Don't Bother

by Jeremy Martin

  Rachael lifted a hand, open palmed. Her reflection did the same. Rachael reached out to take its hand…

  A thwacking noise, just outside. A door flung open. Skyler S. turned the lights on. Rachael reached up to put her hand around her own throat.

  Outside, a woman laughed – sharp, hard. “Cuddle?” Mrs. Shumway said, and laughed again. “I just want it to be like it used to be, when you acted like you wanted me.”

  Rachael’s knees buckled. Grace and Emma helped her to sit on the toilet. Rachael sucked in breath to sob. Skyler S. tiptoe-sprinted across the tile to clamp her hand over Rachael’s mouth.

  “Come on, Albert,” Mrs. Shumway said. “I want you to fuck me in the bathtub.”

  Animal Cruelty

  You find the hurt brown bird in the backyard. It looks up at you from the sharp dry summer grass. Its eye is shiny and black and it doesn’t stay still. Out by the fence where you found the giant diamond that was really just a piece of glass. You can still see the hole it left in the dirt. There, almost underneath the bird’s folded wing. The other wing is open and flapping. The top of it hangs down to make a triangle. You thought before about how you could catch one. When you saw a bird pecking at the ground you wanted to sneak upon it so quiet and slow it couldn’t hear you and trap it under your sandbox bucket. But it couldn’t live in a bucket. It wouldn’t stay. Not even if you filled up the bottom with grass and dug up worms every day. You reach for the bird and touch it with your fingers. The feathers feel like baby hair. You pick it up and it squeaks. You close your fist around its middle and push its folded wing into your hand. The broken wing brushes your face. Your arm shakes. You run to the hard round table and drop the bird on it. The hurt brown bird stands up on the table and walks in a small circle. The table is made of concrete with big hunks of different colored rocks in it. Birds are dirty and you know you shouldn’t touch them. An animal doctor – a veterinarian – would examine the bird on a table like how you are now but then he would put a cast on the wing. Casts are made from something like concrete but not as heavy or you couldn’t move your arm.

  The bird couldn’t fly in a cast. It would need time to get better and animals can’t go inside the hospital. The bird is lying down again. Its chest gets bigger when it breathes. You spread its wings out, long feathers joined by thin elastic skin like a Chinese fan. The bone ends scrape together, and you let go.

  Maybe the bird just needs help to take off. If you help it get up into the air it can fly back home to its nest. You carry it back over to by the fence where you found it. The bird’s claws try to make a fist around your thumb. You throw it high up over the fence but it doesn’t even try to fly. It makes a plop on the other side. It doesn’t bounce.

  Before it’s time to go inside you look through the crack at the bottom of the gate to see if the bird is still there. It lies on its broken wing in the alley dirt looking up into the sun. Ants march in lines from their dark hill to the hurt brown bird and back again. The ants are the black-and-red kind that bite and they crawl in between its feathers. Their antennas feel for a good place for their tiny teeth to tear off little hunks of bird meat that the ants will take back to their hill to feed their queen. The bird’s wing makes a worthless flap every time its heart beats.

  Ants are crawling in its eye.

  The stainless steel box, measuring approximately 23.5 cm (9 in.) x 17.8 cm (7 in.) x 14 cm (5.5 in.) sits, as per its included instruction pamphlet, lengthwise parallel to an interior garage wall beneath a dust-furred queen-sized headboard made from knotty pine. A less than average-sized member of the species mus musculus (common gray-brown house mouse), scouring the vinyl baseboards in paranoid fits, approaches the box cautiously, roseate nostrils aquiver. The mouse moves to circumvent the box, but halts at the corner, sensing the void ahead. Cutting sharp the corner, the rodent feels cold metal brush against its fine hackled hairs. Its whiskers sense an opening just above its head. The mouse tips back onto its haunches to hook its front feet over the hole’s bottom lip and pulls itself inside. The hole leads to a cylindrical tunnel of molded black plastic. The springed pressure plate clicks, triggered by the mouse’s 14 g (.5 oz.) mass, and the cylinder spins, tumbling the mouse through a rectangular opening onto its back. Once the tunnel’s completed its rotation, the compartment is sealed. The mouse shrieks and scurries through the open air until it’s righted. The Other lies in a corner, emitting a distressed odor, but hardly moving save its jittering heartbeat, which sends infinitesimal tremors across the compartment floor. It’s not resting in close proximity to a food source, so the mouse moves on to the other corners, quickly determining them barren. The mouse pushes off its back legs, scraping its nails against the slick, unyielding surface.

