When I returned the next day, I stopped at the edge of the clearing, sucking in air, frozen. The flowers had grown, weaving in amongst themselves, her shape appearing in the layers of green. I held in my hands an old milk jug filled with water, heavy and slick in my sweating fingers. I approached her with apprehension, wind pushing through the leaves of the forest, small creatures tangled in the undergrowth, cracking and rustling, the shrill cry of some lost and frightened bird. I opened the jug and poured it over her, over the flowers, and vines, and grasses. I traced the outline, down her head, over her shoulders, to her arms and legs and back to the top again. I created a small puddle where her brain would surely grow, another in her chest, where a heart might come to life. And then I walked away. Unsteady, I tripped over my feet, glancing back over my shoulder. My desire was uncertain.
I didn’t come back the next day. Busy at work, I thought. Things I needed to do. These were the lies that I told myself, when she came to me in my dreams—in the dark. I ached for her, my hands trembling constantly, a dull throbbing at my temples. And yet, I’d lost my mind. Nowhere else to go, my vision filled with flashes of wildflowers and creeping vines, and I found myself back in the forest.
I stood at the edge of the clearing, her body expanding and contracting, her chest filling with air. She was still a shell, one glorious red rose in the center of her heart, a gathering of white buds at her head. When I summoned the courage to approach and kneel next to her, the wind picked up, whispering to me, things I needed to do. I shook my head. The trees bent under the gusts of wind, the long grasses of the field waving back and forth.
“More,” it whispered. I lay next to Jessica, and the rustle of flowers and leaves as her head turned towards me—it caused my pounding heart to shudder and stop. I listened to her wishes, to the wind and the heady perfume of the wildflowers. I was weak. I stood as the sun set and unzipped my jeans and drenched the flowers and grass. There was a withering crawl of vines, the minerals and vitamins of my urine washing over her translucent skin. Nausea rolled over me and I turned and walked away. What was I doing?
Again I stayed away, fearful of what might come next. But she haunted my dreams, begged me to return, to finish the job, to bring her all the way back. I hesitated at the door to our home, several times. I’d retreat into the house and pour myself a tumbler of amber, over and over, until her voice faded into the walls. It was no use. I could not stay away.
Her final request was beyond me, and the thought of such action repulsed me. I told her it was impossible, I couldn’t make lust out of wishes. Her skin was no longer translucent—it was a pale earthtone, the creeping vines still visible under her skin, the blooming rose sighing in her chest. Two violet blossoms stared back at me from her hardening skull—tracking my every move. I could see her naked form now as I stood above her, her body writhing in the grass and shadows, begging me to complete this act, to plant my seed among the other buds and seedlings that trembled at my feet. Two pink buds stood out in her chest, her right hand drifting down into the mossy growth between her legs, the wind picking up again, a hot breath at my ears, my neck, a desert of heat emerging from nowhere. I found myself aroused. As the sun disappeared into the horizon and the darkness pulled us in, I ran my hand up and down my slick flesh, a stammering in my chest, my breath caught and lost. Bountiful, she gasped and trembled, my prayers for forgiveness disappearing into the woods.
It took me a week to come back, and a part of me thought that maybe I could stay away forever. That maybe I didn’t need to see this to completion, my insanity confirmed, my selfish needs and desire to see Jessica again, manifested in some horror of acts committed out of desperation. But I returned, eventually. Was there ever really any doubt?
She was lying at the edge of the forest, naked in the sunlight that pushed to the rim of the woods, her fragile silhouette disappearing in the sunbeams, reappearing in the shade. She didn’t say anything when I came upon her. She didn’t ask why it had taken me so long to return. She didn’t question the tears that ran down my face. She opened her arms and beckoned me to her, and I knelt down, and then lay down, her arms wrapping around me, then her legs—pulling me in, pulling me under, until we were whole once again.
The Handyman
DATALOG
2023:08.07
A.M.
