Bedfellow

by Jeremy C. Shipp

  Inside her desk the girl keeps a partially crushed matchbox within an old Blue’s Clues pencil case. The front of the matchbox shows a wide blue eye on a dark blue background. Kennedy feels as if she’s seen an eye exactly like this before, possibly inside the room with the dead baby aliens and the big walnut that grew a human mouth. Standing with her back against her bedroom door, she thinks, No one knock no one knock no one knock. About a year ago, she dreamed she smoked a cigarette in a cartoonish-looking version of their living room while her mother screamed at her. Sometimes her mother yelled words, and sometimes she shrieked like Fred from Fred: The Movie. When Kennedy smoked the dream cigarette, a serpent of fire heated up her tongue and squirmed down her throat into her stomach.

  In the present, she lights a match and then quickly picks up the cigarette from off the floor. Her heart runs forward and slams against her chest, over and over, like a football player practicing against one of those foam blocking dummies. She holds the cigarette out in front of her, between two fingers. The flame kisses the paper. A moment passes before she changes her mind and blows out the match like a birthday candle. She even makes a small match-sized wish as the flame dies. The cigarette appears unlit, but she’s worried that there’s a smoldering spark lurking within the tunnel, waiting to burn her house down. Better safe than sorry, so she stubs out the cigarette on the stone Easter Island head on her desk and then inserts the contraband into a half-drunk bottle of flat Sunkist.

  “Sorry,” she says, to the Easter Island head. She checks the top of his head for burns, but he seems perfectly fine.

  At this point, Kennedy feels less like reading about witches and more like casting her own unearthly hexes. She doesn’t know the first thing about witchcraft, so she decides to trampoline instead. Before she can even reach the top of the stairs, Uncle Marvin calls her into his room and asks her for a favor. Apparently, he’s starting another one of his weird art projects.

  Lying flat on his back, with a bottle balanced on his stomach, Marvin says, “Seriously, only give me the ones you don’t care about. I can make do with whatever you don’t mind sacrificing to the craft gods.”

  “Okay,” Kennedy says. “What are you using them for?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Right when she turns away, he adds, “Oh, and there’s a visit to the Ice Scream Factory in this for you. Or 31 Flavors. Wherever you want.”

  Back in her bedroom, Kennedy drags army-green storage boxes from the darkest depths below her bed. For some cryptic reason, the insides of the boxes smell like old books, though there’s nothing here but old toys and a few penguin print T-shirts much too small for her to wear anymore. People in her elementary school used to call her Penguin, or Pengy, but those days are long gone.

  Slowly, Kennedy constructs a wall of dolls across her floor, using the extra doll clothes as a sort of mortar. The image reminds her of those catacombs from Paris, with all the tunnels made of skulls and bones. She read online that the reason they started the catacombs was because there were so many open graves and unearthed corpses, people wouldn’t stop complaining about the smell. Sometimes, a cemetery would burst under a heavy shower of rain, and rotting bodies would spew out onto people’s private property. Ultimately, Kennedy decides to re-form the wall into a more tranquil-looking mountain of figures.

  The trick to deciding which doll clothes should be kept and which should be sacrificed is to rub each outfit between two fingertips and wait. Her heart either whirls inside her, like a flurry of autumn leaves, or it doesn’t. Sometimes, she needs to imagine herself on the edge of a jagged cliff, tossing the chiffon maxi dress (or whatever she’s holding at the moment) into the grasping, claw-like waves below. The dress shrivels and sinks deeper and deeper, toward the deep-sea mermaids with ashen eyes and cadaverous faces. Does the thought make her want to cry or not?

  In truth, Kennedy doesn’t want to get rid of any of her doll clothes, in the same way that she doesn’t throw away her movie stubs or her old school notebooks. At the same time, she wants to make Uncle Marvin happy. He may not be a blood uncle, but he’s been a part of her life since she was five or six. Whether she’s performing the Totoro theme song on her saxophone, or reading a poem she wrote about wild dogs living in the ruins of Pompeii, Uncle Marvin’s always there to give her that stupid double thumbs-up. Kennedy’s dad used to give her that same double thumbs-up years ago, when she was very young. She’s not sure whether Uncle Marvin learned the move from her dad, or if it was the other way around.

