After the People Lights Have Gone Off

by Stephen Graham Jones

  “Cat?” the assistant manager asks.

  Catressa, yes.

  Dick says it with his eyes, mostly.

  The assistant manager spins halfway back around, is already studying something on his desk.

  “She’ll make a good waitress somewhere,” he says as goodbye, then his whole massive frame chuckles.

  On the way out, Dick runs his hand along the label-edge of the condiments shelf, shifting all the prices one item over. Sometimes two.

  His other hand balled tight in his sleeve, where no one can see.

  •

  One hour and nine minutes later—the car not late yet, Mom—Dick’s got the headlights off, is idling at the fire curb by the cart corral, where the squeaky wheeled go to die their slow public deaths.

  The air’s grey, is at least half exhaled smoke.

  Waitress my ass, Dick’s saying to himself every few drags.

  The last cigarette he lit was fifty minutes ago. He’s not asking where the new ones are coming from anymore, or how they’re getting lit.

  Off hatred, he knows.

  Sixteen years of it already.

  Dick smiles. Starts to rub a port hole in the windshield to see from but realizes at the last moment that that would mean looking at his right hand. So he uses his left, and, instead of a rubbed-clean hole—the defroster sucks—he writes his name backwards, so it’ll be readable from the front: D R A H C I R.

  No idea why he never thought of that till just this moment.

  Or, like he’s been saving it for now, yeah.

  Like clockwork, then, Sammy ambles out into the night, leaning back to stretch his back, both his hands on his hips.

  When he comes down from that stretch, he sees it, what Dick’s left: the turquoise and silver lighter.

  Just standing there erect on the shiny blacktop.

  Sammy cocks his head, takes a careful step forward, then another step, and Dick lowers his—not his hand, but the sleeve, he watches as the long sleeve of the hoodie swallows that five-speed little shifter, deep throating it.

  And—more clockwork—the front tires chirp their warning just as Sammy’s leaning down for this impossible thing, this lighter, and, because he’s old, instead of standing all the way to take the Corolla’s impact, he only turns his face to the bright, bright headlights, his shadow thrown so far behind him. Almost as far as he’s about to fly.

  Dick smiles, but it’s so deep in the darkness of his hood that Sammy never sees it.

  But of course one day our father needed something flat and disposable to mix some JB Weld putty on, so he cut down into it with his pocket knife, just hacking a rough square from the side, and I admit that, one bored afternoon, I probably decorated one of the cut-out handles with the kitchen scissors. Nothing regular or patterned, just uneven little triangles snipped here and there. I was imagining if the cardboard were steel, then those points I was leaving would be sharp, would de-finger whoever reached down for a grip, would make the side of the box into a shark mouth.

  Any day it was taking its fatal trip to the curb, I mean, and it would have that week if Mom hadn’t ditched a load of socks in it then not got around to folding them until after trash day. But the world, it always keeps turning, doesn’t it? She got around to the socks, and of course at some point in there we tried to trap the cat under the box (fail), tried to capture a bird in the backyard (partial success), then finally, perhaps overestimating its reliability, we tried using it as a stool (crunch). So we stapled it back together as well as we could, with the staple gun we’d been trying to reach in the first place.

  That was what did it, too, we think.

  We didn’t get the inner flaps lined up with the sides of the box like they had been, so the box’s dimensions were off a hair, and it wasn’t quite square anymore.

  Big deal, right?

  It was just a box, and we got the stapler back up in its cabinet, and nobody knew anything.

  The next morning, though, our dad’s cereal bowl woke us, by breaking on the kitchen floor.

  By the time we got there, we understood why he’d let his cereal go like that: the inside of the box was crawling with spiders. It was writhing with them, hissing with them, boiling with them.

  My mom caught our father’s eye and our father just shrugged.

  I smiled.

  With a shovel, we guided the box across the floor, out the nervous bump the sliding door was, and tipped it off the back porch. The spiders didn’t explode away from the box, but they didn’t cling, either. They just ambled off on their own time, back to their dark places.

