by Paul Pen
“What do you mean, he never goes up there? So what does he eat?”
“He eats children,” I replied.
“But he must have to breathe,” she said. “Don’t you think?”
I opened my mouth to say something. But I couldn’t remember what my insect book said about how crickets breathe. I knew that caterpillars breathe through holes in their skin, but I didn’t know how crickets did it.
“Listen to me,” my sister said. “The Cricket Man comes down through the tunnel from the surface. Which means that he has to open the other door. The outer one. The one we can’t open. That door’s only open while the Cricket Man’s inside.”
I hunched over even more. I lowered my voice.
“Another door?” I asked.
She smiled. “I told you there’re a lot of things you don’t know,” she said. “It’s the trickiest door. That’s why we need the Cricket Man. He’s the only one who can open it.”
I shifted on my backside to move closer to her.
“And if he doesn’t come back?” I asked. “If I’m good, he won’t have to come back. He eats bad boys.”
My sister straightened her back. She held a finger to her mouth, thinking. After a silence, she relaxed her spine again.
“But he will come,” she sighed.
“How do you know?”
“Because you still have that jar in your drawer.”
I lowered my head, knowing that she was right, that I hadn’t been good, that the Cricket Man would keep looking for me until he found me. A shiver ran through my body. My sister must’ve realized because she swooped on me. The books hit each other between our legs like the tectonic plates that Mom had told me about. She put her arms around me, her breasts squashed against my body.
“Don’t be afraid,” she said in my ear. “We’ll be ready when he comes. We’ll make sure the Cricket Man doesn’t catch you with his legs.”
Then I told her a secret.
“I peed myself in the living room,” I said. “Last time he came. He almost got me in the living room. And I peed myself.”
My sister squeezed harder with her arms. Her body shook in spasms.
“What is it?” I asked.
She couldn’t contain her laughing fit and let out a cackle.
“You peed yourself!”
She separated from me, pointing a finger at me while she laughed. At first it made me angry. Then her noisy laughter became contagious. She hit my shoulder to coax me to laugh with her. And there was something comforting in her reaction to my secret. She managed to make me feel like it wasn’t a secret to be ashamed of. I let out a first solitary giggle. She was holding her hands to her belly.
“Peed your pants!” she yelled. The last sound stretched out until it became another fit of laughter. She also tried to imitate the sound of a stream of pee, letting out air through her teeth. That really was funny. I laughed again. This time I couldn’t stop. I surrendered completely to it.
We laughed together until we ran out of air, while she gestured with her hands for us to control the volume of our laughter.
After a few deep breaths we calmed ourselves down. My sister picked up the books that’d fallen on the floor, and opened them on our legs. She combed her hair with her fingers. She glanced at the bedroom door to make sure our laughing hadn’t attracted anyone’s attention.
“There’s nothing to be frightened of,” she said. “The Cricket Man won’t find you.”
“How can you know that?”
“Because you’ll be hidden in Dad’s wardrobe.”
The heat from the laughter vanished in an instant. The momentary chrysalis of tranquility split open to let out a black moth of absolute terror. A death’s-head hawk moth, the lepidopteran that has a skull tattooed on its thorax.
I shook my head.
I tried to get up. I didn’t even want to listen to any explanation my sister might have for those words. She grabbed me by the T-shirt, using the bump of material that she herself had marked in the fabric before.
“You’ll hide in the wardrobe before the Cricket Man arrives,” she said. I opened my mouth, but she whispered more loudly to assert herself. “And when he comes down to find you, you’ll leave through the tunnel. There’s a passage and a ladder on the wall. All going up. When you get out, you’ll head toward the lights. You’ll look for some people. Look for the houses. You’ll tell them that you want to save your little nephew. And you’ll bring them here.” The last word stumbled in her throat. Her eyes went shiny.
“You’re going to bring people to this basement.” One end of her mouth lifted as if she was going to smile, but for some reason she made an effort to remain serious.
“What’s outside?” I asked.
She pressed her lips together. She blinked faster than usual.
“You’ll see,” she said.
I imagined myself poking my head out to see what was above the basement, making myself visible to the rest of the world. Emerging from the depths with my firefly lamp held high. Tapping the jar’s lid to tell them to use their flashing light to make the SOS signal I’d been teaching them. Three short, three long, then three more short flashes. They almost had it. The thought of going outside made me remember something. Or someone. An uncontrollable feeling started in my stomach. It pushed the thought to my mouth. The words escaped before I could contain them.
“My chick!” I cried. I covered my mouth with my hands. I’d let out the secret in front of my sister. With my eyes wide open, I watched her reaction.
“Your chick?” she asked.
I remained silent. My eyes began to dry out from keeping them open so wide.
“Poor thing,” she said. “You don’t understand a thing.” She looked at me in silence for a few seconds. Then she took my hands from my mouth. She wrapped them in hers. “That chick—” she began.
“I didn’t mean chick,” I interrupted in a late attempt to deny its existence.
“I know what chick you’re talking about.”
My neck went soft. My head fell forward.
“I was in the bedroom that night, too, remember?”
