Don't Clean the Aquarium!

by Osier, Jeffrey

  Throughout it all, I am sure I never once ventured outside. The walls around me, those branches, and those amber-colored filters above me, became the barriers of the known universe. The silhouetted forest and the starry sky that I had seen through sleepy eyes on the night of our arrival were just distant memories. I had exaggerated their scale and significance simply because I had not yet experienced the magnitude of the Hive or the all-consuming attentiveness of the tree.

  And all the while, I was catching on to my father. He was afraid, and every day, just as my mother was growing more insistent, he was becoming more afraid. Sometimes, early in the morning or late in the evening, I would quietly follow him around the little house, observing his behavior. I could not then decipher the language his movements and expressions spoke, but replaying them now, I can read his despair, his suffocation. I project all that I have learned since onto the vision of him sitting at the table, palms together as though in prayer, poking and rubbing his fingers against the tip of his nose, his eyes wet, red and unblinking, staring somewhere far beyond the facing wall.

  “Why don’t you just go and talk to them?” she would say to him. “It isn’t such a big deal. Just nod and smile and agree. If you want to leave so badly, just make a nice presentation of yourself, charm a smile or two out of them—you know you’re capable of that—and then we can go. The approval of my family could mean a lot more than you think, somewhere down the line.”

  “Talk to who, Mommy?” I’d ask, planting myself between them, not so much curious as just reluctant to be ignored.

  “Great-grandpa and great-uncle Henry, sweetheart. Daddy and I are talking. Why don’t you go out on the porch and see if you can find the other children.”

  “You talk about them as though they were just . . .” His face would pinch with disgust. My father seemed to hate everybody there. “This place is wretched beyond words, Ellen. What is it we really want from them? Money? Approval? Or maybe, just protection from their disapproval? And what the hell do I have to do with it? Joey, buddy, why don’t you go see if any of your cousins are out yet.”

  And so I would leave, and return hours later to the same bickering, which went on day after day and made no sense to me then and makes little more sense to me now. My mother and her family were in the thrall of a few old men, because they were the family patriarchs, because their love and approval was of unequaled significance to her, because theirs was a goodness that—no matter how cold and frightful—could not be ignored or contradicted. And because my father, her husband, was secondary to them. And because his intense dislike for them made him something less than secondary.

  ~ * ~

  I no longer remember the name of the little girl who was eaten by the walls. I do remember very clearly what the girl looked like because I was, by virtue of my size, the one sent in to retrieve her.

  On that morning, I was playing alone beneath the tree when I heard a commotion. My cousin Vincent Threadgil, a feral, snaggle-toothed nine-year-old, ran up and pointed to me. “You! Come with me!”

  “What’s going on?” I asked. But Vincent was already dragging me across the floor. He ignored the other children who crowded around us as we entered the avenue.

  I began to panic. I tried to stop, tried to plant my feet and pull my arm from Vincent’s grip. When he tugged at me, I began to cry. When he turned and began shouting at me, I started bawling. I was surrounded by older kids now, all of them shouting at me. I realize now that it was probably panic that made them so brutal, and my own panic that made their shouting seem so threatening. A teenage girl lifted me into the air and whisked me to a stretch of the avenue darker and more decrepit than I’d ever braved before. She put me down and pointed out the gap between two tiny houses, a narrow passage between two crooked walls, barely wide enough for me to fit. She hushed the other children and then kneeled before me, a pleading smile on her face. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to stop my crying.

  And in the relative quiet that followed, I heard a weak whimpering, emerging from that hostile cleft into which the girl was now directing my attention. Softly, she spoke the name of one of our female cousins. “She’s back there and we can’t get her to come out.”

  I looked at her, uncomprehending.

  “None of us can fit back there,” she stated firmly, so that there would be no doubt as to my mission.

  “She’s stuck?” I sniffled weakly.

