Unwrap Your Candy

by Jesse Miller

  Mike is introduced, and his face appears in a box on the upper right corner of the screen like a stamp on a postcard. Brittany sits in the center of the stage.

  –All right, let’s bring out your fiancée, Mike!

  The crowd applauds eagerly. Mike took his chair and Brittany took his hand.

  –Baby, you know we been together two years now, and you know I love you.

  –Yeah.

  –But…

  He severed his hand from her clasp.

  –But, what?

  His eyes shifted cartoonishly and rhythmically, like those inky kitten clocks with hyperactive pendulum tails.

  –Baby, I been cheating on you for the last year-and-a-half.

  –What, what… For real? No. F**k that. F**k that.

  Mike’s shaking hand found his forehead. He stood and sat back down. Jurry permitted a moment of respite for all involved and then added:

  –That’s not all, is it Brittany?

  –Of course not, there are still ten minutes left!

  Samantha slid her hand under her panties, hiding her finger inside a moist thatch of hair and sprawled out over the empty bed. She could hear the faucet from the bathroom competing with the TV and turned up the volume.

  Turning back to Brittany, Mike prepared for his special delivery.

  –I also been, ah...

  –Doin’ what?

  –Remember how I told you I been working at the retirement home with old folks?

  Mike nodded.

  –Well actually, I been making a little extra there, too.

  The audience booed or cheered.

  –You been doin’ what?

  Mike stood from his chair and approached Brittany. The stagehands, fully alert, stood by on the pads of their feet.

  –You been f**king people for money! Old f**king? You f**king bitch.

  The audience basted her in a long droning bath of boos, drowning out her two-pack-a-day drawl. What a nasty surprise.

  &

  This one night his father’s face took on a green glow under the single fluorescent light in the kitchen. At first it looked like they were hugging. Her arms were around him, and his were around her, but they looked in the wrong places—too high almost—and then he seemed to try to move but couldn’t get past her. She tangled around him as he swung his body through the room, toward the door and back into the hallway. And then it was clear they weren’t hugging at all. Her hands were around his neck, and his around hers.

  He finally disentangled, pushing her away briefly, but she kept charging back at him. Swatting through the room with huge strokes, he brushed back her rigid frame, which appeared to be all elbows and angles. She bounced off the wall back toward him, and the whole room seemed to ride up and down, seemed to take on a bouncy castle whipsaw feel, and everything was jumpy up and down and side to side.

  And then her hand coiled into a piston and it shot from her side, gouging into his stomach, over and over. And then both hands. And he just stood there, taking it, deep into his guts forever, sinking into darkness and tar, the La Brea of his misery forever, like she’d never be able to pull her hands back out. But she raised her hands again as a huge crack flooded Thom’s ears, and the bouncing room went still. His mother curled into herself on the floor, pressing her hand against her lips. Raymond walked over and knelt down, but she started slapping her hands against the wood floor again and again; the wet splatting of palm on wood echoed through the house until he rose and backed away, until the front door nearly blew off the frame when Raymond left…

  Thom rose from the floor, his mouth was now an infinite and empty well that ached for water. He turned the faucet and scooped the wet inside as a few drops splashed onto his bare chest. He shivered and turned off the tap, heading back to bed.

  Jurry announced Brittany’s pimp, Maxine, and she made her way on stage. Brittany dropped her frank, lean tongue into her pimp’s mouth. Maxine might have been more attractive than Brittany if she wasn’t seventy-five years old. They licked each other for a moment before taking their chairs.

  Thom slowed his pace as he heard the strains from the next room. The sound grew louder, the way an ambulance howls as it moves across a huge piece of highway spinning off noise, summoning dust from the ground, growing into a familiar sound and then souring it as it passes. His heart drummed harder behind his breastbone.

  –Samantha.

  Thom’s voice was drowned out by half-deleted words as he walked into the bedroom.

  –F**k you. F**king stupid c**t. F**k you, you stupid ol’ bee-atch.

  –F**k off. You can kiss my fat f**king ass

  –Samantha!

  She hadn’t seen him approach. In the green glow of the TV her body shuddered with freight.

  –Turn the channel, please!

  She shook again at his strepitus timbre widening out the room as he climbed back in bed.

  –Why? I know it’s not Donahue, but...

  –Turn the fucking channel, NOW!

  –Why? Hang on, I just want to see…

  The audience bellowed:

  Jur-ry! Jur-ry! Jur-ry!

  Mike rose abruptly from his chair and pushed the two kissers apart. Visions of Moses. He clamped down on Maxine’s shoulders. His sinewy, six-foot frame, a succession of mechanical devices designed to repeat motion over and over until death, almost flung her to the floor. Five uniformed stagehands, stoned with muscles, rushed to restrain all three guests.

  Thom’s hand curled into a massive claw and tore the remote control from her. With his other, he shoved her to the edge of the bed.

  –Give me the goddamn remote, you stupid cow.

  Samantha’s face went completely white before turning translucent, and then it seemed to fall from her head like a broken pane of glass, leaving just the frame behind.

  She pulled away from him. Her knee rose and caught his groin as she shuffled on the bed.

