Twisted.2014.12.16.2014 FOR REVIEW

by Michaelbrent Collings

  The woman leaves, sent away by those same cries.

  The boy sits on the floor. The beautiful boy, so young, so familiar.

  And the man sits alone. Sits vulnerable.

  Soon even he senses that there is something amiss. Things have drawn closer and closer, have taken more and more of him. He is becoming sensitive, though he may fight what is happening; though he may deny the truth of who he is, and what he will be.

  But the time has come. The time is here.

  The man makes a few jokes, but finally stands.

  As he does, a hand reaches out.

  It is said that time and space matter little to some things. Neither is a true statement. Time matters greatly. It passes slowly, each minute an eternity. A forever without the ability to follow desire, to slake thirsts that first ache, then anguish, then agonize.

  And space matters, too. For space is the means of finding. Space can be folded, can be manipulated.

  The time is now. The man feels how close It is, because It is below him. Space has folded, and what would have taken up the volume of a body in a time before can now curl into places much smaller.

  This is part of why some things move slowly: time and space must come together, must intertwine in a way that allows both to curl in on one another. Then and now, below and above. The small and the large, the things that last and those that are ephemeral as a candle in a hurricane.

  The man stands. But in the instant that he does, a hand reaches out. It reaches from a place below, beside. It seems to come from the couch upon which the man was seated, but also from somewhere else. A place beyond the ability of any to see. Perhaps the baby could see it, were it placed in the right position. No one else.

  Certainly not the man.

  So the man stands, and the hand brushes against him. Grazes his hip with a glancing touch that is nearly a caress.

  It is not much. Almost nothing.

  But in the barest of contacts, the merest of moments, time and space curl. Then and now, here and there. All come together, all begin to merge and will soon become fully one.

  Before the man has fully stood, before he could possibly see – even if he had eyes with the proper sight – the hand has withdrawn.

  The three fingers curl into a triumphant fist and disappear.

  The touch was almost nothing.

  But it was enough.

  Things have been moved slowly.

  But no longer.

  FOUR:

  SUBJECTS FOUND

  One thing that stands out in these pictures – as in any old photos – is the fact that they were the result of careful planning, staging, lighting, set-up. The cost of silver-based or cellulose nitrate-based film being prohibitive, each individual open and close of the shutter resulted in a thing of tangible and objective value, if not beauty, and corresponding care was taken in the production of each photograph.

  Modern "artists" rely on multitudinous takes made possible by the negligible costs of each individual photo. This essentially renders them little more than the proverbial monkeys, simply punching buttons until they accidentally produce a work of Shakespearean value. Contrast this to our principle subject, who took extraordinary care, even with the particular time constraints under which he operated:

  Sumtyme I dont hav tyme for a good pykcher. I wont rush the work, tho' I be fownd out. I kno my work wont be understoode and I myte be punished, but I wont rush the work.

  I luv the chyldrin. They diserve the best frum me. I wil giv them the ours for thaer most luvly selves to be seen. And my pleasur when I tuch them in the pykshers will remind mee of the pleshur I felt when I tuchd them alive.

  - Silver, Charles M.

  (afterword by Dr. Charlotte Bongiovi),

  (2003) Berkeley, California,

  Memento Mori, Notes of a Dead Man,

  Western University Press, Inc.

  THE FIRST OF MANY

  Alyssa walked in the room only after looking at the embroidered picture to make sure it was neither hanging at an angle nor showing a man with eyes closed and a black line across his throat. It looked normal, so she went in. After turning on the light. And looking at the picture again. And counting to ten to make sure nothing happened.

  And what could happen, Alyssa? What are you expecting?

  Whatever it was, it didn't occur. Even so, even in the bright light, the skin between her shoulders crept and stretched and made her feel less like a mom looking for a baby rattle, and more like a soldier behind enemy lines. One looking for IEDs, but with no information, no preparation. Just a general idea and a blind hope that all will turn out for the best.

  Her shoulder blades pinched closer together, but she forced herself to ignore the sensation of –

  (being watched)

  – danger.

  It wasn't real. It couldn't be.

  But if it isn't, then I'm crazy, right? Because I did see something. I did.

  And there it was: the same problem that kept popping up. Did she tell Blake and have him put her away in a white room with rubber walls? Or did she keep quiet… and perhaps find there really was something wrong here?

  Still thinking, she finished looking through the sewing room. She had looked here first, mostly to prove she could. Mostly to prove there was nothing wrong. Ostriches didn't really bury their heads in the sand to hide from things they feared: that was a human trait. Alyssa didn't want that to be her.

  But she hadn't really expected to find Ruthie's toy here. She just wanted to go in and… what? Prove there was nothing to worry about? That there was, but she was strong enough to face whatever it was?

  That she was just a nutcase?

  She went back into the hall, then to the room she and Blake were using. It was a tidy space. Not Spartan like the sewing room, but everything put away and neat, so looking for Ruthie's toy would be easy in here as well.

  She began with her luggage. Moving aside nursing bras, what seemed like the six dozen shirts she brought since she inevitably lactated right through ten a day.

