In the living room, Daddy’s standing over Mama. She’s on the floor, has red coming off her. I don’t know what the red is or where it’s coming from. She isn’t moving. Then I realize it’s blood. I run over to Daddy and kick his shins. I shout, “What’d you do to my Mama!”
He grabs my kicking leg, makes me fall on my tailbone, says, “Go to the field and don’t come back ‘til I yell. Your Mama and me gonna talk things through. I’ll beat your ass if you come back afore I call. Go now.”
I nod fast. Mama’s hurt, but she’s just asleep. Daddy’ll wake her.
I go outside. The clouds gathered together are black as Grandpa Lee’s bad toenail. They are ready to pour. My tailbone hurts, so I rub it as I hustle to the shed.
Fumbling in the dark until my eyes adjust, I make my way to the back. I know exactly where he is—he says nothing, but I can tell he’s mad. It pulls me like an ant to a sand lion. This doesn’t make me uneasy, it seems right. I find the little oil lamp and make a flame. Then I see dirtman’s body. He looks larger in the pool of oily light. I need him to talk to me, to tell me what to do. My hand is shaking, but I lift the jar and jostle the scorpion out and into the chest cave I made with my fist. The scorpion will be dirtman’s heart. I watch it crawl in, then plug the entrance with our moldy bathtub stopper. I take the bottoms of the bottles and press them in for eyes. The milky brown deepens, and I know he sees me, even if all the color is gone. For his mouth, I make a gash with a stick and jut in my dead dogs’ teeth. Far down into his throat I push a small, creased piece of paper. I’d scrawled the words “Help me make Daddy stop” onto it.
“Can you talk to me? Please?” My whispered voice sounds like someone else’s.
I hear the scrape of a shovel outside the shed. I don’t understand what Daddy’s doing out there. I rock to calm myself.
I tell dirtman I don’t know what to do, that I need a sign from him, a word, that I’ll do anything he wants if he’ll just help me. His body is heavy beside mine. I wipe tears off my cheeks.
Then I hear a brittle voice coming from his packed dirt flesh, No worry. Due time. We will release.
I start, jerk my head, and bite down too hard on my lip, taste blood on my tongue. I whisper, “Was that you, dirtman?”
No answer. The only sounds are those made by the shovel outside. They continue for a long time. Then there’s a terrible silence, like the quiet that comes when coyotes prowl our field.
The squeal of the screen door and a yell from the back porch, “Lucy Ann, come inside!”
I blow out the lamp quick-like and race in. I can’t wait for Mama to wrap her arms around me, to tell me everything is okay.
When I come in, Daddy’s sitting in his EZ chair. He looks a mess, with dirt all on him. He’s cracked open a beer, takes a long pull on it.
I say, “Where’s Mama?”
“Mama’s not coming back,” Daddy says.
It takes me a minute to realize what he’s said. At first, I think he said she was in back, and I start to run outside to find her. But then it sinks in, what he actually said. A cold feeling comes over me as I watch him in his chair. His face is relaxed, as if he doesn’t have a care in the world. As if he doesn’t give a good god damn about Mama leaving. I feel like a trapdoor spider about to pounce.
I say with gritted teeth, “This is all your fault.” Then I run to him and hit his chest with my fists. I keep hitting him and yelling, “You’re no good! You drink too much, and you made Mama mad by losing your job. Mama only stayed before because she felt sorry for you. You are too damn mean and weak for her. And for me!”
He rears back and hits me across the side of my head.
I wake up on the floor. Daddy isn’t here. My left eye is closed, swollen over, and throbs real bad with pain and heat, but I get up and run as fast as I can outside, into the shed.
It’s so dark that I knock over piles of Daddy’s things, slip and fall as they hit me on my hurting head. Somehow, I make it to the back. There’s no time. I finish dirtman in the dark. My eye hurts and I can’t see, but I make dirtman’s arms and legs with knowledge that’s buried in me, crawling up from the past, from my kin, in times of need. I dump water from a pail, make the damp mud into the shape of big arms and legs. Bigger than Daddy’s. And I push Daddy’s brown belt between dirtman’s body and the floor, cinch it ‘round the middle. It’s the belt Daddy uses on me.