  Maxine wagged her finger at Mike. It was wrinkled, nearly purple. A pistol belt buckle held up her black leather pants.

  The audience cried:

  Go Granny! Go Granny! Go Granny!

  Thom hobbled up, one hand holding his stomach, keeping it intact, the other hand—finger extended—stretched toward the remote.

  Then Mike’s lover appeared on stage screaming:

  –This is how I’m comfortable! I don’t judge you!

  Thom depressed the POWER button and entombed the diaper-clad man and everything in the room, in a black contraction of silence.

  Out of darkness Samantha emerged, pressing her wrist to her chest. Out of the thick, fuzzy silence, a small whimper poked through. On top of a musty duvet, she twitched like a newborn puppy looking for a teat, coming up short, and searching for another one.

  Chapter Six

  Section I

  Whale Weight on Sea White Harpoons

  11:00PM- Is the ear really the mouth to the soul? will Thom ever find the right interlude? does Brook Benton have the finest voice ever committed to the human legacy? will our pair ever luxuriate inside a long boozy corkscrew? we’ll wait and see what happens.

  One word does it. She stretched the sentence like chewing gum out of her mouth, but it was just one word that put the champagne bubbles in his blood. As she released her barrette, her hair blossomed into a red-brown bell, drenching her bare shoulders.

  –See you in there, lover.

  That was it. Lover. The door to the bathroom closed lightly as the heated water chattered through the pipes, filling the tub. Rushing to the drain, it softly shushed the apartment. He swished the water music back in his head as he opened the cupboard and plucked a shot glass from the shelf and dialed the bottle cap. The glowing amber curved into the glass. He rattled the countertop seconds later when the glass came back empty. Trading shifts, his eyelids lowered and the corners of his mouth rose.

  Thom pulled open the utility drawer and raked vigorously through its contents:

  One nine-volt battery in a two-battery package.
>
  A rubber band tangle: an omnicolored gyrating atom.

  One pair of scissors—sharp.

  One pair of scissors—dull (once used to cut pizza).

  Seventy-three 1∕100 cents total (four dimes, three nickels, eighteen pennies, and a coupon for Count Chocula breakfast cereal with a retail value of 1∕100 of a penny).

  One roll scotch tape.

  Two receipts for beer: Shlitz and something nice.

  Two receipts for beer plus feminine napkins.

  Three pens green, blue, and red (unchewed).

  Three black pens (chewed).

  Four pens (two blue, two black) without caps (slightly chewed).

  A keyless padlock.

  Glue: wood, paper, and Crazy.

  A winning scratch off lottery ticket.

  A losing lottery ticket.

  A red locket of hair.

  One pair of broken sunglasses.

  Blank post cards spanning thirty-two of the forty-eight contiguous United States of America

  Two telephone directories from, like, the ’60s or something.

  Thom sprang from the drawer. The music! But what would it be? He moved to a particle board cabinet and slid his finger across row after row of shinny jewel-boxes, as a pianist might to rub notes off of ivory keys. He slid a CD from the case and threw open the lid. He pried a disc from its bed but quickly refastened it and restored it to its cradle. Surely there must be something. Something… Something romantic, surely. Old and orchestral, requiring a bow and not a belch. No watered down Beatles songs, the same wet chords and patterns, and no titanic guitar solos. No octopodic drum-fills, please. He recalled a line his father once said:

  The ear is the mouth to the soul.

  Something that sounds better live. Something to bring the room to a glow. Something old.

  Thom stood fully upright momentarily, listening to the shower pipes ring out faint music in the distance. He opened the cabinet door and withdrew tube after tube of half-used wrapping paper. Beyond the tubes, he inched out one of the milk crates of vinyl his father had given him. With the comportment of a wine connoisseur, he inspected his private provision, thumbing through the stack, trying to marry the music to the upcoming moment as though pairing the proper wine to a meal that comes into full being over a series of courses.

  Buddy Holly

  Too hick-upy.

  The Everly Brothers

  Too Siamese, tantric.

  Bobby Vinton

  The narcotic of nostalgia smokes your last cigarette.

  Johnny Cash

  More balls than a gangbang. This was a private affair.

  Johnny Mathis

  Close, so close.

  He couldn’t hear the shower pipes rattling anymore. In a moment of pure mental departure, Thom pulled a record from the stack as though yanking the tablecloth from under a fully arranged dinner table. He stood stock-still, thinking seriously about unleashing what was before him. His father’s dark on-air lyricism ran from his tongue to his brain. He laughed a high-pitched squeak and felt his father there, on the tip of his tongue, about to put the needle to The Bard of All that is Base, The Troubadour of Titties, The Scop of Sleaze, hit ya between the knees, The Versifier, The Pudenda Pacifier, where’s the fire, The One the Only, you’ll never be lonely: Barry White.

