Frail

by Joan Frances Turner

  “Well!” she cried, beaming at us all like Bob Cratchit over the Christmas goose. “Isn’t this another legendary spread, Stephen, you kids in the kitchen have outdone yourself yet ag—”

  “Shut up, you stupid little frail hoocow bitch,” Mags said, her voice rich and rolling like a cool spring fog, and flung her shoulders back in another burst of sweat. “For what you are about to receive, you should all be goddamned fucking grateful. Everyone eat.”

  She dug her bare hands into the bowls and platters, Billy eagerly following suit, and us handful of humans waited our turn; Don doled out a plateful for Janey, Lisa did the same for me. “Naomi,” she called out, quite deliberately. “Aren’t you going to sit with us and eat?”

  Naomi shook her head, still staring at her shoes. What had happened to her parents? Had Billy, this Mags, been part of it? Mags gave Lisa a tilted little smile, then made a show of passing Naomi a huge slice of meat; Naomi gobbled it down so fast I wondered about her for a moment, but no, she was human, you just knew it. Human, and kept constantly hungry.

  “There’s corn too, Naomi.” The boy next to me, presumably Stephen, held out a ladle overflowing with neat, toothlike kernels. Human too. “You like corn, don’t you?”

  “It’s none of your damned business,” Billy spat, the other side of his jaw still frantically working at his meat, “what she—”

  “I bet you do,” Kevin said, and took the ladle from Stephen. “Have some.”

  Billy stared at Kevin, at Stephen in hard, glassy-eyed malice. Naomi dipped her small head right into the ladle, pecking like a scared, starving bird. Canned corn, canned green beans, white rice, venison, rabbit. Glasses and cups of water to wash it down. All around me rose a chorus of raggedy sighs and smacking lips and wet air-sucking gulps as the exes shoved it all in, fistfuls of rice, whole slices of venison, spilling cornucopia-spoonfuls of corn; I concentrated on my plate, on taking calm, reasoned, slow mouthfuls.

  “This is wonderful, Stephen,” Phoebe sighed, giving him a wide, happy smile studded with stuck kernel skins. “Every time it just amazes me, how—”

  “So what trash heap’d she pluck you from, frail?” Billy said, leaning forward with eyes dancing like he was about to laugh. Laugh at me, hard and mean. “Lepingville crest on that jacket, that’s right down the road from where Mags and I used to like to hunt. Looks like we were neighbors, don’t it.”

  My jacket sleeve. Which is how Phoebe knew I was lying, about Leyton, because I’m just that much of an idiot—Lisa was quiet, waiting to take her cues. Kevin glanced from Billy to me, big round blue eyes tense and wary like he’d seen this before, like it’d been him on the hot seat before. “So what if she’s got a jacket?” he said, glancing down at his Bears jersey. “I never played football. I found this in someone’s closet, last winter.”

  “I got it off someone dead,” I agreed. Following his cue. “I don’t come from—”

  “Uh-uh,” Phoebe singsonged, with the dancing, gleeful expression of a kid getting a bigger sister in trouble.

  “Phoebe,” Kevin closed his eyes in exasperation. “Don’t.”

  “Well, she said she did,” said Phoebe, sulky and put-upon, as she stabbed hard at an errant bean. “I heard her, Kevin, you didn’t. Lepingville, by way of Leyton, or was it the other way around—”

  “And only a human would care,” Don interrupted, serene and half-sated, putting thin little bits of rabbit on Janey’s plate. “Human towns, human cities—all dead, all gone.” He gave a tight half-smile to me, to Stephen, the convulsive mouth of a salesman forcing himself to grin at the boss’s awful jokes. “Our undead turf too, all the old forests, nature preserves, little hived-off bits of prairie, abandoned farmland, dead subdivisions—remember how we used to think that made us something, Billy, decades spent stumbling aimlessly from tree to bush, marinating in our own squalor and rot, and if we managed to jump a careless human every other month or so it made us queens and kings? Here lurks Ozymandias, right behind the dung pile! Look on, ye frail-fleshed and shallow-boned, and pretend you saw nothing!”

