Exigencies

by Richard Thomas

  “This is the very last time that I’ll be honest with you,” he said, in that same low, reasonable, human voice. “I only started all this for the women. That was the whole point at first, it was all about pussy.”

  “You were supposed to figure it out. Not right away, but eventually—you were smart, you weren’t like the others. You were supposed to leave, so I’d know when I was done. It was never supposed to go this far.”

  He produced his key ring from somewhere in his robe and threw it down on the ground in front of him.

  “I lied. I’m not a prophet. We’re not going to be saved. You’ve been tricked. Get the hell out of here now while you still can.”

  Father Jim opened his eyes then, and watched Michael carefully. Michael looked down at the floor and folded his hands in his lap. He didn’t move.

  Father Jim got up, leaned over carefully, and picked up his keys. He opened the door. A cockroach scurried away. The light from the room reached out into the hallway, so that in a fixed radius from the doorway you could see the dirty floor, black paint covered in a layer of dust, speckled with calcified grains of fried rice.

  Michael got up and walked back into the darkness. The door closed behind him.

  He walked, he slept. He had a dream about a cold breeze.

  Michael realized that he wasn’t dreaming.

  He turned the corner, and saw sunlight shining down from an open doorway. He got closer. It was a maintenance closet—there was a metal ladder bolted to the wall, leading to an open hatch. He climbed up.

  The horizon was a dirty orange Creamsicle color, the very beginning of the sunrise joining together with the headlights and the traffic signals and the electric artery running through the center of the expressway.

  Father Jim was lying in the middle of the roof face down, with his limbs stretched out and bent in all directions. There was a gun on the ground next to him, and a neat line of blood twisting and curving from his head to the storm drain.

  Michael took a closer look. He didn’t move any closer, he just looked more intently. It was another trick, another test. Michael would not allow himself to doubt.

  “Fuck, man.” Michael turned around. Donald was standing on the other side of the roof.

  “Bullshit,” Donald said. “It was all fucking bullshit. Fuck. Fuck.”

  “Don’t say that,” Michael answered, but Donald didn’t listen, he was already walking towards the body.

  “Fucking...” He reached down and pulled up on Father Jim’s shoulder, flipping the body over and revealing the gaping bloody hole in the side of his head. “Just a fucking joke. Just a fucking joke.” He laughed nervously.

  “We need to wait,” Michael said, but Donald was already walking back towards the ladder.

  “I’ve got to get the hell out of here. I’ve got to go . . . ”

  “No. Not now. We’re so close.”

  Michael wasn’t sure if Donald heard him. In any case, he wasn’t stopping.

  The flashlight was on the ground near the trap door. Michael had stepped over it without noticing that it was there.

  Donald put his hand on the ladder. He had a vacant smile on his face and was whispering something to himself. He was going to swing his feet over and climb down. He was going to leave.

  Michael walked over, picked up the flashlight, and swung the handle into the side of Donald’s head, all in one swift motion. He did it without thinking, and was surprised immediately afterwards at what he’d done. Donald didn’t even hardly seem to notice that he’d been hit. He took a step backwards. He stopped smiling.

  “It wasn’t for anything Michael. It was nothing.”

  “Shut up.”

  “It was bullshit, Michael.”

  Michael hit him again and he fell down.

  For a moment time seemed to speed up and slow down simultaneously. He was swinging the flashlight. He was not yet swinging the flashlight. He’d swung the flashlight, many times, his arm was heavy, he was sitting on the roof with the bodies of two people he used to know, wondering if the cops were going to come. Wondering if anybody was going to come.

  “SHUT UP! WE HAVE TO WAIT! WE HAVE TO WAIT!”

  He beat him to death while the sun came up.

  brendan detzner

  lives, works, and writes in chicago. his work is sometimes scary, sometimes funny, and usually very strange. he’s been published in pseudopod, chizine, bizarrocast, one buck horror, the book of dead things anthology and other venues. he also runs bad grammar theater, a monthly reading series. you can find out about bgt at www.badgrammartheater.com and read/listen to more of brendan’s work

  at www.brendandetzner.com.

