Whispers in the Night

by Brandon Massey

  Selma always laughed at her lies. She was a stout girl, had her tits bandaged up. I caught her leaning over, sniffing Jan in her crotch with a broad smile on her face. “You don’t use it much,” she said, sticking out her tongue coyly.

  I was tied up for several hours of the day, my “agitation” hours as the hired help called them, and Selma and Jan took turns letting me smoke. They fed me cigarettes while they railed against men and their superior, arrogant sex. Selma said she was married once, had one girl, who was assaulted by her minister. The girl never recovered, lost her head, was doped up on meds and had a seizure and walked out in front of a bus downtown.

  “I understand why you don’t want to be a breeder,” Selma said, her lips in a snarl. “To be honest, I wish I had never brought a child into this world. They hate children. They hate babies. Men love sex, that’s all. If we didn’t have pussies, they wouldn’t want to have anything to do with us. Think about it.”

  I wished I had kept my mouth shut. Jan had the bright idea of collecting all of the knockout meds from her pals on the locked wards. When they had a cupful of them, they fed them to me until I lost consciousness and fell back on the bed. Millie told me all about it later; how Jan held the flashlight so the girls could see, and how Keisha, another inmate, tied my arms down, and how Selma went to work with a needle and thread. Something about an African ritual or rite, closing the window of the body to the soul, Selma said to the girls.

  When I awoke afterward, the pain was horrific. I howled in agony. The nurses and orderlies rushed into the room, saw the bright pool of blood soaked into the covers, and pulled them back. I was writhing back and forth, out of my head with physical torment; it felt like a hot butter knife had been put between my bare thighs. One of the orderlies fainted and two nurses carried him out.

  “Oh my God, how could anyone do this!” the head nurse yelled, pointing at my neatly shaved, stitched-up sex. “It’s not funny. This is not funny at all.”

  Nobody was laughing, except me. The pain made me delirious, hysterical. Stitched up like a gaping wound. Neuter. A zero woman reborn.

  Hell Is for Children

  Rickey Windell George

  Tears ran from Gail’s eyes—wide in the dark. Rolled from the left, over the bridge of her nose, and into the salty pool that was forming in the right.

  Rap music oozed through the wall at the back of her head, muffled but thumping, making her brain ache. This was not the sound, however, that was eating away at her insides, at her heart and soul. Somewhere near, in her own apartment, a sound like the howling of a wild dog swelled.

  “It ain’t right,” she said, strands of saliva and tear water connecting her lips. “It just ain’t right.”

  There was movement then in the bed beside her, a body turning, a man’s shoulder coming into view beyond the slope of her silhouette. Then a three-inch Afro and a wrinkled brow, and at last a drowsy pair of arterial eyes emerged as he hoisted himself onto one elbow to look down on Gail’s dark contours.

  “Haven’t you heard?” he said. “Hell is for children.”

  A fresh tributary of salt water broke across Gail’s face, dropped off her cheek, and stained the pillow. How many times had she asked the question of a few moments past? How many times had she gotten one stupid answer or another?

  Somewhere in the bowels of the apartment, a cry broke through the hazy dark, clearly human this time, clearly the sound of pain.

  “He’s hurting,” Gail said.

  “Sheets never hurt nobody. Besides, ain’t got no choice. You want him bangin’ around, bouncin’ off these walls all night?”

  “How’d you like it?” she protested, anger burning like fire in her stare. “You want to be all tied down?” Gail was up then, back like a board, body thin as a rail, naked and black—midnight ebony.

  A strong arm was slipping around her then, the long skinny fingers wriggling eagerly—like the legs of a cockroach, she thought, as the digits brushed her visible rib cage en route toward a breast. God in heaven, were those her ribs showing? Was she trying to starve herself?

  “Get your hands off me, Karl.” Gail snatched away, snatched up her robe from the floor on her side of the bed, and began on with it. She was as disgusted with herself as she was with him.

  “Always the same bullshit,” he said and flounced back down in the mess of sweated bed linens. Then breathing out through his mouth and wiping perspiration from his brow, he said: “Did it get hotter in here?”

