Gooseflesh forms on George’s back. When he turns away from the bedroom wall, he finds Alice standing over him. She’s still wearing the puffy blue dress and the white apron.
“Scoot over,” she says.
“Why?” George says.
“I’m sleeping with you tonight.”
“There isn’t enough room.”
“We’ll make room.”
“Honey, there’s not enough room. You know that.”
Alice stares at George with emotionless eyes. Finally, she turns away and approaches her own mattress.
“Spider!” she says.
BANG. George jumps as Alice stomps on the spider.
But now the spider is no longer a spider. Now it’s nothing but a splotch of yellowish pus.
“Poor thing,” Alice says. She kneels by the pus and weeps. “Poor thing. Poor thing.”
George sighs. “If you feel that way, why did you kill it? Why didn’t you just catch it and put it outside?”
His wife glares at him, a look of disgust mutating her face. “Why would I set it free? Spiders are vermin.”
Alice continues to cry. And as George drifts to sleep, a petrifying stench tunnels into his nostrils.
Tap, tap, tap. Following these taps, George’s neck tenses up and he feels sick to his stomach. He waits for the BANG. He waits five minutes. Ten minutes. An eternity.
Finally, he creeps to the front door and looks through the peephole. On the other side, there’s a bearded man who must weigh at least three hundred pounds. Santa, perhaps.
“Aren’t you going to answer it?” Alice says.
George jumps, because he hasn’t seen his wife for days. He assumed that she was gone forever. She took her toothbrush and everything.
He glances around, but he can’t see Alice anywhere. Maybe he was just hearing things.
Instead of answering the door, he tiptoes into the doll room. He moves to the right side of the room, and admires his collection. Nora, especially.
“Are you ready for your sponge bath?” George says.
“Yes,” one of the dolls says, and steps forward from the rest of the collection. But she’s not a doll, is she? She’s Alice, wearing the puffy blue dress and the white apron. Her hair is yellow yarn, and she has nubs for hands. Her face is white as a ghost.
“Honey,” George says. “What . . . what happened to you?”
Alice grins. “I’m finally finished.”
“How are you going to feed yourself with hands like that?”
“That’s nothing to worry about.”
“Why did you do this?”
Alice wraps her arms around him, but he backs away from her. All of the strength drains from his legs, and he collapses to the ground. His chest feels so tight. On hands and knees, he crawls over to Nora.
He grasps the doll’s arm and forces her to slap his face, again and again.
BANG BANG BANG. The slaps hurt, but he deserves worse. He should have taken better care of Alice.
“Stop that, George,” Alice says. “You’re making a fool of yourself.”
George doesn’t release his grip on Nora until her mouth opens. Her mouth opens wider than any mouth ever should. He backs away from her and clutches at his chest. At this point, he realizes that all of his dolls are opening their mouths as well. In an anticipatory state, he waits for his dolls to speak, but they remain silent. In their mouths, he sees only darkness.
“What do you want?” he says.
Without warning, a man forces himself through the separation in the curtains. He’s the three hundred pound man with the long white beard. The Santa Man grabs Nora and drags her away. The doll flails her arms and legs wildly, but the man is just too strong. George can’t find the strength to move.
“Stop him, honey!” George says.
Alice laughs. “How am I supposed to fight him without proper hands?”
Before exiting the room, the Santa Man stops and looks George in the eyes. George almost expects the man to say, “See you later, Mr. Gator,” but he doesn’t say anything. He just turns away and leaves.
And George curls up on the floor. Sitting cross-legged beside him, Alice caresses his cheek with her nub. She sniffles. Tears of yellowish pus stream from her button eyes and land on George’s face.
“Poor thing,” she says. “Poor thing.”
OUTLIER
JODY SOLLAZZO
Barbra was in high school now, or so they told her, but she felt like she should be much older, or younger. The high school was a big, bright open building. White light streamed into the windows from an unseen source high above. The light was always shining on the tall evergreen trees and the lush green lawns. It was everywhere at all times. The only way to escape the light was to walk right through.