  MY

  MOTHER'S

  CONDITION

  FAITH GARDNER

  Ihad moved to the place where honks replaced hawk-cries and high-rises swallowed redwoods, and didn’t visit my mother as often as maybe I should have, and this is why I knew nothing of her condition.

  Dez and I rode the bullet train to visit, that time of year when every snow-crumbed town that whizzed by us shouted with artificial lights. It had been too long, I thought, Dez on my knee, sucking her pinky. Dez had been barely able to roll over on her belly when I last visited. She had been a hairless pink prize in a fleece blanket when I last visited. And now her tongue had found words, like mommy, and hungry, and even sentences: I want.

  Dez wouldn’t recognize her grandmother from a stranger, I thought. Time splintered wholes into parts.

  After the long wait at the rain-spattered train station, my mother’s telephone bleating and bleating with no “Hello” to interrupt, a yellow cab drove us there. The guilt, the fear was a bone-deep thunder. Something was wrong, some tragedy had befallen my mother—a spill down basement steps, a slick-smiled serial killer, a blood clot to the brain—and left Dez and I with no one to greet us at the station. My mind offered horror after horror like picture-postcards from hell, and I held onto Dez tightly, fidgeting over her shiny shoes, seeing myself distorted and monster-headed in their itty shine. Out the cab window, the forest was an eye-numbing blizzard of green until the cab pulled up to her house.

  “Thank you,” I told the cabbie, who chewed a toothpick and eyed my stockinged legs before screeching out of the driveway.

  I held Dez on my hip and stared at my mother’s bungalow, shingled and brown as a pinecone, and listened to treetop shrieks and ear-tickling breezes.

  “What’s that?” Dez asked, her arms around my neck.

  I picked up the hard suitcase from the damp asphalt, looked back at the empty road.

  “This here’s the world,” I said. “Without subways and skyscrapers.”

  The fear choked, choked, with every click of my heels that brought us closer to the house. The flowerbeds had been upturned, the garbage was raccoon-ransacked and strewn in the yard. Newspapers piled up, weather-torn and wet. And there were no icicle lights hanging from the roof gutters or plastic fat-bellied men in red suits on her lawn.

  “Oh God,” I said.

  “Oh God,” Dez said, and laughed.

  And with each tiptoe nearer to the stoop, I imagined I grew smaller, smaller, my years shed and left behind like leaves in the driveway, and I was a little girl again, frantic with desire, my vocabulary limited to one infinite word: mother mother mother.

  I pushed her door open.

  “Hello?” I asked the wood-paneled walls, the dried flowers in vases, the needlepoint left on the countertop. Dirty dishes in the sink. A tangled pile of mildew-stinky sheets. My eyes filled, and I felt more puddle than person. But Dez was a weight on my hip, and I stood upright, swallowing the pill of fear.

  “I’m here,” my mother said.

  And that’s when I saw her—thank you thank you, my silent voice gratefully gushing—she was alive. Seated on a blanket-draped couch, hands folded in her lap. But . . . I had to gasp.

  She was the size of Dez.

  “Mother,” was all I could say.

  “Mother,” Dez repea
ted.

  “Shhh,” I told Dez.

  I sat next to my mother—my mother, whose hope-bright face and careful cloud of hair only reached my chest. Who wore my jog-a-thon shirt I recognized from 5th grade.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” she said. “It happened to my mother. Now it’s my turn.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.

  “Didn’t want to be a bother.”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head.

  “You can naysay all you want,” my mother said. “What good does it do?”

  Her jaw was clenched, her anger sharpening the words.

  “You can’t live like this,” I said. “You need to come home with us.”

  My mother reached out and squeezed Dez’s fist in her own—they were, alarmingly, almost same-sized.

  “All right,” she said simply.

  And I called the cabbie back, and when the three of us sat in the back seat—Dez in her car seat, mother in my lap—we waved goodbye to the bungalow for the last time.

