Cheer Up, Jimmy: 3 Melancholy Short Stories

by Dania Sonin

Jimmy made his way downstairs, quickly, quietly, pushing everything out of his mind. He’d burned the horse and only the horse, he told himself. She was supposed to be at school. She was supposed to come back and find her white gilded horse reduced to ash. She wasn’t supposed to be hiding in there. She wasn’t supposed to watch him and just let him do that without saying anything. And hadn’t she seen the fire spreading in the first place? He wondered if maybe she’d been asleep under the bed, something she’d been told not to do, of course, but little perfect princess always got her way. He wondered if maybe she thought he’d actually save her as she scratched and clawed and shouted so unladylike. He wondered if he could have even fooled anyone into thinking he would in such a situation. He grabbed his coat and was out the door without a second glance.

  He hid in the bushes as the fire engines showed up, screaming and blaring even though there never was any traffic on their lonely street. He watched them run in, shouting words, numbers and letters, positions and nick names no doubt. He wondered if they would find her right away, if maybe she would be alright. He told himself he didn’t care, that she deserved to be with her damned horse. But, at the very least, it would be nice to know if he’d killed two birds with one lighter.

  “They carried her out wrapped up in this big grey blanket, like it wasn’t hot enough in her room, you know,” Jimmy said. He was absent-mindedly chewing on the callous that had long since developed on his thumb. His palm was waxy smooth, one big scar, but here and there were divots as if the thumb hadn’t been enough to play with.

  “Did it bother you to see her like that, Jimmy?”

  He looked out the window and sighed impatiently, as if it were a question he’d been asked a million times before. “Why would it?”

  He saw her finally, wrapped in a heavy wool blanket, her head hanging limp against her shoulder. Her face was a mess of blisters and charred skin. She looked like a fire-roasted chicken. He could see her chest rising and falling slowly beneath the blanket, but it was erratic and shallow. They put her on a stretcher, flat on her back, and pulled off the blanket. Her arms were black, her hands bloody. He knew that if he looked, her door would be covered with deep bloody streaks. Her legs weren’t much better. Her skin flaked off here and there as they moved her, like the skin of a charred pepper, revealing the pink flesh beneath. Jimmy couldn’t take it. He fell to his knees and vomited until there was nothing left in him.

  When he stood again there was a man on her, breathing into her mouth, and pushing down rhythmically on her chest. One two, breathe. One two breathe. But before long it was clear that for all their effort the little girl was lost to the world. Jimmy watched as they pulled a crisp, white sheet over her blackened face.

  They hadn’t seen him yet and that was good. Safely hiding behind the English Garden that was their shrubbery, Jimmy sat, wondering what he would do next. There was no running from this, not like the other ones.

  The doctor checked his watch then put his pad down on the cheap metal table that separated him from his patient.

  “We only have a few minutes left today, Jimmy. So, I have one last question for you.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Are you sorry, Jimmy?”

  Jimmy looked at him for a moment then leaned forward, clasping his hands and rested them on the table. His eyes were glossy but his lips smiled. He looked his doctor in the eye and said:

  “What do you think?”

  They’d caught him on the highway, only a mile from his house, hands blistered and charred from the fire. In the back of the squad car he listened to the muffled dispatcher’s voice, sending police and ambulances to his home, where, he learned, his mother had fainted upon hearing the news. Fearing he was dead, the firefighters had scoured the blackened guts of the house for remains but had found only signs of arson.

  “They think you burnt the room up, you know, with your sister in it,” the police officer in the passenger’s seat had said to him, looking at him via the rearview mirror. “I think you ran away scared, is what I think. I dunno how a boy so young could burn up his sister. Doesn’t make a lick of sense, if you ask me.”

  Jimmy shifted uneasily in the back seat, secretly enjoying the cool of the metal cuffs against his blisters. He could smell burnt timber, smoldering plastic, a bevy of charcoal smells, all as they passed the now contained blaze that had been his home. He could see his father’s empty car parked beside the driveway. His father was discussing something with the fire chief and didn’t look up as the blue and white squad car rolled by.

  “You sure did a number on ‘at house,” the officer said from the passenger’s seat.

  “You said you thought I didn’t do it,” Jimmy replied, defensively, annoyed at this sudden change of heart.

  “I said you didn’t mean to burn your sister,” the officer corrected. “I never said it wasn’t you.”

  The other man sat at the metal desk, impatiently tapping his pen on the shiny edge, waiting for Jimmy to answer the question. Jimmy sat in his chair, arms folded over his chest, chin down and ponderous.

  “They deserved it more than she did, man, I have to admit,” Jimmy said finally. The metallic tapping stopped and was replaced by the dry scratching of pen on paper.

  “And was it worth it?”

  It was night before his parents arrived at the station. His mother was puffy-eyed and moved in the dreamy way of a sleepwalker, being guided by invisible sights and sounds. His father walked beside her, arm placed firmly and resolutely around her waist, guiding her along, as if she might flee or fall at any moment. He also whispered into her ear, kissing her cheek between her tearless sobs and hiccups. Part of Jimmy smiled.

