Borderlands 6

by Thomas F Monteleone

  How you load a dishwasher shouldn’t matter.

  And it hadn’t mattered because Jim and I were as aligned on dishwashers as we were on most things. We both read instruction manuals so we knew the drill: no dishes touching, plates and pans below, glasses and bowls on the top rack, and with our new machine—I’d splurged on a Bosch—silverware laid in individual slots on the cutlery tray. We never talked about the ban against kitchen knives or whether it’s okay to combine stainless and silver. That’s just how we were brought up.

  It honestly never occurred to us that someone we liked would do it any differently, until we visited my old friend Sally. She’d fixed me up with my first husband so she’d taken a while to warm up to Jim, but five years after my divorce, she’d finally accepted him, even with his master’s in education.

  We were visiting her at her house in Jackson. She’d been overserved at the Snake River Grill and excused herself the minute we got back to her house, leaving me and Jim to clean up the cocktails. We were a little drunk ourselves. He eyed me from across the room; I repaid the compliment. How could I not? He was so adorable, Levi’s hugging slim rocker hips and that dark hair curling over his pressed flannel shirt. His idea of dressing up. I was ready for bed in every sense, but first the dishes.

  Jim opened Sally’s dishwasher and gasped. I turned to see a jumble of crockery and crystal that looked as though it’d been thrown in from across the room, like a freeway pileup complete with bits of bioplasm. The machine was only half-full, yet there wasn’t a single item that didn’t have others pressing against its surfaces. And the silverware was pointing downwards, perfect for incubating bacteria.

  “You didn’t tell me she was trailer trash,” Jim said.

  “Aren’t we the pretentious one,” I said. That was the first time I’d heard him use that expression or anything like it. “The real tell is her loading skills?”

  Jim smiled, shook his head, and started to rearrange the dishes.

  “Are you with me?” he said.

  I brought over the wineglasses and nut bowl and put them into the spaces he’d left.

  “I know Sally can be hard to take. Do you like her any better than you thought you would?” I said. He was turning the silverware right-side up.

  “We’re fine . . . though now, I don’t know.” He cocked his head at the dishwasher, breaking the tension as he always did. “And she does like her wine,” he said chuckling.

  Don’t we all, I wanted to say.

  The next morning, Jim and I went downstairs to the kitchen and caught Sally rearranging the dishes.

  “What are you doing?” he said in a dismissive tone. He was probably as hungover as I was, and Sally, too, given the Costco-sized bottle of Advil she’d left out on the counter.

  “I’m fixing my dishes,” Sally said. She was deliberately taking handfuls of silverware out and putting them back upside down.

  “They won’t get clean that way,” Jim said. I turned away from them and began pulling our cereals down from the cabinet.

  Sally didn’t respond. Jim repeated himself.

  From the corner of my eye, I could see her whirl around to face him and then say, punctuating her points with pained head bobs as though speaking to a dull intern, “We all have our ways and this is mine. People have died falling on knives.”

  Sally finished rescrambling her dishes, fried and ate two eggs sunny-side up, and went upstairs to get ready for Ashtanga class. Jim and I stayed in the breakfast nook, drinking her excellent coffee. The lingering smell of fried egg was revolting.

  “Do we dare clean up?” Jim walked to the sink, motioning with his empty coffee cup. “Maybe leave the dishes. I’ll clean Sally’s egg pan. It’s a mess. She can’t get mad at me for that.”

  He reached under the sink. “Wha—? She uses SOS pads?”

  I sighed. My head ached. My stomach churned. “Stop it, Jim . . . I can’t believe . . . We had SOS growing up. Does that mean I’m trailer trash too?”

  “We used Brillo,” he said with much condescension. “Everyone I’ve ever known uses Brillo. I suppose you used All?”

  “What is the matter with you? We had Cascade, dick, just like now,” I said, distracted, wishing Sally would take me away, even to a strenuous yoga class.

  Jim leaned his back against the counter, crossed his arms and feet, and let his head drop, as though addressing one of his classes for special ed instructors. “Lookit, it’s not just an issue of cleanliness. She’s put crystal in there. And wooden spoons. There could be glass chips or splinters. It’s a safety issue.”