  The girl shook me. “You don’t know that. You don’t know that!” She took a deep breath and then smiled unsteadily when she saw I was about to start crying again. She ran a palm across my hair. “Just walk in there, go in and try to get her to come out. She won’t even talk to us. But if you can reach her… you know… take her hand, maybe she’ll come out.”

  “I got the flashlight,” someone behind us said.

  The girl gave me a little hug. In that moment she seemed almost magically beautiful. It was as though she knew she could bewitch me into doing this, and I could feel, quite suddenly, that yes, this would be all right. There would be light, there would be other kids watching to make sure nothing happened to me. Suddenly I was very important.

  I stepped into a cold, narrow blackness, wading in and out of the path of the flashlight’s quivering yellow eye. I had to step sideways to avoid fingerlets of wood angling out from the walls, and trust that the light would expose any jagged piece that might snag me.

  I saw her quite suddenly, as the flashlight caught and wavered and then held on her. She was no more than three feet away, a pretty little blond girl not much bigger than me. She was looking right at me, probably had been throughout my entire journey to her. I tried to smile bravely, but realize now that she never saw any more than a silhouette of my head surrounded by that shaky halo.

  I reached out for her hand. When she grasped mine, I noticed that the two walls were holding her head in a vise-grip. I realized this because in the moment we touched, the walls eased their grip on her and she was suddenly able to move her head freely. She gasped and blinked, and then began to weep.

  I said, “Come on,” or something equally consoling. I pulled on her hand, and began to step back the way I’d come. She took a first tentative step with me.

  And then the walls clamped shut. I felt splinters strike my face, my arms, and especially the hand that held the girl’s. I let go and watched as the walls closed around her, concealing her from view, though they didn’t pen me in any tighter. I turned and ran, screaming and stumbling, tearing myself on the walls. I could feel and hear chewing behind me and knew that at any moment I could be eaten as well.

  I exploded out of the cleft, and hit the floor howling. I was still young enough to expect someone to pick me up after such a display, but though there were two or three times as many people there as before, not one came forward to console me. When I looked up I saw why.

  He was the biggest man I had ever seen. That and the authority in his face seemed to dwarf everything around him. He was ancient, his skin a palimpsest upon which generations worth of scars, wrinkles and cancers were layered, converging into the characters of an unreadable alphabet. His eyes: icy blue glimmers from beneath eyebrows that cast shadows as deep as any in the Hive. His face seemed divided by a deep diagonal cleft, running from the temple to the opposite side of the chin. He looked at me for only an instant before I shut my eyes and turned my face to the floor.

  It was the commotion that brought me to my feet in time to see the giant emerging from the same narrow gap in the walls. In his arms, the little girl, eyes open, limp, dirty and not nearly so pretty anymore. Considered what I’d seen in there, there was not much blood, but enough to send the girl’s mother—just now pushing her way through the crowd—into hysterics so unbridled that half the children present began to cry. Someone grabbed me from behind and lifted me into the air. I screamed and kicked, even after I realized it was my own father.

  He carried me out of the avenue and plopped me onto a stone bench in the courtyard, kneeling before
me.

  “What happened?” he asked, trying to calm his voice. He stroked my check and then examined his fingertips: blood.

  He shuddered as he spoke. “Joey-boy, you wanna leave this place? You wanna get the heck out of this madhouse?”

  I was ready to nod, but first looked over my father’s shoulder at the tree, its branches so generous in their reach—outward to me, upward to the ceiling, to the walls. I lost interest in him, in what I’d just experienced in the walls, what I’d seen in the eyes of the old giant, and wondered quite abruptly if I should ask my father if I could sit in the tree awhile.

  He shook me out of my reverie. “Joey? Dammit! Look at me, kid.” His own eyes were red now and I had the most terrifying thought of all—my father was going to cry. Instead he carried me back to our bright, tiny house.

  ~ * ~

  One morning soon afterwards, I awoke from an uneasy sleep, aware that my parents had been up all night fighting.

