by Hunter Shea
The toys were in total control. Or my mind was out of control. The attic no longer felt empty, and the feeling of being watched was constant.
I looked at the depression in my sheets and blankets where my leg should have been and cursed it for trapping me here.
DAY SEVENTEEN
I was asleep when my mother came up to take my temperature and ask if I wanted anything special for lunch. My head felt like a burning balloon and it took a while to blink the haze from my eyes.
I hadn’t spoken a word when she said, “Of course I’ll stay with you. Just let me get some fresh sheets and we can watch TV or even listen to that sports radio station you like. Be back in a jiff.”
When she left, I used all of my meager strength to shift slightly up on my pillows. It wasn’t until my eyes and head cleared that I saw it.
STAY.
“In your dreams, asshole,” I said with a raspy voice that didn’t sound like my own. I swatted the blocks with the back of my hand, felt a grim satisfaction as I heard them scatter across the floor.
“I don’t care how sick you make me, I’m getting out of here and away from you. There’s nothing you can do to stop me, you hear?”
The words sounded hollow, even to me.
Later, as my mother changed the sheets around me, I looked for the Lando pieces.
They were gone.
DAY EIGHTEEN
That there was something in the attic with me was no longer up for debate. Aside from the almost daily messages, I felt drafts that shouldn’t have been, heard scuttling noises day and night and once watched in mute horror as my sheet was pulled from the bottom of the bed until the top half was at my waist.
I thought I heard that familiar click-clack at the time and wondered what shape the blocks took to be able to grasp my sheet. My phantom roommate didn’t have the courtesy to show me the magic behind the curtain. No fucking glimpse of the Great Oz for me.
My fever was now at 102. I couldn’t eat, both from fever and the lump of dread in my stomach. I told my father about what was happening, elated when he said he believed me and would get me out of the attic right away. My despair was almost tactile when I realized it had been a dream.
Most of my day and night was spent falling in and out of sleep. Each time, the Landos were there, spelling out their intentions, their desires, their soulless machinations.
FEVER BAD.
WE DO.
YOU NOT NICE.
DYING.
The last one made my heart skip a beat and my bowels threatened to loose themselves.
“If I die, then you’re still up here, lonely, with no one to torment. So you better think twice on that one. The good news then is, you may be rid of me, but I’ll finally be rid of you. I win. You hear me. I win. Don’t need two legs to kick your ass.”
I laughed, a low, mucousy cackle that followed me into my fevered dreams.
DAY NINETEEN
I envisioned that I was back in the hospital. They had gotten my fever to break. Dr. Bay came into my room with unexpected news.
“We flew in a doctor from Switzerland who has perfected a procedure to attach a donor leg to you. It will be just like your own leg. No prosthesis. We’ll operate tomorrow.”
I was in a daze, happier than I had been since the day before I found out I had contracted MRSA at my gym. A new leg. A real leg. I would walk!
They wheeled me into the operating room and I was shocked when they said the operation only required a local anesthetic.
“Are you sure?” I asked, nervous. Wasn’t attaching a limb a huge operation?
“Positive. It will be simple and relatively painless.”
“Relatively?”
Before I could protest, two surgeons in green scrubs entered the room and went about cutting into my stump. The pain was intense, not relative. I tried to scream and a nurse filled my mouth with an old, wet leather belt.
I felt every jab of their scalpels as they peeled away flesh, clamped tendons and muscle, poured disinfectant into my exposed nerves. The belt tasted of wet logs and choked off my wailing.
“Won’t be long now,” Dr. Bay said, hovering over my head with a smile. I shot daggers of hate back at him.
“You hear that? That’s the sound of success.”
The two surgeons were working so closely that their heads touched. Their scalpels flitted across the flayed skin of my legs like water bugs.
Click-clack.
Click-clack.
I awoke drenched in sweat, my heart hammering so hard I was seriously concerned it would burst. The pain in my leg was worse than the day after my amputation. The fire and stabbing agony of my dream had followed me.
