Needles & Sins

by John Everson

  That was the year they revealed the sham of Sallee Regeneration Technique, much to the dismay of thousands who’d removed arms, legs and eyes for fashion. A class action suit helped, but certainly didn’t undo the damage. I have my arm and eye back again, but the arm hangs like limp rubber, and the eye rolls to left and sees only shadows. The ghosts of truth.

  I kept the tattoo; I am forever now her creation, and wear her brand like a symbol. A symbol of selflessness, for I have truly lost my self.

  I left Regina the house; her modifications had destroyed it just as thoroughly as she had ruined me. But I can’t lay all the blame at her feet. She called me perfection but asked me to change. And I did. Without thought. Without thinking about what support beams I was breaking inside my bones, and my soul.

  I live now in a small apartment, and struggle to find the means to survive. I may never again be ready to build. I was made for her, but she was making another.

  I was a carpenter with a full heart and a head of plans.

  But now my heart is dry, a fluttering shrapnel-shorn skin.

  My house lies in ruins, its beams rotted and broken.

  I was a carpenter.

  But all of my blueprints have faded.

  And Regina…

  She’s building a new man now, and lives in his mansion up the valley.

  She’s had the Metallion Treatment. Her skin gleams like polished brass and her hair is now truly made of spun gold.

  She says it’s perfect.

  And he’s perfect.

  They’re made for each other.

  But perfection never lasts, if it exists at all.

  — | — | —

  SPIRITS HAVING FLOWN

  It was never so sterile. So polished.

  So bereft of life.

  The old frame house once sighed with his tortured breath, spoke with his aching lips, stumbled from thunderstorm to snowfall with his unsteady feet.

  No more.

  I move from one room to the next, noting the forest green granny-square afghan folded neatly on the back of the second-hand couch, its cushions, (for the first time?) perfectly fitted together. The thick, dripping grease spots have been wiped away from the small orange and brown tiles above the Donna Reed-era Amana gas oven range, the sloppy spaghetti stains painting the wall by the garbage can scrubbed down to faded shadows. I can see the patterns in the yellowed linoleum. Bundles of daisies. Given Mac’s and my inattention to housekeeping, I’d never seen the flowers before.

  The family has come, has cried, has cleaned, has gone.

  Leaving me. The caretaker. The tenant.

  For now.

  And there is only one more thing to do.

  Mac said he was only lying down for a nap on the perpetually rumpled couch. Those were his last few words to me. His breathing had been labored all week, and I worried. “Go down to The Last Chance later?” he whispered the question, and I nodded. He grinned a small grin and slipped off his heavy glasses as he curled into the cushions and afghan on the couch.

  Nodded at me.

  Caught his breath.

  Wheezed.

  And was sleeping.

  I left the room, figuring to wash the car. While it was a gloomy shade of overcast in Mac’s living room with all the heavy hand-me-down curtains drawn, it was 85 and sunny outside. Out there, life was dancing. In Mac’s house, life moved slower, if at all. Maybe it was the smoke, or the low light. Or Mac. But sitting in his living room was like being trapped in a bubble of amber. Everything was still, and stained in sepia.

  When I came back into the house an hour later, wet with sweat and stray hose water, Mac didn’t stir. I went to the bathroom, rinsed my face and arms, combed back my hair, and then pulled on a fresh shirt. The house was quiet. Nothing too strange there. Mac didn’t go for loud music, and only clicked on the TV at night. But this felt different, even so. At first I put the sense of stillness down to the absence of the screams and laughter of the kids outside, running through sprinklers and shooting at each other with water guns that looked like they’d come from a SWAT armory.

  But no, that wasn’t it.

  The absence, the stillness in the house was a missing constant—that sighing whisper of air trickling in and out of Mac’s lungs. The ever-present wheeze that meant Mac was at home. It had been the background soundtrack to my life here these past six years, for if Mac wasn’t with me, drinking away the pain at The Last Chance, he was here, wondering how it had all come down to this. From a gentle mother’s arms to the edge of the hard Chicago streets to the arms of another woman and her kids and then, not. Loneliness. Only this small house at the edge of a roughed up and left behind farm town with a migrant worker as a roommate and a minute-to-minute struggle just to breathe.

