Tacky Goblin

by T. Sean Steele

HOMELESS

  February 20, 2014

  “Let’s open a joint checking account,” I told my sister.

  “No.”

  “Then let me borrow eighty bucks.”

  “What for?”

  “I cannot for the life of me remember to move my car for street cleaning.” I had just received my third parking ticket in three weeks.

  “Just set an alarm, idiot.”

  The truth was, I had chosen not to move my car. On street-cleaning day, I’d wait until five minutes past noon, then rush outside in my shorts and berate the parking official writing the ticket. I’d unload a week’s worth of frustration on the guy. I’d never been so mean to anybody in my life. It was fantastic. Of course, the downside was I was hemorrhaging money.

  “What you need is a day job.”

  “Stop saying that.”

  “Then you wouldn’t be struggling to leave the apartment by noon.”

  “But I’m a writer.”

  “No, you’re a piece of shit.” She shoved me out the door. “Don’t come back until you’re employed.”

  HIATUS

  March 25, 2014

  “Where the heck have you been?” my sister asked.

  “I was applying for jobs,” I said.

  “For a month and a half?”

  “What? No. Like a couple of hours.”

  “I thought you were dead,” she said. “I even called the cops. There was an investigation and everything. I was their primary suspect. I spent two days in a holding cell.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I was gone for an afternoon. You kicked me out and said, ‘Don’t come back ’til you find a job.’”

  “Did you?”

  In truth, I’d spent the afternoon at the library, killing time reading comic books. “That’s not the point,” I said. “You’re telling me I somehow lost thirty-five days in a few hours?” I sat on my futon. “Did I miss anything?”

  “Sure did. I got pretty jacked. I can do one hundred push-ups in a row now.” She flexed a bicep. “Also Laurie came back looking for you. She stuck around for a couple of days but then sort of gave up on you. I let her stay here. Dude, did you know she only wears sexy lingerie to bed? Even I was getting hot and bothered.”

  I handed Kim a pillow. “Please smother me to death.”

  She patted me on the head. “You can’t kill anybody with a pillow, you dope. Believe me, I’ve tried.”

  INCENSED

  April 3, 2014

  “This place reeks of incense,” my sister said.

  “I’ve been feeling aggressive lately,” I said. “I’m trying to calm down.”

  “Well, yeah. You’ve got a month’s worth of emotions to catch up on. Have you tried cleaning the bathroom? That usually helps you relax.”

  The bathroom was as clean as it was going to get. I’d re-caulked the tub and the toilet, and spent the early afternoon tweezing goop out of the sink drain. Nothing helped.

  Kim sniffed the air. “This smells familiar. Where’d you buy it?”

  “I didn’t. I pilfered it from a wooden chest with a lock. A busted lock. From your closet.”

  “My artillery chest?” She smacked me across the back of the head. “You idiot. That’s special incense. It doesn’t calm you down. It amplifies your mood.”

  “Well, shit.” I went to my closet and dug around. “I guess it’s time to put all this aggression to good use.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Oh, yes.” I tossed her my basketball. “We’re hitting the courts. I’ll loan you a tank top.”

  *

  We went to the Poinsettia Community Center and played two-on-two against two teenagers who looked exactly alike.

  “Twins?”

  “No, asshole,” they said. “I’m the Multiple Man.” One of them blew by me for an easy lay up.

  “We’re losing,” Kim said. “Badly.”

  “It’s hard to keep track of who’s guarding who,” I said. “You’re basically cheating.”

  “At least I didn’t drag my sister to play with me,” they said. “She doesn’t even want to be here.”

  “Yes, I do,” she said.

  “No, you don’t,” they said. “You’re five-two.”

  “Five-four!” She bounced the ball off one of their faces. They both collapsed to the ground, clutching their noses. Kim looked at me. “Wow. I thought he was kidding about the Multiple Man thing. Should we take one of them home, for experiments?”

  “Please, not again,” they said. “We’re the only two left.”

