Knock Knock

by S. P. Miskowski

  On a Friday morning a few months into her pregnancy Marietta woke up and told John she had one of her crippling headaches. He said he thought those only happened when she had her period. She said she had never been pregnant before, didn't know what to expect, and now her migraines had come back. Anyway, she couldn't get out of bed, she told him, not for a while.

  He was already drinking his coffee. He walked away, stood in the kitchen leaning against the counter, squinting from a hangover. His belly hung low beneath his unbuttoned shirt. Even from the next room Marietta could see the thick hair on his stomach, sticking out in all directions.

  She wondered for the thousandth time how he had come to be here, in her house. What accident had occurred, to make these things possible? Why had she not foretold the death of her aunt and all that would follow, when the knowledge could have helped her? What was the use of such a gift as hers? She wondered. She aimed to find out.

  "There's another shirt, it's clean, outside on the line."

  She was struck by a powerful sense that she had said this before. Of course, she might have said it any time, on any day. Yet every detail, John's green cotton shirt with its deep front pockets draped over the wooden clothes rack in the kitchen, the smell of slightly burnt coffee grounds, the rumble of county transport trucks passing the house toward the highway to lay a new coat of tar and gravel, all of this was more familiar than a memory.

  Maybe this was what her intuitions would be like from now on. Not a picture, exactly, but a feeling, a sense of having been here before. More than that, it was as if she were repeating what she had already done. She told herself that this was because the action was already taking place, the course was set, and what would happen was already over even as it occurred to her. The event itself was out of her hands, in a way.

  John's new job was one he wouldn't tell her much about. She knew he was on one of the road crews. She guessed he was getting paid in cash, off the books. Maybe it was a union job he wasn't qualified to do. It was keeping them stocked with groceries, but he was tired when he got home and in no mood for what he called her "messing around."

  More often than not, mercifully as far as Marietta was concerned, he fell asleep after supper and a few shots of whiskey. Then she always washed out his shirt and left it on the line outside. On this occasion, however, she placed another shirt, cleaned the night before, on the wooden rack.

  "I left another one outside on the line, so it's fresh too," she told him.

  Without answering John turned to the rack in the kitchen and picked up the clean shirt. He pulled it on and buttoned it while he grumbled about what he had to do today, and how much smarter he was than the foreman, and how they ought to make him the boss if they wanted to get anything done.

  "Your favorite shirt might bring you luck," she called out. "It's right outside, there, on the line."

  "Let me alone," he warned, in the tone of voice that meant this was the last thing he would say.

  Marietta still had a mark on her right thigh, curved and gouged in the spot where John's belt buckle sported a lump of turquoise. So she said nothing, but she smiled to herself. It was out of her hands now. He had made up his mind. She had tried to change it. He had refused, and that was that.

  So she lay back in bed and pulled the sheet up to her chin in spite of the morning sunlight pouring through the eastern window. She heard him leave, heard the truck engine grind away followed by quiet. After a while there was only the solemn, steady humming of bees outside the window.

  Sweltering heat filled the room in ripples and waves. Light hovered over the bed in a cloud of quivering dust motes. Then all at once, for the first time in weeks, her head flooded with pictures. She wanted to sleep, to rest and wait. She felt that this was not merely one of her intuitions. She was imagining, but also reaching out. She reminded herself that John had made his decision that day. He had chosen his fate, she told herself, and she was merely watching.

  She saw the green shirt, and the yellow and black heat swelling in the air. She heard the sounds of workmen on the road. These came of their own accord like a song or a nursery rhyme that repeats and repeats no matter what you do, or like the sickening memory of a meal in the throes of nausea:

  "Over and done, John Colquitt. Over and done."

  She was still lying there, clutching the threadbare sheet, when the road crew foreman knocked at the front door. Marietta answered wearing her slip. It didn't matter now. John wouldn't know. The foreman had come to say he was gone.

  Behind the foreman she saw John's beat-up white truck parked in the yard. Another man she'd never seen sat waiting in a second truck, newer and cleaner, "better kept" as Marietta's aunt would have said.

  The foreman was mumbling. It sounded like an apology. But no, he wasn't apologizing. He was explaining how John acted up all the time. Showing off and joking around, like he'd been warned not to, like he did every day. Marietta suddenly recalled the way John had bowed to Delphine when she wasn't looking, with a sort of curtsy and a wave of one hand.

  The foreman was here in person to make sure Marietta wasn't one of those wives that might make trouble. She realized, then: If she wanted she could name her price, within reason. She decided to hold her tongue and see what the foreman would offer her as a donation.

  They had been laying gravel. John's primary job was to signal the driver when to release the load. He was supposed to stand clear, call a warning, check again, call out another warning, and then give the driver the signal. He knew this routine well. He'd done this dozens of times.

  It was an accident that John had brought on himself. The foreman wanted to make this clear. One man on the crew swore he saw bees in the air around John's face and hands, but nobody else could say if this was true. So they had all agreed that the mishap (that was the foreman's word) was John's fault. They all saw him take a step forward after the final warning and the signal, right into the path of the truck. When the men on the ground shouted at him, he took a second step in the wrong direction. The driver didn't see him and it was too late even if he had. John was standing in his blind spot, in the very place he had said was all clear.

