2014 Campbellian Anthology

by Various

  “Families”: Stabler invites Benson over to his house for Thanksgiving. Benson offers to help pull the guts from the turkey, something she always wanted to do as a child. Stabler’s wife gives her a bright orange bowl, leaves to attend to her squabbling daughters. Benson notices that Stabler’s wife is not speaking to Stabler. She sighs, shakes her head. Benson sticks her hand deep into the turkey’s guts. Her fingers push through gristle and meat and bones and close around something. She pulls. Out of the turkey comes a string of entrails, on which are suspended tiny bells, slick with blood. The meal is a great success. There is a photo of it on Stabler’s hard drive. Everyone is smiling. Everyone is having a very nice time.

  “Home”: Benson and Stabler go to the New York City Public Library. They show the feral girl’s photo to the librarians. One of them says she doesn’t know her, but her eyes drift upwards when she says this. Benson knows that she is lying. She follows the librarian to the break room and shoves her up against a vending machine. Inside, bags of chips and pretzels rustle. “I know you know her,” Benson says. The woman bites her lip, then takes Benson and Stabler down to the basement. She pushes open a metal door to an old boiler room, from which hangs a broken padlock. A cot stands against a far wall, stacks and stacks of books make a tiny metropolis all over the floor. Benson flips open a cover, then another. All of them have a red stamp: WITHDRAWN. The librarian pulls the gun out of Stabler’s holster. Stabler shouts. Benson turns around just in time for a fine red mist to paint her skin.

  “Mean”: “How could you possibly let her get your gun?!” Benson yells at Stabler. “How could you be looking at books when there was an insane kidnapping librarian in the room?!” he yells back at her. “Sometimes,” she starts angrily, but her voices trails off.

  “Careless”: The captain takes the last photo down from the bulletin board. He wants a drink more than he has in many years. “All it would have taken,” he says, his voice rising with every syllable, “for ONE WOMAN to survive would have been my detectives not being ASLEEP,” here he slams the photo down on the desk with more force than had actually killed her, “on the JOB.” Benson looks down at her legal pad, where she had anagrammed and anagrammed the serial killer’s clue, never succeeding.

  “Sick”: This is how it went. The girl was sick with prophecy. She touched the arm of young Ben Jones, later to be Father Jones, before she knelt herself to death off a Brooklyn rooftop. He carried it inside of his body for decades. Stabler was the one to restrain him when he freaked out during mass, and now had it, too. He sees his daughters, projected into their terrifying futures. He sees his wife, living long and always remembering. He cannot see Benson, though. Something shades his vision. She is smoke, elusive.

  “Lowdown”: Stabler is grocery shopping with his oldest daughter when he sees a man picking up apples, examining them closely, and setting them back down on the pile. He recognizes him. The man looks up. He recognizes Stabler, too. He calls him by his first name, except it’s not his first name, really. “Bill!” he says. “Bill!” He looks at Stabler’s daughter. Stabler grabs her arm and pulls her into the next aisle. “Bill,” the man says, sounding excited, knocking over a display of corn tortillas. “Bill! Bill! Bill!”

  “Criminal”: A man in a ski-mask robs a bank with a plastic gun and gets fifty-seven dollars. The teller saves the day by slicing off his face with the machete that he keeps under his counter.

  “Painless”: “Don’t you worry,” the gynecologist says to Stabler’s wife. “This isn’t going to hurt one bit.”

  “Bound”: Benson decides to try the spell. She combines the ingredients like the man had shown her. She crushes the beans and the bone. She uncorks the bottle. “Tip it fast,” he’d told her, “and catch it under your pestle, or else it’ll float up and away.” She turns the bottle toward the mortar, but suddenly her brain convulses and she is remembering something that never happened, a screaming, burning pain, a dark room lined with windows, curtains drawn, a cold, black table. She stumbles blindly backwards and knocks over the mortar and pestle. She falls to the floor and trembles, shakes. When it finally passes, she sees the girl-with-bells-for-eyes staring back at her. Ringing back at her. The first of many times, she says. All night, Benson dreams, dreams, dreams.

