by Jeff Strand
That single tooth in its lower jaw, barbed and curved, that awful knowing smile from the puckered sphincter of its mouth as it comes up for air, slowly retracting its head to stare at me, neck bent round the wrong way, slime coating its face, it made that hideous ring-mouth into an imitation of a smile.
It’s a boy.
Then it plunged the beak into her stomach, slicing through skin, and fat, and muscle, splaying her open as that cold grey slime oozed down her, mixing and pooling with her blood and that ringing, that ringing in my ears isn’t ringing it’s her screaming, screaming for the baby, screaming no, screaming my name, cursing me, damning me, cursing the thing, even as it lowered its face to her flayed abdomen and forced its head inside.
Its back lurched up once, twice, as if taking great gulping swallows, and then it came, orgasmic shudders rippling through its spine as it straightened and stood from the bed, staring at me, one hand cupping its swollen belly. It caressed my cheek, pushed a finger inside my mouth, kept pressing until my knees buckled and it lowered me onto the bed beside my wife, tears streaming from her eyes, her organs warm and wet against my stomach. I reached out to her, stupidly, tried to cradle her in my arms.
The thing stood above us and arched its back, convulsing, straining, eyes swelling until the veins that laced them began to burst and bloody tears flowed. It straddled her, crouching lower until its vagina was positioned above my wife’s open torso and it pushed, pushed until it came … until … you came. A membranous sac, sliding out of its dilated opening and landing inside my wife. I saw through the pale pink membrane your face, calm and serene, sleeping.
Sleeping.
I woke to her screams, my wife clutching my arm, saying “It’s time! Holy shit it’s time, they were wrong! My water broke! Do you feel it?”
I climbed from the bed, soaked, but not in her blood, but amniotic fluid. Aside from that, the sheets were clean in a way my memory could never be.
And we drove to the hospital, and I strode through the doors like a champion, pushing her wheelchair through the throng gathered there, staring down the confused faces of the nurses and doctors, telling them it was time.
They checked signs. They double-checked charts. They made me sign waivers promising not to sue over all of this stillbirth confusion, these things happen sometimes, we will of course be paying you for your pain and suffering in exchange for—
I told them to shut the fuck up and do their job. We could discuss it later. There would be a later. There would be a rest of our lives. That’s all that mattered. You are all that mattered. Our son. My son. Mine.
I’m telling you all of this now before you understand it, because I never want you to hear it again. I never want you to know about any of this. It’s gone. It’s gone and it won’t come back. It always keeps its promises. You’re in my arms, with your perfect eyes, your ruddy cheeks, and I love you. More than anything. More than everything. I’m laughing at your gurgles, your tiny nose twitching, your perfect little ruby lips when they stretch into that smile, that same kind of goofy smile your mother gets. Your happy little gummy mouth that looks perfect. Perfect and normal except for that one thing that confused the doctors.
That single, smooth tiny tooth breaking through your lower gums. Doctors say this isn’t unusual, they call them natal teeth. I know better. You yawn wide, showing me that tiny ivory blade, and you stare at me placidly, and I can only think, worth the having.
AWAKENING
BY JEFF STRAND
_____
When I discovered that I was the Downtown Dixonville Dismemberer, I took that shit seriously. It was something I’d suspected for a couple of weeks. The blackout periods. The blood stains on my jeans. The dismembered body in my garage. It wasn’t until I found a live body in my shed, not yet fully dismembered, that I had to confront the truth.
“Who did this to you?” I asked the man with no legs.
“You did, you psycho son of a bitch!” he wailed.
I looked at the hacksaw in my hand. I tried to convince myself that the scraps of flesh dangling from the blade did not belong to this man’s leg. They could’ve come from somebody else’s leg. Maybe they weren’t even from a leg; it’s not like I was a forensics specialist.
I’m not saying that it wasn’t pretty damning evidence that I was holding a bloody hacksaw over a guy with recently sawn-off legs. It was. You’d have to be a fool to think otherwise. But, in the moment, I did try to brainstorm other possibilities.
Maybe I’d saved the legless guy. I could’ve stumbled upon a psycho killer, kicked his ass, dragged him to another room, taken his hacksaw with me to ensure that he wouldn’t have it handy if he regained consciousness, and was now standing over the victim to assure him that everything was going to be fine.
“Am I a hero?” I asked.
“No!” the legless guy screamed. “You’re a monster!”
“I’m not calling you a liar,” I said, “but clearly you’ve had a traumatic experience, and maybe you’re not remembering things accurately. Hell, it’s entirely possible that you’ve been hallucinating. I think I’d be hallucinating if I had that much gushing blood. Are you sure I’m the one who did this?”
“Yeah, I’m sure!”
“All right, I guess you’d have no reason to lie.”
So, yes, I was the Downtown Dixonville Dismemberer. What an awkward name. Hard to say out loud. When I was a child, dreaming of one day becoming a serial killer, I’d always thought that I’d end up with a really cool nickname. Slashy Jim or something.
“What are you going to do to me?” the man asked.
