Unwrap Your Candy

by Jesse Miller

  –Well nobody’s asked for one of those in ages.

  A rimple formed along her brow as she slid her eyes across the shelving below the counter.

  –One day they’re gonna stop making these. It’s all going to be floating over us like the cartoon bubbles. And how many, Dear? The roses that is?

  Thom pulled up his wallet and split the leather expecting to see something more. He dropped all he had onto the counter.

  –Whatever this will get me.

  She chuckled and eased the dusty, coffee-ringed phonebook across the countertop before disappearing into the cooler as Thom slid his finger down the Ps with one hand and pointed to the fattest roses he saw with the other.

  *

  Each time Thom neared the house he froze and coasted forward while staring at the door in front. Eventually his foot would hit the gas, and he’d coil around the block one more time. Self-conscious, he would swivel his head, side to side, pretending to be lost when he turned back on the proper street and slowed down in front of the house with the colossal red door like a fresh gash among all the other white houses.

  He could leave it in the mailbox. Open the thing up and just slide it in. Nothing would be lost, really. It was still a nice thing to do. But it could just sit there, too, and the gesture becomes jest. In the shadows, desiccating silently, head hung in a tin tomb while all of the other affairs unfolded and collapsed. And then he might find it days or weeks later, black and web-wrapped, under the endless backlog of credit card applications and fanning sale fliers. And then something would be lost.

  Signaled. Turned. Engine killed.

  A giant could walk through the door with his head held high. Up close, strips of red peeled away from the red painted wood but still clung to the door like a thousand tiny price tags. In place of a peephole, a stained glass window shaped like a sun hung at eyelevel; the sun appeared to be staring at the dead center of Thom’s forehead, the way people feign eye contact with important strangers. He crumpled his hand into a fist and knocked on the door, below the window, where the sun’s heart would have been, thinking this a kind of special calling.

  He knocked again as a light breeze slid through a line of birds threading the sky. Bushes on either side of the house wiggled their tips with a supple, pianist’s grace, but the house remained still. He opened his coat with resolve and tugged out one long red rose. There. He rested it against the door on the WELCOME mat. He would see it here. Turned and leaving, Thom felt his heart decelerate to a slow trickle. But before he was out of earshot he heard a tapping grow louder, a telegraph along the floorboards of the house. The door opened, and the late, wet, autumn sun spilled over his face and neck as he came out onto the porch, standing there, huge and skeletal, all around himself in angles and furrows like rusting scaffolding. His creased fingers clutched an adjustable metal cane. Beyond the labyrinthian lines of his brow, beyond the thin, wire-rimmed glasses, beyond the black bags sagging like hammocks below his irises, his eyes glowed pink like a rabbit’s.

  Thom plucked the rose from the ground and stood up as tall as he could, trying to make eye contact but squirrely, every which way with the eyes, as though about to begin a blind date.

  –Hi there. Are you…

  He couldn’t remember his first name from the paper. Arnold? Aaron was it?

  –Are you, Mr. Polly?

  His head shook sedately.

  –I saw in the paper… I know you don’t have calling hours, but…I work…I worked…

  He nodded again.

  –I just wanted to say that I’m sorry, sir. I hope you don’t think I’m being too intrusive, but, I knew Esther from work. I don’t even…

  As all the oils and the electric thumbtack-laced sweat leached out of his glands and into his pores, he felt like he was leaking down the drain.

  –And I wanted you to know we have something in common. My father, yesterday, too. Four years ago to the day. It makes me connected, feel… connected, kind of, ah… I guess I can relate. Do you know what I mean?

  The wrinkles that etched into his brow deepened as if some invisible driver had tugged on the folded reins of his face. Spindly, craning over Thom, he still didn’t say a word.

  –I know this isn’t much, but I just thought you might like this small token.

  He extended the rose, blossom first, to Mr. Polly, who raised a slender arm and what appeared to be a tiny microphone that dangled from a loop around his wrist.

  Thom felt his hands leave the rose and rise upward, as though connected to strings high above the crest of the doorway and then slide across his bony, time-tortured back to gently tap his shoulder blades. The other hand followed naturally, magnetically. Inside the embrace, he felt like a piñata before you boof it with candy; delineated, but unmistakably hollow.

  And for a second, it was rich, rising and falling on the porch.