  “Poison”: One afternoon, at her desk, Benson feels the telltale tickling. She shifts in her chair. She crosses and uncrosses her legs. On the way home, she stops at the drugstore on the corner. In her bathroom, she squats. She walks carefully to her bed and gets horizontal. She feels the bullet melting inside of her, making her better. The-girl-with-bells-for-eyes comes to the side of her bed, bells swinging wildly like she is a church caught in a stiff wind. Come on. “I can’t.” Why not? “I can’t get up. I can’t move. I can’t even cough.” What is happening to you? “You wouldn’t understand.” Get up. “I can’t.” The core of her is soothed and calmed and she cannot move or else everything will come out. The-girl-with-bells-for-eyes gets as close to the bed as she can without walking through it. She begins to glow. Benson’s bedroom is filling with light. Across the street, a man with a telescope lifts his head from the eyepiece, gasps.

  “Head”: “Okay, so, here’s my theory,” Stabler says to Benson when she gets back into the car with the coffees. “Human organs. They are wet and thick and fit together like pieces of a puzzle. It’s almost like someone zipped open human skulls before birth and slopped them in there like oatmeal. Except that’s not possible.” Benson looks at Stabler and squeezes her cup so hard a little fart of scalding coffee runs down her hand. She looks behind her. She looks back at him. “It’s almost like,” he says thoughtfully, “they were grown on the inside, and are meant to be shaped together.” Benson blinks. “It’s almost like,” she says, “we grow. In the womb. And keep growing.” Stabler looks excited. “Exactly!” he says. “And then, we die.”

  Season 6

  “Birthright”: Stabler’s daughters get into a fight over a bowl of soup. When Stabler gets home, the oldest daughter has an ice pack on her forehead and the youngest is kicking her feet above the tiled kitchen floor. Stabler goes into the bedroom, where his wife is lying on her back, staring at the ceiling. “They’re your daughters,” she says to Stabler. “Not mine.”

  “Debt”: Benson and Stabler don’t play Monopoly anymore.

  “Obscene”: Benson buys twice as much produce as normal, and doesn’t even wait for it to rot. She throws a ripe vegetable in every garbage can in a twenty-block radius. It feels good to spread it out like this, the wasting.

  “Scavenger”: After the body is removed, Benson and Stabler stand around the dried pool of blood. A policewoman comes into the bedroom. “The landlord is outside,” she says. “He wants to know when he can get to cleaning the apartment up for rental.” Benson pokes the stain with her foot. “You know what’d get this out?” Stabler looks at her, his eyebrows knit. “OxyClean™. It’d get this stain right out” she continues. “You could rent this place next week.” Stabler looks around. “The landlord isn’t here yet,” he says, slowly. “OxyClean™ would get this right out,” she says again.

  “Outcry”: Only after the sixth small black girl goes missing does the police commissioner finally make a statement, interrupting the season finale of a popular soap opera. The enraged letters start coming soon after. “Are you going to tell me if Susan’s baby belongs to David or not, Mister Police Commissioner??????” says one. Another person sends anthrax.

  “Conscience”: The drumming won’t stop. Stabler considers that it is his conscience making that horrible, horrible sound.

  “Charisma”: Benson likes her Tuesday night date too much to go home with him.

  “Doubt”: Father Jones prepares to deliver the Eucharist. The first people in line look like Stabler and Benson, except different. Wrong, somehow. When he lays the wafer on the first’s tongue, the man closes his mouth, smiles. Father Jones feels forgiveness melting down the back of his own throat. The woman, then, too, takes it, smiles. Father Jo
nes almost chokes this time. He excuses himself. In the bathroom, he rocks back and forth on his feet clutching the counter and weeping.

  “Weak”: Stabler works out three times a day, now. He insists on jogging to crime scenes instead of using the squad car. Whenever he takes off from the station, his button-down and tie tucked into bright red running shorts, Benson goes and gets herself a coffee from the bodega, reads a newspaper, and then drives to the crime scene. Stabler always arrives a few minutes later, his fingers pressed against his pulse, shoes striking the pavement in an even rhythm. He jogs in place while they interview witnesses.

