by S. A. Hunt
“Cuts like birthday cake,” said Weaver, flashing Theresa an earnest smile. “I’ve been cooking for ages, and somehow I still don’t hold a candle to you.”
“You get a lot of practice, cookin’ for a long line of husbands.”
Cutty said in a wry tone, “I wonder why you outlived them.”
Theresa feigned hurt at her and went back to feeding herself dainty bites of pork chop with the darting, practiced movements of someone steeped in southern etiquette.
Roy interjected, “Nice dress you’re working on, Karen. Where’s this one going?”
The old hippie’s smile only broadened. “Oh, it’s going to a very lovely couple in New Hampshire. They’re planning on a November wedding. No expense was spared.”
“Too bad it won’t be a Halloween wedding. That’d be interesting.”
Cutty shook her head. “Ugh. I can’t think of anything cheesier than a bunch of youngsters decked out like extras from the Rocky Horror Picture Show or something, exchanging their vows in front of Elvis and a congregation of monsters.”
“A congregation of monsters!” said Weaver, bright-eyed and smiling. “What a wonderful thought.”
“Only you.” Cutty eyed the voluptuous Theresa. “And what are you doing tomorrow?”
The dark-eyed Mediterranean woman straightened in her seat. “I’ll have you know I’m volunteering at a soup kitchen tomorrow evening. The one in Blackfield. I’ll be there all evening.”
“You? Volunteering? At a soup kitchen?” Cutty huffed in disbelief and pushed her food around her plate. “The only thing I’ve ever seen you volunteer is your phone number.”
As sullen and stormy as Roy could get, he enjoyed watching the sisters banter. They weren’t biological sisters, or at least he didn’t think they were. Never talked about where they came from, other than to swap stories and anecdotes about long-dead husbands. They never mentioned children.
“So, it looks like we’ve got new neighbors. Down the hill, in Annabelle’s house.”
The other two looked up from their dinner. Weaver was the first to speak. “Oh yeah? Well, are they nice? I think that house deserves someone nice.”
“I ain’t talked to ’em,” offered Theresa. “I saw ’em when I was comin’ home from the grocery store earlier today. I was behind them on the road comin’ out of Blackfield. Looked like a man and a little boy. Colored folks. They was drivin’ one of them Japanese cars.”
Sometimes Weaver could be a little eerie, like a gold-miner who’d spent too much time out in the mountains by herself, but when she smiled, the old woman could light up a room. “Oh, that’s nice—this gray old neighborhood could use a splash of color, I think.”
At that, Cutty dipped her face into one hand and rubbed her forehead in exasperation.
“Say,” Weaver added, “why don’t we invite them up for dinner one night this week?”
“Like a welcome wagon,” said Theresa.
“Yeah!”
“We’ll have a barbecue out back and invite the whole neighborhood, and dance around the maypole and sing songs and tell stories,” Cutty growled flippantly. “It’ll be a regular bacchanalia.”
Picking up her goblet, Weaver swirled a splash of wine. “That’s the spirit! We’ll even have a bonfire!”
Cutty gave her a shrewd glare.
“You know how I feel about bonfires.”
“Oh, right.”
“Still,” said Theresa. “It would give us a chance to get to know them. After all, they’re going to be livin’ in Annabelle’s house. Like that bunch in Nebraska, they’re gonna be askin’ questions sooner or later. We might as well lay the groundwork. Establish a little rapport.”
“Redirect their curiosity. Yes.” Cutty forked a piece of pork chop into her mouth and chewed thoughtfully. “Yes, good idea. Curiosity killed the cat, after all.”
* * *
After dinner, Cutty stood at the island in the kitchen and cut an extra pork chop into pieces, then put it in a food processor and chopped it into a dry, grainy paste. Then she used the processor to chop up a cup of green beans, and then a cup of corn.
She assembled all this processed food on a plate with two steak fries and took it upstairs, along with a glass of tea. She put them both on the nightstand in her bedroom and pulled a rope set into the ceiling, hauling down a hinged staircase behind a hidden panel. She carried the plate and glass up into darkness.
