Psychos

by Neil Gaiman

  No matter what type of animal it is, I know that I will have to clean and carve the bones afterward and make them into forks and knives and toothpicks.

  I try not to look at Shari, but I notice that her crying has not stopped or slowed even a little bit and that worries me.

  Father comes in with our meal, carrying it on the single large plate that we share in order not to waste water, and it is some kind of casserole. He is grinning, and I know that grin: he is proud of himself. I take a close look at the ingredients of the casserole, at the meat. The piece I poke with my fork is strangely white and rubbery. I turn it over and see on its underside a darkened piece of skin.

  Slimy, lizard skin.

  I throw down my fork and glare at him and Shari is crying even harder.

  “You killed one of The Pets!” I scream.

  He nods enthusiastically. “In the future, it may be possible for us to be entirely self-sufficient. We may never have to go outside the family for a source of food. We can create our own meat, nurturing it with our own waste. We’ll be the prototype of the family of the future.” He grins, gesturing toward the casserole. “Try it. It’s good.” He picks up a fork, spears a chunk of meat, and puts it in his mouth, chewing, swallowing, smiling. “Tasty and nutritious.”

  I stare at the food and I realize that it has come from my body and will be going back into my body and will come out of my body again, and I suddenly feel sick. I start to gag, and I run out of the room.

  “The yellow container!” Father calls. “Yellow is for vomit!”

  I can hear Shari crying louder, the legs of her chair making a clacking noise as she rocks back and forth and tries to get away.

  As I throw up into the yellow bucket, I wonder if our dinner is one of The Pets that I had named.

  Father is rougher now. He seems crueler than before, and I wonder if it is because I disobeyed him.

  I would run away if it wasn’t for Shari.

  In school we are learning about taking responsibility for our own actions and how we should clean up our own messes without Mommy or Daddy telling us to do so.

  It is hard for me not to laugh.

  Father says that I have caused him a lot of pain and emotional distress, and he beats me as he prepares to mount me from behind. My pants and panties are down and I am bent over the couch as he pulls out chunks of my hair and slaps my back and buttocks with the hard side of his hand. He is making Shari watch and she starts to cry as he shoves it in and begins thrusting.

  I scream for him to stop it, that it hurts, not even pretending to enjoy it this time, but that seems to satisfy him and I know that he thinks he is recycling his negative emotions by imparting them to me.

  When he is finished, he hits my face until I am bloody and then leaves the room.

  Shari approaches me after he is gone. She stares at me with wide eyes and white face, frightened by what she has seen, and I try to smile at her but it hurts too much.

  “Father hurted you,” she says. She frowns, thinking for a moment, and she hunkers down next to me. “Is he a vampire?” she whispers.

  “Yes,” I say. “He’s a vampire.” I don’t know why I’m saying this, I don’t know what thought process made Shari even think of it, but it sounds good to me.

  Her eyes get even bigger. “Then we better kill him,” she says.

  Kill him.

  I smile at her and I force myself to sit up. “Yes,” I say, nodding at her, wiping the blood from my nose and mouth. “We better kill him.”

  I make a stake from a recycled piece of broken broom handle that I find in the tool cupboard next to the washbucket. Father has been saving that piece of broom handle for some time now, knowing that it has an untapped usage but not knowing what that usage is.

  I have found a use for it, and I feel good as I stand next to The Pets’ habitat and sharpen the end of the stick.

  We kill him while he is sleeping. Shari asks why he sleeps at night if he is a vampire, but I tell her that he is doing it to fool us and she believes me.

  Because I am stronger, I hold the pillow over his face while Shari drives the stake through his heart. There is more blood than I expected. A lot more. It spurts everywhere as he screams and his arms and legs thrash wildly around. Both Shari and I are covered with it, but we’ve both seen blood before, and I think to myself that it’s not as bad as seeing my own.

  I continue holding the pillow until he is still, until he has stopped moving, until the blood has stopped pumping.

