by Isaac Thorne
She had found his iPhone, had tossed it into the cellar for him. He saw and thought he might even have felt his hands capture it on its descent. His father’s voice boomed at him through the Ether shortly after: BOY! BOY! WHAT DO I DO WITH THIS THING? I DON’T KNOW WHO TO CALL ON IT NOR EVEN HOW TO MAKE IT WORK IF I DID!
Graham made no effort to respond. He shrank back against his bubble cell, in fact, curled in on himself until he was radiating as little of his thought and presence as he could. He’d spent most of his young life finding ways to hide from his father in the physical world by simply curling up and remaining quiet. Maybe he could do the same thing in the metaphysical realm. Seconds later, he felt his father’s attention drift away from him and back to the woman above. Graham unfurled himself and stretched the tendrils of his proto-hands toward the lens of the bubble. His father had jammed his iPhone into the right pocket of his pants. That was followed by Afia Afton’s business card. This was as good a time as any to try out the idea that was forming.
What has four wheels and flies?
A garbage truck!
One of his tendrils pierced the wall of the bubble and stretched outward, seeking the nerves that controlled his body’s right hand. The bubble in which he was imprisoned wavered and wobbled, making strange sounds as it did. To Graham, they sounded like he imagined the roar of crashing waves must sound, although he’d never been to a beach. Another tendril followed the first one, piercing the skin of the bubble. That one snaked upward along the spine. The sound of the bubble reacting to Graham’s actions was hurting his father. The old man had plugged his ears, trying to drown out the sound.
Graham seized control of the right hand, freed it from his right ear, and jammed it into his pocket. He grabbed hold of the iPhone, loving that he could sense its weight and form through the skin of the hand he now controlled. Next, he closed his metaphysical eyes and concentrated on his connection with the device, pressing the home button to unlock it and then opening the Messages app with a tap of his body’s index finger. In contact with the device and surrounding its electromagnetic field with his own, he was somehow able to “see” what he was doing without actually laying eyes on it, although not entirely. It was a fuzzy image, like old TV shows broadcast from distant areas in the days before cable television grabbed a foothold and lightyears before internet streaming.
His father Lee was aware of his lost control. He could sense that. He needed a distraction. The left tendril, the one that was not controlling the hand, continued to wend its way up Graham’s body’s spinal column, eventually reaching his throat. There it grabbed control of his vocal cords and mouth while his index finger continued to tap buttons on the iPhone in his pants pocket.
***
Lee fought back. He was able to maintain control of the left hand. The right hand had suddenly unplugged from his ear and jammed itself into the right front pocket of Graham’s uniform pants, where Lee had stowed the “phone” device and the black woman’s business card. Lee was aware of its presence there but was unable to feel any movement of the hand or its attached fingers. His son’s will was weak and always had been. Overpowering him was easier when he was just a kid. Now he was a grown man with a job, and maybe he was still a pushover in many ways, but the physical occupation of his body was apparently not one of them.
As if to underscore this thought, Lee suddenly felt a bulge of air from his son’s diaphragm force its way up his windpipe and over the vocal cords. He clapped the left hand he still controlled over the boy’s mouth, attempting to stop what was coming next, but it was no use. Graham had located enough strength of will from somewhere down in their consciousness to scream the words so that Afia was sure to hear even from behind the closed cellar door.
“Athia!” Lee heard the voice from within the body he occupied shout. “ATHIA! I’m thorry! I’M THORRY!”
Then, just as suddenly as he had broken the surface of the stream of consciousness, he was submerged again. Lee Gordon regained control of the mouth, lungs, and diaphragm. Pins and needles flooded the right hand that had been thrust in the front right pocket of Graham’s uniform pants. It was under Lee’s control. He removed it from the pocket and examined it for any signs of damage. There were none. He was able to wiggle each of the fingers individually, to close the fist and reopen it, all without issue. He balled up his left hand and smacked the knuckles into the palm of the right as hard as he could. There was no pushback, and he was able to feel the hot tingling sensation the punch from the left created in the right palm. Good.
The cellar door swung open again. In its frame stood Afia—or her silhouette, anyway—holding what appeared to be three beer bottles by their throats between the fingers of her right hand. She propped the door open with her right foot while she determined the best placement for the bottles to help the door resist the call of its springs.
“Sorry for what?” she asked.
Lee blanked for a beat, unsure at first as to the meaning of what she was asking him, and then remembered what his son had screamed during his attempted coup. “Oh! Thorry!” he said through Graham’s broken mouth. “I’m thorry for...” His mind raced. “...the thee-thaw! I’m thorry, Athia. I’m thorry for what happened at the thee-thaw when we were little. I was...misthinformed I guess.”
Silence from above him. Lee began to think that it must have been some other black girl his boy had tried to molest on the playground all those years ago, but then she spoke again.
“That was you?” she said, and actually chuckled a little at the memory. “Oh my God, I had completely forgotten about that until just now. It was you, wasn’t it? I was so mad at you that day. What made you think you could just walk up and try to pull down a girl’s pants right in the middle of the playground? Or anywhere, for that matter?”