  “The wax,” my mom decided. It had aged to some state of tastiness the spiders couldn’t resist.

  Maybe.

  The next morning, it was just a box. Our father stood at the sliding door and ate his cereal and watched it lay there on its side, harmless at the edge of the porch, the sun breaking over the back fence.

  Later that day, Mom not watching, we crawled out to the box on fingertips and toes, smelled it. It was just cardboard, a bit damp, its top side sagging in a touch now. We caught spiders, dropped them in, but the spiders didn’t care, just hooked a leg up on the side, then another, and crawled up, out.

  The next morning, the box was full of tarantulas. Ones that weren’t even supposed to come up from their holes for months, if this year at all.

  “Burn it,” my mom said.

  “It’s not the wax,” our father said.

  He took the day off from work, applied the made-up science in his head to the box. Polaroids, rulers, protractors, compasses, spiral notebooks, yarn, coins for size, different kinds of light, different kinds of metal. Magnets, smoke, water vapor. Tuna, but the cat just jumped in, ate it, growling at us the whole time.

  That night he pulled a chair up to the sliding glass door and made a pot of coffee and watched the box, out on the porch.

  The spiders came to it like a spill of oil seeping across the lawn. Like a shadow, spreading, and, according to our father, he never saw them come up over the edge, even, to get inside. But they must have. There they were.

  My dad called in sick again, his fingers jittery.

  Backing out of the drive for either the hardware store or the library, he backed over our third new dog for that year. It was a solemn lunch. Promises were made, tears were snuffed back up into sinus cavities.

  We buried Blackie Dos in the alley, me and my brother standing guard at either end for the trash truck, who might report us.

  Before we could come back through the gate, Mom handed the box over the fence.

  Our father knew when he was beat.

  He went in to his shift the next morning, never saw what we were pretty sure we did: Blackie Dos—or Blackie Dos’s exact twin, just more raggedy—limping down along the fence line behind all the houses. Going to live on some other street.

  The box he’d crawled out of was tumped over by the trash.

  After our father had dropped it in reverently, moving his shoulders and arms either exactly like a good husband or in exact imitation of a good husband, we’d got it back out, set it carefully by the dumpster, because it had to be sitting up like that to work, we were pretty sure.

  But it could have been the wind that tumped it over. Or cats. And there were Blackie Doses everywhere that summer.

  Still.

  That weekend, his second six-pack giving him ideas, our father took apart our old toy box and raided the woodpile, rebuilt the box but larger this time, and sturdier. But he kept to the exact dimensions, was consulting his spiral notebooks before each pull of the saw.

  He told us that what had happened was that we’d stumbled on some secret of the universe, some private geometry, some magic dimension that allowed things to happen that usually couldn’t, but that probably always wanted to. And spiders were tuned to that, or had enough eyes to see it right. Something.

  I reminded him about the decorated handle. The razor blade handle, the shark mouth handle. He studied the Polaroid, compared i
t to another Polaroid, got the file and adze out again, but only after tracing his cuts with a pencil, and coloring them in to be sure they were going to match.

  By morning, it was real.

  “If a little one got spiders?” he said, and balanced it into the bed of his truck. It was the same box, just scaled up from peaches to…to watermelons. Or whatever fruit’s one bump up from that.

  We took it to the edge of town, out by the dump, and set it down by a fence, pitched our tent a few truck lengths away.

  We fell asleep first, like always, in spite of our best efforts and our promises to keep pinching each other awake.

  The next morning there was a scuffling coming from the box. We edged in behind our father, behind the lever-action he’d smuggled out of the house.

  The scuffling was hooves.

  There was a baby horse in the box.

  Its legs were broken, though.

  We followed its drag marks back to an old refrigerator somebody had off-loaded against the fence that kept the dump in.

  “Why would—?” our father said.

  “What?” I said up to him.