  “Hey, her upside-down knives trump your safety arguments. Or maybe she is trying to kill you. You know she’s still friends with my ex, and I know he wants you dead,” I said. I was trying to get a laugh. Or to get him to stop talking, which mention of my ex usually did.

  “She’s sloppy. Her drinking. Plus, it could be dangerous. I can’t believe you’re taking her side.”

  “You just don’t like her because she used to be an investment banker.”

  What a bizarre thing for me to say. But I’d never seen this side of Jim. He was a socialist who’d spent his career advocating for disturbed children, taking a lower salary so he’d have his summers to go fishing and regain his sanity. I knew he didn’t care about what soap someone used, much less what they did ten years ago. He’d married me, even with my MBA. He’d applied to law school eons ago.

  Was it Sally’s bitchiness at breakfast? Or just being in her house for too long? I imagined it could be wearing on him, with its Western-themed homage to slaughter. The cowhide rug. The chandelier of entangled antlers. The horse’s ass wine stopper, its iron body severed roughly at the flank.

  Still dour, Jim left the kitchen to take a shower. I peeked in the dishwasher. Sally’s crystal wineglasses were pressing against each other again; wooden spoons were floating around the upper level, unsecured. And yes, the silverware was upside down.

  Poor Jim. I’d dragged him here because I wanted everyone to be friends. I dreamed of big Thanksgiving dinners, of blended families, and, someday, happy grandchildren playing with Sally’s string of enormous, short-lived dogs. Now he was threatening to ruin it, over kitchen appliances and SOS pads.

  I heard him banging around upstairs; then a text chime sounded. He’d sent me an article about how a London salon owner had died when a sliver of glass she swallowed from a jar of custom mustard cut her carotid artery and she’d drowned in her own blood.

  “Aren’t you the ghoulish one,” I said as he came down. When he didn’t respond, I tried again, this time in a screechy cockney accent, “We don’t have those fancy bespoke mustards.”

  Jim looked at me strangely and began moving his tongue around his back teeth. “What the—” he said as he pushed his thumb and index finger into his mouth and pulled out a wooden splinter. “I rest my case!” he said, waving it around like conclusive evidence.

  “Come on, you planted that!” I said laughing.

  When he didn’t respond, I said, “No, you can’t show Sally.”

  When he began to object, Sally started down the stairs and I glared at him. “You’ve already made one scene.”

  Sally and Jim prowled around each other until it was time to leave for yoga. On the way to the closet to get me a mat, Sally put her silver wine coasters inside the chest, staring directly at Jim’s back as though she feared he might tuck them into his suitcase.

  He saw her and mouthed “what the f—”, put on his coat, and left with her white German shepherd.

  She and I pretty much ran out of the house, then idled away the rest of the day with yoga, shopping, and climbing the hill behind her house. Anything to keep them away from each other until our flight.

  I called Jim to warn him we’d be home soon, but he didn’t answer. Sally brought up the knives again, and when I pleaded no more paranoid fantasies, she told me to
look it up on my phone. Turns out, a little boy did die falling onto knives in a dishwasher some years ago. And a woman in Northampton had met the same fate when she was visiting a minister. Sounded like a Dorothy Sayers plot.

  We were late getting back, so I ran upstairs to finish packing. Jim wasn’t in our room though I did see his suitcase by the back door.

  Sally called up to me, “You’d better come down here. Now,” she said. Her voice led me to the kitchen, where the dishes were once again neatly organized, silverware pointing up.

  Jim appeared in the doorway.

  “Jiiimmm,” I whined.

  “You think I did that when I’ve been told not to touch?” he said, bobbing his head in cruel imitation.

  “Come on, quit joking. We’ll miss our plane,” I said.

  Jim turned around, then pirouetted back toward the dishwasher, his finger pointing at Sally, skidded, and fell directly towards the now-upturned knives.

  At the last moment, he twisted his body, just missing the dishwasher.

  “Fuckin’ A,” he said, staring up at Sally accusingly.

  Sally gave him a strange look, shook her head, and headed out to her car. He sat in the back. They never exchanged so much as another glance.

