by Chris Vola
But what he really wants to do is snap her plastic legs apart like a wishbone. He wants to thrust all the way through her, come out the other side (still thrusting) straight toward your wall. He imagines the two of you doing all sorts of similar things, which is silly, because we all know it would be impossible. But the idea of you doing these things is so alive in him, as alive as the cockroaches currently depositing their eggs in bean-shaped cases under the bed table.
Sometimes Cal thinks of you, of doing these sex things together, and looks at Wife. He feels ashamed. But he does not feel ashamed because of her. He feels ashamed because of you, because he knows he would be an inadequate partner for you, because he would never be able to fill you up the way he knows you must be filled.
When he feels ashamed, he feels horny, so he pulls off the bed sheets and turns Wife on her back. Can you see him whisper in her ears? He tells her he is horny. He licks her ears. Cal traces the wet lines around her mouth with his fingers. He looks at her eyes to make sure she hasn’t seen you watching, but they are shut tight or staring up the growing crack in the ceiling, he cannot tell. Cal thrusts. Then he thrusts hard. The mattress springs and Wife’s hips bend beneath the weight of his shame.
Downstairs in the Forbidden Room, Mrs. Warren wakes up. Cal hears her fat-stretched slippers on the creaking stairs. He hears her thick fists pounding on his door and a terrible scratching sound that must be her voice.
“Quiet in there! Go back to sleep!”
She cannot come and take you away from him. He will let her know:
“Fuck off witch!”
When Cal hears Mrs. Warren clomping back down the stairs to her own rotting section of the house, he is no longer horny. Instead, he takes two stained sheets of newspaper and rolls them up into a tube. He pushes Wife’s drooping head off the bed table and moves it over a few feet. He leans down and whacks the cockroaches eight times. Eight hard whacks until he cannot tell the difference between their insides and outsides.
5.
Cal thinks Wife has left him. He doesn’t see her anywhere. On the bed, under the bed, in the closet, over by the east wall. He’s been searching all morning. She must have opened the window and climbed out. He cannot figure out how she managed to squeeze through the bars. Wife is tricky. Not smart, but very tricky.
She found out about you – it’s the only reasonable explanation. Mrs. Warren wouldn’t have been able to let Wife out. Cal still has her keys. Wife must have seen him looking at you while they were making love, or maybe she heard him speaking to you late at night when we thought she was asleep. Cal knew she would be jealous. His conversations with you offended her deeply.
It’s not that Cal is angry, or even saddened by Wife’s disappearance. She had begun to put on even more weight, beginning to rival Mrs. Warren. All she ever did was sleep over there on the bed. The only thing that bothers him is that when he feels ashamed, there will be no one to thrust into. You are too high up on the wall, the growing crack is still too small, and Mrs. Warren is far too disgusting.
6.
Have you ever had any madness in your family?
Cal only asks because this morning he was invited to breakfast downstairs. He wore his finest tee shirt and sprayed some aerosol mousse on his head for extra volume and shine.
At the bottom of the stairs a doctor waited for him. An old doctor he had never seen. Somehow, the doctor knew Cal’s name and his occupation. His fingers felt like cold eels as he directed Cal into a tiny room, checked his pulse, tested his reflexes, cupped his testicles, and measured his cranium with a pair of metal forceps.
He began asking Cal questions. At first Cal started to fidget a little, because he thought the doctor would ask about you, about your affair, about Wife’s leaving, but instead they ended up discussing irrelevant matters. He wanted to know if there was a history of mental imbalance in Cal’s immediate family, if his parents or grandparents had suffered from any form of dementia, paranoia, schizophrenia, unipolar depression, and a dozen other big words Cal didn’t completely understand. Which is absolutely ridiculous because, as Cal has explained many times, he comes from a good family, full of doctors and lawyers, leaders in the fields of engineering and politics. But he won’t bore you with the details of their astonishing lives. He can see you want to hear more about his breakfast.