When I finish dirtman, the rains begin. I can hear it run across the land. There’s too much, it’s too fast to let in, this ground is so used to the dry. It’s a stubborn, unloved ground, doesn’t know what to do when it gets what it needs. I go outside and stand in front of the empty dog pen and let it wash over me. I wish there was enough rain to fill this entire basin up, to wash everything clean. But there will never be enough. Still, I wish. I wish as hard as I can, and just then there’s a deafening sound behind me. I clutch my ears and turn. The shed roof is cracked in half, and in the near-dark, I see a shape standing in front of the door. I blink my eyes a few times, then wipe the rain from them, look again, and it’s gone.
A shadow lengthens across the yard from the back door. “Lucy Ann, what the hell you doing out here when I’m yelling for you? You’re deaf as a box of goddamn nails.” I face Daddy. I want to warn him, but I don’t. Dirtman could be anywhere. He could do anything. Daddy grabs me by the neck and slings me to the ground. My face lands in mud water.
“I have told you and told you, time and again, not to be running off without telling me.” He bends down, holds me in the water, and I thrash, try to push his hands off my head. It fills my lungs. I choke, but can’t keep it out. My vision blurs and everything sounds like it’s happening from a great distance, just a low thrumming that I’m experiencing outside of me. I feel light, light enough for my legs to lift off the land, and I see myself and Daddy, from above, pulling away higher. For a second, I revel in this feeling of outsiderness. I forget that I need saving. Then, from above, I see a lurking shadow by the side of the house.
Daddy pulls my head out of the puddle and brings me crashing back into my body. I choke up water, and my lungs burn fierce. Daddy’s face is close to mine. I can smell the beer through my spluttering. He yells in my ear over the rain, “Don’t you ever do that again, Lucy Ann.”
He lets me go, stalks into the trailer, and barks, “Come in. Now.”
Before I go in, I look at the side of the house, but I see nothing. I make sure to open the screen door slow so it won’t squeak. I take a quiet bath, try to calm down. When I’m done, I cry into Mama’s soft blue robe. I rub it on my hair and down my cheek. I pretend Mama is holding me and Daddy is playing the guitar and singing.
Much later, I come out, and Daddy’s in his chair. His eyes are closed. The rain is still pounding with the rhythm of blood in my hurt eye and head.
There is a feeling in me as I look at Daddy in the chair. Like I’m shriveled inside. Like there’s no more good I can do. Nothing I can make myself be or do that isn’t already a part of me.
Right now, I decide. I decide I don’t need Daddy. I don’t need Mama. All I need is myself and my dirtman.
When lightning cracks again, I see him in the window. His beer bottle eyes glisten in the electric light. His canine teeth jut out all crooked. I know a scorpion crawls in his empty spaces and wants what it wants, doesn’t feel bad about it. I know that its stinger is certain.
I’m sorry, Mama. I don’t feel an ocean. Not one drop.
My dirtman is at the screen door now. Something is in his muddy hand.
The door squeals open, then is torn completely off its hinges. I back away, over to Daddy, who’s drunk and passed out in the EZ chair, his cigarette still burning away in the ashtray, an empty bottle of Wild Turkey and a case of crumpled Coors cans littered around him. Daddy, who slapped me so hard once for wandering in the field that I couldn’t hear for two days. Daddy, who blacked my eye when I told him he’s too weak to be with Mama. With me. Daddy, who made Mama leave in the first place.
Daddy, who kills everything.
Peering up at my dirtman towering over us, something thumps from deep in my guts, from as far back as my kin goes. Mama’s words float into my thoughts: I don’t have time for weakness. I only have time for hard work, for myself, for my dirtman.
I just need one last look at Daddy before I do my work.
I go to Daddy, and I lean way down. He’s curled in the chair with smooth, relaxed features, gentle and open. His muscles twitch like my baby niece’s do when she’s asleep. He looks handsome again, like my old Daddy. I lean down until I smell his breath, sweet with whiskey. Until I remember his songs and his smiles and his hand on my cheek. Until I see a fine sweat on his forehead, blood drumming in his neck curve like a trapdoor spider opening its lid. As if the hollow in his neck is this whole depressed desert, and we’re all stuck in it, trying to climb our way out from the danger. Maybe he’s stuck, too. Daddy sighs in his sleep, and it’s about the nicest sound I’ve heard from him in a long time.
