by Shane Staley
The step creaked again. Muffled by the door, the guy sang like a nursery rhyme.
“You wanna see what I have.”
He waggled a pink cellphone up to the glass. The front of the phone had spider-webs of cracked faceplate. He turned the phone around.
A glittering rainbow swept across its back.
Samantha’s cellphone.
I wrenched open the door. “Where’d you get that?”
He grinned. “Like my haircut? Your daughter does good work.”
I pulled the phone out of his hand. The faceplate was unreadable from the broken plastic.
“Sorry it’s broke. I got clumsy.”
I dragged him into the kitchen. When the door shut, the deadbolt clicked.
He turned and slid a caneback chair from under the table.
“You aren’t sitting down!” I said.
“I got cancer.” And he sat.
“Tough shit. Where is she?”
“She’s safe! The sooner we get this done, the sooner everything’s happy.”
“Where?”
“All I need’s one thing. Glen, what happened to you?”
Then this skinny, diseased, sad-eyed sack of shit looks up at me, waiting for an answer.
“If you hurt her,” I said, “I will kill you.”
“One damn question, Glen: When you were a kid, you were—”
His red eyes widened.
“—you were evil. Why?”
I slapped him in the head. “Where’s my daughter?”
He put his stick arms up. His eyes looked around the room away from me. “What made you so mean? One answer!”
The guy took a breath, mouth open, panting.
In the hospital, Dad’s head had been tilted back on his pillow, mouth open in a silent moan. I’d seen that look of the dying when I worked in the prison dispensary.
That image of my father sucked the anger out of me.
The guy continued with an awed laugh. “You once crossed a four-lane street to slap an ice cream cone out of Al Devere’s hands!”
I almost said, Who?
But I knew to keep my mouth shut, because the guy’s eyes had gone wide like a freak-out going off. The sucker stick swung to the other corner of his mouth.
“Glen, one winter, you and a bunch of guys were throwing snowballs at cars in the middle of King’s Highway, in the middle of the day, like it was nothing. This woman gets out of a gray Mercedes and moved in on you. Everybody ran. Not you. You stood there and stared her back into her car.”
The memory hit me. It had been a wet snow, and the day had gotten colder, which made the snowballs like glass bricks. That woman wore a camelhair coat, like a lawyer or prosecutor. But what was she going to do? I waited for her to get back into her car. She backed down just like most of the world backs down.
What was she going to do to me that wasn’t already being done?
“What happened to you?”
I slapped the phone on the table, then punched him in his head.
“Oh!” he cried out. “There’s those eyes again!”
“Shut up!”
“I heard…”
His arms made a nylon tent over his head. He spoke from underneath it. “I heard your father used to beat the shit out of you.”
The anger leapt into my hands. I grabbed his jacket again.
His hand slapped at the table. He pushed Samantha’s phone into my face. “Get a grip! A grip! Get a grip on yourself!”
The rainbow trembled.
Outside, the neighbor’s cocker-poo barked like crazy.
I pushed the guy back into the chair and grabbed the phone out of his hand. I walked across the kitchen before I hurt him more.
“Okay,” the guy said. “Okay. So that’s it. Your father.”
I turned around. “That was thirty years ago! Everybody grows up! They get past shit! They go on with their lives! Now where is she?”
His wide-eyed freak-out returned. The wirehanger shoulders rose and fell again. “Get on with their lives! You owe me.”
Where I’d been in prison, if you were owed something, you took it. What the hell was this creep going to do? Every muscle in me tense, I waited.
“What do I owe you?”
He was lost again, rambling. “On Facebook? Nice picture of you and your father hugging. So was he a drunk? Get drunk and beat you up? Call you names?”
“Shut up!”
“My father drank too. So did my mom. They couldn’t keep jobs, so we had to move a lot, right?”
After living so long being afraid of my father, then hating him, all the time just wanting him. Then when I went straight, and he had sobered up, we had a new life. I remembered the Poconos trip, and the squeeze of his arms and the feeling of his bones as I hugged him. The picture of him hugging me, of us hugging.
The guy stared at me. “My mom and dad have been dead a while.”
“What the hell do I care!”
Did he expect that if I got Sam back that he would just live whatever life he had left? Didn’t he realize that I’d call the cops and he’d go to jail?
He was crazy. I had to be careful for Samantha’s sake.
“You still don’t remember me, do you, Glen?”
“Why are you doing this to me? Give me back my daughter!”
“Why? Because while you were slapping ice cream and screwing with snowballs?”
The sucker wriggled like a trapped insect. “I lived every waking moment for four years scared out of my mind that you were going to get me.”
I had to listen to him and play this out.
“My family moved into town freshman year. I got into some dumb fight with your cousin and man, did you come after me. You pushed me off my bike on King’s Highway in morning traffic. Then you stole my bike and bragged about it. Every time you saw me after that, it was a push into the lockers or a punch out of nowhere.”
A face surfaced in my mind. A scared, pale skinny kid with thick brown hair and a ratty blue sweat jacket.
The sucker rattled against his teeth. He pointed at his head. His finger trembled.
