The Malfeasance Occasional

by Various Authors

  Miriam comes in through the door looking like a bilge rat coming off a sinking ship, all parts of her soaked through not just to the bone, nor to the marrow, but all the way to the fraying thread that is Miriam’s very soul. And when she comes in she decides to not just break the ice but drop a bank safe through it by saying:

  “Is this like one of those Tupperware sex toy parties? We all try out the clit-ticklers and double-dongs, see what we want to take home to throw a little seasoning salt on the gone-gamy-past-the-date meats of our store-bought marriages?” She clears her throat. “Not that I’m married.”

  They all look at her like she’s got gills.

  “Whatever,” she says, and walks past them.

  Guess we’re not gonna be BFFs.

  She lights a cigarette.

  * * *

  Here’s how Gold Earrings dies, and Miriam knows this because this is Miriam’s gift-slash-curse, the ability to touch a person and see how and when the Reaper decides to cut them down with the swoop of his scythe—

  Darkness. Ground trembling with thunder’s gall. That acid stink of Clorox—a taste in the mouth, a burning in the nose. But above it, another smell, too, the greasy stench of expended gunpowder in the air—someone’s crying, another someone is screaming, and then a heavy weight falls against the woman’s head. Once, twice, then a third time. Thud, thud, thud. And that’s it—her head cracks hard against bleachy linoleum and there’s a burst of starlight behind the eyes and it’s lights out for real.

  * * *

  The porn store is not well-visited. Dust and cobwebs. Cracked linoleum and walls painted the color of a fading bruise.

  The inner shelves stand stuffed—heh, stuffed, Miriam thinks—with porno DVDs: dicks and pussies and dudes plow girls and girls ride dudes and girls on girls and all the configurations you could imagine.

  Around the edges of the shop hang the sex toys, mostly on pegboards. Big dicks, little dicks, double dicks, strap-on dicks, butt plugs, clit-stimulators, fake vaginas that look like flashlights or rubbery ice cream cones. There’s even something called a ‘Drill-do,’ which looks like a power drill dong attachment, which is a thing Miriam imagines nobody ever wants to see used, except for dumb fucking dudes who don’t know or care how to press a woman’s pleasure buttons.

  It takes her a second to realize ‘Drill-do’ is supposed to rhyme with ‘dildo.’

  The place stinks of Clorox.

  * * *

  Haggard Rag: Woman with crow’s feet around her eyes, smoke lines above her lip. She’s an old beater car, a fast food cup bobbing down a dirty gutter, a woman who’s given nowhere near as hard as she’s gotten.

  Yellow Slicker: Mousy housewife with gleaming doe eyes like she’s trying not to cry, and she’s got a picture of two kids in her hand that she keeps not looking at and massaging with her thumbs—gentle circles, gentle circles. And she won’t take that fucking yellow rain slicker off no matter what. All she says when you ask is, “Storm will be over soon,” even though that seems about a hundred miles from true.

  Gold Earrings: There’s gold in them thar hills. And the ears. And on the fingers. And around the neck. She’s pretty. No. Miriam supposes the word is “beautiful.” Even soggy, the ringlets of dark hair plastered to the porcelain stretch of forehead do little to diminish her elegance. She’s older than Miriam, but not by much. Late 20’s.

  She’s the one to die. Here, if that bleach smell is any indication.

  With the lights out.

  Shit.

  * * *

  Here’s how Miriam finds out. She’s standing there smoking, looking at a series of buttplugs, each increasing in size to the point where she wonders exactly who wants something the size of a traffic cone crammed into the hollow of one’s bowels, and—

  A back door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY pops open, preceded by a half-second of raised voices. A pot-bellied bald dude in a gray t-shirt and with lugnut spacers in his pierced ears comes out, waving his hands like he’s trying to chase away bees.

  “I toldja,” he’s saying to the young girl following behind, a waifish teen with a ratty blonde braid bouncing at her back, “you can’t use the bathroom because you’re not even supposed to be here.”

  The girl is pleading. “Have a heart, I gotta pee.”

  “No,” he says. “It’s employees only. I said that already, didn’t I?”