Barbra was very good at it, being in high school. She knew how to buy the right clothes. She knew how to wax her legs, eyebrows and lip every thirty-eight days so no one would ever see an unwanted hair.
Barbra had the right best friend, volunteered at the old folks’ home, and was nice to the special ed kids, like Plane Cheese Nathan, who only talked about different kinds of planes, and liked to hide cheese in the desks and locker vents to eat later. Sometimes she wasn’t sure she really liked anyone, but she smiled.
Smiling was very important. All other things hinged on smiling. When she smiled no one bothered her. Occasionally someone would say she looked sad and that meant she had to work harder to get the smile into her eyes. She supposed this was how life was always going to be. Then the elf-man came and everything changed. He wasn’t the cute kind of elf-man, the kind that was stout and smiley and decorated lawns. He was the hollow, sharp-faced, tall kind that haunted forests.
She first saw him when she was walking to school. He was lurking around the green trees, following her. He stuck out like an ink stain on Barbra’s desk or a dark hair on her leg.
A few days after the elf-man began following her, Barbra flipped open her homework pad and came across a note written in jagged scrawl, penned hard enough to tear through the next three pages:
REMEMBER THE SWAMP!
Sexy Sadie what have you done? I need you. Please come and save everyone.
She didn’t know what that meant at all. There was no swamp nearby; only a lake. She didn’t know how the elf-man got to her notebook, she always had it with her, but she knew it was him.
The next day Barbra was walking to school in her blue pleated skirt and her white, high-necked, sleeveless Victorian blouse. She was walking with her best friend Laura, who liked to copy her outfits, when she saw the elf-man waiting in the high school parking lot. This was the closest she’d ever been to him. He was leaning against a blue convertible. He had dark, slicked-back hair. He wore a white t-shirt, dark blue jeans, and black and white saddle shoes. Old blues music emanated from the blue convertible. A gruff man’s voice yelling about the world and men. The elf-man wasn’t as tall or as old as Barbra had first thought.
“Did we get a new senior?” Laura asked.
“I’m sure we didn’t,” Barbra said, “Someone like him wouldn’t go here.”
“Someone like what? I think he’s cute. You, Barbra, just don’t like to date anyone without a letter on his jacket. Look! He’s looking at me.”
Laura twirled in the sun as the elf-man looked at Barbra and the man on his radio Ho’ed and Ha’ed. “You’re going to get yourself killed one day,” Barbra said.
Plane Cheese Nathan was having some kind of fit. This happened often, usually when someone took his cheese away. When this happened they brought him into the special ed room and that’s what they were doing when Barbra shouted, “Don’t let them take you into the back room! I know what you’re doing. Where’s Tiffany?”
“Stealth aircrafts are vulnerable to detection during, and immediately after, using their weaponry!” Plane Cheese Nathan shouted back.
The principal asked Barbra what she meant, over and over. Sunlight was blinding her. Barbra had to pretend she was g
oing to cry. Barbra’s father came and repeated the question, “Who is Tiffany?”
That night Barbra was so afraid. She knew that the elf-man was out on her parents’ great green lawn. She couldn’t stand the fear and couldn’t think of how to end it except to face it, and him. So, she climbed out of her window, as she did in her dreams, when she drank and danced and kissed Laura.
He was waiting for her like she knew he would be. He grabbed her by the arms and pushed his mouth against her ear. He said, “They got you twisted ’round good but I know you’re in there.” He said this in an English accent, but Barbra knew he was from a place much, much farther away. It wasn’t until he threw her in his car that her body seemed to start working. She scrambled to get out and he grabbed her again. She screamed as he held her down. He laughed. It was a wild laugh, and then he crooned:
Everything you do is right
Everything I do is true
Bluebell to hell
Well, fuck! Blue felt a little dizzy and it wasn’t from fighting like some stupid suburban skank. Sadie! Sadie was here, on top of her. There was so much to do. It all flooded Blue’s mind like an ice bath and the shock of it made her laugh.
