City Fishing

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  Richard, eager to play along, ran over to the train transformer and turned it on. Annie stood a few feet away, waiting, then suddenly ran toward the tracks. “I’ll save you, Barbie!” and picked up the doll before the train arrived. As a child, Paul had always pretended to be his own father in such heroic games, playing out the John Wayne role. His father had been as distant and mysterious to him as these plastic heroes must be to his own kids.

  He stood by the window, staring at the burned-out husk of the Reynolds house across the street. Two weeks ago Jay Reynolds had carried two of his children out of that fire to safety. He’d been burnt over thirty percent of his body. Since then the neighbors had discussed Jay with a peculiar mix of awe and abhorrence. Consequently, no one had bothered to visit Reynolds in the hospital.

  Paul imagined a truck careening across his front yard, and his last minute dive and tackle that saved Annie and her doll.

  He imagined Richard caught in a gas explosion, and his futile efforts to save his son who was dissolving within the flames.

  Paul was always one of the last to open his presents. Not so much because he had grown disenchanted with Christmas—which he had—but because the kids’ gifts blocked most of the tree and he had a hard time finding any marked for him.

  He thought he’d opened them all—thanking his brood for socks and ties and belts and a heavy robe and two sets of metric wrenches—when Richard pulled out a small package from under the backside of the tree. “One more, Dad.”

  Richard brought it over and dropped it into his lap. The packaging was interesting: it looked like metallic red foil, but felt more like plastic. A small plastic card with his name in crisp black lettering graced the front. The wrapping was fastened in back by what looked like an irregular round seal of the same material as the wrapping.

  “Who’s it from?” He looked around the living room.

  Everyone denied knowledge of it. Finally his wife said, “It’s probably from one of your friends. They must have slipped it behind the tree during the party last night.”

  Paul looked at the tree. Impossible. There’d been far too many packages piled in front for anyone to slip back there. He lifted the front of the card. Inside, in the same black lettering, were the words:

  WHAT YOU WANTED

  He turned the package over and tried to peel the seal off with his fingernail. It didn’t budge to his efforts, but then suddenly the wrapping straightened out, the sides of the box hinged, and a small object tumbled to the carpet.

  Paul picked it up carefully. It was a miniature sculpture of some sort of fantastic insect, done in something like brass, something like copper, with jeweled eyes and a highly-burnished thorax.

  “How cute!” Alice cried. Paul found he couldn’t say anything for a moment.

  “I think it’s some sort of fancy Christmas tree ornament,” he finally said. It was delicate, and so precise in its details that he wondered whether it was an exact replica of some exotic species of insect.

  “Whatcha gonna do with it, Daddy?” Annie asked, without taking her eyes off her Barbie doll.

  “Hang it on the tree,” he said, suddenly so giddy he was almost laughing.

  He walked over to the tree and, reaching as far as he could, placed the insect near the top. He stepped back to admire it. It was amazing, the way its shiny surfaces caught the multicolored lights and seemed to blend them, hold them fast within its metal.

  “Ooooh, pretty,” Annie said.

  “Yes. It is nice,” Paul said proudly.

  A couple of hours after lunch Paul was sitting by himself in the living room, gazing at his ornament, drinking again. He’d needed a break. Annie had temporarily lost one of her dolls (it would show up a couple of days later behind a piece of furniture), and Richard had broken one of his military pieces and lost several of the smaller “personal accessories” (which would not be found). Both were upstairs in their rooms, crying.

  He looked at the bottle. Rolling Rock, the last of the year’s stock. Maybe he’d had too much; his ears felt tender, ringing.

  He looked up at the tree and watched as the new insect ornament moved several inches to devour the head of a tinsel-haired angel. He put down his drink. The tree began to rustle, sprinkling dry pine needles out on his rug.

  “Alice!” he shouted.

  A few agonizing minutes later—during which Paul watched the ornament wander around the tree, disturbing other ornaments, slipping garlands from branches, and chewing needles—Alice and the kids ran into the room, surrounding him, prodding him, asking what was wrong.

  “The tree,” he said, still watching it. “That insect!”

  Alice walked over and began picking up the dislodged ornaments. “That cat!” she said. “You’d think after all these years she’d know better.” She brushed the back of her hand through the branches. “I’m sorry, Paul. Looks like she knocked your new ornament somewhere.”

  Willy rolled his eyes in exaggerated fashion. “Jeez, Dad. Thought it was a fire or something.”

  Paul just looked at the boy.

  Paul went into the bedroom and got his nine iron out of the golf bag. The rest of the afternoon he wandered the house with it. He didn’t find the thing. Just before dinner he put the club away.

  Alice had gone all out on the dinner—both turkey and ham, broccoli in cheese sauce, deviled eggs, all his favorites. Annie had brought her Barbie to the dinner table, where she’d set up a highchair for the thing. Paul was in a good enough mood that it didn’t bother him, even when she pretended to feed it and cheese sauce dripped over its ample bosom.

  As he watched the thin yellow drool drop onto the front of the doll’s dress, a narrow black line, so like a crack, spread across the high cheeks, the distant eyes, joined five other similar cracks spreading from points around the doll’s head, and then the insect’s ragged mouth parts appeared over the top of the fine blonde hair, sharp-edged jowls gnawing through hard plastic.

