The Girlfriend Who Wasn't from Delaware
Page 6
Once the fridge
no way it’s a fridge, not now, no way, not no more
started up last night after the light show, I left my place and ran up the fire stairs. I slowed a bit when I was in the hall because moving so fast, the doors blurring by reminded me of the light show, made me scared.
I stopped at 8203. The ? door. The chugga-pounding of the screwy fridge was clear as day.
It’s coming from here.
I pounded on it with both fists, screaming, “You bastard! Get that damn fridge fixed, ya hear me? Whatever you’re doin’ in there’s gotta stop, some of us gotta sleep! I gotta sleep, you bastard!”
This close to it, I could feel the deep whummwhumm of the thing in my chest. I kept pounding.
“Open up! Open up!”
And then, like a switch being thrown, the noise stopped.
I paused my assault on the door. A light went on, lighting the peep hole. I heard the faintest couple of creaks—footsteps!
I pounded again. “Open up! Open up and talk to me!”
But nobody answered. I ran a ways down the hallway and hid out of sight of the peephole, thinking maybe I can trick him into coming out, but he never did.
Off in the distance, I thought I heard the elevator doors open. Thinking someone might’ve called the cops, I hustle back downstairs to my room, using the stairs again.
The whole time I was up there, nobody came out to see the madman pounding at the door…Rich had an excuse. But what about the other neighbors?
“Mr. Ray. Maybe you need to take a sick day?”
This kid, with glasses, is nervous. A sick day. But I don’t feel sick. Hell, ever since the light show, I haven’t heard a peep outta my barbell. Maybe it was gone for good.
But…it could come back again.
Just like the noises…and the light show…they could all come back at any time…and there was nothing I could do about it.
“Mr. Ray!” It’s our tallest Asian girl. Maybe Winnie’s second-in-command. “Go home and take a sick day!”
“I quit,” I say, but it’s so dry and soft, like a rustle of a paper, not a statement.
Everybody leans in.
“What’s that, Mr. Ray?” Tall Asian asks, polite, because hey, I’m sick. Real sick, like you don’t know, kid. Like I hope you never know.
“I’ll go,” I say.
A couple horns blare at me while I’m driving home, but I don’t think I care if I get in a wreck anymore.
I fall into bed, where I discover my puffy shirt’s been on inside out this whole time, and that when I’m in my bedroom, I can’t stop shaking.
I go out to my couch to flip on the TV. I sit and let the nice sitcom people flash by, but they can’t scrub that bad feeling from my brain. Unease and nausea and dread, all a grimy film around me.
Halfway through the show I get up and take my sis’s noise machine out of the oven, out of the pillowcase. I set it by me, close as the cord will allow, and plug it in, turn it on. I used to think of it as my unfaithful friend. A betrayer.
But now I realize it’s my canary in the coal mine.
Hours pass. I move only my thumb on the remote to tell Netflix yeah, I’m still watchin’. Even though I ain’t.
It’s quarter to midnight when the box goes out.
I know what I have to do.
I take the elevator upstairs. I go to the room, grinding and thudding already started behind the scabby door.
I start beating the door like a British nanny. “HEY, JACKASS! OPEN UP! I KNOW YOU’RE IN THERE!” I pound and keep pounding. Just like before, none of the other hall doors open.
But unlike before, the whummwhumm gets louder and louder. I almost take a step back.
Then the door’s torn open.
Behind the dark shape that just opened the door, I see Darryl watching serenely from his sofa. His head lolls, relaxed. Lamplight reveals lipstick on his collar. Next to him lies a frizzy blonde wig, the same color blonde as The Girlfriend’s. And next to that, a wrinkled, eyeless mask of her face.
“Yes?!” said The Girlfriend’s voice, but it’s coming out of this dark shape in front of me, a shape poured through the apartment—and rows and rows of black eyes glittering with what I take to be rage. The familiar takka-takka seems to be coming from gills—not gills?—hard tissue like fingernails flicking up and down in her neck, chattering there like gills…or teeth…except they ain’t teeth, no, ’cuz I’m facing the teeth right now, a row of them, onyx black.