  I OUGHT TO START CARRYING MY OWN ROLL

  April 10, 2014

  “How’s work?” I asked my sister on the phone.

  “It’s been a shit day, little brother. I thought Barb might like to meet the boy, so I took them both to the park. But she got too attached. When it was time to go, she snatched him in her teeth and hopped the fence. I followed them to the reservoir. They ducked under the spillway. Underground. It’s good you called now. I have to go after them and I bet I’ll lose my signal down there.”

  “So you won’t be home at the regular time?”

  “No, I’ll probably get lost in the tunnels. Why?”

  “I have a hot date tonight and I need help getting ready.” My neck hair wasn’t going to shave itself.

  “With who?”

  “A girl I met at the occult shop around the corner. I was buying incense.”

  “You really should just go to Bed Bath and Beyond. Somewhere more your speed,” she said. “Also, put the razor down. Remember what happened the last time you tried to shave your own neck hair? No one made eye contact with you for weeks.”

  *

  The date was a bust. She only wanted me for my body, to host a demon who would then impregnate her with hellspawn. Or something. I had trouble paying attention. She’d tied me up in her basement.

  “Don’t you have any of those nice waxy ropes? These ones are rubbing me raw,” I said. “You might as well be using duct tape.”

  “I don’t buy duct tape,” she said as she approached with a ceremonial knife. “I can’t stand the sound when you peel it off the roll. Now, be quiet. I need to concentrate.”

  “Look, lady. My soul’s been ripped out and put back in a dozen times over. I’m chock full of corpse bones. I’m damaged goods. This isn’t going to work.”

  “Have some self-confidence,” she said, and sliced open her palm.

  *

  The next morning I sat on the sink while Kim wrangled a muck-covered Barb into the bath.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “It didn’t take. The demon only half-possessed me. The worst he can do is whisper horrible, suggestive things in the back of my head. But I’m like, get in line, buddy.”

  “So did you impregnate her?” Kim asked.

  “Oh, no. She cut me too deep. I lost a lot of blood. She ended up giving me a lift to the ER.”

  “Good to hear. Things went okay on my end, too. They didn’t get deep into the tunnels. They got distracted playing fetch with a dead rat. Barb has a pretty decent throwing arm.”

  The sun dipped below the window frame, its light glinting off the edge of the tub. The pipes in the wall creaked. The faucet sputtered and its flow became a deep red. Barb sighed with pleasure as Kim dumped a cup of warm blood over her coat. I blinked and it was water again.

  “It’s just one thing after another, isn’t it?” I said.

  “Preach,” Kim said. “But really, you should’ve known this girl had ulterior motives. Look at your neck. No normal girl wants a guy with a thicket back there.”

  BORING AND STUPID

  April 27, 2014

  Something was wrong with the bathroom mirror. My reflection was a lot better-looking than me. He knew how to shave without goring his neck. Also, it looked like he actually paid someone to cut his hair.

  “They’re called barbers,” Kim said. “And he’s a chump for going to one. Your hair looks fine. I do a good job considering we don’t have clipp
ers. Or scissors.”

  My reflection blinked at us. I pretended to pick my nose as an experiment. He mimicked me, but I could tell his heart wasn’t in it.

  “Maybe it’s that demon the occult lady planted in the back of your head,” Kim said. “He’s perfect-looking, which is a sure sign of evil. There’s a way to defeat this sort of thing. I saw it in a movie. You’ve got to set up a bunch of mirrors so they’re reflecting off each other. You confuse him, trap him in one, and then break it. Or something like that. I don’t remember. The movie was boring.”

  “This is the only mirror we have,” I said. “Anyway, I kind of like looking at him. He boosts my confidence.”

  “Fine, whatever.” She left the bathroom. “But this is exactly how that stupid movie started.”

  “He’s got very nice lips,” I said.

  LOOSEY-GOOSEY

  April 30, 2014

  In retrospect it seemed inevitable. Over the past eight months our behavior had been what an objective observer might call ‘reprehensible.’ We were due a comeuppance. And finally it arrived: my sister and I both had dates on Friday night.

