Thirteen

by Mark Teppo

  "John, you look terrible, are you okay?"

  "We’ll see," he said. He leaned over and kissed her. "Just know that I love you," he said.

  Laura turned to the kids. "Should we go downstairs?"

  "Mommy, look at all the snow. Everything is white," Missy said.

  Laura got up and walked to the window.

  "My God. John, come here."

  John stood up and walked over to the window, the yard filled with snow, a good four feet up the trunk of an old oak tree. The snow showed no sign of stopping. The limbs were covered in ice, hanging low. John walked to the other window that faced into the back yard, and saw that only the cab of his truck was visible above the snow.

  The kids turned and ran down the stairs. Laura turned to John and opened her mouth, and then closed it. When they got to the bottom of the stairs the kids were already at the presents, starting to rip them open. Coal dust and fingerprints were on the stockings, a small bulge at the bottom of each. They stopped at the bottom of the steps and watched the kids as their smiles turned to looks of dismay.

  "John, what’s going on," Laura asked.

  The kids looked up, the boxes empty. Missy went to her stocking and dumped the lump of coal into her hand. John didn’t remember putting those lumps of coal in the stockings. Some of last night was a blur. Outside the wind picked up. The loose bricks shifted in the fireplace, a dull thud scattering across the roof, and a blur of red fell past the window.

  Missy began to cry.

  "John, what did you do?" Laura’s face was flushed, and she walked to Missy, pulling the girl to her side. Jed kept ripping open boxes, his face filling with rage—any box, big or small—his name, Missy’s name, he kept ripping them open.

  Empty, all of them.

  John sat on the couch and clicked on the television set, all of their voices filling the room, the paper tearing, Missy crying, Laura saying his name over and over again.

  ". . . . or the tri-county area. Temperatures are plummeting down into the negatives, currently at minus twenty and falling, wind chill of thirty below zero. We are expecting anywhere from six to ten feet of snow. That’s right, I said ten feet."

  "Shut up!" John yelled, turning to them, tears in his eyes. He turned back to the television set.

  "Winds upward of fifty miles an hour. We have power outages across the state. So far over fifty thousand residents are without electricity. ComEd trucks are crippled as the snow is falling faster than the plows can clear them. Already we have reports of municipal vehicles skidding off the icy roads."

  John looked up into the corner of the room where a large spider web was spreading. A ladybug was caught in the strands, no longer moving. The weatherman kept talking, but John could no longer hear him. The map, the charts, the arrows and numbers spread across the television screen, warnings and talk of death on the roads.

  ". . . . ould be anywhere from six to ten days before . . ."

  Outside there was a cracking sound, a heavy, deep ripping, and the kids ran to the window and looked out. Icicles and branches fell to the ground, shattering like glass, half of the tree tearing off, one mighty branch falling to the ground, shaking the foundation, sending snow flying up into the air.

  "John?" Laura says.

  ". . . . o not go outside for anything . . ."

  "John?"

  ". . . . lankets, huddle together . . ."

  Somewhere down the road a transformer blew, sending sparks into the sky, the bang startling the kids who started to cry, burrowing deeper into Laura’s side.

  ". . . . olice and a state of emergency . . ."

  The television set went black, and the Christmas tree lights winked off. Wind beat against the side of the house as a shadow passed over the windows. Outside the snow fell in an impermeable blanket, the roads and trees no longer visible.

  The room was suddenly cold.

  John got up and walked to the kitchen, taking a glass out from the cabinet, turning on the water. There was a dull screeching sound, as the whole house shook, nothing coming out of the tap.

  "Pipes are frozen," John said to himself.

  On the windowsill was a line of candles, and three flashlights sitting in a row. He grabbed one of the flashlights and opened the basement door, staring down into the darkness. John walked down the stairs to where the coal spilled across the concrete, grabbing a shovel that he had leaned against the wall. He pulled open one furnace door, then the other, and setting the flashlight on the ground so that is shot up at the ceiling, he shoveled in the coal. In no time the furnace was full. He walked around the basement, the band of light reflecting off the ductwork, turning screws and opening vents. Behind him on the stairs Laura stood with the children in front of her, each of them holding a lit candle, a dull yellow illuminating their emotionless faces. John lit a match and tossed it into the furnace, a dull whoomp filling up the room.