  He is smaller in death, and he suddenly looks harmless to me. I remember all of the good things he’s done and all of the fun we’ve had together and I think maybe we made a mistake.

  Shari blinks slowly, staring at the stake. “He really was a vampire, wasn’t he?” I nod.

  “What we do now?”

  I tell her to take our clothes and the sheets and the pillowcases and wash them in the plant water. We strip and roll up the linens. Naked, I drag Father’s body into the processing portion of the garage.

  I place the biodegradable bags next to the butcher block, and as I take the knife from the drawer, I plan out where and what I’m going to cut, what I’m going to do with his skin, his blood, his hair. I try to think of the best way to utilize his bones.

  Old habits die hard.

  The Shallow End of the Pool

  BY ADAM-TROY CASTRO

  It’s always tough when families split up. Tough on the parents. Even tougher on the kids. And some reunions are best avoided at all costs. They’re like ticking time bombs that only explode upon contact.

  But I suspect that few are so thoroughly designed for mutually assured destruction as the thermonuclear family gathering depicted in Adam-Troy Castro’s “The Shallow End of the Pool.” Taking domestic insanity to a whole ‘nother level of intimate literary conflagration.

  Originally published as a stand-alone by intrepid indie publisher Creeping Hemlock Press back in 2008—in a limited edition numbering only 350 signed copies—it’s an honor and a privilege to give this masterpiece wider mainstream exposure, and the centerpiece position in this already crazed collection.

  I don’t know which one of us woke up first. I do know that when the light changed, illuminating a sky that the wire above us sectioned into little diamonds, I was curled like a wounded ball by the concrete steps, my skull pounding from the beating I’d taken, my arms numb from lack of circulation and my jaw aching like a dead thing attached to my skull with six-inch nails.

  You would have expected us to have collapsed in opposite corners, in the traditional manner of the gladiators we were, but when I opened my eyes I saw that we’d slept only a few feet apart. His eyes were already open, and though it was hard to tell, he seemed to be smiling.

  My Mom the Bitch lived in a desert fortress.

  At least that’s what my father had always told me, sometimes whispering the words, sometimes slurring them, sometimes growing so tired with the same old stories that he spoke in a monotone, making the words sound like a prayer from a faith he could no longer believe.

  She’d nursed me when I was born. But things had already gotten bad between my parents by then, so bad that after less than another full year of trying, they split the kids between them. She took my twin brother Ethan, and Daddy took me, raising me to remember her as the Psycho Bitch she was.

  I didn’t lay eyes on her again until the summer of the year I turned sixteen. On that sweltering day in August my father and I flew to Vegas, rented a car, and drove four hours into the desert to a place where the local roads almost disappeared under the windswept sands. There we took an almost invisible turnoff, and navigated another forty minutes along an abandoned road to the skeleton of a sign that had, once upon a time, decades ago, advertised roadside cabins.

  The resort had never been prosperous. It was just a place for travelers on a budget to rest their heads for the night. Now, it was a wreck, hidden behind a natural outcropping of stacked boulders that God had arranged to look like pra
ying hands. Once, the rocks had protected the guests from road noise. These days the barrier hid the blackened skeleton of the main office, the three cabins still standing out of the original eight, a swimming pool that hadn’t seen water in years, and the mobile home where the Bitch lived with Ethan. I don’t know if the cabins were still officially owned by anybody, nor do I have any idea how the Bitch had ever managed to find such an isolated place to live.

  We pulled up in a cloud of dust to find the Bitch on the mobile home steps, smoking a cigarette, dressed in faded jeans with torn knees, and a sleeveless white t-shirt. She’d aged since the last photograph I’d seen, which dated back to some months after my birth. She’d been young and pretty in that one. But her skin had leathered and her hair, once a shiny brown, had gone gray and stringy, with a long white lock that crossed her face in the shape of a question mark. When she grimaced at our arrival, she revealed a front tooth missing among others yellowed from tobacco and time.

  Leaving the rental’s A/C was a shock. The outside temperature had been edging into the high nineties in Vegas, but here it was more like a hundred, in air that seemed more dust than oxygen.