A pullchain dangled against her face. Cutty pulled it and a soft yellow bulb came on, revealing an attic.
Years of accretion surrounded her, most of it dusted. Victorian-style lounges and parlor tables with baroque mahogany scrollwork and silk cushions. Steamer trunks full of foxed books, scrolls of paper, yellowed newspapers, movie posters plastered with the faces of long-dead actors. Bookcases with broken glass windows set into them. A clown marionette hung from the rafters, face forever frozen in a loopy laugh. A coin-operated weight scale from 1936. Shelves and shelves of bric-a-brac—toys, coins, bayonets, flintlock pistols.
Cutty walked a meandering path through the labyrinth to a door at the far end.
This she unlocked with a skeleton key.
Inside, a bed faced an old tube television in a dark room. The only window was a tall gothic rectangle looking out on the back garden, and it simmered with Tyrian purple light.
Playing on the TV was the History Channel, which she never failed to find ironic, considering who was watching it. The TV’s glow traced the contours of the room with a thin film of blue, and the shape under the thick quilt was only a suggestion in the soft light. The attic’s bare bulb filtered through the open door and illuminated the foot of the bed, bisecting the bedroom with dirty gold. The gray cat with the honey eyes lay curled up by the footboard.
The bedridden shape stirred in the shadows. “Evening, cookie.” Its genderless voice was a dry croak. Folded up in it was the hint of a sarcastic Brooklyn accent.
“Evening, Mother,” said Cutty.
“It is evening, right?”
The old woman slept more often than not these days, and often woke in the wee hours of the night. The bedroom was timeless; there was no clock here, digital or analog, which was how she liked it. Mother hated counting down the hours alone in her rare moments of wakefulness, and the constant ticking was maddening, a torturous metronome out of a Poe story.
“Yes,” Cutty said. “It is evening.”
She put the plate on a vanity and took a bendy straw out of the pocket of her sweater, slipping it into the tea. Sitting on the bed, she helped her mother sit up and drink some of it. The sound of her slurping was like the slow tearing of paper.
“When is it?”
Cutty traded the tea for the plate. “It’s October.”
She gathered up a spoonful of ground pork chop and fed it to the shape under the quilt. The spoon rattled against her mother’s twisted grimace as the meat slid inside. Mother mashed it against the roof of her mouth with her tongue and swallowed.
“What? Already?” wheezed the shape. “Shut the front door.”
“Time flies.”
“Time flies like an arrow, but bees like a fruitcake.”
These garbled aphorisms had long ago ceased to concern Cutty. Considering the crone’s state, it was a wonder she could even communicate. She eased some of the chopped green beans into her mother’s hard mouth as if she were feeding her through a kabuki mask.
Mother sighed. “Will you hand me the television remote controller thing, cookie?”
“Where is it?”
“I dropped it. It’s on the floor.”
The shape’s shriveled eyes followed Cutty as she put the plate aside and stooped to gather the remote. She put the batteries back in it, put the cover back on, and sought her mother’s hand.
“Here you are,” she said, putting it in the stiff claw.
Fingers curled around the remote with a subtle crackle. The TV changed channels at a stately pace as Cutty continued to feed her antediluvian mother pur�
�ed pork. The gray cat on the quilt looked up, yawned, stretched, went back to sleep.
“I think we’re getting close,” said Mother, when dinner was almost over. “Finally, finally, finally. After all these long years.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Maybe once it’s done you won’t be keeping me in the attic with the rest of the antiques.”
Cutty gave her a wry look.
“What?” asked the shape.
“You know you’re only up here to keep you safe. Safe from those nasty murdering men and their stolen heartstones.”
“Bah. You don’t care about me.”
“How can you say that?”
“You hardly ever come up here to visit with me anymore.” Her mother coughed softly into one dry fist. “You’re always downstairs with your friends and that weird Irishman who cuts the grass.”
“I’ve told you before, he’s not Irish.”
“He’s ginger as hell, he does all the lawn work, he drinks, he’s Irish until proven otherwise.”
“No habeas corpus for you, huh?”
Her mother chuckled, though her face didn’t move. “I’m corpse enough for both of us.”
