The trail cam could have snapped poorly focused shot after shot of this, but if it had been there to do that, then it also could have been lucky enough to catch snatches of Rudolfo and Gretta’s epic private battle from two days before.
At one point in it, far from the frame of the trail cam, had it been there, Rudolfo slings Gretta through the trunk of a tree and into the open mouth of a den or burrow of sorts, disturbing the lone occupant of that den or burrow.
Gretta comes to with, first, Rudolfo squatting across from her, cleaning his nails, and second, something nuzzling her backside.
She whips her foreleg around and extracts the bothersome creature, bites into its back to color herself with its blood so as to show Rudolfo what he has coming, but before she can spill that blood, he’s on her again, savaging her vulnerable belly.
She tosses the animal aside, loses herself to bloodlust once again.
Three desperate, unrecorded hours later, spent, Gretta latches her jaws on to the back of Rudolfo’s head and breathes her last, her great weight and last bite enough to keep Rudolfo there until the sun finds them both, burns them together.
Such is love.
Hours after that, though, the motion that would have activated the trail cam is that animal Gretta had only bitten, not killed. It comes to screaming, thrashing, writhing.
It’s infected with her blood, with her ferocity, with her hunger.
It cowboy-walked away, following its long nose.
It doesn’t blink, just flicks its long tongue ahead of it, and so this anteater with a werewolf heart waded into the roiling mass of vampiric ants, Rudolfo and Gretta’s love for each other raging on past their own deaths, and it doesn’t matter in the end whether there was a trail cam to document any of this or not. In three months, there aren’t any people left to watch it anyway, just an eternal battle covering the face of the globe, neither side winning but neither side quite losing either, and so life struggles on in its tooth-and-claw way—its pincer-and-tongue way—finding its own terrible balance.
The Mask, the Ride, the Bag
CHASE BURKE
The night I drove the Mask around this past spring was suffocating, the way humid nights can be in the South, and I was behind on my rent. But that name, “the Mask,” came later, with the bloggers and talking heads and their giddy speculation about his identity. At the time, to me, he was just another rider with a mediocre rating, the last in that night’s long line of drunk students. Nothing more than money, my small cut of the gig economy.
I pulled up to the curb outside the bar and flashed my lights. He was holding a large bag at his side, one of those insulated cooler bags meant for trips to warehouse stores. He was well dressed, but his clothes were dirty, like he’d been in a fight in a dive-bar bathroom. He swung the bag into the backseat, sliding in behind it. Something smelled bad. Too many fine fraternity brothers had thrown up in my car over the years, to the point that I kept barf bags in the backseat, like an airliner, so I knew the smell of puke on clothing. This was worse, sharper, like the acidic tinge of rotting oranges.
“Riverside Apartments?” I said. He had requested six stops; this was the first.
YES, he said.
I froze. I felt his voice in my head and around me, echoing, like I was listening to multiple speakers playing the same sound milliseconds apart.
GO, he said.
I drove.
I glanced at him in the rearview as I neared Riverside, the student-condo complex by the fake lake next to the football stadium. His hair hung in front of his downcast face like the ribbons of a torn curtain.
I parked near the entrance. He shifted and eased open the door.
WAIT.
He extended an arm between the front seats. He clutched a wad of crumpled bills in a hand smeared with grime. The car’s overhead light, dim as it was, took half the color out of everything.
YOU.
I hesitated. “But you’re already paying through the app.”
FOR YOU.
I had to pull the money from his half-clenched fist. He didn’t have any fingernails.
He stared at the rearview, his face hidden in shadow. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the shadow hid an empty space, blank skin, where eyes should be.
He stepped out of the car and leaned toward my window, gripping the roof where the door was open. I heard the creak of stressed plastic and metal, felt the car shift as he applied pressure.
WAIT.
He took more money from his bag, held it where I could see it in the parking-lot light. I nodded, and he walked toward Riverside. I understood.
He’d given me at least a hundred dollars. I stuffed it in one of the empty backseat barf bags, then wiped my shaking hands on a drive-thru napkin. Who was this person? I brought up his passenger profile, but it was blank. Before, there’d been a name, a face. Or had I imagined that? I tried to close the app and restart it, but my phone froze on the list of destinations. Five to go. I could do the math. I waited.
He returned after ten minutes, walking quickly, the bag over his shoulder bouncing against his leg with new weight. I wondered what he’d taken, and from whom. When he got in the car, the smell returned with him, stronger. He reached forward again, passing me another handful of money.
GO.
And that was how the next few hours went. I drove; I waited; I bagged damp and crumpled bills. I didn’t ask questions. His bag grew bigger, distended. Every time he reached forward from the backseat his hands were dirtier, the grime thicker.
And the smell—god, the smell. When I was a kid, my brother and I found a run-down shed in the woods behind our grandfather’s house, on someone else’s rural Florida land. My brother, two years older, dared me to go inside. I pushed the door, then gagged, stumbling backward. Light cut through the doorway across the still form of a dead dog, its eyes open and covered in flies.
By the last stop, an apartment complex outside town adjacent to the river, I was living, fully, in that memory.