My first stop is a housewife on the north shore. She doesn’t ask me about the arm, and I’m pleasantly surprised. Most do. I like to mix it up. Sometimes it’s a factory mishap, my arm torn off in a conveyor belt, the concrete slippery with oil and blood. Other times it’s something more rural, a thresher that ripped it from the socket, the cornfield splashed with arcs of pumping liquid. Truth is I lost it to a needle, the golden sap my only life, my addiction, shooting up until the sores and pus disintegrated my arm at the elbow. They cut it off with lasers while I watched, the stench making my stomach buckle, and at the same time, hunger for a charred filet. The job is the usual digit work. I open a few jars and crimp a few pipes. I lift a piano, an armoire, the back end of her minivan—her two boys running around to rotate the tires, sweaty and laughing at the idiot lying there, his arm a piston powered jack.
P.M.
These are always the tricky ones, the ones at night. It’s never anything that they want done in the light of the day. At the apartment on the edge of the city I find an empty room with a single bulb lit and barely swinging, suspended over a naked man tied to a metal chair. His eyes bulge when I enter the room and he shakes his head from side to side, the gag in his mouth restricting his words. I know better than to let him talk. They’re never innocent.
I see a camera mounted in the upper right hand corner of this roach-infested slum, a sheet of plastic covering the floor. Nice touches, this one. She said her name was Amber, and the Voicescan told me she was speaking the truth—at least, the truth as far as she knew it. I’d come to trust the applications and instruments that had been built into my right arm. I carried a suitcase around with me, everything from screwdrivers and vice grips to handguns and blades. It took incoming data, via voice and email, complete with a slot for swiping, paying off the bill, and a data reader for the myriad of barcodes. Her payment had already cleared—an admission of anger and impatience. They never had the stomach, the ladies that hired me. It didn’t matter much to me. This was what I did now. Days filled with construction, chores and general housework. Nights filled with the wet work. I open the suitcase and pull out a long, thin blade. Detaching the hand, I screw the knife on and turn to the man.
“You know what you did. I’m not here to bargain.”
His head shakes back and forth, and I exhale. Urine runs down the side of his leg as I nod at the camera and move in for the first cut. He’s crying soon, muttering apologies as his nipples hit the floor, followed by the digits on his right hand, then the left. He’s screaming soon after that, bucking in the chair, and to be honest, he’s getting on my nerves. I turn to the camera again and nod my head, then run the blade across his throat. By the time I’m done attaching the saw blade the blinking light on the camera is dead. The limbs are severed and rolled in plastic. I attach the rib-spreader and dig into the ribcage, rummaging around for the heart. I vomit over the pile of appendages, the butterflied chest and the head that stares back at me, eyes open wide with shock.
DATALOG
2023:08.08
A.M.
She won’t even get out of bed. And I know what she wants. Her skin in pale, and her eyes are bloodshot, but her smile is white and the room smells of vanilla. She has long gray hair that is almost white, her eyes a dull shade of blue. Light slips in through the sheer drapes and I pause to move them aside, looking down on the city, the placid lake to the east, the sky clear and blue. And cold. If the coffee doesn’t wake me up, it’s the random times I forget to warm the attachments, a cold hand screwed on sending shivers up my arm. It fractures throbbing veins all the way to my heart. What’s left of it.
“Could you kiss me first?” she asks.<
br />
I nod my head.
“It’s part of the package, miss. Not that you aren’t pretty.”
“I know what I am,” she gasps, reaching for the oxygen mask, “I’m a fucking ghoul, but I used to be stunning, once.” She raises a bony finger and points to a collection of photos, framed and sitting on a nearby vanity.
“You don’t need me for this, you know,” I say. “I mean, there are other ways.”
“You come highly recommended,” she whispers, sucking on the mask. “Hand me those pills, please,” she says, and I oblige. I pop open the top first, and she swallows down the contents of the clear tube. I hand her the water, which she holds in a trembling hand, spilling down the front of her nightgown.
“Better?” I ask.
“Take the sheet down,” she says.
I pull the sheet down and she hikes up her nightie. She is glistening as she spreads her legs, one hand on her breast, her breathing accelerating, eyes on me the whole time. I lean in and kiss her, our tongues sliding back and forth.
