by Ray Cluley
Tom shouted at the water, “I gave ’em back! I’m sorry, y’hear? I gave ’em back!”
What happened next depends on who tells it, but Grady saw it like Tom leapt at the trough. Just dived right in and thrashed about in the water until he drowned. Some say he was pushed in, others that he was yanked forward, but pushed or pulled, nobody could say by who. A few suggested Frazier did it and it made his reputation more fierce than he was used to for a while. Grady, though, he’d seen Frazier at the trough and when that man’s hands were in the water he was trying to pull Tom out, not hold him under. Couldn’t do it, though. And Grady wouldn’t ever say what he saw holding on to Tom to stop him.
Occasionally, when the whiskey was in him, Frazier would add more to the story, but it was a story Grady didn’t much like to hear. There’s no giving a story back when it’s told, so if talk ever went to Tom or James or what Packard did to himself shut up in his cabin, Grady took his old bones elsewhere. He had ghosts enough of his own without adding more.
A Mother’s Blood
“Life swarms with innocent monsters.”
Charles Baudelaire
The child smiles and so she smiles and later she will hate herself for it but right now all that matters is that smile, so she lays out the sticker book and puts on the cartoon and returns to her work, which is in itself work for the child. She stuffs the rest of the load into the machine, turns the dial that tells it to wash stains from clothing that’s getting all too expensive as it becomes too small all too quickly; “I’m a little monster” says one tiny top, bright and fierce, while others host familiar faces that push the price up, announcing, “The force is strong with this one,” “To infinity, and beyond.” As the machine gurgles full and begins the first of its hesitant turns, the start of its cycle, to be followed by another cycle, and another, round and round, so the child in the next room gurgles its pleasure at the screen as friends it has never met, flat and two dimensional (however much they claim otherwise), lead him into song. She tries not to hear it even as she mouths the words.
She’s tired. She’s so very tired. While the child can run from one activity to the next, bounce to every new demand and call its commands with vital enthusiasm, she can only respond with weary obedience, too exhausted to do much more than offer an occasional feeble reprimand. She feels drained. That’s what it does. It sucks the life out of her, suckling first her milk and then everything else; her energy, her essence, and every single dream of what she could have been. They drain you of you and make you them, an extension of what they need, what they want, and they make you like it with that tyrant smile.
Out here, a room apart, the smell of soured laundry still stuck in her nose, she is able to hate the child. With a little distance she can despise the demands and resent the restraint it puts upon her life. She can seethe with jealousy at the life it leads while hers drains away, bleached and thin and unable to sustain her. She mutters her complaints where nobody else can hear, picking up the detritus of domesticity as she carries the washing basket back to the bathroom, her words a familiar incantation and her actions the repetitive ones of a ritual that does nothing to keep her safe.
She returns the basket, ready to fill again, and goes to her room to get dressed. She ignores what she sees in the mirror, turning away from reflections the child will never have, the saddening sight of stretch-marks and scars, unsightly lines she carries beneath her clothes as battle wounds that tell of victory and defeat together; she expelled the child but now she’s tied to it by umbilical bonds of obligation.
She won’t shower—she’s not going anywhere.
The clothes she hides herself in were new before the child was born but now hang as limp and as dull as she has become. Her face is a plain face that wears no makeup, only wears down, and her clothes are the grey of many washes because the child has bled her of colour, taken it for its own, scattered it around the flat in the form of bright toys and garish cardboard books with enough colour spare to spill from pencils and paints and crayons. And if she risks the room where it rests, where no prison crib could ever hold it, if she dares to enter its lair, where bedding is bunched into a nest of hoarded treasures, then she will see all the colour that her life lacks painted on the walls, contained in the posters and the cuddly toys that are stuffed full in a way she will never be again. Its name is on everything; loud blasts of primary colour on its door, stickers on its toys, labels in its clothes, and it’s written in her flesh as well, a stretch-marked ownership she feels in the extra weight she still carries around her hips, in the new looseness she has below, and in the hanging shapes above that are her empty breasts where it once suckled, bruised, and bit.
She makes the bed. Later she will lie in it, but not yet.
“Turn it down, please,” she calls, bending to retrieve a smiling car, a plastic snake, a green-muscled giant. “Don’t make me angry.”
But it will make her angry without trying, without listening, just by being, and it will feed from that as well, take it away with that tyrant smile or surpass it with anger of its own, shrill and sharp and shinier than hers. She is enthralled to this child in the living room, the only one who can use it for that purpose, the child who doesn’t watch the television but will cry if she turns it off and so she listens, again, to the celebrities pretending to be animals, the animals pretending to be humans, and thinks all the time of how much like an animal she is herself, part of a species that produces parasitic soul-sucking progeny.
She goes to the kitchen and puts milk that’s no longer hers back in the fridge, cereal back in the cupboard, a bowl in the sink. She’ll swill it clean of soggy circles later, so many sodden rings that none could have possibly been eaten, and on the table is the proof in the shape of a clean spoon and the torn plastic wrapping of whatever “free” gift had been inside the box. It needs food, it needs love, it needs attention, but most of all it wants to play, and it can, because she gives it food, gives it love, gives it attention.
