... Tick! Tock! Tick! Tock! And on his grubby heels he rocked, this one here and this one there...
Mouthing the words, Pig tried to steady himself against the shelving. He nearly shook the shelves from the wall with his shudder when Mother suddenly dropped the box of toothpicks to the floor.
The spider sat up a little straighter.
Piglet saw Morgan watching Mother, his smile vanishing in confusion. The boy pushed his glasses up his nose and looked into her crisp, ice-blue eyes, but Mother wasn’t watching Morgan. Her lips were set in a thin, unforgiving line. She stood, swaying slightly, staring at Pig where he leaned against the shelves, mumbling the last part of the song over and over so that maybe next time he wouldn’t forget the brown ones.
Morgan forgot all about the toothpicks as his gaze slid down Mother’s slender throat. Piglet watched as the boy’s gaze locked to her lithe curves, the swell of her breasts, the way her heartbeat and heavy breathing raised and lowered them hypnotically. Morgan’s pants bulged, and his hand dropped to his crotch subconsciously.
Mother blinked her eyes once, and Piglet watched in amazement as a tear slipped from the lid of each ice chip, gliding down her soft skin. Despite this oddity, her face remained emotionless. She glanced quickly over at Morgan, caught his gaze as it reached her hips, the soft curve of her ass. She knew what he was thinking.
She smiled through her tears. It was the warmest smile Piglet had ever seen, and Morgan melted in its heat. The boy blushed and pushed the glasses back up on his face once more, averting his eyes. He dropped his embarrassed gaze to the toothpicks.
Morgan cleared his throat. “Mother? Are you, um... Did you know—?”
“Johnson will be home from school in twenty-five minutes, Morgan,” she cut him off, the tears and smiles forgotten, her hands drawing the thin shawl she wore across her breasts. “Do you think it would do for him to see his father like this?” She gestured at Pig in disgust.
Pig was blubbering now, the words of the song washed away in a steady, hiccuping flood of tears and drool. His eyes were closed so tightly that his lashes were buried in folds of damp, streaked skin.
“Get me a hammer, Morgan.”
Morgan gaped, motionless.
Piglet groaned, tried crossing his hooves over his eyes. The spider slipped off Piglet’s snout, dangling by a thread of silk.
“Get. Me. A. Fucking. Hammer.” Mother’s smile flash-point melted to anger so quickly the temperature in the room seemed to rise as she turned to glare at Morgan.
Without a word, Morgan turned around and walked up the stairs, head down.
Mother crossed the basement to the meticulously organized workbench and rooted around in the drawers, disturbing the patterns, destroying Pig’s careful labor. As she searched, she turned to scowl at Pig; her eyes narrower and her lips pressed tighter, his monotonous voice echoing louder with each repetitious chorus. His cyclical song drilled into her head, feeding her rage.
Pulling two five-inch nails from one of the drawers, she turned her head and hollered up the stairwell again: “Morgan! Where’s my hammer!?”
Piglet screeched.
Mother stepped up to Pig, her thumb trailing nail-tight across his cheek, leaving a small white-to-red line. She brought one nail up slowly, positioning it in front of Pig’s squinting eye.
From the stairs, the sound of Morgan’s footsteps, pounding. Pounding.
The spider scurried back up the silk thread, climbing up and trundling down Piglet’s snout to the shelf.
Morgan handed the hammer to Mother slowly, slipping forward to grip Pig by the arms, holding him tight.
Mother positioned the hammer’s head behind the nail, pounded it in.
Pig’s scream reverberated, shimmered and shifted to red inside Piglet’s mind, blending to a mindless squeal. The fear factory churned on, its engines running at top efficiency; melding, molding, chewing, spitting, reliving, breathing life into the process, finding its way through the matrix of emotion—alive unto itself. Piglet no longer in control, trying everything to stop the gears from turning, to shut down the fucking machine.
And again—
The spider reached the top step. The door barred the way, but the crack beneath was wide enough. The breeze spun the single bare bulb overhead in a slow arc. Another scuttling inch. The air beneath the door was fresher, cleaner. Then gone.
