by Mark Morris
* * *
Owen, what do you have?
Nothing.
Seriously. Tell me.
Nothing.
Don’t be a shit. I won’t tell Dad.
(nothing)
Did you steal something? You can’t be—
I found it.
Where?
Outside.
————What is it?
(nothing)
It better not be a mouse or a squirrel or something. Or like a shrew? Is it a shrew? You can’t keep that in here.
It’s not.
What is it? Tell me?
(nothing)
* * *
I could rip it out of his hands and look inside, but I won’t. I could hit him and then take it away from him but I won’t. I don’t hit him, not ever, but that awful terrible no-good thought flickers through my brain like someone waving a flashlight in my face (I see myself hitting him and what I see is more bright than what I normally see and then it goes dark in my head when I shake the thought away or say no no no but then it flashes bright again when I see myself hitting him again and again), and maybe because I don’t hit him I think about hitting him more (and I’m afraid I’m thinking about it more and more because I’m getting older and I’m afraid that’s what goes on in all adults’ heads. I’m afraid all they think about is doing violent, terrible no-good things, and especially to the people they’re supposed to take care of, I mean all the violence in the world has to start in our heads first, right, and I’m mostly afraid I’m thinking like Dad when he stabbed Owen’s Nerf dart gun through the plaster in his bedroom and I’m thinking like Mom when she would tell me what an awful stupid fat-ass daughter I was or like when she wouldn’t say anything to me and just stare at me with her mouth closed so tight and I could hear her saying nothing to me). I won’t ever hit Owen (I’d chew my own hand off first) but it’s hard, it’s all so hard, but I can’t believe he won’t tell me what it is, whatever it is inside the cardboard shoebox that is dark green and doesn’t have a logo, which is weird, I mean, everything has a logo on it, so maybe it isn’t a shoebox (or sneakerbox, I think they should call them sneakerboxes) and is just a rando box. It’s smeared with dirt and mud and there are dark spots on the cover and on the sides, and those dark spots look like the grease spots on the inside cover of a pizza box, so now I’m thinking that whatever is inside the box is nasty and leaking through the cardboard, and I want to tell Owen to wash his hands, but then he’s scurrying past me, or trying to, and I block him, tickle his stomach with my left hand (there really isn’t any stomach to tickle, only his sticklike ribs) and grab for the box with my right, and it works, kind of, because he flinches and for a second I have the box balanced in my hand, only it isn’t very balanced and whatever is inside of it shifts, and whatever it is inside of it feels blob-like, oozy, and it’s so gross I might throw up. Actually, it’s so gross I’m past throwing up because my stomach turns to goo and sloshes down into my toes, and more gross, the bottom of the box, the underside, feels damp, and then, oh my god, the smell, worse than the smell that comes out of the laundry room on a hot day, worse than the septic tank being pumped, and even worse than opening that garbage bag I didn’t realize was full of months-old garbage (because it was sitting in the hall coat closet we never use anymore and I only looked in it because Dad left the doors open and I thought it might be the dolls and toys that manic-phase Mom collected in a “Morgie” bag (and she never told me what Morgie meant or stood for but only that was where your old stuff went to give to the poor people (like us now))), and then Owen whines like a puppy, swats my hand away, and his eyes are all red like he’s been crying and they’re sunken into his head too, and then he is past me and running down the hall, bouncing between all the bags and junk like a miniparkour pro. I yell after him and then Dad slur-shouts something from the TV room, so I stop running, frozen in place, and I don’t want to talk to him now and I tell him to go back to sleep in my head, which I know never really works but it works this time, but it doesn’t matter because Owen gets away and locks himself in his room. I wait until Dad is out again and I tiptoe past him down the hall to Owen’s closed door and I smell the box’s smell (and still feel the box’s feel on the tips (and the insides, I swear) of my fingers).
* * *
Owen. Come on.
(nothing)
Can I see it?
No.
Why not?
(nothing)
This is stupid. Just let me in.
No. Go away. Please.
You can’t stay in there forever. I’m gonna get in there and I’m gonna see it.