  Then his body shrunk inside Thom’s reach. He could almost feel his ancient back snap like a fortune cookie. To just feel him limp in his arms. Still warm. And then they were together. Then the crumble to the ground, bone over arid bone, like a cartwheel. It was all too much squirming. Thom opened his arms. Mr. Polly shook, searching for balance as Thom steadied his elbow.

  –I’m sorry, I just thought…

  The old man bounced his cane like a pogo stick. Teardrops swung off of the tails of his eyes. More sweat pooled below Thom’s armpits.

  –I just didn’t want you to feel like you were alone. Do you understand?

  Mr. Polly’s hands stopped shaking. He reached forward and squeezed the rose back between Thom’s fingers. A metallic device coiled around his wrist. He slid it into his palm and nuzzled it against his throat and then his neck droned in the mutilating argot of electric clippers.

  –FIVE YEARS AGO, SHE STARTED PUTTING THE WASH IN THE DRYER FIRST. DO YOU SEE?

  –Uh…

  –AND THEN ONE TUESDAY FOR DINNER WE HAD RAW EGGS AND HAMBURG PATTIES IN THE SHAPE OF TRIANGLES… DO YOU SEE? SO, I TOOK THAT OVER.

  Thom rolled the rose stem between his forefinger and thumb.

  –AND THEN, OCCASIONALLY, SHE STARTED BRUSHING HER TEETH WITH HER HAIR BRUSH… SO, I TOOK THAT OVER, TOO.

  –Ah…

  –AND THEN, IT WAS THE SCISSORS. YEARS OF IT. DRAWERS FILLED WITH THEM. WHY WOULD I OPEN THOSE DRAWERS?

  –Yeah… They were everywhere on her desk at—

  –AND THIS SPRING SHE COULDN’T GET OUT OF THE TUB. SO, SHE SAT THERE FOR TWO HOURS. SHIVERING TILL SHE GOT PNEUMONIA IN HER CHEST. DO YOU KNOW WHY?

  –I don’t…

  –SHE JUST FORGOT MY NAME AND NEVER GOT IT BACK. SHE COULDN’T RECALL. DO YOU SEE? DO YOU SEE? SOME GUY RUNS A RED, BUT I’VE BEEN ALONE FOR YEARS NOW.

  At that moment, through the horrible din of mind and machine, his name came back to him.

  –I know how you feel, Edwin.

  All the air in Edwin’s body drained out in one wheezy breath. Thom leaned in closer, but quickly retracted.

  –ARE YOU MARRIED?

  –No, but I know…

  –ARE YOU MARRIED?

  –No.

  –HAVE YOU EVER LIVED WITH A WOMAN FOR FORTY YEARS? DO YOU KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE TO HAVE YOUR WIFE’S BRAIN EATEN… EATEN HOLES IN IT BY A BUNCH OF MOTHS?

  –What?

  –HAVE YOU EVER SEEN HER LOOK AT YOU AFTER THOSE YEARS, AND THEN HAD TO LISTEN TO HER SAY…

  Edwin dropped his fist. A ring around each eye glittered like chainmail in the sun.

  He pushed his fist back to his neck.

  –W-H-A-T’S Y-O-U-R N-A-M-E?

  On the axis of his cane he turned, and the colossal red door closed behind him. Only the soft tapping could be heard as he picked away, step by step, from the door.

  Thom watched the door from his car, sliding the key inside the ignition without looking, and stirred up the engine. Like a circus elephant tethered to a mere stake in the ground, he could go. One good piece of footwork, and he’d be gone. He kept watching the door. Backstage in his b
rain, there was a busy cast waiting to pass through the curtain, and it was easy to let them. He conjured a curvy black sedan with out-of-state plates pulled into Edwin’s drive. Out stepped a man who emptied the car of two children before a woman with big eyes joined them on the march to the porch. He watched while the family waited, until the door finally opened. They appeared huge there, tucked under the doorframe. Edwin’s arms wrapped around the man’s body. A few broken rose petals took to the air and clung weightlessly, wobbling around, encircling their bodies in a gust of vermillion butterflies. Thom finally moved the car, circled around the street a few more times and then slipped into idle by the curb, hoping to see the real family approach. But each time around the block the red door remained closed, and the porch was still empty.

