Unwrap Your Candy

by Jesse Miller

  Dracula smoked a cigarette and chatted with Frankenstein with just the right touch of whimsy, seeming not to notice the freckled blonde bobbing on his lap.

  –No loo-loos.

  The thin Elvis appeared and guided Thom into a seat.

  Frankenstein was next. His pants hit the floor and it became very clear that he was, indeed, a monster. Another girl from the party rocked like a water pump until it looked like she would do a full headstand. Perspiration pooled at the edges of her body. Thom could smell her; they could all taste her floral sweetness, the lavender and saline rising out of her flesh and pooling in her pores with each movement. Her hands jerked and jerked as a company of men lofted electrified shrieks into the air.

  –HEAD!

  –HEAD!

  –HEAD!

  –HEAD!

  She went on to another. And then the next. And then another. She moved methodically.

  Every flop and dangle of skin had retracted into his body. He stood up to leave, unavoidably watching Dracula smile; staggering out the door, he tried to remember a line the real Elvis said, but his brain had turned to bleach.

  *

  Thom sat in his car and rolled down his window waiting for Sam to quit the party. He focused on the unlit cigarette between his fingers, brought it to his lips, and then tossed it on the passenger seat. He picked it back up and choked slightly then tossed it back down. He picked it back up and lit the cigarette, sending smoke out through his nose and into the night. The moon was due, overdue. It would split open if it shifted its weight in the sky. He couldn’t turn away from the thing. Neither could an Elvis, some snarled version who stood at his post outside the door of the building across the street. It was huge, everywhere in the sky and pulling in all of the glances and all of the conversations. Pulling at the tide. Pulling on everything. Getting larger and larger. Assuming all of the world into its pale lunar consciousness. Sucking the world dry.

  He watched as a monstrous ring of smoke left his mouth and shuddered boldly in the air.

  Think of the harelip snarl, roar.

  Think of the gold standard.

  Think of the aureate fanning rays from the great golden mane in the sky.

  Think of the sun as the lit cigarette of God.

  He watched as another ring rose upward, moonward, and remembered what the real Elvis once said:

  Sometimes in a crowd, I just feel all alone.

  * * *

  Section II

  It Ain’t Over till it’s Ovum

  2:00AM- The scarcely believable episode of Samantha Freeman’s oval cannonade triggered by Thomas Evans’s unfortunate familiarity with the Jurry Wringer Show.

  Thom rubbed her head. She curled into herself, twisting her pale back toward him, creating new folds along the curve of her stomach.

  –I’m sorry, Sammy. Are you…okay?

  He felt to be wading into an immeasurably deep pool of syrup.

  –Did I hurt your hand? Let me see.

  He moved his fingers to the base of her neck.

  –Don’t touch me.

  –Honey, I’m sorry. I just…

  He rubbed her back lightly, but too much, over and over, as if to prevent something from escaping her body.

  –Don’t touch me!

  She catapulted forward, depositing his hand on the pea green blanket—rather, duvet. Her legs swung across the hall toward the bathroom. Thom followed, but was stopped by the door as it cracked thunderously against the frame. He waited. Paced. Opened his mouth. Turned. Opened his mouth again, but nothing came out.

  Upon opening the refrigerator door, he revealed a tiny city of take-out containers, nearly one for each day of the week. He located the bottle of wine, meant for the party earlier that evening, resting in the door. He quickly plucked it out and went about the uncorking. Opening the utility drawer, he found the same inventory as only a few hours before. No corkscrews. The bottle clapped against the counter as he set it down.

  Thom pulled out a knife from the utensil drawer and tried to force it into the small, long mouth of the bottle. The cork didn’t flinch, only sucking in the tip of the knife. He pushed it again and again, stabbing at the cork and the green witchy glass lips of the bottle, again and again, until it yielded and gave. Finally, the cork crumbled into the bottle, and he pulled it to his own lips, straining the flotsam with his teeth.

