The word I’m looking for is alienation.
Heidi’s pregnancy was a strange time, a time I think of now as something akin to when I had chicken pox at the age of nine, the fever before the itchy dots; instead of three days, it lasted nearly ten months. There was hysterical laughter, sheer terror—early on, doctors warned us that our child may have Trisomy 18 (a genetic disorder that often leads to a miscarriage, stillbirth, or a deformed, weak infant), a warning that was, fortunately, unfounded—and utter exhaustion. But it was all as if in the midst of fever. That silence when your brain finally shuts up, unable to compute what’s unfolding before it. Few things existed, beyond appointments, to mark out time. Heidi, at least, had her work schedule.
All I had were stories.
One right after the other, the stories were written, the stories were sold, and I’d found not just a way to pass the time, but a way to gut out of me all the fear and anxiety and rage—I struggle to recall another time I was so angry and felt so helpless to do anything about it—that filled my head like trapped hornets. And they all seemed to have a similar subtext through them:
Alienation.
That microsecond between action and reaction.
Whatever the plot, whatever the characters, whatever the theme I found myself talking about—I never plan theme; it’s always something that pops up—the people in these stories are always at some form of turning point, when their back is against the wall and change is inevitable, whether the change was self-started or through circumstances. The change isn’t always good, the result isn’t always a triumph, but a change is happening.
And, in the real world, my daughter was born.
The instant between action and reaction ended, the next breath came, and the ground solidified.
My family moved out of my mother-in-law’s basement to Virginia, where I now work, and I’m still telling stories, although the furious urgency of that long ago fever is no longer the same.
The bruising my wife and I took six years ago is gone, but not forgotten.
And that, really, is the ultimate point, I guess. Whatever change comes in the stories to follow, the characters don’t forget. Time and circumstances leave their scars. Or, as a character says in the title story, it’s our broken bones and scars that make us who we are.
So, here they are, the stories.
I realized after reviewing each piece that this collection is more personal than I initially thought. To me, writing’s a job, no different than any of the jobs I’ve had over the years—teacher, landscaper, journalist, waiter—and, in that context, intimacy’s not in the forefront of one’s mind. You punch in and punch out, doing the best job your talent and your hard work can.
But that’s not true and it’s only when looking at these stories all together that I noted how much of my own life I plugged in—not specific incidents that somehow translated to the page, but the idea that, whatever the monster, whatever the circumstance, this comes from some part of my head.
The fear is my fear.
The helplessness is my helplessness.
The rage, despair, anticipation, hope. They are mine—mined from some instance or circumstance, thrown through my mental blender and sprinkled over the plot of some story, or imbued within some character’s response to a situation. These aren’t my scars, but they could be.
They could also be yours. I kinda hope so, anyway.
– June 2016
Northern Virginia
From this house of broken bones …
Crawling Back
to You
PATTY PULLED THE .38 from the glove compartment when the radio, even jacked to maximum volume, failed to block out the waitress’s screams.
“Goddamn it, Thomas,” she muttered, and threw herself from the car. The cellphone tower loomed over her as she stepped into the underbrush. Route 15, close by, was dead at this hour. The woman’s screams had silenced all the cute little woodland creatures in this godless patch of nowhere scrub Nevada forest.
There—to the right and not really going anywhere. The waitress’s screams kept hitching and turning to gasps as she tripped over deadfalls and roots.
Patty smiled, but it felt empty, and she dropped it.
She headed off on a diagonal. The moon, sliced to ribbons by tree branches, turned everything to grayscale, but she saw well enough; she picked her way through the brush easily. The .38 felt sure and heavy in her hand.
A flash of white blurred past the corner of her eye.
The woman.
And, still, no Thomas.
She hissed. Where the hell was he? They didn’t have time—and she didn’t have the patience—for him to play his Master of the Dark shit. If he needed to fucking feed—
(should’ve done that back at the motel)
Patty shook off the thought and corrected her course.
She stepped between two trees and onto a deer path, the woman stumble-bumbling away from her.
“Hey! ” she called.
The woman spun, mouth half-open in a stupid, useless yodel, and nearly lost her balance. It was funny, but not even an empty smile ghosted across Patty’s features this time.
The woman lurched to her, uniform torn and dirty, eyes still glassy from the ether Patty had dosed her with.
“Help me,” the waitress screamed, throwing herself at Patty. “Monster! Monster’s after me!”
“Bitch, I know,” Patty said and, placing her free hand on the waitress’s chest, shoved. The woman went flying, ass skidding across the dirt.
Patty raised the revolver. “I’m the one who brought you here, remember?”
She shot out the woman’s kneecaps and the sound boxed her ears. She didn’t mind. If nothing else, she couldn’t hear the woman’s fresh screaming.
She raised the revolver to put a round through the waitress’s yawning mouth when the ringing in Patty’s ears faded, losing power as a strange humming arose, like the kind heard when you leaned against a utility pole. It brought a chill that tightened the flesh. Shadows grew darker, the moonlight less illuminating. The woman froze mid-scream, her mouth a perfect capital O.
And then, Thomas’s voice, in full Master of the Dark mode, floated across the air.
