The Starlit Wood

by Dominik Parisien

  “Somewhere in here there’s a recipe that triggers OCD,” Tindal said. He’d copied Rolfe’s recipe index to his pen, and he’d been scrolling through the notes. “He sold it to students. Helped them stay focused.”

  “She’s focused, all right.”

  “Restore me now!” the boy in the box shouted.

  El Cap said, “As for psycho Stuart Little over there . . .”

  “I think he’s on something Rolfe called Double-A, or Ask Alice,” Tindal said. “You know, like the song? ‘One pill makes you smaller, one pill makes you tall.’ ”

  “Rolfe always appreciated a Grace Slick reference,” El Cap said.

  Tindal ran his finger down the As until he found Ask Alice again. “Mimics Todd’s syndrome,” he read, “which causes dismal—dis-mee—shit. Dysmetropsia.”

  “That sounds bad.”

  “It means he thinks he’s tiny,” Tindal said.

  “That explains his problems scaling the walls of the box. You know, this whole thing reminds me of that story. You know the one. Tiny guy grows some weed, sneaks into the home of the giant, tries to steal his stuff.”

  “I’d kick them off the cloud now,” Tindal said. “But they’re too high.”

  “How long do you think it will last?”

  “Most of Rolfe’s stuff wears off in four or five hours,” Tindal said. “But then again, they ate so much, and what with interaction effects—”

  El Cap winced. “Never mix, never worry, I always say.”

  The boy shouted, “I can hear you, foul woman! You and your giant friend!”

  “Anything in the recipe box cause Tolkien dialogue?” El Cap asked. “And gender confusion?”

  “Pretty sure it’s my dreadlocks,” Tindal said. “Or the kimono I was wearing this morning. He doesn’t seem to be confused by you, though.”

  “I’m all man.” This from a guy wearing a flowered tank top, bicycle shorts, and flip-flops. But the boy was right in using the word “giant.” El Capitan was indeed mountain-sized.

  Tindal flicked the pen screen closed. “Could you keep an eye on the boy? I want to see if I can get anything out of the sister.” The girl was crouched beside the second-lowest bookshelf, her nose inches from the wood. She didn’t seem to be wiping up the dust so much as gently encouraging it to move to one side. Dust herding.

  Tindal knelt beside her. She didn’t look up from her work. He started to say something, then realized that her sleeve had pulled away from her wrist. Her arm was striped with blue-green bruises. And now that he was looking closer, there were marks on her neck, too.

  Had her brother done this? He talked tough, but Tindal couldn’t see him doing it. The kid radiated love for his sister in a frequency that could not be faked or chemically induced.

  “Excuse me,” Tindal said quietly, and the girl jerked away from him. “You don’t have to be afraid of me,” he said.

  “Whatever you say.”

  “No, really,” he said. “And you don’t have to, like, obey me.”

  “I understand. Your wish is my—”

  “No! Please! I’m not trying to patriarch you. Or even matriarch you.” Tindal sighed. “Could you put down your rag for a second? And come with me to the kitchen?”

  The girl looked longingly at the shelf, perhaps imagining the carefully coerced particles scattering for the hinterlands. Finally she ducked her head and followed Tindal out of the room.

  “I have to urinate!” the boy announced.

  “Can’t you hold it?” El Cap asked, not happy about it.

  “I’ll piss all over your precious cage!”

  In the kitchen, Tindal pulled out a chair from the table and motioned for the girl to sit. She folded her hands in her lap and stared at her feet. Her track shoes were filthy. The hole in the knee of one pant leg showed a dirty kneecap.

  “I want you to think real hard,” Tindal said. “Can you remember your name?”

  “What name do you want to give me?” she asked.

  “See, that’s not really helpful.” He pulled up another chair. “Do you remember where you live? Do you have a home somewhere?”

  She shook her head.

  “So no clue where you were before you broke into my house?”

  “The door was open. I remember that.”

  “You mean, like, unlocked?” Tindal asked.

  She slowly shook her head. “Wide open.”