  “Haunted”: On the subway, Benson thinks she sees Henson and Abler on a train running the opposite direction. They blast past each other in a blaze of butter yellow light, the windows flashing by like frames on a filmstrip, and Henson and Abler appear to be in every one, moving jerkily like they are rotating through a phenakistoscope. Benson tries to call Stabler, but there’s no signal below the earth.

  “Contagious”: Benson stays home with swine flu. Her fever reaches 103º; she hallucinates that she is two people. She reaches over to the opposite pillow, years empty, and feels for her own face. The girls-with-bells-for-eyes try to make her soup, but their hands pass through the cupboard handles.

  “Identity”: Stabler offers to take the girls out for Halloween. He goes as Batman, buys a hard plastic mask. The girls roll their eyes. Before they go out, his wife faces him. She reaches up and snatches the mask off his face. He seizes it back from her and slides it back on. She pulls it off again, so hard the band snaps and catches his face. “Ow,” he says. “What are you doing that for?” She shoves the mask into his chest. “Doesn’t feel very nice, does it?” she hisses through clenched teeth.

  “Quarry”: The man takes out his rifle, braces it against his good shoulder, and squeezes the trigger with all the seductive force of a beckoning. The bullet strikes the missing woman’s neck, and she goes down, loosed of her life before she lands in the leaves and sends them up like ashes.

  “Game”: The man lets out another sobbing woman. As she begins to run for the woods, he realizes he’s tired and wants to go make some dinner. He takes a few steps toward the tree line, and she joins her sister.

  “Hooked”: “I choose this life,” the prostitute says to the social worker with the worried eyes. “I do. Please put your energy into helping girls who aren’t here by choice.” She is so right. She is murdered, anyway.

  “Ghost”: A prostitute is murdered. She is too tired to become a spirit.

  “Rage”: A prostitute is murdered. She is too angry to become a spirit.

  “Pure”: A prostitute is murdered. She is too sad to become a spirit.

  “Intoxicated”: The girl-with-bells-for-eyes—the first one who had sought Benson’s sour sleep breath and twitching eyelids all that time ago—comes into Benson’s bedroom. She walks into the bed. She takes her fingers and presses them into Benson’s mouth. Benson does not wake up. The girl pushes herself, in and in, and when Benson’s eyes open, Benson is not opening them. Benson is curled up in the corner of her mind, and she sees through her eyes distantly, like they are windows on the opposite side of a lengthy living room. Benson-who-is-not-Benson walks around the apartment. Benson-who-is-not-Benson takes off her nightgown and touches her grown woman’s body, inspecting every inch. Benson-who-is-not-Benson puts on clothes, hails a cab, and knocks on Stabler’s door, and even though it is 2:49 a.m., Stabler does not look even a little bit sleepy, though he is confused. “Benson,” he says. “What are you doing here?” Benson-who-is-not-Benson grabs his t-shirt in her hand and pulls him toward her, kissing him with more force and hunger than Stabler has ever felt in his own mouth. She releases his shirt. Benson cries into the darkened walls of her own skull. Benson-who-is-not-Benson wants more. Stabler wipes his mouth with his hand and then looks at his fingers, as if expecting to see something. Then he shuts the door. Benson-who-is-not-Benson returns to her apartment. Benson looks up from her knees to see the girl-with-bells-for-eyes standing in front of her. “Who is driving?” she asks thickly. The bells ring. No one. And indeed, Benson’s body is lying heavy as an unanimated golem on the bed. The bells ring. I’m sorry. The girl-with-bells-for-eyes sinks her fingers into Benson’s head, and

  “Night”: Benson wakes up. Her head is throbbing. She rolls over onto the cool side of the pillow, her dream ebbing away from her like a rubber duck bobbing gently out to sea.

  “Blood”: The butcher takes a hose to the floor, and the blood spirals and sinks down the drain. It wasn’t animal blood, but he has no way of knowing what it was his assistant was cutting up. The evidence is destroyed. The girls remain lost forever.