  “Life is a bitch,” he’d often said to me in a low voice at the edge of a slanted smile.

  “Then you die,” I’d answer.

  He’d squint back at me, take another sip and nod.

  “Then you die.”

  The first time I met Mac was on a barstool at The Last Chance. He was emptying a tall can of Old Milwaukee, and flirting with the bartender with the shadowed eyes. Those shadows came from lack of sleep; she put in time as a receptionist at the Feed Store to make ends meet for her three kids. Still, she humored him, laughing and patting his hand as she emptied the ashtray that had filled up near his right hand.

  “In your dreams,” she answered some off-color comment of his, rolling her eyes.

  “And what exciting dreams those must be,” I said, edging my way into the conversation with a compliment to her. Never hurts to flirt with the barkeep—she’ll pour better for you.

  “What do you know of my dreams?” Mac growled and turned away.

  Strike one.

  “You’re a man. You have the same dreams we all have.”

  A glare from the evil eye. He started talking to the woman on the other side of him, a haggard thing with long painted nails and a mouth that stretched from ear to ear. She looked 70 but was probably really only 45. He showed me his back and said nothing more.

  Strike two.

  I finished my whiskey in two slugs and left the bar—and Mac—behind.

  I was new to town then, having slowly worked my way down from well-paid insurance suit in Chicago to minimum wage bag boy at the last two-horse town 20 miles north. Seemed I couldn’t cure the itch in my soul, and neither could the bottle. I began seeing Mac almost every night at The Last Chance. Where else was I gonna go after a day working the fields? Sweat and forget, that was my new motto.

  One night not long after my first brush with Mac, I pulled up a stool next to him and ordered a Seven and Seven. Mac turned his head to gaze up at me sideways, one eye open, the other squinted near-shut.

  “What you wanna do with a highbrow drink like that,” he said. “You gonna drink at this bar, you order some Jack Daniels straight up, or have Ginny pull you a beer.”

  Ginny had stopped to see my reaction, and I shrugged. “Is a Jack and Coke acceptable?”

  “Suit yourself.”

  From that day on, I was Mac’s barstool buddy. And eventually, housemate.

  There was no funeral.

  Mac wouldn’t have it. He wanted cremation with no ceremony whatsoever. The family compromised and laid him out in a box to wake for one night. Some people probably wanted the chance to say goodbye, they felt; and they were right. The family was amazed at the turnout, but not surprised when the bulk of the bodies walked straight down the street to The Last Chance afterwards.

  I found one of my old Chicago business suits that almost still fit for the occasion, and stood sentinel by the casket as nurses and waitresses and rummies and friends from his growing up days in Chicago streamed by the body. An old flame with a fake eye that was downright creepy if you looked too long probably cried the most. Word is a knife fight with the man who’d been with her before she’d came and went on Mac had taken half her sight. I wondered if she still had phantom sight on her right
side, like when you lose a finger but still feel its presence on the end of your hand. A high school buddy holding 40 extra pounds in his belly who probably wished he could slide his beard up above his forehead helped her away from her increasingly loud casket-side conversation with the dead body.

  But mostly, none stayed too many minutes, or cried too hard. Many were amazed he’d lasted so long.

  His face looked like softly brushed wax, his fingers molded in plastic. That thin brown mustache made him look a downright dapper mannequin lying there in his brother’s suit. He’d never owned one of his own. You don’t need a suit to drink at The Last Chance.

  “It’s so sad,” his family members murmured, talking in whispers in the back of the room. “But it’s for the best,” they reasoned. “What kind of life did he have? When you’re that far into the bottle, what kind of dreams can you have left? He’d drowned them all out.”

  I stifled a sad smile and turned away. If they’d only known; it was the dreams that sent him to the bottle, not the bottle that stifled them. And no matter how hard he tried, he’d never managed to drown them out.

  Nobody sent flowers to Mac’s wake. One plant sent over by the local Christian church marked the head of the casket, and I watched it walk down the street with the family, when they left Mac’s body to be burned. Their cars were packed with salvaged items from his dresser and cupboards. Memory holders, keepsakes, pictures. The solid imprint of his life on the world, dispersed with more transience than his dreams.

