Slim had one cigarette left, but no goddamn lighter. He didn’t think he’d ever find the strength to go get one either; it was getting harder and harder to stand up, let alone walk anywhere. He stuffed his hand into his coat pocket, felt the cigarette there, sighed. His nicotine addiction was kicking him in the balls, but he chewed on it until it subsided.
Luther’s eyes went from Slim’s leg, back to Slim’s face. His tail was between his legs and he whined, whispery and low. His tongue slithered over his chops and snout, matting the hair down with dampness.
Slim flinched as laughter erupted from the street just a few feet away from where he and Luther sat, concealed by the alley’s darkness like two broken-winged bats on a cave floor. The alley was their home. Well, Slim hadn’t meant for it to be their home, but he sat there one day when his leg was smarting something fierce, and he hadn’t been able to move since. Therefore, home sweet home the alley became. It wasn’t so bad at first. He’d plopped down within arm’s reach of a trash can that had some salvageable food inside. He didn’t know who it belonged to, but whoever it was, they hadn’t refilled it since he’d been there. He hoped for them to come each day, but they always disappointed. And as he sat there in that spot, the feeling in his leg turned from excruciating pain to nothing—an ominous numbness.
He didn’t know how long he’d been sitting in that spot, lost track of the coming and going of sunlight. A cakey soup of his own shit and piss cemented him to the ground and wall he was propped up against. The smell of it mixed with the pungent aroma of his festering leg and became a potpourri of putridity. Flies zigzagged around them in a constant chaotic buzz.
Slim twisted his head to face the ruckus sounding from his left and saw a man, each one of his arms wrapped around the necks of scantily clad girls on either side of him. All three of them smothered in green clothing. Slim envied their obvious intoxication, and just watching them stumble along made him shake with need. The girls, wobbly-legged themselves, had to hold up the mumbling man as his feet danced drunkenly on the pavement, refusing to stay straight. They giggled in unison, then lost their footing and all collapsed into a dogpile of green cotton and sweaty skin.
Luther growled. He stepped in between Slim and the interlopers, lowered his head and glared at them.
“Whoa…fuckin’ dog,” the man said, one of the girls’ legs pinned under his chest. “Here poochy poochy.” This was followed by howling laughter and snickering from the girls.
They started to climb back to their feet when one of the females noticed Slim. She squinted into the darkness, simultaneously stumbling to catch her balance. A verdant shine reflected off the plastic clover necklace dangling from her neck.
“S-someone there?” She took about five clumsy steps into the alley, her ankles threatening to snap as she tried balancing on her high-heels. She stopped suddenly. “God damn…fuckin’ smells!”
This remark invited more snickering and cackling from the others. Luther took a few more steps toward her.
Slim stayed quiet. He only wanted them to leave him be. His body shook with hunger and thirst, and most of all, withdrawal. He just stayed still, peering at the girl who stared at him as if he was some kind of zoo animal on display for her pleasure. A fly landed on his nose and tickled it with tiny filth-dipped legs.
The man, with help from the other female, joined their friend in gawking at Slim. They all just stood there, silent, as if just the smell of him had sobered them up.
“Hey…buddy,” the man said. “Y-you’re not wearing any gr…green.” He nearly fell over after saying this, but his friend kept him up.
“Come on,” the girl holding him up said, “let’s get f-fuck outta here. That mu…motherfucker reeks!”
Luther took another step toward them. Slim thought about pulling him back, but he didn’t. He just stayed put, as if remaining perfectly still would camouflage him from the drunkards’ sight.
“H-hey,” the man said, “buddy. D-don’t you know…you can get p-pinched if you don’t wear green?”
The girl took blind steps backward, pulling the man along. His eyes showed that he wasn’t finished talking, but his legs did nothing to keep him there. He was pulled away, and Slim was thankful.
Just leave me be,goddamnit.
The other girl, the one closest to him, still stared. “He’s right you know. B-bad luck not to wear green.”
Luther barked and snapped his jaws at her. A foamy beard had formed around his mouth, droplets creating an inkblot on the concrete below him.