  Whatever words passed between them, the upshot was certain: my father had given up. Smaller now, he looked as though he’d cried through most of the night. The courage he was working up in order to walk out that door and go meet with those old men was far weaker than the calm warmth with which he’d carried me into the Hive so many weeks ago.

  And when he walked out our door he didn’t look at my mother, and he didn’t seem to hear me call out to him. I ran after him but the door shut in my face. In the rush of air that struck me I could smell the rot through which I’d walked in that narrow, wooden cleft only days before. It was then that I noticed our suitcases by the door, latched and standing, just waiting . . . .

  My mother called my name, a cold, sharp insistence in her voice. I didn’t want to turn and look into the face that could reduce my name to such a violent pair of syllables, but it seemed to be the only way to keep her from saying it again.

  She was expressionless, her face oily and glimmering in the kitchen light. Though she glared in my direction, I knew she didn’t see me.

  “I want to go with him,” I declared, my courage draining away by the time I reached the last two words.

  “Your father will be fine. Stay and keep me company.” A queer smile flitted across her face.

  “I want to go away.”

  “We are going away.”

  “I want to go away with Daddy.”

  “We’ll all leave together!” she hissed, squinting meanly at me. She looked like the old man who had gone into the wall to rescue the little girl. “Now, come sit with me.”

  Instead I ran, slamming the door as hard as I could behind me, as though I could somehow wedge it so she wouldn’t be able to follow. It didn’t matter. She probably never even got out of the chair.

  I called to my father as I ran out to the courtyard. The tree seemed to move slightly as I passed it, to twist and to point my father out to me. He was standing at the ragged black mouth of the avenue.

  “Daddy?” I cried, lunging into his arms. He lifted me high overhead and I shut my eyes and probably smiled. He shook me and pulled me close—but not for an embrace. When I opened my eyes he was glaring at me with an anguish that corrupted his features beyond recognition. He dropped to his knees and set me down, looking me in the eyes.

  “What are you doing here?” he cried, shaking me with hands that suddenly seemed enormous. “Can’t you people just . . . leave me alone? What the hell do I have to do?”

  I had no answer. I didn’t even know what he was talking about. I was bawling my eyes out, just trying to get away, not sure who I could go to now. Surely not my mother, and for the past few days there had been so few children, and so few adults I wasn’t already afraid of.

  There was only the tree.

  He continued shouting at me but I could no longer hear him. I was just waiting for his grip to ease long enough for me to break free and run.

  And then he pushed me to the ground. By the time I got to my feet, he was gone. Disappeared into the darkest stretch of the avenue, headed towards the house of my great-grandfather.

  There were no children in the courtyard, only a thin gray man I had never seen before, leaning on a cane, glaring at me with hateful eyes.

  I ran to the mouth of the avenue, but I passed our little house and kept running. I had no idea how I would ever face my mother, could no longer imagine what it would be like with either of them once we left the Hive. I kept on running, too clouded by tears and the sound of my sobbing to realize how quickly I’d passed beyond the range of bright lights. We children had always treaded the darkness cautiously, as though any thoughtless, impulsive movement would encourage something in the shadows—or perhaps the shadows themselves—to reach out and consume us. But I had already been consumed this morning, and it was not the ancients living in the ruins and shadows, not the splintery specters in the walls that had snared me. It had been my own parents.

  It was so dark that I didn’t see the flagstone street turn abruptly to wooden planks. I tripped and rolled to a halt, raising a cloud of dust. I rubbed my eyes, and saw a sliver of light in the blackness before me. The light swelled and leaked outward to reveal a door. I heard laughter—sweet, youthful laughter.

  I wiped my face and stood. With every step I took towards the door, there was a fluttering modulation in that laughter. I touched the door, pushing it open enough to see that the light was not so bright, that this room was indeed as dilapidated as I should have guessed from the exterior. But now I was sure it wasn’t a child’s laugh after all.