  Annie was reaching to stroke the doll’s hair.

  “No!” he screamed, jumping up from the chair, bathrobe flapping like a giant, awkward bird. He jerked the carving knife out of the turkey and plunged it into the doll’s head, where the black lines had just disappeared.

  The force of Paul’s lunge dragged him off-balance, over the chair and onto the floor. He could feel the table rocking under his hip, everybody jumping away, shouting, dishes falling and breaking. From his vantage point on the floor he could see small discarded piles of broccoli, mashed potatoes, ham, and a long, articulated black carapace snaking its way over the orange rug that led back into the living room.

  Paul sat alone in the dark parlor, staring through the partially-open door at Richard running his train set around the coffee table. He’d been there since the knife incident, planning, weighing the risk to his family’s lives (after all, he didn’t know for sure the thing would hurt anyone) against the risk to his own reputation (which seemed irretrievably lost at this point). He’d had to listen while in the other room Alice tried to explain that their father had been under a lot of pressure lately, that he’d been drinking too much, and reassuring Annie that Barbie wasn’t really dead, just wounded, and after Mom took her away to the doctor for a while she’d come back looking brand new. (Oh, great, Alice, he thought. Do you really think a new doll will fool her?)

  The train started up again. Paul could hear the electrical hum of the engine, louder than he would have expected.

  There was an eighth car at the end of the train. There’d been only seven when Richard first set it up. The box said seven. A shiny black tank car with bright yellow headlights and slick piping and a long hard tail that drew sparks when it struck the track.

  Paul came roaring out into the room, fish net held high, imagining himself John Wayne, Indiana Jones, his father.

  He scooped the net rapidly into the rear car, sending a chain of heavy plastic and cheap metal spinning over his son’s head. He raised the net over his head triumphantly.

  The black
thing, a good thirty times larger than when he’d first seen it, snapped its back and hissed a stench from within the net. Then the net was tearing, and the collective voice of Paul’s family was clawing at his ears.

  A shelf ripped off the wall and swung with all his might didn’t even slow the thing. Jagged glass, with Paul holding his foot on its back, didn’t even scar.

  Alice brought him a large pot. Paul slammed the mouth down over it. The black pot rocked, then flew off, cracking the plaster wall by the fireplace.

  What next! What next! Paul began to imagine, and could not turn the imagining off. He started to cry, hating himself as the thing turned and turned on the living room rug, then flew toward Annie, glistening claws cocked, open.

  “Daddy! Daddy! It’s in my hair!” she screamed, and Paul could imagine no heroics, only a sick despair, as he heard his little girl wail and saw the dark fantasy of a spider, the cold fantasy of a serpent, the screaming fantasy of inhuman black appendage ripping through the yellow halo of her hair.

  And looking around for something else to throw, to pry, or pound with, Paul spied the strange shiny wrap neatly stacked on top of all the others by the tree.

  He didn’t feel heroic as he lowered the shiny wrap over his sweet daughter’s head, and felt the edges fold over the thing, the thing passively withdrawing inside the package, no more threat than an old man retiring early for the evening.

  He felt like a fiend.

  It was nearly dawn before Paul finally took his secret present out to the trash. There, with all the discarded wrappings and empty boxes promising more than a child was likely to receive, he placed the box, piling whatever he could on top, however unnecessary.

  He glanced up and down the alley, with familiar backyards and familiar trash bins ranked as far as he could see in the dim morning light. He watched his friends, the other fathers, trying to hide their own presents, their own imaginings, beneath mountains of trash. The sirens began.

  PAREIDOLIA

  If I lay my face in the dust,

  The grave opens its mouth for me.

  — William Blake, The Couch of Death

  Somewhere in the distance a baby was crying. Blake could not understand why they let it go on. Someone should pick the baby up. If he were there, and saw such a baby, he would pick it up, and hold it, kiss its eyes and tell it lies about how everything would turn out, turn out just fine.

  He’d not been to many funerals in his lifetime. He didn’t think this made him at all unusual. Guys he’d grown up with, now in their forties and fifties, they’d see their moms and dads buried, but usually no one else, not even when one of their own dropped a few years prematurely. Especially when it was one of their own.

  He was just beginning to imagine what old age was going to be like—functions decreasing, capacities diminishing, the world spinning so fast with more and more of his life slipping off the edge, and him just sitting there with his eyes leaking, running out of ways to say goodbye. Every day like a funeral.

  Blake had been out of state when his grandparents died; he’d waited until the last minute to tell the family he wasn’t coming. A torrent of cries and recriminations from family members who’d loved the couple no more than he, but he hadn’t been swayed. No one could make him come. It shamed him now that in idle moments he imagined the excuses he would use when one of his own parents died.

  His last funeral might have been when he was ten or eleven. An aunt, looking white waxy in the coffin, her hands folded over daisies plucked from her front yard. That had bothered him: everybody in the family knew she’d hated daisies, thought of them as weeds and mowed them down whenever possible. Later on it came out that the daisies in her hands had been a gossipy neighbor’s idea; someone who claimed to be her best friend, who—she said—knew all there was to know about the deceased.

