He climbed a predominant tree in his backyard. He’d been doing it for a while, just to get away from the pounding in his head. He’d position a board between the branches to make a bench.
From his perch, he could see into several of his neighbors’ backyards. The family a few houses over had a trampoline. A large dog, something clearly bred to death-fight in a pit, lay napping under it.
He looked at it for a while, then looked at other people’s trees and things, but he noticed when a girl, wearing a two-piece bathing suit, walked out the backdoor of the trampoline house. Two other girls, also wearing two-piece bathing suits, followed her over to the trampoline, climbing on and laying out on their stomachs, flipping through three copies of what looked to be the same magazine. The first girl unties her top to tan her back. The others do the same. They talk and giggle to each other. They occasionally seem to look directly at the tree he sits in pretending to read a children’s detective novel. He’s really watching the girls when they aren’t looking, the sweat beading on their lower backs and the round, primary-color-coated humps of their asses. One of the girls arches her back to ask her friends a question he can’t quite hear. If he were viewing her from the front, he’d be able to see her nipples now. Her friends laughed, and she relaxed, but what if it happened again? If he were on the other side of their back fence, looking through a knothole like in a cartoon, he could see them, really see them. When he was sure the girls weren’t watching, he climbed down from the tree. He opened the back gate and walked out into the alley. Bronze-backed horseflies buzzed around something rotting in a dumpster. He tiptoed in the dirt, careful not to step in the dry grass that would crunch audibly under his weight. The fence between him and the girls had no visible knotholes, but a gap between two irregularly placed fence pickets was big enough to put his eye to. He moved toward it slowly and put out his hands to brace himself against the cross beam. It creaked. The dog bolted from beneath the trampoline, to throw itself against the fence. It scream-barked, spitting flecks of foam. Its claws scraped the wood in front of his face. He backed away and began walking home.
“Who’s out there?” a girl demanded. She’d put her eye up to the other side of that same gap. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“Nothing,” he said, conscious of the exact way in which his voice cracked. “I was just walking past here, and you’re dog started barking.”
“You should walk on the fucking sidewalk,” she said. “My dog hears everything, and if he gets past this fence, he is going to bite you.”
“I was just trying to get some exercise,” he said, already walking away.
His mother-in-law said it would be fine to have champagne at the anniversary party. He took a sip just to be polite, then set to draining his hidden whiskey flask.
But she’d clearly had a few glasses when she approached him in the front yard, almost-empty bottle in hand. She put the bottle down in the grass between them, and she sat down close.
“Tell me the truth,” she says. “After all of this time, do you still even think about her?” She picked up the bottle to finish it off, then scooted closer to him.
“Yes,” he said. “Of course.”
Cookie Theft
The in-vitro specialist who helped me have you disguised his remarks regarding the "first mulatto I've ever engineered," as jokes. He never spoke a word of suspicion, though, that I might be more than a decade older than I'd stated on my forms. You made me feel 20 years younger.
And I thought of my formerly wrinkled belly stretched taut the day I received the Diagnosis. You sat outside the doctor's office, pushing primary-colored wooden beads along a twisted metal frame.
"Look at this picture, and describe it for me," the doctor demanded. He presented to me a black line-drawing rendered on white card stock:
A woman stood in the place where meals are cooked holding something, something important. Not watching. Water came from the water source, overfilling the basin, as though the drain were clogged. Dishes, a faucet. Oh… Behind her stood a boy on a stool, peering into an open cabinet. Two of its legs were up off the ground. A girl stood below, watching. She doesn't bother. The wet, the water runs off the counter onto the rocks below, causing white-capped foam in the little pool. Today it shone orange in the sinking sunlight, though the grass surrounding it was brown and dead.
The girl approached the clearing from a distance, shoeless and holding the hem of her dress – a deep red silk taffeta, accented with bows and 250 inches in circumference – just above her knees. But in the outer ring of bushes she heard voices, and felt the need to crouch out of sight.
Two boys, clothes worn to rags, stood facing the water, throwing rocks to hear them splash.