  Miriam stands on her tippy-toes, peers over the racks. Snaps her fingers at him.

  “Hey, just let her piss.”

  Lugnuts crosses his arms like a defiant child. “Only if you buy something.”

  “Right. Because I always go dildo shopping during hurricanes.”

  “It’s a tropical storm,” Yellow Slicker peeps from the floor, and Miriam shoots her a withering look.

  “Damn moochers,” Lugnuts says. “I should call the cops. Fuckin’ loitering and shit, Jeez-Louise.”

  Miriam starts to head toward the back to give him a piece of her mind (and maybe the tip of her boot)—she has to jostle past a rack of flavored lubes and off-brand condoms, and in the process has to sidle alongside Gold Earrings.

  Her elbow juts out—

  Brushes past the woman’s hand—

  And that’s when she sees. The vision hits her like an icepick jammed between the two hemispheres of her brain. The darkness. The gunpowder. The bleach.

  Gold Earrings gives her a look.

  All Miriam can say is: “You’ve got … cold hands.”

  Then she keeps moving.

  * * *

  This isn’t new. Miriam’s had this since she was a teen. Since someone hit her with a shovel and broke something very precious and very alive inside of her. Everywhere she goes she sees death sitting on everyone’s shoulder like a fat-bellied crow.

  She’s been the ghost visiting the scene of countless car crashes, endless heart attacks, organ failures. She’s been the crow on the shoulder as folks die from cancer or a bad fall or a noose. And murders. She’s seen those, too.

  Too many of those by now.

  And those never get any easier.

  She goes back to the rack of buttplugs as the Waif gets to head to the bathroom and she stands there and trembles, trying to find her center—no easy task, since Miriam’s center is about as far flung as Abu Dhabi, but she does her best and draws a breath through her nose and out through her mouth and tries, if only for a second, to ignore the fact that death haunts her steps like a hungry shadow.

  * * *

  To the hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

  Hammer has no choice. Can’t do much else.

  Miriam’s like that. She’s got her thing. Whether you call it a gift or a curse, it is what it is, and to her, every problem starts with one solution.

  The touch.

  * * *

  She introduces herself to Ragged Hag. Or Haggard Rag or whatever the fuck her not-name is. Miriam struts up, hand out. “I’m Miriam.”

  The woman makes a curious little grunt. Stands up from her sit-down on the linoleum, starts to put out her hand and say in a raw-and-raspy five-pack-a-day voice, “Hey, my name’s—”

  Six years hence: her mouth tastes of wine, bad wine, wine that’s almost all sugar and vinegar and came out of a box or a big jug and she comes out of the bar, patting her pockets for a packet of Marlboros and her heel comes down on hard gravel and she grunts as the heel twists in the scree and the shoe pops off and she almost loses it face-first into the parking lot—but that’s not what she cares about nor is it what makes her mad because at the same time she realizes all she’s got left is a crumple pack with a few little tobacco bits at the bottom and not a single fucking cigarette. Good news is, across the highway is a little brick convenience store and she knows for a fact they sell what she wants and so she leaves the shoe behind and does this hitching up-down-heel-to-flat-foot jog across the highway—she crosses the center line just as the other shoe pops and she curses under her breath and that’s when the truck hits her and smears her across t
he—

  “—Junice.”

  “Janice?”

  “Naw. Junice.”

  “Can I call you June?”

  “I like the whole name bein’ spoke, honestly.”

  “Junice.” Miriam says the name like it’s a venereal disease.

  “Yep. You come in off the road?”

  “Mmhuh. Yeah. Was walking when the storm hit.”

  “I saw how wet y’all were.”

  Miriam bites back the opportunity for a joke.

  Instead she asks: “You driving somewhere?”

  “Hitchhiking.”

  “I do that sometimes.”

  “It’s safer than they say. Long as you offer up a little something.” Junice thrusts her tongue into the pocket of her cheek so it bulges. Then she laughs. “You know.”

  “You’re saying you blow them.”

  “Mostly I get handsy. But if they’re nice and they take me a good long way.…” Junice sniffs. “You ever need someone to travel with, lemme know.”