The girl lifted her shirt and her tiny breasts stared at Slim, triangles of paler skin surrounding her hot pink nipples. Her clover necklace clanked against itself as it dangled over her bunched up shirt. “Happy Saint Patrick’s Day,” she said. Then she turned awkwardly and followed her friends out of the alley.
Slim knew he should have been excited to see a pair of breasts. It had been so long. The last pair he’d seen must have been two years ago, and those belonged to Gretchen. That woman would suck a dick for a cigarette butt. Slim remembered he couldn’t even see her nipples through all the grime and grease.
But even though the sight of the clean, young breasts was refreshing, he felt more depressed than anything. The girl had no shame in exposing herself to him. Might as well have been flashing her tits at a pile of maggoty shit for all she cared. An inanimate stinking mound of filth.
Fuck!
And Slim could give a flying fuck about Saint Patrick’s Day. Or any other useless holiday for that matter. Watching countless groups of staggering drunks, all clad in their green, made Slim clench his fists to calm the shakes.
Bad luck not to wear green? You can pinch me right here, bitch!
As the thoughts swirled in his mind, Slim grabbed his crotch and pulled on it, wishing he’d had the nerve to do it while the girl was still staring at him.
He didn’t feel the other tugging. He’d been staring toward the street, watching other drunks as they left the bars. He’d been thinking about the pink nipples staring at him.
He couldn’t feel Luther sinking his teeth into the flesh of his calf, just to the side of his shin bone, the part numbed by disease. When he heard the slobbery growl, he turned and gasped.
“Luther, no!” He reached out and grabbed a handful of loose skin on the dog’s haunches, the fur sharp like the bristles of a broom. He tried to pull the dog off of him, but Luther was in another world. A world fueled by hunger and desperation. “Fuck!”
Slim had never wanted to see his leg. Not after the feeling in it had gone. He was too scared of what he’d see there. The last time he saw it, the deep red of the open wound that refused to heal was surrounded by blackened flesh.
But Luther had torn away the fabric of his pant leg. His snout was stained red…but a diseased red. A dark, milky red. The dog pulled away momentarily to swallow a considerable chunk, and without meaning to, Slim looked down. At his leg. As the blood pumped from the ragged wound, the smell pumped out with it. The air was thick with it.
Slim vomited onto his chest, still doing what he could to keep Luther away.
The black flesh had darkened into a color he’d never seen before. It was deeply dark, inky. Surrounding the black flesh, splattered in milky crimson, was green. Spreading over his shin and under his calf, snaking its way over skin that only months ago was unaffected by his infection.
Green.
Flies buzzed and crawled over the open flesh, their wiggling white offspring burrowing into the tissue. Having had a taste of the pungent meat, Luther became ravenous. As hard as he tried, Slim could do nothing to keep the dog away from getting another mouthful.
As Luther’s mouth clamped down, pinching his leg, Slim could only watch as the dog gorged himself. The dog ate the softened, diseased flesh, mouthful after mouthful, grunting and snorting as he went.
Slim had a moment before Luther dug deep enough for him to feel it, past the dead, black and green flesh to the sensitive meat around his shin bone, to think
about what the drunk group had said to him.
D-don’t you know…you can get p-pinched if you don’t wear green?
He jammed his hand into his pocket and removed the wrinkled cigarette. He clamped it between chapped lips and searched his pockets for a lighter he knew wasn’t there.
B-bad luck not to wear green.
He screamed as Luther bit down again and the cigarette fell into a spreading pool of blood, soaking it in. This time, he felt it. Loud and clear. He looked down at his ruined leg, saw there were still portions of his flesh tainted with that green color.
It didn’t keep his dog from pinching him, over and over, until his teeth scraped against bone.
GHUNT
by Lee Thomas
Sally turned on the faucet and splashed cold water over the eggs. She’d placed a dozen Grade AAs at the bottom of the pasta pot, careful so as not to crack their white shells. Stepping back, she put a hand on her hip and looked through the window as the water level rose. Gray sky. Wind pushing the tops of trees. Her gaze roamed to the distant edges of the yard, the rows of rose bushes on the left and the six-foot hedges on the right. Straight ahead at the end of fifty yards of immaculate emerald grass, stood a blonde brick wall held in place by lines of dove-white mortar. The striking grid between the bricks caught her attention for a moment, but it was the play set beyond the patio that pulled her gaze like a magnet.
