Sometimes I dream there’s been a world war, and the entire Earth is covered with ashes and flames. And in the smoking ruins, all these little scorched cradles are rocking back and forth, back forth, and all the poor babies inside are crying—screaming, really. They’re all sliced up, all slashed and gashed. Some of the babies are white, some are yellow, some are a little of both. They all have beautiful dark eyes—looking at them makes me so sad, knowing they’ll never grow up and be happy. They’ll never say, “I love you, Mommy!” No love. Just pain and death.
Then I find a door that leads into a wonderful dining room, with a big table covered with dishes and trays, loaded with the tastiest food anyone could ever imagine! So I sit down and eat all those wonderful sausages and bratwursts and bananas—but then the ceiling opens up and God and my dead mother are looking at me, calling me a dirty, shameful whore, and then a nuclear bomb filled with knives falls on me and blows me apart, slicing me to ribbons, so there’s nothing left but a few bloody strands.
I was seeing a psychiatrist for a while, and he used to spout all kinds of gobbledy-goop and say it was all in my head—but my own father well and truly raped me, and so did those millions of yellow devils. They all drugged me and had their way with me. A long time ago. But they’d do it again in a second, if I gave them the chance.
It’s true.
Why are you looking at me like that?
You’re squinting at me. Are you part Asian? Are you thinking about raping me? Remember, I have a gun in my purse, right next to my pill case. The case is empty, though. I can’t afford my medicine any more—it costs so damned much. I do take it whenever I can afford it, even though I worry sometimes that maybe it was made by those Asian monsters. My sister used to say I was a prejudiced, but my father would tell her, “No, she’s not—she hates all men.”
That was so long ago, back when he said that. I was very young. The summer before, a boy got me in trouble—his family lived across town. What was his name? The last name was Chang, but the first name—what was it? My goodness, why can’t I remember? I should remember something like that. He had such beautiful dark eyes. And he spoke perfect English, not like some of those others. I loved him—of course, back then, it was wrong to love somebody who was a different color. So I had to use all my saved-up money, and some money I took from my mother’s purse, to pay that back-alley doctor to make the baby go away, before it started to show. He didn’t do a very good job, though. I was in so much pain, bleeding for days, and eventually I had to go to the hospital. It was terrible. Terrible. Terrible.
And that boy, that boy with the beautiful eyes—he didn’t even visit me in the hospital. A devil, that’s all he was. I mean, maybe nobody let him know, but still—it would have made me feel a little better, if he’d have told me he was sorry. But nobody—nobody in the whole world—felt sorry for me. My mother told me I was a disappointment. My own father told me I was going straight to Hell for causing him such shame. He screamed at me and didn’t have any pity for me at all, even though I was in so much pain. There was an infection, you know. Infection. What an awful, filthy word. How could my own father tell me I was going to Hell? He pretended he was so holy, but he was just a man with one of those thingies, just like all men. I know he raped me. My psychiatrist said it was all in my head, but I remember pain—deep, deep pain. My father filled me with pain, that much I know. And even if it wasn’t rape, it was something just as bad, because it made me feel dirty and cheap and miserable.
A few years later, I moved away to Sioux City and met a good man. Bill. He was always very kind and eventually we got married. He was very patient with me, one of the few good men who ever lived. He never yelled at me when I’d wake him up in the middle of the night with one of my nightmares. They made me scream, you know, those nightmares.
We tried to have a baby—we tried and tried—but I couldn’t get pregnant. We went to one of those special doctors and he took a look at things down there. Oh, I was so embarrassed. It turns out my lady parts had been damaged by that other doctor—though now that I think about it, I bet he wasn’t even really a doctor. Good doctors don’t ruin lady’s parts. I should hope they don’t.
I felt so bad, knowing I would never be able to make a beautiful baby for my Bill. He’d been so good to me. So kind. He deserved a baby. Maybe I didn’t, but Bill did.