  He was disappearing now. Cell by cell, he was slowly dissolving. A string of bubbles off a soapy wand. He took another pull, longer than the others, letting the wine fill and overflow his mouth, dribbling down the side of his lips like he’d been popped square on the mouth. He recalled the freckled blonde from earlier and shook his head. He opened his mouth wider than he ever dreamed possible and tilted the bottle back. Could it disappear too? He could have swallowed it whole like a great big blow. He could have stood on his tiptoes and swallowed the moon like an aspirin.

  But it was all too much. He sat quickly at the kitchen table gagging as he wheezed and rocked in his chair, spitting up cork crumbs and cool splashes of wine. As he coughed, violently trying to pull in air, he could see from above, from a fly’s view, in curling luniform kaleidoscope, a million versions all at once. Choking alone in every direction. Eyes half-open. Waiting for something to happen, for the door to open and Samantha to come out and see him gurgling in near-death, wheezing in and out in huge sucks and slashes and then her inevitable crippling revelation that he’d been out here choking alone.

  He began concocting a plan, intermittently splatting out small chuckles and coughs.

  The key would be:

  GO TO BED.

  SLEEP OFF MESS.

  BUY FLOW—ROSES TOMORROW.

  EXPLAIN THE JURRY WRINGER THING.

  The plan was in order. Thom rose up, jerking forward and then correcting to full stance, and pulled a roll of tape from the drawer. He slid a piece over the mouth of the bottle and wedged it back into the fridge, not realizing he had nearly emptied it.

  That’s right. The plan was in order.

  The be would key:

  GO TA BED.

  SLEEPOFF THE STRESS.

  BUY A FLOWER SHOP TOMORROW.

  SAY SOBER SORRY.

  EXPLAIN JURRY WRINGER THINGER OVER DINNER.

  The plan was in order. The plan was in order.

  Thom trudged back to the bedroom and began to untie his shoes. He closed his eyes and curled up in bed trying to coil into something smaller, just a hint of a thing; smaller would be easier to chew into sleep. But above his head the room tortured itself in dramatic contortions. He raised his head and the ceiling listed and wilted, drizzled down and was about to drip onto his chest. He had one shoe on and the other was… He opened his eyes and twirled, shoe untied, stood, baffled and zagging to the bathroom,      gone.

  The door didn’t move with his hands, but gave way against his heel.

  And there Samantha stood so quick and screamed as the blood rose and ruddied up her wide, glamorous face. There she stood on the earth, her needs remaining half-finished and hanging out of her tumescent rump.

  –What the fuck are you doing? Get out!

  Organs all turning white, coming back into himself, clearer and smaller like a matryoshka doll down to the dot, he yelped.

  –I’m sorry, I don’t know, I just…

  He backed out of the room slowly. She threw the door shut, but it flew back open. There was an unmistakable plop. Pennies in a wishing well. He stumbled back into the kitchen.

  She emerged. Blankfaced, flushed, and completely undressed below the waist.

  –Samantha, I’m sorry.

  He edged closer.

  –Leave me alone. Just leave me alone.

  She approached the refrigerator and opened the door

  –I wasn’t fielding, feeling so well.

  He reached for her, but she pushed him back using the door like a riot shield against the vagaries of a thousand pairs of legs and arms that form a crowd.

  –Listen to me Sa
m, I—

  Her hands appeared from behind the shield. She produced an egg in each and brought them up and down inside her coiled fists with weighty portent.

  –Thom, please, just go to bed. Just leave me the hell—

  He opened his mouth but found nothing to release.

  She shook again. She shook again and again.

  –Listen to me. Why you gotta act like that? I just wana talk to you about—

  He didn’t finish. An egg grazed his ear and snapped against the wall. Another one broke against his chest. Two more appeared in her hands as he fled. He grabbed his shirt and jacket off of the floor. Two hit the wall as he wove toward the door without his shoe. He pulled the knob. The door opened. He hid silently behind it, pausing before slowly peering out.

