Hollow Chest

by Brita Sandstrom

  And then a thick brick of letters.

  Charlie’s letters? Mum’s? What else would he keep so close to him, what else would he never give up? Warmth flared bright as a match tip in his chest as he grabbed the letters, and died just as quickly as he looked at the address in confusion.

  To: Charlie Merriweather

  He flipped through the envelopes; all of them were addressed to Charlie. But Charlie had all the letters Theo had sent him; he would have noticed if Theo had taken them back. Confused, he opened the first one—it wasn’t sealed; Theo would never know.

  Dear Charlie,

  A comprehensive but incomplete list of things I miss:

  You

  Mum

  Grandpa Fitz

  your cat Biscuits

  actual biscuits

  my bed

  any bed

  normal tea

  normal anything

  eggs

  knowing what day it is

  dry socks

  Dad

  Theo

  Dear Charlie,

  I tried to imagine what it will be like when this is over, and I couldn’t. I couldn’t picture it. All I could think of was you turning eighteen and being called up into service, like me. But I couldn’t picture you at eighteen, so I just imagined you with a coat with sleeves that came down past your hands onto the floor, and the gun was so much bigger than you and the helmet kept falling down over your eyes.

  Theo

  Dear Charlie,

  I had a dream last night that I came home, but I was sick, I was covered in black mold, and when Mum went to hug me the mold spread all over her and she dissolved. In the dream you swept up the mold with a broom and put it in the wastebasket. In the dream I was still reaching for you, even though I knew it would make you dissolve, too. In the dream I told you to run away from me, but you wouldn’t.

  You wouldn’t, would you?

  Theo

  Dear Theo, Love Charlie.

  Wait, that’s not right.

  Dear Theo loves Charlie.

  Theo loves Charlie, who is dear.

  Who is Theo, dear?

  Charlie.

  That’s not right.

  Dear Charlie,

  I’m so lonely I could scream. I’m so lonely I do scream. You can scream sometimes and people don’t even look at you, they just keep going as if screaming is a normal thing to do. How can they not look? Do they not see me? Do they not hear me?

  Sometimes I think that I’m a ghost, that I died and just didn’t notice, that I died with everyone else last month. I think I died with Johnny and Philip and Stephen and Pip. I keep having dreams where I’m a ghost and no one can see me but I can’t leave and I wake up and I don’t know if I actually did wake up.

  I think that I’m a ghost.

  Theo

  Dear Charlie,

  Disregard last letter. Ghosts can’t hurt this much.

  Theo

  Dear Charlie,

  Did Grandpa Fitz ever tell you how he lost his arm? He told me, when I was your age. He said that he was crawling on his belly towards someone, another soldier, his friend, and he was trying to pull his friend out from under something when a shell landed and that he didn’t even notice his arm was gone at first because his friend was gone, too. Both of them, the friend and arm, just gone, as if they never were.

  I made friends here, does that surprise you? In a place like this? It probably doesn’t seem strange to you, you make friends so easily, you’re so good at that, you see someone and you see everything in them worth liking. I made friends, Johnny and Stephen, Philip and Pip (not to be confused), and because I was their friend, they trusted me. They trusted me to get them across the field and if we could get across the field, then maybe we could go home, one day even if it wasn’t that day. I made friends, and I made them trust me, and I made a mistake and now they’re dead. Gone, like they were never there.

  Grandpa Fitz told me he didn’t regret losing the arm, because it meant that he was reaching for someone. He told me that reaching out is always worth it.

  But Charlie. I think he lied to me.

  My leg hurts. All of it hurts.

  I don’t know if it was worth it.

  Theo

  Dear Charlie,

  I want you to understand why I did it, but I hope you never do.

  Theo

  Charlie couldn’t breathe right. His pulse was hammering in his chest like he was underwater and needed to come up for air.

  I want you to understand why I did it.