  This year he would be the age of his aunt when she’d died. Fifty-two. He told himself the number wasn’t that high, and in the mirror he still managed to find most of his senior high school yearbook face. But pictures taken of him said otherwise. The last few years an old man had sneaked into the photographs, a pale face that seemed to float over the noticeably swollen torso, brown hair washed out into a sandy gray blending subtly into the background. He looked like one of those specters so popular in books of unexplained phenomena, photographed accidentally at a relative’s birthday party, a smudge on the negative or a glare in the lens. The uncle who’s always forgetting he’s been dead for years.

  In recent years Blake had insisted on himself taking all the pictures at the few family gatherings. His ex-wife had remarried and he felt uncomfortable around her new husband. The man was Blake’s age yet he seemed so damned young, so self-assured. “Pleased to meet you, Blake!” Tom had beamed the first time Ellie had introduced them, huge square hand hovering in the air between them. When Blake didn’t respond immediately the hand grabbed him, folded him up inside. “Like the poet, right?”

  Blake enjoyed using that line himself, even though most people he met had never heard of William Blake, and never mind that among that group would have been his own parents, who’d named their only son after a newly dead uncle, a retired butcher.

  Ye worms of death feasting upon your aged parents’ flesh. That was from Tiriell. He’d done poorly in his English courses, but he’d made learning his Blake a priority. Not that he understood all of the poems; in fact he wasn’t sure he really understood more than a few. But he appreciated the feeling of Blake’s poetry, sympathized with its obsessive quality, and most of all understood that need to see beyond the simple lies of the everyday world.

  Tom stood with his wife, their wife, on the other side of the funeral party. A strange phrase that, funeral party. Most of the attendees were wearing appropriate party clothes: somber suits, dark dresses, limp ties.

  Bound these black shoes of death, and on my hands, death’s iron gloves.

  Today he wore a black T-shirt, black jeans, the closest thing he had to full funeral uniform. He could imagine what his wife might have to say about that—she always said he dressed like a kid, ate like a kid, so what kind of adult role model could he be?—but he knew she’d keep her mouth shut because the girls were there with them. She was good about that sort of thing. Earlier Amy had nodded from across the gravestones and smiled. He’d smiled back, knowing he’d get to talk to her later. Janice pretended not to see him—she’d be embarrassed by his clothes, but there was nothing he could have done to please her; he was chronically incapable of sparing his older daughter embarrassment. The last four or five visits she’d made herself invisible, and in his dreams she’d become the imaginary daughter, the one the men in their ghostly white coats would insist had never existed.

  Somewhere a baby was crying again. A funeral was no place for a baby, he thought. He wasn’t sure why he thought that, wasn’t even sure it was true. A cemetery wasn’t a nursery, or a playground. But then again, he could be wrong.

  Slumped on a chair in the middle of the crowd was Charlie, his best friend and the reason Blake had broken his funeral non-attendance record. It was Charlie’s wife who had died, crashed her car into a tree after an aneurysm. Quickly, he supposed, and with little pain, yet death is terrible, tho’ borne on angels’ wings. Charlie was one of the people Blake had lied to about the origins of his name. “After the poet, you know? My parents had great hopes for me.” Lied for no particular reason, since Charlie was hardly the literary type. And it was that inconsequential lie and the lack of trust it betrayed which had always made Blake wonder if he was even capable of close friendships.

  Charlie cried with his mouth slightly open, making no sound. He’d been doing that since Blake had arrived, which was why Blake hadn’t yet said anything to him, or been able to touch him. Sad to say, Charlie’s death wouldn’t have been much of a surprise. He drank too much and ate too much and the worse he felt about it the more he indulged the excess. People said Charlie was hard to understand but Blake found no mystery there at all. In forests
of eternal death, shrieking in hollow trees. It came from looking at things too long and too deeply. Thinking too much, his father would have said, his most common complaint about his son. The terror of seeing might make you a mystic or make you a drunk, depending on your temperament.

  Young children and babies populated much of William Blake’s illuminated poetry. Songs of Innocence. Songs of Experience. They usually had ethereal expressions, heavenly colorings, probably due to their recent contact with an invisible world. The baby’s cries were inaudible now, but he could still feel them in the air, gathering, and waiting.

  Blake could hear Charlie’s soundless shrieking coming out of the mouth hung open in that terrible way, slightly lopsided, the lip on one side thicker than the other, as if something were hiding there. And above that mouth the swollen cheeks, the alteration of the underlying bone, the evolution brought on by grief so profound that in any other context Blake would never have recognized Charlie. Blake had always known this, he supposed, but watching Charlie brought it into focus: those we loved so much lie buried in our faces.

  An old man walked behind Charlie then, rested a fleshy hand on his shoulder, bent and whispered, but Charlie’s expression did not alter, and the old man went on, threading himself through mourners still as stones.

  Blake didn’t recognize the man as anyone he’d ever seen before and yet he recognized everything about him. An old man with a washed-out face wandering practically unnoticed among strangers and family, for he is the king of rotten wood and of the bones of death.