by Unknown
I had been playing with Danny and his ball, his favorite one, the thing whispered, crazed. Even though it was deflated and needed an air pump, which we didn’t have. One of us kicked it into the street. I went out to get it back. I looked up into the blindness of two headlights, and-
Silence engulfed me. I was complete.
The van smashed into me dead-on, and I was sent spinning out in front. A front wheel dug its way across me for a moment, and I screamed. The back wheel followed the same path. I could feel things smashing and breaking inside of me. Stitches popped open, and red-orange ooze gushed out, along with the pink of broken tissue.
The gigantic car kept on driving. I was so small, so shriveled; I had put up about as much resistance as a plastic bag. They didn’t even know they had hit me.
Lights danced in white pools across my vision, twisting down from the streetlight to lick against me, cold and purring all around. Alternate yellow and blue dots of pain swam within the pools. Everything beyond them was dark.
But then Mother was suddenly towering over me, her hands clasped over her mouth, her gray eyes watering. She dropped to her knees and began to gather me up, stretching out the front of her sweater, using it as a makeshift carrier. “Oh, my love, my love,” she said, her voice cracking. My pieces oozed and dripped. Her hands became wet with Me.
I heard a door slam shut, and the scent of sweet potatoes somehow made it past the horrible blankness that had encircled me. I could see the woman, her shoes clicking as she came down the driveway. Her black curls bounced with every step.
“Ms. Steinburg,” she called. Her eyes darted to me, lying in the street, helplessly, brokenly. Her eyes came open; the spikes of pain behind them sharpened into knife-tips. Mother tried to shift to one side, to block the woman’s view, but it was too late. “Ms. Steinburg!” She ran out into the street and circled around until she was right beside me.
The smell of her apron was beautiful. Like burnt sugar cookies and grease, all my favorite childhood scents rolled into one. A bubbling croak came out of me, and I reached toward her, maybe not with my hands but with my mind.
Mother finished gathering up the last of me in her shirt. The woman was staring at her, hard. Their eyes locked as Mother rose to her feet. Then she spun around, head down, and began marching towards the house. “That was my son,” the woman said at last, running up and grabbing one of Mother’s shoulders. “I saw him in the bushes, on your side of the hedge, and he got hit by that van, and … and … look me in the eye, you bitch!” Tears were streaming down her cheeks, and she sobbed, landing a balled-up fist against Mother’s back. Mother stumbled a little, but did not stop. Her eyes never left the concrete walkway. The woman started after her, sobbing, “You bitch! You bitch! You stole his body-”
Mother was halfway across the front lawn, but the woman caught the hem of her sweater and yanked it back. There was a flash, and the woman’s nails tore the side of Mother’s face. She was reaching for the apron, reaching for me…
Mother snatched at the woman’s arm and brought it to her mouth. There was a wet sound as she bit down, hard. The woman stopped reaching, instead howling and stumbling back, clutching her wrist and the bloodied teeth-marks.
Wiping a hand across her mouth, Mother spat, “You were a terrible mother! You didn’t deserve those children, all to yourself! I’ve been giving him the attention he never got. You weren’t even watching him that day the accident happened, were you?!” The woman’s mouth was open. The sobs were no longer making it all the way out of her throat, though she still shook with them.
“Give him back,” she called. I was suddenly very afraid of the woman. I could see insanity glowing in her eyes, two dim stars. “Give him BACK!”
She lunged up the stairs, but Mother slammed the door, locking it into place.
“Don’t you come near me again,” Mother called through the wood, even as it shook under the woman’s desperate blows. “Don’t you ever come near me, or I’ll call the cops, and they’ll ship you off to jail and put your kids in foster care, and you will NEVER see any of them again!”
Mother whirled around and hurried down the hall, and the woman’s muffled sobs faded into the night.
Mother took me to her sewing room, carefully shifting me onto the table. Her eyes traveled up and down, seeing the damage clearly for the first time. A sound escaped her.
She began to talk to me, but it was in a broken voice. “Oh, love, I don’t know … I don’t know if … That first time you were hit, you were bumped out of the wheel’s way, only snapped your neck against the street, but this time it’s … it’s bad.” I managed to swivel one eye around to look at her, though my face was smashed and breaking into pieces. Her fingers brushed against my cheek, stroking it. She stared into my one eye. I realized that she was searching it, perhaps to make sure the love was still there.
Finding it, Mother nodded at me, biting her red velvet lip to keep back the tears. “How am I supposed to fix you this time?” she asked aloud. I could not answer.
Her hands slow, debating, she began to rummage through me, picking out parts she could salvage and stacking them on one side of the table while putting the too-damaged parts on the other. I was aware of how small the good pile was.
She explained herself as she worked.
Mother had lived in this house for years and years, and she knew all about her neighbors. She had been very jealous of the woman next door, who had four beautiful babies all her own, but did not take care of them well enough. The woman’s husband had left her two and a half years ago, Mother said. She could still remember the back-and-forth screaming, the slamming of a car door and the roar as it sped away. It had been the subject of neighborhood gossip for weeks. But still, the woman had those four babies to keep her company. But did she appreciate them? No, not this woman.
