Tail

by Julian Duenker

CHAPTER SIX

  Clouds kidnapped the bright and sunny pavements, in turn filling them with rain. It immediately instilled that indoors day feeling among the people. You could see it in how they walked, hunched over protecting themselves from human interaction. No one was prepared for the bi polar weather to start crying half way through the day, so, many people shuffled from building to arch with summery light clothing. The rain cooled down their bare skin, freezing their expectations for the day.

  Susan was in the car, huddled by her own warmth and the notion that she wasn’t wet. There was a small gap in the left window however. Broken and refusing to move up just the slightest bit to cover whatever little warm joy remained in the car. Shots of rain trickled into the car forming a wet patch on the left seat. Susan hated how the car filled with the smell of outdoors, but at least she wasn’t wet she told herself.

  She parked the car right outside Kevin’s house, as close as possible so to not get wet. She covered her gaps of skin with any loose bits of clothing and prepared to dash. Flung the door banging it against a dent in the wall and locked. Jumping into the ditch of the garden she kept her head down, bearing no heed to the homes of the flowers. The rain bounced and slid down off of her rain coat. It was one she had as a teen so there was a large tear sliding up the back, accompanied by a missing sleeve on her left arm.

  Key in, dreams of warmth unlocked. She stepped in quickly removing the coat and left it on a nearby chair. The open rooms were empty closed off by the sound of rain. The curtains in the back kitchen were closed giving the lower half of the lower half of the house an evening feel. She expected him to be inside because of the rain and seeing as he wasn’t downstairs she assumed he was upstairs. She’s a marvellous detective.

  Debris of his earlier life spread across the front room. Paintings didn’t cover the walls, instead allowing peeled old skin to form the bumpy soft texture around the room. Small trinkets scattered across the surfaces compensating for the lack of family photos. Kevin always whispered his adventures into her ear when she was a child. The stories of him across the deserts and abandoned villages filled her with un-schooled imagination. At her age they gave her the colour palette for her to paint with. Through her father she was introduced to an array of shades that didn’t exist in the structured bubble of a world outside she knew.

  A plate of half eaten potatoes rested on the table. The residue of his presence was apparent in how he left his utensils. It appeared as if half way through eating his dinner something happened grabbing his attention, in turn leaving his collected meal cold from waiting. After seeing the grave of food left on the plate her original idea of him sleeping slowly disappeared with every connection. But she needed to check, to make sure where he was.

  Grabbing hold of the uneven railing she suppressed her steps, just in case he was actually asleep. Her head raised over the carpet until she was at height with the hall. It was long and void of light, with the faintest of glimmers of outside shining through the gaps in the doors. She could never imagine this house not being part of her life. Her childhood moments inflicted every crack in the house. At the very end of the hall was Kevin’s room and to the left of that was Susan’s room, capsuled by nostalgia.

  She couldn’t help herself, she had to gander an eye into her bedroom, her father could wait with the rain. Her room was ajar soaking in the atmosphere of the dank house. Everything that she hadn’t taken when she moved out was still in the aged position they were when she left.

  Her single bed covered the corner next to the window looking out the side of the house. Her knees felt thin like when she was a child. She could feel that blissful happiness from when she was younger stab into the back of her neck forcing a smile. A handmade press of books presented itself on the opposite wall. She remembered how it would always fall on its left side, knocking the books out. Stacks of small books were replaced as the leg instead of making a new one. Kevin always insisted on fixing it, but Susan had no desire to, saying that the books did the job just fine. Naturally it always baffled Kevin.

  A doll corpsed itself on the covers of the bed. Its body was half naked exposed by the wear and tear of a child’s playfulness. Susan never gave it a name. She didn’t particularly like it much when she was young. When she first received it as a present she was so disgusted by the doll is that she buried it in the back garden. But over time boredom got to her, forcing her to engage with it. Using it as a crayoned canvas, she coloured it with graved drawings and morbid dreams. Shapes and broken lines harmed the dolls face, not like some demonic child’s victim but instead a different kind of toy. Through the unintentional fun that she got with the doll she formed a strange bond with it, finding it harder and harder to let go of it. So in the end she left it to protect her room, respect built every time she saw it sitting loyally between the waves of her blanket.

  With her nostalgia stimulated once more, she remembered her quest for her father’s whereabouts. Creeping back into the hall she placed her hand on her father’s door carefully. The creak of dementia wood would have woken up the dead, so she just moved it enough to squeeze her head through.

  The room was empty, void of any breathing pair of lungs. He wasn’t in the house, perhaps he was gone somewhere. Shopping for food? She arched her neck around the body of the room looking for Kevin as if he’d be hid in a corner crying to himself like the heartfelt man that she wished he was.