  –Sam, please.

  He reached for his shoe. With a snap, his ears rang and his forehead ached.

  Samantha stood in place and screamed. Other doors in the apartment building began to open, Thom could see, one after the other. Shirtless, unshaven men, and women with phony silk robes began to step into the hall. He pulled the door to his apartment shut.

  Quietly, he walked past a row of sleepy onlookers. Their mouths moved, but he couldn’t understand what came out. The eggs had stolen his hearing. Reaching the exit, he stopped and turned his body halfway inside and halfway outside the building. Every unit of the building had at least one occupant face-out, representing their household, their nightgreased expressions glistening marvelously from recent ecstasy or from fresh plunges into sleeves of short dreams.

  Right there, it seemed entirely possible that if Samantha ran out of eggs, she could reach into her body and pull out a sticky golden harvest of her own. She wouldn’t stop. It didn’t matter now. Thom stood still and screamed.

  –G’night, Sam!

  His voice registered as a whisper.

  In silence, Thom saw the bodies standing around twitch as two more eggs broke against the other side of the door. And then another one. And then another one. And then another one.

  Chapter Five

  Section I

  Floating In a Tin Can

  10:00PM- In which Samantha and Thomas take a cue from lovers past and try their hand at parking, only to encounter the astonishing and wildly inert presence of the fuzz.

  One more car passed through the intersection, and then the traffic light that dangled in front of them like a lone red shirt on a clothesline turned pale. The yellow dot appeared out of sequence, seemed alive and up to something. It had a funny bone. It swallowed the punch line. The yellow flicked back to red. The longer the dot bled yellow light onto the soft October night, the more detached it seemed from the twitching blips of inspiration it received across the wire, the rolling nourishment through an umbilical cord. Maybe it would urge two vehicles simultaneously through its maddening, widening corridor, just to see what would happen—the impulse to drop pennies from the Empire State Building. He held the car still with the brake as the red circle burned above.

  Thom slapped gum under his teeth. Samantha crossed and uncrossed her arms, burying her hands into her armpits inside the silent car. The smell of the party haunted the cabin—smoke and spearmint masking booze.

  Green light, Thom tapped the gas. Suddenly, a police car streaked through the intersection throwing globs of spinning light across the windshield. He nailed down the brakes, and they rocked forward in tandem. Thom’s right arm came up automatically and drove into her sprawling abdomen. He swung his head left, and then right, before double-checking the rocking green-going-yellow light overhead and sliding slyly underneath.

  –That was fucking close.

  –Yeah.

  These were the first words they’d exchanged since having left the party. It wasn’t until now, until talking to her, noticing what he was missing, that he felt the chill in the car, felt a great need to launch himself out of the vehicle and tumble toward safety.

  She hadn’t bothered to take off her headdress, and in the moonlight, the glitter along the edges of her face formed a series of glowing, circular, silver lines.

  Samantha: Brooding Princess of Heavenhewn Moonlight.

  Thom shifted in his seat away from her and rested his forehead momentarily on the night-chilled window pane. The glass felt thick and impossible to break.

  The right thing to say can never be said. The right thing to say would be, for example: Great party. That is the right thing to say. Always. But that can’t be said. Nothing will happen. It will be perceived as a kind of verbal grenade that falls out of the sky with the pin still attached. You’ll both cringe and stare, but nothing will actually happen.

  There are words that should never be spoken, a phrase like a defibrillator, more than anything else, because it will conduct life back into the lifeless, but it can break your ribs in the process.

  –Are you mad at me?

  Thom scratched his nose as he spoke.

  The lights from a parking lot momentarily overpowered the moon’s melting, lugubrious gawking in on the world. The car trickled over the road, catching the surrounding glowing lamps hanging over the series of roads he followed. Lights blued over the metal as they stretched across the hood and streaked a stream of lines over the length of the car. Another dangling traffic light lay before him.

  –No.

  The gas pedal descended.