  The Other’s palpitations slow then altogether cease. The mouse, moving slower now, sniffs at the emaciated carcass. Trembling, the mouse presses its snout beneath the Other’s fur and begins nibbling at its flakey, sour skin. The fat-encased intestines, once bitten into, expel a sugary, decadent gas, causing the mouse to look away.

  Above, the cylinder again clicks and tumbles, depositing a new Other on the cold metal floor. The Other silently regains its footing and scurries straight toward the corpse. The mouse bares its blood-blackened teeth, and the Other hesitates. The mouse returns its attention to the corpse’s tender spoiled interior, grinding hunks of colon, damp and gritty, between its teeth. The Other takes a position just out of reach and begins chewing at the tip of the corpse’s limp, scaly tail.

  When the skeleton’s bones have been gnawed marrowless, the mouse again explores the vacant corners, pushing itself up against the walls, as though it’s discovered another opening, this one just out of reach. It tips weakly back, and the Other is at its throat, tearing at its windpipe. The mouse twists and convulses underneath, shrieking and clawing at the Other’s eyes. A claw lacerates a cornea, and the mouse pushes its toes into the hot ooze.

  While the mouse slurps at its eye socket, the Other squeaks and pantomimes a scurry, its paws unable to gain purchase on the cold steel.

  Sniffing at the wall, the mouse feels a whisker poke through into the open outside air. It presses its nose to a hole just large enough to encircle it. The mouse soon finds another of identical size, then another. This is a perforated window designed to permit viewing of the status of the trap’s takings without first sliding open the thin steel door. The cylinder overhead clicks again, and a new Other lands, snapping brittle bones beneath it. Paper thin skin crackles like papyrus. The mouse rushes to meet it.

  The ant, not named, skitters noiselessly across a heavily enameled particle-board countertop. A mass once edible but now hardened beyond breaking impedes the ant’s intended path and must be circumvented. The room’s brightness, a potential danger, is registered then disregarded.

  The ant inhales, still unable to determine the exact location of the potential food source. The scent, too faint to pinpoint, is sweet but faintly astringent, a combination closer to horseradish than rotting flesh. The ant turns back toward that inedible coagulation and begins to jab at it with frantic antennae, confirming its complete impenetrability before it moves on. A much larger presence looms just beyond, but the ant continues, stepping more deliberately. The food scent grows stronger and the ant moves toward it.

  A structure many ants high lies ahead, its rounded edges extending out past perceptibility. The food source, its acidity more pronounced now, is somewhere inside. The ant thrusts its anterior gaster segment groundward, secreting a pheromone scent trail for the other workers to trace. It approaches, antennae sensing then ignoring the unnatural angles of the structure’s opening. The surface of the food source is gritty but grippable, and the ant closes its mandibles around a manageable hunk. Its pungency almost stings, but the ant swallows, permitting the morsel to travel as far as its first stomach.

  Returning toward the opening, the ant senses the line of workers, sniffing out the scent trail.

  The entry way is a vacant nail-hole in the g
rout ahead, between two ceramic tiles, its floor lined with a fine white powder. The ant climbs inside, feeling the hunk of food source resting heavy in its gut.

  More workers stand on the other side of the wall, waiting for the ant, already aware she comes carrying the first bite. They have only stopped because they know they must. The entryway isn’t wide enough to permit two to walk simultaneously. The scent trail has at this point been extended to the opening, and, after depositing the morsel inside the colony, the ant will return to follow it back to the food source, forgetting how it was discovered.