  Gail was on her feet now, tying the sash, eyeing Karl as she did. The radio man had said they’d broken a Louisiana state record the day gone by, he’d said it was hot enough to fry bacon on the sidewalk and that the thermostat wasn’t apt to dip below ninety-eight even after sundown. Sweating atop the sheets and washed in the flimsy light flung in through the safety bars at the window, Karl’s caramel-colored skin was lit in the shadowy shades of blue projected off the neon sign across the street. Even his high-yellow hard-on was cyan tonight. Once upon a time on a hot summer’s evening like this, he’d stolen Gail’s heart, and Lord knows her better judgment. Once upon a time, those drowsy eyes and that narrow ass of his were all she could think of. He was not especially handsome, but he’d seemed so to her. Now all Gail could think was what kind of no-account bastard he was, hot for fucking even with his son tied to the bed up the hall, moaning, sealed up behind a dead-bolted door like the hunchback chained in the bell tower.

  Karl’s lips were moving but the words were lost to her.

  There was a moment of blurred unreality then. There was a trickle between Gail’s legs that her fingers chased after. Her fingers coming back red, she determined that it must have been that time of the month, but could not even consider the whereabouts of a pad before another desperate moan was emitted somewhere in the dark beyond her room.

  “—I get sick of this shit,” was the tail end of whatever Karl was saying.

  “Sick of what? You don’t do a damn thing. You’ve never done a damn thing. All you’re good for is tying him down and locking him up.”

  “He’s got to be tied down, you know that.”

  “You should help me.”

  “Help you what?”

  “Help me with Martin, goddamn it! He’s your son, too.”

  Karl’s eyes shifted, the whites bloodshot, the lids heavy. “I’m tired.”

  “And I’m not?”

  Karl adjusted then, turned his back and narrow ass to her. “It’s cause of you we keep going in these circles.”

  Another moment of unreality then: the room turning slowly, the little boom box on the dresser top, so easy to grasp and to pitch at a motherfucker’s head. “I should give him away, right? Dial a number and make him go away?”

  In the moment of silence that followed, the dark stream running down Gail’s right leg arrived at her ankle. Then at last Karl’s answer rang out. “We shoulda put him down the incinerator the day he was born.”

  Gail’s breathing seemed it would stop that instant. It felt as though this man—this lanky son of a bitch in her bed—with the healed knife wound on his belly and the scar from that bullet on his chest, had stomped her in the heart.

  He really didn’t give a damn.

  He didn’t care if the boy lived or died so long as he was gone away somewhere, in a place was how the whites liked to say it. There wasn’t a day that Gail didn’t imagine the possibility, though she wished she could say there was. Her life was an unrelenting trial and it was because of Martin. If she were to put him “in a place,” then everything would be so much easier. Each time she more than grazed the thought, however, she was reminded of the place where she’d spent her growing years: Sister Mary Hellena’s home for orphaned girls, also known as hell on earth.

  That was all right, though, wasn’t it? Hell was for children, to hear Karl tell it.

  Gail didn’t remember leaving the bedroom but found herself in the darkened main hall moving toward the call of her child—now a mix of frantic shrieks and convulsi
ve sobs. She could hear his bed jumping, banging, and creaking as he thrashed upon it. Martin’s door was at the end, the last one on the left, and it seemed the walk—the dread—would never end.

  The noise was earsplitting up close and the scent—God, yes, there was an almost unbearable stink—was heavy in the air as the room grew near.

  “Defecation,” the social worker liked to say.

  “Shit!” Gail had corrected just days earlier. “Don’t dress it up! He shits on the goddamned floor and then he plays in it!” Gail’s arms outstretched almost like Christ on the cross, and turning in the middle of the room, she said: “He wipes down the walls with it. Sweet baby Jesus in heaven, I’ve seen him eating it.”

