by Scott Hale
“Until then, let’s touch base with the head coach of the Brooksville Bombers to discuss the big game coming up this Friday.”
With nothing in his stomach but painkillers, Dario drove in a daze to the restaurant. The date was at 6:45 PM, and he didn’t find a parking spot in the adjacent lot until 6:55 PM. He didn’t bother paying the meter. He already didn’t look good. Being late would make him look even worse.
After a string of screwed-up faces and scathing comments about his appearance, Dario made it through the throngs of twenty-somethings and into the restaurant. While he waited in the lobby, listening to the clink of silverware and teeth on porcelain and glass, two young women with rainbow-colored hair were standing in the corner, staring into their cell phones, speaking to one another without making eye contact. The skinnier of the two was the more domineering, and she told her “friend” she better not blog about the Brooksville Manor incident first, as she, having the most followers, should be the one to raise awareness and support.
Dario gave his name to the busser. They asked him if he was okay, but started leading him to his table before he could answer. He expected that his wife and daughter would be holed-up somewhere in the back of the restaurant, where the shadows were thickest, so one else would see them sitting with him and get to thinking things they shouldn’t be thinking. He was expecting this, and banking on this, but this wasn’t the case at all.
The busser made the first right turn around the second set of booths, and there his wife and daughter were, more beautiful and enchanting than ever.
His wife’s name was Michelle, and she was sitting with her hands folded in her lap, the black dress she wore sparkling like the stars he’d seen in the deep of the Abyss. It had been four years since he’d seen her in person, and she hadn’t aged a day. She looked better than ever. Her blonde hair was fuller, more vibrant. Her skin looked great, and she had lost the weight she always talked about losing.
His daughter’s name was Sarah, and she was sitting opposite her mother with her hands wrapped around a cup of soda, and a look of shock on her face. She was wearing a blouse and jeans, and her dark brown hair had gotten so long that it went almost down to her waist. While Michelle looked the same, Sarah looked like a completely different person entirely. She had been ten on the final days of the split, and now she was fourteen, almost fifteen. Though she still had some years to ago, to Dario, she was a woman. She had that look about her, in her eyes, at the corners of her mouth. She had learned to make do without a father, and now that he was here before her, she didn’t seem to need him anymore.
Michelle pressed her fingers to her lips and in that kind voice he’d thought she’d lost for him, on that day when she found the needle in his arm, she said, “Dario?”
Driving to the restaurant, Dario knew that his wife and daughter would see how terrible he looked and ask him what had happened. He had recited what he was going to say, how he was going to say it, and he had promised himself that he would not spare any details, be it about Ruth Ashcroft, E.A.973, the Membrane, the Maggot, or the Vermillion God. Despite how insane or impossible these things would seem to his wife and daughter, he had to say them, because they were the truth, and he knew that, if he didn’t, he would bury them in the deepest recesses of his mind, deeper even than where he’d put the skeletons he'd recently unearthed. Michelle had reached out to him because time had passed and people were supposed to change with time. If he wasn’t honest, he wasn’t anything. He knew that now.
Sarah finally let go of the cup, condensation dripping off her fingers, and mumbled, “Dad?” She looked around—he was starting to draw attention—and said even more quietly, “Are you okay?”
He almost laughed. Instead, he stepped closer to the table and debated on who he should sit next to. Already he was trying to avoid the—
“Dario,” Michelle said, “what happened to you?”
Sarah. He would sit next to Sarah. Like an old man getting into their wheelchair, Dario lowered himself into the booth. His broken ankle snagged on the side of the seat, and he let out a small, pathetic yelp.
“Jesus Christ.” Michelle was losing her patience. There was that harsh tone he remembered and deserved. “Dario?”
“I—” He smiled at his daughter and wanted nothing more than to hug her. “I was working today. I… I was at Brooksville Manor when it… collapsed.”
“Holy shit,” Sarah said.
“Sarah, watch your mouth,” Michelle said reflexively.
That made Dario smile.
Eyes wide like oceans, Sarah said to him, “Do you know what happened there?”
