Dead Leaves, Dark Corners

by Nicki Huntsman Smith

  “I know what you’re thinking. I realize I don’t seek the degree of difficulty in my subjects for which you seem to strive. The politicians...the lawyers...the celebrities, I know they’re not your cup of tea. Too easy! But my word, those juvenile girls are so wickedly entertaining. They’re so easily persuaded to spew forth such appalling vocalizations, and the best part is the dreadful way they treat the people who love them the most. The parents just keep coming back for more abuse, all in the name of love. What a hoot!”

  “Yes, yes, I know. They’re wonderfully vile in many ways: the temper tantrums, the ingratitude, the disrespect. Most humans never even suspect us. Well, except for that one time...the one they made a movie about. That was some clumsy work. Who did that job, Bernard? Cecil?”

  “That was Eugene.”

  Both demons shook their heads in disgust and made disparaging clucks with their demon tongues.

  “Anyway, I admit, the degree of agony we’re able to inflict using the young females is intense, but my aspirations reach beyond a few wretched parents. Give me a devoted Peace Corps volunteer to corrupt, an idealistic seminary student to sway from the path of goodness. Let me take a crack at one of those Doctors Without Borders...see if I can persuade him to leave the steamy jungles of Guatemala for a lucrative plastic surgery practice in Beverly Hills. Now that’s a good time, I tell you. It’s immensely satisfying to convert a disgustingly virtuous human into a self-serving, unscrupulous creep. You should broaden your horizons, Stanley. You may find it so agreeable you’ll never want another teenage girl again.”

  “Unlikely, but I see your point.”

  Silence followed as the demons puffed on their cigars and idly contemplated malevolent thoughts.

  “I have enjoyed a challenge from time to time,” Stanley said, his tone petulant now. “Are you familiar with Sting, the singer who was popular a decade or two ago? Very spiritual, very ethical, vowed never to ‘sell out,’ as they call it. Did you see his Lexus commercial? That was my work.”

  “Yes, well,” Clarence sniffed, “Rock star. How difficult could that be? Do you remember that chap, Jeffrey Dahmer? The serial killer who ate his victims? Before I moved into him, he was a choir boy and a vegetarian.”

  “I never knew that was your work. Kudos, my friend.”

  “My closing rate is ninety-eight percent, and I only select projects with a difficulty rating of ‘extreme’ or higher, which puts me in the top three percentile for overall job performance. Not many can make that claim.” Seeing Stanley’s dismay made Clarence smile. Demons, after all, garner pleasure from all misery, not just from the human variety.

  “I suppose it’s time we were on our way.” Stanley avoided the subject of closing rates. His wasn’t terrible, but when coupled with the low difficulty of the jobs he selected, he barely achieved the top fifty percentile.

  “Yes, must be off. What is that old chestnut? Miles to go before I wake and so much woe and grief to make,” Clarence said with a sly grin.

  His colleague howled with fiendish laughter. The two demons glided through the front door and into the October night.

  “Where are you heading from here, Clarence, old boy?”

  “I’m off to Washington, D.C. next. I know, I know. The city is considered overworked in our profession. With my high standards, I find the pickings quite slim there, but I have an interesting host in mind.”

  “Well, I’m sure you have something wickedly clever planned,” Stanley said with only mild interest. He was a rather lazy demon and found the prospect of his colleague’s efforts a bit exhausting.

  “I wouldn’t want to give away too much, what with the scarcity of challenging projects these days, but I will say that in the very near future I intend to become intimate with a certain American president. It’s a high-profile job and my reputation is at stake, so I don’t plan on failing. Dare I even ask about your next project?”

  “I’m almost ashamed to admit it. I’m sorry, Clarence, but I just can’t resist those she-beasties,” Stanley cackled. “The last one inflicted so much pain on her parents. I’m dying to have another.”

  “If you still refuse to be challenged, at least evoke plenty of misery...those girls are certainly good for that. I’ll see you around, Stanley.”

  “Take care, Clarence. Have a lovely time in the Capital!”