I recalled how one of my sister’s arms had emerged from under her sheets to grab the mask and put it on when Dad came in to tell me off for sneaking into his bedroom. I nodded.
“I heard what Grandma had you believe,” she said. Her words left me confused. “Poor boy, look at your little face.” My sister rested a hand against my cheek. “It must be tough finding out about so many lies at once.”
The corners of my lips pulled downward. I felt pressure on top of my eyes. And an itch in my throat. My chin began to tremble when I thought that my chick could be another invention.
“My chick . . .” I didn’t know what else to say.
“Another lie,” confirmed my sister. “I told you that Grandma appears better. But she isn’t.”
“But I saw it,” I managed to say. “It was yellow. With feathers. And it tweeted.” I relived the excitement of the birth of the little bird in my grandmother’s bedroom.
“Grandma put it here,” I said, pointing at my shoulder, “and the chick ate from her hair. And then she passed it to me.”
“And then what happened?”
“Dad came. Angry because I’d gone in his room,” I remembered without difficulty. “I hid the chick behind my back. I had it in my hands. Dad made me show them. And the chick . . . the chick . . .” I had to breathe through my mouth to stop myself from crying. I looked at my sister, struggling to understand.
“The chick wasn’t there,” she said, finishing my sentence. “Because there is no chick. It never existed. Grandma lied to you. Chicks can’t hatch from an unfertilized egg.”
“But I saw it . . .”
“Covered in yellow feathers as soon as it hatched? Climbing onto Grandma’s shoulder? Eating from her hair?” She raised the pitch of her voice with each new question. “You don’t know how a bird’s really born.”
I’d never seen it. Not ev
en in a photo in the many books we had in the basement. So I shook my head.
“They come out wet,” she went on. “And clumsy. With their feathers stuck to their body. Like your nephew when he was born, but in bird form,” she added. “Grandma hid the egg under her pillow. And I bet she crushed it with her head.”
I remembered how Grandma had asked me to close my eyes just before it hatched. They don’t hatch if they know someone’s looking, she’d said. Then I’d discovered a wet patch on Grandma’s pillow, similar to the one left by the clot of liquid that fell onto the floor when Dad squashed my other egg.
I thought about the piece of shell I’d kept in my drawer since that night, protected in its T-shirt nest. A string of dribble overflowed one side of my mouth.
“No, please,” I said to my sister. “No . . .”
She hugged me. She stroked my head, hushing me, repositioning herself so that she was sitting beside me. I lay down over her lap. “Don’t worry,” she said to me. “Things will be different very soon.”
That night, I waited for Grandma in her room after dinner. I stood peering into the baby’s crib, my chin resting on the edge of his little shelter. Listening to him breathe. The bedroom door opened. Grandma headed to her bed without noticing my presence.
“I’m here,” I told her. She turned toward my voice, holding a hand to her chest.
“Don’t give me frights like that,” she said. “I’ll start thinking your father was right about you being like a ghost.”
“Don’t say that,” I whispered.
“Do you want to talk about what happened last night?”
I shook my head.
“Do you want to?”
“No.”
Grandma sat on the side of her bed. She took off her rosary and began to flick through the beads with both hands resting on her knees. I went and stood in front of her. I smelled the talcum powder. I bent, intending to give her a kiss, but I changed my mind and straightened my body again.
“Is my chick still alive out there?” I asked.
She said a few more words of her prayer before breaking off. She pinched one of the beads to remember where she’d stopped.
“Your chick?” she asked. “The one that hatched here?”
“The one from the egg Mom gave me.”
My grandmother’s thicker eyebrow made a few different shapes before she answered.
“Sure,” she said, “it’ll be tweeting happily out there.” My sister was right. Grandma lied, too. She stretched out a hand in search of my belly. I took a step back to move away. She clawed the air. “Where are you?” she asked, moving her arm.
I took another step back. “Goodnight, Grandma,” I said.
She raised her sparse eyebrow. She opened her mouth to say something, but at that moment the bedroom door hit the wall. My brother came in making the floor shake as usual. He marched around the room with exaggerated steps, lifting his knees high. When he started humming his song, we understood what state he was in. Grandma shushed him.
“Come on, Scarecrow,” she said to him, “get into bed.”
My brother stopped his march but kept humming at the same volume. There was a lot of saliva splattering through the gap in his bottom lip. My grandmother waited to hear the squeak of the neighboring mattress’s springs before continuing her prayer.
I went up to my nephew’s crib. I poked my head over the side. He was sleeping peacefully in spite of the false scarecrow’s singing and Grandma’s constant mumbling as she prayed. I rested my chin on the top of the wooden frame.
“I’m going to get you out of here,” I whispered to the baby. “So they don’t trick you like they have me.”
He replied with a coo.
Back at the door, I said goodnight again to Grandma.
“And my kiss?” she asked, the prayer stopping, a bead trapped between two fingers.
“Goodnight, Grandma,” I repeated.
I closed the door behind me.
