by Ed Kurtz
“I’m going to get another beer,” he said. He rose shakily and crossed the room toward the kitchen. The room rocked like a fishing boat in a much larger boat’s wake, the waves lolling rhythmically beneath him. His stomach flipped. “Ho, boy.”
Frank Shelton was still crying, reliving the awful moment his own misjudgment and ungainliness ended his sister’s life. His wife and two guests did nothing to comfort him; rather, they all sat with their hands in their laps, gazing stupidly this way and that, like infants experiencing new and baffling sensory data.
Lisa smacked Angelica’s knee and said, “You—what’s your name?”
But the bewildered woman did not respond.
“Chrissakes,” Lisa complained. “It’s got to be you, Leon. They won’t answer me.”
Leon found another cold bottle in the refrigerator and cranked the cap off on the bottle opener affixed to the counter. He took a long swig, exhaled a satisfied gasp and staggered back to the assembly in the main room.
“Jeez,” he said. “Think I’m already half drunk.”
“Lightweight,” Lisa said.
Leon shrugged his shoulders and dumped a quarter of the beer down his gullet. He shivered and smiled stupidly.
“All right,” he said, “whatcha got?”
“This one,” Lisa answered, indicated Angelica with her thumb. “Get her name.”
Leon asked, and haltingly the woman told him her name was Angelica.
“Hmn,” Lisa said. “Rich bitch name.”
Leon sniffed and rubbed his right eye, which was beginning to itch. “Angelica,” he said, “is this your house?”
“Y…yes.”
“Wrong. It’s my house.”
“Oh,” Angelica said, realizing that he was somehow right. “Yes, of course it is. I’m sorry.”
Leon continued rubbing his eye and smiled. “Me and my friend here, we live here. You people are our guests.”
“Yes,” Angelica agreed.
Jim made a serious face and nodded. Lisa killed off her beer and tapped Leon on the shoulder.
“I got an idea,” she said with a sinister grin. “Can you make them obey me?”
Leon dug the tip of his index finger into the corner of his eye and rubbed more rapidly, blurring his vision. The eye welled up, but it felt good.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t see why not.”
He leaned back to address the whole of the foursome as a thin rivulet spilled out of his eye and ran down his face.
“Listen up, all of you. From this point on, you have to do whatever Lisa says as well as whatever I say. We are your masters now.” Grinning devilishly, he then added: “When we say jump, you say ‘how high?’ Got that?”
One by one, the four people on the sofa agreed to Leon’s suggestion in a sort of domino effect. They nodded and mumbled their acquiescence, even as their cloudy eyes drifted elsewhere and their expressions betrayed befuddlement and stupidity.
Leon turned back to Lisa and said, “How’s that?”
She raised her eyebrows and gasped.
“Dude, what’s up with your eye?”
“It’s irritated,” he said nonchalantly. “Happens sometimes. I’ve probably had conjunctivitis six or seven times. I got sensitive eyes.”
“Sensitive, shit,” she exclaimed. “You got green crap coming out of it.”
“What?”
His eye still blurry to the point of near-blindness, Leon wiped the lower eyelid with the tip of his finger and brought the finger up to inspect it with his good eye. Just as Lisa said, a murky green fluid dribbled down his finger and fell down in drops that splashed his trousers.
He said, “Uh, oh.”
23
“Oh, God,” Leon muttered.
His face was inches away from the mirror in the ridiculously spacious guest bathroom, as it had been for several minutes. He balanced himself on the sink with one hand while spreading the skin around his right eye open with the other. The green fluid continued to gradually ooze out from the nasolacrimal duct, and now Leon was beginning to taste it in the back of his throat. It tasted moldy, like withered, rotting leaves.
In the corner of the eye, where it met the base of the bridge of the nose, Leon could make out a tiny green knob protruding out from between the red skin and the eyeball. He kept expecting it to swell into a large, gelatinous drop before bursting and dribbling down his face, but it never did. It simply stayed there, barely poking out from inside the cavity. Against his better judgment, he pressed his finger against it to see if it would come loose. Instead, the tiny nub disappeared behind the eye.