Cutty spooned the last of the green beans into her mother’s mouth and set the plate aside. Reaching into one of the deep pockets of her wizard-robe cashmere sweater, she brought out an apple. It was the size of a softball and its skin was the liquid, recondite red of a ruby. Rare striations of peach and gold curved down its sides.
Her mother sighed with relief and contentment at the sight of it, like a castaway seeing civilization.
“Almost time for another harvest,” said Cutty, handing her the apple. “I think this weekend I’ll see to that. Roy and Theresa can help me carry them to the house.”
Mother clutched it in her bony hands and lifted it to her lips. Her mouth opened, the corners creasing and flaking, the joints of her jawbone cracking, and she pierced the fruit’s skin with her teeth. A soft groan of delighted pain escaped her throat as she bit into the fruit.
Instead of juice, vibrant arterial blood dribbled from its rind and ran down her arms, dotting the quilt.
As the rich carmine ran down her throat, Mother’s skin loosened, her fingers fulling and flushing. The corded veins snaking down her neck and across her shoulder plumped, throbbing, and fresh life trickled throughout her body.
“An apple a day,” she gurgled.
6
Fisher’s comic store wasn’t quite on the main drag through town, but it was tucked into a homey little street one block over, a narrow slice of old-fashioned Americana. Knickknack shops, drugstores, a pet shop, boutiques, barber shops, a bar, lawyers’ offices, a Goodwill, a soup kitchen. They passed a looming gray courthouse and a red-brick police station.
The Monte Carlo slid into an angled parking spot on the street next to eight or nine other vehicles and Joel got out, taking half the stack of boxes out, leaving the rest for Robin. “Did you say Miguel donates these pizzas?” she asked, picking up the boxes and pushing the car door shut with her foot.
“He sees it as grassroots advertising,” Joel said, suggestively tossing out a hip. “Give ’em a taste, they gonna come back for more.”
“Sound like the drugslinger method to me.” She felt for the curb with her toe and stepped up onto the sidewalk. The windows of the comic shop were painted with intricate images of Spider-Man and Batman in dynamic poses, Bats in his blue-and-gray Silver Age colors. Over their heads was FISHER’S HOBBY SHOP in flowing cursive.
A man came out of the comic book store and held the door open for them. “You trying to hurt me, man,” he told Joel, eyeing the pizza. He was brawny but slender, with a swimmer’s build and a round face.
“Fish, you the one doing it to yourself, don’t blame me. I eat like a human. You eat like a mule.”
The comic shop was dimly lit by bar fluorescents. Comics were only a fraction of the wares on the shelves—there were scores of rare, niche, and run-of-the-mill action figures still in their blister packs, board and card games, Halloween masks cast from various horror movies and superheroes, film props, video game keychains, themed candy. A life-size Xenomorph creature from the Alien movies lurked behind a shelf, motionlessly waiting to snag any customers unfortunate enough to step into range of its throat-jaws.
In the back of the store was an open area with booth seats and folding chairs. Arcing over the heads of two dozen people and a small squad of children was a cone of light casting the opening sequence of horror classic Evil Dead on a projection screen.
“Fish on that keto diet.” Joel put the pizza boxes on a booth table and squirted some sanitizer on his hands, wringing them. The kids immediately got up and came to the table, standing at his elbow like hungry hounds. “He try to tell me it’s good and good for ya, but I see that look in his eye when I bring in these pizzas.”
“What’s the keto diet?” asked Robin.
“Zero carbs. None. Zero, zip, zilch.” Joel made that zip-it gesture across his face and started putting pizza on paper plates, handing them out. “He don’t hardly even eat fruit. He’s always been a fitness nut, but this year he’s goin’ in like a muhfucka. I don’t know how he does it.” He gave one to Robin and she slid into the booth.
“What does he eat?” she asked, placing her camera against the wall to capture the table and its occupants. “Unicorn farts and sunshine?”
“Meat. Vegetables.” He wagged his hand. “Bacon all day every day. He cobble together regular food outta irregular bullshit. And the man fry everything in coconut oil. I tell you, one time he talked me into coming down to his place, and he made pizza with this dough made out of puréed cauliflower.”
