When Michael got up in the morning, Daddy hovered over the kitchen sink, gazing with a shimmering intensity into the stainless-steel tub. He was dressed for work but his hair was all messy and his tie was crooked. When he saw Michael watching him he looked up and tried to smile, but he couldn’t quite look Michael in the eyes.
“Heya, Champ,” he said.
Michael sat at the little white table, the one Grammy gave them, and folded his hands neatly in front of him. He didn’t say anything.
“I’m, uh…” Daddy started, then trailed off. Michael saw there was a little cut just above his lip. A wide purple bruise smeared across his temple. He remembered suddenly the breaking glass.
The silence thickened. Daddy cleared his throat. Michael wanted to yell at him, to scream at him to not say whatever it was he was going to say, but the words stuck in his throat like a plug of concrete.
“I’m, uh, I’m going away for a little while,” Daddy said. “I’ve got to…”
He trailed off again.
“Daddy?” Michael asked. His voice was tiny. No scream in it at all.
“I’ve got to go away for work,” Daddy lied.
“Daddy?”
Daddy looked at him. “What, Champ?”
Michael thought he saw something flicker across the black surface of Daddy’s corneas, dancing just out of reach and then crouching there like a coiled snake.
That other. That thing.
They hadn’t been in this house very long. Michael had only a loose sense of time, which sometimes made hours feel like days but sometimes made months whip by like weeks. But he knew it was summer when they had moved here, and now it was the cold heart of winter.
They’d come here because of Daddy’s job. Mommy had had to quit hers, and she’d been mad about it. Michael noticed that most of the ways in which she wasn’t such a nice person got worse. The whole thing with garage sales had started after they moved.
The last house had been brand new. Michael could even remember the builders making it. He’d been three, barely old enough to form a memory. Mommy and Daddy drove him out to this big grass field covered in wildflowers, with a scrum of dark woods running behind it. “See this, Michael?” Mommy had said. “This is where we’re going to live.” He hadn’t understood. But then they’d gone back some time later, and the field was gone and there were big yellow tractors and piles of dirt and the yellowish skeleton of a house that had the tangy wood smell of a fresh-cut Christmas tree. The house was finished the next time they went back, along with others that looked just like it except for the paint. They lined all up and down the street like multi-colored blocks. Big, sweaty men carried all of their things out of the back of a big truck, and just like that, they were home.
The house they were in now was old. He didn’t know how old, but it didn’t have that fresh pine smell. It smelled like his Grammy’s house, all dirt and smoke and old clothes. It creaked and groaned. He kept finding strange things, like the face carved in the wall behind his dresser, and all the weird little markings hacked into the baseboards. When he asked Daddy about those, Daddy said there must have been a little kid who lived there before him who liked to carve on things he wasn’t supposed to. “Don’t do that,” Daddy said, and ruffled his hair, and then mom complained that someone called THE LANDLORD should have cleaned all that crap up before they moved in.
And there was the hole in the basement. A glistening black pit in the far corner, ringed by broken rocks like slanted gray teeth. A smell came out of it. Something like blood. Salt and blood.
“An old well or something,” Daddy said. “Don’t get too close to it. The ground around it might be soft.”
But when Michael asked Mommy, she smiled and said that maybe there was a witch living here before them. Maybe that hole was where she threw the bones of all the little kids she ate. Then she saw his stricken face and laughed. Laughed like she did when he fell on the porch stair.
Heavy footsteps pounding up the basement stairs.
Michael starts to move, legs working without thought. The basement door grows bigger and bigger as he approaches. It looms like a shrine, the knob at eye-level, tick-tocking back and forth like a metronome.
The pounding stops.
With a life of its own, Michael’s hand shoots out. He tells his hand to stop, begs it, but the fingers grip the knob, the wrist turns, the door swings open, and darkness floods into the light of the kitchen, turning everything hard and gray.
The thing wears one of Daddy’s suits, but it’s all stretched out and proportion-less. Long, spindly legs shoot forward like pistons, carrying the thing into the kitchen.
Michael feels his head tilting, and his gaze goes UP UP UP to the thing’s mammoth, disproportionate head. It’s covered in something wrinkly and brown like a paper bag. But alive. Two black button eyes peer out of the torn folds. Michael feels their weight pressing down into him.
“Hi!”
A voice like a wasps’ nest caught in a cloud of bug spray.
“Who’re you?”
“Who am I?” The thing bellows. No mouth, but Michael knows it’s smiling. “I’m your new Daddy!”
Daddy went to work like usual, but he didn’t come back. That was last week. When Mommy finally came out of her bedroom, her face was puffy and red. It was like a swarm of red ants attacked her in her sleep.
She made Michael breakfast, sniffing while she cooked. She didn’t look at him. Michael wanted to reach out to her, to touch her hand or her leg, to say something to make her feel better. But he was five, and he didn’t know how. And there was always that fear, lurking not quite in the back of his mind, that she would turn on him with that not-nice grin and—
“Come here, baby.”
Michael put down the pieces to the puzzle and sat still, watching her.