  “Yeah.” Uh. No. Miriam coughs to clear her throat. “I’m kind of … ronin-ninja-without-clan.”

  “Oh. Okay.” Then Junice asks: “You got an extra cigarette?”

  “Sure.” She doesn’t want to part with a cancer stick, figures it’s time to play nice: “You like wine, don’t you, Junice?”

  “I do.” Junice smiles big and shows off teeth almost as yellow as Yellow Slicker’s slicker. She exhales smoke as she says, “Why, you got some?”

  “I don’t. Wish I did, but I don’t.”

  “Oh.”

  “Seeya, Junice.”

  “Thanks for the butt.”

  Onward, then.

  * * *

  Yellow Slicker’s still got that picture out. The two kids. Not very attractive little fuckers, either. Both got the puffy, moony face of their mother. Miriam already knows the story even before she asks—mother’s on her way home, gets caught in the rain, wants to be with her kids because that’s all she is as a person, a mother, all other identities lost beneath that single crushing, crashing wave—so that when she’s separate from her kids she feels like they’ve been cut out of her like with a cold knife.

  Or beaten out with a shovel, says a little voice in Miriam’s head.

  She thinks she hears the flutter of wings but then it’s gone.

  The housewife looks up, asks, “Is the storm over?”

  Above their heads, the clear sound of hammering rain continues.

  “No,” Miriam says. Afraid to say anything else. This one seems fragile. A teetering stack of teacups. Bone China.

  “Oh.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m okay.” She says in a way that makes it clear she’s not.

  “Nice-looking kids,” Miriam lies.

  “That’s sweet. Thank you.” The woman suddenly turns the picture over in her hands so that only the back is facing. Miriam glimpses a date on the back in blue pen: 11-12-2010. Date the photo was taken, she assumes.

  The woman bows her head low. Almost as if in prayer.

  Miriam knows she needs to touch the woman—needs to, not wants to, like it’s an itch tickling her palms, ants biting at her fingertips—and so she goes for the clumsy move, just brushing past her, letting the back of her hand breeze past the housewife’s exposed neck—

  The housewife sits on moist earth between two graves, the graves of Skip Horsley and Tanner Horsley. She’s in her yellow slicker and the sun is just coming up over the horizon as she gently twists the cap off a small orange bottle of prescription pills, and carefully and one by one she puts them all in her mouth—delicately, slowly, like someone methodically feeding a parking meter—before then taking a gentle drink from a bottle of Lipton raspberry iced tea. The sun rises up through broken clouds. Birds fly. The pills take hold. The woman eases back against a grave and the world runs like watercolors—

  Miriam pulls her hand away as if the woman’s neck is a hot stove.

  It’s then she sees: the bottle of unopened raspberry iced tea next to her purse.

  This woman dies tomorrow. By her own hand.

  Miriam staggers away.

  * * *

  It’s her. Has to be her. Suicide is painless, but all the moments leading up are no such thing—it’s pain that takes you to that point and past. Miriam knows. Knows because once, that was her. Planning on going out. Controlling her descent. Owning how it all goes south. She knows the pain of walking that road.

  Knows how it’ll fuck you up. Like a wire with the insulation stripped off. Popping and snapping and sparking on the floor.

  Make you do stupid things. Bad things. Crazy things.

  Like killing a rich woman in a sex shop.

  But why. Why. That’s the question.

  Miriam walks up to Gold Earrings. The woman mills about near the front door. Acting cold even though it’s getting hot in here ever since Lugnuts started blasting the heater. Miriam doesn’t know what to do or what to say, only that time is ticking down and she’s got, what, a half-hour now? So she cuts right to the bone, asks:

  “What’s your damage?”

  It’s a fair question. Miriam senses something familiar there in the way the woman moves: a defensiveness, an uncertainty, an ill-caged fear. She’s damaged goods, this one.

  Miriam can smell it on her. Like the opposite of new car smell.

  Birds of a feather. Like recognizes like.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You do. Something’s wrong. Something’s tweaking you, like a mouse crawling around inside your heart.”

  “I don’t like storms.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  The woman pulls back. “I … lost someone recently but I don’t know how you’d know that—”

  “I didn’t. But you’re broadcasting something.” Miriam leans in. “Husband?”

