She notices that her eyebrows are becoming bushy, the blonde hairs lifting, unfurling like delicate fronds.
Her father’s eyebrows were like this, even more so. His were almost like antennae, twitching with sensitivity and emotion.
Lisa turns her back to the mirror, looks at the small, conical nubs of flesh arising from her shoulder blades. Two, just like in front, though smaller. She had pointed these out once before, when she had first noticed them, but her mother dismissed them.
Still, Lisa checks them daily, to see if they are… growing.
Satisfied that they are, she turns, brushes her teeth, wraps herself in a towel and walks to her bedroom to finish getting dressed.
* * *
She never sees, never hears the black man leave her mother’s room, her mother’s house that day. She never sees the black man again, and her mother says nothing more of him, offers no explanation.
* * *
A few weeks later she is awakened in the night by something painful that tears through her insides.
Rolling in the bed, she clasps her hands low over her stomach and moans in distress. It is a rippling wave of cramps like nothing she has experienced before.
She remembers dinner, something like chicken and dumplings except it was not chicken, and she clutches her spasming stomach even tighter.
Throwing the covers off, she staggers to her feet. Her gut feels tight and hard, but her insides feel disturbingly liquid, roiling like a deeply distressed inner sea. She stands there for a moment, her hands clutching the covers, her fingers splayed on the mattress for support.
Plipplipplipplip.
At her feet, just within the circle of light cast by the lamp, are what she at first thinks are bright copper pennies falling onto the carpet.
One strikes her bare foot, spatters.
Lisa bites her lip, walks quietly down the hallway to the bathroom, leaving a trail of pennies behind her, as if in a fairy tale where she would need them to find her way back.
* * *
“Well, it came last night,” Lisa says, eying the glass of orange juice set before her, trying to see if anything is floating in it… anything she would need to know about. “Just be thankful you missed it.”
Her mother is turned to the stove, stirring something.
“What’s that, dear?”
“You know… what we talked about? The blood. Well, it came last night.” Lisa takes a tentative sip of the juice, but it is smooth and free of foreign objects.
Her mother stops stirring, doesn’t turn.
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
Lisa hears a deep, quivering sigh issue from her.
“Why didn’t you come get me?”
“I did what you showed me… with the box under the sink.”
“Any problems?”
“Nope.
Lisa takes another sip of the juice, thinking she might want to slow down, save it for whatever her mother is cooking.
“Well, that’s great,” her mother breathes, turning to Lisa and patting her head. “This calls for a celebration.”
“It does?”
Her mother smiles her disturbing smile at Lisa. “Absolutely. I’ll cook you something special for breakfast. What would you like?”
Lisa looks doubtful. “It’s just my period.”
“No, it’s finally happened, don’t you see? It’s what your body was made for, what you were made for.”
“Well, in that case, how about pancakes?”
Her mother’s smile, if at all possible, widens.
“How about chocolate chip pancakes?”
Lisa nods, eying her mostly filled glass of juice.
She knows that, despite her mother’s strange cheerfulness, there won’t be chocolate chips in the pancakes.
She’s glad she saved the rest of the juice.
* * *
That night, she is very aware of having the thing jammed up inside her. She finds it hard to believe that something so soft and small can cause such discomfort.
She tells her mother that it’s like a fairy tale, that tale of the princess and the pea. Her mother tells her that she won’t notice it for long.
But she does, here in her bed.
Thinking of it also makes her think of the blood again, and the veins, the endless web of veins inside her.
She hears noises again this night, the shuffling of feet, grunts and growls, liquid mewlings.
Lisa wonders if the black man has returned to her mother’s room.
She falls asleep, carried away by the cold dream of her father at the center of a giant web. But this is no spider web. The web he is trapped in is composed of veins, great throbbing veins.
His extravagant bushy eyebrows twitch and twitter with each pulse of the veins, gather together in concern when he sees her dream self.
As sleep encloses her in the darkness she has come to fear, she sees his mouth moving, speaking, but they are words the English language cannot penetrate. They rise toward her with great momentum, then lose that momentum, fall back to enmire themselves in the web next to him, useless, unheeded.
As dead, as silent as her father.
* * *
Her mother is not awake when Lisa rises, muggy and disoriented from her night of dreams. Lisa dresses, brushes her teeth, goes downstairs.
The kitchen is dark and untouched. There is nothing cooking on the stove, no note on the table. The room has an eerie, spectral quality to it, as if she is still upstairs and only dreaming of being in the kitchen.
She takes an orange, an apple and a banana from the fruit basket on the table, slips these into her book bag and leaves for school.
At the doorway, Lisa pauses, considers calling for her mother.
For some reason, some reason that slides from her grasp as slickly as an eel, she doesn’t.
She’s not afraid that her mother will answer her, will come downstairs.
She’s afraid that she won’t.
* * *
After school, the house is dark and silent.
She throws the door open onto an atmosphere that is thick and anticipatory, as if the house has contracted itself, tightened its muscles awaiting… something.
Someone.
It’s still early spring, and dusk has already settled on the shoulders of the horizon. The kitchen is various shades of grey when she enters, sees the table set, the note atop her plate.
