9 Tales Told in the Dark 12

by 9 Tales Told in the Dark

  “You’re not making sense,” the woman says.

  “Not a lick,” says the man.

  The cowbell sounds again and Martha looks up over a soup shelf and sees the door open and then close but cannot see anybody walk in. She looks at the man at the register, now leaning his back against the wall behind him, his fishing cap lowered over his eyes as though he were trying to sleep on his feet. Then he tips up his hat and looks at the door, then at Martha, then lowers his cap again.

  “Damn kids and their knock-knock-ditch-‘em games,” he says.

  Martha looks away.

  “My baby girl,” the other man says, “she went down by the rivermouth. Lead down there by a young man from church, and they went down and began to pray and do things like the Maker made them want to do, and looked and saw something wreathing in the water weeds.

  “Not one lick of sense,” the man says.

  “Well, my girl, being a fine child of God, she is, and merciful to a hurt, she gone over and picked up that thing and wrapped it in a sackcloth like the Baby Savior were, then brung it home.”

  “Then what?” asks the woman.

  “Well, she brung it up to me still wet and slimy and showed me and told me what’d happened, and I said, You throw him back! And she said, Why? And I said, ‘Cos water trash gone wash up where it do, and ain’t no use in picking it up neither.”

  Just then, a shelf of filled mason jars topples sideways, crashes to the floor. Everyone stops and looks toward the sound. Jelly and honey and glass crawl slow and dark over the hardwood floor like a rainbow of gasoline in a street puddle under sunshine. A jar rolls toward Martha, stops at her toes. She kneels, picks it up.

  “Sam-Hell?” the man at the register says.

  The now horizontal shelf begins to rock to and fro slightly, a still, small voice noising from underneath it. Like a hurt animal, Martha thought. And she begins to think about Pluto, about the time he broke his hind leg falling down the stairs and the noises he made, weak and near-human.

  “Something’s under there,” the woman says.

  “Chester, c’mere and help me, would you?” the man behind the register says stepping around his counter and toward the mess.

  “Can’t lift,” says the one man. “Not a lick since accident. Knees are shot to hell and back.”

  “Mitch, help me out with this.”

  “Gotta watch the blood pressure,” the other says patting his left man-breast, sending a series of ripples through his gelatinous chest and belly. “Doctor’s orders.”

  “You can’t help me lift a shelf?”

  “Doctor’s orders,” he says again and grins. “Ticker’s getting old.”

  “Lazy bastards, all.”

  The woman steps off her scooter and grips a corner of the shelf. “Lordy, you boys wouldn’t know hard work if it jumped up bit you on the peckers.”

  “Thank ya, ma’am,” the shop keeper says. “On three: One. Two. Three!”

  The two puff heavily and bring up the shelf, reposition it in its proper place.

  The man with the bad knees stands staring at the heap of broken jars and spilled condiments. “Sweet Jesus, Matthew!” he says. “Look!”

  “What?” asks the shop keeper.

  Martha steps closer and looks. There, in the middle of the mess and lying curled like a hatchling in a nest, is a small child—at least a child in the academic sense of the word: It has arms and legs, and a head and face, and between its naked thighs, the expected collection of little boy parts. But its arms are disproportionate, one too long and the other too thick and its fingers so numerous and gangly its hands look like fleshy spiders. She moves closer still: Its hair-lipped mouth hangs open, its gums gashed and wet with red, teeth sparse and crooked and jagged. Pushing past the men standing and staring, she sees its atrophied legs twitching, bent inward like a cricket’s and kicking the jars surrounding. And Martha looks at the small and twisted half-conscious form before her and realizes her child had been born lucky.

  “Yours?” the shop keeper asks.

  Martha looks at him and shakes her head. Glancing behind her, she sees the second man backing toward the door. His lips repeating, Water trash, but making no sound.

  “Best back up then.” He nudges her aside and steps away toward the back end of the store and then through a small door. The door closes; clanking reverberates faintly behind it. Then the man emerges, carrying a long-handled snow shovel.

