by Gray, Amelia
After his shower, he put the liverwurst in the refrigerator, picked a wilted petal off the lilies, and knocked on the connecting door. At first, there was no response. He held his ear to the door and didn’t hear anything. The door smelled like rot and wood and paint. He knocked again.
“Roger,” she said, from the other side. “Come in.”
Olive’s silver belt made her look segmented. Her white legs stretched out like a child’s and she was leaning against the far wall, underneath the old map of a city Roger didn’t recognize. The crack in the wall, the one the map only partly covered, stretched down to her head, making it look like she was attached. Her left foot was bleeding through a wide swath of bandages onto the tarp it was resting on. The bowl next to her was full of blood.
Olive looked a little pale. “I don’t think I should move,” she said. “What are you doing?” Roger shut the door behind him and stood with his back to it.
“I decided I might try and eat my toes,” Olive said, closing her eyes. “But now that I’ve started, I don’t think I should move.”
Roger pushed himself off the wall and knelt down next to her. He unbuckled her silver belt and reached with it under her dress. He looped the belt around the top of her leg and tightened it. His hands were not shaking.
“Sit on the loose end,” he said, pushing it under her. “I hope that works.”
“You brought flowers,” she said, blinking.
“Olive,” he said. “You cut off your toes.”
She looked down at the bowl. “Are they still toes?” she asked. He thought about the metal drums heating in the sun, bouncing in the back of the truck as he paraded their human contents across town. “I don’t want to look at them,” he said.
She touched her leg. “Let’s drink grapefruit juice,” she said. “We should really get you to the hospital.”
The metal drums, hot blood clinging to moist gauze pads. “I’m thirsty,” she said.
“You have no toes on your left foot.”
“I’m thirsty,” she said. She looked at him. She seemed very reasonable.
“A little juice,” Roger said. “And then straight to the hospital.” She nodded and motioned to the kitchen, where Roger filled two glasses with juice.
“I was considering a stew,” she said. He put a glass of juice into her hand on her lap, wrapped her fingers around it. “Chop, braise, stew. I bought the carrots this morning. I already had potatoes and broth. You would need a bit of flour first, and butter. I have those, too.”
The juice glass trembled and spilled onto her lap. “Cooking makes me feel better,” she said.
He looked around for another bandage for her foot. “I don’t cook,” he said.
“I can’t feel my leg.”
“That’s normal.”
“You should try it,” she said. “Cooking. Then we’ll go.”
Roger sat back on his heels. He was worried, but proud of himself for remembering proper tourniquet procedure. He had saved her life. She might thank him once she was in a better frame of mind.
She raised her head and shook it, opening her eyes briefly before closing them again. “A stew,” she said. “I promise, after stew.”
“I don’t know how,” he said, but she didn’t seem to hear him. He picked up the flowers he had brought her, ruined now, though when he put them in the sink they still brightened the room.
UNSOLVED MYSTERY
My first week on the force and that crazy guy starts killing men, digging into the chest cavity—with an actual bonesaw, we think, the cut is so clean—and removing a rib. We nickname him God to be real clever. My girl Lisa thinks I’m joking when I tell her this and when I insist it’s true, she throws me out. The devout type; I should have known. Meanwhile this guy’s on the loose and looking for victims. Usually homeless guys. We found one last week in an alley, frozen to his own blood and stuck to the ground. No calling card from God, just a wound that looks like a shotgun blast at first and more gruesome on closer inspection.
And that’s another thing—no other marks. I can’t figure it. We run toxicology tests. We go over them with a blacklight, we check every inch of skin and hair with agonizing precision. Sam, the morgue tech, says precision in this business is usually agonizing. No strangle marks, no bruises, no chemicals beyond the ones typically cruising through a bum’s veins. No organs harvested. I half expect these guys stitched up, it’s such a clean job. Other than the blood, I mean. Sam says it’s divinity, or a spell, but I think that’s bull. I think it’s cold in those alleys, and God is working fast.
Two things happen to bust everything wide open. This sicko, he gets a guy in a house. He gets him, safe and warm, in his own bed at night. This will baffle me when I find out about it but I don’t learn about it when the other guys do, because my girl Lisa chose that moment to pull a sneak attack on me and bring a priest home for dinner. Some poor sap is missing a rib, bleeding out on his 350 thread-count Egyptian cotton, and I’m passing the asparagus to a guy in a plastic collar.
* * *
This is Father Matthew, Lisa says. She serves fish sticks with mayo and pours the iced tea. Father Matthew spends some time looking pleased with himself. He says, Lisa’s been telling me some interesting things about this case you’re working on.
I say, Yeah. I say Listen, the boys aren’t sure it’s a serial case yet and we don’t want copycats, so don’t leak it to the press or anything.
Father Matthew holds up his hands. He says, What is going on with this world.