  “Do this.”

  Itself, I thought, but didn’t say.

  I felt like crying.

  By the time we got back to the box, it was on its side. The baby horse was trying to stand. And then it was.

  “Warm the truck,” our father told us, tossing the keys over, and we heard the rifle fire once behind us. Heard the splat it made. It made us walk faster, with our hands made into fists, to keep the pictures in our heads from happening.

  We balled the tent up and pitched it into the back of the truck, its poles and stakes sticking out like bones, dragging like fingers. On the way past the box, our father reconsidered, veered a little over, ran over it enough for it to crunch, explode beneath our feet.

  “We won’t talk about this,” he told us, and he was right.

  Nineteen years later, though, after my wife and daughter had what happened to them out on the interstate happen, I used the insurance money for a cinderblock warehouse on the east side of town. The old part of town.

  From our father, I’d inherited a box of measurements, of crumbly Polaroids, and I was an engineer besides, and had been having wrong dreams even before the wreck.

  I took out the north wall of the warehouse, had it rebuilt eight feet, two and one half inches in, and I had the roof removed, had what I said was going to be a loading bay cut out up near the top of the east wall, and I cut out some handles for giant hands, decorated them with a cut-out saw while I hung from the bucket of a rented truck.

  And then I swept the floor, unrolled a sleeping bag, and waited. And waited.

  It was the cement pad, I decided. It had to be. At some point it had heaved, it had buckled, throwing the secret geometry off just enough.

  I leveled it, un-leveled it, re-leveled it, used the last of my savings for one last day of work from the crew, then finally—it was so obvious—had them pour some fresh, like wide steps at either end, except those two steps almost met in the middle. Flaps, I’d forgotten the flaps we’d restapled, just slightly off, making an unevenly-sided butter in the middle, like a channel that might run off an altar, for blood. It was what had originally pulled the north side of our box in that necessary amount—which I’d already done to my warehouse, in spite of the warnings about instability and zoning. To appease the contractor, I’d let him install a guide wire on the backside of that leaning wall, like a buttress, except pulling instead of pushing. He’d left the nut in the cable, too, so that, if anything settled, I could pull back on the wall.

  And then he was gone, and his crew was gone, and it was just me and the box, all around me now.

  The heat rising from the concrete kept me warm in my sleeping bag. I thought again of my wife’s last moments. Of my daughter’s next soccer game. Of a baby horse, trying to stand on legs that had had to be broken, to fit into a refrigerator.

  Instead of sleeping, I stared straight up, through the roof that wasn’t there, and imagined I could see a giant, silent spider with its legs out. It was drifting down through the galaxy like I wanted, like I needed, like this world deserved, for what it had done to me.

  Or, a hundred of them were drifting down, a thousand of them, crawling from planet to planet to get here.

  Either way.

  The box was smart, though.

  It always had been.

  One street over, just past the old park with the rocket ship pointing into space, is the cemetery. The graveyard.

  And the thing about that box was, we never had a lid for it.

  I’m the one who started all this, yeah. But it’s not my fault. We never should have moved to this town. My dad should have gone to work more. And who buries dead animals in refrigerators? And why isn’t the breakdown lane on the interstate wide enough for somebody to actually park there if they need to, when their husband’s just called them on their new phone?

  At least that graveyard by the park wasn’t the one they were resting in.

  Not that it matters, now that death’s become an infection.

  To be continued.

  But I guess that’s a lie.

  After picking her up, too, saving her from the bus, there’s the kids at three-thirty and three forty-five. Nolan from his school, Samuel from the corner just down from the junior high; Samuel insists it’s faster like that, and that he doesn’t care if it’s snowing, or whatever.

  Shane remembers being thirteen, yeah. All too well.

  The corner’s fine, even on a day like today, where if you let the delay on the wipers space out too far, a crust of ice will form on the windshield, and, bam, like that, twenty dollars for new blades.

