by Weston Ochse
Paco felt a kick strike his kidney and lift him into the air. The pain was so intense it blinded him for a moment. When he hit the ground he didn’t even feel it through the scalding glow that had mushroom-clouded in his side.
“When the medic graduates he can’t exactly take the goat with him, can he? So either way the goat dies. That’s what happened to The Mound. I learned everything I could from him. He knew it. I knew it.”
Daddy Pain grabbed Paco by an ear and pulled him to a standing position. He screamed in Paco’s face. “Listen to me when I’m talking to you, goat!” Then he threw Paco against the wall.
Paco slid to a sitting position. In the background he heard two things: his heart beating and the sound of the trampoline. He could have sworn that they were both going boing and in synch.
Daddy Pain stood in the middle of the room and stared at him. The cots had been knocked over and the blankets lay scattered.
“So how is it that you knew about The Mound? Was it Brett? Did he tell you to fuck with me about him?”
Paco wanted to tell Daddy Pain to fuck off, but all he could manage was a bubble of blood.
“And the others?” Daddy Pain glanced around. “We thought you all would know how to fight. I figured there was something about your kind that would make you mean. Keep you alive.”
Paco wanted to tell Daddy Pain that his kind was just like any other kind, but he only managed two bubbles. Then he noticed a movement out of the corner of his eye.
“But none of you were made to last. It’s not as if my boys were too hard on you either.” He giggled. “Because I showed them what happens when a medic kills their goats. I even gave some of them more than one chance. More chances than they deserved and what did they do?”
Paco groaned.
“Exactly. You kill the goat, you leave the family.”
A blanket suddenly puffed full on the floor next to Daddy Pain, as if someone had climbed beneath it. The blanket wriggled towards Daddy Pain. Daddy Pain must have felt something because his gaze darted towards his foot, which was now covered by a blanket. He tried to lift it, but it wouldn’t move. He tried to lift his other foot, then realized his mistake. His arms wind-milled as the blanket pushed his base out from under him.
Daddy Pain crashed to the floor.
Paco cheered but it was only bubbles of blood and foam.
Suddenly all the blankets except one took form and crept towards Daddy Pain. He lashed out, punching as best he could, but they had little effect. His hands kept getting trapped by the fabric of the blankets.
He screamed, when he opened his mouth, it was filled with the corner of a blanket.
Beneath the boing, boing, boing of Paco’s heart were voices. They became louder and louder until he could understand them as if they were speaking in normal voices.
“Chicken Taco, get over here,” Mikey said.
“Fuckers stay away from me” Daddy Pain groaned, managing to pull the blanket free from his mouth.
“We want you to finish it,” B.J. said.
The blankets were moving impossibly fast now, surging and roiling above Daddy Pain’s body. His shirt had been ripped open, revealing an immense tattoo of the special force’s logo. Beneath this was the cursive scrawl of the motto—de oppresson liber— free the oppressed. Daddy Pain’s eyes were filled with madness.
Paco struggled to his knees.
“Hurts,” he managed to say.
“It will be all over soon,” said Tiki, his accent flowing over the words.
“Who’s there?” Daddy Pain’s eyes were covered by a blanket. “What are you doing?”
Paco saw that Daddy Pain’s hands were immobilized, held fast by blankets bulging with the imprint of fingers. His feet were held the same way.
The Mound raised himself under his blanket so that Paco could see beneath it. Darkness moved. “You need to finish.”
Paco stared hard at Daddy Pain. He remembered his own father when they’d fought that last time and he’d discovered that one day little girls grow up to be young men. They might be little girls at heart, but their bodies and muscles are all man and Paco used his new adulthood to defend himself against his father’s last attempt to burn something Paco had found to be precious, letters from a boy he’d met at summer camp. His father had had the same insane look of disbelief on his face that Daddy Pain wore now. Back then he’d decided not to continue hitting his father because no matter how many times he hit him, he’d never understand. It was like hitting a bug. Or a rat. Or a deranged puppy. They were incapable of understanding.
“Come on, Paco,” Lilly said, laughing. “You got to do it.”
Paco shook his head. He tried to speak. It took three times for the words to come out right. “I don’t have to do anything,” he finally said.
“But Paco—” B.J. began.
