Year of the Goose

by Carly J. Hallman

  Kelly poked the girl’s bare leg. Her skin was soft, covered in short pale hairs. “Still a bit chilly for shorts. What drugs are you on?”

  The girl burst out laughing and then shook her head. “Jesus. What’s your problem? Fuckin’ people all have a problem.”

  Kelly leaned into the girl’s arm and looked at her with a well-rehearsed wounded expression (the same one she so often used on Aunty Minnie), until the girl finally met her gaze. “Why you gotta be so weird? Get out of my face.”

  “Sorry,” Kelly said. She softened her voice. She sounded more sincere that way. “I didn’t mean it.”

  The girl shrugged. “Yeah, all right.” But she kept her death grip on the cup.

  Time ticked on. They both looked everywhere but at each other.

  “Hey,” Kelly finally said, her voice still softened. “Are you hungry?”

  The girl cocked her head, furrowed her brow. “Nah, I’m just sittin’ here with this fuckin’ cup for shits and giggles. I got me a whole kitchen full of yuppie food back home.”

  “Do you want me to buy you dinner at a restaurant? That’s all I mean. I’m going to eat now anyway. So you can come or not. It’s up to you.”

  The girl studied Kelly. Her eyes darted from side to side and then up and down, and finally she exhaled a white flag and said, “Yeah, okay.”

  The sun dripped like slimy egg yolk into the horizon. The guy who worked in the vintage shop with the comic-book dresses turned the sign in the glass door around to read closed. The girl dumped the change from her Starbucks cup into her backpack, zipped it up, shoved the cup into a side pocket, and set off after Kelly, who had set off in search of grub.

  “Is this place okay?” Kelly asked, stopping in front of a retro-y diner brimming with denim-clad, baseball-cap-wearing part-time production assistants who paid rent from trust funds. The girl nodded, but it wasn’t really a question, and what choice did she really have?

  Inside, in a vinyl booth, over cheeseburgers and arugula salads and Sprites and, finally, cheesecake slices, Kelly lent an ear to the girl’s woeful tale.

  Like so many of the other homeless freaks Kelly had spoken with, this girl had been raised primarily in foster care. She spewed on the typical slew of shady characters—“parents,” “brothers,” and “sisters”—all of whom stole from her and/or abused her and/or molested her. There were, of course, a few decent humans too, who’d gone out of their way to protect and care for her, but the girl didn’t dwell too much on that good fortune. Why would she? There were other terrible and far more interesting topics to explore: alcoholism and crystal meth addiction and the “things some girls do for money,” which she herself even admitted to sometimes still doing, when times got tough.

  Kelly thought it odd that this girl, a perfect stranger—and one who, with her coherent speech and relatively refined mannerisms, didn’t seem hopelessly mentally ill—was so eager to volunteer all of this traumatic and often incriminating information to another perfect stranger. She stared across at this girl, anxiety rippling up from her fingertips. Why, she thought, does she trust me? Why, she thought, does anyone trust me?

  The girl drew her napkin—the same one she’d used a moment earlier to blow her nose—to her face, wiped her mouth, and turned the conversation to Kelly. “So you from Japan or what?”

  Kelly slowly chewed the last bite of her cheeseburger. “China. I’m Chinese.”

  The girl nodded. “Well, it’s basically all the same, right? You’re here in America now is all I mean.”

  Kelly shrugged—what could she even say to that?—and the girl dove into a long, rambling story about how before she went into foster care, her biological mother dated a Korean man, and about how he had a terrible gambling problem, and how his kitchen smelled really funky, and how he was a grade-A asshole. Kelly drifted in and out of attention, bored now with this insipid girl, and thinking about those college decision letters, about her future. She thought about only this as she handed the waitress her debit card, signed the bill, and stepped down to the sidewalk beside the still-yapping girl. She was so lost in thoughts of admission letters, of test scores, of transcripts that she hadn’t noticed how far they’d walked—out of the gentrified area and into a more sparsely populated stretch of road near Griffith Park.

  Under a streetlight, Kelly stopped. It was time to make a break for it; time to head home and see what that Aunty Minnie was up to, and if nothing amusing, maybe time to pop another of those leftover Valium and go to bed. “All right then. Where are you going?” she interrupted the girl, who was now blabbering on about some lovable Rottweiler in one of her childhood foster homes who was run over by an eighteen-wheeler, “flat as a fuckin’ pancake.”

