Unwrap Your Candy

by Jesse Miller

  Thom returned to the rickety tableau before him and quickly extended a hand toward Esther. She clasped firmly and smiled as she rose.

  Finally, Step 3: The Ascension.

  She made it.

  4) Ooohhhhhhhhhhh.

  Thom’s hand returned to his side after she released it; her feet tilled the carpet as she headed to and from the safe. Her grey zebraic polyester pants, practically bellbottoms, dripped past her off-white sneakers, and her back humped up, causing each arm to come forward, closer to the ground. She stood in front of him. He smiled fully.

  –Forgive me, Mr. Evans. I apologize.

  She passed him the check, her wedding band strangling her ring finger.

  –Not a problem. No big deal.

  He reached forward to take the check then quickly withdrew.

  –Have a pleasant weekend, Mr. Evans.

  One long white hair swung slowly from her protracted chin.

  –Yes, you too, Mrs. Polly.

  Thom raised his cheeks lightly to show her a slight smile then spun around, arms outstretched like a tornado. Had someone been behind him they would have collided. The cracking of teeth. A human toast. Maybe he shouldn’t have assisted. To help is to whelp. And, as long as “maybe” is in play, maybe he should not have delayed the enormous man in the car behind him. Maybe he’s a dentist. Or a doctor…or a liposuctionist. Thom passed through the office, closed the door, and dreamed of pulling it off the frame.

  *

  He was late, but she was sure to be late as well. At least he’d gotten the wine, the wine wasn’t... it wasn’t back there in the refrigerator, back of the mind. Forgotten. Keeping the wheel steady as he drove, he reached under the passenger seat and pulled out a brown paper bag. His stomach growled for the first time all day. He watched a clear bottle of water roll across the floor of his car while holding the lunch he had somehow forgotten to eat that afternoon. There was no wine, and this was certain to be non-trivial.

  At the far edge of the street Thom had driven down, the dilated glass doors of a bloated school bus gave birth to child after child. Each carried a lunchbox like a briefcase. Parents watched horrified from the sidelines as Thom’s car skated forward, in and out of his lane and ever closer, about to cream the bus. He looked up, pumped the pedal with his foot, and the brakes wept glittering solder. Children still onboard spun their heads around in unison, but the car froze sharp before contact.

  When the road was empty of children, Thom watched the long, patient path of the school bus as it trudged by his static car. He sighed and placed his hands at 10 and 2 on the wheel as a kind of delayed display of safety. Framed inside every bus window was a tiny raised middle finger.

  A smile opened along Thom’s face, if only to occupy it.

  Suddenly then, there was something squealing, like the end of the world, like it landed on the roof. He turned back from the school bus’ departure, and there next to his car, in the last winking collapses of late autumn sun, stood an enormous woman, her ballooning stomach pressed flat against the glass, a mere inch or two from Thom’s face. She leaned back and tried for the door handle before Thom could get the car in gear, rockhorseing it forward. The woman screamed. She screamed through her mouth and screamed through her entire head.

  –There are kids, I’ve got kids!

  Maybe it was an echo, or maybe she just kept shouting and it carried. The line repeated in his head all the way through town.

  Thom’s hands were pale, trembling slightly, as he cut the engine and began to walk through the pub. He carved his way past chain-smoking flesh and approached a dimmed cigarette machine in the corner. He hadn’t had one in years.

  The cigarette machine was empty, well out of service. Still, automatic doors opened and closed in his brain, pleasure, release, undo. A sudden bolt of anticipation flicked like an electric tongue across his stormy mind. His mind moved his feet, and across the street he went to the gas station. As the glass doors lingered through their slow sweeps to close, Thom slowly slid the plastic sleeve off the package of cigarettes. He had always enjoyed the unwrapping.

  * * *

  Section II

  The Rest Is Silence

  5:00AM- Awakening on the stoop of his apartment building without keys and slightly engorged, Thom exchanges pleasantries with his speedwalking neighbors, devises a means inside, and immediately unravels.