The Mother spent most of her day at work in a café on Simpton road. In the early mornings, she cooked up meals that flooded the whole street with their smells. She would leave them in the refrigerator for when the children came home on the school bus, tired and hungry. “Lazy. Stupid and lazy,” Mother hissed. “Didn’t make time for her own children!”
The thing in the dark place writhed. Its voice reached me in a dull hum of memories. Momma had to work all the time to get us the things we needed. Danny was oldest, so he was the one who got out the food Mom left us in the refrigerator and heated it up. We knew Mom couldn’t be with us right then. It was alright, we knew we would see her later in the evening, when she was done at the café. Or, if she was already home, when she was feeling better… She was so tired when she came home, she’d go into her room and shut the door. In the meantime, we ate together, not talking but with a silent agreement among us to be quiet so we wouldn’t bother-
Mother kept going, and the memories died back into the shadows.
When I died, this woman was absolutely beside herself. She was going to bury me in the ground, Mother said, to be food for the worms. She did not deserve such a beautiful little boy as me.
Mother, though. Mother had stepped in. She had taken me home, and stitched me up, and given me all the love I could have hoped for, and we had lived happily ever after. Until now, at least.
Mother finished, and we sat in silence. I could tell that she was working at the problem, tossing it about in her head, digging deeper and deeper for some desperate solution. I waited.
Pieces of me were beginning to ooze off the side of the table when Mother suddenly jumped to her feet. “I’ll be right back,” she said, rushing into the living room and grabbing her coat from the closet by the front door. Then she moved to the back, where a shovel had been leaned against the wall in preparation for mulching the flowerbeds.
Mother scrambled out into the night, her eyes livid. I heard her grab the shovel as she went
The dark place in me was whispering madly to itself, but I could not catch the words. I closed the one eye and tried to concentrate on the idea of leopards. I played my favorite a
nnouncer’s voice in my head to pass the time. Scenes of leopards lying together, licking one another’s ears…
Mother returned many hours later, far past the time she usually would have collapsed across her bed. Every part of her was smudged with dirt. .
She set down the treasures she had dug up, underneath the table, where I could not see. A needle came out of her sewing bin. She set to work. I listened to her hum. The only pauses came when she reached into the bag to retrieve a new part. Her humming was more forceful than usual. “Hmm-m-m-HM, Hmm-m-m-HM!”
I whimpered, pain gnashing at me on all sides, and she whispered, “Hush, love. I’m going to fix you up, and you’ll be as good as new.” She reached down, still humming , and picked up a reddish, meaty organ. “A clean start, a new heart,” she sang.
The thing in the dark place stirred. It was sad, I sensed. Sad, and angry, clinging to the moment where the woman with the black curls had run out to me, lying broken in the street, her apron glowing in the light.
I love you, mom, I whispered.
SHE CAN SEE TOMORROW
BY MEL ODOM
“Have you ever seen this man before, Miss Smith?”
Even before Special Agent Thompson took the 8x10 photograph from inside his sleek briefcase, Emily Cooksey knew she had seen the man previously - eight days ago. “No.” She told the lie without inflection, without pause, just as she’d told the man her name was Mary Smith. She was good at lying and would be ashamed of it, if it weren’t so necessary in her life.
Thompson regarded her for a moment while he sat on the threadbare couch she’d gotten at a thrift store. Emily was proud of the couch. The material was dark and rich, a copper color that soothed her mind and didn’t make her thoughts busy.
She’d worked hard for the couch, shopped diligently, then got a friend to help her wheel it the two blocks to her apartment building on a handtruck. The elevator had been out that day and it had taken them nearly an hour to carry it up to her fourth-floor apartment.
Now the FBI agent, and she didn’t think he was that, not really, sat on the couch like it was dirty, like it was a step removed from the trash heap. The tailored black suit the man wore, the Italian tie and shoes, and the French shirt told her that the man liked things.
Emily liked things too. She just didn’t have the money to buy many things. So she made careful investments with the money she made at the seamstress shop only a mile away from her home. She didn’t have a driver’s license because people like Special Agent Thompson would be able to track her more easily.
He tapped the picture on the coffee table between them with a manicured forefinger and smiled warmly, but the coldness in his green eyes remained. Those eyes reminded Emily of snakes, or the glass eyes she’d seen in her grandfather’s taxidermist shop. Those eyes didn’t really have any life to them.
“Maybe you should look again.” His voice was neutral and carried no threat. He was careful about that. All of these agents were. They were very deceitful and they thought they were so much smarter than she was. They were never dangerous till they wanted to be.
Emily sat very primly on the edge of the easy chair she had purchased only last week. The chair didn’t match the couch, but it was comfortable. At the time she’d bought the couch, the thrift store had had a matching chair for sale. Unfortunately, she hadn’t had the money for both, and she’d needed a more comfortable place to sleep than the floor. She’d later purchased a child’s bed, but if the chair had still remained there, she probably would have bought the chair before the bed. If she had and her mother had found out, her mother would have badgered her about being nonsensical. Still, not being able to buy the matching chair had left her feeling so disconsolate that she hadn’t found a chair she’d come close to liking for months.