“Leave me my meal.”
The humming dwindled and branches were snapping all around them, closing in, as if a group of steamrollers were headed their way.
Patty turned and started back toward the car. “Whatever, dude,” her voice lost in the noise. “Figure we got all night for this Christopher Lee shit.”
Behind her, the waitress was screaming again, and then abruptly stopped.
A noxious mixture of wet mold and sulfur drifted through the open cruiser window as John pulled into Mae’s Motel. He braked hard enough to jerk against his seatbelt. “What the Christ?”
The motel was dark and empty, every door closed, every curtain pulled. Even the security lamps were black. Only the yellow MAE’S MOTEL sign—with its flickering NO VACANCY—was still on. He saw Eric’s cruiser at the end of the lot, and he instantly forgot the smell.
John coasted his cruiser up to the dark lobby, his eyes locked on his brother’s car. Even from here, he could see it was empty.
John glanced at the darkened motel. Then where did he go?
As he got out, he touched the St. Anthony’s medallion beneath his shirt. Something pinged in the back of his mind. The cop part of him told him to call Steve, who was probably snoozing through his shift on dispatch. Make this official. Make this procedural.
Instead, he took a step towards Eric’s cruiser on legs that didn’t feel quite there. His brother part was stronger than the cop part. Eric had last reported in at midnight, when he’d reached Mae’s. That had been three hours ago, and Steve hadn’t noticed.
He took a second step, then another. The hairs on his arms and neck stood up. The noxious stink made his head light. The thread of early-morning-empty Route 15 passed along his left. Who called in a noise complaint here? And why call t
he Colton police when this place was way the fuck out of town and under the jurisdiction of the Highway Patrol?
(and why is my brother’s car still here and where is he and why didn’t he call in again?)
Curtained windows on his right. He imagined people behind them, pale people, watching him through the fabric.
(stop it)
He reached Eric’s car and peered in. John’s eyes ticked off the MDT and laptop, Eric’s citation book, the locked shotgun under the dash. Eric’s own St. Anthony medal dangled from the rearview mirror.
Nothing disturbed, but everything wrong.
He straightened, looked at the room the car faced. That feeling of being watched intensified, making the skin on his arms tingle, the hair on the back of his neck stand to attention; the mold-and-sulfur odor more pungent. He felt like every dumbass in every horror movie, the one who went where he obviously shouldn’t go and got his stupid self killed.
(if that was the case, then Eric—)
“You just shut the fuck up right now,” he said aloud, and that, oddly, made him feel a little better.
He was a cop, for Chrissakes.
But he still wasn’t calling this in. Not yet.
He made himself walk to the door and knock, feeling stupid for doing so, but whoever had last closed the door—
(my brother? someone else?)
—hadn’t closed it all the way because it opened an inch, revealing a wedge of black.
“Anyone here?” he called.
He reached in and fumbled for the light switch, trying not to imagine a pale hand grabbing his, yanking him into the darkness.
(stop it, goddammit)
He found the switch, flicked it as he toed the door open the rest of the way.
“Hel—” he started to say, but couldn’t finish when he saw what was in the room.
The only reason he didn’t scream was because he suddenly couldn’t find the air.
Patty paced around the car, a stream of cigarette smoke trailing behind her. In her head, two voices argued,
(why are you so angry?)
He didn’t notice.
(what’s changed?)
He never notices.
(what’s happened?)
I’m just his familiar, and he’s lord of all he surveys, and all that horseshit.
“Fuck,” she said. She raked her hands through her hair. She’d tried the radio again, but switched it off almost immediately, right in the middle of Tom Petty’s “Runnin’ Down a Dream.”
That song had come After and, as such, it was all static and roar. Now, if that puny little station out of Nipton had been playing “(I Just) Died in Your Arms.”
She looked towards Route 15, but didn’t know what she was looking for.
(did the trucker see me?)
“Stop it,” she said.
(is this because of the motel? or the waitress?)
(or how he’s always fucking around, and it’s always what he wants, and we’ve been doing this for goddamn decades—)
“Stop it!” she yelled.
That inner-ear hum arose and she stiffened. The night was still and silent, the moon full and high above, a spotlight on a stage of a play no one had bothered to attend.
Slowly, she turned.
The shadows were darker in the underbrush, almost oily.
“Everything all right, dear?” Thomas asked from everywhere, and she felt that fish-hook tug in the back of her mind; it always reminded her of a cruel dog owner jerking a leash.
Flashing neon—
(—guilt-guilt-guilt-guilt—)
—in her head.
Patty took a drag of her cigarette and couldn’t stop her hand from shaking. “I’m fine.”
Thomas’s face, a blur of white skin and black eyes, appeared in the darkness. She saw blood on his chin.
He pulled himself from the shadows, let them build his tall, black form. She had to look up to see his face and wondered, not for the first time, if he did that deliberately; she didn’t remember him being so tall Before.
“You don’t sound it.”
She turned away, didn’t want him to see whatever might be on her face. “Feel better?”
“Much,” he said. “The motel…left me spent.”
