by Alex Kimmell
You sit on the floor as tears roll from your eyes. Eventually you catch enough breath to say, “How about a dollar for this one, big guy?” Which just starts Jason and Emily laughing all over again. You stand up and resume putting the books back on the shelf. You leave 1,001 Fairy Tales for last, just like Jason would.
When you finally put it on the shelf, it doesn’t hit the back and stop. It keeps going into the wall. Through the wall like it wasn’t there anymore. You pull the book back out and grab the soccer-ball lamp. Aiming it down closer, you try to take a better look. You see a dark crack where the back of the bookshelf should be. You turn to make sure Emily and Jason aren’t watching, and slowly reach your hand into the darkness. It feels moist and scratches your fingers like brittle branches on a dead tree after a cold snow thaw. It opens slightly, welcoming you inside. You feel it pulling you in deeper. Confused and frightened, you’re screaming inside to stop and back away. Roaring to pull your hand back from the dark. Still, your hand slides deeper into the black. Farther than it should be able to. Your shoulder is pressed against the spines of the children’s books lining the top shelf. How can your hand still be moving further in? The branches dig deeper into your skin. Warm blood begins to flow down your forearm. Your panic finally takes hold, and you are about to retract your hand when you feel it.
It’s cold and soft. It must be old, very old. You can feel the dust and something squishy like mold. You move your fingers a little to the side to get a good hold. There are no more brittle branches stabbing and scratching. You pull what looks like an ancient, dust-covered book off the shelf, as if it were resting there next to Goodnight Moon the entire time. The blackened cover was probably expensive leather at one time. The faded string is still tied around the book, keeping secrets locked inside. If you were to pull the knot out, the entire thing would disintegrate. You reach down for 1,001 Fairy Tales to put it back on the shelf, but it’s not on the floor. You look around for it and it’s already tucked away on the shelf, exactly where Jason likes it.
-4-
Auden: Not Safe
Jason is finally asleep. Emily sits with him on the bed, head in her lap, stroking his hair. You sit cross-legged on the floor next to the toy box, turning the old book around in your hands over and over. Afraid to open it, you run your index finger along the spine. The cracked and dry leather reminds you of Gram Aida’s skin when she was in the hospital. Emily looks at you to check in, and you nod that you’re ok. Keeping the book down in the dark, you move toward the door, motioning like you are drinking a glass of water. She nods and whispers, “Leave the light on, ok? I’m going to stay here.”
You blow a kiss and touch Jason’s shoulder, gently closing your eyes for a brief second. Emily grabs your fingers, squeezes gently, and goes back to soothing the boy’s head. Raising your hand, you show her the sign language for “I love you”, and she smiles. The pained look on both of their faces infuses every cell in your body with shame.
Flicking the switch in the bathroom illuminates it with fluorescent light. You have to squint for a moment to let your eyes adjust. You put the book down on the shelf, and sit down on the toilet without lifting the lid. Everything plays back in your head. The vacant stare in Jason’s eyes, the hollow sound of his voice repeating, “Why did you hit me, Daddy?” You lose it. The sobs come, and your chest fights against the truckload of bricks being slammed into your stomach again and again. Your eyelids squeeze tight against the light, but somehow the tears make their way through and pour down your face. Mucous flows out of your nose and drips to your chest. Your legs quiver as your feet pound up and down on the floor uncontrollably, hands clenched in fists so tight your fingers might punch right through your palms.
After what seems like an eternity, you finally catch your breath and regain a semblance of control. You open your eyes and lean against the shower door to your left. Hearing the shuffling of feet, you see Jeremy standing in the doorway.
“I have to pee,” he says groggily.
You wave him over and stand, lifting the lid for him. He drops his pajama pants all the way to the floor, and you have to move him a little closer to the toilet so he won’t miss the target. He weaves back and forth a little bit with his eyes still half-closed. He finishes and starts to walk away. After a step or two, he realizes his pants are still down around his ankles.
