Sinners Circle

by Sims, Karina

  Sophie squeezes my arm. “Pass me my dad.”

  I bend down, grab a handful of photographs out of a brittle paper bag and hand them to Sophie. She shuffles through a few then tosses them onto the porch. Flames licking through floor boards, burning up right in front of us. Bright orange conflagration pouring through second story laundry vents, blue heat melting framed stained glass mounted neatly inside round gable decorative windows. The photographs I handed to Sophie, they’re swallowed instantly. All those moments, the ones some distant relative or close family member felt were meaningful, that meant enough to uncap a lens for, the fishing trip back when mullets were cool, the new truck, ice skating with grandma before she needed pelvic surgery, all those moments, they’re floating skyward now, burned into tiny bits of ash, dissolving into nothing before they can even touch the ground.

  “My brother. Pass me my brother.” My hand slips inside the paper bag. Peewee hockey games, Christmas morning, awkward squats on the Easter Bunny’s lap, a three year old with his elbows dripping with ice cream screaming his head off at Disneyland, they all come out of the wilting paper. When Sophie yanks them away from me, the class photos, the piano lessons, the kids eating snowballs and kicking at each others’ frozen forts, they slit open tiny stretches of skin in between my fingers.

  I’m sucking my knuckle, my tongue twisting those dry strings of spit that cling and won’t let go of the roof of my mouth, dragging braids of goo over skin coated in soot and ash while Sophie throws photographs of her brother into the air. We stand in silence until Sophie muffles a cry, covers her eyes with blackened fingers as the photos flutter into the flames. She falls backwards onto the grass, ass first. Her head tilting back, she looks up at the sky. I sit down beside her, curl my fingers through the long strands of strawberry blonde hair laying flat against her pique knit jacket. If it wasn’t for the massive black clouds of smoke billowing above our heads, we could see all the stars. She’s staring up, lips moving but all the pops and cracks of the wood burning swallow every sound around us. I nod when her mouth stops moving, staring into the fire.

  Sophie sighs and leans on my shoulder. Her words coming in waves, in busted fragments when the noise of the house falling apart doesn’t overpower them. “Amanda, I just...so empty I feel...crazy.” I just keep nodding, using my forehead to blink and kiss the crown of her hair as the splintering planks on the porch pop without rhythm. She shivers against my shoulder and when I reach my arm around to stroke her cheek, I feel a trail of tears winding down from her eyes, rolling past her nose, disappearing through the part in her lips.

  I wind a thin strand of her hair between two of my fingers, lean in and tickle my mouth with it. “You’re so beautiful when you’re falling apart.”

  She turns to me her mouth forming a ‘what?’, but I don’t hear anything, just the walls inside the house collapsing through the floor.

  All around us are acres of grass seed and dirt pounded flat. You could scream bloody murder and nobody could hear you. You’re too far away, the fire is too loud. I poured a good ten gallons of gas in the place before Sophie showed up. Before Sophie showed up, I cut the phone cords and tossed the “SOLD” sign inside the garage. When Sophie got here all the lights were out because before Sophie showed up I pulled all the fuses from the breaker box in the basement.

  I lean in close enough so my lips are giving little kisses every time they move against her ear. “I love you.”

  She looks at me with those big green eyes of hers, they well with tears and spill down cheeks smooth as dirty glass. “Hun, I’ve been saving up...”

  I put a strand of her hair to my cheek as she nods a little toward the house. “I’ve been saving for years. For this place. Two jobs...”

  A big knot in the floor boards pops, crackling. She wipes her tears, dragging a sleeve across her face, the ash on the back of her hand smearing black muck across her cheek. “I just hate it so much. My dad, he was such a...” More walls are crashing down, windows cracking, breaking as flames punch through the panes, sprinkling the dirt lawn with shards of black glass. “...my sister too. Both of them, we couldn’t tell anybody. And my mom, well, my mom...” She wipes wads of snot and tears into the crook of her arm. “She knew what he was doing. She knew why we were really crying after bath time. But she didn’t do anything about it. She didn’t care...When we were teenagers and my sisters asked her about boys and stuff, she looked at us all cold like and said, ‘What do you need me to tell you? You already know what to do.’ I just...I swore one day, I’d come and I’d... I’d burn this house down.”

