by Ronald Malfi
“Food smells wonderful,” Eliza says. Her teeth are like the dented grille of a truck.
“It does,” Tony says. He has silver hair at his temples and you quickly hide your hands behind your back in case that silver hair is contagious.
Michael returns with a glass of wine for Tony and Eliza. “You guys make yourselves at home,” Michael tells them, motioning toward the loveseat. To you, Michael says, “Where’s my little munchkin?”
“In the crib,” you say.
“I’ll wake him and introduce you,” Michael says to the Sandersons.
“Oh,” says Eliza Sanderson, “I’ve been dying to see him.” And when Michael leaves, Eliza turns to you and says, “Is there anything I can help with, dear?”
You say no.
“You look wonderful,” says Eliza. “That’s a gorgeous dress.” She winks, this aging medusa. “I can’t believe you’ve just had a baby.”
Tony just smiles and enjoys his wine.
Your stomach curdles. The smells from the kitchen are making you sick again. You think, I made a mistake. Think, Byron. Bad name.
Maybe there are men outside, maybe there aren’t. Maybe you are jealous of Michael, just like you told the doctor, or maybe that’s not true, either. You don’t know. You wish Michael had never turned on the light switch and that you knew what wine was nice wine and that it didn’t take you twenty-nine minutes to read the six lines on the casserole recipe because you had to make sure you got it right, got it right, got it right.
This is new to you. All of it. Three months new.
Michael comes up behind you but doesn’t come down into the living room. You don’t look at him; you feel him at your back like mirrored sunglasses. Eliza Sanderson cocks her head at a strange angle and stares past you, up at Michael. Tony Sanderson looks as well, and the expression on his face convinces you he smells how awful the food is, too.
You turn. Michael stands there with a quizzical look on his face—a mixture of confusion and bemusement, like someone who knows a joke has been told though he’s missed the punch line. He stands there with the blue moose blanket in one hand and what can only be an uncooked pot roast in the other, and says, “Is this…hon? Some kind of…uh, hon?”
“I made a mistake,” you say.
“Hon? Honey?”
You sit on the couch and smile politely at the Sandersons. In the kitchen, the oven’s buzzer goes off.
Learned Children
Soon after, he began to question his sanity.
Holes, Paul Marcus thought. Craters. A few more months of this and it’ll look like a blitzkrieg.
It was about the missing girl, of course. The scarecrow was a dream—he couldn’t think of it otherwise without compromising his sanity—and he wondered how much of the actual digging had been done in some sort of fugue state, for he could only recall what he had done on the mornings that followed, waking in bed with mud dried to his feet. Once, he’d awoken in the field, his skin gritty with hours’ old perspiration, his arms and shoulders sore from digging.
Digging holes, he thought. Craters. Trembling.
He was what the townspeople called “a distant”—a person from elsewhere who’d come to roost among them. A drafty old farmhouse with more bedrooms than he would ever need and a position of schoolteacher that needed filling were the things that brought him here. A distant, he supposed, was better than intruder, was better than trespasser. Nonetheless, he felt his own intrusion in his bones. His students did not make him feel any more welcome, either. Blank, moonfaced dullards, he often felt like he was preaching to a classroom of earthworms. Even creepier was when their slack disinterest turned to brazen effrontery.
“Can anyone tell me what Blake is trying to say in this passage?”
Ignoring the question, one of the piggish little gnomes toward the back of the classroom said, “They talk about you in church.”
The comment caught Paul Marcus with his guard down. “I’m sorry?” He still did not know all their names, mainly because they refused to sit in their assigned seats. “Someone has been talking about me?”
“In church,” repeated the boy.
“I don’t understand,” Paul said.
“Your car has a broken headlight,” said one of the girls.
“Your shoes are funny,” chided another.
And so on…
It was his students who first brought the missing girl to his attention. They kept her empty desk at the back of the classroom like a shrine; sometimes, after recess, some of the girls would bring flowers in with them from the schoolyard to decorate it. Hardened fingers of bubble gum hung like stalactites from the underside of the desk and someone had carved JANNA IS DED on the desktop.
Of course, since she was never found, no one knew for sure that she was dead.
“Who’s Janna?” he asked upon first noticing the inscription. “What happened to her?”
“Someone got her.”
“What does that mean?”
“She was here one day,” said a boy as he dug around in one nostril, “and the next day, she was gone.”
“When?”
“Month ago.”
“Who took her?”
The boy shrugged. “Why is your hair gray on the sides but black up top?”
The students snickered.
There was no Janna on his roster. Were the little cretins messing with him? He didn’t put it past them. There had been frogs in his desk and, disturbingly, a baby bird with its neck broken in his coffee mug one morning.
But they were not messing with him.
“It’s true,” said George Julliard one afternoon in the teacher’s lounge. He was working around a mouthful of peanut butter and jelly. “Abduction is the sheriff’s best guess.”
“She isn’t on my roster.”
But he found out why later on: his roster had been carefully rewritten to exclude Janna’s name. His roster was not the original. The original was found crumpled in a ball in Janna’s desk, her name clearly legible. When Paul brought this to the principal’s attention—a middle-aged woman with thinning silver hair—she only laughed and said kids will be kids.