  The driver was a good man. He knew what he was doing and swore he hadn't made the mistake that claimed John's life. This was all that the road crew saw that morning: just a man with a surprised look on his face vanishing into a torrent, buried, his mouth and eyes and nose filled with gravel, collapsing under the weight before he could shout for help. He was turned, that fast, into nothing.

  Marietta knew it all before the foreman broke the news. Now John was dead and it was his own fault, nobody else's. He was careless and stupid. He drank too much and his sweat smelled like booze. Everybody knew it. Everybody knew he couldn't hold down a job for long. He messed around at work, and made dumb jokes nobody laughed at. He always got fired, except on that day, when he got himself killed.

  She didn't cry. She asked the foreman if he wanted coffee.

  The man blinked and seemed to relax. He touched a hand to his hat, and said no but thanks just the same.

  She told the foreman she couldn't afford to bury John. He'd have to be buried by the county, if he was to be buried at all.

  "And I've got no way to collect him," she said. "I can't even drive his truck."

  The foreman looked at Marietta's belly, swollen inside the flimsy, yellow slip. Her violet eyes showed no sign of tears.

  "We weren't legally married, or anything," she said. "I don't expect he had anybody else. He didn't have any friends that I know of. Nobody to notify except me."

  The foreman glanced at the closed-in squalor of the house. Then he reached into his pocket and handed Marietta five hundred dollars.

  "For your troubles, ma'am," he said. "We'll see to it, for you."

  Then he turned away. She held the money and the keys to John's truck.

  After the foreman left with the other guy, she put the money in a coffee can in a hole in her bedroom closet, with the ones and fives she'd be
en hiding. She had stopped keeping money in an herb jar after John had torn the place apart and wrecked her supplies.

  She took a mason jar out of the freezer, shook it, and left it on the kitchen table for a couple of hours. Later she counted two, three, four dead bees. Six were humming for dear life. The same number that thawed out in the pocket of her husband's shirt that day.

  In the late afternoon she put John's clothes into a cardboard box. After the sun went down she burned them in the yard. She took the license plates off the truck and buried those. She parked the truck out back, near the blackberry bushes. They were coming back because John hadn't pulled them up at the root. He'd been too lazy to do the job right. After a while they would cover the truck completely.

  Marietta did away with every sign that John Colquitt had ever been part of her life. Except for the baby inside her, a baby she hoped would be a boy who was nothing like John. The only other thing she kept was his last name, because she liked it.

  In her sixth month Marietta had a telephone installed in her house for the first time. She called her friends to let them know that John Colquitt had left town, and she'd had word from Portland that he had died in a bar fight. It was a crazy story. Maybe that was why Ethel believed it. Beverly said the man was a lazy, no-good son of a bitch and had probably run off with a woman. She assured Marietta that she was better off without him, and Marietta agreed.

  Both friends pitched in to help: fetching groceries, cleaning house, and doing little repair jobs. Now that John was gone they seemed happy to visit. Beverly quickly redecorated the place in warm colors, with sturdy secondhand furniture she found in thrift shops in Longview. They accepted as a sign of their friend's independence that she declined to have one of them move in until the baby was born. They made Marietta swear that she would call them when her time came. She promised she would.

  This was a lie, like the story about John, and like her assertion that she was seeing a good doctor who didn't mind making house calls. She told so many lies she wondered if she could keep them all straight. There was nothing else she could do.

  During her entire pregnancy she had only one dream. It began right after John died, and once it started it came almost every night. In the dream Delphine appeared by her side, looking over her shoulder and whispering:

  "She's coming now. She's almost here. Don't go outside."

  In her dream Marietta walked to the front door. She looked out at the yard, softly blurred at the edges in the hazy moonlight. The road beyond was invisible, shrouded in fog.

  "Did you bury it?" Delphine asked.

  "Yes," she replied.

  "How deep did you bury it?"

  "Deep enough."

  "She's coming now. She knows you."

  Her time came at four a.m. three quarters of the way through her eighth month, in the middle of the week. She forced a knot of cotton cloth between her teeth to keep from screaming. She let the baby come, half hoping it would die, and then wishing like hell she had called her friends for help. She wasn't ready for this, she thought too late, and the pain cut through her.

  It was only when she stopped to take a full, deep breath and the infant lay shivering on the bedclothes between her legs that she realized she was giving birth again. By the time she started to push, the twin had crowned and it came quickly, slippery as spit, chasing the path of its brother.

  Marietta cut the cord to each baby with a scalpel. She dabbed them with alcohol and tied them off. She wrapped the twins in a red quilt, cleaned herself with warm water and a towel, and carefully changed clothes. Then she sponge-bathed the infants, just enough to clear the clots of afterbirth from their bluish-pink flesh.

  The boy lay sleeping, breathing gently with a thin grin across his lips. Marietta placed him in the crib. She turned her attention to the girl, who wasn't moving. Marietta thought she might be dead, she was so still, and her face was set with its features tight like a fist.