“Goddamnit,” he groaned.
The veins that branched throughout the sclera were another issue altogether, though indisputably related to the rest of his woes. Leon had had bloodshot eyes many times before, but nothing about the distressing network of miniscule green lines in the white of the eye suggested blood at all. They had to be veins—nothing else branched like that—but whatever awful, verdurous fluid filled them was certainly not blood. It was the same green ooze that leaked out of his tear duct, he was sure of it. Perhaps the nasty nodule he’d pushed back into the socket was the root of it all, some manner of infection that was producing all that goop. Leon wished he hadn’t touched it in the first place.
He got down from the sink and ran the faucet over a monogrammed hand towel until the water turned warm. With the damp towel he wiped his eye and face, cleaning away the fluid, but only clearing the way for more to seep out.
Leon dropped the towel into the marble sink basin and sat down on the toilet seat cover. He wanted to cry, but restrained himself. He knew it would only amount to more green gunk pouring out of his eye.
From the main room he heard Lisa cackling and something banging around. For all intents and purposes, Leon had left her in charge. But then she had been in charge from the start—the only thing she was missing was the power to control their subjects, which she now possessed. And all Leon had was some infectious slime leaking out of his face in the bathroom.
He daubed his infected eye with the corner of his sleeve as the house shook to life with blaring rock music. Startled, Leon jerked his head up as the machine gun drums and rapid, grinding guitars of some thunderous heavy metal track rattled the mirror and made the lid on the toilet tank clank against itself. His eye throbbed and the dull ache in his forehead fared no better for the roaring noise. Grinding his teeth and sucking in a deep breath through his nose, Leon threw the door open and stomped back out to the main room of the house. He felt the eye twitch painfully with each heavy step.
Before he could bellow a harsh demand that they turn the music down, Leon stopped dead in his tracks upon first sight of the peculiar proceedings taking place by the stairs.
Lisa was giggling madly at Angelica, who held a yellow plastic archery bow in her hands. They stood near the foot of the stairs, and across the room from them Frank leaned against the far wall. He was concentrating hard on balancing the red apple on top of his head. As far as Leon could tell, Frank was entirely oblivious to the steel shaft sticking out of the wall just inches from his left ear. He seemed equally unperturbed by the fresh one Angelica was setting up in her bow.
Lisa managed to reign in her hilarity enough to commence humming Rossini’s William Tell Overture. For his part, Leon could not understand why she would intone The Lone Ranger theme song at that particular moment, but he dismissed his confusion in light of the present danger.
“What are you doing?” Leon boomed over the harsh notes of the blasting heavy metal.
“Where one finds both a bow and an apple,” Lisa shouted back, “well, you figure it out.”
Angelica ran her fingers over the fletching on the arrow and fitted the nock against the bowstring. Curling her fingers tightly around the plastic grip, she set the head of the arrow on the anchor and pulled back the string as she took aim. Lisa’s lips spread apart, baring her teeth in a wild grin as she watched, breathless.
“Easy now, Frank,” s
he said. “Don’t let that apple fall.”
“Lisa,” Leon said gravely, “I don’t think this is such a great idea…”
“Good thing nobody here gives a good goddamn what you think,” she responded, keeping her eyes on Angelica. “Go ahead, Angelica. Let that fucker rip.”
Angelica pulled the bowstring until it would give no more, then released it and sent the arrow flying in the general direction of the apple on her husband’s head. The point punctured the wall with a dull thud about three inches northwest of the apple. A cloud of plaster dust rained down on Frank’s hair and shoulders, though he did not appear to notice. He continued to focus solely on keeping the apple balanced.
“Steeeeee-rike two!” Lisa crowed.
Angelica dipped her head, disappointed.
“You’ve got one more,” Lisa reminded her. “Make it count.”
Leon felt his right eye welling up again, coating the surface of his eye with a blinding green mist. He dug a knuckle into it as he turned to the sofa. There sat Jim and Martina, both stark naked.
“Jesus, Lisa—why haven’t they got any clothes on?”
“That’s old news,” she said. “Right now it’s archery time.”