  Dishonor was right. He’d been right the whole time. Theo had let the wolves eat his heart and then he had forgotten, in that slippery, magic way of theirs. Something had happened to him, had changed something inside him in a way Charlie simply could not know. And it was so bad he had been willing to let war wolves eat his heart out of his chest rather than feel it anymore.

  Charlie couldn’t stand it, the thought of it, the idea, the knowledge, it was intolerable, unbearable. Anger tried to bloom inside him, a knife-edged flower—after everything I’ve done for you, for our family, you just gave up, you gave up before you even got here, you said you’d always find me, you promised me you’d always find me, but you left, you left me, you let them take you away—but it struggled and shuddered and died. He just felt numb.

  With clumsy fingers, Charlie began stuffing letters into his pocket.

  “Mmmm, that’s it,” Anguish said, licking his chops. “You brought the good stuff.”

  Drool pooled under his tongue and spilled out on the ground in spatters. He let his mouth fall open wide, and then his jaw seemed almost to unhinge, like a snake’s mouth, his dark red tongue lolling loosely in invitation.

  The space between Charlie’s fingers and that mouth seemed so far as he stretched out his hand, the letter crumpling with the force of keeping himself from shaking. Each fang lining Anguish’s jaws seemed to lengthen as Charlie laid the last letter on the wet ribbon of tongue.

  The paper began to dissolve like sugar, even before Anguish’s jaws closed with luxuriating slowness.

  “The good stuff,” Anguish said with a wet grin. “But not enough.”

  “Heh heh, heh heh.” Agony’s voice seemed to drip down Charlie’s neck like a smear of oil.

  “I gave you what you asked for,” Charlie said, his voice croaking in the quiet street.

  “But not enough. Never enough.”

  Charlie reached into his pocket for those other letters that Theo had kept where his heart should be, the ones Anguish would eat like crisps or candy floss. Like they were nothing.

  In the dream I told you to run away from me, but you wouldn’t.

  Charlie closed his searching fingers into a fist. No.

  You wouldn’t, would you?

  No. They didn’t get to have those. They didn’t get to have more of Theo, they didn’t get one more morsel of the memory of his brave, battered heart.

  I want you to understand why I did it.

  “Something for something,” Charlie said. Agony and Anguish, who let pain melt like candy in their mouths. “Show me,” he breathed. Then, louder, “Show me what he felt. Show me what he felt, and give me what I need.”

  This time it was Anguish who laughed, as Agony bit into Charlie’s leg.

  It hurt so much that the pain turned into a separate thing from Charlie, like it was an enormous rock or a wave of water or a bomb was going off very slowly inside his body. He had to become a sort of Far Away Charlie just to look at it. It was extraordinary, that anything inside a person could feel like this, that when God was thinking up human beings, he thought he should make them so that they could ever feel this way. Far Away Charlie would ask Father Mac about that later, someday, if he lived through this, if you could live through fire and ash and broken things all crawling through your veins and skin and ripping you apart.

  Theo lived through this, Far Away Charlie thought. Theo felt this. Theo’s still here.

  And just like that t
he pain was gone. Charlie opened eyes he didn’t remember squeezing shut.

  Agony was licking his chops. Anguish was drooling, his breath steaming out around him in a fog.

  Charlie made himself look down, knowing the ruin he would see where his leg used to be. But when he rolled up his trouser leg, the skin underneath was smooth and unbroken, nary a scar to be seen, except the little one from when he’d crashed his bicycle into a tree when he was seven and hadn’t quite gotten the hang of corners yet.

  And he was surprised to find that he wasn’t afraid of Agony and Anguish anymore. It was the same as when one had been waiting for something really terrible one knew was going to happen—when it finally did, afterwards there was really only room for relief.

  I want you to understand why I did it.

  But I hope you never do.

  The numbness that had settled over him turned to stinging pins and needles, like the very guts of him had fallen asleep and were waking up. Oh, Theo. He had just wanted it to stop. He had just wanted it all to stop. The sweet, blessed relief of that, the stopping. It felt like a mercy.