That was a good question. Lots of possibilities. I could, for example, just leave. The man would presumably bleed out, and I could go on pretending that there was some alternate explanation for what had happened. If I let him die, he wouldn’t talk to the police, unless the police propped him up and jiggled his head around and spoke for him in a high-pitched funny voice, which was unlikely.
Or I could saw off his arms. That would put me on low moral ground, obviously, but I never liked letting a job go unfinished. Like if a neighbor was mowing his lawn, and he stopped halfway through because it started to rain, I’d look through the window and think, “Dude! Finish your damn lawn!” I wouldn’t actually mow his the second half of his lawn for him, because mowing lawns sucks, especially in this heat.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked the man.
“Let me go!”
“But that’s kind of impractical, don’t you think? Where are you going to go?”
“Just stop hurting me!”
“I’ve already stopped. What you’re asking is for me not to resume hurting you. I understand that you’re under a lot of trauma, but communication skills are important.”
“Please, give me a phone!”
“If I give you a phone and let you call for help, they’ll be able to trace it back to me. That wouldn’t be very smart of me, now would it? It’s kind of disrespectful that you would suggest that I’d do something so stupid. Come on, man, I’m standing over you with a hacksaw; why would you insult me?”
“I’m sorry …”
“I don’t think you mean it.”
The man began to weep. “I’m really sorry.”
Now I felt bad, because it seemed like this conversation was turning into something where I was taunting a victim, but I swear I wasn’t. Everything I was saying was sincere. I didn’t have a wicked grin or anything. Nothing would’ve made me happier than if we could work this out in a civilized manner.
“You’re bleeding pretty bad,” I told him, even though I was sure he already knew.
He didn’t answer.
“Do you know how to make a tourniquet?”
He still didn’t answer.
“Are you dead?”
“No.”
“You were acting kind of dead. Please respond to my questions to avoid further confusion. You do not want to get buried alive. Goodness, no. It’s never happened to me, bu
t you don’t need first-hand experience to know that it’s not pleasant. Now what were we talking about before I thought you were dead?”
“Tourniquet.”
“That’s right. Do you want one?”
The man shrugged.
“I’m going to have to look up how to make one online. Do you think you’ll live long enough? That pool of blood underneath you is pretty big.” I resisted the desire to splash my shoes around in it. That would be undignified.
The man closed his eyes.
That rude piece of crap. Well, we’d see if having me saw off one of his arms was motivation for him to pay attention to the conversation.
It wasn’t.
I checked to see if he was breathing. No breath. I checked his heartbeat. No heartbeat. I checked his pulse. No pulse. This lack of breath, heartbeat, and pulse, combined with the fact that several pints of his blood were no longer in his body, was a pretty clear indicator that he’d passed away.
To cut off the other arm of a man who was already dead was an extremely deranged thing to do. You couldn’t exactly stand in front of a jury and have them nod their heads and say, “Yeah, that’s probably what I would have done in similar circumstances.”
I really, really wanted to cut off that arm. I’d missed out on the legs because of the blackout period, so I was feeling kind of cheated. Getting to saw off his last remaining arm would go a long way toward resolving that feeling.
Only a sick person would do that.
But in contemporary slang, “sick” meant “cool,” and I wanted to be cool. So I’d do it. I’d saw off his arm.
I sawed off his arm.
It was kind of disappointing. Like when you have two slices of chocolate cake, and you eat the first one, and it’s sooooo delicious, and then you think about how great the second piece is going to be, but then you’re full after the first couple of bites, and you wish you’d saved it for later.
Then I cut off his head. Also disappointing. Not as disappointing as the second arm, but not nearly as fulfilling as I would have hoped.
I thought about cutting his head into several pieces, but, no, that would be going too far. I settled for just cutting off his ears. He had very soft earlobes.
I realized that somebody was watching me.
I turned around and glanced at the police officer. His arms were crossed over his chest and he looked quite stern.
“I, uh, didn’t know anybody was there,” I said.
“Obviously.”
“Am I under arrest?”
“I think you know the answer to that.”
“How long have you been watching?”
“Long enough.”
“But how long?”
“That is none of your business.”
“You would’ve had to open a door to come in here, and while I was cutting off his ears, I wasn’t absorbed enough in my work not to hear a door open. It would’ve had to happen while I was sawing off his head. And I started to lose interest while I was doing it, so it would’ve had to happen when I’d just started sawing off his head. You just stood there and watched me saw it off!”
“So?”
“So, why didn’t you stop me?”
“That, also, is none of your business.”
“I think you were getting some kind of deviant pleasure out of it. No officer of the law would stand there and just watch a decapitation if he wasn’t enthralled by the sight. You disgust me, sir.”
“Oh, is that how it is? A man who saws off the head of an innocent victim can judge the spectator? Maybe I feared for my life.”
“You’ve got a gun. I’ve only got a hacksaw.”
“You could also have a gun. I haven’t searched you.”
“All the more reason to diffuse the situation instead of watching it. If I’d seen you out of the corner of my eye, I could have taken out the gun—which I don’t have—and shot you.”
The police officer nodded. “Busted. I was watching because it made me tingle.”
“So now what do we do?”
“I don’t know. Suicide pact?”