  Daddy said, “Hug your mother.”

  I crossed the seventeen steps between myself and the stranger on the mobile home steps. She put her arms around me and called me honey, even as her fingers probed my back, testing the bunched muscles there for any signs of flab. “My God, Jen. I remember when you were just a baby.”

  I cut the hug short. “I’m not a baby any more, Mom.” “No. You’re not.” She squeezed my upper arm, testing its solidity with strength I would not have expected from her. “She’s an Amazon, Joe. Better than her pictures.”

  And that was just hateful mockery, because I knew what an Amazon was, and what one wasn’t. An Amazon is tall: I was still three inches shorter than Daddy. An Amazon hacks off her right breast: I still had both of mine, and I daily cursed the hormones that had built them into a pair of fleshy curves softer by far than my bulging arms, my corded shoulders, and my granite abs. I was strong, and I was compact. I’d used diet and exercise to reduce those unwanted tits to the smallest size the genetic roll of the dice would allow, but I was still only a girl, the Amazon status we’d strived for a goal that would forever remain beyond my reach.

  Daddy must have been thinking the same thing. “Where’s the boy?”

  The Bitch raised the cigarette to her lips and took a drag so deep the paper sizzled. “Inside.”

  “Call him out.”

  The Bitch took another long, slow drag of her cigarette, just to demonstrate that she wouldn’t be hurried by the likes of us. “Ethan! Your father’s here!”

  Ethan emerged from the mobile home, screen door slamming.

  In all my life I’d seen less than thirty photographs of my brother. They were what Daddy gave me instead of birthday or Christmas presents. As per the agreement that had governed the relationship between parents since the day of their dissolution, the two of them provided each other with such updates twice a year, just to keep each side apprised of just how the other was developing. Our basement dojo has a wall, tracking Ethan’s metamorphosis from the chubby-cheeked toddler he was when last we saw each other, to the thick-jawed, iron-necked bruiser he was now. Watching that chest fill out, those arms swell, those muscles layer upon muscles, and those eyes grow dark as coals, in what amounted to time-lapse photography of a monster sprouting from a seed, had spurred me on more than any number of Daddy’s lectures or rewards or punishments. Nothing communicated the urgency of hard training more than those pictures. Nothing made my own situation look more and more hopeless, for while Ethan and I were twins, the nasty combination of gender and genetics had provided him with a body much more hospitable to muscular development than mine. His last measurements, sent with glee six months ago, had already declared him a foot taller and some heavy pounds heavier than myself, with less than one percent body fat.

  He was even bigger now. The last six months had provided him with another growth spurt. He was stripped to the shorts, by design I think, his hairless pectorals gleaming with the sheen left by his latest workout. His face, tanned to near blackness by the brutal desert sun, was so dark that the unpleasant white glow of his teeth stood out like a searchlight at the bottom of a deep well. His greasy shoulder-length black hair completed any resemblance he might have had to Tarzan. Next to him, the Bitch was a wisp in danger of being blown away by the next strong wind. He dwarfed her, and dwarfed me.

  If my father had raised an Amazon (a label I rejected), then the Bitch, with her exacting cruelty, had raised a Greek God.

  There were flaws. The enlarged jaw and forehead testified to the hormonal imbalance inflicted by steroid abuse. I had a touch of that myself, and had endured taunts about my face in most of the schools I’d briefly attended. Like mine, his chest was lined with hairline scars from training accidents and, I think, punishments. Unlike me, he was so very muscle-bound that his flexibility had suffered. He moved with the clumsy deliberation of a stop-motion dinosaur in a fifties monster flick. I moved better than that. And, like The Bitch, he couldn’t really smile, at least not at us: the closest he could manage was an uneasy grimace.

  “Hello,” I said.

  His voice was thick, his consonants gutteral. “Hello.”

  Once upon a time, we had drifted together in the same womb, knowing nothing of the venom being passed between those who had brought us into this life.

  The Bitch said, “Hug your father.”