  My body seemed to swell. I was a lady King Kong in a cab. Even the view outside the window, the other cars, the rainclouds smeared across the sky, took on a new diminished proportion.

  My mother disliked my apartment. The late-night thumps of the treadmill upstairs, the hot curry pong that filled the hall, the roaches that scuttled across the linoleum in late hours.

  “At my size, they’re monstrous,” she said. “You’ve got to get out of this place.”

  “In your condition, you’ve got to take what you can get,” I told her. “It could be worse.”

  “It will be worse,” she promised.

  I bought a double-stroller, took Dez and my mother out on daily walks to the park after work. There, she could listen to the creek water and stare at ants as they marched along tree bark. Dogs without leashes, pigeons pecking at lawns.

  “I miss my home,” my mother said sadly, staring at a Chihuahua in a leopard-print coat that peed on a maple. “This isn’t nature.”

  “Mother,” I said. “I’m doing the best I can.”

  “That nanny treats me like a child,” she said. “Yesterday she tried to spoon-feed me.”

  I sighed. “I’ll talk to her about it.”

  “And Dez keeps pulling my hair,” she said. “No matter what I say—you leave the room and she goes straight for a fistful of my hair.”

  Dez laughed.

  “It’s not funny, Dez,” I told her. “You be nice to Grandma.”

  “She won’t listen,” my mother said. “Sometimes I wish you had just left me there to shrivel up in familiarity.”

  I held my mother’s tiny hand in my own.

  “I couldn’t let that happen,” I said. “I love you.”

  “Part of love is admitting you have no control,” she said. “That’s something I think you’ve never understood.”

  I stared at an older woman hurrying by us, scarecrow tall and thin, in a herringbone coat. She was laughing into a telephone; I watched the silver sky, and I was so miniscule, plankton in a whale’s jaws.

  “Let me call a doctor,” I murmured.

  “Not that again,” my mother said. “I told you, I get a whiff of a hospital or a specialist, and I’ll shoot off like a cat. I may be small, but my legs still work.”

  “Fine,” I said.

  I stared at them side by side—my mother with her colorless curls, my daughter with her mop of white-blond—both in pink sweaters meant for Dez. The opposite poles of my DNA, bizarre twins. I knew this was a snapshot in time, a moment born to be lost, but it felt so permanent then that it ached like a growing pain.

  My mother’s mother—my grandmother, that is—had the same condition. Over a short period of years, she shed pounds and inches, lost the ability to drive, open doors for herself, reach countertops. Finally, my mother took her in, made her a basket-bed and a closet-room. And when my mother took my grandmother to the doctor, they kept my grandmother overnight, then over weeks, invited more and more doctors in to see her, filmed her, poked and pricked her, thrust her in the belly of plastic machines, until finally my mother hired a lawyer and demanded the hospital release her poor, small mother, who was trapped inside an incubator like an awful house of glass.

  On the way home from the hospital, on the train, my mother clasped the shoebox holding her mother, muttering apologies. She petted her mother’s hair and sucked back tears, suggested medicine women and wild herbs. My mother dozed as the train hummed along, and when she awoke, she had missed her stop. She frantically grabbed her luggage and got off at the next station. It was only then, on the platform with the steaming chug of the train as it pulled away from her and left her alone, that she realized she had left her mother on the seat.

  The monotone operator on the telephone swore she would check the lost and found. A day later, my mother got news that the shoebox had been recovered—cardboard crushed, dinner napkin that was once a blanket gone, only empty space remaining.

  I made a bed for my mother from Dez’s cradle, and when summer came, I moved her to the bassinet. She wouldn’t let me use the measuring tape.

  “Why?” she asked. “No matter what the numbers say, I’m shrinking.”

  “It’s hard for me to notice,” I said. “I see you every day.”

  But it was the comparison that made her dwindling obvious. For as Dez swelled and ballooned—stumbling around the house in new frilly dresses while my mother stooped to Dez’s hand-me-downs—my mother was now the obvious runt of the two. I often found my mother hiding in the hamper, or beneath the bed, to avoid Dez and the nanny, and even the Rumba that my mother had started to fear would swallow her up. I thought that was ridiculous—my mother wasn’t insectile enough to be swallowed by a sweeping machine.

