The Lonely

by Ainslie Hogarth

  The Smell

  I decided that I needed to enlist some help if I was going to find what was causing The Smell. So I went outside to find Hector.

  He was broiling in the sun, the air rippling off his warm black body. He lay on his back, the skin on his jowly face pooled around his upside-down skull, revealing his enormous teeth in a friendly way. I stepped into his sunlight, casting a tall shadow across his face. He looked up at me.

  “Wanna come inside and help me find something?”

  He rolled over lazily, shook the sleep from his head, and trotted behind me toward the cabin. He’d know what he was looking for as soon as he walked in.

  He took a big sniff and went straight for the fancy dish cupboard, digging his way through, crashing teacups and small, useless dishes, burying his face in a large silver serving dish. After a few seconds he pulled something out and dropped it gingerly to the floor, leaving behind dollops of froth from the corners of his mouth.

  A squirrel. Dead. Its small, round belly bloated with gas, eyes open and dry like little black beetles. His nose was pink, his fur all gray. With my hands overlapped on my mouth and nose, my eyes began to expand with tears. A squirrel tail without life is the saddest thing you could ever see. Without that vivacious electric eel inside, controlling the fluff, squirrel tails just looked like a sad pile of dust bunnies. And that was what I’d mistaken it for when I’d dug around in that cupboard.

  “Thanks, Hector!” I warbled, not meaning it. “You’re a good boy,” and I rubbed his neck.

  Suddenly a tiny squeak severed his praise. This squirrel was alive! But just barely. Unfortunately, Hector was all business. As soon as he realized that the little thing was breathing, he scooped it up and crushed it in his big powerful jaws. A fast, merciful death, but still a gruesome one. He dropped the punctured thing at my feet, trotted back outside, and worked his way back into the spot where the grass was bent and imprinted with his once-sleeping shape to resume his nap.

  I scooped up the lifeless bundle, laid it in a shoebox, wrapped the shoebox tight in electrical tape, and stuffed it in a bundle of hopefully odor-suppressing blankets in mine and Julia’s attic room.

  The Incident

  I debated showing Julia the squirrel. When you take that kind of step in your life, becoming a person who hides dead animals in their room, it’s kind of hard to come out about it. It’s like telling your family you’re a drug addict or something. People aren’t going to take it very well, and it’s not the most flattering thing in the world to be. So I waited.

  I sat the whole day and night with the shoebox I’d put it in, watching, wondering if there was still a squirrel in there at all, wanting to unwrap it but scared. On the bed, with my legs crossed and the shoebox in my lap, I read a fairy tale from the big, stately Hans Christian Anderson book we kept up there. A story about a poor girl, little and cold and selling matches in the street. It was very late when Julia finally came home.

  “You’re still awake,” she said when she entered.

  She spoke these words in such a way that I had absolutely no idea how she meant them. You’re still awake: disappointed. You’re still awake: happy. You’re still awake: impressed. But being awake isn’t that impressive. Unless you’d been in a coma. I nodded because it seemed the best way to respond to something that you didn’t really understand anyway. It was my usual response when hobos with no teeth or people with impossibly thick accents tried to communicate with me. Nod, nod, nod.

  “What’ve you got on the bed there?” she asked, noticing my shoebox.

  “I’ll show you, but you have to promise not to freak out.”

  “Oh god, Easter, what is it?”

  I lifted the lid off the shoebox.

  “What part of that was supposed to freak me out?”

  It was empty. I was shocked. It had been there. I’d picked it up and placed it inside. I’d seen the small hole where Hector’s tooth pierced his inflated little belly. Where had it gone? I looked around, scared. Hadn’t I been watching the whole time? I peed once, for two minutes tops.

  “I had a squirrel in here,” I finally said.

  Julia looked alarmed. “Is it inside the house some-where?”

  “No, it was dead.”

