by Paul Pen
“A rat,” I managed to say.
“No,” she responded. She pressed the little boy’s head against her chest. “Where?”
“In the crib,” I said. “A huge rat, it came out from under the sheet. It walked over his face. Grandma, it scratched his face.”
Mom appeared in the room. Behind her, my dad and my brother. They crowded around us.
“What’s happened?” Dad asked.
“What’s happened, you ask?” My grandmother held the baby out for my mother to take him, then she stood up. She spoke very close to Dad’s face. “Rats. I told you they’d end up giving us a fright.”
“Rats?” Mom covered her mouth.
“There’s poison in every corner,” Dad explained. “Maybe with the delay it took a bit longer for—”
“Sure, blame it on him,” my grandmother broke in. “Is there any more with today’s things?”
My father left the room without answering.
My sister then appeared in the doorway. She parted a lock of hair caught in her mask’s artificial nose and examined the tips. “What’s happened?”
My brother grabbed my sister’s arm. He pulled her toward the baby, which still cried in my mother’s arms. He pushed her till she was down on her knees.
“Don’t touch me!” she yelled. “Get off me. Don’t touch me.”
My brother’s fingers went white around her arm. “You should have”—he choked on a syllable—“have been looking after him,” he said.
She groaned.
“Leave her,” Mom said as she stroked the baby’s face. “It was an accident.”
“It was an accident,” my sister repeated. “This place is full of rats.”
My brother let go of her arm. She massaged it.
Dad returned to the room. “We’ve got another box,” he said.
He shook it so my grandmother could hear it. It was red, smaller than a cereal box, but the same shape. The black silhouette of a rat was printed on one side, inside a yellow circle.
“Someone bring me the antiseptic from the bathroom,” Mom asked while blowing on the baby’s face.
My sister sat on the bed. She chose another lock of hair and smoothed it using two fingers like scissors.
“He’s your son,” my mother said. “Won’t you go?”
“How about his father goes?” she replied.
I ran to the bathroom to find the first-aid kit. Screams came from the bedroom. I also heard a slap.
In the afternoon I sat by Mom on the brown sofa in the living room. She was mending one of Dad’s shirts. On the sofa’s arm was the sewing box she’d used to help my sister after she gave birth. It was really an old Danish cookie tin. That was what the lid said. Behind us, my brother was riding the exercise bike, the pedal clipping the metal frame once every five seconds.
I observed Mom’s face. Her profile sculpted by the fire. Once I found her in the kitchen looking at a photo. She was touching it with her fingers. It was her before going down into the basement. She was standing on some rocks, gripping her skirt between her legs. Surrounded by the white spray from a massive wave that must’ve soaked her an instant later. Mom knelt to show it to me. When I saw that face of smooth skin and perfect features, like an orthopedic mask over Mom’s scars, I seized the picture frame and threw it to the floor. The glass broke.
On the sofa, I stopped the needle and thread. I kissed my mother’s cheek. I liked her eye that was almost shut. I liked the rough feel of her skin when she kissed me on the forehead before I slept. And I liked the clumsy eyelid that wrinkled up when she was concentrating on mending a shirt’s elbow.
Her nose whistled after I kissed her. I pressed my mouth against her ear. “Did the Cricket Man come for me last night?” I asked.
She let her shoulders fall and folded the shirtsleeve on her lap. She put the thread, needle, and thimble back in the sewing box. I stroked the wrinkly fold between two of her knuckles. The circle of burned skin at the base of the thumb. The wide, smooth scar near the wrist.
“For you?”
I nodded.
“Why would he come for you?”
I thought about the firefly jar hidden in the drawer. About how I could’ve suffocated the baby when I put it in his crib. The questions I’d begun asking myself about the world outside.
“Because . . .” I hesitated.
“And anyway, how’s an old man who doesn’t even exist going to stick you in a sack?” She pinched my nose.
“I saw him.”