“Bluebell?” Sadie asked—in his British accent—but he sounded different.
“Sade?” Blue asked.
He sounded hoarse, like they had made him scream all night again. Like they reminded him that he possessed an extra hole between his legs he didn’t want. But, then Blue saw Sadie’s jaw stick out, her eyes fiery; Sadie was determined.
“I’ve been working, doing everything you said, but it—” Blue kissed Sadie before he could finish. She knew she had to run again out of all this sun and green and plastic, but for now she only cared about Sadie’s lips like before. Sadie’s lips were worth hours of pain.
“Oh, Sadie!”
“It’s Sebastian now. Call me Sebastian. I haven’t thought of a good surname yet.”
Sadie’s forehead was so furrowed Blue could get lost in the black of it. She touched him in between his legs and inside of him. She touched him until she got lost in the bigger blackness of his open mouth.
When the other car hit Hale’s, he spun out and gripped the blond ponytail of his wife’s lover. There was a drop of blood where Hale had cut off the hair.
The ponytail was the only thing Hale had gotten for himself in a very long time. When he was young he had relied a lot on his quiet charm and his ability to listen to people. Despite being a bit rat-like, with large eyes and a long flat nose, pretty young starlets loved Hale for this ability to focus on them. Now Hale focused on not losing his grip on the ponytail as the car spun.
He wasn’t going to die. Not yet. He had been dreaming of his death for seven years. He would die, tied to a chair, in a black and white room. Hale understands things in the dream. He knows The Doctor is Evil. He knows the changing girl with her stiffly moving beautiful face is Good. In the dream it all makes sense.
Waking life was more difficult. It was in waking life that the dream paralyzed him and his wife froze his credit cards. Drinking had soured his charm; it was hard to get work on a film set now.
Hale crawled from the ruins of his Mustang. He limped over to the other car. Money was fluttering along the asphalt. He searched the rest of the wreck. In what was left of the back seat he found a black bag filled with money beside half of the driver’s head. He slid the bag carefully through the broken window. There was about two grand in the bag, and a note:
B&W Lodge. Dr. Garbles. 2Mil upon complete.
Hale touched his head and saw blood on his fingers. It was time to face his fears. He had to prove The Doctor didn’t exist. Or he had to prove he did and die, or live. Or Hale could kill him and somehow get two million dollars. Either way he would be free. He wanted to see The Shifting Girl.
“Diane says you are an outlier,” said a girl carrying a pink sock ball.
The Sock Girl, now standing at Hale’s table, had black stringy hair and large eyes. She had bruises on her arms. She wore a gray T-shirt that was too small and her pointed nipples showed through. Before Hale could respond she walked back to her friends.
The lounge had a closed-down bar, bad waxpaper lighting, cheap leave-out food and a spinning rotisserie of sausage skewers—self-serve. He could tell the place had once been great. It had an old jukebox that played Elvis.
A square-shaped Mexican kid reached into a bag of M&Ms, removing them one at a time as The Sock Girl’s bimbo friend guessed the colors from across the lounge.
“Red.”
“Brown.”
It had been three days at The Black & White Lodge. Since his head had stopped aching from the accident, Hale was starting to feel like an idiot.
“Blue.”
The M&M guessing bimbo was the first lady of these winners. She wore a black bustier that fanned out at the hips to look like bat wings, fishnets and black lace-up hiking boots. She had platinum blonde hair with blue streaks and distant kohl-rimmed eyes.
She was pretty but not his dream girl. None of the girls here could even be the faceless girl The Doctor kills first. His dream girl was good and brilliant. In his dream, she and the faceless girl had a holy relationship. His dream girl shifted from a beautiful brunette to a beautiful black girl as she trembled, unable to move from the pure white sheets where she lay. Hale knew he wasn’t going to see that here but that meant he wouldn’t see his death either, or The Doctor. He didn’t have anywhere to go so he might as well watch this teenage drug binge. He might still get his two million dollars, but he doubted it.
