Kia and Gio

by Daniel José Older

  “Listen to me, Kia. Go home.” My stomach plummeted. “Go now.”

  “N…”I started to say, but he shushed me with a look.

  “Don’t look back. Just go. I’ll be home soon.”

  I shook my head.

  “Kia.” No debate, no whining. This was not a game. And I had no choices. “Go.” He put me down and turned towards where the six men made their slow journey towards Jeremy’s house.

  The trees all around me crawled with pale roaches. I took a step backwards, but Gio didn’t even look to see if I’d gone. He launched down the hill, quiet as a ninja. I saw the light glint over his muscley arm, saw a splotch against it, another roach, just before he swiped it off. I cringed. My whole body wanted to vanish, burst out of the trees and get as far away as I could. But my heart wouldn’t let me turn away from my cousin. I stood perfectly still, caught between the two impossible choices, and anyway: useless.

  Gio came up behind the first man at a sliding crouch. He anchored one leg in the dirt and flew up into the air, flashing the other leg out in a stunning roundhouse kick. His foot found its mark; the man collapsed with an eerie silence. I think Gio was as stunned as I was: for a solid three seconds he just stood there gaping at the man sprawled on the ground. The others didn’t seem to notice, or, if they did, they didn’t care; the slow march toward the house continued.

  I took a few steps down the hill. I couldn’t watch, couldn’t stop watching. Gio stepped over the one he’d taken out, but a hand came up from the ground and wrapped around his leg, dropping him to one knee. The man rose up fast, faster than he should’ve been able to after taking a hit like that. Two of the other men stopped and turned slowly towards the fray. Gio stabilized himself in a sturdy horse-riding stance, so he was ready when the blow came. It was clumsy and slow, like the man couldn’t quite get his limbs to do what he wanted them to, but I could tell from the way Gio leaned to the side that there was an unnatural force to it. Gio sidestepped and let the weight of the guy’s hit do the work, just like he’d been taught. As the man stumbled forward, Gio brought his elbow down on the back of his head.

  The two other men moved in from either side. Gio’s hoarse yell cut through the quiet suburban night: “Jeremy! Run!” Even the attackers seemed startled. Jeremy appeared at the window and everyone looked up at him. Gio took advantage of the confusion, kicking in the kneecaps of one man and then spin-smashing the other, another roundhouse. The first was done—I saw him crumple, again with that impossible silence, but the second guy recovered quick and barreled into Gio.

  The back door of the house swung open and Jeremy gaped out. “What’s going on? Giovanni?” It was like an electric shock went through the three men not busy with Gio. They lurched forward, crowding around Jeremy, blocking the door from closing.

  “Get inside!” Gio yelled from the ground. The man closest to him smashed him hard across the face and he fell limp as the rest of them disappeared into the house.

  I ran. I ran straight into the center of all that hell. Felt something tickling my arm and swiped at it over and over without bothering to even look at what it was. The man who’d hit Gio was crouching in the dirt with his back to me, and me, I thought of death. No strategy, no caution: just death. Because all my little body could do was surge forward, even as my mind screamed at it to turn back, and the man was only a few steps from me now.

  Gio’s leg came out of nowhere, swept like a lightening bolt along the ground, and took the guy’s legs right out from under him. The guy fell so fast you could actually hear the swoosh of wind. Before I could even yell, the man was on the ground and Gio was over him, and then Gio’s foot was smashing down, again and again on the man’s face. I heard the squishing destruction of flesh, then a much sharper cracking sound, and then it was just a dull thud, over and over again under Gio’s sobbing breaths.

  And then something started moving. I saw Gio tense, but it wasn’t the man, it was something else. The broken skin of his face writhed to life and the thousand pale cockroaches that had been his skin scattered away. More poured out of his sleeves, from under his collar, swarmed off his hands to reveal shreds of flesh clinging to raggedy bones. Gio and I both stepped back, but the roaches weren’t interested in us; they scattered outward in a confused swarm and then flushed as one towards the house. Towards Jeremy.

  “No!” Gio yelled. I couldn’t even catch my breath before he’d turned and stormed past the roach swarm into the back door.

  “Gio!” I yelled. We were still alive. Why couldn’t he understand what a miracle that was? A few minutes ago I thought everything was over, and now we were alive: both of us! I hated my cousin almost as much as I loved him right then. The night was so quiet. I heard the gentle evening song of the cicada, a few night birds chirping in the trees above me. Someone was watching TV in a house nearby, a reality show, from the sound of it. Had no one heard us screaming? For a terrible moment, I wondered if any of it had even happened. Then I walked shakily towards the house, barely breathing, barely conscious.

  Inside, there was a dim little alcove with winter jackets hung up, and a cubby area full of weathered board games. Something glinted from the short stairwell leading into the kitchen. Not roaches; it was perfectly still: blood. I moved faster, stepping around the wet spots and up into the kitchen; all dark, no one there. From somewhere in the house, Gio was yelling: “Jeremy? Jeremy?” I released a dark little sandbag of weight from my heart. Gio was safe for the moment. If he was looking for Jeremy, he wasn’t fighting the crazy cockroach men. If he was looking for Jeremy, he was alive. The thought of ending this with Gio still intact made me want to sit down at the kitchen table and sob, but I kept going, through a windy hallway, past the living room—moderately fancy and very lived-in—and up the stairs.

  “I told you to…” Gio mumbled when he saw me. “…I thought I told you to…” His eyes were so wide, the way horses look in movies when they get shot; like, you didn’t know they could get so wide, that such noble, magnificent creatures could actually be afraid. “He’s gone.” Gio fell against the wall and slid down into a crouch, sobbing. “They got him.”