  “You have something for me,” Charlie said, his voice breathless with pain, but steady. Certain. “Something for something, that’s what you said.”

  Anguish sneered at him, but jerked his head towards his brother. With one last mad chuckle, Agony threw his head back as a convulsion rippled through his meaty body, starting at his tail and spreading all the way up to his mouth, where he made a hacking sound like something detonating underwater, and in a spray of bloody spittle, spat out a key that looked too tiny and delicate for the violence of its expulsion.

  Charlie knelt to pick it up, then immediately dropped it, sticking his fingers in his mouth. Its edges were sharp as a razor. A thin line of blood bloomed across his fingertips.

  He heard Agony’s laugh once more, but when he looked up, the war wolves were both gone. Agony’s laugh seemed to echo much longer than it should have.

  Mum was still asleep by the fire when he came home. Charlie wanted to tuck her blanket around her shoulders. But he couldn’t risk waking her just yet. He walked past and back upstairs to Theo’s room.

  The envelopes were still there on the floor in a pile. He wanted to shove all their letters back in, as quick as he dared, but he couldn’t. He just couldn’t. He folded each one up along its seams and placed it into its envelope as carefully as tucking in a baby, as carefully as if it was a small and precious thing as breakable as it was dear.

  Back into the breast pocket of the coat they went. It would be a tight fit to get the cigarette pack in, too, and he considered throwing it out, empty and crumpled as it was. There was a picture of a horse on the front, and someone had drawn spectacles on it in smudgy ink. Charlie thought of Mellie’s pram, full of chipped vases and teacups and tattered ribbons. Charlie didn’t get to decide what was rubbish and what was precious. He shoved the pack in the pocket with the letters, crumping it a bit further in the process.

  “Sorry,” he whispered, and patted it, smoothing down the coat’s lapels.

  Three keys clinked quietly against his heart.

  28

  “CHARLES?”

  Charlie froze.

  “Charles?” Mum repeated, her voice coming from the wingback chair, still slurred with sleep.

  “Yes, Mum?” He stepped closer and the weak light caught the slick tear tracks on each cheek.

  “He’s so scared, Charles. I’m scared, too. I never thought I could be this scared, not of anything, not after your father. But I think about losing him all over again—I think about losing one of my boys—”

  “Hush, Mum, it’s okay,” Charlie said, kneeling down beside her and smoothing down her sleep-mussed hair. “It’s okay. I’ll take of it. I’ll take care of everything, you’ll see.”

  Mum shook her head and tried to push herself out of the chair, but her strength seemed to fail her halfway, and she collapsed back into it with sigh.

  “Listen,” Charlie said, touching her shoulder to keep her in place. “Listen. Once, there was a king and queen who had no children.”

  Mum ground the heels of her hands against her eyes and made a noise like she was about to say something, but Charlie put a finger against her lips. His hand looked much larger next to Mum’s face than he remembered it being.

  “The king and queen wanted a baby to love more than anything. And they wished and wished and wished for one, but no baby came.”

  Charlie picked up the blanket that had fallen from Mum’s lap and wrapped it snug around her shoulders, the red-and-green tartan wool scratchy and safe against his skin. Still talking, he stood up and walked over to the sink. The kettle was waiting, patient and big-bellied, by the draining board.

  “So one day, the king and queen went out riding and they met an old lady by the side of the road. Now, most people thought the old lady was quite mad, because she talked to herself a bit and didn’t care much for other people and she fed a lot of the animals that the other people thought were pests.”

  Water went into the kettle. The kettle went onto the stove. The flame on the burner jumped to life with a soft whoomp, like getting the air knocked out of you by a flying cat that had missed you very much. Or a little brother who rugby-tackled you as you came off a train. Like someone loving you with all they had.