(nothing)
* * *
I go to my room and shut the door and instead of screaming or crying or trashing everything, I neaten (old-Mom’s old word) it some more (the room is already clean, so clean you could eat off it (something Mom, old-Mom, used to say with a smile) so it’s like straightening, or picking up stuff and putting it back where it was), and, I’m telling you, neatening is something I never did before Mom left, before things got worse-worse. When I was Owen’s age my room was a pit and I loved it, owned it and it really was a beautiful pit, but now it isn’t. Clothes are in my bureau and hanging up in my closet and books are on the bookshelf and everything has a place (the glass in my two windows are cracked and have pieces missing but you can’t really see it (but you can feel it on cold nights) unless you open the curtains, and I would fix it if I could, but I don’t know how to unbreak broken glass), and none of it makes me feel better, and it makes me feel anxious because my room is the nexus of the universe (something me and Stacey came up with, or she came up with it because the word nexus was in a book she read, she loves to read (I have too much time to read so I don’t and I can’t stay in my head that long without other stuff creeping in so I draw sometimes but most of the time I shut off my brain watching music videos on YouTube and videos that show ghosts are real even though I think most of them are faking even if I want them not to be), or if I’m not that important to be the nexus of the universe, my room is the nexus of this house, which means I have to keep my room like this or the worse-worse will get even worse (it can always get worse) and everything will come crashing down). I try to FaceTime Stacey but she isn’t answering and I hope she isn’t mad at me and I think about making my own video to show her what the rest of the house looks like (besides my room, which she sees every night when we talk) but I hear Dad up and creeping around the house like a creep, and the wooden floors creak and groan and are so tired under him, and then it’s already dinner time, or what is supposed to be dinner time, and I leave my room (with one of my clean bowls, and I hold it like a shield), and Dad is back on the couch eating Pop Tarts and drinking beer, and we still have these plastic one-serving cups of mac ’n cheese and I make one for myself, three minutes thirty seconds in the microwave and add the radioactive yellow cheese dust, and I pour the stuff into my clean bowl (I won’t eat out of the microwaved plastic cup because I don’t trust it’s not melted) and toss the plastic into the full sink because I don’t care if the kitchen is clean or not because the kitchen isn’t the nexus. I stand and eat quickly even though the mac ’n cheese lava burns my tongue and the roof of my mouth and I think about making Owen a bowl and bringing it to him because a good big sister would do that, but I don’t feel good right now, and I’m going to wait him out of his room, like waiting is some action, a thing that I can throw against his door and break it open, but I don’t want to wait, I so don’t want to wait I even go into the TV room to talk to Dad.
* * *
Owen won’t come out of his room for dinner.
I’ll take care of it.
He needs to eat.
Worry about yourself.
Dad—
He’ll eat when he wants to.
(nothing)
* * *
This isn’t going to go well because I know, I can feel it, that Owen shouldn’t be in his room by himself with whatever it is he found in that
box, that dead-smelling thing, and that’s all I can imagine is in the box, some dead thing, and why would he save that?, and I picture him just staring into the box at some awful mess that used to be alive, and there’s blood and ripped-up fur and pink guts and dark, empty eye sockets (and in my head the eye sockets look like his do now, and then I can’t unsee Owen standing there looking into the cardboard box with no eyes, with nothing eyes) and I see him touching it and he’s there in his room crying by himself and he’s sad for the dead thing because he doesn’t really understand what dead means, and I think he thinks it means you simply go away when you’re dead because like a week after Mom left he asked if she was dead and Dad laughed and said Why not? So I’m standing here with steam coming out of my mac ’n cheese bowl and it feels like it’s coming out of my ears too because I’m so mad and so don’t-know-what-to-do and I stomp out of the TV room the way Dad hates, like really hates, and I yell at Owen to come out and bring out the shoebox and I pound on his door, and then Dad comes thundering down the hallway yelling at me, at us, at everything. Normally Dad being Dad would turn me quiet and small but I’m so mad I don’t really hear him and it sounds like everything is underwater and I throw my bowl at Owen’s bedroom door and it bounces off and shatters on the floor and Dad is too drunk-slow to grab me but it doesn’t stop him from wrecking-balling into a wall trying to block my escape, but I easily sidestep him and duck into my own room and lock the door and then he’s banging on my door swearing at me and calling me names and saying I’m just like Mom but I don’t care about any of that and I let his pounding and yelling be underwater sounds, but I’m crying because I broke the bowl and now there’s only one clean one in the whole fucking stupid fucking house.