I tell him, This guy God, he’s got a bonesaw on loan and he’s cutting into men and taking their ribs. Homeless guys.
Bonesaw? says Lisa, dipping a fish stick into a pile of mayo. And he calls himself God, Father Matthew says.
Yeah, I say. Well, tell the truth, that’s what us guys down at the precinct are calling him. Kind of a code name, you know.
Nobody knows his true name, Father Matthew says.
I say, Yeah.
He puts down his glass, says, Naming God is a very serious thing. Yeah well, I say, He’s everywhere, right?
Sure, he says.
Even in serial killers, right?
I thought you didn’t know he was a serial killer, Lisa says. Father Matthew holds the edge of the table. It’s not a name you just throw around, he says. It makes it sound like you respect him.
After Father Matthew leaves, I do the dishes for Lisa and crawl into bed just as she’s finishing her vespers. All the doors are locked, the windows are bolted, and I have a chair propped against the front door. Just in case God’s watching and he wants to make it personal.
We’re safe, Lisa says. I asked for protection.
He won’t get in tonight, I say.
She says, I think you worried Father Matthew a little with the respect thing. She kisses me on the cheek.
Worried myself a little, I say, truthfully. What I don’t say is, God’s a clever bastard and I do respect him. He’s everywhere.
DINNER
When the waiter brought a plate of hair to the table alongside Beth’s soup, it was difficult to be polite about it. Still, Beth felt the need to be polite, because it was a nice restaurant, and she was on a date for the first time in months, and with a guy she actually liked. His name was Dave and he smelled like shaving cream and the subway.
From the way Dave looked first at the plate of hair and then at her, Beth couldn’t be sure if he had ordered it for her, as a surprise, while she was in the bathroom. He had been talking earlier about the exotic locations he had visited in the previous year—Bali, Peru, some island near Madagascar—and she assumed that interesting foods and customs were a part of those voyages. Dave had a disarming smile and an easy way with words that had made the night go quickly until that moment.
Beth dipped her spoon into the soup, a tomato-cream bisque that she had ordered with a sidelong glance at Dave, hoping he wouldn’t think her uncultured for skipping over the more adventurous carrot ginger gazpacho. Dave had ordered a sala
d, which had not yet arrived, giving him time to focus his gaze on her. She put her spoon down.
“Please,” Dave said. “Eat. Don’t wait for me.”
“Would you like to try anything?” Beth said. She hoped Dave would go for the hair, which lay clumped on its plate directly between them. In fact, it wouldn’t be entirely clear that the plate of hair was meant for her, except that the waiter had bowed at her when delivering the plate, and had murmured to her his wishes that she enjoy her meal; despite, she assumed, the fact that her entree of squab would be arriving later. Beth wondered for an uneasy moment if squab was not actually a small bird, as she had figured, but a plate of hair.
“Do try something,” she said.
Dave shook his head. He was still smiling, but his gaze had dropped to her lips, meaning either that he wanted to kiss her— she had read about this technique in magazines—or that he wanted her to take a healthy chunk of hair with her fork and choke it down with a swallow of red wine, forcing the clogged mass down her throat like an obstruction through the pipes of a bathtub.
Beth couldn’t take her eyes away from the plate of hair. The soup fell into the background, harboring her forgotten spoon. It was auburn hair, and piled up with a volume that made it seem as if the chef had snipped off a massive tangle and laid it there without presentation.
“Would you like to leave?” Dave asked.
It was as if he had plucked the thought from her mind, but when she looked at him, she knew it was not a sincere proposal. He had pulled some strings for their reservation, after all, getting the two of them a table at the last moment, no doubt at some expense to his professional standing. Men didn’t enjoy asking for things, Beth knew from the magazines.
She shook her head at him cheerily, too quickly. She would
have to eat the hair, she knew—that or ruin the date, and everything that went along with it. He was watching. He knew it, too.
A JAVELINA STORY
The domestic hostage situation had been underway for three and a half hours, and the pack of wild animals heading up the negotiation project was making little progress. There were five javelinas and they looked intimidating enough all together, weighing as they did between fifty and eighty pounds each and brandishing tusks, trotters, and snouts. Their mottled brown hair shone with drying mud from a nearby drainage ditch. It was a warm day, with a slight breeze in the air, and the javelinas were ready for a nap.
That morning, someone at the district office made a clerical error of impressive proportions, transferring the badge status and its related responsibilities from Officer Clint Javarez to the wild javelinas. The javelinas had been found eating the fruit off a prickly pear cactus in the city park, and had spent the afternoon waiting patiently in the back of a squad car for the Animal Control van to arrive. Once the order came through, they were driven by a rookie to the site of the hostage situation, dropped at the scene with a large cardboard box of supplies, and abandoned.