  The social worker was a fat white woman with a man’s bowl haircut. She looked quite literally like someone had put a large soup bowl upside down over her head and simply shaved whatever hair there was that spilled out around the rim. Her eyes held all the compassion of ice cubes and her personality was none the warmer. “So toileting is still a problem?”

  A problem? Gail thought, giggling at the stupidity of the question inside her head. Martin was fourteen and the size of a man, and he could not tell a toilet from a water fountain, or his ass from a stump in the ground.

  “A problem?” Gail answered the question with the restatement of those two ridiculous words, and without realizing it she’d begun to turn again in the middle of her living room, like a child’s spinning top slowly running out of steam. In snatches she glimpsed the kitchen through the entry: orange painted walls, white linoleum floor, a cutting board on the counter, a meat cleaver on the board—glinting silver light.

  In turns the social worker sensed the change, saw the bulging capillaries in the other woman’s eyes, felt the heat coming off her body. Gail was a woman on the edge.

  Typically Martin spent his days at school, in the special class that he was taken to by way of the special blue bus. It was summertime, though, and school was over, and those few precious hours of reprieve were just a memory. It was the sound his body made hitting his bolted bedroom door that had pulled Gail’s thoughts back from the cleaver. She liked to imagine that her son was trying to break the dead bolt, liked to give him credit, that at least his actions were efforts at escape. But he slammed the walls and the window boards and the floor equally as often as the door. Perhaps he just liked the sting of the impact?

  “You’re a stupid bitch,” Gail said to the social worker. “Yeah, I got a problem. I have to lock my son in his fucking room all day. I have to board his window so he don’t jump out. I need help!” Her hands went up to her head, gripping the thick puff of her hair, pulling—the pain had felt good, made her feel real. “Why won’t somebody help me?”

  “No one will come out here, Gail. Not to this neighborhood and not to deal with Martin. It’s an awful thing to say, but you should really start considering the inevitable. Martin is getting big and these outbursts much more dramatic and frequent.”

  “I ask you to get someone out here to help me and all you can talk about is how I should give him away.”

  “It’s my recommendation that we seek institutionalization.”

  “You want to take my baby away from me?”

  “Gail, I don’t place this kind of suggestion lightly. Yours is an extraordinary case—”

  Martin’s door thumped and rattled with his weight again.

  Gail’s eyes locked on the fat woman, shimmering liquid hatred. “Get the fuck out of my house.”

  Now, in that long hallway for the some-odd thousandth time, Gail wondered if it wasn’t time to dial the number. The fat lady had left in a rush, but not before leaving a card—a magic number that could make Martin go away. Gail reached the knob and the mechanism of the dead bolt and she wondered if she could do it again. If there was help, if she was not so alone, perhaps she could go on.

  The one Therapeutic Support Specialist brave enough to come to Kindred Green—Mr. Lucas—had not returned after the day Martin smeared ejaculate in his face. He’d been a godsend for the few days it lasted, helping with feeding and bathing, but when the boy had brought his dripping hands out of his oversized diaper and slammed the slimy palms in Mr. Lucas’s face, the heyday ended. The boy must have tackled him, taken him down. Martin had been cleaning his hands with the man’s face—in his beard, across his nose, wriggling his gummy fingers in the man’s gaping mouth—and giggling insanely when his mother, hearing Mr. Lucas’s stifled screams, came and wrestled Martin loose. Everything ended in screams where Martin was concerned—his or someone else’s.

  Martin was screaming as the rod of the dead bolt retracted from the jamb.

  “I’m leaving!” Karl was in the backdrop, in the hallway now, but not on his way to lend a hand. He’d gotten into his jeans and was headed for the front door. Even now, Martin—all one hundred and sixty pounds of him—was wailing just on the other side of his bedroom door.

  “Please,” Gail appealed to Karl. “Don’t leave me by myself again. Just help me settle him down.”

  The front door was already ajar in the man’s grasp. The hallway’s lone bulb played a game of tricky lighting in the murk, made sweaty highlights on the tops of the man’s shoulders, made the rivers of moisture on his chest seem dark as oil.

  “Please stay.”