  The girl pointed into the park: dark trees, hills. “I’m meetin’ a friend over there sometime tonight. If he decides to show up. His name is Eddy—I think you’d like him. He’s wicked hot, everyone says, but not my type. Maybe—”

  Kelly nodded. “Okay,” she said. “Take care.” But she hadn’t even taken a full step before the girl’s voice, tinged with desperation, rose up from behind her.

  “Hey, how about a little cash?”

  Kelly stopped in her tracks. She spun around slowly. A flash of red.

  “Just a few dollars? I need me some bus fare.”

  She squinted. The girl was a silhouette now. Not a girl anymore. A shadow. “Oh,” Kelly said, her soft voice quavering. “That’s interesting. Why do you need to take a bus? What happened to Wicked Hot Eddy?”

  She wasn’t a shadow. She was real, in focus. The streetlight shone strangely on the girl’s pale skin, making it appear green, decayed.

  “The park is right here,” Kelly said. “Why do you—”

  “Come on, bitch, a few dollars ain’t gonna make no difference to you.”

  A red curtain dropped over Kelly’s eyes; she knew somewhere in the core of herself that this wasn’t a real curtain, but her perception was colored by it all the same. What was real? What was a curtain, even? After everything she’d done, this was how the nasty skank thanked her? After buying her what was probably the nicest meal she’d had in ages? After sitting there and politely listening to her vapid sob stories? She had the audacity to ask for money on top of everything?

  The curtain grew thicker, velvety, thicker still, until nothing was red, until nothing was there at all.

  That night, even before she popped a Valium and drifted into a silent void, Kelly couldn’t recall what had happened in the minutes that followed, but she vaguely recalled a struggle, the girl’s soft skin against her palms, a faded sensation of hatred and a stronger sensation of total indifference. The power of squeezing, denying breath; the freedom of running. And she read later a few news articles about a dead vagrant found in Griffith Park, but she never spoke to the police and she never went to jail, and anyway that evening, before the Valium, when she’d returned to that big, empty house in Culver City, she’d found a thick envelope on the kitchen counter printed with three big maroon letters: USC.

  MY CULINARY ARTS EDUCATION HARDLY PREPARED ME FOR THIS

  DEAREST CAMPERS, IT IS ONLY HUMAN TO WANT TO PROTECT YOURSELF, and it is therefore only human to sometimes wish others harm. So when your mother slaps your chopsticks out of your tubby little hands, when your teachers stop their lessons to reprimand you for stealing bites of that piece of cake you sneaked from home, when—

  Kelly, startled at the touch of a fingertip on her shoulder, stopped speaking and spun around. The counselor Zhao had sent to his office leaned in and whispered, “There’s no contraband left. The cook distributed all of it.”

  Kelly nodded. Dozens of sets of eyes, and it seemed too the ghostly eyes of those missing, stared back at her. In the not-so-far distance, under a setting sun, Zhao and the other counselors struggled to roll a body into the storage shed—and there were still two more bodies left on the basketball court.

  “Okay,” Kelly said. “The end! Questions will come shortly. But first, a different
game, a sort of intermission if you will.”

  The campers cheered.

  “This game is called Statue. If you want to win some food, you must sit still, and I mean completely still, until I return.”

  The campers, saliva glands audibly gushing and gleeking, went motionless. The courtyard looked like a sculpture garden at a modern art museum. If only she were sipping a latte at the Getty and not running around like a madwoman in this goddamn concentration camp. Kelly wove her way through the children-cum-statues to the dining hall and back into the kitchen. She pounded on the now-locked door, shouting at the cook to let her in.

  He answered the door with his cleaver raised. He exhaled, lowered the cleaver, and stepped aside.

  “I need food,” Kelly panted. “Any food.”

  The cook shook his head. “Fresh out.” He set the cleaver down on the prep table. Blood glistened on the blade.

  Kelly’s eyes widened. “What happened to it?”

  “Damn kids ate it all.”

  Sweat seeped from her palms. She took a wide stance. Control, control. “No, I mean the cleaver—what’s the blood from?”