But we did eventually find our beautiful baby. We had to wait a long time, but finally, we were able to adopt Denise. Her mother didn’t want her, but we did. I love her so much. I’ll never understand how her mother could have given away such an angel…such a precious, precious angel. But I’m glad she did. I don’t know what I’d do without her. These days, I think my love for Denise is the only thing holding me together.
Denise has no idea she’s adopted. She doesn’t know any of these things. Nobody does, these days—except that psychiatrist, though I can’t afford the visits any more. Oh, and you! You know, now. I have no idea why I’m telling you all this. You do have a kind face. I suppose that’s why.
And it does help to talk about it.
All my old problems were so long ago, everybody’s passed away since then. My parents both died over twenty years ago. Bill, just about three years ago. My sister died last year.
Oh, now stop looking at me like that. Stop squinting like some damned Asian devil. I didn’t kill them, if that’s what you’re thinking. There aren’t any bullets in my gun. Even if I was being attacked from all sides, I couldn’t afford to load it. I don’t have any money. Bill was a good man, but bless him, not the best provider in the world. He was a janitor. Didn’t make very much. I guess he thought he’d live forever, because he never bothered to take out life insurance. His funeral used up a lot of his savings. Though I didn’t skimp on the coffin. I bought him one of the best. Beautiful wood. That man deserved a shrine. So I did the best I could.
So I’m going to see my daughter. She’s going to find me a nice little place to live where someone can look in on me every now and then, and make sure I always have enough food and clean laundry and pills.
I haven’t had my pills for three or four days now.
Out of pills.
Out of money.
Out of everything, really. Out of—
What did you say?
I heard you. You said something. I believe you said I was out of my mind.
That’s very funny, mister funny-man.
Sometimes I wish I was out of my mind.
Because it’s hell being inside of it.
EYE DEW
On Sunday they got married and became completely different people. Even though they had lived together for ten years before the ceremony.
That happens, sometimes.
They had decided not to go on a honeymoon, to save money. And really, after ten years, most of the lust was gone anyway. They’d only married because they were tired of relatives griping at them. “When are you two going to get married? The state probably considers you married anyway—that whole common-law deal—so you might as well just get it over with.”
As soon as they arrived home that night, she peeled herself out of her wedding dress and flung herself into the shower, to wash away her make-up, hair gel, even the fine golden body-glitter lightly sprinkled on her shoulders and cleavage. He just stripped off his tuxedo and flung himself straight into bed. Though most of the lust had departed, a bit of random randiness remained.
She emerged from the bathroom with an oatmeal-based beauty mask caked on her face and her hair up in curlers. “Oh, honey,” she said, glancing at the manmade tentpole jutting up under the covers. “I don’t have the energy for that tonight. I’m completely exhausted. Weddings are hard on a bride. Be a dear and bring in the gifts from the car. We don’t want burglars breaking into the car during the night and stealing all our wonderful gifts. Can you do that? Right now?”
&nbs
p; So he threw on some clothes, went out and brought in the gifts from the car. When at last he returned to the bedroom, she was already asleep, snoring like a trumpeting elephant with a sinus infection.
He wasn’t tired, so he went out to the living room and watched the cartoon channel for four hours, until he fell asleep slumped in his armchair. He dreamed of wide-hipped cartoon wives with crying babies clinging to their meaty legs. The wives kept chasing their scrawny, crazy-eyed husbands with rolling pins, screaming orders at them. “Take out the trash, you bum! Wax the car! Do those dishes! I’m too tired from raising these damned brats of yours!” The husbands could only reply with frenzied cries of “Yes, dear! Yes, dear! Yes, yes, yes!”
In the morning after shaving, he weighed himself—he did so every day—and was shocked to see that he’d lost six pounds. He used to have a little bit of a paunch, but now his stomach was quite flat.
At the kitchen table, she was eating a huge breakfast of bacon, eggs, toast and orange juice. “You’d better hurry up,” she said. “You’re going to be late for work.”