It’s her mother’s handwriting, she knows, but only barely. Its slanted, jagged letters are strung together as if under duress.
Eat your dinner. All of it.
Lisa sets the note on the counter and sees a plate wrapped in clear cellophane. She unseals the plate, finds two of her mother’s sandwiches; the smell of the honey is thick and cloying.
Glancing at the ceiling to where her mother’s room is, she knits her eyebrows together in confusion. She carries the plate to the table, opens the refrigerator.
She takes out a pitcher with a Post-It note stuck to it, as if in Wonderland.
Drink this. All of it.
Lisa shakes her head, brings the pitcher to the table. The pale celery color of the liquid within lets her know it is her mother’s special tea.
Appreciating the fact that she doesn’t have to swallow great wads of this meal, Lisa starts to eat. Chewing a mouthful of the sandwich, she pours herself a glass of tea, fragrant as a flower garden. It washes away the sticky honey from her mouth, and it is all sweet, sweet.
While she finishes the first sandwich, she hears sounds from upstairs, as if two pieces of fabric are being drawn over each other…or ripped apart. A skittering rustle across the upstairs floor sends a deep and powerful tremor of fear through her. A chorus of small, impatient, voices are all talking at the same time… muttering, whispering.
Her heart begins to beat faster, though she doesn’t know why.
The bumps sprouting from her shoulder blades itch maddeningly, and she rubs them against the back of the chair
.
Lisa reaches for the second sandwich, notices that her arms are covered with powder, as thick as if she had applied makeup to them. It billows from them with every movement, sends a cloud of multi-colored dust into the air, snowing onto the table.
She might have worried at all this––wants to worry at all this, but there is a deep lethargy growing inside her, a calming fog that rolls through her veins, carrying somnolence to every cell.
She goes on eating, filling her stomach with the second sandwich and glass after glass of the cold, bracingly sweet tea.
When she is done, she rests a hand on her distended belly and burps. It tastes of honey, and sweet, green growing things.
Lisa pushes herself from the table, stands.
Upstairs, there is a susurration that seems to imply many, many things moving; many, many feet.
“Lisa, dear,” comes her mother’s voice from within that sound. “We need you.”
Though her mother’s voice sounds cracked and distorted, as if playing from an old-fashioned record album, Lisa obeys.
“Coming, mother.”
* * *
The stairwell is dark, but a light from the upstairs hallway bleeds onto the landing, and it calls to Lisa, beckoning her on as much as her mother’s voice.
Lisa stumbles up the steps. Each lifting of her foot is laborious and strained, like moving through molasses.
It seems to take minutes to climb the stairs, step after plodding step, but she is at the top now, staring down the hallway.
The light comes from a sconce near the door that is always locked.
She steps toward it, and that light flickers, dies.
It is replaced by a sharp knife of light that slices across the hall floor.
The door is open.
Lisa stops short, places her hand on the wall for support.
There is a vibration, a tickle that runs through the floorboards, the walls.
There is a sound, a rustle like dry leaves in the fall trying to speak.
There is a smell, deeply biological and rank, like venom and nausea.
She places her hand on the open door, pushes…
Inside, it is a nightmare, and it requires Lisa’s mind several moments to understand it.
At the far end of the room, wedged into the upper corner, is a bestial shape, molded from darkness. Until it moves, Lisa is unsure what it is.
When it does move, Lisa’s heart vibrates in her chest like a trapped animal, shaking with a fear so deep and integral to what she is that she nearly swoons.
Legs. It is the legs of the thing moving that does it.
Legs. Eight of them, long, tapering to hairy points.
Legs. They were tucked into the thing’s body, but now they unfold, seem to spread across the entire room.
“Lisa,” says a high-pitched, reedy voice from some part of the thing.
“Mother,” she breathes in response, and it feels like a breath that has been trapped inside her for years, waiting to find a way out.
Lisa opens her mouth to speak again, when she feels a tickle across her foot.
She pulls her eyes away from the thing that is her mother. Her eyes roll in their sockets like orbiting planets, until they are pointed down.
A host of small bodies is racing across her feet, up her legs.
Small, furry, agile.
Like their mother.
She can hear the creaking of their tiny voices.
Lisa steps back, breathing hard, heart pumping.
She turns to the door, but there is no light there any longer. The only light is here in the room, and she feels compelled by it.
“Hush, child,” her mother says, unfolding herself from the corner of the ceiling and stepping down, each leg stepping gently, careful not to crush the eggs, enshrouded in a caul of webbing, the hatchlings that teem across the floor. There are so many, so very many that the floor looks like a carpet whose pattern is constantly shifting.
“No,” Lisa says, and feels a tremendous pain in her back that nearly brings her to her knees. She holds the doorframe, shudders as she hears the material of her shirt rend.
“It is who you are, dear. Who you were made to be.”
“No,” says Lisa, feeling something wet and sticky unfold from her back, sees a puff of rainbow powder in the air.
“It is the way of things. Your father gave his life for yours,” her mother says, stepping closer, her rank odor now a physical presence in the room. “That you might live to give yours.”