“Daddy…can you fix my pants?” He holds his arms straight up, and you kneel down to pull them up for him. “Thanks Daddy.”
“You’re welcome Jer. Do you want me to tuck you in again?” He shuffles out.
“No Daddy. I’m big now. I can go night by myself.” He leans against the wall until he gets to his door. “Goodnight night Daddy.”
“Goodnight night buddy. Sweet dreams.”
Your eyes are red, and you are covered in the remnants of crying. After a little warm water and soap, you almost feel clean. Putting the towel back on the rack, your hand reaches down for the book. Not quite sure what to do with it, you head down to the kitchen and sit down at the table with a bottle of beer. A cigarette would be so good right now, but you and Emily both quit after Gram Aida died.
You realize what this thing feels like. Running your finger over the cover, it’s like old cancer skin. You want to pull your hand back, but you leave it there for a moment, stretching your fingers out and pressing your palm down completely. You hold your breath and lean your ear down a little bit closer. You could swear it almost feels like it’s breathing.
No. You sit back and push the book a few inches away from you, across the table. The old rotting string wrapped around the cover is dark red. So dark it’s almost black. The knot looks like an impenetrable tangled mass. Something a drunken sailor would tie when he wanted to keep a secret safe. Or a child would tie to keep the boogeyman out. Or lock him in.
You lift your bottle to take a sip of beer, but the cap is still on. Pushing your chair back, you grab the magnetic bottle and can opener Emily sticks on the refrigerator door. Popping open the beer, you toss the cap toward the trashcan. You miss by a few inches but shrug your shoulders, telling yourself you’ll pick it up in a few minutes.
The cold beer washes down your throat, and you feel like you’ve been parched for a month. Your entire body relaxes and your muscles unclench as the refreshing alcohol enters your system. After a few swallows, you put the bottle down on the table and open your eyes. You look out the window and see the black shapes of what must be trees gently swaying in the night air. It’s dark, but the streetlights around the neighborhood glow enough to give you a black-and-white view of most of the yard. You can see outlines of trees and bushes. Black painted cardboard standees floating in the blackness.
Then you stop. You hear it, the shuffling and scratching sound. The same sound the squirrel was making behind the tree. You don’t see anything moving, but you know you can hear it. At the kitchen door, you grab the latch and flick it up to unlock it. The scratching is louder and closer now. There must be another one of those squirrels out there. You open the door and switch on the outside light.
As soon as your foot touches the concrete of the patio, the scratching stops. Now there is nothing but the sounds of traffic flowing by and your neighbor’s stereo playing an old Peter Gabriel record. “At least they have good taste in music,” you think. Shaking your head, you go back inside and close the door. You’re just freaking out from the last few days. You pick up the bottle and go to the living room. There’s nothing good on the box, even with all these channels, so you leave it on the Late Late Show and watch some plastic-surgery-ridden 59-year-old actress try to look like she’s still 23 and tell jokes that are desperately unfunny.
Beer finished, you start thinking about having one more before going up to check on Emily and Jason. You close the fridge and open the beer. This time, you make the shot in the trash. “Yes!” You pump your arm like Michael Jordan. You pick up the bottle cap from earlier and drop it in the bin. When you walk past the table, you have to stop. Everything fre
ezes and you almost drop your beer. Catching yourself on the back of the chair, you see it. The string is untied, lying in swirls on the table, casually splayed next to the book.
It is an invitation. The book wants to be read. Read by you. Everything inside of you is telling you to get away. But you can’t move. Your breath comes in shudders. Your body is exhausted from being pushed so hard emotionally over the past few days. You don’t think you can fight it.
You drop your bottle and scream “No!” as you flip the table over, knocking everything to the floor. You pick up a chair and send it flying across the room, breaking flowerpots and crashing through the window. You grab the refrigerator and, using more strength than you knew you had, rip off the door and send it crashing into the hallway. You are a hurricane. You are wild, unrestrained madness. You are a whirlwind destroying everything that you touch.