From the other room, bubbling laughter like a series of hiccups sends a thrill coursing through her blood, carrying with it a forced desire to do whatever it wants if only she can hear it again, or see that smile, and be around for the next adorable antic.
She has to get away. The bathroom, where there’s relief to be had in a shut door and the chance to sit down.
She gathers a handful of loo roll and gives the toilet seat the necessary wipe, tosses the tissue, pulls down her clothes, and sits. She inspects her underwear for blood, although she’s already done so in dressing, because she longs for her next period, yearns for the relief it will offer in what it tells her she’s not. And then there will be the opportunity for emotional indulgence, a selfishness like the child’s, permission to cry, to weep her fucking eyes out, while allowing rage-red thoughts of ending everything that makes her existence so exhausting. She can imagine stabbing it with coloured pencils, bright sharpened stakes through the heart, or she can entomb it alive behind a wall of Lego, deliver it poisoned letters that spell doom and destruction in coagulating shapes of spaghetti, maybe take it out for an evening walk and leave it at a crossroads, fantasies of abandonment that have the child disappear like morning mist with the coming of the dawn. And it wouldn’t be murder because it would be self-preservation, thoughts she can forgive herself for because it’s the moon’s fault, it’s her monthly cycle. She can cry and be angry and her husband will accept it because he has to and her child will recognize it, her kin of tantrum, and let her bleed a while.
But her period does not come. This is the nightmare she can’t wake from.
There is a box in the cupboard that is hers, tucked behind the toilet roll that no one else changes, and she takes it and opens it and dreads what the plastic prophet will tell her.
“Muuum . . .”
The vowel sound longer than it needs to be, the word drawing strength from how it makes her cringe. Her withdra
wal from it powers its growth.
“In a minute, sweetheart.”
She knows that no blood is coming because something else needs it now, and she damns her husband for how he has damned her, curses his nocturnal penetrations, the rare seductions that are desperate attempts to stoke a dead fire, nothing but a tired prodding to keep the embers smouldering because a fire too bright would be dangerous, might burn the child. And she curses herself, too, for wanting the penetrations, yielding to them if not initiating them, seeking the oblivion that comes when she does, the brief reprieve an orgasm offers however stifled it must be.
At the door, as she pees; “Muuuuum . . . ieeee . . .”
“In a minute.”
And in a minute she might be, might be mummy, might be mummy yet again, so she shakes the stick and waits and hopes she isn’t but knows she will be.
There it is. There’s the cross that does nothing to keep them at bay, only announces their arrival. Another lives inside her, then, feeding from her as the first one did, taking its sustenance from hers, using her blood, growing, pushing, reshaping her to accommodate its needs. She has not invited it, has in fact taken steps to prevent it, yet here it is, all the stronger for defeating her in its early stages of life, in existing. A girl to supplant her, or a boy to exert its dominance in forcing her to carry a penis.
That banging at the door again, that bastard banging, and she wishes for a miscarriage, a letting of blood and bond, wondering how many mothers have died in childbirth, killed by what they carried, wondering how many others missed out on such mercy to die slow gradual deaths each and every day, revived enough in tiny smiled instalments to do what’s wanted. She could scrape or poke her way out of this, drink or smoke or exercise to exorcise herself of the thing that hides inside her, but she knows she won’t, knows she can’t, because its power has already begun, and here’s its blood-brother banging at the door so that the latch loosens and the door swings inward. She gets a foot to it, stops it opening all the way, but she’s sitting on the toilet with her shirt clutched in her armpits and a cross she can’t bear clutched in her trembling hands. Its face is at the gap between the door and frame, startled by the entry, startled by the abrupt abortion of it, eager to push through regardless, and it gives her a smile, a different smile, one that sees her as she shouldn’t be seen, private and vulnerable, but it doesn’t care except to mock her for it with a sickle of sharp milk teeth, a smile that’s gone before she can decide if it was ever really there.
“Mummy,” it says, “I’m hungry.”
And she cries, because she knows it always will be.
The Travellers Stay
By night the motel was nameless, the stuttering fluorescence of its neon sign only a rectangular outline of where words once were. The light made the shadows of the building darker and gave moths the false hope of somewhere to go, collecting the dust from their broken wings so that a once-vibrant white was now mottled and sulphurous.
By day the place fared no more favourably. The title of its sign was visible, Travellers Stay, but so was the fact that it needed a fresh coat of paint twenty years ago. Flakes peeled like scabrous sores. In sunlight, the building behind the sign was more than a dark shape but not much more, the drab monotony of its sun-bleached walls broken only by the repetition of plain numbered doors.
When Matt arrived, the motel was neither of these places but something in between. Dusk was a veil that disguised before and after and the motel looked as good as it ever could. Anyone who came to the Travellers Stay came at dusk.
“We’re here,” Matt said. He made a slow turn and bumped gently up-down an entrance ramp. A sheet of newspaper skittered across his path as an open v, became caught on a wheel, and was turned under it twice before tearing free. He pulled into a spot between a rusting truck and a Ford that sat flat on its tires and noticed neither. “Wake up.”