  “Boyfriend.”

  “How’d he bite it?”

  The woman reacts like Miriam slapped her. “That’s a horrible question.”

  “It’s a horrible world. To rephrase: how did he slip gently off this mortal coil?”

  Blink, blink. She keeps looking toward the back of the store. Looking for an exit? Maybe. “Car accident.”

  “Anybody else die? In that accident?”

  “I don’t—I don’t know. I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”

  Miriam’s mind works like it’s a squirrel gnawing on a hard-to-crack nut. Tries drawing an invisible line between Gold Earrings and Yellow Slicker: a line formed in shattered windshield glass and twisted metal.

  It’s tied together. It has to be.

  Car accident. Those two dead kids, Skip, Tanner.

  Husband—no, boyfriend—died. Maybe took out those kids in the crash. Yellow Slicker is trauma-bombed. So is Gold Earrings in her way. That trauma, bang. Brings them together. A crash harder than the accident. Thrown together by a storm? Is fate that fucked up? Miriam already knows the answer to it, and it’s a big booming thunderclap YES. But what to do about it? That’s the rub, isn’t it?

  Miriam is the pivot point. It’s on her that fate hangs. Fulcrum.

  She can decide to do something: there’s a way to sway the Reaper’s hand, and only one. To turn him away, he needs blood for blood, bird for bird—

  Like for like.

  The Reaper won’t leave the table without a meal and that means to save Gold Earrings, she’ll have to take out Yellow Slicker.

  Is that the right move?

  Shit. Shit.

  She needs a drink.

  * * *

  To Lugnuts, then: “You got booze back there?”

  He sneers. “This is a dry county.”

  “Doesn’t mean this is a dry store.”

  His ape nostrils flare. Lugnuts hanging low in his ears sway as he shakes his head.

  “Why would I give you a drink of what I got?”

  “Because if you don’t, I’ll kick your ass so hard, the next time you’re on the toilet y
ou’ll have to shit past your dick.”

  By his face, Miriam sees he’s trying to imagine it. “That’s a convincing argument.”

  “I thought so.”

  He reaches under the counter, pulls up a bottle of Four Roses bourbon.

  “Got a glass?” she asks.

  “Why, you fancy?”

  “You better not have mouth herpes,” she says, then grabs for the bottle—

  Her finger touches his as the bottle passes—

  He dies on the toilet, an old man so obese his flabby grub-white asscheeks almost swallow the porcelain throne—he strains, sweats, teeth cracking against teeth, then something from inside one of his veins comes loose like a bolt popping off a rickety truck and that little piece of plaque or corn or horseshit or whatever it is goes punching through his heart and into his brain and it’s all red behind his eyelids and then dead behind his eyelids—

  Miriam pulls the bottle away. “Mine now.”

  “I want a taste.”

  She hisses at him. Bares her teeth.

  Turns around walks a couple steps, almost runs into the teen Waif as she comes up out of the bathroom looking ashen.

  “Can I have a taste of that?” the girl asks.

  “How old are you?”

  “21.”

  “If you’re 21, I’m 42.”

  “You’re not 42.”

  “That’s my point, dum-dum.”

  “Oh.” The girl pulls back. Holds her messenger bag close. “Sorry.”

  “Where’re you coming from?”

  “Up north a ways.”

  “Me too. How’s the bathroom in there, by the way? I figure the bathroom of a porn store has to be one of the most repulsive places on earth. Like, jizz-caked light bulbs and some sort of … syphilitic fungus on all the faucets. And maybe a dead clown face down in the toilet.”

  The girl blanches. “It was fine.”

  “You seem nervous.”

  “I just don’t like storms.”

  “I’ve heard that one before.”

  “Well.” She blinks. “It’s true. Does anybody like storms?”

  “I do.” She doesn’t say: It’s what I feel like inside, most of the time. Instead she explains, “Sunny days are boring. Storms are primal. Eventful. Boom and crash, hail, winds, heavy rain. Sometimes the world needs things to shake shit up.”

  The girl’s jaw tightens. “Maybe you’re right.”