“Eww.”
Fish, his girlfriend Marissa, and a tall white biker-looking guy named Kenway came to sit with her in the booth. Kenway’s Goliath frame was crammed into a black T-shirt and his massive beard made him look like a lumberjack having a mid-life crisis. A riot of color and lines ran down his huge arms in sleeves. Robin helped them destroy the pizza and an army of craft beers while they ignored the movie.
As the evening progressed, she became more and more glad she’d agreed to come. Several sequels into a Halloween marathon, she looked up from her beer and realized all the movie-watchers had disappeared. Michael Myers stared blankly out of the screen at a roomful of empty chairs.
“So what do you do?” Robin asked Marissa over the rim of her beer.
“I’m an ER doctor at the hospital here in town.” Marissa glanced at her boyfriend with a warm smile. “Fisher here is a computer nerd on top of his hobby shop. Data entry and programming.”
“Sawbones and computers. Nice. I don’t think I ever had the steel to get through medical school. Just takes something I ain’t got. And my Macbook is the extent of my technical wizardry.”
“I believe everybody thinks that until they’re on the other side, and then they’re like, Holy crap, I did it.”
“Basic Training was like that,” said Kenway. “My mom didn’t think I could get through it.” He laughed. “Something tells me she didn’t think much of me before I went in.”
“What?” asked Marissa. “I don’t believe that. You’re huge.”
“I’ve always been big, but it wasn’t always muscle. I was a tubby guy when I enlisted. I lost a lot of weight in Basic and OSUT. When I came home, my mom picked me up at the airport and asked me, ‘Where the hell did the rest of you go?’ Turns out six months doing calisthenics every day with no beer or hamburgers makes you drop about seventy pounds.”
He checked his watch. “Think it’s about time I head home,” he said, and Marissa let him out of the booth. Robin watched as he unfolded himself and stretched six feet of broad muscle.
She polished off her beer. “Got work in the morning?”
“No, ahh—I don’t really work,” Kenway said, jamming his fingers into his jeans pockets. “Well, I do—” He gestured with a big craggy hand. “—but it’s not really your usual nine-to-five.”
Marissa smiled. “Kenny is Blackfield’s local artiste.”
“Is that so?” Robin beamed. The smile felt alien and uncomfortable on her face. “What kind of art do you do? Underwater basket weaving? Chainsaw carvings?”
The hulking man laughed and folded his arms. “A little of this, a little of that.” It should have looked authoritative, menacing even, but somehow it seemed protective, bashful. “I did the big mural on the wall at the park, and the superheroes out there on the windows of this shop. I have vinyl equipment too, and I make leather stuff.”
“Renaissance man. Maybe I can commission you to paint my van.”
“That skeezy-ass candy van?” asked Joel.
Robin pursed her lips at him. “Yes, my skeezy-ass candy van. Needs a little style, maybe.”
Kenway rubbed the back of his neck. “I’ll take a look at it, then. What’d you have in mind?”
“Do you do a lot of vans?”
“A couple. Mostly pickup trucks and hot rods from out of town. Shit-ton of motorcycles for guys out of Atlanta and Chattanooga. Did a big-ass snake on a dude’s truck a few years ago. It was pretty freakin’ sick, took forever. Went all the way around the back from one door to the other.”
Robin tried to picture the van with a new paint job. “How do you feel about doing one of Joel over here, butt-naked, sprawled out on a bear-skin rug in front of a fireplace, with a rose in his mouth?”
The two men traded looks. Marissa burst out laughing. Joel shrugged as if to say, I’m game. “You just describing a Saturday night for me,” said the pizza chef, striking a pose.
“I’m pulling your leg, big guy,” Robin said, grinning. “No, it’d have to be something simple, with stylized artwork. Nothing cheesy.”
“Sure I could figure something out.”
“I think you should take the lady back over there and let her show you her skeezy-ass candy van,” suggested Joel, with a devilish smirk. “I live on the other side of town, and it’d be out of my way, so I can’t take her home, but your art studio is between here and the pizzeria.”