Apex Magazine - January 2017

by Apex Publications

  And then he turns to her, to Patsy, and he’s walking over to them with his mouth compressed into an anxious line, and Maria wonders why she couldn’t just leave well enough alone.

  Hi, ladies, he says. He glances over Maria, still dripping from her not quite finished carwash, before he turns to Patsy, scrawny and wide-eyed in her wheelchair, and Maria’s heart starts to pound, her fists clench.

  Are you feeling okay? he says to Patsy. You look pale.

  Patsy, bless her heart, recovers quickly from the shock of being addressed by the creep she was just whispering about. I don’t feel any worse than I usually do, Shaun, but I appreciate your concern.

  I know you’ve both heard things about me, he says.

  Maria sees her own cold trepidation mirrored in Patsy’s round face. Her wheelchair-bound neighbor’s thick glasses, framed by graying curls, magnify her pop-eyed shock.

  I’m sure everybody heard me screaming the other night. I don’t even know what I was saying. He hangs his head. I know Mom and Dad had to tell all of you why. I didn’t leave them a choice. And that’s no one’s fault but mine. Everything that’s happened to me is all my fault. All of it.

  The pain on his face is so frank that Patsy has gone misty-eyed. Maria feels that urge, too, gathering behind her own eyes, but it doesn’t gain momentum, because something in her doesn’t believe in what she’s seeing, as if it’s staged, a movie trick, as if she’s staring at the most perfect rubber mask ever molded.

  I know I frightened everyone, he goes on. And I know I caused my mom and dad a lot of pain and confusion and worry. I have to make it up to them. And I want to make it up to all of you.

  How are your mom and dad, Shaun? Maria doesn’t think she kept the suspicion completely out of her voice.

  Oh, man, he says. They’re so unhappy right now. Unhappy as they can be.

  The way he looks at her, when he says it.

  I know dad helps you around the house sometimes, he says. Maybe I can do that for you. Help out some.

  The thought makes her skin crawl. She’s shaking her head before she even comes up with words to blurt out. I can always lean on my ex if I have to, she says, with what she hopes is a jaunty smirk. He doesn’t know jack about squat, but he can afford electricians and plumbers. And the courts made sure he has to pay for them. Don’t you worry about me.

  But he’s already turned to Patsy. Same offer stands for you, he says. My mom’s told me about how much trouble it is for you, keeping things up inside your house. I know I can help. I want to help. His voice grows even more urgent. I’ve been so selfish. Putting my needs above all others. That needs to stop. I want to do something that I know is worthwhile. Give to a good person.

  Oh, Shaun, poor Patsy stammers, that’s, that’s so sweet…

  He keeps speaking to Patsy, even though he’s looking at Maria sidelong. Mom told me what she said to you. About talking to myself all night. In different voices. How they could hear me through the floor. About the fight I had with Dad. How they locked themselves in the bedroom to keep me out. I know. Yes, it’s all true.

  This is exactly what Patsy had been telling Maria about when Shaun walked up. The things she’d heard from Francene.

  But I’m done with that. I’m done with the DTs. Too much has happened to me these past few weeks, and I’ve made a lot of mistakes, and I can’t take any of them back. But I want to make good now. I want to show everyone that I can.

  Maria has backed away a little. You don’t need to try so hard, she says. Just be the person you want to be. And quit being bad to yourself.

  He ignores her, kneels beside Patsy. Come on, Patsy, please. There’s got to be errands I can help you with. Chores?

  The sheer force of his need bends her will. She nods, flashes a nervous smile. Sure. Sure. Tomorrow. Let me think about it.

  And he takes her hand. Thank you. Kisses her fingertips. Then stands, and grins radiantly at both of them, a smile so heart-breakingly genuine that Maria feels ashamed for a moment that her hackles were ever raised.

  And then he turns to his house, and goes inside, without knocking—the door isn’t locked.

  Immediately she’s at Patsy’s side. I don’t think you should do it. Don’t let him in your house. It’s not…he might be looking to steal something. For money. For drugs. It’s what happens.