  He laughed, thrust his fork into another slice of meat. “A nasty, brutish, vermin-riddled farce disguised as living. Stray dogs had more dignity. And then, suddenly, by utter accident—life! Actual, inexhaustible life!” His eyes narrowed as he studied Janey, Stephen, me, and he grinned in earnest. “The only true life there ever was, the only life that isn’t slow nonstop rot. And we have it. And I mean to make the most of it. Doesn’t it make you want to dance, Billy? I mean, really dance, not just that pathetic fall-over psychic two-step we used to think was cutting a rug?”

  Billy frowned and chewed his beans with a funny, lost look on his face, like a senile old man at his own birthday party who’d couldn’t fathom why total strangers were handing him cake. Janey sat looking at her meat, nonplussed, like it was some strange art display, and then Don waved a hand and she let out a murmur of surprise, shook her head, quickly ate the slices all up and looked to him for a nod of approval. She only ate when he said she could, then, just like with Naomi. Maybe he punished her if she disobeyed him, no driving privileges. No lipstick.

  Don was gazing at me now, with the same grimace of distaste he’d given me on the roadside. “You never answered Billy’s question,” he noted. “Did you.”

  “She doesn’t have to answer anything,” Lisa said, her voice tight. “Or was that all just more crap you fed me, about ‘respecting family ties—’ ”

  “You’ve been fed half the day and your frail don’t stink anymore, you can let her pony up when she’s asked.” Mags’s voice was drawling and singsong like she was beyond bored. “You have any more family here, kid? Mother, brother, other—”

  “You already know she doesn’t,” said Kevin. Gripping his plastic picnic spoon like a weapon. “They’d be here. Just—”

  “They’re not here,” I said, just so Mags would stop talking. My mother wasn’t dead. They kept telling me that, saying it for years now and they were wrong, but I didn’t say “my mother” and I didn’t say “dead.” You don’t confirm lies out loud, that’s dangerous. My stomach twisted up and I wanted to shove my plate away, but I was afraid they’d punish me if I didn’t eat. Pick up your fork. Eat it like medicine. Then something struck hard at my hand and the fork flew right out of it, and I was rigid in my chair as Mags loomed over the table, arm still raised.

  “When one of us talks,” she snarled, “you listen, and answer. You understand?”

  Her t’s, k’s, d’s jabbed and stabbed at my ears even as her voice went hissing soft, like fireplace pokers wrapped in moldy velvet. Lisa was on her feet, Kevin too but I could feel them both holding back, gauging how far they could go before I got punished for what they did; Lisa put a hand on my shoulder, careful, just the palm.

  “She’s right, Amy,” Lisa said, voice soft, a stroke of the hand in silent apology as we all sat back down. “Go on. Don’t act too good for the room.”

  Or you’ll get your head kicked in and I can’t stop them. Just like with Don. “We lived in Lepingville,” I said. I looked Mags straight in the eye, her big dolly-eye fringed with the longest lashes I’d ever seen. When did women stop having roundcheeked doll faces like that? She must’ve died decades ago like Don, longer. “Me and my mom. That was it. Lisa’s not my sister. We met on the road. She thought saying that would make it easier here. My dad died when I was little. My mom . . .” You do not affirm lies out loud. “. . . is gone.”

  Janey held my fork out to me, timid, confused, and I didn’t take it because I couldn’t pretend to eat anymore. Don gave her a little nudge. “Your food, Jeanette Isabella,” he muttered. “It’s only half-gone.”

  Janey looked flummoxed for a moment, then smiled like she’d just worked out an impossible math problem and dug in, with my fork. I’d been wrong, she wasn’t waiting for permission. She needed Don to remind her to eat at all. Stephen, who’d sat picking at his green beans and glowering in silence, pushed his chair aside and stood up.
<
br />   “New platter,” he muttered, and dumped what was left on Don’s, Billy’s, Mags’s plates, carelessly as a farmer slopping pigs. He took off for the kitchen, all long skinny shambling legs; as he came marching back with another meat-piled platter Naomi suddenly darted into his path, reaching for a napkin that had dropped to the floor. He tripped right over her, fresh utensils and meat and gravy and gloppy rice splattering over the dirty wooden boards like some great invisible creature sicked it all up.

  Stephen shouted in surprise, sprawled on hands and knees in the mess, and Naomi let out this breathless little scream of terror like a rabbit seized by a cat. Billy was out of his chair, thick pale fingers in her scalp clenching her chopped-off hair and nobody was doing anything, we were all sitting there, standing there, holding our breaths, waiting. Even knowing it’d take him only seconds, a second, to snap her neck.