“Come sit with Mommy for a minute.”
There was a word that he knew, a word he learned in school, and he didn’t want to say it. But it hovered there, flitting about in the back of his throat.
“Michael…” A note of reprimand now. He stood, timid, and went to her. She sucked him into a tight, terry-cloth embrace and kissed his forehead. She stunk, like old milk and sweat socks.
“I’m sorry about all this, Champ,” she said, and her breath smelled worse than the rest of her. It was like something died in her mouth. He had to fight the urge to pull away. “Tell you what? Why don’t we go out and do something fun today?”
He imagined going out with her like this and suppressed a shudder. She could shower and get dressed, run a comb through the limp carpet of her hair. But whatever her anchor was right now, she’d be dragging it along with her.
The word slid past his tongue before he could stop it.
“Are you and Daddy...getting divorced?”
And there it was.
The not-nice smile.
Two days ago, Michael went into the basement.
He stood at the edge of the old well and looked down. Daddy had told him not to do that, said the ground might be soft, but he did it anyway because Daddy was gone and Mommy was upstairs crying and no one cared what he did anymore anyway.
A perfect circle of darkness sank away into thick, meaty nothing. The brick-lined gullet was slick and moss covered, crawling with white things he thought were beetles. He could hear the papery rasp of useless wings, the click-click-click of brittle legs scrabbling against rock. He smelled blood and salt, heard the steady thud-cough of running water far below.
And splashes. Like something was thrashing down there in the dark.
He stepped back and looked closely at the stones ringing the well. They were covered with markings, haphazard slashes that took him a moment to recognize as the same patterns hacked into the baseboards.
He turned to go back upstairs, and his eyes fell on an old metal cabinet against the far wall. It stood next to a listing, wet-warped tool bench. There was something on one of the lower shelves, shoved way into the black cubby like a rodent hiding from
the light. It was lumpy and misshapen, like an old pile of rags.
He went to the cabinet, knelt, and fished the thing out. It fell to the dirt floor and opened like a poison flower.
A wet, papery mask. Wrinkled like a brown paper bag.
Coal-black eyes like buttons, a face covered in waxy brown skin like paper, no mouth or nose or hair. Just a twist of frayed rope, hanging loose around the neck.
A laugh like wasps. Or like little white legs scratching across brick.
“I’m your new Daddy,” the thing says and Michael goes cold. “I’m your new Daddy, and I’m coming home!”
“Well,” Mommy said. The word came out measured, like there was a thought hiding behind another thought. “That’s entirely up to your Daddy, I guess.”
He looked down at his hands.
“Your Daddy…” she started, then shook her head and tried again. “Do you know what paranoia means?”
He shook his head.
“It means thinking something is true when it isn’t. It means…it means looking at a thing and seeing something else that isn’t there. Do you understand?”
Michael thought of the well downstairs. The mask. When he looked at it, what he thought he saw was the discarded skin of a snake.
“I don’t know.”
“Your Daddy saw something, and he thought it was something else,” she said. “And the thing he thought he saw made him mad. That’s all.”
“Was it something about me?”
She looked at him, level, and he watched gears turning behind her red-rimmed eyes. He remembered something his Daddy said once about his old boss, back before they moved. The phrase was passing the buck. Michael didn’t know exactly what that meant, but he got the basic idea. And he understood that Mommy was, in that moment, looking for a way to pass the buck.
But instead she just shook her head.
“No, it wasn’t something about you, baby,” she said. “It was something about me.”
Heavy footsteps suddenly clomped on the basement stairs, and Mommy smiled. It wasn’t the not-nice smile. It was wide and full of teeth, and it made her look like a lunatic. Michael saw in her eyes a strange mixture: relief, joy, terror, and something else he couldn’t quite touch.
“Look! He’s home now!”
And she was up off the couch, hastily wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, floating like ether across the old brown grate. Forgetting that there was no outside door to the basement, that Daddy always came in through the front. Up the porch stairs where Michael skinned his knee.
(I’m coming home)
He opened his mouth, but nothing came out.
It was too late, anyway.
Michael heard Mommy cross the kitchen, heard the basement door bang open on a squeal of old hinges. Heard it exhale a low, wet sigh and smelled the pit’s salt-blood breath, rolling through the house on a sour wave.
He closed his eyes and waited for the scream.
Cauterization
Mack Moyer
John prefers that I prepare the lines. His are always too rocky, too hard on the nostrils. I shake two big nuggets from the cellophane wrapper onto the nightstand and cover them with a crumpled dollar bill.
I lay my expired driver’s license over the dollar bill and massage the nuggets into a fine dust. It’s a skill, all right. Apply too much pressure and tiny chunks will burst out the sides. Too little pressure and you end up with a bloody nose.
John hovers over my shoulder impatiently as I cut the pile into two lines and roll the dollar bill. I snort my line first.
The crystalline blast sears my left nostril. In a moment, it will dissolve across a membrane and into my bloodstream. The uptick in my pulse rate will become an audible drumbeat. Emotional cauterization will ensue soon after.
