“Want one, shithead?” I said, real sweet and soft, and threw him Ariel first. The fish body, rigid, smelling of chemicals, landed with a thunk in front of the startled animal. The dog leaped back, withdrawing closer to the crumbling foundation of the house. “How about Belle then?” I said. “Sink your teeth into that.” I could hear the muted sounds of Alexis calling for me, louder as she stepped out on the back patio. I reached for Cinderella’s stiff body and paused to look at the delicate beauty of her scales up close. As the dog crept toward the two fish, gaining interest, the back screen door of the stone house flung open. The mother came tottering out, followed by Butterball and the kid.
“What are you doing?” she said.
Butterball didn’t have his usual reflective shades on, and without concealment his eyes appeared small with dark circles, his face more childlike. He looked more like a scared, misshapen old boy than a misshapen young man. Little brother hovered behind older brother’s sagging jeans. I held Cinderella and saw them standing there as uncertain as creatures disturbed under a rock and began to feel ashamed for all of us. The kid reached up to touch his brother’s ass, at which the teenager snapped a hand back to slap him away, like he was waving away a fart. “Yeah,” Butterball said. He stepped forward.
“Giving your dog old fish,” I said. “But if you got a reason he shouldn’t eat it …”
“Fuck you and your fish,” the mother said. She kicked at either Ariel or Belle and knocked off her flip-flop. “Keep your goddamned fish to yourself and mind your own fucking business.”
Alexis called for me again. I turned around to see her edging closer. She was wearing the pink tutu outfit her grandparents had given her. I hadn’t yet told her the princesses were all dead. I chucked Cinderella in the hole and turned away.
“Stay away from my house,” I said. I picked Alexis up and held her to me, walking quickly toward our home. I didn’t look back at the neighbors, but heard muttered curses and the thump of what turned out to be Ariel, or maybe Belle, falling close behind us. Alexis didn’t ask about the fish, as if fish-throwing was a given around here. She put a knuckle up to her mouth and gnawed lightly on it, like she used to when she was a baby, squinting back over my shoulder with an expression I didn’t quite recognize, neither fearful nor sad, as if thoughtfully plotting some dark revenge. “How about some Cocoa Puffs?” I said.
John lectured me briefly about engaging with the enemy when he got home. “Stay the fuck away from them. Especially when I’m not here. What if they had done something more than throw a fish?”
“They did do something more!” I said. “They killed them, to start with.”
“Guess they heard from child services.”
Alexis liked to draw wiggly figures she called fish princesses. One blobby, gold and pink creation she gave to John to hang on the refrigerator. The Fish Princess was wearing a tutu.
“Jesus Christ,” I said, and tore it down before dinner.
A policeman came to take a dead fish report the next morning. When I saw the squad car in the drive, I felt a momentary chill inside, the way I always feel around cops. Like I should run up into the woods and hide further in the hills even if I haven’t done anything wrong. The biggest sons of bitches I ever knew from high school had become policemen. Bastards with badges. He had a country-cop saunter, a walk that said he could give a shit, was even vaguely amused, as he came up to the front door. I led him through the house to the backyard. He smiled and winked at Alexis, who stared back at him, unmoved.
“You say it was bleach?” he asked. “Can’t really smell it.” The officer stood a ways back to admire the fish pond. “Nice water feature.”
“And then when I was trying to bury the fish, they threw one at me,” I said.
“Who did?”
“The ones that did this,” I said. “Over there.” We walked to the edge of the yard and stood beside the freshly dug earth.
“You saw them poison the fish,” he said, “and then they come over and grabbed them up?”
“Well, no, but I know it was them. Their dog wouldn’t shut up so I threw one at it.”
“You did?” He seemed to find this funny. “I’ll need to have a word with them. Thank you, ma’am.”
While the cop went next door I surveyed my yard: a struggling dogwood transplanted from my parent’s farm, a dry bird bath, hand-painted mailbox, grass patchy with stray chicken feathers and dandelions, and the fish grave. I always thought I would wind up in town proper, away from the fields and scrub oak–lined fences, the burned-out remnants of trailers and chicken houses, away from people like our tweaker neighbors and cranked-up Guatemalans. I wanted a manicured, paved street with sidewalks. Real sidewalks.
