Drew had come so close, saved only by the sun and the wrong turns he’d made that delayed them enough for it to rise before the sisters fed.
A breeze rustled the three trees, and they made sounds like whispers and groans. Drew leapt to his feet and ran to his car.
He drove fast into town, filling up at the first open gas station he found. The morning paper fresh on the news rack showed a headline about another suicide at the bridge—a young woman who’d jumped last night around the time Drew left his office. He stared at the article, afraid to touch the paper, then paid the attendant and sped away. He reached home in time to cook a special breakfast for his wife and daughters, who were surprised and happy to see him, and after his daughters left for school, he called in sick and skipped work to be with them that afternoon.
He wanted to make the most of the time he had left.
Ed Kurtz on Elizabeth Massie's “Abed”
Of all the short fiction pieces I have ever read by the multitude of women writers in our genre, none stands out so starkly to me as Elizabeth Massie’s “Abed.” Reading Massie is like a master class in horror literature, from her superb novel Sineater to some of the finest short stories in any genre, but “Abed” in particular strikes at the soul. At once shockingly gruesome and compassionate, she takes the form of “extreme horror” and imbues it with heart and humanity. Not many writers are capable of such a challenging juxtaposition—the form is typically reserved for pure shock value—but Massie succeeds in jangling the reader’s brain with pure horror while simultaneously pulling heartstrings, forcing a close, almost claustrophobic siblinghood with poor, doomed Meggie. A classic.
◙◙◙
Mules
Ed Kurtz
When the A/C unit finally blew the curtain hard enough to wrap it around the steel casing, the puke-yellow glare from the streetlight stabbed directly into Mary-Jo Ford’s eyes and forced her awake. Chagrined, she tried rolling over, away from the window, but the frigid motel air raised cool goose pimples on her back and she could hear some woman hollering in the parking lot, and then there was the matter of the smell.
Mary-Jo groaned, slid up to lean against the headboard, which was screwed into the wall. She threw a crusty glance at the clock on the nightstand—also screwed in—and saw it was only half past two in the morning. She felt disoriented, and it took her a minute to remember where she was.
Presidio, Texas was where she was. Just across from Ojinaga, where she’d been. And from the smell of things, Hank had gone and shit the bed.
“Christ Jesus,” Mary-Jo muttered. She leaned over to switch on the lamp. The light from it was somehow worse than the streetlight outside. Everything here was yellow, aged beyond further use.
Hank sprawled out on the queen bed, half under the sheets and half dangling out, like a photograph of somebody drowning. Mary-Jo knuckled the corners of her eyes, blinked away the white spots, and immediately saw the mess soaking through the top sheet.
They’d had some crazy nights together, Hank and her—crank, crystal, grass laced with Christ knew what—but this was the first time she’d ever known him to shit himself in his sleep. She pinched her nostrils closed and made a hog-calling noise.
Whoo-ee.
Last night was a celebration, all right; there’d been Chivas Regal and a rock so fat she had to break it up to fit the smaller crumbs in the pipe. They talked about snagging one of the girls working the rooms downstairs, roll around a bit and maybe take some pictures with the Polaroid, but she was spent before they could get together enough to put the plan to action. And by then, she didn’t much care anymore. Hank was flying high and Mary-Jo crashed hard and fast. She didn’t know when Hank followed suit, but now she was up and he was still down and she was going to have to do something about the goddamn stink.
She threw a punch at his shoulder, hard. His torso gave with the impact, sank back. His thin, sandy-blonde hair spilled down over his stubbly face.
“Hell, Hank,” she grunted. “You got to wake up. This ain’t hygienic like.”
She thumped a knuckle against the crown of his skull. He didn’t so much as moan.
Mary-Jo said, “Ah, no. Ah, hell.”
The woman outside shrieked louder still, railing against the cops to whoever would listen and quite a few who would rather not. Mary-Jo brushed Hank’s hair away from his face and peeled back his eyelids with her thumb.
He was, as she suspected, dead.
◙
They’d met Octavio at the dentist’s office on Blv. Libre Comercio in Ojinaga, as prescribed, the afternoon before. The dentist was Octavio’s uncle. Under the flickering bulb in the one-john bathroom, he unzipped a blue and white duffel and showed them what they’d come for: a pile of condoms packed fat with Mama Coca.
Mary-Jo thought they looked like little white sausages. Octavio brought them a two-liter bottle of orange soda to help get the pills down, called Hank and Mary-Jo his poco mulas. The soda was gone before they managed to swallow just two each. The rest took up another two bottles and most of the remaining daylight.
Mary-Jo hated the orange soda, and the fact it was warm only made it worse.
In the evening, after sunset, she and Hank waddled back to the Impala parked crookedly on the boulevard and said nothing as he turned back toward the border. When the border patrol grilled him, he could barely speak. The officer searched the Impala, found nothing of interest. They rolled on through, back into the good old U.S. of A., a couple Cads of blow, wrapped tautly in greased latex, resting painfully in each of their bellies.
◙
“God almighty,” Mary-Jo sobbed, hunkered down on the edge of the bed farthest from Hank’s body. She let herself have a good cry. There was never anything quite approaching love between them, and she had no inclination to embellish their history now, but they’d had some good times. A mess of bad ones, too. But most to the good.