“Turned out, I had neurochemical problems. Obsessive. Panic attacks. I didn’t know that at the time. I worried about you every minute for four years.”
I almost yelled. “Then it was your problem!”
“Oh for years I agreed with you. It was my problem. The way I was created? Wired? Whatever? I got therapy. Got medication. Grew old. I had no family. No kids. But I was okay. Living with it.”
I didn’t know where this guy was going.
He looked at Samantha’s phone in my hands.
“Whenever it got bad at my job or whatever, I would still think of you. Confronting you. But I could never imagine beating you up.”
He rolled his eyes. “Then came the cancer and oh boy!”
My hands clenched the phone. My thumb pushed into the broken faceplate. It cut into my thumb and stung.
That sting grew as I thought Samantha, I can’t lose you again I can’t screw up—
“Glen, that’s when I really started looking for you. For closure. I found newspaper stories of you getting arrested. Then you disappeared a few years ago. I expected to find your obituary. Car crash or overdose or shot. Buried in a cornfield.”
He struggled to his feet. The whites of his eyes had gone completely red.
“Then there you were on Facebook. You had a kid. You and your father were hugging. You were healthy—”
My muscles ached from the tension. If he took one step toward me, I didn’t know what I was going to do.
I said, “You just stay there.”
“—and then it all made sense. My life made sense.”
He thumped his chest. “I went against the way I was made. That’s why my life didn’t make sense anymore!”
A loud laugh, and his hands flew around as if electrified. “So I went off my meds and boy did I think of you a lot then! I doubled my pain medication and looked you up. Looked up your family.
Found where all of you lived. Because you owe me.”
The skeletal man swayed as if tired and drunk.
“You can’t pay me back for four years’ worth of fear. But this is a good start.”
I stepped up and punched him in the stomach. “What did you do with my daughter, you sick fuck!”
Punched again. My fists sunk so deep into the skinny body, I struck his spine.
He screeched like a bird and dropped, slapping his hands on the linoleum.
I kneeled and punched his cheek. The wet smack made my arms ache for more.
“Where is she?”
He stayed doubled-over. He snarled, trembling and heaving. He said nothing.
I slapped him hard. Felt his nose crunch.
The wireless phone on the wall rang. I barely heard it. Every minute counted until he told me where my daughter was.
He fell over onto his side, blood pouring from his face. Jaw tight, grunting, sobbing…
Laughing. He laughed like quiet hiccups. The sucker stick lay bitten in half on the floor.
He spat out the other half. “Scared now?”
I punched again. He grunted and something in his face cracked. I patted him down. No wallet. No I.D. Keys to a rental car.
The car.
I ran out my front door. “Samantha!”
My mind flashed with images of her tied up in the trunk. Bleeding to death laying in the backseat.
The backseat was empty. The trunk was rental tidy.
Back in the kitchen, the phone had stopped ringing. I took the handpiece off and turned off its power switch.
The guy still lay on the floor. His face shone slick with blood. He clenched his hand under his left eye.
I kicked him in the legs. He cringed. Then he looked up with a winner’s smile.
“I learned to put up with so much shit—”
Another slap shut him up. “I only hit you. So what! Kids do stupid things. We get past it.”
He wheezed and bobbed, trying to laugh. “Past it!”
“Get up, faggot.”
He laughed again, spattering blood. “There it is!”
I pulled him to his feet. He weighed next to nothing.
He panted. “Remember…when you pushed me down the stairs outside gym?”
My fist slammed his kidney. He cried long, hoarse, and satisfying.
He looked back up. His left eye was already swelling closed.
“Called me ‘faggot.’ One of your favorite words.”
I had to keep him conscious so he could talk. I dropped him.
Stomped on his hand with my workboot. Again. Bones shifted under my foot.
Hand curled, his eyes rolled into his head and he wailed.
I crouched down to him. “Hey guy? Guy? Scared yet?”
A bloody gob of spit spun like a bolo onto my shirt.
Then I thought, Oh my god, what’s in his blood?
I pushed him away and went to wash my hands in the sink. Realized it didn’t make a difference. His blood was all over me. His head lolled against my stove. I kicked him.
“Wake up! Wake up, you faggot! Where is she?”
He held up his good hand. His sleeve had pulled back to show plastic hospital bracelets. He swallowed blood with a crackling sound.
“I finally figured out…that’s what your father called you. Faggot.”
The shame and pain from childhood swept over me. Slaps. Punches. Shouts. The stink of liquor. Twenty years of my father’s rages. Jail wasn’t that different.
The guy coughed. “I’m dying, Glen. Pancreatic. Couple of months tops. See?”
He pointed at the sucker stick. The side of it read: “fentanyl 220 mcg”.
He laughed, vague and sleepy.
I shook him awake. His breath rattled.
If this guy dies now…if he dies….
“Where?” I said.
It came out as a thin, weak breath.
It came out as a whine.
“I did my time! You shit, I did my time!”
I hadn’t made a sound like that since I was little. Crying just made Dad hit me harder. Yell “Pussy! Little fucking faggot!” louder, and I did sound weak and I hated that sound.
I remembered Samantha in my arms with the smell of newborn baby. Holding her little tear-wet hands when I promised I’d never leave her again. Her shoulder so warm and strong at the beach.