"They caught my pa three days later," the smaller of the two, Charles, continued. "The hounds smelt him." Charles' clothes looked especially ripped and dirty, almost suspiciously so, as though someone had deliberately torn and buried them.
"So what'd they do?" the other boy, Louie, asked.
"Chopped his foot off." Charles spit. "But what they ain't know, see, is my pa spent time on a sugar plantation, on an island where they dance to nighttime drums and slit chicken throats."
"No sir," Louie said, after contemplating the rock in his hand. "I don't believe I believe it."
"Better start then, ’cause my pa, he got free. They ain't know he knew about the homunculus, 'cause they ain't know about it theyself."
"The what?"
"You ever cut a worm in half?" Charles didn't wait for Louie to answer. "What happens?"
"Two worms. Two worms happen."
Charles shook his head. "No. Not actually. What it does is go on being one worm. That other part don't move again." He paused but waved Louie off when he opened his mouth. "That's what my dad did when they chopped his foot."
"Yeah, but lots of people live through that and go on, hopping around."
"But what if it weren't the foot that lay there dead? My pa, he trained his foot so it'd remember how to be the whole rest of him." Charles laughed before Louie could. "Think of it," he said. "My pa, a foot tall, run off through the forest free."
"Why that's just nonsense."
Charles turned around and dug into the knapsack he'd left dangling from a nearby tree trunk. He pulled out a small hatchet, the edge of its blade glinting. "Let me see your hand."
"Nuh-uh. Those hounds would eat me then."
"You shrink down, we put you in a jar and load you on a wagon out of here. Easy as that." "Then why ain't you done it?"
Charles spit.
Louie tucked his hands beneath his armpits. "I don't wanna be small."
"It wears off afterwhile."
Louie walked around like that awhile then twisted his face like he might cry. He offered his left hand. His right he held to his mouth to gnaw its heel.
Charles gripped Louie's fingers and pushed the hatchet blade into Louie’s palm until blood swelled up around it. Charles turned Louie's hand palm up. "Hold it like that," he said.
Charles reached into the front of his pants and extracted a tiny pouch. He shook some of its powdered yellow contents out into Louie's bleeding hand. The wound began to bubble. "That'll hurt some," Charles said. There’s no way Louie heard that over his own screaming.
"Now lie on your belly at the water's edge," Charles instructed when Louie stopped to suck in air, "and hold that hand out above your head."
Louie, his irises gone faint now, complied, and Charles crouched down beside him, stepping on Louie's fingers to hold his hand still. He raised the hatchet above his head and brought it down, fast.
The girl readied herself for another scream, but none came, just the wet thwack of a blade embedding in a muddy bank. Grit of metal in sand. Louie lay still on the shore, but his hand flopped like it longed to breathe water. After a moment, the hand calmed and began to slowly balance itself on its middle and ring fingers, waving its pointer and pinkie. The thumb's dactylogram shifted and swirled, forming a tiny face, Loui
e's face. Louie’s hand morphed into a tiny version of his former self, and that self stood naked, clutching his genitalia. His shrieks were almost inaudible. Louie’s body, his former body maybe, sprawled on the bank not moving. Charles was back to his knapsack now, retrieving a ceramic jar. The new Louie turned away as if to run but then began to back away from the lake that stretched out ahead. Charles removed the lid from the jar and inverted its opening. He plopped it down over Louie. The girl nearly screamed herself.
Charles flipped the jar and clapped the lid back in place in a single motion. He brought it to his ear and shook it. The girl imagined she could hear Louie's small body rattling around inside.
"Careful, boy. Stop, stop," the cries came from the other side of the clearing. A man with hair faded to the color of yellowed ivory limped into view from a nearby patch of trees
Mr. Blanketyblank! He brought a hankie to his mouth to wipe away the drool that collected in the corners. "I told you they need them unharmed."
Charles held the jar steady, offering it to Mr. Blanketyblank though he still stood a good distance away and limped at the pace of one used to using a cane.
"What do they do with them little boys anyway?" Charles asked.
Mr. Blanketyblank laughed once, low and breathy. "You really wanna find out?'
Mr. Blanketyblank took the jar from Charles.