  She snuggles into my shoulder and I know she’s got her eyes closed because I can feel her eyelashes flutter shut against my neck. She whispers and this time I can hear her, “I thought for sure this place would be bought up. I was so afraid that it would be taken away from me before I got a chance.”

  Sophie reaches past me to the paper bag, looks inside pulls out a picture of her dad flexing his arms in front of a monster truck. “When he died two years ago, none of us went. My brother, yeah, but mom being gone and all, it was just Devon and a couple of dad’s work buddies at the funeral.” She flicks the picture onto the porch. The monster truck, it curls up and dies just like all the little ballerinas. “He didn’t even leave us anything.”

  I nod. “Oh.”

  She lays back on my shoulder. “Yeah.”

  “Who paid for the funeral then?”

  “The state I think.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah, they cremated him.”

  “What did they do with his ashes?”

  I feel her shrug, her eyelashes flicking shut. “I don’t know.”

  It takes ten seconds to come fully awake, thirteen to lose over a pint of blood once the Carotid artery has been severed, and thirty seconds for a full grown man to bleed out, leaving plenty of time to get down the hall and slip into the bedroom with the bunk beds cradling thing one and thing two.

  Sophie’s eyelashes flip open, tickling my neck. I smile and turn to kiss her. “I didn’t want you to have to wait to buy this place. Or have some jerk move in with his family, you’d never get it then.”

  She holds up my hand, kisses my knuckles and points off into the distance. “I wonder why there’s all those machines over there.” There’s all kinds of construction equipment parked neatly by a pile of masonry stones.

  I shrug and try cracking my neck again, “I’m not sure. Fixing the place up maybe?”

  Sophie yawns and puts her head back on my shoulder.

  We just sit there on the patch of grass, watching the blaze consume the frame of the house, bending it down to nothing more than a sagging structure of soot and embers. I keep my eyes closed, staring into the red, swallowing little clouds of smoke and feeling Sophie blink against my neck. After a couple minutes she stands up, crunching the empty paper bag inside both palms, and throws it underhand onto the charred porch. I stretch my legs a bit as she holds out a hand, “Come on hun, we gotta get going before the construction people come by or someone sees this and calls the cops or something.”

  I loop my fingers through hers, kiss her cheek and wave some smoke out of my eyes as we walk away from the searing light, into the dark. She runs a hand through my hair, a ringed finger snagging a tangle when her fingertips pass through the ends at my shoulders. “Your hair is so black, Amanda...” She laughs and slaps my butt. “Hun, if I didn’t know you and saw you out here at night, I’d think you were a ghost. We should go to a tanning place sometime.”

  I laugh, tickle her waist and smack her butt back. “Thanks.”

  As we walk away into the dark, the light slowly receding behind us, fading dimmer and dimmer on our backs I wonder if the plastic jerry cans I left in the living room will melt entirely. I’m wondering if it was a good idea to not leave them on the rug, but on the wooden floor by the bookshelves. I wonder how far the dad got from his bed, I picture him staggering to the light switch and wish I could have seen the total look of horror on
his face when he realized the power was out, I wonder if he could hear me going into his sons’ room. I laugh a little when I think of him turning to pick up a phone, trying to call nine-one-one but hearing no dial tone just before going into the Big Black and falling face first onto the carpet. What a way to die.

  “What’s so funny?” Sophie smiles into my eyes.

  “Oh I was just thinking about what a jerk dad’s are.”

  She giggles a little and kisses my cheek. “I don’t need that kind of pain in my life anymore. I don’t even want to think about it. He was so horrible. But now, now I have you. And I know you could never hurt me. You could never hurt anyone like he could.”

  Before I was even out the door, when I saw Sophie come jogging down the path to the house, the place was already engulfed in flames. If she hadn’t been running towards me, the sound of her feet pounding on the hard dirt, she would have heard the screams. She would have heard the sound of those little boys burning apart in their beds just screeching and screeching wrapped inside flaming quilts and oiled rope. But I closed the door to that burning house and stepped off the porch and wrapped my arms around her and made sure that paper bag of hers was crinkling in her ears when I held her close and kissed her.