  “It was my fault,” Stephen said, almost slipping again in a juice puddle as he dragged himself to his feet. “I wasn’t looking where I was going, she was picking up—”

  “You little shit,” Billy whispered, nose to nose with Naomi. His hard ex’s voice had gone soft and molten like wax under a match, as if the rest of us were squawking receding dots he couldn’t see, couldn’t hear through the fog of his own rage. “Do I keep you around so you can starve me? Do I do that? Do I keep you so you can fuck with my food and get your miserable scrawny meat-stick ass in the way of—”

  “It was my fault!” Stephen shouted. “I wasn’t looking!”

  “Leave her alone,” Lisa whispered, and she was out of her chair again like someone had pulled her by the collar, like slow strangulating strings were forcing her to rise. “Get your hands off her, and leave her alone.”

  “You fucked with my food.” Billy shook Naomi until I felt my own teeth rattling. His face was a smooth, bloodless mask, eyes the thinnest of paper slits. “You fucked with—”

  “I didn’t mean it!” Naomi’s voice came out in a warbling little croak, like she hadn’t spoken in hours or days, and then she was sobbing hard knowing it wouldn’t do her any good. “I was picking up Janey’s napkin, I didn’t see, I’m sorry—”

  “This how you want to behave, Naomi?” Mags was perfectly calm, sitting there popping another chunk of venison in her mouth as Naomi went scarlet from crying. “You want the Scissor Men to take you away? Because if you don’t wanna be a good girl, if you don’t even wanna look where you’re going, they can come take you someplace bad—”

  “I don’t.” Naomi was gasping, snuffling back tears, Lisa was standing there vibrating with rage trying to judge her moment, couldn’t just jump in case he hurt Naomi, and Don was smiling at Stephen daring him to try. “I don’t want to go with them, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I want to stay here with you—”

  “Come on,” Kevin whispered, pushing back his chair, taking my arm ready to haul us both out the door. “Come with me and Phoebe. They’re too angry to care who they hurt. Come on quick.”

  I stayed where I was because I couldn’t move. Phoebe sat there too, her eyes dark with unfeigned fear.

  “You wanna go to the bad place?” Billy was singsonging now, a sneering lullaby from behind gleaming grinning teeth. “They’ll take you there, you little bitch, the Scissor Men’ll take you there right now and they’ll snip your hands clean off, snip your feet off, you’ll never run and trip people ever again, snip snip—”

  Naomi made another sobbing screaming sound and Lisa was grappling with Don, who’d thrown himself feet-first in her path. Don’s chair went flying, Phoebe leapt out of the way before it could hit her and Kevin shoved her protectively behind him; Janey sat there smiling at nothing while Don and Lisa feverishly punched and kicked, scrabbling in the fallen meat scraps and drying smears of rice. Mags just laughed and kept stuffing her round pretty face and my skin felt swollen hot, my arm was raised with my water cup ready to fly at Mags’s head and then Janey, spacey oblivious Janey had my arm in a death grip, forcing it and the cup down with both hands. Stephen was brandishing something long and tarnished in Billy’s face, the big carving knife he’d dropped tripping over Naomi, and even though that was nothing to Billy but a rusty scrape, a papercut, we were all watching, the whole room was suddenly still and quiet. Stephen’s teeth were clenched tight and his face looked as flushed as Naomi’s, hot as mine felt, not with fear but rage.

  “You had your fun,” he told Billy, his knuckles pale and taut around the knife handle. His face was as thin and angular as Billy’s was smooth and full. Naomi just stood there between them, crying. “It’s not enough you make that new girl turn her life inside out for you, now you have to beat up on a little kid, again, because you’re such a pathetic fucking freak you can’t handle looking at—”

  Billy hit him in the jaw and Stephen went sailing, face-first to the floor. Don wrenched himself from Lisa’s grasp and kicked Stephen in the side, hard, again, and Stephen made retching sounds and stretched an arm out, shielding his face. His fingers uncurled slowly, he let the knife drop, and Billy motioned Don back.

  “Don’t fuck him up too much,” he muttered to Don. “He’s our best cook.”