  She fears something worse, but she can’t imagine or articulate what.

  I want to help him, Patsy says.

  No, no, you don’t have to do that.

  It’ll be fine, she says. I feel so bad for him.

  Well, If you notice anything funny, you call.

  A shy smile. I will. Don’t you worry.

  third square

  Lance crouches behind the peeling picket fence that stretches from the side of his parents’ house like a molting wing, and peers between the slats, watches the woman in the wheelchair roll back home, watches Maria finish up her chore, plucks idly at the crotch of his jeans.

  He doesn’t know which of the two women he hates more, the freakish one that gives him the willies with her cheerful, slurring speech and owl eyes and spindly frame slumping all the wrong ways, or the sad sexpot bitch who thinks she’s too good to give him what he wants.

  That latter hate has been with him a long time, planted in puberty, growing poison vines. A tower of athletic-numbered-and-school-lettered muscle in high school, he never had trouble reeling in pussy at the rich-kid parties despite his own humbler origins—and he couldn’t count how many times, when he’d had some dumb bitch squealing beneath him while he hammered her with his hips hard enough to leave bruises, he’d shut his eyes as he spurted and groaned and pictured his neighbor across the street in all her latté-skinned glory.

  As for the former, he’d only ever imagined choking her to death.

  In truth, his loathing for either woman means nothing special, given his quick slide into obscurity after squeaking through graduation, his father who still calls him a lazy cocksucker, his father’s cheapskate friend who owns the oil-change shop where he works but doesn’t pay him enough to let him move out, the friend’s microskirt-wearing slut of a daughter—his withered, leathery heart holds plenty of hate to spare for all of them, and most everyone else besides.

  When Maria finally goes inside, Lance stands up, adjusts his jeans, and notices with an angry blush that the creepy kid from two doors down is staring right at him. The gall of that boy, prissy Shaun, offspring of perfect Clive and Francene, standing beneath a tree, not averting his gaze at all. And fucking grinning.

  Lance meets him stare for stare, getting angrier by the second. What the fuck are you looking at?

  The little prick grins and shrugs. Actually grins and shrugs.

  You want me to come over there? Want me to beat your junkie ass?

  No, that’s okay, he says. As if this is fucking funny. But he trucks toward his house like the plucked chicken he is.

  Lance thinks about shouting after him, but he knows that little prick has been acting all bugnuts, he knows that family has guns, and his entire life has been about walking the edge of discretion, only hurting others when he knows there will be no repercussions.

  That little prick had been a recipient of some of that hurt, once upon a time. You’d think he would remember how it felt, surrounded and petrified in the little park down the hill, blubbering on the ground while Lance’s friends circled him and laughed, while Lance himself pretended he was going to shove the pipe wrench in his grip handle first up Shaun’s prissy little asshole. He had no intention of doing so, but the fact that the little faggot believed it and was terrified enough to piss himself, and too humiliated afterward to ever tell—that was what mattered.

  You’d think he’d remember that, and know who not to fuck with.

  Recalling the scene brings Lance to a quick boil, but not because of his crybaby neighbor’s defiance of the pecking order. Lance remembers how that confrontation ended, with perfect daddy Clive, who seemed so much bigger then, dr
iving his Pontiac right over the cement parking block and onto the playground grass, stepping out with a tire iron gripped in one hand as all the big kids scattered. Lance hating little Shaunie even more as he ran, not because his wuss ass had to be rescued by his dad but because he knew his own dad would never do anything like that for him.

  Think of the devil. Inside the house, Lance’s dad starts shouting, and he freezes, and fucking hates himself for doing it. His dad’s just screaming at his mom again. Nothing for him to care about.

  Lance saunters all supercool back to the garage and resumes the task he had planned to start when Maria popped out her front door with all that skin showing. He has his Cutlass Supreme’s front tires up on ramps, the oil filter wrench and the oil tray and the new filter already in easy reach. He lies down on his back on the mechanic’s creeper he swiped from his employer and glides under the engine.