Suddenly, the spider was sucked backward, the door opened, and the vacuum created sent it floating, webs flying, catching and whipping it in a slow-motion feather-light arc toward the walls and shelves.
Footsteps: heavy, shuffling, slow.
“Such a fucking easy thing to do,” Morgan’s voice floated down the stairs. Each word rolled slowly from the inner pit of the boy’s sneer. Pig knew Morgan was sneering. He always sneered.
The spider scuttled up a long, thin thread, dangling from Piglet’s snout, caught in the spur-of-the-moment flailing of web and wind. Piglet snorted, trying to dislodge the spider. Morgan appeared at the base of the stairs.
“Did you get it right, Pig?” he asked softly. “Did you do it like she said, slow and careful? Did you sing your fucking stupid song and stack them just right?”
Pig backed into the shelves, felt the one behind his arm shake, and stopped. The impact with the shelf set an entire row of jars rocking. Pig turned, eyes wide like china plates, reaching to steady them, failing, finding his hands sliding through a falling torrent of jars, light blue Gerber lids spinning like out-of-control poker chips before his eyes.
Piglet bit down on the silently screamed warning...Brown, he whispered. Fucking brown, you moron.
The jars tumbled in a long, slow arc. Morgan stepped forward, arms outstretched, in a comical clown-at-the-circus attempt to catch them all, grabbing a few, missing a lot. The door opened. Mother’s slow, measured steps sounded on the stairs.
When the shattering of glass had finally stopped—the grimy floor strewn with eyeballs, bits of glass, and formaldehyde—Mother cleared her throat and spoke.
“You forgot the brown ones again and panicked, didn’t you, Pig?”
Pig looked up from the one jar he was able to catch. Mother’s eyes were little ice-blue darts of hate.
He nodded furiously, and rapidly mumbled the words to his song under his breath.
Morgan, hands full holding two jars, and one crooked under an arm, swung a leg at Pig, kicking him back into the shelves. “Shut the fuck up with that stupid song, you retard!” He kicked out again, catching Pig behind the knee and toppling him into the debris at their feet. Shards of glass sliced into Pig’s hands and knees, and he screamed. Morgan kicked him in the stomach. Pig flipped over onto his back, flattening several staring eyeballs and grinding more glass into his flesh. He was soaked with formaldehyde and bleeding from a hundred little cuts, but he kept mumbling the words to his song. The words were very important. He had to learn them, no matter what.
Morgan put the jars down on the workbench, turned around, saw Mother standing calmly at the foot of the stairs.
Pig lay still, chanting, bleeding.
Piglet chanted along with Pig, the words threading themselves between Pig’s, forming a multi-layered mantra of fear and dread: Pig couldn’t stop Mother. Piglet couldn’t stop the machine... Tick, Tock.
The spider trundled along Piglet’s back, tickling him.
“Johnson will be home from school in twenty-five minutes,” Mother began, slowly, ignoring her writhing husband’s pain; ignoring the tick tock of the clock; ignoring the stuffed piglet and ever-present spider on the shelf. Piglet was not even sure she had ever seen them before. “Do you think it would do for him to see his father like this?” Mother finished, pulling her shawl around her shoulders.
The spider jumped from Piglet’s back and made his way toward the window again, never one to give up, and growing bored with the show, anyway. It was easier now, since Pig had cleared the way by knocking off nearly all the jars.
Once at the base of the window fr
ame, the spider tentatively tried to crawl out through the seemingly open window, only to find it still bottled up with Piglet’s imaginings. Oh, well. More webs to spin, more shows to watch.
By the time the spider turned back to the show, the nailing had already begun. The older boy was holding the man down, while the woman raised and lowered the hammer, driving the nails into the man’s eyeballs; same event, but with a slight variation every time. If it had known how, the spider might have yawned.
Piglet glared at the spider, cursing its nonchalant detachment, and tried to change the events unfolding before him. The same fucking events that occurred every time he started the machine up. There were only two scenarios, it seemed: either Johnson died on the metal table, pig biscuits crammed down his throat, a chunk of flesh, bone, and insides cut away from his chest, or this—this fucking eyeball crucifixion.