You are sitting at the table, calmly and slowly opening the cover of the book. You freeze. “What the fuck just happened?” you say to the room. When no one answers back, you actually feel relieved. The flowerpots are neatly lined up under the unbroken window. The table and chairs are all centered in the room, with the placemats and fruit bowl peacefully laid out in place. The refrigerator door is closed, and you can hear the motor of the ice machine cycling hypnotically.
Your chest tightens, and you shove the book away from you again. As it slides across the table, it hangs onto the far edge for the briefest of seconds, and then gravity takes over and draws it down the floor. You sit still for a moment. The decision is made. Just throw the damn thing away and be done with it. You walk to the other side of the table and kneel down to pick it up. You can see something sticking out from under the front cover. It’s just a half an inch or so, but enough that you can tell it was stuffed into the book hoping to be found. You pull a little on the corner, and it does not appear to be yellowed and old like the other pages in the book. Someone put this in here relatively recently.
Gingerly, you slide the page out and let it fall. Kneeling there on the kitchen floor, sweat building up on the back of your neck, you can’t wrap your head around it. None of this makes sense. Your hands tremble, and you rub them up and down on your thighs to try to get the feeling back in your fingers.
Should you pick it up? Do you really want to know what it is? You have the sickening feeling that you know whatever is on that paper is going to make you wish you hadn’t. But you see your hand reaching down and taking up the corner. It’s almost like you are watching yourself from another room in another house, like a voyeur peeping in through a window.
You sit back down in your chair and look at the folded piece of paper right in front of you. Your stomach hurts with a dull pain right underneath your ribcage. You hear a high-pitched ringing in your ears. There is definitely something else in the ringing. It sounds like words. Barely there, but you can hear them speaking. “You turn the key.”
You open up the page slowly, closing your eyes to protect yourself from seeing what’s really there. The paper tries to lift up at the crease on the table, and you smooth it out so it stays unfolded. You almost laugh. It’s written in red. Much too smooth to be a crayon. The letters are thick and smudged, like they were finger-painted. It’s very sloppy and hard to make out. Some of the letters were written backward. So many misspellings that whoever wrote this was probably about the same age as Jason. You take a big swig from your beer and read…
You see stars and feel queasy, before it dawns on you that you stopped breathing. The kitchen spins, so you grab the edge of the table to stop from falling out of the chair. Each time your eyes look up to where the letter is resting on the placemat, they quickly dart away into space. A vain attempt to focus on anything but the child’s dust-covered warning.
You stand to grab another beer out of the fridge, if for no other reason than to face away from the table. With head tilted back, it doesn’t take long to finish it. So you pull another one out and open it up, thinking to yourself, “If I ever needed any liquid courage…”
Not sure if your head is spinning from the alcohol or everything else that has happened tonight, you can hear a child’s voice. “He come back.” Who will come back? What is he sorry for? “No read book.” There’s no date on the page, but the paper doesn’t look new. It’s certainly not as old as the book seems to be.
Before you realize it, you’re down under the table, picking up the leathery volume. Weighing it in your hands, you still think you can feel it pulsing. You don’t want to throw it away anymore. You fold the note along the existing crease and place it inside the cover of the book without opening it. Walking over to the living room, you place the book on the shelf in between copies of The 2009 Songwriters Marketplace and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Walking upstairs to get some sleep, you hear the child’s quiet voice in the back of your head that shudders your spine again.
“Not safe.”
-5-
Auden: Paper Cuts
Sunlight whispers through the sheer white curtains that Emily put up on your first night in the house. The window is open, and you can feel the soft breeze build up from the rising Santa Ana winds over the hill. No alarm clock buzzing with the annoying voices of local-DJ morning shows to wake you. No flying-seven-year-old-ninja knee to the groin to disturb you from your rest. Turning your head to the right, you see Emily’s empty pillow. Her side of the bed still untouched. And it all comes back to you.