  The darkness inside is a warm blanket, enveloping the ant. The line of workers continues moving along the dusty ledge. Beyond the ledge lies an incalculable void. Those venturing beyond it had returned days later, empty stomached and fewer in number.

  Ahead was the Queen and the nurses tending spawn, alabaster and immobile. The ant regurgitates the hunk of food source at Her feet, and the nurses crowd to sniff. The ant senses a scent trail leading out of the colony into the opening at the end of the ledge, strong enough now to remove all doubt…

  The ant waits its turn then lays its tribute before the Queen. The ant senses a scent trail but its legs buckle beneath it and ignore repeated commands to straighten. Its antennae tremble detecting the nurses, who’ve either ceased to move or wandered away to leave the spawn unattended. The spawn are still as before, but they no longer throb with life force. The Queen’s wings flutter, and then they do not.

  Mice again, but this time you’ve got a small dog whose impossibly slender legs might snap beneath a trap’s spring loaded brass bar. So you opt for the adhesive variety, though you can’t imagine them actually working. Mice are smaller than you’d remembered, and quick, surely too nimble to be caught in this device.

  But in the morning, there it is nonetheless, its tiny foot pads held fast to the floor of the flimsy, open-ended envelope. Your tiny dog crouches nearby, sensing the tinier animal’s panic but wary of its twitching inkblot eyes, the whipping of its wormy tail.

  You clamp the trap between your thumb and middle finger, unconsciously refusing to bend your elbow as you carry it out the back door, and extending it away from your body when you unhook the gate.

  After opening the dumpster, you pause, considering the shivering thing’s ultimate fate, sealed in a swampy hot metal box, dehydrating or starving, smothered beneath ever-thickening piles of savory garbage.

  You drop the box on the ground, meaning to flatten it with your foot. An image halts you mid-stomp: The mouse squashed, squeaking a death cry too shrill for human ears; the last sound it hears the matchstick snapping of its own spine, its last sensation the squirting of its eyeball from a smashed socket.

  You return your foot carefully to the ground and stoop to retrieve the trap. You drop it in the dumpster, where it lands in a pile of uprooted ragweed. You struggle not to hurry inside.

  The next morning, you wake to the garbage truck’s metallic scrapes as it grasps the dumpster and upends it, emptying the contents into its receptacle.

  The mouse, buried beneath layers of sun-heated polyurethane bags, comes to rest several miles later – upside down and staring into the open mouth of a tomato soup can, only partially emptied. If it's lucky, it is eaten by a cat.

  Hog Heaven

  [Note: The only remaining artifact from Hog Heaven, the unmade film intended to be Elvis Presley’s last, is a single typewritten screenplay page. It contains the partial lyrics to a song – a duet employing labored wordplay to draw a parallel between sexual intercourse and riding a flying motorcycle.]

  EXT. XXX STUDIO PARKING LOT – DAY

  An overhead shot from a flying contraption descending on the Parking lot of XXX Studios.

  Zoom in on a group of three navy-shirted security guards surrounding a younger, better-educated man. The camera centers on him and draws in close; he's shorter than the encircling guards, two of whom are currently gripping his shoulders and leading him out of the lots. This is Jeremy Martin.

  JM's POV: JM watches the leading security guard (name tag reads: "Herschel") out front, talking to JM while walking backward across the parking lot.

  HERSCHEL

  Now look, you, you told me you weren't going to cause trouble.

  He wheezes an asthmatic smoker’s wheeze.

  Pan down to JM's red Nike Air Force Ones, lingering long enough to clinch an endorsement deal. The toes are now scuffed parking-lot gray. JM's ripped right pants leg is still rolled up, revealing a navy dress sock and hairy, pale flesh.

  Herschel is still talking, but his voice drowns in the sound of scraping gravel. The camera swings up to reveal Herschel has left the frame; the only thing ahead now is a steel gate opening onto the street.

  HERSCHEL (O.S.)

  (indistinct)

  The camera jerks up, and the other two guards shove JM. He lands, chest-first, in sun-sticky street tar. The camera switches to JM's POV in time to catch an eyeful of asphalt. At this point it becomes obvious to the audience that what Herschel, in a sadly revealing moment, said earlier was "Have a nice trip, asshole!"

