by Graeme Hurry
He says goodnight sweetly and reminds me about the show we are going to see on Friday. I reach, trying to apologize.
‘When are you going to break in my new grill?’
‘How about when you finish unpacking? We’ll have a full-force barbeque once you get your books out of boxes. Maybe we can have my parents over when you are settled.’
‘Really?’ He must hear the eagerness in my voice.
‘It took you three months to get your clothes in a dresser, I’m not holding my breath.’
As he walks down the drive his footsteps sound loud in the cricket infested night.
The last time I lived Out Here, out of a city, out of an understanding of city, was when I was seventeen, before college. At the time it was just Where You Lived. Where everyone I knew lived. I had my first make-out sessions on well-manicured lawns. I cried about getting a C in chemistry on a back patio overlooking a heated pool. I grew up in friend’s parent’s hot tubes. Breaking the law meant standing stoned in the middle Orchid Drive betting on which streetlight would go out next. When I left I never thought I would miss it.
Years of city life, of cement, of drunks and panhandlers, of 24-hour grocery stores, noise and neon, had changed me and now, watching my boyfriend pull away I noticed how he didn’t have to check his mirrors before backing down the drive.
Sprinklers come on. Click and whoosh. I go inside to the little symphony of hums. Hums you would never hear in the city. The dryer, the dishwasher, the bathroom fan. It is so quite that my cat sounds uncoordinated as she jumps off my fourth-hand couch to greet me, grateful to finally be alone.
I pet her. I drink wine. I go to bed.
In the night it comes again.
Muscle and bone. The strange landscape of a torso heaving across my bedroom floor. My floors used to be hard wood. You would hear a body pulling itself along them. You would have heard shins scrape the grain. But on the plush carpet there is no sound, only light reflecting off what shouldn’t be.
I pray. For the first time in years I pray. It feels blasphemous to pray with my eyes open, to pray without the image of God in my mind. I pray, watching sinew slide across bone. I pray watching something deeper than shadow pulling itself closer and closer to my bed. In the abnormal light night of suburbia, I pray.
It moves as if it is dragging an immense weight. If it has hands they could reach my bed, tangle in my covers, weave into my fabrics. If it has a face it could tilt its head and meet my eyes. But it can’t. It isn’t real. It is a trick of the light, a bad dream, poor diet, stress, swamp gas and weather balloons. My prayers turn into desperate justification.
It bumps my bed.
It is so close it would only take looking over the edge to see.
‘You look as if you haven’t slept!’ My mother tells me two seconds after hugging her hello. ‘Those bags under your eyes make you look ten years older.’
‘Thanks, Mom.’
‘Are you having nightmares again?’
‘I’m fine’
‘Is it that new boy you’re seeing? I had such high hopes for this one, but keeping you up all night?’ She shakes the small bouquet on her head disapprovingly. ‘This is the longest relationship you’ve had in what? Eight years?
‘Five’
‘I knew something must be wrong with him. Grown men should know better. A woman without sleep just falls apart. I would expect that kind of selfishness from children, maybe a husband, but a boyfriend?’
‘I keep thinking someone is in my room at night.’
‘That’s ridiculous! That’s a silly thing to dream.’
‘It doesn’t feel like a dream.’
‘Are you seeing a therapist?’
‘What? Mom, no.’
‘Because sometimes we need to talk to people, about things, to people, not to mothers.’
‘It’s just a bad dream.’
‘You should see a professional.’ She looks at me as if she has been waiting for this my whole life. ‘It’s okay to ask for help.’
‘I don’t need a therapist.’
My mother unexpectedly grabs my hand and leans over the table. ‘Wren.’ She looks desperate. ‘Please, get help.’
‘I’m doing fine, just still adjusting to the new house.’
Relief brightens my mother’s face. ‘That must be it. Of course.’
‘Your mom is strange,’ my boyfriend tells me as he opens the door to his high-rise apartment. He gestures towards a gift basket from Strong Men Fitness Magazine. A prominent bottle of protein pills juts out the top of a wicker basket shaped like abs.