More of the spiderlets climb her legs, step through her hair, tangling it. Some dangle from her arms, some dangle from her… wings?
She feels the hair of their small bodies, stiff as bristles, poking at her naked belly, her neck. She can feel the quivering of their bloated abdomens, black with a curiously familiar yellow pattern.
Lisa wants to step into the darkened hallway, wants to flee down the darkened stairs, but there is something about the dark, some terrible thing about the dark that keeps her there, despite her terror.
There is something about the light in the room, something about the crazy dark prisms of her mother’s clustered eyes that keeps her there, despite her terror.
Her mother leans in a bit more, and she smells of spoiled meat, a sharp, acrid odor that can only be poison.
“You are your father’s daughter,” she whispers, lifts one long, impossibly thin leg to stroke Lisa’s cold, trembling cheek. “And your father knew how important it is to feed his children.”
* * *
Lisa rubs absently at the iridescent skin of her arm, which powders at her touch.
Dust with the rainbow sheen of oil on water drifts over the spatters of her blood, glitters like tiny fish scales in the null-light of the nursery.
Her brothers and sisters take it in, take it away…
THE SCENT
He steps outside, pauses on his front stoop.
William is not an old man, not by today’s standards, but he is a hat man. He is not bald or even balding, but he is a man who believes in hats. He believes in the fashion of hats, the safety of hats. What a hat says about its wearer.
In an age when men no longer wear hats, William wears hats.
And not just any hats. Not baseball hats or any of their varieties, to be sure—’gimme hats’ with the names of insurance companies or local feed stores, caps emblazoned with the logos of college or professional teams or even caps with rap words on them, meant to be worn bill backwards.
A hat, to William, means a fedora with a crisp crease, perhaps a staid, squat bowler, or a conservative Homburg. Even a cool Panama or a rakish pork pie like those worn by Sinatra or Martin. On occasion, he’s even been known to step out in a Stetson.
Today, he wears a tawny suit of tweed topped by an expensive beaver felt fedora; a rare and expensive hat, it makes him feel stylish and gives him a jaunty, nostalgic air.
He fingers its brim as he stands there, azaleas in bloom on either side of his porch. The cherry and dogwood trees are in blossom, too, and their over-sculpted, fuzzy pink and white blossoms give them the look of poodles standing on their hind legs.
As he adjusts the angle of the fedora, he inhales deeply their mingled odors: the fruity, flowery scents, mingled with the musky, almost sexual smell of the Bradford pear trees lining the street, brazenly announcing their availability to every passing bird and bee.
William walks to work, as he does each day, rain or shine. It is why he bought the condo in this marginal neighborhood on the verge of downtown St. Louis. Gutted and rehabbed throughout, William’s townhouse is beautiful: all hardwood floors and pristine, white gallery walls, and stainless steel appliances.
Outside, though, the neighborhood is gutted. To either side of his condo are decaying tenements, collapsed warehouses and piles of bricks and debris that once, when whole, might have housed livery companies or taverns or rendering plants.
His neighborhood is marginal, yes, but he has had few troubles. With no car, he’s
not experienced any of the multiple thefts and break-ins many of his other gentrified neighbors have been subject to. His townhouse is fully outfitted with a state-of-the-art security system, which in the two years he’s lived there has only gone off twice, and one of those occurrences had been caused by him. His backyard patio-cum-garden, small though it might be, is enclosed by a solid brick wall 10 feet in height, topped by a “decorative” row of iron spikes.
On his walks to and from work, he has never been mugged or assaulted. He is, though, constantly approached for money by men and women who plead various needs, all jointly understood to be false. The mother who needs an operation. The bus ticket for some vital trip. Money for a meal or to bail a loved one out of jail. William gives money or not depending on his mood and the creativity of the story, bestowing it when he does as much as an award as charity.
Having set the tilt of his fedora to keep the sun from his eyes, he steps down onto the pristine sidewalk that bisects his small, merely ornamental front lawn and sets off. The crisp, level lines of this sidewalk give way quickly to cracked and shattered pavement. In some places, great swaths of it are picked away like scabs, revealing the shocking red of cobblestones beneath; the desiccated, jumbled flesh of an older time; the time, perhaps, of the livery and the rendering plant.
William steps gingerly over these scars, barely noticing them anymore. He crosses Tamm and then Pestalozzi Streets, skeletal buildings lining each side like pallbearers. The trees give way to stunted, sprawling bushes whose flowers are small and stingy. Their odors are sharp, spicy, unpleasant, though they cover, somewhat, the musty, mothball aromas that waft from the abandoned buildings along this stretch of his path.
Here, a structure that once housed a carriage company. Here, a tannery. Here—disturbingly, right next door—a butcher shop. All closed, all gone years ago. Their faded signs, ghostlike on the brick sides of their buildings, give tantalizing clues to what they offered. Igloo Ice and Cold Storage. Renner’s Valves and Boilers. The Eston Millinery Co. (William once peeked inside this building, through a hole in a boarded window. He saw nothing but dark emptiness. The intense, acrid smell of urine kept him from exploring further.)
Little Deaths Page 11