Sitting up, you call her name. Not shouting yet, but not quietly either. No answer. Throw the covers off and get on your feet. The hardwood floor is cold and feels a little damp. You call her name again, louder this time, with a touch of panic in your voice. No answer. Your bedroom door is open, so she should be able to hear you. The kids’ rooms are only a few yards away. Moving faster now, you head into the hallway, calling out yet again. Silence answers you. Your heart picks up its pace, and a cold line of sweat makes a trail down the center of your back.
Jeremy’s door is open. The Spider Man poster is leaning crooked to the left on the far wall. Pajama shirt almost made it into the hamper, while one leg of the pants fell in, the other draping over the side. Closet door is open, and you can see he didn’t unpack his shoes like he promised. They are still inside the box, shoved into the bottom underneath his clothes. Bed is actually made.
“Hey!” Now at full volume, your voice cracks like a teenager’s. “Where are you guys?”
You see that Jason’s door is closed, and real panic sets in. Racing to the door as fast as you can, you come to a stop as the floor splits into pieces. Thin slices come apart, opening before you like pages of a book. The need to find your family overpowering the impossible sight in front of you, you run over the edges of the pages. Your feet balance on the tops of flimsy pieces of paper, jumping swiftly from each one to the next. Your left foot slips over an edge. Too much momentum pushes you forward, and you fall. Your arms shoot up to grab onto a handful of pages in front of you. There is enough thickness in the bundle of paper caught between your fingers to hold your weight, but not for long. You pull yourself upward before they bend, dropping you into the darkness of the binding somewhere down below. Trying not to look down, you see letters on the page in front of you. They swim in a chaotic dance, connecting in patterns that form the words “You turn the key” over and over, the black ink thick and splattered in every direction. Paper slices into the skin of your hands. Smears of dark red drip down the side of the page as you pull yourself up to the top, collapsing with your lungs as they suck in air, stretching to their limits. Holding steady against the sway of the paper, you push to your feet. Looking down to maintain your balance, the floor beneath you has gained solidity once more. The brown rug feels cool and soft compared to the sharp, thin paper that cut into your bare feet. Running the last few yards to the door as fast as you can, you grab the knob with your left hand and pound on the door with your right. “Jason?” The circle of brass is stuck and doesn’t turn. “Emily?” Using both ha
nds, finally you turn the knob and the door opens. Deep in the back of your head, a rational voice slowly states the obvious, that the door must be sticking because of the weather. The irrational voices start drowning him out as you see that no one is in the room.
Spun at full circle, the room is a blur. Keeping your palm pressed to the wall, you fly down the stairs two or three at a time. They stretch out below you, pulling the floor forever away. “Where the hell are you guys?” You smell a sour smoke from the kitchen and hear an old AM radio playing a cacophony of atonal voices and strings. The glass-shattering melody is not helped by the accompaniment of crackling, ear-piercing static. “Hello?” You stop at the edge of the kitchen.
Jason and Jeremy are sitting across the table from each other. Straight-backed and stiff, their heads are both cocked to the right at perfect ninety-degree angles. They are dressed in corduroy shorts with blue-and-red-striped short-sleeved shirts, knee-high white socks with red stripes at the top, and green suspenders. Jason’s straps are stretched tight over both shoulders, while Jeremy’s left suspender strap hangs down over the side of his chair. Emily stands at the stove wearing a blue dress with a white apron over it. Her hair piled high in a bouffant ‘do, she looks like something right out of a 1950s sitcom. Other than the fact that her head is locked at that same strange ninety-degree angle as the boys, that is.
As you slowly step further into the room, she holds out the frying pan in her left hand. With a metal spatula, she lifts up the charred and blackened body of a squirrel and offers it to you. All three of their mouths open gapingly wide. You hear the cracking of bones as their skin starts to tear open, blood splattering all over the perfect, model-home kitchen.