Dutifully, Emily leaned forward and looked at the picture with feigned interest. She was more aware of the way the way the coffee table cover hung slightly askew, thanks to Thompson’s aggressive finger, but at least the scars and the bad words someone had written in permanent marker remained covered. She hadn’t been able to clean those off.
The man in the picture was perhaps twenty years or more older than Special Agent Thompson. Emily had decided that the agent was only a handful of years older than her, which put him around thirty. The man in the picture had gray hair and a bulldog face, but his hair had been more gray and he’d looked fatigued the day Emily had finally spoken with him.
“No.” Emily shook her head and pulled at her skirt, making certain that it never rose above her knees. She wore tennis shoes and knee-high stockings, sensible clothing that her mother would have approved of.
“You see, that’s strange.” Thompson talked slowly, like he was speaking to a child or a backward person. “Special Agent McReady filed a report that he was going to meet with you.”
“He never did.” Emily met his gaze guilelessly and kept her heart rate under control. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like tea? It would be no problem at all.”
“No, Miss Smith, I wouldn’t like any tea.” Thompson scowled and leaned back so that his coat fell away from the big pistol holstered at his hip.
Emily sat there and wished she had something to do with her hands. But she didn’t, so she just clasped them on her lap. McReady hadn’t wanted any tea either. She did hope that this present situation didn’t go the way the one with McReady had.
“How long have you lived in Chicago, Miss Smith?”
“All my life.”
“Can you prove that?”
Emily couldn’t. She kept her face calm. There was a way out. There was always a way out. She had learned that. “Do I have to?”
“I would like very much for you to. I checked with the building super. You’ve only lived here for fourteen months.”
“Has it really been that long?” That surprised Emily. She hadn’t known she had stayed so long. Usually she didn’t stay in one place much more than six months. She had been more comfortable in Chicago than she had in San Francisco or Boston or Atlanta, though she had liked the weather in San Francisco a lot more. She’d stayed there too long as well.
“You moved in here a year ago, April, Miss Smith.”
“Chicago is a nice place to live. Except for the winters. The winters are very harsh.” Back home in Alabama, winters had been gentle things, a placeholder, really, between fall and spring.
Thompson frowned. “You have a bit of a Southern accent, Miss Smith.”
“I doubt that.”
“No, you do. I’ve been told I have a very good ear for such things, and you’ve covered yours up very well.”
“Maybe what you hear is a bit of an accent I picked up from the other young women I work with.”
“The other young women you work with are Chinese, Miss Smith. I know that because I checked with your employer, Mr. Grimaldi.”
“Ruth Batson isn’t Chinese. She’s from Atlanta, Georgia, I believe.”
Thompson nodded. “You’re right. I talked with her too. Do you know what she said?”
Emily waited, knowing it couldn’t be good. These government men were a lot like the Treasury men her grandpa had always cursed about when he was roaring drunk.
“Mrs. Batson said she thought you were from somewhere down south too.”
“Well, she is mistaken.”
Thompson looked around the small living room and at the collection of watercolor landscapes Emily had hung. None of the pictures were real, of course, because she couldn’t afford anything like that. She’d cut them from magazines and framed them after seeing a television show about framing.
He returned his gaze to her. “Do you have a high school yearbook, Miss
Smith?”
“No, I’m afraid I don’t.”
“That’s unusual. Most of the women I know have copies of their high school yearbooks.”
“I’m afraid I’ve had a bit of bad luck hanging onto things over the years.”
Thompson smiled. “I don’t think high
school was that far away for you, Miss Smith.”
Emily flushed because the man was deliberately flirting with her. She had never been comfortable with being treated like that.
“What about pictures?” Thompson seemed like he was eager to be pleased, that anything would satisfy whatever questions he had.
“Pictures?”
“Sure.” Thompson shrugged. “Pictures of you and your family. Of you when you were younger. I know people who either have shoeboxes of pictures or they’ve filled up Facebook accounts with them.”
“I’m afraid I don’t have any pictures either.”
“Facebook?”
“No. I don’t have a computer. They’re too expensive.”
“That’s a shame. You’re very photogenic.”
Emily flushed again.
Thompson shifted on the couch and leaned forward. “That’s how McReady found you, you know. Through pictures.”
McReady had told her that too, but he had caught up with her at the diner on the corner, by the apartment building. Once a week Emily splurged and bought a chicken-fried steak dinner there to reward herself after six days of backbreaking labor over a sewing machine. He had threatened to handcuff her then and there if she hadn’t come with him.
“I don’t know Mr. McReady.”
“I think you did, Miss Smith, and I think that you did something to him that made him step out in front of a produce delivery truck.”
In spite of her effort not to react, the memory of the man getting hit by the truck – THUD! – caused Emily to draw in her breath sharply and close her eyes. When she opened them again, Thompson was smiling.
“That truck killed Agent McReady stone dead.”
“I’m very sorry to hear that.”
“Agent McReady wasn’t a friend, but he was a competent agent. The agency I work for doesn’t like to lose its people.”
“That’s very commendable. In this economy, I don’t think many employers care about their employees.”