by Jim Johanson
Billy walked into the kitchen shyly like a pet adjusting to a new home. Consolo grabbed two glasses from above the sink, set them on the counter and emptied the remainder of the bottle into them, allowing the second glass to overflow onto the counter for the sake of finishing the bottle. He paused momentarily, eyeing the spot of gin on the counter. The spill on the counter reminded him of his deceased wife. Consolo looked up from the spill, his eyes pointed up and out, looking through the sliding-glass doors leading out to the pond in his backyard. His eyes took on a sickened glaze like that of a man who had just vomited profusely. He clamped his eyelids shut, then reached to grab a dirty dishrag to soak up the spot of gin on the counter.
Consolo pressed the dishtowel down into the counter, the gin soaking into it. He lifted the rag, a curious expression on his face. He breathed out then held the rag over his face, breathing deep the intense vapors of gin.
Billy kicked the side of the side of the breakfast bar. Consolo turned his head to see Billy gawking at him like a confused animal. Consolo removed the rag from his face and spit onto the floor.
"What are you doing standing there looking at me? Stop it. Sit down."
Consolo pointed at the closest bar stool with the index finger leading from his gray hair covered, half-fat, half-muscular arms. Despite being an athlete in his youth, years of over-eating had covered Consolo's strong muscle with layers of pudge, and his arms has grown thick like the rest of him.
Billy complied. He moved like an old, sick, abused dog, instinctively obeying commands as best as he could understand them to avoid punishment.
Once Billy sat firmly in the stool, Consolo seemed to lose track of him, as though he had disappeared once he had followed orders. He was in his place, contained. Objects being moved out of place had always been a barrier to thought for Consolo. It was necessary first for everything to be correct in order for him to think. He had trained his wife slowly over years exactly how to place all of the objects in the house, when to do the dishes, when to wash the clothes, how the furniture needed to be arranged and cleaned. His loss of her became a loss of control over his world, and he’d become vexed at his standards not automatically being held-up.
Without his wife, Consolo’s world had dissolved into a chaotic mess of unpredictability and upheaval. Billy, the brain-damaged latchkey child, would be her surrogate, an even more willing puppet than she had been. No matter how much influence Consolo ever had over his wife, she'd had a brain and a propensity for the occasional rebellion. Billy, Consolo thought, no longer had that ability, excised from him by his own carelessness.
With the power disconnected, Consolo could no longer store food in the fridge. He’d taken to firing his rifle at geese and ducks that gathered in the pond in his yard, then salting and curing the meat. With total disregard for sanitation, Consolo striped the birds of their meat in his bedroom, finding it comfortable to do so while seated at the edge of his bed. Feathers, rotted entrails and bones of the animals littered the carpet of the bedroom. Consolo walked over the remains so much in his heavy boots that the smashed remains had practically merged with the carpet, ground down into the fibers.
He kept a can of powder bleach on the dresser, occasionally sprinkling it over the carpet to control the smell, though for the most part he’d become so acclimated to the stench that he barely noticed it anymore.
Before learning to cure his food with salt, Consolo tried to store several pounds of meat in the refrigerator with the power disconnected. After finding the meat crawling with maggots, he closed the refrigerator door and never opened it again.
Behind Billy, placed carefully in a rocking chair in the corner of the living room, was a human sized “doll”, a figure wrapped in heavy fabric, its face that of an animal with an anthropomorphic build. It had a heaviness to it, so much that it bent the chair backward as though a person were seated in it. The general peculiarity of the doll leant credibility to the notion that there was more to it than just plush fabric and stitching.
"Billy, I have an assignment for you. A purpose. Any man needs a purpose. You want to be a man, like me? Did your father teach you how to be a man? Look up at me."
Billy stared blankly forward, his eyes twitching and fixated on a brown spot on the wallpaper behind Consolo.
"LOOK UP AT ME!"
Consolo’s stale breath shot from his mouth like exhaust from a worn-out muffler.