  Light was there. Expanding. Descending stair by stair from the sun. Coating his eyelids and activating all the machinery, the rods and cones spinning around in his eyes, spitting out clouds of blue and red twinkling dots that blur into the Ishihara tests. He opened his eyes slowly, trying to neatly shed the evening’s collection of debris. White light grew to an ever-brightening slow yawn all over his face. His lap took shape, first the outline, then the thicker lines of his body. Legs rose like loaves of bread.

  Then came the details. The fine print. He noticed the new topography of his pants, the brown smudges, shit or shoe polish. Craggy eggshells rose off his knees like little mountain ranges and jutted down his legs.

  A tightly rolled newspaper stood up erect between his knees like some kind of lightening rod that seemed to have attracted all of the other bits to his clothes. Without thinking, he slid the rubber band downward—naturally—down to the base, and the paper budded in his hands. Just then a slightly muted drone clicked behind the door of the building. Meaninglessness, all meaningless, a private language of machines or insects. Each step closer to the door, realized a language more related to the one he understood, picking up on the tails of words as they slipped through and flapped around his ears. It was as if the entire evolution of all wriggling interior thought, all the exposed wires, all the pneumatic grunt-speak had thawed into the most immediate and glowingly cogent slang within mere moments, within earshot. Sound ripened into words. Words loomed together the fibers of thought. Thoughts became action.

  The air was thick, magnetic as he rose to his feet. He quickly felt caught up in it, plucked away from the universe. The door to his building opened, ripping through the day like dry toast through a half-fried egg.

  –I’ve never liked asparagus. It tastes like soiled branches. You should know that.

  –Howard...

  Her eyes squeezed together a glare.

  –I do know that.

  Glimmering in the early morning sun, her jogging suit appeared newer than Howard’s. Thom looked for the tag as they stood in the doorframe staring back at him, straddled between the inside and outside, door ajar. He tried to stand perfectly still, as though he was well out of service.

  He opened the paper. It fell like a curtain before his pants. He fluttered and crunched his eyelids like teeth, trying to chew himself into something small, something smaller than the periods spotting the front page. The couple emerged fully formed from the inside. Their completeness, their cleanness, their great and powerful nessness, spiraled around Thom like a tornado of needles.

  –Mornin’.

  Thom left off the g to give it that just‐rolled‐out‐of‐bed authenticity, as if the edges of words had been sanded off and forgotten somewhere in dreamland.

  –Hello.

  –Hi there.

  Howard’s companion seemed focused on Thom’s crotch.

  –Nice day. Goin’ joggin’?

  –No, no, speedwalking.

  –Oh…

  Thom threw his eyes to the paper and shuffled ahead, trying to slip past the couple before the door shut.

  –Excuse me, young man.

  His eyes slowly rolled upward.

  –Are you the one who has been stealing our paper?

  Stealing sounded like gangbanging. Paper sounded like dead grandfather.

  –Of course not. We’re like neighbors. We are neighbors! Neighbors don’t do that sort of thing, right?

  –We’ll somebody’s been doing that sort of thing. It’s a damn epidemic in this building!

  –We’ll, I am not that, it’s not me.

  –Of course y
ou’re not. It’s never ever anybody’s fault, right?

  The words hung almost visibly on the corner of her lips. Howard’s gaze didn’t move from his sneakers.

  –Whose name is on that paper? Give it here.

  She grabbed; Thom dug in. He pulled, but she had steel in her arms. As she pulled one way, Thom matched it in the other. Her arms raised, Thom’s followed.

  –Young man!

  He pulled back.

  She pulled. The majority of his strength gone, Thom swished around all vertigo.

  –Goddammit, Rose, let go of the fucking paper!

  She released the paper and walked off the porch before dissolving in the sea of sunlight bouncing off her jumpsuit. The door opened again, spitting out an unfamiliar man with a shiny, serious face and a smile that seemed too flat to be pleasant. He had goose bumps on his arms and a thick vein above his elbow that disappeared beneath his sleeve. Thom grabbed at the closing door and held it open, as if to lure Howard back inside.