Then I hear a low rumble and the words, Must release.
I stand straight and look at my dirtman. His glass eyes blaze. His crazy muck mouth opens wide, the dog teeth like insane fangs pointing every which way, but I know for him, there is only one way. The scorpion burrows in his muddy body, and it is ready. His huge arm reaches out, palm opening to the ceiling, to God above the blinding sun who made us all. Who made us all writhe around in the dirt. My dirtman’s slimy hand opens for me. Grandpa Lee’s hammer is in it.
But I can’t take it. It’s too heavy, and just now, seeing my dirtman, seeing my Daddy, I feel weak.
My dirtman grunts and raises the hammer. On instinct, I shove myself between him and Daddy. I hit his chest with my fists until my arms and face are coated in mud.
“Dirtman, don’t!”
His leaden hand pushes on my shoulder until I have no choice but to lie down, flat to the floor. He kneels over me and gazes, his crazy face, the face I made, alive and electric and wet. The jagged black eyes and crooked-teeth mouth don’t animate at all, as if he’s half dead, but doomed to move by someone else’s want. By my want.
I flinch and jerk my head when he lifts his arm up and brings it down. Then he rubs his heavy hand across my hair and cheek. I feel his slick, thick finger leave a trail as it slides. He hums to me, a rumbling that is deep water churning. I cry, and the tears sear my eyes. I close them and wish that everything was different, that everything was better, that we could all escape, be clean and free. I wish this as hard as I’ve ever wished anything. And I know my dirtman hears my wish.
When I open my eyes, I see the hammer hanging in the air. I shut them again, and wait. For the red to spread under my legs, then back, then head. For my dirtman to make me an ocean.
My Daddy’s ocean, all he had to give, final and glorious. Floating me up forever.
—For my mentor and friend, Pinckney Benedict, and his “Mudman.”
© 2014 by H.L. Nelson.
To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight.
H.L. Nelson (hlnelson.com) is head of Cease, Cows literary magazine, Associate Editor for Queens University of Charlotte’s journal, Qu, and Proofreader for Literary Orphans. Her publications include Writer’s Digest, Lunch Ticket, PANK, Menacing Hedge, Hobart, Connotation Press, plus over forty others in the last year. H.L.’s poem “Absolution” was nominated for Best of the Net 2013. Her fiction chapbook, The Sea is Only Meat, will be out this year (Sundress Publications). She is busy co-editing an anthology which includes stories by Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, Lindsay Hunter, Mary Miller, and other excellent female writers (Upper Rubber Boot Books, 2015).
MACHINES OF CONCRETE LIGHT AND DARK
Michael Cisco
Things always seem closer together on a bad morning. I slept poorly last night, and now the relentless brilliance of the day makes my eyes smart and my face ache with squinting.
Just within the station doors I stop to adjust my bag where it is cutting into my shoulder, and I notice at my feet a small piece of black plastic shaped like a capital L, and one end is frayed into a tuft of fibers. What did that come off of—or is it a complete thing?
I check the board and signs and walk hastily to meet my train. A glance to my right tells me that someone has fallen in step with me. I think, it’s Jeanie . . . but she had had one of those faces whose outlines vary so much from one angle to another that she could sometimes be hard to recognize. She always preferred to walk on my right, and would keep her head turned to me in just that way, as if she were getting ready to rap me on the scalp with her chin. She’s looking at me now with a superior expression, having crept up and fallen in with me, taking me unawares the way she used to do.
Not wanting to acknowledge her, a little frightened, and made blank-minded by surprise, I lower my eyes again on the tile floor ahead of my feet. It’s perfectly flat. That would be a pretty pitiful bit of deception, but if it weren’t for the weariness I wouldn’t be subsiding into myself like this.
Defeated, I turn to her, and she halts with me.
“Jeanie?” I ask falsely, trying to seem to verge on being pleasantly surprised, a fading part of me still en route to my train.
“I thought it was you,” she says confidently, her lisp unchanged, her voice much lower now, the hair not much longer, the skin if anything paler, flaking a little by her eyes like I’d forgotten it did. She has a bag on her back too. We always had looked more alike than different, even if she was taller.
