Slasher Girls & Monster Boys

by April Genevieve Tucholke

  Hollow bones. They make a blood-curdling crunch when you step on them. Drops the soul right out of you, unless you like that sort of thing. And roasted pork doesn’t smell nearly so appetizing when mixed with the funk of scorched feathers and beaks. Still, I dragged what was left of our hogs out of the bone pile and we ate them anyway. With Ma gone the next morning and Pa vanishing to look for her without coming home for two days thereafter, we couldn’t turn our noses up at free ham and bacon, no matter what was used to spice it.

  In Clover’s fairy tale, the prince wouldn’t have spiraled into even deeper rages after losing his princess and their one means of income. He would’ve found another way to make cash instead of taking odd jobs in town, then spending every penny on whiskey, tequila, and the occasional carton of eggs when a carton of cigarettes was too steep.

  I fell asleep after the storytelling ended that night, listening as a snore whistled through Clover’s empty tooth sockets, wishing the prince of her fairy tale could somehow, someday, be our pa.

  In the years that followed, I came to understand why they say to be careful what you wish for.

  2: The Collector

  Pa showed up the morning after he punched Clover, as apologetic and humble as a dog caught in the act of peeing on his owner’s rug. I’d like to think it was the sight of her bruised and swollen mouth that did him in. But why would it bother him any more than the busted cheeks and black eyes he’d given me and Clover in our past?

  Whatever it was, I chose to be grateful, because something broke him good. I could’ve sworn I heard the sickening crunch of hollow bones as he knelt in the yard and begged us to forgive him. I wished he was cracking beneath my feet, like the skeletal corpses on that fated morning we found Ma disappeared.

  After Pa’s apology, I didn’t remember much of the conversation. Only that he said he’d found an answer—to our finances and his soul sickness. He had made arrangements for us to meet our savior. Pa called him The Collector, and he was to arrive that afternoon.

  When the sun was midway over the mountain, beaming in hot yellow streams, Clover and I took the dirt road to the forest and climbed some magnolia trees to watch for our mysterious guest. Barefoot in cutoffs and sleeveless shirts, we swung upside down from our perches.

  In the months since Ma’s disappearance, my favorite tree had become the one with a white split in the bark starting at the lowest branches and running all the way to the ground. That breach in the wood showed up the day after Ma left. The color of the split reminded me of the streaks in Ma’s hair. I was convinced the same lightning storm that struck her also struck the tree, which somehow made them connected. This tree was still alive, so she had to be too. And one day, she’d come back to us.

  As I swung in and out of the shade, beads of sweat crept through the top of my scalp like creepy-crawling ants. I braided my wavy, red hair without turning upright, tying off the end in a knot before dropping it so it hung like a noose from the network of branches. It shimmered in the sunlight, favoring a giant piece of cherry licorice that would be sweet and stick to my teeth. I grabbed my braid by the end and nibbled the dusty, brittle strands, almost surprised when it didn’t taste of cherries at all.

  “Sage,” Clover hollered from another tree a few feet over. “Look . . . a motorbike.”

  There he was, as promised, coming up the dirt road wearing a modern suit, dress shirt, and tie that looked out of place atop the old-timey sidecar motorcycle. Not a stitch of skin showed under his grown-up clothes. He even wore mittens . . . the woolly, winter kind that only had space for your thumb and then a place where the other four fingers sat snug and cozy, like baby chicks under their ma’s wing.

  But even with all that, I could tell he wasn’t much older than us . . . skinny and just starting to get his muscles. Dappled with sunshine and shade, he took on a funny green tint as his bike rumbled beneath our canopy of leaves. He roared past the trunks, looking up once, then down again before I could catch the reflection of my cherry licorice hair in his shiny black helmet.

  A flock of wrens followed in his wake, blackening the sky. They drove me and Clover from the branches in their haste to find perches. By the time we scrambled down and followed the boy’s tire tracks up the winding road, he was already parked next to Ma’s dried-up vegetable garden and banging on the front door with a black, fisted mitten. He held the handle of a red-and-white ice chest in the other covered hand.