  My behemoth of a brother turned the head on his massive tree-trunk neck, and narrowed his eyes as he took in the figure of the man whose seed had provided half of him. Hatred burned in those eyes. He took two steps and enveloped Daddy in an embrace so tight that I half-expected to hear the crunch of shattering vertebrae. Unlike the Bitch, who had made a big show of hugging me back, Daddy just let his arms hang motionless at his sides. It was a brief hug. After a second or two my brother stepped back, his social obligations fulfilled.

  Daddy said nothing.

  The Bitch’s eyes glittered. “Aren’t you going to say I’ve done well?” “I don’t have to say it. I can see it.” “Then aren’t you going to say I should be proud?” “I wouldn’t give you the satisfaction.” “Bastard.” Her eyes turned to me: “I’m sure the two of you have a lot to talk about, after all these years. You can spend some time together this afternoon, if you’d like. Your father and I will need the rest of the day to finish work on the pool.”

  Daddy could not have been happy about this development, as private time between my brother and I had never been part of the family agenda. But the state of war between my parents had not gotten to where it was by either showing fear in the face of a challenge. “I have no problem with that. She’ll need a few minutes to get ready, but after that, they can have the rest of the day if they want.”

  I coughed. “No.”

  Her head swiveled. “What?” “This is just stupid. What are we fucking supposed to do, become friends now? That’s just psychological warfare. I want to get this bullshit over with.”

  Ethan’s eyes glittered, but not with the anger I might have expected. “You sure? There’s plenty of time for that.”

  Daddy said, “I suppose we could use your help setting up.”

  I said, “There’s that, too.”

  My mother and father let out a shared sigh. “I’m sorry you feel that way,” said Ethan.

  Damned if our parents didn’t look a little regretful, too. “All right,” Daddy said. “Give us about half an hour to get settled and take stock, and we’ll meet on the patio.”

  “You can use Cabin Three,” the Bitch said.

  I backed away from her and Ethan, staying between them and my father until I could get behind him and concentrate on retrieving our trunk from the back seat.

  Ethan and The Bitch just stayed by the mobile home steps, watching us. Measuring me.

  Cabin Three turned out to be surprisingly well-preserved, given that s
o many of the others had either burned down or collapsed. I’d expected cobwebs, scorpions, and an inch and a half of dust. We got a freshly swept wooden floor with a pair of bare box-spring mattresses with fitted white sheets. There was no air conditioning, which meant that the temperature was stifling, but the walls seemed solid enough, and the fresh screening on all the windows promised some protection from the local flies. There was no toilet, but there was a note to the effect that Ethan had dug a fresh outhouse for us, a short walk into the desert. For a sink we had a porcelain basin and a gallon jug of warm bottled water.

  Daddy and I had lived in worse during my endurance training in the Sierra Nevadas, one long summer about three years earlier. That place had been so rickety that my last task, on the last day, had been to demolish it with my bare hands. By the time I was halfway done my knuckles bled and my fingers were studded with splinters. He had called me his best girl.

  Without a washroom, settling in amounted to little more than dumping the bags on the unmade beds, so I took care of that, changed into a fresh white t-shirt bearing the name of a dojo I’d attended in Seattle, and then went around back to inspect the empty swimming pool. A leftover from the roadside cabin days, it and the cracked, weed-ridden patio surrounding it were the only paved things in the Bitch’s entire homestead. It was kidney-shaped, three feet deep at the kiddie steps and thirteen feet below the rusted brackets that had once anchored the diving board. The bottom was pitted and streaked with years of windswept sand; there was also the corpse of a little black bird in the deep end, buzzing with flies. The air shimmered. Without any water to cut the sunlight, the walls had nothing to do but reflect the glare at one another, turning the entire bowl into a natural reservoir for heat.

  Lifeguard chairs sat on both the concave and convex sides of the pool. They looked new, or at least recently wiped clean. So did the long and narrow tarpaulin, a few yards into the desert, there to keep the sun off a cylindrical shape three feet high and thirty feet across.