  Turning back to his family at the top of the steps, John smiled, and wiped the grime off of his face.

  Occupy Maple Street

  — Gregory L. Norris

  The house stood on the pedestal of the hill and overlooked the river. Boke remembered the place from when he’d lived in the town before the Occupation. All the locals knew it, he figured, by the blue glass lamp that shone out at night from the front parlor’s bay window. A round base, blue the color of jay feathers and the delphinium flowers that once grew in his mother’s yard, in that life from a million years ago. Cobalt blue.

  "This house?" Boke asked, and punctuated the question with a sigh through his nostrils.

  Cashan handed him two keys, one a fresh steel-silver, the new copy of the dulled brass original. "You know it?"

  Boke didn’t detect anything deeper than normal conversation, but one never could be too cautious. "Yes, Supervisor. You could see it on the other side of the river at night, because of the blue lamp."

  "The blue lamp," Cashan parroted. "It’s yours now."

  Boke accepted the keys, which had warmed considerably during their brief exposure to the day’s sunlight and Cashan’s grip. "And the family that lived here?"

  "Not a family. Two men. Nobodies."

  No bodies, thought Boke. He willed all emotion from his face. Two men, bodies no longer. He didn’t need specifics; his imagination filled in the details. Taken discreetly, likely in the night after the blue lamp was switched off and while the residents of the house, still bodies until that hour, lie huddled in bed.

  "It’s a good neighborhood now. Safe. Mostly workers such as yourself. A security man lives just over there." Cashan tipped his chin at a craftsman-style house with a wide front porch.

  That explained the unoccupied state of the house with the blue lamp. His house now. Boke nodded. "Understood, Supervisor."

  "I’ll help you with your bags."

  "That’s not necessary. I only have these few cases."

  "I insist."

  Cashan picked up the larger of the two duffels that contained all Boke owned, and marched up the vacant driveway whose asphalt had taken on the color of comfortable denim, save where a dark stain marred one area, just outside the front door.

  The door creaked open. From the cut of his eye, Boke noticed a crack in the frame, near the lock. It had been repaired but not erased.

  An unpleasant sweetness infused the interior of the house on Maple Street, the smell of rooms closed up to deny fresh breezes, the ghosts of candles already burned and beverages enjoyed and sharp voices echoed into silence.

  "I’ve been told the appliances work," said Cashan. "You have your ration card?"

  Boke patted his back pocket, where his papers and plastic filled an old leather wallet. "Of course."

  "You’ll need to stock the cabinets and refrigerator. Otherwise, whatever’s left inside the house is for you to use."

  Boke forced a smile. "With great appreciation to both the Treasury and to you, Supervisor."

  Cashan smiled, too, though the gesture—revealing a length of yellow teeth—seemed more
of a snarl. "You can thank me by bringing your best work to the factory."

  Cashan extended his hand. Boke accepted the gesture and shook, aware of the missing gap where the other man’s pointer finger should be, and doing his best to not think of the cruelties the remaining four had inflicted upon so many others.

  Nothing was where it belonged. Sofas, two in a shade of platinum, sat stacked on their arms against hallway walls. The antique desks and tables were piled on top of one another without any care for the rich, rare burl of their wood. A jagged scrape marred the top of a credenza, the gouge visible beneath a layer of dust.

  What Boke assumed was the dining room by its six harp-back chairs boasted an elegant mural on the wall, of cherry trees in full bloom. It looked Japanese, like intricate pictures from a book he remembered before the Occupation and the ban on reading. Someone had cut across the mural, intentionally defacing it.

  There were no books in the house. Those, Boke guessed, had gone into the backyard, where the late summer overgrowth was taking back the vast, oily black stain between a garden shed and the wood line; where words, concepts, dreams, and lusts were incinerated, burned from existence, gone forever.