  This chore is child’s play, and as he clamps on the wrench, his mind wanders, because the smirk on that little prick’s face still pisses him off. His rage is like a hydra made from rattlesnakes; it wants to sink all its fangs into its target, any target, and never let go.

  He mutters under his breath as he awkwardly twists the wrench. I know what would wipe that smile off your face, you little prick. He twists. That crazy bitch niece of yours showed up at Mickey’s party stoned out of her mind. He twists. She gave every motherfucker head that was there. He twists, harder. The filter’s not coming off. I had my turn in line, little prick. I had my turn. What do you think of that, prick? What do you think?

  But then his stomach is in knots, because the fact is he’d been so drunk he barely remembers what happened that night, only Denise’s eyes staring up at him, bloodshot to the point of pink. And the memory makes him sick—

  The filter tears apart, spraying oil all over him. Fuck!

  It takes him a full second to realize that in his distracted state of mind he was turning the wrench the wrong way, and then he cusses that much louder.

  And that’s when he notices the shoes. There’s someone standing in front of the Cutlass, two nice high tops parked right by his left thigh.

  What the— he begins, but he doesn’t get to finish, because something shoves what feels like a fist-sized rock in his mouth. He thrashes, smashes his forehead into the bottom of the engine. The thing in his mouth shoves down, slams the back of his head into the ground. It tastes like snotty flesh. It pulses and thickens, and his muffled scream becomes a shriek as his jaw pops out of its hinges.

  The shoes never move. Dark, mottled ropes blur with cobra speed around the tire ramps.

  The engine drops, embeds itself in Lance’s body. His chest and ribs cave in. His pelvis splits. Beneath him, the caster wheels pop out from underneath the creeper. The weight of the Cutlass pins his head sideways against the concrete of the garage floor. So many nerve signals are roaring that he doesn’t feel his right ear tear free. He’s shrieking, shrieking, shrieking, but the sound can’t get around the fleshy obstruction swelling in his mouth.

  He doesn’t have enough mind functioning rationally to wonder how Shaun is with him, under the car with him, somehow slid under to join him, bright green eyes boring right into his as he once again displays that maddening smirk.

  You remember my niece, then, Shaun says. Turns out, she does remember you. Just barely.

  Something balloons out. From Shaun’s neck. Like a sack. Except it’s also a face. A girl’s face. Bright things crawl from her eyes.

  stitches

  You were so lucky.

  Your father never told you, No you can’t, never said anything was out of your grasp. Your mother never laughed at you when you talked about writing poetry for a living, starting a band, hitchhiking the country just to do it. They always told you that whatever you wanted most was the thing that was best for you.

  You had to take things into your own hands to learn what a waste you are, what a repulsive excuse for a human being you turned out to be, even before you could no longer call yourself human.

  At rare intervals, such as now, shuddering on your parents’ king-size bed, stifling your whimpers with the barrel of your father’s .357 magnum, you congeal in some rough approximation of your old self.

  Most of the time you are not—you are a creature of unbridled longing, unstoppable hunger, lacking even the discerning predilection for the weak and unwanted that kept the monster you have now become hidden from the light for long ages.

  You no longer know where you begin or when you began. You can crawl inside yourself like a silverfish skittering through the coils of a rolled-up tapestry but no matter how deep into the dark you crawl you will never find the other end.

  You are every god that ever had the raw remains of a sacrifice stretched over its shoulders, every monster that ever wore its victims’ skins, stitched them into capes, coats and masks. The soul is a bright morsel sealed in an envelope of flesh, and you are the unbinder and the weaver, the one who adds new patches to the ever-growing quilt. You carry the motes that, when cast upon your prey, reveal the seams by which you unhook and unbutton, but never rip, never draw blood.

  You are a nightmare from the grimmest of all fairy tales. Call your true name, and you’ll simply unhinge your jaw to swallow the shrieking princess and her squalling baby whole. You are a throat that can never be stoppered, a hole that can’t be sealed by sunlight or stake or bullet.

  Sometimes the you who once was slides out from the folds to glimpse the surface, but that you is never is control. There is nothing in control.