  The two demons parted ways; one went east and the other west. In a few moments, no trace of their shadowy selves could be seen or sensed.

  Inside the recently vacated house, the human family slept fitfully. If they had been awake, they would have noticed a faint odor of cigar smoke and felt a vague sense of unease. But since they weren’t, they only moaned in their sleep and dreamed of unpleasant things.

  Pomp and Circumstance

  “Damn it, Thomas, I knew you weren’t paying attention. Now you’ve gone and overcooked ‘em.”

  “Shut your pie hole, Millie. I’ve done no such thing. Look.” The bowling ball of a man sliced into one of the two pieces of meat sizzling in the ancient cast iron skillet.

  “See? It’s still nice and pink. Now go put the salad and the spuds on the table. I’m half-starved!”

  Beads of perspiration glistened on the scalp that was visible through a few greasy, tenacious strands. The remaining hairs had held on for years, like die-hard Cubs fans in the last inning of a Yankees game.

  “Oh my, that does smell heavenly,” the woman said, annoyance replaced now with giddiness. Her upturned nose hovered over the frying pan as she closed her eyes in olfactory ecstasy.

  Thomas, her husband of seventeen years, watched with a mixture of amusement and disgust. Millie had never been a looker, but now that she had maxed out the Sunbeam in the bathroom (the needle only went to three hundred), he no longer asked her for sex. Fortunately for them both, they had another interest they could share: a passion for food, and the more exotic, the better.

  “Get your snout out of there and do what I said. I’m pulling these off now.”

  Millie didn’t exactly scurry out of the small kitchen with the peeling daisy wallpaper and the perpetual stink of fried food – her scurrying days were a hundred and fifty pounds ago – but she did make haste. Nothing got the woman moving quicker than their special Friday night dinners.

  He looked forward to them too. There was something to be said for pomp and circumstance, as he called the events when they pulled out Millie’s Old Albert Country Rose china and ate in the dining room, unlike the other six nights of the week when they had dinner in their recliners watching Wheel of Fortune, loaded melamine plates balancing on beefy laps. On Fridays, they would fire up the Kenwood turntable and listen to Queen and Kansas on vinyl – as God intended – streaming through two circa 1980 Pioneer floor speakers. Thomas swore today’s music systems couldn’t hold a candle to his HPM-900s, and Millie admitted they did sound better than the radio in her Prius.

  She lugged the salad bowl and mashed potatoes past the twin 15-cubic-foot Whirlpool chest freezers that stood sentinel against a wall in the kitchen. They had a smaller GE in the garage where they kept the more mundane beef and chicken.

  For tonight’s feast, Thomas had foraged in the freezer on the right, the one with the scotch-taped, hand-printed note that read: HERE THERE BE DRAGONS! It was a private joke, a snickering elbow-to-the-stomach of the freezer beside it whose label read: EMU, KANGAROO FROM BONNAROO, WYOMING CARIBOU, FREE-RANGE ALLIGATOR (haha), and EAST TX WILD BOAR.

  No humdrum caribou for them tonight, he thought, as he carried the foil-covered platter into the dining room.

  Millie was seated with her grandmother’s linen napkin draped over her ample bosom. Thomas tucked a matching napkin into the front of his flannel shirt, which strained to cover an enormous belly – she liked to ask him when the triplets were due, as if she had any room to criticize – and sat down opposite his wife.

  “Would you like to say grace?” she asked with a simpering smile, chocolate brown eyes twinkling in the candlelight.

>   Millie had gone all out with the candles and the Irish lace tablecloth. Thomas had the disconcerting thought that she might be trying to get him into the sack, then dismissed it. After the meal, they would both be too full to think about rekindling their sex life.

  “Very funny. No, you go right ahead.”

  “God is great, God is good, let us thank him for this food. Amen!” she giggled, then stabbed a hunk of perfectly browned meat from the platter and transferred it to her plate.

  Watching her wield the large serving fork made him think of Ursula the Sea Witch brandishing a trident at The Little Mermaid. He stifled a smirk.