“Are you sure?”
I nodded with my eyes wide open.
“Sure you’re sure you’re sure?”
She said the words in a funny way to distract me. But I remembered the bangs. The antennae scraping the hallway ceiling. The clicking of his back-to-front knees.
“I’m sure,” I insisted. “Maybe he came for the baby.”
“For the baby? What has the baby done?”
I shrugged, unable to find an answer.
Then I got it. “Mom,” I said. I gave a long pause before continuing. “Mom, is the Cricket Man the baby’s father?”
Her head fell forward, as if the neck had turned to mashed potato. She glanced at my brother on the bike to make sure he wasn’t listening.
“You do say some silly things,” she whispered. “If your father heard you . . . Son, you have to listen to me. The Cricket Man doesn’t exist. You’re safe here.”
“But I saw him.”
“The Cricket Man doesn’t exist,” she insisted. “Anyway, you don’t even know how babies are made. We’re not on that page yet.”
“I bet it’s not so different from how insects do it,” I responded. “And I’ve read a lot about that in my book.”
Mom smiled. One eye involuntarily closed. “Believe me, son, it’s very different.”
She picked up the shirt and took the needle and thread from the sewing box again to resume her work. A circular container made of transparent plastic fell onto the sofa. I examined its contents, moving it in my fingers.
“What are these?”
“They’re your milk teeth.” The container slipped. It rolled along the floor until the lid came off. The teeth scattered. My brother heehawed from the bike.
“Go on, go,” Mom said. A black thread joined her mouth to the shirt on her knees. “I’ll tidy that up. But go before this needle has your eye out.”
I took two of the teeth without her noticing.
I ran to the hall. Dad was speaking to my sister from the bathroom door. The faucet was running. “Put it on,” he said.
“I need to wash my face,” she responded.
“And I need to lay this stuff in the bathroom.” Dad showed her the box of rat poison he had in his hand.
“Lay it, then.”
“I don’t want to be looking at your face while I’m doing it.” Dad saw me and registered my hand pinching my underpants.
“And nor does your brother,” he said. He winked at me. “He needs to use the bathroom, too. He can’t come in if you have your nose hole out.”
I stood still.
The faucet kept running.
My sister’s arm emerged from inside the bathroom. I was about to close my eyes. She took the box of poison. Dad was left with his arm outstretched.
“I’ll lay it,” she said.
Then the pedaling noise stopped in the living room. The floor reverberated when my brother began one of his marches. He whistled the same melody as always.
I sucked in saliva, squeezing my underpants.
“Your brother needs to come in,” insisted my father. His tone darkened. “Put your mask on.”
I heard the strap adjusting.
“There’s a good girl,” he said, and he let me by. “You can go in now.”
Dad waited for me to position myself in front of the toilet bowl.
My sister clicked her tongue.
From the living room, Mom called to my father. “Make him stop,” she yelled, referring to my brother and his
march around the kitchen.
Dad took the box of rat poison from the sink and put it on the cistern.
“You lay the poison,” he told me. “I don’t trust this one in the mask. One cube behind this cupboard.” He touched the unit under the sink. “Another behind this one.” He laid his hand on the towel cupboard. “And another behind the door. Understood?”
I nodded.
“And wash your hands properly afterward,” he added. “I don’t want to find you dead in a corner.” He disappeared off to the living room, where my brother was still marching.
I took the cubes of poison from the box. They were light blue. I positioned them where Dad had told me. My sister was looking at the reflection of her mask in the mirror. She hit the jet of water a few times to make it splash onto the glass. Her image blurred. When I put the last dose of poison down behind the door, she asked, “Can I wash my face now?”
I nodded as I left the bathroom. My sister kicked the door shut.
I handed the rat poison box back to Dad, who was now on the bike. He snatched it from my hands as he pedaled and jammed it between two parts of the frame.