  Don kicked him a few more times, the ribs, the back of a knee, and Stephen made a choking noise, retched in earnest; he curled up, knees to chin, rocking where he lay. Janey still had my arm and when she stared at me it was like a cloth suddenly swept cobwebs from a smudged window, she was alert and urgent and every part of her signaled Be quiet, be still and quiet—and then she blinked and her eyes filled with formless, benign shadows once again. She sat down and smiled at the air until Don returned to her, patting her hand reassuringly like someone else had caused all the fuss.

  Phoebe, standing back against the wall, let out a high-pitched, seesawing giggle; Kevin gave her a sharp nudge to silence her. Billy still had Naomi clenched in his hands, beneath the panic in her face I could see how much it hurt, and Lisa was reaching for the carving knife when Mags polished off the last of her rabbit, let out a huge rumbling belch, stood and slid her fingers up and down Billy’s arm, down and up. His mouth curled up, slowly, into a sulky pucker; he let Naomi go, and Mags smiled.

  “I think we got the point across, William,” she said, and even with all those poker thrusts of the tongue it was the softest exvoice I’d ever heard. “The whole point. One of these days, you’ll go and kill her without meaning it.”

  She shook her hair back, every part of her rippling and shuddering beneath the wine-colored dress, and bent her head to Naomi, crouched in a huddled heap of misery by Don’s chair. “We were just angry, pet.” Naomi was crying again, tiny little sniffing sounds as she mopped a small hand across her cheek, and Mags murmured and cooed. “We didn’t mean it. We’re sorry. You’re a good girl. There’s no such thing as Scissor Men—”

  “There are!” Naomi shrieked, her hands balling into fists by her sides; coughing up snot, big brown eyes pinned in terror, but the words flew from her in a paroxysm of frustration. “You’re lying, you’re lying to everyone, I’ve seen Scissor Men, they’re all over the beach, there are, there are, there are—”

  Billy flew at her, and Janey and Phoebe both screamed; Mags grabbed and wrestled him backward, forcing him back into his chair like he was the little kid misbehaving, and shoved him back against the cushions while Lisa held tight to Naomi, teeth bared, febrile and vibrating to hurt something like she never was with that feral dog. Stephen tried to get up and Don kicked him again. Billy made a horrible sound, a squeezing strangling noise as if his own body were throttling him, and then caught his breath. Inhaled like some agitated horse, with a loud, whinnying whistle.

  “Okay,” he said, staring up at Mags, not resisting her anymore, breath slowing as she rubbed the back of his neck. “Okay. Okay.”

  Mags twined fingers in his hair, pale blond and cornsilk-fine so it slipped away as she touched it. She gave Lisa a rueful little smile. “You better take her,” she said, glancing at Naomi. “Mood he’s in, he really will snap her neck. You want th
e run of her so bad? Go on, then. Play saint for a few days. You’ll get sick of her soon enough. Trust me.”

  Billy got up from his chair, sliding an arm around Mags’s waist; they turned and headed for the back porch, side by side. Naomi, who’d been staring from ex to ex wide-eyed and fearful, pushed hard against Lisa’s arms.

  “Daddy!” she shouted at Billy’s retreating back. Neither of them even slowed their steps. “Daddy! Mommy! Don’t leave me again!” Lisa bent close to her, trying to soothe, and Naomi beat fists against Lisa’s body as her face distorted, crumpled. “Mommy, Daddy, come back, I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

  “Later,” Lisa told her quietly. She couldn’t see us, the whole rest of the room had vanished. Only Naomi. “They’ll come back later, when things are better, not—”

  “Mommy!” Naomi screamed.

  I ran for the front door as fast as I could go.

  Illinois Avenue was empty again and I kept running, away and away from the back porch and that whole house, until I was winded and dizzy and had to sit down hard on the curb at Buell. I pulled out my cell phone, I was going to call whoever called me, find them, ask them to come get me out of here, but it was dead and wouldn’t light up no matter how many buttons I pressed and I choked back all my shouting, shoved it back in my jeans. Closed my eyes. Still dizzy.

  I had my head hunched down and my jacket open to let in cool air, trying not to remember that boy Stephen puking sick because I already felt nauseous enough, and then I heard footsteps and jolted my head up. Phoebe. She gave me a big hearty grin, like we were old friends meeting in a bar, but the whole rest of her face sagged in exhaustion.