  Another green light hung on the horizon. A decision. This was a decision. Rush forward and risk having to grind out a halt. Or approach naturally, as if the light weren’t there, and then lose time behind it.

  The light turned yellow. The pedal dropped.

  –Are you sure, because, just so you know, you won.

  –What? What does that mean?

  He accelerated through the fading intersection. Samantha turned sharply, her face pinched up hard into decrescendos and crescendos.

  –You won. The competition’s over. You are prettier than the moon.

  And that would be that. Primer laid. The pancake for the crowd. Let them eat. Anything beneath could be masked. It was a matter of letting it set now.

  Exaggerated a degree or two by the wine, Samantha shook her head back and forth in the passenger seat. She hadn’t exactly grown used to his follies, not exactly; you don’t always remove the rock in your shoe. Sometimes you just keep walking. She opened her purse and plunged in for a cigarette as her body sank deeper in the seat. The light struck red, but the car slipped through just about clean.

  *

  Nothing that had a food cart on board could land at the Maple County Airport. The setback buildings surrounding the hanger, holding windows and doors and dotted with lights, flickered intermittently in the distance. Over the windshield, yellow flashes starred and spread into the folds of the rippling darkness that seemed to coil around the car. Over and over, in careful repetition, a series of lights flashed out signals like the silent tongued language of bees enumerating their honeypots in swirling, show tune gestures. Thom and Samantha sat in the car sharing a cigarette on the gravel road that led to the hangar as grey smoke rose from a cracked window into the purple gauze of the sky.

  Sparkling and spinning, the configuration of lights rolling around the airstrip slowly rose, and the white lights mingled with those already winking in the air. And then the red flashes blinking every few seconds were the only foil to a plane’s invisibility in the sky; it seemed like every now and then one plane would emerge fully, shedding the skin of the glistening black sky behind, and carefully descend to the ground.

  –I’m listening to you now.

  –Well, now I don’t have anything to say.

  Samantha and Thom exhaled simultaneously, one with smoke and the other without. A plane rose from the earth, and one yearned for the ground. The two steel props seemed to meet in front of the moon, whirring with propellers and lights like bees buzzing around a swollen, glowing hive.

  –Let’s give up.

  The up was part of a long thread of laughter that Samantha spun from her mouth.
She had cut it off. She had called it off.

  –Well…okay!

  Thom instinctively raised his hand and found her neck and rubbed down to her back as though to steal the tension out of her, the way a magician might cozen a quarter.

  As he slid closer, he could smell her sour, salty breath, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered more than that single kiss. He kissed hard, kept his tongue involved like the whirling hand of a conductor who knows the entire symphony will collapse if the hand falters. His breath couldn’t be any better. Maybe even more fermented, and maybe she was conducting and he was playing.

  He kept his hands off her—at least off her fun parts—to avoid degrading the whole act. Retard the meaning. This was the first kiss. This was the velvet highway. He kissed back hard again, too hard, probably, making several passes on either side of her face.

  It was time though, wasn’t it? This holding pattern could only last so long. Stop on yellow or plow through red. The green light comes later. Thom cupped her breast, though not like real lovers. He was cupping it up, holding it up and not pulling it down, not trying to pull it off. He held it lightly, intentionally awkward, as though in the burgundy pretend of a building on fire, checking to see if a doorknob were hot or not. His left hand followed, and she began to rise, ascending up from her seat. Falling up, off of the ground, a tax on his lap, but well worth the weight.

  It was certainly time. And she began rocking above him, so slow and delicate at first. And then she kept on rocking harder and it was certainly time.

  Suddenly, a stiff white beam of light cut through the car.

  –Sir, roll down your window, please.

  Sam’s hand was wrapped around Thom. He could feel himself shrink away from the world, away from the man holding a flashlight in his face. Thom’s studly middlemost was nothing more now than a morsel of food caught between his back teeth now. It would never come out again…a tingling little mosquito bite between his legs.