“Work?” He stared down at the bowl of cereal in milk she’d set out for him. The cornflakes were now cornmush. “We’re on vacation for the next two weeks, remember?”
She waved a strip of bacon at him dismissively. “Vacation? What for? The wedding’s over. I called your office and told them you’d be in, same time as always. I gave my office notice two weeks ago, so I’ll just stay home preparing our future. That’s what wives do.”
She got up, grabbed his breakfast bowl and poured its contents down the garbage disposal. “You won’t have time for that if you want to make it to work by eight.”
At the office, he found his black plastic in-box piled high with financial reports to prepare—plus, his boss wanted him to work on increasing the internet traffic of the company website, even though he’d never worked on that sort of thing before and had no idea where to begin. He wanted to cry, but what kind of a man does that?
“You have a family to feed now,” his boss said. “Once you become a family man, you have to work harder than ever before. That’s the way of the world.”
When he arrived home after three hours of overtime, she greeted him at the door, waving a paint scraper in front of his face.
“How am I supposed to prepare our delicious future meals looking at those awful off-white kitchen walls? That terrible color is sucking the life out of me.” She put the scraper in his hand. “Be a dear and paint the kitchen Springtime Periwinkle Fantasy No. 12.”
“But I just got home from work and haven’t had a thing to eat since lunch,” he said, slapping his belly, which was now not merely flat, but actually sunken. His clothes felt loose, almost oversized. He slapped his empty belly again for emphasis, and the vibrations sent his pants flying down around his ankles.
“Oh honey, we don’t have time for that now,” she replied, gnawing on a roasted turkey-leg. Where did that come from? “Now please, get started on that kitchen. I’m going to look at new bathroom fixtures on the internet.”
By two in the morning, he had the kitchen walls all scraped clean. He slept on the couch and dreamed of Amazons in aprons. When he woke up, he found himself seated behind the wheel of his car with his business clothes piled on the passenger seat. He managed to struggle into his shirt and pants—he couldn’t get dressed in the driveway, what would the neighbors think?—then slipped on his socks and shoes and drove off to work. His clothes were looser than a circus clown’s jumper, but there was nothing he could do to fix that. He certainly didn’t have time to go shopping for new clothes—he was already five minutes late for work.
He spent the whole day working on financial reports and internet matters, and only had time for half a chicken-salad sandwich for lunch. He was so tired, he just wanted to curl up in a corner and cry himself to sleep, but that sort of thing takes time.
He painted the kitchen that night while she ate doughnuts and looked on the internet for a new mailbox—maybe one that had a pattern of baby ducks around the edges. Ducks were so cute.
He finished painting around three in the morning, then fell asleep on the kitchen floor and dreamed of bulldozers in Eva Gabor wigs. When he woke up, he was fully dressed at his desk, already working on a new batch of financial reports. His suit was so loose, he felt like a child playing dress-up in adult clothes.
Springtime Periwinkle Fantasy No. 12 turned out to be a nightmare, absolutely hideous, so she told him to scrape all that off and start over. He also washed all his shirts and pants in hot water that night, so they would shrink and fit him better.
The company website’s traffic figures just weren’t increasing fast enough, so that meant spending some weekends working on that, and the new kitchen color, Dainty Daisy Delight No. 7, turned out a little too greenish, too queasy, so he had to scrape it away, and he lost more weight and that meant boiling his clothes until they’d shrunk enough to suit him, and she ate chicken nuggets dipped in zesty barbeque sauce as she surfed the internet for pretty hand towels, and a new batch of financial reports came in and the car needed an oil change and Warm Autumn Ochre No. 8 looked like crap and so did Cool London Mist No. 10 as well as Enchanting Aqua Surprise No. 43 and his clothes needed more boiling and she bought more housewares and home improvements on the internet while eating pastries and pastrami and tacos and roast beef and one day, she turned to him and said, “Honey, we need to talk.”