  By fall, I got rid of the Rumba, though, as it didn’t seem so crazy anymore. She was almost minute enough to get a limb caught in it. Besides, history haunted like a ghost made of words. I remembered my mother’s mistake with her mother. I vowed never to be so careless.

  As the weather grayed and temperatures dropped to cruel and icy nadirs, I took her out for walks each day, wrapping her in a fleece blanket, cradling her in my arms as we strolled by delis and street vendors. But I was too afraid to let her off on her own, to explore the park lawns or sit on tree branches. There were sharp-toothed dogs and chiding squirrels. She was bird-sized. She was prey.

  My mother was only about six inches tall now, and increasingly quiet, and depressed. She stared out the window for hours and napped constantly in my top drawer among stockings and discarded hairpins.

  For Christmas, I bought my mother a dollhouse. I placed her inside and watched her mouth, a red O.

  “It smells like trees,” my mother said, touching the banister. She was wearing clothes I had bought from a Toys R Us, meant for dolls; that meant my mother wore a jean jacket and pink shimmering tutu. She reminded me of a child, the way she giggled as she touched the hung paintings I’d special-ordered. “The details!”

  I hadn’t seen joy on her in ages. There was a flushed smudge to her cheeks as she ran up the stairs.

  “A kitchen!” she said, throwing open the cabinets. “With dishes!”

  She stared at herself in the tiny bathroom mirror. “There I am!”

  She sat on the bed in the master bedroom. “It fits me,” she said, amazed.

  Dez was jealous. “I want a dollhouse,” she said, stamping her foot and pushing her stuffed monkeys and books to the floor.

  “You’ll get it someday,” I said.

  A heavy moment hung in the air like a knife dangling over the room, and I cleared my throat. I saw my mother stare at me with a tiny frightened expression that asked, what will become of me? And I looked away with a visage that refused to answer, my refusal replying, I don’t know.

  I often stared at my clock and thought, if I wanted it bad enough, if I concentrated well enough, I could stop the ticking. If we could pause, there would be no trag
edy in this. I could freeze everything and just be here, just enjoy this instead of scurrying to keep up with the invisible hurricane of change.

  Her happiness didn’t last. Because, she reminded me, the house was well-designed, impeccably decorated with miniatures but . . . non-functional.

  “The toilet doesn’t flush!” she said, opening the lid. “See? The sinks don’t run. The stove doesn’t work. I’m living in a model home.”

  “There’s no such thing as a fully functioning dollhouse,” I reminded her.

  “It’s somehow worse,” she said, her voice quivering. “Because for moments in here, the proportions are all so right, I forget I’m not normal. Yesterday I spent half my day straightening out the extra room, rearranging it to make it just right for a guest room—when I realized I’ll never have any guests.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, peering in, seeing my enormous bleary eye reflected in the bitty bathroom mirror. “I’m trying my best.”

  But nothing I did could prevent her weeping. And though her body was miniscule, her sobs, her voice, they were still large enough to fill a room.

  “Why’s Grandma sad?” asked Dez, who was wearing her new Christmas pajamas. She was a little girl there, suddenly, with her long tangled hair and her nightgown. She wasn’t a baby anymore. I could see the startling blueprint of a woman—a lovely brown-eyed half-me woman—in her features.

  “That’s enough,” I said, wiping my eyes. “Go to bed.”

  I watched Dez tiptoe out of the room, and into hers, where she crawled into her low bed on the floor and covered herself with blankets.

  When you watch over someone every day, nearly every shared hour, change seems like a lie. But there was no denying my mother’s shrinkage was slipping to disappearance. The cabinets in her dollhouse became unreachable and she could no longer crawl into her own bed without a boost. Her meals consisted of a mere crumb or two. And then she herself was the size of a crumb, an ant, until finally—I had to squint to see her—a flea, a dust speck, and then beyond location.