  “Gross, man. What’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with me! There was this terrible smell, Julia, couldn’t you smell it? Strong enough to make you gag. It was making The Mother insane. I looked everywhere and couldn’t find it so I finally got Hector to help me and he found it, Julia! But it wasn’t dead yet, it was just barely alive, but Hector could tell and you know what he’s like, as soon as he heard it squeak he killed it.”

  Then I had to concentrate for a moment not to cry.

  “So you decided to peel the stinking dead squirrel off the floor and bring it into our room to show me?”

  “Yeah!”

  “You’re insane. This is what happens when you spend too much time with that stupid dog.”

  “I am not, Julia! I am not insane. I’m telling you, this squirrel was in the cupboard, he was in that big serving dish.”

  Her eyebrows quivered, her mouth cracking at the corners. She was about to laugh.

  “Goddammit, Julia, you put it there, didn’t you! No wonder it’s gone.”

  She burst out laughing, so hard she could barely contain herself. She laughed herself backward, plopping onto a beanbag chair on the floor where she finally exhaled herself back into a normal state. Her legs made triangles with the floor.

  “Why would you do that, Julia? Why would you make me think I was going crazy? Why are you such a terror?”

  “Me? You’ve been so boring I can barely stand to look at you!”

  “What else do you want from me? I picked you! I want you! Why are you still being so mean?”

  “Maybe you did some serious damage, Easter. Maybe you hurt my feelings too much this time.”

  I stared at her in the way that forces people to explain themselves further. So that’s what Julia did.

  “You think if you’re normal, he’ll like you more. You think if you bring a boy home he might even be jealous, or at least feel protective of you. But he won’t, Easter. I’m the only family you’ve got. Why can’t you see that?”

  I felt guilty. Incapable of denying it because it was true. I’d been having fantasies of life without her, life without The Mother too. A house with just me and The Father, where he’d have to pay attention to me and he’d want to because I’d be my better self.

  I kept quiet because I knew that if I tried to lie, she’d know. So she painted her face all smug, got up, shut off the light, and snuck under the covers on her side of the bed.

  Besides the shoebox and the too-small bed, there were a few other things in our attic room. There was a desk with two drawers both filled with broken pencils and crayon nubs and crinkled pieces of paper of varying degrees of usefulness. There was a bookcase where our Hans Christian Anderson book lived, as well as lots of others that Julia and I would read from out loud on nights when it was too hot to sleep. There was a white nightstand with a lamp on it and a floral sheet dividing our room from a storage area filled with tent poles and camping stoves and inflatable mattresses. A large box of matches peeked from beneath the sheet like a shoe. I thought of Lev’s feet peeking beneath the cuffs of his jeans and I wished he were hiding behind the curtain, somehow able to see that I didn’t want to be mean to him. That I had to be. Because I already had a Julia and there wasn’t room for two people who thought I was wonderful.

  In the middle of the night, after our fight, I heard Julia rustling behind it, her back end sticking out in front.

  “Hey!” I hissed. “What are you doing back there?”

  “What?” I’d startled her. She shot up like a splash and the sheet moved like a disturbed pond behind her. “What? Oh, nothing. Just go back to bed.�
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  “Ha! Yeah right. What’ve you got behind your back?”

  “What? Nothing.”

  I swung my legs out of bed and marched as authoritatively as I could over to her without making too much noise. This would have been a terrible time to wake The Parents.

  “Julia, for god’s sake, I know it’s not nothing. Just show me what you’ve got. You know you can’t do this. It’s not fair.”

  “Oh my god Easter, fine. You’re such a brat.”

  With that she slammed the big box of matches down into my hand with a thunderous rattle.

  “What are you doing with these?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re full of ‘nothings’ tonight.”

  “Well, I don’t know, Easter. I just wanted to play with them a little bit.”

  “In the middle of the night?”

  “What’s fun about playing with matches during the day?”

  “I guess that’s true.”