  Howard’s tiny lips parted but he didn’t say a word. They continued to stare in an unspoken contest until Thom walked backward through the door, turning down the hall and disappeared into the wall like a mouse slinking into a hole.

  Across the street, Rose touched her toes, shrouded in treeshade. Howard was almost halfway up the block.

  *

  He didn’t want to turn the knob. A closed door had a kind of purity to it. It was a kind of hymen. The metal knob was cold and numbing in his hand. All at once, he never wanted to open that door again. Never clean another dish behind those walls. Never take another shower. Never screw uncomfortably on the sofa.

  Something perfectly violent lay behind the door, wickedly indifferent, juiced. There was a fire behind the door, and he could feel the doorknob sizzle. The best thing now would be to flee. Fleeing is not surrendering. Fleeing buys time to reload.

  Slippery under his palm, the knob was over-ripe fruit and gave in. Door, wide open, his nostrils filled with an effluvial wallop from the eggs that she’d thrown at him last night. Ornamentally, they hung off the walls in every direction. The albumen, drying and sliding downward, left translucent silver rings around each egg as it had soaked deeper and deeper into the wall overnight.

  This…this, must be what a fetus smells.

  Quietly, he passed the closed bedroom door and headed for the bath. He tried the lock but it was broken, so he rolled two towels against the door to keep it closed.

  One endless supple thread ran into the white basin. Soon, steam stood on the water and stretched upward. Thom ran his hands over the top of the water, half expecting to tug notes from the ceilingsoaring steam. The room warmed into a foggy-white fluctuation as slowly rolling steam caressed him completely.

  Button by button his shirt fell to the floor. Laces like pulling dead snakes from a burrow. Sockplop. Sockplop. A hollow pantleg and then another. He lifted his undershirt overhead and saw only white. The closest you get to climbing back inside.

  Toewet.

  And then allwet.

  Thom broke the skin of the water and slid inside with a muted thud, pitching a splash of water across the lip of the tub and onto the floor.

  His plump stomach rolled across the surface of the water and bobbed with the current. Floating above and burning, a fleshly sunrise. He tried to ignore it, pretending, but he couldn’t. The blinding thing. Moi ra. He put his eyes past, focused on his feet, working the controls of the faucet. One long thread of water coiling into the tub. Like the fats. The fates. He let it fill until it couldn’t anymore. Water ran over the basin and spread across the floor. He cut the stream and toed the drain lid with his other foot. He pedaled in this way, cutting and releasing, raising and filling, overflowing, letting the blood and dirt and egg slide over and over until he was clean. Through the window he watched as the sky seemed to lower more and more, flaring brighter and brighter. You can see it all, pressed flat by gravity. It’s always so good to be alone.

  A waterlanding. A new skin.

  And a warm one.

  Chapter Two

  Section I

  Hitched

  7:00PM- Undaunted by the seemingly endless flummery at bar-side, Thom Evans eventually meets up with Samantha Freeman for a low key, mid-priced meal.

  One of his hands rested on the rim of the glass, the other against the bar. A bottle of vodka reclaimed its slot, and a liquor city skyline took shape, sprawled see-through, crystalline. See through walls. Bottles made to look like women in evaporating dresses. Smoke clouds slowly moped from patron to patron along the bar. An active pint of Guinness appeared before him and darkened as it sat. It was still settling, still in the process of being built.

  A tall, unshaven man took up the seat next to his, black dust ground in to both his cracked and craggy hands. Before the man could light a cigarette, a saffron pint stood under his nose. Two olives, which appeared more testicular than anything else, rolled on the bottom of the glass. He tapped on the rim. Thom tried to avoid staring.

  –In Ireland, they call that stuff The Devil’s Milk.

  Thom turned slowly, checking to see if he was, indeed, being addressed.

  –What?

  –I said, in Ireland, they call that The Devil’s Milk.

  He pointed with his cigarette. A highway of veins ran along his arms.

  –Really? I didn’t know that, I’ve never been. I’ve heard it was called The Wine of the Country there. I thought that was, uh…clever.