"Now how about my –"
Mr. Blanketyblank waved off the question, staring up now at the bush the little girl crouched behind. "You see that?" he asked. "That length of ribbon yonder, blowing in the breeze. I believe that's –" Mr. Blanketyblank waved his hanky like a flag. "Get down here, young miss. You know She’d die, practically, if She saw you out here like this."
Mr. Blanketyblank led the girl by the elbow back to his wagon. It was small, covered in a canvas. The blindered horses shifted their feet. Mr. Blanketyblank set the jar down on the footboard, placing a rock on its lid, and offered the girl a coarse hand, intending to pull her up into the seat. The springs squeaked when she sat. The footboard felt rough beneath her toes. Her skirt, once released from her grip, covered the jar below her.
Mr. Blanketyblank yelled "Yah" and snapped the reins once, throwing the girl, causing her to kick to keep balanced. Beneath her skirt, the jar rattled at the road's every clod and crater.
"What were you doing out there in this finery?" He asked. She knew she'd once been somewhere requiring such clothes, but she didn't know how to answer him. She was preoccupied instead with the thought of the tiny colored boy upsetting the lid from his jar, vaulting over its lip. The boy might scramble up her leg. Those tiny fingers pinching handholds in her calves, in her naked thigh. At the next curve in the road, she raised her skirt just enough to kick the jar from the wagon. She never heard it shatter. The boy, she told herself, climbed out unharmed and ran to an offroad hiding spot.
When they got back to town, the houses had their blackout curtains drawn.
"You need to get inside," said Mr. Blanketyblank. He called the horses to halt in front of the place he assured her was her house. He got down to help her out, but she'd made it halfway to the front door when he’d made his way around the wagon.
The door was unlocked, in fact had no lock and no bolt. It swung inward when she tried to knock. The house was dark inside, its wooden floors unswept. The furniture in the parlor was rotted and collapsed, and, feeling through the cabinets in the lightless kitchen, she felt animal droppings but no candles.
She decided to sit with her back against the door, propping it closed, but it swung free when she put her weight to it. She ran her finger along a one-inch gap between the door and its jamb, allowing a chill. The girl incorrectly assumed this was cold air entering the house, but it was in fact heat escaping.
She woke curled up on the floor to a protesting creak. The sound of a window in a nearby room being budged from its swollen sill. A heaving, then a crash, then too many legs grappling to right themselves. The girl had a cobweb across her eye, but she couldn’t move to pull it away. She held her breath and tried to look through the crack beneath the door.
[...]
The next day, she spotted Mr. Blanketyblank's wagon hitched up in front of the Jameson place, and knew she'd left something irreplaceable inside it. She stripped to her delicates, which made it easier to crawl toward the wagon. Peering through the spokes of the rear wheel, she could see Mr. Blanketyblank, conversing with the Jamesons on their front porch. Mrs. Jameson, her face raw and puffy, her eyes and nostrils leaking, handed Mr. Blanketyblank a jar, its lid bound closed with twine. Mr. Jameson stood in the doorway behind her, monitoring the transaction with arms Xed thick across his chest.
While this continued, the girl crept around back and slipped into the opening in the canvas canopy. A stench like spoiled meat. Flies hovered hungrily above a limp gray mass – a donkey, several days dead, its open eyes reflecting nothing.
She heard feet approaching, and hurried to hide behind the decaying corpse. Mr. Blanketyblank opened the flap and set the jar down inside the wagon, in a wooden crate stacked with similar containers. He glanced toward the donkey, but turned away when Mrs. Jameson began to scream. She ran toward him, and he stood up.
"It's not right," the woman yelled. "I won't let you." She came at Mr. Blanketyblank swinging her fists. Mr. Blanketyblank grabbed her shoulders, locking his elbows to keep her at arm's length.
Mr. Jameson walked into view and pulled his wife from Mr. Blanketyblank's grip. Mr. Jameson spun his wife around and slapped her face before shoving her to the ground.
"Whore. You oughta be lucky I don't sell you too."