On the way back to my bedroom, I discovered two green spots of light behind the window. I looked back toward the living room. Mom’s hand appeared for a second in the rectangle of the doorway into the hall. It was pulling on black thread. My grandmother’s door was still closed. She hadn’t come out all day since breakfast.
The two new fireflies hovered in a playful way behind the glass, like a giant, cross-eyed insect looking in. When I opened the window, they landed on my hand.
“You’re from outside, aren’t you?” I said.
In my bedroom I found my brother sitting on the edge of his bunk. He was whistling his march through his broken lip with his pajama bottoms tucked into his socks. Seeing me, he stretched out his arms, like the man on Grandma’s rosary cross. He stood very still in his cornfield.
11
Grandma didn’t have dinner with us. We waited like we did at breakfast, but when the soup stopped steaming in its bowls, Dad gave us permission to start. This time it was Mom who gave thanks to the One Up There. When Grandma finally came out of her room, she found us on the sofa, illuminated by the intermittent light from the snow on the television. It was time for the movie.
Grandma dragged her slippers to the sofa. She sat with her hands in her lap. Lying on the floor, I breathed in the smell of talcum powder. Dad followed her movements from the striped armchair. He was sitting with one leg crossed over the other, a foot resting on the opposite knee. He was shelling peanuts in a bowl on his stomach, breaking the shells with his thumb. My brother asked if he could be the one who inserted the tape in the recorder. He waved it in the air like a trophy before letting himself drop near the Betamax machine. The ground trembled. He managed to get the tape in on the third attempt. My sister applauded. She was sitting on the floor, rocking the baby in her arms. The little boy was asleep. Mom, who was drying a plate near the sofa, flicked my sister’s head with the dishtowel for making fun of her brother.
“Mind the baby,” my sister said. She bent her back over in an exaggerated way, shielding the child as if protecting him from an explosion.
“Oh, come off it,” my mother responded, and she hit my sister again with the dishtowel.
“Mom!” she protested.
But Mom smiled and went over to the kitchen sink. She rarely sat down to watch the movies. She might follow them from start to finish, but did so resting against the sink, drying the dishes. Or from the table, talking to Grandma and choosing potatoes for the next day’s lunch. Or standing by the sofa, biting her nails with enough skill that they wouldn’t fall on the floor. She kept them in her mouth till she’d finished. Then threw the clippings in the bin. It made her fingernails jagged, like little saws. “You can start,” she said now from the kitchen. “I’ll come and sit down soon.” But she wouldn’t sit down.
“Can I watch?” I asked. I was lying facedown, my chin resting on the floor and my arms stretched out to the sides. I liked feeling the cold of the tiles in the main room.
Dad stopped shelling peanuts. “Which one did we put on in the end?” he asked my brother.
He looked at me from the video recorder, and grunted. The light now coming from the screen painted blue brushstrokes on his face. He got up and went to Dad’s armchair. He whispered the movie title into my father’s ear.
“No, you can’t,” Dad said to me. He tossed up a shelled peanut and caught it in his mouth.
“Can’t we put a different one on?” Grandma asked.
“No. Anyway, it’s his bedtime. He’ll just fall asleep on the sofa.”
Grandma turned her face toward Mom. I could see the dark skin of her neck, thick and rough.
“He’s right,” my mother answered, a nail clipping dancing between her lips. “It’s his bedtime.” She came over to me.
“Come on.” She ruffled my hair.
My sister sat up. “Take the baby with you, then,” she said. As if he’d heard his mother name him, the little boy began to cry.
“What’s wrong with him now?” She held the baby out in front of her to get a better look at him. In the holes in her mask, her eyes narrowed. The baby’s feet hung over the floor. He coughed, waggled his legs, shook his head.
My grandmother quickly bent down. She felt for the baby with her hands and picked him up, resting him against her chest. She gently patted him on the back.
“What is it?” Mom asked. I sensed a hint of alarm in her voice.
Grandma continued to assist the boy.