  I sat down on the floor gently and spread my nightgown over my crossed legs, letting my knees provide the support beams for a little hammock. I then dumped a healthy number of matches on top. Julia sat down across from me and made her own nightgown match-dish. Hers was bigger than mine so she poured in even more matches. We smiled at each other. Julia always had the best ideas. I wasn’t mad at her anymore about the squirrel.

  “I’m not mad at you anymore, Julia.”

  “I’m not mad at you either.”

  “I love you and I want to keep you forever.”

  She smiled and lit the first match and it came to life aggressively. Strong and high and bright but out too soon. Only the shortest bit of limp, withered head drooped from the end of the stick.

  “Damn,” Julia whispered. She tossed it.

  She tried another and produced the same overly enthusiastic result. Again the dud was tossed. Again and again. Soon there were dozens of singed sticks piling up around us like a campfire.

  “Mom and Dad are going to smell this, you know. They’re going to think we’re setting the cabin on fire.”

  She lit another match and we both watched with held breath as it slowly quivered to life. A little creature finally awakened. Our new pet. Delicate. Proverbially pink and unspoiled as a baby. But not for long. Its dark center lub-dubbed with heat. It throbbed in our ears. And somewhere in its deepest, hottest core, a picture came to life: a pair of legs over a jeaned lap, sunlight streaming in and emblazoning the downy hair misted all over the young, lazy legs that were now squirming somewhat. Toes thuddling. Slowly a hand, fingernails the size of quarters, came down on her tennis-ball knees and the match went out.

  “Did you see that?” I asked.

  “Of course I saw it. I did it.”

  She lit another match.

  The flame came to a jagged end and danced like a chorus line of bright little toes. They were lapped at over and over again by the heat coming up from the center of the match. But in a second that center became a long pink tongue, devouring the tiny toes one by one from the end of a pudgy foot. Wrapping around and sucking down like plucked grapes. But the foot didn’t bleed. It just kept producing little toes to be inhaled. A broad smile, a mouthful of toes. Toe teeth. Then the match went out.

  “Let me do one.”

  So she handed me the box of matches. Her teeth glistened in the dark room.

  I lit the match. And wondered what would happen if I were to kill Julia myself. Hold this match under the hem of her dress, watch it erupt, watch her spin around like a firecracker, skin melting, flesh dropping, charred flops splattering on the floor.

  The Fire erupted in red, a dark sore in the center, moving out into a frenzied shell of orange. It was being prodded, poked, by some undetectable but furious wind. Rubbed and irritated, stoked. Then it hollowed out through the middle and became our tub, filled with water, glowing red and almost perfectly still. Floating in the middle of the water was a small gray squirrel, drowned and bloated, eyes as still as little black bugs. The squirrel became the head of the match which began unfolding from the inside out, getting bigger and bigger and I realized that I was holding a handful of matches, blazing.

  The flame got bigger and hotter and then I was in an entirely different room. A white room with neon green lines like hills and valleys waltzing over the walls. Blue and red polka-dots puncturing the scene. I smelled clean laundry and rubbing alcohol and I felt hands all over my body, lifting things, poking things, pressing things, moving things, holding things, turning things, bending things, flicking things. Some of these hands even had special devices; pulling things, tapping things, probing things, stinging things. I felt like I was getting a makeover. I was going to get up from this bed that I was lying on, walk to the mirror and see a whole new face staring back at me.

  I realized later that I was in a hospital.

  I remembered Julia saying, “Easter, no! No! NO!”

  And she’d been on fire, flinging bright bits of her nightgown through the air as she spun, each bright bit a fiery bird flying frantically and colliding with everything. The sheet that divided our room from the camping gear, the sheet from which the matches peeked at us in the first place. It went up quickly, shards of it joining the flock and soaring to our bed and our pile of books. Everything prickled; my eyes burned. We must have baked like Salty the cat in his trash can tomb before it woke The Parents and they called the fire department.