  “I thought you just went on a date,” Kim said, brushing her teeth. “With that occult girl. The one who spawned a demon inside of you.”

  “Doesn’t count,” I said. “I think I knew all along she dabbled in the dark arts. Somehow that took the pressure off.”

  “I feel sick. Everything is awful.” She spat into the sink. “What, he’s going to talk about his family and I’m supposed to pay attention? How do we keep finding ourselves in these insane situations?”

  “I think this is actually SOP for young people, according to books and movies.” I opened the medicine cabinet and selected a pill bottle.

  “What are those?”

  “My anxiety meds.”

  “I didn’t know you took pills. Gimme.” She snatched the bottle and read the label. “These aren’t anxiety pills,” she said. “They’re anti-diarrheals.”

  “I find treating the symptom as effective as treating the cause. Or at least it involves a lot less self-evaluation.”

  HOT NIGHT

  July 12, 2014

  We were making up stories about people we’d killed. It was Kim’s turn. She described a Purple Heart veteran who bet she couldn’t find his scar. When she failed, she produced an old-fashioned straight razor and made her own, waving the blade in front of his neck, which split into a red oval. He opened his mouth, and before it filled with blood she saw the scar. A bullet hole in the back of the throat.

  “I don’t understand this game,” said Rick, my friend from high school. He was staying with us indefinitely.

  “It keeps your mind sharp,” said Kim. “Like Sudoku.”

  Rick lay back on the cot we had set up next to the kitchen table. Moonlight through the blinds softened against his face. He looked like an angel.

  “I push a stockbroker in front of an eighteen-wheeler,” he said. “The tires rip off his thousand-dollar three-piece suit and mulch his face into ground beef. Bystanders cheer. His keepers bury him in a porcelain Venetian mask, but I steal it before they close the casket. On the one-year anniversary of his death, I fill it with raw hamburger meat and leave it on his widow’s doorstep.”

  “Poetry,” said Kim.

  IS THAT A PROMISE?

  July 17, 2014

  Kim tweezed a splinter from her heel but it kept coming. It wasn’t a splinter at all but an infinite strand of hair. She spooled it around her hand and kept pulling. I briefly wondered if hair was all she had inside her body, like if she continued her body might flatten into a rug. But she said she could feel it tugging at the inside of her head, like an ingrown hair from her scalp that had rooted its way along her skull, twisted around her spine, her hip, and wound down her Achilles tendon until it poked out through the bottom of her foot. She stopped pulling and looked up at me and Rick. “What a shame if it snapped,” she said. The spool glistened; maybe the inside of the body was the ultimate shampoo. I’d recently ditched my shoulder-length hair for a crew cut, and while looking at the spool I felt an inordinate sense of loss.

  “It seems disrespectful to snap it,” Kim said.

  “Disrespectful to who?”

  “Time.”

  “Tie it in a bow around your foot,” Rick said.

  “I’ll limp.”

  “Shove it back up into your heel,” I said.

  “Unrealistic.”

  Finally, it had to be done. She pinched the hair near the base of her foot and yanked. She went cross-eyed as it plucked away from the inside of her scalp. She finished pulling and dumped the spool in the trash. “This stays in the trash. If I find either of you wearing it as a necklace or whatever, I’ll make you eat it.”

  Our eyes twinkled with anticipation.

  LONELY AUGUST

  August 5, 2014

  Rick was out of town and Kim was going back to Chicago for a month. The day before she left she filled the refrigerator with a hundred dollars’ worth of groceries.

  “Unnecessary,” I said.

  “You have a tendency to wither away when left alone. You forget to eat.”

  “Untrue,” I said.

  “Remember when I went to San Francisco for a week? I came home and the fridge was empty. You were surviving on pickles you got from work. Your mouth was full of canker sores.”

  “Unrelated,” I said.

  I was sick of people thinking I couldn’t take care of myself. I wanted to be a strong, independent person. I wanted to be decisive and assured. I wanted to be a beacon of strength, a pillar of wisdom on which all my family and friends could lean.