Neither of these scenarios helped Piglet in the slightest. Johnson needed to live, goddamnit. Pig needed to live. A father and son need to be together.
... something like a rainstorm in Piglet’s mind. Something like a rainstorm. Fury, hate... fear... something like a factory, churning, mulching. Piglet couldn’t stop the factory, but maybe he could find a path through the storm. More gossamer flitted down between synapses, slicing his flesh. He screamed, but continued twisting in the factory’s grip. Ice, steel, coalescing, forming, reinventing his thoughts. Pushing everything down into his mind, cramming it in (tick, tock), flattening, layering smoothing (tick), crushing everything into a ball of white pain... thin as silk, smooth as silk, strong as silk.
Silk.
Gossamer.
Tock.
Piglet let go.
The clock started ticking backward again. Something deep inside Piglet clicked, breathed. This was it.
The fear factory fired up for the final run.
• • •
“...Johnson will be home from school in twenty-five minutes. Do you think it would do for him to see his father like this?”
The spider trundled along the shelving, spinning a bit of web here and there, like a man walking down the street tossing a coin into the air to pass the time.
Piglet barely glanced at the spider as it made its way over to him. Piglet was concentrating. This one felt right somehow. Everything would work out this time, and he didn’t need that fucking spider laying eggs in his ears and spinning webs between his nails like it used to do to... father. To Pig. To... dad.
Tick Took, Piglet!
Pig’s voice. He hadn’t heard Pig’s voice in so long.
The spider was weaving a new web across Piglet’s back, trying to blanket him in the wispy stuff. It tickled, but Piglet was concentrating. Nothin’ doin’, bub, he thought. You’re not fucking me on this one, ya little bugger.
Pig knocked over shelves again and mumbled his chore song incessantly. Morgan plodded up the stairs to get the hammer. Mother retrieved the nails and scowled, always scowled.
Come on, son, let it go... Tick! Tock! And on his grubby heels he rocked... Let it go.
Dad.
Dad’s song. Pig’s song.
This one here and...
A boy needs his father.
The spider suddenly fell off Piglet’s back. It flailed its legs around in the air for a second and then righted itself. It skittered away from Piglet and started toward the window.
Something was happening inside the factory.
Piglet’s head was empty of thought. He stared at Mother; gazed at her thin lips, her piercing eyes, her ice-blue eyes. Bobbing around in—
He shot a glance at the empty shelves; saw Morgan trudging down the stairs, listened to Pig whimpering on the floor, waiting for the nails.
Piglet, nearly entirely covered in spider webs—piggy in a gossamer blanket—pretended to close his eyes, pretended to take a deep breath... and a real tear trickled down his cheek, sluicing into myriad trails that followed the spider’s intricate weave. Down, down under his chin, tiny bits of it dripping onto the shelf, shattering into millions of shards, each with a variation of their lives, all of their lives—the different ways things could have been, should have been. Piglet saw them all.
Then Piglet exhaled.
A boy needs his father.
A boy needs.
A boy —
Johnson came down the stairs to see his mother with a five-inch nail positioned over his father’s right eye, a hammer ready to pound it home, and his brother, Morgan, holding him in the corner against the empty shelving, broken glass, pickled innards and eyeballs littering the floor. Pig was bleeding from his hands and knees, mumbling his chore song. Johnson instinctively mouthed the words along with him.
Mother raised the hammer. Johnson screamed and bolted across the floor toward her, crunching glass, nearly slipping in the formaldehyde.
“What the fuck are you doing!?” Johnson roared in Mother’s face and pushed her off of Pig. She collided with the lower shelving, the hammer knocked out of her hand. Piglet watched from the shelf and knew what was going to happen next. Knew before it happened, a brief insight into his family’s factory.
The one he’d been waiting for.
Johnson looked down at Pig and his face scrunched up into a twelve-year-old ball of hate. His father: bleeding, mumbling incoherencies, terrified, and having done nothing to deserve any of it. Ever. It was Mother. Always Mother. And Morgan, her fucking puppet. Her incestuous, pathetic, illiterate fucking lackey, blind to her control.
And on his grubby heels—
Blind to her killing.
—he rocked.
Blind to everything.