She gave him four gentle slaps on the back.
On the fifth, the baby burped.
It was a loud burp, almost like an adult’s.
My brother was the first to laugh. Then my sister. Dad cleared his throat with a first attack of laughter and then continued to guffaw with his mouth wide open. A piece of peanut skin detached from his lip and returned to the bowl it came from. Mom smiled, letting air escape through her nose. I laughed with her. Even Grandma smiled, this time for real, showing her teeth and raising the eyebrow with less hair.
We laughed like the family we were, accompanied by the orchestral symphony from the television, which showed a woman wielding a torch among the clouds.
“OK,” Dad said then, “that’s enough. It’s about to begin. Go on, and take the baby with you.”
“She can take him,” my brother said.
“Don’t start,” Dad cut in. “Your brother’s taking him.”
I took the baby from Grandma’s arms. She stroked my face.
“You’re such a good boy,” she said in a voice I could just hear. “And don’t worry about me. I’m almost back to normal.”
I left the room with the baby in my arms. I knew what movie it was as soon as I heard the first line over the noise of peanut shells breaking.
I stopped at the door to the little boy’s room. A storm of light broke in the living room, behind me. I looked at the closed window at the end of the hall. When the light flashed, I discovered my own reflection in the glass. I walked toward it. The changing light made the shadows dance and the space change shape. As I advanced, for a moment I couldn’t see the hallway anymore. Then the light returned, and I discovered myself again in the glass. Like the ghost that Dad said I was.
A ghost looking into the house from the outside.
The baby moved in my arms. He pressed his forehead against my chest and made a nice sound with his throat, like cooing. We continued until I reached the window. I opened it. I repositioned the little boy so he faced the outside, so he faced the darkness. Another flash of light from the television allowed me to see the nothingness on the other side of the bars. A box inside another box.
A soft breeze came in through the window, reaching the baby’s face and making his eyelashes flitter. He moved his lips in a sucking reflex.
“It’s from outside,” I told him. I lifted him to my face, pressing one of my cheeks against his,
and added, “It smells different. But I don’t know what of. Smell it.”
I closed my eyes, feeling the heat of my nephew’s skin on my face. His little heart was beating on the hand I had on his torso. I was holding him from behind with my other hand. I felt his body rise and fall, filling itself with the air that came from somewhere neither he nor I would ever know. I breathed that moisture in deep. The baby’s chest expanded under my fingers.
We breathed together.
After opening my eyes, I took hold of one of the little boy’s hands, his fingers closing around one of mine. Then he gripped one of the bars like it was another finger, but then let it go. He stretched out his arm, wanting to reach whatever there was beyond. He tried it with his other arm as well. He opened and closed his little hands in an attempt to reach behind the window.
“You can’t go out,” I whispered to him.
The boy’s face wrinkled up, and he showed the corners of hard flesh that were his gums. His eyes became mounds of wrinkled skin, the first stage before an outrageous scream. I put my hand over his mouth.
“Shh, Dad can’t see us here.”
The baby kicked his legs. He squirmed with his head, trying to free his nose and mouth so he could cry. I shushed him again in his ear. From the living room a woman’s screams came from the movie.
“Wait, I have an idea.” I closed the window. “Look, there’s no need to cry.” I made him face the window. The flashes of light in the living room reflected our image in the glass. “Look at us,” I repeated. “We’re outside now.”
The baby’s eyes opened on the other side of the glass. I smiled at the only part of me that didn’t live in the basement. And he smiled back.
The white light suddenly vanished, making us disappear.
We were left in the dark again. Trapped in the basement.
Then Mom’s nose whistled.
“Do you really want to leave?” she said from just behind me. The fright made me unable to answer.
From the living room, Dad asked Mom if she wanted him to pause the movie.
“No, it’s all right. I’m going to the bathroom. I wasn’t watching it, anyway.” Mom took the baby from my arms.