  The rattle wasn't in her luggage. She checked Blake's. And again, found only what he had packed. Clothes, toiletries, a book he was reading – some horror story about a monster in an insane asylum – and….

  She flipped through the contents of his suitcase again. Just to make sure. Good news – even small bits of it – had been in low supply recently.

  After looking three times, she was positive. "Thank you, Blake," she breathed.

  The book was gone. He had gotten rid of it, just like he said he would. Not that she doubted, but it was great to actually see the thing out of their lives.

  She decided to do something special for her husband. He worked so hard, he did so much. He never believed it – that was one of the more insidious products of his upbringing. It wasn't just about the scars on his back, the reason he would never go shirtless in front of Mal. It wasn't about his constant terror of becoming what his father had been to him.

  Blake's father had punished him over and over again. And it didn't matter that Blake never deserved it, not for a moment. He never talked about it – not even to her, not directly at least – but Alyssa could see that on some deep level he believed he deserved the punishments. Some fundamental place in his soul had been broken by the constant battery, mental and physical, and had come around to his father's point of view.

  Blake Douglas could work every day to become successful in every aspect of his life: good father, good husband, good earner. It wouldn't matter. Not to him.

  And Alyssa was powerless to fix that part of him, that broken part. It was a wound she couldn't bind, because it was in a place she couldn't find.

  It was worse now that things were going tail over teakettle with their finances. Because in Blake's eyes, every success was due to luck, or someone else's hard work. But every failure, every loss: his to own, and his alone.

  Still, she would try. She would try until they grew old together, died hand-in-hand together. And if Blake died not bel
ieving he was worthy of anything, he would at least die knowing that she had given him everything she had to give. That even though his "failures" she had never abandoned him. And maybe after, in Heaven – if there was such a place – he'd understand. Understand what he was, what he was worth.

  Maybe that was what Heaven was.

  The idea was enough to take her around the rest of the room without following her previous, morbid chain of thought. Without thinking of the choice between lunacy and a reality that had fallen into nightmare.

  She made it to the card table Blake had set up. Flipping back a few of his work papers, her movements now cursory and dreamlike. She was barely paying attention to her present. Which was fine. One of humanity's greatest gifts is the ability to avoid the present by burying itself in past memory or future dreams.

  Sometimes the present is simply too dangerous. Sometimes even thinking of it is too much.

  A scream ricocheted into the sewing room. It pierced the line between first floor and second, and so pierced her as well. Alyssa felt like she was halfway down the stairs before the scream had fallen to silence. Her feet drove downward so hard that she was less running than kicking her way down.

  Blake. Blake had screamed! She had never heard that, what could have caused that?

  She ran around the stairwell. Skidded on the slick floor of the entry. Tore through the anteroom and for the first time since the family's arrival barely noticed the sound of the clock, or the pain that lanced through her as she took each step, slid around each corner.

  She burst into the living room…

  … and Blake was sitting on the couch. Watching TV with Mal, Mal stuffing pizza in his face so hard an onlooker might expect pepperonis to shoot out the back of his head.

  Blake had Ruthie across his lap, holding her rattle over her and shaking it gently.

  He looked over as Alyssa ran in, his expression surprised and amused. He rattled the toy. "Found it," he said.

  "It was under the cushion," said Mal, the words barely making their way through a three-pound bite of dough and cheese.

  "You…." Alyssa couldn't find words. The dash downstairs had robbed her of breath, giving her pain as a poor substitute. More than that, she just didn't understand. "You screamed," she finally managed.

  "Dad was doing the boogie dance," said Mal. He smiled. For a moment Alyssa didn't care what happened, because Mal was smiling. He hadn't smiled – really smiled – since the centipedes. Seeing his face lit up with happiness, with the joy that only a child that knew a secret joke could feel… it was almost enough for Alyssa to dismiss any and all problems.

  In fact it was more than enough. She smiled back at him. One hand was on her lower stomach, but it dropped away as her pain simply disappeared.

  Her boy was happy.

  Then Ruthie started to cry. Alyssa looked at her daughter, and saw that the baby's eyes were open. Fully awake.

  Unlike babies' hearing, which develops quickly, their sight takes the better part of a year to mature. The first month they can typically only focus on things within a foot or so, and they don't even know how to keep their eyes working in tandem: cross-eyed babies or babies with one eye rolling around independently are common.

  Ruthie was no exception. But at this moment she seemed to be staring at Blake. Directly at him, in fact, even though he had leaned far back from her.

  (like he doesn't want her to see)

  Ruthie's baby rattle – another red and white, high-contrast toy – was directly in front of her face, and it should have drawn her attention, transfixed her.

  But she looked right past it. Straight up, appearing to stare directly at her father's face almost three feet away.

  She cried and cried.

  Alyssa looked at Blake, too. He was so concerned she didn't know which person was more heartbreaking. Whispering "shhh, baby, shhh" over and over, Blake rattled her toy and rocked his baby.

  Ruthie screamed. Not a cry, a full shriek.

  And for a moment, Blake's face changed. He looked angry. His mouth twisted, a writhing line ready to spit at the child, to shout at her. His cheeks reddened, his eyes glittered.

  The instant passed. Ruthie stopped screaming, and Blake kept saying "shhh, baby" and he was simply himself again.