Dario opened his mouth, and on his tongue, he had maggots, faces shaped like blood-drops, and a vermillion woman reduced to the symbol of the faith she wanted to destroy, now crowned atop her wriggling weapon’s killing head. He had children screaming in his ears for their mother, and a butcher knife that had severed centuries of families. In his heart he had fear, and in his gut, an anxious mire formed from the run-off of the Membrane. And in his mind… and in his mind, there was a grave. At this grave, he stood no longer alone. His wife and daughter were there, shovels in their hands, waiting for him to make the final call.
“No,” Dario said, nearly choking on the lie. “I don’t. I got out. I didn’t see anything.”
Michelle put her hands together as if she meant to pray, and pressed her face into her palms.
Sarah chewed on her lip, and the woman she’d become was lost to the little girl he remembered.
Dario faked a smile, thought up a fake story, and took his memory of the Maggot and buried it deep inside himself; in that dark place beyond consciousness, where women like Ruth Ashcroft reigned supreme, where hells like Brooksville Manor thrived; where all the painful, hurtful, terrible, disgusting, disappointing mistakes humanity and himself tended to make—where the skeletons swam in their soil, the ghosts haunted their skulls, and the bats in the belfry sang madness at the midnight hour; to that shed, where the creeping things keep each other company, that forgotten place, that forlorn place—that necessary place, where the dead go to die.
AUGURS
Lux, Fenton, Ramona, Asher, and Echo sat in quiet contemplation as they nursed their coffees on the Grindout’s patio and considered Salinger Stevens, a twenty-one-year-old, white, poor but still over-privileged, cisgender male whom they hadn’t cared for in high school, and who they now couldn’t stop talking about, as he had been found dead in his apartment last night, his head degloved, with small worm-shaped lacerations on his chest that formed the word ‘faggot.’ While his death was, ultimately, the centerpiece of the conversation, they kept finding themselves coming back to his sexual orientation, because each of them, with the exception of Ramona, had been completely convinced he was straight. After all, the group considered themselves excellent, if not almost prophetic, judges of character, which either meant the murderer incorrectly spelled the word (‘Maggot’ was Fenton’s suggestion), or that Salinger was actually straight, and that this crime was no more than a message directed at their leader, Lux, and her sidekick, Echo. Begrudgingly, Lux did admit that the murder may have been a sick threat to the whole of the LGBTQIA community in their town, or if nothing else, just their group, being that they were so popular. Nevertheless, they were, each of them, gender-fluid; and living in a place named Bitter Springs, it was, to them, only a matter of time until the waters soured. Or so Lux preached; the others agreed it wasn’t the most successful of similes, but Echo liked it well enough. That was generally the way of things.
“Good lord, who do you think you found Salinger?” Fenton asked, cringing. “I hope it wasn’t his mom. She’s a sweet one.”
Asher scoffed. “Ms. Salinger’s a sweet one? Honey, I saw her wrestle a holiday ham out of Sister Mary Pascal’s arms. She was putting on the brass knuckles by the time security rolled up.”
“Oh, come on.” Fenton rolled his eyes. “Everyone gets a little impatient during the holidays.”
“H
olidays? That was last week, Fen.” Asher laughed into his coffee as he sucked up the drink and the steam coming off it. “That woman gives me the willies.”
“Strong women freak you out, huh?” Ramona chimed in, eyebrows raised so high they joined her hairline. “Color me surprised.”
“Thought someone already did,” Asher said. “Or was it you just got into the box of crayons?”
Fenton, incurably gullible, became concerned. “Ramona, you’re not starving yourself again?”
Ramona’s face turned radical red, with that waxy, crayon coating to boot, and said, “You’re an idiot. Fuck you both.”