  Kim clapped her hands in front of my face and I snapped back to the present. “This is exactly what I’m talking about.” She wheeled her luggage to the door. “I asked Garth to check on you periodically.”

  “Garth is checking on me? He can’t even go to the bathroom without help.”

  “He has trouble with stairs, too. He says he’ll knock on his floor every night until you shout back, ‘Good night sweet angel best friend.’ He insisted on choosing the code sentence so he’ll know it’s really you.”

  “Oh, I’ll respond with something.” I rummaged in the closet for our figurine collection. “He’ll know it’s me.”

  BEDTIME

  August 8, 2014

  In protest of her absence, Barb wouldn’t come out from under Kim’s bed. By day two the situation had escalated into a hunger strike and I had to crawl in after her.

  “It was incredible,” I told Kim on the phone. “Have you ever been under your bed? It felt like I’d crawled into a tremendous cavern, except when I rolled onto my back the night sky stretched endlessly above me. There were stars and comets and unknown planets, and moving among the constellations were all my regrets and faults and mistakes I wasn’t even aware I had made. Looking into the sky, I found myself completely empty, and I knew I would be empty forevermore because the aforementioned regrets and faults and mistakes I wasn’t even aware I had made were the soil from which all that I had been and could be grew. Basically, the contents of my self were floating away into space and I watched non-existence accept me back into its arms.”

  “The contents of my self were floating today, too,” Kim said. “Then I flushed. But to answer your question: no, I haven’t been under my bed because it’s impossible. I sleep on a mattress on the floor. What happened is, the bed ate you. I told you to stay out of my room. All the evil shit in there is my burden. You can’t handle it. Did you get Barb back, at least?”

  “No, I think she’s lost forever. I’m still under here, actually. I just called because I wanted someone to talk to.”

  “Well, good,” she said. “As long as you’re talking to someone you’ll probably continue to exist. Don’t hang up.”

  But I struggled for anything to say.

  “I’m at home in La Grange for the weekend,” Kim said, picking up the slack. “I’m in the kitchen right now, looking in the refrigera
tor. I’d forgotten what a full fridge looks like. It, too, is incredible. Do you want me to describe it to you?”

  “Yes, please,” I said.

  IMPROV

  August 17, 2014

  I sat in front of my laptop and watched the backs of my hands glisten with sweat. I was trying to write a story, but it was clear to me the heat had sapped my creative energies.

  “Rick,” I said, “give me a title. Any title at all, and I’ll build a story around it.”

  “‘Pussyfinger.’”

  I closed my laptop. “We need to get out of here.”

  “I’m real homesick,” Rick said from his cot. He was leaning against the window fan. “I miss my mom.”

  “You miss air conditioning.”

  *

  We ended up at a Men’s Warehouse in Glendale. Rick’s uncle, a movie composer, had given us two extra tickets to the Emmys and we needed to get fitted for tuxes. An old man wrapped measuring tape around my chest. He was a lot shorter than me, and when I looked down I saw beads of sweat quivering atop his scalp.

  Meanwhile Rick sat at a desk across from a younger salesman. “No flowers, no vests. We’ll need cuff links. Bow ties. No shoes; we already have those. We want a real clean look. Slim fit. Class. We’re going to the Emmys, you know.”

  “Are you nominated?”

  “Not this year.”

  I was anxious to leave. We’d parked in the Trader Joe’s lot across the street and I didn’t want to get towed. Trader Joe’s, Men’s Warehouse, Emmys. A lot of brand names in one day for me. The upside of being cooped up in the apartment all day was that I had forgotten these places existed. I was a little overwhelmed. I felt like an idiot.

  The old man measured my chest again. He looked at me. “Stop breathing so heavily. Your rib cage keeps changing size.”

  *

  By the time we got home it was cooler outside the apartment than in, so we spent the early evening drinking beer on the front steps. We listened as next door a mother yelled at her daughter.

  “You need to start behaving like an adult,” the mother said.