‘I think that means she likes you.’
‘There are virility pills in there.’
‘Boundaries aren’t really her thing.’
He smiles at me. ‘You want to try them out?’
A deep satisfying sigh and then:
‘Maybe we should take your mother to The Bodies Exhibit.’
I almost laugh. ‘I’m not sure if it’s something she would enjoy.’
‘It might be good for her.’
‘How exactly would seeing petrified corpses be good for my mother?’
‘I don’t know.’ He props himself on his elbow, ‘Maybe she needs to be reminded she isn’t made out of starched cotton and hat pins.’ This time I really laugh. He pulls himself over me and presses his lips into mine.
‘You have the best laugh.’ A sense of dread starts to fill me. He is over me pushing me down with his weight. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Yeah, I just um… I can’t breathe.’
‘Yes you can.’
‘Could you just get off?’
‘Again? Are you trying to kill me?’
‘Please.’ He moves his weight.
‘You don’t like it when I’m on top of you.’ He says a little dejected.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I won’t crush you.’ He is letting it go. I can tell by the way the muscles around his eyes relax. ‘I know I’ve put on a little weight, but I don’t think I will literally crush the air out of you.’
‘I’ve been meaning to talk to you about the extra weight. I know I didn’t make this clear when we started dating but I really need you to stay beautiful. My love is completely dependent on you always looking good.’ That word snuck in.
‘Well my love is dependent on your mother continuing to send me ‘natural male enhancements.’’
‘Well good, because I’m not sure if I could stop her.’
High above the city streets I sleep through the night for the first time in weeks.
‘What a horrible idea.’ My mother almost shouts, her head jerking back in disgust almost dislodging her current tiny hat clinging to her immobile gray hair.
‘It’s really very interesting.’
‘It’s pornographic,’ My mother whispers at a volume that half the café can hear. ‘They show genitals!’
‘So does Michelangelo.’ My mother gives me a stern look.
‘Really, Wren, I thought you would know the difference between art and rotting bodies.’
‘They aren’t rotting. They’re plasticized. It’s a process through which tissue is preserved…’
‘Bodies belong in the ground.’
‘All of them?’ I love the mischief in his eyes as he speaks to her.
‘Yes, all of them.’
‘Even the living ones?’
‘Living people don’t have bodies. They are just…’ She is flustered; logic will often do this to her. ‘They are human until they die and then they are bodies.’
‘I still think it would be good for her,’ My boyfriend says as he drops me off at my house.
‘A lot of things would.’ We kiss and he backs out of the driveway, making the turn at the end of my block without signaling.
My cat lets me know that she is not pleased with my absence. I am reaching to fill her water bowl when out the kitchen window I glance and see a bloody torso, limbless, suspended in midair. in the backyard somehow without eyes it is stari
ng at me. Instinctively I pretend not to see it. Look down. Water in blow. Cat at feet.
I make tea while not looking at the backyard.
An un-thought name enters me.
Uncle.
My uncle, the one I haven’t seen since I was about four. My dad’s brother who stopped coming to Thanksgivings and Christmases long before I have distinct memories of them. I had to ask my mother who he was last summer when going through old photos. I had almost forgotten my dad had a brother.
‘Where is he now?’ I asked my mother who had tensed just from me resting my finger on his captured image. The picture stood out in an album of frozen smiles with shopping mall backdrops. His back was to the camera, shirt off, muscles made blue and orange by the almost night of the suburbs. He was tossing me, at two or three, high in the air. It was vivid and artistic, bold, where all that surrounded it was planned and pained.
‘Dead.’
‘Oh, did we go to his funeral? I don’t remember.’
‘We didn’t take you. Don’t ask your father about it, it upsets him.’
My mother, who was full of stories about every family member’s flaws and imperfections, slammed the album shut and told me that she didn’t understand why I was being to rude so her that day.