By then he was just a wizened, palsied little monkey, spattered with paint and dressed in crumpled, shrunken doll clothes, gnawing hungrily on some old paint chips—they looked so pretty and tasted so sweet, so yummy. But the toxins in the chips made him drowsy, sooooo drowsy. He felt himself falling asleep, and before his mind drifted into a black-velvet beddy-bye tunnel, he looked up and saw his five-hundred pound wife standing over him, her jowls flecked with pancake crumbs and dripping with maple syrup. And she whispered, “I’m bored. This whole marriage thing just isn’t working. I want a divorce.”
As his mind wended its way down into darkness, he pondered the fact that he could still feel his cheeks. He couldn’t feel any other part of his body…not even his lips…but yes, he could still feel his cheeks, warm and wet with tears.
* * * *
He woke up three weeks later in a chrome hospital bed. About a dozen thin plastic tubes spooled into or out of his body, nourishing him or removing wastes.
By the side of his bed sat a handsome, red-haired, thirtyish man with kind blue eyes.
“You’re awake!” the man cried. “My prayers have been answered.”
Confused, he stared at the red-haired man. “Who are you?”
The man sighed. “Poor thing. You’re still delirious. Just rest. I’m so happy you’re awake! Soon you’ll be all better. You’ll see.”
“I must be having trouble with my memory,” he said. “I remember getting married to her and painting the kitchen…painting it more than once…and…”
The red-haired man laughed. “You really are delirious! But no wonder, after all you’ve been through. You must be starved—you’ve lost a lot of weight, so we’d better buy you some ice cream on the way home.”
“Yes, I’d like that,” he said.
“You’ve never been married,” the red-haired man added, “and certainly not to a woman. You were painting our kitchen and you forgot to open some windows. The fumes got to you. The doctors were worried about brain damage, but I knew you’d be okay. Still, that didn’t stop me from worrying night and day, and praying, too. I’ve been by your side this whole time, crying for you. Now you’re better and we have so much to look forward to.”
The red-haired man then began to cry. Copious tears of relief flowed down his face, landing on his lap and the floor with syrupy plops. He shed tears of Springtime Periwinkle Fantasy No. 12 and Dainty Daisy Delight No. 7 and Warm Autumn Ochre No. 8 and Co
ol London Mist No. 10 and Enchanting Aqua Surprise No. 43 and pretty soon the nurses rushed in to see why the patient was screaming.
FINE PRINT
Once you hit twenty-seven, it becomes practically impossible to make friends; better to become self-absorbed and content. Hector Derhake decided this as he stirred up his yogurt. No fruit came to the top—this one was plain, although he’d grabbed it from among the fruit-flavored selections. Next time he would read to make sure.
Hector had belonged to a small group of friends in college, but over the years they had all moved away. Now he was an entire week into his twenty-seventh year and basically friendless. He was an assistant art director at a small advertising agency. Sometimes he had lunch with others from work, but his co-workers always felt that this time together had to be used as a brainstorming session. The agency folks were too fickle, he felt; if he quit tomorrow they would all become instant strangers.
The problem was that he wanted to make friends. He didn’t really want to retreat into himself. Whenever he saw one of the agency people with a group of friends, at a restaurant or out shopping, he would wonder what he was doing wrong. Why weren’t people clustering around him?
It was early Saturday morning and Hector had nothing to do until the afternoon; then he was going to drive into the country to look at some property which, evidently, now belonged to him. One of his uncles, Ezekiel Derhake, had died recently, leaving him a house in a nearby semi-rural community.
Hector’s paternal aunts and uncles were scarecrows—bachelors and spinsters, all old, thin and gangly. His parents had died in a car accident several years ago. He imagined that he would end up with a number of houses eventually. The entire scarecrow clan lived apart and hated one another, and even though they probably didn’t cherish Hector, there was really no one else to name in a will.
Hideous Faces, Beautiful Skulls: Tales of Horror and the Bizarre Page 8