Another truck of migrant laborers on their way to the chicken farms slowed down as it passed, a dry, fine dust billowing behind it. The men inside craned their necks to look at me and the squad car, and I heard the faint sound of tinny music from their radio. I stared back at the driver, who pulled in an arm that draped out the window and sped up. I watched them disappear around the curve. No one turned back around.
I went in the house and watched from the chocolate loveseat. The mother wasn’t home, but Butterball stepped out on the porch and shut the door behind him. He pointed at our house a time or two. The policeman nodded, followed the line of his finger with his gaze, and nodded some more until he seemed satisfied.
“Ma’am,” he said when he returned, “my best advice is to stay away from them, but this call is on record. Unfortunately, there’s no way to prove anything.”
“Fine,” I replied, and shut the door.
I worked in the yard until John got home, Alexis beside me most of the time, to show the neighbors I wasn’t going to take any more fish-killing kind of bullshit hiding out in the house. Alexis built things she called forts with sticks in the grass. “For fairy princesses,” she said.
That night, in the early-morning hours, John and I were awakened by stones hailing onto the roof, followed by a spray of rocks at the windows. Looking into the semidarkness I saw the ember light of the mother’s cigarette. She stooped to pick up another handful of gravel. She flung once more with a limp wrist. The sharp crack of the gravel hitting the window forced me to step back. Stones dribbled onto the roof. She stood there a second more, seeing us peering out from our home like treed raccoons before she flicked one last cigarette into our yard and turned to her car. The roar of Butterball’s Z28 was heard sliding around on the dirt road as he drove away, and then the coughing start of the mother’s engine.
“Maybe that was their last fuck you,” John said. “I’ve got one back if it wasn’t.”
As the morning light grew stronger, so did the glow from within the stone house. Whatever shit they hadn’t taken with them absorbed the smoke, the heat, perhaps embraced its welcome release. A cleansing.
“Told you they were cooking,” John said, and picked up the phone to call the fire department.
“No,” I said. “Wait.”
We watched the gathering flames work upon the rotten insides of the house until the first flickers emerged, exploring the fresh air outside.
“Go ahead,” I said.
After John called, we saw that Alexis was sleeping through everything and went out to watch the house swollen with fire. We stood back from the growing flames, hearing small explosions and pops from within, who knows what remnants of poison released in the heat. An electrical wire flipped and sparked near the collapsing porch. Two truckloads of Guatemalans on their way to work pulled over to watch. We spoke to one another in different tongues but seemed to convey the same message as we pointed and nodded. The Guatemalans looked infinitely weary. I turned back to see our own house in its soft, orange light. The colors I’d chosen for the exterior, Lambskin and Froth, looked beautiful in the warm light of the burning house, like a sculpted cake, except for a notable absence in the backyard. Lola was gone, riding the open highway in a rusted-out Z28 with Butterball wide, wide awake, probably
stroking her naked tit.
A gathering of old men from the volunteer fire department hung around drinking coffee until midmorning. Happy. House fires weren’t common; you were always lucky to be rousted from your retirement to attend one. And this one was better off to let burn. Toxic. The same officer who took the dead fish report was there, but this time he took notes and seemed to find me less funny. “You’d better stay away from what’s left of this mess until we can get it cleaned up,” he said. We all stood with our hands on our hips, shaking our heads. John promised to bring back motion detection lights to put on the house after work, but I didn’t think they would be back, as the officer agreed. “Probably running to their next rat hole,” he said. By noon, everyone was gone.
Midafternoon and another truck rattles past, full of birds and slinging feathers and trailing the smell of shit and fear. Bodies are tucked into dirty white balls, giving up whatever hope can flicker in a chicken’s little brain. Others, stunned, dead-eye the passing landscape, more colors, shapes, and sounds than they have ever seen inside a commercial poultry house. Trucks carting chicken-catchers follow. Brown faces, empty with exhaustion, see me standing by the azaleas, surrounded by decorative lawn ornaments, holding a fistful of dandelion roots, a little girl in a pink tutu sitting in the grass beside me playing with brightly colored ponies. I wonder if any of them are our Guatemalans from nearby. I stop and stand to watch them pass and then peer back at my house. I imagine how I would crop this scene. With the afternoon haze of airborne dust giving the sky a golden glow, the dry, yellow fields surrounding us look almost like something from a magazine. The woods beyond conceal the limestone bedrock that my ancestors struggled to scratch a living from. Our French Country #809, flowers and garden, looked a fruitful place, safe from invasion. A peaceful image of a distant land where generations upon generations drink wine and watch their children grow. If you looked at it just right, it could be something beautiful.