Tears in my eyes, I screamed at the guy. “Where is she?”
Bloody and purpled, his eyes opened. His curled fingers came up. Waved me close.
I leaned to him.
Through ruptured lips, he whispered, “Still..weak little pussy.”
Somehow, the kitchen’s phone receiver came down on his face. It made dry, plastic cracks as it struck. His head made wet sounds like punching a wet towel, like flinging paint.
My fingers flexed around the phone. The sticky blood felt like paint. Felt like the other times when I had blood on my hands.
The stink of blood filled the kitchen.
I sank to my knees and wailed.
You hear everything in the suburbs.
Eventually, someone called the police.
They found me clutching the guy and weeping, hysterical, begging him to wake up.
My crotch was damp with piss, I was so scared.
It was a blur after that. Lights flashing. Cop lights blue-and-red. An ambulance shining cherry red like Hell. The twist of handcuffs. A hand on my head as I sat in the car. The door closing.
In the middle of the dark street stood Samantha. A cop talked to her and pointed at the house. She stood hands at her sides, long blond hair swaying in tiny little shakes, no, no.
The cop walked her over.
“Dad?”
I was so tired. “The guy said he hurt you.”
“Someone stole my phone at the salon. I tried calling you!”
Cuffed behind me, the blood dried into grit between my fingers.
Her disappointment tore out my heart.
I told her, “All I know is the guy said he hurt you.”
“The police say that man had no criminal record. They say he was in fucking hospice care. He was dying. They think maybe he’s in a coma.”
Tears filled my eyes. “You think I was ripping him off? Baby, no. No.”
“The police said your parole is revoked until this is adjudicated.”
“Did you get the guy’s name? The guy?”
Her mouth opened in shock. “You mean you don’t even know him?”
The cop opened the car door and radioed in. The car trembled when he started the engine.
She stepped back, hands in fists. “Grandpa was asking for you! What do I tell him?”
The cop pulled the car away. I had a record. The cop wasn’t going to do me any favors.
The car left her in the street, tiny in the stares of neighbors and flashing lights and the glow of a TV news camera.
Why? I thought. Why did the guy screw up everything? The last months of his life—
Then I realized: When the cops toss my house and they find the gun…
I moaned. I brought my head to my knees and cried.
The Matchbox Sign
Evan Dicken
The rash on Wyatt’s neck glared back at him from the filmy glass of the mirror. He prodded it, and blood oozed from the inflamed skin, sickly brown in the light of the bathroom’s exposed bulb.
His gaze slid over his shoulder, to the bed.
It couldn’t be a mosquito bite. Wyatt kept the windows closed and locked, their edges sealed with putty. Spiders sometimes crept in through cracks in the plaster, spinning webs high in the corners where Wyatt couldn’t reach. If he’d been bitten by a brown recluse, especially on the neck, he might be moments away from death.
This time, there’d be no one to find the body.
An image of Momma forced its way into Wyatt’s thoughts. She was stretched out on the bed, her nightgown askew. He remembered staring for hours at the dark blue tracks of varicose v
eins inked on the pale flesh of her thighs.
The flies, always the bravest, were first to notice she had died. They’d circled like buzzing vultures, darting down to steal sips from Momma’s unblinking eyes. It had taken longer for the crawlers to join in, but all too soon they’d crept from the cracks to file up her body, a funeral train of cockroaches, carpet beetles, and silverfish.
When Wyatt died, the bugs would eat him, too. Or maybe the spider venom would only paralyze him. He imagined the first tickle of antennae on his exposed skin, the scuttling tap of legs, the first few tentative bites.
That terrible thought snapped Wyatt back to the present. He went to his computer—set amidst a pile of vivisected circuit boards, LCD screens, and blue plastic cases. The Gameboys had come yesterday, ordered from an electronics wholesaler. Wyatt would fix those he could and sell them online. It wasn’t a great job, but it kept him from going outside more than he absolutely had to.
An internet search for brown recluse bites filled the screen with terrifying images—limbs turned black with necrosis, faces so swollen that they hardly looked like people at all, and bandages pulled back to reveal holes of flesh filled with raw, red meat.
Wyatt clenched his jaw tight against the rising tide of bile. Thankfully, none of the pictures resembled the angry red stippling on his neck.
“Rash and insect bite,” returned millions of hits, so Wyatt added “bed.” The very first picture looked similar to his rash. He clicked on the thumbnail and the words “Cimex Lectularius,” appeared, white on a black screen, followed a block of text.
He snatched his hand away from the mouse as if the words could scuttle down the cable.
Cimex Lectularius. Bedbugs.
* * *
“They mostly come at night, mostly.” Wyatt checked his arms again for bite marks.
“So did my first wife, but I’d be less worried if I’d find her in your bed.” Chernikov laughed as he peeled back the sheets with hands that reminded Wyatt of old, dry figs.
“Is posturepedic, yes? Very nice.” The landlord smiled, his teeth the color of old newspaper.
“Well? Do you see them?”
“Moment. Moment.” Chernikov ran a hand along the mattress seam, then peered myopically at his fingers.