At the head of the table, Lux cleared her throat so hard it sounded as if she’d been gargling gravel the entire time. Echo, her right-hand woman to her right, pleaded to the others with her wide and permanently watery eyes for them to be quiet. She hadn’t always looked that way, but Lux meant ‘light,’ and she was the one thing Echo couldn’t look away from. Ramona had warned her once, when they were both good and liquored-up, that Lux was like the sun—that if you followed her too long, you’d end up blind and somewhere you never intended to be. Good as the advice might’ve sounded, neither of them had listened to it. They’d been following Lux’s path for as long they could remember; there was no safety to be found in the shadows she cast.
“Let’s get serious,” Lux said.
Echo nodded, echoing her sentiment.
The Grindout’s patio was empty today. It was Sunday, and the good people of Bitter Springs were getting their routine doses of godliness at the various churches and chapels scattered across the town and the forest of Maidenwood. Atheism was in right now, so most of the youth had skipped the pews for a seat at their favorite coffee shop, bookstore, or hole in the wall dive that didn’t serve anything with a soul. Though the congregated youth would never admit it, these Sunday mornings were their own form of Mass; the multi-syllabic foods and drinks, their host and wine, and the hot-off-the-Internet controversy, their gospel. And just like church, they’d feign kindness, and interest, until the service was over, and they could conjure up with all their shit-talking, a storm of epic proportions that would see them through the week until their next date with drama.
“We’re not going to let this blow over like the Brooksville Manor collapse,” Lux continued.
Ramona piped up. “Salinger’s a white man from the suburbs. It’s not going to blow over.” Being 1/64th Asian, she felt qualified to make such statements. “Hate crimes are all the rage.”
“Don’t minimize it,” Lux said.
“Yeah, come on, don’t,” Echo repeated.
“Bitter Springs, Bedlam, and Brooksville are, basically, a microcosm for this whole corrupted country,” Lux said. “If we can make a difference here, it stands to reason we can make a difference elsewhere, right? I mean, I have so many followers online.”
Echo nodded enthusiastically; Ramona, Asher, and Fenton less so, given that they’d been reminded of the fact almost every day of every week.
“Like the rest of the world, this is something very wrong with our town. A low-income apartment complex collapses and no one bats an eye? And now someone is targeting the sexual norms of Bitter Springs? Come on, now. Everyone else here might be blind—” Lux said this loud enough for everyone on the coffee shop patio and outside it to hear, “—but I know we’re not. We see things other people cannot or will not see. We say things people cannot or will not say.” She licked her lips and leaned into the table, banging her coffee down on it, like a gavel. “What’s wrong with being brutally honest?”
Echo shook her head, and shrugged.
“No one changed the world by asking it nicely to do so.”
“We should put that on a banner,” Asher said. “In bold, bright, blood-red. We can use Ramona’s crayon box for that.”
Ramona opened her mouth to yell at him again, but her smile stopped her.
“That might clash with the message we’re trying to send, especially in the safe spaces around town,” Fenton said.
“Yeah, but how did we get those safe spaces?” Lux asked.
Cringing, Fenton said, “We were a little brutal, weren’t we?”
Ramona said, “Got to be with these fat… not shaming, you know what I mean.”
Together, the group nodded in agreement.
“Fat fucking bigwigs running the show around here,” she went on. “Goddamn. Makes me so mad. Pull up the carpet they’ve been sweeping everything under and you’ll find a full-on graveyard.”
“Exactly, exactly!” Lux leaned back in her chair, as the rest of her congregation moved to the edges of theirs. “I don’t want to be a victim ever again.”
“Neither do I,” Asher said quietly.
Fenton shook his head, eyes downcast.
Ramona spit.
Echo kept her attention locked on Lux, and reflected her hard exterior.
Lux took a sip of coffee as if it might be her last and said, “What do know about Salinger Stevens?”
“Salinger Stevens,” Fenton started. “A twenty-one-year-old white, allegedly straight male from a middle-class family. His dad left about the time we were in… fifth grade? Sixth grade?”
“Sixth grade,” Asher said. “He was the first to get hit badly with acne. Guessing it was the stress of his daddy leaving that aggravated that mess.”
“No guessing,” Ramona said. “Definitely was.”
“His mom, Judy, as we discussed, is a… tough woman,” Fenton said.