Billy's frame jolted backward, his eyes focused on Consolo's mouth. Consolo’s big lips looked like red slugs glued to his face.
"Good boy."
He handed Billy a glass of gin.
Chapter 10
Mary had gone back into the kitchen and lost herself completely somewhere between her eyes and the spot where her gaze met a crack in the wood of the kitchen table, trapped in a dysphoric meditation. The house was eerily silent. Mother hadn’t stirred in quite some time. Perhaps she had finally forsaken Mary and given up on her. Mary knew that one day her mother would forever cease her bellowing, but the thought instilled in Mary equal parts fear and confusion. She questioned herself as a daughter. Was she so horrible, so vindictive that she could delight in her mother's absence? In her death?
Across from Mary, on the other side of the kitchen was the door to the cellar. Memories of her father and mother fighting. Images of her father opening the cellar door and demanding that she and Billy go into the basement so that he could “speak” to her mother to “talk things out”.
The thoughts haunted Mary for quite some time until she managed to make them dissolve somewhere into the woodgrain patterns of the table. Everything dissipated. She was as nothing, living in a nothing house with no one, just herself and the table, and in that emptiness she found solace. In her mental melding with the table, she too became an inanimate object, save for the functions of her heart and the quiet breath that puffed listlessly from her nose.
Mary realized then that she could smell the dank, squalid air of the basement rising up from below through the cracks of the cellar door. It made the air impure, unbreathable, a punishing force for her senses. The smell hadn’t changed in ten years. Even when she left the kitchen, it followed her in her memories.
Darkness had fallen onto the Greer household. The sun was below the horizon and there was nothing but still, silent blackness outside the shuttered windows. This was the odd period of quiet in-between the time that the birds stop chirping and the coyotes begin howling.
Mary’s psychological entwinement with the table, a place of temporary peace on an otherwise uneventful Friday evening, was broken when her brother burst through the backdoor. The wooden frame of the screen door caught against the springs and slammed back shut the door against the interior frame behind him as he entered.
Mary became visibly startled but did not rise from the table. She let her soft, pale, right arm drop to the table as she turned her head toward the commotion. Billy nearly fell to the floor but braced himself against the doorway separating the kitchen from the tiny adjacent mudroom.
Billy's eyes darted all around the room, seeking clarity in a place normally well known to him. Mary could smell the gin on Billy's breath from five feet away. She’d not yet forgotten her last encounter with Billy in his room. Stuttering, she attempted to greet him. A paralyzing fear squeezed her throat and stuck to her tongue like steel bolts run through a meat grinder.
"B--Bill-- ly," she stammered. "Are you okay? It's... it's late, where are you, I mean... where have..."
Her voice trailed off as she began to lose hope that he would even understand what she was asking.
"Where... where did you go? So late?"
Billy coughed and let his chin droop to his chest, pointing his face at the floor. A faint memory of crawling on the kitchen floor as a child fluttered into his confused mind. He remembered his mother and father seated at the table, dolling out globs of mashed potatoes and corn with big wooden spoons. Father was long gone now, and Mother seemed not far behind. There was no guiding light, no pa
rental figure to tell him to "do" or "do not", or to say that "this is good" or "that is bad." Good Billy. Bad Billy. It was all the same. The only driving forces were chaos and survival.
Billy remained mute. Slowly he drew his gaze upward from the floor to face Mary. A look of grim abashment spread across her face. She seemed to adopt a facial expression of equals parts empathy and terror. In Billy's eyes, Mary seemed so far away, like a distorted caricature, a cartoon character viewed through a fisheye lens.
Mary stood up from the table, not sure whether to go and hide in her room or to make sure that Billy didn't fall over and hurt himself. Suddenly Billy lurched forward. Vomit exploded from his mouth. He dropped to his knees with a resounding thud against the tile floor. Twice more in rapid succession a mash of foul-smelling fluids and alcohol-soaked, partially digested food erupted from his mouth.