“I... I was misthinformed,” Lee repeated in what he hoped was a good imitation of his idiot son’s ridiculously overwrought conscience. Not that the bitch in his house right now would know the difference, he supposed. Still, if he was going to be Graham now, there was no better time to practice the limp-dick facade. “My dad told me that black girlth have tails. I wanted to see for mythelf, I guess.”
Afia’s shoulders slumped, the beer bottles in her right hand bounced against the side of her leg. “And you believed your dad? Seriously? Had you ever in your life seen a person with a tail?” She raised her voice a tad. Not angry, more incredulous. “And even if you did believe him you could have just asked me, not tried to pull down my pants in front of God and everybody. Jesus, Graham!”
“I’m thorry,” Lee tried again. “I was just a thupid kid. I didn’t see anything. I promise.”
She sighed. “All right. Well, I guess there was no harm done, was there? Except for my pride and your behind when the principal got hold of you. Honestly, Graham, I don’t remember a whole lot about all that. Maybe I blocked it out. Or maybe it’s just that we were very young at the time. But I do remember my mother getting really pissed off about it. How old were we?”
“I don’t know. Theven or eight?”
“Eight. It must have been eight. I think I remember telling on you to Mrs. Batey. She was out there on the playground with us at recess. So we were probably eight. That’s how old I was when my mother disappeared. The same year, I guess. So I think in the grand scheme that this incident seems to have weighed on you a whole lot more than it affected me, don’t you think?”
Oh, if you only knew, Lee thought.
“Anyway, it was years ago and, like you said, we were just stupid kids. Kids do stupid things. Although I will say that your father was a racist for telling you things like that. And, I’m sorry to say, that’s not the only reason I think about him that way. He and my dad didn’t get along, either. Did you know that? I don’t know why, but there was some nasty blood between them. I never got the full story out of my dad before he was murdered.”
Lee stifled a smile as that memory arose from the depths. What his dumbass son had done to her on the playground was
infinitesimal when compared to what Lee himself had done to Afia’s family. Not only had he killed this woman’s bitch of a mother. He’d also murdered her father when the dude had gotten a little too close for comfort that night after work. But, hell, it was the man’s own fault for not controlling his bitch of a wife in the first place. Plus, Darek—and what kind of name was that anyway—had threatened his job at the carbon plant. That left him with no choice.
***
Inside the bubble, the holes that Graham had made in his prison sealed themselves when he withdrew the tendrils. He’d hoped that would not happen. He had hoped he could bide his time, gather some strength after his excursions and then use that strength to stretch out those punctures he’d made. If he could make the hole big enough for his entire consciousness to step through, maybe he could force his father into the stream instead, imprison him there until he could find a way to rid himself of this thing. Would he need a doctor or an exorcist? He didn’t know, but he’d also never know if he didn’t find a way out.
He allowed the cloud of his consciousness to absorb the tendrils he’d formed from it and then curled in on himself, wanting to rest until he could find the strength to pierce the bubble again. He could feel himself drifting. Could he dream when he was only his consciousness and not directly attached to his physical body? His father was thinking about something else now, something that felt to Graham like a dream. From somewhere outside, he distinctly heard Afia say her father was murdered. Then that feeling from before enveloped him. His father was reliving another memory.
The bubble closed in on Graham, squeezing him, forcing him into yet another past wherein he had no power.
***
They’d always hated each other, at least as far as Lee could remember. It started when the carbon plant gave the Afton man a locker right next to Lee’s own, where Lee had to smell his sweat and look at his nasty parts every goddamn day of the week after their shift was over. He kept having to tell the faggot to stay on his own side of the locker doors, quit trying to rub up against him while he was changing out of his work clothes, but it never did take. It was enough to drive a man to drink. If that is, the man wasn’t already a drinker. It was that stuff that had nearly gotten him fired. So-called Darek had apparently one time caught sight of the flask Lee stowed in the bottom of his locker, usually under a spare pair of coveralls. He’d told on him, just like his bitch of a daughter had told on Graham on the playground about four years prior. Their supervisor had searched his locker, found the flask, and poured it out. No drinking on the job, he’d said. There were safety concerns on account of the furnaces and heavy equipment. He’d only get one more chance. If they caught him with alcohol on the job again, he’d be fired and escorted off the grounds immediately.
In his defense, Lee had held off butchering the black man as long as he could stand it. He had genuinely tried to clean up his act. His livelihood was at stake, after all. He left the beer at home for a while, content to make up for lost time once he’d crossed the threshold into his own castle every evening. Then came the blackouts. Drinking over six hours what he usually drank over eighteen was too much to metabolize. Often, he awoke the next morning with a monster hangover and mud caked to the bottom of his Wolverines, with no idea of where he had gone or what he had done the night before. For all he knew, he had been out killing young whores again. It was the next best thing to fucking them when all the beer makes your ding dong dangle instead of coming to attention. There might have been a few flashes of memory of standing in front of the black man’s house, bottle in hand, screaming at him to come out of there, to show himself and be a man about all the trouble he’d caused. He remembered someone—maybe the black woman’s little daughter—gawking at him from behind the corner of a shade in one of the windows, but not much more than that.