  “Oh-my-god,” she moaned. “You’ve outdone yourself. The seasoning is perfect. What did you use?”

  “I tried some of that Cavender’s Greek Spice that I picked up at the Publix. Plus a little garlic powder and some fresh-ground pepper. I think I hit a home run!”

  “Well, it’s just about the tenderest piece of meat I’ve ever had in my life. Did you marinate it?”

  Thomas shook his balding head, no longer perspiring now that he was out of the hot kitchen.

  “Didn’t need to. It’s like veal, you know?” he said with a wink.

  Millie snickered. Freddie Mercury waxed philosophically on fat-bottomed girls, while Pat Sajak and Vanna White flitted across the television in the living room, muted so as not to compete with Freddie.

  ***

  Three blocks away, a man reached into a box of copy paper, removed the top sheet, and stapled it to a telephone pole. His anguish could be seen even in the fading sunlight. It was etched into the lines between the frowning brows and charcoaled in half-moons under his eyes.

  Ten minutes later all the telephone poles on the block displayed newly-stapled flyers.

  Twenty minutes later the same was true for the telephone poles on the next block over.

  Thirty minutes later the man was shuffling along a cracked sidewalk a half-mile from home, when something caught his eye.

  The sun was a glowing half-melon on the western horizon, throwing the cirrus clouds into a frenzy of peach-colored cotton candy. There was just enough daylight to see a red dog collar poking out from under the bottom of a series of wooden steps which led to the front porch of a nondescript house.

  It was a miracle he’d seen it. Just a small segment of cherry-colored leather showed. It might have been a piece of plastic or an old watch band.

  But it wasn’t. It was a dog collar.

  His dog’s collar, he realized the next moment when he held it in a trembling hand and stared at the attached tag. “Milo” and a phone number were engraved on the slightly tarnished metal. His phone number.

  He could hear music coming from the house. Dust in the Wind was a favorite of his father’s. He had listened to the album countless times growing up.

  He stood there for a moment holding the collar, then climbed the steps and knocked on the front door. He could still hear the music playing inside, but no one answered. He knocked again and waited. Still no answer. He turned, headed back down the steps, and then rounded the corner of the house. The side door was unlocked. It led to a tidy one-car garage furnished with a late-model Prius, tools, a lawn mower, and a small freezer.

  The door leading into the house was also unlocked.

  The kitchen smelled of grease and garlic and something else. Tangy bottom notes he couldn’t identify.

  He heard people in the next room, talking over the loud music which had covered the sound of his entrance.

  The sad eyes glanced around the room at the outdated wallpaper, slid over the avocado-colored appliances, then rested on two white enameled rectangular boxes.

  Freezers, larger than the one in the garage. There were notes taped to them. He scanned the words on both, then lifted the lid of the one that read HERE THERE BE DRAGONS!

  “Oh my lord!” Millie squealed at the man who stood in her dining room. In one hand the stranger held a package from the HERE THERE BE DRAGONS freezer. On the butcher’s paper hand-printed in neat letters: “Milo, Welsh Corgi.” In the other hand he held Thomas’s enormous carving knife, freshly sharpened for tonight’s feast.

  Ancestry

  “Six to eight weeks. That’s what it says on the package.”

  The man who spoke was handsome in the way average-looking, middle-aged men just beginning to gray are handsome, even if they’re carrying a few extra pounds around the middle. There’s something about the ‘wisdom highlights,’ (Michael’s term) that added to a man’s appeal, or perhaps his mystique; made him appear wiser than he might actually be.

  In Michael’s case, however, there was an impressive intellect solidly backing the claim made by the graying hair. He was smart, which was the quality Andrea loved most about him, although his sense of humor came in at a close second. He could fix just about anything that broke and was willing to solve a myriad of problems, from computer viruses on her Dell desktop to training their neighbor’s pit bull to walk on a leash like the perfect gentleman canine.

  “Here’s your test tube,” Andrea said. “Work up a good spit and fill it up to the black line. That’s it. Keep going, almost there.”