Hesitantly, Mary moved toward Billy, her sisterly instincts pushing her toward trying to help her brother. She noticed another peculiar smell about him, at first overshadowed by the alcohol. His clothes had mud caked onto them, and from the mud a strange and unfamiliar stench emanated. Mary could not discern the nature of it, but it made her entirely uncomfortable in an unearthly way, as if to smell something that was threatening by nature. Despite the ferocity of the stench, she could not place it. It was enough to keep her at arm's length away from Billy, but the gap between them was about to close.
Billy rose up to his feet and fell forward onto Mary, using her as a support. Mary nearly buckled under his weight. She bent her knees and pushed against him to lift him upward. He tightened his grip around her in response, not wanting to let go.
“Billy, you’re hurting me…”
He squeezed tighter, pressing his full body weight into her.
“Billy stop it!”
Mary’s pulse increased with a wave of distressed adrenaline. She mustered all of her strength to shove him backward. His hands came off her as he tumbled back. He hit his head and neck against the doorframe then slumped down to the floor. Cradling his head in his hands, he started kicking his legs against the floor spasmodically.
Backing away, Mary placed herself on the opposite side of the kitchen table, ready to run at any moment, not knowing what to expect from Billy. He turned his head and puked onto the floor. Afterward he stopped kicking his feet, stood up awkwardly and stumbled, just barely keeping his balance enough to prevent himself from falling.
Visually, Billy seemed to have lost track of Mary. He looked down at the floor, then up at the ceiling, rubbed his hands across his face and through his hair, bent and contorted his body into strange angles, then turned his back to Mary, facing the doorway. He took off in a sudden sprint, tearing straight through the screen of the back door. Mary’s mouth hung ajar as she watched Billy fall down the back stairs. Unbothered, he picked himself up and ran off. His shadow danced across the moonlit grass until he and it were swallowed up by the cavernous mouth of the woods.
Mary stepped slowly over to the screen door, holding her breath to keep herself from hyperventilating. Cold sweat formed on the back of her neck.
Just get to the doorway. Shut the inside door. Turn the lock.
She repeated those words in her head like a mantra as she crept closer. Through the torn screen, she could see only blackness and a faint hint of moonlight.
Get to the door. Shut the door. Turn the lock.
As Mary moved into the mudroom, she lifted up her right hand. It looked paler than normal, covered in goosebumps, trembling. She closed her hand into a fist to steady it, clenched and unclenched it. A cold wind blew in through the massive hole that Billy had torn through the screen. If he'd moved any less gracefully he might have torn the entire door off the hinges.
After what felt like an eternity, Mary managed to put her hand around the edge of the wooden interior door. She shoved it closed, then braced her shoulder against the door and turned the lock on the knob, finally exhaling and gasping for breath as she did so. She allowed herself to slide down to the floor, back pushed up against the door. A splinter from the old wooden door slid into the skin of her back. She didn’t feel it.
Taking a few slow, deep breaths, she began to calm herself, until realizing that the door to the garage was still unlocked. Up in a hurry, she twisted her ankle as she rose to her feet. Pain shot through her leg, but she ignored it as she drove herself back into the kitchen. The bolt in the lock snapped closed as she turned the handle. Again trying to calm herself, she ran her hands through her hair, sweeping a few light auburn tufts out of her strained face.
Mary wanted to collapse in bed, or to be somewhere, anywhere else. Anywhere with safety, with serenity, with--
Mary stopped herself as she approached the massive puddle of vomit on the floor. She blinked repeatedly, not trusting her own eyes at what she saw at the center of the puddle. Covering her mouth to avoid breathing in the awful stench, she leaned closer to get a better look. She nearly vomited herself when she got close enough to confirm what she feared to admit she’d seen.
At the center of the revolting pile of regurgitated stomach contents lay the tip of a ghostly-white, shriveled finger, the fingernail still intact. It was severed at the knuckle where it would have connected to the rest of a person.
The scene was so shocking that it took a moment for Mary to piece it together.
Finger on the floor. Billy vomiting. Billy vomited... Billy ate... Bite ate part of a finger.