  Driving away he wondered about all of those scissors; hundreds of pairs of scissors snapped inside his head, cutting things free over and over with the great snake hiss of the blade. The car seemed to drive itself. The blades kept hissing in his head, cutting more memories loose. He looked at his hands on the steering wheel, unable to remain still.

  * * *

  Section III

  Taxes

  The start of a lush remembrance in which our dear Thomas Evans and his father, Raymond Evans, visit a lepidopteraium on a soft october day.

  Still waiting for the check, they didn’t speak. They had met in the morning for breakfast, ordered big, but neither touched their plates much. When the waitress finally delivered the check, held between surprisingly plump knuckles along her point and mid fingers, Raymond smothered it with his hands immediately. He squeezed hard, craned around and fisted the slip into a cone as he pulled it from the table. As he did, his hands shook so much that his watch unbuckled and completely slid off his wrist. He pulled the bill closer to his face and pretended nothing had happened.

  –Pricey omelet.

  Thom picked up the watch and reunited it with his father’s wrist. His hands were larger than Thom’s, so large that he could barely cover even one of them with both of his own. It was good to see it, his fingers rattling—a fly crashing against a lampshade, a flesh and bone telegraph chattering out a message. It was something to bob your head to.

  Raymond and Thom left the restaurant and walked the two blocks back to the car without speaking. Raymond was always either mono or stereo. Today it was mono.

  –How are you feeling?

  –I feel…fine.

  –So, how long’s it been?

  Thom kept walking, never altering the interval between steps, and unlocked and opened the passenger door on his curl around the car. His rapid stride abruptly ended as he opened the driver’s side door, where he filed himself inside the car practically upright. He dialed up the radio—lodged the volume deep in the mid-fifties—which filled the rest of the ride over.

  *

  All of the patrons stood in an odd line to enter, clumped out here and there in teetering spots, klathcy ellipses, and then slipped one by one past the cashier and into the next room. Hanging black plastic strips, like huge languid eyelashes, rubbed each visitor as they passed through into the garden. Two strips clung momentarily to Thom as he passed, peeled off his chest slowly, then swung backward to lap at the next visitor.

  It took a moment for the eyes to adjust. Inside, the room opened on to massive verdant trees, looming out huge, green, nearly blood-red leaves; most were fat like rowboats and floated over the curves of the ceiling. Waves of sunlight swam overhead through the thinner palms, these snakey malachite‐looking feathers in float, pitching white, nearly blue light onto the terra cotta path that curved over the floor. A geodesic dome cupped it all together, sitting like an enormous glass bowl over the entire garden, holding it all in. Every person inside seemed to be standing perfectly still, hesitating to smile. Not a single breath was drawn.

  Thom took naturally to the unspoken edict of the room, stopped his feet and tried to hold onto his breath. He turned back to Raymond, the only one moving, whose hands trembled against the frozen statuary that sprawled through the court and the coiling stone footpath, embryo-tight in spots, and in others unfurling wildly like some unfamiliar signature curling across the Deceleration of Independence. The whole snarl of movement forward over the world had stopped for all the other visitors, but for Raymond, life itched on defiantly, beginning at the great chamber of his chest then shivering out in the rounds of popping blood cells burning through his whole body, then down the fire tube barrels of his arms and out the clubbed tips of his thick fingers.

  Some slight thing, a leaf it seemed, caught above the ground, looped end over end as the rest of the visitors watched. And then suddenly it was clear why everyone was so still. It was all to the right of the ellipses, the after. A silent woman had spilled wine, ancient wine, the scorching lavender wine of a Caesar on her blouse. A stock-still man’s arm had rows of pinks and blues and was made entirely out of button candy. A frozen child’s crown, the soft spot that hadn’t closed, was endorsed by two widening wedges of purple blood. A stiff grey-haired woman had dotted her starched white slacks with pale, steamy butterpiss. Wordless. Motionless. All dead air. They weren’t really there anymore. Everyone held the same emerging smile and look of incredulity on their faces. For a moment, they were all gone.

  For a moment they were all just hushed subjects in a court…the hissing vortex before the next record begins. And then it all turned together and greyed. It’s the twisting, whirring tinnitus of the heart. Imagine the fabled Kansas farmhouse rewound on a massive turntable and spit back up into the sky…and it all strips the paint and funnels back to black and white. The people slippered away into their clothes, just suits, it’s all black suits now. It’s taxes, just tuxes now, floating tuxedos in a great flattening dissolve through the garden. And it was all for them, the whole room, the world, all of it was for the untold butterflies, bowtie after bowtie after bowtie, to clasp onto in elegant positions around the enormous room.