  Marietta moved to pick up the baby, and the infant's eyes opened. She didn't jerk her head or look around. She stared straight up at Marietta with eyes as blue as a cornflower petal. Her brow remained furrowed but her lips formed an even line. She was watching with such intensity, Marietta's hands began to tremble.

  "This is not dreaming," she said. The baby only stared at her.

  Marietta sat down and tried to put her thoughts in order, but every route she took led back to Delphine's words. She considered the baby sleeping peacefully in his crib; then the second baby lying on the bed, watching. Marietta shook her head. She sat for several minutes like that, with her hands in her lap.

  Then, in the stillness, she heard it. Faint at first, like an insect buzzing in another room. A fluttering noise, closer, gave way to a murmur, a voice murmuring to itself.

  It was thinking. She could hear it thinking. Not the wonder and fear of a newborn, but the ruminations of someone old, the rough litany of ancient memory.

  Marietta stood and without a word or another thought she went to the kitchen. She opened the cabinet doors under the sink and reached back into the mildew-scented darkness. There she found an old toolbox her aunt had kept for years, always at the ready for the many repairs needed around their outdated home.

  She could hear her infant daughter starting to fuss in the bedroom. It sounded like a baby, any baby, hungry for its mother.

  "You can't fool me," Marietta whispered.

  She lifted out the metal toolbox and opened it. She spread a cloth on the floor and began as swiftly and quietly as possible laying aside all of its contents.

  When Ethel answered her phone call and came to the rescue with Aunt Constance in tow, they found Marietta awake in bed. In her arms she cradled her newborn son. She told them she had just nursed him for the first time, without any trouble. She told them she was tired but otherwise she felt fine. She told them she had decided to name the boy Henry. Although she couldn't manage a smile, she ate a bowl of applesauce and drank a glass of water and told them she felt better than she had in months.

  The Women (1979)

  The space station crew gathered around a cluttered table. They were celebrating the recovery of the sickly guy with red hair, who now looked haggard and hungry. Bad jokes and plates of steaming food and cans of some mysterious liquid were passed around. Everyone was laughing. Relief made them giddy.

  The man started coughing. He gagged and choked. He fell backwards onto the table, on top of the food.

  "Disgusting."

  "Be quiet."

  "Right on top of the food!"

  "Shh!"

  His friends grabbed him by the shoulders and held him, trying to stop his convulsions, but he went on gagging. Everyone at the table caught him by his arms and legs and held onto him. The doctor tried to force a spoon into his mouth, to hold his tongue down. The red haired man's feet kicked in spasm, and he screamed.

  "He's going to die," Beverly whispered. "Wait and see."

  "Argh!"

  The three women screamed and jumped, along with the other movie patrons, when the man arched his back and blood burst through his white t-shirt. His friends tried to hold him down, but he kept convulsing.

  "He's hemorrhaging," the captain shouted.

  "See?" Beverly said, but no one heard her.

  "Argh!"

  The audience screamed as another clot of blood popped from the man's chest. The man let out a wail of agony.

  "Oh, that's," Ethel started to say something.

  She was silenced by the man's screaming and by the shrieking of the audience all around her, when something that looked like a blood-soaked fist jumped out of the man's chest. It shot upward, tearing the man's skin and organs, and spattering everyone with blood.

  The audience screamed again. Blood spurted up and out of the man, in wave after wave. One of the women slipped in the gore and fell down. A monster face with tiny, metallic teeth shot upright from inside the man and looked around while the man's hands fluttered involuntarily.

  "Gaah! No!"
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br />   People were screaming louder now. Someone in the back row of the theater stood up and bolted, leaving the double doors flapping back and forth. No one turned around to look. All eyes were fixed on the monster inside the man. Coiled, perched atop his dying body in triumph, it was working its little teeth. It opened its mouth at the man's terrified friends and made a tiny growl like a baby or an animal, reveling in their fear, warning them to stand back.

  The crew watched and pressed themselves against the wall to get as far from it as possible. The creature took off with a noise like a tearing zipper and flew across the room, leaving the man's body torn open, gaping on top of the table.

  "Good Christ," said Ethel.

  Marietta nodded silently, her face transfixed by the images on the screen. Beverly fetched a tissue from her purse, delicately blew her nose, and then whispered:

  "That would never happen."

  The other two looked at her in the dark. Then Ethel began to laugh.

  Two hours later over neglected Cobb salads at Jessup's Diner the three young women sat in stunned silence until the waitress stopped by to ask if anything was wrong. They looked up from their booth and shook their heads no.

  "We just saw that space movie about the monster," Ethel told her.

  The waitress' eyes grew wide.

  "Oh, boy," she said. "My sister saw that and told me all about it. I hate scary movies. She said it sure was good, though."

  She was gone in the next instant, checking on other customers. It was Saturday and the place was packed.

  Around here Saturday afternoon was for movies and lunch with the family. Then a barbecued supper at home, if the weather was good. A roast chicken if it rained. In either case too much food and too much beer. Sunday morning was for church service and regret. Sunday afternoons were reserved for more beer and ball games on TV. Once a month most people gathered for a potluck meal after church.