I lay my hands at my side and felt something damp.
Pulling my palm close to my face, I could see perfectly in the moonlight.
Blood.
My sheets were covered in fresh crimson.
Squirming in terror, my right leg brushed against something hard and jagged under the sheets.
“What the hell?”
Looking down, I saw a solid, tapering mass where there should have been nothing.
Breathing in sharp, shallow gasps, I gripped the top of my sheets.
Counting to three, I pulled the sheets aside and dry heaved.
My leg!
The Landos had not only formed a plastic, toy version of a leg; they had burrowed into my stump, the tiny nubs on their outer planes sinking into flesh, muscle and bone until they were as much a part of me as my normal, right leg.
The hard plastic leg jerked from side to side. I had to stifle a shout when I saw my rectangular toes, two of them red, one green and two more yellow, twitch with life.
With a reflexive thought, I pulled it up, bent at the knee, and stretched it back straight.
My head felt clear for the first time in days. The fever was gone. My fear was gone. In their place was a new leg.
A Lando leg.
A final message had been engineered on my tray.
WE WIN. NOT LONELY.
For the first time, I left the letters where they stood.
Sitting up, I swiveled both legs over the bed, gingerly placing the soles of my feet on the floor.
I wanted to go for a walk. It was a crisp, clear October evening and it called out to me to prowl the silent streets, to put one foot in front of the other, to run, to skip, to dance.
Putting on my robe, I made my way down the stairs.
Thump.
Click.
Thump.
Clack.
Time to walk.
Enough of me. We finally get to this eerie gem by Norm Hendricks. The man’s mind operates in ways that that I’ve always envied. Where I see an object or person or event in black and white, Norm always dives into the gray. And the gray is where the good stuff lives.
PIPER
By Norm Hendricks
Justin Phillips sat on the bed in his cell, his dull eyes looking out the barred window. He waited for the miracle to start before he called for the guard and asked for the exercise yard.
For nearly a year, Justin lived in the Mechanicville town jail. Somewhere, lawyers were playing paper games with the dix trix turnkey. Somewhere, Justin’s fate, sealed as it was, tried to shift away from what the victim’s family wanted. Somewhere, men in suits were making a lot of money on passing papers back and forth concerning a boy everyone wanted dead. Somewhere, someone didn’t know anything about Justin or the fact that he killed Kenny Frasier, but those were places far away, places light years from prison bars and windows cocooned in chicken wire.
Justin knew he killed Kenny Frasier and felt bad about it. Justin had no opinion on his own pending death.
In the end, he knew it made no difference.
Ever since that cop-in-a-suit, the Dix Trix Turnkey, bamboozled Justin's grandfather into bringing Justin in for additional questioning, the thirteen-year-old Justin knew the cops were out to get him and would get their way. Justin didn't know a lot. He knew that
if the cops want a kid, particularly a special kid like Justin, that kid didn't stand a chicken's chance in a fox den.
That's one of Gramps's funny sayings. He had a peck of those sayings mostly concerning farm stuff like chickens and foxes.
Gramps somehow smelled out Justin's secret. He couldn’t of, just couldn’t. The only witness was hidden in the scrub woods at the heart of the neighborhood. Somehow, though, he knew. His grandson had killed little fair-haired Kenny Frasier. He shouldn’t be surprised though; should he? Gramps and he were close. Gramps was the only one who paid close enough attention to Justin to know if anything was wrong.
Justin stood and looked in the mirror, really a section of buffed metal. He saw his close-set eyes and long, drooping ears below his head of angry red hair and felt the familiar hate in him. The hate he held for stupid, ugly boys like the one who looked back at him through the milky sheen of the unbreakable prison mirror. But the dumb-dumb in the mirror was too small to contain his hat so it swelled and flowed, threatening to swell and swallow the world, sometimes even Gramps, or the memory of Gramps.
Justin peered through the chicken wire window at the far end of the parking lot, searching for the sandpipers. He was certain the miracle would happen again. This time he would go when he heard the voice.