  Raymond’s shaking hand rose and twitched into the air, a fledgling wing, and he held it above the ground as if his finger were caught in an electrical socket. Palm open, he shook against the static backdrop. His fingers blurred and became one object. One small Duke of Burgundy materialized and braided a dizzying path through the air. As it fluttered, vacillating between two poles, back and forth, back and forth, it looked as if its body had been spliced into the frame, skipping a couple here, there, as it passed in apoplectic fits, and hovered then over his quivering sunward palm. Thom crafted a mountain range formed of small thoughts, mulling over the frozen muller, too, and could read the message that shook from his father’s hand.

  He watched the pair, Raymond’s shaking hand and the trembling butterfly. He couldn’t tell the difference, if there really was one, if the thing dropped or his father’s fingers rose. Without differentiating, believing, the butterfly rested on the tips of his fingers and posed demurely like a masthead. For a long while, neither creature moved. His father leaned into Thom’s ear. Closer—slowly. The Duke of Burgundy’s wings bowed before the silent entirety of the garden.

  –Almost a week. Thom nodded his head in agreement, carefully bobbing his head, noticing just now the ten or more butterflies that had landed along his arms and body.

  The Duke’s wings hung low, perpendicular, imperceptibly above his motionless palm, lightly fanning the air. Without thinking, Raymond could have crinkled it into a ball or pulled the wings from the fuselage. But he held it there, still. Two weightless passengers. Quiet. Free.

  * * *

  Section IV

  Repeat

  A bit later, it seems- A short, violent exchange between our gallant hero and the unnerving sensualists of a long lorn 7-Eleven.

  FREE MEDIUM COFFEE WITH EVERY FILL UP

  BISHWATER FAMILY OF BEERS - 30 PACK $15.99

  ATM INSIDE

  He didn’t remember turning into the parking lot or even wanting to stop. Curled around the steering wheel, his hands trembled slightly, flexing open and then sn
apping shut with a swift reflexive tortility as though pulled by a team of imaginary horses. He couldn’t, it was… he couldn’t remember where he had just come from. Ed…win’s, of course. Another ad layered on dull glass before him read:

  MUSTANG CIGARETTES - BUY 2 GET 1 FREE

  That’s the stuff. He opened his car door and closed it, forgetting about the car windows, which gaped open into the blackness of the car like caves. From their spot leaning on a blown out payphone, two young boys looked deep into the blackness. A severed phone cord dangled from the receiver like a long silver umbilical cord. One boy’s arm was entirely down his pants handling his crotch while a cigarette burned boldly in his free hand. He took a drag and exhaled a request for Thom. He couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven.

  –Hey man, you wanna do me a fuckin’ favor?

  Thom walked by them, trying not to notice or be noticed. He didn’t say a word, walking past the uneven pyramid of windshield fluid and passing the ICE machine standing huge and half‐filled with neat cold stacks, placeholding a bouncer’s cool, impersonal gaze by the door.

  Automatic doors opened and closed.

  A motion sensor clued a buzzer to puff a loud beep, which clued the clerk to slide his borrowed copy of Slits back under the counter. Barriers are only so effective. Sometimes things just leak through, even if you hold them back.

  –Pack a Mustangs, please.

  Thom bounced his gaze off the floor. There was always a twinge of guilt in buying cigarettes, like pinching the rolls of fat around your stomach before biting into a cupcake.

  –Are these for those kids outside?

  He raised his eyes to meet the clerk’s incontrovertibly shaking head. That voice.

  –No, they’re for me and my lungs.

  The clerk’s huge face held a bristly black beard that thinned slightly around his chin. As it drifted toward his neck, it shrank in accordance with his body. There seemed to be too much material stuffed into his arms, and bony knobs poked out from his elbows and wrists. His fingernails were all bitten down to jagged stubs. He was all dowel arms, bulldoggedly propped up behind the counter, clamped on tight with a blue nametag and topped with a store hat. He had the head of a man, the body of an adolescent, and a fresh black eye.