  Behind him in the parking lot are the mounds of dirty snow, months of it already. On Saturdays, when Nolan’s here with him to pick Mommy up from work, Shane always pretends to have just seen a miniature door kind of embedded in one of those big snow piles, or a window, and—is that a chimney? Is somebody living there?

  Each time he circles slow around the mounds, trying to stay ahead of the security Jeep, Nolan’s head will track those igloos, his mouth held in that doubting, pre-smile mode. Because what if, right?

  Shane doesn’t remember exactly what it was like to be eight, no. But he knows what he would have liked it to have been like.

  He plans, one day, to come out here, fix some mock window—just a pipe, even, up top—into the snow, watch Nolan’s chest swell with magic, but it’s always cold, wet, impractical.

  Like the man coming into focus by the empty fountain.

  Shane waits for the wipers to sweep the snow dust away again before leaning forward from his magazine.

  Yep.

  Guy’s standing there in short sleeves, the cuffs of his jeans rolled and hanging loose, cigarette dangling from his lip like this is an audition for a fifties musical.

  Except the bowler hat, Shane supposes.

  Is this the new breed Molly’s been calling “hipster,” maybe? And, aside from being famously poor tippers, are hipsters impervious to the elements as well?

  Shane smiles to himself, goes back to the article.

  It’s something about current trends in education. He flips through to the end—four pages—gauges that against the time left: thirteen minutes. Three pages every thirty seconds, then, with time to keep an eye out for Security.

  Golden.

  It’s a word that hipster should know, and use.

  Shane looks up as if to tell him that across all this distance, through all the glass and steel and unfamiliarity, and sees him instead in the rearview mirror. The back seat.

  “Hey—!” he blurts and pushes on the brake for some reason, cringing up against the wheel in a way he’s already ashamed of.

  The hipster isn’t hip anymore, either.

  Instead of a t-shirt and jeans, it’s now a shabby three-piece suit with an antique wool overcoat, like one of Shane’s professors used to wear. The only thing the same as be
fore is the snugged-down bowler, the snow on it not even melting yet. And the eyes. They penetrate, don’t look away. Are amused somehow, at how Shane’s swaying his back in, preparing himself for the gun, the knife, even just the hand, reaching all the way to him.

  “If you have a minute,” the non-hipster says, making a production—elbows, three layers of sleeve—of opening the leather briefcase now on his lap.

  “What are you—you can’t just—” Shane tries, his heart beating again now, and the non-hipster waits this out, his hands still holding the briefcase open.

  Is he wearing eyeliner too?

  “You can’t—” Shane says again, still stuck on that.

  “It’s about your, your…” the man begins, shuffling through papers in the briefcase “…Nolan, is that his name?”

  Shane fixes his eyes into the rearview mirror against this man.

  Is this how it starts? Ransom situations? And what kind of competent kidnapper would target him, Shane?

  But never mind all that right now.

  “What about him?” Shane says, the world narrowed down to just the two of them now.

  If need be, he can drop the Impala into gear, bound ahead twenty yards in one surge, through the glass doors of that store that keeps changing names every season.

  It’ll accomplish something, surely.

  “I’m sorry to tell you this,” the man says, and hands a stiff brown paper over the top of the briefcase to Shane.

  No, not paper at all, but—film? Like an x-ray?

  It makes a noise like small, fake thunder when Shane tries to flap it straight enough to read.

  It is medical film.

  Only, this isn’t—the skull’s shaped all wrong. Not like Shane’s seen before. He angles the film to the side, turns it all the way over, and finally sees it: the skull’s not the same because the shot was taken from above, some angle like that. Looking down. The shadow of a backpack zipper floating at the bottom of the sheet.

  It’s not quite an x-ray, though. More about soft tissue.

  The brain.

  “I don’t know how you got in here,” Shane says into the rearview mirror.

  The man nods, acknowledging that difficulty but not bothering to address it, and then cocks his left arm up, for his watch.