by Amelia Gray
The photographer’s assistant had tried to cover Marcy’s pimple with a concealer before the ceremony, but Marcy waved her off. It would shine as if it contained its own light.
The wedding party gathered to watch the first dance. Dave bowed to June and she took his outstretched hand. They danced to something slow, cheek to cheek. They made a handsome couple. Old men held their wives in the crowd. They got halfway through a slow turn when June fell.
The crowd reached for her, but nobody moved to break the circle they had made to watch the dance. Dave kneeled down to his bride, who was clutching her stomach, but she clawed at him and he reeled back, calling for a doctor. Her legs splayed like a doll. A pink stain was spreading across the silk of her gown over her stomach, darkening to red, drenching the fabric. She howled like a creature.
THAT POOR BOY, said the pimple. LET’S GET OUT OF HERE.
Marcy ran to her car and tore out of the lot, throwing her heels into the passenger seat. She thought of the desperate look on her friend’s face. Stopping at a diner on the way home, she walked in barefoot and ordered a milkshake, fries, a slice of peach pie, chicken tenders, and a patty melt. The food arrived all at once and she pressed every course to her cheek, grinding each in turn until, over dessert, she was asked to leave.
Christmas House
Christmas House is an interactive, inclusive holiday residence. It is home to a manger scene, a gift exchange, a holly-hanging sing-along, and standards of the Yuletide such as hot buttered rum and various nogs. Visitors to Christmas House are charmed to see such traditions carried out in the spirit Jesus Himself might have intended, had He been a businessman.
Christmas House is a truly participatory experience. If a guest wishes to behave as if he or she is the first in the world to discover the act of becoming profoundly drunk on warm nog, that is his or her right. If a cast member wishes to tear down the mistletoe and declare that no man will ever understand true sorrow, he or she should act on that motivation.
Christmas House is home to fifty-three poinsettias. One cast member’s sole duty is to distribute these poinsettias in an efficient manner while maintaining the spirit of Christmas. The cast member must bring together everyone he or she knows, apologize for being a burden, and award guests one poinsettia each. After their departure, the cast member must remove the leaves of the single remaining poinsettia, place them in a blender with warm water, and create a vitamin-rich paste for his or her face and neck.
Christmas House never sleeps. The first shift runs from dawn until dusk, the second from dusk until dawn. Cast members must remain within Christmas House during business hours. Cots and beds can be found upstairs. Infants employed by Christmas House may sleep during their manger shifts.
Christmas House sits at the far end of a firing range. At times, a bullet may shatter a window and nestle into an opposing wall. Cast members decorating windows must manipulate the sashes with boughs and hanging garlands while keeping their bodies tucked aside. The manger is bulletproof and hidden from the public.
Christmas House is not responsible for injury. If a guest is caught by a stray round, he or she must be carried to a location off-site and allowed to seek medical attention independent of the operations of Christmas House. Cast members are permitted to treat wounds in the spirit of Christmas, for example by compressing a blood-soaked trouser with holly leaves while singing “Silent Night.”
In accordance with the true spirit of Christmas, guests and cast members of Christmas House must balance illusion and truth. The tinsel is penance and the figgy pudding is suffering. The Yule log offers no reprieve. Carols are sung, but nothing that rhymes is true. The hidden manger is in operation at all times. Individuals doubting the mystery of the season will be escorted from the premises.
Four
Viscera
After Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau
This page was once plant material, crushed and sluiced and pressed through a machine in a warehouse, the process overseen by a man plagued with a skin infection. The man, ankles swollen after the sixth hour on the job, would loosen his damp shoelaces for some late-day relief—the flesh pillowing over his yellowed athletic sock—and would scratch the pimpled back of his hand, his wrist, and his arm so liberally that a steady snow of flaked skin would drift onto the pages as they flew through the pressing machine. Naturally the pages, which told the story of an uneventful journey, became infected with his particulate matter. His wounds wept in the morning but after a hot afternoon in the warehouse had almost fully clotted, carrying their weep in scab. Continuing his factory tour, the man found such perverse relief in rubbing a particularly affected spot on his forearm that his eyes rolled wetly back and his mouth dropped wide, allowing a line of spittle to gather at his lip, roll down his chin and over his stubble, and drop onto a speeding page bearing the climax of another story immediately before its entrance into the oven, baking the genetic evidence of his future heart disease into this very page, which you are touching with your hands and which will find its way into a used bookstore, perhaps after your own death from heart disease, where it will be touched by people ill with the flu, sinus infections, the kind of solid stuff that moves out of the body like a bus pulling out of a station, the empty seat waiting.
Date Night
The woman and man are on a date. It is a date! The woman rubs a lipstick print off her water glass. The man turns his butter knife over and over and over and over and over. Everyone has to pee. What’s the deal with dates! The man excuses himself. At the table, the woman scratches her forearm a little too hard and a slice of skin peels up with her fingernail. She tries to smooth it back but it doesn’t go even when she presses her palm to it. It curls around itself like a pencil shaving. The woman is dismayed.