  Pa opened the screen with a swing of creaking hinges, inviting The Collector across the threshold. Clover and I stepped in behind. The boy was taller than I originally thought, and leaner. We strode to the kitchen behind him, where Oakley sat with a plate of leftover gingerbread from the night before. A small electric fan blew crumbs and stagnant air around the room, its head revolving as if taking us all in.

  Our visitor tugged his helmet free and laid it on the table. My tummy did a flip, fascinated and repelled by what I saw. Mainly because I couldn’t see anything.

  He wore a mask made from a soft tan cloth . . . like the shammy Pa used to dry his truck after a wash. The edges were gathered at the boy’s neck under his shirt collar and secured with the tie. Two holes were cut, big enough to show soulful brown eyes and dark lashes. There were slits for his nostrils, which was the only way he could breathe, since there wasn’t a hole for his mouth.

  The Collector stared at Oakley, who had a half-eaten gingerbread boy’s leg drooping from his lower lip. My brother’s freckled face twitched, on the verge of either tears or hysterical laughter. When the gingerbread plopped into his cup of raspberry Kool-Aid and spattered the white-and-ivory-checked tablecloth with red droplets, Pa sent him out to play.

  Oakley obliged, but not without grabbing the binoculars he’d made of empty toilet paper rolls, tape, and plastic wrap. He perched on a stump outside the kitchen window and stared in through the fake lenses.

  Me, Clover, and Pa settled at the table. Ma’s chair was left empty as always. None of us touched it anymore out of respect, or superstition.

  The Collector sat where Oakley had been, his mittened thumb tracing one of the perfect gingerbread people on the plate, as if mesmerized by the shape. The cookie caught on the wool and he had to shake himself free.

  Afterward, he pulled a piece of paper from his jacket pocket and pushed it into Pa’s hands. I realized then why our guest didn’t need a hole for his mouth. It appeared he wasn’t much of one for words.

  Pa didn’t like to read aloud, so he slipped the paper to Clover, since she was the one who always volunteered when Ma used to teach us our lessons.

  Clover cleared her throat and read, trying to conceal the lisp from her missing teeth: “In Matthew 5:29–30, it says: ‘If your right eye makes you stumble, tear it out and throw it from you; for it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. If your right hand makes you stumble, cut it off and throw it from you; for it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body, than for your whole body to be damned.’” Her hand shook, but she continued. “‘If the foot leads you astray, remove temptation; see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Feet, eyes, ears, tongue, and hands. That will be the order of dismemberment. Payment to the amputee is ten thousand dollars per piece.’”

  Clover’s blue eyes fluttered and she looked up with a flushed face into Pa’s watery gray gaze. “Amputee? It has your signature.”

  I could see the wooziness overtaking. I helped her into the faded petal-pink bedroom we shared, guiding her onto the bottom bunk.

  When I returned to the kitchen, Pa told me everything. How he’d been arrested for drunk and disorderly behavior the night before. How The Collector—under the employ of a wealthy doctor who was rumored to have found religion and moved here from a big city to study folk medicine and its ties to the Bible—had brought a note that offered Pa bail. The condition was, Pa agreed to help the doctor prove his new t
heory: that godly qualities were transferable through skin and bones.

  Supposedly, the doc could make Pa a better man by switching out a specified map of body parts with a “good person’s” cadaver pieces. In keeping with the Bible verses Clover had read, there were five bodily sectors most inclined to sin. And if Pa were to trade out his offensive parts for better ones, he could be the kind of parent he wanted to be—a substitute for Ma and her productive, gentle ways. The only catch was the doc was a recluse, and refused to come out of his house to chop off any parts or stitch on cadaver pieces. No one was welcome to visit him, either. So that duty had to fall on someone else.

  Pa had signed the contract in jail just to get back home to us. It was as good as done.

  I bounced a glare from him to the masked visitor, who was preoccupied with Oakley’s plate of gingerbread again. “So, you’re going to do the amputations, then?”