  In the end, Kennedy dumps a hefty double handful of miniscule clothes and accessories onto Marvin’s bed. Somehow, she manages all this without a single tear, or even an echo of a tear.

  “Yeah, these will work,” Uncle Marvin says, lifting a monarch butterfly–style fairy gown with his pinky. “We’ll go to that ice cream place as soon as I’m feeling better. I’m still a regular Sicky Vicky, or Heavin’ Steven. Those are Garbage Pail Kids. Probably before your time.”

  Kennedy’s tempted to ask him again what he’s planning on doing with all the clothes, but he won’t tell her, she’s sure. Uncle Marvin likes surprises.

  Before she leaves, he gives her a double thumbs-up and says, “Don’t leave me hanging.” So she gives him a double thumbs-down back.

  “Agh, that hurts,” he says, with a hand over his heart.

  In her bedroom, as the girl returns her toys to the plastic storage boxes, she pictures a wall of doll heads crumbling apart. Ferret corpses gush from the cracks, dressed in straw bonnets and afternoon dresses. Maybe she’ll write a poem about a wall of dolls someday, but for now she pushes the image from her mind. With her palms, she brushes down the goose bumps on her arms.

  Instead of storing away the tiny stovepipe hat from her keep pile, she decides to place it on the Easter Island head. He deserves a little luxury, after the day he’s had. After she slides the storage boxes to the darkest depths of her room, she returns to the land of Sparkle Fantasticos. She types, alone in her room, searching once again for astrophysicists and Nigerian grandmothers and ventriloquist dummies brought to life by dark magicks. From the words of these strangers, she sees that the world is filled with beauty and with horrors, and she’s not quite sure which she likes hearing about more.

  Imani

  Using her husband’s hand pruners, Imani slices slowly through the peeling, brambly flesh of the rosebush. She squeezes the handle again and again, until the dull blade eats completely through the base. As soon as the bush collapses, hundreds of shriveled leaves jostle loose and flutter to the ground, like a swarm of insects all dying at once.

  Hendrick noticed the first dead bush months ago. He said gophers had likely eaten the roots. He said he would go to Home Depot the next day. His exact words were: The damned dirty rodents are as good as dead.

  Now Imani cuts her way through a second dead bush, and then a third. Only the last bush in the row remains alive. In her mind, she promises the plant that she’ll buy the gopher poison soon.

  Out loud, to the empty yard, she says, “I’ll gopher broke to keep you alive.” A crow or raven caws in the distance, but no one else seems to appreciate her pun.

  Imani puts on some shabby gardening gloves before stuffing the bushes into the green waste bin, but ultimately, the fabric doesn’t provide her much protection. She cringes when a particularly malicious thorn stabs her right where she cut herself the night before.

  Right after she accidentally broke her grinning peanut statue, Hendrick said, “I’m sorry.” But he didn’t seem sorry. Imani wonders if he remembers that he bought her the eyeless peanut when they were first engaged. They found him at the Hamburger Man Thrift Shop, which the two of them named after the giant fiberglass statue at the entrance that no one ever purchased. She remembers the hamburger-headed man held a spatula in one hand and a butcher knife in the other. Hendrick liked to tell her that one day she’d come home and find the thrift shop’s mascot on their front porch, staring at her with those sesame seed eyes. When the
y first laid eyes on the smiling peanut, Hendrick said they found Hamburger Man’s long-lost brother.

  The throbbing in her finger quells by the time she removes Hendrick’s gardening gloves. Her Band-Aid must have caught in the fabric, because she can see her cut, still closed and barely noticeable, despite the thorn’s best efforts. Unconsciously, she brings the small wound, which now tastes of lawn clippings and lavender, to her lips.

  On her way to the sliding glass door, she steps on what turns out to be a toy mouse with a handlebar mustache. She doesn’t have any pockets, so she carries the creature all the way upstairs, into her bedroom, and places him on her nightstand, where he flexes his eight-pack amidst a forest of amber candles. Ordinarily, Imani will spend a couple hours cleaning on a Saturday morning, and then move on to bigger and better things, like true crime podcasts or Lin-Manuel Miranda or hikes through a moderately haunted forest. Today, no matter how much she cleans, she can’t seem to satisfy herself. There’s a nervous, almost panicky energy in her arms and legs that won’t dissipate.