  “What’re you gonna do with that?” Martha asks.

  “What I gotta.”

  “Lordy, what’s the matter with you people?” the woman says squeezing her form back into her scooter and riding it toward the child.

  “Gonna wash up where it do,” the second man says from across the store.

  The woman looks back and glares at him. “It ain’t hurting nobody. It’s just a little thing, barely more than a suckling after all.”

  She leans down and brushes some glass from its cheek with her sausage-like fingers. It looks up at her and makes a sound low and inhuman.

  “Ain’t no use in picking it up,” the man said louder.

  As she touches its face again the child jumps, its cricket legs propelling it upward, and lands on the woman’s bosom. Startled, she reverses her scooter knocking it into a wall of cereal boxes behind her. They rain to the floor with a thick galumphing sound. Then she screams in pain. The child leaps off her and slips and slithers on jelly and glass, then takes off on all fours toward the door. Martha watches as it passes her: Its mouth is smeared with blood, something pink clenched in its teeth. She looks at the woman, half falling out of her seat and clutching her left breast, red leaking from her soft flesh and down her shirt. Martha turns again and sees the man by the door collapsing to the floor in fright, tightly clutching his own cleavage. The child races on all fours toward him, and he bicycle-kicks at it hard. One blow connects with its head, dislodging the contents from its mouth, knocking the child sideways and into the front counter. The shopkeeper runs toward it, snow shovel out like a jouster’s lance, and lunges the heavy orange plastic blade down.

  There is a wet sound, and a loud cry. The cry lasts a long time. Then a silence so deep Martha could hear the blood pushing through her head.

  The man on the floor pushes himself to his feet.

  “Whose is it?” the other asks.

  “Hell if I know,” the shopkeeper says. ”Some dumb bitch likely forgot to keep it locked up.”

  “Oh, God! Oh, Jesus Christ!” the woman says clutching herself where she’s missing skin. Nobody seems to pay her mind.

  “Either that’re she started in feeling sorry for it and let it free, like a captured titmouse or squirrel,” the shopkeeper continued.

  “Lord, I need a doctor,” she says. “I’m bleeding so much!”

  “Goddamn whores oughten just take a coat hanger to all ‘em fore they’re ever even born. That’re learn to keep their dresses lowered and their panties up. Save us all the trouble of dealing with these little shits like they’re our problem!” Then the shopkeeper scoops the baby with the shovel, then lets the shovel drop and looks over at the man pushing his wobbling mass back vertical.

  The man looks at him, then away.

  The woman’s voice resonates through the store: “God! God! God!”

  Martha quietly watches them, yet watches nothing at all, unable to comprehend their speech, their alien motions, replaying the last few minutes over and over in her head. Then she looks at the baby being gentled away, destined for the dumpster. Her chest jumps, and she starts to cry. She cries loud, so that she can’t hear them talking anymore. After a while, someone places a hand on her shoulder, but she doesn’t look up to see who, swats it away.

  And at some point, she begins to run again, pushing through the store-folk encircling her and out the front door. She runs and runs, eyes open yet blind with tears, feeling the pebbly town road under her feet turn to grass and the grass to thick leaves and branches. Then she stops and breathes and looks
around: she's out of the town, and far into the woods at its outskirts. She looks behind her at where she’d come from, then up at the high branches and the sun pouring white and smooth as hot milk through them, and deduces by the dimmer brightness she’d run into the late afternoon. Then she looks at her trembling hands and realizes they’re still holding the glass jar of raw honey. Her feet are hurting bad now. So she sits on the cold and damp earth and sets the honey beside her and picks small rocks and splinters from between her toes. When she finishes, she buries her face in her hands and stays very still a while and cries again. After that, she wipes wetness from her eyes and sniffs. And she smells water; listening, hears it run.

  River

  Sitting in the reeds at the river’s edge, Martha eats the honey with her fingers until her belly is bitter with sweetness. The river is big and green. Occasionally, she dips her foot into the water, which feels cold and slimy against her toes, and leaves it there until they burn with coldness. The pain feels right somehow.