“I’m always right. Always. Just once I’d like to get a purple one when I said ‘brown,’” the girl said.
“Aw baby!” her English boyfriend said.
“There are no purple M&Ms,” the oldest, a nervous blinking girl said.
“That’s the point, Lucy,” Bustier Girl said.
“There are purple shelled chocolate candies that look like M&Ms but aren’t. They’d never be in regular M&Ms,” The Sock Girl said.
“God, American coffee is shit and I’m getting bloody sick of Elvis. Don’t they have any Sex Pistols in that thing?” The English kid was leader of this tribe. He clearly had the most intelligence and money and seemed to be the only one who looked like he wasn’t dressing from a grab bag.
“I’ll snap your neck, you little faggot!” Mr. Cowboy Hat yelled suddenly.
Mr. Cowboy Hat had made himself a fixture at the closed bar and, like Hale, he drank his own store-bought alcohol. Unlike Hale he was a pock-marked handle-bar mustached slab of a man who owned his space. “You come into my country, you insult my coffee, my king! We kicked your ass out of here once and I’ll be happy to kick your ass out again and throw your groupies out with you!”
“Oh, well, God Save The King. I meant no disrespect. He was the only one here who had real groupies. Though I really do wish he had burnt out rather than faded. It seems leaders of revolutions have trouble adapting to the changes of their own movements.”
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about kid, but—”
“You mentioned The American Revolution. Now that was bloody brilliant. Know why they won?”
“What?”
“Do you know why the Americans got their own nation? The British went about it all military style where the Americans dug in their heels and fought for hearth and home.”
“Slade likes to discuss this stuff. I don’t see the point. The patterns are set,” Bustier Girl said. She sat on one chair and stretched her legs out on another.
“You gotta know your history, Blue,” he said. The Nervous Girl (looking nervous) was the only one who had a normal reaction to Mr. Cowboy Hat. The Sock Girl smiled and held her sock. The square Mexican kid grabbed a handful of M&Ms and ate them.
Hale thought it was possible that Mr. Cowboy Hat was the connection, but it seemed unlikely that anyone would trust Mr. Cowboy Hat with two million dollars. Hale might have liked to see Mr. Cowboy Hat snap the kid’s neck,
though. The kid oozed effortless charm, the kind it had taken Hale a lifetime to get perfect, and then lose.
“Oh, Slade, baby,” Blue said, “Just come dance with me.”
She pulled the kid to her and they danced to “Love Me Tender.” Mr. Cowboy Hat sat back down and groused.
Hale went back to drinking his whiskey. The whiskey brought him no courage, but it made him realize how far he was from his dream, how much he had wanted the dream, or anything, to happen. His cheating wife would say that was his problem. He was always waiting for something to happen, rather than making it. Well, he had made her lover’s hair shorter.
Hale decided he’d fuck off back to L.A., scrape up some charm and get a job. He went to leave the B&W and saw Mr. Cowboy Hat had buttonholed Blue alone at a table by the exit.
“What are you doing with that boy, little flower? It’s clear you need a man.”
Mr. Cowboy Hat had straddled the back of a chair. Blue licked a sausage skewer from the rotisserie.
“That hasn’t been my experience. Granted my experience is unique,” she said.
She worked the sausage in and out of her mouth. In and out.
Hale dropped his getting-the-fuck-out plans looking at the girl’s mouth working the sausage. In and out.. Round and round. In and out.
“You are a very unique flower.”
“You can’t be very unique. Unique is an absolute. You either are ‘like nothing else’ or you’re not.”
In and out slowly now, a second bite. Mr. Cowboy Hat rose and grabbed her arm gently.
“You seem to know a lot, but I know something you don’t.”
“What’s that?” she asked, smiling.
“You were a little weed growin’ up. Your mama kept you but your daddy left you. So, you’re afraid all men are going to do the same, but now you’re bloomin’. You’re a bloomin’ flower and I’m gonna give you a little sniff. Can I give you just a little—”
In Heaven, Everything Is Fine: Fiction Inspired by David Lynch Page 27