  They were in the room for less than ten minutes before Jimmy was on the floor and bleeding and his father was nursing his swelling fist. The attending officers reluctantly escorted the man away from his fifteen year old son, leaving the dreamy mother to deal with him. But she would say nothing, would not even look at him, only sobbed that dry sob, and hiccupped. Her eyes were bloodshot, red beacons on her pale face. Jimmy too was pale, save for the red river flowing from his nose. Together they almost looked festive. The blood dripped slowly onto the cold metal table between them. She watched it as he had watched his sister: horrified, mystified, but undeniably pleased.

  “I’m not a pyro,” Jimmy said, as he’d been saying for the last twenty years. “I chose to do what I did, and I don’t regret it not even for a second. Don’t think I do.”

  “So, you’d do it again?”

  Jimmy’s thumb flicked open an invisible lighter. Thick scar tissue shone with nervous sweat as he flicked the imaginary lighter on and off. He thought of his sister, his mother, his father, his brother, the house he’d grown up in, the white horse, the white-hot doorknob, the police laughing at his cowardice, his mother cursing him at the trial, the lighter they’d found in the bushes where he’d hid and watched them try inconsequentially to resuscitate his little sister who’d never done anything to anybody, who’d only usurped his place as youngest child as an accident of birth, who made him Valentine’s Day cards and offered him gifts of origami cranes. He thought of that white horse, how it was as white and as pure as she was, beautiful as she was, everything that she was, and he wondered if maybe he had meant to do it, if maybe all the lies he’d been telling all these years were true.

  “Jimmy?”

  “Honestly,” he said after a pause, and, for the first time in years, he thought he meant it, “I would.”

  Cold Bones

  There were cold bones in the earth, he knew exactly where, cold bones that were calling to him, urging him to visit. He would picture them, the chattering teeth of the skulls trying to persuade him in their smug, chirpy tone, telling him that he just had to visit, had to prove that he cared. But did he care? He wasn’t sure. The graves were dug methodically, six feet deep, each one of them, and that was respectful, he’d thought. Respect and care are different, though.

  At night he would dream
about them, always the same dream: hollow skulls with their strangely jointed jaws, clicking as they questioned him and he in the cold dirt, immobile, buried up to his head, insects beginning to investigate his lips and nostrils. And the skeletons would ask their questions, the ones he couldn’t answer:

  “Why did you make us?”

  “Why did you leave us?”

  “What did we do wrong?”

  The problem with living out in the boondocks was that you could always smell the dirt. It was rank and wet, full of life and movement and all the shit a forest’s worth of animals could produce in a day. The smell made him sick on those mornings, after those dreams of being buried alive, and then there’d be a click in his brain and he’d have to take a get out. He would drive for miles a few miles vowing to find somewhere new, but he could never get much past that spot where he liked to sit and shoot squirrels, and it smelled like dirt there too. It was just off the road and under a nice big shady pine whose roots were beginning to show. There he could set up his BB gun and sit nice and quiet in the cool shade, shielded by the needles and the smell of pine instead of dirt. It was soothing sitting there, or had been, but now it smelled like death, stank to high holy hell, and he knew exactly why. Those roots were pushing up death itself.

  There were four rough rectangles of dark-coloured earth barely covered by the thick layer of yellowed pine needles that had consumed the rest of the forest floor. They’d been dug and filled long enough ago that the bodies inside had been picked clean by maggots and other crawly things, like the ones in his dreams, but he liked to keep them nice and clean nonetheless. He’d kick the pine needles off, sometimes even bending down to brush them off, as much as he hated the feeling of the gritty earth between his fingers and under his nails. It seemed like once it got you, you belonged to it forever. He’d clean his nails until they bled trying to get the blackness out, to feel clean. Mostly though, he sat there, staring at his work, wondering how those cold, dirty bones felt down there, all alone but at the same time part of their own group of unfortunate souls. He envied them in a way, a way that made him angry. He could remember the first time he’d felt that way, when the first grave had first been filled, a still warm, lifeless corpse at the bottom, and the air all around him was cold and damp with that soggy earthen smell. It was a cold but humid night, foggy and moonless, and the humidity stuck to him like cool sweat.

  “I’ll bet you think you’re real smug down there,” he’d said to newly churned dirt. “I’ll bet you think you did a real good job’a foolin’ me. I’ll bet you think I’ll be good’n lonely now, dontcha.” The silence compounded by the murky darkness only made him angrier. “You’ll see, you son of a bitch. Soon you‘ll be nothin‘ but cold bones.” His voice was as dark and gritty as the dirt he shovelled onto the already well-packed heap. That night he’d dreamed that he’d heard those clacking teeth, only that first time they had no question, no accusation. The first time, they only laughed.