“I wasn’t gone fifteen minutes…”
“Load her up,” Lisa instructed Angelica, ignoring Leon.
Angelica picked up her last arrow from the floor and fitted it into the bow. She puckered her brow and narrowed her eyes at the target, at the shiny red apple teetering precariously on the crown of Frank’s head. Lisa tittered. Leon dragged his knuckle over his beleaguered eye, and a fat dollop of green fluid spilled out on his cheek.
“Damn it,” he said, hurrying to wipe it away with his shirt.
Lisa said, “Steady now. Take good aim this time.”
“Where the hell did you find that stupid bow, anyway?” Leon asked as he finished up his wiping.
“Fire!” Lisa hollered, flailing her arm like some fifties greaser’s girl at the illegal racetrack.
Angelica released the arrow and it spun across the room in a blurred line for its quarry. Like its predecessors, the arrow missed the apple—instead, it struck Frank on the side of his nose, entering through flesh and cartilage and crushing through until only the last third of the shaft stuck out of his face. He emitted a guttural sound as his left eye bulged and twin dark red spouts gushed out of his nostrils.
“Holy shit,” Lisa shouted, laughing. “I think you pinned him to the wall.”
Angelica gazed lazily at the floor at her feet.
“No more arrows,” she mumbled forlornly.
“You’re out,” Lisa informed her.
“Shit!” Leon screamed. “SHIT!”
He threw his hands to his head and gaped at the gory tableau on the wall. Frank’s mouth hung open and his tongue lolled out. A thick, viscous rope of bloody saliva slid off the tongue and swung like a noose. Blood leaked out from the wound in the center of his face, replete with mucus from his ruptured sinus cavity and white flecks of cartilage and bone.
“She killed him! He’s dead!”
“He’s not dead,” Lisa said, annoyed.
She walked calmly over to Frank and slapped him on the chest. Frank jerked and made a low, keening sound.
“Nuhhhh.”
“See? I doubt it even touched his brain.”
“Touched his…? There is an arrow in his face!”
“And you’ve got snot coming out of your eye. Some days you get the bear, and some days the bear gets you, my friend.”
At that, Lisa flashed a toothy smile and gave Leon a wink.
“It’s not snot…,” Leon began, before a sharp, stinging pain exploded behind his mucky eye. He moaned and dropped his head into his hands.
“You’re overreacting,” Lisa said.
“No more arrows,” Angelica whined.
Leon snarled and bent over, squeezing his eyes shut against the light of the room. The pressure in his forehead had not ceased, but the intense pain behind his eye was many times greater, more agonizing. It was as though an invisible finger was pushing at it from the inside, trying to pop the eye out. He cautiously touched it, expecting to feel the skin of the eyelid, and he was surprised to find that he touched the surface of the eye instead. Though he could not see out of it, the eye was very much open. And the nub was back, thrusting out from within.
“Oh,” he moaned, “oh God.”
“What is it now?” Lisa asked with patent irritation.
“It hurts,” he said in a low, pained voice. He dropped to his knees, then sank to his rump. “It hurts so much.”
“You’re not the one with a steel shaft in your head.”
As she spoke, Lisa looked back at Frank, who remained affixed to the wall with the arrow protruding from his gushing, misshapen face. Pinkish-white tears oozed out of his bulging eye. Everyone’s got shit in their eyes around here, she thought. Frank gagged, a nauseatingly wet noise that made his sagging tongue wiggle.
Lisa shuddered and turned away.
On the floor, Leon gently rocked back and forth, cupping one hand over his blind, stinging eye. The heavy metal music raged on, waning and waxing in sweeping highs and lows that felt like blows to his skull.
“Turn it off,” he pleaded. “Jesus, just turn it off.”
A few seconds later, the music abruptly ceased, plunging the house into near dead silence. All Leon could hear now was the measured thumping inside his own skull and the occasional sucking sound emanating from Frank Shelton’s trembling, blood-drenched face. He held his position for a few minutes, controlling his breathing and waiting for the pain to subside, though it never did. At last he moved his hand from his face and slowly sat up.