  The room was littered with scarred memorabilia. Totem be totems in the designated corners. Dead skin painted the curved wood surfaces. Odd physical rocks represented the cemented memories of the aged man. They all formed around, hand placed, in a circle of needed friends. With attributes placed by the wrinkles of his eye, they provided the illusion of company. She had been in his room with often sight, but she had never seen such a strange placement of his belongings as if stretched out like a thigh muscle. As she gawped at the red meat, a noise came through the window which looked out into the backyard.

  Inching her attention up to the pained glass she focused her vision through the fog of rain. A sound of metal fighting rock shattered through. She saw her father’s silhouette off in the distance shaking to her own fear. Storming down the beaten carpet she stood in the frame of the kitchen door and looked out into the battlefield of the backyard.

  Ever since Kevin had decided to redress his garden, the back side of the house was always dripping with the ideas of what he wanted it to be. But the task of redecorating took time and effort that he decided to spend on the front first. Because of this the back garden was left to grow with a distorted back brace, morphing the spine of the grass to live in patches. A fantastical football pitch is exactly what the garden looked like.

  Kevin was in the far reaches of the garden, banging his shovelled grip against the ground of rock and stones. She moved towards sheltering herself underneath the umbrella of the tree. Few bullets of rain passed through the gap in the branches, but she ignored them, focusing on more pressing matters.

  Howling her words through the sheets of rain she said; “Dad!! What are you doing.....? Come inside.” He turned around digging the shovel into the ground to throw his next words. “I need to work.... planting a few things. The garden won’t finish on its own.”

  “Come over here.” He left his shovel behind and apprehensively walked over to her warming his shoulders with the blankets of branches.

  “Why do you have to do it in this weather... can’t you just leave it for another day and come inside... hot cup of tea. How does that sound?” At that point she had wrapped herself in her own confused skin huddling for warmth with the embrace of her arms.

  “It sounds great but I started working and I plan on finishing... I’m not allowing this weather fucking decide my day.” He said as he middle fingered the sky.

  Frustration built up in Susan, mainly because she had to endure the weather to indulge his words. She decided to dig a disapproved look into him. No other words would have worked, so she turned on her heel and w
ent into the house. He stood there with his own slight guilt. Brushing his coarse hand up against the trunk of the tree, he dug a hole with his work boots deciding what to do next. The shovel stood erect in the dirt, while Susan dried herself off in the eye of the kitchen. The rain filled the hole he was digging. With that in mind he thought to himself that maybe the weather would take care of it, maybe time would pause for the garden’s back hole, and perhaps Susan would forget.

  The back door of the house swung with reserved force pushing small puddles into the kitchen. Susan stood by the kettle preparing a cup of hard conversations. He ignored her at first, shifting about the kitchen building up an uncomfortable silence while he dried himself off and changed his clothes. She slighted her neck over to him.

  “The garden is that important is it? Some buried treasure you’re not telling me about… or maybe some bunker hiding all of our relatives.” She said with undeniable laughter for the situation. Holding his soaked shirt in a bundle he ate the question.

  “Did I ever tell ya about when I stayed a while in Canada?”

  “No ...and I don’t like it when you avoid my question.”

  “Just give that cup of tea, sit down and listen... cause I’m listening to you. K?” He placed himself at the end of the table, waiting for his cup of always over-milked tea. With her knees banging up against the underbelly of the wood she sipped on her warmth waiting for the story to slip out from beneath his wrinkly heat. He warmed his palms with the drink first before igniting his story.

  “I was in my late twenties... I think. Doesn’t matter. Having no one at home left, I had decided to roam around the place. Puberty is no fucking fun when you have no one to torment you know.”

  Susan raised her legs until they were pressed against her chest instilling that natural feeling of self-achieved warmth. “Ya my favourite story is the one with you through the highlands of Iceland.”

  “Ya… damn right… glad you remember that one… This one played a little differently though. I forced myself to try different places... to find a place to stay and eat. Was in Canada with that goal, through towns and villages by myself. A couple of stolen drinks, food and foreign fists later I came across this old fella. Bag of fucking skin he was. Seemed like an easy target to steal from, so I followed him home. As you do when you don’t have a dinner in front of you.” Letting out nostalgic laughter he leaned back into his worn chair.

  “I genuinely thought I was being stealthy you know… moving between bushes and shite. He knew well though what I was up to that night.... I got to his house and waited until he settled down for the night... waitin for the cover of darkness as the poor man’s bible says. But you know hunger can make a man tired... while I was asleep he moved me into his house. He had so much flabby skin it must have hid all of his muscles, cause I was heavy. When I woke up in the morning he had placed out a breakfast for me and all.... I didn’t know what to think. Kind Canadians I suppose.” She leaned forward with hungry breath lining her lips with the taste for insight.