  “Huh.” Now that he thought about it, it was possible he’d gone to bed without closing the door. Rolfe had gotten angry with him about that before, though the latch was clearly faulty. Now that he was the owner of the house, he’d have to buckle down, get serious about security.

  “Can I go back to the dusting?” the girl asked impatiently.

  Tindal intuited that an awkward amount of time had passed. “Sorry. Zoned out there,” he said. “You can go back when you tell me where you came from. And, uh, who did that to your arm.”

  Her face crumpled.

  He felt terrible for asking. But hey, kids, right? See something, say something. As long as he didn’t have to do something, too.

  “I don’t know!” the girl said. “I don’t remember! Just let me do my job, please?”

  From the hallway the boy shouted, “Be careful with me, ogre!” El Cap walked past, cradling the boy in his arms, heading toward the bathroom. “I will crawl in your ear and batter your brains!”

  The girl burst into fresh sobs.

  “I need something, anything,” Tindal said. “Do you have a wallet? Purse?”

  She shook her head.

  Tindal put his face in his hands. He’d have to drop these kids off at the police station and hope the amnesia held after the drugs wore off. If he was lucky, all they’d remember was that a hag and a giant held them captive.

  Tindal wasn’t sure he was that lucky. “So, little girl,” he asked gently. “Do you know who I am?”

  “Tindal the Witch,” she said, wiping away a tear. “And your companion is El Capitan.” She smiled for the first time since he’d found her. “Did I do good?”

  “Just . . . great,” Tindal said.

  The boy shouted from the bathroom, “Don’t you dare drown me! Wait! Come back! Give me back my wand!”

  El Cap walked into the kitchen. “This fell out of his pocket.”

  “A pen! He’s got a pen! Thank God,” Tindal said.

  “May I please go back to my chores?” the girl asked.

  The boy refused to unlock the device. When Tindal tried to hand the pen to him, he threw his arms wide as if trying to hug a redwood. Something about taking the device from him had moved it from the realm of the tiny—one more toy-sized item among the boy’s micro-possessions—to Thing of Giants.

  “We’re just trying to find your next of kin,” El Cap said to him.

  “Never!” the boy said.

  “Or your friends,” Tindal said. “Wouldn’t you like your friends to come pick you up?”

  The boy’s look turned crafty. “And how many young ones have you lured here in just that way?”

  “There’s no luring,” Tindal said. “I do not lure. You walked in uninvited.”

  “Because I was lured,” the boy said.

  The word sounded dirtier every time they said it.

  “Hey, what about the emergency contacts?” El Cap asked.

  “Right! Of course.” Tindal unrolled the screen and said in a clear, perfectly sober voice, “Call. Emergency. Contact.” He grinned. “It’s ringing. You’re a genius, mon Capitan.”

  El Cap shrugged bashfully. The screen displayed a number and the name ICE HOME hovering over an animated map of Toronto.

  “What the fuck do you want?” a woman said. At least he thought it was a woman. The screen stayed rudely dark, and that harsh, corrugated voice could have been that of an old man.

  “Uh, hi,” Tindal said. “Who’s this?”

  “Who the fuck is this?”

  “My name’s—” Caution neurons managed to fire in time to
interrupt him. “I’m a friend,” he said. “Calling from your son’s phone. At least I think he’s your son. Do you have a son? Or a daughter? Because—”

  “Fuck off,” the woman said. The screen displayed CALL ENDED.

  “Huh,” Tindal said. He let the screen retract. “Was that your mom?” Tindal asked the boy.

  The lad glared back over the tops of his knees.

  “I’d run away too,” El Cap said. “That voice.”

  “Right?” Tindal said. “Like a garbage disposal with a spoon in it.”

  “A garbage disposal that smokes three packs a day,” the Captain said.

  “Ha! A garbage disposal that—”

  In the corner, the girl moaned.

  Oh. Right. Focus. Tindal called the number again. “Please don’t hang up!” he said. “I just want to get your children home. See, they’re here in my house—”

  “You call me again, motherfucker, and their dad will track you down and bash your fucking head in, you hear me? Tell those fucking kids they’re not welcome here anymore.”