“I’m only forty years old,” she cries, tears running down her cheeks.
I stand up and go to the suitcase. I take off my right hand, and screw on the device. It is a long fleshy thing, with various buzzing and throbbing points of contact. I turn to look at her and she smiles at me, her right hand busy between her legs.
My clothes never come off.
My right arm is moving back and forth, in and out, the buzzing and rotating filling the room with a dull hive of sweaty bees, her eyes glassing over as the drugs start to kick in. It’s going to be close, a race to the end. My left hand is holding her bony fingers as she gasps and moans, closer and closer. Something inside me shatters, as she bucks and shakes, the bed wet now, her back arching as the lights dim in her wide open eyes, and she stops moving now, her arms quiet at her side, her fingers falling out of mine.
I log the entry, the deposit hitting my account with a hefty tip and I accelerate the car in a straight line, no longer looking for the curves.
Bringing In the Sheaves
Ever since I was a little boy, the cornfields filled my nightmares with the sounds of rustling stalks, and the stench of something decomposing. I guess you could call it a recurring dream, the way the empty fields would fill my head with gentle hot winds and stinging scratches up and down my arms. I blame it on my younger brother, Billy—it was his idea after all, his fault. But I don’t hold onto that grudge. I see the girl, Margie, every once in awhile, hanging out in front of the 7-11 or maybe down by the bowling alley. Small town living doesn’t offer up many options, but back then she was one of them—today, less so.
Doesn’t really matter the name of our town, they’re all the same, dotted across the Midwest, filling up the middle of Illinois, long arteries of dust and despair stretching out in every direction. Bluford, Cairo, Dakota—we all worked the fields, tending to chickens, hogs, cows and the like. It was a lot of early morning chores and dark nights where we tried to kill ourselves one way or another.
My younger brother Billy, only three years my junior, he’d tag along whenever he could. Sometimes I needed somebody to shoot hoops with on the back of the barn, or to blame the broken window on, that’s how it went. He was always falling down, his simple skull filled with ideas, massive forehead constantly scratched and riddled with scabs. I didn’t treat him like a simpleton, but he was definitely slow. I’d hear a thud or a slam, something creaking or snapping in two, and I’d go running for the barn, running for the tractor that kept moving into the cornfield, with nobody on top of it, as it disappeared into the unforgiving folds. A tine of a pitchfork jammed through his meaty thigh, trying to fly out of the loft into a pile of hay below. An angry raccoon disappearing down the dirt road, unwilling to be his pet, Billy’s face and arms bleeding, his wide grin stretched taut over bones that knew no failure. One dead animal or another, cradled in his arms—a hen with a snapped neck, or field mice staged around a tiny table sipping at tea, a stiff cat swung around by its tail. He didn’t mean anything by it, just curious, I guess. We all are.
The girl lived down the road a bit. She was always dirty, constantly lifting her torn skirt over her head, showing off her dingy underwear to whoever would look. But she was sweet on me, sweet on Billy. Margie was a year ahead of me. She probably just wanted somewhere quiet to go where her daddy couldn’t touch her, where her mother couldn’t lay her dead eyes on Margie’s thin arms and pale skin. So we let her come over, after school, or in the summertime. We’d pal around with her down by the creek, looking for tadpoles, or frogs to put in jars, left out on a shelf where they’d dry up and leave our room stinking of something gone foul—rotten and thick.
When she asked us to tie her up, we thought she was joking. We were older now, sixth grade for me, about twelve, and Billy only nine. I had seen a filmstrip in class once, bad illustrations of flaccid penises, the scientific data going over my head, our stunned faces flush and embarrassed by the idea of a naked woman’s body, the idea of what we were supposed to do. It was dirty. And yet, it was spectacular.
We’d seen her underwear before, it wasn’t a big deal, and we weren’t interested in putting our tongues in her mouth. Gross. But we had nothing else to do, so we tied Margie to a post at the back of the barn, and turned to each other, mute, as she smiled in the dimly lit space. We ignored her for a bit, leaving her to squirm, to test the knots, moaning and grunting. She was our kidnapped ransom, so we went about the barn fortifying our defense, leaning broken broom handles against the wall, our weapons, gathering shovels and baseball bats, and a lone, rusty pitchfork, still stained with a bit of Billy’s blood.