The sick crunch of Morgan’s skull stopped Pig in mid-song. He blinked rapidly and watched Johnson pull the hammer away from his older brother’s head, shards of cranium sprinkling to the littered floor, blood turning everything red.
“Green with the green,” Pig whispered.
“Blue with the blue,” Johnson finished, locking eyes with his father. “Such an easy thing to do.”
Morgan fell over in Mother’s lap, twitching, his glasses slipping down his nose for the last time.
Mother sat up. Her eyes burned with hate and shame, her eldest son’s life draining into the designs of her flower-print dress. She said nothing, just glared. Pig backed away from her, hands behind him, cutting new grooves in his already bleeding palms.
“Brown with the brown,” he said, his voice quivering with the power he knew the words held. When he’d reached the far leg of the metal table, he turned around and clasped it tightly with both hands.
“And then we’re through,” Johnson mouthed, barely any breath left in his lungs to push the words out. He glanced back at his father.
On the shelf, Piglet was rigid, expectant, defiant. Waiting for the words. Screaming at the fucking fear factory to let. Him. Hear. The words.
Pig looked at his wife and felt nothing. Nothing at all.
“All the way... from brown to blue.”
• • •
Johnson dropped his mother’s ice-blue eyes in the formaldehyde solution and twisted the lid on tightly. He placed it on the shelf next to Piglet.
(The cat’s-eye marbles glinted in the dim light of his room.)
Pig sat in the chair beside the metal table and shivered uncontrollably. Piglet watched, as if from very far away.
Mother and Morgan lay entwined in death, Mother’s empty eye sockets boring holes into Johnson’s soul, even now seemingly filled with hate and reproach; Morgan’s head slopped the last of its contents into Mother’s lap, dust motes collecting on the surface... a fly hovering, buzzing lightly above the puddle, then dropping in for a taste.
The paper was a scrawled miasma of gore. Pens lay in careful stacks to the side. Green with the green, blue with the blue. The brown lay uncapped, its tip leaking onto the paper where Johnson had left it.
“Fuck!” he hissed.
Johnson glanced over at Piglet on the shelf, walked over to the little stuffed toy and removed the nails�
��first the left, then the right—from its eyes. The small fur-tufted animal didn’t look like a fucking “fear factory.”
Johnson returned to his desk, brushing the pens aside with a quick motion of his hand, dropping the nails to the carpeted bedroom floor, forgotten. Grabbing the black stippling pen, he set to work furiously on Pig’s eyes. With a quick flick of his wrist, he circled the tip of the pen, and again—two perfect circles shaded rapidly to the heads of ten-penny nails.
“Fucking moron,” Johnson whispered.
Pig didn’t look up from the paper. He shivered, trying to remember his song, trying to remember which color he’d forgotten this time as inches above his head, the brown ink seeped accusingly, caught in the glare of cat’s-eye blue from the shelf.
The spider decided to try the window one last time. Maybe this time it would really be open. If not, it could always come back and get the fly, so there was really nothing to lose. Cool air blew beneath the aged window frame. The spider shivered.
Johnson turned, catching a glimpse of the plump black body for the first time as it trekked across his desk, making its way purposefully toward the open window by Morgan’s bed.
His mother, singing in the kitchen as she prepared supper (Morgan’s favorite, as usual), faded from his mind.
Morgan, sprawled heavily in the corner on his own bed, reading a Spider-Man comic, faded, too.
Pig wasn’t home. Pig was never home. Fucking retard.
And soon enough, Pig had faded, as well.
The spider, nearly to the window ledge and freedom, slipped, webs streaming out, desperately seeking purchase—finding none.
Johnson lashed out.
Moments later, he rubbed the spider’s guts into the inkblot of brown on the paper, fading it into a web dangling from half-drawn shelves.
• • •
Dr. Wagner sits forward after reading Johnson’s file, writes something on a yellow notepad:
“...appears to have mouthed the word ‘home’.”
He leans back once again and scratches his chin thoughtfully, as all good psychiatrists do. When he raises his eyes to meet Johnson’s, he sees that the teenager is staring at the final word of the sentence he’s just written.
My Eyes Are Nailed But Still I See Page 4