The sense of safety that locking the doors had provided Mary had been shattered. She felt a terrible lump in her throat. She tried to swallow, but the lump would not be moved.
With a quick turn, she grabbed the truck keys off the hook in the mudroom, slipped on her shoes, and dashed out into the garage. Hopping into the family truck, she started the engine and sped off toward Jackie's house.
Mary’s brain functioned on autopilot during the drive, adrenaline propelling her. Jackie's driveway was hard to spot from the road, but she’d been there so many times that she could have driven there blindfolded if she needed. She turned into Mary’s driveway, her headlights parting the rows of pine trees.
The truck cabin bounced up and down uncomfortably as Mary sped down the long dirt path leading to the house. Scattered gravel crackled loudly underneath the truck's tires. Someone inside must have heard the truck pulling in, or seen the headlights when they draped the front windows in light. By the time Mary exited the vehicle and started toward the house, a light had flicked on indoors.
Jackie pulled back the curtains in the window by the door at nearly the same time that Mary knocked. Jackie jumped backward, startled by the sudden noise. Quickly realizing that it was Mary standing on the doorstep, she unlocked the door. Mary knocked repeatedly even as the door opened. She stepped inside before Jackie even had a chance to greet her.
"Mary, what--- are you okay?"
Mary threw her arms around Jackie.
"Shut the door, shut the door," repeated Mary.
"What happened?"
Jackie managed to kick the door shut with her foot, Mary's arms still wrapped tightly around her.
Chapter 11
Billy returned home before midnight to find the back door locked. After moving around to the garage to see that the truck was gone, he found entry into the house through the interior garage door. In such a hurry, Mary had forgotten to relock it when she left.
The smell of vomit still hung thick in the air of the kitchen. Billy decided to clean it up. He couldn’t remember where Mary kept the cleaning supplies. While searching, he discovered a bottle of bleach underneath the sink.
Rather than cleaning up the mess properly, Billy simply dumped the bucket of bleach onto the soiled areas of carpet. He let the bottle empty then dropped it to the floor. The finger was still in the center of the debris. Without thinking much of it, Billy took the finger to the sink and let it fall into the garbage disposal as though it were merely a discarded piece of food. He turned on the faucet, flipped the switch for the garba
ge disposal, and considered the task completed.
The noise of the disposal was loud enough to wake mother. Billy heard her hoarse voice ring out from across the house. She called out repeatedly, asking who was home. Billy watched the last of the water from the faucet flow downward into the disposal. After a moment of contemplation, Billy turned his attention toward the wooden block by the sink that held a series of kitchen knives. Once razor sharp, the knives had dulled progressively over the years. Billy pulled a rarely used, serrated bread knife with a pointed tip from the block.
"Billy, my sweet child, is that you? I can tell. I know my boy."
Billy stared at his reflection in the knife. He dragged the tip of his pinky finger across the blade until blood seeped from his finger from a freshly made cut. His blood traveled down the edge of the knife and dripped onto the kitchen counter.
Billy walked to the bathroom to get a Band-Aid for his finger, but he took the knife with him, holding it softly in his hand like the leash of a puppy.
"Billy, that's you, isn't it? I sense the purity in your soul. Don't walk by like I don’t exist, come see your mother."
Billy paused. He turned the knife upward so that the blade was behind his arm, hidden from view. Breathing slowly, he stepped into his mother's room, pressing the door open with his shoulder as he entered.
"There, there you are, my child. My good child. My success."
The room was scarcely lit save for the light from a plastic lamp made in the image of the Virgin Mary. The colored plastic had faded over the years, and the lamp now had the appearance of an item that no one buys at a garage sale but the owner refuses to discard, put on sale again and again, year after year.
"I was a good mother to you, was I not? I'm so sorry that I failed your sister, so warped in her perversion, hands of boys... hands of men, taken her flesh."
Billy seemed more interested in the light of the lamp than he was in anything that his mother was saying. It cast strange shadows on the bed and walls.