He heaved the bag into the footwell when he returned. It bulged like the stomach of an engorged animal.
DONE.
I kept my hands on the steering wheel, my eyes forward.
LOOK.
His voice was like an arena of voices. He opened the bag, and I turned around.
At first I couldn’t tell what was inside. The contents, nearly colorless in the weak light, glistened. But then I recognized in the amorphous red the metal wiring of braces around a full set of teeth, and the picture pieced together, the parts filled out into wholes. I vomited onto the floor.
YOU SEE.
He closed the bag and dragged it out of the car. He tapped at my window, leaving a smear on the glass, until I rolled it down. My legs had cramped with fear. He held out more money. I could see his face for the first time: the haggard, pockmarked face of a young man like me. The bright ball of the streetlight reflected like white suns in his eyes. I took the cash.
He lifted the bag and swept his hair back in a single motion. When he looked at me again he was someone else, the face, impossibly, a reflection of my own. I was looking at myself. When he smiled, it was my smile, replaced with blackened teeth.
He walked down the street toward the river, dragging the bag behind him. He paused, once, to wave at me. His face had changed again.
The next day, the apartment murders were all over the news: six sleeping students pulled apart in different ways, their missing fingers, missing eyes, missing teeth. Most of a week went by with nothing but rampant speculation, stories running wild, before the police got two tips. Each said they saw a man carrying a bag through an apartment building’s long hallway, and when he looked at them they said he changed his face, like he was taking off a mask.
It’s been two months, and the summer is quiet. I needed to keep driving, but I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t even get in the car. I sold it a few weeks ago. The bag of cash sits untouched in a box in my closet. I try not to think about it, but I have to spend it
soon. I’m broke. I don’t leave my apartment much, and when I do, I avoid looking at people. I don’t want anyone to see me. I don’t want my face to be remembered, or recognized.
My brother called today, just to say hello. He asked how the driving life has been treating me, what with the slowdown of summer, the college town emptied of students who might never move back. Great, I said. Just great. It’s a good way, I told him, to fake a living.
Cedar Grove Rose
CANISIA LUBRIN
They say Rose was born in invisible space. And because of this Rose could bend anything to her will. If you come upon the thick blockades of unbothered bush that surround Here, her neighborhood formed by the momentary rage of a volcano that no one remembers, nowadays you would have a bitch of a time convincing anyone of Rose’s storied animalities. Here’s one field with its pickets on the boundary still drawing apart sunlight and moonlight like matchsticks in the dirt. The sinewed edge of Here was once the British Empire’s communications headquarters and its stronghold of slave catchers. And army whores during the Second World War. All the bays on the Atlantic side of Here are deep, just wide enough to keep ships unseen by enemy vessels. There has always been more here, of course. Rose knew this. But what nobody knows is that Rose made this invisible space of hers with all of its merciless things, that Rose turned a fugitive from There, a helloid by nearly any standard, into a Rose simply because she could.
Part of Rose’s magic was how she ran. She ran often, faster than she really could, churning the earth-lain dirt into wings, or some dragonfly nebula. Almost made me wish I never gave up that job at the butterfly conservatory of There. In Rose’s presence all of a pre-life leaped from its latency. She could bend time and man just the same. In a more just world, her unmarked grave would read: Here lies Haggard Rose, her life was the best and strangest alchemy.
Rose’s mama would tap a metal spoon on the tar drum outside her kitchen when she needed her to do something, like chase down a chicken for dinner. Rose heard this tapping from miles out and would take to beating her feet along the roadside, making it home in record time, each time. But I want to tell you something particular about Rose and a stranger, a fella who seemed to be connected with a spoon in a way nobody out There has ever seen. I won’t tell you how I know Rose and all this; we just don’t have the time for that now. But you’ve got to believe me because I own these words.
This field was a big place, even to a kid like Rose, and she treated it like her own yard. Everything Here was miles between trees and something somebody threw away. Rose chased one rooster for two hours but it seemed he got smart and learned all her moves. Then the fella I told you about earlier, standing on the corner, called out to Rose, said his name was Baron, and that Rose should leave that chicken alone and let it “forget-about-you for a minute.” Something was familiar about that fella all the same: his leathery face and the notebook he carried in a custom-made leather strap diagonal on his chest. His arms seemed attached a few inches too low from his shoulder blades. Then he pulled out a spoon from his back pocket and stuck it above his ear like a pencil. He was standing next to a big wooden tray with a small radio on it, and he had a pair of tap shoes strung over his bony shoulders.
“You’re not from Here,” Rose was saying to the fella.
“Well, if I’m Here, must be something here,” he answered, but looking at me.
“Must be what thing,” I cut in, knowing that there was nothing Rose ever came upon that did not suggest something else. Once when she fancied herself a musician, the pots and the pans, the potty with the broken lip, everything capable of making a hollow sound was an invitation to express her world-class musicianship. She even had a banana stand in for a violin one time and used her mama’s bread knife as a bow. Her body, always Cartesian, turned things inside out. Even though she did not have the benediction of the church as a performer of miracles, this is what everybody knew. I was interested in this stranger, how he ended up Here. The Second World War was over and I was hell-bent on mercy, not mercy really, but making sure to remind the brokers of mercy that they were not to actually claim its power. I had stopped a crowd from stoning a woman they thought was the wrong kind of whore. They ran me out of that town. I don’t mind. I remember a time when Rose would have been hanged and burned for the things she can do, but that bygone era was one she herself willed out of existence. It has nothing to do with how many nails I have pulled out of my palms and feet.