The old doctor had devised a way to shrink the nutrition found in a full meal down to the size of five tiny blue capsules. You must find that hard to believe, but it’s true – just five blue capsules and a glass of water, equal in dietary strength to a plate of steaming hot eggs, bacon, grits and sausage. He passed Cal the meal on a plastic slab, assuring him it was as fresh as a newly disemboweled hen. His delicious breakfast was over in two gulps. He left a clean plate.
Cal complimented the old doctor’s cooking, forgetting to tell him how much better it was than Mrs. Warren’s gruel. He and his assistant, Thomas, were nice enough to escort Cal back to his room and tuck him into bed. Before they left, he fell into one of the most dreamless sleeps he’d had in years.
7.
Outside the window and just past the metal bars, a tiny honey-colored butterfly glides by Cal’s face, then another. He wishes you could see them tumble together so beautifully. Puffs of air sometimes brush them against the grass as they move across the yard towards the fence. Then a real gust sweeps them up – five feet, ten feet, twenty feet – until they become two miniature globes in the sky. Cal squints to see them for another thirty or forty seconds until they disappear into a cloud, maybe the sun. Gone. Cal waits for them to come back, but after a few minutes he gives up looking and turns to stare at you.
They probably like it better out there, don’t you think? Two butterflies and Wife.
8.
This morning Cal woke up early to work on your sculpture. It was almost complete. He wanted you to touch it. But when he reached under the bed, his hand found nothing except for three cockroaches swimming in a puddle of lint-fuzzed Cheez Whiz.
Cal tore apart the bed, flipped over the bed table, and kicked around some newspapers. He heard rustling downstairs in the Forbidden Room and thought of Mrs. Warren. Could she have seen the sculpture under his bed when she opened the panel in the door to slide him his breakfast? Had she found her keys? No, they were still in his right pajama pocket where he’d had them for weeks.
He sat on the bed for a few minutes trying to collect himself and figure out what could have happened. No thoughts came. Cal knew he had put the sculpture back under the bed after working on it the night before. No one else besides you had been in the room since.
Exhausted, he collapsed on Wife’s pillow and turned his head toward the east wall. Then Cal saw it. A small piece of newspaper poking out from under the closet’s door. He jumped out of bed, flung open the closet, and there it was, your sculpture lying undamaged on the ground.
Who could have done this? Mrs. Warren is too fat. Cal would have heard her huge feet tramping around the room. The old doctor is too pleasant. Was it Wife? She does hate you, and she’s the only one tricky enough to slide through the bars. Like how she must have left Cal.
He has decided to hide the sculpture under Wife’s pillow. That way, it will be right next to him at night. When Cal feels ashamed, it will be like he is sleeping with a part of you. Such a small part, though.
9.
Cal wakes up and hears conversations downstairs. He slides over the bed table and crouches to the ground, one ear to the floor. There are at least three people talking. The floor is thicker than he thought. Cal only understands a little of what they are saying but what he can make out clearly are the tones of voice being used. What awful tones! You may not believe him, but in those tones he hears the beginnings of a horrible plan. Cal is very perceptive.
It appears as though Wife has returned and is the ringleader. Cal hears the stupid squeals that must be her rotted voice. He listens to her tell the other people in the room awful lies about his treatment of her over the years, ab
out Mrs. Warren’s keys, about the sculpture, even about you! Of course Mrs. Warren agrees with her. She tells the others about how hard it has been to raise Cal by herself and to take care of him for many years, that it will no longer be possible to do so, that there is no money left to renovate the house. What terrible lies! Then the old doctor proposes something terrible. He wants to take you and the sculpture from Cal, to take him to a new house where Cal will be all alone, forever. Cal cannot hear the reactions of the other people in the Forbidden Room, but if they have already looked Mrs. Warren in the eyes (which seems probable), it is already too late. They are all brainwashed and tricky, just like Wife.
Cal walks over to the bed and lifts the sculpture. It is more than three feet long and the chewed ends of the forks are very sharp. He carries it into the closet and waits for Wife. She cannot find him here and if she does, he’ll be ready.