Mr. Blanketyblank wiped his mouth with the handkerchief. "I was just heading over to the Render's place, matter of fact. I happen to know he's in the market."
Mrs. Jameson reached up from her place at her husband's feet and pulled at his shirttail. "No, baby. You wouldn't throw your little dumplin’ to those things in the mine." Mr. Blanketyblank grabbed the man's arm, held it till Mr. Jameson looked away from his wife.
"This is a business matter between men, if you don't mind my saying so, Mr. Jameson," he said. "And the men your wife refers to are war veterans."
Mr. Jameson kicked at his wife’s legs. "Get in the gotdamn house."
Mr. Blanketyblank sighed and closed the wagon's flap.
The girl stood to slip away, forgetting what it was she'd come for, but the wagon lurched forward then, pitching her into the carcass, pressing her face into the greasy fur. Instead of vomiting she cried, hoping the horse’s hooves would obscure her weak noises.
The donkey did not slide up against her, as she feared it would, when the wagon stopped. Mr. Blanketyblank’s footsteps shuffled the dirt when he stepped around the wagon’s side. He pulled open the flap, causing the backs of the girl’s inner eyelids to glow red.
“Render, you rascal,” he hollered. “Get out here and help me drag this ass.”
A door a decent ways off creaked open, and the girl moved to peek from behind the donkey’s head, but ended up squinting into direct sunlight. The outline of a man nearly filled the doorway of an asymmetrical cabin. He stepped out into the yard, looking toward the wagon’s side, where she assumed Mr. Blanketyblank stood. When the Render moved, his full-length apron flapped heavy in the wind.
“I don’t want it,” the Render said, his voice not nearly as deep as his size suggested.
“A donkey,” Mr. Blanketyblank said, stepping into the foreground. “The kind whose hooves you can boil to make glue, with meat enough to feed a family of five. Eight if they’re not so particular. And who can afford to be these days?” Mr. Blanketyblank forced a lungless laugh.
The Render came forward and made to peer inside the wagon. The girl froze, sure she’d been spotted, but the Render swatted the air in Mr. Blanketyblank’s direction, then turned back toward the house. “That’s not my line anymore.”
“You saying you’re not a render, Render?”
“I’m no longer in the glue trade, K
it. A disgusting, unpleasant business, truth be known. Did you bring any females?”
“Not today, I’m afraid. I told you there’d be levels decent white men wouldn’t…”
“Well you’ll be taking a few with you. Dipping the hands has proven the key.”
“That’s exactly why…”
The Render threw back his head to bellow: “Oh, Silas—”
A boy of indeterminate race, lanky and shirtless, stepped out of the doorway, pulling a length of rope in each fist. These ropes were looped around the unfortunate throats of two bipedal creatures, bowlegged and crouching, and the boy led them out closer to the wagon.
“So you’re wondering if I’ll haul these two, are you?”
The Render ran the tip of his thumb across Mr. Blanketyblank’s cheek. “I’m not wondering shit, except maybe what our soldier friends’d think of finding out they been getting shipments of shoe-blacked white boys. Might be an affront to their code, Kit, you never know.”
Mr. Blanketyblank took a step backward. “Code? Those men are deserters.”
“Damned if they’re the only ones.”
The creatures began hobbling back toward the house, pulling against their ropes, throwing their heads, lowing like livestock. The boy did not move.
“Load them up, Silas.”
The girl ducked down then and heard only a struggle then the jolt of two heavy bundles dropped into the wagon with her.
“Those gals are prepaid,” the Render said, “so mind they don’t jump ship, won’t you?”
The road beneath her, the girl risked a quick glance. She saw a lady’s face turned toward her. The girl put a finger to her mouth to beg the lady’s silence, but bit the tip when the lady’s facial features became clearer in the dim light. Lips stitched shut with rawhide strips, wet holes where eyes once were.
The road became rougher now, and increasingly steep. The creatures’ muffled sobs and the panicked thump of outturned feet settled to an ambience, like the donkey’s stench – perceptible only when she thought about them. Only Mr. Blanketyblank’s occasional irritated directions to the horses gave her a decent distraction from that single constant thought…
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