  “Parts”: “Is it me, or is this steak kind of gamey?” Benson’s date says to Benson. She shrugs and looks down at her scallops. She prods one with a knife and it parts a little in the center, like a mouth opening, or worse. “It’s just… a weird flavor,” he says. Another bite. “But good, I guess. Good.” Benson can’t remember what he does for a living. Is this their second date, or their third? He chews with his mouth open. She invites herself to his apartment.

  “Goliath”: Stabler takes another long pull of his whiskey. He slumps in his armchair. Upstairs his wife sleeps, sleeps, dreams, wakes up, sleeps more, hates him, wakes, hates him, sleeps. He thinks of Benson, the way she stood there, the way her clothes looked put on funny, the way she drank from him like she was dying of thirst, the dreamy way her hand ran over the metal fence, over the iron-tipped gate like she was asleep, like she was high, like she was a woman in love, in love, in love.

  Season 7

  “Demons”: Shadows pass over the marbled halls of justice, through the police station, across crowded and empty streets. They slide up walls and through grates and under doors and arc through glass windowpanes. They take what they want, leave what they want, and some cry, and some don’t. Life is created and destroyed. Mostly destroyed.

  “Design”: “If this child is part of The Plan, then The Plan was that I would be raped. If this child is not part of The Plan, then my rape was a violation of The Plan, in which case The Plan is not a Plan at all, but a Polite fucking Suggestion.” Benson reaches out for her, but the woman looks down at the water, kneels from the railing, and is gone.

  “911”: “Look, it’s just that I’m walking around feeling like I’m going to vomit out my own toenails, and I want to die, and I want to kill someone, sometimes, and I feel like I’m on the verge of dissolving into a puddle of organs and slop. Organ slop. “Um, that’s… that’s… I’m sorry. Look, I just called to report a vandal in my neighborhood.”

  “Ripped”: They find the actress hours after her disappearance, tied to the mast of a ship in New York Harbor, a reproduction musket laced between the coils of rope and wedged between her voluminous breasts. Her Renaissance Faire corset is half-unlaced, her shirt torn. He wanted her to fight back, she tells Stabler. He wanted her to slap him, and call him a scoundrel, and then to marry him. He called himself Reginald.

  “Strain”: Benson gets the flu. She vomits up: spinach, paint shavings, half a golf pencil, and a single bell the size of her pinky nail.

  “Raw”: At Benson and Stabler’s favorite sushi restaurant, they have stopped using plates and started using models. Benson pinches a red swatch of tuna from the hipbone of a brunette who seems to be trying very hard not to breathe. The owner stops by the table, and seeing Benson’s frown, says, “Cheaper than plates, you know.” Stabler reaches for a piece of eel, and the model takes a sudden breath. The meat eludes his chopsticks—once, twice.

  “Name”: All over the city, pedestrians stop mid-stride, a small weight lifted from bodies, a memory snuffed. A barista, marker poised over a cup, asks a man the same question in ten seconds. He stares at her, blinks. “I don’t know,” he says. In graves and ditches, in morgues and mortuaries, in rushes and bogs, dipping and rolling on the skins of rivers, names trace the bodies of the dead like flames along kindling, like electr
icity. For four minutes, the city becomes filled with the names, with their names, and though the man cannot tell the barista that Sam wants his latte, he can tell her that Samantha is not coming home but she is somewhere, though she is nowhere, and she knows nothing, and everything.

  “Starved”: Stabler tries to convince his oldest daughter to eat something, anything. She takes the paper napkin in seven small bites.

  “Rockabye”: After the girls are asleep, Stabler sits next to his wife, who is cocooned under the blankets of their bed. Even her face is swaddled. Stabler gently pokes at the opening in the comforter, and soon the tip of her nose is revealed, a heart of skin around her eyes. She is crying. “I love you,” she says, “I do. I am so angry with you. But I do love you.” Stabler takes her into his arms, her whole cloth burrito self, and rocks her in his arms, whispering sorry, sorry into her ear. After he turns out the light, she asks him to cover her face again. He lays the tucked bits back over her, lightly.