  Recovery

  I’ve never been able to remember the first second that I wake up. It’s like this one tiny event that happens every day that I’m physically incapable of being aware of. Maybe it’s because the brain doesn’t work enough at that point to start holding on to things. So even though you wake up, you don’t actually realize it because you have no idea what it’s like. Maybe it’s horribly painful. A feeling like your eyes have been soldered shut in the night and then sliced open like a paper cut in the morning, but because you don’t remember it, it may as well have never happened. But I don’t like the idea of waking up and not realizing it. I want it to be exactly how I imagine it to be.

  When I woke up in the hospital, I knew I was awake before I even opened my eyes. It was very strange waking up in the world behind your eyelids, pulled from the depths of your subconscious into the dark.

  I think it must have been the unnatural position that the doctors put me in to sleep. Flat on my back with my head elevated slightly and crammed between two pillows, my arms along my sides, my hands in fists around wads of sheet. I was unnaturally straight and everything in my body was very aware of it having been placed that way.

  I opened my eyes as slightly as I could and spotted The Parents in low chairs upholstered in a raw-looking, rose-colored fabric. They each had a Styrofoam cup placed on a wooden armrest and were looking up at a man in a white coat who had his rounded back to me. He sat on a black leather stool with three wheels and I noticed that he was moving, slowly and ever so slightly, over a groove in between tiles on the floor. Slowly, slightly, thump. Slowly, slightly, thump. Back and forth and back and forth. Slowly, slightly, thump. Maybe he was performing some kind of subliminal humping routine, an old doctor trick that makes bad news go over better because the sick or bereaved are brewing a reaction to this undercurrent of unsolicited lechery, a distraction from the tragedy.

  Probably not. Probably he just did it because that’s what he did when he was sitting on a chair with wheels. He probably did it in his office too, in his desk chair, and at home in front of the computer at night. I’ll bet that when he sat on a couch or in a dentist’s chair he went crazy after a little while, longing desperately for the slowly slightly thump, slowly slightly thump satisfaction that he got from these other chairs in his life.

  My whole body had the feeling somewhat of being suspended, or perhaps it was the feeling of being all together too warm and prickly. Whatever I was wearing didn’t feel like my clot
hes. It felt like a hospital gown, which meant that someone in this hospital had to change me, force my lifeless limbs into the arm holes and tie up the back. Someone around here had seen me naked and I had no idea how to avoid them. This was torturous.

  I moved my eyes to the left (no Julia) and to the right (no Julia). Perhaps she was gone for good this time. This time I could phone the long-necked Lev and tell him I’m sorry. That I wanna hear bells with him and be normal forever. And then I felt so guilty that I ached. Guilty that I hadn’t been there to take care of Julia’s body and guilty because even though I loved her more than anything, I really hoped she wouldn’t be back. But I couldn’t move or cry or let on that I was awake because I was trying to listen to what the doctor was saying. He spoke quietly with his back turned to me. He said something about The Fire, that it’s what happens when a young girl is very lonely and looking for attention, and he thought it would be best to separate me from them for a while. The Mother growled something about abandonment and The Father said something about how no one had even said the word “abandon.” I couldn’t really understand any of it.

  Before I could further eavesdrop, The Mother caught sight of wetness between my eyelids.

  “Easter? Easter, honey, you’re awake.”

  It sounded more like the command of a hypnotist. I opened my eyes as fully as I could and pictured them swirling under her control. They asked me how I felt, did I remember what had happened, could I hear them? Fine, sort of, yes, I answered. Then came the assault: what the hell is the matter with you, you could have killed yourself, what possessed you to do such a thing? I don’t know, I know, I don’t know. Sorry.

  “Sorry!” The Mother shrieked. “Easter, for god’s sake, you could have killed all of us! Do you realize that? What were you thinking?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The doctor interjected, whispered something in The Mother’s ear.

  She cleared her throat and continued: