Wilde Stories 2014

by Editred by Steve Berman

  50. Because the water at the bottom of the quarry was still an eerie blue with the light from the sky, even though the sun had already slipped past the horizon.

  51. Because they were all standing so much closer than I was to the uneven lip of the quarry, and I reached out my arms and clasped my hands on air, so they were linked up in a human chain, and I ran and leapt and they went over the edge but I still had another three feet of solid ground ahead of me.

  52. Because I stepped forward and looked down and there they were, far below, their backs to me, waist-deep in water and looking down into it, still holding hands, some of them unable to stand on broken legs, and there was blood in the water.

  53. Because it was more from weariness than anything else when I lay down on the ground, head pressed to the dirt, and I knew even though I couldn’t see them that they were all fully underwater, and I opened my mouth and breathed in that sweet cold December night air and then breathed it out, breathed it in and breathed it out, until the tension slackened in my muscles and I knew the field was broken, because they had drowned.

  54. Because I got up off the ground knowing I had lost her forever, that she had seen straight through to the cold twisted heart of who I was. And in seeing who I was, she had shown me myself.

  55. Because I had been too dumb to see how this power, this privilege I didn’t want but had nonetheless, far from helping me to see, had blinded me to the truth of who we were.

  56. Because in the movie, Carrie’s punishment for killing her foes was to die, and mine was to live.

  57. Because Anchal knew what I did not: that we are what we are, and we act it out without wanting to, and only death can break us of the habit of being the bodies we’re born into.

  Happy Birthday, Numbskull

  Robert Smith

  I was always a sensitive child, finding terror in the tiniest, most ridiculous things, like the time I watched in mystery and horror as my mother and father cracked open long, bizarrely shaped and spiked, pink crab legs at the kitchen table, and, over newspaper, sucked the insides out, mouths garishly covered in melted butter.

  I grew up in aluminum houses all over Michigan. You can still see it in my face. You can see the rusted cars in the front yard, and my mother vacuuming the bottoms of above-ground swimming pools as if they were Olympic sized. If you look close enough you can see kids with lice and cousins with fetal alcohol poisoning kissin’ and touchin’ each other in the woods. You can see crack addiction and Canada, where tiny handwritten letters tied to helium balloons ended up.

  I remember my mother telling me that a penny thrown from the Empire State Building could kill somebody. Maybe it was then I realized it didn’t take much. I was always a sensitive child, finding terror in the tiniest, most ridiculous things, like the time I watched in mystery and horror as my mother and father cracked open long, bizarrely shaped and spiked, pink crab legs at the kitchen table, and, over newspaper, sucked the insides out, mouths garishly covered in melted butter. As they scoured over the messy and seemingly extraterrestrial pile, I was convinced my parents had been the victims of “body-snatchers,” and it took the better part of my youngest years before I was ever convinced otherwise.

  I can also remember being completely terrified as my father whittled the strange, coarse, alien-like rind off a pineapple, working in some weird nostalgic trance, reminiscing about the year he lived in Hawaii with his older brother. Again, I visualized some sort of Martian mind control, but for years, even without being under the psychic influence of a pineapple, he would talk about the time he went surfing in Hawaii and saw a shark swim past him. When retelling the story, my father would make the shape of a dorsal fin with his right hand and slowly move it through the air in the space between us, and I could imagine rows and rows of shark’s teeth snapping at my feet below me, wherever I was. I was a highly imaginative and anxious kid. It didn’t take much more than unfamiliar fruit or spindly shellfish to push me over the edge.

  I used to get bloody noses in the middle of the night from sleeping next to the furnace to keep warm. Once, my father had to remove a blood clot from my nose, a cluster of cells and mucus rooted all the way to the back of my sinus, like wild plants clinging to clumps of dampened soil. When he pulled it out, I felt relief and a newfound empty space in my head I didn’t realize until then I had, as if somebody scooped out my brains and left me a cleanly shucked, less cluttered skull. I remember my father laughing at my reaction to my new sense of self as I shook my head back and forth, amazed at the feeling of emptiness.

  “I can’t feel my brains,” I said, rattling my head in bliss. My father began to laugh along with me for the first time I can ever recall. My father now being rendered in memory as a passive bystander, a mystery of a man, either at work or absent from work or just completely missing. When home, he was a loving father, yet somehow never managed to fully express it. He was always somewhere else, even when in the same house.

  “I can’t feel my brains!” I giddily exclaimed over and over again.

  “You Numbskull,” he playfully christened, and at that moment I didn’t want to be known as anything else.

  In the Midwestern winter mornings my mother would send me out to warm the car for my younger brother, Calvin, and the twins. She’d give me the keys and I’d sit in the driver’s seat and secretly read one of her V.C. Andrews paperbacks while the windows were still frosted over, concealing me from the rest of the world. I wasn’t allowed to read my mother’s books. They were not for little boys, which made me covet them even more. I’d project myself right into the portraits of sinister looking families that were found behind the book’s jacket, and inside I poured over the absurd stories of Gothic horror, family secrets and forbidden love, fantasizing about a life outside my own, which was that of an awkward eight-year-old boy who got crushes on other boys, was the oldest of four, and son to two very young parents who fought all the time about things he didn’t quite understand.

  It seemed like everybody was always talking about eating people back then, which only heightened my seemingly inexhaustible fears and anxieties as well as unanswered questions. Jeffrey Dahmer was in the news, Silence of the Lambs was on pay-per-view. For the first time, I was hearing phrases like “cannibalism,” “necrophilia” and “homosexuality”. Hearing those words lumped together was an obvious cause for even more confusion and concern for me as I struggled to figure things out about myself, by myself, and why I was made to feel wrong for the way I acted, which, for a lack of creativity on the part of my critics, was more or less like a girl, a strangely terrified girl. But for a few moments every morning I was alone in my own igloo, behind windows covered in snow and ice, with the steam coming from the old muffler growing into white, condensed clouds all around me, and I felt that was the only part of the day I was ever really safe. At least until the windows defrosted, and the crystallized corners slowly rolled back onto themselves, curling at the melting edges like a page from a book I wasn’t supposed to be reading thrown onto a fire.

  My family eventually moved into a perfectly square, three-bedroom home in Warren, Michigan, a small, poor county on the outskirts of Detroit. My father immediately built a giant deck from bleached lumber. It attached to the back of the house and was twice as big as its host. Four steps from the ground, the yard beneath forever cast into a shady place for hiding, for stray cats to give birth to their kittens, for soft balls and other small things to end up missing. He wrapped it up in a lattice of wood to keep anything larger than a small animal from getting underneath the floorboards.

  A snake’s jaw doesn’t actually unhinge at the skull to swallow something larger than its mouth. It simply stretches…

  The first summer in that house I celebrated my eleventh birthday. My mother wound streamers across the banister and tied clusters of balloons from the posts. My cousins threw water balloons at each other from over the rails. In the driveway another cousin picked out the raw center of his grilled hamburger with his chubby fingers and
rolled the pink meat into little fleshy balls before popping them into his mouth, a clown face of red Faygo stains outlining his grin while he watched two other sunburned and shirtless neighborhood kids perform a duel with Super Soakers in the driveway. They put their backs together, then walked away in measured steps, counting to ten before whipping around and blasting each other with the water guns.

  My younger brother, Calvin, was in the above-ground pool pulling the tightly suctioned snorkel mask from his face, releasing it with a POP, tipping out the water that leaked in.

  The twins wore bright orange floaties that held their delicate arms forever suspended on the surface of the water next to their ears, which barely bounced above the carefully chlorinated three feet of water. My family had dug out a slight, gradual slope in the yard beneath the surface of the pool lining, adding an additional inch and a half of depth at the very center. Here the twins couldn’t reach the bottom even on the tips of their toes so they just kicked their legs back and forth with an excited sense of freedom and danger.

  I was watching all this from the deck, hiding behind the girth of my Gramma Mae, my father’s mother. Gramma Mae had poor blood and fluid circulation, and as a young adult the doctors made the mistake of simply removing the collapsed veins from her lower legs. Consequently she became dependent upon a wheelchair, and over the years she continued to gain weight and her legs swelled up and scabbed over in protest. She only got out of her chair to use the restroom and then later to go to bed. She wore large floral-print muumuus and taught me how to play rummy and gin rummy, and read to me from a children’s Bible, illustrated and abbreviated, whenever I would come and visit. After Genesis we always became uninterested and put the book down.

  She’d scrub her legs with pumice stone, and I would watch as she attended to her suffocating limbs, the exfoliated skin and scabs drifting around her, catching light in great-whittled swarms while she sang:

  “Gonna dance with the dolly with the holes in her stocking’s / Knees keep a’knockin’ / Toes keep a’rockin’ / Gonna dance with the dolly with the holes in her stocking’s / Dance by the light of the Moooon!”

  And I always felt safe with my Gramma Mae, preferring her company to kids my own age.

  The neighbors next door were grilling out back as well. It was a group of brothers, all young adults sharing the house with their single, shut-in father. They were rebel boys that liked to hunt. On this day they had just returned from a trip upstate and brought back with them a deer loosely wrapped in a black tarp in the bed of their truck. I overheard my mother ask them to leave it where it was until after the party, before moving it to the garage, because she didn’t want the kids to see it.

  When it was time to open presents and sing “Happy Birthday” my mother tied a T-shirt around my head and sat me in front of a birthday cake in the shape of Garfield’s head, lit by eleven dripping, pastel-colored candles. When she untied my blindfold, it seemed as if all of my cousins had encircled me, towered over me grinning with stained teeth and faces, savage war paint from artificially colored popsicles, sodas and ice cream cones. Their arms held behind their backs as if to protest their innocence.

  “Come oooooon, make a wiiiiish!” my mother prompted, always quick to grow impatient with such a nervous son.

  I sucked in and clenched my eyes like jumping from a large cliff and inched my face towards the miniature flames, anxiously aware of everybody watching me. I pushed the air from my chest and just as my breath passed my O-shaped lips I opened my eyes and saw my birthday guests had been concealing small aerosol cans behind their backs and were now pointing them at me. As I blew my wish into the candles, coils of Silly String spiraled towards me, combusting into little blowtorches of fire as the flammable confetti grazed over the birthday candles then licked my face just inches from the cake.

  My mother, also caught unaware by the practical joke, and horrified by the unpredicted disaster, let out a quick yelp. The eyes of the other adults widened in awe, stunned and mesmerized by the simple beauty and hypnotic qualities of the fire. The fireball of gas quickly rolled over my face, and extinguished itself before anybody really knew what happened. Although not before scorching my eyebrows and eyelashes into minuscule black balls of crusty protein. Two beats after the last eyelash went up in a wisp of smoke, Herb the stoner neighbor from across the street heroically threw his mug of beer at me.

  The neighbors next door, separated by a chain-link fence, but just as present as the rest of the guests, let out howls of approval at the fireworks display as the entire deck four steps above fell into a moment of silence. Two of the brothers gave each other high fives, and the third tuned the dial on the old pickup’s radio, which was parked in front of their garage carrying the secret, bloating cargo. He cranked up the volume as the opening cords of Black Sabbath’s “Children of the Grave” presented itself through the static, then made the sign of the devil with his left hand, saluting total righteousness. A breeze caught beneath the tarp in the bed of the truck and peeled it back, providing a creep show to instigate the already horrified party.