  The DNA kits ordered through an ancestry website had been Andrea’s idea. She had been intrigued by the notion of discovering from what parts of the world her people had originated. She had always had a keen interest in Ireland and Scotland, and it might not be a coincidence that her dark hair and blue eyes were also physical traits of those pagan tribes. Perhaps in one of her past lives, she had been a druid, or a chieftain. Maybe she was the Celtic queen Boudicca, reincarnated. Whatever the tests revealed, it would be fascinating.

  Michael had been less enthusiastic about the idea, which was unusual for him. He encouraged and supported her ‘fringe’ interests, whether it was amateur ghost-hunting in their local cemeteries, or learning to read Tarot cards. His activities were more mainstream: woodworking and craft beer brewing. She suspected he enjoyed these uncomplicated hobbies due to the mental drain of his job at Lockheed Martin. Building guided missile systems required intense concentration, and he was always exhausted when he came home from work. She adored her husband – a real-life rocket scientist – as much now as she did seven years ago when they were first married. He was remarkable. She just hoped he wouldn’t lose all that distinguished hair, because the skull to which it clung had the oddest of shapes. You couldn’t tell it because of the hair, but when she pressed her fingers along the pronounced ridge that ran from front hairline to back hairline, it still freaked her out a little, even after all these years.

  “Are you worried the lab will discover you have mutant DNA?” she said with a grin.

  “Well, it’s been the million-dollar question since you first discovered what lurks beneath all this follicular splendor.”

  “Your sagittal crest is just a chromosomal throwback to your Great Ape ancestors. You’re not Professor X.”

  “You’d prefer I was bestial rather than mutant?”

  “You were a beast last night.”

  “I didn’t hear you complaining.”

  “Why would I? I’m an animal lover.”

  He smiled, spat once more into the plastic vial, pressed the lid on, and handed it to her. By then his smile had faded, and frown lines appeared between his eyebrows.

  She hated when that happened.

  “What’s wrong, Michael? Is it one of your headaches coming on?”

  “No, I just have reservations about this. We have no idea what happens to our...samples...once they arrive at that pseudo lab. How accurate are the tests? How reliable are the results? What do they do with the information? These people are keeping a database of intimate details of all the suckers who send in their spit. Do they sell our email addresses to online merchants? Will we start getting spam from lederhosen companies because forty-seven percent of our ancestors were from Bavaria?”

  She laughed, relieved. It wasn’t the onset of a migraine; his were legendary in their duration and intensity.r />
  “No. The company said they don’t sell their customer list. They’re charging plenty for the test, plus they try to get you to sign up for their genealogy services. I think that’s how they make their money.”

  “I’m not interested in connecting with my fourth cousins.”

  “I’m not either. I just want to know more about my ancestral roots. Don’t you?”

  “Not especially. What if they tell me I’m the great great great great grandson of Vlad the Impaler?”

  “You’d need to add a few more greats to that, if so. He lived in the fifteenth century.”

  “You’re such a weirdo for knowing that.”

  “No, I’m a history teacher. I should know things like that.”

  “Really? Where was Betsy Ross born?”

  She punched his arm. “You know American history isn’t my forte.”

  “Yes, you love all that creepy stuff. I promise I won’t tell the school board.”

  “That would be in your best interest. I don’t make much money, but you’d have to cut back on your bacon addiction if I lost my job.”

  He didn’t smile. “I just have a bad feeling about this, honey. What if they discover details about us? Information we’re better off not having...out there.”

  She blinked. “Like what? Michael, you’re not making any sense. This is just a genetic ancestry analysis. What are you worried about?”

  He shrugged.

  “You’re being ridiculous. I’m going to run this package down to the post office. The sooner we mail them off, the sooner all mysteries will be resolved.”

  Four Weeks Later

  “Andrea, do you recognize that black car in the cul-de-sac?” Michael asked, standing at the front window of their home, peering through the plantation shutters. “It’s just idling. Not parking, not leaving.”