ROSE BUNCH’S fiction and nonfiction has appeared in Tin House, New Letters, Gulf Coast, River Styx, Fugue, the Greensboro Review, and PMS poemmemoirstory. Winner of a 2010 New Letters Dorothy Churchill Cappon Prize for the Essay, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and third-prize winner of the Playboy Fiction Contest, she received her MFA from the University of Montana and a PhD from Florida State University. As a Fulbright Full Grant Scholar to Indonesia, she spent the 2010/11 academic year living in Bali, and is now completing a novel set in her homeland, the Arkansas Ozarks.
51 hours
by tao lin
Jack woke ~2:30 p.m. and talked to Daniel on Gmail chat. Daniel said he and Allie didn’t sleep last night and were getting drugs then eating brunch to celebrate Allie getting fired from the waitressing job she got a few days ago. Jack showered and left his apartment and text-messaged Daniel that his Adderall shipment, which arrived once a month from a college professor, hadn’t arrived. Daniel said he didn’t know if he could stay awake for a party that night without Adderall and asked if Jack wanted to buy Adderall from his drug dealer. Jack said he would contribute twenty dollars for the 11-for-$110 deal. Daniel didn’t respond. Jack went to a café and drank a large iced coffee and created what he viewed as “oxy water” by dissolving a small plastic bag of blue-yellow paste consisting of OxyContin, a little Klonopin, and a little Adderall in a Tea’s Tea bottle of water. He’d made the paste, accidentally, by washing his jeans in the bathtub with those drugs in the pocket. He text-messaged Daniel that he felt like most of the OxyContin disappeared, or something, when it turned into a paste, because it didn’t seem like the same amount as before it became a paste. Daniel responded with a panicked-seeming text message of two compound sentences speculating on what happened to the OxyContin. Jack grinned and responded for Daniel to stay calm and that the OxyContin was safe, in a Tea’s Tea bottle. Jack went online at the library feeling a little high from the Klonopin-Adderall paste on the outside of the OxyContin packet he’d licked clean, combined with the iced coffee and an amount of OxyContin he’d licked from his fingers. A few hours later he met Frank and Daniel on the second floor of a building on the Lower East Side for the one-year anniversary of an Internet company. Jack drank half the bottle of oxy water. Daniel drank the other half. It was ~9:30 p.m. “Should we go to the other thing now?” said Frank about a gallery in Brooklyn that was showing Jack’s art tonight in a group show.
“Are you okay, man?” said Frank on the train to Brooklyn.
“Yes,” said Jack and focused on not moving or thinking.
“You don’t look okay,” said Frank while grinning at Daniel.
The train arrived and they walked five blocks to the art gallery, which was someone’s apartment. Jack looked at his art on a wall. He went in the bathroom, then with Frank and Daniel to the roof. “I feel a lot better,” he said and went downstairs and said hi to Laila who was holding a glass of wine and seemed sober and who introduced Jack to two people whose names he didn’t try to remember. One said something nice about Jack’s art and Jack made a noise while not looking at anything. Sara walked toward Jack who said, “This is Sara” and “This is Laila,” and, as Sara was complimenting Laila’s necklace, walked away, through a door, into a small room, and sat on a foam floor. Sara entered and sat by Jack and said Laila had said, “So, what’s new?” to her, and that was when she knew it was time to walk away. Jack went to the roof and looked at Daniel and Frank seated next to each other grinning. “Jack,” said Daniel. “Come here.” Jack stood in front of Daniel and Frank a few seconds, then went downstairs and stood near Andrew who was talking to David about if a horse could win “best athlete of the year.” Jack was aware of Laila in the distance talking to people. He went to the roof and stood by Justin and said, “Look at that kitchen,” and pointed at a lower floor on another building. Justin said, “What kitchen?” and Jack moved close to the edge and almost fell off the roof. He asked if Justin would have felt responsible if he had died. He went downstairs and said, “Hey, I’m leaving, just wanted to say bye,” to Laila, who was sitting on the floor, and they hugged. Laila seemed incoherent and unable to stand.