I don’t look out the kitchen window again that night. I keep my eyes down when I cross to the pantry for the food my cat is impatiently demanding. I try not to notice the prickling in my arms as I turn the light out and head for bed. Leaving the cool laminate flooring of the kitchen for the soft as yet unstained wall-to-wall carpet, I avert my eyes from the front windows as well.
A moment before dreaming, my uncle and his one picture come into focus, his back to the camera the lines of muscle. Me small suspended only by time, being pulled into his arms.
Weight.
Pressing weight. On my rib cage. Pressing me into a mattress. I open my eyes and I see wings. Beating with no intention to lift the horrible weight collapsing my lungs. Pressing me down.
That night I remembered. That night it finally crawled into my bed. That night it lurched over the edge of my mattress into my line of view. That night I could no longer pretend. Shoulder blades lit by soft streetlights, pain ripping through my body, the sound of what might be fluttering wings or hot breath close to my ear.
‘You love me,’ says my ex boyfriend. The ex slipping quickly, unstoppably, into no title at all.
‘You love me,’ he says again. It should sound pompous. It should have made things easier, but doesn’t. In his eyes I see a future in an apartment above the city away from the trim grass and rows of brick mailboxes. Away from my memories.
‘I just can’t handle this right now.’
‘It’s your mother,’ he says firmly. Surely. His eyes lose their sparkle of dislike when I can only gently shake my head no.
‘Whatever it is, we can fix it,’ he hesitates. ‘I love you.’ He pleads with his eyes and I can almost trust him, I can almost say the words that have been sticking in my throat for four months.
Then the streetlights click on. He lets out a deep breath and it sounds like wings.
‘Whatever you’re leaving me for, I hope it’s worth it’ he says it softly, almost sweetly. He walks slowly to his car. After a long moment he pulls away without checking his mirror.
The grill has a funny, unused smell as I press the ignite button. The smell only becomes stranger as I tip the eight-hundred dollar Barbeque Master on its side next to the house. For a moment I notice the seller had lied, the siding isn’t wood but some facsimile that burns green and smells like singed Barbie Doll hair.
It’s not the memory of the weight that hurt, not the hot breath, not the searing pain that makes me start the fire. It is the memory of a noise that was so soft you wouldn’t have been able to hear it in the city. A sound that is now so loud it drowns out the crackle of the flames as they crawl up the lattice-work of my home, the sound of footsteps, of my mother’s footsteps on carpet, pausing, waiting, listening, outside my bedroom door and then quietly passing by.
I sit and wait for the sirens, hoping that when they come they will finally obscure the sound I should never have heard.
…OH MY!
by Rhonda Parrish
Kaj hummed the tune to The Lollypop Guild as he skipped toward home. He executed a hop-turn and stumbled. ‘It’s the light,’ he told himself, though he knew it to be a lie. The problem, as evidenced by the fact even the tip of his nose was numb, was all the wine he’d consumed at Boj’s party. His excess was forgivable though, it wasn’t everyday a house dropped out of the sky and squished the Wicked Witch of the East.
Remembering the look on her face as the shadow of the house pinned her in place made him laugh and his giggle ended in a hiccup as he rounded the corner of the tall hedge that circled the town center.
There it was, in the center of town square. The house. Its landing hadn’t done it any favors, it leaned to one side and detritus littered the ground around it. Everything had been left where it fell in order to celebrate the witch’s death but later today they’d have to figure out what to do with it. They couldn’t just leave it; there was the body of a witch under there somewhere.
Kaj peered at it through bloodshot eyes. Houses in Kansas were different than those of Munchkinland. They were bigger, for one thing, and not nearly as colorful. The glass had shattered on impact and the pieces that crunched under his boots as he stepped closer were clear, not tinted every shade of the rainbow like the windows of his own home.
He leaned against the side of the building and stood on his tip toes to peer in a window. Inside, things had been tossed this way and that which made sense since Dorothy said she’d been caught in a twisting wind that wound the house up more than a top.
A scraping sound broke the near silence of the morning and Kaj jumped and looked around. The little flutter of guilt and nerves in his stomach made him laugh at himself. No one else was about, they were all at home asleep or else back at Boj’s enjoying the last of the drink.