* * *
* * *
I wake up and it’s the kind of dark that fills you through more than just your eyes (when I was little I used to ask my parents about how I slept at night because I didn’t like thinking about me lying there with my mouth open so anything could go inside and I wouldn’t know and I would get upset and ask them to check on me (this is what they used to tell me) and push my mouth closed if it was open before they went to bed and I’d ask them to double and triple check my mouth if they woke up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom). The house feels quiet but like a fake kind of quiet, like there are things crouched and waiting to jump out at me and then I realize there are noises in the hallway and they were there when I woke up and I heard them without hearing them which means the sounds were probably there when I was asleep too, and that makes it sound worse now, so I listen and I don’t know what is making those wet sounds, not like something dripping, but more like a squish, a wet sponge in a fist, and then maybe that sponge is sliding and slurping across a door, not my door but Owen’s. I sneak out of my bed, grab my phone (I fell asleep watching videos and I didn’t plug in and charge so there’s only three per cent battery left) and sneak across the room and stand with my ear only inches away from my door and I cover my mouth (not because I think something will go inside) to keep from breathing too loudly and keep myself from calling out, not because I think Dad is out there cleaning (yeah, like he’d ever be out there cleaning, ever, never mind the middle of the night when he’s likely a case of beer deep into his blackout) but because it must be Owen cleaning up the mac ’n cheese mess, and that means he’s out of his room, standing in front of his door and that means his door is not locked and if it’s not locked, then I’ll be able to get in his room and to the shoebox if I’m quick and I’m careful, and no, forget quick, I don’t want to scare him, so I turn the knob slow and hope he doesn’t hear the little click that sounds like a crash, and I’m about to open the door when I notice there’s no light coming from the hallway, and I used to always go to bed with the hall light on and I’d stare at that glowing line under my door until I fell asleep, so, okay, that’s really weird, right?, I mean, why would Owen be out there cleaning up in the dark (he hates the dark more than I ever did and he usually sleeps with a light on in his room)? He must really be trying to not wake me or Dad up, and if he doesn’t want to wake me it’s because he doesn’t want me going into his room, and it’s like he’s making me and Dad out to be the same person, and we’re so not, and I want to cry and instead I open the door and start to tell Owen that I’m sorry I was all over him earlier and that I grabbed the box away from him and that I won’t make him do anything he doesn’t want me to do or see and maybe I can help him clean up the mess and then I’m worrying he’s out in his bare feet and there are probably still big shards of broken cereal bowl on the floor (when I was seven I cut my wrist and had to get stitches after falling on a broken coffee mug and the scar is a fat red worm or a slug curling down my wrist), and then my door is wide open and the hallway is so dark and empty, and it’s hard to tell but there’s no outline of Owen standing in front of his door at the end of the hallway, but I think the door is open, and, yes, it is and it’s open into more darkness. I’m standing there in the hallway and the wet sounds have stopped and I hear my ears trying to hear in the silence and there’s a small, muffled clap from down the hall, near the collection of dark lumps that is the broken cereal bowl, at least I think it’s the cereal bowl, and I turn on my phone’s flashlight app, and the light it throws is a weird white, like bones on an X-ray, and on the floor is Owen’s shoebox, all by itself, I mean there’s no cereal bowl and the mac ’n cheese mess is all gone, just the shoebox, and it looks bigger than I remember it, way bigger actually, like it almost stretches from wall to wall in the hallway, and is it a different box? Its colour is hard to tell in the flashlight, but I can see some of those damp spots on the cover, and it’s a few feet away from Owen’s door and I can’t smell it, but I know if I get closer I would, so do I get closer? This is my chance to see inside of it, yeah? Instead I stand there and listen and there’s only the electric hum of the fridge coming from the kitchen, and I whisper Owen’s name, and he must be in his room because I don’t hear him in the bathroom or in the kitchen or anywhere, I mean, he was just out here cleaning up the mess, right? That’s what I heard, I swear, and I don’t know why he’d leave the box on the floor and his door open, and my feet finally shuffle forward and then the phone flashlight dies and it’s like the house and the world and everything went away and left me floating in darkness, and I blink my eyelids as fast as a hummingbird’s wings trying to adjust, and I say Owen’s name again, a little louder and a little less braver, and instead of the shoebox I look where his open door is and I can sorta make out the doorframe and then within that dark I see something move, or I think I do, sliding around the corner, coming out from Owen’s room, or more like the shape is expanding, like how a balloon fills up, and it’s big, or tall, and it’s not Owen, way too big for Owen, so it’s Dad, but that’s me putting the math of who’s in the house together to come up with it’s Dad because I swear it doesn’t feel like it’s Dad and I know middle-of-the-night-stuff is always weird and wrong and off but I’m totally awake and totally aware, like super-aware, like an animal instinct aware, right, and I can’t see Dad, and he doesn’t say anything to me, which is whatever because he’s probably drunk, but again this doesn’t seem like what’s going on, and now his breathing sounds broken down and not in rhythm, and like real underwater sounds, and he must’ve knocked the box over (not that I hear it) because the dead thing smell takes over the hallway and I cough and I back up and go into my room and shut the door and run to my bed and go under the covers and I leave the light off because I don’t want him to know I’m awake, if he’s drunk enough he’ll forget or not bother, and I’m always dying and surviving because of his not-bother, and the hallway floor creaks with his weight then the creaking stops, and it didn’t stop in front of my door, and there’s a long nothing, the longest nothing, and my mouth is covered and I breathe through my nose just in case, and then I hear the cardboard box sliding on the hallway floor, slowly, sliding away down the hall, away from my door, and in my head I see Owen (not Dad) dragging the box ac
ross the floor and into his room because it’s now too heavy for him to carry.