  It all happened so fast that Alyssa couldn't tell if it was real.

  Probably not. It's looking more and more like you're nuts, old gal.

  Maybe it was post-partum depression, or even psychosis. She hadn't had either of those after Mal, but that didn't mean she couldn't get them now.

  Blake kept whispering.

  Mal kept watching TV.

  Ruthie stopped screaming.

  Alyssa was silent, too. But now she felt like screaming. The first of many screams, screams that would go on and on and never end.

  CATCHING RIDES

  Ralph was late. It was late, Ralph was late, the world was spinning way too fast and his wheels were spinning way too slow.

  The dead were getting close.

  He had missed a deadline today. The client didn't notice – Ralph was only off by six seconds, per the satellite-updated clock on his tablet. And it wasn't a beeline job, so the client wasn't all sweaty about getting the envelope into her hands.

  But Ali called him five minutes later and asked if Ralph was okay. So Ali must have seen the time sig on the receipt on his software and known that it was a late drop.

  "You dead, man?" said Ali. His normal voice: blunt, deep, and wrapped around a mouthful of food. Probably pulled out of the Lego lunchbox he had brought today. Ralph couldn't decide if Ali's lunchbox fetish was awesomely weird or just plain awesome.

  "No," said Ralph. "Not dead." He didn't stop pedaling as fast as he could. A car pulled out of an alley and he almost got bolognafied all over its hood.

  "What was that?" said Ali, his voice now blunt and deep and garbled by food and also muffled by the horn the car's owner was practically laying across.

  Ralph let go of the handle long enough to engage in a bit of sign language. Most messengers preferred the middle finger, but he liked to hold up thumb, first, and pinkie. "I love you" in sign language. It kept his heart rate down and either brought out a laugh from the other person or really drove them bonkers. Either was fine.

  This guy was a bonkers-type. The horn started stuttering as he banged it with both hands.

  Then he was behind Ralph. Gone. Good, because Ralph didn't like the look of the dead woman on the guy's roof. Naked, splayed out, holding a lit cigarette whose smoke disappeared into nowhere. She gave him the creeps.

  All of the dead were doing that now. Not most. All.

  "You hear me, Hickey?" said Ali. "You okay?" He actually sounded concerned.

  "I'm fine. Be in soon for another hot order." Ralph hung up. He didn't want to get pancaked, and too much phone talk was a good way for that to happen. More than that, he didn't want Ali to hear the scratch in his voice. The fear.

  It wasn't a surprise he finally missed a bullseye. He hadn't slept in close to forty-eight hours. Monster Energy drinks and shot after shot of Red Bull chasers could only keep you going so long.

  Then you started to slip.

  Someone stepped off the curb. Soccer mom with her kid. They didn't look where they were going, and a car passed by Ralph and slammed right into them.

  He screamed. Wobbled. He lost control of the bike and it veered into the lip of the curb. The tire ground against it, the spokes clicked a rapid tap dance against the concrete. Then he fell. Rolled.

  Screaming still.

  A few people on the sidewalk clustered around him. "You okay, buddy?" "Someone get the license plate –" "Give him room, give him room!" A host of concerned voices, which normally would have made him smile – cities always got a rap for being full of uncaring jerks, but then a person fell and sometimes people actually noticed.

  But they were noticing the wrong thing.

  "Not me!" he shouted. "Help them!" He threw off several hands that pulled at
him, some trying to help him to his feet while others tried to keep him down so he could recover from his fall. "Help –"

  And he fell again. Nothing to do with his original crash. This was an impact of a new kind. Nothing touched his bike or his body, but he felt a hammer smash right into the gray center of his brain.

  The woman and her kid were fine. The car that had run into them was still rolling down the block. Not a care in the world.

  And that meant the mother and her child were not there. At least, not for the car.

  Ralph could have handled that. That was the sort of thing he'd been dealing with for a long time. But the mother turned. The child turned.

  Now he saw that the kid was a little girl. She'd been wearing a sweater with a hoodie, so he couldn't tell before. But when she shifted toward him he could see the long pigtails trailing down her front. He could also see that most of her face was gone, blasted away by a shotgun.

  The shotgun was held by her mother. Ralph hadn't noticed it, either, just seeing them step out. But now he saw it. Saw the mother holding the wood stock, the barrel angled slightly toward the girl. The woman herself was pale. Dark circles under her eyes, blue lips. So she'd probably o.d.'d or sat in a closed garage with her car running after….

  After she killed her girl.

  Horrible. But again, it was something he'd seen before. This was one of the bad ghosts, one of the ones who didn't catch rides or chat about the afterlife, but just walked from place to place like a storm ready to bring a bit of devastation wherever it went.

  The mother looked at Ralph. Straight, right into his eyes, and winked. Her blue lips widened in a long smile.

  The little girl at her side did not smile. She had no face to do so.

  Ralph knew that the step off the curb hadn't been just a random event. Hadn't been an accident. The dead woman had meant him to see what he did. Had intended him to believe a horror had occurred.

  Maybe even tried to kill him, too. What if he wobbled into traffic instead of into the curb, after all?