I shrugged. “Yeah, all right.”
I let him go first. He blew his brains out, but instead of taking the gun and doing the same, I kicked it aside. Yes, it was a dick move. But by then I’d accepted that I was the kind of person who would back out of suicide pacts.
I cut up the police officer’s body. It felt great.
I was invulnerable.
I was God.
It turned out, I was not invulnerable and/or God. My next victim had a Tazer and two brothers who were unhappy with me for trying to kidnap her. I’m in their garage now. Ironic.
Anyway, I suppose these are the last words of the Downtown Dixonville Dismemberer, which they were kind enough to let me write down in my own blood. (Excuse the typos.) I probably won’t talk to you soon, so enjoy the rest of your evening.
READINGS OFF THE CHARTS
BY ADAM CESARE
_____
Three dates into our relationship and it’s hard to tell if she likes me for me. Or because I own a car and a GoPro.
We pull up to the agreed upon meeting place—a stretch of road where a busted streetlight provides the most cover for the car—and park.
Sitting in the passenger’s side, Trish looks great in the glow of her phone’s screen. Unlike a lot of girls, her profile picture doesn’t do her justice.
She looks so good that I don’t give a shit why she likes me.
Then I look at the guy approaching my car. He’s a heavyset dude with a chinstrap. I think maybe this guy, Bobby, is her boyfriend and they are using me for my car and equipment.
It’s the same thought I’ve been having all day.
Last night Trish told me that she wanted me to come along on one of her hunting expeditions, which sounded cute, harmless. And it was only this morning that she let spill we would be meeting up with her “investigative partner” when we got to Kings Park.
“Bobby doesn’t need a ride from you, though. He lives within walking distance of the site,” I remember her adding, as if anticipating what I’d been thinking.
Kings is an abandoned insane asylum that the government has been in the process of dismantling for over a decade. I’ve driven by it hundreds of times growing up, but I don’t live on this part of the Island so I never snuck in as a kid.
Around six o’clock I packed up my camera and a flashlight, then we stop by Trish’s parent’s house so she can pick up her equipment. While she was doing that I was parked in her neighbor’s driveway.
I’m not quite ready to meet her parents.
“Good to meet you, dude,” Bobby says, holding his hand out and then giving me one of those alpha-guy shakes. I don’t get the impression that he’s trying to be protective of Trish, just that this is the way he shakes hands with every “dude” he meets.
He crushes my hand. He’s probably been carrying his extra weight since high school and this is the way he thinks the cool kids greet each other, all these years later.
He’s wearing black cargo shorts and a black t-shirt, with a black and white bandana pressed across his forehead. All those black clothes would be great for stealth, but his exposed shins are so pale that they’re practically phosphorescent.
Even in the low light of the abandoned stretch of service road, I can see that his bandana is mottled with sweat. The accumulated crust makes me think that it’s a permanent fixture on his head. To make myself feel better in the throb left by the handshake, I imagine his head rag is hiding early onset baldness. He’s maybe a year or two older than me, thirty, I’d guess.
“Has Trish explained what we plan on doing tonight?” he asks, crossing his arms, his tone immediately becoming faux-professional.
It’s going to be really hard to maintain my composure if this guy starts lecturing me about spirits and orbs.
“Trespass on government property?” I ask, smiling back.
His laugh is polite, more acknowledging that I made a
joke than telling me he finds it funny.
“Well, that too, but what we’re doing,” he starts.
Trish interrupts Bobby, tapping on the trunk of my car with one of her many rings. She’s indicating that she needs to get her duffle bag. I take the dongle out of my pocket and hold the button to pop the trunk.
“Trish tells me you have no experience,” Bobby begins again, “So let me break it down, because I can already tell that you’re skeptical.”
I start to make an excuse. I want to say something to reassure him that I’m not going to be a sarcastic asshole the entire night, but the only thing stopping me from engaging in that sarcasm is that I want to get back in Trish’s pants. I could give less of a shit about their “investigation.”
I nod for him to continue and he does.
“You know, on those reality shows they call it ghost hunting. But that’s gives the wrong impression to the public about what it is we do. We hold ourselves to rigorous scientific standards. We don’t hunt, we perform experiments, set up controls, and then document.”
“With GoPros.”
“Yes. The better the camera, the higher the clarity of the recording and the more likely we can be to get confirmation of an observable phenomena. Likewise, the more cameras we have fixed on one area, the better chance we have of catching the phenomena from multiple perspectives.”
I have to admit, I’m taken aback by how well Bobby speaks. I was expecting him to be barely able to string a sentence together. It didn’t make his subject any less bullshit, but his semi-rehearsed lecture does make him seem more legitimate.
I decide I like Bobby.
As long as he and Trish don’t bonk me on the head and take off into the sunset with my car.
Trish crosses to the front of the car, unzips her duffle bag, and begins to take inventory.
“EMFs, two, spectrometers, remote and handheld, audio recorders,” she says as she peers into the bag. I hear metal and plastic clanging around and I hope whatever she’s stirring up inside that bag doesn’t leave a dent on my hood, there seems to be a lot of it.