Justin didn't remember what stirred up the hate that morning a year ago. It could have been any number of things that reminded him of his ugliness or his stupidity.
He remembered trying to work out the hate in a familiar way. He rode his bike, the one he stole from a kid over in Sumpter, a full ten miles away, too far to go looking for a beat up bike with its seat cushion split in the middle. Up and down the summer green streets of his neighborhood, he had pumped the pedals hard, trying to burn off the hate by driving his leg muscles to the point of cramping.
Hey, it’s just Justin. He’s just Justin and that’s all he’ll ever be. He wasn’t sure if he had actually heard it. Maybe it just floated on the air around Gramps’s house from some old time when some bratty kid had infected him with the hate.
Justin was burning up Front Street when he spotted cute little Kenny Frasier walking on the sidewalk next to the scrub-choked empty lot that ran between Elm and Cypress Streets.
The hate had just begun to leak out through his aching calves when he spotted Kenny Frasier. He saw the soft, adorable sixth-grader in his clean jeans and Aerosmith t-shirt and felt the anger start to build.
"He's so cute, I could just squeeze the air out of him," Marilyn Massi had cooed over the bright, shiny boy one day.
Anger turbo-powered straight on. The hate was burning up the roads in Justin's small brain. Inside hate was a giant wrestler, like The Rock, grabbing parts of Justin’s brain and smashing them like wrestlers do with chairs when they hit their opponent over the back.
Justin saw Kenny and saw the wooded lot. Some older kids had abandoned a fort building project in the thick undergrowth of the scrub woods. Justin knew they left tools.
There would be a hammer.
Justin cruised up on Kenny.
"There's a fort in there you know," Justin announced.
"I know. I watched Russ Micheals take wood through the hole in the prickers," Kenny said defiantly. His voice a high, squeaking scratch on Justin's boiling brain. Inside, The Rock was cooking up something horrible.
"Oh Yeah! Well I helped them put up one of the walls, the one with the big knothole in the wood," Justin said loudly. Kenny didn't seem to have the proper respect for this declaration. Justin jumped off his bike and stood looking down on the younger blond boy. "You don't believe I helped put up a wall?"
"I didn't say that," Kenny said, taking a step back from Justin's anger. Secretly, no words necessary, Kenny knew that Justin really was The Rock. This made Justin smile.
"Come on, I'll show you," Justin said, taking hold of Kenny's small wrist.
"I don't wanna," Kenny said.
He leaned back against Justin's urgent pull.
"What are you, a baby? Afraid of the woods? Baby cakes, baby cakes," Justin called.
"I ain't no baby cakes," Kenny said, relaxing his resistance.
"Come on," Justin said, pulling Kenny onto the foot path beneath a dome of cat briar thickets.
Young sugar maple and sweet gum trees shadowed the path with their late summer plumage. The clay soil between the rows of cat briar was worn and hard. Kenny tripped several times over the intricate piping of roots protruding from the hard pact earth. Justin kept Kenny moving, pulling him by the loose neck of his T-shirt.
They reached the clearing in the finite wilds of the lot where the older boys seemed nearly done with their knot-holed plywood and rotting two-by-four hide out. Now forgotten, it was a little safe haven for dangerous wrestling moves and pot-smoking.
"See there it is!" Justin cried, whipping the smaller boy around to face the uncompleted box.
The fort sat in the east side of the tight clearing. The opening in the ratty woods was shadowed by the over-hang of overgrown forsythia. The golden branches were further clogged by snaking tendrils of wild grape. Most of the summer sun was blocked from reaching the clearing. Shadows deep as potholes rimmed the edge of the fort clearing.
"Yeah, I see it. Can we go now?" Kenny asked.
Justin let go of the shirt collar. The blond boy took a step back, keeping his brilliant blue eyes on Justin.
"I wanna see inside. I bet there's neat stuff in there. Mitch Bender and Robby Wynn told me they got tools from their big brothers, but I didn't believe them," Justin said excitedly.