Only when he cranked the handbrake did Ann stir beside him, sitting up from the pillow she’d made of her jacket against the passenger window. The denim had pressed button patterns into her forehead like tiny eyes. A sweep of her fringe and they were gone without her ever knowing they were there.
“Where are we?” Her breath was sour with sleep.
“Motel.”
Ann turned to the back seat. “John, honey.”
John, her teenage son, mumbled something that spilled a line of drool and woke. He wiped his chin and sat up. “What?” he said. “What?” He sniffed at the saliva drying on the back of his hand.
Matt released the steering wheel and flexed his fingers. He arched his back and shifted in his seat, eager to get out and stretch his legs.
Ann was looking around. “Here? Seriously?”
Matt ignored her.
There was a woman sitting on the porch enjoying a cigarette. She was leaning back on a chair with her feet up on the rail. She was wearing cowboy boots. Cowgirl boots, Matt supposed. Black jeans and a vest top the same, faded grey from too many washes. The door behind her was propped open by a pack of bottled beer.
“Want me to loan you fifty?” Ann said. “She can’t be any more than that.”
It could have been funny from someone else, but Ann had never mastered that type of humour.
“She’s not a hooker,” Matt said. He was tired. His words came out the same way.
“And how would you know?”
The woman was attractive. Matt found a lot of young women were, these days. But if he felt any lust it was for the cigarette she held and the beer she drank. Hell, it was for the ease with which she did both. As he watched she brought a hand up to her mouth and inhaled lazily. She chased it with a tip of her drink.
“I don’t know,” Matt said. He got out of the car before he had to say anything else.
The woman looked his way and raised her beer in silent greeting.
“Hi,” he called back. Mr. Friendly.
The thump of a car door behind him. Ann.
“We’d like a room,” he said to the woman.
“You sure?”
Matt looked at Ann and wondered how much of their conversation the woman might have heard.
“We’re sure,” Ann said. “You got any?”
Matt sensed some sort of bristling, but only from his wife. The woman in the chair merely shrugged. “Twenty or so, judging by the numbers on the doors.”
“We just want one,” Matt said.
“Help yourself,” she said. She said it differently to most people. Got the inflections all wrong.
“Do we pay by the hour here or what?” John asked, slamming his door at the same time because he wasn’t brave enough with the insult. Matt heard him, though, and he’d told him before about slamming the door. Not for the first time he wished Ann’s ex had got the custody he’d apparently wanted.
Ann made a show of looking around the parking lot and beyond. It was a show Matt had seen before and it meant she was looking at how he might look at the woman.
“Just one night,” he said.
“Hope so,” the woman said, getting up and going inside.
That’s how you do it, Matt thought, looking at John. Chicken shit.
Ann was looking at Matt, eyebrows raised, waiting for him to react somehow to the woman’s attitude. He made a show of looking around the parking lot and beyond.
The sky had darkened to something like the colour of the woman’s clothes. An occasional breeze tossed litter in small circles and swept grains of sandy dirt across the ground. From far away came the quiet noise of a passing car, a long hush of sound as if the coming night had sighed.
“We’re not staying here,” Ann said.
“I’m tired,” he replied. It meant yes we are and I don’t want to fight.
“I’ll drive,” said John.
“Not my car.”
The woman re
turned with a large disk of white plastic declaring 8 in big bold black. It looked like a giant eye with twin pupils, the key dangling like a metal tear.
“Thanks,” Matt said, stepping up to take it.
“Clean sheets, towels, TV.” She pointed across the lot. “Vending machines are over there.”
“Thanks,” Matt said again. He gave the key to Ann and grabbed the bags from the trunk. John kicked at a crushed can and sent it clattering. The woman sat back in her chair and retrieved her bottle. She brought it to her mouth slowly. Swapped it for the cigarette.
“Quit staring.” Ann took one of her bags from him, more for the impact of snatching it than from any desire to help. She gave the room key back to him so whatever it opened up would be his fault.
“Good night,” the woman said quietly as they walked away. And in a dry tone, addressed to the floor, “Don’t let the bed bugs bite.”
S
“It’s gonna be a shit hole,” John said.
Matt smacked him across the back of the head with his free hand. Thought, fuck it.
“Hey!” John and Ann said together, John rubbing at where he’d been struck.
“Language,” was all Matt said, but mostly he’d struck out because he was fed up with the boy. And there was no need to state the obvious—of course it would be a shit hole.
“You can’t hit me,” John said. “You’re not my dad.”
“Thank God.”
“Matt—” Ann started.
“Sorry. I’m just tired, okay? Sorry.”
He wasn’t tired, though, not really. Tired of driving, and tired of taking John’s crap, but not tired like he wanted sleep. In fact, what he wanted was a beer and a smoke and a few minutes on his own to enjoy both.
Ann gestured at the door. A brass 8 that was probably plastic, a peephole beneath like a dropping.
Matt fumbled with the key. The overlarge fob made it a handful. It was the old-fashioned type of key, one you turned in a lock. It turned easily enough; he could have opened the door with a toothpick. He pushed the door open.