  The worker transport collected Boke at five prompt. Another warm dawn made the early hour less miserable. Dread, however, filled him at the notion of mornings in months ahead after the heat was gone and the hillside and surrounding neighborhoods woke layered in winter white.

  The factory was drab, like its predecessors where Boke had served duty: humorless walls painted in beige and industrial yellow. Boke maneuvered levers, completed his part in the long centipede chain that fulfilled the Treasury’s many needs and desires, both here and overseas.

  Boke anticipated returning to the house on Maple Street, with its echoes of former happiness and elegance, and, at night, not sure why, he switched on the cobalt blue lamp in the bay window.

  A stiff autumn rain hammered the house. At some point in the downpour, a cat’s plaintive mewls invaded the room. Baby sobs kept sleep away. In the darkness broken only by the road’s lone streetlamp, Boke imagined a cat, once a beloved pet, now stray but not entirely feral, scratching at the front door to be let in. Sleep eluded him past the midnight hour in a bed that once belonged to other people. He masturbated in an attempt to relax. It didn’t help.

  According to the clock, at just after two the mewling resumed. A skinny cat seeking entrance into its former home, in search of its human family. The previous residents had owned a cat, according to the food and water bowls he found weeks earlier among the dusty clutter in the kitchen cabinets. Boke had wondered of the cat’s fate then, as his imagination sometimes pondered the two men, the no-bodies. The men who dined among the delicate cherry blossoms. The hands that switched on the cobalt blue lamp at night.

  Boke buried his head between two pillows. The crying baby chased him.

  "New workers coming into town," Cashan said. "We need to house them, so you’ll be getting a roommate."

  Boke nodded. "There’s plenty of space. Thank you for the update, Supervisor."

  Cashan clapped a hand to his shoulder. Boke ignored the missing finger, which had invaded his nightmares, along with the echoes of a stray cat scratching at the front door.

  A roommate in the big house. Boke didn’t confess the loneliness he’d suffered alongside his dark dreams. He welcomed the company, he admitted only to himself.

  "Worker Shotton," Cashan said. "Meet Worker Boke."

  The man standing at the front door stood ramrod straight, showing no expression beyond the raw nerves projected through his eyes. Boke offered his hand. Shotton eyed it through a lens filled with private stories, short and long, whole novels written in invisible ink, and briefly hesitated from accepting. When their hands connected, Shotton shook with the sort of strength capable of snapping the bones of lesser individuals. Boke didn’t take the display for aggression or an attempt to establish dominance, but for unease, awkwardness.

  "Show him around the place, will you," Cashan said.

  "Of course, Supervisor. This way, Shotton."

  On his first day in the house on Maple Street, Boke had found a mattress and box spring resting against a wall in the back bedroom. The pair now lay on the floor, sans frame. Shotton sat upon the threadbare comforter, staring out the window. He still wore his factory uniform, though his boots rested beside the bed along with discarded socks.

  "If you need anything," Boke said.

  Shotton broke focus with the patch of night visible through the grimy windows and the deceptively bright sparkles of golden light in the neighborhood below the hill, along the river, where upstanding workers and their families huddled against the growing darkness—a landscape liberated of all deviants and undesirables, purged of the Treasury’s foes.

  The room’s closet contained an antique crystal lamp. Boke had plugged it into the socket to welcome his new roommate. Like the bed, the lamp sat on the bare floor. Shotton’s unease registered clearly in the canted light.

  "Need?"

  Boke shifted his weight to the other foot. "You may hear a cat. A stray cat that visits at night, scratches at the front door. I think it used to live here."

  Shotton nodded.

  "Goodnight, Worker."

  "Goodnight," said Shotton.

  Boke wandered downstairs. The cobalt blue lamp glowed in the bay window. He switched off the lamp, opened the front door, and checked for the cat. Then, finding the entrance vacant, Boke locked the door and returned to his room.

  He dreamed about Cashan’s missing finger, which wiggled and wriggled caterpillar-like about the house on Maple Street. Boke heard it scratching around, opening cabinets in the kitchen, skittering over the scuffed hardwood floors, the clack of its nail beating a tattoo into his subconscious, eventually rousing him awake.