Eric called it a swing set. When she’d heard that he’d ordered such a thing for their daughter, Sally had expected one of the metal tube and rubber seated constructions of her youth. She should have known better. Eric did nothing cheaply. It had taken a fourteen-foot truck to haul the thing to Sally’s house. Two men who looked like extras from a Mafia movie had hauled the pieces and parts to the backyard and had spent two days building the thing, which was part tree house, part jungle gym and yes, part swing set. A stainless steel slide twisted from the second story to the patch of sand below. Mary had been thrilled by the structure. She’d jumped up and down, clapping her hands, squealing and racing toward the edifice with such joy, Sally had felt guilty for trying to talk her husband out of buying it.
Of course the set was too extravagant—ridiculously so—for a four-year-old. Not only was it enormous, it cost more than Sally’s first car had. Further, she just didn’t see the point. At her daughter’s age, Sally’d had only a rusted bicycle, handed down from her older brother, Mitchell, and random toys—a few dolls, a couple of puzzles, an incomplete set of Lincoln Logs and another of Tinker Toys—and they’d kept her occupied well enough. Granted, she would never wish her childhood on Mary; she wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
All beautiful plants start buried in crap, Eric had told her.
Her husband, a font of bumpersticker wisdom and Hallmark sentiment, was, nonetheless, wonderful. She just wished he could forgo this one tradition: the eggs; the hunt. She found Easter and its trappings distasteful, but she’d kept such feelings to herself, choosing instead to pretend disinterest in the springtime festival.
Sally turned off the tap. Water covered the eggs. Ripples ran over the surface, and she stared into the pasta pot, unnerved by the sudden idea that each egg would have eventually become a chick, a living creature if only it had remained untouched. But did it matter? Either way—whether hard-boiled or allowed to gestate and hatch and sprout feathers—the things were still low rungs on the food chain. At least this way they weren’t forced to push toward maturity through suffering and perplexity.
None of that for these little guys. Just some water. A bit of flame. A pool of scald. Oblivion before sentience.
She carried the pot to the stove and set it on the front burner, and then ratcheted on the gas flame.
SALLY IS TEN YEARS old. It is nighttime and she peers through her bedroom window. A man stands in the yard below—a shadow with just a smudge of pale where his face should be. He lights a match, revealing coarse, familiar features, and lifts it towards the cigarette in his mouth and the fire catches in his eyes and they burn like a rat’s eyes, and she sees his lips spread away from the cigarette butt, rising at the edges into a horrible smile. He clamps onto the cigarette with his prominent front teeth and the cherry of the smoke burns the same color as his eyes and Sally feels dread like streams of ice on her back. She leaps away from the window and races to her bed. With the covers over her head like a shield, she squeezes her eyes closed and breathes heavily and curls into the smallest ball she can manage.
THE WATER BOILED. SALLY checked the digital timer on the range. She pinched the phone between her shoulder and ear, listening to her mother babble on about the holiday, and Sally mumbled and grunted, agreeing with her mother while forcing herself to hear nothing the woman said. A big family event. Everyone will be there. The whole Carter clan. Mitchell and his family. Cousins whose names she couldn’t keep straight—was Kelly the one with epilepsy? Or was that Karen? Had Jim just returned from Germany or was that Jimmy, Jim’s second cousin? Her aunts. Their husbands. And Henry.
Sally had asked her mother to rescind Uncle Henry’s invitation, but her mother had wanted a reason for excluding the man, and Sally couldn’t give a reason.
To make matters worse, her appeal to keep Henry out of the holiday had caused an inquisition, which she was in no condition to face. So, Sally had decided to keep her branch of the family tree—her Eric, her Mary—at home. Naturally her mother had refused to let it rest. She’d gone through Eric, had played her guilt games and the bullshit family-is-everything card, and Eric too had wanted an excuse from Sally, and she hadn’t provided one. No reason. Nothing she could verbalize.