She holds her hands on her lap when the man returns from the bathroom. He pulls back his chair and sits heavily. When the woman sees him, she covers her mouth to stop her laughter. The man must have washed his face too hard in the sink, because his left eye and cheekbone are stretching apart. Bits of paper towel are stuck to his cheek. He has wiped off his face! He observes her mirth with a skewed sullen glare until she shows him the skin of her forearm; then, he laughs with her. He uses his butter knife to scrape up a portion of his own arm to match hers. She plucks at her cheekbone until it forms a sharp point. He grasps his thumb and twists it hard. It pops into his palm and he overhands it into the kitchen. The woman bares her breasts and flicks her nipples off her body like flies on a summer day. They land on the floor and a waiter catches one under his heel and slips across the tile.
The other patrons have been watching this central pair. Underneath the couple’s skin a clear paneling emerges: a carapace, a subcutaneous shell. Their bodies are mannequins carrying skin and clothing and color.
A wild look enters all eyes. Individuals wipe flesh off one another with napkins soaked in wine. A mother gnaws her child in its booster seat. One man lifts his ruddy toupee to reveal a few pathetic strands of glue-coated hair, blond in color, which he swipes off in one motion and stuffs down his shirtfront. Another man flicks open his button fly. His pubic hair scatters like dandelion florets. The man howls and a woman rips his dick off and drops it into a bowl of soup. What’s the deal with soup!
Tablecloths are pulled from tables and the tables themselves are scrubbed of their color. A waiter dumps a tray of meat onto the floor, shines the tray on his ass, and wears it as a breastplate to go into battle with the cook, a stout man with a blistered face. The cook uses the dishwasher’s rags to wipe himself clean, revealing a featureless figure dripping with rage and shame. He tips a boiling pot of pasta water onto the waiter, who himself is freed from ears, hair, dermis, and his white waiter’s gloves, a pair he had once bleached every night and which now gunk up the kitchen drain along with a holiday ham and a full set of teeth.
The room contracts. A woman screams until someone slips a dessert spoon under a muscle in her neck and flings her larynx to the floor, at which point t
he woman grasps both breasts, rips them from her body, and applies them to her throat. The breasts produce twinned howling wails that consume a grown man whole. Flesh is siphoned into a bowl and poured without discrimination into a free-standing grandfather clock that is set on fire and rolled into the street.
There rises a rallying cry of mutual recognition. This is no blind agony. It is a celebration! Every piece of internal armor on each individual is so thick with shine that even light from the recent past and future finds a way to burst forth, shattering across shattering glass, covering all in a blinding healing bleeding screaming LIGHT because that’s what LIFE is, you assholes! That’s what it means to be alive!
Curses
Our mother has become the object of our curses. The first was a rash made to climb up her arm like a creeping vine. She saw it when she was cleaning a breakfast dish and set down the soap to idly scratch.
“What in the fine hell,” she said. It was a poor curse and performed in a hurry. If she had consulted the proper sources, she could have stopped it all right then. Blessedly, she is the type of woman to slap a bandage on a runny rash should it start to crack and bleed, the type to ignore a heart murmur on the occasion of her child’s birthday. She would hope to die on an Easter weekend so as to reuse the church lilies.
The second curse happened soon after, when each fingernail on both her hands began to darken and smell of scorched plastic. She scrubbed them with acetone. Layers of nail commenced flaking off into shaved-looking piles.
“It must be that dish soap,” she said. We nodded. At night we curled under blankets and carved incantations into our shared palm. We each had our own hand, but it was the one that joined us that made us special.
She yelled from her room in the morning and we rushed in to find her hair gone from the top of her head. Her lovely yellow hair, which she would brush and plait each night, was clumped on the pillow like a cat beside her.
That was enough. She told Phillip to get the car keys and drive us to the urgent care. We sure did, looking like a funny family on the Classic’s front bench, fiddling with the radio station while she sobbed, nails black as a boar, clutching her hair in a bag on her lap as evidence for the ladies in the clinic.
We had to wait an hour and a half among the others in the waiting room. They breathed in unison and the room expanded and contracted like a lung. One man had cut himself open with a thin blade and another looked ill from drink, while a woman next to him ate a hamburger from the top down, savoring the bun’s upper half before licking the mayonnaise from its toasted bread. The tin shutters on the windows bowed inward as everyone inhaled. Mother was plumbing the depths of her bagged hair like she’d find a jewel therein. We set immediately to a spell.
It was a nasty set of tricks to play, but truly she chose her destiny throughout. The curse we sent arrived in the form of a line of ants marching in from the swinging glass door and heading for her ankle like they smelled honey under her skin. We watched them shrink as they approached her, to pinpoints and smaller, so small that she wouldn’t feel them when they sped over sneaker and bunched sock onto her bare skin, finding individual hairs and pushing into her pores.
She felt them soon enough. We imagined it was like sensing her blood was moving independent of bodily whim, which must have felt ticklish in an unsettling interior way. She reached over and clutched Morris so hard that we squealed. The ladies at the clinic were acquainted with dramatics but they weren’t prepared for Mother’s violent dance. One of them came around the counter and restrained her with both hands. The women looked into one another’s eyes and Mother started crying out of pure shame.
