty and totally indifferent to the day’s bizarre events. So, she got up and decided to make coffee. She could get a start on the job hunt early. But she was exhausted and only stared at her closed laptop. She couldn’t shake the dream, couldn’t shake the guilt. They should have told someone. Who just drives away from a coffin on the ground? What kind of people lived in that neighborhood? Was it for cult rituals? Voodoo? A gang initiation thing? A sex thing?
Unbidden, she pictured old dried flesh flaking off on a kitchen table. An old mummified corpse surrounded by candles and hooded people. Unlikely. Probably just stupid teenagers with nothing better to do.
As she sat with her coffee, she stared out at the quiet city street. The first vestiges of morning greeted her: the lightening of the sky and an occasional car passing by. Soon it would be bustling and alive again. But wait—
On the opposite side of the street, a man stepped from the shadow of a tree. His head tilted, he looked right into her window. Tall, with dark skin and dark clothes and very thin. She gasped and leaned away from window, pulse fluttering.
When she dared look back, the figure was gone.
Could have been coincidence, just some man walking, notices a light on, he looks up just as she looks out…but the dread squeezed. Too many coincidences. She remembered the blackbird, a crow or raven, she couldn’t tell the difference, city girl that she was. The uncanny way it watched her. Was this about what she and David knew, what they knew and didn’t report?
“Not everyone is out to get you, Helene.” Her father had always teased her for being paranoid. Said she never trusted anyone, was always looking over her shoulder. Didn’t have enough faith in humanity. He’d been quietly disappointed that she didn’t take after him and his big heart. He didn’t understand that a petite pretty woman who trusts that easy, who wanders through life inevitably becomes a victim. Helene wasn’t a fool. It was easier to be kind and generous if you were a big man. The world loved big white men.
The last twenty-four hours proved she was right, not her father. The kind of humanity that digs up coffins and leaves them on the side of the road in a pile of garbage is not good. Thinking about her father inevitably led to thinking about him dying, and then thinking about him dead. Her father was in a coffin now. She could remember him lying there, deflated and empty, a shell, in the funeral parlor. She imagined him underground, rotting. Or dug up and taken, his casket left smashed on the street. Hands pawing at his body, lifting it out of the satin-lined interior.
She just made it to the trash can in time to retch, hot coffee sluicing its way back up and out. Too much thought of death, of strangers watching her windows, of her father, dead only a year.
David’s soft snores floated in from the bedroom and she seethed. She wanted to run her nails down his docile, stupid face, leaving bloody furrows. She wanted to punish him for his complacency, for her own. They should have called the cops, told someone. He should have remembered her fucking father died a year ago. She should have waited for the cops.
It’s never too late. She dug around in her purse and pulled out her phone, watching the bedroom door for any sign of David stirring. There was none.
“911, what is your emergency?” The operator chimed in.
Outside the window, the man in black was back on the sidewalk. Standing in the same spot as if he’d never left. Only now, there was another man about five feet down the pavement looking up in the same way, dressed the same. Heart in her throat she pressed herself against the wall, hoping she was hidden from the window.
“Ma’am? Hello?” the operator called out, sounding a hundred miles away.
Helene was whispering without realizing it, her heart in her throat. “Yes, I would like to report something I saw today. Pilling St. It was a coffin.”
“A coffin?”
“Yes, right out on the street. Empty. Freshly dug up. Piled with some trash. That’s all. Thank you.” She hung up, pushing the phone away
from her on the table. She risked a peek out the window, and to her horror, the two men were now three. Each standing the same way, same dark skin, same black clothes, same still pose looking up at her. They reminded her of black birds. Crows. Heckle and Jeckle. A murder of crows perched in wait. Why was it called a murder? Not a group or a flock; a murder.
She looked toward the bedroom, knowing David slept on. How could he not sense her distress? How could they have a future if he was deaf to her feelings, her fears, her father’s death? The danger emanating from the men on the street? She pressed her cheek to the window sill, and yes, she could see the street. Now, there were four men. Four men, all in black, so dark they were little more than silhouettes cut out of poster board. All standing still and staring up at her window. She couldn’t see any eyes, but she knew they could see her. She debated running to the bedroom or calling out to David. She was soaked with stinking sweat.
“Circle of life,” David had said to her in the funeral home, while she wept and held her dead father’s cold hand. David then clapped her shoulder like a little league coach before stepping outside for a fucking cigarette, leaving her all alone.
While he was technically with her now, albeit sleeping, she felt just as alone. She watched with increasing distress as a fifth man appeared on the street, mirroring the pose of the other four. Five dark strangers gazed up, like birds on a wire, the strange cock of their heads, the stillness.
Watching her. Wanting her to see them, wanting her to know they were there.
Helene, scared, tired of feeling tired, and of feeling so sad, in a moment of bravery, or perhaps defeat, stepped full into the window and stared down at them. Six of them, then seven, then eight. The ninth stood in the center of the street looking up at her, and the tenth was on her side of the street, staring straight up to see her.
The Half That You See Page 21