“Did any of you change my roster?” he asked his students the following day.
“What’s your favorite color?” asked one of the girls.
“Do you like cats?” asked a boy.
Holes, he thought. And the scarecrow.
It was a dream, surely. The scarecrow was just a slapdash thing strung to a post in the east field, its clothes tatters of flannel, its face a featureless burlap sack. Something so innocuous even the crows nested on its shoulders and pecked at it. Yet at night, in Paul’s dreams—for surely they were only dreams—it would appear framed in Paul’s bedroom window, its respiration—respiration!—impossibly fogging up the glass.
In a state of near-somnambulism, Paul would climb out of bed and, barefoot, follow the lumbering dark shape around the side of the house. That first night there was a shovel leaning against the porch. Paul took it as a weapon. The scarecrow—nothing more than a smudge of darkness—moved onward through the stalks of corn.
It wasn’t until Paul reached a sparse clearing in the corn did he realize the scarecrow had disappeared. Something about the softness of the ground troubled him. The shovel, it seemed, was all too conveniently in his hands.
He dug, thinking of the missing girl, thinking, Janna is ded.
In the end, he found only an empty hole in the earth. And in the morning, despite the filth on his feet, he wondered if it had all been a dream.
But it was no dream. And it continued for the first month. When he tried to stay awake, the scarecrow did not appear. It was only on those nights where, bested by exhaustion, he would slump over in a chair only to awaken at the sound of the creaking porch as someone circumnavigated the farmhouse. A shape would lumber past the windows.
Scarecrow, he thought, shuddering.
He was supposed to find the girl—that much was clear to him. Each night,
the scarecrow led him to a different part of the field. Often, Paul could discern patches of barren earth between the stalks, and he would commence digging. Other times, he found himself uprooting stalks to cultivate his craters. By the end of the month, and with the harvest moon now full in the sky, the field was pockmarked by his obsession.
“She lived in your house, you know,” said one of his students…and how simple was he that he hadn’t already come to this realization? It gave his obsession a heart and a soul.
“You’re getting warmer,” said another student, and this caused the hairs on the back of Paul’s neck to rise. As if they were watching him at night while he dug like a grave robber in the cornfield.
He wanted to ask them, Is the scarecrow real? He wanted to say, Is that what got Janna? But he didn’t. He would be driven out of a job for being a madman.
Again, night came. The scarecrow appeared shifting through the corn at the edge of the field. This night, Paul waited for it, sitting on the porch with the shovel across his lap. Again, he followed it into the field. When he lost sight of the creature, he began digging.
Janna is ded.
There was nothing beneath the ground.
Above, ravens cawed.
On a Tuesday, someone put a rotten apple on his desk. Someone else had stuck used flypaper in X formations across the windowpanes in the classroom. Again, the principal laughed and said kids will be kids.
“No one handed in their homework,” he said to the class. This wasn’t totally accurate—someone had handed in a ream of paper on which they’d pasted cutout photos from glamour magazines. Paul found this alarmingly sociopathic.
At the end of the day, as they filed out of the classroom, one of the girls smiled at him. Her front teeth were blackened and there was a bruise on her left cheekbone. “Tick tock goes the clock,” she said to him.
“What?”
She smiled horridly then fled from the classroom.
He no longer waited for the scarecrow to make its appearance; he spent his evenings digging trenches in the cornfield. By the second month in the farmhouse, there was very little corn left.
Exhausted, sore, he dragged the shovel behind him back toward the house, stopping only when he saw the scarecrow hanging from its post in the east field. Its form was slumped under the weight of countless black crows. Despite his tiredness, he went to it. The crows were bold and did not fly off immediately. Paul scared them off eventually by swinging the shovel.
“Get,” he said. “Go on.”
It hung like wet laundry, its pant legs sprouting straw, its flannel shirt tattered. The featureless burlap sack of its face seemed to sag under the weight of its existence.
It does not exist. Not like that.
He reached up and pressed a hand to its straw-filled flannel shirt.
Not straw-filled.
Paul went cold. He dropped the shovel in the dirt.
Reaching up, he peeled the burlap face away to reveal a second face: a head turned funny on its neck, reminding Paul Marcus of the dead baby bird left in his coffee mug.
The next Monday, after a weekend spent at the sheriff’s office filling out paperwork, he stood before his classroom. The earthworms were suspiciously quiet this morning. Nothing had been left on or in his desk. The flypaper had been removed from the cracked windowpanes.
“I want…” And his voice cracked. “I want you all to turn to chapter five in your texts,” he continued, trying hard to sound in control. He was sweating through his tweed coat and his throat felt constricted. “I want—”
“Dogs can sense fear,” said the boy toward the back, picking his nose.
“My mother had an abortion when she was a teenager,” said one of the girls.
Paul Marcus offered them a wan smile and wondered, not for the first time, whatever happened to the schoolteacher he had replaced.