“Bet you she’s a femme.” Asher nodded. “The butch act isn’t fooling anyone. I’ve seen her getting fresh with Mom.”
“How the hell you know so much about Judy Salinger?” Ramona asked. “Never mind. I do not want to know.”
Asher winked at Ramona, and bit into his knuckle.
Fenton continued. “Salinger worked at the Lawn and Garden over on Cadence Street. Full-time. He’d been there for little over a year. No jobs before that. According to his page, he wasn’t with anyone, but I’d heard rumors he had been seeing Lauren over in Brooksville after her friend, Beatrice, was found dead in Maidenwood.”
“White girl ends up dead in the forest? Damn near national news.” Ramona’s cheek quivered. “I do get it, Lux. I’m sorry Brooksville Manor never panned out.”
Lux waved her off, as if she wasn’t bothered. But they all know how much time Lux had spent in trying to raise awareness for the low-income families in the tri-county area. The sum total of her efforts had resulted in five-hundred-dollars from a few, rich, guilty white families and the aforementioned safe spaces—one on the high school campus, and one here at this coffee shop. The idea of having the safe spaces in Bitter Springs rather than Brooksville was to encourage those who were sick of the institutionalized racism embedded in the Brooksville system to come to Bitter Springs, to show their discontent and to be part of Lux’s plan of making the town a safe haven for minorities. No one ever showed up the safe spaces, except for a handful of freshmen and sophomores who had recently come out as furries and transsexuals. Bummed by the response, Lux ended up blowing the five-hundred-bucks at a micro-brewery on the riverfront, where she rented the place out and turned it into an echo chamber, to have her beliefs confirmed by her peers and sooth her bruised ego.
When Echo told her later that night the gathering had been a success in strengthening the support network for minorities in the tri-county area—two suicidal teens chose life that night—Lux laughed it off and told her to turn off the lights.
“He was a jock all throughout high school,” Fenton said, “but he didn’t want to get into college for his sports performance alone. He volunteered at the soup kitchens during the winter.”
Asher said, “Aw,” and rolled his eyes.
“Smoked a lot of weed his senior year. His group of friends got smaller and smaller. His last girlfriend, before Lauren, if she counts, dumped him the night after prom. Posted on her page afterwards that the only time he could get it up was if he was looking at himself
in the mirror.”
“And his mom has a wicked rage when it comes to holiday hams,” Asher said. “Don’t forget that detail.”
Echo snorted.
Lux did not react at all.
“He was pretty conservative last time I saw anything from him,” Ramona said. “Made some stupid ass comment after the Brooksville thing about how there went more of his tax dollars to pay for the poor’s mistakes. Or some shit like that. I don’t know.”
This time, Lux did react. She had a grin on her face. “He said, ‘Everyone’s asking for hand-outs, when we should be giving them hand-jobs. That’ll shut them up.’”
“Pig,” Ramona said, hate-drinking her coffee.
Asher threw up his arms. “Man’s got a point—”
Lux shook her head, and the color left Asher’s face.
“He was a really nice guy in high school,” Fenton said.
“Was being the operative word,” Ramona corrected.
“So, what changed?” Fenton chewed on the inside of his lip. “Do you think everything went downhill after his dad left?”
“One less man in the house?” Lux chuckled. “Should’ve been smooth sailing from then on out.”
Echo, who had been so quiet it was if she had faded out of existence, cleared her throat and said, “I went over to his house once, like two years ago, when I was a junior, I think?”
Lux shot her a damning glare.
“I… I was with my mom. She had to drop something off. Ms. Salinger invited us in.”
“What’d you see, honey?” Asher said.
“Nothing… Well, I mean, his house seemed normal.”
Ramona scoffed. “Don’t they all?”
“I had to go the bathroom. I used the one closest to his room. I didn’t get a good look inside it, but in the bathroom, I started to snoop.”
Lux relaxed and took Echo’s hand and started rubbing her fingers.
“There were pills, prescriptions, for depression and anxiety. I… can’t remember… the names of them. But, yeah.”