Some commotion inside the building startled the javelinas from their rest. One roused himself from their makeshift nest and trampled branches, sniffing the air. Another nosed the box, tipping its contents out in the process. From the box and into the muddy ditch rolled flares, a set of cell phones, a bullhorn, a bulletproof vest, a packet of sunflower seeds, pads of notepaper, a box of facial tissues, tear gas, five grenades, a set of walkie-talkies, and what looked to be a semi-automatic weapon. The javelinas couldn’t be sure. One made a snuffling noise and trotted into the ditch to investigate.
Fifty feet away, the home’s front door opened and a man’s gloved hand reached out. The javelinas looked up with mild curiosity when they heard the man’s voice.
“I’m losing patience in here!” the man yelled. “When I lose patience, people start getting shot in the head!” The javelinas heard screaming in the house behind the man. One of the javelinas rolled over in the nest and chewed at a knot of hair on her trotter.
The man, who was mostly obscured by the surrounding wall, held a gun in one hand and leaned the other against the door frame. “I’m trying to be reasonable!” he shouted. He switched the pistol to his other hand, knocking the barrel nervously on the door. After hearing no response, he added: “Heads will roll!”
From the ditch, the curious javelina found the sunflower seeds in their plastic packet. The javelina lay one trotter delicately at the edge of the packet, lowered his snout to the ground, and took the edge of the plastic between his teeth.
At the door, the man wiped the back of his neck with a paper towel. The silent tactic, he thought, remembering back to a freshman psychology book he had stolen at a yard sale and kept by his toilet. Reverse psychology. In the back room, his hostages were screaming again. “Shut up,” he called back, “or I’ll put eight rounds into your forearms!” I could really learn something here, he thought.
The sunflower seeds remained trapped in their packet, the slippery plastic elusive to the animal’s teeth. The javelina made a trumpeting noise and drove his trotter down, first crushing a cell phone, then one of the walkie-talkies. The other beasts were alarmed and excited by the noise and tumbled down the hill in a mass. In their excitement they crushed the flares, smeared the paper into the earth, broke the sight off the rifle and bent the outer rim of the bullhorn.
The man heard the metallic crunching noises. They’re destroying their own equipment, he thought, but why? He shut the door and walked into the back room, scratching the back of his head with the butt of his gun. His hostages, five fraternity brothers who the man had tied to chairs with knots he learned in the Boy Scouts, began crying and begging for their lives when they saw him.
The man raised his hand for silence. “I think we’ve all learned a lesson today,” the man said. He raised his pistol and killed his hostages before killing himself.
Outside, the javelinas discovered that the packet of sunflower seeds had opened under the commotion of their trotters. The javelinas fell to happy fighting over the salty treats.
We have all learned a lesson today.
THE DARKNESS
“I think I’d call us strange bedfellows,” the armadillo said.
The penguin barely heard her. He was, at that moment, attempting to hold a straw between his flippers.
The armadillo centered her shell on the barstool. She was drinking a Miller High Life.
“Strange bedfellows indeed,” she said.
The penguin gave up on holding the straw and stood on his stool to reach the lip of the glass. He could barely wet his tongue with a little gin. “What’s that?” he asked.
“You are a penguin, and I am an armadillo,” the armadillo said. “My name is Betsy.”
“That’s a beautiful name,” murmured the penguin, who was more interested in the condensation on his glass. “I fought the darkness.”
“You did not.”
The penguin swiveled his head to look at Betsy. He had very beady eyes.
“What’s your name?” she said. “Ray,” said the penguin. “That’s a nice name.”
“I fought the fucking darkness.”
“Neat,” Betsy said. She let her long tongue dip into the bottle, lapping the surface of her beer. “What was that like?”
“Well Betsy,” Ray said, “it was evil incarnate.”
“Oh.”
“Imagine the worst evil ever done to you in your life.”
Betsy thought of the time she was locked in a shed.
“Got it,” she said.
Ray pecked at his highball glass in anger. “Well,” he said, “imagine that, except fifteen times worse. That’s what the darkness was like.”
“That sounds terrible,” Betsy said. She was trying to be noncommittal about the whole darkness thing in the hopes that Ray would drop it. Before coming to the bar, she had used vegetable oil to shine her shell to a high sheen. In her peripheral vision, she could see the lights above the bar playing off her shoulders.
“What do you think of my shell?” she asked.
; Ray leaned back a little to appraise the situation. “It’s nice,” he said.
“I like your coat.”
“This old thing,” Ray said, patting his feathers. “It’ll smell like the bar for weeks. You can’t get this smell out.”
“That’s the good thing about a shell,” Betsy said.
They sat in silence. Betsy wondered if she had perhaps said too much about her shell. Ray wondered where the bartender got off serving a penguin a drink in a highball glass. He would have rather taken his gin out of an ashtray.
Betsy tapped her claw against the beer bottle. “Have you ever protected an egg?” she asked.