Knocking
Picture it: a squalid, self-deprecating little bungalow wedged like a rotting tooth in a mouthful of rotting teeth along the poorest side street of North London. Skies terminally gray, where the textured hues of an early morning are practically indistinguishable from those of a premature dusk, this little bungalow sat, undaunted, unfettered, deprived of everything yet feeling nothing in such depravity. On the outside the building looked like a construct stretched out of shape to resemble something from some child’s fleeting nightmare. It looked gray and tired, the exterior stucco sheathing overcome by corded veins of ivy and ginseng where, in the springtime, sparrows nested. Despite the previous occupants’ insistence to the contrary, the entire building canted slightly to the left. While ample space was provided for one to traverse the ivy-encrusted alleyway that separated our home from the building to our left, upon looking up while standing in this very alley, the proximity of our roof to the neighboring roof appeared to be less than six inches apart. Surely, following the passage of a few more years, the two roofs would eventually touch, the buildings bowing together like united lovers over an abyss. The listing was even more noticeable when glasses of water or bottles of wine were abandoned on tabletops, countertops, coffee tables throughout the place: it did not take much scrutiny to observe the not-so-subtle tilt to the surface of the given liquid. It was not something you felt, although both Tara and I found it difficult to fall asleep the first month of our occupancy, and after some casual discussion, we both decided our insomnia was due to our bodies acclimating themselves to the structural misalignment.
The interior of the bungalow was shabby and colorless, the atmosphere at times overtaken by a sort of chronic fatigue. The windows were too small, like the portholes in a ship, the panes dulled to cataract opaqueness. Standing in the center of the foyer and looking up revealed a gutted hollow that yawned to the second floor and, beyond that, the cathedral ceiling. It was like living in the gullet of some prehistoric reptile. The walls were an ancient alabaster, the woodwork and molding so old and arthritic, it seemed almost criminal to attempt any restoration, lest we upset some divine plan.
And for a while, it was perfect.
“This works, yeah?”
“It works,” Tara said. “It all works.”
“Tell me one thing you love about living here.”
“One thing?”
“Just one.”
She considered. “I love the way everyone says ‘bloody.’ It’s very British.”
I laughed. “All right,” I said. “Now tell me one thing you hate.”
She said, “I hate the bloody weather.”
We moved to London from the States near the end of May, on our one-year wedding anniversary. It was different and new, all of it. I’d grown up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., while Tara had spent her youth with a family of seven in the sun-baked scrublands of the Midwest. We had a good life in the States, but we were young and anxious and ready to take on as much of the world as we could. So we found the decrepit little flat in North London, and despite its ugliness (or maybe because of it), we loved it. We suffered the expected tribulations associated with any relocation—a missing box of dishes, a busted table leg, the discovery of items previously thought lost weeks after taking up residency—but in all, it went off without a hitch. Tara knew nothing about London but proved a quick study. She made it a point to venture into Camden, to patronize the neighboring shops and cafés and pubs in order to soak up the local custom. The discrepancy between U.S. dollars and British pounds was a cause for some mild frustration, but she soon got the hang of that as well. For the most part, we found the people to be mutually polite and reserved, displaying a sense of propriety and a respect for personal space that would have been mistaken back home for haughtiness or, in the least, some form of social maladjustment. I took a job teaching English at the university and Tara studied for her doctorate in child psychology while working part-time as a waitress at the Algerian.
Summer, the smell of the Thames was unrelenting. We would sleep with the bedroom windows open, falling asleep to the scent of the city. (This routine
was abandoned, however, after a series of seemingly unrelated murders in the Heath transformed this humble pleasure into an act of recklessness.) We had a washer and dryer, but Tara took to hanging the clothes across a stretch of clothesline from the patio windows to the deck railing at the rear of the bungalow. One warm afternoon, we picnicked at Highgate Ponds and got drunk on cheap red wine. We laughed ourselves into stomach cramps when a group of middle-aged male locals appeared and stripped out of their clothing to sun themselves in the open quarter. Their nudity was severe and white, all ribs, stomachs, and wiry pepper-colored pubic hair.
The bungalow sustained two bedrooms off the ground floor, a foyer that communicated with a den that, in turn, fashioned off into a quaint kitchenette. The second floor contained the bathroom and another room that could have been forged into a cramped bedroom or an equally cramped study. At her pleading, I awarded the second-floor room to Tara, which she fashioned into a handsome little study of obsessive-compulsive neatness.
Once we’d settled into our respective roles, with North London starting to not feel so alien, I quickly immersed myself into the mix at the university. Tara attended her classes during the day, leaving the bungalow brooding and empty in our absence. On the nights she worked at the Algerian, I would sometimes visit for a pint; other times, I would stay home alone and listen to the encroaching silence of the bungalow while invisible clocks ticked in shadowed background.
One evening toward the close of summer, a soft rain falling in the streets, Tara appeared in the doorway to my home office door. I was perched over my desk, grading papers from my summer school class.
“Hon,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“There’s something upstairs.”
“Hold on.”
I scribbled a note in the margin of the paper I was reading then turned to face her. “There’s what?”
“I don’t know. Just come look.”
I followed her up the winding staircase to the second floor. Through the slats in the balustrade, I looked directly down the gaping maw of the narrow little house, straight down to the foyer below. A soft rain pattered against the windows. I could hear a dog barking far off in the distance.