  The pen went dead again. “Whoa,” Tindal said.

  “I think I see where the boy gets his anger,” El Cap said.

  “She said, ‘their dad.’ I don’t think they’re her kids.”

  “Evil stepmother,” El Cap said, nodding. “Classic.”

  “She said Dad would track us down.”

  “How?” El Cap said. “You didn’t tell her your name.”

  “Unless—shit. What if the phone’s got location turned on?”

  “Who leaves that on?” El Cap said. “That’s the first thing you learn in the war against the Great North American Spytocracy.” He took the pen from Tindal. “Maybe I can—huh.”

  “What?”

  “Evil Stepmom didn’t have location turned off on her phone. Look.” A pulsing dot hovered over the animated map next to the words ICE HOME.

  “Don’t close the screen!” Tindal said. The locator would vanish, and he’d have to call that terrible woman again.

  El Cap touched something on the screen and showed it to him. A trail of pulsing dots between here and there. “Perhaps the father is henpecked but kindly.”

  “I don’t have time for this,” Tindal said. “The wake is in four hours. I still have to decorate, make pizza pockets . . .”

  El Capitan regarded him from behind his expanse of beard, saying nothing.

  “Okay, okay,” Tindal said. “You’re right.” He took the pen from him. “I’m going to need some courage, though.” He went to the living room and looked at the pages of recipes taped to the walls. Which one was Courage? He had a distinct memory of printing some out on orange paper. Or maybe red. Blue? No—

  “Are you going or not?” El Cap asked him.

  Damn. He was going to have to do this straight. Or at least as straight as he was currently, which in medical terms was Not Very. “While I’m gone, maybe point OCD girl at the kitchen?”

  “Dude,” El Cap said disapprovingly.

  He followed the trail of dots past KFCs and nail salons, through throngs of Numinous-addicted converts pressing Numinous-infused paper into his hands, over underpasses and under overpasses, around shifty-eyed cops and their drug-sniffing badges, through leafy blocks of ramshackle twentieth-century frame houses and shadow-slabbed blocks of ramshackler apartment buildings, until he reached a blighted neighborhood that was ramshacklest of all: unregulated multifamily homes painted with multiple coats of resignation and misery.

  It was the longest two kilometers he’d ever walked.

  He found an empty cement planter to perch upon and rested his soul for a while with a quick half-dozen vapes of Millie-produced ultraproduct. Not Courage but definitely a viable treatment for anxiety.

  The destination dot still throbbed at him from the boy’s pen screen. Not too far now. Though he was concerned by the battery indicator that had started flashing at the opposite end of the screen. How long had that been going on? It was interesting that the battery icon flashed in synchrony with the map dot. Beep-boop. Beep-boop. Beep—

  “Uh-oh.” Tindal said this aloud, though only the planter was there to hear him. The trail of dots had vanished as if consumed by ravenous pill heads. He tapped at the screen, and the whole of it went black.

  He experienced a wave of panic that was subdued only by another set of hits from the vape. Then the cartridge gave out, and he knew he was truly screwed: alone in unfamiliar territory, holding two skinny, dead devices. He would have thrown them across the road if he was the kind of person who threw things. What was he supposed to do now? Going door-to-door in a neighborhood like this might get him killed. And even if someone answered, what would he say? Hi, my name’s Tindal, and I’m looking for the parents of two cognitively impaired white slaves staying at my house.

  No sense in that. The only choice was to go home. His brain flooded with relief chemicals, most of them internally generated.

  From above him a voice said, “And don’t forget the fucking tampons!” Tindal thought, I know that voice. It sounded like an animated garbage disposal.

  He did not want to look up. Instead he looked right, where a short, pudding-faced white man had stepped out of the apartment building. A swoop of black hair covered his forehead, leaving none to cover the bald spot in back. He raised a hand to the upper window and said, “I heard you!”

  Henpecked? Tindal wondered. Kindly?

  Tindal risked a peek skyward. From an open second-floor window, a pickax wearing a white dust mop screamed down, “And pizza pockets!” Which reminded him that he was hungry, and that he really needed to get back to the house to prep for the wake.