  The camera struggles upward to show the now closed gate. Beside it, a telephone pole, and at the base a broken bike chain, roughly bolt-cuttered and discarded. Someplace incredibly nearby, a car horn honks.

  […]

  The interview scene is key. The aging but acceptably slim A1C Aron O’Rion (ably played by a slimmer, post-detox you know who) has so far been only the one-dimensional flying-motorcycle-pilot, but the audience is now supplied with a satisfying backstory and a new romantic angle, thanks to Ms. Janice Billings, a very pregnant local reporter (played by Ann-Margret – post-Carnal Knowledge, of course – with her gently maturing body wrapped snug in fake belly-fat.) O'Rion has agreed to meet her in the emptied circus tent after an opening performance in East Saint Louis.

  Billings stands eager-eyed, clutching a reporter's notebook, top spiral threaded with a pre-chewed fountain pen of a brand which would not be manufactured for at least 15 years after the film's implied setting. O'Rion, an unnaturally beautiful member of the Greatest Generation, must help out a woman in need. (And the way she clutches that notebook pushes her swelling chest up at O'Rion, making it impossible not to notice that she's begun lactating a bit, a damp spot expands on her blouse. Sexy it isn't, but give the wardrobe department points for authenticity.) So he tells her everything, or at least as much as is convenient, about his life as a traveling circus pilot, taking a physically improbably flying motorcycle on tour through the contiguous 48. He tells her he worked during WWII as an Air Force mechanic (but leaves out that a diminished lung capacity caused by a childhood bout with pneumonia kept him out of the pilot's seat) and that it was a mechanic buddy's idea to outfit a decommissioned service motorcycle with surplus aircraft parts.

  Cue swirling-petroleum-jelly flashback…

  O'Rion, slathered with make-up and fit with a wig of crew-cut horse-hair plays wrench-bitch for fellow mechanic A1C Manshadow. Manshadow, his face distorted by a thick pair of regulation glasses, the lenses smudged with grease, attaches various airplane parts to a military-issue motorcycle, seemingly at random. An all-too-conveniently placed blackboard in the background holds the workshop’s only schematic: a crude chalk drawing of a motorcycle fitted with wings and a propeller labeled "This."

  Back in the tent O'Rion drops his head and charges past Billings offscreen. By the time she recovers enough to ask what's become of Manshadow, the only reply is the far away revving of a motorcycle engine.

  O'Rion rolls onscreen on a Harley Davidson, winged and propellered. Billings at this point looks more startled than wooed. "I asked what –” BARRRRRROOOOOOMROOMROOM.

  O'Rion, glad to have something loud enough to shut Billings down, has found his lady-melting grin again. Billings hops on, and the two make tracks in the sawdust. The engine noise, having served its purpose, is mixed down until it's nearly inaudible, and the introductory chords of the obligatory musical number fade in. And sure,
this interview ultimately leads to the article that metastasizes a flying motorbike into an international security incident, endangering the lives of most of the movie's major characters, but that hardly matters now as O'Rion – perhaps in an attempt to fill the uncomfortable silence, or maybe in an attempt to distract himself from the near uncontrollable urge to stare at Billings’ premature lactation spotting – breaks into song.

  The exhilaration of fresh-minted love is only slightly diminished by the nagging knowledge that no reputable doctor would ever allow a woman in such an advanced state of pregnancy to fly.

  […]

  EXT. SEEMINGLY ABANDONED HOUSE – DAY

  A dilapidated house occupying a barren dirt lot.

  A caption reads: "Residence of formerly famous screenwriter MR. ––––, who wishes to remain anonymous for this interview."

  We approach the front door with an establishing steady-cam shot. JM's fist enters the frame and taps the jamb, which is marred by several deep scratches, each about the width of a crowbar. Mister answers. His face is back-lit, obscured by strategic interior lighting, and computer-blurred in post-production. He's holding something - impossible to discern what exactly - in front of what's probably his mouth, or possibly his throat.