  Now, walking down this dark road, stars blazing overhead, Sophie kisses my cheek again and blushes when she tells me, “You’re a really beautiful person, Amanda.”

  XXIX

  I’m closing. I’m counting the coins and bills, I’m writing down the numbers and dividing the figures of the amount of cash in the till. Somewhere between the digits and their decimals something rings. I look up from the sheet of paper and towards the direction the sound is coming from. It’s the telephone in Harry’s empty office.

  I just sit there staring at a wall of pornography, then I drop the pencil and follow the noise. I stand outside his door and after the fifth ring I try the knob. The door is unlocked. I watch the little red light on the phone turn on while the machine takes the message in silence. The waste bin, it’s been emptied. All that’s in there now are a few small balls of black tape rolled into BBs.

  I sit down in his wasted looking swivel chair, fit my fingers together and close my eyes. I can still see the flames from last night, rising and roaring. Sophie’s precious little feet slapping down the drive towards me. The echo of the children burning alive in their beds, tucked into their own death, moves through me in excruciating chills. I see their little faces turn black, melt into themselves, I think of the children who tortured my mother, I see them dancing around her while she prayed to be saved. I see their little baby faces spit and scream at her while she cried, their little chubby fingers punching her in the mouth and filling it with knives. My mother’s screams pass through me in waves too dark to touch or see, but they smash and boil in all parts of me. My entire body trembles, it trembles and goes numb because the waves of my mother and the chill of those children I set to burn alive in their beds freezes me completely. Entirely. I am unable to move.

  The detonation of heat and screaming that burned at my back as I stood on the porch, all comes back to me in icy recall. But as I sit here, frozen in the memory of fire and pain, I remember Sophie sprinting towards me with that big paper bag full of her childhood, and I’m able to breathe with ease. I think of lying with her last night and the smell of her home, the warmth of her blankets, her body all around me. I can start to feel my fingertips again and that howling dissipates into fog and then nothing.

  I open my eyes and rest my elbows on the desk and sigh. I pick up the telephone, red light blinking on New Message. I dial Sophie, she doesn’t pick up at home. I call her at work. Switch board connects me with the psychiatric unit.

  “Hello, Psych, this is Mrs. Karen speaking.”

  “Hi, this is Amanda Troy, I’d like to talk to Sophie Harris, please.”

  “Who?”

  “Sophia Harris.”

  “Just one moment, may I ask who I am speaking with?”

  “Amanda.”

  “Who?”

  “Amanda Troy.”

  “Ok, so an Amanda Troy wants to speak with Sophia Harris, I can pass on the message and who can I say is leaving the message?”

  “No, this is Amanda Troy.”

  “Oh, sorry, that was a little confusing. And who do you want to speak with?”

  I tap my finger over the flashing new message, covering and uncovering the light, watching it glow through my finger. “I want to speak with Sophia Harris, please.”

  “Oh sure, one second please. Sophia is just on her break. I’ll put you through to the lunch room.”

  I hear Mrs. Karen put the receiver down and say to one of the other nurses, “How do you transfer a call to the staff room again? I keep forgetting.”

  A distant voice says, “I can’t remember either, let me ask Michelle.”

  I shake my head and wiggle the mouse on Harry’s computer to see if he’s got solitaire. His computer desktop, its total chaos, he’s got files and folders scattered everywhere over a swastika background. I start clicking random folders seeing if anyone of them will pop up with a games menu or something.

  Whoever Michelle is, she comes into the room on the other end of the phone and I hear her say to Mrs. Karen, “Oh, here I’ll show you, just push...” then my phone beeps and I hear it ring onto another line.