  “Oh.” The cook blushed, hemmed, hawed. “Well, uh, it’s a funny story. I was scooping ice cream out of the tub for that Number Seventy-Four, keeping him quiet like you said, but I couldn’t scoop fast enough. I started sweating even worse. My arm went all limp like a noodle, and I started to see all these funny things—not hallucinations, mind you—but more like thoughts that were pictures. I saw myself being eaten alive. All sorts of weird things. Did you know that people and bananas share fifty percent of their DNA?”

  Kelly shook her head—what did that even mean? He sounded like a nutjob, a lunatic. Maybe her jokes were on point and he had actually served time in prison—that was, after all, where so many of the mentally ill wound up. “I did not know that about bananas, no.”

  “My culinary arts teacher always told us that, the point being to teach us to respect food and—”

  “Maybe your culinary arts teacher should have spent less time pontificating about fruit DNA and more time teaching you how to cook,” Kelly spat. The cook cocked back melodramatically, like this was the Three Stooges and she’d just slapped him with a dead fish or something. A sensitive soul. It didn’t matter. She didn’t care. Focus. “The cleaver. Why is there blood on the cleaver?”

  “Well, I’m getting there. So I’m scooping away, never scooped so hard in my whole damn life, when suddenly I hear a bit of a ruckus coming from over near the window. I turn my head real quick and look over and see this kid, I think it was Camper Thirty-Five or Fifty-Two—who can tell any of these rascals apart?”

  “That’s why they wear number tags.”

  The cook shrugged. “Yes, well, anyway, I realize that this camper has chewed his way through the screen like a billy goat and is trying to climb in through the window! Slippery melon thinks he can tiptoe away from the rest of the group and help himself to a little snack. I swear, give these kids one millimeter of freedom and they take a whole hundred li.”

  “The blood. Get to the blood.”

  “So I told you I was already in a bad state of mind. A frenzy really. What with all the deaths, the cover-ups, and so on. So I dropped the ice-cream scoop in the tub and ran over to the window. I spotted his fingers on the ledge, those fat little sausage fingers, and I hacked them clean off with my cleaver.” He pointed across the room, where ten stumpy fingers lay scattered on the floor.

  Vomit lurched up Kelly’s throat. She reached out and grasped the prep table to keep from keeling over. “Where is the rest of him?” she asked weakly, but truthfully, she didn’t want to know.

  The cook blushed again, and his quivering lips surrendered to a sheepish grin. “Outside under the window.” He paused. His smile fell. “Uh, well, look, after I chopped off his fingers, I may have sort of, um, beheaded him.”

  Kelly felt the blood drain from her face in one whoosh, like a toilet flushing. “What? Why?”

  “No reason really. I just sort of lost control of myself for a moment.” He laughed. His eyes shone with a familiar reddish light.

  Kelly worked to keep her own expression stoic. “Okay,” she said calmly, cautiously. “Well, where’s the ice-cream kid?”

  The cook instantly perked up, eager to redeem himself. “Oh! After I beheaded that fingers kid, I jammed ice-cream kid in the freezer with the dead ones to keep him quiet until you came back. Stuck him in there with the scoop and the tub. Give him a little DIY time. Give my poor arm a break.”

  Kelly stepped over to the freezer, her feet concrete bricks, knowing but dreading what she was to find.

  A moment later, she and the cook dragged the unconscious ice-cream kid’s body onto the kitchen floor. They crouched over him, his blue lips, his darkened eyelids.

  “Hypothermia,” Kelly said, rubbing her icy hands together. “How is that even possible? How cold do you keep it in there?!”

  “You were droning on out there for a damn long time.”

  “Oh.” She did a double take. She flipped her hair over her shoulder. She batted her eyelashes. She stood. “You heard my speech?”

  The cook nodded. “And to be honest, I’ve heard better.” He rose, stepped away from the body, picked up the cleaver, and inspected the blood. “Oy, guess I should clean this up.”

  Just as he finished his sentence, the ice-cream kid’s corpse opened his eyes, and the cook gasped, hopping back unsteadily, spooked at this sight. The cleaver slipped from his hands and landed, blade down, on ice-cream kid’s throat, slicing it clean through.