  Invisible ice crackled over his flesh. In the darkness broken by the streetlamp, Boke imagined the finger working its way under the inherited comforter, touching him. The hair on his legs prickled on instinct. All the moisture drained from his mouth, transformed into and exuded from his pores as clammy sweat. The clacking of the nail jumped out of his nightmare and persisted in the waking world. Only after Boke’s heart stilled did he recognize the cadence for what it really was: a mouse moving about behind the walls, emboldened because the cat was gone.

  Shotton was a handsome man with an unhappy face. According to the deepening lines around his eyes and mouth, his nights in the house were as disturbed as Boke’s.

  A cold rain fell, the next in a long line of gray days.

  "Can I ask you—?" Shotton whispered.

  Boke glanced at the other workers huddled beneath their hats and umbrellas. None listened in.

  "Sure, Worker."

  "Do you think our house is haunted?"

  Boke shuddered, as much from the nature of Shotton’s question as the power contained in an otherwise innocuous word.

  "Our," he said, and coughed to clear his throat.

  They drank the beer allotted on their rations cards. Though weak and practically tasteless, the brew conjured the first real smile Boke saw on Shotton’s face.

  "Praise the Treasury," he said lightly, and raised his bottle.

  Shotton chuckled, laughter another rarity. "Fuck the Treasury."

  They clinked bottles together. Eyes met, held. In that locked gaze, understanding passed through telepathy.

  Shotton’s throat knotted under the influence of a heavy swallow. "You said the ones who lived here before us . . ."

  "Two men," Boke answered, nodded.

  Shotton’s eyes drifted away. Boke tracked them to the Japanese mural. For a brief and startling instant, the cherry blossoms seemed to float in a lazy breeze. Boke blinked. The alcohol in his system assumed full responsibility.

  Shotton again faced him, and then their lips connected. Mouths crushed together. Boke kissed back, emboldened by the mild sweetness of the beer on Shotton’s breath. Hands cupped cheeks. The kiss grew painful in intens
ity a moment before it broke.

  "I’m sorry," Shotton said. "By the Treasury, Worker, I’m so terribly sorry!"

  The other man jumped to his feet and hurried out of the dining room. The heavy clomp of his boots on the stairs sent Boke’s racing heartbeat into a gallop. He wanted to cry, but the tears refused to fall.

  Boke switched off the cobalt blue lamp. Raindrops drummed against the exterior of the old house on Maple Street in lieu of his tears, more sobs from a storm that refused to end. Shadows cut through by mosaics of bald light from the streetlamp dropped over the parlor.

  He shuffled toward the staircase, gravity weighing down his footfalls. A scratch at the front door paused him on the first step. A plaintive mewl filtered through the door. Boke backtracked, reached for the knob, and turned. A figure on four legs darted through the gap and into the house, chirping in feline.

  The cat eyed him suspiciously from a corner of the kitchen, its spine arched, its eyes all pupil. While filling the old food dishes with water and crumbles of meat left over from their dinner, he recorded the animal’s matted coat, the piece of missing ear, the desperation, the fear, in its gaze. He’d seen the same look in Shotton’s, assumed it mirrored his own.

  "Here you go, cat," he said, and set down the bowls.

  The cat yowled on its way over to the food. Boke thought about petting the cat, remembered Shotton’s kiss and the fallout after, and decided against it.

  Boke marched up the stairs to his borrowed bedroom.

  No, stolen, the voice in his thoughts corrected.

  Shotton’s door was closed. Boke kicked off his boots, stripped down to his underwear, and crawled beneath the covers. The creak of footsteps drew him out of the fog, a state neither fully awake nor asleep but trapped in the limbo between. The bedroom door, once closed, now stood open.

  "I dreamed about them again," said Shotton. "The two men."

  The quiver in the other man’s voice, the prickle of hair standing up on his naked flesh, registered in Boke’s awareness despite the long shadows and uncertain hour. He drew back the covers. Shotton hurried over and into his warm embrace. They spooned beneath the blankets redolent with Boke’s sweat, neither man speaking.