  “‘I know how to help you get a child,’ said the old lady. The queen was suspicious, but the king was so excited that he insisted they listen to what the old lady had to say. ‘I will give you a task to complete, and you must agree without knowing what the task is. But if you can complete it by the end of one year, you will have a child of your very own. It will be hard, and scary at times, but—’” Charlie smiled a little into the cups he was carefully spooning loose tea into. “‘There’s no cure for scary like a job that needs doing. And I’ll tell you that for free,’” he added, just for authenticity.

  “The king and the queen discussed it over lunch and tea, and finally they both agreed that it would be worth whatever the maybe-mad old woman wanted them to do if they could have a child to love more than anything. So they went back to where the old lady was waiting and agreed to her terms. She smiled a great big smile, even though she didn’t have all that many teeth left. And she had the king and queen follow her to the local orphanage, where she yelled and yelled until a wild little girl with absolutely filthy hair and no manners to speak of coming hurling out to meet them in a big cloud of dust.”

  Hot water went into each cup and along with a splash of milk for Mum, because that was how she liked it and milk rations could just jog on. Mum was watching him with big, liquid eyes and he wrapped her fingers around the teacup carefully. He sat down in the other chair and blew on his tea to cool it off before he went on.

  “‘Your task,’ said the old lady, ‘is to civilize this wild creature. Her parents died a long time ago and the kind people of the village brought her here to be taken care of until someone came to claim her. But no one ever did, and she’s so wild that she won’t let anyone get close enough to care for her. If you can teach her to comb her hair and wash her hands and mind her manners enough that someone can manage raising her on their own, in one year’s time, I will give you the child you so desire.’

  “The task didn’t seem so bad, honestly, so the king and queen took the wild little girl back to their castle with them. Except they realized very quickly that the wild little girl didn’t want to be civilized. She kicked and screamed whenever anyone tried to brush her hair. She bit anyone who tried to come near her with soap. She cried all night so that everyone in the castle was half-mad with being so tired.

  “Finally, the queen and king—their crowns at funny angles and big dark circles under their eyes—went into the wild girl’s room and said something to the effect of, ‘What on earth do you want, you strange, unwashed little thing?’ And the little girl started to cry again, the big ugly kind of crying that’s kind of embarrassing to look at. She cried so long and so hard that eventu
ally she tired herself out and fell asleep on the floor, right between the king and queen. The king and queen were afraid they’d wake her up by leaving or moving or breathing too loud, and so instead they just fell asleep right there on the floor next to the little girl. None of them had ever slept better.”

  Mum had finished her tea at some point after the king and queen had taken in the little girl and had closed her eyes to listen.

  “Now it went on like this, back and forth, for a year. The queen and king were soon so caught up in wrestling the little girl’s hair into braids and insisting she use spoons and forks instead of her hands to eat dinner that they quite lost track of time. So they were surprised when the old lady came back, and asked if they’d finished their task.

  “‘Oh!’ said the queen. ‘Could we maybe have just a little longer?’ The king agreed that the little girl was not quite civilized yet, but that with just a little more time could definitely pass for human rather than beast.

  “‘Very well,’ said the old lady. ‘You may have one more year. After that I will return and see if you have completed your task and are ready to receive your child.’ Now things went on like this and the next year, when the old lady came back, the queen and king felt it would be an awful waste to interrupt the wild little girl’s schooling just when she was starting to figure out her times tables and hadn’t bitten her dancing master in several weeks. So they asked for another year to complete their task, and the old lady gave it to them. And so on, and so forth, until the little girl was almost grown and considered by just about everyone in the castle to be delightful, even if she did seem to have a moral opposition to wearing shoes.

  “When the old woman came back the final time, the queen and king began to cry when they greeted her, because they knew the wild little girl was thoroughly civilized now, and would be a welcome addition to any home. They didn’t want to see her go, as they had grown quite fond of her. Sometimes they still let her sleep in between them when she had nightmares. They loved her more than anything, you might say.