The worst of the icepick headaches and throwing up were the days he had to call in sick. Those missing hours had caused the bank account to dwindle. Bills were getting harder to pay and his will to roll out of bed in the morning had all but vanished. So if he couldn’t maintenance drink after his shift, and the black man was preventing him from maintenance drinking at work, maybe the best thing he could do for himself would be to rid himself and the carbon plant of the black man: the root of the problem, the snitch, the tattletale. Hell, Lee and the supervisor were perfect pals at work most of the time. He’d probably forgotten all about the flask incident by now. So maybe it was time to get rid of Darek, get his work life back to normal once and for all.
It was old hat for him by then. He’d followed Darek Afton out of the carbon plant after the end of the shift that evening. It was a clear night. The sodium security lights that lined the employee parking had buzzed to life hours ago, but there was enough shadow to protect him. Hidden in the folds of the spare pair of coveralls he carried under his arm—those that were once used to protect his drinking at work and since then had served no purpose—was his dad’s old hunting knife, a long fixed blade that his father had intended for him to use for Boy Scouts. Except there were no troops in Lost Hollow and Lee Gordon’s father had been much too lazy to drive him to Hollow River to locate one. He’d held onto it anyway, thinking that someday he might put it to good use and learn to hunt. Back then he thought he might be hunting deer or rabbit or squirrel. Turns out that humans made for better practice.
Except Darek Afton was younger than him, not a drinker, and fast. Lee Gordon at that time in his life was thick around the waist and probably had heart disease from all his years of alcoholism. Darek had climbed into his car and driven off before Lee was even close enough to call out to him. Fine, then. He’d follow him. Lee leaped behind the wheel of his F-150 and sped off in pursuit. At some point, Darek had noticed that he was being followed. He’d swung the Cougar, the car his now deceased wife used to drive every day, into a slot in the parking area next to the sidewalk around the town square. It was a violent act. Lee could hear the squall of the Cougar’s tires and the squeal of badly worn brakes as the other man made the turn and dragged the old boat to a halt. Lee glided his own pickup into the slot on the passenger’s side of the Cougar, using Darek’s car to provide cover as he snatched the hunting knife from the pile of the spare coveralls on the seat beside him, and slid out from behind the wheel of his F-150. Darek, meanwhile, had to walk around the Cougar to confront Lee face-to-face. He chose to walk around back, which suited Lee just fine.
“What the fuck do you want?” Darek shouted at him. The black man’s fists were clenched and his eyes ablaze in the light that shone from the full moon hanging over the town square. It was bright enough to cast shadows, including a long clock hand-like shadow from the obelisk that appeared to be pointing directly at them.
“Just this.” Lee dashed toward the other man, hunting knife clenched in his right hand and tilted at an upward forty-five-degree angle from his hip. He brought it up to Darek’s face as he closed the distance and, before the black man could completely process what was happening, dragged the blade that was explicitly honed for the cutting of flesh from the lobe of the right ear and across his throat. He finished with a flourish at the flap of the left ear while Darek, eyes wide, clamped his hands over the fresh wound, trying in vain to stop the lava-like flow of precious blood from his throat. It had already begun to pool at the crew-neck of the T-shirt he wore, and seeped from there into the thinner fabric below.
Darek stumbled backward, his fear-filled eyes bulging from their sockets and his mouth gaping for either air or words. He fell into the middle of the street that encircled the town square, crawling crab-like on his elbows in a panicked last-ditch effort to escape. He was still alive, then, but not for very much longer.
Lee strode back to his F-150. He gathered some McDonald’s napkins that had littered the passenger side floor mat for ages, bundling them into a single dry rag that he used to wipe down his weapon. The blood smeared over the blade. He would need to clean it again later, but that could wait until he got home. After this chore
was finished, he’d clean it again and then drop it in the crawl space with everything else he’d ever had to hide. He placed the knife, with his dry rag wrapped around the bloody blade, back into the folds of the spare pair of coveralls on the seat. Then he turned his attention to the dying black man.
Four years before this, Lee Gordon had managed to carry that dead bitch Grace Afton through the woods from her house to his, get her inside, drag her down the cellar stairs, and shove her into the crawl space to rot. Now, after nearly half a decade of downing Bud after Bud and chain-smoking Winstons, he began to wonder whether he would be able to handle a man twice the dead woman’s size and who had at least ten pounds on him in a similar fashion, especially after a long day at work and a goddamn street fight. He supposed he could drag the body back to the F-150. If he got Darek around the shoulders, he might be able to haul him up over the tailgate and shove him inside. But that was bound to leave a shitload of blood both on the tailgate and in the bed of the truck. That was a hell of a lot to clean up when your brain is foggy with a hangover.