(it shouldn’t have)
“Good,” she said, looking at Route 15. “If we leave now, we can be in LA by morn—”
Something within her growled loudly, a growl of hunger, but lower, and she winced.
“Ah,” Thomas said. “Is that what’s wrong? I’d been so busy, I’d forgotten about you.”
She took a hit off her cigarette and couldn’t taste it. Now that it—whatever it was; after three decades, she still didn’t really know—had made itself known, she felt the hollow inside her, felt it growing.
Thomas approached, a swath of hovering black.
She’d kept up on the pop culture mythology over the years, watched as the ‘90s and the millennium added to it, twisting vampires into something romantic, lustful creatures of fate to be loved and cherished.
Thomas’s mouth broke into a grin of nightmarish needle-teeth. “I know what you need.”
(I doubt that.)
Thomas extended his hands, tipped with yellowish talons. With a quick movement, he opened his wrist and thick, black blood—almost an ichor—welled.
She licked her lips and hated herself for it.
“Drink this, faithful servant,” he said, and he sounded like he was grinning, “in remembrance of me.”
She tried looking away but only managed to look into Thomas’s face, and his fathomless black eyes captured hers.
Vampires weren’t sexy, but there was a lust for abandonment, the desire to give into the nihilistic thrill of nothing; to finally just give up and let go.
Patty’s mind emptied, and she lowered her mouth to drink.
Velvet on her tongue, rapture in her gut.
John ran.
(blood)
Down the length of the motel room, kicking in doors, seeing the dark Cracker Jack prizes that lay beyond.
(blood on the walls)
Back to his cruiser, peeling out.
(blood puddled thick on the plush carpet)
Rocketing down Route 15, not seeing anything, high-beams staking the black night.
(bodies on the bed and hanging from the coatrack and the sink and-and-and)
John ran.
(Eric’s head—mouth gaping and eyes goggling—in the busted picture-tube of the 1980s television)
From the sights, from the mold-and-sulfur stench, escaping neither.
(Eric, staring at John with dots of blood on his eyes)
John had no idea how long he’d been stopped, shaking in his seat, when he finally noticed the engine ticking to itself.
He looked up and blinked against the light from the high-intensity security lamp shining through the windshield. Stumbling from the car, he rubbed his eyes until the after-images faded, then looked around. “What the hell?”
He’d parked behind the truck stop a half-hour west of Mae’s. His was the only vehicle back here. Around the front, he heard the deep-throated rumble of idling eighteen-wheelers.
It didn’t make sense, but, then again, none of it did.
He leaned against the car to keep standing. In spite of the pungent stink of diesel, the smell of mold and sulfur hadn’t left him. It seemed stronger, somehow, than before.
He forced himself to focus. I just left a crime scene. I just left the remains of my brother. My brother.
A rush of warm shame swept him, but he made no move to head back. His gut churned, but he didn’t know if it was from guilt or horror. Unconsciously, his hand crept to his St. Anthony medallion, and his stomach calmed a little.
He started across the lot to the truck stop, feeling like his legs were wobbling more than they really were. The stop was a restaurant-slash-convenience-store-slash-gas-station. Once inside, he ducked towards the restrooms and thanked whatever god existed that they wer
e empty. He rubbed water into his face until it hurt then looked at himself in the mirror. Underneath the buzzing fluorescents, his skin had a sickly, cheesy appearance.
“You’re a handsome devil,” he said. “What’s your name?”
What he had to do, of course, was call it in, but how would he explain having been there without reporting it? More to the point, how could he face that again?
He looked down at the sink. “I’ll call Steve,” he whispered. “Ask him if he’s heard from Eric, yet.” He grimaced as bile lapped at the back of his throat. “He’ll assume I fell asleep. He’ll believe it. Then …”
He rubbed his face. How in the hell could he convince Steve nothing was wrong?
“Because I have no other choice,” he told his reflection and his voice was a little firmer. A little. It would have to do.
He opened the men’s room door and nearly walked into the waitress and cook waiting outside.
“Jesus,” he cried, grabbing the frame to keep from falling. The door, pulled by its pneumatic arm, smacked his ass.
“You busy, officer?” the waitress said, as if cringing policemen were a common sight. She appeared middle-aged but maintained a 1950s hairstyle and glasses.
John mentally willed his heart to slow down. “Can I help you?”
“We didn’t know if we should write the guy off or call somebody,” the cook said, his dark face strained.
John blinked. “Excuse me?”
“We have a girl—”
“A woman, Beverly,” the waitress said and, oh yeah, John could imagine her slinging coffee during Eisenhower’s reign of benignity.
(i’ve lost my fucking mind)
John rubbed his forehead. He almost wanted a migraine to come on, anything to distract him.
“Beverly,” the cook said. “She went out back to dump some trash and never came back.”
“Beverly’s not the type of person to leave her shift unannounced,” the waitress said. She must’ve caught the glance the cook shot her because she went on. “Not that we didn’t think that was impossible, but then this driver … This driver came in. Said he saw Beverly leave with some woman, but we didn’t know if we should believe him. He just came in a half hour ago. Smells like he’s had a beer or two.”
Bones are Made to be Broken Page 2