  “I stayed with him for an “I don’t know how fucking long” amount of time, but I was in no position to refuse. The place itself was nice, you know forests and trees and fields. All the space that the young man me needed to run around in. I was never very kind to people that dared to place a leash on me you know. So I spent most of my days out in his garden and worked shifts for him at his sawmill. He fed me and then I spent every evening out under the garden with him. The simple act of giving me food was enough to make me submit.” Whether it was the thought of how ridiculous it all sounded or the swishing muscle memory of his chopped off tail, he managed to laugh.

  He finished his tea in one gulp finalising the cup. The rain tormented the glass from the windows. The arms of the tree tortured itself with the bending strength of the wind. Colour grew fearful of the outside noises, running away from their surfaces in an attempt to find somewhere inflicted by rays of what was left of the sun. Each depressing element of the kitchen seeped into the odd words pulled out by Kevin.

  “A forest fire started one night... Tried to save him and all that heroic jazz. The garden gone, him gone, house gone, I had nowhere to go. Everything about him and that place were the only things that kept me alive... so I just slept outside the ash place... every fucking night.” somehow he managed to find the corpse of laughter in the conversation.

  “He paid me with food and shelter so I didn’t exactly have any money to go somewhere else. Beautifully symbiotic relationship between an old kind man and his testosterone fuelled dog no? Naturally when one party disappears so does the other. But somehow no one told me this, so I stayed at the burnt down place and tried to salvage who knows what... running around waiting for my master to return like the good boy that he trained me to be. It doesn’t matter how attached you are to someone, food always comes back reminding you that life still exists and so do you.” With that he grabbed his cup of tea and banged it against the hard table to punctuate his point.

  The empty liquid in Susan’s cup rang hollow within the bones of her fingers. She didn’t know what to say, she didn’t feel the need to say anything, just diverted her attention to the dwindling heat in her knees. “What happened next?”

  “I just stayed until I found somewhere else to sleep, shit and eat. When I left the trees were in the same bent position as when they had died. That garden couldn’t survive you know. No matter how much I wanted it to return to its former beauty.”

  “So with the story over, I feel very entertained. Thank you very much. Should be a movie and all, but why? Why did you tell me this? It’s depressing enough with the weather outside.” At that point the conversation had receded to the back of his tongue, parched and begging like a mad man for another drink. “I just felt like I needed to share. That story has been playing in my mind all morning and I guess I just need someone to lay it on.” “Selfish.”

  He got up from the table and proceeded to drown himself with a new cup of tea. Susan followed him with her eyes as he leapt from his chair. She was half expecting to see a tail wagging from all of the fucking dog references in his story. But nothing, unfortunately he was just a normal man with no tail. Damn she thought to herself. Her enjoyment for fantasies burst then and there.

  “So what’s the story with the demonic circle of props up in your room?”

  He took the shift in conversation as his queue to stretch. Contemplating where he should rest his ass next he hovered from one corner of the room to the next.

  “I’m just running through some old memories of mine. Nothing creepy about that is there? I don’t exactly have photos to make a scrapbook out of so those tiny things are the closest thing I have to my earlier life.”

  “I get that, but they are just laid out so dramatically.”

  “Indulging myself.” The rain kept banging like the rain does, forcing all the tiny droplets into a state of self-reflection. Like why do we have to be wet? And why do we have to fall and hit the ground? All of their questions had actual answers but considering how they were in fact water and lacked the ability to think, those very simple questions became their transcendental philosophies.

  “Now it’s my turn to snoop around your daily life. Get up to anything interesting... in the past day?” The words came out buttered with creamy laughter, showing how little he expected her to say.

  “Ya actually… I met a guy at a bar last night. Mathew was his name.... first name basis. Fancy photographer and all that… I’m planning on meeting him again soon. He is vague enough, like all he left me was an address and a time. Don’t even know his last name yet.”

  Paused at the kettle, he turned around and leaned on the counter with his pressured hands.

  “As your father I feel obliged to tell you that that sounds so fucking fishy I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a fish market he was leading you to.” He was laughing at his cheesy reply but at the same time Susan saw genuine worry inflict his face as he tried to squeeze the light hearted jokes from
his cheeks.

  “You know that I can handle myself right?” Susan said trying to lure him into her body language. Kevin swallowed the bait and leaned into her over the table.

  “Out of everyone that I know, you are the one who can handle themselves the most, I just don’t know how… Mathew handles himself.” “He’s fun.” She said ending the conversation on her note. She appreciated and loved the concern that he had for her but it would always end on her note. Both of them knew that.

  And that was all they could say to each other. The rain continued to thrash its body against the walls of the house. Kevin waited until the weather calmed down from its temper until he went once more into the fray of his back garden. They shared a few more polite words between each other, but with time pressing on Susan’s ankles she left heading towards somewhere new. Before she escaped her old home however, Kevin had placed a small lump of cash in her palms. The transaction stank of repetitiveness, so she just covered her nose and thanked.