John’s turn. He snatches the bill and snorts his. He’s greedy with his meth, at least as much as he can be; he paid for this batch, but he gives me the cash and I procure the crank through my dealer. While I don’t charge John for acting as a middle man, sharing the bag goes without saying.
I’ve got plenty more stashed away in the kitchen but John doesn’t know that, though he rightly suspects it.
The crank kicks in and John bounces across my bedroom, endlessly flapping his gums. Allison is getting worse, he tells me. Sleepwalking again. Dragged the kids into the backyard around three in the morning just a few nights ago. The kids told him that Mommy was saying some real whacko shit, to boot, all while she held a cigarette lighter to her forearm until a quarter-sized patch of skin was charred black.
I curl up on the couch, spark a Marlboro Red, feeling the loose phlegm rumble in my chest as I take a drag. I’m not really listening to him; his once-weekly monologues about his wife are both rambling and redundant. Aside from Allison’s backyard witching hour shenanigans, it’s nothing I haven’t heard before.
Instead, I’m calculating John’s chances of maintaining an erection later. When his tolerance is low, the meth hits him too hard and he can’t keep a hard-on.
When his speech takes on a staccato stutter, so bad that he can only finish half his sentences, I resign myself to a night without an orgasm. It will consist of John bitching about Allison, John attempting to jam his flaccid cock into me, John failing.
I’d say I’m disappointed but I still get free crank out of the deal, so I’m not complaining.
During the course of his monologue, John steps under the ceiling fan. It’s connected to a light fixture, three bare bulbs, only one of which works, and barely at that. In that flickering light, the alternating shadows hit him at the right angle and he looks fifteen years younger.
His small but inexorably growing double chin seems to recede. His widow’s peak vanishes and, though I know it’s only the shadows playing tricks, I can almost see the small, beginner’s gauges stretching out his earlobes.
A familiar bit of flotsam drifts through my stream of consciousness. I laugh, and for a moment he glares at me, assuming that I’m laughing at his marital woes. I can and do laugh at him, by the way, but not now.
“I’d love to be homeless with you,” I say to him.
His scowl turns to a smile. That was his big line, a lifetime ago, as we sat in a darkened corner in the community college cafeteria, half-assing the comic book we planned to create. We never completed a single page, hardly even outlined a plot, but it was enough for us to brag about on Myspace.
Anyway, that night, ten minutes before the overnight janitors would boot us from our corner, I mentioned that our big, grand artistic endeavors just might never pan out, that we’d be starving artists living on the street.
Then he said it. Not the greatest pick-up line I ever heard, but it made me realize I liked him, that he liked me back.
“We kissed for the first time that night,” John says, looking on wistfully as he lights a cigarette.
“Fucked for the first time, too.”
“We never did finish the comic though.”
We laugh, not because the crank’s got us tweaking, although we are. We laugh like we laughed fifteen years ago. And just like that night fifteen years ago, John manages to keep his erection.
We fuck to unspoken memories of our youth, to our vague, unfounded hopefulness. My thighs snap shut around him, like a spring-loaded animal trap snaring the last vestige of our youth. And, for a moment, we’re not just fucking, though I wouldn’t dare say we’re making love. Then again, it feels like something more than two former scene kids using crank and sex to lubricate their passage into middle age.
He pushes into me, grunts; I dig my fingernails into his back. I run my fingers through his thinning hair. We look into each other’s eyes and I want to tell him that this is more than meth and sex, that he is the only other person who has a key to my house, that during my last doctor’s visit, I listed him as my emergency contact.
For that moment, I choose to forget that our relationship is, at its core, transactional. Call us what you will, but when I inevitably snort one lin
e over my limit, when my heart shudders and the myocardial tissue turns brown and I gasp my last ragged breath, it’ll be John who finds me the next morning, who’ll dial 911 when he discovers my corpse. That’s gotta be worth something.
I shudder with orgasm just as John climaxes inside me. Then he groans in that worried way of his and, that quickly, we return to the reality of our sometimes-weekly trysts in my isolated North Philly hovel where, at our very best, John can stay hard long enough to regret dumping his load into me.
I sit up, turn my back to him, aware that a new roll of fat is forming around my ribcage when I bend over, but I hide that as quickly as I notice it when I pull a ratty Against Me concert tee over my bare frame.
John’s exit is unceremonious. I’m staring out my window smoking when I hear him struggling to button his jeans; it gets a little harder for him each week.
“Want me to leave you a bump?” he asks.
He knows that I want him to but I just shrug and stare out into the dark. His keys jangle as he heads to the door. He opens it, shuts it, and descends to the living room. Only then do I turn around. The fucker didn’t leave me a bump.
I manage to sleep at some point, though not for long. It’s been a while since I’ve been bothered by sleep deprivation. With a meth habit, fractured sleep just comes with the territory.
It’s almost four in the morning. I awake standing at the kitchen counter with a fresh whiskey and ginger ale in my hand. Drinking it is probably a bad idea but I see that the whiskey bottle is nearly empty. It had been full, last I remembered.
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