  The only thing you ever had control over, was Denise. Until she fled. Right into the arms of another monster, and led you right to it, led it to you.

  She ran from your probing hands, from the sickening price you exacted for a false show of brotherly love, and to addiction, to alcohol, to sex, to Ecstasy, to the archdemons of crack and heroin and meth and finally into the grasp of something a million times worse.

  When you tracked her down at that quaint little shop, innocuous front for a methadone empire, it was waiting for you. It had a name, Lenahan, and a sweet public face, and an awe-inspiring profile in the drug-running underworld. And an even older pedigree and an even more terrible purpose, a hunger it fed so carefully, so thoroughly.

  And you thought you were so clever, when you bested it with its own button-hook magic. But as it died, it opened you up, it made you understand what you were, a pathetic, predatory scavenger, a belly-crawling degenerate, feeble clone of its own black-stitched glory.

  You’re draped in its hunger, in its lust, in its skins, but not worthy of the mantle. You’re the will-o’-the-wisp struggling to steer the whirlwind.

  You’re the fly swallowed alive, helpless, wriggling.

  In the dead of night, blubbering on all fours on your parents’ bed, you press the tip of the brutal metal barrel hard against the back of your mouth and squeeze the trigger.

  The bullet bores through your palate, out the back of your head, punches into the ceiling. You feel nothing but a hard tug.

  You start screaming. The screams are in Denise’s voice, in your father’s voice, in the voice of an innocent little girl, in voices you don’t recognize and never will.

  You push your mouth down on the barrel, jam it in your throat, you gag on it but shove it in deeper, you squeeze the trigger in your fist again, again, punching holes through your head, the entire clip, ten spent shell casings spit from the chamber one after the other. And you wail and you keen as each bullet does you no more harm than a needle shoved through a cloth sack.

  Your cries leak through the spiral coils inside you and you can feel the responses in kind, a muffled chorus of despair croaking for release.

  You’re just one more voice at the crest of this crypt, the thin-stretched shroud wound over and through a mass grave packed with thousands, pressed on each other in layer after layer.

  Your father’s gun has gone impotent but you keep clicking the trigger, screaming into an empty chamber.

>   Still later in the night, when the cops come to the door, you calmly tell them nothing’s wrong. You let them search the house. They ask about the bullet holes in the bedroom ceiling. You say your son did that when he was drunk and alone in the house, before you had him taken to rehab, and right now you don’t know where he is.

  They can see there’s no blood. Finally, they leave you. And you resist the urges. You leave them alone. You let them leave.

  The crushed shell of your mind leaks with other urges, more pressing lusts to slake.

  fourth square

  Truth be told, Patsy gave no credence to Shaun’s strange, tear-stained speech of the previous day, expected nothing to come of it, which makes the knock on her door so early this morning that much more of a surprise.

  Everyone promises to call on Patsy and her cats. No one ever does. And she makes sure they don’t need to. Every warm day, she makes sure they all have to see her bright-eyed, smiling face.

  Most of her neighbors pretend to be kind to her, and she’s not blind to the pretense. They smile too long, won’t look her in the eye, say goodbye before she’s done talking. She’s always gracious about the subtle abuse—a compromise she offers to those who might be happiest if she gave into the disease slowly rendering her paralyzed, if she simply stayed in her home and withered away, died helpless and forgotten in her bed, a sacrifice to the flies.

  One of the consequences of being inconsequential, a person looked past rather than seen—she has been cast as the neighborhood’s cheerful confessor, its motorized wheelchair-bound repository of secrets.

  If she wanted to, she could make the whole neighborhood come apart at the seams. But, because she never breaches trust, never shares these sacred scraps, and because of the pity those with a glimmer of a conscience feel toward this woman with no friends, she is entrusted with so much. She knows so many things about people who care little to nothing about her.

  She hears the elderly woman at the end of the street complaining about her tramp of a granddaughter. She hears Francene’s frettings about missing Denise, and her not-so-perfect son, and the suspicions about her husband that she doesn’t quite dare face head-on.