When at last her tear ducts dried up and the shuddering relented, she went round the bed to the bathroom and washed her face, trying to remember not to pick at the scab at the corner of her mouth. Hank hated that. The picking, not the scab itself.
She then started a hot bath, and while the faucet sputtered into the tub, she took a damp towel back into the main room for what she hoped was going to be the worst part of it—looking for the product among the mess on the sheets.
It was, after all, bought and paid for. She still had to deliver.
Gagging, Mary-Jo went to work. She found it necessary to take a break every five minutes or so, to duck back into the bathroom and breath in the hot steam. And when, at long last, she was done, she was distressed to discover the product Hank swallowed back in Ojinaga was still inside him.
“I’m so sorry, baby,” she said softly, frantically waving her hand an inch from her face, “but that’s gonna have to come on out.”
First, she lowered him into the scalding bathwater, underpants and all. The water burned her hands and quickly fogged with filth. She let him soak for a bit while she tended to balling up the soiled sheets and double-checking the door was locked up tight.
Then she withdrew Hank’s butterfly knife from the pocket of his jeans on the floor. A scalpel, she realized, would have been better suited for the task at hand. But who carried a scalpel around with them?
She fought against his weight for a few minutes, struggled to keep his face above the water. He kept sliding down, stopping only when the murky water slapped against his swollen eyelids. It didn’t matter, and she knew it didn’t matter, so she just pulled out the plug and watched as it all swirled nosily, chokily, down the drain.
His body gleamed, shone wet in the fluorescent light. She studied the tattoos dotting his flesh, the one for his mama he’d gotten in County from a Lowrider with a homemade gun. It was on his left bicep, and on the same place on his right was one spelling out Libby, who he said she shouldn’t worry about. Libby’s gone, baby, he said.
His mama was gone, too. Everybody Hank loved was gone, to hea
r him tell it, and everyone who loved him. Mary-Jo didn’t know for sure if she ever did, or if she did now; she’d never said as much. She was afraid it might be a lie. She was afraid that, someday, he would get her name inked on his skin, only to coo softly to some other bitch that Mary-Jo’s gone, baby, Mary-Jo’s gone. If she had the Lowrider’s tattoo gun, she would needle her name onto him now. A last remembrance, before the cutting began.
Hank was skinnier than a starved hound, just skin wrapped tight around corded muscles and equally narrow bones. Mary-Jo was thankful for that, because it seemed to make her job much easier. His body was like a roadmap, every section clearly marked.
She began at the soft bit underneath his sternum, uncertain how hard to press on the handle. Black-red blood beaded at the tip of the knife, but she realized quickly she was going to have to put more elbow grease into it. She propped her knee up on the edge of the tub and jimmied her opposite foot between the toilet and the too-near cabinet beside it, jockeying for leverage. Once that was settled, she hauled a deep breath into her breast and stabbed Hank like she hated him.
The blade sank clear to the hilt with a crunch, five inches at least, and a whistling gust sang out of Hank’s mouth. Mary-Jo yelped, staggered back, and fell over the toilet. The handle of the butterfly knife stuck straight up from Hank’s chest. Mary-Jo collected herself, breathed in good air and exhaled the bad, just like the counselor lady at the Goree Unit back at Huntsville advised. Once she felt sufficiently composed, she resumed her position on the edge of the bathtub, gripped the handle again, and started to saw.
Business is business, she told herself, over and over, as Hank gradually split open and the tears spilled down her blood-hot cheeks.
In the end, Mary-Jo cut Hank deep lengthwise, from sternum to groin, and more shallowly across his midsection, to form a seeping red plus sign. The tub—never that white to begin with—was now spattered with blood, as were the walls, and the floor, and Mary-Jo herself. She took a moment to throw the seat up on the john and empty her own guts through a retching series of false starts and, finally, a torrential stream from deeper inside of her than she thought possible. She was slick with sweat from crown to toe. Despite the heat, she juddered like a junky.
“All right, then,” she rasped at the ruin of Hank’s midriff. “Give me what you got, baby doll. We sure as shit didn’t go down Mexico way for nothing.”
With that, Mary-Jo Ford dug her fingers beneath the flaps in Hank’s gut and pulled them back and apart with a wet snap. To finish the job, she retrieved the knife and cut away at connecting tissues and stubborn organ meat, opening him wider and wider, ever baffled by the glistening red mess inside a body and how in hell any doctor could make sense of it. But she knew a stomach when she saw one, and she saw Hank’s now, so she steeled herself to rip it apart when something caught her eye and forced a shuddering shriek out of her throat.
It was, unmistakably, a tiny hand.
The hand moved; balled slowly into a loose fist and released again. It was red and wrinkled and smaller than a newborn baby’s. Mary-Jo had popped one out herself, in another life—she knew. In the fraction of second she’d seen the thing, she registered its stubby fingers, even the minuscule nails edged the tips. And it moved. By Christ, it moved.
Stupidly, she whispered, “Hello?”
She wrinkled her nose and shook her head, angry with herself.