The woman gathered her up and said, “You twinsies follow us.” It was rude of her to deny us our intricacy, and in response we caused a small blaze among the paperwork on her desk. The fire was large enough to startle the desk staff and waste a pitcher of water. We were thrilled at our new and exciting control.
We were brought to a checkup room and the woman went back to attend to the mess on her desk. Without delay a doctor arrived and ignored Mother in favor of examining the stretched web of baby skin connecting our arms to the shared hand. “I’ve heard about you,” he said, smiling at us. This pleased us immensely and we saw to it that his dinner that night would be delicious. Morris nuzzled the doctor’s hand.
Mother gripped the table, her blood surely writhing. We started to feel a little bad about it, but there was nothing to do but wait until the ants shrank to a cellular level. They would remain, their antennae a swaying villi mass in her small intestine, but she might not be so discomforted. The doctor was asking us about how we dressed and slept and Phillip was explaining the shared seats and tailored shirts while she thrashed.
“Remove these demons,” she cried, terribly hoarse.
The doctor glanced at her file and put it down. “I’m not sure how to begin,” he said, producing an otoscope to examine our ears. “Your record notes a rash and hair loss, but I wouldn’t jump to any conclusion that involves a demon or demons.”
“These boys—” she said, before Morris touched her with a gentle hand and removed her ability to speak. She jabbed at us, and we focused our thoughts until the blackness on her nail spread. Finger and nail dropped onto the floor like a crust of bread. The sick spread from her finger to her arm and she watched it, weeping in pantomime. The doctor began testing our reflexes with a rubber mallet and marveling at the transference of reflex.
“I wonder sometimes what it would be like to have a sons,” the kind doctor said. We laughed and laughed!
Blood
Your boyfriend’s dad taught us how to explode mosquitoes. All you needed to do, he explained, was flex your arm and some mechanism would lock the insect to expand until it burst. Your boyfriend’s dad was a contractor who worked on places in the neighborhood and lived on a street lined with unfinished homes. He said that all we’ve got is our minds and our muscle and so we ought to know how to use both. He would jab at your arm and say Isn’t that right, Joshua? And you would laugh and rub the back of your neck and agree that he was right.
The neighborhood was the type where all the houses went up at once, so fast that their wood all surely came from the same trees, sheetrock from the same stone. You let me tag along with you and your boyfriend and sometimes he gave me ten dollars to get us some cheeseburgers.
We tried the thing with the mosquitoes for months, skipping the sprays and creams that might ward them off. We never saw them get us. We were pocked with welts that stung under tanning oil. I remember running across unfinished rooftops, jumping from house to house, but that wasn’t right. It was your boyfriend’s dad who did that and only once, striding a gap onto a garage extension to avoid climbing down and climbing back up. He was strong and cocksure, and seemed fairly confident in his own immortality. I’m still attracted to any man who can whistle.
Your boyfriend was all right. He played the violin. The three of us were lying on a roof once and he said that after death your consciousness snaps out and that’s all. I thought he had fallen asleep. You said that when you died you wanted your ashes cast into marbles and distributed to your family. I would get the one that looked most like a galaxy, and your boyfriend would get the second. If anyone died, you said, it wouldn’t be one of us. He shrugged and said it didn’t matter either way. We climbed down and looked at the beams where one of the guys had drawn maybe one thousand separate pairs of tits. I was reading a book in school about a girl who folded paper cranes and so this made sense.
* * *
The three of us rode our bikes to the community pool and watched the girls playing tennis. I always found three or four spokey dokes for my bike in the playground by the court, the plastic nibs half buried like they had grown there. We once broke a ramp constructed at the base of a hill for our red wagon and that was the worst thing that happened to any of us, as far as I knew or cared. The idea that everything was fine laid the delicate foundation of my life.
You figured out the m
osquito trick right at the end of the summer, before you went to high school and I stayed with the little kids. It was the sweet spot of August and almost my birthday. We were sitting in a half-finished house at the time, drawing in the wood dust on the concrete, when you called my name and I saw it was stuck in your arm, at the prime point of your bicep, placid and feeding, swelling like a tick. Once it burst we shouted with joy. We spread its mess around with our fingers. Afterward I would wonder why the mosquito didn’t fight harder against your skin, why it didn’t strain to free itself, if it maybe knew how special you were.
Precious Katherine
The doctor chewed on his lower lip as he worked. “That explains it,” he said.
Mark and the doctor looked into the metal pan together, in which a lump of bloody tissue rested, plain as the afternoon and free from Mark’s anesthetized shoulder.
“I don’t see it,” Mark said.
“There it is.”
They leaned in close. The tissue was perforated by white flecks and a ribbon of darker stuff.
“There’s a nearly functional endocrine system here.” The doctor ticked up a tag of flesh. “Explains your mood swings. There’s a little heart, right there. And look,” he said, coming away with one of the white flecks balanced on his blade. He held it up to the light.
“A tooth,” Mark said.
The doctor clapped him on the back. “After all that, a goddammed resorption. Never thought I’d see one outside a book.” He gave the pan a gentle shake, revealing a rib cage as delicate as a bird’s.
“Can I keep it?” Mark asked.