  Thom gently parted the cardboard album cover and pulled the hard wax from the sheath. But there had been a mistake along the way… his father, perhaps, or some other lucky arrangement had trickled down to this one perfect moment. He stared incredulously at the album in his hands. Light from above was ladled into the thin grooves and bathed the discus. He wiped a little dust from the lid and offered the record to the platter, excusing the needle from its pedestal. The thin concentric furrows, the fingerprints of the platter, spun wildly into a wobbly black convulsion. The needle descended like a giraffe’s great bowing head to kiss the ground. It was that one about God’s finger touching Adam’s, and so, too, life was given; and out of a pregnant primal crack and haunting hellion hiss came a slow unraveling silence, and out of the slow, heart-clattering silence emerged a squall of tinny strings and trickling piano keys flooding into Thom’s ears.

  Someday, someway, you’ll realize you’ve been blind.

  A small smile feathered his face as the red Mercury label spun hypnotically below his eyes.

  Go on. Go on.

  Until you reach the end of the line.

  He curled back to kitchen, back to the utility drawer:

  One rusty “D” battery: a pickle barrel.

  A checker (red).

  A shoelace.

  Three pointless pencils (EXTREMELY CHEWED).

  A silver wristwatch without strap.

  Two booklets of matches (one matchless, the other half‐full).

  He discarded a booklet onto the floor trying to spark the candles. Another booklet of matches rose to the surface of the pile. Thom tore it open and paused. One bent, flaking match—and above the match was a series of numbers. His eyes slid over the surface of the train of numbers, and a thin smile trotted out across his face. He slowly waved the booklet through the air as though he had just missed winning a scratch‐off ticket by one number. He lifted his eyes to the ceiling, his chest filling with a kind of cold comfort, knowing life was not going to be stirred up, even minutely. Now he was done.

  It was her number.

  It was her number, written by his own hand the night they met. That was his seven with the cross at the neck, and his looped two from before he’d decided a looped two was too feminine. And then later, standing in front of her couch, there was that first moment when she put her wet tongue to his mouth and how her breath seemed so panicked and electric, like a bug zapper, and how little he knew of her, and how moist and cool and warm it was at the same time, like a toaster in the bathtub, it all was suspended in rosemist, locked in the velvet vault of moisture and sweat, locked inside her torso which seemed to swirl below her waist when he got close to her. He longed deeply from the edges of his toenails to the crest of his crown to sting and sweat inside that exact moment again.

  *

  It was a delicious scene out of some forgotten ’80s movie. The backside of a nude in the shower, her outline clinging to the opaque shower curtain. A camera angle from inside and steam covering all the fun parts.

  And then that glorious moment when she turns around.

  The Shower Scene

  –Hon?

  No, no, say Bobby. Or Scotty. Some all-American Johnny football name that ends in y and can wear a horizontally striped shirt in good conscience and pull off jeans and a sport coat. But the scene ended as if formatted for television, edited for content and savagely refigured for the screen. Samantha turned; the valve and the sudsy clack and clang of pipes gave way to the faint music of the phonograph. The curtain slid open before the steam emptied out. Pale blue droplets of water clung to her breasts, which appeared bigger than he ever recalled. His vision sharpened.

  It’s just a matter of time.

  Of course, Brook Benton was right. He’d always be right.

  –Could you hand me a towel?

  –Right-o.

  Thom watched as two long drops descended from below her red, showerglowing ears and rolled across her neck, between the aisle of her breasts; he tried to ignore the droplets rushing over the swell of her stomach that finally halted above her glistening patch of pubic hair.

  He had looked too low for too long and shot back his glance to her awaiting stare. She positioned the towel against her center, slightly above the full slip of her nethers, and attended to the drying outpress of her stomach.

  –Sorry.

  Samantha contained her words, but her head shook back and forth as though part of the drying procedure. Her skin had been pelted red by the exceptionally powerful shower—one of the few perks of the apartment. Thom extended his open palm.

  –Hey, I wanna show you something.

  He seized her hand and pulled her through. Heat hit
them before light. Dozens of tiny candles curled around the room like a smile notched into a pumpkin, and dancing teeth carved and stepped backward into the flesh of the darkness. A series of jittery shadows found their way onto Samantha’s shoulders and chest.

  –It’s all for you, lover.

  She didn’t say anything, just fell onto the bed and began coating her legs in lotion. He should have baited her with a little kiss. Kisses are like bridges—they freeze first.

  A cold surge of air picked up and rattled the windows. In agreement, the candles swayed but did not surrender to the efforts of the wind to dement the moment. Thom shivered and tooled around the room for a smoke. He lit a cigarette off one of the fidgeting candles. Blood didn’t seem to reach his toes. He dragged on his cigarette as deep as he could and passed it to Samantha’s extended hand. Drowsily, she brought it to her mouth as her other hand slid up and down her white, tusky legs, rubbing in the lotion.

  Thom sat down on the edge of the bed and folded his hands in his lap just as the moonlight poked in through the window. There, it was a giant pale octopus treading the sky, and in that moment, it seemed to be coming closer, to be dipping, dropping off the diving board in space, and swimming down through pushover velvet nothingness, gurgling a free‐fall million, and up the window. And then it would be all suctioncuppy spikes and strainerteethblood…

  He shivered as a moist tongue bathed his ear.

  Turning, he saw Samantha pull on her cigarette. She leaned back on the bed with her eyes closed, a bronzed nude bathed in candle light, no longer using the lotion on her legs.

  Chapter Seven