  “Gio.” My little ten-year old voice sounded calm, authoritative, for the first time in my life. And there I was, still in my tutu. I felt ridiculous. “We gotta go, Gio. We gotta go now.”

  He looked up. I’d broken through to him. He nodded, took the trembling hand I’d reached out to him, and stood.

  * * *

  The smoke alarm screams to life again. This time my ears are so close to it that the shock almost knocks me off the chair I’m standing on. Also, the lights have gone out. It’s mid-day, so I’d barely noticed, but yes, a certain glower has fallen over the room now. I turn and wrench the damn smoke alarm right off the wall with a grunt, drop it on the ground. I have to get out of here. I have to go, I have to go now. I step down and nothing comes to kill me, so that’s good. The air is so thick, I feel like I’m wading through it. I’m halfway to the door when I hear Eliades groan. I was so anxious to get out I’d blocked him from my mind completely.

  Eliades is responsible for this mess. He brought his crap in here, whatever it is. I bristle. And Baba Eddie gets half the credit for not being on time, dammit. Either way, it’s not my problem. And who am I to get involved? I take another step towards the door, put my hand on the handle, close my eyes.

  Inside myself, I know I’m not gonna leave Eliades. I can’t. Giovanni is with me, somehow. I know it as clear as I know my name. He’s been with me all day, like he was there, whispering the story in my ear all along. I turn. Take a step through the murk towards the back of the store. Make my way down the middle aisle, past the different colored candles and the mason jars full of herbs and tinctures. Eliades is sprawled out in the half-price easy chair, his arms to either side, his mouth hanging open, a little drool trickling out. His breaths come in shallow gasps, his eyes squeezed shut.

  Just above him, the air is … it’s off. It shudders like those updrafts of heat on
a summer day. If I squint, I can just make out a shape—no, two shapes: great heaving forms reaching down towards Eliades, crushing him.

  Giovanni is with me. He is my bravery, my strength. I step directly in front of Eliades and look up into the nauseating shimmer of spirit above him.

  Baba Eddie says people make too big a deal out of ghosts; they get freaked out and don’t know how to handle them, because we so full up with freaky stories about poltergeists and whatnot. He says most ghosts just want something, and usually all you have to do is ask what they want and then give it to them; it’s that simple.

  I put my hands to either side, not unlike Ishigu right before he takes off, and say “Spirit!” It sounds so cheesy; but still, something shifts in the room. “Spirit,” I say again. “What do you want?”

  When nothing happens, I feel even sillier, but that’s better than the sheer terror. I am, after all, still alive. I exhale, drop my arms. I’m thinking maybe some absurd coincidence happened; Eliades stroked out just as the smoke alarm malfunctioned and the power went out and I had an anxiety attack, yes that’s it—and then a searing pain erupts in the center of my head. I close my eyes and all the bright color splotches resolve into a pair of diamonds, and then they open, they’re eyes. See me. It’s like a hundred people whispering the same thing at the same time. I hold my breath. See me.

  “Spirits just want attention,” Baba Eddie told me once as he watched a jubilant customer walk out the door. “Like, more than half the time. And they’ll do what they gotta to get it. Ignore them, they’ll up the ante.”

  See me. It’s not talking to me, this thing. It’s talking through me. And I can’t really blame it: I volunteered myself. I put my hand on Eliades’ contorted face. He’s clammy, trembling. “Open your eyes,” I say. “Look at it.”

  Eliades shudders, shakes his head.

  “Do it.”

  Slowly, one at a time, his eyes open. I step back, step away from it all. The heaviness leaks steadily out of the room. I can breathe again. Eliades’ face unclenches and tears pool at the edges of his eyes. His chest heaves up and down, silent sobs. The presence is still in the air just above him but it’s dissipating. “I’m sorry,” Eliades whispers. “Isadora. Lo siento.” He’s staring up at it, watching it go. “I’m so so sorry.”

  * * *

  The night of the roaches wasn’t the last time I saw Giovanni, but it might as well have been. In the weeks after Jeremy disappeared, Gio withdrew deeper and deeper into himself until one day he was just gone. His parents had kicked him out years earlier, but my dad loved him like their only son. They wallpapered the neighborhood with flyers, pestered the police about it everyday, put search teams together to scour all the back corners and abandoned fields. Nothing. The boy was just gone. It barely got a blurb in the papers of course—a little missing notice in the local crime section of the same issue that had a moving tribute to Jeremy on the front page.

  I’ve made up so many stories. But the practical part of me knew he was just a hurt kid that had been through some fucked up shit he couldn’t make any sense of, couldn’t even tell anyone about. But then again, so was I. And then he was gone and I was truly alone.

  Baba Eddie comes in just as Eliades is leaving.

  “You don’t want your reading anymore?”

  “No, Baba, I’m all set.” Eliades wipes his eyes. “I feel … I feel light. I feel like I can go on now. Your student is quite impressive.” He whistles as he walks out into the street. The door shuts with a jangle of bells.

  Baba Eddie looks at me. “The fuck did you do to him, Kia?”

  “I don’t wanna talk about it.” I keep my eyes on the computer screen. “Just show up on time next time, please.” I should tell Baba Eddie all about it, everything. I want to. But I also don’t. Because right now, I’m busy saying goodbye. Giovanni has been with me all day, just like Isadora, whoever she was, hung in that cloud over Eliades. Which means Gio’s gone. Really gone. Dead and gone, gone. Which means I have to stop pretending, stop making up stories, and finally, finally for real this time, let go.

  So I do.

  Copyright © 2014 by Daniel José Older

  Art copyright © 2014 by Goñi Montes