  Tindal hopped up and began following the man down the sidewalk. When they were a hundred yards away from the ax-wife’s window, he said, “Hey, man, quick question?”

  The man kept walking. Tindal hurried up alongside him. “Fuck off,” the man said tiredly.

  “I’m here about the kids,” Tindal said.

  The man shot him a glance.

  “Fourteen or fifteen?” Tindal said. “A boy and a girl. I don’t know their names.”

  The man stopped. “What about them?”

  “Don’t worry, they’re safe. They’re in my house, and they’ve eaten some of my—I think they’ve taken drugs.”

  “They do that,” the man said.

  “But they’re fine!” Tindal said. “I just want to be able to get them home safe to you and their stepmother.”

  “Their what?”

  Tindal nodded back the way they’d come. “No judgment? But, I mean, wow. Harsh.”

  The man’s eyes narrowed. “You’re the one who called.”

  “That’s right. I was just trying to reach out to—”

  The slap spun Tindal’s head around. Pen and vape went flying, proving that Tindal was the type to throw things, but only under specific conditions. Then he bounced off a NO PARKING sign and plopped to the ground.

  The man bent over him like a Doberman on a short chain. “That’s their goddamn mother, motherfucker! I’m their goddamn father! You don’t talk to us like that! And you tell those fucking kids that I will not be disrespected in my own damn house!”

  Tindal put up his hands. “Wait a minute, wait a minute. I think I’ve made a mistake.”

  “You bet your ass you have,” the man said.

  Tindal took a breath, then coughed. His jaw felt like he’d been hit by a shovel. He thought of those bruises on the girl’s arms. Either Mr. Shovel Hands put them there, or Madam Ax Face had. Did it matter which?

  “I’m just a little confused,” Tindal said. “You’re both shitty parents?”

  That was when Mr. Shovel Hands started kicking him. His feet were pretty hard, too.

  By the time Tindal limped back into the house, it was transformed: black crepe paper looped across the front windows, candles burned on the tables, and a Gregorian chant dance remix played through Rolfe’s array of matchbox speakers.

  Well, not everything had ch
anged. The boy still huddled in his box in the living room.

  “Where’s El Capitan?” Tindal asked him.

  “He went to obtain food, I think,” the boy said almost sheepishly. “My sister is cleaning the bathroom.”

  “You seem better,” Tindal said. Not completely, though: his skin shone with sweat, and his eyes were red-rimmed with exhaustion.

  “I am better,” the boy said. He ran a hand through his damp hair. “I would like to apologize for some of the things I said to you. I am so sorry.”

  “No worries, little man.”

  His head jerked up at that.

  “I mean, young person! Not little person!” The boy did not seem to believe him. “Listen,” Tindal said, “you want something to eat? Drink? I think I have some Vegemite and pita chips.”

  The boy exhaled. “I would like that, thank you.”

  Tindal walked toward the kitchen, then realized the boy wasn’t following. “It’s in here,” Tindal said.

  “I understand, but . . . ?” He glanced down at the box.

  “Just stand up,” Tindal said. “Oh wait, are your legs cramped? Sure they are. Just a second.” He limped back to him, held out his arms. The boy reluctantly reached up. Tindal bent at his knees, freshly kicked ribs twinging, and got his arms around him. The boy came out of the box, feet pedaling the air, and Tindal set him on the ground. Immediately the kid hunched to the floor.

  “Ha-ha!” he said, and slowly turned toward the door. He put his right hand down inches in front of him, then dragged a knee forward.

  “What are you doing?” Tindal said.

  “I shall escape, find a weapon, and then come back and rescue my sister!” His left hand moved another few inches.

  Tindal moved between him and the door. They boy howled in anger. His fingers crept forward to grip the toe of Tindal’s sandals. He pushed up, grunting.

  “Are you trying to trip me?” Tindal asked.

  “Fall, crone, fall! Crack your head against these stones!”

  “First of all, this is carpet. Really, really clean carpet.”