He went into the fort. The back wall was a square of old plywood – one more square was needed. Half the roof was missing too. A low, brown light leaked into the damp smell of burned leaves. Justin looked around frantically for the tools used to make the dilapidated castle.
There were none on the dirt floor of the cramped fort.
Justin didn't know if Kenny had responded to his cool doubting of the fort's builders, Bender and Wynn. Kenny should be in awe of the way Justin knew so much about the fort and its builders. Kenny was still in the clearing when he emerged from the fort, looking worried. Justin felt like he had to keep talking to keep the chicken Kenny from running away.
"I told them they were liars. Their brothers hate them. They wouldn't give them their snots. Then I saw Terry Bender and Phil Wynn in here smoking weeds with the Tettleton sisters," Justin reported eagerly.
He went around to the rear of the fort and was rewarded with a big black box.
"Weed," Kenny said.
"What?" Justin asked, flipping the top of the steel box.
A lose pile of tools lay at the bottom of the container.
"They were smoking weed, not weeds," Kenny said.
"Right, weed."
The Rock was tramping through Justin’s mind as he put his hand around the wood handle of a fork-clawed hammer. The Rock had arms of steel, chest muscles the size of garbage-can lids. Justin had the hammer.
"Can we leave now, please?"
"Hey! Kenny, you gotta look at this. It's so cool," Justin said, trying to inject his slobbering tones with plastic awe.
He needed Kenny to come around the fort so he could surprise him. Justin was a slow clumsy kid; he knew that much. If Kenny decided to run, he would never get him.
"What?" Kenny asked. He stayed on the other side of the fort's rain softened walls.
"Come see, then we'll go," Justin said.
He remembered being very calm. He was sure Kenny would come around. He had no real reason not to.
Justin remembered smelling the ground's feeble fertility. It reminded him of pulling weeds in his grandfather's garden. Gramps would gently guide and advise him, pointing out the weeds he missed without scolding or hitting.
Justin felt Kenny's frustrated footfalls through the ground and smiled. He kept his back to Kenny and pulled the hammer tightly to his chest. He felt the claw scratch him a little.
"I don't see anything," Kenny whined.
&n
bsp; "In the box."
Justin stood to let Kenny look in the steel tool coffin for the supposed magic. Justin kept his body between the hammer and Kenny’s line of sight.
"It's just a tool box," Kenny said.
He bent to look in the box.
Justin raised his eyebrow just like The Rock and brought the hammer up to his ear. Justin hesitated for a moment. The reality of his actions touched his frustrated brain. For a fraction of second, he heard the echo of his mother's screeching voice. She was the voice of his faltering conscious asking him why he always had to be such a bad boy.
A bad, stupid boy.
“Wha?” Kenny asked, catching Justin’s shadow over him.
“Can you smell what I’m cookin’, Baby Cakes?” Justin shouted inside, his mouth only murmuring.
The hammer came down in a beautiful arc. It was like a giant wrestler launching himself from the ropes. The smooth radial movement of the hammer didn't make Justin smart. It didn't make him handsome.
But it was good. It was his. In this wooded ring it was his move, and it was a doozie.
When the hardened steel of the hammer's head brought a hallow thunk from Kenny's glowing blond head, Justin felt the swell of victory in his dirty underwear, an electricity in his groin.
Kenny fell flat to the ground, his red-splashed head just missing the tool box. He made no move to escape. Justin pounded the golden head to pulp.
At the trial, they said Justin beat Kenny for several minutes, though the first blow knocked the young boy unconscious. Justin supposed that was true.
He remembered he swung the hammer that last time and felt an elated weakness spread through his flabby body.
He dropped the hammer and walked out of the scrub lot, unobserved.
Justin looked out the window of his cell and watched the first drifts of sand crest the weed-choked rise that lined the rear parking lot of the Mechanicville municipal jail and courthouse. Occasionally, when the sand crested, Justin heard the distant mournful cry of sea birds.