  She leans back on her elbows, tilts her head back, closes her eyes:

  She thinks about her son, likely awake now, likely now bashing his head against his bars until he bleeds and howling for a release he’d never known nor ever will. Or maybe for food. She’s been gone a long time. She looks at the honey.

  She thinks about her father, who she knows is home by now, likely searching the house for her, to punish her for sins he’ll make up when he finds her. She thinks about him pacing each floor, each room, as the child’s disfigured and lonely screams permeate the very breadth and depth of the house’s every crevasse, seeping up through the gaps in every floorboard, and further stoking the rage consuming her tired father by the second.

  And how, when she was with child, he’d kept her locked in her room the six months her conception had become noticeable, not even letting her out when finally her time had come and she shrieked in pain and beat the door and floorboards as hot fluid ran down her legs. But her father was vanished a long time. And when he finally came up the stairs and unlocked the door and entered, he lifted her dress, knelt in front of the gray, mucous-covered orb working itself out of her slow-tearing vagina with both violence and beauty. He ordered her, “Push.” So she did. And after many hours and much blood, it was done, and he took it away to its appointed place, and there it has stayed.

  Then she recalls something all but forgotten: She thinks of a time when she was small, when her father used to take her fishing at a green pond some miles away. The water was warm under the summer sun. Her mother had packed the two sandwiches, tuna salad, or maybe peanut butter and jelly. Or maybe not; maybe that was a different time. Her father used bloodworms as bait. She watched them throb and wreathe and stiffen, venous and pink and wet, inside a small Styrofoam cup. Their shapes used to fascinate her in ways she would only years later understand fully. And as these recollections come and go and return and replay in shuffled, half-backward fragments, her heart begins to jump and a sadness she’s repressed until now begins to flood over her. She screams, loud and long, her eyes still shut tight, gripping her hair and pulling hard, hearing individual strands snap and dislodge at their roots. Her back and pelvis arched, and she rolling stiff through the tall tall grass. Then the flood passes, and she finds herself on her side, her eyes blurry with wetness, tiny sobs hiccuping from between her lips—wordless curses at God for not existing in the first place.

  The sun begins to set over the slow-rippling water. And she doesn’t want to go home. She only wants to hide here in the reeds and wait. She sees her breath thicken, hears her heart beating in her ears and the small, smooth noising of crickets chirping and bullfrogs honking.

  The water lap...lap...lapping against the riverside.

  She remembers she is very tired.

  Her eyelids lower—but sleep doesn't come. She wants to forget, release the pressure ever building behind her ribcage, doesn't know how but one way.

  Slowly, the sticky fingers of her right hand spider down her abdomen. Her heartbeats, not so much increasing as awakening, stretching like some beast coming to from a deep slumber, synchronize with the cacophony of noises swirling around her. But her mind leaves her more and more by the passing seconds until the landscape of her senses becomes a patchwork of lucidity. Her hand resting firm on her pelvis. The other automatically lifting her soft dress until her fingers find soft underwear, then skin and coarse hair. But she experiencing all as though outside her own body, as though succumbed to paralysis and pleasured by ghostly hands. And as she floats through a current of timelessness all the hurt, every memory of life up to this point inside her head washes away. She is nothing and everything, unborn and ever-existing all at once; the embodiment of the electricity generating between her thighs and there spreading throughout her form, out her fingertips, then back into her in an infinite cycle. Through her eyelids, she again sees Christ's bastard ceramic children, unsuffered at last and dancing ballet in the sky: behind the clouds, between the stars, around the moon. Her soul leaves her chest and joins them. She watches it go.

  And for once, she is pure.

  She stops, listens for a while:

  Sounds of water and wind and life and heartbeat move symphonically through the air, notes weaving in and out of range and twisting into hypnotic knots of rhythm like lightning bugs in a dark and newborn forest.

  But after a while passes, footsteps.