Goddamn, she thought, it’s the rock, it’s gotta be the rock. I’ve done gone crazy.
To verify her conclusion, she rose and leaned back over the eviscerated remains of poor, dead Hank.
The hand remained. The hand still moved.
Mary-Jo slapped a hand, tacky with blood, over her mouth to stifle the next scream.
◙
She wasn’t crazy.
She dug into Hank’s corpse to rescue whatever struggled inside of him.
◙
At fifteen, in the clinic that frequently served as a maternity ward in the McCulloch County juvie detention center, Mary-Jo Ford gave birth to a baby girl, all red and squalling. The girl-child was gone before Mary-Jo could so much as brush her fingers across the wretched creature’s face, but she’d gotten a good enough look to burn it into her brain for the rest of her life. She saw that baby girl almost every time she shut her eyes, even all these years later.
The creature that stirred amidst Hank’s ropy, stinking entrails was equally wretched to her judgment, but smaller by half. Its left half was more developed than its right, with an arm and a leg and five digits wiggling at the end of each; the opposite side was shriveled and stick-thin. She could make out its tiny ribcage jutting up beneath translucent flesh, its small round belly poked out above the red mass at its groin. The mass pinned it to Hank’s guts.
The face was small and pinched, too small for the proportionally oversized head, upon which not a single hair sprouted. Mary-Jo gazed deep into the thing’s tiny black eyes, and she decided they did not see her. It opened its slit of a mouth and mewled, softly.
What are you? she wanted to ask, but she knew there would be no point. Instead, she poked tremulous fingers into the quivering red mass at the thing’s middle and peeled it back, revealing what looked like an umbilical cord snaking from its belly into Hank’s stomach.
Also revealed to her was the creature’s sex: he was a boy.
And, knowing this, no longer a creature.
He was only a boy.
“I’m gunna get you out of there,” she said quietly to the child, her eyes and nose starting to drip again. “Hold tight, little fella. I’m gunna get you out.”
◙
Pregnancy in men, Mary-Jo reckoned, was a biological impossibility. And Hank, she knew perfectly damn well, was all man.
So, as she cradled the desiccated child in her gore-stained arms on the bed, she concluded that it had always been with Hank. It was always inside of him.
This, if true, made him not Hank’s baby, but his baby brother. A little twin, born at last, if thirty some odd years too late.
“I ‘spect I ought to call you Hank too, now,” she cooed at little Hank.
Little Hank sputtered and shivered, his lame right arm twitching and round, black eyes rolling.
“Hush now. Mary-Jo’s gunna take care of you. I’m practically your big sister, don’t you know.”
Little Hank flopped his lumpy red head against her breast and burbled.
While the baby fussed, as best it could, on a blood-stained motel hand towel atop the bed, Mary-Jo finished what she started with Hank. She split open his stomach sac, sliced down the length of his large intestines. Of the four Easter eggs he’d swallowed, she only recovered three; the last was reduced to a loose flap of latex, its contents absorbed into Hank’s body while he slept. The damn thing burst, and he OD’d.
Suddenly panicked the same would happen to her any minute, Mary-Jo gulped down the laxative they’d bought at a corner store. It did its work quickly and efficiently, and after standing naked in the tub under the hot spray for a few minutes—Hank’s carved up remains between her feet—she rinsed off the product and lined them up next to the sink. Seven in all, one-eighth less than they promised to deliver.
She bit her lower lip.
Little Hank puled restlessly from the main room.
My Hank, Mary-Jo thought, her face growing warm. My little Hank.
The men she and Hank had been muling for were not nice men. They were cartel men, low level chiefs with nothing to lose and no conscience to prickle them. Even Hank had confessed to being afraid of them, but his excitement for bigger, better scores once this trip was done overshadowed his crawling fear. Now Mary-Jo was possessed of enough fear for the both of them. There was nothing now they could do to Hank, Big Hank, but she could conceive of no limits to the things they’d do to her when she explained how one of the pills had gone and popped. No matter that it had killed her man, forced her carve him up like a Christmas turkey.
Business was business. And failing to live u
p to a promise was bad business.
She washed off the butterfly knife in the bathroom sink, and then she pierced one of the stuffed condoms with the tip of the blade.
“Sit tight, little man,” she called out from the bathroom. “Big Sis will be along directly.”
She held the package up to her face, almost oblivious to where it recently came from, and snorted deeply from the opening she made with the knife. Hank’s twin started to hiccough, alternately chirping and belching. Mary-Jo inhaled until her lungs were full, held it in and relished the numbing cocaine drip at the back of her throat.
And once she recovered, she did it all over again.
◙
She was never meant for motherhood, Mary-Jo Ford. It was why they took her baby girl away without ever asking her thoughts on the matter. That was why Little Hank’s best shot had to be somebody else, somebody who didn’t mule drugs across the border and dissect her own man to get at the product that was useless to her now.
Besides, he wasn’t a baby, anyway. He was thirty some odd years old, just like Hank. Not grown, but no infant. An anomaly, a thing that shouldn’t be.
Mary-Jo figured she was, too.
Deep Cuts Page 17