  I keep clicking folders, opening and closing them, dozens of porno JPEGS popping up all over the place. The line keeps ringing, the pictures start turning into animals fucking and being fucked, women roped up and bleeding, old people strapped to torture devices. He’s got pictures of pigs being stabbed, burned and beheaded and I stop clicking them closed when I recognize the shoes at the feet of the person holding the shank. These pictures all have dates on the side. These pictures didn’t come off the internet. I click back onto the photos of women, bound and bawling, whipped and weeping, the same set of shoes as the others. I go to close the folder but wind up clicking on another one.

  The phone picks up on the other end and Sophie says, “Amanda?” as I’m staring at hundred of pictures of myself in thumbnail size. Sophie says, “Amanda is that you?”

  I click on one at random; I’m drinking a coffee walking to my car after work.

  “Amanda?”

  I click on another one, I’m outside Pinks hailing a cab.

  “Amanda, are you there?”

  I’m in the window, washing Marcy’s dishes.

  “Amanda, are you OK?”

  I bite my lip and my heart stops beating because, I’m holding Sophie’s hand in the park.

  “Sophie... is Carl there?”

  “What?”

  I’m stabbing that grocery girl in the throat with a screw driver.

  “Sophie, I need you to listen to me very carefully. I need you...”

  Telephoto lens, I’m fucking Alison.

  “Amanda, what’s going on?”

  Achromatic lens, I’m dusting dirt off my hands onto my pants as I look down at a grave I’ve dumped a body into.

  “I need you to tell me if Carl is there.”

  “What? Why would you call me and ask that why didn’t you ask if he was...”

  Sophie and I, last night, kissing on the steps of her house.

  “I’m coming to get you. Meet me in the parking lot.”

  “What? No I have three hours of my shift left! What’s this all about, are you cheating on...”

  “Sophie! Parking lot!”

  I hang up the phone and click on the last picture in the folder. It’s dated same as the one of me and Sophie kissing on the stairs. It’s dated from last night except one hour later. It’s Marcy, hogtied on the floor of my cellar, her eyes scooped out of her head, her neck cut completely open.

  Everything goes blurry, the whole room spins so bad I fall off the chair, bang my head on the desk and throw up in the waste basket. My guts clench hard and deep into themselves but no matter how hard I shut my eyes or pull them open I can’t get the picture of Marcy out
of my head. Something falls off the desk and smashes me on the head. It’s a camera, black tape over the flash, little pieces of tape over the little orange light that blinks every time you take a picture. I wipe a strand of vomit off my lip. I pick up the camera, peel off the tape, hold it close to my face and slowly roll it into a tiny ball. Drop it into the garbage.

  I breathe, I stand, I go to walk out of the room, but that little red light flashing message catches my eye. I pick up the phone again, press play. A man’s voice says, “How many tapes do you have? We’ll pick them up in the morning; if these are fakes we’re taking your balls and our money back.”

  I don’t notice I’ve run a red light until someone plows into the back of my car. I stumble out, my forehead bleeding, the driver in the other car yelling after me, “Stop! Stop!” But I don’t, I don’t stop until I’ve run the last five blocks to the hospital and my lungs are burning acid inside my chest.

  Sophie rushes over to me as I fall to my knees panting in the parking lot. “Amanda! Holy Christ! What happened to your head? Come in the ER, I...”

  I swallow air in gulps so fast I have to fight to keep from passing out, “Sophie, where’s your car?”

  “What?”

  “Where’s your car, come on.” I wave, totally winded, away from the hospital. “We gotta go.”

  “What? No! We’re going in here to get you some help, you’re bleeding all over the place it’s—”

  I shake my head, wipe blood out of my eyes. “No, you don’t understand, I…”

  “Did you take something?”

  I stand up, reach in her pocket and snatch her keys. She tries taking them away from me, I grab her arm and twist it. “You’re coming with me. This place, it isn’t safe.”

  “What the fuck? Let go of my arm!”

  “No, listen, you don’t...” I take a deep breath and pull her towards her car.

  She screams “Help!”

  I let go of her arm and cover her hand with her mouth, drag her in between two ambulances. “I’m not going to hurt you!” I check around to see if anyone is looking, there’s not a soul in sight. “Just listen to me, you have to get out of here now. Someone is going to hurt you, really bad.”