“Lisa?”
He opened his good eye, just a crack, enough to let in the light and wait for his pupil to dilate. Once he was accustomed to the light, he twisted at the waist to look over the large room. Diagonally across from him, beside the stereo cabinet that towered near the sofa, Lisa stood stock-still, staring blankly ahead. She’d turned the music off, just as Leon had told her to.
Just as he’d commanded.
“Oh, Christ,” Leon said.
His eye twitched. Unconsciously, he jammed a probing finger at it and flinched upon feeling the long, fibrous nub jutting out from the corner. It was considerably longer than it had been before, when Leon accidentally pushed it back in. Now it reached past his nose. His chin wobbled and his bottom lip contracted with an involuntary quiver.
Everything was going to hell. Leon had ruined minds, he’d ruined lives. He’d ended lives. He frightened Ami away and now, in the throes of agony, Leon had inadvertently turned his awful talent on Lisa, too. He had no one. No place to go. And whatever was inside his head, the author of his pain and his power, was now endeavoring to get out.
I’m changing, he thought, though he could not understand what it meant. Maybe I won’t be Leon anymore. I’ll be me, but different. Not Leon.
“Leon is dying,” he said aloud.
The nub in his eye squirmed, as if in assent.
Leon laughed, a short snorting laugh through his nose. It forced fluid out from his right eye, which dribbled down his face and came off in drops from his chin. It was warm and gummy. He did not bother wiping it away this time.
Lisa remained beside the stereo, her spine as straight as the arrow obtruding from Frank Shelton’s face. All she was missing was the tall bearskin hat to be mistaken for a member of the Queen’s Guard, for nothing was apt to snap her out of her frozen state—not until Leon gave the word. So he rose and went to her, his legs rubbery and unsteady underneath him, and directed his clear left eye at her expressionless face.
“Turn it back on,” he said.
Lisa frowned.
“Turn it on your own damn self,” she snapped. “I’m not your bitch.”
The nub trembled and Leon cracked a small, canted grin. He exhaled a relieved sigh and nodded.
“God,” he said, awkwardly rising to his feet. H
e went over to the stereo and switched it on. “I thought…”
“You thought what?”
“Nothing.”
The music pounded as miserably as before, so he cranked the dial until a new radio station came in. It was a Top 40 station, and it was just wrapping up some syrupy pop song about love and loss and dancing the grief away. As the song faded out, the DJ announced another slew of equally syrupy songs, to be played following a sponsor’s message. The nub tickled the surface of Leon’s eye and he winced. His experiment was successful enough, he decided. No need to sit here and listen to this garbage.
But before he could issue another demand to Lisa, the aforementioned sponsor’s message stopped him cold.
“It’s that time again,” a serious, gravelly voice grimly pronounced. “It’s fire ant season.”
“There goes our barbeque!” a new voice complained. He was answered by a calm, feminine voice of reason: “We can still have the barbeque, honey—after we call The Pest Guys!”
Leon blanched as he lunged forward to switch off the stereo himself.
He’d heard the ad before—two dozen times, probably—and it always elicited the same grouchy reaction from him. Namely, the ad prickled Leon’s sense of outrage at all the people who so easily resorted to so-called pest control specialists at the first sight of any organism possessing too many appendages for their tastes, or too few. Found a spider? Kill everything. A centipede in your vegetable garden soil? Kill everything. A red ant making its way across your vast, artificially green yard? KILL EVERYTHING. That human impulse to carpet bomb a given species in response to one’s own irrational fear of arthropods rankled Leon to no end. Though this was not how he responded to The Pest Guys’ ubiquitous radio spot on this particular occasion. In fact, Leon’s addled brain stopped processing anything the people on the radio said the moment he heard the word ant.
There goes my brain! he thought with a cynical half-grin.
“No fucking wonder,” he said in a low whisper to himself. “Pablo’s little hitchhiker, the son of a bitch. Or the hitchhiker on the hitchhiker. Got in Pablo and everything else…”
He flecked the growth in the corner of his eye, which inflamed the discomfort and sent a sharp, stabbing pain straight back to his brain.