  Back home, we ordered out for Thai and ate in front of the TV. We were both exhausted and ate quickly. I took our plates to the kitchen, but when I opened the Bosch, I saw it was packed full, even the soap dispenser.

  Jim had been such an asshole our last day in Jackson. If he could condemn my friend for how she loaded a dishwasher, what else had I missed? And that last stunt in the kitchen? My ex and I had been together for thirteen years, and it wasn’t until our final months that I felt the full brunt of his meanness, when he thought the cleaners had lost his shirt and blamed me.

  I was working myself into a really good snit. I crammed the plates into already occupied slots and set my glass sideways on top of the bowls. For extra measure, I threw the forks on top of the drain.

  Jim came in with the empty takeout containers and dirty serving spoons. I tensed as he looked inside the machine, steeling myself for the kind of barrage I’d suffered over the goddamn shirt. Adding his self-righteous safety obsessions to the mix. This should be good.

  “Go ahead, say it,” I practically spat at him.

  He laid the spoons in the cutlery tray, came around the lowered door, and reached for me. I tried to push him away but he wouldn’t let me go.

  “No more safety jokes, Jim? You came off like a paranoid nut case,” I said spitefully.

  He leaned back still holding me. “Because of the dishwasher?”

  “What the hell was that?” I said.

  “I’m sorry. I just really don’t like Sally. Please don’t make me go again.”

  I started to snap back, to tell him . . . what? That he was right?

  “Let’s just go to bed,” he said, a grin creeping onto his face. “But if we’re going to run it now, could you please take the forks out of the stainless steel tub? You don’t want to pierce the AquaSeal.” He pulled me closer. Technical talk aroused us.

  “Don’t forget about hydrogen buildup. Hey, seriously!” I said, trying to untangle myself. “The manual said to run hot water after a vacation or the Bosch might explode.”

  But my sweet fool pushed Start anyway.

  Red Rabbit

  Steve Rasnic Tem

  Winner of the British Fantasy Award and the World Fantasy Award, Steve Rasnic Tem has spent almost four decades creating a unique and personal brand of fiction. Marked by characters steeped in tortured introspection—recalling Kafka at his most unsettling—Tem’s stories examine ordinary people struggling with the pain served up every day by an uncaring universe. The following story about a man dealing with his wife’s dementia takes us on a journey of delusion and terrifying ambiguities.

  He found her on the back porch again, watching the yard through the sliding glass door. He didn’t want to spook her, so he made some noise as he left the kitchen, bumped a chair, and made a light tap with one shoe on the metal threshold that separated the porch from the rest of the house. Then he stopped a few feet behind her and said, “What are you looking at, honey?”

  “The rabbit. Matt, have you seen that rabbit?”

  “That was yesterday, Clara. Remember? I went down there, and I scooped it up with a shovel, and I dropped it into a trash bag. Some wild animal got to it. Rabbits can’t protect themselves very well. That was yesterday.”

  “But it’s back.” Her voice shook. “Can’t you see it?”

  He followed her gaze to the lower part of the lawn, where it dipped downhill to the fence. Shadows tended to pool there, making the area look damp even though it hadn’t rained in almost two months. Beyond were a field of weeds and wildflowers, and the line of trees bordering the old canal. Beyond that was the interstate. You couldn’t see it, but you could certainly hear the traffic—a vacillating roar that you could pretend was a river if you really tried.

  The skinned and bloody rabbit had appeared there yesterday at the bottom of the yard, eased out of the shadows as if from a pool. And here was another one, its front legs stretched out toward the house, its body gleaming with fresh blood. This must have just happened. They must have had some sort of predator in the yard.

  “I see it,” he said. “Something got another one.”

  “Something terrible is happening,” she said. “I’ve been feeling it for weeks. And now this rabbit—I see it every day. Sometimes just after sunrise, sometimes just before sunrise. I thought I was going crazy, but now you see it too. What do you think it wants? Can you tell me what it wants?”

  Matt looked at her: her eyes red and unfocused, lips trembling. She was somewhere else inside her head. She was wearing this old green tube-top thing. She’d never looked good in it. Her back was knotted, her shoulders pushed up, her arms waving around as she spoke. He figured she must be crazy tense if he noticed it—he never noticed things like that.