  Instead of answering me, The Collector lifted his dark brown eyes and held up his hands in the mittens, working them like lobster claws as he shook his head. Something told me it wasn’t just his tongue that didn’t work right, and I wondered how many other parts of him were broken.

  I studied the contract again, staring at the dollar signs. Ten thousand per piece. I’d never seen that much money in my life. Lord knew we could use it.

  “There’s no guarantee,” Pa said, his voice wavering. “I could die. But either way, we get paid. And you’re the only one strong enough to help fulfill the donations, Sage.”

  I thought again of the pile of chicken bones out in the yard after the storm six months ago. How I wished Pa had been the one to run out into the lightning to save our livestock. Then maybe Ma would still be with us. Not a day went by when I didn’t fantasize about how much better life would be without his drunken rampages. Without him.

  That’s all it took for me to nod and force my tongue to work. “I’ll do it.”

  As if coming out of a trance, The Collector reached into his pocket and handed off a business card to me: Cut clean through the bone and cauterize the raw edges.

  I frowned and looked up at him. His gaze stayed on mine for an instant and I thought I saw pity there. Or maybe regret.

  Then he handed off another card, of which he seemed to have an endless supply. This one had post-surgical instructions, and a promise to return when the deed was done. It said we wouldn’t need to contact him. He had ways of knowing.

  The Collector stood and without our offering them, carefully wrapped the gingerbread people in a napkin and dropped them into his jacket pocket. Then he put on his helmet and left.

  3: Gingerbread Man

  Pa and I decided there was no better time than the present to earn our first payment. He grabbed the bottle of sedatives The Collector provided, along with a canning jar filled with moonshine. Clover and Oakley stayed in the house due to the storm clouds rolling in.

  Pa and I walked together out to the shed. He even chose the saw.

  It felt so strange, him handing me a weapon, after being one himself for so many years. It was like an offering. A penance. And I was ready and willing to take the payment.

  I didn’t have the proper tools. I didn’t have the proper experience. What I did have was the ability to imagine myself in another time and place. Ma used to call me her fanciful girl, because I could pretend so intensely, I would lose myself and forget everything around me. It came in especially handy when she had to stitch something up . . . like the gash I got in my forehead when I was eight and Pa pushed me into the barbed-wire fence that surrounded the garden. My fault, for not doing the weeding right.

  “You’re just my little gingerbread girl,” Ma chanted softly as I cried, then explained how the stitches were little scallops of white icing that would hold me together so I’d be in one piece and pretty.

  After Pa drank half the moonshine to wash down two pills, I helped him climb onto his cleared-off workbench. He rolled up his pants leg, fingers slow and awkward from drowsiness, until his left ankle was exposed. Then I tied down his hands and feet, to keep him still . . . for his own good.

  Saw in hand, I was no longer Sage Adams, looming over the prone form of my wretched, troubled pa. I was a French baker in Paris, slicing up a gingerbread man. The spurt of blood that slicked my fingers as the saw ground back and forth, the curling of flesh, and the cracking of bones became raspberry filling, marzipan coating, and cookie dough burned too crisp around the edges.

  Once Pa passed out, and with only the swell of the wrens’ songs and the storm brewing outside, nothing could distract me from my imaginary bakery. Not the sweat drizzling along my brow, not the coppery tang of fresh blood, not the ache in my hand, biceps, and forearm from sawing so long to get through the bone.

  Only when his foot plopped onto the pillow of newspaper I’d arranged to catch it, did I drag myself back to reality. My stomach turned. I bent over and threw up, but was careful to aim away from the ten-thousand-dollar foot.

  During the hot and cold sweats that followed, I cauterized his mutilated stump as the card had instructed. I used the hot iron . . . the one Clover pressed our clothes with and made her hair straight with so Oakley and Pa could tell us apart. The sizzle and stench of burned skin made me nauseous again. I chewed the lovage root The Collector had supplied. It eased my stomach before I spit the soggy clump from my mouth and packed it around the wound to prevent scar tissue from forming.

  The room spun as I wrapped the amputated foot in a heavy plastic bag and placed it in the ice chest.