Paco stared at the darkness beneath The Mound’s blanket. He shook his head. “I’m not a goat. I’m not a chicken. I’m just a boy from Boise.”
“Paco,” Mikey whispered.
“My name is Brian.”
For a millionth of a second, so quick that Paco would never really know if he saw it or not, he thought he saw the smiling face of The Mound, a man well past his years, scarred and twisted. Then the Mound’s blackness returned, descending on Daddy Pain until his face was covered. His body began to thrash as if it was being eaten by electricity.
The sounds from the trampoline had stopped. Paco turned towards the door and beheld the little girl in white standing in the doorway.
She waved happily. “Hi Brian.”
“Hi Sue.”
“Is Daddy ready to go to Hell?”
Paco had started to smile, but he stopped as his thoughts hitched around the little girl’s words. Then his face began to fall. “Oh, no. Not you too.”
16. Trampoline Psychopompand-circimstance
Daddy Pain stopped thrashing.
The blankets moved off the body, as if those who were hiding under it were crawling across the room, then as one, they all fell flat.
Sue strode into the room like little girls the world over. “Come on, Daddy. Let’s go play with the others.” She held out her hand.
Paco struggled to his feet as he watched a translucent hand leave the confines of Daddy Pain’s body. The girl gripped it, leaned back and pulled. Soon, a second Daddy Pain was on his feet, standing next to her. He glanced towards Paco but didn’t seem to see him. He stood hunched over, his eyes downcast, his mouth quivering in a frightened thin line.
The girl turned and led him through the door and down the hallway.
Paco limped after them, pausing to spit or when the pain in his side became too much. Something was broken inside.
He made it into the kitchen just as Sue and Daddy Pain slipped into the back yard. When Paco reached the door, they were climbing atop the trampoline.
Soon they were jumping. Slowly at first, then higher and higher. For the first time Daddy Pain wore a smile that had nothing to do with pain. It was as if he was beginning to experience something akin to joy. And the higher he jumped, the wider he smiled.
Boing, boing, boing.
Then the girl spoke. “Heaven is like this but this is as close as you’re going to get, you old fucker.”
Daddy Pain gave her a confused look. On his next jump, instead of rebounding upwards, he sank silently through the trampoline until he was gone from sight.
The girl slowed her jumps until she came to a stop. Then she waved. “See you soon, Brian.”
He raised his hand to wave back, but she was no longer there. It was as if she’d blinked from existence.
He stood there for a good long time.
From somewhere nearby he heard a dog barking. The sound of surf battering rocks was a constant undertone. A bird chirped.
He took one step forward. Then another. And another. When he was at the trampoline, he gripped the edge and heaved. It was so heavy. His insides screamed at the effort. He heaved again, and was able to d
islodge it from where the legs had sunk into the dirt. Now that it was loose, it was easy to turn over.
He stared at the bodies in the pit. They’d been covered with lye, dusted white like Christmas cookies. He recognized Randy, who must have been killed recently. Dude 1 and Dude 2 lay nearby, dead for more than a week. Their faces were almost unrecognizable, but their general appearances were unmistakable. They’d been dead before he’d ever been captured. Then he saw B.J., dead and smiling. Beneath a mess of limbs that could only belong to the other goats, he spied a length of white. Unmistakable white. Whatever had happened to her she’d ended up here.
He choked on a sob, then swallowed the rest of it down. He’d never be able to explain why he did it, but he reached into the pit and tore a piece off her dress. She had been a lost soul, a destroyed soul, and he couldn’t help but believe that she should have become more than this. He held it tight in his hand and turned away.
It seemed like an hour before he was able to stagger through the yard, the living room, and navigate the complex mechanism of the locks on the inside of the front door. He stumbled down the front walk and only stopped when he was able to grip the mailbox. He let it hold him up for a time.
A mailman eventually came by in a truck. The man glanced once at him, then opened the box, slid in a sheaf of envelopes and kept driving.
The mailman got about twenty feet, before he stopped, reversed and pulled backwards until he was even with the mailbox.
He was an older black man. Concern and confusion grew in his eyes. “You okay, son?”
He shook his head.
“Something happen to you?”
He nodded his head.
“In that house?”
He nodded again.