  As Imani’s folding laundry, Hendrick comes in carrying a toilet paper roll in one hand and his iPad in the other.

  “I was going to do that,” he says, motioning to the piles of laundry with the toilet paper.

  “Then why didn’t you?” Imani says, the words spilling out of her in a torrent that sounds angrier than she intended.

  “I didn’t because you woke up at four in the damn morning and beat me to it. What was I supposed to do? Wake up at three?”

  Imani sighs. “You know that’s not what I was suggesting. You could have done the laundry days ago. The hampers were overflowing.”

  “And that’s the worst thing in the world, right? Overflowing hampers, dust on a porcelain bird, a lampshade slightly askew.”

  Imani sets Tomas’s Fizzgig shirt on the bed and takes a deep, cinnamon-scented breath through her nose. “Can we quit while we’re ahead here? I’m sorry for snapping at you. I’m having a shit day.”

  “Fine with me.” With that, he storms toward the en suite, running into the cedar chest at the foot of the bed. He manages to catch himself before falling on his face.

  “Did you move the furniture?” he says.

  Imani can’t help laughing a little.

  “I’m serious,” he says. “The bed seems . . .”

  “Babe, what are you talking about?”

  “Nothing. Never mind.” He inches his way into the bathroom, turning his head left and right. He shuts the door, gently, as if he’s too frightened to make a sound. Imani feels the smile sink down her face.

  “Babe, are you okay in there?” she says.

  “Leave me be, woman,” he says, sounding more like his huffy self again. “I’m doing God’s work in here.”

  While folding laundry, Imani scrutinizes the bedroom for any aberrations. Eventually, she inserts her earbuds and continues the episode she started yesterday, about a man who killed only men with blond hair and buried them with their chest cavities full of fertilized chicken eggs.

  In a few minutes, she pauses the episode and places the mouse toy on a modest tower of folded laundry. The mouse rests on the slobbering mouth of Slimer.

  Setting the laundry on the floor, Imani uses the family knock on Tomas’s half-open door. For a moment, she remembers her own mother removing the screws from the door hinges. She remembers her mother grunting as she dragged Imani’s bedroom door away. This was a punishment, for some small sin she doesn’t remember anymore.

  “Special delivery,” Imani says, setting the clothes on Tomas’s bed.

  Tomas pauses his computer game and spins around in his chair. He’s not usually a kid who looks a person in the eyes, but right now he studies her face, a sharp-edged look of concern dominating his usually soft features.

  She holds out the mouse toy and says in her best Mickey Mouse impression, “You forgot me outside. I tried to take it in stride. Then I cried.”

  “Mom, that’s not how he talks.”

  “Okay, how does he talk, then?”

  In a hoarse, gremlin-like voice, Tomas says, “Hello.”

  Imani flies the mouse over to the boy’s desk and makes him crash-land next to a family of glow-in-the-dark zombies. The mouse still seems unafraid, even millimeters from a growing, undead bloodhound.

  For a time, Imani watches her son play his computer game. On the screen, a caped goat soars through an asteroid field populated with spinning hay bales and demonic carrots. Of course, the mother aims her attention less on the galactic battle and more on the way her son giggles and gasps as he plays, the way he hops out of his chair when the goat explodes in a supernova of guts and half-digested T-shirts.

  Eventually, the flying goat faces a titanic tin can wearing a pinstriped fedora and a wispy mustache. Tomas avoids a barrage of exploding peas and asparagus missiles. After a few seconds, though, the poor goat is devoured.

  “In Russia, can eats goat,” Imani says.

  The gigantic tin can takes a bite out of Earth, chuckling as he chews, and Tomas stares at the screen in silence.

  “You’ll get him,” Imani says. “If you get really stuck, you should ask Uncle Marvin. He’s good at games, isn’t he?”