Jack stood by Daniel and Andrew in the hallway.
“I used Adderall for the first time the other day,” said Andrew.
“Oh, sweet,” said Jack. “Did you like it?”
“Yeah. I didn’t think it would work.”
“How many milligrams did you use?”
“Forty,” said Andrew.
“Jesus,” said Jack.
“I used twenty and it wasn’t working so I used another twenty.”
“Nice,” said Jack.
Laila was walking toward them holding an unlit cigarette dangling between two fingers, barely maneuvering the hallway. “I already said bye to her,” said Jack to Daniel. “I already said bye to her,” he said to Andrew.
“I thought you were leaving,” she said.
“Bye,” said Jack. “I am.”
A few minutes later she was moving toward him from the other direction. She moved her head toward his head and said, “I’m on ’shrooms,” with unfocused eyes, and moved past him in the hallway, in the opposite direction of the exit.
About ten minutes later Daniel, Frank, Andrew, Jack got in a taxicab to Manhattan Inn. Jack ordered ribs. Daniel and Frank ordered an appetizer of chicken wings to share. Andrew said, “Why doesn’t she stop dancing?” Jack looked at a woman dancing alone. Daniel and Frank ignored Andrew, whose eyes, in response, seemed to unfocus a little before refocusing elsewhere. Jack thought about saying something. He picked up his glass and drank water. Frank left to sleep. Daniel left the table to talk to other people who had come from the gallery. It was ~1:45 a.m. Andrew said he was “good friends” with his roommate, an Asian girl with an administration job in a nightclub, then left to sleep. Jack ate ribs alone at the table. “I thought you were a vegetarian,” someone said to him after a few minutes.
“No, I’m eating ribs,” said Jack.
“I thought you didn’t eat meat,” said the person.
“I eat meat,” said Jack.
“Oh, I didn’t hear you,” said the person. “I thought you said you weren’t eating meat. But you’re eating ribs.”
Daniel returned to the table holding a drink. “You should grow an enormous afro, without any warning, for your next author photo,” he said.
Jack, an artist and a writer, laughed and paid for his food and left to sleep.
He woke ~2:30 p.m., ate three mangoes, looked at the Internet, text-messaged Daniel, slept from ~3:30 p.m. to ~8:30 p.m., emailed Frank he was staying in tonight. He exercised in his room and showered. His Adderall had arrived and was in the kitchen and he moved it into his room. He went to a café and drank a large iced coffee with no ice and went to the library and worked on things until ~12:30 a.m. He bought bananas, a mango, a cucumber, and walked toward his apartment. He saw a text message from Daniel that said, come hang out, Frank bought a bunch of speed, and walked a few blocks to a bar and into the bathroom—which had a second door, leading outside—and splashed water to his face, dried off, went through the second door to the bar’s outdoor area where Daniel, Frank, Maggie were standing talking. Jack and Daniel began arguing about something while grinning. Jack said Daniel needed to “lay off the eggplant,” referencing a joke they had about how Daniel had been eating eggplant as a drug and was now heavily dependent on it. Frank said his eyes were red because of cat allergies.
Daniel, Frank, Maggie, Jack stood on the sidewalk outside the bar discussing where to go to snort Frank’s crystal meth. They crossed the street to Harry’s apartment, went upstairs, stood in a large dark room of sofas, a TV, an open kitchen, a corner table with two computers. Dance music was playing loudly. Harry was hugging people from behind, or from the sides, while making loud noises.
“Harry seems out of control,” said Jack.
“He hasn’t done speed before,” said Frank.
Jack peeled his mango alone in darkness at the kitchen sink and ate it, then walked elsewhere and noticed Daniel, Frank, Maggie in a bathroom with the door not fully closed. Jack pushed at the door. “It’s me,” he said and went inside. Maggie was sitting on the bathtub’s edge. Daniel and Frank were sitting on the floor, around the toilet. “We thought you left,” said Daniel.
The Speed Chronicles Page 13