  Wiping my bloody hands on a dust rag, I escaped, leaving Pa to sleep off the sedatives in the garden shed. I returned to the cottage carrying an ice chest worth more money than I’d ever seen, all for two hours’ worth of labor. That is, unless you counted the lifetime it took for Pa to grow it.

  At the sink, I washed my hands till the water no longer ran red, and gurgled salt water to rinse the taste of vomit and lovage root from my mouth. Clover and Oakley had fallen asleep. Thunder rumbled in the distance and the wrens had silenced.

  Not many people realize the truth about wrens. They may be smaller than a kitten’s head, but they’re brave. Stare down their mortal enemy, beak to fangs, if their home or hatchlings are threatened.

  Maybe Pa had been watching those birds since Ma had been gone. Because he’d finally stared down his enemy in a way most men would never have had brass enough to try.

  That night, I dropped into bed and dreamed of life-sized gingerbread houses made of human legs and arms, held together by stitches of red licorice that were actually blood veins. Instead of gumdrops and jellied candies decorating the windows, there were organs: hearts, lungs, kidneys, all dripping and fresh from their corpses. The sidewalk leading to the house was made of hollow bones that rolled beneath my feet with a teeth-jarring crunch.

  The Collector showed up the next day to pay us and trade the red-and-white ice chest for a blue one containing Pa’s new piece. He also handed me a small tub of regenerative ointment. The handwritten label listed ground salamander hearts as the main ingredient, and claimed that by slathering it on the cadaver part’s raw edges, it would regenerate Pa’s skin and bones to the donor foot once it was stitched into place with the hemp thread provided.

  I found that the stitching went easier than the cutting off. I only had to pretend I was piecing a broken cookie together with icing.

  It took Pa three months to heal enough to use the foot, so we decided everything would have to come off one at a time. One foot, then the next after the replacement healed. One ear, then the other. One eyeball, one hand, and so on. There was also some adjusting, since his cadaver donor was two sizes smaller than Pa. But we accepted each new and improved body part along with the money without flinching, because the transplants were going to make him a better man. Like Ma had always said, beggars can’t be choosers. And we would never be beggars again.

  Over the next three ye
ars, The Collector’s drop-offs and pickups became as ordinary an occurrence as doing laundry or mopping the floor.

  The experiment was working. The donor’s blue eyeballs that replaced Pa’s gray ones helped him see without his reading glasses. With his new tongue, he spoke softer, kinder. And he never cursed. After the ear exchange, Pa listened closer to everything we’d say. Who cared if his ears were smaller? He never ignored us or forgot the important things. That’s all that mattered.

  That, and the money.

  Pa had always loved Ma’s cooking. I’d taken over kitchen duties, and in time, as Pa started changing, I started wanting to use her recipes. Maybe because it made him smile, and I’d forgotten what he looked like when he was happy.

  Now that we had a steady income, I didn’t lack for fresh ingredients. Once Clover and I were of driving age, we took the truck to town and did the shopping.

  Pa rarely left the house. He was too self-conscious about the scars. There was no reason for him to leave anyway. We’d fixed up the house real pretty and had a proper stove. We’d even bought Oakley a swing set and fort for playing Cowboys and Indians.

  Over time I started to notice that, quiet as he was, The Collector had a kind heart. He always stopped to play with Oakley in his fort when he came by. He also gave us gifts. Not the kinds that were expensive, but the kinds that meant something. He gave Oakley a real set of binoculars and showed him how to use them to scope out giant hawks from the roof of his fort. He gave Clover new eyeteeth on a dental fixture connected to a retainer. And me? I got an endless supply of cherry licorice. Any time I ran out, he’d bring more.

  I started to make a habit of baking fresh gingerbread men on the days he was expected, because I’d grown fond of how his dark eyes shone bright each time I wrapped some up careful and insisted he take them home. I found myself talking to him a lot, even though he never talked back. Until finally, one day, he pulled out a memo pad and pen from his jacket, and began to respond through notes written awkwardly with his clawed mitten. It was almost like hearing his voice, reading that messy script.