The mailman pulled out his cell phone. “We’ll get some help.” He spoke to 911 for a moment, then turned and asked, “What’s your name?”
He sat down hard on the ground. “She called me Brian,” he said.
“His name is Brian,” the mailman told the operator. “Brian what? What’s your last name?”
“Overstreet.”
The mailman relayed the information to the operator then shut his cell phone. He got out of his truck. “What happened in there?”
Brian Overstreet smiled into the bright blue sky and remembered a day when he’d been a little boy, no thoughts in his mind other than how wonderful the world was and how awesome it was to be alive. On that day he’d worn a dress, much like the one worn by Sue, taken from his sister’s drawer. Everything had been magical until his daddy had caught him. The memory had been forgotten all these years, suppressed beneath a crust of pain, fuel only for his nightmares.
“What went on in there? Is there anyone else hurt?”
Brian looked squarely at the mailman. “Not anymore,” he said. “Never again.”
Brian glanced at the white peeking from his iron-fisted grip on the remnant of Sue’s dress. The Chinese believed that white was an evil color. Bad guys in kung fu movies wore white. So different from Western culture and America where the hero had a white hat and rode a white horse. Was that who Sue was? Was she the hero? Had she saved him?
“You should wait here. An ambulance will be here soon.”
From far away Brian heard the trampoline go boing, boing, boing.
With all the Family Pain gone, he wondered what she was still doing bouncing up and down; this ghost of a girl. Who was she waiting for?
In a moment of terror, he realized that she’d never even been there at all. The fabric fluttered beneath the rear wheel of the mail truck. It was no longer white, but the dingy color of brown wool. The same color of wool they had for their blankets.
Brian had been so happy when he was a kid. The sound of his father playing the old forty five over and over had got him ready to come out, to pretend, to be a kid who was happy just to be a kid, even if he was a boy pretending to be a girl. He’d put on his sister’s dress and had sung the song with his dad. When it came to the part where Johnny sang, “My Name is Sue. How do you do?” Brian had leaped out from behind the burn barrel and had stuck his hand out just like Sue had by the sliding glass door, wearing the biggest, sloppiest grin any kid who trusted the universe had ever worn.
And his life had never been the same.
Brian nee Paco Le Poulet had come a million miles and had evolved from a human to a goat and back to a human since then. He’d headlined at Leather Kitty, experienced the adulation of a host of unmarried men, learned the intricacies of a chimera, and played story time with the ghosts of dead goats. All of it made him the man of this moment and to his surprise, he didn’t want to go back to the way he was before. Instead of trying to be someone else, it was time to try and be that person he’d wanted to be that warm summer evening when the sun had been low, the music had been loud and the world had seemed so magically bright. He might not be able to be a kid again, but he could find that girl he once was that had made him so happy.
Sue.
The sound of the trampoline finally stopped.
About The Author
Weston Ochse (pronounced Oaks) lives in Southern Arizona. His work has won the Bram Stoker Award for First Novel in 2005, been nominated for a Pushcart Prize for Short Fiction in 2003 and won the Buffalo Screams International Film Festival Original Screenplay Competition in 2010. His work has also appeared in anthologies, magazines and professional writing guides. He thinks it’s damn cool that he’s had stories in comic books. His novels include Blaze of Glory (Bloodletting Books), Empire of Salt (Abaddon Books), and Scarecrow Gods (Delirium Books).
Weston holds Bachelor’s Degrees in American Literature and Chinese Studies from Excelsior College. He earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from National University. Weston is a retired U.S. Army intelligence. He has been to more than fifty countries and speaks Chinese with questionable authority. Weston is a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, a purple belt in Ryu Kempo Jujitsu and a green belt in the Hawaiian martial art of Kuai Lua.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
1. Captured
2. Arrival
3. Daddy Pain
4. Nightime
5. Fresh Goat Meat
6. Dying Cockroach Position
7. Jimmy Snuka From The Top Rope
8. Barbequed Woody Woodpecker
9. Trampoline Girl
10. Pain Management
11. The Land Of Suicide Chimeras
12. Little Girl Lost
13. Martial Artist Crash Test Dummy
14. Winner Winner Chicken Dinner
15. Billy Goat Gruff
16. Trampoline Psychopompand-circimstance
About The Author