  As the funeral parlor locked its doors, I realized that all that I had now of him was a piece of glass and the empty shell of a house. And even that would soon be denied, once the family sold it. Even his ashes wouldn’t remain; those would be shipped north for burial once the cremation was complete.

  I have to laugh as I think of the reactions in those first hours after his death. The phone calls. The tears. The shock. The first hurried clearing of the house. When his sister arrived late in the afternoon from up north, she barely said a word to me, but instead performed a silent reconnaissance of the house. She peeked into all the cupboards, knelt to peer under the couch and felt between his mattress and box spring. Finally, she got up the nerve to just ask.

  “The guns, the knives…?”

  “He left me instructions,” I said. “I disposed of them all.”

  A troubled smile, and a nod. One less detail for her to worry about. The last thing the family needed at this stage was police interest in Mac’s unlicensed hobbies.

  If she’d only known of the one important thing I had yet to dispose of. But, I suppose, she wouldn’t have understood. Hell, five years ago I wouldn’t have understood. Just a few months ago, I wouldn’t have been ready.

  It’s time now though. For me. I have to be ready.

  In his bedroom, I shove aside the ancient metal frame of his single bed, and with a screwdriver pry up the loose board beneath. There’s an echo of a child’s scream as I lift out the small wooden box buried there, under the dead man’s bed. Is the echo from the children outside, down the block? Or is it from the delicately filigreed box, from the faces peeking out there amid the slim vines and trees embossed in its lid? It too, had lacked for a funeral.

  I replace the board and the bed, and returned to the kitchen. On the strangely clean table, I lay them out. One violent glass frame after another. They are small things that the box divulges. Country housewives hang similar glass shards from strings above their windows to catch and bend the sun.

  Mac used them to catch and bend dreams.

  Bad ones.

  Nightmares.

  I spread the myriad shards of mottled glass until the entire table was covered. The fake woodgrain surface came alive with twisting, writhing shades of flame, of blackness, of blood. Reaching to the middle, I lifted one that I recognize as mine. An ancient face stared back at me through the slender trap of glass. An old man, by the look, and gentle. But I knew better. This father figure was a haunt who’d chased me through back alleys in the night, all teeth and black nails and rusted razorblades thirsting for my neck. It had been years since he’d plagued my sleep. Mac had trapped him here, along with so many others.

  There was the malformed, hideous child that his sister had never borne. There was the grisly red-smeared traffic accident that once woke his niece up nearly every night, shaking and sweating with fear and grabbing at her belly to see if it was still whole. There was the nephew’s family dog, dragging its twisted body away from the road, trailing its lifeblood and back legs behind it. And there was his other sister’s late husband, a cold thin greying man with a tight fist that beat and beat and then stopped, as his leg sprang to motion, dealing out his love in sharp hard blows to the ribs. Monsters and madmen and murder.

  Hard dreams to handle.

  These visions and so many more Mac had captured and held from his family and friends over the years, until his box was full and his power stretched thin as an old man’s skin.

  Only his will held these dreams here, and that will was gone now. Already some of the dreams had discovered that the cage that had bound them for so many years was gone, and I could see the shape and color of the woodgrain pattern through the clear glass they’d left behind. As I surveyed Mac’s collection, his life’s work, I began to cry. It wasn’t the emphysema, or the Old Milwaukee, or the cigarettes that had killed him.

  It was the dreams.

  Wiping the water from my face, I hefted the screwdriver and considered. The dreams would escape, no matter what I did. Dreams can’t be killed; can only be stopped for a while. Mac had taught me this: dreams are forever.

  But if they can be trapped, can they be maimed? I wondered. Hobbled?

  I looked down at the table and saw a miniature Ginny, being raped after hours at The Last Chance by a thug with long black hair.