The eggs boiled. Sally looked through the bubbles at them. One of the shells had cracked. A thin white tail grew from the slit, tried to rise on the scalding tide.
Sally suddenly felt ill, and she covered her mouth with a palm. She looked away from the pot.
Her mother prattled on like an adult in a Peanuts cartoon, all warble and distortion. Sally grunted and said, “I really have to get back to the eggs,” noting another three minutes on the timer. There was no rush to finish the eggs; she wanted off of the phone. She couldn’t bear her mother’s shiny, happy voice and her exhilaration of reunion with the various spawn of the Carter family. Sally believed the only thing to celebrate regarding her family was distance.
“Happy Easter, honey,” her mother said. “We’ll see you soon.”
Happy Easter. Now there was an oxymoron. A grotesque joke. An impossibility.
Did her mother even know what she was celebrating? Really? The woman thought it was a grand celebration of Christ’s rebirth, but Easter had been celebrated long before the Christians had co-opted its lunar date. Tammuz. Semiramis. Ishtar. Ester. Those were the first deities recognized with springtime bacchanals.
But the Christians had invaded pagan lands. Strategy and weaponry had given them victory, but they wanted more than compliance; they demanded converts. Faith had to follow flesh into submission. Like all good molesters, they presented the pagans gifts to make them compliant. They offered to allow, even encourage, the pagans’ festivals of spring, but over time added their own philosophy to the goings on, and eventually the church absorbed the power of these events.
And so Easter was born, with its bunnies and its bonnets and its marshmallow candies and its eggs.
The egg.
A symbol of fertility. Of actual birth, not rebirth.
And what did the fucking misguided children of Christ do with that symbol? They took the egg, and…
—Here is your innocence. Here is your unblemished whiteness. Let’s harden it with scalding water and then make it up with dyes and paints and bits of glitter and then we’ll break it open and peel away its alluring costume before we devour it whole.
YOU DON’T WANT TO stain your pretty white dress. Take it off.
ONE EGG DROWNED IN the blue dye and another soaked up green pigment like toxic waste. These were the last two. The once-white shells were now stained sickly pastels. After the
y dried, Sally would attack them with the glue stick and the glitter. She’d use the pre-printed decals and the paint pens to finish them off.
Normally, decorating and hiding the eggs was Eric’s job. Sally had made it clear that she would have none of it, but this year Eric had pleaded with her. He’d been called into the hospital three days running and he hadn’t had the chance to decorate eggs for their daughter. Sally had insisted that the ritual was unnecessary, but the misery in Eric’s eyes and the sadness in his voice when he asked her to “please reconsider,” had clearly indicated how important the ritual was to him, so Sally had relented.
Her eggs would never look as nice as the ones her husband made. He used crayons to create relief in the dyed color and expertly stenciled intricate designs. Eric made genuinely beautiful holiday eggs—a feat well beyond her capabilities. But she had to try. Despite her disgust with the holiday, she still wanted everything to be perfect for her daughter. Sally was just happy she’d remembered to use the wire egg ladle, paper towels and some latex gloves (a benefit of having a doctor in the house) so her fingers didn’t get decorated as well.
The cracked egg nestled in a kitchen towel, unaccompanied. The broken thing rested alone, as if Sally feared its damage was contagious.
Later in the afternoon, Mary would hunt eggs in the backyard of her grandmother’s house, along with her cousins and second cousins. As far as Sally was concerned, one hunt should have been more than enough, but Eric was a creature of habit. Traditionally, he gave their daughter a special gift at Easter, and this year was no different. He’d bought Mary a lovely silver bracelet and a cheap plastic egg in which to hide it. Since he didn’t want to take the chance of another child finding the prized egg and throwing a fit when they couldn’t keep the treasure inside, a pre-extended-family backyard hunt was his answer. The bracelet was yet another extravagance and something else Sally would have to keep track of. Mary was too young to understand the value of jewelry beyond the aesthetic pleasure of sparkling metals and glittering stones. The bracelet, like the earrings Eric had bought his little girl for Christmas, would go in Sally’s jewelry box to be issued to her daughter for special occasions.
A Hacked-Up Holiday Massacre: Halloween Is Going to Be Jealous Page 4