“Where are you going?” she asks, a little imperious, looming over me.
I explain disjointedly. The names and places that I belong to now sound as bizarre as if I’d invented them, but they’re everything I’ve loved and built around myself in the nine years since July, the pier or boathouse or whatever it was and the path back through the trees to the street and not looking back and not listening.
“My parents moved back into the old house. That’s where I’m going now,” she tells me. “Why don’t you come along?”
“How long—?” I hear myself ask.
“Just a day. You can spend the night.”
“All right,” I say. “Sure.”
Without smiling, she opens her arms and takes me in them.
She is smiling when she releases me.
A thready, faltering sort of voice is chattering to me—It won’t take too long, I suppose—I won’t be missing anything and actually I was going back a day early; I could spend the night and go on in the morning. The words skip along the adhesive surface of a black, silent, motionless body of refusal, and its familiar spirit hissing at me, telling me insistently to escape, even if that means turning on my heel and running from her.
The station is vast, the high ceiling above me crawls with a disembodied roar of announcements. Black clocks with shiny plastic faces spell out the time in white points. Cold air gushes from colossal, softly-whirring vents. Everything is new, and spotless, white tile, white plastic, white steel, and white air conditioning tubes, and all manner of gleaming sterility. The air is so cold and dry it hurts my eyes.
Jeanie points the way to her train. One moment it is far off in the distance, and the next moment it’s directly in front of us, looking like a prostrated space rocket in a museum, glistening like ice. Its rounded windows and hatches are like frozen wafers of ink. Jeanie is in her clean element; she always hated feeling dirty and derived a great deal of pleasure from the exaggerated measures she took to keep herself clean.
“I think this train is new.”
The words drop from my mouth like the lifeless inanities they are. There’s something about Jeanie that utterly inhibits idle talk; I never could speak with her unguardedly. I had to watch what I said, vet it, and, as a rule, decide against saying it. It isn’t that I wanted to avoid exasperating her with trivia, it’s that there is something so relentlessly ultimate about her that I would feel like an ass no matter what I said, and consequently spoke as efficiently as possible.
&
nbsp; She nods, looking at the silent train. The muttering under the white ceiling, which seems to hang above us like a luminous cloud, drones on, and somewhere an alarm is buzzing. Another train rumbles away from a nearby platform. Stepping through the hatch, an odor like hospital smell, and new plastic, and bleach, surrounds me.
I’m shocked to see a narrow black passageway in the car, lined with skinny doors of gleaming black acrylic. I was expecting to see rows of ordinary seats.
“Compartment 17C,” Jeanie says. “17C.”
Suddenly I feel a quick intensification of regret at what I’m doing, now that I know there are compartments instead of open seats and there will be no other people, visible around me, for me to turn to for respite. I didn’t realize I would be so completely on my own with Jeanie.
I find a white plastic tab with 17C on it and turn the recessed steel lever, pull the door open and step back awkwardly to make room for it as it swings out into the corridor. My bag gets caught in the doorway, and I have to yank it this way and that behind me to get into the box. Throwing my bag up on the glinting steel rack over the seat, I turn and watch Jeanie coming in, getting jammed a bit and pulling herself free. She has always been taller. Her figure has filled out quite a bit since, much more than mine did, but she’s still lean.
It’s as acridly cool in the train as it was in the station. Jeanie turns her head toward the platform. Without a sound, the train glides forward, as if at her bidding. Adjusting my bag in the rack, the movement takes me by surprise, and I allow myself to fold onto the seat. The muttering has followed us into the train; the voices are so faint they can’t possibly be making announcements—no one would hear. They seem to be murmuring amongst themselves.
Jeanie sits between me and the window, on my right. The train passes a succession of pillars that languidly stroke the station lights, already dimmed by the heavy tinting of the glass. She is looking at me, fixedly, with no expression. I pretend to be more curious about the view through the window than I am. The tunnel covers us like a black cape and we’re alone together in a little cell of light, rolling along in the deep. My reflection blocks my view when I try to gaze out directly. I have to look around it, diagonally. Jeanie turns to glance out the window herself, and then becomes still, as if something interesting out there had arrested her attention.
Nightmare Magazine Issue 21 Page 5