  Whatever furnishings had once filled this room were now no more than a dust-gray spiral of debris—as though chairs, tables and draperies had been shattered in a whirlwind. It looked as if that tempest could reawaken at any moment, so I stepped around the debris, sticking close to the walls. The laughter diminished to a soft, luring tease.

  As I rounded the corner I saw the backside of a woman’s dress: a pink floral print against faded blue, complemented by tiny bloodstains, the material wrinkling and writhing with her movements. Her arms were flailing at the wall, but I could not see her hands, which disappeared into the shadowy surface.

  She was no longer laughing. She was crying, screaming horrible oaths to a person or thing I couldn’t quite distinguish from the wood patterns. It was only when I saw the wood grain move and a piece of it reach around her that I realized that the wall—or at least a part of it—was alive, as alive as she or I was. I thought of the little girl sandwiched between those two clutching pieces of wall and the way the wood had breathed apart and then smacked back together again, pinning her into place and enveloping her without ever crushing her.

  I was too mesmerized by the kaleidoscopic dance of the wood grain to move or even make a sound. I watched as a great arm of wood rose between the woman’s legs and would have pulled her into the wall cavity if the arm hadn’t crumbled into slivers and smoke when she squeezed her thighs around it. And then both she and the wall emitted a low, gurgling laugh. A mass of wood rose from the peak of the wall fissure and a face, as craggy as the bark of a tree, turned in my direction and its eyes, as beautiful a blue as my mother’s, opened and looked down at me.

  And with that, the wall fell silent, and the woman was released from its grip. She whirled around and glared at me with those same eyes, and while a smile spread across the wooden face above her, her own face contorted in anger.

  “Spying little bastard!” She staggered towards me, her bloody dress and skin pierced and torn by knifelike splinters. The wall shuddered, its face folded into itself and within moments it was a smooth, lifeless surface. By that time the old woman was almost upon me. “I know who you are, you spying little bastard!”

  I turned and sprinted for the door. She laughed, and as if on cue, the entire house and even the doorway through which I dove laughed as well.

  I rolled into the avenue. The wood was not so old and gray and crumbling anymore, and it was no longer so dark.

  The woman leaned in the doorway. There was no blood on her dress or on
her face. She was old, but there was a grandmotherly glow in her features now and a sweetness in her smile unlike anything I thought I would ever see on my parents’ faces again.

  “Joey Gilliland! Come here and have some fresh-baked brownies, you little sweetheart.” I could even smell the brownies. I wanted, needed so badly to believe that if I followed this nice old woman back through the doorway, she would sit me at a table and feed me brownies and milk and tell me stories about my mother that would be so funny I’d laugh milk through my nose.

  Instead I ran. No longer towards or away from the light, because the light was everywhere now, a dim but consistent illumination that revealed nothing. In the center of the courtyard was the tree, not so gigantic or warm and inviting as it had once seemed. It served only to obstruct the sunlight that would have otherwise leaked through the dull brown glass ceiling. Besides, there was a crowd surrounding the tree and I wanted no part of crowds. I made my way towards the little house in which I’d lived all summer, not because I had any wish to see my parents, not because I believe they could protect me from or cure me of anything I might encounter in any dark avenue. I wanted only to get a ride with them out of this horrible place, back to a world I barely remembered.

  But our little house was dark, and the suitcases my parents had placed just inside the doorway were gone. I ran back to the courtyard, calling out to my mother and father. A few in that crowd turned to look at me and I noticed that there were at least a few children left. I heard a woman screaming, shouting curses I couldn’t understand. Some of the crowd laughed, a few shouted back at her, but most turned away, embarrassed. As the crowd began to disperse, the children were jerked away. One of them was the little girl I’d tried to pull from that hungry wedge between the walls, her face swollen and still a little scabby. I called out to her but her father yanked at her arm and escorted her away as she cried in protest. I stood at the edge of the crowd and let them file past me, none dating to meet my eyes except for my cousin Vincent, a look of loathsome satisfaction on his face . . . .