So that fella, he had big crisscrossed teeth and a bad spotty beard, like Miss Mona’s mangy dog. And when he smiled he looked deep into you and you knew things were about to go all green, that he saw things in you that you were afraid of just because you didn’t know them yet. Things he had done, a horrible chronicle. Still, his little square mustache must have been the worst thing about him. That and how he looked to have leather skin, like it was grown in a lab to look dark and stay hard.
The fella had a dog with him. The dog had a crescent scar on its face like it had collided with a horse.
“Hey, kid,” he said, “never mind what I am. Just say a word. Anything that a-come to mind.”
Then Rose looked at him strange like he was stupid and Rose was smart, and the man said again, “Go on, now.”
“Spoon,” Rose said, stepping back. I know, but assume Rose didn’t know what she was up to.
The man raised his arms slowly and arched himself into the shape of a goddamn spoon.
“Go on, another. Like . . . A color this time.” The fella hacked through a laugh.
“Red,” Rose said, wanting the man to melt this time.
The fella opened his arms like they were wings and brought his head down to his crotch. Then he twisted and turned himself until his head was sticking out from the middle of his body, now curved like a helix. He actually looked like a rose. It was disgusting, of course. Rose smiled. The fella looked horrified.
“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine . . . I’m coming!” he yelled, seemingly out of his own sense. The fella’s voice was bubbly and jazzy in that kind of rusty way. I thought he was talking to me but he jumped, skipped a high skip over to the side, and started shuffling his feet and tapping and swirling his hand around his chest and his head and smiling. Then the dog jumped up on the table and pressed his little paw on the play button and on came some jazz. Some Coltrane. It must have been “Venus” but fifteen years too soon. And he did this counting and dancing for a time and then asked Rose to join him.
Well, Rose looked as though she didn’t want anyone seeing her doing things with this lunatic but she broke off two sticks from the hibiscus plant on the left and started whipping the air, playing air drums. All the loud noises you wouldn’t believe. It was, after all, that one night in 1938 that Rose’s mama found her reputation as a Seeyer for being one of those women that warned the world about the end of the war. She was prone to happiness and unrepentant. “Take your shadow out and bury it if you won’t let me do my work,” she had told the local priest. Yet everyone criticized Rose roaming Here like she owned Here, making of her years some kind of failed psalmody, forgetting her mother’s diatribe against the priest. But remember now that Rose was born in invisible space.
“Hey, mister!” Rose shouted through the commotion she had no doubt created. But he didn’t seem to care to break from all his ticking about to look back at the girl. By a flash of sun off three brass teeth in the front of the fella’s mouth, I had to look away quickly. In that brief time, I gleaned his hand. Its three and a half fingers. Rose’s mama had told about the men who would come with the three and a half fingers and the notebooks filled with formulas for poisons and bombs and all manner of hell on earth. She had told of the submarines nestled in the Caribbean Sea and their torpedoes.
Rose shouted again, “Hey, mister!”
He turned back this time, weary as I’d ever seen a man who knew he had been eclipsed into exile.
#MOTHERMAYHEM
JEI D. MARCADE
Elodie
Kang was in the shower when the skin of her right hand sloughed off.
She thought at first that she’d dropped her washcloth. One moment, she was working conditioner into her hair, and the next, she heard a wet slap against the bottom of the tub.
Elodie squinted at the bare bones that protruded from the smooth nub of her wrist. There was no pain. Though they had been stripped of flesh and muscle, the ends of each phalange remained as snugly joined as ever, and curled obediently when she clenched her fist.
“Eomma,” she shouted. Panic lent a sharp edge to her voice.
A rush of footsteps on the stairs. Elodie’s mother barreled into the bathroom. She had been in the middle of lunch. Belatedly, Elodie grabbed for the towel and wrapped it around herself without stepping from under the showerhead.
“What? What happened?” Mrs. Kang cried in Korean. Her eyes flew to Elodie’s hand, and the alarm faded from her features. “Finally. Thank God. Why are you just standing there? Turn off the water. Are you just going to let that clog the drain?”
Mrs. Kang reached past her daughter to scoop the soggy clump of subcutaneous tissue from the bottom of the tub with her chopsticks.
Elodie recoiled. “Eomma! That’s so gross!”
Her mother made a dismissive sound as she slung it into the trash. “It’s just skin. Now finish up and get dressed. I want to take pictures of your new hand to show Halmeoni.”
Elodie had trouble sleeping. Not just because she had to get used to her bones snagging on the bedsheets or tangling in her hair.
The world made too much noise. Her bedroom walls and window panes might as well have been paper. Every slam of a car door or bark of a neighbor’s dog sparked against her nerves.
Tiny Nightmares Page 11