  “What for?” Karl asked. “We both know how this goes. Sleepless night, wailing mongol—”

  “Don’t you dare call him that! He ain’t no mongoloid. He’s our son.”

  “Whatever,” Karl said. “We know how this plays out, how it always plays out.”

  “If you help me it might be different.”

  Karl looked back. Was the expression smug or sad? Gail couldn’t tell. Whichever it was, the front door closed just the same and then, utterly alone, she was pushing her way into Martin’s room. Though she couldn’t see their swarming little bodies she could hear the hum of flies swimming in the pitch-black. She fished for the light switch, found it, and gasped at what she saw.

  Martin was there on his bed, one hand free of the sheet ropes where the bedpost had broken. He was completely naked where he’d torn his pajamas and the giant diaper off with his free hand. Writhing awkwardly, straining against the remaining restraints, he was masturbating so fiercely that his penis appeared bruised and raw.

  Gail thought about the sheets, how he must have fought to get that hand free. It was so very wrong to tie him down, but at the same time bizarre compulsions ruled his sad life, and it was impossible to predict what he would do. It was impossible to keep him safe at night without restraint. The boards at his window, which allowed only a peek of light in the day, seemed equally cruel, but what was she to do? He’d put his fists through the glass once already.

  Was it time to dial the magic number? Gail’s vision blurred and she saw the monstrous nuns of her childhood, vaguely recalled the things that one of them had done to her with kitchen utensils—spoons, forks, in one case the handle of a rolling pin.

  When Gail’s eyes refocused she saw that she’d been right about the flies. Dozens were milling about, laying their eggs in the shit-smeared sheets. Only now did she see the filth that covered the boy and the linens, even his pumping hand. Then she spotted the roaches, silent and stealthy by comparison to the flies, and far more numerous. There were at least two hundred of them, up from the cracks and dark spaces, feeding on the boy’s feces and spilt semen, and drinking the sweat off his lopsided body. They scattered in the light now, at least a dozen of them scurrying by and over Gail’s bare feet, the little antennae probing, tickling. She did not jump or even stir.

  Martin reared his body up toward the door and moaned. It was nothing intelligible, just a guttural sound, but to Gail it said Mommy.

  Down syndrome coupled with mental retardation and a severe sensory disorder had made her fine boy into this puffy-eyed monster, and not a day went by that she didn’t wish she could take the affliction away even if it meant carrying the burden herself, or that he could simp
ly have been born ordinary, or if none of those options, then not born at all. She hated herself for some of the things she thought, but how could she help but to think them?

  How much more could she take?

  Just then, Martin raked his man-sized hand across the wall at the head of the bed and left a series of brown streaks that a fresh set of flies swarmed toward.

  In the corner, the movement of other flies captured her stare. Her bucket was there at the center of the flurry, the washrag slung over the lip of the pail, soiled already from the last change. Gail’s eyes glazed over before spilling salt sorrow, and then she shut the door. She thought of the place she’d grown up, of the nightmares she’d endured. She thought then of the room in which Martin lived, of the bed he was tied into at night, of the window that offered no light and the stench and the shit and the roaches and the flies.

  Hell was for children.

  Gail went to the card that was taped to the refrigerator, and next to the phone hung from the kitchen’s west wall. Spanish music invaded this room, seeped through the cinder block.

  “I can’t take this anymore,” she said as a female voice filled the line. “I’ve tried and tried to be a good mother, but I can’t do no more. I’m all used up. All used.”

  When Gail was done on the phone she went to the hall closet and then out the front door.

  She knew where to find Karl. He never went far, just far enough not to have to hear the mongoloid’s crying. This was usually no farther than the lobby or the back steps where it was easy to score cheap weed. Gail found him in a corner, on the floor smoking some herb. He’d already been to the back steps and come out to the lobby proper to relax and enjoy his smoke.

  “I did it,” she said, eyes red and runny, nose running as well.

  Karl looked up from where he was perched on the linoleum, his back to the wall of silver mailboxes.

  “I called about Martin,” she said. “They’ll be here to get him in under an hour.”