So the fridge ain’t broke.
“I…I-uh…” I try glancing into The Girlfriend’s face, but when I do my crotch grows warm. My body tells me it’s the thing to do, since I can’t make heads or tails of her face. The back of the inside of my skull itches.
“Is it about the damn fridge?” she says. The fingernail gill-gears in her neck whirr like the blades of a mower, a chitinous growl. The awful whummwhumm.
“Listen, prit—you—what’s your name?”
I keep trembling.
“It’s Ray,” says my ex-friend, calm on the sofa, hair mussed from
Let’s steer our thoughts away from any particulars, shall we?
whatever they’d been up to before I interrupted.
“Ray! Listen!” barks The Girlfriend. “The fridge is fine. And even if it wasn’t, it would not be any of your business. Just like how this. Isn’t. Any. Of. Your…”
The Girlfriend’s gleaming hand/claw/leg rolls in a circle in the air, inviting me to finish the sentence.
“Business!” It comes out in the choked voice of my asthma, now resurfacing after a fifteen-year absence.
A strange gurgle. “Yes,” says the Girlfriend. I still can’t look directly at her. Which makes it easier to notice the blue stripes painted on her head in a sidewindy pattern that reminds me of the garish carpet in the Las Vegas airport. I been there once. For a conference. A long time ago.
(Did she paint ’em on herself?)
(Did HE paint ’em on her?)
The Girlfriend speaks again. “Do you still feel like hassling my Darryl over the state of his machinery?”
I shake my head.
“Do you think you will ever feel such an urge again?”
I shake my head.
All the eyes narrow and the lips around the teeth stretch into a grin.
“Delightful! Well, I’m sure you have things to get back to. Have a good evening, Ray.”
The Girlfriend shuts the door in my face.
| | |
A hundred fingernail-moon-shaped legs softly felted over the rug, curled to rest against Darryl. The Girlfriend wrapped her bottom pair of arms around him. With the other pair, she finger-combed her wig out and then laid it out over the sofa back.
He admired her in the lamplight. But by now he could read some of her expressions. “What’s wrong, babe?”
“Poor Ray. He made…water…in his pants.” The ticking gills in her neck ceased movement, and a sigh escaped out her neck. “I shouldn’t have snapped at him.”
“Oh, babe, I’m sorry.” Darryl tucked her head against his neck. Her legs pricked his body gently, repositioning themselves closer.
“He’s a nice man,” she said. “But so lonely! No adventures. I could have shown him so much.”
“I know, babe. But not everybody’s ready for you. Remember when you first showed me?”
“Yes…”
“And now look at us!”
Her neck started back up slowly, takka…takka. “Yes…maybe he will be the same. We can all be friends!” Her body, alive in excitement, began swelling the air with sound again. “Oh, Darryl, I’m so lucky I found you!”
The floor beneath the sofa throbbed beneath them.
“Right back at you, babe.” He grinned a crooked grin and pulled her close. “Now…where were we?”
Special Thanks…
…to PopDrinks for letting me be their writer-
in-residence.
…to Russ Sharek, for the toki pona translation.
Also by Danielle Williams
WONDER Out Where the Sun Always Shines
HORROR The Bureaucrat
The Girlfriend Who Wasn't from Delaware
Growing Shadows in the Desert
Side Effects May Vary
What the Cat Brought Back
HUMOR Magic Fashion Frenchies #1: Love Potion Commotion!
A Gingersnap Cat Christmas
The Purrfect Christmas
FORTHCOMING Steel City, Veiled Kingdom
The Horror of Hriana
Magic Fashion Frenchies #2: Salute a Pooch!
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About the Author
Danielle Williams believes her outrageous imagination can be attributed to a healthy childhood diet of computer games, Bruce Coville books, Twilight Zone reruns, and Martin H. Greenberg horror anthologies.
She graduated from Brigham Young University in the 2000’s and currently resides in the Wild West with her patient husband and threenager cat.
Hints of fantasy and science fiction always sneak into whatever she’s writing.
For more info about Danielle and her upcoming ebooks, visit PixelvaniaPublishing.com.