  He felt sorry for her, but he also felt scared for himself. The woman he loved had been gone for years, and now he was left with this. He wasn’t a good enough person to handle something he hadn’t signed up for.

  “It’s not the same rabbit, Clara. There must be a predator loose in the neighborhood. Probably just a big cat or maybe a dog. It’s just a dead rabbit. I’ll go get the shovel and take care of it. There’s nothing to get upset about.”

  He didn’t really understand how her mind worked anymore. But maybe his being logical helped her. No one could say he hadn’t tried.

  “There’s blood all over him,” she said. “He’s all torn up. Can’t you see that something terrible is going to happen, that something terrible is happening? Can’t you see it?”

  She continued to stare at the rabbit in the yard. She wouldn’t turn around and look at him. It felt creepy talking to her back all the time. He didn’t dare touch her when she was like this, like a fistful of nerves. He didn’t think she’d looked at him full in the face in days.

  “It was a wild animal. It had a savage life. And something got to it. It’s not like a cartoon, Clara. Rabbits can’t protect themselves very well. Real rabbits in the wild, their lives are short and cruel.”

  They hadn’t had sex in a long time. He’d been afraid to touch her. You can learn to live with crazy, but you can’t touch it. He couldn’t let her drive, and when he left her alone, she called him at work every hour to complain about some new thing she’d suddenly realized was wrong. Their GP kept prescribing new pills for her, but he was just a kid, really. Matt was sure the fellow had no idea what was wrong with her.

  “I haven’t been feeling right, Matt. Not for a very long time. Something terrible is going to happen—can’t you sense that?”

  “I know that’s what you feel, but just go lie down. Let me take care of this, and then I’ll come join you.” But he knew sh
e wasn’t hearing, the way she stared, glassy-eyed, and the edge of her upper teeth showing. He stood in front of her and whispered, “Go inside now. Please.” When she didn’t respond, he stepped closer to block her view of the yard and put one arm around her, gave her a bit of squeeze.

  “Honey, just go inside and lie down. I’ll join you in a few minutes. Maybe I can even figure out what’s killing these rabbits, and I’ll deal with the thing. You just go inside.” Hopefully she’d be asleep when he was done. When she was asleep he could grab a drink, watch some TV, relax, and unwind for once.

  He grabbed a shovel and a trash bag and some gloves and started down the slope of the lawn. He’d generally neglected that part of the backyard. The ground there had always been mushy, unstable. He didn’t know much about groundwater, septic systems, any of that stuff. But he figured it must be some sort of drainage issue, maybe because of the old canal, or maybe because of an old, broken septic system, something like that. It didn’t smell too bad, just a little stagnant most of the time, a little sour. Only sometimes it stank like rotting meat. But they couldn’t afford to fix it, whatever it was, so he’d just tried to ignore it.

  The carcass wasn’t where he had seen it. In fact, he couldn’t find the rabbit anywhere. He thought about that mysterious predator, and went back to the house and grabbed the rake that was leaning against the wall by the sliding glass door.

  He stood still, the rake held in both hands in front of him, raised like a club. He still didn’t see the rabbit. He felt unsteady, and shortened his grip on the handle. He imagined that the predator, whatever it was, had dragged the body off somewhere. Some of the more dangerous animals in the region—coyotes, a wildcat or two, once even a small bear—had been known to wander out of the foothills and follow the canal into the more populous suburbs. He crept down the lawn toward the fence, afraid he might lose his footing. The grass looked shiny, slippery, as if the earth beneath were liquefying.

  He detected a subtle reddish shadow as he got closer to the fence, and then saw that it was a spray of blood. The body had been pushed up against one of the fence posts, eviscerated, but still clearly some version of rabbit. He was glad Clara couldn’t see this. It must have suffered terribly, ripped and skinned alive, all gleaming bright-red muscle, damp white bone, strings of pale fat. But the muscle had no business being bright red like that, like some kind of richly dyed leather. He’d skinned squirrels with his dad—he knew what a dead, skinned animal looked like, so dark and bruised. But this? This looked unreal.