Stepping away from the house he dusted his hands off on his dark blue trousers and turned in the direction of home. He’d reached the bushes on the other side of the square when he heard it again. A soft scraping sound coming from Dorothy’s house. Kaj paused, tilted his head and cupped his ear to hear the noise better if it repeated. It did.
He frowned. His imagination immediately going to all the stories about the Wicked Witch of the East from his childhood. Stories about the evil magic she used, the power she had over life and death. His thoughts lingered on the one recurring theme from those stories—only one thing could kill the witch. What if that one thing wasn’t actually a house falling from the sky? What if she hadn’t died after all? What if she was under there trying to claw her way out? But she couldn’t be alive, could she? Dorothy had taken her slippers off and that couldn’t happen while the witch still breathed and he’d seen with his very own eyes how her feet curled up and withered beneath the house.
The noise came again. A scratching, scraping noise that was becoming louder, louder and more persistent. If it wasn’t the witch, someone or something else was in there. It’s just a rat, he told himself, but his feet didn’t obey his halfhearted command to keep walking home.
‘Hullo?’ he called, surprised to hear how weak his voice sounded, how thin. The sound came again and this time he thought he saw, through the window, some of the shadows inside shift. ‘Hullo?’
‘Hullo!’ a voice behind him said cheerily.
Kaj jumped, swallowing the scream that had flown up into his throat, and spun around to find Mooki smiling at him. ‘Gah! I—that is, you startled me.’
‘Well,’ Mooki said, ‘you did say hullo.’
Mooki’s face was flushed and his eyes glassy. Kaj had seen him at Boj’s party and could guess the cause for both. Realizing that he was the more sober of the two made Kaj smile and, for some reason increased his confidence. He straightened his shoulders and nodded toward Dorothy’s house.
‘I thought I saw something in there.’
‘In the house?’ Mooki leaned forward dramatically, his eyes narrowed as he squinted at the building.
‘Yes, there was a sound—there. That’s it. Did you hear that?’
Mooki’s eyes widened and he nodded. ‘I did! What do you suppose it is?’
‘I don’t know,’ Kaj answered then raised an eyebrow. ‘Why don’t you go find out?’
‘Okay,’ Mooki shrugged and took a crooked step toward the door. Kaj grabbed his sleeve to pull him back, and Mooki stumbled and turned nearly full circle in order to regain his balance. When he recovered his footing he squinted at Kaj. ‘Whaddjya do that for?’
‘What if it’s the witch?’
‘If it’s the witch we have big problems. She’s dead.’ Mooki laughed and started walking back toward the house. ‘It’s probably a cat.’
The sound came again, a ripping noise, like wood being splintered, and Mooki paused but then continued. Kaj let him go.
Kaj took a seat by the bushes and watched as Mooki opened the door and stood in the opening. He looked bizarrely out of proportion, the doorknob was almost taller than he was.
‘Hullo?’ Mooki called, then he stepped into the house.
Moments later, Mooki’s scream preceded him out the door. He didn’t run out, he fell. His legs were still in the house while his upper body stuck out the door. Even across the distance that separated them Kaj could see his friend’s face, mutated by terror. Mooki was scrambling, arms flailing wildly as he dragged himself out the door.
Kaj stumbled toward Mooki as his screams reached a pitch higher than Kaj had ever heard before. Mooki dragged his lower body from the house just as Kaj came within spitting distance. His legs were a bloody mess. Kaj was stunned, he’d never seen an injury like that before and no idea idea what could cause it. Mookie crawled a short distance away and then collapsed onto the ground. Great waves of blood gushed out of his thigh with regularity Kaj immediately identified as his heartbeat.
Kaj ran toward his friend, pressing his palms against the throbbing wound. As Mooki’s life gushed out of him, Kaj knew there was nothing he could do. ‘Oh Mooki! What happened to you?’ he cried. Mooki was beyond answering. His eyelids fluttered and he fell limp in Kaj’s arms.