  “Yeah,” Tomas says as the goat’s body parts surge to the beginning of the level and amalgamate into a hero once again. The goat vomits up a new cape made from a patchwork of fabric scraps.

  Returning to her bedroom, Imani finds her husband sitting cross-legged on the bed, watching some mobster movie on his iPad, folding laundry.

  He glances up at her and says, “I’m sorry you’re having a shitty day. Is there anything going on?”

  “No.” Part of her wants to tell him that she’s feeling overly, nebulously anxious, even by her standards. But if she does reveal this, he’ll only suggest that she go on a hike or take a lavender bath or eat some wild-caught salmon.

  “Why don’t we go to Antony’s tonight?” she says. “Marvin can watch the kids.”

  “Marvin’s recovering from surgery,” Hendrick says, folding one of her floral midi skirts in a way that defies all logic and reason. “He can hardly get out of bed. Anyway, we already went to a restaurant this week. What about our once-a-week rule? You wanted to put aside some extra money for Christmas.”

  “Yeah,” Imani says, quietly. “You’re right.”

  Of course, the truth is that Hendrick doesn’t want to go to Antony’s. If he did, he would suggest that she ask Trinity to come babysit. He would try to convince her that breaking the once-a-week rule isn’t the worst thing in the world. He would tell her that Christmas wouldn’t be ruined by one date night. But is all this true, or is she projecting her own fears onto him again?

  “Maybe we could watch some Netflix later,” Imani says.

  “Yeah,” her husband says, his eyes on a bullet-riddled mobster on his iPad. “Sure.”

  They continue folding, and Imani delivers a stack of flannel and denim to Kennedy. The girl graces her with a “Thanks, Mom” before returning her attention to her library book, slapping a flip-flop against her heel as she reads.

  “How is it?” Imani says.

  “Good, but not enough curses. I don’t think the woman’s even a witch at all.”

  “Are all the words spelled right, at least?”

  “Mom, no.”

  Next, Imani collects a few threadbare T-shirts and stretchy exercise pants from off her bed. She wonders if Marvin brought this surfing Worf shirt at random or as an intentional homage to the past. She didn’t know Marvin or Hendrick back in their college days, but she’s heard all the stories. She knows the two of them hosted Trek Meets in their dorm’s community room, where they watched The Next Generation and drank vodka and cranberry juice from Big Gulp cups. Their immeasurable Trekkiness is what initially brought the two of them together.

  “Special delivery,” she says, out of force of habit.

  “Oh, cool,” Marvin says, holding an oversized pencil between two fingers, a legal pad on his
lap. “My clothes were starting to smell a little like durian fruit.”

  On her way to the dresser, Imani’s legs buckle and the clothing slips from her hands. The blood in her face plummets elsewhere into her body. She takes a seat on the faux leather tub chair in the corner.

  “You okay?” Marvin says, repositioning his whole body so that he can face her.

  “Just a little dizzy,” Imani says. “I probably spent too much time in the sun, hacking at dead things.”

  “Wow, you sound like a regular zombie hunter.” He taps the bulbous pencil eraser against his forehead. “Oh, that reminds me. Do you have Dead Alive on Blu-ray? I didn’t finish looking through your collection earlier, so I’m not sure what you have Peter Jackson–wise.”

  “Sorry, I don’t remember ever seeing that.”

  “That’s a shame.” Marvin attempts, unsuccessfully, to spin the large pencil in his hand. “There’s this zombie baby named Selwyn who really steals the show. At one point, the main guy takes Selwyn to the park, and the baby gets launched into the sky using a teeter-totter. I read somewhere that Jackson finished the movie under budget, so he used the extra money to shoot that park scene. It’s a great scene.”

  “Sounds like it.”

  Throughout this conversation, her disequilibrium fades, only to be replaced with a piercing headache behind her eyes. She can feel her heartbeat pulsing in the veins of her neck, and also in the cut on her finger. With a pang in her stomach, she wonders if she’s getting ill, with a cold or flu or worse. But she can’t recall any other symptoms. She’s felt unusually sprightly the last few days, hasn’t she? No headaches before this one, no stomach problems, nothing to complain about at all.