  “No,” I cried, and brought the heavy end of the tool down to crush that vision. It shattered and sent other dreams flying off the table to crack and litter the floor. In the air, a scream, and a sparkle, and then … nothing. I repeated my attack on glass holding a monster intent on rending the limbs from a blond boy I recognized from last night’s wake; he’d grown at least a foot since this dream was captured. A slight flash, like the faintest slide of a prism, and he was gone. Again and again I brought the screwdriver down, shattering nightmares and adding crumpled dents to the fake grain of the plywood table. The air filled with the angry twinkle of freed visions, and I felt my heart stumble as they surrounded my head, a chattering, screeching host of untouchable teeth and talons. When all the glass was shattered, I spun about the room and swung the point of the tool like a dagger at the air, alive with nightmares and dream deaths. Tears ran down my cheeks as I begged the dreams to follow their catcher.

  “Die,” I begged.

  “Die.”

  At last, the room was quiet, and I rose from where I’d fallen on the floor, surrounded by empty, clear shards of glass.

  I left it all, and went back to my own room, far down in the shadows of the long hallway.

  From beneath my own bed, I pulled out a single triangle of glass. I’d fashioned it from a broken attic window, smoothing its dangerous edges carefully with sandpaper and spit. It was the first talisman of my graduation from apprentice to dream catcher. I lay back on the bed, wondering how I could ever be as strong as Mac, to steal and seal so many dark visions. It was up to me now to carry on his work, to lighten lives of 3 a.m. heartache and sleep-stealing succubi.

  I held up my one shard of glass to the light, and felt the weight of its pull on my heart.

  Mac’s gasping face met my own.

  “Let me die,” his dream whispered. “Please just let me go.”

  Just days ago, I had captured this shade as he gasped and trembled in a troubled sleep.

  Now I hold his dream to rue and remember forever.

  It is the first weight in what will become my own collection of imprisoned dreams.

  And I think that it will always be the heavi
est.

  —For Jerry

  — | — | —

  WARMIN’ THE WOMEN

  I read in an old book once that you can’t choose who you love and I guess it’s so. I want to have Trent as my own always, to have and to hold and all that, but the council goes and gives me Marta. Some nights she squirms beneath me like a handful of nightcrawlers, but I keep her pinned. It’s no effort really. I’m a half a horse heavier than her—she ain’t going nowhere. She lays there next to me afterward, mouth openin’ and closin’ like a fish caught up in the weeds by the tide. She complains then, squinting lids across black marbles in slits of pearl.

  “You’re too heavy and you make me too hot,” she hisses, but I just smile.

  “That’s my job—that’s the job of all men,” I retort. “Warmin’ the women.”

  She always shuts up quick then and rolls away. I can’t wait ‘til her seed week is over and Trent can come back for the nights. This is the sixth month I’ve had her during her seed week and she’s yet to get big. If she don’t after this time, we can finally put her to some good use. Meanwhile, I just miss Trent. He never complains I’m too heavy. And he doesn’t squirm, he pushes right back. But I got to admit, the council is right. Women have to be got pregnant or there wouldn’t be no Trents. Fact is, there ain’t many women ‘round these days to get a child in. And most just can’t seem to hold a kid in their bellies.

  I wish I could give Trent a son. We’ve talked, and he wants to give me one too. Maybe this time his trip will pay off.

  Trent’s out now on a fuzzhunt to the city. Never know what kinda fuzz you find in those tumbledown ol’ towers. Council gave me one a couple years back that they found up there and after her first week I got to itching my own fuzz and pole like they was on fire. I thought it was cuz of all the pictures on her skin—dragons, snakes—boogie stuff. I went ‘fore the council and showed ’em what she done to me—got some whistles too when I dropped my pants. I didn’t pay the courtin’ no mind, just pointed ‘n’ screamed ’bout the fire she laid on me. I said it was probably poison from the pictures on her skin. Dragon bit me, I says, and council laughed. But doc say it’s just an itch, rub this on, and it goes away. But cuz o’ the itch, now I get the worst women—‘Last stop before the drop is Jack’s crop,’ the council says when they assign the women. Don’t wanna spread the itch. And Trent now got the same fire from me. Well, we give that fire right back to that picture girl, that’s for sure. The council sends more guys right back up to the city looking for more. Trouble is, most of the ones they bring back got something wrong with ’em. The skin falls off ’em when ya slap at ’em, they got sores ‘n’ walk crooked. And they never git kids.