Billy finally approached her and licked her face, from her chin to her eyebrow, and she giggled and turned her head away. He spit into the dirt.
“Salty,” he said.
He picked up a stick and started poking her, in the belly at first, and then he raised and lowered her faded skirt.
“Billy?” I asked.
He glanced at me, then back to Margie, a dirty grin easing across his face.
“What? She started this.”
Margie turned to look at me, her eyes tiny fragments of coal.
“Leave him alone, Rodney,” she said, “We’re just playing.”
“Yeah, Rodney,” my brother wheezed, bending over, and raising her skirt. “Let’s see what she’s got.”
I crossed my arms. I wanted to see too. I glanced to the house, and it was quiet, nobody in sight. Billy held her skirt up with the stick, as Margie smiled, and took his other hand and placed it between her legs.
“Nothin’,” Billy said. “She ain’t got nothin’.”
A car skidded into the yard and Billy let her skirt fall back down, and quickly untied her from the post. His face was splotchy and red, as was hers, but I was cold and pale, on the verge of throwing up.
“I better get home,” Margie said. “Almost dinner.”
She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek, and skipped out of the barn, into the sunlight. I wiped my face, the sticky residue of strawberry bubblegum, Billy’s eyes on me, glassy and empty.
****
It was all Billy could talk about—Margie. All summer long. I didn’t see her again, not for a while, but he went looking for her whenever he could. He looked for her at the grocery store with mother, whenever we went for a ride with dad, fishing or off on some errand. He leaned out of the beat up Chevy Nova like a dog, his tongue flapping in the wind.
My father always plowed a section of the back forty, a path out into the corn, with a patch of it cleared out, like his private sitting room. There wasn’t much in the space, just a rusty metal chair and a crate filled with empty beer bottles, a hole dug into the earth filled with cigarette butts and spent matches. I don’t blame my father for wanting this space, somewhere away from our mother, who had an endless list of things for him to do—broken latches and busted screens to fix, buckets of paint that needed to be emptied. As far as I know, he’d just sit out there in
the dark, staring up at the stars, drinking and smoking, wishing to be someplace else. Anywhere else.
On the rare evenings when the two of them would go upstairs, turning the television set up loud, hand in hand as they climbed the stairs, all giggles and fists of flesh, Billy and I would head for the fields, to sit in his chair, and stare at the sky. It was as close as we’d get to the man, as close as he’d let us get. We’d find half smoked butts and smoke them, coughing and spitting onto the ground. We’d drink the warm remnants from the bottom of the bottles and cans, sweet and sour and forbidden.
When Billy started disappearing, this was the place I went. I often found him covered in blood. He wouldn’t say anything, just hold his palms up to me and grin. I’d take him back to the house and clean him up, hosing him down until he started to cry, and then I’d slap him until he shut up.
Margie started showing up again, and she and Billy would disappear into the barn. They had secrets now, would go quiet when I walked into the barn. We’d still take walks together, to the creek and into the woods, even out into the cornfields, lost and scratched by the sharp stalks and ears, hollering for each other, hiding, as we choked on the dust and the heat. Inevitably we’d end up in my father’s room, lying by the chair, the walls of corn around us a fortress against the rest of the world. I only saw them kiss once, but it made my stomach curl. He was too young, I thought, and even though he was my brother, he was clueless about Margie’s advances. I barely understood them myself.
I cornered Margie one afternoon and warned her off my brother. She put one hand on her hip and asked me if I wanted that attention, if her time spent with my brother was something that I’d prefer she reserve for me? I told her she was crazy, but she wasn’t wrong. And on an afternoon when Billy wasn’t around, she and I ended up in the hayloft, our wet mouths on each other, my stomach in knots, telling myself this was what I needed to do in order to protect my brother, my hands on her dirty, sweaty body, our tongues a slick disaster.
Tribulations Page 6