If you love Cal as much as Cal loves you, then you will be very quiet. You will not make a sound until this is over.
10.
It has been twelve hours and Wife has not come. Cal leans against the wall of the closet as he cradles the sculpture, twisting it like a spit that drips with roasting meat. His silent breathing increases to hundreds of choked inhalations each minute. He turns his ears in all directions, just in case Wife decides to sneak back in through the window. She cannot surprise him this time.
Cal hears a noise downstairs. He grips the sculpture harder. Another minute of silence and then the sound of feet on the staircase. Not loud, stomping feet, but tiny, delicate feet, so soft that the stairs barely make a creak.
There is silence in the hallway. For a second Cal thinks the sounds on the staircase are only a dream until he hears the clink of metal on the other side of his door.
“Hey, you. It’s time to have some dinner. If you eat everything like a good boy, I’ll have a nice surprise for you.”
Listen to her lies! It is Wife who would eat you both.
“I’m not fooling around. Come get your food or I’m throwing it out!”
Cal’s stomach rumbles. Wife is tricky. But he does not move. He raises the sculpture and peels the newspaper back to reveal the sharpened forks. Though he is saddened by the destruction of his masterpiece, Cal knows this is no time for self-pity. This is a time for action. He forks until drops of sweat fall from his hands.
Wife pounds on the door. She pounds again. Louder. Cal hears a key scraping in the keyhole. She must have taken Mrs. Warren’s keys from him and made copies when he wasn’t looking. Maybe Mrs. Warren had an extra set this entire time! Still, Cal is well hidden.
The quiet feet enter his room. They walk towards the bed. The tray makes a soft thud as she sets it on the bed table. The floorboards creak as she bends down to check under the bed. There is no sound for a long time. Then the feet change their direction and come back towards the closet. There is a hand on the knob. It starts to turn.
“I know you’re behind the door. Just come on out. We’ve played this game too many times already.”
But this is a new game, Cal says to himself as he scrunches his eyes shut and kicks open the closet door, swinging the sculpture as if he were a madman. Wife screams and falls to the floor as the ends of two forks stab her chest, then her stomach.
The holes and slashes in Wife add up to all the times Cal felt ashamed. For each time he tried to thrust through her. For each time she drooled. That makes thirty-seven. Thirty-seven holes in drooling Wife.
Cal focuses his eyes and looks down, unable to speak.
That is not Wife’s tray of disgusting food spilled across the floor. That is not Wife’s scratching voice. That is not Wife’s thinning black hair. Those are not Wife’s failing black eyes.
11.
The blood won’t clot.
Instead, it falls carelessly down Mrs. Warren’s arms, chest, and stomach, collecting in the expanding puddle on the floor.
It looks more brown than red, don’t you think? A nice shade of mahogany or copper.
Cal stares at her face. She is so fat that bulges of skin spill out from her sleeves, from the neck-hole in her blouse, and from under her filthy black stockings. Almost like the expanding puddle enveloping the floor, choking bread crusts, newspapers, cockroaches, and his feet.
It looks like syrup, Cal thinks. Maybe that’s why he’s stuck here. He cannot budge, not at the sight of the blood, or at the choking noises that soon turn to silence. The old doctor pleasantly shoves Cal away from Mrs. Warren’s body, swearing loudly, pleading with him to tell him something, anything.
“Yes, I think I did it,” Cal finally says. “And I’d do it again.”
Before the old doctor can respond, Cal acquaints his wrinkled neck with the sharp ends of the forks.
12.
The bodies of Mrs. Warren and the old doctor become cold as all the blood slowly pours out of them. Their skin stiffens an hour after their ankles stop twitching. It turns a chalky light green. That’s when the cockroaches and other insects become interested.
13.
Cal looks out the window past the bars and sees that the two butterflies have returned. It is a beautifully sunny morning. Their yellow wings are tiny matchbooks making trails of fire on the grass. The ruined sculpture rests on its side just below the window where it was dropped last night. It is more valuable to him now than ever.