32
The potato cupboard emptied as the days went by. The rice, milk, and eggs began to run out, too. Mom had rolled up the toothpaste tube with a hairpin to get as much as possible out of it. My sister said that it was a good sign, that soon we’d be able to put the escape plan we’d devised into action. I lost the desire to see it through whenever I thought about the fact that I was going to have to hide in the same wardrobe where my sister said the Cricket Man would come in. At night, in the dark, she reminded me of the reasons why I had to get out of the basement, persuading me from the bottom bunk. She always kept her mask within reach, on the mattress, in case Mom or Grandma suddenly came into the room.
That was what happened one night when Mom opened the door without warning. She came up to my bunk in the dark. “Are you always going to sleep up here, or what?”
“My sister doesn’t want to use this bed.”
Although she was lying right under me, she said nothing. Mom brushed my hair with her fingers.
“Son, why’ve you been so quiet lately? Have we done something to upset you?”
My sister hawked, though it didn’t seem like she needed to clear her throat.
“Have you changed your mind about anything?”
“No, Mom,” I lied. “There’s nothing wrong.”
“You sure?”
I confirmed I was with a sound in my throat.
“You can tell us anything.” She stroked my head in silence. “Anything.” When she kissed me, I felt the wrinkled skin that surrounded her lips on my forehead. Before withdrawing her face, she whispered in my ear, “Even if you think you can’t.”
My sister scratched the mask with a fingernail as a signal to remind me of the pack of lies they’d told me.
“There’s nothing wrong, Mom,” I repeated.
She sighed. “All right,” she said. She tucked me in and gave me another kiss on the cheek.
Before she left the room, my sister spoke.
“No kiss for me?”
Mom closed the door without answering. My sister let out a chuckle.
On another of those nights, while my sister was putting the finishing touches on the plan from the bottom bunk, I remembered that I’d left the cactus in the living room. I’d spent the whole afternoon pushing the plant pot along with a finger, following the course of the patch of sun. Watching the dust dance between its spines and thinking about how that light could envelop me as well soon enough.
“Where’re you going?” she asked when she saw me climb down from the bunk.
“I left my cactus in the living room.”
“OK, fetch it. But don’t talk to the others too much.”
I headed up the hall toward the living room, which was lit like it was every night by the television’s glow. I noticed that the intensity of the light didn’t change. The movie must’ve been on pause, two blurry lines of interference traveling up and down a frozen image.
“. . . leave because he wants to,” I heard my mother say, her voice barely a sigh turned into words. “His father’s plan isn’t working. We’re going to have to tell him everything. He’s not so little anymore. We knew that—”
“Quiet,” said Grandma. “I hear something.”
The floor creaked under my feet.
Mom looked out into the hall. “What’re you doing there?”
“I just came out,” I lied. “I left my cactus in there.”
Mom scanned the floor. “You can get it tomorrow. I’m talking to your grandmother now . . . about the movie we’re watching.”
Mom never paid much attention to the movies. She just followed them from the kitchen, leaning against the countertop, biting her fingernails so they ended up like little saws.
“Anyway, you should be in bed,” she added. “Go before your father gets back.”
In the bathroom, the cistern emptied with a final sucking noise. If I wanted the cactus to sleep with me, I had to rescue it before he came out. I heard him turn on the water to wash his hands. I ran up the hall, ignoring my moth
er’s urgent gestures. I dodged her at the hallway entrance, slipping through her hands.
The water stopped running in the sink.
Mom decided to try to overtake me. We both pounced on the plant. Although I was first to reach the pot, she grabbed my forearm. The ceramic container slid between my fingers.
The pot flew.
It broke as it hit the floor in the middle of the living room.
“No,” Grandma said when she heard it. She’d listened to what was happening from the sofa.
“Son,” said Mom, “no, I didn’t want to . . .”
The light from the TV set allowed me to see the soil spilling in all directions. The two balls of spines that formed the cactus rolled to the hallway entrance.
The hinges on the bathroom door squeaked. Dad was coming. He started a sentence before reaching the living room, but was unable to finish it. Just like he was unable to complete his last step. I heard the crunch under his foot, similar to the sound Mom made when she stuck a fork in the pulp of an orange to squeeze it.
Grandma held her hand to her mouth.
Mom squeezed my shoulder in some sort of apology. I moved away from her.
Then Dad screamed. The yelp that follows a flash of pain. The soles of his worn brown slippers had offered little protection against my cactus’s spines. He rested a foot on the opposite knee to look at the sole, leaning against the corner that formed the beginning of the hallway, right where I’d hidden from the Cricket Man. Then he scoured the floor with his eyes. When he discovered my mother and me by the table, his hair scar tightened.
“This’d better not be what I think it is,” he said. The two of us looked at the squashed remains of my cactus. What should’ve been a spherical shape was nothing more than a formless lump of waste among triangular pieces of broken pot on a carpet of soil.
“Tell me what this is.” Dad raised the volume of his voice. He let go of the corner he was clinging to and swooped on me. When he put down his injured foot, he gave another cry. He had to hop on one leg to reach the sofa. There, Grandma tried to feel for the injured limb, but Dad batted her hand away with the sock he’d just taken off.