  –No, they don’t call it that.

  The jukebox flared. Thom leaned in closer, studiously, trying to establish a proper speaking distance.

  –So…you must be Irish then, Thom asked.

  –Toward the end of the day.

  The man looked in hard at Thom.

  –Are you Irish?

  A roll of grey smoke wrapped around his words as he tapped on the rim of his glass. Dark lines embedded under the man’s nails hung in the air like ten little crescent moons.

  –Sadly, no, Thom replied.

  –Sad? Don’t be sad about it for chrissakes. You’re the lucky one. You’ve actually got the luck of not being Irish.

  Rebuked slightly, Thom tried to conjure a line but came up a bit lame. He turned a three-quarters view and addressed the glass the stranger was tapping. He clutched the pack of cigarettes in his hand. It really had been forever.

  –So what’s with your drink there? Why do you drink that?

  –With olives?

  –Yeah.

  –That’s how my old man used to take it. A P-B-R-tini, he’d call it.

  Smoke carried a laugh out of his mouth. He tapped on his glass again. One of the olives floated to the surface.

  –That’s why I…I follow in my father’s footsteps, too.

  Thom folded the lid of his pack backward and withdrew a cigarette. A flash of fire itched through him. It really had been forever. His body was governed by another mind. The stranger nodded. With haste, he picked up the lighter.

  –May I?

  –Yeah, go nuts.

  A nearly naked woman, no bikini, slung a Berretta as black and smooth as obsidian over her shoulder. Wavy threads of smoke drifted from the end of the barrel. Red high heels and it was all just stupid, Bettie Page, scissoring, and shiny. It lit on the first try.

  At first he couldn’t speak, the kind of rush the dead get coughing drowned up water out of their lungs. He wanted to hold the smoke inside forever, steal it from the world. His head scraped the sky.

  –Thanks.

  The man nodded and tapped again as the second olive rose to the surface. He pointed at Thom’s drink.

  –You know where some great milk’s poured?

  Shaking no, he didn’t say anything. Nothing could compete. Thom kept drawing in smoke.

  –The old uh, the old ah… Pubic Louse. Just past the car wash. Bigger pints. Cleaner taps.

  Suddenly the man brought the glass down to the bar.

  –Good luck following in your father’s footsteps.<
br />
  He stood and bled into the crowd. A five flickered under his empty glass, and two soggy olives rolled around the bottom like decapitated heads.

  Thom sat quietly, waiting, losing track of the time, lighting one stick off another.

  *

  He was fairly happy sitting across from her. His head was clear.

  –They call this the uh, The Devil’s Milk in Ireland.

  She pulled her hair away from her face and gathered it together; she patted and re-patted the crown of her head. Her shoulder-length hair seemed to approve and even endorse her head’s movements, wreathing in robust concurrence with each nod and sway, but offering an extra ripple, a flicker. Her fading red tresses tapped against her shoulders almost audibly, as a paint brush might when fleshing out a canvas. Really, her hair was more brown than red now, browner than it had ever been. At least she didn’t have hair on her face. Thom peeled back the paper lid on his pack of cigarettes, performing a strange calculus on the size of the bites she pulled from her glistening Cobb salad.

  –I didn’t know that.

  –Neither did I until tonight. This chimney sweep or something just told me that.

  The cut of her thin white linen shirt hinted at the descent of her chest. The full, gentle dip downward. From across the room, a stranger, a complete unknown, some Benny Hill compulsive molester could snatch a view of her ceaseless cleavage and seal it away in his cerebral vault.

  –Say, Thom...

  She jerked a slab of chicken off of her fork.

  –What’s with the smoking?

  He took a huge drag and imagined passing out.

  –You smoke.

  –Yes, right, but you don’t anymore. And couldn’t you wait until I finished eating?

  Tips. He brought the tip of his cigarette into his mouth, varnishing it with his lips. Tits.

  –Sammie, I see your…your top…the full…

  He muted his voice.

  –Breasts.