  Her eyes tremble open as a long long shadow slides over her from somewhere behind.

  “Can I help you with that?”

  And the broken fractions of time reform all around as she, throwing her skirt back over herself, opens her eyes fully, rolls over onto her hands and knees, and looks up at the blurry silhouette standing there like the Holy Ghost come to repo her soul.

  Car

  She sits in the passenger seat. It all happened so fast, so strange.

  When she got to her feet, Clinton had asked her if she needed a ride home.

  She'd said she didn't, snatched the honey jar off the ground, capped it. “Were you watching me this whole time?”

  “I didn't wanna disturb you.”

  “What? No! Why were you there?”

  “I saw you runnin’ and followed you in my car. I followed you a long time before you dipped into the trees. Then I got out tracked you to here.”

  “What, were you, like, jerking off in the bushes or something?”

  “Thought about it. A couple times.”

  “That's so fucking creepy!”

  “Sorry. I don't know why I—”

  “Just leave me alone!”

  “Let me give you a ride someplace.”

  “No.”

  “But it's dark and getting colder.” He breathed out hard and slow so she could see.

  “No. I need to go home.”

  “Then I'll take you there.”

  “Jesus Christ, no. Just go away.”

  When she turned away from him and walked through the trees, trying hard to feel some semblance of a trail under her burning-cold feet, Clinton followed her, giving directions. She’d glared backward at him a couple times, but he didn't say anything about it, so she let him be.

  When they’d reached the car, she couldn't feel road beneath her toes. So Clinton opened the door without a word, without an expression. And she got in.

  Now, in the car, they sit in a silence thick and awkward as a jellyfish and have been what feels like nearly an hour.

  “I'm sorry,” he says.

  “Shut up.”

  “Okay.”

  “Shut up!”

  He reaches for the keys dangling in the ignition. “Found your shoes in the back. They're underneath your seat, if you want 'em.”

  She bends down and sees them resting on top the collection of items that fell from his glove box earlier. As she bends down, slips the shoes on, something catches her eye, something shiny half-buried under gospel tracts. She reaches for it, picks it up. The knife's red handle has a white Swiss cross on it. She opens
the small blade. The engine starts, so she sits back up, hiding the knife in her palm between her thighs.

  He puts his hand on her knee and throws the gearshift out of park, and backs out onto the dark road. He drives slowly. She asks, “You planning on kidnapping me or something?” and he answers, “Where do you want me to take you?” She says wherever he wants to take her, and he says, “Away,” and she says she can't, and he says, “I know.” After that neither says anything. Not until the car stops in front of Maratha’s house. Inside, the lights are on.

  “Listen. Earlier, I said I’ve been wantin' to get to know you awhile, but I think I already do. I know your name anyway, Martha. And I know what you've done. Word gets around at church and in town, and I've had my fair experience dealing with mongoloids too.”

  She watches him as he talks. He stops a second and looks at her as if to see if she's listening. Then he keeps on.

  “Plus, I've seen you with your father. Guy reminds me of mine: a fanatic who thinks you're some kinda heathen for doing what the invisible man says ‘Thou shalt not.’ But, yeah, I know you. Better than you think. And I like you. And I want you to like me too.”

  Then he leans closer. Slow and timid, suppressing a grin from curing on his lips. She doesn't move. So he kisses her, gently this time. She doesn't move. Kisses her, and that's all. She doesn't. And when he finishes, he looks at her awhile, and she him, and there are no words. None at all.

  Martha looks aside and sees an unfamiliar car parked in front of the house.

  Clinton looks over too.

  “Wait, why is my father here?” he asks.

  “Your Dad?”

  He smiles and runs his fingers down her face, her shoulder, arm, then leg and up her dress. “It's okay.”

  “No, it's not. Let me out.”

  He squeezes her thigh, and she squirms.“It's fine. Don't worry.”

  “Get off!”

  “Relax.”

  “Goddammit!”

  He leans in closer again.

  Her heart races. She pushes away.