  “Hell yeah, little dude!” The neighbor yelled and nodded from the open door of the truck towards me, signaling my very first memory of acceptance ever. I saw all this from behind the remains of my eyelashes, and noticed my cousins, neighbors and parents looking back at me with a new-found respect and fear as they waited to see what would happen next, as if I would be the one willing it to be. As if I could summon the elements, scorch the earth with fire, unveil scores of covered corpses by my command of the wind. Only my Gramma Mae looked on with an innocent delight and slight confusion.

  While my heavy-metal neighbors rocked out to my total wickedness, the corners of my lips began to curl up into a wise grin, much to the fright of most of my family and guests. A stray cinder floated over to one of the balloons tied to the banister, and let out a loud bang as it landed.

  This time everybody jumped in unified nervousness, except for me.

  My wish had come true.

  In my parent’s bedroom my mother aggressively tried to conceal what could have possibly been considered to be the mark of the devil. Screams of children playing outside could be heard as she searched her makeup kit for the proper instrument. She tested eyeliner on her hand then steadily applied it to my bald eyebrows.

  “Hopefully your hair will grow back by the time you start school. You need to make some friends. Stop being such a little girl all the time. Scared of your own shadow,” she said as she labored, checking the results.

  She sketched the last effect onto my brow then whirled me around to face the mirror of her vanity.

  “Shit! That won’t work, will it?” On my face were two thickly drawn eyebrows at arches that gave me an exaggerated, comical expression of worry. My mother rummaged around again, pulled out a long floral scarf from a dresser drawer and a pair of large sunglasses and affixed them both to my head.

  “It’s time you start acting like a man. Okay?”

  As my mother contemplated her creation, unaware of any irony, there was a knock at her door. She looked into my face for some recognition, but was visibly disappointed as she walked over and opened the door, revealing my birthday guests and their parents, grouped together like Christmas Carolers. They stood awkwardly on the threshold, the kids obviously having been prompted by the adults to apologize and say goodbye, the twins in front of the chorus, still wearing their bright orange floaties.

  “Sorry thank you for having us happy birthday goodbye I’m sorry about that thank you goodbye happy birthday!”

  My mother stood holding the door open for the guests. She had cemented a fake smile on her face as if to suggest everything was okay, until she turned away from them and faced me with a look of threat.

  “Say goodbye, young man.”

  Theatrically, as if mustering the strength from my deathbed, I drew a breath and managed a mutter as I raised my chin, and clutched the scarf close to my face. My mother was horrified, my guests begged the
ir parents to take them home, and the twins laughed hysterically.

  “Thank you…and…good-bye.”

  Right There in Kansas City

  Casey Hannan

  I tell him I found sword fighting to be a violent pursuit, and I have abhorred violence since my terrifying birth.

  My friend enters my apartment, takes off his shirt, and accuses me of being a brown recluse spider. He senses my desire to devour him in the dark of my living room. He’ll shake out his clothes from now on to make sure I’m not lurking inside.

  “It’s a hot den of iniquity in here,” he says.

  I call it a nest. I don’t believe in air conditioning. I’ve torn the stuffing from the couch cushions and made a bed in the corner. The light fixtures don’t have bulbs. I smile to survey it, which is a mistake because of my teeth.

  My friend has it in his head I have fangs. My canines are long. All parts of me are long. My face has been the real joke. I went as a happy crescent moon for Halloween for many years. That was during my social phase. My medicine phase.

  Now I never go outside. I buy cereal on the Internet. I have a full-length mirror I pretend is a window into the neighbor’s place.

  “Do something,” I say to my reflection in the mirror.

  “Do me,” my friend says.

  He’s part blind from where his pet tarantula flicked irritating hairs into his eyes. They are grey and opaque as raw almond milk. He can discern shapes and make do with the fuzzed aura of a new outfit, but he never knows if his hair is saying what he wants it to say.

  “I want to silence my hair,” he says. “Get it shorn completely. Will you do that for me?”

  I say I consider shearing hair an erotic act, and I won’t have any involvement in it.