There is no Mrs. Warren to bring food wrapped in newspapers on a metal tray. There is no old doctor to offer breakfasts of blue capsules. There is no Wife, not now or ever. There is nothing to help ease your feeling of shame. You must leave, the two of you, right away.
Cal will pull you off your wall, very gently, and wrap you in four pieces of newspaper. Then he will put you back in the box. Don’t worry, you won’t be in there for long. He will find a new room, one with freshly painted walls, a bigger window, a pleasant old doctor, and no Wife. He will place you lower on your new wall so you can be close and so you won’t feel ashamed.
Neither of you will ever be alone again, I promise.
The Only Way This Can End
She keeps asking what he does even though it’s obvious he’s exhausted all of the permutations of the nouns and gerunds already listed on his profile, rehashing clipped versions of what he’s already typed in their email exchanges. She says that the bucket of Coors Light bottles on the table between them makes her feel like she’s in an interview (“Is there a clipboard in your hands I can’t see?”) so he moves next to her in the haggis-smelling dim of the Scottish sports bar, which looks like pretty much any other sports bar, that he chose because her social preferences included “low-key scenarios with a twist.” At least here, just behind the open front doors rimmed with sharp-smelling cedar (he remembers carving wood like this into ninja stars at summer camp for an impending assault against a rival cabin that never came), he has a clear view of their respective vehicles – her moped with the duct-taped gas tank, his fixed-gear Schwinn – safely shackled together to a street light near the edge of the curb.
She gives him crap for leaving his phone on the table – “Expecting a text from tomorrow’s hussy?” – even though it’s laying screen-side-down, and who besides his great aunt has ever used the word hussy? She jokes about her helmet hair and the dirt-scuzzed Doc Martens with neon laces she uses for riding boots. “It’s a good thing you decided against the tie,” she says, “but I’m still not sure why you even considered it, Mr. Salmon Polo Shirt. I mean, we’re not working now, are we? Do you want this to feel more like work?”
He’d obviously been kidding about wearing a tie.
The color of his shirt is coral, not salmon.
He wants to look at his phone.
He hears a finance bro at the adjacent booth tell his buddy to hurry up and buy the next round of three-dollar whiskey shots because happy hour’s almost done. The idea of a handful of three-dollar whiskey shots bludgeoning his esophagus produces a sequence of satisfying images in his brain but she still has two-plus Coors Lights to finish and he
’s already used one bathroom excuse.
She asks him about his latest freelance projects – is freedom from “commuter servitude” spiritually and/or financially lucrative? For a second she reminds him of a grunged-out version of Amelia, the petite, plucky economics major who had been the first of a handful of “serious” entanglements, at a time when he didn’t understand the inherent danger and stupidity of attaching that adjective to anything. Before heading to class years ago, Amelia would bitch about him sleeping through mornings, warning about “misguided safety net-ism,” and who, from the pieces of social media detritus he’s glimpsed, had several years of mixed success in the derivatives market before moving to Baltimore and becoming pregnant/engaged to a mixed martial artist.
“I make it work,” he says.
She asks about his gap year in Iceland, hiking across glaciers, the thermal springs. His summers of golf course maintenance (“I’m picturing a more angular version of Bill Murray in Caddyshack?”), the type of bait used to catch the striped bass he’s holding in one of his profile pictures, the seventh grade snowboarding accident and subsequent nose job.
He doesn’t ask about her life: the hostess gig in a neighborhood where the baristas have just begun to outnumber the crack dealers, why she still rides the moped if she’s scared the engine bar will fall off, whether her own summer camp experience included the manufacture of projectiles. He assumes she wants to say something about herself, that her constant bullet points of inquiry are a cue.
She wants me to play the ancient game, he says to himself, shuddering a little at the childishness of the image, to throw the same stones she’s been throwing. But he’s already vomited up so many stones by spending years searching the bars for targets, that he has only two left – the ones lodged firmly between his legs.