  NEVER TRUST A FAT KID FARTHER THAN YOU CAN THROW HIM

  AS KELLY DEALT WITH THE KITCHEN AND ZHAO ROLLED THE LAST BODY into the storage shed, a camper, whose file showed that he suffered from ADHD (diagnosed the year before by a doctor in Shanghai) in addition to obesity, was physically unable to sit still any longer in Kelly’s Statue game and cocked his head slightly to the left, but not so slightly that he couldn’t see Zhao and the counselors maneuvering his dead bunkmate’s body. Realizing at once that his bunkmate was irreversibly dead and not actually being taken to an imaginary infirmary, he let out a yelp, which startled many of the children-cum-statues into turning around themselves to see what the matter was.

  The counselor who’d been left in charge immediately “scolded” these rule-breakers for their disobedience with slurs such as “silly geese” and “doggone rascals.” The children paid no mind to her cheery, somewhat psychotic form of authority. Soon, others, their curiosity devouring their desire to win an arbitrary game, began to turn around too. Some shouted. Some tittered. “Have you seen So-and-So? I think So-and-So is dead!” Some just shook their heads, tut-tut.

  The slur-slinging counselor, threatened by this uprising, armed herself with the flashlight/Taser combo she’d found in Zhao’s office, where she’d been sent to search, in vain, for contraband. (She was usually terrified of weapons, preferring to use poisonous substances as a means of control and revenge, but she had also heard many stories of fat children viciously attacking their minders, and had herself once witnessed what she considered to be one such event long ago, before her imprisonment, in a Wuxi Pizza Hut when a child threw a bowl of potato bacon soup in his mother’s face after she refused to let him order a third brownie à la mode.) The counselor, who had only ever administered physical punishment to ex-lovers via pesticides, began tasing those children who moved, zapping them into unconsciousness (this Taser, acquired at a black market army/police supply store, had an unusually high/deadly voltage) and scaring the others into inanimate submission. Soon, the crowd was under control, there were no whispers, and there was no movement. There was just the sound of cicadas chirp, chirp, chirping.

  MEANWHILE, BACK IN THE KITCHEN…

  ZHAO BURST THROUGH THE DOOR. “THEY KNOW,” HE SAID. HIS EYES darted around, and he moved his head to and fro, as though expecting a fat kid to pounce on him at any second.

  “What? Who knows what?” asked Kel
ly. Her head was swimming, woozy. She leaned with her back against the prep table, clutched her stomach, stared down at the poorly laid tiles on the floor, and wondered what the hell she’d done to deserve this. Just steps away, the cook held his cleaver under the faucet. He hummed an old Communist ditty. The water ran red, then pink.

  “The kids,” Zhao said. He grabbed his stomach. “Ow. They know something is amiss. They started talking. What are we going to do?”

  Kelly bit her lip—how long could they keep doing this? “Um, well, I suppose we can continue to distract them until we figure something else out, right? It’s supposed to be movie night. How about we do that? Act like everything is normal, act like it’s movie night.”

  Zhao sighed. “I don’t have a better idea.” He cast his gaze to the floor. His cratered cheeks glowed green. “Where—where did those fingers come from?”

  Kelly opened her mouth but, not knowing where to begin, left him hanging, and bolted outside to deal with the campers, whose faces lit up at the sight of her.

  “Who’s the winner?” Camper Ninety-Four cried. “Is it me?”

  “Um.” Kelly fingered the ends of her hair. “You’re all the winners.”

  “What about them?” another said, pointing at a grouping of bodies the counselor had tased. “They didn’t stay still.”

  “Um,” Kelly said. “If you ‘fell asleep’”—she pronounced those two words with a certain euphemistic emphasis that told the children not to question—“then you’re not a winner and you can stay here and sleep outside tonight.” She raised her voice, addressing the dead: “Did you hear that sleepyheads?! It’s outside for you tonight!!”

  Camper Sixteen, a known smartass and always in the front row, piped up. “If they’re asleep, then why aren’t they snoring?”

  Kelly “accidentally” stomped on Camper Sixteen’s hand, effectively shutting him up, and announced, “All right, let’s go. I’ll, uh, order pizzas for all the winners.”